Chapter
1

Stardate 1256.9

Turning from where he knelt next to an open access panel that revealed a maze of circuitry and conduits hidden behind the nondescript gray bulkhead, Lieutenant Mahmud al-Khaled rose to his feet and dashed toward the row of consoles lining the opposite wall of the environmental control substation. The room, like its nine counterparts scattered throughout the massive space station, was crammed full of computer workstations and display monitors as well as banks of gauges, dials, and switches.

"Try it now!"

Lieutenant Isaiah Farber, one of the more talented members of al-Khaled's team, tapped several buttons arranged in multicolored rows across the console's polished black surface, the controls looking almost tiny beneath his massive hands. Muscled and broad-shouldered, Farber appeared on the verge of ripping through the gold uniform tunic stretching across his chest and back.

Looking up at one of the display monitors set into the bulkhead just above eye level, Farber grimaced. "Nothing. We're still locked out of everything."

"Damn it," al-Khaled snapped. "This doesn't make any sense." According to every diagnostic conducted by him and his team, the environmental control system should have been operating within acceptable parameters. There was no reason for it not to be, as it, along with everything else aboard Starbase 47, was practically brand-new.

"Report!" said Lieutenant Curtis Ballard, the station's chief engineer, from where he worked at another station. "Is that section sealed off yet?"

From an adjacent console, a female ensign nodded, her own face a mask of anxiety. "Yes, sir," replied the young Asian woman, who al-Khaled remembered was named Tamishiro. "Ventilation ducts and all hatches leading to those areas are locked down."

Ballard nodded, and al-Khaled saw the sweat running down the side of the man's face. The report was short and terse, but al-Khaled knew, as did everyone else in the room, what it meant. Anyone still occupying those sections was now trapped, unable to escape the poison rapidly taking the place of breathable atmosphere.

"Environmental control's treating it like it would any section of the station with differing atmosphere requirements," al-Khaled said. "It won't let us just open a door without an adjacent section configured to act as an airlock." Shaking his head, he added, "Trouble is, it won't let us do that, either."

"Get computer control on that lockout," Ballard ordered, slapping the console with the heel of his hand as he continued to work. "How many people are still in that section?"

It took several seconds for Tamishiro to call up the relevant data from the station's internal sensor network. "Thirty-six, sir."

Pointing to another of the display monitors, Ballard said, "Tell the maintenance teams to start cutting through the doors. We'll force them open manually and seal off adjacent sections once we get those people out of there." With the sleeves of his gold tunic pushed up above his elbows and smudges of some unidentified substance dirtying his otherwise pale, unremarkable features, the man looked every bit like a harried mechanic frustrated with his inability to understand why the machines under his care were refusing to cooperate.

Al-Khaled sympathized with his fellow engineer, particularly in light of the current situation. Of course, the dilemma they now faced was only the latest in a string of problems that had plagued Ballard and his staff for weeks as they struggled to ready for operation Starfleet's newest deep space outpost, designated Starbase 47, or its more colloquial name, Vanguard.

For reasons currently surpassing understanding, systems across the mammoth Watchtower-class station were beset by irregular yet frequent malfunctions. Sensors, communications, life support, computer interfaces, and their related components all had fallen victim to such troubles, sometimes two or three times within the same twenty-four-hour period, each time requiring repeated readjustment, realignment, or retuning. In short, none of the station's more sensitive systems had worked properly with any consistency since their activation. The spate of anomalies had tested Starbase 47's talented cadre of engineers to the point that the base's commanding officer, Commodore Diego Reyes, had called for assistance in the form of Starfleet's Corps of Engineers, specifically, Lieutenant Al-Khaled and his team assigned to the U.S.S. Lovell.

Before today, the malfunctions had been merely annoying—all while evading resolution with relentless determination. Now, for the first time, they were proving to be life-threatening.

"Atmosphere mixture continuing," Tamishiro reported, shaking her head. "Methane concentration increasing. Ambient temperature three hundred eight degrees Kelvin and rising."

It had happened without warning, the first sign of trouble coming as someone reported a foul odor permeating the air on one level of the station's civilian residential district. Environmental sensors designed to detect such anomalies had not caught the problem, at least not until the strange pollutant began to spread throughout the section. The quick actions of a station maintenance worker had prevented other decks from becoming contaminated, with the affected area now completely sealed off from the rest of the station. Only then was the cause identified: internal environmental sensors—for reasons as yet unknown—had determined that the normal Class-M atmosphere which supported most humanoid life-forms in that section of the residential zone needed to be replaced with one similar to that found on Class-Y planets.

"Unless everybody up there has suddenly turned into a Tholian," Ballard had commented as the situation continued to worsen, "we're in big trouble." Anyone trapped in the affected section would be cooked alive, assuming they survived the toxic atmosphere currently replacing the oxygen-nitrogen mix favored by those living on that deck.

"Sir," al-Khaled heard Tamishiro call out, the ensign turning from her workstation to regard him and Ballard, "Lieutenant Soral reports they've begun cutting through the hatches. The hospital's been alerted and medical teams are on standby."

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