“I wish—I wish I could have met you next spring. I’m so sorry…I’d better go.”
Aquila rose. “That’s foolish, Carol. It’s a long trip back, and it’s nearly dark.”
It was a long trip back. Port Orchard was a historical reference site, so it was against the rules to beam in. The only way to get here was by ferry or ground car.
“We had already planned for you to stay over,” Terrence said.
When she realized they meant it, Carol agreed, not only because of the long trip. She was grateful to them simply for making the offer, grateful to them for not hating her, and glad to be able to spend more time in the company of two people who reminded her so strongly of the person she had loved.
Saavik started awake, unable to believe she had fallen asleep, and, at the same time, unsure what had awakened her. She stood up and looked out over Genesis at night. Here and there across the land faint lights, like the shadows of ghosts, drifted between twisted trees.
It is merely bioluminescence, Saavik thought. What the humans call fox-fire, and Romulans call devil-dogs. And Vulcans? What do Vulcans call it? No doubt they speak of it in chemical formulae, as no doubt so should I.
She was standing on the rocky promontory that thrust out below the cave mouth. She had come out here to keep watch, and because she was afraid her exhausted restlessness might wake the Vulcan child. Genesis had permitted itself a short respite between its convulsions, and the boy had drifted off into his first painless sleep.
Saavik’s tricorder beeped again, and she realized how long David had been gone. She considered, decided to take the chance of transmitting, and opened her communicator.
“Saavik to David.” She waited. “Come in, David.”
Only static replied. She closed the communicator quickly, more worried than she cared to admit, for worry was not only an emotion, but a completely unproductive use of energy.
A low, moaning cry came from the cave. Saavik braced herself against the inevitable ground tremor that echoed the child’s pain. Rocks clattered down the hillside. Saavik sprinted for the cave entrance, dodging boulders and raising her arms to ward off a rain of gravel. The huge trees rocked and groaned.
She stopped just inside the cave. The boy huddled against the wall as if he could draw in its coolness and take upon himself a stony calm. His muscles strained so taut they quivered, though the earthquake had faded. This paroxysm had nothing to do with the convulsions of the dying world.
“Spock,” she said softly.
Startled, he flung himself around to face her.
He had changed again. Before, she could see him only as a Vulcan child. Now she could see in him her teacher, her mentor—Spock. He was younger than when she first encountered him. But he was Spock.
The fever burned in his face and in his eyes. He fought what he could not understand. He struggled to gain some control over his body and his world.
Saavik knew that he would fail.
“So it has come,” she said to him in Vulcan. She moved closer to him, speaking quietly. “It is called pon farr.”
He could not understand her words, but her tone calmed him.
“Will you trust me, my mentor, my friend?” I know it is no longer you, she thought, but I will help you if I can, because of who you used to be.
The sound of his labored breathing filled the cave. She knelt beside him. She was not certain that anything she could do would ease his pain. They were not formally pledged, psychically linked.
His body was so fevered she could feel the heat, so fevered it must burn him. She touched his hand and felt him flinch as a thread of connection formed between them. She guided his right hand against hers, then put her left hand to his temple. His unformed intelligence met her trained mind, and she used the techniques he had taught her—it seemed so long ago, in another life—to soothe his fear and confusion. Saavik felt the tangled tautness of his body begin to relax.
Spock reached up and gently touched her cheek. His fingers followed the upward stroke of her eyebrow, then curved down to caress her temple, as Saavik met the gaze of his gold-flecked brown eyes.
The viewscreen wavered with the Enterprise’s change of state from warp speed to sub-light. The new star and its single planet spun where only a few days before the Mutara Nebula filled space with dense dust-clouds. Despite everything, Jim Kirk remained taken by the world’s beauty.
“We are secured from warp speed,” Sulu said. “Now entering the Mutara sector. Genesis approaching.”
“What about Grissom, Mister Chekov?” Kirk asked.
“Still no response, sir.”
Sulu increased the magnification of the viewscreen and put a bit of the ship’s limited extra power to the sensors, but he could find no trace of Grissom, either.
“Bones,” Kirk said tentatively, “can you give me a quadrant bi-scan?”
He glanced back at McCoy. The doctor hunched unmoving over Spock’s station. After a moment he spread his hands in frustration and defeat.
“I think you just exceeded my capability…”
“Never mind, Bones.” Kirk gestured to Chekov. “Mister Chekov—”
“Yes, Admiral.” Chekov joined McCoy and took over.
“Sorry,” McCoy said shakily.
“Your time is coming, Doctor. Mister Sulu, proceed at full impulse power.”
“Full impulse power,” Sulu said.
“There is no sign of ship, Admiral,” Chekov said. “Not Grissom, not…anything.”
“Very well, Mister Chekov. Continue scanning.”
Kirk rose and joined McCoy.
“You all right?” he asked softly.
“I don’t know, Jim,” McCoy said. “He’s…gone, again. I can feel him, it’s almost as if I can talk to him. But then he slips away. For longer and longer, and when he…comes back…my sense of him is weaker.”
Kirk frowned. McCoy had not added that he, too, felt weaker, but he did not have to. It was obvious to Kirk that the doctor’s strength was slowly draining away.
“Keep hold of him, Bones,” he said. “Keep hold of yourself. We’re almost there.”
Saavik smoothed Spock’s tangled hair. The fever had broken, the compulsion had left him. He slept, and he would live. She wondered if she had done him a kindness by saving his life. He was still completely vulnerable to the convulsions of Genesis, which would continue to torture him.
She sighed. She had done what she thought was right.
She was terribly worried about David. He should have returned long ago. She drew out her communicator and opened it, but on second thought put it away. Spock would sleep for some time, so she could safely leave him alone. It would be better for all of them if Saavik sought David without using her communicator and advertising their presence. She rose and started for the cave entrance.
She heard something—footsteps. This cursed world made sounds difficult to identify accurately, a task she would have found ridiculously easy anywhere else. Hoping it was David but believing it was not, she pressed herself against the cave wall.
A great dark shape filled the entrance. The tall and massive humanoid figure carried a sensor that sought out his quarry.
A Klingon—!
While he still stood blinking in the darkness, Saavik launched herself at him. If she could overcome him and escape into the woods with Spock—
Roaring with fury, he spun, knocking her back against the cave wall. His bones were so heavy and his muscles so thick that she could barely get a grasp on him, even on his wrist. He flung his arms around her and began to squeeze, shouting angrily in a dialect of Klingon that she did not understand. She struggled, pressing her hands upward. Klingons had different points of vulnerability than humans, who were different again from Vulcans and Romulans. She broke his grasp for an instant and smashed her fists into the sides of his jaw. He staggered backward, dazed by the transmission of energy from the maxilla into the skull.
Saavik heard laughter.
Two of his com
rades had followed him into the cave. They stood beside Spock, who sat watching, half-awake and confused. Both were armed; they held their weapons aimed at Spock. They taunted her—again in a dialect she did not know, but the meaning was clear: Get him, little one, beat him if you can, and we will laugh at him for the rest of the trip. Beat him and lose anyway, because we hold your friend hostage.
She stepped back, spreading her hands in a gesture of surrender.
Enraged by the others’ mockery, her opponent rushed at her with a raging curse. He struck her a violent backhand blow that flung her against the cave wall.
The impact knocked her breath from her. She sagged against the stone, her knees collapsing. She pressed herself against the cave wall, barely managing to hold herself upright.
Her opponent snapped a harsh reply to his laughing companions, dragged Saavik’s wrists behind her back, twisted her arms, and pushed her forward out of the cave. The other two pulled Spock to his feet and roughly hurried him outside.
Saavik stumbled down the rocky trail to the promontory. Dawn lay scarlet over Genesis, turning the trees a deep and oppressive maroon. Overnight the thick gnarled trunks had sprouted tens of thousands of spindly, barbed branches that flailed at the people passing beneath them. A thorn caught in Saavik’s shirt and tore it. Another tangled in her hair. She tried to look back, to see if Spock was all right. With only the shroud to wrap around him, he was terribly vulnerable. But her captor forced her faster down the trail. The branches thrashed and clattered, as if whipped by a violent wind.
But there was no wind.
Even the stones had changed. The sharp thrust of the promontory was rounded, smoothed, and darkened with a patina of age that implied a thousand years of erosion. A Klingon officer stood upon it in an attitude of possession, gazing out over the forest below. A creature stood at his side.
His hunting party flung Saavik and Spock roughly down behind him.
Saavik lay still, clenching her fingers in the dirt and struggling to control her anger. If she surrendered to the madness now, she could only bring death to them all.
The commander turned slowly.
“So!” he said. He spoke in Standard, but his faint accent did nothing to disguise his impatience. “I have come a long way for the power of Genesis. And what do I find?”
He gestured sharply as Saavik pushed herself to her knees.
The rest of his landing party dragged David forward and shoved him down. He sprawled on the stone beside Saavik. She gasped at the dark bruises on his face, the blood on his mouth, the scratches and welts on his arms and hands. He looked ashamed. She wanted to touch him, she wanted to protect him from any more pain, but she knew if she betrayed any concern for him their captors would use it against them.
“What do I find?” the commander said again. “Three children! Ill-bred children, at that. It’s only what one might expect of humans, but you, and you—” He glared at Saavik, then at Spock, and then he laughed. “So much for Vulcan restraint,” he said.
His creature echoed his laugh with a growling whine.
Saavik rose to her feet, very slowly, her rage so great she trembled.
“My lord,” she said. Her voice was so calm, so cold, that it astonished her. “We are survivors of a doomed expedition. This planet will destroy itself in hours. The Genesis experiment is a failure.”
“A failure!” The commander laughed with every evidence of sincere good humor. “The most powerful destructive force ever created, and you call it a failure—?” He took one step forward. Saavik had to raise her head to look at him. He was head and shoulders taller than she. “What would you consider a success, child?” He chuckled. “You will tell me the secrets of Genesis.”
“I have no knowledge of them,” Saavik said.
“Then I hope pain is something you enjoy,” he said.
Saavik was accustomed to being taken at her word, but she knew she could not hope for that courtesy from the enemy commander. Genesis had taken six primary investigators plus a laboratory full of support personnel eighteen months of solid work and all their lifetimes of experience to create. Even if Saavik had belonged to the team, she would not be able to say, in a few simple words, how to recreate their project.
The Klingon sergeant hurried forward with an open communicator. The commander cut off his words.
“I ordered no interruptions!”
“Sir!” said a voice from the communicator. “Federation starship approaching!”
Saavik and David caught each other’s glance, hardly daring to hope.
The commander glared at them, as if they had called the starship to them at this particular moment, simply to frustrate him.
“Bring me up!” he said. And to his landing party, “Guard them well.”
He and his creature vanished in a dazzle of light.
Kruge reformed on board his ship and strode to the bridge. Torg saluted him and gestured to the viewport.
“Battle alert!” Kruge said. As the bridge erupted into activity around him, he folded his arms across his chest and observed the Constellation-class Federation starship that sailed slowly toward him. He smiled.
It was his, as firmly in his possession as the three child-hostages on the surface of Genesis.
Warrigul pressed up against his leg. Kruge reached down and scratched his creature’s head. Warrigul hissed with pleasure.
The Enterprise’s search for Grissom continued fruitlessly. Kirk wondered if, somehow, it had finished its work and headed back to Earth. Traveling at warp speed, they might easily have missed it. No doubt David was back home already, having coffee with Saavik. Or laughing with his mother about that lunatic James Kirk, rushing off in a stolen ship on a self-imposed mission that no one else could understand. Kirk pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.
“Sir—” Chekov said.
“What is it, Commander?”
“I’d swear something was there, sir…” Chekov peered at his instruments, which had flickered with the sensor-signature of a small vessel, but now stubbornly continued to show absolutely nothing. “But…I might have imagined it….”
“What did you see, Chekov?”
“For one instant…Scout-class vessel.”
“Could be Grissom,” Kirk said thoughtfully. “Patch in the hailing frequency.”
Chekov did so, and nodded to Kirk.
“Enterprise to Grissom,” Kirk said. “Come in, Grissom. Come in, please.”
“Nothing on scanner, sir,” Chekov said.
“Short-range scan, Mister Chekov. Give it all the focus you’ve got. On-screen, Mister Sulu.”
Chekov focused the beam, and Sulu switched the viewscreen, which showed nothing but empty space.
On the bridge of his fighter, Commander Kruge listened to the Federation ship’s unguarded transmission:
“I say again, Enterprise to Grissom. Admiral Kirk calling Captain Esteban, Lieutenant Saavik, Doctor Marcus. Come in, Grissom!”
“Report status,” Kruge said, keeping his voice offhand, but secretly rejoicing. Kirk! Admiral James T. Kirk, and the Enterprise! If he returned home having vanquished the legendary Federation hero, and bearing Genesis as well—!
“We are cloaked,” said Torg. “Enemy closing on impulse power, range five thousand.”
“Good.” Kruge stroked the smooth scales of Warrigul’s crest and murmured to his creature, “This is the turn of luck I have been waiting for….”
“Range three thousand,” Maltz said.
“Steady. Continue on impulse power.”
“Yes, sir!”
Kruge noted Torg’s intensity, Maltz’s uneasiness.
“Range two thousand.”
“Stand by, energy transfer to weapons. At my command!”
“Within range, sir.”
Kruge turned slightly. After a moment, his new gunner raised his head and froze, noting Kruge’s attention.
“Sight on target, gunner,” Kruge said. “Disabling only. Understood?”
/> “Understood clearly, sir!”
“Range one thousand, closing.”
“Wait,” Kruge said, as the Enterprise loomed larger in his viewport. “Wait….”
At the same time, Kirk studied the enhanced image on the viewscreen of the Enterprise.
“There,” he said. “That distortion. The shimmering area.”
“Yes, sir,” Sulu said. “It’s getting larger as we close in—”
“—And it’s closing on us. Your opinion, Mister Sulu?”
“I think it’s an energy form, sir.”
“Yes. Enough energy to hide a ship, wouldn’t you say?”
“A cloaking device!”
“Red alert, Mister Scott!” Kirk said.
“Aye, sir.”
The Klingon vessel must have beamed someone on board. Chekov would have had only a second or two to catch a glimpse of the ship. If his attention had wandered for a moment…
“Mister Chekov,” Kirk said, “good work.”
“Thank you, Admiral.”
The lights dimmed. The Klaxon alarms sounded: a bit redundant, Kirk thought, since every living being on the ship was right here on the bridge.
“Mister Scott, all power to the weapons system.”
“Aye, sir.”
McCoy stood up uneasily. “No shields?”
“If my guess is right, they’ll have to de-cloak before they can fire.”
“May all your guesses be right,” McCoy said.
Kirk tried not to think what the appearance of this disguised ship, in place of Grissom, must mean.
“Mister Scott: two photon torpedoes at the ready. Sight on the center of the mass.”
“Aye, sir.”
The Enterprise sailed closer and closer to an indefinable spot in space, more perceptible as different if one looked at it from the corner of the eye. The ship was very nearly upon it when—
Sulu saw it first. “Klingon fighter, sir—”
The Klingon craft appeared before them as a spidery sketch, transparent against the stars, quickly solidifying.
Duty, Honor, Redemption Page 41
