Against the Wind
By Michael Marek
Story concepts by Michael and Charlotte Marek

     It may sound like a funny thing for a Commander in Starfleet to say, but I don’t like command. I didn’t join Starfleet to command a starship. I joined to become a scientist. The fact that I sometimes end up in command situations, through no ambition of my own, is just an unpleasant fact of life I have to deal with.
     I was thinking about how much I dislike command halfway through commanding the evening shift on the USS Crazy Horse, on a shakedown cruise just out of our 18-month-long refit.
     I love serving as Science Officer, collaborating with my colleagues in our various science labs. I know most of them really well. I picked most of them to serve in my department on the Crazy Horse. But when you command the watch, you have to deal with engineering and tactical and helm and navigation.      But it is “good experience” for me, and the ship was an officer short, so the senior officers were rotating command of the evening shift, 1600-0000 hours. That means once every four or five days, I got stuck in charge.
     Oh, did I say that my husband, Michael, had just been promoted to Captain? The really unusual and classified top-secret deal under which the former captain had almost never visited the ship was made obsolete when the Cardassian War ended. The old captain got promoted “upstairs” and Mike was finally awarded the title for the job he’d pretty much been doing for the last nine years.
     So, there I was, sitting in the Captain’s chair, worrying about what might go wrong……
     “Commander,” said the communications officer. “I have an incoming subspace message. It’s coded as a distress message, but it’s addressed as a private message to the Captain.”
     “Who’s it from?” I asked.
     “I can’t tell, sir. It’s coded…really private.”
     I paused for a few moments to consider the options.
     “Notify the captain,” I ordered.

     “Captain on the bridge.”
     I still wasn’t used to hearing that phrase in reference to myself but I made it a point not to smile as I walked out from the Ready Room.
     The USS Crazy Horse was only two days out of spacedock where the ship had undergone an extensive refit. Nobody had been more surprised than me when our captain accepted promotion and I was offered the post. The Captain, who we were getting used to calling “The Commodore,” still provided tasking to the Crazy Horse on occasion, given the unique and highly classified nature of The Commodore’s duties. In some ways, not much changed, other than the décor and technology of the ship.
     Most of the Crazy Horse crew from its previous five-year voyage was back on board following temporary duties during the refit. I asked many to return, given the effective teamwork we had built up over the years. A couple of them were determined by Starfleet to be unsuited for any duty other than the Crazy Horse.
     With my promotion, the ship’s artificial intelligence and second officer, Moira, had moved up to first officer. I hadn’t filled the Second Officer’s job yet, allowing the senior officers to rotate command of the evening shift.
     Because my wife, Charlotte, was the officer of the watch that evening, I was on my own and had spent a couple of hours in the ready room, sorting through paperwork that had accumulated during the last few hectic days.

     “Mike,” I said, standing to meet my husband as he approached the center seat. “It’s definitely coded as a distress signal, but the sender refuses to speak to anybody but you.”
     “Let’s see what it’s all about,” he said. I was glad he decided to take the message on the bridge rather than in the ready room. It was a distress message, after all. I threw a cue to the communications officer who nodded back at us to indicate that the circuit was open.
     “This is Captain Marek of the starship Crazy Horse. Please identify yourself.”
     “Mike, you old spacedog,” came a gravelly voice back, raising a few eyebrows on the bridge. The signal was audio only. “It’s Josh Kipling. I hear you’re coming up in the world. Married, finally. Got your own ship, finally.”
     “Good to hear from you, too, Josh,” Mike answered evenly, although he was smiling. Kipling was a friend of his from Starfleet Academy days but he had dropped out of Starfleet after a few months as an ensign. He’d been on our wedding guest list, but we weren’t able to locate him to deliver an invitation.
     “I doubt that this is just a congratulatory call,” Mike continued. “What can we do for you?”
     “Something has come up that…I need some help on,” Kipling replied, dropping the pleasantries. “You remember our pledge on graduation night?”
     “I remember, Josh.”
     “Good. I’m sending details in a coded file. You know the password.”
     “I’m sure I do,” Mike answered, running his hand through his slightly graying red hair. “Are you OK, Josh ?”
     “So far,” he chuckled. “It’s not terminal, not yet at least. But don’t take too long to get the ball rolling. Things could get dicey, fast.”
     “A-firm,” Mike acknowledged, unconsciously falling back on a term used by Starfleet Academy cadets.
     “Kipling out.”
     “WHAT was that all about?” I asked as soon as the circuit closed. “Is it a distress call or not?”
     “That’s what I’m going to find out,” Mike said and retraced his steps to the ready room.

     Josh’s information was brief and not completely revealing. He was stranded on the surface of an uninhabited planet around a star identified only as P3X259. He had no way to get back to his ship in orbit, the S.S. Iberia, through which he was relaying communications. Nobody else was with him, either on the planet or on the ship. Something in the atmosphere of the planet was scattering transporter beams so he could not trigger his ship remotely to beam him up. He implied that he had found something remarkable and didn’t want to call in just any ship to recover him and whatever his prize was. He had survival rations for a few more days.
     After reviewing Josh’s information, I held a brief conversation with the Admiralty talking, it turned out, with Admiral Janeway, recently promoted and thus holding down the night shift.
     “Mr. Kipling is a private citizen,” stated Janeway, shaking her head. “Starfleet has no obligation to pull his fat out of the fire.
     “On the other hand,” she mused, tapping her fingers on her desk, “Crazy Horse is on a shakedown cruise, and I owe you a favor. So that’s where we’ll leave it. You already have discretion as to your course for the next three weeks. No specific tasking other than ironing out the refit bugs.”
     “Understood, Admiral,” I said, having gotten the best I could expect from her.
     “The Iberia’s coordinates are in unsurveyed space,” she cautioned. “We can’t honestly call it Federation territory but nobody else claims it either. Be careful out there, Michael. Janeway out.”

     Another thing I hate is unpleasant surprises. That’s what Kipling’s message was. Mike disappeared into the ready room for over an hour. I know he talked with Starfleet, because the bridge crew had to make the connection for him. Then he came out and ordered a course change and speed increase to warp seven. No explanation, just a course and speed change.
      “Any…special precautions, sir?” I asked, giving him a look intended to ask “what’s going on?”
     “There is no emergency at this time,” he said cryptically.      “All standard procedures in effect.”
     I was itching to know what was going on, but I judged it would be better to ask in private. Although I don’t like it, I know that there are times that not everybody on the bridge is supposed to know what is going on. Of course, they knew that something was going on, because everybody heard the original message.
     What was ahead of us on our new course? I checked for myself from a science station at the rear of the bridge. A whole lot of nothing was ahead of us. About five days ahead of us, at our present speed, was a white dwarf star. It had never been surveyed, at least not close up.
     My darling husband was already in bed and asleep when I got back to our quarters after Bravo shift ended. I put a pop-up reminder on my calendar to talk to him about Mr. Kipling.

     I actually didn’t think much about Josh over the next few days. Crazy Horse was five days away from the system where he was, assuming continued travel at warp seven. I ordered our course changed and sent an automatic message to Josh that we were on our way. It didn’t seem to be a very big deal, actually. Josh always had a tendency for theatrics. We would swing through the system where he was waiting, pick him up, and be on our way in no more than two or three hours. The shuttle launch would be good training, in itself, given that the shuttles had also been refitted.
     After her late night watch, my wife was still asleep when I arose the next morning. Alpha Shift begins at 0800 and I always made it a point to be on the bridge promptly. In theory, I could juggle duties so that, as Captain, I did not command a watch. In practice, I was used to commanding one of the shifts myself and I liked it. The lack of a second officer allowed me to delay giving up my watch.
     On the other hand, as the situation allowed, I often left the bridge in the hands of a more junior officer during parts of Alpha Shift, monitoring their efforts on the PADD I carried everywhere with me. It’s both a good training opportunity for them and a chance for me to regularly visit and informally inspect various parts of the ship.
     At 0750 I met commander Moira in front of the captain’s chair for the shift change briefing -- kind of a “here’s what’s going on” report from the outgoing shift to the incoming shift. Similar briefings were going on at duty stations all over the ship. At 0759, Moira and I held what was generally our most formal conversation of the day.
     “Commander, I relieve you,” I said, indicating my readiness to assume direct command of the bridge for the coming eight hours.
     “Captain,” Moira replied, “the bridge is yours.”
     It was a busy shift for me. The shakedown cruise required multiple tests of all equipment under varying conditions. It was often necessary to design complicated tests to ensure that they were sufficiently rigorous. I liked to be present when the major systems received their stress tests and was not above crawling the Jeffries Tubes myself to inspect the results.

     I didn’t get to talk to Mike about Kipling until lunchtime. We met in Roddenberry’s, he having left somebody else to keep an eye on things on the bridge.
     “So, what’s the deal?” I asked.
     “No big deal,” he replied, shaking his head. “Josh somehow got himself stuck on a planet. We’ll just kind of…come across…his ship, contact him on the planet and give him a lift back to the ship. Starfleet ships do that kind of thing all the time.”
     “Where was he when we were trying to find him for our wedding?” I groused.
     “Josh apparently won this ship in a poker game on Argelius. He’s been out around the edge of the Federation ever since. It’s not hard for a private ship to get out of subspace contact. They don’t have anywhere near the communication range we do.”
     “I assume you expect to find him at P3X259?” I asked and Mike nodded yes. “Then why would he contact us? There is one colonized planet and two space stations closer than us.”
     “I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “But I do know that on our graduation night, Starburst Squadron promised to always be there for each other. Billy and Paula each have their own ships now, but Crazy Horse is a lot closer than either of them at the moment. It will be an easy rescue. I couldn’t really say no.”
     “I’ve heard about those ‘private ships at the edge of the Federation,’” I said. “They tend to have Orion connections.”
     “I can’t imagine Josh working with criminals,” Mike said, quietly. “I wish he’d stayed in Starfleet.”
     “Yah,” I agreed, with a smile tugging at my lips. “He could be coming up in the world, with a ship and a wife, finally.

     We approached P3X259 near the middle of Alpha Shift, dropping out of warp at the edge of the diminutive star system. Stellar Cartography began a standard survey of the system, since no Starfleet star had apparently ever done more than a distant flyby.
     In the half hour it took us to reach the one M-Class planet, the survey revealed an ancient white dwarf star with only a handful of satellites. The planet for which we were bound was the largest; to be M-Class it had to be much closer to its primary than Earth was to Sol. Its year would be hardly more than 100 Earth days.
     As an M-class planet, the world was borderline . Sensors reported moderate amounts of plant life but sparse animal life, raising questions about how viable an ecosystem the world retained. Charlotte speculated that it had been terraformed and that the process was breaking down, possibly from a lack of the kind of ecological maintenance that terraformed worlds often require.
     On the other hand, there were many cities on the planet, raising the prospect of a dead civilization or an abandoned world.
     “I have one human life sign on the planet and contact with a ship in orbit,” reported the tactical officer, putting the image of the ship on the main screen. “Transponder code identifies the ship as the SS Iberia.”
     Josh had told me in a message years earlier that the Iberia was an old Boomer ship, that is, a Class J starship that had begun its life as the traveling home of a family of traders. Refitted with warp-six engines, it still took weeks to cross distances that the Crazy Horse usually spanned in days. The ship was long and narrow with a partial load of cargo pods fastened to its central shaft. It was scarred and battered looking. It was obviously many years since the Iberia had seen the inside of a spacedock.
     “General hail,” I directed.
     “Reply from the planet,” the tactical officer said a moment later, nodded to indicate an affirmative answer. “Audio only - from a communicator pin.”
     “Put me on,” I said. “Josh Kipling, this is the USS Crazy Horse.”
     “Welcome to the little star system that time forgot,” came back Josh’s rough voice. “You sure took your time getting here.”
     “You can’t complain about five days at warp seven,” I answered, knowing that he was not really complaining but just being Josh. “What’s your status?”
      “Running out of food. Running out of water. Running away from bad guys. Anticipating a sight for sore eyes.”
     I tapped a contact on the arm of the captain’s chair.
     “Transporter room, can you get a lock on the com signal on the planet?”
     “No, Sir,” the transporter chief replied after a moment. “Something’s scattering the confinement beam in the atmosphere.”
     “Josh,” I continued. “I’m sending down a shuttle to get you.”
     “Finally,” he groused. “Uh, tell them to be careful. The flight down was tricky.”
      “In what way?” I asked.
     “Well,” Josh began hesitantly, “there’s some kind of automatic defense system still working on this planet. My landing boat got shot down. It’s some kind of laser, I think. The beam has to hold on the target for a few seconds to do damage. My old crate wasn’t maneuverable enough to stay out of their way.”

     Moira led the mission to rescue Kipling, onboard the shuttle Polaris. As first officer, away team missions were now her responsibility. Lieutenant Commander Samantha Neal was also assigned to the mission, as pilot.
     I was not impressed by finding out at the last minute that there was a likelihood of danger to the away team.
     “Your friend could have told you a lot sooner,” I told Mike privately. “He made it sound like some kind of engine trouble but it turns out that he was shot down.”
     “Be that as it may…” Mike said, obviously not happy about it himself.
     “The whole things smells fishy to me,” I added, mostly to myself.
     “How do you mean?” Mike asked.
     I called up survey results on a PADD I was holding.
     “This is probably a terraformed world,” I explained, pointing out several details on the screen that supported my conclusion. “You almost never find intelligent life in white dwarf systems. Whoever built those cities probably came from somewhere else. If that’s true, most likely they didn’t die out; they just left.”
     “How old are the cities?” he asked.
     “Around 15,000 years, but very well preserved.”

     I made it a point to be at Science Station One on the bridge to monitor the shuttle flight. We had heavy sensor coverage on the shuttle as it entered the atmosphere, its shields protecting it from the heat generated as the ship descended into the thicker and thicker air. About the time the shuttle reached 30 kilometers above the ground, the science station began beeping with alarm.
     “The shuttle is under fire,” I called out to the bridge in general. We’d been expecting it, but it still came as a shock. A half dozen widely spaced batteries on the surface were firing intermittent bursts at the shuttle.
     “It looks like conventional high powered lasers,” I added a moment later. “Each battery fires for three seconds and recharges for six.”
     As I finished, Moira hailed us from the shuttle.
     “Go ahead, Polaris,” Mike answered. The signal was not so good, probably the result of the high-energy laser bursts on the hull of the ship. Each time the science station showed a laser hit on the shuttle I could hear Sam, who was presumably piloting, cuss in the background.
     “We’re under heavy attack,” Moira reported through the noise. “Shields are at 66% and dropping. Evasive maneuvers aren’t helping much. Whoever the computer is down below is doing a darn good job of holding the lasers on target. We’re not maneuverable enough to dodge them.      Moderate damage but nothing vital - yet.”
     “Abort the mission,” Mike ordered. “Get the heck out of there.”
     “You don’t have to tell us twice,” Moira answered. Sensors showed Polaris accelerate upward rapidly. At precisely 32 kilometers the barrage stopped.

     I met the Polaris in the landing bay. The little ship was heavily scorched.
     “What a way to spend my first away team mission as first officer,” quipped Moira as she exited the craft.
     “I’m sorry, sir,” said Samantha, also exiting the craft. She shook her head and thumped her fist on the side of the shuttle. “I did my best but this…heap wasn’t designed for tight maneuvering. You’d need a combat fighter to dodge those lasers.”
     “Samantha did a fine job,” affirmed Moira. “Unless you want to consider returning fire, we are unlikely to safely get a shuttlecraft down to the surface.”
     No, I didn’t want to return fire against the ground batteries. Legally, the planet was not abandoned, but just unoccupied. The fact that there WERE automated defenses had to be taken as testimony of the former occupants wishes concerning their property. Under space law, I could justify a rescue mission doing no damage. Firing back on the defense systems was a much thornier issue, particularly if the rightful owners ever returned.
     I thanked them both for their efforts and dismissed them but as Moira was about to enter the corridor outside the landing bay I called her back.
     “Have you had the opportunity to analyze the attack from the surface?” I asked.
     “I have now,” she answered with a smile, probably having scanned the data in the moment between my question and her answer.
     I put my hand to my chin and stroked, enjoying the feel of my new beard.
     “Correlate against the performance characteristics of the Diana,” I said, directing her attention to a non-Starfleet ship nestled in a corner of the landing bay. It was actually the same model flyer I had flown with Josh in Starburst Squadron all those years ago. When Charlotte and I were married, I modified the one-seat design to add a second station behind the first. Call it a hobby, but with the non-standard modifications I’ve made over the years, the Diana is the hottest ship I’ve ever flown.
     “Hum,” mused Moira. “An interesting idea. The Diana’s performance characteristics are much superior to any shuttle we have on board. I would estimate an 82% chance of safely reaching the surface and returning, assuming optimal piloting. Shall I prepare to take her down?”
     I was still stroking my chin.
     “I’ll fly her, Moira,” I said.
     “Over my rotting corpse, if I had one,” she spat back. “Captains don’t do rescues. If one person goes, it’s the first officer, which is me, buddy boy.”
     “Nobody can fly that ship better than me,” I countered. “Even with your reaction time, I can do better. It’s quirky. Very quirky. You wouldn’t have any time to practice, and no room for error.”
     “Get it through your thick head, Michael. You’re the captain. You can’t do this mission.”
     “I have to,” I said. “It’s my duty, from long before I served on this ship.
     “Besides,” I added, trying to convince her with a grin, “I’ll do it while I’m off duty. I guarantee I won’t miss Alpha shift. Think of it as shore leave.”
     Moira was looking at me quizzically.
     “Plus…” I was thinking fast. “You can’t really be the one to go. The regs are clear that in a non-emergency situation no officer can lead two successive away team sorties. Since you CAN’T take the mission and since nobody else could possibly fly the Diana in combat without hours and hours of training, I have to be the one to go.”
     Moira was about to make a retort when my communicator chirped.
     “Mr. Kipling calling for you,” the com officer advised.
     “Put him through,” I said and, after pausing a moment to allow the circuit to be opened, I addressed Josh. “We had to abort the mission, Josh.”
     “I saw,” he replied, dryly. “Quite the fireworks display. So what now?”
     “We’re working on another plan,” I told him. “What’s your status?”
     “I’m running out of time,” he said bluntly. “Something’s stalking me, day and night. I’ve stayed ahead of them, but I can’t afford to sleep or they might get me….”
     “Just hang on a littler bit longer,” I urged. “We’re not giving up.”
     When we closed the connection, Moira was glaring at me. She spoke first.
     “I’ve reanalyzed the attack and every bit of data I have on your flyer,” she said, glowering at me. “I am forced to agree that I would not have significantly better odds of success than you would in piloting this mission.”
     “Moira,” I said quietly. “Josh is my friend. By the regs, maybe I shouldn’t go but by everything that’s right, I have to be the one to go down there. And yes, there’s probably something fishy going on and I have to be the one to straighten it out, even if it gets Josh in trouble.”
     “I understand about loyalty, “ she replied slowly. “I really do. Go get your damn friend. But if I have to do reams of paperwork for losing my captain….”
     “You won’t,” I said, with a smile and a wink. “I promise.”
     One down and one to go, I remember thinking, not looking forward to telling Charlotte about my plans.

     “Are you crazy?” I shouted. We were in our quarters and my darling had just told me about his ridiculous plan to fly his toy spaceship down to the planet to get that jerk, Kipling.
     “I’m not crazy,” he replied. My husband rarely raises his own voice. He always seems to be able to rationalize why he is right and everybody else is wrong.
     “Let somebody else go get him,” I retorted.
     “The Diana’s the only ship we’ve got that’s maneuverable enough. I’m the only person who has flown it enough to take it into combat.”
     “We can go somewhere and get a real rescue ship,” I urged.
     Mike shook his head. “Something’s after Josh. I don’t know what. He needs to be off that planet in hours, not days.”
     I thought for several seconds.
     “It will be dangerous,” I said quietly.
     “Not worse than a dozen times when we were behind Cardassian lines,” Mike said. “ Charlotte , what do you want me to do? Leave him down there to die?”
     What could I say to that? I actually said quite a bit more, but ended up grudgingly agreeing that Mike had to go.

     It had been less than two weeks since I had last taken the Diana out. Our refit had been done in Earth orbit and Charlotte and I sometimes used the little ship as an alternative to transporters. When we had a few days of leave, it made our time off a little more memorable when we could spend a couple of hours en-route.
     So, the little ship was at peak performance as I swept down from the Crazy Horse, first into low orbit and then into the atmosphere. Shields and inertial stabilizers did their jobs as Diana slowed to a few multiples of the speed of sound. I wanted to be moving fast for most of the trip to elude weapons lock as long as possible. There had to be a lower altitude limit to the laser targeting, probably somewhat above the tallest buildings. I figured I’d decelerate heavily after the barrage ended and just before landing.
     The coordinates Josh had given me were programmed in and I had an approach vector planned. The city to which I was bound had apparently been a seaport. At any rate, it was ocean-side with a large harbor. I would enter the city from the harbor mouth then fly the avenues between buildings to what appeared to be a park or town square. Josh said he would be waiting there.
     At 31.7 kilometers above the ground, the lasers began firing.
     Diana’s shields did a pretty good job of deflecting the beams, but any shields can be worn down over time. I had several minutes yet before I could possibly get below their firing range. Moments after the first laser blast hit, other batteries locked on, one by one. It was time for evasive flying.
     There is an art to executing evasive maneuvers that are both random enough to avoid predictability, yet systematic enough to move a ship in the direction one wants to go. It was not a new challenge to me. I’d first helmed a ship in combat 20 years earlier and had refreshed that experience more recently during the Dominion War. I skipped and dodged around the sky, often managing to go several seconds between laser impacts, yet all the time working my way toward the surface. I kept the inertial compensators on medium, accepting a rough ride in exchange for the additional power that could be allocated to shields and engines.
     I was actually feeling pretty confident, due to the luck I’d had so far in evading the weapons fire. That confidence didn’t last long, though. I was making my way down through twelve kilometers altitude, when the Diana lurched, smoke flashed outside and cockpit alarms blared…..

     I have learned to be cool under fire. When I have a job to do, I can concentrate on the job and not end up worrying too much about the danger. When, however, people I care about are in danger and I am safe, it drives me crazy. I hated that Mike had to go down to P3X259. I understood why, I guess, but I dreaded the possible outcome of the flights down and back.
     We were monitoring his progress from the bridge, of course. Moira was in the Captain’s chair, legs crossed and hands on the armrests. I was at my usual place at Science Station One, at the back of the bridge.
     “He’s been hit,” Dolores said from the Tactical station, adding, “there’s debris falling away from the Diana.”
     I think my heart fluttered.
     “Lock ship’s phasers on the ground batteries, and hold for my word,” ordered Moira. Was she actually thinking of firing?
     “He’s still maneuvering,” reported Dolores a moment later. “He hasn’t lost engines, at least not completely.”
     I think I then remembered to breathe.
     “He’s at eight kilometers now. Six,” Dolores kept up a running report. “Sensors indicate his starboard engine is overheating. “
     “Moira…” I began.
     “He’s doing OK, Dear,” Moira tried to reassure me. “His shields are still at 72%. He’s taken only one major hit and a couple of dozen minor ones. His odds are getting better every second that passes.”

     The laser firing began scaling back as I passed 3.2 kilometers. One after another of the batteries stopped firing on me as I dropped below their horizons. As I swung wide, so that I could enter the harbor straight on, the last of the laser cannons cut off, probably to protect the buildings from coming under fire.
     I was moving slower than I’d expected to be at this point because I’d had to scale back my starboard engine to one-third power after the hit it had taken. Even so, I had to break heavily with those one-and-a-third engines to get down to a reasonable cruising speed for the flight between buildings.
     The city was festooned with skyscrapers, but not exactly like the old cities of Earth. There was no glass on them, and they were not limited to a small core area at the center of the metroplex. Each had a unique shape, broader at the base and tapering as it rose. Aside from that, the various buildings looked nothing alike.
     It took me almost ten minutes to make my way to the open area that, for all the world, looked like a park. I took the opportunity to check in with the Crazy Horse.
     “I hope you weren’t too worried,” I said after establishing contact and reporting my status.
     “Not at all,” replied Moira evenly. Sometimes her A.I. unflappability drives me crazy.
     “This engine’s going to need some work,” I advised, twisting to glance back through the cockpit cowl at the engine housing. “I’ll run a diagnostic when I get down, but the laser blew off the outside skin of the engine.”
     “Keep us posted, Captain,” Moira said in closing. I assumed she used my rank as a reminder that I had promised to be home in time for my shift on the bridge.
     Josh ran out to meet me as I settled in for a landing and opened the cowl of the cockpit.
     “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” he called out in his rough voice as I quickly ran through the post-landing checklist.
     He was already inspecting the engine as I stepped down to the ground. A quick handshake was about all the additional greeting we exchanged.
     The Diana could fly without the duranium covering on the engine housing. The damage inside the engine was scattered across several points but none of it was too bad. I had tools I needed to fix her up in the emergency repair kit. All it would take would be some time.

     When we got word that Mike was down safely, I was ready to leave the bridge. My shift was over but I had been there under my prerogative as Science Officer.
     I wasn’t sure where I was going, but I ended up in Roddenberry’s, our ship’s 10-forward lounge, talking to Elaine.
     “I hate waiting like this,” I told her.
     “You have confidence in Michael, don’t you?” Elaine asked.
     “Yes, but that doesn’t make it easier when he’s in danger and I’m not.”
     “Have the tables ever been reversed?” she asked, signaling one of her staff to bring over our respective beverages of choice.
     “How do you mean?”
     “Has Michael ever had to wait while you were in danger?”
     “Well, yes,” I answered, after a moment. “We’re in Starfleet. That happens from time to time.”
     “Tell me about one of them,” Elaine prompted.
     I paused for a moment. “There was the magnetar incident.”
     “I don’t remember that,” said Elaine.
     “It was when the Crazy Horse was in the Gamma Quadrant a couple of years ago,” I said. “Now that you mention it, you weren’t with us on that mission, were you?”
     “I was visiting friends in Ottawa ,” Elaine replied, nodding her head.
     “We were there with the Federation task force, helping the various worlds rebuild after the defeat of the Founders,” I explained……

      I rolled over in bed, bumping into a medium-sized lump in the covers. The cat meowed and jumped to the floor...the cat?
      “We don’t have a cat,” I said to myself. “At least not outside the holodeck…”
      Mike called from the bathroom of our quarters aboard the USS Crazy Horse, “What are you mumbling about?”

     I told him about the cat, and he grinned. “But you don’t like cats,” he laughed.
     “Maybe it was a nightmare,” I replied, reluctant to get out of the snuggly warm bed. Suddenly, I was wide-awake and sitting upright. “I need to get to the lab. What time is it, anyway?”
     By this time, Mike was sitting on the edge of the bed. “I changed the duty roster...”
     “Oh, thanks for telling me.” My voice dripping with sarcasm, I slid back under the covers.
     “However,” Mike continued, “you still have to get up and put on your uniform. ‘Senior Staff Breakfast Before Major Action,’ remember?”
Maybe I had let it slip my mind on purpose. It felt too much like a last meal before execution, especially now that the Cardassian war was over. My First Officer husband, however, had a loose interpretation of what constituted “major action.”
     “OK,” I sighed. “What flavor is the marmalade this time?”
     After our meal, to which we had invited the Federation High Commissioner, we prepared to approach the Wormhole. Many ships had traveled through the home of the Prophets to reach the Gamma Quadrant before, but this was our first time.
     “Lt. Willmerdinger, send the tachyon burst to activate the opening,” intoned my dear husband. With Moira’s help, I prepared to take more astrometric readings per second than I ever recorded before. Sure, the Federation had lots of readings from the inside of the wormhole, but I wanted to see if I could discover something new. Maybe an anomaly that hadn’t been there before Captain Sisko disappeared.
      The path we followed through the wormhole was a swirl of beautiful colors, but it was so foreign an experience that it was hard to register what we were seeing. Oh well, I thought. Maybe later analysis would turn up something interesting.
     As we exited the wormhole, I heard a sudden, loud, gasp. I realized that several of the bridge crew, including myself, were only then starting to breathe again. I could imagine how it had looked through the huge window in Roddenberry’s to the lucky crewmembers able to gather there for the “crossing."

     “Well, we made it,” the obvious being stated by The Commissioner, as he hugged Moira’s simulacrum, one arm around her shoulder. “Now to Bltzbk II for some diplomatic fun and games.”
      The rest of the trip to the planet was almost boring compared to the flight through the Celestial Temple , but we had enough negotiation preparations to keep us busy. As I tried to decide which dress uniform to wear, I asked Mike if we really had to attend all the ceremonies.
     “Probably not all of them, but at least the opening session and any banquets arranged to celebrate whatever,” Mike answered. “We’re just the taxi service, not the negotiators.”
     “Well, there won’t be any problem getting volunteers to beam down for food and drink,” I observed. “You may have to chain some of them to their duty stations.”

     As we approached some of the other crew waiting for a turbolift to the shuttlebay, they smiled as they caught the tail end of our conversation.
     “Let me tell them how we really met,” Mike grinned at me, turning to address the others. “The way she ignored me when I said excuse me, not once but twice. How I stood over her completely oblivious head and cleared my throat, loudly. How I finally got her attention by shaking her arm to which she growled with annoyance.”
      “Hmph. My powers of concentration are legendary,” I retorted. “The only reason I made it through Starfleet Academy was my ability to shut out all the noise.” As part of a failed experiment in off-campus housing, my room for two years had been next to a marina. Halyards and metal flag hooks slapping against sailboat masts, rumbling motorboat engines, air horns, whistles...I thought boating was supposed to be relaxing.
“Oh, so I’m just background noise?” Mike emoted as we stepped onto the shuttledeck.
     I sighed and smiled. “Michael, one of these days you’re going to consider yourself lucky to have married me. Now get into the shuttle so we can get this over with.”
     I think Mike was more bored by the opening speeches and diplomats’ posturing than I was. Afterward, I teasingly asked him what his favorite part had been.
     “Oh, definitely the Commissioner’s speech,” he replied. “It’s amazing how he managed to explain tripping up the stairs as part of his ‘presentation.’” Mike and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.

     “We’re not going to be able to stay here,” Josh said, looking around nervously. He had an Orion trader’s bag slung over his shoulder and he never let it get out of his reach.
      “Why not?” I asked , my head buried in the starboard impulse manifold.
     “The sun’s setting and, well, there are things that come out at night,” he said, hesitantly.
     I straightened up and looked at him.
     “What kind of things?”
     “I haven’t seen them close up,” he answered, not looking me in the face.
     “Josh,” I said forcefully. “You need to tell me what’s going on here.”
     “I haven’t seen them close up,” he repeated. “They come out at night. Maybe they’re alive. Maybe they’re robots. They tore apart my shuttle and hauled it off. I think they’re somehow the custodians of the city. When something’s here that isn’t supposed to be here, they clean it up.”
     “These are the things that you say are stalking you?”
     “Yah,” he mumbled. “It takes them an hour or so to show up, but your ship’s already been here for 40 minutes. We’ll need to move it in a bit.”
     I actually wanted to see these things, whatever they were. We had the Diana ready to move well before her first hour on the ground was up. (I judged that the damaged starboard engine could easily provide the modest amount of power needed, along with the port engine, to float Diana at low speed to another landing spot. Cracking escape velocity was another matter, of course.) Josh was in back and I was the ship’s front seat. The cockpit cowl was still up, but we were ready to take off on a few seconds notice.
     We were nearing the end of twilight when I heard whirring sounds across the park. Lights were flickering in one of the broad avenues between buildings. They were still a quarter kilometer away when they first came into view, first one and eventually three objects, trundling along slowly under their own power. I keyed Diana’s sensors to scan the objects. The objects quickly registered as self-propelled machines.
     “We’d better go, Mike.” Josh prompted.
     From the sounds I heard as I lifted Diana off, it appeared that the robots were talking.

     Yes, I was taking a long time to get around to telling Elaine about the magnetar. I was worried about Mike. Maybe I didn’t want to get to the end of the story too fast.
     Over the next few days, most of the crew kept themselves occupied trying to find things to keep themselves occupied. I had plenty of volunteers who wanted to help analyze the data we had gathered inside the wormhole, as well as some I could assign to surveys, helping to increase our knowledge of the quadrant’s spectacular stellar formations.
  “This is odd,” Moira muttered as I walked behind her. I wasn’t sure if she meant to grab my attention, but she had. All I needed was to have the ship’s computer picking shapes out of gaseous clouds. I glared down at her screen, not seeing the visual scan I expected, but a graph.
     I shrugged. “If you’re designing a carpentry tool, I think your saw has a few teeth missing.”
     Moira turned to me indignantly.
     “Statistically speaking, this would indicate one extra ‘tooth’ every third interval, as opposed to one missing in each of the first and second intervals as you observed.” Moira had the air of someone who is always right, but we were close enough friends that I didn’t let her get away with it very often.
     “What are you analyzing, anyway?” My curiosity was piqued. I looked at the screen next to the one with the graph.
      “A magnetar!” I answered my own question. “Wow, we haven’t been this close to a....”
      Magnetar? I felt like I had when I bumped into the cat that wasn’t there. I lowered my voice by several decibels.
     “This can’t be right. Magnetars emit regular bursts of x-rays and intermittent gamma rays. This one’s got a regular pattern of gamma ray bursts.” I tapped out the rhythm represented by the graph, and laughed. “Care to dance?” I asked Moira.
     “No,” she huffed. “I don’t cha-cha.” Sometimes my sense of humor annoyed her. Like now.
     I continued in a whisper.
      “If this really is a magnetar and not an artificial construct that just looks like a magnetar, then something is either blocking some of the bursts, or creating an extra one periodically.”
     I decided to take a middle-of-the-road stance on the technicalities for the sake of proceeding uninterrupted.
     “We need to, uh, investigate this in person, wouldn’t you say?” I asked.
     Moira’s conspiratorial smirk assured me that she would find a way to have the First Officer assign us both to the away team.

      “The Crazy Horse dropped off Moira, Marina and me, with Samantha as pilot, in a runabout to study the Magnetar while Crazy Horse went back to nursemaid the diplomats,” I told Elaine, continuing my story.
“That was a motley crew,” assayed Elaine, but I ignored her jibe. “So what exactly is a magnetar?”
     I told Elaine that a magnetar is a pulsar, a collapsed remnant of a super-massive star with a magnetic field a trillion times stronger than Earth’s Sun. As the spinning star collapses, it spins faster and faster until it is rotating several times a second. Magnetars are powerful emitters of x-ray and gamma ray bursts.

     Samantha was maneuvering our runabout, the Potomac to pass as close to the surface of the magnetar as was safe so that Moira and I could take precision sensor readings.
     “What would cause a magnetar pulse like that?” Sam asked as she laid in the course.
     “Some kind of resonance,” I answered.
     “The Starfleet astronomical database contains no other examples of magnetars producing anything close to dance rhythms,” added Moira, dryly. “The timing of this rhythm is perfect, to my limits of accuracy, whereas most magnetars are totally unpredictable in their gamma ray emissions.”
     “My bet is that it’s not natural,” I said.
     The runabout swept down toward the surface of the dead star. Our structural integrity fields were at full power to keep tidal forces from pulling us apart.
     The magnetar was hardly ten miles across, glowing darkly in red. It looked a bit like a campfire ember, blurry because it was spinning so fast.
     Moira and I were both busy running the sensors, not talking much. We would evaluate the data we collected after we completed the pass.
     “Two minutes to perigee,” said Samantha, referring to the low point in the orbit.
     I barely heard her and didn’t reply because I was concentrating on the sensor board. My concentration was disturbed, however, when the runabout shuddered.
     “What was THAT?” called out Moira.
     “We’re caught in a tractor beam,” replied Samantha.
      “From where?” I asked. As Science Officer I was in command of the mission and had to take charge.
     “I can’t tell,” said Samantha, who was energetically operating some controls on her panel. “Behind us, but I can’t detect any ship there. If it’s a cloaked ship, all these gamma rays would make it impossible to find.”
     “What’s our course?” I asked.
     “It’s drawing us higher, away from the magnetar,” Samantha answered, with an odd sound to her voice.
     I realized that I was feeling queasy, too. I turned to look at Moira, but could hardly focus my eyes. Her head was lolling back and as I watched she slumped back against her chair. I tried to speak but couldn’t get words out. I was in the process of trying to turn back to look at Samantha when I, too, lost consciousness.

     I landed Diana a couple of kilometers from the park and immediately keyed the recording I had made of the sounds emitted by the robots, tying in the Universal Translator.
     “You are in violation of Ligil law… return all artifacts and you will be permitted to leave…you are in violation of Ligil law…return all artifacts…”
     “Josh?” I prompted, shutting off the audio.
     “What do you know?” he answered with a lopsided grin on his face.      “Talking Droids.”
     “Out of the cockpit,” I ordered, anger creeping into my voice. “I’m tired of you dodging the question. I want to know in detail exactly what is going on here.”
     “Ok, ok,” he tried to calm me as he climbed down.
     “I mean it, Josh! Whatever is going on here stinks to high heaven”
     “I know, I know,” he said, as I also stepped down to the ground. “Here’s the deal. I landed safely the first time.”
     We were standing in a pool of light thrown by lamps recessed into Diana’s hull. I had left them on high, assuming that I would be working on repairs. Josh must have seen me grimace.
     “I know I, well, sort of led you to believe that I was shot down the first time I tried to land,” Josh said. “I actually landed with no problems. I looked around for anything worth salvaging. I found something and when I tried to take off, they fired on me. I landed again, hard, and wrecked my shuttle. Every so often since then I’ve had to scoot to get away from the talking robots.”
     “What did you salvage?” I asked.
     Josh didn’t say anything but reached into his bag. What he drew out… I first thought it was a rock, twice the size of his fist, and wrapped in a thick cloth. It sparkled and flashed shades of green in Diana’s lights.
     “This is an emerald,” Josh said in a hushed voice. “A flawless giant emerald, according to my tricorder.”
     “Do you know what this is?” I gasped and Josh nodded his head. “The robots called this place Ligil…”
     “Ligillium,” said Josh, still nodding.

     “Uuuhhhhh…” groaned somebody. I’m not sure if it was Samantha, Marina or Moira. I was awake, but wished I wasn’t because of a splitting headache.
     One glance outside the runabout showed that we were inside some kind of hangar bay.
     “Somebody’s going to get a piece of my mind,” grumbled Moira. “ Maximum bandwidth.”
     Moira’s simulacrum is organic, sort of, and she seemed as groggy as I felt.
     The engines are completely shut down,” reported Samantha. “Does anybody remember anything?”
     “Just passing out,” I replied. “Moira, what can you tell us?”
     “The Potomac is in atmosphere which is breathable to us,” she said, taking stock of her various sensory registers. “Gravity is .88 of Earth normal. I am picking up absolutely no electromagnetic radiation, which is odd if we are still anywhere within several light years of the magnetar. We have been unconscious approximately 27 minutes.”
     “Something, or somebody, pulled us out of orbit around the magnetar and did something to make us unconscious,” summed up       Marina.
     I tapped my communicator pin and said, “This is the United Federation of Planets runabout Potomac. Hello, we want to talk to somebody.”
     Nothing happened.
     “We come in peace on a mission of scientific exploration...”
     I tried a couple of times more to get somebody’s attention, but either they couldn’t hear us, couldn’t understand us, or didn’t want to answer.
      Moira, meanwhile, was peering out the big front windows of the ship and using her special visual capabilities to scan the walls, ceiling and floor.
     “I see nothing that looks like a camera or microphone,” she reported after a few moments. “It’s hard, however, to predict what they would look like without knowing anything about the culture that made this place.”
     “Does anything look like a door?”
     “Well…”

     “Ligillium has been a legend on space faring worlds for thousands of years,” I pointed out.
     “I’ve been looking for it,” Josh said, gingerly putting the emerald back into his bag. “The Zateral Emerald is one of the most legendary relics in the galaxy, maybe along with the Sword of Kahless, the log of the Starship Eloquim, and the Sacred Hoops of Forstron IV. I spent a month at Memory Alpha last year, looking for any trace. A couple of cryptic references made me think P3X259 might just possibly fit the description left by Raael of Tondus 1,500 years ago… Nobody had ever been here to look around, as far as I could tell, so here I am.
     ”As soon as I got into orbit,” Josh continued with enthusiasm, “I knew I had something. This planet was clearly terraformed. Nothing like this could develop in a white dwarf system.”
     I rubbed my fingers through my beard.
     “I hasten to point out that it is perfectly legal for me to conduct salvage here,” said Josh, straightening up. “Under Federation law this planet is not occupied and obviously hasn’t been for thousands of years. I was perfectly in my rights to try to take the emerald back to the Iberia.”
     “I remind you that we are NOT within the borders of the Federation,” I replied. “It seems to me that whoever built this place left their systems operating. Look around you. The city is in good repair.”
     “Now wait a minute,” Josh began.
     “Is there any doubt in your mind that… call them the Ligilliuns…left security systems in place to prevent looting?”
     “It’s not…”
      “To prevent the emerald from being removed?” I shook my head. “If I had to rule, as Captain of the Crazy Horse, I would have to say that the owners have made their intentions completely clear. This place is NOT abandoned, Josh. It’s just unoccupied for the moment.”

     “I hate Jeffries Tubes,” commented Marina, as we crawled through a cramped access way.
     “They’re not so bad,” I answered, trying to cheer her up. “I’ve had some interesting times in Jeffries Tubes.”
     “These are not Jeffries Tubes,” injected Moira. “They are analogous, but Matt Jeffries had nothing to do with them.”
     We had waited over an hour with no reaction from whoever had parked us in the hangar bay. The engines of the Potomac would not start, for no reason we could determine. We resolved to find out who had committed this hostile act, and take whatever steps were needed to free ourselves.
     Escaping the hangar had been no serious challenge for four competent female Starfleet officers. It was inconvenient that we had to crawl, but even if we had been able to find a regular corridor, it might not have been safe to just sashay down the halls.
     We were now making good time, but were not sure exactly where we were going. Moira was attempting to correlate the various conduits in the tube with directional probabilities.
     As time passed and we encountered no hostile aliens – no aliens of any kind, actually – I guess we got a little less careful. I think it was       Marina that started the girl talk.

     “Oh, I like girl talk,” injected Elaine. “What did you talk about?”
      “I’ll tell you some time when not so many people can overhear us,” I said, glancing around the always-crowded lounge.

     Josh led me to the place where he had found the Zateral Emerald. I would have to call the building a museum; the home of the emerald was a little chamber to one side of the main hall.
     “This is killing me,” he said as he handed the gem to me. I held it for a moment, and then placed it on the stand that had clearly been designed for it. Lights from several directions pierced the emerald, making it glow in a way that was both beautiful and eerie.
     “Mike,” my friend said and when I turned, Josh pointed.
     A figure stood there, although I quickly identified it as a hologram. It was completely alien, but I had the impression of great age, which is funny, considering that it was generated by some sort of computer. It began to speak and the universal translator in my com badge translated.
     “Thank you for replacing the Zateralia. The rules of the Ligil prohibit removal of artifacts on display. You are now free to go with our best wishes.”
        “Huh,” snorted Josh. “Just like that.”
     “Apparently so,” I said, patting my friend on the shoulder. “Let’s go get my ship patched up and get out of here.”

     “So what happened then?” asked Elaine. I had paused in my story as the waitress brought another round of drinks to our table, synthehol for may and who knows what for Elaine.
     “It turns out that the Crazy Horse came to pick us up and discovered us missing,” I explained. “They must have had better sensors because they figured out that there was a cloaked space station in orbit around the magnetar.”
     “Your husband rescued you?” asked Elaine.
     “Not exactly,” I replied. “He had made first contact and was just getting around to asking if these people knew where we were when we dropped in on them.”
     “Dropped in?” asked Elaine, quizzically.
     “Well, actually, we fell through the ceiling,” I confessed. “The Oshontae are several hundred years ahead of us in technology. They were using the magnetar as a power source. That’s why it had an artificial pulsation rhythm.”
     I was about to launch into an explanation of the physics of energy extraction from a magnetar when my communicator chirped.
     “Ensign Calloway on the bridge, Ma’am,” said the communications duty officer on the other end. “The Diana is approaching Crazy Horse. No activity from the batteries on the ground and no casualties on the ship.”

     I felt bad about it, but I did not invite Josh to remain on board Crazy Horse, not even for a few days. I told myself that it was because we had a shakedown flight to complete, but I knew that it was really because he had deceived me about the situation when he asked me to bail him out.
     “It will take me weeks to get back to the frontier,” Josh observed as I escorted him to the transporter room. “And when I get there my shuttle’s gone.”
     “The Iberia has transporters,” I observed.
     “Mike,” Josh said as he stepped up onto the transporter platform. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
     “Legally, you may be right,” I said, evenly. “But you lied to me. There was a whole lot you should have told me up front , and that’s hard to forgive.”
     “You live a sheltered life in Starfleet, Mike,” he replied, shaking his head. “You don’t know what it’s like for civilians out here on the edge. I just barely scrape by while you have unlimited replicator services. I was going to do great things with the money and the fame the emerald would have gotten me. Go back to Earth. Help people. I made some bad choices, yes, but my heart was in the right place.”
     “I know, Josh. It always is. Take care of yourself,” I bade him farewell. Over my shoulder I said to the transporter operator, “Energize.”