Ishtar Rising Book 1 Read online

If any force in the universe could have restored those lives in exchange for his own, he’d have struck the bargain in a heartbeat.

  The turbolift doors hissed open directly behind the captain, interrupting his grim meditation. He turned and watched his first officer, Commander Sonya Gomez, enter the bridge. Trailing behind her was Lieutenant Commander Domenica Corsi, chief of security, and Lieutenant Commander Tev, the ship’s new second officer.

  Gold glanced over his shoulder and observed Gomez and Corsi watching the screen, apparently enthralled by the spectacular image displayed there. Tev merely glared down over his flat Tellarite nose at the viewer, his blunt, hirsute face a study in disdain.

  If the tableau on the viewer provoked any Galvan VI-related unease in Gomez or Corsi, neither officer revealed it. Instead, both women seemed momentarily awestruck, like children seeing the Grand Canyon or the Valles Marineris for the first time.

  “Venus,” Gomez said. “I’ve never taken the time to come here before.”

  Gold smiled, thinking of all the denizens of New York City who had never managed to fit a visit to the Statue of Liberty into their hectic schedules. His New York–bred wife, Rabbi Rachel Gilman, had yet to make the brief trip downtown to the reconstructed monument.

  “I haven’t been here since I took dense-atmosphere flight training back at the Academy,” Corsi said, her gaze captivated by the lethal, deceptively placid-looking cloudtops. “It’s funny how little the planet has changed since then. Considering how long terraforming efforts have been going on here, I mean.”

  “That’s why we’re here,” Gomez said. “To help the Ishtar team fix whatever seems to be holding the project back.”

  “How long has the project been under way?” Corsi said.

  “It’s been six years and change since Pascal Saadya took the reins,” Gold said. “And Starfleet had been studying the whole Venus-terraforming concept for a couple of decades before that.”

  Gomez whistled, evidently surprised. “Six years. That seems like sort of a long time for one of Dr. Saadya’s terraforming jobs.”

  Gold nodded. “Dr. Saadya told me that preparing and testing mathematical climate models has taken up the lion’s share of his time up until now. But he claims that the numbers phase of the work is finally coming to an end. So the time has come, at long last, to apply a bit of elbow grease and start turning the nuts and bolts.”

  Corsi made a face. “I wonder how he was able to sit on his hands for such a long time and do nothing but…calculate.”

  Gold shook his head and allowed an impish grin to spread across his face. “Maybe six years sounds like a long stretch to you and me, but Saadya can be a patient cuss when he needs to be.”

  But it’s never taken him more than four years, tops, to renovate an entire planet from soup to nuts, Gold thought. Strange.

  “I’ve read some of Dr. Saadya’s papers,” Gomez said, sounding impressed. “He’s already terraformed a couple dozen pretty inhospitable planets. He’ll probably go down in history right alongside some of planetology’s real legends, like Gideon Seyetik and Carl Sagan.”

  Gold maintained his grin. “That’s what Pas always believed. I can already tell that the two of you are going to get along great.”

  Gomez’s jaw dropped. “You know him personally?”

  “Before he went full-time into the business of recreating the heavens and the Earth, he was a junior science officer aboard the Gettysburg. We struck up a friendship there and we’ve tried to keep up with each other’s careers ever since. But before yesterday I hadn’t heard from him in years.”

  He only seems to get in touch when he needs a favor from Starfleet. Or has an extremely farshtinkener tsoreh of a problem that he needs somebody else to fix in a hurry.

  “Saadya’s project is obviously suffering from some fundamental efficiency problems,” said Tev, shaking his head dismissively at the image displayed on the screen. The da Vinci was quickly approaching the planet’s night side.

  “I’m no planetologist,” Corsi said, apparently in reluctant agreement, “but maybe Dr. Saadya has bitten off more than he can chew with this project.”

  Gold shrugged. “We’ll find out soon enough.” He couldn’t help but wonder whether Corsi was right. Had his old friend finally taken on a world that even his great talents couldn’t tame? Pas certainly hasn’t lost any of his chutzpah. Nobody can take that away from him.

  “Faugh,” said Tev. “Some truly egregious errors have been committed here, despite Saadya’s alleged ‘patience.’ Otherwise the terraformers wouldn’t have destroyed one of their own key ground stations.”

  Turning to face the Tellarite, Gold said, “I’m sure Dr. Saadya will be delighted to accept your keen engineering insights, Tev. And that Project Ishtar’s problems, whatever they may be, will soon be in the most capable of hands.”

  Tev nodded to Gold, clearly accepting the compliment with what passed for good grace among Tellarites. Though Gold knew his praise sounded superficially sarcastic, his words were, in fact, utterly sincere. Despite Tev’s lengthy inventory of personality deficits—vanity, arrogance, and overweening conceit predominating among them—none of Tev’s crewmates could dispute his technical brilliance.

  “Ishtar,” Gomez repeated, still staring at the hot-house planet. The da Vinci continued moving languidly toward the terminator that demarcated one end of the long Venusian night. “I know that name’s from some old myth or other.”

  “Mesopotamian,” Corsi said. “Assyrian and Babylonian, mostly. She was a fertility goddess. They used to call this planet Ishtar all over the ancient Middle East.”

  Gold’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Have you started working Abramowitz’s side of the street, Corsi?”

  The security chief shrugged. “I guess I got interested in ancient cultures back at the Academy around the same time I was memorizing Sun-Tzu’s Art of War.” Gold wondered briefly if, in turn, Abramowitz, the ship’s cultural specialist, had secretly cultivated some unarmed combat expertise that she was keeping to herself. Go figure, he thought.

  “This is simply an N-class world with a toxic, reducing atmosphere,” Tev said. “Perhaps this so-called Project Ishtar is less than efficient because the humans running it have chosen to waste so much of their time and energy on romantic superstitions and unproductive tale-telling.”

  Gomez scowled. “Romantic or not, most of us humans find ‘tale-telling’ a rewarding pastime. And a lot of fun to boot.”

  “I am not here to have ‘fun,’” sniffed Tev. “I am here to repair what others have broken.”

  “I’m sure we’ll all have a positively delightful time,” Corsi said, deadpan.

  Standing behind the tactical console located at the rear of the bridge, Lieutenant Anthony Shabalala interrupted Tev’s response. “Ishtar Station is coming into view, Captain.”

  On the screen, the exterior running lights of the half-kilometer-long Ishtar Station had become visible, peeking out from beyond the dark side of the planet’s terminator.

  “Hail them, Shabalala,” Gold said, grateful to get back to business.

  “Aye, sir,” the tactical officer said. “Hailing frequency open.”

  A moment later, the noxious cloudscape vanished from the screen, replaced by the face of a dark-skinned man who appeared to be in his early sixties. When Pascal Saadya saw Gold he smiled, displaying his even, brilliantly white teeth.

  “David! It’s good to see you again, my old friend.”

  Rising from his command chair, Gold returned Saadya’s smile. “Likewise, Pas. What can we do for you? I know it has something to do with assistance for your terraforming project, but our last conversation was a bit, ah, vague.” As, Gold thought, was the initial message Saadya had sent him the previous day.

  Saadya’s smile faltered for a moment, but quickly recovered much of its wattage. “I’d prefer we discuss that in private, if you don’t mind. Could we meet aboard the station?”

  Something’s got him rattled, Gold th
ought.

  Aloud, he said, “My first officer and I will beam right over.”

  * * *

  It was long past midnight as the schedule was reckoned aboard Ishtar Station, and most of the staff had already retired for the evening. But Pascal Saadya wasn’t one who tended to waste much of his precious time sleeping. He regarded the dearth of other people in the vicinity of his office principally as an absence of distraction.

  Saadya was beside himself with both joy and relief as he watched Gold and his first officer materialize on the transporter pad near his office. The joy was sincere and heartfelt, for it had been too many years since he’d seen his old friend David in person. The relief stemmed from what Saadya had heard about the crack team of engineers David commanded.

  Particularly his Bynar pair.

  “I have to tell you, Pas,” David Gold said after the initial greetings and pleasantries were exchanged, “my boss wasn’t keen on diverting the da Vinci here.”

  Leaning against the side of his cheerfully disordered desk, Saadya steepled his fingers. “Ah. Montgomery Scott. A true traditionalist. Tell me, what specifically bothers him about the project?”

  Saadya watched as Gold’s eyes strayed to the cloudtops that were visible through the office viewport. “Captain Scott seems to have more than one objection.”

  Saadya did his best not to scowl. Deliver me from the Starfleet brass and their retrograde thinking. And they say Venus spins backward.

  “For instance?” Saadya asked carefully.

  Gold appeared to consider his words for a moment before speaking. “For starters, he’s not thrilled with your plan to tow Mercury into a new orbit around Venus.”

  Saadya chuckled. “I see. No doubt because I wish to tamper with the familiar early-morning skies of his youth. Unfortunately, it’s a step I will have to take eventually if Venus is ever to take her rightful place as Earth’s twin world.”

  Gold offered Saadya a blank look, then gazed toward Gomez. The da Vinci’s first officer appeared to understand.

  “You need to create tidal effects,” she said. “You’re planning to jump-start the Venusian core by generating a magnetic field to keep out hard radiation.”

  Saadya felt a broad, involuntary smile cross his face. “Mercury will also stabilize the Venusian rotational axis over multimillion-year timescales.”

  Gold’s eyebrows rose as the true enormity of Project Ishtar appeared to sink in. “You’ve taken on quite a job, Pas,” he said at length. “No wonder it’s taken six years just to get through the number-crunching phase.”

  “I do not believe in taking half-measures, David. Of course, one mustn’t get ahead of oneself. These steps won’t be taken until after the atmospheric reconditioning is completed.”

  “And there, I’m guessing, lies the problem,” Gold said, nodding. “And the reason you’ve asked the S.C.E. for help.”

  “Precisely,” Saadya said, trying to keep the edge of desperation out of his voice.

  “I’m not sure exactly what we can do for you, though,” Gomez said. “The da Vinci doesn’t carry a lot of atmospheric processing equipment.”

  “I know,” Saadya said. “But that’s not why I asked you to come. What I need is your crew’s computational brilliance, to tie up the final loose ends of our atmospheric dynamics simulations. Particularly that of your resident Bynar pair.”

  Gold and his first officer reacted in a manner that Saadya didn’t expect—they cast distinctly uncomfortable looks at one another.

  The captain was the first to break the ensuing silence. “Ah, Pas, something’s happened that you obviously weren’t made aware of.”

  Saadya felt the emotional scaffolding behind his smile begin to crumble. He struggled not to show any anxiety. “What do you mean? You do have a Bynar pair serving aboard the da Vinci, don’t you, David?”

  “Had a Bynar pair,” Gold said.

  A pit of despair opened in Saadya’s belly. He couldn’t keep his eyebrows from vaulting heaven-ward. “They’re gone?” He trailed off in confusion. For a brief, irrational moment, he wondered if the Central Processor Pair on Bynaus had discovered his plan to draft a second Bynar pair and recalled Gold’s Bynars out of sheer spite.

  “One of our two Bynar crew members was killed on an away mission earlier this year,” Gold said quietly.

  Without that Bynar pair, Saadya thought, there truly is very little these people can do to help save Ishtar.

  “Pas, how the hell did you even know we had a Bynar pair on board?” Gold said. “Your Starfleet membership card lapsed a long time ago.”

  Hearing no heat behind his old friend’s words, Saadya offered him a rueful smile. “Surely you’ve spent enough time around us technical types, David, to know that we’re nothing if not resourceful.”

  “You forgot to mention sneaky and underhanded,” Gold said, returning the smile. “But it’s reassuring that you don’t seem to be quite sneaky and underhanded enough to steal current information. Anyhow, we’ve just got the one, now.”

  Saadya’s brow wrinkled. “Just the one what?”

  “Bynar. After 111’s death, 110 decided to stay on board. He’s going by the name Soloman now, and he’s our resident computer expert.”

  Hope rekindled within Saadya. All right. If I can’t have access to another Bynar pair, perhaps a solo Bynar will do in a pinch.

  Aloud, Saadya said, “I thought Bynars always stayed in bonded pairs.”

  “They generally do—if they expect to integrate back into Bynar society,” Gomez said. “Single Bynars tend to be pariahs among their own people.”

  Saadya briefly considered whether a Bynar social leper might succeed in expediting the computational efforts that were taking up so much of 1011’s and 1110’s time these days. Surely they wouldn’t let a social stigma affect a working relationship, he thought. Not on something as important as Project Ishtar.

  “Soloman,” Saadya said aloud, parsing the name’s evident meaning. “Doesn’t that name seem vaguely insulting to you? It sounds like a reminder of what he’s lost.”

  “He’s never complained about it,” Gold said, his tone growing defensive. “We both sort of arrived at it together.”

  Gomez cocked an eyebrow and adopted an almost lecturing tone. “In fact, I think the name helps him deal with his single status successfully. And it might even give him a perspective on information technology that’s completely unique among Bynars.”

  Fascinating. A Bynar who stands astride both Bynar and human experience, Saadya thought, hope returning. Perhaps he could be useful in ways I haven’t even anticipated yet.

  Saadya held out his hands in a placating gesture. “Forgive me, David. I did not mean to criticize your crewperson’s choice of nomenclature.” He sighed. “Will you help us?”

  “No offense taken, Pas,” Gold said. “And as long as the da Vinci is in the neighborhood, you’ll have all the engineering and material support we can spare. Commander Gomez will supply you with whatever you need. Including the able assistance of Soloman.”

  Saadya felt his smile broaden. “Thank you, David. You may well be the salvation of Team Ishtar’s efforts.”

  Perhaps I won’t need that second Bynar pair after all. Maybe one individual will make all the difference.

  If not, he knew he had run out of other options.

  Chapter

  3

  Gold was pleased to see that the da Vinci’s senior staff was already assembled when he and Gomez arrived together in the starship’s main briefing room at 0758. Present around the irregularly shaped table were Tev, Soloman, tactical systems specialist Fabian Stevens, and structural systems specialist P8 Blue. The former three individuals already were seated, while Blue sat in her specially modified chair at the end of the table. Also present were Corsi, cultural specialist Carol Abramowitz, cryptography expert Bart Faulwell, and Dr. Elizabeth Lense, the da Vinci’s chief medical officer.

  A few hours earlier, Dr. Saadya had supplied Gold and Gomez with copiou
s amounts of data regarding Project Ishtar, intended to bring the da Vinci’s staff up to speed as quickly as possible. From the intent manner with which most everyone was studying their padds, Gold intuited that his people were still doing as much last-minute homework as they could cram.

  “Good morning, everybody,” he began as he sat at his usual spot at the head of the table. “As I’m sure you’ve all already noticed by now, the project we’re going to assist Dr. Saadya and his team with is pretty heady stuff.”

  Corsi’s earlier expression of awe had been replaced by a furrowed brow, a change no doubt caused by prolonged exposure to cold, hard data. As usual, the security chief didn’t mince words. “It looks pretty damned dangerous, sir,” she said, setting her padd down on the table. “If everything doesn’t go perfectly to plan, it’s going to be a real challenge just keeping everybody on the team alive.”

  Gold tried to muster a smile, but failed as recollections of Galvan VI sprang to mind unbidden. “That’s why I invited you to the party.” He took a seat, then faced Dr. Lense. “And you, too, Doctor. As Corsi has pointed out, this project is liable to suffer a catastrophe during its next phase—unless everybody involved is very careful. Lots of people could be injured.”

  Lense did not look enthusiastic. “Anybody exposed to that witch’s cauldron of an atmosphere for more than a couple of seconds will be way past my ability to help.”

  To break the pensive silence he sensed was about to engulf the room at that statement, Gold nodded to Gomez, signaling her to begin the technical briefing.

  “The real dangers are hard to evaluate objectively,” Gomez said, still standing as she looked over the figures on her own padd. As she continued, Gold noticed that she, too, now seemed haunted by memories of the hellworld where her lover, second officer Kieran Duffy, had died. “Venus isn’t the most human-friendly environment in the solar system, so any approach to terraforming it is certain to involve some unavoidable hazards.”

  Gold admired his first officer’s talent for under-statement. With a temperature of around four hundred and eighty degrees Celsius, Venus’s surface was the hottest in the solar system, except for the sun’s photosphere. Flesh would vaporize in moments, and its surface pressure of ninety bars would just as swiftly crush humanoid bones—or a Nasat exoskeleton—flat. “Venus” and “friendly” shouldn’t even be used in the same sentence.