WildFire Book One Read online

  “Hi, Emmett,” Lense said warmly. “The captain requires an update on my medical status.”

  Emmett turned to face Gold. “Doctor Lense has shown marked improvement over the past few weeks, sir. Her sleep patterns have returned to normal, and her energy level has increased. Overall, I would evaluate her psychological status as stable. Emotionally, she seems to be in good spirits.”

  Gold cocked an eyebrow and flashed a crooked grin at Emmett. “Really? Good news. Very good.” Gold stroked his chin. He hated to continue this line of inquiry, but he needed to be sure she was really recovering and not simply masking her symptoms. He respected Lense, but he couldn’t afford to be too trusting. “What percentage of sickbay’s walk-in cases have you treated over the past six weeks, Emmett?”

  “Actually, sir, I haven’t attended a patient in the past four and a half weeks, since shortly after we arrived in the Tenber system. Dr. Lense has activated me only to assist with her lab work, and only when her scheduled sleep cycles coincide with those of Medical Technician Copper and Nurse Wetzel.”

  Gold nodded, very pleased with the report. “Thank you, Emmett.”

  Emmett smiled back. “You’re welcome, sir. Is there anything else I can do for you today?”

  “No, thank you, Emmett. We’ll let you know if we need you.”

  Emmett nodded, then blurred and dissolved with a barely audible hum of photonic generators shifting into standby mode.

  Gold looked at Lense, who couldn’t conceal her expression of self-satisfaction. Normally, her cockiness would have irked him, but considering the turnaround she’d made, he couldn’t hold it against her. “Well, Doctor. Sounds to me like you’ve earned a bowl of my wife’s matzoh-ball soup. Or, at least, a fairly good replicated facsimile of it. Join me for lunch?”

  “It would be my pleasure, sir.” Lense rose from her desk and fell into step next to Gold. They reached the door, then halted as the comm chirped. The voice that followed was that of Lieutenant David McAllan, the ship’s spit-and-polish tactical officer. “Bridge to Captain Gold.”

  “Gold here.”

  “Captain, we’re picking up an emergency signal from a Starfleet vessel, with a message on an encrypted channel.”

  Gold frowned. “Put it through to my ready room. I’ll be there in a moment. Gold out.” He looked at Lense, and sighed heavily. “I’m afraid I’ll have to give you a rain check on that free lunch, Doctor.”

  Lense shrugged. “That’s okay, sir. I’ve always known there’s no such thing.”

  * * *

  Commander Sonya Gomez, first officer of the da Vinci and leader of the ship’s S.C.E. contingent, monitored her team’s progress as she stood and sipped her Earl Grey tea at the center console on the lower level of the operations center aboard Whiteflower Station. The spacious, two-level, state-of-the-art command area of the traveling mining platform was large enough to accommodate up to thirty people during normal operations. Right now, however, its only occupants were Gomez and Lt. Commander Kieran Duffy, her second-in-command on the S.C.E. team.

  Duffy was at the rear of the upper level, half-inside an open bulkhead, his beeping and chirping tricorder in one hand and a sonic screwdriver in the other. The tall, blond engineer was searching methodically, but with expiring patience, for a fault in the command center’s wiring that the diagnostic program was unable to track down, for reasons that were equally elusive. Gomez caught the sound of muffled swearing from behind the bulkhead, but couldn’t make out the words.

  She heard an echoing, metallic banging that she surmised was Duffy’s sonic screwdriver being pounded like a hammer against a duranium bulkhead. “Everything all right?” she said teasingly, amused at Duffy’s mounting frustration over what initially seemed to be a simple problem.

  “Fine,” Duffy said, clearly irritated. “Never better.”

  “You should take a break.”

  Duffy sighed heavily. He turned off his tricorder, put it back into a holster on his belt, and pulled himself free of the bulkhead. He looked around the nearly finished operations center. Two of the three large monitors that dominated the front wall showed the da Vinci’s two new “Work Bugs”—larger, three-seat versions of Starfleet’s one-person work pods, designed for heavy-duty industrial operations.

  P8 Blue was piloting Work Bug One like a natural. Fabian Stevens was piloting Work Bug Two, but with far less finesse. Blue had spent the past five weeks showing Stevens the ropes, teaching him the finer points of the crafts’ controls. Together with two assistant engineers in each pod, Blue and Stevens were making excellent progress securing the station’s pristine white exterior hull plates.

  For the past five weeks the da Vinci had been in orbit around Tenber VII, a strikingly beautiful, ringed gas giant planet. Gomez and her team had been assigned to construct a mobile mining platform and refinery that would roam the planet’s rings, seeking out such precious ores as dilithium and ultritium, which a Starfleet advance scout had detected here in abundance a few months ago.

  The S.C.E. team had been busy since they arrived, most of them volunteering for double shifts on the mining station and refinery, which they soon nicknamed “Whiteflower” because of its gleaming, ivory-hued duranium hull plating and five, teardrop-shaped sections that extended outward at regular intervals from the equator of its hemispherical, central engineering hub. Not long afterward, the name became official, much to the crew’s collective amusement.

  Duffy sleeved the sweat from his forehead as he walked to the replicator. He rubbed the back of his aching neck as he ordered. “Computer: quinine water with a twist of lime.”

  “That item is not currently listed in the replicator databank,” the computer said.

  Duffy stared at the replicator with a glare of equal parts anger and disgust. He closed his eyes and drooped his head in defeat. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” He stood, arms akimbo, anticipating the computer’s inevitable, overly literal reply. It didn’t come. He opened his eyes, then turned and looked down at Gomez.

  “How do you like that, Sonnie? Doesn’t it usually make some kind of Vulcanesque remark when we say things like that?”

  “I had Soloman reprogram it to ignore rhetorical questions.” She reached under her console and picked up a thermos. “I figure I just saved you about an hour per month that you’d have wasted in pointless arguments with the mess hall replicator.” She pushed her dark, wavy hair out of her eyes, waved the thermos, and flashed him a come-hither smile. “Care to guess what this is?”

  “You know me so well,” he said. He grinned and jogged to the short stairway that connected the two levels of the operations center. He hopped up to a sitting position on the rail and slid down it to the lower level, landing on his feet with casual athleticism in front of the petite brunette. She handed him the smooth, metallic, curve-topped thermos. He removed the cap and gulped down two mouthfuls of quinine water, then gasped contentedly. “That hit the spot.”

  He’s like a boy sometimes, she thought as she sipped her Earl Grey and studied him out of the corner of her eye, watching the bobbing of his Adam’s apple as he downed another swig of quinine water. They had been attracted to each other almost immediately when they had met aboard the Enterprise over a decade ago, and had dated briefly, but it ended amicably when she transferred to the Oberth. Then, after nearly eight years apart, they found themselves together again aboard the da Vinci.

  But the situation had changed: she was now his boss, and that had made their renewed romance more than a little awkward. She constantly had to remind herself that reigniting their affair had been her idea, part of the “live life while you can” philosophy she had embraced after her brush with death on Sarindar. She thought she could live in the moment, the way he did, but lately she was becoming less certain. I love him, and I know he loves me…but he’s always leaping from one adventure to another. He never thinks about the future.

  “Sonnie,” he said, suddenly unable to look her in the eye, “I’ve been thinking.”


  Oh, no.

  “About tonight—”

  “You mean dinner with Fabe and Domenica?”

  “Yeah.” He self-consciously combed his fingers through his short hair. “I was wondering, I mean—”

  “Tell me you’re not canceling.”

  He inhaled through clenched teeth. “Not exactly. I was thinking we might…reschedule?” She tilted her head to one side and glared reproachfully at him.

  “Kieran, you were the one who said we should have dinner with them, that you wanted to ‘bury the hatchet’ with Corsi. You even had real Betazed oysters and Risan white wine brought in on the last supply ship.”

  “I know, it’s just…well, I wanted tonight—”

  “What is it about her that makes you act like this?”

  “What’re you—”

  “Do you hate her that much?”

  “I don’t hate her, Sonnie, I—”

  “Then what is it? Why do you get weird every time her name comes up? What, are you two having an affair or something?”

  Duffy’s face was flushed red and his voice pitched upward. “Damn it, Sonnie, this has nothing to do with her.”

  “Then what’s it about?” She looked at him, trying to read through his eyes what was going on in that mysterious mind of his. His jaw was moving, but no sound was coming from his mouth. She had seen him go through this kind of struggle only once before, when he had asked her out on their first date aboard the Enterprise. He took a deep breath—

  Their combadges both chirped. “Gold to all personnel.” Gomez noted that Gold’s voice was unusually grim and terse. “We have new orders. Secure the Whiteflower station and report back to da Vinci immediately. S.C.E. staff, assemble in the observation lounge on the double. Gold out.”

  Gomez looked at Duffy, who clearly had detected the same bad omens in Gold’s message that she had. She tried to lighten the moment. “You were saying…?”

  He frowned. “I guess it’ll have to wait.” He turned away from her and climbed back up the stairs toward the operations center’s only working turbolift. She hesitated, then followed him up the stairs and into the turbolift.

  “Level six, transporter room,” he said as the turbolift doors slid shut with a pneumatic swish.

  “Kieran, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he said in a clipped, neutral tone that she knew meant something serious was on his mind. “Never better.”

  Chapter

  3

  Domenica Corsi, the chief of security aboard the da Vinci, hurried down the corridor toward the briefing room, fumbling to get her hair tied back into its customary, tighter-than-regulation bun. She had switched from alpha shift to gamma shift four weeks ago and had finally become accustomed to her new sleep schedule. Gold’s urgent summons had just roused her from a particularly pleasant dreamscape, her first in a long while.

  She blinked her eyes hard to dispel the fuzzy border around the edges of her vision, finished securing her blond hair into place, and stepped inside the observation lounge.

  The room was unusually quiet. Captain Gold was already there, standing behind his regular seat, his expression somber as he stared at the reflective black surface of the table. Lense, Faulwell, and Abramowitz had taken their seats and were conspicuously not speaking.

  Corsi moved to her own seat as Soloman, the ship’s Bynar computer specialist, entered behind her, followed moments later by engineers Fabian Stevens and P8 Blue, a Nasat whose compact, insectoid form Corsi sometimes envied for its resilience. P8, whom most of the ship’s complement called “Pattie,” settled into a seat specially designed for her multilimbed physiology, located at the far end of the table from the captain.

  Last to enter the briefing room were Duffy and Gomez. Duffy looked scuffed, while Gomez was the very picture of composure. Corsi sensed an unusual level of tension between the two, but under the circumstances, it was difficult to know how to read their moods. Gold looked up at Gomez as she moved to her chair, immediately to his right. His speech was curt and direct.

  “Commander, are all da Vinci personnel accounted for?”

  “Yessir,” Gomez said quickly, a bit surprised by Gold’s sudden formality. If he noticed, he gave no sign of it that Corsi could see.

  “Gold to bridge.”

  “Go ahead, sir,” McAllan said over the comm.

  “Set course for the Galvan system, maximum warp. Engage when ready.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Gold leaned forward slowly, as if he were resisting a terrible weight pressing down upon him, and rested his palms flat on the tabletop. The throbbing hum of the small ship’s warp engines kicked in, distant, deep and familiar.

  “About an hour ago, we received an automated distress call from the starship Orion,” Gold said. “She ejected her log buoy after suffering a massive onboard failure while navigating in the atmosphere of a gas giant. The data from the buoy’s flight recorder is not good.” Corsi watched Gold’s hands close slowly into fists as his jaw clenched. “We have reason to believe the Orion went down with all hands, including seventy-one S.C.E. personnel.”

  “Oh, God,” Gomez said, a look of dread draining the color from her face. She composed herself and looked quickly back up at Gold. “The Orion was Lian T’su’s ship, sir. I—” A look passed quickly between her and Duffy. “She was a friend.”

  Gold nodded compassionately at Gomez, then looked back at the rest of the group. “There’s more, of course. What you’re about to hear is classified.”

  Corsi started. If classified information was being bandied about, she wondered whether or not non-coms should be present. Eyes-only information usually wasn’t for the eyes of enlisted personnel like Stevens, Faulwell, Soloman, Blue, and Abramowitz. But she trusted that the captain knew what he was doing.

  “We’ve been informed by Starfleet Command that when the Orion went down, her S.C.E. team was testing a new, prototype stellar-ignition warhead, code-named Wildfire.”

  Gold turned toward the monitor behind him and activated it. It displayed a detailed schematic of a torpedo-shaped device and a seemingly endless scroll of technical data running up the screen along one side. “It’s protomatter-fueled, and capable of initiating stellar-core fusion. Its stated purpose is to aid in terraforming by turning gas giants—such as Galvan VI—into small dwarf stars to provide extra energy sources for remote planets.”

  Corsi considered the device’s other potential uses. Every scenario she could think of gave her a sick feeling in her stomach. She had to ask.

  “What if this device were deployed into an existing star?”

  Gold fixed her with a stern look. “It would depend on the mass of the target,” he said. “Small stars would supernova within a matter of minutes. Midsized ones might take up to an hour to explode. An extremely large star could possibly be turned into a supermas-save black hole that would begin swallowing neighboring systems.” Gold scanned the faces of his staff; the dismayed glances that were crisscrossing the table confirmed they all grasped the scope of the crisis. “So, as I’m sure you all understand, Starfleet is particularly anxious for us to recover the device.”

  “Sir,” Duffy said, straining to keep his tone of voice diplomatic. “What about the Orion?”

  Gold cleared his throat—more, Corsi suspected, out of diplomacy than out of genuine need. “She went down in neutral territory, which means salvage rights go to whoever reaches her first. Starfleet has made our chief priority the safe recovery of the device—with the salvage of the ship and the rescue of her crew, if possible, a close second.”

  Corsi nodded, envisioning numerous potential complications. “Sir, we should also be prepared for the possibility that the Orion was the victim of a hostile action,” she said. “And even if it wasn’t, its distress signal might have attracted unwanted attention.”

  “I already have McAllan working on tactical options, coordinate with him,” Gold said. “We’ll reach Galvan VI in about nine hours, and we’ll be goin
g into the atmosphere as soon as possible after that. Faulwell, Abramowitz: work with McAllan and Corsi—give them any insight you can into threat forces we might run into out here. Gomez, you and your team have nine hours to work out a plan for recovering the device.” He glanced at Duffy. “And hopefully, the Orion.”

  Gold didn’t look Lense in the eye as he spoke to her. “Doctor, I don’t expect there to be survivors aboard the Orion, but prepare sickbay, just in case.”

  “We’ll be ready, sir.”

  “That’s it, then. Reconvene here at 2100 hours. Dismissed.”

  Corsi lagged behind as the rest of the group filed out. She understood now why Gold had included the entire S.C.E. team in the briefing despite the high security—in this instance, they did need to know if they were going to do their jobs right.

  Duffy, Corsi noted, walked quickly out of the lounge, Gomez half a step behind him, with no eye contact passing between them. He’s pretending not to be hiding something, Corsi deduced, and she’s pretending not to be bothered by it. Wonder what’s going on there? Before she could think of possible explanations, she realized Fabian Stevens was standing just behind her right shoulder.

  “I guess this means no oysters tonight,” he said.

  Corsi sighed. “Guess so.”

  She still didn’t know what to make of her budding friendship with Stevens, whom she had begun calling “Fabe” whenever they were alone together—a situation that had become more frequent during their extended assignment in the Tenber system. It had been several months since their spontaneous, synthale-fueled one-night stand. She’d asked him to keep the matter to himself and not expect anything to come of it. To her surprise, he had done exactly as she asked.

  At first she had been grateful for his discretion, but as time passed she found herself inventing reasons to be near him on away missions and planning her schedule so she’d be in the mess hall when he was. There had even been a few more occasions when they’d been alone together.