Star Trek: Titan - 006 - Synthesis

by James Swallow

  “This is the most bloodless game I’ve ever played.” Pava Ek’Noor sh’Aqabaa leaned back in her seat and folded her arms across her chest. The Andorian woman’s antennae tightened, curling downward in irritation.

  Across the table from her, Y’lira Modan’s golden face shifted into a quizzical expression. “I thought this was a leisure pastime,” she began, glancing at the oval cards in her hand. “There’s no violence inherent in it.” The Selenean looked around Titan’s mess hall with an air of slight concern, perhaps wondering if the game would take on some combative aspect at a moment’s notice.

  “Bloodless,” Pava repeated with a sniff. “As in devoid of passion or thrill.”

  To her right, Torvig Bu-Kar-Nguv cocked his deerlike head and showed a slight toothy smile. “I’m quite thrilled,” he offered.

  “You’d never know it,” Pava said dryly, drumming her blue fingers on the dwindling pile of coins in front of her.

  The fourth player in their circle said nothing, instead resting his hand over the second of his cards, yet to be turned faceup. Tuvok’s steady, unblinking gaze remained fixed on the Andorian.

  After a moment, Torvig spoke again. “Commander Tuvok is showing the Ranjen,” he explained, the mechanical manipulator in the end of his slender tail coming up to point at the turned card in front of the Vulcan. The elliptical card showed a traditional icon of a Bajoran theologian, with characteristic hood and robes. “At best, he can score an eleven-point combination, with the reveal of an Emissary.”

  Pava glared down at her own hand, the turned card showing a radiant Kai on the steps of a Bantaca spire.

  “Of course,” Torvig piped, “if you show the Emissary or even another Kai, you’ll have a firm win—”

  “I know the rules, Ensign,” she snapped. “I’m just… considering my options.”

  Y’lira shrugged. “You only have two of them, Lieutenant. Match the commander’s wager or fold. It’s quite straightforward.”

  The Andorian chewed her lip. The pile of replicated lita coins in front of the Vulcan tactical officer was the largest on the table, with Torvig the only other player still showing more than a few tokens remaining; the Choblik had been losing and folding all night, retaining an annoying good humor all the while. He seemed to have absolutely no understanding of the dishonor attached to his utterly unremarkable play. Y’lira had just thrown her last stake into the pot, and Pava was in the same boat; if she matched Tuvok’s bet, she’d be cleaned out. But the idea of folding chafed on her. She felt her hands draw into fists. It was only a game, but that didn’t mean she wanted to lose it.

  “In reference to your earlier comment, Lieutenant, the game of kella has quite a violent history.” The commander spoke evenly, adopting a lecturing tone. “During Bajor’s preenlightenment age, there were several matches of historical note that resulted in declarations of warfare or brutal reprisals after one tribe’s champion player lost to another.”

  “I’ve always admired Bajoran passion,” Pava allowed. “But then they’re a people like mine, who react with zeal. They don’t analyze every incidence, don’t reduce everything to statistics and numbers!” Her voice rose toward the end of the statement, and she frowned at herself.

  Torvig’s head bobbed. “Isn’t that the point of games like this?”

  She glared at him. “I bet you’re computing the odds and probabilities of every possible combination of cards right this second, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” said the Choblik easily. “I imagine Commander Tuvok has done the same, along with Ensign Y’lira. The Vulcans and the Seleneans are renowned for their analytical abilities.”

  “My point,” Pava retorted. “If you turn this into a numbers game, it robs it of any excitement. Kella is about chance and risk, not mathematics!”

  “I find mathematical conundrums quite stimulating, actually,” said Y’lira.

  “Oh, for blade’s sake.” Pava’s face flushed indigo, and she shoved the rest of her coins into the middle of the table. “There. All in.”

  “Reveal,” said Tuvok, ignoring the Andorian’s emotive reaction, nodding to Y’lira.

  The Selenean bowed her head and turned her second card, bringing out a Prylar in a monk’s habit to go with the Kai already before her.

  “Ah, ‘The Passing of Knowledge,’ an eight-point pattern,” Torvig noted brightly.

  Y’lira raised her golden hands from the table in a gesture of surrender; with no stake left, she was out of the game. Her last gesture was to denote the next player to reveal, and she nodded at the lieutenant.

  The others turned to watch Pava without comment. The lieutenant’s lips curled, and she snapped over her other oval card with a hard flourish, nailing it to the table with her finger. A Ranjen, the mirror of Tuvok’s shown card, stared back up at her. She felt a sudden surge of excitement. Torvig had a Ranjen showing as well, and the poor second-rank card offered him as little chance for a win as the commander.

  “Ten points for Kai and Ranjen, ‘The Answered Question,’” said the Choblik. “The lieutenant leads.”

  Pava immediately pointed at Tuvok, whose irritatingly composed manner had been grating on her as he had siphoned off her coins throughout the game. “Reveal!”

  Without a glimmer of concern, the Vulcan displayed a Ranjen. At only two points, “The Bearers of Truth” was the lowest-scoring hand that had appeared all night. Pava immediately clamped down on the beginning of the grin that threatened to race across her lips, and she had to place her hands flat on the table to stop herself from preemptively reaching for the pot.

  “Ah, me, then.” Torvig’s tail manipulator looped over his right shoulder and delicately flipped the last oval onto its face. Pava’s moment of anticipation disintegrated so decisively that for a second, she was sure she could hear it shatter like breaking glass. The dark complexion and gold-haloed face of an Emissary card lay there, silently announcing her failure.

  “The Emissary and the Ranjen,” Tuvok intoned, in case Pava wasn’t clear on how badly she’d been beaten. “Eleven points scored for ‘The Learned Ones.’ Well played, Ensign.”

  Torvig’s augmented eyes blinked, and he reached out with his forepaw cyberlimbs to draw the pile of Bajoran coinage to him. “That was quite engaging. It’s a shame these are only score markers. I imagine on Bajor, I’d be quite wealthy.”

  Pava grumbled something under her breath and stood up. “I think next time I play, it won’t be against people with calculators in their heads.” Of course, intellectually, she knew that the coins were valueless tokens replicated just for the sake of the game, but that didn’t soften the blow of losing. And losing to a diminutive ensign who resembled the snowskippers she’d hunted in her teens on Andor just rubbed ice into the wound.

  Torvig paused. “I’m the only one here with neuralprocessing circuits in my cranium.”

  Y’lira smiled serenely. “There’s always Chief Bralik’s floating Tongo tournament, if it’s high emotion you’re looking for, ma’am. Although it’s mostly greed, not passion.”

  Pava shot her a glare. She was never really clear on the cryptolinguist’s grasp of sarcasm. “My meaning is, games of chance should be exactly that, random and chaotic, just like real life! It’s the thrill of the roll of the dice, the turn of a card. It’s not something to be bled dry of all emotion, just reduced to equations and probability graphs.”

  “In all systems, even those that appear to be chaotic in nature, there is a form of order,” Tuvok replied. “If it can be determined, then it can be emulated and predicted. I would submit to you, Lieutenant, that the element of chance is illusory. It simply requires a means of computing robust enough to transcend it.”

  Ensign Torvig’s robotic fingers had made quick work of dividing his pile of winnings into four identical towers of lita coins. “I’d love a rematch,” he offered, but the Andorian was already thinking about a different kind of game, something more her speed, something that would involve hitting things with sticks.

/>   But then everything was swept away as the deck pivoted without warning beneath her feet, throwing cards and coins and everything not bolted down up into the air.

  A metallic moan echoed through the bulkheads as superluminal velocities were abruptly canceled out, shock waves of kinetic energy backwashing through tritanium panels and duranium spaceframes. The starship shuddered along its length, internal lighting flashing out, then returning in jagged strobes. Somewhere, an electroplasma conduit popped and shorted as breakers kicked in.

  Pava shot out an arm to snag the lip of the table, her other hand unceremoniously catching hold of Torvig’s tail as he fell upward. The Choblik gave a lowing cry of surprise that turned into a grunt as the Titan’s artificialgravity generators caught up to the shock and reasserted control.

  Loose items clattered back to the deck in a rain, and Pava landed awkwardly, hissing as she banged her leg against a chair.

  Y’lira blinked. “We… we’re out of warp?”

  “Yes,” managed Torvig, shaking his head. Anything else he was going to say was drowned out by the blare of the alert sirens.

  Tuvok was already racing for the mess-hall door. “Stations!” he shouted.

  Coins and cards abandoned, the other officers sprinted after him.

  TWO

  “What the hell was that?” demanded Vale, wincing at the pain in her right shoulder. When Titan had bucked, she’d grabbed the arm of the command chair to stop herself from being flung to the deck of the bridge. She was thinking maybe she’d wrenched something. “Full stop!” The order seemed a little redundant, but she gave it anyway. On the forward viewscreen, a fizzing plane of static cast hard, sharp-edged shadows.

  “Sandbank,” muttered Lieutenant Lavena, leaning close over the helm.

  “Spare me the oceangoing metaphors, Aili.” The first officer got to her feet and surveyed the bridge with a grimace, waving a hand in front of her face to waft away a drift of thin smoke. Panels around the engineering console flickered and spat fat sparks as a junior officer worked to stabilize the system.

  The Pacifican pilot turned in her chair. “Force of habit, Commander, sorry.” She tapped her panel. “We struck a pocket of spatial distortion. It caught us out of nowhere. It must have blown the warp bubble, knocked us back to sublight.”

  To Lavena’s right, Lieutenant Sariel Rager was pushing stray hair out of her face from where it had come loose, her dark eyes still wide with the shock. “Confirming that, ma’am. Close-range sensors are reading dissipating tetryon discharges, consistent with a distortion effect. Titan sailed right through the middle of a zone of collapsing subspace instability.”

  Vale cursed under her breath. “I thought Melora was feeding you nav data on these…” She frowned. “These sandbanks.” The commander walked forward. “You’re supposed to go around them, not through them.”

  “We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said Rager.

  Lavena’s face colored slightly. “With all due respect, this sector is so choked with spatial distortion, there’s hardly anywhere we can go where we’re not passing through them. But it’s mostly low-level, not enough to affect the ship.”

  Zurin Dakal glanced up from behind the bowed sciences console. “That didn’t feel like ‘low-level’ to me,” said the Cardassian. Lavena frowned back at him, and he looked away. His gray fingers ran across the panel, working furiously. “Confirming Lieutenant Rager’s readings. The distortion zone must have gone through a sudden expansion-contraction event. It’s a million-to-one chance we were even nearby. Without temporally desynchronized sensors, there’s simply no way we could have avoided it.”

  “Status report?” As Vale asked the question, she turned to see Tuvok enter the bridge through the port turbolift and move swiftly to his post behind the tactical horseshoe behind the command pit.

  Ranul Keru caught her eye. The Titan’s Trill security chief was at the main systems display at the back of the bridge. “No hull breaches, no internal threats,” he began, getting a confirming nod from the Vulcan. “Sickbay reports coming in… minor injuries, no fatalities. Obviously, we’ve lost warp drive for the moment. Life support and impulse power got shook up, but they’re still operable.”

  “Weapons and shields are nominal,” Tuvok added. “Scanner arrays returning to operating status.”

  “So we got tripped up and fell on our backsides, but aside from dents in our dignity, we’re fine?”

  Keru nodded. “It would appear so, Commander.”

  Vale looked back to Dakal. “Ensign, tell me this doesn’t mean we’re going to have to crawl through this sector at sublight from now on.”

  “I’m still forming a hypothesis,” he replied.

  “Form quicker,” Vale demanded. “We just turned the captain’s day off upside down—literally—and he’s going to want an explanation.”

  A chiming alert tone sounded from the tactical station. “I am detecting multiple objects in our vicinity.” Tuvok’s eyebrow arched. “In addition, energetic residues.”

  “From the distortion?”

  “Negative.”

  Dakal was nodding. “I see the objects. Not ships… at least, not a whole one.”

  Vale looked forward. “Can we get that screen working?”

  One of the engineers worked his console, and the main viewer, flickering and hazy with distortion, became clear. Immediately, Vale spotted a half-dozen jagged forms drifting against the blackness. Some of them tumbled, catching the light of far distant stars, while others bled orange streamers of spent energy behind them.

  “Based on the clustering of the fragments, this appears to be the remains of a single vessel. I would estimate the craft to be around one-third the mass of the Titan. I am detecting refined metals, tripolymers, decay products from spent electroplasma…” The ensign read off the report from the sensor grid. “Traces of directed-energy discharges. Lots of them.”

  “Weapons fire,” said Keru, grim-faced.

  “A battleground?” Lavena studied the display, her hands tensing.

  “Tuvok…” Vale threw him a look. “Any pattern matches in our databases?”

  The Vulcan paused. “There are multiple particle signatures… I would hypothesize high-energy antiproton weapons.”

  Dakal spoke again. “All of the fragments display a similar metallurgy. I’d need to make a closer examination for full confirmation.”

  “You want to go and pick up a piece, Ensign?” said Keru. “It’s swimming in radiation out there.”

  “One ship,” echoed the commander. “Whatever happened, it was smashed to pieces.”

  “What could do that to a starship?” Lavena asked aloud, a note of fear in her voice.

  “Internal explosions? Gravitational stresses?” suggested Rager. “Or maybe something with really big teeth.”

  “I can find no correlation with any elements of known ship design in the tactical database,” Tuvok added.

  “Zurin, what about life signs?” said Vale.

  “The first thing I scanned for, Commander,” the ensign replied. “No organic forms detected. As Lieutenant Commander Keru stated, the ambient radiation fogging the area is quite lethal. If any conventional carbon-based life survived…” He nodded toward the debris field. “Survived that, I doubt they would have lived much longer.”

  “We’ve encountered plenty of life-forms that can handle high rads,” noted Rager.

  Dakal nodded. “And I scanned for those as well. I admit, it is possible there could be shielded compartments within the larger pieces of wreckage or zones we can’t read at this range.”

  Keru let out a slow breath. “Whatever took place here, it was brutal. I’m wondering if that, uh, sandbank we hit was a side effect.”

  “I concur,” said Tuvok. “The expenditure of energy in this area far exceeds that which would be required to atomize the mass of the wreckage. We can only conclude that another combatant was present.”

  “Obviously,” Vale retorted.


  “Indeed,” Tuvok continued, “but if another craft was here, then why do the sensors register the ion trail of only one vessel?”

  “You’re saying whatever did this just… vanished?” Dakal licked dry lips.

  “I am merely presenting the information available at this time.”

  Vale frowned. “All right. First things first. We get our ship back on an even keel before we start worrying about someone else’s. I want situation reports from all department heads in ten minutes.” She turned toward Lavena. “And Lieutenant, you work with Melora and Zurin. See if you can’t find us a way to make sure we don’t run aground again.” Vale’s lips curled. “Honestly, it’s embarrassing.”

  • • •

  “She’s fine,” said Ogawa, snapping shut the medical tricorder and pulling a big smile for Tasha. “A little shook up, but then aren’t we all?”