Mea Culpa: The Folly of My Days

[Tachyon 0]

“Mea Culpa: The Folly of My Days”

Stardate 0607.29

Lieutenant Tandaris Admiran

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The result on the computer screen caused him to go completely pale. His body stiffened as it would if anticipating some sort of attack. He could feel his palms sweating as they gripped the rounded edge of the console with alarm. It was impossible. How could—what could cause it? Surely he was not doing anything to cause it.

 

So why was the signal emanating from his quarters?

 

Tandaris looked around engineering. Then got out a repair kit and left abruptly, heading for deck 4. His need for discovery had just gotten personal.

 

When he arrived at his quarters, they admitted him easily enough—apparently they were still his quarters. He put the repair kit down on his desk and opened it, then took out a tricorder and reconfigured it to interface with the ship's internal sensors. It started to beep as it traced the source of the low-level gamma radiation used by whatever was causing the gel-pak malfunctions. Nothing on his bed. Nothing near the desk. He brought it past the storage locker, and suddenly it beeped with a passion.

 

There it is. The shop on Al-Ucard. The alien trinket. You're an idiot, Tandaris.

 

Mottled black and green, organic in its very design, it now blinked with a deadly sinister purpose, its rim glowing magenta. As soon as Tandaris laid eyes on it he knew that it was the source of the problems.

 

Bought from a merchant on Al-Ucard, Tandaris had thought it interesting but quite innocuous. He had obviously be wrong—very wrong. After so much inactivity, it was somehow alive and transmitting instructions now on nearly undetectable frequencies. So much for security.

 

“Okay, that's not good,” Tandaris said to himself—or perhaps to Umb, who looked at him stoically from one corner of the bed. The stuffed animal did not comment, although Tandaris imagined that its critical expressions were enough to drive him to shame. He should have known better than to just pick up something totally foreign and store it in his quarters! It reminded him of an incident over a century ago that a past host had caused, not too dissimilar from this. Fortunately, Tandaris had a few advantages: experience, and an advanced starship.

 

Well, you broke it. Now you get to fix it.

 

The alien device looked up at him with a cyclops eye. He could feel the low-level gamma radiation coming off it, and its malice was equally tangible. Tandaris took it with him as he left his quarters, his personal stake in the games to come now confirmed.

 

All bets were off. The starting line had receded into the distance, but someone in the shadows ahead kept on moving the finishing line farther and farther away.