Ex Machina

by Christopher L. Bennett

  “All is going according to destiny,” Dovraku said calmly. “V’Ger’s ascension was announced by a vast eruption—the Oracle deserves no less.”

  “The explosion would also devastate Lorina and could exterminate its entire population.”

  Dovraku spoke while he operated a console. His actions were swift, sure, and precise, as though he’d practiced this for years. “And did you think the World could be cleansed without first being swept clean by the fire? The first World was destroyed to give birth to the second, the cradle of the Oracle. The third World, the Oracle’s paradise, cannot be born until the cycle is repeated.”

  Spock’s eyes widened as he deciphered what Dovraku was doing. He tried to lunge forward, but the guards held him back. “You are launching all the missiles!”

  “As it was with the herald V’Ger, so shall it be with the supreme Oracle. The missiles will travel to equidistant positions, englobing the World in a cage of fire. When it reaches symmetry, completeness, perfection, then the fire of Truth shall purify the World.”

  “Everyone will die, Dovraku!”

  The fanatic came over to stand before him. “No. They will be saved, taken into the Oracle’s bosom. Those who are worthy, at any rate. You shall meld the Oracle and myself, and trigger our ascension. You, Spock, are the instrument of salvation. Thus you redeem yourself for standing by while Kirk killed so many gods.”

  The captain. Where are you, Jim? Spock had to admit to himself that he had no certainty Kirk was even still alive.

  * * *

  It never rains but it pours, thought Sulu. It hadn’t been too difficult to run interference against the Shesshran attack, picking off their torpedoes with the phasers or blocking them with the shields. If the sixteen Shesshran ships were to focus their attacks on the Enterprise, they could probably do some real damage, especially with Sulu not firing back; but their main objective was still Yonada. Well, some of theirs, anyway. The Shesshran tended to act independently, coordinating with others only insofar as it was to their own advantage. So far that meant neither the ship nor the asteroid-moon was taking the full brunt of their attack. But that plasma cannon was nearly in range. He’d tried hailing the Shesshran and explaining the danger of Yonada’s destruction, but they’d either dismissed it as a bluff or asserted their confidence in being fast enough to escape it.

  And just now, several dozen nuclear missiles had been fired from Yonada, on low-orbital insertion trajectories. “Target those missiles!” he cried. “Pick them off, Mr. Perez.”

  But Perez had other concerns. “Incoming plasma bolt, sir, on course for Yonada.”

  First things first. “DiFalco, intercept!” The impulse engines surged as the chief flew the Enterprise headlong into the plasma bolt’s path. “All deflector power to forward shields!”

  The superhot helium plasma collided with the ship at a fair fraction of lightspeed, imparting a hefty portion of kinetic, thermal, and electrical energy. The ship’s forcefield bubble and forward deflector shield absorbed or dissipated most of it, but the reaction made the generators shudder in their housings, sending a rumble through the ship. Almost immediately, a stronger blast rocked the vessel. “Report!” Sulu cried.

  “Shesshran torpedo hit on our lower port flank.”

  “Damage to port deflector grid,” reported Chezrava from the damage control station.

  “Forward deflector down to eighty-six percent power,” Mercado reported. “Forcefield at seventy-nine percent and recharging.”

  “Resume normal deflector coverage. Extra power to the port grid to compensate.”

  “Normal coverage, aye,” Perez acknowledged.

  The new forcefield system had the advantage of being a full englobement, unlike the more directional deflector shields. An enemy couldn’t punch a beam through the “seams” between shield sections anymore, or leave a whole flank defenseless by knocking out the shield grid on that side. But the trade-off was that the forcefield’s power couldn’t be concentrated for point defense—and that if it was weakened in one direction, it was weakened all around. The plasma bolt had drained it enough that it couldn’t fully block the torpedo’s energy, and with all the deflector power aimed forward, the port flank had been vulnerable. Did the Shesshran understand the ship’s defenses that well, or had they just gotten a lucky shot?

  “Status on Yonada’s missiles?” Sulu asked.

  Uuvu’ it answered. “They’re heading for equidistant positions, a full englobement. How derivative.”

  “Still in phaser range?”

  “Only a few.”

  “Perez, get what you can with phasers, target the rest with torpedoes.”

  “Not a good idea, sir.”

  “What now, Hrrii’ush?”

  “They’re too close to the planet. Phasers are surgical— they can take out the drives without blowing the warheads; but torpedoes would set them off, and that could pose a radiation hazard to the people.”

  “Wonderful. Is there anything around here I can shoot?”

  As if in response, Perez said, “Shesshran beams and torpedoes getting through to Yonada, sir.”

  “We have to hope they won’t do too much damage. That plasma cannon and those nukes are our main concerns.” He turned to Uuvu’ it. “Okay, if Dovraku’s copying V’Ger, he won’t blow the missiles until they’re in position. How long?”

  “Fourteen minutes, forty seconds, sir.”

  Sulu nodded. “Auberson, brief the captain.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  DiFalco turned to face Uuvu’ it. “Fifteen minutes and you’re afraid they’re too close to the planet?”

  “Some have to circle to the opposite side to get in position. But the ones on this side would be close enough to do damage by the time a torpedo gets there—especially considering that a torpedo makes a pretty big explosion of its own.”

  “So we focus on the cannon first,” Sulu said. “It’s manned, right? We can’t just blow it up?”

  “Yes, sir. Unless you decide we have to, sir.” He looked at a readout on the science console. “Plasma cannon about to fire again, sir,” he announced.

  Sulu threw him a look. “Why couldn’t you warn us last time?”

  “I didn’t know what the power curve looked like then. Ah, there! Firing, sir!”

  “DiFalco,” Sulu said with resignation, “put us in its way. Let’s take our licks again.” But then an idea struck him. “Wait… fly into it, navigational deflector on maximum! Maybe we can scatter it some.” It made sense—the forces involved when a high-speed particle cloud ran into the ship were no different from those involved when the ship flew at high speed into bits of space dust and debris, which is what the navigational deflector was designed to prevent by shoving them out of the way.

  But the plasma bolt was pretty dense, and the scattering was only partial. The forward shield and forcefield still took a fair amount of pounding from it, and the ship rumbled again. Then suddenly there was a sharp crack. The ship bucked, and the lights and readouts flickered. When the defense-screen status display at the tactical console lit up again, Sulu noticed it was without the oval indicating the forcefield englobement. “Forcefields down, sir!” Perez confirmed. “Deflector grid holding.”

  “What happened?”

  Uuvu’ it answered. “Some of the plasma got through. I think the gravity gradients of the navigational deflector and the forcefield canceled out at a few points.”

  “Deflector dish and forcefield coils offline, sir,” Chezrava reported. “Forward ventral phaser bank and main sensor array damaged.” The ship graphics on the screens around his console flashed with red lights clustered around the lower fore section. The Zaranite’s expression was indiscernible through his insectlike respiratory mask (though Sulu knew his natural features looked like a cross between a theatrical tragedy mask and Munch’s The Scream), but he sounded agitated. He looked at Sulu as though searching for answers.

  So Sulu decided to search for a couple of answers of his own.
“Bridge to engineering. Scotty, how the hell did this happen?”

  * * *

  “Don’t look at me, Mr. Sulu!” Scott called back. “I’m not the one who decided to try that stunt with the deflector dish! What do you expect when you get creative with untested systems?” This is why ships are supposed to have long shakedowns before they get sent into action, he added silently.

  “I need that forcefield back up, Mr. Scott!” Sulu called, just as another spread of Shesshran torpedoes thudded against the port side, where they knew the lass was weakest.

  “It’ll take five minutes to recharge the coils!” Actually it could probably be done in three, but Scott preferred to make conservative estimates to allow for unforeseen delays. Better to lower expectations than raise them, or commanders would start demanding the really impossible.

  “We don’t have five minutes, Scotty. That plasma cannon only takes about a minute to recharge. And we’ve got a shade over ten minutes to deal with it and do something about those missiles.”

  “Aye, we’re on it.” And you still have an annoying fascination for timepieces, Mr. Sulu. “Scott out.” He shut off the return channel—a one-way channel from the bridge was always open at red alert so engineering could monitor events—and turned back to his staff. “Ross, get me a read on those coils! Odanga, you and your team get up to that phaser bank! Hawkins, reinitialize the deflector dish! Bandar, swap out sensor circuits C-36 to E-15!”

  He joined Chief Ross at the foyer console to study the forcefield power readouts. As he’d expected, the coils were recharging slowly. They ran all the way around the rim of the saucer, which was a good long way, so there was a lot of coil to recharge. “Sir,” Ross suggested, “maybe we could shunt power from the inertial dampers. They’re similar systems, and with the nav deflector down, we won’t be making any fast moves for a while.”

  “Aye, but a good whack from that plasma cannon could squish us into haggis.” Then he smiled at her. “But it wouldn’t hurt us to lose a little weight!” He opened a comm channel. “Scott to bridge. I’m cutting gravity by half to shunt power to the forcefield coils.”

  “Understood.” A moment later Auberson’s voice echoed through the ship: “All hands brace for fifty percent gravity reduction.”

  Scott caught Ross looking at him with a twinkle in her eye. “What?”

  She grinned. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you? Not the battle, I mean. The problem-solving.”

  “That’s the beauty of it,” Scott said ironically as he felt his weight decrease. “Around here we never seem to run out of problems….”

  * * *

  Vaylin Zaand watched Kirk intently as the captain listened to the report from the Enterprise—just as he’d been watching Kirk throughout this mission. “Acknowledged, Mr. Sulu,” the captain said. “You take care of the cannon, we’ll try to stop the missiles from this end.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Kirk out.” We’ll try, he’d said—not I’ll try. This was not the glory-seeking hothead he’d imagined Kirk to be. Somehow he was different here, on a mission, away from the ship. The ship complicated things. Zaand could see it in his body language. His relationship with the Enterprise, its crew, and its ghosts was still unsettled, conflicted. He set himself apart, still unsure of whether he belonged. That was part of why he’d felt to Zaand like an interloper, someone who didn’t fit into the proper scheme of things. But here, those complications were set aside. It was purer: the man, his mission, his team. He knew his purpose and his place. Throughout all of this, from the moment of the attack, he’d been decisive. Without the luxury to stop and analyze, to second-guess himself, he’d just spontaneously made the best decisions to get them to where they were, almost at the control room, getting ready to strike and end the danger. It had to be the intuition Sulu and Chekov had spoken of… yet to Zaand it looked, it felt, it read in the body language like an almost Rhaandarite insight into how the universe was supposed to work. Maybe they were both the same thing; maybe intuition was just a subliminal understanding of the rules of things, and the humans just didn’t see it in those terms because it was so automatic. Or maybe, he admitted to himself, it meant that Rhaandarites’ “natural insight” into cosmic order was a form of intuition after all.

  Kirk turned to Natira. “Once we get in there, will we be able to take out the missiles remotely? Send an abort code?”

  Natira searched her memory. “If the missiles are being guided in this way, they must be under the direct control of the Oracle. Instead of being set to detonate on impact, they will need to have a detonate command transmitted to them once they are in position.” She glanced at his phaser. “The simplest way to stop them will be to destroy the Oracle’s core processor so it cannot send the signal. Indeed, that would solve many problems.” Anger flared in her eyes. “Would that I had done it in the first place.”

  “All right. Governess, you wait here. Mr. Chekov, gentlemen, let’s move in.”

  They began to advance the last few dozen meters to the exit. Zaand watched Kirk a moment longer, then decided he had to ask the question that had been troubling him since the surface. He moved forward next to Kirk so he could speak softly. “Sir, may I ask something?”

  “What is it, Ensign?” His expression was open, receptive, not hostile at all.

  “Up above… you told the governess that you trusted my judgment. How can you? You haven’t worked with me before… and I’ve given you no reason to trust me.”

  “Because you haven’t trusted me.” It was not accusatory, just accepting.

  “It’s… more complicated than that. I… when Rhaandarites…” He sighed. “No, I suppose I haven’t.”

  “Ensign, the thing about trust is, the only way you can know whether to trust someone… is to trust him. To give him your trust and the chance to live up to it.” He paused in thought. “Our job comes with a lot of risks. But trust is the biggest risk of all. And it’s the one thing no ship, no crew can function without.” He caught Zaand’s gaze. “You’re a member of my crew, Ensign. We depend on each other to survive. In that situation, trust has to be a given.”

  Zaand couldn’t look away from those eyes. “I think I understand, sir,” he said. It was a very Rhaandarite sentiment, in its way. He realized that when Rhaandarites defined each other by their social roles, took for granted that others would fulfill their roles, that was an act of trust. There was more to it than simply knowing that a procedure had been followed. So even if the procedure had been violated, there could still be other grounds—stronger grounds, even—for trust or loyalty.

  Besides, Kirk had been captain of the Enterprise for five years. If he’d filled that role with the kind of quiet conviction Zaand was seeing in him here, then maybe the impropriety hadn’t been his displacement of Decker. Maybe the impropriety had been that he’d ever left that role in the first place.

  Zaand didn’t know whether he was violating Rhaandarite social rules by thinking this, or actually gaining some insight into the higher tiers that had eluded him before. The one thing he did know for sure, as he looked into Kirk’s eyes, was where his loyalty lay. “Yes… I understand. But may I ask… if we can’t function without trust, then shouldn’t that include… trusting yourself?”

  Kirk’s eyes widened, and nothing more needed to be said. Which was just as well, since they were nearly there and had to stay quiet anyway.

  Chekov took point, moving forward to the tunnel exit and checking his tricorder for the locations of the hostiles. He used hand gestures to convey this information to Zaand and Swenson, and to instruct them on how to proceed. Then he looked at Kirk, who nodded. “Go.”

  After that things moved quickly, though Zaand’s mind methodically processed and filed every detail. Chekov kicked the door open and went in firing. He stunned one black-robed hostile and took the others by surprise long enough for the team to deploy into the control chamber. It was cramped, cluttered, full of blocky consoles oddly reminiscent of decade-old Starfleet des
igns. Nearby, Commander Spock stood with a tall figure whose body language marked him as the leader, and a man with serious psychological dysfunctions. Other hostiles flanked them, guarding the commander.

  A hostile neared him, raised his sword. Zaand stunned him. Swenson was slower to respond and had his arm slashed by another hostile, causing him to drop his phaser. The swordsman swung at Swenson’s torso, but his body armor deflected the blow. Zaand turned to stun him, but Swenson took him out with a head butt, a kneecap kick, and a right cross. Spock attempted to take advantage of the distraction, but his guards held him firmly.

  Then Kirk advanced. “Spock!” he cried, radiating relief mixed with concern. It left him distracted for one crucial second, as another hostile emerged from the outer chamber and fired her crossbow at the captain.

  At his captain.

  Zaand didn’t choose to leap into the path of the crossbow bolt. It was simply what he was supposed to do. It was his place.

  But it hurt more than he could have imagined. He reflected that Starfleet body armor design could have used more neck protection.

  “Zaand!” That was Chekov. A phaser whined, a body fell. Zaand was fuzzy on the details. But he saw Kirk and Chekov kneeling over him. “No,” Chekov cried, filled with guilt, blaming himself.

  “It’s all right,” Zaand managed to say. He clenched Kirk’s hand. “I served… my captain.”

  And then he understood it all.

  * * *

  Once again, Kirk was left no time to mourn someone who’d died because of him. Unfortunately, he’d gotten to be an old hand at compartmentalizing his grief, putting it on reserve until he had the luxury of facing it. For a moment he feared that Chekov would be unable to do the same. Zaand was the first one lost under his command—and on the very first landing party Chekov had assigned him to. Kirk knew that would hit especially hard.

  But Pavel had grown a lot in the past few years. He efficiently channeled his rage into action, letting out a roar as he phasered Zaand’s killer into unconsciousness, then launching himself to take on the others.