by David Mack
“It is so far,” Desai said. “Here to ruin it for me?”
Moyer smiled. “If we had time for a game of racquetball, I would be.” She handed Desai a data slate. “I finished the background checks on the incoming security personnel.”
Skimming the report, Desai asked, “Any red flags?”
“Just one: Petty Officer Third Class Armstrong. Forensic specialist asking for a transfer from the U.S.S. Orem. Multiple reprimands for insubordination, and a history of creating public disturbances. I rejected his application.”
Desai looked over the top sheet of Moyer’s report and nodded. “Fine. Need anything from me?”
“Just sign next to the X and I’ll bounce his butt to a graveyard shift on some rock where he won’t bother anybody.”
“Done,” said Desai. She etched her autograph onto the transfer orders with the slate’s stylus, then handed both items back to Moyer. “Bounce at will, Lieutenant.”
Veering away toward her own office, Moyer replied with a smile and a playful salute, “Aye, sir.”
The door of Desai’s private office was open, and she could see her desk and chair. She nodded at her assistant and was almost inside her pseudo-sanctuary when a man called out to her. “Captain?”
She turned to see another of her senior lawyers, Commander Peter Liverakos, walking toward her. Like everyone else in the JAG complex that morning, the lean man with a salt-and-pepper goatee had a data slate tucked under his arm. Desai resisted the urge to heave a rueful sigh and said, “Yes, Commander?”
“Sorry to bother you, Captain, but the Orion ambassador’s been giving an earful to Admiral Weiland about some of our prosecutions of Orion nationals here on the station. The admiral would like to know where we stand on those cases.”
Desai rolled her eyes. “They broke the law on Federation soil. If they’d stayed on their own ships, this wouldn’t be an issue.” She pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes for a moment. “Where did we leave those cases?”
“I’ve offered their counsels plea bargains. They haven’t replied yet. My guess is they’re hoping we’ll drop the charges.”
“And what does Admiral Weiland want us to do?”
“I think his exact words were, Crucify them, but I’d have to check the transcript to be sure.”
“Revoke the plea deals,” Desai said. “If they want mercy, let them give us something we can use. If they don’t, Mars can always use a few more ditchdiggers.”
“Aye, sir,” Liverakos said with a nod and a grin, clearly eager to get to that day’s work.
Finally free of distractions and emergent crises, Desai stepped into her office and settled into her chair. Her computer terminal powered up at the touch of a button, and she began looking over that day’s official communiqués from the Starfleet JAG office on Earth, as well as daily situation reports from the station’s security division. It had been a fairly busy overnight shift.
Her door signal buzzed. “Come,” she said.
The door slid open, and her assistant, Ensign Roberta Lenger, entered carrying Desai’s breakfast on a tray. She set a mug of steaming-hot coffee on Desai’s desk. “Morning, Captain.”
Desai picked up her coffee and smiled at the younger woman. “It is now.”
Placing a small plate on the desk, Lenger said, “The commissary was out of raspberry pastries. I hope blueberry is okay.”
“It’s fine,” Desai said. “What’s my schedule this morning?”
“You have a meeting in twenty minutes with Admiral Nogura, to review an interdiction order for the Omicron Ceti colony.”
Desai shook her head. “As if we need the threat of arrest to prevent people from visiting a planet whose star bathes it in Berthold rays.”
Lenger shrugged. “You know how looters get.”
“I certainly do. Is the docket set for the afternoon?”
“Yes, Captain. The disciplinary hearing for Crewman Sohl starts at fourteen hundred. You’ll be presiding over opening statements and the first part of the prosecution’s argument.”
A sip of black coffee proved a few degrees too hot for Desai’s tongue. She swallowed quickly, winced, and said, “Very good. Anything else?”
“The station’s chief of security is outside and waiting to see you. And before you ask—no, he doesn’t have an appointment.”
Desai cast a longing glance at her breakfast, then grimaced. “I need to let my coffee cool anyway. Send him in.”
“Yes, sir.” Lenger stepped out and motioned the chief of security inside Desai’s office.
Haniff Jackson was a man of average height and impressive physique. His red uniform tunic was stretched taut by his biceps and pectorals. He kept his black hair cropped close to his brown head, and he had recently shaved off his goatee, without which he looked younger than his thirty-six years. He strode to Desai’s desk and stood at attention before it. “Captain.”
“At ease, Lieutenant. Have a seat.”
“Thank you, sir.” Jackson pulled back one of the guest chairs and settled into it. Only then did Desai notice the red data card tucked into one of his massive palms.
She folded her hands on the desk. “What can I do for you?”
“For the past year, I’ve been investigating the bombing of the U.S.S. Malacca,” he said. “I’ve been combing the witness statements, the forensic reports, the internal sensor logs, flight-recorder data from the ship, everything.” He handed her the data card. “I think I’ve found a new lead in the case.”
“A new lead?” She looked at the card in her hand. “It’s been almost a year. I’d think the trail would be cold by now.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Jackson said. “But with everything else that’s happened here since then, we never really gave this case the attention it deserved. So I did some checking. All the logs and physical evidence we collected are still here, and any personnel we thought might be material witnesses have been kept on—no one’s transferred off this station without my permission since the bombing.”
Sliding the data card into a slot beside her computer, Desai asked, “And what is this new lead?”
“I have witnesses who link certain suspects to an ongoing smuggling operation involving the Orions on the outside and some of our own people here on the station.”
Curious, she accessed the information on the card. Just as Jackson had said, he had several confidential but on-the-record statements from witnesses who alleged pockets of corruption were active within Starbase 47. “Has any of this been corroborated?”
“Only on a circumstantial basis,” Jackson said. “That’s why I need warrants for arrest, search and seizure, and analysis.”
She admired his zeal for the job. “Consider them granted. You’ll have them all in hard copy by oh-seven hundred tomorrow.”
He stood and extended his hand. “Thank you, Captain.”
She shook it. “You’re welcome, Lieutenant. Good hunting.”
Jackson nodded and left the office.
As the door closed, Desai reveled for a moment in the silence and solitude. She took a bite of her pastry and wiped a fleck of frosting from her upper lip.
Then she looked at the framed photo perched on the corner of her desk of a craggy-faced middle-aged man in a moment of serene repose, and she remembered why she felt so alone all the time, no matter how many people accosted her before breakfast.
Diego Reyes, the man she loved, was dead.
Desai put down her pastry and pushed the plate aside.
She wasn’t hungry anymore.
Lieutenant Ming Xiong knew his monthly report to the brass was off to a bad start when the station’s commanding officer, Rear Admiral Heihachiro Nogura, kicked it off by saying, “Stick to small words, Xiong. I’m in no mood for technobabble today.”
“Yes, Admiral,” Xiong said, wondering how he was supposed to convey the critical details of his presentation without using any of the terminology he had developed to define them.
Se
ated next to the admiral, and just as eager to hear Xiong’s report on the latest research findings from the Vault—Vanguard’s top-secret research lab devoted to the Shedai—was Xiong’s civilian supervisor, Dr. Carol Marcus.
Marcus and Nogura were like night and day. She was blond and curvaceous, fair-complexioned with smooth skin. The Asian flag officer was thin and lean. His tanned face was lined with age and the burdens of office, and his brush-cut hair, once black, now was surrendering to waves of gray. Both had blue eyes, though of different shades—hers were sky blue, and his were closer to the deep bluish gray of tempered steel.
Seated side by side in Marcus’s office—which had been Xiong’s office before Marcus was placed above him in the chain of command more than a year earlier (a slight that still had Xiong seething with resentment)—the scientist and the admiral each held a fresh cup of hot coffee. The rich aroma of French roast filled the tiny room, reminding Xiong he still hadn’t been able to make time to get his first cup of the day.
“Over the past several weeks, my team and I here in the Vault have suspended all other projects to focus on the Mirdonyae Artifact,” Xiong said. He used a small remote control to activate a wall monitor, which displayed the visual portion of his briefing. “I’m happy to say we’ve made a number of interesting discoveries about this amazing object.”
An image of the artifact appeared on-screen. It was a twelve-sided polyhedron; each face of it was shaped like a symmetrical pentagon. “At first, we speculated it might be a key for unlocking Shedai technology, because it certainly provides an unprecedented level of access to their systems, but that wasn’t enough to explain some of its more bizarre properties.”
Xiong called up some comparative diagrams of energy readings from the object. “For instance, it seems to telepathically trigger a fear response in most humanoids who come within a few meters of it. We ruled out infrasonic frequencies as the cause, and then we found it was pumping out beta waves at a level we’ve never seen before. That’s what was provoking the constant sensation of anxiety and sometimes even terror that people reported while working with it. We’ve contained the phenomenon by bombarding its isolation pod with inverted waves, which cancel out its effects.”
He called up his next data screen: a complex chain of particles. “When we got down to the sub-nucleonic level of its surface material, we found the same multiphasic properties we’ve come to associate with the Shedai avatar, except it’s been uniquely polarized to inhibit the passage of high-energy particles from its interior. This might have been accomplished by reorganizing atoms of a superdense transuranic element in a modified dilithium nanomatrix, but so far we haven’t been able to look deeply enough to map its structure. Doctor Hofstadter has proposed a new kind of analysis that might help. It’s called an icospectro-gram, and I’d like to encourage you both to have a look at his proposal and consider prioritizing—”
Nogura said, “Xiong, I don’t mean to minimize the fine work you and your team have done, but I’m afraid I need to cut this meeting short. Doctor Marcus led me to believe you had major developments to share. If you would be so kind as to sum up, I promise to read your unabridged report this evening.”
“Yes, sir,” Xiong said, secretly relieved to skip the more tedious sections of his report. He switched the image on-screen to one that resembled a ball of fire with burning tentacles flailing in all directions. “This is what lies at the center of the Mirdonyae Artifact. It’s the source of the beta wave, and the reason the object can access any piece of Shedai technology it contacts. What you’re looking at, sir, is a living but currently disembodied Shedai.”
Nogura’s eyebrows arched upward. “Really?” He got out of his chair and walked to the screen. Staring at it up close, he seemed quietly impressed. “That’s very interesting.” He looked expectantly at Xiong. “Dare I ask what your second major discovery was?”
“My analysis of the artifact’s constituent elements and the nature of its fabrication have led me to conclude that, while it was made to interface with Shedai technology, it was not made by the Shedai but by some other power.”
“Prompting the question of who made it,” said Marcus.
Furrowing his salt-and-pepper eyebrows as he stared at the image on-screen, Nogura asked, “Could the Tholians have built something like this?”
Xiong shook his head. “I don’t think so, sir. The materials are far more sophisticated than anything we’ve ever seen them create. For that matter, they’re more advanced than anything we currently know how to produce.”
“So we have no idea who made it,” Nogura said.
“Not at the moment, sir,” Xiong said.
The admiral frowned. Using a control panel next to the screen, he switched it to a star map of the Taurus Reach. “Your first report about the artifact said the Klingons had brought it to Mirdonyae from someplace else.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do we know where this object of yours comes from?” Xiong replied somewhat abashed, “Not yet, sir, but we’re working on it.”
“All right.” Nogura faced Xiong and clasped his hands behind his back. “It looks like we’ve got a pretty good handle on the what part of this equation, and not so good a grasp on the who, how, or where. Which brings me to my last question. Do we know why this device was made? Was it to trap a Shedai? To control their machines? Or are those merely incidental details?”
Xiong bowed his head, partly out of humility. “Honestly, sir, we can’t say yet why or where it was made, or who made it. But I can tell you this: we are all very, very eager to find out.”
18
May 30, 2267
The Skylla was a dark ghost drifting in the void between the stars, silently haunting the shipping lanes of the Taurus Reach.
Silent from the outside, maybe, Pennington mused. He was barely able to hear himself think. He had learned to live with the constant racket caused by the repairs and upgrades he and T’Prynn had been making to the stolen ship since its hasty departure from Ajilon more than two months earlier.
“Please hand me a coil spanner,” T’Prynn said, reaching a hand out of the crawl space toward Pennington.
Pennington poked around in the tool kit they had found in the ship’s engineering compartment and once again was grateful for the time he had spent traveling with Quinn. Because the Rocinante had required many impromptu repairs, Pennington had needed to get the hang of starship maintenance to prevent Quinn from getting angry enough to blast him out an airlock. He located the coil spanner and passed it up to T’Prynn, who was hard at work making improvements to some crucial system in the belly of the ship. “Here you go.”
“Thank you,” T’Prynn said. Seconds later, deep thrumming sounds and a series of ponderous thumps resounded throughout the ship, shaking the deck under Pennington’s feet.
He poked his head around the edge of the crawl space and said, “Mind if I ask what you’re tinkering with?”
“I am recalibrating the governing mechanism for the ship’s inertial dampeners,” T’Prynn replied. “When combined with some improvements I plan to make in the firmware for the structural integrity field, we should notice a substantial improvement in this vessel’s maneuverability at high-impulse speeds.”
“Brilliant,” he said, quietly impressed.
The day before she had rewired the vessel’s shields. In the preceding weeks, she had improved the sensitivity of their scanners, extended the range of their communications, and enhanced the efficiency of the life-support system, ensuring they would have potable water and breathable air indefinitely.
Their lonely vigil in deep space would be limited only by the ship’s available provisions, which upon their last inventory had been estimated at roughly an eight-month supply for two people.
T’Prynn shimmied out of the crawl space and handed the coil spanner back to Pennington. “The modifications are completed,” she said. “However, we will need to improve its power supply to make certain it remains reliable during perio
ds of stress.”
“Right,” Pennington said. “We could route power from the unused crew quarters on the port side to the inertial damper.”
“An excellent suggestion,” T’Prynn said, moving toward the ship’s bow. “Will you assist me in setting up the shunt?”
“My pleasure,” Pennington said. He picked up the tool kit and followed her. He was keen to see the Vulcan woman’s next bit of technical wizardry. Though he’d learned a lot while hopping from planet to planet with Quinn, he felt as if he had learned more in the past two months of assisting T’Prynn on the Skylla.
She pointed to the deck of a narrow corridor that crossed the ship’s main passageway. “We will need to remove these deck plates to access the power-distribution system.”
“On it,” Pennington said. He plucked a mini crowbar from the tool kit and started prying up the plates, backing down the corridor as he went.
T’Prynn lowered herself into the meter-deep space, which was filled with parallel rows of plasma conduits buzzing with energy. She opened some access panels and began shutting off selected circuits.
As the last deck plate in the short passage lifted free, Penning-ton set it aside, tilted up against the bulkhead like the others. Then he worked his way back through the knot of pipes and cables to T’Prynn. “What’s next?”
“I need a decoupler to begin this procedure.”
He fished out the tool and handed it to her. “Voilà.”
“Thank you,” she said, and set immediately to work creating a power shunt from the mass of electro-plasmoid spaghetti that was twisted around their feet.
He was content to stand and watch her work. Because she had eschewed his previous attempts at small talk, he refrained from speaking lest he break her concentration at a crucial moment.
