STAR TREK: NEW EARTH - CHALLENGER

by Diane Carey

  Doing his best not to attract any attention, Keller hunked his shoulders down some and let his head hang even though he was still looking up, sort of.

  Shucorion looked down at him. Somehow that was appropriate. Why didn’t he just say it?

  In fact he didn’t say anything for quite a long time. Keller tried to keep his expression passive, but knew everything showed in his eyes, all his fears and insecurities, doubts and determinations, and the belligerence that drove it. He tried to communicate that he’d just turn around and get somebody else, but in this instant he realized he didn’t really want anybody else. Shucorion carried James Kirk’s stamp of approval and had given Keller just the right nudge when he’d needed it. And he was all the things Keller had said.

  “You say I’m different from my own kind. You’re most perceptive, to see so much. I am different from them, though I’ve tried to hide it. During the last cycle, I made myself useful as a blast technician—one who scours destroyed buildings and shafts for heavy metals from meteorites after a particularly cataclysmic ore shower.” He made a sweeping gesture at the pile of salvage around them. “Then I set charges and render the destroyed zone into manageable pieces that can be used to rebuild. We must rebuild almost constantly. Our planet circles a star which circles another, and when the two cycle near each other, great destruction is delivered to our planet.”

  “Yes,” Keller supplied. “We call them ‘Whistler’ and ‘Mother.’ I’d heard they’re pretty hard on you.”

  “On the Kauld planet also, but more to Blood Many. We are the unfortunate. We’ve come to call this the Blood Curse, to always be on the underside of events as we seemed to be cast. Then dynadrive came, and we thought this was good, but it turned out to be more of the Curse.”

  He stopped briefly as the wind lashed and nearly knocked them down. Keller put his padd up to protect his face, but Shucorion seemed hardly to notice the weather’s unhappiness. Was his own planet constantly under the lash?

  “I was inside a gutted shaft,” he went on, “in a tall building someone had unwisely built near a fault line. It was my job to reactivate the site for mining. I was not enthusiastic that day—I had lost several family members in the ore shower, but if I failed to work, I would be disrespectful of those killed by the ore shot. I was supposed to go up in the building and start the automated machinery that would begin the sifting process. According to precaution, I was supposed to send in a mechanical unit that would take most of the day to safely rise to the top of the structure, check the integrity, then turn on the automators.”

  “Bet you didn’t,” Keller anticipated.

  “No, I didn’t. . . . I was hungry, exhausted, and no one was looking. I went in alone. The only safety precaution I took was to turn the emergency power off. When I did, the grid shorted out, and my arm was badly injured.”

  He pulled up the sleeve of his tunic, showing his right arm badly scarred by a lightning-grid of electrical burns. Keller winced in empathy. The scoring didn’t look like the sort of thing that healed overnight.

  “I should have taken the warning,” Shucorion continued. “Instead, I went to the top and turned on the automation. The instant I did, the vibrations began to destroy the shaft. The building began to collapse in every direction around me. Down I went. Through explosions, fire, sparks, shattering glass, and crashing beams, I rode the collapsing structure all the way to the ground.”

  Keller clapped a hand over his mouth. “Great snakes!”

  Shucorion seemed rather entertained by his own tale. “And I landed on my feet . . . utterly unharmed.”

  “Oh, come on, now!”

  “You see, when I did the right thing, I burned my arm. When I took a risk, everything turned out miraculously fine. I began to think that perhaps this might summon a change for my people, to believe there was something about me that let me take chances and be an element of change. I even have a little cult around me, mostly those who were with me that day.”

  “What a story,” Keller offered. “You know, people who take chances have a much better possibility of success than those who don’t. We’ve always just taken that as a given!”

  Shucorion’s eyes widened. “The risks I see being taken by your people, by you—these are astonishing to me. Astonishing! What seem like mindless chances which I have taken now shrink beside the things you will do to succeed.” He put his hand proudly on his chest and declared, “I thought I was a very daring fellow, before I met Humanity.”

  Smiling at his own revelation, Shucorion happened to look down and noticed something. He bent over, pushed his hand into the clutter of stuff at his side, and came up with a slightly scratched but otherwise laudable Keeling shank. He showed it to Keller, and came closer to present it, almost like a peace offering.

  “This is the difference you see in me,” he finished. “I will take a risk.”

  Did somebody say “peace”?

  Even as Keller accepted the Keeling shank in his hand, Shucorion didn’t step back. “Blood have lost countless thousands in this cycle without end. But I think if Nick Keller had been among us, we would have lost fewer.”

  Either the sun was melting or somebody had just sprayed ice on the back of Keller’s neck. Or the wind changed.

  At this remarkable compliment, gripped by both surprise and humility, Keller was on his feet before he realized his legs were working again. Despite the unevenness of the thing he was standing on, he managed to straighten and square his shoulders. He suddenly wanted to live up to the stunning award he had just been given.

  “Your technology is beyond ours,” Shucorion added. “I have little experience with it. I’m not qualified to be first officer in your fleet.”

  Keller spread his arms. “You’ll fit right in. I’m not qualified to be captain.”

  Shucorion smiled at Keller’s whitewashed humility. “In that case, we shall be a fine match.”

  After a whirlwind sorting expedition, the heavy lifting began immediately, with the exception of a couple of minutes to visit the head. After that, Nick Keller pretty much ditched eating or any other functional necessity for the next thirty hours. He spent all that time with either Zane or Scott, or other technicians, picking through the acres of salvaged parts, cannibalizing what he thought he might want and confounded by the fact that he wasn’t sure at all what he might need.

  Shucorion and his forty or so Blood soldiers showed up instantly and proved to be the most tireless laborers Keller had ever seen. They never said no, they seldom paused, they never complained, they solved their own problems, and they hardly ever rested. Such dogged determination became very quickly embarrassing. What workers!

  Partly because the Blood never paused, within the first four days those parts were being welded, bonded, glued, tenoned, thermal-sealed, or fused into amalgamated ship sections. More than twice Keller had to talk Scott into thinking about function instead of form. Scott was a brilliant engineer, able to jury-rig almost anything, but it was up to Keller to think in terms of what they needed against what they had.

  One of the more heartwarming moments occurred when a shuttlebus arrived with the insignia of the Colonial Governor’s Office plastered all over it and two hundred colonists piled out. Summoned by Governor Pardonnet, they had come to help after all.

  At that moment, building the ship became a colonial effort. Colonists trudged in from the reaches, many with good skills, and started picking at their own little areas of expertise. Nick Keller himself became the clearinghouse for final decisions. He and his coin worked overtime.

  Just make a decision. Doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad. A bad decision now is better than a good decision five minutes from now, if you’re going to die in four minutes.

  Hull form was determined by salvaged parts available from the Peleliu, the derelict CST Beowulf, and other ships that had been stressed beyond their limits out here. The underhull of Peleliu’s saucer section, minus the pot lid, provided a basic structure. They lifted it up onto a huge
scaffold, the same way old steamships were once made back on Earth, and started attaching things to it.

  Scott ordered cobalt-obsidian-coated radiation-resistant hull plates from the wrecked privateer Hunter’s Moon, to be pulled off and bolted onto a make-do top section, creating a thick “black hat” for the saucer section. Sections from the private ships Winston Churchill and Mable Stevens were used to mount the saucer onto the engineering hull, which was pieced together from four separate sections and cut to fit each other. Fanshaped blue strakes from the loading bay of American Rover were used to mount the nacelles, looking more like flying buttresses than nacelle struts. Scott called them “Rover strakes,” and the name stuck. The nacelles, precious cargo from Beowulf, were mounted below the hulls like skids on a sled.

  If anything appeared to fit together, it was all cosmetic. Keller knew none of these parts or sections had been cast as single pieces. He wondered if the ship would be strong enough to leave the atmosphere at all, never mind take enemy fire, but time would have to tell. Right now all he wanted was to make an appearance, maybe surprise the Kauld into backing off for a few more weeks.

  As the ship took shape, he found himself having both dreams and nightmares. Usually they had the same plot.

  It would work, it might fly, and it was just ugly enough to be scary. Perfect.

  On the sixteenth day, he stood below the monster scaffold and peered up at the underbelly of the engineering section. To his left were Zane Bonifay and Zoa, not standing too close to each other. To his right were Savannah Ring and Shucorion. No one said anything. The only one in a Starfleet uniform, though, was Savannah—strange, because . . . well, because Savannah was strange, but most because she was the one Starfleet had threatened to kick out if she didn’t accept unsavory assignment at Belle Terre. Bonifay’s uniform had been put away in favor of a more filth-tolerant work suit, and Keller still wore his favorite black Fleet T-shirt, as he had all through the dirty part of the project. Wearing the uniform tunic right now just felt wrong. He didn’t deserve it.

  A few feet away, one of the nacelles swept down on its flying buttress. They looked like standard Starfleet nacelles, but they hid some secrets. Expedition mule engines, for one, capable of impulse or warp speed with corresponding tug muscle, powered by the Blood warp core, in fact an alien contraption given to the Blood and Kauld by others. Scott said they were eccentric. How that would play out, no one knew. Not a thoroughbred, but a quarter horse.

  Above him, way above, flew the patched saucer section, bearing signs of scorching from welders and graffiti from overanxious or cynical participants in this goofy project. Everybody wanted to have his name scratched in her. Or his mother’s name. Or his opinion.

  The ship was a patched-together stew, with mostly blue and gray hullplates but the odd red or green or purple one, but there was something stubbornly proud about the way she stood up in her scaffold, sticking her chin out forward and her duck-winged nacelles sprawled out underneath on their flying Rover strakes. From here they couldn’t see the black hat on her saucer section, those tough cobalt-obsidian plates Scott salvaged from Hunter’s Moon and bolted on. Somehow it was fitting that this ship should be part pirate. Keller imagined the hat would be the only pretty part of this hybrid.

  As his friends stood at his sides, he felt obliged to offer a few words.

  “Well, there she is,” he announced. “Our one-picket wonder.”

  Bonifay shifted from one foot to the other. “Thank you, Commander Encouragement. Any comments from the bilious horde?”

  “There will be,” Savannah said, “if you call me ‘bilious’ again.”

  Zoa and Shucorion remained without opinion, or at least without voiced opinion. Keller got the idea that the reasons for their silence were myriad and probably opposite. He resisted asking. The ship was here, almost able to be launched. Whether she remained in space once they got her up there—no time for a test run. Her maiden voyage would be one of instant significance. There would be no shakedown. Either everything worked, or it didn’t.

  The weather had changed again. Unlike yesterday, which had been windy, dry, and cold, today it was windy, dry, and hot. Keller shrugged out of his work jacket and dropped on a nearby tarp. Suddenly he snapped his fingers. “Oh, I forgot!” He punched up the offending segment on his padd and stuck it in front of Savannah. “It’s says to establish a firm ‘connect ion.’ What’s a ‘connect ion’?”

  She shook her head. “Never heard of it.”

  He swung the padd in the other direction. “Zane, what’s a ‘connect ion’?”

  Zane came out of his communing with the ship, which, typical of a devoted bosun, he clearly liked. “A what? Let me see that.”

  “Right here.” Keller showed him the padd screen.“Do you know what this is?”

  “‘Connect’ . . . oh, sure. The graphic tag skipped a space.”

  Keller looked again. “‘Connection.’ Well, for pity’s sake. Have you seen my brain? It’s about this big. I seem to have lost it.”

  “What’s her name?”

  At Savannah’s mystic question, Keller turned again. “What? Her name . . .”

  “We can’t call it Peleliu,” she said. “That wouldn’t be right.”

  “No, no . . .” Keller looked at the ship again. “Wouldn’t carry any punch out here at Belle Terre. The Blood and Kauld don’t know about World War Two or the Battle of Peleliu or what the Marines endured there.”

  “At least we haven’t forgotten,” Bonifay mentioned.

  “No, we sure haven’t.”

  “What’s its class?” he asked. “What kind of a ship is it? The what what?”

  Folding his arms tightly around his chest, Keller shook his head, stumped. “I don’t know . . . part cruiser . . . part cutter, part dreadnought, part lander, part scout—”

  “Some light cruise, some battleship,” Bonifay supplied, “and a piece or two combat support tender.”

  “She’s a composition ship,” Savannah suggested. “Composition? Miscellany?”

  Surveying the mottled contraption lovingly, Zane shrugged one shoulder and framed his words with animated hands. “She’s a . . . an alloy. A crossbreed. A peasant. She’s one of my own kind! Don’t look—I may weep.”

  Keller looked up, up, up to the underside of the saucer section, peering straight through in his mind to the stitched together bridge.

  “The U.S.S. Mongrel?” he said.

  He won their praises in the form of dust on his boots and Savannah’s hand across the back of his head.

  “What’s the matter with that?” he whined. “If the shoe fits—”

  “Pardon me,” Zane responded, “I’m gonna go over there and throw up.”

  Shucorion caught Keller’s eye with a glint of amusement, but as usual had no creative suggestions. Zoa remained underwhelmed.

  From the bosun’s kit slung jauntily on his hip, Bonifay pulled a laser microtorch and held it out to Keller. “Here, Nick. Sign on.”

  Warmed to his toes, and scared all the way back up again, Keller took their encouragement as poorly placed confidence. He held the microtorch in both hands, turning it over and over. They were pleased, and rightfully so, with their miraculous work over the past days, but he was too aware that he may have charged them with the forging of their own coffin.

  No way out of it, though.

  He strode over to the nacelle, which had so valiantly, so recently and fruitlessly served another ship. He had given this nacelle either a second life or a second death.

  His whole body suddenly tight, he reached up and scrawled his name nice and big in the ship’s hide. Nick Jacob Keller.

  “No rank?” Savannah asked.

  He shook his head. “No rank. It’s just us.”

  “Ahoy!”

  The shout came from far overhead. They had to step back to get a look.

  Far up in the scaffolding, poking out of an open access hatch in the ship’s neck section like Rapunzel sticking out of her tower win
dow, Montgomery Scott waved until they saw him.

  “Mr. Keller,” Scott called. “Would you like to come to your bridge for the first time, lad? She’s open for business!”

  Chapter Nineteen

  THE INNARDS of the ship looked like something had been turned inside out and left to the elements. Actually, that was pretty much what had happened to most of this construction material. Scratches from wind and rain showed on the bulkheads and strakes and struts, beam brackets, gunwales, braces, joiners, doors, frames, and anything needed to hold them all together. Salvaged material remained at a premium on Belle Terre. The good stuff had been skimmed off almost immediately and disseminated around the planet for homes, buildings, a hospital, and the businesses needed to provide an economic base for the new Earth.

  The mongrel ship, then, was made of secondhand everything, and hardly any of it was Starfleet standard. Only now did Keller realize how many of the Expedition ships had been made in far-flung spaceyards all over the Federation. Somehow Commander Scott had managed to stitch together a working bridge.

  Nick Keller and his straggly team, as patched together as the ship herself, stepped onto the bridge. Some things were familiar. Others, as alien as Zoa or Shucorion. Or Zane, for that matter. Then again, Savannah wasn’t exactly from this side of the spiritual divide, either.

  Wonder what that makes me?

  Keller stepped forward. Beneath him, there was a raised quarterdeck in a crescent shape, slightly off center, bending its centerpoint over to the starboard side. At the two ends, angled steps fanned down to the command deck, which was only one step down. To the port, then, was most of the lower deck, carpeted with burgundy low-nap, the quarterdeck with navy blue, obviously from two different ships, making the bridge look like one astral body eclipsing another.

  Instead of above the turbolift, much as it had been on Peleliu, the sci-deck he’d requested had been mounted on the port side, and stood about five feet up with steps forward and aft of it. The space under it looked like it had some kind of panels, but Keller couldn’t tell what for. This sci-deck didn’t have a lattice to protect the crew from falling, but instead a short wall of alien metal with a field of quatrefoils cut into it, each big enough to put a hand through, to allow sound and light to pass through. The hand-level caprail was glossy and the color of a ripe beet, brighter than the burgundy carpet.