Missing in Action

by Peter David

  “And you base that assessment on your many years of medical research?”

  Tania scowled. “Obviously not. But…”

  “No. There is no ‘but’ at the end of that sentence,” Selar told her firmly. “Need I remind you—and apparently, I do indeed have to—that a crewman returning to duty is not a given. Any crewman who has been disabled requires my certification that they are fit to return to their normal post. Your collapse is entirely without known cause, and I cannot possibly predict when, or if, there will be a recurrence. Under those circumstances, I would be derelict in my duty as CMO to send you back to your post at ops. The captain requires someone he can rely on, not someone who is a threat to fly apart for no discernible reason. Have I made myself clear, Lieutenant?” When Tania didn’t respond immediately, Selar prompted, “Lieutenant?”

  “Very clear, Doctor.”

  “Good.” She pointed to the isolation ward, a sectioned-off part of sickbay used for extended observation. Without a word, Tania headed off toward it, walking in the gingerly manner of someone who hasn’t used their leg muscles for a while.

  Selar watched her go, then turned her attention back to Xy. Her eyebrows knitted as she glanced at the work he was carrying. “And what are you up to?” she demanded.

  “Trying to develop something that may kill the captain.”

  “Let me know how that goes,” replied Selar, as she turned and headed back to the observation ward.

  Xy watched her go, and then his gaze settled on Tania. She was staring out at him from behind the enclosed partition. There was a sadness in her expression, but also a quiet sense of resolve. She knew this was only temporary. They can’t hold me here forever.

  She blinked at the same time that Xy did, and he back-pedaled, confused and concerned. He had no idea whether that last thought had been his own…or if he’d picked it up from Tania. Except, despite his Vulcan heritage, he’d never shown any proclivity for telepathy.

  Which meant either he was imagining it…or there was a new wrinkle in his mind…or Tania’s mind had somehow connected with his and she had been the one to initiate the contact.

  Xy stared at her, but Tania quickly turned away from him, leaving him staring at her back and resolving to do some serious research into the background of one Tania Tobias.

  Space Station Bravo

  i.

  “I hate men.”

  It was Robin Lefler who had spoken at that particular moment, but at that point all she was doing was echoing the earlier-stated sentiments of the other two women in the room. The room, in this instance, was Elizabeth Shelby’s quarters. The get-together had moved from the more formal environs of her office to the more leisurely, laid-back surroundings of her quarters.

  They had kicked off their boots and let down their hair…in Mueller’s case, literally. Her long blond hair, usually tied back, hung down to her shoulders and occasionally obscured her face. In the earlier part of the evening as the drinking had commenced, she had endeavored to brush it out of her line of sight. By this point, she wasn’t even bothering, allowing it to hang in her face while she endeavored to look between the strands.

  Shelby was draped over her bed, while Mueller was slumped back in a chair. Robin Lefler had thrown herself across the couch, and was staring with intense fascination into the glass of Orion whiskey she was nursing. “I hate men,” she repeated.

  “Any particular men?” asked Shelby.

  “The ones I know.”

  “Oh, okay. Well…at least it’s not all men, then.”

  Shelby was feeling a pleasant buzzing in her head. She suspected the other two were feeling it as well. She knew better than to drink so much that she would be unable to function should an emergency come up. The joy of synthehol, of course, was that one could shake off the effects at a moment’s notice. Genuine alcohol, such as what they were drinking now—a gift from Shelby’s loving husband the last time he’d come by—required far more moderation. It was a fine line and she had no intention of crossing it.

  As for Mueller, the woman absorbed alcohol the way black holes absorbed light. Shelby had no idea how much liquor Kat had consumed, but she didn’t appear to be in the least bit diminished.

  Lefler, on the other hand, was completely hammered. Propping herself up on her elbow, she looked up blearily at Kat and asked, her speech slightly slurred, “What was I just talking about?”

  “Men,” Kat reminded her.

  “Oh. Right. Men.” She flopped back down, resting her head on her biceps. “I hate Henri L’Ecole, who talks to me like I’m an idiot. I hate Xyon for causing all the problems with Kalinda. And more than any of them, I have a deep, abiding, unforgettable, immortal hatred for…” She blinked like an owl in daylight. “What’s his name?”

  “Si Cwan? Your husband?”

  “Right.” She pointed at Shelby, who had just spoken. “That guy. Any woman has to be totally insane to become involved with Si Cwan in any way, shape, or form.”

  Mueller pointedly cleared her throat. Shelby, in spite of her foul mood, smiled, knowing that Mueller had been briefly involved with Si Cwan.

  It seemed that Lefler had forgotten, though, for she misunderstood Mueller’s throat-clearing noise, pointed at the Trident captain, and said, “See? She agrees with me.”

  “Whatever you say, Robin,” Mueller said politely.

  The women had been talking almost nonstop since congregating in Shelby’s quarters. Now, though, silence fell, and with it a general black mood that matched Shelby’s own. She rolled back on the bed, her legs crossed at the ankles, her arms flung to either side.

  Shelby said, “So this is what command comes down to. This is what having power means. Lying around, doing nothing, because someone in a higher position of command than you tells you to stay put.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Lefler. “What’s the point of having authority and power if you can’t command someone to blow up someone else whenever you feel like.”

  “No point at all,” Shelby said. She closed her eyes and stared with fascination at the insides of her eyelids. “God, I miss him. I miss Mac so much, and I want to go help him, but I can’t. I can’t because I have to sit here with my high rank and not accomplish a damned thing.”

  “At least you have a rank,” Lefler reminded her.

  “So do you.”

  “Yeah, but I mean at least you have responsibilities to go with the rank. I had responsibilities, but now I’ve got nothing, thanks to my husband, whom I hate. And now I have to sit around and wait until new responsibilities are assigned to me. By a man.”

  “Who you’ll hate,” Mueller reminded her.

  “Well, not at the moment, but once I meet him, sure.”

  “You could,” Shelby pointed out, “get your new assignment from a woman. Would that help?”

  “No, it wouldn’t help!” Lefler said in exasperation. She tried to sit up, but her eyes spun in their sockets and she flopped back down again. Her battered sense of dignity prompted her to pretend that she’d intended for that to happen. “It wouldn’t help because I should be helping Si Cwan…”

  “Just like I should be helping Mac,” said Shelby.

  Lefler managed a nod, which was not an easy thing since the room was determined to spin around when she did it. “Instead he ships me off like I’m…I’m…”

  “A woman?” suggested Mueller.

  “Excess baggage.”

  “And isn’t that typical of men?” Mueller said. Disdaining a glass, she simply took a slug of the whiskey straight out of the bottle. “To regard women as excess baggage? A convenience but little more.”

  Shelby lay there for a time and then, still staring up at the ceiling, she said, “No.”

  “No?” Mueller seemed intrigued by the disagreement.

  “No.” She forced herself to sit up. “What are we talking about here? Making sweeping generalizations about men, as if all of any group—men, women, humans, whatever—are all the same. And we’re only
doing it as some sort of a…a group exercise in delusion. Pretending en masse that we don’t care about the men in our lives when the fact is that we’re as miserable as we are because we care so much. So who do we think we’re fooling?”

  “You certainly had me going,” said Mueller.

  Shelby made a dismissive gesture. “Knock it off, Kat. It’s nonsense, and you know it’s nonsense. And you’re just egging us on because you don’t have a man or a serious relationship in your life, and it’s bothering the hell out of you.”

  “The lack of relationships in my life is not bothering the hell out of me,” Kat replied. “It’s a matter of choice. Of necessity.”

  “Oh, bull. It’s only ‘necessary’ because you choose to make it so.” She suddenly became hyperaware of the fact that the space station was turning in a slow orbit. This was routine, of course, and the rotation was so gradual that one couldn’t feel it any more than they could sense the turn of a planet. Now, though, she was feeling positively dizzy. She forced herself to continue speaking, even though the words sounded heavy in her mouth. “You’re the one who decided that captaincy requires isolation and loneliness. Mac and I were both captains, and neither of us felt the need to be isolated.”

  “Yes. And look how that turned out.”

  Shelby’s gaze hardened. She pointed a finger and said, “Get out.”

  To her surprise, Mueller actually looked contrite. “Admiral, I…apologize for that remark, it was…”

  “Go!” snapped Shelby, refusing to be mollified. She continued to point in a commanding fashion. “Go! Right now!”

  “But—”

  “Go! That’s an order!”

  Without another word, Mueller rose, bowed slightly, and then headed in the direction that Shelby was indicating. The door slid open and Mueller stepped through, letting the door close behind her.

  The door opened once more and Kat reentered. Before Shelby could say anything, Mueller spoke with quiet intensity. “You know what we should do? We should just say to hell with it. We should just go after them. The three of us commiserating and being depressed and feeling helpless…you know what it is?”

  “A waste of material?”

  Mueller pointed at Shelby and then touched the tip of her own nose. “Exactly. Exactly right, Elizabeth. A damned waste of fine material. And of resources.”

  “She’s right, y’know,” said Lefler, who was working extremely hard to put coherent syllables together. “How’re we s’posed to be serving Starfleet to the best of our considerable abilities when we’re perfectly content to sit around on our assets.”

  “Who says we’re ‘content’?” demanded Shelby.

  “I know I didn’t.”

  “Nor did I,” said Mueller. “How can it remotely be considered a reasonable use of resources, dispatching the Trident to transport passengers hither and yon, when we can be so much more. When we should be so much more.”

  “It’s a disservice. It’s wrong,” Lefler said.

  Shelby nodded thoughtfully. “My father always taught me that, when I see a wrong occurring, I had a moral imperative to try and make things right.”

  “Yes!” Mueller declared. “A moral imperative! That’s what this is! Your father was absolutely right.”

  “He always was. Or at least he always said he always was.” She considered the matter further. “Here’s what we should do.” The other women leaned forward, Lefler almost toppling over, to hear her next words. “I should take command of the Trident…which I’m within my rights to do, as a ranking officer. You might, of course, take offense at that…”

  “And yet, somehow, I don’t,” Mueller deadpanned.

  “I inform the ambassadors to Ares IV that we’re going to arrange alternate transportation for them.”

  “Let ’em walk!” slurred Lefler.

  “Then I take the Trident back into Sector 221-G, we find Mac, we sort out this business with the Priatians, and we get this stupid civil war under control before matters go from bad to worse.”

  “Hear, hear!” Lefler cried out, raising her glass and causing liquid to slosh out the sides. She didn’t appear to notice.

  “That, Admiral, is one hell of a damned fine plan,” said Mueller before yawning loudly.

  “Yeah? I’ll tell you what kind of plan it is,” Shelby said. “It’s the kind of plan where, when you wake up in the morning, you say to yourself, ‘What the hell was I thinking?’ ”

  “I disagree.”

  “All right then,” said Shelby, who felt ready to pass out. “Here’s the plan. We sleep on it, and when the dawn comes, we’re going to see things in an entirely different light.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” Robin declared. Then she paused and frowned. “Wait…is this a different plan now? Or is it the same plan except kind of revised?”

  “It’s a plan to make a plan,” Shelby told her.

  “Hear, hear!” Robin tried to take another slug of the whiskey, but was less than successful as the glass bumped against the side of her face and the liquor spilled down her cheek. Instead of moaning or trying to wipe the liquor away, she simply laughed and pointed at it before yawning deeply and then slumping over to one side.

  “Wow,” said Shelby, staring at Robin’s unmoving form. “She really can’t hold her liquor, can she.” At which point she rolled over, closed her eyes, and fell sound asleep.

  Mueller studied the two of them. “All right, this is just disappointing,” she said to no one. She emptied out the remainder of the bottle of whiskey, then leaned back in her chair and stared into space. Her mind went into a sort of Zen state as she contemplated the options presented her, weighed the possibilities, and realized that if they truly did undertake the endeavor being considered, it might well cost Shelby her rank. And perhaps Mueller, and even Lefler as well.

  At that moment, she didn’t especially care about that. All she cared about was not feeling the way she was feeling these days. She was tired of feeling lonely. She was tired of feeling helpless and out of control, the recent ugliness with Romeo Takahashi being only the latest example of that.

  She felt as if this harebrained scheme might be her best shot at taking back control of her life. That she would be sending a message not only to Starfleet, but to herself, that Kat Mueller could be as wild, as unpredictable, as…as…

  …as Mackenzie Calhoun. Well, that was it, wasn’t it. Even when he was gone—possibly forever—the long reach of the way he conducted himself remained the standard for sheer ludicrous bravado that any commanding officer worth his or her salt could not help but emulate.

  Kat Mueller believed in efficiency. In organization. In order. Now, though, she was contemplating tossing all that aside…so that she could believe in herself.

  It seemed a worthwhile trade to her, and that was the last thing that filtered through her mind before she drifted off to sleep.

  Hours later, when Elizabeth Shelby woke up, her mouth felt as if it had been stuffed with cotton wads. She tried to sit up, moaned softly, and flopped back on the bed.

  As soft as the moan was, it was sufficient to awaken Lefler, who sat up violently and then clutched at her head and slumped back onto the couch. Mueller, for her part, was sitting perfectly upright in a lotus position. As she became aware that there was movement in the room, her eyelids fluttered for a moment and then opened. Her eyes had rolled up into their sockets but now returned to their normal position and focused on Shelby.

  There was dead silence that was finally broken by the admiral.

  “I’m not ready to mourn my husband.”

  “Nor I,” said Mueller. “Nor am I ready to do nothing in a situation where my doing something could have positive consequences.”

  “And I’m…” Lefler started to speak, then winced at the volume of her own voice and continued in a whisper, “And I’m not ready to just let my husband shunt me aside.”

  “So essentially,” Shelby observed, “the dawn has come, which should be the time that we see thin
gs in a new and more sensible light…and yet we’re still talking about ignoring Starfleet orders up one side and down the other, and potentially throwing away our careers. Where’s our common sense? Where’s our belief in the righteousness of the chain of command? Has Mackenzie Calhoun’s cowboy mentality infected all of us? What, ladies, is the answer here?”

  They pondered it for a time, and then Mueller noted, “It occurs to me that there’s no such thing as ‘dawn’ on a space station.”

  Shelby considered that and then a slow smile spread across her face. “That’s good enough for me,” she said.

  ii.

  Ambassador Julian Fox and his entourage were standing on the bridge of the Trident, waiting for the return of her captain. Fox came from a long and proud line of ambassadors. He was broad-shouldered, square-jawed, and had drilled into him by his grandfather never to allow starship captains to give him any guff. His grandfather had had a run-in with no less a legend than James Kirk, and to hear Julian’s grandfather tell it, the whole damned crew of the Enterprise would have been dead thanks to Kirk’s recklessness if he, Grandfather, had not stepped in and taken control of the situation. Julian Fox was determined to follow that fine example set by his forebears.

  Fox folded his arms and said brusquely to Commander Desma, “This is intolerable. We need to be on our way to Ares IV. Where is Captain Mueller?”

  “My understanding,” Desma said carefully, “is that she’s in conference with Admiral Shelby.”

  “Still? She’s been there for…what? Twelve hours? Thirteen?”

  “Apparently they have a good deal to discuss,” said Desma.

  Suddenly the turbolift door slid open and Mueller strode out. Then Desma saw who was behind her and immediately she was on her feet, calling out, “Admiral on the bridge!”

  Instantly everyone stood as Shelby walked onto the bridge of the Trident. She smiled as if she found the entire thing quite amusing. “Well, this is a new experience. If you’d jumped to your feet like this while I was captain here, I might never have taken the promotion. At ease.” Everyone began to sit, and then she immediately added, “Except you, Hash.”