CHAPTER 10

The next morning, Malcolm and Hoshi sat in the command center, downloading the recordings from the scanners. Both were quiet, their egos still bruised from being called before the captain the night before.

After a time, Malcolm said, "We got off lightly."

Hoshi had to agree. After they had told the captain what they and Trip and Travis had been doing, Jon hadn't seemed so angry at being woken up. Rather, he had been concerned there was a potentially serious situation with an intruder. He'd warned them that if there ever was a time in the future where there was even the remotest possibility of harm to Enterprise, he damn well better be told, and then he had ordered them to continue their efforts to find out exactly what it was they'd seen. While Hoshi and Malcolm reviewed the recordings, Trip and Travis were in the launch bay. The captain had had no objection to continuing the work on the Wayfarer's Rest because most of the phenomena they'd experienced had taken place there.

Hoshi had just finished downloading the information from the scanner she and Travis had used when she was paged and told she had a message from Starfleet. She glanced at Malcolm, but he seemed engrossed in what he was doing at a nearby console. She told the officer filling in at communications to send the message to her in the command center. Braced for bad news about Hikori, she read the text-only message, and frowned when she saw it wasn't about her brother.

"Is something wrong?" asked Malcolm.

"No. Starfleet found some distant relatives of Robert Watson on Earth. They've agreed to make arrangements for the body."

Malcolm nodded and returned his attention to his work as she comm'd the captain and relayed the information she'd received.

"One more reason to go home," came Jon's voice over the comm. "We'll set a course back to Earth as soon as we're done mapping this sector of space."

Hoshi's spirits lifted at his words. They would only be here another day or two; the mapping was going more quickly than they'd anticipated. When they got back to Earth, she'd be able to check on Hikori personally, perhaps even spend some time with him and the rest of her family. When she joined Malcolm at his console to start reviewing the recordings, she was in a better frame of mind.

"I thought we'd start with the visual recordings of that thing we saw," he said as she slid into a chair next to him. He scooted over to give her room.

Malcolm and Hoshi peered at the screen, trying every kind of enhancement they knew, to make the cloud-like object more distinct. The flat, two-dimensional image on the screen seemed even more insubstantial than what they'd actually seen. After an hour, Hoshi rubbed her weary eyes. "No matter what we do to it, it looks like mist."

"The only reading I could get was from the EM field it generated," Malcolm noted. "I have no idea what it's made of. It's possible it's pure energy, I suppose." He blinked several times. "Let's give our eyes a break, shall we, and listen to the audio for a while?"

To make the task go faster, Hoshi listened through an earpiece to the recording she and Travis had made, while Malcolm listened to the one taken by Trip. Both audio recordings were also represented as graphs on screens that showed abrupt peaks whenever a sound registered. For the first half of Hoshi's recording, there were long stretches of silence, with a corresponding flat line on the graph, after each time Travis had asked the ghost to show itself. Then the recording reached the point where she had been telling Travis about her experience in the observation lounge, and he had asked her what she was thinking about.

"I was wishing I was home with my family."

Hoshi stopped the recording and replayed that part. Her sensitive ears heard some noise besides her voice, but she couldn't make it out. She looked at the screen displaying the graphic and saw there were two bands instead of the usual one. She adjusted the signal to separate the bands. On the first band, she heard only her voice.

She played the other band. It wasn't clear, but with a little refinement, she was able to discern what she thought were words. One hand to her earpiece, her brow furrowed in concentration, she listened to it again. It couldn't be background noise; they'd shut everything off in the launch bay. She was sure it was another voice, male to judge by its timbre. Could the scanner have picked up part of a conversation between Trip and Malcolm outside the Wayfarer's Rest? She made one more adjustment, listened intently, and turned to Malcolm, who sat hunched in a chair with his own earpiece.

"Listen to this," she said. As he pulled his earpiece out, she put the audio on external speakers.

"Home... Go home."

Malcolm shifted in his chair. "That doesn't sound like any of us," he said.

"Let me check something," Hoshi said. She keyed some commands into the console and played the audio portion of one of Robert Watson's last logs. She entered a few more commands and ran a comparison with the new voice. "According to the computer analysis, these voices match," she told Malcolm quietly, but she could see in his eyes that he hadn't needed the computer's confirmation. He'd already realized they'd heard a dead man speaking as she'd played one recording right after the other.

For the next two days, nothing happened. There were no more ghostly apparitions, no unheard voices picked up on surveillance devices Malcolm had set up in the launch bay, no missing tools or moved objects.

Jon, seated in his command chair on the bridge and ready to give the order to return to Earth, was glad to be going home. He was reserving judgment about what had happened to his senior officers. Maybe it had been a ghost, maybe it hadn't. But they had insisted that there was something in addition to the regular crew on board, and he'd learned to trust their instincts. Unfortunately, they hadn't been able to come up with a definite answer. Enterprise was due for a thorough maintenance inspection when they returned to Earth; maybe that would turn up something.

"All charting has ceased," T'Pol said from her science station. "Scanners have been recalibrated for standard operational settings."

Jon nodded. He leaned forward. "Take us home, Travis. Warp 3."

"Aye, sir," the helmsman said. He input commands at his console, and Enterprise leaped to respond--

--only to falter badly. Jon gripped the armrests on his chair as the ship lurched violently and came to a dead stop. "Travis! What happened?" he snapped.

"I don't know, sir," came the tense reply. Travis had been thrown forward against his console. He shoved himself back, holding himself up with one hand while the other worked the controls.

"There are fluctuations in the warp core," T'Pol called out, referring to readings at her console.

"Inertial dampeners were unable to compensate for the abrupt drop out of warp," said Malcolm from his spot at tactical. "We're lucky we all aren't smears on the forward viewscreen."

The ship seemed to right itself as the inertial dampeners caught up. Jon relaxed his grip and punched a button on the comm panel on his chair's arm. "Trip! I thought everything was ready for warp speed?"

"It was, Cap'n," Trip's voice came from Engineering. "The best I can make out is that it's a problem with one of the plasma injectors."

"How long will it take to fix?"

"Not long. I'll run a diagnostic on the injector and--" Trip broke off, and Jon could hear someone talking in the background. Then Trip's voice came back. "Cap'n? The injector has to be replaced."

"We have spares, don't we?" Jon asked, leaning back in his chair as his adrenaline rush started to subside. Unexpected equipment failures were rare, but they weren't unheard of.

"Cap'n, that's not what I meant. The injector...the reason we have to replace it...it's not there any more. It just -- disappeared!"

Jon traded a glance with T'Pol, who raised an eyebrow. "Things don't just disappear," Jon said.

"I'm tellin' ya, Cap'n -- it's gone. We do have spares, though."

"What about impulse?" he asked.

There was a long pause on the other end of the comm line, as if Trip was checking something. A moment later, the engineer's came through. "It should be all right."

Jon closed the connection and looked at Travis at the helm. "Let's try this again. Full impulse on the same heading."

"Aye, sir," Travis responded, and entered the commands. "Full impulse."

Jon slowly relaxed as nothing untoward happened. He let out a long exhalation. "Well, at least we're moving in the right direction."

No sooner had the words left his mouth than an alarm sounded from the helm console.

"Impulse is offline," Travis reported, turning in his seat to look at Jon with a puzzled expression.

At her station, T'Pol checked some readings. "Confirmed."

Before Jon could contact Engineering, the comm panel on his armrest beeped, followed by Trip's voice. "Sir, you're not gonna believe this."

"Something's wrong with the impulse engine," Jon stated flatly.

"Yeah. I can't figure it out," Trip responded. "Both engines were in perfect condition. Nothing like this should have happened. Talk about a coincidence!"

"Get on it," Jon ordered. "I want to know why both 'perfect' engines suddenly conked out." He stabbed the button to close the channel. He took a deep breath, trying to control his frustration. In front of him at the helm, he noticed the stiff set of Travis' shoulders. "It's not your fault, Travis."

Travis turned slightly in his chair to look at back at him, his expression anxious. "I know, sir. I just can't help thinking that the spirit of Robert Watson isn't going to be pleased."

Jon grimaced. He'd been wondering how long it would take after Trip's announcement that the plasma injector had disappeared before someone brought up the ghost. But they hadn't proved or disproved its existence, only that strange things had been occurring for which they had no explanation. He glanced at T'Pol, whose subtly disdainful expression was telling him exactly what she thought of ghosts. He shifted his gaze to communications where Hoshi sat with a carefully neutral expression. Of course she'd be upset by the delay; they still hadn't heard how her brother was doing.

Sitting in his command chair wasn't accomplishing anything. He got to his feet and said to T'Pol, "I'll be in Engineering."

The Engineering department was in an uproar when Jon arrived. Trip was shouting orders, one after another, to his crew. Jon had calmed down on the turbolift ride to Engineering, but it seemed his chief engineer had gone from incredulous to downright angry in the meantime.

"Trip," he said, pulling the man aside. "What's going on?"

"Aw, Cap'n!" Trip ran a hand through his hair. "We got a replacement plasma injector out of stores, but something's wrong with it. I don't know what. Rostov is off getting yet another one. And we still don't know what's wrong with the impulse engine. Everything checks out -- it just won't work. And to top it off..." Trip scowled. "...I can't find my toolbox."

Jon would have laughed had the situation not been so serious. He'd been told about the missing microcaliper, and he personally thought that either Trip had forgotten he'd left it in the Wayfarer's Rest's cockpit, or that Travis had moved it there as a joke and wouldn't admit it. "You didn't leave your toolbox in the launch bay, did you?"

"No, I didn't," Trip said indignantly. "I brought it back here yesterday because I needed my tools when we checked out the engines before going back to Earth. I haven't been back to the launch bay since." Trip started toward the exit.

Jon followed. "Where are you going?"

"I can't do anything until Rostov gets back with another injector," the engineer said over his shoulder. "I'm going to check the launch bay, just in case."

A few minutes later, both men strode into the launch bay. The Wayfarer's Rest was as Trip had left it a day ago. A quick search outside the small vessel turned up no sign of his missing toolbox. Trip muttered something about memory and not being that old as he stepped into the engine compartment; Jon wisely held his tongue as he followed.

"Everybody on my staff knows not to mess with my toolbox," Trip griped as he stood in the center of the engine compartment after checking all the nooks and crannies and not finding what he was looking for. "So it wasn't one of them who made off with it."

Jon was opening his mouth to suggest they go back to Engineering when a loud clang came from farther inside the little ship.

Trip shot Jon a startled glance and said, "Here we go again." He hurried into and through the living quarters to the cockpit. Jon was right behind him.

Trip entered the cockpit, and as he moved to one side to make room for Jon, he said, "I think somebody's tryin' to tell us something."

Jon followed his gaze. A cabinet door on the bulkhead was open, and inside he could see two toolboxes. One he recognized as Trip's, and from where he was standing, he could see the initials "RW" on the handle of the other.

Jon immediately called a meeting of his senior staff, minus Trip, who had returned to Engineering. As the officers gathered around the situation table, he asked, "What the hell is going on?"

None of the officers replied except T'Pol, who said, "I do not know."

Jon glared at her. "Not the answer I want to hear. Toolboxes just don't move by themselves. And they certainly don't open cabinet doors by themselves."

"That's almost exactly what happened to Trip and me the other day," Malcolm said. "I still can't explain it."

Travis, Jon noted, was avoiding making eye contact with him. "I know what some of you are thinking. You think it's the ghost of Robert Watson. But if he wants to go home, why is he is causing all this?" Jon asked with a wave of his hand, indicating Enterprise in general.

The helmsman shook his head. "I don't know, sir. After Hoshi and Malcolm found his voice on the recordings, saying he wanted to go home..." Travis trailed off uncertainly.

"It might just be one giant, bizarre coincidence that all this is happening," Jon said. He held up a hand to stop T'Pol who had taken a deep breath that he recognized as the beginning of an argument from her. "But after finding Trip's toolbox where we did... The sooner we find out what's causing these things, the better, because now it's interfering with the operation of this ship."

In the strained silence that followed Jon's declaration, he was paged. He answered it at the comm panel on the bulkhead next to the situation table.

"Cap'n, we have another replacement plasma injector installed, and all the diagnostics check out," came Trip's voice. "The warp engine should be good to go."

"It's about time," Jon said. "We'll get underway at once." He closed the channel, indicated that Travis should return to his station, and strode to his command chair. The other officers also returned to their stations.

"Let's try this again," Jon said as he sat down. "Travis, ease us up to warp 3."

"Warp 3. Aye, sir," Travis said.

Jon held his breath as Enterprise responded, going to warp exactly as she should. As the stars became elongated streaks of light zipping by on the viewscreen, Jon slowly let his breath out. Maybe the trouble with the engines had been a coincidence--

A high-pitched alarm sounded at T'Pol's station. He looked over to see her staring at her console in as much surprise as a Vulcan could display.

"Now what?" he asked irritably.

"Life support is offline," she said.

Jon fumed as he drummed his fingers on his armrest. He was willing to bet there was no cause that could be found for life support going out without warning. It seemed to him that something didn't want them to get underway. First the engines, now life support. If they got this problem fixed, what would go wrong next? An explosion in the armory? Sudden decompression of the ship?

Jon got to his feet. "Travis, all stop."

Travis entered the appropriate commands. Jon waited. He didn't think it would take long. He wasn't disappointed.

As soon as Enterprise's forward progress was halted, T'Pol reported, "Life support has been restored."

Jon reached over and used the comm panel on his chair to contact Engineering. "Trip, tell me what you did to restore life support."

"I didn't do anything, Cap'n," came the reply. "I was about to ask what you did up there."

Jon cut the channel. He began to pace slowly around the bridge. "All right, people. For the sake of argument, let's say we do have the ghost of Robert Watson on board." A distinct sniff came from the direction of T'Pol's science station, but Jon ignored her. "Hoshi's seen what might be his ghost, and was touched by it. We've had disappearing and reappearing tools and toolboxes, and a cloud-like thing four of you saw in the launch bay. We even have a recording that some of you believe is Robert Watson's spirit telling us he wants to go home." He paused, gazing around at his crew members. "Well, we're trying to get back home, but something won't let us. What are we doing wrong?"

There was no answer, but Hoshi was suddenly busy at her console. Jon stepped over and asked, "What is it?"

"Robert Watson's home..." she said. She keyed in some commands and called up information, quickly reading what appeared on a screen at her station. "He has relatives on Earth, but..." She nodded as if confirming something. "I don't think Robert Watson considered Earth his home. His wife and child died on Vega, and that's where they are buried."