by David Mack
Other eBooks in the Star Trek™: Starfleet Corps of Engineers series from Pocket Books:
#1: The Belly of the Beast by Dean Wesley Smith
#2: Fatal Error by Keith R.A. DeCandido
#3: Hard Crash by Christie Golden
#4: Interphase Book 1 by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore
#5: Interphase Book 2 by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore
#6: Cold Fusion by Keith R.A. DeCandido
#7: Invincible Book 1 by David Mack & Keith R.A. DeCandido
#8: Invincible Book 2 by David Mack & Keith R.A. DeCandido
#9: The Riddled Post by Aaron Rosenberg
#10: Gateways Epilogue: Here There Be Monsters by Keith R.A. DeCandido
#11: Ambush by Dave Galanter & Greg Brodeur
#12: Some Assembly Required by Scott Ciencin & Dan Jolley
#13: No Surrender by Jeff Mariotte
#14: Caveat Emptor by Ian Edginton & Mike Collins
#15: Past Life by Robert Greenberger
#16: Oaths by Glenn Hauman
#17: Foundations Book 1 by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore
#18: Foundations Book 2 by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore
#19: Foundations Book 3 by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore
#20: Enigma Ship by J. Steven York & Christina F. York
#21: War Stories Book 1 by Keith R.A. DeCandido
#22: War Stories Book 2 by Keith R.A. DeCandido
#23: Wildfire Book 1 by David Mack
COMING SOON:
#24: Wildfire Book 2 by David Mack
#25: Home Fires by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Copyright © 2002 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
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Chapter
1
Captain Lian T’su tightened her grip on the armrests of her seat. The Orion main viewer showed another huge web of lightning bolts tear through the roiling, red-orange clouds of the gas giant’s atmosphere. The electrical discharges rendered the clouds visible for little more than a second and were followed immediately by a bone-rattling boom of thunder that reverberated through the decks of the Steamrunner-class starship.
“Do you have a lock on that signal yet?” T’su said to her tactical officer, raising her voice slightly to be heard over the din of the ship’s groaning outer bulkheads.
“Negative, Captain,” said Lieutenant Ryan. “Atmospheric interference is still too heavy. Switching to a delta-channel isolation frequency.”
The hull of the Orion had begun shrieking in protest soon after they had descended ten thousand kilometers into the gas giant’s turbulent lower atmosphere. Now that the ship had dived below twenty-five thousand kilometers, one-fifth of the way to the planet’s core, the eerie sounds of fatiguing metal were becoming almost constant, and the vibrations through the hull were growing more severe by the minute.
Twelve years ago, when T’su had been an ensign, she had been at ops aboard the Enterprise-D as it skimmed the upper atmosphere of Minos while under fire by an automated attack drone. At the time, she’d thought that was a rough ride. Compared to this, that was nothing, she thought, wiping the sweat from her palms.
T’su turned back toward the main viewer, which now showed only a dim outline of the thermal disturbance they were speeding toward. The test of the Wildfire prototype had been about to commence when Lieutenant Sunkulo, her operations officer, had detected an unknown energy signal that mysteriously vanished the moment sensors had been trained on it. If there was another ship in the atmosphere, following the Orion, the mission’s security was at risk. T’su had orders to keep the prototype out of the wrong hands at all costs, and she was well aware of the potential for disaster if she failed.
Right now, however, she was more concerned about the threat to her ship posed by the planet itself. “Current hull temperature and pressure?” she asked, trying to keep her voice steady. Always project confidence, she reminded herself.
Sunkulo tapped a few keys and answered calmly. “Temperature is eleven thousand four hundred degrees Celsius. Pressure is twenty-two million G.S.C.” Anticipating his captain’s next request, he added, “Structural integrity field still holding.”
T’su nodded. Around her, the rest of the bridge crew was quiet, intensely focused on their work. Lieutenant Fryar was making constant, minor adjustments at the helm to keep the ship steady while Ensign Yarrow relayed his data from the science station to Ryan at tactical. They were using active tachyon scans to map the atmosphere’s thermodynamic layers and currents in order to plot the course the Wildfire device would take to the planet’s core. The data was being constantly uploaded to Lieutenant ch’Kelavar, the ship’s Andorian second officer, who was in the forward torpedo room with the Wildfire development team.
Another lightning flash caused the main viewer to flare white for a split second. Another thunderclap, magnified by the density of the gas giant’s atmosphere, drowned out the sounds of the Orion’s groaning hull plates and shook the ship violently. The lights on the bridge flickered for a moment, and several display screens became scrambled and failed to recover even after the shaking ceased. T’su winced as the acrid odor of burned-out isolinear chips assaulted her nostrils.
Commander Dakona Raal, the ship’s imposing first officer, placed a reassuring hand on T’su’s shoulder. She silently smiled her thanks to him, and he nodded almost imperceptibly in return and moved his hand away before anyone else on the bridge noticed it had been there.
A native of Rigel V, Raal had been mistaken for a Vulcan by almost every member of the crew when he first came aboard last year. He had responded by shaving his head bald, growing a goatee, and making a point of leading a Klingon folk music sing-along during the crew’s last shore leave. He also had learned to cook a hasperat so spicy it could knock the nasal ridges off a Bajoran, and Dr. Cindrich, the ship’s chief medical officer, had described Raal’s unrestrained laughter as “infectious.”
Raal was unorthodox, brash, and sometimes a bit too obviously attracted to T’su for her comfort, but at times like this she was glad to have him close by. This was her first command, and although ferrying a contingent of Starfleet Corps of Engineers specialists wouldn’t have been her first choice of assignments, the past month had taught her it was rarely boring. Through it all, Raal had proved himself to be an exemplary first officer, the one T’su could always count on in a crisis.
But this crisis was getting too close for comfort.
“Lieutenant Ryan, stand by to deploy the Wildfire device on my mark. Helm, as soon as it’s away, get us out of here, best possible speed.”
Ryan and Fryar both acknowledged and continued to tap keys. “We’re ready, Captain,” Ryan said. T’su leaned forward in her seat, about to give the order, when the image on the main viewer
changed.
The low hum of activity on the bridge ceased as everyone turned toward the viewscreen. A latticework of glowing colors seemed to be growing around the ship like a coral reef; grids of light, in parallel and perpendicular rows, surrounded the Orion like a cage of energy. T’su snapped her crew back into action. “Tactical, what is that? Is it Tholian?”
“Negative, Captain. The energy signature doesn’t match any known configuration.”
T’su swiveled toward her science officer. “Yarrow, tell me something useful.”
Yarrow studied his display. T’su could tell something was wrong; when Yarrow was alarmed, his mane puffed out and his whiskers twitched. Right now, his mane was twice its normal size. “It’s a photonic energy grid, Captain, source unknown. I can’t determine its—”
“It’s shrinking!” Sunkulo said. T’su spun back toward the main viewer in time to see the image dissolve into static. Sunkulo’s console was rapidly dominated by warning lights. “We’re losing power all over the ship!”
T’su clenched her jaw as a powerful shock wave rattled the ship. “All decks! Damage reports!”
“We just lost comms,” said Ryan. He pressed futilely at his console, which was stuttering its way into darkness like every other panel on the bridge. T’su found herself barraged with reports from every direction at once. Helm wasn’t answering, auxiliary power was failing, tactical was offline. The voices overlapped, frantic and hoarse, struggling to be heard over the din of wrenching metal. One voice cut through the clamor, firm and quiet.
“Captain,” Raal said gravely. “We’re about to lose the structural integrity field.” T’su looked at Raal, saw the hardness of his expression, and realized this was the no-win scenario she’d been warned about at the Academy all those years ago. “Recommend we release the log buoy, sir.”
T’su nodded curtly, and felt her thoughts turn inward as Raal bellowed the order to Sunkulo. Seconds later, the buoy was away. T’su shivered from adrenaline overload as the bridge lights faded and the bridge slipped into total darkness. She covered her ears as the shrieking of the hull became deafening and the atmosphere’s turbulence hammered her ship.
As a flash of lightning a hundred times larger than anything T’su had ever seen on Earth tore through the bridge, the last thing she felt was a hand on her shoulder.
Chapter
2
Bart Faulwell strolled into the da Vinci’s mess hall and passed Carol Abramowitz on his way to the replicator. He glanced at the short, dark-haired woman, who was so deeply engrossed in whatever she was reading on a Starfleet-issue padd that she had allowed her raisin oatmeal to go cold and congeal into a hardened mass in the bowl in front of her.
“The butler did it,” he said. Abramowitz seemed not to notice his comment. Then, with some effort, she pulled her attention away from her reading material.
“Huh?”
“I said, ‘The butler did it.’” He noted the complete lack of comprehension in the cultural specialist’s expression. “You were so entranced,” he said, “I figured you must be reading a mystery of some sort.”
“No, no. Actually, I’ve been fascinated by Keorgan art ever since that mission we went on with Soloman a few months ago. I had no idea their photonic cloud sculptures could be so elaborate. Understanding their aesthetic is like opening a door into their collective psyche.”
“Sounds fascinating,” he said. “Want to see something completely different?” Abramowitz looked up at the bearded, middle-aged cryptographer and linguist. He was keenly excited about his latest endeavor and was certain that if he didn’t show someone soon, he’d simply burst. Carol put down her padd and sighed.
“My answer makes no difference, does it?”
“Not really.” Faulwell turned to the replicator. “Computer: Faulwell Test One.” With an almost musical hum of activity, a swirling vortex of molecules began to reorganize themselves inside the replicator’s service area. A few seconds later, a dog-eared and coffee-stained leather-bound copy of Melville’s Moby-Dick had formed.
Faulwell picked up the book, flipped it open to its title page, and handed it to Abramowitz. She examined it and saw his signature, the ink seemingly as fresh as if he had just signed it. “Perfect, right?” he said. “Accurate down to the indentation the pen made in the page. It even has the same smell as the original,” which, he noted with pleasure, was a comingling of old paper and worn leather.
She looked back up at Faulwell. “So?” He picked up the book and snapped it shut in one hand with a theatrical flourish.
“The point, my unobservant friend, is that for the past year, I’ve been a fool.”
“I could have told you that.”
“More specifically,” Faulwell said, ignoring her remark, “I’ve been writing my letters to Anthony on paper and reading them to him in subspace messages. Then, on those rare occasions when I get to see him in person, I’ve been giving him letters he’s already heard me read to him.”
“So you’ve decided to start reading him chapters from Moby-Dick? That’s romantic,” she deadpanned. He sat down across from her and held up the book in both hands.
“What if I told you this book is actually still in my quarters right now? Or, I should say, the original is still in my quarters.”
Abramowitz caught on. “You made a replicator pattern of your book.”
“Exactly. And I can do the same for my letters to Anthony and send them to him, attached to subspace messages.”
She took the book from him and began flipping through it. “Very clever. You worked this out yourself?”
Faulwell shrugged. “I had some help from Diego,” he said, referring to the da Vinci’s transporter chief, Diego Feliciano. “He seemed happy to have a project to work on,” Faulwell said. “I think he’s as bored as the rest of us, going around in circles out here.”
“You see, that’s your problem: you don’t know how to appreciate downtime.” She put down the book, stood up and placed her bowl of now rock-hard oatmeal back into the replicator for matter reclamation. She touched the control pad, and the bowl vanished in a whirlpool of dissociated atoms. She turned back toward Faulwell. “Gomez and her team are having a grand old time building their…whatever it is—”
“It’s a mobile mining platform and refinery.”
“Whatever. There’s no one trying to steal it, kill us, or start a war. Do you want Gold to send us off to some remote planet? With no backup or hope of rescue when our supposedly simple mission inevitably goes tragically wrong?”
He pretended to think about that for a moment, even though he knew the answer was obvious. “No.”
Abramowitz leaned in close and whispered into his ear with an intensity that was only half in jest. “Then shut up.”
* * *
Captain David Gold lay on his back on the biobed, with his arms folded behind his head, admiring the details of the ceiling of the da Vinci sickbay. Dr. Elizabeth Lense, the ship’s chief medical officer, stood beside the bed and methodically waved her medical scanner back and forth above her commanding officer’s torso. The scanner’s high-pitched oscillations rose and fell in a steady cadence.
“Three minutes you’ve been scanning the same spot,” Gold said. “Maybe something I should know?”
“No, sir. Physically, you check out in perfect shape.”
“You mean, for a man my age.”
“No, I mean you’re in perfect shape.” She put away her medical scanner and entered some notes on a padd. “Though I am considering putting you down for a psychiatric consult.”
Gold sat up slightly, supporting himself on his elbows. His white eyebrows were raised in an expression of displeased surprise. “Excuse me?”
Lense held her poker face for a very long two seconds, then broke into a wide grin. “You might be the first captain in Starfleet history to volunteer for his annual physical.” Gold’s expression softened, and he swung his legs off the bed and sat up. “Most skippers,” Lense added, “have to b
e hounded like a Ferengi on tax day to show up for their exam.”
Gold stood and stretched his lean, thin body. He let out a relieved groan as the crick in his back went pop and vanished.
“How do you think I stay in such good shape? Not by ignoring my doctors.” Gold picked up his uniform jacket from on top of the console next to the bed. He put it on and studied Lense as she walked to her desk and transferred her notes into the computer. “And how have you been, Doctor?”
“You mean physically?” she said, in a tone that let Gold know she understood exactly what he was really asking. A few weeks earlier, he had had to call her to task for letting her work slip because of problems with depression. She had begun relying too much on Emmett, the ship’s Emergency Medical Hologram, to handle her everyday patient care. Gold, fortunately, had stepped in and helped Lense get back on track.
“I mean, in general,” he said.
Lense sat down in her chair, her posture straight yet relaxed. “Busy, believe it or not,” she said. She folded her hands in front of her. “With security and engineering escalating their little practical joke war over the past two weeks, I’ve had to deal with some interesting cases. Lipinski and Robins came in with the ends of their hair fused together at a molecular level.” She chortled softly and shook her head. “The smell was horrendous. Separating them without shaving their heads made for a very entertaining afternoon.”
Gold chuckled. “I’m sure it did. Any idea who the culprit was?”
Lense nodded. “My best guess would be Conlon.”
“Mine, too. And you avoided answering my question.”
Lense tapped her index finger on the desktop for a moment. “You’re right. But I think what you need is a second opinion. Computer, activate Emergency Medical Hologram.”
A blurry, humanoid-shaped holographic image appeared between Lense and Gold and quickly formed into the trim, dark-skinned, and friendly visage of Emmett. He came into focus, surveyed the serene sickbay, and smiled at Gold. “Good afternoon, Captain,” he said, then turned his head to offer a friendly nod to Lense. “Doctor.”
