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  #37: Ring Around the Sky by Allyn Gibson

  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.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 2003 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

  STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of Paramount Pictures.

  This book is published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., under exclusive license from Paramount Pictures.

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  ISBN: 0-7434-7609-3

  First Pocket Books Ebooks Edition December 2003

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  Chapter

  1

  Captain S’linth tasted the air. The bridge of the Resaurian ship Dutiful Burden smelled of fear-sweat and musk. The hard plates inside his mouth secreted digestive juices that burned with an acidic taste at the back of his throat.

  He stepped to the fore of the bridge, within striking distance of the massive viewing screen. Trusting his crew to navigate the spit, S’linth allowed himself a moment to stare into the Demon’s face. Oblivion stared back. The maw opened wide as the Resaurian ship descended, the Demon snarling at the stars above, showing its hatred for all life. His Burden trembled as a new wave broke over the bow.

  “Ten ris-units and closing, Captain,” said First Navigator Th’osh. “Gravimetric tides are increasing. Perhaps we should make our offering now.”

  An idea that would not sit well with the ship’s Council-appointed overseer. Looking back, he saw Suliss stir, rising out of his self-induced torpor.

  S’linth pouched his neck muscles. “Your scales are dry, Th’osh,” he snapped at the navigator. “Control your fear, or slither back to your quarters. Tradition dictates our offering to be given at no farther away than two ris-units.”

  Calming, Suliss nodded. Among Resaurians, tradition held the full weight of law. Th’osh bowed his head, nictitating membranes rolling over black eyes in a gesture of submission. “My apologies.” The ship shook again, and Th’osh thumped his tail against the deck.

  “Accepted,” S’linth told him, not wanting to ruin the Resaurian by frightening him out of service. Th’osh was young, barely over his second adult shedding. By comparison, the soft scales on S’linth’s belly were larger and darker than the armored ones on Th’osh’s back. The youthful navigator had several centuries of life to look forward to, and would live better helping to maintain the small Resaurian fleet than he would coiled up in a planetside nest.

  “Any other difficulties?” S’linth asked. His obsidian gaze roamed the bridge.

  Only his communications officer, Lyssis, met his gaze. “I am still detecting the subspace signal on our emergency bands.”

  He faced back toward the front of the bridge. The signal again. It had bothered him ever since breaking orbit over Resaurus. An inconstant, open subspace signal. This was new. New always presented a problem. “No modulation?”

  “No intelligent modulation, Captain. It continues to act like an open channel, except for the slowly shifting tone.”

  “It is outside of tradition,” Suliss whispered. “Ignore it. We will make our offering, and return home.”

  But S’linth refused to ignore anything that might prove a hazard. Space travel was not for the hide-bound. He continued to consider possibilities. A beacon. A nonstandard beacon, since the tone was not quite constant and would break off at irregular periods. An energy signature, warped by the gravimetric forces. Something about it felt familiar, but nothing S’linth could find in the traditions offered any help.

  “Continue to monitor,” he ordered. “Science station, prepare the offering.”

  The bridge crew functioned automatically, many following the traditional course of actions they had learned by rote. Science announced that the offering was ready. Navigation called down the distance as the Dutiful Burden crawled carefully out over the Demon’s maw. This cycle, S’linth planned to take his Burden to zero ris-units. As the vessel eased to a halt over the promontory, he crossed arms over his scaly chest and spoke the Council’s words.

  “May our offering ease any suffering, shine hope in the darkness, and keep the forces within banished for another cycle.”

  Science station launched the Resaurians’ offering as S’linth finished the traditional speech. A crash of metal against metal leaked up through the deck, followed by an electrical scream as the firing mechanism shoved the duranium-encased load out into space. On the viewscreen, it looked like a giant, faceted-nose bullet being shot down the mouth of the Demon.

  Something…

  “Tracking,” Th’oth announced, busying himself with sensors feed. “Good signal. It looks as if the offering will be accepted with favor.” He paused. “Signal is flattening out. Signal is constant.” Softly, but not so softly that S’linth
could not hear, the young Resaurian said, “Now we can get away from here.”

  Signal is constant!

  S’linth coiled about, turning his back on the Demon. Weak legs pushed out from his belly to form a tripod with his thick tail, giving him greater stability. He pointed one muscular arm at his communications officer. “The subspace signal! The beacon. Over what range does it vary?”

  Lyssis recoiled, then turned her gaze back to her panel. “Over what time?” she asked.

  “Since leaving Resaurus.”

  “No more than twenty-five percent, plus or minus.”

  Slowly, he turned back around to stare into the abyss. The Demon stared back. “And it repeats. In between breaks, it must repeat.”

  “It shows no pattern in between breaks,” Lyssis said, checking the logs. “No, wait. I see a repeating pattern between the fifth and eleventh, and the sixth and twelfth recurrence. And…now between the first and fifteenth. Captain? What does that mean?”

  Suliss watched him intently, no doubt ready to argue that tradition demanded they return home. Now. S’linth tasted the air, and the fear-sweat was stronger. Once his people learned that the Demon was speaking to them, the scent would be overpowering. But tradition demanded that he tell his crew.

  And tradition was law.

  He nodded at the viewscreen. “I know what this is.”

  Chapter

  2

  “I know what this is,” Sonya Gomez said, pulling her padd out of Tev’s meaty hands. “I don’t need help.”

  Having rescued her work from the Tellarite, Sonya carried it over to one of the da Vinci’s science workstations and relaxed into a chair, stretching her legs out, not caring that she blocked part of the aisle. She usually enjoyed the bridge during beta shift. On tired evenings when she wasn’t studying the latest journals released from the Daystrom Institute, she often wandered up. Ensign Joanne Piotrowski was the duty tactical officer, and the two of them got on fairly well.

  Sonya should have read more into the deadpan face Jo gave her when the turbolift doors whisked open, and never gotten off.

  “I only commented that it looked familiar.”

  Mor glasch Tev had followed her. Hands clasped behind his back, with his monk’s fringe of dark hair and frosted beard, he looked like one of her old Starfleet instructors about to deliver a lecture. The da Vinci’s second officer certainly never showed reluctance in offering his opinion. The fact that Sonya outranked him as ship’s first officer and head of the onboard S.C.E. team did little to dissuade the Tellarite.

  “Fascinating quantum degradation.”

  “I don’t appreciate people reading over my shoulder either.” She glanced up at him. “What I’m trying to say, in the nicest possible manner, Tev, is that I’d like to work on this solo.”

  If the Tellarite was capable of showing chagrin, she had yet to see it in his first two months aboard ship. His porcine features were perfect for smugness, though. Or well trained for it.

  The maddening thing was that, in general, she approved of Tev trying to be more of a team player. He’d started nicely on that road during the salvage of the Dancing Star. Now, though, he was going too far in the other direction, trying to be part of the team when she just wanted to be left on her own.

  “All right. Let me know when you catch up.” He snuffled. “But I’m guessing that signal has been bouncing around in subspace for close to one hundred years.” He shuffled off with the air of a disappointed instructor who had just seen a promising student fail her first lesson.

  Hah! This was actually a continuous signal being broadcast from only eighteen light-years distance. By subspace standards, that was barely next door. She considered pointing that out, but Tev was already back at another station working on whatever personal project he’d been on when Sonya arrived. Interpersonal Skills Assessment, maybe? She wondered what his face would show after receiving a big, fat “fail.” The way Tev acted, you would swear he had never failed at anything his entire life. Well, maybe he hadn’t.

  Until now.

  She wanted to point out Tev’s mistake to someone. Not just for the petty pleasure it would give her, but it might go a long way to begin making him more tolerable to the crew. Little mistakes might help ease everyone into that transition.

  Except that most of the second-shift crew were stringently watching their own consoles. No one had wanted to draw the Tellarite’s attention, apparently, content to let their first officer act as the lightning rod. Only Rennan Konya from security met her gaze, and the Betazoid would already know her surface thoughts, wouldn’t he?

  Konya nodded, then waggled his head from side to side as if unsure whether or not to agree with her previous line of thought.

  So much for that. She climbed out of her chair for a quick trip by the replicator, tucked her padd under one arm while making her selection. “Hot tea, Earl Grey.”

  With a light hum, the replicator materialized a bone china mug filled to the brim with her steaming beverage. She picked it up, warming both hands around the mug, blew steam from the top and sipped carefully. Perfect.

  The Betazoid glanced over at her. “That’s not hot chocolate, is it?”

  From the other side of the security, Tev snuffled. “You are two meters closer than I. You must have heard her order. It is Earl Grey tea.”

  Sonya groaned. Her run-in with Captain Picard—quite literally—had taken on all the hallmarks of Starfleet legend. Yes, she had spilled hot chocolate all over the captain of Starfleet’s flagship while serving aboard the Enterprise. Yes, she had taken to drinking Earl Grey—Picard’s favorite—as penance, and then discovered how much she liked it. Some days it had seemed the entire galaxy was bent on making her remember that awkward encounter, but the ribbing finally ran its course.

  Then Galvan VI happened.

  Two dozen crew replacements and months of grieving later, Sonya now wasn’t certain what was worse: that the hot chocolate incident had resurfaced as a running joke among the crew, or that Tev couldn’t even appreciate the humor.

  She walked back to her station via security. “For a Betazoid,” she told Konya, “you’re pretty insensitive at times.”

  “Why do you think I opted for security?”

  Of course, Sonya knew that wasn’t really the truth. Rennan made a great security officer precisely because he was sensitive, in every sense of the definition.

  Sipping her tea, letting the light brew slide down her throat, Sonya fell back to task, analyzing the signal the da Vinci had pulled out of subspace. She double- and triple-checked her results, chewed on her bottom lip for several minutes, and then kicked herself back out of the chair to find Tev.

  The Tellarite was comparing the technical specifications of Romulan and Klingon cloaking shields. A little light reading, no doubt.

  “Ninety-three years,” she told him without preamble.

  “Ah. Well, I only had a glance at the data, after all.”

  Sonya shrugged her apology. “The data is in the computer. You could have pulled a copy for yourself.”

  Tev turned away from his viewer, looking at her with his deep-set black eyes for a very long moment. “You are my superior officer. You made it clear—doubly so—that you did not desire my help.”

  “Right.” She turned back for her chair, caught herself. No, dammit. She’d build a bridge over this river if it killed her. “Except we both see ninety-three years of degradation, according to the quantum shift, and the signal originates only eighteen light-years distant.”

  She had Tev’s attention. He scowled. Another expression for which his heavy-jowled face was tailor-made. “The data does not make sense.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  Tapping commands into the touch-sensitive console, Tev brought up the communications logs and a variety of sensor readings. “Let us see if we can find your mistake,” he said.

  Sonya gritted her teeth.

  But Tev could not find a way to reconcile the data either. A m
inor victory, and one that did not appear to sit well with the overachieving Tellarite. “Can we reconstruct the original signal?” he asked, a touch of wounded pride to his voice.

  “I’ve been trying to do that,” Sonya said. “At five hundred percent compression the signal approaches something that might be an audio waveform, though it’s too far gone for the universal translator to match up with any known language files.” She dumped her padd work back to the main computer and pulled up audio at Tev’s station. It sounded like a lot of hissing, broken apart by a lot of static.

  She supposed it could have been the other way around just as easily.

  “Computer,” Tev said. “Return to original signal. Repair using the Telek System and then recompress five hundred percent. Search language files and translate.”

  “Telek?”

  “Romulan,” Tev told her, and managed to do it in a way that suggested she should already know. “He made contact with Voyager several years ago. Through a wormhole. I told you the signal looked familiar.”

  “Ready,” the computer answered.

  “Begin playback,” Sonya snapped, annoyed at Tev all over again.

  A wash of static burst from the station, followed by a raspy, metallic tone. “…ellllf…aussz…”

  Sonya leaned in. If she had heard right…“Computer, compress another twenty-five percent. Begin playback.”

  Close enough. The static was a sharper, more painful burst, but the voice clearer. “…help uz…”

  They had the attention of the entire beta-shift bridge crew. “Help us,” Tev repeated, loudly.

  Sonya nodded. “We have a distress call,” she said, then tapped a lighted square on her console to summon Captain Gold.

  Chapter

  3

  Captain David Gold had never been prone to nightmares, but the one he raggedly clawed his way out of left him gasping for air. Not trusting himself to speak for a moment, he remained in his darkened quarters, his deep, faltering breaths creating strange echoes that only heightened his uneasiness.