by Dave Stern
That was Travis. He continued without turning, his attention focused on the helm.
“A lot of the guilds that deal with outlying areas of the quadrant, at least. We had occasional dealings with them on Horizon.”
Horizon was the cargo freighter Travis had been born and raised on, the freighter his family owned, which—after his father’s recent death—was now commanded by his brother, Paul.
“Definitely Thelasian,” Hoshi announced. “Some kind of alert message—wide-range transmission. Not meant for us specifically.”
Archer nodded. “On speakers.”
She nodded back, punched in a series of commands on her console. A crackle of static, and then—
“…all ships within range of this message. Remain clear of coordinates…”
—another burst of static, as the UT struggled to keep up—
“…reports of numerous unprovoked attacks by unidentified vessels. Sector-wide task force forming to deal with these attacks. Respond on this frequency. Message repeats. First Governor Maxim Sen, Thelasian Trading Confederacy, to all ships within range…”
Archer signaled Hoshi to cut off the signal, and was about to have her respond as per the message’s directions when he noticed something odd.
Travis’s hands had fallen away from the helm.
“Travis,” the captain asked. “Something wrong?”
The ensign took a good five seconds before responding.
“Sir, did that message—was that—did he say Sen?”
“Sen. Yes.”
“Maxim Sen?”
“That’s what it sounded like to me. Why?”
“Sen. Maxim Sen.” Mayweather shook his head. “Sonuvabitch.”
Archer almost fell off his chair. In the three years the captain had served with Travis, he’d never, ever heard him curse before.
“Ensign?”
Travis spun about in his chair quickly. He seemed to be, as far as Archer could tell, blushing.
“Sorry, sir. It’s just that—”
“It’s all right. You know him, obviously.”
“Know him? Well, I couldn’t really say that I know him. But know of him. Know who he is? That, for sure, Captain. That for sure.”
Trip was suddenly at Archer’s side again.
“Sounds like a story waiting to be told, sir.”
“And how.” The captain stood. “T’Pol, take over here, if you would. Trip, Travis…”
Archer headed for the ready room.
Two
Inside, he gestured toward the room’s other chair, and then toward his helmsman.
“Have a seat.”
“No, thank you, sir. I’m fine like this. Captain, I want to apologize again for the language I used before, I just—”
“It’s all right, Travis. We’re all grown-ups here. Now—Governor Sen. The Thelasian Trading Confederacy. Explain.”
“Especially the sonuvabitch part,” Trip added.
“I’m guessing this has something to do with Horizon,” the captain said.
“Yes sir.”
“And Sen was involved?”
“Sen and a lot of money.” Travis fell silent for a moment; Archer could sense the anger building inside him again. The captain exchanged a quick glance with Trip.
“Travis…”
“It’s a long story, sir.”
“We’ve got time.” The captain had told Hoshi to hold off on responding to Sen’s message until he’d had a chance to talk to Travis. T’Pol had triangulated the message’s point of origin: a small planet a day’s journey away, in what the Vulcans had called the Procyron system, which meant Enterprise was well out of their sensor range. Sen wouldn’t know they were here until they wanted him to, which was just the way Archer wanted it for now.
“Sit,” Archer said, again nodding to the chair.
Mayweather reluctantly settled himself into it.
“Where to begin,” he said, leaning forward and clasping his hands together. “I guess with the certification, when the Cargo Authority gave us clearance for the Morianne-Deneva run. That was a big shot in the arm for us financially.” Travis paused, and shifted position, craning his neck so he could catch the captain’s eye. “Morianne is—it’s the gateway to the old Allied Worlds systems. Huge trading market.”
“I know Morianne. Go on.”
“Well…the trading post there, Prex Morianna—that’s run by the Thelasians.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Yes, sir. The Morianne take their cut, but the Confederacy’s in charge. They run the guilds, the docks, everything. Which didn’t mean much to us at first, the big deal was just getting clearance to go there, to Morianne—it meant dozens of new trading partners. A whole new market for the goods we handled, and goods from dozens of new worlds to import as well.”
“When was this exactly?” Trip asked.
Mayweather turned again to face the commander. “Maybe thirteen, fourteen years ago. Paul was turning twelve then, I remember, so…” He frowned, and thought a minute. “No. It’s more like seventeen years ago now. Wow. That’s hard to believe.”
“Time flies,” Archer said. “Seventeen years ago. So you were…”
“A lot younger. And not much use to my father, I can tell you that.” Travis smiled. “That was the year Paul and I set up a laser-tag course in the aft cargo bay. Spent pretty much that whole year doing nothing but that—didn’t matter what the cargo was, we were climbing all over it, setting up obstacle courses, that sort of thing…not too smart in retrospect, considering.”
Mayweather turned again toward the captain, to include him in the conversation, the ensign shifting in his seat one more time, at which point Archer suddenly realized (or more accurately, remembered) that the ready room was intended as a place for quick, private conversations/communications, for decision making, for his own quiet contemplation.
Long stories, perhaps, were better told elsewhere.
Travis cleared his throat.
“Before you get started again,” the captain said quickly. “Anybody here hungry?”
Travis was; Trip wasn’t, and neither was Archer, but they all went to the mess hall anyway. Eleven hundred hours, still an hour before shift change and the lunch rush, so the place was deserted, as Archer had counted on. He and Trip got coffee and took seats at a table along the far wall, while Travis waited for a sandwich.
Trip took a sip from his cup, and shook his head.
“I gotta cut down on this stuff.”
The captain studied his friend. “Late night?”
“Early morning. Hess is still sick, so third shift is short a man. Woman, in this case. I’ve been picking up for her on the back end. Got up at zero-four-hundred today.”
“Ouch.”
“Ouch is right.” Trip took another sip. “You know what else? I walk on the bridge the last two mornings, and Hoshi’s already there. Looking like she’s been there all night.”
“Really?”
“For a fact. Captain—don’t know if you’ve noticed, but she’s pushing herself mighty hard these last few days.”
“I’m not worried about Hoshi,” Archer said. “She can handle it.”
“I know. It’s just that…” Trip pursed his lips, shook his head. “She seems a little obsessed with this particular translation. Maybe you ought to talk to her—tell her to relax a little.”
Archer bit back the first reply that came to mind—nobody ever died from a little hard work—and nodded.
“I’ll talk to her,” he said, and he would, though he might not exactly phrase things the way Trip had—“relax.” He didn’t think Hoshi would listen to him if he said that anyway. The captain suspected she’d take a break when she’d done what she set out to do, and not a second earlier.
“Sorry, sir,” Mayweather said, joining them. “Didn’t think that would take so long.”
Archer told him not to worry, not to rush: Trip took up the conversational slack while Travis ate, bringing th
e captain up to speed on a few ship-related matters, and a few more personal ones. When Archer noticed that Mayweather was finished, though, he put the conversation back on track.
“Okay Travis. Let’s get back to your story. Governor Sen and the Morianne-Deneva run.”
“Right.” Travis took a deep breath. “Okay. So Morianne—we did a handful of runs out there, at a month and a half each way from Deneva, but they were good runs, sir. Very profitable. Not only did we find new customers for the ore the Authority required us to carry, but we made contacts with a whole new group of traders, people from all over the quadrant. Not just representatives from different mining consortiums, either—we’re talking Shandeeki painters, Dondran arms merchants, the Maszakian engineers, and of course, every transaction we made”—here Travis paused—“we dealt with representatives from the Thelasian Trading Confederacy.”
“Including Sen, I’ll bet,” Trip said.
“No. Not right away. He wasn’t part of the government then—at least I don’t think he was. I got the impression he was more of a freelance guy then—just a trader. Whatever he was, though, I remember him coming on board Horizon, all of us getting introduced to him before he and my father went off to talk business. The upshot of which was we took on the second leg of a delivery contract they had, for a private customer back on Deneva. A shipment of high-end solar panels, which they loaded onto Horizon the next day in a dozen duranium reinforced, tamper-resistant cargo pods. Those pods—I’d never seen anything like them before. Or since. Built like tanks. Hit ’em with a small nuke, probably wouldn’t even scratch the paint. Seemed that way anyway.”
“But something went wrong,” Archer said.
Mayweather nodded. “It sure did. We got to Deneva, and no sooner had we requested permission to dock than two CA ships pull up alongside, come aboard, and without so much as a by-your-leave confiscate the pods.”
“Because…”
“Well, it took a couple weeks for us to find that out. A couple weeks of my father knocking on almost every door at the Authority, calling in favors, getting down on his hands and knees and begging. Finally he got the story—part of the story, anyway.”
“Let me guess,” Trip said. “Those cargo pods weren’t really full of solar panels.”
“Oh, there were a few panels in there on top, for show. We checked them out before we signed off on delivery from Sen. But underneath…well, we never found out exactly what was underneath. But from the hints my father’s contacts at the Authority dropped, we’re pretty sure there were weapons. Some pretty powerful weapons.”
“Sen was running arms,” Archer said.
“Someone was,” Travis said. “He denied any knowledge of the shipment’s contents as well.”
“You didn’t believe him?” the captain prompted.
“I didn’t know what to believe. My father, though—he had his doubts, that’s for sure.”
“Okay, I get all that,” Trip said. “So what happened next?”
“Next.” Travis frowned. “Next, we tried to get our money back.”
“Your money.” Archer frowned. “Explain.”
“We bought the cargo from Sen—and the contract to supply that cargo to the customer along with it. Without the cargo to sell…”
“You were out the money.”
“Yes, sir. And it was a pretty big chunk of money.”
“Where was the customer in all this?”
“We never found that out either. My dad thought that they might have gotten arrested too, but it’s also possible they heard about the trouble we had and just decided to take off. Which left us going back to the Thelasian authorities back on Morianne for some kind of restitution.”
“What about the Cargo Authority?” Trip asked. “Seems to me they would have a vested interested in getting involved—considering where the arms were going?”
Travis shook his head. “The CA didn’t want to rock the boat with the Confederacy, Earth being the new kid on the block and all.”
Archer almost smiled. He knew that feeling a little too well himself.
“So what’d you do?” Trip asked.
“Well, the first thing we did was head out on the Morianne-Deneva run again. We needed money, and the only way to get it was to keep working. So my dad stayed focused on that. We all stayed focused on that. We took on live cargo—which is very profitable but very labor-intensive, if you couldn’t guess. A lot of that work—feeding, cleaning, exercising…that fell on me and Paul, which put a stop to the laser tag for a while. Meanwhile, my father worked on trying to find someone in the Confederacy to talk to. To complain to—about the money, and about Sen. He had to meet with the Confederacy representative, begin some kind of a formal appeals process. Petition for a portion of our money to be returned. We left Morianne that first time, thinking we made progress, but…”
“Let me guess,” Trip said. “Next time you came back, they had no record of your filing an appeal.”
“You got that right,” Travis said. “No matter how many times we filed, how many times we tried—”
“You never got the money back,” Archer supplied.
“No, sir, we didn’t and that’s another reason why I’m—”
The mess hall doors opened at that instant, and Doctor Phlox walked in. He caught sight of the three men, and made a beeline for their table.
“Captain. Gentlemen. Commander T’Pol told me I would find you down here, sir.”
“She was right. What’s on your mind, Doctor?”
“A few things. The Thelasian Trading Confederacy, for one. I understand we’ve made contact with them?”
“That’s correct. We were just talking about the Thelasians, as a matter of fact. Travis here was telling us about an encounter he had with them, when he was back on Horizon.”
“I too have history to relate regarding the Thelasians, sir. Do you mind…”
Archer nodded to the chair next to him, and Phlox sat.
“Please—continue with your story, Ensign,” he said to Travis.
“Not much more to tell, sir. We have an open appeal with the Confederacy. Last I heard…” He shrugged. “Well, it was more of the same.”
The captain nodded. There were some other things he wanted to say to Travis, chief among them that no matter what Sen had done seventeen years ago, the man was apparently the head of the Confederacy now, and they would have to treat him with the respect due that office. They meaning everyone aboard Enterprise but in particular Travis, and that whatever issues he had with Sen regarding the past, he’d have to put them on hold.
“All right, Ensign. Thank you. Doctor…”
Phlox nodded. “My experience with the Thelasians. I dislike, of course, speaking ill of anyone, but in this case, I will make an exception. The Thelasians—and I speak of the Confederacy now as an institution, not necessarily of the people themselves, who of course must be judged as individuals in their own right, I want to be clear on that…”
He looked around the table as if he was waiting for a response.
“You’re being very clear, Doctor,” Archer said. “Go on.”
“You should take great care in dealing with them, sir. They can be most unpleasant people. Untrustworthy. The one I dealt with was a real…” The doctor frowned, and thought for a moment.
“Garkohuda,” he said, or something like it. “Teyaneema Garkohuda.”
Archer looked at Trip, who looked at Travis, who shook his head.
“Which means…” the captain prompted.
“In the human vernacular? The closest analogue, I believe, would be son of a bitch.”
Trip burst out laughing. Archer, unable to help himself, followed a second later. Travis turned away from the table, his shoulders shaking.
Phlox looked confused.
“I don’t believe this is a laughing matter, gentlemen.”
Archer got control of himself and explained why it was. Then Phlox went on to relate a horror story concerning a delayed shipment o
f antibiotics to a Denobulan colony that instantly sucked any remaining levity out of the room by the time he was finished talking.
“I’m getting a fairly good picture of the kind of people we’re about to deal with here,” Archer said after the doctor finished. “But we’ll be on our best behavior anyway.”
“Our usual charming selves,” Trip said.
“That’s right. Travis…?”
The ensign nodded. “Of course, sir.”
“Good. Doctor,” Archer said, standing, “thanks for your input. Gentlemen, let’s get back up to the bridge and—”
“Excuse me, Captain,” Phlox interrupted. “Before you go—there is another matter I wanted to speak with you on as well. If you could spare a moment…”
The doctor looked serious about this matter too, whatever it was. “Sure. Go on, Trip, Travis. I’ll catch up to you in a minute.”
The two men left. Archer sat back down.
“What’s on your mind, Doctor?”
“A matter I’ve been concerned with for some time now,” Phlox began. “It concerns Ensign Hoshi.”
Three
There were fifty-seven pulses altogether in the alien signal. Each pulse was of a different wavelength. There was no apparent mathematical relationship between the individual wavelengths, nor between any groupings of wavelengths that she or the computer could come up with. Each wavelength was discernible as a discrete audio frequency; the entire pattern of fifty-seven pulses took approximately twelve seconds to listen to. The first time she heard it, it sounded like a continuous burst of static. At the end of her shift that day, Hoshi forwarded it to the workstation in her room. She listened to it several dozen times before going to sleep that night, hoping to hear something, she wasn’t sure exactly what, some kind of pattern that might provide a way in to a more regimented translation effort. By the end of that time, she could hear a distinct tune to the signal. She listened to it countless more times over the next two days; somewhere in the midst of all that repeated listening, she realized she’d memorized that tune. And even as she worked on more typical approaches to the signal’s translation—frequency analysis, physical mapping of the waveforms, experimental substitutions of local language clusters for each of the coded pulses—she continued to hear it sounding in her head. She was fairly sure she dreamed it last night; she definitely woke up to it this morning. She heard it even now, sitting at her station on the bridge. She decided that maybe she’d been hearing it a little too often.