by Judith
“But what about me, Spock?” McCoy pressed. “What did you have figured out for me?”
Spock eyed McCoy warily. “Doctor, there was a five-percent chance that you would die or be seriously injured in a reckless camping accident. There was a ten-percent chance that Vice Admiral Hammersmith would change his mind about your assault on him and have you arrested.”
“And what about the rest of it?” McCoy said. “There’s eighty-five percent still to go. I can take it.”
Spock glanced away. “And there was an eighty-five-percent chance that you would arrive here,” he said quickly.
McCoy was confused. “Hold on, I am here. You were right. Why be unhappy to see me?”
[336] “Doctor,” there was an eighty-five-percent chance that you would arrive here one month from now. When I received Captain Kirk’s communiqué from the Ian Shelton today, I admit I was quite astonished that you were included.”
McCoy’s smile was so wide his face seemed to expand. “Spock, you underestimated me! I’m not going to let you forget this for months! For years!”
“I know, Doctor. Which is why I am not pleased to see you.”
Everyone except Spock and the Talin joined the laughter that followed. It was interrupted by the double chirp of Scott’s communicator.
Scott flipped the device open. “Scott here.”
“Lieutenant Styles, temporary commander of the USS Enterprise, here, Mr. Scott. I believe your time is up. Prepare to be beamed aboard.”
Kirk’s eyes darkened. “Styles?” he repeated in disgust. “That pompous, strutting napoleon is in command of my ship?”
Styles’s voice came back from the communicator. “Say again, Scott? I didn’t quite get that.”
Scott knew it was time to make his stand. “Uh, I canna beam up right now, Lieutenant.”
“And why not?”
“Uh, we’ve had a wee bit of an emergency down here.”
“Good Lord,” Styles sighed. “You’ve got half of Starfleet orbiting over you right now. How can you have an emergency in an FCO base?”
“Communications are out,” Scott said, then dropped the communicator to the floor and stepped on it.
Kirk went to Scott and put a hand on his shoulder. “Scotty, Styles is an officious nit, I know. But he is your commanding officer.”
Scott was past caring. “Aye, Captain, I know. But I’ve spent three months taking apart the Enterprise trying to find out what happened to her and it’s only now that Mr. Spock’s come that we have a chance of finding out. And if we can prove that we were attacked, then the vice admiral will let me stay here until we find out who did it and why. I’m sure of it.”
[337] Kirk turned to Spock. “What do you say, Spock? Can you prove it?”
“I shall so endeavor, Captain.”
“Good,” Kirk said quietly. “If anyone can, you can.” Scott saw a change come over Kirk then. Somehow, for just a moment, he no longer had the bearing of an officer or leader, he was just one person among many, no different from the rest.
“Thank you, Captain,” Spock answered. “Now, if you take positions facing the master viewscreen, I shall present the facts as Seerl and Orr have helped me understand them.”
Scott half-expected to see Styles and a security team beam in at any second. But he also knew that Styles would rather sit it out in orbit for an hour or so before admitting to Hammersmith that he had lost track of his chief engineer. As long as Spock didn’t waste any time arguing with McCoy, Scott figured he’d be able to see the entire presentation, or whatever it was that Spock had been working on for the past six hours.
Spock called for the first datachannel he had prepared, and the image of a Wraith shuttle appeared in a large section of the viewscreen. Scott recalled hearing about this picture. The Talin had recorded one of the FCO’s sampling runs.
“Seerl and Orr tell us that on Talin this picture was officially described as a hoax,” Spock said. “The perpetrators were reported to be members of an organization that believed that extraplanetary beings were visiting Talin.”
“We know about this picture, Mr. Spock,” Wilforth said. “We know it didn’t tell the Talin anything about us.”
“Correct, Mr. Wilforth, but what is more important about this picture is what it tells us about the Talin. Specifically, the sophistication of their visual recording technology. The Wraith-class shuttle was designed to be virtually undetectable. However, this image proves that the Talin were able to track such craft.”
Spock asked Cardinali to open the next datachannel and a flood of images—real and artistic representations—began to move across the screen. Scott thought it was one of the oddest assortments of flying vehicles he had ever seen.
[338] “These are pictures of other, so-called extraplanetary space vehicles which were reported in the public update media on Talin.”
“But the FCO has already searched through these images most carefully,” Wilforth said. “There are no other Wraith photographs among them.”
“Correct again,” Spock agreed. “With the Talin’s help, Carolyn Palamas programmed the graphic computers to sort the images and select all those showing legitimate flying vehicles not indigenous to Talin.”
“We also did that,” Wilforth said.
“And these are the results Lieutenant Palamas obtained.” The images on the screen—some saucer shaped, some round like balloons, others angular or rounded like winged aircraft—sorted themselves into smaller and smaller groups until nothing was left.
“See?” Wilforth said. “That’s exactly what we found, too. What are you trying to say here, Mr. Spock?”
Spock walked around to the front of the command console so he could address everyone, his back to the screen. “Mr. Wilforth, it is my contention that on a planet with the proven technology to capture images of fast-moving, near-invisible, covert alien spacecraft, the fact that only one such image exists is not logical.”
“But our computers were able to scan through every image, Spock. We found nothing,” Wilforth argued.
“No, Mr. Wilforth. The FCO did not scan through every image. Only every image available to the FCO.” Spock looked at Cardinali. “Datachannel two hundred, if you please.”
A new series of pictures came on screen. Twelve of them. Each a clear and detailed image of what could only be a Federation Wraith-class shuttle traveling through the atmosphere.
“The FCO never had a chance to analyze these images because they were obtained through military sources and judged classified,” Spock said.
Richter slammed his cane against the command console to [339] get Spock’s attention. “If the FCO couldn’t get these snarled pictures, then how the ziq did you?”
Spock placed a hand on the console. “The FCO did get these pictures, Dr. Richter. Unfortunately, they were obtained on the FCO’s last mission to Talin—the intrusive-collection landing party sent from the Enterprise. Talin was devastated and the FCO outpost shut down before any of the classified and unreleased datafiles obtained during that mission could be evaluated. These pictures were finally analyzed today and as they clearly show, without a doubt, the Talin were aware of the FCO’s operations on their world.”
A deep voice resonated through the lab. “Well done, Mr. Spock.” It was Vice Admiral Hammersmith. Scott tried to remain inconspicuous. With the vice admiral were Styles and three red-shirted security officers.
“I am not yet finished, Vice Admiral.” Spock stepped around the command console to face the vice admiral directly.
Hammersmith stared appreciatively at the screen. “I tell you, Mr. Spock, when I look up on that screen and see that the Talin military had been tracking FCO missions, that tells me that you are finished. For whatever it’s worth, what you’ve done here today is to conclusively show that whatever happened on Talin wasn’t just the Enterprise’s fault. The blame must also be shared with the sampling personnel and director of this outpost.”
“No,” Carole Mallett said angrily. “I onl
y conducted twenty sampling runs to Talin. It’s inconceivable that they could have been sophisticated enough to record my operations thirteen out of twenty times!”
“The evidence is right up there on the screen,” Hammersmith said. “It appears that Starfleet is going to have to re-open the board of inquiry so it can spread the blame around. Now where’s Lieutenant-Commander Scott hiding?”
“Vice Admiral,” Spock said forcefully. “What is on the screen is only a portion of the evidence, as you call it. Mr. Cardinali, datachannel two hundred and one, please.”
A second series of images came on the screen—pictures of [340] wingless flying craft, long and streamlined with pinched-in midsections and deep grooves along their forward hulls. Scott tried to count them but there were too many. They didn’t fill the entire screen so he knew there were fewer than one hundred, but still there were more than five times as many as the images of the Wraiths. The only problem was, Scott couldn’t tell what they were.
Neither could Hammersmith. “What are those supposed to be, Mr. Spock?”
“For want of a precise term,” Spock said simply, “I chose to call them sampling shuttles.”
“But the FCO doesn’t use anything that looks like that,” Wilforth protested.
“They are not FCO shuttles,” Spock said. “Neither are they from any known world within the Federation. Or without.”
Scott saw Kirk’s eyes fill with excitement. “Yes, Spock,” Kirk said. “That’s it.”
But Hammersmith didn’t share that excitement. He was irritated when he spoke. “Just what are you trying to tell us, Spock?”
“According to the classified records which were analyzed today, for the past fifteen standard years, the world of Talin IV has been inundated with visits by these alien shuttles. These shuttles identified and used the same gaps in Talin’s radar defenses as did the FCO. However, so great in number were the aliens’ intrusions that the Talin launched a vigorous program to upgrade their detection devices. The FCO’s Wraiths were not recorded because the Talin were trying to specifically find them. The Wraiths were recorded by military devices designed to detect the shuttles you are seeing on the screen now—alien shuttles.”
Wilforth waved his hands at Spock. “Just a minute, Mr. Spock, this isn’t making any sense. If the Talin governments officially denied the existence of these extraplanetary craft, why did they then upgrade their defenses?”
Spock asked for datachannel two hundred and ten. Scott brought it online. A geopolitical map of Talin IV appeared. [341] Moments later, a flurry of hundreds of green dots flashed on and off across it.
“The dots represent major military outposts, airbases, space launch facilities, and nuclear power plants.” Spock reached across the console and pressed a switch. The green dots were almost overwhelmed by a second flurry of flashing red triangles. “The triangles represent sightings of the alien shuttles. As you see, they are almost exclusively centered on the military installations.”
Hammersmith joined Spock by the console. “Mr. Spock, there’s nothing remarkable about trying to analyze military and industrial capability—no matter which Talin group was doing the analyzing.”
Spock pointed at the screen. “Look at the frequency of sightings, Vice Admiral. There are far too many of them to be accounted for by any need by Talin’s nations to analyze each other’s military strength. I submit that these alien craft were engaged in a systematic series of provocative sorties designed for one reason only—to heighten the fear of war on Talin and to make the military and political leaders of the planet arm themselves to the point where stability would no longer be possible.”
“Are you saying that aliens were attempting to start a war with Talin?” Hammersmith asked incredulously.
“Not with Talin,” Spock corrected. “But on Talin. Preliminary tapes collected by the FCO team indicate that the incursion into polar air space, which almost brought the Talin to war while the Enterprise deployed satellites, was the result of provocative overflights by one or more of these shuttles.”
Hammersmith shook his head. “This can’t be right, Mr. Spock. It’s impossible to—”
“You’re wrong, Vice Admiral!” Kirk was up by Spock and Hammersmith now. “Whatever you think about the existence of any unidentified aliens, Spock is right in his conclusions. The data came from the Talin themselves. The data cannot be ignored. Someone was trying to get the Talin to destroy their own world.”
[342] “Then the Prime Directive wasn’t broken!” McCoy shouted. He joined Kirk and Spock. The three of them faced Hammersmith together though the vice admiral directed his gaze solely at McCoy. Knowing what he did about the two men’s last meeting, Scott wasn’t surprised.
“The doctor’s right, Vice Admiral,” Kirk said. “The Prime Directive does not apply here. Talin IV’s normal development had already been altered by the aliens’ attempts to increase political and military tensions. It was right for the Enterprise to step in. The military exchanges on Talin were the result of extraplanetary interference. The Prime Directive compelled us to act as we did to prevent those exchanges!”
Hammersmith backed off, obviously shaken. “But to make an entire world blow itself up? Why, Kirk? What possible reason could there be to force a planet to destroy all life in a nuclear war?”
Spock reached for another switch on the console. “But not all life on Talin has been destroyed, Vice Admiral.”
A new image came up on the viewscreen. It was a realtime feed of the dayside of Talin IV, transmitted from one of the Enterprise’s sensor satellites. Scott bristled as he saw that the insulting caption—KIRK’S WORLD—was still displayed. Behind him, he heard the Talin ambassadors make a sound of anguish that needed no translation.
The choking clouds of dust and radioactive poison which had swept the world were almost gone now. But the destruction they had brought would scar the planet for centuries, if not millennia. The land masses were still streaked black and brown. The once-white polar ice caps were gray with soot from the worldwide firestorm that had raged for weeks after the disaster. The only sign of life remaining on the planet was in the oceans now choked with the deep purple algaelike organism that had mutated and bloomed in the days after the planet’s death.
“What could possibly live down there?” Hammersmith asked in sorrow and anger.
“Mr. Cardinali,” Spock said, “cycle back in memory one month.”
[343] The image of the world shifted as the viewscreen presented the earlier recording. The clouds were thicker, but the ravaged land and purple-stained oceans were unchanged.
“Another month back,” Spock said.
The image shifted. A brown-streaked hurricane battered the primary continent. Some patches of blue could be seen in the oceans among the purple, but more than half the planet was obscured by smoke and clouds.
“Two weeks after the incident,” Spock said.
Shift. The world was wrapped in a black pall. Through small breaks in the almost solid cloud cover, fires raged.
“Two days.”
The planet was hell.
“Mr. Cardinali, have the computer run through that day’s recording, extracting all portions of the images that show what lies beneath the clouds to construct a composite picture of the land masses and the oceans as they appeared then.”
Cardinali typed in the commands. Slowly the clouds disappeared from the image of Talin as the computer assembled the clear areas from thousands of separate shots to create a master picture of the planet’s surface. Walls of fire followed the coastlines where the cities had been clustered. Forests and farmlands blazed.
Then Scott thought the computer made an error as the oceans were reconstructed. The first section cleared showed that a mutated bloom of purple algae had already appeared. More of the oceans cleared. Scott saw another bloom. And another.
He felt his flesh creep as the rest of the planet appeared as it had been that day. The algae blooms were studded across the oceans in a regular, geometr
ic pattern.
“Good Lord,” McCoy whispered.
“No,” Hammersmith gasped.
“Exactly,” Spock said without inflection. “The algaelike organism which has taken over the entire ocean ecosystem of Talin IV is not a mutation brought on by radiation. It is an artificial lifeform which is not native to Talin, and which was seeded on that planet quite deliberately. Just as the nuclear [344] holocaust was deliberately induced to ensure that the world would be made ... fertile for it.”
Scott was horrified by the atrocity that Spock had just described. He heard the Talin keen with high-pitched wails of sorrow as their translators told them what Spock had said.
McCoy’s face was splotched red with anger. “Who would do such a thing, Spock?”
Spock calmly changed the display back to the pictures of the streamlined, pinch-waisted alien shuttles. “They would,” he said.
Kirk’s face was grim and set. “But who are they, Spock? Where are they?”
“To answer that question, we will need help from two additional sources,” Spock said. He turned to Hammersmith. “The Enterprise, which will enable us to find the aliens ...” He turned to face Richter. For the first time Scott noticed that the old man’s face was drenched in sweat and pale with shock.
“... and you, Dr. Richter,” Spock concluded, “who have always known about them.”
TEN
McCoy felt the sudden pressure of Hammersmith’s hand on his arm with anxious relief. He had known that this confrontation was coming and he was glad to get it over with.
“Could you wait in my office?” Hammersmith asked Kirk and Spock, who walked just ahead with Wilforth and Richter. “The doctor and I will be along in a moment.”
Kirk looked at McCoy, subtly asking if the doctor needed help, but McCoy shook his head. “I’ll catch up, Jim.” Then he and Hammersmith waited as the other four disappeared around a corner in the corridor.
