Star Trek Online: The Needs of the Many - Couverture souple

Martin, Michael A.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 143918657X ISBN 13 : 9781439186572

Editeur : Pocket Books, 2010

Synopsis

Book by Martin Michael A

A propos du livre

Extrait :

THE UNDINE WAR

UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL

Chef’s Personal Log,U.S.S. Cochrane(NCC- 59318) Crewman Bradley S. Cowper, recording Stardate 73968.8*

Commander Drake, the agent from Starfleet Intelligence, has spent the past two days conducting lengthy interviews with every member of the crew who might have witnessed any part of the... incident that resulted in the sudden arrest and removal of Captain T’Vix, First Officer Donovan, and Security Chief Patel at Draken during one of the Cochrane’s routine patrols of the Romulan Neutral Zone boundary. Even I got interviewed for a couple of hours, and I was nowhere near the bridge when whatever was supposed to have happened there happened. After all, I’m just a cook.

It didn’t take long for me to size up this Drake character as an inherently untrustworthy bastard. Commander Donovan probably would have described him as “oleaginous,” but I’ll settle for smarmy, or maybe just oily. Adjectives aside, I don’t trust him any more than I trust those... creatures that Ensign Farquar tells me he somehow unmasked impersonating the captain, Commander Donovan, and Chief Patel. Which is why I’m making this recording on my own personal tricorder rather than on the Cochrane’s computer system. Before he leaves us, Drake will no doubt purge the main computer of any explicit reference to what’s just happened to the top of the Cochrane’s chain of command. That is, if he hasn’t got around to doing it already.

This afternoon, Drake called me in to the temporary Starfleet Intel HQ he’s set up for himself in Captain T’Vix’s ready room. He assured me that I’m above suspicion now, though he won’t tell me exactly why that is. Has he managed to run some sort of medical scan on me without my noticing? He isn’t telling. Still, it was a relief to hear that I’m no longer considered a serious risk of suddenly transforming into a vicious, three-meter-tall praying mantis.

Then the oily bastard told me what he expects me to do next—entirely in my capacity as chef for the officers’ mess, of course. Apparently, Drake is convinced that T’Vix, Donovan, and Patel weren’t the only disguised monsters still trying to blend in among the Cochrane’s senior staff. He suspects that there at least two others, and he hopes an experimental food additive that SI has just developed—to be dispensed discreetly by me—will flush out any remaining infiltrators.

I almost wouldn’t put it past him to give me poison to spike the food with, so that anybody who doesn’t have to rush to sickbay before dessert will stand revealed as an enemy infiltrator....

JAKE SISKO, DATA ROD #S-13

Kaferia (Tau Ceti IV), just outside the spaceport city of Amber

A man of early middle age greets me at the seafront resort, where a strip of low, modern hospitality structures fronts a wide swatch of fine white sand that borders a preternaturally calm, cerulean ocean. A few families and small children stroll the beach and wade out into the peaceful waters. When I turn my gaze inland past the buildings, I see groves of slender Kaferian apple trees swaying gently in the warm breeze. Although this place is the stuff of holosuite fantasies, I have it on very good authority that it is indeed real. If I had lived this man’s life—that of a soldier who had survived an attempt to beard the Undine/8472 monster in its lair—I suspect I’d be sorely tempted to retire to someplace as peaceful as this.

Speaking with a faint but unmistakable Texas twang, the man introduces himself as Paul Stiles, a former Starfleet ensign turned enlisted private in the MACO (Military Assault Command Organization) during the “hot” part of the Undine War. He tells me he’s now a master sergeant, retired, though a MACO is always a MACO.

Stiles’s handshake is as firm as duranium, and his eyes—or some of the memories lodged inextricably behind them—look every bit as gray and unyielding. His gaze, though superficially warm, only barely conceals a cold, distant cast that reminds me of the million-mile stare I’ve seen in the eyes of Jem’Hadar soldiers. I can’t quite tell whether his smile indicates genuine appreciation for an opportunity to record his combat experiences for posterity, or whether he’s merely eager to get this interview done so he can go back to the business of putting the horrors of the war behind him. After we’ve been speaking for a few minutes I notice that this man often straddles a line between what I call “military briefer mode”—an emotionally unconnected, stick-to-the-facts mode of communicating—and the strained, melancholic silences of a soldier afflicted with survivor’s guilt, a man who believes that he somehow let his fallen comrades down by making it safely home from the field of battle. I’ve encountered a lot of people like this. No matter what their counselors may tell them, no matter how many Christopher Pike Medals of Valor such men and women may receive, they will never measure up in their own uncompromising eyes, simply because they failed to do the impossible.

I notice right away that Sergeant Stiles is quick to scowl at my freely admitted ignorance of military lore, and that he is plainly uncomfortable hearing anything that sounds remotely like hero worship. Recollections of combat sometimes make him shudder visibly, making me wonder if the Undine stalk him in his dreams even now. But he doesn’t quite fit the profile of a chronic post-traumatic stress case, since he frequently dons a warrior’s bluster that fits him like a comfortable pair of running shoes. His boasts might impress a Klingon, though they sometimes make him sound as though he’s really whistling—or perhaps shouting—past the graveyard. But he is also quick to chuckle, and I get the feeling that he does so in response to some private joke rather than to any of my questions. I find that strangely reassuring—it almost makes me overlook the sense of hypervigilance the man radiates.

Almost, but not quite.

You were a junior officer on a path toward a solid Starfleet career when the Undine conflict entered its “hot war” phase.

I was an ensign. A junior tactical officer with pretty good prospects for promotion. I was expected to be career Starfleet. There’s always been a Stiles or three in the service, going back to the Earth-Romulan War. And we were a clan of web-footed wet-navy sailors before that.

So with all that tradition behind you, why did you transfer over to the MACO?

I have relatives who’d disagree with me loudly for saying this, but serving in Starfleet was never an end in itself to the Stiles clan. At least it shouldn’t have been. I always saw it as merely a means of keeping humanity safe from whatever Big Bad might be out there sharpening its claws, getting ready to snuff us out, be it paranoid Xindi or Romulans, or those giant three-legged stick bugs who call themselves the Undine.

But Starfleet was heavily involved in the Undine War from the very beginning, just as it was in those earlier wars with the Xindi and the Romulans.

Mister Sisko, there’s “involved” and then there’s “committed.” Those two concepts don’t overlap as much as you might think in times of war. The difference between them is the same thing that separates the chicken from the pig at an old-fashioned breakfast. You see, the chicken is “involved” with breakfast.

But the pig is “committed.”

That’s it exactly. I wanted to be closer to the real action. Not sitting on the bridge of a ship, launching torpedoes by tapping at some tactile interface.

So you wanted the pig’s greater “commitment” to the cause. But if you play that metaphor out to its conclusion, you’re talking about a level of commitment that nobody can survive. A suicide mission.

As a MACO infantryman, you have to make peace with a truth as old as the Trojan War: you might come back with your shield carrying you instead of the other way around. And that’s assuming that you were lucky enough to come back at all. I’ve lost count of how many of my buddies were either vaporized in space, or buried on some godforsaken nowhereworld after a slash from some Trike’s claws left him full of cooties that ate him from the inside out.

Trike?

Trike. Kickstand. Three-legged Deano. You know, the Undine.

Every war generates a fair amount of shorthand nomenclature, mostly pejorative, intended for referencing enemies. The Undine War is no exception to the grand military tradition that allowed such monikers as “Jerry,” “Fritz,” and “Victor Charlie” to enter the general lexicon. I understand the impulse. Still, I have to wonder how the many tripeds who served as MACOs during the war—Triexians and Edosians, to name only two species—feel when they hear a slur like “Trike.” But I sense that bringing that up might not endear me to the sergeant.

Of course. You’ve been in closer quarters with the Undine than most Starfleet officers have managed to get.

I suppose I got closer to Deano than even most MACOs did.

Even that might be a bit of an understatement. After all, you’re one of the relatively few humans who’s actually been aboard an Undine starship and lived to talk about it.

I just did what anybody else with the same training would have done: I tried to keep my buddies alive.

I’d like to discuss the boarding operation, if you don’t mind. Can you give me some of the details?

I was serving with a MACO detachment that the U.S.S. Thunderchild was ferrying toward a hot spot just outside of the old Romulan Neutral Zone boundary. The place we were headed for was an asteroid, an airless hunk of rock and metal that the Romulans left honeycombed with mining tunnels. I never learned the Romulan name for the place, but I know it was renamed Chiron Beta Prime after the Earth-Romulan War left it under Earth’s jurisdiction.

So we were training hard throughout the voyage, running environment-suit combat drills in holographic mine simulations throughout every duty shift. Didn’t want to get caught with our cammies down around our ankles, you know?

It’s a good thing you were so vigilant. According to the mission logs, theThunderchildwas nearly a parsec away from its destination when it encountered the spatial anomaly.

That’s right. I heard later that Lieutenant Andex was at tactical when the bogey appeared, and that he reported the anomaly as a graviton ellipse. Most of the guys in the Thunderchild’s MACO unit assumed that Deano had to be hiding either inside the ellipse or right behind it. All the squids on the bridge thought so, too.

Squids?

It’s shorthand for “Starfleet.” From an old nautical term referring to sailors. Goes back to the days when wet navies landed jarheads on beaches for amphibious assaults. The guys who piloted the boats were the squids. The marines who leaped off the boats to storm the beach were sharks. You know, like in the language of the Maori, where the word for “shark” is mako?

Anyhow, “squid” was our sort of good-natured nickname for the Starfleeters, though it didn’t always fit them all that well. Take Andex, for example. He was from Sauria, and it would have been a lot easier to think of him as a “squid” if his mouth wasn’t a half meter across and bristling with about a hundred steak-knife-sized teeth.

I want to thank you for being so patient with my asking questions that nobody who’d served either in Starfleet or with the MACO would have to ask. And I hope you’ll indulge me with another stupid question: What exactly is a graviton ellipse?

I’m not surprised you don’t know about those. Nobody in the MACO does, and in Starfleet it’s next to nobody. A graviton ellipse is a small volume of normal space—it can range from microscopic size up to the size of a small asteroid, or maybe even bigger—that’s been kicked into high warp speed because it somehow got tucked inside an envelope of gravimetric distortion. GEs mostly travel through subspace, only popping out when their trajectories take them close to an EM hot spot—like a Federation starship on its way to a throwdown with the Kickstands.

Anyway, most everybody aboard expected the Trikes to leap out of the ellipse and down our throats any second. Me, I wasn’t so sure.

Why?

Because of something nobody else in my combat unit was thinking about, probably because none of them were part squid the way I was. As dangerous as GEs can be, I knew that they had one redeeming trait: the fact that they’re about as rare as monasteries on Risa. Only a handful of GEs have been documented since a big bastard of one plucked the old Aries IV command module right out of the Martian sky way back in 2032. If Deano really was surfing into our universe on top of that anomaly, then he was damned lucky to have found the perfect wave by sheer accident. Either that, or he was damned smart to have figured out how to re-create the very subspace storm that nearly shut down all human space exploration beyond the Earth-Luna system forever and ever, amen.

Well, we always knew that Deano was a clever bastard. Maybe even a very clever bastard, having built all those elaborate simulation-environments they’d used to train their fake-human infiltrators. He was certainly clever enough to surf in on a convenient spatial anomaly he happened to notice heading toward us through fluidic space and subspace. But was he a clever enough bastard to build both his own board and the wave beneath his three big nasty-scary feet? I was still holding out some hope that he hadn’t gotten quite that clever yet.

The after-action reports of Commander Marta Segusa, theThunderchild’s senior science officer, say that the initial analysis of the spatial anomaly turned out to be wrong. The phenomenon turned out not to be a graviton ellipse at all.

That’s what Major Shea told us once the bridge crew discovered that what we were really dealing with was just a garden-variety subspace rift. I would have been relieved to hear that, but there wasn’t time for that because the rift opened up almost directly in the T-child’s flight path. And it spat out a honking huge Trike bioship so close to us that we almost traded paint jobs.

The Undine ship was hiding inside the anomaly, waiting to ambush theThunderchild?

It sure as hell looked that way. I mean, what are the odds of our two ships crossing paths purely by accident? Look, the word “astronomical” was coined specifically for situations like that one. Space is really, really big, so a haircut’s-breadth near-collision like that couldn’t have been an accident. I figured they must have entered normal space at the exact location and time that they did because they knew we were coming. They were watching us. Somehow they had learned to monitor our universe from safely inside their own, or from inside subspace. And that allowed them to engineer the superluminal almost-crash that collapsed our warp field and knocked out our shields, among other things, in the sa...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Prior to the terror-filled times of the Long War -- the seemingly endless struggle against the Undine, a paranoid, shapeshifting race once known only as Species 8472 -- enemy sleeper agents quietly penetrated every echelon of Federation society, as well as other starfaring civilizations throughout the Alpha and Beta quadrants. The ensuing conflict shook humanity to is very core, often pitting its highest ideals against a pure survival instinct. All too often the Undine War demanded the harshest of sacrifices and exacted the steepest of personal costs.
Drawn from his exhaustive research and interviews, The Needs of the Many delivers a glimpse of Betar Prize-winning author Jake Sisko's comprehensive 'living history' of ths tumultuous era. With collaborator Michael A. Martin, Sisko illuminates an often poorly-understood time, an age marked equally by fear and by courage.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Pocket Books
• Date d'édition: 2010
• ISBN 10: 143918657X
• ISBN 13: 9781439186572
• Reliure: Poche
• Nombre de pages: 432