Star Trek: The Original Series: Inception by S.D. Perry

Author:S.D. Perry [Perry, S.D.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Pocket Books/Star Trek
Published: 2010-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

Eight

The trip to Mars was uneventful. The team was excited and full of chatter, though Carol found it difficult to relax with them, spent her time ostensibly buried in a collection of data slates as star-filled darkness whipped past the chartered shuttle. Her thoughts were elsewhere.

She tried to shake off her guilt as they prepared to dock at Mars’s main station, a Federation terminal. It connected directly to Starfleet’s shipyard facility, from where they would be beaming down. She had known about the baby for four days now and had not spoken to Jim in person once. Carol felt like she was hiding from him. It didn’t help that she’d figured out exactly nothing in that time. She kept thinking that she had to get herself ready, to be prepared. But for what? She still didn’t know what she wanted to do.

I’ll see him soon enough. Once the experiment is set, we’ll have plenty of time to talk. The thought was bittersweet. She wanted to put an end to the agony of indecision and longed to see him—but she was all too aware that their days of carefree romance were over the very second she told him that she was carrying his child.

Until then, there was work to do, a lot of work; she needed to focus. She shifted her mind back into its proper gear and unfastened her safety harness, her hand grazing her belly as she did so, resting there for a beat.

The shuttle’s captain appeared in the passenger hold before Carol and the others could exit. “May I have your attention, please?”

“What is it?” Carol asked. Her team members looked at each other, murmured their curiosity.

“I’ve received a communication from station security. There is a protest going on just outside the Starfleet facility … aimed at you, it seems. They’re suggesting that you might want to consider staying aboard the shuttle until the situation is controlled.”

There was a burst of anger, of indignant surprise from the other team members. Carol shushed them with one raised hand. She was also surprised but could guess what it was about; hadn’t she been teasing Jim about it, just the other day? Environmental issues. It was ridiculous. Inception was an extremely limited soil study with no planetary implications, not at this stage.

“Aren’t they on private property?” Mac asked.

The captain sighed. “A Martian court recently upheld that the pedestrian conduits are to be considered public domain.”

Troy Verne broke in. “That’s right. People are allowed to gather peacefully in the pedestrian tubes. It’s happened before.”

“But who are they? Why are they protesting us?” Leila asked.

“Since the government here voted to lease out land and approve resource tapping, there have been a lot of protests,” Alison Simhbib answered. “There has been particular concern about anything to do with terraforming.”

The captain nodded. “According to the communication, it’s sponsored by an environmental concern called Redpeace. They were trying to bring an injunction against Kraden concerning your experiment, but it fell through.”

It was the first Carol had heard of it, and from the exclamations of the others, she wasn’t the only one.

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