“Rewind and resume playback,” said Geordi, paying attention this time. Yes, the radiation suit sounded fascinating, and it was exactly the kind of thing that would challenge her mind. When she talked about the interphase generator, he felt a shiver, because he’d had personal experience with that Romulan device.
“But keep that hush-hush about the phase-shifting technology,” she said in a sly aside. “We don’t really have permission from the Romulans, but I’ve always been good at reverse engineering. I think that with the Alliance, maybe we can get permission after the fact.”
“We’d better!” said the disembodied voice of Mikel, somewhere in the background.
“Anyway, it’s worked in all the trials, and we’re doing more today,” concluded Leah. “I really feel happy about this project, because it’s going to do some good and save lives. So take care, Geordi. Keep the Enterprise running. And thanks for all the kiwi!”
Her beaming face blinked off the screen, taking part of his heart with it. “End transmission,” added the computer.
La Forge sat back in his chair, wondering what he would say to her in reply. As always, it would be carefully worded to be innocuous. “Computer, record reply to message nineteen.”
“Begin when ready.”
Geordi plastered a smile on his face. “Hi, Leah . . . and Mikel. I’m glad you like the kiwi. When you’ve been around the fleet as long as I have, you learn how to pull a few strings. Everything is fine here on the big E, and we’re almost back to full staff again. We’re supporting a geological survey on Itamish III to see if it’s stabilized enough to support a mining colony. It beats fighting a war. It’s been months since we’ve had any real excitement, but nobody’s complaining. Uh, Data has a violin recital tonight.”
He twisted his hands, trying not to get tongue-tied. “I’m going to try to go to more conferences next year. Maybe I’ll bump into you somewhere or other. I’ll send you a schedule. Good-bye, Leah. End transmission.” He cringed as soon as he signed off, wondering if he had sounded too forward. Meeting her at a conference somewhere was probably his fantasy but not hers.
“Message sent, delayed subspace relay,” said the computer.
Geordi tried to shrug it off, because, after all, Leah already knew he was a hopeless goof. I should just forget about her and never see or hear from her again, he decided, knowing he would be better off. But he wouldn’t do that, because he didn’t have a lot of sense where Leah was concerned.
The off-duty engineer went on to answer a dozen more messages and do a little technical reading. He was thinking about getting a quick bite to eat when his terminal beeped at him.
“Message undeliverable,” said the computer.
“Which message?” asked Geordi.
“Reply to message nineteen, Leah Brahms at Outpost Seran-T-One. Outpost not responding.”
Now Geordi sat forward with interest. “That can’t be—we’ve got a million relays out there. Why isn’t the outpost responding?”
“No response from sector 4368.”
“No response from the entire sector?” asked Geordi incredulously. “What is the explanation?”
“None reported.”
“Keep trying,” said the chief engineer, rising to his feet. He fastened the collar of his tunic as he strolled toward the door. It looked like his free time would include a trip to the bridge.
four
A grizzled old Klingon sat alone at a table in the back of a dark tavern, staring into space. He had wild salt-and-pepper hair that tumbled past his shoulders, craggy forehead ridges split diagonally by an old scar, eyebrows that bristled like weeds, a broken nose, and a pointy white beard, streaked with black. But the most frightening thing about him was his blurry eyes, which stared straight ahead in abject terror.
With a twitch, the Klingon broke out of his fearsome reverie and realized where he was. He quickly grabbed a mug studded with targ knuckles and drained it lustily, letting half of the amber liquid course down his beard. Without warning, the Klingon pounded his fist on the table, shaking the whole establishment. “More ale!” he roared.
Fortunately, the dim tavern was mostly empty, except for two lovers giggling in a corner booth and a drunk Tellarite sleeping at the bar. The customer at the bar woke up and blinked, as Pasoot the bartender scurried from behind the counter, hefting another huge mug of foaming ale.
“More ale!” thundered the voice, shaking the glasses hanging above the bar.
“Coming!” shouted Pasoot, weaving gracefully among the empty tables and chairs. Pasoot was also a Tellarite and a large one, but he had learned to negotiate the tavern furniture like a ballet dancer.
“Here you go!” said Pasoot, presenting the mug he had specially ordered for this customer. “Anything else, Sir?”
“No,” muttered the Klingon in a guttural voice, again staring straight ahead. “You didn’t see it coming, did you?”
“See what?”
The elder’s eyes blazed. “The green fire . . . it eats everything! Then there’s the lava and the geysers . . . and the wind . . . that awful wind—”
“Uh, didn’t see it today, Sir,” answered Pasoot cheerfully. “The weather looks nice outside. You sure you don’t want some skull stew?”
The Klingon laughed insanely for a moment, then grew somber once more. “Go away,” he grumbled.
Pasoot didn’t wait to be told twice. He grabbed the empty mug and scooted across the room and back behind the bar.
His other customer was now awake and indignant at the loud-mouth who had woken him up. “Who’s he?”
Pasoot whispered, “The Klingon consul. Drunk again as usual.”
“He’s in shameful condition,” sniffed the Tellarite, his speech slurred.
Pasoot considered that for a moment, then shook his head. “Not for a Klingon. He’s pretty peaceful for a Klingon. I used to serve a lot of them, and believe me, we could do worse. He’s quite reasonable when he isn’t getting nostalgic.”
The Klingon muttered into his mug of ale, “Don’t leave them! No chance . . . not with the lava—”
“What’s he yelling?”
“I don’t know . . . it’s this kind of nightmare he has. Something about the ‘green fire eating everything.’ Then he talks about the lava and the wind. Always with the wind.”
“The wind! The wind!” roared the Klingon.
Pasoot nodded sagely. “See what I mean.”
“Why do you put up with that?”
“Because he’s my best customer.” The bartender picked up a glass and thoughtfully dried it with his towel. “I guess I feel sorry for him, because he must have messed up really badly to be sent to Hakon. In fact, a Klingon that old should either be a general, an ambassador . . . or dead.”
He prodded his indignant customer. “So are you going to order another drink, or are you just going to complain?”
Before the tipsy Tellarite could reply, the outer door opened, and a ray of light sneaked into the darkness. The sunlight realized it didn’t belong and quickly vanished, but a young Tellarite female was left in its wake. She was short and shapely, and her bristly hair was a rich auburn shade, not the orange of most males. She peered around the tavern, squinting into the dim light.
“Is he here?” she asked irritably.
“I don’t know who he is,” said the drunk at the bar. “But I’m here, and I’m all you need.”
She wrinkled her snout. “Just tell me, Pasoot, is he here?”
“Maltz? Yes, he’s way in the back.” The bartender pointed with his towel. “He must be asleep, or else you’d hear him.”
She snorted and put her hands on her hips. “Do you know how to sober up a Klingon?”
“Well, you can always impugn their honor, but I wouldn’t recommend it.” With a sigh of resignation, Pasoot finally moved from behind the bar. “Come on, Solia, I’ll help you.”
They warily approached the rear table, where the Klingon was indeed sleeping and snoring harshly, his face
immersed in a puddle of spilt ale. Pasoot asked, “What’s the emergency?”
“A trade delegation from the neutral worlds has landed, and they’re demanding to see somebody important,” answered Solia.
“And this is the best you could do?” asked the bartender, shaking his head.
“A Klingon is always impressive,” answered Solia, looking doubtfully at her charge. “Well, almost always. My orders are to bring him to this reception.”
Pasoot shrugged. “I guess we don’t have a lot of local celebrities. Okay, but I’m only going to do this once.”
The bartender leaned over the fallen Klingon and said sharply, “Officer Maltz, to your feet! The enemy is near! Jagh! Jagh!”
The old Klingon lumbered to his feet, looking startled and wary. “It was that madman, Kruge, who got us captured! I could not do . . . Huh? Where am I?”
“Hello, Consul Maltz,” said Solia soothingly, taking his arm and snatching his cloak from the back of his chair. “If you’ll come with me now, we’ll get you ready for your reception. More food . . . and drink! Come on.”
Brave soul that she was, Solia dragged the stumbling, muttering Klingon out of the tavern into the blazing light of day. Pasoot could only shake his head and say to his other customers, none of whom were listening, “I have a bad feeling that old guy is not going to live long.”
“But I tell you, Dr. Brahms, we can’t let them all die!” whined Paldor, his snout flaring. The Tellarite sat in the cockpit of the shuttlecraft, banging on the star map on his console. “This Tellarite colony is right in the path of that thing back there, and we have time to go warn them. Besides, you say you want to get word to somebody in the Federation.”
Leah gulped, although she kept her hands firmly on the controls, wondering how far the big Tellarite would go to save his people. They still hadn’t made their communications system work, although Leah thought the distress signal was getting out. Yes, they had to stop somewhere, but was this it?
“How much time do we really have?” she asked.
“I can’t tell.” Paldor shook his bushy head with frustration. “Its speed is variable, depending on how many solar systems and dust clouds it has to chew up along the way. Now that I know what to look for, I think I can spot it on sensors. At warp speed, we were traveling about three times faster, so I’m sure we’ve gained some time on it. Come on, Dr. Brahms, we’ve got to stop running and start warning!”
“Okay,” said Leah, “you made your point. Do you think you can make your people believe their whole planet is in imminent danger of being destroyed?”
“What choice do we have?” asked Paldor grimly.
Leah nodded and glanced at his map. “Okay I’m changing course for—”
“Hakon in the Hivernia System,” answered the Tellarite with relief. “Thank you, Dr. Brahms.”
“You’re going to do something for me,” she replied. “You’ll find isolinear chips in the media drawer.”
“Okay,” said the Tellarite, opening the small drawer and finding the compact storage devices. “What should I do with them?”
“Transfer all the data we’ve collected, plus your thoughts and recollections—anything you can think of—onto an isolinear chip.
We’ve got to make a record of what we’ve seen . . . in case something happens to us.”
“But how will we protect the chip?” asked Paldor.
“The same way I was protected—we’ll put it into the suit.” She glanced back at the radiation suit, hulking silently in the rear of the craft.
“Okay,” said the Tellarite, inserting a slim rectangular device into the computer. “How would you describe the changes that this mysterious energy wave made to the planet?”
“Mutagenic, radical,” answered Brahms with a shiver, trying not to visualize what she had seen all too closely. “Matter seems to be reorganized into an entirely different substance, but it’s also alive. You saw what it did to the moonbase.”
“Let’s hope we get to Hakon in time,” said the Tellarite, frowning so deeply that his bushy eyebrows knitted together.
“Let’s hope somebody listens to us,” added Leah.
Dressed in a laboratory gown and wearing rubber gloves, Captain Jean-Luc Picard carefully washed the clump of rock and sand with water and a small brush. He made certain to stand over the strainer, so that any small material which fell off would not be lost in the flow of water. It was meticulous work requiring patience, but it was also oddly satisfying. The captain of the Enterprise liked working with his hands, and he could be infinitely patient when dealing with antiquities.
It helped, too, that he was in a lab full of people doing the same work. Although he wasn’t entirely sure what he was doing, there was plenty of expert help with whom to consult. Plus he felt useful when he saw the small piles of shells, fossils, and mineral specimens he had gleaned from the fist-sized chunks of river bottom in his basket.
He felt a presence looming behind him, and he turned to see the mission commander, Itakva Gedruva. Professor Gedruva was a Tiburon, so she had the dignified, bald head and enormous, leaf-shaped ears of her species.
“Thank you, Captain, for volunteering to do all this work,” she said gratefully. “We normally have a hard time finding volunteers to clean and sort samples.”
“Think nothing of it,” said Picard magnanimously. “I enjoy working with antiquities. You can ask my crew; I welcome any mission that gets me poking around in some old dig.” He lifted a delicate bit of rock that was full of clam-shell imprints. “How old do you think these fossils are?”
“I would guess the carbon dating would show them to be half-a-million in terran years,” answered the professor. “Thus far, we haven’t been surprised, but maybe you’ll find an arrowhead and shock us.”
“That would be shocking, wouldn’t it?” asked Picard with amusement. Then his expression grew thoughtfully serious. “But what do you think happened to life on Itamish III? It was on track to be a garden planet, wasn’t it?”
The elderly Tiburon shook her enormous ears. “We have theories, but we don’t know exactly. That is what we hope to find out, to try to prevent it from happening again. Life is so delicate, Captain Picard. You realize that after you sort through the bones of a few hundred planets where life used to thrive and does no longer.”
“Professor!” called someone else at a nearby table.
“Excuse me, Captain.” With a polite nod, the mission commander was gone, leaving Picard to continue brushing and washing.
He was just starting to remove the clay from a new sample when his combadge chirped. “Bridge to Picard,” said the familiar voice of Commander Riker. With gooey, gloved hands, the captain couldn’t touch his combadge to answer it, and he had to set down his material and tools, remove a glove, and open his gown.
With relief, he finally answered the hail. “Picard here.”
“I’m sorry to bother you, Captain,” said Riker, “but we’ve got a situation.”
The captain knew his first officer well enough to realize that he wouldn’t interrupt his free time unless it was important. He was also not going to come out and say what it was when he could be overheard. Riker was confident enough to deal with almost anything on his watch, so this had to be something well beyond the scope of their peaceful mission.
“On my way,” said the captain, rising from his stool. He removed his other glove and his lab gown, shrugging helplessly at Professor Gedruva. Her brief smile told him that she quite understood the requisites of command.
A few moments later, he strode onto the circular bridge of the Enterprise and looked curiously at the clutch of senior officers gathered around the tactical station: Riker, Data, and La Forge. Neither Data nor La Forge were supposed to be on duty, yet both of them were poring over data.
“Status?” he asked Commander Riker.
“As Mister La Forge discovered, we’ve lost contact with almost an entire sector of Federation space, 4368. That’s fairly close to us,
toward the center of the galaxy.”
Picard frowned. “What about ships in the area?”
“We’ve tried, but we can’t raise any ships, outposts, or any relays out there. Unaffected areas nearby don’t report anything amiss.”
Data looked up from the tactical station. “The communications blackout spans several inhabited solar systems, and there was no advance warning. Starfleet can offer no explanation.”
“You can’t raise anyone at all?” asked Picard incredulously. He knew that region of space, and it was one of the sleepiest, most peaceful parts of the Federation, far removed from the Demilitarized Zone and sites of recent conflicts.
La Forge lifted his head up. “We think we’ve found a faint distress signal, but that’s it. We can’t even get a signature from it.”
“Can you read me the last message from Starfleet?” asked Picard.
“Yes,” said Riker, leaning over the small terminal built into the arm of the captain’s chair. “Communications outage in sector 4368 confirmed, reason undetermined. Unable to reach other ships in area, so no ships dispatched at present time. Enterprise, use captain’s discretion to investigate, but please advise of decision. Signed, Admiral Nechayev.”
Picard rubbed his chin thoughtfully, well remembering one of the more prickly members of the admiralty, Alynna Nechayev. It was odd that she should be involved in such a day-to-day matter, since she was usually more concerned with counterespionage tactics and secret missions. She had spearheaded their espionage efforts against the Maquis, Bajoran terrorists, and Cardassians, for instance. Not that those situations didn’t call for extreme tactics, but Picard still felt guilty over having recruited Ro Laren, Sito Jaxa, and others for such dangerous missions, many of which had not ended well.
The captain couldn’t help himself—whenever Admiral Nechayev was involved, he felt the warning hackles rise on the back of his neck. He said nothing to any of his subordinates, but they knew. After all, they had seen the admiral chew him out for one of their risky failures. All of this was just one more reason to take “captain’s discretion” very seriously. He had a strong feeling that Nechayev wanted the Enterprise to go but wouldn’t come out and say so.
The Genesis Wave: Book One Page 5