The list of mishaps, accidents, and failures—both human and mechanical—was, Captain Gold noted sourly as he scanned the log, as prodigious as it was disturbing. As he had every right to be, Gold was extraordinarily proud of his crew and their record, but by the sixth day of operations in the Sargasso Sector, the crew of the da Vinci felt as though they had been chosen to serve as the butt of one long, elaborately cruel joke, the punch line to which was a non-stop series of disasters, major and minor.

Gold rubbed absentmindedly at the still-bare ring finger of his biosynthetic left hand. Like the fact of his still missing wedding band, this mission seemed to be jinxed by some bizarre corruption of all laws of probability. To encounter the occasional mechanical mishap or work accident was to be expected. To encounter nothing but was way off the charts of anything Gold had ever heard of happening on a Starfleet vessel.

Soloman had checked the computers six ways from Sunday and could discover no source of corruption or malfunction that might explain its behavior. Dr. Lense had examined every crew member for any and all physical or psychological causes of chronic klutziness, but likewise came up empty-handed. The captain had even had the ship’s environmental systems checked for abnormalities, anything that might be influencing the crew or ship to act as they were, but there was nothing, not in the air, not on any level of the spectrum, nothing amiss.

It was, from all appearances, just a run of incredibly bad luck.

Still, in the aftermath of the black-hole incident the engineers had decided to suspend such potentially disastrous exercises until they sorted out the problems.

And Bart Faulwell hadn’t been the last to experience some form of computer malfunction. The worst such incident occurred in the early morning hours of the fifth day as Rusconi executed a maneuver ordered by Tev to reposition the ship in preparation for a round of demolition. Though having entered the correct coordinates, as witnessed by the meticulous Tev and attested to by the operations log, the da Vinci had proceeded to spin, far in excess of programmed speed, into a near disastrous collision with one of the derelict ships before being brought back under control. The port nacelle had suffered serious damage, though no one, fortunately, had been hurt.

Another misfire had resulted in a grouping of thirteen derelicts that had not yet been scanned, examined, and cleared being demolished by torpedo. In this case, it turned out all right, but it could just as easily have gone the other way, ending in disaster.

But losses of data, environmental system failures, and strange malfunctions of the drives continued. Even the replicators had been acting up, churning out inexplicable creations in response to routine requests by members of the crew. Ensign Piotrowski had asked for a cup of coffee, regular, with three sugars. The replicator had supplied her with a three-tailed kkk’tukkiquith’quattkkk, a delicacy for whose molecular matrix it was not programmed.

Gold’s own request for a snack of sliced vegetables had resulted in a platter of nugget-sized chunks of a thus-far unidentified isotope. Fortunately the sensors had instantly detected its powerful radioactive signature and alerted Gold before he had been exposed long enough for any harm to have been done.

But it wasn’t just the physical dangers that seemed to be everywhere that were so draining. Worse was the constant petty annoyances, the lost tools, the misplaced personal effects, the wrong turns, the misremembering, the misjudgments. It was endless and endlessly distracting. How could the ship’s conn officers execute orders knowing they could trust neither the computer nor their own judgment? How was the chief engineer supposed to do her job when she couldn’t count on the tool she had put next to her on the floor just seconds before to be there when she reached for it again?

“Odds are it’s right where you left it, David.”

Gold chuckled and shook his head. He knew he was letting it get him down, but he had seldom in his career felt so frustrated. Yes, sometimes the situation did seem helpless, all options explored, exploited, and failed, but there was always something, no matter how desperate, to try, to do. But there wasn’t anything to be done for a run of lousy luck. He had been in enough poker games in his life to know that it was all up to the cards, and if the right ones didn’t come to you there wasn’t thing one that you could do to change it. The problem was, while you could fold on a crummy poker hand, you didn’t have the same option in life.

Certainly not when you were in command.

And so, even if David Gold couldn’t provide them with the answers to this dilemma, he would at least give them his leadership. Which made it time to stop moping over his pitiful captain’s log and get himself up to the bridge and look like he didn’t feel as though the sky were falling all around him.

“Thank you, that’ll be all,” he said to the computer in his quarters.

“Unidentified user. Please state name and access level,” said the computer.

Gold didn’t bother responding, leaving his room with its missing rings and recalcitrant computers, wishing—without hope—for a reprieve from the misery.

Proving him an optimist, if not a realist, the answer to that wish was a loud, pain-wracked scream that pierced the air. Gold took off at a run toward its source, the turbolift at midship.

What now? he thought, expecting, from the sound of the scream, the worst and finding nothing less. Bart Faulwell was sprawled, writhing in agony, across the turbolift’s threshold, clutching at his throat, his scream dulled to a moan by painful gasps for breath. Two security guards, Krotine and Lauoc, had already reached the red-faced language specialist and were alerting sickbay, but Gold couldn’t see any obvious source for Bart’s distress.

“He can’t breathe,” Lauoc said.

“What happened?” the captain demanded.

“Don’t know, sir,” Krotine stammered. “He just started gasping, then he went down, screaming.”

Dr. Elizabeth Lense came running down the corridor and the helpful crewmates scrambled to make room for her. She passed her tricorder over Faulwell, frowning at the readout.

“How the hell…?” the doctor muttered. She quickly shook off her surprise, then adjusted her hypo to deliver the proper medication. Administering the dose, she said, “Hold on, Bart. I’ve got you.”

Faulwell’s face had started to turn blue, his lungs unable to deliver oxygen to his starved blood despite his desperately heaving chest. Now, as the meds flowed through his system, his throat seemed to open and air flowed in. His dry, pained heaves quieted to gasps, then diminished to a wheeze as the color slowly drained back into his face.

Dr. Lense’s tricorder scanned Bart again, and this time she looked up, smiling and satisfied with the reading.

“Anaphylactic shock,” she said to Gold in answer to the obvious question. “Bart’s had a severe allergic reaction to something. I’ve administered antihistamine and stimulants to open up his breathing passages. He should be fine.”

“What’s he allergic to?” Gold asked.

“According to his file? Nothing. Hence my confusion.”

“This wasn’t nothing, Doctor.”

“Of course it wasn’t,” she said. She looked back at Bart, tapping him lightly on the cheeks. “Bart? Bart, can you hear me?”

Without opening his eyes, Faulwell said, “Yeah, yeah. Man, what hit me?”

“Did you eat or drink anything in the last half hour, Bart?” the doctor asked.

Bart nodded, his head still a bit wobbly. “Umm, yeah. Had an energy bar…” he said, then laughed weakly. “Didn’t work.”

“What kind? What was in it?”

Faulwell managed to open his eyes and, when he answered, his voice was noticeably stronger. “Peanut butter. My favorite. Why?”

“Peanuts,” she said to the captain as though that explained everything. “To those allergic to them, the reaction can be quick and, without immediate medical attention, even fatal.”

“Except I’m not allergic to peanuts,” Bart corrected her and took in a long, shuddering breath as he raised himself up on his elbows. “I eat peanut butter practically every day. You could use my blood to create a vaccine for the stuff.”

“Apparently not anymore,” said Dr. Lense. “I’m sorry, Bart, but as of right now, I think you’re officially off peanut butter.”

“Aww,” said Faulwell. He let his elbows slip out from under him and thudded back onto the floor.

“No need to be so dramatic, Faulwell,” said the captain with a relieved smile.

Bart didn’t answer.

“Bart?” said Dr. Lense, quickly activating the tricorder and taking a new reading.

But Bart Faulwell was dead.