The Antares Maelstrom

by Greg Cox

  “If you’d done your job properly, I’d be long gone by now!”

  Her voice sounded familiar to Sulu, despite being distorted by the speaker. “Remove the helmet.”

  The suspect hesitated, but complied with instructions. Air hissed as the seal attaching the helmet to the suit was broken. The helmet came off to reveal the flushed and perspiring face of Zita Mansori, captain of the Solar Wind.

  “Captain Mansori,” Sulu greeted her. “I thought I recognized your voice.”

  Grandle glanced at him. “You know this individual, Sulu?”

  “We’ve met in passing.” He kept his eyes on Mansori. “Care to explain what you were doing on that nacelle?”

  “What if I don’t?”

  Sulu noticed a tool kit affixed to her belt. Without asking, he stepped forward to confiscate it. She bristled at the liberty, but was in no position to object. He cracked it open to reveal a small assortment of compact tools, including a rodinium-tipped drill capable of piercing, say, the casing of a warp nacelle. He showed Grandle the drill.

  “Apparently your transporter filter doesn’t register this as a potential weapon,” Sulu said. “I’d think about plugging that hole with a software patch.”

  Grandle scowled at the drill. “Consider it done.”

  “So I have a tool kit,” Mansori said. “What’s the big deal?”

  “So you weren’t planning to perform any unauthorized surgery on the Lucky Strike’s nacelle?” Grandle challenged her. “Maybe drill a few inconspicuous leaks in just the wrong places?”

  “Prove it,” she said. “Is there a law against spacewalking?”

  “Maybe not,” Grandle said, “but it doesn’t look good when there’s a saboteur afoot and you’re caught red-handed.”

  Mansori’s face went pale as she realized just how much trouble she was in. “Slow down. You don’t think I was behind all those so-called accidents? That’s insane. My ship was one of the first to get sabotaged. I was just after a little payback!”

  “She has a point,” Sulu conceded. “Her ship, the Solar Wind, suffered some major malfunctions days ago . . . and she blamed the Lucky Strike’s captain, Mirsa Dajo. Minus anything in the way of evidence, that is.”

  “I told you before,” Mansori said, “Dajo’s the one you should be looking at, not me.”

  “Oh, we have reason enough to hold you for the time being.” Grandle worked the transporter lever again, dispatching Mansori to a cell in the brig, which, like all the cells, was equipped with built-in transponders to enable one-way beaming. Force fields sealed off the cells once they were occupied. Grandle waited until the transport was complete before calling up a view of the cell on the main screen. She nodded in satisfaction as Mansori materialized in the formerly empty cell. “Figured I’d let her cool her heels a bit while we sorted this out. What are you thinking?”

  Sulu lowered his phaser. “Honestly, I think we may have caught a would-be saboteur, but not the saboteur. What’s Mansori’s motive for sabotaging her own ship?”

  “Misdirection?”

  “To what end? The Solar Wind would be well on its way to Baldur III by now if its engines hadn’t been tampered with. Instead, Mansori is losing passengers and profits to the likes of Dajo.” Sulu clipped his phaser back to his belt. “This business with Mansori strikes me as a personal grudge taken to an extreme, nothing more.”

  Grandle scowled. “Which would mean that the real saboteur is still at large.”

  “Probably.” The more Sulu thought about it, the more he suspected that Mansori was (relatively) innocent when it came to the rash of malfunctions plaguing the station and its visitors. “Just look at how easily we caught her. This was an amateur job; the real saboteur wouldn’t have triggered that alarm exiting the airlock, or we would have nabbed them by now.”

  “Unless she finally got sloppy?”

  “After leaving no trace up until now?” Sulu asked. “You really believe that?”

  “No.” Grandle slumped down in her seat. “Would’ve made life easier, though.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  A disturbing thought pushed its way back into Sulu’s brain. What if the real sabotage was an inside job? As Mansori had just demonstrated, it was difficult for a civilian to pull off such a crime without being detected by the station’s security systems, let alone do so repeatedly. You’d need to be very familiar with those systems, and have free access to most anywhere on the station, to carry out an ongoing campaign under Grandle’s very nose.

  Mansori couldn’t do that, he thought. Nor Dajo or another visitor.

  He peered at Grandle, reluctant to share his suspicions with the prickly security chief. Sulu trusted his Starfleet team implicitly, but Grandle was bound to react badly to even a hint of an accusation against her and her staff; Sulu decided to keep his theory to himself until he had more to go on.

  “Something on your mind, Sulu?”

  Sulu briefly wondered if Grandle could be the saboteur, but that made no sense. She had no reason to disrupt the workings of her own station—and every reason not to.

  “Just wondering what you were planning to do with Mansori?” Sulu lied.

  Grandle contemplated the prisoner on the viewer. Mansori had shucked the bulk of her spacesuit and was now pacing back and forth in a lightweight, protective undergarment. In a moment of frustration, she flung a discarded gravity boot at the entrance to the cell; azure sparks crackled as the boot bounced off the force field confining her. She ducked to avoid being nailed by the rebounding footwear.

  “Tempted to ship her off to a penal colony,” Grandle said, “along with half the other troublemakers disturbing my peace, but I’ll probably just keep her under wraps until the lockdown is lifted and she can go be somebody else’s problem.” She flicked a switch to banish the view of the cell and its unhappy occupant. “Beats having to press charges and go through all the rigmarole of a hearing. Case you haven’t noticed, we’re short on judges and lawyers in these parts as well.”

  “Works for me,” Sulu said. All they really had on Mansori was trespassing and attempted mischief. “You expect Tilton will go along with that?”

  “Ordinarily, that would be his call,” Grandle admitted, “but . . . what were we just talking about before?”

  “Tilton,” Sulu recalled, “and the fact that he’s not all there.”

  “Exactly.” Grandle stared morosely at the empty screen. “I hate to admit it, but he’s just a ghost of his former self.”

  A ghost, it occurred to Sulu, who could go anywhere he pleased.

  Eighteen

  Baldur III

  “The sooner we wean you off this creaky old rust bucket the better.”

  Montgomery Scott barely remembered his quarters back on the Enterprise. He had been practically living in the Thunderbird, trying to keep the rickety refurbished spacecraft up and running. It was well into the night shift and he slugged down a cup of coffee, wishing he had something a wee bit stronger to spike it with, as he conferred with the power plant’s manager, Paul Galligan, in an administrative office just off the main control room. The blueprints for a new hydroelectric generator, currently being constructed in the hills outside town, were displayed on a desktop terminal before them. Scotty hoped that this and other such projects would soon get Jackpot City to the point where they could take Thunderbird offline for good.

  “Someday perhaps,” Galligan said. He was a middle-aged family man whose job had become much more demanding in recent months. Worry lines creased his face, while Scotty was pretty sure he had been wearing the same ratty wool sweater for days now. “But that generator won’t be operational for weeks at best, unless we cut some pretty serious corners.”

  “Don’t even think about it,” Scott said sternly. “You’re going to build that thing, you build it right or you’re just asking for heartache down the road.” He glanced around at his surroundings. “One jury-rigged time bomb is quite enough, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

&
nbsp; “Oh, you’ve made your opinion of this operation quite clear,” Galligan said, shrugging, “and I’ll concede that getting our power supply from Thunderbird’s old engine room is more of a matter of necessity than preference. As for the hydroelectric plant, I suppose we could try to throw more people and resources at the project, although I’m not entirely sure where we’d get them from.”

  “Aye, there’s the rub.” Scott was torn between making Thunderbird as safe as possible and helping the colony develop viable alternatives in a timely fashion. The truth was, he ought to concentrate on both, but there was never enough time or people to get it all done, especially if he wanted to keep the Enterprise adequately staffed as well. Lieutenant Charlene Masters was currently minding engineering in his absence, but he was reluctant to pull any more technicians away from her to assist him planetside. “We’d be robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

  “Hard to know what to prioritize,” Galligan agreed. “In the meantime, and you’re not going to like this, we’ve been requested to increase our output by another nine percent.”

  Scott nearly spit out his coffee. “Are ye out of your mind? We should be scaling down, not ramping up!”

  “I don’t like the idea either,” Galligan said, “but demand keeps increasing faster than we can keep up with. You’ve got the new expansion at the spaceport, which is now operating around the clock; new computers and offices being set to process mining claims and disputes; temporary housing for all the new arrivals . . . all of that requires additional energy, beyond what we’re already producing.”

  “Can’t ye tighten your belts some?” Scott asked. “Restrict consumption to what’s strictly necessary?”

  “You want to be the one who shuts down all the bars and music halls, or explains to people why their sonic showers and protein resequencers aren’t working?” Galligan flinched in anticipation of the flak that such restrictions would generate. “And, honestly, I’m not sure that modest energy-conservation measures would really make a significant dent in the demand. We’d be getting a lot of grief for very little gain.”

  “I suppose.” Scott reminded himself that they were dealing with an unruly civilian population, not disciplined Starfleet crew members trained to sacrifice creature comforts if necessary. “But even still—”

  A muffled thump from the engine room caught Scott’s attention. He didn’t know the geriatric rumblings of the Thunderbird the way he knew the Enterprise’s every hum and murmur, but that didn’t sound right to him. A frown betrayed his unease.

  “Did you hear that?”

  Before the other man could answer, a junior technician stuck her head into the office. “Excuse me, Mister Galligan, Mister Scott?” Kate Spears said. “But we seem to have an issue.”

  The young Baldurian, who had previously struck Scott as a good worker, appeared worried, but not panicked. Scott hoped that boded well. Nevertheless, he got up from the desk and headed straight for the control room. Galligan did the same, interrogating Spears all the way.

  “What is it, Kate?” he asked.

  “There was a blockage in the deuterium stream feeding into the reactor, possibly caused by some unwanted clumping. The system automatically flushed the clog loose by increasing the pressure behind it, but it looks like that might have damaged a valve or two, maybe.”

  I knew something sounded wrong, Scott thought, wishing he’d been mistaken. They strode briskly onto the floor of the engine room, which was sparsely populated by a mere skeleton crew. He immediately glanced at the primary diagnostic board, specifically the gauge monitoring the reactor’s internal temperature, and was relieved to see that it was only running a little hot, not enough to pose a major concern yet. Thank heaven for small favors!

  Spears sat down at an empty control panel as Scott and Galligan looked over her shoulders. Glancing about, Scott noticed other technicians looking frustrated and anxious as they fought their instruments, which were clearly not cooperating as well as they were supposed to. Despite that reassuring temperature reading, Scott could feel in his bones that this was not going to be a simple fix. His gut churned in anticipation.

  “Problem is,” Spears elaborated, “we’re having trouble controlling the flow of deuterium into the matter-antimatter assembly, so we have to keep compensating with the antimatter to avoid an imbalance, but now the magnetic constrictors governing the antimatter stream are acting up, possibly in response to the rapid fluctuations in the system. One glitch keeps leading to another, like dominoes falling.”

  Scott didn’t like what he was hearing. He glanced again at the core-temperature gauge and saw that it hadn’t budged one bit since the last time he’d checked it, despite the erratic variations in the input streams.

  That couldn’t be right.

  Crossing the chamber, he quickly confirmed what he feared: the temperature reading was frozen and had not updated itself for at least six minutes. Fear gnawed at his nerves as he did a forced reset on the monitor. All at once, the temperature reading jumped into the yellow zone, indicating that the reactor core was already way too hot for safety’s sake. Warning lights blinked on belatedly.

  “Bloody hell,” Scott muttered.

  The tension in the control room mushroomed as well. Galligan went pale, but managed to keep his composure. “Bring that temperature down,” he ordered his workers, “however you can.”

  “I’m trying,” Spears insisted, her eyes glued to the displays at her panel. “But nothing’s working. Matter and antimatter are flooding the warp core.”

  Scott hurried to her side. “Have ye tried compressing the stream before it reaches the injectors?”

  “I wish I could,” she said, stress tinging her voice. “But the variable compression nozzles seem to have been knocked out of alignment.”

  Scott recalled seeing an inspection report on those nozzles. They were well past their expected lifetime, by a generation or so. Replacing them had been high on his maintenance team’s to-do list, but there had been other components that had needed upgrading first and replacement nozzles had proven hard to come by, considering they were antiques these days. Most everything on the Thunderbird was old and obsolete, in fact, meaning that replacement parts had to be fabricated from scratch or more modern units made to adapt to the older systems, with varying degrees of success.

  That’s coming back to bite us, he thought. “What about the backup dampers?”

  Spears did a system check. “Shut down for an overhaul, sir. Supposed to be back online by Monday.”

  Scott felt his own temperature rising. He had argued against keeping the reactor running while the secondary dampers were being brought up to code, but had been overruled; in theory, the system should be back in place by now, but everything was running behind schedule due to unexpected complications and more pressing emergencies. Scott silently cursed the ancient vessel and the colonists who had thought it was a good idea to drag her out of retirement. On the Enterprise, there were any number of tricks he could try to bring the overheating reactor back under control; Thunderbird was not the Enterprise, however. Even in her prime, she lacked the redundant backup systems and options built into a modern Constitution-class starship, which left Scott only one course of action.

  “We’ve got to shut the whole works down . . . while we still can.”

  Galligan stared at him as though he’d lost his mind. “A total shutdown? You can’t be serious. There will be blackouts throughout the city and that’s just for starters. It will take days to get the reactor back online if we shut down completely. Longer if we have to inspect and repair the entire assembly!”

  “You’d rather risk a warp core breach in the middle of the city?” Scott said. “Because that’s what we’re looking at if we don’t pull the plug on this before it’s too late.”

  “I can’t do this on my authority,” Galligan said, wavering. “I need to consult the mayor and the board of directors . . .”

  “There’s no time for that. For heaven’s sake, man, you have
a wife and family in town; their pictures are all over your office. Don’t you realize their lives are at stake as well?”

  More warning lights ignited on control panels and visual displays, as though joining in the debate. Spears looked up from her console in dismay.

  “One of the dilithium crystals has fractured!”

  Scott felt a chill run down his spine. The crystals were crucial to regulating the matter-antimatter annihilation reaction within the warp core. Damage to even one crystal gave them even less control over the runaway reactor.

  “That’s it,” Scott said. “We’re done talking.” He edged past Galligan to get to Spears’s console. “Step aside, lass. I’m making this call.”

  She surrendered her seat to Scott, while glancing apologetically at Galligan. “I’m sorry, sir, but I have friends and family outside too.”

  To his credit, the manager made no effort to stop Scott as he attempted to initiate the emergency shutdown protocol. Scott had just instructed the computer to begin the procedure when a power surge from the bollixed reactor caused the control board to crash. Precious moments slipped by as he waited impatiently for the system to reboot, which took much longer than it should have. One more reason why the old ship should have never been fired up again. The Enterprise’s computers could have rebooted three times by now.

  “I don’t understand.” Galligan tugged anxiously at his collar. “Why is everything breaking down all at once?”

  “It’s like Spears said before,” Scott explained, “one malfunction leads to another, setting off a chain reaction of minor problems snowballing into a major cock-up.” He manfully resisted the temptation to say I told you so. “This whole setup was a house of cards just waiting to collapse.”

  The board finally lit up again.

  “About bloody time,” Scott said. Unhappily skipping over a couple of prudent preliminary steps, he attempted to disconnect the matter-antimatter injectors from the warp core in order to collapse the reaction.

  At least that was the plan.