THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST Read online

  “Excuse me, I know he’s a friend of yours, but I wouldn’t do anything like that.”

  Guinan smiled, glancing up at the gleaming monorail overhead. “You wouldn’t?”

  Jayme shifted, trying to ignore the bed of Ibernian tulips that seemed to be mocking her with their vibrant orange mouths. “That’s different. I’m trying to help my roommate. I can’t just turn her into Academy security.”

  “Have you tried talking to her?” Guinan asked.

  “Of course! I try all the time, but she’s . . . she’s an odd person. Elma grew up on Holt, in the habitat domes.”

  Guinan nodded as if she knew Holt well. “You would value your privacy, too, if you lived with that many people under one roof.”

  “So you understand my problem!” Jayme exclaimed in relief. “She won’t confide in me, and I’m afraid she’s gotten into something over her head.”

  Guinan turned her head slightly, once more considering the homing beacon in her hand. Jayme couldn’t see the map, but she heard the tone that signaled that the beacon was now stationary.

  “Listen,” Jayme said urgently, taking a step closer to Guinan. “What is Holt known for? It’s mostly Bajoran resettlement camps, right? Well, why do you think that is?”

  “Because Bajorans are the only ones desperate enough to put up with those conditions?” Guinan suggested.

  “Well, that’s true,” Jayme conceded. “But it’s also in the perfect strategic position to serve as a resistance base.”

  Guinan furrowed her brow. “So what are you saying?” she asked.

  “I’m saying that I grew up here in San Francisco, and most of my mother’s family is in Starfleet. My aunt Dani is on a patrol right now near the border of occupied Bajor. I know the Federation can’t risk their peace with the Cardassians by helping the Bajorans get back their homeworld. And I’m afraid Elma is trying to help the Bajoran resistance. She might get something from my aunt’s messages, or . . .” Jayme glanced away, as if suddenly more interested in the lights on the Golden Gate Bridge than the homing beacon in Guinan’s hand. “There’s lots of programs in my tricorder that could be used to . . . well, used to compromise Starfleet systems.”

  “I see.” For a moment Jayme thought Guinan really understood, then the bartender added, “If you turn in your roommate, they’ll find out that you’ve juiced up your tricorder.”

  “No!” Jayme quickly denied. “I’ve done nothing illegal, just . . . unorthodox. If I thought there was a real danger, I would tell security even if I got into trouble myself. See, I realize we’re in this together. I’d just like to be able to confront her with everything.” She looked longingly at the homing beacon. “But it would help if I knew where she was going. She could be in a bar right now, and I’m making a big deal over nothing.”

  Guinan slowly nodded. “You’re very good, Jayme Miranda.”

  For some reason, Jayme didn’t think that was intended as a compliment. But when Guinan handed back the homing device, she was too pleased to care.

  As she zoomed and focused the map, Jayme absently told Guinan, “You know, Crusher’s lucky to have you for a friend.” Finally the correct section of the city clicked in and the readout showed the location—the radio observatory.

  Guinan waited, clearly leaving it up to Jayme whether to tell her.

  “She’s at the Deng Observatory.”

  “That doesn’t sound too dangerous,” Guinan commented.

  “No . . .” But Jayme wasn’t so certain, and while she owed Guinan for not turning her in for that crazy leap onto the monorail, she wasn’t about to tell this stranger everything. “Maybe I should talk to my Quadmates about this.”

  “That’s probably a good idea.” Guinan kept staring at Jayme until the cadet started to squirm, feeling as if she had told Guinan everything. “Maybe you should think about going into a different line of work, Jayme Miranda.”

  “Why do you say that?” Jayme asked, startled.

  “You aren’t happy.”

  “Not happy? But I love Starfleet! I’ve waited all my life to join Starfleet.”

  “If you say so,” Guinan demurred with a smile.

  Jayme hesitated, but Guinan didn’t seem concerned about pressing her point. Uneasily, she said, “Thanks,” as she left.

  At the end of the walk, she glanced back. Guinan was waiting in the soft pool of light around the monorail tower. Her hands were patiently folded together under her tunic, and she was apparently ready to stay as long as it took for Crusher to show up. Jayme knew she was being irritable, but she thought Crusher must not properly appreciate his friend to make her wait like that when she’d come so far.

  But Guinan was wrong about one thing—her situation was completely different from Crusher’s. The Nova Squadron had been acting like kids, playing a dangerous game to show off in front of everyone. Just look what it got them. Nick Locarno, the leader of Nova Squadron, expelled from Starfleet, and the others skulking around like pariahs, living, breathing examples for the other cadets of what not to do.

  But Jayme didn’t need that lesson. She was doing this to help Elma, not to get glory or praise for her own efforts. No, she understood the Starfleet code, and she would keep on trying to help her roommate, even if Elma didn’t want her help.

  “Why couldn’t you build another subverter—or whatever it is you call it!” Bobbie Ray complained for the dozenth time. “Then we could have walked in the front door like normal people.”

  Jayme hardly had any breath left, and rather than argue with Bobbie Ray, she concentrated on climbing the endless ladder to the top of the peaks that supported the Deng parabolic dish. She did spare the time to glare at the furry orange humanoid clinging to the exterior maintenance ladder, the last one in line.

  Starsa, who was just below Jayme, shot back, “What are you complaining about? You don’t seem to be having a hard time.”

  It was true—the large Rex was a natural athlete, specializing in security and hand-to-hand combat. But to hear Bobbie Ray talk, he would rather curl up on a couch in the sun and sleep all day.

  Bobbie Ray’s roommate, Hammon Titus, gave Jayme an edgy grin. “You could have warned us about this part when we were back in the Quad. Is there any other surprises you have planned for us?”

  “I thought I told you,” Jayme muttered, letting Starsa relay what she’d said to the others. Then she had to ignore their indignant denials.

  Okay, so she hadn’t told them about this part. But how else did they think they were going to get inside the closed observatory? They knew the dish was anchored in a large natural depression in the mountains, with the receiving station deep underground.

  They had a saying in Starfleet—you always remember your first Quad. Jayme just wished her first Quad was worth remembering. All the spark was in her fellow freshmen cadets, and her opinion of them was falling fast under this test. It was only two thousand feet up, for the Horta’s sake.

  As for the four older cadets in their Quad, the ones they were supposed to look up to and emulate, that was an even sorrier lot. Not that she expected to have much fun around T’Rees since he was a Vulcan, and she gave Elma allowances for being socially twisted by her upbringing on Holt, but she had expected more from Nev Reoh, a former Bajoran Vedek, and Moll Enor, a newly joined Trill. The exotic possibilities in such roommates were endless, but Moll Enor had hardly spoken four words since the semester had begun, while Nev Reoh readily admitted that he was a failure at everything he had tried. It was practically the first thing he said, and he tended to repeat it periodically. Reoh was different, even among the few Bajoran cadets—he was older than everyone else, and it didn’t help that his prematurely receding hairline added even more years to his appearance. With so many somber people around, Jayme sometimes felt like she was living in a geriatric ward instead of a Quad.

  Jayme heaved herself onto the perimeter walkway, shifting over to allow the others up behind her. Bobbie Ray took one look at the five thousand foot parabolic dis
h, with the opposite edge so far away that the regularly spaced lights disappeared in the darkness, and said, “I’m having second thoughts about this.”

  Titus crossed his arms. “Yeah, what makes you so sure Elma’s helping the Bajoran resistance? She’s got a class in radio astronomy this semester. Maybe she’s doing lab work.”

  “After midnight?” Jayme countered. “And what about those Cardassian code files I found hidden in the back of her closet?” She hurried on before they could think to ask her what she was doing in the back of Elma’s closet. “What else is she doing with code files if she isn’t decoding intercepted material and sending it to the resistance?”

  “But this antenna only receives,” Titus protested. “It doesn’t transmit.”

  “Ah, but it does transmit!” Jayme said triumphantly, pleased that she’d taken a few minutes to flip through some of Elma’s technical manuals on the large radio telescope. “It has to send coordinates to an orbital satellite to focus the telescopic electronic camera. That beam could be aimed at a communications satellite, relaying information that the antenna has picked up. Or it could be used to tap into the orbital satellites, relaying the faster-than-light subspace radio communications from Federation starbases and starships throughout the Alpha Quadrant.”

  Bobbie Ray stood right on the edge of the dish, perfectly comfortable with the sheer drop. “I think we should quit while we’re ahead.”

  “And what if she is a spy?” Starsa asked. “Do we just march into Superintendent Brand’s office and tell her we were right here but didn’t bother to go inside and see what Elma was doing?”

  Jayme silently applauded Starsa’s spirit. Her species experienced a late puberty, so she was basically a ten-year-old both physically and in the amount of impulsive daring she possessed. Unfortunately, the tall, slender girl was also suffering from severe acclimation sickness, so her slow metabolism had to be regulated and adjusted for Earth’s pressure and gravity.

  Jayme had almost rejected Starsa for this mission on physical grounds, but now she was glad she had brought her along. Especially when Starsa leaned over the edge, shuddering at the drop but laughing at the vertigo it caused. The others shifted uneasily, clearly reconsidering their protests in the face of her courage.

  “Come on,” Jayme ordered, taking advantage of their indecision. “We’ve got to climb out on the truss and take the antigrav lift down.”

  She gestured to the enormous cross-lines high overhead, anchored to three towers around the edge of the dish. The lines met in the center, supporting a ring that allowed the feed to move, steering the beam that was reflected from the dish anywhere within five degrees of the zenith.

  “Up there?” Bobbie Ray protested, looking at the lines overhead, then down into the black hole in the very center of the dish. “It looks dangerous.”

  “The maintenance crew does it all the time,” Jayme tossed off, heading toward the nearest tower.

  “More climbing,” Titus grumbled, but he followed her.

  Starsa was kicking her heels over the edge. “Why is it so big? Our telescope at the Academy isn’t nearly as big.”

  “That’s because it’s a light wave telescope,” Jayme explained. “Radio waves go from a few millimeters to about thirty meters in wavelength. So the bigger the parabolic dish, the bigger waves it can catch.”

  “Oh, I knew that—” Starsa started to say, then she let out a piercing scream.

  Jayme wasn’t sure what happened, but Starsa was suddenly plummeting down the nearly vertical wall of the dish, screaming like she was being burned alive.

  An orange blur shot down the white, curving wall as Bobbie Ray dived after her. While Starsa tumbled, bouncing against the reflective metal plates that lined the dish, Bobbie Ray took an aerodynamically correct position as he zipped down headfirst.

  Jayme jammed her fist in her mouth as she hung over Titus, watching their descent. Bobbie Ray’s greater bulk caused him to rush past Starsa. They receded to tiny dots as they neared the flattened curve at the bottom of the dish, but they were still going fast, straight toward the gaping black hole in the center.

  Bobbie Ray splayed his arms and legs, turning into a dark gray X against the dish, spinning as he slowed. But Starsa was still tumbling out of control. Jayme didn’t think Bobbie Ray would have time, but he got his feet under him and made an impossible leap sideways. Even his tremendous strength wasn’t enough, but at the last second, he snagged Starsa by the hair, stopping her right at the edge of the hole.

  Starsa’s screams continued to echo out of the dish as Jayme frantically tapped her communicator, set for a special frequency just for this mission. “Is she hurt? Is she hurt!”

  Titus had put on his spotting loop and was peering through the misty air. “He’s got her! He’s picking her up. Now he’s shaking her—”

  Starsa’s screams abruptly stopped.

  Bobbie Ray’s lazy drawl came over their communicators. “She’s fine.”

  “He grabbed my hair!” Starsa shrieked in the background as Bobbie Ray released her. “It’s half pulled out! You big stupid cat!”

  Jayme let out her breath, sitting down on the walkway with a jolt. “That was close!”

  “Good thing she’s got all that hair.” Titus murmured, still watching them through the loop.

  Jayme was still shaking her head, thinking—Now what? But she didn’t want Titus to know how shaken she was.

  Bobbie Ray was poking around at the edge of the hole, not bothering to respond to Starsa’s complaints, which came clearly through the communicators. “Hey, there’s a lift down here,” Bobbie Ray said. “Why don’t you slide down and join us?”

  “What?!” Jayme exclaimed. “Do you think we’re insane—”

  “Just make sure you catch me!” Titus sang out. “Yee-ha!”

  With that, he leaped over the side of the dish, laughing as he whizzed down feetfirst.

  Jayme watched him quickly dwindle, falling nearly two thousand feet. But this time Bobbie Ray jogged over to position himself in Titus’s path, leaving plenty of space between him and the hole. As the big Rex grabbed hold of the cadet, Titus’s momentum carried them spinning the last few meters. Starsa tried to help by getting between them and the hole, but she nearly got knocked in.

  They were all jabbering at once, so that Jayme couldn’t tell what was happening down there. But everyone seemed to be all right. She didn’t need a spotting loop to tell when all three faces expectantly turned up in her direction.

  She almost called for them to wait for her while she took the truss-lift down like a normal human being. But it would take forever for her to climb all the way up the tower and walk to the middle of the truss. Their presence must have already been recorded by the deformation of the enormous dish, supported by sensitive antigrav nodes, and surely there was an alarm going off somewhere that the dish needed adjustment.

  Jayme swung her legs over the side. For a moment she hung there, facing a near-vertical drop, her instincts crying danger. But a good officer knew how to roll with the punches.

  “Ex astris, scientia!” Jayme cried out as she jumped off the edge.

  The first part was the worst, when it felt like she was actually falling with hardly any contact between her and the wall. Then the drag of the slope caught her, redirecting her and making it feel like she was going even faster and out of control. Instinctively her hands tried to grab hold of the smooth surface and she flipped over on her stomach. All she could see was the sharp, white edge of the dish far overhead, cutting into the night sky.

  Then something caught her ankle and jerked her in a big circle. Jayme cried out as her leg was practically pulled from her hip joint.

  When she was convinced she was fully stopped, she checked to make sure the hole was safely far away. Then she finally rolled into a sitting position.

  “Did you have to pull so hard?” she asked Bobbie Ray, digging into her pocket for the portable biogenerator that came in standard cadet first aid kits. Bet
ween the shoulder injury from the monorail and now this, she was beginning to realize why doctors were routinely assigned to away teams.

  Bobbie Ray showed his teeth—his way of laughing. “Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch. Why doesn’t anyone ever thank me?”

  Starsa was rubbing her head, mussing her thick curly ponytail as she glared at the Rex. “Can I have that when you’re done?” she asked Jayme.

  Jayme handed it over and went to the access port. The tertiary mirror was positioned inside and down a few meters on its own steerable truss. A catwalk ran along the inner edge, with an antigrav lift right next to the cable that carried the amplified radio signal down into the receiving station.

  “Well, we’re halfway there,” Jayme said, trying to think positively. “Let’s get going.”

  Moll Enor woke from a deep sleep as the beeping got louder and more insistent. For a moment, the tonal quality reminded her of the wake-up chime at the Symbiosis Institute and she thought she was back on Trill, awaiting notification that a symbiont had been selected for her.

  As she struggled to sit up, still mostly asleep, she realized she was in the Academy Quad. The beeping was the sensor on Starsa’s pulmonary support unit and physiostimulator pack, warning that her activity was exceeding recommended limits. In the four weeks Moll Enor had known Starsa, the girl had exceeded her recommended physical limits thirty-one times. The beeping was so routine that Moll had become accustomed to it and ignored it, knowing that the relay would buzz uncomfortably on Starsa’s implant, warning her to slow down.

  But when she glanced at the time, she realized that T’Rees was still out, giving a workshop on extended meditation techniques. Usually Starsa’s Vulcan roommate took it upon himself to monitor Starsa’s habits and scold her when she was thoughtless.

  Moll couldn’t understand what could be causing a medical alert at this time of night, when Starsa was usually in bed asleep. She quickly got up, noticing that Nev Reoh was still sleeping soundly in his bed, his mouth open and his face pressed against a pillow, with the blanket twisted impossibly around his body. One bare foot jutted over the edge. He didn’t even shift as the beeping escalated.