by Peter David
Buoyed by the success of his first flight, McHenry was eager to see what an approach looked like from the outside.
Crane was the 4-D pilot, Harris at the helm. McHenry and Seetara watched from the bridge as Amazon’s image grew smaller on the viewscreen.
“Magnify.”
The tactical officer responded to Murphy’s command. The view focused in on the runabout as it neared the event horizon. Without the 4-D displays, the colors and lights seemed dim and monochromatic. They reminded McHenry of the thunderstorms back on Earth: powerful and dramatic, but nothing like the brilliant chaos he had seen from the holodeck.
Amazon approached the event horizon, then assumed a course that followed the rim of the singularity. The open com channel between Glenn and Amazon relayed every sound from the runabout.
Crane had assumed control, and his muttered monologue provided a running commentary on his every move. He ran through the navigational routines, his fingers following his mumbled instructions. His words tumbled out faster and faster as he tried to keep pace with his flying fingers.
The sequence reached the most dangerous point, disengaging, and Crane’s voice rose. He was breathing fast, and talking faster, as he completed the maneuver and returned control to Harris.
Crane’s exaggerated sigh of relief drew a chuckle from the assembled crew. They had all felt the tension, and success now allowed them to relax. For a minute.
“Ouch!” Crane yelled, startling the assembled bridge crew.
The doctor instantly tapped his communicator. “Mr. Crane? What seems to be the problem?”
“My fingers. Cramped,” Crane answered through what sounded like gritted teeth.
McHenry winced in sympathy. The command sequences were long and complicated, and had to be executed swiftly.
“Mr. Crane?” Murphy said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Can you still operate the controls?”
“Negative.”
The single word stopped them all. It wasn’t a failure; Crane had already completed his part of the flight. But McHenry could see concerned glances passing among the members of the design team.
Crane and Harris returned to Glenn without further complications, but there was an air of uneasiness in the conference room as the team assembled. The pilots were subdued, taking their places without their usual discussion and horseplay.
Murphy ran through the debriefing, covering the operation of the runabout and the data collected by the monitoring systems. Finally, he turned to Crane.
“Mr. Crane, can you tell us what happened after Harris resumed control of the flight?”
Crane gingerly rubbed his hands together for a moment before he answered. Although the cramp had passed, the movement still looked painful.
“After I completed the transfer to Harris,” he began, “I shut off the holo controls, using the prescribed shutdown procedure. Everything worked the way it should, except for my hands.” Crane looked down at the offending digits, as if they could offer an explanation. “They just cramped up. Clenched, and I couldn’t relax them for a couple minutes.”
Dr. Trent took over from Murphy. He asked questions, and nodded as Crane answered. Satisfied, he turned to Murphy.
“I think this is simply a muscle-fatigue problem. We’re asking these pilots to perform at their maximum physical output. Is there some way the sequences can be streamlined?”
Murphy was a good engineer, but he had the best on his design team, and he passed the question along to them. A few were nodding, and two were already bent over a padd, sketching changes.
“Looks like it,” Murphy said. “Let’s see what the team comes up with.”
Murphy looked back at Crane. “How are the hands now?”
Dr. Trent answered. “He’s fine. As I said, it appears to be a muscle-fatigue response.”
Murphy nodded. His attention was already on the engineers. His dismissal was almost an afterthought as he moved to join the impromptu brainstorming session at the end of the table.
McHenry eagerly assumed his position in the command chair. The mission would launch in ten minutes, but he was ready now.
This rotation should have been Seetara’s, but the doctor had grounded the Vulcan. Some foolishness about exposure to a virus. Instead, Seetara had come to the hangar bay to watch McHenry take the runabout out.
“Sorry for taking your mission,” McHenry said. Even though he was anxious to fly the new configuration, he didn’t like to see his friend disappointed.
“There is nothing to be sorry for,” Seetara replied evenly. “It is not my mission for you to take. It is the mission of the next pilot in the rotation. Since I am unable to fly, you are the next pilot. It is your mission.”
Harris and Crane arrived. Harris took her place at the helm, and Crane joined Seetara. Soon, Murphy hailed the hangar, and told them to prepare for launch.
Crane and Seetara left the bay, and Harris took them out. McHenry activated the holographic controls. Over the com link, he heard Murphy give the order, and heard Harris reply, “Here we go.”
He watched the displays as they sped toward the spot of darkest space, which held the black hole. Light shimmered on the edge, and disappeared into the darkness within. Colors danced at the rim. Streaks of red swirling into blue, then a flash of green, combinations and shades that Mark had no words for. Each millisecond brought another permutation.
McHenry logged every change. He could feel the dip and sway of the ship as the subspace distortion increased. He knew, without sensors or readouts or displays, their precise location in space, and the limits of their navigational instruments. It was as if he were a part of the ship.
“Transferring control,” Harris said over the com channel.
McHenry knew Murphy, on board Glenn, was monitoring them. For his benefit, he replied, “Roger that.”
Control of the ship was now in his hands. He entered the command sequence for the flight without hesitation. They had all drilled, were all trained to back up the other pilots. So far, it was a routine test.
As they approached the event horizon, McHenry veered off, skimming the ship along the edge of safety. The simulated viewscreen showed the black emptiness moving along their starboard side, sliding past them.
The ship’s speed grew erratic, as they approached the space-time distortions of the event horizon. McHenry held Amazon to the prescribed trajectory, letting the sensor array read the fluctuations.
McHenry sensed a sideways slip in the ship’s course. It felt as though it had moved, though no more than a fraction of a millimeter, in the time between milliseconds.
He calculated the consequences. They were in an unstable time-space. Slippage could occur in time that did not exist for the rest of the galaxy. Unchecked, it would drag Amazon in, and there would be no escape.
Fingers flying, McHenry made a minute course correction, pulling Amazon back into the proper space-time. It was all over in the blink of an eye. Amazon was safely back on course.
When neither Murphy nor Harris commented on the correction, he hesitated. Had it actually happened? Or had it only happened in the exact time-space where he was, and not for anyone else?
After a few seconds, the sensor array indicated that they had finished collecting the data the engineers needed. McHenry brought Amazon about, pulling free of the event horizon, and putting the ship on course for their return flight.
“Returning control,” he said.
“Roger,” Harris replied. She resumed control of the ship, and McHenry leaned back in his chair. His eyes closed, and he looked like he was asleep. But his thoughts were racing, already planning the next mission, when he would have the helm.
Next time, Crane would have the controls. McHenry would just be along for the ride.
The event horizon shimmered on the forward viewscreen. It was closer than McHenry had ever been, closer than he ever wanted to be.
Amazon bucked, speeding up and slowing down as the temporal shifts battered it
. He could hear Crane’s harsh breathing over the open com channel.
McHenry knew the concentration required to hold the ship on course. He had done it on the last flight. Surely Crane could do the same. Just a few more seconds, and they would be clear.
The ship rolled, and McHenry clutched the arms of his chair to avoid being thrown to the deck. Crane was breathing faster now, panting with the exertion.
McHenry hesitated. Crane could do this. McHenry just had to have faith.
He sensed the minute Crane lost control. Before the sensors could detect it, before the warning klaxons sounded, McHenry knew.
“Computer, end program. Authorization McHenry-Alpha-Zero-Three.” Without waiting for orders, McHenry assumed control of the ship.
Amazon’s standard controls lacked the fourth-dimensional modeling of the holograph, but McHenry might be the best astronavigator in Starfleet.
And if he wasn’t, he and Crane were both dead.
His fingers flew across the controls. The ship veered, and in his imagination he heard welds creaking with the strain. McHenry wished he had the added capabilities of the 4-D system, but he couldn’t reach it. He had to rely on the standard controls.
The ship bucked again, but McHenry anticipated the movement, and continued his frenetic pace. They were slowly coming back on course.
Gravitational shear pulled at the off-course ship. The starboard side of the ship was somehow traveling faster than the port side. The Cochrane readings were spiking well above safety limits. The ship might literally tear itself apart.
McHenry shut out the warning klaxons. He ignored the readings and the displays. He knew where to go and how to get there. He just had to do it.
Amazon made another slip, this one in the right direction. She shuddered and slipped again. In a few moments, McHenry knew he had the ship back on course.
“You all right?” he asked Crane.
There was no answer. McHenry continued to manipulate the controls, his concern for his copilot growing with every second of silence.
The turbulence had been momentary, but both intense and unexpected; at least, it was to anyone who wasn’t Mark McHenry.
The event horizon receded. Amazon broke free of its influence, regaining her normal stability. McHenry instantly set the autopilot and leaped from his seat.
He stepped through the hatch to the holodeck, and into a nightmare.
Crane’s chair was still anchored in the middle of the empty room, but Frankie wasn’t in it. The holographic controls were still functioning, but there was no one to operate them.
Instead, Crane was crumpled against the far wall of the cabin, where he had been thrown by the turbulence. Blood stained his shirt, and poured from beneath his scalp. One leg was bent at an unnatural angle.
But the noise was the worst. He wasn’t exactly breathing, but instead snorting and gasping as though unable to draw air into his lungs.
From an emergency med pack mounted on the bulkhead, McHenry pulled a medical tricorder. “Computer, monitor readings,” he commanded as he ran the tricorder over Crane’s body. “Recommend treatment.”
McHenry knew the runabout was relaying the tricorder readings to sickbay aboard Glenn. It had been only a couple of minutes since the last time he had heard from Crane. But how long could he survive without oxygen? How long before McHenry had to act?
His combadge chirped, and then he heard Dr. Trent speaking from Glenn. “Recommend you place Lieutenant Crane flat. Do not move his left leg any more than necessary.”
McHenry began shifting Crane’s body, laying him flat on the floor, as the doctor continued. “It appears his airway is obstructed by his posture. Can you send another scan?”
“Affirmative,” McHenry said through gritted teeth. Crane was heavier than he looked, and McHenry had never been much for weight-lifting.
Still, he managed to lay Crane out. As he ran the tricorder over him once more, Crane gasped again, and shuddered as he drew in a huge lung-ful of air.
“He’s breathing again!”
“No need to shout, Lieutenant. We have his telemetry. We know he’s breathing.”
Mark wasn’t sure, but he thought he heard a note of amusement in the doctor’s voice. There sure as hell wasn’t anything at all amusing about this situation.
“Then you know he’s still unconscious, and he’s still bleeding,” he said, trying to keep his anger from showing in his voice. “Shouldn’t we do something about that?”
“The head wound is superficial. Put a pressure pack on it. You’ll find one in the medikit,” the doctor replied. “And he’ll come around soon enough. Just get him back here so we can patch him up.”
Murphy broke in. “We’ll beam him to sickbay as soon as you’re in range, McHenry. We’ll debrief after Crane’s through with the doc. We want to know exactly what happened out there. The sensors went nuts here, we lost telemetry for a few seconds, then we had you in control and moving away from the event horizon at top speed. We’re anxious to hear what you and Crane can tell us.”
“Returning to Glenn. Amazon out.”
McHenry tapped his combadge to end communication. He put a pressure pack on Crane’s head, and tried to make him a bit more comfortable. It was hard to tell if it did any good, since Crane was still unconscious.
McHenry was hurtling through space with an injured crewmate, an experimental ship that no one else could control, and a growing feeling of guilt.
In his ignorance, he had assumed anyone could do what he had done. He had refused to admit his unique abilities, to acknowledge that he was different from the other pilots in the program.
But he was. He could do things Crane and Seetara and Harris and Murphy couldn’t do. He could fly to the thin edge of the event horizon and back again, knowing the exact limits of his control. But no one else could.
He looked down at Crane. He was still deathly pale, but he was breathing steadily. The blood no longer flowed down his face, though his uniform shirt was soaked with it. He looked like he was sleeping, but each time he moved, however slightly, his face was creased with pain.
This was the cost of McHenry’s ignorance, and someone else was forced to pay it.
They were nearing transporter range. McHenry returned to the pilot’s seat and resumed control of the runabout.
Within seconds he was hailed by Murphy. “We’re ready to transport Crane to sickbay.”
McHenry felt the acceleration as Crane’s weight was removed from the ship; then the ship adjusted and resumed its proper speed. He would reach Glenn in two and a half minutes. And what would he do when he got there?
McHenry cycled the door of the runabout open. He sprinted down the corridor in the direction of sickbay.
Halfway there, Murphy intercepted him, grabbing his arm. “What happened out there?”
McHenry shook off his grip and kept moving. Murphy fell in beside him, not letting him get away. “What happened?”
“How’s Crane?” McHenry countered.
“He’ll be fine. The doc’s already working on him.” Murphy was panting as they ran. His sedentary engineering duties didn’t keep him in shape for running.
“Good. Then I can see him for myself.”
They ran through the door of the sickbay, and then McHenry stopped, looking for his injured crewmate. He spotted Crane and hurried to his side.
Crane was still unconscious, but his face was no longer marked with pain. He looked relaxed, as though he were simply resting.
McHenry caught the doctor’s arm. “How is he?”
“Better than I expected, frankly.” The doctor pulled free of McHenry’s grasp and continued his work. “And he’ll continue to improve, if you’ll let me do my work.”
“Sorry.” McHenry stepped back, letting his hand drop. What was he doing here? He didn’t know, but he knew he had to stay. “Can I wait here?”
“As long as you don’t interfere, I don’t care where you wait. But if you get in my way again, I’ll call security.
”
McHenry retreated a couple steps, giving the doctor plenty of room. “Yes, sir,” he said quietly.
Murphy was still at his side, but he was also quiet. The fact that Crane hadn’t regained consciousness seemed to have dampened his demands for information.
The room was silent for long minutes, as the doctor circled the bed. He scanned Crane, administered hyposprays, and treated him with instruments McHenry didn’t have names for.
Finally, after what seemed like hours, Crane opened his eyes. There was an instant of panic on his face, then swift comprehension of where he was. And then, as clearly as if he had spoken aloud, the relief of finding himself alive and more or less in one piece.
But that moment of panic on Crane’s trusting baby face would stay burned in Mark McHenry’s memory. He was sure he would carry that image with him, in everything he did, for the rest of his life.
“Good to see you, buddy,” McHenry said.
Crane gave him a shaky thumbs-up. “Good to see you, too. Didn’t figure I’d be seeing anybody again.”
“Hey, I couldn’t let anything happen to the second-best navigator in Starfleet, could I?” McHenry nearly choked on the truth of the old joke. It was one he swore he would never use again. “Not to mention what Harris will do to me for letting you get hurt.”
“No way you could have stopped it.”
McHenry could feel Murphy hanging on their conversation, listening and weighing each word. He chose his words carefully.
“No,” he lied. “I don’t think there was.”
He felt Murphy stiffen. “Let’s not be too hasty,” he said.
“We’re not being hasty, Murphy.” McHenry turned to face Murphy. If he was going to kill the man’s dream, he should at least have the guts to face him. “The ship was beyond our control. Period. I don’t know how we got out of there, and I doubt we could do it again.”
Murphy looked stricken.
“There are things we can’t see,” McHenry continued. “Time and space are distorted in ways we can’t understand, can’t simulate, and can’t compensate for.”
McHenry wished he could tell him the whole truth, but even the truth would do him no good. Because the truth was that McHenry could understand. He had a unique gift, a gift that could compensate for the distortions. A gift he could not share with another being. And without that gift, the 4-D project could not succeed.