“Enemy vessel at five thousand kilometers and closing,” Chekov reported. On the viewscreen, the gray-green alien vessel was visibly drawing closer. It was of similar design to the 814, except smaller and with significantly less power. That didn’t make it any less of a threat, though, as the remains of the transport had attested.
Uhura, holding her audio receiver in place, announced, “The 814 is firing, sir.” At the same time on the screen, Kirk witnessed an energy beam lancing out from below the Enterprise and streaking past the Taarpi vessel by what looked like mere meters. The Taarpi vessel then returned fire and, as the Enterprise offered a far larger profile, their beam scored a direct strike.
The lights dimmed marginally, but otherwise, the shields absorbed the brunt of the assault. “Shields are holding,” Strassman called out.
A second later, the deck pitched. “What the hell was that?” Kirk demanded, gripping the arms of his chair.
It was Uhura who answered, “Commander Laspas has ordered the 814 to take evasive maneuvers,” just as the deck then tipped in the opposite direction.
“Careful . . .” Kirk said in a low voice, addressing a crew who could not hear him, and who owed him no allegiance.
* * *
“Careful!” Scotty cried out as the Enterprise lurched again harder, throwing him against one of the orange webbed safety barriers at the edge of the main engineering section. “Ye can’t jolt a ship of this size around like a beach ball!”
“Your ‘wee bairns’ can handle a little rocking,” Chief N’Mi snapped back at him over their open comm channel. “More phaser hits like that last one, neither vessel can.”
Scotty bit back his reply. The Domain engineer had made it clear that they had very different attitudes toward their respective ships, and that she considered him overly attached to and protective of his ship. Unfamiliar as he was with the Liruq and the idiosyncrasies of their language, he couldn’t be certain if her jibe had been meant as humorous or if it was genuine mockery. Scotty had opted to assume it was the former, though there was nothing friendly in the woman’s tone now. Not that he could blame her—both their ships were endangered, and both were being hampered by the other in their efforts to protect themselves.
The deck tilted again, and Scotty gripped the console before him as the lights and control panels flickered. “Blast it! These relays are still too sluggish!” Scotty hit a switch on his console companel. “Ogden, Farrell, we need that control circuit back on line now!”
“We’ve almost—”
“Not ‘almost’—now!” Scotty cut Crewman Ogden off, then closed the channel as he noticed another alert signal blinking on his situation board. “Bloody hell. N’Mi, are you seeing this internal pressure spike in the starboard warp plasma umbilical?”
“Code 8-55 confirmed, Scott,” she said, her tone reflecting Scott’s concern. “Attempting to counteract. Stand by for code 8-40.”
Emergency warp core shutdown, Scott translated silently as he started running for the main reactor control room. “Acknowledged,” he shouted, and fought hard not to unleash any more caustic remarks. They’d known there would be a high risk, if forced into an armed confrontation, of overstressing the connections between the two ships. If the umbilical was compromised too soon after dropping out of warp, before the warp drive had completely cycled down, the results would be disastrous for both vessels. But a complete shutdown now would mean a long restart procedure once the crisis had passed, and until then, both of their ships would be in the same situation the Enterprise had started in: stuck in a hostile star system without their FTL drives.
Except not really—the 814 could simply cut the Enterprise free, engage their own warp engine, and be on their merry way alone.
Scott wasn’t sure that was such a terrible possibility.
The engineer turned a corner, his boots almost slipping out from under him, and reached the reactor control room. Once inside, he immediately slapped his hand against the panel on the bulkhead, dropping the heavy containment hatch. A core shutdown wasn’t a normally a dangerous procedure, but this wasn’t a normal circumstance. If anything went wrong, the rest of the ship needed to be protected. As the hatch rumbled into place and sealed Scotty inside alone, he hoped to heaven nothing went wrong.
Turning away from the hatch, he went to the small chamber’s situation panel and was both surprised and relieved to see that the plasma pressure reading was already dropping back toward normal. He reopened the channel to the Domain engine room and said, “Lass, you did it.”
“Affirmative,” N’Mi answered, her tone colored in relief. Then the deck shook again under Scotty’s feet. “But the danger is not yet over.”
“Aye,” Scott said as he unsealed and reopened the hatch to return to main engineering. To himself, he wondered where the most serious danger to the Enterprise was coming from.
* * *
“Dammit!” Sulu swore as the Taarpi ship dodged another of his phaser shots.
“Steady, Lieutenant,” Kirk said. “Don’t let them rattle you.” The ship shook again as the 814 initiated another maneuver. Strassman at engineering had managed to fine-tune the inertial dampers so as to minimize the worst effects of the jarring directional shifts, though not to cancel them out entirely.
“They’re coming around for another pass,” Chekov said, just as the ship shook again, this time under the enemy’s weapons fire. As the Enterprise presented a larger target than the 814, they had taken the brunt of the assault.
“I see them,” Sulu said, sighting the Taarpi vessel through the extended stereoscopic viewer at his console. He triggered the phasers again, and on the main viewer, beams of blue phaser energy lanced out and struck home.
“Direct hit, amidships,” Chekov reported.
“Weapons and engines only, Mister Sulu,” Kirk reminded him of the orders he had given at the outset of this engagement. The plan he and Laspas had agreed upon was to disable the Taarpi shields and to use the Enterprise’s transporters to bring the Taarpi aboard for questioning, and eventually for trial.
“I’m trying, sir,” Sulu said, frustrated. “But with our targeting systems disassociated from helm control, I’m being forced to compensate manually.”
Kirk keyed open the channel to the 814 as the ship was shaken by another blast. “Kirk to Laspas. We need you to transfer helm control to us.”
There was a slight hesitation from the Goeg commander before he responded. “Clarify.”
The captain was caught short by that. Was he really being asked to explain a request to have control of his own ship given back to him? “Our weapons targeting is being hampered by the segregation of the two systems. We have the wider range of fire; it makes more sense for control to be given back to my bridge.”
There was another wait for a response from the Domain vessel, and Kirk was about to ask Uhura if the link had been severed when Laspas finally said, “Tie in all control stations with corresponding Enterprise bridge stations.”
Seconds later, posts that had been in near-silent standby mode for close to two weeks came back to life, and the familiar music of electronic tones and chirps filled the bridge again. “That’s more like it,” Chekov said as both he and Sulu conducted a quick review of their current status.
Kirk tried to put the frustration he was currently experiencing to one side to focus instead on the situation at hand. “Mister Sulu, fire at will.”
“Yes, sir,” the helmsman answered as the Taarpi ship made another swooping pass on the main viewscreen. Sulu fired weapons again, and this time his shot was far more accurate. “Direct hit on their impulse engine!” he shouted in triumph. “They’re limping, sir. I think we have them.”
Kirk struck the left arm of his chair with his fist, sharing in Sulu’s jubilation, “Uhura,” he said, “open a channel. Tell them to stand down and surrender their vessel.”
Uhura turned to her console, then quickly turned back. “They’re refusing our hails, sir.”
“Ca
ptain,” said Chekov, “I believe they are attempting to go to warp.”
Kirk knew that he couldn’t let that happen; he didn’t want this pursuit to become an open-ended mission. “Sulu, move to intercept. Don’t let them get away.”
Sulu said, “Aye, sir,” and an instant later, a photon torpedo was launched from the Enterprise, flew across the bow of the fleeing vessel, and exploded directly in its path.
Kirk leapt up from his chair. “Sulu! No!” he shouted. Using photon torpedoes against a vessel the size of this one would have been deemed overkill even before it had been disabled.
Sulu, though, had recoiled back in his chair, hands poised up and away from his control panel, as he watched aghast at the scene playing out on the viewer. The force of the blast had sent the Taarpi ship into a tumble, turning end over end as a series of smaller explosions, like a string of old-fashioned black powder firecrackers, flared along its outer hull. “I didn’t do that, sir!” he said.
Before the captain could demand to know who did, he heard the whine and whoosh of another photon torpedo being propelled from its launch tube. Looking up to the screen again, he saw this one land a direct hit on the Taarpi ship, and watched in horror as the vessel was consumed in a white-hot fireball of matter/antimatter annihilation. Kirk grabbed hold of the back of Sulu’s chair to steady himself, looking first at the horrified upturned face of the helmsman, then at his first officer. “Spock?”
The Vulcan turned in his chair away from his station. “The torpedo launches were not initiated by Mister Sulu.” Kirk’s follow-up question caught in his throat, and fury overtook his shock as he registered Spock’s next words. “The triggering commands came from the 814.”
Eight
Spock stood as Kirk headed for the turbolift. Unbidden, Spock followed directly behind the captain, joining him just as the doors began to slide closed. Kirk pretended to ignore him as he ordered the car to the ventral airlock and squeezed the activation handle with far more force than necessary. They rode for several seconds in silence, Spock violating standard convention by remaining at the front of the car with his back to the door. Finally, Kirk met his first officer’s passive stare and snapped, “Was there something you wanted, Mister Spock?”
Spock considered his commanding officer and friend for a moment longer before answering, “May I respectfully suggest that confronting Commander Laspas at this time would be unwise, given your present emotional state.”
“Mister Spock, even you must recognize that my ‘present emotional state’ is completely justifiable,” Kirk said testily.
Before Spock could elucidate on that point, Sulu’s voice sounded from the turbolift companel. “Bridge to Captain.”
The captain reached over and replied, “Kirk here.”
“Sir, we detected an escape pod from the Taarpi ship,” Sulu reported. “Three life-forms aboard.”
A small glimmer of hope broke through Kirk’s dark expression. “Beam them aboard immediately, and alert McCoy.”
“Already way ahead of you, Jim,” the doctor’s filtered voice interjected. “We’ve got all three of them, and we’re on our way to surgery.”
“Surgery?” Kirk asked, the light of his hope dimming. “How bad is it?”
“I wish I could tell you, Jim, but right now . . .” McCoy said, and trailed off uncertainly.
The captain sighed. “I know you’ll do your best, Bones. Kirk out.” He deactivated the comm unit’s transmit button, and looked back to Spock. “You realize, if Bones can’t save them, that’s three more murders on my head.”
“You cannot accept the moral responsibility for the actions of others,” Spock told him.
“It was my ship that struck the killing blow,” Kirk countered, pained. “I’m the one who agreed to cooperate with Laspas in this . . . vendetta. I believed him when he said what he wanted was justice, not revenge.”
Spock paused to consider his response. “Might I suggest the possibility, Captain, that the destruction of the Taarpi ship was not intentional? The first torpedo launched was fired across their bow.”
“The first of two, Spock,” Kirk reminded him.
The Vulcan acknowledged that point with a nod. “I would also note that the Domain does not possess photon weapons; the most powerful armaments in their arsenal are cobalt fusion torpedoes. It is likely they were unaware of our photon torpedoes’ capabilities.”
“Is that supposed to excuse them for co-opting our weapons systems?”
“No, sir,” Spock said. “Although we had already agreed to assist the Domain against the Taarpi ship, and had already employed our weaponry against them.”
Kirk shook his head at him, incredulous. “Spock, you’re the one who took exception when they interfered with our scanners. Now you’re defending their commandeering of our weapons?”
“No, sir,” Spock said. “I am not defending what they’ve done, and I continue to be concerned by the seemingly cavalier treatment of this ship by Commander Laspas and his crew. However, we are in a position where continued cooperation with them is necessary if we are to reach their repair facilities. It is in our best interests to recognize that the Goeg Domain is not as similar to the Federation as we may have initially thought.”
Kirk scowled. “That has become abundantly clear.” The lift came to a halt, and the doors opened. The captain took a step forward, but Spock remained where he stood, blocking his path.
“Jim, I know from experience that it is pointless to recommend putting your emotions aside,” Spock told him. “But I would advise you to take care where they are directed before acting on them.”
Kirk finally allowed himself a small smile. “Mister Spock, never for a moment believe that your counsel is pointless.” Spock acknowledged the sentiment with a nod as he stepped to one side, allowing the captain to disembark.
* * *
Damn Spock and his cold Vulcan logic, Kirk thought as he climbed down the connecting tunnel from the Enterprise to the 814. For a man who claimed to be so unfamiliar with emotions, Spock had a strong understanding of their potentially destructive power. This shouldn’t have been that surprising, given his own struggle to tame the human half of his nature.
But his friend also knew him well enough to have recognized there was more underlying his impulse to rush onto Laspas’s ship. As much as he might have liked to deny it, Kirk understood Spock’s subtle suggestion that beneath his anger at the Domain crew was anger at himself, for having placed so much confidence in Laspas.
Kirk’s feet hit the deck of the 814’s airlock entry chamber, and he willed himself to present the guard with, if not a friendly face, then one of a man in firm control of himself.
Once he had made his way down to the Domain ship’s nerve center, he was greeted by an effusive Laspas. “James!” he said, crossing the deck toward him, wearing a broad smile. “We are victorious, thanks to you and your crew!”
“No, not thanks to us,” Kirk answered adamantly.
Laspas chuckled at what he took to be modesty on Kirk’s part. “Now, as much as I would like to claim the credit and the glory, it was your weapons that won the day.”
The other man’s exultant reaction to what had happened brought Kirk’s tamped-down emotions to the surface again. “Yes, they were our photon torpedoes. But the responsibility for what was done with them is on your head, not mine.”
Laspas stared at Kirk in open confusion, as did Satrav, who was drawn from his post into the exchange. “Captain Kirk, perhaps it’s a problem with our universal translators, but it sounds as if you’re displeased.”
“Oh, I’m displeased,” Kirk assured them. “I am highly displeased. I didn’t give the order to fire those torpedoes. It was someone in your crew who hacked into our weapons control system.”
“Weapons!” The Goeg commander crossed the deck in one long stride, to where a nervous-looking Liruq sat at one of the foremost stations. “Do you know anything about this?”
The young officer’s eyes jumped f
rom Laspas to Satrav and back as he stammered, “I . . . I saw the Taarpi were preparing to go to warp, Commander. They needed to be stopped.”
“And so you used the Starfleet ship’s weapons?”
“From our position beneath NCC-1701, we couldn’t fire on them ourselves,” the weapons officer explained. “It was our only option.”
“Your only—?” Kirk started to say before restraining himself. It was not his place to reprimand the man while his commanding officer was standing right beside him.
Laspas turned to gauge Kirk’s reaction, and then turned back to the Liruq. “Code 10,” he told the junior officer, who immediately stood and vacated his station, seeming almost relieved to escape his commander’s scrutiny.
“Another example of this ‘initiative’ you Starfleet officers are so fond of?” Satrav muttered. Kirk shot him an acid look, but the second commander had already turned away and resumed barking out his orders to the command center.
“James, join me,” Laspas said, and led the way to the doorway tucked to the side of the forward viewer bank. Kirk followed him into his ready room, and waited as Laspas stood in silent thought for several seconds before turning around to face him.
“James, I can understand your objection to having your authority undermined and having a sensitive ship’s system compromised. But . . . this battle was meant to be a cooperative effort. It’s not really so important whether it was your crew or mine that struck the final winning blows, is it? We can both take pride in our victory.”
Kirk blinked once in surprise. “You think that’s what this is about? Bragging rights?” he asked. “Your crewman committed an act of mass murder! And he used my ship to do it!”
Now it was Laspas who expressed shock. “You call that murder? It was the animals aboard that ship who murdered over a hundred civilians!”
“You told me your intention was to apprehend them, question them, and bring them to justice,” Kirk reminded him.
Star Trek: The Original Series: The Shocks of Adversity Page 14
