Myriad Universes - Infinity's Prism Part 29

Julian nodded. "You're right, of course. As always." He felt uplifted. It refreshed him to be in the counsel's presence. He never saw the shadow of deception on the Khan's face, not even the casual, tiny untruths that the members of his crew employed, that he pretended not to see for civility's sake.

Khan soberly returned his nod. "My friend, it is a hard truth that sometimes deeds we think distasteful must be undertaken in order to preserve the integrity of Earth and the Khanate. Ask yourself this: what coin do the lives of a few ragged zealots carry when balanced against the security of a thousand worlds?"

"None, my Khan."

"Just so-" The counsel hesitated in mid-speech, as if he sensed something only he could see. His eyes narrowed.

"What is it?" Julian asked.

"A message," Khan said, with mild irritation. "Your adjutant, the youth Jacob. He has arrived with a summons to the command deck. He awaits you outside my chamber."

"Urgent?"

"The boy seems to think so."

Bashir bowed. "Then, my lord, I will take my leave of you." He straightened. "You bring me clarity as always."

"I am always here, Julian," he replied, and walked away toward the palace. The hologram hazed and vanished, and Bashir was alone on the grid once more. He smothered the moment of dismay at being called back, and strode to the hatch.

He found Jacob with a datapad in his hand. At they walked along the corridors of the Defiance, Sisko pa.s.sed him the device and quickly explained what Dax had discovered.

"Whatever drive system propelled the ship is not operating anymore," said the young man. "Helot Dax opined that the vessel was captured by the Ajir star's gravity well and drawn in."

Bashir examined the images on the pad. He raised an eyebrow as he scanned the text from sh'Zenne's initial report on the craft. "Is this meant to be some sort of joke?"

Jacob's serious expression did not waver. "Far from it, Princeps. I double-checked the Andorian's findings, as usual. She appears to be correct. The vessel does indeed match a known design of Terran origin. From the pre-Khanate era."

Bashir found it difficult to accept at first glance. "A slower-than-light colony ship, a craft more than three and a half centuries old, here, hundreds of light-years across the quadrant from its planet of origin." Even as he said the words, he felt a tingle of excitement in the depths of his chest. If sh'Zenne is not mistaken, then this craft would have been launched at the same time Khan Noonien Singh was battling to liberate the Earth from the corrupt warlords who dominated it.

The thought of venturing aboard such a ship fascinated him. It would be like stepping back in time...

"It is unprecedented," Jacob continued, "but it is not beyond the realms of possibility. Without motive power, the ship could have drifted for decades outside the well-traveled s.p.a.ce lanes of the Alpha Quadrant. It may even have been dragged here by some form of spatial phenomenon, perhaps a wormhole or a graviton ellipse."

The guard at the command deck saluted Bashir and opened the hatch to allow him entry. O'Brien turned as he entered, catching the tail end of Sisko's explanation.

"Here it is, lord." The tactician nodded at the main screens.

Bashir looked at the image, comparing the reality with the computer-generated mock-up drawn from Defiance's records of the early twenty-first century. The vessel reminded him of the design of an ancient submersible warship: a long, cylindrical hull with a broad dorsal fin. A cl.u.s.ter of what had to be modular fuel tanks marred the otherwise bullet-smooth, aerodynamic lines of the craft.

Jacob's thoughts mirrored his commander's. "A streamlined body design," he noted, "designed for atmospheric egress and landing."

The princeps glanced at sh'Zenne. "Any more data?"

She shook her head. "Not yet, lord. I am still running a search protocol through our historical database, but information from that period is...patchy."

He nodded. During the Romulan Wars of the 2100s, attacks on Earth had cost the nascent Khanate much, and among the casualties had been libraries of contemporary history. It had only been because of Noonien Singh's diligence and interest in his ancestors that any records of Earth's ancient cultures had survived the bombardments.

O'Brien grimly folded his arms across his chest. "I think we should destroy it," he said flatly.

Bashir nodded at a tertiary screen, where the wreckage of the rebel Bajoran ship still drifted. "Did that not provide enough target practice for you?"

"A derelict appearing from nowhere, just as we capture Kira Nerys and her militants?" O'Brien sniffed. "It is too coincidental. I do not trust coincidences."

The commander's eyes narrowed. "You must learn to understand, Optio," he said lightly, "not every happenstance is a trap. Not everything about the universe is directed toward you." He wandered to Dax's console. "Is the vessel's structure intact? Can we take it in tow with our tractor beam?"

The Trill nodded. "Aye, lord. I believe the derelict's hull is capable of weathering faster-than-light velocities, if we can extend our warp field out to enclose it."

"That can be done," offered the Andorian. "But it would severely impact Defiance's flight performance. We would be forced to remain at a relatively low warp speed, no more than factor two at best."

"Make preparations," Bashir ordered. "We shall see if this is indeed some strange form of elaborate snare." He gave O'Brien an arch look. "Inform Doctor Amoros to a.s.semble a medical detail and prepare a boarding party. Light weapons and armor." The optio nodded and spoke into his communicator headset.

Jacob looked up from his console, running a visual scan over the old ship's fuselage. "Sir? I have something." As Defiance closed on the derelict, powerful spotlights on the warship's hull stabbed out to cast hard disks of white across the gray metal, revealing the lesions of thousands of micrometeor impacts. Up close, the disfigurements of decades of s.p.a.ce travel were clear to see.

There were pale shadows on the plating. For a moment, Bashir thought he was seeing carbon scoring, but the lines were too regular, too evenly s.p.a.ced. There were letters on the side of the ship, radiation-faded into ghostly glyphs. "Enhance that," he said, and Jacob did as he was ordered.

The scanner's image patching software extrapolated the available data and brought the symbols to life. The first was a colored disk with what appeared to be a globe of Earth upon it; the second, two strings of letters. "D-Y-one-zero-two," Sisko read aloud. "An alphanumeric code. A designation, perhaps?"

"I am not sure," Bashir admitted. The mystery of the ancient ship tugged at him, and his earlier concerns fell away. With each pa.s.sing moment, the desire to venture aboard the old hulk grew stronger.

Dax's console gave a chime. "I have a correlation, lord. The code DY-102 is a vessel identification, apparently one of several craft constructed during the early 2000s. Registered as part of a Terran pannational extrasolar exploratory organization, rendered obsolete during the age of the Great Ascension." She looked up and met Bashir's gaze. "The ship is called the Botany Bay."

As soon as the lights came on, Bashir reached up and took off his helmet. A wash of cold air, heavy with dust, struck his lungs. At his side, Doctor Constantin Amoros shot him a severe look, gripping his hand computer. At length, Amoros's head bobbed. "Atmosphere is breathable," he allowed. "We may unhood." Bashir's boarding party followed suit.

"If I may say, that was a foolish gesture," Amoros said from the side of his mouth. "There might have been toxins in the atmosphere."

"I am in no mood for hesitance," Bashir responded airily. "Boldness, Constantin. It is a commander's prerogative."

The doctor's hard look rolled off the princeps. Both men were quite alike in stature and aspect, enough that some might even have thought them to be brothers; but in manner they were at different ends of the spectrum. Amoros was dour and humorless, his cold demeanor rarely cracking, and then only when he was presented with a scientific challenge. Their physical similarity stemmed from their shared bloodline. Both men were of Joaquin stock, able to trace their lineages back through the decades to the family of the First Khan's trusted warrior adjutant; in a way, they were cousins more than brothers, but thanks to the foresight of Noonien Singh, in these times all humans could consider themselves to be blood kinsmen.

The Andorian stood up from the portable fusion generator she had connected to the derelict's power train. "Systems are coming online all through the main decks," she reported. "Several outages across the length of the ship, but that is only to be expected."

"Life signs?" Bashir directed the question at Amoros.

The doctor was quiet for a moment. "From a distance, this vessel would seem dead," he began, in the lecturing tone he often adopted. "That may explain why it has traveled so far and never fallen foul of an aggressor."

"Then there are crew aboard?" Squad Leader Tiber ventured the question on everyone's mind.

Amoros nodded, consulting his portable scanner. "Below us, two decks down, inside a gravity carousel. A conglomeration of organic traces and life signs." A slight smile tugged at the corner of the man's lips, but it was gone before anyone else could see it. "Humanoid, without doubt. But very reduced...I would say near to death, but the readings are too uniform."

Bashir ran a gloved hand over a console; a rime of oxygen frost glittered across the panel. "The crew have not seen fit to come greet us. We will go to them." He beckoned Amoros to go with him and, with a jut of his chin, summoned Dax as well.

Ezri's first impression was of a mausoleum. She had a quick, blink-fast flash of memory from the life of Lela Dax, of a cemetery asteroid where the dead of a dozen worlds had been interred in shallow alcoves along an endless winding corridor. In similar fashion, the crew bay of the old Earth ship was a technological rendering of the same structure. Horizontal compartments with slit-windows ranged up along the walls of the chamber, and white vapor pooled around her boots as she moved in, two steps behind Bashir, Amoros, and the troopers. Through the frosted-over gla.s.s she could clearly make out the shapes of human beings, all of them in silent repose. Next to each chamber, a series of monitoring devices blinked and cooed quietly, displaying vastly slowed respiration and heart function. There were dozens of them, and visible through an observation window, another two chambers beyond this one. She made a quick estimate: a hundred people, give or take.

"Sleepers," said Amoros. "These people are in cryogenic suspension, Princeps. It was a common practice in the era before faster-than-light travel was invented. All of them are in a deep somnolent state, like an induced coma."

Tiber seemed unconvinced, panning his phaser rifle back and forth across the room, as if daring an unseen a.s.sailant to leap out and attack them. Ezri gave him a wide berth as she crossed to a data terminal set into one of the walls. Her hand computer made short work of establishing a basic interface.

Something had drawn Bashir's attention. "Asleep, you say?" He bent to study one of the monitors, on the compartment closest to the hatchway. "I think this one may beg to differ."

The levels on the monitor were slowly rising, and even as Dax watched, she saw a twitch of movement from inside the compartment. "Is it safe to wake them, lord?" she asked.

Amoros answered the question. "We cannot be certain. After so long, there could be damage...An uncontrolled revival..."

"Stop it, then," Bashir ordered. "We do not want to kill any of them."

"I think it may be too late," Dax ventured. "Princeps, it may be that we triggered this by venturing aboard the ship."

"The Trill is correct," said Amoros, scanning the compartment with a sensor wand. "He is already too far along." The doctor reached for the medical kit in his backpack.

"He?" She heard the spike of interest in Bashir's voice.

The compartment hissed, and on hinges over three centuries old, the ice-covered door came open. Pallid and shaking, a figure in an orange ship suit half-fell from the cramped, freezing tube to the metal deck. Bashir was there in an instant, holding the man up.

For a moment, Ezri wondered if the man was a Trill or a Bajoran. Certainly, he couldn't be an Earther. He was too small to be one of them, without the height or the broad chests of the Children of Khan. His muscles lacked the definition of an Earth-born physique. Even the youth Jacob was taller than this one.

Amoros applied a hypospray to the man's neck, and his eyes fluttered open. He blinked and swallowed, unable to speak. His mouth emitted dry, gasping noises.

"Do not try to talk," Bashir told him. "Do not be afraid. We are not here as your enemies. We are from Earth. We found your ship adrift."

The man nodded, and the effort seemed to drain everything from him.

Bashir shot the doctor a look. "He is barely alive. Take him back to the Defiance's sickbay."

The doctor shook his head. "I beg to differ, Princeps. I am not sure his body would survive the shock of teleportation. I will have to work on him here."

"Then do it." Bashir laid the man down on his pallet and stepped back. Ezri heard him take in a sharp breath. "Who are these people?" he said quietly.

Dax stepped away from the other console, leaving her hand computer to sift through the ship's systems, and studied the monitor. There was a discolored panel beneath it, with an image of the man, although without the matted beard that now grew about his face. She saw a name and rank, and read it out aloud. "Mission commander, S.S. Botany Bay, Captain Christopher, Shaun G."

"Captain..." Bashir nodded at that. "Of course. It is sensible that the ship's systems would awaken the vessel's most senior officer first, in the event of an emergency."

Tiber grunted. "Captain?" he echoed. "That cannot be right, lord. I mean, look at him." He pointed at Christopher with the muzzle of his gun. "He has to be a helot, a humanoid from a servant-world. And one of them would never be granted rank." The trooper glanced at Dax and sniffed.

All at once, a cold rush of understanding washed over Ezri, and in that moment she saw that Bashir had felt it too.

The princeps a.s.sembled them in the Defiance's briefing room, the senior officers taking their seats on the benches on the upper tier, while the helot ranks stood on the lowered level in front of them. Bashir came to the commander's lectern and began without any preamble; his words were being broadcast throughout the warship.

"At this time, every piece of data we have recovered points to the same conclusion. The derelict we detected, this Botany Bay, is indeed exactly what it appears to be."

On his bench, O'Brien folded his arms, but said nothing.

Bashir continued, his strong, clear voice carrying across the room as images blinked into life on translucent holo-panels hovering above them. "Carbon-dating of hull metals and comparative radiation patterning confirms the age of the ship. Log records recovered from the vessel's main computer core were partially corrupted through age, but Helot Dax is working to reconstruct some of the missing elements. According to their logs, this ship," he said, as an image of the Botany Bay formed before them, "lifted off from a military facility called Groom Lake, on Earth's North American continent, in November of the year 2010, Terran calendar."

The princeps paused to let the revelation sink in among the Defiance crew; a ripple of surprise pa.s.sed through the room, and he let it subside before he continued.

"There is a crew of ninety-two humans on board in a state of artificially induced suspended animation. Doctor Amoros is currently working to stabilize a handful of the crew so that we might revive the rest of them successfully at a later time." He glanced across the room. "Doctor Douglas, will you elucidate, please?"

A woman with dark, shoulder-length hair stood up; Sarina Douglas was currently Defiance's senior medical officer while Constantin was with the boarding party. "Lord," she said, with a nod. "We have determined that five members of the Botany Bay's crew perished due to system malfunctions during their remarkable odyssey. Quite amazing, when one considers the comparatively crude nature of their technology. A large percentage of the remainder are in a delicate condition, enough that they would require a lengthy and careful reanimation process to bring them around. As the princeps stated, Doctor Amoros has brought a group of the strongest individuals to a waking state."

Tiber gave a derisive snort.

"You have something to add, Squad Leader?" Bashir shot him a look. "Speak, if you wish. I give my officers freedom to make their opinions known."

"Just an observation, if it pleases the princeps," said the trooper. "Those...people on that ship are hardly what I would consider strong by any proper measure of the word. They are just..."

"Basics," said Douglas. This time the pause for the revelation was a little longer, and several of the officers showed signs of annoyance or disbelief.

"Sarina is correct," Bashir continued. "The sleepers are, to a man, all pure-strain Earth-born humans, but they are from a time before our Great Ascension. Remnants from an era when mankind had not yet embraced the gifts of genetic augmentation to improve itself."

O'Brien leaned forward. "Princeps, I think a better word to describe them might be throwbacks." Tiber grunted in agreement with the tactical officer. O'Brien gestured at a holo-image of a sleeper captured from one of Amoros's medical scans. "These are primitives, sir. Unenhanced, weak relics of a past that humanity has left in the dust."

"They are our ancestors, after a fashion," offered Douglas.

The optio didn't even look at her. "Our species shares an ancestry with apes, too, but I would not want to unlock a cage full of them. Those sleepers are a lesser subspecies of our race, something we bred out of our bloodlines for good reason!" O'Brien fixed his attention on Bashir. "Lord, why are we even wasting time with this distraction? Our mission at Ajir was to intercept and capture the rebel Kira, and that we have done. This...distraction..." He waved his hand dismissively. "This is not something for a ship of the Khan to be loitering over. Give it to the Vulcans. Or better yet, let me dispose of that distasteful old hulk and be done with it!"

Dax gingerly raised her hand, and Bashir nodded to her. "Dax, you wish to add something to this discussion?"

"Does a Trill maggot's opinion carry more weight than mine?" O'Brien grumbled.

The princeps gave him an acid glare, and the optio fell silent, realizing that he had spoken out of turn. Bashir glanced at Dax and nodded again. "Speak."

"Respectfully, I would suggest that the Botany Bay and her crew will be of great historical interest to Quadrant Command and the Khanate. May I remind you that His Excellency Tiberius Seja.n.u.s Singh, grandson of Noonien Singh and Earth's Khan Imperator, has himself spoken of his interest in archaeology? Many of your planet's libraries and knowledge bases prior to the rise of the First Khan were lost during the chaos when the Romulan Wars swept across your solar system. Between them, ninety-two humans from the twenty-first century could do much to fill those voids." She swallowed and went on, talking quickly in case one of the Terran officers tried to speak over her. "What I have recovered from the crew records indicates that the ship is manned by an eclectic mixture of experts from several disciplines. Scientists, engineers, all of them with superior skill sets..." Dax paused, taking a breath. "Superior by 2010 human standards, of course."

Bashir was silent for a long moment, musing. Dax's invocation of the name of the current Khan of Earth had silenced any further dissent. "We cannot ignore the historical importance of this find," he said finally. "As culturally dislocated and inferior as this Botany Bay is, it remains a part of Earth's past. We will return with it to Station D9, deliver the rebels, and bring our primary mission to a close, as the optio noted."

"That will take us weeks," said O'Brien. "With that wreck under tow, we cannot even reach cruising speed."

The Andorian raised her hand in request and Bashir acknowledged her. "If I may make a suggestion, Princeps, there is a way that we might reduce our travel time."

"Go on."

"I have confirmed Helot Dax's estimation of the sleeper ship's condition. I believe I could install a structural integrity field generator and rig a temporary warp sled from the nacelles of our shuttlecraft."

"You can make the Botany Bay warp-capable?"

"Aye, lord. Warp five, six even. The infrastructure is essentially no different from that of a conventional starship. In the broad strokes, the technology has changed little in the past three hundred years."

"A better solution," Bashir allowed. "Very well. Get it done." He gave the room one final sweep of his gaze, and found no one ready to question him. "My orders have been given. Return to your duties."

Julian found Jacob waiting for him after the chamber had emptied. The young man was watching him intently. "I know that look," said the commander. "You said nothing in the briefing, but now you come to me with a concern you were unwilling to voice in front of the others."

"The optio seems determined to ignore the value of this discovery. I do not understand why."

Bashir smiled without humor. "Miles...o...b..ien maps his life by what he considers to be hostile, Jacob. If it is not something he can kill, it makes him uncomfortable."

"You make him sound almost Klingon."

"His bloodline is McPherson-Austin. He has their wit and temper. Battle is the only thing that focuses his mind." The princeps studied Jacob for a moment; as with the elder Sisko, the young man had the hard eyes of those who carried the pure strain of the Amin lineage in their DNA. Jacob's father also shared the same predilection for ruthlessness that the original Elijah Amin was said to have shown, when the Somalian warlord was Khan Noonien Singh's contemporary.