STAR TREK: NEW EARTH - CHALLENGER

by Diane Carey

  For an instant Keller wondered why they’d bothered to carpet when time was at such a premium. Then he remembered the noise buffer, the fire-retardant treatment, the safety factor in case anyone fell down—there were reasons other than cosmetic.

  The panels below the rail were almost entirely dust brown with khaki braces, while the starboard side was black, khaki, and blue, all largely the colors of the outside of the ship. The most strikingly Starfleet element to the bridge was the rail offering a safety zone along the crescent deck. Though it too was painted burgundy instead of bright red, the rail provided a comforting tie to service ships for many generations, and the strongest thread holding Keller to this place as some kind of déjà vu. He felt, if not at home, welcome.

  Burgundy, black, navy blue, gray, a bit of cream or khaki here and there . . . Keller let the colors seep into his mind until they started to feel right. This quilt-patched place was indeed an echo of the exterior of the ship. He felt as he looked around that part of him was still outside, standing at the slightly tilted nacelle, surveying the magpie hull.

  The ship was looking back down at him, surveying him too. Did she like him?

  Generally, Commander Scott had taken the trouble to establish a familiar work theater for him. The engineering master situation monitors and science sensors were up on the sci-deck, communications and tactical to the commander’s right, and the helm in the middle. The biggest difference Keller could see was that all the work pulpits on this bridge faced the main screen. No one had to turn his or her back from the forward attractions. On the crescent quarterdeck, each station chair was nestled under a desk station that jutted out like a spoke toward the center of the bridge. The crewman manning each post would have the main control pulpit in front of him, and auxiliary panels conveniently to one side, within arm’s reach.

  “Somebody should’ve thought of this sooner,” he said, pointing at the obviously sensible arrangement.

  “I did,” Scott said. “But you know bureaucrats.” With that, he moved away, letting Keller get the feel of his new domain without being crowded.

  The helm and nav station was in two pieces rather than one console, and the two were mismatched. The pilot station was circular, like a big tube stuck in the deck with a tilted work desk, while the nav station was a kidney-bean shape, with colorful isolinear chip banks and several homing and guidance optical subprocessors for the navigator to use. All were dark now, but their little screens held some hint of promise.

  In fact, all the quadritronics were dark. Some of the indicator lights were working, but no screens. Keller was relieved to see a fairly standard main screen, a little wider than he was used to and less tall, but at least there was one.

  “Think she’ll turn into a beautiful swan someday?” Savannah commented as she poked at the medical/hazmat/environmental tie-in boards.

  A medical and life-support post on the bridge—another good idea.

  “How do you feel?” Shucorion asked from just above him on the quarterdeck, running his hand critically along the rail.

  Before Keller, just a few steps away, the command chair at last drew his attention. It wasn’t a Starfleet chair. Silently he thanked whoever made the decision not to bring Peleliu’s chair here. But where had this dark green leather chair, worn to a soft sheen, with brass studs in its arms, come from? Had it always been a command chair or was this a reassignment?

  “I feel,” he finally answered, “like I’ve got a nine-hundred-thousand-ton brain tumor.”

  Picking at the nav station, Zane Bonifay didn’t turn, but commented, “I had a brain tumor once, but it starved.”

  Over there, Mr. Scott chuckled freely as he powered up the revamped helm.

  But now, Keller’s nervous grin evaporated as he tipped his head upward, to the bridge dome. A cold dread washed through him as he looked upward, half expecting to see Tim McAddis frosted into the fabric of the ship. Instead, blessedly, there was a barbecue-black ceiling dome of cobalt-obsidian, several layers thick, standing stubbornly between them and the outside. In this light, the plates glowed with the faint hint of dark, dark blue. The cobalt.

  “Sometimes the good guys wear a black hat, Tim,” he murmured.

  He closed his eyes a moment. A shudder of relief and other horrors shot down his spine. He thought he buried it, but when he opened his eyes, the intuitive Bonifay and the always observant Shucorion were both watching him. Beyond them, the women were interested in the bridge and their respective stations. Zoa quickly found the tactical and weapons pulpit on the starboard side. She’d been vigorously plucking various kinds of weaponry from other ships, or converting things to weapons that nobody would ever have thought of using that way. Keller had to admire the way she seized her purpose. Like him, she’d agreed to a task, and was determined to see it through. She never seemed plagued by doubts, as the rest of them certainly were. He had no idea what kind of proximity weapons she’d come up with. He could only hope they’d have the time for her to explain it all to him.

  His feet cold and his hands aching with the rush of blood through his exhausted body, Keller snatched for the most sensible thing to ask for first.

  “Give me the general run-down of . . . well, let’s start with what we know doesn’t work yet.”

  “That’s easy.” Bonifay raised his bosun’s padd. “We got no galley, no food processors, some frozens in storage, only half of the heads and showers are working, we’re short on water, only three lift trolleys for the whole ship, so don’t expect anybody to arrive in a split second. No internal surveillance, no automatic payload coordination, no photosynthetic processing, no particle filtration—”

  “Zane! Never mind.” Keller held up a staying hand. “Just put it over there. I’ll look it over . . . later.”

  “We need your permission to move the infirmary and dispensary again.”

  “This is the third time! What’s wrong with deck four?”

  “We had a spill.”

  “Of what?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “Then move sickbay to deck five.”

  “There isn’t room on deck five. Deck six has no air circulation, and deck eight’s not insulated yet.”

  “How about deck seven?”

  “There’s a little problem. The Blood guys misunderstood our numerical system. They skipped from six to eight.”

  “We have no deck seven?”

  “None.”

  Mr. Scott was at his side now, taking his arm, pulling him away. Over his shoulder to Bonifay, Keller tossed, “Ask Ring where she wants to put it.”

  Bonifay scowled. “But she’ll tell me.”

  Scott pulled him down to the command arena, a place Keller wasn’t inclined to just go by himself. “All right, here’s what it is,” the elemental engineer tersely began. “You got components from a couple dozen ships under the skin here, each with its own modifications to integrate the energy and electrical synapses. There’s no good way to hook this into that. We don’t know what’ll work and what’ll cry uncle. All the lights come on for now, but we’re sitting in a dock. What happens in space, under stress, in battle—I’ll be taking bets.”

  Scott waved a hand across the mismatched systems monitors.

  “What you do have is functional tripolymer embedded matrices with tactile and auditory feedback on your high-resolution displays, and you have full operational profiles of the guts of the ship—that is, of whatever’s operational. I made everything as simple as I could get away with.” He paused and turned to Keller with a Santa Claus expression. “Now, I don’t draw in my own blood. Don’t be afraid to change what you need to change. Rip it all out and start over if you find a better way. My feelings won’t be hurt.”

  Keller wanted to explain his own ideas about function and reliability, the amalgam between crew and mechanics, but somehow that seemed unwise. In his first venture as a real commander, a new sense arose in him—the listening sense. He got a glimmer that the most foolish thing he could do now
was to do all, or even much, of the talking. Becoming a shipmaster wasn’t the end of a process of education, but in fact the starting point.

  “Effective piloting,” Scott continued, “might be almost impossible in tight quarters till you get used to the mules. The ship can go forward, back, side to side, and up and down by basic helming, but this compact design’s also capable of tight turns and pivots. Might be a distinct advantage in interplanetary situations, assuming you don’t pull her apart at the seams just learning to handle her. No matter what we did, there’s no way to balance the hundred thousand flickers of programming still embedded in all the chips buried all over the parts we used. The only way to do that would be to let a computer do all the maneuvers, and as we know from the past that doesn’t work.”

  “Are you saying the crew will have to coordinate their boards with each other?”

  “That’s right. I hope you have people who get along.”

  Keller stifled the urge to glance at Savannah or Zoa, but did catch a glimpse of Bonifay in his periphery before stopping himself. “What’s the biggest danger?”

  “Warp,” Scott bluntly said. “There’s no basis for computer simulation. None of these components were meant to work together. Testing it would take months and months of writing programs and computer time. You don’t have that. You’ll just have to experiment and try not to tear her apart. There are a million and one conflicts. The computer might throw a snit and stop working. If you push her wrong, the warp core might blow. The mules are so strong, they might tear the nacelles right off. Try not to let that happen.”

  Keller groaned. “Dang . . .”

  “Aye, you’ve all got a real challenge on your hands.”

  An understatement’s understatement. A Frankenstein ship whose parts were never meant to work together, populated by people who were never meant to work together.

  Around them, more and more of the systems came on as Shucorion and the others pressed pads and buttons, flipped switches. Keller found himself abruptly aware of what was missing here, how sparse the crew really was—but did he want to take more people out into space and increase the loss numbers?

  “Got an engineer picked out?” Scott asked. “I haven’t seen one assigned.”

  “Oh, no, sir, not yet. Our last engineer died of his injuries about a week ago.”

  “A shame. I’ll go along for your first flight.”

  “Commander, I can’t ask you to do that. When we come back, it might be in a million pieces blowing by on the solar wind.”

  Scott didn’t even honor that comment with a response. He just kept on talking. “And here’s my personal advice. I learned it from watching Jim Kirk, so I’ll hit you with the short stick. Here it is: Get ahead of what your enemy wants. Figure out what he wants on the large scale. He doesn’t just want to win a fistfight. That’s for kids. There’s always something bigger. Find out what that is, and you’ll be ahead of him. And throw away the book right here and now, or you’ll get predictable.”

  Keller smiled. “I already threw the book overboard, sir. I think it drowned.”

  “Just makin’ sure. And the other thing is even more important.”

  “What other thing?” Keller braced himself.

  “You’ve done well,” Scott offered, his merry face beaming. “Two weeks ago there was no ship here. There’s a ship now. There’s something to go for. You’ve cobbled together a good solid chance here. Be glad of it.”

  The assurance, and the approval within it, had a dual effect on Keller, partly uplifting and partly dreadful. He communicated his gratitude with an expression as best he could, for he had no words that would work.

  “Mr. Scott?” Bonifay cannily approached from the nav station.

  Scott turned. “Hm?”

  “We were wondering . . . what kind of a ship is this? We figure she’s Mongrel-class . . . but . . .”

  The seasoned veteran straightened and his eyes widened merrily. “Mongrel-class? I like that. But lad, she’s a composite frigate.”

  He could’ve been completely snowing them and they’d never know. A frigate, yes, was traditionally a smaller, tighter, more maneuverable vessel than a battleship or ship of the line, quick in action and mighty for its size, usually overgunned and notoriously flexible. Keller got the idea Scott liked frigates, the way he said it.

  But that word “composite”—what did that mean? Was she more a frigate or less? She had mule engines, so she was part tug-and-tow boat. Her warp core was Blood, so she was part alien. She was part CST and part cutter, and about sixty percent pure mystery. Would the parts work together? Would they speak the same language, recognize each other’s impulses?

  “Composite frigate, Mongrel-class,” he tasted.

  A totally new brand of ship. A new ship for a new colony. Possibly a new war. A whole new challenge.

  Scott’s dark eyes twinkled. He climbed the ladder to the sci-deck and took the engineering pulpit, cued in a few undecipherable commands, then looked at Keller. “Like to give the order?”

  On the lower deck, Keller’s knees turned to water. The command chair loomed before him, detached from its cradle, floating free in the air over his head, getting bigger and heavier by the moment. He felt caught in the same vortex, a cyclone of responsibilities he wasn’t ready for, every other whirling molecule dark and unexplained.

  Cold in here . . . he rubbed his hands together. They felt chafed, dry and cracked, and strangely empty. He expected them to feel full, overloaded, weighted down, but there was something helpless about empty hands.

  Dry-mouthed and shivering, afraid they could all see the not-so-internal quake, Keller tried to swallow a couple of times but failed.

  His chest constricted and pushed out the words.

  “Power to the sphere,” he ordered. “Internally metered pulse drive . . . on.”

  Around them the bridge began to hum with a sudden flood of energy. The sci-deck’s upper grid of larger scanners popped on, only half of them with actual graphics, the other half with struggling lines and search programs as they looked for some connection or other, but the pulpit stations all came to life with lights and power.

  Bonifay and Savannah let out whoops of cheer. Zoa happily pounded her board without her expression even changing. She liked being armed. Shucorion looked around the bridge with obvious satisfaction. He seemed impressed.

  Hands in the air, Keller was thrilled as a teenager at a sports event.

  “We’ve got a ship!” he cried.

  And his heart began to beat again.

  “Okay, first, second, and third things first. We’ll need a crew manifest and we’ll have to assign watch officers and establish some kind of station bill. So I need to know which stations need to be manned round the clock and which can shut down periodically. We’ll have a ship check every fifteen minutes until the systems are stabilized. Let’s see . . . Savannah, you’ll be responsible for developing emergency procedures—”

  He was cut off by an alarm going off on the communications station relay to the planetary harbormaster’s mainframe. It had gone off before, but not with so many decibels, not enough to interrupt a person speaking.

  Assuming malfunction, Bonifay stepped over there and picked at the data-crystal membranes, trying to turn it off.

  But it wouldn’t turn off. In fact, it increased.

  Suddenly Bonifay stiffened. “Nick, harbormaster’s getting a warning from the planetary satellite system!”

  Keller spun around and caught himself on the plum-colored rail. “Oh, please tell me it’s a malfunction.”

  Everyone was still and tense as Bonifay frantically filtered the signal. “No such luck. They’re picking up incoming ships! A lot of them!”

  Keller snapped his fingers rather rudely at Shucorion, but only because he couldn’t cough up his new first officer’s name right now. “Take the helm!”

  Everyone else jumped to a station. So few people, so many buttons—

  There was nobody on navigation, nobod
y to plot a clear way, watch out for spatial obstructions, handle the subspace and lateral and graviton sensor arrays, handle the accelerometers, optical gyro, inertial dampering field processors, guidance subprocessors, damage control—whoever just called this station by just one name?

  Keller dropped into that seat himself. The command chair went vacant for now. Before him the kidney-shaped workstation came to life in a flood of lights and graphics as Mr. Scott fed power through to all available systems.

  “Okay, this is it. Saddle up, crew. Outboard anybody who isn’t signed on!”

  “Done that already,” Bonifay said. “We’re good to go.”

  “Then let’s rumble. Unhook the slings, pull out the tent stakes, and shove off. Main screen on.”

  He wasn’t even sure who around the bridge was doing what job. Nobody had been given specific assignments, except Shucorion, and Scott up there seemed to be the one who was really making things happen. The ship would rise, Keller had no doubt. After that, he would be at center stage and no one, not even Montgomery Scott, could dislodge him.

  At least, not without cracking him over the head from behind.

  The long rectangle of screen popped on before him, showing a picture-window view of the scaffolding in front of the ship. Three workbees were frantically pulling the scaffolding down. The rest of it would just have to be knocked down.

  “Vertical thrusters on,” Keller charged. “Let’s ride!”

  Chapter Twenty

  THE VERTICAL THRUSTERS lifted the dappled ship straight upward, away from the cradle of scaffolding, to the waves and swinging fists of the workers left below, the colonists who had thrown in their two bits over the past sixteen days to put this impossible dream together and get her in space. Before them the scrabbly complex of Port Bellamy grew small and shrank away, blended to white as the ship moved upward into a scowl of clouds. Heading for space. Any minute now.