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  The present…

  “Stop.” The request came out as a mixture of grunt and plea. Henry Winter could barely find his voice, what with the cramp in his side and his lungs smothering from the thick, acidic humidity down here in the tunnels. The master computer, he’d been told, required these atmospheric conditions. Though how the Bynars survived long enough to build and reboot a second master computer down here without suffocating was anyone’s guess. Especially since it had taken them ten years. “I can’t take—” A cough. “—another step.”

  The Bynar pair paused mid-scurry, their heads swiveling back to look at him in unnerving unison. Henry had yet to determine whether 110 was the shorter one or 111. And what minimal empathic abilities he had did him little good with figuring out who was who since the emotional makeup of Bynars tended to resemble a series of branching either/or questions.

  “You had said, Commander, that—”

  “—time was of the essence.”

  “She may elude us if—”

  “—we wait. There is danger—”

  Henry held up a hand to silence them. “Let’s not assume facts not in evidence—” Another coughing spasm overtook him; he spat a clot of phlegm onto the ground. “Besides—I appear to be having difficulty breathing.”

  “We will stop—”

  “—since you cannot—”

  “—walk unless you breathe.”

  “We suppose that we can—”

  “—slow down for a time.”

  Bracing his hands against his thighs, Henry nodded, grateful he wouldn’t have to waste any more breath persuading them. Bynar pragmatism served them well in crisis situations, such as the present one. He leaned back against the smooth gunmetal-gray plating with a dull thwap. “We’ll go soon. I’ll be fine.” He took a deep, wheezy, breath followed by a quick exhalation. Flecks of light orbited before his eyes; lightheadeness swamped him. His middle-aged body wasn’t cut out for this pace. “Let’s take five.”

  The Bynar pair exchanged looks.

  Before they could ask, he answered. “Five minutes. A break. I need to get my blood sugar up.” He unfastened his pack and began rooting around for a ration bar. The bars tasted like sawdust glued together with weloo tree sap, but he couldn’t afford to be picky this far underground. He ripped open the wrapper and took the first, pleasure-free bite. The Bynars watched him intently. He might not like this particular meal, but he wasn’t g
oing to let them rush him. Henry gulped the gritty, saliva-softened glob, then took his next bite.

  The Bynars, he figured, would keep track of time; they’d let him know the millisecond his five minutes expired. Of the thirty-five kilometers they needed to cover to search for their missing person, they’d covered twenty, at a brisk pace to Henry’s mind. While he’d been prepared to turn around and send someone else to complete the job after every kilometer, his Bynar associates never wavered from their mission. The Bynars’ uncanny ability to stay on task both impressed and irritated him. When they removed tricorders from their utility belts, ostensibly to collect data from their surroundings, Henry sighed with relief. Obviously they felt they had enough time to investigate their surroundings more carefully. Time equaled rest, and Henry could certainly use more rest.

  At his annual physical last month, the doc had warned him that Marietta’s homemade lupa-lupa pies might taste like a slice of heaven going down, but the increasing width of his middle placed strain on the natural arteries grafted onto his second synthetic heart. Henry wasn’t faithful enough with his meds to make a difference in his health. If the arteries blew where he didn’t have access to a top flight medical team (like down here in the bowels of Bynaus), he’d bleed out before he hit the ground. A natural optimist, Henry brushed the doc’s concerns aside like so much white noise; those pies brought back sweet memories of his childhood on Betazed, and he wasn’t about to give them up. Besides, in Starfleet JAG, one rarely found the need to maintain his fitness level at a three-point-five-minute-per-

  kilometer pace. Doctors worried too much. Forty years in Starfleet had earned him the right to eat for pleasure, not merely well-being.

  Besides, this trip to Bynaus was supposed to be a routine criminal defense. He was to meet his client, figure out the nature of the misbehavior, and make sure the rights of a Federation citizen were protected. How was he to know he’d be called on to pursue his runaway client through the innards of the planet Bynaus! Talk about feeling like he’d fallen into a second-rate, late-nineteenth-century Earth pulp novel—Digging to the Core of Earth was it? What kind of computer was so important and delicate that they didn’t allow transporter beams within its underground access tunnels anyway?

  The Bynars took a few steps in his direction, using hand motions to wave him up off the floor. Excited chatter passed back and forth between them before one of the Bynars tried to press the tricorder into his hand.

  His five minutes couldn’t be up, he thought grumpily. Henry pushed himself off the floor with a grunt, brushed some schmutz off his uniform, and took the proffered tricorder. His eyes widened. “So this means—?”

  “The missing person has been—”

  “—in the vicinity sometime in the last—”

  “—two hours. We are—”

  “—on the right track,” Henry said, getting the hang of this Bynar speak. He was pleased. The Bynars’ efficient use of time and resources definitely had an upside. The three of them might have wandered through kilometer after kilometer of tunnels for days if they’d hadn’t caught this break. At least now they knew that his client had passed this way and they stood a chance of finding her. Maybe he could convince a pack of the Bynars to emigrate offworld and become JAG investigators.

  “It is blood—”

  “—however. There could be—”

  “—injuries.”

  Damn. Henry closed his eyes, squeezing out the image of his client dying slowly so far away from home. A new resolve filled him. “Let’s get going, shall we?” Reenergized, Henry increased the length of his stride until he outpaced the Bynars; with his longer legs, he should have been leading the way from the start. Thanks to this latest lead, he might be home on Starbase 620 for Marietta’s home cooking within a day or so if he could get this case wrapped up. Assuming the case was straightforward. He sighed. Too bad it was murder. And murder was rarely simple.

  Before…

  Personal Log, Lieutenant Temperance Brewster, Starfleet Personnel Organization

  You’ll never guess where I am. I even have an attaché—Ensign Alban—assigned to help me, a newly promoted junior-grade lieutenant. I can hardly believe what’s happened myself, considering what it took to get me here.

  But wait. I’ll start from the beginning. I haven’t talked about this for a while because there didn’t seem to be a point. The more I thought about the situation, the more irrational it seemed that the higher-ups in my organization seemed unwilling to see what was right in front of their faces! Over the last four months, the stress drove me to gnaw my fingernails down to their nubs. When they started bleeding, I decided to shove my frustration to the back of my mind where it wouldn’t irritate me so much.

  I’m an Academy grad. I know how to handle competition and difficult circumstances. I know this is my first posting, but it’s not like I’ve been a civilian desk jockey for the last ten years and don’t have a clue about life outside my cubicle. There’s a war on, and dammit, I want to be useful. I’ve been bucking for a chance to do some planet-based recruiting—anything that will get help for my friends out there flying around the stars. Nothing like an in-person, face-to-face appeal, I always say, to light a fire under people. We need to be more assertive, get in their faces a bit, appeal to their patriotism. If you don’t give them a reason, no one in their right mind is going to sign up willingly to face the Dominion.

  Too bad it took the destruction of the DiNovia to finally wake this organization up and solve my problem for me. Not my problem—Starfleet’s problem. You’d think that having personnel stretched from one end of the quadrant to the other trying to keep our fleet glued together with spit and good intentions would have been enough to justify stepping up recruiting efforts. But no. Tragedy finally won out over common sense. Too bad that’s what it took to wake up the big brass.

  It’s not like I’m not pragmatic. In every war there are accidents and mistakes. Every time I see a list of friendly fire incidents, it’s all I can do to keep from crawling under my desk and crying until I collapse. Those are my friends out there. The calculations and stats we’ve spent decades perfecting figure in “loss of life” due to error, especially during a war. What I can’t get past is when those errors are preventable.

  The military side, though, covering artillery and weapons—that’s not my job. I help staff science and engineering departments. Whether my people (I think of them as “my people” since I’m the one that aided in assigning them) survive a sneak attack is often dependent on what kind of fancy flying the conn officer can pull off and how accurate the operations and security officers are with their targeting. I feel protective toward my people—I want to do whatever I can to make sure they can do their jobs.

  When I put off my counselor training to join the office of personnel, I assumed the biggest problem I’d have would be convincing the top guys at Daystrom to give up lucrative research positions to join Starfleet’s deep-space recon programs. That assumption was wrong. We’ve finally reached a point in the Dominion War when I’ve had to add variables to my personnel equations to account for having too few people doing too much work. The most common complaint I hear these days is exhaustion. Who isn’t tired during a war? But when my people get tired, big consequences can follow.

  Which brings me back to the destruction of the DiNovia. Captain Met’gi added an additional S.C.E. team to Starbase 511 when it became obvious the existing staff couldn’t handle the nonstop repairs coming in from the front. This poor S.C.E. team was pulled from the frontlines in the Bajoran sector and put straight to work repairing starships whose insides looked like bowls of tangled pasta. After working five straight shifts, the S.C.E. core specialist miscalculated the calibrations for the DiNovia’s coolant fuel ratios by 0.2 percent. The cascading warp core failure happened so quickly, the ship’s chief engineer didn’t have time to react. We lost a hundred and twenty good people in the explosion. Not because of the damnable Dominion, but because we have too few people to han
dle too much work.

  My superiors finally took me up on my suggestion to look for new places to recruit personnel. Though a few individuals expressed reluctance (paranoia still lurks even ten years after the incident with the Enterprise), the board was persuaded by the DiNovia problem that they needed to exhaust more possibilities. Bynaus was an obvious example of an underutilized population.

  Of course Bynars have served in Starfleet since the “appropriation” of the Enterprise from Starbase 74, but we haven’t aggressively sought them out. If a pair wanted to join or serve as civilian advisors, assuming they passed the requirements and were willing to live by the rules, we accepted them the way we’d accept any Federation citizen. The Bynars’ efficiency and skill in working on computers is unparalleled in the Federation. A Bynar pair can diagnose, repair, and upgrade a malfunctioning computer system in a fourth of the time that it takes engineers of other species. That being said, the Bynars aren’t well-known or understood in the Federation because they keep to themselves. Only a small number of them leave Bynaus at any given time, so most Federation citizens can go a lifetime without ever meeting a Bynar pair. No one I know will ever say, aloud, that they think the Bynars are conspiring against the government, or that they present a danger to any of its citizens. But the old–timers around the office, if you get them to talk “unofficially,” will confess that it scares them how easy it was for the Bynars to take the mighty Enterprise, without resistance, right under the noses of the starbase and the Enterprise crew. They deceived Commander Data and Commander La Forge, for Pete’s sake—no small accomplishment! For that reason, there’s always a bit of wariness when dealing with the Bynars. These days, though, circumstances don’t allow us to be so cautious.

  With the number of damaged ships Starfleet faces these days, time is of the essence. Even the shipyards are stretched to beyond their limits. The recruiting board is finally willing to move past their previous misgivings and actively search for Bynars who could help ease the workload of our stressed and strained S.C.E.

  Which brings me to my current location: dada—I’m on the Watson on my way to Bynaus. I’ve never traveled for work before, so I have to confess a bit of a thrill at being able to see more of the Alpha Quadrant. Sure, I’ve done the Mars caverns and made the occasional jaunt to the standard recreation spots around my home colony on Centauri. But this—going on official Starfleet business, with an attaché even, to a place that almost no one goes. It’s so exotic!