Star Trek - Outwardly Mobile
The Big Jump
by
Jay P. Hailey
The kid had a scar across his face and a mean look. As he came and sat down in the conference room I saw more scarring on his arms.
His muscles were stringy but dense. I instinctively took a dislike to him. He scared me a little bit. I bit down on the feeling.
He grinned at me and the grin was just wrong for his face. "You're Captain Hailey?" He asked me.
I nodded slightly "Pleased to meet you. You're…"
"I am Mission Commander Barak." He said.
I blinked at him. This kid was somewhere between 17 and 20 years old. "Ah, pleased to meet you Commander Barak."
His hair was short. He carried himself with dignity. But to me he seemed like a street rat from a frontier world. "We're very pleased to meet you." He said looking at me carefully. "You see we're in serious trouble."
"We have noticed." I said soothingly. "If we can help, we will."
T'Sing walked into the briefing room and handed a PADD to Kamaline.
"We encountered a brown dwarf in our path." Barak explained. "It has destroyed our whole mission profile. My ship is off course so drastically I don't see any way to recover the mission."
Kamaline looked at the PADD intently.
"We have access to some technology that you don't, yet." I said. "I believe we can help. May I ask what your mission profile is?"
"We're colonizers, Captain. We're on our way to found a new home for my people." Barak said.
"There is a lot I don't understand about your ship." I said. I called up scans on the big display screen. "Your ship is stressed. You life support and recycling systems are near failure. My analysis indicates that it couldn't be intended to last more than twenty years at the outside."
Kamaline got up
Barak nodded. "That is correct. We have a limited amount of life support left."
I squinted at him "There's no way your ship has come this far in twenty years or could get anywhere else in that amount of time."
Barak nodded. "This is inherent in the design Captain. We were certain when this mission was planned that faster than light propulsion was not possible."
"But…" Kamaline tapped me on the shoulder. "Captain, you should see this."
I took the PADD and looked at it. It was a scan of Barak taken as he beamed aboard. The thing that caught my eye immediately was the crystal imbedded in his brain, with delicate tenrils of wire stretching everywhere in his brain.
"Ummm, Commander Barak, do you feel quite alright?" I asked carefully. This was bad. I was reminded of Borg implants or the mind control units used in the AI war. I called up a text messaging window on the PADD and sent a priority message to Lt Zuma to call a Security alert.
He looked at me intently for a moment and then grinned. "Your sensors must be very good indeed."
"Would you care to explain?" I asked.
"Our mission would take hundreds of years. We doubted that a generation ship could make it intact. We had no way to preserve our bodies reliably for that period of time." Barak said.
Kamaline tapped some of the display I peered at it. "Go ahead."
"But we did have technology to store memories, all the ineffable parts of one's self . The crystal in my brain is the stored memory of someone you might call the Original Barak. My current body is a clone. Grown and raised with the crystal inside, and connections growing and forging as my new self grew and matured." Barak explained
This is what Kamaline was pointing to. The scan had elements that Doctor Burlington highlighted and noted indicated a clone.
"When my new body was suitably mature, my stored memories were activated and I came back to life in a newer, younger body." Barak smiled, pleased with his people's technology.
"What about the scars?" I asked him.
Barak sobered. "Apparently the mechanisms we'd set for raising the clones were imperfect. We discovered they'd cast off civilization, as presented for them by automated systems, and had become quite feral. All of this ended when the original identities were activated."
I held his gaze while my stomach rolled.
"Do you have any memories of the pre-activation identities of the clones?" Kamaline asked.
Barak nodded. "Oh yes. My new brain is fully functional." He looked grim. "The memories are unpleasant. It was quite a task wresting control away from the savage who'd grown up in my place. I fear he'll be with me always. I am working on a bit of a temper control problem."
He smiled again "However, My control is solid and now, you have come to rescue us from certain death. Certainly things are looking up."
I grinned insincerely. "Yes. Yes, we'll help you."
-*-
Marcella Burlington looked at me carefully. "You're really going to help these monsters?"
I took a bite of my scrambled eggs. "Yes."
Marcella looked at me. "Do you want to?"
I looked at her for a moment. "No. They're good, old fashioned mind controlled zombies. Lucky for us, because I get the feeling the original personality on that clone would have gutted me as soon as look at me. I'm not certain how much control the Barak personality had in there."
"But we're going to anyway."
I didn't want to think about it. It made me sort of sick. But there was no other way around it. "They're going to have children someday. These kids will be screwed up but not as badly as these people."
"Unless they have more crystals."
I blinked at her. "The alternative is putting the Discovery in gear, flying away and leaving them to gasp and die. I don't know that I can do that."
She looked at me. "You did it to Agricorp and Colacorp."
I stared at her for a while.
"I was wrong." I said.
Burlington touched my hand "You can't save every patient."
"Yeah, but I feel better when I try." I said.
She stood up and nodded at me and then left
I continued working on a plan to tow the sublight colonizer to someplace less
than suicidal for her crew.
-end-
Disclaimer: Paramount owns all things Trek. I claim original characters and
situations in this story for me.
