Chapter One
Sunlight danced down from the afternoon sky to splash over the few occupants of a sandy stretch of beach, drenching them in the bright yellow sunshine Sol was famous for. There were a couple and their children, playing lazily on the shore amongst the waters of the small lake, obviously enjoying the warmth of the midmorning sun. Further down the sparkling white sand a man lay on his back upon a beach towel bearing the symbol of the UFP, shading his eyes from the sun as he relaxed from a recent swim. Beside him rested a small cooler with a duffel leaning against it.
The kids from down the beach took off at a run, yelling and laughing as they played some game or another. Quade grinned under his arm as he lay there, eyes closed, enjoying the sunshine. It was something that he didn't get to enjoy enough anymore. He wouldn't have been here now except he'd broken one of his own rules and decided to make a little side trip to Earth, sending Walters off in the Mary Lou to pick up the shipment on Mars while he stayed here and got a few things accomplished, including the replacing of some of the crew.
For a moment he frowned, remembering what had happened to the crew he'd had to replace. Then he mentally shrugged. Sometimes things just work out. Sometimes they don't. Life was what it was and there wasn't any sense in getting upset at it. It just wasn't worth it.
The children's' shrieks of delight as they splashed in the waters of the lake caused him to grin yet again as he thought about the upcoming run. He'd been able to find a couple of interesting people to fill out the berths on the Mary Lou. He'd been lucky to find a doctor willing to berth on a civilian ship. Most of the people fresh out of medical school either had debts to pay off, which meant an apprenticeship somewhere, or had accepted the job before they went into school, which meant Starfleet. Finding one who hadn't already been approached while still in school who met his own standards for his crew hadn't been easy.
Or that's what he figured, anyway. He'd been lucky enough to arrive on Earth when the John Hopkins School of Medicine was disgorging their latest batch of baby faced doctors into the unsuspecting world. He'd put an ad on the local 'net about his needs, then waited. It hadn't been a couple of days when he'd filled both the doctor and security chief spots. Not that the second spot wasn't overblown just a bit. There wasn't much need for security when there was only a dozen or so individuals on board. Though whoever he'd picked was in for some interesting training exercises on the ship's weapons systems.
He actually hadn't planned on filling the security spot on this leg of the trip. He hadn't really known why he'd put the word out on the local 'nets about what he needed. It just felt like the right thing to do. And it seemed to have paid off. He wasn't sure how he was going to fit in with the rest of the crew, but that was a problem he'd deal with if or when he had to. His credentials were good and he had felt right during the interview. Now only time would tell.
Speaking of time. He stretched, then stood and began gathering his things. The Mary Lou should be making port very soon. He wanted to be there when she landed. He'd about reached his limits of the time he could spend out among the general populace. These days he felt better on board ship than he had out in the open. Which was another reason he'd come out here, he thought as he finished gathering his things and headed toward the parking lot. He inhaled the fresh, clean air, savoring the natural smells of the land. Now if he could bottle that smell he'd make a fortune on the fringes!
The Mary Lou flew silently through space as she made her way out of Mars orbit and headed toward Earth on impulse power. While they could have made a micro jump and saved themselves several days, it would have put a strain on the engines that wasn't really needed. And that's something that the Captain would have had a problem with. Oh, not with using the resources, if needed. But using them when there wasn't a dire need to. The civilian vessels that made up the backbone of the UFP merchant fleet didn't operate on the same principles as those in Starfleet. There, if something was needed it was requisitioned, and in a day or two it arrived, if it wasn't already on-hand.
That wasn't the way it worked on the civilian fleets. Every cred, every bar of latinum counted toward the bottom line. As for the most part the bottom line was the difference between completing a voyage and not, most in the merchant fleets tended to squeeze every last drop of blood out of a piece of equipment before writing it off, and even then it stuck around in a miscellaneous parts bin in some corner until it could be put to use again.
That was on fleet vessels. The Mary Lou was privately owned, still not all that common an occurrence among the civilized worlds. Most found space travel in one's own ship too expensive an endeavor unless one was willing to make a business of it. So if she could save the captain and owner some creds by taking a bit longer to get to Earth, then so be it.
The woman doing the thinking was Janice Walters, First Officer of the Mary Lou. She was currently seated in the captain's station on the small bridge, surrounded by the muted lights and low murmur of conversation as people went about the business of running a starship. Her eyes flickered to the currently unmanned weapons station. Her eyes dimmed a bit as she thought of the last person to occupy that station. Rodger had been with the ship for a couple of years, and they'd formed a friendship that only living in close quarters for long periods of time could form. Then he'd gone and gotten himself killed in a senseless transporter accident. There hadn't even been anything left to bury.
She glanced around the bridge again, satisfied at what she saw. Only one station was actually manned, and that was Helm Control. All the others were on stand-by, ready to be brought online at need, whether by the crew or by the computer. And the people that would man those stations were good. She'd stack them up against any crew that Starfleet could throw at them. Most of the bridge crew had been around at least six months and had gotten used to how things were done here. It would be interesting fitting in the new personnel. She could do it, though. She'd done it before.
"Ma'am? We're a half hour out."
Janice looked up from her thoughts to look over at the Helm station, where T'Kel was looking back at her. The Vulcan had been with them almost a year now. She had fit smoothly into her role as the main helmsman for the Mary Lou. Janice had noticed the simulation time T'Kel had put in on the simulators, pleased that she'd made the attempt to locate and use them on her own. She made sure that some of the more advanced tactical simulations she'd requisitioned from Starfleet found their way into the Vulcan's hands.
"Very good, T'Kel," she replied. "Contact Earth Approach Control with our papers and destination."
Janice leaned back as T'Kel turned to the communications board to carry out her request. Another hour should find them safely grounded and waiting on the captain.
Pam did one last walk-through of the apartment, checking all the little hideaway places that small objects tended to gravitate for items that she might have missed. As usual she found nothing. Yet she still had to go through the routine.
Making her way back to the front door she looked at the boxes stacked next to it, along with the travel bag next to them. It was hard to believe that seven years of her life were packed in those six little boxes. She looked around the apartment again, realizing how big a step she was about to take. For all of her adult life she'd attended class, then did her internship working at first one hospital and then another, until they all tended to blur together.
It had been worth it, she decided. All the sweat and tears that went into getting her medical degree fell by the wayside as she picked up the last item to be packed; her diploma. She sighed, finding it hard to believe that little document gave her the right to call herself a doctor. She looked at it for a long moment, then packed it away. She'd frame and mount it when she arrived at her new job. Her first job on her own.
When she'd graduated she still hadn't decided what she wanted to do, other than being a doctor. Some of her friends had gone on to join Starfleet, while others took jobs at various ground-based facilities scattered around the UFP. She'd looked at several of those, and had even half convinced herself on a couple of them. None of them had felt exactly right.
Then Captain Samuels had entered her life in the form of a posting on the local jobs 'net. The idea of hanging her shingle on a starship, of all things, hadn't even entered her thoughts until she seen the ad. At first she dismissed it out of hand as something she'd not want to do. She found herself continually pulling it up and reading it over and over, until she finally broke down and called to set up an interview.
That interview had gone well. She and the captain had spent several hours talking. At first he'd asked her about her training and areas of expertise within the medical field, seemingly pleased when she'd told him she'd specialized in both human and xeno-biology. He'd even seemed more pleased to find out that she was single, with no current attachments. He'd seen her quizzical look and grinned. He was pleased because of the nature of his business, which could possibly take them away from Earth for long periods of time. It was better, it seemed to him, for there not to be any entanglements to worry about back home.
At the end of the interview he'd offered her a berth on his ship as chief medical officer, with a starting pay that was both reasonable and acceptable to her. She'd surprised herself by accepting immediately, totally out of character for her. She normally would have agonized for days over the decision before finally making one.
The door buzzed, announcing the arrival of FedEx. She showed them the boxes that she was shipping back to her parents, then, after one final look around, turned away from here old life, heading out to new adventures.
"Excuse me, I require assistance."
The voice carried over the background noise of the busy loading dock. The port of Newport News, once one of the busiest sea ports of the East Coast, had been rebuilt after World War III as part of the DC/Richmond/Newport News mega-complex. Acres and acres of land was filled with hundreds of landing bays, all fed from a central shipping complex. From the air it was a site to see. From the ground it was just confusing.
One of the supervisors looked up from his board to see a young male Vulcan standing a few feet away from him, obviously trying to get his attention while not looking like he was trying to get the supervisor's attention. Stifling a grin he looked over at him.
"Can I help you?" he asked, raising his voice so he could be easily heard.
"I require directions to bay 143. The bay designations appear to be missing in this section of the docks." The Vulcan stood with calm poise, even with the anti-grav personnel locker trailing behind him. Nothing in his demeanor indicated he'd spent the last hour looking for the location himself.
"No problem," the supervisor replied. "They are renumbering the entire area, and if you don't have one of the new maps you're screwed." He pointed off to a series of bays. "The one you want is the third in. You can't miss it. It'll be right in front of you. Shipping out?" he finished conversationally.
Sonak nodded.
"According to control," the man stated as he put down his padd, "there's a ship, the Mary Lou, due in any time for that berth."
Sonak nodded again. "That is my present destination."
"Then you'd best be on your way. Your ship's inbound."
"Thank you for your assistance." Sonak tapped the device on his wrist, causing the locker to rise from the ground to stop at a hover. Without a further glance at the human Sonak began walking toward the waiting bay.
"Vulcans."
The word almost caused Sonak to break out in laughter. Which would not be a good thing, as he was trying to keep a low profile, and a laughing Vulcan would be anything but ordinary. Even though the Romulans had ended up on the same side as the UFP during the Dominion War, not many people considered them "good guys." It was a good thing, in his opinion, to allow people to go on thinking he was a Vulcan. When it finally came out that he was not he would just shrug. It wasn't as if he would deny it if asked directly.
The sound of the comm hail cut through the ambient noise of the Engineering bay, as it was designed to do. "Hey Peter, you awake down there?"
The sound of a chair rolling across the floor was followed by a meaty thump as Peter Jordan slid away from the diagnostics he'd been examining on the workstation to punch the comm on the main console.
"Yeah, I'm here," he replied. "What can I do you for?"
"Is your toy ready for a trip down gravity well?" Janice's voice drifted out of the comm, the humor evident in her voice. "Norfolk's just given us clearance to land. The captain would be proud, too. It's way on the edge of the field."
"Well ain't that just dandy," Peter replied absentmindedly as he ran through several configurations of the console in front of him, his eyes taking in the details on each at a glance. After another moment he stopped.
"All's green across the board," he stated, confident that nothing on this ship would be any problem. "You're clear for atmospheric anytime you want."
"Thanks, Chief." Janice replied, then clicked off. A moment later the all-hands signal piped through the room.
"We're on approach to a landing at Norfolk Station in a couple of minutes. Ground radar shows a good storm between us and our berth. Good news is the ship will get a nice little bath. Bad news, it's going to get a bit bumpy at times. Secure all loose items. Command out."
Peter shot a quick glance around his shop, only finding his coffee cup out on the table across the room. He gathered that in, then pulled up the ship diagnostics on the main wall console. Green glowed everywhere as system after system reported back on the healthy workings of the Mary Lou.
Heh. The Mary Lou. He hadn't gotten the nerve up yet to ask the captain why in the world he called such a ship as this such a silly name as that. Better than that, he still hadn't gotten up the nerve to ask the captain how in the world he'd come to own this ship either.
The Mary Lou was special. She was about a hundred seventy meters long with a width of one hundred thirty four meters, standing at a height of thirty meters. Massing out at almost four hundred thousand metric tons, she supported four decks, with a normal crew of fifty. Unlike a normal civilian ship, the Mary Lou had a very thick skin. The generators for the deflector shields were top of the line, and the hull itself was covered with ablative armor. So even if the shields failed the ship would withstand much more than an adversary would expect before damage became too great to continue.
Not that she'd have a problem dealing her own damage, if she wanted. The ship carried six pulse phasers, for facing forward and two facing the stern. She had three phaser beam emitters, one on the top hull and two on the bottom, along with 3 torpedo tubes, two facing the stern and one facing forward. There were also two other tubes facing forward that could take conventional torpedoes. They also could take another type of load, as was evident from some of the settings on the tubes themselves. However, what other type of load had never come to light. They were light on the loads for the torpedoes, as they only carried a total of twenty photon torpedoes.
Photon torpedoes. What in the hell did the captain need with photon torpedoes? There was enough firepower on this ship to level several major industrial centers without trying! Granted, looking at the ship from the outside none of the weaponry would be evident, as they were invisible until needed. Only then would the weapons become evident.
If the weaponry hadn't been enough to clue him in to what he'd signed on to support, looking at the engines had. There was only one class of ship that had the warp engines mounted inside the hull. He hadn't realized that any had been let out into civilian hands. He'd been skeptical of the berth until he'd run the Mary Lou through the registry, only to have her come up totally clean. Her ownership papers designated one Quade Samuels as rightful owner of all shares in the ship.
Oh, some things had been changed, to be sure. In place of the matter/anti-matter warhead that normally was located in the bow, a full spectrum sensor platform had been installed, along with other equipment he hadn't been fully knowledgeable on. Cargo bay two had the ability to be converted into any number of different environments, both agreeable to human life and otherwise. Right now it held several different kinds of scientific probes they'd picked up for their last mission. The captain hadn't decided whether they were going to hang on to them or not, so for the moment they stayed right where they'd last been crated.
A sharp jolt brought him back to the present, where the instruments showed the ship on final approach. He nodded with satisfaction as the massive landing legs deployed from the bottom of the ship, touching down in the center of the pad with a solid thump.
Peter felt the engines calm as the load demanded from them eased, then vanished as the ship's weight came fully on the legs. Lights flashed green as all indicators confirmed the legs condition. He tapped the comm switch.
"Legs are locked tight. We're ready to cut over to station power at your command," he reported.
"Make it so, chief. Let's tighten this lady's mouth down on the nipple." Janice's voice definitely had a touch of humor in it, Peter thought. He had to figure out what was going on! "Oh, I hope you got those quarters straightened out like you were supposed to," she continued. "New arrivals waiting us when we touch down."
"Yeah, the quarters are ready," he replied. It had been hard, but he'd felt the cleaning out of their gear had fallen to him. After all, he'd caused the problem in the first place. No matter how the captain had tried to convince him otherwise. He knew, even if they didn't.
"Good. Get on those couplings." The connection clicked closed.
