by Diane Carey
“I’m going to be sick, Robert.”
April laughed and clapped him on the back. “Rogue.”
George straightened, feeling a sudden need to head off a pile of complications by understanding them one by one. “What has all this got to do with the Rosenberg?”
“Oh, yes. This is the ship that’s going to save those people’s lives,” April explained as Sarah Poole appeared opposite him and stared out at the looming starship. “She’s a stockpile of new technological stuff. Fourth-generation warp drive, a vast increase in power, dilithium focusing that allows for a maximum cruise speed of warp six with bursts to warp eight, extremely tough new shielding—I could go on forever.”
“You already have,” Sarah murmured.
“We should be able to reach those people in record time.”
“But you said it was a four-month journey at warp three. Even with fourth-generation drive, it’ll take a month to go around the storms, and you said they don’t have a month.”
“It’s not going to take a month.”
George narrowed his eyes in doubt. No matter the size or power or beauty, even that ship out there couldn’t bend space and make the trip any shorter than it absolutely had to be. He watched with great caution as April pressed his lips together and slipped his hands into his pockets again.
“With advanced shielding,” April began, “and this ship’s [46] duotronic-enhanced navigation, we should be able to batter our way straight through the core of those ionic storms.”
From behind him, George felt the ripple of astonishment from Drake and the lady doctor, but it was not that to which he responded. He stepped closer to April, leaning over the console that separated them. “Through? Through the heart of ion disruption? Robert, you’re out of your mind!”
April raised his brows and looked straight at George. “We should be able to reach those people in a week. A week.”
“Should be able? Not will be?”
“Well ... I’m an optimist, but not a cockeyed one. But the starship is a breakthrough. She’s the culmination of several technological breakthroughs of the last decade that are only now coming into practical use.”
George closed his eyes for a moment, dazzled and confused, then paced around April while staring at the deck. He put a hand to his head, trying to hold in all these new things. April waited in silence and watched him, a gaze George felt acutely, but stiffly ignored.
After a moment George spoke again, sharply and intuitively. “And it’s Starfleet’s gambit.”
“It had to be.” April responded with a shrug. “There was no other way to finance her. But she’s a Federation vessel, George, not Starfleet alone. What do you think of her?”
“What am I supposed to think? Don’t you know already?”
“I’d like to hear it.”
George waved a hand. “We’ve been guarding that Neutral Zone for seventy-five years because we’re afraid of another Romulan attack. And why? Because they haven’t had any reason to be afraid of us, that’s why. They haven’t had to respect us.” He jabbed a finger toward the viewport. “That’s no rescue ship out there. That’s a fighting machine!”
April quickly paced around the navigation console, which had somehow come between them. “This is not a spaceship, George,” he insisted dramatically. “George ... this is a starship!”
“Starship, spaceship,” George canted, knowing he was casting bait.
“George! Star. Listen to the word.” April’s voice softened, but intensified. “Star. A luminary, far away in the cosmos, so far away that it seems only a sparkle in the night. A little titter of life so easily misinterpreted as mere mythology but those who just don’t see it for what it is.”
[47] “Star, I got it.” George sighed.
“Ship,” April segued, easing the word in on a sweep of his arms that led from the stars outside to a pair of cupped hands. “Since those first squabby reed vessels waddled across the ocean from here to there, holding little nameless people who had nothing in common but their dreams of discovery, the word ‘ship’ has become profound!”
George shook his head, amazed at April’s blind idealism. “Rob, this is first-rate. Have you copyrighted this?”
“Just take the tour. See the ship. Feel her around you.” The captain’s arms dropped to his sides. “Then we’ll talk.”
The process of beaming was nothing to look forward to, and George didn’t. He’d never been beamed before, but he’d heard about it. Nothing good. So when they left the runabout hooked up to the spacedock and Claw Eagle, or whatever his name was, signaled the starship to “energize,” George couldn’t help holding his breath and waiting to die. The first sensation was of sound—a buzzing noise like insects, soon accompanied by the sensation of being crawled on by all those insects. Somehow he had climbed into a beehive, and now he couldn’t find the door.
Vision went next, into a vortex of irritating color. Then came immobility. He tried to move his arms, just to reassure himself, but they didn’t seem to be there anymore. He became acutely aware of his internal organs quivering. The bridge of the runabout rearranged itself around him—he sensed it more than saw it—and then he saw something take form. A room with pale gray walls trimmed in red ... a free-standing console with two men behind it ... and he himself was standing in a wide cubbyhole framed with some kind of bracings. The room solidified, and a slight vertigo flushed over him. After a moment, he took a little breath, then a deeper one, then one more just to make sure.
“Everyone all right?”
April’s voice was a shock in the suddenly quiet chamber.
“Not exactly a perfected process, is it?” came Sarah Poole’s dry response from somewhere in the back.
“George?”
George dared to look down, and discovered he was standing on a frosted lens disk. “That’s the most nauseating experience I’ve ever had in my life,” he said. He looked around for Drake and found him in [48] back. The other man’s chocolate eyes were ringed with white, but he was in one piece.
“We’ll get better at it,” April assured him as he stepped off his own disk. “Breathtaking, though, isn’t it? Not just one person at a time, but all six of us. We can conceivably beam a whole landing party up and down just that easily.”
“If your hopes are so high for it,” George asked immediately as he stepped down to April’s level, trying not to wobble, “why does the ship still have a flight deck?”
April hesitated. “Eventually, just for backup, we hope.”
“Won’t there be alternative transporter rooms for backup?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“Seems like a whole lot of wasted space if you really expect the transporter to take over the duties of shuttles, doesn’t it?”
April swung his hands and said, “George! I’m just a simple romantic. You know design engineers. They love new ideas but they refuse to give up old ones.”
“Just asking.”
“My friends,” April offered, holding his hand toward the door. “To the bridge.”
“There are only fifty-seven people on board,” Captain April explained as they walked a long unadorned corridor on some unnamed deck, and in some places there were only structural beams for support, but no walls yet. “All are specialists in the building of this ship. There’s no one on board who hasn’t been rated and cleared of at least a level-eight security clearance. These are the best of Federation engineers, electrical and computer scientists, propulsion experts, and so on. All her parts were designed in secret, and built in separate places. No one who worked on the parts had any idea what it was he was contributing to. Other than the bridge, which you’ll see in a moment, there are only two completed decks on the entire primary hull, and the engineering hull is still partially unfinished. There’s no rec deck yet, but that area has been converted into an emergency medical area for the people we’re going after.” He turned to look back at the doctor. “Sarah, you’ll want to inspect that right away, because there�
��ll be no time to get provisions once we’re under way.”
“It sounds like there’s already no time,” Sarah commented, stepping aside to allow two technicians with antigravs to pass by with some kind of heavy electrical panel.
[49] “What’s finished?” George interrupted.
“The computer facilities ... the sensors ... the warp engines, though untested ... all the bulkheads and conduits ... life support throughout most of the ship ... heavy weapons systems ... exterior shields ... not auxiliary control yet, though I hoped it would be—”
“Sounds like preliminary testing conditions to me.”
April nodded and gave George a look of approval. “Yes, you’re precisely right.”
“What are her weapons capabilities?”
“She’s armed with laser streams and particle cannons for heavy short bolts, all adjustable from grade one through grade ten impact/burn. Not quite impotent, you might say,” he added with a reluctant nod. “We were almost ready to test the primary equipment, just the things that make her go and let her defend herself against space elements. Shields, sensors, propulsion, and so on. When this emergency with Rosenberg came up, we decided it was time. The starship’s time. She’ll never have a better chance to prove herself before prejudices settle in around her.”
“Prejudices?” George pulled his gaze from the sparkling new corridor and the doorless rooms he’d been peeking into and looked at April. “What kind of prejudices?”
“Well, time enough for that later. You need a tour of the ship if you’re going to be first officer.”
George stopped in his tracks. Drake and the astrotelemetrist bumped into each other trying to avoid bumping into him. “If I’m going to be what? Robert, I’m not qualified!”
April swung around easily and squashed George’s objections with a tilt of his head. “Oh, qualified, George! Look around. All you see are qualified people. I don’t need another one of those. I need you, George. I need an exec who’s a counterbalance to myself. It’s the only way I’ll be able to trust my decisions.”
“That’s a foolish choice,” George told him with raw honesty.
With a grin April gestured toward George, and to the others he said, “You see? Just what I need!”
George dropped his head in frustration.
The captain smiled tolerantly. “Come on, George. You’ve served in space before. And you don’t get to be head of security at a starbase without having some mastery of current technology. Don’t you think I [50] know that? And whatever else there is, you’ll figure out. You’re a bright fellow, George.”
April stepped into an elevator and waited for everyone to join him. His two bridge officers stepped in without hesitation, then Dr. Poole, not quite as boldly.
George hung back and glared at Drake. “You’ve been conspicuously silent through all this,” he accused.
Drake rolled his eyes. “The dead say very little.”
“What killed you?”
“Shock.”
“Good. At least I’m not alone.”
The turbo-lift was fast and also a little nauseating, but it gave George a perception of the size of the ship. Darned big, he thought. That’s the size of it. As soon as the door opened and the bridge stretched out before them, Florida and Sanawey moved quickly to what George presumed were their respective posts.
The bridge was a circular place, still drab because much of its trim painting hadn’t been finished yet. George glanced around and could see the code markings scribbled where the red and blue trim would eventually be. The floor was lightly carpeted in drab dove blue, and probably made to cut down on acoustics. All around the upper level near the ceiling were visual readout screens, each dwarfed by a huge main viewing screen directly at front and center. All those screens, including the big one, were dead gray. Several technicians were closing portals to electrical nightmares along the floor, and on a recessed deck in the center of the bridge, Florida was bringing life to the helm controls. A whisper of energy hummed through the console.
“This way,” April invited, and moved to their right. He stood before a shiny black control console with colorful but unmarked switches, dials, toggles, and computer cartridge input notches. “This is our pride and joy,” he said with supreme confidence. “It’s called a ‘library’ computer. We can virtually store the knowledge of the galaxy in a computer bank and recall it instantly. This is the culmination of the duotronics discovery. Speed of analysis and recall has been increased ten thousand times. Ten thousand times! The Vulcans helped with its design and programming, but they wouldn’t give us a specialist to run it. Apparently they couldn’t find anyone among them who wanted to cast his lot with a pack of humans. But this”—he placed his hand affectionately on the console—“is the reason we can navigate at warp. Even at warp six. And even through completely unmapped [51] territory. Astonishing. Because of this, the correlation between advanced sensors and the ship’s navigation is extremely fine and fast. This is what’s going to allow us to smash through those storms.” He gave them a little glance then, just to reaffirm his connection with them, and said, “It’s not going to be easy, you understand, not something even a starship will do every day, but it is possible in an emergency.”
“Interesting disclaimer, Captain,” George commented.
“Well, I felt obliged. But you can see the advantage. We don’t have to do warp hops anymore—warp a little, stop, do a sensor scan to make sure you’re not going to pile into somebody’s planet, warp a little farther, stop again ... no more of that. Thanks to the library computer, we can extend the explorable range of our galaxy a thousandfold.”
“Why the secrecy?”
“Pardon?” April turned, forced back to the moment. “Oh ... yes.” He turned completely around and leaned on the console, thoughtfully staring down at the lower deck, evidently lacking the words to describe this ship and his hopes for her. Somehow she was the core of something easily perverted, and April wanted all the conceptualizations about her to be right. It was several seconds before he spoke.
“She’s not meant to be a pageant wagon,” April said, beginning slowly. “She has to be introduced gradually, carefully. She’s easy to misunderstand, and many Federation member governments are suspicious of a centralized power. That’s what this ship looks like—like one facility is trying to build a device so powerful that no one will be able to challenge its decisions. You see, if the Federation doesn’t centralize soon, it’ll ossify. It won’t mean anything or do anything. This ship and a fleet like her will mean ideological unity if we play our cards right.”
George paced across the upper deck to a place where he could scan the firing mechanisms on the helm console. Carlos Florida looked up at him self-consciously, but said nothing as the newly appointed first officer glared fiercely at the instruments as though the control panels themselves were capable of manipulating the people around them.
After a long time, George said, “This is the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.”
April came forward and leaned on the bridge hand rail. Cagily he prodded, “Why?”
“Why? A ship like this ... even just one of her ... and you’re talking about a whole fleet?”
[52] “Yes, as many as ten starships. But I don’t—”
“Don’t you?” George attacked. “Don’t you really? You’re avoiding reality, Robert. That computer, those sensors, those weapons, all that compounded energy stored in this ship—it adds up to a power machine that could cut through enemy vessels a lot more easily than through those ion storms. For the first time, we can protect the frontier and our colony planets, and be taken seriously. We can intimidate the Romulans, the Klingons, and everyone else into leaving us alone.”
April waved a hand desperately. “But do we want to do that?”
“Are you saying we don’t?”
“How can we justify reaching out into the galaxy if we shut off anyone from looking in?” April’s voice was softly insistent. “This ship is for exploration
, George. That’s what I want her to be seen as.”
George stepped toward him. “A civilization flourishes best when it can protect itself.”
“Yes, but you can’t tell defensive weapons from offensive just by looking. Her philosophy must be established first! Any bravado will cheapen her and put our credibility at risk.”
“You’re too much of a poet, Robert.”
“That’s why I brought you along, George.” April strode past Drake and Sarah, who were remaining safely silent, to what was obviously the captain’s command chair. He leaned on it like an old soldier on a warhorse and searched for better words. He seemed to think he wasn’t getting his point across, and that it was his own fault.
“George, try to understand. If the starship is misinterpreted as a military machine, exploration will be the sacrificial lamb to all that fear. We mustn’t let that happen. Eventually we hope to encourage other races than humans to join the crews of these ships—those who can physically live together. Once the starship’s benevolent capabilities are proven, the UFP Congress will accept her as a truly interstellar ship, not belonging to any one government or planet. It’s the first step toward truly unifying the known galaxy. We have to overcome the paranoia that goes with a ship of this kind, that taste of the military you’re talking about, and show the galaxy that this ship is a harbinger of growth and expansion that will give us all more quality of life in the long run. We can bring civilization to uncharted tracts, bring back alien technologies and ideas we never dreamed of—season ourselves with wisdoms we’ve never thought of before.” He held out his hand as though to offer George the truth. “That’s why an impossible rescue is her perfect first mission. This is not a military machine, George.”
[53] “It’s not? Grade-ten laser and particle cannon intensities? How do you figure it’s not? Do you realize how many systems could be protected just by the presence of one of these? People could sleep easier by the billions!” George moved around the deck, feeling it out, as if to see if the starship agreed with what he was saying. Several sets of eyes watched him, most of them afraid he might look at them and demand comment. Ultimately he turned on April again. “You keep talking about principles and philosophies, Captain, but men of principles have to be willing to stand their ground. There’s nothing wrong with might as long as it’s used to defend right. One of our principles has to be that you can’t take something away from someone else just because you’re able to.”
