Star Trek: The Next Generation: Starfleet Academy #8: Starfall

by Brad

  “I think I did all right,” Jean-Luc said. “Don’t worry. When we finish the engineering tests, you’ll be the happy one and I’ll be a wreck.”

  She gave him a weak smile, and they moved along to the advanced Cochrane mathematics examination. Jean-Luc settled in at a terminal, one of ten, with Sandy beside him. The first question appeared: “Given a starship propelled by two standard warp field nacelles operating at 50 percent capacity, beginning from a sublight speed of .1c relative to its destination D, calculate the time T required for the warp field energy to reach the millicochrane output necessary to move the vessel along the c boundary at precisely the speed of light.”

  Sandy began furious computations, but Jean-Luc immediately keyed in his response: zero. It was a trick question. Starships never traveled at precisely the speed of light. They had to move either slower or faster than c—otherwise, there would be no boundary, and Planck physics would make no sense. Sandy belatedly realized this. Jean-Luc was halfway through the second question when he heard her grunt of self-directed anger.

  At last they both finished, each feeling reasonably sure of a good score—though Jean-Luc had a nasty, nagging dread that he had overlooked something, that he had failed again. By now the other candidates were looking frazzled and exhausted. Jean-Luc began to feel a little flicker of hope. Maybe he wouldn’t disgrace himself completely. In fact, he began to suspect there might be a possibility of his passing the exams. After all, he realized suddenly, he’d just passed the one test that had tripped him up last year! The engineering test would take all afternoon. If only he could weather that one, he thought, then the next ones might not be as bad as he feared.

  They broke for lunch, and since he had ninety minutes, Jean-Luc decided to go into Paris for a meal away from the hectic pace of the testing center. He had just settled in at a sidewalk café when his computer padd blipped. He put it in communication mode and heard Louis’s cheerful voice: “Hello, Jean-Luc! Are you in town?”

  “Yes,” Jean-Luc said, grinning. “You knew I’d be testing for Starfleet again. Except right now I’m having lunch at the Four Candles.”

  “I’m only a few blocks away! Stay put, Jean-Luc, and we’ll join you in ten minutes.”

  “We?” Jean-Luc asked, but Louis had already broken the connection. As Jean-Luc ordered his lunch, he wondered who “we” would turn out to be.

  He didn’t wonder very long. Louis came rattling over the cobblestone street on a bike, with Kim Bloom on his right and Misty on his left. All three looked tan and fit, and they clattered their bikes right up to Jean-Luc’s table.

  “Hello,” he said, delighted to see them. “Have some lunch.”

  “We’ve eaten, thanks,” Louis said. He put one arm around Kim’s waist, the other around her sister’s. Jean-Luc could not help giving his friend a roguish grin. He had warned Louis about what might happen!

  “How are your tests going?” Kim asked as she pulled away from Louis and parked her bike.

  Jean-Luc shrugged. “No decision either way, yet. Maybe you’ll bring me luck.” They settled in for mineral water and chitchat. Jean-Luc ate his lunch while both Kim and Misty stole little bites of his shrimp salad. An hour flew by, with Jean-Luc feeling not exactly jealous but a little excluded. Louis clearly enjoyed being the center of both Misty’s and Kim’s attention, and he was full of their bike trip. They had already toured Paris and the countryside to the north, and they were setting out this afternoon for a long excursion southward into Provence.

  “Be careful,” Jean-Luc warned him. “You cycle about as well as you swim. The way you wobbled along down the street, I thought you were about to fall off and break an arm.”

  “They’re teaching me to be a better cyclist,” Louis said. “Did you know Misty won her town’s cycling competition last year?”

  “Yes, Kim told me twice,” Jean-Luc said with a smile.

  “Well, I’ve got to get back to the testing center. Have a good trip. Kim, Misty, take care of this clumsy fellow.”

  “We will,” Kim said with a laugh. “And you have wonderful luck on your exams.”

  They rode away, and Jean-Luc watched them. He had never seen Louis so happy, and he was heartily glad for his friend. At the same time he felt a little pang of doubt. In a way he would like to be like Louis, spending time just having fun. It had been a hard year, and the deceptions and secrecy had made it all the harder. If only he could be as carefree as his friends, just for a few days, he thought he would be supremely happy.

  However, he had an appointment with a test supervisor in twenty minutes. He summoned an aircar and rode back to the testing center, worrying again about engineering, command, and psychology.

  CHAPTER

  7

  The room was made of perfectly black squares, outlined by the gold lines of the holoconductors. Jean-Luc stood in the center and waited for something to happen. This was a holodeck, similar to those used on Federation starships for training and for recreation. It was capable of creating vivid three-dimensional illusions of reality, so real that you could touch and smell the images as well as see and hear them.

  Jean-Luc drew a deep breath. It was only the third day of testing, and already the competition had dwindled from eighty-nine other hopefuls to just thirty-one. Sandy had washed out on the literary essay, as she had feared, and left with a wry, “We1l, there’s always next year.”

  The Andorian had vanished, too, although Jean-Luc did not know what had tripped him up. His own testing group was down by more than half. From the fifteen they had started with, only seven remained. Well, no matter what happened, he had made it at least as far this year as he had the previous one—and he felt a lot better about his chances this time around.

  Jean-Luc glanced down at his uniform and nervously tugged the tunic as if to straighten it. The style gave him a clue or two about the command test. It was an old-fashioned Starfleet outfit. He recognized the insignia as that of a commander, an officer who had not yet earned the permanent rank of captain. A communicator, an impossibly bulky thing almost fifteen centimeters long and twelve broad—nearly as long and wide as his hand!—hung at his belt. Old-fashioned, that was the key. Think, Jean-Luc told himself. What do you know about Starfleet, date approximately 2150-2175?

  Well, it was a more military organization than current Starfleet, exploring the universe and coming into contact with hostile aliens. Crews and ships all Earth-based, of course. There had been a war or two, notably with the Romulans. He wondered if—

  “Attention, cadet candidate Jean-Luc Picard. Are you receiving me?”

  “Yes.”

  A long pause. Then, patiently, the dehumanized computer voice said, “I remind you to use your communicator, cadet candidate.”

  Jean-Luc blushed and took the awkward thing from his belt. He flipped it open, extended the primitive subspace antenna, and said, “Yes, I receive you.”

  “Your assignment for the command test is to take command of a Starfleet probe ship mapping and exploring four class-M planets in Sector Fifteen-G. Your armament consists of three arrays of four pulse-phase laser cannon and a battery of twenty particle torpedoes. Your top speed is warp three point five, and your optimum cruising speed is warp two. Your ship has surveyed three of the four planets in question, finding them life-bearing but without intelligent inhabitants. You have just entered standard orbit around Sigma Oronyx Four. Here is a representation of the planet.”

  The walls shimmered and seemed to dissolve into the darkness of star-sparkling space. A huge representation of a planet hovered above Jean-Luc, a world of approximately equal parts sea and land, the shallow water a shimmering golden color, the land a vibrant blue-green, studded with enormous jet-black dead volcanoes and streaked with swirls and spirals of cloud. Jean-Luc frowned. He recognized the planet. It was now known as Van Damen’s World, with a well-established population, chiefly humans and Bolians. There was something in history about its discovery, though, something that he could not quite remember
.

  “Computer, I have some questions,” Jean-Luc said.

  “Ask.”

  “What is the complement of my ship?”

  “You have a crew of twenty-nine. Your first officer is Lieutenant Andrew Chen. Your science officer is Lieutenant Ariadne Korzeniowski. Your weapons officer and chief of security is Lieutenant J. R. Newell.”

  That did no good, thought Jean-Luc as he made a real effort to lock the names into his memory. It wouldn’t do to fumble for a name at a crucial moment. What was it that his memory was trying to tell him? Perhaps one more question. “Thank you, computer. And what is the name of my vessel?”

  “You are commanding the U.S.S. Ponce de Leon.”

  Jean-Luc swallowed hard. He had read about the Ponce de Leon weeks ago, in the Xenology library. Now he knew. Oh, yes, indeed, he knew all too well what he was up against.

  The Ponce de Leon was a byword in Starfleet for a ship in a hopeless position. It all flooded back from his reading now: In the year 2159, during the height of the Romulan-Earth War, the Ponce de Leon had blundered into two Romulan destroyers, ships that had been damaged in an earlier battle and that had dropped into orbit here to refit. What resulted was less a fight than an act of annihilation. An under-armed survey vessel with only primitive weapons, the Ponce de Leon had been lost with all hands, and only a desperate message, sent by old-fashioned radio, had told the universe of their fate.

  “The simulation will begin fifteen seconds from now,” the computer said.

  The planet schematic faded, but not before Jean-Luc had noted almost absentmindedly that Van Damen’s World had three tiny moons orbiting it, hardly larger than moderate-sized asteroids. The fifteen seconds seemed to take a week. Again Jean-Luc nervously tugged at his tunic.

  Then the darkness shimmered into shape and form. He was standing behind three officers in an incredibly cramped command compartment. Something told him that the windows in front of him were real windows and not viewscreens. Through them he could see the rounded silver nose of the Ponce de Leon, and beyond that the planet itself, slowly rotating.

  “Standard orbit, sir,” said the woman to his left.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant Korzeniowski.” Jean-Luc took a deep breath. No Romulans were in sight, so he couldn’t order an alert. He’d have to justify it later.

  “You may commence your survey of the planet.”

  “Aye-aye, sir.”

  For a few moments they cruised in silence. Jean-Luc was trying to deal with the weird feeling that he was playing a game, as he had often done when he was just a kid. His officers were all older than he was, by ten years or more. He wondered how they saw him, and then immediately felt foolish. They weren’t even real. They were only holographic illusions that the computer generated.

  And yet it all seemed real. The air had the sharp scent of metal and electricity, and under that the stuffy odor that was a little like that of a locker room. It was a tight little compartment, and people manned it twenty-four hours a day, every day.

  “Sir,” said Lieutenant Newell, sounding puzzled. “I’m picking up traces of ionized plasma.”

  “Location?”

  The security officer shook his head. “I can’t pinpoint it. It’s at orbital distance, perhaps five thousand kilometers from the planetary surface. Very diffuse. Perhaps it’s some atmospheric reaction. This is a class-F Nine star, more active than our sun.”

  “Or it could be the trace of a starship impulse engine,” Jean-Luc said.

  Lieutenant Chen looked over his shoulder, his brown eyes troubled. “Unlikely, sir. Any plasma traces from our early unmanned probes would have dissipated months ago.”

  Jean-Luc rubbed his chin. “Well, perhaps I’m being overly cautious, but just to be on the safe side, let’s change orbit. Number One, put us at the same orbital distance as that small moon ahead. Keep us about a thousand kilometers away from it. We can scan the planetary surface from there just as well as you could from here.”

  “Our resolution won’t be one hundred percent, sir,” warned Lieutenant Korzeniowski.

  “No, but it will be close enough. We’ll reserve anything interesting or puzzling for a closer look during the next stage of the survey. Number One, you have my orders.”

  “Aye-aye, sir.”

  It was coming back, all of it. The Ponce de Leon was such a compact ship that the First Officer also served as helmsman. Chen laboriously keyed in instructions—imagine not being able just to tell the computer what you wanted it to do! The ship responded, the impulse engines coming on-line to boost their trajectory higher, closer to the small tumbling chunk of rock that was Van Damen’s World’s lowest moon. They slipped into the new orbit. Jean-Luc gazed out at the irregular speck of moon. “Can we magnify that fifty times?” he asked.

  “Aye-aye, sir.” Lieutenant Korzeniowski manipulated a board of instruments, and a representation of the moon came up on a display screen at her science station.

  Jean-Luc leaned in close. It was a dark red body, pocked with craters and crisscrossed by stress fractures. “What is the composition of that, Lieutenant?" he asked.

  “Sir, I’m scanning the surface of the planet at the moment. If it could wait—”

  “I’m afraid it can’t.”

  The science officer grunted with ill-concealed displeasure and recalibrated one of her instruments. “I’m sounding it with a laser probe,” she said. “Spectroscopic analysis will take about half a minute.” After a pause she added, “Sir.”

  “How about that plasma trace?” Jean-Luc asked Lieutenant Newell.

  Newell, probably the oldest person on the bridge, shook his head. “I still can’t get any kind of fix on it. If a spacecraft has been using its impulse engines around here, it hasn’t been in the past couple of weeks.”

  “I still think it’s probably natural ionization,” muttered Lieutenant Korzeniowski. “Spectroscopic results coming in. Sir, the moon consists of various mineral ores, chiefly iron, with smaller proportions of copper, zinc, and lead. These account for approximately fifty percent of its mass. The remainder is common silicate and carbonaceous rock.”

  “Noted, Lieutenant.”

  “May I redirect my sensors to the planet, sir?"

  “Yes.”

  “Just another moon,” she muttered.

  “Uh-oh,” Newell said. “Sir? We’ve got company.”

  Jean-Luc’s hands were sweating. “Where away?” he asked, slipping into the naval jargon he had so often read in stories of adventure. “I mean, bearing and mark?”

  “Bearing one-seven-seven, mark negative twenty-one.”

  Behind and below them, ideally spotted for a sneak attack. “How far?”

  “Four hundred thousand kilometers, closing fast.”

  “Lieutenant Chen, take her around that moon. Make it look as if we’re running for cover. But the second Lieutenant Newell says we’re out of scanner range, I want you to put the Ponce de Leon into as tight a turn as she can stand. We’ll slingshot around the moon and get a look at who’s so interested in us.”

  “Aye-aye, Captain,” said both lieutenants at once.

  The Ponce de Leon leaped forward, the movement translating itself as a sickening lurch. The inertial damping systems had not been perfect back in 2159, Jean-Luc thought. Well, neither were the Romulan warships of that year. Although they used fearsome nuclear weapons, the Romulan craft didn’t even have warp drive. Of course, that had not stopped them from devastating over a hundred warp-equipped Earth vessels.

  “Executing turn, sir,” said Chen.

  The centripetal force made it hard for Jean-Luc to stand. He realized his command chair was right behind him. He settled into it, but he was leaning forward, his eyes on the streaking stars visible through the forward windows. The planet flashed past, a blur of green and blue and white, and then the view steadied. “There,” Jean-Luc said. “A Romulan. Shields up. Red alert. Mr. Newell, ready all weapons.”

  The computer hooted a klaxon warning as the we
apons officer brought his banks of pulsed-phased laser cannon and torpedo tubes on-line. Newell grunted. “Very far from home, aren’t they? What are they doing here?”

  “Several Romulans were unaccounted for at the Battle of the Flame Nebula, about half a light-year from here,” Chen responded. “This one’s had just about enough time to get this far from the site of the battle, although it’s not heading toward Romulan space. It might have been damaged and—”

  “Belay the talk,” Jean-Luc said. “Stop the red-alert signal—if our people don’t know we’re on alert now, they never will. Lieutenant Korzeniowski, hail the Romulan.”

  “Aye, sir.” Lieutenant Korzeniowski’s voice was tight, tense. “Hailing. Sir, they’re responding.”

  “Put them on.”

  “Sir, they are on.”

  Jean-Luc grimaced. Right. In the old days there had been no video displays for subspace communication between different star-faring races. The technology had not been able to handle alien signals efficiently then. “Romulan vessel,” said Jean-Luc, hoping his voice wasn’t shaking too much. “This is the captain of the Earth vessel Ponce de Leon, on a peaceful survey mission. What is your intention?”

  “Sir, they’ve hove to,” muttered Newell.

  A pause, and then a strange voice crackled over the communicator, all of its personality lost because of the primitive universal translator. “Captain of the Ponce de Leon, this is Romulan captain Sharak. Our vessel was disabled in warfare. We have undertaken repairs.”

  Jean-Luc gripped the arms of his command chair.

  “We1l, Captain Sharak, my vessel is not primarily a ship of war. May I suggest a truce?”

  Newell looked sharply at him. Romulans were not known for accepting truces.

  The Romulan’s voice came back at once: “We have completed repairs, Earth captain. If you will permit us, we will leave under full impulse power for Romulan space within the next ten of your minutes. You will wish to report our presence here to your superiors. We acknowledge your responsibility to do so, but as a gesture of good faith, we ask that you make your initial report by radio instead of by subspace communication.”