Dreadnought! Read online

  My last order.

  The very last.

  The hull shuddered under me and myriad voices began to penetrate the bulkheads.

  Suddenly everything stopped. Everything. The noises all went away—the hum of machinery and computer circuits ceased. Only the voices remained.

  “What the hell—” someone said, like a ghost calling from another dimension.

  I closed my eyes. The voices began to solidify behind the walls. “Overload! Access lights, go to emergency power. Goddamn insane cadet!”

  “Auxiliary power, where’s the juice?”

  “Whole main simulator’s down.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “It’s a junction overload. She made the system try to fight itself.”

  “Harrison, what’s taking so long? Oh—’scuse me, Captain.”

  “Tech crew, report to simulator A on the double.”

  “Where’s Lieutenant Selok? Maybe he can talk to it.”

  The universe began to subdivide. Slowly I remembered: I was no different from anybody else. They’d done it to me, just as I’d heard they would. Not only had I failed, but I’d destroyed the simulator in the process. I had never heard of that happening before. So why did it have to happen to me?

  Voices buzzed. They were talking about me. I heard my name spinning like a dervish through the corridor.

  “All right. That’s enough. Quite enough.”

  There was a whirling sensation that nearly threw me flat. The hum of ventilators rose. The smoke began to clear. I lay on my side, blinking into a maze of lights and humanoid shapes. I felt violated.

  “Quite enough, Mister Piper. Please relax.”

  Swallowing was an effort, but I did manage to get to my feet from my kneeling position on the upper deck before Commander Josephson approached me. Behind him, foggy forms of Star Fleet upper-echelon personnel stood soberly watching me. To my left, Illya Galina was crawling out from beneath part of his control panel, staring at me with something that might have been astonishment. Outside the simulation chamber, technicians were scrambling to disengage the simulation computer from all the other computers in the immediate area. Only then did I realize what I had done.

  “Rather a unique display, Lieutenant,” the Commander grumbled, his black eyes and swarthy complexion obscured by the clearing smoke. He stopped in his advance to let two “dead” members of the bridge crew rise and step aside. There were coughs and sneezes all around, and a general feeling of discomfort. “Tell me … at which point did you decide there was no Kobayashi Maru?”

  I cleared my throat and packed back my hair in a gesture that was too feminine, suddenly aware that my nonregulation backcombs had failed to keep the layered, honey-brown strands out of my face. “It had to be a trap. There was no other possibility.”

  “At which point.”

  “When the second contingent of enemy vessels appeared, sir. At that point it became clear there were too many of them for a simple border patrol. So many ships would not have allowed a distress call to penetrate the neutral zone.”

  “Your estimation of your performance?” Josephson repressed the quirkish grin he was known for.

  “Inadequate, sir.”

  “Why?”

  “I raised shields too late. I failed to order weapons armed upon entry into the neutral zone. I also should have dispatched a communiqué to Star Fleet Command that I was about to breach the Organian accord by attempting rescue of Kobayashi Maru. By failing to do so, I prevented any possibility of Liberty’s being rescued if it was indeed a trap.”

  He had a habit of tilting his head to favor his nearly deaf left ear. “All true. Final score?”

  “Grade B midrange.” I winced at giving myself such a high score. New shame engulfed me.

  He raised his head, looking out into the main training depot beyond the shattered walls of the simulation chamber. “Are those systems clearing yet?”

  “Getting there, Commander,” a technician called. “It’s a mess.”

  Josephson turned to me. “You caused quite a hullabaloo with the base computers.”

  I remained silent. There was nothing I could say.

  “Lieutenant,” he began slowly, “do you realize you have just come closer than any command-line cadet to actually checkmating the no-win scenario?”

  Not knowing if it was a reprimand or a compliment, I gulped, “No, sir.”

  “Report to debriefing at two hundred hours. And Lieutenant … your assignment has just been changed. You won’t be reporting to the Magellan.”

  “Sir?” I had turned away, but this stopped me. Not report to Captain Flynn? The sweat that had collected on my forehead seeped into the furrows of a confused expression. Had I done so badly that they would prevent my serving on a Galaxy-class ship? “Commander?”

  He hadn’t intended to tell me, yet it seemed he was itching to. I couldn’t imagine Commander Josephson capable of petty arrogance, but all it took was this small prodding to make him turn back to me. “I’ve had a direct request, just now. You’re to report to Docking Bay 12 at eight hundred thirty hours. You’ve been assigned to Captain Kirk.”

  I stared at him, my eyes stinging. This time, there was no smoke.

  Enterprise!

  Chapter Two

  BRIAN SILAYNA FOUND me in my quarters, staring at the wall. When I saw him, still wearing his standard Engineering Division jumpsuit in the familiar red of Star Fleet services, I stumbled into his arms and held him more tightly than I ever had, even at more intimate times. Together we hid in the threshold’s shadow.

  “They reassigned you,” he said, not moving.

  “Brian, they put me on Enterprise! They said I was asked for.”

  “Are you happy about it?”

  I pulled away, knowing what he was really asking. I was nearly as tall as he was, tall enough to look straight into his dark eyes. “Yes.”

  His expression twitched. We’d been lovers for over a year. He knew what the answer meant.

  I went on. “But I don’t understand it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I failed. I made tactical errors every step of the way. I lost the ship.”

  “Piper, everybody loses the ship. That’s the purpose behind the Kobayashi Maru test. Even if you made the right decisions, the people around you are obligated to make sure every alternative fails. It was the same when I took the test. Except …” He put space between us, pensively fingering the mementos on my dresser and the open duffel bag I had been distractedly packing.

  “Except?”

  “Except that I didn’t turn the whole starbase on its ear like you did.”

  Humiliated, I dropped onto my bed and put my back to him. “You’re exaggerating.”

  “The hell I am. You set a record. There’s only been one person ever to beat the no-win test, and he cheated.”

  “Who?”

  “The same person who was in the observation room with Josephson. The same man who asked to put you on Star Fleet’s sweetheart.”

  “Captain …”

  “Kirk. Yes.”

  He sat next to me, a warm magnetic presence against my arm, evidently giving up trying to convince me that I had done something good. “I have to report to Captain Flynn at nine hundred hours. It won’t be easy to go alone.”

  Clasping my hands between my knees, I waited until the knot in my throat dissolved before trying to speak. Brian was alluding, with his tone, to plans we’d made together, dreams we’d built, possible futures. “We’ve been lovers, Brian, and I do love you. Even more significantly, we’ve been friends. I cherish that. But if I learned anything from that test, I learned not to love too dearly anyone on my ship.” With a shuddering breath I went on. “I can’t tell you how strong the impulse was to leave the bridge and run to find you when I thought the engineering section had been hit. My mind was with you, with us, when the Romulans fired on Liberty. It curtailed my deductive reasoning. I had to force myself to think clearly, and I c
an’t afford that. It’s fatal to give in to love. I understand now why the Vulcans are so efficient, and why they survive. Enterprise will be better for me than serving on Magellan with a person I love.”

  Silence fell in my cabin, descending like a crystal-cloud I saw once on Proxima Beta. It felt just that heavy. “I don’t mean to hurt you.”

  He sighed. “I would be hurt if anyone else told me this. You really intend to command, don’t you, Piper?”

  “If I’m good enough,” I said. “But only if I’m good enough.”

  “You’re always too hard on yourself.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “Yes you are.”

  “Command has to be.” I stopped with that sharp remark, realizing I was on the verge of insulting him. He would make a fine assistant engineer on Magellan, and someday Brian would make an excellent chief engineer—I had no doubt of it. If he was lacking in any skill, his steadiness of character would make up for it. But he would never make an officer of the line. He didn’t have the drive.

  Yet, who was I to say? I compared myself to everyone and everyone to myself, always fighting to be an iota better, faster, that extra dimension more worthy than anyone around me. I didn’t care what I had done to the computer system. I could deal with the whispers and rumors and the nicknames. I couldn’t deal with having lost my ship.

  Secretly I was angry with Brian for not telling me what to expect during Kobayashi Maru, though the secrecy in which the test was shrouded wasn’t his fault. It might have been a streak of vindication or sniggering cruelty that kept upperclassmen from divulging the horrors of no-win, even secreting away the name of the ship that would make the fake distress call, but it was Star Fleet Academy tradition never to tip anyone’s hand. I now understood that going into the test cold was the only way.

  Brian put his arms around me. In friendship, but refusing love, I returned the embrace. “I’ll miss you,” he whispered simply. “Enterprise’s gain is my loss. I guess it’s better than losing out to some smooth-talking midshipman. I love you, Piper.”

  My fingers found his hair. “We’re too close,” I warned. “We’ll always be friends … that’s good love too.”

  The soft beep of my intercom alarm seemed loud as a red alert klaxon. Dazedly I ordered it off.

  “Eight hundred hours.”

  “Yes.”

  “Docking Bay 12 is waiting.”

  “Yes.”

  I had never been to Earth before graduating into command school. It was a nice enough planet, very blue and watery, and its atmosphere had a propensity for cumulus clouds, but it wasn’t as consistently beautiful as Proxima Beta. But then, home is always more beautiful to those who leave with the idea of seldom returning. I kept a photoslide tape of Proxima’s lush mossy landscape and dripping lepidodendron trees—moss was our most tenacious perennial—and in times of mental turmoil I would scan the collection, drugging myself with the bathed greens of the humid emerald planet that had spawned me. Meeting more and more Terrans now, here on our ancestral rocks, I often wondered how we had adapted to so many varieties of climate. Earth had more kinds of air than any place I knew of, and humans could breath them all. Being descended from humans who had colonized and adapted to Proxima made most of Earth uncomfortable for me. Though the heat of coastal California was easier to deal with than most localities on the planet, I couldn’t get used to the wind. Every time I opened my mouth to breathe, some capricious little gust would steal my breath and leave me gasping. And I could never, never get used to that garish yellow sun.

  I was quivering with anticipation as the shuttle arched out over the shimmer of Puget Sound, baring to me and the other passengers the volcanic topography that gave the area its flavor. Character. Like Brian.

  I vowed that would be my last thought of him, and turned my mind to sifting out all the tidbits of near-legend that had come my way about the majestic Enterprise and her daring who’s-who of officers. No ship had explored as far, encountered as much, endured as much as this starship, and no crew had survived so long under such a roster of impossible situations. Oh, yes, we’d heard plenty about these people. I’d heard and marveled at the stories like every other plebe, but, never expecting to find myself serving on board her, I’d eventually discarded these bits of information. Now I had to gather them once again, force my mind to remember. It was my duty.

  There she was. The buttresses of the docking bay opened before us as the shuttle maneuvered for final approach to Enterprise. Everyone in the shuttle was flashing looks at each other, trying to figure out which of us was to board the starship. Not me, though. I knew who it was.

  I was looking at her.

  She didn’t look like a ship that had been from hell to Klingon and back, several times. She gleamed and glowed in the eternal night like a star instead of a starship. Her newly painted Fleet insignia and call letters stood out as though they had substance, her warp engine nacelles fanning out across the universe as though they knew its secrets. Vast, it was vast … shockingly bigger than I ever guessed a starship could be. Amazement shunted through me that mankind, any race, could engineer and actually build such a thing of power and grace. And I was going to board her. I was going to serve her. More than anything else, she appeared as a giant constellation of a winged horse, reared and prancing, refusing to look into the eyes of weak beings who had merely created her; life belonged to Enterprise, and she was in command of it.

  When I arrived at the cabin assigned to me by the duty officer, I found precious few clues as to the habits of my suitemates. There were two cabins joined by a common head; my cabin had three bunks in typically austere Star Fleet style, and in deference to the unknowns who already called this home I found a noncommital place to dump my gear. It was quiet and dim in here compared to the bustle going on all over the ship. Every transporter was busily rematerializing crewpeople from the surface. Not knowing whether the rush to board was usual, I took it as such and minded my own business. There was, though, a distended air of excitement. Probably just me. After all … Enterprise.

  I stood in the middle of the cabin, feeling out of place and seeking out signals about those I was living with. Boldness took over when I spied a sealed canister on one of the vanities. That quarter had a few personal items around it: a 3-D of grinning people, all blond, obviously related to each other, was perched next to a discarded hand towel and a hairbrush. The lid of the canister came off easily—

  And went right back on. We had insect life on Proxima, and pets too, but nothing like the writhing crayfishy half-snakes in there. I shuddered. To each its own.

  The canister clunked back onto the vanity to the sibilance of the door opening. I turned, and it took every discipline I knew to bury the spontaneous gasp in my throat.

  The Gorn was tall, much taller than I and too tall for the cabin portal, so she was stooping to come in, curving her reptilian spine and dipping the massive headful of undeniably carnivorous teeth. Her tyrannosauric appearance and glittering sapphire eyes gave her an aura of attack stance. Her skin was crimson, evidently to imitate the color of Star Fleet issue. She was wearing a Gorn tunic emblazoned with Fleet insignia and the cobra crest of Cestus System. I smiled. It couldn’t hurt.

  “I’m Piper. We’re roommates, I guess.”

  The Gorn hissed, moved into the room, stood to full height, and began touching me. I thought I was being searched, but soon it became evident she was introducing herself to me. Clawed pads rippled up and down my legs, and I raised my arms to let her explore.

  Another voice sounded from the door, obviously human and very welcome. “Oh, y’all’re here. Good.” A sloppy young second lieutenant strode in with a medical officer directly behind him. He was blessed with a perpetually friendly face, a nose slightly crooked from a break long-healed, average height and hair, and nice eyes. His companion might or might not have been of Earth. “You must be Piper. I’m Judd Sandage, Starship services. I’m in charge of the officers’ mess, so watch out what you eat.
Y’all can call me Scanner. Everbody does, ‘cuz I got some great dream of working in the sensory. Too bad about triple bunkin’, ain’t it? They got decks five and eight closed down for bulkhead repairs, so even the officers are sharing.” He squinted as though he’d just thought of something. “Y’know, I hope you speak English.”

  I laughed. “Yes, I do, Scanner.”

  “Good,” he drawled. “And you don’t mind the unisex setup.”

  “I asked for it.”

  “Glad to hear it. It don’t pay to be shy on a starship.” He waved a hand. “This here is Dr. Merete AndrusTaurus, and the one checkin’ you out is Telosirizharcrede of Cestus Eliar. We know it as Wren’s Planet. You know … Cestus Seven?”

  “Oh!” I blurted, and frightened Telosirizharcrede with my enthusiasm. She jolted away, hissing, but I snatched her paw and smiled away both our embarrassments. “Is she one of the first?”

  “The first. They just started bilingual training for Eliarn cadets. Osira is the Gorn ambassador’s daughter.”

  “Ah, so diplomatic immunity.”

  “Yeah, she sideswiped a shipload of red tape.”

  I was still holding Osira’s hand—paw—and with a look I hoped was as friendly on Wren’s Planet as it was on Proxima, I replaced her pads on my leg and she continued scouring me.

  “Where are you from?” the medical officer asked. She was a stocky woman, plantinum haired and with slightly upturned eyes that hinted at alien cells in Terran bloodlines.

  “Proxima Beta.”

  “That’s why you’re tall.”

  “I thought I was, till I met Osira.”

  Dr. AndrusTaurus said, “We’re system-mates. I’m from Earth Outpost Walter Twelve. I did biomorphology training on Proxima Alpha. What section are you assigned to?”

  “A nice quiet place in Environmental Control. They tell me it’s temporary. I’m a captaincy candidate, so they’ll be moving me around a lot.”