Star Trek by ALL

Author:ALL [ALL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2012-01-23T21:23:25+00:00

18

U.S.S. ENTERPRISE, SECTOR 001

STARDATE 58567.2

Sleeping was the worst.

Each night, Picard and Beverly Crusher were locked into the captain’s cabin under visual sensor surveillance as three guards stood watch in the corridor. Each officer assigned to this mission was required to follow the same routine.

The enlisted crew slept on bunks in the hangar bay, using the emergency supplies the Enterprise carried for humanitarian aid and mass evacuations. There could be no privacy, not even in the heads and showers.

Despite the forced company everyone on board had to endure, Picard was not the only one to note how empty his ship seemed to be.

Worf, La Forge, Beverly—they all had commented on the eerie sense of abandonment they felt.

Even with the need for trios of security guards, the crew complement was less than half its normal number. There were no non-Starfleet family members on board. The science departments had been closed and all staff reassigned to Mercury. In engineering, La Forge had kept only enough specialists for three skeleton shifts. With the warp core shut down, there was no need for warp engineers.

That, more than anything else, Picard decided, was what made his ship feel so lifeless: the constant, almost subliminal vibration of the warp engines was gone, as if the Enterprise had lost her pulse, her heart.

She was no longer a starship, just another spacecraft.

Lying quietly in the darkness of his quarters, Picard felt as if a part of himself had withered along with his ship, and he feared that soon the Federation would follow in this slow descent into helplessness. Not even the comforting presence of Beverly beside him could dispel his apprehension and his growing sense of vulnerability.

At 0300 ship’s time, it was those dark thoughts and not Picard’s sleep that was disturbed when Worf called him from the bridge.

Picard felt Beverly stir, turned his head to look at the com screen by his bunk, no need to open his eyes. “Go ahead, Mister Worf. I’m awake.”

“Captain, there is a ship approaching our coordinates at high warp. It’s on course for Earth. It will reach our position in thirty-three minutes.”

Picard sat up, eyes now open, staring at the image of his first officer on the bridge. Beverly got out of bed, used to the hours of a ship’s captain, little different from those of a chief medical officer.

After three days on picket duty in the Oort Cloud surrounding Earth’s solar system, the Enterprise hadn’t encountered a single warp vessel. The other ships enforcing the embargo of Sector 001 had reported only a handful of vessels requesting entry. All available information indicated the inexplicable warp-core malfunctions had continued to propagate as Doctor Muirhead had predicted. Older and less powerful cores were being affected now, stranding even more ships in interstellar space, a new diaspora.

“Is it a Starfleet vessel?” Picard asked.

“Technically, yes.”

“ ‘Technically’?”

“It is a Q-ship. A Starfleet vessel with civilian registry. The Belle Rêve.”

Picard knew the name well.

“That’s Kirk’s ship,” Beverly said.

“So he claims,” Worf replied.

Picard headed for his private lavatory as Beverly stood by the cabin’s small replicator, ordering Earl Grey and coffee.

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