By the Book (2 page)

She consulted her notes on weapons. "Listen up," she said. "I'm not letting you look at this."

Mayweather and Anderson searched for their own padds. Hoshi waited, poised and ready.

"I had no idea this was going to be like school," Mayweather said under his breath to Anderson.

"We never fought green Martians in my school," Anderson said, then set his padd on the table. Mayweather placed his beside Anderson's.

When they were ready, Cutler read them the weapons information. They dutifully wrote it down.

"Each of you will start off this mission with these weapons," she said. "When these weapons are used up or destroyed, you can't get more without returning to the ship. Understood?"

All of them nodded while reading.

Cutler pushed on, feeling as if she had almost got them to the point where they actually might like role-playing. "I ask you questions about what you want to do. You can ask me questions about the settings. When you take an action, I will tell you if there is a consequence to the action or not. Then we'll roll the bolts to see how you do. Okay?"

"Roll the bolts," Anderson said, trying the phrase.

"Like rollin' dem bones," Hoshi said.

"What's that?" Mayweather asked.

"It's a slang term that came from-"

"Ready to start?" Cutler interrupted on purpose. She knew from experience that sidetracks could prolong a game. She'd seen it on the nets when she played as a kid. "So what do you want to do first?"

"Okay, we're standing in front of the canal," Anderson said, obviously checking.

Cutler nodded.

"Is there a way across?" Anderson asked.

"There's a small boat tied to the bank, just barely big enough for the three of you. And one hundred paces down the canal there is the remains of a bridge that might be crossed."

At that moment a faint glow came through the windows of the mess as the Enterprise dropped out of warp. Mayweather, Anderson, and Cutler scrambled to their feet and went to the windows. Entering a new system was always exciting. Even, Cutler had to admit, better than making up an adventure in their heads.

She glanced over her shoulder. Hoshi clung to the edge of the table, her expression neutral, but her body rigid. She hated any unusual movement of the ship-and she seemed terrified of the changes in speed.

Cutler turned away. The crew had tacitly agreed to ignore Hoshi's reactions, hoping, perhaps, that they would go away.

The yellow sun of the system seemed warm against Cutler's face, even though it wasn't possible to feel heat through the port. A reddish-tinted planet was spinning into view. Greens and blues and reds swam by below them as they dropped into a high orbit.

"Wow, that could be a terraformed Mars," Anderson said.

"Too much water," Mayweather said, pointing at the oceans that covered about a third of the planet.

At that moment Captain Archer's voice came over the communications speakers. "Ensign Hoshi, Ensign Mayweather, report to the bridge."

"We'll start this game later," Anderson said as the two headed for the mess hall door.

"You can count on it," Mayweather said. "After this much setup, I've got to see if we at least can get across the canal."

"Piece of cake," Anderson said, laughing.

Cutler said nothing as she picked up the painted bolts and cup. She knew what she had planned for the three of them crossing the canal. And there wasn't going to be anything easy about it.

Captain Jonathan Archer was standing beside his captain's chair, his arm resting on its back, when the sound of the lift caught his attention. It always caught his attention. He was still as excited as a boy about commanding his own starship. Even the word "starship" gave him a slight thrill.

Ensigns Travis Mayweather and Hoshi Sato stepped off the lift. Hoshi's cheeks were dusted a faint pink and she looked down as she moved toward her station. Mayweather had a telltale twinkle in his eye. He'd been teasing her about something, and Hoshi, still uncertain about many things on the ship, provided an easy target.

Archer suppressed a smile as he turned back toward the screen. In experience, in attitude, they were the most different members of his crew. Yet they shared something the rest of the crew did: they were the absolute best at what they did.

The image on the screen caught him and made him forget his two ensigns. The image of the red and blue and green planet floating there was a beautiful sight. Sometimes he found himself staring at all the new planets, the new space anomalies, with his mouth half open in wonder.

Then he'd catch T'Pol staring at him, and realize he looked like the biggest rube. No wonder she had trouble taking him seriously. The thrill he enjoyed every time he stumbled on a new sight probably seemed like incompetence to her.

He forced himself to take a deep breath and contain the excitement he was feeling. He glanced at the readings in the arm. Everything looked good. They had taken a high orbit over this planet and from what he could tell, there was a decently advanced civilization here.

"I have confirmed a recent warp trail signature," T'Pol said, glancing up at him from her science station. Her dark Vulcan eyes were as intense as always, her expression blank.

A warp trail signature? Really? Finding other aliens was as thrilling to Archer as orbiting a new planet. Maybe more.

"Can you track it?" Archer struggled to sound as dispassionate as T'Pol did. He'd never achieve that, but at least he'd keep the puppylike enthusiasm out of his voice.

"I can," T'Pol said. "It originated from high orbit near the second planet, moved a short distance away, and then terminated."

"A test flight," Archer said, more to himself than anyone.

"That would be a logical deduction," T'Pol said.

"There are a number of satellites and what you might call 'space junk' in low orbit," Lieutenant Malcolm Reed said. "I see nothing threatening."

Archer turned and leaned on the railing separating him from Hoshi. The metal was cold. "Is anyone hailing us?"

"No, sir. There are different radio bands, maybe civilian, maybe not." She raised her head. Her gaze met his. As always, Archer was struck by the brilliance that radiated out of her dark eyes. "Their language is going to be a problem."

"Why's that?" Archer asked.

T'Pol also looked up, from her science station, to wait for Hoshi's answer. The Vulcan's movements were always compact, efficient, in a way that the rest of the crew's weren't. The fact that she raised her head indicated interest.

Archer couldn't imagine Earth's best linguist thinking any language was going to be a problem. Hoshi could almost instantly get a grip on the basics of any tongue. It was the main reason he had desperately wanted her on board for this first trip.

"Structure," Hoshi said. Her head was tilted slightly. She was clearly listening to the aliens' broadcasts as she talked. "I've never heard anything like it. In fact, I've never imagined anything like it. The structure of a sentence seems to mean more than the words. At least from what I can gather so far."

Her fingers flew over her board, keying in the computer diagnostic.

"Keep working on it," Archer said. He turned to T'Pol and then Reed. "Well?"

"It appears we've run into a humanoid culture," Reed said, examining the computer screen in front of his station. His fingers pressed buttons as he spoke. "From what I can gather, they're about one hundred years or so behind us technologically."

"Because of a war?" Archer asked, remembering that when the Vulcans discovered Earth a hundred years before, humans were recovering from a very nasty war.

"No," Reed said.

On the main screen the planet below them was in darkness, lights of the cities clear even from this height. Archer couldn't believe their luck. Their mission was to go out and meet new races, and here, almost on their back porch, was a planet just making its first steps into space.

"There is another race on this planet as well," T'Pol said. "They inhabit the southern continent completely."

"What?" Archer said, keying in the scans of the southern continent for the main screen.

It took only a moment before he realized T'Pol was right. Unlike the roads and cities that covered the rest of the planet, this continent seemed almost untouched. Very alien-looking villages dotted the edge of the shoreline all the way around the continent. Thousands and thousands of them, their village structures very different from anything on the rest of the planet. And nowhere near as advanced.

"Are you sure these aren't members of the same race who are just less advanced?" Archer asked. For a long time, humans developed at different rates because of their different cultures. Only recently, historically speaking, had human culture united technologically.

"Yes, I am certain," T'Pol said. Archer thought he caught a bit of a chill in her voice. He'd offended her by questioning her skill. He hadn't been doing that, exactly. He'd just wanted clarification. But he wasn't going to tell her that.

"Captain," Hoshi said, "I'm still not getting all of this language. But I'm pretty certain about a few things."

"Go ahead," Archer said.

"The race that inhabits most of this planet call themselves Fazi." Hoshi paused for a moment, listened, and then shook her head. "They have an extremely structured and rigid society, from what I can tell, and are led by a council of sorts."

"It would be that council we would contact?" Archer asked.

"I think so," Hoshi said.

It was clear to Archer she wasn't one hundred percent sure yet.

"I would recommend patience and study," T'Pol said. "There is much to learn here."

"For the moment I agree," Archer said, dropping into his captain's chair. The leather sank comfortably beneath him, almost as if the chair had been designed to his own physical specs. He leaned forward and studied the planet below as the ship's orbit brought them over the area of sunrise. As he watched, the lights of the alien city below were slowly overwhelmed by the daylight.

Down there people were just waking up and starting their day. Maybe for them it would be a day that would be remembered for a very long time. The day when the Fazi learned there was a much bigger and vaster universe out beyond their solar system. And that they were not alone, just as humanity had learned when the Vulcans landed.

When he took this mission, Archer had promised himself that if-and when-they made first contact, he would do it better than the Vulcans had done.

He intended to keep that promise now.

Elizabeth Cutler wiped off her table in the mess. She was pleasantly full-having opted for the first night of the homemade stew instead of the Vulcan broth she'd been experimenting with. Everyone said the stew was better the second night, but she still hadn't recovered from her microbiology classes as an undergraduate. Any food that was more than a few hours old had a way of turning her stomach.

She credited that to her imagination. It always forced her to see the microbes forming their little colonies inside what was going to be her meal. The imagined problems got worse when she thought about meat.

Her bolts were resting beside the table, along with a thick towel. She was getting ready to start the game again, although part of her wished she wasn't.

The reddish blue planet floated outside the windows, filling the mess hall with slowly changing colors. Every time the Enterprise orbited over different sections of the planet, the colors changed. They had been in high orbit now for over twelve hours.

She'd asked when she had started her duty shift earlier that day if she could start investigating the aliens' biology. But the information they were getting from the planet was too sketchy. Besides, her work was extremely detailed and usually she had to have a sample before she could begin.

She wanted to get down there now and get a sample, but she would have to wait, just like everyone else. Over dinner, Mayweather had confessed that he had the urge to steal a shuttle and head through the planet's atmosphere. He wouldn't do it, of course. None of them would. But she had had the same urge.

So close and yet so far.

Anderson hadn't said much. He'd been spending the day studying the planet's geography and cataloguing the differences between the new planet and Earth. But he was running into the same problems Cutler was. At some point, he'd need to go to the surface to get samples so that he could start a proper geological survey.

But that point wasn't even close yet.

Anderson stood in front of the windows now, his hands clasped behind his back. The air in the mess was close and warm. The environmental systems sometimes couldn't cope with the cooking steam and the increased number of bodies at mealtime. Fortunately, most everyone had finished and left.

Cutler spread her towel over the table and contemplated the game. She'd have to work to make it as interesting as that planet teasing them out there.

She knew there was little chance that Ensign Hoshi would be returning to the role-playing game while they were anywhere near the Fazi planet. From what Cutler had heard, the language of the Fazi had Hoshi pulling out her hair. Cutler couldn't imagine the brilliant woman being upset about anything, but from all reports, Hoshi was getting more and more that way as this language frustrated her at every turn.

Cutler could wait until this real-life drama was over, she supposed, but she didn't want to. She needed to be distracted from her fantasies about the life on the planet below. So she had asked Crewman Alex Novakovich if he'd like to join their first adventure to Mars.

She should have asked him in the first place, but she hadn't thought of it. She avoided thinking about the away mission she had taken with Novakovich. The mission had shaken her to her core, sometimes making her doubt her own mind. If she closed her eyes, she could still see the hallucinations that had so angered her. They had seemed real, even if they were a pollen-induced vision.

Fortunately, Captain Archer was forgiving, and T'Pol, who'd taken the brunt of Cutler's paranoid ravings, said simply that encounters on strange new worlds took tacks that no one expected. That is why, she had said, looking at Archer, Vulcans always proceed with caution.