CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“Regeneration cycle complete.” As his alcove powered down, Icheb awoke after six hours with barely enough time to dress and replicate a nutritional supplement before he was due on the bridge for his first full day of temporary command of the Tesseract. He hoped the night had been uneventful in his absence. He assumed it had been, as the senior staff had been instructed by Adele before leaving that they could summon the chief engineer to interrupt his regeneration cycle if they really needed to.
As usual, Icheb felt much better after a full night of rest. The headache he had been fighting in engineering last night was gone, and he no longer felt tired or off-balance. Eager to take advantage of his renewed energy before the day sapped it away again, he headed for the bridge, carrying his nutritional supplement with him so as not to be late.
During the short walk there, he recalled working with Maren in engineering the night before. They had been interrupted by Adele’s calling him to her ready room to brief him on the away mission, but before that, he reflected, they had actually been interacting with one another like a team, and they had come up with a way to alter their shield configuration and energy signature to both reduce their apparent size and appear more traditionally Federation despite all the technology they had “borrowed” from the Borg. At impulse, the latter had been easy to do, but Maren was trying to figure out a way to create the same effect at warp and slipstream speeds, too. There were times it might be useful. Throughout the process, Maren hadn’t quite been warm, but she had treated him civilly and even expressed concern for his well-being on more than one occasion. It was less than he wanted, but more than he had been expecting, given her extremely negative reactions to all of his previous attempts at interaction.
Between the sudden, marked improvement in his situation with the chief engineer and the prospect of spending a few days in the captain’s chair of the Tesseract, Icheb was in an unusually good mood, despite the questionable circumstances that had led to his command. He was normally early for Alpha shift, but today, he arrived right on time. “Good morning, sir,” Iden Nix greeted him as he walked onto the bridge. He nodded and smiled at her.
“Good morning, Lieutenant. Have we heard anything from the away team?”
“They’re still en route. Nothing new to report, sir.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant.” Icheb said with another smile, and the Bolian woman gave him a slightly perplexed nod in return.
John Quigley was at tactical in Ryzal’s absence, per Icheb’s hastily issued crew reassignments the night before. Icheb nodded in greeting at John and grinned at him, too, and John smiled back in obvious bewilderment at his usually reticent friend’s unexpected good cheer. Icheb walked to the center of the bridge and settled into the command chair with enough slightly self-satisfied contentment that Iden and John exchanged a glance. John couldn’t help himself. “Did you have a good night, Commander?”
Icheb craned his head around to look at his friend. “Great,” he replied, knowing John was thoroughly puzzled, and enjoying the rare opportunity to feel like he had the upper hand in their social interaction. “Yours?” He took a sip of his nutritional supplement.
“Just fine, sir,” John replied, shooting Iden another look. She shrugged, shook her head, and turned her attention to her console.
Despite the uneasy circumstances of being stuck at impulse in a damaged sector of space without their captain, Icheb couldn’t help but enjoy sitting in the command chair. He was pleased with the job Adrian Keller’s temporary replacement was doing at the helm, and all systems appeared to be functioning well. If they could get through today without incident, they would be a third of the way through the damaged area of subspace and that much closer to resuming their course to the Delta Quadrant ... assuming Adele was back by then.
Forty-five minutes later, as Icheb sat quietly reading the comparative analysis Astrometrics had completed of the readings from this region of space and the readings from Aris 4, the comm. activated, and the bubbly voice of Sheila Duggal came over the bridge speakers. “Commander Icheb, please report to sickbay immediately.” The mention of sickbay brought Icheb’s good mood to a quick end. He reached behind his neck and touched the ever-present cortical monitor he was wearing. It was still there. He got up, walked over to John and pointed to it.
“Is this on?” he asked. John pulled aside the collar of Icheb’s shirt and looked at it.
“Glowing means it’s on, right?” he asked.
“Yes,” Icheb replied.
“Then it’s on.”
Icheb nodded and put Iden in charge while he reported to Sickbay as Sheila had requested. He wondered why he was being summoned on the CMO’s day off. When he arrived, the first thing he noticed was that Maren was there, too, standing next to Sheila and looking impatient. For a moment, he was gripped by irrational fear as he wondered what, if anything, she had told them. He gave her a slightly panicked, questioning glance, and she narrowed her eyes and shook her head, then pointed to a table full of gel packs. Relief and a bit of embarrassment washed over Icheb as he realized this visit to sickbay likely had nothing to do with him personally, and everything to do with the fact that he was currently in charge of the ship.
“Thanks for coming on short notice, Commander. I hope your first day of command is going well,” Sheila said.
“It is, thank you,” replied Icheb. “What is this about?”
Sheila motioned toward the gel packs. “Dr. Marchenko had just about figured out what had been happening to these gel packs when she had to go on the away mission,” she said. “I had some time this morning, so I looked at her work, and maybe it just needed a fresh pair of eyes or something, but I’m pretty sure I know what’s going on. The problem is, I’m not sure it can be fixed.”
“Explain,” Icheb and Maren demanded in flawless unison. Sheila looked surprised and a tiny bit intimidated. Maren blushed and looked down at her feet, but Icheb barely suppressed a small smile. It had been a long time since that had happened, but it had once been such a frequent occurrence that John had jokingly called them One of Two and Two of Two -- their own little collective.
“Okay,” Sheila said. “We have a Cairn officer aboard. His name is Rennel Linto, a lieutenant JG in the operations division. He’s one of only four Cairn officers in Starfleet, and the only one who has ever been assigned to a ship with bio-neural gel packs. I think he’s inadvertently causing the failures with his unusually strong psionic field.” She tapped at a console next to the table and brought up a magnified image of a neuropathic scan, pointing to a few small, dark spots. “The neural fibers are suffering trauma similar to the kind of trauma you or I would suffer if a telepath tried to invade our minds at the deepest levels. The gel packs don’t have any shielding or protection against his psionic waves, so their neural tissue is very susceptible to this kind of damage.”
“But how do you know it’s the Cairn? Don’t we have a lot of telepaths on board?” Maren asked.
“Ninety-seven of them, mostly Betazoids and Vulcans,” Sheila replied. “It took me a little while to narrow it down. But a lot of the telepathic species on board simply don’t have enough telepathic projection power to affect anything around them. Basically, they’re receivers, not transmitters. And some of the rest have never been in the parts of the ship that have had failures. When I looked at the failure reports you gave to Irina, I was able to find only five telepathic crew members who had been in the areas of the failures and had sufficient psionic range to cause this kind of damage. Then I noticed there had been an unusually long gap between failures, coinciding with our away mission to Aris 4. The only one of the five who was with us on that away mission was Linto,” she said, looking at Icheb.
Icheb remembered Rennel Linto from the impromptu briefing he’d given on the hangar deck before the mission. The lieutenant, apparently unable to speak, communicated by way of a specially designed artificial voice box that translated the images in his mind into words. “That’s not conclusive proof,” Icheb pointed out, “but it does sound like the most reasonable assumption given the facts. Have you tested your theory?”
“No,” replied Sheila. “I wanted to notify you first and ask you what you want to do. If you bring me some working gel packs,” she said, looking at Maren, “I can call him in and run some tests. But if it does turn out to be him, I’m not sure what we can do about it. Seven years is an awfully long time to confine someone to quarters just for being who they are, and I can’t think of a way to dampen the psionic field of a Cairn without causing significant impact on his daily life. They use their telepathic abilities for everything, even communication. It was only twenty or so years ago that humans were even able to begin communicating with them.”
Maren sighed in frustration. “Well, if we keep letting things go on like this, we won’t have any gel packs left. We just launched, and my staff has replaced 57 of these things. We have a good number of spares, but nothing lasts forever, especially not at this rate. Something has to be done.”
“It will be,” Icheb reassured her quickly. “Don’t worry.” He managed to resist the impulse, created by years of habit, to place his hand on her arm in an attempt to comfort her. He stayed silent for a moment, thinking, all the while keenly aware of the unfortunate similarities between his own situation with his neural transceiver and this officer’s situation with his telepathic abilities. He wanted to help Rennel live a normal life on the Tesseract. “What if we could find a way to shield the gel packs?”
Maren looked at him incredulously. “All 21,492 of them? How?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Icheb, “but I have no doubt that you will find an effective solution. The alternatives are unacceptable. Dr. Duggal, bring Lieutenant Linto in and test him. Lieutenant O’Connor, work with her to come up with a way of shielding the gel packs. I’d like to see your proposal by the end of Beta shift. If I’m regenerating, wake me. This is important and every hour makes a difference.”
Maren nodded. “Yes, sir.” Icheb gave her a bemused glance. He had always outranked her, so he was used to her calling him that in the context of their careers in Starfleet, but the fact that he was now giving her direct orders was something he was going to need some time to get used to. Maren met his gaze for a second longer than strictly necessary. He saw something in her eyes, a feeling -- he wasn’t sure what.
His communicator chirped. It was John. “Bridge to Commander Icheb, there’s someone here to see you.”
Icheb tapped his combadge. “Acknowledged. On my way,” he said.
“I have to return to the bridge,” he told Maren and Sheila, though they had both heard the transmission. “Contact me if you think of a better solution or make progress with this one.” He turned to Maren. “If you want my assistance after Alpha shift, let me know.” Maren nodded.
As he walked back to the bridge, Icheb thought of the three captains he’d served under as a bridge officer. Their days had often consisted of one interruption after another. If the last hour was any indication, his first day of actual command was shaping up to be no different. As he walked onto the bridge, he saw his uninvited visitor before he saw anyone else. Steeling himself for the abuse that was sure to follow, he walked toward the petite blond woman who was clothed in civilian attire. As he passed John’s station, John whispered “I tried to get her to come back later ...”
Icheb paused and shook his head. “I don’t predict she would have taken “no” for an answer. It’s not your fault,” he whispered back. He continued his walk to the door of Adele’s ready room, where Eleanor Gentry stood looking even more agitated than usual.
“Hello, Ms. Gentry,” he said cordially. He manually entered the security code for the ready room and the door slid open. As they walked in, Icheb pulled out a visitor’s chair for Eleanor, then sat behind Adele’s large desk. He and Eleanor sat staring at each other for several seconds. Finally, Icheb broke the silence.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
Eleanor waved the PADD she was holding angrily. “What the hell is going on here, Commander?”
Icheb eyed her with preternatural calm. “If you’d calm down and tell me to what you’re referring, I would be happy to try and answer any questions you have.” Adele had told him not to volunteer anything. He was good at following orders.
“You know what I’m referring to, Commander. Am I to understand that Captain Oyugo is on her way to a planet we have had no formal contact with, and you are now in charge of the Tesseract? And no one thought it wise to send the advisory board more than a PADD full of data regarding the matter?”
“Starfleet captains often handle first contact. There’s nothing out of the ordinary about that. It didn’t seem necessary to do more than put the information in the daily report,” Icheb answered, indicating the PADD she was holding, one of five he had ordered distributed to the members of the advisory board.
“No other Starfleet captain answers to an advisory board, Commander. There’s a reason we’re here,” Eleanor retorted.
“I don’t see anyone here but you, Ms. Gentry,” Icheb answered coolly. His outward calm rivaled that of any Borg drone, but he had just about had it with the obnoxious lawyer. “The rest of the advisory board seems to have accepted the situation. You’ve made it quite clear you disapprove of my presence on this mission. Would you like to discuss that, since we’re alone? Or would you rather continue shouting at me about a perceived slight?”
Eleanor assessed him warily. She could see that he was out of patience. If he had been human, she would have used it to her advantage somehow, but she suddenly realized she was at a loss. Maybe that was what terrified her about the ex-drone. She didn’t know the first thing about what made him tick, or what he was capable of.
“I want to know why you’re here,” she finally said. “I looked at your file, at least the parts I have access to. You’re very highly classified, you know,” she added snidely. “I’m finding it hard to imagine why someone who escaped from the Borg Collective and apparently ran away from his home world would want to return. Personal curiosity, Commander? Or is it something more?”
“If you’re going to accuse me of collaborating with the Borg, could you get to the point?” Icheb requested in an impatient tone. “And if you could do it more efficiently, I’d appreciate it, as I’ve heard it before. I’m sure you know you’re not the first person to have made the suggestion -- you did say you read my file.”
“I’m not accusing you of anything, Commander,” Eleanor retorted testily. “I’m merely trying to understand why someone who endured significant personal sacrifice to get to the Alpha Quadrant in the first place would be so eager to return to the Delta Quadrant at the first opportunity. And I must say, I find it more than a little disconcerting that after eight years of no recorded Borg activity, we get out here with you on board, and suddenly space is littered with the remains of destroyed Borg and something is interacting with your implants.” She paused to take a breath, then blurted out the truth. “You’re right, Commander. I don’t think you belong on this mission. I think your very presence is a huge risk, and I don’t care how well-regarded you are by your superiors at Starfleet or how much useful information about the Delta Quadrant is contained by the implants in your brain, you scare the hell out of me. I hope to God you prove me wrong, but I have a bad feeling about all of this.”
Icheb stood up, clearly done. “Thank you for your input, Ms. Gentry,” he said politely but firmly, without bothering to acknowledge her rant. “I look forward to seeing you at the next meeting of the advisory board.” He motioned toward the door of the ready room, silently inviting her to leave.
Eleanor had lost that bout, and she knew it. The Admiral had been right, Commander Icheb handled himself surprisingly well under pressure. She had lost her composure, revealed too many of her own thoughts, and allowed him to stay entirely too quiet. Something about the XO just unnerved her, and she had allowed it to affect her judgment. She vowed that it wouldn’t happen again.
“Thank you for your time, Commander,” she replied coldly. Nodding at him as she passed, she walked out of the ready room and off the bridge.
Inside Admiral Beckley’s office, the Admiral chuckled as he listened to the exchange on the live feed, amused at the attorney’s obvious humiliation. He had to admit the Borg kid had balls of steel when the situation called for it. He wondered if those were standard issue from the Collective, as he had met plenty of Starfleet captains and even some Admirals who might have tripped over themselves trying to please the pretty, hard-charging lawyer. It was almost enough to make him hope the kid made it through the next seven years and got a ship of his own. He listened for another minute until he was sure Icheb had left the ready room, then deleted the audio file and deactivated the feed. It would reactivate automatically the next time someone spoke in the room.
With his morning entertainment finished, Admiral Beckley turned to more pressing matters. He pressed the call button on his desk. “Martha,” he said, “replicate some lunch, would you?”
“Yes, sir,” came the disaffected reply. Beckley smirked. It was good to be the Admiral.
