by Barbara Paul
Babe was growing suspicious of Scotty. Kirk had said he wanted the engineer on the bridge to help Blue, to try to feed in more power at those times Blue claimed the helm was sluggish. But since Blue's performance remained abysmal for the most part, Babe was wandering over in Scotty's direction more and more frequently. Kirk decided it was time for Blue to shine a little.
He gave Scotty the signal. "Full reverse."
The ship boomed backwards as if fired out of a cannon. The Sackers were surprised, and none more so than Blue.
"Very good," Kirk said calmly. "Now full stop."
Without even a hint of vibration the ship halted its backward flight.
"Why, Blue, I do believe you're getting the hang of it. Hard to port."
The ship shot off to the left. A couple of the Sackers started jiggling in pleasure. Kirk let Babe take over, and the amazing performance continued. Scotty slowed down the power feed a couple of times to keep it all from looking too easy, but by the time Babe called a halt, the other Sackers were actually congratulating Blue.
Babe ordered a series of six targets released, to be fired upon while the ship was in motion. They hit five out of six.
Blue was jiggling in his seat.
Kirk said, "That was good work, Blue. And you, too, Engineer." He smiled.
"Thank ye, sir," Scotty smiled back.
The captain decided the time was ripe, now while the Sackers were in a self-congratulatory mood and their guard was down a little. Now he could—
But he didn't get a chance to put his plan into operation. Babe unexpectedly announced, "I think we are ready. Rose, you may send the message."
Silence immediately fell on the bridge, and Kirk felt an ominous prickling at the back of his neck. "What message?" he demanded. "What are you talking about, Babe?"
"Put it on audio," she told Rose.
The message was in English.
ATTENTION: STARFLEET COMMAND. THE RACE OF BEINGS YOU ARE PLEASED TO CALL SACKERS HAVE IN THEIR CONTROL THE MEANS TO STOP THE EXPANSION OF THE NEW UNIVERSE WITHIN YOUR OWN. YOU WILL SURRENDER ALL YOUR STARBASES TO US WITHIN TWENTY STANDARD HOURS OR THE EXPANSION WILL BE ALLOWED TO CONTINUE. THERE WILL BE NO NEGOTIATION. YOU HAVE ONLY ONE CHOICE: SURRENDER TO US OR WE ALL DIE.
"That's suicide!" Kirk cried. "Have you no more respect for your own lives than you do for others'? How can you throw your lives away like that?"
"Lass, this is foolishness!" Scotty implored of Babe. "What do ye want to be doin' a thing like that for?"
"It is the Plan," Babe said simply.
"Plan!" Kirk exclaimed. "I keep hearing about a plan! What plan?"
"It is our Plan, and you now have a part to play in it. Captain Kirk, I am giving you an order. You are to shoot down the Enterprise, and you are to do it now."
Kirk was so stunned he couldn't answer.
"Oh, lassie!" Scotty moaned softly.
Kirk recovered. "You're out of your mind. I won't do it."
"If you do not shoot down the Enterprise, Captain, I will. We have a better chance with you in command, but—"
"You have no chance at all!" Kirk said heatedly. "Look, Babe, we need to talk privately. Let's go into the readyroom."
"There is no need for talk. Will you open fire upon the Enterprise?"
"No, and neither will you. There are things I haven't told you. Ten minutes, Babe. You can give me ten minutes."
Before Babe could answer, Rose spoke up. "Message from the Enterprise. Audio only."
"Pipe it in," Babe ordered.
The bridge was suddenly filled with the soft sound of a shimmering, specially augmented tone, oscillating gently between a major keynote and its minor. Then as they listened the tone modulated to a higher pitch.
"Music!" Brownie exclaimed. "Why is the Enterprise sending us music?"
After a few minutes the pitch changed again. "I like it," Orangejuiceandwodka volunteered.
Jon, the yellow Sacker, began rocking from side to side without moving his feet. After a minute Rose joined him, the two swaying in unison as the Enterprise's "music" continued its climb up the scale.
"This makes no sense," Babe said, puzzled, "unless it is a code of some sort that the humans can decipher and we cannot. Is that what it is, Captain Kirk? Captain?" When he didn't answer, she whirled around quickly, for a Sacker. "Captain!"
Kirk had collapsed into the big command chair, his arms cradling his head on the control panel in the armrest. He was sleeping peacefully, a faint smile on his face.
"He's asleep?" Brownie couldn't believe it.
"The music!" Misterma'am cried, suddenly understanding. "It was the music that put him to sleep—they are trying to put us to sleep! Turn it off—quickly! Quickly!"
Rose shut down the transmission from the Enterprise.
The young Sackers exchanged uneasy glances, momentarily rendered speechless by their close call. "These humans are full of tricks," Babe finally said. "We must all be on our guard." She bent over the sleeping captain. "Captain Kirk! Wake up! Captain Kirk!"
"Give him a good shake," Blue growled.
"Captain!"
Kirk drowsily opened his eyes; the sight of Babe peering at him from six inches away completed the waking-up process. "What happened?"
"Your friends aboard the Enterprise tried to put us asleep," Babe answered, straightening up. "As you see, we are not as susceptible to seductive music as you humans."
Seductive music? Kirk tried to think. Spock must have done something with that thingamajig from sickbay, the instrument Bones sometimes used to hypnotize trauma patients. A good notion, with bad results. Kirk sighed heavily—and was startled to hear the sound of rusty machinery starting up.
It wasn't rusty machinery; it was Scotty. The engineer lay sprawled in his seat, head thrown back, snoring up a storm. Kirk walked unsteadily over to him and shook his shoulder. "Scotty—wake up. Wake up, Scotty." He slapped the engineer's cheek lightly four or five times with his fingertips. "Mr. Scott—wake up."
Scotty woke up, reluctantly. And realized he'd been asleep. He was appalled. "Oh, sir! Sleepin' on duty!"
"Not your fault, Scotty. Mr. Spock played us a lullaby—it got me too."
"Captain Kirk!" Babe called impatiently. "Before you took your little nap, you were about to direct an attack against the Enterprise. Return to the command chair."
Kirk fought against a feeling of letdown as he walked back and planted himself in front of the red Sacker. "Before I took my little nap, Babe, I was asking you for ten minutes' private conversation. Is your Great Plan so inflexible it won't allow me ten minutes? What happens to your mission depends on what you do next. You can't make a command decision without knowing as much about the circumstances as you can learn."
Brownie hovered behind the Sacker commander, ready to offer advice. Babe didn't ask for it. "Very well, Captain. Ten minutes only. Brownie, you have the conn."
The brown Sacker twitched. "I?"
"You're in training for a command position, aren't you?" Babe asked sharply. "So command! Take the conn." Unaware of how much like James T. Kirk she'd sounded, she led the captain into the readyroom as Brownie gingerly lowered himself into the command chair.
Most of the readyroom was taken up by a strategy table, currently not activated; the small space was even hotter than the bridge proper. The first thing Babe did was toss aside her cloak. The message was clear; the Sackers were through catering to human peculiarities. Babe's sac fluid was thinner than human blood, but "bloody" was the word that popped into Kirk's mind. Yet his stomach did not heave, much to his surprise. Was he actually getting used to these repulsive-looking beings?
He got straight to the point. "If you fire upon the Enterprise, that will be the biggest mistake of your life."
"I do not see why. We have the superior weaponry."
"Ah, but the Enterprise has something you don't have, and that is a pointy-eared Vulcan named Mr. Spock. Babe, you're nowhere near ready to challenge Mr. Spock. I'm not sure I could tak
e him, and I hope never to have to put it to the test. And there's still the problem of Blue. He had a good run just now, but he's still a neophyte. And remember he'll be going up against the best helmsman in the fleet."
"I cannot allow the Enterprise to interfere with the Plan."
"The Enterprise is not going to interfere! Say Starfleet does surrender its bases to you—the Enterprise is going to want to make sure you get back to the Beta Castelli system safely so you can stop that destructive influx of heat. But say you attack my ship. Mr. Spock will retaliate, you can count on that, even though you have the four of us on board. Your shielding system is good—the best I've ever seen, frankly. But no shield is perfect. What if the Enterprise hits the place where you're storing the baryon reverter? What happens to your wonderful Plan then?"
The Sacker commander twitched; she obviously hadn't considered that. But when she did consider it, she began to sag.
"What happens?" Kirk persisted.
"The Plan fails," she admitted.
"You didn't think of that, did you?" Kirk pressed. "Babe, when you're in command you have to think of everything. It's part of the anticipating I keep telling you about. You can't just react, you have to act first. Like the time Blue stormed off the bridge. You should have been ready for that. And you should never have let him go. But when he did go, you should have called Security and ordered him placed under restraints. You don't ever let a crewman walk out on you—not ever. And I could name a hundred other things. Babe, believe me—you're not ready to take on Mr. Spock. You don't want to risk the reverter. You're in over your head."
She sagged even further. "I have failed," she said heavily. "I have tried to learn, I have tried to follow your example. I have given my very best effort—but it is not good enough. I am not fit to command this vessel."
Kirk's throat tightened; this was it. This was what he'd been building toward, the moment he could move in and crush her utterly, when her self-esteem was at its lowest ebb and her defenses shattered. It was the moment he could shatter her ego beyond any hope of recovery. Do it. Do it now, before she has time to bounce back.
Do it.
He couldn't do it.
He let the silence between them build as he tried to get his own jumbled feelings in order. Finally he began to speak, in the softest tones he'd ever yet used with her. "Babe, you have the makings of a fine starship captain. I've been telling you all the things you've done wrong because that was my job. But I didn't tell you all the things you've done right—even though that should have been part of my job too, I suppose. But you do a lot of things right. You learn fast. You make sensible decisions. You have the respect of your crew. And you've had the courage to take on a responsibility that no youngster should ever be burdened with."
She lifted her head. "What did you call me? A youngster?"
Kirk smiled. "I know you're not grown up yet, Babe. I know you're all youngsters, every one of you on this ship. That accident that put you in charge—it killed off every adult on board."
"How … how did you find out?"
"It doesn't matter. But we've all known for some time now. And the Enterprise knows as well. I sent a sort of message while the visuals shield was down." He laughed awkwardly. "That's one reason I want to avoid a battle. My crew on the Enterprise would feel guilty as hell shooting down a bunch of kids."
"You still consider yourself a part of the Enterprise?"
"Of course. I always will. You'll soon feel that way about your own ship, if you don't already. Babe, tell me about the Plan. It's out in the open now. It's not your plan, is it?"
Babe made one of her indecipherable Sacker sounds and said, "We were not included in the planning sessions, we 'youngsters'. The Plan was formulated before I was taken out of the incubation vat. Our Elders devised the Plan, and every one of us on the ship was trained with only one goal in mind—to make sure the Plan was correctly and efficiently executed when the time came."
"Where are you from originally? Someplace outside the Federation's sphere, I know."
"We originally occupied four planets circling a sun that has no name on your star charts. This was long before I began my life, you understand. But our sun had almost depleted itself of fuel when the Elders of the Four Worlds decided we must find other worlds to live on. And so the search began."
Kirk knew what was coming. "And you found yourselves unwelcome wherever you went."
"Yes. At first no one knew why. The computer has records of the studies made of local laws and customs, and of our attempts to honor them. But gradually the truth came out. The sight and smell of us make other races ill. Our voices can cause deafness. If we touch you, you burn. No one wanted us to stay."
"So you decided to take by force what you couldn't get peaceably."
"Not exactly, and not immediately. Captain, can you understand what it is like to spend your entire life being rejected because of physical attributes you were born with? Everywhere we went, for over fifty years, every race we contacted turned their backs to us. My race did not know there was anything unusual about us until we left our homeworlds. And when we did leave, it was to find ourselves being treated as worse than lepers."
Kirk remained silent, understanding her pain.
"Our computer is full of recorded instances when some well-meaning human made suggestions as to what we could do to get rid of our odor, or change our appearance, or the like. It was always assumed that we would not only be willing to alter ourselves to accommodate your prejudices, but also that we should be glad of the opportunity to do so. No human ever suggested altering himself to accommodate us."
Kirk grimaced. "Yes, that's the human race for you, I'm afraid."
Babe went on, "Eventually the Elders became convinced there was no place at all for us in your Federation. So the years of ignominy eventually came to a head, and the Plan was devised to force you to learn to live with us. If we were the rulers and you the underlings, then you would have no choice but to adapt. So when the Zirgosians perfected their technique for tapping into a neighboring universe, the Plan was put into action."
Kirk had suspected it must be something like that, but hearing Babe put it into words made it more real. This takeover plan was not hers, but she was doing her damnedest to make sure it worked. But all the Sackers were in on it, not just this ship. And because of the accident that robbed this ship of all its adults, the entire Sacker race was forced to rely upon a youngster to get the job done. Why didn't they just wait until some adult Sackers could be beamed aboard from another ship?
Because that would have upset the Plan, Kirk told himself. He remembered the signal they'd received from the other Sackers saying that a recently repaired ship was now in orbit around Starbase Four. Probably every Starbase had a Sacker ship circling it now, ready to accept the base's surrender. Or perhaps several ships—nobody knew how many Sackers there were all together. To pull one of those vessels away long enough to meet Babe's ship might have upset some distribution of power they'd arranged. And there was something else. Scotty had said each ship carried one "clan"; perhaps beaming adults aboard from another ship would have violated some clan taboo. But whatever the Sackers' reasons, it was now up to Babe and her crew of kids to make the Plan work.
Kirk finally spoke. "So none of this was your idea. But there's one thing that was your idea." He paused. "Holox."
"It was necessary," Babe said quietly. "We could not allow the colonists to endanger the incubation vats."
"There were ways to stop them other than by killing them, Babe. And you killed two of my people as well, a woman named Ching and a man named Hrolfson. That makes you a murderer, Babe. Doesn't that mean anything to you at all?"
"A hundred alien lives are of less value than one of our own."
"That's something else that sounds memorized. Besides, all lives are of value."
"That is a comforting thing to say, Captain, but do you truly believe it? The stranger who attacks your friend—is his life of equal value to that
of your friend?"
Kirk grunted. "Well, there's one thing I'll have to take back. Maybe you're more grown up than I gave you credit for. But the killing was wrong, Babe. No argument in the universe can justify what you did to those people on Holox."
The readyroom didn't have space enough for any serious pacing, but Babe managed it anyway. Three steps in one direction, three steps back. "Captain Kirk, from the day I was old enough to understand language, I was taught that I must harden myself against other races. Every one of us on this ship has been taught to kill when killing is the solution to a problem that might interfere with the Plan. It is a doctrine I accept. I not only accept it, I embrace it. As much as I have come to respect you, Captain, I will kill you rather than let you interfere. Make no mistake about that."
Kirk's heart pounded. He took off his helmet to wipe an arm across his sweaty forehead. "And you're willing to kill yourself and the rest of your race rather than …"
"Rather than continue as lepers. Yes."
"Oh, Babe, Babe!" Kirk groaned. "You've lived your whole life on a ship—you don't understand what it is you're destroying! You have the rest of your life ahead of you, and you don't have to live it inside these bulkheads. It doesn't have to end this way. . . . let's talk. We can work something out."
"We tried that. No one listened."
"Then let's try again. I don't think anyone understood what it was like for you."
She stopped pacing. "It is no longer in my hands. The Plan is under way."
"Contact the other ships. Tell them—"
"Captain," she interrupted him abruptly. "Your helmet. You did not put your helmet back on."
He'd forgotten. The minute she mentioned it, though, Kirk's stomach started to churn. He forced down the feeling of nausea and said, "You see? We can adapt. You just didn't give us enough of a chance."
Babe stared at him, unbelieving.
He said, "Do you really want to kill me, Babe?"
She took her time answering. "I do not wish to kill anyone. But I will, if I must. It is my duty."
