by David Mack
It’s almost as if I was born for this job.
The troop of fuzzy creatures hopped away from the water to graze on a patch of small green weeds growing nearby. Taryl focused the holographic scope on the nearest one, the largest of the bunch, and started recording a vid to add to her field report. The animal nibbled on one weed, then another, before clutching several at once in its forepaws and sitting up on its rounded haunches to survey the area.
It looked directly at her and froze in mid-chew.
As slowly as she could, Taryl put away the scope. She didn’t want to spook the nervous critter. It tilted its head, and she mimicked the gesture. Behind it, the other adult was munching on some orange flowers. There was a cluster of the blossoms at Taryl’s side. With glacial slowness, she plucked a few and let them tumble into her palm. Then she knelt, extended her open hand toward the animal, and rested the back of her hand on the mossy ground.
The animal stood a bit taller and sniffed with a twitching nose.
Taryl remained still. In her mind, she became as a plant, rooted in place, devoid of will, a harmless feature of the landscape. She slowed her breathing and ceased blinking.
One wary hop, then another, brought the creature to within a meter of her hand.
Her mind was clear and without pretense. She existed in that moment alone, bereft of a past, without thought of a future, just a peaceful presence dwelling in the eternal now.
It took another hop and sniffed again, its eyes fixed on the flower petals in her hand.
Another hop. If only she could lean forward without scaring it, she could touch its fur, perhaps even feel the beating of its heart through its fragile form.
Her communicator let out two shrill beeps.
The animal sprang upward, twisted about-face in midair, and landed at a full run. It and its brood scampered off in a panic and disappeared into the impenetrable rainforest.
This, Taryl remembered, was just one of the many reasons she preferred the company of animals to that of most sentient beings. She flipped open her communicator.
“Taryl here. This better be good.”
“I hope you’re grading on a curve, Ensign, because this is the captain.”
She winced with embarrassment. “Sorry, sir. Go ahead.”
“I’m having you beamed back to the ship, on the double.”
As much as she wanted to protest, she could tell from the captain’s tone that he wasn’t in a mood to grant her field survey an extension. “What’s going on?”
“I’ll explain once everybody’s back aboard. Stand by for transport.”
“Aye, sir.” She moved clear of the trees and took a final, wistful look at the grotto.
This would have been a nice place to camp for the night.
She sighed, and then the rainforest melted away in a shimmer of champagne-colored light and a semi-musical wash of noise.
So much for paradise.
• • •
One perquisite of being in command that Terrell never tired of was the luxury of being the last person to arrive for any meeting. He entered the Sagittarius’s mess hall to find the rest of his crew assembled. Their low murmur of conversation tapered off as they noted his arrival. They had grouped themselves in their usual fashion, around the three curved dining tables against the outer bulkhead. Seated at the table farthest from the door were the four engineers; at the middle table were the three field scouts. Closest to the entrance were the ship’s two medical officers, its XO, the science officer, and its Kaferian helmsman-navigator, Ensign Nizsk.
They all faced the interior bulkhead, before which stood the ship’s second officer, Lieutenant Commander Sorak. The white-haired, centenarian Vulcan greeted Terrell with a nod, then activated the bulkhead display screen behind him, signaling the start of the briefing.
“Three hours and eleven minutes ago, Ensign Nizsk logged an unusual reading on the ship’s sensors.” He looked at the navigator. “Ensign, please elaborate on your findings.”
Sorak stepped aside. Nizsk stood and stepped forward, her four upper limbs held close to her thorax, her mandibles clicking rapidly.
Even after months of shared service on the bridge of the Sagittarius, Terrell still found it difficult to gauge the insectoid flight officer’s emotions. Her compound eyes had no pupils to dilate, and her carapace made her visage inscrutable. His only cues to Nizsk’s state of mind came from the specialized universal translator module she wore around her neck.
Nizsk opened a graphic on the screen, an image of an energy wave form. “During my shift as watch officer, long-range sensors detected a high-level dark energy fluctuation, originating from bearing two three three mark nine.”
Dastin raised his hand. “Excuse me—a what?”
“A dark energy fluctuation. It is a rare phenomenon, often associated with intersections between our universe and parallel dimensions. Dark energy events have been known to produce unpredictable, faster-than-light shock fronts that propagate through subspace. Their effects also have been shown to provoke spontaneous temporal inversions, resulting in the detection of events prior to their occurrence.”
“Hope you’re takin’ notes,” Ilucci said to Dastin. “There’s gonna be a test later.”
Terrell cut in, to prevent the briefing from spiraling into a verbal free-for-all. “Hold the jokes for a few minutes.” To Nizsk he added, “Ensign, please continue.”
She switched the image to an animated map of the star system. “After I ruled out the possibility of the signal originating on this planet’s surface, I broadened my search for its source. However, I found no possible origin point along that heading within the bounds of this system.” A tap on the control panel with one of her claws called up a star map of the surrounding sector. “Though it can be difficult to pinpoint the origin of a dark energy event, readings I have collected from sensor buoys deployed by the Endeavour during its pass through this sector two months ago give me reason to believe the epicenter of the fluctuation is in the Cavino system, approximately three point six light-years away, on the heading I detected.”
This time Razka lifted his hand. “What do we know about the Cavino system?”
Sorak switched the screen to a map of the distant star system. “Cavino is a main-sequence star, Class F. It has eleven planets. The five inner worlds are terrestrial, but only the fourth is capable of supporting organic life. The six outer worlds are all gas giants.”
Theriault caught Sorak’s eye. “Do we have reason to think the fluctuations are coming from the fourth planet?”
“Unknown,” Sorak said. “Given the infrastructure needed to produce a dark energy event, a surface-based generator is the most probable source. However, it is theoretically possible that a sufficiently advanced starship or starbase could create such an effect.”
Nizsk interjected, “It also is possible that the origin of these readings lies beyond the Cavino system, and that it merely happens to intersect that heading.”
Doctor Babitz leaned forward to join the discussion. “Do we know if the fourth planet is inhabited? And, if so, would the presence of this kind of technology countermand our obligations with regard to the Prime Directive?”
Sorak’s almost British-sounding accent was as cold and dry as his Vulcan logic. “At this time, Doctor, we have no advance intelligence about the fourth planet, or about any civilization that might reside there. Consequently, I would advise we proceed with all due caution.” He directed the rest of his statement to Terrell. “Furthermore, I suggest we assume the Prime Directive applies until we have incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.”
From the middle table came Taryl’s heated protest. “Hang on! We’ve barely started our survey here. Now we get one weird sensor reading and we just drop everything to chase it?” She withered beneath the combined weight of the other officers’ stares of reproach. “What?”
“I understand your frustration, Ensign,” Terrell said. “But everything we’ve seen so far suggests this world is safe for colonization. All that’s left to do here are routine analyses and mapping runs. A civilian advance team can do that without us.” He got up and stood beside the bulkhead display. “These dark energy fluctuations, on the other hand, are near the top of Starfleet’s list of rare phenomena whose investigation we’ve been ordered to prioritize. I don’t know what makes them so important, either, but I know that some admiral at Starfleet Command wants us to track them down before the Klingons do. Do you understand that?”
Abashed, Taryl averted her eyes. “Aye, sir.”
That would do for the moment, Terrell decided. He turned to Nizsk. “Plot a course for the Cavino system, maximum warp. Use stealth-approach protocols once we reach its Oort cloud.” He pivoted toward the engineers. “Master Chief, make the boat ready for space. We go as soon as you give the green light.” A turn toward the rest of the crew. “Chief Razka, you and your scouts get down to the hold. Lock down the rovers and the cargo. Doctor, I want you and Mister Tan Bao to help Hesh secure his samples in the lab.” A deep breath. “Get a move on, people. Time to hit the road. Dismissed.”
The crew dispersed in a hurry to their duty stations. Just outside the mess hall, the engineers climbed the ladder to the engineering deck, while Theriault, Nizsk, and Sorak headed forward through the curving passage, to the bridge, and Hesh led Doctor Babitz and Nurse Tan Bao in the opposite direction, toward his lab. As soon as the ladderway was clear, Razka slid down it to the cargo hold, followed by Dastin. Taryl stopped at the ladder and heaved an angry sigh. Terrell sidled over to her and lowered his voice. “Everything all right?”
“Sorry, sir. I’m just annoyed, is all. I became a field scout so I could explore new worlds ahead of everyone else. Instead, I spend most of my time on the ship, filling in on the bridge.”
“What do you want me to say? It’s not as if you weren’t briefed about the way an Archer-class starship runs. We all do what it takes three people to complete on other ships. It’s just the way things work on a boat this small.”
She pushed a hand through her spiky black hair. “I know. It’s just . . . we finally got to spend some time exploring a real planet, a beautiful planet—and now we’re walking away from it to chase some funny particles, or waves, or whatever.”
“Taryl, I know the last few weeks were pleasant, but they were also kind of ordinary. Civilians can handle the mundane. But confronting the weird?” He gave her shoulder a reassuring clasp. “That’s why they have us.”
3
“Doctor? We’ve got another one.”
The nervous young paramedic’s shouted notice was the last thing Doctor Jeniven Vatrachos wanted to hear—and the last thing he wanted his patients to hear. The waiting room outside the emergency center was already full, and he had patients doubled up in the exam rooms. None of which was unusual for a major metropolitan trauma center such as Valto General Hospital. In all the years Vatrachos had worked there, he had never seen a shift that was anything less than hectic. After all, life was unpredictable, and accidents were going to occur.
But this was unlike anything he’d ever seen.
Not prepared to take the paramedic’s word, Vatrachos left the admissions desk and strode down the corridor to the triage room. Lurking beneath the astringent bite of antiseptic was the reek of dermal toxins secreted in response to pain, a vestigial biological trait shared by all Austarans. Once, the oily discharge from their pores was meant to discourage aquatic predators from making meals of them; in the modern age, it posed an additional hazard to medical practitioners working to ease wounded Austarans’ pains and save their lives.
Vatrachos used the foot-activated dispenser near the triage room door to squirt some disinfectant gel on his hands, and then he held his slicked extremities upright with his fingers apart, to make it easier for a physician’s assistant to pull protective latex gloves over them. The tight elastic closed around his wrists with a loud snap. “All right. Let’s have a look.” He stepped over to the exam table and stood beside the paramedic, who tended the ward’s latest admission, a mottled yellow-and-red female pogling. “Who do we have here?”
Her three eyes shimmered and her wide mouth trembled. “Loludi.”
“Are your parents here, Loludi?”
She pointed back toward the waiting room. “My mother is talking to the nurse.”
He tried to reassure the scared child with a soft tone of voice and a restrained smile. “Don’t worry. She’ll be here soon. Now, can you show me where it hurts?”
Loludi held out her left hand. Its smallest digit was bent at an oblique angle that was painful just to look at. Vatrachos steadied her wrist with a gingerly two-fingered grip while he examined her broken finger. There was no mistaking the nature or precise location of the injury: a full break of the fifth metacarpal, approximately one-third of the way up the bone from the carpometacarpal joint. He traded a look of unease and suspicion with the paramedic, then put his attention back on the patient. “How did this happen?” The youngling recoiled guiltily, so Vatrachos made an effort to calm her. “No one’s saying you did anything wrong. Knowing how the break happened might help us do a better job of fixing it.”
Reassured, she let her explanation spill out in a breathless stream. “My brother was chasing me so I tried to slam the door on him but I caught my finger in the door and it broke.”
“You’ll be more careful next time you close a door, won’t you?” She nodded and seemed more relaxed. “Good. My friend here is going to give you a shot to numb your finger. Then he’ll put that bone back where it belongs and fix you up with a nice little splint. Sound good?” Another nod, more enthusiastic this time. He patted her shoulder, then turned to the paramedic and lowered his voice. “Make sure I get a copy of her chart, and get clean X-rays of that finger before you set it. Understand?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
Vatrachos left the triage room and passed through the waiting room once more on his way back to the corridor of exam rooms. Looking back at him were dozens of new arrivals waiting to be seen—each of them cradling a left hand with its last digit broken just above the carpometacarpal joint. Just like the dozen or so patients already occupying the exam rooms.
Even more perplexing for Vatrachos was the fact that, if his patients all were telling the truth, no two of them had broken their hand the same way. One had slammed his hand in the door of his vehicle; another had gotten his pinned between slats in a shelf as he fell from a ladder. A female patient had broken the bone while trying to swat a large arachnid as it scuttled across her kitchen countertop; one young boy broke his finger trying to catch a ball thrown by his older sibling. And on and on the stories went—each cause unique, but the injuries all the same. It was either the most surreal set of coincidences Vatrachos had ever seen, or else he was the victim of one of the most elaborate and bizarre practical jokes in history.
The sliding doors at the main entrance parted. Another pair of Austarans entered, this time a couple of gray-and-white-striped young adults. A pair of uniformed peace officers walked in behind the couple and detoured around them on their way to the nurse’s desk.
Vatrachos moved to intercept them, but they were faster on their feet than he was, and they reached the nurse’s desk first. The taller officer leaned down. “Good evening. I’m Constable Ankath. We’re responding to a call from a Doctor Jeniven Vatrachos.”
“That’s me,” Vatrachos said, cutting off the nurse’s reply. “I’m Vatrachos.”
The officers turned toward him. “What can we do for you, Doctor?”
“Would you come to my office, please?”
Neither of the officers seemed enthused about the invitation, but they followed him down a narrow corridor to the administrative wing. He ushered them inside his office and shut the door. “Please, hav
e a seat.”
The younger officer moved toward a chair. Constable Ankath stopped him with one hand. “Doctor, we’re busy tonight. Can you tell us in a few words why you called?”
“Something odd is happening. Dozens of people have come into the trauma center tonight with the exact same injury—a broken small digit on the left hand—but no two patients broke it the same way. The odds against every patient in a shift coming in with the same injury when they have no other shared factors is . . . well, to be frank, it’s incalculable.”
“That’s it?” Ankath sounded annoyed. “We’ve got alarms going off all over the city, and you called us down here because you’ve got a series of freak coincidences?”
How can I make them understand? “I think it’s more than that. I can’t explain what would cause something like this, but it’s not natural. Something is going on here.”
Ankath puffed out his vocal sac, then let it deflate with a derogatory sputter. “Tell you what, Doctor. As soon as you figure out what law’s been broken, feel free to come down to the precinct station and file a report. Until then, have a nice night.”
The two constables turned and walked out of Vatrachos’s office, and they left the door open as they departed. Standing behind his desk, Vatrachos felt foolish and angry at the same time. I know this can’t all be happening by accident—but what did I really expect them to say?
He had no idea what was going on, but he had a sinking feeling that whatever it was, it would get worse as the night wore on—and that before it was over, broken fingers would be the least of its consequences.
• • •
If there was one thing Sefsan Kleftis understood better than most Austarans, it was the mathematics of probability. His entire career as the general manager of the Chrimata Casino and Hotel was predicated on his keen grasp of the sacred geometry of chance.
Every game on the main floor had different odds, but most were so close to even that the average guest of the casino never noticed anything untoward. The secret to the business’s profit model, of course, was the same as that of every other gaming house on Anura: The odds had to tilt ever so slightly in the house’s favor at all times. That wasn’t to say that the house always won. What mattered was the house’s edge, which varied from one game to the next but in practice never dipped below five percent. Over time, the grind of the house’s edge against even the luckiest players’ winnings would leave them busted and the house that much richer.