While the dinner party went on, Drorig stalked the corridors. It would have been hard pressed to explain exactly why, but it stalked through them nonetheless. It was ship's night, and that meant Alpha and Beta shifts were either sleeping or relaxing, and Delta shift was hard at work. It was quiet, in the corridors.
Drorig was certain it had heard something. But that was definitely not what it was looking for. Why would it look for that?
It was distracted and turned a corner too quickly, and suddenly found itself nose-to-nose with McDowell and Derning. Whatever had compelled it into the corridors evaporated in an explosion of mixed feelings. "Hey," Drorig greeted them gamely. "Fancy bumping into you two. Almost literally."
Freis was on her sleep shift, at least in theory. In practice, something nagged at her. It wasn't an unusual experience- insomnia was her own personal bane. It would descend suddenly and without warning, and several nights of sleep would dry up. Oh, she was certain that the doctor could prescribe something. The replicator was likely well stocked with things that would put her out.
Freis understood her insomnia as a choice. For right or wrong, she was a bit superstitious about it. When she couldn't sleep, she believed it was that pattern-matching section of her brain going into overdrive. It had spotted something, and it wanted her to know, because through whatever heuristic her brain had adopted, it had decided this "something" was important.
Freis had read that dreams were where those important connections were forged. As true as that was, in her brain, it was those sleepless nights that made her aware of them. Without hope of sleep, she turned to Ulysses. Despite being an English novel, she preferred reading the disconnected novel in its Lojban translation. Whatever was nagging at her would explain itself soon enough.
Hiran was the one working late. The Borg were bothersome at the best of times. Their sudden suicide would seem a good thing, but the puzzle it posed was its own problem, and perhaps a worse one. With the routine work of the day done, he went back to the data. He couldn't make sense of stellar emissions or magnetic fields, but he could read through the scene of a battle like it were a book. Hiran tracked back through the damage the probes had detected, and walked through the Borg's self destruction.
Surveys came and went. Magellan entered a "dead-zone" of stars. For light-years upon light-years, there was little more than various dead systems; apart from the stars, they were devoid of anything larger than a respectable asteroid.
The procedure, in these cases, was essentially: "drop a probe out an air-lock, and see if it hits anything interesting." No one expected them to. No new life or civilizations, and no new worlds, either.
NGC674243 was one of these systems. It was an uninteresting red giant, any planets it may have had at one time had long since beet cast into the void or devoured by the engorged star a million years ago. It weighed in at four solar masses, and the hot corona was dispersed across two and a half AU. It had no distinct photosphere, as was common in these kinds of stars.
The first unusual factor was its magnetic field. For a star of that size and type, it was unusually strong, and extremely chaotic. The probe registered a kilo-tesla magnetic field from a fair distance out. Nearer the core of the star, it was entirely possible that the field rivaled the mega-tesla field of a neutron star during the brief surges of extreme magnetism.
As scientifically interesting as that might be, it wasn't enough to generate an alert. Data was logged, indexed, and cross-referenced. Astrometrics received some low priority notifications recommending some long range investigation. The star isn't what caused Vydok's console to throw up a red tinged warning message.
The star contained a tumor. The tumor massed approximately 37,000,000 metric tons, and was a loose accumulation of matter dancing at the edges of the star's corona. Even without the computer's warning, Vydok's eye could recognize it as the remains of a Borg cube.
The cube was devoid of power, and had no life-signs aboard. Its structural integrity had failed, and now three large sections gently orbited each other, with a cloud of smaller fragments escorting them. In a few months, friction would win and they would fall into the star, to be gone forever.
There was no sign of external damage to the cube. Based on the probe's sensors and the computer's best guess, it had simply fallen apart.
Transporters aren't economical for short distances. Up and down from orbit, they're cheaper than any other option. On the surface of a planet, for any distances under one and a half thousand kilometers, it was a ridiculously extravagant expense. This meant, planet-side, any given city only had a handful of transporter terminals. Major cities had one or two public terminals, while some private organizations might own their own- Starfleet's San Fransisco campus (which actually was spread across a region from Sacremento to San Diego) had half a dozen different terminals, although they were rarely used for short trips.
Officers on sabbatical couldn't count on using Starfleet's transporters, any more then they could take a shuttlecraft out for a long jaunt to Risa. Which meant they were going to beam down in SFC, San Francisco Central. With only one likely output, that made it easy for someone looking for an officer vacationing in SanFran that was an easy spot to catch them.
Not that Nazeh or Mayat were expecting any greeters. So it was fairly surprising when a bearded, long-haired man was waiting for them holding a sign with their names. The real shock was the face behind the sign, and under the beard: James T. Trent. His mouth erupted in a smile when he saw them, and one hand waggled over his head for their attention. "Hey!" He lowered the sign and moved in towards them, his arms wide as if going in for a hug, but the surprise in their expressions stifled his enthusiasm. He settled on another awkward wave. "Welcome to Earth. How goes, you crazy kids?"
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- Tags
- borg, computronium, downtime, future trent, james r kirk, kleptes, mirror universe, moving stars, portals, sathene parat, shore leave, trent is crazy, trent reactor, wedding
"Ah," the pointed face of the Brekkiri stared down over the knot of bristles that served the same purpose as a mouth, "it is pleasing to contact you, Commodore. We have known your people through the Magellan, and recently contacted them. We wish to supply support to your efforts in this region of space."
It had taken an hour of pleasantries to move the conversation to this point. Thanks to the briefings from the Magellan, Petroski understood a little bit of the social games the Brekkiri played. The first person to broach the subject of the conversation "loses". They had elevated circumlocution to an art form.
From the small talk, Petroski had managed to extract quite a bit of valuable information. The Brekkiri were on the edges of the former Terran Empire. When the center of the Empire collapsed, the fringe colonies were ripe for the plucking- and the Berkkiri did so. Only then did they learn why the Terran Empire collapsed.
A coalition of Beta Quadrant species was forming, and the Federationempire was invited.
In Science, the computer had many jobs chugging away. One of them was linked to up to the internal sensors, left over from when they were purging computronium. Designed by Trent, it measured changes in entropy on a quantum scale. The spoor of computational processes powers of ten more powerful than the ship's computer. Briefly, the system detected one such process, located in the Science lab itself. Before it could sound the alarm, alerting the staff to a possible computronium intrusion, the surge fled. Local entropy increased back to normal background levels. But a massive surge of structured information had existed, however briefly, someplace in main Science.
Hours earlier, Trent and Nazeh were elbow deep in the guts of the Mirage. The Mirage was depressingly unhelpful when it came to understanding the component they were repairing. Repeatedly, he made gnomic pronouncements that gave them no insight and after not too long, it became clear that he was covering his ignorance. "What's interesting," Trent said as they worked; Mayat watched over them, ready for anything. "Is that this isn't really a ship, but it isn't a single mechanical organism either. It's more like an ecosystem." He flashed some data across the Nazeh's tricorder. This vessel wasn't the merging of carefully designed systems- in fact, as they had worked, they discovered that some sort of mechanical tapeworm was growing fat off the plasma conduits that fed the "altar" they were repairing. "There's a whole group of mechanical niches that are filled in."
On the bridge, sensors started begging for attention from Tactical. Someplace in the system- there were signs of Borg power signatures.
Sickbay was still a hive of activity. Doctor Goren was surprised, actually, to notice Trent moving among the injured. There were several other Science officers moving among them, providing aid and succor. Honestly, it didn't take a great deal of training to operate a dermal regenerator- and it helped free the doctors up for surgery.
While Trent's presence was a surprise, what happened next wasn't. As Goren watched, one of the Terrans that had been on stretcher duty whirled on the Lieutenant, shouting angrily. A moment later, Trent was prone on the ground. The Terran spat at him before moving back to work. One of the security grunts tapped his comm-badge and moved to intercept.
The refugee ships in the first wave were in bad shape. Many of them were Terran warships driven back from the battle. The others were work-ships, filled with their slaves of a plethora of other races. "Hail the Sparta," Dekospos ordered, some bile in his mouth.
On screen appeared a bearded mad-man. His tunic lay in shreds, and his bare skin was covered with unattended and suppurating wounds. A wild beard sprouted unevenly and his hair stood at ends. The other crew on the bridge didn't look much better.
"You're going the wrong way, fool," he said. "Death is all that is behind us."
Dekospos paused for a moment, taking in the scene. "We have medical supplies. Doctors."
The mad-man nodded, but his face was blank. "So? What good are they?"
Dekospos shifted in his seat uncomfortably. "I would think you want your crews tended to."
"Perhaps..." he admitted.
Strangely, the Captain was no where to be seen during this entire exchange. He never seemed to notice, or care, that his senior staff were all collaborating (or conspiring?). Coordinates were retrieved from the data- links to Federation routers that were relaying back to the Ferengi Alliance. And the general Federation subspace network- giving the Ferengi wider access to the most recent information than the Magellan had. It was decided that, for the time being, the Ferengi should be left, confined in "solitary" (via hologram emitter). Hiran would make his good-cop offer later.
With no need to see to their guest, this left Goren to find his own entertainment- and that landed him back in Sickbay. Here, he was extremely surprised to see the Captain, directing the offloading of some large quantity of supplies. All of it was medicine, and all of it was the variety that was difficult to replicate. Scolchen ointments, used for severe cases of sepsis in many humanoid species. Tralen Lincatures, suitable for treating plasma burns. Those emergency medical supplies that could often mean life and death on the battle-field.
All of which were already in supply on the Magellan. The supply closets were completely filled, at this point. And the Captain was barking orders while surrounded by palettes of medical equipment and supplies- more than enough to fill the supply closets six times over.
