by Judith
“A strategy is one thing,” Kirk said, sliding the sensor controls back and forth, “but to carry this off, they’d have had to rewire their comm system into their sensors. Unless they’ve got a couple of communications geniuses onboard, I don’t see how they could have done it so quickly.”
“Maybe they did it earlier?” Gauvreau suggested. “Before they knew we were here.”
“Possible,” Kirk said, “but not likely they’d want to limit their own comm system to just short-range transmissions out in deep space. There’s something very strange about that ship. Damn it!”
“What, Kirk?”
Kirk slapped his hand on the console. “They’ve disappeared again ... no ... there ... I don’t believe it. They managed to broadcast a perfect phase delay to us so our sensors showed no return signal for a few seconds.” He turned to look at Gauvreau. “Just when did Orions get so smart?”
“Why not stop underestimating them? Let’s give them some of their own back.”
Kirk smiled in swift response. He liked that idea. He went to work on it immediately.
Thirty minutes from intercept, the Shelton blazed through space, straight for the Orion vessel. Abruptly, it dropped from warp, flipped to a full reverse heading, then vented its impulse baffles at point nine nine cee. When the relativistically compressed vapor cloud cleared from around the ship, the Shelton rotated slowly, stern over keel, running lights out.
On the Shelton’s bridge, Gauvreau unstuck her hands from her chair. The inertial dampeners of the freighter had not been able to keep up with sudden vector shifts. Neither had her stomach.
“Good,” Kirk said. “Very good.”
“What was so good about that? If the cats ever come out of [317] their kennels they won’t eat for a month.” Gauvreau rubbed at her face to wipe the tears of surprise from her eyes.
Kirk couldn’t blame her. It had been a wild ride and he had almost been thrown clear of his chair himself. “As far as our friends out there are going to be able to tell, the Shelton just lost warp drive,” Kirk said. “Between the exhaust venting cloud and the system shutdown and the spinning, they’re going to think we’re crippled.”
“This is good?” Gauvreau asked.
“Trust me,” Kirk said happily. “Now broadcast an emergency beacon, but cut it off after a few repetitions.”
“Terrific,” Gauvreau muttered. “That way no one will ever find us.”
“Don’t worry. They’re going to come in with their guard down. We’ll get our ID scan, then pop off a torpedo, then hit warp.”
“I don’t know, Kirk. The way they’ve been behaving, I don’t think their guard’s ever going to go down.”
Kirk scratched at his neck under the tight collar rim of the pressure suit. “Don’t be so pessimistic. It’s not as if we’re dealing with Academy graduates here.”
“Is that so?” Gauvreau pointed at the screen. “Look at that.”
The visual screen painted an image of a brilliant streak passing by—the Orion vessel had not stopped.
Gauvreau read from her instruments. “We were flooded by sensor radiation, Kirk. They did a complete scan.”
“Hold it. They’re coming back,” Kirk said, intently watching the course change indicators. “Ready with that torpedo as soon as I get them in memory.”
Suddenly the Orion ship fell out of warp space directly beside the Shelton. Whoever was piloting her was fearless. Or an idiot.
“Steady,” Kirk cautioned. “Get ready on that torpedo.”
“It’s not going to do a whole lot of good, Kirk. Look what they’re doing.” Gauvreau gestured to the screen.
It took Kirk a moment to realize what Gauvreau meant. Then he understood. These pirates were better than any he had ever [318] dealt with before. They were even better than any he had ever heard of before. Standing off from the Shelton a half kilometer distant, the Orion ship matched the freighter’s slow cartwheels, constantly keeping at right angles to the waste-jettison tube.
“I’m never going to be able to target them at this rate,” Gauvreau complained.
“Doesn’t matter,” Kirk said. “I’ve got them in sensor memory now. Starfleet will be able to track them down and deal with them.”
Gauvreau stared up at the viewscreen. “That doesn’t help us now, Kirk. Their scanners are going to be able to see our warp engines power up. If we can’t fire a torpedo for a diversion, we’re not going to be able to get out of here.”
The Orion vessel moved in perfect step with the freighter, waiting. But for what, Kirk couldn’t be sure.
“Get ready on the torpedo,” he said suddenly. “I’m going to use the attitude thrusters to speed up our rotation. As soon as the tube lines up with the pirate, fire.”
“Torpedo ready,” Gauvreau responded.
Kirk slid the attitude control forward and the Orion ship disappeared from the viewscreen as the Shelton’s rotation increased. “Now!”
The freighter shuddered as the photon torpedo was jettisoned. Kirk reached to engage warp drive. But the Orion ship went to warp first, moving toward the torpedo casing and the Shelton, missing both by centimeters. The Shelton remained in normal space. Its safety programs had not let it go to warp while another warp drive was in such close proximity. The Orion ship was now in normal space on the opposite side of the Shelton. The torpedo detonated harmlessly, a hundred kilometers away.
“What kind of maniac is piloting that thing?” Kirk asked.
“Kirk! They’ve got a disrupter cannon powering up. They’ve locked on us.”
“Ready torpedo two,” Kirk said. He’d dealt with maniacs before.
“If I try to fire, they’ll blast us!”
[319] “Just keep the tube open and I’ll do the rest,” Kirk said. He held his hands over the board, counting silently to himself.
“Torpedo ready.”
“... three ... two ... one ... now!” Kirk hit two sets of controls at once. The Shelton lurched forward, directly toward the Orion ship. At the same time, Kirk used the forward cargo tractor beams to pull the torpedo from its tube and position it in front of the Shelton—without firing it.
The Shelton came to relative rest ten meters from the Orion ship. The hull creaked with the stress of the sudden deceleration.
“I don’t believe it,” Gauvreau gasped. “They didn’t fire.”
“Of course not,” Kirk said. “Look what they would have hit first.”
There on the screen, locked into position exactly five meters from each ship, was the sleek and gleaming case of the photon torpedo.
“Great,” Gauvreau said. “So the first time either of us tries something, we’ll both be blown up.”
Kirk shook his head. “If they were Klingons, maybe. But whoever’s running that ship is too smart to want to die. We’ll work our way out of this. One way or another.”
Gauvreau unslung her helmet from her chair and put it on her lap, keeping it ready.
The incoming light on the communications board suddenly blinked on.
“I’ll handle the transmission,” Gauvreau said, taking her helmet to the comm station. “You stay ready to get us out of here.”
Kirk watched the screen as the close-up image of the Orion ship was replaced by a visual channel from the Orion’s bridge.
“Who is the madman who commands your vessel?” the pirate commander snarled. He wore a black battle helmet, black radiation goggles, and a voice-distorting translator cap that covered his nose and mouth. “I am the pirate Black Ire and I demand that you drop shields and allow my crew to take over [320] your vessel before I blast you into transporter dust! Surrender now or die a thousand deaths!”
Gauvreau didn’t open a return channel. “Listen to him, Kirk. He sounds insane.”
Kirk stood up, eyes fixed on the screen. “It’s all right, Captain. I think I can handle this. Open up a channel back.”
“If you say so.” Gauvreau bit her lip. “You’re on.”
“What say you to my demand,
spacedog?” Black Ire growled. “Or do you wish me to flay you open and take out your organs one by one?”
Then Black Ire’s head jerked and he leaned forward staring at his adversary in amazement.
Kirk frowned and narrowed his eyes. “I admit I’ve been slow in getting around to that physical, but don’t you think this is taking professional concern a bit too far, Bones?”
On the viewscreen, Black Ire clawed at his goggles and mask.
“Jim?” McCoy said, eyes wide with wonder.
Behind him, Chekov and Sulu and Uhura crowded excitedly into view.
I knew it, Kirk thought. The four of them were together. And heading for Talin, just as he was.
All that was missing now was Spock and the Enterprise. And Kirk doubted they’d remain missing for long.
NINE
Scott’s footsteps echoed in the empty corridors of FCO Outpost 47. The hundred and twenty personnel who had once worked there had been recalled to Earth five days after the devastation of Talin IV and the facility had been deserted ever since. Until last week, Scott thought. Everything had changed then. And maybe tomorrow things would change even more.
“Aye,” Scott muttered to the corridor, adjusting his grip on the three storage boxes he carried, “and if Lieutenant Styles had wings he’d still be a pig.”
Scott continued along the corridor, remembering and savoring the look on the lieutenant’s face when the Enterprise had survived the separation of her warp-distorted port nacelle the previous week. It had been such an odd expression of delight and regret. The delight was without question because the ship remained intact and Styles had his designs on her. But the regret Styles had felt had been because Scott was standing with him—and the twenty-being team of Starfleet experts—in the observation lounge of the Exeter when the separation had taken place. The chief engineer did not consider himself a mean or vindictive person, but when the Enterprise had remained peacefully in space before them, safely minus her damaged [322] nacelle, he had taken great joy in turning to Styles and saying in a voice which all could hear, “I told ye so.”
For Scott, the separation of the nacelle had gone just the way he had expected. For the experts, it had been a terrible disappointment, especially after all the self-important trouble they had gone to in arranging for the Enterprise to be towed to the edges of the Talin system.
As the time for the nacelle’s removal had approached, excited groups of them watched intently through the viewports as well as on the viewscreen close-ups. After the Enterprise had been completely evacuated, four uncrewed workbee shuttles had been attached to the ship’s port nacelle with carbon tethers. Twenty-eight additional remote-controlled workbees were attached to the ship’s secondary hull. The plan was that, when the two groups of shuttles pulled in opposite directions, the port nacelle’s explosive bolts would be triggered to separate it from its support pylon. The experts clenched their hands together, scarcely daring to speak to each other, expectantly awaiting the brilliant rainbow flare of destruction. Scott had just felt irritated and impatient.
With the carbon tethers pulled taut and the Enterprise beginning to slowly drift away in the direction of the twenty-eight pulling workbees, a bright yellow flash had sparkled from the support pylon joint on the nacelle. Then, as the experts gasped—and some braced themselves as if shock waves could travel through a vacuum—the Enterprise had only continued to slowly drift in one direction while the twisted port nacelle drifted in the other.
One hour later, sensors showed that the warp-compressed point of the nacelle was still evaporating molecule by molecule. That led one of the disappointed experts to propose an alternate theory to account for the nacelle’s slow disintegration. Perhaps, the expert suggested, the hull metal had been damaged by the barrage of fusion explosions to which it had been subjected and was simply undergoing a molecular outgassing effect similar to the skin leaching which occurred on primitive [323] Earth-orbiting spacecraft centuries ago. Scott had moaned, “I told ye about that, too,” but by then the scientists were digging into old historical tapes, to come up with new theories, completely ignoring the now-orphaned nacelle.
At last with the theoreticians otherwise engaged, Scott had had an easy time directing the installation of the new nacelles the Exeter had brought and left in orbit around Talin’s moon. Once the Enterprise had been quickly towed back into lunar orbit to undergo her final repairs, the work had gone smoothly and now, one week later, there was little left to be done. For that Scott was grateful. But not for much else.
Scott came to the doors marked Sortie Planning Center and they reluctantly slid open before him, sticking from disuse. The people working in the vast room looked up from their tables and desks piled high with microtapes and datacubes and printouts. Despite the work—and the possibility for failure—that remained ahead, Scott felt renewed to see so many familiar faces. Vice Admiral Hammersmith had been true to his word, and then some. Already more than half the Enterprise’s crew had been transferred back to the Talin system to assist with the repairs, and most of the rest were in transit.
Carolyn Palamas came up to Scott to take the boxes he carried. “Thank you, Scotty. We’ve just got the next terminal set up.”
“Careful, lass,” Scott said as he passed the containers over, worrying about the delicate chiming sounds he heard as the duplicate Talin datadisks inside jostled against each other.
“I know what’s riding on this,” Palamas said gently, then returned to her section of the vast room.
Scott watched her go, caught up in memories. There was a time when he thought they might have been more to each other than colleagues. But the events at Pollux IV had changed that and, in a way, Scott was glad they had. Otherwise, he might never have gotten to know Mira Romaine when the Enterprise took her to Memory Alpha and—
“Mr. Scott, I require your assistance.”
[324] Scott felt he had been suddenly transported back in time. He had missed that voice more than he had realized. “Aye, Mr. Spock, I’m coming.”
Despite the four months that they had been separated, Scott had noticed no difference in Spock when the former science officer had beamed to the Enterprise earlier that day—other than his civilian clothes, of course. At first, Scott had been surprised when Vice Admiral Hammersmith had escorted Spock to Scott’s cabin. But given what he had heard on the update channels about the trouble Spock was causing on Earth, the chief engineer had had no doubt that his former fellow officer would be returning soon to the Talin system. Even Scott knew that logic would demand that Spock be prepared to act in case the Council debate he had ignited was finally settled and the authorization was given to begin rescue operations.
Spock had not been at all surprised by Scott’s continued presence on the ship, nor had he expressed any pleasure at being reunited with him. After saying hello, he had merely asked if Scott would help him reopen Outpost 47. Hammersmith had said he was happy to loan Scott out if Scott also agreed—which he had, without hesitation.
“How’re ye doing, Mr. Spock?”
Spock looked up from the large desk where he worked. The terminal screen before him displayed row after row of the multicolored paint splatters that Scott now recognized as Talin script. “How am I doing what, Mr. Scott?”
Aye, Scott thought, I’ve missed the voice, if not necessarily what it says from time to time.
“I mean, are the modified terminals working out for you?”
“Yes,” Spock said. “The ambassadors have been most resourceful in helping us adapt our equipment.”
Scott glanced over to Seerl and Orr. The Talin ambassadors worked with a group of young humans and Mario Cardinali, the FCO outpost’s ex-manager of communications. Spread over two work benches and a corner of the floor were fifty desk computer terminals, cases open, most with circuit boards removed.
[325] One of the two Talin—Scott still couldn’t tell them apart unless Orr allowed her skin to change to a blue shade—moved quickly and surefootedly aroun
d the spread-out equipment, lifting its legs and its feet high like a strutting heron. The creature was supervising the work the young humans did to convert the standard Starfleet terminals so the machines could extract information from Talin-style datadisks. The young people were university students, Scott had been told, though he felt certain that no one in university would dare dress the way that this lot did. Scott knew that students had never dressed so outlandishly when he had been their age.
The second Talin stood to the side of the equipment work area, talking though a small translator unit to a young woman who was busily arranging rations on a set of mess trays. Scott had seen many strange things in his day, but the sight of the saurian creature gently cradling a wee baby in its arms as it talked to the baby’s mother ranked among the oddest. Though at the same time, the sight of the two species united in such mundane activity made him feel secure about the Federation’s future. Now if only the Council would realize what the voters had realized and authorize the aid mission which Spock had fought for.
“What can I be doing for you, then?” Scott asked Spock.
“I shall require full computer access to the main communications monitoring lab. Mr. Cardinali can provide you with details.”
“Beggin’ your pardon, Mr. Spock, but there’s not much of any communications to be monitoring in the vicinity these days.”
“True,” Spock agreed, “though there are eight standard years’ worth of previously captured data to analyze. The monitoring room would make the process more efficient.”
“I’ll get on it right away, Mr. Spock.” Scott saw the clouded look that came to Spock’s face. “Och, ye know what I mean.”
As Scott left the work room with Cardinali, Vice Admiral Hammersmith appeared in the doorway. “Ah, engineer, I’m glad I found you. Lieutenant Styles reports that the [326] construction drones have finished replacing the master transtator nodes and that the warp generators in the new nacelles are locked in and ready to power up.”
Scott hesitated. “So, then ... what you’re saying, sir, is that the Enterprise is ready to be taken out?”
