Foundations Book Three

by Dayton Ward, Kevin Dilmore

  Tomar replied, “I suspect that the outcome would have been much different, and that we would not be having this conversation today.”

  “It’s only a matter of time before our teams are the first to encounter a new alien species,” Talev said. “If that happens, then the S.C.E. has to be ready.”

  Al-Khaled nodded. “Our teams should be augmented with cultural specialists and linguists, people who are trained to handle the rough spots when different species interact.” Shrugging, he added, “Engineers can’t be prepared for every type of alien technology they encounter. They can only draw from their previous experience when they encounter something new. But somebody who can deal with the people responsible for that technology should be present, too. I intend to see that our teams are prepared for that eventuality.” Smiling, he added, “I told you I wasn’t done giving orders, Scotty, and I intend to make this plan my first order of business when I get back to Earth.”

  Perking up at that, Scott cast a guarded look at his friend. Was this the part where al-Khaled finally clued him in as to his next assignment? “What have ye got in mind, Mahmud?”

  “Starfleet has created a new staff position at Headquarters: liaison for the S.C.E. This person will be responsible for coordinating all of the missions the Corps undertakes, as well as ensuring that the teams get the personnel and logistical support they need.” Pausing dramatically, he tapped himself on the chest. “You are looking at the first S.C.E. Liaison.”

  So this was the big mystery, Scott realized as Tomar and Talev offered their congratulations. This was what al-Khaled had hinted at when Scott had first come aboard the Chandley. His friend was getting back into the game, all right, and doing so in a big way. After all these years of faithful service, Starfleet had finally seen the value of the S.C.E. and had appointed one of its most talented members to ensure that the Corps continued to thrive and succeed.

  There was only one thing wrong with the notion.

  “A desk job?” he scoffed. “That’s a fine waste of your talent if ye ask me. I could never see myself trapped in some office. It’s just not in my blood, Mahmud, and I dinna think it was in yours.”

  Chuckling at that, al-Khaled pointed a warning finger at Scott. “If I can be talked into such a job, anything’s possible. Never say never, my friend.”

  Scott laughed at the idea. Him, sitting at a desk while there might be a ship out there in need of an engineer?

  Never, indeed.

  Chapter

  8

  Stardate 53684.7

  “Chicken broth, Abramowitz Recipe Number Five.”

  As the mess hall replicator processed her request and her drink appeared, Carol Abramowitz reached for the steaming mug, bringing it to her nose and savoring the aroma of its contents. The addition of the Cajun spices she preferred gave the broth a sharp, pleasing flavor that never failed to elicit a sigh of contentment from her as she took the first sip.

  Settling herself at one of the tables in the rear of the mess hall, Abramowitz looked down at her padd for what seemed like the hundredth time today. The lines of text had long since begun to blur into a single indistinct mass, resisting her attempts to comprehend it. Somewhere amid that chaos was her latest report to Gabriel Marshall, the representative of the Federation Diplomatic Corps who had been assigned to this mission.

  Perpetually gruff and irritable, the diplomat had no great love for anyone in a uniform who wavered from his idyllic notion of what a Starfleet officer should be: a drone who followed orders without question and avoided complicating the lives of diplomats. Dealing with him, as well as confronting the data she had been collecting, organizing, and reviewing all day, had finally conspired to leave Abramowitz exhausted and dejected. This, despite the pep talk Captain Gold had given her earlier and the combination story/history lesson she had received from Captain Scott. Worst of all, she still had the same headache that had plagued her these past several hours. She could get any one of a number of remedies from Dr. Lense, but Abramowitz had never been one to take medication for what she considered simple ailments. What she needed, she knew, was rest.

  Rest, and a damned fine mug of chicken broth.

  “How’s it going?” a voice asked from near the replicators and Abramowitz looked up to see Kieran Duffy walking toward her with a glass in his hand. How had he entered the room without her noticing?

  Shaking her head, Abramowitz took a sip from her mug. “Yet another report for Headquarters. I’m trying to find some way to make this one a little less traumatic. Marshall nearly had a stroke when he heard what happened to the Senuta ship.”

  Duffy laughed at that. “My best buddy Gabe? How’s he doing, anyway? You should tell him I said hello.”

  The flippant remark brought a much-needed smile to Abramowitz’s face. “Somehow I don’t think that would go over very well.”

  Marshall had wanted Duffy’s head on a pike several months ago during the da Vinci’s mission to recover the century-old U.S.S. Defiant from an interspatial rift deep in Tholian space. When the Starfleet engineers discovered incriminating evidence aboard the derelict vessel linking the Tholians to a devastating attack on a Klingon colony, the normally reclusive aliens had launched an assault on the da Vinci and the Defiant. While in temporary command of the da Vinci, Duffy had managed to defuse the situation, salvaging both the recovery operation and the tenuous peace between the Federation and the Tholian Assembly.

  That, however, had done nothing to calm Gabriel Marshall’s anger over how the mission, one he had not endorsed in the first place, had come dangerously close to becoming a full-blown interstellar incident. Since then, the diplomat had continued to publicly make clear his disdain for Starfleet in general, and Duffy and the da Vinci in particular. It had certainly served to make Abramowitz’s subsequent interactions with the man that much more trying.

  “He’s going out of his skull trying to figure out what to do,” she said. “Headquarters is hip-deep working out all the bugs to get the Senuta home, but they keep stumbling over the fact that no one knows where their home is.” Smiling again she added, “They’re not used to being in the dark like that. And on top of everything else, Marshall can’t seem to get a grip on the idea that the Senuta aren’t blaming us for stranding them here.”

  Duffy drank from his water glass before continuing. “It throws him off his rhythm. Diplomats need a balance of good things to take credit for and bad things to blame on enemies, or else the entire political fabric of the reality in which we live would be swallowed by entropy. They can’t stand the simple idea of everyone just getting along and not trying to point fingers at each other all the time. Such a notion gives them ulcers.”

  “No dreams of serving on the Federation Council, I see,” Abramowitz quipped as she raised her mug to her lips. “That’s probably a good thing.”

  “I should announce my candidacy for the next elections,” Duffy replied, “just to see how many shades of purple I can get out of Marshall.”

  As the pair shared a laugh at Duffy’s irreverent view of politics, the mess hall doors parted to admit Bart Faulwell and the two Senuta engineers, Ircoral and Tkellan. The diminutive aliens wore their now familiar wide-eyed expressions of wonder as they followed the da Vinci’s linguistic expert into the ship’s dining facility, their eyes taking in the room’s every detail.

  “Hello, you two,” Faulwell said, a satisfied smile on his face as he crossed the room to join Abramowitz and Duffy.

  His own features screwing into a suspicious frown, Duffy regarded Faulwell warily. “You look entirely too smug about something. What’s the smile about?”

  Faulwell took a seat at the table, followed almost immediately by Ircoral and Tkellan. “I bring good news,” he said. “Soloman has found the navigational charts in the data he recovered from the Senuta ship. I’ve taken a look at them and they’re pretty limited by our standards, but not unlike what our first deep exploration starships possessed a couple of centuries ago.”

  “E
nsign Wong can probably make short work of those,” Duffy replied.

  Faulwell nodded. “Already has. He was able to cross-reference against our own navigational databases. It took some doing, though. The Senuta are from a star system deep in the Beta Quadrant, on the edge of explored Klingon space. Weeks away at high warp.” Shaking his head, he added, “I’m amazed that the Klingons didn’t intercept them.”

  “That’s great,” Abramowitz said. “Of course, this makes Marshall’s job harder, as now he’ll have to explain how an alien ship tore through Klingon space and how they’ll be asked to allow these same trespassing aliens back through so they can get home.”

  “Lucky for us we have an ambassador who’s friends with the Klingon chancellor,” Duffy said. Worf, the first Klingon to serve in Starfleet, had resigned his commission the previous year in order to assume the role of Federation ambassador to the Klingon Empire. Abramowitz had not yet met Worf but his reputation preceded him, of course. She was sure that this situation would be concluded with little further difficulty with his assistance. It was Worf who had overseen talks among the Federation, the Klingons, and the Tholians in the wake of the da Vinci’s mission to recover the Defiant, with the Klingons and Tholians actually engaging in the first true peaceful negotiations ever attempted between those two peoples. If Worf could handle that, then getting safe passage for the wayward Senuta would be child’s play for him.

  “We will be going home soon,” Ircoral said, her face beaming. “My only regret is that we will be forced to leave you while there is still so much to be learned.”

  Leaning forward in his chair, Duffy said, “Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much about that. If there’s one thing that you can count on when it comes to diplomacy, it’s that it takes time. Then there’s the matter of securing a ship to ferry you home. My guess is that we’ve still got a few days together, at least.”

  “What do we do now?” Tkellan asked. “If we are to be together for a while longer, then we should not waste the opportunity. Surely there is something more you can tell us.”

  Breathing a sigh of relief, Abramowitz settled back into her seat and allowed herself to relax for the first time since this mission had begun. The Senuta would be returned home, no doubt accompanied by Federation envoys eager to open a dialogue with the newly encountered people. While she of course would not be going along with the delegation, she could take satisfaction that she and her shipmates had set into motion the process that would allow that meeting to take place at all. Further, this entire mission had served as a reminder to her, and to her companions, just why there was a Starfleet Corps of Engineers, and just why she and others like her traveled with them.

  Regarding the two Senuta engineers now, though, Abramowitz found herself with an uncustomary lack of ideas on what to do next. She did not want to disappoint Ircoral and Tkellan when they were so obviously expecting something from her and her companions. But all she really wanted to do was just finish her chicken broth, take a hot shower and then crawl into bed for a decent night’s sleep. Seeing the look in Faulwell’s eyes, she figured that the linguist felt very much the same way.

  Only Duffy appeared to have any measure of energy left, and suddenly she had her answer. She cast a wicked look at the engineer, who saw the evil smile on her face and swallowed nervously.

  “What?” he asked.

  Abramowitz turned her attention to the Senuta instead.

  “Have you ever heard of a Tellarite?”

  About the Authors

  DAYTON WARD has been a fan of Star Trek since conception (his, not the show’s). After serving for eleven years in the U.S. Marine Corps, he discovered the private sector and the piles of cash to be made there as a software engineer. His start in professional writing came as a result of placing stories in each of the first three Star Trek: Strange New Worlds anthologies. He is also the author of the Star Trek Original Series novel In the Name of Honor, as well has having cowritten the two-part Interphase and the upcoming Home Fires for the Star Trek: S.C.E. series, both also with Kevin Dilmore. Besides working on other Star Trek projects, Dayton is currently writing The Last World War, an original science fiction novel scheduled for publication in 2003. Though he currently lives in Kansas City with his wife, Michi, he is a Florida native and still maintains a torrid long-distance romance with his beloved Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Be sure to check out Dayton’s Internet cobweb collection at http://daytonward.com.

  * * *

  KEVIN DILMORE remains very thankful to the person who, at age nine, tipped him off to the fact that Star Trek was a live-action television show before it was a Saturday morning cartoon. A graduate of the University of Kansas, he works as news editor and “cops and courts” reporter for a twice-weekly newspaper in Paola, Kansas, where he lives with his daughter, Colleen. Kevin also covers “nonfiction” aspects of the Star Trek universe as a contributing writer for Star Trek Communicator magazine. He is looking forward to his future writing projects with Dayton Ward, which include the upcoming Star Trek: S.C.E. eBook Home Fires. Kevin still harbors his adolescent desire to see his name shared with a doomed red-shirted ensign in an Original Series novel.

  Coming Next Month:

  Star Trek™: S.C.E. #20

  Enigma Ship

  by J. Steven York & Christina F. York

  Sent to investigate the mysterious disappearances of several Federation starships, the U.S.S. da Vinci discovers a true technological marvel: a holographic vessel. Commander Sonya Gomez and her S.C.E. team try to navigate the different holographic scenarios playing inside the “holoship,” and are surprised to find the crews of the missing ships—who think they’ve already been rescued!

  Gomez and her team must convince the crews that they are trapped in an endless holographic program, or risk losing them forever!

  COMING IN SEPTEMBER FROM POCKET BOOKS!