Star Trek Starfleet Corps of Engineers - 42 - Sargasso Sector by Star Trek

Author:Star Trek
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780743493673
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2004-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter

8

The captain’s mouth had been dry for the past half hour. No matter how much water he drank, he couldn’t seem to get enough moisture. Ever since Dr. Lense had been forced, after a nearly forty-five minute struggle, to accept reality and pronounce Bart Faulwell dead, David Gold had felt strangely drained of everything. One instant they had been talking, the next a man lay dead half inside a turbolift.

Nothing the finest care and technology could prevent.

It had gone beyond madness, Gold thought, getting himself a fresh glass of water from the replicator. He had lost crew before, lord knew. Salek and Okha during the war. 111 on the beast. And twenty-three people in one, horrible incident at Galvan VI. But there, as senseless as so much death ever was, there had at least been a visible cause. A situation against which steps might have been taken, measures tried.

But what did they have now? Peanut butter. Bad luck? He looked at his senior staff, gathered with him in the observation lounge. Did he seriously intend to put forth the theory that this was all on account of simple bad luck? Finishing his water, the captain decided he had better let the others have their say before he dropped that particular bubbemyseh on the table.

“Faulwell’s death,” Gold said, “comes as a shock to everyone. It was as random, as unlikely an event as anyone could have foreseen.”

“So senseless,” said Sonya Gomez, fiercely.

Tev nodded. “What are the chances of an adult with no prior history of a problem developing so severe an allergic reaction to a much-consumed food?”

Soloman said, “Not likely at all. Yet far more so than a replicator producing a kkk’tukkiquith’quattkkk or an unknown isotope.”

“Or anything else that’s been going wrong. Think of it, what are the odds everything goes wrong all the time?” said Nancy Conlon. “This entire mission’s been jinxed from the start.”

“Jinxes do not exist,” Tev said. “Bartholomew did not die from ‘bad luck.’ Luck is not intrinsically good or bad. It is just random chance. It is neither a cause nor an effect. It just is what it is.”

“Besides,” Soloman said, “it’s not as though ‘luck’ or random chance possess physical qualities that can be quantified and manipulated.”

“Bart is dead,” Sonya Gomez said in a soft voice. “He was a dear man and a good friend and now he’s dead because of something as ridiculous as snack food? I don’t think so, people.” She looked from face to face. “There’s something wrong here. And it is bad luck, but something is helping it along. Maybe it’s not anything we can measure, but you all feel it, don’t you? I mean, we’re better than this. All the accidents, the lost and broken tools, the equipment failures. We don’t make these kinds of mistakes, and we sure as hell don’t make them with the recent alarming rate of frequency. Something is influencing events. Something killed Bart.”

Gold said, “What’s left that we haven’t already checked? And with chance against us, how do we propose to reverse our luck?”

“Really, Captain,” said Tev.

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