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  The engineers stopped talking and looked quizzically at her. They also looked a bit disappointed. Oh, God, Gomez thought, they saw this as their chance to show off for an S.C.E. officer and I just slammed them. Great. “Look,” she said, “I’m sorry, it’s just that I couldn’t hear myself think. It’s going to take all of us to solve this, and you know this stuff much better than I do.”

  “So,” one of them began, the oldest of them, and the other two stayed silent, quietly accepting him as spokesman, “what do you want us to do?”

  Gomez thought about it for a minute. There had to be something that sounded good but got them out of her hair. She pulled up the specs on the station routing conduits. “I think we need hands-on inspections of the data interfaces at these three nodes.” She pointed on the display. “I think they might be futzing out on us and causing feedback throughout the system.”

  The oldest of the engineers—still a young man from Gomez’s point of view—looked thoughtfully at the station schematic. “That…” he began, and Gomez held her breath, worried he’d seen through the make-work she’d just given his team, “…just might be it.” He turned to the two younger men and nodded. “Okay, guys, let’s split ’em up north, south, and east.” He turned to Gomez. “We’ll call in when we get there, call in again when we have status for you. That work?”

  Gomez nodded, still uncertain whether he’d seen through what she was doing and was just playing along, or if she had randomly put her finger on something that might actually impact the problem. In any case, she would have a chance to work in peace. “Thank you,” she called after them as they opened the large blast door, left the control center, and closed the door behind them.

  That left Gomez alone in the relative quiet with only the faint buzzing of the equipment filling the room, and that gave her a chance to think. They’d said that they just put in a new—relatively new—interswitcher, a new power gauge, and a new—what was it?—memory unit. Newly added equipment was always the first place to look for a malfunction—that was Engineering 101 stuff. So think this through. An interswitcher was just a glorified dimmer switch—it couldn’t cause this much trouble. Nor could a power gauge, especially one that was right in front of her and clearly working perfectly. So first things first, check out the memory unit.

  A quick diagnostic showed the memory unit filled to capacity. That’s odd, Gomez thought, this station doesn’t have enough data traffic to fill up any memory unit, even one this old-fashioned. She checked the specs on the unit. It was a fourth-generation version of the ones now in general use throughout the galaxy, although those were on their fiftieth or sixtieth generation by now. Still, it should have had plenty of storage.

  So, Gomez thought, let’s see what’s filling it up. A second-level diagnostic pulled up a repeated pattern, and Gomez downloaded one unit of the pattern and then uploaded it to the overhead display screen.

  To her surprise it was pure text that read:

  To Whomever This Reaches:

  I, and my planet, are in desperate need of your help. I am the Finance Minister for Sigma V, a small world in Sector 861, on the far edge of the galaxy. The peaceful, freedom-loving, and democratic republic for which I work is under siege by a horrible military power who will bring ruin upon us and upon any other planet that falls within their reach.

  As Finance Minister, I am in a position to access the wealth of our entire planet. I am contacting you in hopes of gaining your assistance in moving this gigantic sum, an amount equal to almost five billion bars of gold-pressed latinum, off our world before it falls into the control of the opposing forces, who will use it to oppress my people and to export their terror to the rest of the galaxy.

  I realize the difficulty of what I am about to ask, but I am desperate. I need access to any and all latinum accounts you may have, so I can transfer my world’s funds there. I recognize that there may be substantial risk to your person involved, so in recompense I am offering to pay you ten percent of the entire planetary wealth of Sigma V, which amounts to just under five-hundred-million bars of gold-pressed latinum.

  Before you accept this offer, please think over the risk carefully. If you have the courage to accept, simply reply to this communication with all your latinum account information and wait for the funds to be transferred to you. I will arrange to recover the bulk of the monies that rightly belong to the people of Sigma V at a later time. Any interest that accrues over that time will belong to you as well.

  Please, help me and my people.

  Ardack Sprachnee, Finance Minister, Sigma V.

  Gomez laughed when she read it. In form and function it was clearly a piece of tribblecom, a letter sent out with the intent of reaching the maximum number of communication links in the hope that someone somewhere would be foolish enough to fall for the obvious scam. The letter contained subprogramming that enabled it to eat up as much memory space as the target system had, reproduce itself to the extent of the “food supply,” and then broadcast itself to every connected user on the system—as well as to every communications address the system contained. Uncontrolled, a tribblecom could clog up an entire computer system—which was what seemed to be happening here.

  Gomez ran a few tests to confirm her theory, and was relieved to see her first thought was right—the recently installed memory unit was just advanced enough to be accessible to a modern tribblecom, but not advanced enough to have built-in safeguards against them.

  A few buttons punched brought up the hidden sub-code behind the letter, and it was the work of only a few moments for Gomez to decide which of a dozen glommer programs would be most effective. Named for a tribble predator the Klingons had genetically engineered way back when, a properly targeted glommer would turn the tables on the tribblecom, tracking it to wherever in the system it tried to hide, devouring it, and leaving behind clear and usable memory.

  By the time the three station engineers called in with their status data, Gomez had a working glommer written—it had been a little tricky, the tribblecom was a little different from others she’d dealt with. She told the three of them she’d found the problem and to come on back. It took a few runs through a compression compiler to get the glommer to run on a memory system this old and so cramped for space, but it was working. Gomez got up and recovered her knapsack from where she’d dropped in on the floor. As the tribblecom was wiped from memory, she could see system lights going from red to amber to green as station control came fully back online.

  That’s that then, Gomez thought, and headed for the door and pushed the open switch. The door, she was glad to see, swung open quickly and smoothly. She was about to step through and head for the departure lounge when the communications system beeped behind her, and her headache, which had been forgotten in the heat of problem-solving concentration, came back in full force. With a sigh she stepped back into the room and answered it.

  “May I ask with whom I am speaking?” a mechanical sounding voice said.

  “Commander Sonya Gomez,” she replied. “S.C.E. What can I do for you?”

  “Could you hold a moment, please?” the voice said, and Gomez waited, patiently at first, them impatiently. When it seemed there was no one there, Gomez cut the connection and headed out again. At that moment the door to the control center slid smoothly and firmly shut, with an ominous sense of finality. Gomez hit the open switch again but nothing happened.

  Gomez sighed. Maybe she hadn’t cleared the system after all. She went back to the board, but found it nonresponsive. As far as the computer was concerned, she might not have been pushing the buttons at all. She tried to resolve it on her own for a few moments, then bit the bullet and flipped the communications switch back on. I’m not above asking for help when I need it, Gomez thought, but it’d be embarrassing to have to ask the guys I threw out of here to come to my rescue.

  The communications switch was dead.

  No reason to panic, Gomez thought. They’ll realize their control center is cut off pretty quickly,
and someone will come get me out of here. One of the overhead display screens popped into life just as she was moving toward the communications console. Gomez turned to look up at what she expected to be the face of the oldest of the three engineers, or that of Director Jerifer. Instead, the face of Captain Gold stared out at her. And he was not at all happy.

  “Gomez,” he said, his slightly careworn face showing a combination of anger, concern, and curiosity, “what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Gomez was taken aback. Yes, it seemed she hadn’t fixed the computer problems on Hidalgo Station as quickly and easily as she had hoped, but the captain’s reaction was way out of proportion to the situation. She wasn’t even late getting back to the da Vinci, although she might be if it took more than a few hours to get out of the control center.

  “Well, sir,” Gomez started, but Gold continued.

  “That’s crazy talk. You’re putting the lives of hundreds of people at risk.” Gold’s voice softened. “Gomez, is something wrong? You’ve never expressed a single political thought in all the time you’ve been on the da Vinci—and now this?”

  “Sir,” Gomez began again, “in my defense, and with all due respect, what in God’s name are you talking about?”

  Gold sighed and paused, but not as if he’d heard her. To Gomez it looked as if he was listening to someone offscreen. Then he continued.

  “Gomez, it’s very hard for this old man to hear you speak like that. For your sake, I hope it turns out you’re under some kind of mind control, or possessed by an alien life form, or some other equally valid excuse. For now, all I can do is ask you to restore the station’s life support to full strength. Please, those are real people you’re dealing with, not abstract political concepts.”

  There was another pause. Gomez quickly checked the readouts—station life support had been cut to ninety percent.

  “Agreed, then.” The sadness in Gold’s voice was palpable. “I’ll make sure Starfleet and the Federation take your demands seriously. We’ll speak again in two hours.”

  “Sir!” Gomez shouted. “Don’t—” But then he was gone. She tried the door switch again, tried the communications switch four or five times, and ended by slamming her fist down on the computer console. Something bad was happening, and she was obviously involved, and she was very, very interested in finding out what the hell was going on.

  Chapter

  3

  On the bridge of the da Vinci, Captain David Gold sat with his back straight despite his exhaustion, wondering what the hell was going on. He asked Ensign Haznedl at ops to replay the conversation he’d just had with Gomez, beginning with the sector-wide onscreen announcement that Gomez had made.

  “Attention Federation government,” Gomez had said, reading from a padd she held up in front of her, “this is Commander Sonya Gomez, formerly of Starfleet. I can no longer sit by and let the Federation continue to compromise its ideals and its principles by holding thousands of people in prison for no crime greater than differing with the Federation on issues of policy.

  “I have been forced to take drastic steps to secure the release of these prisoners of conscience. The computer system of Hidalgo Station is under my control, and I have just reduced the life-support settings by ten percent. I will reduce life support by another ten percent every two hours that the prisoners on the attached list remain incarcerated.”

  “Gomez,” he had said, fighting to keep his voice steady, “what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  There had been a pause as Gomez’s image on the viewscreen looked up at him sadly. “Captain Gold,” she had said, “I’m sorry that you are involved in this. I am only doing what has to be done. Someone has to take a stand.”

  “That’s crazy talk. You’re putting the lives of hundreds of people at risk. Gomez, is something wrong? You’ve never expressed a single political thought in all the time you’ve been on the da Vinci—and now this?”

  Gomez’s image looked at him sadly. “The Federation is drunk with power, Captain. It must be brought to its knees. This is only the first stage of a Federation-wide rebellion that will wrest the reins of power from those who oppress the masses.”

  “Gomez,” Gold had said, choosing his words very carefully, “it’s very hard for this old man to hear you speak like that. For your sake, I hope it turns out you’re under some kind of mind control, or possessed by an alien life-form, or some other equally valid excuse. For now, all I can do is ask you to restore the station’s life support to full strength. Please, those are real people you’re dealing with, not abstract political concepts.”

  “That’s something the Federation should have thought of years ago. Two hours, Captain, or I lower the life support. I’ll speak with you then. Agreed?”

  “Agreed, then,” Gold said wearily. “I’ll make sure Starfleet and the Federation take your demands seriously. We’ll speak again in two hours.”

  This is the last thing we needed, Gold thought. The crew was exhausted, stretched almost beyond endurance by the just-completed mission to Artemis IX. The mission to reverse-engineer million-year-old alien crystal technology had seemed tedious but manageable at first. Yes, the airless environment and high gravity of the planet meant working in bulky, specially modified EVA suits, but at least no one had been shooting at them—until the Androssi showed up to take the technology for themselves.

  Gold was already short four people, with Lense at her medical conference, Gomez on leave, and the replacements for Caitano and Deverick not having reported yet. Still, he had had to deploy almost the entire crew, sending Corsi and her remaining security people with phaser rifles to defend the engineers as they worked under fire to evaluate and understand the long-abandoned technology, which had turned out to be pretty nasty and a serious threat to the inhabited planets of the Artemis system.

  In the end the job was done, and no lives were lost among his crew—for which Gold was grateful; they had only just returned from Deverick’s and Caitano’s funerals—but at the moment his people were all but burned out, Gold included. Since they were headed for the Hidalgo Station anyway to pick up Commander Gomez, Gold had secretly scheduled shore leave on the station for as much of the crew as could be spared. Now not only was that out of the question, but Gomez—whose expertise had been sorely missed on Artemis IX, Tev’s protestations to the contrary—was at the center of a new, improved crisis.

  “Do you think that’s possible, sir?”

  The voice of Lieutenant Tony Shabalala from the tactical station behind Gold’s command chair pulled Gold back to the present.

  “What’s possible, Shabalala?” Gold asked.

  “That Commander Gomez is under mind control, or that she’s been possessed by some kind of alien entity?”

  “I certainly hope so,” Gold said. “It’s a strange galaxy. That kind of thing seems to happen a lot—it happened to me about fifteen years back, for that matter.”

  “Love to hear that story someday, sir.”

  “Sir,” Haznedl said, “I’m getting an urgent communication from Starfleet Command.”

  “Well, I wonder what they could possibly want?” Gold said to the air in front of him.

  The communication from Admiral Pishke had been surprisingly brief, Gold thought, considering the seriousness of the topic. Since Gomez was his officer, and all efforts at reaching anyone trapped on the station by the shields had been blocked by a static field, he was being given point on resolving the situation. In the meantime, Starfleet was reviewing the lengthy list of prisoners Gomez was demanding be released—it turned out there were thousands of them from hundreds of worlds within and without the Federation. The admiral had promised to get back to Gold with the results of the review just under the two-hour deadline.

  The question was what to do now. Gold’s answer was to do whatever they could with the materials at hand, just like always. It was just barely possible that Gomez had harbored these feelings for days, months, or years and that Duffy’s death ha
d pushed her over the edge. Even as Gold thought it, though, he all but dismissed it. For one thing, Duffy’s death was months ago, and she’d shown no sign of cracking. He also didn’t believe this was something she would do, even if she did break down. As captain, though, he had to check out all options.

  Another possibility was that something happened to Gomez when they dealt with that quantum foam mess in the Bajoran system. But that doesn’t track, either—we were all exposed to that, and we’ve had the added stress of Artemis IX on top of that, and none of us are demanding that political prisoners be released.

  Gold spun his chair around to face the aft stations. Soloman, the Bynar computer specialist, was working there by himself, as much of the rest of the crew was on mandatory downtime to recoup after the last week’s efforts. The Bynar seemed to feel Gold’s eyes on the back of his neck, or perhaps had heard the captain’s chair swivel in his direction, because he turned around and looked at the captain with a quizzical expression on his face.

  “Soloman,” Gold said, “I hate to ask you this, but needs must. Could you break the security profiles on Commander Gomez’s personal logs? We need to see just how much of an aberration this is, if there’s anything in her personal writings that would have predicted her behavior.”

  Gold sometimes found the expressions on his Bynar officer’s face hard to read, but Soloman did seem a little uncomfortable at being ordered to invade Gomez’s privacy. I’m not happy about it myself, he thought, but under the circumstances, I really have no choice.

  “When you pull the logs up,” he said to Soloman, “wake up Abramowitz and ask her to go over them.”

  Carol Abramowitz’s official assignment to the S.C.E. was cultural specialist, but she also had the most psychology training of anyone on board, with Lense unavailable. She was the best choice for a quick on-site analysis of whatever was in Gomez’s journals—and while Gold could just have them sent to Starfleet for expert analysis, if it turned out that the journals had nothing to do with the situation, which was what Gold thought was most likely, he wanted Gomez’s intimate thoughts to be kept as private as possible.