by Greg Cox
The pod touched down on a weed-infested airfield, only a few meters away from the Shimizu. Kirk was relieved to see that the sleek cruiser appeared to have been undisturbed. Reclaiming the phaser from Spock, he cautiously disembarked from the pod while keeping a sharp eye out for either the native Usildar or any lurking Klingons. No immediate threats presented themselves.
“Looks like the coast is clear,” Kirk said. “You picking up anything we need to worry about?”
“Negative.” Spock scanned the surroundings for humanoid life-forms as he emerged from the pod behind Kirk. “I surmise that the Klingons may be preoccupied with the Jatohr citadel at the moment, as opposed to the surrounding area. It’s very possible that they have not even detected the Shimizu yet.”
“Sounds about right,” Kirk agreed. “The fortress and its technology are a tempting prize, probably even more so than a couple of stray Starfleet officers.” He glanced around the site; the oppressive odor of the fruiting fungi sickened the air. “I’m not seeing any Usildar around either.”
“Nor I.” Spock’s eyes also scanned the surrounding ruins. “I would not be surprised if the increased activity at the citadel, up to and including the Klingons’ assault on the fortress, has induced the Usildar to flee the region, at least for the time being.”
“Given their history, I can’t blame them for heading for the hills,” Kirk said. “And they’re probably better off staying clear of the Klingons in any event.”
“That would be advantageous,” Spock agreed. “The Klingons are not known for their delicacy when dealing with indigenous peoples who lack the technology to defend themselves.”
That was putting mildly, Kirk thought.
Unlocking its hatchway, they piled into the Shimizu and fired up its engines. Kirk took the helm this time. The cruiser was no enigmatic alien aircraft; it was a Starfleet vessel.
“I think I’ve had enough of your piloting, no offense.”
Spock gave him a bemused look. “If I had feelings, they would be hurt.”
“Somehow I doubt that.”
Under Kirk’s control, the Shimizu took off from the airfield and accelerated toward space. Within minutes, they had left the planet and its atmosphere behind. Kirk was relieved to put Usilde in his proverbial rearview mirror, even as he knew that he was merely saying adieu to the planet, not goodbye. He was honor bound to return to Usilde someday soon—for Captain Una’s sake.
We’ll be back, he promised her silently. Count on it.
But they were not out of the woods yet. No sooner had they exited the planet than they were hailed by the Klingons.
“Attention: Starfleet vessel! This is Captain Guras of the Klingon battle cruiser Ch’Tang. Surrender or be destroyed!”
Spock consulted a display panel. “Sensors confirm the presence of three Klingon battle cruisers in orbit around Usilde. One of them is breaking orbit to pursue us.”
“And the others?” Kirk asked.
“Remaining in orbit around the planet. As I theorized earlier, the Klingons are likely more interested in seizing the Jatohr citadel at this juncture.”
“And judge that a single battle cruiser is more than enough to deal with a ship the size of the Shimizu,” Kirk said. “In any event, I suspect we’ve outstayed our welcome in this system.”
“By a considerable margin,” Spock agreed. “Raising shields.”
The Shimizu was unarmed but fast, Kirk recalled. It was time to put that speed to the test. He cranked the impulse engine up to maximum, and the sleek courier ship rocketed away from the Ch’Tang, which accelerated to keep pace. An aft viewer showed the fearsome battle cruiser chasing after them. Its bulbous green command pod was connected by a narrow neck to a massive engineering hull, which emulated two downward-pointed wings. Many times the size of the Shimizu, the Ch’Tang was big enough to swallow its fleeing prey whole.
“You will not escape us,” Guras vowed. “Surrender and you may live to see another day!”
“In a Klingon penal colony or torture chamber?” Kirk replied. “We’ll pass, thank you very much.”
A jolt shook the cruiser. Kirk felt a drag on the ship’s progress, retarding their speed.
“Klingon tractor beams attempting to lock onto us,” Spock reported. “Despite his bluster, it appears that Guras would prefer to take us alive.”
“He wants to know what we know about the citadel.” Kirk pushed the impulse engine harder to compensate. Power gauges crept toward the red zone. “Can we shake those tractor beams?”
“I believe so, thanks to Captain Una’s singular modifications to the shields.” He manipulated the deflector settings to augment her innovations. “The ever-shifting harmonics and polarities should interfere with the Klingons’ efforts to lock onto us.”
Kirk felt the courier slip free of the tractor beams. He hoped that Guras was finding the Shimizu just as slippery as Chekov had earlier. The irony of the situation, that they were using the same tricks Una had used to evade the Enterprise, did not escape Kirk.
This gave him an idea.
“Hang on,” he warned Spock. “I’m going to try something.”
With Usilde behind them, the Shimizu made a run for the fourth planet in the system—an icy, inhospitable chunk of rock—where Kirk feinted diving toward the planet’s thin, wispy atmosphere.
“Cease your craven flight,” Guras ordered. “You will find no sanctuary anywhere in this system. All these planets belong to the Klingon Empire.”
But Kirk wasn’t looking for a hideout, just a convenient spot to make a U-turn. Pulling out of the dive at the last minute, he circled around the planet, briefly putting it between the Shimizu and the Ch’Tang, before heading back and deeper into the system. The trick bought them a few minutes, but only a few. Making a half orbit around the planet, the stubborn battle cruiser reappeared in the courier’s aft viewer.
“No more games, Starfleet! You court destruction!”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Kirk said, stalling. “We’re carrying some valuable artifacts from that fortress on the planet. You really don’t want to risk blowing them to atoms.”
“Better to destroy them,” Guras countered, “than let Starfleet have them!”
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” Kirk said with a sigh. “Guess we have nothing more to talk about.”
He terminated the transmission.
“The Ch’Tang is opening fire, Captain,” Spock said. “Disruptor beams incoming.”
Kirk attempted evasive maneuvers, but a disruptor blast grazed the Shimizu’s shields, causing the courier to tilt violently to starboard. A blinding blue flash lit up the cockpit as the shields deflected most if not all of the beam’s destructive energy. Even a glancing blow from the Ch’Tang’s high-powered disruptor cannons had jarred Kirk to the bone. He tasted blood and realized that the jolt had caused him to bite down on his lip. Warning lights flashed across the control board.
“Shields down twenty percent, Captain,” Spock stated. “I would not advise absorbing many more attacks of that magnitude.”
“I don’t intend to, Mister Spock.”
Steering well clear of Usilde and the other two Klingon warships, Kirk aimed the Shimizu toward the very center of the solar system and the blazing yellow orb that reigned there. “Check your scanners, Spock. Do we have a straight shot to the sun?”
A flicker of unease crossed Spock’s stoic features as he grasped Kirk’s intentions. “Captain, are you attempting to—”
“Take a leaf from Captain Una’s playbook? Absolutely.”
Despite the Shimizu’s superior speed and maneuverability, the Ch’Tang and its firepower were not going to be easy to escape, especially once they got out into deep space and there were no planets or moons to hide behind. One or two good hits from the battle cruiser and they’d be sunk, unless they pulled out way
ahead of their pursuer—the same way Una had.
“Captain, the danger—”
“Just do the math, Spock, before it’s too late.”
A second blast from the Klingons sent the Shimizu into a roll. Sparks erupted from a burned-out capacitor. Gritting his teeth, Kirk stabilized the courier’s flight and struggled to keep it straight on track for the sun. They zipped past Libros I at maximum impulse, putting the system’s planets behind them. Kirk warmed up the warp engine.
“Split-second timing is required,” Spock said. “I suggest you turn the helm over to me . . . despite your earlier comments about my piloting.”
Kirk transferred helm control to the copilot’s seat. “I take it all back, Spock. I can’t imagine anyone else I’d rather have at the helm right now.”
“I will endeavor not to disappoint.”
The sun—a main-sequence star similar to Earth’s—took over the view before them, squeezing out the empty space. Kirk could have sworn that he could feel its heat even across space and through the Shimizu’s protective hull and deflectors. The cockpit felt uncomfortably hot and stuffy; the environmental systems labored audibly to compensate for the shrinking distance between the small spacecraft and the star. Sweat gleamed on his face, but whether that was from heat or stress was anyone’s guess.
“Are you mad, Starfleet?” Guras challenged, hailing them once more. “Turn back before you incinerate yourself!”
“Not exactly my plan,” Kirk said. “But it will do in a pinch.”
The Klingons could not be allowed to gain possession of the Key. One way or another, he was going to keep them from getting their hands on it. Cremation was preferable to surrender.
“Spock?” he asked.
The Vulcan’s gaze was fixed on the ship’s chronometer. “Going to warp in three . . . two . . . one.”
An abrupt increase in acceleration, by several orders of magnitude, shoved Kirk back into his seat. Sunlight flooded the cockpit, overloading the brightness filters, as Spock took the Shimizu into an insanely tight orbit around the sun, defying the star’s powerful gravitational pull and placing a terrible strain on the courier’s compromised shields and structural integrity. Vibrations rattled the cockpit and its passengers, causing Kirk to bounce erratically in his seat. The intense solar heat made the cockpit feel first like a sauna, then like an oven. The ship lurched violently toward the sun, tossing Kirk to port. Painful g-forces tugged on his face and body. His arms and legs felt as heavy as neutronium. It was a struggle just to breathe.
“Heat shields . . . buckling,” Spock managed to utter in vibrato. The tremor in his voice indicated that even his formidable Vulcan stamina was being taxed. “Approaching . . . breakaway . . . point . . .”
The ship’s hull and engines screamed in torment as the Shimizu fought to break free of the star’s nigh-irresistible pull. Kirk clenched his jaw to keep from screaming too. The blood rushed from his head. Darkness encroached on his vision, despite the overwhelming sunlight, and he realized he was blacking out.
Hold it together, Spock, he thought. Hold us together.
The universe went away.
* * *
Blinking, Kirk climbed out of a bad dream to find himself slumped in his seat aboard the Shimizu. His head throbbed, his mouth was dry, and he felt as though he’d consumed one bottle too many of tranya. Dizziness made the cramped cockpit seem to swim before his blurry eyes. A slingshot maneuver could do that to you.
“Spock?”
“Present and conscious, Captain, if feeling distinctly the worse for wear.”
Kirk was relieved to see his friend awake and alert in the copilot’s seat. He wondered if Spock had been rendered unconscious as well, or if the Vulcan’s superior stamina had kept him from blacking out entirely. Kirk sat up straight and squinted at the front viewscreen. Nothing but empty space stretched before them.
“Where are we?”
“Approximately three-point-eight hours from the border of the disputed territory,” Spock replied, looking even greener around the gills than usual. “It is uncertain, however, as to whether we or this ship will endure that long.”
Kirk didn’t like the sound of that. “Explain.”
“The strain exerted on the Shimizu during the slingshot maneuver, on top of the damage previously inflicted by the Klingons’ attacks, has fatally compromised the ship’s systems. Life-support is failing, as is the artificial gravity. Long-range sensors and subspace radio are inoperative. Shields are down and the warp engine is overheating at an accelerating rate. A catastrophic failure is imminent, unless we severely reduce our rate of speed, but even that would only delay the inevitable . . . and reduce our odds of reaching neutral space before we completely lose all life-support.”
“Oh, is that all?” Kirk said wryly. Now that Spock had mentioned it, Kirk noticed that the air in the cockpit already tasted stale, while the temperature had him sweating feverishly. A steady decline in gravity accounted for his lightheadedness. “What about the Klingons? Are they still in pursuit?”
“Undoubtedly, but the breakaway factor served to give us a substantial lead on the Ch’Tang, albeit at considerable cost to our own vessel. Maintaining that lead, however, also argues against reducing our speed, despite the terminal strain on our warp engine.”
Kirk absorbed the litany of bad news.
“You paint a vivid picture, Mister Spock. Give me the numbers. How much time do we have?”
“Estimate total life-support failure in four-point-two hours.”
“And how long to the border again?”
“Roughly four hours, assuming the engine does not explode before then.”
“Not much of a margin for error there.” Kirk let out a long sigh. He couldn’t help wishing that Scotty was along to babysit the struggling engine, although he knew that there was nothing the redoubtable engineer could do that Spock wasn’t also capable of. They could just use a miracle or two at the moment.
“Understood, Mister Spock. Increase speed.”
“Are you certain, Captain? The engine—”
“It’s a gamble we’ll have to take. We’re losing life-support, we have no shields, and we’re being chased by some very determined Klingons. Speed is our only hope.”
“I cannot dispute your logic,” Spock said. “Increasing speed to warp eight.”
The internal lights flickered worryingly as the moribund ship accelerated. Warning lights and gauges, which were already flashing anxiously, kicked it up a notch or else burned out altogether. A hiccup in the gravity caused Kirk’s gorge to rise. The smell of burning circuits contaminated the already less-than-pristine air. Kirk silently apologized to Una for the abuse they were putting her ship through, but figured that was probably the least of her concerns at the moment, wherever she was.
May she be faring better than we are.
He and Spock kept conversation to a minimum to conserve air, but their tense race for the border hardly passed in silence. Frequent alarms and alerts, growing increasingly insistent, strove to remind the men of what they already knew too well: the Shimizu was on its last legs. Laboring systems groaned and rattled and creaked in protest, even as they began to break down completely. Gravity went the way of the shields, making Kirk feel like some primitive astronaut from centuries past. Loose items, such as a discarded rations wrapper, a stray microtape, and a data slate, began to drift aimlessly around the cabin until they could be secured. Kirk snatched a floating stylus out of the air and stowed it in a weapons locker below the flight controls to get it out of their faces. Safety straps alone kept Kirk from drifting off his seat. Hours passed both too fast and too slowly.
“Life-support down to ten percent,” Spock reported after a time. “And falling.”
Kirk appreciated the precision, but his own body was telling him the same thing and much more emphatically. The sweltering heat and thinn
ess of the air reminded him of his last visit to Vulcan; he could have used one of McCoy’s restorative tri-ox injections. He was breathing hard, but to less and less effect as smoky, unscrubbed air brought dwindling amounts of oxygen to the cabin. Perspiration dripped down Kirk’s face. Spock was better adapted to such circumstances, but even Vulcans needed to breathe; he was running out of air and time too.
“How much longer?” Kirk asked, gasping.
“Approximately six minutes,” Spock said. “Not that we are guaranteed succor once we pass the boundary, only a possible end to pursuit.”
And even that’s questionable, Kirk thought. Would the Klingons stop at the border if there was still a chance of capturing the dying courier ship? Kirk wanted to think that Captain Guras and his compatriots would think twice before pursuing a Starfleet vessel into neutral territory, what with the Organian peace talks on the horizon, but counting on a Klingon to choose discretion over belligerence was never a safe bet. Granted, at this rate, he and Spock were likely to be corpses by the time the Ch’Tang or any other Klingon warship caught up with them, but there was still the little matter of the Key.
A violent shudder jolted the ship. Flames erupted at the rear of the courier, filling the vessel with thick black smoke that rapidly infiltrated the cockpit. “Warning! Warp engine at critical,” a computerized voice shrieked before breaking apart into static. “Evacuat—zzzzzz.”
Kirk placed a hand over his face to avoid inhaling the smoke. He raised his voice over the crackling flames behind him.
“Spock?”
“The engine is melting down. Matter-antimatter containment failing. Estimate one minute to catastrophic breach.”
At which point, Kirk knew, the Shimizu would explode like a photon torpedo, leaving nothing behind but superheated plasma dispersing into the vacuum.
Perhaps it’s better this way, he thought. At least the Klingons won’t get the Key.
A light flashed on the control panel, almost lost amidst the smoke and alarms.
“Captain,” Spock said hoarsely, “we are being hailed.”
