He flung himself down on his bunk and threw one arm across his eyes. His stomach churned; he felt nauseated by tension and anger. He lived his life on the verge of ulcers, a fact he denied. He was convinced that if he could just sort out the events of the last day properly and deduce what would happen next, then he could somehow stop the progression of disaster. But all he could do was think, over and over again, I shouldn’t have trusted McCoy. After everything I’ve seen I should have known better, I shouldn’t have trusted McCoy.
He heard the door open; he lay very still, pretending to be asleep. Light crept past the folds of his sleeve. He wondered if McCoy had come to dispatch him, as he had got rid of the captain, or if Spock had come to poison him, as he had somehow poisoned Lee, and Judge Desmoulins, and the security guard. Footsteps approached. He prepared himself to fight, trying to tense his muscles without appearing to move.
“Mr. Braithewaite?”
The tension went out of Ian in a rush. He pulled his arm away from his eyes and sat up quickly.
“Mr. Scott—thank god!”
“I had to override the lock,” Scott said. “I tried to reach ye on the communicator, but I couldna get through.”
“They’ve cut me off,” Braithewaite said. He sprang to his feet. “I tried to give McCoy another chance, and he had me arrested.”
“Aye,” Scott said dully.
Ian took Scott by the shoulders. The engineer did not meet his gaze.
“I knew I could trust you,” Ian said. “I knew there had to be somebody on this ship who would make a difference. My god, if you weren’t here—”
“Dinna remind me,” Scott said. “Dinna tell me compliments. There’s naught but shame in all of this.”
“We’ve got to try to recapture Spock and Mordreaux. They’ve both left the ship but they might have overlooked some kind of clue. They were working in Mordreaux’s room—come on!”
He plunged out into the corridor, oblivious to being seen or recaptured. Scott followed.
Dr. Mordreaux hunched down in a chair, his arms crossed over his chest. He glowered at Spock.
“Dammit, no!” he said again. “Iknew this would happen if I helped you, I knew it. You’ll never be satisfied till you manage to impose your own will and your own ethics on mine!”
“I assure you, Dr. Mordreaux—”
“Shut up! Get out! Do whatever you want, I don’t care.”
“Do you release me from my bond?” “No! Your actions are on your own head. If you do this, I’ll expose you for the liar you are.”
Spock gazed down at the time-changer. Dr. Mordreaux’s threat was trivial enough: If Spock broke his promise and kept the professor from being arrested, the promise technically would never have been made; if Spock failed, the professor would be taken to the rehabilitation colony, and no one would pay attention to what he said. But even if the threat were a compelling one, it would not control the Vulcan’s actions. Spock alone had to decide whether he must break his word, and whether he could live with himself afterward if he did.
The door to Dr. Mordreaux’s stateroom slid open.
“Ye said they’d escaped” Mr. Scott said to Ian Braithewaite.
Braithewaite stared at Spock and Mordreaux, his stunned expression changing to relief and triumph. “It doesn’t matter, we’ve caught up to them. Get that thing away from Spock. It’s—it’s a weapon!”
“Mr. Scott,” Spock said, “have you been looking for me?”
“Mr. Spock... Mr. Braithewaite has made some serious accusations against you, and against Dr. McCoy. I ha’ some questions I canna work out in my mind. I think we must talk.”
Braithewaite snorted in disgust.
“Are you giving me an order, Mr. Scott?” Spock asked.
“I dinna wish to put in a formal charge of unfitness against ye, but I will if ye force me to it.”
“You will be charged with mutiny.”
“Will ye no’ just explain?” Scott cried. “Ye willna answer my questions, ye’ve lied to me—”
“For gods’ sakes, Mr. Scott!” Braithewaite yelled. “This is no time to argue over your hurt feelings!” He lunged toward Spock. “Give me that—”
As Braithewaite grabbed for the time-changer, Spock pushed him aside and fled. He shouldered his way past the two security officers at Dr. Mordreaux’s door, but Scott and Braithewaite followed him on the run, and the taller man closed the distance quickly.
“Stop him!” Scott shouted, and the sounds of confused voices and running footsteps intensified into chaos.
Spock raced through the corridors of the Enterprise . He spun around a corner and ran headlong into Dr. McCoy and Captain Hunter. But Hunter had no reason to try to stop him; he escaped again and abandoned McCoy to the confusion as Scott and Braithewaite caught up to them. He could hear everyone shouting at each other, cursing, yelling conflicting orders and explanations, with McCoy doing his best to complicate matters further. But after a moment the muddle broke up into a string of pursuers again. As Spock plunged into the transporter room, Ian Braithewaite put on a final sprint, launched himself at Spock, and rammed into the Vulcan’s knees. They went down in a tangle, Ian clutching at the time-changer and trying to drag it away.
Spock clamped his fingers around the muscle at the base of Ian’s neck, seeking out the vulnerable nerve. The prosecutor collapsed in an angular heap. Spock freed himself and lurched to his feet. Without taking the time to double-check the settings of the changer, without stopping to think whether he should try to go farther back than he originally planned, all the way to the beginning, Spock leaped onto the transporter platform. Hunter appeared in the doorway, her energy-pistol drawn. She aimed it: it would not stun; it was a killing weapon.
Struggling halfway to consciousness, Braithewaite groaned. “Stop him,” he said. “Stop him, he murdered Jim Kirk.”
But she hesitated. As Mr. Scott and two bewildered-looking security officers rushed into the transporter room, followed a moment later by Dr. McCoy, Spock pressed the controls and felt the rainbow light engulf him, crush him, and rip him away into the continuum.
Dr. McCoy felt the warp engines shudder into unwilling resurrection, feeding their power through the time-changer. The drain was too great. As the lights faded, the doctor watched Hunter lower her energy-pistol.
She had plenty of time to fire, McCoy thought.
“What the hell did he do?” Hunter said.
“He made a fine botch of my repairs again, for one thing,” Scott said from the darkness, his old self for a moment.
“Emergency power should come on line in a minute or so,” McCoy said. “Like I told you, we’ve been having some problems—”
“You’ve got more than problems,” Hunter said, in a tone that silenced him.
The quiet movement of the air returned, and the lights glowed dimly back to life around them. The voices of frightened crew members jumbled together in an erratic crescendo. The computer began to babble, then lapsed into fuzzy white noise.
Mr. Scott helped Ian Braithewaite to his feet. Dazed, the prosecutor almost fell again. McCoy hurried forward, but Ian jerked away from his help.
“Keep your hands off me.” He sat down on the transporter platform and buried his face in his hands.
“All right, Ian,” McCoy said mildly. He turned to the security officers. “Is anyone guarding Dr. Mordreaux?”
“I—I guess not, Doctor.”
“You better get back there then, both of you. Everything’s under control here.”
They looked skeptical. McCoy did not blame them.
“Out!” he yelled.
They left, reluctantly, to return to their post. McCoy folded his arms and regarded Braithewaite.
“You’re supposed to be in your quarters, Ian,” he said. “What are you doing out?”
“I freed him, Dr. McCoy,” Scott said. “I dinna ken what’s happened to this ship, I dinna ken what’s happened t’ye and Mr. Spock since all this started. But Mr. Braithewaite has
asked questions that need answering, and you willna answer them.”
“Scotty, you disobeyed my direct orders—”
“Your orders! Ye are no’ a command officer! What business had he leaving ye in command?”
“Spock left the doctor in command because it was the only way he could carry out his plans,” Braithewaite said. “He had to keep you out of the way.”
“Now just a minute,” McCoy said.
“Stop it, all of you.”
The three men fell silent, recognizing the tone of someone who had earned obedience and respect.
“I outrank all of you, including Spock,” Hunter said, “and if I have to pull rank to find out what’s going on, then consider it pulled. Dr. McCoy, do you have anything to say now?”
He started to answer her—but Spock had got away, and perhaps he needed only a few minutes to put everything right, but if he failed again and returned, he would be stopped if his plans were known.
McCoy could not take the chance of revealing what they were trying to do. He shook his head in defeat.
“Mr. Scott?” Hunter asked.
“I dinna ken what has happened. Dr. McCoy said Mr. Spock was deep asleep. He isna asleep, you saw that for yourself. That didna look like any transporter beam I ever saw before, either—and where could he go? I canna make his actions come out to make any sense in my mind. Unless Mr. Braithewaite’s suspicions are correct. I dinna want to believe them—but if they’re no’ true, why does Dr. McCoy want to go to Arcturus?”
“Arcturus!” Hunter said.
“Where’d you get the idea I wanted to go to Arcturus?” McCoy asked, baffled.
“Ye told me ye did,” Scott said, and then, when McCoy shook his head, “Ye said, if ye asked for warp four to Arcturus, would ye get it.”
“I didn’t mean it,” McCoy said. “I just picked the first example I could think of. But so what if I did want to go to Arcturus? What possible difference could that make?”
“Leonard,” Hunter said, “Arcturus is almost exactly equidistant from Federation, Romulan, and Klingon space. It’s neutral—most of the time, anyway. People go to Arcturus to make deals.”
“I don’t want to go to Arcturus,” McCoy said again. “I only wanted to know if the warp drive was on line.”
“He doesn’t even make up decent excuses!” Ian said.
“No, Mr. Braithewaite,” Hunter said, and she looked as if she were about to burst into laughter. “You’re right about that, Dr. McCoy doesn’t make up good excuses. But what do you have to say?”
“Spock’s been trying to free Mordreaux,” Braithewaite told her. “He was on Aleph right after the trial, I saw him. And he was monkeying around with the transporter just before Kirk was murdered. But Spock couldn’t get Mordreaux away, so he settled for escaping himself once things began to fall apart on him. He’d already drawn Dr. McCoy into his scheme. The security commander was involved, but they got rid of her—”
“The security commander? You can’t mean Mandala Flynn!”
“Yes—She wanted to command a ship like this so badly she could taste it. It was no secret, she even told Kirk. But he laughed at her. He must have known that a stateless person had no chance of advancing that far in Starfleet.”
“You’ve got some pretty strange ideas, Mr. Braithewaite.”
“But that’s what happened! Spock probably offered her the Enterprise in return for her help. They had to get rid of Kirk first. Dr. Mordreaux tried to kill him but failed, so Spock pressured McCoy into letting Kirk die.”
“Dammit, Braithewaite, he was dead! He was already dead!” McCoy’s voice broke and he turned away. In the following silence he managed to collect himself again. “I carried out his wishes. I followed the terms of his will. You can look at it if you want.”
“I intend to,” Hunter said. “Whatever you did or didn’t do afterwards, that doesn’t change the fact that Jim was assaulted.”
“You could have stopped them!” Ian cried. “Why didn’t you shoot Spock when you had the chance?”
Hunter glanced down at the pistol still in her hand, and slowly holstered it. “Do you think I’d kill a person on your say-so?”
Ian stood up and started toward the transporter console. “It still isn’t too late! We can still—” He halted just as McCoy was about to leap at him to prevent his revealing the time-changer’s auxiliary unit. Ian swayed, a lost, confused look on his face.
“What’s the matter?” Scott said. “Ian—”
The prosecutor collapsed, his body completely limp.
“The nerve-pinch—” Scott said.
“It isn’t that,” McCoy said, on his knees on the floor beside Braithewaite. He recognized the symptoms immediately, this second time in as many days. “It’s hypermorphic botulism! Help me with him, there isn’t time to wait for a stretcher!”
In the grip of the changer, Spock felt time pass. The sensation was very different from that of the
transporter alone, which was nothing more than a brief moment of dislocation at the end of the process. This felt as if he were falling through space, through hard vacuum, buffeted by every eddy of the solar wind, every current of each magnetic field, tossed by gravity waves, by light itself.
He materialized two meters above the ground, in Aleph Prime’s core park, and fell the rest of the way. He landed hard enough to knock the wind out of him, and he had to fight to keep from losing consciousness.
It could have been worse. He knew he could not calibrate the device with total precision—getting from a moving starship to the place where Aleph had been several days before was accomplishment enough—so he had chosen to appear in open space. That way he had a better chance of not reincorporating inside a wall. He would have preferred to appear in the emergency transmitter room, but felt the chances against succeeding were too large to challenge. He got up, brushing himself off, glancing around to discover whether or not he had been seen.
He had chosen darkness as well as open space: the park mimicked a diurnal cycle, and right now it imitated night. An artificial moon hung in the dull black starless sky.
Leaving the park behind, Spock entered one of the maze of corridors that formed Aleph Prime. He passed a public information terminal and requested the time: he had arrived, as he intended, approximately an hour before the emergency message to the Enterprise had been transmitted.
In the pre-dawn hours, even revelers on leave from the ships and transports and mining operations centered around Aleph had mostly gone to their beds, but the few beings Spock did pass paid him no attention. McCoy had been right about the uniform; it would have made him more conspicuous. He was well aware of the human penchant for comparing assignments, ships, commanders: had he been in uniform it would not have been long before some overfriendly inebriated human raised more questions than he could answer.
The small government sector was even quieter than the rest of the station. He knew where the emergency transmitter was, but it was inaccessible to anyone without the proper code. He walked slowly down a hallway lined with glass-walled offices, all dark and deserted: customs, security, Federation, Starfleet, the public defender’s office, the prosecutor’s office—
The lights flicked on; Ian Braithewaite left an inner chamber and entered the main room. Spock froze, but it was too late to get out of sight. Clutching briefcase, portable reader, and a handful of transcript flimsies, Braithewaite came into the hall. The lights faded out when he closed the door. He noticed Spock only when he nearly ran into him; he glanced down distractedly.
“Sorry,” he said. “Can I help you? Are you looking for somebody?”
Of course, Spock thought. He has not met me yet; he does not know who I am, and he has no suspicions about me. Tomorrow, when the Enterprise arrives, he will remember that he has seen me.
Does this mean I fail here, too?
“Where is the Vulcan consulate?” Spock asked.
Braithewaite pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.
“Oh. Right. You’re in the wrong sector, all the consulates are in a higher-class part of the station entirely.” He gave directions to an area in Aleph Prime’s north polar region. Spock thanked him, and Braithewaite left, reading one of the
transcripts as he walked. It was no wonder it took him time to recall where he had seen Spock before.
Once the prosecutor was out of sight, Spock tried the door to the emergency transmitter. It was, of course, locked, and the computer that guarded it demanded identifications. He was careful not to speak to it or palm the sensor; he did not want it to have legally admissible proof of his presence.
For a moment he thought about returning to the public information cubicle, accessing the computer, and breaking through its guards to open the transmitter room. He had deceived the Aleph Prime systems before, or, more accurately, he would do it in the future; he could do it now.
But that was exactly what Dr. Mordreaux would do. It was the simplest, most direct way of getting to the transmitter, which the professor had to do if he were to order the Enterprise to Aleph. Al Spock had to do was find a place of concealment, wait, and capture him when he arrived.
Cautiously, Spock tried each door along the corridor. Somewhat to his surprise, one of them opened. Inside it was dark but he did not wave up the lights. He could see well enough: it was a small, empty courtroom, perhaps the one in which Dr. Mordreaux had been convicted, sentenced, and denied any appeal.
Tout comprendre c ’est toutpardonner, Spock thought: a philosophy difficult to express in Vulcan. He could understand why the humans faced with Dr. Mordreaux’s research had been so terrified of it, so determined to suppress it that they would subvert justice to succeed. It was hardly his place to forgive them, though; he could only wish they were not so utterly certain to misuse what the professor had discovered. Had he been on Vulcan, had Vulcans been the only beings involved, they would have studied the principles and honored the discoverer; and they would have agreed, by ethical consensus, never to put the principles into use.
The Entropy Effect Page 20
