Star Trek: The Next Generation: Starfleet Academy #6: Mystery of the Missing Crew

by Michael Jan Friedman

  Griffiths eyed him warily. “So I was,” he said. “Anyway, it can stay there for as much as six or seven minutes, tops. Then it’s got to be sent out through the emitter array. But before it reaches the emitter, it’s got to pass through a—”

  Before the chief could finish his sentence, the deck in the transporter room seemed to heave up at one end, throwing not only Griffiths across the room, but the Yann as well. They crashed into the far wall. However, being an android, Data was able to catch himself before he could slide past the control console.

  In the next fraction of a second he analyzed the situation. The Yosemite had been shaken—that much was certain. More than likely, this condition had been caused by the unidentified vessel. And whatever that vessel had used against the Federation ship, it had carried with it sufficient force to overcome the Yosemite’s inertial dampening systems.

  Just as suddenly as it had pitched, the deck righted itself. Muttering beneath his breath, clinging to a bulkhead for support, Chief Griffiths got to his feet. He looked dazed, confused.

  The Yann weren’t in very good shape themselves. That was one of the drawbacks of being made of flesh and blood, rather than a construct of artificial materials. It wasn’t all that difficult to be injured.

  Making his way over to his fellow cadets, Data helped Sinna—the nearest of them—to her feet. “Are you all right?” he asked her.

  She nodded. “I think so,” she replied. “Are you?”

  “I am unharmed, But then,” he explained, “I was designed to be a good deal more durable than any naturally occurring organism.”

  Suddenly the entire transporter room was bathed in a flash of blue-white light—a flash so bright and so all-encompassing that even the android’s eyes had trouble adjusting to it.

  When he could see again, he noticed that the room was lit only with red-orange emergency lights. But that wasn’t all that had changed. Transporter Chief Griffiths was gone.

  Data and the Yann just looked at one another in the eerie glow of the emergency lights. None of them knew what had happened—not to the room, and certainly not to Chief Griffiths.

  “Now what?” asked the Yanna called Felai. “Where has the chief disappeared to?”

  “The captain told him to remain at his post,” recalled Odril.

  “So where is he?” inquired Lagon. He swallowed. “And why didn’t we see him leave?”

  Sinna looked up at the overhead lighting grid, where only the emergency panels were lit up. “Computer,” she said, “restore normal lighting to Transporter Room One.”

  The computer’s answer was quick and to the point. “The Yosemite is operating on battery power,” it explained. “Normal lighting is not a priority life-support system.”

  Battery power? Data wondered why that should be. As unlikely as it seemed, perhaps the computer had made a mistake. He asked it to confirm its previous response.

  It did just that. “The Yosemite is operating on battery power,” it repeated. “Primary power is off-line.”

  The android mulled the information over. “Apparently,” he noted, “the ship was hit hard enough for its power relays to be damaged.”

  “Hit?” echoed Lagon. “Hit by what?”

  Data shook his head. “I do not know. However, we seem to have been hit by something. Otherwise, the deck would not have pitched and thrown you across the room.”

  “I’ll bet it was that other ship,” suggested Felai. “The one Captain Rumiel called the yellow alert about. It must have fired on us.”

  A possibility, the android conceded. However, an unsubstantiated one.

  “Let’s worry about one thing at a time,” advised Sinna. “Computer,” she said, “where is Chief Griffiths at this moment?” Like any other officer on the ship, the chief could be located through the communicator badge he wore on his uniform.

  The computer seemed to hesitate just the slightest bit before answering. “Chief Griffiths,” it announced, “is not present on the Yosemite.”

  It took some time for that to sink in. They all looked at one another, trying to make sense of the computer’s response.

  “Not on the ship?” said Felai. “But how can that be? He was here just a minute ago.”

  “That information is not available,” the computer told the Yann.

  “We have to tell Captain Rumiel,” decided Odril. “He’ll know what to do about this.”

  “You’re right,” added Felai. “Transporter Room One to bridge. Come in, bridge.”

  They waited for a reply. There wasn’t any. Data knew there were only two possibilities: either the communications system wasn’t working properly or there was no one on the bridge to respond.

  Normally, he would have expected that the first answer was the correct one. However, with Chief Griffiths’s disappearance still unexplained, he wasn’t too certain of anything right now.

  “Computer,” said Lagon, “why won’t the bridge answer us?”

  The computer’s reaction was as short as it was ominous. “There is no one present on the bridge to do so.”

  “What about the rest of the ship?” asked Odril. “Where is there someone present … someone who can tell us what’s going on?”

  “There is no member of the crew present on the Yosemite at all,” the computer informed him.

  Felai shook his head. “No. There must be some mistake. This ship was full of people just a few moments ago.”

  “Chief Griffiths was here a few moments ago as well,” Data pointed out. “But he is no longer here, either.”

  “The corridors,” said Odril, eyeing the exit. “All we have to do is go outside, and we’ll see that it’s not so. We’ll see that there are still plenty of people here.”

  “Good idea,” Lagon maintained. “That is, if the doors still work.”

  The doors worked fine. But what they saw out in the corridor didn’t reassure them. In fact, they saw nothing. Nothing and no one.

  “There’s no one here,” observed Felai, stating the obvious in his astonishment.

  “There have to be people somewhere,” insisted Odril. “They can’t all have vanished.”

  “Can’t they?” asked Sinna. And then, when the others looked at her: “If Chief Griffiths is gone, and all the crewmen in this corridor as well … why can’t the whole crew have disappeared?”

  “But then … where did they go?” asked Lagon. Abruptly he blinked. “Wait a minute. That other ship … could it be?”

  “Sweet deities,” said Odril. “Is it possible that they transported the crew right off the Yosemite? Aren’t there supposed to be safeguards against something like that?”

  Data nodded. “Under normal circumstances it is not feasible to transport someone off a shielded vessel. And during a yellow alert, shield maintenance would have been a top priority.”

  Felai shook his head. “Couldn’t there have been a malfunction?”

  “Computer,” called Sinna. “Have the ship’s shields dropped at any time in the last ten minutes?”

  “Negative,” replied the computer. “Shields have remained operational during that period.”

  “No malfunction,” observed Sinna, looking more than a little perplexed. “But still, they’re all gone.”

  Odril scowled. “Then why aren’t we? Why didn’t we disappear along with everyone else?”

  It was a good question, the android thought, and an uncomfortable one as well, because of the uncertainties it brought with it.

  “Maybe we will disappear,” remarked Felai, saying aloud what all of them were thinking. “It may just be a matter of time.”

  “Now there’s a cheerful thought,” muttered Odril. “At any moment we could fade away … and never know how or why.”

  He looked from Felai to Lagon to Sinna, as if keeping them in sight would somehow prevent them from being whisked away like the rest of the crew. But, of course, it wouldn’t help at all.

  “The only way to know if we are vulnerable,” Data reflected, “is to isolate t
he critical variable which allowed us to remain when the others could not.”

  “Variable?” echoed Lagon. “You mean … the difference between us and the rest of the crew?”

  “Precisely,” Data confirmed.

  “We’re Yann,” suggested Felai. “And you are an android. No one else on the ship fell into either of those two categories.”

  “True,” conceded Sinna. “But those attributes wouldn’t have given us any special protection against a transporter beam.”

  “We weren’t Starfleet officers,” Odril chimed in. “And everyone else on board was.”

  Lagon grunted. “But those on the unidentified vessel would have had no way of knowing that.”

  “It must be something else,” Sinna agreed. “Something which made the five of us less desirable to them … or more difficult to obtain a transporter lock on … or …”

  Data turned to her, a hypothesis already forming in his positronic brain. “A transporter lock …” he repeated.

  Sinna returned the android’s scrutiny. “Have you got something?” she asked him eagerly.

  “Perhaps,” he replied. “Though I am not certain. As you may know, Starfleet away teams in need of a transport are often located by their communicator badges. Without them, the transporter operator must find some alternative way to fix their coordinates.”

  Felai’s eyes narrowed as he looked at Odril’s red coveralls, then his own. “But we don’t have badges,” he muttered, “because we’re not in Starfleet yet.”

  “So,” added Sinna, “if the aliens fixed on Captain Rumiel and his crew via their communicators—”

  “They would not have been aware of us,” Data told her, completing the thought he had begun a couple of interjections ago. “As far as they were concerned, we did not exist.” He paused as the others considered his theory. “Of course, that is only one possibility. I will need more empirical information before I can determine if it is true.”

  For a moment there was silence. Then Lagon slammed the side of his fist into a bulkhead. His frustration was evident in his face.

  “This isn’t fair,” he complained. “How are we supposed to figure this out? We’re not even real cadets yet.”

  Data sympathized with the Yanna. If he had had emotions, he believed he would have been frustrated, too. As it was, he saw clearly what they had to do.

  “Lagon is correct,” he announced. “We have no training. We are not prepared to react to a situation of this complexity. Our primary goal should be to make contact with a Starfleet facility.”

  “How do we do that?” asked Odril.

  Data thought about it—though his android mind worked so quickly, he arrived at a conclusion before his companions could even blink.

  “We must go up to the bridge,” he answered. “If the ship’s subspace communications system is working, we will be able to access it from there.”

  “And then what?” asked Felai. “We wait for hours, maybe even days, until Starfleet can respond—with that other ship out there liable to find out about us at any moment?”

  It was true that Starfleet might take some time to come to their rescue, depending on which base received their call for help and the position of the nearest vessel. There was no point in wasting that time.

  “We could make use of the waiting period,” the android replied, “to investigate what happened to the ship’s crew … and to recover it, if that is at all possible. Perhaps, in the process, we may learn how we may defend ourselves against the actions of our adversary—whoever it may be.”

  The others looked skeptical. However, no one challenged the idea. After all, none of them seemed to have a better one.

  CHAPTER

  3

  Data watched the doors of the turbolift open, revealing the bridge of the Yosemite and the star-specked viewscreen at the far end of it.

  The place was ghostly silent. Neither the android nor the Yann did much to lift that silence as they emerged from the lift and headed for one dimly illuminated console or another.

  “It’s just as the computer said,” reported Sinna from the navigator’s position. Her features were bathed in greenish light as she leaned out over the instrument panels. She kept her voice low, as if out of respect for those who were no longer here.

  “All tactical systems are down,” she continued, “except for the transporter unit and a limited shields function. All battery backup power is being used for life support and to maintain deflectors.”

  “Wonderful,” remarked Odril, who was standing by the helm. “What else could go wrong?"

  As if on cue, Lagon gasped. Everyone turned to look at the communications console, where he had stopped and was staring intently at the monitor.

  Looking up at them, Lagon said: “We’re receiving a hailing signal from an unidentified vessel. They want to speak with our captain.” His eyes grew wide with worry. “It’s them,” he concluded. “The ones who fired on us.”

  “Why can’t we see them?” asked Odril. “Shouldn’t they be visible on the viewscreen?”

  “Not necessarily,” Data replied. “They may be out of visual range at this point—or simply positioned behind us, where the viewscreen would not detect them unless specifically directed to do so.”

  “They want to speak with our captain?” repeated Felai. “But they already have him. They can speak to him face to face.”

  “There is still no proof that they were responsible for Captain Rumiel’s disappearance,” the android reminded him. “To this point, we have only speculated to that effect.”

  “That’s true,” Lagon conceded, trying to make sense of the situation.

  “But who else could have done it?” asked Felai, his eyes flickering in Data’s direction. “Who else is out there? It had to have been them.”

  Sinna looked to the android as well. “What are we going to do, Data? They want an answer. And there’s no telling how they’ll react if they don’t get one.”

  The android had no ready solution to the problem—as much as he wished it were otherwise.

  “Sinna’s right,” agreed Odril. “If we don’t give them some kind of reply, it will only alert them as to how helpless we are….”

  “Assuming they don’t know that already,” added Felai.

  “Yes,” said Odril. “Of course, Brother. But let’s not make that assumption before we speak to them or we could be giving ourselves away without needing to.”

  Seeing the wisdom in Odril’s remark, Felai gave in—though reluctantly. “As you say, Brother, we’ll speak to them first.”

  “But if we speak to them,” Lagon added, “won’t that reveal our helplessness even more surely than our silence? After all, the crew is gone. There’s no one here but us—and we’re hardly in a position to run a starship.”

  “A good point,” said Odril solemnly.

  Data was in agreement as well. “Unless …” he said.

  Sinna looked at him. “What?”

  The android thought for a moment. “What if we were to give the appearance that the captain was still here? That the Yosemite was still fully manned and ready for action?”

  Sinna’s eyes brightened. “You mean … take their places? Act as if we were the ship’s senior officers?”

  “Yes,” Odril confirmed. “That’s exactly what he means. Let’s see …” He stroked his chin. “There are five of us … enough to pose as captain, navigator, helmsman, communications officer, and science officer.”

  “But we can’t carry out the jobs of those officers,” complained Felai. “All we can do is stand at their posts.”

  “That may be enough,” commented Data.

  “And what about the bridge itself?” Felai reminded them, indicating its confines with a sweeping gesture.

  “One look at this place, and they’ll see that we’re working with emergency power.”

  Felai was correct, Data mused. Still, there might be a remedy for that.

  “Given a little time,” he told the Yann, "�
��I may be able to reroute the power now providing life support to a low priority area such as the cargo bay—and deploy it here on the bridge. In that way we can at least create a semblance of business as usual.”

  “Reroute the power?” echoed Lagon. “And how do you propose to do that—unless you have some technical expertise you’ve been hiding from us?”

  The android shook his head. “My understanding of ship’s systems, gained during my time on the Tripoli, is regrettably basic. However, my positronic brain enables me to absorb a great deal of information in a short period of time.”

  Sinna grunted. “And where are you going to get this information, Data?”

  He moved to the science station. “Right here,” he told her. “All I have to do is access the Yosemite’s computer through this terminal. It should not be very difficult. In fact—”

  “They’re sending another message,” Lagon announced from his position at the communications console. “They want us to move off right now. Otherwise …” His brow creased with concern. “Otherwise they’re going to take hostile action.”

  For a moment no one moved. No one spoke. They just tried to come to grips with the deadly reality of their predicament.

  At last Odril broke the silence. “We can’t move off,” he said with a sigh. “Our engines aren’t working.”

  “But they don’t know that,” Sinna pointed out. She turned to Data. “And with any luck, it’ll stay that way.”

  “Indeed,” said the android. Fired up by a new sense of urgency, he activated the science-station monitor and set about learning about the ship’s systems.

  It would have taken a human being hundreds of hours to learn what he needed to know about the Yosemite. But then, Data was not a human being.

  Being a great deal like a computer himself, he was able to scan the information on the monitor as quickly as it could scroll by him. The Yann muttered softly in the background, no doubt finding it hard to believe that anyone could learn at such an incredible rate.