Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Young Adult Books #6: Field Trip
SURVIVAL COURSE
Ever since the Wormhole was discovered as a shortcut to the far off Gamma Quadrant, Jake Sisko has been dying to go through it. Not only is the one-of-a-kind stable Wormhole an incredible sight, but the trip through is a once-in-a-lifetime ride! Now, with a lot of urging from her students, Keiko O’Brien is leading a field trip through the Wormhole to Cetus Beta, a very safe, boring planet on the other side. What could possibly go wrong?
But then a Cardassian raider shoots down their Runabout! Now Jake, Nog, T’Ara, Ashley and the other students are trapped on a planet where plants rule: they move, run, eat … and scream. With a Cardassian search party closing in, the students find the Runabout is useless and their tricorders are missing. And then suddenly, Jake and his friends come face-to-face with a new enemy … one who threatens their only hope of escape!
Cover art by Alan Gutierrez
Interior Illustrations by Todd Cameron Hamilton
“There’s no way to get a message out?” Jake asked.
Nog turned to Lek. “Do the Cardassians have a subspace radio?”
“Too late you are,” Lek informed him. “Scavenged it already is.”
Nog sighed. “Why did I know you were gonna say that?”
“Wait a minute,” Jake said. An idea was starting to form in his mind. “I think you’re on to something here. We don’t have any equipment left, but the Cardassians do.”
Lek shook his head. “Taken it all is. Tricorders, radio, everything we took.”
“Not everything,” Jake replied with a grin. “They still have a working spaceship.”
His friends stared at him as if he were crazy. T’Ara’s eyebrows rose so high they disappeared in her bangs. “Are you suggesting…?”
“Yeah,” Jake chuckled. “Let’s steal their entire ship!”
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STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE
Cast of Characters
JAKE SISKO—Jake is a young teenager and the only human boy permanently on board Deep Space Nine. Jake’s mother died when he was very young. He came to the space station with his father but found very few kids his own age. He doesn’t remember life on Earth, but he loves baseball and candy bars, and he hates homework. His father doesn’t approve of his friendship with Nog.
NOG—He is a Ferengi boy whose primary goal in life—like all Ferengi—is to make money. His father, Rom, is frequently away on business, which is fine with Nog. His uncle, Quark, keeps an eye on him. Nog thinks humans are odd with their notions of trust and favors and friendship. He doesn’t always understand Jake, but since his father forbids him to hang out with the human boy, Nog and Jake are best friends. Nog loves to play tricks on people, but he tries to avoid Odo whenever possible.
COMMANDER BENJAMIN SISKO—Jake’s father has been appointed by Starfleet Command to oversee the operations of the space station and act as a liaison between the Federation and Bajor. His wife was killed in a Borg attack, and he is raising Jake by himself. He is a very busy man who always tries to make time for his son.
ODO—The security officer was found by Bajoran scientists years ago, but Odo has no idea where he originally came from. He is a shape-shifter, and thus can assume any shape for a period of time. He normally maintains a vaguely human appearance but every sixteen hours he must revert to his natural liquid state. He has no patience for lawbreakers and less for Ferengi.
MAJOR KIRA NERYS—Kira was a freedom fighter in the Bajoran underground during the Cardassian occupation of Bajor. She now represents Bajoran interests aboard the station and is Sisko’s first officer. Her temper is legendary.
LIEUTENANT JADZIA DAX—An old friend of Commander Sisko’s, the science officer Dax is actually two joined entities known as the Trill. There is a separate consciousness—a symbiont—in the young female host’s body. Sisko knew the symbiont Dax in a previous host, which was a “he.”
DR. JULIAN BASHIR—Eager for adventure, Doctor Bashir graduated at the top of his class and requested a deep-space posting. His enthusiasm sometimes gets him into trouble.
MILES O’BRIEN—Formerly the Transporter Chief aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise, O’Brien is now Chief of Operations on Deep Space Nine.
KEIKO O’BRIEN—Keiko was a botanist on the Enterprise, but she moved to the station with her husband and her young daughter, Molly. Since there is little use for her botany skills on the station, she is the teacher for all of the permanent and traveling students.
QUARK—Nog’s uncle and a Ferengi businessman by trade, Quark runs his own combination restaurant/casino/holosuite venue on the Promenade, the central meeting place for much of the activity on the station. Quark has his hand in every deal on board and usually manages to stay just one step ahead of the law—usually in the shape of Odo.
CHAPTER 1
It’s perfectly safe; what could go wrong?”
Those words would come back to haunt Jake Sisko, but when he heard them spoken, he believed in them implicitly. It was only later that Keiko O’Brien’s comment would be proved completely, utterly, and almost fatally wrong….
Ms. O’Brien was conducting a lesson in astronomy for her small class of students. The computer projected a huge hologram of the Galaxy in the air just above their heads. The four quadrants of the Galaxy were lightly shaded, and Ms. O’Brien was using a laser penc
il to point out the various stars.
“This is Sol,” she explained, her beam of light picking out a small star near the edge of an arm of the Galaxy.
“Earth is Sol Three. And this is what humans call 40 Eridani.” She indicated a star close to the first. “That’s the home star of the planet Vulcan. Both, as you can see, are in the Alpha Quadrant. Now, who can point out where Deep Space Nine is located?”
Naturally, T’Ara’s hand was the first up. Jake was a much slower second. Jake’s best friend, Nog, simply rolled his eyes in disgust.
Like most Vulcans, T’Ara was tall, slim, and very serious. She had long dark hair that was usually worn in a ponytail that freed her pointed ears and cut straight along her forehead, showing her slanted eyebrows. The Vulcan people didn’t believe in allowing their emotions to rule their lives, and carefully kept their emotions hidden. Despite her maturity, T’Ara was only seven years old, and as a result her control over her emotions sometimes slipped. She was always ashamed when this happened, so her friends tried to pretend not to notice. Ms. O’Brien handed T’Ara the pointer, and she used it to illuminate a star in the Alpha Quadrant.
“Quite right,” the teacher agreed. “Most of the worlds that we have explored lie within either the Alpha or Beta Quadrant. And, of course, we’ve started to explore some of the stars in the Gamma Quadrant thanks to the Wormhole.”
What made Deep Space Nine so important had been the discovery of the Wormhole. This was a strange, almost unimaginable, tunnel through space. One end of it rested here, in space close to the planet Bajor. The other end of it was in the Gamma Quadrant, about 70,000 light-years away. Going through the Wormhole was a shortcut in space that saved ships years and years of travel. Before the Wormhole had been discovered, nobody had known much at all about the Gamma Quadrant. Now there was a thriving trade, with traffic constantly passing back and forth through the Wormhole. The trouble was (from Jake’s point of view) that he had never been allowed to go through it.
Jake shifted in his chair. “Only we never get to see those stars, do we?”
Ashley nodded. “That’s right, Ms. O’Brien. We’re sitting right on top of the Wormhole, but we’ve never been allowed even to peek inside it. It’s not fair, is it?” Ashley Fontana was T’Ara’s best friend, a human girl whose mother was one of Chief O’Brien’s technicians. Ashley was slightly younger than Jake, with long blond hair and an ability to repair machines that was almost as good as she thought it was.
“Well,” their teacher said carefully, “I’m certain it’s just that everyone wants to make sure it’s safe first.”
“Oh, sure,” agreed Jake. “They’ve been exploring the Wormhole for well over a year now. When do you think they’ll consider it safe?”
T’Ara almost smiled. “Have you ever been through the Wormhole?” she asked Ms. O’Brien.
Their teacher was taken by surprise by that question. “Well, no,” she admitted. “I haven’t.”
“Would you not like to go?” asked T’Ara innocently. Jake could barely stop himself from laughing. He could see the edges of the young Vulcan girl’s lips twitching. She was really stirring things up!
“Well, yes,” Ms. O’Brien replied. “Of course I’d like to go. But it isn’t as simple as that and—” She broke off as she realized that all her students were looking at her with grins on their faces—except for T’Ara, who somehow managed to keep her amusement down to minor twitches of her lips. “That’s quite enough of that,” the teacher said firmly. “Let’s get back to the lesson, shall we, and not get sidetracked?”
The lesson continued, and Jake thought he’d heard the end of the subject. To his surprise, he was wrong. That evening, as he and his father sat in their small apartment eating dinner, the computer by the door chimed.
Commander Sisko called out: “Come in!” The computer then opened the door.
Ms. O’Brien walked in. As she saw the almost-empty dessert plates, she said apologetically: “Oh, I’m sorry. I can come back later.”
“That’s all right,” Jake’s father said. “We’ve just finished. Jake, perhaps you could run the dishes to the recycler?”
Jake got the hint immediately; this was probably going to be adult business, and his father wanted him out of the way. “Uh, sure,” he agreed. He was used to the procedure.
“No,” said Ms. O’Brien, quickly. “There’s no need for Jake to leave. In fact, he’s part of the reason I’ve come here.”
Commander Sisko shot his son a what-have-you-done-now? look. “I see. Has he been up to some mischief with Nog again?”
“No, nothing like that,” the teacher assured him. “Quite the opposite, in fact. He and his friends made a suggestion in class today that seems to me to have some merit to it.”
“Really?” asked Jake, amazed at the news. He hadn’t expected her to complain about him, but one could never quite tell what went on in teachers’ minds.
“Really,” she agreed, smiling at him. To his father, she explained: “They raised the idea of a field trip.”
Commander Sisko raised one eyebrow thoughtfully. “A field trip?” he asked.
“Yes,” Ms. O’Brien replied. “None of them have really been off the station since we all came here, except for a few trips down to Bajor.” Jake winced at that, remembering his last trip down to the planet with Nog, and the unexpected consequences of their impetuous decision. Ms. O’Brien continued: “They’re all getting kind of restless, and I thought a field trip would do them good—get them off the station and into something a little more stimulating.”
“I see,” Jake’s father said carefully. “So you want my permission, is that it? And, I assume, the loan of a runabout?”
“Exactly, Commander,” agreed the teacher.
His father nodded. “Well, it sounds reasonable enough to me.” He gave Jake a quick smile. “Travel broadens the mind, as they say, and these young minds need all the broadening that they can get. So, where do you intend to take them? The Fire Falls of Ushara? The Monastery Fortress of Kai-tona? The Gardens of Pure Delight?”
Ms. O’Brien shook her head. “None of those,” she admitted. “In fact, I wasn’t thinking of anywhere on Bajor at all.”
Commander Sisko shrugged. “Andros, then?” he asked, naming the next closest planet. “Or the Asteroid Belt?”
“Actually, I was thinking of Cetus Beta,” Mrs. O’Brien told him.
It took a second for the name to sink in, and then Jake’s father stared at her in astonishment. “Cetus Beta?” he repeated. “In the Gamma Quadrant? Surely you must realize that’s completely out of the question?”
Jake had been following the conversation with interest—and then excitement—when his teacher had suggested a flight to a world in the Gamma Quadrant. His heart sank, though, at the firmness in his father’s reply.
“Aw, Dad!” he protested.
Commander Sisko frowned. “Don’t ‘aw, Dad’ me,” he said. To Ms. O’Brien he added: “Surely you realize how dangerous a trip like that would be, Keiko?”
To Jake’s surprise, Ms. O’Brien didn’t back down. “Not at all,” she replied calmly. “I’ve done my homework on this, Commander. Cetus Beta is in one of the closest planetary systems on the far side of the Wormhole. There’s no intelligent native species in the whole system, and absolutely no animal life of any kind on Cetus Beta itself. The entire world is completely populated by plants. It’s just about the safest planet we’ve ever discovered, and it’s been checked out by two Federation science vessels and declared absolutely harmless.”
Commander Sisko’s frown softened a little. “I see. Anything else?”
“Just one more thing,” the teacher answered. “My students are all getting restless, being so close to the Wormhole. Do you realize that they’re all dying to see what it’s like? And it’s out there, luring them on. You know what children can be like, Commander. How long do you think it’ll be before one of them decides to stow away on a ship heading out there?”
 
; His father gave Jake a frown. “Knowing these rascals,” he admitted, “I’m somewhat amazed that one of them hasn’t tried it yet. So you are suggesting that an authorized trip through the Wormhole might serve to satisfy their curiosity?”
“An authorized, safe, and responsible trip,” explained Ms. O’Brien. She seemed to be sensing victory. “Just ten of the students,” she added. “Jake, Nog, T’Ara, Ashley, and six of the Bajorans. I’d go along, and there would be the pilot of the runabout, too. We could camp out on Cetus Beta for a week, then return. It’s perfectly safe; what could go wrong?”
CHAPTER 2
Jake was having a great deal of trouble keeping his mouth shut. He was dying to jump in and try and help persuade his father. He knew, though, that he was likely to make his father more obstinate if he interrupted, so he managed somehow to stay quiet. He couldn’t prevent the eagerness he felt from showing on his face, though, and his father saw it.
With a laugh Commander Sisko shook his head. “It looks as if I’d better agree,” he conceded. “If I don’t, I’ll have to have every ship leaving the station from now on searched to make certain my son isn’t part of the cargo.”
“Yes!” Jake exploded happily. “Way to go, Dad!”
“But,” his father said, holding up a hand in warning, “it had better be firmly understood that you and the rest of your friends are to do everything that Ms. O’Brien says, or you’ll all be grounded for the rest of your lives. Is that clear?”
“Yeah, you bet, absolutely,” agreed Jake happily.
Turning to Ms. O’Brien, his father added: “All right, Keiko. I think you’re correct. These youngsters have been cooped up on DS9 for too long. And Cetus Beta is probably a lot safer for them than even Bajor would be. You can have a runabout and a pilot for a week’s stay. Let me check out the list of supplies you’ll be taking and your schedule.” He glanced at Jake again and grinned. “I hope you’re planning on taking this trip pretty soon. I don’t think your students will be able to contain themselves too long.”