Star Trek: The Original Series: The Rings of Time

2020

They found the stowaway waiting for them on the lower level of the habitat module. The crew’s personal quarters were one deck above, while the mid-deck was a common area that served as gym, infirmary, galley, and general rec room. Sealed cupboards and pantries lined the walls. A treadmill was there for exercise. Circular windows offered a view of the endless void outside, but Shaun wasn’t interested in sightseeing right then. He stared instead at someone who, to put it mildly, was not supposed to be there.

“Whoa,” she said, tumbling in the air just below the ceiling. From the look of things, she was still trying to get the hang of navigating without gravity. She grabbed onto a hanging guide loop to arrest her uncontrolled flight. She groped in vain for a smart tablet floating nearby. “This is trickier than it looked on YouTube.”

The stowaway was a petite Hispanic woman who appeared to be in her twenties. A neon-blue streak added flair to her dark brown hair and bangs. A floating ponytail wagged back and forth with every movement of her head. Her tank top and shorts set her apart from the astronauts in their standard-issue jumpsuits. As she rotated head over heels above them, Shaun glimpsed a tattoo at the nape of her neck. It was a series of concentric rings.

“Who are you?” he demanded. Grabbing her ankle to keep her from spinning away, he yanked her down until they were face-to-face. His own foot was tucked into a loop in the floor, holding him in place. “And how did you get aboard my ship?”

“Zoe Querez,” she introduced herself. “Colonel Christopher, I presume? Pleased to meet you at last.” She nodded at the other two astronauts floating behind him. “Captain Fontana. Dr. O’Herlihy.” She held out her hand. “I’ve read so much about you, watched so many videos, that I feel like I already know you all.”

“Are you freaking kidding me?” Fontana looked as if she wanted to throttle the stowaway. “You think this is some sort of goddamn meet-and-greet?”

Shaun ignored the woman’s outstretched hand. He shared Fontana’s outrage. How dare this glib intruder screw up their mission and treat the whole thing like a joke? He fought to keep his temper under control.

“You have a lot of explaining to do,” he said sternly. “Start talking.”

“All right,” she replied, dropping some of the flippant attitude. “I can see where my being here must be a bit of a shock.”

“To say the least,” O’Herlihy said drily.

She tried to snag the tablet as it drifted by. “Short version: I’m an investigative blogger. Maybe you’ve read my work?” She searched their faces hopefully, only to be disappointed. Shaun had never heard of her. She sighed before continuing. “And I crashed your party to get the scoop of the millennium and to find out the real story behind this trip.”

“Real story?” O’Herlihy echoed. “What do you mean?”

“Never mind that right now,” Shaun said. At the moment, he was less interested in her motives than in how exactly she had pulled this off in the first place. “How did you get aboard this ship?”

“Sorry,” she said. “I can’t divulge my sources. Journalistic ethics and all.”

“Ethics?” Fontana said incredulously. “You’ve com-promised a historic, multi-billion-dollar mission that’s been years in the making, and you have the nerve to talk about ethics?” She confiscated the runaway tablet, which apparently belonged to the intruder. “I ought to cram your First Amendment rights up your—”

“Easy, Fontana,” Shaun interrupted. “We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

He tried to figure it out. The stowaway could not have ridden up in a cargo bay, since those weren’t pressurized or equipped for life support, so she must have been smuggled aboard via the Renaissance or one of the other ships servicing the Lewis & Clark while it was being prepped for departure. Maybe a Russian Soyuz capsule or one of the French construction crews? In any event, she could not have managed that without inside help, probably from one or more persons involved in the Lewis & Clark’s construction and assembly. Shaun shook his head at the very idea. Even with well-placed accomplices, the difficulties involved in slipping an extra person into space boggled his mind, but clearly this “Zoe Querez” had managed somehow. There’s going to be a hell of an investigation when this gets out, he thought. Heads will roll.

Maybe even his.

“Are you nuts?” Fontana accused her. “We can’t take on an extra passenger. Everything has been calculated for three people. The food, the weight, the oxygen, you name it.” She threw up her hands in exasperation. “This is crazy.”

“Please!” the stowaway shot back. “You think I didn’t do my homework? I know that this mission was planned with wide safety margins, just in case something went wrong way out past Mars or wherever. You’ve got food, air, and water to spare. We’re not talking a ‘Cold Equations’ scenario here.”

Shaun caught the reference. She was citing a classic old science-fiction story in which an unlucky stowaway had to be jettisoned from a crucial space mission that had absolutely no margin for error. She was right about one thing: this Saturn mission was a lot less precarious than that fictional space flight. The ship’s chemical fuel cells produced more than enough water for their purposes, weight was less of an issue since they hadn’t needed to achieve escape velocity, and as for food, well, NASA didn’t intend them to starve to death if one of the refrigerated pantries went on the fritz.

“Listen, you freeloader,” Fontana said. “If you think you’re eating any of my share, think again. I’m not doing without because some irresponsible gate crasher snuck in where she didn’t belong.”

“That’s not going to be a problem,” Querez said. “If you check your cargo bay, you’ll find enough frozen dinners to sustain me for the trip and enough missing cargo to make up the weight difference.”

“Missing cargo?” Shaun didn’t like the sound of that. “What are you talking about? Every bit of that equipment was vitally important to this ship’s mission.”

“Yeah, right,” she said sarcastically. “Like that time capsule from Ms. Hultquist’s third-grade class at Thomas Jefferson Elementary School, the one with the large bronze plate with Senator Plummer’s name on it?” She rolled her eyes. “C’mon, we all know that was a boondoggle to get one last vote on that funding bill. Somehow I think science will survive if you don’t drop a crate of glorified souvenirs — including, as I recall, a school yearbook, a Bible, several personal letters and drawings, an autographed football, various stuffed animals and action figures, flash drives, CDs, baby teeth, and a complete set of Harry Potter novels — into orbit around Saturn for all eternity.”

Touche, Shaun thought. He recalled posing for a photo op with the senator back in her hometown in Kansas City. At the time, it had seemed a small price to pay for a crucial vote in the Senate. “I take it the time capsule didn’t make it aboard?”

“Not exactly,” she admitted, “although there’s a package with all the right markings. And you know all those orchid bulbs that big perfume company sponsored?”

“I get the idea,” Shaun said curtly. “You seem to have thought this all out, Ms. Querez.”

“Please,” she insisted. “Call me Zoe.”

Fontana snorted. “That’s not what I was planning to call you.”

“You said something about the ‘real story’ behind our mission,” O’Herlihy recalled. “What did you mean by that?”

“Like you don’t know,” she challenged him. “I mean, all of a sudden, we have to go to Saturn, even though Mars and Jupiter are much closer to Earth? Hell, Saturn is twice as far from the sun as Jupiter is, but we’re going there first? You really expect people to buy that?”

“We’ve explained that before,” Shaun said. “Dozens of times. Jupiter has a far more dangerous radioactive field, and Saturn just happens to be in alignment right now, or will be by the time we get there. We miss this chance, it’s another thirty years before it comes around our way again. If ever we want to check out Saturn and its moons, now’s the time.”

“Plus, there’s the comet,” Fontana reminded him.

“That’s right,” Shaun said. He’d gone over this in countless press conferences, so he knew the spiel by heart. “Hubble has spotted a previously unknown comet approaching Saturn. It should be passing by the planet about the time we arrive. How could we pass up an opportunity like that? It’s a two-fer.”

“Sure, sure, that’s the official story,” Zoe said skeptically, “and I’m certain it’s true enough as far as the space science goes. Thirty-year solar revolution, dangerous Jovian radiation, incoming comet, yada, yada. But that’s