The second reason, which Fabian knew as well as she did, was that listening to and mentally picturing Kieran would be bad enough. Actually having to watch him again would be far worse. She’d heard of people who had programmed their lost loved ones into holodecks, so that they could visit them at any time. But to her that sounded like sheer torture, the notion of watching Kieran and talking to him but knowing that it wasn’t really him, that it was just a program. With a shudder she pushed the thought away. This option was definitely easier to handle.
“How long will it take?”
“Two hours if you let it run without pause,” Pattie said from behind Fabian. “We condensed some of the less important elements so you’d get the basics first, and then could go back and call up the peripheral details if you needed them.”
“Good thinking. Hopefully it won’t come to that.” Sonya blushed the minute she’d said that. Here she was, implying that their previous commander might have been so stupid he’d missed something obvious, and that they’d all been too dumb to catch it themselves. She saw from their faces that neither Fabian nor Pattie had taken it that way, but cursed under her breath anyway. She should know better than that, but lately she’d been saying a lot of things she shouldn’t have.
Rather than risk insulting her friends and teammates again, Sonya just nodded to them and swiveled her chair to face the observation lounge’s main screen. The swish of a door told her they’d left the room, but Sonya had already turned her attention to the monitors.
“Computer, engage program,” she called out, and settled herself more comfortably. As the first report began, she winced but forced herself to listen past the sound of Kieran’s voice. She tried thinking of the others on the mission, but that didn’t help much. Based on the stardate, it was after Chan Okha was killed in action, but before he’d been succeeded by Bart. Replacing the ship’s linguist wasn’t a priority in the heat of battle, after all. It was also when 111 was still alive and working in tandem with 110, before the former died on the Beast and 110 became a literal Soloman. A Bolian named Tydoan was the ship’s chief medical officer, not having retired yet. Drew, Barnak, McAllan…They were all still alive, too.
And so was Kieran…
Again, she forced herself not to think about it, put all the deaths behind her, and was eventually able to let her eyes lose focus and drift into the events, reliving them as if she herself had been there.
Chapter
2
Stardate 52698.1
“What do we know about this place?” Kieran asked, leaning forward to glance at Gold and Salek. “Randall V—I’ve never heard of it.”
“Good,” Gold replied. “If you had, I’d have to shoot you.” The half-smile said he was kidding—mostly. “Randall V is classified, and what I’m about to tell you doesn’t leave this room.” He looked around, and everyone nodded their agreement. “Fine. It’s not an important system, in and of itself—no habitable planets, no valuable ores or other substances on any of the rocks floating around that bloated sun. But it’s strategic as all hell. On the far side of it is Cardassian space, and on this side is us. Most of the other systems around here are inhabited, and we’ve got bases or at least allies in half of them.” He frowned. “They have the rest.”
“So this one is the free zone, where anybody can pass through because nobody’s looking,” Fabian volunteered, and Gold nodded.
“Precisely. And both sides have agreed—without openly saying anything—that neither side will block this one system. It’s the open channel, in case they want to negotiate or surrender.” He didn’t bother to mention the reverse option.
“But we can’t just leave it like that,” Fabian mentioned, half to himself, and once again Kieran admired his friend’s perceptiveness. Fabe might not be the fanciest guy around, but very little slipped by him, especially if it had to do with tactics. “We’ve got to keep an eye on what they’re doing, just like they’d want to keep an eye on us.”
“Of course. Their method is to send a patrol ship through here every few days, just to make sure the system is still clean and safe.” Gold grinned. “Ours is a little more subtle. Commander?”
At Gold’s prompt, the dark-skinned Vulcan typed in a command, and an image appeared on the room’s main screen. It looked like nothing so much as the stylized image of a large, pitted rock. “The official designation of this asteroid is R5-3791. It’s one of over a hundred small asteroids in the system, composed of iron, lead, silicon, and carbon, with bubbles of nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen inside.”
Kieran glanced over at Fabian, who’d started grinning. “What’s so funny? It’s a damn space rock!”
His friend shook his head. “You’ve got to start reading something other than those pirate stories, Duff. Sure, it’s a rock—with exactly the right elements to hide a staffed base inside.”
Silently Kieran cursed himself. Damn, he should have caught that! The air bubbles were the real giveaway, and he noticed Pattie’s antennae waving in good-natured laughter at his expense. At least Salek wasn’t laughing—not that he ever did.
“Okay, okay—so I missed it. We’re talking about a hidden outpost.” Gold nodded for him to continue. “So we set up a station inside that rock, their sensors only see the chemicals already present, and we can watch them come and go. Nice. I take it something’s wrong with the outpost?”
“The outpost itself is fully functional,” Salek put in, “as are all of its crew. The problem lies beyond it, but within the system.” He tapped his padd, and a new image appeared on the room screen. “Specifically, it lies here.”
“Okay, now I’m stumped,” Carol volunteered from farther down the table. “I’ve never seen a ship like that before.” And Carol knew every major race’s vessels, and a lot of the minor ones.
“No one has, as near as we can ascertain,” Salek informed her. “The vessel does not match any record, nor even partial accounts. It is a complete unknown.”
“Well, it doesn’t look Cardassian, anyway,” Pattie commented. “They’d never build anything without their typical nacelle configuration—it’s too ingrained in their design philosophy.”
“It’s not one of theirs,” Gold agreed. “And it’s not one of ours. We don’t know whose it is. But it’s taken up residence there, and that’s bad news. So your job,” he glanced at Salek, then around at the others, “is to figure out whose it is, what it’s doing there, and then make it go away. All before the Cardassian patrol comes back, sees it, and starts getting suspicious. Our number-one priority is to protect the secret of that outpost.”
“We will arrive in approximately two point seven-five hours,” Salek informed them. “During this approach, Duffy will scan the vessel repeatedly, compiling information as our sensors pull in more details. Stevens will assist me in analyzing the data and creating as detailed a schematic as possible; 110 and 111 will scan the data for any transmissions, and will also institute a blocking protocol to prevent it from sending out any distress signals or other information. Blue will consider methods for contacting the outpost.”
“What do you mean, contacting them?” Carol asked. “Can’t we just open a channel?”
“We could,” Salek agreed. “But if anyone else is within sensor range, that will pinpoint the outpost’s location.”
“Actually,” Gold corrected him, “we can’t do that even if we wanted to. The whole point to R5-3791 is that it can’t be found. Not even by us. We don’t know which of those asteroids it’s in, and it’s been designed to foil passive and even most active scans.”
“Precisely.” Salek tapped one long finger on the table. “But the outpost’s own sensor array is exemplary, and will be able to provide a host of useful data on this vessel. Thus, when we arrive in the system, we must make contact with them, without knowing their location and without attracting undue attention. Blue, that will be your job.” He glanced at his team. “In roughly two hours we will reconvene here to examine what we have discovered and plan the
next phase.”
Salek turned to go, and Kieran exchanged a grin with Fabian. In the months they’d been working together, no one had been able to convince their Vulcan team commander that the words “approximate” and “rough” did not go with precise time measurements. But since Salek was willing to put up with their little peculiarities, they suffered his as well.
Two hours later, the team met back in the conference room. A model of the unfamiliar ship rotated on the screen while they shared their findings. Next to it was the image of a small, cylindrical object. Fabian looked at it with admiration as Pattie finished her explanation of the changes she had made to the device in order to communicate with the base.
“…so these radio beacons are now set up to send and receive short-range bursts in their immediate area. We’ll deploy a bunch of them when we arrive, and they’ll have overlapping coverage—we’ll be able to hear the outpost’s signal no matter where they are in the system. But the real key is this one.” She tapped her padd and a section of the beacon enlarged, with a schematic beside it. “This links all of the beacons together, and any signal one receives is immediately echoed by all the others. They all broadcast on a low-level radio frequency that the Dominion isn’t likely to pick up.”
Kieran nodded. “So it’s a mirror trick—with each beacon echoing the messages from the outpost, no one can tell which of them got the original data and which are just repeating it. That way they can’t use the beacons to narrow down the location.”
“Very efficient,” Salek said, and Pattie sat back down, antennae vibrating with pride. “Now we can communicate with R5-3791 and share data with them. Stevens, please tell the others what we have determined about the vessel itself.”
“It’s big,” Fabian said, and the others nodded.
In the year he’d been serving on the da Vinci he’d learned not to gloss over the things he thought were self-evident. Salek had told him early on: “Do not omit any detail, no matter how obvious or trivial. It may prove useful.” So now he made sure to include everything, even something no one could possibly miss.
“About the size of a Cardassian battle cruiser, a little narrower but a little longer.” Everyone nodded again as a battle cruiser appeared on the screen next to the model. It was an impressive display—one cruiser could carry two destroyers within its bay, and a destroyer could easily fit two Sabre-class ships within its own hangars.
Kieran took over. “The metals are a strange composition, though the elements are all familiar. Some type of titanium alloy, apparently, with a particularly high conductivity. Good for channeling weapons or shields, definitely. But the way the energy inside there is being damped out, it’s got some pretty strong shielding as well.”
“I’ve ruled out every race I can think of,” Carol added. “This is somebody new.” Fabian again admired the logic of whoever had first suggested a cultural specialist be assigned to the S.C.E.—along with a linguist, though they had yet to replace Chan Okha for that position. Both their insights into other races had proven invaluable more than once.
“No life signs are evident,” Salek pointed out. “Though with a ship this size we would certainly expect crew. Docking bays and airlocks are visible along the exterior, indicating that it was built for entry, if not for sustained occupancy.”
“The computers—” one of the Bynars began.
“—are active within—” the other added.
“—but are neither broadcasting data nor scanning the area.”
Fabian shook his head. The way the pairing finished each other’s sentences had taken a long time to get used to. It wasn’t like with a long-term human couple, where one might anticipate the other’s thoughts and finish what they’d been about to say. No, this was a case where the two Bynars were so linked that they basically had one mind. Neither possessed the sentence, and neither stole it—they shared it, with no sense of ownership beyond “us.”
“So it’s not looking or talking, but it is doing something?” Pattie asked, and the Bynars nodded.
“Not just—”
“—something. Its signal—”
“—is increasing in strength and frequency.”
“So it’s revving up,” Fabian said, and they both nodded at him this time. “Okay, it’s getting ready to do something. We just don’t know what.”
“Two other elements we must consider,” Salek said. “First, the vessel shows no signs of damage. Its hull is structurally intact, with no more than the minor scrapes one might expect while floating within an asteroid-strewn system such as this one. Second, its energy signature is unique.” A signal appeared beneath the model, with notations alongside indicating various benchmarks along the known spectra.
“That’s not an antimatter signature,” Kieran pointed out. “The pulse is all wrong, and it’s at the wrong wavelengths. If anything, I’d say it was closer to a sun.”
Salek nodded to him. “An excellent deduction. Yes, the closest match to the ship’s energy type is that of a sun. Nuclear forces, caused by the fusion of hydrogen and helium particles.”
“So this thing is harnessing a small sun as its power source?” Carol scratched her chin. “Isn’t that kind of impossible?”
“As far as we know, yes,” Pattie said. “A sun that small would have collapsed long ago, forming a singularity.”
“But it could be solar-powered,” Kieran pointed out. “Just absorbing stellar radiation and using that for power. Free fuel, essentially—and plentiful.”
“That is the most likely possibility,” Salek said. “But we will not know for certain until we have examined the vessel more closely.”
He started to say something else, but Fabian held up a hand. “Hang on a sec. I know we need to find out what’s going on here, and that will probably mean boarding it, but what if it’s a trap? What if it’s a bomb? High energy levels, active computer signals, strong shielding, no sign of a crew, no attempt to send out a distress signal, and it’s sitting in the only free zone within ten systems during an interstellar war. That sounds like a trap to me.”
Again, Salek nodded. “An excellent point. How do you suggest we proceed?”
Fabian sat back and thought about it for a second. “Well, we have to assume that it is a bomb, and prepare ourselves accordingly. The question with any bomb is, what’s the trigger? If this thing is rigged to a timer, we’re screwed—there’s nothing we can do about it, short of getting in there fast and disarming or deactivating it before it counts down to zero. If it’s got a stimulus trigger—it goes off if the air pressure changes, or the temperature, or the noise level, or if something is moved—we’ve got to make sure we don’t affect anything.”
“Easier said than done,” Kieran muttered. “How can we get in there and look around if we can’t touch anything? And if our own body heat could be the thing that sets it off?”
Fabian shrugged. “Nothing’s perfect, but there are a few tricks we can pull. We should beam over in space suits—that’ll help mask our body heat and will also keep us from altering the ship’s atmosphere. We’ll be breathing bottled air rather than touching and possibly shifting whatever’s floating around in there. But ideally we’d have some way to hide our visible presence as well.”
Pattie raised a pincer. “I can rig small holoprojectors to each suit. They won’t run for long, but while active they can take whatever appears behind the suit and project it on the front, and do the same with whatever’s ahead on the suit back. So it’ll look like you aren’t there. We’ll have to move slowly, but I think it’ll fool a ship’s sensors.”
“Great. That should take care of anything like lighting, shadows, colors, etc. It will also fool lasers, which used to be one of the best ways to rig a bomb—link it to a low-intensity laser, and the minute the beam is broken the bomb goes off.”
“Very well,” Salek said. “Upon entering the Randall system, we will begin deploying Blue’s modified radio beacons. That will put us in contact with R5-3791, so that we may receive
and examine their data on the ship. Once we have collated that material with our own findings, Captain Gold will bring the da Vinci within transporter range. Blue will be beamed aboard the other vessel—her shell makes her more durable, and thus the most likely team member to survive an explosion. She will sweep the ship for any sign of danger. Stevens, you will monitor the situation, and alert us to any change in the ship’s activity, and particularly in its energy levels. Be prepared for an emergency beam-out if you do detect an energy increase that might indicate an approaching detonation. If nothing is detected, Blue will locate a computer junction, and the Bynars will beam to her coordinates and interface with the ship’s system. That should tell us whether we are facing a trap, a bomb, or a derelict. Duffy, you will begin developing scenarios for deactivating the ship’s power source and disposing of it in some manner that will not call attention to this system.” He stood. “We will enter the system in roughly twenty minutes. Blue, please begin preparing the holoprojectors and attaching them to our suits. Everyone else, prepare to release and sync the beacons.” He turned and headed toward the door, leaving his crew to stand and follow him out.
Fabian caught Kieran’s eye and pantomimed wiping sweat from his forehead, and Kieran nodded back. At least this time it wasn’t the two of them walking into the proverbial fire like back on Lamenda Prime….
“We’ve analyzed the data from R5-3791,” Kieran reported an hour later. “The ship entered the system at warp three, then braked to a stop. At the time, the outpost registered over two dozen life signs on board, as well as an energy level of dangerous proportions. The ship began an active scan of the area. Immediately after that, its energy level spiked, and then dropped down to barely subsistence level. The life signs all vanished at the time of the spike. Since then, the energy has begun building again. No signs of life since, though.”
Collective Hindsight Book 1 Page 2