Collective Hindsight Book 1

by Aaron Rosenberg

  “It is no longer a bomb, then,” Salek commented.

  Fabian, however, shook his head.

  Salek’s eyebrow rose. “You do not agree? The vessel had a much higher energy level, and then it rose suddenly before falling off again. If it was a bomb, it has clearly already been detonated.”

  “Not necessarily,” Fabian said. “Sure, it did something, but that may not have been detonation. Some bombs have smaller explosions leading up to a larger one. They use the initial releases to catalyze elements, altering materials so that the final explosion will trigger a cascade effect from the now-radioactive surroundings. There’s also the subterfuge factor. If I knew someone might be watching a bomb, I’d make it look like the thing had gone off prematurely by setting up a smaller explosion beforehand. Then, after letting it sit dormant for a while, they’d figure the danger was past and would wander in to get a better look. And that’s when I’d detonate the real thing.”

  Kieran stared at his friend. “Y’know, Fabe, sometimes you scare me.”

  Fabian grinned at him. “What can I say, Duff? I’m twisted—it’s what makes me such a good tactician.”

  Their commander nodded. “The ability to think like the enemy is a valuable one. You are correct that it is a possibility. We will proceed as planned.” He gestured to Pattie and the Bynars. “Blue, 110, 111, suit up and meet me in the transporter room. Stevens, Duffy, please take your stations.”

  “Got it.” Kieran watched him walk out, then turned back to Fabian. “Do you really think it’s a bomb like that, with all those levels and safeguards and tricks?”

  Fabian shrugged. “Honestly? No. But it’s better to be safe, and survive, than get careless and die.”

  “I’ll drink to that.”

  “Fine.” His friend slapped him on the shoulder. “If we survive, you’re buying.”

  Chapter

  3

  And, once again, having a shell gets me into trouble.

  Pattie adjusted her suit, checked again to make sure the holoprojector was online, and then signaled Salek. He tapped a button, and vanished from sight as she was transported onto the alien ship.

  Normally, the Nasat did not require a space suit—she could survive for prolonged periods in the vacuum of space. In fact, her first mission for the da Vinci involved repairing a communications relay by crawling across its outer surface. But there were other occasions when even her chitinous exterior needed protection—for example, the time they had to retrieve some equipment from the acidic atmosphere of Eridas IX—so Commander Salek had commissioned a specially modified suit to be fabricated for her.

  Her first impression upon materializing was cleanliness. The corridor was spotless—gleaming walls of some sort, curving outward slightly so that the corridor was basically a tube with one side flattened for the floor, and a soft glow from the ceiling and walls providing light. No pictures, panels, or protrusions.

  She checked her suit display. If it was right, the projector was working perfectly, and the corridor still looked empty. The suit had also shifted its temperature to match the area, which she noticed was near the upper threshold for human capacity.

  “I’m in,” she reported. “Hallway of some sort, completely empty. Be warned, guys—it’s pretty warm in here. Not quite boiling point, but not too far off.” She glanced around. “No sign of trip wires, lasers, or pressure plates. Also, there’s no atmosphere in here.”

  Duffy’s voice came through her communicator. “We’re not reading a hull breach.”

  She checked her tricorder. “Neither am I. There’s no pressure, and it’s hot rather than cold. But there’s no air—like somebody dumped it or purged it. Might have to do with the energy spike the outpost registered.”

  “We’re not getting anything funny here, either. The energy buildup’s continuing, but at the same slow rate. Your arrival doesn’t look like it’s had any effect. I guess Fabe’s bomb theory may be a bust.”

  “And I’m happy to be wrong, too,” Stevens chimed in. “But it pays to be sure. And we won’t know until the Bynars get a crack at the computer system.”

  “Already on it,” Pattie responded, moving slowly and carefully down the hall. She’d just rounded the first bend when she came across the corpse and cursed out a series of chirps.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m okay. Just surprised, is all. I’ve found one of the ship’s crew.” She bent down for a closer look. “Dead, definitely. Humanoid, carbon-based—and extra crispy.” She scanned the body with her tricorder. “No known match, but that’s not really a surprise.”

  “Keep moving, Blue,” Salek said. “The primary goal is to reach the computer core.”

  “Yes, sir.” Pattie stepped around the body and continued on her way. A few paces later, she found what she was looking for. “I’ve got an access port, sir. Beam the Bynars a meter to my left.”

  An instant later, the Bynars materialized, their dataports clinging to the belts on the outside of their suits. The pair immediately opened the port and began speaking to the computer in that strange high-pitched singsong of theirs. Pattie settled back to watch—she knew that, at their speed, it wouldn’t take too long.

  Nor did it. She’d only been sitting for a minute or two, studying the material of the wall—some sort of ceramic, or ceramic-metal compound, she guessed—when 110 spoke up.

  “We have gained access—”

  “—to the ship’s computer systems. This ship is known as—”

  “—the Nal’q’far, or Dancing Star. Sensors confirm that—”

  “—the ship has not been rigged with explosives, or otherwise—”

  “—set to trap or harm visitors.”

  Pattie wiggled in relief. True, her shell could protect her from a certain degree of harm, but whatever had killed that crew member would have cooked her as well.

  “Understood,” Salek replied. “Duffy, Stevens, and I will beam over momentarily.”

  “Got it.” Pattie left the Bynars to continue their talk with the computer, and began analyzing the wall while she waited.

  Salek materialized on the Dancing Star, and immediately took in his surroundings. Duffy and Stevens beamed in safely next to him. Blue was examining the wall with her tricorder, and 110 and 111 continued to inspect the computer core. Leaving the Bynars to their work, he approached Blue and asked after her scans.

  “The wall’s part metal and part ceramic,” she said. “At a guess, I’d say it was built to handle intense heat.”

  “That would explain why this guy was roasted but the walls weren’t even singed,” Stevens commented, kneeling down by the body. “Whatever killed him struck hard and fast.”

  Salek was surprised at this pronouncement, since Stevens had not opened his tricorder. “Explain.”

  “Just common sense and a general understanding of how people work.” He gestured at the body, which was blackened and shriveled. “The burns—and that’s exactly what they are, burns from a massive heat source—are slightly worse in front. This guy was facing whatever hit him. But his face and chest are just as burnt as his arms. If he’d seen it coming, he’d have raised his hands to shield his face—it’s a natural reaction, trying to protect yourself from danger. He didn’t do that, which means he never got the chance.”

  “A sound deduction,” Salek said. “Though it is merely conjecture, assuming this race would react in a way similar to your own, it is plausible. For now, we will consider it a working hypothesis.”

  “Sir, we have—”

  “—accessed more of the ship’s data,” the Bynars reported.

  Salek once again admired the way their thoughts intertwined, allowing them to alternate speaking without any hesitation. It was an impressive display of symbiosis. But they were still reporting.

  “Much of the older data, including—”

  “—the ship’s origin point, have been purged.”

  “To keep the info out of the wrong hands, probably,” Duffy commented. “That
’s what you’d expect from a military ship, certainly.”

  111 shook her head. “Except that this ship—”

  “—has no weapons.”

  “No weapons?” Fabian straightened up from the body and stepped over to join them. “What about those funnels along the sides?”

  “According to the ship schematics, those—”

  “—are exhaust vents,” the Bynars explained. “They also function as—”

  “—maneuvering jets.”

  “An efficient use of excess energy,” Salek said. “We will survey the ship quickly. Stevens and I will proceed aft. Duffy, you and Blue will head to the fore; 110 and 111, remain here and continue to analyze the ship’s data. Have the da Vinci beam that body up to sickbay, so that Dr. Tydoan may examine it. Report in every five minutes.” He set off down the hall, and a moment later Stevens caught up with him.

  “I think the atmosphere got burned away,” Stevens said. “The heat in here must have been pretty intense, judging from that body, and the fact that it’s still pretty warm. I’m guessing it vaporized whatever air the ship contained, and that simply helped fuel the explosion.”

  “A valid conjecture,” he agreed. “Given the scan of that body, Dr. Tydoan will most likely confirm that the crew breathed an atmosphere similar to our own. Such elements would contribute to any fire, and be consumed by it.”

  They continued to follow the corridor, and Salek let part of his mind drift. This ship intrigued him in its sense of focus. No weapons, no security, energy vents that doubled as thrusters—it had been developed to use available materials to their fullest, and only for necessary purposes. If their mission had not been urgent, he would have been interested to study the vessel further and perhaps discover the builder’s original intent.

  Doors opened off the corridor, leading to small sleeping chambers, possible offices, and even what resembled a medical bay. Several of the rooms contained bodies, and a few were found farther along the hall as well. All of them matched the first corpse in general shape and in cause of death. Judging from Duffy’s intermittent reports, the rest of the ship was much the same, which suggested a force not only powerful enough to char a body to the bone in an instant, but also one fast enough to sweep the entire ship in that same brief moment.

  The corridor finally ended in a wide archway. Salek paused just beyond it, to take in the sight before him. It was a single vast chamber, easily large enough to contain the da Vinci itself. Lining the two side walls and the ceiling were flat panels covered in a slight sheen. More panels rested in flat racks that ran the depth of the room in neat rows. Conduits from the panels led to a fat column in the center, whose sides were inset with crystals. The crystals, for their part, were visibly throbbing, and the glow radiating from them lit the entire room easily. They also provided noticeable warmth that could be felt even through the cooling systems of the suits, making this room even hotter than the corridors beyond. Salek, who came from Vulcan’s desert environment, actually found it comfortable, though he suspected the humans were not having as easy a time of it.

  “The engine room, without a doubt,” Salek commented, stepping inside and examining the objects all around him. He had begun to form a theory on how this vessel worked, after the initial scans, and now he applied the evidence against his theory to see if it held. It did.

  “It would seem that Duffy’s conjecture was correct,” he announced. “This ship does use solar radiation for its power source. These are the storage units, and undoubtedly the larger panels we noticed along the hull, which we initially suspected were nacelles, are in fact the collectors.”

  “An entire ship powered by solar energy? Amazing.” Stevens spoke in an awed whisper. Salek understood the sentiment. It was an impressive feat. But right now that was of no concern.

  “I’m on the bridge,” Duffy announced. “We’ve got more dead aliens here, most of them sitting in what look a lot like our own command chairs. I’ve yet to find anyone who wasn’t killed the same way.”

  “Nor will you,” Salek replied. “I believe the entire ship’s crew died simultaneously as the result of an internal energy release.”

  “The ship vented excess solar radiation?” Stevens asked, and he nodded. “That would account for the burns and the lack of air, definitely, and if it had enough pressure built up the release would have flooded the entire ship in seconds. It fits.”

  “We will reconvene on the ship’s bridge,” Salek informed him and the others. “Now that we have more information, we can make sense of the larger picture.”

  Stevens followed as they left the engine room and moved down the hall, trying not to notice the charred corpses littering their path.

  “Okay, so the ship runs on solar radiation, as your brilliant second officer deduced.” Duffy smiled wryly from his perch on the edge of a console. He had not touched any of the corpses yet, and had no desire to move one just to gain a proper seat. No one else did, either. “It takes in too much energy, vents it internally, and kills its own crew. Anyone else see any problems with that?”

  “Of course,” Salek replied. “This ship was designed to handle such radiation—hence the conductivity of its hull and the shielding just behind that. A ship made to use stellar energies would have safeties preventing such an overload. Yet the cause of death and the internal damage”—for they had found some evidence of charring in side rooms, where anything not metal had been burnt away—“confirms that the energy was released in this manner.”

  “I don’t think the lieutenant commander’s arguing the what,” Pattie chimed in, “more the why. Clearly whatever did this was extremely hot, and given the ship’s power source, stellar energy makes sense. But the idea of an accidental overload seems odd.”

  Duffy nodded. “Exactly. We’ve got countless safety protocols for the warp core—why wouldn’t they have the same sort of thing for their engines?”

  “They do,” one of the Bynars—Duffy thought it was 110—replied. “We have sorted through much of the—”

  “—remaining computer data. This ship had—”

  “—extensive safety protocols, including automatic cutoffs.”

  “Such an explosion should—”

  “—never have occurred.”

  “Okay, so it couldn’t have happened by accident,” Stevens said. “What about on purpose?” The others all turned to look at him, and he held up his hands. “Hey, can I help it if I see the ugly possibilities?”

  “You are suggesting sabotage,” Salek said. “That is possible—certainly the safety protocols could be disengaged, and that would allow for the energies to be vented internally. A ship of this nature might even have some protocol for such an internal release, to flush away intruders or dangerous particles, and thus all that would be required is removing safety overrides and activating such a protocol.”

  “But if there was a saboteur,” Duffy pointed out, “they’d have been killed along with everyone else. As near as we can tell, the energy poured through this entire ship in an instant. Nobody could hide from that.”

  “Could someone have set things up, then escaped beforehand?”

  Duffy shook his head. “Not without being noticed. I’ve gone over the data from the outpost. They didn’t see any other ships near it, no escape pods or the like, and no life signs outside it. So unless it was rigged before it ever hit this system, that’s not what happened.”

  “What if the purpose was not to kill the crew?” Pattie pondered out loud. “We’re assuming that it was either an accident or murder, but what if it was deliberate and the deaths were a necessary cost, not the end goal?”

  Stevens paced about, hands gesturing. “So somebody on this ship decides to flush the energy from the ship’s systems and does it internally, killing himself and everyone else on board. Why? Why not just flush it externally, and not hurt anyone?” He paused. “What if somebody was going to get hurt either way? And the choice wasn’t to hurt or not, but who would get injured? If these people valued
other lives over their own, they might have sacrificed themselves to save the others.”

  “Which others?” Duffy asked him, and in response his friend stabbed a finger toward the front viewscreen, which showed the rocks floating beyond the ship.

  “How about R5-3791?”

  “They killed themselves to save the outpost?” Duffy was finding that one hard to believe, but the Bynars were both nodding, and speaking to the ship computers in that high-pitched series of whines and beeps. After a moment they switched back to more normal language.

  “The computer logs indicate that—”

  “—life-forms were detected somewhere nearby. The crew—”

  “—knew that they were not alone in this system.”

  “Their engines can only handle so much energy at once,” Salek surmised calmly. “From the brief glimpse Stevens and I had, the containment systems are limited, and are already close to capacity again. The ship must need to keep moving in order to bleed off what it has absorbed. It reached this system, and stopped for whatever reason, intending to vent excess energy. But then the crew detected life nearby, and knew that, if they followed normal protocols, they would endanger those others. Instead they chose to vent internally, killing themselves but protecting the outpost from harm. It is logical.”

  “Yeah, except for one thing.” Duffy tapped a few equations into his padd, then showed the others the results. “The energy released in here wouldn’t have covered the distance to most of these asteroids. Some of it, sure, but not enough to put the people on R5-3791 at risk, especially if they’re holed up in one of the rocks along the system’s outer edge. And we can assume this crew knew a lot more about solar energy than we do, since they worked with it constantly—they’d have known that the release wouldn’t have extended far enough to hurt anyone that far away. So they killed themselves for no reason.”

  But Salek was not convinced. Duffy had noticed before that once his commander had settled on a hypothesis, he followed it until he was absolutely sure it was wrong. Often that meant he found something they might have overlooked otherwise but that proved the theory correct. Like now.