8. The Good, the PADD and the Ugly

USS Lobotomy, in orbit around Verbilax XIX

“First Officer’s Log, Stardate 60204.4. Hi computer, it’s me again, boy you wouldn’t believe the day I’ve had! Finished the personnel review with Counsellor Aardman this morning, she really should learn to relax before she ruptures something. I don’t see why my suggestion that we treat the crew to a month on Wrigley’s Pleasure Planet for being so nice to me during my first year as the first officer – I still love the sound of that, Commander G. C. Wall, First Officer of the USS Lobotomy!! So cool! – is such a bad idea, but she went completely nuts at me when I suggested it, so I guess I’ll have to let it slide, for this year at least. Spent the rest of the morning stuck in the command chair – boring! There’s nothing to do! So I relieved the ensign at the helm and took control of the ship myself, spent a great afternoon back at the controls. Captain Critchley didn’t seem in a very good mood when he came up to the bridge, but I’m sure it had nothing to do with me! He kindly gave me the rest of the day off, so then I came down here and started recording this log… guess my day hasn’t really been that exciting after all. Sorry.

Commander Wall deactivated the log recorder and threw himself into a chair, in a huff. He had been on board the Lobotomy for nearly a year now, and, while it was nice to have a bit of a change, he had found life much more interesting on board the Psycho. He now looked back on his memories of those times with great fondness, his subconscious carefully editing events into a more palatable form. He did miss Damerell a bit, they had worked together for years, been through the Academy together, nearly died several times, defeated the Borg… ah well, there would still be shore leave, when they could get them to coincide. He had taken to trying to spice up life on the Lobotomy himself, although so far his attempts had been met with a certain amount of apathy, and in one or two cases outright, burning hatred. How could he have known that Ensign Jv’zzkdy was allergic to whoopee cushions? And as for his April Fool’s joke of landing the ship in the Gobi desert, the less said about that the better.

The Lobotomy appeared to be permanently assigned to missions that never required anyone to leave the ship. She never did any exploration, and was limited to patrolling borders and playing nursemaid to supply runs through hostile territory, none of which, against all odds, had led to any problems whatsoever. They had never met a hostile ship, been absorbed by a giant space amoeba, had a member of the crew kidnapped, been tested by a near omnipotent alien entity, or even had a holodeck malfunction. All of the things that seemed to happen with a nerve-wracking regularity to the Psycho seemed to avoid the Lobotomy like the plague. And it seemed that Captain Critchley liked it that way. Wall, however, was finding that he did not.

Perhaps this new mission would provide some excitement. The Lobotomy had been diverted from its standard patrol to the Federation Advanced Research Facility on Verbilax XIX, to collect a cargo of 20,000 new Type-571 PADDs and to distribute them to certain stations and bases for field testing and quality assurance. Captain Critchley, after a week’s worth of constant pestering from Wall, had eventually reluctantly agreed to allow his first officer to coordinate and organise the distribution of the PADDs. If he played his cards right, it might even involve some shuttle piloting!

As it turned out, that was not to be the case. He, along with the Lobotomy science officer and the cargo bay chief, beamed down to the Research Facility to monitor the transport of the PADDs up to the ship. The science officer, Lieutenant Hannah Cross, was practically bouncing off the walls with excitement. She had a tendency to do that anyway, but now she was practically vibrating.

“New PADDs!! I’m so excited!! These PADDS mark a new era in the field of remote data presentation and manipulation!!!” she squealed as the first batch of PADDs disappeared from the transporter.

Wall regarded her sceptically. “What’s so great about them anyway?”

She stared at him, goggle-eyed in amazement. “You mean you don’t know?! The beginning of a new era in the field of remote data presentation and manipulation-”

“Yes, you said.”

“-and you don’t know?!?!”

Wall shrugged.

Lieutenant Cross dashed across to the loading platform, popped the top off a crate and pulled a PADD. She ran back and shoved it into his hands. He looked it over, turning it this way and that, looking for whatever it was that was so special. Apart from a new colour scheme – ocean grey instead of battleship grey – and a different LCARS layout, it seemed identical to any other PADD he had ever used. When it became obvious he was just going to stand there holding it, she made a little disgusted sound and tapped a control, turning it on.

“Put your thumb on that little panel,” she told him. He did so, and nothing happened.

“Now patch it through to the Facility’s computer system and access their database on… Native Verbilax fauna.”

“Umm…” Wall frowned down at the PADD. He reached out to begin tapping, but she grabbed his arm and shook her head.

“No, just think it,” she smiled happily.

Shrugging to himself, Wall thought hard. Connect to Research Facility database and access data on native fauna.

To his shock, the PADD began to flicker and in barely an instant a detailed encyclopedia with all the information he could ever need on – he glanced at the first entry, did anything actually have that many teeth? – Aaltorgs through to Zxenfreys.

“Wow,” he commented.

“Is that all you can say?!?!” Lieutenant Cross demanded. “It’s a masterpiece of design, a brilliantly conceived and implemented advance of such proportions that it will change the way our computers work forever!!!!”

“It will?”

“Of course!! Just think, being able to control an entire starship with your mind!”

Wall considered that, head tilted to one side. “Nah,” he said finally, “where’s the fun in that?”

Giving him a truly disgusted look, Lieutenant Cross stomped back over to the crates and lovingly placed the PADD back inside.

USS Psycho

“I want to know who turned my doctor into a bluidy raging homicidal maniac!” Olding shouted as he paced behind his desk in his ready room. Counsellor Hill was sat on the other side, watching him pace and worrying about his blood pressure.

“Society?” she suggested, trying to lighten the mood. Something, possibly Olding’s glare, told her that she had failed. The revelation of Jackson’s past as a Section 31 assassin had come as somewhat of a shock to them all, Jackson included. What no-one had worked out yet was how, or why, he had suddenly been reactivated to go on his killing spree. Let alone by whom, since Section 31 had already denied all knowledge. Hill spun Olding’s terminal around and activated it.

“Computer, access security archive, sickbay, two days ago, starting at oh-eight-hundred hours.” They knew that the first death had occurred shortly after that, so it seemed as good a place to start as any. They both watched as Jackson pottered around sickbay, before disappearing into his office. A few moments later he returned, looking very different. His movements were smooth, assured and fluid, betraying his newly-restored training.

“Okay, now display records for the Chief Medical Officer’s office, time index 2234 to 2418. Clearance code Hill-Epsilon-Two-Four-Six-Oh-One.”

The view changed, and Jackson entered his office for the second time, watched from a different viewpoint. He sat and answered what appeared to be a call to his terminal. Hill activated the sound.

“Jackson here.”

“The big cheese flies at midnight.”

Jackson’s eyes glazed, and he stood, exiting his office. The image froze. Hill and Olding looked at each other.

“Seems like a good place to start lass,” Olding said. “Hop to it!”

USS Lobotomy

“First Officer’s Log, Supplemental. Our itininerery for the PADD distribution is as follows: Nine thousand PADDs to Lemal II, five thousand to Hadleigh Station, one thousand to the USS Chesney and the final five thousand to be delivered to Memory Alpha, where I will be meeting up with an old friend. So far all appears to be going smoothly. Wow! That sounded nearly professional, I’m getting better at this!”

The Lobotomy took up orbit around Lemal II, an uninteresting small planet in the Kaja system. Captain Critchley was sat in the command chair, Wall beside him.

“Hurry up then Commander,” Critchley said brusquely, “the sooner we get this done, the sooner we can get out of here. Don’t see why it take a starship to do this anyway…”

“Yes sir,” Wall stood and tried to do an imitation of Hill at his most first-officerish, hands on hips, legs akimbo, head tilted slightly back. Unfortunately Hill was not the best person to study for this sort of thing and, while he managed to make it look reasonable, Wall just looked a bit silly. “Wall to Cargo Transporter One.”

“Cargo One here.”

“Energise.”

There was a moment of silence, and then the chief manning the transporter came back on. “Uh, the transporter won’t work sir. Apparently one of the system buffers is on the blink. It means none of the transporters will work, sorry.”

Wall’s eyes lit up. “Get those PADDs down to the shuttle bay, I’m taking a shuttle!”

The PADDs loaded, taking up every available space, Wall prepared to pilot the shuttle down to the planet. Lieutenant Cross was joining him, taking the co-pilot’s seat. They lifted off relatively smoothly, dislodging only one of the crates. The shuttle sped out of the bay and headed for the planet. Wall has having too much fun being back at the controls of a shuttle again and Cross was still annoyed with him for what he had said earlier, so the flight passed in silence, until they had just entered the atmosphere.

“Uh oh,” Wall tapped hesitantly at his controls.

“What do you mean, ‘Uh oh’,” Lieutenant Cross demanded.

“Well, there’s good news and bad news,” Wall told her, as she noticed that the ground was approaching rather fast. “The bad news is we’ve lost the engines.”

“And the good news?”

“Ah, well, I kinda lied about there being good news.”

The shuttle plunged towards the ground, and Wall realised that without its engines the vessel was supremely badly designed for atmospheric flight. At this point, even a parachute would be welcome.

“Don’t worry!” Wall said manically, “I’ve done this lots of times before!”

He fired the underside thrusters in an attempt to slow their descent and aimed them for the spaceport.

“Kaja Spaceport to shuttle Cerebellum, please adjust your rate of descent.”

“Cerebellum here, don’t you think I would if I could!!” Wall responded.

“Ah.”

“You got it!”

“Please hold.”

“Hold?!?”

Pulling the nose of the shuttle up and managing to direct the shuttle towards their designated landing zone, he shifted the thrusters up to maximum, which would cause a burnout in a relatively short time, but succeeded in further slowing their descent.

“We will impact in one minute,” Lieutenant Cross reported, her voice remarkably steady.

“Spaceport to Cerebellum, if you can slow down any more, we might be able to grab you with our safety tractors and bring you down.”

“Riight,” Wall muttered. He glanced around, and had a thought. “If we make ourselves lighter, the thrusters will be more effective!” His eyes rested on the PADDS, but he dismissed that after a moment’s thought. Starfleet would be more concerned about the loss of the PADDs than their lives, most likely. He glanced at his panel. “Right,” he repeated, more firmly, then proceeded to jettison both mini-nacelles and explosively release the clamps holding the useless impulse engines on. Their descent slowed a little more as the thrusters began to whine painfully. The ground was so close now they could make out people running for cover.

At three hundred meters above ground level two blue beams lanced out of the control tower. One missed but the second latched onto the shuttle, not managing to stop it but slowing it further. The second then managed to get a grip, and bare meters before the shuttle plunged into the concrete the industrial tractor beams forced the shuttle into a flat path, bottom scraping on the ground as they slowed it to a halt so as not to subject its occupants to crushing forces. It came to a halt and Wall and Cross were thrown forwards, cracking their heads against the viewports.

“Ow!”

Wall’s hand hit the console and the rear doors opened, spilling crates of PADDs everywhere. Personnel from the port arrived to start taking them away for the first round of testing. Wall and Cross staggered out of the shuttle and collapsed onto the ground.

“That was exciting,” Wall breathed.

“Mm…”

“How are we going to get back to the ship?” he mused.

“You can always just use our transporters at the port,” one of the port personnel suggested as he pushed a crate past on a grav-unit.

“Why didn’t we use them to beam the PADDs down?!” Wall demanded, sitting up.

The man shrugged. “You launched the shuttle before we could suggest it.”

Wall lay back with a sigh. At least the PADDs had been delivered safely.

USS Psycho

Counsellor Hill was sat in front of the terminal in Jackson’s office, accessing the logs of the received messages. If she could trace the origin of the message that activated Jackson, she would have somewhere to start her investigation. She located the one with the appropriate time/date stamp and examined the appropriate entry. She traced the lines of communication back through a communications array in the Beta Argula system, then to a Federation listening post on the far side of the Beta quadrant, after which it bounced through just about every array or communications station the Federation had between Vulcan and the Romulan border, before making its way back again. Hill sighed. This was going to take a while.

USS Lobotomy

“Coming up on Hadleigh Station,” The ensign manning the helm reported. Wall struggled to sit upright from his slumped position in the command chair.

“What’s the deal with the transporters this time?” he asked, looking over his shoulder at the Operations chief.

They’re fully operational now,” he reported. “Lieutenant Cross has been working flat out to repair them, to avoid another shuttle ride.”

Wall turned back, a little disappointed. After a few moments of silence, the Operations officer cleared his throat. “Uh, should I hail the station?” he asked. Wall looked confused for a moment.

“I guess.”

The station commander, Admiral Connelly, appeared on the viewscreen, an ancient old man with terrible breathing problems. He cleared his throat with a frankly nauseating sound and spoke.

“Can we… wheeze… get this over andcough done with?” he demanded.

“Yes sir,” Wall replied. “Beginning transport now. Wall to Cargo Transporter One, energise.”

“About time!” Lieutenant Cross’ voice came back through the intercom. “Beginning transport.”

Wall waited impatiently for a few seconds. In the background behind the station commander he could see the faint outline of the PADDs beginning to take shape on the station’s transporter. It began to shimmer strangely.

“Uh, the transport is being disrupted!” the Ops chief called out.

“Confirmed,” Cross put in from the transporter room. “We’re losing the annular confinement beam! Attempting to reinforce.” A tense moment of silence. “No good, I’m keeping the pattern in the buffer, but it won’t last forever. We need some options!”

Wall stared disbelievingly at the fluctuating image on the viewscreen. First the shuttle, now this. He was starting to think the mission was cursed or… his thoughts trailed off as he tried to piece together the events of the past few days. Something was odd about them, but he could not quite put his finger on what it was. Pulling himself back to the matter at hand, he made a suggestion.

“Can’t we just pull the PADDs back here?”

“Negative!” Cross answered. “The signal processors are unstable, if we try to do that we’ll just get a pile of debris. The only way to get whole, working PADDs is to push them to the end of the transport process… which is pretty much impossible right now.”

“Sir,” the Ops chief said hesitantly, “what about if we reduced the scope of the beam, to just materialise them outside the ship, rather than all the way to the planet? It’d require less power, so we could realign the confinement beam.” Wall stared at him blankly.

“Lieutenant Cross?” he asked, hoping someone had understood the man.

“Well…” she said doubtfully, “I don’t know…”

“Is it worth a try?”

“I suppose.”

The image on the viewscreen switched to a point just on the outside of the vessel, and a transporter beam began to coalesce. Wall breathed a sigh of relief, then went tense again as the beam started to waver as before.

“It’s no good!” Lieutenant Cross called up.

The Ops chief was frowning at his console. “You need to re-set the gain on the de-limiters, it’s still set for long range!”

“What?” Cross demanded.

“Here, I’ll do it!” The officer’s hands flew over his controls and, finally, the PADDs appeared, intact. Wall collapsed into his chair. All this transporting was taking it out of him. He was going to go and have a lie down. Abruptly the station commander’s image appeared on the viewscreen.

“We’ll… wheeze take it from here, Lobwheezeotomy. Go away and try not to make any other cawheeze tascoughtrowheezephic errors wheeze understand?”

“Uh, yeah, okay.”

Wall turned the bridge over to the Ops chief and hurried for the turbolift. He was beginning to think that someone did not want these PADDs to reach their destinations, and he was planning to find out who it was.

USS Psycho

“Well, it’s a bigger job than I expected,” Barfoot told Counsellor Hill, drawing a breath in through his teeth, “we’ll need specialist equipment and everything. It’ll take at least a week.”

“Stop arsing about and get on with it!” she ordered him, and he gave a little grin.

“Just kidding,” he said, “now let’s see what you’ve got here then.”

Hill had called Barfoot in when the path she had been tracing through a whole slew of subspace relays and multispectral transmitter pods (she had never even heard of them before today, let alone knew how they worked!) seemingly diverged, coming from two sources simultaneously. Trying to deal with that was beyond her capabilities and, what with the Psycho currently being a little lacking with science personnel, she had called on Barfoot to help out.

“Hmm,” he muttered, examining her previous traces to ensure they were correct. “Well, our first option is that it’s somehow been mirrored at this point, making it look like it comes from two different sources. It’s not that hard to do, actually, a simple matter of bouncing the signal and incorporating a little destination-source remapping code, which could then bounce around happily for days, even weeks.” He studied the messages thoughtfully. “The thing with that, though, is that the code leaves a trace of itself in the relay station, no matter how clever the programming is.” Hill wondered briefly how Barfoot knew so much about something that was, essentially, illegal, but decided against asking. He frowned and manipulated the controls some more.

“Well, I can’t find anything. That either means our sender is tremendously skilful, or he didn’t do it this way. Hold on,” he said then, squinting at the information. “This message,” he pointed at one of the trace options, “arrived nearly a week before the other one.”

“Couldn’t the time have been altered as well?” Hill asked.

Barfoot shook his head. “Nah, the time/date stamp is hardcoded into the relay’s matrix. Nothing short of… well, nothing can change that.” He pondered. “Let’s have a look at the message that was sent from here.”

He called it up and whistled. “See, it was produced from code from both of the messages we were looking at. When the second one arrived it started a buried program – look, you can see in the relay’s databanks where that happened – and produced this message to send on.”

Hill slumped in her chair. Chances were these messages originated from completely different places, and given how long it had taken her to track the one message this far, she dreaded to think how long it would take to track both…

“Right, the first one came from a moon base around Alpha Centauri, the second from Vulcan.”

Hill stared at him in amazement. “How did you do that?” she demanded.

“I just changed the settings to display the full header information rather than the shortened version.”

Hill slapped her forehead and then rubbed it, wincing. She slammed her fist down on the desk. “Now what?!” she shouted. “We’ve hit a dead end!”

Barfoot considered the terminal thoughtfully. “Not entirely. For that code to be run in the relay to combine the messages, you’d need fairly high access privileges. That’d leave its traces all over the place, and even if they’ve cleared up after themselves, a direct scan should be able to recreate the data we need.”

Hill slapped her commbadge. “Hill to Bridge.”

“Aye Counsellor?” Olding’s voice came back.

“Set course for Relay Station 43872-Alpha. We’re getting close to tracking down our mysterious enemy.”

“About bluidy time!”

USS Lobotomy

Wall had spent the last day trying without success to piece together the puzzle that would reveal who it was who was trying to sabotage his efforts to deliver the PADDs to their destinations. He stared down at the old-style PADD he had written his notes down on. It started promisingly enough with ‘Suspicious incidents’ at the top, a short list including the malfunctioning transporters and the shuttle losing power. He then tried to compile a list of suspects, but that stalled when he realised he couldn’t think of anyone. He’d then jotted down a couple of random song lyrics, scribbled ‘I am a fish’ a few times and drawn a picture of himself in a shuttle decimating a Jem’Hadar fleet. At least, that was what it was meant to be. Now he looked again, it looked more like a llama holding a shotgun blasting at a herd of stampeding wildebeest.

The penultimate delivery of PADDs was due to take place in an hour, to the Starfleet research vessel USS Chesney. Wall, lacking anything better to do, wandered down to Cargo Bay Two, where the last batches of PADDs were being kept. He found Lieutenant Cross down there as well. She looked up, a little startled, as he entered, a look of dislike coming into her eyes as he walked up, which was quickly removed.

“How’s it hanging, Lieutenant?” he asked, peering over her shoulder at the PADD she was holding. She quickly shut it down.

“None of your business,” she snapped. “Can I help you?”

He shrugged, his normally vacant mind for once primed to process and analyse information, making him wonder what on earth she was doing with schematics of the ship.

“I’m bored,” he admitted, idly lifting the lid of one of the crates, snatching his fingers out of the way just in time as she slammed it closed.

“Surely there must be someone else you can go and annoy?” She stalked to the other end of the cargo bay towards the large doors, leaving Wall to wander after her. He followed her around the bay for the next few minutes as she seemingly randomly opened and closed various crates.

“You’re the First Officer,” she finally said when it became obvious he was not going to leave her alone, “surely there are a hundred things you should be doing!”

“Yeah,” Wall agreed, “but they’re all seriously dull.”

She gave him a withering look and turned back to what she was doing to the control panel on the door.

“What’re you doing?” he asked curiously.

“Routine check,” she said dismissively. “The Captain hasn’t decided how he wants to effect the delivery of these PADDs to the Chesney, and I’m just making sure nothing can happen to them in the meantime.”

Wall stared at the blinking red light on the panel, which eventually changed to a steady green one. He glanced up to find Lieutenant Cross had vanished, and heard the small door at the far end of the bay close. He jogged down the length of it to catch up with her, and slammed right into the door, which stubbornly refused to open for him. Clutching his nose, he eyed the door in bewilderment.

“Computer, why won’t the door open?” he asked.

“The door to Cargo Bay Two will not open because it is locked,” the computer replied.

“Can you unlock it for me?”

“Unable to comply. The door has been locked with a security clearance code.”

This was getting ridiculous. “I’m the First Officer! I demand you let me out!”

“Please state the correct clearance code,” the computer intoned.

“I don’t know the sodding code!!” he shouted.

“Incorrect.”

A thought occurred to him. “Who set the code?”

“Chief Science Officer Hannah Cross.”

Another thought at the back of his mind was trying to make itself heard, namely the answer to the question, ‘Why would Lieutenant Cross lock me in the cargo bay?’

“Warning: Cargo bay doors opening. Depressurisation in one minute,” the computer interrupted his thoughts as an alarm began to sound.

“What?!?” Wall spun round to see warning lights flashing at the far end of the massive room. The intercom sounded.

“Bridge to Cargo Bay Two,” Critchley’s voice echoed, nearly drowned out by the sirens.

“Wall here,” he answered.

“What on earth is going on down there?” the captain demanded.

“I wish I knew!” Wall replied. “Lieutenant Cross locked me in here, and then this happened! Stop it!!”

“We can’t,” Critchley said, “our controls have been bypassed. The only way to do it is from the inside.”

“I can’t do that!!” Wall shrieked, his eyes falling on one of the crates. “Unless…”

He ripped the lid off and grabbed one of the brand spanking new PADDS.

“Depressurisation in thirty seconds,” the computer pointed out as Wall pressed his thumb onto the sensor panel and stared fixedly at the PADD, one thought going around in his mind.

Close doors to Cargo Bay Two… Close doors to Cargo Bay Two…

Before his eyes the screen on the PADD glowed into life, and he could make out it accessing various commands and functions in about a tenth of the time it would have taken him, had he known what to do in the first place.

“Ten seconds…” the computer said, and then beeped. “Depressurisation halted. Doors returning to standard configuration.”

The sirens stopped and Wall breathed a deep sigh of relief, collapsing against the crate. He looked down into it and froze.

“Good work Commander!” Critchley called down the intercom, sounding pleasantly surprised. When there was no reply he repeated, “Commander.”

“Um,” Wall said hesitantly, staring down into the crate at the flashing lights and fairly self-explanatory countdown timer merrily ticking off the seconds. As he watched it crossed over five minutes. “Anyone up there know how to defuse a bomb?”

USS Psycho

“Well?” Olding demanded as he stormed out of his ready room onto the bridge. Hill stood from the command chair.

“We’re six minutes closer to our destination than we were the last time you asked, sir,” she said in response, pausing as the ship dropped out of warp, “which means we’ve arrived.”

As the Psycho took up a stationary position next to Relay Station 43872-Alpha Hill and Barfoot clustered around one of the science stations at the back of the bridge.

“This is a heck of a lot easier when we have direct access to the systems rather than having to go in over a remote connection,” Barfoot commented. They all waited with tense patience as his fingers dances over the smooth control panel, eyes fixed on the information scrolling on the screen in front of him. He muttered to himself as he worked.

“Come on Petey… there’s the message… hmm… okay.. la lala… ooh!”

“What is it?” Hill peered at the screen.

“Cramp,” Barfoot told her, reaching down to massage his calf. “Okay, here we are, there’s the message and the high priority access code used was… this one.” He pointed at a seemingly random jumble of symbols on the screen and Hill stared at it blankly. She had never seen it before, but when Olding stepped up and peered at it she saw a frown of recognition cross his face.

“You know it sir?” she asked curiously.

He nodded. “Of sorts,” he admitted. “It’s t’style that was used for high privilege access accounts eighty-odd years ago when I took command o’ the first Psycho.”

“Surely it should have been decommissioned?” Hill remarked, and Olding nodded.

“Aye, but this relay station is bluidy old and pretty damned remote, so if someone wanted to give themselves a backdoor into the system…”

“It would be the perfect place to put it,” Hill mused. “But who’s going to have access to that sort of information? I mean, all discontinued command codes and the like are wiped from every system in Starfleet except…” her eyes widened.

“Aye lass,” Olding nodded as she reached the same conclusion he had. “There’s only one place in the Federation this kind of information can be found.”

USS Lobotomy

Wall was sweating heavily as he bent over the device that he had been informed, having described it to the listening officers, was large enough to destroy most of that section of the ship. So far they had discovered that the new PADDs could not interface with the bomb, that this particular crate had been bolted to the floor so it would not be blown out with the others when the bay depressurised and that Lieutenant Cross had also disabled access to the cameras and booby trapped the Jeffries tubes. She had been a busy girl, it seemed.

“Any and all suggestions would be appreciated,” Wall called out as the device hit the one minute mark.

“Stick your comm badge on it so we can beam it into space in a local-area beam,” someone on the bridge shouted through the intercom.

“Genius!” Wall exclaimed, ripping his badge off and slapping it on the crate before yelling, “Energise!”

The crate, and a fair chunk of the floor it was bolted to, disappeared in a swirl of blue as the door opened and Lieutenant Cross stormed into the bay. Wall took one look at her wild eyes and in the interest of self-preservation turned tail and ran like buggery.

“I’m going to kill you!!!” she screamed as she took off after him, reaching out with her hands as she closed on him. The ship shuddered as the bomb exploded outside in the vacuum of space, making Wall stumble. They managed a full circuit of the bay with the deranged science officer closing all the time.

“Computer!” Wall shouted as he approached the now-unlocked doorway, “Override Wall-One-Two-Three-Four-Five, open door and close it immediately!”

The door slid open and he desperately dove through it, his feet just clearing the threshold as it hummed closed again. There was a sickening crunch as his pursuer failed to stop in time and impacted with the other side of the door. Wall got to his feet and leant against the side of the corridor as Captain Critchley and a couple of security guards appeared.

“Report!”

“Lieutenant Cross is bonkers sir!” Wall said, gasping for breath. “She just tried to kill me!” He crossed to the door and hesitantly opened the door. Lieutenant Cross was sprawled on the floor, unconscious. Critchley frowned down at her.

“Something strange is going on here,” he grumbled. “Get me some answers, Commander!”

“Um,” Wall looked confused, “how, sir?”

“I don’t know! Use your imagination!”

“Oh God, please, no more,” Lieutenant Cross moaned. She was tied to a chair in the Lobotomy‘s bowling alley-themed mess hall, the Golden Turkey. The place was currently empty, the lanes dark. There were a startling number of empty plates stacked on the table in front of her, and she was slumped against her restraints. Wall moved to the replicator.

“Another greasy yuck-burger,” he ordered, and the replicator beeped.

“Warning. This is the fifteenth greasy yuck-burger you have ordered in the last half hour. Consumption of more than one greasy yuck-burger a day is considered damaging to your health.”

“Acknowledged. Override Wall-One-Two-Three-Four-Five.”

The plate appeared on the tray and he took it over to the table.

“I’ll never talk,” Cross groaned, eyeing the burger with no small look of fear. Ignoring her, Wall shoved the burger, dripping with fatty goodness, into her mouth and forced her to eat it all, including the bits of salad that fell out onto the plate. When he was done, he released her from the chair and dragged her to the door.

“Where are we going?” she asked, clutching her stomach.

“I’m going to take you on a little shuttle ride,” Wall told her, thoroughly enjoying the horrified look she gave him.

Wall had overlooked one minor point of the plan, he realised as he threw the shuttle into yet another inertial-dampener overloading manoeuvre. The sounds of Lieutenant Cross being violently ill in the rear cabin was making him feel a little queasy himself. Plus the cleaning bill for the upholstery was going to be horrendous.

He pulled the shuttle to a halt and walked into the rear, feet squelching slightly on the damp, sticky carpet.

“Ready to talk?” he asked, holding his nose. Cross looked up at him with red-rimmed eyes and started to spill her guts. Metaphorically, anyway. She had already done it literally more than once. Wall listened to her story with growing disbelief, and when she had finished he hurried to the intercom.

“Wall to Lobotomy.”

“Go ahead Commander,” Critchley answered.

“How long until the rendezvous with the Chesney sir?” he asked.

“They should be here in about five minutes, why?”

“And after that, how long until we reach Memory Alpha?”

“About two hours. Commander, what is going on?” Critchley demanded irritably.

“I’ll tell you everything I know when I get back on board,” Wall told him, “but it’s really important we get to Memory Alpha as quickly as possible,” he added. “That’s where this whole thing started.”

To be concluded…