“I think he wants to be alone,” Estresor Fil noted. “It’s not an uncommon response. I think I have a Flintstones episode that might be instructive.” She had stopped too, Felicia realized, and was looking at her with those big emerald eyes. Her blank face reminded Felicia of a puppy’s, to which people always seemed to impart whatever feelings they wanted to see there. She wondered suddenly if Estresor Fil had a crush on her. Why else would she have let the other guys go on without her?
Because she wants to make sure you’re okay, stupid, she answered herself. It has nothing to do with a crush. Not every person’s interest in every other person is romantic.
That, she realized, glancing at Will’s distant, retreating form, was a lesson she had learned many times over.
No Saturn. Will could scarcely believe the dumb luck. He’d already been tagged as a research assistant on a scientific project taking place there, and had been looking forward to it for months, and now, with the flinging of a few fish—flinging in which he hadn’t even taken part—it was gone, vapor through his fingers.
He figured the rest of his squadron had already gone home by the time he was released from Superintendent Vyrek’s office, but he wasn’t ready to face people he knew yet. Instead, he wandered alone across the Academy campus in the dying light. Boothby, the groundskeeper, looked at him with sad eyes and slowly shook his head, wispy white hair fluttering with the motion. So word is already out, Will thought. That didn’t take long, did it? Helping himself to a seat on one of the benches stationed at intervals along the paths, he watched the whirl of Academy life pass him by for a while. A cluster of cadets joked and laughed, Geordi La Forge—with his distinctive VISOR, everybody knew who Geordi was—at their center. Will knew that it was ridiculous to think he’d never be that happy again, but at this precise moment he had a hard time imagining any other fate.
He was still sitting on the bench, stewing in his own juices, as his father would have put it back in the days when they’d spoken to one another, when a first-year cadet named Arnis, a Trill female, sat down next to him. Though Arnis and Will had been friendly, they had not been especially close until both were picked for the Saturn team this coming summer. After that they’d spent a lot of time together, planning for the summer, studying the research project and the living conditions they’d face, and making guesses about their futures. She was an attractive young woman who kept her dark hair trimmed close, displaying the distinctive Trill spotting along her temples, cheeks and neck in all its glory. As she sat, she frowned at Will. “I’m so sorry, Will.”
“So you’ve already heard, too? Is there anyone on this campus who doesn’t know yet?”
“It’s pretty much all anyone’s talking about,” Arnis told him. “You guys—you and Omega Squadron—are just about famous.”
“Infamous, maybe,” Will countered.
“Either way, it seems like everyone knows your names. You’ll be signing autographs before long.”
“So all you have to do to make yourself well-known is to be escorted back to campus in the custody of Starfleet Security,” Will said bitterly. “After having caused property damage and wasted enough seafood to feed a large family for a month.”
“Maybe it’s not something to message home about,” Arnis said. “Although, in your case, I guess you don’t do a whole lot of messaging home to begin with. But, you know, maybe it’s better to be known than not known. In time, people might forget why they know your name, but they won’t forget your name. It could be a good thing, in the long run.”
Will shrugged. “Going to Saturn would have been a good thing in the short run,” he said. “Tomorrow I’ll learn what my replacement posting will be, but I doubt it’ll be nearly as interesting as that would have been.”
“Oh, I’m sure Saturn will be boring as anything,” Arnis said. Then, with a laugh, she admitted, “Okay, it won’t be. But I’ll pretend it is, for your sake.”
He tried to smile but had a feeling it wasn’t coming off quite right. “Thanks,” he said. “It’s just—you know, sometimes it doesn’t feel like anything ever works out for me here on Earth. I don’t think I was meant to be here. My destiny is out there somewhere, among the stars. Down here I’m just too landlocked.”
“Will, that’s not true,” Arnis said sorrowfully. “You’ve had a rough time, I guess. But you’ve also got an exemplary record here at the Academy. The way you whipped that Tholian ship in the battle sim? That may go down in Academy history just as much as your little fish fray does. Okay, you got a black spot today, but overall it’s still a record to be proud of. When you graduate, you’ll be assigned to a starship right away, with your record, and then you’re on your way.”
Will knew, intellectually, that Arnis was right. But he couldn’t shake the cloud of pessimism that hung over him with the near-arrest, the loss of his summer plans, and now the mystery of whatever had become of his father. It wouldn’t be the first time the old man had walked away from responsibility, but Kyle Riker took his job, if nothing else, seriously, so it was odd that they hadn’t heard from him. “Thanks, Arnis,” he said without notable enthusiasm. “You’ll keep me posted, right? Let me know what Saturn’s like?”
“Of course I will,” she promised. She looked out at the sky, which had grown dark while they talked, and stood up. “Hey, I’m meeting some people in the mess hall. Do you want to come with?”
Will hadn’t thought about dinner, but now that she mentioned it he did notice the first stirrings of hunger. “The mess hall? Do you know what they’re serving tonight?”
She hesitated for a moment. “Um…I think it’s fish.”
“I’ll just get something in my room,” Will said. “Thanks anyway.”
Arnis gave him a half-smile and retreated to join her other friends. Zeta Squadron had scattered after the superintendent’s rebuke, and Will—not for the first time in his young life—found himself feeling utterly alone.
Kyle sat on his bunk, back up against the bulkhead and his padd balanced on his lap. It wasn’t very comfortable, but he was learning that nothing about the Morning Star had been designed for the comfort of humans. But then, there were precious few humans on the ship to be inconvenienced. He kept reminding himself that he had chosen a freighter specifically so he wouldn’t have a lot of people around.
Well, he thought, you got what you wanted. In spades.
Ever since leaving Earth, the Starbase 311 flashbacks had lessened in frequency and severity. For that, he was profoundly grateful. But after having spent several days in no company but his own, he had decided that the best thing to do was to confront those memories in an organized way.
Someone at Starfleet, he had no doubt, was trying to ruin him at the very least, and more likely to kill him as well as ruin his reputation. He had gone over, in his own mind, all the Starfleet-related jobs he had done for the past few years, and couldn’t quite make the intuitive leap from any of those to his becoming a target. That left only Starbase 311 and the Tholian massacre that had taken place there. That was the wild card, the life event that seemed most likely to have brought him to the attention of his unseen enemy.
Had the whole attack on the starbase been designed to kill him, he wondered? Was the only survivor of the assault really the target? Was someone now trying to finish the job left undone two years before? It seemed unlikely, but he had to consider every possibility. And to do that, he had to try to recall those details he had intentionally boxed away, forever, he had hoped. Somewhere in that incident the key to what was happening to him now might be buried, and if it was there he had to turn it up. So he scanned the records on his padd of his work there, and he worked on remembering.
The Tholian Assembly took the concept of territoriality to new heights. There were various theories espoused for this, but the fact was that Federation relations with the Tholians had always been marginal at best, and very little was known about their forbidding world—a Class-Y planet incapable of sustaining human life—or their
culture. Tholians were believed to have very short lifespans, possibly measured in months, although there was speculation that they passed on their consciousness in some kind of crystal memory formation from one generation to the next. Whatever the psychosocial reasons, though, they didn’t tend to stray far from their own territory, and they didn’t like it when others encroached. That was, in fact, a huge understatement—they defended their own territory with rabid determination. As a result, most other cultures tried to keep their distance lest they raise the ire of the Tholians.
Which, given the expansive nature of the Federation, was bound to happen someday. Starbase 311, a free-floating space station, was primarily a scientific field station, in the far outreaches of the Alpha Quadrant. While its stated purposes were science and research, the fact of the matter was that it was the closest Federation outpost to Tholian space and therefore of political and possibly military significance as well. If the Tholians would accept a starbase so near Tholian space, what else might they accept? Whole regions of the Alpha Quadrant were unexplored due to the Federation’s unwillingness to test the Tholian comfort zone, so 311 was intended from the outset to be somewhat of a test case.
Because of its military potential, Kyle had been assigned to the starbase to examine the situation for himself. If the Tholians permitted the starbase to function unmolested, then there might be room for further expansion, and Kyle’s role was to help arrive at that determination. If, on the other hand, the Tholians objected to 311’s presence, Kyle would be on the scene to help strategize a Starfleet response. Either way, his strategic expertise was needed there, and he went where he was needed.
He was there for only a couple of months, as it turned out. A couple of months—but for everyone else on the starbase, their final months. Sitting on his bunk on the Kreel’n ship, he brought up the list of those who had served on Starbase 311 alongside him. Humans, Deltans, Rigelians, Andorians, Vulcans, Saurians…the sons and daughters of at least a dozen worlds had died that day. Looking at the names brought back flashes of memory. Li Tang, brilliant and sarcastic; Wulthrim, whose laughter could shake the starbase on its axis, Sul Sul Getreden, acerbic and humorless but with an unexpected poetic streak that showed through even on scientific reports. And so many more.
Combing the records on his padd, he noticed something he had forgotten about completely. Most of the scientists were fairly open about their research, and enjoyed talking about it even with those who might not thoroughly understand their stories. But there was a small group of scientists who claimed their work was classified at levels even beyond that at which Kyle was cleared, and this group remained secretive about their experiments the whole time Kyle was on the station. Other researchers began to suspect that they were up to something they shouldn’t be—genetic engineering experiments, strictly forbidden by Federation law, was the rumor. Now that he thought about it, he remembered the conversation he had with Simon Urs-Sistal, the half-Aurelian physicist who had confided in him.
“I’m just not sure what to do about it,” Simon had said to him. They’d been sitting together at a table in the starbase’s lounge, some distance away from anyone else, hunched over their drinks and talking in low tones. Kyle had known from the outset that this was a conversation Simon wanted to have in private, but he said it had to be in a public place, because anyone’s quarters might be bugged. That had piqued Kyle’s curiosity, and the story Simon told once they huddled in the lounge had more than lived up to it.
“Report it,” Kyle said simply. “What else can you do?”
“The thing is, these are only suspicions,” Simon said. Aurelians were humanoid but with a skull crest that came to a point at the top rear of their heads, and Simon had inherited that feature from his Aurelian mother. In times of stress—as now—he had a tendency to scratch at the base of the crest, as if to soothe an itch. “I can’t prove a bit of it. What Roone and Heidl and the others are up to in there, none of us know for sure. But that in itself concerns us.”
“Because the rest of you know what you’re all working on?” Kyle asked.
“Exactly,” Simon replied. “I’m assessing the intersection of pulse theory with superstrings—the idea that subatomic pulses can travel on the superstrings that bind all matter in the universe. Theoretically, this could give us instantaneous communication across vast distances, and possibly even, at some point, virtually unlimited transporter potential. Much faster and more efficient than subspace communication. I stress that it’s all very theoretical at this point. I’m interested in pure research, not necessarily the practical applications of the research, and this is a good place to do it. But the point is that everyone knows what I’m working on. We talk, we share ideas. A biogeneticist might have a brainstorm that will help me in my work, and by the same token I might give her an idea as well.”
Simon paused, scratching at his crest like he was trying to excavate it. His sunken eyes looked into Kyle’s meaningfully. Kyle was silent—Simon had a lot on his mind, and he’d spill it, given time—and waited. Finally, Simon continued. “But those guys—Heidl especially, but also Roone and what’s his name, Latriso Bistwinela—they’re so secretive you’d think they were working for the other side. They’re not, I’m sure—they came on Starfleet ships, and their research seems to have Federation support—but their attitude is such that it worries me. And then, from what little I’ve been able to glean by talking to other researchers, I’m not sure the Federation is precisely sure what it’s supporting in that lab.”
“What do you mean?” asked Kyle.
“This far from home, it’s very hard for the Federation to keep real tabs on anything. Yes, we send back reports and data, but reports can say anything we want them to, and data can be doctored. Falsified. I could say I’m working with subatomic pulses in deep space, while really I could be spending my days with holodeck simulations of Orion slave girls. It’s unlikely that anyone at Federation headquarters understands much of what my data shows anyway, so they believe what I tell them, for the most part.”
“So you think that team is working on something other than what they say they’re working on?”
“That’s the thing, Kyle. They don’t even have a cover story. It would be the easiest thing in the world for them to tell us they’re performing some simple experiment or other. But we might ask them how it’s going, or offer suggestions. They don’t seem to want even that much interaction with the rest of us, so they just don’t say anything. But Jenkins and Kauffman see the bills of lading from materials that arrive on every Starfleet vessel, and those materials suggest that there might be some genetic manipulation going on.”
“Which is frowned upon,” Kyle suggested.
“Which is absolutely illegal.” Simon had raised his voice unconsciously, and now he glanced around to see if anyone had noticed. “Illegal,” he repeated, more softly.
“Which is why you should report it.”
“Yes, yes,” Simon agreed. “I should. I will, Kyle. I mean, I have no definitive proof. But I have my beliefs, and those of several other prominent scientists on this base. We can ask that Roone and his crew be investigated—not that they’ve necessarily done anything wrong, but if they haven’t then they have nothing to fear, right?”
“Makes sense to me,” Kyle had said.
And report it, Simon had, Kyle remembered. The Federation officials had taken it seriously enough that a hearing had been scheduled, and Starfleet sent a ship out to 311 with an investigative team on board. The team had arrived at the starbase, and the starship—the Berlin, an Excelsior-class ship, Kyle recalled—had made arrangements to come back in several days to pick the team up.
But the day after the team arrived—the day the scientists were to explain what they’d been working on—was also the day the Tholians attacked. At the time, Kyle thought the attack had been prompted by the Berlin’s visit, as if the Tholians, barely able to tolerate a starbase, had been set off by the unexpected arrival of a heavy cruiser, inste
ad of the smaller Oberth-class ships usually used to supply the station.
Whatever had prompted the attack, it had come suddenly and without notice, almost as soon as the Berlin was too far away to return in time to help. Tholian warship activity in the sector was commonplace, as would be expected so close to their well-defended boundaries, so no one gave much thought to the approach of six ships until they crossed out of Tholian Assembly space and neared 311.
Kyle had been sleeping in his quarters when the Tholians had come close enough to raise alarms. He’d been called to the starbase’s command center, and by the time the turbolift got him there a red alert had been issued. Klaxons blared, flashing red lights declared a state of emergency, and Starfleet officers ran to their battle stations. This was precisely why Kyle was stationed here.
But the assumption had been that any Tholian incursion would come after a breakdown in negotiations, or after some aggressive posturing on their part. None of their battle simulations had included a seemingly unprecipitated attack out of thin air. Starbase 311, being primarily science and research oriented, had shields and phaser banks and photon torpedoes, but that was the extent of their defensive systems.
When Kyle reached the command center, the first of the Tholian ships were heaving into view near the starbase. Powerful red lights from their ships shone brightly—Kyle’s first thought was that they were already firing, but it turned out not to be weapons fire. He was never sure what it was—just illuminating their target, he guessed. But so much about the Tholians would remain a mystery to him. Whatever it was, when the first one appeared, Commander Bisbee, the ranking officer, looked at the red circle of light and said, “Looks like sunset over the Pacific.”
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