Rosetta

by Dave Stern

  “For Ensign Sato, translation is as much an

  art as a science….”

  The doctor went on. “It involves intuitive reasoning as well as the collation of a learned body of knowledge. And her fear, quite simply, is that when the Xindi cut into her brain, they somehow damaged her ability to reason in that manner.”

  “You’ve told her that isn’t the case though,” the captain said. “That there was no damage to her brain.”

  “I told her I believed that to be the case, yes.”

  “And what did she say to that?”

  “She asked if I was certain.”

  “And you said…”

  “Fairly certain was, I believe, my exact response.”

  Archer’s exasperation must have shown on his face. Phlox hurriedly continued.

  “The fact is captain, that for all we know about how the human brain functions, there is still a great deal that remains a mystery. The Xindi may very well have damaged Ensign Hosh’s ability to synthesize knowledge in certain ways. I frankly have no way of knowing for certain.”

  “You’re not helping me here, doctor.”

  Phlox frowned. “I thought I was being very helpful.”

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Copyright © 2006 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

  STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of Paramount Pictures.

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  With thanks, once again, to Margaret Clark,

  Donna O’Neill, and Scott Shannon at Pocket.

  Messrs. Feinstein, Weisler, and Spector

  over at Amherst.

  And the good people past and present—

  Paula Block, Mike Okuda,

  Rick Berman, Brannon Braga, Harve Bennett,

  and Gene Roddenberry—at Paramount.

  Historian’s Note

  The events in this book take place between December 27, 2254—while the Orion women were passengers on the Enterprise (“Bound”) and January 19, 2255—when a xenophobic group tries to stop the formation of an alliance between Earth and several alien governments (“Demons”).

  One

  On the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, on the edge of uncharted space, Captain Jonathan Archer tensed in his command chair. A speck of silver flashed on the main viewscreen.

  The cacophony of electronic signals sounding around him surged in intensity: at the science station to his left, at weapons, directly behind him, at auxiliary communications to his right.

  They were coming.

  “Same vessel, Captain.” That was his science officer and second-in-command, Commander T’Pol, Vulcan, one of only two nonhumans serving aboard Enterprise. She looked up from her viewer, straightened, and stood. “On intercept course.”

  “Confirm that.” Reed at tactical spoke. “Picking up an energy buildup in the aft section of the ship, Captain. As before.”

  Archer nodded grimly. “As before”—as in the two other times they’d encountered this ship. When the energy buildup was a prelude to weapons fire. As in they had about half a minute before said fire occurred again.

  “Mister Carstairs.” Archer spoke without taking his eyes off the viewscreen. “Any change in their signal?”

  “No, sir.” Ensign Carstairs was at his right hand, at the aux com station, handling routine communications duties, so that Hoshi—Ensign Hoshi Sato, Enterprise’s com officer—could concentrate on translating that incoming alien signal. The captain forced himself not to look in her direction. Hoshi was working; even without seeing her, he could picture her in his mind, seated ramrod-straight at her station, head cocked slightly to one side, listening to the alien signal. Let her work. If she had something to report she would tell him.

  “Captain?”

  “Mister Carstairs. Speak.”

  “I’m picking up something coming from the lateral sensor array.”

  “Something.”

  “Very faint. Very regular, though. Could be a signal, could be noise. I’d need to divert some processing power to filter out…”

  “No. We need that processing power for the UT. All of it.” Hoshi answered before Archer could, and now he did turn to look at her, and found that the picture in his mind had been exactly right. She sat exactly as he had envisioned her, listening, seemingly oblivious of the frenzy of activity around her.

  Excepting, of course, that she wasn’t oblivious at all.

  “It’ll keep, Ensign,” Archer told Carstairs.

  “Fifteen seconds to weapons range, Captain,” Reed said. “This would be a good time to…”

  “Do nothing,” Archer snapped. “Travis, maintain course and speed.”

  “Aye, sir,” Reed and Mayweather both said, almost simultaneously.

  Reed wanted permission to bring their own weapons on-line. Archer wasn’t going to give it to him. He’d briefed the captain earlier this morning; telemetry from their last encounter showed a potential weakness in the alien vessel’s defense systems, one Reed thought he could exploit.

  But Archer didn’t want to send any mixed messages. Enterprise came in peace. He would not assume an offensive posture under any circumstances. He didn’t want to fight; he wanted permission to enter what the aliens obviously considered their sovereign space. He wanted to talk to them. Hard to do that at the moment, though. Considering.

  Again, he forced himself not to look back at Hoshi.

  “Weapons fire,” Reed said, and a nanosecond later something streaked by the bridge, light flashed, and the entire ship shuddered.

  Archer frowned. That felt closer than the other times.

  “Same weapon as before,” T’Pol announced, bending over her viewer. “Charged particle rays, transmitted as two separate beams, sources join at target point to produce explosive effect akin to a molecular disruptor.”

  “It might be my imagination,” Archer said, standing. “But that felt a little bit closer than last time.”

  “Not your imagination at all, Captain.” T’Pol spoke without moving. “It was closer. One hundred meters off our port nacelle.”

  “One hundred meters.” That was Trip, behind him. His chief engineer let out a long, slow whistle. “That’s pretty close.”

  “That it is.”

  “Might not be a bad idea to charge the hull plating, sir,” Trip said, stepping up alongside his chair. “Just in case.”

  “We’ve been over this, Trip,” Archer said. “We don’t want to send any mixed messages.”

  Trip smiled. “Just a friendly reminder.”

  “Noted.”

  “They’re charging weapons again, Captain,” Reed said.

  “’Cause as much as we don’t want to send any mixed messages,” Trip continued, “the odds of us eventually being able to communicate with these people greatly increase if we’re alive.”

  “I got it, Trip, thanks.”

  The alien vessel f
illed the viewscreen before him. This was the third time in as many days that they’d encountered the ship. For all its weaponry, it was small—maybe a quarter the size of Enterprise. Clean lines—utilitarian, functional, more like an Andorian ship in that respect than, say, a Klingon or Vulcan vessel. No structures for ornament or effect. Not a warship per se either, though they obviously had their share of weapons.

  “Sensor readings coming in, sir,” T’Pol said. “Biosigns, roughly a half-dozen humanoids, Minshara-class atmosphere characteristics—difficult to distinguish among them, a number of what I would call sensor artifacts…some kind of protective field perhaps.”

  “Same as before, in other words?”

  “Yes, sir, same as before. No additional data.”

  “Weapons fire,” Reed interrupted.

  Another flash of light, and the ship shuddered a second time, even more strongly.

  An alarm sounded.

  “That felt like a hit,” Reed said.

  “Negative,” T’Pol said. “Disruption occurred one meter off the port nacelle.” She paused a second. “Reading significant scorching and overheating in surface thermal components.”

  “Damage?”

  “None I can detect.”

  “Rerouting signal to auxiliary conduits, just in case.” That from Trip, already back at the engineering station. “Like I said, that’s some damn fine shooting.”

  “Assuming they meant to miss again,” Archer said.

  “I believe that to be the case, Captain,” T’Pol said. “Correlating data from our previous two encounters with the alien vessel, I’ve detected a pattern to their weapons fire.”

  “Go on.”

  “Our first encounter, they fired twice, targeting coordinates fifteen hundred, then one thousand meters off our position. Second encounter, coordinates five hundred, then two hundred fifty meters off. This encounter, one hundred meters, and then one meter off.”

  Archer nodded. Trip spoke.

  “Not much margin for error next time, sir. Sure we don’t want to charge the hull plating?”

  Archer hesitated, and then, almost of its own volition, his head swiveled in Hoshi’s direction again.

  She looked up at the same time, almost as if she’d read his mind, and shook her head.

  “Nothing. There’s no pattern to the signal. Each pulse is different from the preceding one. Entirely different waveforms, each time. Makes no sense. How can you construct a language like that?”

  The question was rhetorical. A good thing, Archer thought, because he had no idea how to answer it. Hoshi had come to the captain’s mess last night for dinner, and started to explain how she was attempting to translate the signal, frequency analysis, linguistic theory, applications to underlying brain structure, on and on and on. Archer had kept up with her until dessert, a good forty-five minutes, but then she’d started in on some of the more esoteric theories about language acquisition, application of Chomsky’s principles to first encounters, and he’d had to stop her, completely lost.

  After that, they’d talked about water polo for a while.

  “Captain, additional telemetry coming in.” T’Pol was bent over the viewer again. There was an edge to her voice; Archer had an ear for the subtle variations in her tone, at least. She sounded excited. No, strike that. “Excited” was too strong a term. Interested, perhaps.

  “We’re picking up variations in electrical activity throughout the alien ship,” she continued. “Fluctuations in their power grid. The configuration of the grid itself…appears to be changing.”

  Archer frowned. He looked over at T’Pol, and then back at Trip, who had his head down and was making frantic adjustments to his own console.

  “The shape of the power grid is changing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that…” He frowned again. “That’s not possible…is it?”

  “No.” She continued to stare at her viewer.

  “Damn peculiar,” Trip said. “But it looks like that’s what’s happening, all right. Here. Take a look.”

  Archer walked to the engineer’s station. Trip’s console showed a 3-D model of the alien spaceship, thick white lines representing the ship’s exostructure against the black background of the screen. Thinner green lines pulsed within the white ones—the ship’s power grid, a sensor-generated map tracing the electrical energies coursing through that superstructure.

  “That’s how the grid looks now.” Trip drew his index finger down the middle of the screen. A solid blue line appeared, splitting the image they were looking at in half. He keyed in a series of commands, clearing the right-hand side of the screen, shrinking the image till it fit whole in the left, then bringing up a second, similar image to fill the right-hand side of the screen.

  Trip pointed to the image on his right. “That’s how it looked before.”

  Same ship, same white lines, but as the captain looked at the two of them side by side he saw instantly that the network of green lines—the power grid—was vastly different. “Could they be rerouting power?” Archer asked.

  “No. We’d pick up residual energy traces. This,” Trip pointed from one image to the other, “it’s like they rewired the whole thing. Physically laid new conduit in seconds. Which—like you said—isn’t possible. At least not with any ship I know.”

  “Which is why I am attempting to recalibrate the sensors,” T’Pol said. “We may have incorrectly compensated for the alien ship’s defensive shielding.”

  “That could account for a certain degree of error,” Trip said. “Not enough to explain this, though.”

  “So how are they doing it?” Archer asked.

  “That’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question, all right,” Trip said.

  T’Pol looked up from her viewer. “The what?”

  “Colloquialism,” Trip said, and smiled.

  T’Pol frowned. She seemed to be on the verge of commenting, but Reed interrupted her.

  “They’re charging weapons again,” Reed said.

  Malcolm’s hand hovered over his console; Archer debated giving the order he knew his armory officer was waiting for, charge the hull plating, stand their ground, make the alien vessel react. Truth be told, he was as tired as Malcolm of running away from this particular vessel.

  Their first encounter had come the day before yesterday, with Enterprise a week out of Barcana Six, skirting the edges of known space. The Vulcans had been out here, the Andorians too, Tellarites, a few others, so they had a rough idea of what to expect, but it was very, very rough. Archer had wanted to fill in the blank spots on their charts, wanted to see what was beyond the edge of those old Vulcan maps. Just as they’d been about to stop skirting the edges and actually enter unexplored territory, though, they’d picked up the alien signal, followed in short order by the alien ship, and then the warning shots. The delineation, Archer assumed, of the aliens’ territory. The statement “This far, and no farther.”

  Zefram Cochrane’s words from the inaugural ceremony of the warp-five complex came to mind, and Archer smiled wryly to himself.

  No boldly going allowed around here, the captain thought.

  “All right,” Archer said, taking his seat again. “No sense in finding out how close that next shot’s going to be. Full stop, Travis. Back us off at impulse—slowly—along our previous course. T’Pol, let’s take another look at those old Vulcan charts, see what else is out here.”

  “Captain?”

  That was Hoshi. Archer turned to face her.

  “We’re not giving up, are we, sir?”

  “Giving up? No. But there’s no sense in banging our head against this particular wall right now.”

  “Sir,” Hoshi began, and there was a world of emotion in that single word—anger, frustration, disappointment, and a few others the captain couldn’t name, “I can—”

  “I know you can. I know you will.” Archer held her gaze a moment, and offered another encouraging smile; what else could he do, after all?

  �
�Keep at it,” he said. “I want to come back this way.”

  “Yes, sir,” Hoshi said finally, and turned crisply back to her station once more, and began to work again. She would keep at it, Archer knew, keep at it till she translated that signal, no matter how long that took. The captain knew what the rest of the crew was only beginning to realize, that there was steel behind Hoshi Sato’s delicate facade.

  Archer walked back to the situation room: T’Pol was there already, a three-dimensional map of the space surrounding them projected above the table she stood at.

  “Barcana Six,” T’Pol said, pointing to a small dot at the very top of the galactic plane, in the corner of the projection closest to her, “and our current position.” She indicated a spot a little farther away from the corner, and down toward the center of the projection.

  They spent the next few minutes discussing alternative routes through the sector—the alien ship, by its actions, had effectively claimed a significant portion of the space they were now in as their own—eventually settling on a route that took them back toward the apex of the galactic plane, and on a course ninety degrees starboard of their current heading. The captain had Malcolm and Trip join them, and they were in the middle of refining the course, taking into account reports from Tellarite survey logs suggesting the presence of scavenger ships—possibly even Klingon pirates, a narrow arm of what the Empire claimed was their sovereign space extended into one of the nearby sectors—when Hoshi interrupted.

  “Excuse me—Captain? The noise Mister Carstairs was picking up earlier?”

  “Go on.”

  “It’s definitely a signal. Sounds a little like Thelasian to me.”

  “Thelasian?” Archer returned to his seat, his officers taking their regular stations as well.

  “I think so, sir. Running it through the UT now.”

  Archer frowned. “What do we know about the Thelasians?”

  “Very little,” T’Pol said. “One of the oldest recorded spacefaring civilizations in the quadrant. Exact point of origin unknown, sources suggest dwindling population numbers.”

  “They run a lot of the trade guilds.”