Distant Early Warning

by Dayton Ward

  He sensed the swing of his opponent’s knife hand and lashed upward with his left arm, halting the downswing of the blade over his head even as he punched at the intruder with his other arm. Farber heard a satisfying grunt of pain as his fist sank into the soft flesh of the attacker’s lower torso.

  Still, the other man was faster, his arms and legs moving with incredible speed as he pushed himself away from Farber. The knife sliced forward again, and this time the engineer winced as hot pain lanced down his left forearm. Instinct pulled him away and he felt a dull throbbing in his arm, in synch with his rapid heartbeat as he looked down to the thin incision from his wrist to his elbow. Blood streamed from the new wound to stain the gold material of his sliced shirt sleeve.

  Then he sensed movement toward him and lurched to his right as his assailant jumped toward him again. In a blind grab, Farber managed to catch the attacker’s arm in his own massive hand. With a furious growl he pulled the arm down and around until his opponent was forced to turn his back to him. The knife clattered to the deck and he howled in pain as Farber forced his arm up between his shoulder blades. With his free hand—the one now slick with his own blood—he gripped the back of the other man’s head and pushed him forward to slam his face into the side of a nearby cargo container. The attacker cried out in renewed pain, but the engineer ignored it as he pushed his head forward again, repeating the blow to the intruder’s face.

  Despite all of that the assailant was still struggling to free himself, but Farber had him now. Still gripping the other man’s wrist in his right hand, the lieutenant pulled upward until he felt the arm separate from the shoulder socket with a dull pop. The attacker screamed, but the renewed agony only seemed to fuel his own movements. Pushing off from the cargo container, he spun with startling speed and lashed out with his good arm, catching Farber just below his throat. The engineer staggered back before tripping over the edge of a smaller cargo box and crashing to the deck in a clumsy heap.

  His vision blurry from the force of the attack, Farber shook his head even as he rolled to his side and back to his feet. Arms out and away from his body in a defensive stance, he tensed for a new attack but instead heard only the sounds of footsteps running away from him. Looking around, he finally caught sight of the attacker dashing through an open doorway at the end of the cargo bay, disappearing into the corridor beyond.

  “You could have gotten yourself killed, you know.”

  Farber nodded in agreement as he watched Ezekiel Fisher, the station’s chief medical officer, tend to his wounded left arm. Dressed in the blue tunic of Starfleet’s sciences branch, Fisher was a human male of African descent, perhaps eighty years old, who carried himself with a quiet authority that the engineer instinctively trusted. His black hair and beard were liberally laced with streaks of gray, and his dark brown eyes carried the wealth of professional and personal baggage that Farber would have expected from a man of his years.

  Though al-Khaled had applied emergency first aid to treat Farber’s wound, it had required the services of a medical professional. Farber was thankful that the cut, though running nearly the length of his forearm, was not at all deep. No tendons had been severed and the blade had missed hitting a vein. Fisher had made short work of things, cleansing the cut before treating it with a dermal protoplaser. Within twenty-four hours, there would not even be a scar.

  Still, it hurt like hell.

  “We found two knives,” Lieutenant Jackson said as he stepped around a stack of cargo cases and approached Farber and Fisher, a data slate clipped to his left hip and a canvas carrying bag slung over his right shoulder. Of Farber, he asked, “You didn’t get a good look at him?”

  “Good enough to know he was wearing a body suit,” Farber replied, “including a full face mask.”

  “A stealth suit,” al-Khaled added as he moved to stand next to Jackson. “Used by Starfleet special operations personnel. They mask body heat to avoid infrared detection.”

  Frowning, Jackson replied. “Which would explain why he wasn’t picked up on internal sensors.” He released a tired sigh. “Wonderful.” To the engineers, he said, “He was shadowing you while you searched for the data transmitter. For all we know, he was on his way to get the thing before you beat him to it, and he improvised from there.” Looking back toward the center of the cargo bay, where members of his security staff were at this moment conducting a thorough investigation of the entire scene, he shook his head. “Damn. Ballard was a good guy.”

  Farber felt a pang of guilt in his gut as he nodded in agreement. Though he knew he could have done nothing to save Ballard, he was certain that the device would likely have claimed his own life but for sheer timing.

  I’m so sorry, Curtis.

  “We want to help you find who killed him,” al-Khaled said as though echoing that thought, nodding with a conviction Farber knew only too well. There was no mistaking the set to his friend’s jaw or the look in his eyes. Now, the matter was personal, and he wanted it resolved.

  Jackson replied, “I’ll take all the help I can get. Station security is one thing, but murder investigations and forensics are out of my league.” Retrieving his data slate, the security chief activated the unit, using its accompanying stylus to scribble something on the slate’s faceplate.

  “I’m transferring the evidence to you, Doctor,” he said as he reached into the shoulder bag and extracted a pair of long, thin blades—each inside its own sealed container. “I’d like to know if a blade like one of these might have been used on Ensign Malhotra.”

  Nodding, the doctor replied, “I’ll get on it right away, Lieutenant. I should know something in an hour or so.”

  Everyone in the room looked up as the lights flickered, and for a brief moment Farber felt his stomach lurch—a familiar reaction when moving from one artificial gravity field to another.

  Life support’s acting up?

  “Now what?” Jackson said, squinting his eyes in response to the still-blinking lights. Reaching for his own communicator, he flipped it open. “Jackson to operations. What’s going on?”

  The voice of Commander Jon Cooper, Vanguard’s executive officer, replied, “Cooper here, Jacks. Looks like a batch of new trouble with that alien signal or whatever the hell it is. You still with those engineers from the Lovell?”

  “Damn,” Farber said, shaking his head in resignation. “I thought we had that thing figured out.”

  “Apparently not,” al-Khaled replied, sighing in irritation.

  Nodding, though Cooper could not see it, Jackson said into his communicator, “Yeah, they’re still here.”

  A burst of static met his response before Cooper’s voice came back. “Send them to main engineering. Looks like we still need their help.” His statement was met with another bout of crackling interference, sure indications that the mysterious carrier wave was meddling with communications now, as well.

  Farber’s eyes met al-Khaled’s as the lieutenant asked, “You up for it?”

  “Yeah,” the engineer replied, feeling a sense of obligation to assist in the tragic absence of Curtis Ballard. “Let’s go.”

  Chapter

  8

  The workstation nearest to the door exploded just as al-Khaled entered primary engineering control.

  Throwing up his arms to protect his face, the engineer ducked to his right to avoid the worst of the blast, feeling the heat of sparks and bits of plastic composite shrapnel peppering his uniform and exposed skin.

  “Mahmud!” Farber called out as he entered the room behind al-Khaled, shouting to be heard over the alarm Klaxon echoing throughout the chamber. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” al-Khaled replied as he brushed still-warm pieces of small shrapnel from his tunic. Noting Farber’s torn and still blood-stained left sleeve as well as his somewhat ashen complexion, he asked again, “Are you sure you’re up for this?”

  Farber nodded. “Don’t worry about me. Let’s see what we can do to help.”

 
Al-Khaled looked about the control room and quickly found Lieutenant Shepherd, second-in-command of the station’s engineering department, bent over a console, her hands moving frenetically over the array of controls before her. Working at adjacent stations were Ensign Tamishiro, whom al-Khaled remembered from the earlier incident with the environmental control system, and Ensign Ghrex from his own team.

  “Supplement power from the auxiliary generators,” Shepherd said, pointing to one display monitor at Tamishiro’s workstation before reaching up to brush sweat-matted auburn hair from her eyes. “I don’t want life support acting up on us again. And shut off that damned alarm!”

  Stepping back from the station to consult another cluster of status monitors, the engineer caught sight of al-Khaled and Farber crossing the room toward her, and al-Khaled noted the strain, fatigue, and grief in her eyes. Word about Ballard’s death doubtless had spread throughout the station’s crew with undue haste, and he recognized the look of someone forced to set aside their personal feelings of sadness and loss in order to concentrate on the situation at hand.

  “What’s happening this time?” al-Khaled asked as the alert Klaxon faded. Without its blaring report bouncing off the bulkheads, the control center was quiet save for frantic movements and short, terse interactions between the ten or so engineers moving and working about the room.

  “That damned signal,” Shepherd replied. “Even worse this time, and it’s not even trying to be subtle anymore. Now it’s pushing and beating its way through everything in its way. If it keeps up, it’ll tear the guts out of this station.”

  Farber asked, “But still the same frequency and modulation as before?”

  Behind her, Ghrex turned and looked up from her console. “Yes, sir. The only difference now is the intensity. It’s wreaking havoc on every sensitive onboard system simultaneously. Computer access has been compromised, the primary long-range sensor array is offline, and so is the intrastation communications network. Even our portable communicators are experiencing some measure of interference.”

  “We’ve got other problems, too,” Shepherd added. “I’ve gotten word that the Lovell’s experiencing fluctuations in her warp engines. One dilithium crystal’s already fractured, and your chief engineer is performing an emergency shutdown in the hopes of preventing more damage.” She shook her head. “Thank God our support ships are all out on assignment, otherwise we might be looking at a quartet of warp engine overloads.” Casting a glance toward Tamishiro, she asked, “What about that Orion ship?”

  “Its main engines are offline,” the Asian woman replied without looking up from her station. “Their mechanics aren’t completely incompetent after all, it seems.”

  “What about the station’s power generators?” al-Khaled asked. “Aren’t you having problems with them, as well?”

  Moving to an adjacent console, Shepherd nodded. “You don’t know the half of it. We’re picking up spikes in both main power plants, and our attitude control system is also starting to act up.” She indicated one display monitor with a wave of her hand. “Maneuvering thrusters are firing at random, and I’ve had to assign three of my people to try and coordinate manual adjustments until we can override the system.”

  Al-Khaled pictured an image of the station in his mind, bobbing and weaving through empty space in response to its unruly attitude control thrusters. When overseen properly by designated automated processes, the collection of small thruster ports positioned across the outer hull of the starbase kept it stationary at its assigned coordinates and corrected for drift.

  And what happens when they’re not looked after?

  “What can we do to help?” Farber asked, his attention splitting between Shepherd and the collection of status gauges and monitors behind her, far too many of which were displaying troublesome if not alarming information.

  Blowing out a sigh of mounting frustration, Shepherd replied, “If you could pull one of those fancy Corps of Engineers miracles out of your pocket, that’d be great right about now.”

  As she and Farber moved to a nearby workstation, something groaned beneath al-Khaled’s feet, channeling vibrations up through the deck plating and across the bulkheads. To him the sound was all too familiar: that of duranium and trititanium protesting at being pulled and twisted in manners with which they did not agree.

  “That can’t be good,” Farber said, and al-Khaled saw the expression of worry beginning to take hold on the muscled lieutenant’s features. Shepherd turned to say something in response, but the words were lost as a renewed alarm Klaxon blared to life, its cacophonous, rolling wail once more filling the room.

  Then al-Khaled felt it. Almost imperceptible at first, it took only heartbeats for him to identify the sensation of gravity pulling him in a different direction than normal. Recognition dawned in the instant before he felt the deck shift the barest fraction beneath his feet.

  “The thrusters!” he called out even as his stomach registered the shift in his center of gravity. Lunging across the room, he gripped the edge of a console as the angle of the floor continued to increase. All around the control center, other members of the engineering staff were encountering similar difficulty. Those seated at workstations were able to anchor themselves against the increasing slope of the deck, while others like him scrambled and stumbled for something to which they might cling.

  “Can’t we just shut them off?” Farber shouted from the station he now staffed, sitting in the chair and holding on to the console before him.

  Hitting a control to silence the current alarm, Shepherd replied, “Attitude control is unresponsive.” She had wedged herself between the edge of one workstation and the narrow service ladder leading up to the room’s second deck. “Random thrusters are firing intermittently.” As she made the report, al-Khaled felt the deck plating beginning to tilt in a new direction.

  Without instructions from the system’s self-correcting algorithms, the thrusters, if left unchecked and if they fired in just the right sequence, conceivably could push the station into a frenzied tumble. While structural integrity and inertial damping fields as well as artificial gravity would—for a time, at least—keep Vanguard’s inhabitants from suffering the worst effects of such chaotic movement, the truth was that the station simply was not designed to withstand this sort of prolonged stress for any great length of time.

  In other words, we have a big problem.

  “If this keeps up,” Shepherd said through gritted teeth, “the station could tear itself apart.”

  That would be the problem.

  “We’re getting calls from all over the station,” Tamishiro shouted from where she still clung to her console, a communications receiver inserted into her ear. “Injury and damage reports, the works.”

  “Forget all of that,” Shepherd ordered. “Find me a way into attitude control, damn it!”

  All around him, al-Khaled heard and felt the mounting strain on the very structure of the station, its support frame beginning now to protest with conviction the stresses being placed upon it. Still holding on to the edge of his console, he reached out and managed to enter a command string to request a diagnostic task for the structural integrity system, and was relieved to see that it still appeared to be functioning normally.

  How long will that last?

  A two-note tone chirped from the communicator clipped to his waistband. Retrieving the device, he flipped its antenna grid open and pressed the activation switch. “Al-Khaled here.”

  There was a pause before the connection was completed, and then a hiss of static burst from the communicator’s speaker grille before he got a reply. “Mr. al-Khaled, this is Lieutenant T’Laen.” Though the interference degrading the channel was still audible, it was not enough to drown out the computer specialist’s voice. “I have been analyzing this latest transmission and I believe I have a theory.”

  “This really isn’t the time, T’Laen,” al-Khaled said, swiveling his chair toward the control console and planting his fe
et against the bulkhead underneath as the room began to tilt in yet another direction, though this time the angle and the speed of the shift was not as pronounced.

  “I believe this signal to be automated,” the Vulcan said, undeterred by al-Khaled’s discouragement, “much like the original carrier wave. Many of the linguistic algorithms involved appear to be similar, though there are new variables I have not yet been able to study. Still, my preliminary analysis suggests parallels which might—”

  “T’Laen!” al-Khaled snapped. “The concise version, if you please.”

  “Simply put, Mr. al-Khaled, I believe that the person or technology responsible for sending the original signal received our reply, and that entity is now responding in kind. It is my assertion that we are, in effect, being hailed and that the signal’s origin point is awaiting our reply.”

  “Can we skip to the part where this helps us?” Farber shouted from where he sat, two consoles to al-Khaled’s left.

  In her typical fashion, T’Laen ignored the emotional outburst. “I am attempting to create a new reply to send in much the same manner as we did earlier.”

  “That will take too much time,” al-Khaled said. “The station won’t put up with these erratic positioning corrections long enough to wait for a change in the signal.”

  Farber said, “What about—”

  “Emergency shutdown!” Shepherd called out, cutting off her fellow engineer.

  Nodding excitedly, Farber replied, “Exactly!”

  “I don’t understand,” al-Khaled said.

  Turning in his seat and bracing himself against his workstation to keep from falling from his chair, Farber replied, “Think about it. The original signal reacted to our message. What if whoever or whatever sent it didn’t just stop, but instead studied T’Laen’s message and composed a reply? They could be looking for someone or something to talk to. If we don’t give it an answer, maybe they’ll stop transmitting their own signal.”