Текст книги "Reap the Whirlwind"

Автор книги: David Mack

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“Not just a sneak-and-peek, then,” Nassir said.

Shaking his head, Reyes replied, “Not this time. We want a full survey. But after Erilon, we’re taking precautions.”

Nassir nodded once. “Understandable,” he said. “Terrible, what happened to Zhao. He was a great officer.” With an almost paternal concern, he asked, “How’s Khatami handling command?”

“Like she was born to it,” Reyes said. “It’s not the way anyone likes to get promoted, but she’s making it work.”

“Good,” Nassir said. “I’m glad.” He sighed, then changed topics. “When’s our mission briefing?”

“Tomorrow at 0900,” Reyes said. “I’ll have Xiong meet with your people on the Sagittarius.” Eyeing Nassir for his reaction, he added, “Incidentally, Xiong’ll be going with you.”

To Reyes’s surprise, the news seemed to please the captain. “Excellent,” Nassir said. “I rather enjoyed his last visit.”

Amazing, Reyes mused. An authority figure Xiong hasn’t pissed off yet. Maybe there’s hope for that kid, after all. “Glad to hear it,” Reyes said, as they started sidestepping through wave after wave of civilians, colonists from the Terra Courser who were pouring onto the docking bay thoroughfare. Eager to escape the press of bodies, Reyes said, “I’ve kept you from breakfast long enough, Captain. Ready to head up to Manón’s?”

“Absolutely,” Nassir said.

They cut left toward a nearby turbolift and were almost free of the crowd when a woman’s voice called out sharply from several meters away. “Diego!”

Jeanne. Dread, like a sudden splash of cold water in his face, shocked Reyes to a halt. He tried not to clench his jaw but failed. Nassir, standing at his side, turned and looked behind them. Reyes asked, “She’s coming this way, isn’t she?”

“With a vengeance,” Nassir said.

Reyes closed his eyes. He took a deep breath that did absolutely nothing to enhance his calm. Opening his eyes to confront the inevitable, he said to Nassir, “Go on ahead, Captain.”

“Yes, sir,” said Nassir, who advanced quickly toward the turbolift. The Deltan captain had always demonstrated a keen sense of when to make an exit—an option that Reyes was, at that moment, dismayed to find himself without. As Nassir entered the turbolift, Reyes turned and faced his ex-wife.

Like many natives of Luna, including Reyes himself, Jeanne Vinueza was tall and long-limbed—the result of spending part of her formative years in a low-gravity environment. Her chestnut hair was curly and spilled over her shoulders and upper back, longer than it had been when he’d last seen her more than six years earlier. As always, she was stylishly dressed and carried a metallic briefcase. She fixed him with her brown-eyed stare as she strode toward him. Other civilians scrambled to make a path for her, some stumbling almost comically out of her way.

Expecting a verbal onslaught, Reyes lowered his chin and chose to lean into the harangue. She stopped in front of him, eyes blazing, and planted her free hand on her hip. She remained as youthful-looking as ever; if Reyes hadn’t known that she was nearly forty-five years old, he might have guessed her age to be thirty-five instead.

Neither of them said a word for several seconds. Then the gleam in her eyes changed from furious to mischievous, and her lips trembled before opening into a lopsided smile. “Hola, Diego,” she said.

He was both relieved and annoyed. “Hi, Jeanne.”

An awkward moment lingered as they wondered how to greet each other. Several clumsy attempts at a platonic embrace and kisses on both cheeks left Reyes feeling self-conscious. He pulled back from Jeanne and looked around to see if any members of Vanguard’s crew were observing this embarrassing reunion. Hundreds of hastily averted glances made him conclude that everyone on the station was probably watching them.

“So,” she began, clearly searching for words. “You’re a commodore now. Impressive.”

Holding up his wrist, he said, “Don’t let a little extra braid fool you. I’m still a jerk.”

“Sí,” she replied, “but an impressive jerk.”

He marshaled a pained grin. “Please tell me you didn’t spend eight weeks on a transport just to come out here and flatter me.”

Turning businesslike, she said, “I’m just passing through, on my way out to Gamma Tauri IV.”

That didn’t sound right to Reyes. “Now, that’s a surprise,” he said. “Thought you always said you wouldn’t be caught dead on a colony planet.”

“True,” she admitted. “I used to say that. But that was before I was offered the chance to be the leader of one.”

“You’re the president of the New Boulder colony?”

“Don’t make it sound so glamorous,” she said. “It’s an appointed position with a contract, like a company executive. And my first item of business is a meeting with Ambassador Jetanien, Captain Desai, and your colonial administrator, Aole Miller.” She looked over his shoulder at a chronometer on the wall. “Speaking of which, I’m running late.” For a moment, she seemed on the verge of saying something else but then thought better of it. “Maybe I’ll see you before I ship out,” she said, inching away toward the turbolift.

“Maybe,” he said. “You know where to find me.”

A turbolift car arrived. Jeanne stepped in and squeezed into place among the other passengers. The doors closed, and Reyes was left brooding in the middle of the passageway.

Serves you right for not reading the damn colony briefings, Reyes berated himself. The Lovell and its team from the Corps of Engineers were currently deployed to Gamma Tauri IV—principally for colonial support but also to find another alien artifact like the ones that had been found on Ravanar and Erilon. If another such artifact was on the planet, as Xiong’s research suggested, and it proved to be as much trouble as those previous discoveries, then everyone on Gamma Tauri IV was in danger.

Reyes had never been comfortable with Starfleet Command’s decision to let civilian colonization efforts provide unwitting cover for its search for new samples of the Taurus meta-genome—an exceptionally complex string of alien DNA, whose discovery a few years earlier had sparked Starfleet’s mad rush into this remote sector of local space, including the construction of Starbase 47 itself. The presence of a legitimate colony, however, was the best camouflage his people could ask for; it gave them countless valid reasons for being on Gamma Tauri IV. Defense, construction, various surveys, mapping, irrigation efforts, sewage treatment—any number of civil-engineering efforts would conceal the Lovell team’s hunt for the meta-genome and another artifact. The risk, of course, was that one wrong move could put the entire colony in peril.

And now Jeanne would be in the middle of it.

He remained bitter toward her for the way she had ended their marriage seven years earlier; she had terminated it like a canceled contract, as if it had been nothing more than a simple partnership that had outlived its usefulness. Despite that, part of him still harbored affection for her. Even as he had cursed her name during the divorce, deep fires had smoldered in his heart for her, and he had tried more than once to fan them back to life; but where he had seen the possibility of rekindling their romance, Jeanne had seen only ashes.

I should tell her not to go, he insisted to himself. Then duty reminded him, You can’t tell her why. And unless she knows why, she won’t listen to you. Maybe not even then.

It had been a serious breach of orders for him to bring his two closest friends—Dr. Ezekiel Fisher and Captain Rana Desai, the station’s presiding Judge Advocate General Corps officer—into the loop several weeks ago, but at least they were Starfleet officers, and he could make a case to Starfleet Command that they needed to know the truth in order to perform their duties.

Telling a civilian would be another matter. Revealing the truth about Operation Vanguard and its current mission on Gamma Tauri IV to Jeanne, no matter how noble his motives for doing so might be, would mean the end of his career once word got out. About that, he had no illusions. If he warned her, the truth eventually would come out, and when it did, he would spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement on the coldest landmass on the remotest planet within reach of the Federation.

It was nearly 0800; he had yet to get a cup of coffee, and the senior staff meeting was about to start. Normally, Reyes waited until after lunch to decide whether a day was a good one or not, but as he trudged toward a turbolift for the ride up to ops, he decided that any day that began with him being ambushed by his ex-wife couldn’t possibly end well.

Jeanne Vinueza’s esper skills were nowhere near as powerful or focused as those of Vulcans, but she had enough experience gauging emotions and picking up surface thoughts to know when she was being lied to. Looking across the wide gray table at the Chelon ambassador and two Starfleet officers, she was certain that at least one of them was hiding something.

It wasn’t Aole Miller. Starbase 47’s colonial administrator was an open book, all bonhomie, warmth, and untainted goodwill. Men like him were a rarity, in Vinueza’s experience: good souls unblemished by pessimism or cynicism. Short and ebony-skinned, with a smooth-shaved head and a bright white smile, he was without a doubt the most truthful and forthcoming person in the chilly, utilitarian-looking conference room.

Ambassador Jetanien and Starfleet JAG officer Captain Rana Desai were another matter.

Jetanien held up a data slate in one scaly, clawed manus. “I’ve read your petition three times, Ms. Vinueza,” he said. “And I still don’t understand.”

“You don’t understand our petition?” Vinueza asked.

“I understand its contents perfectly,” he said, setting down the slate. “What I fail to understand is why I’m reading it at all. Frankly, I find your case for refusing protectorate status incomprehensible.”

Mimicking his archly patronizing tone, she replied, “Perhaps your colleague Captain Desai could explain it to you, Mr. Ambassador.” She tried to glean some sense of his reaction, but his face, a leathery olive mask marked by a turtlelike beak and deep amber orbs for eyes, betrayed nothing. His thoughts were even more remote from her; Chelon brain waves were too dissimilar from those of most humanoids for Vinueza to read.

Jumping into the conversation, Miller seemed genuinely taken aback by the colonists’ petition. “I respect your colony’s right to independence,” he said, leaning forward. “But declining official Starfleet protection in a sector targeted for conquest by the Klingons seems, well, unwise.”

Desai added, “If it’s a matter of preserving your world’s legal autonomy, Ms. Vinueza, there are several exemptions available under the Federation’s colonial charter for the Taurus Reach. Accepting our protection would not obligate you to anything that hasn’t been ratified by a vote of your colony’s residents.”

There was no duplicity in Desai’s surface thoughts, at least none that Vinueza could detect. Something felt off about the slim Indian woman’s demeanor, however. A tinge of concern, a shadow of doubt, the hint of a secret lurked behind her words. She isn’t malicious, Vinueza concluded, but she’s not being completely forthright, either.

Vinueza replied, “It’s not about our independence, Captain. Our concerns are based on the rising frequency of clashes between the Federation and the Klingon Empire. If we accept UFP protectorate status, we might as well paint a bull’s-eye on our colony. Neutrality, both politically and economically, seems like the safest course to us. So with all respect, the people of New Boulder would rather not fly your banner over their new home.”

“I daresay you would be hard-pressed to find a more ardent supporter of colonial self-rule than myself,” Jetanien said. “However, I have to confess that I find your political risk assessment of the Taurus Reach somewhat lacking in nuance and marred by gross naïveté. Disavowing affiliation with the Federation, far from sparing you the notice of the Klingon Empire, will in fact bring you more swiftly to their attention as a soft target, one that they can encroach upon without fear of Starfleet interference or reprisal. I would beg you to reconsider and withdraw your petition.”

She shook her head. “That’s not an option, Mr. Ambassador. The colonists have already ratified this petition. As their representative, it’s my responsibility to honor it.”

“And as their leader,” Jetanien countered, “it’s your duty to prevent them from making a potentially fatal mistake. The people of New Boulder are your constituents, Ms. Vinueza, not your shareholders. You are not blindly yoked to their will.”

Vinueza sighed softly and resisted the urge to reply before thinking through her response. Jetanien’s remark about shareholders clearly had been intended to goad her, by casting aspersions on her previous tenure as the chief executive of an interstellar dilithium-mining corporation and implying that her experience in the much-maligned private sector was inapplicable to her new role as an officer of civil government. The first one to get angry loses, she reminded herself. Don’t take the bait.

“I would not present a petition in bad faith, Mr. Ambassador,” Vinueza said. “Nor would I advocate any measure that I felt would be to the detriment of those I represent. The New Boulder colony is an agricultural collective. Gamma Tauri IV has no dilithium, so I’m not worried the Klingons will show much interest in it. What does worry me is how interested Starfleet seems to be. You’ve clearly read my file, so you know about my esper skills. Well, every time I’ve talked to Starfleet Command about this colony, I’ve gotten the feeling that someone is hiding something. Bottom line? I don’t trust you people.”

“Ma’am, we just want to ensure the safety and success of your colony,” Miller said. “The Lovell and a team from the Corps of Engineers have been there for the past four weeks, helping your people get their farms running, their water cleaned, and their backup generators operational. And I want to assure you that even if you refuse protectorate status, the Lovell and her team will stay on to assist you, no strings attached, until your colony is fully self-sufficient. Starfleet just wants to help.”

Rising from her seat, Vinueza said, “Thank you, Commander, that’s very generous.” She picked up her briefcase and cast a suspicious glare at Jetanien and Desai. “But I suspect we’ll be getting Starfleet’s help whether we want it or not.”

2

Ensign Brian O’Halloran grunted and struggled to keep his hands from slipping off of the enormous, prodigiously heavy component, the name of which had slipped his mind at about the same time as his back had slipped a disc. He was fairly certain that part of the problem was that his partner, Ensign Jeff Anderson, was sitting on a rock behind him instead of helping him hook up the humongous whatever-it-was to a juncture in the colony’s new water main. As his knees began to wobble under the strain, O’Halloran pleaded, “Would it kill you to lend a hand?”

“Yes, it would,” said Anderson, staring at the horizon. “It kills me that we’re stuck here, pounding out this kind of grunt work, when there’s a whole world full of other stuff we could be doing.” Eyeing O’Halloran’s predicament, he added, “You should put that down before you hurt yourself.”

As if Anderson had spoken magic words, the clumsy hunk of heavy metal fell through O’Halloran’s hands. He leaped backward, barely dodging clear in time to save his foot. “Great,” he groused, wiping sweat from his brow. “It’s probably broken.”

“Stop complaining,” Anderson said, brushing a bang of blond hair from his eyes. “You know the first rule of engineering: If it jams, force it. If it breaks, it had to be replaced anyway.”

Pacing around the device, O’Halloran replied, “It didn’t jam, I dropped it—because you weren’t helping me.” He stepped back and stroked his dark goatee as he studied the problem. “How the hell are we supposed to get it back in position?”

Anderson shrugged dismissively. “Who cares?” He gestured at the sea-green dome of sky overhead. “Look at this perfect day. We’ve got sun, fresh air, our health, and a colony full of women less than a kilometer away. Gamma Tauri IV is our oyster, and you’re worried about a…” He paused and squinted at the oddly shaped device. “What is that thing?”

“I don’t know,” O’Halloran said defensively. “I thought you knew what it was.”

“And to think, we both have engineering degrees,” Anderson deadpanned. “We should be ashamed of ourselves.”

Circling the device again, O’Halloran wondered aloud, “How are we gonna move it? It’s gotta weigh a few hundred kilograms, at least.”

Folding his arms across his chest, Anderson replied, “What’re you asking me for? You’re the one who dropped it.” O’Halloran lunged at his partner, who lifted his hands and backpedaled quickly out of reach. “Whoa! Hang on there! Just calm down, and I’ll help you.”

“Right,” O’Halloran snapped. “I wouldn’t be in this mess if you’d helped me like you were supposed to.” He lifted his arms in frustrated surrender. “Why’d I let Parsons talk me into taking her shift? I’m not even supposed to be here today!”

“I know why you took her shift,” Anderson said. “You’re sweet on her and thought you could score some points.”

“That’s not true,” O’Halloran protested.

Anderson nodded knowingly. “Yes it is. Four weeks we’ve been on this dirtball, hooking up sewers, digging ditches, and laying cable—and the whole time you’ve been mooning after her. It’s pathetic, really. I’m almost ashamed to know you.”

O’Halloran shook his head. “No, no, no.”

“Yes, yes, yes, my friend. Which, incidentally, is what I think you’re hoping to hear lovely Lieutenant Parsons shouting from your bunk one of these nights.”

Trying again to lift the deadweight widget, O’Halloran said through clenched teeth, “You really have a one-track mind.”

“Untrue,” Anderson said. “Sometimes I think about hockey.”

A sickening pain bloomed in O’Halloran’s gut. He was fairly certain that he’d burst an internal organ through sheer effort. Slumping forward onto the gigantic gadget, he mumbled, “Good luck finding enough ice for hockey on this dustball.”

“Oh ye of little imagination,” Anderson replied. “Four years of engineering classes at Starfleet Academy, and that’s the best you can come up with? ‘Good luck finding enough ice’? When we have eighty-five thousand liters of the most advanced commercial refrigerants known to man at our fingertips?”

Rolling his eyes, O’Halloran said, “Those are for the food warehouse. I don’t think they’d appreciate us using them to make a hockey rink.”

“Only because they lack the proper appreciation for the sport,” Anderson said as he slumped down next to O’Halloran, who had seated himself against the side of the massive machine. “We could fix that.”

Knocking on the device to hear the hollow echo inside, O’Halloran said, “We have to get this thing hooked up first.”

Anderson scrunched his face into a grimace. “Says who?” O’Halloran was aghast. “Says Lieutenant Commander al-Khaled. It was a direct order.”

“And you’re going to let that stand between you and what might be one of the most amazing afternoons of hockey in your entire life? That’s no way to live, my friend.”

Ahead of them, sparsely vegetated rolling hillsides shimmered under a brutal summer heat wave. O’Halloran squinted into the glare. “How long do you think the ice would even last?”

“I don’t know,” Anderson said. He counted on his fingers for a few seconds and mumbled under his breath before coming up with an answer. “About twelve minutes.”

“Hardly seems worth it,” O’Halloran said.

“Story of my life, pal. Story of my life.”

Minutes melted away into a hazy afternoon, and the two young officers had almost begun to doze off when a deep voice boomed from above and behind them. “Break time, gentlemen?”

Both men scrambled to their feet and turned about-face toward Lieutenant Commander Mahmud al-Khaled, the recently promoted second officer of the Starship Lovell and their S.C.E. team leader. The swarthy man looked immaculately put together and completely unfazed by the dry, sweltering heat that had settled over the New Boulder colony for the past several days.

O’Halloran spoke first, stammering all the way. “I—that is to say, we—we were working on the, um, on this, and we had a bit of trouble connecting the, uh, that, to the other, um—”

Al-Khaled asked Anderson, “Care to step in here?”

“I think what Ensign O’Halloran is trying to say, sir, is that this…thing…is really unbelievably heavy.”

The lieutenant commander glanced at the device, then back at the two junior officers. “Of course it is, Anderson. That’s why I told you to bring a couple of antigravs.”

O’Halloran turned his head very slowly toward Anderson and whispered with genuine menace, “I am so going to kick your ass.”

“I’d pay to see that,” al-Khaled said with a smirk. “Later. I want this filtration unit running by 1800. Both of you double-time it back to camp, get that load-lifter, bring it back here, and get this done. As in immediately. Dismissed.”

“Aye, sir,” O’Halloran said with a nod. He grabbed Anderson’s sleeve and pulled him along as he began jogging back toward camp, where the rest of the S.C.E. team’s equipment was stored. For once, Anderson cooperated and jogged along.

The heat was merciless, and the fact that they had been ordered to jog back to camp made it seem even more brutal.

“Filtration unit,” Anderson said, with a glibness that O’Halloran had always envied. “At least now we know what it is.”

Between huffing breaths, O’Halloran gasped out, “I’ll get you for this.”

“Sure you will,” Anderson said.

“I hate you,” O’Halloran said.

Anderson took a deep breath while running, let it out slowly, and smiled at the sky. “Lovely day.”

“Why does nothing bother you?”

As if perplexed by the question, Anderson replied, “Why should it?”

“Must be nice to be a sociopath,” O’Halloran said.

“It has its moments,” Anderson said. “So, seeing as we’re running all the way back to camp—”

“No,” O’Halloran said preemptively.

“—and we’ve already got all the refrigeration coolant—”

“No,” he insisted again.

“Don’t you want to teach the natives how to play hockey?”

Venting his irritation, O’Halloran snapped, “There are no natives here, you moron. This is a colony. These are colonists.”

“See?” Anderson shot back. “This is why you never have any fun. You turn everything into a semantic argument.”

“Those antigravs better be fully charged,” O’Halloran grumbled.

His sarcasm still sharp, Anderson asked, “Yeah? Why?”

“ ’Cause after we hook up the filtration unit, I’m gonna use ’em to haul your body out to the desert.”

Lieutenant Commander Mahmud al-Khaled walked between the rows of prefab colony structures and tried to tell himself that the help he and his team were providing to the colonists of New Boulder made up for the danger that he wasn’t telling them about.

All the buildings on this dusty main street looked alike. Built from identical kits and powered by a common generator, the drab gray boxes had been arranged in neat, orderly rows. Anything for the illusion of order coming to chaos, al-Khaled figured. Each of the shelters was numbered, with three leading digits to indicate the closest numbered cross-street and two more digits after a hyphen indicating the lot number. A few industrious souls had taken the added measure of hanging makeshift signs in front of their doors, announcing their trade: Hardware. Dentist. Plumbing. Mechanic.

The colony had grown quickly. Despite the generally arid equatorial climate on Gamma Tauri IV, its soil was quite rich; with proper irrigation it held substantial promise as an agricultural resource. As an engineer, al-Khaled knew the value of dilithium crystals, but he also appreciated that sometimes people needed fruit, grain, or vegetables even more than another load of crystals to run a warp drive.

He reached back and palmed a sheen of sweat from the nape of his neck. It felt strange to him that it was so bare; he had been accustomed to wearing his hair longer and leaving it slightly unkempt, but the climate on Gamma Tauri IV had made the shorter, regulation-recommended hairstyle suddenly appealing. Heat normally didn’t bother him very much; he suspected his Middle Eastern upbringing made him less sensitive to high temperatures.

It was a hazy day, and the moment he’d stepped out of his climate-controlled temporary shelter on the outskirts of the colony, the scorching summer air had struck him like a blowtorch. It still beats being cooped up on the ship, he decided. Even though he had come to think of the Lovell as his home, he enjoyed spending time planetside once in a while.

He turned a corner and continued off the colony’s official street grid to a large building set slightly apart from the others: his team’s local operations center. Except for the red pennant of the United Federation of Planets that was painted on the structure’s façade and the Starfleet Corps of Engineers logo emblazoned on the door, it looked like any other prefab shelter erected by the colonists. It was surrounded by a haphazard collection of equipment: antigravs, four-wheeled and six-wheeled all-terrain vehicles for scouting the countryside, seismological and meteorological sensor gear, excavation vehicles, tool sheds packed with construction and drilling equipment, and a shuttlecraft for long-range recon.

As he approached the entrance, a deep thunk from inside the doorframe signaled the release of the door’s magnetic locks. The portal slid aside with a soft hiss, and a low chatter of voices, some belonging to people inside the room, others being received over comms, became audible. Al-Khaled stepped inside. The door closed behind him.

The main room beyond the door was close and cluttered. Three rows of a dozen tables were pressed end to end, with an engineer or other specialist working on either side of each one. Every table was covered with maps of Gamma Tauri IV’s sole landmass—an irregular crescent that stretched nearly two-thirds of the circumference of the globe, reached from subarctic to subantarctic latitudes, and occupied more than thirty-three percent of the planet’s total surface area. Overlying these topographical renderings were various scans and survey results: subsurface water reservoirs, mineral resources, projected weather patterns, plans for expanded civil infrastructure emanating from the New Boulder colony. It was a massive effort to turn this world, which had been unoccupied by sentient life just three years ago, into a self-sufficient civilization that could eventually help feed others.

Moving through the packed room toward a nondescript door at its far end, al-Khaled saw his second-in-command of the S.C.E. team, Lieutenant Kurt Davis, moving with particular haste to intercept him. Davis’s shaved head reflected the overhead lights, which cast harsh glares in the dimly lit, windowless workspace. His path and al-Khaled’s intersected at the end of a row of tables. “Sir,” Davis said, “Captain Okagawa is trying to reach you. He says he has news from Vanguard.”

“I don’t suppose he told you what the news was.”

As he expected, Davis shook his head. “No. But it didn’t sound good.”

“It never is,” al-Khaled replied. “Thanks, Kurt.”

As al-Khaled began to step past him on his way to the unmarked door, Davis said, “Sir, I’d like permission to return to the Lovell.”

The S.C.E. team leader turned back to face his second with a knowing grin. “Afraid your engine room won’t be safe in Luciano’s hands?”

“Not at all,” Davis said. “Margaux knows if I get it back any different than I left it, she’ll be floating home. I just want to go back because…well, I have nothing to do here.” Gesturing at the roomful of specialists, he continued, “These people all know what they’re doing, Mahmud. They don’t need a babysitter. And besides, I’m a propulsion specialist; my skills aren’t exactly in demand down here.”

Al-Khaled sighed. Davis’s request was reasonable, but he was reluctant to grant it. With his own attention consumed by the S.C.E.’s other, clandestine mission to Gamma Tauri IV, he had been unable to devote the time necessary for supervising the colony-support efforts; he had been relieved to know that Davis was filling that role while he had been occupied elsewhere. There was no way to explain the situation to Davis, however, without breaching the mission’s security protocols.

“All right,” al-Khaled said finally. “Finish your shift, then you can beam back up to the Lovell. I’ll have Ghrex take over as beta-shift supervisor. But if there’s an emergency, I might need you back on the double. Understood?”

“Perfectly,” Davis said. “Thank you, sir.”

“You’re welcome.”

Davis acknowledged the end of the conversation with a nod, then stepped away to continue moving through the room and making spot checks of the other specialists’ work. Al-Khaled walked to a plain, dark gray door at the back of the room, endured a brief biometric identification scan of his left retina, and stepped through as the portal opened.

He descended a narrow double switchback of stairs to a much smaller command center. Though it looked spare and utilitarian, it was concealed by some of Starfleet’s newest sensor-blocking materials and was equipped with its most advanced computers and sensor technology. The wall opposite the stairs was actually a massive display screen, which provided most of the pale blue light that filled the room. Facing it were eighteen people seated at two short rows of workstations, set one behind the other on raised tiers. Another map of Gamma Tauri IV was displayed on the wall screen; it was marked with a complex assortment of grid lines, color codes, symbols, and statistics.

Lieutenant T’Laen sat in the middle seat of the rear row of workstations, patiently sifting through scads of data on her monitor. Al-Khaled approached the Vulcan cautiously and stood behind her while waiting for her to pause in her work. Several seconds later she stopped and turned her chair toward him. “May I be of service, sir?”