Star Trek: TNG Indstinguishable From Magic (5 page)

The panel remained closed. “It seems to be fused shut. Khalid, hand me a pry bar.” The ensign drew a stout metal
bar from his equipment belt and handed it to La Forge. With some effort, Geordi popped the panel free, and Choudhury helped him move it aside. They shone their lights into the space beyond, which was a black hollow like the socket of a recently pulled tooth. The lights picked out the glinting lines of a ladder at the back of the space, leading upward.

“This should take us up to A deck.”

“Perhaps I should go first,”
Choudhury suggested.

“If you want, sure.” He gave her a phaser-cutter. “At the top, you’ll have to cut through the door.”

“Understood.”
Choudhury ascended the ladder, and, after a moment, Khalid and La Forge followed her. It was only a four-meter ladder, but by the time Geordi reached the top he could see the light of the phaser-cutter. A roughly oval section of the door, its edges still glowing, toppled outward with a heavy thud that La Forge could feel through his boots.

The three of them ducked through into the bridge, careful not to stumble. The crisp clarity of their sims beacons in the sterile chamber picked out horseshoe-shaped stations on either side of the forward part of the bridge, with the helm console between them. The main viewscreen was smaller than Geordi had expected, and totally matte-black. The captain’s seat should have been in the center, of course, but only the base of its mounting was there. More stations were set behind the center position, including a table-like affair recessed at the rear of the bridge. There was no sign of the crew that Geordi could see.

There were a surprising number of handholds around the bridge, and the control consoles had a lot more buttons and switches than La Forge had seen in a long time. It was a good thing, he realized, as they’d never even see the label on a smooth LCARS console if it was as dead as these
boards. Maybe, he thought, they had the right idea back in the day.

He moved to the center of the bridge, standing over the stump of the mount for the captain’s chair, and turned a slow three hundred and sixty degrees. One part of his mind was concentrating on directing his light at points of interest, looking for any sign of a member of the crew, or for any sign of energy, or for clues as to what happened to the ship. The other part of his mind was just drinking in the fact that he was standing on the bridge of an NX-class ship, inside a piece of history. He got a sudden flash of what Counselor Troi’s abilities as an empath did, as he felt, or at least imagined he felt, Captain Picard’s envy at his being over here.

“There aren’t any visible breaches here,” La Forge noted. “and the
Enterprise
’s sensors didn’t register any lifeboats or escape pods as missing, so what happened to the crew?”

Choudhury managed to make her shrug visible through the EV suit.
“Maybe another ship took them off at some point?”

“Before or after the Romulan minefield?”

“Before or after she ended up here?”

“Take your pick.” Geordi walked further across the bridge, playing his lights into every corner. With no atmosphere to scatter the light, the discs of brightness projected onto walls and floor were beautifully pure and illuminating, but not very informative. On the starboard side of the bridge, tangled nests of steel basketry cast angular inky shadows. It took Geordi a moment to realize that they were the mangled remains of the bridge’s chairs. “I wonder how much force it would take to rip the center seat mounting apart.”

“Without leaving any other marks on the ship,”
Choudhury added.
“A bomb or grenade in here might have done it, but there’s no shrapnel damage.”

“Whatever happened in here, it wasn’t an explosion. If any of the crew survived you’d think they’d need to have replaced the chairs for their stations. And if not . . .”

“Then who moved the bodies?”
she said, finishing the thought for him.

“Exactly. Khalid,” La Forge ordered the ensign, “scan the structural framework around the bridge, and let’s see whether we can get a handle on what stresses it’s been under, and when. Also look for any signs of microscopic breaches. If we can pressurize the bridge at least, that’ll make checking out the rest of the ship a lot easier.”

“Aye, sir,”
Khalid said, and began attaching deep-scanning nodes to the wall. They would send their questing signals into the structure, and link the results back into a tricorder. It was slower than a standard tricorder scan, but a lot more precise. While he did that, La Forge walked around to the engineering station, and opened a panel.

He probed the circuitry inside with a handheld unit, introducing power to the ancient systems in the hope of seeing where it would flow and where it would leak. It simply didn’t react at all. He let out a sigh, thinking that he may as well have tested the energy flow in a rock. Geordi resigned himself to the idea that this was going to take a long time.

While La Forge and Khalid went about their business, Jasminder Choudhury made her own survey of the bridge. It was empty, sterile, and, in her opinion, creepy. Even an empty ship usually had some remnant sense of the people who had been living aboard. Sometimes new ships even held an intangible mood of expectancy as they anticipated the arrival of their crews.
Intrepid
didn’t feel like either of those. Choudhury thought that it simply felt like an unreal
thing, out of place and not belonging. Worse still, it felt like it couldn’t possibly stay, but would disappear from their sight and their memories at the first opportunity.

Just like her crew seemed to have done.

Shivering inside her EV suit, she searched in vain for any sign of deliberate violence or weapons damage. There was none, but something else drew her attention. The walls, imploded monitor screens, and console surfaces in this part of the bridge seemed to be coated with something. Choudhury couldn’t tell what it was just from looking, but it gave her a most uncomfortable sensation. It was solid, like a thin layer of crisp sandstone, and showed black and gray when she cast her flashlight over it.

“Commander,” she said, “there’s something odd here.”

“Odd?”
La Forge put the power unit back in his belt and came over to her.

She drew her finger along just above the layer of sediment. “There’s a coating of some kind on this half of the bridge. The walls, the consoles, furnishings, everything. It’s like some kind of fungus, maybe. I mean, something that grew here two hundred years ago.”

“Whatever this is, it’s been here for a lot longer than two hundred years . . .”
He reached out a hand to touch it, but Choudhury stopped him, suddenly sure that she shouldn’t let him disturb it. It didn’t look infectious, or anything like that, but something in her subconscious warned against messing with it.

“Commander . . . maybe we should have this stuff checked for biological agents. Just in case.”

La Forge looked at her for a long moment, then looked back at the material on the wall.
“Yeah, maybe you’re right. La Forge to Taurik.”

“Taurik here.”

“Taurik, is there any sign of energy remaining in the systems down there?”

“Negative, Commander. I would venture that even a cold start would not revive the engines. They are almost fossilized.”

“That’s about what I figured,”
La Forge sighed.
“Another thing. We’re seeing a sort of petrified mold or something, in parts of the bridge. Is there anything like that where you are?”

There was a long pause, and Choudhury could hear a faint shuffling as Taurik’s comm system picked up his moving around; no doubt he was looking for the encrustation.
“Yes, Commander, I see some material that fits this description.”

“Okay, Taurik. Don’t touch any of it for now.”

“
Understood, Commander.”

La Forge thought for a moment, his enthusiasm for this piece of history waning. “La Forge to
Enterprise,”
he said at last. “We’ve discovered some material spread across some of the surfaces over here. It may be some kind of mold or fungus.”

“Growing in the vacuum?”
Picard’s voice came back.

“No, sir, it seems to be completely dried out—petrified, like stone—but I’d like to have it checked out for biomatter.”

“Stand by, Geordi.”

A couple of minutes later, silver light blazed in the center of the bridge, and Doctor Beverly Crusher materialized in an EV suit, carrying a medical case in one hand.
“You asked for a house call, Geordi?”

“I guess I did,” Geordi said with a grin. He led her to a large patch of the petrified material on the port side door. “This stuff definitely isn’t part of the ship, and it looks like it might be some kind of biomatter.”

Beverly took a medical sensor from her case, and directed it at the material. A faint spread of light from the
device vaporized the surface molecules of the material, which sparkled in the beam. Almost immediately the device flashed to announce that it had analyzed the particles. Through the faceplate of her helmet, Geordi could see Beverly’s expression take on a grim sadness. There was no sign of surprise in the expression, though.

“Organic material,”
she confirmed.

“Is it safe to touch?”

“Safe, yes.”
Beverly extended a hand, and gently rubbed at the organic matter. It rubbed away easily, crumbling to dust that sparkled in the beams of their lights. Under it, a darker patch was revealed. It was a fragment of blue cloth, which Geordi didn’t recognize at first. Then he remembered that, back in the days of the NX-class, Starfleet’s uniforms were all blue jumpsuits.

“Damn,” he whispered. “Is that what I think it is?”

“I’m afraid so, Geordi. This biomatter is not a fungus or microbial growth. It’s the remains of the crew.”

“How can it—” Geordi bit off the question. “Inertial dampening failure.”

“I think it’s pretty clear-cut, Geordi.”
Crusher shivered, the motion visible even through the EV suit.
“The impacts at near-relativistic velocities have put visible dents in the walls, and, well, you can see how it has affected the cells of the crew’s bodies.”

“Like dropping a tomato off a skyscraper . . .”

“Unmistakable.”

“Damn,” Geordi whispered again.

Listening to Doctor Crusher’s explanation, Choudhury felt a chill. Her urge to avoid touching the biomatter had been right, but for the wrong reasons. The stuff wasn’t a threat, but it was human remains, and so ought to be treated with respect.

She looked around the bridge with a new viewpoint. The ship didn’t seem so unreal now. It wasn’t a thing out of its time, it was a war grave, and demanded a certain reverence.

“I’ll collect samples of the remains from as much of the ship as we can reach,”
Doctor Crusher was saying.
“Hopefully I can identify specific DNA markers and pass on the word to the descendants of the crew.”

“Understood,”
Picard’s voice answered.
“I’ll let Starfleet Command know what we’ve discovered so far. Picard out.”

After several hours, La Forge had been glad to return to the
Enterprise.
Discovering the remains of the crew had been oddly reassuring, but Geordi had put in enough time trying to get power into
Intrepid
’s circuits to know that it was going to be a long and frustrating job, if it was even possible.

The engineer had returned in a somber mood, and was still feeling that way when he reported to Captain Picard on the bridge. “There’s no sign of enemy fire. From the condition of the remains, it looks like a massive failure of the inertial dampening system killed the crew. Whether that was caused by the shock wave from a mine, there’s just no way to tell without accessing the automatic logs. Obviously that’s something we’ll be focusing on.” La Forge hesitated. “I—” he shook his head. “I dunno, but if it was caused by a mine, right after the ceasefire . . .”

Picard nodded understandingly. “It’s a sad truth, and one with no consolation to it, that someone must always be the last casualty of a war. All too often it’s an even more unfortunate truth that the last casualty of a war occurs after the armistice has been signed.”

Worf, sitting at Picard’s right, nodded sagely. “There
are always units at the frontline too far away to receive the message at the same time.”

“Indeed. I wonder if it would have made a difference to the relatives of the
Intrepid
’s crew, to know that their loss was not that of being a post-armistice casualty of war.”

“They still died in the line of duty,” Worf said approvingly. “Whatever happened to them, they bear no shame because of it.” La Forge didn’t think that made much difference in the end, but appreciated Worf’s sentiment. “For what it is worth, the bodies recovered at the NX-07’s last known position were those of Chief Engineer Anna Byelev, and Ensigns Yukio Kawazana, Georges Toussaint, and Roland Brazzi. All members of
Intrepid
’s engineering section.”

“Had they abandoned ship?” La Forge asked. “Taurik didn’t report any sign of hull breach on the engineering decks.”

Picard shrugged. “The records don’t say; however, all four were wearing environment suits, and we know that some repairs were scheduled.” He looked thoughtfully at the ship on screen. Members of the medical staff were still over there, collecting samples, and the engineering investigation had been put on hold. It was, as Choudhury had pointed out in her report, a war grave. “We don’t even know, as of yet, how many of the crew died on board, let alone why.”

“It’d definitely be worth further investigation, Captain.”

“In EV suits?”

“Everything’s dead over there. There are a few meteoroid punctures that could use patching, but once that’s done . . . There’s no reason we couldn’t pressurize the interior from a portable system. The bridge is still sealed, and could be pressurized right now.”

“I understand that,” Picard said, “but Doctor Crusher
has recommended that the ship remain as a vacuum for the moment, to prevent further decay of the crew’s remains, at least until they’re all identified and the relatives informed.”