STAR TREK - SCE - 33 - Collective Hindsight Bk 1

VIP免费

2024-12-20 0 0 268.59KB 33 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Other eBooks in the Star Trek™:

Starfleet Corps of Engineers series from

Pocket Books:

#1:The Belly of the Beast by Dean Wesley Smith

#2:Fatal Error by Keith R.A. DeCandido

#3:Hard Crash by Christie Golden

#4:Interphase Book 1 by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore

#5:Interphase Book 2 by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore

#6:Cold Fusion by Keith R.A. DeCandido

#7:Invincible Book 1 by David Mack & Keith R.A. DeCandido

#8:Invincible Book 2 by David Mack & Keith R.A. DeCandido

#9:The Riddled Post by Aaron Rosenberg

#10:Gateways Epilogue:Here There Be Monsters by Keith R.A. DeCandido

#11:Ambush by Dave Galanter & Greg Brodeur

#12:Some Assembly Required by Scott Ciencin & Dan Jolley

#13:No Surrender by Jeff Mariotte

#14:Caveat Emptor by Ian Edginton & Mike Collins

#15:Past Life by Robert Greenberger

#16:Oaths by Glenn Hauman

#17:Foundations Book 1 by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore

#18:Foundations Book 2 by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore

#19:Foundations Book 3 by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore

#20:Enigma Ship by J. Steven York & Christina F. York

#21:War Stories Book 1 by Keith R.A. DeCandido

#22:War Stories Book 2 by Keith R.A. DeCandido

#23:Wildfire Book 1 by David Mack

#24:Wildfire Book 2 by David Mack

#25:Home Fires by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore

#26:Age of Unreason by Scott Ciencin

#27:Balance of Nature by Heather Jarman

#28:Breakdowns by Keith R.A. DeCandido

#29:Aftermath by Christopher L. Bennett

#30:Ishtar Rising Book 1 by Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels

#31:Ishtar Rising Book 2 by Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels

#32:Buying Time by Robert Greenberger

#33:Collective Hindsight Book 1 by Aaron Rosenberg

Coming Soon:

#34:Collective Hindsight Book 2 by Aaron Rosenberg

#35:The Demon Book 1 by Loren L. Coleman & Randall N. Bills

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s

imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or

dead, is entirely coincidental.

AnOriginal Publication of POCKET BOOKS

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon &

Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY

10020

STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of

Paramount Pictures.

This book is published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., under exclusive license

from Paramount Pictures.

For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN: 0-7434-8083-X

First Pocket Books Ebooks Edition October 2003

POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Visit us on the World Wide Web:

http://www.SimonSays.com/st

http://www.startrek.com

Chapter

Stardate 53851.3

“Great, a runaway train.”

Sonya Gomez found herself going through several emotional states at once. The part of her that was the

first officer of theda Vinci thought,Fabian’s finally getting his sense of humor back. He’s starting to

recover. But the part of her that was Sonya Gomez, the lover of the now-deceased Kieran Duffy,

wanted to snarl,How could you? Your best friend is dead! How can you joke about anything?

She managed to put both halves aside and focus on what Fabian Stevens was talking about.

Captain Gold nodded his agreement. “That’s a pretty apt description, Stevens. It’s large, heavy, and

moving at an alarming rate—in a perfectly straight line.” He gestured at the viewscreen, which showed an

image of the runaway ship. The image had been captured by a long-range sensor array as the vessel has

hurtled past a Federation colony, and was too small to make out many details beyond the basic shape.

Sonya studied the image as best she could. The ship resembled an old Earth bullet-train, flat on the

bottom and the back half of the top but curving down in front. Along the side stretched a long mirrored

expanse, most likely a fuel nacelle. The entire shape emitted a soft glow, more orange and red than white

and gold—almost like a wreath of fire.

“Well, I don’t know that this means much, but I don’t recognize it,” Bart Faulwell said. He glanced at

the dark-haired woman next to him. “How about you, Carol?” But Carol Abramowitz just shook her

head.

“I don’t either,” Sonya admitted. “Not that I’m surprised—we’ve certainly seen our share of new ships,

and new species for that matter, on this ship.”

“One of the advantages to this job,” Gold pointed out gently. “Always something new to see.”

“We need to know what’s in its path,” Domenica Corsi pointed out.

P8 Blue waved an antenna. “Already on it. We’ve plotted its trajectory—easy enough, since it seems

perfectly straight.” She touched her padd, and a map of the quadrant appeared on the conference room’s

secondary screen. “Unless the ship changes direction, at least a dozen worlds lie directly in its path, three

of them Federation members. And that’s just the most immediate area—we have no idea how far this

ship might go if it isn’t intercepted.”

“Then there’s your job, people,” Gold announced. “Intercept it. As quickly as possible. I’ll get us near

this thing, match its speed so you can study it. Just don’t take too long.”

At that cue, Sonya forced the S.C.E. leader portion of herself to take control. “All right, people. Tev,

check our files—see if we have any data on this thing. Pattie, dissect that trajectory—we need to know

how much time we have before it hits an inhabited world, or something near one. Fabian, start thinking of

ways we might slow down this train. That’s it, people—let’s get to it.”

“Okay, the train’s a wreck.”

Sonya walked over to the science station on the bridge where Fabian had taken up residence. She saw

the long-range sensor display, which was now showing their runaway train. “A wreck?” she prompted.

“Yeah, it’s taken a lot of damage. Worse, it’s putting out a ton of energy. Way more than anything that

size should—except for maybe a bomb.”

“We’re looking at a bomb?” Sonya shook her head. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why fire a bomb

this far from any possible target? And why make a bomb that big? More likely it’s something on severe

overload.”

“Sure, but that doesn’t make it any less dangerous.” Fabian levered himself back to his feet. “Oh, and

the energy—it’s nuclear. Hydrogen and helium, most likely, though that’s just a guess for now.”

“Great, so now we have a runaway star instead of a train.” Sonya sighed. “Okay, keep at it.”

Tev was puzzled—and he hated the feeling. He liked to know what was going on, and usually did, but

something was happening with this mysterious ship and he did not yet know what it was. During the

briefing, he had been sitting across from Stevens and Blue, and had seen their reaction when Gold had

put the image onscreen. The tactical specialist had paled and clenched his jaw, and the structural systems

specialist’s antennae had begun to quiver. Something about that ship had prompted a reaction. And they

were not alone. Abramowitz had avoided Faulwell’s question, nodding instead of speaking, which was

uncharacteristic. Perhaps she was hiding something. Even the captain had seemed a bit more terse than

usual. It was as if all four of them were in on some conspiracy.

The problem was, Tev couldn’t find anything in the library computer for them to conspire about. The

search for matches on that ship had come up empty. He had checked the files for that particular ship

configuration, and found nothing. Then he had looked for anything resembling it. Also nothing. Next he

had searched for ships known to have shields of that distinctive color and design. Nothing. He had even

looked for vessels that traveled by way of straight lines alone, and drawn a blank.

No one knew anything about that ship. Or at least, no one was admitting to it.

Tev turned his formidable intellect to the problem of the conspiracy. If he could solve that riddle, it

would lead him to the actual information he sought.

Oddly, though the captain, Stevens, Blue, and Abramowitz seemed to be involved, Commander Gomez

and Faulwell had looked as puzzled as Tev was. As for Corsi and Soloman, they were more difficult to

read; if they also shared the hidden knowledge, their faces had not revealed it. But if he assumed that

they did, it provided an easy connection, for all of those involved had been on theda Vinci since before

even Gomez had joined. In fact, they had all been here during…

Turning back to his console, Tev opened and launched a particular subroutine he had created some time

ago, more for academic purposes than for real use. He had crafted the program with his usual efficiency,

however, and it performed exactly as requested. A moment later a small smile crossed his face, and he

transferred the information into his padd before rising to his feet. So much for being puzzled. But now

came one of his favorite parts—the presentation. This promised to be…interesting.

“I’ve identified the ship.”

Sonya glanced up at Tev’s comment. She and Fabian had been going over the sensor data, along with

Pattie. Tev waited until he’d received a nod before he continued.

“I scanned our files and got a match.” Tev gestured toward the wall monitor with his padd, and the

information he’d sent appeared on the larger screen. “The ship is calledDancing Star. I found its

specifications in S.C.E. mission entry DV30193.”

“Wait a second.” Sonya looked back at Fabian, who was looking oddly sheepish. “DV30193? That’s a

da Vinci file! We’ve seen this thing before?”

“Well, not you,” Fabian replied slowly. “It was back before you’d joined—just before, actually. It

was—” He hesitated.

“—the last mission of Commander Salek,” Pattie finished for him.

“Oh, great.” Sonya leaned back in her chair and rubbed her forehead. Salek had been Gomez’s

predecessor as first officer of theda Vinci and head of the ship’s S.C.E. complement. “So now we’ve got

a runaway sun that’s already killed one member of this crew. This gets better all the time.” She looked

back at Fabian. “During the briefing, neither of you mentioned this. Neither did Soloman or Corsi or the

captain—and Carol out-and-out lied to Bart.”

Fabian at least had the good grace to flush and glance at his feet. “We were under orders, Commander.”

“Orders? What are you talking about?”

“What they mean is that the mission was classified.” All four of them turned toward the ready-room door

as Gold entered the bridge. “It was during the Dominion War, and all of those events are classified for

security reasons.” He glared at Tev. “I’d bevery interested to know how you accessed those files.”

Tev simply shrugged. “I performed a standard search. I did design the search engine myself—it must

have simply bypassed the security measures. Starfleet might want to work on that.”

Sonya reminded herself yet again to speak to Tev. The man was an excellent engineer, and an asset to

the team, but his utter disregard for certain strictures and his contempt for anyone he did not consider an

intellectual equal had already earned him several enemies. If not for his undeniable skill he never would

have achieved his current rank—and if he didn’t learn to behave with a little more respect, or at least

circumspection, he’d never rise any higher.

The captain continued to glare at him for a moment, and Sonya knew he wasn’t fooled. Not much

slipped past Gold. But finally he shrugged and walked over to the console.

“Actually, the reason I came in was to give you access to those files. I’ve cleared it with Starfleet

Command—nothing in that mission is a security risk anymore, and you definitely have a need to know

aboutDancing Star. ” He tapped a command into the console, followed by a security code, and the files

appeared onscreen. Initially they bore the black band across the front that indicated they were sealed,

but after Gold entered the code, the band disappeared. Sonya couldn’t help but notice that Tev looked a

little annoyed at this—it stole some of the importance from his accomplishment for Gold to simply hand

her the materials a moment later.

But she’d deal with wounded pride later. For now she turned to Pattie. “Tell me about this thing.”

Her Nasat crewmate nodded, antennae wobbling. “As the captain mentioned, it was during the

Dominion War. There’s a Federation outpost near Randall V, strictly surveillance, and they put out a

distress call. A ship had appeared in their system, and it wasn’t one of ours. Not one of the Dominion’s

either, but it was putting out an alarming amount of energy. We were sent in to investigate and get the

new ship out of there before it could endanger the outpost. We also had a time issue—if the Dominion

noticed the ship’s energy output, they’d come investigate themselves, and that could expose the outpost.”

Fabian took over. “We did disable it, ultimately, and the outpost was kept secure. But Salek was killed

in the process.”

Sonya nodded. She could see why the files had been classified—the outpost’s existence and location

would have been critical information during the war. The best way to keep that data from falling into the

wrong hands was to simply seal the materials from everyone, and swear those involved to silence.

“Are we sure it’s the same ship?”

“Would I mention it otherwise?” Tev tapped out a command on his padd. The wall monitor switched to

an image of the runaway vessel, and a second image alongside it. “On the left is our current objective. On

the right is an image from that earlier mission. The two are identical, including several distinct points of

damage.” Circles appeared on both images, highlighting several of those areas, which were then

magnified and overlapped. They were a perfect match.

“Good work, Tev—you and your search engine. Okay, so it’s theDancing Star. But you guys disabled it

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

OthereBooksintheStarTrek™:StarfleetCorpsofEngineersseriesfromPocketBooks:#1:TheBellyoftheBeastbyDeanWesleySmith#2:FatalErrorbyKeithR.A.DeCandido#3:HardCrashbyChristieGolden#4:InterphaseBook1byDaytonWard&KevinDilmore#5:InterphaseBook2byDaytonWard&KevinDilmore#6:ColdFusionbyKeithR.A.DeCandido#7:Invinc...

展开>> 收起<<

STAR TREK - SCE - 33 - Collective Hindsight Bk 1.pdf

共33页,预览7页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

STAR TREK - SCE - 33 - Collective Hindsight Bk 1

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: