by Greg Cox
Unwilling to surrender to either fate or fear, however, he’d resolved to confront any trace of agoraphobia by spending as much time as possible upon the roof, in defiance of both his qualms and the oppressive summer heat. Nothing in this new world will get the better of me, the boy vowed, sweating beneath the sun. Not even myself.
He still missed his mother, of course, not to mention his teachers and classmates, but he was adapting to his changed circumstances, just as any truly superior being would. His new foster parents, distant relations of his deceased mother, were kind enough, and capable of providing him with a comfortable home environment. Prabhot Singh worked as an civil engineer for the city, while his wife Sharan illustrated children’s books. Childless themselves, they doted on the newly orphaned Noon, marveling at his obvious talent, strength, and precociousness. Neither Prabhot nor Sharan were his intellectual equals, naturally, but the challenge of exploring a brand-new world, as well as the Singhs’ admirably well equipped library, were providing him with sufficient mental stimulation, at least for the time being.
Noon lowered his gaze to the thick hardcover book spread open upon his lap. Certainly, he couldn’t complain about his current reading material. The Life of Alexander the Great was an engrossing tale, made all the more thrilling by Noon’s knowledge that all of it was absolutely [248] true. Caught up in its inspiring account of conquest and glory, the young boy flipped the pages eagerly, temporarily abandoning modern-day Chandigarh for the bloodstained battlefields of ancient Greece and Persia. He saw himself, with Alexander, at the head of a mighty army, conquering city after city, nation after nation. Thebes fell, and Tyre, Jerusalem, and Babylon, until the entire ancient world, all the way to the eternally flowing Indus, surrendered to the power and destiny of a single indomitable will. Noon’s heart, stronger and more resilient than any ordinary child’s, beat in unison with the bygone war drums sounding in his brain, while visions of empire filled his imagination. ...
Thunder rolled, and dark clouds gathered on the horizon, as the monsoon drew ever nearer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
STARDATE 7004.1
“CAPTAIN, WE ARE APPROACHING SYCORAX.”
Spock’s voice, emerging from the intercom in Kirk’s quarters, roused the captain from his historical research. So soon? he thought. It felt as though he had just begun delving into the Enterprise’s extensive database, but, no, upon reflection, he realized that a full three Earth days had passed. “Understood,” he replied promptly, rising from his desk and switching off the computer terminal. “I’m on my way.”
Although present-day responsibilities now demanded his attention, the events of the distant past lingered in his mind, following him through the ship’s corridors all the way to the nearest turbolift. So that’s how it all began, he mused. I don’t envy the decision that Gary Seven and Roberta faced back in 1974. There was no way, of course, that Seven could have known for certain how dangerous Khan and his fellow supermen would become, but, even if he had, what else could he have done? How do you protect the future from the threat posed by innocent children?
Definitely a dilemma to keep in mind when dealing with the Paragon Colony, he resolved. The turbolift came to a stop and Kirk stepped out onto the bridge, where he saw that McCoy had already joined Spock and the others. The Vulcan first officer surrendered the captain’s chair to Kirk and took his accustomed place at the science station. “As you can see,” he informed Kirk, “Sycorax is now within visual range.”
[250] On the viewscreen, a solitary planet spun slowly against a backdrop of star-studded darkness. Swirling clouds, dirty yellow in hue, blanketed the approaching sphere, concealing the planet’s terrain from sight, while periodic flashes of intense electrical activity lit up the churning clouds from within. Kirk looked in vain for any visible sign of habitation. “Not exactly the most inviting world I’ve ever seen,” he commented out loud.
“Indeed,” Spock acknowledged. The light from his scanner cast deep blue shadows on his refined Vulcan features. “Long-range sensors indicate that Sycorax is a Class-K planet, roughly comparable to Venus in Earth’s own solar system. The atmosphere consists primarily of carbon dioxide, with gaseous sulfuric acid providing a heavy layer of cloud cover at an altitude of approximately fifty to sixty meters. Wind velocity in the upper atmosphere exceeds three hundred and fifty kilometers per hour. The temperature at the surface can surpass four hundred and sixty degrees centigrade, while the atmospheric pressure is approximately ninety-one point four times that of Earth at sea level, and equivalent to the pressure half a mile below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Gravity is point eight-seven-three standard, and the planet itself is composed primarily of nickel-iron and various silicates. Hardened lava plains cover seventy-five point eight percent of the surface, with the rest of the terrain taken up by a variety of craters, mountains, and plateaus. Sensors detect no indigenous life-forms. ...”
“Thank you, Mr. Spock,” Kirk interrupted. He rested his chin on his knuckles as he contemplated the fog-wreathed planet. “I get the idea. Sycorax is not exactly the local garden spot.”
“It makes Siberia sound like a resort town on the Black Sea,” Ensign Chekov observed from his post at the navigation console, to the captain’s right.
“Hell of place to start a colony,” McCoy groused. The doctor stood behind the central command area, leaning against the cherry-red safety rail. “Let alone a genetically engineered utopia.”
“Perhaps they had their reasons, Doctor,” Spock stated. “Certainly, the Federation has established colonies on less hospitable worlds, when there was sufficient incentive to do so.”
“But what sort of incentive could possibly induce people to spend [251] over a hundred years in such a lifeless hellhole?” McCoy argued, not willing to concede the point to Spock.
Kirk decided to head off any long debate. “I guess we’ll find out soon enough, Bones,” he said. “Mr. Sulu, place us in orbit around the planet. Lieutenant Uhura, see if you can hail the colony.”
Sulu and Uhura carried out his orders with their customary speed and efficiency. Within minutes, the communications officer had made contact with the planet on the viewscreen. “I have the regent of the colony for you, Captain,” she reported.
“Thank you, Lieutenant.” Kirk nodded toward the main viewer. “Onscreen.”
Sycorax’s stormy, amber countenance was replaced by the head and shoulders of an attractive Asian woman, possibly in her mid-sixties. Shrewd black eyes examined Kirk from a round, benign-seeming face framed by short white curls and bangs. At least she doesn’t look like Khan, Kirk thought, then introduced himself.
“Welcome to our system,” the woman responded warmly. “I’m Masako Clarke, current regent of the Paragon Colony. Thank you for answering our invitation.”
“Thank you for having us,” Kirk said diplomatically. “My officers and I are looking forward to learning more about your society. When would be a convenient time for us to beam down a landing party?”
Clarke gave the matter a moment’s thought, then smiled out from the screen. “Well, it’s late afternoon here. Why don’t you give me an hour or so to prepare a proper reception, then come down whenever you’re ready I’m afraid, though, that I’m going to have to ask you to take a shuttlecraft instead of using your transporters. The colony is protected by a permanent forcefield, for reasons which I can explain more fully during our meetings. I hope that’s not too much of an inconvenience.”
“Not at all,” Kirk assured her. Piloting a shuttlecraft through the planet’s turbulent atmosphere was going to mean a bit of a bumpy ride, but it wasn’t anything the shuttle’s own deflector shields couldn’t handle. “A shuttle it is. I’ll see you in an hour then, Regent Clarke.”
“Please,” she insisted. “Call me Masako.”
* * *
[252] Less than sixty minutes later, the landing party assembled in the shuttlebay. For this initial encounter, Kirk had chosen to keep the mission’s personnel down
to the minimum: just himself, McCoy, and a single security officer, discreetly armed with a compact Type-1 phaser. Kirk himself took the pilot’s seat in the Columbus-2, while the security officer, Lieutenant Seth Lerner, occupied the copilot’s chair. Muttering under his breath, McCoy strapped himself into the seat directly behind Kirk. “An awful lot of trouble,” the doctor complained, “just to hear a sales pitch for genetic engineering.”
Kirk fired up the shuttle’s impulse engines, then used the ship’s communicator to contact Spock on the bridge. “Last chance, Spock,” he joked over the carrier wave. “Are you sure you don’t want to come along?”
“Perhaps on some later occasion,” Spock’s voice replied. Kirk could easily visualize the Vulcan’s cool, thoughtful expression as he explained his reasoning. “As far as we know, the inhabitants of the Paragon Colony have spent over a century attempting to perfect the human genome, so it is not implausible that they might be disturbed, or perhaps even offended, by the presence of a human/Vulcan hybrid.” Spock’s dispassionate tone suggested that he was not at all personally offended by any hypothetical prejudices on the part of the Paragon colonists. “Until you and Dr. McCoy have determined otherwise, it seems more politic for me to remain aboard the ship at this moment in time.”
“An admirably prudent course of action, Mr. Spock.” As ever, Kirk was unable to find fault with Spock’s analysis. “Good to know I’m leaving the ship in such responsible hands.”
“I would be appalled if you had any thoughts to the contrary,” Spock answered. “May you have a successful meeting with the regent and her associates.”
“Will do,” the captain said. He checked the control panel to make sure that the shuttlecraft was sealed and fully pressurized. “Preparing for takeoff. Kirk out.”
“About time,” McCoy grumbled behind him. “Let’s get this over with.”
[253] “Why, Bones,” Kirk teased the irascible physician, “I thought you preferred old-fashioned vehicles to transporter beams?”
McCoy snorted disparagingly. “Not when it involves flying into a thunderstorm the size of a continent! If man were meant to travel through that kind of toxic tempest, we’d have evolved on Venus instead.”
Kirk noticed that Lieutenant Lerner was starting to look a bit uneasy. The security officer was relatively new to the Enterprise, having recently transferred from the U.S.S. Forge. “Don’t let the doctor’s Cassandra act get to you, crewman,” he advised. “His general attitude is only slightly less ominous than his bedside manner.”
“Says the man who can talk a supercomputer into committing suicide,” McCoy retorted, eliciting an amused grin from Kirk.
“Touché, Doctor.” Kirk waited until the shuttlebay was fully de-pressurized, then watched as the clamshell doors slid open in front of the shuttlecraft, providing access to the airless void outside the Enterprise. He pulled back on the throttle, and the shuttle lifted off from the launchpad, cruising slowly toward the open archway and out into space. Artificial gravity kept the landing party comfortably secured in their seats.
Once clear of the larger spacecraft, Kirk immediately set course for Sycorax. The hostile, cloud-covered planet looked considerably larger and more forbidding from the cockpit of the Columbus than it had from the Enterprise’s more spacious bridge.
At full impulse, it took them less than five minutes to enter the planet’s atmosphere. The transition was like going from a clear summer night into the heart of a hurricane. Cyclonic winds buffeted the shuttle, shaking Kirk and his companions in their seats. Lightning flashed all around them, presaging titanic bursts of thunder that could be heard even through the shuttle’s insulated bulkheads. Flying droplets of sulfuric acid pelted Columbus’s duranium hull, although the ship’s deflectors protected the outer ceramic plating from the acid’s corrosive effect. Struggling with the controls, Kirk and Lerner worked in tandem to keep the shuttle on a steady downward trajectory Even with their forward lights on full power, Kirk and his copilot were [254] unable to see beyond the smoggy yellow haze through which they descended. Kirk had to navigate from instrumentation alone, keeping a watchful eye on the astrogator as he followed a homing signal provided by the colony. A bolt of lightning struck Columbus, rocking the shuttle so hard that McCoy gasped out loud. “I knew this was a bad idea,” he said.
“Only a few more meters,” Kirk promised him. As they neared the surface, the temperature outside the shuttle increased dramatically, boiling away the billowing clouds of acid rain so that the atmosphere gradually cleared, improving visibility. Kirk could now glimpse a cracked, arid landscape through the last retreating wisps of vapor. Vast basaltic plains, occasionally pitted with gigantic craters, stretched for countless kilometers between rocky mountain ranges totally devoid of snow or vegetation. Waning sunlight, filtered through the dense, yellow-white cloud cover, gave the lifeless wasteland a dull beige tint. Spock certainly didn’t exaggerate Sycorax’s desolate nature, Kirk concluded. Hard to imagine anyone would want to settle down here for good.
“Atmospheric pressure approaching eight thousand kilopascals,” Lerner reported. McCoy whistled appreciatively; that was enough pressure to crush a humanoid body many times over. “And rising.”
Kirk nodded, not too worried yet. He had plenty of faith in Starfleet engineering. Perspiration glistened upon his brow as some of the blistering heat outside penetrated the shuttle’s bulkheads. “Structural integrity holding?”
“Yes, sir,” the security officer reported.
“Very good, Mr. Lerner. Let me know if there’s any change.” Despite his confidence in the shuttle’s construction, Kirk knew that the sooner they reached their destination, the better. Peering through the cockpit windshield at the barren terrain below, Kirk spotted something rising in the middle of an empty plain directly ahead of them. Its smooth lines and perfect symmetry clearly advertised its artificial nature. “Look, right ahead. That must be the colony.”
The man-made structure appeared to expand in size as the shuttlecraft descended toward it. The Paragon Colony turned out to be enclosed in a large domed biosphere, approximately fifty kilometers in [255] diameter and apparently built atop an immense crater in the planet’s scorched and splintered surface. The dome was a pale translucent green, constructed seamlessly from a substance Kirk couldn’t immediately identify. Some variety of transparent aluminum? he speculated. A sparkling, bluish aura hinted at the existence of the forcefield defending the dome from the planet’s unforgiving environment.
A tractor beam soon locked on to the shuttle, and Kirk surrendered control of the vessel to operators within the colony. Automated doors opened near the base of the dome, and the tractor beam smoothly guided the shuttle through a dock-sized airlock and into a large interior hangar. Reduced to sight-seeing for the moment, Kirk glanced around the cavernous landing bay, spotting a wide assortment of vehicles parked within the hangar. Ranging from small scout ships to massive cargo haulers, the heavily reinforced transports appeared durable enough to explore and endure the intense heat and pressure outside the dome.
Columbus shuddered momentarily as its stabilizers and landing pads touched down on the floor of the hangar. Behind Kirk, McCoy expelled an audible sigh of relief. “Don’t go kissing the ground once you’re out of the shuttle, Doctor,” Kirk cautioned him. “You might give our hosts the wrong idea.”
External sensors indicated that it was safe to exit the shuttlecraft, so Kirk unsealed the main doors and stepped out onto the floor outside. Sycorax’s gravity, slightly weaker than Earth standard, added a little extra bounce to his step. The air was cool and comfortable compared with the overheated interior of the shuttle. McCoy and Lerner exited Columbus behind him, just in time to greet the delegation sent to meet them.
Masako Clarke led a party of maybe a dozen men and women, who crossed the hangar on their way to the shuttle. Kirk couldn’t help noticing that, at first glance, the colonists appeared uniformly trim and attractive; even the older citizens, silver-haired though the
y might be, looked healthy and fit. Clearly, infirmity, obesity, baldness, even simple homeliness had been purged from the colony’s gene pool. Poor Bones, Kirk thought, recalling the doctor’s somewhat lived-in features. He must look like Quasimodo to them.
[256] “Welcome to Sycorax, Captain, gentlemen.” Along with the rest of the delegation, Regent Clarke wore a skintight, one-piece bodysuit that could become standard apparel only on a world where everyone had a flawless physique. “Let me introduce you to a few of my senior staff,” she said, gesturing toward the individuals to her immediate left and right, respectively. “This is Aaron Rosenberg, chairman of the Committee for Genetic Development.” The dignitary in question, an athletic-looking older man with short brown hair, bowed politely at Kirk and the others. “And this is Karen Jones, the head of our Engineering and Infrastructure Department.” Another perfect physical specimen, this one with unblemished mahogany skin and an elegantly coifed crown of snowy white hair. “I’m afraid,” the regent continued, “that we’ve been cut off from the rest of the galaxy so long that we don’t actually have any sort of diplomatic corps, but perhaps that’s something we can remedy in the weeks to come.”
“You seem to be handling the diplomacy perfectly well all on your own,” Kirk complimented Clarke, then introduced McCoy and Lerner. The good doctor, Kirk was glad to note, offered their hosts nothing but down-home Southern charm and graciousness, despite his personal reservations about the colony and their mission. “You’d never guess that you don’t receive visitors every day.”
Clarke accepted Kirk’s praise humbly. “In all honesty,” she admitted, “I have had a bit of practice recently.” The welcoming committee behind her began to part down the middle as those at the rear of the party worked their way toward the Starfleet officers. Kirk’s eyes widened in amazement and he heard McCoy gasp as well. “What the—?” Lerner blurted involuntarily, his hand instinctively reaching for his phaser.
