Delta Anomaly

by Rick Barba

  She smiled her amazing smile, and Kirk felt his heart skip a beat.

  “Okay, so what’s up with your Science test on Monday?” she asked.

  Kirk squinted. “You really want to hear about it?”

  Hannah nodded. “Yeah, I’m all ears.”

  Spock stood at the window of Uhura’s hospital room. He faced north toward the Golden Gate Bridge, which stretched away at a sharp angle less than a mile away. A towering fog bank was beginning to roll over the span like a massive tidal wave.

  “The inland wind is ruining our perfect night,” said Spock, turning to the bed.

  Uhura burst into a coughing fit. Spock took a step toward the paging button in concern, but she waved him away.

  “No, no, I’m okay,” she said, clearing her throat. “Really. I’m good.”

  “Maybe you should try another round of supplemental oxygen,” said Spock. “Dr. Griffin said the pulmonary irritation could flare up again.”

  “Thank you, Commander, but that won’t be necessary,” she said.

  Spock took a deep calming breath. Then he said, “I fear I am on the verge of annoying you, Cadet.”

  Uhura laughed, which triggered a cough. Then she said, “And I worry that I’m keeping you from more important things.”

  Spock’s eyes widened. He was still learning Human inflections and connotations, and he wondered, Is Nyota signaling a desire that I should go?

  “Perhaps I should let you rest?” he said, unsure of how to proceed.

  “No!” She answered a bit too emphatically, and covered by quickly adding, “I mean, I think we still have some issues to review. From my lab work.”

  Spock nodded. “I do feel somewhat responsible for this incident,” he said.

  “Why?” asked Uhura, puzzled.

  “A simple logic string,” he replied. “You would not have been in the lab so late if I had not recommended you to the commandant for this task.”

  “Really?” she replied, almost indignant. “Commander, I thought you knew me better than that.”

  Spock turned back to the window. “Why do you say that, Cadet?” he asked.

  “I’m in that lab almost every night,” she said.

  “Oh,” said Spock. “I was not aware of your evening routine.”

  Uhura looked him in the eye and smiled. “You will be eventually,” she said.

  Spock raised an eyebrow. He gazed down at neat rows of white gravestones. The medical college grounds sat adjacent to the San Francisco National Cemetery, a military burial site. Just to the right sat the Officers’ Lounge, a well-lit place where Starfleet royalty liked to sip debilitating concoctions and tell war stories. Spock avoided it religiously.

  Uhura wondered if she had gone too far. She pressed a button on her bed rail to lower her head a bit. “I’ve only been your student a short while,” she said.

  “Yes, true,” he said.

  “In another six months you’ll probably wish you’d never met me,” she said.

  Spock allowed himself a smile. “You are relentless in your pursuit of knowledge,” he said. “However, I find that to be a most admirable trait, Cadet. One of many you possess.”

  Uhura breathed a sigh of relief.

  The fog’s gloomy front rank was pushing through the Presidio now. Above, the lights of the Golden Gate were blinking out of view, one by one. Spock watched the murk spread like surging water across the perfect military rows of grave markers below him. He almost flinched as a ragged fog specter, pushed hard by the sea wind, flew straight into the window. It broke apart on the pane like a boiling white fluid.

  Spock closed his eyes. Then he opened them and turned to Cadet Uhura.

  “So let us work,” he said.

  “Yes, let’s,” she replied.

  Kirk gave Hannah the latest update on the Tanika Station scenario. It wasn’t much; all Kirk knew was that Team Delta would be shuttled into an enclosed environment and (according to the prep sheet) “carry out Starfleet science directives in a First-Contact setting.”

  “An enclosed environment?” she repeated.

  “Correct,” said Kirk.

  “So you’re not planet-side?” she asked.

  “Doesn’t sound like it,” replied Kirk. “And we already did the First Contact mission final, so we’re assuming Tanika Station will be uninhabited.”

  “So your job is to explore, observe, then acquire and analyze science samples,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Kirk. “But these exercises are designed to be unpredictable. So, any advice?”

  “Just don’t kill anything, soldier,” replied Hannah. Then she impulsively leaned over and kissed him.

  “If I promise not to kill anything, will you do that again?” Kirk asked, pulling her closer. The air seemed to crackle with electricity. Kirk went in for another kiss, when suddenly the cable-car bell rang. “Columbus Avenue, hang on, half left!” called out the conductor, shattering the moment.

  “Hey, you ever been to City Lights?” asked Hannah with sudden excitement.

  Kirk said, “No. What is it?”

  “What is it?” she repeated. “Are you kidding?”

  “No.”

  Hannah turned to the grip man at the car controls. “Next stop!” she called. As the car rounded the half-turn onto Columbus and braked to a halt, Hannah checked her watch. “It’s getting late,” she said to Kirk. “What about your curfew?”

  “I’ll be fine,” he replied.

  City Lights was a bookstore, and it was generally considered the birthplace of the 1950s Beat generation. Two years prior it had celebrated its three-hundredth birthday, a remarkable achievement in an age where bookstores didn’t much exist anymore as actual, nonvirtual places. True, City Lights was as much a museum as anything. But it was still a cool place to hang out, look over old-fashioned printed books, and have a cup of good old-fashioned slow-brewed coffee.

  Kirk and Hannah hopped off the car at Columbus Avenue and started walking toward the famous bookstore. Kirk grabbed Hannah’s hand. She snuggled closer to him, and he wrapped his arm around her.

  Columbus slashed the city at an angle, running from the North Beach waterfront all the way to the soaring towers of the Financial District. It dead-ended right into the Transamerica Pyramid. As they crested the hill near the park at Washington Square, the glittering skyline was etched sharply against the darkening sky. A few blocks later, the great pyramid loomed directly ahead of them.

  Hannah pointed at it.

  “Hard to believe that was one of the five tallest buildings in the world when it was built,” she said. “Now it’s the runt of the skyline.”

  This was true. In 2255, many skyscrapers in the district towered far above the Transamerica Pyramid. Some were nearly twice its 850-foot height.

  “Well, it’s still the only pyramid, I guess,” said Kirk.

  “Right,” said Hannah. “The sacred shape.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, thinking, This girl can make anything sound sexy.

  Absently Kirk noticed the first tendrils of fog creeping through buildings up ahead. As he crossed Green Street, he turned to see streetlights being blotted from view in the distance as the fog advanced. The wind was picking up. He zipped up his jacket.

  Hannah formed a shape with her hands. “Many ancient cultures saw the pyramid as some kind of mystical shape,” she said. “Some still do.”

  Kirk was amused. “Well, they make great tombs and casinos,” he said.

  Hannah nodded. “The pyramid’s geometry is supposed to intensify electromagnetic frequencies that create a perfect scalar resonance.”

  “Yes,” said Kirk. “I understand this effect whitens whites and brightens colors. It also kills germs that can cause bad breath,” he said, leaning in for a quick kiss.

  Hannah laughed and kissed him back.

  A brilliant flare of white light suddenly flashed in the sky up ahead, near the tip of the Transamerica Pyramid.

  “How’d you do that?” Hannah
asked after a moment. “Do you control lightning, too?”

  Kirk was alert. He listened for a few seconds. “No thunder,” he said. “Hey, I grew up in Iowa. Where there’s lightning, thunder follows.”

  Three more blinding flashes lit the sky in rapid succession, like a pulsing strobe.

  “Definitely not lightning,” said Kirk.

  “Maybe it’s some kind of aircraft warning,” said Hannah. “’Cause, wow, look at the fog!”

  Heavy fog suddenly poured across the street from right to left, coming from the seaward direction. The wet chill felt like a sudden freeze.

  “Yikes,” said Hannah. “Let’s get to the bookstore.”

  They picked up the pace down Columbus. Kirk felt a sudden sense of dread. His peripheral vision had caught a glimpse of movement directly behind them. Now he spun around, and nudged Hannah behind him.

  A tall, hooded figure seemed to hover in the air just up the sidewalk, about ten feet in front of them.

  Kirk’s jaw clenched so hard, it popped. Then his tactical training kicked in. He took a deep breath and cleared his head.

  “Hannah,” he whispered over his shoulder. “Get ready to run.”

  Kirk kept his eyes on the dark figure. It moved toward them. Kirk backed up, forcing Hannah backward too.

  “Listen carefully,” he said quietly. “If you see any sign of black smoke, any sign at all . . . run. Do you hear me? Run like hell.”

  “I hear you,” said Hannah calmly.

  “Don’t let it catch you.”

  “Right.”

  A second dark figure coalesced in the fog next to the first. Kirk blinked and looked again.

  “Great,” he said.

  Hannah peered around him.

  “You’re Starfleet, Kirk,” Hannah whispered. “Kick some ass!”

  CH.9.12

  Delta Origins

  Starfleet Academy’s cryptology lab was the best code-breaking unit in the known galaxy, and its Cheetah3000 massively parallel quantum processor was custom-made for extracting meaning from something like a single white glyph etched on a black bit.

  Yet McCoy was still stunned at how quickly the supercomputer cracked the code. Less than twenty-four hours after he’d submitted the white marking for cryptoanalysis, the machine spit out a result with an estimated 99.9999997 percent probability of being accurate.

  As McCoy sat in Dr. Chandar’s nanotech lab in Hawking Hall, the Academy’s science center, watching live video of a nanite swarm, he reviewed the results with his friend.

  “The category of meaning is not surprising or mysterious at all, Parag,” said McCoy, scrolling down the document. “It’s a date and origin stamp.”

  “Just as we suspected,” replied Chandar. “It was so clearly a simple ID mark.”

  “Ah, but wait,” said McCoy. “Here’s where it gets interesting.” He turned the pad toward Chandar. The screen displayed a swirling mass of stars. “The white glyph is actually an embedded strand of numerical data that, when plotted in 3-D, produces this stunning holo-image. It’s our galaxy, Parag! The Milky Way! Re-created in remarkable detail.”

  Dr. Chandar stared in amazement. “A star map,” he said.

  “Exactly,” said McCoy.

  “And does it display travel waypoints so we can see where the swarm has been?” asked Chandar.

  “Unfortunately, no,” replied McCoy. “Each nanite’s galactic map has only two sets of spatial coordinates marked. One is Earth, as you would expect—the swarm’s destination marker.”

  He tapped on his pad’s screen, and the view zoomed through star clusters until it centered on the solar system and zoomed in on blue Earth. The planet was highlighted by a glowing aura.

  “Now here’s the other marker,” McCoy continued. “We have to assume that this set of coordinates marks the swarm’s place of origin.”

  He tapped the screen again. This time the view careened through the star systems of the galaxy’s Alpha Quadrant and zoomed clear out of known space.

  Dr. Chandar’s head jerked at an angle in bewilderment. “That is no region of galactic space I’m familiar with,” he said.

  “Yes,” said McCoy. “You are not familiar with this region because nobody is.”

  The view settled on a glittering region that appeared to be a mass of swirling debris—comets and asteroids, perhaps, and other planetary fragments.

  McCoy looked gravely at Chandar. “Parag, this is a core ward sector of the Delta Quadrant.”

  “What?” cried Chandar in disbelief.

  “Unknown space,” said McCoy, nodding. “We don’t even have sensors there.”

  “But our nearest border with Delta is thirty thousand light-years away,” said Chandar. He whipped out a calc-pad and did some quick figuring. “A Constitution-class starship traveling at its maximum velocity of Warp Six would take, let’s see . . . more than 138 full Earth years just to reach the edge of that quadrant.”

  “Precisely,” said McCoy. “And that’s why the date stamp is so interesting.”

  Dr. Chandar’s face lit up with an involuntary smile—all his neurons were firing.

  “The date stamp,” said McCoy, “based on standard galactic time computation, indicates the swarm was created or activated just two months ago, standard Earth time. So either it was created en route from the Delta Quadrant . . . or it got here unbelievably fast.”

  Chandar nodded. “Perhaps via some sort of transwarp corridor?”

  “Well, I’m not a physicist,” said McCoy.

  “No, you’re a doctor,” said Chandar. He pointed at his monitor, where a nanite swarm swirled lazily in live video on-screen. “And that’s why I think you’ll find this fascinating.”

  McCoy rolled his chair closer to the monitor.

  “Oh, wait,” McCoy said. “There’s one more thing about the glyph.” He punched up the Cryptology report again, then scrolled to a section, enlarged it, and held it up for Dr. Chandar. “Does this number mean anything to you, Parag?” he asked. “Anything particular in the world of, say, nanotechnology?”

  Chandar stared at the pad’s screen: 5618.

  “‘Five-six-one-eight,’” he read. “Hmm. No, not right offhand.”

  McCoy looked at the pad. “Because this simple number forms the entire bottom quarter of the glyph, according to the cryptoanalysis.”

  “That would suggest it is important,” said Chandar.

  McCoy gave the on-screen number another look, then shook his head and closed up his digital pad. “I guess we’ll run it past some of the other labs,” he said. “It must mean something.”

  Dr. Chandar rubbed his hands together and scooted his chair to the microscope.

  “Okay!” he said. “Now watch. This is fun!”

  Kirk had an idea.

  “Take off your jacket!” he said to Hannah.

  “What?”

  “Your jacket,” he said, pulling off his own.

  The two dark figures stood unmoving as the fog thickened. It was cold and wet, and now Kirk and Hannah shivered without coats on.

  “If you see anything that looks like black smoke, start fanning as fast as you can,” whispered Kirk. “Like this!” He started flapping his jacket up and down.

  Hannah gave him a sideways glance. “Have you lost your mind?”

  Kirk took a step toward the figures, wildly flapping his jacket. As he did so, a third dark figure appeared between the other two. In a deep voice, this middle figure spoke.

  “What the hell are you doing, mate?”

  Kirk stopped flapping.

  “Who’s there?” he called. “Show yourself!”

  The three figures moved slowly forward until their facial features were vaguely visible. It was clearly three Human males, all tall, all dressed in dark, hooded jackets. All three had heavily tattooed faces.

  “What are you guys, a basketball team?” asked Hannah. Still shivering, she slipped her jacket back on.

  The two fellows on the outside laughed, but the guy in t
he middle just leered dangerously at Hannah. He had a mouth full of silver-carbonate teeth filed to gleaming points. He pulled off his hood to reveal a shaved, tattooed head. A row of razor-sharp skull studs ran down the middle of his scalp to form a very painful-looking mohawk.

  Kirk knew the branding. These guys were part of the Mongol Saints, the most violent gang in the Bay Area. Based in Oakland, Saints often traveled in threes, looking for easy marks.

  Kirk smiled and relaxed.

  “Sorry, guys,” he said. “Whew! Thought you were someone else.”

  Hannah, also having realized who was standing opposite them, stared at him, mouth open.

  Kirk, still holding his jacket, draped his other arm across Hannah’s shoulders.

  “Did any of you fools see the bright flashing lights on the pyramid?” he conversationally asked them.

  The hoodless guy in the middle stopped leering. The way the other two flanked him, it was clear that he was the leader.

  “No,” he said. “Say, that thing with the jacket—that was really funny.”

  Kirk sighed. “Thanks,” he said. “Hey, listen, it’s cold. Care to join us in the bookstore? It’s just down the block.” He grinned and looked the stud-head in the eye. “I’ll buy you a peppermint latté.”

  He was not amused. “No thanks, mate,” he said. “We’ll take your girl, though.”

  “No, I don’t think you will,” Kirk said calmly. His arm was still around Hannah. He reached down with his free hand, flipped the communicator open on his hip, punched in a quick code, and flipped it shut. Then he spun Hannah away from the trio and started walking away from them.

  “Good luck with the surgery, guys,” he called back.

  Behind him he heard one of the wingmen say, “What surgery?”

  “Jim, what are you doing?” asked Hannah, twisting to look over her shoulder. “They’re coming!”

  “I know.” Kirk smiled. “Just walk.”

  A small group of people popped out of the fog and passed them heading the other direction, but Kirk knew it wouldn’t matter to the Saints. They enjoyed brutal public beatings.

  “Jim, I’m scared,” whispered Hannah.

  “Don’t be,” he said. “You are safe with me. I promise.” He tightened his grip around her slender shoulders.