by Diane Carey
“There could be plenty of reasons,” Jana mentioned.
M’Giia nodded. “And war could be one of them.”
“I never meant to imply that,” I told her sharply. I was losing control again! “If there’s trouble on the border, we’ll find out soon enough. Starfleet Academy isn’t exactly the first line of defense. Get back to work. The next command crew will be here in twenty minutes and this melt-down has to be put back together. Corin, just a minute.”
As I tugged him aside, he protested, “Again? I told you, I’m doing my best!”
“I don’t think so. You fumbled twice. You wasted seconds. We need those seconds. The team’s only as fast as its slowest reaction. Right now, that’s you.”
Corin’s dark face flushed with a touch of bronze, just enough to show me he was on the edge of blowing up. “We’ve been through this.”
“And we’ll go through it again until you deliver what you’re capable of. I want you to study the maneuver protocols for three hours solid before our next mission.”
Did I sound like a commander, or just bossy? What exactly was the difference? After two years in the Academy, I thought I knew, but now, standing at the delivering end instead of the receiving end…
Today only the uniform was keeping Corin from imploding my face. Sooner or later I had to get it right, with or without the uniform.
“Look,” he began slowly, then sighed. “This stuff … it kind of scares me. I could always do it, but I never had to take a bunch of responsibility. This stuff about the whole crew’s lives depending on me.”
Feeling as if my skin was tightening, I had no idea what to say to that. He’d gotten through the courses and the training and the rigors of the Academy well enough to make command school—that meant somebody saw a potential senior officer in him, or at least in his talents.
Now this had landed on me.
I drew a breath, then talked without letting it out.
“What you mean is, you’ve been avoiding real challenges all your life, you’ve been protected by your parents; wealth, and you liked it that way. Don’t you think it’s time to walk the wire without a net?”
His eyes turned hot and his brows came down.
“Why should I care what you think? I don’t need the Academy. In fact, I don’t need Starfleet. After all, I guess they got their fill of cowards.”
“Hold it—” I caught his arm as he tried to step past me. We did an awkward dance over the spilled cables and ended up turned around, but I managed to keep him from walking away. “If you keep backing off, nothing’ll ever improve.”
“Improve?” Corin shook his head and lowered his voice, trying to keep this between us and the snapping sparks on the consoles. “And if I don’t ‘improve,’ then everybody here is going to crash land? I don’t mind being dangerous to myself, but when I get dangerous for everybody else, it’s time to cut and run.”
Maintaining my grip on his arm, I told him, “That’s not acceptable and you know it.”
“Oh, really? Well, tell you what, Captain Kid, what happens if I work harder and then mess up anyway? What then?”
“Then we’ll be there to back you up,” I said bluntly. “That’s crew thinking.”
As if I knew.
Buoyed by my promise—a whopper, by the way—Corin seemed surprised for a few moments. His expression moved through a half dozen emotions, including disbelief. Gradually he slumped out his belligerence, paused, then nodded and looked up at me. “You’re going to see a big change.”
He nodded again in agreement with himself and escaped to the upper deck, where he started helping Sturek reposition the sensor trunk housing.
Was that all it took? A couple of phrases of encouragement? Reassurance that we’d stand behind him if he botched a maneuver? Good for me. I’d have to try this more often. If only I believed a word of it.
“Cadet Forester, report to the commandant’s office.”
The comm voice almost unstitched my skin. I dropped the hot spanner in my hand and tripped on the cables.
“What do they want?” Corin straightened and looked at the ceiling as if it might answer.
“You know what they want,” Jana said with a warning tone. “They monitor our performances console by console. Think they’re stupid?”
“No, I only think you’re stupid.”
Jana laughed at his lame response. “Oh, bet that one took brain power, Geoff.”
For the first time since—when had I heard his voice last?—Sturek turned and spoke up. His voice had a clear edge of annoyance that made us all pay close attention.
“This is unconstructive,” he said. “Such behavior risks our chances of succeeding as a command team. And I, for one, would rather not have on my record that my first command team fractured due to something as inefficiently visceral as personality clashes. Either fight with each other and be done with it, or decide not to. Make up your minds.”
We all fell suddenly silent, with me wishing I’d said that.
Feeling that the wrong person had been made commander of this team, I shuffled up the bridge steps toward the turbolift.
“What’re you going to tell them?” Corin asked.
M’Giia, Jana, Robin—they were all watching me.
I swept them with an unhappy gaze, which landed on Sturek’s displeased glare.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Guess we’ll find out.”
Chapter 5
“Come on, Corin, support her foot! No one person can climb this!”
The athletic grounds were breezy and bright as we engaged in the Academy’s idea of teamwork—working like dogs to climb a forty-foot tall artificial rock wall that nobody could climb alone. The whole thing was arranged that way—the only footholds and handholds were just at the right distance and stretch that we had to help each other at some point.
I’d made it to the top of the wall with Sturek’s help, and below us Jana and Corin were struggling up, with Jana above.
Corin’s brown face was pasted with sweat as he squinted up at me. “This is why civilized people invented transporters!”
“Come on, don’t gripe!” I called. “We could’ve died five times already at this pace!”
“David!” M’Giia came jogging across the ground, calling for me.
“Up here!” I leaned over to get her attention, and darned near fell. Only Sturek grabbing me by the waistband averted a really embarrassing and painful moment, despite safety lines.
She shaded her eyes and squinted into the sunlight. “Commander Rotherot wants you to report to his office as soon as you finish on the field.”
“Acknowledged. Tell him I’ll be there. As soon as Corin gets his center of gravity up here. Come on, Corin!”
“It’s just a drill, Forester. Our lives aren’t really on the line.”
“Wrong. If you don’t step it up, I’ll kill you.”
“I expected better from you and your crew.”
Wounds came from phasers, wounds came from knives, sparks, fists, but nobody ever told me that wounds came from senior officers.
Commandant Rotherot’s simple sentence bruised me from my forehead to my anklebones. The sting of humiliation cut deep, but there was only one response a cadet could possibly make.
“Yes, sir. So did I.”
Rotherot occupied himself with wiping up a dribble of what seemed to be tea, since that’s what he was drinking, from the corner of his desk. “Despite your efforts, Corin’s scores are still under par, and Engineer Brady’s responses are less than innovative, and your communications officer seems distracted at best.”
“Yes, sir. And, sir, in fairness I have to inform you that my own performance has been less than inspired.”
“Really?” A deep voice sounded over by the couch.
Captain Sulu was leaning on the window brace, looking out over the athletic grounds where six squads of freshman cadets were running through midday drills.
“Command evades you, Cadet?” he went on when
I didn’t answer his non-question.
“It confuses me, sir,” I admitted, anxious to vector the conversation off my team and onto myself. “But I’m aware of the problems, sir, and the team is pulling together to solve them.”
“Be specific,” Sulu instructed. “What kind of problems?”
My boots were suddenly tight. “Personality conflicts, sir.”
Moving the neat stacks of papers on his desk to wipe under them, Rotherot paused suddenly and looked up. “Are you going to complain about personality conflicts when a Klingon heavy cruiser is barreling down on you? Do you know what you’ll be up against? They’ve got a whole new—”
“Commandant,” Sulu cut him off briskly.
Rotherot’s beefy face flushed pink, and he almost seemed to have been punched. He stood there, half bent over his desk, holding the cloth he’d been using to clean in one hand and the stack of papers he’d moved in the other. And he stared at Sulu, then at me.
What was that about? What was there about Klingon heavy cruisers that would make Sulu tell Rotherot to stop talking about them?
A chill ran down my back, swelling up a sensation of having been through this before. Something about this conversation was naggingly familiar…
“Sir,” I began, and suddenly my throat seized up. I knew what I wanted to ask, but the actual business of asking turned my stomach upside down.
Sulu came around in front of me and sat on the corner of Rotherot’s desk. Man, were they different from each other!
“Go ahead, Cadet,” he prodded. “What is it?”
“Sir, how do I … replace a member of my crew?”
Oh—ow! God, where was the wastebasket! I had to throw up!
If only I even knew who I was talking about—Corin? M’Giia? Robin? Myself? Any minute now, Sturek and Jana would be filling all six bridge position, by themselves. Lot of jumping around.
“You don’t,” Sulu said sternly. “There’s no changing crew in the middle of a mission. As Captain Kirk said, you do your best with the hand you’re dealt. If your team isn’t getting good results, it’s up to you to tighten up their talents. Understood?”
No. Not a bit. Not a clue. Say it again.
“Yes, sir!”
“Dismissed.”
I spun on a toe, and almost fell over a chair. Might as well. Couldn’t look any more ridiculous than I already did.
The office seemed sixty feet long as I tried to get out. My feet had turned to iron. The door panels sensed me coming and opened up—
And Vanda M’Giia stood there, escorted by a security guard. She looked confused, intimidated.
“M’Giia!” I spoke out. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” she murmured. “They won’t tell me.”
“You’re dismissed, Forester,” Commandant Rotherot called from inside.
“Sir,” I dared, turning, “if you’re going to address a member of my crew—”
“This is personal, Mr. Forester,” Captain Sulu said. “You’re dismissed.”
They didn’t even wait for the aye-sir before shutting the door panels manually between M’Giia and me. The last I saw of her was the crimping of her shoulders as she faced two men she had never expected to speak to in person.
I could only stare at the closed gray panel, and listen as the servolocks hissed into place. It would take a phaser to get in there now.
The security guard took a position on the other side of the door panel, his posture communicating that I was finished here and really better move on. He didn’t even look at me. Did he know what was going on?
I turned and forced myself to walk away, resisting the urge to set up camp ten feet outside the commandant’s office. How could they talk to me about teamwork, then keep me in the dark about one of my teammates?
Outside the door of the building—the sun cut into my eyes instantly and I paused for a moment to let them adjust, looking instead down at a squared boxwood hedge flanks by rows of coleus plants nodding in the offshore breeze. There weren’t very many insects around because of the breeze, one of the little comforts that occasionally offset the physical duress of training. All we needed was flies and mosquitoes, right?
That sun really hurt. No, more than that—headache.
“Mr. Forester?”
I snapped to attention, expecting an officer or a senior, but found myself squinting at the female cadet who had come between Robin and Corin. Gage. Faith Gage.
“I’m Faith Gage. You wanted to see me?”
“Uh…”
“Jana Akton said you wanted to talk to me.”
“Oh, she did .. ah-huh. Well, I’m glad to meet the person who’s been spending so much time with my crewmen.”
“You mean Geoff Corin?”
I tipped my head. Just to test the water, I said, “Actually, I meant Robin Brady.”
“Oh … Robin.”
Bending my chin down to avoid the sun. I found myself staring at—parts of her an officer and gentlemen shouldn’t stare at. So I faced the sunlight and tried to look at her hair or ears or—man, those were some eyes.
“Corin and I have a lot of fun together,” she said. “As for Robin … I have him in a few engineering classes, and he’s in my morning drill company, but he just can’t get his head out of the Jeffries tubes.”
“Well, he’s pulled it out long enough to get down-right infatuated with you,” I mentioned honestly.
“Yeah … he’s a nice kid, real tech-smart, but I couldn’t be interested in somebody whose whole life is dilithium matrices. It’s just not for me.”
“I know. I’ve been trying to get him to do other things.”
“Mmm,” she uttered, nodding.
My eyes hurt, so I looked down again, and quickly up. Just couldn’t slip like that. “Do you have any suggestions?”
She shrugged one shoulder, which did volcanic things to the places I was trying not to look. “Why doesn’t he join one of the social groups on campus?”
I looked past her shoulder at the freshman barracks. There just wasn’t anyplace on her that I could actually look.
“He’s in a group on campus,” I said. “He’s in my crew.”
She shrugged again—mmmm—and said, “Well, he needs some kind of outlet to break through all that shyness.”
“I can’t order him to be sociable. Maybe he’ll listen to you, though. Could you make a little suggestion?”
Before she could answer, I noticed a movement past her shoulder—somebody was waving at me. And they were calling my name. Corin … Jana … Robin and Sturek, and a dozen or so other cadets.
They were running toward the activity center where the cadets’ lounge was housed.
“David!” Jana called. “Commandant’s about to make an announcement!”
“You’d better go,” Faith Gage said. “I have to report to the foreign language lab.”
She left without any other amenities, and I got the feeling she didn’t want to be around Corin and Robin at the same time.
I broke into a run and met my crew at the lounge’s inner doors, where Jana was just turning up the volume on the lounge viewscreen.
“Have you been watching the news?” she asked me, eyes wide.
“No. Why?”
“Rotherot’s been repeating an announcement.”
The screen cut in on the commandant in the middle of a sentence.
“—have been given official confirmation that the Federation colony on Bicea was destroyed two days ago by unknown forces. There are no survivors. First reports of this tragedy were made by the U.S.S. Sentinel at twenty-two-thirty last night—”
“Bicea,” I murmured. “That’s one of the main port colonies on the Klingon border, isn’t it? How many—”
“Over two hundred thousand,” Sturek filled in instantly.
Jana folded her arms around her ribs and seemed to ache.
Corin shook his head. “M’Giia had relatives there, David.”
I looked at him. “Which re
latives?”
“All the relatives she had left after Lursen Prime,” Robin told me. “Her mother, four brothers—”
“Everybody,” Jana choked. “The few remaining members of her family lived there. They were building a life in what they thought was a safe place. They were the primary Andorian ambassadorial link in the sector. Now they’re all…”
Her last two words choked off and made no sound, yet we all heard them. All dead.
“Can she get some leave time?” Corin asked, as if he felt obliged to say something, to say anything.
Robin looked at me. “Bicea was one of the disputed planets along the Klingon Neutral Zone, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Sturek filled in when I couldn’t speak up. “Treaty arbitration gave it to the Federation, but the Klingon Empire has never formally relinquished its claim. They never accepted the judgment.”
The other cadets in the room were talking quietly also, and some listening to the words between us, or at least I got that feeling. Maybe I was just oversensitive, but they did know that one of my crewmates was from Bicea. They seemed to know, anyway, and that stayed with me. I felt all their eyes.
And I felt all their eyes shift—M’Giia was just entering the lounge.
Her blue complexion had gone storm gray. She didn’t look around, didn’t acknowledge anyone as she walked stiffly to us, not looking up at the screen where Rotherot was still speaking.
No one said anything. At first this struck me as cruel, when I abruptly realized they were all waiting for me to do the speaking.
This command stuff … there was too much to it.
“M’Giia,” I began, tentative at best. “is there anything we can do?”
She raised her eyes to Rotherot’s flat form on the screen. Strange how, set like jewels in the velvet field of her alien skin, her eyes could be so very human.
Her voice was frail, but filled the room as she shook her head very slowly.
“No one can help a sole survivor.”
Chapter 6
“Robin—Robin, don’t walk away.”
“I think we should leave her alone.”
“She doesn’t want to be alone. Just let her sit there for a minute and talk to me. We’re on the same team, but I hardly see you anymore. How did that happen?”
