Star Trek The Next Generation® Read online

  “Jason?” He reached for the communications controls at the edge of his desk, trying to get the signal back. When that failed, he called down to the communications department.

  “Admiral,” the duty officer began, “I was just about to call you. We’ve lost the signal from Intrepid.”

  “I noticed. Any indications as to why?”

  “Could be anything. Equipment failure at their end, subspace interference, stellar activity . . . It’s not that rare.”

  Collins could hear the unspoken “but” on the horizon. “Go on.”

  “The computers automatically analyze incoming signals, and they flagged an anomaly just as the Intrepid’s signal went offline. There was some kind of power drop-off, as if the signal source was moving, or was being sent by an array whose elements were diffusing. But that’s not what happened, as they don’t have an array that large, and it was too quick. Instantaneous, in fact.”

  Collins took a deep breath, knowing instinctively that he wouldn’t be going home tonight. “Who do we have close enough to go and take at look at Intrepid’s position?”

  “No Starfleet vessel is within a week of the co-ordinates, sir. There is a Vulcan ship, the Ni’Var . . .”

  “How quickly could they reach the coordinates?”

  “A couple of days.”

  Collins nodded slowly. “Let’s ask them.”

  “Aye, sir,” the duty officer acknowledged, and then he vanished from Collins’s screen. The admiral turned back to his office window, watching the sky darken.

  It took three days before spotlights pierced the blank gaze of Anna Byelev’s faceplate, and illuminated her half-open eyes. She didn’t smile at the prospect of rescue. She didn’t so much as blink, and her pupils didn’t react to the light.

  A Vulcan medical technician in an EV suit with a flight pack attached jetted out to steady her spinning form. With a deft touch of the maneuvering thrusters set into the pack, he was aligned with her, and slowed her movement. Then he was able to fly her body back to the Ni’Var’s airlock, which was situated in the base of the blade-shaped hull, near the warp ring that surrounded it like a hilt guard.

  Hers was the third body recovered, and the Ni’Var’s sensor officer believed there was only one more in the area. A humanoid form was small and hard to detect in the vastness of space, and it had taken eighteen hours to find three bodies and two panels of hull plating. As the sensor officer narrowed the field of blackness which, if his calculations were correct, could contain the last body that was recoverable, he could hear the captain softly acknowledging the recovery of the most recent.

  A moment later, the captain’s voice was directed to him. “How long do you calculate before the final cadaver is recovered?”

  “We should detect it within the next twenty minutes.”

  “Then I shall order the navigator to prepare to resume course, and inform Starfleet of our progress so far.” The captain paused, then stepped down from his station to the sensor booth. “There are no indications of further Romulan mines?”

  “None, Captain. But they were in the indicated area. Radiation readings confirm this.”

  “Thousands of kilometers away, but not here . . .”

  “Captain?”

  “The two hull panels are all that remain of the Earth ship?”

  “Indubitably. I have recorded the courses of their drift and plotted their exact point of origin. If any other wreckage or materials from the ship had come from that point, we would have detected them no less than five hours ago. Since we have not, they are not there.”

  “Even were the mines in contact with the ship, they could not have destroyed every part of it so completely,” the captain mused. “Intriguing. I wonder how the humans will interpret this matter?”

  “Logically, they will interpret it as having been destroyed. They may yet be correct.”

  “And they may not. I believe it will be more accurate for us to simply report the vessel lost, as there is no evidence of the true cause of its destruction.”

  The sensor officer nodded in agreement. “Though there is as little evidence that the ship ever existed at all.”

  “That is something to which Starfleet would not react well.”

  Two Weeks Later

  There was noise and chatter in the background of the Hidden Panda bar in Trenton. It was lunchtime, so most of the booths were occupied by men and women taking the weight off and enjoying the bar’s famous Chinese food deals. The lunch crowd kept an eye on the 3D projection that was tuned to the Federation News Service. It hung from the ceiling above the large squared-off enclosure of the bar, projecting the news anchors’ heads above the bar staff. Though there were four expanses of bartop, only three people were seated there. A lanky man in his late thirties was watching the news with a keen interest. He was dressed casually, in loose slacks and an even looser shirt and overshirt, and his high forehead creased a little as the newsreader continued her report.

  “The Vulcan ship Ni’Var recovered only four bodies. A memorial service is being held in San Francisco today. There is no solid evidence as to what caused the disaster. The proximity of a Romulan minefield so close to the Intrepid’s position has led Starfleet to declare the ship to be a casualty of the minefield’s automated decommissioning . . .”

  “Damned Romulans,” Jo the hostess grumbled. She was Anglo-Korean, and had kept her looks past her fortieth, with an athletic build. “Decommissioning my ass. This treaty is giving them the chance to do what they feel like to our ships, and we’ll bend over and take it. ‘Thank you, sir, may I have another?’ Two-headed bastards. Am I right or am I right, B.R.?”

  “Very likely, Jo. Very likely. Well, apart from the two-headed thing. They could have three heads, or none.” B.R. remembered a competition the local newslink had held a year or two back: draw a Romulan. Most of the entries they showed had depicted fanged and clawed monsters with tentacles. A few had depicted the president, or unpopular celebrities.

  “Well, yeah. But you know what I mean. Bastards.”

  The woman round the corner of the bar didn’t pay any attention, but the other man, who was nursing a drink away from the lunching workers, looked up. He was short and stout, dressed in dark tweeds, with a dour, lined face; in every way the opposite of the tall and thinning-haired B.R. He looked like a history professor from the university, whose campus was a couple of blocks over.

  “The Vulcans, Andorians, Klingons, Orions, and Denobulans are all humanoid, so why wouldn’t the Romulans be the same?” the professorial man asked.

  B.R. blinked. “I suppose there’s no reason why they shouldn’t, but there are non-humanoid races out there too, like the Xindi bugs. And they attacked us. Maybe the Romulans fought us because they’re not humanoid.”

  The professor looked like he was about say something else, but then he closed his mouth. “Logical, I suppose,” he said at last. “Show’s you’re a thinker. That’s good.”

  “A thinker, yes,” Jo agreed, “that’s our B.R. He’s a scientist, you see.”

  “At the university?”

  “Private enterprise,” B.R. said. “In the field of research and development.”

  “Ah.” The professor-dude nodded sagely. “An inventor! And what do you invent?”

  B.R. thought for a moment, resisting the urge to be honest and say, Nothing that works yet. “I think I’d like to invent something that makes starship travel a little less dangerous. Mine detectors, maybe, or more effective shielding.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Jo said, sounding a lot more serious. B.R. recalled that she had a brother on a freighter out there.

  The professor-dude nodded in vigorous agreement. “I certainly can’t disagree.” He raised his glass. “A toast to inspiration!”

  B.R. raised his glass in return. He looked back up at the screen, which was now showing file images of the recovered dead from their Starfleet personnel files. If they had detected the mines earlier or had stronger protection, they wouldn’t b
e mere denizens of a file archive now. “Here’s to inspiration.”

  PART I

  CHALLENGER

  1

  Captain’s log, Stardate 60074.2. The Enterprise is conducting a survey of the Agni Cluster, a group of G-class stars in Federation space near Ferengi territory. The presence of a group of main sequence yellow stars suggests that there will also be Class-M planets, which may be suitable to create new colonies for some of the populations still affected by the Borg invasion of almost two years ago.

  The duty is not likely to prove, shall we say, exciting, but it is a very important one nevertheless. Aside from the numbers of refugees still seeking new homes, it is important that the Federation continues to explore and expand.

  Golden light from the nearest star, a hundred and twenty million kilometers to port, gave the Sovereign-class Enterprise’s sleek surface the healthy glow of an athletic creature. Even coasting through a solar system, the ship was poised, proud, with the attitude of a racing thoroughbred.

  Like all such thoroughbreds, the Enterprise was driven by a large and powerful heart. The warp core pulsed at the center of her three-story main engineering chamber with a reassuring throb as it held in the energies of matter/antimatter annihilation, and only released them under tight control. The sound always brought a smile to Commander Geordi La Forge’s face when he walked in.

  “You appear singularly pleased, Commander,” Lieutenant Taurik observed, as Geordi stepped beside him to cast a glance over the dilithium matrix monitor. “Has the tuning of the dilithium matrix been completed to you satisfaction?”

  “The dilithium matrix is fine, Taurik,” Geordi replied. Truth to tell, he had been getting a little frustrated trying to think of the right things to say in a message he wanted to send to the U.S.S. Lexington. He had only just got used to Tamala Harstad being around when she had been transferred there, and he had spent his off-duty hours of the last couple of days trying to think of just the right way to tell her that she was out of sight but definitely not out of mind. He hoped she’d stay that way, and wouldn’t slip further away. He needed a break from thinking about the message, and, as always, being in the vicinity of the warp core put his mind at ease. “Just listen to her.”

  “Her?” The Vulcan’s features assumed a slightly quizzical expression, and then cleared. “Ah, you’re referring to the Enterprise herself.”

  “I guess so, though really I mean the warp core specifically. Can’t you hear that purr she makes?”

  “I hear the sound, but I would not have interpreted it as a purr.”

  Geordi chuckled.

  “I’ve noticed that most humanoid species feel a sense of pleasure from being exposed to rhythmic sounds of a certain depth and low frequency.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that too. Counselor Troi used to say it’s something about being back in the safety of the womb.”

  “Logical. Fortunately I am not affected.”

  Geordi had been around Vulcans long enough to know better, but settled for saying, “I guess that’s your loss, Taurik. There’s a reason they call it pleasure.”

  “Tea, Earl Grey, hot.” Jean-Luc Picard gave the order by habit, and then took the cup when it materialized in the replicator’s slot on his ready room wall. He sat with it behind his desk, and returned to the reports that he was triaging. Only some of the planetary surveys would be forwarded on to Starfleet Command. Choosing which were to go and which weren’t was an important duty, but a far from interesting one.

  He sipped his tea and turned his attention to the report on Indra IV, a gas giant in the region, which the Enterprise’s probes were surveying remotely. A jovian planet would never be one upon which to place a large civilian population, but there were two Mars-sized moons that looked suitable for terraforming.

  Picard had just decided to attach the report on Indra IV to the possibles list that he would send on to Starfleet Command, when there was a chime over the communications system. “Captain Picard to the bridge.” Worf’s voice filled the ready room.

  “On my way,” Picard responded, saving the file, and draining his tea. He stepped through and walked onto the bridge of the Enterprise. If the engineering decks and staff were the heart of the thoroughbred, then its brain was the bridge, on the top level of the saucer section. Here the decisions were made, based on the sensory input it had received.

  The burly Klingon in the center seat vacated it as Picard approached, and the captain noted that the main screen displayed a normal starfield. Whatever had attracted his first officer’s attention either wasn’t visible or wasn’t in range yet. “What is it, Mister Worf?”

  “Lieutenant Choudhury has detected an object in our path.” He indicated the Indian woman at the tactical console.

  “An object?” Ordinarily, Picard might have been irritated at being called to the bridge for such a vague reason, but not when it meant a respite from the survey reports. From the carefully bland expression on Worf’s face, he could tell that the Klingon officer knew that very well. “All right, what kind of object?”

  “A metallic mass,” Jasminder Choudhury announced from her tactical station, “almost directly ahead. It’s approximately two hundred meters long, and masses eighty thousand tons.”

  “An asteroid?”

  “Possibly, but . . .” She looked over the sensor readings that scrolled across her display. “The object appears to be composed of a mixture of nickel, titanium, a limited amount of duritanium . . . If it’s an asteroid it must be hollow.”

  “Hollow?” Picard looked over her shoulder. “A two-hundred meter geode . . .” He smiled faintly. “That would be quite a rarity as paperweights go, wouldn’t you say, Lieutenant?”

  “Definitely. An asteroid of that composition, over two hundred meters long, should have a much higher mass than eighty thousand tons.” Choudhury frowned at something in the readouts, and shook her head. “But, frankly, sir, I doubt an asteroid with that composition could even exist naturally. The alloys are artificial.”

  “A vessel, then?” The smile stayed on Picard’s features, but his tone became much crisper and more alert.

  “Almost certainly.”

  “That is why I called you to the bridge, Captain,” Worf explained.

  Picard thought for a moment, looking at a display of the Enterprise’s current position and heading. “You said it was ‘almost’ directly ahead . . . How almost is almost?”

  Worf brought up a navigational display. “If we were to intercept, we’d have to adjust our heading to three-five-two mark four. It would take us approximately an hour out of our way.”

  “Well, we’re in no particular hurry . . .” Picard turned to the helm, where a Bolian was at the controls. “Ensign Trell, adjust your heading to three-five-two mark four, and increase speed to warp factor four.” Picard sat, Worf taking his place in the seat on the captain’s right.

  “I trust the reports are going well, sir,” Worf rumbled after a moment.

  “No rest for the wicked.”

  A few moments passed, and then Choudhury spoke up again. “I’m getting clearer sensor returns from the object, sir. Definitely a vessel, and, going by the strength of the return for duritanium, almost certainly of Federation origin.”

  That surprised Picard. “Federation? Are you certain of that, Lieutenant?”

  “The numbers don’t lie, sir.”

  “Maintain present course and speed. I’d best finish with the survey reports before we reach your mystery object, Mister Worf.” With that, he rose and returned to his ready room.

  It took Picard around half an hour to skim through the remaining survey reports, forward his recommendations to Starfleet, and return to the bridge. He noted that Worf had moved to one of the science stations against the wall of the bridge. Rather than take the center seat, Picard walked to the science station. “Something about our mystery asteroid?”

  Worf nodded. “Since the idea of it being a Federation vessel has already been broached, I asked the compute
r to match the object’s composition with any known starship designs.”

  “And found a match,” Picard surmised.

  Worf grunted an affirmative. “Several Federation starship classes were constructed of those materials in the twenty-second and twenty-third centuries. The NX-class, Daedalus-class, and so on. Some Andorian ship classes also match.”

  Picard nodded. “And which do we think this object is?”

  “From the dimensions of the object, the most likely match is the twenty-second century Starfleet NX-class. That would have the correct composition, the same mass, and a length of two hundred twenty meters.”

  “Close enough to the approximate length of the object.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “NX-class?” Picard gazed at the main viewer, as if he could somehow focus on the ship ahead, even though it was yet to come into visual range. “With the recovery of Columbia, I thought they were all accounted for.” He paused for a moment. “There were, what? Fifteen or sixteen ships in the class, in the end?” He paused. “Computer, do any NX-class vessels remain listed as missing in Starfleet records?”

  “Negative,” the voice came from the air. “No NX-class vessels are listed as missing.”

  Worf glowered. “I took the liberty of accessing Starfleet records on the NX-class. With the salvage of the Columbia, as you say, all the NX vessels constructed are now accounted for. All of their fates are known.”

  “I see . . . Then either Starfleet’s records are in error, or . . .” Picard left the sentence hanging, open to suggestions.

  “Or the vessel ahead is a duplicate or replica of some kind. Either a copy or, at best, a vessel reverse-engineered from an original.”

  “And, given the era from which the class dates, the only people in a position to reverse-engineer such a vessel from one that had been salvaged would have been—”