Starfleet Academy Read online

  Absurdly I cleared my throat before speaking. “This is Captain David Forester of the Starfleet science vessel Agincourt. We’re picking up your distress signals and are ready to assist. Please identify yourselves and detail your damage and casualties.”

  What a dumb name for a ship. Agincourt. A medieval battle. What did that have to do with anything? Who made up these games anyway?

  At the communications console, M’Giia listened to her earpiece and frowned. “Getting some kind of response, but…”

  “Put it on the speaker.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Grobbeiied thyoo skantto picniussh tou thenonsecu daiitaloo yosh clumus esthel ab eploiisin loofshoit comeesiver muut…”

  She clicked it off. “It’s all like that.”

  “Universal translator?”

  “On line and working. Something’s garbling even the translation. When a universal translator can’t make sense of what it’s hearing, it reverts to the original language in case anyone speaks it.”

  Gripping the back of the command chair, I mumbled, “I don’t speak that.”

  Evidently she didn’t either.

  “No communication,” I muttered, trying to think. “By the book, what’s next?”

  “Scan for life signs,” Sturek filled in, even though I hadn’t really been fishing for an answer from any of them.

  I glanced at him. “Do that.”

  “Scanning. Reading large numbers of low-level humanoid life signs … at least seventeen hundred. Picking up minimal but stable life support systems … and signs of repair attempts under way—”

  “Repair? You mean they’re trying to–”

  PFFFOOM! A huge vomit of blue fire erupted from the propulsion stream of one of the nearby ships. We saw it, and two seconds later, we felt it.

  Wave after wave of hard hits rocked the bridge—that didn’t feel like any simulation!

  The helm fritzed and argued, and Corin raised his hands away from the sparking board and didn’t even try to control the surges through his controls.

  “Lock those down, Corin!” I shouted over the boom boom of impact force.

  He tossed me a disapproving shrug. “I’m not touching that! I’ll get my fingers burned.”

  “Oh, poor you!” Jana leaned across the helm to Corin’s side and tapped off the power to the snapping circuits, at least enough that the rest of the board could be handled.

  “Amazon,” Corin chided.

  “What’s happening?” I called. “Are we under attack? Scan for hostile ships.”

  Boom boom—

  “Reading no additional vessels,” Sturek reported.

  “Then what’s causing that eruption?”

  He worked his board briefly, then frowned. “Eruptions are tracing back to the pockets of space dust.”

  He spoke slowly as he did the analysis. The sensors cast a soft jewel-toned glow on his face. “The phenomenon seems to be toxic, reacting with the drive sequences of these alien ships. The nearest alien ship attempted to start its engines, and their method of drive is reacting with the chemical construction of the dust in this solar system.”

  “You mean their own drive is blowing them up? That’s what caused damage to this whole fleet? What about our drive?”

  “No adverse reaction to impulse exhaust, David,” Robin reported.

  “Their exhaust sequences read markedly more rich than ours,” Sturek confirmed, and looked at me. “I believe we are safe to maneuver on impulse drive.”

  Another surge of energy blasted across us, and I lost my grip on the chair and ended up on one knee next to Jana.

  I shoved myself back up. “Sturek, are you sure?”

  “Negative,” he said. “It’s simply a conclusion based upon—”

  “Good enough for me. M’Giia, keep trying to explain to them that we’re here to help.”

  Another hit rocked the bridge, but this one was different, harder, shorter, and blew half of Robin’s engineering console into a flashing mess.

  I swung around. “What was that?”

  “They’re firing on us!” Robin called. He stood several steps away from his board, fumbling and unsure about what do to. “Why would they do that?”

  “Maybe they think we fired on them,” Jana said.

  “That would mean they don’t know what caused their damage,” I concluded. “They don’t know their own drive is doing it. M’Giia—”

  “I’m trying,” M’Giia insisted. “There’s no way to break the garbling.”

  “Try the interstellar friendship code.”

  “I already tried.”

  “They’re firing again!” Jana shouted.

  I whirled toward the helm. “Corin, evasive action!”

  “If you say so.” He shrugged and picked at his board.

  The shot got through before we moved an inch.

  “Reading attempts at repair from at least thirty ships,” Sturek informed us. “If they fire their propulsion systems, the entire solar system could become one large incendiary bomb.”

  “Understood.” I coughed on the haze of smoke descending from the ceiling. “Robin, how many of those ships can we tow at once?”

  “Four or five, I think.”

  “Don’t think! Figure it out! Is it four, or is it five?”

  Precious seconds were eaten up as he checked his systems. “It’s … four.”

  “Jana, pick four ships and get tractor beams on. If we can pull them out of this space, they’ll be able to use their engines without killing themselves. Then maybe they’ll get the idea—”

  “Two more ships shooting at us!” Sturek called over the crackle of damage, and a second later the ceiling exploded.

  Chunks of bracing and conduit shell fragments from above and entire transfer cables came slithering to the deck, hot and sparking.

  “Get those ships under tow!” I called.

  “Tractor beams are on,” Corin said. “What more do you want?”

  On the upper deck, M’Giia twisted around in her seat. “They don’t understand that we’re trying to help them.”

  “I wonder why their weapons don’t ignite the dust,” I muttered.

  “Better find out,” Jana said, looking at her board, “because we’re starting to score casualties.”

  I was losing crew. My legs started shaking. Emotions were getting the better of me—I could feel the creeping fear. “Astern, one quarter impulse, Corin!”

  “Got it, quarter impulse, backing up.”

  “Just repeat the order!”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “They’re resisting our traction,” Robin said. “They’re powering up to fire again.”

  “And some of the other ships,” Sturek rasped through the thickening smoke, “seem to be on a power build-up to fire on us also.”

  “How can I make them understand?” I paced between the helm and the command chair. “I don’t want to shoot at them, but they’re shooting at us … can we beam the survivors on board?”

  “Seventeen hundred of them?” Jana shot back.

  Robin said, “That much transporter power in quick succession would drain the impulse drive.”

  “I agree,” Sturek added. “And the toxins in the space dust make transportation risky.”

  “Understood.” I watched the ships on the screen, all just hovering and turning lazily in place. “M’Giia, hailing frequencies.”

  “We already tried—”

  “Try again, please.”

  “Aye, sir, frequencies open.”

  “This is Captain Forester of the Agincourt. We are attempting to tow you out of the incendiary dust. Please cease fire. I could easily destroy you, but I’m not trying to! Cease fire! You are not under attack!”

  “It won’t work,” Corin grumbled. “The program won’t let it work.”

  “We can’t treat this vessel like a program!” I derided.

  “We’re scoring damage,” Jana said mournfully, “and more casualties. Now logging deaths in the e
ngineering sections.”

  Frustrated, I shook my head. “All right, if that’s the way it is. Corin, target one of the tow ships’ weapons port.”

  “What?” He twisted around. “You want to fire on them after you said you wouldn’t?”

  “Right. Phasers at half power. Maybe they’ll understand we’re not trying to destroy them if we show them we can. Target their weapons port with a quick burst. Come on, do it!”

  “Okay, if you say so.”

  “Give the correct response!”

  “Okay, targeting, aye.”

  “Fire!”

  The screen showed us our own phaser shot, lancing out through the murky brown globs of space dust toward one of the four ships we were towing. Red light swamped the alien ship’s port aft quarter.

  “Good hit,” Corin reported.

  “Hold your fire.”

  “Captain, that ship is powering up its propulsion systems!” Sturek called. “They’re igniting engines!”

  “M’Giia, broadcast interstellar cease and desist!”

  “Broadcasting—”

  Sturek spun around from his controls and threw up one hand almost as if to disengage himself from the bridge. “Too 1ate!”

  A blue plume boiled from the ship we’d targeted as it fired its engines and tried to pull out of our tractor beam, and the pockets of space dust around us started to pop with ignition, blowing like fireworks between the four ships we had under tow.

  “Break and run!”

  “We can’t leave them!” M’Giia called.

  I watched the chain reaction erupting across the screen. “We can’t stay! Send a call to Starfleet Command for backup!”

  “David, the shields!” Sturek dodged back to his console.

  How could I forget something like that!

  “Full shields!” I ordered, but he was already putting them up, and it was already too late.

  The blue-white eruptions ran along the stranded ships like the lines in a connect-the-dots puzzle, cracking open hulls and igniting exhaust and fuel as if the energy out there were hungry and hunting. On the screen, a sweeping hand of blue fire rushed through the pockets of exploding dust on its way toward us.

  “Corin, vector us out of here! Full impulse!”

  The blue wave surged toward us and overtook us, swallowing up my last words in a crackle of damage. The lights flashed, the ceiling snapped and sparked, and the consoles smoked. Warning signals flashed frantically and klaxons whooped, calling for abandon ship, but I couldn’t make myself say that.

  Just when I’d have had no choice if this had been a real ship, the computer voice boomed in my ears:

  “Program shut-down. Your ship is destroyed. You sustained loss of all hands. Scores will be posted at sixteen hundred hours.”

  And all the sounds whined their last, then settled to silence. Even the normal bridge noises turned off. The sense of failure was complete.

  I waved at the acrid smoke. “Well, I think we can agree that could’ve been better. Any suggestions?”

  “Yellow alert might’ve been a good idea at some point,” Jana droned.

  That one made me wince. I’d completely forgotten the alerts.

  Man, did my eyes hurt. This simulator was devilishly real, and my muscles ached for real too. My head felt like a balloon, my arms like iron.

  “All right,” I said with a sigh, “let’s start cleaning up so the next team doesn’t realize how badly we botched the program.”

  “What?” Geoff Corin swung around in the navigation seat. “Who’s that! Oh, is that our captain speaking? Why, hello, Captain! Why don’t you try steering a ship through something like that. I’d like to see how

  much better you’d do.”

  I tilted my head. “Don’t eat your heart out, Corin. It’s just a simulation.”

  “So was the opening ceremony,” he reminded me wryly. “I think you busted my shoulder while you weren’t taking it ‘seriously.’”

  I glowered at him, because that was kind of unfair, but if I told him it was unfair he’d think I was a wimp for whining. So I kept my mouth shut while M’Giia, Robin, and Jana Akton arranged a couple of stools and climbed up to the ceiling conduits, which were sparking all over me and Corin. I stood up and started handing them tools and receiving parts and panels from them.

  “He thinks he’s a commander because James Kirk took a shine to him,” Jana said, sweeping me with her cold glare. “I say he just got lucky.”

  Robin stuck his head out of the ceiling. “Lucky!”

  Everybody looked at him and he shut up suddenly, unable to muster any more defense.

  “Cadet Forester deserves credit,” Sturek said fluidly. “He was the only one who took action.” As I cast a grateful glance up there, he frigidly added, “Even though it was non-regulation action.”

  Oh, fine.

  Robin handed me down a cable, and I attached the end of it into a circuit trunk on the deck. The simulator was a wreck. Now we had to clean it up for the next cadet team. Minutes to decimate, hours to mend.

  “I didn’t think about regulations,” I said. “I just reacted. I’d say Corin’s right. I got lucky. Captain Kirk thought my action was right for the moment, but I could just as easily have gotten everybody killed.”

  “Don’t throw me no bones, man,” Corin said.

  I turned to him and fanned my arms. “What—I can’t be a humble tyrant?”

  They all stopped and stared at me. Then Corin, amazingly, cracked a smile. Jana’s stance eased off some. M’Giia glanced at Sturek, then back at me. All hands relaxed a little—I wasn’t imagining it, was I? Had I actually gotten them to move over to my side a little bit?

  Corin made peace by taking a tool I was holding and passing it up to Robin. Jana stepped up onto one of the stools and braced a chunk of dangling hardware while M’Giia worked on the loose piece, and a small funnel of sparks shot down onto me and Corin. We both ducked, and almost bumped heads.

  “Luck is nice,” Jana said, “but I wouldn’t depend on it. I never have.”

  “I don’t consider luck,” M’Giia offered. “I joined Starfleet because I have something to offer. Andorian society offered me only luxury as a lord’s wife. I want to make my own decisions.”

  More sparks fritzed from the ceiling, and we all ducked.

  “Procedures aren’t perfect,” Jana went on crustily once the sparks died. “Neither is Starfleet.”

  “Neither are we,” I mentioned.

  “Speak for yourself, Benevolent One,” Corin drawled.

  Jana leered down at him. “What got a clown like you into Starfleet, Corin?”

  “My parents,” he said as if he’d heard that question before. “They bought me the best schools, the best teachers, the best clothes, and Starfleet.”

  Jana’s face cranked into a terrible grimace. “Starfleet isn’t for sale!”

  “I dunno,” Corin snapped back. “I got a great deal on a shuttlecraft—”

  Jana’s cheeks flushed with anger. “Starfleet may be a joke to you, but I worked my way out of the mines to get here!”

  The stool tipped under her and she almost dropped the mechanism she was holding up.

  “Jana, don’t drop that!” M’Giia warned.

  “Lookee, fo1ks!” Corin crowed. “We got us a supercharged holedigger right here at the Fleet! Should we genuflect or what?”

  “You dirty show-off punk!” Jana plunged off the stool, and would’ve dropped the mechanism if Sturek hadn’t plunged in to catch it, but that only stopped it from landing on my head. It didn’t stop the connections from snapping.

  Hot sparks and arcing electricity skittered from the ceiling as if Jana were some kind of comet and those were her tail. She got Corin by the collar and rammed him backward. They crashed into the command chair and rolled from there to the lower deck.

  “Jana!” I grabbed her by the arm. “Back off!”

  She twisted around. “What? Me?”

  “A little innocent ribbing and
she can’t take it,” Corin grunted from the deck.

  Jana took a swipe at him. “You insulted me and I don’t have to take it!”

  “No, but you can’t threaten a fellow cadet,” I said.

  “Corin, apologize.”

  “David, she jumped me!” Corin wailed.

  “Apologize,” I insisted, “or you’ll deal with me instead of her.”

  Big threat. Jana could probably bench-press me and Sturek at the same time.

  But what the hell, it sounded good, didn’t it?

  Corin got to his feet. He took a step back and looked at Jana. “Sorry. Okay?”

  “I guess,” Jana huffed.

  Beside me, Sturek held the manifold and seemed to be inwardly grinning, if that was possible. I never thought it was until now.

  Robin Brady glanced from cadet to cadet, wondering if the moment of surrender might explode into another fight, as if we weren’t bruised enough for one day.

  One day … all this on the first day of command school. What next?

  “Nice smooth beginning,” I sighed. “I can’t wait till things get rough.”

  “Good afternoon, crew.”

  I strolled into the cadet lounge, hoping my tone of pseudo-pretentiousness would lighten the mood.

  “I asked you all to meet me here so we could all get acquainted in something other than a hail of sparks. Did everyone get a drink?”

  Corin held up a glass of something brandyish. “Any chance of something stronger?”

  “Not on my salary.” I took a seat between Robin and Jana Akton, noticing that Jana and Corin were sitting about as far apart as they could manage in the clutch of lounge chairs. On the other side of Jana, M’Giia sat even more rigidly than Sturek, who was actually more relaxed than any of them. Well, except Corin. He evidently had relaxation down pat.

  “So what did you think of Captain Kirk’s speech this morning?”

  “I think he’s dead right,” Corin said. “We’re sure not the best of the best.”

  “Well, he’s got something right,” Jana countered. “He’s saved the Federation a dozen times. Mostly by breaking regulations.”

  “Or by backing up the regulations,” M’Giia added. “He couldn’t have been that much of a maverick and avoided court martial. He must’ve had something more on his side.”