Gateways #6: Cold Wars Page 7

  “Captain!” Ross snapped.

  “Yes, sir?” said several people at once.

  Ross sighed and spoke to Shelby even as he directed an impressively withering look at Calhoun. “In light of the current situation, Captain Shelby, speak with this crewman and see what further details you can learn. Send a report directly to me, if you’d be so kind.”

  Ross then turned and started giving assignments out to others, particularly near the Klingon and Romulan borders, as Shelby said in a low voice to Calhoun, “You just love making new friends, don’t you?”

  “Why do people take an instant dislike to me?” asked Calhoun, all innocence.

  “It saves time,” replied Shelby.

  He laughed softly at that, and then, more seriously, whispered, “The crewman you’re referring to . . . is it M’Ress? The Caitian?”

  Shelby nodded. Calhoun had known about her; he was the one who had suggested M’Ress as a possible crew member for Shelby.

  Then Calhoun’s attention was caught by the silence in the room. Ross had stopped speaking, and instead was taking all of them in with a single glance. “These will be trying days ahead of us all. I want to keep in constant contact, and I’ll be reachable any time you need me. Good luck.”

  Realizing the conference was almost over, Calhoun suddenly wanted to turn to Shelby, to say things to her. He realized he’d been standing there the entire time and not once told her he loved her. But when he looked her way, she was already gone. They all were. The connection had been severed just that quickly.

  “Grozit,” he muttered in annoyance. Seeing Shelby had simply served to remind Calhoun of just how much he missed her. He wondered if she felt the same way, and then he forced himself to bring himself up short. He had promised himself that he was not going to miss her. He had his life, she had hers. The marriage was an acknowledgment that they were forever intertwined, but it was most certainly not an excuse for moping around.

  “I love you.” It was Shelby’s voice. He looked for her, but she wasn’t there, except in his imagination . . . or perhaps it was some sort of residual signal held over from the meeting.

  Just to play it safe, he said, “I love you, too,” and hoped that—if it was, in fact, a stray signal of some sort—he hadn’t just said something untoward to Admiral Ross . . . or Picard . . . or especially that female Bajoran, who looked like a very tough customer indeed.

  5

  TRIDENT

  M’RESS COULDN’T TAKE her eyes off him. It was only the abrupt snapping of fingers, practically in her ear, that drew her attention back to the matter at hand. The snapping fingers belonged to First Officer Katerina Mueller. Tall, imposing, vaguely Teutonic, and rather chilly, she had dark blonde hair tied back in as severe a style as M’Ress had ever seen. She also had a nasty scar on her left cheek that she seemed to bear with a good deal of pride. M’Ress had found herself taking an instant dislike to Mueller for reasons she couldn’t even begin to comprehend. That was how M’Ress tended to work: on instinct. However, M’Ress still felt very much the displaced traveller through reality, and couldn’t help but feel that it was not her place to judge Mueller, the first officer. Curiously, Mueller preferred to be addressed by the rank of XO, an abbreviation for executive officer. In Starfleet, it was the term customarily assigned to the night-side officer who was the functional equivalent of the first officer. No one was quite sure why Mueller preferred it that way—probably because she had spent so much time with the rank herself—but the night-side first officer, Lieutenant Commander Tang, didn’t seem to care one way or the other, so XO it was. In any event, it was M’Ress’s job to try and get along with Mueller (and, for that matter, with everyone else), rather than decide arbitrarily who she was and was not going to find palatable. So she swallowed her distaste for the unlikable woman and determined that she was going to try and put behind her all her sad memories of those she had lost and focus on . . . on . . .

  . . . on the bleak, hopeless existence of being a stranger in a strange land . . .

  Well, that way certainly lay madness.

  All of these thoughts and more had been moving through M’Ress’s brain as they had been awaiting the arrival of the ship’s science officer. Seated in the conference room (Lounge! They called it conference lounge now. She had to keep reminding herself of that) besides M’Ress and Mueller was Captain Shelby herself. They had been making idle small talk while waiting for the science officer, most of which centered around how M’Ress was adjusting to her new home.

  Terribly. I feel eyes on me wherever I go, and people whisper to each other as I go past, “Is that her? That’s her, isn’t it? The Caitian relic from a century ago. What’s it like for her? How’s she managing?” I feel like an oddity, a freak, which is what I am, and this will never be my home because I have no home, I’m just this piece of spacefaring flotsam that happened to wash up on your shore.

  All of that went through her head, even as she smiled and said, “Everything is going just fine, Captain. The crew’s been receptive, patient, and helpful. Things couldn’t be better.” She was impressed with herself because she really hadn’t ever been much of a liar before, but she was apparently getting quite adept at it. She was aware that her ears were flattened against the top of her head, a sure sign—for anyone who knew her—that she was uncomfortable or nervous. But these people didn’t know her, didn’t know a damned thing about her. Unconsciously she licked the backs of her hands and smoothed her hair down.

  Even as Shelby nodded, apparently pleased and satisfied with the response, M’Ress felt as if Mueller’s gaze was boring into her, capable of seeing right through her dissembling and calling her on it at any moment. But Mueller remained as silent and distant as the icebergs of which she reminded M’Ress.

  M’Ress shifted slightly in her chair, trying to get accustomed to the fit of the new uniform. It felt far stretchier than any she’d known before, and she didn’t like the feel of the fabric against her fur. Her own people had very little patience for clothing; their fur provided them all the protection they required. But she was in Starfleet, and as such she felt constrained to wear the appropriate accoutrements. There was nothing in regulations, though, that said she had to like it.

  Then the door hissed open and a gentle, almost amusedsounding voice said, “Sorry I’m late.”

  “Why should now be different from any time in the past?” Mueller said tartly.

  M’Ress looked up at the individual who had just entered, and it was as if her mind had suddenly gone blank.

  Since M’Ress was Caitian, it would have been only natural that her standard of beauty would be formed by those of her own race. All of that went out the window, though, when she saw the man standing in the doorway. He was tall and muscular—she could tell even though he was in uniform, because the cloth almost seemed to adhere to him, tracing the lines of his abs. His face was nearly triangular, his chin strong, his eyes slightly slanted and drawn back, his nose aquiline. His skin tone looked like pale gold, and he sported a mane of red hair that swept back and down, although it was neatly cropped just above his collar. But the skin itself seemed almost to glow with . . . what? Health? Power? It was impossible for her to say. And the eyes, upon closer inspection, actually seemed to sparkle. It was as if he did not have retinas, corneas, or other normal ocular parts. Instead, it seemed—upon close inspection, crazy as it sounded—as if his eyes were comprised of tiny sequins, an inner circle of silver surrounded by an outer circle of blue.

  It was at that point that M’Ress heard the impatient finger-snapping from Mueller in her ear that forced her attention back to the moment at hand.

  “I’m sorry . . . what?” M’Ress said desperately, feeling mortified that she had so utterly zoned out of the moment.

  “Lieutenant Commander Gleau was just apologizing for not having met with you earlier,” Shelby said. She seemed more amused than anything by M’Ress’s temporary “ departure” from the meeting. “You have, after all, been assign
ed to the science department.”

  “I’ve been remiss,” said Gleau. M’Ress might have been imagining it, but it seemed as if there were bells tinkling when he spoke. “As the captain said, my heartfelt apologies. Organizing a science division is a rather daunting task, wouldn’t you say?”

  He was asking M’Ress. She said the first thing that came to her mind: “If you want me to say that, then, yes.” Then she heard the words that had come out of her mouth, and wanted to crawl under the table.

  “That’s nice to see: cooperation,” said Shelby. “ Lieutenant Commander, it’s my suspicion that Lieutenant M’Ress here has never met a Selelvian.”

  M’Ress shook her head mutely. “I . . . read about them . . . you . . . them . . .” M’Ress managed to say. “Along with about fifty other new member races that joined the Federation in my . . . my absence . . .”

  “I’m one of the first in Starfleet. There are some”—and he seemed to cast a glance in Mueller’s direction—“who feel uncomfortable with us around, because we exude a high degree of . . . what’s the word . . . ?”

  “Bull?” Mueller suggested.

  “Charm,” said Gleau. “Some simply call us the Elves, after a mythical race of beings who had the power to charm the pants—and just about anything else, it seemed—off humans of old Earth. An amusing nickname, don’t you think?”

  “Hilarious,” said M’Ress, still captivated by his eyes. Her ears were perked straight up, and her tail was extended. She became aware of the outward signs of excitement, and her cheeks flushed furiously. This time she was incredibly grateful that the significance of her outward reactions were lost on those looking at her.

  Mueller harrumphed rather loudly, bringing matters quickly back on track.

  “Circumstances have arisen, Lieutenant,” Shelby said, “that might directly pertain to you. You described the device that catapulted—no pun intended . . .”

  M’Ress winced inwardly but kept her face neutral. “ Understood.”

  “. . . catapulted you to our time as a sort of ‘gateway.’ If that is truly the case, yours may well be the first encounter on record with such a device. We need to find out as much as possible about it.”

  “If that’s the case, why don’t we simply go to the planet where it was located? I mean, my understanding is that we’re one of two vessels here in Sector 221-G, the other being the Excalibur. Certainly our presence won’t be missed here for a little while. . . .”

  “Just tell us, if you would, what happened,” said Gleau. Even though he was all business at this point, she still felt as if she could drown in his very presence.

  “Well,” she said slowly, shifting in her seat, “truthfully, there’s not much to tell. It was shortly after I’d been reassigned off the Enterprise. I was serving on a science vessel called the Einstein, and we had found some unusual energy signatures off a world called Ceti Alpha VI. When we arrived, a landing party—I’m sorry, away team—”

  “Use whatever terminology you’re comfortable with,” Shelby said.

  “An away team,” continued M’Ress, “consisting of myself, Lieutenant Wexler, and Ensign Levine, went down to the surface to investigate it. We found what can only be described as a sort of . . . of pulsation in the air.” She paused in wonderment, recalling the sight as clearly as if it happened yesterday, which she realized, subjectively, it practically had. “It was just there, right there, in an open area near some rocks and outcroppings, and there were what appeared to be controls set within its proximity. The only thing I can think of is that it was running through a sort of self-test—”

  “Self-test?” said Mueller.

  “Some types of equipment, when not in use, go into a kind of standby mode,” Gleau told her. “Every so often, however, they will activate themselves and run themselves through a series of self-diagnostics, just to make certain everything is in working order should the equipment need to come on-line. It sounds to me as if that was what the lieutenant and her team stumbled over.”

  Shelby nodded, taking this in, and then asked, “What happened next?”

  “Well . . . I approached the device, using my tricorder. I was trying to get readings off it, see if I could determine the power source.” She was holding her hands up as if the device were in them still. “And then the tricorder . . .” She paused.

  “The tricorder what?” asked Gleau.

  “It was as if . . . as if it interfaced with it somehow. Activated it, perhaps. Either kicked it into active mode or—worse—self-defense mode. The next thing I knew there was some sort of massive energy discharge, and a burst of colors like a rainbow exploding in my head. It . . .” She stopped for a moment, composing herself, all too aware that she was describing the last moments of what had been her “real” life. Feeling their eyes upon her, she steadied herself and continued. “Then the world roared around me, and I was hauled off my feet and through the . . . gateway, as I called it. Everything seemed to twist and expand and contract, all at the same time, and the next thing I knew—”

  She paused again, this time with dramatic impact. “And then—?” prompted Gleau.

  She laughed curtly. “And then I was in Dublin.”

  “Dublin?” said a perplexed Mueller. “Dublin . . . Ireland?”

  “Yes.”

  “On Earth?”

  “Unless they relocated Ireland to Vulcan recently, yes.”

  “So . . . you suddenly found yourself in Dublin, Ireland . . . on Earth . . . a century into what you would consider the future,” said Gleau wondrously.

  “You don’t have to sound quite so thrilled about it,” M’Ress told him. For a moment she felt slightly annoyed with him . . . and then instantly felt guilty because she’d dared to feel that way. What was it with this guy?

  “You’ll have to excuse Mr. Gleau,” Shelby told her, leaning back in her chair. “He tends to be rather enthusiastic about scientific discoveries, anomalies, and the like. As you might suspect, we prefer to consider it merely part of his charm.”

  “As opposed to behavior bordering on the childlike,” noted Mueller.

  Gleau did not appear the least bit chastened by Mueller’s faintly scolding tone as he said, “It’s just that Ireland is an interesting site. I’ve made a hobby of ancient Earth myths and peoples, for obvious reasons. I wonder if beings used that gateway to come through to ancient Ireland . . . beings who might have been the basis of those referred to as ‘ leprechauns.’ ”

  “Very amusing,” said Mueller, who didn’t sound amused. She turned to M’Ress. “What then?”

  “Then . . . not much. I contacted Starfleet. Was brought to the Temporal Investigation Department. One thing led to another and . . . here I am.”

  “Yes. Here you are,” said Shelby, scratching her chin thoughtfully.

  M’Ress felt as if she was letting them down somehow. As if she should have more information that she could provide them. She leaned forward, her tail twitching, and she said, “As I was saying . . . if we could return to Ceti Alpha VI . . .”

  “That might prove problematic,” Gleau informed her.

  “Why?”

  “Because there is no Ceti Alpha VI.”

  She blinked, confused. “What? But—”

  “Your ‘interface,’ as you call it, with the Gateway apparently set off some sort of alarm, which in turn set off a chain reaction,” Gleau explained, looking rather apologetic to have to tell her. “At least that’s what the records of the Einstein indicate. It’s our suspicion that you stumbled onto more than just a Gateway world. There may have been other technology there, hidden, waiting to be restarted by the race that had planted it there. But when you came upon it . . .”

  “It blew it up . . . rather than let it all be discovered, probed . . . the whole planet, gone,” Mueller finished.

  At that moment, M’Ress felt something inside her die, just a little bit. “Oh,” was all she managed to get out as her throat constricted.

  Gleau leaned forward and rested a
hand atop hers. In another circumstance, she would have been all too aware of the warmth his touch generated. As it was, though, she could not remove the black shroud from her mind. “You were hoping,” he said softly, “that we could return there . . . that you could find that Gateway, reprogram it . . . and get back to your own time.”

  “That would, of course, be a violation of regulations,” Mueller reminded her.

  And something in her tone, something in the flat and unsympathetic way she said that, caused M’Ress—just for a moment—to lose control. Slamming the table with her open hand, she snapped at Mueller, “To hell with regulations and to hell with you!”

  Mueller’s face might have been carved from granite for all that she reacted to the outburst. Shelby said sharply, “Lieutenant—!”

  At that moment M’Ress absolutely didn’t care what Shelby did to her. “Am I done here, Captain?” Her lips were drawn back, her fangs bared. She hadn’t intended to appear threatening, but that was how she looked, nonetheless.

  If Shelby was at all intimidated, she didn’t let it show. She looked as if she was about to say something else, but instead her face softened slightly, and Shelby told her, “Yes. You’re done.”

  “Thank you. A pleasure meeting you, Lieutenant Commander Gleau. We must dash my faintest hopes of normality again sometime.” And with that, she padded quickly and ever so quietly out of the conference lounge.

  Idiot! Idiot idiot idiot! She excoriated herself mercilessly as she barreled down the corridor. Even though she was moving in a manner that felt akin to a freight train, she nevertheless made almost no noise. So stealthy was she, even in her ire, that people jumped in surprise as she seemed to materialize right behind them. They hastened to get out of her way, and she ignored them. What the hell kind of impression was that to make? It wasn’t enough that she was someone out of her proper time and place; now she was going to poison the well of the era she’d been stuck in? What an absolutely flaming stupid way to conduct herself!