I spin the big boxy command chair around, shuffle some data carts, stare at the log reader, and generally pretend to be busy for a bit. It doesn't fool Yeoman Grant; she hands me a PADD and a stylus anyway.
"O for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention," I mutter.
Winston Moorcroft rolls his eyes. "You're not doing after-action reports like that, are you?" he asks, and his soft Jamaican accent makes him sound doleful. "We're going to be in enough trouble over the Sircab IV business as it is."
"Hey," I say, "nothing important got broken. Just a few heads and an Orion ship, not the Prime Directive or the Organian Treaty...." The Sircabians are a pre-warp society just making their first steps into space, and discovering the hazards of the void. An Orion House was apparently determined that the hazards of the void should include them... whether as a serious attempt to keep Sircab IV pre-spaceflight, or just as a piece of random privateering, I don't know. Anyway, for them, the hazards of the void included me and the Harrier, and hopefully the Sircabians will get to develop spaceflight, or not, on their own terms and at their own speed.
At any rate, that's how I'm writing this up for the log. The Orion ship got fairly thoroughly trashed, but the Harrier took a knock or two in the process... enough for me to feel justified in putting in at K-22 for repairs, and letting my crew loose on the station's fleshpots. We could all use a break.
The meeps and bleeps and trilling of the twenty-third century bridge have, finally, become nothing more than background noise to me... this modern instrumentation took some getting used to, particularly since I came to it fresh from an NX-class from a hundred years ago, but I've got the hang of it now. Which is good, since I've got my skinny backside plonked back in a command chair at last. Where it belongs... I keep telling myself that, I don't know if I believe it or not. My first command, after all, ended rather abruptly, with ship, crew and self hurled through a time warp and into the next century.
Someday, I need to go back to the Stygmalian Rift and... deal with it. Current tech should be up to it. I think.
But, for now, I have paperwork to do, and I settle down to that. The bridge is meeping and bleeping quite happily, with my very UFP crew all at their stations and taking care of things. Three humans - myself, Win Moorcroft, and Kara Grant - the Andorian Thiras Ythill at engineering, the ash-blonde Vulcan T'Pren at the helm, the dark-haired stocky Tellarite Stulk on navigation... come to that, even the humans are a pretty mixed bunch, with Win being as big and dark-skinned as I'm little and pale, and Kara Grant being small, neat, well-groomed and a complex mix of ethnic groups, brown-skinned, dark-haired and sharp-featured with startling green eyes. She's from some colony world that wasn't even discovered when I had my... misadventure. God, that makes me feel old.
Stop that, Ronnie, I tell myself firmly. You're not old, you were just born a very long time ago.
The ship shivers, coming out of warp. I glance up at the big plain rectangle of the viewscreen. K-22 is bang in the centre. It's one of a series of stations cobbled together from a limited set of modular parts; this one looks like two mushrooms joined together at a point along the rims, one mushroom standing on an oil-drum-shaped engineering module. Well, it might not be pretty, but it's a home port.
"Win," I say, "start working up some lists for liberty parties, will you?"
"Already done," says Win, with a broad toothy smile.
"Well, I hope they're well behaved ones," I say. "Wouldn't want to get banned from Argo just for having a little fun."
It gets a chuckle from Win, but T'Pren turns around with puzzlement showing on her long elegant face. "Argo station is several decaparsecs from our current location," she says, "and I am not aware of any onerous policies with regard to shore leave -"
"Earth cultural reference," I say, "don't worry about it." I say it absently, because something is nagging at me - something about the view on the screen.
I hear Stulk mutter, "Humans!" and notice Ythill shooting him a quick grin. My mind's still on the viewscreen, though. Something is not right. Or, at least, not what I expect.
"Hey. Can we get magnification two on the viewer?"
T'Pren hits the switch; it's amazing how much you can control from any one of the bridge stations. The mushrooms abruptly get bigger, and near that oil drum is....
"What's that?" I ask. "Or, well, it's a ship, obviously, so who's that?" Even magnified, the thing is no more than a sort of blot, but it's hanging around the engineering module... which suggests that it's a big ship, too big for the station's internal docking bays. And I'm not sure about the configuration....
"Scanning now." Win bends his head over the what-the-butler-saw machine at the science station. I'm sure there's a good reason for it, but I still think that scanner looks silly. Then Win snaps bolt upright, and his brown eyes are completely serious. "Configuration matches a Xindi Ateleth-class dreadnought cruiser," he says in a flat voice.
"What?" The Xindi? What the hell brought them out of whatever hole they've been living in? "Go to yellow alert. And hail the station, see what's going on."
"Sir." Grant has an earpiece in and is working the comms console like nobody's business. "That ship is carrying a Starfleet ID transponder. Recognition signature is for the USS Leacock. No NCC number, though. I'm querying the ship's computer, but responses are coming back either 'not know' or 'classified'."
Oh, boy. I try to think. The Xindi are a thorny problem. In many ways, the technically advanced five-species culture would make an ideal candidate for Federation membership... in practice, the way they tried to destroy Earth, that time, and the subsequent infighting, well, it makes them a bit iffy, diplomatically speaking. The Ateleth-class was used by the Primate subspecies, I seem to recall, and those guys were comparatively OK... but OK enough to give Starfleet one of their warships? Supposedly, the Xindi Council has put the whole culture in self-imposed isolation at the moment....
"Hail from Station Administrator Melgrove, sir," Grant adds.
"OK. On screen."
The screen changes, the view of the station being replaced by - well, presumably, the Station Administrator's office. It's a rather plain room, enlivened by coloured indirect lighting and a big flat abstract design on one wall, which looks like a small supernova made of tinfoil. Melgrove is human, male, grey-haired and dull-looking, wearing the neatly pressed overalls that pass for formal wear in this century. I suppose I can't talk, not while I'm wearing this mini-dress. Melgrove's overalls are a fetching shade of mauve. "USS Harrier," he says. "We've been expecting your arrival. Am I talking to the commanding officer? Captain Grau?"
"That's me," I say. "Veronika Grau, call me Ronnie, everyone does. If you're expecting us... does this have anything to do with the massive Xindi battlewagon parked by your engineering module?"
"Ah. Yes." He looks grumpy now. "Captain Caird of the USS Leacock would like to meet with you at your earliest convenience. It's to discuss an upcoming operation which, apparently, I'm not cleared to know about. Though if it involves this station -"
"OK," I say, before he can complain some more. "USS Leacock? I mean, that's what the transponders are telling us, too, but it's a bit unusual for Starfleet, you gotta admit."
"The whole situation seems to be unusual," Melgrove grumps some more, "but it seems I'm not allowed any explanations. Perhaps you'll have more luck."
---
So I beam over, and Melgrove shows me to some meeting room and then skedaddles. Truth be told, I'm not paying him too much attention, because there are two people in the room already, and one of them I know.
The one I don't is a short woman in a tactical captain's uniform; she has honey-blonde hair and blue eyes and a dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and she is constantly smiling, like she's adorable and she knows it. The one I do know, though, is calm and poised and elegant in science division uniform. "Dr. T'Mev?"
"Captain Grau. It is agreeable to see you." T'Mev's face gives absolutely nothing away. When I went through the Stygmalian Rift and a hundred years into the future, Starfleet's psychologists and guidance counsellors were all over me and my crew like a well-intentioned rash. T'Mev and I spent many happy microseconds, over the course of a couple of months, talking through the adjustments we'd all need to make. I suppose it's due to her good offices that I'm still in today's Starfleet, instead of cooling my heels in a museum or something. But I never expected to see her again after I got back into a starship and left Earth. Here she is, though, motioning me to sit down, so sit down I do.
"You've moved out of counselling services?" I ask her.
"I have taken on a more active role in stellar survey. There is much to be done. However, that is not what I am here to discuss today. Allow me to introduce Captain Carolyn Caird, of the USS Leacock."
"Aye," says Caird, with that officially irrepressible cheeky grin still in place, "an' ye'd be Captain Veronika Grau o' the USS Harrier, an' Ah'm tae call ye Ronnie, am Ah right?"
"Everyone does," I say. That accent is enough to strip paint. I'm tempted to ask her what part of Wales she comes from, but I guess that would be tactless. "So, that giant death toboggan outside is yours, is it?"
She laughs. "Aye, the Leacock's kinda no' yer regular Starfleet issue, Ah'll gie yer that."
"No kidding. So what is a Starfleet captain doing in a socking enormous Xindi ship? Win it in a poker game, did you?"
"Need-tae-know, lassie, need-tae-know," says Caird with a wink. "This whole business's a muckle secret, ye ken? An' Ah'm no' allowed tae tell ye onything ye dinnae need tae ken."
"My colleague expresses herself dramatically," says T'Mev, "but she is essentially correct. The situation we hope to address is - compartmentalized, I think is the most appropriate term. The detail information is extremely restricted, and there are factors of which you are not aware - and of which you cannot safely be made aware."
Oh, boy. "Some kind of black ops? Got to tell you, I don't like the sound of that."
"We are not Section 31, or any similar agency," says T'Mev. "But there are circumstances which - Well, perhaps I had better outline the position for you."
T'Mev always struck me as honest when she was counselling me. But I know damn well she kept a lot of things to herself, at the time, because what shrink doesn't? However... I won't know whether or not to trust her until I've heard a little bit more about whatever this is. So I give her a guarded nod and say, "Go on."
"Thank you. Your name has come to our attention because, well, you are operating in this star sector, and you are almost unique in having direct first-hand experience of the Suliban conflict."
"The Suliban?" I raise my eyebrows at that. "Now that's history - granted, so am I, but even so -"
"Information has come to our attention which suggests the presence of a cache of Suliban technology on the planet Priyanapari, the sole habitable world orbiting the star of the same name. Again, there are factors of which you are not aware... but they make it essential that this cache, should it exist, should be found and neutralized."
Now this sounds like trouble, fair enough. The Suliban made a very creditable effort to smash up the beginnings of the Federation, and they were getting exotic technology from - well, let's just call it exotic sources. I can well imagine an obscure Suliban weapons research facility turning up somewhere in the galactic boondocks... and someone at Starfleet Command deciding it should be swept quietly under the rug without worrying the general public about it. However....
"So what do you need me for? You've got a giant Xindi battleship to play with. That ought to be enough to clean out any Suliban relics."
"There are complicating factors -"
"Of which I am not aware."
"Precisely." T'Mev doesn't even get flustered at the interruption. "Your personal expertise in dealing with the Suliban may prove invaluable -"
"I don't think I've ever even met a Suliban," I point out.
"You are familiar with the time period of their operations. You will be able to spot details which I myself or Captain Caird might miss. This makes your involvement in this situation... highly desirable."
"Och aye," says Caird. If she says "the noo" as well, I might just puke.
"Also," T'Mev continues, "as I think we have suggested, Captain Caird and I must be discreet in our approach. Ideally, our names should not appear in the reports of this incident at all -"
"Ah'm s'posed tae be somewhere on the ither side o' th' quadrant, the noo," says Caird. Puke time.
"We would like," T'Mev says, "you to investigate the Priyanapari situation in the Harrier, so that it appears, for the record, as a standard planetary survey. Captain Caird will be accompanying you, of course, so that the Leacock can provide any level of appropriate support."
"And whatever other information you two decide I need to know," I say.
"Essentially, yes. We are concerned that other parties may have received the same information as ourselves. We cannot be sure what other parties - it may be imagined that a Constitution-class cruiser like the Harrier should be equal to most contingencies, but the Leacock will be on hand should anything unexpected transpire."
"Aye," says Caird. "Dinnae fret, lassie. We'll keep ye safe an' sound, niver fear."
Somehow, I'm not reassured.
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