Vulcan, gone?
I'm wandering around Earth Spacedock's main concourse in a sort of a daze. Two of Twelve has shut up, for the most part - stress situations do that - but her voice has been replaced, now, by the endless round of questions circling in my head.
There were always Vulcans around - from the first time I was in Starfleet, before the Federation even got going, even. Always. Sometimes friendly, sometimes overbearing, playing up the "elder brothers from beyond the sky" angle for all they were worth - but always there. Knowledgeable, dependable. That's the problem. Dependable. We relied so much on them, and all of a sudden they're not there any more....
There were usually Andorians, too; I spot one of them now, looking harassed and stalking along the concourse. I head for her. "Tylha. How's it going?"
Tylha shakes her head. "I've been trying all morning to get some straight answers about my ship's refit. Everything's in chaos right now. What about you?"
"Oh. Yeah. Awaiting fresh orders - half my scheduled patrol pattern is outside Federation territory, all of a sudden, I'm waiting on a revised schedule. Or Admiral Gref might pull me back to the main body of Sixth Fleet - I just don't know. Don't think anyone knows." I look towards the exit, and the lights of Club 47. "Come on, let's get a drink. Damned if I'm doing my worrying sober."
Tylha grins ruefully. "It might be the most productive thing I can do, come to think of it."
The club is quiet, subdued. I grab an Aldebaran whiskey and one of those tunnel wine things for Tylha. We find a corner booth and sit down to brood.
"At least," Tylha says, "Okeg's announcement might make things easier."
I take a gloomy sip of my drink. "In the short term, maybe," I say. "Not for long, though."
"We could keep the dual-citizenship thing going indefinitely -"
"There's too much else." My ill-disciplined brain is suddenly racing. "Take an example. Central Music Arena at Alma-Ata. Booked for a festival of Vulcan music, 'Meditations on a Frequency of 421 Hertz' or some such evocative Vulcan title. All of a sudden, Vulcan culture has pushed off back to Vulcan, so they need to book someone else - let's say, you and your Gustav Holst groupies get together and put on a celebration of the master's life work. So, a few months down the line, after loads of rehearsals and hiring the outfits and polishing the accordions or whatever Holst wrote for, the Vulcans suddenly come back and say 'April Fool! Can we have our hall back, now?' - well, just how would you and your fellow Holsterettes feel about that?"
Tylha opens her mouth, but I don't let her answer. "Trivial example, I know. Better one. Whole bunch of commercial projects are up in the air at the moment, were being underwritten by the central bank on Vulcan, but can't be any more because that bank is now outside the Federation. Bank of Tellar is stepping in to cover, for the most part, and right now the Tellarites are howling like a Ferengi when the rent's due. But, six months, a year, down the road from now, those investments are going to start showing a profit - and do you think the Tellarites will be happy then about turning them back over to the Vulcans?"
Tylha has evidently given up on trying to answer me. "Or take one closer to home. Right now, all over Starfleet, there must be several hundred execs to Vulcan captains who are settling in to the centre seat on a starship. How are they going to feel when their captains come back? With a warm Vulcan greeting like 'you have performed adequately and may now resume your normal duties', most likely. Well?"
I stop. I could think of a few more examples, but if Tylha's antennae droop any further, they're going to get into her tunnel wine. "Okeg says the door is open," I finish, "but it can't stay open indefinitely. Somehow or other, we've got to find a way to haul the Vulcans back in."
"Damn it," says Tylha. "I should have left Stiak in that dust storm when I had the chance."
"Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, kiddo," I say. "Don't fret over it."
"I'll try not to." Then Tylha looks up, and her drooping antennae start to twitch. "There's... something in the air...."
"Don't I know it. Gloom, despondency and depression, I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord."
But Tylha's face has turned intent with concentration. "That's not what I mean.... Ionization. There's an ion charge building up. Somewhere near." She stands up -
Behind the club's glass wall, just a little way down the concourse, a console suddenly spits out a shower of sparks. Tylha swears and sprints for the exit. I down my whiskey in one, and follow. The sparks are coming in a steady stream, and an alarm is warbling.
Still swearing, Tylha rips an access panel off the nearby wall, exposing a bewildering maze of wiring, conduits and controls. It's the sort of thing I know as "someone in Engineering, fix that, will you?", but Tylha evidently knows her way around it; she pulls something out, fiddles with something else, tinkers with a control panel... and the flood of sparks slows to a trickle, then stops entirely, leaving only scorch marks on the floor and a thin bitter haze of smoke in the air.
A pair of men in maintenance tech overalls come running up. "What the -?" one of them yells.
"Mag constriction in the EPS feeder relay was tuned too high," says Tylha. "Way too high. Maintenance logs." She holds out her hand, and one of the techs presses a PADD into it. Tylha turns back to the access panel and starts to do things to the controls. The techs don't question her. I wouldn't question her, it's obvious she knows what she's doing.
"Something's wrong here," she mutters. Her fingers rattle on the PADD's interface. "Look. You've got a Tech Specialist Tulik resetting the mag units, tuning them up thirty per cent, at 0905 this morning... and a Tech Specialist Kowalski tuning them up another thirty per cent at 0926. Took it way over spec - first power surge in the network, it overloaded. You'll have to take that module out of circuit and replace it entirely, now."
"Tulik?" One of the techs curses. "God damn the Vulcan, I thought he was gone - are they sabotaging us now?"
*/*distributed command network and decision pathing failures
---units in non-resolvable functional status
---inadequate control systems for reallocation of tasks
---individual efforts necessarily ineffective compared with collective endeavour*/*
I clutch the plastic and metal of the Borg implant on my head. "Oh, Christ," I say. "Two of Twelve knows what's happened. Damn it. I hate it when she's right."
Tylha and the two techs stare at me.
"You thought this Tulik was gone," I say, "so Kowalski did his job, only he didn't realize Tulik hadn't gone, and he'd already done it. Oh, God. This sort of thing must be happening all over -" I turn an anguished gaze on Tylha. "Vulcans, all through the Federation. We depended on them, and now they're gone, or they might be gone, and in a way that's worse. We've got gaps all the way through our admin and technical infrastructure, and we don't know where they are. The whole mechanism of Starfleet, of the Federation, has got... distributed brain damage. That's bad. Trust me, I know about brain damage. And this is gonna get worse before it gets better."
"But -" Tylha is frowning deeply. "We can adapt, we can make allowances - changes -"
"Sure we can. Sure we can. Assuming people will let us."
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