Progenitor

by Michael Jan Friedman

  PROGENITOR

  Michael Jan Friedman

  Based upon STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION®

  created by Gene Roddenberry

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 2002 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

  STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of

  Paramount Pictures.

  This book is published by Pocket Books, a division of

  Simon & Schuster, Inc., under exclusive license from

  Paramount Pictures.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce

  this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue

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  ISBN: 0-7434-2796-3

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  Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Poul Anderson,

  knight of ghosts and shadows

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Acknowledgments

  I find myself once more indebted to a handful of good people, without whose loyalty, help and hard work I’d never have had the opportunity to put this book in your hands. I gratefully acknowledge the efforts of John Ordover, editor; Scott Shannon, publisher; Paula Block, executive director of publishing at Viacom Consumer Products; Dave Van Domelen, science maven; Gene Roddenberry and the illustrious writers and producers of Star Trek: The Next Generation, who invented Jean-Luc Picard and the good ship Stargazer. I’d also like to thank my wife and sons, who are kind enough to open my office door and throw in mail from time to time; my parents, who have been known to bring me citrus fruit so I don’t get scurvy in the manner of some fifteenth-century sailor; and my friends, who understandably have trouble believing I’m smart enough to write this stuff.

  Chapter One

  JEAN-LUC PICARD HAD LOST his fencing partner. His name was Daithan Ruhalter. Ruhalter had also been Picard’s captain, his predecessor as commanding officer of the Stargazer.

  Picard had been happy to discover that there was another fencer on the ship, a security officer by the name of Pierzynski, who had a good few inches on Picard and outweighed him by perhaps thirty pounds. Unfortunately, as Pierzynski had subsequently discovered, size and skill didn’t always go hand in hand.

  At the moment, Picard enjoyed a four-touches-to-none advantage in a five-touch match. To this point, Pierzynski had failed to take advantage of his longer reach, just as he had failed to do so in the four matches that preceded this one.

  Picard could have postponed the inevitable and toyed with the fellow for a while. However, he didn’t want to give Pierzynski the illusion that they were competitive enough for the captain to consider doing this on a regular basis.

  It was unfortunate. Picard had hoped a good fencing session would distract him from what he was obliged to do when the Stargazer reached Starbase 42.

  But Pierzynski hadn’t provided much of a distraction for him. The disposition of Caber and Valderrama still weighed heavily on the captain’s mind, making him wonder how he could ever have allowed himself to embrace those individuals in the first place.

  Picard sighed. “En garde.”

  Pierzynski raised his blade in response. Then, aggressive by nature, he took a step toward the captain.

  Picard frowned. He didn’t even have to parry to create an opening. Taking a couple of steps back, he waited for Pierzynski to follow him. Then he planted his back foot, extended his point and launched himself forward—all in one quick, fluid motion.

  He hit Pierzynski in the ribs, just below his elbow. Point and match. “Alas,” he said.

  Pierzynski reached for the top of his mask and pulled it down, exposing his flushed, fatigued-looking face. Then he tucked the mask under his sword arm and extended his hand to the captain.

  “Good one, sir. One more?”

  Picard removed his own mask and clasped the security officer’s hand. “Perhaps some other time, Mr. Pierzynski. I’m due on the bridge in half an hour.”

  Pierzynski nodded. “Of course, sir.” He smiled sheepishly. “I hope I didn’t disappoint you too much, sir.”

  The captain smiled back and lied through his teeth. “You didn’t disappoint me at all, Lieutenant. I simply had a good day.”

  That seemed to make Pierzynski feel a little better. At least, it seemed that way to Picard as he showered, dressed, and made his way to the bridge.

  He arrived just in time to receive word from his communications officer that a message was arriving for him. Naturally, the captain reckoned it was from Starfleet Command, since his only orders at the moment were to exchange personnel at Starbase 42.

  He was wrong. It wasn’t from Command, after all. Apparently, it was from the Crazy Horse.

  “Really,” Picard said, wondering what it might be about.

  “Really, sir,” Lt. Paxton confirmed for him.

  “I’ll take it in my ready room,” Picard told his comm officer, and went there to receive the message.

  Phigus Simenon, chief engineer of the Federation starship Stargazer, eyed the knot of scarlet-clad specialists standing at attention in front of him. There were twelve of them in all, males and females representing six different species.

  They didn’t seem happy. But then, he didn’t want them to be happy. Not after what he had just seen.

  “Disgraceful,” he spat, feeling his anger constrict the flow of blood in his throat vessels. “Absolutely disgraceful.”

  “Sir,” said Dubinski, one of Simenon’s senior officers, “in all fairness—”

  Simenon cut the man short with a snap of his tail. “Fairness?” he repeated, giving the word a bitter twist as it echoed throughout the engineering section. “You want fairness after you let this ship go up in a ball of matter–antimatter fury?”

  In reality, the Stargazer hadn’t suffered so much as a scratch. But that was because the events of the last several minutes had only been a simulation of a warp core containment failure, not a real one.

  Simenon ticked off his section’s failings on the digits of one scaly clawlike hand. Each accusation snapped and cut like the business end of a very sharp whip.

  “First,” he hissed, “you relaxed and assumed the internal sensors would detect the beginnings of the failure. Second, you allowed the computer to respond to the situation, when you should have taken the initiative yourselves.”

  Both were grievous errors, considering Simenon h
ad shut down the sensors and the computers for a five-minute period. But then, what good was a test if it was too easy?

  “And third,” he finished, “you hung onto the core too long when you should have ejected it immediately.”

  The assembled engineers seemed to strain under the weight of their superior’s charges. They weren’t used to this kind of talk—even from the likes of him.

  But it wasn’t Simenon’s job to mollycoddle them. His job was to make sure the ship got what it needed in the way of power and propulsion and a number of other critical areas, and he would be damned if he was going to fall short of accomplishing that.

  That was why he was ripping into his engineers, right? To ensure that they didn’t falter in their vigilance? To make sure the Stargazer didn’t fall victim to some ridiculous and avoidable oversight?

  “Sir,” said Dubinski, now that Simenon had vented the worst of his figurative spleen, “I’d like permission to speak.”

  Simenon fixed the fellow with his lizardlike gaze. “Permission granted, Mr. Dubinski. I can’t wait to hear the excuse you’re going to give me.”

  The engineer frowned. “It’s not an excuse, sir. I’d just like to try to put this... exercise . . . in perspective.”

  Simenon shrugged. “By all means.”

  “First off, sir, we did conduct periodic checks of the core—even more frequently than Starfleet directives recommend. And while it’s true we gave the computer a chance to respond to the situation, we had every reason to believe it would do so—since our boards told us it was running fine.”

  The engineering chief harrumphed. “And your slowness in dumping the warp core once you realized the computer wouldn’t do it?”

  “It just didn’t feel right,” Dubinski explained. “After all, complete, irreparable and rapid failure is virtually unheard of without apparent cause—enemy fire, a collision with another ship, something—and we couldn’t identify anything that might have triggered a breach of the containment vessel.”

  It was a good answer. Simenon had to admit that, if only to himself. In fact, it bothered him that he hadn’t considered it.

  Just as he hadn’t considered that every control console in engineering would show the computer was online—something the chief should have taken into account if he were to make the test a fair assessment of his people’s preparedness.

  It wasn’t like him to gloss over important details. But then, it wasn’t like him to conduct unannounced drills in the first place. He had always judged the efficiency of his section by virtue of daily observations, not contrived exercises.

  So what had come over him? A sudden lack of confidence in his security measures? Or something else—something unrelated to the continued welfare of the Stargazer?

  Something that had been bothering him more and more over the last several days, keeping him awake at nights and insinuating itself into his thoughts during his waking hours.

  Inwardly, Simenon cursed and crossed the room to a sleek, black control console, where he made a show of inspecting what was on its various screens. It gave him time to think—to gain that sense of perspective of which Dubinski had spoken.

  Maybe he hadn’t been fair to his engineers, he thought. Maybe—gods help him—an apology was in order, as hideously distasteful as the concept seemed to him.

  Then Urajel, the Andorian on his staff, breathed something to the woman next to her. Obviously, she hadn’t intended for Simenon to hear it. But he heard it, all right.

  He heard it all too well.

  Turning from the console and glowering at the Andorian with slitted yellow eyes, he said, “What was that, Ms. Urajel?”

  The engineer’s face suffused with blood, giving it a dark blue tinge beneath her fringe of silver-white hair. No doubt, she was tempted to deny she had said anything. But she couldn’t do that.

  Urajel steeled herself. “I said I wonder what crawled up your hindquarters, sir.”

  Another time, Simenon might have let the remark slide, insubordinate as it was. But not this time.

  This time, his anger surged. “You’ll run safety drills for the balance of this shift,” he rasped, not just to Urajel but to all of her colleagues as well. “And for the next shift, and the one after that and the one after that, until I’m confident that what I saw today won’t happen again.”

  Simenon knew he wasn’t being fair to them. He knew he was abusing his power as engineering chief. But even knowing these things, he couldn’t help it.

  Before he said something he would really regret, he whirled and made his way to his office.

  Picard considered Starbase 42 as it loomed ever larger on his bridge’s main viewscreen.

  Like many of the interstellar bases Starfleet had built in the last twenty years, 42 was comprised of a long cylinder, a protruding ring in the vicinity of its midsection and an even more prominent ring near what was generally recognized as its top.

  Both rings were liberally dotted with brightly lit observation ports. At this distance, the captain imagined he could see uniformed figures framed in the ports, peering out at him in curiosity even as he was peering in at them.

  Where had all those figures come from? Where were they going? There were so many uniformed personnel in the fleet, it was barely possible to keep track of even a fraction of them. . . .

  Much less to know who would become an asset to his crew and who would become a burden. Or who would choose to leave just when she seemed to have found her niche.

  “You look positively grim,” said Gilaad Ben Zoma, Picard’s friend and first officer.

  “Do I?” the captain asked.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d think your shields were down and you’d just fired off your last photon torpedo.”

  Under most circumstances, Picard would have smiled at the metaphor. But not under these circumstances.

  “I’ll do my best to cheer up,” he said.

  Ben Zoma leaned a little closer. “That would be nice. And while you’re at it, you may want to give the order to establish orbit.”

  The captain glanced at Idun Asmund, his primary helm officer, and realized that she was waiting patiently for instructions. Feeling his face flush, he said, “Establish orbit, helm.”

  “Aye, sir,” came the response.

  Picard frowned at his lapse as he watched Idun manipulate her controls and activate the ship’s braking thrusters. Keep your mind on what you’re doing, he told himself.

  “You know,” Ben Zoma said in a voice only the captain could hear, “none of this is your fault. It wasn’t even your decision to bring these people aboard.”

  “I know that,” the captain replied. “But that doesn’t mean they’re not my responsibility.”

  “And as for that other personnel situation—”

  Picard stopped Ben Zoma with a gesture. “Let’s contemplate that later, shall we? I can only take so much change in one day.”

  “Orbit established,” reported Idun’s twin sister Gerda, who was seated at the bridge’s navigation console.

  The captain nodded. “Hail the base.”

  “Aye, sir,” said Ulelo, who had minutes earlier taken over for Paxton at the comm panel.

  In a matter of moments, the officer in command of Starbase 42 appeared on the viewscreen. He was a broad, squared-off fellow with pronounced crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes and a thatch of thick, gray hair. And though he gave Picard his name readily enough, the captain couldn’t have repeated it if his life depended on it.

  Despite what he had told himself, he was still distracted by what was happening to his crew. More to the point, he was still wondering if he could have done anything to prevent it.

  There’s one thing you could have done, he reflected. You could have denied the captain of the Crazy Horse his request to speak with one of your officers. But that would have been neither fair nor in keeping with Starfleet protocol.

  The commander of the starbase asked if Picard would be beaming down himself. When he i
ndicated that he would not be, the man said something polite and signed off.

  As the image of the base was restored to the screen, the captain turned to Ben Zoma. “Shall we?”

  The first officer stood aside for him. “After you.”

  Reluctantly, Picard got up from his seat and made his way across the bridge to the turbolift.

  Chapter Two

  AS PICARD AND BEN ZOMA ENTERED Transporter Room Three, one of half a dozen such facilities on the Stargazer, the captain saw that there were two uniformed figures waiting for them beside the hexagon-shaped transporter platform. One of them was Juanita Valderrama, a middle-aged woman with a kind, round face and dark hair. The other, a man in an ensign’s uniform, was the tall, sturdy-looking Joe Caber.

  Picard turned to the morning-shift transporter officer, who was standing off to the side at his black, streamlined console. “Mr. Refsland,” he said, “is the base prepared to receive Lieutenant Valderrama and Ensign Caber?”

  “They are, sir,” confirmed Refsland, a husky, blond fellow in his middle twenties.

  The captain nodded. “Good.” He indicated the platform with a gesture. “If you please.”

  Caber ascended without any further encouragement. Valderrama, on the other hand, hesitated.

  “Is something wrong?” Picard asked her.

  The lieutenant lifted her chin. “May I speak candidly, sir?”

  The muscles worked in Picard’s jaw. Here it comes, he thought. The disclaimer. The “I was wrongly accused” speech.

  “By all means,” he responded.

  Valderrama’s nostrils flared. “I want to apologize,” she said softly. “Not only to you and First Officer Ben Zoma, but to Ensign Jiterica as well. What I did was reprehensible. I wish the idea had never even occurred to me.”

  It was the last thing that Picard had expected to hear after Valderrama tried to take credit for someone else’s idea—in this case, Ensign Jiterica’s. Glancing at Ben Zoma, he saw a look of surprise on his friend’s face—although it must have been only a faint shadow of the surprise visible on his own.