by David Mack
“Such as?”
“Extreme warp velocities,” Helkara said as they detoured around a large crevasse where two adjacent hull plates had buckled violently inward. “Wormholes. Quantum slipstream vortices. Iconian gateways. Time travel. Oh, and the Q.”
She sighed. “Doesn’t leave us much to go on.”
“No, it doesn’t,” he said. “But I love a challenge.”
Dax could tell that he was struggling not to outpace her. His legs were longer than hers, and he tended to walk briskly. She quickened her step. “Keep at it, Gruhn,” she said as they reached the top of the saucer. “Something moved this ship clear across the galaxy. I need to know what it was, and I need to know soon.”
“Understood, Captain.” Helkara continued aft, toward a gaggle of engineers who were assembling a bulky assortment of machinery that would conduct a more thorough analysis of the Columbia’s bizarrely distressed subatomic structures.
Memories drifted through Ezri’s thoughts like sand devils over the dunes. Jadzia had detailed the profound oddities that the Defiant’s sensors had found in the Columbia’s hull, and she had informed Starfleet of her theory that the readings might be a clue to a new kind of subspatial phenomenon. Admiral Howe at Starfleet Research and Development had assured her that her report would be investigated, but when the Dominion War erupted less than two months later, her call for the salvage of the Columbia had been sidelined—relegated to a virtual dustbin of defunct projects at Starfleet Command.
And it stayed there, forgotten for almost eight years, until Ezri Dax gave Starfleet a reason to remember it. The salvage of the Columbia had just become a priority for the same reason that it had been scuttled: there was a war on. Seven years ago the enemy had been the Dominion. This time it was the Borg.
Five weeks earlier the attacks had begun, bypassing all of the Federation’s elaborate perimeter defenses and early warning networks. Without any sign of transwarp activity, wormholes, or gateways, Borg cubes had appeared in the heart of Federation space and launched surprise attacks on several worlds. The Aventine had found itself in its first-ever battle, defending the Acamar system from eradication by the Borg. When the fighting was over, more than a third of the ship’s crew—including its captain and first officer—had perished, leaving second officer Lieutenant Commander Ezri Dax in command.
One week and three Borg attacks later, Starfleet made Ezri captain of the Aventine. By then she’d remembered Jadzia’s hypothesis about the Columbia, and she reminded Starfleet of her seven-year-old report that a Warp 5 ship had, in the roughly ten years after it had disappeared, somehow journeyed more than seventy-five thousand light-years—a distance that it would have taken the Columbia more than three hundred fifty years to traverse under its own power.
Ezri had assured Starfleet Command that solving the mystery of how the Columbia had crossed the galaxy without using any of the known propulsion methods could shed some light on how the Borg had begun doing the same thing. It had been a bit of an exaggeration on her part. She couldn’t promise that her crew would be able to make a conclusive determination of how the Columbia had found its way to this remote, desolate resting place, or that there would be any link whatsoever to the latest series of Borg incursions of Federation space. It had apparently taken the Columbia years to get here, while the Borg seemed to be making nearly instantaneous transits from their home territory in the Delta Quadrant. The connection was tenuous at best.
All Dax had was a hunch, and she was following it. If she was right, it would be a brilliant beginning for her first command. If she was wrong, this would probably be her last command.
Her moment of introspection was broken by a soft vibration and a melodious double tone from her combadge. “Aventine to Captain Dax,” said her first officer, Commander Sam Bowers.
“Go ahead, Sam,” she said.
He sounded tired. “We just got another priority message from Starfleet Command,” he said. “I think you might want to take this one. It’s Admiral Nechayev, and she wants a reply.”
And the axe falls, Dax brooded. “All right, Sam, beam me up. I’ll take it in my ready room.”
“Aye, sir. Stand by for transport.”
Dax turned back to face the bow of the Columbia and suppressed the dread she felt at hearing of Nechayev’s message. It could be anything: a tactical briefing, new information from Starfleet Research and Development about the Columbia, updated specifications for the Aventine’s experimental slipstream drive … but Dax knew better than to expect good news.
As she felt herself enfolded by the transporter beam, she feared that once again she would have to abandon the Columbia before making its secrets her own.
* * *
Commander Sam Bowers hadn’t been aboard the Aventine long enough to know the names of more than a handful of its more than seven hundred fifty personnel, so he was grateful that Ezri had recruited a number of its senior officers from among her former crewmates on Deep Space 9. He had already accepted Dax’s invitation to serve as her first officer when he’d learned that Dr. Simon Tarses would be coming aboard with him, as the ship’s new chief medical officer, and that Lieutenant Mikaela Leishman would be transferring from Defiant to become the Aventine’s new chief engineer.
He tried not to dwell on the fact that their predecessors had all recently been killed in fierce battles with the Borg. Better to focus, he decided, on the remarkable opportunity this transfer represented.
The Aventine was one of seven new, experimental Vesta-class starships. It had been designed as a multimission explorer, and its state-of-the-art weaponry made it one of the few ships in the fleet able to mount even a moderate defense against the Borg. Its sister ships were defending the Federation’s core systems—Sol, Vulcan, Andor, and Tellar—while the Aventine made its jaunt through the Bajoran wormhole to this uninhabited world in the Gamma Quadrant, for what Bowers couldn’t help but think of as a desperate long shot of a mission.
He turned a corner, expecting to find a turbolift, only to arrive at a dead end. It’s not just the crew you don’t know, he chided himself as he turned back and continued looking for the nearest turbolift junction. Three weeks aboard and you’re still getting turned around on the lower decks. Snap out of it, man.
The sound of muted conversation led Bowers farther down the corridor. A pair of junior officers, a brown-bearded male Tellarite and an auburn-haired human woman, chatted in somber tones in front of a turbolift portal. The Tellarite glanced at Bowers and stopped talking. His companion peeked past him, saw the reason for his silence, and followed suit. Bowers halted behind the duo, who tried to appear casual and relaxed while also avoiding all eye contact with him.
Bowers didn’t take it personally. He had seen this kind of behavior before, during the Dominion War. These two officers had served on the Aventine during its battle at Acamar five weeks earlier; more than two hundred and fifty of their shipmates had died in that brief engagement. Now, even though Bowers was the new first officer and a seasoned veteran with nearly twenty-five years of experience in Starfleet, in their eyes he was, before all else, merely one of “the replacements.”
Respect has to be earned, he reminded himself. Just be patient. He caught a fleeting sidelong glance by the Tellarite. “Good morning,” Bowers said, trying not to sound too chipper.
The Tellarite ensign was dour. “It’s afternoon, sir.”
Well, it’s a start, Bowers told himself. Then the turbolift door opened, and he followed the two junior officers inside. The woman called for a numbered deck in the engineering section, and then Bowers said simply, “Bridge.” He felt a bit of guilt for inconveniencing them; he and the two engineers were headed in essentially opposite directions, but because of his rank, billet, and destination, the turbolift hurtled directly to the bridge, with the two younger officers along for the ride.
He glanced back at the young woman with a look of sheepish contrition. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay, sir, it happens,” she rep
lied. The same thing had happened to Bowers countless times when he had been a junior officer. It was just one of many petty irritations that everyone had to learn to cope with while living on a starship.
The doors parted with a soft hiss, and Bowers stepped onto the bridge of the Aventine, his demeanor one of pure confidence and authority. The beta-shift bridge officers were at their posts. Soft, semimusical feedback tones from their consoles punctuated the low thrumming of the engines through the deck.
Lieutenant Lonnoc Kedair, the ship’s chief of security, occupied the center seat at the aft quarter of the bridge. The statuesque Takaran woman stood and relinquished the chair as Bowers approached from her left. “Sir.”
He nodded. “I’m ready to relieve you, Lieutenant.” A more formal approach to bridge protocol had been one of Bowers’s conditions for accepting the job, and Captain Dax had agreed.
“I’m ready to be relieved, sir,” Kedair replied, following the old-fashioned protocol for a changing of the watch. She picked up a padd from the arm of the command seat and handed the slim device to Bowers. “Salvage operations for the Columbia are proceeding on schedule,” she continued. “No contacts in sensor range and all systems nominal, though there have been some reports from the planet’s surface that I want to check out.”
Bowers looked up from the padd. “What kind of reports?”
A wince creased her scaly face. “The kind that make me think our teams are more fatigued than they’re letting on.”
He tabbed through a few screens of data on the padd to find the communication logs from the away teams on the planet. “What gives you that impression?”
“A pair of incident reports, filed eleven hours apart, each by a different engineer.” She seemed embarrassed to continue. “They claim the wreck of the Columbia is haunted, sir.”
“Maybe it is,” Bowers said with a straight face. “Lord knows I’ve seen stranger things than that.”
Kedair’s face turned a darker shade of green. “I don’t plan to indulge the crew’s belief in the supernatural. I just want to make certain none of our engineers have become delusional.”
“Fair enough,” Bowers said. He glanced backward over his shoulder. “Is the captain in her ready room?”
“Aye, sir,” Kedair said. “She’s been on the comm with Admiral Nechayev for the better part of the last half hour.”
That doesn’t bode well, Bowers realized. “Very good,” he said to Kedair. “Lieutenant, I relieve you.”
“I stand relieved,” Kedair said. “Permission to go ashore, sir?”
“Granted. But keep it brief, we might need you back on the watch for gamma shift.”
She nodded. “Understood, sir.” Then she turned and moved in quick, lanky strides to the turbolift.
No sooner had Bowers settled into the center seat than a double chirrup from the overhead speaker preceded Captain Dax’s voice: “Dax to Commander Bowers. Please report to my ready room.” The channel clicked off. Bowers stood and straightened his tunic before he turned to the beta-shift tactical officer, a Deltan woman who had caught his eye every day since he had come aboard. “Lieutenant Kandel,” he said in a dry, professional tone, “you have the conn.”
“Aye, sir,” Kandel replied. She nodded to a junior officer at the auxiliary tactical station. The young man moved to take over Kandel’s post as she crossed the bridge to occupy the center seat. It all transpired with smooth, quiet efficiency.
Like clockwork, Bowers mused with satisfaction.
He walked toward Dax’s ready room. The portal slid open as he neared, and it closed behind him after he’d entered. Captain Dax stood behind her desk and gazed through a panoramic window of transparent aluminum at the dusky sphere of the planet below.
Though he’d known Dax for years, Bowers still marveled at how young she looked. Ezri was more than a dozen years his junior, and he had to remind himself sometimes that the Dax symbiont living inside her—whose consciousness was united with hers—gave her the resources of several lifetimes, the benefit of hundreds of years of experience.
Since they were alone, Bowers dropped the air of formality that he maintained in front of the crew. “What’s goin’ on? Is Starfleet pulling the plug on us?”
“They might as well be,” Dax said. She sighed and turned to face him. She sounded annoyed. “We have twenty-four hours to finish our salvage and head back to the wormhole. Admiral Jellico wants us to be part of the fleet defending Trill.”
“Why the change of plans?”
Dax entered commands into her desktop’s virtual interface with a few gentle taps. A holographic projection appeared above the desk. According to the identification tags along its bottom, it was a visual sensor log from the Starfleet vessel U.S.S. Amargosa. There wasn’t much to see—just a brief, colorful volley of weapons fire with a Borg cube followed by a flash of light, a flurry of gray static, and then nothing.
“The Amargosa is one of five ships lost in the last sixteen hours,” Dax said. “All in the Onias Sector, and all to the Borg. No one knows if the same Borg cube destroyed all five ships.”
“If it was the work of one cube, it might be another scout,” Bowers said. “Another test of our defenses.”
“And if it wasn’t,” Ezri said, “then the invasion just started—and we’re out here, playing in the dirt.” She shook her head in frustration and sat down at her desk. “Either way, we have to break orbit by tomorrow, so we can forget about raising the Columbia. We need a new mission profile.”
Bowers crossed his arms and ruminated aloud, “Our main objective is to figure out how the Columbia got here, and our best chance of doing that is to analyze its computer core. We could beam it up, but then we’d have to re-create its command interfaces here, and that could take days, since it wasn’t what we’d planned on. But if Leishman and Helkara’s adapters work, we can leave it in situ and download its memory banks by morning.”
“And then we can parse the data on our way back,” Dax said, finishing his thought. “Not my first choice, but it’ll have to do.” She looked up at him. “Let’s get on it. Before we leave this planet, I want to know what happened to that ship.”
* * *
In the darkness, there was a hunger.
The need was a silent pain in the blank haze of awareness—a yearning for heat, for life, for solidity.
Mind and presence, the very essence of itself lay trapped in stone, its freedom a dream surrendered and forgotten along with its name and memory.
It was nothing but the unslaked thirst of that moment, unburdened by identity or the obligations of a past. All it knew were paths of least resistance, the push and pull of primal forces, and the icy void at its own core—the all-consuming maw.
For so long there had been nothing but the cold of empty spaces, the weak sustenance of photons. A momentary surge of energy had roused it from a deathly repose and then slipped away, untasted. Now, in a dreamlike blink, it had returned.
At long last it was time.
After aeons of being denied, the hunger would be fed.
2156
2
“Sensor contacts, bearing one-eight-one, mark seven!”
Captain Erika Hernandez snapped her attention from the line of ships on the main viewer to her alarmed senior tactical officer, Lieutenant Kiona Thayer. “Polarize the hull plating,” Hernandez ordered. She was taking no chances. The Columbia was a long way from home, escorting a mining convoy home from the Onias Sector, which was the site of the hotly contested intersection of the Romulan Star Empire, the Klingon Empire, and the farthest extremity of Earth-explored space.
A single whoop of the alert klaxon sounded throughout the ship as Hernandez rose from her chair. She took a single step forward, toward the helmsman, Lieutenant Reiko Akagi. “Bring us about,” Hernandez said. “Intercept course.” She glanced left at her senior communications officer, Ensign Sidra Valerian. “Hail the convoy, tell them to take evasive action.”
Thayer looked up from her c
onsole. “We can’t get a lock on the enemy vessels, Captain. They’re jamming our sensors.”
“I can’t raise the convoy,” added Valerian, who turned her desperate stare toward the ships on the viewscreen. Anxiety sharpened her Scottish accent. “Ship-to-ship comms are blocked.”
Lieutenant Kalil el-Rashad, the ship’s second officer and sciences expert, intensified his efforts at his own console. “I’ll try to help you break through it,” he said.
“Tactical alert,” Hernandez said. She returned to her seat as the turbolift door opened and her first officer, Commander Veronica Fletcher, stepped onto the bridge. The blond New Zealander nodded to Hernandez as she walked past and took over at the unoccupied engineering console directly to Hernandez’s right. “Tactical,” Hernandez said, “report.”
“Signal clearing,” Thayer replied. “Six ships, closing at high warp.” She looked over her shoulder at the captain. “Romulans.”
Valerian made fine adjustments at her panel’s controls as she said, “Breaking the scrambler code, Captain. We’re intercepting one of their ship-to-ship transmissions.” Fear overcame the young woman’s training, and her voice wavered as she informed the bridge, “All vessels are being ordered to target us first.”
“Arm phase cannons, load torpedoes,” Hernandez said. “Number One, tell Major Foyle and his MACOs to lock and load. Helm, all ahead full. Tactical, target the lead Romulan—”
Catastrophic deceleration hurled Hernandez to the deck, pinned her officers to their consoles, and wracked the ship with a groaning crash. Consoles dimmed, and the overhead lights went dark. The throbbing of the engines became a low, falling moan. On the main viewscreen, the long pulls of starlight resolved to a slowly turning starfield, indicating the ship had dropped out of warp and was drifting at sublight.
“Report!” Hernandez shouted as she picked herself up off the deck.
“Command systems aren’t responding, Captain,” Fletcher said, making futile jabs at her console.
“Valerian,” said Hernandez, “patch in the emergency line to engineering, put it on speakers.”
