Gauntlet

by Michael Jan Friedman

  “But, sir—”

  “That’s an order,” McAteer told him.

  Picard didn’t like the idea, but the admiral wasn’t giving him any choice in the matter. “As you say, sir.”

  McAteer nodded. “Again, good luck to you. McAteer out.”

  A moment later, his image winked off the viewscreen and was replaced by the Starfleet logo. The captain glared at it, then tapped the combadge on his chest.

  “Navigation, this is Command—” He stopped abruptly, deeply embarrassed by the slip. “This is Captain Picard. Set a course for the Beta Barritus system.”

  “Aye, sir,” came Gerda Asmund’s reply.

  “Helm,” he went on, “take us out of here. Half impulse until we clear the base.”

  “Aye, sir,” said Idun.

  Through his ready room’s lone observation port, Picard could see the hourglass shape of Starbase 32 receding in the distance, shrinking rapidly against the star-pricked darkness. In a matter of moments, it disappeared altogether.

  Taking Admiral McAteer with it. And none too soon, the captain reflected angrily.

  He sat in his chair a moment longer, trying to deal with his resentment. Only when he felt he had it under control did he get up and leave his ready room.

  Picard reminded himself that there were seven new crewmen aboard the Stargazer. It wasn’t their fault they had been foisted on an unwilling captain.

  Chapter Five

  ENSIGN ANDREAS NIKOLAS PRESSED the padd in the bulkhead next to his quarters, watched the duranium doors slide apart, and went inside to examine his home away from home. Nikolas had served on other starships of this class, so he had a pretty good idea of what awaited him. He wasn’t disappointed. Two beds, a couple of computer terminals, two chairs, two tiny closets, one bathroom door.

  And one roommate.

  In this case, the last item was of the tall, broad-shouldered, and clean-cut variety. He was in the latter stages of making his bed when Nikolas walked in on him.

  The guy straightened, smiled, and held out his hand. “Guess we’re going to be roommates,” he said, his blue eyes twinkling beneath dark, close-cropped hair.

  “Guess so,” Nikolas returned. He shook the fellow’s hand. “Andreas Nikolas—but my friends call me Nik. And you?”

  “Joe Caber.” The grin behind the words was as white and perfect as they came.

  Caber, Caber . . . It sounded familiar. “Where have I heard that name before?” Nikolas wondered.

  The other man looked a little uncomfortable. “My father’s Neil Caber. You know, the admiral?”

  Nikolas snapped his fingers. “I knew I’d heard it somewhere.” He considered Caber in the light of this new information. “So you’re on a fast track.”

  His roommate shrugged. He looked a little embarrassed. “I sure as heck hope so. I’d like to be a captain someday.”

  You and every crewman from here to the Neutral Zone, Nikolas thought. “And how’re you doing so far?”

  Caber didn’t seem eager to talk about himself. Still, he answered Nikolas’s question. “From what I can tell, just fine. I was second in my graduating class at the Academy. And my stint on the Mediterranean couldn’t have worked out any better.”

  Obviously, Caber was a shoo-in. He’d be sitting in a center seat by his thirty-fifth birthday.

  Nikolas turned his attention to his unmade bed, so the other man wouldn’t see the look of bitterness on his face. “They thought I’d be captain material too, once upon a time.”

  Caber smiled, but it was the kind of smile that tried to mask pity. “And you’re not anymore?”

  “I got in some trouble,” Nikolas told him. Of course, that was a bit of an understatement.

  “Everyone gets in trouble sometime,” Caber said.

  “I got in trouble a lot,” Nikolas expanded. “At the Academy they said I was reckless and headstrong. And I had a . . .” He dredged up the words they had used in his personnel file. “. . . a penchant for unbridled honesty, which was their polite way of saying I couldn’t keep my damned mouth shut.”

  “That’s not necessarily a bad thing,” the other man allowed.

  Nikolas chuckled. “Tell the folks at the Academy. They decided I’d be lucky not to get my butt kicked off the first ship whose captain was dumb enough to take me.”

  “Prove them wrong,” Caber advised. No doubt, that’s what he would have done.

  The problem, Nikolas reflected, was that the Academy people were right. He was everything they said he was—stubborn, impulsive, ill-equipped to work within a command structure.

  He wished he could be more of a Caber type. He wished he could be confident and cooperative, following a clear-cut path to a captain’s chair.

  But that wasn’t the hand he had been dealt. He was who he was. And if he couldn’t be a starship captain, he would be whatever fate had in store for him.

  “Hey,” Nikolas said, “you hungry?”

  His roommate smiled that perfect smile. “I’m always hungry.”

  “Then what do you say we head down to the mess hall and see what’s on the menu?”

  “I say let’s go,” Caber told him.

  “I’m already there,” Nikolas said. Leaving his bed unmade, he led the way to the mess hall.

  * * *

  Dikembe Ulelo walked along the corridor next to his superior, Communications Chief Martin Paxton.

  Paxton, a man with curly brown hair, was giving Ulelo a tour of the Stargazer. “You’ll like it here,” he said. “Captain Picard’s as sharp as they come. And he treats his people well.”

  “That’s good to hear,” Ulelo responded.

  But his attention was focused on the power-supply junction just ahead of them, its location easily identifiable by the little door set flush with the bulkhead. It was the second such junction they had passed since leaving the turbolift.

  Ulelo’s previous assignment had been on the Copernicus, an Oberth-class vessel. The Copernicus had had twelve power-supply junctions on each deck.

  “You’ll work the graveyard shift, of course.” Paxton smiled sympathetically at him. “Just as I did when I was low man on the totem pole. But just for a few weeks. Then we’ll all take turns.”

  “Of course,” said Ulelo.

  “So what do you like?”

  Ulelo looked at him. “Like?”

  “You know,” said Paxton. “Food, hobbies, interests . . . ?”

  “Ah.” Ulelo thought for a moment, but nothing came to mind. “I don’t have any real preferences.”

  Paxton seemed surprised. “Really?”

  “Yes. Why do you ask?”

  “Most people have pretty distinct likes and dislikes. Me, for instance, I’m a coffee man. Can’t wake up without it. And when it comes to hobbies, I’m a medieval history buff.”

  “I like to try new things,” Ulelo said, hoping that would assuage his superior’s curiosity.

  Paxton nodded. “Then you’re going to like it here even more. We’ve got some really exotic tastes on board. Take Vigo, for instance—our weapons officer. He eats this Pandrilite stuff that looks like beach sand mixed with ground glass. Swears by it. Personally, I have trouble even looking at it.”

  He laughed. Ulelo took that as his cue to laugh too.

  They came to a place where the corridor crossed another corridor. Paxton turned right. So did Ulelo—at which point he saw the set of double doors at the end of the corridor.

  Paxton pointed to them. “Next stop, engineering.”

  Ulelo nodded. There would be many things to see in engineering. Many things to learn.

  “I can’t wait,” he said.

  Carter Greyhorse was sitting at his computer terminal, going over his list of scheduled medical examinations, when his first patient of the day walked in.

  She was wearing a complete Starfleet-issue containment suit, domed helmet and all. That alone set her apart from anyone else who had ever visited Greyhorse’s sickbay.

  But even strange
r-looking was her face—if indeed it could even be called a face. It seemed vague, insubstantial as he viewed it through the helmet’s curved, transparent faceplate, and there was only a suggestion in it of humanoid features.

  She looked around for a moment, her movements stiff and awkward in the suit. Finally, she spotted Greyhorse and crossed sickbay to get to him.

  As the doctor got up and came out of his office enclosure, he forced himself not to stare. But it was difficult not to. He had been looking forward to this moment from the time the newcomers beamed aboard—one of them with more trouble than the rest.

  “You’re Ensign Jiterica, I take it?”

  “Yes,” came the reply—not an actual voice but a mechanical simulation, generated by a vocalizer in the containment suit. It sounded flat, tinny, and oddly paced. “I’m here for—”

  “Your exam,” he said, “yes. This way, please.”

  Greyhorse indicated the nearest biobed, which was just outside his enclosure. He had just recalibrated it the day before.

  “Have a seat,” he told Jiterica.

  The doctor waited for her to reach the biobed and sit down—a clumsy affair at best, given the bulk of the containment suit. Then he activated the bed’s biofunction monitors, ran a routine diagnostic, and examined the monitors in front of him.

  Normally they would have shown Greyhorse the status of his patient’s vital functions, each of them represented by a vertical white bar against a dark blue field. In this case, the bars refused to appear. In their place, a message came up: Reset parameters.

  Clearly the bed was baffled—and that wouldn’t change even if the doctor spent his whole day resetting parameters. The device was simply incapable of tracking Jiterica’s life signs.

  Nor was Greyhorse surprised.

  After all, his patient wasn’t a creature of flesh and blood like everyone else serving on the Stargazer. Jiterica was an anomaly in the annals of Starfleet personnel—a being made up of nothing more than positive ions and electrons.

  Her species, the Nizhrak’a, was native to Nizhara, a gas giant in the Sonada Sin system. They were lowdensity, plasmalike life-forms held together by powerful psychokinetic forces, nature’s response to the crush of gravity and atmospheric pressure—not to mention the vicious and volatile radiation fields—that prevailed on the ensign’s planet.

  The Nizhrak’a were also immense—in some cases, almost as big as the Stargazer herself. But they could condense themselves when necessary. The ensign, for example, could pour herself into a containment suit and move through what must have seemed to her a warren of tiny spaces.

  According to Jiterica’s medical file, she possessed all of the biological systems—nervous, digestive, ambulatory, circulatory, sensory, and so on—found in any humanoid life-form. However, the configurations of charged particles that comprised these systems were so spread out and seemingly unrelated as to render them unrecognizable to the sensors in the biobed.

  The only part of Jiterica that approached the description of a solid was the particle membrane that served as her outer skin. It gave her body shape and definition, and kept it from being ripped apart by her world’s arsenal of savage, high-velocity winds.

  Like every other part of her anatomy, she could psychokinetically control this membrane down to the subatomic level. That was what allowed Jiterica to assume a more or less human form and facial features, which she had been advised would minimize the differences between herself and the rest of the crew.

  So why did she need a Starfleet containment suit? For several reasons, Greyhorse had learned.

  First, Jiterica couldn’t maintain her condensed form for long. The suit, which was specially equipped with an electromagnetic reinforcement field, enabled her to remain in a tightly packed state indefinitely without placing undue strain on her resources.

  Second, the ensign’s physiology was designed for maneuvering in the roiling, nightmarish atmosphere of a gas giant, not the relatively narrow corridors of a Federation starship. The suit enabled her to move as her fellow crewmen moved—on foot, in a predictable direction, and at a reasonable rate of speed—thanks to a sensor-motor technology developed specifically with the Nizhrak’a in mind. All Jiterica had to do was generate an electrical shock in a particular part of the suit’s sensor net, and its motor grid would do the rest.

  The containment suit’s third virtue was that it maintained a felicitous environment for its wearer, simulating the kind of gravity, air pressure, and atmosphere one was likely to encounter on her world. Jiterica could have survived without these benefits, especially for a short period of time, but over the long haul it made her existence on the Stargazer much easier to bear.

  Last, the suit enabled Jiterica to communicate. By stimulating her vocalizer with a variety of electrical shocks—much as she did to achieve locomotion—the ensign could make use of a limited vocabulary. If the doctor recalled correctly, she had more than two hundred Federation-standard words and phrases at her disposal.

  Likewise, a device under her helmet received the spoken word and translated it into electrical signals. That way, Jiterica could “hear” information as well as convey it.

  Of course, she could have achieved neither speech nor movement without hours of rigorous training at Starfleet headquarters in San Francisco. Greyhorse could only imagine how difficult those hours must have been. How exhausting.

  How utterly frustrating.

  He asked himself if he could have learned to live among Jiterica’s people, amid the hellish, howling tumult of a gas giant. Not even for a moment, he decided.

  So why had Jiterica put herself to all this trouble, exposed herself to all this pain? What did she hope to gain?

  The answer, like many answers, lay in the always arcane realm of interstellar politics.

  As Greyhorse understood it, Nizhara wasn’t a Federation member world. However, the Federation was courting it for its strategic location near Cardassian space.

  Jiterica’s presence in Starfleet was therefore something of a trial run—an attempt to see if Nizhrak’a and humanoids could establish a mutually beneficial relationship. To this point, the experiment hadn’t gone very well.

  The ensign’s previous commanding officer, Captain Cepeda of the Manitou, had observed that the ensign was unhappy under his command. Worse, he projected for the record that she would be unhappy on any ship in the fleet. He said that Jiterica hadn’t sought a discharge for one simple reason—her enduring belief that her people would benefit from Federation membership.

  Apparently she was willing to suffer a great deal of hardship to see that happen.

  For the time being, Greyhorse decided to dispense with the idea of identifying Jiterica’s vital signs. That was a problem he would have to work on when time allowed.

  “You may sit up,” he said.

  The ensign swung her legs around—another awkward motion, thanks to her containment suit—and did as the doctor suggested. Then she fixed her ghostly gaze on him and waited.

  “I’ve familiarized myself with your personnel file,” Greyhorse told her, producing a handheld padd from the pocket of his lab coat. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell me everything I need to know—for instance, what diseases your species is prone to, and how your body is equipped to fight them.”

  “I understand,” she said in the same tinny voice.

  Jiterica went on to inform him about the parasites of her world, which came in two basic varieties. Greyhorse likened them to the bacteria and viruses that plagued solid life-forms.

  According to the ensign, her species’ defense against these parasites was to create a tiny gas bubble around the offending organism, effectively isolating it from the rest of their systems. Deprived of nourishment, the parasite eventually withered and died.

  “Interesting,” said the doctor, making a note of the information in his padd. “And what about other forms of injury? Say, from an impact? Or exposure to radiation?”

  “Only my skin can sustain injury
,” Jiterica told him. “When it is compromised, I reform it.”

  “Consciously?” he asked.

  Her features fuzzed over as she concentrated on the doctor’s query. “If the injury is bad enough, I do it consciously. Otherwise, my body repairs itself in due time.”

  He asked her several other questions in the next few minutes, and she was able to answer all of them to his satisfaction. But it wasn’t just the substance of her responses that enlightened him.

  The more she was compelled to speak, the shorter and blunter her sentences became. What’s more, her facial features fuzzed out for longer and longer periods of time.

  Apparently, the effort required to converse with Greyhorse was taking its toll on her. Not wishing to cause her any more discomfort than necessary, he said, “We’ll continue this another time. For now, you can return to your duties.”

  Jiterica looked at him, her features still in the process of reforming behind her transparent faceplate. To his mind, they didn’t create an impression of contentment. Her expression looked strained, as if she were carrying a burden much too heavy for her.

  Of course, Jiterica wasn’t humanoid, so her expression wasn’t necessarily a window on her feelings. It might simply have represented her best attempt to look like someone else—Greyhorse himself, perhaps, or one of her trainers at Starfleet headquarters.

  “Thank you,” she told him.

  He nodded. “You’re welcome.”

  Then he watched as the ensign slid off the biobed and walked away. Her movements were stiff, mechanical, almost painful to watch. But Greyhorse watched anyway.

  He couldn’t help admiring Jiterica. As difficult as it was for her to exist under these circumstances, she never made the slightest complaint. That took courage . . .

  If not a great deal of common sense, he added inwardly.

  Frowning deeply, Greyhorse returned to his enclosure and prepared for his next examination. But every now and then, he thought he saw a poorly defined face in the depths of his computer screen returning his gaze with a stubborn stoicism.