Tiger: The Far Frontier Read online

  Tiger

  The Far Frontier

  By

  David P Smith

  Contents

  Chapter_1

  Chapter_2

  Chapter_3

  Chapter_4

  Chapter_5

  Chapter_6

  Chapter_7

  Chapter_8

  Chapter_9

  Chapter_10

  Chapter_11

  Chapter_12

  Chapter_13

  Chapter_14

  Chapter_15

  Chapter_16

  Chapter 1

  As the stars streamed past the view-port of the observation deck, Lieutenant-Commander Dave Hollins reflected on the vagaries of fate. He couldn’t believe he’d got away with it.

  For a while he’d thought his career was over before it had begun. After the passing out ceremony, he’d listened with a growing sense of dread as the Commodore had read out the assignments for his class of graduates from the Academy.

  He’d waited for a posting as an engineer on a garbage scow, or as a Comms Officer in a relay station at the arse-end of nowhere, but when the Commodore read his name, it was followed by “Executive Officer, USS Tiger, Sector 244.” He couldn’t believe his luck! Tiger was a name whispered in hushed tones. One of the “Constitution” class heavy cruisers, she’d set a new speed record a year ago, with no-one able to understand how her crew could force this one vessel to be nearly a quarter of a warp factor faster than any of her identical sister ships.

  Perhaps because of this feat, rumours abounded of her being fitted with the very latest in experimental computers, featuring organic components that would allow the computer to grow and learn like a human mind.

  Perhaps more fascinating for Dave was the prospect of going to Sector 244, one of the most remote sectors in the Federation, bounded on one frontier by the enigmatic Sha T’Al race and the dangerous and aggressive Tana Empire.

  Of course, he would have had no-one to blame but himself if he’d ended up as the junior lieutenant in charge of mucking out the menagerie at a federal museum. His time at the Academy was already an unwritten legend and a by-word for poor behaviour.

  Dave Hollins had arrived at the Academy with a point to prove.

  His Dad had abandoned him and his mum when he was in his early-teens. After a bitter slanging match, his dad had called his mum things that made Dave angry even to this day, but he’d then said the one thing that had shaped Dave’s life ever since.

  It was burned into Dave’s memory, that lingering scowl his Dad had thrown over his shoulder as he walked out the door for the last time, taking a handful of possessions to a new life a hundred light years away;

  “….Yeah, I’m a waster. I got nothing, I’m going nowhere. But you’re just like me son, and you’ll never amount to anything, ever.”

  He’d slammed the door behind him, leaving Dave and his mum in tears, hugging each other, holding onto to each other like shipwrecked sailors clinging to the flotsam of their sunken ship. As the door closed, so did a chapter of non-descript under-achievement in Dave’s life.

  Dave had never been able to resist a challenge. As a kid, he’d broken many bones and broken even more rules, because if he was dared to do anything, he couldn’t back out. He’d broken his arm once, trying to climb a tree no-one else could. When his arm had healed, he went back and he’d climbed the tree just to prove it could be done. He was the first kid in his year at school to be suspended, when he’d sneaked into the Principles office and painted the Principle’s beloved black leather executive chair with odourless black paint, ruining his very expensive suit in the process. He’d done it because it was something his class mates had said no-one would ever have the balls to do.

  As Dave’s father had said those words, he’d set the biggest challenge in Dave’s life.

  To amount to Something. To be Someone.

  Life was tough for Dave and his mum. She scraped a living doing what she could as they drifted around the United Kingdom. Nothing ever seemed to work out and they tried their luck in America, still never settling anywhere for long. Eventually, it had dawned on Dave that he needed a fresh start, in a place where social status, background and connections weren’t an issue. A place where ability was recognised and rewarded. A place where you were encouraged to be the very best that you could be.

  A place like Starfleet.

  He’d taken the many aptitude tests, undergone evaluations and sat interviews and passed everything with flying colours. Entering the Academy for the first time a few months later he’d been a face in the crowd, uniformed and indistinguishable amongst hundreds of other cadets. Within a few weeks, he was known to cadets and instructors alike.

  He was blessed with an abundance of natural aptitude, but perhaps no more than a dozen other excellent cadets. What set him apart from, and above, his fellow cadets was his steely determination to succeed. The other cadets would pass tests and congratulates themselves, but Dave was always moving onwards and upwards, each success the springboard to another challenge, each challenge met and mastered.

  And that’s where it all came so close to going spectacularly wrong.

  Ok, he’d not helped himself. It’s hard not to be a little cocky when you’re top of the class at everything. So when he’d just posted record scores in the finals of his second year, he treated himself to a night on the town with a few of his class-mates.

  Things quickly got out of hand. The challenges to down shots, or sink the next beer before the other guys were just the usual high-spirits expected of off-duty cadets. But then Jimmy Dobrolewski had hit him with the big one.

  Jimmy was an average student in a class of the best the Federation had to offer. Where Dave shone through academic excellence, Jimmy was a near invisible figure, destined to be a footnote in the year-book and a barely visible head at the rear of the class photograph. His only characteristic of note was that Jimmy knew how to have a good time. He knew the best bars, could get tickets for the hottest gigs and always knew someone who could get them into any bar or club they wanted to go to.

  He'd led Dave and small group of friends on a whirlwind tour of the best bars and clubs in the San Francisco bay area, ending up at 3am in a tiny club on the shore of the bay looking up to the famous Golden Gate Bridge.

  Drunk and exuberant, they were shooting their mouths off about who’d slept with whom. Dave had been keeping quiet as he’d not indulged in such pleasures to the extent of some of his more excitable class-mates, but he let slip that he had slept with the daughter of the Commodore of the Academy.

  This in itself was no big deal. The Commodores daughter, Estelle, was something of a fixture around the Academy. While she was both beautiful and intelligent, she was also, frankly, a sure thing. Rumours of her promiscuity were quickly supported by a good dozen of his class-mates (male and female) who’d shared her bed that year, and conversations with the seniors at the Academy confirmed that she’d been treading that path since she turned fourteen, a good eight years past.

  That was where the dangerous path had started: a very inebriated Jimmy said “Screwing her ain’t no big deal. Hell, even Stumpy Stan got it on with her. "

  Stumpy Stan was a fellow cadet blessed with an exceptionally low height to weight ratio, bad breath, greasy hair, sweaty feet, galloping acne and a seemingly unrelenting obsession with comic books. His one redeeming feature was his access to his father’s mint-condition early 21st century Dodge Viper, a feature that kept many male cadets calling at the garage of the family home and more than the odd female cadet calling for a ride.

  Jimmy swayed and smiled, clearly having his own fond memories of the beautiful Estelle, but then his expression changed: "But if someone could nail the Commodore�
��s wife? Now that would be an achievement. That would be a feat right up there with being the first man up Everest, or being the first man on the moon!”

  Even here, on his way to his new posting, with his Lieutenant-Commanders rank insignia fresh on his uniform after a miraculous escape from the wrath of the Commodore, Dave wished he’d not risen to the bait.

  He knew he should have kept quiet and agreed it would be a legendary feat, and let some other fool risk everything. He should have smiled and realised it was too stupid, or just wrong.

  But Dave couldn’t resist a challenge.

  He’d drunk far too much and was far too cocky. Standing up (none too steadily) he’d announced that he would sleep with the Commodore’s wife before they graduated, in just a year’s time.

  Waking up the next day with a hangover and an attack of conscience from a conscience he didn’t even know he had, he’d realised what a huge mistake he’d just made. He’d showered and gone about his routine praying that last night was just a bad dream, or that everyone else had been too drunk to recollect his stupid, boastful pledge.

  He’d only got ten paces outside the door of his apartment before a cadet he barely knew yelled “Go Hollins, you can do it, man! Nail that bi-atch!!”

  The floor didn’t oblige by opening up and swallowing him, nor did it on twenty or thirty other occasions a similar sentiment was voiced in the next fifteen minutes or so before he attended his first class of the day.

  The nightmare was finally made real when he sat down next to Jimmy, only for his friend to lean toward him and whisper “Dodgy Danno is taking odds. I got fifty on you to seal the deal my man!”

  The rest of the day was a blur, as the enormity of his mistake sank in. It seemed every conversation he heard was about whether or not he could bed the Commodore’s wife, and with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach he knew he was doomed to try. He felt bad for himself, but his conscience ate away at him for other reasons.

  Whilst Commodore Nolan was almost universally disliked and his daughter Estelle was taken at face value (or face down value depending on what mood she was in), the Commodore’s wife was a different matter. Estelle had clearly inherited her stunning good looks and intelligence from her mother Therese, but the similarity stopped there.

  While Estelle was a self-absorbed sybarite, Therese was probably the nicest person on the face of the earth. Nothing was too much trouble for her: she supported a dozen charities with boundless enthusiasm and energy, and would be a friend, confidante and counsellor to anyone who would ask that of her. She was warm, and generous, and had once been seen to actually, really, properly cry when she accidently stood on one of the million ants that lived beneath the Academies beautifully manicured lawns.

  What kind of sad, twisted individual would try to use such a wonderful, beautiful person as the object of a pointless bet? Step forward Cadet Dave Hollins, serial challenge defeater and complete and utter bastard.

  What followed was the most shameful episode of his life as his conscience lost out to the demon competitive streak that had come to dominate his life.

  Convincing himself that he owed it to the hundreds of cadets who were staking their cold hard credits on his performance, he swallowed his pride, mentally cudgelled his conscience into a bleeding, comatose pulp, and set about this challenge with characteristic determination. He didn’t consider himself handsome, but he was tall and athletically built, and he knew his winning smile was backed up with a deadly arsenal of funny anecdotes and expertly delivered compliments. He could do this.

  He started small, volunteering for a couple of charities where Therese happened to be a committee member or fund-raiser. He got talking to her, innocently, casually, and……. my goodness are you really the Commodore’s wife? What a small world!

  After a couple of weeks, he’d upped his game, coming up with all manner of bizarre excuses to call her and try to get her alone so he could try to, literally, charm the pants off her. She was sweet, and understanding, and great company, and totally and unswervingly faithful to her husband.

  As the months had gone by he’d changed tack time after time, trying to find some weak spot in the ramparts of her decency. He began to worry she’d think he was a schizophrenic lunatic, so often did he change his mannerisms and general personality around her, but she always remained heart-breakingly sweet and trusting.

  As the year end had approached things had become desperate, and with time running out he’d stooped lower and lower into the depths of deceit in a shameless bid to avoid defeat. At last he’d managed to get her alone and broke-down in a flood of Oscar-winning tears as he explained that he only had a month to live (providing carefully faked documentary evidence as he did so), and would die alone having lost his mum, dad, baby sister and all four doting grandparents in a tragic and horrific house fire that appeared to have started when his beloved pet dog had spontaneously combusted.

  And to think he would go to his death bed as a virgin……..

  He won the bet, and lost his self-respect.

  Therese had silently cried huge tears of sadness, shame and regret as they made love, but her shame was a molehill lost in the shadow of Dave’s mountain of self-loathing.

  He wasn’t the same afterwards. His presence around the Academy was met with near deification by the other cadets, but he was sullen and withdrawn, drowning in alcohol and loneliness. It was just as well that he’d already completed his course work and most of his exams, as for the few weeks after the sordid business with Therese he couldn’t concentrate, or communicate or even function as a human being. He cut classes, drank too much and even got into a couple of stupid fights over stupid things.

  It was almost a relief when he was called to Commodore Nolan’s office six weeks later to face a stream of pure unadultered hatred. Sweet, innocent Therese had been crushed by the guilt of her infidelity and had broken down and confessed everything to her beloved husband, only to be stunned when told that Cadet Hollins was not, in fact, dead as she had supposed, but due to graduate imminently at the top of this or any other class. Therese, bless her, was pencilled in to actually present him with a special award for his outstanding achievements.

  Dave took the verbal beating silently and would gladly have taken any other form of beating, verbal, mental, physical or any combination thereof. There was nothing anyone could do that would make him feel worse than he already did. The Commodore dismissed him after admitting that he couldn’t expel Dave as he’d not technically broken any of the Academies rules. But there was venom in his voice as he promised Dave that no-one could indulge in such callous deeds without justice being done.

  When the Commodore announced his posting after the passing out parade, he could only assume that the saintly Therese had somehow diverted the undoubted wrath of her husband, and he offered a silent prayer of thanks that this year’s awards were presented by a local civic dignitary who’d kindly stepped in at very short notice after Mrs Nolan was unexpectedly taken ill.

  Of all the thousands of pictures and holograms that were taken of that graduation ceremony, Dave kept only one single image: A perfectly timed snapshot of Estelle Nolan gleefully planting a very, very hard kick in Dave’s groin……..

  --------------------

  USS Tiger was currently stationed at a star system called Hole. Several people Dave had spoken to had offered explanations for the unusual name, but Dave didn’t let any of them dampen his enthusiasm. Hole was the only Federation inhabited system in Sector 244, with a population of around 10,000. They were almost exclusively miners and engineers trying to extract a few rare elements from the crust of the tiny rock-like world and the other planets in the same system.

  Sector 244 was a LONG way off. It covered an area on the very fringes of the Federation, out as far as the edge of the galactic spiral arm. Beyond that boundary there were no more known alien nations because there were no stars for hundreds upon hundreds of light-years. Much of the territory of Sector 244 was unexplored, but o
n one side the Sector was bounded by two alien territories. Sha T’Al space was an area that encompassed about two hundred star systems. Apart from their border with the Federation the enigmatic Sha T’Al were bounded on all other sides of their territory by the aggressive Tana Empire. Squeezed between the Federation and the rapidly expanding Tana Empire, the Sha T’Al's limited growth had led to their territory forming a flattened disc between their two larger neighbours, with large borders for a relatively small volume of space.

  Sector 244 was so remote that there were no regularly scheduled transport missions and not a great deal of traffic of any sort. He’d started the trip almost beside himself with excitement, but the outward bound journey was painfully slow, taking the best part of three months in total. Dave had been booked on a commercial passenger transport as far as Rigel. Commercial transports were rarely capable of much more than warp factor five, but at least whilst on board for the four week journey to Rigel he had company in the form of the ship’s other passengers.

  At Rigel, he transferred to USS Santiago, one of the few fleet vessels assigned to Sector 244. The Santiago was a small courier vessel, fast and long-ranged, but in reality little more than a large, warp-drive equipped shuttle. She would be the first visitor to Hole in nearly six months. He was allocated a tiny, cramped cabin and left pretty much to his own devices for the remaining eight weeks of his trip to Sector 244.

  He was going stir crazy inside a week. The courier had only a small crew and with operational areas out of bounds and the off-duty crew members resting between duty periods, Dave went days without seeing another living soul.

  Dave eventually decided to make best use of his enforced cabin time. Even here, as far out past Rigel as he was, the fleet’s command network was available to him through a small computer terminal in his cabin. With time on his hands Dave elected to prepare thoroughly for his role as Executive Officer.

  On graduating, most of his class were assigned the rank of Lieutenant (Junior Grade), and even the better graduates were normally only posted as full Lieutenants. He was unique in his year in being given the rank of Lieutenant-Commander on graduation, and a post as Executive Officer of a Starship (a very senior position for someone straight out of the Academy). This was a huge honour and a reflection of his superb all-round performance over his three years at the Academy. As a result, his new commanding officer would justifiably have great expectations of him. When he finally arrived on board Tiger, Dave wanted to hit the ground running and live up to his star-billing.