by David Mack
“The plasma relays are still overheating, sir. We had to remove them for recalibration.”
Panic and desperation infused the chief engineer’s every word. “Castellano, we ship out in less than three hours.” He pulled his hand down over his hollow-cheeked face, then roughly scratched his crown of shock-cut hair. “Lock down the phaser capacitors at seventy percent of maximum and fix the plasma relays later.”
“Aye, sir. Castellano out.”
Another blinking light captured his attention. He opened another intercom channel. “Engineering to ch’Shonnas.”
“Go ahead, sir,” said Lieutenant Thanashal ch’Shonnas, the ship’s darkly reticent Andorian science officer.
“Your status indicator just went red, Shal. What happened?”
“That fix we talked about? Didn’t take. All the crystals you sent up were burned out.”
“Bloody hell.” Concentrate on my breathing, Judge told himself. Unclench fists. “Hang tight, I’ll see what I can do. Engineering out.” He flipped a switch and opened a line to the bridge. “Engineering to Commander Milonakis.”
“This is Milonakis. What’s up, Kevin?”
“Vondy, we’re in a bind. We need your magic.”
“Name it,” Milonakis said.
The chief engineer relaxed a little. Milonakis knew someone on every base and starship in the fleet, and the XO had a particular knack for trading and bartering. If anyone could find what the Bombay needed on short notice, it would be him.
“Regulator crystals for the sensor array,” Judge said. “All our spares are fried, and our main is cracked…. Mayday.”
“All right, I’m on it. Milonakis out.” The bridge channel clicked off.
For a moment, Judge thought he might have put out the last of the metaphorical fires plaguing his third consecutive shift without a break. Then he turned and found himself chin-to-snout with Lieutenant Loak, one of the more gratingly overeager junior officers on the Bombay engineering staff. Something looked different about him.
“Loak, why is your hair pink?”
“Long story, sir.”
“No doubt. What’s up?”
“Ensign Anderson informs me that you’ve postponed the repairs to the impulse control,” Loak said.
“That’s right,” Judge said. “You got a beef with that?”
“Certainly not a personal one, Commander,” Loak said. “But until we complete these repairs, we will be at less than sixty-three percent efficiency in maneuvers at half-impulse, and strenuous full-impulse maneuvers could overload the system.”
“I appreciate that, Loak, really I do. But you might notice we’re a little short of manpower down here tonight.”
“Sir, we cannot postpone this until after departure. Once the impulse system is engaged, we will be unable to make further repairs to these systems.”
“I’m aware of that,” Judge said. “I do know how engines work, you know. But we’re putting this boat back together with spit and promises right now, so we can ship out on an emergency milk run. We’ll be back in six days. Fix it then.” He shooed Loak away as he would a small animal that had overstayed its welcome. “Off you go.”
The Tellarite sulked as he stomped away. Judge looked around main engineering. At a monitoring station next to his main console, Engineer Donna Ford was cross-checking the warp power readouts against the rated norms listed on a chart in her hand. Ensign Robertson—whose first name, by coincidence, was also Donna—stood next to her, observing but not doing much else that Judge could see.
“Robertson, what are you doing?”
“Supervising,” she said, with a naïveté that Judge found endearing only when he encountered it in attractive young women.
“That’s lovely,” he said. “Why don’t you supervise recalibrating the alignment of the dilithium crystals? And you can do it yourself, to make sure it’s done properly.”
She glared at him with wounded pride, then walked toward the main warp reactor. “Yes, sir.”
He flashed a reassuring smile at the enlisted woman. “Ford, is it?”
She looked afraid, like a small woodland creature in a spotlight. “Yes, sir.”
“Ford, I’d like you to do a favor for me. Find Cargo Chief Hayes and tell him that if he doesn’t find our missing duotronic cables, I can’t guarantee that his quarters will continue to enjoy the benefits of working lights, ventilation, or plumbing.”
“Aye, sir,” the young woman said, and started toward the turbolift.
“Oh, and Ford? On your way back, stop by the mess hall and pick me up a spot of tea and some biscuits.” Remembering the subtle shades of mistranslation between her American dialect and his own, he shouted out a clarification before the turbolift doors closed. “And by biscuits, I mean cookies!”
A shrill voice came from behind him and cut like a knife. “Cookies? Is junk food all you eat?” Judge turned toward the scolding like a skipper steering his boat into a storm wave. Dr. Hua Sun Lee had snuck up on him to deliver one of her patented harangues. “No wonder you skipped your physical again. With a diet like yours, you must be an infarction waiting to happen.”
“I really don’t have time for this.”
“Five! That’s how many times you’ve made an appointment to take your physical and haven’t shown up! Five!” Physically, Dr. Lee was a tiny woman, but she had a temper and a voice that could overpower a charging bull.
Judge handed her his checklist. “It’s on my list, Doctor. Unfortunately, so are four dozen other critical items, all of which need to be resolved before we ship out in”—he checked the chronometer—“two hours and fifty-six minutes.” Despite his inner voice telling him to remain calm, he felt himself grow more hysterical by the moment. “I’ve got a mess hall whose food slots haven’t been restocked. I have a main sensor array that, for no reason I can possibly fathom, is suddenly blind to the element carbon. My engineering team seems committed to disassembling anything that still works, the cargo chief misplaced all my spare parts, and I haven’t slept in over twenty-five hours. I’ve seen naught but this compartment, the inside of that turbolift, and my own quarters for the past eleven months.” His desperation turned to bitter sarcasm. “So I apologize if I’ve inconvenienced you, Doctor, but, as you might have noticed, I have a few petty details to attend to at the moment.”
Dr. Lee frowned up at Judge and shot him the most venomous stink-eye stare he had ever seen. “All I ask is that you cancel appointments you can’t keep.” She turned, walked a few steps, then spun back. “Tomorrow at 1700 hours?”
His smile wasn’t the least bit sincere. “That would be lovely.”
“Show up this time.”
“Understood.”
Lee nodded once, affirming that the discussion was over. She walked away, through a gaggle of junior computer engineers who all were scrambling in a panic toward Judge. “Sir!” shouted Lieutenant Kashuk. “The library computer is offline!”
It was like Judge’s worst nightmare during his Academy days. “What? How?”
“We were running a standard optimization cycle after we installed the database upgrade, and—”
“Upgrade? I didn’t order any bloody upgrade.”
Kashuk and the others traded embarrassed looks. “We downloaded it from Vanguard.”
A sick churning feeling spun through Judge’s gut. “Tell me you didn’t install the Sigma Seven utility with it.”
More downcast eyes told him the worst was true: They had tried to load software that hadn’t yet been backward-engineered for the Bombay’s Mark II computer core. “Let me guess,” he said. “It’s locked in diagnostic mode and isn’t accepting input.” Dismayed nods all around. “Unbelievable! Who do you people work for? I thought we were on the same side. Show of hands: How many of you are paid saboteurs?”
“We’re sorry, sir,” Kashuk said. “We should have read—”
“Forget it,” Judge said, slipping into problem-solving mode. “Pull the plug on the main core, inter
rupt main power and cut off its backup battery, then do a full restart. Go!”
The engineers scurried away to try and repair their mistake before the next one made its entrance. Best-case scenario, Judge reasoned, they might have the computer back up in about two hours…which will leave me less than an hour to test the sensors and about a dozen other things. It took all his willpower and training to stop himself from hyperventilating.
“Mr. Judge,” a woman said from behind him.
Well past the point of civility, he snapped, “What?”
Then he turned to see the placid face of Captain Gannon.
“Something wrong, Mr. Judge?”
He brightened his face with a smile whose sincerity was undermined by the anxiety that pinned his eyebrows up around his hairline. “Wrong? What could be wrong?”
“Everything’s all right, then?”
“Couldn’t be righter.” She’s not buying it.
“Carry on, then.” She smiled and continued on her way aft.
“Thank you, Captain.” He kept the smile plastered on his face until he was sure that she was not coming back. Sagging with exhaustion and despair against his console, he muttered to himself, “We’re so right roundly pooched, it’s not even funny.”
Tim Pennington lurked in the shadows across from the gangway to the Enterprise.
He rechecked his notes while he waited. So far, he’d convinced five lower-decks personnel from the ship to talk with him, either off the record or on the condition of anonymity, about the ship’s recent jaunt to the energy barrier at the edge of the galaxy. The mission had failed and resulted in nine deaths. But the true horror, his sources had said, was what transpired later, after the ship began its long journey home.
The first time he heard the story of Gary Mitchell’s transformation into a telepathic, telekinetic, homicidal übermensch, he had dismissed it as the tall tale of a crewman who had spent too many months on duty without R&R. But the next witness confirmed the report, as did the other three. Aside from expected variances on picayune details, their stories lined up with frightening specificity. If even half what they had told him was the truth, this had the makings of an incredible scoop.
He had multiple firsthand sources; he had been to the station’s operations office and received copies of the death certificates for Commander Gary Mitchell and Dr. Elizabeth Dehner; and he had filed a freedom-of-information petition with the station’s chief JAG officer, Captain Rana Desai, for copies of Captain Kirk’s official after-action reports regarding the deaths of Mitchell and Dehner. Rumor had it that Kirk had listed them as casualties of the failed attempt to breach the energy barrier, when in fact they had been killed under mysterious circumstances on Delta Vega.
From somewhere down the corridor, a turbolift door gasped open. Footfalls echoed brightly and grew louder, sharper, closer. Pennington peeked around the corner. At the first sight of a gold-colored sleeve adorned by two-and-a-half rings of braid, he emerged from hiding. Quickly interposing himself between Kirk and the gangway entrance, he held up his Federation News Service credentials. “Captain, a moment of your time?”
“No,” Kirk said. He tried to detour around Pennington, who sidestepped and blocked him again.
“How did Gary Mitchell die, Captain?”
Kirk’s expression hardened, and his posture became ramrod-stiff. Anger burned brightly in his eyes. Through a jaw tight with suppressed fury, he said, “In the line of duty.”
“Where did Mitchell die, Captain?”
“Are you implying something?”
“It’s a simple question.”
“And you want a simple answer,” Kirk said. Pennington nodded. Kirk added, “My answer is in my report. Excuse me.” The captain shouldered past Pennington and stepped onto the gangway.
“I’ve already requested copies of your report,” Pennington said. “I’ll be interested to see if they match up to the eyewitness accounts I’ve already compiled.”
Kirk stopped. For a moment, Pennington expected the young commanding officer to turn back and prolong the conversation. Instead, without turning around, Kirk resumed walking.
Maybe the witness statements were wrong; perhaps they were based on hearsay. It was possible that Kirk’s official report would contain no discrepancies at all. But if it did, his dismissive response was the same as saying “No comment.” In the court of public opinion, that would be seen as suspect at best.
Clicking off his handheld recorder, Pennington decided to head upstairs and ask Captain Desai to expedite his petition for Kirk’s report. If his hunch panned out, tomorrow’s FNS feed would be led by a report with his byline on it.
Montgomery Scott had just finished a very long double shift in engineering. The ship had been in dire need of new power cells for weeks; its warp coils had been overdue for recalibration. Multiple critical systems throughout the ship had required swap-outs, or upgrades, or tune-ups. To Scott’s elated satisfaction, Vanguard’s spacedock maintenance team had met all those needs in quick order; he hadn’t seen a starbase so large and well equipped since leaving the core systems of the Federation. The Enterprise still had more work ahead of it—most notably, a complete refit of its bridge—but those changes would have to wait until the ship returned home to Earth.
Taking advantage of a rare free moment in his schedule, he now was seeking out an item of personal desiderata that wasn’t likely to be available through official channels. A carefully worded question to his old chum Vondas Milonakis, along with a case of the Enterprise’s spare duotronic cables, had led Scott to the station’s lower docking wheel, where an Orion merchantman known as the Omari-Ekon was berthed.
At the end of a very long, conveyor-like gangway, he saw the closed airlock hatch to the Omari-Ekon flanked by a pair of hulking, green-skinned sentinels. Ever the quintessential Scotsman, he walked with unflagging confidence directly toward them.
From either side, each guard grabbed one of his arms, stopping him in midstep and lifting him off the floor. The one with the long, drooping mustache asked in a low hard voice, “Can we help you?”
“Aye, lad. I have a business proposition for your boss.”
The guard seemed unconvinced. “Do you even know who my boss is?” Scott winced at the sour stench of the man’s breath.
“I’m guessing he’s a man who can get things done.”
“My employer doesn’t like unannounced guests.”
“Announce me, then.” Scott’s biceps were starting to hurt from the two guards’ relentless grips.
“Are you carrying any weapons or communications devices?”
“I’m just here as a customer, lad.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
Scott was growing annoyed. “No, I’m not armed, and I don’t have a communicator.”
The guards let him down. Mustache, as Scott had decided to refer to the thug in charge, pointed at the wall. “Lean forward and put your hands there.”
“Is this really necessary?”
Icy stares and folded arms made clear that it was. He did as he was told. Mustache stood back and watched while the other guard frisked Scott. Several seconds later, having explored areas in which Scott was fairly certain no human could possibly have concealed anything larger than an ingrown hair, they allowed him to turn around. “Who shall we say is here?”
With all the patience and good cheer he could muster, he said, “My friends call me Scotty.”
“Rank, full name, and current assignment.”
So much for keeping things cordial, Scott concluded, his chipper grin turning to a frown. “Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott, chief engineer, Starship Enterprise.”
“Hang on.” Mustache reached under his jacket and removed a small communicator-type device. He keyed in a sequence that Scott couldn’t see, and spoke quickly in a low whisper. All the while, he and his compatriot kept a close watch on Scott, who rocked on his heels, whistled softly, rolled his eyes from one ceiling pipe fixture to another, and
otherwise made a deliberate nuisance of himself, simply because he could.
Mustache flipped his communicator closed and put it away. The hatch behind him opened with a grinding scrape. “Mr. Ganz will see you now.”
“Thank ye, lad,” Scott said. He walked inside, and the hatch closed quietly behind him. For a moment, he thought he was alone in the darkened but immaculate corridor of the Orion ship.
Then a hand slapped down on his shoulder. He turned to face a slim man in an exquisitely tailored ash-gray suit and polished, matching shoes. The man’s skin was an unnerving shade of pure coal black, a hue unlike any found in humans; it was glossy, like oil, and it reflected light so well that Scott could almost see his reflection in the man’s high, broad forehead. His head was shaved, and a tightly twisted braid of pale violet hair jutted from his narrow chin. “Commander Scott,” he said, flashing a smile composed of gleaming black teeth. His flat-black, almond-shaped eyes betrayed no hint of his thoughts. “I’m Zett Nilric. Welcome.” Polite as this man was, Scott’s intuition warned him that his host was undoubtedly a killer.
“Mr. Nilric, I was—”
“Mr. Zett.”
“Sorry,” Scott said. “No offense meant.”
“None taken,” Zett said. “Forgive my interruption. Please continue.”
“The bruiser outside said I was to see a Mr. Ganz.”
“Yes. He’s on the recreation deck. Please follow me.”
Zett led Scott a dozen meters or so down the corridor, to a small, exceptionally quiet turbolift. They rode together in silence for several seconds. When the turbolift doors hissed open, a strong, sweet-cherry aroma wafted in from the dim space beyond. No sooner had Scott followed Zett out of the turbolift than he was met by an impenetrable wall of sound, heavy with driving bass and raging with a drone of synthetic chords.
Gauzy, translucent curtains of multicolored fabric were draped in long overlapping swoops, creating a clearly marked path into the heart of this compartment. From the reverberating acoustics and the multiple layers of music, Scott deduced that the space was enormous. Emerging from the maze of curtains, he saw that he was right. Intense shafts of roaming light sliced through the low, smoky haze of narcotic smoke that polluted the air. As his eyes adjusted to the subdued illumination, he observed that the sprawling split-level space occupied most of two upper decks aboard the Orion vessel. Movement from above caught his eye. Looking up, he saw that several sections of the deck overhead had been removed, adding to the impression of an airy, luxuriously open environment.
