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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Copyright © 2005 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

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  Chapter

  1

  Commander Sonya Guadalupe Gomez was glad her shore leave had come to its inevitable end. It wasn’t that she hadn’t had a good time on Recreational Station Hidalgo, it was that she had had almost too good a time. Her body was sore from dancing and her head a bit achy from imbibing liquids that were definitely not made with synthehol. As she threw her belongings into a small knapsack in preparation for the da Vinci’s arrival that afternoon, she glanced over at the bed in her small tourist quarters. She had slept alone the entire week, but not for lack of the opportunity to do otherwise.

  She had spent much of her shore leave with Tobias Shelt, a dashing, live-by-his-wits trader who had made showing her a good time his own personal mission over the last seven days. Together they had taken in all that Hidalgo had to offer, which wasn’t all that much compared to a modern, sophisticated pleasure center. Gomez had chosen Hidalgo over someplace like Risa for two reasons: first, her parents had met on the station a few decades back and kept nagging her to go there, and second, the station had been preserved in pretty much the same condition as it had been when her parents had been there, and it had been quaint and old-fashioned even back then.

  That meant food slots rather than replicators, that meant com units on the walls rather than a combadge communications link, that meant entertainment that was live rather than holographic, and most important, it meant a break from the cutting-edge technology Gomez faced every day as an engineer assigned to an S.C.E. ship.

  Gomez had met Tobias Shelt her first evening on the station when she was moping over the fact that her original plan called for her to be sharing this vacation with Wayne “Pappy” Omthon. She had intended to spend her next leave with the owner of the freighter Vulpecula ever since they spoke shortly before Captain Gold’s granddaughter’s wedding on Earth. Unfortunately, the Vulpecula’s last cargo damaged the ship and Wayne was currently on Lissep engaged in a massive legal and mechanical hassle to get his ship fixed and get the client who did the damage to pay for it.

  Of course, she didn’t find this out until she had already arrived at Hidalgo and found a harried but very apologetic recorded message from Wayne explaining the problem.

  Things looked up immediately when she met Tobias. He was polite, gentlemanly, and not at all insistent on the bedroom being a part of how they spent their time together. An old-fashioned guy to go with an old-fashioned station. He was attractive, interesting, made her laugh, and was clearly waiting for some sign from her before he took the relationship further than dinner and dancing. Why, Sonya thought, didn’t I give him that sign, or just drag him back to my cabin? Ten years ago I would have. Even five. Even two.

  Her packing done, Gomez double-checked around the cabin to make certain she hadn’t left anything behind, wondering while she did so if all the grieving and growing she had done since the death of Kieran Duffy had forced her to leave so much of herself behind that she wasn’t even the same person anymore. She’d been having those thoughts ever since their odd adventure with parallel universes on Deep Space 9 and she briefly encountered an alternate Kieran.

  It made it damn near impossible to know what to do with poor Tobias.

  A loud chirping suddenly sounded, breaking her reverie and doing nothing to reduce the ache in her h
ead. Gomez recognized the archaic beep as the sound of the wall-mounted communicator. She walked over to it and flipped the On switch. The burst of static that came out turned the minor throbbing in her temples into a full-blown headache.

  The static died down for a moment and a soft, officious voice confirmed her identity, then asked if she would hold on for a moment. Static filled the room again, making Gomez wonder if she had time before the da Vinci arrived to stop by the medical suite for a headache cure.

  “Commander Gomez,” a strong, feminine voice said, “I’m Director Jerifer of Recreation Station Hidalgo.” There was no static, but a sudden silence spoke to Gomez of a communications malfunction. Then there was static again, and then Jerifer was back on, her words barely audible. “The station has been experiencing a series of unexplained malfunctions, including in communications.”

  Gomez flipped the return switch. “I hadn’t noticed,” she said. The communicator went dead again. She waited, and Jerifer’s voice came back on. “Could you come up to control and take a look at our communications array? You’re S.C.E., right?”

  Gomez sighed. The da Vinci was due to pick her up in a few hours anyway, so getting back into harness a little ahead of time wasn’t all that much of a problem, and she would rather work than think right now anyway. “Sure!” she said loudly, hoping Jerifer could hear her.

  “What?” Jerifer said.

  “Sure!” Gomez repeated loudly. “I’ll bring my kit.”

  “Thank y….” Jerifer’s voice began, but was drowned out by static. Gomez turned the communicator off and headed for the door, her knapsack on her shoulder. She punched the antique door switch, and the door opened—then, as she tried to walk through it, closed again. Another push of the switch, the door opened and closed very quickly, then opened partway, then closed, then finally opened and stayed that way.

  Well, isn’t this lovely, Gomez thought. Her head pounded.

  It took longer than Gomez had anticipated to reach the control room. The trip there had been more than a little stressful on a couple of levels. The lighting in the corridors had kept switching between blinding brightness and total darkness, turning the corridors into surreal strobe-lit tunnels that made it more than a little difficult to find the turbolift; and when Gomez had finally found it, the voice commands were nonfunctional, as was the wall communicator. She had been about to step out and ask someone where the control room was when Tobias Shelt stepped in.

  “Hi,” he said to her, and flashed her a wide happy smile. “I was just looking for you. Today’s your last day, right?” Gomez saw his face fall as he picked up that she had her knapsack with her. “Sonya,” he said in a sad, scolding tone, “you weren’t leaving without saying good-bye?”

  Gomez had hoped to do just that. Better, she had thought, to just sneak away.

  “Uh, no,” Gomez said, sounding unconvincing even to herself, “I’m headed to the control room; they asked me to take a look at what’s causing the malfunctions.”

  “Place is just old,” Shelt said. “Nothing a few upgrades can’t take care of.”

  “I hope you’re right.” Gomez smiled up at him without meaning to. “But for now, I can’t even get there. I don’t know what level it’s on, and the lift has gone deaf. Won’t take voice commands.” She kicked the side of the lift a little harder than she had intended to.

  “Please choose a destination,” the elevator said suddenly.

  “Control Center,” Shelt said quickly, and the turbolift started upward, although its motion was far from smooth. “That was easy,” he said. “If the rest of the problem is that simple, you’ll still have time for a farewell breakfast.”

  “These things are rarely as simple as they seem on the surface,” Gomez said, hoping that this wasn’t the one time they were. With any luck a few complications would eat up the rest of the time before the da Vinci arrived and she’d be able to make the clean getaway she’d planned in the first place.

  “Well, look,” Shelt said reasonably, “if there’s time, there’s time. If not, we had a great week, didn’t we?”

  “Uh, yes, we did,” Gomez said. Shelt tilted his head like he was expecting a good-bye kiss, but at that moment, the turbolift stopped, the door opened, and there were five or six people in the corridor outside.

  “If you have time,” he said to her as she stepped out. “I’ll be around….”

  “Right,” Gomez said over her shoulder. There was an actual physical sign on the wall outside the turbolift door with an arrow that pointed the way to the control center. Some old-fashioned things were extremely practical. By the time she reached the control center, the strobing in the corridors had slacked off to a slight flickering that still pulled painfully at the corners of her eyes.

  Chapter

  2

  The control center door was heavy and thick, Gomez noted as it slid open. The precautionary radiation shielding was as out of date as the rest of the station, ten times as bulky as modern photoclastic materials. The rest of the center was of the same period. Gomez hadn’t seen a room like this anywhere outside of images in her history of engineering class. It was overstuffed with consoles whose lights, switches, buttons, and dials played an electronic symphony of unfamiliar clicks, buzzes, and pops. The place doesn’t lack for spit and polish, Gomez thought. The systems are old but I’d bet they’re in great shape.

  Above the consoles were old flat-panel displays, although the status readouts they showed were in modern style. The thing Gomez found the strangest—and the most old-fashioned—was that the visual readouts were above her head rather than being in essentially the same location on a unitary touch-screen interface. The control center also contained three Hidalgo Station engineers, who were, it seemed, frantically tracking down and resolving all the malfunctions as quickly as possible.

  “Hey, guys,” Gomez said. “Any idea what’s causing this?”

  “Haven’t had…” one of them said, as he threw switches that clicked and checked dials that whirred.

  “A chance…” another picked up, sliding a squeaking chair back and forth between a console on one side of the room and a console on the other, spinning around as he went.

  “To look into it.” The third one finished as he slid down to the floor and began pulling open a creaking access panel.

  “It’s all we can do…” It was back to the first one, who was now on the other side of the room.

  “To stay ahead…” the second, from under a control panel.

  “Of the breakdowns.” The third, now on his feet, reading quickly through a readout screen.

  “Make sure….”

  “No one….”

  “Runs out of air…”

  “Or anything else bad….”

  “Happens.”

  Gomez nodded, following the rapid interchange easily enough and pleased that it seemed the team here knew what they were doing. It was just that they were shorthanded in this crisis. Fair enough. “Okay, you guys keep doing what you’re doing, I’ll start looking for the top-level problem.”

  The three of them acknowledged her plan with nods as they continued to rush around the room responding to various lights and alarms.

  Gomez sat down at the only free console and took a deep breath. As she familiarized herself with the system she noted that there were sections that were slightly more modern than the rest of the setup. They were still decades old, but looked recently installed. There were things Gomez had to know, so she grabbed the sliding chair before the engineer could slide away and spun him to face her. “Anything new go in before this all happened?”

  “A couple of weeks ago we put in a new interswitcher, a new power gauge, and a new memory unit.” The engineer rolled his eyes. “The crap was no more than twenty years old, untested, unreliable, and buggy. What could we do? They don’t make the good stuff anymore. Bet that’s where the problem is.”

  As she released him to continue his frantic tour around the room, Gomez smiled at the notion of twenty-
year-old equipment being called new. She understood, though, what he was getting at. If safety and unbroken functionality was your primary goal, then a tried-and-true system was often better than a new one, because over the years, all the bugs get worked out, all the patches on the patches on the patches got integrated, and the system was finally made near one-hundred-percent reliable. Problem was that usually happened long after new, improved systems came online, and you wound up back at where you started ironing out problems. Just as well that’s how it works, Gomez thought. It keeps us engineers in business.

  The room suddenly got quiet, almost ominously so. The alarm beeps and squawks faded out. The lighting in the room was stable. Gomez scanned the status lights, which were carefully labeled by hand as to whether they reported on shields, life-support, or other station systems. They were all showing green.

  “Looks like you got it,” she said to the three.

  “Won’t last,” One of them said.

  “It’s not stable,” another said.

  “You have any idea what’s causing it yet?” the last one asked.

  “Come on, guys.” Gomez’s eyes ran over the switches again. “Give me a minute or two.” She stood up and checked the more familiar readouts on the overhead display. There were fluctuations in several major systems, too many to be accounted for by random malfunctions. Sabotage? Gomez couldn’t imagine that anyone would think of Hidalgo as worth the effort. So it had to be something higher, something at a control level….

  “Maybe it’s a synchronistic leveling problem?” one of the station engineers said.

  “Or a failed N-space conformation in the hyper-bridges?”

  “No, more likely a bug in the negotiation buffers…”

  “A pattern breakdown in the—”

  “Stop!” Gomez heard herself say, then instantly regretted it. These weren’t Starfleet engineers under her command, they were civilians who most likely knew this equipment better than she did. But with this headache she wasn’t going to be able to work this problem while trapped in a hailstorm of out-of-date techspeak.