CHAPTER 9

"All right," Sisko said, from behind the desk in his office. "Brief status reports. Dr. Bashir, you first."

Bashir was seated next to Sisko's desk. He was grim. "There is little I can say. The survivors are dying from Upsilon Radiation exposure, and there is so far nothing I can do to stop it. We beamed off sixteen survivors. Six have since died. As for the remaining ten, they were farthest from the explosion and so it will take longer for them."

"Are they in the final stages?" Dax asked. Her expression showed deep sympathy for the survivors, and for Dr. Bashir.

"No. Five of them began experiencing mild discomfort in their arms and legs, which means that the neural degeneration is beginning to have physiological effect. Dyneuryllin has been shown to be effective against pain at this stage. I have replicated an adequate supply of Dyneuryllin and been administering it as needed. I estimate that, within about a day, all of the survivors will be experiencing unpleasant physical sensations. And after another day or so, their pain levels will come to the point that Dyneuryllin will no longer help. In fact, no treatment will be able to relieve their pain, and their pain will be quite severe. And after another two or three days, they'll expire."

O'Brien took a breath. "Is there nothing we can do?"

Bashir shook his head. "There is nothing I can do. I've tried several approaches, some of them quite radical, without success. I'll keep trying, of course."

"Increasing the dosage won't help?" Dax asked.

"No, it won't. The Dyneuryllin I'm administering is not Regular Dyneuryllin. It's Grade Orange Dyneuryllin, and if you start to double or triple the dosage of that grade, there is a risk of severe nausea, which simply makes things much worse. And if you administer a bolus above ten times the dosage, there's a risk of death. By all accounts, my patients will reach a point where there is no dosage of any medication that will reduce their suffering."

"That is a hell of a fate to have to deal with," Sisko said.

Bashir nodded. "I've been totally honest with my patients. They are fully aware of what they face." He forced a smile. "My patients are very brave."

"Starfleet knows that," Sisko said. "I was informed a few minutes before this meeting that Lieutenant Pitts will be presented with an award for meritorious conduct, for taking command after an extreme emergency and redirecting the Observer back to the Alpha Quadrant."

"Yes, I know," Bashir said. "I was with her when she received notification of the award. She said that she refuses it."

Sisko has never heard of anyone doing such a thing. "Refuses it?"

"Yes. She said that that award is appropriate for actions that save lives. Well, her actions didn't save any lives. All of her shipmates are dead or will be dead within days. So, she refuses to accept the award." Bashir rose. "Sir, if there's nothing further, I'd like to return to the Infirmary. I have some tests that I'm conducting."

"Of course, Doctor."

Bashir left the office. Sisko, Dax and O'Brien sat unmoving for several moments. Eventually Sisko returned to the business at hand.

"Dax, status report?"

"We have detailed scans of the Observer. We have accounted for all of the personnel except for the two officers who were in the Probe Preparation Bay at the time. The sixteen individuals who were beamed off are identified, of course. We have also positively identified all but nineteen of the deceased personnel by their DNA. Now, there were eight people aboard the Observer who were members of the probe team. We now know that two of them were near the Probe Control Station, and four of them were off duty in their quarters. The other two, it is reasonable to conclude, were in the Bay. Their names were Jackson and Schoon."

"I know both of them," Sisko said. "That is, I've read their fitness reports, health records, unclassified log entries. Both were excellent officers, first rate, in fact. I can find no indication in any of the records, not even a remote hint, that either officer may have wanted to harm everyone on board. And I find no suggestion of incompetence or carelessness. Quite the contrary: both men are deemed to be exceptionally efficient at their work."

"I'll bet the same could be said for the other members of the probe team," Dax said.

"Yes."

"The four members of the probe team who were off duty were Barkress, Fahmy, Kelly, and Van Wyk."

Sisko nodded. "All excellent officers, according to reports."

"And the two members of the probe team who were near the Probe Control Station," Dax continued, checking her notes on her device, "were Alexander and Rogg."

"Also both excellent officers," Sisko said.

Dax waited a moment before speaking again. "There is one slightly unusual thing about Alexander. It is probably nothing."

Sisko finished the sentence for Dax: "But I did order you to take note of anything odd, no matter how small."

"Yes. Well. Rogg's body was at her post, at the Probe Control Station. Alexander's body was about a meter away. He was apparently standing behind Rogg."

O'Brien didn't get it. "Why is that unusual?"

"Alexander wasn't supposed to be in Probe Control. Alexander's post was supposed to be in the Shuttle Hangar, inside the retrieval shuttlecraft. When probe launches occur, one member of the team has to be ready to go retrieve a probe with a shuttlecraft, in case one of two things happens. If the probe goes off course, it is has to be retrieved. According to the Commission's public records, a probe has never gone off course in the history of the Project. A more likely event, one that has happened thousands of times, is that the probe fails to prime and has to be retrieved. Now, it's probably not a serious concern that Alexander is not where he was supposed to be, since the Shuttle Hangar is fairly close by; but strictly speaking, Alexander's body was found away from his post."

Sisko tried to imagine how that might be significant. "Okay," was all he said.

Dax went on. "Also, I spoke to the senior member of the probe team from Surveyor. He says he has no theories as to how the explosion might have occurred."

Sisko had hoped for more help than that. "Dax, did you get any impression that he really knew what happened? Or perhaps that he had a very good idea what had happened, and he was just trying to protect himself or his probe team or Observer's probe team?"

"My impression is that he was being straight with me," Dax replied. "In fact, he did tell me a few interesting things, supposedly off the record. For one thing, the authorization code to detonate can be given, and in the case of Surveyor is routinely given, while the probe is still on board."

"What?"

"They don't give the actual command to the probe to detonate, but the authorization code is given after preparation checklist completion, before the probe is launched."

"If Observer followed the same procedure," O'Brien jumped in, "then one of the safety measures that we thought was there might not have been there at all."

"Actually, two of the safety measures might not be there." Dax cleared her throat. "Once the authorization code is received, the detonation command can be received at any time. Even if the probe is still aboard."

"You mean to say," Sisko asked with a note of incredulity, "that nothing prevented the Probe Control Station from telling the probe to explode inside the ship?"

"That's what I understand," Dax nodded. "But the expectation is that doing so would be a futile thing. There still are the automatic life, gravitational, and environmental protections in place. Any one of them would stop the detonation from occurring."

"If they could defeat the gravitational safety, as we think they could," Sisko intoned, "then they'd be closer to making the probe detonate."

"But the officer at the Probe Control Station can't defeat the gravitational safety," O'Brien pointed out. "I think you'd have to be in the Probe Preparation Bay to do that. You can't do it remotely."

The thought troubled Sisko. "That would suggest that someone in the Bay and someone in Probe Control conspired to cause this explosion."

No one said anything for a few seconds.

Dax cleared her throat again. "The officer from the Surveyor said something else that was interesting. Apparently, there is some resentment or jealousy among the Surveyor crew, directed at the Observer. It seems that there is a perception that the Observer is deemed to be much better than the Surveyor, and so the Observer got all of the good mapping missions, while Surveyor got all of the less desirable ones."

"Is there anything to that?"

"Possibly, Benjamin. I mean, the mission to the Gamma Quadrant was a prestigious mission, and Observer was selected for it over Surveyor."

"Yes," Sisko remembered, "even though Surveyor was actually closer to us than Observer was, when the assignment was made."

"And I also found a public report from a few months ago, that there was a very prestigious research project involving binary gas giants in the Okrusk star system. Observer was selected for that mission even though it was four days away from the system, and Surveyor was just a few hours away. The report said that the researchers preferred to use the facilities of Observer. There was nothing in the report about how the crew of Surveyor felt in being passed over, but we can guess they weren't too pleased about it."

O'Brien had an idea. "Would this resentment or jealousy be a sufficient motive, do you think, for the Surveyor people to do something to Observer that might cause Observer to suffer an accident?"

"Doubtful. If I read the Surveyor probe team member right, there was some bitterness, but not seething anger or hatred. Also, the two crews did not really interact, so one has to wonder what the crew of Surveyor could do to cause a disaster aboard Observer."

"It may be that the assignments that carry the most glory also carry the most risk," Sisko mused. "Perhaps Observer's assignments were more hazardous than those of Surveyor."

"Possibly," Dax agreed, although she couldn't see any reason why that would mean Observer would have a risk of probe explosion that was greater than that for Surveyor.

Sisko turned to O'Brien. "Chief, you talked to the person who designed the safety systems. What did he think might have led to the explosion?"

"He didn't know. No idea at all."

"He said that?"

"Not in so many words." O'Brien decided not to mention the details of his difficult conversation with Stoan. He'd tell them all about it later; now wasn't the time. "Mister Stoan did imply that if he knew what had happened, he'd share that knowledge with me. But he didn't have anything to share."

Sisko thought it sounded like Stoan might have been evasive, by implying things rather than saying them outright. Evasion would, however, be at odds with Stoan's reputation for being forthright. "I take it, Chief, that you don't feel he had anything to hide."

O'Brien thought for a moment. "Sir, I get the impression that he is troubled about this incident, troubled in the extreme. His reputation is on the line. I think he would find it very difficult to handle learning that there was a defect in his design or a hazard that he'd overlooked. So I suspect he has considered and reconsidered as many possibilities as he can imagine, yet he is totally mystified at how the incident could happen."

"Did he say anything else of interest?"

"Just that we were investigating the wrong way. He gave no recommendations as to what way would be better."

Sisko leaned forward. "What do you think? Are we investigating the wrong way?"

O'Brien answered carefully. "No. I think we are looking at the things we need to look at."

Sisko leaned back. "All right, then. How about your scans of the Probe Preparation Bay? How did they go?"

"Quite well, actually. Each scan could only reach a limited area of the Bay, but with a series of scans I was able to reach nearly the entire Bay. The computer stitched together the various scans to give me a reconstruction of the interior of the Bay. There is one small difficulty, though."

"What's that?"

"I'm not convinced that the computer stitched the scans back together properly. Probably the blast damage made it difficult for the computer to match up the corresponding elements in the various scans."

"What makes you think the computer stitched the scans together improperly?"

"Well, after the computer made its first pass at combining all of the scans, I ran a reconstruction simulation to determine where in the Bay the probe must have been when it exploded. And the simulation found that the reconstructed source of the blast was not where the probe was. The discrepancy is significant. We know all of the places that the probe could be inside the Bay: in the receptacle, on the bench, in transport. This simulation indicates that the probe exploded about half a meter away from where it should have been at any time during preparation."

"Is it possible that the thing that exploded was not the probe?" Immediately after throwing out the idea, Dax dismissed it. "No, that can't be right. How could it not be the probe? Upsilon Radiation was released, so we know that the probe exploded, don't we?"

Sisko frowned, then something occurred to him. "Could it be that the probe wasn't actually being prepared for launch? Could it be that the probe was one that had failed to prime, and was being returned to the Bay, and that's why it may have been in an unexpected place?"

O'Brien squinted, then brightened up a wee bit. "You know, I'm not sure it would explain why the explosion seems to be in the wrong place, but it might explain a lot of other things. If this probe was being returned to the Bay as an FTP, it would mean that all of the safeties on this probe would have recently been deactivated and the detonation order would have been given. If priming resulted in electromagnetic shear, then that might mean that some of the metallic moving-parts components inside the probe may have gotten pushed and pulled in many directions at once. Maybe some of the safeties got deformed or stuck in a disengaged position. Or maybe the probe wasn't a dud, it just exploded later than it should have."

"Look into that," Sisko ordered.

"Aye, sir."

"I don't think that scenario will hold up," Dax said cautiously. "A probe that fails to prime is retrieved from the planet and is returned to the Bay by the shuttlecraft, right? The team members in the Bay immediately reinsert the mechanical safeties and return the probe to the Locker, don't they? Well, if this were an FTP probe, then the shuttlecraft would still be outside Observer, having just returned the probe. But we know that the retrieval shuttlecraft was not outside Observer, it was inside the Hangar; and we know that the shuttlecraft pilot, Alexander, was away from the shuttlecraft and inside the Probe Control Station."

O'Brien nodded. Put that way, the scenario seemed less likely. "I'll look into it anyway, just to be thorough. First, I should make sure the computer stitches my scans together using more reference points, so we'll know whether the probe exploded in the wrong place or not. I have a sneaking suspicion that when the computer runs the reconstruction simulation again, the explosion will be centered pretty much right above the bench, where the probe almost certainly was."

Sisko sighed. "Okay, unless you have any urgent matters to attend to, I'd say the two of you are done for the day. I'm done, too, except that I still have to give a progress report to Commissioner Young. I think I'm going to ask her whether it's true that the Observer got more desirable assignments than the Surveyor. I'm also going to try to see what I can find out about past mapping missions; I feel I need to understand the context of Observer's past missions, so I can find out why this one was different. But I'm really hoping she'll share with me what she'd found based upon her examinations of the Surveyor and the probe assembly facilities."

"I'll be interested in that, as well," O'Brien remarked.

"Oh, Chief," Sisko just remembered something he wanted to discuss. "In addition to holographic simulations based upon your scans, I'd also like you to begin building some actual physical models that rely on sensors like those in the Observer. Not holographic simulations, but actual real-life models. And then I'd to have you try to defeat them or deactivate them or get around them. You think you can beat the gravitational gradient sensor? Well, I'd like to see you actually do it. Maybe you can trick the other sensors, too."

"Aye, sir. Good idea." O'Brien had already been planning to do this, ever since reading that Stoan himself preferred to test his safety systems with physical rather than holographic models; but O'Brien hadn't found the time to build any physical models. He felt a bit embarrassed that Sisko had suggested it first.

Dax spoke. "I'm going to try to talk to some of the other members of the Surveyor probe team. Maybe they have some ideas."

"There's someone else I want you to try to talk to, Jadzia," said Sisko. "In my review of Observer personnel records, I saw that there is a former member of Observer's probe team who left Observer and is now stationed at Starbase 12. Some unspecified family difficulty. Her name is Gaulle, I believe."

"I'll talk to her."

"And something else, Jadzia. If you can, see whether you can determine which probe was the one that exploded. And also, see whether you can determine whether it was an FTP probe or not."

"I've already looked into this. There's not much I can tell you. In the Locker, there are eleven empty slots. This may indicate that the Observer went to the Gamma Quadrant with a full load of ninety probes, and that the one that exploded was the eleventh one in the sequence. We're not quite sure what the actual sequence was, though, since the empty slots seem to be distributed around the Locker at random."

Sisko thought it unlikely that probes would be withdrawn from the Locker at random. "Maybe the Commission can deduce the sequence from the pattern of empty slots. The Commission might be able to figure out what probe it actually was. I'll ask. Maybe the Commission has access to this probe's service record, manufacturing certificates, assembly history. They might find something. Whether they share anything with us is another matter; but I doubt there's anything else we can do."

"Hmm." Dax wondered what might happen if the Commission found that assembly records showed that the probe was improperly constructed. Would they tell us?

Sisko looked down and sighed heavily. "Tomorrow, I'll continue searching the records for any evidence that might shed light on any motive that might impel someone to commit such a horrific act." He looked up again. "I doubt I'll find anything. Well. Is there anything further to discuss tonight? Hearing no further business, you are dismissed."

Dax and O'Brien rose and left the office. Sisko tapped his control panel and ordered the computer to set up a secure communication channel to Commissioner Young. The conversation with Commissioner Young was brief. Sisko explained what had been done and what had been learned, and Young listened without comment. When Sisko asked her for information about her examination of the probe assembly facilities, she responded curtly that such information was classified above his level of clearance. Sisko inquired into whether the Commission might be able to identify the exact probe that had exploded, and whether the Commission could tell him anything about that particular probe. He received the same response. Sisko then asked whether anything had been learned from examination of Surveyor, and Young once again told him the information was classified.

When Sisko said he'd heard that Observer and Surveyor were treated differently in the assignments they received, and he asked whether there was any basis for such a belief, Young became testy.

"Why are you asking about Surveyor? Surveyor has nothing to do with this incident. Focus on Observer, Commander Sisko."