Gauntlet

by Michael Jan Friedman

“And the best part,” Caber told him, “is you don’t feel you’ve kowtowed to anyone. You’ve still got your dignity.”

  Nikolas smiled. He did, didn’t he?

  “Thanks,” he said.

  Caber smiled at him. “Believe me, it’s my pleasure.”

  Chapter Eight

  PICARD HEARD THE SOUND of chimes and looked up from his terminal. “Come,” he said. The doors to his ready room slid aside with a soft exhalation of air, revealing the matronly, dark-haired form of Lieutenant Valderrama. Looking a bit tentative, the science officer came in and allowed the doors to close behind her.

  “You asked to see me?” she said.

  “I did indeed,” the captain replied. He swiveled his chair around to face her. “Please have a seat.”

  Valderrama made use of the only other chair in the room, which was situated on the other side of Picard’s desk. It occurred to the captain that the woman was old enough to be his mother, and for just a moment he felt awkward addressing her as a subordinate.

  Then again, he mused, a great many of his subordinates were older than he was. Just not by quite so many years.

  “I trust you’ve settled in by now?” he said, feeling the need to engage Valderrama in conversation before he began to get into anything more substantive.

  “I have,” the sciences chief assured him.

  “Good. And your personnel?”

  “Top-notch, as far as I can tell. I’m very much looking forward to working with them.”

  Picard nodded. “Excellent.”

  Valderrama seemed comfortable enough, both in her position and in his ready room. With that in mind, he put pleasantries aside and launched into the real reason he had summoned her.

  Leaning forward in his chair, he said, “I hope you’ll understand if I speak bluntly, Lieutenant.”

  Valderrama seemed to gird herself. She must have sensed this coming. “Aye, sir.”

  “Other captains have not been pleased with your performance of late. They have reached the conclusion that you are coasting—that you could do better if doing better still mattered to you.”

  Valderrama reddened. “They have said that, sir.”

  “However,” Picard went on, “I don’t care what conclusions other captains have reached. On the Stargazer, you’ll be starting out with a clean slate.”

  It wasn’t the kind of speech the lieutenant had expected. That much was clear from her bewildered expression.

  He pressed on. “I fully expect that you will do an exemplary job here—a job of which you and I can both be proud. You will need to do no less, considering what we will soon be facing in Beta Barritus.”

  Valderrama stared at him for a moment. Then she lifted her chin and said, “I’m grateful for your confidence in me, sir. I’ll try to be worthy of it.”

  “I’m sure you will,” Picard replied.

  Pug Joseph hadn’t slept very well. He had been thinking about his new security officer all night long, turning the problem over and over in his mind and dreading the moment when he would have to confront the Binderian about his obvious inadequacies.

  Maybe, he had told himself more than once in the wee hours as he lay staring at the ceiling, it would have been more merciful to nip Obal’s hopes at the outset. Maybe it would have been less painful for the little fellow in the long run.

  But he hadn’t done that. He had shied away from what he couldn’t help seeing more and more as the inevitable. And when the inevitable came, it would be that much more difficult for both of them.

  As he thought that, he reached the doors to the security section. They slid apart in front of him and revealed an anteroom manned by two armed officers, Garner and Pierzynski. The officers inclined their heads and acknowledged him by name.

  “Carry on,” Joseph said, feeling a little silly.

  Garner and Pierzynski were full lieutenants just as he was. And as soon as the captain found a permanent security chief, Joseph would be standing guard alongside them.

  Beyond the anteroom lurked the hexagonal main security facility, where an officer named Horombo was sitting in front of a huge, concave bank of closed-circuit video screens. Each one showed him a different, strategically important portion of the ship—the bridge, engineering, the transporter room, and so on.

  “Chief,” said Horombo, sparing him a glance.

  “Horombo,” Joseph responded.

  He proceeded across the hexagon to its opposite side, where an open doorway provided access to a short corridor. His office was located farther down that corridor. So was the Stargazer’s armory, which stood opposite his door and contained every phaser on the ship that wasn’t currently in use somewhere.

  The other doors that opened on the corridor led to a weapons diagnostics room, a weapons repair room, a target range and a storeroom full of communicators, palmlights, and other gear often needed by Stargazer away teams.

  Joseph was so dull-witted and bleary-eyed from lack of sleep that he almost passed the diminutive figure hunched over a table in the diagnostics area without noticing him. Taking a step backward, he peered inside the room and saw that it was Obal seated there.

  “Obal?” he ventured.

  The Binderian turned to him. “Good morning, sir.”

  Joseph didn’t get it. “You’re not on duty for another six hours,” he pointed out.

  “True,” Obal responded. “But I felt my time would be spent more wisely here in security.”

  The security chief could hardly object to such zeal. “So you’ve been . . . what? Testing the accuracy of our ordnance?”

  The Binderian smiled at him. “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s admirable,” Joseph told him, “if unnecessary. Chief Ang made sure that was done before he left.”

  “In that case,” Obal said cheerfully, “Chief Ang must have had something else on his mind at the time.”

  Joseph looked at him. “What do you mean?”

  The Binderian held up the type-1 phaser in his hand. “This unit as well as several others exhibit targeting inaccuracies.”

  The security chief was understandably skeptical. He held out his hand and said, “May I?”

  “Of course.” Obal turned the phaser over to him.

  Joseph placed it in the diagnostic device, closed the cover on it, and checked the digital readouts. Sure enough, the targeting mechanism was off—if only by a few hundredths of a millimeter.

  “As I said,” Obal noted, “there are inaccuracies.”

  Joseph turned to him and smiled. “Not serious ones, mind you. But I’ll give you credit for finding any at all.”

  The Binderian inclined his head. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Now we’ve got to fix this thing. Why don’t you—”

  “Actually,” Obal piped up, “that won’t be necessary. I’ve already made all the necessary corrections, sir.”

  “You have?”

  Obal nodded. “At least with regard to the type-one and type-two devices. I have yet to test the rifles.”

  Joseph looked at him. “You can’t mean all the type-ones and type-twos.”

  “On the contrary, sir. That’s exactly what I mean.”

  “But . . . between the type-ones and the type-twos, there are more than sixty phasers.”

  “Sixty-four, to be exact, sir.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Not at all,” Obal assured him.

  The security chief chuckled appreciatively. “And you weren’t even scheduled to be on duty.”

  “As I said,” the Binderian reminded him, “I felt my time would be spent more wisely in security.”

  Under the circumstances, Joseph couldn’t help but agree.

  “After I check the rifles,” Obal said, “I would like to take a look at the brig. In my experience, graviton polarity source field generators require frequent recalibration.”

  Joseph nodded. “Sure. Knock your socks off.”

  Obal smiled. “Thank you, sir.”

  The security chief left
him in the diagnostics room and continued to his office, where he sat down in front of his computer screen. But before long, he found himself thinking about the Binderian again.

  Sixty-four phasers, he mused. And in his free time.

  Maybe he had been too quick to judge Obal, he told himself. Maybe the little guy was going to work out after all.

  Vigo smiled to himself as he moved his tiny wagon across the winding blue ribbon of a river. Then he looked across the octagonal sharash’di board and saw Valderrama smile too, albeit a bit more ruefully.

  “Looks like you’ve got me,” she said.

  Remembering his manners, the Pandrilite contained his enthusiasm. “I’ll grant you, it looks that way. But it’s not because you didn’t pursue an interesting and effective strategy.”

  “It couldn’t have been that effective,” the sciences chief rejoined. “Otherwise, you would be the one conceding defeat.”

  “What hurt you,” Vigo observed, “was your third-level defense. You should have chosen stone over sky.”

  “I would have,” Valderrama told him, “if I’d had any large green stones left.”

  “You had two of them, actually. They were buried in the riverbed and obscured by ice.”

  To underscore his point, Vigo lifted the glassy overlay that represented ice and exposed the trough in the board that represented the river. It was filled halfway to the top with fine dark sand. Using a big, blue finger, he moved the sand around until he revealed a couple of smooth, blue-green stones.

  “You see?” he said.

  Valderrama looked surprised by his revelation. “But how did you know they were there?”

  Vigo shrugged. “They had to be. When we left the first level, only three stones had turned up in the river. And on the second level, there weren’t any at all. So—”

  “So there had to be a couple of them on this level.” Valderrama nodded in appreciation of his logic. “Well done, Mr. Vigo.”

  He inclined his head. “Thank you.”

  “And,” she added with a gleam in her eye, “get ready for a rematch.”

  The remark caught Vigo off guard. “Really?”

  “You don’t think I’m going to just roll over and accept defeat, do you?” And with her challenge hanging in the air, Valderrama began to set up the board for another game.

  The Pandrilite grinned.

  He hadn’t been happy about saying good-bye to Cariello, Valderrama’s predecessor as head of the sciences section. Cariello was known for her drive and enthusiasm, her desire to get the most out of herself and others.

  Vigo hadn’t expected her replacement to be nearly as good. But fortune had smiled on the Stargazer, it seemed, because Valderrama was obviously made from the same mold.

  “Well?” she said. “What are you waiting for?”

  He chuckled. “Nothing, Lieutenant. Nothing at all.”

  Savoring the prospect of another match, he helped her put the game pieces back in place.

  Ben Zoma forked half a stuffed grape leaf into his mouth and savored its aromatic flavor while he considered the list of Starfleet advisories on his padd.

  It was midafternoon, and the Stargazer’s lounge was nearly empty, just as Ben Zoma liked it. Not that he wasn’t the gregarious sort. On the contrary, he was probably the most gregarious person he knew.

  But as the Stargazer’s first officer, he needed to digest everything that was happening on the ship—and in the case of a Starfleet advisory, everything that was happening off the ship as well. It was easier to do that in an empty lounge than in a full one.

  “Commander?” someone said.

  It took Ben Zoma a moment to realize that it was he who was being addressed that way. But then, he had only been a first officer for a week or so.

  “Yes?” he said, looking up from his padd.

  Wu was standing across the table from him, smiling politely. “Is this seat taken?” she asked, indicating one opposite Ben Zoma’s.

  He shrugged. “I don’t think so.”

  “Good.” Wu pulled the chair out and sat down, dispelling any notion Ben Zoma might have had about finishing his reading in peace. “I’m glad I found you here,” she said. “I wanted to speak with you.”

  “What about?” Ben Zoma asked, putting down the padd.

  Wu’s brow knit. “Our last conversation included a rather . . . awkward moment. I wanted to address it.”

  Ben Zoma dismissed the notion with a wave of his hand. “You did that already. You said you were sorry.”

  “Yes,” his colleague agreed. “But I wanted you to know that what I said was heartfelt.”

  He smiled. “I never had any reason to believe otherwise.”

  “You know, I never would have put my foot in my mouth that way on the Crazy Horse.”

  Ben Zoma understood. “Because you knew her personnel a lot better than you know the Stargazer’s.”

  Wu nodded. “Exactly.”

  The first officer was able to sympathize, since the Stargazer hadn’t been his first assignment. “It’s difficult getting used to a new ship and crew, especially after you’ve been in one place for a long time.”

  “It is,” his second officer confirmed.

  “So let’s just forget what happened,” he suggested. “In fact, I’ve forgotten it already.”

  Wu looked grateful. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it,” said Ben Zoma. He glanced at his padd, which was sitting next to his plate of stuffed grape leaves. “And now, if I can ask you a favor . . .” He let his voice trail off meaningfully.

  Wu seemed to notice the padd and the grape leaves for the first time. “Of course,” she replied quickly. “By all means. Sorry to have distracted you from your work.”

  “No problem,” he assured her.

  She began to withdraw as quietly as she had approached him, but before she could leave, Ben Zoma tendered an invitation.

  “Any time you want to talk . . .”

  Wu smiled at him again. Then she crossed the lounge and made her exit through its set of sliding doors.

  Ben Zoma smiled too, Wu’s overzealousness at their first meeting as forgotten as he had promised it would be. Then he went back to his padd and its advisories.

  Chapter Nine

  JITERICA STOOD AMID A HERD of snub-nosed silver shapes, the overhead lighting glinting off their duranium hides. “We’ve got a type-eleven pod, a type-twelve pod, and three type-thirteen pods,” said Lieutenant Chiang, the gray-templed officer in charge of the Stargazer’s lone shuttlebay. His voice rang proudly from one end of the facility to the other. “We’ve got a type-three personnel shuttle, two type-four personnel shuttles, and a couple of type-five personnel shuttles, and right here is a type-eight heavy cargo shuttle fresh from the yards at Utopia Planitia.”

  The Nizhrak knew exactly what types the vehicles were. Shuttle design was one of the myriad subjects she had studied in her crash course at Starfleet headquarters.

  “Of course,” the short, stocky Chiang went on, “the type-twelve is in the process of being overhauled for the umpteenth time, so it’s useless to us right now.”

  Jiterica saw a pair of uniformed legs sticking out from under the type-12, the exterior of which was virtually identical to the type-11. It was on the inside that the two shuttles were entirely different, thanks to the type-12’s 500-millicochrane impulse driver engines and its three sarium krellide storage cells.

  “As you can see,” said Chiang, rapping his knuckles on the type-3, “we’re not exactly cutting edge here from top to bottom. This little number can barely maintain warp speed over the long haul, so we’d only use it in a dire emergency like a full-scale evacuation.”

  “I understand,” Jiterica responded.

  She had been sent here to assist the shuttlebay crew for the time being. She had no objections to the assignment. An ensign was supposed to familiarize herself with as many aspects of starship operation as possible.

  “We’ve got another type-five on order
,” Chiang told her, “but between you and me, I don’t expect to see her any time soon. The way they ration out new shuttlecraft, you’d think there were a million ships all clamoring for them at once.”

  He chortled and looked to Jiterica, as if he expected some specific reaction from her. But not knowing what it might be, she remained silent and waited for a clue.

  “Rrright,” Chiang said at last. He rapped on the type-3 again. “Well then, let’s see if we can’t—”

  Before the lieutenant could finish his sentence, he was cut off by a loud clanging noise. Chiang turned grim suddenly, no longer the affable tour guide. He shouted out some orders, then pointed to the double doors that comprised the shuttlebay’s entrance.

  “Let’s go,” he said to Jiterica.

  She understood the reason for his sense of urgency. The loud sound she “heard” through her audio sensors was the signal for all personnel to respond to some immediate danger—loss of air pressure, exposure to radiation, or something equally inimical to humanoid life—by unhesitatingly evacuating the shuttlebay.

  Jiterica wasn’t sure why such an action was necessary. To her knowledge, the ship was not under attack. Nor was it in the vicinity of any dangerous phenomena. On the other hand, anomalies cropped up from time to time in the course of subspace travel, and the Stargazer might have encountered one of them.

  In any case, it wasn’t the Nizhrak’s place to determine the reason for the evacuation. Her only responsibility was to leave the area as quickly as possible.

  There had been half a dozen other crewmen in the bay besides Jiterica and Chiang—two humans, a Vulcan, a Bolian, a Carpathian, and a Vobilite. They all locked down their respective control stations and scampered for the exit.

  But Jiterica couldn’t scamper. Her containment suit wasn’t equipped to let her move that quickly. All she could do was proceed at her usual deliberate, mechanical pace—a limitation that had never been an issue until that moment.

  Chiang noticed Jiterica’s difficulty, stopped halfway to the exit and came back for her. But her condensed mass was more or less equal to the lieutenant’s, so he didn’t have the option of picking her up and carrying her. All he could do was turn her around, grab her suit under its armpits and drag her toward the double doors.