Collective Hindsight Book 1

by Aaron Rosenberg

  “Don’t fret, Ina,” Gold assured her. “That would be Salek. Part of this farkochte plan, I’m sure.”

  An instant later, McAllan announced, “Cardassian shields reallocated, sir. Torpedoes away.” They saw the torpedoes strike, and Gold could hear the excitement in McAllan’s voice as he reported further, “Direct hit, sir! Significant damage!”

  But what happened next made their attack pale by comparison.

  First the Dancing Star unleashed its second attack. As with its previous strike, the funnel of flame struck the Cardassian ship full along the side, and they could actually see the ship’s hull glow even through the shields. Then McAllan announced that the Cardassian shields were down.

  “Sir,” Ina announced, “transporters have engaged.”

  At the same time, Duffy shouted.

  “Spike from the Dancing Star! No!”

  The alien vessel seemed to glow from within—and then Gold realized that it was doing exactly that. Light was pouring from every seam in the ship, and illuminating every portal. They were looking at a small, metal-encased star, and Gold resisted the urge to look away.

  It was a good thing he didn’t, or he would have missed what happened next.

  The Cardassian ship had also begun to glow, only its brilliance was more pronounced, as the section where the Dancing Star had struck it twice collapsed, pouring energy out from its side. Fortunately, the energy trailed off almost immediately, as the flames found nothing else to burn and so extinguished themselves in the cold of space. Even so, Gold understood why Salek had told him to move the da Vinci. If they had been too close, that release could have cooked them as well.

  “I’m not registering any life signs, sir,” Ina reported quietly.

  “What about the Dancing Star?” Duffy demanded. “What about Salek?”

  Ina glanced at Gold when she responded. “That was what I meant, sir. No life signs.”

  “Dammit!” Duffy slammed his hand down on his console, making several of the others jump. Gold had half expected it, and kept his seat. “He planned this all along! That’s why he ordered us off the ship! That’s why—”

  “Duffy!” Gold let his own anger leak out, to give his voice the edge necessary to snap the younger man to attention. “Time enough for recriminations later. For now, finish the job your superior gave you.”

  “Yes, sir.” The glance Duffy shot him could have come from the Dancing Star’s gun, but Gold didn’t mind. Duffy would appreciate the need for focus later—for now it was enough to have him working again, and making sure Salek’s sacrifice had not been in vain.

  “Prepare to broadcast message along the requested frequency,” Duffy muttered a few minutes later, and at Gold’s nod McAllan set the comm systems to suit. A moment later, the Cardassian was heard once again on the bridge.

  “Grach’noyl to Cardassian Central Command. Anomalous energy reading identified as solar flare. The star is reading as unstable, and could prove dangerous. Ships are advised to exercise caution when—” the message suddenly ended in static.

  “That’s it?” Gold asked despite himself, glancing over his shoulder. Duffy just shrugged.

  “Yes, Captain. That’s what Salek instructed us to send. Now the Cardassians will think the Grach’noyl got hit by a solar flare, and they’ll chalk it up to a sloppy gul. No reason to suspect the presence of an outpost, although Randall V may not see as much traffic in the future.”

  “True enough, but not really our problem.” Gold gestured to the screen, and the two ships floating life-lessly before them. “Those, however, are.”

  It was a subdued group that met in the conference room, and all of them avoided looking at Salek’s empty chair.

  “We need to get rid of both ships now,” Stevens pointed out. “Not just the Dancing Star.”

  “Yes, and we still have the same problem there as before,” Pattie agreed. “That ship is too large for the da Vinci to tow. So is the Grach’noyl. And we can’t wait for help—the Cardassians could decide to send a second ship, just to make sure that last message wasn’t a fake.”

  Duffy shook his head. “They’ll buy the message. It had the Grach’noyl’s ID stamp on it, and was in their gul’s own voice. But you’re right, they might still send someone—if for no other reason than to salvage anything left on the warship. So, any suggestions?”

  Surprisingly, it was one of the Bynars who raised a hand.

  “Go ahead, 110,” Duffy told him.

  “The Cardassian ship is badly damaged,” the little Bynar commented, “but—”

  “—the Dancing Star is not. Its systems—”

  “—are offline again, but can be rebooted quickly, now that—”

  “—we are familiar with the codes.”

  “Okay, so we’ve got one working ship and one that’s been turned to slag.” Duffy sighed. “Too bad we didn’t find anything like a tractor beam on the Dancing Star, or we could use it to tow the Grach’noyl.” He knew there had to be a way, but his brain just didn’t seem to be working right now. He was still too shocked by what had happened.

  Fortunately, the rest of the team—now his team—was able to take up the slack.

  “The Cardassians have tractor beams,” Pattie pointed out. “We’ve seen them in use before. And that warship is big enough to tow the Dancing Star.”

  Stevens nodded. “Right! And we can repair any damage to the tractor with our own parts. A lot of it’s external anyway, so it might have escaped the brunt of the blow. If we can get it up and running—”

  “—we can use that to hitch the two together,” Duffy finished for him, “and then pilot the Dancing Star out of here, with the Grach’noyl trailing behind. Good call, people. The only question is, what do we do with them?”

  He glanced at the conference room viewscreen, which showed the two ships floating in space—and the sun looming behind them.

  “All set, Fabe?”

  Fabian nodded from the console on the Dancing Star. “Just one more bit here, and—got it.” He slapped the console shut and stepped away. “We’re good.”

  “Right. Duffy to da Vinci. Diego, prepare to beam two back.”

  “Roger that, Commander,” said Chief Feliciano.

  “Standing ready.”

  Kieran then said, “Pattie, how are you doing over there?”

  Fabian watched his friend, and wished there was something he could do to help. Salek’s death had shocked him, of course, but he’d only been on the da Vinci for a little under a year. Kieran had been here much longer, and so had worked with the Vulcan a lot more closely. The death had hit him a good deal harder because of it. But Fabian suspected that what had really upset Kieran was being left out. Salek hadn’t bothered to reveal his plan to him, or to anyone, and Kieran felt betrayed by that. It was understandable, but that didn’t make it feel any better.

  “We’re good here, sir,” Pattie replied over the communicator from the Cardassian vessel. “Activating tractor beam—now!”

  A wide beam of dull yellow-green energy struck the Dancing Star, and Fabian felt the ship lurch slightly as the two vessels became linked together.

  “Got it, Pattie. Good work. Now beam back. We’ll meet you in a minute.” Kieran glanced over at him, and Fabian tried not to let his own face show how awful his friend looked. “Ready to send this ship off on its final voyage?”

  “Let’s do it.” They tapped in the commands, and the Dancing Star’s engines powered up. Without the collectors, and with all the energy it had recently released, the ship had little power left, but it would be enough. It wasn’t going very far.

  “That’s it, then,” Kieran muttered, and turned away. “Let’s head back.” He tapped his communicator. “Beam us back, Diego.”

  As the transporter took them, Fabian couldn’t help a final glance back, at the spot he and Kieran had both avoided on the bridge. The captain’s chair—and the small pile of ash resting upon it.

  Chapter

  5

  Stardat
e 53851.9

  Sonya blinked and stretched, not surprised to realize that her back had gone stiff. Her eyes burned, partially from the strain of watching the screens so closely and partially from the tears she’d angrily brushed away. Those last few moments of the battle, when Kieran’s anger and sorrow had come through so clearly—when he’d been both grieved at Salek’s death and also furious that his commander had made such a momentous decision without him—had been too much for her. She’d had to pause the program for a moment and let her own feelings pour out, weeping uncontrollably and cursing the universe’s sense of irony. But at last she’d gotten herself back under control, and had been able to watch the final portion of the reports with little more than a subdued sob.

  Before her, the viewscreen still showed several panels of information—the last words of Kieran’s official report, the schematics of the Dancing Star, and some theories on how the engines worked. But all she could see in her mind’s eye was that gout of flame leaping from ship to ship, and the way both the Dancing Star and the Grach’noyl had glowed from within, like massive beacons in the night.

  Salek had done the right thing, of course—the only thing he could have done, really. The ship had been powering up again, and in another two hours it would have overloaded, taking the whole star system. He’d needed to vent that energy a second time, and it had to be internal to protect the da Vinci and the outpost. So he’d made the choice to do it himself. He could have programmed the ship to vent, of course, but that would have left the da Vinci to face the Cardassians, and they would have been destroyed. So first he had used some of the ship’s power supplies to weaken the Cardassians and knock down their shields. Then he’d set the da Vinci’s transporters to beam the contents of the Dancing Star, minus himself and any physical architecture, onto the Grach’noyl. And then he’d let the energy loose.

  A lot of it had been beamed into the Cardassian ship, enough to kill everyone on board and to fry all of the ship’s systems. But transporting energy wasn’t an exact science, and a fair bit had still flooded the Dancing Star. Salek had known that it probably would, and that most likely the remaining amount would still be lethal. But it was still the best course of action. He’d died instantly, too fast to feel any pain, and had saved the rest of his team, the da Vinci’s crew, and the outpost.

  The irony of it was that the Dancing Star itself had barely been damaged from the blast—it had already weathered one internal vent, and the S.C.E. crew had brought the ship back to full activity before the Cardassians had arrived. If they’d had more time they could have analyzed it more fully, perhaps, and tried to mimic the ship’s energy collection system. But, since they needed to vacate the area as soon as possible, Kieran had led the team in sending the Dancing Star into the sun, where no one would ever find it again.

  So what was it doing here now?

  “Okay, I’ve been over the reports,” she told the others a few minutes later, as they gathered around her. “Good work on the reconstruction, by the way.” She’d been pleased to notice afterward that, once she’d gotten absorbed in the events, she had stopped realizing that it was Kieran speaking. Focusing on the details really did help ease the pain—or at least push it to the background. It had only been Salek’s death, and Kieran’s response to it, that had pulled the pain back to the fore. “But now we’ve got another problem.

  “The thing is,” she pushed her chair back from the table and stretched, “that Salek did a good job. No surprise there—from everything I’ve heard and read, he was an excellent engineer and a good commander. He considered the situation carefully, and based his decisions on the information everyone had collected. It all makes perfect sense, and I’m not sure I would have done anything any different.”

  “So why is that a problem?” Abramowitz asked. “It should be a good thing, shouldn’t it, to know that you agree with his actions?”

  “Yes, but clearly something was wrong. If not, the Dancing Star would still be floating in the heart of Randall V’s sun, unreachable even if it wasn’t simply reduced to molten metal. Instead, here it is, light-years away and without a scratch on it.”

  “Which makes this thing even more valuable than before,” Stevens pointed out. “Not only does it harness the energy of the stars, but it can dive into a sun and come back out none the worse for wear. The Androssi would kill to get their hands on it.”

  “Exactly.” Gomez scrubbed at her forehead with one hand. “Which leads to another question. If you guys disconnected the collection array, why is it registering an energy buildup again? We know how powerful this thing can get, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let anyone here immolate themselves just to drain it off, but if we can’t figure out why it’s got more juice now we won’t be able to stop this from happening again.”

  She sighed and resisted the urge to put her head down on the table. The S.C.E. had already been up against this vessel once before, and though at the time they thought they’d succeeded in disarming it, clearly in retrospect they had failed. So why should she think that she’d have any better luck this time around?

  TO BE CONTINUED…

  About the Author

  AARON ROSENBERG was born in New Jersey, grew up in New Orleans, graduated high school and college in Kansas, and now lives in New York. He has published short stories, poems, essays, articles, reviews, and nonfiction books, but for the last ten years the majority of his writing has been in role-playing. Aaron has written for more than ten game systems (including Lord of the Rings, Vampire, DC Universe, EverQuest, and Star Trek) and is the president of his own game company, Clockworks (www.clockworksgames.com). He has two degrees in English, and misses teaching college English, which he did for several years. His other fiction includes the previous S.C.E. eBook The Riddled Post and the novelette “Inescapable Justice” in Imaginings: An Anthology of Long Short Fiction. He is currently hard at work on more S.C.E. fiction.

  Coming Next Month:

  Star Trek™: S.C.E. #34

  Collective Hindsight Book 2

  by Aaron Rosenberg

  During the Dominion War, Commander Salek and Lt. Commander Duffy of the S.C.E. dealt with a runaway vessel that was endangering a star system—a mission from which Salek did not return. Now, a year later, Salek’s and Duffy’s replacements—Commander Gomez and Lt. Commander Tev—are faced with the same runaway ship.

  Facing more than one ghost from the past, can Gomez and Tev succeed where their predecessors failed?

  COMING IN NOVEMBER FROM POCKET BOOKS!