Star Trek: The Next Generation: Starfleet Academy #6: Mystery of the Missing Crew Read Online Free Page B

observed Felai, stating the obvious in his astonishment.
    “There have to be people somewhere,” insisted Odril. “They can’t all have vanished.”
    “Can’t they?” asked Sinna. And then, when the others looked at her: “If Chief Griffiths is gone, and all the crewmen in this corridor as well … why can’t the whole crew have disappeared?”
    “But then … where did they go?” asked Lagon. Abruptly he blinked. “Wait a minute. That other ship … could it be?”
    “Sweet deities,” said Odril. “Is it possible that they transported the crew right off the Yosemite ? Aren’t there supposed to be safeguards against something like that?”
    Data nodded. “Under normal circumstances it is not feasible to transport someone off a shielded vessel. And during a yellow alert, shield maintenance would have been a top priority.”
    Felai shook his head. “Couldn’t there have been a malfunction?”
    “Computer,” called Sinna. “Have the ship’s shields dropped at any time in the last ten minutes?”
    “Negative,” replied the computer. “Shields have remained operational during that period.”
    “No malfunction,” observed Sinna, looking more than a little perplexed. “But still, they’re all gone.”
    Odril scowled. “Then why aren’t we ? Why didn’t we disappear along with everyone else?”
    It was a good question, the android thought, and an uncomfortable one as well, because of the uncertainties it brought with it.
    “Maybe we will disappear,” remarked Felai, saying aloud what all of them were thinking. “It may just be a matter of time.”
    “Now there’s a cheerful thought,” muttered Odril. “At any moment we could fade away … and never know how or why.”
    He looked from Felai to Lagon to Sinna, as if keeping them in sight would somehow prevent them from being whisked away like the rest of the crew. But, of course, it wouldn’t help at all.
    “The only way to know if we are vulnerable,” Data reflected, “is to isolate the critical variable which allowed us to remain when the others could not.”
    “Variable?” echoed Lagon. “You mean … the difference between us and the rest of the crew?”
    “Precisely,” Data confirmed.
    “We’re Yann,” suggested Felai. “And you are an android. No one else on the ship fell into either of those two categories.”
    “True,” conceded Sinna. “But those attributes wouldn’t have given us any special protection against a transporter beam.”
    “We weren’t Starfleet officers,” Odril chimed in. “And everyone else on board was.”
    Lagon grunted. “But those on the unidentified vessel would have had no way of knowing that.”
    “It must be something else,” Sinna agreed. “Something which made the five of us less desirable to them … or more difficult to obtain a transporter lock on … or …”
    Data turned to her, a hypothesis already forming in his positronic brain. “A transporter lock …” he repeated.
    Sinna returned the android’s scrutiny. “Have you got something?” she asked him eagerly.
    “Perhaps,” he replied. “Though I am not certain. As you may know, Starfleet away teams in need of a transport are often located by their communicator badges. Without them, the transporter operator must find some alternative way to fix their coordinates.”
    Felai’s eyes narrowed as he looked at Odril’s red coveralls, then his own. “But we don’t have badges,” he muttered, “because we’re not in Starfleet yet.”
    “So,” added Sinna, “if the aliens fixed on Captain Rumiel and his crew via their communicators—”
    “They would not have been aware of us,” Data told her, completing the thought he had begun a couple of interjections ago. “As far as they were concerned, we did not exist.” He paused as the others considered his theory. “Of course, that is only one possibility. I will need more empirical information before I can determine if it is true.”
    For a moment there was silence. Then