Burning Dreams

by Margaret Wander Bonanno

  Pike had already decided that as soon as this mission was over, he’d request a transfer. Assuming, given Kamnach’s eagerness to find and engage a Vestian ship, that this mission would be over, and safely, anytime soon.

  For the moment, though, he focused on the burbling of an invisible stream, the cries of the nightbirds—piped in, he knew, and they’d gotten the mockingbird wrong—but the scent of Hana’s hair was real, and so was the warmth of her skin, the touch of her hands on his face.

  What were her plans, her dreams? he wondered. Starfleet never discouraged shipboard romances, but didn’t encourage them, either. Pike knew of a couple of officers and even more enlisted personnel who had formed permanent relationships, even married, but they were uncommon. The kind of relationship Charlie and Hobelia had was even more unusual. He’d tried long distance relationships a few times and failed. Rare was the woman who would wait for him to show up between missions.

  Concentrate on the here and now, he thought as he kissed Hana good night at the door to her quarters and returned to his own. There may not be a tomorrow.

  12

  U.S.S. Aldrin

  Pike crawled through the smoke to the vicinity of the captain’s chair, grabbed an armrest and pulled himself upright, fumbling for the intercraft. “Engineering…damage report!” he shouted past the whooping of the red alert. “Comm, turn off that klaxon! I don’t think anyone needs to be reminded we’re on red alert.”

  From engineering came the sounds of voices overlapping, orders being shouted and confirmed, a feedback echo from the red alert klaxon sounding belowdecks as well. Comm was abandoned; Flowers had been injured by a small explosion at her station during the initial attack. Pike pulled himself toward the comm station against the wonky gravity, and quashed the klaxon.

  “Engineering?” he repeated, deciding he was better off staying at comm. Even in Kamnach’s absence, it didn’t feel right for him to be sitting in the captain’s chair. “Pike to engineering…what’s going on down there?”

  Finally a hoarse voice he didn’t recognize managed to stop coughing long enough to say, “Warp engines off-line, life support compromised, sir. Shields down to thirty-five percent. We’ve had to seal off decks twelve and thirteen to contain the fire.”

  Pike started to speak, coughed, started again. “Casualties?”

  “Three dead, eight injured, four in the vicinity of the hull breach still unaccounted for.”

  Charlie! he thought, but suppressed the thought immediately. Nothing he could do from where he was, anyway.

  “Chewy? How soon before…”

  “Sir…Lieutenant Chua’s dead.”

  Pike sat back in the chair, momentarily stunned. The chief engineer’s cheerful face flashed through his mind. Chua and the others had died on his watch. The others, possibly including Charlie, and if Flowers’s injuries were severe…This was the burden of command, the thing he’d dreaded most. No time for dread now; he had to get the ship back online and away from the border before more Vestian vessels found them and finished the job.

  Around him the skeleton of a bridge crew had contained the circuitry fires at the bridge stations. Wesley made the rounds with a fire extinguisher, but the smoke lingered in the air, a dirty yellow haze. With life support laboring on backup controls, the smoke refused to dissipate.

  “Wesley, belay that and get back to your station. Plot us a course out of here,” Pike said sharply.

  Wesley, still not sure if he should be obeying the first officer or starting a counter-mutiny, did as he was told.

  Pike assumed as much, and went on talking to engineering. “Shields and life support first, weapons later. We need to breathe before we can fight. Pike out.”

  Tell me I’m dreaming! he thought with the tiny little corner of his brain that wasn’t ticking with procedures, regulations, and the sinking feeling that if they got out of this alive and returned home, he and those who had sided with him were facing court-martial. Tell me I’ll wake up and none of this will be happening!

  But it was no dream. They’d met and fought one Vestian vessel, destroying it. A second battle had nearly destroyed them, though not before Pike had relieved Captain Kamnach of command and confined him to his quarters, effectively staging a mutiny, but within the letter of the law of Starfleet regulations as he understood them.

  He’d done everything he knew how to avoid a confrontation, and now there was no way out.

  They’d spotted the first vessel early that morning. Vestian ships were top-heavy with weaponry, but their sensors had blind spots, and they hadn’t spotted Aldrin.

  “Half impulse,” Kamnach said quietly. “Arm lasers.”

  “Armed and ready, sir,” Hanley reported just as quietly.

  “Warning shot across her bow on my mark…”

  “Aye, sir.” Hanley’s finger hovered over the button.

  From the science station, where he’d relieved Renkova, who was still analyzing the debris from the presumed Tellarite vessel, Pike cleared his throat. “Captain?”

  “What is it, Mr. Pike?”

  “She’s still on her side of the border, sir. Regulations—”

  “—specify that we should hail her first, and if there’s no response to our challenge, then we fire across her bow. You familiar with the weapons array on a Vestian Aloku-class battleship, Mr. Pike? Ever try to pick up a sea urchin?”

  Prior to this mission he hadn’t been, but Pike had done his research. The visual on the forward screen confirmed what he’d learned. The Vestian ship bristled with weapons ports in all directions. Depending upon the situation, it could fire those weapons in sequence, transforming itself into a spacefaring Gatling gun, or all at once, spewing plasma fire like darts in all directions.

  “No, sir. But I’ve accidentally brushed up against a saguaro and not been able to sit down for the rest of the day,” Pike answered, keeping his voice light. “Which is why—”

  “Which is why, in spite of your folksy little tale, we are not going to hail that ship and risk getting spiked,” Kamnach finished for him. “Weapons, fire when ready.”

  Pike winced as the laser released, holding his breath until he saw it lance through empty space well ahead of the Vestian ship, which abruptly turned toward them, searching for the source of the fire. Pike could see Flowers scanning for any comm from the Vestian ship. Catching his eye, she shook her head: Nothing. They were not even attempting to communicate with Aldrin. Maybe Kamnach’s decision was the right one.

  Simultaneously, Kamnach was barking orders, maneuvering Aldrin into position behind a particularly large chunk of rock—not big enough to hide them completely, but big enough to confuse the Aloku’s sensors.

  Whoever was captaining the Aloku didn’t seem to care. The ship’s forward weapons ports began to glow, and then she fired.

  By the book, Aldrin should not have even fired a warning shot unless the Aloku violated the border. Strictly speaking, the Aloku was well within her rights to fire back. It all happened rather quickly after that.

  “Target her aft shields, there!” Kamnach ordered, jabbing a blunt finger at the schematic on the screen between the helm and nav stations. “Short burst ought to get her to pay attention and back off. Even a Vestian won’t fight with no shields.”

  Weapons fired. A short burst should have just knocked out the shields. Instead, the entire ship went up in a fireball. The forward viewscreen damped some of it, but for several moments the bridge crew was virtually blinded. The shock wave came next.

  “Hang on!” Kamnach said unnecessarily as they braced for impact.

  Did Pike only imagine he saw the captain and his weapons officer exchanging triumphant glances?

  As the shock wave dissipated, Kamnach slouched back in his chair, hands tented over his stomach. “Oops!” he said with a small, smug smile. “Guess we put a little too much punch into that. All hands, stand down from red alert. Helm, return to original course and speed. Comm, notify Starbase 3 we have met and dispatched one Ve
stian Aloku fighter-class vessel found in violation of treaty border, blah-blah-blah. Give them the current time and coordinates.”

  “Aye, sir,” Flowers responded.

  The current coordinates, Pike realized, checking, were well over on the Federation side. Whatever remained of the Aloku would drift in all directions. Nothing but the captain’s say-so as to which side of the border she’d been on when the exchange began, and that was that. Or was it?

  “You could get us both in very big trouble, Mr. Pike,” Renkova said grimly. “I was going to transfer off this ship of fools before we got drafted for this mission. I don’t fancy spending any part of it in the brig.”

  “I understand,” Pike said, equally grim. “If there were any other way to do this…but I don’t have the science skills; you do.”

  Renkova sighed. A handsome woman, her long, curly hair just a tad over regulation length framing a high-cheekboned face with mournful brown Ukrainian eyes, she’d watched the slow dance between Hana Flowers and the handsome first officer wistfully. Time was she’d have gone after Pike herself, but no more.

  “Should be easy enough to correlate the coordinates in ship’s logs with…hello!” she said.

  “What is it?” Pike leaned over her shoulder to see what she was looking at.

  “According to the log entry, we never violated the Vestian border.”

  “Renkova, I was there. I saw what happened,” Pike objected, scowling.

  She shrugged. “Logs can be altered,” she suggested carefully.

  Pike weighed the import of what she was saying. Before he’d come down here, he’d checked the engineering logs and found that the settings on Hanley’s lasers had been recalibrated slightly higher than they should have been. He was willing to bet that if he double-checked now, they’d have been reset to normal.

  “Would you be able to tell if the logs were altered?” he asked Renkova carefully.

  “Depends on the skill of the person who altered them,” she said, equally carefully. Neither was sure they could trust the other; Kamnach’s divide-and-conquer command mode saw to that. Renkova hesitated. “However, a really skilled science tech could probably find artifacts suggesting tampering, without leaving any traces of her own.”

  Pike took her meaning. “It sure would help if we had someone that skilled aboard…”

  Later, alone in his cabin, he weighed the evidence. He had in fact double-checked the laser settings, and this time they were normal. He cursed himself for not logging the previous settings when he found them, but he’d only checked on a hunch, and hadn’t wanted to believe what he saw.

  Kamnach and Hanley were using the tensions between the Federation and the Vestians as a hunting expedition, a personal vendetta, a chance to rack up points for some sort of blaze of glory—call it what you would, they were skirting regulations for their own ends.

  Why?

  Pike’s research on Kamnach had revealed a loner, a commanding officer who spent his off-hours alone in his cabin playing computer chess, his leave time cruising the watering holes in whatever port he was in, drinking hard, but never causing problems. If he’d ever had a wife or children, they weren’t in his profile.

  His weapons officer Hanley was much the same. Both men were at an age where, traditionally, they ought to have been kicked upstairs to desk jobs, or taken early retirement to do other things with their lives. The fact that both were still locked into their seats on a Starfleet vessel’s bridge said that it was all they had.

  Looking to go out in a blaze of glory, and take as many people with them as they could. That might work for Vikings or Klingons or Egyptian pharaohs, but Pike had no intention of joining anyone’s funeral pyre, or letting his commanding officer’s juggernaut take Charlie and Hana and the rest of the crew with him.

  By this time tomorrow they would be out of range of even Starbase 3 comm. No need to hide in the debris field to avoid messages from Starfleet Command updating them on the Vestian situation—which might easily have resolved itself, if past rumblings between Vestios II and V were any indication—or to tell them to return to base.

  Does he think he’ll get away with this? Pike wondered. Does he realize hunting Vestian ships against orders could turn a little border skirmish into a full-blown war? Does he care?

  Kamnach’s “Three Most Powerful” speech rang in his head. Yes, Kamnach did think he could get away with it. And unless Pike monitored him very carefully, he probably would.

  “Captain?” Wesley’s voice wavered nervously. The situation was all but identical to yesterday’s—a Vestian fighter, bristling with weapons ports, patrolling her side of the border, as yet unaware of the Aldrin.

  “I see her,” Kamnach replied, leaning forward in his chair, a feral look on his face. “Weapons—”

  “Armed and ready, sir,” Hanley replied a little too eagerly.

  “Captain—” Pike made sure his own voice was steady before he spoke. “She’s on her side of the border. Just like the ship we engaged yesterday.”

  He shouldn’t have added that last part, but he had to. All eyes on the bridge turned toward him. He knew without looking at any of them who was with him and who wasn’t.

  “I know, I know,” Chewy had said when he and Pike had met at the food dispenser that morning before the others arrived in the officers’ mess. “I’m not in a position to do anything on my own, but if you challenge him, I’m with you, Pike.”

  Renkova had made her feelings clear the night before in the Sciences lab.

  Pike steered clear of Hanley. He didn’t need him anyway. But helm and comm were important.

  “You’re talking mutiny,” were Wesley’s first words after he’d heard Pike out.

  “It’s not mutiny to refuse an order that goes against your principles,” Pike argued. “C’mon, Wesley, I’m the one with the reg book up my spine. You’re supposed to be more flexible. What they’re doing is—”

  “—is within captain’s discretion when out of subspace range in time of war,” Wesley cut him off.

  “‘Time of war’—!” Pike snorted. “Where’s the declaration of war, Wesley? Where are our orders from Starfleet Command telling us to engage Vestian vessels on their side of the border, recalibrate the laser settings, then doctor the logs afterward?”

  Wesley’s gaze faltered. “Don’t push me, Chris. I’m just a helmsman. I leave policy to the policy makers.” He swallowed hard, reaching a decision. “I won’t stand in your way, but don’t ask me to stand with you.”

  “So that’s the way it is!” Pike said, more than a little annoyed.

  “Hey, you follow your conscience, I follow mine!” Wesley called after him, a little too loudly.

  Hana Flowers was even more conflicted.

  “I can’t, Chris! Please don’t ask me to disobey orders!” There were tears in her eyes when she said it. “I told you, I’ve never been in combat before. I couldn’t sleep last night, thinking about the people on that Vestian ship. I know they’re aliens, but they had lives…”

  “Don’t you see I’m trying to prevent unnecessary loss of life?” Pike reasoned with her. “Including ours. What Kamnach’s doing is wrong. It’s a court-martial offense. And it could get us all killed.”

  Hana pulled away from him, hands over her ears to block out his words.

  “I’m not listening to you! I don’t know anything about tactics or politics or any of that stuff. I’m just a comm officer. It’s hard enough for me to do my job without thinking too hard about the messages I’m relaying. Please, Chris, leave me out of this!”

  It wasn’t the answer he’d been hoping for, but at least he was reasonably certain she wouldn’t turn against him if and when the time came. Wasn’t he?

  They were all on the bridge, except for Chewy, and they were all looking his way, each of them committed to their own belief in what was right. If he needed to defy Kamnach, could he make it stick with only the chief engineer and the science officer backing him up? And Charlie, of course, for wh
atever use a transporter chief might be, particularly when he couldn’t talk to him directly.

  “Eyes on your stations!” Kamnach barked, breaking Pike’s reverie. When everyone else had complied, his gimlet eyes bored into Pike’s.

  “I’m aware of the position of the Vestian vessel, Mr. Pike. I’m also aware of your reluctance to do your job in helping us repel an enemy from its path of destruction. I should have reprimanded you after yesterday’s little performance, but I didn’t. Guess I’m getting soft in my old age. But I’ll tell you this: You feel uncomfortable with the current situation, Mr. Pike, you feel free to transfer off my ship, effective immediately. Otherwise, mind your own damn business and do your job!”

  Without pausing for breath, he rotated his chair so that Pike was no longer even in his peripheral vision and opened the intercraft. “All hands, this is the captain. Go to red alert. Prepare for battle.”

  It might have been a repeat of yesterday’s event, but two things happened. First was Lieutenant Flowers’s voice cutting through the red alert klaxon.

  “Captain? The Vestian vessel is hailing us, sir. And I’m receiving a delayed transmission from Starbase 3.”

  Kamnach did not so much as acknowledge that she had spoken. With his back to her, he made a chopping motion with his hand that said Not now!

  The second thing that happened was that Pike motioned Renkova out of her chair and said: “Flowers, relay both messages to the science station.”

  Kamnach swung his chair around. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Pike didn’t answer. Methodically he unscrambled the message from Starbase 3 and put it on speakers.

  “…terminate all activity and…” A burst of static. “…Vestian Council has…” Another. “…repeat, Aldrin, you are to return to…”

  The message ended there.