by Diane Carey
Offering only a cautious and meagerly reassuring pat on the arm as he turned to watch the ominous darkness on the forward screen, Keller grumbled, “I ignore, therefore I am.”
In space before them, the sun Occult showed only as a gurgling gray field with a black background on the nearly blind sensors. Silently Keller cursed the faraway neutron star that bleached this whole sector with its shroud. That something so distant could affect their moment-to-moment safety suddenly irritated him. He wanted revenge. He wanted magical powers.
The bridge seemed to have too much clutter and activity for alert status. The presence of Bonifay, two other technicians, and a bosun’s mate digging in the coals started to irritate Keller as he paced away from the science station toward the main screen, though careful not to block the non-view from Roger Lake’s haunted eyes. As the ship felt its way clumsily across the solar system at a fraction of the speed she would indulge normally to cross such a space, he began to chafe with each movement, clatter, or utterance from the techs. This wasn’t the time for repairs to be going on. Why didn’t Lake shoo them off? Couldn’t they see the yellow alert lights flashing? Couldn’t they hear the constant beep of the warning sounds?
This ship’s whole sense of discipline was falling apart. Roger Lake’s carelessness had spiderwebbed throughout the whole crew. Things were happening that shouldn’t. Order was compromised. Alert status didn’t seem to mean much anymore.
His grumpy thoughts were confirmed when the turbolift opened and emitted Savannah Ring with a medical pouch. Behind her Zoa tramped out on her toenail sandals. Now what?
Keller stepped down to the lower deck and met them by the helm. “What’re you two doing here? I thought I left you hanging.”
Savannah wagged a shoulder at Zoa. “Beats me what Hatshepsut’s doing here. I’m here to give vaccinations. Part of the quarantine clearance.”
“Not a good time. Why don’t you go finish rushing the blood to your brain?”
“Because it’s eleven hundred. ‘Vaccines to be administrated one hour before each change of watch, allowing for a rest period’—out of my way, princess.” She aimed her shoulder again, this time to butt Zoa back a step in order to use the helm as a table.
Zoa’s eyes suddenly blew wide. Her arms flexed, shot over her head, hands clasped in a rocky knot that would’ve cracked Savannah’s skull like a nut.
Just in time, Keller stuck out a warning arm. He never really touched the Rassua, delivering instead a clear warning. “Vulcan-like,” he reminded.
With her own words to restrain her, Zoa thought twice and lowered her arms. Her anger immediately dissolved, but Keller got the feeling it hadn’t strayed far.
“Savannah, off the bridge,” he ordered.
She glanced at him, defiant, and continued to pull out vial after vial of hypospray. “I don’t answer to you. I work for the Governor’s Department of Health, remember? Haz-mat, search-and-rescue, preventative medicine—”
Pushing her back, almost into Zoa, he collected her vials and clattered them back into the pouch. “Don’t come up here again during alert.”
Unimpressed, she zipped up the pouch and gathered her hypos. “Okay, Sheriff. But you just delayed your planetary privileges by forty-eight additional hours.”
“Off.”
“Fine. I’ll be in sickbay, wasting perfectly good time.” She stalked aft, leaving Keller to face Zoa.
From under the rail as he sprayed sealant foam into the crack, Zane Bonifay mumbled, “Use it to brush your pet boar.”
“Go retch, Bonifay.”
How did they all end up here at once? Keller tipped his shoulder until he had Zoa’s attention. “You too. Off the bridge.”
She didn’t flinch. “I have clearance. I come to watch.”
True enough. The Federation Council had made an agreement with the Rassua, and Starfleet was obliged to comply.
He looked at Lake. Would the ship’s master have an opinion? But the captain was completely involved with the helm and the forward screen. Attention to the muttering interactions going on around him apparently hadn’t the slightest call.
Dismayed, Keller moved to the upper deck, to where McAddis nervously tended the dynoscanners. With a terse fold of his arms, Keller pressed back against the console’s rolled edge and tried to stay calm. “Rassua,” he grumbled. “It’s got to be a bastardization of ‘harass you.’ ”
“What do you think ‘Zoa’ means?”
With a little shake of his head, Keller dared a glance at the Rassua. “She’s gonna cook and eat us.”
McAddis cast the same glance at the lift door as it closed with Savannah inside. “Doesn’t seem like Ring has much of a sense of humor either.”
“She does,” Keller said, “but you gotta catch it at the right moment. It’s like one of those early Mars shots. You gotta wait for the window. Otherwise you crash and burn.”
“Like a challenge?” The science board chirped and worked as McAddis attended them, keeping his eyes downward now. “Here comes one.”
Warned, Keller turned. He found Shucorion strolling toward him from the aft ramp, careful not to draw attention from the lower deck.
At Keller’s knees, Bonifay found renewed interest in his work and pulled the visor back over his face. Beside him, the four-foot-tall tank burped and hissed. McAddis remained turned away, giving the other two men a chance at pretended privacy.
Accepting the gesture, Keller faced Shucorion squarely. “Mr. Advisor, got anything to say about this?”
Allowing their conversation to be shielded by the background ring of the constant soft whup-whup of the yellow-alert alarm—not as loud as red alert, but enough to talk under—Shucorion kept his voice low. “Most dangerous. Your crew does not yet possess the skills for this kind of attempt.”
“We never had to develop them,” McAddis reminded irritably, inflicting himself back into the picture. “Federation ships have constantly active sensors. We never learned to maneuver without them. We don’t need to dead-reckon.”
Not finished with Shucorion, Keller moved closer to the Blood visitor and pressed, “Did you suggest to our captain he could do this?”
The Blood leader seemed briefly surprised by the accusation. It took him a moment to respond. “Your captain is no fool. Clearly he attended my methods. Blood have spent generations learning to maneuver during the Blind. He did pay close attention. I never suggested—”
“Explain to me how you do it.” Who cared if that sounded like an order? “Keep your voice down.”
Across the lower bridge, Roger Lake’s bloodshot eyes were fixed on the forward screen, while in his periphery he kept tabs on Hurley. Behind him, the confused Helmsman Makarios hovered near the command chair, without the foggiest idea of what to do. The wide main screen showed barely more than a few kilometers ahead of the ship until all of space blurred into a dark sheet. Beyond that, only the faintest glow showed where in fact the blaze of Occult should have nearly blinded them. They were circumnavigating a sun, and couldn’t look at it or even read its presence.
Shucorion’s voice hummed in Keller’s ear like a conscience. “If you know your thrust and speed, and you know where you started, you can trust your measurements. The Blind isn’t completely blinding once its signals are deciphered. Over many generations, Blood have learned to read . . . I believe you call them ‘static.’ As a blast engineer and Plume avedon, I’ve spent my life doing this. Reading space density, light shifts, the solar winds, things we can measure on the hull—for instance, temperature from nearby objects. If you know the magnitude of nearby stars, you can read the heat upon one side of your hull and judge proximity distance from them, adjusting your position with each changing degree. Also, radiation or spectral information from nebulae, clouds, and gas anomalies. Of course we must employ careful charting.”
With his arms folded and one hand pressed to his lips as he listened, Keller gawked at him in admiration both unashamed and uncloaked. He pulled his hand away from his
mouth after a moment. He leaned toward Shucorion and fanned his fingers to make his point completely clear.
“I’m a chimp,” he proclaimed.
McAddis indulged in a nervous smile that quickly faded. “Sailors did that all the time at sea, Nick. Still do. They can see a gust of wind before it arrives. And the early submarines could move with strict, careful calculation of underwater charts.”
“I just became an amoeba.”
From the deck, Bonifay’s voice was muffled inside his mask. “Go for blue-green algae. You’re so close.”
“If I want your opinion, I’ll issue you one.” To Shucorion, Keller quietly suggested, “Lake knows you do this kind of thing, but he might not realize you’re better at it than we are.”
“He does seem overly confident. Why is he not speaking to his crew? He drives the ship himself.”
“That’s something different. Tell me if there’s specific danger here,” Keller asked.
Reality showed in Shucorion’s shaded eyes. “We are very close to this sun. Its radiation and heat will wash out everything else that might be read. Distance from the sun itself will be greatly distorted. Even if we succeed in going around it, you’re unlikely to be able to find the ship you seek. The mission, then, is pointlessly hazardous.”
From the deck, Zane Bonifay didn’t turn to look at Captain Lake, but sent his message to Keller and the others. “He’s trying to prove something.”
Keller wanted to kick him. Still, he resisted and instead made a bet on Bonifay’s intuition. “Prove what? Competence?”
“Wisdom. It’s not the same. And he’s not trying to prove it to us. He’s proving it to himself.”
Shucorion lowered his head slightly, and his voice even more. “And no one is more dangerous than a man who no longer believes in himself. I shall walk away now, slowly, thus he doesn’t notice us speaking.”
The incredible bald caution took the other men completely by surprise. To hear it said outright, flatly . . .
As quickly as that, like a curtain rising, Keller saw Lake for what he was—a man desperately clinging to the one thread of heroism remaining to him, in his own imagination. Lake had lost the confidence of his crew. They hadn’t managed to hide it from him. He knew.
Oh, God, he knew.
“I just don’t know what to do,” Keller murmured. This was a bad dream, standing up here, with the captain down there, so close, yet paying them no attention at all, as if Roger Lake had retreated into single-man fighter and was making decisions only for himself and not for a crew of two hundred, and a colony of sixty-some thousand. Was it the Tavola methane kicking in? Only one out of eighty are affected . . .
How surreal it was to be standing up here, on the upper deck, talking about the captain in these low near-whispers, with him right down there. Ordinarily a captain was sensitized to every murmur going on around him on his bridge, but Lake had lost that completely. Either he no longer heard, or he just didn’t care. Keller and McAddis could’ve kickboxed up here and the captain wouldn’t have broken his mesmerization with the non-informative forward screen and the helm under his hands.
“But if I’m so wrong,” Keller uttered softly, “why didn’t Captain Kirk relieve him when he had the chance? You should’ve seen his face, Tim—he knew what was going on, but he left Lake in command. He must believe it’s best for the Service and the ship, that an experienced captain is still the best bet.”
“Maybe Kirk just didn’t realize how erratic he’s become.”
“No . . . I’m the one who realized.”
Fielding the idea that he wasn’t getting his message across, McAddis squared off and tried again. “Listen, Hamlet, I don’t know what’s right. I only know he’s making bad decisions fifty percent of the time. That means you, as first officer, become involved in either letting those decisions stand or challenging them. All I’m saying is, don’t be afraid to do it your own way. See if it works. Don’t do what somebody else told you or what the book says, or what so-and-so would do or what you learned someplace else. Look—”
With a casual turn, McAddis rearranged his stance to hook a hand on Keller’s shoulder. Most of the time, that gesture was the other way around. Keller felt a little self-conscious. It was usually his hand doing the sage reassuring.
“I’ve served under a lot of captains,” the science officer said. “I don’t think one of them remembers what the heck he learned at the Academy. Most guys who go by the book are just trying to prove they’ve read it. We know you’re new at this . . . the crew understands. Being a leader is mostly instinct. You know what they say—‘Timidity isn’t a plan of action.’ Quit wondering what’s the right thing to do, and do whatever you think might work. Flip that shuttle if you have to, but do something. A bad decision now is better than a good decision five minutes from now, if you’re going to die in four minutes. Does that make any sense?”
Crouching on the deck again, Zane Bonifay simply gazed up at them, primarily watching Keller. He offered no opinions, but the one-man audience made Keller feel as if he were on an auction block instead of a ship’s bridge. Yet somehow the advocacy of Tim McAddis and the rare silent regard of Bonifay did help him.
“Makes a lot, Tim,” he awarded. “I really hate it.”
With a forgiving shrug, McAddis smiled and clapped him on the back.
Keller turned the coin back and forth. “Let’s see what this says.”
“What’s the question?” Bonifay asked.
Over there, at the helm, Roger Lake remained transfixed with maneuvering the ship. On the other side of the bridge, Shucorion watched the engineering and sensor banks, and oversaw Lake’s movements every few seconds. Whether he approved or not, Keller couldn’t tell.
“Don’t know the question yet,” he confessed, and flipped the coin.
He clapped it onto the shiny black surface of the science console. The three of them bent over the platinum dot.
Bonifay read, “ ‘It is decidedly so.’ ”
“Now your job’s easy, Nick,” McAddis said.
“Yes, of course it is. I think my feelings can best be demonstrated in dance.”
“I’ll kill you first.”
“What’s that!” At the nav station, sweating, Joe Hurley came to life. “Solar flare?”
Keller, McAddis, and Bonifay turned just in time to see the last gush of a reddish-orange streak running across the screen. As it faded into the cloak of Gamma Night, their suffering sensors picked up one crackle at the end of the streak. Then the screen went dark again.
“Weapon fire!” Captain Lake cried, abruptly angry and somehow thrilled at the same time.
Keller dropped to the lower deck. “Incoming?”
“No, lateral,” Hurley said. “It wasn’t aimed at us. There must be somebody else out there!”
Breaking everything from regulations to simple courtesy, Keller turned to Hurley and ordered, “Put the shields up right now, quick!”
At the helm, Roger Lake shot him a purely evil glare, as if Keller had betrayed him in a most horrible way, and on Lake’s lips was the countermand. The shields as they came up instantly compromised the sensors under Lake’s hands. He was now even more blind than he had been.
The only thing that stopped him was a sudden flashing light on his board—an alert. Sensor overload. He turned back to attend to it, and the shields stayed up.
Over Keller’s shoulder, McAddis’s breath took on a pant. “I can’t pinpoint the source of the first shot. Definite phaser traces, though.”
“Standard phasers? You’re sure?”
“Absolutely.”
Keller turned to Lake and very clearly said, “Then they’re not Blood or Kauld, sir. They’re Federation. It’s got to be a warning shot.”
Lake squinted at the screen. “Why would Pandora’s Box be shooting across space?”
“It must be a warning shot, sir,” he repeated. That’s why I put up the shields! Give Makarios back the helm. Do your own job.
But
neither his words nor his mental telepathy penetrated Lake’s stubborn brain.
“Still no source reading,” McAddis reported.
“Never mind the source,” Keller suggested. “Scan where it was aimed. See anything?” On the upper row of monitors, the screen on his right was covering the area where the light had stopped running. In space, it shouldn’t stop at all. He moved back to the rail, watching McAddis’s struggling spectrograph. “Focus, focus, Tim—”
“I’m trying . . . There! Oh, my God!!”
A hard blast struck the ship and sent the controls screaming. Instantly, so close that the impact was almost uninterrupted, came a second hit, then a third. If the shields hadn’t been up, they’d be space dust by now.
Uncomforted that his breach of protocol had saved their bacon, Keller swung around. “Kauld ships, Captain, mark three-eight! More than five of them!”
“Hell, we’re almost on ’em! Security to the bridge!”
“Security? Why?” Rushing to the helm console, Keller bent into Lake’s periphery. “Roger, why security?”
“Somebody set a trap for us!” The captain’s face blanched. He braced his arms so hard on the helm that his elbows locked and bent in a strange direction. “I can’t trust a damn soul! Which one of you set us up!”
Chapter Thirteen
THE SHIP TOOK a body blow and rocked toward her starboard shoulder. They’d been hit, blindsided. Nobody could misinterpret that.
Near the command chair, Makarios pitched all the way across the lower bridge to the port steps. The two engineers tumbled backward over the rail and landed in a tangle where Makarios had been standing a moment ago. Already on the starboard side, Zane Bonifay managed to catch the teetering cannister of sealant before it toppled and rolled into McAddis’s legs. Near engineering, Shucorion had a grip on a strut to keep himself from falling. He’d been ready. He had to move aside as the turbolift opened and spewed two shocked security guards with helmets, chest shields, and two phasers each.
A few steps from where Keller clung to the rail, Zoa also pressed back on the rail, both hands gripping it, and watched the screen with passiveness that Keller decided must be a lie. He couldn’t worry about her right now.