After the Fall Page 9

  “Problem, Commander?” asked Kat.

  Desma took a deep breath and then entered. She appeared a bit flustered, which was odd, since Desma in and of herself represented two things that Mueller rarely saw flustered: first officers and Andorians.

  She had the blue skin, plain white hair, and antennae that were typical of her race. Her face was rounder, though, far less angular than the typical Andorian’s, and her eyes were unusually intense, giving the impression that she was mentally dissecting you even if she was just staring at you.

  “I believe we need to clear the air, Captain.”

  “Oh.” Mueller stared at her uncomprehendingly. “Well…all right. Talk to Hash at ops, have him coordinate with engineering, and they can run a diagnostic on the atmospheric filters.”

  If Mueller looked bewildered, Desma was no less so. “No…Captain…I mean…” She shook her head. “I mean the air between us.”

  “Oh,” Mueller said again, and then understanding dawned. “Oh! Clear the air between us!” But then she was once more bogged down in a deep layer of confusion. “Is the air between us cluttered? That is to say, do you have a problem with me, Commander?”

  “Do I?”

  Now Mueller was beginning to feel a bit impatient. “Commander, I’m strongly suspecting I’m going to have enough trouble supplying my own answers for this conversation. I’ll be damned if I have to supply yours as well.”

  Desma drew herself up stiffly. “I’m not asking you to speak on my behalf, Captain. I am quite capable of speaking for myself.”

  “Well, thank God one of us is,” said Mueller with an amiability she didn’t feel. “Commander, what are you going on about?”

  “Permission to speak freely, Captain?”

  “I don’t see that I could possibly avoid it.”

  “I feel,” Desma said, pacing back and forth in a small, very precise line, as if she were a one-female parade, “that you consider me an intruder.”

  “You’re my second-in-command, Desma,” Mueller reminded her. “You’re part of my crew. My good right arm. In what way would I possibly be considering you an intruder?”

  “It’s nothing I can readily put into words, Captain.”

  “Well, I hate to point this out,” Mueller said with rising impatience, “but words are pretty much all we’ve got at our disposal. So find the words or find the door.”

  “Captain, I’m not stupid.”

  “Imagine my relief.”

  “I know,” Desma continued gamely, “that I was not your first choice for executive officer. Or any choice, really. I know that you were practically ordered to by Starfleet.”

  “First of all, let’s get a few things straight,” Mueller said, leaning back in her chair and affecting an air of casual detachment. “In Starfleet, no one gives out orders that are ‘practically.’ Either orders are issued or they aren’t. There’s no ambiguity, no middle ground. So in answer to your question—and although it wasn’t actually a question, I’m choosing to regard it as such—no, I was not ordered to bring you on as my executive officer, practically or otherwise.”

  “But there was some arm twisting going on,” Desma insisted.

  Mueller shrugged. “I think it safe and accurate to say that you came highly recommended.”

  “Perhaps even vigorously recommended?”

  “I wouldn’t dispute that characterization,” admitted Mueller. “Yes, Starfleet brass at the highest levels repeatedly recommended you for the post. But it was a recommendation only, vigorous or no. A recommendation that, as a Starfleet officer and captain of the Trident, I was fully empowered to attend to or ignore, at my discretion.”

  “May I ask, Captain, why you chose to accede to Starfleet’s request to give me this assignment?”

  “None of your damned business.”

  “Captain!”

  “It’s really not, Commander,” Mueller told her, rising and stepping around from behind her desk. “In case you’ve lost track of the number of pips each of us has on her uniform, I don’t have to answer to you.”

  “I didn’t mean to infer you were…”

  “No, you didn’t mean to imply I was, but the inference which I drew was, I think, a fairly accurate one.”

  “Captain, seriously…”

  “I’m being serious, Commander,” Mueller said, and the coldness in her eyes made it quite clear that she was. “If someone above me in rank asks me for my rationale over a decision, then I will give it. When a subordinate asks, the inference I draw is that she lacks confidence in my ability to make decisions.”

  “No, Captain,” Desma fervently assured her. “I have no lack of confidence at all in your decision-making ability.”

  “None?”

  “None at all.”

  Mueller considered that a moment, then leaned against the desk. “If that were the case,” she pointed out, “if that were really, truly the case…you’d have no need to ask me in the first place, would you? Your confidence in the decisions I make would be all you’d need. You wouldn’t doubt me. You wouldn’t doubt yourself. You would instead simply take it on faith, which is how the chain of command is supposed to work. Tell me, Desma…do you think you’re unqualified in some way?”

  “No, Captain, I do not.”

  “Incompetent, perhaps?”

  “No!”

  “Of lesser ability than other potential candidates?”

  “No, Captain.”

  “That’s impressive,” Mueller said, raising a single arched blond eyebrow and sounding caustic. “So you’re saying that you were the single most qualified candidate out of the entirety of Starfleet. Best educated, most experienced, better than anybody.”

  “Now wait, Captain…”

  Mueller made a tsk-tsk noise. “Sounds to me like your ego has run wild, Desma.”

  “Captain, it’s nothing like that at all. I’m not saying I’m the best-qualified person in all of Starfleet…”

  “Why aren’t you?”

  Desma blinked in confusion and her antennae responsively twitched. “Why aren’t I what?”

  “Saying you’re the best-qualified person in all of Star- fleet,” Mueller said to her readily.

  “Be…because I don’t know if it’s true…”

  Mueller slammed her open hand so hard on her desk that Desma jumped slightly. “You never admit it. Not ever.”

  “But…”

  “Not. Ever.” Mueller felt as if she and Desma were connected by a thin strand of energy, gut to gut. “Desma, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that because your people, the Andorians, were such a help to the Federation during the Selelvian War…and because so many of your people suffered casualties during the attacks on the Andorian embassies…that Starfleet somehow felt it ‘owed’ you this assignment. That the Andorian membership in the Federation has always been shaky at best, and your presence here would contribute to a smoothing over of possible lingering resentments. Am I right?”

  “Well…something like that…”

  “Stop thinking it. It’s pointless, you’re only hurting yourself with it, and it’s of no relevance. It’s causing you to perceive slights on my part that aren’t there, and there’s no way in all the levels of hell that I’ll allow myself to be dragged into any sort of dispute that has even the faintest evocative whiff of the difficulties M’Ress had with Gleau.”

  “The…what that who had, Captain?” she asked, puzzled.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Mueller, brushing aside the question. “The only thing that matters is this: As a second-in- command and executive officer, your career path is angling you toward command. It’s the direction you’re heading whether or not you want it, and you can take that as true from someone who definitely didn’t want it. Presuming you reach that exalted rank, you don’t need to be carrying doubts along with you as to how you got there or whether you deserve to be there. None of that is going to matter worth a damn. Instead the only thing that’s important—the only thing that th
e people who have staked their lives to your abilities are going to care about—is your getting the job done with conviction and confidence. That’s all. Doubts, uncertainties, and confusions are to be shared with the ship’s counselor, and your spouse…but only if your spouse outranks you. Otherwise keep your damned mouth shut. So don’t come in here and start telling me about all the doubts or issues you have with your having assumed the post of executive officer here. They’re of no relevance to me, and they shouldn’t be to you. I’m not your mother, and those people out there aren’t your children. Do the job or step aside for someone else who can. Are you intending to step aside, Commander?”

  Desma squared her shoulders. “No, Captain, I have no intention of doing that.”

  “Then do your job and stop second-guessing yourself and me.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  With that, her head held high, Desma turned on her heel and walked out the door, leaving Mueller to marvel at the spectacular amount of crap she had just laid upon her first officer.

  “Captain’s personal log, supplemental,” she said softly. “I’ve been letting my animosity toward Commander Desma show in my attitude toward her. I have to restrain myself in that regard, because it undercuts my main reason for taking her on.

  “Desma is under the impression that I gave in to pressure from Starfleet to accept her as my second-in-command. The fact is that there was a good deal of pressure, most of it coming from the Office of Interplanetary Affairs. Although I’ve no proof, I suspect a deal was cut behind closed doors that an Andorian would be given a high-profile position aboard a Starfleet vessel at the earliest opportunity. There is concern that Andorians are underrepresented in Starfleet, and a perception of bias. It is my belief that there is no bias. Most Andorians are screened out by the requisite psychological profiles for entering the Academy. And they’re screened out not because they are Andorians per se, but because they are by nature a fairly violent race.

  “Commander Desma is one of the rare exceptions, possibly because of the unique circumstances of her upbringing. For that reason, she was a prime candidate for this opportunity.

  “Nevertheless, I found myself repulsed by the notion of taking her on as first officer, despite the pressure from the OIA. I could not understand why I felt such personal revulsion at the notion, but after some meditation, I realized: The only Andorian I’d ever known was Lieutenant Commander Cray, and he turned out to be a traitor. Because of that negative experience, I was concerned that I was developing a racial bias against Andorians. To categorize them as a violent race is simply to observe a continuing characteristic of the species, in the same way that one would think of Klingons as warlike and Vulcans as logical. But to actively distrust them on the basis of the actions of an individual…that is not an attitude in keeping with a Starfleet captain.

  “So I accepted Desma’s application as first officer, really, out of self-interest. To try and cure myself of a potential bias that could affect my performance by forcing myself to face something—someone—against whom I was unreasonably prejudiced. She is, to all intents and purposes, a guinea pig through which I’m working out issues I have with her species.

  “Her presence here is one of the most selfish acts I’ve ever performed. I cannot let her know this, however, as it will further aggravate a situation that is already delicate. So I must make greater effort not only to hide, but to overcome, my fundamental antipathy for her. It is the only way to erase this potentially fatal weakness from my personality.”

  She took a deep breath then and let it out. “I just wish to God,” she said, “that there was someone on this damned ship I could talk to about it other than myself. End log entry.”

  For long moments after that, she sat and stared out the window at the passing stars. It was odd. Mueller had always been someone who sought solitude. It was one of the reasons she’d been so comfortable being in charge of the nightside, until circumstances had propelled her front and center and, eventually, into captaincy. Yet she’d always thought of captaincy as the ultimate solitary position, so one would have thought she’d be happy there.

  It was only upon taking on the assignment and sitting in the big chair that she’d realized captaincy wasn’t about solitude. It was about loneliness. That was a very different thing. Even when she was sitting on the bridge, surrounded by her crew…she was still lonely.

  “Ah well,” she said to no one as she stood and smoothed her uniform jacket, “too late to complain now.”

  She headed for the door of the ready room and, as it slid open, almost collided with Lieutenant M’Ress.

  The Caitian science officer rocked back slightly on her paws, but her perfect sense of balance prevented her from tumbling back. Instead she provided enough leeway that Mueller was able to stop herself from actually banging into M’Ress.

  “Sorry, Captain,” said M’Ress, the catlike officer recovering with her typical grace. “Just coming to get you. We’ve found something.”

  That was typical M’Ress: getting so excited about something that she had to go and get Mueller instead of just summoning her via the com unit. “Let’s see it,” said Mueller, stepping out onto the bridge.

  Desma smoothly stepped up and out of the command chair, calling, “Slow us to one-half impulse.”

  “One-half impulse, aye,” Mick Gold snapped back from the conn. The Trident obediently slowed as Mueller stood in the center of the bridge, studying the screen.

  “All right,” said Mueller, “what am I looking at?”

  “Bringing it up on the screen now, Captain,” said M’Ress. Mueller noticed that M’Ress’s tail was switching. Typical behavior when she was enthused about having discovered something. “We’ve been tracking random particles of highly energized tachyons that have no natural explanation. We find them occurring in greater and greater concentration, and we now have localized what we believe to be the point of origin. I designed a schematic to visualize it.”

  The screen shifted to display the course that the Trident had been following. A series of glowing red spots were superimposed. M’Ress began, “The spots represent the—”

  “Trail of tachyon emissions, yes, I understand that, Lieutenant,” said Mueller. “Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?” She pointed to the left-hand side of the screen, which coincided with their own position.

  “Yes, Captain,” said M’Ress with clear satisfaction. “I believe we’ve found a sinkhole.”

  Mueller had never actually seen such a thing, but she had certainly read about it in various briefing papers that outlined what to do if the Borg happened to show up in your vicinity. (Papers which, for all their variety, nevertheless managed to boil down to pretty much the same thing: “Get the hell out of there.”)

  “Sinkhole” was the nickname given the origin point of a transwarp conduit. It more or less looked like a whirlpool in space, at least from an emissions point of view. That was what Mueller was looking at now. The tachyon particles, glowing red on the screen, were scattered about on the right-hand side of the screen, but began to draw tighter and tighter in as her eye tracked them across. Then, finally, there it was: The tachyon particles converging into a great, glowing whirlpool effect. A sinkhole. It was no longer there; they were staring at a ghostly image of what had been there earlier, but wasn’t anymore.

  Still, it was daunting to see it, even in the form of trace records. One would never have been able to tell by Mueller’s demeanor, because it remained as detached and frosty as ever. But inside, a faint chill was gripping the base of her spine as she imagined what it would be like to see one of those damned things opening up in front of you, knowing that it was about to spit out something great and terrible: a Borg cube, nigh invincible, looking to assimilate whatever it encountered that was of the slightest use, and dispose of whatever wasn’t.

  “Captain?”

  Mueller realized to her chagrin that M’Ress had been talking and she, Mueller, hadn’t been paying attention. She drew herself up, shak
ing off the distraction, and said, “Sorry, Lieutenant. Just…weighing options. Give me that again…?”

  “I was saying,” M’Ress said carefully, as if wanting to make sure that Mueller was fully attuned to her this time, “that we don’t know for certain if, unlike other transwarp conduits of record, this one was being utilized by the Borg.”

  “My guess,” Romeo Takahashi drawled from ops, “is that it wasn’t.”

  “Explain,” said Mueller.

  “See that planet?” He indicated a small orb hanging not far from the point of origin of the conduit. “That nice, blue and green, still-in-one-piece world?”

  “Of course. It’s still there,” Mueller realized. “If the Borg had come through here…”

  Lieutenant Arex, the three-armed, three-legged Triexian security chief, spoke up from his station at tactical. “Then there’d be nothing left. From all that I’ve read and studied about the Borg, even if the planet had nothing that was of interest to them, they’d chew it up just for the minerals to help power their vessel.”

  “Plus Borg ships leave an identifiable ion trail,” M’Ress spoke up, studying her science scanners. “I’m not picking up anything like that.”

  “All right, people, you’ve sold me. This isn’t the Borg we’re dealing with.” She folded her arms. “M’Ress, can you give me an idea of how long ago that thing was in existence? When did a transwarp conduit last open here?”

  “Hard to know for sure, Captain,” admitted M’Ress. “Based upon standard deterioration of the particles, I’d say seventy-nine hours…but that’s as much guesswork as anything.”

  Desma spoke up, standing at Mueller’s right elbow. “So what vessel readings are we getting? What’s come out of that thing within the last seventy-nine hours?”

  “That’s the problem. Near as I can tell: Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Desma sounded surprised and confused, and Mueller’s reaction was pretty close to that, although she didn’t indicate it. “How can that be?”

  “There have been reports,” Arex said slowly, “that the Romulans have improved their cloaking devices to such a degree that they now have vessels that move without leaving any sort of energy signature.”