Aftermath

by Christopher L. Bennett

  Naturally, it was then that the shooting started. “You think?!” O’Brien cried as he ducked behind a column.

  Corsi let her tricorder drop, trusting her eyes more, watching for the source of the beams. More blasts came, from a low angle, and she returned fire, but not before one particle stream hit Vance Hawkins in the leg. He cried in pain and dropped. Corsi afforded him a brief glance—he was moving, but still in the line of fire. “Konya! Get Hawkins to safety. Krotine, cover fire!”

  Sonya struck her combadge. “Gomez to Gold, we need emergency beam-out!” Nothing. “Gomez to Scott! Gomez to Starfleet HQ, come in, emergency!” Nothing and more nothing. “Damn—we’re cut off!”

  Fabian Stevens was no racist. He’d never approved of the occasional wisecracks he heard about the Tellarites’ resemblance to Terrestrial pigs. Few people in this day and age meant anything truly malicious by it, but even the casual jokes and swine-related nicknames struck Stevens as insensitive and disrespectful to an entire species (though, come to think of it, that attitude in itself was probably unfair to pigs, who were surely perfectly decent sorts once you got to know them). Indeed, that was part of what had prompted his interest in Tellarite culture, his desire to learn about their full depth and texture as a people. (Said interest, of course, had led to a rather unfortunate incident in a bar, thus providing Kieran Duffy with one of his favorite stories to tell.)

  Even with his personal dislike of Tev, Stevens still would’ve objected to anyone making a porcine slur against him. Generally he could never resist a bad pun, but he’d never even think of accusing Tev of hogging the glory, or of saying there was something not quite kosher about him. No, the thought would never cross his mind.

  Nonetheless, the metaphor came to him unbidden: As they surveyed the exhibits in the Alien Technologies wing of the new Starfleet Museum, Tev looked as happy as a hog in a wallow. His deep-set eyes gleamed as they roved over alien devices whose function remained unknown, burning with the desire to dissect them and extract their secrets. He clearly had great enthusiasm for the S.C.E.’s work, and Stevens figured he deserved some credit for that. But it seemed to be the only thing Tev did give a damn about, and Stevens didn’t see any way he could work with the man. Let Tev go off on his own one-man team—he sure seemed to think he could do it all himself. Probably everyone would be better off that way.

  At least Tev spreads the wealth around, Stevens thought. As if condescending to his own crewmates weren’t enough, he was now haranguing the museum’s assistant curator, a bearded, professorial man named Sutherland, about the inaccuracies in some of the artifact descriptions. “He can never resist telling anyone how brilliant he is, can he?” Stevens asked Scotty.

  The older man shrugged it off. “Och, you know how it is with Tellarites. Honest to a fault. To them, courtesy and tact are just other words for lies. I find it refreshing myself.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” Stevens said.

  “And modesty’s no different. Tev’s just bein’ forthright about himself. If it comes off as superior, it’s because, bottom line, he is one o’ the very best. What, ye think I’d assign anything less to fill poor Duffy’s shoes?” Stevens winced, and Scotty peered closer. “Och, I get it. Of course this isn’t about his bein’ a Tellarite.”

  “Of course not. I like Tellarites. They tell it like it is, just like you say. Makes them a very…dramatic people.”

  “What it’s really about, then,” Scotty went on, “is that he’s not Duffy.”

  “It’s not just that. He’s the anti-Duffy. Duffy was a nice guy, easygoing, friendly. He made the team like a family. It’s not just—with all due respect, sir, it’s not just technical know-how that makes a good team member.”

  “Are you sayin’ I chose badly, then?” When Scotty wanted, that avuncular twinkle in his eye could become a cutting laser. Stevens fidgeted under it for a moment, until Scotty chuckled and released him from the stare. “Fabian, lad, let me tell you somethin’. If I gave you a second officer like Duffy was, you’d keep expectin’ him to be Duffy. Which would not be fair to him—or her—and would be terrible for the team, because you’d keep on strivin’ after a rapport that’s gone forever, and you’d never find your stride again. This way you can make a fresh start, and find a new balance.”

  “You make it sound so easy,” Stevens said. “But then, what would you know about it? Someone on the Enterprise crew died, they always managed to come back to life. Hell, you were resurrected twice! What, did you guys do the Grim Reaper a favor or something?”

  Scotty’s anger returned, for real this time. “Don’t you dare tell me I never lost anyone, Mr. Stevens! I lost dozens of good people on the Enterprise. Engineers like Harper, Compton, Watkins, and Cleary. Friends like Gary Mitchell and Bob Tomlinson. My own nephew died in my arms! Aye, I’m blessed that a few of my closest friends are still with me, but when I woke up from that transporter beam, it was like almost everyone I’d ever known had died all at once. So don’t you presume to tell me I don’t understand what it means to lose someone!”

  They were both very quiet for a time after that. Finally Stevens met Scott’s eyes in silent apology and entreaty, and asked in a very small voice, “So how do you manage it?”

  The anger in Scotty’s eyes turned to a deep sadness. “I’m afraid experience is the only way. You just have to get through it and out the other side.”

  “But then what do you do?”

  Scotty smiled understandingly. “You find something new. Something to build, something to fix…something to give yer life meaning. That’s why I took Admiral Ross’s offer to join the S.C.E.—better than wallowing in nostalgia.”

  “But how meaningful can it be if it’s going to be lost sooner or later too?”

  “It doesn’t have to last to have meaning, lad! Every moment it brings you a sense of accomplishment, of success, of makin’ entropy’s work just a wee bit harder—that’s all the meaning you need.”

  Scotty clapped Stevens’s shoulder, and the younger man smiled in thanks. Then he shook off the moment. “Okay, that’s all well and good. But how do you fit Tev into that equation? He’s just impossible to get along with.” Stevens saw that Tev was starting back toward them, and lowered his voice. “I don’t see myself building anything useful with him. There’s no way he could be part of any rapport.”

  “That’s what I thought about a certain Vulcan when I first met him oh, a lifetime or four ago. Not to mention a certain doctor with such a mouth on him I wondered he hadn’t been kicked outta Starfleet the first day.” He winked. “Tension’s a force like any other, lad. The trick is simply findin’ how to make it useful.”

  Stevens was skeptical, but said nothing, since Tev was arriving. “Despite the mislabelings,” the Tellarite told them, “we can be confident nothing’s missing from the AT collection that fits our parameters.”

  “Aye,” Scotty sighed. “’Twas a long shot.”

  “Not necessarily. Alien devices aren’t always recognizable as such.” He showed them a padd containing a lengthy catalog of items and their descriptions. “A list of all missing alien artifacts, even those not clearly technological.” Stevens groaned inwardly at the added work. At least this was one difference between Tev and Duffy that should work in his favor: Tev seemed to revel in research. He’d probably be glad to carry most of the workload himself.

  Indeed the Tellarite did throw himself eagerly into the research, but it didn’t make things any easier for Stevens, since he had to struggle to keep up, checking items that Tev then double-checked. When his pace flagged, the second officer prodded him to work harder, which, on top of his constant kibitzing of Stevens’s conclusions, just made the human more and more frustrated. Only Scotty’s weather eye upon him kept him from erupting. He just couldn’t understand how this kind of tension could produce any beneficial results.

  Just as Stevens was becoming convinced they were on a wild-goose chase, Scotty perked up as something in the catalog caught his attention. “H
ang on a minute!”

  “Sir?”

  Scotty showed the padd to the curator, Sutherland. “Can you show us where these are kept?”

  “Ah, yes, the Cabochons. This way, please. We, um, have them in storage. Much of the museum is still under construction, and the, ah, flashier items tend to take priority. A shame, really—I’ve always felt they were an intriguing mystery.”

  Stevens was feeling the same way about now. “Sir, what are these…Cabochons?”

  “Ah,” Sutherland said. “A set of small crystal spheres discovered on a dead planet in the Beta Aquilae sector in the 2180s, by the starship Knossos, I believe. Presumably created by that planet’s civilization, but the planet had suffered some total cataclysm, wiping out all other signs of their presence. To this day we don’t know by whom they were made, or how, or even what they’re made of.”

  “Aye,” Scotty said intently. “They canna be scanned clearly due to some kinda low-level subspace interference.”

  “And what does that tell us?” Stevens asked.

  “I’m not sure.” Scotty frowned. “There’s something on the tip of my mind, something familiar about the interference patterns.”

  Sutherland led them through the museum archives, finally reaching a shelf from which he extracted a box not much bigger than a standard engineer’s tool kit. He opened it to reveal a set of fourteen glassy orbs of various sizes, though none larger than a racquetball. Stevens peered into their deep red interiors, intrigued by their inner facets, which seemed to extend to infinity. “I don’t get it. I thought we were looking for missing items.”

  “Ah, but two of them are missing, including the largest one,” Sutherland told him sadly. “These were all we could recover.”

  Tev was scanning them with his tricorder. “The interference pattern is familiar, Scotty. It reminds me of the subspace shockwave that hit the da Vinci.”

  Scotty examined the tricorder readings, a gleam coming into his eye. “No doubt, laddie, but that’s not what I saw in it. Look closer—doesn’t that remind you of anything else?”

  Tev frowned. “Some kind of primitive warp equation—Alcubierre, perhaps?”

  “More like Van Den Broeck.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Stevens.

  “I take it,” Tev said pedantically (and predictably), “that you’re not up on the history of warp theory.”

  “I’m a hands-on kind of guy, Commander. I leave theory to the ivory-tower types.”

  “Ahh, that’s how I used to think,” said Scotty. “But once I woke up from my seventy-five-year nap and saw how much learnin’ I had to catch up on, I figured I might as well brush up on the basics.

  “Ye see, lad…the problem with the earliest warp theories is that generatin’ the warp bubble would’ve taken more energy than the universe contains.” Scotty chuckled. “This was before Cochrane figured out how to tweak the subspace geometry and change the constants. Anyway, one o’ the proposed solutions was to make the warp bubble dimensionally transcendental. Big as a ship on the inside, smaller than an atom on the outside.”

  Stevens’s eyes widened. “Of course! If the Shanial structure was in a microwarp bubble like that, and the field collapsed…my God, it’d be just like what happened. It’d expand from a point to full size in an instant, blasting away everything around it with incredible force.”

  “Aye. The microwarp equations turned out to be useless for propulsion—for one thing, you’d be smaller than a wavelength of light and couldn’t see a thing—so they were abandoned when subspace theory came along. But who’s to say they couldn’t be used to shrink somethin’ into a static microbubble?”

  “You mean…like a subspace compression!” Stevens interpreted. “Like that time on DS9 when they shrank the Rubicon by folding most of its mass into subspace.”

  “Aye,” Scotty chuckled. “I heard about that. A wild tale, that one. I never would’ve believed it if we hadn’t run into such a trick back on the old Enterprise—a scoundrel name o’ Flint shrank the whole ship down into a trophy for his shelf. Lucky for him he froze us in time, too, or you can be sure I’d’a sent a phaser beam right up his haughty snoot.”

  Stevens smiled politely. Even though he’d seen plenty of strange things himself, he felt Scotty’s yarns always had an air of the tall tale about them. Tev simply ignored them both and focused on the problem at hand. “So you’re saying the Cabochons are some kind of static warp-field generators, containing these microbubbles?”

  “Aye. It all fits. Which means they cannot be part of a Breen attack—they’ve been on Earth for two hundred years already.”

  “But that was about when the Nachri drove off the Shanial,” Stevens countered. “Maybe they’ve been lying in wait all this time. Maybe they’re the kind of species that thinks in the long term.”

  “Maybe,” Scotty said with a skeptical squint. “But consider for a minute, lad, what might happen to a static warp bubble if it were hit by…oh, say, the Breen’s energy-damping weapon?”

  That brought Stevens up short. The Breen weapon had had a devastating impact on the Allies’ forces, dissipating ships’ energies into the subspace dimensions, rendering them powerless. “It would probably break down the field. But no, wait, if that were the explanation, this would’ve happened months ago.”

  “Unless the fields were only destabilized.” Scotty didn’t need to say more—this was practice, not just theory. Unless stabilized by exotic particles such as tetryons, a warp field was as shaky as a house of cards, prone to collapse if jostled by too much mass or energy. “Buried under the rubble, things would’ve been pretty quiet for ’em and they could’ve stayed semistable indefinitely. But if one of ’em was dug up, handled, even exposed to too much sunlight, it could’ve been the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

  Sutherland was fascinated, and moved in to examine the Cabochons more closely. “You mean…these—”

  “Don’t touch that!” Scott hissed. “Have ye not heard a word we’ve been sayin’? If those Cabochons were destabilized as well, they could be bombs waitin’ to go off!”

  Sutherland jerked away and began a careful retreat on tiptoe, promising to notify the authorities.

  “But they’ve already been handled since the attack,” Stevens said. “Dug up, cleaned, brought to the museum—”

  “The fields may have been only partially destabilized,” Tev replied. “Any further stimulus would worsen the instability. There’s no telling when the point of collapse could be reached.”

  “We’ve got to beam them into space.” Stevens reached for his combadge.

  “It won’t work,” said Tev. “Even this close we can’t scan the Cabochons, only their interference patterns. Impossible to get a transporter lock. We’ll have to remove them physically.”

  “Can we do that?”

  “If we’re careful enough, hopefully,” Scotty answered. “But that still won’t solve the whole problem.” He met the others’ gaze solemnly. “There were two Cabochons missing.”

  The massive columns provided excellent cover against the Shanial’s fire (assuming it was the Shanial). Unfortunately, the team was cut off from the exit, which had closed anyway when Krotine had come through to provide cover fire for Konya. It would take more work with the P-38s to get out, which would leave them exposed to the attackers’ particle beams.

  Konya had dragged Hawkins behind a column and was scanning him with a tricorder. “It’s not too bad,” Hawkins said with a grunt, critically appraising his own leg wound. “But it…shorted out the gravsuit. I can hardly move.”

  “I know,” Konya said. “I can feel it all. Here—for both our sakes.” Konya concentrated for a moment. An intense pain arced through Hawkins for a split second, leaving a relative numbness in its wake. “Wha—what did you do?”

  “A feedback trick—temporarily overloaded your pain receptors. Only lasts a few minutes, though.”

  “Thanks. Maybe you should’ve been a doctor instead of a security g
uard.”

  Konya studied him. “You have an unusually high sensitivity to pain, did you know that?”

  “Well, I can’t actually sense other people’s pain to compare. But I’m not surprised.”

  “And yet you went into a line of work that constantly exposes you to pain and injury. Why didn’t you do something safer?”

  “Sometimes I ask that myself,” Vance smirked. “Here I thought my bad-luck streak had finally broken—but no, first day back, I get shot.” Noticing Konya’s dark eyes appraising him, Hawkins searched for a serious answer. “Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it. But bottom line—it is. If it protects other people. So I’m not going to let a little sensitivity stop me from doing what’s worth doing.”

  Konya smiled. “Then we have more in common than you thought.”

  Behind another column, Gomez and Corsi were pinned down. Corsi was saving her shots, carefully aiming at the sources of fire, but the shooters moved deftly through the maze of columns. Gomez glimpsed broad, squat bodies with numerous limbs, and no clear vital spots such as a distinct head. Abramowitz had guessed right—they were not humanoid.

  “We come in peace!” Gomez cried for the fifth time, hoping the hoary first-contact mantra would reach the attackers’ ears (if any) over the gunfire, and get translated into terms they could understand. “We mean you no harm!” she continued, though it was hard to say it with conviction when she saw Corsi’s expression.

  Still the shooting continued. “Bart! Any chance of a translation?”

  Faulwell shook his head. “They’re not using any known grammar. They’re too alien.” Most humanoid species, by virtue of similar neurological evolution, spoke languages following several dozen basic grammatical structures. This was why universal translators could usually get a grip on an alien language in mere moments. The pattern even held for certain energy beings that had presumably evolved from humanoid ancestors. But these Shanial represented a separate evolutionary track. Deciphering their speech would be a slower process—if they ever got a dialogue going.