Bloodthirst
Page 29
George bellowed an animal protest as the cloth closed in on his mouth, and the woman had a fight just getting near his face. Something about her told him she was a professional. She seemed to know the moves he would make as he twisted and tugged against the two strong men, and she anticipated him enough to force the odorous narcotic into his nostrils. His muscles jellified. The room turned to sizzling colors. A tunnel began to close around his vision, snuffing out the colors. He felt himself sinking. The cloth pressed tighter over his mouth, and the heavy drug drowned his universe. A black, black universe.
“Hello, children.”
The bridge of the cramped little runabout brightened at the sound of its master’s voice in such a manner that seldom accompanies the reappearance of a captain on a bridge. True to the greeting, it was as if Dad had returned from a fishing trip. This wasn’t their usual assignment ship; that was plain from the sparseness of crew and their unfamiliarity with the design. This was nothing more than a getting-from-here-to-there ship, and this time the “there” was top secret. No one but the captain himself seemed to have any concrete idea of where they were going or why.
The young man on helm turned immediately and said, “We have warp, Captain. Our e.t.a. is thirty-nine minutes.”
“Ah! Good,” the captain responded in his reassuring Coventry chant. “Thank you, Carlos. You always do such a magnificent job.” Clad in a sloppy Irish wool cardigan that hid much of his mustard-gold Starfleet uniform, the captain was a one-man destruction zone for the hackneyed image of Englishmen as stuffy and passionless. That was evidenced as he dropped his hand on the helmsman’s shoulder. “Have you had your lunch? This is a good time.”
The helmsman looked up for confirmation and found it in the captain’s offhand nod. “Thanks, sir thank you.”
“Not at all. Off you go.” He waved a hand at the thickset communications officer and said, “You too, Claw. Off you go. Dr. Poole and I can handle things up here for a short while, I ‘magine.”
The two junior officers gratefully left the bridge under the affectionate gaze of the captain. On the port side, a woman with dark blond hair folded her arms and said nothing, but merely watched the captain.
He was a gentle-faced man in his early forties, with brown hair sloppily palmed to one side, a slightly hooked nose, and powder blue eyes pouched with experience. Given to hanging his hands in the pockets of that non-regulation cardigan, he looked out of place on the tight little bridge. She remembered the time she’d pecked at him about the sweater, only to be informed by another officer that the captain suffered a rare blood deficiency that made him slightly chilly most of the time. While any other officer in Starfleet would feel obliged to wear a thermal layer under the uniform, this man simply slipped the sweater on and called it solved. Over several years of service, the sweater, like its master, had acquired a slight sag and a lot of respect, not to mention a professorlike image that smothered any vestige of his Starfleet accolades—considerable ones.
When the juniors were gone, the captain settled into the helm chair instead of his command seat and lounged back, shifting his gaze to the woman. She was still looking at him as though he needed looking at.
With a deep breath and an easy grin, he said, “Rolf tells me you knocked them out straight away.”
The woman shrugged with her eyes. “I didn’t want to have to explain anything to them. I don’t have the answers.”
The captain stuffed his hands into his old knitted friend. “I could give you the details of the mission”
She held up a defensive hand. “No, thanks.”
“You’ll have to find out sooner or later, Doctor my dear.”
“No, I don’t. The less I know, the less involved I have to get, and the sooner I can get back to the colony I’ve been assigned to. The one I requested and was granted by the Federation.”
The captain’s thin lips curled in unmistakable amusement. He tipped his head. “It’s a compliment.”
The woman leaned forward. “It’s an intrusion. I have other work to do in another place.”
“Can’t you see that you must be the most qualified person? You’ll be the first, you know.”
“I’m sure there’ve been doctors on big boats before,” she responded dryly. “I don’t know how you arranged to get my orders changed, but I intend to log a formal protest as soon as we get back.”
He chuckled. “Orders do change, Sarah. And this is an emergency mission, after all”
“You’re not going to admit it, are you?” she accused.
The captain tossed his head and laughed. “In my experience, it’s wisest never to admit anything to a pretty woman who’s also smart.”
She grimaced, her ivory face made pasty by the poor lighting and given a green cast by the medical services smock. Only her dark brown eyes, as she narrowed them at him, seemed to have any substance in the unflattering light. She gave her head a shake as though to call attention to what she had once described to him as uneventful hair. “Don’t smooth me, Captain. I’m over thirty. I’ve heard it before.”
“Obviously not sincerely enough.” He rolled back still farther in the wobbly helm chair and watched space stretch by at warp two. “At least I managed to convince the authorities to let me select my own command crew. And there was barely time for that. Well,” he said, giving the ship’s navigation console an affectionate slap, “I’ll explain it in full to you as soon as Kirk gets up here.”
Dr. Poole settled into the science station seat and told him, “He’s not going to get up here. I locked them in the hold.”
“Oh, that won’t make any difference.”
She blinked. “Houdini?”
“Stubborn.”
His rueful nod ushered in a silence that lasted several long, quiet minutes. Through the wide main portal, they watched space peel by with the kind of speed it takes time to get used to. It never ceased to be startling, or beautiful, or even a touch frightening, and none of it was natural. This speed was the accomplishment of inventive minds. In all the wonders of the natural universe, this wonder belonged to intelligence alone. It was nice for something to be marvelous because it didn’t know any better, but to be marvelous by design
The captain sighed and contemplated the miracles he would see in the next few days. Inside the pockets, his hands clenched with foresight and the quaking thrill of participation. In his eyes was reflected the passage of hope’s foothills.
When the bridge entry panel opened and the floor vibrated, he knew the contemplation was over for a while.
“On your feet!”
The captain and the doctor turned and stood up to face the two men, the russet-haired one armed with a particle-cutter from a ship’s emergency kit. Though Dr. Poole froze, the captain swung his arms out wide and said, “George! How good to see you! You look strapping. How’re the boys?” He strode to them and gave George a pat on the arm, then turned to Dr. Poole. “I told you they’d be right along.” He gave George a little shake and drawled, “Ingenious fellow.”
George Kirk let his breath out in a gasp and sucked in a new one, staring fiercely at the captain, then the doctor, then the bridge, then the captain again. “R” He took another breath and tried again. “Robert!”
Behind him, Drake brandished the bent lighting panel they’d used to break out of the hold, still not quite convinced of the captain’s jovial greeting.
The captain rocked on his heels, devilishly pleased with his reunion. “Didn’t think I could be so clandestine, did you?”
“You” George began, "You kidnapped us?”
“Well, there simply wasn’t time”
“There’d better be time now!”
“Oh, yes, plenty. A good eight or ten minutes yet, I’m sure,” the captain said, glancing at the chronometer.
George took a few uncertain steps around the bridge, his head still swimming with the ricochet, and demanded, “Where is everybody? This ship’s practically empty. Where’s the crew?”
“In the mess hall, I suppose, having a good lunch. There are only a few on board. Security reasons, you see.”
George narrowed his eyes. “Security what are you up to?”
“I want you to volunteer for a mission.”
“What mission?”
“I can’t specify.”
“To where?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“For how long?”
The lopsided grin appeared. “Sorry.”
“After I volunteer, then you can tell me?”
“Right.”
“And I’m supposed to just trust you?”
“I’d be so grateful.”
“All right. I volunteer.”
The captain’s grin widened and he looked at Sarah. “Didn’t I tell you?”
Sarah shrugged her innocence. “It wasn’t my idea to drug them.”
“Yes, would you care to explain that?” George demanded, glaring at the captain.
“Well, you see, this mission is the ultra-top-secret response to an emergency situation, and decisions had to be made quickly. They finally allowed me to choose my own officers, so”
“Who did?”
“Starfleet Command.”
“You got Starfleet Command to authorize you to knock us out and kidnap us?” George shook his head. “I’d like to see that memo.”
The captain held his hands out wide. “It was the only way they’d agree to it.” Amused by Kirk’s dubious expression, the captain suddenly touched his lips with one finger and said, “Oh, forgive me. I’m being inhospitable.” He gestured gallantly between them and the woman. “May I present Commander George Kirk, and over there is Lieutenant Francis Drake Reed. Gentlemen Dr. Sarah Poole.”
George stared rudely at her, quite aware of the rude part, and once his memory adjusted for the sickish bridge lighting and the green smock she wore instead of the unmarked lab jacket she’d been wearing before, he recognized her. “We’ve met,” he snapped.
Sarah bobbed her eyebrows and requested, “Don’t look at me like that. He did the same thing to get me here.”
George snapped back at the captain, “You did that to her? And why pull Drake into this?”
The captain shrugged and strode a few steps to the upper bridge for a long look at Drake. “While it would be easier if you’d just drag around a teddy bear or suck on a blanket, I knew you’d want him along.” The hands went back into the pockets, and the captain suddenly looked as though he was hovering in front of a blackboard, waiting to see if his students comprehended a new hypothesis. He was so innocuous and self-assured that he was almost impossible to dislike. With that tolerant grin, he nodded. “Well, then. This is a good time for explanations. Gather round, children.” He moved to the computer bank and tapped the access. “Computer on,” he said.
“ Working.”
“This is Captain Robert April. Request security access, Starfleet Command authorization, graphic tape one.”
The console buzzed to life, and its raspy fake voice responded, "Authorization accepted. File on screen.”
Above them appeared a series of diagrams and photographs of a familiar colonial transport ship, one of the Seidman Class long-distance movers. Old, but time-proven. It meant nothing at all to anyone except, of course, Captain April. He nodded at the diagrams. “This is the United Federation Colonizer S.S. Rosenberg. She was off into space to colonize a newly discovered planet in the space just recently charted by the Federation. Five days ago we received a distress call from the Rosenberg. They don’t, of course, have an advanced sensor system and weren’t able to realize the severity of an ionic storm cluster they encountered until after they were already too deep inside it to stop the damage and reverse course. They’re adrift. No engine power, and heavy radiation leakage in their storage compartments and engineering areas. Most of their foodstuffs has been contaminated. Actually, even if they did have the food, there’s radiation leakage into the inhabited parts of the ship. It’s only a matter of time, and not much time at that. To make the long story tolerable,” April said with a sad sigh, “they’re going to die out there.”
George was the first to break the heavy silence. “How many?”
April half turned. “Fourteen families. Fifty-one people. Twenty-seven are under fifteen years old. Young families with babies, and without experience. And without food.”
“God” Sarah breathed, then caught the breath with the knuckle of her thumb and kept herself from uttering her anguish.
“Of course, a shuttleplane was dispatched straight off,” April went on, “but no conventional ship can risk going through the ionic storms until they’ve dissipated, and that could take years. The rescue ship is going around the storms, but even at warp three that’ll take four months. The Rosenberg only has about three weeks’ worth of supplies on hand, and, of course, I mentioned the radiation leaks,” He gazed at the graphic screen. It cast its pattern of lights on his face. “Fifty-one people who think they’re going to die in space, hopelessly out of range. And the really tragic part is that we can communicate with them quite nicely, with communications at warp twenty. All of the Federation is listening to them die out there. Journalists are having a field day, you can well imagine.”
His gaze dropped as he stepped off the upper deck, past the three pained faces of his chosen crew, only to find himself yanked around to stare up at George Kirk. Unmistakable in the Vikinglike hazel eyes was the image of two little boys in a cornfield on a planet suddenly too far away for peaceful memory.
“You’ve got something planned,” George snapped. “What is it? We’ll try it.”
April’s light blue eyes filled with affection, and he grinned at the fierceness he knew he would need at his side. He opened his mouth to answer, only to be interrupted by the beeping of the ship’s auto-nav. He turned as though responding to a dog barking outside his door. “Ah! We’ve arrived. Drake, do you know how to take the ship out of warp?”
Drake blinked out of his trance and recovered his usual false humility. “I shall die trying, sir.” With that, he moved to the helm and pecked at the controls.
April moved toward the bridge viewing portal and watched in wonder as the ship smoothly fell out of warp drive and approached what appeared to be a spacedock behind a little cluster of asteroids. He breathed deeply, as though he could nearly smell the fresh air of reassurance.
George left the upper deck, his eyes never leaving his former commander, all the details of their mutual past flashing through his mind. He came to April’s side and saw unshielded resolve in the captain’s expression. It was infectious. And confusing. He shouldered his way into April’s periphery and quietly prodded, “What is it, Robert? What are you planning?”
“Think of it, George,” April murmured. “An impossible rescue. A way to turn a four-month journey into a three-week epic triumph in the name of life. Think of it.”
Now George moved around to face him, and to force April to look at him. In the upper edge of the viewscreen, unnoticed, the spacedock moved closer.
“Why all the cloak and dagger?” George pressed. “Why didn’t you just ask me?”
“Couldn’t take the chance, old boy.”
“Why?”
April stepped closer to the helm, placed his hands on the console, and looked out, upward, at the looming spacedock. He nodded out, up. “That’s why.”
Soft lights from the spacedock played in his eyes.
George stepped closer, leaned over the console, and looked out. The lights bathed his ruddy cheeks and drew him on, into astonishment.
“My God” he whispered. “What is that?”
“That,” April breathed, “is a starship.”
Look for STAR TREK fiction from Pocket Books
Star Trek®: The Original Series
Enterprise: The First Adventure · Vonda N. McIntyre
Final Frontier · Diane Carey
Strangers From the Sky · Margaret Wander Bonanno
Spock’s World · Diane Duan
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The Lost Years · J.M. Dillard
Probe · Margaret Wander Bonanno
Prime Directive · Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens
Best Destiny · Diane Carey
Shadows on the Sun · Michael Jan Friedman
Sarek · A.C. Crispin
Federation · Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens
Vulcan’s Forge · Josepha Sherman & Susan Shwartz
Mission to Horatius · Mack Reynolds
Vulcan’s Heart · Josepha Sherman & Susan Shwartz
Novelizations
Star Trek: The Motion Picture · Gene Roddenberry
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan · Vonda N. McIntyre
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock · Vonda N. McIntyre
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home · Vonda N. McIntyre
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier · J.M. Dillard
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country · J.M. Dillard
Star Trek Generations · J.M. Dillard
Starfleet Academy · Diane Carey
Star Trek books by William Shatner with Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens
The Ashes of Eden
The Return
Avenger
Star Trek: Odyssey (contains The Ashes of Eden, The Return, and Avenger)
Spectre
Dark Victory
Preserver
#1 · Star Trek: The Motion Picture · Gene Roddenberry
#2 · The Entropy Effect · Vonda N. McIntyre
#3 · The Klingon Gambit · Robert E. Vardeman
#4 · The Covenant of the Crown · Howard Weinstein
#5 · The Prometheus Design · Sondra Marshak & Myrna Culbreath
#6 · The Abode of Life · Lee Correy
#7 · Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan · Vonda N. McIntyre
#8 · Black Fire · Sonni Cooper
#9 · Triangle · Sondra Marshak & Myrna Culbreath
#10 · Web of the Romulans · M.S. Murdock
#11 · Yesterday’s Son · A.C. Crispin