Star Trek: The Next Generation - 119 - Armageddon's Arrow (8 page)

Still holding his mother’s hand, René asked, “How long will you be gone? When will you be coming back?”

Beverly replied, “Not long, but I may not make it back before your bedtime. If that happens, your father will have to tuck you in.”

This actually seemed to make the boy happy, and he turned his attention once more to Picard. “Will you read me more of that storybook?”

“Indeed I will,” Picard said, already looking forward to returning to the novel he and René had been enjoying the previous evening. “I’ve been waiting all day to read it.”

Offering a mock frown, Beverly asked, “And which book is this?”

“The one with the aliens who crashed on Earth a long time ago,” René replied, growing excited as he offered his description. “It’s a big secret, and everybody’s looking for them and worried that more aliens will come, but there are these people who are nice and who are trying to help them get away.”

Beverly shook her head, but her smile betrayed her. “Just the perfect thing to fill a young boy’s head before going to sleep.” Eyeing Picard, she added, “I suppose it’s better than Dixon Hill.”

“That’s tomorrow night,” Picard said.

The whistle of the ship’s intercom system filled the computer lab, followed by a voice the captain recognized as belonging to Doctor Tropp, the
Enterprise
’s assistant chief medical officer.
“Sickbay to Doctor Crusher
.
”

Beverly tapped her combadge, which chirped as it activated. “Crusher here. Go ahead.”

“
Doctor Harstad wanted you to know that your team’s preparations are complete, and they’re ready to depart whenever you are
.
”

“Excellent,” Beverly replied. Checking a chronometer on the closest of the computer workstations, she added, “Let them know I’ll be ready to leave within the hour. Meet me in the shuttlebay at seventeen hundred hours.”

“Acknowledged. Tropp out
.
”

The connection closed, and Beverly leaned closer to René, cradling his face in her hands. “Time for me to go, little man, but I’ll be home as soon as I can. I promise.”

As though anticipating that the private meeting was coming to a close, Hailan Casmir appeared in the doorway leading from the computer lab. “All right, René. It’s time to continue our afternoon lessons.”

“Can I have a snack?” the boy asked, his mood and attention shifting on a whim as only children could accomplish.

Casmir nodded. “I think we can arrange that.” He extended his hand and René stepped around his mother, though he did pause before allowing the Argelian to lead him from the room.

“Bye, Mama,” he said, before kissing her on the cheek.

Watching him leave with Casmir, Picard waited until both were out of earshot before asking, “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” Beverly replied, before drawing a deep breath and pushing herself from the chair. “It’s just like going to work any other day, right?”

Picard said, “To us, yes.”

“I know it’s silly, and it’s not like I haven’t been through this before, but still.”

“Well, you just do what he says, and come back soon.” Picard reached out and placed a hand on her shoulder. “And be careful over there.”

“I’ll have Worf and an entire security team with me,” Crusher countered. “I’ll be fine, but it could take some time to figure out how to revive the crew.”

Recalling the latest reports offered by Worf and La Forge, which detailed the status of the alien vessel’s various onboard systems, Picard said, “Assuming you can do it without harming them. If you can’t do it there, we’ll discuss options for transporting them back here.”

“One thing at a time,” Beverly said. Then, she gave him a playful poke in the arm. “You’re really going to read him that silly book tonight?”

“Absolutely,” Picard said. “I can’t wait to see what happens next.”

8

T’Ryssa Chen loved zero gravity.

There was a unique freedom to floating and moving around in weightlessness. Even swimming, another activity she had come to love, was not a proper comparison. Though she had experienced low- or null-gravity environments on infrequent occasions during her childhood, it was not until her enrollment in Starfleet Academy that she realized it was something to be enjoyed.

“I swear, you’re just like a kid sometimes,” said Dina Elfiki as she followed behind Chen, who at the moment was amusing herself by putting her body into a twisting roll as she drifted through the narrow, weightless tunnel.

“I can’t help it,” Chen replied, following Cruzen as the security officer led the way up the tunnel to the cockpit, and maneuvering without effort through the null-gravity space. “I always have fun in zero-
g
. It’s like flying.” She and the science officer had ventured along with Lieutenant Kirsten Cruzen to investigate what appeared to be the mammoth ship’s bridge. After nearly four hours aboard the alien ship, gravity and environmental control systems now were online in several of the vessel’s habitable areas. While the atmospheric requirements of the ship’s passengers seemed largely compatible with most of the humanoids on the
Enterprise
crew, Elfiki had determined that the oxygen content here was more similar to Vulcan than Earth. Therefore, Commander Worf had authorized the inoculation of the entire team with tri-ox compound from the shuttlecraft’s medical kit to compensate for the disparity. This allowed the away team to dispense with their EV gear while moving about. Chen, like the rest of the away team, was dressed in the gray, single-piece form-fitting garments typically worn underneath the heavier suits, which bore no rank insignia or other accessories save their combadges as well as the phasers and tricorders they carried in holsters on their hips.

Scans had revealed that certain areas—including most of the tunnels and passageways linking the ship’s different decks—were deliberately designed without artificial gravity systems. Chief among those, it turned out, was the bridge and most of the tunnel connecting that compartment with the main passageway running the length of the ship. For her own part, Chen was having a ball with the whole setup.

Ahead of her, Cruzen said, “I can’t say I hate it, but I don’t love it, either. Mostly it’s just a pain in the ass.”

Chen could not agree. Even at the Academy, where other students had dreaded those exercises, she looked forward to them and even scheduled additional after-hours training time in zero-
g
simulators. She also took advantage of holodeck programs that re-created early spacecraft from Earth, Vulcan, and other planets, which had been constructed and flung toward the stars long before their respective homeworlds discovered artificial gravity technology. Her favorite simulations of this type were the first flights from Earth, in which she would portray one of the astronauts journeying in small, fragile ships to make those initial, hazardous landings on Luna. It was a period of human history which had always fascinated her, and though she had read numerous books and seen historical recordings recounting those missions, Chen still wondered what must have gone through the minds of the men who made those original flights while trusting their lives to machines and technology which were little more than a child’s toys by modern standards.

Cruzen emerged from the connecting tunnel, reaching for handholds as she twisted her body up and away from the opening so that Chen and Elfiki could follow her. Chen pushed her way into the cockpit and oriented herself, noting how the eight workstations had been arranged around the compact space, taking advantage of the bulkheads and ceiling.

“Interesting layout,” Elfiki said as she pulled herself out of the tunnel. “Maybe we can get Captain Picard to reconfigure our bridge this way.” Using one foot to give herself a slight push, the science officer sailed toward the cockpit’s forward canopy and the workstation positioned in front of it. “Some of the monitors and other indicators are active and operating at minimum power levels. It mostly looks like current system status updates, that sort of thing.” She retrieved her tricorder from the holster on her hip and activated it, the sound of its warbling echoing in the restricted compartment. “Just like that console we found before, all of these workstations appear designed to access any shipboard system.”

“I know that we’ve figured the ship incorporates an enormous amount of automation,” Cruzen said, having maneuvered herself so that she was resting against a seat at the station adjacent to the one Elfiki was studying. “But this is something else.”

Elfiki nodded. “I don’t know what the builders had in mind so far as letting the onboard computer run the show while the crew was in hibernation. The fact that it’s been doing just that for over a hundred years, and that’s after the ship took what looks to be a serious beating, is some damned fine engineering.”

“I can’t wait to see what Commander La Forge finds,” said Chen, using her free hand to push away from the console to the right of the forward-facing position and float across the cockpit to the adjacent seat. Her tricorder continued to scan the unfamiliar controls, only a few of which now made sense thanks to the
Enterprise
computer’s ongoing efforts to build a language database for the universal translation protocols. “You know he’s probably having the time of his life down there.” The chief engineer, along with Worf and Rennan Konya, had decided to make their way to whatever passed for the engineering section closer to the massive ship’s far end. “The propulsion and weapons systems alone are probably jaw-dropping.”

Cruzen said, “What I want to know about is the time travel. Where the hell did this thing come from, and did it really jump from there back a hundred years or more? If so, why? That’s the mystery that has my attention.”

“I should’ve known that if I hung around long enough,” Chen replied, “we’d find a way to get mixed up with time travel. Ours, or somebody else’s.”

One of her preferred leisure activities since being assigned to the
Enterprise
was reviewing the logs of its previous missions, which of course were the sorts of things one heard about from official news sources as well as Academy curriculum. Several missions—not just those of the current starship but also its predecessors—had involved exposure to various temporal anomalies or beings who traveled through time. While many details of those encounters remained classified, enough information had escaped redaction to make an engrossing study for many a hopeful cadet. Indeed, there were numerous stories and tall tales shared by senior cadets alleging that the simple matter of naming a new vessel “
Enterprise
” brought with it the jinx of being plagued by all manner of time-based trickery, and that the Federation’s Department of Temporal Investigations even had a special group, “Section 1701,” dedicated to nothing more than dealing with the fallout of these encounters. While there was no evidence to prove such assertions and Chen had always rejected such fanciful gossip, there was no denying that the current
Enterprise
and those which had come before it had endured their share of odd experiences, with time itself as much as anything else.

“Assuming we’re right and this ship did travel through time,” Chen said, “you don’t suppose DTI will come all the way out here to investigate, do you?”

Shrugging, Elfiki replied, “Who knows? If those people are anything, they’re unpredictable.”

“Maybe they’re on their way here and they’ll be here yesterday,” Chen said.

Cruzen groaned. “You’re not allowed to make jokes for the rest of this mission. I’m going to ask the captain to make it official when we get back.”

Having maneuvered herself into one of the seats, Elfiki was using her tricorder to scan the console’s interface. “The translation protocols are making some decent headway,” she said after a moment. “I should be able to get started on some decryption protocols soon, and hopefully then we can access their computer’s database.” Guided by her tricorder and the information it was processing both from its own scans as well as data sent back to it from the
Enterprise
, the science officer began pressing controls and moving her fingers across touch-sensitive panels in a sequence which to Chen seemed almost arbitrary, but after a few moments Elfiki looked as though she had been working the console all her life.

“Well, Commander La Forge was right,” Elfiki said. “A lot of the files I’m finding are protected by security lockouts, but there’s still enough here to confirm what we were thinking from the beginning. This ship has one purpose, and it’s to blow up stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?” Cruzen asked.

Instead of replying, the science officer brushed her fingers across one of the console’s flat surfaces. In response to her movements, the screen at the center of her workstation activated, depicting what Chen saw was a moon or planetoid.

“I found this recording in one of the unsecured files,” Elfiki explained. “From what I can tell, it’s one of the last entries in the database. According to notes appended to the footage, this is a test of the primary particle weapon.” She pressed another control, and an instant later the moon was consumed by a wide, bright beam of white fire which surged forward to strike it. The assault continued as a wave of energy washed over the moon’s surface, and with all three officers watching in stunned silence, the planetoid broke apart.

“Dear god,” said Cruzen, her voice all but a whisper.

Elfiki halted the playback and the screen went dark. “I’m still sifting through files, but pretty much everything about this ship is—or was—a secret, and it was built to be a first-strike weapon.”

“You mean a last-strike weapon, right?” Chen asked.

Shrugging, the science officer replied, “That’s another way to look at it. The people who built it call themselves Raqilan, and two of them are sleeping belowdecks, and from what I’ve been able to pull out of the computer, they’re at war with another race called the Golvonek. They live on different planets within the same solar system.”

“Like the one we were heading for when we changed course to come check out this ship?” Cruzen asked.

Elfiki nodded. “Looks that way.” She tapped controls on her tricorder. “I need to start sending this data back to the
Enterprise
. Captain Picard’s going to want to see it.”

“I’m going to have a look at some of the other systems,” Chen said, maneuvering her way to one of the other workstations and settling herself into its seat. It took her a moment to figure out the chair’s restraint system but in short order she had secured herself in place. Using her tricorder, she accessed the information the away team had collected and shared pertaining to the computer interfaces. After studying the data and comparing it against what she was seeing on the console before her, she tapped her combadge. “Chen to Commander La Forge.”

“La Forge here.”

“Sir, I’m attempting to access some of the ship’s automated systems, but a lot of them appear to be protected by encrypted security lockouts.”

There was a pause before the chief engineer replied,
“We’re still finding our way around down here, Lieutenant. We found a master control console in the engineering compartment, and we’re using it to reactivate some systems. I’m trying to do things in a logical sequence, but it’s slow going as we figure it out a step at a time
.
”

“Maybe I can help,” Chen replied. With the tricorder data to guide her, she began making tentative taps on the console. In response to her efforts, some of the station’s indicators flickered to life. “I think I’ve found a startup sequence, sir.”

A tone from one of the consoles which to this point had sat dormant caught their attention, and Elfiki was the first to maneuver across the weightless cockpit. Chen shifted in her chair and saw the science officer scanning the workstation with her tricorder. “These controls oversee the ship’s weapons and defenses, including their version of sensors and a targeting array, and what looks to be some kind of early warning system.” As she relayed her report, the other stations began activating around them, each console and its host of monitors, status controls, and interfaces activating and executing what Chen figured to be their respective startup sequences.

The entire cockpit was coming to life.

*   *   *

“Commander, are you seeing this?
We’re starting to see some serious activity up here
.
”

Standing at the five-sided tower that was the centerpiece of the alien ship’s engineering space, with its collections of display monitors, status indicators, and clusters of controls, Geordi La Forge grimaced as he heard T’Ryssa Chen’s report and realized what had happened. In front of him, the family of monitors was giving him updates fed to it from all across the colossal vessel as various onboard systems reported being up and running. Initiating the restart protocols had been almost too easy, thanks to the sophisticated software which allowed the ship’s computer to run with near total independence.