Star Trek by Dayton Ward, Kevin Dilmore Read Free Book Online

when Starfleet Intelligence came looking for me.”
    Looking up from a compact control console that mirrored the one Donovan was operating, Lieutenant Hu’Ghrovlatrei regarded her companion with an amused expression. “Feeling a bit misled, are we?”
    Donovan indicated the interior of their makeshift operations center. “You have to admit that this isn’t the most exciting way to spend our day. Sittingaround hunched over computer consoles, waiting for something interesting to come along? This isn’t what I joined Starfleet for, you know.”
    An Efrosian, Ghrovlatrei had a long mane of bright white hair that seemed to glow in the tiny room’s reduced lighting, contrasting sharply with her dull orange-hued skin and the muted gray of the standard one-piece jumpsuit she wore, identical to those favored by many of the
Hope
’s crew. Her piercing cobalt blue eyes, however, twinkled in the dim illumination cast off from the status monitors arrayed before both officers. “Part of the adventure of serving in Starfleet is waiting for the unexpected to occur. It is also part of the frustration. Patience, my young friend. Everything cannot always be exciting, even in our line of work.”
    â€œNow there’s an understatement if I’ve ever heard one,” Donovan replied, though he knew his friend was right. That did not make it any easier to accept the fact that, for the moment at least, he was bored out of his skull.
    A third-generation Starfleet officer, Donovan had grown up listening to the stories told to him by his father, mother, and grandmother of their experiences serving aboard starships and exploring far-off worlds. While his mother had commanded both a science vessel and a patrol ship monitoring the Neutral Zonenear Romulan space before retiring, both his father and grandmother had served in the Starfleet Security Division. He had not inherited his taste for adventure from his mother, and it was almost a given from an early age that Tobias Donovan would follow in his father’s footsteps.
    One afternoon during his final year at the Academy, however, a woman with three pips on the collar of her Starfleet uniform came to visit him. She told Donovan how she had reviewed his record and about how impressed she was with the test scores he had accumulated during his years of study.
    â€œYou have a bright future,” she had said. The natural talents he appeared to possess, if properly cultivated and allowed to mature with the appropriate level of supervision and mentoring, could become powerful assets to Starfleet.
    Must have been a standard recruiting lecture
, Donovan decided.
    It was impressive, however, as was the additional training he had received following graduation from the Academy and receiving his commission. Uncounted hours of classroom and field instruction in intelligence gathering and covert operations had been only the tip of the iceberg, with the promise of even more excitement waiting for him as soon as he undertook his first mission.
    What he had not expected was for that assignment to stuff him inside a packing crate.
    Along with Commander Ross, he and Ghrovlatrei had installed their sensor equipment inside a large Type XII storage module, a model often used by colonists when first establishing a presence on a new world. Once emptied of its contents, the interior of the Type XIIs could be converted into a temporary shelter until more permanent dwellings were built.
Ulrika’s Hope
was already carrying five such containers in the bowels of this mammoth cargo bay, making it that much easier for theirs to blend in. Should the module be scanned, a masking field projected from within would show the cargo container to be filled with agricultural equipment as described in the ship’s manifest.
    â€œI think you will agree,” Ghrovlatrei said as she turned back to her sensor console, “that this is one assignment where a lack of activity is not