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The blare of the red alert was easily the worst way to wake up. An irresponsible amount of Romulan ale the night before might come in as a close second. And though the crew of the Cerritos had enjoyed a small celebration with the crew of the Carlsbad after narrowly avoiding being the objects of surreptitious spy-jinks, Ensign Rutherford had spent the evening basking in the rare treat of admiration from another crew rather than drinking.
He slipped out of his bunk, dropping to the floor of lower decks and could not shake the feeling that something was off. Not the red alert or whatever it was for, but something else. Other than the red emergency lights, the corridor was dark. And empty. There should have been a small crowd of ensigns quickly getting into uniform, but he was the only one in sight.
“Computer,” he said. “Locate Ensign Mariner.”
“Ensign Mariner is in the shuttle bay coordinating the evacuation.”
What the heck? he thought to himself, slipping into his pants and jamming a foot into each shoe.
“And Ensign Boimler?”
“Cetacean Ops.”
“Ensign Tendi?”
“Find her yourself, slacker.”
He knew the computer didn’t live in the ceiling - that’s just where the speakers were - but he could not help but slowly look up at the bizarre reply.
He tapped his badge. “Engineering, this is Ensign Rutherford.”
“About time!” yelled Luitenant Commander Billups through the comms. “Get to your damned station!”
“Yes, sir. Right away, sir!” he replied, feeling like it was his very first day at the Academy in San Fransisco.
“Computer,” he said between breaths, “What’s going on?”
“You’re late, that’s what.”
“Computer, what is wrong with you?”
“Nothing that couldn’t be cured by having one less engineer within my corridors. Why don’t you pop into airlock seventeen before you get to engineering. Look, you’re passing by it right now.”
Airlock seventeen was just before the doors to turbo lift two that would take him down to engineering. The interior airlock doors cycled open as he approached. There was no way the outer doors would open. Too many safety protocols standing in the way, but those open interior doors looked ominous to someone wearing nothing but a standard uniform, talking to a ship’s computer that was clearly malfunctioning. Would those protocols hold if the computer were compromised?
He skirted past the doors and hit the button for the turbo lift. When it arrived, Ensign D’Vana Tendi was already inside.
“Oh, thank God! Tendi!” he said, entering the lift. “What is going on?”
The doors closed and the turbo lift began to drop.
“Same old, same old,” she replied in bored annoyance, flicking through screens on her PADD. “Red alert’s been going off for like twenty minutes, and you’re just now getting out of your bunk. And you look like crap. Fix your hair. Looks like you and Boimler just had another hot sesh in the holodeck.”
He passed a hand through his hair. It was indeed a mess.
“Other side,” she said after flicking a glance at him.
“I don’t have hair on the other side, Tendi.”
“Whatever.”
He was deeply disappointed in himself when he could not help but pass a hand over what he knew to be the tritanium outer shell of his implant.
There was just more messy hair.
A cold dump of adrenaline flooded his body, prickling out along the skin of his shoulders and arms. His fingers trembled when his pinky found a left eye that should not be there and a left ear that was as warm and malleable as the right.
That’s what was off. There were no blue LCARS bars in his vision. How had he not noticed? His breath came deep and fast and a strange granularity began to creep up his neck. He was hyperventilating. There were whispers behind the turbo lift walls. He looked around to find where they came from.
“Ugh,” Tendi said in disgust. “Here, let me help you.”
She reached to the side of his head and tugged a handful of wires out from his hair, letting them drop to the floor.
“What the hell?” he huffed in horror.
The turbo lift doors opened. Tendi stepped out.
“You’re the worst, dude,” she said with a backward glance. “Get your shit together.”
“Where are you even going?” he said, mystified.
He followed her out the doors, but she was gone. The ball of panic behind his breastbone doubled in size.
Just get to engineering, he thought. Get to your post - get to your job. There has to be an explanation.
He brushed fingertips again through hair that should not have been hair and it may as well have been spiders for how much it creeped him out.
“Hold it still, Tendi.”
“Yes, doctor.”
“Just keep that hatch open, I should be able to port in with the adapter.”
The lower hull passageway to engineering was endless, as though the Cerritos was miles and miles long. Rutherford resisted the urge to keep touching his newly uninterrupted face and head. Maybe he was having some kind of sensor malfunction or an update that wasn’t laying down cleanly with the Vulcan operating system. There had been glitches at the beginning while the implant learned to navigate standard Starfleet digital protocols. There had been moments of intense pain and sensory overload. Maybe whatever was going on with the ship was responsible.
That has to be it, he reassured himself.
But it didn’t explain Tendi or the wires in his hair that should not be hair.
Brad’s voice came from somewhere ahead.
“Computer, I thought you said Ensign Boimler was in cetacean ops.”
“And I thought you said you were a real Starfleet officer, poser.”
“Computer! Stop being mean!”
“Stop being a waste of space and maybe I will.”
Rutherford turned the corner to the engineering deck and found Brad sitting on a couple of small storage containers, Ensign Jet Manhaver leaning provocatively over him, his hand to the bulkhead, Brad’s eyes locked on the handsome ensign.
“When are you gonna drop that joke of an engineer and get you some’o this right here?” Jet said in a deep, husky voice. He side-eyed Rutherford and added, “Oh, look. Ensign Late to the Party earning his nickname yet again.”
“… Brad?” Sam squeaked out.
“Don’t tell me this chump still has a crush on you, Boims?”
“I know, pathetic, right?” Brad chuckled in a devastatingly scornful way. “Just stop, Sam. It’s too embarrassing to watch. Jet’s Galaxy class, if you know what I mean. Why would I settle for soooo much less?”
Brad brushed the backs of his fingers down Jet’s chest.
Jet leaned up and approached Rutherford, stopped and gestured with both hands to his own crotch.
“Welcome to the Enterprise, Ensign. Like what you see?”
The Cyclodyne W-01 welder Brad had given him dangled horribly and hugely from where no welder had any business being.
Tears welled in Rutherford’s eyes. He was sure that if he had stepped out of airlock seventeen, it would feel just like this, the air punching out of his lungs and his body quickly chilling to zero degrees Kelvin. He squeezed his eyes shut.
“Dr. Vanik, we’re ready for the positron scrubber.”
“Have you isolated the aberrant code, Dr. T’Ana?”
“Yes, look at these sectors here, here and here.”
“I can’t believe those bastards did this to him!”
“Ensign Tendi, control yourself. Your outbursts do not help your friend.”
Opening his eyes, Jet was gone, and so was Brad. Save for the whispers that came from everywhere and nowhere, he was alone again in the dark passage with the baleful glow of the red alert pulsing overhead.
I’m malfunctioning. That has to be it. People don’t just appear and disappear. And no one has a welder for a… He shook his head, trying to clear the image that threatened to burn itself into his memory forever.
“Ensign Rutherford! Get over here right now!” Billups yelled with a voice that would have done Shaxs proud.
Sam ran to his station. Billups was the only one in the whole of engineering.
“I’m going to eject the warp core,” Billups said. “Enter in the security codes when I tell you.”
Sam looked at the core. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with it. The delicate fractal display that emanated from the core, the one that only Sam saw through his implant, rolled and progressed upward through its cycle far beyond its physical confines, the smaller patterns becoming the larger pattern over and over again, like an angel made of light rising forever from the solid parts of the core.
He brought his hand to his face. The implant was still missing. He still had two eyes and two ears and hair where there should have been tritanium casing and some of the Federation’s most sensitive, most bleeding-edge technology.
He should not have been seeing the fractal angel of the warp core without the implant. It should have just been a large tube of light.
“You’re supposed to input the code. You’re the section head and the senior officer,” Rutherford rasped at Billups.
“So now it’s sass on top of being useless, huh?” Billups shot back at him. “I knew it was a mistake keeping your lazy ass on board the ship.”
“I am not lazy!”
“You’re pointless, kid. There ain’t a damned thing you do that couldn’t be handled by an old DOT-7 repair bot. Heck, not even Boimler needs you anymore. You’re nothing compared to Jet. Now enter in the damned security codes.”
“No,” Sam refused. “All of this is wrong and you already know the codes. Enter them yourself.”
He backed away from the station and glanced back at Billups just in time to see him blink out of existence.
“Dr. T’Ana, monitor his physiological signs. I will handle the scrubber.”
“Understood, doctor. Be careful with him.”
“You imply I would be anything less?”
“I imply that I want you to be careful with him. Don’t get your pointy ears all ruffled.”
“Rerouting now. Buffer active, positron scrub commencing.”
Above and to the left of the warp core, the engineering bay began to pinch and swirl as though a tiny singularity had popped into existence and was drawing the bay in. The swirl grew and rippled and flowed outward. Sam turned on his heels and ran out of the bay as fast as he could.
Down the corridor that led to the turbo lift, the sound of sheering metal and the dull thud of explosions consumed by the singularity followed him, growing closer. He bolted into the lift and glanced back to see the deck begin to buckle. He hit the panel over and over again, desperate to make the lift go faster. Groans and horrible popping noises came through the bulkhead.
“The infected area has been isolated and surrounding code has been rerouted into the buffer.”
“You sure this ain’t gonna fry him? He’s been through a lot already because of this thing.”
“That thing is the finest technology Vulcan produces, doctor. Purge the affected area.”
“Please be okay, Sam.”
“Ensign Tendi. Do not make me remind you again.”
“Don’t be a prick, Vanik. She’s his best friend.”
The groaning was a beast hot on his heels. The lift shuddered wildly and suddenly he was in free-fall and complete darkness. There was no more groaning or shuddering, just the terror of knowing there was nothing but the turbo lift walls between himself and the vacuum of space.
There was a hissing. Then a cracking.
He tapped his eyepiece light but found only the skin of his temple.
The cracking turned into ripping and he was jettisoned from the lift along with the escaping atmosphere.
The cold was an ache, like holding a block of ice, but all over his body. The singularity pulled him inexorably in. Had there been air, the increasing speed would have made wind.
The last thing he remembered was Brad sitting under the muscular architecture of Ensign Manhaver, both of them sneering at him.
For a long time, there was nothing. No sound. No light. No touch. No smell. The nothingness was absolute and impenetrable.
Am I dead?
Sam.
I thought it would be different.
Sam.
The blackness lightened into greyness that gave on to a deep, dull red.
“Sam, open your eye, sweetie,” Tendi said.
His mouth was made of dried glue. It was difficult to open, impossible to say anything.
“I’m putting a straw to your mouth, Sam. Take a sip. Just a little one.”
How had Tendi survived the singularity?
The straw poked his lips gently. He took a sip of the tasteless water and his mouth and throat opened again like an EPS array that had just been purged. He reached a hand to his implant, finding some wires and cords in the way, but there it was right where it should be.
He breathed a sigh of relief and opened his right eye.
The glare of the biobed lights was intense. He winced away from their bright shine.
“Sorry, kid, lemme fix that,” Dr. T’Ana said as gently as he’d ever heard her speak.
The lights dimmed and he blinked the blurriness out of his vision. The eyepiece wasn’t sending any visual signal. It was still dead.
“What… what happened?” he asked.
“Those psychic mines,” Dr. T’Ana replied, holding a medical tricorder in one hand and cycling from one peripheral to another with the other hand. “That program they were running crawled its way into your implant’s code and laid a little psychic spy egg in your Vulcan thingamajig.”
The Vulcan man standing next to Dr. T’Ana raised an eyebrow and gave the doctor a reproachful look.
“Quaintly barbaric description, but not wholly inaccurate,” he said. “The incursion of hostile code has been successfully removed. I am running a full systems diagnostic on the implant and installing a new firewall and security widgets. Much more secure than the Starfleet code that had been patched in. When that is complete, the eyepiece and other external and internal sensors will come back online. Since we had access to the internal areas of the implant, I took the opportunity of making a few hardware upgrades as well. I was part of the team at the Vulcan Sciences Academy that designed the prototype for your device. You’ll find a tutorial in your downloads folder to instruct you on the new functionality. ”
Dr. T’Ana finished with the tricorder and laid the equipment aside on an instrument table.
“You’re fine physically, but you’ve been through it, kid. You rest up and I’ll go inform the captain.”
“Where’s Brad?” he croaked.
“Once the implant is fully operational, you may have visitors, but not until then,” said the Vulcan.
He and Dr. T’Ana left the room. Tendi pulled up a stool and sat next to him, passing gentle fingers through his sweaty hair.
“Please tell me you remember me,” she said, her face collapsing into sobs.
“Of course, I remember you, Tendi.”
Though she tried to hold it back, her chest shook. She took Sam’s hand and he squeezed back.
“I was so worried it would be like last time,” she said, wiping her eyes.
“It would just give us another chance to become best friends again,” he said, paraphrasing her words from the last time she’d sat in a stool next to his hospital bed.
She laughed, though the tears still came.
“I saw horrible things, Tendi,” he whispered.
“Yeah, you mumbled something about Jet being the Enterprise.”
“That’s not exactly what I saw, but let’s go with that,” he said, more than happy to never let anyone know about what he’d actually seen regarding Jet. “Where’s Brad?”
“Dr. T had to sedate him,” she said. “He was freaking out and demanding to be here, but Dr. Vanik from the Carlsbad wouldn’t allow anyone near you while he was working on your positron net. T’Ana sorta lied and said she needed me, so Vanik let me stay to help. You’re still hooked up to a bunch of stuff, so don’t lift your head, but Brad’s across the room in one of the other beds. He’ll be out for a while. Dr. T had to dose him pretty hard.”
“Did I do anything stupid? Do I owe apologies to anyone?”
“No,” she said. “Not at all. We were in the lounge talking with the guys from the Carlsbad and you started twitching and then crazy stuff started scrolling across your eyepiece and then it was like you shut down or turned off. You slumped over into Ensign Young and you were just gone. Oh, Ruthy, I was so worried about you. I love you, man. I don’t ever want something like this to happen again without you knowing that.”
She was still crying and sniffing back the tears.
“I love you too, Tendi.”
Brad mumbled from across the room, “Get… get your hands… off my man… you Orion hussy.”
It was hard not to laugh at that, though his throat didn’t feel up to it.
His eyepiece blinked, went staticky, and reinitialized. He could see again, and the LCARS bars were right where they should be. His ear was next and picked up Brad’s soft snoring from across the room.
“You’re coming back online,” Tendi said in delight. “I better get the doctors.”
“No, wait,” he said. “It’s fading, like a dream when you wake up, but I want to tell you before it’s all gone.”
He recounted the entire experience, from the red alert to finding her in the turbo lift to discovering Brad and Jet together, and then Billups saying cruel things about him.
“It was making you see your worst nightmares and fears,” she said. “Just like down on the research station. But none of those things are remotely real. You’re my very best friend and nothing will ever change that. And Brad loves you, Sam. I’ve never seen him more sure of himself, or more confident than when he’s with you. And you have to know that Billups thinks the world of you. You can’t say anything, but he’s been getting my opinion on a bunch of different drawings and designs for that box he wants to make with you for your welder. He’s super into it. He’s shown me dozens of sketches. He talks about you like you're his son.”
"He calls me that all the time."
"Yeah, I know."
There was more mumbling from across the room.
“No, Mandolina… I… I gave it to Sam. Get your boobies off me. They’ve got blight.”
“I think she dosed him a little too hard,” Tendi said.
“I think Dr. T’Ana never does anything she doesn’t mean to,” Sam replied.
Tendi left to get the doctors and Sam closed his eye to the sound of Brad’s gentle mumbling. The Cerritos was a crazy ship, just like the crew of the Carlsbad had said, but at least it was just regular crazy now.
The End