Star Trek: That Which Divides (3 page)

BOOK: Star Trek: That Which Divides
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Several years later, the
Resolute
’s sensors had picked up the ship, registering its low, battery-generated power readings and what was determined to be a distress signal. Upon intercepting the stricken vessel for closer investigation and then detecting life signs aboard, the
Resolute
’s captain made the decision to render assistance, resulting in the first Federation-Dolysian meeting. After the captain made her report to Starfleet Command, a decision was made to send a Federation first-contact team with the
Resolute
when it towed the freighter back to the Kondaii system.

“Captain,” a female voice called out from behind him, and Arens turned to where his helm officer, Lieutenant T’Vrel, sat at her station. “Sensors are registering a vessel emerging from the rift.”

“One of the ore freighters?” Arens asked, redirecting his attention back to the main viewscreen.

The Vulcan did not reply at first, leaning forward in her seat to peer into the scanner that had extended upward from her console. Then, she said, “Affirmative, sir.”

“I’ve been waiting to see this,” Boma said, moving back to his own station. “I want to monitor the energy readings from the rift as a ship passes through.”

“So,” Arens said, unable to resist the opening his science officer had provided him, “we’re calling it a rift again?”

“Quiet, sir,” Boma replied. “People are working here, and you’re distracting them.”

Hebert smiled. “I assume that was said with all due respect?”

“If it makes you feel better.” As he bent over his console
and looked into his station’s scanner viewport, Boma’s face was bathed in the soft blue glow emanating from the instruments.

Arens turned back to Zihl. “Advisor, how many of these cargo runs do your freighters make while the rift is open?” He glanced over his shoulder at Boma as he asked the question, but the younger man either had not heard him or was choosing not to react to the gentle needling.

“Each season is different,” the Dolysian replied, “and we always endeavor to establish and maintain a safety deadline, after which no ships are permitted to transit the Pass. For as long as my people have known about the energy field and Gralafi, we have been able to predict within a margin of error when the Pass will open and close.” She paused, then added, “Of course, there have been a few miscalculations, as well, but those were long ago, and infrequent.”

Hebert asked, “You’ve had ships in transit when the rift’s closed?”

The advisor nodded, bowing her head. “A few times, yes. On those occasions, the ship making the journey was destroyed.”

“And nothing can penetrate the field after that?” Boma asked.

“That is correct, Lieutenant,” Zihl replied. “When my people first perfected space travel, we sent automated probes to the energy field, followed by larger ships piloted remotely from ground stations on my planet. In every case, the vehicles were lost. So far as our technology can determine, the field is impenetrable except for when the Pass is open.”

Arens could not help imagining the
Huang Zhong
in such a situation. Not liking where his musings were taking
him, he returned his gaze to the viewscreen, watching as the freighter emerged from the energy field and into normal space. Having been born into a family of low-warp, long-distance cargo haulers with a history going back to the earliest days of the Federation more than a century earlier, it was easy for him to see that the vessel had been constructed with function and practicality taking a priority over aesthetics. The ship was comprised of a forward section, which likely held the navigational and other control areas as well as crew berthing, and an aft segment from which protruded a quartet of engine bells that provided the ship’s propulsion and expended waste products from whatever it used as a propellant. The two sections were linked by a long support pylon that Arens figured must contain crawl spaces and other work areas, and beneath which were connected six modular containers of differing colors. Even from this distance, Arens could see that the ship and its components were well-worn, with missing paint or no paint at all, replaced hull plates, and other signs of age and constant use.

“By the time the Pass closes again,” Zihl said, “enough erinadium will have been obtained to supply the energy needs of my entire planet for one of your years. Combined with the other mining facilities we have operating on our planet’s two moons as well as other sources of production on Dolysia itself, we are able to meet our energy requirements with ease.”

Arens nodded. “It’s an impressive operation, that’s for sure. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anything like it; not on this scale, and certainly not with the added wrinkle of only being able to get the ore to your planet every three years.” Then, he shrugged. “On the other hand, I suppose you’ve had plenty of time to iron out all the wrinkles.”

Seeing the renewed look of confusion on Zihl’s face, he was about to explain the idiom when Boma called out from his science station.

“Captain,” he said, lifting his face away from his scanner’s viewfinder. “You should have a look at this. Based on what we’ve been told about how stable the conduit is and how it doesn’t seem to react to ships passing through it, I didn’t expect to pick up any sensor fluctuations, but that’s exactly what I’m seeing here.”

Frowning, Arens asked, “You caught something as the freighter was coming through?”

Boma nodded. “The rift does react to the passage of ship traffic, but not in any way that’s immediately noticeable. Look.” He tapped a series of controls on his console, and one of the overhead screens began to display what Arens recognized as a computer-generated graphic of the energy field. “I don’t know how to describe it except to say that it was sort of a rippling effect. I was able to pick it up on this side of the rift, but then our sensor beams scattered again. From what I can tell, the effect started from the other side and worked its way in this direction, tracking with the freighter’s course. It’s only a minor deviation from the readings I’ve collected to this point, but it was still enough to catch our attention.”

“Advisor,” Hebert said, her brow furrowed in confusion. “Has this sort of thing ever happened before?”

“Not that I know of, Commander,” Zihl replied. “Though our monitoring devices possess nothing approaching the ability of your equipment, no probe we have ever dispatched to study the Pass has ever discovered anything which might hint at its being unstable.”

“This probably sounds like a stupid question,” Hebert
said, “but could any disruption or whatever you want to call it be caused by our sensors?”

Boma replied, “I don’t think so, Commander. We’ve been conducting full sensor sweeps since we got here. This is the first indication of anything out of the ordinary.” He shrugged. “To be honest? I don’t think it’s an instability. It’s almost as if the field was . . . I don’t know . . . sweeping over the freighter as it passed.”

“Like some sort of scan?” Arens asked. “But that would mean . . .”

“It’d mean the field isn’t a natural phenomenon,” Boma finished. “If that’s the case, then it’s not like anything on record. Captain, we need to check this out.”

Arens nodded. “Agreed.” What might such a revelation mean, particularly for the Dolysians? As interesting as chasing down this mystery sounded to him, the captain knew he needed to proceed with care. Prudence was a fine watchword, at least for the moment, but that did not mean sitting idle. “Would it help if we got you a little closer?” Arens asked.

“It certainly wouldn’t hurt,” the science officer said. “We were planning to take a look at the other side, anyway.”

Turning to Zihl, Arens said, “Advisor, would you be able to obtain the necessary permissions to allow my ship to enter the Pass?”

Zihl replied, “Certainly.”

Arens nodded, his anticipation at the thought of getting to see firsthand whatever might lay beyond the rift tempered with concern over what Boma’s sensor readings might be trying to tell them. Could he and his ship be responsible—without malice but through simple ignorance—for introducing some new, random element into whatever
mix had conspired to create and sustain the enigmatic energy field before them? Had they endangered the planet it shielded, along with the resources that world possessed and upon which the Dolysian people had come to depend?

Despite his conflicting and troubling thoughts, Arens could not help the mounting excitement he felt as he regarded the main viewscreen and the image of the anomaly. “Okay, then. Let’s go have ourselves a look.”

TWO

James Kirk stared across the table, schooling his features to match the implacable expression on the face of his first officer. Spock, as always, offered no overt clues, but Kirk also could discern no subtle hints or unconscious facial tics or eye movements; nothing that offered the slightest insight into what the Vulcan might be thinking. The best Kirk could do was match his friend’s unreadable expression, and see how the next moments played out.

“What do you want to do, sir?” asked Montgomery Scott from where he sat to Kirk’s left, eyeing him with unrestrained amusement. On the table before him was a partially depleted deck of playing cards, on top of which the
Enterprise
’s chief engineer had placed a blue poker chip.

Staring at Spock over the five cards he and the first officer each held in their hands, Kirk did not move his eyes as he replied, “Don’t rush me.”

“I think he’s bluffing,” Scott said, offering a mischievous grin.

Sitting across the table from the engineer and holding cards of his own, Leonard McCoy snapped, “You had your chance, and you folded. Now give the man time to think, why don’t you?” Then, he reached toward Kirk and tapped the table next to his friend’s elbow. “I don’t mean to rush you, Captain, but would you mind hurrying the hell up?”

“What happened to giving me time to think?” Kirk asked, unable to resist a small smile even though he did not direct his gaze to McCoy.

The ship’s chief medical officer cleared his throat, then reached for the glass of brandy sitting on the table near his right arm. “That was until you decided to make a career out of this. I’ve performed operations that didn’t take this long.” He punctuated his statement by raising his glass in mock salute before sipping the brandy. After the current hand’s opening round of betting and drawing of cards from Scott, who had volunteered to be the dealer for the evening’s session, Spock had with no hesitation bet a few of the blue chips stacked before him on the table—the equivalent of twenty Federation credits—and McCoy had matched the wager. Though the chips had no real monetary value, in keeping with standing policy aboard ship prohibiting actual gambling, Kirk still remembered the physician’s blunt opinions regarding the matter on the first occasion the officers had assembled for poker: “You can’t play poker without poker chips. That’s against the law, and if it’s not then it damned well ought to be.”

“I thought you said patience was a virtue, Bones?” Kirk said, reaching for his own stack of chips and selecting a few without taking his eyes from Spock.

McCoy snorted. “I never said that.”

Across the table, Scott countered, “I’d stake my life on having heard you say that very thing, Doctor.”

“Keep it up, and a hearing test will be only the first stage of a very prolonged, uncomfortable physical for the both of you.” The comment was loud enough to elicit laughter not only from Kirk and Scott, but also from other crew members seated at nearby tables or standing near the recreation
room’s bank of food synthesizers. For the first time, Kirk realized that their friendly game had acquired a bevy of curious onlookers.

McCoy’s conduct might have him in trouble with the captain of just about any other ship in Starfleet, and though Kirk himself had on occasion been required to rein in the doctor, the truth was that he enjoyed his friend’s often cantankerous nature—a good deal of which was exaggerated for one reason or another, depending on the situation. The doctor’s utter fearlessness when it came to questioning authority had come in handy more than once; indeed, one of McCoy’s greatest virtues was that he was unmoved by whatever professional fallout might come his way should his behavior be viewed with less tolerance by an admiral, government official, or anyone else. Anyone who knew Leonard McCoy knew the man’s primary motivation was providing quality care to his patients, along with the opportunities Starfleet afforded to increase his knowledge and understanding of medicine and how it was practiced by the various cultures he might encounter in his travels. Beyond that, McCoy had little use for just about everything else pertaining to the service, its rules, or most of the people who occupied its upper command echelons, and Kirk derived great enjoyment from the thought that his friend was only humoring him by consenting to wear a uniform at all.

Whatever you do, Bones, promise me you won’t ever change.

Deciding against responding to his friend’s good-natured jabs, Kirk instead kept his attention on the game and the enigmatic opponent sitting across from him. “Mister Spock, you seem entirely too comfortable for my
taste, so let’s see what we can do about that.” With his free hand he counted chips from his stack and with a gentle toss deposited them on top of the small yet growing pile at the center of the table. “I see your twenty credits, and raise you another forty.”

Spock’s face betrayed not one hint of reaction, as though his features had been carved from granite. “A bold wager, Captain.” Without looking at the table or the cards in his left hand, the first officer retrieved a quartet of blue chips from his stack and put them on the pile. “I see your forty.” With a quick movement he took four more chips from his collection. “And I raise an additional forty.” Shifting his gaze to McCoy, he added, “To you, Doctor.”

“My mother raised no fools,” McCoy said, placing his cards facedown on the table. “Fold.”

Kirk, keeping his own expression neutral, once again searched for some kind of tell on Spock’s face, but the Vulcan betrayed nothing. “Doctor McCoy taught you well, Mister Spock, but I think he may have left out a few things.” Reaching for his chips, he grabbed enough to match the first officer’s raise, then reached for five more. “Fifty.”

BOOK: Star Trek: That Which Divides
13.75Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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