Force and Motion (9 page)

O'Brien turned into a room as the doors parted, hesitant at first, but then clearly pleased by what he saw: a dimly lit space with a handful of small tables and unmatched chairs scattered around them. The walls were decorated with cheap posters of entertainers or sports stars from a half-dozen worlds. There was a four-meter-long bar with a small sink and a rack of various glasses and mugs arrayed behind it, and rickety stools arrayed in front.

Faces turned to check out the newcomers when they entered, but then everyone saw Maxwell and returned to their conversations. The lone figure behind the bar, a small, dark Terran woman, called out, “Hey, Ben. Get your butt over here and take a look at the tap. I think it's busted again.”

“I keep telling you, Nita,” Maxwell said, “that you can't
yank
on it. You just
pull
. Gently. You have to baby it, or the keg will fill with carbon dioxide.”

“That's what I said: it's busted.”

“Calm down, Nita,” Maxwell said, sliding around behind the bar and pointing Miles to an empty stool.
“Say hello to my friend Miles O'Brien. Miles, Doctor Nita Bharad.”

Bharad slipped past Maxwell in the narrow space, not taking care to avoid contact. “Hi, Miles,” she said. “So, it really is true that Ben used to be in Starfleet?”

“Um, well,” Miles said, quickly glancing at Maxwell for confirmation that he could speak of such matters. Maxwell shrugged. “Yes. A long time ago. We were shipmates.”

“He's being circumspect, Nita,” Maxwell said, checking the hoses on the tap. The rig was handmade out of odds and ends that Maxwell had found around the station, so it was fussy. Carefully unscrewing one of the connectors, he felt a hiss of compressed gas on the palm of his hand. “It was much worse than that: I was his captain.”

Bharad guffawed and slapped the top of the makeshift bar. “Captain of
what
? Do they have ships that just clean up the mess after the big ships are finished doing whatever they need to do?” A couple of the people at the tables chuckled.

“Something like that,” Maxwell agreed, screwing the connector in place. “It wasn't very prestigious, was it, Miles?”

“No,” O'Brien agreed.

“Napoleon said an army marches on its stomach,” Maxwell said, finding a clean pint glass. “But you need latrines too.”

“Well, he was too refined,” O'Brien added.

“The French,” Maxwell explained. “They're a refined people. Here, Miles. Try this.” He handed over the pint.

“He was Corsican.” O'Brien accepted his glass gratefully, careful not to disturb the masterful head.

“They're refined too,” Maxwell said, half filling another clean glass. Holding it aloft, he said, “To refinement.”

“Refinement,” O'Brien repeated, and touched his glass to Maxwell's.

Bharad watched the two men like she was observing a tennis match, head bobbing back and forth in time. “Clearly, you two had plenty of time to work on your routine.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“Keep working on it,” she said, hopping up onto the stool beside O'Brien's. “And get me another beer.”

Whoever this man is,
Miles O'Brien thought,
I'm not sure he is Benjamin Maxwell.
He watched as his former captain plucked another pint glass out of a rack of (hopefully) clean dishware, lifted it to the tap, pulled the lever, and patiently watched the amber liquid flow. Smiling, Maxwell half listened while Nita Bharad rambled about the latest round of havoc her “babies” (presumably the giant spiders) committed around the station, and her staunch defense thereof.
Mischief
was Bharad's word. O'Brien suspected
mayhem
might be a better fit. Remembering that he had spent too many years drinking synthehol beer, he thought,
Pace yourself, Miles
. He took a small sip from the pint. Rolling the stout around in his mouth, he smiled.

“Not bad, right?” Maxwell said. “Microbiologists make the best beer.”

“Obviously,” O'Brien said.

“Though botanists are valuable too,” Bharad inserted.

“Couldn't agree more,” O'Brien said, smiling and leaning back. “Married to one.”

“Well, then you know.”

“How is Keiko?” Maxwell asked. “And the kids? Let me think—Molly should be eighteen and Yoshi is . . . twelve?”

“Thirteen.”

“Wow. Huh.” He shook his head. “Amazing. Time flies.”

“It does,” O'Brien replied. “Faster than I can stand sometimes. They're all fine. Or, well enough. Molly is driving Keiko mad and Yoshi . . .” He shrugged. “Honestly, I don't know what to tell you about him. A bit of a mystery, that one. I don't think either of them knows exactly what they want or where they want to be.”

“Did you at that age?”

“At eighteen?” The chief snorted and puffed out his chest. “I wanted to be on a starship and I wanted . . . well, I wanted to do something worthwhile.” He let his shoulders sag. “But at thirteen? I think I wanted to ride bulls in the rodeo.”

“And look where you are.” Maxwell lifted his half-pint in a toast, though he didn't drink from it.

“I suppose,” O'Brien said. “Though there are days on the station that feel a lot like bull-riding.”

“I wanted to study spiders,” Bharad said. “At thirteen and eighteen. And eight, now that I think of it. And thirty-eight.” She tossed off the rest of her pint and turned to O'Brien. “Have you heard about my babies?” she asked, her words a bit blurry from beer.

“Yes.”

“Would you like to meet them?”

“Well, I might not have time. We're only supposed to be here for a few hours, Doctor Bharad.”

“Call me Nita,” Bharad said. The rapidity of her speech appeared to ratchet up as her alcohol intake increased. “And there's plenty of time. Or hasn't Ben told you that wherever he goes, Ginger is never too far behind?” She directed her gaze above O'Brien's head and smiled brightly. “Oh, here she is now.”

The chief glanced over at Maxwell, who was grinning maniacally. He groaned inwardly, unwilling to offend the geneticist. O'Brien tilted his head back and looked up.

There was Ginger (presumably) dangling from the ceiling, spinning slowly on a silken thread. Right over the bar. Centimeters above his head.

O'Brien felt a shudder rise up; suppressing it, he slipped off his stool so he could observe the creature from a discreet distance. Ginger checked her spin by touching one of her hind legs to the wall. Her mouth bits moved in a manner that O'Brien felt could only be described as “thoughtful.”

“Say
Hello
, Miles,” Maxwell said.

“Ahhhh . . .” O'Brien began. “Hel—” Alarm bells were going off. Something was wrong. Something was terribly, terribly wrong. He dared to take his eyes off Ginger and glanced at Bharad, and then Maxwell. They were looking up at the ceiling, eyes twitching back and forth. Bharad was frightened, Maxwell was alert, amusement evaporated. “Wait,” O'Brien yelled so as to be heard over the din. “What is that?”

“It's a contamination alert!” Maxwell shouted back. Everyone in the bar froze for a half second, all except for Bharad, who reached up and pulled Ginger to her chest.

“What's happening?” O'Brien tried to set his pint
back on the bar, but he stumbled on the stool and the glass tipped over, his stout spilling across the bar top.

Bharad's eyes were wide with trepidation, but she was quiet. Ginger had folded her legs around the geneticist's torso, either protectively, or possibly seeking protection. “Ben,” Bharad said, “get to the shuttle! We need you! You can't fix this by yourself—” But before she could finish her statement, the transporter beam had immobilized her. A moment later, she disappeared.

All the other barflies had been whisked away, too.

O'Brien and Maxwell were alone in the Public House.

Maxwell pulled a small device from a pocket and pointed it at the ceiling. The alarm faded away. He pocketed the device. “Come on, Miles,” he said, dodging around the bar and racing for the door.

“What's happened?” O'Brien cried at his former commander's back.

“Don't know,” Maxwell shouted back. “Not exactly. Some disaster or another.” The doors parted and Maxwell ran out. O'Brien followed, adrenaline pumping, his ears still ringing from the klaxon, though calm had descended. He'd been in too many situations like this to be rattled for more than a moment. Just one thing really bothered him and that was just how
delighted
Ben Maxwell had sounded when he shouted the word
disaster
.

Chapter 8

Two Years Earlier

Starfleet Intelligence

Paris, Earth

L
ieutenant Commander Travis Higgins rapped a knuckle on the top of the low wall that separated his desk from his office mate's. “Hey, Javi.” Travis's friend and colleague Javier Rodriquez was also a lieutenant commander and an incident report investigator. As usual, Rodriquez had his personal transceivers jammed into both his ears, eyes scrunched tightly shut, and was likely listening to the cockpit chatter of the transport whose crew's luck ran out and they corkscrewed into an asteroid. It was, as Rodriquez had commented on more than one occasion, not a pleasant duty, but someone had to do it.

Higgins rapped harder. “Javi!” he said, raising his voice. No response. Rodriquez was mouthing the words he was hearing through his headphones, trying to make sense of the murmured jargon and personal asides bandied back and forth between the bored helmsman and exhausted navigator.

Higgins tossed a stylus at Rodriquez's head. Rodriquez caught it midflight, held it lightly in his hand, and raised a middle finger. Then, slowly, he lowered it. He then lifted his index finger, requesting a moment of patience. Hig
gins held his peace until Rodriquez finished whatever he was doing and tugged the transceivers from his ears. “Yes, Mister Patience?”

“Come take a look at this.”

“At what?”

“A recording of a deposition.”

Rodriquez tilted his head to one side and squinted at Higgins. “Because I've never seen a deposition before? I mean, you
do
know what we do here, don't you?” He indicated the rows of desks to his left and right, ahead and behind. “All of us? And, if not, what have
you
been doing the past couple years?”

Higgins made a
very-funny-ha-ha-ha-hilarious
face. “No, really. Come here and check this out.”

“Why?”

“If I tell you that, there's not much point in you seeing the recording.”

Rodriquez slumped down in his chair, which silently reconfigured itself to give him maximum back and hip support. “You know, I have my own work to do. I can't just drop everything . . .”

“I don't need you to do my work. This is . . .” He lowered his voice. “I want to make sure I'm not missing something really important here. Can you just stop being such a . . . so
you
.”

Rodriquez rubbed his face, stood up, and straightened his tunic. Protocol was that to visit another officer's work area you put on your jacket, but Rodriquez decided to flout convention. He walked around the front of their desks and plopped down into Higgins's guest chair. “Show me,” he said, leaning forward. His large, brown
eyes were bloodshot.
Probably staying out too late with the new girlfriend
, Higgins decided.

“This is from the
Darius
hearings. I told you about this the other day at lunch.”

“The freighter,” Rodriquez recalled. “Snared by pirates. What were they? Cardassians?”

“No, Cardassian ship, but probably an Orion crew. They bought up a lot of old Cardassian ships after the war ended, especially the
Hideki
-class.”

“I get the same briefings you do, Trav.”

“Yes, but do I assume you
read
them? No, I do not.”

Rodriquez pursed his lips and made a sour face. “Continue, please.”

Higgins complied. “So, these poor bastards were attacked just outside the Regulus system, out in that big, empty space that borders the Neutral Zone, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah. Lot of activity there recently.”

“Right, well, no one mentioned it to the captain of the
Darius
apparently. Or he was just rolling the dice.”

“What kind of ship is the
Darius
?”

“Good question.
Xepolite
built. I can't pronounce the class name.
H'rut?
Something like that with a glottal in the middle. You know, the kind with the dense hulls?”

“Particle scattering, yeah.”

“Right.” Higgins leaned back into his chair, settling into his story. “So, the
Darius
's captain decides to make a run for it.”

“Brave. Not that they had much choice.”

“No argument. No way is a
Xepolite
-class outrunning a
Hideki
.” He bounced forward, the chair back following,
contouring to his spine. “Except they
do.
Because they have this helmsman who apparently knows everything there is to know about wringing every joule of energy out of a warp core.”

“Really?” Rodriquez was interested now. Higgins felt vindicated. “What happened?”

“The
Darius
managed to stay ahead of the pirates, avoided their tractor beam, and was heading like a bat out of hell for Starbase 46.”

Rodriquez squinted, drawing a star chart in his head. “Okay,” he said. “Yeah, that makes sense. If they could hail the starbase, they could get help.”

“That's what the second-in-command said was the plan.”

“Second? What happened to the captain?”

Higgins frowned. “This would be the point where the pirates opened fire.”

“Really? Surprising. That's not the usual
modus
.”

“No, it's not. That's why this is so interesting. The Orions, or whoever they were, must have been aggravated enough by the
Darius
's moves that they stopped worrying about catching her intact and just decided, ‘What the hell.' And they start peppering her with disruptor fire, not full power at first, judging by the sensor readings, but enough to shake her up pretty bad.”

“And the captain died.”

“Yeah, she was under a major power coupling when it came loose.”

Rodriquez made a sympathetic face. “That's rough. Any other casualties?”

“No. But I saw the interviews with the second, and he
didn't look to me to be the sort to stay calm under fire. I figure the helmsman was calling the shots. I mean, he had the crew's lives in his hands at this point.”

“But they're taking fire.”

“Their aft shields collapse. And I expect the Orions—or whoever—were about to take out the engines when the helmsman decides that this would be a good time to drop out of warp . . .”

Rodriquez tipped his head to one side. “Okay.”

“And let the pirates get in front of him . . .”

“That would happen, at least until they dropped . . .”

“Then as soon as they flew past, he went back into warp.”

“Now that's just crazy.”

“Wait, it gets better. He goes
right
for them. Warp six. And he's firing his phasers, these tiny, little units that can't do any more than melt debris when you're in orbit.”

“No way that's going to have any effect on a
Hideki
.”

“Not supposed to. Camouflage for the real attack.”

“Which is?”

“He'd had the cargo master tractor out some of the shipping containers they were carrying. Guess what's in them?”

“On a Xepolite ship?” Rodriquez shrugged. “Something borderline illegal, I expect.”

Higgins jabbed a finger at his friend. “And we have a winner. Depleted uranium. To be used for who-knows-what? Best not to ask, perhaps. Very dense, though. And if you split open the cargo container just a few hundred meters away from the
pirates and let the uranium pellets spread out in a fusillade . . .”

Rodriquez winced. “Ow.”

“Ow is right. The only thing left of the
Hideki
was a smear in space.”

“A highly radioactive smear in space.”

“Which is why there was an official hearing. If it had just been a pirate hit-and-miss”—Higgins shrugged—“I doubt we'd even have heard about it. We had to send out a couple SCE ships to clean up the mess. No one was happy, believe me.”

“I would imagine not,” Rodriquez conceded. He raised his hands in a gesture halfway between surrender and a shrug. “But is this such a big deal? I assume it has something to do with the helmsman.”

“Of course.” Higgins smiled in a manner that he hoped could be described as sardonic. “Check this out.” He touched a control, and the small viewscreen on his desk came to life. They were now looking at the image of a human male, late middle aged, sitting behind an anonymous table in an anonymous chair. Higgins thought the interviewee looked as if he was expending a tremendous amount of effort to keep his posture relaxed and casual.

“Where did you get the idea to use part of your cargo as a shrapnel grenade?”
asked an off-image interviewer.

The man shrugged.
“Something I read once. There was a time, we're talking a couple hundred years ago, when starships used to fight that way, before phasers and disruptors. You had to just throw things at each other and then run away as fast as you could.”

“But now ships have shields. The pirates had shields. You knew that.”

“Sure,”
the interviewee said.
“But
Hideki
-class ships
have a flaw: their shield generators. They're great with energy weapons, but they can't distribute kinetic energy. The Cardassians would never bring them into battle situations for that reason—too much debris. They would always position them at the edge of the field of battle and pick off stragglers from afar.”

Higgins heard the interviewer snort, impressed despite himself.
“And you know this how?”

The man smiled self-deprecatingly.
“I like military ­history.”

“You like military history.”

“Yes.”

“And you can make a freighter move like an attack vehicle.”

“I don't know about
that
. The
Darius
is a good ship—tough. And, past a certain point, any kind of space battle is just luck. We were lucky.
I
was lucky.”

“Lucky
?”

“You keep repeating what I say without asking any questions.”

“Apologies, sir. Just collecting my thoughts.”

“I understand.”
The interviewee crossed his legs and sat back in the chair. He never took his eyes off the interviewer.

The interviewer was quiet for a few seconds, but then continued—rather lamely, Higgins thought—
“Do you have anything else you wanted to add to your testimony?”

“No. Other than I'm sorry about the mess. Please extend my apologies to the SCE
. Those poor bastards always have to deal with this sort of thing when everyone else just runs on to the next . . . well, you know.”

“Sure.”

“If you have the opportunity, please extend my condolences to Captain Selim's family.”

“Couldn't you do it yourself?”

The interviewee shook his head.
“No, I'm leaving right after we're finished here. That's okay, isn't it?”

“I think we have everything we need. Leave your contact information in case there's any follow-up, but
 . . .”
The interviewer paused. His tone of voice shifted, going from the professional to the purely personal.
“Why are you leaving? You just saved these people, the entire crew. They owe you their lives.”

The man shrugged and, finally, looked away from the interviewer. His head dropped so that the bright, overhead lights cast long shadows down his face. He murmured a reply, but even the room's sensitive pickups couldn't make out his words.

“Pardon?”
the interviewer asked.

“I said, ‘Not all of them,' ”
the man responded.

“You mean, not the captain?”

The interviewee shook his head and seemed genuinely puzzled.
“No,”
he said.
“I meant, not the pirates.”

“You think there was a way that you could have gotten away without killing the pirates?”

“Yes. Of course. There's always a way.”

“Well, Mister Maxwell, I've investigated a number of incidents and, frankly, I usually don't have the luxury of speaking to survivors, let alone an entire ship full of them. Most of the time, I just listen to the captain's logs and look at the scans. It's not usually this . . . well . . . this happy an outcome. You should cut yourself some slack.”

The man—Maxwell—nodded his head and seemed
to smile, but the smile didn't reach his eyes.
“Are we done here?”

“We're done,”
the interviewer said. The commander froze the image.

Higgins asked, “Do you know who that was?”

Rodriquez glanced over at Higgins, a squiggle of a question mark in his brow. “Someone named Maxwell? Should I know who that is?”

Higgins sighed extravagantly. “Did you ever study?”

“
Me
?” he asked. “I seem to remember being twentieth in our class and you were like, what, two hundred fifteenth?”

“Two twelve, but that's not the point. Benjamin Maxwell. Doesn't that name mean anything to you?”

Rodriquez shook his head slowly. “Should it?”

“The
Phoenix
?
Killed a bunch of Cardassians back before the war with the Dominion? Years before anyone had any idea what they were up to?”

“I have a vague recollection,” Rodriquez said. Higgins was sure he was lying. “And I also recall it wasn't as simple as that. You're making it sound like Maxwell was prescient or something, but the way I remember it, he was just . . . angry. Or traumatized. Something like that. And the only reason you recognized him is because you've always collected these kinds of stories.”