THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2380 SAENAR, SALUSIA While Cheltopolis is the official administrative capital of the Empire of Salusia - the city where Parliament, most of the government offices, and all but a handful of the foreign embassies on the planet are located - the Crown City of Saenar, a hundred miles to the north, is the spiritual capital of, not the planet nor the empire, but rather the Salusian people. A much older city than Cheltopolis, Saenar is held by legend and tradition to stand on the spot where Cheltaria, ancient warrior-queen, unifier of the Salusian nations, ouster of the vile Sardaukar, built the camp from which she masterminded all her great deeds. Whether this is literally true is much debated in academic circles, but the Salusian on the street believes - or prefers to let himself believe - that it is so. It's because of this cultural, if not political, primacy that Saenar, not Cheltopolis, is the site not only of the Palace Imperial, the Queen's official residence, but also of the headquarters of Salusia's oldest peacekeeping force. Where the Royal Salusian Armed Forces (jointly headquartered in the vast and impressive Triskelion on the outskirts of Cheltopolis) are creations of the modern, bureaucratic, semi-democratic government, the Royal Salusian Mounted Police can trace their lineage back to the green-coated men- and women-at-arms of Cheltaria's original court. Unlike the scarlet-and-silver-liveried Imperial Guards, whose mission is the safeguarding of the Crown, the greencoats' task, personally bestowed upon them by the First Queen herself, is the safety and security of the ordinary people of Salusia. As he entered the Great Lodge (as RSMP Headquarters was commonly known) on his first full day back on Salusia, Grissom found himself bearing this mission more prominently in mind than usual. The truth of the matter was that he had gone to Xawin only reluctantly, and only because the First Lord of the Admiralty had personally asked him to go. He would much rather have stayed in Saenar and tended to his normal duties, because right now, those duties were anything but normal. Right now, the normally laid-back Crown City was a tense and nervous place, a city under siege, and Gil Grissom considered it his personal responsibility to break that siege. His boss intercepted him before he'd made it halfway across the Lodge's entrance hall with its creaking floor of scarlet greel parquet, and it was clear from the stiffly brisk way she was walking that she couldn't have agreed more. "Well, well, look who decided to come back to work," she said, falling into step with him. "Enjoy your vacation, Grissom?" "I hardly consider investigating a shipwreck on an ice planet any kind of vacation, Superintendent Verron," Grissom said. "Yeah, well, I didn't see you -here- doing your actual -work,- so... " Verron flipped a hand. "You're lucky, though. No new bodies have turned up while you were gone. Hell, I shouldn't complain. Maybe we should send you out of town more often." "Am I a suspect, Mirrim?" Grissom asked mildly. He pushed open the swinging doors that led from the main corridor into the wing of the Great Lodge set aside for the Scientific Investigations Laboratory. Verron wrinkled her muzzle in amusement, showing the sharp points of her upper canines. "There's a thought," she said. "But no, so far you're only suspected of slacking off." "Yeah, well, that's about to change," a harried-looking young Vindari declared as he met them in the lab lobby. /* The Who "The Seeker" _Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy_ (1971) */ Eyrie Productions, Unlimited presents UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES EXILE Manhunt Part 2:Fugitives and Messengers Benjamin D. Hutchins (c) 2009 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited SOCKO SODA BOTTLING COMPANY VESPER, MUSASHI OUTER RIM TERRITORIES When the city of Vesper retreated into its dome, following the catastrophic failure of the planet Musashi's biosphere in 2288, most of its wrecked industrial areas were left outside. There was no point in reclaiming the land, so the factories were simply abandoned in place. Most were ruined anyway, flattened by the planetary shockwave or all but disintegrated in the firestorm. The only significant exception, and no one really knew (or cared, come to that) why, was the old Socko Soda bottling plant, which stood a short distance outside the dome, mostly intact. It could be seen from some of the buildings along the inner rim of the dome, and was something of a local landmark, its status as the only recognizable building on the outside (and the giant letters "SO K " on the roof) making it easy to spot. No one paid it any attention other than to sight on it to make sure they were at the west side of the dome, and even if the Vesperites had known that an outlaw starship had landed on the far side of the plant, and that ship's crew was now taking up residence, they wouldn't have cared. The only Vesperites who gave one-tenth of one damn what happened outside the dome were the people who worked in the spaceport, and that was over on the east side. Standing on a catwalk high above what had been the process floor, Captain Benjamin D. Hutchins, late of the Federation Starfleet (and commonly known as Gryphon, at least in the place where he found himself now), watched what remained of his crew set up shop. It continued to impress him - maybe even slightly disturb him - that they set to work with such equanimity, getting everything squared away just so, when what they were doing amounted to setting up a guerilla headquarters in hostile territory. This was not something the average Starfleet crew was trained to do, much less cope with the necessity of doing, but there they were, quietly getting the job done. It was more than he could have expected, more indeed than he felt he had a right to hope for, after what they had all been through in the last couple of weeks. Technically, he doubted he even had any legal authority over them any longer. Not only was their ship, the ship of which he had been captain, so much scrap metal and cosmic debris, they were an incalculable distance from their home port without any but the slimmest chance of ever getting home. Though they were on the inner fringe of the Outer Rim, not too far from the core worlds of galactic civilization, they might as well have been marooned on the far side of the galaxy as far as they were concerned. He couldn't have been surprised by a mutiny, or at least mass desertion, but there wasn't a hint of it in any of the spacers stacking cases and inventorying supplies down there. Gryphon watched them for a few more moments, then sighed, turned, and walked into what had been the plant foreman's office. He went behind the office's battered desk, slumped into the chair, leaned forward with his elbows on the desktop, and lay his forehead in his hands. Ever since this crisis began, he'd kept running, figuratively speaking. He'd never allowed himself to relax, not for a moment. There had been too much to do. Those who survived the wreck of the Invincible were, in his own mind if not by the law's letter, still his responsibility. They had to be led out of the frozen wastes of that Godforsaken planet where they'd come to rest. Fortunately, there had been that pirate base. Fortunately, the pirates had had a ship. Fortunately, they'd made it to Musashi and managed to slip onto the planet undetected. Fortunately, this abandoned soda plant was still here and could be made habitable without too much trouble. How many "fortunately"s could he pile up? It sometimes seemed as if he'd spent his whole life making the best of a series of lucky breaks, always skirting the chasm of disaster that waited to swallow him if they failed to keep coming. Or maybe that was just the fatigue talking. Or the grief, which, now that he -had- a chance to stop running and let the skein of tension within him unwind, threatened to engulf him entirely. Out there in the bottling plant, 44 survivors were trying to make this bolthole a home while their captain figured out what to do next. They made up just barely more than 10 percent of the Invincible's 432-being crew. Back where they came from, a captain who lost his ship, to say nothing of such a huge proportion of her crew, faced a court-martial as a matter of course. Here, if they were caught, he might face much worse; but in the darkened foreman's office at Socko Soda, he conducted his own internal court-martial. Had he done everything a reasonable, prudent, and competent commander could do to safeguard the vessel and crew entrusted to him? He heard a quiet tread behind him, and knew he should pull himself together, but somehow he just couldn't be bothered. He stayed where he was, hoping that whoever it was would have the tact to turn around and leave again. Instead, he heard the footsteps approach; then there was a click and beep as the person manipulated the controls of the tricorder that was lying on corner of the desk. A moment later, the incongruous sound of music, playing back from the tricorder's audio module, filled the small office with an ancient harmony. I'd like to thank the guy Who wrote the song That made my baby fall in love with me... A tiny fragment of a smile touched Gryphon's lips, but he didn't look up until he felt a gentle hand slide onto his left shoulder. His eyes followed the arm up to the shoulder, and thence the face, of his first officer, if indeed such a spare pair of words could describe all the things the woman called Commander Saavik was to Captain Hutchins of Starfleet. She regarded him calmly, her face as impassive as a Vulcan's should be, but there was just the slightest glint in her eyes - a glint that sufficed, between two such old friends, to encapsulate a complicated tangle of truths and feelings. /-- THIRTY-FIVE YEARS EARLIER (ca. STARDATE 6305) Gryphon sat at his desk in the Enterprise science lab, tinkering with a tricorder. He wasn't really a member of the sciences department (indeed, he wasn't really a member of any department), but Mr. Spock had provided him with the desk years before, when he had first joined the ship in its travels, and it had never suited either of them to change the arrangement. A few yards away, Spock sat at his own desk, his back to Gryphon's, and pursued whatever inscrutable scientific agenda he was pursuing that day. Unnoticed by Gryphon and unacknowledged by Spock (who often found that it served best to let her think he hadn't noticed her restless prowling of the ship's corridors), the preadolescent half- Romulan girl whom the Enterprise had recently rescued from the wreckage of a failed colony entered the lab by the side door and stood observing the two of them. She stood in the doorway and observed, though there was nothing much -to- observe for a few minutes. All the same, she liked to watch Spock work - it reassured her that he hadn't disappeared - and she also found intriguing his interactions with the strange human-of-indeterminate-status who shared his lab (and whose name she could not even approximately pronounce - it had a Y and a digraph -adjacent-, for all love). Spock had encouraged her to observe his dealings with his human crewmates, the better to understand how to get along with them when she entered the mainstream of galactic society, and he seemed to have an especially easy working relationship with this one, an interaction not of captain and subordinate, as with the vaguely frightening Kirk, nor of antagonist and sage, as with the acerbic McCoy, but of peers. Perceptive for her age and near-feral upbringing, Saavik wondered whether it had to do with the human's lack of official standing - that Spock could interact with him on a simple man-to-man level, as one questing intellect to another, without the paramilitary trappings of the service to get in the way. She was still pondering this, watching them sit in companionable silence, when the tricorder the human was working on suddenly started making... -strange noises-. /* Barry Mann & the Halos "Who Put the Bomp (In the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp)" ABC-Paramount 10237 (1961) */ Saavik knew her command of Federation English wasn't terribly solid yet - she had only started learning it when she came aboard, bare weeks ago - but all the same, she could make out most of the words, enough to realize that what the tricorder was making was some kind of song. Presumably the human was trying to configure it for music playback, although why anyone would do that escaped her. With a sound of faint consternation, the human poked at the internal component he had been adjusting, and the tricorder fell silent. "Sorry," he said. "No apology is necessary," Spock replied automatically. Neither turned or looked up from his work for this exchange. A pause. "Spock?" "Yes, Benjamin." "Who -did- put the bomp in the bomp ba bomp ba bomp?" The question made next to no sense to Saavik - she had no idea what any of the nouns were - but she trusted Spock's answer would illuminate the matter for her. In this, she was to be let down, for, after a moment's grave consideration, Spock replied (still without turning from his work), "I do not know, but it is logical to surmise that the same individual put the ram in the rama lama ding dong." Another pause. The human smiled and bent to his work again. "I love hangin' with you, man," he said fondly. "Indeed," said Spock, and both men lapsed back into silence. Confused beyond hope of recovery, Saavik went back to her room to lie down. --/ "I wish Spock was here," Gryphon observed quietly. "He would say that you and I, between us, have everything he could bring to the situation," Saavik replied. Gryphon smiled wanly. "I guess so. I still wish he was here, though." She inclined her head, conceding in a low voice: "As do I." Then, looking him in the eye, she went on, "Site preparations are nearly complete. The crew will need you to tell them what's next." He chuckled darkly. "'Every man for himself' comes to mind." Her hand on his shoulder gripped a little more firmly. "Your people are confused, battered, and frightened," she said, "but one thing gives them the strength to carry on: their belief in their captain. You have brought them this far." Her eyes intent on his, she added with perfect confidence, "You will not fail them now." "You say that like I haven't failed them already," he replied wearily, hooking his left hand over her forearm so that she wouldn't release his shoulder when he got to his feet. "Looking down there just now, seeing how few of them are left, I found it hard to take that view." He shook his head. "Casualties are a reality every captain has to face, but... so -many.- And for what? Nothing. The stupid vendettas of enemies I made before most of them were even born." Lowering his head, he added in a smaller, lower voice, "I feel like I've led all those trusting, idealistic kids to their deaths." "If my memory serves me correctly," said Saavik, who had no doubt that it did, "you made at least two of those enemies in the course of helping to save - in one case saving single-handedly - the Federation. To perish in the opposition of such a threat, even at a lifetime's remove, is no disgrace." A slight coldness came into her voice as she added, "Or are you now saying that Peter died for nothing as well?" Gryphon glanced sharply at her, stung by the reminder of their long-dead Academy classmate, killed in battle against a similarly-risen old foe of Jim Kirk's. Then he took her point and nodded, moving his hand down her arm until it covered her hand on his shoulder. "You're right," he said. "Sorry. I need to get ahold of myself." Grinning, he lifted her hand from his shoulder, kissed it - an almost unpardonable liberty for most men - and let it fall. "Thank you, Commander," he said, then shut off the tricorder and added, "from the bottom of my boogedy boogedy boogedy shoo." Then, squaring himself up, he strode out of the office. Saavik stood looking after him for a moment, then very faintly smiled to herself and followed him. SAENAR, SALUSIA Harrison Chu explained the situation as best he could while he, Grissom, and Verron sped crosstown. "The call came in half an hour ago as unknown trouble," he said, then took a moment to curse through gritted teeth at a spaceport limousine that didn't get out of their official airspeeder's way in a fashion he deemed diligent enough. In the passenger seat beside him, Superintendent Verron tried not to look like she was hanging onto the edges of her seat. She wished Grissom had gotten to the speeder first; he drove almost as fast as Chu, but he wasn't quite so... monomaniacal about it. "What kind of trouble did it turn out to be?" Grissom asked from the back. "The first officer on the scene was CCC," Chu replied. "He took one look and called for us to take over." "Oh, no. Not another kid... " Verron moaned, but Chu shook his head. "Nope. Couple. Man and a woman, they think, dead in a wrecked car." "We don't usually get called in on traffic fatalities," Grissom observed, diplomatically not adding that, if Chu didn't let up a little bit on the throttle, they stood a good chance of -becoming- traffic fatalities at this rate. "Well, that's the weird part," said Chu. "First officer says the car's -wrecked,- but it didn't -crash.-" "I think I can safely say that this is a new one on me," said Mirrim Verron matter-of-factly. The Crown City Constabulary officer who had discovered the car was quite right. It -hadn't- crashed; it was, in fact, parked quite normally by the side of Overlook Drive. It was most definitely wrecked, though. The roof was torn away from its mountings at the front and sides and peeled back like the lid of a sardine tin. Pebbled glass sparkled all around it. And inside were two thoroughly deceased subjects of the Crown, still more or less in their seats. "Jeez, they're just kids," said Chu. He shined his flashlight on the front bumper of the car. "Saenar College parking sticker." He shook his head and made a sympathetic clicking noise. "Probably came up here to get a little privacy, and... what the hell happened then?" Grissom popped the latches on his field kit. "I guess we'd better find out," he said. "These A-pillars look like they've been cut with a laser lance," Chu went on, playing his light up the front of the car. "Serious crumpling at the front edge of what's left of the roof... " "And what the hell's this?" Verron wondered, crouching to examine something on the ground. Grissom and Chu walked carefully around to join her, Chu wielding his light, Grissom leveling a holocamera. "This" was a deep impression in the asphalt of the overlook parking area, showing where something heavy and mechanical had pressed down hard. The central impression was circular, surrounded by three rectangular flange-like markings with a distinct ridge pattern. "It's a footprint," said Grissom, holographing it. Verron almost but not quite touched it, leaving her gloved fingertips hovering just above the circular part. "This part looks like lettering. Chu, give me some better light here." Chu bent down and thumbed the control on the base of his flashlight, switching its emissions from plain white light to polarized blue, and tilted it so the beam struck the center of the impression at an oblique angle. The change made the smaller markings in the center spring out in sharper relief - sharp enough that the three investigators could clearly see that it was, indeed, lettering, stamped in reverse on the pavement. Verron flipped the letters in her head and read, "GENOM." "D-series battlemover," Chu said at once. Verron turned to look at him. "Military combat mecha. The original model was designed to counter the old Bahamode Industries Garland." "You can tell what model it is from its footprint?" Chu shrugged. "Grissom knows bugs, I know battle droids," he said. Verron straightened up. "So... your theory is that someone piloting some kind of -war robot- walked up to this car and tore the roof off." Chu nodded. "That's how I read it." The superintendent considered that, then nodded. "Okay, as soon as we're done the initial site survey, run with that. Find out if there are even supposed to be any of these D-series things on the planet, and if so, who's missing one." She turned to Grissom. "Meanwhile, you and I will concentrate on figuring out who these two are, and how our hypothetical rogue robot jockey killed them." SOCKO SODA VESPER, MUSASHI The survivors of the Invincible's crew were weighted toward the science and operations departments; most of the engineers had gone down with the ship, either killed in the initial battle that crippled the vessel or trapped below decks when the drive hull exploded. The exceptions had been in Impulse Engineering, trying to get the fusion reactors back online, when the pylon failed. Fortunately for Gryphon's peace of mind and whatever plan he had, his chief engineer had been among them. Henry Lang and his small remaining crew, despite injuries and the understandable grief of having lost so many of their colleagues, had pulled together and gotten the old bottling plant's power reactor working in jig time, so that they wouldn't have to draw the power for their encampment from their captured pirate transport. The next phase was no less technical, but it didn't require the big-bore energy systems skills of an engineering team, so Lang and his crew could get some rest while the science guys did their thing with the scavenged comm equipment. The hardest part was rigging a mast on the roof of the building; with no easy roof access from inside, that required a bit of fancy work with the exterior drain pipes by a couple of the security officers. Now Lieutenant Vanessa Leeds, formerly the chief communications officer of the starship Invincible, sat at a complicated console she and a couple of Instrument Section technicians had bodged together. It was made mainly of equipment cannibalized from the pirate ship, with a few bits and pieces salvaged from the wreck of the Invincible, all of it affixed to a framework of steel pipes and stanchions scrounged from the bottling plant's defunct innards. Watching her as she set to work, Gryphon couldn't help but think that she looked like some kind of post- apocalyptic outlaw radio DJ. What she was actually doing wasn't very far from it, except instead of broadcasting pirate radio into the radioactive outback, she was - with the help of the machine intelligence who inhabited the tachyonic computer core they'd salvaged from the Invincible's data center - trying to tap unobtrusively into the galactic Internet. This was easier said than done, given that network's underlying technologies and the way they differed radically from the information systems of her home reality, but Vanessa was one of the best comm jockeys in the fleet, and with Vision's help, she was up to the task. "Okay," she reported, the glow of the holodisplays glinting from her glasses. "We're live." Turning in her seat, she added, "It'll take us a while to start pulling together even a basic overview. There's a -lot- of data out there. I can confirm right away that the pirates' system on Xawin had the galactic timecode right, though. Today is February 21, 2380." Gryphon nodded. "Very well, carry on," he said. "Aye aye, sir," Vanessa replied, turning back to her work. Gryphon paced away from the comm station, listening with one ear to the low murmur of Vanessa conferring with Vision on various matters of protocol and network penetration. It was a lot like the undercurrent he was used to hearing from her station on the Invincible's bridge, off to the left, a little behind him. Comforting, in its way; an indication that not everything about the universe had turned upside-down in the last few days. "Twenty-three eighty," he mused half-aloud as Jaime Finney fell into step alongside him. "I've completed a full security muster, sir," she reported, breaking into his reverie. She handed him a datapad, which he looked over and thumbprinted, feeling faintly silly as he did so. For whose records was his authorization being granted? "Glad to see Al Giotto made it," he said. "And Breckenridge, too. Between the three of you, we could probably make a grade school class into a significant security asset, let alone 40 experienced spacers." Finney smiled. "The hard part was getting the Starfleet Security survivors to squad up with the Marines. You know there's a long-standing rivalry there." Gryphon nodded. "It was the Marines I was mostly concerned about. Technically, I'm not their commanding officer; Lt. Peckham was, and with her dead, Breckenridge still comes above me in their chain of command, commission or not." "Yes, well, Gunny Breckenridge and I have an understanding. Besides, he respects you as much as any of the rest of us. So do the rest of the jarheads, come to that, and even if one of them didn't, Gunny and I could handle it. Anyway, we've got a decent squad-level force put together. I've got Giotto handling perimeter security, and if need be, we have a solid excursionary force." "Hopefully we won't need it. I'm not planning on pulling any bank jobs." Finney smirked. "You'd need Captain Harriman for that." Gryphon sighed, smiling. "Wouldn't that be nice. Anyway, good work, Jamie. Depending on what Vanessa and Vision dig up, I may need to go into the dome to make contact, and if so, it'll be nice to have some cover. I don't imagine I've been pardoned in absentia... although a lot can happen in 24 years." MONDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2380 STARFLEET HEADQUARTERS SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, EARTH CENTAURUS SECTOR If there was one thing Valeris had learned in a decade as a prisoner of the Jaros II stockade, it was that incarceration was dull. She believed, if anyone had asked her, that she had learned rather more than that, but still, it was one of the paramount facts that had become clear to her during her time in lockup. She supposed she wasn't technically a -prisoner- of Starfleet this time around; after all, these people had no way of knowing that she was a convicted traitor back home. As far as they were concerned, she was just a junior engineering officer who had survived the destruction of her ship, only to find herself marooned in an alien dimension. These people seemed to think she was from the future, which she would have found slightly amusing if she were human; interestingly, they didn't seem to have any -problems- with that idea. It was almost as if they expected that sort of thing to happen now and then. Still, there were some... -irregularities- presented by the evidence found at the Invincible's crash site, not least the Invincible herself, and until they could get those things cleared up, the Starfleet officers who had attempted to debrief Valeris so far had told her she shouldn't plan on doing a lot of sightseeing in her new reality. That bit of diplomatic shorthand would have brought a smile to her face, had she been a person inclined to do much smiling. She sat now in a conference room at Starfleet Headquarters, which was like a museum-diorama version of the one she remembered, and waited for her debriefing officer to come back and continue his futile pursuit of facts she did not have and others she did not care to share with him. It wasn't much of a life, but it beat the stockade. If nothing else, the food was better. The door opened with the characteristic hiss-squeak of the era, and Valeris turned in her seat to give her interlocutor a dismissive look - and froze, her eyes widening in shock. The Starfleet officer entering the room now wasn't the one who had been dealing with her since her arrival at the starbase, a rather portly human security officer whose face tended to match his shirt in relatively short order. This officer was taller, leaner, and wore the blue shirt of the science division. And he wasn't human. At least not entirely. Being Vulcan, Valeris was naturally adept at concealing her state of mind; but a decade in a military prison, out of all contact with her fellow Vulcans, had eroded her mental discipline somewhat, and she now found herself unable to keep her reaction entirely contained. She rose, staring at him. Before she could speak, he was joined by another man, this one human, also wearing science blue, and carrying a medical bag. "Good afternoon, Lieutenant," said the Vulcan. "I have been asked to continue your debriefing. My name is - " Unable to contain herself, Valeris blurted in a half-whisper, "Spock!" Spock arched an eyebrow at her, his expression betraying nothing but puzzlement. The human, on the other hand, looked from one Vulcan to the other and back again, a mixture of puzzlement and annoyance on his face. Then he declared, "Well! Now that we've established -that,- perhaps we can get started." "Please, Doctor," said Spock with very faint asperity. "Editorialize later if you must." Then, turning his attention back to Valeris, he added, "I fear you have me at a disadvantage, Lieutenant," and Valeris realized that he didn't know her. Of course he didn't; he wasn't the Spock she had known - not to sugar-coat it, the Spock she had betrayed. Now that she looked at him, she could tell that he was much younger, in keeping with the archaic uniform he wore. Even if some local equivalent of Valeris existed, which was not a given, she would not even have been born yet when Spock was this age. All this flashed through her mind in about a quarter-second; then she got hold of herself by a significant effort of will and sat down again. "Your reputation precedes you, Commander," she said, gathering all her self-possession. Then, giving him a coolly arched eyebrow of her own, she asked, "Why have you brought a surgeon?" Spock opened his mouth to reply, but the doctor breezily pre- empted him: "Oh, don't pay any attention to me. I'm just here to make sure nobody goes into cardiac arrest or anything." He sat down at the far corner of the conference table, folded his arms, and smiled toothily. "Just make like I'm not even here." "Dr. McCoy's assessment of his reason for being here is needlessly colorful, but essentially accurate," Spock told her. He seated himself at the head of the table, with Valeris on his right, and arranged his tricorder in front of him, setting it to record. "As you have no doubt already been told," Spock went on, "Inspector Grissom's report from Xawin has raised some troubling questions regarding the company of the ship aboard which you arrived in this dimension. Before acclimating you to your new reality and releasing you into society, Admiral Fitzpatrick considers it imperative that these questions be answered." "I have nothing to say to Admiral Fitzpatrick," Valeris replied coolly. Spock gave her the eyebrow again. "To withhold information it is in your best interest to disclose is not logical," he observed. "As is assuming you know what is in another's best interest," said Valeris. "She's got you there, Spock," McCoy chortled. The Vulcan scientist gave his human colleague an infinitesimal look of annoyance, then nodded to Valeris, conceding the point. She stonewalled him for half an hour, just as she had the man with the red face, though it was a much more difficult proposition with an interlocutor as skilled and persistent as Spock. Finally, though, he seemed to recognize that he wasn't going to get through to her, not this way, not this time. Shutting off his tricorder, he rose to his feet and said, "I regret that we were unable to come to an understanding, Lieutenant. The situation is causing Admiral Fitzpatrick sufficient distress that he may feel justified in ordering more drastic measures soon." Fixing her with a solemn look, he added, "I would find it most distasteful if I were ordered to conduct a telepathic examination." Valeris blanched, preventing her lips from trembling only through the gravest exercise of will. She'd experienced something like that once before, albeit not at the hands of -this- Spock, and she knew in her heart of hearts that she would do anything she had to do to prevent it happening again. Somehow, she mastered her voice and replied without a quaver, "That would be unpleasant for us both, Commander Spock. I trust you will do everything you can to avoid such an outcome." "If it comes to it," Spock told her, "there are others who will be happy to step in if I refuse. In that case, you would be better off with me." He picked up his tricorder, shouldered it, and said, "Good day, Lieutenant." Adding, "Doctor," in a tone some distance short of a command, he turned and left the room. McCoy got up and, after a sympathetic look at Valeris, made to follow him. Valeris got up and stopped him with an outstretched hand. "Doctor... I am experiencing considerably increased discomfort from my radiation burns," she said, indicating the plastisealed patch on the right side of her face. "Can you verify the integrity of the dressing?" McCoy smiled. "Why sure," he said, unslinging his medical bag, "I'd be happy - " You'd think I'd learn one of these days, he mused to himself as he sagged unconscious to the floor. SOCKO SODA VESPER, MUSASHI Officially, insofar as anything the survivors of the wreck of the Invincible did was official, the cluster of data systems, cannibalized holodisplays, and other assorted electronics in the corner of the old soda factory's process floor was called the Information Center. Over the days since its establishment, though, it had grown to encompass much of that end of the floor, with cables snaking here and there, a whole forest of antennae (mast and dish) up on the roof, and two new pipe-and-weld racks to hold its ever-expanding galaxy of monitors and processor units. As it grew and spread and became, for the most part inadvertently, more and more sinister-looking, it had come to be known informally among the survivors as "the Matrix". At the center of the Matrix, surrounded by the glow and flicker of a dozen displays, Vanessa Leeds sat in a swivel chair recovered from one of the bottling plant's offices, surfing the ebb and flow of the galaxy's digital sub-universe. It had taken her the first couple of days to become full conversant with her new reality's information technologies. Since then she'd been developing tools for gleaning useful information from the colossal flow of nonsense of which any civilization-spanning Internet will inevitably consist. This was a hit-or-miss process, refined through painstaking trial and error, and Vanessa and her partner in this endeavor, the machine intelligence known as Vision, knew it would take them a while yet to reach the point where their tools would start developing truly useful patterns. They were reaching the end of a trial run now, checking primarily against the local metropolitan area's information systems. If it turned up anything more helpful than the random noise of a reasonably open society's public discourse, that would be a good start. In that time, the rest of the survivors had busied themselves with a number of other tasks. Some had formed small scouting parties and, employing a modified form of the standard Starfleet protocols for operating undercover within pre-contact societies, fanned out into Vesper and the surrounding countryside, finding ways of entering and leaving the dome unobserved, gathering more direct intelligence on their new situation, and picking up takeout food. Others concentrated on keeping the salvaged equipment organized and ready for action when the time came to move beyond the establishment-and-scouting phase. A small number were still under direct medical care, their injuries mending, but severe enough that they remained incapacitated for the time being. Today, though, everyone was on the premises, and almost everyone (apart from Vanessa) who could get out of bed had gathered in a roughly circular mob at the far end of the process floor, observing one of their lost ship's best-loved traditions. USS Invincible had been known for many years as one of the happiest ships in the fleet. There were many reasons for this, but in large part it was attributable to a number of ship's traditions that served as both morale-boosters and anchors for a strong esprit de corps. There was Movie Night, of course, and Taco Night (much imitated throughout the fleet), and the annual talent show, and the shuttlecraft races, and the Science! Fair. But of all of them, the one that was by far the most popular with the widest selection of the crew, and with almost as many -practical- benefits to the running of the ship, was the more-or-less-monthly event officially described on the schedule of activities as Command Self-Defense Instruction and Demonstration (Open), better known to the crew as Captain-Pummelling Day. On Captain-Pummelling Day, the captain would repair to the ship's gymnasium at four bells in the first dogwatch, and for the next two bells he would provide practical demonstrations of self-defense and close-quarter combat techniques against any member of the crew who cared to try him. The opportunities for informal redress of grievance, within limits, were understood and often cheerfully taken up. All of this was not, strictly speaking, in accordance with Starfleet regulations, but it was a hugely popular occasion nonetheless. The ship's traditions had carried on, once the crew was settled in the Socko Soda plant, by a sort of silent mutual consensus. Taco Night was the first to reappear, followed by Movie Night, and as the end of the calendar month approached, everyone had wondered whether the captain would see fit to observe Captain-Pummelling Day. When, that afternoon, he had announced that all hands who wished to might turn to for self-defense instruction, it had almost caused a cheer. Gryphon stepped into the improvised ring dressed in Starfleet warmup gear ("PROPERTY OF USS INVINCIBLE ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT") and a pair of old-fashioned canvas sneakers, rather than specialized martial arts clothes. He had a long, slightly curved sword strapped across his back, its grip jutting up above his right shoulder. As he stood, flexing his hands and waiting, the assembled crew looked around in noisy anticipation to see who he was going to tangle with first. A moment later, they got their answer, and it settled a breathless hush over the crowd. This was a thing that happened so infrequently that not everyone present had been with the Invincible long enough to have seen it before. The captain's first opponent of the day was Commander Saavik. She wore her long dark hair pulled back in a tightly woven braid, secured at the end with a length of green ribbon. She had eschewed the generic Starfleet warmup togs in favor of ancient Vulcan fighting clothes, snug-fitting, designed for maximum mobility, and finished in a curious pattern that reminded the humans in the crowd, especially the Marines, of nothing so much as urban flecktarn camouflage. In her right hand, she held a black-lacquered pole about two-thirds as long as she was tall, topped with a fan-shaped blade that looked like it was made of bronze, and capped with a blunt weight of the same metal at the other end. Gryphon smiled at the sight of her, then turned to address the assembled crew. "Commander Saavik is holding a traditional Vulcan weapon known as a lirpa. As you can see, it's similar to a number of medieval weapons that originated on Earth. In fact, it's often known among Earthpeople as a Vulcan glaive. I have here a weapon widely regarded as the pinnacle of the swordmaker's art on Earth: the katana, or Japanese long sword. This will be a somewhat more technical demonstration than Mr. Zarkov's display of Russian bear-wrestling techniques last month," he added with a wry grin, drawing a laugh from those who had seen it. "Shall we begin?" asked Gryphon, bowing to his opponent. By way of answer, she returned the bow, then attacked. /* Gerald Fried "The Ancient Battle" _Star Trek_ episode 30: "Amok Time" (1967) */ This was a side of their first officer few of the surviving members of the Invincible crew had seen before. They were accustomed to thinking of her as a quiet, retiring sort when off-duty, not much given to socializing. She wasn't cold or standoffish, nor reticent to the point of rudeness, all traits the more widely-traveled members of the crew had encountered more than once in members of her species, but she certainly did not possess what one would call a boisterous soul. Those who had seen her in crisis situations during away missions knew that she was a deadly shot with a phaser, and that her skill with the jiujutsu- based Starfleet standard self-defense form was considerable, but even they would probably not have imagined her like this. She made no sound, and her face remained as perfectly impassive as it was during any routine patrol mission or deep-space transit. Gryphon punctuated his counterattacks with the occasional explosive cry, but Saavik said nothing. Her strength was considerably greater than his, as anyone at all familiar with Vulcan physiology might expect, but he was far from helpless before her onslaught. His uncanny ability to anticipate her actions and the exceptional discipline with which he controlled his mind, body, and weapon to take best advantage of that ability more than compensated for her physical advantages, and his endurance seemed limitless. It was only after several minutes of sparking, clashing, recoiling athleticism, a contest marked by unbridled aggression on the part of both parties, that the more perceptive members of the audience began to realize that a change was stealing over both officers. Gryphon's focus was becoming, if anything, even more laserlike, his movements becoming surer and his attacks more fully committed, and Saavik... Saavik seemed to be -enjoying herself.- A -smile- had crept onto her face, very modest, very restrained, but utterly unmistakable. Their weapons clashed, locked together, the flat of Gryphon's sword run up hard against the corner formed by the base of the lirpa's blade, and the fight became a contest of strength, which no one thought the captain had a chance of winning. He was wily, though, as more than one member of the crew knew from painful personal experience, and they were all waiting to see what he would do to get out of it when Vanessa's voice, amplified by the Matrix's impromptu PA system, suddenly cut through the tension in the air like the proverbial knife: "Captain to Sickbay!" Gryphon and Saavik made surprised eye contact across their locked weapons; she tripped him, dumping him heavily to the floor on his back, at the same time that he twisted his sword free with a ringing, sparking scrape and wrenched the lirpa from her hands, sending it spinning across the ring. "I believe that's a draw," he remarked with a grin from the floor. Saavik regarded her empty hands for a moment, then seized his free hand and pulled him to his feet without apparent effort. "I believe it is," she replied equably as he replaced his sword in its saya. As the cheers of an appreciative crew poured over them, Gryphon's perceptive eye took in his exec's heightened color, the faint sheen of perspiration on her forehead and throat, and the sparkle at the back of her dark eyes. "Oh my," he said, his voice inaudible to any ears but hers under the tumult. "Is it that time of decade again already?" Outwardly composed, she replied noncommittally, "It could be." Gryphon considered that for a moment. "Hm!" he said with a thoughtful smile. Then, breaking the tableau, he clapped her cheerfully on the upper arm and said in a louder voice, "Well! Let's go see what Dr. Selar has for us, shall we?" As he made his way through the gathering, accepting the congratulations of his crew, she stood looking after him for a moment. Then, shaking her head in a way very familiar to those who had watched her interactions with her all-too-human captain for years, Saavik picked up her lirpa, leaned it over one shoulder, and walked after him. "Sickbay" had originally been one of the soda company's flavor laboratories, or so the survivors had surmised from the sinks, long tables, and general air of chem-labbiness about the room, which stood off to the side of the process floor under its own low roof like an outbuilding that had been mistakenly erected inside the plant. Dr. Selar had commandeered it almost at once, converting the tables into impromptu hospital beds with cushions run up by the tailor (still described officially, with delightfully anachronistic verve, as the sailmaker's mate) and what equipment she and her surviving staffers had managed to salvage from the Invincible. Here, sheltered away from the bustle of the main floor but within sight and hearing of it (better for morale, something to which Selar was curiously attuned given her own more-than-usual Vulcan impassivity), the few remaining invalids among the survivors lay at their ease while Selar and her staff nursed them back to health. And here, in a little group off to one side, Gryphon found the doctor attending to the small group of Federation Marines and security personnel he had dispatched on a scouting mission the previous day. Their leader, a tall, buzzcut, slightly grizzled veteran Marine, did his best to come to attention and salute, which was not that easy, given that he was reclining on a padded lab table while Dr. Selar fitted him with an intravenous drip. "At ease, Sgt. Breckenridge," said Gryphon, returning the salute as a matter of courtesy (though such gestures had not been compulsory in Starfleet for quite some time). Turning to Selar, he asked, "What happened?" "The sergeant and his men are suffering from mild radiation poisoning," Selar replied. "They are in no danger, but I thought it best not to delay their treatment." Gryphon nodded. "Carry on," he agreed. "Gunny, do you feel up to reporting now? I've waited 90 years, I can wait another day while the doctor fixes you up." A man didn't become a gunnery sergeant in the United Federation of Planets Marine Corps by wanting to delay his reports for medical treatment, so Breckenridge cracked a wry, lantern-jawed grin and said, "Sir, I'd just as soon report if it's okay with Herself." Selar nodded. She had no idea why the burly Marine had a particular fondness for her - the stars knew she had never done a single thing to encourage it in any way - but his behavior was always correct and sincere, so she tolerated it. "Try to keep your expansive gestures to a minimum," she said dryly, "to avoid disturbing your IV." "Secure the French accent, aye aye, ma'am," Breckenridge replied. Selar arched an eyebrow at him, having entirely failed to understand the remark, but let it pass and moved on to start on one of his subordinates. "The school's still there, sir, and it appears mostly intact," the Marine continued. "That part of the city was sheltered by a ridge when the blast wave and firestorm came through. I'm sorry to say we failed to gain access, though. We got within 200 meters before Corpsman McRea called a halt. The area's hot - McRea was picking up about four millisieverts per second on her instruments. That's a potentially fatal dose in around 20 minutes, if I remember my NBC warfare training right. Not a healthy neighborhood to be doing a lot of exploring in." Gryphon nodded. "I was afraid of that." "There's something else, sir. As we were exfiltrating, we cut across the corner of a dry lake bed. There were signs that somebody landed a dropship of some kind there not long ago. I don't know what kind, but the landing skids and the ramp were obvious, and what looked like armored vehicle tracks heading back the way we came. The tracks end at the lakeshore, and Doc was adamant that we had to get out of there by then, but it looked like they were heading for the same part of town we were interested in." Saavik, who had remained silent up until now, spoke. "How long ago would you say this was, Gunnery Sergeant?" "Well, ma'am, it never rains around there, so erosion would be minimal apart from the wind, but still, they looked pretty fresh. I'd say within the last five to seven years." Breckenridge looked a bit downcast. "Sorry we couldn't bring you better news, Captain." Gryphon grinned. "At least what you did bring me was interesting," he said. "Good work, Gunny. You and your guys can take the rest of the week off. Get some rest and do what the doctor tells you." Breckenridge smiled and saluted. "Aye aye, sir. I'm Herself's to command." Gryphon maintained his morale-boosting smile until he was halfway across the sickbay, out of sight of the Marines; then he let his face assume the thoughtful scowl it really wanted to wear. Saavik said nothing, letting him come to it himself. "Damn," he said. "Taking a full science team in there is out of the question. We don't have the protective gear." "Agreed," she said. "Assuming a full search would require at least 60 minutes, the human members of the search team would certainly be seriously injured - very possibly killed." Gryphon nodded. "I won't ask my people to go through that for my own personal agenda," he said. "Especially not after everything they've already been through." Saavik paused, considering her next words carefully, and then said, "I will go." Gryphon stopped in his tracks and looked at her sharply. "Alone?" "I am your most experienced scientific officer," she replied calmly. "My physiology is capable of withstanding a higher radiation dose than a human's. I am familiar with the circumstances of the case as you have described them. If there is anything to be found there, I can find it and return with it." "There may be nothing to find," Gryphon said, shaking his head. "You heard Breckenridge - there's every indication that someone's been there before us." "We will not know that," said Saavik relentlessly, "until someone goes to see first-hand. Captain, we've come this far. We cannot just leave it now." "I can't ask you to run that kind of risk for my gain either," he told her. "If anyone has to go, I'll do it myself. I'm not just an ordinary garden-variety human, you know." "I would never presume to dismiss you as ordinary," she said dryly, "but I propose a compromise: We will both go." At his skeptical look, she went on, "Together we will be able to make a more effective search in less time. Combining that factor with our particular hardiness may be the only chance of success." Gryphon regarded her for a long moment, then smiled. "Eminently logical, Commander," he said. "Thank you." "Okay. Go square away your equipment. I'm going back to draw some Rad-X and get a lecture on unnecessary health risks from Selar, and the last thing I need is a Vulcan-on-Vulcan argument over the mission," he added with a wry grin. "We'll leave in an hour. I have to tell Jamie what we're up to, and I'll need the extra time to talk her out of coming with us." Saavik inclined her head, perhaps hiding a smile. "Aye aye, Captain." TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2380 SAENAR, SALUSIA One of the things that consistently annoyed Harrison Chu (if only mildly) about his colleague Gil Grissom was that, no matter what time of the day or night Chu called him, Grissom always sounded fresh and alert. It was impossible to tell whether Chu had woken him or not. If so, he was a remarkably fast waker. If not, when did he sleep? It was an enigma that Chu often worried at in the back corner of his mind, just to keep himself occupied. "Sorry, did I wake you?" Chu asked as a matter of form; it was an ingrained reflex in all the members of the RSMP SID's night shift, asked without expectation of any but the stock answer the way normal people said "How are ya?" and "Oh, fine." As the form required of him, Grissom replied, "No, not at all. What's up?" "Are you at home? I'll be there in five minutes. We've got a call." "Another torn-open car?" Grissom asked dryly. "No," Chu replied, his tone so serious that it erased the mild flippancy from Grissom's mood at once. "A little girl. Mirrim's already there. She told me to tell you it all looks familiar." "Damn." Grissom rarely allowed himself even that much of a show of anger, but he'd had a hard time with the recent spate of child murders - a common failing, if indeed failing it was, among criminal investigators in the civilized parts of the galaxy. "Yeah," said Chu sympathetically. "Anyway, I'm on the 220 now. Maybe three minutes out." "I'll be ready." WOODY CREEK, COLORADO EARTH Valeris left her stolen surface transport by the road and walked the last mile up an indifferently plowed dirt track, snow crunching under her boots and dusting the epaulets of the field jacket she'd found in the van. Had she been human (she kept insisting to herself), she might have felt a bit nervous as she approached the big, rambling house at the end of the track. She'd been warned that the man she'd come to see tended to be a little touchy about visitors. She hadn't quite expected that to translate into a wiry, balding, slightly wild-eyed man in a loud shirt, patched multicolored shooting jacket, and Chinos pointing a giant, antiquated handgun at her from his front porch, but then, nothing much -had- gone according to her full expectations since her escape from Jaros II. "Who the hell are you?" the man demanded. Squinting thoughtfully at her, he added, "Huh. A Vulcan. Haven't seen one of those in a while." "My name is Valeris," she said, holding her hands up and open in the universal don't-shoot-me gesture. "Are you Dr. Duke? Dr. Raoul Duke? I have a message for you." "Oh yeah? Who from?" "He... he told me to say: someone who was there when the fun stopped." Duke regarded her keenly for a few moments, then lowered the gun and stuck it into the waistband of his Chinos behind his back. "Shit. Come on in," he said. /* Lionrock "Scatter & Swing" _City Delirious_ (1998) */ Eyrie Productions, Unlimited presented UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES EXILE Manhunt Part 2: Fugitives and Messengers starring Giol'bertis Grissom Mirrim Verron Harrison Chu Benjamin D. Hutchins Saavik Spock Valeris Spock Leonard H. McCoy, MD Vanessa Leeds Jaime Finney Gy.Sgt. Noah Breckenridge, UFPMC Selar, MD and introducing HUNTER S. THOMPSON as Doctor Raoul Duke by Benjamin D. Hutchins with The Eyrie Productions Usual Suspects Dialogue assistance by Chad Collier Geoff Depew Plot wrangler Philip J. Moyer To be continued in Part 3: Collect Telegram from the Edge of Forever E P U (colour) 2009