Chapter 1
One year earlier
Two months after the Destruction of Vulcan
Captain's Personal Log
Defiant is pressing on, continuing our threat assessment of Sector 114. Sensor sweeps have picked up little of interest, though whether that is a good or a bad thing is beyond me. Our orders from Admiral Marcus are clear, however - seek out any and all threats to the Federation that might be lurking out here. After what happened to Vulcan, it is hard to argue with the logic of those orders, but we have bypassed at least a dozen spatial anomalies and potential M-class planets in the past few weeks that would have merited investigation.
I cannot help but feel that we are pushing too fast and too far. We were not meant to be out this way for years yet. Who knows what we have missed in our haste to protect ourselves...
"Captain? I think I may have something."
Captain Toria Zane looked up from the padd with the latest engineering reports and tried to focus on Lieutenant Malardd Xin. The extremely young Tarmelian conn officer swiveled around, his globular eyes bugging out even more than usual. Zane blinked, his words only just getting through the fog of fatigue that hung over her thoughts. Sleep had been elusive ever since this special mission began and it had only become more so as the days had turned into weeks.
"Probably another asteroid collision," muttered Commander Lawrence Berkshire from his position at the communication's panel. Zane cast a quelling gaze her XO's way, though she had a hunch he might be right.
Turning back to Xin, she saw his eyes retreat back into their undersized sockets in chagrin. Not for the first time, she wondered how a species had evolved such poorly protected and yet incredibly sensitive eyes. Focus, Tori.
"What is it, Lieutenant?"
"I... That is, the sensors have picked up... I mean they found-"
"Sometime this week would be nice, Xin," Berkshire said.
"Commander."
Berkshire lifted his hands as if to apologise.
"What did you find, Mal?"
"A distress call, Captain. Automated. Coming from a ship."
Her fatigue vanishing in a rush of adrenaline, Zane stood and took the two steps necessary to reach the Xin's station. She felt him tense as she peered over his shoulder.
"Show me."
Xin brought the readings up on his screen. The distress call seemed to be coming from a derelict ship floating a few light years away. It was transmitting in what appeared to be an ancient Earth computer code that the onboard systems translated as a standard SOS. There did not seem to be an audio or virtual element, just the code repeating again and again. A beacon in the night. Zane wondered how the hell long the thing had been transmitting.
"What the hell is one of those doing out here?" Berkshire had come up on her left.
"You recognize it?" She indicated that Xin should focus in on the ship itself.
Zane had never seen anything like it. The entire ship was about the length of one of Defiant's warp nacelles and its main hull was barely any wider. A strange semi-circle intersected the tapering structure, like a sickle cutting through a piece of wood.
"It's an old DY class, probably a 100 if those markings are anything to go by. There was a model of one in the Museum of Space Flight back home. These were it for longterm space travel before the third world war. They used to have to strap a nuclear rocket on them to even get them into orbit."
Zane found herself looking at Berkshire with a surprised expression on her face. Her XO caught it and to her surprise, he blushed, drawing himself up in a defensive posture.
"So I used to be a spaceship geek. Sue me."
Zane hid a smile and turned back forward to see the image of the ancient ship appear on the main viewer.
"So what are we talking here?" she asked Berkshire. "Early twenty-first century?"
Berkshire shook his head, his embarrassment forgotten as he stared at the ship. "More like late twentieth. 1990s or there abouts."
She better understood Berkshire's earlier comment now. What the hell indeed.
"Are there any registry markings?"
Xin nodded. "They've been damaged by space debris so I asked the computer to give us its best reconstruction. They should be coming up... now."
The picture on the main screen grew fuzzy for a moment before coalescing into a enhanced section of the mystery ship's outer hull. Zane squinted, but Berkshire got there before her.
"SS Botany Bay."
"Heard of it?"
Though Berkshire shook his head, Zane could not shake the impression that she had seen a flicker of recognition in the man's gaze before he denied it. What could he be hiding?
"Anything in the records?" Zane asked over her shoulder, looking at Lieutenant-Commander Rhhan, the Andorian science officer. He was already hunched over the viewfinder, studying the index of billions of computer files that made up every Federation starship's memory banks. Before she could even finish her question, he straightened, shaking his head and setting his antennae trembling.
"Nothing in the computer library, beyond a reference to a pre-First Contact city in Australia. However records from the time are extremely fragmentary due to the devastation of the Eugenics Wars and the Third World War."
"Thank you, commander." Not taking her eyes from the Botany Bay, Zane lowered her voice, excluding the rest of the bridge crew from her conversation with Berkshire. "What do you think?"
"I think any human who got all the way out here doesn't deserve to be left out here to vanish in an engine malfunction or be picked up by some alien treasure hunter."
Zane agreed with the sentiment, but she also knew that this went beyond the parameters of their mission. Whatever was onboard the ship, it did not pose a threat to the Federation. She was about to tell Berkshire that when Rhhan spoke up again from the science position.
"Captain, I am picking up viable lifesigns aboard the ship."
"Lifesigns?!" Zane was not sure whether her or Berkshire sounded more surprised. "How is that possible?"
"Interference from the engines make it difficult to get an exact reading, but it would appear that the Botany Bay is a sleeper ship. I am receiving energy readings consistent with cryogenic stasis pods."
A sleeper ship? Carrying what had to be refugees from either the Eugenics or the Third World Wars. It was the discovery of the decade. Of the century. One that Zane knew she could not pass up. No matter what her orders said.
"Commander, prep a landing party. Let's see what we have here."
***
Materialising onboard the mystery ship along with the rest of the landing party, Mallard Xin sucked in a breath of recycled air, feeling confined within the silvery environmental suit he and the other officers had been forced to put. As the sparkling effect of the transporter beam faded, he focused his eyes on the ship's corridor, allowing his species' highly evolved vision to take in the sight.
Although he knew logically that other species did not enjoy the wide spectrum of visual stimulae that his own people did, he could not quite grasp the idea. While his colleagues, all human except for the Andorian Rhhan, pulled out their tricorders, Mallard's natural vision was able to see energy readings as waves of colour and oxygen particles swirling like sparks of electricity. By the time Rhhan gave the all clear, Mallard was already deactivating the oxygen purifiers on his back and getting ready to take the helmet off his suit.
The air in the derelict ship was musty but breathable. Mallard saw that the oxygen level was actually a little high by Terran normal standards, but still well within safety levels. He allowed his eyes to study the rough metal plates and small rivets that made up the decking and hull, trying to picture the men and women who might have made such a dangerous voyage in such a fragile vessel.
As the crew members of the Defiant spread out, looking for the lifesigns that Rhhan had found, Mallard drifted off down one of the nearby corridors. He found himself in a darker part of the ship. His eyes adjusted quickly, allowing him to see into the shadows. He picked out the handful of large transparent tubes almost immediately.
Cryogenic stasis. He could see the energy readings rising from the tubes' internal systems like clouds of red smoke. They still seemed to be well supplied with power - he wondered whether the ship used some kind of prototypical bussard collector to gather power from errant spatial particles. If not, the engines must be extremely resilient to still be functioning after so many years.
Glancing back at the main corridor where he could just about make out his colleagues' voices, Mallard crept over to the nearest stasis tube. The cryogenic systems had created a frosted effect over the glass, obscuring the features of the tube's inhabitant. Mallard carefully ran a couple of fingers over the surface, revealing a human female.
Although he found humans to be a strange looking race - their faces were too pinched, their eyes too narrow - his own race was similar enough to theirs for him to recognise the attractive aspects of the woman's face. Gold-red hair, full lips, a small nose and well defined cheek bones. From what he had noticed of his human colleagues' mating rituals, he believed that this woman would be considered to be a highly attractive mate.
His hand drifted down the tube until he reached the control panel. Almost without thinking, he began to press his fingertip to the keys, checking the tube's internal integrity and confirming that this woman was ready to be woken from her centuries' long sleep. As he worked, his eyes never left the woman's face. He could imagine her waking up, her tiny eyes widening in surprise at the sight of an alien face looking down at her, her lips drifting open. Mallard began to access the awakening protocols, reading through the code and imprinting it onto-
A hand reached down and grabbed his wrist. Mallard blinked in surprise and looked up to see Commander Berkshire looking down at him.
"I'm not sure touching anything is such a good idea."
Shaking his head as if waking from a dream, Mallard took a step back. "N-No sir. Sorry, sir."
Berkshire let go of his arm and turned to go back to the main corridor. He paused in the archway, though, his head twisting slightly so that he could look at Mallard out of the corner of one eye.
"You did good today, Lieutenant." Mallard thought that might be the first time the XO had called him by his rank since he had come onboard. "Try and relax a little bit on the bridge and you'll do fine."
Mallard opened his mouth to thank the commander, but the man was already gone. The Tarmelian stood there for a moment, astonished that Berkshire had actually been able to talk to him without making a snide comment. The human XO had made no secret of his disdain for Mallard ever since he came onboard. Maybe he wasn't a total ysuks.
Turning back to the frozen humans, Mallard allowed his eyes to drift over the names inscribed on the metal plates. Persis. Mara. Joachim. Singh. Rodriguez. He wondered who they all had been and how they would adjust to their new era. He determined to download what he could find in the databanks about their era once he returned to Defiant. Anything he could learn might help him help them once they woke up.
"Xin, back to the beam-in location. We're heading back to Defiant."
With a soft sigh, he turned and headed back to the main corridor.
***
Lieutenant-Commander Thy'lan Rhhan settled into his chair and reached under his desk. His practiced fingers found the small transmitter he had been given on Starbase 5 eight months before and activated it, feeling a brief tingle as the device scanned his DNA before loading the protocol that had been programmed into it. Almost instantly, the screen on his desk lit up, the usual Starfleet iconography replaced by a dark symbol meant to represent a raven.
Settling back, Rhhan waited for the connection to go through. Hidden subspace transmitters smuggled on to every communication's buoy Defiant had left behind on its way out into the expanse would be accessing Federation comm protocols, briefly rewriting them and piggybacking his transmission on seemingly harmless data packet bursts. Anyone accessing the comm routines from Defiant or from Earth would have absolutely no reason to suspect anything untoward was going on.
Just the way the Section had designed it.
After a few minutes, the black raven vanished, replaced by the familiar face of Admiral Alexander Marcus. The older human light blue and dark grey uniform of a Section 31 officer, meaning he was somewhere on Io Station rather than at his usual station. Rhhan's commanding officer frowned.
"What is it, Agent?"
"I have news of the Defiant's mission, sir."
"A threat?"
Rhhan shook his head. "An opportunity, sir." When Marcus' frown deepened, Rhhan allowed himself a rare smile. "What do you know about augments, Admiral?"
Very well written, tense and quite provocative. This is the written equivalent of throwing a brick through a window to gain someone's attention - effective but shocking.
