Chapter 1
Smoke. The smell of it wafting through the air brought back memories of screams. The screams pleaded with him, but there was nothing he could do; they were already dead.
The screams became louder and shriller until he realized they weren’t screams at all. It was the alert klaxon. He opened his eyes, reaching past the empty bottle of Romulan ale to press the intercom to the bridge. “Hey, what’s going on?” he asked. There was no response. The intercom had gone dead. “Ah, hell,” he muttered.
His head felt heavy, as if it were in a separate plain of gravity. The rest of his body ached as if a couple of Nausicans had used him for sport. That was almost the case, although the girl had looked a little better than a Nausican.
He didn’t remember her name, hadn’t bothered to ask. She had been a gift, along with a case of Romulan ale, for accepting the contract. She had purple skin with a waist-length mane of hair the same blue as the ale. “What is she?” he asked Ril, the agent for this highly-illegal transaction.
The Ferenghi smiled, baring his pointed teeth. “Does it matter?” he said. He then leaned forward to whisper, “There’s something you should know about her.”
After explaining, Ril left them with a key to a holosuite. “I’m Brett Boutwell. You got a name?”
She only shrugged. As Ril had said, though, what did it matter? Brett let her lead the way up to the holosuite, where he found out what she kept hidden beneath all that hair. Upon seeing this, Brett made a note to give Ril an extra strip of latinum for his generosity.
From there, Brett’s memory became hazy. He didn’t have the slightest idea how he’d gotten back to the ship. Nor did he remember leaving the station. At the moment, he couldn’t even remember where they were going. Better find that out—and what that infernal siren was about.
In the corridor, the lights flickered and then finally died. At least that killed the damned klaxon too. Feeling along the walls with his fingers, he made his way to the rear of the ship. He found Smitty in the engine room, his feet dangling out of an access shaft. “What’s going on here?” Brett said.
“Power’s offline again,” Smitty called from inside the shaft. “Backups burned out too.”
“That’s great. Didn’t you and Grek check everything out before we left port?”
Smitty slid out of the shaft, wiping off grime from his facial ridges. His real name was of course not Smitty—it was something human vocal chords could never reproduce—but he reminded Brett of old Smitty, one of his professors at the Academy and the name stuck. They never discussed whether Smitty liked the arrangement or not, but he’d stuck around with Brett for five years now, though they were far from prosperous.
Hauling cargo was not the most profitable
Even without the danger, there was the problem of keeping a ship running. His freighter, the Cassandra, dated from around the birth of the Federation, or so it seemed. It was certainly old enough to belong in a museum. Still, the old gal had run smoothly enough most of the time. There were only the occasional hiccups like today. Hiccups could be costly, though.
“Maybe if you hadn’t been out with that Hebnaxian whore all night you could have given us a hand,” Smitty said.
“It was part of the negotiation. If I turned her down, we would have lost the deal,” Brett said. With a smile, he added, “Come on, you would have done the same thing. Especially if you knew about that little secret of hers.”
“Trust me, I know all about it. That’s all you’d talk about when Grek and I were dragging you back here.”
“I’m sure she’d have let you have a turn if you’d wanted, so don’t get sore at me for having a good time.”
Smitty made a warbling sound in his throat, which Brett knew from experience meant it was time to change subjects. “At any rate, it shouldn’t take much longer to get us running. You should check on Grek. You know how he is about the dark.”
“Aye aye, Captain,” Brett said, tossing a perfect Starfleet salute to his comrade. At least he hadn’t forgotten everything from his training yet.
The door to the bridge wouldn’t open until Brett laid his shoulder into it and pushed as hard as he could. The door relented an inch. “Grek, you in here?” Brett called through the crack in the door.
“Cap’n, is that you?”
“It’s me. You want to help with this door?”
Footsteps rumbled across the bridge. A sand-colored hand gripped the edge of the door, forcing it aside as if it weighed nothing. Which for an Uhmec it probably did. Another sand-colored hand pulled Brett through the door as if he weighed nothing too.
The Uhmecs lived on a planet so close to their sun that no one thought anything could survive there. To survive, they’d developed exteriors as hard as stone that could withstand the heat and wind. They were stronger than Klingons and just as fierce, their hides able to withstand anything except a high-powered disruptor shot. But because they spent their entire lives under the merciless gaze of their sun, they couldn’t stand darkness, especially out in the middle of nowhere.
As Brett sat in his chair, he watched Grek pace across the deck like he was readying to charge someone or something. From experience, Brett knew better than to say anything or he might be that someone. A charging Uhmec could turn him into a smear on the wall.
Tiring of pacing around the room, Grek finally settled at his station. A warm breeze blew across the bridge from his angry snorts. In another few minutes, Grek might decide to tear the whole bridge apart and then they’d be in an even worse fix.
Just then the lights came on and the computers restarted. “Power’s back,” Smitty called on the intercom.
Grek muttered something in his native tongue. Even without a universal translator, Brett knew it was a hallelujah. “We’re back in business,” Brett said. “Let’s get underway.”
The warning klaxon started up again. “Another ship is approaching,” Grek said.
“Great. Starfleet?”
“It does not match any Starfleet designs. It does not match any known configurations.”
“Let’s see it.” The ship that came up on the viewscreen wasn’t like anything Brett had ever seen before. From what he could tell, it wasn’t one design but several patched together. The forward section appeared to be Cardassian, the rear Ferenghi, the nacelles Klingon, and bits from other races as well. The disruptors that opened fire were definitely Romulan.
The computers around Brett sparked and then died again. A section of the ceiling ahead of him caved in, giving him a look at the bottom of the ship as it cruised overhead until the emergency systems sealed off the damaged section. The lights dimmed. And then silence. “Grek? You all right?”
