by Ted Pedersen
Humans are a bundle of unresolved emotions, Nog thought. Actually it was something his uncle, Quark, had said. Show me a human with a lot on his mind, and I’ll show you someone ready to be taken advantage of.
Of course Nog didn’t want to take advantage of a friend, but it comforted his sense of Ferengi pride to know that he could if he wanted.
Nog started to leave the holosuite area when another tremor rumbled through Space Camp. Like all the others he had experienced since arriving on Rijar, this one quickly passed. But they were still unsettling.
Earlier he had overheard a conversation between Professor Kala and Wingate. No one knew what was causing the tremors, since there didn’t seem to be any pattern. But if something serious did happen, Wingate had assured the professor that there were shuttlecraft ready to evacuate Space Camp.
Somehow that did not particularly reassure Nog.
The next day, the four teams were each given command of a simulated starship and were put into competition with one another. For Jake and Nog it was not unlike one of the Space Patrol hologames they played on Deep Space Nine’s Promenade.
Each of the teams took turns rotating between different assignments. What was good about the exercise was that each member of a team had to depend upon at least one other teammate. That was also what was bad.
After missing for the third time with his aft phasers, Jake began to suspect that Nog might be deliberately feeding him faulty data. When he mentioned it, after their ship had been destroyed, Nog emphatically denied it.
“You’re just a poor shot,” Nog explained. “I always beat you at the arcade.”
That was not exactly true, Jake thought. He had won his share of hologame encounters, but he had to admit the Ferengi did have more of a “killer” instinct when it came to battle games.
Although Jake let the incident pass this time, he remained suspicious.
It was later that same morning, after a short shuttle ride to the canyon country south of Space Camp, that Jake’s next encounter with Nog occurred.
The team was rock climbing up a gnarled stone monolith that bordered the craggy canyon beyond. This was a physical exercise and Jake felt confident he could easily outperform Nog.
Without either Jake or Nog acknowledging it, they were now competing with each other in every test. One was always trying to one-up the other—particularly if Dyan was present.
The rock climb was a good example. Jake went first, using his athletic talents and the skills he had learned from his father during similar climbs on Mars. This terrain was similar to that of the Red Planet, particularly since terra-forming had boosted the oxygen content and created a mini “hothouse” environment to make the Martian winters less frigid and the summers, if not exactly summer, at least like a mild spring.
Dyan was second on the rope, followed by Nog and then K’am bringing up the rear. Each climb consisted of half the team, and these four had seemed to evolve into a habitual group.
The climb, like many of the Space Camp exercises, was designed as a test of teamwork rather than individual competition. But that didn’t deter Jake from wanting to show off his climbing skills a bit.
“You’re very good,” Dyan said after Jake had traversed the underside of a large rock that blocked their path to the peak.
“I did a lot of climbing when we lived on Mars,” Jake answered as he helped Dyan climb onto the top side of the overhanging rock. From here it was only a few more meters to the peak. Anxiously, Jake started to climb upward.
“Shouldn’t we wait for the others?” Dyan asked.
“Ferengi aren’t very athletic. We’ll meet him at the top.”
Reluctantly Dyan followed Jake. There were an abundance of footholds and this last part of the climb was almost easy compared to what they had already endured.
Down below them, Nog and K’am continued up the almost vertical side of the monolith where the climb was anything but easy. Nog, in particular, was having a hard time.
“Do you want to stop?” K’am asked as they paused on a small outcropping about halfway up.
With sweat dripping from his ears, Nog looked down at the ground which was a lot farther down than he had imagined when he had been looking up. Heights were not something he was very keen on. But then he glanced back up to see that Jake and Dyan were almost at the peak. “Never.”
With renewed energy, Nog attacked the rest of the climb with a ferocious determination. K’am skillfully followed. This type of exercise was child’s play to someone who had been born Klingon, but he had the courtesy not to make it seem too easy.
They had almost reached the top of the overhanging rock when Nog made a misstep, lost his footing, and tumbled from the rock face out into space and toward the ground.
Fortunately, safety precautions had been rigidly enforced. All that happened to Nog was that he found himself dangling in midair from the end of his security line and doing a lot of yelling, as his bravado momentarily left him. He was humiliated, but not hurt.
“Relax,” K’am yelled at him as he pulled him back up on the line. “You’re perfectly safe.”
“Easy for you to say,” Nog grumbled. He reached out and grasped the Klingon’s hand as he let himself be pulled up.
When he was safely back on the overhanging rock, Nog paused and looked up at Jake and Dyan. Was it his imagination or was Jake silently laughing at him?
CHAPTER 7
Can I speak to you?” Nog asked as they were returning to the shuttlecraft for the trip back to Space Camp after the rope-climbing exercise.
“Sure,” Jake answered, sensing the seriousness in Nog’s tone. Ferengi were never serious about anything except gold-pressed latinum and…
“Females,” Nog said.
“Females?”
“Well, one female. The Betazoid, Dyan.”
“Definitely a female,” Jake tried to joke.
“You have to stay away from her,” Nog declared.
“What’re you talking about?”
“I think you’re trying to show me up in the field tests so you can steal my girl.”
Jake stopped short and looked at his Ferengi friend. “I don’t believe this. I’m not trying to steal Dyan from you by showing you up. It’s just that humans are better athletes than Ferengi. Everybody knows that.” He started to walk away, then stopped to add: “And, one more thing. She’s not your girl.”
The rest of the afternoon went badly between Jake and Nog. Each retreated to a separate corner of their shared quarters and tried to pretend the other wasn’t there.
Nog busied himself with his holocube. He downloaded the events he had previously recorded into his touch pad and edited them so that his role became central and magnified. He cut out those parts that showed him in a less than favorable light. It wasn’t cheating, but creative manipulation, which was a most admirable Ferengi trait.
As he worked, Nog thought about how he had originally considered the whole “miniature Starfleet” style of Space Camp stupid. At first he had gone along with the games only to impress Dyan. But something changed over the past few days. He was beginning to like it—at least a little bit.
And, he thought, that was very un-Ferengi.
Jake was also gaining new insights as he recorded his thoughts in his private diary on his touch pad. He had grown up as a “space brat,” with “home” being wherever his father had been stationed, on ship or planet. Starfleet was the only life Jake had ever known, but it was not the one that he necessarily wanted to embrace.
He had to admit that Deep Space Nine was an exciting environment. Being so close to the wormhole and the unknown Gamma Quadrant which lay beyond it, there were new experiences every day. But, strangely, Jake found the process of writing about the experiences in his journals more rewarding than the actual doing. Alone, interfacing with only his computer and his imagination, was what Jake enjoyed best.
That evening, after dinner, Jake took his touch pad outside and sat in the gathering dusk and wrot
e. Not so much about what was, but about what could be. He loved stories, remembering the times when his mother read to him when he was much younger, and later how he enjoyed listening to his father’s enthusiastic tales about life among the stars.
And now Jake was learning to spin his own stories. While his father may have imagined him as Ulysses sailing a futuristic set of stars, Jake thought of himself more as the blind teller of those tales, Homer.
“A strip of latinum for your thoughts,” Jake looked up to see Missy, the candidate from Sri Lanka on Earth.
“Ah … just my journal.” Jake’s attention had been focused so much on Dyan that he had almost ignored the other two girls in his group. Missy was brown skinned with features that spoke of a Southeast Asian heritage.
Missy was soft-spoken and kept her own counsel, but her skills in science tests were more than impressive. Her goal, he remembered from an earlier conversation, was to become an engineer.
“I wish I could put my thoughts on screen so easily,” she said as she sat down next to Jake. “I can think of what I want to say, but the words never seem to match the vision in my mind.”
“That’s a universal dilemma,” Jake said. “I have the same problem. I see the world around me, but it’s difficult to translate so that someone can read my words and see what I see.”
“There was a writer who lived in my country several centuries ago,” Missy told him. “His vision of space still survives, even if it is a bit technically out of date. His books inspired me to work on getting into Starfleet.”
“Arthur C. Clarke,” Jake said. “I’ve read his books myself.”
Missy looked over his shoulder at the words lingering on Jake’s touch pad screen. Normally Jake was terribly shy about sharing his writing, but something about Missy’s attitude proclaimed that she was a colleague—even if his tool was words and hers was a microprobe.
“Do you like to write?” she asked.
“When I get it right,” he replied. “Which isn’t that often.”
Missy smiled and he knew she understood. “I feel the same way about adjusting a core drive.”
“I’ve always thought of words like stars,” Jake said. “They’re like the lights in the sky that show us the way.”
“Such a beautiful way to put it, Jake. It sounds to me that you’ve found your vocation.” With those words, Missy got up and walked away, leaving Jake sitting under the stars and wondering if she might not be right.
The encounter with Missy had put Jake in a better mood. When he returned to his room, Nog was already asleep, which he was glad of, not wanting to increase the hostility that had sprung up between them.
They had always competed with each other, but in the past few days at Space Camp, their rivalry had taken on a harder edge.
As Jake slipped into his bunk he noticed the crystal face on the holocube on Nog’s desk was glowing. It reminded him of a sponge that was soaking up everything it could find. But then that thought passed and he fell asleep.
In his dreams he thought about Missy and her words, but then she morphed into the image of Dyan. It was a tranquil scene, with the two of them exploring a green velvet world.
But somewhere in the depths of the long forest, Jake sensed an intruder. Something or someone was prowling there—and he had very big ears.
CHAPTER 8
Jake remembered learning in school about the ancient Roman Empire that once existed on Earth. Rome had been a great nation, ruling most of the known world at its height. But, as all civilizations eventually do, Rome had fallen from its pinnacle of glory, devastated by civil unrest inside and wars outside.
Now, walking through a holosuite replication of ancient Rijar constructed by the archaeological team working there, he thought that much the same thing must have happened here. This city, or what remained, was only a pale reminder of what had once been a mighty empire. Based on Starfleet’s archaeological digs on the planet, this was probably how it had looked after the final wars and before the ravages of time and the environment had destroyed it.
“Perhaps there are still other cities here buried beneath the sand, frozen in time,” he said to Dyan as the team paused in front of a large monument of an armored soldier astride a ferocious lizard beast.
“Perhaps,” she said. “Maybe we’ll even discover one before our summer here is over.”
“Not sure I’d like to meet that fellow in a dark alley,” Jake quipped as he studied the statue of the warrior astride the beast.
“He doesn’t scare me,” Nog said, joining them. Jake noticed that his Ferengi friend had this increasingly annoying habit of interrupting any time Dyan was around.
“That’s because a Ferengi would be so intent on stealing the stranger’s purse, he’d forget the stranger might be holding a weapon in the other hand,” Jake said with more than a hint of sarcasm.
“For good friends, you two always seem to be at odds,” K’am noted as the other cadets joined them.
“All in fun,” Jake said, trying to soften his early barb. But he noticed that Nog was still scowling.
“What’s in that building over there?” Missy asked, as much to lighten the mood as to gain information.
“Let’s check it out,” Dyan said. She started walking and the others accompanied her. K’am, ever the diplomat, made a conscious effort to walk between Jake and Nog.
K’am checked his tricorder. “That’s the main hall. It’s where the government conducted their business.”
As the quartet strolled toward the building, Jake noticed how little remained of what must have once been a beautiful city. What had caused such differences between the people of this planet that their only recourse was total destruction? Then Jake remembered that even on Earth, in the late twentieth century and into the early decades of the twenty-first, individual and nationalistic passions had nearly brought his home world to the brink of destruction.
But to allow petty differences to escalate into warfare that threatened the destruction of their entire planet seemed absurd to Jake, who had been born into a much more enlightened age. And yet he knew that even today on Deep Space Nine there were still those survivors of the Bajoran-Cardassian conflict who harbored such deep hatreds that they gave no thought to the consequences of their revenge.
Inside the building Jake saw that the walls were decorated with icons that must represent the people and places from the planet in happier days. Each of the icons was framed in a blue border. That must symbolize the sky, Jake thought. And there was always a green base. That was the ground beneath them. Those two colors were a pattern that seemed to appear in not only their pictures, but their structures and machines.
“I have a feeling, looking at these pictures, that this may have been a race of latent telepaths,” Dyan observed as she stood in front of a wall of images.
“Quite likely,” Jake agreed. “Perhaps what you’ve been sensing is a residual effect of that telepathy.”
“An interesting hypothesis,” Dyan replied. “But I think it’s something else.” She stepped back and looked around the room.
The room was incomplete, a virtual reality replication with key pieces of information missing. Space Camp had done their best to make this simulation as real as possible, but there was still much that remained unknown about Rijar and the people who had lived and died there.
What Jake could tell about the room was that it had been some kind of meeting place. No, he thought, it was more of a control center, like Ops on Deep Space Nine. This was probably the nerve center of the city. Or it had been once.
As he wandered around the room, Jake saw open portals where equipment had been. Perhaps it was missing because of the incomplete data Space Camp had to work with. Or, more likely in his opinion, it had been moved to a safer place as the city continued to be attacked by its enemies.
“I think the people who were left must have gone somewhere else,” Jake said, voicing his conclusions.
“Deserted their posts.” The snarl in K�
�am’s response indicated to Jake that beneath his diplomatic exterior there beat the heart of a true Klingon. Duty onto death, no matter what.
“No,” Jake said. “I think they went to another place to continue the war.”
“Such a waste,” Dyan mused. “All this death and destruction … and for what purpose.”
“Does seem senseless,” Nog agreed. “The Ferengi would never do this.”
“No,” Jake agreed. “There would be no profit in it.” Then he quickly turned and exited the building before Nog could come up with a retort.
Outside in the plaza the sun was bright and Jake imagined how the city had been so long ago. It would have been a lovely place to live.
Slowly, one by one, the others followed him out. Each was in a somber mood from the experience. Exactly what Professor Kala intended, Jake thought.
“Hope you enjoyed your shore leave.” Cadet Wingate appeared out of nowhere and paused beneath the statue of the armed rider on the beast. “For tomorrow you die.”
They all looked at him. Wingate continued to smile. “It’s solo combat tomorrow.”
Solo combat, thought Jake. He knew from his father’s stories of his time in Space Camp what that meant.
They would be dropped into an alien environment, each with a single weapon. Not to defend themselves against whatever alien threats they might encounter, but to use against one another.
This was Space Camp’s version of the ancient Roman circus in which gladiators were thrown into an arena to battle each other—until only one of them was left standing alive at the end.
CHAPTER 9
The landscape surrounding Jake was primeval. He saw that this was a world in the process of being born, or, at best, in its early childhood. It was still raw and unformed. Molten bursts spewed out of crevices that were ripped open by almost continuous quakes. There were no trees to be seen, only gnarled rock formations. It was a planet of smoke and fire.