Chapter 8.

Two Years Earlier Starfleet Intelligence Paris, Earth Lieutenant Commander Travis Higgins rapped a knuckle on the top of the low wall that separated his desk from his office mate's. "Hey, Javi." Travis's friend and colleague Javier Rodriquez was also a lieutenant commander and an incident report investigator. As usual, Rodriquez had his personal transceivers jammed into both his ears, eyes scrunched tightly shut, and was likely listening to the c.o.c.kpit chatter of the transport whose crew's luck ran out and they corkscrewed into an asteroid. It was, as Rodriquez had commented on more than one occasion, not a pleasant duty, but someone had to do it.

Higgins rapped harder. "Javi!" he said, raising his voice. No response. Rodriquez was mouthing the words he was hearing through his headphones, trying to make sense of the murmured jargon and personal asides bandied back and forth between the bored helmsman and exhausted navigator.

Higgins tossed a stylus at Rodriquez's head. Rodriquez caught it midflight, held it lightly in his hand, and raised a middle finger. Then, slowly, he lowered it. He then lifted his index finger, requesting a moment of patience. Higgins held his peace until Rodriquez finished whatever he was doing and tugged the transceivers from his ears. "Yes, Mister Patience?"

"Come take a look at this."

"At what?"

"A recording of a deposition."

Rodriquez tilted his head to one side and squinted at Higgins. "Because I've never seen a deposition before? I mean, you do know what we do here, don't you?" He indicated the rows of desks to his left and right, ahead and behind. "All of us? And, if not, what have you been doing the past couple years?"

Higgins made a very-funny-ha-ha-ha-hilarious face. "No, really. Come here and check this out."

"Why?"

"If I tell you that, there's not much point in you seeing the recording."

Rodriquez slumped down in his chair, which silently reconfigured itself to give him maximum back and hip support. "You know, I have my own work to do. I can't just drop everything . . ."

"I don't need you to do my work. This is . . ." He lowered his voice. "I want to make sure I'm not missing something really important here. Can you just stop being such a . . . so you."

Rodriquez rubbed his face, stood up, and straightened his tunic. Protocol was that to visit another officer's work area you put on your jacket, but Rodriquez decided to flout convention. He walked around the front of their desks and plopped down into Higgins's guest chair. "Show me," he said, leaning forward. His large, brown eyes were bloodshot. Probably staying out too late with the new girlfriend, Higgins decided.

"This is from the Darius hearings. I told you about this the other day at lunch."

"The freighter," Rodriquez recalled. "Snared by pirates. What were they? Carda.s.sians?"

"No, Carda.s.sian ship, but probably an Orion crew. They bought up a lot of old Carda.s.sian ships after the war ended, especially the Hideki-cla.s.s."

"I get the same briefings you do, Trav."

"Yes, but do I a.s.sume you read them? No, I do not."

Rodriquez pursed his lips and made a sour face. "Continue, please."

Higgins complied. "So, these poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds were attacked just outside the Regulus system, out in that big, empty s.p.a.ce that borders the Neutral Zone, you know what I mean?"

"Yeah. Lot of activity there recently."

"Right, well, no one mentioned it to the captain of the Darius apparently. Or he was just rolling the dice."

"What kind of ship is the Darius?"

"Good question. Xepolite built. I can't p.r.o.nounce the cla.s.s name. H'rut? Something like that with a glottal in the middle. You know, the kind with the dense hulls?"

"Particle scattering, yeah."

"Right." Higgins leaned back into his chair, settling into his story. "So, the Darius's captain decides to make a run for it."

"Brave. Not that they had much choice."

"No argument. No way is a Xepolite-cla.s.s outrunning a Hideki." He bounced forward, the chair back following, contouring to his spine. "Except they do. Because they have this helmsman who apparently knows everything there is to know about wringing every joule of energy out of a warp core."

"Really?" Rodriquez was interested now. Higgins felt vindicated. "What happened?"

"The Darius managed to stay ahead of the pirates, avoided their tractor beam, and was heading like a bat out of h.e.l.l for Starbase 46."

Rodriquez squinted, drawing a star chart in his head. "Okay," he said. "Yeah, that makes sense. If they could hail the starbase, they could get help."

"That's what the second-in-command said was the plan."

"Second? What happened to the captain?"

Higgins frowned. "This would be the point where the pirates opened fire."

"Really? Surprising. That's not the usual modus."

"No, it's not. That's why this is so interesting. The Orions, or whoever they were, must have been aggravated enough by the Darius's moves that they stopped worrying about catching her intact and just decided, 'What the h.e.l.l.' And they start peppering her with disruptor fire, not full power at first, judging by the sensor readings, but enough to shake her up pretty bad."

"And the captain died."

"Yeah, she was under a major power coupling when it came loose."

Rodriquez made a sympathetic face. "That's rough. Any other casualties?"

"No. But I saw the interviews with the second, and he didn't look to me to be the sort to stay calm under fire. I figure the helmsman was calling the shots. I mean, he had the crew's lives in his hands at this point."

"But they're taking fire."

"Their aft shields collapse. And I expect the Orions-or whoever-were about to take out the engines when the helmsman decides that this would be a good time to drop out of warp . . ."

Rodriquez tipped his head to one side. "Okay."

"And let the pirates get in front of him . . ."

"That would happen, at least until they dropped . . ."

"Then as soon as they flew past, he went back into warp."

"Now that's just crazy."

"Wait, it gets better. He goes right for them. Warp six. And he's firing his phasers, these tiny, little units that can't do any more than melt debris when you're in orbit."

"No way that's going to have any effect on a Hideki."

"Not supposed to. Camouflage for the real attack."

"Which is?"

"He'd had the cargo master tractor out some of the shipping containers they were carrying. Guess what's in them?"

"On a Xepolite ship?" Rodriquez shrugged. "Something borderline illegal, I expect."

Higgins jabbed a finger at his friend. "And we have a winner. Depleted uranium. To be used for who-knows-what? Best not to ask, perhaps. Very dense, though. And if you split open the cargo container just a few hundred meters away from the pirates and let the uranium pellets spread out in a fusillade . . ."

Rodriquez winced. "Ow."

"Ow is right. The only thing left of the Hideki was a smear in s.p.a.ce."

"A highly radioactive smear in s.p.a.ce."

"Which is why there was an official hearing. If it had just been a pirate hit-and-miss"-Higgins shrugged-"I doubt we'd even have heard about it. We had to send out a couple SCE ships to clean up the mess. No one was happy, believe me."

"I would imagine not," Rodriquez conceded. He raised his hands in a gesture halfway between surrender and a shrug. "But is this such a big deal? I a.s.sume it has something to do with the helmsman."

"Of course." Higgins smiled in a manner that he hoped could be described as sardonic. "Check this out." He touched a control, and the small viewscreen on his desk came to life. They were now looking at the image of a human male, late middle aged, sitting behind an anonymous table in an anonymous chair. Higgins thought the interviewee looked as if he was expending a tremendous amount of effort to keep his posture relaxed and casual.

"Where did you get the idea to use part of your cargo as a shrapnel grenade?" asked an off-image interviewer.

The man shrugged. "Something I read once. There was a time, we're talking a couple hundred years ago, when starships used to fight that way, before phasers and disruptors. You had to just throw things at each other and then run away as fast as you could."

"But now ships have shields. The pirates had shields. You knew that."

"Sure," the interviewee said. "But Hideki-cla.s.s ships have a flaw: their shield generators. They're great with energy weapons, but they can't distribute kinetic energy. The Carda.s.sians would never bring them into battle situations for that reason-too much debris. They would always position them at the edge of the field of battle and pick off stragglers from afar."

Higgins heard the interviewer snort, impressed despite himself. "And you know this how?"

The man smiled self-deprecatingly. "I like military history."

"You like military history."

"Yes."

"And you can make a freighter move like an attack vehicle."

"I don't know about that. The Darius is a good ship-tough. And, past a certain point, any kind of s.p.a.ce battle is just luck. We were lucky. I was lucky."

"Lucky?"

"You keep repeating what I say without asking any questions."

"Apologies, sir. Just collecting my thoughts."

"I understand." The interviewee crossed his legs and sat back in the chair. He never took his eyes off the interviewer.

The interviewer was quiet for a few seconds, but then continued-rather lamely, Higgins thought-"Do you have anything else you wanted to add to your testimony?"

"No. Other than I'm sorry about the mess. Please extend my apologies to the SCE. Those poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds always have to deal with this sort of thing when everyone else just runs on to the next . . . well, you know."

"Sure."

"If you have the opportunity, please extend my condolences to Captain Selim's family."

"Couldn't you do it yourself?"

The interviewee shook his head. "No, I'm leaving right after we're finished here. That's okay, isn't it?"

"I think we have everything we need. Leave your contact information in case there's any follow-up, but . . ." The interviewer paused. His tone of voice shifted, going from the professional to the purely personal. "Why are you leaving? You just saved these people, the entire crew. They owe you their lives."

The man shrugged and, finally, looked away from the interviewer. His head dropped so that the bright, overhead lights cast long shadows down his face. He murmured a reply, but even the room's sensitive pickups couldn't make out his words.

"Pardon?" the interviewer asked.

"I said, 'Not all of them,' " the man responded.

"You mean, not the captain?"

The interviewee shook his head and seemed genuinely puzzled. "No," he said. "I meant, not the pirates."

"You think there was a way that you could have gotten away without killing the pirates?"

"Yes. Of course. There's always a way."

"Well, Mister Maxwell, I've investigated a number of incidents and, frankly, I usually don't have the luxury of speaking to survivors, let alone an entire ship full of them. Most of the time, I just listen to the captain's logs and look at the scans. It's not usually this . . . well . . . this happy an outcome. You should cut yourself some slack."

The man-Maxwell-nodded his head and seemed to smile, but the smile didn't reach his eyes. "Are we done here?"

"We're done," the interviewer said. The commander froze the image.

Higgins asked, "Do you know who that was?"

Rodriquez glanced over at Higgins, a squiggle of a question mark in his brow. "Someone named Maxwell? Should I know who that is?"

Higgins sighed extravagantly. "Did you ever study?"

"Me?" he asked. "I seem to remember being twentieth in our cla.s.s and you were like, what, two hundred fifteenth?"