Sargasso Sector Read online

“Doing good, Laura. How much more to go?”

  “Four more decks, and the containment unit should be free-floating.”

  “That’s your cue, Fabian. You up for this?”

  “I’m fine, Commander.” Stevens’s smile was tired. “A streak of bad luck is just a self-perpetuating cycle. The first bad thing throws you off your stride, the second rattles you, by the third you’re convinced you’re jinxed, and everything after that is just you tripping yourself up worrying that you’ll trip up. Personally, I don’t buy into it.”

  “So we’re all just neurotic?” Gomez asked.

  Stevens grinned. “Each in our own way.”

  “Bridge, we’re through the last deck. Sensors show the containment unit is free and clear.”

  “I copy that, Chief,” Gomez said. “Fabian, ready on the tractor beam.”

  “Going in,” Stevens said and triggered the beam with a tap of his fingers. His eyes were fixed on a three-dimensional image of the alien ship on his screen that served as a visual guide for the path of the tractor beam.

  “Just like threading a needle,” Gomez said softly.

  “Contact,” Stevens said. “Gonna start to ease it back out now.”

  “Scan of the containment unit looks good,” Gomez said. “Go for the extraction.”

  There was silence over the next few moments as Stevens drew the squat alloy container from the bowels of the ancient ship, up past decks that had last seen movement most of the way to a million years ago. Soon, the unit would be in open space and in position for the next phase of the operation.

  “What’d I tell you?” Stevens said. “No such thing as bad luck.” The containment unit slid into view from inside the gutted derelict.

  Gomez smiled and said, “I never for a second doubted you. But, just to be on the safe side….” She held up her hands, showing crossed fingers on both.

  Stevens laughed. “If you want to know the truth, with my hands being occupied I had my toes crossed.”

  Tapping her combadge, Gomez contacted the engineer in the cargo bay. “Ensign Lankford?”

  “Yes, Commander?”

  “You may launch the drone at your discretion.”

  “Drone away, Commander. Through the cargo doors, locked on target and closing.”

  A small drone vehicle, about the size of a duffel bag, glided onto the viewscreen, on course for rendezvous with the containment unit.

  “Two thousand six hundred meters and closing.”

  In just a few minutes the drone would ease up next to the containment unit and, on contact, would fire its main gas-propellant engine to push itself and the unit into the very heart of the field of wreckage.

  “Two thousand three hundred.”

  At a predetermined distance from the da Vinci, the drone would detonate, shattering the containment unit and, of course, unleashing the black hole.

  “One thousand nine hundred.”

  The singularity would begin to do what it did best, drawing everything within its event horizon toward and into its influence. Ships unmoved since forever would race toward the black hole, expanding into infinite mass before disappearing inside the thing’s insatiable maw.

  “One thousand two hundred.”

  It would sweep its immediate area clean and, not too long after it had sucked in everything it could reach, it would begin to feed on and collapse in on itself. Even a black hole so small as this one could exert its gravitational mastery over several hundred million square kilometers, a significant dent in this particular pile.

  “Nine hundred klicks and closing.”

  There were risks, of course, but under controlled conditions, with the da Vinci moved to a safe distance to observe the event, they were—If our luck holds, she thought—acceptable. And this method, in addition to being fast, also offered some fairly attractive safety features of its own, most specifically in the case of the accidental release of any unknown but potentially hazardous contents of any of the ships.

  “Three hundred klicks. Sensors are locked on target. Two hundred…one hundred…”

  Everything from inert organisms to uncontrolled chain reactions would get caught up in the singularity.

  “Two hundred meters.”

  Nothing unleashed could be more powerful than the gravitational pull of that tiny bundle of compacted matter. This would throw out not only the baby with the bathwater, but the bathtub and the whole bathroom as well.

  “One hundred meters…ninety…eighty…”

  If this worked, Gomez judged it would take a maximum of six strategically placed black-hole releases to open a lane wide enough for the approaching traffic through the Sargasso Sector. That would still leave several dozen lifetimes worth of intact derelict ships for future study.

  “…Forty…thirty…”

  At twenty-six meters, the drone’s main thruster ignited and sent it slamming into the containment unit at several thousand KPH, relative. The struck object spun off at a tangent, while the drone, its trajectory altered by the impact, went streaking toward the not too future rubble of another derelict.

  “Dammit,” Gomez growled. “We’ve got a misfire. Get us out of here, Robin. Now!”

  The bridge crew sprang into motion, their voices rising with the sudden whine of the da Vinci’s surging engines.

  “I have the drone impacting with the derelict in four minutes,” Stevens shouted.

  “We’ll be at warp in one,” Ensign Robin Rusconi said from the conn.

  “The containment unit,” Gomez said heatedly as she scanned her console. “I’ve lost it in the clutter of the debris field.”

  “The unit would’ve been built to survive impact,” Stevens said, but the look in his eyes was anything but confident.

  “It’s three-quarters of a million years old, Fabian,” she reminded him. “Bet whoever built it didn’t expect it to be in service that long. If it gets loose before we’re out of range….”

  He nodded, then pointed to his screen. “Got it! Plotting trajectory…it’s good! The unit has clear sailing for a good hour, plenty of time to retrieve it.”

  “Warp one,” Ensign Rusconi announced.

  As the da Vinci pulled back from the Sargasso, Gomez and Stevens tracked the errant drone. By the time the little booster glanced off the side of the looming ship, they were well out of the danger zone. A misnomer, actually, as the result of the collision was almost nonexistent. The drone’s mass was insufficient to do anything more than dent the larger ship’s hull and cause it to begin to wobble slowly in its orbit.

  Stevens looked over at Gomez and frowned. “Now, is what just happened bad luck or good luck?”

  “Why do I think that luck had nothing to do with it?” Sonya said.

  “ ’Cause,” Stevens said, “we’re scientists, not gamblers. We wouldn’t have played this hand if the odds hadn’t been in our favor.”

  “We need,” Gomez said in agreement, “to find out just who the hell’s been dealing us these crappy cards.”

  Chapter

  7

  The list of mishaps, accidents, and failures—both human and mechanical—was, Captain Gold noted sourly as he scanned the log, as prodigious as it was disturbing. As he had every right to be, Gold was extraordinarily proud of his crew and their record, but by the sixth day of operations in the Sargasso Sector, the crew of the da Vinci felt as though they had been chosen to serve as the butt of one long, elaborately cruel joke, the punch line to which was a non-stop series of disasters, major and minor.

  Gold rubbed absentmindedly at the still-bare ring finger of his biosynthetic left hand. Like the fact of his still missing wedding band, this mission seemed to be jinxed by some bizarre corruption of all laws of probability. To encounter the occasional mechanical mishap or work accident was to be expected. To encounter nothing but was way off the charts of anything Gold had ever heard of happening on a Starfleet vessel.

  Soloman had checked the computers six ways from Sunday and could discover no source of corruption or
malfunction that might explain its behavior. Dr. Lense had examined every crew member for any and all physical or psychological causes of chronic klutziness, but likewise came up empty-handed. The captain had even had the ship’s environmental systems checked for abnormalities, anything that might be influencing the crew or ship to act as they were, but there was nothing, not in the air, not on any level of the spectrum, nothing amiss.

  It was, from all appearances, just a run of incredibly bad luck.

  Still, in the aftermath of the black-hole incident the engineers had decided to suspend such potentially disastrous exercises until they sorted out the problems.

  And Bart Faulwell hadn’t been the last to experience some form of computer malfunction. The worst such incident occurred in the early morning hours of the fifth day as Rusconi executed a maneuver ordered by Tev to reposition the ship in preparation for a round of demolition. Though having entered the correct coordinates, as witnessed by the meticulous Tev and attested to by the operations log, the da Vinci had proceeded to spin, far in excess of programmed speed, into a near disastrous collision with one of the derelict ships before being brought back under control. The port nacelle had suffered serious damage, though no one, fortunately, had been hurt.

  Another misfire had resulted in a grouping of thirteen derelicts that had not yet been scanned, examined, and cleared being demolished by torpedo. In this case, it turned out all right, but it could just as easily have gone the other way, ending in disaster.

  But losses of data, environmental system failures, and strange malfunctions of the drives continued. Even the replicators had been acting up, churning out inexplicable creations in response to routine requests by members of the crew. Ensign Piotrowski had asked for a cup of coffee, regular, with three sugars. The replicator had supplied her with a three-tailed kkk’tukkiquith’quattkkk, a delicacy for whose molecular matrix it was not programmed.

  Gold’s own request for a snack of sliced vegetables had resulted in a platter of nugget-sized chunks of a thus-far unidentified isotope. Fortunately the sensors had instantly detected its powerful radioactive signature and alerted Gold before he had been exposed long enough for any harm to have been done.

  But it wasn’t just the physical dangers that seemed to be everywhere that were so draining. Worse was the constant petty annoyances, the lost tools, the misplaced personal effects, the wrong turns, the misremembering, the misjudgments. It was endless and endlessly distracting. How could the ship’s conn officers execute orders knowing they could trust neither the computer nor their own judgment? How was the chief engineer supposed to do her job when she couldn’t count on the tool she had put next to her on the floor just seconds before to be there when she reached for it again?

  “Odds are it’s right where you left it, David.”

  Gold chuckled and shook his head. He knew he was letting it get him down, but he had seldom in his career felt so frustrated. Yes, sometimes the situation did seem helpless, all options explored, exploited, and failed, but there was always something, no matter how desperate, to try, to do. But there wasn’t anything to be done for a run of lousy luck. He had been in enough poker games in his life to know that it was all up to the cards, and if the right ones didn’t come to you there wasn’t thing one that you could do to change it. The problem was, while you could fold on a crummy poker hand, you didn’t have the same option in life.

  Certainly not when you were in command.

  And so, even if David Gold couldn’t provide them with the answers to this dilemma, he would at least give them his leadership. Which made it time to stop moping over his pitiful captain’s log and get himself up to the bridge and look like he didn’t feel as though the sky were falling all around him.

  “Thank you, that’ll be all,” he said to the computer in his quarters.

  “Unidentified user. Please state name and access level,” said the computer.

  Gold didn’t bother responding, leaving his room with its missing rings and recalcitrant computers, wishing—without hope—for a reprieve from the misery.

  Proving him an optimist, if not a realist, the answer to that wish was a loud, pain-wracked scream that pierced the air. Gold took off at a run toward its source, the turbolift at midship.

  What now? he thought, expecting, from the sound of the scream, the worst and finding nothing less. Bart Faulwell was sprawled, writhing in agony, across the turbolift’s threshold, clutching at his throat, his scream dulled to a moan by painful gasps for breath. Two security guards, Krotine and Lauoc, had already reached the red-faced language specialist and were alerting sickbay, but Gold couldn’t see any obvious source for Bart’s distress.

  “He can’t breathe,” Lauoc said.

  “What happened?” the captain demanded.

  “Don’t know, sir,” Krotine stammered. “He just started gasping, then he went down, screaming.”

  Dr. Elizabeth Lense came running down the corridor and the helpful crewmates scrambled to make room for her. She passed her tricorder over Faulwell, frowning at the readout.

  “How the hell…?” the doctor muttered. She quickly shook off her surprise, then adjusted her hypo to deliver the proper medication. Administering the dose, she said, “Hold on, Bart. I’ve got you.”

  Faulwell’s face had started to turn blue, his lungs unable to deliver oxygen to his starved blood despite his desperately heaving chest. Now, as the meds flowed through his system, his throat seemed to open and air flowed in. His dry, pained heaves quieted to gasps, then diminished to a wheeze as the color slowly drained back into his face.

  Dr. Lense’s tricorder scanned Bart again, and this time she looked up, smiling and satisfied with the reading.

  “Anaphylactic shock,” she said to Gold in answer to the obvious question. “Bart’s had a severe allergic reaction to something. I’ve administered antihistamine and stimulants to open up his breathing passages. He should be fine.”

  “What’s he allergic to?” Gold asked.

  “According to his file? Nothing. Hence my confusion.”

  “This wasn’t nothing, Doctor.”

  “Of course it wasn’t,” she said. She looked back at Bart, tapping him lightly on the cheeks. “Bart? Bart, can you hear me?”

  Without opening his eyes, Faulwell said, “Yeah, yeah. Man, what hit me?”

  “Did you eat or drink anything in the last half hour, Bart?” the doctor asked.

  Bart nodded, his head still a bit wobbly. “Umm, yeah. Had an energy bar…” he said, then laughed weakly. “Didn’t work.”

  “What kind? What was in it?”

  Faulwell managed to open his eyes and, when he answered, his voice was noticeably stronger. “Peanut butter. My favorite. Why?”

  “Peanuts,” she said to the captain as though that explained everything. “To those allergic to them, the reaction can be quick and, without immediate medical attention, even fatal.”

  “Except I’m not allergic to peanuts,” Bart corrected her and took in a long, shuddering breath as he raised himself up on his elbows. “I eat peanut butter practically every day. You could use my blood to create a vaccine for the stuff.”

  “Apparently not anymore,” said Dr. Lense. “I’m sorry, Bart, but as of right now, I think you’re officially off peanut butter.”

  “Aww,” said Faulwell. He let his elbows slip out from under him and thudded back onto the floor.

  “No need to be so dramatic, Faulwell,” said the captain with a relieved smile.

  Bart didn’t answer.

  “Bart?” said Dr. Lense, quickly activating the tricorder and taking a new reading.

  But Bart Faulwell was dead.

  Chapter

  8

  The captain’s mouth had been dry for the past half hour. No matter how much water he drank, he couldn’t seem to get enough moisture. Ever since Dr. Lense had been forced, after a nearly forty-five minute struggle, to accept reality and pronounce Bart Faulwell dead, David Gold had felt strangely drained of everyth
ing. One instant they had been talking, the next a man lay dead half inside a turbolift.

  Nothing the finest care and technology could prevent.

  It had gone beyond madness, Gold thought, getting himself a fresh glass of water from the replicator. He had lost crew before, lord knew. Salek and Okha during the war. 111 on the beast. And twenty-three people in one, horrible incident at Galvan VI. But there, as senseless as so much death ever was, there had at least been a visible cause. A situation against which steps might have been taken, measures tried.

  But what did they have now? Peanut butter. Bad luck? He looked at his senior staff, gathered with him in the observation lounge. Did he seriously intend to put forth the theory that this was all on account of simple bad luck? Finishing his water, the captain decided he had better let the others have their say before he dropped that particular bubbemyseh on the table.

  “Faulwell’s death,” Gold said, “comes as a shock to everyone. It was as random, as unlikely an event as anyone could have foreseen.”

  “So senseless,” said Sonya Gomez, fiercely.

  Tev nodded. “What are the chances of an adult with no prior history of a problem developing so severe an allergic reaction to a much-consumed food?”

  Soloman said, “Not likely at all. Yet far more so than a replicator producing a kkk’tukkiquith’quattkkk or an unknown isotope.”

  “Or anything else that’s been going wrong. Think of it, what are the odds everything goes wrong all the time?” said Nancy Conlon. “This entire mission’s been jinxed from the start.”

  “Jinxes do not exist,” Tev said. “Bartholomew did not die from ‘bad luck.’ Luck is not intrinsically good or bad. It is just random chance. It is neither a cause nor an effect. It just is what it is.”

  “Besides,” Soloman said, “it’s not as though ‘luck’ or random chance possess physical qualities that can be quantified and manipulated.”

  “Bart is dead,” Sonya Gomez said in a soft voice. “He was a dear man and a good friend and now he’s dead because of something as ridiculous as snack food? I don’t think so, people.” She looked from face to face. “There’s something wrong here. And it is bad luck, but something is helping it along. Maybe it’s not anything we can measure, but you all feel it, don’t you? I mean, we’re better than this. All the accidents, the lost and broken tools, the equipment failures. We don’t make these kinds of mistakes, and we sure as hell don’t make them with the recent alarming rate of frequency. Something is influencing events. Something killed Bart.”