by David Mack
She won’t have given up on me yet, he assured himself. But she won’t wait forever. Sooner or later, she’ll go on with her life, without me. I might get home while she’s still alive, but it won’t matter, because my life will be gone. Our life.
“There’s still time for a change of plan,” Foyle said. He watched Pembleton to measure his reaction. “If we drop the ship back to quarter impulse, we can focus on repairing the transceiver, maybe get a message home before everybody we know gives up on us.”
“Nice idea. But if that was a possibility, I have to think we’d be doing it already.”
“Maybe,” Foyle said. “But what if it’s just that Graylock needs to take orders from someone who knows how to motivate him?” He glanced at Pembleton.
The sergeant kept his expression a cipher. For as long as Foyle had served with him, Pembleton had been a master at encrypting his feelings. “It might take a pretty big shakeup in the command structure to cause a change like that,” the sergeant said. His eyes betrayed nothing as he returned Foyle’s stare. “Permission to speak freely, sir?”
“Granted.”
“Considering the amount of damage to the ship, and the skill we’ve seen Graylock use to keep it running, I’m inclined to believe him when he says the transceiver can’t be fixed. And if the captain thinks this is our best shot, I’d say trust her.”
Foyle responded with a slow nod. “So, you don’t think a change in strategy or leadership would be in our best interest?”
“Under these circumstances? No.”
Something about the tenor of that answer prompted Foyle to press on. “And if, at some future juncture, our circumstances were to change …?”
Pembleton shrugged and replied with an ominous nonchalance, “Well … that’s a different question.”
2381
7
Melora Pazlar felt as if she were the stillness at the center of everything. Floating in the womblike zero g of Titan’s stellar cartography lab, she was surrounded by a holographic sphere of stars, a virtual front-row seat to the universe.
Aloft and held in place by tractor beams so gentle that even her fragile senses couldn’t feel them, she turned in slow degrees. She manipulated images of science-department reports and sensor analyses that were superimposed over the holographic backdrop, rearranging them with fluid arcs of her arms and subtle turns of her wrist. It was like a silent ballet.
She marveled at Ra-Havreii’s handiwork. He really is a genius, she thought with admiration and delight. Then she remembered their almost-kiss and her reflexive retreat. She had pondered it for the past several hours while she worked, and she still didn’t know why she had rebuffed him. The Efrosian was handsome and charming, and had a whispered reputation among the ship’s female humanoids as a considerate companion. He had everything going for him, and he clearly was more than a little interested in her, and she knew that a few years earlier she might have welcomed him eagerly.
Now, however, she couldn’t imagine letting his lips touch hers without a shiver traveling down her spine. The idea of his hands on her flesh made her pull her arms to her sides, and her entire body tensed and began to fold in on itself.
Bending forward, she propelled herself into a slow tumble around her center of gravity. She forced her arms wide, as if to take the stars and nebulae into her delicate embrace, and she cleared her mind while drawing deep breaths. Tuvok had taught her well how to master her emotions and calm her mind. He had even imparted some wisdom in the area of self-defense, by emphasizing styles and techniques based on evasion. She had become an expert at slipping away from people.
A soft but insistent synthetic tone beeped in quick triple pulses, breaking her moment of reflection. The sound made bright echoes against the unseen surfaces of the holotank. Pazlar used bend-and-stretch gestures to arrest her forward rolling. It took a few seconds for her to become still once again. All the while, the computer’s alert continued chirping at her. When at last she was steady, she stretched out her arm and waved her hand in a semicircle to halt the shrill signal. “Computer, report.”
“Anomalous energy signature detected,” replied the feminine voice of the ship’s computer.
Pazlar tried not to get her hopes up. Titan’s crew had charted many unusual energy signatures in this region, and few had proved worthy of even a cursory follow-up. “Elaborate.”
“Concentrated pulses of triquantum waves with a subspatial distortion factor of four-point-six teracochranes.”
This was something new. “Have we identified the source?”
“Affirmative. Bearing 335.46, mark 291.14, distance eighteen-point-two light-years.”
“Show me what we have about the pulses’ point of origin,” Pazlar said. “Provide a false-spectrum display of the pulses’ trajectories and superimpose over my starmap interface. Prepare secondary data displays.” More focused now, Pazlar began her fluid choreography of data screens as she called them into existence. “Particle analysis of the wave pulses.” Down and to the left. “Cross-reference with past energy emissions from this sector.” Right and up diagonally.
The luminosity of her holographic environment became blinding as several beams of laser-intense white light radiated in all directions from what looked like an empty point in deep space. Pazlar squinted against the glare. “Computer, tone it down a bit, please.” The beams faded to a dim blue, and she was grateful that Ra-Havreii’s user interface had been programmed with a sophisticated grasp of idioms in several languages.
There was nowhere in the holotank that Pazlar could position herself without being intersected by multiple beams. “Computer, estimate the power level of these bursts.”
“Unable to comply. Power levels have exceeded the limits of our sensor capacity. Severe subspatial distortion is interfering with scans of the origin point.”
Now Pazlar was worried. Subspatial distortion? At that power level? Not good. She pulled the empty sector-grid chart to the front of her array of screens. “Pazlar to Lieutenant Rager.”
Titan’s senior operations officer answered over the comm, “Go ahead.”
“Sariel,” Pazlar said, “I need a priority reassignment of the main sensor array.” She felt a low-power force field give her tactile feedback as she entered commands on her holographic interface. “I’m sending over a grid reference, and I need to see every last bit of it in maximum detail as soon as possible.”
Rager was apologetic. “Melora, I can’t do that. Some of the scans we’re running were ordered by Commander Tuvok. If you want to cancel his assignments, you’ll need approval from the XO.” A computer feedback tone was audible over the channel. “Hang on, I just got your file.” A few moments later, Rager muttered, “You sent me a blank grid reference? You want me to drop everything to point the main array at nothing?”
“I don’t think it’s nothing,” Pazlar said. “Something at those coordinates is sending out high-energy bursts in every direction. More to the point, it’s something we can’t see.” She sent over her readings of the wave pulses and waited until she heard the chime of its arrival through the open channel.
“All right,” Rager said. “That is interesting. I can bump a couple of the research projects and let you have the gravi—”
“Sariel,” Pazlar snapped, “look at the energy profile for the pulses! Now look at the ambient readings in the center of that grid reference. Are you looking?”
Anger put an edge on Rager’s voice. “Yes, but I don’t …” She paused for a few seconds. Then she answered with understanding and alarm, “Triquantum waves.”
“Also known as a telltale sign of transwarp conduits.”
“The array’s all yours.”
* * *
“Spell it out for me,” Riker said to Pazlar, whose holographic avatar sat at the conference table with the rest of Titan’s senior bridge officers. “How close are these pulses to Borg transwarp signatures?”
“Similar, but not identical,” Pazlar said. “Their energy leve
ls are greater than anything we’ve ever seen the Borg use, but their subspatial distortions share a number of properties with transwarp conduits. They might be related.”
Keru leaned forward to look at Riker. “I agree, Captain. It’s possible the Borg have developed a new form of transwarp to replace the network they lost.”
Riker was troubled by Keru’s speculation, but at the same time he was grateful to have something to work on. It was just after 2300 hours, nearly the end of beta shift, his normal time for retiring to bed with Deanna. This situation would give him a reason to stay awake a few more hours and let her go to sleep first, before he returned to their quarters. He looked at Lieutenant Rager. “Do we know what’s generating these pulses?”
The brown-skinned woman shook her head. “No, sir. We’ve made the most detailed scans we can from this distance, and so far we haven’t seen anything at the pulses’ origin point. But we have come up with a few anomalies.”
“Naturally,” Keru quipped. “Never a shortage of those.”
After shooting a glare at the chief of security, Rager continued, “Most of our scans showed the sector as empty, except for a pretty harsh radiation field. But when we mapped the currents of cosmic particles passing through the sector, we found this.” She entered a command on her padd, and a computer-generated animation appeared on the conference room’s wall-mounted viewscreen. It showed countless overlapping streams bending around a central point. “Even though we can’t read any sign of space-time curvature in that area, particles moving through it have their directions and velocities altered as if they’d run into something big.”
Intrigued and worried in equal measure, Riker asked, “Big like a Borg transwarp hub?”
“No,” Pazlar said. “Big like a star system.”
“All right,” Riker said. “I remember seeing a planetary cloaking device during my first year on the Enterprise. It’s not hard to imagine someone taking it to the next step.”
“The question, then,” Keru said, “is who that someone is.”
Rager keyed in more commands on her padd and changed the animation on the viewscreen to show the trajectories of several of the energy pulses. “It’s worth noting,” she said, “that a few of these bursts appear to be targeted at Federation space. The energy signatures taper off after about twenty light-years from their point of origin, so if they are the leading ends of transwarp conduits, there’s no telling where they let out.”
Riker looked at his first officer, who had been unusually quiet so far during the meeting. “Chris? What do you think?”
Vale addressed her reply to Pazlar. “Sounds like you might have stumbled onto a Borg installation,” she said. “This might be how they’ve been bypassing our perimeter defenses.”
“Hang on,” Rager said. “Don’t you think we might be jumping to conclusions here? She only said there are similarities to Borg transwarp frequencies.”
Tuvok added, “I concur with Lieutenant Rager. There is no evidence that the Borg have ever ventured into this region of the Beta Quadrant. Furthermore, if we are dealing with a cloaked star system, such an undertaking would, presumably, take a great deal of time to accomplish. Because we are within eighteen light-years of the pulses’ source, the cloaking would have to have occurred at least eighteen years ago, or else light from the star would still be visible to us.”
Pazlar’s avatar perked up. “That’s right,” she said. “I need to check something.” She picked up her padd—which was part of her projected holopresence—and worked quickly while the conversation continued around her.
“You both make good points,” Vale said to Rager and Tuvok. “However, the fact that energy bursts are being directed from here toward the Federation, at the same time that the Borg are slipping through our defenses, is highly suspect. Even if the Borg didn’t create the thing sending the pulses, they might have discovered it and found a way to exploit it.”
Keru added, “Or maybe it is using them against us.”
“Also a possibility,” Vale said. Turning to Tuvok, she added, “Either way, if there is a link between this phenomenon and the Borg, it’ll be our job to stop it.”
“To borrow a human expression,” Tuvok said, “‘easier said than done.’ If the Borg have established a stronghold in a cloaked star system, there will be no way to estimate their numbers until it is too late to turn back. We might well find ourselves severely outnumbered.”
Keru nodded and looked at Vale. “He’s right. It’s not like we can call for reinforcements out here.”
“I’ve got something interesting,” Pazlar interrupted. She relayed her padd’s information to the wall viewscreen. “I cross-referenced the star charts we got from the Pa’haquel and the Vomnin to see if they’d ever noted a star at these coordinates. They have.” She got up and walked to the monitor to point out details as she talked. “In fact, we noted it ourselves, in a wide-area mapping survey several months ago, before we entered its ‘dark zone.’ It was a main-sequence star, high metallicity. Its gravitational signature indicated several planets in orbit. About eight hundred years ago, it started fading, and its gravitational signature changed in a way that suggests it lost its planets. Approximately seven hundred years ago, it went dark. So, today, to anyone within seven hundred light-years, it’s as good as invisible.”
Riker asked with real curiosity, “What happened to it? Did it go supernova? Collapse into a black hole?”
“No, sir,” Pazlar said. “It just … went dark.”
Keru deadpanned, “Gee, that’s not ominous.” He turned to Riker. “If they don’t want to be seen, maybe we don’t, either.”
“Agreed,” Riker said. “Tuvok, do what you can to reduce our sensor profile. Rager, deploy subspace radio boosters at shorter intervals, in case we need to get a signal back to Starfleet in a hurry. Keru, get your security teams ready to make an assault on the Borg, and be ready to repel boarders. Pazlar, keep analyzing the energy pulses, and report any new findings.” As he pushed his chair back from the table, he said to Vale, “Commander, put us on an intercept course for the source of those pulses, maximum warp.” Riker stood and made a quick exit, followed by the other officers.
They moved as a unit down a short passage to the bridge. There, Riker settled wearily into his chair as Vale ordered the course change. The pitch of the engines’ whine climbed rapidly as Titan accelerated to its maximum rated warp speed. On the main viewscreen, the stars were no longer just streaks or even blurs so much as snap-flashes of light racing past, forming a tunnel of light around the Luna-class starship.
Vale finished making her circuit of the bridge and placed herself just behind Riker’s left shoulder. “I just had a worrying thought,” she said in a confidential tone. “It seems to me that someone who’d turn their star system invisible probably won’t be thrilled to receive visitors.”
“Good point,” Riker said. “Take the ship to Yellow Alert.”
* * *
Ranul Keru took two steps inside the auxiliary engineering lab and realized he was surrounded.
Machines of alien grace were grouped together in what seemed to Keru like a haphazard fashion, leaning against one another, clumped in tight clusters, or set front to back in ragged lines along the lab’s bulkheads. The odors of chemical solvents and superheated metal assaulted Keru’s nostrils, and he stepped carefully through the maze of incomplete inventions.
He followed his ears. Despite the blanketing hum of whirring generators, hissing ventilators, and purring servos, he still discerned the irregular tapping and scraping of a tinkerer at work. On the other side of an incomplete frame snaked with wires and patched with isolinear arrays, he caught the flash of a phased-pulse welding iron. When the red-ringed indigo afterimage faded from his retina and he could see again, he spied his friend Torvig eyeing a misshapen gadget on the bench.
“Hi, Vig,” Keru said, making a small wave of greeting. “I buzzed a couple of times but got no answer, so I let myself in.”
The Choblik engineer rolled his head to one side, an oddly endearing affectation that Keru had learned was used by Torvig’s people as a gesture of trust—an unspoken show of faith that the new arrival would not go for one’s jugular. “It’s good to see you, Ranul,” Torvig said. He trotted in bouncing steps toward Keru, his prehensile tail undulating behind him to help preserve his balance. When the squat, cervine young officer was closer to the burly Trill security chief, he craned his head back to make eye contact. “Is there something I can make for you?”
Keru smiled, being careful not to bare his teeth. “Maybe,” he said. “You seem busy enough, though. What’re you working on?”
“Prototypes and scale models,” Torvig said. He gestured with one of his silvery bionic arms toward his workbench. “Let me show you.” He flounced like an excited child back to his U-shaped work area, and Keru followed him.
Long, mechanical arms studded with tools and utilities reached down from the ceiling, where they swiveled from ball joints. A few curious devices hovered or tumbled in place, like tools abandoned in zero gravity. One side of the dark gray work surface was littered with dust, metal shavings, stray isolinear rods, optronic cables, and hundreds of sparkling bits of debris. Heat lingered in the air, a testament to interrupted efforts.
Standing upright at the end of Torvig’s work area was a narrow, rectangular slab more than two meters tall, half a meter wide, and barely four millimeters thick; it was black and cast a mirror-quality reflection. “I’ve been working on this for many weeks,” Torvig said, aglow with pride. “What do you think?”
Keru was at a loss for words. He wasn’t certain if the slab was meant to represent an engineering achievement or an artistic one. Not wanting to offend Torvig, he finally settled on a neutral and factually incontrovertible declaration. “Shiny.”
