by David Stern
The doctor tuned her out. The lieutenant—petite, Asian, female, from sciences—was nice to look at but excruciating to listen to. Having Spock for a mentor hadn’t helped in that regard. It seemed to Boyce that she—along with every other member of the Vulcan’s department, for that matter—had now acquired the habit of peppering her speech with words like “logical,” and “fascinating.” Which this briefing definitely wasn’t.
He focused on the tricorder again. Or tried to, anyway. His heart wasn’t in it. He shut the device down, checking his medikit. As he did so, his fingers brushed against something unfamiliar. He reached in and pulled out a BT shunt. A spare, one he’d brought with him when Pike had first told him about the mission. Just in case Tuval had gotten cold feet about wearing his. The commander—in the seat in front of Boyce, piloting the ship—hadn’t, though. Every so often, when Tuval shifted position, Boyce caught a glimpse of the little blue light blinking happily away underneath the commander’s landing-party jacket.
Pike sat on Tuval’s right, nominally at the conn position, but his mind clearly was elsewhere. Boyce’s first instinct on boarding the shuttle—before that, in fact, his first instinct on hearing about the Klingon attack on the Orions—was to tell Pike “I told you so,” but he’d refrained for some reason, and now he was glad he had. The captain—make that commodore—had a lot on his plate just this second: Hood and Excalibur on the way, the promotion, war on the horizon. Besides which, the raids the tallith had told them about pretty much proved Boyce’s point. The thought of war made him sick, yes, but it made him even sicker to think about the Klingons getting away with what they were doing. Mass murder. They had to be stopped. Here and now.
“… though some of these references must be acknowledged as inaccurate, otherwise we would have to believe that this is the same Liyan who first assumed clan leadership close to seventy-five years ago, and the woman who contacted us is obviously—”
“Excuse me, Lieutenant.” Pike sat up a little straighter in his seat and cleared his throat.
The captain, apparently, was paying attention after all.
“The most relevant question at the moment is whether or not these particular Orions are trustworthy. What kind of reputation this clan, this Liyan, has. Do those databases have anything to say about that?”
Hoto frowned. “That is a difficult question to answer definitively, sir. There exists, within the databases we have access to, anecdotal evidence of piracy, but the incidents seem in my estimation to be related more to skirmishes between the Codruta and other clans. The Singhino, the Caju—”
“The Caju. They’re a clan?” Pike frowned. “I thought Caju was more of a generic name for a certain kind of trading interest.”
“It is now. The name is originally derived, however, from a single such clan.”
Boyce frowned, suddenly remembering something. “What about the Orion syndicate?” He recalled having to deal with pirates from that organization back in the day, who’d intercepted a cargo transport of his at one point. “Where do they fit into all this?”
“The syndicate’s influence on current affairs, particularly in this sector of space, is minimal. Their strongholds are concentrated in territories on the other side of the Borderland. Near the Dohelee border.”
“That’s a long way from here.”
“The Orion people have widespread settlements across this part of the galaxy. A cursory reading of the historical evidence suggests that at one time, the Second Empire maintained influence over a considerable area of what is now Federation space.”
“Speaking of Federation space,” Tuval said. “We’re leaving it in five—four—three—two—one. And let me say again, for the record, that I don’t think this is a good idea. We are well out of transporter range.”
“Noted, Commander,” Pike said. “As before.”
There were seven of them in the shuttle: the captain, Boyce, Tuval, Hoto, and three red shirts from security. Ross, Smith, and Collins, the latter a grizzled old veteran who had considerable experience as a battlefield med assistant, which was why he was there. Tuval had assigned him to go with Boyce to the Orion sickbay and evaluate the situation. Four security personnel in all. Pike thought that was too many, sent the wrong signals; Tuval thought it was too few. The commander would have brought along a dozen red shirts if he’d had his druthers. And left the captain behind. Along with, no doubt, the shunt. Which reminded him …
The doctor pulled the spare out of his medikit and held it out over Tuval’s shoulder.
“What’s that?” Tuval spoke without turning.
“A spare. In case you want it.”
“I don’t. But.” The man took one hand off the console, though, and took it from him anyway. The shunt was magnetically charged; Tuval slapped it onto the console in front of him, and it stuck there with a resounding thunk.
“Be prepared,” the Commander said. “That’s my motto.”
Collins spoke up. “We have docking clearance from Karkon’s Wing, Captain.”
Pike looked forward, and Boyce followed suit.
There, visible through the shuttle’s main porthole, was the Orion ship.
“Doesn’t look like any Marauder- class I’ve ever seen,” Tuval said.
“You can see the silhouette.” Collins pointed forward. “Buried under a lot of extraneous stuff, though.”
“Weapons enhancements, most likely,” Tuval said. “I really don’t think this is a good idea, sir.”
“I heard you the first time, Ben. And the second.” Pike leaned forward, squinting. “Not necessarily sure those are weapons. Looks like some kind of sensor array to me.”
What it looked like to Boyce was a hunk of junk. A jury-rigged hunk of junk. He saw exposed conduit leading from one of the forward hull segments to the bow. He was no engineer, but that wasn’t standard engineering protocol on any ship he’d ever heard of.
“Enterprise shuttle, this is Karkon’s Wing. You are cleared for docking.”
“Thank you, Karkon’s Wing, ” Tuval said. “ Magellan here. We confirm docking clearance. Initiating procedure now.”
The shuttle veered left, coming around the side of the Orion ship, passing a scarred and blackened hull segment on which a few scrawled symbols—Orion letters, Boyce supposed—were barely visible.
“Ready to get your hands dirty, Doctor?” Pike asked.
“Not just yet,” Boyce said, and reached into his medikit. “And neither are you.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means roll up your sleeve, Captain.” Boyce pulled out a hypo. “We wouldn’t want you to catch any cooties, would we?”
Pike glared and did as he was told.
Cooties wasn’t far from the truth.
The hypos were Starfleet SOP when dealing face-to-face with Orions, pheromone-suppressant drugs designed to curb their responses to the species’ females. Pike felt the effect almost instantaneously: a deadening of his sense of smell. A slowing of his reflexes, too, supposedly insignificant, but the captain didn’t like it. Tuval liked it even less.
“Doesn’t feel right,” he said to Boyce, rolling up his sleeve. “Feels like I’m swimming through cotton.”
“That’ll pass.”
“The sensations I am experiencing are quite different,” Hoto said. She was looking down at her arms, as if seeing them for the first time. “An acceleration of my metabolism. A disconnection from my surroundings.”
“You’ll get used to it, too,” Boyce said. “Probably even quicker.”
The women had gotten hypos as well as the men—a slightly different concoction, the doctor said, because the pheromones affected them in different ways, tended to cause headaches in human females, something to do with the inhibition of certain neural transmitters. So Smith, Ross, and Hoto had gotten stimulants as part of their formula. This was one of the reasons Tuval had wanted women on the security team and why he’d argued for Number One to make the trip rather than the captain. Pike supposed he
had a valid point, but there was something slightly insulting, he felt, about sending your second-in-command to treat with the ruler of an entire race. Besides which …
He wanted to see this evidence for himself, the sensor readings that Liyan had of the Klingon attacks. If they were as definitive as she’d said—even if they were as definitive as the readings they’d been able to recover from Starbase 18—then Pike would have to admit he was wrong. About a lot of things.
He would also have to prepare himself and the crews of three starships for the very real possibility of war.
Magellan shuddered slightly, then came to rest. Pike stood and moved toward the shuttle hatch.
Tuval stepped in front of him. “Hostile territory. You know the drill,” the commander said.
Pike did, having had to perform it several times himself aboard Lexington. He stepped back reluctantly. Tuval punched a control on the hatch access panel, and the door slid open. The commander stepped through it, hand resting lightly on his phaser.
“Empty,” he called back from the airlock. The others followed him in. Tuval walked toward a second hatch six feet away, at the other end of the airlock. It opened at his approach. A few seconds later, the commander reappeared and gave the all clear.
And Pike, at last, stepped from Magellan and onto the deck of the Orion ship.
The first thing he noticed was the temperature, a good ten degrees warmer than Enterprise, though the light was dimmer. Next was the gravity, slightly heavier than Earth-normal. The deck gave slightly beneath his feet. The plating seemed thinner than that aboard Enterprise, the ceiling lower as well. Maybe two and a half meters high.
“Captain Pike?”
The voice came from his right. Pike turned and found himself almost face-to-face with one of the largest humanoids he’d ever seen in his life. More than two meters tall, easily. Heavily muscled, deep green skin, long dark hair in a ponytail, dark brown trousers, a dark brown vest to match. His eyes were pinpricks of black, set in a long, angular face.
“I’m Captain Christopher Pike,” the captain said, stepping forward.
“I am Gurgis, of the Clan Singhino.” The man bowed and stepped to one side. “May I present to you Liyan of the Codruta, tallith of the Orion people.”
Behind Gurgis were two other Orion males—not as big as he was but huge nonetheless. Guards, obviously, wearing helmets, sidearms, and ceremonial swords. Maybe not so ceremonial—the edges of the blades caught the light in a way that suggested they were very sharp. And very well taken care of.
The guards stepped to either side, and from between them, a woman stepped forward.
It took Pike a second to recognize Liyan.
She had changed in the interim between first contact and their arrival. She now wore a long gray dress, with a matching robe that trailed behind her. Her hair was pulled back and piled high on her head. She wore something on her head as well, halfway between a crown and a headpiece, gold, encrusted with blood-red jewels.
She was considerably taller than she’d seemed on the monitor, his height, more or less.
She was also, he realized as she stepped forward, one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen in his life.
“Captain. Welcome aboard Karkon’s Wing. We are honored to have you.”
She bowed; Pike did the same.
“On behalf of the United Federation of Planets, thank you. We are honored to be here.” He turned and motioned his crew to come forward. “I’d like to introduce you to—”
“Philip Boyce.” Another Orion—male, considerably smaller than the others, skin more aqua-colored than green—stepped out from behind Liyan, an excited look on his face. “You are Philip Boyce, are you not?”
“I am.” Boyce, an easy-to-read frown on his face— how does this guy know my name? —stepped up next to the captain. “And you are—”
The newcomer bowed. “Petri. Medical chief of Karkon’s Wing. ”
Pike frowned. “How do you know my doctor?”
The man opened his mouth, but it was Liyan who responded.
“We trade with Argelius, from time to time. Your name—your work—is well known there, Dr. Boyce.”
“Indeed. A tremendous legacy, Doctor.” Petri pronounced the word strangely—the second part of it, anyway. Doc-tore. “Something to be proud of.”
“Thank you,” Boyce said, not looking happy about the attention at all. Pike understood why. Argelius was not something the doctor would want to be reminded of at this point in time.
“We hope you can be of similar service here, Doctor.” Liyan smiled.
Boyce grunted an acknowledgment. Not wanting to give offense, Pike stepped in front of the doctor and answered for him.
“As do we, Tallith. I know the doctor will try his best.”
“That is all we can ask.” Liyan turned to Petri. “You will escort the doctor to the medical wing, Petri. Show him the injured.”
The man bowed. “Of course, Tallith. This way, Doctor.”
“We have supplies for you as well,” Boyce said. “A half-dozen crates. Aboard the shuttle.”
“Excellent.” Liyan waved the big man forward. “Gurgis.”
He bowed. “I will attend to it, Tallith.”
He set off down the corridor, Petri and Boyce following him.
“Mr. Collins?” Tuval prompted. “Weren’t you going to … ?”
Ben nodded in the direction of Boyce and Petri.
“Yes, sir. On my way.” Collins, who had undergone medical training, saluted smartly and started off after the others.
“Captain Pike,” Liyan said, “we have prepared a reception in your honor. If you would come this way . . .”
She stood to one side, motioning down the corridor, in the opposite direction from Boyce and Petri.
Pike hesitated. A reception. He’d wanted to get right to business; they didn’t exactly have a lot of time to fool around. Hood and Excalibur were half a day away, the Klingons probably even closer. Boyce had instructions to spend no more than an hour evaluating the medical situation. Pike didn’t want to spend any more than an hour, two at the most, aboard this ship. Take a look at that sensor evidence, have Hoto evaluate it and any other data the Orions had. Feel Liyan out on the question of an alliance, the possibility of their two cultures, joined against the Klingons. A reception? There wasn’t time, really, and yet …
He looked up at Liyan. She was royalty, in effect. Royalty demanded certain ceremony. Noguchi would understand. It made perfect sense.
“Of course,” he said, and bowed again. “After you.”
She smiled and stepped past him. Pike moved to follow and in that instant caught Gurgis’s eye as the man emerged from Magellan, carrying one of the supply crates, which had to weigh several hundred pounds on his shoulder.
The man looked at Pike and then past him to the tallith, disappearing down the hall.
He did not look happy at all.
FIVE
It was basic battlefield medicine. As he’d suspected. And since Orion physiology was almost identical to human, Boyce was practically able to work on autopilot. Cauterize here, regenerate there, transfuse … after a while, it was easy to forget he was working on living flesh, albeit green. Occasionally, though, he would look up and see a face (if it wasn’t a face he was working on), or someone would moan, and he would remember what he was doing and why and who was responsible for his being there. And then the anger would threaten to surface again.
The Klingons, he thought. Jaya.
“Dr. Boyce.” He looked up. Collins stood there, concern on his face, gloves on his hands, bloodstains on his tunic. “That’s the last of the regen gel.”
Boyce nodded. Bad news but not entirely unexpected. They’d been going through the stuff at a very rapid clip, the hour or so they’d been there; there were a lot of burn injuries to deal with. The gel was the one thing they’d brought that the Orions didn’t have. Apart from that …
Their presence there didn’t seem that nec
essary to him at all. Okay, maybe Petri could use another trained hand or two, but those hands didn’t have to be his. Boyce wasn’t doing anything a trained nurse couldn’t—hell, a half-trained nurse. Collins was as good in these situations as he was. Made him wonder why the Orions had been so glad to see him, so effusive in their greeting.
He finished cauterizing the wound in front of him and straightened. His neck was killing him. He rubbed it and set down the medikit.
“I’m going to take a break,” he said out loud, to no one in particular, and headed out of the treatment room into the main hall.
There were perhaps half a dozen Orions milling around. More came and went as he watched, entering and leaving the dozens of treatment rooms in the ship’s medical wing. Boyce had lost count of how many he’d been in himself over the last hour or so. Some were huge (two had been the size of cargo bays; it looked to him, in fact, as if they had been cargo bays at one point, two decks high, with walls of rough steel the second level up), some the size of Enterprise ’s own sickbay, a dozen beds, while others were single-patient rooms. All branched off the central hall that he stood in now.
Petri had given him a thermos of some kind of nutrient drink earlier; Boyce leaned against the wall and downed some of it. Funny little guy, Petri. Nervous little guy. The way he’d jumped when Liyan said boo, the way he’d hurried to obey her every command, reacted to her like a puppet on a—
Boyce stopped drinking, suddenly realizing that they’d all—himself and Pike included—acted exactly the same way when they’d come onboard. Marching here and there, on her orders, without a second thought.
The pheromones. The little cocktail he’d injected them all with … He wondered if it had been quite strong enough.
“Dr. Boyce!”
Speak of the devil.
Petri was hurrying toward him, coming out of one of the treatment rooms.
“There you are. Please don’t wander off unescorted. The tallith would not want you to come to be injured or exposed to any danger.”
