by David Mack
Now they all plodded in single file and aggrieved silence.
Have to save our air, Kilaris told herself. She wondered whether the Nausicaans had even considered supplying her or the other prisoners with enough air for the return trip. Once we finish whatever it is they’ve brought us here to do, they might have no reason to bring us back.
Varoh led them up a narrow passage through a wall of jutting rocks. The gap’s sides were unnaturally straight and clean. Kilaris touched one with her gloved palm. Its surface was glassy smooth. Cut by an energy weapon, she realized.
As she neared the crest of the carved pass, she saw what lay on the far side.
Embedded at an angle in the planet’s surface was a huge starship. Never before had Kilaris seen one of similar design, but some of the markings on its fractured outer hull were of unmistakable provenance. This wreck had been a Husnock vessel.
It had slammed into a mountainside of jagged rock formations and buried one side of itself in the stone. There were no gouges in the planet’s surface leading to the crash, which led Kilaris to suspect the vessel had survived a nearly direct impact. For the ship to be even partially intact after such a calamity was most remarkable.
Varoh pointed at an open wound in the hull. His voice sounded tinny through Kilaris’s helmet transceiver. “We enter there.” He looked Kilaris in the eye. “Then you work.”
As close as the crashed vessel appeared, it still took the group nearly an hour to reach the break in its hull. Wind-blown sand spilled into the ship in a steady flow, then vanished through cracks in the deck and bulkheads. Varoh activated a palm beacon. Its beam slashed blue and cold through the deep shadows inside the derelict ship. “This way,” he said.
Kilaris had hoped that moving around inside the ship would be easier than traversing the moon’s surface. Once inside she saw that was not the case. Because of the angle at which the ship had come to rest, all its decks and bulkheads were skewed at odd angles. Worse, its crash had inflicted serious interior damage. As she and the others followed Varoh deep inside the wreck, she saw bulkheads that had buckled or broken apart. Gaps in the sloped decks fell away into abysses of twisted metal, dangling cables, and shattered machinery.
Pek wondered over the open channel, “Does he even know where he’s going?”
“Quiet,” Slokar said. “No more questions, or I bleed you.”
Though Kilaris had known the answer to Pek’s question, she had kept it to herself. From the moment they had set foot inside the crashed starship, she had noted the fluorescent yellow markings painted by hand at regular intervals on the bulkheads—some in characters unique to the dominant Nausicaan language, others just simple directional notations. The symbols had glowed when the beam from Varoh’s palm beacon played across them.
It was clear to her that the Nausicaans had been to this vessel before, had scouted it in detail. They likely had encountered unsafe passages, dead ends, and other hazards. Not being fools, once they confirmed a safe route through the wreckage, they marked it. Those symbols were a map out of this place. If Kilaris could avoid letting the Nausicaans know that she had discovered this, they might underestimate her at a key moment, thereby affording her a chance to put this knowledge to use. And if it should facilitate their deaths, so much the better.
Varoh ducked through a break in a bulkhead, then used his weapon to beckon Kilaris to follow him. She did so, and was followed inside by Pek, and then by the last two Nausicaans with the Bynars on their backs. Once they all were inside the cavernous chamber, whose center was dominated by a machine that resembled a massive pipe organ Kilaris had once seen on Earth, the Bynars were dropped to the angled deck and left to pick themselves up again.
Slokar looked at his men and pointed at a dark bank of computer consoles. “Power.” His men hurried to the consoles and started keying in commands. As they worked, the consoles surged to life, and Kilaris was surprised to see they sported Federation-standard interfaces.
A deep hum filled the silo-like space. Kilaris searched for the source of the mellisonant vibrations and found a portable fusion generator that looked to be of Klingon design. More consoles awakened, spilling blue and orange light in all directions. As the space brightened, Kilaris saw the tangled nest of cables packed against its edges. They were a mishmash of power lines, ODN fibers, and grounding cables. By their colors and other markings she could see they hailed from a variety of sources: Cardassian, Romulan, Starfleet, and some she didn’t recognize. They must have sourced all this equipment on the black market, she deduced.
The Nausicaans finished activating their hodgepodge of mismatched components while Slokar kept his eye on Kilaris and the others. Groaning winds resounded in the emptiness of the dead ship around them, but inside what Kilaris now could see was a multilevel, vertical cylinder of space, the peculiar machine at its heart pulsed with ever-changing hues of light and thrummed with palpable energies.
Varoh, Zallas, and Motar stepped away from the consoles. Slokar used his weapon to direct Kilaris, Pek, and the Bynars to take over where his men had left off.
“This”—he glanced at the conglomeration of cylinders—“is Husnock computer core. You break encryption. Get us command codes for ship.” He moved to Kilaris’s side, close enough that had they not been wearing environmental suits, she might have felt his breath on her neck. “You have one hour. Then—” He raised his disruptor to the side of her head and mimed pulling the trigger. “Understand?”
“Perfectly,” Kilaris said, knowing it was what the brute wanted to hear.
“No tricks.” Slokar tapped the side of his helmet. “We hear what you say.”
The Nausicaans withdrew to the far side of the compartment to await the fruits of the prisoners’ labors. Pek and the Bynars stared at Kilaris, as if she would know what to tell them to do next. All she knew was that she understood the Nausicaan leader’s wishes all too well.
He wants us to do the impossible—and will kill us if we fail.
She breathed a quiet sigh of exasperation. Most illogical.
Everyone’s focus was sharp on the bridge of the Titan as the ship dropped out of warp, followed closely by the Canterbury. From her seat beside the captain, Sarai alternated her attention between the tactical data on her command display and the annotated imagery on the main viewscreen, which showed a ringed gas giant with several moons of varying sizes and types.
Vale leaned toward Sarai and said simply, “Find that ship, Number One.”
Sarai stood. “Mister Tuvok, where does the trail lead from here?”
The Vulcan furrowed his brow at the sensor data on his console. “Difficult to say. Intense radiation from the gas giant is masking the kidnappers’ impulse signature and interfering with our sensors.” Tapping in new commands, he added, “Attempting to compensate.”
Sarai decided to make the problem’s resolution a team effort. “Rager, work with Tuvok to filter out the radiation interference. Lieutenant Torvig, stand ready to coordinate assistance from the engineering department as needed. We might need to modify the sensor array.” The operations officer and engineering liaison nodded their acknowledgments of her orders, so she faced the security chief. “Keru, figure out which moons the kidnappers’ ship could have landed on, then dispatch probes to scan their surfaces with optical sensors.”
“Scan them old-school,” Keru confirmed. “Aye, sir.”
“Helm,” Sarai continued, “put us in orbit of the nearest candidate moon. Ops, augment our optical scans of that moon with a narrow-frequency search for concentrations of duranium high enough to suggest the presence of a starship.”
The crew settled into their tasks, and for a few minutes the bridge was quiet except for the soft music of computer feedback tones and the muted susurrus of intraship comm chatter. Sarai returned to her chair and continued to review new tactical intel on her monitor. She and Captain Vale looked up at the sound of the turbolift doors opening. They stood as Admiral Riker stepped onto the bridge and beelined
toward them. “How goes the hunt, Captain?”
Vale said, “Methodically, sir.”
“Well, if there’s anything we can do to move things along, we—”
“Excuse me, Admiral,” Tuvok cut in. “Commander? I have something. Optical scans by one of our probes have identified what appears to be the wreckage of a starship.”
The captain took over. “Put it on the main screen, with telemetry.”
An image hashed with static shivered on the main viewscreen. Through the digital snow and wavy lines of interference, Sarai recognized the angular shapes of a starship’s hull—or, to be more precise, half of a starship’s hull. The rest of it appeared to be buried in a mountainside spiked with bladelike rock formations.
Riker stared at the image, his expression a mix of wonder and horror. He spoke in a haunted whisper. “That’s a Husnock ship.” He looked at Tuvok. “How long has it been there?”
The Vulcan gave a small shake of his head. “Unknown, sir. Precise scans are unreliable because of the radiation from the gas giant.”
Melora Pazlar swiveled her chair away from the sciences console. “Based on the erosion of the hull and the penetration of sand drifts into its ruptures, as well as the absence of any visible crash path on the moon’s surface, I would estimate the vessel has been here for at least a decade, perhaps longer. If I were to offer an educated guess, I would place the time of its crash sometime shortly after the extermination of the Husnock species.”
Taking a moment to review the sensor data on her own console, Sarai zoomed out five percent to survey the region surrounding the derelict. At once her eye fixed upon another glint of metal on the surface. She relayed a magnification of that object to the main viewscreen. “There’s something else down there.” The moment the enlarged image appeared on the forward screen, she recognized the vessel’s shape. “That’s the ship we’ve been chasing.”
Intrigued, Vale asked, “Distance from the Husnock vessel?”
“Nine point six kilometers,” Sarai said. “It appears their landing site was dictated by the size of their ship, which suggests they aren’t carrying any auxiliary spacecraft.”
“What about partners?” asked Keru. “Or rivals, for that matter?”
Rager looked up from the ops panel. “I’m not reading any other ships in the system—but with all this radiation clouding our sensors, I can’t guarantee we’re alone.”
Tuvok switched the main screen back to the image of the Husnock ship, this time at a greater magnification than before. “There appear to be fresh footprints leading toward the ship.”
That detail garnered the admiral’s attention. “Can we tell how many people? Or if the prisoners are inside the ship?”
“Negative,” Tuvok said. “Though there seem to be several sets of footprints, they overlap and obscure one another, suggesting the group moved single file.”
“That said,” interjected Keru, “we have a downed Husnock vessel, and the scientists abducted by the Nausicaans were a starship engineer, a xenolinguist who’s just made a major breakthrough in the Husnock language, and a Bynar pair who have been studying Husnock computers for the past few years. If the Nausicaans haven’t taken the prisoners inside that ship, I for one will be very surprised.”
“As will I,” Riker said. “Let’s beam down an away team, on the double.”
“Sorry, sir,” Sarai said, “no transporters, on account of the radiation. And anyone we deploy to the surface will need to suit up for EVA. The good news is, we can land a lot closer to that wreck in a runabout than the Nausicaans could with their ship.”
Riker nodded. “All right. Have the Nechako prepped for liftoff as soon as my away team joins me in the shuttlebay.”
Sarai traded a knowing look with the captain, then said to Riker, “Admiral, this op is likely to involve close-quarters battle. If you lead the team, I’ll have to insist on joining you.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way. Assemble your team and meet me in the Nechako.”
“Aye, sir.” Sarai followed Riker to the turbolift as she added, “Keru, you’re with me.” The security chief fell in beside her as they entered the turbolift and she tapped her combadge. “Sarai to sh’Aqabaa, Modan, and Sethe: report to the main shuttlebay immediately.”
Knowing that lives were hanging in the balance, Vale felt as if her every thought and action were mired in mud. Still, she did her best to present a confident façade from the center seat of Titan’s bridge. Around her, the other bridge officers submerged themselves into their assigned tasks, but there was naught for Vale to do but watch the main viewscreen and observe the quickly receding shimmer of the Nechako, which streaked toward the rocky moon and a confrontation with armed and dangerous adversaries.
Project calm, she reminded herself. Embody professionalism. Her mantra was interrupted by the chirp of an incoming transmission on Tuvok’s console. The Vulcan silenced the alert and said, “Captain? A private transmission for you from Captain Scarfield on the Wasp.”
Thank God—something to do. She stood. “I’ll take it in my ready room.”
Vale stepped off the bridge and into her sanctum—just one of the privileges of command she had learned to appreciate since her promotion to captain. Though the ready room had been hers to personalize for several months, she had yet to dress it up with personal items or creature comforts. On a certain level, she liked the room the way it was: simple, functional, and private. She settled into her chair and activated her desk’s holographic comm screen. The state-of-the-art interface automatically scanned her retinal pattern and genetic profile, then opened the channel.
Captain Scarfield’s face appeared inside the holoframe. “Christine, I have good news and bad news. Got a preference for which comes first?”
“Life is short, Fiona. Start with the good.”
The dark-haired woman transferred over a packet of sensor logs on the data subchannel while she spoke. “We tracked the first signal to a subspace repeater buoy in deep space.”
“Any idea who put it there?”
“We have a few theories,” Scarfield said. “It was a patchwork piece of tech—a piece from here, a piece from there, if you know what I mean.”
Vale nodded. “Black market. So probably the Orion Syndicate.”
“That’s our guess. There’s a few clever bits in the hardware and the programming, but none of it’s slick enough to make me think military operators put this in the field.” A dip of her chin. “Check the logs I just sent. My tactical officer hacked the buoy’s command-and-control.” She continued while Vale reviewed the logs on a second screen. “We used its transceiver to confirm that the other two Mayday calls we received came from more buoys linked to this one.”
“And that’s the good news?”
“No, the good news is my tac guy did some kind of techno-magic that made all three buoys generate a feedback loop that fried their onboard computers. So they won’t be clogging up our subspace channels anymore.” She took a mock bow. “You’re welcome.”
“Nicely done. And my commendations to your tac guy.” She resigned herself to facing the second part of Scarfield’s report. “Dare I ask what the bad news is?”
Scarfield’s good mood faded. “We’ve been noticing an uptick in weird activity since we fragged the buoys. Fleeting warp echoes in our baffles. Momentary pings at the edge of long-range sensors. Snippets of encrypted comm signals on ultralow subspace frequencies.”
“You think you’ve picked up a tail?”
“More than just a tail—I’d say we’ve picked up the whole tiger. The readings we’re seeing can’t all be from just one ship. We’ve got hits on multiple bearings, all at extreme range.”
“Have you tried launching passive probes to extend your sensor profile?”
“Sure.” The other captain shook her head. “Hasn’t worked. We’re still seeing ghosts and shadows. I’ve put us on an evasion course—doubling back, arbitrary changes in heading and speed—but I just can’t shake
the feeling we’re being followed by someone—or something.”
Vale couldn’t pretend not to be troubled by Scarfield’s news. “That doesn’t sound like the Orion Syndicate, Fiona. Anyone who can play cat and mouse with a Starfleet slipstream vessel must be some sort of professional military—possibly the sort that have cloaking devices.”
“My thinking exactly,” Scarfield said. “Whoever they are, I’m doing my best not to lead them back to you and the Canterbury. But I can only dodge ’em for so long.”
“I understand, and I appreciate what you’re doing. Whoever they are, keep them busy as long as you can—but if you feel like you’re getting boxed in, regroup with us immediately. If someone’s looking for a showdown, we’ll have better odds standing together.”
“Acknowledged. If we learn anything new, we’ll keep you posted. Wasp out.”
Scarfield’s face vanished, and the holoscreen went dark. Vale used the control panel on her desk to open a channel to the bridge. “Mister Tuvok, get me a secure channel to Captain Mareet on the Canterbury, and patch it through to my ready room.”
“Aye, Captain,” Tuvok replied over the comm. “Stand by.”
It took only a few seconds before Vale’s holoscreen activated again, this time to show the green-haired commanding officer of the Canterbury, a Catullan man just a few years older than Vale. Captain Arius Mareet greeted Vale with a warm smile. “Captain. What news?”
“Fiona and the Wasp have neutralized the phony distress signals, but they seem to have attracted mysterious and unwanted attention in the process.”
“What kind of attention?”
