Advancing to the helm-navigation console, Kirk sat down beside Konerko and took over the controls. Then he opened an intercom channel.
“This is Lieutenant Kirk,” he said, “calling all crewmen. If you can hear me, report your status at the nearest intercom station. Repeat, I need to know your status.”
He turned, intending to ask one of the crewmen who had accompanied him in the lift to man the comm station. To the woman’s credit, she was already sitting there, monitoring the ship’s intercom traffic. The man was making himself useful as well, dragging Vosberg away from the engineering console.
Konerko leaned closer to Kirk. “This couldn’t be all of us, could it? I mean, if we survived …”
“We’ll find out soon enough,” he told her, watching the acting comm officer and taking comfort in the distraction.
“We’re getting some responses,” the woman reported. She glanced at the lieutenant. “Lots of them, in fact.”
“That’s good,” said Konerko.
In the next two or three minutes, they received reports from almost every deck on the ship. Some had sustained heavy casualties, some light, and a few had seen no casualties at all. A quick estimate revealed that more than half the crew was still alive.
But that meant almost half the crew was dead.
Kirk swallowed. Half the crew was … more than two hundred people. His heart sank in his chest. The ship had become a floating morgue, and there was no one left on it who outranked him—no one he could ask for guidance or advice. It was all up to him now.
Konerko was looking at him. They all were, it seemed—even the staring corpses of the captain and his bridge officers. The engines hummed monotonously, a subtle vibration in the deck below them.
“What do we do now?” someone asked.
“We attend to the dead,” the lieutenant decided.
He took a breath, then let it out. Later, there would be time to revile himself. For now, he had a job to do.
Pulling a toggle switch, he opened another intercom channel. “This is Lieutenant Kirk,” he began, trying to sound as if he was in command—of himself, at least. “I want you all to listen carefully.”
He informed the crew about the fatalities and what he believed had caused them. He told them about the captain and his command staff. Then he assured them all that the danger was over, though he didn’t actually know that last part for a fact.
“I’ll need parties on every deck to search for bodies,” the lieuteant said, “and bring them to the cargo bay. When everyone is accounted for, we’ll place a stasis field around them.”
To prevent decomposition, Kirk thought. But he didn’t say it out loud. The trauma the crew was going through was bad enough without its having to imagine the corpses rotting away.
“Be careful to search everywhere,” the lieutenant advised them. “Even in what you think may be the most unlikely places. We’ve got to make sure to find them all.”
In some cases, he knew from experience, it wouldn’t require much searching to find the dead; they would be choking the corridors in grotesque, heart-stopping numbers. But in other instances, they might still be lying in their quarters or some obscure part of the ship.
“I’m going to take us to the nearest Starfleet facility,” Kirk told them. Consulting his instrument panel, he saw that it would be Starbase 16. “Once we’re there, we’ll have some time to consider what happened here. In the meantime, I expect you all to discharge your duties to the best of your abilities, just as you did before.”
Easier said than done, the lieutenant reflected. But then, it was no more than he was asking of himself.
“Carry on,” he finished. “Kirk out.”
That done, he turned his attention to his helm controls. In a moment or two, he had made the adjustments necessary to get the ship safely out of the Tycho system. Then he engaged the impulse drive.
There was no response.
The lieutenant checked his monitors. There didn’t seem to be any malfunctions in the propulsion assembly—none he could find, anyway. And yet, the ship wasn’t moving.
He tried to engage the impulse drive a second time. As before, nothing happened. And whatever the problem was, it wasn’t registering on the internal sensor net.
Kirk felt his mouth go dry. This wasn’t good, he thought, trying to steady himself. This wasn’t good at all.
Without impulse power, their orbit would deteriorate. In fact, he realized with a shock, it had begun to deteriorate already—something Konerko would have noticed if she’d had any experience at navigation. Hell, he would have noticed it if he hadn’t been focused on taking charge of the ship.
Gleaning the numbers from his monitors, the lieutenant carried out the computation in his head. In nineteen minutes, give or take a few seconds, the ship would start spiraling down toward the planet’s surface. A minute and a half after that, the descent would become irreversible.
He was the primary helmsman—maybe the only helmsman left on the ship. He had to do something and he had to do it quickly, before anyone else realized there was something amiss. The crew was on the razor’s edge already, Kirk told himself. Something like this, an unexpected danger, might push a few of them over that edge.
Suddenly, the thought came to him … could the creature have had something to do with this? Could it have drained the impulse engines as it drained the captain and his command staff?
Probably not, he decided, trying to reason the thing through. It had only attacked living things. There was no evidence it could damage anything else.
“Is something wrong?” asked Konerko.
The lieutenant turned to her. “The impulse drive is offline,” he said as calmly as he could.
The ensign’s brow puckered with obvious concern. “Offline …? But … what’s the problem, sir?”
Kirk suppressed a sigh. “I don’t know.” Then he added, “Yet.”
Konerko ran a diagnostic routine. It didn’t show anything wrong. No surprise there, the lieutenant thought.
He bit his lip, reviewing his options. Unfortunately, he couldn’t use the warp drive to leave orbit. The gravity wells of the various planets in the Tycho system would tear the ship apart. It was the first thing they taught you in piloting class.
There was only one alternative. Without hesitation, Kirk slaved his helm controls to the navigation console. Then he got up, came around the captain’s chair, and headed for the turbolift.
“Where are you going?” Konerko asked.
“To find out what’s wrong,” he told her.
“But the helm—” she began.
“—doesn’t work,” he finished for her, “so it doesn’t matter who’s sitting there. At ease, Ensign.”
A moment later, the turbolift doors opened and he got inside. By then, the lieutenant had already begun picturing the architecture of the impulse drive in his mind.
Certainly, he could have done the same thing at the helm station, and asked one of the other crewman to do the dirty work. But as far as he could tell, none of the survivors possessed his technical know-how.
Besides, Kirk wouldn’t have to search the whole ship for the problem—not when he had a clue on which to base his investigation. In fact, he had already isolated it in his mind.
He instructed the turbolift to take him to Deck Seventeen. That was where he would find the only two places on the ship where the impulse relays had been installed within a meter of the internal sensor network.
Certainly, it could have been a coincidence that both the impulse drive and its diagnostic system had failed at the same time. But the lieutenant’s instincts told him otherwise. Whatever was responsible for one failure was likely responsible for the other as well.
A moment later, the lift doors parted, revealing Deck Seventeen. There weren’t any crewmen in the immediate vicinity, either living or dead. Breathing a sigh of relief, Kirk went over to a panel in the bulkhead, slid it aside and inspected the assortment of tools stored there.
> Selecting two of them as well as a tricorder, he closed the panel and continued on his way. He made two left turns before the corridor led him to a duranium ladder—and the kind of hatch door that gave entry to the ship’s ubiquitous Jefferies tubes.
Climbing the ladder and swinging the door open, the lieutenant clambered up into the tube. It was a long, cramped cylinder full of conduits and flashing circuitry that connected with other cylinders full of conduits and circuitry—all of it designed to provide access to the vessel’s various systems, propulsion and internal sensors included.
The sound of the engines was stronger here, unshielded. It drummed in his head like a giant heartbeat.
Some thirty meters up ahead, there was a junction. Kirk turned left there and kept crawling. Another twenty meters up, he came to the place where he suspected the problem might be.
Activating his tricorder, he scanned the area. But everything seemed to be working there—both the propulsion relays and the sensor net. He gazed back down the tube. He would have to retrace his steps to find the other possible trouble site.
Doggedly, the lieutenant crawled back the way he had come. After a few minutes, he passed the hatch through which he had entered the tube in the first place. Then he kept going in the other direction, turned at the first junction, and came in sight of his destination.
He had expected to see an empty Jefferies tube, just like the others. What he discovered was something else entirely.
There was a human being lying there amid the flashing lights, sprawled faceup across the curvature of the tube. What’s more, Kirk recognized him. His name was Lieutenant Crane. He had worked in engineering.
The lieutenant swallowed. The thing had been here as well, he thought, a chill climbing the rungs of his spine. It had gotten into the Jefferies tubes as well as the corridors and the bridge. In fact, for all he knew, it might still be there.
Just beyond the next junction, it occurred to him. Or maybe the one directly behind him …
Kirk whirled, thinking he had glimpsed something white and gaseous out of the corner of his eye. But there wasn’t anything there—just another narrow cylinder full of data conduits and relay circuits.
Taking a breath to steady himself, he turned around again and advanced to the spot where Crane was stretched out. It didn’t take the lieutenant more than a moment to see that the man was dead, his face every bit as pale and icy cold-looking as Piniella’s or Gilhooley’s.
There was something clutched in the engineer’s hand. Looking closer, Kirk saw that it was a tricorder, just like the one he had brought with him. Apparently, someone had noticed the impulse problem earlier, traced its origin to this location, and dispatched Crane to take care of it. But before he could do anything, he had been killed.
Like all the rest, the lieutenant thought. Like the two hundred others who had been turned into porcelain statues.
Clenching his jaw, Kirk got to work. First, he used his tricorder to identify the problem—a breakdown in one of the relays that provided power to the driver coil assembly. Then he used his spanner to bypass the problem and render the system intact again.
A simple correction, really. Ridiculously simple. But without it, the ship’s impulse drive would have remained useless to them.
The repair complete, the lieutenant gathered up his tools and made his way back toward the hatch. He still had a few minutes left, he judged, to contact Konerko via the intercom and have her engage the drive.
It would not be very difficult. After all, he had already charted a course. All she would have to do was implement it.
Unfortunately, there was no time for Kirk to drag Crane out of the tube—not when their orbit was deteriorating more and more with each breath he took. But he would be sure to have someone go in and get the man.
The lieutenant owed Crane that much, at least.
Chapter Five
LIEUTENANT JUNIOR GRADE Gary Mitchell stood in the lounge of the U.S.S. Constitution along with the ship’s command staff, surrounded by off-duty crewmen playing three-dimensional chess, drinking from mugs and swapping jokes.
Despite the laughter he heard, the lieutenant was the happiest man in the room—as happy, in fact, as a sloppy, fat Orion with a belly full of warm, juicy wing-slugs. But then, there was a reason for his good mood. He was going to see his old friend again.
Mitchell had never doubted that Jim Kirk would do well for himself. He had always known the man would rise through the ranks of the Fleet faster than a shooting star, eclipsing his peers along the way.
After all, Kirk had been earmarked years ago as a guy with exemplary command potential. He had been the darling of Starfleet Command almost since the day he set foot on the grounds of the Academy.
Of course, the path of Mitchell’s own career had never been anywhere that assured. Since day one, he had slacked off in his studies at the Academy, repeatedly disobeyed the orders of his superiors, defied the customs of alien cultures, and generally made a nuisance of himself. In a way, it was a miracle he had gotten anywhere.
Fortunately for Mitchell, Kirk and others had seen some potential in him. They had stood up for him and defended his actions whenever he went out too far on a limb. And through their grace, he had earned himself a berth on one of the Fleet’s premiere starships six months earlier.
So when Mitchell had learned that his friend would be serving on the same vessel with him, the amazing part wasn’t that they would be plying the stars together again, just as they did at the Academy. The amazing part was that Mitchell was plying the stars at all.
Feeling a hand on his shoulder, he turned and found himself looking into the face of the Constitution’s first officer. “Your friend is late,” said Commander Hirota, affecting an expression of disapproval beneath his brush of jet black hair.
Mitchell shook his head with the utmost confidence. “There must be a problem with the transporter on the base. Jim Kirk’s never been late for anything in his life.”
“You know,” said Chief Engineer Jankowski, a dirty blonde with sensuous lips and an infectious smile, “you’re not making it easy on your friend, Lieutenant. After hearing so much about him, we’ll all be disappointed if he doesn’t walk on water.”
“On a starship,” Hirota pointed out, “that would be difficult to prove one way or the other.”
“I’ll tell you from experience,” Mitchell told them, “he doesn’t walk on water. But believe me, that’s the only thing about him that’ll disappoint you. You know what I’m like, right?”
“Right,” said Jankowski.
“Well,” said Mitchell, “Kirk’s even better.”
“So’s a Denebian slime devil,” remarked Lynch, a dark-skinned man with chiseled features who served as the ship’s science officer. Technically, he was also Mitchell’s superior, since navigation fell under the jurisdiction of the science section. “On the other hand,” the man continued, “we’re not bringing a slime devil aboard as our primary helmsman.”
That got a laugh from Hirota and Jankowski—not to mention a chortle from Borrik, the bowlegged communications officer with the long face and the zebralike markings on his skin. Mitchell felt compelled to give as good as he got, the product of growing up on the streets of New York.
“A Denebian slime devil,” he told Lynch, “wouldn’t have the guts to work the helm. He’d be more suited to … oh, say, the science station.”
That got an even bigger laugh. Lynch’s eyes narrowed as he approached Mitchell and went nose to nose with him, making a point with his imposing height. But the younger man stood his ground.
“I’d kill you for that,” said the science officer, “if you weren’t so damned entertaining to have around.” Then he clapped Mitchell on the shoulder and laughed as heartily as anybody else.
“I’m glad everyone’s having such a good time,” said a familiar voice—one that resounded with authority.
Suddenly, the room fell silent. Mitchell turned along with everyone else and saw the
robust form of Captain Augenthaler fill the entrance to the lounge, his small, blue eyes screwed up in mock disapproval.
The captain wasn’t alone, either. There was an athletic-looking fellow standing alongside him, a young man with neatly combed, golden brown hair and a face that spoke of cornfields and wide-open skies.
“Sorry, sir,” Hirota responded, straightfaced. “We didn’t mean to have a good time in your absence.”
There were smiles all around. Mitchell smiled as well, certain that Augenthaler would take the first officer’s remark in the spirit in which it had been tendered.
“Apology accepted,” said the captain. He made a gesture to include everyone in the room. “As you were, people.”
The room began to buzz again, though not quite as loudly as before. After all, nearly everyone present wanted to know what Augenthaler was up to.
The captian took in his command staff with a glance. “If you can all stop chuckling for a moment, I’d like you to meet our new lieutenant … Jim Kirk.”
Mitchell grinned. It was good to see the old curmudgeon again. In fact, it was damned good. And wasn’t it just typical of Kirk to look like he’d lost his best pal when everyone around him was in such a good mood?
As long as Mitchell had known him, Kirk had always been a bit too serious for his own good. And every time it seemed the man had loosened up a little, he did something to demonstrate conclusively that he was still the same stick-in-the-mud as always.
Mitchell’s impulse was to wrap an arm around Kirk’s shoulders and present the lieutenant to the command staff. However, that job belonged to Captain Augenthaler, and the last thing a junior officer wanted to do was step on his commanding officer’s toes.
“Lieutenant Kirk,” said the captain, “allow me to introduce my staff. My first officer, Commander Akira Hirota.”
Hirota inclined his head. “Welcome to the Constitution, Lieutenant. I look forward to working with you.”
“Likewise, sir,” Kirk replied.
Augenthaler went on. “And this,” he said with a sweep of his arm, “is Christina Velasquez, my chief medical officer.”
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