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USS Kidd, NCC-3207
On Patrol, System Intaria, Neutral Zone
December 24th, 2290
Silence met Captain Christine Markus as she strode down the corridors of her ship, attired in the dress uniform she had cleaned and pressed especially for tonight. Her eye roamed ahead of her, taking in the decorations that had sprung up all over the Kidd -- a sprig of mistletoe here, a bough of holly there, and various exotic florae produced by the ship’s hydroponics lab in the weeks preceding -- pausing only to peer closer at a flower or vine the likes of which she’d never seen before. “That crazy Bolian’s really gone and done it this time,” she muttered, making a mental note to commend her science officer for a job well planned and executed. “I didn’t know he had the time to get all these plants to grow...”
“They’re nice, aren’t they?” boomed a voice behind her, sending a jolt through the captain’s body even as she spun to face the alien in question. Arlo’s broad lips twisted into a positively hideous smile, jabbing a finger at a wreath of flowers he’d just finished tacking onto the wall. A thin mist of pollen drifted up from their petals, tickling her nose with their scent. “I picked up all the seeds the last time we were docked without telling you. I figured you would have wanted me working on something more useful than decorating the boat for your human holiday.”
Grinning, the captain pushed back a stray strand of red hair as she paused to admire Arlo’s handiwork. “Those are Risan orchids,” she observed, breathing deeply to make the most of this unexpected bounty. “I don’t know much about plants, but the hubby says it takes quite a bit of time to make sure they actually sprout. No wonder I haven’t seen you around after our shift.”
“Good catch. Rivo’s been pestering me to leave my lab for the last three weeks -- something about him not having anybody to sit down with to a board of chess. I’m the only person who loses to him anymore, or so he tells me.” The Bolian’s sonorous laughter echoed merrily in the hallway. “Poor guy. I’m told even his girl won’t play against him anymore, though I’m sure she makes up for it in other ways.” The relationship between the chief engineer and his pretty associate was the subject of much discussion among the rank and file.
“They’re going to be at the party tonight,” said Markus with a wink. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they leave early, though -- can’t spend much quality time together if everybody’s watching.”
“Don’t be surprised if they try -- they’d do it in a heartbeat if they thought they could get away with it. I’ll tell them to go easy on the eggnog before somebody snaps a picture and sends it home to their folks.” The Bolian’s Academy days had left him with a truly baffling assortment of hackneyed human idioms.
“For somebody who doesn’t celebrate Christmas, you’re certainly getting into the spirit of the thing.”
“As far as I’m concerned, it’s an excuse to sit down and eat. And that,” Arlo declared, patting his not insignificant paunch with his hand, “that’s the great thing about your human holidays. If you think it’s important, you throw the biggest party you can think of, eat a lot, and -- how’s that again? -- take two aspirin and tell your friends to wake you in the morning.”
Markus snorted in disdain. “Like you don’t take advantage of the occasion either. Besides, I figure the crew’s been wound up too much for the past six months, trolling around this sorry excuse for a star system making sure the Klingons don’t come steal it. Not that I’d mind if they tried, you know, as then we’d actually have something to do. But not even the Klingons are that dumb.”
“Nobody wants to be blamed for starting a war,” Arlo pronounced, scratching the top of his bald head as if deep in thought. “I figure that if we stay here and they stay there and nobody moves, we’ll be right safe until some big-balled idiot starts playing chicken with Lady Luck.”
“Balls, eh? That’s an appropriate choice of words,” said Markus with a straight face, though her glittering green eyes revealed she was more amused than her dignity allowed. “But speaking of balls, you’d best get down to the mess. The XO tells me he wants some help hanging up the ornaments and the banquet starts in less than thirty minutes.”
“I’m on it. But I tell you, if the galley doesn’t work twice as hard on dinner as I did on decorations, I swear there’s going to be hell to pay.” With that, the Bolian shuffled off into the lift, his heavy footsteps accompanied by the hiss of closing doors.
"You’re a good man," the captain called out after him, before taking a closer look at the blue blossoms gleaming in the light. And only then did she notice the red -- hypnotic rivulets of dark, pulsing red that coursed through those translucent leaves.
Bridge
2230 Hours
Lieutenant Vogel was bored out of his mind, and he knew exactly what to blame -- his terrible, horrible, absolutely deplorable luck.
Never mind the fact that he’d been told ever since graduation that the night shift was the dead shift; never mind the fact that he’d volunteered for the night shift anyway when he came aboard. To the fresh-faced officer a little less than halfway through his second cruise, some hostile celestial power had bent its omnipotent will to his relentless persecution, fixed itself upon him like some malevolent Fury to a Sophoclean hero. Fate had it in for him, the acting captain often mused, and there was not a single damn thing he could do about it.
The others on watch were similarly disgruntled, even as they busied themselves with their routine tasks in an effort to distract themselves from thoughts of the celebration in full swing below them. But every so often, seven pairs of eyes would invariably drift back to the chronometers on their consoles, waiting for the clock to release them from their torture so they could enjoy the fruits of the season.
“Diagnostic on the environmental systems complete,” said the science officer, glowering at the lines of output filing neatly down his screen. “Carbon dioxide levels holding at one point five, oxygen normal, pressure normal. Nothing’s changed from the last time we ran the test. As predicted. Bet they’re enjoying all the clean air down there, aren’t they?”
“Can the commentary, Baker.” Vogel really wasn’t in the mood to hear his prolix compatriot complain about what couldn’t be helped. “Our shift’s over an hour and a half from now, and I really don’t think the captain would be heartless enough to leave us with black coffee and watered-down gruel.”
“I would be wary of putting it past her,” a wiry Deltan piped up -- the navigation officer, her head polished to an unnatural shine. “Do not underestimate the persuasive capacities of a hundred hungry humanoids when presented with surplus rations.”
The ensign nodded in agreement while he prodded his screen with a bony finger, powering up the Kidd’s high-frequency sensors for yet another one of the routine deep scans that protocol required him to conduct. The bridge’s lights flickered and dimmed as power was routed from nonessential electrical systems to the sensor arrays nestled in the stern of the ship. “Seven of us and a hundred of them. Our odds don’t look so hot, do they?”
“Watch yourself,” warned Vogel. A harsh note crept into his reedy tenor, lending it a grating edge that played sharp counterpoint to the humming of the Kidd’s scanners. “Just do your job. The more you whine, the less work gets done.”
Chagrined but by no means mollified, Baker bent back over the luminous displays packed into his station, across which were flashing reams of data like so many ants scurrying down a tree. “Sectors one through four are clear. There’s a big rock in sector five -- that’s the planet, nobody get excited -- and a small rock passing through sector six -- that’s the moon. The Klink ship’s still at the very edge of our range. They haven’t done a thing in three hours -- probably getting -- ”
“Speculation on what the Klingons are doing is unnecessary.” The lieutenant sighed, leaning back in his seat while fantasizing about the various painful punishments that Federation law prevented him from inflicting on his subordinate. One particularly pleasing scenario involved the cat-o’-nine-tails and a canister of table salt, a prospect that made Vogel shiver with a certain morbid satisfaction.
“ -- and in case you were wondering, sir, the sun’s still fusing hydrogen like there’s no tomorrow.” The ensign hadn’t stopped reading out the results of the scan. “No subspace anomalies to report, no unanticipated commchatter, a lot of fuzz -- got to fix the detectors one of these days -- and -- whoa.” His fingers danced over the console, freezing the datastream in place. “Something just went nutty in sixteen.”
“Nutty,” Vogel repeated. His eyebrows drew together as he gripped the edge of his seat like a vice. “An interesting choice of words. Care to elaborate?”
Baker frowned and fell into a reflective silence. Then, after a few seconds spent deep in thought, he spoke up once more. “Just nutty -- there’s really no other way to explain it.”
“Explain what?”
“You want it the simple way or the hard way?”
“How about the quick way?”
The science officer shrugged philosophically, though he obviously relished the role of teacher. “Well, the computer says that the sun disappeared for two point two four picoseconds during the tail end of the scan.”
Vogel blinked. "Come again."
“Well, it didn’t disappear per se, since as far as I know it’s physically impossible to make so much matter wink out of existence. The only explanation I can think of is that something generated so much electromagnetic radiation in such a short amount of time that it caused our sensors to malfunction and give us a whale.”
“A whale.” Vogel’s eyes narrowed as he processed the barrage of information. “Are you being abstruse on purpose, Baker, or do you always talk like this?”
“Sorry, sir.” Scientific zeal had rapidly replaced bitterness in the young ensign’s voice once he had been confronted with the strangeness of the situation. “It’s jargon -- a holdover from humanity's old navy days. You know those old clunky things that we used to drive in the twentieth century, those underwater boats? They ran into problems like this when they tried to use their sonar before holographic imaging was developed. Their software was initially designed to identify oceanographic phenomena, so every time it encountered something it didn’t know how to deal with, it would tell the people using it that blue whales were mating or something along those lines.”
“So that translates into -- ”
“Our computer returning a completely nonsensical result when it runs into something it can't possibly process. In this case, the scanners found a source of energy so powerful in sector sixteen that it defaulted to a null value -- which also means we're not dealing with an unknown energy signature, as Federation programmers made provisions for that early in development. The computer does recognize it, but there's enough deviation from baseline readings so it can't give an accurate result."
"Yeah, yeah, I get the point." The lieutenant shifted uncomfortably in his seat, his knuckles whitening as he contemplated the gravity of the situation. Thoughts of Christmas dinner had become little more than a passing fancy flitting around in his head. On one hand, he could ignore the whole thing, dismissing the irregular results of the scan as an abnormality in the system -- a completely logical decision, he reflected, given the situation. All I'd really have to do is pretend like we never noticed anything and continue on patrol, and if it happens again we'd know something was wrong and take action. But weighing against that was the possibility of breaking free from interminable routine, of proactively engaging in the process of discovery that was the key to new worlds, new ideas, new jobs... "Baker, is the Bird of Prey still at its charted position?"
"As far as I can tell. Their engine signature is holding at -- no, wait, wait, it seems like they've picked up the same thing we did. They're approximately ten klicks away from their original position and accelerating. Weapons are still offline, but that's probably because they're diverting every iota of power to their shields that they can."
"Show me, Sil," Vogel ordered, an ominous shadow leaping across his face with every flicker of the ship's dimmed lights.
At the navigator’s command, the viewscreen switched to a bird's-eye view of the surround, a vast expanse of emptiness punctuated only by a sun and its attendant planet. Holographic gridlines spun out from its sides to run down and across the entire array, through which was speeding a single red arrow.
"What's his ETA to sector sixteen?"
"Seven minutes at current speed," replied the Deltan. "Less, if he goes faster."
"Well, that makes our decision rather easy, doesn't it? Comm, notify the captain and tell her we're readying the ship in accordance with Starfleet Directive 5066A, justified by interference from an unknown source independent of enemy forces. Weapons, sink as much power into electronic countermeasures as we can afford. If this comes to blows, I don't want to have to eat any more disruptor fire than we have to. Helm, plot an intercept course, maximum impulse. We're heading in."
The Kidd's powerful engines came to life with an explosion of ionized gas as it arrowed towards System Intaria's star.
