Star Trek: TNG Indstinguishable From Magic (2 page)

“Okay, but no hanging around sightseeing, just in case. Get the plates swapped out, and get your arses back indoors ASAP.”

“No argument from me, sir.”
Anna turned back toward her team.
“So, you heard the captain. Let’s get this done.”

Lambert was out of the pressurized EV suit and back in his uniform jumpsuit in record time. The bridge was busy, but hushed and tense; low voices exchanged urgent updates on sensor readings, weapons readiness, engine status, and the myriad other issues that a Tactical Alert brought to the crew.

Zeinab al-Qatabi looked up from her control board as Lambert entered. “Any further energy bursts?” he asked.

The deceptively petite lieutenant shook her head. “I’ve begun charging the phase cannons, but I don’t want to polarize the hull plating while Commander Byelev and her team are still outside.”

“If the plate replacement was put on hold, how much of a weakness would there be when the hull was polarized?”

“Overall percentage-wise, hard to tell,” she replied, “but a hole in one’s armor is a hole in one’s armor. Then again, armor with a hole is probably better than no armor. I’d recommend bringing the engineering team back in, and polarizing. Just in case.” Lambert sympathized entirely, but Anna had made a good point also. He took the center seat, and called over to Harry Croft, “Is there any indication
that we’re already within a minefield, if that really was a Romulan Class Four that just popped off?”

The mahogany-skinned Englishman at the science station shrugged his massive shoulders. “No indications either way. I’ve set up a scan to look for gravitional micro-lensing that might indicate a cloaked object, but you know how they are about homing in on the source of active sensors.” He pursed his lips. “I’ll figure out a workaround to get more data out of the passive sensors.”

“Figure it out quick, Harry.” Lambert next turned to Gustav Larssen, the hefty blond man at the communications seat. “Gustav, get me Starfleet on the blower.”

Lambert knew that some captains preferred to hold conversations with Starfleet in their ready rooms, but in his opinion anything that concerned the ship concerned the whole crew. He also thought about what al-Qatabi had said, and pushed the button that gave him a link to the work party outside. “Anna, change of plan. Stow your gear and get inside. I’m notifying Starfleet, then I’ll want to release a probe and back off to a safer distance to complete the repairs.”

“Understood, Captain.”
Her voice was professional, but he could hear the disappointment in it.

After a few moments, Larssen cleared his throat and said, “I’ve got Admiral Collins on the line, sir.”

Collins looked a little tired on the viewscreen; not bone-tired or woken-in-the-wee-small-hours-tired, but he had that look that desk jockeys wore when there was less than an hour before they could leave the office. Lambert was under no illusions that the admiral’s role was much more than office-based; the admiral was wearing a two-piece variation of the uniform jumpsuit, which had a blazer-type collar.
“Jason,”
the admiral acknowledged.
“What’s troubling the
Intrepid?”

“Romulan mines, Admiral,” Lambert began. “Lieutenant al-Qatabi is transmitting our position back to you now. We’ve observed the detonation of a Class Four cloaked mine, about thirty thousand clicks away. Harry is looking out to see whether there are any more—”

“They don’t usually go solo,”
Collins said with a sigh.
“There’s probably a field.”

Lambert nodded. “I wanted to check with you whether there had been any communication from the Rommies that might throw a light on the mines here. For one, how does their presence tie in with the new treaty?”

“Well, under the terms of the armistice, they agreed to disable any mines in disputed territories specified in the treaty, and that certainly includes your location.”
Admiral Collins paused.
“The detonation wasn’t near enough to you to do any damage?”

“No, sir, but it’s still brown trousers time knowing they’re out there.”

“Sirs,” al-Qatabi broke in. “Some types of mines are given a finite life span, and others have had remote detonators for decommissioning after a conflict. Is it possible that what we’ve seen here is actually part of the process the Romulans are using to disable their mines? We know they’d rather destroy their matériel than let us take it.”

That made sense to Lambert, and he could see the admiral nod, all the way back in San Francisco.
“I’ll have the diplomatic corps see if they can get a response out of the Romulans,”
Collins said,
“as to whether this is actually a decommissioning act.”

“It better be,” Lambert grumbled. “We’ve all got enough medals already, and if Johnny Archer earns any more, his dress uniform will collapse under their gravity.”

Admiral Collins smiled at that.
“I’ll tell him you said
that. In the meantime I suggest you mark the limits of the field.”

“I’ll get Harry on to it. Unless you want to send
Enterprise
out here to do it, and we’ll—”

Jason Lambert never even knew that he didn’t get to finish his sentence. He also never felt himself move, and never felt the first or last molecule in his body deform and rupture. All things considered, it was a merciful death.

Anna Byelev mentally cursed as she gave Lambert a prompt “Understood, Captain,” and shook her head inside the EV helmet. She looked out in the direction in which Captain Lambert had said he’d seen the flash. She didn’t doubt that he’d seen one, but there was no sign of anything there now. Anna half imagined that the stars were flickering: since there was no atmosphere to refract their light, they were being distorted by cloaking fields. She had never had that much of an imagination; halfway was as far as she went before reminding herself that the human eye couldn’t see a cloaking field that far away, and that being in zero-
g
meant that the cells suspended in the liquid center of the eye had the chance to move in front of the retina and distort distant tiny pinpoints like stars.

“All right,” she said to her team, “you heard the captain.” She gestured toward the framework that held a sandwich of four hull plates and the compartments of equipment needed to maneuver them into place and fix them there. “We’ll magnetically secure the plates where they are, and get back indoors out of the cold before any wolves come along to disturb us, eh?”

Her team chuckled at the comparison, but Anna herself was dismayed at not being able to get the job over and done with. “Georges,” she said to the Frenchman, “Hand me the
magnetic drone, and then you take the opposite corner of the support frame.”

“Here you are, Commander,”
he replied, holding out the C-shaped tool toward her. She reached out to take it.

It wasn’t there, and, suddenly, neither was Georges.

Anna had just enough time to be baffled, as she realized she was wasn’t stepping across the
Intrepid
’s hull any more. The stars spun wildly, and she saw an EV suit with a cracked faceplate hurtle across her field of vision. Her ears were ringing with a scream from somewhere, and she couldn’t tell if it was her own, or one coming through the comm system from one of her team. Before she could recognize her situation for what it truly was, or feel any of the terror that would have resulted, the stars flashed white. In fact, the universe flashed white, and, for Anna, that was the last thing that ever happened.

The sun was getting low over the ocean view from Admiral Sean Collins’s office at Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco, turning the distant horizon to blood.
“I’ll get Harry on to it,”
Jason Lambert said on the admiral’s wall screen.
“Unless you want to send
Enterprise
out here to do it, and we’ll
—” Static snapped out of, the screen, replacing Lambert and the bridge of the
Intrepid
as completely as if they had never been there. Collins started at the suddenness of the change.

“Jason?” He reached for the communications controls at the edge of his desk, trying to get the signal back. When that failed, he called down to the communications department.

“Admiral,”
the duty officer began,
“I was just about to call you. We’ve lost the signal from
Intrepid.”

“I noticed. Any indications as to why?”

“Could be anything. Equipment failure at their end, subspace interference, stellar activity . . . It’s not that rare.”

Collins could hear the unspoken “but” on the horizon. “Go on.”

“The computers automatically analyze incoming signals, and they flagged an anomaly just as the
Intrepid
’s signal went offline. There was some kind of power drop-off, as if the signal source was moving, or was being sent by an array whose elements were diffusing. But that’s not what happened, as they don’t have an array that large, and it was too quick. Instantaneous, in fact.”

Collins took a deep breath, knowing instinctively that he wouldn’t be going home tonight. “Who do we have close enough to go and take at look at
Intrepid
’s position?”

“No Starfleet vessel is within a week of the co-ordinates, sir. There is a Vulcan ship, the
Ni’Var
. . .”

“How quickly could they reach the coordinates?”

“A couple of days.”

Collins nodded slowly. “Let’s ask them.”

“Aye, sir,”
the duty officer acknowledged, and then he vanished from Collins’s screen. The admiral turned back to his office window, watching the sky darken.

It took three days before spotlights pierced the blank gaze of Anna Byelev’s faceplate, and illuminated her half-open eyes. She didn’t smile at the prospect of rescue. She didn’t so much as blink, and her pupils didn’t react to the light.

A Vulcan medical technician in an EV suit with a flight pack attached jetted out to steady her spinning form. With a deft touch of the maneuvering thrusters set into the pack, he was aligned with her, and slowed her movement. Then he was able to fly her body back to the
Ni’Var
’s airlock, which was situated in the base of the blade-shaped hull, near the warp ring that surrounded it like a hilt guard.

Hers was the third body recovered, and the
Ni’Var
’s
sensor officer believed there was only one more in the area. A humanoid form was small and hard to detect in the vastness of space, and it had taken eighteen hours to find three bodies and two panels of hull plating. As the sensor officer narrowed the field of blackness which, if his calculations were correct, could contain the last body that was recoverable, he could hear the captain softly acknowledging the recovery of the most recent.

A moment later, the captain’s voice was directed to him. “How long do you calculate before the final cadaver is recovered?”

“We should detect it within the next twenty minutes.”

“Then I shall order the navigator to prepare to resume course, and inform Starfleet of our progress so far.” The captain paused, then stepped down from his station to the sensor booth. “There are no indications of further Romulan mines?”

“None, Captain. But they were in the indicated area. Radiation readings confirm this.”

“Thousands of kilometers away, but not here . . .”

“Captain?”

“The two hull panels are all that remain of the Earth ship?”

“Indubitably. I have recorded the courses of their drift and plotted their exact point of origin. If any other wreckage or materials from the ship had come from that point, we would have detected them no less than five hours ago. Since we have not, they are not there.”

“Even were the mines in contact with the ship, they could not have destroyed every part of it so completely,” the captain mused. “Intriguing. I wonder how the humans will interpret this matter?”

“Logically, they will interpret it as having been destroyed. They may yet be correct.”

“And they may not. I believe it will be more accurate for us to simply report the vessel lost, as there is no evidence of the true cause of its destruction.”

The sensor officer nodded in agreement. “Though there is as little evidence that the ship ever existed at all.”

“That is something to which Starfleet would not react well.”

There was noise and chatter in the background of the
Hidden Panda
bar in Trenton. It was lunchtime, so most of the booths were occupied by men and women taking the weight off and enjoying the bar’s famous Chinese food deals. The lunch crowd kept an eye on the 3D projection that was tuned to the Federation News Service. It hung from the ceiling above the large squared-off enclosure of the bar, projecting the news anchors’ heads above the bar staff. Though there were four expanses of bartop, only three people were seated there. A lanky man in his late thirties was watching the news with a keen interest. He was dressed casually, in loose slacks and an even looser shirt and overshirt, and his high forehead creased a little as the newsreader continued her report.

“The Vulcan ship
Ni’Var
recovered only four bodies. A memorial service is being held in San Francisco today. There is no solid evidence as to what caused the disaster. The proximity of a Romulan minefield so close to the
Intrepid
’s position has led Starfleet to declare the ship to be a casualty of the minefield’s automated decommissioning . . .”

“Damned Romulans,” Jo the hostess grumbled. She was Anglo-Korean, and had kept her looks past her fortieth, with an athletic build. “Decommissioning my ass. This treaty is giving them the chance to do what they feel like to
our ships, and we’ll bend over and take it. ‘Thank you, sir, may I have another?’ Two-headed bastards. Am I right or am I right, B.R.?”

“Very likely, Jo. Very likely. Well, apart from the two-headed thing. They could have three heads, or none.” B.R. remembered a competition the local newslink had held a year or two back: draw a Romulan. Most of the entries they showed had depicted fanged and clawed monsters with tentacles. A few had depicted the president, or unpopular celebrities.