by David Mack
Eskrene [The Ruby] adjusted her mind-line hue to complement Radkene’s. I concur. Might not the Federation aggrieve the Klingons by impeding their expansion? Our enemies may yet neutralize one another, leaving the Shedai Sector barren once more. Patience is—
Deafening and blinding, an excruciating thought-pulse ripped through the Political Castemoot. Hues blanched to near-transparency, mind-lines faded, the SubLink faltered. Instinct propelled the conclave participants to escape the SubLink, to retreat into the broader sanctuary of the Tholian Lattice. But there was no peace to be found; a piercing wave of psionic power held the Tholian race in its crushing grip. In a flash, every Tholian mind knew the icy touch of enslavement.
As abruptly as it had come, it ceased.
Echoes of the thought-pulse rocked the Lattice, like the aftershocks that followed quakes in the volcanic Underrock beneath Tholia’s three principal continents. Normally, the Ruling Conclave withheld alarming knowledge from the lower echelons of the Lattice-at-large, in the interest of preventing reckless actions by individuals that could bring harm to the rest of the Assembly.
Such discretion had just become impossible.
The Lattice was ringing with terror and incandescent with fury. An ancient and terrible force had seized the Tholians by usurping their most inviolate form of communion. They knew not this power’s name, its purpose, or why it had called to them. About it, they knew only two things:
Where it was—and that it must be annihilated, at any cost.
5
Commodore Diego Reyes exited his office and strode across the top level of the operations center of Starbase 47. Even at its least frenetic moments, the nerve center of the enormous facility buzzed with signal chatter and pulsed with foot traffic—yeomen bearing reports and work orders, department chiefs going to or returning from one meeting or another. This morning, service personnel dodged out of Reyes’s unswerving path. Technicians tore their eyes from the huge display screens, which wrapped around the top third of the high perimeter wall, to watch the lanky flag officer pass in a swift blur.
Elevated slightly above the chaos was the supervisors’ deck, which was situated in the center of the cavernous circular compartment and bounded only by a simple gunmetal-gray railing. The anchoring feature of the platform was an octagonal conference table, into which were set eight situation monitors, each with its own set of controls. Known to the operations staff as “the hub,” it was from this compact block of workspace that the bulk of the station’s business was managed each day.
Gathered around the hub at 0823, and already deep into the morning staff meeting, were the station’s department heads, minus the chief medical officer, who was notorious for shunning such briefings. Commander Jon Cooper, the station’s executive officer, ran the meeting with his trademark low-key aplomb. Lieutenant Judy Dunbar, the senior communications officer, sat with her eyes closed and twirled a curl of her light brown hair around one index finger as she listened and committed the minutes of the meeting to her photographic memory. No one took any notice as Reyes quietly climbed the steps toward the hub.
“Ray,” Cooper said to the fleet operations manager, Lieutenant Commander Raymond Cannella, “what’s this I’m hearing about a six-hour delay in docking clearance for the Chichén Itzá?”
“It’s their own fault,” said Cannella, a hefty man with a thick, nasal New Jersey accent. “They left Cait two days early but never updated their flight plan. They’re lucky we found them a berth at all.”
Cooper tilted his head in a half-nod. “Fair enough.”
Reyes reached the top of the stairs, and everyone turned at the sound of his approach. Despite his best efforts not to tread with such a heavy step, he found it difficult to muffle his footfalls. The commodore was a big man, tall and broad-shouldered, and his ex-wife had been fond of telling him that his “aura” frequently preceded him, even through a closed door. Serves me right for marrying a telepath, he brooded. Lifting his chin in a friendly but curt greeting, he said, “Morning, folks.” Overlapping variations of Good morning, sir were volleyed back at him. “Mr. Cooper,” he continued, “do you mind if I butt in for just a nanosecond?”
“Not at all, sir.”
“Thank you.” Reyes looked at Vanguard’s senior engineering officer, Lieutenant Isaiah Farber. “Mr. Farber, what’s topping your priority list these days?”
The heavily muscled Starfleet weight-lifting champion mulled his answer for a moment, then said, “Mostly space-dock systems, sir. We’re still fine-tuning the—”
“Because I think that in a claustrophobic environment like ours, it’s the little things that raise or lower the bar on our quality of life. Don’t you agree?”
A sheepish glance worked its way around the hub, from one officer to another, starting and ending with Farber. He looked up at last and said, “Your food slot’s on the fritz again, sir?”
Reyes feigned astonishment. “Amazing, Farber. You must be psychic. Exercise truly broadens the mind, after all.”
“I’ll have your food slot fixed by 1300.”
“Excellent,” Reyes said, patting Farber firmly on one beefy shoulder. “God is in the details, Mr. Farber.”
“Aye, sir.”
Turning his dark gray gaze toward Cooper, Reyes said, “When does the Bombay make port?”
“Nine-twenty hours.”
“Notify me as soon as they enter spacedock.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Carry on. My best to Jen and your boy.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Reyes nodded quickly to the rest of the group, then turned and walked back down the steps. He looked around the ops center, which was packed with computers, communication devices, and gadgets capable of myriad technological marvels—with the notable exception of being able to produce a cup of coffee. As frontier hardships go, this is kind of petty, he admitted to himself. But if forty years in the service, flag rank, and sector command aren’t worth a cup of java, what the hell is?
He walked into his sparsely furnished office and sat down at his desk. The morning reports and pending orders were all waiting in neatly arranged stacks, courtesy of his alpha-shift yeoman, Toby Greenfield. Although he had expected, upon first meeting her, that her perpetually sunny disposition would grate on his nerves, he had found the opposite to be true. Truth be told, he had to admit that the longer he served with her, the more he grew to appreciate her joie de vivre.
The buzzing of his intercom drew his attention. Recognizing Greenfield’s ID code, he opened the channel with a push of his thumb. “Go ahead.”
“Captain Desai to see you, sir.”
“Give me a moment, then—”
His office door swished open and Captain Rana Desai strode in. The petite, late-thirtyish Indian woman carried a sealed legal folder under her arm. Like many of her contemporaries, Desai wore her raven hair in a stylish but simple bob cut.
Behind her, Yeoman Greenfield stood, looking flustered, in the doorway. She signaled her silent apology to Reyes, then stepped away and let the door close.
Reyes leveled his stare at Desai and said, with monotonal sarcasm, “No, I’m not busy, please come in.”
Desai took the folder from under her arm and handed it to Reyes. In a voice that was no less steely for its gentle London accent, she said, “On behalf of the Starfleet Judge Advocate General, your attempted exercise of eminent domain on Kessik IV is hereby deemed improper, and your petition is rejected.”
“Excuse me,” Reyes said, his ire rising swiftly. “We laid claim to Kessik IV by the book.”
“Maybe you need to read that book again, Commodore,” Desai said. “You can’t steal a colony from its residents just because you want its dilithium mine.”
“First of all,” Reyes said, slowly rising from his chair to tower over her, “we’re not stealing it, we’re buying it. Second, we don’t want its dilithium mine, we need its dilithium mine—it’s a matter of military necessity.”
She flashed
an insincere smirk that bordered on a sneer. “How unfortunate for you that the law wasn’t written solely to service your needs.”
“Actually,” he said, “that’s exactly what eminent domain is for. Ambassador Jetanien signed off on this personally.”
“Too bad he had no more authority to do this than you did,” Desai said. “Eminent-domain law, as written in the Federation Charter, applies strictly to member-worlds of the Federation and unoccupied planets within sovereign UFP territory.”
“We planted our flag. That makes Kessik IV our territory.”
“If you’d planted your flag first, maybe. But the crew of the mining ship Epimetheus staked their claim on Kessik IV before Vanguard was even half-built. They have a local government and a solid claim to independence.”
Legal semantics irritated Reyes to no end. “They’re Federation citizens—the law still applies.”
“Not on the frontier, it doesn’t,” Desai said. “Eminent domain applies only inside Federation space. And even there, the rights of the state do not trump the rights of the individual, or of free communities on previously unclaimed worlds.”
Reyes tossed the folder of legal mumbo jumbo on a stack with a host of other documents he planned to ignore for the foreseeable future. “I like high-minded ideals as much as the next guy, Captain, but I also have to face hard facts: Starfleet needs that dilithium resource. The Federation needs it.”
“Then perhaps we should have devoted more time, more ships, and more personnel to securing it before someone with civil rights came along and laid legal claim to it.” Abandoning her lecturelike tone, she continued, “As of 0830 today, I have acted on behalf of the JAG office to void the Federation’s claim to Kessik IV, and I have countermanded your order to have its residents relocated.”
A flare of temper twisted his face into an angry mask. “ ‘Countermanded’?” In long, ominous strides, he circled his desk toward Desai. Her face betrayed a fleeting sign of fear; then she hardened her features and stood her ground as he harangued her. “Captain, there’s one thing we need on the frontier even more than lawyers, and that’s a chain of command. You want to challenge me on points of law, fine—but I will not permit you to usurp my authority.”
Desai’s voice was steady, her gaze unyielding. “I didn’t usurp your authority, Commodore—you exceeded it. And it’s my job to tell you so.” She continued to stare up at him, apparently content to respond to whatever verbal tactic he chose next.
He took the easy way out: “Dismissed.”
The dark-skinned lawyer maintained her proud bearing as she acknowledged the command with a nod, turned away, and left his office. Alone once more, he remembered a not terribly clever old joke that suddenly had the ring of truth to it: What do you call a ship carrying a thousand lawyers into a black hole?
A good start.
Tim Pennington was still learning the finer points of being a journalist, but after six years as a stringer for the Federation News Service he knew that taking a confrontational attitude with a senior UFP diplomat could be risky.
In particular, it would be exceedingly awkward if an ill-chosen comment were to provoke a heated exchange or angry outburst here, in a public, “outdoor” café on the edge of the plaza for Stars Landing, a crescent-shaped cluster of commercial and—to a lesser extent—civilian-residential buildings that wrapped halfway around the station’s central hub. Its architecture, which evoked such natural shapes as shells and honeycombs, was as much a work of art as a marvel of engineering. Some of its structures were nearly twenty stories tall and all but scraped the simulated spring sky of Vanguard’s vast habitat shell, which was rich with transplanted flora and teeming with off-duty station personnel and transients. Dozens of people were eating at tables adjacent to Pennington’s. Several meters away, two clusters of Starfleet officers had just organized an impromptu game of Frisbee. Without a doubt, this would be a most regrettable place for an argument.
On the other hand, his instincts told him that Ambassador Jetanien was hiding something. He chose his words with caution.
“I think you’re evading the question, Your Excellency.”
His thoughts well hidden behind a leathery, unexpressive shell of a face, the alien diplomat chewed another pickled keesa beetle. “Perhaps I was distracted by the fact that I am eating breakfast…. Maybe your question was poorly worded.”
Sickly sweet and pungent odors from Jetanien’s insect-breakfast entrée mingled in Pennington’s nose as he leaned forward and feigned contrition. “May I rephrase?”
“By all means,” Jetanien said, spearing another keesa beetle with the two-tined fork clutched in his clawed hand. His movements were unhurried, graceful. The Rigellian Chelon was the sort of person who could eat the messiest meal without making a spot anywhere on his snow-white, gold-hemmed, satin-textured raiment. Even the headdress that hung from his gleaming black fez remained pristine.
“Given that the Taurus Reach is so remote from established civilian shipping lanes and Starfleet patrol routes,” Pennington said, “why has the Federation Council chosen to devote so many personnel and resources to a mission so far from home?”
Jetanien chewed slowly. His voluminous, amber-colored eyes stared past Pennington. I’ll give him credit, the young reporter thought. He certainly knows how to play up a dramatic pause.
“Exploration has always been the Federation’s most honored endeavor,” Jetanien said at last. “The imperative to make contact with new life-forms and civilizations is the key to enriching our understanding of the universe, and of ourselves.” Skewering another keesa beetle and wrapping it in a twirl of reddish Vulcan seaweed, he concluded, “Our mission requires us to dare the unknown, and few regions within our reach are as unknown—and unclaimed—as the Taurus Reach.”
With a sound that Pennington took to be a grunt of self-satisfaction, Jetanien guided another vinegar-scented forkful of his breakfast into his prodigious beak of a mouth.
Suspicion crept into Pennington’s tone. “Mr. Ambassador, with all due respect, I received almost the exact same answer from a Starfleet Command press liaison two days ago.”
“Really?” Lifting a swan-necked beverage container, Jetanien added, “Imagine that.” He downed a generous mouthful of N’v’aa, an amazingly sour fruit cocktail that Pennington had sampled the first night he arrived on Vanguard. It was a throat-clenching mistake he had vowed never to repeat. Apparently, only Chelon taste buds found the libation even remotely palatable.
Putting aside the unpleasant memory, Pennington soldiered onward with his impromptu interview. “Is it possible that the Federation’s push into the Taurus Reach is part of a broader astropolitical strategy?”
“Could you be more specific, Mr. Pennington?”
“Even a cursory review of regional star maps indicates that the region is bordered almost entirely on one side by the Klingon Empire, and on the other by the Tholian Assembly.”
“Quite correct,” Jetanien said.
“So what is the Federation’s motivation for moving so aggressively into this area?” Pennington clenched his fist as he struggled to make his thoughts coalesce. “The Tholians have consistently pushed the borders of their territory in the opposite direction of the Taurus Reach, but the Klingons are extending their frontier in as many directions as possible. If they expand to the Tholian border, the Federation would be caught in the crossfire of a Klingon-Tholian conflict. Is this station part of an interstellar firewall—a tactic to avert a Klingon-Tholian war and deny the Klingons any more territory on our border?”
Jetanien finished chewing and swallowed with a muffled croaking noise. “A very good question,” he said, then picked up his plate and extended it toward Pennington. “Would you care for a keesa beetle? They’re quite crunchy today.”
“Thank you, no.”
The ambassador took back his plate. “Suit yourself.”
Bland rehearsed answers were all that Pennington had ever heard, from anyone, whenever questions a
bout Vanguard were broached. In press conferences last year on Earth, the president had answered queries about the project with so many euphemisms and empty platitudes that the press corps was surprised he had any rhetoric left for his reelection campaign. Regardless, the questions continued to persist: Why had Vanguard’s construction been fast-tracked? Why had three ships of the line been assigned to it on a permanent basis? What made the Taurus Reach a more viable arena for commerce and colonization than the Kalandra Sector, which was so much closer to Federation space?
Pennington had made the interminable journey to Vanguard hoping to find answers to some of those questions. Instead, he was getting the same talking points as his Earth-assigned colleagues—and, just to make it worse, missing out on the Paris nightlife and press-corps gossip.
Jetanien wolfed down his last few fried beetles. Watching the Chelon diplomat eat, Pennington realized that he had a sudden hankering for waffles. Wondering if the café was still serving breakfast, he turned to summon a waiter.
Before he could shout “Garçon!” a general announcement echoed inside the vast, hollow-doughnut–shaped space of the habitat, emanating from camouflaged speakers and seeming to be everywhere at once. “Attention, all personnel,” the feminine voice said in a businesslike tone, “the Starship Bombay is on approach to main spacedock bay two. Alpha-shift maintenance and cargo crews report to bay two for priority operations.”
The message began to repeat as Pennington, suddenly energized, rose from his seat and swiftly gathered his notes off the tabletop. “Mr. Ambassador, will you excuse me? I have a pressing matter to attend to.”
Pennington was already several meters away and dodging through the Starfleeters’ Frisbee game before he realized he had left without waiting for Jetanien’s reply. As he sprinted across the wide-open green, he forgave himself. Priorities, he reminded himself as he reached the station core and boarded a turbolift. You have to have priorities.
“I don’t know what you see in this game,” said Jabilo M’Benga.