Star Trek: Titan - 006 - Synthesis Read online

  “I AM TITAN,” SAID THE HOLOGRAM, AS IF IT WERE OBVIOUS.

  “I am everything this ship is, every fragment of knowledge and data. And you are my crew. This will not do,” it said. There was a swirl of virtual pixels, and the hologram melted into the shape of an attractive human woman. Her hair was dark, her eyes bright with intelligence; she wore a formfitting Starfleet uniform in command red, without insignia or rank. She smiled. “This will suffice.”

  The captain’s eyes narrowed. “Why have you chosen to look like that?”

  The avatar appeared confused. “Does this aspect trouble you?”

  Riker shot the others a look. “The woman… her name is Minuet.”

  Vale got the sense that she was missing something. “If you’re part of this ship, if you know who we are, then you have to know that your… creation presents a concern for us.”

  The hologram nodded. “I am not a danger, Commander. I can maintain all normal shipboard functions without interruption. Currently, four thousand eight—”

  Riker stepped forward. “You recognize my authority as the commanding officer of this vessel, yes?”

  The avatar nodded. “I do, sir.”

  “So if I give you an order, you’re going to follow it.”

  “To the best of my ability,” came the reply.

  Riker nodded and turned away. “You’re dismissed.”

  “I—” The hologram broke off and then nodded. “Aye, sir.” With a whisper of virtual light, the avatar faded into nothing.

  “This complicates things,” said Troi.

  Other Star Trek: Titan books

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  by Christopher L. Bennett

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  by Geoffrey Thorne

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  by Christopher L. Bennett

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  by Andy Mangels and Michael A. Martin

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  by Michael A. Martin and Andy Mangels

  STAR TREK TITAN™

  SYNTHESIS

  JAMES SWALLOW

  Based upon

  Star Trek® and

  Star Trek: The Next Generation ®

  created by Gene Roddenberry

  Pocket Books

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ™, ® and © 2009 by CBS Studios Inc. STAR TREK and related marks are trademarks of CBS Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved.

  Copyright © 2009 by Paramount Pictures Corporation.

  All Rights Reserved.

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  First Pocket Books paperback edition November 2009

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  Cover design by Alan Dingman; cover art by Cliff Nielsen

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN 978-1-4391-0914-4

  ISBN 978-1-4391-2349-2 (ebook)

  For Marco,

  with thanks

  PROLOGUE

  Input 68363-28583-29548-2939. [2G White-Blue] Resume sublight motion from subspace shear vector. Defold operation complete. Error Parity 0.04%.

  “Clockset Check”

  Working…

  Confirm beacon ident. Relative spatiotemporal locative range is nominal.

  “Clockset Resume”

  Scan coordinates reached. Commence deep pattern sweep.

  Working…

  Working…

  Working…

  “Alert Condition”

  Processing. Go to Status 1.

  Energetic barrier raised. Power to offensive systems.

  ++WARNING++ ++WARNING++ ++WARNING++

  “Incursion Event Detected”

  Interrogative: Location?

  Quadrant 79548/33/8754

  Process: Evaluate threat.

  Working…

  Threat identity: Null incursion clade—Grade Six/Seven/indeterminate.

  “Threat Condition ELEVATED”

  Interrogative: Engage incursion affirmative/negative?

  Energetic barrier: Impact [Multiple] [Directional] [In-creasing].

  Drives: Standby.

  Go to Status 2.

  Offensive systems: Active [Firing] [Ineffective].

  Working…

  Process: Evaluate threat.

  “Threat Condition CRITICAL”

  ++WARNING++ ++WARNING++ ++WARNING++

  Energetic barrier: Collapsing [Imminent].

  Systems: Damage [Ongoing].

  Interrogative: Retreat possibility?

  “% Negligible”

  Energetic barrier: Inoperative.

  Drives: Inoperative.

  Process: Initiate core protection protocols.

  “Attempting to Complete Function”

  Working…

  Working…

  System Failure. System Failure. System Failure. System Failure. System Failure.

  System Failure. System Failure. System Failure. System Failure. System Failure.

  SyDeTm F36ure. S}@>em FaDG£&e. Sy258 F_+^%£e. Input 68363-28583-29548-2939. [2G White-Blue] CONTACT LOST

  ONE

  Floating there, Melora Pazlar reached forward and carefully, delicately, put out the star with the cupping of her hand. The most gentle of radiances pushed back at her fingers, brushing lightly against her palm. She held it there for a moment, wondering about the shadow she was casting across a dozen worlds, the great darkness she had brought. If she wanted, she could have seen it for herself. A simple command, spoken aloud. A shift in viewpoint, down to the dusty surface of some nameless planetoid. Easy.

  “The thing about this place is,” said a voice, “you could let working in here go to your head.”

  Melora grinned and let the sun go, falling backward, dropping away. She made herself turn in midair, the spherical walls of Titan’s stellar cartography lab ranged out around her, and found Christine Vale looking up at her from the control podium. “It’s been said,” she noted. “Sometimes it is easy to lose yourself in the scale of things.”

  Vale brushed a stray thread of hair back over her ear, unconsciously straightening a recently added gunmetalsilver highlight amid the auburn bangs. She glanced around. “Like looking the universe in the eye, right?”

  “That’s why we’re out here.” Melora drifted gently down to the same level as the commander—it was a subtle thing, but she had always thought it bad form to look down on a senior officer—and she floated closer to the podium. The small catwalk and open operations pulpit were the only sections
of the chamber given over to Earthstandard gravity. The rest of the room replicated the microgravity environment that Melora had known growing up on Gemworld. Her tolerance for the so-called standardg setting deployed aboard most ships of the line was poor, and when she wasn’t floating here, a restrictive contragravity suit was required to prevent the stresses overwhelming her body. The technology was leaps and bounds beyond the powered chair or exoframes she had used in the past but still not enough to tempt her outside the lab without due discomfort.

  Holographic projection grids hidden inside the walls threw out scaled images of stars, nebulae, and all manner of other astral phenomena, filling the lab with its own tiny universe. It was a great improvement on the earlier versions of the imaging system installed on the old Galaxy class ships, flat-screen renditions replaced by this interpretation of the interstellar deeps. She gave Vale a smile. “Want to step up?”

  The other woman folded her arms. “Nah. I’ll stick to solid ground for the moment.” She refused with a half-grin, as if on some level she was hoping that Melora would try to convince her otherwise. But then the moment passed, and Vale tap-tapped on the console before her. “You’ve got something interesting for us?”

  The ghostly pane of a control interface followed Melora as she moved, always staying within arm’s reach, and now she reached for it, nodding. “I’m starting to think we might need a new scale of defining things, Commander. After all the stuff we’ve encountered out here so far, interesting sounds a bit… bland.” The Elaysian tapped out a string of instructions on the virtual panel.

  Vale nodded. “It does seem like we’re using up all the good adjectives.” Temporal discontinuities and ocean worlds, interstellar conduits and cosmozoans, new life and new civilizations around every corner. When the uncanny and the unknown became commonplace, there was a risk you could become jaded. “Okay, not interesting, then. Let’s shoot for…” She paused, feeling for the right word. “Beguiling.”

  “That’ll do.” Melora triggered a command, and the matrix of stars and worlds shifted abruptly, enough that Vale reached out a hand to steady herself on the podium. From her standpoint, it had to be like standing on the prow of a ship plunging headfirst through the void. By contrast, any sensation of vertigo was nonexistent for Melora, who had lived most of her life walking on air. She adjusted the scaling of the display and drew them deeper into the representation of the sector block that lay ahead of the Starship Titan. The viewpoint closed in on a relatively isolated binary system haloed by the indistinct shapes of a few planetary bodies. “Here we are.”

  “You got a cute name for this one?” Vale asked lightly.

  “Just a string of location coordinates and a catalog number at the moment.” She reached out and widened the interface panel, unfolding new windows that displayed real-time feeds from the Titan’s long-range sensor pallet. “Here’s what spiked my attention. Lieutenant Hsuuri pulled this out of a cursory automatic scan of the sector…” She highlighted a string of peaks in a sine-wave energy pattern. “Cyclic output on the extreme eichner bands, very tightly packed together.”

  “Natural phenomena?” Vale raised an eyebrow.

  “Not like this,” Melora replied. “At least, not like anything I’ve seen before. It’s too precise, too engineered.”

  “Artificial, then.”

  The Elaysian gave a slow pirouette. “And there’s more. See here, and here?” She brought up a second data window, filled with a waterfall of text readouts. “That looks like some variation of a Cochrane-type distortion. Very faint but definitely there.”

  “Starships?”

  “Starships.” A note of wonder crept into Melora’s voice. “Maybe.”

  Drumming his fingers lightly on the wall of the turbolift, Will Riker adjusted the carryall dangling at his side, fixing the strap so that it wouldn’t bite so hard into the flesh of his shoulder. He felt every gram of the weight through the thin cotton of his short-sleeved Aloha shirt, and he shifted, trying and failing to find a more comfortable way of holding it.

  The elevator car slowed to a halt, just as the captain realized he wasn’t actually at his destination; instead, the doors hissed open, and he found himself looking at the scaly countenance of his Pahkwa-thanh medical officer, Shenti Yisec Eres Ree. The saurian rocked on his clawed feet, hesitating on the lift’s threshold.

  “Doctor?” Riker inclined his head, granting permission.

  Ree’s long lips thinned, and he stepped into the elevator, drawing up his tail. “Captain. Pardon me, I was just on my way to sickbay.” He spoke in a deep, throaty rumble.

  “Resume,” Riker told the lift, and it continued on its journey downship. For a moment, the humming of the electromag conveyors was the only sound. The silence was in danger of turning a little awkward; recent events had put some distance between the captain and his CMO, and despite an amount of spoken forgiveness, there was still a reticence between them.

  Hardly surprising, Riker considered. He did bite my wife. And later kidnap her and my unborn daughter. Even with all of the best intentions, that sort of incident wasn’t just going to be forgotten overnight. Ree’s actions had been cleared by a board of inquiry, but that didn’t do anything to change the fact that the personal—if not professional—trust between the doctor and the captain and his wife had taken a hard knock. It would take a while to rebuild it to its former state.

  Ree’s dark eyes gave Riker’s attire a sideways glance. “If you don’t mind me saying, that’s a decidedly nonregulation look for you, sir.”

  Riker plucked at the collar of the shirt, thumbing over the patterned print of blue sky, yellow beach, and palm trees. “It’s casual Friday, Doctor,” he said with a smile, attempting to lighten the mood. “Didn’t you get the memo?”

  “Captain,” Ree replied gravely, “it is Thursday.”

  “I’m off duty,” he noted. “I’m taking some quality time with the family.”

  “Ah.” Ree paused and sniffed the air. “I smell meat.”

  Riker patted the carryall. “Replicated ham sandwiches. I’ve got a picnic in here. Not to mention diapers, baby powder, cleansing wipes, a water flask, blankets, a couple of cuddly toys, a self-heating milk bottle, and a bunch of other stuff. I carry less than this on an away-team mission.”

  “I have noted that human parents have a tendency to overprepare,” said Ree. “Still, better safe than sorry, I believe the expression goes.” The saurian blinked slowly. “How are your wife and daughter?”

  “Good,” Riker noted. “Tasha’s developing fast.”

  “That would be the Betazoid in her.”

  “You can see for yourself, next time Deanna brings her in for a checkup.”

  “Perhaps.” Ree looked away. In fact, in the weeks after their return from Lumbu, the prewarp planet where the Pahkwa-thanh had taken Riker’s stricken wife so that she could give birth, the doctor had ensured that it was Riker’s former Enterprise crewmate Alyssa Ogawa who had handled all postnatal care. Ree had kept his distance for the most part, although on one occasion, Riker had seen him reach out a gentle digit to stroke the child’s head. The saurian hadn’t been aware that Tasha’s father was observing him, and to Riker’s amusement, his daughter had confidently reached out and patted the alien’s dinosaurlike snout. She was fearless, just like her namesake.

  Ree’s remorse was visible in the slight stoop of his shoulders. Driven beyond reason by a mix of his own biology’s primitive drives and the effects of Deanna’s empathic abilities, he had stolen mother and baby-to-be during the Titan’s mission on the planet Droplet, convinced that only he could keep them safe. In the aftermath, Ree had freely admitted his culpability and offered himself up for censure, but the captain had refused. Now it seemed as if the saurian doctor was walking on eggshells every time he crossed paths with Riker and Troi.

  The captain frowned. This had gone on long enough. “Actually, I have a better idea. How about you have dinner with the three of us, in our quarters?”

&nb
sp; Ree blinked again. “Captain… you are aware that my eating habits as a carnivore…”

  “I’ll make Andorian sushi,” Riker suggested. “That’s human and Pahkwa-thanh edible, right?”

  The doctor seemed genuinely at a loss for words, and so when the lift halted, he appeared quite relieved. “Is that… an order, sir?”

  The captain stepped out into the corridor. “It’s an offer. And it’s up to you.”

  Ree nodded again, and the lift doors closed.

  Christine inclined her head, a smirk threatening to break out on her lips. Despite everything she had just said about the routine wonder of the Titan’s ongoing mission in the Canis Major region, after Melora’s report, she suddenly felt a little tingle of that electric thrill that presaged a new discovery. What are we going to find this time?

  “Okay, so that’s pretty int—” Vale stopped, shook her head. “Pretty beguiling stuff.” She glanced up at the turning yellow-white masses of the binary star pair. “A possible interstellar civilization out in an otherwise sparsely populated region. At the very least, I think I can persuade the captain to take us off our current heading and swing by a bit closer, take some better readings on the high-definition scanner array.” She considered this for a moment. “Of course, knowing Will Riker, he’ll throw caution to the wind and go straight up to their front door.”