Captain's Glory зпвш-9 Page 2

  Before he could even request it, O’Hara opened a critical-equipment locker beside the doors and retrieved two palmlights. With their twin beams of light sweeping over the distant test core, Drumain took the first steps into the chamber as O’Hara followed close behind. Their footsteps echoed in the metal-clad chamber.

  As they drew nearer and their palmlights revealed more details, Drumain saw that the cylindrical core, nine meters long and two meters in cross section, hadn’t shifted from its test bed. But the test bed itself was barely visible. It thrust upward as if trying to escape the mound of dark cubes piled around it like drifting sand poised to engulf a pyramid on Mars.

  Black residue clung to the sides of the core like frozen streams of water.

  Drumain gestured to O’Hara to circle round the core to the left. He took the right.

  Other than the residue, neither of their tricorders detected anything beyond the ordinary.

  But tricorders had their limitations.

  Drumain reached the front of the core, and nearly dropped the device.

  A Starfleet admiral was standing there, waiting.

  Before he could even begin to ask her how she could possibly have survived the vacuum and the energy fluctuations of the warp field, the admiral smiled at him.

  “Hello, Tresk,” she said.

  It wasn’t the tone an admiral used to address a subordinate officer-it was the greeting of an intimate friend. And now that Drumain could see her more clearly in the beam from his palmlight, she seemed far too young to have attained her rank.

  “Admiral… did you just beam in?”

  The admiral’s warm smile expanded, and Drumain had a sudden realization that explained the familiarity of her voice-Eleanor Stein.

  Twelve years ago, in their last year at the Academy, he had lost his heart to her. But she, like him, had valued a Starfleet career more than passion, and after graduation they had taken separate paths. Drumain still dreamed of her, and had always wondered if she dreamed of him.

  “I do,” the admiral said, answering his unspoken question.

  A wave of gooseflesh swept up Drumain’s spine to prickle the close-cropped hair at the back of his neck and scalp. The admiral took a step forward. With that one movement, she no longer resembled his long-lost love, she became her, just as she had been twelve years ago, her admiral’s uniform now a cadet’s jumpsuit.

  Drumain blinked, incredulous. “Eleanor…?”

  “Commander… who’re you talking to?” O’Hara came around the front of the core, then stopped dead in surprise. She shone her palmlight into the cadet’s eyes. “Where’d you come from?”

  “Mirrin,” the cadet said as she turned away from Drumain to O’Hara.

  Drumain blinked again, puzzled, but relieved. The light had played tricks on him. In profile, the admiral looked nothing at all like his memory of Eleanor. Even her jumpsuit looked like a civilian outfit.

  “Mom…?”

  Drumain recognized a familiar shock in O’Hara’s voice. As if relays closed in his brain, triggering his own internal safety overrides, he switched from engineer to Starfleet officer.

  He and O’Hara faced a human where no human could reasonably be-a human disturbingly like a lover he’d never forgotten, yet also like his teammate’s mother.

  There could be only one explanation, one thing to do.

  Drumain’s finger trembled as he tapped his combadge. He hoped there was still time, but feared there was not. “Drumain to Security. Intruder alert. Test Chamber One.”

  The intruder turned, and with that motion her features blurred, then focused. She was Eleanor again.

  “Oh, Tresk, that wasn’t necessary. There’s nothing to fear now….”

  “O’Hara,” Drumain said urgently, “get out of here. Run.”

  Without taking her eyes off Drumain, the cadet held out her hand to O’Hara-

  – and that hand stretched through the air like smoke.

  Drumain’s breath left him as the dark strand writhed toward O’Hara.

  O’Hara’s palmlight and tricorder dropped, clanging on the triduranium tiles, as she clawed at the black substance that swept over her face.

  Drumain found his voice. “Let her go!”

  The cadet shook her head. “I know she wants this. So do you.”

  Drumain heard rustling. He looked down in horror. There, in the slash of light sent by O’Hara’s palmlight across the chamber floor, undulating shadows of black residue flowed from the test core to his boots.

  Drumain tried to step back, but he felt resistance. He twisted around.

  The black cubes were stacking up behind him, already as high as his knees.

  He began to fall, but the cadet was suddenly before him, both arms wrapped around him, just as Eleanor had held him on their last night together.

  “Accept…” she said.

  Drumain’s pulse fluttered with fear as he stared past his captor to a small mound of utter blackness that was rapidly dissolving into wisps of smoke.

  It was all that was left of O’Hara.

  “Embrace….”

  Drumain looked into eyes that held all the love he had forgotten, the desire he had tried to banish from his life.

  “… No…” he whispered, even as he felt his own body absorbing, dissolving…

  “Be loved….” Soft lips sought his, and Drumain felt his mouth open wide as black tendrils streamed down to fill his throat and seal his lungs. His vision dimmed, then died as a once-beloved face exploded into dark particles and engulfed him.

  At 0808, a Starfleet security team watched helpless in amazement as a slowly moving, cresting wave of black sand began rising in the test chamber. As Tresk Drumain joined Mirrin O’Hara in the Peace of the Totality.

  At 0809, the test core exploded.

  The surge along the power conduits to the antimatter generator released magnetic containment.

  In the next ten seconds, there were seven more explosions. In less than a minute, all thirty buildings of the institute were in flames.

  Two minutes later, eight hundred and fifteen personnel perished.

  Over the next three days, three hundred and twenty more succumbed to injuries.

  Only the fig trees survived. Planted by the man whose genius had made the United Federation of Planets possible, and now the only living witnesses to the beginning of the Federation’s end.

  The Totality was finally ready to share its gift with all the species of the galaxy.

  And it knew that once that gift was truly understood, it would be accepted without hesitation.

  2

  U.S.S. TITAN NCC-80102, SALTON CROSS

  STARDATE 58552.2

  In less than an hour, the star would die.

  It would take more than five hundred years for the light of its passing to reach Earth, but long before then the star’s demise would be analyzed and understood by the astronomers on board the starship now orbiting it.

  It had taken less than three months for the U.S.S. Titan to reach Salton Cross. And, despite the immensity of space and the multitude of stars, given the unique nature of this one star it was inevitable that the Titan would not be alone.

  The Luna-class starship’s classic twin-nacelle silhouette, flattened as if it had been frozen in the moment of its jump to warp speed, was framed both by the immense blue-white star it had come to study and by the gleaming, chrome-finish spikes and vanes of the Araldii ship that had joined it.

  The two vessels, their commanders confident in the ability of their ships’ engines, were within the destruction zone of the coming supernova. But where there was danger, there was also the opportunity for scientific discovery. That’s what their mission was this day.

  Neither ship’s commander knew of the war that had begun.

  As much as Will Riker had enjoyed and treasured his time as first officer of the Enterprise, he had no trouble admitting that being captain of the Titan was even better.

  His command was one of Starfleet’s ne
west class of starships, a return to the ideals of the Federation’s past, built for exploration as much as for military missions. Deceptively small, remarkably efficient in design and engineering, it was also home to a unique community of three hundred and fifty of the Federation’s best and brightest. Riker took pride in knowing that of the twelve Luna-class vessels in service, his ship held the most diverse crew. There were only fifty humans in its company.

  That mix of human and aliens of all species-from Ferengi to Syrath, Cardassian to Vulcan, Trill to Pahkwathanh-filled the Titan with a vibrant mood of shared purpose and discovery. There was no greater adventure, no greater calling, than expanding the limits of knowledge, human and otherwise.

  For some, Riker knew, the words bordered on cliche, and their grammar was questionable to be sure, but the speech Zefram Cochrane had given centuries ago still served perfectly to define the Titan’s mission-the mission for all beings at all times– “to boldly go.”

  Riker couldn’t imagine a better, more fulfilling life. Especially since he shared it with his wife, his imzadi for decades, Deanna Troi.

  Today, they were starting their workday as they usually did, in Riker’s ready room, he with his coffee, she with her tea.

  Their topic of conversation, however, was a first for the Titan. They were in the midst of planning a formal reception and dinner for the Araldii, the newest species with which the Federation had made first contact.

  More to the point, it was the first truly unknown species with which Captain Riker and the Titan had made first contact, without any preparation from Starfleet’s First Contact Office.

  Which is why he and Troi had been joined this morning by Ship Leader Fortral, commander of the Araldii ship the Titan had encountered.

  “It will be possible to reduce the atmospheric pressure in our reception hall to five hundred torr,” Troi said, referring to the notes on her protocol padd. On the Titan, Troi served both as ship’s counselor and diplomatic officer.

  There was a brief lag as Fortral listened to the translator device in her headphones. According to the datastreams the ship leader had provided to the Titan, Aralda was a large world, twice the size of Earth, yet with gravity only two-thirds Earth normal. Its low density was in part responsible for its equally low-pressure atmosphere. The headphones Fortral wore not only fulfilled the need of providing translation functions, they helped diminish what was, to Araldii, the deafening volume and high pitch of human voices and the background noises of the Titan’s environmental systems.

  “The low pressure will not cause you discomfort?” Fortral asked in concern. The dark blue, tigerlike stripes that ran horizontally across her pale blue skin glistened as her primary mouth moved. Her secondary mouth, located in what for humans would be the mid-chin region of her face, remained closed, used only for eating and drinking.

  Fortral’s own voice was a soft, almost impossible-to-hear whisper. Riker’s and Troi’s universal translators recreated the gentle quality of the ship leader’s speech while boosting its volume.

  “No,” Troi said. “Though it will affect the preparation of some of the foods we plan to serve.”

  “We appreciate the gesture of goodwill,” Fortral said.

  “As we appreciate the data you shared with us concerning the supernova,” Riker replied with a broad smile.

  The Titan had arrived at Salton Cross two weeks earlier. The Type O star was eight times larger than Earth’s sun and had been catalogued centuries ago. But only in the past two decades had scientists reached the conclusion that the star was about to become a supernova.

  Accordingly, the Titan had been tasked with ferrying a large contingent of astronomers and astrophysicists to the immediate vicinity of the star in order to observe its death throes.

  In retrospect, Riker realized, he should not have been surprised to find an alien vessel already on station, waiting for the end; Araldii astrophysicists were the equal of the Federation’s. In fact, they had more detailed acoustic scans of the star’s surface than Starfleet’s automated probes had captured. Fortunately, the Araldii had been pleased with the historical observations that Riker had been able to share in exchange. The Araldii had not been studying the star for as long as humans had.

  One of Fortral’s dark blue stripes flickered white for an instant and she held up her three-fingered hand-a human gesture Troi had shown her in the past few weeks-so Fortral could stop humans from talking as an “entangled” message came to her.

  The stripes were not a natural part of Fortral’s body or coloration, but appeared, instead, to be a type of technology Riker and his science department had never seen. He’d asked his staff to try to determine if the stripes were the result of genetic engineering or nanite implants. They were still working on the matter.

  What they were able to tell him was that the stripes functioned as communicators, transponders, tricorders, and even-Titan’s chief security officer had informed Riker, though the effect had never been demonstrated-as weapons.

  Riker found all this fascinating. The basic tools of modern life aboard a starship could never be taken from the Araldii, because they were already incorporated into their flesh.

  “My science leader informs me that the final detonation is approaching,” Fortral said.

  Reflexively, Riker looked out the ready room’s portal. It was dialed down to almost total opacity, but Salton Cross filled more than half the view and the star’s blinding light was still hot on his face. The warmth reminded Riker of being on an actual oceangoing vessel, sails snapping, salt spray flying, sun blazing. He knew he would have been an explorer in any age to which he’d been born.

  “That’s in line with our predictions, as well,” Troi confirmed.

  Riker blinked as Fortral unnervingly flowed from the chair to a standing position. That really was the best term to describe the movement, he decided. His ship’s medical scans had indicated that the Araldii did not have a skeletal system, though they did have adaptive muscle bundles that fulfilled the same supportive function. Apparently, however, different postures required different arrangements of muscles. Whenever an Araldon moved from one position to another, it was almost as if air had been let out of her in one place so she could be reinflated in another.

  And, Riker reminded himself, the Araldii on their ship were all females. Why there were no Araldii males on board was a question that had not yet been solved by either group’s translators. It was as if the question made no sense, or had no relevance to Fortral’s people.

  “I should return, then,” Fortral said as her muscle bundles took on her walking configuration. “We will depart ahead of the shock wave as planned.”

  At a nod from Troi, Riker stood as did she.

  The plan that all had agreed to was that the Titan would withdraw from the north pole of Salton Cross at just under warp one. Doing so would permit the ship’s sensors to record high-resolution, time-expanded data from the star’s explosion. Fortral’s ship would do the same from the star’s south pole.

  Riker and Fortral had set a week’s time for their next rendezvous. He was looking forward to the exchange of their sensor logs and the celebration of their first contact with a reception. The festivities would necessarily be taking place on the Titan. Human visitors to the attenuated atmosphere of the Araldii ship developed the equivalent of mountain sickness within hours.

  Riker held out his hands to either side, palms out, as a human might gesture to indicate he carried no weapons; it was the Araldii gesture of greeting and farewell. “Ship Leader Fortral, I wish you a safe journey and look forward to your return.”

  Fortral returned the gesture to Riker and to Troi as she waited for her translator to finish whispering Riker’s words to her. Then she replied, “I wish you the same, and with sincerity, may many males inhabit you.”

  The Araldii ship leader then distorted her mouth in what some might think was a passable imitation of a human smile. Riker immediately turned to Troi for insight into Fortral’s strange s
tatement, but the ship’s counselor just shook her head at him. When he turned back to Fortral, all the Araldon’s blue stripes were glistening, most of them flickering between dark blue and white. A moment later, she flickered into transparency, caught by her ship’s transporter.

  ” ‘May many males inhabit you’?” Riker asked.

  Troi shrugged. “Whatever it meant, she said it with absolute conviction and well wishes. And I think she was actually trying to smile at you.”

  “Then I’ll feel honored… I guess.”

  The computer display on Riker’s desk chimed. “Bridge to Captain Riker.” It was Riker’s first officer, Commander Christine Vale.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Captain, the Araldii ship is withdrawing. Doctor Burke suggests we do the same.”

  “On my way,” Riker answered. He gestured to the door leading to the bridge. “Time to go to work.”

  Husband and wife, captain and counselor, Riker and Troi stepped onto the bridge of the Titan.

  Joanna Burke, director of astronomy at the moon’s Weiler Observatory, was already waiting, standing by the science station to which she’d been assigned. Her attention was riveted on the main viewscreen, where Salton Cross seemed to pulse as its surface roiled with magnetic eddies large enough to swallow planets.

  Commander Vale smoothly stood up from the center chair and moved to the right. “All systems ready for warp-point-nine-five withdrawal, bearing zero zero niner zero.”

  As Riker sat down in the center chair at the back of the bridge, he thought again that its arrangement was a most comfortable combination of those on the EnterpriseD and –E. He spoke to his navigator. “Ensign Lavena, move us into position above the pole and prepare for warp.”

  “Aye, sir.” Aili Lavena’s hydration suit made its characteristic gurgle of slow shifting water as she expertly moved her sheathed hands across her control board. As a marine humanoid at this stage in her life cycle, the Pacifican female was at home only in a fully aquatic environment.

  But Lavena’s control of the Titan was assured and absolute, and in response to her flight commands, Salton Cross appeared to rotate on the viewscreen. The movement stopped only when the Titan was eighty million kilometers directly above its north magnetic pole.