Star Trek: Discovery: Fear Itself

by James Swallow

  “Where is my daughter’s vessel?” Tauh’s patience was thinning, but both the captain and the lieutenant caught the reveal.

  Does he mean Nathal? Burnham considered the possibility. Now that she thought about it, there was some familial similarity between the admiral and the acerbic commander of the star-freighter.

  “We don’t know for certain,” began Georgiou. “Our first inkling that something was amiss came when my ship detected a subspace pulse effect at long range . . .” The captain provided a quick but thorough précis of the events that had transpired over the last few days; the nadion pulse, the rescue operation, the suspected hijacking of the transport, the surprise attack on the Shenzhou and resulting damage to its warp drives. She made no mention of Saru’s behavior, or her own terse conversation with Nathal.

  Like father, like daughter, thought Burnham, recalling the commander’s manner. She could see where Nathal had learned her brisk and uncompromising methods.

  Once or twice during her explanation, Tauh’s subordinate Craea had reacted to Georgiou’s statements and tried to interrupt, but the admiral silenced him with a hard jerk of the wrist each time. Still, by the time the captain was done, Tauh’s expression has turned thunderous.

  “This would not have happened if you had not interfered,” he said, cold fury seething beneath the words. “What gives you the right?”

  “Lives were in danger.” Burnham said it without thinking, and then it was too late to take it back. “We had to act.”

  Tauh turned his full attention on the lieutenant for the first time. “Your officer speaks out of turn,” he said.

  “She does,” Georgiou admitted. “I encourage it.”

  “And now this situation is spiraling out of control,” he went on. “Your ill-considered good intentions have escalated a problem that was ours to deal with! Do you understand that, Captain?”

  Georgiou’s tone cooled. “Your daughter, her crew, and the Gorlan refugees aboard that vessel are alive because of Starfleet intentions, sir. I won’t apologize for that.”

  Tauh advanced a step toward them, glaring at Georgiou. “Of course not. The Federation’s arrogance is legendary. You think you can do no wrong, and it galls me that some foolish Betans believe we are better off under your banner than on our own.” He made a negative noise in the back of his throat, shooting a brief, withering look at his own officer. “You come here, to our space, with little understanding of the delicate balance of things. And you interfere.”

  A brittle note entered the admiral’s voice, and Burnham caught it. She got the sense that there was more to this than just the Peliar’s wounded pride and a father’s concern for his child. Step back, she told herself. Consider the whole. Think of what you know of these people and ask yourself . . . what is he really afraid of?

  “You do not live in this place,” Tauh was saying. “You and the other outworlders, you pass through. And Peliar Zel must deal with what comes in your wake.”

  She had it then, the element that she had been missing. Burnham gave her captain a sideways look and Georgiou inclined her head, granting permission.

  “Admiral, if I may ask . . . When was the last time the Peliar Cohort encountered a Tholian ship in this area?”

  It was as if the temperature in the compartment had instantly dropped ten degrees. Burnham saw Tauh stiffen at the mention of the alien threat, and his mask of belligerence briefly slipped. Beneath it, she glimpsed someone on edge, fearful of what unknown dangers the Tholian Assembly represented.

  “We stay out of their way,” he said, at length. “Only a fool would draw their attention.”

  “And you are afraid that the presence of a Starfleet vessel will do that.” She made it a statement, not a question.

  “I was not granted command of a ship like this because I blunder into battles that cannot be won,” Tauh retorted, covering his lapse. “I understand the realities of the situation. Unlike you.”

  “If that is so,” said Georgiou, “then you know that the Tholians are always watching. And whatever they choose to do, neither Peliar Zel nor the Federation will get a say in it.”

  “My standing orders, Captain, are to ensure we give them no pretext, and to maintain the security of my people.” He aimed a thick, gloved finger at her. “Your presence risks both of those things.” Tauh took a breath. “You said you were following the freighter. Where was it heading?”

  “Their course was taking them toward an uncharted system near Dimorus.” Georgiou folded her arms across her chest. “We tracked the ship’s ion trail, but without warp drive we couldn’t catch up to them.”

  Tauh exchanged glances with Craea. “No matter how we try to solve it, the Gorlan problem continues to waylay us. This time they have gone too far.” He turned away. “Go back to your ship, Captain, and return to your Federation.”

  “We are in nonaligned space, sir,” replied the Shenzhou’s commander. “Peliar Zel does not have sole right of authority here.”

  He ignored her, speaking directly to his men. “Adjutant! Recall the drones and ready the ship. There can be only one place they are heading. . . . Set a course for the sanctuary.”

  “As you order, Admiral,” said Craea, and he tapped a button on a wrist-mounted control device.

  “Let us come with you!” Burnham blurted out the words, and Tauh turned on her.

  “What do you ask of me now?”

  “Take us with you,” she repeated. “There are Starfleet officers on your missing ship, it’s in our interests to help you find it and deal with this crisis.”

  “I do intend to deal with it,” Tauh said firmly.

  “If not that, then help us complete the repairs on our warp drive,” said Georgiou, sensing an opportunity. “The Shenzhou will join you. Our two ships together can bring this matter to a close, peacefully.”

  “Again, you are arrogant enough to assume we are of the same mind. I do not seek a peaceful resolution.” He paused, letting that sink in, then gave his subordinates another order. “Leave a pair of drone units behind. They will escort the Shenzhou to the Federation border. By force, if necessary.”

  “What about our officers on the freighter?” demanded Burnham.

  “We will repatriate whatever we recover,” Tauh said distantly. He jutted his chin toward the Peliar technician at the transporter controls. “Send them back.”

  “No!” As the word formed, Burnham felt the humming in her ears, and emerald light washed over her.

  • • •

  The metallic mesh panels enclosing the elevator platform drew back, and Britch Weeton was shoved unceremoniously onto the command deck of the Peliar star-freighter.

  He tried to look in every direction at once. This was his first ever hostage situation, and he wasn’t really sure of how things were supposed to play out. Starfleet’s broad guidelines on this kind of thing took the position that negotiating was the first and best way to defuse a dangerous situation; anything that prevented loss of life was to be considered, and a violent response was warranted only under the most serious of conditions.

  But it was one thing for an instructor in Weeton’s Academy class on Comparative Ethics to talk about those things in a calm and rational manner, and quite another to be in the thick of it, with angry four-armed aliens pointing guns in your face and snarling at you in a language your UT can barely process.

  When they pulled him out of the mess hall, his first thought was that they were going to make an example of him. Lieutenant Saru had been gone for hours, and just before the Gorlans had come for Weeton, they’d taken away a bunch of the Peliars as well.

  Are they flushing people out the airlock one at a time? He’d heard scuttlebutt about Nausicaan pirates doing that to their victims, and his skin crawled with the grim possibility. But they went right past the docking ring and headed up to the command level.

  Weeton and the others had felt the change when the big ship had dropped out of warp, and for a while he had dared to hope that meant this or
deal was nearing its end. For all Nurse Zoxom’s hard work, Lieutenant Commander Johar was still unconscious, and Weeton feared that the chief engineer would never awaken if they couldn’t get him to a proper medical facility. Watching Johar’s face turn the color of tilled earth and his breath come in gasps made Weeton’s hands clench. He hated not being able to do something to help.

  Now he was here, and there were lights and screaming sirens, and he had no idea what the hell was going on.

  “Ensign!” He spun toward the sound of the voice and there was Saru, gesticulating wildly with those big, long Kelpien arms of his, frantically beckoning him toward one of the consoles. “Get over here!”

  “Sir?” As he approached, he saw a Gorlan female working another panel, and the Peliar engineer Riden at a control rig. Riden very clearly didn’t want to be doing whatever it was he was doing.

  “This ship is counting down to an ejection sequence that will detach all of the cargo pods,” snapped Saru, waving his hand at a screen that showed a graphic of the transport vessel and the container modules attached to its spinal hull frame. “We have to stop it, now!”

  “Drop sequence will start at the stern.” Standing close by, the Peliar second officer Hekan studied the same screen. “It’s all automated. Once started, it can’t be stopped.”

  “For the Creator’s sake, pray you are mistaken,” growled the Gorlan female, and she looked to Saru. “We are moving everyone forward, but it may not be enough . . .”

  “I can understand what the Gorlans are saying,” said Weeton, his mind racing as he tried to take everything in. “I mean, better than before. How is that?”

  “Not relevant!” Saru said sharply. “You’re here because I told them to bring you! Get on that console and block the activation sequences on the release mechanisms.”

  “Okay . . .” Weeton went to the panel and immediately saw the problem. The automated controls had multiple redundancies that meant no single operator could override them alone. To force the module ejection sequence into a null mode needed at least four pairs of hands. Lucky we have a Gorlan here, he thought.

  Weeton brought up the main control and made an attempt to put the command system into a feedback loop, but it bifurcated the order string to the other consoles and worked around him. “Oh, this is a tricky one . . .”

  “Try to put the release gears into a maintenance mode,” said the Gorlan woman. “It won’t stop the drop sequence, but it will delay it . . .”

  “Why is this happening . . . ?” Weeton asked the question out loud, but then he pushed it aside. Those pods are full of people. We have to keep them alive. That was all that was important for now. The young engineer put out of his mind all thought of the armed, angry Gorlans crowding around him. He didn’t dwell on whose lives he was being asked to save. He set to the task, just as he had been trained to.

  “I can’t stop it!” cried the Gorlan. “Oh, Creator, grant mercy . . .”

  Weeton looked up as the rearmost cargo module on the display changed to a blinking blue white. On an inset screen, he saw huge hatches dropping closed to seal the container off from the rest of the vessel. Tiny figures scrambled to get through to the far side before the gap closed. Dozens of terrified Gorlans clawed at the deck as they tried desperately to escape.

  Then the timbre of the warning siren changed and the screen went blank. Weeton heard a distant thudding of magnetic bolts and couldn’t stop himself from stealing a glance out of the main viewport. A dark, slab-sided shape was drifting away from the star-freighter’s stern, trailing crystals of frozen atmosphere. “Did . . . did they all get out in time?”

  “Unclear,” said Saru grimly.

  On Weeton’s panel, he saw the same process repeating itself in the next module as the mechanisms of a second container prepared to detach. He made a decision and switched off the visual feed showing the chaos and panic unfolding at the hatches. I can’t look. Can’t lose myself in that. What would Johar say? Do the work, Britch, he told himself, repeating it like a mantra. Do the work.

  He looked back at the failed loop program and frowned. “Okay, wait, I think I see what I did wrong.” Weeton looked to Saru. “Can we both try this together? Two inputs at the same time might slow the function cycle . . .” He glanced at Riden and the Gorlan woman. “At the same time, if you try the maintenance-mode thing?”

  “That might work.” Saru saw the way Weeton was thinking. “Kijoh, can you do it?”

  “I will try,” said the Gorlan woman, and she gave Riden a pointed look.

  The Peliar engineer glanced at Hekan, seeking her permission. She gave it, and he made an affirmative gesture.

  “Do it now,” Saru ordered, and Weeton committed the program once again. It was awkward working on the unfamiliar Peliar console, with their splayed-out keypad setup and curved screens, but he got around it.

  “Done!” he shouted, his heart pounding in his chest.

  “Done,” echoed Saru.

  Riden and Kijoh both did their part, and there was a moment where no one moved or spoke. Then a new and more strident alarm began to bray, loud enough that it gave Weeton a start.

  “What? No! Did we screw it up?” He looked back through the viewport, afraid that he would see more modules coming adrift, more debris clouding the space around the big ship.

  But then Kijoh gave him a double slap on the back that almost knocked him over. “The alarm is the shutdown warning! We stopped it!”

  “For now,” muttered Riden, stepping back from his console. He gave Hekan a poisonous glare and let himself be led back to where his commander was watching from across the compartment.

  “I’m missing something,” said Weeton. “Little help, Lieutenant?”

  “We have just saved thousands of lives,” Saru told him. The Kelpien looked washed out and fatigued. “That is all that matters.”

  That wasn’t in doubt, but there was more going on here, and the ensign wasn’t about to be brushed off. “So we’re working with them now?” He nodded toward the Gorlan hijackers.

  “It’s . . . complicated,” sighed the lieutenant.

  “Yeah, no kidding,” Weeton replied.

  “You failed again,” shouted a hard, angry voice. The Gorlan with the white hair strode forward and menaced the captive Peliars. “You have underestimated us, denigrated us from the start . . . but we endured!”

  “He looks really pissed off,” the ensign said quietly.

  “You have no idea,” Saru offered.

  “No more lies!” hissed the Gorlan leader. “Peliar Zel will be called to account!” The red-band reached for the disruptor holstered on his crossbelt, and Saru saw it too.

  “Madoh! Stop . . . !” The Kelpien rose up and waved his hands, and he looked to Weeton like a scarecrow trying to hold back a thunderstorm. “What good does it do to take out your frustration on them?”

  “Perhaps you are a better target?” The alien called Madoh cast a threatening glare in Saru and Weeton’s direction.

  “Those cargo modules down on the planet’s surface.” Saru gestured at the gloomy ball of cinders they were orbiting, and Weeton started to piece things together. Suddenly, the automated drop sequence made sense. This wasn’t the first time this had happened. “Your people are alive, surviving,” the lieutenant was saying. “We can find a way to communicate with them, and those modules are still intact and whole. It might even be possible to bring them back up into orbit . . .”

  “Evacuate them?” Kijoh came closer, running a single hand over her sweating brow. “Yes. It might work . . . if I can remote-program the thrusters on the modules, tie in to the freighter’s tractor beam arrays . . .”

  “You see?” Saru was animated by the possibility. “Aggression wins you nothing.” The lieutenant looked toward the ensign for support, but all Weeton could do was give him a wooden nod.

  “Will you do anything to prevent bloodshed?” Madoh said coldly, and Saru didn’t seem to pick up on the menacing subtext in his words.

&nb
sp; “The Shenzhou will come looking for its people. For us,” Saru went on. “And when they do, I will speak for you. I will put your case to my captain and the Federation, there will be an appeal—”

  Rough, harsh laughter rolled around the command deck and the lieutenant fell silent. Weeton had been in rooms with hard-faced, hate-filled people like this before, in darker times of his life, and despite the fact he was on the bridge of an alien starship light-years from home, it felt horribly familiar. “I don’t think he’s interested in that, sir,” he said.

  “I am tired of promises,” Madoh said slowly, weighing every word. “I have heard too many of them. They are all made of dust.” He crossed the chamber toward the Starfleet officers. “Our patience is at an end.” The Gorlan leaned in, and he fixed Saru with a pitiless gaze. “Yes, your ship will come for you.”

  What he said next made Weeton’s blood run cold.

  “I am counting on it.”

  • • •

  “The carrier passed beyond the edge of our sensor range three minutes ago,” said ch’Theloh as he entered Captain Georgiou’s ready room. “The drones they left behind are crowding us.” He made a dismissive gesture toward the window on the aft bulkhead.

  Burnham leaned forward and looked out through the portal. She could see one of the automated escort craft cruising uncomfortably close to the Shenzhou, off the ship’s stern. There was a weapons turret protruding from the prow of the vessel, and the muzzles of the high-energy phase cannons mounted there were tracking them.

  “Admiral Tauh left us with an ultimatum,” added the first officer. “If we don’t start moving back toward the border within the hour, the escorts will open fire on us. We try to raise shields, they open fire. We power up our weapons . . .”

  “I get the picture. Can we neutralize them?” Georgiou sat on the edge of her desk as she shrugged out of the tactical vest over her duty uniform.

  The Andorian’s expression soured. “Yes, but not without taking some hits ourselves. Phasers are still not up to optimal status.” He paused. “Our engineering team is good, but they’re not . . .”