Star Trek: The Next Generation: Starfleet Academy #6: Mystery of the Missing Crew (4 page)

Abruptly someone
else
interrupted Chief Griffiths—but it wasn’t anyone in the transporter room. It was the voice of Captain Rumiel up on the bridge, carried here by the ship’s intercom system.

“Yellow alert!” he called out, in a calm but commanding voice. “All ship’s personnel—yellow alert!”

CHAPTER
2

Data wondered what sort of conditions could have prompted a yellow alert. Judging by the expressions on the faces of Chief Griffiths and the Yann, they wondered as well.

Fortunately, it wasn’t long before Captain Rumiel supplied them with additional information.

“We have sighted an unidentified vessel off the starboard bow,” he announced. “Until we can convince it to answer our hails, all hands are to report to their posts.”

All over the ship, the android mused, officers were rushing up and down corridors or swinging into turbolift cars. But not here. Griffiths didn’t move, and neither did Data or the Yann.

After all, the transporter chief was at his post already. And being passengers on the
Yosemite
, the cadets had no posts to rush to. All they could do was remain where they were and speculate as to the identity of the newcomer.

“The captain said the vessel was unidentified,” noted one of the Yann—the one named Lagon. “That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s hostile.”

“No,” agreed the Yanna called Odril. “But it can’t be too friendly if it’s not answering our hails, now, can it?”

“It could be anything at all,” Chief Griffiths chimed in. “Hostile, friendly, or anything in between. There’s no way to tell yet. Whatever it is, though, l’m sure we’ll be able to handle it, so why don’t we just carry on with our lesson?”

“That would be preferable,” Data told him.

“Please,” said Sinna, “go ahead. We’re listening.”

Satisfied that he had regained his audience, the transporter chief cleared his throat again. “Now, where was I?” he wondered.

“You were describing the way an object is temporarily stored in the pattern buffer,” the android supplied cheerfully. “You were saying it could linger there for up to …” He let his voice trail off.

Griffiths eyed him warily. “So I was,” he said. “Anyway, it can stay there for as much as six or seven minutes, tops. Then it’s got to be sent out through the emitter array. But before it reaches the emitter, it’s got to pass through a—”

Before the chief could finish his sentence, the deck in the transporter room seemed to heave up at one end, throwing not only Griffiths across the room, but the Yann as well. They crashed into the far wall. However, being an android, Data was able to catch himself before he could slide past the control console.

In the next fraction of a second he analyzed the situation. The
Yosemite
had been shaken—that much was certain. More than likely, this condition had been caused by the unidentified vessel. And whatever that vessel had used against the Federation ship, it had carried with it sufficient force to overcome the
Yosemite
’s inertial dampening systems.

Just as suddenly as it had pitched, the deck righted itself. Muttering beneath his breath, clinging to a bulkhead for support, Chief Griffiths got to his feet. He looked dazed, confused.

The Yann weren’t in very good shape themselves. That was one of the drawbacks of being made of flesh and blood, rather than a construct of artificial materials. It wasn’t all that difficult to be injured.

Making his way over to his fellow cadets, Data helped Sinna—the nearest of them—to her feet. “Are you all right?” he asked her.

She nodded. “I think so,” she replied. “Are you?”

“I am unharmed, But then,” he explained, “I was designed to be a good deal more durable than any naturally occurring organism.”

Suddenly the entire transporter room was bathed in a flash of blue-white light—a flash so bright and so all-encompassing that even the android’s eyes had trouble adjusting to it.

When he could see again, he noticed that the room was lit only with red-orange emergency lights. But that wasn’t all that had changed. Transporter Chief Griffiths was
gone
.

Data and the Yann just looked at one another in the eerie glow of the emergency lights. None of them knew what had happened—not to the room, and certainly not to Chief Griffiths.

“Now what?” asked the Yanna called Felai. “Where has the chief disappeared to?”

“The captain told him to remain at his post,” recalled Odril.

“So where is he?” inquired Lagon. He swallowed. “And why didn’t we see him leave?”

Sinna looked up at the overhead lighting grid, where only the emergency panels were lit up. “Computer,” she said, “restore normal lighting to Transporter Room One.”

The computer’s answer was quick and to the point. “The
Yosemite
is operating on battery power,” it explained. “Normal lighting is not a priority life-support system.”

Battery power
? Data wondered why that should be. As unlikely as it seemed, perhaps the computer had made a mistake. He asked it to confirm its previous response.

It did just that. “The
Yosemite
is operating on battery power,” it repeated. “Primary power is off-line.”

The android mulled the information over. “Apparently,” he noted, “the ship was hit hard enough for its power relays to be damaged.”

“Hit?” echoed Lagon. “Hit by what?”

Data shook his head. “I do not know. However, we seem to have been hit by
something
. Otherwise, the deck would not have pitched and thrown you across the room.”

“I’ll bet it was that other ship,” suggested Felai. “The one Captain Rumiel called the yellow alert about. It must have
fired
on us.”

A possibility, the android conceded. However, an unsubstantiated one.

“Let’s worry about one thing at a time,” advised Sinna. “Computer,” she said, “where is Chief Griffiths at this moment?” Like any other officer on the ship, the chief could be located through the communicator badge he wore on his uniform.

The computer seemed to hesitate just the slightest bit before answering. “Chief Griffiths,” it announced, “is not present on the
Yosemite
.”

It took some time for that to sink in. They all looked at one another, trying to make sense of the computer’s response.

“Not on the ship?” said Felai. “But how can that be? He was here just a minute ago.”

“That information is not available,” the computer told the Yann.

“We have to tell Captain Rumiel,” decided Odril. “He’ll know what to do about this.”

“You’re right,” added Felai. “Transporter Room One to bridge. Come in, bridge.”

They waited for a reply. There wasn’t any. Data knew there were only two possibilities: either the communications system wasn’t working properly or there was no one on the bridge to respond.

Normally, he would have expected that the first answer was the correct one. However, with Chief Griffiths’s disappearance still unexplained, he wasn’t too certain of anything right now.

“Computer,” said Lagon, “why won’t the bridge answer us?”

The computer’s reaction was as short as it was ominous. “There is no one present on the bridge to do so.”

“What about the rest of the ship?” asked Odril. “Where
is
there someone present … someone who can tell us what’s going on?”

“There is no member of the crew present on the
Yosemite
at all,” the computer informed him.

Felai shook his head. “No. There must be some mistake. This ship was full of people just a few moments ago.”

“Chief Griffiths was here a few moments ago as well,” Data pointed out. “But he is no longer here, either.”

“The corridors,” said Odril, eyeing the exit. “All we have to do is go outside, and we’ll see that it’s not so. We’ll see that there are still plenty of people here.”

“Good idea,” Lagon maintained. “That is, if the doors still work.”

The doors worked fine. But what they saw out in the corridor didn’t reassure them. In fact, they saw
nothing
. Nothing and no one.

“There’s no one here,” observed Felai, stating the obvious in his astonishment.

“There have to be people somewhere,” insisted Odril. “They can’t all have vanished.”

“Can’t they?” asked Sinna. And then, when the others looked at her: “If Chief Griffiths is gone, and all the crewmen in this corridor as well … why
can’t
the whole crew have disappeared?”

“But then … where did they go?” asked Lagon. Abruptly he blinked. “Wait a minute. That other ship … could it be?”

“Sweet deities,” said Odril. “Is it possible that they transported the crew right off the
Yosemite
? Aren’t there supposed to be safeguards against something like that?”

Data nodded. “Under normal circumstances it is not feasible to transport someone off a shielded vessel. And during a yellow alert, shield maintenance would have been a top priority.”

Felai shook his head. “Couldn’t there have been a malfunction?”

“Computer,” called Sinna. “Have the ship’s shields dropped at any time in the last ten minutes?”

“Negative,” replied the computer. “Shields have remained operational during that period.”

“No malfunction,” observed Sinna, looking more than a little perplexed. “But still, they’re all gone.”

Odril scowled. “Then why aren’t
we
? Why didn’t we disappear along with everyone else?”

It was a good question, the android thought, and an uncomfortable one as well, because of the uncertainties it brought with it.

“Maybe we
will
disappear,” remarked Felai, saying aloud what all of them were thinking. “It may just be a matter of time.”

“Now there’s a cheerful thought,” muttered Odril. “At any moment we could fade away … and never know how or why.”

He looked from Felai to Lagon to Sinna, as if keeping them in sight would somehow prevent them from being whisked away like the rest of the crew. But, of course, it wouldn’t help at all.

“The only way to know if we are vulnerable,” Data reflected, “is to isolate the critical variable which allowed us to remain when the others could not.”

“Variable?” echoed Lagon. “You mean … the difference between us and the rest of the crew?”

“Precisely,” Data confirmed.

“We’re Yann,” suggested Felai. “And you are an android. No one else on the ship fell into either of those two categories.”

“True,” conceded Sinna. “But those attributes wouldn’t have given us any special protection against a transporter beam.”

“We weren’t Starfleet officers,” Odril chimed in. “And everyone else on board was.”

Lagon grunted. “But those on the unidentified vessel would have had no way of knowing that.”

“It must be something else,” Sinna agreed. “Something which made the five of us less desirable to them … or more difficult to obtain a transporter lock on … or …”

Data turned to her, a hypothesis already forming in his positronic brain. “A transporter lock …” he repeated.

Sinna returned the android’s scrutiny. “Have you got something?” she asked him eagerly.

“Perhaps,” he replied. “Though I am not certain. As you may know, Starfleet away teams in need of a transport are often located by their communicator badges. Without them, the transporter operator must find some alternative way to fix their coordinates.”

Felai’s eyes narrowed as he looked at Odril’s red coveralls, then his own. “But we don’t have badges,” he muttered, “because we’re not in Starfleet yet.”

“So,” added Sinna, “if the aliens fixed on Captain Rumiel and his crew via their communicators—”

“They would not have been aware of us,” Data told her, completing the thought he had begun a couple of interjections ago. “As far as they were concerned, we did not exist.” He paused as the others considered his theory. “Of course, that is only one possibility. I will need more empirical information before I can determine if it is true.”

For a moment there was silence. Then Lagon slammed the side of his fist into a bulkhead. His frustration was evident in his face.

“This isn’t fair,” he complained. “How are we supposed to figure this out? We’re not even real cadets yet.”

Data sympathized with the Yanna. If he had had emotions, he believed he would have been frustrated, too. As it was, he saw clearly what they had to do.