RenegadeRenegade IIUniversalSIDSID TalesSID RebirthThe Cause More StoriesStories in GermanEssaysFan Film Reviews

Star Trek Renegade - Pilot by J. Grey, copyright held by A.P. Atkinson

Chapter 1

Wolf 359 - Stardate: 43989.1-44001.4

The Mirage maintained the highest factor of warp she could safely manage while the support and rescue fleet fanned out behind her, a mismatched group of vessels ranging from state of the art to barely space-worthy. Stars streaked past them as the energy field her engines produced bent the rules laid down by the universe, slowing down the passing of time as they travelled at speeds unthinkable to minds bogged down with traditional physics.

Lieutenant Commander Blake Girlings comm-badge chirped to attract his attention while he sat back in his temporary accommodation on board the ageing Starfleet transport, U.S.S Yorktown.

"This is Lieutenant Darrow to Lieutenant Commander Girling." A voice called out from the gold symbol on his chest.

"Go ahead." He huffed as he pressed the metallic badge, standing up to turn his attention to the circular viewport of his claustrophobic guest quarters. The stars were stretched into infinity as they passed him by, the light glowing softly over his face. He was 35 years old with tidy dark hair beginning to thin slightly that was combed backwards from his face which sported a tidy brown beard. His eyes beamed intensely into space as he waited for the incoming message.

"We have the Mirage on our scopes." Darrow told him flatly. "We will rendezvous in thirty five minutes."

"I'll be ready." He replied solemnly with an almost imperceptible shake of his head. "How long until we're in communication range?"

"We can hail them in ten minutes to prepare to match warp for transport." Came the efficient response.

"Acknowledged." Blake said with a sigh, this looked set to be another assignment that was going to fall far short of what he had hoped for but it was difficult to let his old friend down and hardly the time to cause trouble for Starfleet command.

The Yorktown was a gracefully ageing Constitution class vessel that had been refitted to serve as an ambassadorial transport ship after her usefulness as a front-line starship had passed. Her weapons and shields were still in place but many of her labs and equipment had been replaced with enlarged staterooms and widened corridors to accommodate various dignitaries, many of them enjoying breakfasts that stretched well beyond lunch . Her gleaming titanium hull plating had slowly dulled to a soft grey with the passing of many years in space and much of her technology had been upgraded or replaced during her service so that now she was a very different ship to her original design. Her twin impulse exhausts glowed a brilliant red at the rear of her regal saucer section as she pulled in close to the Mirage, the head of the emergency mercy fleet.

The Mirage herself was a modified Ambassador class starship with widened nacelle support pylons and much larger shuttle bays along the large spine that ran down her secondary hull.

"We have matched Warp." The Transporter chief said without a note of emotion in his voice as he lazily toyed with the controls.

"I hear this is a tricky procedure." Blake noted with a raised eyebrow.

"I am competent." The officer replied without bothering to look up.

"It's not just me, you're transporting a twelve year old child as well!" Girling reminded him with annoyance clear in his tone as he stepped down from the pad towards the control alcove.

The Sulusin junior officer looked up finally and met his angry glare with a look of unconcerned apathy.

"This is a relatively simple transport compared to many combat beamings I have made." He said simply. "There is no need for concern."

"I hope not!" Blake growled, turning on his heels to step back to the glowing transporter pad. "Because if anything does go wrong it'll be an empty coffin at my funeral, not yours."

"Are you ready?" The officer asked as he entered the final coding.

"We'll be fine." He winked at the young girl beside him as she looked up with a pair of innocently trusting eyes. "Energise!"

"Has he arrived?" Commander Darren Rogers asked as he ran breathlessly through the automatic doors.

"Not yet!" Aldrov Dokks replied with a facial twitch that was meant to emulate a smile although the rows of razor sharp teeth gave her look an altogether more threatening appearance. "Any second."

"Fantastic." He sighed with relief, catching his breath and leaning heavily against the dull grey wall plating.

The transporter pad lit up suddenly with flickering blue light while the hum of the energisers filled the room. The fuzzy form of a pair of humanoids began to take shape in the cylindrical beams of light as the sound slowly melted away.

"Katherine!" Commander Rogers exclaimed excitedly as he stepped forwards, hardly able to believe his eyes.

"I thought you'd be pleased!" Blake said with a raised eyebrow and measured smile as he stepped forward. "Permission to come aboard.

Katherine ran forward past the young officer and hugged her father as he scooped her up in his stocky arms and swung her around excitedly.

"How the hell did you manage this?" Commander Rogers stammered as he put her down and wiped an involuntary tear from his eye.

"She was at Starbase DS4, where I was sent from, and her mother said she could spare her for a few days." Girling explained. "She can't stay, the Yorktown has to leave in a few minutes."

"Of course!" Commander Rogers agreed enthusiastically, turning to his daughter. "This is no place for you!"

"I just wanted to see you, Dad!" She shrugged. "I know this is going to be a dangerous mission."

"No, not at all." He tried to reassure her.

"No." Blake agreed with a slightly irritable edge to his voice. "All the danger will be long gone by the time we get there."

"So welcome to the Mirage!" Commander Rogers began gesturing grandly at the spartan interior of the hospital ship while the crew scuttled busily around them.

"Thank you!" Blake said without sincerity.

"I gather you don't much want to be here." Rogers suggested with a wry smile.

"I signed on to Starfleet for the chance to explore." He shrugged. "Of course this Borg incursion has caused a big shake up through the ranks but I hadn't expected to find myself aboard a mercy fleet vessel."

"You'd rather be defending the Earth from its enemies?" The Commander ran his hand through his greying hair and ran his eyes over his portable terminal while he reviewed the young officers records.

"Now that you mention it..." Blake said, allowing his words to trail off suggestively.

"You don't think this is an important mission?"

"Of course it is!" Blake said suddenly, stopping to face his superior officer. "I don't mean to imply otherwise."

"Then what?" Commander Rogers smiled, cocking his head thoughtfully to one side while his keen eyes bored into the young officers.

"The Borg apparently tore the fleet to pieces at Wolf 359. Of course I think that sending in a mercy fleet to scour for survivors is a noble and vital function of the Federation." He began. "I'm grateful that you thought to ask for me but I just don't see how I can fit into this."

"You're an officer aboard a Starship, the same as all of us, a cog in a machine perhaps but a machine dedicated to an end we all believe in!" He explained, offering Blake just enough of an explanation to leave most of his questions unanswered.

"Commander, I have been posted all over the fleet!" Girling began in annoyance. "I was bounced from one temporary posting to another since I left the academy. I've served with security, engineering and minor command assignments, and now here when I have no medical training."

"So?" Commander Rogers shrugged, dropping the pad to his side and raising his eyebrows knowingly. "We've known each other a long time, Blake. Don't you know what's going on?"

"No Sir." He replied, his brow furrowing with confusion. "What is going on?"

"I knew your father for many years." He began with a smile. "He was a fine officer."

"I know you were close friends, I assume that's why you requested me for this assignment." Girling raised his hands in frustration.

The silence stretched for several seconds that felt much longer to the young officer, adrift in a sea of mindless bureaucracy and teased by the growing suspicion that the man in front of him had at least some of the answers he was looking for.

"We need to go to the bridge!" Commander Rogers said simply.

The Turbolift streaked along the narrow shaft, powered by an electro-magnetic field that made the car smell faintly with a whiff of electrical ozone.

"This ship needs security and command level tactics as much as any other Starship." Commander Rogers explained.

"Really?" Girling asked. "It's reasonably rare for a regular Starship to need to defend herself."

"This is not a regular Starship!" The Commander grinned. "We go to where the violence has already happened and could well happen again, it's not unusual for pirates, salvage scavengers or even spies to be amongst the debris of a damaged vessel."

"I see." Blake replied thoughtfully as he grudgingly become more interested.

"Once we attended a damaged Miranda class vessel and were confronted by three Romulan scouts who were operating under cloak trying to beam the key systems out for intelligence purposes." The Commander continued while the Turbolift display changed direction showing that they had begun final ascent to the bridge.

"What happened?" Blake asked.

"We're doctors not warriors." He shrugged. "They had their shields down for transport when we detected the debris bouncing off their cloaked hulls and the computer predicted their hull outlines. We beamed over canisters of Anaesthazine gas designed to rupture at the Romulan air pressure."

"You put them all to sleep?" Blake smiled at the simple cleverness of the tactics.

"Then we took all the survivors from the damaged vessels and left the Romulans on board a ship with no key systems while we towed their ships back for analysis." Commander Rogers continued as the lift car drew to a silent halt and the doors slid open with a hiss.

"Sounds like a reasonable trade..." Blake agreed.

"Welcome to the bridge!"

The fleet followed the U.S.S Mirage into the debris field that had once been a Federation staging post. Proud Starships that had gone out on a mission to protect their homeworld and their own sense of individuality now drifted lifelessly in space with shattered hulls and dead crews. The gleaming plating of the vessels were scorched with weapons fire as the Borg had dropped any interest in assimilation and simply ploughed through the fleet destroying everything in their path. Perhaps it had been a measured act to demoralise the Federation or perhaps a demonstration of impatience or aggression but in the end it mattered little in the face of the aftermath of such immense hostility.

The bridge of the Mirage was plunged into silence. Captain Harrow stood at the raised section in the centre, stepping gingerly forward from her chair towards the holographic main viewer in awe of the spectacle unfolding before them.

"I'm detecting the wreckage of 35 distinct vessels." The Vulcan operations chief reported with a respectfully lowered voice that sounded like even he was disturbed by what he saw. "I detect the debris of at least 4 more that were probably completely destroyed, at least I am not detecting their registries."

"39 vessels?" Commander Rogers said rhetorically in disbelief.

"You would have to include the automated defences, attack drones and base mounted weapon platforms to fully appreciate the degree of violence we're witnessing." The Captain noted, partially lost in her own sense of shock.

"One ship did this?" Blake asked, momentarily forgetting his rank as he stepped forward. "It's unbelievable."

"One Borg cube!" Lieutenant Nerus agreed from behind him. "A race integrated into their own technology. Massively advanced compared to us, apparently."

"We have a job to do, people!" Captain Harrow called out, snapping herself from the chilling spectacle and rousing her crew to action.

"This is Lieutenant Commander Blake Girling on temporary assignment." Commander Rogers stepped forward to introduce him to his captain. She looked into his eyes for a second and easily read his thoughts.

"Don't worry, Mr. Girling, none of us have ever seen anything like this before either!" She smiled supportively.

"I'm sorry, sir!" He shook his head. "I just can't believe what I'm seeing."

"You're assigned to serve as mission control officer in section 1." She told him in a more authoritative tone.

"Yes sir!" He said, taking some effort to drag himself back to the grim reality.

"This hospital ship is divided into 5 sections." Commander Rogers explained. "Triage-1, Triage-2, surgery, engineering and control."

"Right." Blake nodded that he understood.

"I'm head of triage-1, we beam aboard survivors and fix them up or send them on to surgery. We have a small officer team to co-ordinate our efforts." He said.

"How small?" Blake asked, looking from face to face of the officers around him, feeling a little lost as if floundering wildly out of his depth and wearing a rock of considerable proportion around his neck that robbed him of the ability to swim.

"We are it!" Lieutenant Nerus said flatly.

He turned to look at her, a short Vulcan female who looked around his age but was probably much, much older. Her hair was very regulation and jet black as Vulcans hair always was and her eyes were fixed on his and devoid of warmth.

"Blake Girling." He offered redundantly as he raised his hand in greeting.

She looked down at his outstretched palm as if it contained a decomposing rat but finally accepted his greeting only grudgingly. She shook it once without gripping properly and then withdrew her hand and gripped them both behind her back while continuing to stare blankly at him.

"You are my superior officer." She said simply. "However you will require my assistance in adjusting to your new post."

"Don't I know it..." He replied grimly as he glanced back at the scene of devastation before him.

The Mirage Impulse exhausts glowed dimly as she slipped forward at barely more than thruster speed into the debris field followed by the other 8 craft of the mercy fleet. She banked to port and began drifting into the most densely packed area of wreckage as her advanced sensors probed every inch of space and twisted metal for signs of life or a body were life could be induced to return.

"Triage-1, we stand ready." Nerus reported curtly through her comm-badge. "It is our duty to provide information to the bridge of our status and capacity."

"I get it." Blake agreed with an annoyed expression. "I have done this kind of thing before."

"Hospital vessels tend to be slightly different to normal Starship operation." She continued. "Here our duty is not to explore, we are autonomous in our mission parameters and are required only to save as many lives as possible."

"I have figured this out for myself!" He grunted as he tapped in his command codes into the triage-1 command station terminal.

"I hear you have undergone a series of brief temporary assignments." She said conversationally as she worked with the data pouring in from the bridge. "Congratulations."

"Congratulations?" He huffed. "It seems that everyone knows what's going on here but me."

"I would have thought it was obvious." She remarked, clearly relishing her superiority.

"Perhaps you could offer your opinion?" He suggested.

"I do not feel it is my place to draw presumptions without additional information." She replied flatly.

"I could order you." He sneered, relishing his superiority.

"You could not." She stood up from her console to stare unwavering at him while logic chewed away in the recesses of her structured mind. "I would be forced to infer that your lack of knowledge is derived from officers superior in rank than myself and that it is their wish that you remain uninformed."

"So..." He sighed, crossing his arms in front of his chest. "You're not just pretending to be a Vulcan, are you?"

"I fail to see what purpose it would achieve to impersonate a member of my race." She shrugged.

"I tend to agree." He nodded with a slight smile.

A bleep suddenly pierced the distant sounds of medics preparing to work and replicators generating stocks of drugs and implements.

"We have found survivors." Nerus noted with enough surprise to make her eyebrows twitch slightly. "We are two minutes from beaming range, apparently the radiation from the damaged vessels is cutting down our scanner range so we will need to be in immediate proximity."

"Understood, how many?" He called out as he began towards the medics station.

"At least 20 aboard the wreckage of the USS Bellerophon "

"Hear that?" Blake Girling called out. "We're receiving injured in just under two minutes."

"We're ready!" Commander Rogers said with a smile. "How are you doing, Blake?"

"It isn't what I had expected." Blake admitted with a nod and a controlled grin that continued to slip beyond his control and spread quickly across his face.

"It never is, every single time we go out." Rogers grinned back.

"I can imagine, Sir!" Blake nodded.

"I never got to thank you properly for escorting my daughter to come and see me." Commander Rogers said as he grabbed up a medical tricorder and flipped it open to check the battery life.

"It was no trouble." He smiled. "She's a great kid, we had lots of fun with her beating me repeatedly at various card games."

"She is." Rogers agreed as he flung the tricorder unceremoniously onto his desk and began loading hypo-sprays with pain killers. "I don't get to see her that much."

"I guess not." Blake watched as the burly doctor scampered around checking the equipment that had been checked very thoroughly already by the utterly competent staff.

"It cost me my marriage." He explained, pretending he was more involved in his checks than he actually was. "I'm damned if it's going to cost me my relationship with her too."

"I'm sure she'll understand." Blake offered. "I hardly saw my father but I knew that what he was doing was important."

"He was a good man, your father." Commander Rogers smiled. "I miss him a lot."

"So do I..."

Two automated escort vessels took their position at each side of the devastated hull of the Bellerophon while the Mirage drifted into position to transport the survivors. The defence ships were sleek vessels deployed by a carrier ship at the rear of the fleet. They were variations on the standard perimeter defence ships that were able to accommodate a crew and were equipped with improved sensors and computers to make them slightly more capable. Both of the small cylindrical vessels were capable only of high Impulse speeds but heavily armed and programmed to defend the hospital ships at all costs.

Captain Harrow peered into the ship before her in the viewer as if looking through a window.

"Any sign of activity?" She asked.

"The ship is dead-in-the-water." Her operations chief confirmed. "Most of the outer hull has fractured and power is gone but I am detecting 20 distinct life signs although each are very weak."

"Excellent." She grinned. "Do you have a transporter lock?"

"Not yet." Sallox reported as his fingers danced deftly over the control panel. "I am having trouble cutting through the radiation..."

"Boost power to the transporters and targeting scanners." She instructed impatiently as she took another involuntary step forwards to the main view screen.

"I have them!" Sallox cried out loudly.

"Drop shields for transport." Captain Harrow ordered.

The Mirage floated serenely above the debris field shielded behind her automated escort ships. Suddenly the lead ship erupted into silent flame as a beam of coherent energy tore effortlessly thought it, instantaneously crippling its powerful defensive shields. The blast expanded violently as the emergency systems dumped the anti-matter storage tanks too late to prevent the main tank from completely detonating. The blast tore into the Mirage, shaking her from her fixed position and throwing the hull of the Bellerophon into her secondary hull with a gut wrenching shearing force that sounded through the entire ship.

A second beam streaked out from nowhere and connected with the port nacelle. With no defence from her shields the plasma flow was easily disrupted and the radiator grill of the drive module erupted in a furious blast of twisted hull plates that showered out in all directions, embedding themselves in the ship or drifting out into the debris field.

"What the hell is going on?" Blake cried out. "Report..."

"Unknown." Nerus admitted, struggling to coax any information through her console along the damaged relays. "We have been hit by weapons fire and have collided with a solid object."

"Not the Bellerophon?" He yelled above the noise of emergency klaxons and raised voices. "There are survivors there."

"I do not have that information, all command networks have been temporarily severed." She reported. "Along with sensor relays and the internal comm system."

"What's going on?" Commander Rogers barked above the noise.

"We're working on it." Blake told him as he worked at his own consoles. "We have injured on this deck, looks like you're going to be busy."

"25 wounded on their way." Nerus confirmed.

"Can we patch into the local sensor grid?" Girling asked, turning to face her.

"Explain." She inquired as her mind began working on his idea.

"Sensors are relayed to the bridge, can we cut the line to the sensors on this level and get the information directly?" He asked, not familiar enough with the ship to know himself if it would be possible.

"Yes." She said suddenly as her mind fed her the connections she would have to break into. "It will give us only an incomplete local report, long range sensors are not on this level."

"Give me anything you have." He growled in anticipation as he opened the wall panels with his security codes and began drawing out hand phasers to arm them with as a precaution against begin boarded.

Injured people were led in through the open access portals by equally wounded comrades. Medics scurried up and took them to their work-stations for examination and emergency treatment. Blake looked on in silence as the efficiency and calmness surprised him. There was none of the panic, the screaming and anguish of a Starship rescue mission, simply an efficient crew performing efficiently.

"Both of our defence escorts have been destroyed and our port nacelle has been rendered inoperative." She began. "A vessel is approaching but I can't get a fix on it. The fleet is responding but they will have to pick their way through the debris so they are unable to offer immediate assistance."

"We need to buy them time!" Girling said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. "Do we have phasers?"

"We have power to the weapons array but the targeting scanners are inoperative and bridge control is not operational." Nerus said. "We should consider abandoning this ship."

"We can't!" He disagreed firmly. "There are too many people aboard."

"We will likely be destroyed by the next attack, it is logical for as many people to escape as possible." She persisted calmly.

"If we can buy the fleet some time we might all make it." He replied with fierce resolve as he called up the library computer. "We could manually align the phasers if we could get to the control station."

"We can reach it!" She replied with a raised eyebrow, intrigued at his suggestion.

"They've obviously tried to incapacitate us, they won't be expecting us to fire on them, it might buy us the time we need!" He said hopefully, not entirely convinced.

"It may." She agreed.

The doors erupted into a flaming ball of fire as the phaser beam tore through them.

"Doesn't anything on this ship work any more?" Blake Girling grumbled as he returned the weapon to his hip.

"We are only concerned with the phaser control." Nerus reminded him. "Doors can be replaced later.

The phaser control station was a meagre cube of steel plates with none of the carpeting or wall coverings that were evident on even the most spartan space fairing vehicle. It was a dingy box designed only for the routine inspection and testing of the upper banks. Sickly red light bathed the room which was beset with heavy trunking and pipe-work and a single large console at the far wall and a circular Jeffries tube access portal.

"Let's get on with this." He said urgently as he ripped the grey panel away from the control console. He slung it to the floor with a loud clatter where it lay with the label warning people not to remove it facing upwards.

"I can bring a sensor image to the viewscreen." She offered as the panel lit up with a hazy and distorted image. "I still cannot get a read-out on the vessel although it is closing rapidly. It is using the hulls of the Starfleet vessels to mask itself from us."

"If we fire from here we should still be able to hit it." He replied but his statement was more of a question.

"Indeed." She nodded as she reset the systems from inside the control console. "The sensor probe beam will now act as a targeting marker for the phasers."

"Perfect." He shrugged at the distorted image that cackled with electronic noise with a renewed sense of hope.

"You will have to target them here and I will go into the Jeffries tube and fire manually at your signal."

"Go!" He told her. "Set your Comm badge for local person-to-person communication so I'll be able to contact you to tell you when to fire."

"Agreed!"

The ship listed out of control as main power was still unavailable and the reserves were all busy setting force-fields to seal in some of the damage and maintain the internal atmosphere. Triage-1 was set in the upper section of the main hull at the top of the vast circular saucer. Even with the enormous damage she had sustained, two of the upper phaser strips were still functional.

Lieutenant Commander Blake Girling sat in silence, the only sounds in the tiny control room were those of his own heart thumping in his chest and his own laboured breathing.

"Girling to Nerus, are you in place?" He called out over his intercom.

"I am." She confirmed. "It is a good thing indeed that your experience of Starship operation is so wide."

"I guess so." He smiled weakly while his eyes remained fixed on the makeshift viewscreen waiting for any movement from behind the wreckage of his fallen comrades ships. "Maybe you could fill me in on your theory?"

"Perhaps." She acceeded.

"Now would be as good a time as any." He said hopefully, scanning every inch of the screen.

"It is clear that you are being groomed for command." She said simply.

"You think?" He said in surprise as a faint smile spread across his face.

"I do." She agreed. "It is not unusual for a potential command officer to be given a short tour of various assignments to better familiarise himself with Starship procedure."

He watched as a dark object began to emerge from within the torn ribs of an Excelsior class vessel in the distance, its heart clawed out by a weapon of unimaginable power.

"Are you ready?" He asked, beads of sweat tracing down from his head and prickling uncomfortably under his uniform.

"I am." She confirmed.

"Fire."

A glowing beam of orange light streaked forward from the front phaser bank out into space towards the stricken Excelsior class hull. A bloom of orange flame tore forth from the impact point sending a shower of sparks and distorted energy from the enemy vessels shields. Whatever it was, it banked from the blast as if in retreat, more shocked than wounded. A second phaser beam struck out at the alien ship followed by another, both hitting the shields and hiding the craft behind a bloom of flame and raw energy.

The ship slunk behind another destroyed vessel as a forth beam tore through space wildly and completely missed.

They fired a single volley in return that hit the Mirage's upper hull and shattered the upper phaser banks in a huge blast of energy as the power lines blew out across the upper hull..

Suddenly the alien vessel erupted in flame as five more ships opened fire as reinforcements finally arrived, along with a dozen automated defence vessels. Phasers struck at all points as each ship fired continually and followed up with a spread of high-yield photon torpedoes.

"Commander Girling?" Nerus called out over the closed comm channel. She laid crouching in the cramped service tunnel waiting for a response but none was forthcoming. There was an exit hatch not far from her position so she began to crawl, her familiarity with the vessel already telling her it would drop her into a main corridor where she could quickly return to the control room.

"Commander Girling?" She repeated into her comm badge as she continued crawling up the tunnel. The plating was hard and cold beneath her hands and the soft rubber flooring in the centre did little either to aid her progress or minimise her discomfort, although as a Vulcan she ignored the latter and struggled against the former.

She kicked down the exit panel and hefted herself into the main corridor, wondering what she would find. She was faced with everything bathed in red lighting from the emergency systems and the muted Klaxons warning of the red-alert condition. People were urgently scampering up and down tending to emergency signals and their wounded comrades around her.

"Crewman!" She called out to a passing Betazed officer. "Has the Comm system been restored yet?"

"Yes sir, it has." He replied, tears forming in his glassy eyes from the pain of an injury to his left forearm. She glanced at the shattered limb he was nursing which was dripping his thick red blood to the floor.

She stepped forward and took his comm-badge, hoping that hers had simply malfunctioned.

"You get to the infirmary immediately." She instructed.

"Yes sir." He breathed heavily and ran off on his way.

"Nerus to Girling." She said impatiently into the communicator.

"Nerus to Triage-1, medical emergency in phaser control room 3."

Commander Rogers dug the Hypo-spray into the mans neck so hard it actually hurt the wounded crewman before he moved swiftly onto the next one.

"I need a refill here!" He shouted to anyone who might be listening as he moved from one body to the next, followed by a troop of inexperienced young medics.

"Commander Rogers." Lieutenant Nerus called out from the doorway.

"Yes?" He asked, spinning from his work to see the filthy and dishevelled Vulcan female.

"Can you spare a moment?" She asked coldly, her head hung slightly and her hands clamped before her.

"A moment, yes." He agreed in irritation, handing his tools to a young officer and walking over, wiping the blood from his hands as went.

"I have unfortunate news." She offered.

"I'm surrounded by unfortunate news." He quipped with a disproportionately cheery smile. "It goes with the territory."

"Commander Blake Girling rigged a manual phaser lock to engage an enemy vessel and buy us the time we needed until the fleet could join us." She explained.

"He's a good man." He nodded proudly. "Just like his father, quick and resourceful. I hope he chooses to stay with us for a while."

"I'm sorry to report he was killed in the action when a weapons strike breached the hull." She stared into his eyes, hers reflecting a measure of emotion she was unable to totally conceal.

"He was sucked into space?" He asked, his voice cracking and his face dropping the cheery facade.

"Yes." She said regretfully.

"We could find him..." Commander Rogers suggested, empowered by hope as he spun around to begin issuing orders.

"I'm afraid not." She said forcefully, dragging his attention back to her. "I have analysed the flight data. He was hit in the head with debris and was killed instantly, resuscitation seems unlikely."

"I don't believe this." Rogers hung his head in his hands. "I won't believe this."

"I'm sorry." She replied helplessly.

 

Chapter 2

10 years later

The merchant freighter S.S. Wanderer lurched violently to the side as another blast tore across her flimsy hull that had never been designed for combat or really much of anything else.

"Report!" Captain John Graves called out above the sound of the hull framework grinding away at itself as the tired old ship performed manoeuvres that would have been ill advised when she was a current model. Her main bridge complex stuck out from a saucer section and housed a low-powered defector array that was more than adequate for her top speed of warp-6. Her speed, such as it was, was provided by a pair of nacelles that had been salvaged from a racing yacht that the owner had clumsily piloted into the side of the freighter some time in her distant past. The mismatched parts had driven her value down to a point where the asking price could be met by her current crew, on a strictly observed policy of no refunds.

"I just can't get a lock on the damn thing..." Commander Winston Morrow cried out above the wailing warning klaxons as a jet of smoke blasted from his console. "Maybe the attacking ship is cloaked or something?"

"It can't be firing if it's cloaked." Captain Graves replied haughtily, turning his attention to the bank of controls behind him as shattered power conduits released flashing arcs of electrical energy skipping across the bulkhead. "She isn't going to take much more of this."

"She's a light freighter, not a battleship." Winston nodded as his control panel winked out and fluttered reluctantly back to life before him. "I don't think I can take much more of this."

"Captain!" A voice called out over the internal comm channel.

"Report!" Captain Graves shouted as he dropped heavily into the command seat at the centre of the small bridge and pressed down on the small panel to his left.

"This is Haldo Compz in engineering." The voice continued in a grating and irritatingly calm monotone. "She can't take much more of this."

"Shields are almost gone!" Commander Morrow screamed as an emergency light lit up on his console warning that he may very well soon be dead.

"Tell the crew to abandon ship..." The Captain said in an angry tone, his mind stubbornly refusing to furnish him with a plan that might otherwise save them all.

"They didn't need much telling." The commander grunted. "They all left when the shooting started, we're the only ones left on board!"

The hull grated with the gut wrenching sound of internal support joists shearing as the ship banked hard to starboard in a futile attempt to evade her pursuers.

"That can't be good!" Commander Morrow cringed, glancing around the roofing joists and imagining them falling on top of him.

"Open a channel or something!" Captain Graves said hopelessly.

"They wouldn't talk to us before, they're certainly not going to now that our communications array is destroyed." The Commander wearily sighed at the continuing barrage of incompetence.

"What do you suggest?" The Captain growled.

"The same thing I always suggest." Winston spun around to face him. "Not getting into this much trouble in the first place!"

"You said this would be fun." John Graves sighed, flopping back helplessly into his command chair.

"I say a lot of things." The commander said with a note of infuriation evident from the tone of his voice. "I said that one fifty year old phaser bank would offer adequate defence, I said that Tarquarian Gin would be interesting to try, I said that the Sumarilus we met on Draxil 5 was probably a girl."

"You're right." The Captain said thoughtfully while shifting in his chair as the uncomfortable memories were prompted to scurry through his mind. "I must stop listening to you!"

"This is Haldo Compz." The intercom chirped again. "Shields are gone, I have no more power from anywhere, unless you want to set fire to the gin."

"We need to abandon ship." Captain Graves said sadly. "My poor ship..."

"We're not leaving, John!" Commander Morrow told him over the din of the automatic fire-suppression system as white smoke blasted across the rear wall, dousing several small fires.

"I admire your spirit!" Graves smiled, leaning forward in his chair.

"The escape pods are all gone!" The Commander continued. "There was only four!"

"Oh." The Captain said, closing his eyes in exasperation. "We have time to make it to the shuttle bay?"

"We fitted the bay out with coolant generators and swapped the shuttles for two industrial crates of Tarquarian Gin..." The Commander shouted. "You said we'd make a killing on the trade circuit with that stuff."

"I know..." Captain Graves smiled. "I'd just rather not die sober."

"Captain!" Haldo Compz cried out over the internal comm system. "I have a partial sensor echo of another ship approaching us."

"Looks like we don't have time to make it to the shuttle bay!" Commander Morrow groaned as his console fluttered again and somehow flashed back to life.

"Hmm?" The Captain uttered, missing his comments while burying his problems in a small flask of strong liquor. "You want some of this?"

"Yep!" Morrow agreed enthusiastically, jumping up and grabbing the drink with obvious relish between his trembling hands.

"The other ship has powered weapons and I'm detecting targeting scanners..." The comm system reported.

"It's been nice working with you." Captain John Graves said to his old friend with a warm smile.

"Yeah." Morrow grudgingly agreed, handing back the flask as the powerful and illegal liquid gouged its way across his senses, easing some of his nervousness as a large portion of his brain cells simply rotted away. "Next time I'll buy the ship and you can be my commander."

"Doesn't seem like we're going to have to worry about next time." He shrugged, shooting back a large dose of liquid numbness.

"They're firing." Haldo Compz reported.

The two officers grimaced and looked at each other with a sigh of grimly accepting their fate because they had no choice but to do so.

The Wanderer shot forward under the inertia of her last blast of Impulse power while the small attacking ship stayed beneath her hull, away from her single phaser bank. A sudden blast of energy surged suddenly into the small ship sending it careening away from the helpless merchant vessel. The phaser bolt was quickly followed up with a repeating blast of energy pulses that tore across the tiny vessel and sent blue arcs of energy jolting around her damaged shields. The small craft suddenly vanished in a flash of blurred motion as it went to warp while still barely able to do so.

"What the hell?" Captain Graves began. "Aren't we meant to be dead?"

"We're still on board the Wanderer." Commander Morrow observed coldly, the nerves creeping up his spine and making him tremble visibly. "This can only be hell."

Suddenly the internal comm system spluttered to life with a shrill whistle. "Stand by and prepare to be boarded!"

"Who the hell was that?" Captain Graves jumped away from his chair in surprise.

"Definitely hell." Morrow raised his eyes to the ceiling and shook his head sorrowfully.

"Maybe Compz rigged the internal system to communicate externally?" Graves suggested hopefully. "He's a clever little alien."

"He's seven foot tall." Morrow sighed. "And he's a Moronian who would be offended if he heard you call him that and would probably knock you on your arse."

Suddenly a whining sound filled the room that dropped suddenly to a low hum while three pillars of light erupted into the narrow bridge that flickered with sparkling blue energy. Three humanoid forms stepped out of the transporter beams with raised phaser pistols.

"Federation!" Captain Graves said with hint of suspicion. "Standard grey uniforms!"

"Don't move!" Said the lead man. He was dressed in a grey jump-suit with a yellow top visible between his padded shoulders. A black ceramic chest-plate was worn by all three officers and the pistols they were carrying were not standard-issue. They were black and larger than normal with a more meaningful discharge vent made from glinting, threatening metal.

"Are you Starfleet?" Commander Morrow asked, reflexively raising his hands.

"You're all under arrest!"

The three merchant crewmen were beamed directly to a ships brig where they resided behind a very powerful security field. The brig was made of unfinished metal formed into a cube with raised sections along all edges which projected force-fields at each transparent wall, effectively preventing any kind of escape.

Captain Graves looked at Commander Morrow who was perched uneasily on the edge of his cot and hanging his head in his hands while muttering about how much he hated virtually every aspect of his life.

"What's the charge?" Graves ventured to one of the two officers on duty in the security station. One turned to face him. The young officer looked him up and down and then turned his back on the Captain without a word.

"Is it a crime now to be shot at?" He persisted.

Two more officers walked through the checkpoint leading in a tall alien. He had grey mottled skin and was painfully thin by human standards. His eyes were black and darted around the room nervously. His cheeks were huge, bony and pronounced and there was a mound of some kind in the middle of his forehead.

"Haldo Compz!" Captain Graves said with relief. "How are they treating you?"

"Fine." He grumbled. "I had to go through a detailed scan for security because they needed to classify my genome."

"What's that on your head?" Commander Morrow said, standing up and stepping gingerly towards the buzzing electrical field.

"What?" Compz asked, raising his hand to his forehead and wiped off a large lump of mashed potato. "Oh... I was in the galley when the shooting started, things were flying everywhere."

One of the officers took him firmly by the upper arm and led him to a vacant cell cube and ushered him unceremoniously inside. He walked in such a way as to always have access to his sidearm.

"So I just wait here then, do I?" Compz asked redundantly.

"You do indeed." The Starfleet officer told him with a tone that suggested he was doing him a favour by even deeming to speak.

"My lunch was somewhat disturbed, I could use a snack." Compz continued.

Captain Graves muttered something to himself and turned away from his chief engineer, hiding his expression of amusement.

"I will see what I can arrange." The guard told him curtly. "What's your nutritional requirement?"

"Do you have any of your young on board?" Compz asked innocently.

"Excuse me?" The Guards eyebrows raised and he took a reflexive step backwards somewhat in surprise.

"I prefer fresh but a replicated one will suffice." Compz explained with a shrug.

"We don't replicate our young!" The officer spat the words out in anger as his face glowed an angry red.

"Oh you should." Haldo smiled and nodded his head as if enjoying the memory of a delicious meal. "I have some recipe programs on board my ship. I'd be happy to go and get them if you'd like."

"We'll all go." The Captain suggested with a hopeful smile.

The officer sneered angrily and turned to leave without another word.

"Do you have one of those dogs?" Compz shouted after him as he left through the checkpoint.

"Humans!" He shrugged, turning to the Captain through his transparent electrical fence.

"What did they do to you?" Graves asked.

"They scanned me at a molecular level before they'd even beam me aboard." Haldo explained, leaning back onto his bunk. "They were being very thorough, these are not regular Starfleet."

"I tend to agree." Commander Morrow added from his separate cube through the security field. "Do you know what kind of ship this is?"

"It's new." Compz nodded. "Intrepid class I think. I got a partial scan as it drew alongside us. It has several differences though."

"The question is who are these people and who was firing at us?" The Captain said thoughtfully, laying back onto his bunk.

"The question is, were we safer while we were being shot at?"

Captain Joseph Faruqui sat back in his ample ready room at the rear of the bridge complex while he scanned through the files on his desk mounted interface in silence.

"This alien..." He began thoughtfully.

"Yes sir?" Turaz replied, sitting up suddenly in the seat opposite his commanding officer.

"You've been my chief medic for three years, have you ever seen anything like him?" He asked without taking his eyes from the monitor.

"I have not." The ageing Vulcan assured him.

"Not many species get past us, where did he come from?" Captain Faruqui turned the monitor off and offered his full attention to his chief medical officer.

"He refused to tell us, as is his legal right." Turaz explained, leaning forward onto the desk. "He and the other crewmen from the S.S. Wanderer are clearly friends so we can assume that they have known each other for some time."

"I'm confused." Faruqui sat back in his chair, clamping his hands behind his head. "These people are clearly up to no good and yet they were being fired on by an insurgence shuttle of unknown origin which should mean our enemy has shown it's head."

"Perhaps they have fallen out of favour or have outlived their usefulness." Turaz suggested. "It would be logical to destroy their vessel to maintain some level of secrecy."

"That's not their style." He sniffed. "They do things quietly, they haven't remained hidden this long by drawing attention to themselves."

"Agreed." Turaz nodded tentatively.

"This smacks of panic." Captain Faruqui smiled, an act his face was unaccustomed to performing. "This could be the mistake we've been waiting for them to make."

Captain Graves stood to watch as another officer joined the security team. She was around thirty and lean with long red hair tied neatly behind her head. She would have been attractive if she didn't appear so severe with a pinched up face that looked as though she wanted to bite someone and would happily do so if the situation came close to arising.

"I am Commander Sarah Brown." She began as she stepped towards the prisoners while the security team fanned out behind her. "First officer aboard this vessel."

"John Graves." He smiled wistfully, stroking his white beard as suggestively as he could manage for a man who had had most of his clothes confiscated. "Captain of the Wanderer."

"What ship is this?" Compz asked.

"The USS Violator." She replied succinctly without acknowledging the alien.

"Violator?" Morrow asked in surprise.

"Yes." She agreed impatiently. "I usually get it right."

"A little harsh for a Starfleet vessel." Captain Graves smirked with a curiously furrowed brow.

"Come with me please." She replied simply.

"Where are we going?" Morrow asked, standing up in readiness and eager not to provoke anyone.

"I shall say this only once." She began, stepping back and clasping her hands tightly behind her back. "We are going to a secure interview room where there will be two security officers in attendance who will be armed with live phaser pistols on an elevator setting."

"Elevator?" Morrow shrugged.

"She means that the first bolt will be set to high stun and every shot will increase in power after that." Compz explained gravely.

"Any attempt to escape will result in severe injury to yourselves." She continued. "When we reach the interview room your responses will be closely monitored by telepaths as well as technology that is highly efficient in detecting mood. If you are honest and frank with me I will return the favour."

"Before we go anywhere, I want to know who you are!" Commander Morrow insisted.

"You are in no position to be making demands!"

The interview room was a spartan box finished in dull grey panels of metallic plastic composites. A table was fixed in the centre with a holographic imager in the middle and three chairs were bolted to the floor on each side. Dim yellow lighting glinted softly off the bare structural support beams that ran through the corners and vanished into the brown carpeted floor.

"How long have we been waiting?" Morrow groaned.

"Too long." Captain Graves sighed.

"This is part of their tactics." Compz said cheerfully as he played aimlessly with the chair controls.

"Who do you think it is?" Graves asked conversationally.

"I think its Starfleet intelligence." Morrow suggested optimistically.

"You hope!" Compz grinned, his thin lips pulled back tightly to show his blunt vegetarian teeth. "I would remind you they're watching us, probably gaining as much information from leaving us alone as they would from an interrogation."

"It can't be them though, can it?" Morrow said hopefully. "Why would they have fired on us and then saved us?"

"We don't know who fired on us, it could have just been pirates." Captain Graves offered.

Suddenly the door hissed open as Commander Brown stepped gracefully through. It slid shut and then locked with a loud thud of metal beams sliding into place. Two guards fanned out from behind her to take position either side of the door, each wearing a black chest plate and a phaser on their belt.

"I have some very simple questions for you." She said as she took her seat opposite and casually discarded a note-pad onto the desk.

"What a coincidence." Captain Graves smiled.

"I would recommend simplicity." Compz agreed. "We tend to drink a lot of our cargo manifest."

"Do you, or have you ever worked for Section 31?" She asked, ignoring him.

"What's that?" Compz asked with a shrug.

She glanced down at her pad but it relayed no information about his sincerity. A glance at the sweat pouring down the head of the other men told her a great deal more.

"Well?" She persisted.

"So you're not Section 31?" Graves asked, his false smile vanishing in a rush of relief.

"This is a Starfleet Intelligence vessel." She told him. "You do not have dealings with them?"

"No." Captain Graves replied firmly.

"Fine." She nodded, glancing briefly at her pad. "What were you doing in the trade routs?"

"Trading?" Morrow suggested sarcastically. "We were hauling two industrial crates of Tarquarian gin."

"I know." She agreed, glaring at him with reserved menace. "But you were doing something else, weren't you?"

"Like what?" Compz asked, deliberately interjecting to take the pressure off his nervous Human comrades.

"Why don't you tell me?" She suggested.

"Have we broken any laws?" Graves asked.

"I don't know." She shrugged. "Have you?"

"Let's just tell her." Morrow sighed, slumping back in his chair.

"We have little to lose." Compz agreed. "Especially as we have already lost our ship."

Captain Graves looked at the faces of his crew and back to the expectant gaze of the Commander and sat back thoughtfully.

"This is the part where this stops being an interrogation." He told her. "This is an exchange of information or it's nothing."

"That depends." She cocked her head to one side, clearly intrigued.

"No." He shook his head. "We probably have more information than you have and if you want to hear it we want something from you."

Captain Joseph Faruqui stepped briskly into the medical bay trailed by an armed security guard who was growing slightly bored with following the Captain around all day and was taking pains not to show it.

"Anything new on our guest?" He barked with an authoritative tone drawn from his absolute confidence in his own abilities.

"No sir." Turaz reported grimly. "My assistant has run a full tissue scan to the DNA level and has found nothing."

"Yes sir." Katherine Rogers agreed, stepping forward with a vial of sickly brown liquid. She wiped a mop of untidy brown hair from her face and continued. "There is no information encoded into him at any level. Even though we're not familiar with his species he is exactly what he appears to be."

"And what is that?" Captain Faruqui enquired with a raised eyebrow.

"A rather annoying vegetarian species with slightly enlarged cranial capacity, below average physical strength and no heart." Turaz reported, stepping forwards in front of the young medical officer.

"No heart?" The Captain sneered in semi-disinterest.

"He has a liquid system inside his body but it doesn't function to oxygenate his blood, he seems to use air only to regulate his temperature." Ensign Rogers called out from a rack of vials where she was fitting in the tissue sample.

"He is highly intelligent and well adapted to space travel." Turaz noted. "It's quite possible that wherever he came from he has brought new technology with him. Perhaps that is what their attackers were after?"

"Commander Brown to Captain Faruqui." The voice called out from his comm badge.

"Faruqui here." He acknowledged, pressing the badge to open the channel and confirm his identity.

"I have a request..."

"This better be good." Captain Faruqui grumbled as he sat opposite the three crewman from the merchant vessel.

"You won't be disappointed..." Compz grinned. "We'll save that experience for your wife."

"We'll see." He grumbled, deliberately ignoring his comments as he sat back in his chair. "Impress me."

"I am a Moronian." Compz began. "My race is only about 100 years old. We're well adjusted to space travel because we're genetically engineered to be."

"We have encountered many modified species before." Commander Brown noted with disinterest.

"A splinter group from your Federation founded a colony well outside their borders using an experimental transport ship that used a Transwarp catapult." Compz continued. "The supply ship was launched from a machine that created a temporary Transwarp blast. At the other end another catapult was assembled and my race was created."

"You have my attention!" The Captain smiled weakly, leaning forward.

"15 years ago I stowed away on a returning supply ship knowing that there would be no way for me to return to my home." Compz said sadly. "I was only a child at the time. My parents were the governors of the colony and had found out about the plans that the Federation had for them. I was packaged up with all I would need to survive the journey and at least some of the knowledge my kind had acquired."

"What were these plans?" Commander Brown asked, tapping away on her pad.

"My colony was destroyed by an anti-matter device that had been brought on the ship I escaped on." Haldo Compz replied, breathing in deeply. Captain Graves reached out and placed his hand supportively on his friends shoulder.

"He's been watching Section 31 ever since." Morrow said softly. "We've all been trying to expose them."

"I see." Captain Faruqui sat back in his chair thoughtfully.

"Your turn." Captain Graves said, nodding towards the intelligence officers. "Who was firing on us?"

"That was what we call an insurgence shuttle." The Captain explained, deciding to extend them some of the answers they were looking for. "It's basically an upgraded Runabout. The central mission pod is loaded with twin retractable full size photon torpedo launchers and the side phasers have been fitted with pulse phaser cannons."

"We were nearly destroyed by a Runabout?" Morrow sighed.

"Perhaps when the mouse goes after the cat it should be better prepared..." Commander Brown suggested smugly.

"Insurgence shuttles are the most commonly used vessel that Section 31 employs." The Captain continued. "They're small, difficult to lock onto with weapons and highly manoeuvrable."

"We spotted that." Compz replied grimly.

"Your turn again." Commander Brown interjected. "How were you watching Section 31 without them knowing?"

"First a question..." Captain Graves grinned knowingly, toying with his wispy white facial hair. "If we have located a base of operations for them what will you do?"

"We will find out what they're up to and stop them getting up to any more mischief." Captain Faruqui snorted. "That's why we're out here."

"This technology is incredible..." Ensign Katherine Rogers enthused, handing the tricorder back to the gangly alien, Haldo Compz.

"Yeah." He nodded. "This is about right."

The young medical officer looked into the large orange sphere on the cargo bay floor and almost laughed at its ingenious simplicity.

The Captain and his entourage stood staring at the translucent lump of inert bio-matter that had a darker blob in the centre.

"This is it?" He asked in surprise, turning his attention to his senior medical officer.

"Apparently so." Turaz agreed with Vulcan disparity. "It was relatively straight forward to synthesise and is relatively unsophisticated."

"It's one of those brilliant ideas that simply never occurs to you." Ensign Rogers added.

"We've been dropping these probes out in the trade lanes for years." Commander Morrow smiled.

"And they're totally undetectable?" Commander Brown asked, scratching her head curiously.

"It's just a lump of inert bio-matter." Compz explained proudly. "It won't show up on sensors because the beam just goes straight through it, a navigational deflector will instantly vaporise it so you can't collide with them and nobody is looking for them anyway!"

"And they're solar powered." Captain Graves added to make himself appear useful. "We position them in line of sight with a sun and the photon energy provides the fuel it needs."

"Every vessel that passes leaves an energy imprint on them." Compz continued. "The nucleus is damaged by energy signatures, we just analyse them with normal sensors and they tell us how close, what kind of ship and what it was doing when it went past them."

"A totally passive sensor grid?" Captain Faruqui nodded, growing impressed with the abilities of the seemingly inept Wanderer crew.

"Section 31 has no idea it's out here." Captain Graves added. "And we know where their ships have been going because all other traffic is declared, it's just a case of eliminating everything that should have been there."

"And you're going to share that information with us?" Faruqui asked leaving little room for a negative answer.

"We're coming with you." Captain Graves smiled. "So we can show you."

"We've worked too hard and for too long not to see this through." Compz pleaded.

"You will each have a guard assigned to you and your movements will be severely restricted." Commander Brown acceeded grudgingly. "That is if we do decide to permit this."

"We'll tow your ship to the nearest moon and leave it in captured orbit." The Captain nodded. "We'll leave it cloaked so it won't draw any attention. "It needs extensive repairs but you can sort it out later."

"Cloaked?" Morrow exclaimed in surprise.

"You're on a Starfleet Intelligence vessel now." Captain Faruqui told him. "The rules no longer apply."

 

Chapter 3

The U.S.S. Violator emerged from warp with a blaze of blurred motion as she phased back into normal space-time. Her main hull was that of an Intrepid class starship but her rear shuttle bay entrance had been widened slightly and a second bay had been fitted along her spine above the twin rear photon torpedo launchers. The second bay had been added by engineers to increase the otherwise pitiful load capacity of the design and after several Captains had taken command of the new ships and embarrassed themselves by ordering shuttles to dock in non-existent places. The powerful twin nacelles were supported with slender fixed pylons that jutted up from the rear at a shallow angle. Buried in the nose where the secondary navigational deflector once sat was a large pulse phaser cannon that jutted forward menacingly and the hull was littered with irregular plates of additional ablative armour with redundant replicators that could regenerate them in a heated battle.

She banked hard towards her objective. Beneath her nose was a long tunnel that housed the newly fitted Quantum torpedo launcher binnacle, quite separate from the normal twin forward launchers.

"I have Huttus 12 on long range scopes, they will be able to detect us soon with normal sensors." The operations chief stated flatly from his control booth at the rear of the bridge.

"Bring the cloaking device online." Captain Faruqui instructed.

The security chief Goruss Clogg brought the replicator grid in the forward section of the nose online. Deep in a hidden alcove the replicator generated a sophisticated cloaking device designed to bend light around the ship with a field of controlled gravitons.

"How can a Starfleet vessel have a cloaking device?" Captain Graves asked from the rear of the bridge where he had been grudgingly included in the proceedings.

"We don't." Commander Brown replied evasively. "According to the Romulan treaty that would be illegal."

"But you just said..." Graves stuttered, his reasoning floundering wildly.

"We keep a pattern of a cloaking device of Federation design in the replicators. When we need it we generate it and dissolve it when we're finished." She explained. "That way we don't have one for anyone to scan or find if we ever get boarded."

"It's still illegal for the Federation to use them." Graves argued nervously, growing increasingly unsure of his ground.

"They have to catch us first." Captain Faruqui sneered. "I would remind you that the technology you employ against Section 31 will be of great interest to them if they should ever become aware of it. It is in all of our interests to keep certain matters to ourselves..."

"I have completed preliminary scans of Huttus 12." The operations chief announced as his information appeared on the main viewer.

"It is a type C moon in orbit around a gas giant of mostly hydrogen composition. It's a binary system, three other moons in orbit, all ice planets except Huttus 12 which is essentially a gigantic solid rock."

"Solid Rock?" The Captain repeated, turning his attention to the merchant.

"They came here more times that any other world." Graves explained. "We were heading here when we were attacked."

"Anything else in orbit of any value?" Commander Brown asked as she stood up to move closer to the main viewer.

"Some trace metals in the bands around one of the other three planets. Nothing worth mining."

"It was this moon!" Graves repeated forcefully. "We extrapolated the orbits with our computers to check their position and at the time the ships came and went they were heading for this moon!"

"Your computers are hardly much better than counting on your fingers." Commander Brown pointed out coldly. "If you don't mind me saying."

"What kind of ships?" Captain Faruqui asked thoughtfully.

"Mid-range cruisers." Graves glared back at her while he spoke. "Older warp signature and almost no Impulse that we could detect."

"Perhaps a Miranda class?" Faruqui suggested.

"We would have picked up thrusters too on our Bio-probes but we got nothing."

"Perhaps an Aggressor?" Commander Brown suggested with a raised eyebrow.

"My thinking exactly." He agreed.

"Wait." Captain Graves stepped forward angrily before his assigned guard restrained him with a hand firmly placed on his shoulder. "You said we weren't going to play this game any more."

"Did I?" Captain Faruqui asked in a slightly mocking tone. "Actually it might be useful to have Mr. Compz up here to confirm our theories."

"I'll get him." Commander Brown nodded, stepping to one side and tapping her comm badge.

"The Aggressor class was the first vessel Section 31 built. Before then they had borrowed or stolen ships to carry out their missions." Faruqui explained. "They're basically Miranda components but with twin silent Impulse drives, a larger hanger bay to carry four attack shuttles and a few other important variations."

The Turbolift doors swung open with the customary hiss as Haldo Compz blundered through with his ungainly limbs floundering around him in his usual casual manner.

"You called?" He chirped happily.

"What sort of vessels came here?" The Captain asked, stepping back from the main viewer. "Miranda class?"

"No!" Compz shrugged. "The Deflector signature was more narrow and powerful, almost no radiation and the warp coils were completely dead when not at warp. The Core was completely screened and I didn't detect any Impulse exhaust."

"Aggressor class!" Captain Graves said with a knowing nod, enjoying the unfamiliar feeling of even slight superiority.

"What?" Compz asked in surprise.

"It pays to know your enemy..." Graves smiled smugly.

"I want a complete scan of that moon..."

Commander Winston Morrow sat dolefully in the canteen sipping from an amazingly good cup of coffee. It was a well known fact that many of the replicator patterns interfered with each other and the engineers, when planning the basic menus often ended up programming things that were totally removed from what they were meant to be. It was seen as a useful morale builder on board ships as it gave the whole crew something to be united against when things were slow.

The replicators on board the S.S. Wanderer could only make three things and two of them were toxic to humans and the other tasted like it should have been. He sipped again at the coffee and couldn't help but to be impressed at the subtle perfection of the flavour. It was impressive to think that only moments before it had been a clot of biological human waste matter in the reclamation plant waiting to be rearranged at a molecular level. He didn't like to think about that too much as it had already put him off of ordering anything to eat.

"May I join you?" A voice broke his meandering thoughts as he looked up to see where the voice might have come from.

"Certainly." He replied, gesturing to an empty seat opposite to the young attractive officer dressed with blue uniform suggesting a science background.

"Your friends are all up on the bridge." She said as she dropped her tray down in front of her. Morrow looked hungrily at the steaming plate of pasta.

"Let them play at being spies." He shrugged. "To be honest I just want to go home."

"Where's home?" She asked with a smile.

"Earth Moon." He grinned. "I can see Earth from my old mums house."

"I was born in space." She sighed. "I'm always home..."

She watched him for a second, waiting for a response or some gesture that the conversation was indeed involving both of them.

"Are you hungry?" She asked, noting his interest in her lunch.

"Erm, yeah." He nodded. "I guess I am."

"Over here." She waved at his security chaperone. "Guard, get this man some macaroni cheese number 56."

The guard looked at her as if shocked by the suggestion that he should perform menial duties. He stepped forward a little unsure, knowing she outranked him but wondering if obeying the order was a derelection of duty.

"They have to be good for something!" She smiled as he finally capitulated and headed off to the food replicator panel.

"Winston Morrow..." He grinned, offering her his outstretched palm. "First officer of the Wanderer."

"Katherine Rogers." She shook his hand warmly. "I clean the racks in the medical bay."

"Oh." He muttered. "Maybe we should have shook hands after lunch."

"Don't worry." She assured him. "Only thing I've been toying with is your friends tissue samples and bio-probes."

"He's a smart guy." Winston nodded as a plate of steaming pasta was deposited in front of him by a surly security officer.

"He seems to be." She agreed enthusiastically. "Ironically I don't get to meet too many smart people working on an intelligence vessel."

Winston smirked knowingly as he began investigating his lunch with a plastic fork.

"What about the Vulcans?"

"They're not so smart..." She huffed. "They're self righteous and they struggle to adapt to new ideas."

"Really?" He shrugged. "Not what I've heard."

"A lot of stuff is kept hidden from view, especially with the Vulcans." She admitted as she chewed on her macaroni.

"Like what?" Winston asked, his curiosity piqued.

"Vulcan strength for instance!" She began, pointing her fork at him as she spoke. "They're physically no stronger than Humans."

"I've seen them." He shook his head and wrinkled his brow.

"Psychologically human strength is limited by group consciousness." She explained, gesturing lazily with her fork. "Humans have learnt to be of a certain level to avoid injury or over exertion and the level is unconsciously agreed upon by the whole race but you see frequent cases where people exploit their full strength under an emotional impact that overwhelms the conditioning."

"I've heard of that." He nodded, her statements seeming to make sense.

"Well Vulcans have found way to overcome those psychological barriers so they can use their full potential whenever they wish." She turned her full attention back to her meal. "We will too, after centuries in space things are changing."

"I see." Winston regarded her suspiciously.

"Don't even get me started on Mind-melds..."

"There are large deposits of various metallic compounds in the rock." Commander Brown reported as the data showed up on the tactical display mode of the main viewer

"Enough to fool our sensors!" Captain Faruqui nodded.

"I told you!" Graves announced triumphantly.

"What we lack in sophisticated computers we make up for by not being you." Compz agreed cheerfully.

"The moon is indeed riddled with a network of caves." Commander Brown continued, ignoring his comments. "Added to that it seems likely that they would employ a damping field to further confuse our scanners."

"I would say that that goes without saying!" Compz sneered.

"Sir." Security chief Goruss Clogg said sharply, his mouth tentacles vibrating madly. "I am detecting a vessel moving quickly on our position."

"Scarab?" Captain Faruqui asked, spinning quickly to the tactical booth.

"No sir, Aggressor."

"At least that's something!" He grumbled. "Shield up, red alert, drop cloak, arm weapons systems."

"We get to see a Section 31 starship!" Graves said happily, folding his arms over his chest. "I take it they're no match for this ship?"

"That remains to be seen." Commander Brown informed him, deflating him somewhat greatly.

The vessel shot from the moon towards the Violator at full impulse power. The twin nacelles were mounted at the top of the ship, low to the hull to narrow the forward signature making a slightly harder target for anything that sought to fire on it. Her nose had a bulging array with brilliant glowing torpedo launcher and her belly had a deep undercut with a glowing deflector buried inside it. At her tail two impulse exhausts glowed dull yellow as the escaping gasses were passed through sophisticated cooling fans.

The Violator turned to face her with its nose cannon glowing deeply red as it came slowly to life.

"All weapons ready and target locked." Clogg reported. "Ion stream fired from deflector."

"Ion stream?" Captain Graves shook his head, turning to face Compz.

"In case they cloak, the hull would still disrupt the stream and they'd be able to track for a few extra seconds." Compz shrugged to the viewer where a blaze of shimmering white particles spewed from the deflector array towards the oncoming vessel. "And it does look pretty."

"Red alert?" Morrow shrieked in more mortal fear of his life. "This just isn't my day!"

"I have to go." Katherine told him as she jumped up. "Battle stations, I'm a medic, I have duties."

"Thanks for lunch." He called after her, wondering where he was meant to go. He watched for a few seconds as the dining area quickly emptied until he stood alone with his burly guardian and a flashing red beacon.

"What about us?" He asked, turning to the guard.

"If you'd like I could accompany you to your quarters so you could cower under your bedclothes." He suggested dryly.

"I think the bridge." Winston suggested angrily. "I know you're normally not allowed up there but I don't mind leading the way."

"You two stay out of the way!" Commander Brown said, pointing as rudely as she could at the two observers.

"Fine with me." Compz agreed.

"You know..." Captain Graves began, digging his balled fists into his sides and stepping forwards. "... I outrank you, young lady."

He was met with a glare that reminded him of his mother, a woman who still sent shivers of fear down his spine thirty years after her death.

"Just saying." He grumbled somewhat disgruntled.

"They have locked weapons." Goruss Clogg reported.

"They're playing chicken." Captain Faruqui sneered. "Heading directly for us at maximum sub-warp with their weapons locked and knowing ours are too."

"The question is, who's going to fire first?" Commander Brown added, stepping down from the raised booth section at the rear of the bridge. "Time to impact?"

"93 seconds." The operations manager answered.

"We stand ready with all evasive patterns locked in." Helm reported.

"89 seconds."

"Program to fire automatically when they reach 40 kilometres and bank hard to starboard at full Impulse." Captain Faruqui ordered, growing increasingly tense.

"84 seconds"

The U.X. Saracen was bearing down quickly on the motionless Violator while she sat waiting calmly for her enemy to close in. The Saracen was unmarked except for her name and number in small letters across her saucer and a few warning badges for the benefit of her engineers. Most of her view ports were unlit as the crew was occupied with battle operations and she had little on board to support recreation in any case.

"Closing." Security chief Clogg reported. "Program locked in and ready to execute."

"Or be executed." Compz suggested.

"Always the optimist." Captain Graves grinned without humour. "To him the glass is always about to be smashed into the face of somebody who least expects it."

"They're firing, sir." Clogg reported. "Two photons."

"Hard to Starboard." Captain Faruqui ordered. "Evasive pattern Gamma 12. Return fire."

"Full spread of torpedoes away." Clogg confirmed as the screen lit up with the hologram of five angry red blooms of fire streaking away towards the Saracen.

One of the two photon torpedoes skipped across the shield harmlessly as the Violator continued to roll out of their path. While the other detonated several kilometres ahead of her nose. The Saracen banked hard to port and instantly vanished in a blaze of blue as it went to warp.

"Track them." Captain Faruqui barked.

"Damage report." Commander Brown ordered over the sounds of alarms.

"They've cloaked sir." Goruss Clogg reported as the scans showed nothing. "They detonated a torpedo in front of us to dispel our ion beam, we are unable to track them."

"No damage." The ops chief called out. "The torpedoes were low yield, it was just a trick to cover their escape."

"Damn!" Faruqui shouted. "Go to yellow alert and bring us into standard orbit of that moon."

"Yes sir!" The comm officer agreed, navigating the massive ship with the simple touch of a few buttons.

"That was obvious." Compz grinned from the rear of the bridge. "I'm surprised you fell for a trick like that."

"I'm growing tired of you." He growled back menacingly. "One more word and I'll have you escorted off the bridge."

"Before you do, might I make a suggestion?" Compz asked politely.

"Security, remove this man..." Faruqui barked, gesturing wildly.

"They thought nothing of killing 20000 of my people to cover their tracks, if they've left they won't have left without destroying what they've left." Compz shouted as a guard approached him, his hand twitching towards his pistol.

"Wait." Captain Faruqui shouted more calmly. "Explain quickly."

"They will have rigged this place to self destruct as soon as the last of their people is out." Compz said quickly, clearly not flustered by the threat of the guards. "They may have intended for you to pursue them in which case you may still have some time."

"I need a full and detailed scan of the interior of that moon." Commander Brown called out, pointing to the operations chief.

"I can't get sensor beams past the mineral deposits. I could send in probes and recommend sending shuttles into the larger caves." He suggested.

"Launch class 5X probes into the surface tunnels." She ordered.

"Shame you don't have any of those insurgence shuttles." Captain Graves shrugged.

"I have four!" Faruqui told him sternly.

The massive hanger doors at the back of the Violator rolled up into the support joist spilling light onto the landing marker pad. Two of the large upgraded and heavily armoured Runabouts flew out, one after the other. Their nacelles glowed a fierce blue from the broiling plasma churning away inside and a beam of blue light seared through space from the navigational deflectors added to the under side of their noses. They flew at maximum impulse towards the moon, their belly doors opening to deploy their full size torpedo launchers.

Haldo Compz sat quietly behind the pilot of the insurgence shuttle, his eyes darted around the narrow cabin taking in every detail, noticing every reading on the consoles. He flicked his eyes up to the two massive transparent aluminium windows at the moon as it loomed closer, filling his field of view.

"Are you sure you can diffuse anything we might find down there?" The pilot asked, leaning back from his command controls as he gently eased the craft towards the yawning mouth of a huge tunnel in the rocky face of the moon.

"Yes." He said simply and without conceit. "I was raised on a colony where all we had was Section 31 technology, I know how they think as well as anyone."

"That's what you tell them." Winston Morrow added quietly from beside his old friend.

"Truth is I have no idea what we'll find." Compz admitted quietly. "It seemed as good a way as any to get down here and check the place out."

Ensign Rogers stepped into the forward section from the tunnel that connected the rear lounge carrying a grey case embossed with the curled snake emblem of the medical profession.

"Almost there." She sighed redundantly as she flopped down into the opposite bench from the merchant crewman.

"Can't wait." Morrow sighed, glancing up to the yawning chasm as the shuttle slipped inside. The cave suddenly lit up from the ships navigational lights as the craft gingerly made her way deep below the surface.

"May I ask you a question, Mr. Morrow?" She asked cheerfully, opening her case on her lap to check the contents.

"I don't know." He replied grimly. "Last time someone asked me a question I ended up on a heavily armed shuttle going into a secret base to diffuse a doomsday bomb."

"How about if I promise that things couldn't get any worse if you answer this one." She smiled, checking her medical tricorder.

"It could get much worse." Compz shrugged. "We're just the support shuttle, the other one is loaded with troops ready for a firefight. This is a recipe for utter disaster."

"Please shut up." Morrow said, leaning forward and hanging his head in his upturned hands. "Ask your questions please and then maybe he'll shut up."

"Probably not." Compz added nonchalantly.

"I just want to know why you're here." She asked, turning her attention from her tools. "All the officers here are doing their jobs, I was sent in case of injuries to the attack party, Compz has personal issues but what drives you to risk your life like this?"

"Long story." Morrow sighed, sitting back heavily as if the weight of the world had fallen suddenly on his shoulders and was digging in with clawed feet.

"3 minutes to airlock contact." The pilot reported as the craft picked her way along the narrow tunnel.

"It seems we only have time for the abbreviated version." Katherine said softly, trying to coax him to continue.

"I once attended the academy." He replied sadly.

"Starfleet?" She asked with some small measure of surprise.

"So did my sister." He nodded. "She vanished on special assignment, I never got an answer to what she was doing or what happened to her."

"You never found out what happened?" She asked.

"No." He shook his head sadly. "I joined Starfleet believing it was something wonderful. We all imagined that our future would be spent exploring space, reaching out into the universe and meeting new species to learn from, glorying in our differences and living for the journey."

She nodded quietly, his words striking a chord inside her.

"But it isn't." He sighed. "It has dark secrets and hidden threats. What you see is one face but the Federation has others and when my sister vanished I lost my faith in it forever."

"So you're looking for her?" She asked softly.

"I don't know what I'm looking for." He snapped. "I just knew I wasn't going to find it at Starfleet Academy."

The lead Runabout drifted gently towards the end of the tunnel. It's marker lights picked up a solid metal bulkhead with a circular indent of a standard Federation airlock surrounded by small docking clamps. The shuttle drifted to a halt and then rotated to come alongside the entrance before sending out tendrils of energy from the tactical sensors. The small ship drifted closer to the wall sending out a barrage of frequencies to trigger the docking arms. Suddenly with a whine of hydraulics and a jet of steam the airlock activated. The circular port began to slowly extend from the flat metallic surface to marry up with the airlock at the side of the Runabout cabin.

"Red team have entered the complex." The pilot reported.

"When do we dock?" Compz asked impatiently.

"Red team have to declare the area safe." Katherine Rogers explained, slamming her case and taking a deep breath. "They lay down a series of sensors as they work their way in, when the risk of hostility is negligible we'll go in and look for your doomsday device."

"I suggest they get a move on." Morrow scowled as thoughts of the tunnel suddenly erupting in an anti-matter explosion filled his mind. Death was something he didn't relish but somehow the thought of dying in an energy burst so quick and violent that he simply ceased to be chilled him to the bone. He shuddered nervously at the grim spectre of becoming instantly nothing.

"Don't worry..." Compz nudged him sharply in the ribs, his long nose twitching involuntarily from the smell of his friends nervousness.

"I'm fine." Winston replied. He reached out to wipe an imaginary piece of lint from his grey-blue jacket and noticed his hand was visibly shaking. He quickly pulled his hand out of view and glanced about hoping nobody else had seen him.

"We're all a little nervous." Katherine assured him.

"And hungry..."

Red leader Thomas Trenter pointed his phaser carbine down a silent tunnel. It was dark and barley lit except for a sickly yellow glow from phosphorescent plating that was designed to have a low energy signature making detection even more difficult. His carbine jutted out in front of him, designed purely for combat. It was short and finished in dull grey ceramic thermal-coating with the controls facing backwards in the targeting binnacle so the target couldn't see the lights. The muzzle was a metal protrusion with two projection nozzles so the weapon could fire multiple beams at various settings.

"Trenter to Red three." He said softly, pressing the comm button on the side of the earpiece.

"Red three." The voice replied. "All clear, no movement."

Trenter pointed his muzzle ahead as he traced his way swiftly and carefully along the short corridor towards a sealed entrance followed by two other troopers covering his advance.

"Go!" He growled. Immediately the second trooper lurched forward and attached a sensor probe to the doorway and began entering settings on a modified tricorder.

"Strange power signals sir." The officer reported. "Door locked with advanced fractal encryption algorithm and magnetically sealed. Force field running through the centre of the tritanium plates."

"This is Red one." He began is he pressed the button on his ear. "I think we have what you're looking for."

"Confirmed." The reply buzzed into his earpiece. "Emergency procedure alpha."

"Confirmed." He agreed before turning to his two men. "Alpha," he grunted, withdrawing from the sealed door a few steps. "Go!"

Instantly the second trooper jumped back from the door leaving the sensor behind as the third man jumped forward with two long metal rods in his hand. As he moved into position three silver legs sprung out from the bases and the conical heads began to glow blue and hum slightly.

"Pattern enhancers in position. Ready to receive Blue team."

"Are we blue team?" Compz shrugged, looking around with amusement at the petrified face of Winston Morrow. "I thought you were on yellow team?"

"Give him a break!" Ensign Rogers said flatly as they stood up and stepped quickly to the transporter pad.

"We're blue team!" Compz said cheerfully as they began to dissolve into a coherent matter stream. "Don't you feel safer already?"

"The door is sealed and we have very odd readings from inside." Thomas Trenter reported efficiently as he stepped back to let the team of experts get to the entrance and begin their incompetent tinkering.

"Interesting." Compz enthused as he snatched up the tricorder.

"What?" Katherine knelt down beside him.

"This sensor probe is very unusual." He said, running his finger along the device attached to the door.

"Focus please." Winston grumbled. "I'm very keen on not dying today."

"Oh right." Compz smirked. "Not dying... right."

"Can you get us in?" She asked, Morrows nervousness beginning to become infectious.

"Withdraw the Red team." He instructed as he read through the tricorder data.

"Go." She said, snapping her thumb towards the other end of the tunnel.

"Guns make me nervous." Compz smiled as the disgruntled troops withdrew.

"But you're ok with ticking bombs?" Morrow leant heavily against the smooth metal wall, shaking slightly from a mixture of nerves and utter helplessness.

"The door is sealed because there's something in there they don't want getting out." Compz explained. "Whenever there is any doubt about a project a door of this kind is fitted as a simple precaution.."

"They don't want it getting out?" Winston asked, his interest aroused in the most negative way he could imagine.

"Don't worry." Compz assured him. "I've seen doors of this kind outside children's play areas."

"What about the strange readings?" Katherine asked.

"I don't know." He admitted. "I haven't seen anything like it before. I would guess there's some kind of biological material in there."

"And they use that a lot in their technology?" She suggested thoughtfully.

"They do." He nodded gravely. "It has proved to be an enduring and adaptable source of invention."

"So how do we open the door?" Morrow asked, dreading that the answer wouldn't be that they couldn't and they should flee immediately.

"Not as difficult as it might appear." Compz grinned, standing up from the sensor pad. "You just press the button..."

He reached out to a small black control pad fixed to the wall and as he pressed it a series of lights instantly illuminated. He touched the top yellow button and the door hissed quietly open.

"You intelligence type are looking for everything to be more complicated than it sometimes is." He shrugged to the bemused expression on their faces.

"We're receiving a message from the surface, relayed from a probe." The comm officer aboard the Violator reported. "We're being asked to move back and raise our shields."

"Scan for another ship!" Captain Faruqui ordered.

"Raise shields, red alert!" Commander Brown cried out, jumping up from her reports.

"Nothing sir." The operations chief reported as his console lit up with sensor data.

"A Scarab could be cloaked." He growled. "Flood the area with negative ions."

"Sir!" Commander Brown pointed to the main viewer as the tactical scanners locked onto a small device materialising in space beyond the moon.

"Magnify." He instructed, stepping forward towards the viewer. The image jumped forward to show a cylindrical object with a glowing red fusion generator at its base.

"What is that?" Commander Brown asked, wrinkling her brow curiously.

Suddenly the screen lit up brilliant white and the ship rocked violently from the blast.

"Typical of the intelligence mind." Compz shrugged, waving around a small box of sensor circuits he had pulled from the door. "Build a fusion amplifier detonator and set to self destruct if the room is entered but not bother to protect it from being beamed into space."

"So we're safe?" Morrow shook visibly along the whole length of his body as rock from the man-made cavern crumbled from the blast of the bomb and fell to the floor.

"We're safe from the bomb." Compz shrugged. "We still don't know what this door was trying to stop from getting out, and now the door is jammed open and we're unarmed."

"Oh god!" Morrow called out, covering his mouth with his hand as his stomach jumped in fear.

"Speak for yourself." Katherine grumbled pulling out a small concealed phaser.

"I thought medical staff chose not to be armed." Compz smiled but it concealed his disappointment.

"If it's going to be him or me..." She replied with a note of resolve while she set the flat little weapon to the highest level of stun it could manage without lobbing off large chunks of flesh, "...then it's going to be him!"

"We haven't detected any people left here." Compz reminded her.

"There are lots of members of Starfleet who don't register as people on tricorders." She pointed out, glancing into the dim cavern while her eyes adjusted to the darkness.

"Most of the them appear to be serving on your ship." Compz shrugged, his shiny black eyes being more accustomed to the darkness than humans.

"Lights!" He called out as the sounds of Morrows stomach rejecting the macaroni cheese echoed around the chamber.

The hall was instantly filled with light that picked out the huddled image of Winston Morrow kneeling behind them being violently sick.

"Replicators!" Compz called out sympathetically, hoping to offer him a shred to cling to as the remains of his dignity trickled along the floor.

"Yeah." He gasped, waving them away so he could compose himself.

"What the hell is that?" Katherine called out, her phaser dropping limply to her side as she stepped into the cavern, overwhelmed by the surprise of what she had found.

 

Chapter 4

"We're receiving a comm signal from the moon." The officer called out. "Audio only."

"On screen." Captain Faruqui called out angrily.

"Sir." The officer began sheepishly. "It's audio only."

"Speakers..." He hissed through gritted teeth.

The channel opened accompanied by a wail of static as the signal was coming from deep within the moon and relayed off of several probes to get to the ship.

"This is Ensign Katherine Rogers, we have beamed the device into space where it was able to detonate safely."

"Repair crews have sealed the hull breaches." Commander Brown reported absently as she paced the bridge with her reports.

"We have discovered some unusual equipment in here that contains biological matter." She continued. "We know they frequently employ such things in their technology and I am going to attempt to ascertain what the purpose of this equipment and indeed this installation is. Rogers out!"

"Equip a technical away team." Captain Faruqui turned more calmly to his first officer. "I want their computers interfaced and sucked dry. I want every piece of pertinent data on my terminal in one hour."

"I will send down a full team." She acknowledged, grabbing up her pad and selecting a team. "I take it we're filtering for details of the Scarab?"

"If there is any." He nodded. "And I want to know what's going on down there. See if you can arrange any assistance for that medic."

Ensign Rogers and Haldo Compz stood just inside the open doorway to a vast stone chamber, a hole scooped out by engineers and sealed with metal at various intervals. The weaving, interconnecting tunnels had been turned into a base with the simple application of doors, airlocks and power generators.

"What the hell is this?" She gasped, staring at the devices in the cavern.

"I have no idea..." Compz admitted, scratching his head curiously.

She stepped forward to the machinery in front of her. Thirteen huge tubes set into the floor. Steely grey cylinders clawing to the ceiling at a shallow angle leaning back. Each tube had a deep base with equipment throbbing away at either side, a small glowing fusion generator at the rear fed each with power and a jumbled mass of tubes and hoses vanishing into the dark shadows of the high ceiling.

"I'm getting readings from the generators and the computers." She shrugged, staring fixedly at her tricorder readings. "I'm not detecting anything inside except a biological signature but that could just be residue from the air."

"That's impossible." Compz peered over her shoulder at the small device as lights and numbers danced across the screen. "You must be detecting something, life signs or molecular density."

"Nothing." She confirmed. "It's like the scan is just being dissipated or swallowed up."

"There is one way to find out what's inside." Compz shuddered at his own suggestion as his eyes locked onto the frosted black screen at the front of the tube.

"I've never seen you getting nervous." She sniggered, finding the sight of his dented enthusiasm deeply unsettling.

"I have a bad, bad feeling about this." He grumbled. "Best not share that with Mr. Morrow as he has little left to throw up except his organs."

"Please..." She groaned at his humour that seemed to amplify itself when least called for.

"Sorry." He replied. "My race tends to resort to tastelessness when we get nervous."

"Really." She raised her eyebrows, glad for the distraction from the growing uneasiness she was feeling.

"How the hell would I know." He shrugged grimly staring at the tubes. "They're all dead."

She turned to look at him, wondering if he was joking or making some point about what he feared would be inside the tubes.

"I suppose we better do this before another Runabout full of engineers comes and does it for us."

"Indeed." He agreed, swallowing hard and stepping forward with laboured breath.

They stepped up to a narrow platform at the base of the first tube. At its front was a large hatchway that wrapped half way around and it had a plate of dark transparent material set in the top. Condensation had accumulated on the panel and moisture ran freely down the cold metal from the glass.

"You or me?" She asked quietly.

"I'm just an observer." He reminded her with a knowing smile and an outstretched palm gesturing towards the machine.

She took a deep breath and folded the door of her tricorder closed, setting it back at her hip. Keeping the phaser in her right hand she pulled the sleeve of her left arm down to cover her hand.

"I guess I'll just peer right in." She sighed.

"I'll just stand right back then." He shuddered.

"Right." She breathed heavily. "I'm wiping it then..."

"Any news on my people?" Captain John Graves asked above the furious activity going on around him on the Violator bridge. Normally he was a man who relished in his own boundless arrogance, enjoying the misfortune of others from his elevated position as Captain although the rank was a largely honorary one befitting him only in so far as his money had liberated the ship from the scrap yards . Now, aboard a Starfleet intelligence ship he was thrown into a whole different world. The Wanderers crew, sensors and engineering was laughable compared to the level of sophistication and efficiency that was buzzing on all around him.

"They're fine." Commander Brown said without giving the impression she had cared enough to actually check.

"They're not soldiers, they're just people." He began to explain his fears and to be involved in the activity to any degree.

"If anything had happened we would have been apprised." Chief of security, Goruss Clogg leant forward from his station and spoke softly through his mouth tentacles. "On this ship no news is good news."

"Thanks." Graves sighed. "I guess I'm just feeling like a third nacelle."

"We're in contact with the moon." Clogg explained, taking some apparent sympathy for the merchant Captains position. "We're setting up pattern enhancers in the caverns now so we can beam directly down."

"What do you hope will be down there?" He asked conversationally.

"As head of security I hope they find nothing at all." Clogg quipped with a wry smile that was hidden by a mound of flapping fleshy appendages sprouting from most of his face.

"As the Captain responsible for my crew I hope they find discarded crates of Latinum." He quipped back.

"Stranger things have happened." Clogg nodded. "Section 31 has a great deal of acquired wealth, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find a portion of it down there."

"I see." Graves replied thoughtfully.

"It's in our interest to keep it out of the hands of Section 31." Clogg continued. "I'm sure that Captain Faruqui would not have a problem with letting you have it."

"Really?" He said in some surprise.

"Really." Clogg nodded, losing interest in the conversation as sensor data was relayed to his console.

"Captain!" Graves called out, setting his course across the bridge while watched scornfully by his assigned guard.

"This better be good." Faruqui assured him coldly.

"I was just wondering if there is any way to get news of my people." He began respectfully, hoping to gain some favour. "They're not soldiers and must be quite out of their depth down there, I know you will do you best to protect them after we've all made such a huge sacrifice for you."

"I'll see what I can find out." He replied, waving his hand in a gesture meant to convey the message that he should leave.

"May I ask what you're hoping to find down there?" Graves pressed on.

"No." Came the firm reply.

"I heard some mention of a Scarab?" Captain Graves unwisely continued.

Captain Faruqui suddenly lost interest in his reports and glared menacingly into the slightly startled eyes of the other Captain.

"I might have misheard." Graves blustered. "Slabs maybe? Perhaps you were talking about Arabs?"

"Security." Faruqui said with quiet menace. "Escort this man to his quarters where I'm sure he will prefer to remain for the time being!"

Her chest exploded with adrenaline and her natural reflexes pushed her back from the tube.

"It's a person!" She gasped, her breathing laboured.

"A real person or an intelligence type?" Compz quipped to hide his own nervousness.

"Cut it out." She growled under her breath. "It's a man, a Human."

Compz sighed in regret, he had feared the tubes contained something sentient but had hoped against reason he was wrong.

"Perhaps there's some way we can find out more about him from the readouts on the cylinder." He suggested dryly, pre-empting her agreement and beginning to tap away at the controls.

"Ok." She agreed with a nod as she composed herself.

"He's alive." Compz began with a note of surprised relief. "He's at level 4 whatever that is."

"Level 4?" She repeated. "What are they doing to this poor man?"

"He may have volunteered." Compz suggested. "And as for your question I'm afraid I can find out little more without security clearance.

"Perhaps I can take some scans of him back at the ship and figure this out." She said, thinking out loud as she gingerly picked her way through the disorderly equipment.

"Perhaps." He agreed. "But we still are unable to scan the inside of the tube and yet I have readings through it, perhaps scanning this person is not going to be possible."

"There's a person in this one too." She called out from the second tube. "Another man."

"I imagine there is in all of them." Compz replied grimly.

"Oh God!" She cried out suddenly, recoiling in horrified surprise from the tube, her hands clamped to her mouth and her phaser skipping unnoticed across the bare rock floor.

"What?" Compz cried out, hefting his large and ungainly frame up on his feet. "Is he moving?"

"No..." She whispered, shaking visibly. "I need to get back to the ship."

Captain Faruqui stalked menacingly along the spartan corridors of his heavily armed vessel towards his meeting. Menacingly was his preferred method of stalking, his rank was enough to make his subordinates clear a path for him but his attitude ensured he would not be bothered with meaningless pleasantries by anyone who valued their rank.

"The technicians are all in place." Commander Brown reported efficiently as she strode as fast as she could to keep pace with her Captain.

"Any problems?" He sneered, knowing there would be something he could bite her head off for if he dug hard enough.

"They are having some problems interfacing with the computers." She admitted, hating having to do so. "The information is also encrypted so everything we get is having to be processed by the computer, it may take several hours before we access much data."

"Keep at it." He instructed. "Try being inventive. Look for secret access codes, anything that mentions the Scarab."

"Were doing the best we can." She assured him. "Our pattern enhancers were declared fully operational a few minutes ago so we should be able to beam things directly up. When we can bring the computer storage crystals aboard things should go a lot more smoothly."

"Keep me apprised." He grunted, stopping short suddenly without warning so that his first officer kept walking before she realised she shouldn't have.

"I'm on top of it." She said without confidence.

"I have a meeting, it shouldn't take more than a few minutes and then I'll meet you on the bridge." He explained gesturing to the medical bay doors. "When I'm done in here bring me a live phaser so I can vaporise Captain Graves."

"Sir?" She gasped, her eyes widening suddenly.

"Don't worry." He sniffed. "Just a happy thought to keep me going."

"Sir." She nodded that she both understood and agreed before briskly proceeding with her business.

The medical bay doors slid open as the Captain walked through.

"Turaz." He called out. "What's going on?"

"Sir." Turaz nodded in greeting as he appeared from behind his opaque office screens.

"You called a meeting." Faruqui shrugged in quiet exasperation.

"Actually it was me sir." Ensign Rogers stepped out of the office, clearly still highly agitated as she wiped a mop of her unruly hair from her face.

"What is it?" Captain Faruqui narrowed his eyes to defensive slits and fixed his attention on the impertinent young officer.

"We found something down there!" She began awkwardly. "I've checked my findings and I think you need to see them to decide how to proceed."

"I'm listening." He said, folding his arms tightly across his chest signifying that her words would fall on stony ground and would need to contain miraculous revelations if he were to remain cordial.

"We found tubes containing Human beings who are alive and undergoing some kind of procedure." She explained, unable to hold his gaze for very long.

"What kind of procedure?" The Captain pressed on.

"I don't know that sir." She shook her head and swallowed hard. "That isn't what I need to tell you."

"Then what?" He asked, uncrossing his arms as he began to grow genuinely curious.

"The second tube contained a man." She stammered as if the words were coming only with considerable effort.

"Yes?" He said to encourage her.

"I knew him..." She explained sadly.

"Who was he?" Captain Faruqui asked, stepping forward slightly, coaxing the explanation out of her.

"His name was Blake Girling. He died over ten years ago at the battle of Wolf 359." Her voice began to crack as she barely managed to finish speaking.
"Wolf 359?" He asked, as if the suggestion was preposterous. "When the Federation made its first stand against the Borg?"

"And now he's alive in one of those tubes."

"Ten years ago you were just a child." Captain Faruqui persisted as sympathetically as he could be bothered to. "You must have been mistaken.

"No sir." She shouted, glaring at him with angry eyes. "Sir, I know what I saw."

"It is unlikely this man is who she claims him to be." Turaz added coldly.

"It's him." She said softly.

"We're leaving in three hours." Captain Faruqui said thoughtfully, rubbing his chin and pacing slowly away from her. "I can't leave you behind. Section 31 already knows we've been there and will soon find out that they failed to destroy the base. When they do they'll probably send ships to destroy the complex ."

"We can't leave him there." She argued, wiping a tear from her eye and silently rebuking herself for not keeping a tighter reign on her emotions.

"So what choice do we have?" He asked bluntly, turning suddenly to face her.

"Beam him up." She suggested with a ray of hope lightening her mood slightly.

"I don't want to lose what might prove to be a useful piece of information." He said thoughtfully, chewing things over vocally as he began pacing again. "But then I don't want to take any risks."

"I can go down and scan for any possible contaminants." She jumped up excitedly. "I'm sure Haldo Compz would be happy to help, he knows a lot about Section 31 technology."

"You would have less than three hours." Faruqui goaded her gently.

"I can do it." She assured him.

Winston Morrow sat in the darkness of Captain Graves temporary quarters staring out of the transparency at the myriad twinkling stars in the distance. His mind was unfocused, racing through thoughts that he couldn't or wouldn't commit himself to.

"Here." Graves passed him a hot cup of coffee and sat down beside him.

"Thanks." He muttered, taking the coffee and wrapping his hands around it.

"Did you really think it would be that simple?" Graves smiled supportively, sympathising with his old friends deflated mood. "The first Section 31 base we ever set foot on would have your sister all neatly there waiting for you?"

"I didn't expect to see her there." He grumbled. "I didn't expect to throw up either."

"We all get scared." He huffed. "It's been a hell of a time. Shot to pieces, arrested, pressed into duty aboard this flying prison, threatened with doomsday bombs and faced with who-knows-what!"

"Did you hear what they found?" Morrow asked, sucking in air through his teeth. "What Compz and the doctor found?"

"I heard." He nodded sadly. "People."

"My sister could be down there." He shuddered. "She could be locked inside a tube like that somewhere."

"Or she could be locking people into tubes somewhere." He sighed. "If you're going to do this you know what we have to do..."

"I know." Morrow groaned wearily. "We have to look for answers, not what we want to find. We have to find the path that's real, not make our own that will eventually lead us nowhere."

"Glad you remember." He grinned.

"But what now?" Morrow snapped, angry with himself but tired and disorientated enough to want to lash out.

"Meaning?" He shrugged his reply.

"We've lost control." Morrow sneered. "They're going to drop us off with no probes, no ship and no answers and we're going to have to start all over again."

"One day at a time..." Captain Graves nodded slowly as he reached into his pocket for his flask of brutally strong gin to pep up his coffee.

"Thanks for coming." Ensign Rogers said as the light from the transporter beam faded away.

"I won't say "any time"." Compz replied grimly, taking in the cold metal tubes in front of them.

"I know." She shuddered. "This place creeps me out too."

Haldo Compz flicked open a tricorder and began his scans, waving the instrument about with disinterest.

"This is a waste of time." He raised his eyebrows and turned to face her. "There's no danger in beaming this apparatus up for proper analysis."

"I know." She smiled. "I just have to go through the motions to get these things taken up."

He nodded approvingly and his lips raised slightly.

"So who is this guy?" He asked conversationally as he stepped up to the observation platform.

"Blake Girling." She replied. "He died at Wolf 359 over a decade ago."

"How did he die?" Compz peered into the tube at the man inside.

"He died a hero." She explained, staring raptly at the screen. "His ship was attacked and he rigged the phasers to fire manually to protect them. He defended the ship until the fleet could arrive but was killed when the hull ruptured."

"The Borg?" Compz shook his head sadly.

"No." She replied with a shrug. "They were on a mercy fleet of hospital ships looking for survivors, the Borg had carried on to sector 01 by then."

"I see." He nodded. "Who was he to you?"

"His father and mine served together for years until his father was killed. My father sponsored his entry into Starfleet academy." She began sadly. "We met a few times, the last time he took me with him when he was delivered to my fathers ship so I could see my dad, that was the day he died."

"Nice to hear that Starfleet has some nice stories left." Compz said disparagingly.

"He was a good man." She wrinkled her brow, struggling to remember. "I was just a kid and he looked different but I know its him."

"Different?" Compz asked, intrigued. "Older?

"No, he doesn't really look any older." She shrugged. "He had more hair and was stockier perhaps."

"Humans do tend to lose their hair as they age." Compz noted running his hand over his smooth, oily head. "They tend to increase in mass though, rarely decrease."

"I don't know." She sighed. "But I'll find out."

"I might as well be poking this container with a sharp stick." He grunted waving the useless tricorder around. "I'm not getting anything from inside."

"Me neither." She admitted. "It would be a breach of protocol if I beamed him up now."

"Why?" Compz grinned. "We're not detecting any danger."

"I'm not detecting enough to declare it safe either." She grinned back. "But I am only a junior officer, I am expected to make a few mistakes."

"We better decide quickly." Compz added pointing towards the control panel. "He's just gone up to level 5!"

Turaz stormed calmly onto the deck of cargo bay 3, his footsteps ringing noisily around the otherwise empty storage facility.

"You beamed up a tube?" He shouted accusingly to the young medical officer as his cold logic began to crack.

"Yes sir." She replied, standing to attention.

"Here it comes." Compz muttered to her under his breath to himself.

"We ascertained that there was no danger to the ship and little danger to the occupant of disconnecting the machinery." She continued, gesturing to the tube.

"What are you basing that assumption on?" He asked with a quizzically raised left eyebrow. "You have yet to ascertain the purpose of the device and still you declare it safe to act arbitrarily on your own volition."

"The man is alive and the machine is not intended to provide life support." Compz added lazily as if the chief medics opinions were boring him.

"Then what?" He asked.

"I suggest we revive the man and ask him." Compz replied evenly. "He will doubtlessly have something that our investigation is currently lacking. A sense of humour perhaps?"

"It is a simple matter to be flippant in your position." The Vulcan turned to the large Moronian with the Vulcan equivalent of annoyance which was exactly like the Vulcan equivalent of joy only with more eyebrow raising. "I am responsible for the physical wellbeing of this crew."

"I have met enough of them to believe they deserve you." Compz quipped, shaking his head and returning his attention to the tube.

"Sir, we need to revive him." Ensign Rogers stepped forwards. "We're leaving soon and I'd like to be able to hear what he has to say before we abandon the other 12 tubes."

Captain Faruqui darkened the mood instantly as he stepped from the turbolift onto the bridge.

"Report!" He called out over the sound of a junior officer announcing his presence.

"We have three computer cores on board from the station." Commander Brown stepped forwards with her trusted pad in hand. "As well as 17 storage crystals that we're scanning for data."

"Anything on the Scarab yet?" He smiled, enjoying the feel of the tide finally turning in his favour after too many years chasing hopeless leads.

"We have found instances of the word and are working to translate the context of the sentences." She nodded with a measured expression of cautious optimism.

"We also have one of those tubes aboard!" She continued, hoping the small dose of good news would sweeten the bad slightly.

"On whose authority?" He snapped grumpily, more because he enjoyed being grumpy than because he felt that having the device on board was in any way negative.

"The medical staff found no contaminants and declared it safe." She explained. "It was also transported with maximum filtration."

"Damn that Ensign!" He spat his words out like holding them in was burning his mouth. "She should have asked before authorising a transport."

"They need permission to revive him." Commander Brown added, returning her eyes to her pad.

"Over my dead body." He grunted, happy that he could deny her that at least.

"Sir, I should inform you." She huffed, regretting having to continue. "We found several mentions of the Scarab in the data bank attached to the computers in the room the tubes were found in."

"They could be involved?" He asked in surprise. "How?"

"I don't know sir." She shrugged. "Reviving him does appear to be the only way to find out."

 

Chapter 5

Lieutenant Commander Blake Girling lay motionless on the main bio-bed in sick bay while Turaz sat at his office computer trying to make some logic of the meandering gibberish his medical sensors were reporting to him.

"So there he is." Compz noted redundantly as Ensign Rogers scuttled around with her medical tricorder looking for anything that might add some missing piece to the puzzle.

His hair was thinning out on his head and had been cropped short and his once full beard had withered to a few wisps of mousy brown hair. His body was lean and pale and the front of his skull had a small indent from his fatal injuries that had now almost completely healed.

"Are you still sure it's him?" Compz asked.

"This man was like a second son to my dad after his father died." She nodded. "Although with my father that meant he almost never saw him."

"It seems odd with Humans that you choose to form these family structures when you don't seem biologically predisposed to do so." Compz smiled.

"My dad didn't seem to be." She smiled regretfully. "I know he loved me and my brother but he was always out trying to save the lives of strangers instead of us. I guess we both felt a little slighted."

"From what I remember my parents ate a lot of grass." Compz shrugged. "I survived so I can only conclude they had my best intentions at heart."

"My dad preferred this guy to my own brother." She explained, hardly noticing what Compz was saying. "I think it was because my brother had no interest in joining Starfleet or becoming a medic. He was more like our mother."

"Being sentient is a tricky business." He agreed. "You don't know if you're getting it right or not until it all goes wrong."

She went silent and stepped back from his motionless body, encased in the clamshells of the scanning unit.

"I'm ready." She spoke softly, looking up to Compz with troubled eyes.

"Proceed." Turaz called out from his office without moving.

She smiled to herself and stepped forward with a loaded hypo-spray as the circular monitor assembly slid silently open. "I still get no reading from him."

"Me neither." Compz agreed. "If it wasn't for the bio-bed sensors registering his mass and my own eyes which I have learnt no to rely on then I would be unsure whether or not he was actually there."

"There." She said as she injected a dose of chemicals into his neck. "That was a small dose, it will take at least several minutes to take effect."

Blake Girling instantly began to mutter to himself, his eyelids fluttered a couple of times and he again fell silent and motionless.

"Minutes...?" Compz asked with raised eyebrows. "I was told that female Humans are disposed to underestimate the length of things, at least that's what Winston frequently assured me."

Suddenly his eyes flicked open and he sat up quickly with a yell of pain and surprise that shocked them all.

"Slight miscalculation?" Compz suggested, blustering in mild panic as he gestured to the hypo-spray that clattered to the deck plates that Katherine had dropped in her surprise.

"It's ok." She called out stepping forwards to reassure him. "It's ok."

"Where am I?" Blake cried out, his voice husky and deep while he squinted painfully from the light. "Who are you?"
"You're safe!" She assured him. "You're in sick bay."

"Sick bay?" He groaned, slumping back heavily onto the bed. "Sick bay."

"How do you feel?" She asked as he breathed heavily and settled with his arm covering his eyes.

"I've felt better." He groaned. "Not sure about worse though."

"Do you remember anything?" She asked softly, lowering herself to his ear while Compz moved in closer.

"The ship?" He cried out, springing back up again and sending Compz into a fresh bout of conspicuous panic. "We're under attack."

"No, it's all over." She said, trying to ease him back onto the bed. "You saved the ship."

"Good." He sighed, flopping back easily. "My head hurts like hell."

"Hardly surprising considering that a large segment of the bulkhead flew through it." Compz observed without wishing offence but unable to restrain his mouth for long periods of time.

"What?" Blake said, pulling his arm from his eyes and moaning as the light cut painfully into his retinas.

"You were very badly injured." She suggested diplomatically.

"I guess I'm lucky to be here?" He groaned. "Can I get some water?"

"Haldo?" She asked, glancing over to the replicator before quickly returning her attention back to Blake. "You're luckier than you can imagine."

"I feel like the luckiest man ever to get sucked into a Bussard collector." He told her, the effort of talking causing his throat to burn painfully.

"Do you feel up to hearing what is going on and answering some questions?" She asked bluntly, passing him a glass of water and struggling to help him sit up.

"I feel as weak as a Vulcan practical joke." He grumbled. "But I guess so."

"Do you know who I am?" She asked hopefully, smiling broadly in anticipation.

"You look like a big dark blur in the middle of a big bright blur." He replied as the cool water gently caressed his aching vocal chords.

"You should see how she looks to me..." Compz grinned.

"You're an even bigger dark blur." Blake told him. "But from the smell I would guess I don't know you, it's the kind of thing anyone would remember."

"You do know me." She told him. "You knew my father too."

"Past tense?" He grumbled. "Who died?"

"Ironically both of you apparently." Compz grinned.

"What?" Girling snapped, looking up and trying to drag his unresponsive body to an upright position before the effort of exertion overcame him and he slumped back down. "I'm so tired, what have you done to me?"

"Sleeping will do that to you." Compz observed sarcastically with growing impatience.

"What's going on?" Blake persisted wearily.

"I don't know if you're strong enough to hear this." Katherine told him regretfully. "But time is growing short and we have to move quickly."

"Go for it." He shrugged. "I could use some good news."

"My father was Commander Rogers." She began with a slight twinge of sadness as she spoke his name.

"He died?" Girling snapped, dragging himself up from the bed.

"Yes, but not on board the Mirage." She continued, her mind racing ahead to marshal her thoughts so she could explain in some way that wouldn't confuse or terrify him.

"I thought he only had one daughter." Blake gasped, squinting as his eyes burning painfully from the lighting.

"I am Katherine." She nodded. "You last saw me when I was twelve years old on board the Yorktown."

"I don't understand." He admitted.

"You've been dead for over 10 years." Compz interjected. "You died protecting the Mirage."

"What?" He sneered, in disbelief at what he was hearing.

"You died protecting the ship." Katherine explained. "A section of the bulkhead hit your head as the hull ruptured and your body was sucked into space."

"I'm dead?" He repeated.

"It looks good on you." Compz grinned. "You wear it well. Rather better than you wear the hospital smock."

"My father died in a shuttle four years ago on a stupid rescue mission." She replied with a tear welling up in her eye. "He never knew when to stop..."

"This is unbelievable." Girling shook his head and winced as a torch of pain shot through his temples, scrambling his disoriented thoughts.

"We were investigating a colony outpost and we found several tubes." Katherine explained. "You were in the second tube, they all contained people."

"How did I get there?" He groaned through the cloudiness of his muddled mind.

"We don't know." She shrugged. "We have to leave orbit very soon, I need to know anything you can tell me before we do."

"I don't remember anything." He sighed, rubbing his temples and closing his eyes as he ransacked his splintered memory. "I remember locking the ships upper phasers onto an attacking ship but never getting a good view of it. We had to fire at it through a hole in another ships hull."

As he spoke the cloudy tendrils of shadowy images began to creep back into his memory. He wrinkled his brow looking for more details, anything that could remind his of what had happened.

"The fleet arrived and I kept firing on this ship." He said. "That really is all I can remember."

"We can't scan you." Compz added. "Our equipment doesn't detect you at all."

"That's impossible." Girling shook his head, wincing again at the dull pain.

"It's as if our scans are passing straight through you." Katherine agreed. "The only way that would be possible is you were emitting some kind of damping field but we can't even detect the presence of that either."

"This all sounds a little unlikely." Girling sighed, looking up from under his pitched eyebrows.

"You're telling us?" Compz smiled down with his huge rubbery lips.

"What was this colony I was supposedly on?" He asked suspiciously.

"I'm not sure if I can really tell you." Katherine replied regretfully,

"What do you mean you can't tell me?" Girling snapped in irritation. "I'm a Starfleet officer."

"In my opinion..." Captain Faruqui called out from the doorway. "...That remains to be seen!"

Commander Winston Morrow asked for a plate of replicated pasta, sticking very closely to what he already knew was palatable. The steaming dish materialised in front of him in a shimmering haze of silvery light.

"You should try some of the other stuff they have here." Captain Graves suggested as he crammed food greedily into his mouth.

"I have enough experience with replicators to know that I've had enough experience of replicators." Winston smiled wryly as he sat down beside his Captain.

"I hear they're planning to leave orbit." Graves said with a shrug.

"They're worried about being attacked by section 31 vessels." He nodded. "After being attacked by one I would guess they have little idea how powerful they are. They seem as much in the dark as we are."

"I don't trust them at all." Captain Graves said with a sneer.

"Nor do I." He agreed. "But they're the only chance I've got now that our ship is in pieces and we've exhausted our best lead in years."

"Our ship is in pieces again!" The Captain corrected with a grin.

"I need to find my sister." Morrow said dolefully.

"I know." He replied softly. "But you're not going to find her on the first Section 31 base we come across."

"They're checking the computer files for her name." Morrow said with a dampened enthusiasm. "It's in their interest because she might be a good lead for them."

"I'd like more information." The captain said thoughtfully. "Hopefully we can get a message from Haldo soon."

"Yeah, they seem to trust him." Morrow said hopefully.

"That's only because they don't have much choice."

Captain Joseph Faruqui stepped quietly into the chief medical officers room where they could enjoy some privacy from the others.

"Have you been monitoring?" He asked as he pulled out a chair.

"I have." Turaz agreed, turning the desktop interface screen so that both men could see it. "They have made no mention of anything that would suggest that the officer knows anything more about his situation than he has admitted to."

"And you're still unable to scan him?" He pressed impatiently.

"I have carried out some very thorough scans of the tube he was locked into." He offered by way of an alternative. "It is a very sophisticated device. It monitors every aspect of the human condition and has advanced computer systems capable of communicating with other instruments, perhaps subtle enough to communicate directly with the Human nervous system."

"Are you suggesting he was being programmed?" Faruqui sat back and rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

"Not necessarily." Turaz closed his eyes for a second as if lost in meditation. "The device is extremely sophisticated and it will take several more days before I have enough facts on which to draw conclusions."

"But that would seem likely?"

"It would seem likely." He admitted. "However, there were also feed-tubes that were designed to inject physical matter into the bodies."

"Life support?" Faruqui asked, shrugging with slight disinterest and hoping to revert the conversation back to the programming aspect.

"It clearly was designed to fulfil that function however the canisters of fluids that were being injected have other interesting properties."

"Like?" The captain pressed.

"One contained a colourless liquid that, much like the people inside, we are unable to detect."

"I'm ok." Blake insisted as he dragged himself to the edge of the bed to sit up. His blue medical smock was pulled tightly around him as he shivered noticeably even though the medical bay was warm to the others.

"You look it." Compz agreed sarcastically.

Blake shot him an acidic glance.

"Are you feeling stronger?" Katherine asked, her tricorder still stubbornly refusing to admit he was there.

"I need the toilet." He admitted with a weak smile. "I guess that fact is empowering me."

"I'll help you." She smiled back, reaching out for his arm and helping him to his feet.

"Did your father ever talk about me?" He asked as they shuffled uneasily towards the toilets.

"Yes." She began. "Once when I was fifteen I joined him for a conference out beyond Rigel. I remember he was really engrossed in the lectures and for a whole day he never mentioned you at all."

"I see." He smiled.

"He really liked you, he blamed himself for your death." She continued. "He took a lot more risks after you died, I guess that was how he came to be piloting that damned shuttle."

"I'm sorry." Blake said earnestly, appreciating the bitter irony.

"It's ok." She replied dismissively. "I've had a long time to get over it."

"What about you?" He continued. "How's your career?"

"I got amazing scores at every test I ever took and ended up on an intelligence service vessel." She replied without much pride.

"This is an intelligence vessel?" He frowned.

"That's right, that's why we're investigating that colony." She nodded.

"Starfleet intelligence?" He shook his head in disbelief.

"That's right." She agreed as she reached up to the black panel at the toilet door and pressed the controls. "I guess you're on your own from here."

"I'll make it." He assured her.

"I've set the gravity in there down by half so you should be able to move about ok." She told him as he stepped awkwardly inside. "Give me a shout if you need anything."

"Katherine Rogers?" The Captains voice boomed out from behind her.

"Yes sir!" She replied, snapping round to face the imposing figure of her commanding officer.

"I would like a word with you." He told her bluntly, stepping over to the bio-bed where Compz was still standing.

"What has he told you so far?" He asked as she stepped up beside him.

"Nothing, sir." She admitted with a shrug. "He doesn't know anything."

"What do you think, Compz?" He asked, turning to the large alien.

"Do you really care what I think?" Compz said with a knowing smile.

"I see you as a consultant." The Captain replied diplomatically, avoiding his gaze and choosing not to admit that he didn't.

"I think this man is a victim of circumstance." Compz folded his arms over his bony chest where his oversized sternum showed through his thin white shirt. "I think he will be able to offer you no more information than your chief medical officer."

"What do you mean?" He grumbled in annoyance.

"Turaz is locked into a pattern of thinking where he looks for proof of his theories, as are you to some degree and you will never uncover Section 31 with that attitude." Haldo Compz explained. "You need to gather truths with an open mind that is ready to learn instead of wondering how pieces fit into what you already know."

"I already do that." Faruqui sneered.

"You can be certain that your enemy does." Compz replied firmly. "And you have failed to catch them at every turn."

"I have them now." Faruqui argued through angrily clenched teeth.

"Only because you stumbled onto my investigation." Compz replied, his humour vanishing altogether. "That's why you tolerate me."

"Perhaps you're right." He angrily conceded. "That man could be a spy, programmed to kill this crew, a living bomb or a tracking device. Perhaps he is a victim but I still need to know he's safe to have on board."

"Perhaps he is not actually who he appears to be." Haldo Compz suggested. "He could be a clone or even a hologram but conjecture, while an amusing way to pass the time is otherwise pointless."

"Meaning?" Captain Faruqui prompted.

"He is a piece of this puzzle." Compz nodded, unfolding his arms. "But he will not fit into what you already know."

"Rogers?" He turned to face her. "I want him to submit to every conceivable tissue test you can imagine."

"I'm sure he won't mind." She hoped.

"I don't care if you have to resort to taking his pulse with your fingertips and staring at his blood under a microscope." The Captain told her with a definite note of rebuke. "If he's to stay on this ship I want a full explanation of who and what he is now, not what he was ten years ago."

"Are you suggesting we might leave him behind?" She asked with a grim severity in her accusing gaze.

"Not yet." He shrugged. "If he is to stay aboard my ship then he will wear a comm badge with a constant transporter lock on him."

"A wise precaution." Compz agreed. "I would run with shields up at a rotating field frequency to disrupt any signals incoming or outgoing."

The Captain looked at him sternly but began to nod involuntarily. "Anything else you'd suggest?" He asked sarcastically.

"I would post a guard with him and construct a force field around his quarters and suggest that he resides close to the outer hull away from any sensitive equipment or systems." Compz replied as if bored with having to do so. "The targeting system on your phasers won't lock onto him so I would recommend the highest non-fatal setting at wide beam."

"Sounds reasonable." He agreed with a wry grin.

"He's not dangerous." Ensign Rogers insisted.

"He seems more inclined to trust you so you've just volunteered to work with him." Captain Faruqui told her. "In the mean time, I hope that Mr. Compz continues to make his talents available to us.

Commander Sarah Brown stood at the circular bridge at the top of the ship, reviewing data on her portable terminal as the junior officer stood in front of her briefing her without the apparent need to stop for breath. She nodded in time with his voice, barely noticing what he was saying. She glanced up and noticed his blue lips as they moved together, mouthing the words that she was dutifully ignoring. Between them was a noticeable amount of thick clear liquid that pooled between his teeth as he spoke. She looked back down to her terminal that had all the information that he was trying to give her already laid out on it between convenient menus and prompts.

"So!" She began, cutting off his rhetoric. "You have gathered this information from the available comm traffic from this base?"

"That is correct, sir!" He agreed with a proud nod. "It was quite difficult."

"They have been speaking with another base about the tubes and about the Scarabs?" She continued, already having the answers but needing to be very sure of her ground before she informed their somewhat irritable Captain.

"The Scarab is mentioned several times, as are the tubes." He replied, clenching his hands behind his back and rocking on his heels. "Whatever their function they are connected in some way."

"That will be all." She said finally, deliberately declining to thank him.

"Yes sir." He nodded with noticeable disappointment that she had failed to comment on his talents.

"Commander Brown to Captain Faruqui." She spoke into her comm-badge.

"Faruqui here." Came the instant reply.

"I need to speak with you right away sir." She smiled thinly.

Blake Girling pulled down the grey T-shirt over his tired and aching body and breathed heavily from the effort.

"So I don't get to wear a Starfleet uniform?" He called out from the bathroom of his guest quarters.

"Sorry!" Katherine turned to Compz who was sat next to her and sighed that she couldn't offer him better news. "You're not fit for duty, I'm sure the Captain will allow you one when you're feeling better."

"It's ok!" He sighed, splashing water onto his face and staring at himself in the mirror. His eyes peered into their reflection as if hunting for the shadow of himself deep in the image he cast.

"The uniform is over-rated." Compz added. "I preferred those old ones where all the women wore short skirts."

"They don't do that any more." Katherine told him with pointed annoyance.

"Worst mistake Starfleet ever made!" Blake agreed, stepping out from the bathroom and flopping heavily into the large grey seat at the corner of the room. It was plainly decorated and dimly lit but comfortable and functional and it even had a window which was a rare thing on what was essentially a large battleship. "Or at least I thought so until today."

"Rough day?" Compz asked with a knowing wink.

"I've had better." He replied. "I have some questions if anyone feels ready with some answers."

"Feeling better, are you?" Katherine smiled.

"A bit." He admitted, returning her smile. "Who is Section 31?"

"I'm not allowed to say." She said with regret while turning to the tall Moronian. "Luckily Compz is..."

"Do you remember the reports of the first ever visual contact that Humans ever made with the Romulans?" He asked, leaning forwards.

"I think so." Blake nodded. "It was Kirk who made contact, wasn't it? Aboard the Enterprise?"

"That is correct." Compz agreed with a cheery nod. "You'd met them before but never seen them when Kirk and his crew finally got a glimpse."

"And?" Blake shrugged.

"It scared the hell out of them." Compz smiled. "They looked like Vulcans, pointed ears, silly hair cuts and pitched eyebrows."

"Yeah, they were the same race but split centuries ago." Blake agreed.

"They didn't know that and the Vulcans hadn't bothered to tell anyone either." Compz began. "The Enterprise crew wondered what the hell was going on and quite rightly too. These Romulans were threatening them and they had a Vulcan officer on board in a key position who suddenly looked like a spy or something."

"You have to understand the feelings of Humans at the time." Katherine added. "The Federation was pretty new, as was Starfleet and it was working out really well. The peaceful exploration of space was coming along nicely built mostly on the shoulders of us and the Vulcans."

"Starfleet was terrified that this was all going to end in tears." Compz continued. "They were afraid that the Vulcans weren't actually what they appeared to be."

"They couldn't do anything because they had to publicly trust the Vulcans or the Federation would be over." Katherine interjected, caught up in the mood.

"That was when they started Section 31." Compz said sadly. "They were separate from the Federation or even Starfleet although they were bound by the same rules, at least at first."

"They were just meant to explore the Romulan/Vulcan situation and find out if there was a threat to the Federation." Katherine shrugged. "That was all."

"They were totally autonomous." Compz said. "They were kept out of the chain of command so their existence could be denied if things went wrong, they were a secret but were well supplied and determined to keep the Federation safe."

"And they've been operating ever since?" Blake said, leaning back heavily.

"They've been growing more powerful and secret all the time." Katherine admitted. "They have access to Starfleet at the highest level and have been skimming off technology and power."

"This ship doesn't pose much of a threat to them." Compz said sadly. "Nothing does."

"And Starfleet intelligence is trying to stop them?" Blake said with an amused grin beginning to spread across his face.

"That's right." She nodded.

"They have access to the people who give you orders and they've ordered you to stop them?" Blake asked. "And Captain Faruqui is put in charge of hunting them down?"

"I have nothing to do with this!" Compz made a point of noting his own position. "I come from a colony set up by Section 31 where we were genetically modified to be better suited to space travel."

"So what are you after?" Blake asked coldly.

"From what I know, the experiment largely failed so my colony was destroyed." Compz replied evenly. "I guess I'm after revenge."

 

Chapter 6

Captain Faruqui stepped onto his bridge from the main turbo-life entrance and was cordially announced as he did so.

"My ready-room." He told Commander Brown as he stalked across the command deck towards his private chambers while she dutifully complied with his curt instructions.

The ready-room doors hissed closed behind them, ensuring their privacy from the rest of the bridge officers.

"Sit down!" He told her as he seated himself behind a moulded silver desk that was fixed to the bulkhead wall. His room was decorated with framed holographic images of the dignitaries he had met during his rise to command and a large model of the first ship he served on as Captain sat at the far side beneath a window, a tired old Excelsior class ship.

"Sir?" She asked as she dutifully complied.

"You have good news for me?" He asked but in a tone that was more like a command and his expression that anything less would not be tolerated.

"I believe I do." She ventured, handing him her personal terminal. "We have gleaned some information from the base computers."

"Anything I should care about?" He goaded her, dropping her pad to the desk in disinterest with it, preferring to hear her explanation rather than rummaging through reams of raw data.

"There are several mentions of the Scarab in the comm traffic from the moon." She began, almost excitedly. "They mention planning to run tests aboard the Ibex."

"What sort of tests?" He frowned. "I thought the Scarab was fully operational and in limited production."

"We couldn't tell, the data was highly encoded." She apologised. "Perhaps they are making improvements?"

"What else?" He leant forward, resting his chin on his upturned hands thoughtfully.

"The tubes are mentioned in reference to the Scarab and the tests, they have something to do with this plan." She offered, hoping to pique his interest.

"But no mention of what they are actually for?" He replied with disappointment.

"No." She admitted. "But they are the only operational ones, some kind of prototype. The entire moon base was being set up to mass produce whatever the tubes were for."

"Apparently they are for resurrecting the dead." He shrugged, sitting back in his black leather chair.

"There was no overt mention of their function." She sighed. "But there is more good news."

"There better be!" He told her, dropping his head again to his upturned hands.

"Most of the comm traffic was to the same place, the place where the tests were going to be performed on board the Ibex." She began with a smile.

"Go on..." He told her.

"It appears to be some kind of testing ground, an experimental lab." She told him. "I think we have enough information to extrapolate its position."

"You know where it is?" He sat up excitedly, his eyes beaming with childish glee.

"The computers are working on it and I have a team running simulations in astral cartography." She smiled more widely. "I expect answers within the hour!"

"So!" Blake began, hoisting himself from the seat with obvious effort. "Starfleet is looking for Section 31, who is also Starfleet or at least another face of it?"

"I guess so." Katherine replied dolefully.

"It's no longer the Starfleet you used to know." Compz told him. "I believe that their influence has begun a deep corruption that is eating into the very heart of the Federation and I can back up my beliefs with sound evidence."

"It certainly sounds like it." Blake agreed with an angry nod as he turned to face him.

"There are other signs." Compz began. "Starfleet is now building purpose built battle-ships and engaging in the forced resettlement of races when it suits them to do so!"

"I find all of this hard to believe!" Blake replied with some evident surprise. "Starfleet intelligence is getting away with this?"

"Not Starfleet intelligence!" Katherine corrected him. "Starfleet command has authorised all of this."

"No!" Blake closed his eyes and shook his head in disbelief. "Battle ships?"

"Defiant class, Prometheus class!" Compz nodded sorrowfully. "I know of three other classes that are still listed as Escort vessels but are clearly designed for nothing but combat."

"I know of more!" Katherine added softly. "Quite apart from the vessels that Section 31 covertly employs, Starfleet intelligence has access to attack ships."

"Your father would be ashamed of you!" Blake said angrily at her, forgetting for an instant that she had actually grown up. "This was never his vision, he believed in Starfleet and the Federation mandate."

"No!" She yelled back, jumping to her feet to defend herself. "He agreed with my application to join SF intelligence."

"I sincerely doubt he would have agreed with any of what I've just heard." Blake sneered.

"He knew about the Defiant class, it was originally designed to counter the Borg." She argued, her fists clenched and her temper soaring. "We took a pounding at Wolf 359 from just one Borg ship and we know they have more. Their technology was frighteningly advanced, we had to learn to defend ourselves. Even my father said it was reasonable."

"It always sounds reasonable!" Blake yelled back, his anger surprising even himself. "In world war two the nazis gassed to death thousands of Jewish people. The gas was officially listed as a cleaning chemical so that the delivery agents and ordinary people would have no problem with making it, it all sounded reasonable to them, too at the time!"

"This is not productive!" Compz stood up, hoping to calm them both down.

"Does it have warp drive?" Blake asked, glaring into her eyes with silent menace broiling away inside him.

"What?" She asked, not following his reasoning.

"The Defiant." He explained. "Does it have warp drive?"

"Yes." She shrugged. "Of course it does."

"Why would a defensive vessel have warp drive?" He argued although more calmly as he took control of himself. "Perimeter defence ships are not meant to be fitted with it. If you want to counter an attack you do it with improved defences along a perimeter, you don't build battle ships."

"But..." She began, not knowing what to say.

"There is a reason we never built them before." Blake said evenly, digging his hands deeply into his pockets. "We never needed them."

"Starfleet famously relied on diplomacy and peaceful methods." Compz agreed. "In fact the Borg invasion was finally stopped by a starship accessing the Borg technology when all weapons had long since failed."

"It sounds like you've lost your way." Blake said, turning towards the window.

"We're leaving orbit." Captain Faruqui told his chief medical officer.

"I see." Turaz replied coldly, gazing emotionlessly into his commanding officers eyes.

"I would like to bring at least two more of these tubes up to the ship." He continued. "For study."

"I see no danger in doing so." Turaz agreed. "I would appreciate the chance to study the devices while they still contain a being."

"I thought you might." Faruqui smiled knowingly.

"I have been able to find almost nothing of any note in the tube we have." Turaz explained with a hint of frustration evident through his emotionless Vulcan façade.

"What about this clear liquid?" The Captain asked conversationally "Any luck with that?.

"Nothing." He admitted. "Although I am now able to detect it with scanning devices."

"You can scan it?" He snapped up in optimistic surprise.

"Whatever was in there has broken down now that it is separated from its energy source." Turaz replied.

"What does scanning reveal?" Captain Faruqui pressed.

"It is a simple saline solution with a few trace minerals, nothing I can draw conclusions from and definitely nothing that offers any clues to their function."

Katherine Rogers sat alone in her quarters feeling like a scolded child who had been caught with her hand in a cookie-jar. She sat at her modest computer access terminal reviewing files. Her security clearance was low but allowed her into the files she was looking for. A schematic of the Defiant flashed onto the screen as the menu system scrolled down around the sides offering her the choices of different views and more information on various non-classified areas of the vessel.

She sighed heavily to herself as a large part of her was forced to agree with Blake Girlings dire view of the situation.

The door chimed to warn her that someone was waiting outside and she had no current desire to speak with anyone.

"Come." She called out wearily to the computer hoping it wasn't Captain Faruqui or Turaz coming to help her bad day continue inexorably towards worse. Instantly the door slid open to allow Haldo Compz in.

"Hi!" He smiled as he lumbered into her small windowless quarters.

"Hello." She replied with notable relief, looking back to her files. "I've been thinking about what he said."

"Who? Girling?" Compz asked innocently.

"I've looked up the Defiant." She told him, turning her monitor so that he could see the images.

"Four forward pulse phasers, two quantum tubes with advanced targeting trackers, ablative armour and rotating shield modulation all built around a power source generating so much power that it's constantly trying to tear the ship apart." She explained sadly.

"It would imply that it was built by a people who are losing faith in peace." Compz agreed with her apparently grim assessment.

"I thought that by working in SF intelligence I would be at the cutting edge of protecting the Federation." She explained. "Now I don't even know what I'm protecting it from or even if it deserves protecting."

"You're protecting it from itself." He shrugged, stepping closer and perching uneasily on the end of her desk. "Rather erroneously I might add."

"Meaning?" She asked, already knowing the answer.

"Meaning that something you believe in should hardly be a threat to itself." He explained. "Section 31 would be no threat to anyone if their activities were made public, their power would mostly vanish."

"Why didn't you tell anyone about them then?" She asked, leaning back and crossing her arms across her chest defensively.

"Who would listen to me?" He smiled. "And in any case, I couldn't draw too much attention to myself or they would find me and kill me. I am after all living evidence of their existence."

"What am I going to do?" She sighed, hanging her head sorrowfully and enthusiastically rubbing her forehead.

"About what?" He asked as supportively as he could be inspired to manage.

"I can't just resign my commission, this isn't regular service." She explained. "I can't turn my back on my career either."

"So you've decided that you no longer want this job." He shrugged. "I'm sure I can find a place for you aboard the Wanderer, or at least what's left of her."

"Your ship?" She laughed. "No offence but things aren't that bad just yet."

"What's wrong with my ship?" He snapped defensively. "She's a good little craft."

"It's a mess." She reminded him. "It's crippled and deserted in orbit around a rock in space because a shuttle shot it to pieces."

"And you don't feel it would be an upward step in your career?" Compz asked with a smile.

"I was more thinking along the lines of applying for a position aboard a rescue ship or something in Starfleet medical." She explained. "Follow in my fathers footsteps."

"At least you have options." Compz sighed in sympathy with himself. "I have to carry on my fight against Section 31. I have nothing else and nothing else to look forward to."

"I guess not." She bit her lip as she suggestion that perhaps he should consider joining Starfleet flashed through her mind. "I guess I don't know what to think."

Blake Girling sat at his terminal going through every file he could find about Starfleet intelligence, Section 31 or anything else that might shed some light on his situation. They were painfully scarce and security warnings blocked him at every step of the way.

He stared thoughtfully out of his window for a moment, thinking about what he had heard. His mind was clearer than it had been, the pain in every movement had numbed and had slipped past his notice but he still felt irritable and his temper was short.

A file appeared about his old friend Commander Rogers. His shuttle had been caught in the blast of a warp core breach after he continually ignored warnings to withdraw. He had already shuttled out more than 50 injured people from the crippled vessel and had been officially recorded as a hero.

"Goodbye old friend!" He said softly, sighing at the grinning picture of the stocky, cheerful man he'd respected and known so well.

Suddenly inspiration hit him. He rummaged through the desk draw for equipment before finding a black box that contained thick padding which was loaded with tools and devices. He tutted loudly to himself that the phaser was missing but that hadn't been a total surprise. He smiled as he grabbed up a tricorder and flicked it open.

Mercifully it hadn't really changed, it seemed a little lighter and the colours of the flashing readouts seemed brighter but it was essentially the same piece of kit he had been trained to use. He set it to look for what he knew would be out there and began to wave his arm. He waited while the little device scanned for energy signals that were processing his repetitive movement and then the sensor locked on with a determined chirp.

"Got you!" He grinned stepping over to the far bulkhead wall to the source of the scanner. He ran his eyes over a large featureless black panel on the grey wall. He pressed it and a menu suddenly appeared that offered internal ship communications in the event of failure of the internal comm system.

He ran his fingertips along the surface and dug his nails into a tiny gap, pulling as he did so. With ease the panel simply tore from the wall revealing a flashing and pulsing jumble of circuitry and fibres. A little surprised at the flimsiness of the ship he set the tricorder to detect at a shortened range and quickly found what he was looking for. He pulled a tiny black tube from the panel that contained a security monitoring probe that had been watching him.

His tricorder told him that the device was some kind of optical imaging system that watched and listened to everything happening in the cabin.

"I'll give you something to watch." He grinned, swallowing the small device.

"The coordinates have been set into the computer." Commander Rogers confirmed.

"Are all shuttles and crew accounted for?" Captain Faruqui sat in his middle chair issuing orders around the bridge.

"All shuttles are confirmed and locked down. Crews accounted for and secure." Goruss Clogg replied from his station.

"Engage cloaking device." He instructed.

"Replicators responding." Came the reply from the operations chief. "We are cloaked."

"Is the course set in?" He asked the helmsman.

"Ready, sir." Came the efficient response from the front of the bridge.

"Maximum warp." He ordered as the main viewer blurred the stars around them as the ship gently accelerated beyond the light barrier with a brilliant flash that suddenly lit up the view screen.

"Four point three hours to target." Commander Brown reminded him.

"Keep me posted." He replied, stepping up from his chair. "I want red alert and battle stations in two hours, we don't know what we're going to find when we get where we're going."

"I have programmed all tactical scenarios into the system." Goruss Clogg told him. "All weapons are nominal and inventory is fully loaded. We are as ready as we'll ever be."

"Three more vessels have acknowledged and will join us twelve hours after we arrive." Commander Brown added.

"That will give me the time I need to check things out without other people tripping over my feet." The Captain said as he headed off to the sanctity of his ready room. "I want level one diagnosis run on all sensors including tactical."

"We went to Warp." Commander Morrow said with a shudder.

"I know." Captain Graves replied with curt nod. "Why don't you go and try to find out what's going on?"

"Me?" Morrow gasped. "I don't want to go out there!"

"I'm confined to quarters." Graves reminded him. "Go and find Compz, he'll know."

"He's probably working with them by now." Winston argued in a whiny monotone. "I'm not sure if I trust him any more."

"Compz?" Graves ruffled his brow and shook his head as if the suggestion was ridiculous. "We've known him years."

"I know." Morrow agreed. "All he cares about is getting at Section 31, if it meant working with Starfleet, I think he'd do it."

"He'd hardly be betraying us then, would he?" He smirked. "We just want to get at Section 31 as well."

"I'm not saying he would." Morrow shrugged, raising his voice as he spoke. "We know he went down to the moon again and is working closely with that doctor."

"That's his job." The Captain sat back and crossed his legs, sipping from his ever ready flask of gin. "You don't know what you're saying, do you?"

"No!" Morrow admitted. "I'm scared, alright!"

"Me too." Graves nodded slowly. "I have a bad feeling about all of this."

Girling opened the service panel of the replicator and jabbed the probe into the circuitry.

"Computer." He called out from the side of the machines alcove. "Give me a hand-phaser."

"Unable to comply." It told him in a flatly unemotional female voice.

"How about now?" He said, crossing circuit pathways with more aggression than skill.

The opening flashed instantly to life and the glimmering light faded quickly into a puddle of chicken soup replicated without a bowl. The cold soup dripped to the floor along the front of the machine leaving a trail to the carpet.

"Give me a phaser." He repeated, pulling out the main control board and jamming his probe into the over-ride command module.

"Unable to comply." The computer persisted nonchalantly.

Blake picked his way carefully out of the machines innards and stood back thoughtfully surveying the uncooperative device.

"Computer." He began hopefully. "Replicate a type 7 power module."

"Unable to comply." It mocked him. "The replicator is restricted to supplying food only."

Blake rubbed his chin and perched himself on the edge of a table, thinking of all the parts around him.

"Computer." He began with a renewed sense of purpose as an idea struck. "Is there any problem with the replicator?"

"Affirmative." The computer agreed. "There is damage to the primary command input circuit."

He stepped quickly up to the instrument and jammed the probe into another circuit hard enough to crack the mounting bracket and damage the connections.

"Is there any problem with the replicator?" He repeated.

"There are no reported problems with the replicator." The computer replied.

Blake stood up with the imaging coils in his hand and the shattered remains of the diagnostic sub-processor spilt out on the floor.

He took the part to his desk and pulled the power supply from his maintenance probe and began wiring the parts together while checking the design schematics on the computer database for the instructions of how to build a phaser.

"Computer." He said as he checked that the imaging coil was firmly attached to the power supply. "Monitor this room for any energy spikes and relay all information to my tricorder."

"Drop out of warp." Captain Faruqui instructed. The ship emerged into normal space still cloaked and invisible to the eye of anyone who may be watching.

"I have the location of the base on long-range sensors." The operations chief reported.

"We're a long way inside the neutral zone." Commander Brown noted cautiously. "If we get caught here, we're going to be in a world of trouble."

"Perfect place for a base of operations." The Captain noted. "Nothing is allowed to enter the zone so nobody would think of looking for them here."

"I am detecting a large planet in a binary solar system with a ring of asteroids, that appears to be the location we were given." Commander Brown offered, tapping in numbers at her station.

"On screen."

The main viewer dropped the normal holographic rendering from the front of the ship and showed the planet they were monitoring.

"Show me this asteroid ring." The Captain ordered as the view zoomed in on the exact coordinates.

"The larger asteroids are nearly as big as Earth's moon." Goruss Clogg noted. "They contain a high concentration of metal deposits and could easily hide a base in the same manner as we have previously seen."

"Are we detecting any power signatures?" Faruqui asked, leaning forward to the viewer and squinting for any detail.

"No sir." Goruss confirmed. "But they could simply be cloaking themselves."

"They could indeed." He agreed suspiciously. "Move us in, thrusters only and passive scans. I don't want to do anything that might tip them off."

Ensign Katherine Rogers stepped into cargo bay 3 riddled with doubt and confusion about both Starfleet and herself. She looked up from her own meandering thoughts to see two more of the tubes from the Section 31 base. She stood motionless for a moment, staring with surprise at the tall cylindrical structures that stood like a pair of monoliths at the centre of the cargo bay.

"Come in." Turaz said, standing up from his work with a medical tricorder in his hand.

"Doctor?" She began as she walked petulantly towards him.

"I was instructed to remove more of these tubes for analysis and I require some assistance." He explained simply without noting her surprise.

"You never said that you were intending to bring any more up." She said.

"I am not required to explain my orders to junior officers." Turaz noted impatiently. "Hand me the EM stimulator."

"Yes sir." She looked around the floor where dozens of tools had been carelessly discarded in his frustration with his work. "We did try to scan for any electromagnetic fields and found nothing."

"These tubes are still functioning normally, we have not severed them from a power supply yet." Turaz explained.

Katherine shook her head to herself in dismay as she glanced over to the visual displays.

"Sir!" She began forcefully. "These tubes have reached level 7 now and we don't know what that will mean to the people inside."

"It is our job to find out." He replied flatly, reaching out his hand for the stimulator.

"These machines could be harming the people inside." She explained adamantly as she grudgingly handed him the tool.

"It would be illogical to suppose that." He began with a singularly Vulcan exclamation. "The one man we have extracted from one of these devices was in good health after having been dead for a number of years. There is clearly an end result that these devices are attempting to achieve as they sought to produce more of them."

"More of them?" She gasped. "Why?"

"It is our job to find out." He repeated. "Incidentally, concerning the healthy individual we extracted from the tube, I have several questions."

"Questions?" She asked, waiting nervously for him to continue.

"As you know we extracted a sample of this mans blood." Turaz began. "I have run many simple tests as scanning devices are still ineffective on his tissue."

"What did you find?" She asked, her eyes closing as she screwed up her face in anticipation of impending bad news.

"How old is this man?" Turaz asked, standing up to face her and wiping his hands on a towel as he did so.

"He was thirty five when he died." She said simply, shaking her head as she wondered what was coming but was almost afraid to ask.

"I would estimate his age at no more than twenty eight from the reaction of his cells." Turaz told her. "It appears he has been somehow regenerated to a younger biological template as well as being brought back from the dead."

Turaz picked up an engineering tricorder relay that glinted with pulsating red light as he switched it on before he returned his attention to his job.

"How do we know they intended to produce more of them?" She asked, kneeling down and peering into the workings of the tube where Turaz was again clambering about.

"A partially decoded message." He explained. "The entire base was intended to become a production facility."

"Producing what?" She asked, peering into the dark glass opening to the vaguely human face inside.

"This man is a Human." Turaz explained. "We have failed to identify him so far but the computer is working on it. Girling had lost some weight and facial hair so we are assuming the same will be true of this one. What he is intended to be at the end of the treatment remains a mystery."

"We should get him out of there." She suggested, a chill running up her spine at the thought of what might be happening to him.

"Doing so would tell us little." Turaz countered. "Girling could offer us nothing we didn't already know."

"If we knew who this man was then we'd know more." She said hopefully.

"And if we wait then we could find out much more and would still be able to ask him that question."

"Sir." Commander Brown said as the door to the Captains ready room shut behind her.

"How long to complete full sensor scans?" He asked, his attention fixed on his monitor.

"Another two hours, I'm afraid." She explained. "With only passive scanning it is taking some time."

"Understood." He agreed, looking up. "Have we found anything interesting?"

"Not yet." She admitted. "Five asteroids are large enough to be habitable in the way that their previous base was, we're concentrating our efforts on them now."

"This doesn't make sense." He said thoughtfully. "This is a lab. They're running tests on ships."

"Yes sir." She agreed. "That seems likely."

"What sort of tests can you run in the neutral zone?" He shrugged. "There are detection markers everywhere, anything would be detected and the risks of that happening are just too high."

"I agree." She said, the thought never before occurring to her but making sense.

"What would they be testing here, and how would they be getting away with it?" He asked, not even hoping for an answer.

"I guess we'll know when we find it." She replied hopefully.

"We're close to the Federation in the neutral zone between us and Romulan space." He said rhetorically. "We've found tubes on board that contain a man who died years ago but is now fine, and we know that they want to test something aboard the Ibex..."

"It's not much." She agreed.

"Look at this!" He said, turning his terminal around to show her. "That is Blake Girlings quarters.

"Yes sir." She nodded as she watched the screen.

"He pulled out the security monitoring device and swallowed it." He continued. "And now he's exercising."

"Starfleet crewmen are required to maintain a level of fitness." Commander Brown noted while the small image of the officer moved across the screen.

"I had engineering run a little experiment on him, just for fun." The Captain told her. "We beamed a replacement monitor in there once we'd discovered what he was up to."

"Sir?" She asked quizzically.

"For the last half an hour they have been gradually increasing the gravity in his room." He explained. "Now this man has only just been declared unfit for duty due to extreme fatigue brought on by this procedure."

"I see." She nodded.

"He pulled the comm panel off the wall with his fingernails." Faruqui continued. "And now he's working out at twice the normal G-level and he hasn't even seemed to notice."

"What do you think this means?" She asked, her eyes jumping up to meet his.

"I don't know yet." He shrugged. "But it means something."

 

Chapter 7

"It could be an impulse turn." The operations chief confirmed.

"These energy signatures cannot be a naturally occurring event." Commander Brown added, confirming what the Captain already knew. "There is at least one ship out there performing high speed manoeuvres."

"Have they detected us?" Captain Faruqui asked impatiently, staring at the main viewer which could tell him nothing.

"The readings are erratic but they don't appear to be heading in our direction." Goruss Clogg said with notable relief drawn from the fact that with the cloaking device in place they were running without defence shields.

"We have been moving in with thrusters only in black-hole mode so it is unlikely that they will be able track us." Commander Brown added hopefully.

"Follow the signal with scanners." He instructed as the Captain hoisted himself from his seat to turn to his officers.

"Yes sir." Clogg agreed as he locked the tactical scanner grid onto the signal.

"It's two ships." The operations chief reported.

"Confirmed." Commander Brown agreed. "I'm detecting two impulse trails but they are very weak and definitely not heading this way."

"So at least two ships are leaving..." The Captain said thoughtfully. "I just wonder how many are left."

"More to the point, how many Scarabs?" Goruss Clogg added.

"I doubt it would be more than one." Captain Faruqui assured him. "We don't believe there are more than three or four completed yet."

"Yes sir." Clogg replied. "But one would be more than enough, wouldn't it, Sir?"

Lieutenant Commander Blake Girling turned in surprise as his door chimed signalling the presence of a guest. He breathed a heavy sigh and drew a lung-full of air into his aching chest that burnt from the exertion of forcing himself to exercise.

He reached into his shirt pocket for his brashly assembled phaser made from parts of the replicator and switched the controls to activate it if he should feel the immediate need to do so.

"Come." He called out to the computer.

The doors slid open with a hiss as the magnetic seals gave way and Katherine Rogers stepped in sheepishly and began peering around in the darkness.

"Does the light still hurt?" She called out from the doorway apologetically.

"I just prefer it this way." He replied, stepping in front of the window so the faint starlight illuminated his silhouette. "Come in."

"I need to talk." She said as she began across the cabin floor. "You're breathing is laboured, are you alright?"

"I'm feeling much better actually." He assured her. "I had some tension to work out."

"I can come back later if you're busy." She offered hoping he wouldn't take her up on it.

"I'm done. Why don't we take a walk?" He suggested, grabbing a black jacket from the back of the chair and throwing it on over a grey shirt.

"How about the observation lounge on deck 3, we're at battle stations so nobody will be in there?" She suggested, halting as she spoke.

"Fine with me!" He smiled, glancing back at the comm panel.

"The stars seem a little odd." Captain Graves noticed as he paced the length of his cabin.

"They seem dull and unfocused." Winston Morrow agreed as he watched the pacing figure with growing annoyance. "What do you think it means?"

"I think we're cloaked." He replied, nodding in agreement with himself.

"Wouldn't everything out there look black?" Morrow shrugged. "The light would be bent around us."

"I've never been on a cloaked ship." Graves replied, stopping momentarily to stare out of the window. "If the light was totally bent around us then the ship would be unable to function properly. They must compensate for that somehow."

"Maybe the window is just dirty." Morrow offered with a sigh.

"Graves to Compz." The merchant Captain said as he tapped on the comm-badge he had been issued.

"Compz." Came the reply from the small gold symbol.

"Are you busy?" He asked, reaching into his back pocket for his gin flask.

"Yes." He replied earnestly. "But I could use a break, shall I come down?"

"Yeah, it would be good to see you."

"I guess I was a little harsh." Blake began as they walked into the observation deck room that sat just below the raised bridge assembly at the top of the main hull. There were five large plate windows that gave an utterly impressive view of the massive purple and blue planet that was orbited by a circle of dusty brown rock fragments loaded with metallic minerals that made a pulsating ring of shimmering colours as the distant sunlight caressed its way across them.

"That's alright." She shrugged.

"I guess all this is a lot to take in." He explained. "One minute I'm in fight with some alien vessel and the next it's over a decade later and I'm being told I was killed and brought back by Starfleets evil twin."

"You signed up for this!" She smirked, her grim mood weighing heavily so that smiling somehow escaped her.

"It's all getting a little surreal." He grinned back.

"It might be getting worse." She told him flatly.

"Go on..." He said as he took a seat at a table next to the windows and waited for still more bad news.

"They beamed up two more of the tubes." She explained.

"With more people inside?" He asked.

"We can't get past the computer encryption so we can't tell who they are yet." She nodded in agreement. "I do know that when we found you the treatment had reached level 4 and it was at level 5 before we got you out, on these two it's already at level 7."

"But we don't know what that means?" He asked rhetorically.

"We're in orbit around a planet that might have a Section 31 base." She continued. "Apparently the people in the tubes were going to be tested aboard a ship."

"Tested in what way?" He leant forward and stared unwaveringly into her anxious eyes.

"I don't know." She shrugged sadly. "We're cloaked and scanning for this hidden base at the moment, it could be in the asteroid ring."

"They're going in?" Blake asked, leaning back with a faint smile forming as ideas traced their way through his cluttered mind.

"They can't take the ship in." She explained. "I have heard they're out-rigging two insurgence shuttles with cloaks and quantum torpedoes."

"Insurgence shuttles?" He shrugged.

"Runabout class ships." She explained. "We have four on board but only three are ever primed and functional. They're big transporters but ours carry heavy weapons and armour."

"But look just like ordinary transports?" Blake nodded gravely. "I'm beginning to get the hang of this intelligence stuff."

"It doesn't take much..." She smiled. "...Intelligence that is. You just make sure you're someone that can't be trusted and assume that everyone else is too."

"That's great." He nodded sarcastically. "I don't think there's enough intelligence on this ship to go round."

"Look." She said, leaning forwards. "I want to help these people, they could be just like you with no idea about any of this."

"Me too." He agreed. "How?"

"I was hoping you could tell me!" she shrugged.

"Do you trust your Captain?" He asked. "Will he use what he finds on the planet to help these people?"

"To be absolutely honest I don't think he will." She replied, sighing heavily as she spoke. "He just wants to get to Section 31."

"Then I'm going to have to go down to the base." He said firmly.

"I think we have it, Sir." Goruss Clogg said with a note of jubilation on his croaky voice as his console flashed some very shaky sensor data to him.

"The base?" Captain Faruqui jumped up from his chair, grinning widely.

"One of the larger asteroids has a device that is emitting some kind of navigational deflector bubble to keep the other asteroids away." He explained. "It is phased in tune with our own sensors so we didn't detect it at first."

"On screen." He barked angrily, spinning to the main viewer.

The image of the asteroid filled the screen. It was simply a large inert rock in space, almost perfectly spherical and spinning gently in no discernible pattern, or at least one that it didn't see fit to divulge to observers.

"There are several tunnels wide enough to accommodate our attack shuttles." Commander Brown reported cheerfully. "If the Violator remains at cloak then we should be undetected while our security team attacks and the shuttles will be safe from attack by the Ibex once they're inside, assuming of course that it's still in the area."

"How long until the shuttles are ready?" Captain Faruqui asked, turning to his over-worked chief of security.

"They are reporting ready." He replied. "Crews are performing pre-launch tests and security personnel are assembling in the staging area."

"Goruss, report to the lead ship." He instructed. "Assemble a secondary team to deploy from the support ship. I want two engineers and two medical officers on the staff."

"What about Haldo Compz?" Commander Brown suggested. "He would be invaluable if we came across any more traps!"

"See if he's willing." The Captain sneered. "Remind him that this could be a bumpy ride."

"Hello lads!" Haldo called out cheerily as he wandered into his crews temporary quarters.

"Compz." Captain Graves called out cheerfully, standing to greet him.

"I hear you are confined to quarters." Compz noted. "Did you try and steal some cutlery or something?"

"I didn't do anything." The Captain grunted. "I mentioned Scarabs and ended up being very rudely treated."

"They are all very touchy about that." Compz agreed, lowering his frame into a waiting chair that hadn't been waiting for him while Morrow looked on in frustration that somebody had stolen his seat.

"What is a Scarab?" Morrow asked, scolding himself for allowing his curiosity to get him further involved with things he knew he shouldn't have got himself involved with in the first place.

"A ship." Compz shrugged. "Some kind of ship, I don't know what's special about it but they're scared of it."

"They were unsure about the power of the Aggressor class." Captain Graves stood up and began pacing the floor thoughtfully. "That was just an upgraded Miranda type vessel. By now it must be very old but it still posed a threat to them on this brand new armoured stealth battleship thingy."

"Perhaps Section 31 have no qualms about using weapons that aren't morally acceptable." Morrow suggested. "Polarised ion streams are illegal due to the radiation fallout but are nearly half as destructive as Phasers again."

"The radiation would damage the ship and the crew, there's no way to protect against it." Graves pointed out. "This was an old ship, it didn't look like some suicide machine."

"Maybe they've simply got more advanced technology." Compz postulated. "Several older designs of vessels have endured to this day due to their virtues over more modern designs. The Excelsior class, for instance has proved to be able to withstand incredible amounts of punishment and can endure high warp for longer periods than many more recent ships."

"The Miranda is a modular design." Captain Graves added in agreement. "It could be built quite cheaply and is a common sight that doesn't attract much attention."

"But..." Compz continued, drawing the focus of attention back to himself where he preferred it to be. "What is the Scarab?"

Blake Girling walked along a silver and grey corridor with boringly repetitive support joists and lighting fixtures marking every section. He was followed closely by a burly security officer who was under instructions to follow his every move without being overly intimidating.

He knew that his civilian clothing was a considerable nuisance in his plans to smuggle himself aboard one of the two insurgence shuttles but he had simply to live with it. He had considered beaming himself aboard but had discounted that plan immediately as the targeting scanners couldn't detect him so beaming him anywhere was virtually impossible. The only way that anyone could tell where he was, was either visually or by the comm-badge he had agreed to wear.

He walked briskly towards the officers lounge one deck up from the observation deck so that the guard lost sight of him for an instant around the bends and got used to doing so. The guard knew enough to suspect that his own presence was merely a precaution or possibly in case he fell sick and not that Girling posed any real threat, he was after all a Starfleet officer.

Blake walked slightly faster around a blind corner and drew his cobbled together weapon as he did so out of sight of the security officer. He knew that when battle stations were called it was normal to find ships relatively quiet as everyone was otherwise occupied and that suited him perfectly.

As the guard stepped round the corner, Blake was waiting for him with a short discharge from his phaser. The replicator coil flashed with sparkling orange energy as a beam of coherent photons streaked erratically from the muzzle end into the shocked and unprepared guard.

With a groan the big man slumped noisily to the ground, his eyelids fluttering and his arm twitching from the low power of the blast not quite doing everything it was meant to do.

Blake knew he had to move quickly as he grabbed the shoulders of the man and dragged his weight towards a Jeffries tube opening that he had noticed on his way to meet Katherine. With a grunt he hefted the groaning man into the service ducts and grabbed the door plate from the floor.

He waited for a second, looking at the guard who was already beginning to moan and twitch more openly.

With a sigh he shot him again, the beam catching him on the leg and sending him plunging into unconsciousness.

Blake tossed the comm-badge in the tube and shot it with his phaser pistol before fastening the door to the Jeffries tube and continuing on his way to shuttle-bay 2 to embark on his next act of stupidity but he knew it was now too late for regrets.

Katherine Rogers stepped into the slightly recessed airlock opening to the insurgence shuttle and continued down the narrow access-way to the rear lounge where rows of seating for the landing party had replaced the normal comforts. She sat at one of the last few seats available and waited in silence for whatever would happen to begin to happen.

She glanced out through the side window at the maintenance team who were scurrying around with flashing tools and instruments making sure every device was functioning perfectly as detection could make their short journey a significantly shorter one. Faint tendrils of white smoke rose from the ships vents before the internal air conditioning could swiftly remove them and the air was heavy with the smell of powerful machinery preparing itself.

She craned her neck to the doorway in the hope of seeing Blake but no matter how much she strained she could barely make out the door. She closed her eyes and hoped against reason he'd make it, especially after all the help she had given him would, if discovered end her career in an unfortunate and permanent manner.

Haldo Compz continued on to shuttle-bay 2 at his usual leisurely pace as if the world around him was as important as his last bowel movement.

"Compz!" He heard a voice call out from behind him. He turned to see Blake Girling jogging to catch up with him as they both made their way up to the bay entrance.

"You're going down to the base?" Girling asked conversationally.

"It seems like the thing to do." Compz agreed. "These people would rather kill themselves than actually think the mission through so I'm going to try and offer the voice of reason and if that fails then at least I have the amusement of being able to tell them that I told them so."

"You don't think this is a good idea?" Blake suggested.

"Even though this is a science base there is still bound to be a security team, not to mention that there's probably at least one aggressive ship in orbit." Compz agreed.

"So you're a consultant too?" Blake smiled, holding up a portable pad with his orders programmed into it although he had programmed them himself earlier using Ensign Katherine Rogers command codes.

"They roped you in?" Compz sighed. "I didn't think you were that stupid."

"I'll take that as a compliment." Blake grinned as they reached the bay.

The doors slid open to the large shuttle bay that had an observation platform running around the top. The rear walls had deep hanger doors recessed into them where large service and cargo bays resided and yellow lighting danced across the floor in a regular pattern.

In the middle of the snug fitting bay was the imposing form of a large insurgence shuttle, a huge grey boxy craft with nacelles burning blue and red and the impulse engines already powered and ready to propel the craft into space.

Blake led the way as Compz clearly had no interest in doing so. He crossed the floor and handed the pad to the flight officers as he stepped up the entry gantry to board the ship.

"We're the consultants!" Blake pointed his thumb at his chest as the officer took the pad. "Lieutenant commander Blake Girling and merchant chief engineer Haldo Compz."

The officer scanned the pad quickly and looked up from his seat at the navigation controls.

Blake waited with a neutral expression, hoping his plan would work while the seconds ticked by, every one taking him closer to the brig and then an extended period of exploratory surgery by inept intelligence staff trying to extract every secret in the most literal way.

"Please take your seats, sirs!" The officer handed him back the pad and pointed rudely to Compz. "You'll have to sit at the rear but the Commander may remain in the control booth if he wishes."

"I'm just a consultant." Girling smiled, knowing that the two way communication holograms might reveal his presence to the Captain. "I'll go through to the lounge with the others."

"As you wish." He replied curtly, turning his full attention back to the controls of the shuttle.

"You made it." Katherine leant forward to whisper into Blake's ear as he sat down beside her in the converted lounge of the shuttle.

"Didn't you think I would?" He asked with a smile. "I guess they have other things to worry about right now."

"How did you lose your escort?" She cupped her hand over her mouth as she spoke to keep her voice from travelling.

"He's sleeping off a phaser blast in a Jeffries tube on deck 2." He replied calmly. "He'll be fine in an hour or so."

"Where did you get a phaser?" She scowled.

"I made one out of parts I rescued from the replicator." He shrugged. "It's dead now though, It was only good for a few shots."

"We should all be offered weapons when we land." She looked him over suspiciously, dubious of his ability and motivation to fabricate weapons undetected. "Why did you build it?"

"Without wishing to sound derogatory, I don't trust you." He replied with a shrug. "Not you personally, just this whole Starfleet Intelligence thing."

"I think I'm beginning to agree with you." She sighed.

The two cloaked insurgence shuttles slipped unseen into the broiling asteroid belt that circled the immense unnamed planet below. The target loomed large before them amid a lazily spiralling wall of randomly moving rock.

The shuttles crept along at thruster speed in case their impulse engines were detected, guided by sophisticated computers that monitored each rock under the watchful gaze of the highly trained flight crew.

"They're maintaining communications silence." Goruss Clogg reported from his station. "They will signal with a three millisecond pulse from their impulse engines when they are about to enter the asteroid."

"Do you see any problems monitoring the shuttles?" Commander Brown asked while the Captain stood motionless at the centre of the bridge staring into the viewscreen with his hands clasped behind him.

"I can't say." The operations chief replied earnestly. "I won't know if I can detect the impulse signal until it comes. At this point I'm not detecting anything through their stealth cloaks and I'm reasonably certain that we haven't been detected either."

"Maintain constant passive sensor sweeps of the whole sector." Captain Faruqui grunted. "The Ibex could be out there, I'd rather avoid her than tangle with her."

"Agreed!" Goruss Clogg replied enthusiastically.

"Estimated time to contact?" Faruqui turned purposely from the monitor at the front of the bridge to face his officers.

"The shuttles should arrive at the base in about two minutes, depending on the density of the asteroid field at their approach vector." Commander Brown replied, stepping up to the centre section of the bridge to join him.

"Weapon status?" He growled towards his security chief.

"Phasers charged and all banks report ready." Goruss Cloggs fingers danced across his controls as the data flashed up before him. "All four torpedo tubes are loaded and the main forward quantum tube is armed with full inventory. Main pulse-phaser cannon has priority power feed and is running at full power."

"We're ready for anything." Commander Brown smiled to herself.

"Perhaps not." Captain Faruqui hung his head thoughtfully. "Not if the Ibex is out there."

"The first shuttle has entered the tunnel." The first flight engineer called out over the comm system aboard the second ship.

"I wouldn't want to be aboard that one!" Haldo Compz grinned towards Katherine and Blake.

"It's going to be a rough ride." Blake agreed with a shrug.

"How are you feeling now?" Compz asked, turning to peer out of the side window as the ship slipped into the gaping mouth of the huge crater.

"I'm fine." Blake assured him. "If the worst thing that happens to you today is not being dead then it's been a good day."

"I guess so." Compz nodded as his lips curled away from his large flat teeth. "You recovered quickly, have you managed to remember anything more?"

"I'm afraid not." He replied with a shrug.

"May I ask you a personal question?" Haldo blinked innocently.

"You can ask!" Blake grinned back.

"When you died, did you see a tunnel of light and some dead relatives wrapped in white cloths waiting for you?" Compz asked earnestly with a slightly disturbing lack of sarcasm.

"I'm afraid not." Blake raised his eyebrow quizzically. "It just went black and then there was suddenly this massive painful blast of brilliant white light when I woke up."

"Oh, I see." Compz replied disappointedly.

"Why do you ask?" Katherine leant forward as she spoke.

"My entire race is dead." He explained with a shrug. "They're all gone and it would be nice to think that they continue in some way, somewhere. I would hate to feel that all I have left in my life is a quest for revenge for their deaths."

The airlock hissed open with a sigh of escaping gas as the pressures equalised between the access portal and the shuttle. The control engineer and the tactical officer worked quickly at the front of the powerful transport ship as the security detail prepared for their attack run.

"We all know what we're doing?" Goruss Clogg asked to the rows of officers all brandishing their phaser carbines menacingly.

"Yes sir." The red squad leader confirmed as he banged his hand hard onto the centre ring of his black chest-plate to activate a low powered deflector shield that went some way to protecting them from most of the blast of a direct phaser hit.

"Transporters ready?" Goruss continued, turning to his flight engineer.

"I have a full sensor map of the base interior. Were ready to deploy the mines." He confirmed. "At your signal."

"Beam the concussion mines to every location." Goruss Clogg ordered before row after row of dark circular implements began to vanish from the transporter pad in a flash of sparkling blue light.

"Red team go!"

"They're on their way." Katherine said with a shudder as the shuttle decloaked and manoeuvred in towards the waiting docking arm. "They will beam in concussion mines first, they fire a wide beam phaser discharge to incapacitate anyone within range and then they track any movement and fire on it."

"Sounds reassuring." Compz noted. "I'll be sure not to move."

"Your comm-badge will send out a constant non-belligerency signal so the mines won't trace you." She smiled but it looked more like an apology. "If there's any circuit failure the devices deactivate, it's quite safe for you."

"I don't have a comm-badge." Blake whispered as the ship jerked slightly as it married up with the docking clamps.

"It uses the same detection system as tricorders do, you'll be safer than anyone." She assured him.

"What happened to your comm-badge?" Compz asked knowingly, waiting for him to explain as he folded his ungainly arms over his equally ungainly chest.

"I lost it." Blake said as if it didn't matter.

"I take it you're not actually meant to be here then?" Compz continued making little effort to remain unheard by the others in the cabin.

"Keep your voice down." Katherine told him.

"I'm just trying to help those people trapped in the tubes." He explained hopefully. "I have something of an affinity with them."

"A more elevated reason than revenge, I suppose." Compz quipped at his own expense.

"Please don't tell anyone." She begged.

"What are you planning to do?" Compz asked, leaning forward and lowering his voice.

"We're going to find anyone who can tell us what the hell is going on." Blake assured him. "Hopefully before the troops move in and destroy any hope of getting some answers."

"You told me that without their secrets Section 31 would lose their power." Katherine reminded him hopefully. "You know you're not going to destroy them with guns or bombs."

"You want me to help you?" Compz sniggered, his lips gyrating madly in time with his stunted laughter.

The flight engineer suddenly called out over the tannoy system, plunging the cabin into silence.

"We're docked, begin blue team deployment."

 

Chapter 8

With pattern enhancers in place, Blue team were beamed into position from the second insurgence shuttle to places where the troops had cleared any resistance that might be offered by the Section 31 officers.

"Here we go again!" Compz huffed as he materialised from the flickering energy beam in a dingy cavern with various metal piping disappearing into the long dark twisted tunnels.

"Isn't this your natural habitat?" Girling asked as he drew his tricorder and flipped it open.

"No, my kind wasn't designed as cave dwellers." Compz assured him.

"I meant being in mortal danger." Girling corrected him as he casually discarded his borrowed communicator badge that had allowed him to use the transporter.

"Where are we?" Katherine Rogers asked as the effects of the energy beam melted away.

"They've beamed us in behind the worst of the fighting." Compz shrugged as the sounds of phaser blasts cut through the heavy artificial atmosphere. "I can smell the ionisation on the air, I guess there was some weapons fire here very recently."

"I bet you wish you were a foot shorter." Katherine smiled to the huge alien.

"I wish I was back in bed." He responded.

"We received a sub-space message from insurgence shuttle 1." The operations manager reported from his station.

"On screen." Captain Faruqui stood up from his command seat in readiness as the silent monitoring around the bridge could finally end.

The viewer dropped the long range image of the asteroid belt and gave way to an indistinct and grainy representation of security chief Goruss Clogg as he led his team deep into the base.

"We've met some resistance." He reported through his holographic relay. "We managed to disable most of the defence teams with the phaser mines, we were lucky enough not to have been detected until we docked."

"How long until you declare the area safe?" The Captain asked excitedly.

"We are mopping up the last few troops now and most of the base inhabitants have retreated to some kind of underground bunker complex, we had the element of surprise and everything is going very well." He reported with a happy grin at his own abilities that was masked by his numerous oral tentacles. "We've started erecting pattern enhancer grids along the less shielded caverns and have beamed the blue team aboard already. We should be able to bring the full insurgence team in from the Violator in a matter of only a few minutes."

"Excellent!" Captain Faruqui began ringing his hands together in eager anticipation. "Keep me posted!"

The sound of weapons fire echoed noisily through the hollow chambers, periodically punctuated by the tortured screams of fallen soldiers as energy beams connected with their bodies, robbing them instantly of their consciousness. The lighting flickered as power began to fluctuate throughout the base complex.

Blake Girling led the way down the narrow tunnel carved from solid rock with power conduits running along into the distance and self powered lights glimmering eerily against the uneven walls with a sickly yellow light. Katherine Rogers and Haldo Compz followed close behind, glancing behind them occasionally from a sensible dose of paranoia.

"Are you sure about this?" Katherine asked redundantly, hoping to distract herself from her swelling apprehension.

"About what?" Compz shrugged while his attention remained fixed on his tricorder as it scanned the area with tendrils of invisible energy. "We're heading the right way."

"The troops are just interested in mopping up the other troops." Girling added as he picked his way through the gloomy cavern. "The power readings show that anything interesting is down this way."

Katherine nodded and peered behind her, waving her small phaser around at the dancing shadows.

"There are no humans anywhere near us." Haldo Compz assured her.

"You can't detect Blake with that thing." She reminded him. "Section 31 probably have a number of nasty surprises waiting for us."

"This is an experimental facility of some kind." Compz agreed with a knowing nod. "There are countless horrors beyond your imagination that could exist here."

"That's very helpful." Girling shot him an acidic glance but human expressions were largely lost on the big alien whose facial musculature was vastly different. His race had a preferred system for expressing mood which was simply to tell people how they felt but he held that honesty was largely wasted on Humans who didn't employ it, welcome it or even expect it.

"It's useful to be prepared." Compz told him flatly, glancing up from his tricorder.

"You're preparing me for a heart-attack." Katherine quipped to keep herself from giving in to her own fears.

"An electro-magnetic pulse on a microwave carrier beam could be modulated correctly to cause a heart-attack." Compz postulated cheerily. "Fortunately the material of your Starfleet uniform is designed to block most kinds of energy to some degree."

"You're not wearing a uniform!" Katherine sneered and raised her eyebrow knowingly.

"I don't have a heart." He shrugged while another of his grotesque smiles carving its way across his leathery face.

"What are you detecting?" Blake asked as he came to a fork in the tunnel that split off in two directions.

"If I had to guess," Compz began. "On the left is a complex of labs and further down on the right is a very, very, very large cavern containing some extremely odd readings.

"The labs?" Katherine suggested.

"If I had to guess." Blake nodded, glancing wryly at the large Moronian who probably had a very clear idea of what he was detecting but simply preferred to be annoying.

"Luckily the troops and engineers are not used to configuring their equipment to detect the kinds of things I expect to find here." Compz added cheerily. "We should have a good head-start over them."

"I'm counting on that." Girling nodded, glancing up from his readings to see if Katherine was dealing with her situation as well as he hoped she might.

"I'm fine!" She assured him, waving her phaser pistol behind her into the gloomy tunnel where the shadows were dancing across the jagged rock floor as if they were empowered with some conscious desire to taunt her.

"I'm detecting some kind of security field ahead." Compz told them. "Scanning is becoming very difficult."

"Just what we need." Blake grumbled.

"I guess your career is over." Compz added, to inspire some conversation.

"I had decided to rethink things anyway." She replied with a sigh. "I had grown a bit fed up with polishing Turaz's sample racks. The problem with SF intelligence is that they never tell you anything."

"At least on a regular Starship you're part of everything." Blake agreed, flashing a glance back to her, accompanied by a supportive smile that was swallowed by the gloom.

"I have been thinking going to work on a Hospital ship like my father." She suggested.

"I only served on one for a few hours." Blake began with a tiny shudder as the memories kicked up a swirling tirade of the imagined horrors that must have befallen him. "I can tell you it wasn't what I had expected. I would have happily served a long tenure on one and would have very much enjoyed the work."

"Everything about life is what you make it." Compz interjected. "I serve on a merchant vessel running various chemical poisons around the galaxy for profit but I enjoyed the time I have spent."

"I guess so." Katherine nodded.

"Starfleet is all about exploring space." Compz began. "Life is an exploration at its most basic level and every new experience can teach you something about yourself. In a wonderfully cosmopolitan galaxy replete with variety every colony, outpost and cruiser out there has something you've never thought of."

Suddenly a figure jumped out in front of them from the shadows and halted in shock and surprise equal to their own. He had a weapon in his hand and was clearly agitated, breathless from the effort of running and the fear that had inspired him to do so.

Blake stood at the front of the group, his mind suddenly flooded with thoughts as he looked at the vaguely detailed silhouette that stood in front of a humming yellow light-plate. The seconds stretched into eternity as they stared at one another, his mind swirling with thoughts. He couldn't draw a phaser because he didn't want to shoot the man who may yet be turned to their way of thinking and he didn't want to provoke a fire-fight in any case.

In a movement that seemed almost like it was happening in slow motion the man before him began to raise his pistol...

Captain Faruqui stood in the centre of his bridge as his ship crept in closer to the asteroid that concealed a hidden base. He was vaguely aware of the activity around him but ignored it, lost in thoughts of his final victory over Section 31. This would be a crippling blow for the covert arm of the Federation, a decisive victory against the shadows that haunted his beloved Starfleet.

"If they're looking for us then we're well within scanning range." Commander Brown told him flatly, knowing already that he knew that.

"They have other things on their minds." The Captain sneered with a rare smile cracking on his face. "I'll beam down another thirty troops in a few minutes and over-run the base completely."

"What about the Ibex?" She shrugged. "It could still be in the area."

"I know." He agreed, his smile vanishing completely. "We'll do this the same way as before only faster, we'll beam every computer component aboard that we can and then we'll do as much damage as we can and leave."

"This is going to hurt them." Commander Brown agreed, glancing up to the viewscreen, following his vacant gaze that was locked on the image of the asteroid.

"I intend to hurt them." He assured her, dragging his attention from the image and boring directly into her eyes with a measure of the hatred that was boiling away inside him. "I want them to know that I can hurt them, I want them to be on the run for once."

"Yes sir." She quickly turned away, choosing not to hold his angry stare.

The phaser pointed directly at them. Compz had seen everything quite clearly with his impressively adjusted visual abilities and had already pressed himself against the wall to make himself harder to hit but Katherine was lost in her fear and unsure how to react.

As the beam lashed out against them with unreservedly furious energy Blake jumped in front of her, forcing her back against the harsh rocks and offering his own body to absorb the blast. The fiery orange charge tore towards him until it finally made contact. A blue sheet of coherent energy appeared from his back and glowed hotly as it deflected the beam from his body with a crackle of arcing electrical power.

Blake reflexively spun towards the man, raising his left palm in an utterly instinctive gesture, his adrenaline flushing pure thought from his mind leaving him only the ability to react. A jolt of blue energy blasted from his palm and contacted the man directly in the chest sending him sprawling backwards forcibly into the rock face.

There was silence.

Blake found himself crouching in front of Katherine who had fallen to the ground as he had thrown himself onto her. His hand was outstretched and empty and the threatening man was laying in a heap and heavily stunned at least.

Compz stepped forwards from the rock and stood silently in the grim chamber, waiting for someone else to take the burden from him and be the first to speak.

"What happened?" Katherine asked, rolling over to prop herself up on her elbows, her phaser pistol laying unfired beside her.

"Good question." Compz agreed. "I'm glad you asked it."

"I wish I knew." Blake gasped, lowering his hand to his side and standing back up, his brow wrinkled thoughtfully while he racked his mind for an explanation. He raised his hand and examined his palm but it remained as featureless as it ever had. "He must have missed me."

"He hit you." Compz assures him. "The beam hit you."

"It didn't..." Blake replied absently, turning to face him while still breathing heavily from the shock.

"You had a shield." Compz told him flatly. "The beam hit a shield."

"How can I have a shield?" Blake shrugged. "That's impossible."

"You shot him with a beam of energy that came from your hand." Compz reminded him, stepping back slightly, deeply unsettled by what had happened. "Perhaps it is time to embrace the impossible."

"What the hell did they do to you in that tube?" Katherine asked, hefting herself up on her shaking legs and voicing the question on all of their minds.

"I don't know." He replied, turning forwards with newly found resolve. "Lets go and find out."

Goruss Clogg had positioned his men at various key positions around the base where they could stun anyone found moving with beams that were guaranteed to overwhelm any defensive armour, like the kind that his own troops wore.

"Pattern-enhancers are all in place and report operational." A young officer reported proudly.

"Send to the Violator, we are ready to receive the full insurgence team and the engineers." He ordered succinctly. "Begin scanning for the main computer."

"Sir!" An Ensign from Blue team stepped forwards with an open tricorder. "I'm detecting a large area immediately below us. There is a network of power signatures and interconnecting tunnels."

"Is that the computers?" Clogg asked, offering only a small amount of his attention as he continued about his business.

"No sir!" The Ensign replied, following after him. "From my scans I would guess that it's a network of labs and stores. It has security fields in place and may still contain people."

"Not interested." Clogg replied haughtily. "Find the computer and then we're out of here."

"Sir, if there are people down there that we can't detect then they may have been injured by the phaser mines." The officer began.

"Enough." Goruss Clogg growled, spinning on the officer and glaring menacingly into his eyes. "We don't have time for this. We get the computer and we leave."

"Yes sir." The officer hung his head shamefully. "I just feel that a computer core would be controlling environment and life support controls, if we remove it then we could kill them all."

"That is not an issue!"

"How do you feel?" Katherine put her hand on Blakes shoulder as the three continued down the shaft.

"I'm fine." He assured her with an awkward nod while he tried to avoid eye contact.

"You're breathing heavily." She told him. "I wouldn't be fine if this was happening to me."

"Well it's not." He stopped and turned suddenly to face her.

"We're your friends." Compz told him forcibly, swallowing his apprehension. "We're all in this together now."

"I'm scared." Blake admitted, closing his eyes and leaning heavily back against the wall. "I don't know what's happening to me. I'm a reanimated corpse with built in weapons. I had been rotting in space for 10 years and now I'm at the heart of a conspiracy deep within the ranks of the very organisation I died trying to protect."

"You were in a frozen vacuum." She told him, her voice as soft and supportive as she could manage. "You would have been maintained in good condition which is probably why they used you, and as for the rest we'll soon find out."

"We will find out." Compz assured him. "It is frustrating that we have many more questions than we do answers."

"I'm ok." Blake pushed himself from the rock wall and turned to continue. "I'm sorry I snapped at you."

"It's alright." Katherine smiled, waving her hand dismissively. "I understand."

"What is a Scarab?" Compz asked as he buried his attention back in his tricorder. "I have heard them mentioned a number of times."

"A Scarab?" Katherine replied with a shrug. "I don't know much, I guess not many people do."

"Is it a ship?" Blake asked, happy and relieved that Compz had offered a welcome change of subject.

"It's the latest ship from Section 31." Katherine agreed. "It's an incredibly advanced design, years ahead of anything that Starfleet has."

"Please continue." Compz asked, his interest piqued.

"They're around two hundred metres long we think." She continued. "Flat design, they look like a Scarab beetle which is where they must have got their name. The front is rounded with a hollow under-belly and the nacelles fold out from the tail when they go to warp."

"I thought that Federation design had more or less discounted moving the nacelles as a waste of time." Compz asked conversationally. "The requirements of the machinery and the complications of the plasma injector conduits far outweigh any slight benefits that you might gain."

"True." She admitted. "We really know very little about this ship. What little we do know comes from an encounter that an SF intelligence vessel had with one last year."

"I take it the Scarab came out on top." Blake guessed.

"According to the emergency message beacon the other ship released it did." She replied with a grim nod. "That was all that was ever found. Since then it's been a top priority to find out anything we can about these ships."

"That explains a lot." Blake said thoughtfully. "But where do I fit into this, what were they doing to me in the tube?"

"Perhaps a disposable crew?" Compz suggested. "Section 31 is a relatively small group."

"Too much effort." Katherine shook her head, discounting his suggestion. "In my opinion they were doing something to offer the ship an advantage."

"There are clear advantages of a crew with built in shields and weapons who are not detectable." Compz nodded.

"I'm detecting the source of the security field ahead." Blake interjected, plunging the conversation into the annuls of antiquity.

"Perhaps it has what we're looking for behind it."

Captain John Graves waited for a few short seconds as another cup of coffee appeared in a shimmering haze of silvery light in the replicator panel.

"Are you sure I can't get you anything?" He asked, turning to Commander Morrow.

"I'm fine, thanks." Winston assured him from his seat as he gazed out of the small window at the asteroid belt. "We're getting closer, you know?"

"I know." The Captain agreed as he slumped into his chair. "We're moving in, probably for transport."

"What do you think they're going to do with us?" Winston asked rhetorically as he turned to his old friend hoping for a hint of optimism.

"I don't think they'll settle for having us sign a secrecy declaration." Graves laughed weakly. "This is still Starfleet, they're not going to do anything nasty."

"You know what occurs to me?" Morrow began, lowering his voice for added impact. "Nobody knows we're out here. Nobody knows where the Wanderer is and the crew will all report that is was destroyed by a small attacking ship. The Violator is operating covertly and nobody knows we're aboard."

"What's your point?" Captain Graves asked, knowing already that he didn't want to know.

"They have a lot of loose ends to tie up and we're one of them." Winston explained with a shudder.

"This is still Starfleet." Graves repeated hopefully although his faith was severely dented.

"And what about Compz?" Morrow persisted. "Section 31 don't want him running around and Captain Faruqui hasn't much time for him either. Even if they return us to the Wanderer they're signing our death-warrants."

The rocky tunnel ended abruptly. At the other side of the flickering security force field was a brilliantly lit white tunnel made from sterile artificial plating with a metallic grill floor.

"This would be the entrance to the labs." Compz guessed, dropping his tricorder. "My scans are being absorbed by the field, I can't see much of anything beyond it."

"Well someone was running back up the tunnel so there could well be more people inside." Katherine said, grabbing his phaser from her belt.

"The field controls are on the other side." Compz craned his neck to see a black access panel set into the wall beyond the security field. "I don't see how we're going to get inside."

"Maybe I can get inside." Blake suggested, folding his tricorder into his pocket and stepping up to the shield. It's got to be worth a try."

"You could be hurt." Katherine argued.

"There can't be more energy in this thing than there is in a direct phaser blast." Blake shrugged. "We don't have a lot of time before someone figures out what we're up to, if they haven't already."

"It would be a simple matter to deactivate the shield from the other side." Compz agreed.

"Maybe you should try stepping through it then." Katherine replied haughtily to Compz.

"I'll be fine." Blake took a deep breath and turned to face the almost invisible screen. Each little glimmer and shudder of light seemed to threaten him with silent menace as he shuffled his feet closer to the edge. Stepping into it deliberately could easily throw him back through the tunnel with enough force to break a lot of the bones he relied on to be able to live and he didn't relish trying.

With another deep breath he closed his eyes and stepped forwards.

The field shuddered around him, breaking open to allow him to pass effortlessly through and sending jolts of electricity up his spine, tingling at his nerves as he trod safely to the other side.

"He made it." Katherine grinned widely, turning to Compz with an obvious expression of relief.

"I'm not entirely surprised." Compz admitted. "Although I have never seen anything like that before."

Goruss Clogg watched as reserve troops were beamed in alongside the engineering team whose job it was to remove the main computer core.

"Sensors show the location of the computer." An engineer informed him from behind a bank of equipment. "I've set coordinates and can beam a team directly there using the Runabout transporter."

"Do it." He replied coldly, caring little for explanation about the technology that allowed him to get his job done. "Send a security team with the engineers."

"Sir!" Ensign Darryl Moss said as he stepped forward, pressing on his silent communicator behind his ear.

"Report!" Clogg told him.

"Three of our consultants are unaccounted for." Moss replied. "They were last seen heading into a tunnel complex and have now disappeared from our scanners."

"Compz?" He asked with a weary sigh.

"And Ensign Katherine Brown." He replied with a nod. "I'm afraid there is more bad news."

"Of course." Clogg replied with a nod. "There always seems to be when anything involves Compz."

"Lieutenant Commander Blake Girling is also missing." Moss told him, pressing against his communicator.

"He's probably with the others." Clogg shrugged.

"No sir, he's missing from the Violator." Moss reported. "He stunned a guard and has vanished."

"I saw him on the Blue team manifest." Clogg sighed. "He must have faked his orders."

"And now he's missing with Compz and a hostage?" Moss suggested. "Shall I ready a team to pursue him?"

"Pursue him where?" Clogg sneered at his inferior officer. "We've lost them remember."

"Yes sir." Moss said sheepishly.

"We don't have time anyway." Clogg breathed out heavily. "We have a possible Scarab in the area and have to get out as soon as possible."

"We can't just leave an officer behind." Moss argued, surprised at even hearing the suggestion.

"Why don't you get on to shuttle two and find out who authorised Girling to come on this mission?"

The white tunnel was relatively short and soon broke into a corridor with several branches leading off to the various labs.

"I'm only detecting two life signs in the building." Compz noted with a sigh of relief.

"Together?" Girling asked hopefully.

"They appear to be making an effort to simplify our lives." He replied with a nod. "Third office on the left."

Blake took out his phaser and made sure it was set to stun. "I guess it makes sense for me to go alone and make sure they're friendly."

"We don't know if you can shield yourself again!" Katherine told him grumpily. "You can't just walk in there alone."

"I won't take any chances." He assured her. "But I have an advantage, and there's only two people in there who don't know I'm coming."

Girling stalked quietly along the edge of the corridor towards the office. He kept looking for other signs of movement as he knew that tricorders were easily fooled and it was indeed wise to embrace the existence of the impossible in a place that served as a production line for it.

He quickly reached the office and stood at the edge of the open doorway, waiting for an instant to listen for voices and to gather his nerves for the attack.

He could quite plainly hear the sounds of panic from at least one of the pair and that offered a level of reassurance that was very welcome.

Steeling himself he swung around the door behind his phaser pistol.

"Nobody move." He yelled, levelling the weapon at the two men. One was older, dressed in a white lab coat and his hands reached skywards instantly without another thought. The other man was dressed in a black jump-suit with ceramic armour panels at the upper arms and chest. He reached for his weapon with the same thoughtlessness with which the other had surrendered.

His actions were met with a prolonged impact from Blakes phaser that caught him square in the chest and sent him reeling back across the room to lay in a crumpled, groaning heap on the floor.

"Who are you?" Blake hissed, turning his weapon on the technician as he stepped into the room.

"I'm Doctor Harold Jones." He replied softly. "I'm not armed, please don't hurt me."

"I'm not looking to harm anyone." Blake assured him, relaxing slightly. "I'm looking for answers and I expect them to be forthcoming."

"You're the one with the gun!" Dr. Jones smiled thinly.

"Can we come in?" Compz called out from beyond the open door.

"Yeah, come in." Blake replied, lowering his weapon to his hip although it still pointed at the Doctor.

"I'm Haldo Compz." He grinned, raising his hand in a gesture of greeting at their captive.

"Compz." Katherine took his arm and pulled him back.

Suddenly all the lights went out, plunging the room into darkness for a moment before the red emergency lights took over and bathed the room in it's gloomy incandescence.

"What's going on?" Girling cried out, raising the weapon and locking his arm straight towards the Doctor.

"I don't know." He replied enthusiastically. "Something has failed. It could be anything from the power grid to the main computer."

"The computer!" Compz replied as his mind filled with possibilities. He pulled out his tricorder and began scanning. "The security fields have failed completely."

"The power grid has failed?" Katherine asked, spinning around behind her weapon, checking that the shadows contained nothing that could threaten them.

"The computer!" Compz replied. "It's gone, there's no main processor here anymore."

"They've beamed it aboard the Violator!" She groaned. "It would have been a priority."

"Without it then every system on this base will fail." Blake said, hoping he was wrong.

"Including the cloaking devices." Compz agreed. "We are deep within the neutral zone in an illegal base where the Romulans and the Federation can now see us."

"Not to mention the Ibex." Girling reminded him.

"Who are you?" Dr. Harold Jones asked, gesturing with a nod towards Girling. "I mean one of you is in a Starfleet uniform but you two are dressed in civilian clothes."

"Looks like we're sitting ducks." Blake groaned. "That means you are too."

 

Chapter 9

Captain Faruqui sat in silent meditation behind his ready -room desk staring at the model at the far wall. His first command, a tired Excelsior class ship, long and elegant with narrow nacelles perfectly suited to extended periods at high warp and visually stunning in her prime representing the definitive pinnacle of starship design.

His ship, the U.S.S Malinche had served him well while he forced his career towards Starfleet intelligence, always a thing that held the greatest fascination for him. He smiled faintly as he thought of more innocent times when his ship had enjoyed a more subdued routine than the constant crushing stress he now lived with.

The Violator was under cloak in hostile space while his entire security force was looting the computer systems from a secret base and a Scarab class ship was hunting him down with potentially more on the way or indeed already there.

His door chime sounded indicating the presence of someone without wishing to be within.

He sighed heavily to himself. Certainly his tenure aboard the Malinche had been a mere stepping-stone in his career but he was forced to admit that he regretted leaving sometimes and to wonder if he would ever think of the Violator in such fond terms.

"Enter." He called out, sitting up straight and switching his desk console on to make it appear that he was as busy as he liked his crew to think that he always was.

Commander Brown stepped in with a spring in her step that could only indicate the arrival of some good news.

"You have something for me?" He asked, gesturing with his open palm for her to take a seat.

"I have news, and I have good news." She replied with a curt nod.

"I'm waiting..." He told her with a hint of amusement.

"Blake Girling somehow got down to the asteroid." She began with a slightly lowered head and a shrug of her eyebrows.

"I see." The captain nodded with little surprise.

"It seems that Ensign Katherine Rogers codes were used to fake his boarding orders and he stunned the guard with a device made from parts of the replicator." She explained, her eyes fixed on her pad. "The computer didn't detect the missing parts because he damaged the diagnosis circuits."

"And the good news." He prompted, unmoved by the preceding report.

"The main computer is aboard and I'm already withdrawing the security team." She smiled, her eyes springing up to meet his.

"Excellent." He beamed back. "I take it you've lost contact with our wayward Ensign?"

"And Haldo Compz." She nodded. "They must have discarded their comm-badges and the teams can't locate their bio-signs."

"Bring the two insurgence shuttles aboard." He instructed. "And get the other one ready to depart immediately."

"It's already out-rigged with the cloak and the warheads are armed." She replied.

"I'll take care of the rest."

"Yes sir."

"So what do we do?" Katherine asked, flashing a worried glance at the others.

"Good question." Blake shrugged, turning to the doctor. "What are you doing here alone?"

"I was downloading my notes." He replied, keeping his wide eyes fixed on the cold muzzle of Girlings phaser. "I can't leave or hide in the bunkers without them, I have too many years of my life invested in them."

"This base is over-run." Compz told him flatly. "You're stuck here with us now and we all need to leave, I take it that you appreciate your predicament?"

"I have a gun pointed at me." Dr. Jones told him. "My predicament is foremost on my mind."

Blake lowered the weapon and placed it on his belt. He raised his empty hands palm upwards and shrugged. "If you don't help us get off this rock then you're dead too."

"So now we trust him?" Katherine almost laughed but quickly realised that nobody was in a joking mood. "He works for Section 31."

"Not any more." Compz told her grimly. "He works with us or we're all dead!"

"How long have we got?" Blake sat back on a steel desk and lowered his head into his hand as his mind began working over their situation.

"What do you mean?" The doctor asked with a shrug.

"With the main computer down the deflector shields will fail." He explained. "How long until the other asteroids begin pounding us to pieces?"

"Perhaps an hour, maybe two." The Doctor replied sadly, these thoughts never before occurring to him, his mind had been utterly focused on saving his work, not his life.

"Backup computers will take care of gravity, life support and everything else until something happens." Compz explained. "Any non-routine event could over-load them and if that happens then systems will begin failing all over the base."

"What could be described as non-routine?" Katherine asked hanging her head in dismay and knowing she didn't really want to know.

"Anything that makes the backup computers think." Compz told her showing no signs of his usual optimism. "A shuttle docking, an asteroid hitting the shields, a mouse running into a door..."

"I get the idea." Blake groaned. "We need to leave in a big hurry."

Captain Graves sighed heavily and stared out of the huge transparency that separated his guest quarters from the icy vacuum of space.

His throat burnt with a reassuring kind of pain that he didn't even notice as being unpleasant as he took a long shot from his flask of Tarquarian gin. His mind fogged over for a second, his thoughts sent scuttling into the recesses of his mind like cockroaches retreating from a light.

He shook his head as if doing so would shake his thought back together.

"Love those Tarquarians." He commented, gazing lovingly at his flask and smiling towards his first officer.

Commander Winston Morrow reached out for the flask and took a long, welcome blast of the thought numbing liquid.

"That stuff will kill you!" He grinned as his mind fell back together like a jigsaw missing most of its parts.

"I should be so lucky." Graves shrugged back as the door chime sounded.

"What the hell was that?" Winston Morrow cried out, recoiling from the door.

"Someone wants to come in!" Captain Graves told him flatly with a note of amusement.

"Don't let them..." Morrow told him fearfully, his eyes as wide as saucers.

Captain Graves shook his head knowingly and took the flask back from his friend.

"No more for you..." He smiled. "Come in."

The door slid open with a hiss as Captain Faruqui stood in the opening, lit brightly from behind.

"Mind if I come in?" He asked politely.

"It's your ship!" Captain Graves replied with a shrug. "Perhaps I can offer you a drink."

"I have a matter of some urgency I would like to discuss with you." He began, his hands clamping themselves behind his back as he sauntered into the cabin with the door sealing behind him.

"Great!" Morrow moaned, his eyes rolling up.

"I intend to level with you." Faruqui began, rocking on his heels.

"It's about time." Graves told him sternly, gesturing with his hand for the Captain to take a seat.

Captain Faruqui sat down, nodding his gratitude for the offer. He crossed his legs away from the men and sat back thoughtfully.

"We are deep within the Neutral zone under cloak at a Section 31 base." He began, instantly grabbing his audiences attention. "We have a ship in orbit hunting for us, a Scarab class attack ship."

"Scarab?" Morrow asked, his curiosity outweighing his common sense as often it did.

"The fiercest and most powerful ship you can imagine. Armed with weapons that cut through our shields like they're not there and able to travel faster than warp 9.99 although we have no idea how." He explained. "They're being built in secret by Section 31, we don't know where this technology comes from."

"I can see why you're concerned." Graves agreed.

"We have captured their base and removed their computers." He continued. "We have remained undetected so far by remaining cloaked and hiding at the edge of the asteroid belt."

"But now you have a problem?" Morrow suggested knowingly.

"We need to leave in a hurry before we are detected and destroyed and to do so I need your help." Captain Faruqui told them.

"You need our help?" Graves asked, sitting up excitedly.

"Your friend Haldo Compz is refusing to answer our hails and has gone missing in the base, I need you to bring him back as quickly as possible before it's too late."

"You want us to go over there?" Winston sneered as if the suggestion was tantamount to many unpleasant forms of suicide.

"We intend to ferry you over in an insurgence shuttle." He explained. "We have set up pattern enhancers at the appropriate frequencies and can beam you directly back through the shields once you find him."

"I don't know..." Captain Graves replied, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.

"Your ship was badly damaged through no fault of your own." Faruqui began with a raised eyebrow. "We have discovered a very large amount of Latinum on the Section 31 installations which would make repairs a very great deal simpler."

"You're going to pay us?" Morrow smiled.

"I'm going to buy your silence." He told him flatly. "You've done what you set out to do, you've hurt Section 31 more than anyone else ever has. Now I'm going to pay you enough to ensure you never have to trade again. You can go where you want and do what you want. Section 31 will never find out about your involvement unless they hear it from you so you'll be safe."

"And if we refuse?" Captain Graves sat back, clamping his hands behind his head.

"I'll continue trying to raise him as best I can but if I detect the presence of a ship I'll have to leave Compz behind to die." Captain Faruqui replied leaving no question of his sincerity. "I can't take on a Scarab and can't risk the entire ship and crew in a vein attempt to do so."

"What is this place for?" Blake asked, looking up from his ruminations.

"This installation?" Dr. Jones asked. "It's a lab, we test things, new technology."

"Blake," Katherine began, "we need to leave now!"

"There's no conventional way to leave." Compz reminded her. "We need to ascertain what options are available to us."

"Are there any shuttles?" Katherine asked hopefully.

"No." The doctor replied with a shrug. "We're re-supplied by passing ships, they have to remain cloaked to operate here and shuttles are usually too small to carry an effective cloak."

"There's nowhere to beam us to..." Blake added redundantly. "It seems we're trapped here."

"If Section 31 run true to form then they'll destroy this base now that it has been uncovered." Compz added thoughtfully. "They won't care about their own personnel, in fact they would probably assume them already dead."

"This is great." Katherine huffed in her frustration. "I can't believe we've come this far to get stuck here now..."

"Are there any ships here?" Blake snapped up hopefully.

"Yes..." The doctor replied, a little taken back with Girlings sudden surge of enthusiasm. "We have a large hangar bay with all the captured vessels we were reverse-engineering. That's what we do here."

"Reverse-engineering?" Katherine screwed up her face curiously.

"They capture vessels and copy the technology." Compz told her. "It's quicker than doing the job properly yourself."

"That's where most technology comes from." Jones replied haughtily. "Federation technology didn't all grow from the invention of warp-drive, most of what we take for granted has been usurped from other races by people like me."

"And what sort of person would that be?" Compz leaned forward showing the first signs of aggression in his long memory.

"Meaning..?" The doctor stammered nervously.

"You should choose your words more carefully around these two." Katherine told him gravely. "They have more reason than most to disapprove of your methods."

"Who are you?" He glanced from face to face of the two men in front of him who were glaring with barely concealed menace.

"I'm a Moronian!" Compz told him, gritting his teeth. "Men like you genetically engineered me and then wiped out my whole race."

"Moronian?" The doctor smiled nervously. "I've heard of you."

"I'm gratified that our reputation at least has outlived my kind." He growled.

"You weren't wiped out..." He stammered, highly unsure of his ground as he flashed glances from face to face. "I've heard stories."

"What sort of stories?" Blake scowled at him.

"Moronians aren't really a race." He began, backing gently away from the large and menacing figure. "They're just Humans who were infused with DNA of other species to enhance their basic abilities."

"You're Human?" Katherine smiled at him. "I would never have guessed."

"That's even more reason not to have killed us." Compz grumbled as the new information churned away inside him.

"The Mornoia colony was destroyed." Jones continued. "As far as I know everyone was relocated first."

"What?" Compz turned on him again, his black eyes glowing with almost perceivable anger.

"We wouldn't kill that many people." Dr. Jones shrugged. "We're trying to protect the Federation, not destroy it. We use unusual methods but we don't resort to genocide."

"You know this for a fact?" Compz spat the words at him, demanding a reply.

"Well...No..." He replied.

"To be fair, do you know for a fact that your people were destroyed?" Blake asked.

"Let's just concentrate on getting out of here." Compz grumbled.

White light spilled into space from the invisible ship as the shuttle-bay door yawned open allowing the cumbersome form of the insurgence shuttle to drift out showing only a minor distortion of the light bent around it.

Captain Graves huffed to himself as he paced up and down the lounge at the rear of the little combat ship.

"I can't believe we're doing this." Commander Morrow grumbled.

"I know." He agreed leaning up against the bulkhead to stare out of the lozenge shaped window. "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

"I was fine with it until I actually saw the shuttle." Morrow agreed.

"I know." Graves replied with a shudder. "Did you see the size of those pulse-phasers on the side?"

"You couldn't miss them!" Morrow nodded enthusiastically. "No wonder the Wanderer never stood a chance!"

"And that big thing mounted on top?" Graves continued, turning to face his friend.

"I guess that was the cloaking device." Morrow shrugged.

"Oh god..." Captain Graves gasped as the blackness of space vanished to give way to the sight of a seamless wall of rock. "I think we're in the tunnel now."

"We'll be docking in a few seconds then!"

"Fantastic." Graves added sarcastically. "Lets head down to the control room, get some weapons and get out there and find Compz. The sooner we do the sooner we'll be out of here."

"Agreed." Morrow replied with clear reservation.

"Can you use a tricorder to boost the gain on a comm badge?" Girling suggested as the four moved out of the office. "We could monitor comm traffic, find out what the Violator is up to and I'd definitely be interested to know if any troops wake up."

"I can do that." Compz nodded, his fingers instantly began dancing across the controls.

"Do you think he's ok?" Katherine whispered to Blake.

"I'm sure he could do with some time to think." He replied. "When we get out of here he'll probably realise that it's good news."

"Now do you see what kind of man you are?" Katherine asked, turning to the disgruntled doctor who had been made to walk in the middle of the group. "Your methods hurt people."

"I've got a lot more questions for you yet." Blake told him.

"No problem." He replied haughtily like a scolded child. "I'm a scientist, not a soldier. My job is to answer questions and shed light on ignorance. Ask away."

"How many ships are in this hangar?" Katherine began. "Is anything there actually useful?"

"There are lots of ships." He shrugged. "Most don't work any more."

"We need to run a blockade." Blake sighed. "We're expecting to meet heavy resistance so something with a working cloaking device would be ideal."

"I have the original Romulan prototype of the Bird-of-prey." The doctor smiled happily. "The one the Klingons stole to build the B'rel from."

"The Klingons stole the B'rel?" Compz looked up with sudden interest.

"It's not widely known but not a proper secret." Katherine added.

"Is it much different?" Blake asked.

"It's a lot cleaner." Jones smiled. "There are small nacelles on the wingtips where the Klingons fitted guns on their version. Originally the wings moved down to open the radiators and bring the nacelles into position for warp, the Klingons fitted their warp coils at the rear but left the moving mechanism in because they thought it looked good."

"Typical Klingon engineering." Katherine nodded.

"Does it work?" Blake asked, dragging the conversation back to more pressing matters.

"The cloak does but the warp drive is inactive and it doesn't have any weapons." Jones replied with a sorry expression.

"Maybe you could get out and push?" Compz suggested dryly.

The insurgence shuttle jerked slightly as the hull married up to the airlock doors.

"We're parked." Captain Graves swallowed an imaginary lump in his throat as he continued down the narrow interconnecting tunnel to the cockpit.

"I guess so." Morrow agreed with a sigh.

Graves stepped down the two metallic steps to the cockpit just in time to see the two flight engineers vanishing in a haze of sparkling blue light.

"They've beamed off!" Captain Graves called out with a rising tide of panic beginning to uncoil itself in the pit of his stomach.

"Why would they do that?" Morrow shrugged. "It doesn't make any sense..."

"No." He agreed angrily. "It doesn't."

Captain Graves pushed past his friend and ran back into the tunnel that led to the lounge and stopped at the small doors that allowed access to the central cargo pod.

"This isn't a weapons pod!" He called back to Morrow as he peered inside.

"What do you mean?"

"These insurgence shuttles are meant to have a central pod with twin racks of photon torpedoes on board." The Captain explained. "There are no racks here."

"I don't like this..." Winston moaned wearily as he stood behind his captain and peered into the pod.

"There are two tubes." He began as he stepped gingerly into the cargo bay. "I heard they found something like these on the other base."

"There's a rack of torpedoes on the other side!" Morrow called out from the corridor.

Graves sighed with a small dose of relief that his fears may be unfounded. He knelt down and gazed into the dark glass set into the door of the tubes.

"Are there any lights flashing on the torpedoes?" Graves snapped, jumping up with a renewed sense of dread.

"Yes." Morrow replied. "Red light flashing at the fronts."

"Oh no..." Graves moaned, hanging his head into his hands as a surge of acid exploded in his belly and sweat began to prickle uncomfortably down his spine.

"What does that mean?" Morrow asked, his head appearing in the tiny doorway.

"It means they're armed." Graves sighed hopelessly. "They normally don't arm until they lock onto a target."

"So they're ready to explode?" Winston gasped.

"Any impact or shock will set them off." He agreed, slumping back to perch on the tip of the tube.

"They're going to kill us?" Morrows eyebrows traced upwards as the horror took hold of him.

"I imagine the warp core is set to overload." He nodded. "With the warheads as well there's plenty of anti-matter to destroy this entire base, us included."

"What can we do?" Morrow shrieked, his voice escalating in volume and tone.

"Find Compz!" He grinned with a renewed hope.

"He might already be dead." Morrow cried out.

"Why would they bother?" Graves jumped up to the cargo door and dragged himself through. "Why kill him when you can just leave him behind to die with the rest of us..?"

"How far is this hangar?" Katherine moaned as the dingy rock tunnels seemed to drag on forever.

"It's not far." Jones assured her. "May I ask a question?"

"I guess so." Blake acceeded grudgingly.

"What do you expect to have to get past?" He asked. "There are a number of serviceable vessels but it depends what opposition you're expecting to encounter."

"The Romulans for a start!" Blake told him moodily. "And the Starfleet intelligence vessel, Violator who might have brought in even more ships by now. Added to that we think there's a Scarab looking for us too."

"We've had a busy few days." Compz quipped. "A whirlwind of fun, parties and making friends with everyone we meet."

"There's nothing here that will get past a Scarab." Dr. Jones smirked, glancing at their annoyed expressions as if he thought they were joking. "They have the best sensors in the galaxy, nothing gets past them."

"Is there one out there?" Blake hissed coldly.

"The Ibex." Jones nodded. "She's still in orbit."

"So all bets are off!" Compz raised the part of his forehead where his eyebrows weren't.

"I haven't given up yet." Blake assured him with unrealistic resolve.

"The Romulans won't give us any trouble." Dr. Jones added as they continued.

"How comes?" Katherine asked hopefully.

"They work with us, they know we're out here."

"The Romulans work with you?" Blake repeated in surprise.

"Of course." Jones replied as if the suggestion was ridiculous. "The greatest threat to the Federation in this quadrant is everyone but the Romulans and they feel the same way about us. The Klingons could turn on us at any time and would if they thought they'd win. The Borg are a huge threat and then there's the Ferengi and the Dominion allies are still a significant danger if they ever wanted to be."

"So you work with the Romulans?" Katherine shook her head in disbelief.

"Not publicly." Jones replied, raising his palms as if this was all just common sense. "We just have an agreement with them."

"We still have to get past the Ibex..." Compz reminded them.

"What could do it?" Blake stopped suddenly in his tracks and turned on the scientist.

"Nothing." He shook his head. "They won't fire on me anyway, I helped to design it."

"I wouldn't bank on that." Katherine assured him. "Section 31 has a habit of tying up loose ends."

"They still need me to design her successor." He said hopefully with a tone that implied he was growing increasingly unsure.

"Plenty of good men like you." She smiled thinly, slapping him on the arm.

"The next one has come before but we weren't ready." He replied dismissively. "They need me to realise the vision!"

"I'm picking something up." Compz said with some surprise. "It's a very faint signal but someone on this base is hailing us."

"See what you can do to boost the signal." Blake told him.

"I hadn't thought of that." He grumbled sarcastically.

"This is Captain Graves to Haldo Compz." He repeated.

"This isn't going to work." Morrow grumbled pathetically.

"We know that the Violator has to slink off at thruster power with shields down." Graves insisted. "If it goes to impulse or warp the Scarab might detect her and pursue. At that speed it's going to be a while for her to get safely out of range."

"But we don't know where Compz is!" He moaned.

"We only need stop the warp core overload and then we can get the hell out of here on the insurgence shuttle." Graves replied forcefully.

"This is Haldo Compz." A weak reply issued from the Captains comm badge evoking a great deal of jubilation.

"This is Graves." He began excitedly. "Faruqui has rigged a shuttle to explode with enough warheads to blow us all away. We don't have long. Can you get to the main docks in time to help us defuse it?"

"On my way." He replied. "Compz out."

"Looks like we have more things to worry about." Compz smiled. "Just as things were getting dull."

"It's been quite a day." Katherine sighed.

"We have to get to the main docking area." Compz turned to the scientist. "My friends from the Wanderer need our help to defuse a bomb that will kill us all so we need to get there by the fastest means possible."

"Transporters require the main computer." He shrugged. "There's a tunnel that will get us there in about three minutes."

"Compz to Graves." He began as he pressed on his communicator. "On our way, sit tight."

"The Wanderer?" Doctor Jones raised his eyebrows curiously.

"My old ship!" Compz nodded in his general direction, still not keen on talking with him.

"I've heard of it." The doctor began as all three stopped suddenly and turned to give him their full attention. "We have its crew here."

"How do you have the crew?" Katherine asked.

"They ejected the escape pods as we were attacked." Compz explained. "How did you get hold of them?"

"I don't know." The doctor shrugged. "I imagine there was a cloaked ship that tractored them in."

"They're prisoners here?" Blake asked, frowning in disapproval.

"Not exactly..." He began nervously. "They were delivered to me for as raw materials for my experiments."

"What did you do to them?" Compz sneered, stepping forwards with his fist balling angrily, ready to attack at the slightest provocation."

"Nothing!" He assured him quickly, his hands raised in surrender. "They were being prepared but nothing had been started."

"What did you intend to do to them?" Blake asked, manoeuvring himself between Compz and the slightly built scientist before he took it upon himself to slightly unbuild him.

"It's... difficult to explain." Jones stammered nervously. "We have this procedure that we designed."

"Does it involve putting people in tubes?" Katherine asked, dreading his answer.

"Yes." He replied in surprise. "How did you know?"

 

Chapter 10

Captain Faruqui stood at the centre of his bridge with his hands clasped behind his back and a smile set onto his face while the reverse view of the ship was displayed on the viewer. They crept at barely a crawl from the asteroid as the minutes and seconds ticked away inexorably towards the destruction of his incursion shuttle.

"Five more minutes to detonation." Goruss Clogg sneered from his console towards his commanding officer. The intelligence service was run on a strictly need to know basis and he had been selected to join the group who were deemed to need not to. It was true that he would have had many reservations about his task had he known what his orders would lead to.

The captain had asked him to quietly mention to the merchants that there would be Latinum for them if they simply stayed out of the way. He had assumed, quite reasonably that his intention was to ensure a measure of co-operation, not to tempt them into a trap that would rob them of their lives.

"Excellent." He replied, hardly hearing his security officers words.

Clogg had been told that the Section 31 troops would have been beamed aboard the Violator but that had seemed not to have happened meaning that everyone remaining on the asteroid would be instantly killed. Clogg hung his head sadly, hating himself for allowing himself to have been blindly lead into such an unthinkable act and worse for leading others along with him.

"As soon as we reach minimum safe distance send the signal to overload the warp core with a self destruct countdown." The Captain commanded. "When it detonates go instantly to warp, they'll be too busy to track us with any luck and we'll be back in Federation space in time for breakfast."

"Sir!" Cloggs attention was suddenly roused from his self recriminations by a warning symbol on his terminal. "I'm tracking an incoming signal."

"A ship?" He asked urgently, spinning round in surprise.

"According to the scanners it's a Scarab." Clogg said in agreement. "It's coming in at high warp and isn't cloaked."

"How long to contact?" Commander Brown leapt up from her seat.

"Three minutes." Clogg confirmed.

"It can't be the Ibex." Captain Faruqui groaned, his eyes rolling back in his head. "She's closer than that."

"If they're coming in uncloaked then they want us to see them." Commander Brown shook her head in dismay.

"They want us to drop our cloaks and raise our shields so they can see us." Clogg muttered to himself but loud enough for everyone to hear.

"They can probably already see us. This could just be an attempt to intimidate us." The Captain told him firmly. "I don't want to provoke them. We'll wait until we know where we stand."

"Tell me about the tubes!" Blake insisted firmly, glaring at the dishevelled scientist.

"Tell us on the way." Compz interjected. "We have a bomb to defuse or nothing else is going to make much difference!"

Blake remained motionless, breathing heavily as the anger bubbled away inside him. "Alright." He finally conceded. "Lets go."

The group hurried along the narrow rock tunnel towards the main docking area.

"What do the tubes do?" Katherine asked as they moved along.

"Lots of subtle things." He replied. "It's too complex to explain."

"You better find a way to make it simple." Blake growled from the front of the group as his torch picked out the way to go with a flickering tongue of light licking across the uneven surface.

"It goes back to the Scarab." He began. "We originally conceived the idea to counter the Borg threat."

"The Scarab?" Katherine asked thoughtfully, trying to make sense of what she knew. "What was the idea?"

"The idea to fight fire with fire." The doctor told her simply in a rehearsed monologue that he'd clearly given at several board meetings. "It all began with a captured vessel."

"Not the Romulan ship?" Katherine smiled at the ridiculousness of her own suggestion.

"Of course not." He agreed, growing slightly breathless from the exertion of trying to keep up. "If you intend to go to the hangars then I can show you."

"They'll be here soon!" Captain Graves assured himself verbally, as if hearing himself say it offered him some comfort.

"I hope so." Morrow agreed, rubbing his temples that were throbbing from the effect of a few sips of Tarquarian gin. "Who knows how long we've got, or even if Haldo can fix it."

"I know you can't!" Graves told him. "And I couldn't stop a core overload on the Wanderer, let alone a sophisticated military ship."

"A warp core overload on the Wanderer would barely light a candle." Morrow smiled weakly at his own humour.

"That's true." He grinned back with a vague glimmer of hope that was far outweighed by the gravity of the situation.

"Look!" Morrow yelled as a finger of light felt its way from the tunnels and the sound of familiar voices echoed through the chamber.

"Thank god." Graves sighed to himself, throwing his head back in relief as a smile carved it's way across his lips that just wouldn't take no for an answer.

"Compz." Winston called out, jumping up and down and waving his arms as the big man hurried over.

"Hi guys!" He called back, anxious to tell them everything but forcing himself to remain focused for once. "What's the situation?"

"The hold is loaded with live and armed torpedo warheads and the crew have beamed back to the Violator." Graves told him quickly, leading him to the airlock. "The core is set to overload and the self destruct timer is counting down."

"What have you tried?" Compz glanced back to Morrow as he followed them to the Runabout.

"Nothing." Captain Graves shrugged.

"We called you!" Morrow agreed. "That was the only idea we had."

Haldo Compz nodded knowingly and glanced for a moment at the pair of inept men who were officers in honorary rank only.

"You did the right thing." He told them as he stepped over to the airlock.

Blake and the others walked over to the hatch as the others slipped inside the ship.

"Is there anything you can do?" He asked, turning to Katherine.

"Damn it Blake, I'm a doctor." She told him. "...Not an engineer."

"What about you?" He turned to the scientist who had turned a very odd colour as terror gripped him firmly enough to drive rational speech from his abilities.

"They would have reset the codes and locked the docking clamps." Katherine guessed. "I doubt there's much any of us can do."

"They've reset all the codes and locked down the docking clamps!" Haldo called out from the airlock.

"Can you eject the core?" Blake asked with a hopeless shrug.

"Yes, I can." Compz agreed. "But whether it's attached to the plasma injectors or rolling around on the tunnel floor it's still going to blow us all to bits."

"Good point." He muttered. "Any ideas?"

"Not good ones." Compz stepped out of the airlock towards them. "I've reset the clock to give us a little more time. The computer is confused by some very silly programs I added but it won't keep it busy long, perhaps an hour at most."

"He's bought us some time!" Blake turned to the scientist. "Now it's your turn to get us out of here."

"Me?" He gasped, stepping back.

"You said the Scarabs are based on technology from a ship you captured." Blake continued. "If it's here then we can use it."

"We can't use it." The doctor shook his head fiercely. "Humans can't use it."

"I've had enough of this!" Blake rubbed his temples and turned from the terrified scientist. "I'm the highest ranking Starfleet officer here so I'm taking command!"

"Fine with me." Compz nodded. "I'm happy so long as it's not my fault when we all die!"

"Then we're agreed." Blake continued to cut off any further comments that could eat into whatever time they had left. "Me, Compz, and Jones are going to the hangars to find something we can get out of here on."

"And me?" Katherine asked.

Blake handed her a tricorder. "You take the others and find the Wanderer crew."

"I can show you how!" Dr. Jones whimpered, pointing at the map on the tricorder screen.

"Everyone stay in touch. Report anything!" He said as the groups separated. "Good luck!"

The Scarab class vessel, Sphinx emerged from warp trailing streams of blue light from her outstretched nacelles that jutted from her sides like a pair of small wings. As she went to impulse the nacelles folded back behind her nose, the three indents along their length were glowing a fierce red from her Bussard collectors. Her hull was flat and rounded at the front with a stumpy oblong tail with the bridge module running down her spine and housing a dark engineering section with a glowing green heart. A large weapon jutted forwards from an alcove on her nose and two black indents at either side had deep red torpedo tube throbbing a dull red from their photon spill ports.

"Oh my god." Captain Faruqui said as the image of the vessel filled his screen.

"They're pointing straight at us." Goruss Clogg told him. "They must have detected us."

"Do we raise shields?" Commander Brown asked, her eyes glued to the screen at the fore of the bridge.

"If we do that then we'll have to drop the cloak." He said simply. "We don't know for sure that they know we're here."

"The Ibex is de-cloaking." Clogg cried out. "It's off our port bow, two thousand kilometres."

"I guess they know we're here." Captain Faruqui groaned. "Hail them..."

"What was this ship you found?" Blake asked as the hangar doors loomed in front of them. "It's a long story." The scientist began, more used to laboratory thoroughness than explaining to a couple of angry men with phasers.

"Then perhaps you better begin." Compz told him angrily.

"Do you remember the battle of Wolf 359?" Jones asked. "The Borg cut through our defences with frightening ease, destroying around 40 ships."

"I remember like it was yesterday." Blake told him flatly with a humourless smile.

"Well the Borg Cube continued on towards Earth but it left something behind." Jones explained. "A kind of scout ship, apparently they often do it to act as sensor relays and to watch for their victims trying to escape. It helps gather information on the behaviour of a species and inform them of new species that might attempt to offer assistance."

"Go on." Blake urged him, highly intrigued.

"Well the rescue team that followed the Cube encountered this scout ship." He continued. "Of course it cut the first ship to pieces but the entire fleet managed to damage it quite a lot."

"That was a Borg ship?" Blake stopped in his tracks, facing Jones with shock and surprise. "A Borg scout fired on the Mirage?"

"The Mirage?" Jones asked, furrowing his brow curiously. "I think that was it, yes."

"Take my word for it." Blake growled.

"It died when the Cube was destroyed, luckily for the rescue fleet." Jones shrugged. "We salvaged the vessel and classified the incident."

"So the Scarab is a Borg inspired ship?" Compz asked while Blake seemed lost in his own inner torment.

"Oh no." Dr. Jones dismissed the suggestion with a small laugh. "It has Borg inspired propulsion and weapons but we can go much further with what we learnt from that scout."

"Further?" Blake hissed angrily.

"Our original prototype used every piece of technology we could make sense of." He replied proudly. "Computers, materials, nanoscopic robots flooding the super-structure repairing damage instantly."

"What happened to it?" Compz asked, listening raptly.

"Nothing." Jones admitted with a hint of regret. "It just didn't work."

"Why not?" Compz leant forward to the scientist so that his breath could be felt across his face.

"We never knew." The Doctor told him. "Nothing worked, the whole system refused to initialise. That was when we changed direction and designed the Scarab."

"The Scarab is just a stopgap until you can assimilate all the Borg technology?" Compz suggested.

"Yes." He agreed enthusiastically. "We use them to test every advance we make, one step at a time. At first we were too excited by what we had so we went back to basics to find out where we went wrong."

"Where is this Borg ship?" Blake growled menacingly.

"Behind that door." Dr. Jones replied quietly, unsettled by the sheer hatred facing him.

"Why didn't you destroy it?" Blake sneered, stepping up to the door as he pushed the doctor aside.

"We needed to learn from it." He replied simply. "We couldn't waste such an opportunity."

"Opportunity?" Blake said with contempt.

"Without that scout we'd have no Tri-cobalt warheads, no Quantum Torpedoes, no pulse phasers." Jones explained in an attempt to vindicate his position.

"He was at Wolf 359!" Compz told him flatly.

"I see." Dr. Jones replied with a nod of realisation as he turned to the young officer. "Then I can imagine why you hate the Borg but you have to see that having this gave us the advantages we needed to defeat them the next time.

"They came back?" Blake asked, his brow furrowed over his aggressively pitched eyebrows.

"They did." He nodded, his own brow wrinkled curiously as he wondered why he wouldn't know. "We learnt enough from this ship to covertly improve our weapons across the whole fleet."

"I died at Wolf 359!" Blake sneered at him. "I woke up in one of your damn tubes, the recipient of your procedure."

"That's impossible." Jones smiled, turning his head to face Haldo, assuming he was joking.

"Why?" Blake insisted.

"There are 13 levels." He began. "Level one is just a scan but level 6 erases the memory of the subject before they're reprogrammed. How would you know who you are?"

"I was taken out at level 5." He replied in disgust.

"It's dangerous to remove someone until the program is complete." He offered weakly, hanging his head.

"You were turning me into a Borg, weren't you?" Blake sneered, hardly able to look at the doctor for fear of losing his temper with him.

"We created a Federation version of the Borg nano-probes." He told him with a lowered voice. "They make detection impossible and increase your brain and musculature to a superior level, increasing your strength and intelligence. Chips are added throughout the brain to augment it's functions and a replicator net is set into your right hand."

"And a phaser in the left..." Compz added knowingly.

"When we built the prototype there was a lot we didn't know and the same is true of what we were doing to you." He admitted. "When we heard our tubes had been found at Huttus 12 we had new ones delivered here so we could carry on. We didn't know exactly what would happen and we only intended to do it to the bodies of deceased Starfleet officers and crewmen, we honestly didn't think we were doing anything wrong.."

"It always sounds reasonable." Blake shook his head sadly.

"I've found them." Katherine said, smiling as her tricorder flashed up the whereabouts of the 12 missing Wanderer crewmen.

"Great, I can't wait to get out of here." Morrow rubbed the top of his arms as the cold air began to chill him. He noticed that he could see his breath as it left his mouth and knew the temperature must be falling rapidly. "I take it life-support has failed?"

"Just about everything has failed." Katherine agreed.

"We could go back to the shuttle." Graves suggested dryly. "It's going to get hot there soon."

"I'll be fine." Morrow assured him with a shudder.

"This way." She ushered them into a large hall where 12 of the tubes were jutting from the floor.

"My crew are in those?" Captain Graves asked, slightly horrified at the sight of the intricate machinery that was working it's way into his peoples bodies.

"They are!" She agreed a little surprised. "I can scan them!"

"I guess they'd only just started..." Morrow suggested.

"They haven't started anything." She glowered accusingly at the merchants. "They all died in your escape pods from asphyxiation."

"All four pods failed?" Graves asked. "Isn't that a little unlikely?"

"Not if you remove the power supplies to run the coolant generators around the gin!" Morrow sighed, slapping his forehead in realisation at what they'd done.

"I'd forgotten about that." Graves pulled an apologetic face at the Ensign.

"They're alive, they haven't done anything to them yet except repair the damage." She told him sternly. "They're unconscious but should come to if you open the doors."

"You know there's two more of these on the shuttle!" Morrow told her as they walked to the first of the tubes.

"Oh no!" Katherine cringed as she remembered the two tubes that Turaz had been tinkering with. "No loose ends."

"What?" Graves asked.

"Nothing." She sighed, throwing a hypo-spray to Morrow. "Inject each of them in the neck and they'll be fine. Go as fast as you can and then get them to the hangar, I'm going back to the shuttle."

"Do we have time?" Graves called after her as she hurried out.

"I hope so." She called back. "I suggest you don't tell them about the power supplies!"

"They have responded to our hails." Goruss Clogg reported as a light began blinking on his console. "Incoming message."

"On screen." Captain Faruqui ordered in a slightly subdued manner as if someone had purposely urinated on the burning flame of his enthusiasm.

The viewer flashed from the image of the Sphinx to the face of her commanding officer. She was younger than he had expected and had the casual gait of someone who knew that the fight was already won before it had even begun.

The Captain sat at her post, just looking at the reserved panic going on aboard the Violator with some amusement before she bothered to stand. Finally she deemed to speak and stood before the viewer, adjusting her black uniform absently as she did as if the Starfleet intelligence vessel posed no more discernible threat than an insect buzzing around a lion.

"Your cloaking technology is interesting." She began with an icy grin. "It should be in a museum."

"What do you want?" Captain Faruqui scowled.

"Now, it's you that raided our base." She reminded him. "Clearly it is you that wants something."

"I got what I came for, now I'm leaving with it." He told her with a fierce resolve that appeared to worry his senior staff who were clearly wondering how he planned to implement his brave words.

"How are you going to achieve that?" She goaded him. "You're out of your depth and drowning fast."

"We'll see." He growled back. He quickly turned away from the screen and made a cutting gesture at his throat to signal his desire to have the audio part of the signal muted. "How long until our shuttle explodes?"

"Any minute now." Commander Brown told him under her breath.

"I'll keep them talking." He began, still with his back to the screen. "As soon as it goes up raise shield and fire everything we have at those two ships. Hopefully it will catch them off-guard."

"Yes sir." Goruss Clogg agreed.

Captain Faruqui turned back to the screen.

"We're both Starfleet." He began with a knowing grin. "You're not going to destroy me."

"Don't bank on it." She assured him.

The hangar bay doors slid open and Blake Girling walked gingerly through onto the observation platform. The bay was a gargantuan cavern scooped out of solid rock at the heart of the asteroid with scaffold towers supporting the gigantic forms of the many docked vessels. Blake peered into the gloom through the transparent aluminium glazing in search of the Borg vessel.

"It's there." Dr. Jones told him, pointing out into the distance to a massive grey structure. The scout ship was a long oblong of dark plated metal with a deep hole at the bottom that showed off the random mass of machinery inside that spilt from it's rear. Two outriggers jutted from the sides of the hull with more jumbled structures winding together within and the only light that picked it out came from the rigging that held her.

"So that's it?" Blake sneered.

"Its construction is less generalised than a Cube." The doctor explained. "The outriggers contain a pair of redundant power sources that seem to provide the propulsion."

"We don't care." Compz cut him off before the scientist in him forgot that their lives were in imminent danger and began waffling on about nothing important.

"Will it work?" Blake asked.

"The power sources were removed for analysis and never replaced." The doctor replied. "We tried to copy them using Federation technology."

Compz shook his head as the hopelessness of their predicament began to overwhelm him. He leant his hands against the glass and stared out at the ships in the hangar. The bright green Bird of Prey was visible in the distance with it's wings tucked up for landing on one of the service pads and the port nacelle was missing from the tip and had been disassembled next to the ship.

"What about the prototype?" He said as hope taunted him once again.

"The first ship you made?" Blake agreed. "Where is it?"

"It's at the end of this gantry." He replied shaking his head. "You can't see it from here."

"Is it complete?" Blake persisted.

"It doesn't work!" Dr. Jones said firmly. "We can't even make the lights come on inside."

"Compz?" Blake shrugged his shoulders.

"I can try." He nodded with a huge leathery smile. "Anything beats standing around waiting to die."

"Why hasn't that damn ship exploded?" Captain Faruqui grumbled under his breath as he tried stringing along the Captain of the Sphinx.

"We have a problem!" She began.

"Really?" He asked, turning to face her with an open expression of interest.

"I want our computer core back." She told him. "You won't be able to decode it anyway so it's of little use to you in any case."

"I'm sure you do." He smiled.

"I could simply destroy your vessel but I don't really want to do that." She continued thoughtfully. "You've erected a force-field around it to stop me transporting it out but if I damage your vessel sufficiently that will drop. I could board your ship but don't want to cause a running fire-fight."

"And of course you can't beam a team here without lowering your shields." He reminded her.

"Oh please..." She waved her hand dismissively and wiped the smile completely from his face. "I think the fairest thing would be for me to give you ten minutes to send me what is mine and then I'll have no choice but to proceed with more forceful methods."

"Mute audio." Captain Faruqui instructed, spinning to his officers. "Why hasn't that shuttle detonated yet?"

"Compz may have deactivated it." Commander Brown suggested with a knowing sigh.

"Hack in to the computer, get me answers and blow that damn station up." He instructed.

The doors to the prototype ship opened with a hiss and a rush of cold stale air.

"It smells!" Compz told them redundantly.

"We couldn't activate the systems." Jones reminded him. "We had to install portable heat and air generators so we could go aboard."

"They smell." Compz insisted.

"It doesn't matter." Blake reminded him. "Get on board and see what you can do."

"Where are you going?" He asked as Blake headed off in the opposite direction.

"I'm going to see what's keeping Katherine!"

Katherine worked frantically with the second tube door which resisted her with equal resolve. The other was open with a woman inside groaning softly from her injection of stimulants that had so far failed to rouse her to consciousness.

She was pale and gaunt in much the same way that Blake had been and her hair had completely gone, the only reminder that it had ever been there were the few dark threads spread around the inside of her cylinder.

"Damn!" She cried out in relief as the door finally unlatched and swung open with a shuddering opposition to her efforts. There was a man inside, darker skinned but still human and larger built than Blake although his skin looked drawn and taught against his lean musculature. She quickly injected the compound into his neck and sat back wearily, hoping they would revive quickly.

"Come on..." She gasped as the seconds ticked away. The verbal countdown was stammering around the shuttle, reaching the last few seconds and then bouncing back up to several minutes in it's confusion caused by Compz additional programming.

"Please come on!" She closed her eyes. "Please wake up..."

Captain Graves led his weary crew towards the hangar bay with Morrow constantly barking at them to speed things up or die in a flaming barrage of instantaneous annihilation.

"Graves." Blake called out. "Come on!"

"We're on our way." He assured him loudly. "These people are tired, you know."

"Did you catch up with Ensign Rogers?" Morrow called out. "She went to the shuttle."

"The shuttle?" Blake shook his head in disbelief. "The shuttle with 6 armed warheads and a warp core about to breech?"

"That's the one." Graves grinned.

"Why did she go to the shuttle?" Blake sighed.

"There was two more tubes on it." Morrow told him as he tried bodily dragging along two stragglers.

"With people inside?" Blake snapped.

"I saw people inside." Graves assured him.

"Go to the hangar bay, we're hoping to get a ship working to get us out of here..."

Compz followed the circle of light cast by his torch into the bowels of the ship with the errant scientist behind him.

"Basically this is just a skeleton." Dr. Jones told him conversationally. "It doesn't really have any bulkheads or anything yet. It's just a network of replicators and field generators with some very clever little bits of equipment dotted around.

"I can tell." Compz replied without interest.

"It has everything to make it work but it just didn't." He explained as if his mouth might seize up if he stopped moving it. "I keep feeling like perhaps we forgot something. Something so simple that it never occurred to us."

"I get the impression that you'd be unlikely to miss the simple things." Compz goaded.

"Where do you intend to start?" Jones asked. "We don't know where the fault lies, perhaps in the engine room or the main computer or even the bridge?"

"I wonder." Compz looked him over sarcastically. "I wonder where the fault could possibly lie."

"It's called the Corinthian." Jones carried on regardless of anyone listening.

"Really?" Compz continued, feeling and blundering his way along the corridor.

"Once it's fully active the replicators will generate all the panelling along the interior." He noted as Haldo slipped on a loose pipe.

"Fascinating." Compz continued.

"Of course we never actually finished any of it." He just carried on. "It's inspired by Borg design but definitely a Federation ship. The outer shell is going to be fully plated with armour."

"What does it look like?" Compz asked, hoping that if he wouldn't shut up then he could at least tell him something interesting.

"It's very pretty." He said simply. "An elegant design, very slender. If it's the engine room you want then here it is!"

"Katherine?" Blake called out as he entered through the airlock.

"Blake?" She cried out in relief. "I'm in here, the cargo pod."

"What's going on?" Blake asked as his head poked through the access portal.

"They won't revive." She told him. "I opened the tubes and gave the stimulants but they just won't wake up."

"We have to get out of here." He said, cutting her off. "This ship could literally blow any second."

"We can't leave them here." She argued, pointing back to the helpless figures.

"Alright." He agreed, rubbing his temples thoughtfully. "We'll beam them to the Hangar platform with the shuttles transporters and deal with them there."

"Yes!" She replied with a sigh of relief. "And then beam ourselves."

"Perfect!" He replied. "Put a comm badge on each of them and then all we'll have to worry about is whether Compz can get that prototype working to get us out of here."

"Prototype?" She called out as Blake scrambled off to the transporter controls.

"The ship that attacked the Mirage was a Borg scout ship." He explained as he located their signals. "They captured it and built a federation version but it never worked. They built the Scarab class from it."

"They used Borg technology?" She repeated in disbelief. "It's self-replicating, there's no way to safely work with it."

"I don't think safety was foremost on their minds." He nodded as the two people in the cargo pod dematerialised.

"Give me a comm badge and we'll get the hell out of here."

"There is power." Compz said rhetorically as he scanned the engine room with his tricorder. "The mains are offline but energy is being fed to the systems."

"I know, everything should be working." Dr. Jones agreed.

"It's as if nothing knows what to do." Compz told him.

"And yet the computer is fully operational." He shrugged. "I spent years studying this, I don't see how we're going to get this thing working in the few minutes we have."

"We'll do it because we have to." Compz told him as he adjusted his tricorder. "I take it there's Federation programming in the computers?"

"That's right but it is compatible with Borg computer systems." Jones dug his hands into his hips grumpily. "We thought of everything."

"You missed something." Compz grunted in reply.

Blake materialised on the hangar observation platform near the airlock in front of the two people from the cylinders who were laying motionless on the metal plated floor.

Captain Graves and the others were making their way slowly along the gantry towards them and waved as they caught sight of one another.

"Katherine." Blake pointed at the approaching crewmen. "Get them to help you aboard with these two. I'm going to find out what the ship status is."

"Ok." She agreed, tapping her foot impatiently as the seconds ticked away on the shuttles self-destruct timer.

Blake stepped up to a narrow platform that had been hastily assembled in front of the airlock to the ship. Everything about the base had a utilitarian feel, brashly assembled from engineering kits designed to be thrown together and disassembled fast.

The airlock doors hissed open and he stepped into the darkness.

Suddenly a brilliant white light exploded behind his eyes, his mind erupted violently in pain and a fury of splintered images. Memories kicked up by a cyclone of though swirled through his synapses, disjointed forms of things he'd seen or imagined, brilliant colours permeating his essence and dancing wildly around his mind.

He slumped to the floor, barely noticing the hard metal plating as he cracked his knees hard onto it. He groaned as his mind surged with the energy that suddenly flowed through it. In an instant his memory showed him as a child. His father had taken him to the gigantic Earth starbase. He'd watched in silent awe as a Constitution class ship had slowly backed towards him to dock at the waiting platform inside the cavernous interior. His mind lurched forward to the specifications of the Defiant class battleship, he saw himself sitting a desk, reading through files. He saw the corridor of the Mirage as he ran towards his death, the flaming energy of a Borg weapon as the bulkhead tore through his head, ripping his life from him to be later returned by the same technology.

He opened his eyes, not sure any more where he was, or even who he was.

The corridor was lit and grey panelling was beginning to form in the hazy silvery light of a replicator generator. He felt something growing inside him, a kind of energy that wafted through him, feeding him information and power. He knew every inch of the ship, inside and out. His mind felt its way into the computer core, accessing every gigaquad of data that had been fed into the drives, he felt the hull as electrical fields tingled through the structure generating hull armour and systems the engineers had never understood.

He stood up to watch in silence as his ship came to life.

"My god." Compz muttered as the main power system hummed gently to life. A huge glowing ball, illuminated softly in blue as a faint tendril of energy snaked lazily through the centre. The light picked out the engineering equipment, pipes and conduits plumbed unevenly into the glowing heart of the ship, feeding it with raw materials as the ship sucked them in and converted them into unspeakable amounts of pure energy.

"What did you do?" Dr. Jones gasped, his eyes wide in childlike amazement.

Suddenly with a crack the faint tendril running through the core sparked to life and a tunnel of white light cascaded upwards from the injectors and the whole ship rumbled to life, light flicked on and replicators began humming as panels, flooring and other parts began to form themselves.

"I told you I could do it." Compz told him uneasily, slowly folding away the tricorder and wondering what the hell was going on.

"You did it?" Jones muttered softly, spinning around in wonderment as his life's work unfolded before him.

"Actually." Compz admitted. "I didn't do anything..."

"Time is up." The Captain told him sternly.

"Wait!" Captain Faruqui replied anxiously, furiously struggling to find anything to talk about while his staff hacked into the insurgence shuttles computer and hurried up its self destruction.

"I've waited long enough." She replied haughtily. "Beam the computer core out immediately."

"You'll have to lower your shields." He said, his eyes lowered in defeat.

"Just beam it into space." She told him with a viscous smile. "I'll do the rest for you."

"Begin transport." He shrugged to his security officer.

"I have the codes locked in." Goruss Clogg told him. "I have found them and am ready to transmit at your signal."

"Excellent." Captain Faruqui replied with a grin, knowing exactly what he meant. "Go."

Goruss Clogg pressed the button that connected his console to the shuttles destruct timer and completed the sequence manually.

Suddenly the base erupted in a flash of anti-matter that lit up the bridges of the Violator and both Scarabs. The blast of energy vaporised the asteroid as the warp core and all six warheads exploded with an incredible destructive yield. The secondary blast tore out with a ring of power, shattering the entire asteroid belt and blowing chunks of super-heated rocks cascading furiously out into space.

The Violator dropped her cloaks and raised her shields in the few seconds of surprise and fired a volley of quantum torpedoes into the two stunned Scarabs. White bolts of energy erupted on their shields and arcing blue bolts flashed across their hulls.

"Plot a course out of here!" Captain Faruqui growled triumphantly above the scenes of devastation playing out on his view screen.

"Engaged!" The helmsman replied, understanding the urgency of the situation and pre-empting the command to engage the drives.

"I'm detecting another ship closing." Goruss Clogg shouted above the red-alert klaxons. "Closing fast!"

"Reverse view on screen." The Captain barked. "Arm photon torpedoes."

A small ship tore out of the flaming wreckage of the asteroid, its engines glowing a deep blue across it's unfinished exterior. It flew effortlessly through the rubble that rained out behind it, rocks skipping across its impenetrable shields as the vessel screamed towards the Violator .

"They've beamed something aboard!" Clogg cried out in surprise. "Its in hangar bay 1!"

"Erect a tactical shield around shuttle-bay 1!" Captain Faruqui cried out. "Now!"

"Shields up, sir." Clogg confirmed nervously. "I can't beam it out unless I lower our shields."

"What is it?" Commander Brown called out.

"Oh god." Goruss Clogg swallowed hard. "It's our shuttle. Scanners show it's missing the warp-core and the torpedoes but the self destruct charges are still on board and the timer is running."

"Cancel it." Captain Faruqui called out, his voice low and hard, already knowing it would be hopeless.

"Too late." Clogg confirmed his fears.

A blast echoed through the rear of the Violators hull between her nacelle pylons. The shield contained most of the explosion but not all of the energy. The body of the shuttle tore itself to pieces as the charges erupted, showering the bulkheads with flaming chunks of burning metal and shattering the power conduits that lay behind.

The Violator slowed down as power instantly stopped being fed from the warp-core, the shield struggled to contain the broiling energy while the radiator grills flickered and the ship lurched in space. Suddenly the hangar doors exploded, torn from the bulkhead and thrown out into space before a flaming barrage of shrapnel. The hull buckled from within as a power conduit blew out, tearing a streak of flaming panels out along the rear of her crippled hull.

The two Scarabs began to move in, surprised but not seriously hurt from her attack.

Suddenly the Corinthian shot between them. Her tadpole shaped hull had two elegant protrusions from her nose supporting two engineering nacelles that throbbed with broiling blue plasma. Her body was open in most places to show the intricate Borg inspired engineering beneath her strong armoured shell that was surrounded by walls of potent energy. Her nose held a massive ion weapon and a launch tube beneath. She pirouetted between the battleships with ease as if taunting them with her speed and manoeuvrability.

The weapons of the two Scarabs erupted as they both fired on her at once.

"Shields are holding." Katherine called out from a control panel at the rear of the small bridge. "Don't ask me how."

"I know how." Blake assured her calmly from the centre, his mind directly connected with the ships computer and systems. The other two officers from the tubes sat at the front of the bridge behind the helm and operations control systems, their dark eyes faced silently forwards while their fingers danced with confidence over the controls.

"I can't activate the weapons." Doctor Jones called out in mild panic. "I can't even see how to bring on the viewscreen..."

"Sorry." Blake smiled. "I forgot you couldn't see out."

As he spoke the front of the bridge vanished. The structure was low and had curved, sweeping columns supporting the roof, the front three sections of the wall suddenly became seamless holograms of space with the image of the two attacking Scarabs coming at them from opposite sides.

"How are you doing this?" Katherine gasped.

"This is Girling." Blake said as he stood up.

"Compz here." A reply called out from nowhere.

"We have full power?" He asked.

"Everything is running perfectly down here." Compz nodded happily as the spherical generator glowed brilliantly with a broiling snake of energy crackling through it. "Not that I have a clue about how any of this is meant to work."

"Good enough for me!" Blake assured him.

"What are you going to do?" Katherine asked, craning forward from her terminal.

"You're about to find out." He grinned.

The Sphinx fired a stuttering beam of phaser energy from her nose cannon, the bolts careened across the Corinthian's shields as she rolled away, leading the attackers with her.

From several of the exposed engineering sections on her bow beams of blue energy licked out at the two ships, connecting perfectly with both. Arcs of electricity blasted across their shields as their energy matrix was destabilised by the powerful tractor beam that pulled them both around as she flew between them. The Sphinx continued firing harmlessly at the little ship while she streaked past before suddenly vanishing in a blur of warp energy.

The pulses carried on blasting out before the Scarab could tell what was happening and tore into the motionless Ibex, ripping through her collapsing shields and unprotected hull beneath.

The surface of her nose erupted in fire as the pulses shredded her armour.

The Corinthian appeared behind the Sphinx in a flash as she emerged from warp, she fired another blue energy damping beam into the rear of her engineering alcove and with a shudder of crackling energy the glowing green power source winked out plunging the ship into darkness.

"I never had to fire a shot!" Blake told her as he turned to the bemused expression set onto Katherine's face.

"How are you doing this?" She asked more insistently.

"I don't know." He replied earnestly, ruffling his brow for a way to explain. "It's like I'm connected to the machine, I can hear it talking to me and it hears me talking back. It's not like a language, more like just suddenly remembering what you haven't really forgotten."

"There are several cerebral interface circuits in your brain." Dr. Jones nodded in agreement with him. "They were meant to allow the crew to communicate together more efficiently."

"They work." Blake told him. "I can hear the other two as well."

"They're spooky." Captain Graves shuddered. "They just opened their eyes and wandered onto the bridge when we brought them on board."

"How does it feel?" Katherine asked, shaking her head slightly in wonder.

"It's alright." He told her. "It's not invasive."

"Are you sure you're ok?" She persisted.

"It's not perfect." He shrugged. "I can't see everything at once but I can access all the information in the computer, the tactical scenarios, the data files. I can think with the assistance of the most powerful computer the Federation has ever built so I'm finally as smart as I always told everyone I was."

"We filled the computer with everything." Jones told them. "We wanted to test its capacity, we put in every Section 31, Romulan and Federation file ever written.

"Open hailing frequencies." He said for the benefit of those who could only hear with their ears. "And get Compz up here. He's going to enjoy this."

"Damage report?" Captain Faruqui cried out as his ship listed helplessly in space.

"Main power feed to the nacelles is gone." Commander Brown called back. "Emergency fields are holding us together for now, engineering teams are responding."

"How could they do this?" The Captain called out over the buzzing warning sirens and the occasional flash from a console as power systems overloaded.

"With consummate ease." Blake Girling assured him as he appeared on the viewscreen.

"You did this?" Faruqui growled, turning in his rage towards the image.

"Actually you did!" Blake reminded him. "I just returned something you lost."

"You attacked us!" He grunted, his face flushed with rage.

"You would have killed everyone on that asteroid which almost included us." Blake told him calmly. "I never fired a shot at you."

"Weapons!" He growled. "Lock on to that ship."

"This is getting us nowhere." Blake sighed and rubbed his forehead in exasperation.

Suddenly Captain Faruqui vanished in a brilliant flash of energy.

"Welcome to the Corinthian." Captain Graves waved at Faruqui as he appeared on the bridge of their vessel. He looked around in surprise at the dark gothic structure of the ship with sweeping columns and soft, gloomy lighting.

"Send me back to my ship." He insisted.

Suddenly, in a blue flash the Captain of the Sphinx arrived to stand next to him. She spun in surprise, glaring around her.

"Patricia?" Morrow stood up in shock. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"Winston?" She gasped. "Why aren't you in uniform?"

"I dropped out..." He stammered. "You're the captain?"

"This is your sister?" Blake frowned, jabbing his thumb towards her slightly dishevelled and highly surprised form.

"I'm afraid so." He admitted before turning back to her. "I thought you were in trouble."

"She is now." Blake told her with a stony severity as he turned to face the two captains. "You both are."

"I demand..." Began Captain Faruqui.

"You are in no position to demand anything." Blake cut off his words with a raised hand. He crossed his arms over his chest and began shaking his head in disappointment as if preparing to scold a small child.

"What do you intend to do?" Captain Patricia Morrow asked, accepting her position with a willingness to hear him out at least.

"You two disgust me." He said simply. "You should be ashamed of yourself."

"Me?" Captain Faruqui gasped, pointing at his chest in disbelief.

"All I've done is to turn your actions against you." Blake told him bluntly. "Your ship is helpless because I gave you back a shuttle you planned to use to kill hundreds of Section 31 personnel, it was too late for me to do anything but leave the warheads behind with the core and beam the people from the bunkers aboard the two Scarabs. You should think yourself lucky I didn't send the core to you!"

"I hope you don't expect me to thank you!" Faruqui grumbled his reply.

"And you." Blake turned to Captain Morrow. "You shot the Ibex to pieces. I would have invited their captain to join us but he's a smouldering burn mark on his bridge carpet now."

"I can't believe how low you're willing to sink." Katherine sneered at her former captain. "You're a murderer."

"I had a job to do, young lady." He growled.

"The job of a Starfleet Captain never included this level of disregard for human life." Blake told him. "You've lost your way."

"You're ten years out of date!" Faruqui grunted his reply. "You don't know anything."

"I know that Starfleet wouldn't sanction your actions." Blake shrugged. "I know your career is over when I hand in my report."

"Your report?" He asked, taken aback.

"I've just been promoted to acting Captain." He retorted. "I always said I wanted to make Captain before I reached 30 and now my cells have regressed a few years I figure I finally made it."

"I declare you fit for duty." Katherine crossed her arms and smiled knowingly.

"The word of my chief medical officer." Blake told him. "Starfleet are going to be very interested when I dock at Earth with this ship."

"You can't go to Earth with our prototype." Captain Morrow scowled.

"We have every piece of data about the entire history of Section 31!" Haldo Compz told her from the doorway with a raise of the piece of his forehead that would have included an eyebrow if he were fully human. "I would say your organisation is finished."

"You destroyed yourself." Blake continued. "People like you always do. You don't care about people so the people you tread on come back to haunt you eventually."

"My investigation found Blake, he found this ship with all the evidence we could ever need." Compz agreed. "You built the weapon that finally finished you off."

"I finished them off!" Faruqui told him.

"Hardly. You just forgot the founding principals of Starfleet." Blake sneered at his bottomless reserves of arrogance. "If someone throws a rock at you and you throw one back then next time they'll just find a bigger rock."

"What do you mean?" He crossed his arms and turned away.

"He means that Section 31 grew in power because you started an arms race with them." Compz told him. "You diverted your energy to fighting yourselves when there were real threats out there and real opportunities."

"I thought we'd learnt to solve our problems without turning to violence but now you're building battleships, sending armed shuttles after merchants and destroying each other in a vain effort to destroy a ship you hadn't even managed to identify." Blake said with a note of regret.

"When you dock this ship in section 01 at Earth then maybe it will remind them." Captain Graves stood up and shot back a gulp of gin.

"I hope so." Blake smiled back. "Because we've got too much to lose if it doesn't."

"What are you going to do with us?" Captain Morrow asked, her eyes fixed downwards.

"I'm going to leave you here." He told them flatly. "Your ships are damaged. The Violator isn't going anywhere, the Sphinx engines were disrupted at full power and the Ibex has big holes in it, none of your ships are in a fit state to follow me."

"I suggest you work together." Compz called out. "And I suggest you work quickly before Starfleet gets here to impound your ships and place you all under arrest."

"But for now..." Blake said, stepping forwards to the hapless Captains as he crossed his arms over his chest. "Get off my ship!"

They instantly vanished in a flash, returning to their own bridges.

"So what now?" Katherine asked, leaning back from the terminal.

"We do what I said." He shrugged.

"We go home?" Morrow suggested with an eager smile, rubbing his hands together at the thought of returning to Earth.

Blake looked back to Katherine and Haldo before spinning round to the two assimilated officers. He rolled his eyes up and along the support joists that led to the holographic viewer and peered at the nose of his ship.

"I already am home." He replied.

 

HomeTop
	Last modified: 28 Mar 2026  http://fiction.ex-astris-scientia.org/renegade-pilot.htm