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The USS Hesperides approached a small rocky world near the Neutral Zone—an automated observer outpost. Lieutenant JG Athena Marin, along with three others, beamed into the sparse interior of the planetoid. It was the first away mission Marin had commanded; she tried her best to project authority.
“Shields are down,” she told the others, “so let’s be quick with these upgrades. If you have any questions, I’ll be here the whole time. Don’t hesitate to ask. I’ll be right here.” She sensed a transporter cycle beginning and realized she was the one being transported. “What—”
“—the fuck?”
She had materialized aboard an unfamiliar ship, but the two women standing behind the transporter console were familiar to her: Sub-commander Ka’ina and bridge officer Chanchi, Romulans she had met on the planet Ttokva in the Neutral Zone.
The sub-commander explained, “You are aboard the scout ship Vek’Sau, which is under my command.”
“Did you just…kidnap me?” asked Marin. “The Hesperides—”
“Is very far away,” finished Ka’ina. “You’re deep inside the Romulan Star Empire. We only just materialized you.”
Marin was outraged: “You kept me on ice? Do you realize how dangerous that is?”
“We do it all the time,” said Chanchi. “Our storage crystals are far more reliable than your pattern buffers.”
“The captain of the Hesperides will search for me!” warned the Starfleet officer.
“You forget,” said Ka’ina, “we’ve met your captain.”
“He’s an idiot,” added Chanchi.
“Yes, but he’s very tenacious,” argued Marin.
“Look…,” the sub-commander stepped down from the console platform and tried to strike a conciliatory tone, “we brought you here to ask for your help.” She activated a bulkhead-mounted view screen. “Once you see the reason why…”
On the viewer was a Federation starship, a light cruiser, possibly a century old, tumbling against a dense starfield. A bluish energy pulsed across its hull with sparks and lightning-like probes leaping into the surrounding vacuum. The entire ship, spinning out of control, was suffused in the glowing energy.
Marin could just make out the ship’s designation: USS Roland. Several generations of ship design had passed since its launch. The nacelles featured the lovely art deco lines of that era. There were no lit ports or running lights that she could see.
“Wow,” she said.
A Romulan heavy battle cruiser, a warbird, was shadowing the mysterious Federation ship at a safe distance. Most of the crew of the scout ship Vek’Sau had transferred to the warbird prior to the illegal sortie into Federation space. That way, in case of capture, only the ship's senior staff would face consequences.
The three Romulans and Lieutenant Marin gathered in the ship’s tactical planning room.
Chanchi, the scientist of the bunch, recounted what they knew so far.
“Based on the vessel’s current trajectory, it did not enter from Federation space at all, but from south of the galactic thin disk. A hull sample was removed by disrupter and analysis confirms a lack of exposure to galactic radiation. My guess is that the Roland was traveling at extreme warp, and when the warp drive failed, it went sub-light in Romulan space. And by the way, there are no life forms on the ship, at least none that we can scan.”
“And the energy discharge?” asked Marin.
Son’a, a fellow engineer, explained, “It’s something of a mystery. But we believe it to be a kind of electrostatic discharge that is currently bleeding off into the surrounding spacetime flux, and it’s producing some intense x-rays. But what continues to supply the energy? Why is it never drained? We don’t know.”
“The problem,” said Ka’ina, “is that we can’t get near enough without getting zapped. It’s not the ship we want, Lieutenant. The Roland is old tech. In fact, the Directorate has one just like it in storage. But what’s the energy source inside? Whatever it is…it’s amazing. We want to investigate, but we can’t figure out how.”
“But what can I do to help?” complained Marin.
“We thought,” said Son’a, “that if we could access the ship’s records and logs, we might find an explanation for the phenomenon. Believe me, we’ve tried. We’re hoping that, with it being a hundred-year-old Federation vessel, you might have the expertise to access it remotely.”
“And what do you intend to do with me after that?”
The sub-commander addressed Marin: “When this is finished, you will be returned to Federation space. Along with the USS Roland, if possible. Lieutenant, I am a woman of my word. Before, on Ttokva, we were competitors. But now I’m asking you to join us in this particular endeavor. The crew of the Roland may have found a new energy source, and the Directorate has tasked us with plumbing the origin of all that power. You can be a part of that discovery. We will share the knowledge, I swear. You have my word as captain of the Vek’Sau.”
Marin managed to integrate her tricorder into a Romulan workstation in order to use their short-range comm system to hack into the Roland. Of course she objected to being kidnapped and she didn’t trust the Romulans, but perhaps she felt that the sub-commander—Ka’ina—would live up to her word and protect her. There was no denying the scientific significance of a possible new energy source—as unlikely as that might be. And the universe did have a knack for putting her in the right place at the right time.
“You’ve made progress.”
Marin started, having been unaware that Son’a was just behind her, watching her download data from the Roland.
“Yes,” she replied. “I know a few tricks for breaking into old data cores. But it turns out getting in was the easy part. The data is badly degraded, even with redundancy. I’ll need to do a ton of processing to pull whatever files I can out of what’s left.”
“I will give you access to this ship’s central processing unit.”
Marin was shocked. “You trust me that much?”
Son’a examined her with a penetrating gaze. She placed a cold water bottle on the work station in front of Marin—a offering of friendship? Then said, “We need a win. Our crew was never favored by the Directorate. None of us comes from a connected family. And, lately, fate has not been kind to us. But Hontai Ka’ina is a gambler. She’s bet all her chips on you, Lieutenant. Don’t…don’t let us down.” Son’a smiled kindly. “We need a win.”
Situated next to the comm station was a port to allow visual inspection of surrounding space. And through that port could be seen the USS Roland, whips of blue fire lashing through the quantum flux around it, tiny beads of intense energy shedding from its hull like water droplets.
Marin stared at it and sighed. “When I was a kid, back in Tokyo Bay City on Earth, they used to give us sparklers during the summer festival. It’s hard to explain—a thick wire covered in oxidizer and metal flakes. They burned brightly, throwing off glowing sparks into the night air. The power discharge of that ship reminds me of that.”
“You’re from Earth?” said Son’a. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Me too. All those…fragments of culture…are now dispersed across the entire UFP. Or they just live as memories, lying dormant until awakened. Anyway…sparklers. They were beautiful, but the damn things burned at two thousand degrees. Why give those to kids? Never understood the reasoning behind that.”
“Life for a Romulan is similarly full of dangerous traditions. For both children…and adults.”
After a full day of data interpolation, Marin strode confidently onto the cramped bridge of the Vek’Sau and triumphantly held up a data crystal.
“I have the answer.”
Chanchi plugged the crystal into her console and began to browse the files.
Marin glanced around. “Where’s the sub-commander?”
“The sub-commander is in her sleep cycle,” said Son’a. “Best to wait.”
“Best to wait? Are you kidding me? This is what you guys kidnapped me for.”
“Well, I’m not waking her,” decided Chanchi.
“Me neither,” agreed Son’a.
Marin’s attention was captured by the events on the forward viewer. A discharge path had somehow formed between the tumbling USS Roland and the distantly trailing Romulan warbird, jumping and snapping like a whip. The warbird’s shields quickly collapsed and its two engines separated and exploded. The hull between them was shattered.
“Oh god!” cried Marin.
“Raising screens,” said Chanchi, her fingers flying quickly across the tactical console. The energy from the rogue starship then switched direction and snaked toward the Vek’Sau, wildly distorting the shields. “The warbird took most of the hit, but we won’t last long.”
“We’ve lost propulsion,” reported Son’a from the helm station. “This is bad. We’ve got to get off this ship. But we can’t use the escape pods while the screens are up.”
Marin observed the distorted topology of the ship’s force barrier and came to a realization.
“The energy is probably following the data stream,” she said. “We can beam through that path onto the Roland.”
“What if we shut off the data stream?” suggested Chanchi.
“You’ll just eliminate our only means of escape!” argued Marin. “We have to beam across!”
The others protested stridently, but could conjure no other solutions.
Marin persisted: “We can survive on the Roland for a short time. The hull armor will protect us from the x-rays. The problem is…ain’t nobody gonna rescue us from the inside of that!”
They stood silently, facing each other, while the hull popped and crackled with stray energy and the consoles around them began to spark and smoke.
“Screens are failing…,” said Chanchi meekly.
Kai’na ran onto the command deck wearing a nightgown and screaming, “What the hell is happening?”
Wearing EV-suits, the four hastily beamed to the interior of the USS Roland just as the signal from the Vek’Sau abruptly faded. They floated into the computer core, which was the most shielded part of the ship apart form the warp core.
“How are the lights on?” asked Ka’ina.
“Confession time,” said Marin. “I restored some of the systems remotely. Not enough air for life support, at least not yet. And…,” she admitted reluctantly, “I sent a signal to my ship.”
“That’s just…great,” said Ka’ina bitterly. “I trusted you!”
“You kidnapped me!”
“Well, I thought we’d moved past that.” Ka’ina folded her arms and looked at the floor.
Marin tried to bring a singed control console back to life. “I’ll try to change the signal to a general distress call. Not that it increases our chances much. And anyway, just to live up to my end of the bargain, I know what happened to the USS Roland.
“It happened like this: the ship hit a natural wormhole at warp speed which flung it outside the galactic ring, into the halo, sixty thousand light years distant. They tried to make it back, but eventually ran out of resources. Even a subspace signal would take decades to reach Federation space at that distance, so they improvised. Running out of antimatter, and with no way to refuel, they rejiggered the ship’s warp field generators to exponentially expand the metric of spacetime within one of the warp cores. The more spacetime, the more quantum flux they could mine for antimatter condensate. They reasoned that, in this way, they could create a feedback loop to fuel the warp drive. Evidently, they lost control of the reaction and had to abandon ship. Now, this all happened about seventy years ago. I’m guessing they died in intergalactic space. The ship continued on. Without anything to stop it, the expansion energy reaction has continued to this day.”
“It sounds like limitless energy,” said Chanchi.
Son’a shook her head. “We don’t even have the know-how to build containment fields for overloaded spacetime now, a century later. The process is too unpredictable, and the energies too great. It’s one of those technologies that is always just on the horizon, but never materializes. In other words, you’ll always spend more energy trying to contain the reaction than you’ll extract from the process.”
“They were desperate,” said Marin.
“They gambled and lost,” concluded Ka’ina.
Six hours later, the shaky environmental system had produced enough oxygen for the four to remove their helmets.
“I’m hungry,” complained Ka’ina.
“I’m starving,” agreed Chanchi.
“Can we not talk about this?” pleaded Marin.
The four were sitting on the floor of the computer core chamber in the very minimal “gravity” afforded by the rotation of the ship.
“We’re so screwed,” sighed the sub-commander. “I lost my ship. Was already on the Directorate’s shit list. I would beat my head on the floor if it wouldn’t cause me to fly across the room.”
Chanchi began to rummage around inside her EV-suit. She pulled out a deck of hexagonal-shaped playing cards and shoved eight into each person’s hands.
Marin tried to learn the game as it progressed, but gave up. “You guys are just making up the rules, aren’t you? Why would the colors not matter a minute ago, but now they do? How come three numbers in sequence worked before, and now it doesn’t?”
“Because the rules progress with each hand played,” said Son’a. “We—we told you that.” She gasped and broke a sweat. “The air’s getting thin. Have to put the helmets back on soon.”
“My suit wasn’t fully charged,” said Chanchi resignedly. “It’s already out.”
Staring at her tricorder, Marin exclaimed, “Oh shit.” There was a tray in the bottom meant to hold extra data disks and she had placed a protein bar in there some time ago. She unwrapped the bar and split it four ways.
“Mosaf’vute,” Marin recited the Romulan toast very badly and ate her portion in one go. The others did as well. “Stale as hell,” she chewed and smiled.
“Yet somehow delicious,” remarked Ka’ina.
Marin’s comm beeped and her captain’s voice emerged: “This is the USS Hesperides, do you read?”
“Captain?” Marin answered. “What—how did you find me?”
“Got your signal,” Renfield said. “Took a risk. Haven’t encountered any Romulans. Yet. However, we can’t pinpoint your location within the USS Roland.”
“You’ve got to destroy the warp core of the Roland,” said Marin.
“How, without hurting you?”
“We’re located inside the shielded CPU core, in EV-suits. There’s four of us. You should be able to lock on and beam us out once the energy has dissipated. Be sure to keep your distance until then.”
“Hold tight,” suggested Renfield.
After rescuing the four, the Hesperides returned to Federation space as quickly as possible. The three Romulans were placed in detention. Renfield visited them in their cell.
“Personally, I’m inclined to hold the three of you accountable for stealing my chief engineer. A non-consent beam-out is a serious crime in the UFP. But Lieutenant Marin has begged me to consider your request for asylum, and to consider a form of alternative justice instead of turning you over to Starfleet Command.”
Renfield activated a comm channel, and Sovak, the captain of the commerce vessel Ganway, appeared on the view screen.
“Sovak T’lon, a former Starfleet officer of Romulan lineage, has accepted the task of integrating you three into the crew of her ship while overseeing your acclimation to life in the Federation. She will even sponsor your citizenship request, should it come to that. It’s either that or Starfleet justice, which probably involves a fast return trip to the Romulan Star Empire. The choice is yours.”
The three exchanged looks, but it was clear that Ka’ina was still the senior. She addressed Sovak through the comm channel.
“I swear, we will pledge ourselves to you, your ship, and your flag.”
“That’s good to hear,” smiled Sovak.
“What…is that flag, by the way?” asked Chanchi.
“Oh, this flag?” Sovak glanced at the tattered flag mounted on the bulkhead behind her. It featured a black background with a humanoid skull and crossbones in the foreground, and had originated from her time captaining the infamous Talon.
“This flag,” began Sovak, again turning to face her beloved artifact, “stands for freedom.”
END.