T’Vran nodded, her demeanor somehow grimmer even through her mask of nonemotion. “Those were dark times indeed. What do you know about this keeper of Surak’s katra?”
The entire room seemed to be slowly turning, even as it began to grow dark at the edges. “He’s a human. And I know his name: Jonathan...”
The lights dimmed entirely before Trip got to hear the rest of his own words.
FOUR
Saturday, July 26, 2155
Enterprise NX-01, en route to Tarod IX
THE BRIDGE WAS QUIET as the time of the shift change drew near. Which was why the amber light in the lower left-hand corner of her bridge comm console immediately attracted Ensign Hoshi Sato’s attention.
Checking her chronometer, she saw that more than half an hour remained before she was to have her private meeting with Captain Archer. Reassured that she had time at least to scan through the latest dispatches from Earth’s most influential media organization, Hoshi placed the tiny receiver in her right ear and toggled the activation switch. The recording that had just arrived via the subspace bands immediately began spooling onto one of her small comm screens.
Newstime, Hoshi thought. She settled back in the comm station’s padded chair, expecting to see the latest news of the unfolding Romulan conflict, just as the civilian world back home on Earth was receiving it.
What she didn’t expect to see was Enterprise orbiting a half-sunlit Earth. Judging from the latticework of support structures visible on the screen’s right side, the image must have been made aboard the McKinley drydock station, or perhaps the Obama facility.
“This is Newstime, with Gannet Brooks,” intoned the familiar deep voice of the same faceless male announcer Hoshi had first heard back in grade school. Hearing it now, particularly during times as stressful as these, was always a comfort.
As Enterprise continued her slow, stately tumble around humanity’s homeworld—and the angular logo of the Solarcorp News Service—a more spontaneous-sounding female voice replaced the canned male one. “This is Gannet Brooks, with all the news that’s under the sun. Although the reports remain sketchy, Starfleet’s Starship Enterprise— one of Earth’s most advanced interstellar vessels—has been involved in what Starfleet’s public relations officials describe as a ‘skirmish’ in the distant Gamma Hydra sector.”
Hoshi suddenly noticed a presence beside her, and looked up to see Lieutenant Reed standing at her elbow, watching the small comm screen along with her.
“Do you mind turning the sound up a bit, Ensign?” Reed said. “I’d like to see why Newstime thinks we’re headline news.”
It was obvious to Hoshi that Reed’s remark was intended as tongue-in-cheek, his dry British sense of humor coming to the fore. Just as it was crystal clear that there could be only one reason why Gannet Brooks would consider Enterprise particularly newsworthy this week.
After all, it wasn’t every day that one of Starfleet’s most prominent captains abandoned a distressed civilian vessel and its crew in order to save his own ship.
Deactivating her earpiece, Hoshi brought the sound up so that Reed could listen along with her to Brooks’s report. Her finger remained poised over the mute switch, however, just in case Captain Archer returned to the bridge unexpectedly.
“Starfleet Command’s Admiral Samuel W. Gardner insists that Captain Archer was well within the bounds of command discretion in his decision to abandon a civilian freighter in distress. The vessel in question, a Tau Ceti IV registered Earth Cargo Service neutronic fuel carrier called the Kobayashi Maru, fell under attack several days ago and was ultimately destroyed, along with a crew of eighty-one and some three hundred colonist passengers, by several hostile ships described variously as either Klingon or Romulan in origin. According to Admiral Gardner, Enterprise was in imminent danger of being captured, and the starship’s advanced technologies would have fallen into the hands of a hostile power.
“But other anonymous sources inside Starfleet have been considerably less kindly disposed to Captain Archer’s decision to withdraw from the Gamma Hydra sector massacre. Among these—”
“I think I’ve heard enough,” Reed said, and Hoshi responded by turning the sound down slightly below the threshold of hearing while a montage of stock images of Enterprise persisted on the screen.
“That goes for me, too,” said another voice from the bridge’s center. Hoshi turned in time to see Ensign Travis Mayweather looking sullenly toward her from his helm station. His usual good humor had been sparse at best ever since the Kobayashi Maru incident, and the news report—no doubt a painful reminder of the recent disappearance of his own family’s freighter—clearly wasn’t helping his mood any.
Worse, Mayweather’s foul temper made her wonder if some of those “anonymous sources inside Starfleet” to whom Brooks had spoken might not be billeted right here, aboard Enterprise.
You’d think that anybody who’d get that upset would at least have the decency to quietly apply for a transfer the way I did, she thought, disgusted. It sure beats stooping to telling tales out of school to the press about the captain.
As the ship’s comm officer, it was certainly within the scope of her abilities to find any surreptitious crew communications with Earth that might be buried deep in the subspace radio logs. But she had already decided not to take that step during her remaining time aboard Enterprise, unless and until the captain expressly ordered her to do it. Crew morale was bad enough right now without exacerbating matters by releasing a toxic cloud of suspicion into the ship’s atmosphere.
She deactivated the monitor screen, hoping to banish Enterprise’s tarnished reputation along with the starship’s image. Maybe there are some things we’re all better off not knowing.
Archer had been dreading the meetings he was about to face, but he knew he couldn’t afford to put them off any longer; if he didn’t sit down now with each of the crew members who had requested transfers—before Enterprise reached Tarod IX, where he and the entire crew would immediately get buried neck-deep in the next wartime crisis—there was no telling when he’d get around to doing so.
He had to admit, though, that Ensign Hoshi Sato looked at least as uncomfortable as he felt. I guess it’s not every day that an ensign gets to deliver a vote of no confidence directly to her captain’s face in his own ready room, he thought, feeling glum.
Archer watched in silence as Ensign Sato squirmed quietly in the seat on the other side of his desk.
“Why, Hoshi?” he asked at length.
She looked confused by the directness and ambiguity of the question. “Sir?”
“I thought you were happy here, Ensign.” He knew he couldn’t continue to ignore the proverbial elephant in the room, so he decided to tackle the matter directly. “But since the Kobayashi Maru incident, I can certainly understand why you might— “
“That had nothing to do with my decision to move on, Captain,” she said, interrupting him, which was something he was very nearly certain she had never done before. A look of horror crossed her smooth, youthful face as she realized what she’d done.
“It’s all right, Hoshi,” Archer said, trying to sound encouraging. “I’m relieved to hear you say that. Now tell what this is really about. Please.”
Her brow creased slightly as she looked into one of the room’s upper corners while she gathered her thoughts. A moment later, she fixed her gaze back upon Archer and said, “I don’t feel particularly useful here, sir.”
That surprised him even more than her previous statement had. “I don’t understand.”
“There’s nothing for me to do here, Captain,” she said, an edge of frustration sharpening her tone. “Professionally speaking, I mean. I’m a linguist, and a ship devoted to exploration can provide a linguist with more than enough challenging work. But that’s all changed now that Starfleet’s main priority has shifted to defense and war.”
“Where will you go?” he asked, spreading his hands before him. “It’s not as though the explo
ration game is going to look any better on any of Starfleet’s other ships of the line. Not while the war is going on.”
She nodded. “I’m thinking of going back to Earth.”
“What can you do on Earth that you can’t do out here?”
“Every human language provides a window into each culture’s distinctive way of being human,” she said after a pause. “Whenever any indigenous Earth language disappears, it’s a loss comparable to the extinction of the humpbacks a hundred years ago. Except that the loss is a matter of disappearing memes rather than genes.”
“I suppose that’s true. So exactly what’ll you be doing?”
She brightened somewhat. “I’ve been offered a fellowship with an academic project devoted to preserving and teaching Earth’s indigenous languages. The planet has been on its way to becoming a linguistic monoculture since before Cochrane discovered the warp drive. It would be a shame to let any more regional dialects go extinct.”
Archer sat very still, staring off into space as he allowed Hoshi’s words to sink in for an unmeasured interval.
“Hoshi, Starfleet is going to need your linguistic expertise now more than ever,” he said at length. “And that’s because of the war, not in spite of it.”
Her eyes widened. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Your linguistic talents have helped us get inside the heads of aliens more times than I can count,” he said. “We’re going to need to bring that kind of talent to bear against the Romulans if we’re going to have any hope of anticipating their next moves.”
“I don’t feel I’ve been very much help to you lately, Captain,” she said, the corners of her mouth turned downward. “I couldn’t help you save the Kobayashi Maru.”
It always comes back to that, doesn’t it? he thought. Aloud, he said, “Some problems just don’t have a solution that’s going to make everybody happy. Or even let everybody survive.”
“I suppose not.” Her voice was barely audible.
“But having our most talented people out here on the front gives us our best chance,” he said, leaning forward across his desk. “Hoshi, you put your finger on it yourself when you used the word extinction. If the Romulans win this war, then the human race will have much bigger worries than protecting Earth’s linguistic diversity. There’s a hell of a lot more at stake here than saving our memes, Ensign. So here’s the bottom-line reality: I need you. Earth needs you. But it needs you here, not doing language botany in some rain forest while the Romulans do to Earth what they’ve already done to Coridan.”
Hoshi sat stock-still, blinking rapidly as she considered his plea. He hoped for everyone’s sake that she was conjuring images of Coridan’s still-burning oceans.
“All right, Captain,” she said finally. Favoring him with a weak smile, she said, “You’ve convinced me. At least for now, while the Romulans are a threat. Is it too late to withdraw my transfer request?”
He answered her with a grin and leaned back in his chair. Making an expansive gesture at the skewed piles of paperwork and padds on his desk, he said, “I’m afraid I’ve been too swamped lately to file it properly.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said.
He nodded, still grinning. “Dismissed, Ensign. And please tell Ensign Mayweather I’d like to have a word with him.”
“Yes, sir,” she said with a nod before she disappeared through the hatch.
The feeling of dread that had filled his belly prior to his meeting with Hoshi abruptly returned, along with a bedrock certainty that Travis would prove far less persuadable than had Hoshi.
Less than a minute later, Travis Mayweather was seated in the very spot that Hoshi had just vacated. And though the young pilot had somehow managed to keep his facial muscles as disciplined as T’Pol’s, there was no mistaking the fire that burned behind his eyes. It was understated and silent, but it spoke volumes.
“I don’t suppose there’s any point in my trying to talk you out of leaving Enterprise, Ensign,” Archer said, not willing to prolong the agony any longer than absolutely necessary.
“No, sir,” Travis said. His gaze was focused intently upon the wall just over Archer’s shoulder.
Archer rose from his chair and walked past Travis, pacing the narrow confines of his ready room. “All right. But I’m not letting you go without a forthright answer to one question.”
“Sir?”
Ducking beneath a beam, Archer stopped and faced his helmsman. “Why? And don’t bother asking me for permission to speak freely. You have it already.”
Travis looked uncomfortable, as though he had not thought through a response to that question because he had never expected Archer to ask it.
After a span of a couple of dozen heartbeats, the young man rose from his seat and stood at attention. “Sir, in light of what happened to the Kobayashi Maru, I cannot in good conscience remain aboard this ship.”
You mean, in light of what I did to the Kobayashi Maru, don’t you, Travis? Archer thought.
Or maybe this was really about whatever mysterious fate may have befallen the Horizon.
Archer decided that in the end it didn’t matter. After all, he was neither a psychologist nor a grief counselor. He knew that if Phlox had failed to dissuade Travis from his decision, then there was a good chance it was neither a youthful existential crisis nor a passing whim.
Besides, the captain knew that he couldn’t afford to entrust the safety of his ship and his crew to any bridge officer who couldn’t stand behind him one hundred percent—even if he did believe deep down that the ensign wasn’t all that out of line to blame him for the Maru incident.
With a determination born of resignation, Archer stalked back toward his desk, from which he took one of the several padds he had left stacked there. Several quick jabs brought up Mayweather’s transfer request, which he completed with a final savage stabbing motion of his right thumb.
“All right, then, Ensign,” Archer said, unceremoniously tossing the padd back onto his desk. “Your request is hereby approved. I’ll see to it that you’re picked up for Starfleet reassignment at our next rendezvous opportunity. Until that time, I’ll expect you to maintain a standard duty schedule.”
Travis nodded. Archer had half hoped that the younger man would bank the angry fire behind his eyes. But unlike Hoshi, he betrayed no sign of any last-minute change of heart.
“Understood, sir. Thank you, sir.”
Archer’s jaw hardened as he answered with a curt nod. “Dismissed, Ensign.”
And fair seas, he thought sadly as Travis vanished through the hatchway that led back to the bridge.
Archer couldn’t sleep. And apparently neither could Porthos, his loyal beagle, who leaped up into his lap as he sat on the side of his bunk, trying with only middling success to commit some of his thoughts about the past few days to text.
“I hope you’re not just trying to let me down easy before handing me your transfer request,” Archer said, laying the padd aside so he could stroke the dog’s short fur. Porthos’s only response was to lick his master’s face.
Setting Porthos aside, Archer rose from the bunk and cinched his bathrobe tighter about his waist. He reached into one of the pockets and tossed a dog treat toward the beagle’s sleeping corner, and Porthos wasted no time pouncing on it.
“All right, Porthos,” Archer said with a weary sigh. “If I don’t follow through on my promise to T’Pol and Malcolm and go for a jog around the decks, I’m liable to start talking to myself.”
Although the hour was late, Archer took the time to change into a fresh duty coverall, though he still hadn’t bothered to shave. The intercom whistled just as he was stepping through the hatchway into E deck’s outermost corridor. The brisk, no-nonsense tones of the gamma-watch commander, Lieutenant Donna O’Neill, followed half a heartbeat later.
“Bridge to Captain Archer. We’re receiving a real-time priority subspace communication from Starfleet Command.”
“Thanks, D.O. Go ahead an
d pipe it down here.”
A moment later he was seated behind the small desk in his quarters, staring anxiously at a gold Starfleet crescent-Earth-and-chevron standard.
The gray, careworn visage of Admiral Samuel William Gardner soon displaced the graphics. “Jonathan. Sorry I wasn’t reachable when you called. I’m glad to see I’m not disturbing you by getting back to you so late in the ship’s day.”
Archer smiled wryly. “Don’t worry about that, Admiral. I’m not real big on sleeping these days anyway.”
“Or on shaving, I can see. Looks like you’re running a pirate ship.”
“Reprimand received, Admiral. I’ve been a bit preoccupied lately, and it’s only going to get busier once we reach the Tarod IX outposts and start picking up the survivors. Can you talk about the current tactical situation?”
Star Trek: Enterprise: The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Star Trek : Enterprise) Page 4
