“Can anyone explain this to me?” David Gold asked. “Has the entire crew suddenly turned incompetent, or does this ship have a serious problem?”

Sonya Gomez, to the right of the captain in the observation lounge, could only frown in frustration. “I seriously doubt the former,” she said, “but can’t find any evidence to support or deny the latter.”

“How else do you explain it? Major failures in no less than three of our primary systems in only a couple of hours isn’t standard operating procedure.”

Soloman looked troubled, as though for a sick friend. But considering the Bynar’s near-psychic connection to computers, his ability to communicate with them on an almost intimate level, perhaps humanoid and machine were close in ways his shipmates could never understand. “I have examined the ship’s computers thoroughly, down to her source code,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong that I can detect, certainly nothing of a magnitude that might explain the lock and fire simulation of the weapons system, the communications blackout between the Shirley and the da Vinci, and the unauthorized activation of the tractor beam.”

“And,” Gomez added, “let’s not forget the complete lack of a record of any of these events in the ship’s internal log.”

Stevens said, “That’s what I keep coming back to. I mean, the log records everything from the rate of dilithium crystal decay to the different varieties of tea requested of the replicator by the crew, so what are the odds it’s going to miss not one but three fairly substantial malfunctions?”

“On its own?” Soloman said. “I would venture to say the odds are so high as to be incalculable. But there is no sign of any outside influences on our systems. Whatever is happening is happening from within the da Vinci.”

Gold rubbed a weary hand across his forehead and looked around the table at the concerned faces of his crew. This was supposed to have been an easy one, a simple—if not delicate and vastly fascinating—job of clearing alien wreckage from a newly opened space lane. Each and every member of this crew was among the very best in their fields. Alone and as a group, they had encountered and solved more life and death problems than he cared to even think about, saving many lives—his own included—in the process on more than one occasion. But here they now sat, stymied by what appeared to be a computer glitch. He had to again ask the question that Gomez had glossed over at the opening of the meeting. “So can we rule out human error?”

Tev, uncharacteristically silent up until now, said, “Absent any evidence to the contrary, I would tend to think we can, Captain.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Tev,” Stevens said, surprised to hear the Tellarite take anyone’s side but his own.

Tev looked at Stevens without expression. “It is no such thing, Specialist. I can merely conclude that since there has been a series of near calamitous events of which I was involved in but one, and knowing that all my actions were proper and by the book, that the others, too, must be the result of some other cause as well.”

Stevens winked at Conlon. “Nice to know our backs are covered, isn’t it?”

“All right,” Gold said. “Our priority remains, as always, the successful completion of our mission. We’ve still got a tight schedule to maintain, which means everybody will be working twice as hard to do that and find and correct this problem. Whatever it is.”

There were nods all around the table.

“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen,” the captain said, rising. “And in the process, let’s be careful, shall we?”

Carol Abramowitz was, she decided, as close to heaven as she had ever been…at least in terms of her professional life. The da Vinci’s cultural specialist kept coming back to the phrase “as happy as a kid in a candy store” to describe herself as she brought each new alien vessel’s image up on her screen. Like the previous twenty or thirty ships—she had lost count—she had catalogued since beginning her shift on the second day in the Sargasso Sector, this one was unlike any she had ever encountered in any of her studies. Unlike any the da Vinci’s vast database of ships, comprised of records dating back to the dawn of human space flight, could match.

Her latest find lay four hundred meters long by three hundred meters wide…or, she thought with a smile, it could have been the other way around since the bizarre alien construction gave her human perspective no point of reference for top or bottom, fore or aft. To her eyes, it appeared to be made up of countless squares and rectangles of varying compositions, squished together into an angular whole that possessed a strange beauty all its own. Each boxy unit was marked with a different set of glyphs that might or might not have belonged to the same language.

“Fascinating,” she breathed, unaware that she had spoken out loud.

“I’ll say,” said Language and Cryptography Specialist Bart Faulwell from his station near Carol. “By the time we’re done here, the Federation’s database of dead and lost languages is probably going to increase by tenfold.”

“What I wouldn’t give for a look at the culture of even a fraction of the civilizations that created these ships,” Carol said.

“Soloman told me the older the ship, the less the chance of finding anything usable in their computer records. No matter how sophisticated their technology, a few million years is going to degrade just about any storage medium to uselessness, and, if it hasn’t, it’s not likely to be anything with which our technology can interface.”

Carol laughed but her eyes remained fixed on her screen. “It’s something, isn’t it? Here we are, hundreds of light-years from our planet of origin aboard a ship capable of traveling from one end of the quadrant to the other, and the stuff we’re finding here makes me feel like a chimp trying to understand the works of Shakespeare.”

“That’s a coincidence, your mentioning the Bard,” he said. “I was just thinking of the line from Hamlet, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ ”

“ ‘O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!’ ”

Carol and Bart glanced up as Sonya Gomez walked into earshot, quoting the line that proceeded Bart’s in Shakespeare’s famous work. “And never more appropriate than under these circumstances,” Sonya said.

“Hey, Sonya,” Carol said. “How goes the engineering survey?”

Sonya’s grin threatened to split her face. “Amazing. The range of ships we’re cataloguing are, literally, mind-boggling. There are vessels out there from races that must have gone extinct before humanity was even an evolutionary glimmer on Earth. Subwarp solid fuel rockets, nuclear powered ships, impulse drives, black hole drives….” Her grin did not fade even as she shook her head in wonder and confusion. “…Including what may be at least a dozen variations on a transdimensional drive. There’s stuff going on out there that none of us can even guess at.

“Of course, there’s the rub,” she said with a grin as she quoted Hamlet again. “Without knowing what ninety-five percent of those ships are, or were, we’re faced with the possibility of disaster on a cosmic scale. All it takes is one energy source reacting adversely with another, or some previously unknown variety of particle or wave to be released and…boom! There goes the neighborhood, and maybe a solar system or two along with it.”

Carol shuddered. “Ugh! I hadn’t thought of that possibility. Good thing I’m too excited to sleep or that would keep me up at night.”

“Rest assured,” Sonya said, “we’re playing it extra safe. Anything we’ve moved we’ve been keeping in the same relative proximity to other vessels as it had been in the Sargasso. Anything we’re not one hundred percent sure of, we’re leaving where it is, and I’ve come up with what I think is a positively brilliant scheme to—”

Sonya Gomez’s explanation was cut short by an urgent chirping tone from Bart’s console. “Oh, for—” he blurted out, biting off an expletive before it could pass his lips. “I don’t believe this!”

“Problem?” asked Carol.

“Looks like. Hold on a second.” His face clouded with anger. “Computer, what’s the problem with my file?”

Another chirp, and the soft, comforting feminine voice of the da Vinci’s computer replied, “Please state the file name.”

“The one I’ve been working with for the last six hours,” he said. “Sargasso, day two, linguistics.”

“There is no file by that name,” the computer replied.

His eyes wide with disbelief, Bart stared at the console. “This isn’t possible,” he said. “Check again for file ‘Sargasso, day two, linguistics.’ ”

“There is no file by that name.”

During Bart’s exchange with the computer, Abramowitz quickly verified the safety of her own files, immediately dumping the contents onto her padd for backup and safekeeping.

“We’ve got serious computer issues, people,” Sonya said in a tight voice. “Right when we need to be able to count on it most.”

“Right now, I wouldn’t trust it to count to ten,” Bart said, slumping in his seat.

“Right now, I’m beginning to wonder if it even can,” said Carol.