He scoffed. “Because she’s a peace activist who was worried he was pushing Starfleet in a militaristic direction! Are you seriously proposing pacifism as a motive for murder?”
“You’d be amazed what people can rationalize, Doctor.”
“My God, Captain, Rakatheema’s windpipe was crushed by a single blow! Does she look strong enough to do that?”
“On an Arcturian, if the blow is struck at just the right weak point, in just the right way—and it was—then great strength is not required. Someone with the knowledge and dexterity of a medical doctor could pull it off.”
“She told you she doesn’t know Arcturian anatomy!”
“She told me.” Her brows lifted, driving home the point.
“Why, of all the—”
He broke off as Janith-Lau grasped his shoulder. “It’s all right, Len. Like the captain said, she’s doing her job. I’m a plausible suspect—the only one she has at the moment. I can’t blame her for thinking that under the circumstances. She’s only doing her due diligence. The best way to deal with it is to cooperate with her investigation. Surely it’ll turn up evidence to clear me, or to identify the real killer.”
“You’re too trusting, Ashley.” McCoy peered suspiciously at sh’Deslar. “Don’t forget, Rakatheema was one of her own. And you know how Andorians are about vengeance. How objective do you think she can be?”
The captain kept her stony calm, but her antennae stiffened angrily. “For your information, Doctor McCoy, I was born and raised in Cincinnati. I’d appreciate it if you’d keep your stereotyped assumptions to yourself.” McCoy flushed, feeling ashamed of himself. “And yes, he was Security, but I never met the man. I can do my duty fairly. I want to make sure I find the right killer, whoever that may be. That’s the only way to get justice.”
Sh’Deslar turned back to Ashley. “But you’re right, Doctor Janith-Lau—at the moment, you’re a definite suspect. Under the circumstances, I have no choice but to detain you for further questioning.”
Janith-Lau nodded bravely. “I understand.”
McCoy stared at her. “You’re just gonna stand for this? Call your lawyer! Call Jim! We can fight this!”
She clasped his hands. “It’s all right, Len. I know the truth will set me free soon enough.” She smiled. “Besides, getting arrested is a badge of honor for a peace activist. Although usually not under these circumstances. I’ll be fine.”
McCoy kept his silence as sh’Deslar formally arrested Janith-Lau and escorted her away—but he wasn’t about to take this lying down.
Kirk would know what to do.
Starfleet Headquarters
“Admiral, this whole thing is ridiculous! Ashley Janith-Lau is no murderer!”
Admiral Cartwright threw an impatient glare at Kirk as the two flag officers strode briskly through the halls of the Headquarters complex. “Based on, what, two weeks’ acquaintance?”
“Doctor McCoy has known her for years. I trust his judgment.”
“And I trust Captain sh’Deslar’s judgment. I recommend you let her do her job and focus on doing yours.” Cartwright grimaced. “We’re stretched thin already with vacuum flare preparations. The last thing we need is a murder to contend with!”
“All the more reason you should let me assist in the investigation, Lance. At least let McCoy handle the autopsy. The sooner we get this resolved—”
“Enough, Jim. You and McCoy clearly have a personal stake in this.”
“I can compartmentalize my emotions, and I trust Bones to do the same. We both had to do so often enough on the Enterprise. I’m sure you did too. You know the rules as well as I do.”
Kirk recalled a time or two when those rules had worked against him—such as the Ben Finney court-martial, where his own old flame Areel Shaw had been assigned to prosecute him. In a civilian court, their relationship would have required her recusal, but under military law, an inability to follow orders due to personal attachment would be dereliction of duty.
Cartwright was unswayed. “That may be the case on a starship out in deep space, where there’s no other authority to turn to. A captain or CMO has to take responsibility despite personal attachment, because there’s no one else. Here on Earth, that doesn’t apply. I don’t doubt your ability to compartmentalize when you need to, Jim—but you don’t need to in this case. There’s no good reason for you to be involved besides your personal interest in the suspect.”
The senior admiral stopped and turned to face him, obliging Kirk to do the same. “You’re still thinking like a frontier captain, assuming you have to take sole responsibility for everything that happens. You’ve got to accept that your situation is different now. You’re part of a larger whole, and you can’t just barge in and take charge of every situation. You need to learn that before you end up turning into some kind of maverick.”
Kirk held his gaze evenly. “You give me too little credit, Lance. There’s more at stake here than one person. The Warborn cadets have struggled to gain acceptance from the start, and they’ve just lost their primary advocate. With Rakatheema gone, that leaves you and me as the strongest proponents of their presence in Starfleet. We have a responsibility to see that this tragedy doesn’t ruin their chances.”
Cartwright’s expression wavered as he considered Kirk’s words. “That’s a valid point. Still, you’re too close to this. Besides, your responsibility is to the students—the Warborn and everyone else. They’ll need your attention to get them through this hard time.”
“That’s fair.” Kirk thought for a moment. “At least let me assign Commander Chekov to assist Captain sh’Deslar.”
The senior admiral shook his head firmly. “I need Chekov for the flare task force. He’s the closest thing we have to an expert on the damn things. He’s currently out on the Amazon, patrolling local space.”
“Sulu, then. He has some training in security.” That was a slight overstatement; it was merely one of multiple disciplines Sulu had experimented with briefly in his early years in Starfleet. But it had been sufficient to let him double up as the Enterprise’s weapons officer on his first five-year tour aboard her, and to lead the occasional armed landing party. For what it was worth, Sulu’s parallel counterpart in the alternate universe of the Terran Empire had been the I.S.S. Enterprise’s security chief, implying an innate aptitude for the role.
“He’s had little contact with Doctor Janith-Lau,” Kirk went on. “And as a faculty member, Sulu is under Professor Blune’s authority, not mine.”
After a further second, Cartwright nodded curtly and resumed walking toward the Major Missions Room. “Very well. If Captain sh’Deslar agrees. And if you agree to stay the hell out of her way and mine. Focus on your own job, Jim.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
He split off from the admiral at the next intersection, heading for the exit and from there to the Academy to speak to Sulu. He counted this as a win, but it was more of a compromise than he preferred.
Cartwright has a point, Kirk realized. I can’t do it all myself. I don’t need to—there are plenty of others here who know their jobs better than I do.
I need to learn to delegate. Trust in Spock and Uhura to handle the flares; trust in Sulu to handle the investigation. It’s the students who need my attention now.
* * *
“Radiation signature detected!”
Admiral Cartwright spun away from the windows overlooking San Francisco Bay. His eyes swept across the three large screens that dominated the opposite wall of the Major Missions Room, showing status graphics of the ongoing monitor effort and patrol distribution across the Sol system. Indeed, the center screen was showing a graph of a radiation signature that had become familiar to Cartwright by now.
He cursed silently. He’d been monitoring the situation for over eight hours and had just been thinking of getting dinner. He supposed he’d just have to grab a ration pack when he could.
Lieutenant Kexas, the Edoan who had called out the alert,
was shuffling around the “pool table,” the double-hexagon console at the center of the room, working its controls with all three of her arms. “Confirming. It is a vacuum flare signature.”
“Location?” As Cartwright moved in alongside her, he hoped this third flare event would be like the previous two that had struck the Sol system over the past fifty-two hours. Both flares had lasted nearly five hours and had grown to encompass a volume larger than the Earth itself, yet both had appeared in empty space, in keeping with the probabilities. The first affected zone had contained nothing of note besides a navigational buoy and a small Earth-crossing asteroid. The second flare had been in the path of an Earth-Mars shuttle with nearly two hundred passengers aboard, but far enough ahead that they were able to decelerate and avoid it; the only casualties had been a few missed appointments. Mercifully, Admiral S’rrel’s fear of all the flares appearing at once had not come to pass. But that meant the threat would continue to hang over Earth and its neighbors for an unknown time to come. How long before their luck ran out?
Not long at all, he thought as he saw the location marker appear on the system overview display on the rightmost wall screen. Kexas spoke, confirming and adding detail to the display. “Flare zone is in the orbital path of the L5 Lagrangian community. Projecting growth rate and longevity… estimating sixty-two minutes before the first L5 facilities enter flare zone. Estimate fourteen percent of L5 facilities at risk of direct flare contact.”
Commodore Song had called it. The L4 and L5 Lagrangian points—islands of gravitational stability leading and trailing Earth in its orbital path by sixty degrees—were natural places to locate space stations. The first wave of L5 habitats in the twenty-first century had tragically been lost in one of the early warp experiments, but the Lagrangian points had been too valuable to leave unoccupied for long, and thus they had eventually filled up again with asteroidal ore-processing facilities, repair and refueling stations, research outposts, and the like. Over the past two centuries, they had grown up into sizable space-based communities, orbital cities in their own right comprising numerous space stations spread out in wide orbits around the Lagrangian points like satellites around invisible planets. Given how wide a volume they occupied, it was no surprise that they would be the first targets hit.
“That fourteen percent. What’s their total estimated population?”
A Zaranite ensign answered through his breathing mask. “Two hundred eighty-four thousand, Admiral.”
And barely an hour to evacuate them. “Order all available ships to converge on L5. Ground all civilian traffic, and authorize in-system warp travel for the task force. Alert medical facilities to prep for incoming casualties.”
The control room personnel moved briskly to comply with Cartwright’s orders. This was what they’d spent the past few days preparing for, and they had it down cold. Cartwright was sure the captains and crews of the task force ships were equally ready.
But how well would the civilians of L5 cope with what was now bearing down on them?
U.S.S. Amazon NCC-1975
Pavel Chekov double-checked the sensor reading on his science station, praying it wasn’t actually showing what he thought it was showing. With Reliant still under repair at Denobula, he had found himself assigned to the Amazon, a Soyuz-class ship very similar to Reliant in design. The bridge science console was a near-perfect match for his station aboard Reliant, but he hoped there was some subtle difference he had overlooked, leading him to misread its displays.
But the error check confirmed the result. Mizuki City, the massive L5 habitat that the Amazon had been assigned to evacuate, was moments away from being engulfed by a new surge of vacuum flare microbursts that had just erupted from subspace directly in its orbital path.
When Chekov announced this, Captain Jangura spun to face him, blinking his bulbous red eyes. “Damn. That’s sooner than expected.” The greenish-brown Saurian turned to his helm officer. “Merck, increase speed. Get us back there!” As the lieutenant acknowledged the order, Jangura turned to his first officer. “Randolph, how many people are left to evacuate?”
“Over four thousand, sir,” Commander Joel Randolph answered in a lilting Indian accent. “But we’ll have trouble punching transporter beams through that interference.”
“Can you and Chekov make it any less troublesome, Commander?”
The handsome, dark-complexioned young officer traded a look with Chekov and nodded. “We can try, sir.”
Chekov smiled briefly at his old Academy classmate. It was good to be working together again, though he was still getting used to thinking of Joel by his married name—and trying not to be too envious that Randolph had managed to find a spouse and become a first officer before Chekov did.
The two of them fell readily back into their old rhythms as they applied themselves to the transporter problem. It wasn’t so different from the tests and simulations they had gone through at the Academy, aside from the stakes being much higher. Joel had always had a knack for outside-the-box solutions, though it had often fallen to Chekov to point out the practical problems he overlooked.
“… So this lets us narrow the confinement beam and tighten the focus. It’ll pierce the interference more effectively.”
“But it will slow the transmission of the matter stream by nearly fifty percent, Joel. Which doubles the risk of a microflare emerging within or near the beam. It could blow the beam wide open and we’d lose the evacuees.”
“They’d be at less risk as moving targets than sitting ducks, Pavel. Remember those tennis lessons I gave you? Always keep moving.”
Ensign Rider at communications spoke up. “Damage report from Mizuki, Captain. Main power compromised. Several outer compartments breached to vacuum. Multiple fires ignited by microflares. Casualty list too, sir. Their hospitals are filling rapidly.”
“And at just as much risk as the rest of the city,” Jangura hissed. “Gentlemen, get those transporters working!”
But another problem was almost immediately heralded by an alert from Chekov’s energy sensors. “A transport docked to the city is leaking gamma radiation! Looks like warp reactor damage. Containment fields weakening.”
“Confirming distress signal,” Rider added. “They’re unable to shut down or jettison the reactor. They’re evacuating back into the city.”
“It won’t save them if that reactor goes,” Randolph said, striding forward. “Merck, get us in there! Rider, have them release the docking clamps once the ship’s empty. I’ll tractor it away.” He took his position at gravity control.
Chekov kept working on the transporter problem, reorienting the targeting scanners to focus on the dock facility to which the ship’s crew was evacuating. They were the ones in most urgent need of rescue. Clenching his teeth, he went ahead and made Randolph’s proposed modification, hoping his old classmate was right about the odds.
“The ship is evacuated,” Rider reported, “but docking clamps are frozen!”
Jangura turned to the tactical station. “Chu, target phasers on the ship’s docking port. Blast it free.”
“Twenty seconds to core breach,” Chekov announced, even as he forwarded his final computations down to the transporter chief below. “Energizing all transporters now.”
“Phasers locked,” announced Molly Chu. “Firing!”
Chekov glanced at the main viewscreen, which Rider had focused on the transport ship and the adjoining docking module of Mizuki City. Both were engulfed in the fierce, eruptive sparkle of the vacuum flare, occasionally spitting out small jets of vaporized hull material or emitting brief, blinding flashes from inside their windows. A phaser beam sliced through the docking connector at the prow of the transport, and the blast of decompressing atmosphere, spent in a fraction of a second, pushed the ship into a slow, tumbling drift away from the station.
That tumble worried Chekov for a moment, but Randolph soon reminded him why he’d been the Academy’s top tennis star three years running. He snagged the ship in
the tractor beam with flawless aim and flung it deftly away from the dock.
Even so, it barely made it a kilometer before it blew. Anyone left in the docking module would have taken an instantly lethal dose of radiation. Jangura turned to the science station. “Transport status?”
Chekov smiled at the report from the transporter room. “Module evacuated, sir. All passengers now aboard.”
“Very good, Commander. You think we can find room for a few hundred more?”
“As many as we can fit, sir.”
He glanced over at Randolph, who gave him a thumbs-up. He returned it, but his celebration was guarded. This was one small victory in a larger crisis—one whose duration he could not predict.
Even a pro like Joel couldn’t win every game.
U.S.S. Prospero NCC-1801
Malcolm Uhura slumped on the couch in the break room of the Prospero’s sprawling sickbay. “Eighteen hours straight,” he gasped. “I haven’t had a shift like this since my residency.”
The fatalities from the flare strike on Mizuki City and the other L5 colonies had mercifully been few, no more than several dozen, thanks to the advance preparations and the quick response of the emergency fleet. It would have been a considerably larger death toll if not for the hard work of the fleet’s medical teams.
Malcolm had been struck by all the different ways the tiny, searing wormholes could injure people. Only a few had suffered internal punctures or burns from microflares manifesting inside them or passing through them. Many had suffered thermal or radiation burns from their proximity, or had their organs damaged by the overpressure shock from flares bursting in small, enclosed compartments, instantly superheating and expanding the air. Many had ruptured eardrums or retinal burns. Quite a few had been poisoned by noxious gases leaking from blown conduits or toxic compounds from vaporized structural materials. There had been a fair share of straightforward cases of thermal burns and smoke inhalation when leaking fluids had been ignited by microflares or by sparks from damaged electrical circuits. And inevitably, some had been crushed or trampled by crowds too panicked to follow instructions for an orderly evacuation.
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