Star Trek: The Fall: The Poisoned Chalice (5 page)

Velk's parting words hung in the air after he was gone, and presently Lieutenant Ssura entered the office, his ears sloped forward forlornly. “Sir? Apologies. I was not correct on the protocols, and the chief of staff—”

“It's fine,” Riker told him. “I think I've just learned more in one conversation than hours of reading those
files would get me.” He paused, thinking, then shot his aide a glance. “Contact my wife on the
Titan
. Tell her to make a dinner reservation.”

*  *  *

Entering the main engineering compartment, Tuvok was not surprised when the first sound he heard was the strident voice of Doctor Xin Ra-Havreii, the
Titan
's chief engineer.

“No,” he was saying, “you don't just walk in here and start taking things to pieces. I don't care who gave you permission.” The Efrosian had a tendency to talk loudly and slowly when confronted with someone intent on contradicting him, as if he were condescending to converse with a life-form of subnormal intelligence. Tuvok saw Ra-Havreii standing in front of the starship's dual warp core, bathed in the glow of the matter-antimatter stream as it pulsed at idle. He had his hands on his hips, his narrow chin jutting forward, and he was blocking the path of a group of other Starfleet officers and noncoms, all in engineering coveralls.

The new arrivals were an overhaul crew from McKinley Station, and some of them were guiding antigravity trolleys loaded with components and equipment cases. The officer at the focus of Ra-Havreii's invective was a lieutenant commander, a Deltan, and his face was tight with annoyance. “Sir, if you will just—”

“Just what?” Ra-Havreii snapped. “Just let you start banging on things like a troupe of primates? I know every bolt and weld in this ship, lad, and if you think for one second I am going to let some greasy-fingered yard-bound
stranger
poke and prod my vessel, you're gravely mistaken.”

Tuvok's arrival caught the gaze of Ensign Crandall, one of Ra-Havreii's staff, and he rolled his eyes in a silent plea for help. “Chief Engineer,” Tuvok began, stopping the other officer before he could continue his tirade, “why are you obstructing these people in their duties?”

Ra-Havreii rounded on him, brandishing a padd. “Have you seen this? Have you?” Tuvok barely got a look at the screen before the engineer waved it away. “The captain gets a promotion and the first thing he does is have the ship dismantled? I always thought those stories were a joke, but it seems it is true; the moment any officer in Starfleet gets kicked up to the admiralty they automatically become unbalanced!”

“Ordering an overhaul of the
Titan
is in no way a sign of impaired judgment,” Tuvok replied coolly. “In point of fact, Doctor, one might argue that it is your present behavior that is indicative of such a bias.”

“My point exactly,” muttered the Deltan, earning him a sharp look from the chief engineer. “We're not here to
dismantle
anything, Commander. Admiral Riker ordered us to expedite a number of hardware and repair requests in
Titan
's maintenance queue, and so we have. We're here to help.” He gestured around.

It was evident that
Titan
's engine room was more sparsely populated than usual; in fact, like much of the ship, crew numbers had already thinned considerably thanks to a generous shore leave schedule posted by Commander Vale. Tuvok declined the offer to partake in any planetside liberty. His wife, T'Pel, was on
Titan
and he had no emotional need to “stretch his legs,” as Vale had put it. The same did not seem so for many of the other crewmembers, however. The Vulcan noted that a significant proportion of the ship's complement
had either elected to visit or otherwise communicate with their family units in the days after the assassination on Deep Space 9. The reflection of an emotional need, he surmised, to reinforce the connection with loved ones in the face of a greater crisis.

“I don't know you,” Ra-Havreii was saying to the Deltan. “And any one of my team can tell you, people I don't know don't get to touch my engines.”

“He is pretty anal about it,” offered Crandall wearily, and Ra-Havreii shot him an acidic glare.

“I'm not being obstructive,” the engineer insisted, “just
careful
.”

The Deltan threw up his hands. “Fine, sir. We'll just leave these components here on the deck. You can have your own people fit them and take twice as long about it, while we put our feet up and drink
raktajino
back on the station.”

But Tuvok noted that Ra-Havreii had stopped listening to the junior officer after he said the word “components.” He pushed past him to the nearest antigrav and peered at one of the new modules. “This is one of the new covariant field modulator pods. The Type Seventeen. I requested one of these six months ago.” The Efrosian's manner shifted, his annoyance melting away. “I've been wanting to get my hands on this for a while. . . .”

“As I said,” replied the Deltan, “the admiral said—”

Ra-Havreii gave an airy wave. “All right, all right, I didn't ask for your life story. Get to work, then. Let's see how efficient you spacedock types are.” He turned to Crandall. “You, make sure they don't break anything.”

Tuvok raised an eyebrow. “May I assume the maintenance will now proceed without issue?”

“Of course,” said Ra-Havreii, waving him away. He was already moving down the line of new items of hardware, a low smile on his face.

The commander didn't believe that for a moment, of course. In his service aboard the
Titan,
Tuvok had come to understand that the ship's chief engineer was, to be certain,
idiosyncratic
.

He turned away to return to his other duties and almost collided with an ambulatory tower of equipment boxes. Tuvok nimbly sidestepped, but the diminutive figure carrying the cases still staggered. The uppermost box shifted and fell, revealing a deer-like head and wide, augmetic eyes. The Vulcan caught the container easily before it struck the ground.

“Oh. Sir!” piped Ensign Torvig Bu-Kar-Nguv, a slightly startled tone in his voice. “I didn't sense you there.” The Choblik cocked his head, shifting the weight of the other boxes in between the two cybernetic manipulator arms extending from his torso.

“A smaller load for someone of your physical dimensions would be more logical, Ensign,” Tuvok noted. “Continue. I will assist you.”

“My thanks, Commander.” Torvig's metal-toed feet clacked over the deck and Tuvok followed him, carrying the errant container in both hands. He expected the ensign to join the maintenance team from McKinley, but instead the Choblik used the artificial claw-like appendage on the end of his prehensile tail to open a hatch into another annex of the engineering deck, one of the auxiliary support bays.

Torvig made quick work of stacking his containers and took the last one from Tuvok with a bob of his head. “Thank you again, sir. I can take it from here.”

However, Tuvok made no move to leave, instead
looking around the bay. “Were you not among the crew granted opportunity for shore leave, Ensign?”

“I was,” Torvig replied, opening the cases. “I chose to refuse. As we are in stand-down mode for the next few days, I hoped to use the time to work on a . . . lower-priority project.”

Tuvok noticed a mechanical shape suspended in a work frame nearby, draped in shadows where the lamps surrounding it were inactive. It was immediately familiar to him: two almost spherical pods of dull metals, a cluster of stocky manipulator limbs hanging loosely below the main body. A spider-like form, inert and silent.

“Lights,” he ordered, and the lamps snapped on, revealing the shape of the alien mechanoid known as SecondGen White-Blue. When Tuvok had first encountered this machine-creature, it had moved with life and intent and ready intelligence; but now it was nothing but dead metal.

“I kept him in storage for a while,” Torvig explained, almost guiltily. “Down on cargo deck three. But it didn't feel right.” Tuvok said nothing as the ensign nervously fiddled with a photonic probe. “Commander Ra-Havreii talked about dismantling him, but I am uncertain if he was making an exaggerated statement for comedic effect. . . .”

“Anything is possible.” On an impulse he couldn't immediately quantify, Tuvok reached out a hand and placed it on the motionless form of the machine. White-Blue was an artificial intelligence, the product of a synthetic species from the Beta Quadrant known as the Sentries. Created long ago by a now-deceased race of organic beings, the Sentry Coalition had made first contact with the
Titan
out past Canis Major; in
the aftermath of that event, the being White-Blue had been granted permission to remain on board the starship as a guest. The AI had later assisted the
Titan
crew during their encounter with the alien terraforming construct known as Brahma-Shiva, at great personal risk; but it had been at the planet Ta'ith near the Vela Pulsar that Tuvok had truly come to know the mind of the mechanoid. Together, one organic brain and one synthetic, they had briefly shared consciousness with a machine known as One One Six in a risky attempt to prevent the destruction of the planet. White-Blue had sacrificed its core intellect, transferring itself into One One Six in order to save Ta'ith from destruction. All that remained of the machine-form now was its physical “droneframe,” the databanks and positronic mind within it apparently empty.

Tuvok drew back his hand from the cold metal. “Ensign, what do you hope to achieve here?”

Torvig blinked, taken aback by the question. “I considered White-Blue to be a friend, sir. I feel it is only right to attempt to reconstruct his consciousness.” He nodded to a portable computer core. “A backup version of his core processes exists in this device. In time I hope to restore him to an active state.”

“Curious,” Tuvok continued. “Mister Torvig, if an organic being you considered a friend was also lost in such a manner, would you also try to reconstruct him?”

“I know what you're saying,” Torvig replied. “That White-Blue has . . .
died
and that I should accept it. But I see no reason to. He is a synthetic intellect, sir. He doesn't adhere to the same laws of existence as we organics. He's
software,
not
hardware
. And I think I can reboot him.”

“Have you considered what you will have if you succeed?” Tuvok glanced back at the silent machine. “The being that we knew has gone. Any new version will be only a facsimile, without the experiences that shaped the original White-Blue.”

Torvig was silent for a long moment. “You may be right, Commander. But I owe it to him to make the attempt.”

Tuvok wondered how much of the Choblik's desire to follow this path stemmed from his own needs rather than any altruistic desire to reanimate the Sentry; Torvig's people were a species of demi-intelligent arboreal life that had been cybernetically enhanced to the level of true sentience, and it was fair to say that his origins made it difficult for him to connect with other beings. In White-Blue, a fully engineered life-form, Torvig had found something of a kindred spirit, and he had difficulty letting that go.

“I wish you success, Mister Torvig,” Tuvok said. “But I caution you; we must all eventually live with the losses of those close to us. It is the nature of all existence, organic or synthetic.”

*  *  *

In the corridor beyond, Tuvok turned toward the turbolift to find the hulking, muscular form of Chief Petty Officer Dennisar approaching him. The big Orion nodded as he saw him. “Sir? A moment?” He offered the Vulcan a padd.

“Is there a problem, Chief?”

Dennisar shook his head. “I'm just the messenger, Commander. A signal came in for you from Starfleet, priority one, personal and urgent.”

Tuvok raised an eyebrow. “You could have relayed it to me from the bridge.”

“No, sir,” said the Orion. “It's encrypted, a text file. For your eyes only. Commander Vale asked me to bring it to you personally.”

He took the padd and saw the warning flash displayed on the screen. As Dennisar had stated, the message required Tuvok's thumbprint on a reader plate and his personal security authorization.

His task complete, the Orion gave a nod and returned to a waiting turbolift.

Tuvok glanced around; he was now alone in the corridor. He tapped the reader and spoke quietly. “Authorization: Tuvok-Pi-Alpha. Decrypt.”

The padd chimed, and the lines of the message spooled out across the screen, dense strings of nonsense text re-forming into readable words. The Vulcan was no stranger to such coded messages; in earlier years, he had received communications in such a fashion during his missions while undercover in the Maquis. But those days were long behind him.

He was looking at new orders from the highest levels of Starfleet Command, a covert mandate that required his immediate acceptance, no questions asked. He was to depart the
U.S.S.
Titan
in less than two hours, then to report to Starbase One in civilian attire to board a transport heading out of the Sol system. The orders concluded with a set of rendezvous coordinates in the Alpha Centauri system and a warning to reveal nothing of the message's contents to anyone.

Tuvok read the text a second time, committing it to memory, and then activated the padd's erase function.

It was a long moment before he turned away and set off.

*  *  *

Velk was only aware that the airtram had lifted off by the motion of the shaft of sunlight through the portal in the hull. The flyer's inertial compensators kept everything within it perfectly stable; he refused to travel any other way.

The Tellarite didn't like matter transporters. The concept of being discorporated and shot through the ether to be rebuilt somewhere else sat poorly with him. Galif jav Velk was reluctant to give up that degree of control over himself, to rely on someone else to take brief ownership of his molecules. Unless it was absolutely unavoidable, Velk traveled by shuttle or flyer, and he cared little for those he might inconvenience because of it.