by Dave Stern
“Oh. Right. That mission.”
“Yes. I believe I may be able to help.”
“Really?”
Reed smiled.
The proximity light flashed.
“Hang on,” Travis called out, to Malcolm and to everyone else, and turned the ship hard to starboard. Reed grabbed the console for support as the gravity stabilizers struggled to keep up.
A meteor—no, make that an asteroid, a rock that looked to be at least the size of Deimos—shot past on the viewscreen.
The ship steadied itself, and shot forward again.
The ready room door opened. Trip stood there, frown on face.
“Captain…” that from T’Pol, standing behind him.
Trip took a deep breath.
“Carry on,” he said, and stepped back inside the ready room. The door closed.
“Let’s talk after your shift,” Malcolm said, clapping Travis on the shoulder. “The armory.”
Travis watched him go, wondering what sort of help, exactly, Reed had in mind.
He found out a few hours after shift, when he entered the armory.
The huge room was deserted except for Reed, who sat in front of a display screen. On the screen in front of him, video was playing. People dressed in fancy clothes, eating, drinking, talking…
It was footage from the reception on Procyron, Travis realized.
“Where’d you get that?” he asked.
Malcolm spoke without turning around.
“Poz and Verkin. They sent it to me early this morning—along with a few other goodies. The Intelligence Division’s complete file on the explosion—some background material on Governor Sen.”
“Sounds like quite a haul.”
“Not really. No smoking gun, as it were. Nothing I can take back to the Thelasians and say, ‘Your governor’s a thief and a murderer, help me find him.’ Just a lot of suggestive details.”
“But, you think Sen’s alive?”
Reed spun around in his chair.
“That’s right,” he said. “I think the explosion was a smoke screen of some kind. I think he found a way out. I think he’s hiding somewhere right now, laughing at all of us, and I want to find him, and wipe that smile off his face.”
Travis nodded. “Anything in what Poz and Verkin sent on that might tell you where?”
Reed shook his head. “Not really. I need more information. More background on Sen’s past—his associates—that sort of thing.”
“Can they get it for you?”
Malcolm smiled then. It was not a happy smile.
“Oh, they can get it all right. The question is—can I afford it?”
“They want money.”
“Oh yes. A great deal of money.” Reed told him then how much, at which point Travis’s eyes widened.
“My mistake—I paid them too well, apparently. Sen’s credit chits,” Malcolm continued. “Now I seem to have created a monster.”
“I wish I could help,” Travis said.
“I think you can.”
“How? I don’t have that kind of money.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure.”
Travis folded his arms across his chest. “What?”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Malcolm said slowly, “but the money you’re trying to track down for Horizon, the money Sen stole from you in the first place, that’s a lot of—”
“Oh no,” Travis said. “That’s not my money. That belongs to Horizon.”
“No, right now it belongs to the Confederacy, doesn’t it? And you’re not having much luck convincing them otherwise?”
Travis frowned. “True enough.”
“You need records of your dealings with Sen, isn’t that so? You need proof that he stole the money from you, correct?”
“That’s true too.”
“I suspect that Mister Poz and Mister Verkin could find that proof for you.”
“For a price,” Travis said. “Isn’t that so?”
“True, but…in your case, I suspect they’d be willing to work for a contingency fee. A percentage of monies recovered.”
“You suspect?” Travis eyed Malcolm dubiously. “You talked to them already, didn’t you?”
Reed smiled again. “Guilty as charged.”
“Hmmm.” Travis folded his arms across his chest. “It’s a thought, all right. But how does this tie into getting more information on Sen?”
“Money,” Reed said.
“Money. I don’t understand.”
“The Bynar get a percentage of your deal, and I get a percentage of theirs.” He smiled. “A piece of the action, as it were.”
“A piece of the action.” Travis frowned. “All in a good cause, I suppose.”
“In a damn good cause,” Reed said and then, without waiting for an answer, spun around in his chair, and keyed in a few commands. He spoke briefly to someone, and a few seconds later the big screen came to life. On it were the two Bynar—Poz and Verkin.
“Gentlemen,” Reed said. “You recall Ensign Mayweather?”
“Indeed.” The Bynar on the left—Travis couldn’t remember if it was Poz or Verkin—nodded acknowledgment.
“Of course,” the other added. “We anticipate a mutually profitable relationship, Ensign Mayweather.”
“Good,” Travis said, because he couldn’t think of what else to say.
“Allow me to cut to the chase,” Reed said, smiling. “Let’s make a deal, shall we?”
Eighteen
Someone was calling her name.
“Ensign Sato.”
Hoshi blinked, and opened her eyes.
Theera was standing over her bunk, arms folded across her chest.
“I would appreciate it if, in the future, you refrained from accessing my personal messages.”
The Andorian did not look happy.
“Wait a minute,” Hoshi said, sitting up, trying to gather her wits. “You’ve got the wrong idea. You left the message on-screen. I didn’t…”
“You did,” Theera said. “The playback was recorded.”
“But it was an accident. I—”
She stopped talking because Theera had stopped listening. The Andorian turned her back on Hoshi, and walked right out the door.
Hoshi blinked again, and frowned.
What a way to start the day, she thought.
She got up and stretched. Her muscles felt stiff and sore all over, in the way that muscles ached if you lay down in one position and didn’t move the whole night long. She glanced at the clock on her data viewer, and saw she’d slept for close to eleven hours. Overslept. Her head felt fuzzy still, in fact. She could use a long hot shower.
She got up and accessed the terminal. There were no water-based showers on the ship. There were sonic ones, scattered all throughout this deck. The idea of high-pitched noises didn’t appeal to her at that second.
She was halfway into her spare coverall when a voice sounded.
“Ensign Sato.”
The voice was coming from the terminal. She sat down in front of the small screen again.
A Mediator, a young one, one she had never seen before, was on the display.
Hoshi finished getting dressed and activated the video return.
“Right here,” she said.
“Elder Green wishes to speak with you,” the Mediator said, and the screen went dark for a second, and then cleared.
“Ensign Sato.” Elder Green, she saw, was in the analysis chamber, Mediators bustling around her.
“Have I disturbed your rest?”
“No. I’m awake now. I didn’t mean to sleep this long, I just…”
“It is of no concern. I am aware you were only recently discharged from your ship’s sickbay.”
“Thank you,” Hoshi said.
“I was curious if you’d had a chance to speak with Technician Theera?”
“Ah. We have talked,” Hoshi said.
“And has she told you anything of interest?”
To leave her
alone, Hoshi thought.
“They were…preliminary discussions,” Hoshi said. “Just reacquainting ourselves.”
“I see.” Green frowned. “I trust you will make further communication a priority today.”
“Of course.”
“Because time is of the essence.”
“Yes. I understand.”
“Good. Please keep me informed.”
Green nodded then, and closed the channel.
Make further communication a priority. Given the look on Theera’s face as she’d stormed out before, Hoshi wondered exactly how she was going to do that.
At that instant, her stomach rumbled, reminding her that her body had priorities of its own as well.
She logged off the terminal, and headed for the nearest mess hall.
Twenty minutes later, fortified with some solid food and some actual coffee, she was back in the analysis chamber, at the same console she’d been at previously.
Theera was working nearby, at another station. Preoccupied. Despite Elder Green’s request, Hoshi decided not to bother her just yet. Instead, she reentered the virtual library, and did a little research on Andorian physiology. She was curious about the structure of the Andorian brain—how it responded to trauma. She had a friend once who had been in a terrible accident and afterward couldn’t remember anything about the incident at all. His memory, in fact, ended an hour before the accident had occurred, and picked up with his returning to consciousness in the medical center on Phobos. Whereas she, on the other hand, could remember every second of her ordeal at the hands of the Xindi.
From what she found in the Kanthropian database, it seemed Andorians reacted in similarly varied ways. She wished she had Theera’s medical history; she’d have to ask Elder Green if she could obtain that. She’d have to ask Green for Theera’s personal history as well; there might be something in there about who the man in the message had been.
Finished with the Andorian medical database, Hoshi returned it to the shelf, and then paused a second.
She was in a wing of the library dealing with—or rather, representing—databases on various alien races. The databases were organized alphabetically.
On the shelf above the works dealing with Andorians, there was a slim volume entitled The Allied Worlds: Apocrypha and Established Fact.
The Allied Worlds. That rang a bell with her, and a second later she had the reference. T’Pol’s briefing; the suggestion that the Thelasian Confederacy represented the remnants of that ancient, all-powerful empire.
Intrigued, Hoshi manipulated the controls on the input pad, and took the book down off the shelf. A little more manipulation of the controls, and she opened it.
The first page was a monitor screen, with various subheadings. A table of contents, purporting to outline the Allied Worlds’ rise and eventual decline and disappearance. Hoshi chose a listing at random: War with the Barreon. The menu disappeared, and the page filled with images of huge gleaming starships that bore the Allied Worlds insignia—a blue-green circle filled with stars, encircled by silvery, sexless humanoids. The ships moved through space in precise, military formation, heading toward a single, even larger vessel. That ship was obviously crippled. The Allied Worlds cruisers fired on it, a volley of energy weapons that lasted a good ten seconds. The ship exploded, turning into a jumble of flaming wreckage, and scorched metal, and bodies, dozens of bodies tumbling into the vacuum of space, dead or dying, clad in uniforms of a blue color that reminded her of the ocean at her grandfather’s beach home in Se An Pura, not the deep blue of the Pacific but a lighter aqua, uniforms now ripped and stained red everywhere, the Barreon themselves, dying as individuals, dying as a civilization. Whatever capture device was filming the scene zoomed in on those bodies, showing them in gruesome detail.
Enough of that, she thought, and returned the book to the shelf.
She read for a while longer within the library, looking at astronomical charts, historical records, tracing the movements of various civilizations and linguistic families across this part of space, searching for any language that might, in any way, resemble the Antianna signal. She found reference to a great many races she’d never heard of before, but their languages were, by and large, all remarkably similar to ones she was familiar with. The products of a bipedal, tool-making culture. The same LMUs, over and over again. It was interesting reading, though…for a while.
Then it was nothing but frustrating.
Hoshi removed her headset, and stood.
She surveyed the chamber a moment. The activity within was not as frenzied as it had been yesterday, in the face of the Antianna attack, but there were, she thought, at least as many Mediators at work, at the various stations throughout the large room.
She wandered over to the group she’d observed working yesterday, when she’d first entered the chamber with Emmen. They were engaged in running the signal through various filters, modulating in an attempt to simulate the hearing abilities of literally dozens of different races, some real, some computer-modeled constructs. No matter what they did to the signal, though, they failed to reproduce any of the sort of repetition that would allow them to begin frequency analysis.
She moved on to another group of Mediators. These ones were occupied with what at first seemed entirely different tasks to her—some of them working within the virtual database, others at command-interface terminals that had been set up next to the main console, still others standing around and talking to each other.
She listened a moment to their conversations, and gathered that their efforts were focusing on identifying—and potentially tracing back to a point of origin—materials found within the wreckage of the destroyed Antianna vessel. The metals, the trace minerals, the method of construction…
Results on that front were negative as well.
She moved on again, to the next console, the next group of Mediators, and stopped.
Theera was among them.
The Andorian was wearing a headset—presumably working within the Kanthropian database. Except the other Mediators at the console, she saw, were all gathered together in front of it, in a rough semicircle, talking.
“It is possible,” one was saying, “that we are looking at a merger of two linguistic families. A forced merger.”
“A war within the space the Antianna claim?” another Mediator asked, frowning. “There is no evidence of such a conflict occurring.”
“There are no races within the space at this technological level,” a third put in.
“Hear me out,” the first said. “You’ll recall the data we received from the Teff-Langer Conglomerate?”
“Regarding the Trill?”
“Yes.”
“A parasitic invasion?” Several of the mediators exchanged glances. “It does not seem likely.”
“Host-symbiont,” the first corrected. “An actual, biochemical merging of two distinct consciousnesses—and thus, linguistic families.”
The group was silent a minute.
“Interesting,” one said.
“We would need to research,” another added. “All symbiotic species within Type-Two FTL range of this quadrant area.”
“An exobiologist should be consulted as well,” a third said.
They turned as one to the consoles—and saw Hoshi.
“Who are you?” the first asked.
“Sorry,” she said quickly. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop. I’m Ensign Hoshi Sato—from Enterprise.”
“You have something to add to our discussion?”
Hoshi shook her head. “No, I was just listening. A symbiotic species.” The idea intrigued her. “They really exist?”
“Information is available within the database.” The Mediator gestured toward her station. Hoshi turned reflexively.
Theera had taken off her headset, and was glaring at her.
The Andorian stood up.
“Excuse me,” she said, and headed toward the chamber exit.
“Wait a minute,” Hoshi
called after her. “Theera!”
The Andorian kept going. Her legs were longer than Hoshi’s; the ensign had to practically run to keep pace, never mind catch up.
Theera was a good ten meters ahead of her when she reached the hall. Ten meters ahead, and moving quickly.
“You left the message on-screen,” Hoshi yelled after her. “I played all of five seconds of it.”
The Andorian hesitated a moment, then turned.
“I am on my way to the mess hall,” she said. “You may accompany me.”
The mess Theera took her to, though, was not the one she’d been at this morning. This one was two decks down, a large, square, room with a row of tables along one wall and a bank of what looked like, at first glance, a row of monitors along another.
“There are smaller areas scattered throughout the ship. This is the main dining hall,” Theera said.
She walked to one of the monitors and—to Hoshi’s surprise—spoke to it.
“Roasted flatroot. Imparay redbat,” she said, enunciating each syllable carefully. “Faridd.”
The monitor changed colors.
Theera pressed the edge of it, at which point the monitor surface recessed upward and out of the way. Theera reached inside the space it had left, and pulled out a tray. On the tray was a plate of food: a brownish orange vegetable, meat of some kind—the redbat?—and a drink, from which steam issued.
“It’s a food replicator?” Hoshi said.
“Obviously.” Theera took her tray and found a seat.
The monitor window—which was obviously not a monitor, but simply the covering for the replicator—slid back into position.
Hoshi moved closer, and studied it.
She knew it was something that Starfleet long-range planners were discussing. Late one night Hoshi had even heard Chef telling Commander Tucker how soulless the food would be. His eager listener (slowly chewing a slice of sweet potato pie) pointed out that it would be hard to program, harder still to simulate all the different foodstuffs and their tastes, and textures, never mind their nutritional values.
The Kanthropians seemed to have overcome at least some of those obstacles. The question, as far as she was concerned, was how extensive their recipe banks were. Whether or not they included any Earth foods.
