Collective Hindsight (Book 1) - Aaron Rosenberg [20]
So what was it doing here now?
“Okay, I’ve been over the reports,” she told the others a few minutes later, as they gathered around her. “Good work on the reconstruction, by the way.” She’d been pleased to notice afterward that, once she’d gotten absorbed in the events, she had stopped realizing that it was Kieran speaking. Focusing on the details really did help ease the pain—or at least push it to the background. It had only been Salek’s death, and Kieran’s response to it, that had pulled the pain back to the fore. “But now we’ve got another problem.
“The thing is,” she pushed her chair back from the table and stretched, “that Salek did a good job. No surprise there—from everything I’ve heard and read, he was an excellent engineer and a good commander. He considered the situation carefully, and based his decisions on the information everyone had collected. It all makes perfect sense, and I’m not sure I would have done anything any different.”
“So why is that a problem?” Abramowitz asked. “It should be a good thing, shouldn’t it, to know that you agree with his actions?”
“Yes, but clearly something was wrong. If not, the Dancing Star would still be floating in the heart of Randall V’s sun, unreachable even if it wasn’t simply reduced to molten metal. Instead, here it is, light-years away and without a scratch on it.”
“Which makes this thing even more valuable than before,” Stevens pointed out. “Not only does it harness the energy of the stars, but it can dive into a sun and come back out none the worse for wear. The Androssi would kill to get their hands on it.”
“Exactly.” Gomez scrubbed at her forehead with one hand. “Which leads to another question. If you guys disconnected the collection array, why is it registering an energy buildup again? We know how powerful this thing can get, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let anyone here immolate themselves just to drain it off, but if we can’t figure out why it’s got more juice now we won’t be able to stop this from happening again.”
She sighed and resisted the urge to put her head down on the table. The S.C.E. had already been up against this vessel once before, and though at the time they thought they’d succeeded in disarming it, clearly in retrospect they had failed. So why should she think that she’d have any better luck this time around?
TO BE CONTINUED…
About the Author
AARON ROSENBERG was born in New Jersey, grew up in New Orleans, graduated high school and college in Kansas, and now lives in New York. He has published short stories, poems, essays, articles, reviews, and nonfiction books, but for the last ten years the majority of his writing has been in role-playing. Aaron has written for more than ten game systems (including Lord of the Rings, Vampire, DC Universe, EverQuest, and Star Trek) and is the president of his own game company, Clockworks (www.clockworksgames.com). He has two degrees in English, and misses teaching college English, which he did for several years. His other fiction includes the previous S.C.E. eBook The Riddled Post and the novelette “Inescapable Justice” in Imaginings: An Anthology of Long Short Fiction. He is currently hard at work on more S.C.E. fiction.
Coming Next Month:
Star Trek™: S.C.E. #34
Collective Hindsight Book 2
by Aaron Rosenberg
During the Dominion War, Commander Salek and Lt. Commander Duffy of the S.C.E. dealt with a runaway vessel that was endangering a star system—a mission from which Salek did not return. Now, a year later, Salek’s and Duffy’s replacements—Commander Gomez and Lt. Commander Tev—are faced with the same runaway ship.
Facing more