Star Trek Chapter 01
The scan alarm woke Justin up. The panel above his rack already had the readouts-it was a Federation signature. Justin relaxed, if it had been a Klingon he'd expect to be detained for a few days, until their purposely inefficient trade bureaucracy verified his registration that allowed him to prospect the Neutral Zone. The Federation could be just as much of a pain in the ass-if he happened to be smuggling. As it was, he had finished off his last liter of Romulan ale two days ago and he never smuggled things into the Klingon Empire; that was just plain stupid.
He rolled out of bed and, rubbing a tight muscle in the back of his neck, went to the pilot station and sat down. The scans continued, these less obtrusive, just making sure he was still there. It only took a couple of minutes before the star field off to his right shimmered, there was a flash, and a Liwei class corvette dropped out of warp about ten thousand kilometers away. The hale came immediately.
"Unidentified vessel, this is the Federation Corvette Vladimir Komarov. Please identify yourself and your mission."
Well, at least he was being polite. Justin opened the link and a gold shirted Lieutenant Commander (human) appeared on the screen.
"This is Cooper's Revenge," Justin replied. "I'm out here prospecting."
"You're not squawking your registration data, I have to request that you send it over."
"Sure." Justin brought up the folder, then moved it to the Transmit icon and pressed 'execute.' The Federation officer looked down and someone off screen said, "Look's legit Captain." He looked back up at Justin.
"We were following a trail of a cloaked ship coming from Klingon space. They seemed to be having problems...it looked like they couldn't control their fuel mixture...then it petered out. It was pointed right for this system. It might have been a smuggler. Have you been into Klingon space recently?"
"You've got my logs and you can see it wasn't me."
"We were just thinking there might be someone in trouble out here," the Lieutenant Commander replied. "You might want to keep an eye open." He paused, "You're pretty far out, do you require anything?"
"Naw. I'll be heading back towards Deep Space 7 here in a couple of days. So far this trip has been a bust. I'll keep an eye open for your troubled cloaked ship." He had to smile at his little joke, the Starfleet officer didn't.
"I'll bet," the Lieutenant Commander said with a smile, "nice piece of salvage."
"I'd just take the cloaking device and leave the rest," Justin replied.
"Right," was the response. They both knew that civilian vessels were forbidden from using cloaking devices. "We'll be reporting your location in our routine logs, of course. When can they expect you at DS-7? That way they can be keeping an eye out for you."
"I haven't filed a flight plan," Justin said, "and I'd prefer to keep it that way."
"Risky," the Lieutenant Commander responded. "No one would know to come looking for you..."
"Tell you what, Commander, just put it in your report that I'm heading back to DS-7 in a few days. If anyone starts looking for me they'll find the report in any query about my ship. This way it'll be informal and no one will come looking for me if I change my mind."
"Understood." The officer looked annoyed. "Is there anything else we can do for you?"
"Yeah, have you seen any Klingon action in the area? I usually try to stay clear of their patrols.
"Nothing out of the unusual."
"No one chasing your cloaked ship?" Justin asked.
"No," the Commander responded. "Whoever it is they haven't been seen or they're letting them go."
"You think it's a spy?" Justin asked an obvious question that he knew had already been discussed on the Corvette.
"The Klingons are too careful, you know that."
"I guess so," Justin replied. "Anyway, I'll turn over my logs when I get to DS-7."
"Mr. Cooper, you have been good about that in the past."
"I try to stay on the right side of the law," he replied.
"That's what our records say," the Commander said with a smile that implied he didn't believe it-the records also detailed his less than successful stint in Star Fleet.
With the usual pleasantries they parted but not before Justin heard someone off screen say that a course to Aldebaran was laid in.
As soon as they'd gone into warp, Justin pulled up the charts of the Canus system, wondering where a broken ship might hide. Canus was a red dwarf so it'd be pretty shy of heavy elements. Two planets, mostly achdritic-nothing he'd be too interested in unless there was a salvage fee to be had. It was a long shot to stop there except that these old, light star systems often had dilithum deposits in their asteroids and, occasionally, an impact would push it into crystals. He hadn't found any though.
He had ignored the two planets-they had undoubtedly been closely surveyed-instead he had been poking around the three asteroid belts that circled the star. Now he turned his attention to the planets. They were both terrestrial; small rocks with thin carbon dioxide and methane atmospheres. One had an average surface temperature of 183 C and the other was down to -15C. He picked the cooler one.
On impulse, it'd take two days to get there so he decided to use the energy for a warp jump. He'd come to envy, and resent, the Starfleet ships that could gather their own antimatter from the interstellar void. Only the richest people, and governments, could afford shipboard scale collectors with their fabulously expensive dilithum crystal catalytic concentrators-each crystal a million times larger than the puny, almost invisible, things used to direct his fuel to the reaction chamber. The rest of the flunkies had to buy antimatter from energy conglomerates. A warp jump took a lot of energy while two days at impulse would barely register against his power reserves- time literally is money.
He was in orbit 20 minutes later. The charts of the place were pretty good and, sure enough, a quick scan of the surface turned up an anomalous heat source and a close look through the telescope confirmed the wreck of a small Klingon trader- sometimes called a "bird of pay" as they were patterned after the larger and much more dangerous Klingon light warships. There were no signs of life, so he took the Revenge down and landed a kilometer away. He suited up and walked over, unaware that he was being watched by a remote that had landed three kilometers away from the wreck.
The ship was mostly intact, but it had been a pretty beat-up unit before the crash landing. A fire in the central control had taken care of the two Klingons-they were both unrecognizable charred blobs of purple goo. The cargo holds were empty and the dilithum crystals were too pitted to be any immediate use. He was able to score three grams of antimatter. And, sure enough, there was a strange luminous tube that formed a housing around the feed for the deflector array and, hooked up to that, was some sort of controller with Romulan markings. Adapting the Romulan cloaking device to a Klingon ship must have been quite a trick, and Cooper had no idea how to install it on his ship (itself built at Alpha Ceti).
It took him three hours to tear out the cloaking device and its associated equipment. He then rummaged around in the engineering control computers and removed every piece of memory he could find-hopefully somewhere in there the cloak's driver software was stored. He had to go back to Revenge to get a carryall to transport the stuff back.
After six hours on the planet, Revenge lifted off and, forty-five minutes later, jumped into warp on a course to Thata Eridni, the only place Cooper figured he'd find someone to install the thing. It'd drain his bank account but the potential profits were too good to pass up.
As he immerged from the atmosphere he was tracked by the long range sensors of the Komarov. It was too far away for Cooper to see it, but watchful eyes were very aware of every one of Cooper's moves.
"There he goes, Captain Spock," Leutenant Commander Munroe said to the Vulcan standing next to him. Munroe was visibly nervous, having the Star Fleet Attache' to Vulcan, himself holding the rank of Captain (reserve), not to mention such a famous person, on board was definitely stressful.
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