Star Trek Starfleet Corps of Engineers - 33 - Collective Hindsight - Book 1 by Star Trek

Author:Star Trek
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780743480833
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2003-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

“Okay, so the ship runs on solar radiation, as your brilliant second officer deduced.” Duffy smiled wryly from his perch on the edge of a console. He had not touched any of the corpses yet, and had no desire to move one just to gain a proper seat. No one else did, either. “It takes in too much energy, vents it internally, and kills its own crew. Anyone else see any problems with that?”

“Of course,” Salek replied. “This ship was designed to handle such radiation—hence the conductivity of its hull and the shielding just behind that. A ship made to use stellar energies would have safeties preventing such an overload. Yet the cause of death and the internal damage”—for they had found some evidence of charring in side rooms, where anything not metal had been burnt away—“confirms that the energy was released in this manner.”

“I don’t think the lieutenant commander’s arguing the what,” Pattie chimed in, “more the why. Clearly whatever did this was extremely hot, and given the ship’s power source, stellar energy makes sense. But the idea of an accidental overload seems odd.”

Duffy nodded. “Exactly. We’ve got countless safety protocols for the warp core—why wouldn’t they have the same sort of thing for their engines?”

“They do,” one of the Bynars—Duffy thought it was 110—replied. “We have sorted through much of the—”

“—remaining computer data. This ship had—”

“—extensive safety protocols, including automatic cutoffs.”

“Such an explosion should—”

“—never have occurred.”

“Okay, so it couldn’t have happened by accident,” Stevens said. “What about on purpose?” The others all turned to look at him, and he held up his hands. “Hey, can I help it if I see the ugly possibilities?”

“You are suggesting sabotage,” Salek said. “That is possible—certainly the safety protocols could be disengaged, and that would allow for the energies to be vented internally. A ship of this nature might even have some protocol for such an internal release, to flush away intruders or dangerous particles, and thus all that would be required is removing safety overrides and activating such a protocol.”

“But if there was a saboteur,” Duffy pointed out, “they’d have been killed along with everyone else. As near as we can tell, the energy poured through this entire ship in an instant. Nobody could hide from that.”

“Could someone have set things up, then escaped beforehand?”

Duffy shook his head. “Not without being noticed. I’ve gone over the data from the outpost. They didn’t see any other ships near it, no escape pods or the like, and no life signs outside it. So unless it was rigged before it ever hit this system, that’s not what happened.”

“What if the purpose was not to kill the crew?” Pattie pondered out loud. “We’re assuming that it was either an accident or murder, but what if it was deliberate and the deaths were a necessary cost, not the end goal?”

Stevens paced about, hands gesturing. “So somebody on this ship decides to flush the energy from the ship’s systems and does it internally, killing himself and everyone else on board.

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