The object pushed itself through the inner edges of the Veil, and for an instant, the play of light and energy haloing the planetoid seemed to suggest the presence of great tentacles of corposant, like the limbs of a cephalopod, folding and unfolding.
Spock heard Kirk mutter something low, under his breath—a fragment of half-remembered poetry the sight had brought to the captain’s mind. “‘Until the latter fire shall heat the deep; then once by man and angels to be seen . . .’”
“Alfred, Lord Tennyson,” he recalled, his perfect memory pulling the name from his studies of Earth’s ancient classical works. “ ‘The Kraken.’ ”
Kirk shook off the moment of introspection and pointed at the screen. “Analysis, Spock?”
“Doctor McCoy’s suggestion that the object may be a rogue planet of some kind seems at first to be the most logical suggestion . . .” He paused, considering his next words. “But it exhibits behavior unlike any rogues I am aware of.”
“A world thrown off from its own star system . . .” said Ensign Zyla. “I’ve heard of such things but never seen one before.” He paused. “But wouldn’t we have detected it on our approach from deep space?”
“An excellent question,” Spock agreed. “I have already begun a search through our computer records to seek out that data. However, I believe we are dealing with something other than a planetoid that has been cast away from another sun to simply drift into this system.”
Sulu was nodding in agreement. “A rogue wouldn’t fade in and out on sensors. It wouldn’t be able to disappear and reappear into dust clouds and subspace backscatter . . .”
“Surely you do not think it is some kind of vessel?” Arex’s heavy brow furrowed. “Not possible! It exhibits no propulsive power. No identifiable form of instrumentality, no obvious defensive or offensive systems.”
“Lieutenant,” said Kirk, “if there’s one thing you’ll quickly learn being part of this crew, it’s that the definition of what is possible is a lot broader than you might think.” He turned in his chair toward the comm station where Uhura and M’Ress were studying the displays. “Are we getting anything?”
The human and the Caitian exchanged a look. “A lot of noise on many frequencies, Captain,” began Uhura. “Nothing that resembles an ordered structure of transmission, like data or language . . . but we’ll need to conduct a deeper analysis to be sure. ”
“It all sounds like interference,” M’Ress added. “Unusual, yes, but just what you would hear if you pointed the sensors at any geologically active space body.”
“Is it possible that whatever attacked the Syhaari ranger ships is on the surface of that . . . leviathan?” Kirk gestured at the planetoid.
“Sensors are having difficulty returning a clean reading through the planetoid’s atmosphere,” said Sulu. “It’s laced with highly charged particles and exotic radiation.”
“We need to take a closer look, but I’m damned if I’ll put this ship on top of that thing.” The captain looked back at Spock. “I think it’s time we launched that probe you suggested earlier.”
“I concur,” said the science officer. He had already taken the liberty of preparing such a unit and tapped out a command on his panel that released the small impulse-powered drone. “Probe is away.”
Similar in mass to a standard photon torpedo casing, the probe was compact and swift, deploying a fan of passive and active scanning arrays as it dove into the rogue’s gravity well. Immediately, new blocks of data were transmitted back to the Enterprise, adding more to the puzzle of the intruder object.
Spock nodded to himself. “Captain, one potential explanation occurs to me. It could be that the Syhaari ships were caught in an energy discharge from the . . . the leviathan’s atmosphere. That might account for the ‘attack’ they suffered.”
“You’re suggesting it was a natural phenomenon?” said Kirk.
“It is a possibility I am considering, Captain.” A spike in the sensor feedback broke the Vulcan’s chain of thought. He glanced at his panel as Ensign Haines gave a shocked gasp.
“Energy build-up!” she reported. “Directly in the path of the probe!”
Spock glimpsed a surge in ambient power levels in the area nearest the drone, and then a heartbeat later that power was suddenly transmuted into a violent discharge of energy. A blazing line of electrostatic force briefly connected the Enterprise’s probe with the turbulent atmosphere of the planetoid, acting like a fork of lightning in reverse—and the remote craft was instantly destroyed.
The science officer’s eyebrow rose as the screens relaying data from the probe went dead. “I believe my initial hypothesis may have been premature.”
Lieutenant Sulu studied his console with amazement. “Captain, the power of that energy strike . . . a discharge one-tenth of the output would have been enough to wreck the probe! It wasn’t just destroyed . . . it was annihilated.”
“Overkill,” muttered Zyla, the Cygnian’s pale face flushing pink.
“A reflexive defense reaction,” Spock mused aloud. “Almost an autonomic response to a perceived intrusion.”
“Commander, you’re talking about that thing like it’s an animal,” said M’Ress.
“Indeed.” The Vulcan gave a nod, exploring the thought.
“Fall back, but slowly,” Kirk ordered. “Mister Arex, what’s our shield status?”
“Operating at one hundred percent, sir,” said the Triexian.
A warning tone swiftly brought Spock’s attention back to his viewer, and he peered into the hooded scope. “Reading another surge of energy . . . now registering multiple sources of emission, converging on a single site.”
“There!” Arex’s center arm rose to point at the viewscreen.
A series of glowing streamers raced around the curvature of the planetoid’s surface from all points, coming together at a locus directly in line with the Enterprise. Visually, they resembled the same ghostly bands of aurora-like energy that ringed the object, each with a flashing nimbus of corrupted atmospheric particles surrounding it. The streams came together in a collision of forces that wove to form a ragged sphere of deadly potentiality.
“Forget slowly,” Kirk amended, seeing the danger along with the rest of his crew. “Impulse power, full reverse, now!”
The object receded, but even with the sublight engines pushing them away, the starship’s escape speed was too sluggish for comfort. Somewhere in the heart of that churning energy, a point of criticality was passed, and Spock called out another warning as the surge became a jagged spear of actinic lightning. It reached for the Starfleet ship like a grasping claw, the lethal electroplasma shock lashing up out of the turbulent atmosphere and through the vacuum.
Enterprise was in the pivot of a hard turn as Arex and Sulu tried to put the ship about and throw distance between them and the planetoid, but even in tandem the two officers were not fast enough to prevent the vessel taking a massive hit from the attack.
Spock grabbed the edge of his console with one hand, his other shooting out to snag Ensign Haines before the shock of the impact tossed the junior officer off her feet. He felt the bridge’s gravity invert for one sickening moment as the ship’s inertial compensators struggled to maintain some degree of stability.
The starship groaned as the twin forces of sheer kinetic power and overwhelming electrical energies slammed into the hull and raked down the length of the vessel. Breakers blew out in a chatter of explosive blasts, barking chugs of noise that sounded like old chemical-ballistic firearms. For one grim moment, the entire bridge was plunged into pitch darkness, a blackness so deep that not even Spock’s superior Vulcan eyesight could pierce it. Then the lights flickered back to standby status, and he caught the scent of burned polymers and acrid smoke.
Ensign Haines gave Spock a grateful nod, and then to her credit, his subordinate went straight to the damage control station, b
ringing the console to active status.
“Report!” called the captain. In the deep crimson glow of the ship’s emergency lighting, Kirk’s face seemed pale and drawn.
“Still collating crew status,” said Uhura.
Sulu was wrestling with his controls. “Course erratic. We’ve been knocked into a tumble . . . stabilizing.”
“Shields are . . .” Arex faltered in the middle of his reply, and Spock heard the Triexian draw a tight breath. “Captain, our shields are gone.”
“With one hit?” Ensign Zyla seemed unable to believe the evidence of his own sensors. “That thing blew down our deflectors with a single strike? What kind of monster are we facing?” The young man’s voice was wavering close to the edge of panic, and Kirk gave him a hard look.
“To your post, mister,” he said firmly. “Do your duty!”
Zyla blinked, and nodded weakly. “A-aye, sir . . .”
Kirk’s attention returned to the navigator. “Arex, can you get the deflectors back?”
“Working on it,” came the reply. “Captain, I do not have to tell you—”
“Another hit like that and we’re done for,” Kirk finished the lieutenant’s sentence. “Sulu, get us the hell away from that object.”
Spock studied the Enterprise’s damage-distorted power curves and knew what the helmsman would say next. “Warp engines are not responding to command inputs, sir.”
“Heavy damage to both main propulsion units,” reported Haines. “That hit fractured the primary intercoolers and caused major malfunctions in the flux chiller arrays . . .” She looked to Zyla, who gave another nod to confirm the ensign’s statement.
“Object is turning,” said Sulu. “Yes, confirmed. The planetoid is altering its course.”
“It’s coming after us,” M’Ress said quietly.
“We’ll discuss how that’s actually possible when we get out of this,” Kirk said. “Deflectors. Engines. Everything else is secondary.” He glanced at Spock. “Options?”
Kirk’s initial order—to vacate the immediate area as swiftly as was possible—was still the most ideal choice, and Spock reiterated that. But whatever was guiding the actions of the planetoid had another outcome in mind. For a third time, the strange ambient energy fluctuations in the object’s upper atmosphere grew visible as they accumulated potential. This time, the science officer knew what to watch for in the traces from the sensors, but he feared the information might come too late to save the ship. Part of the Vulcan’s mind closed itself off from the others, rapidly calculating the odds of survival for the four hundred plus souls making up Enterprise’s crew, should the order to abandon ship be given. The estimate was a sobering one; Spock’s crewmates would most likely suffer the same fate as the pilot Duchad’s less fortunate colleagues.
“Energy configuration is different this time,” Spock noted. “Distributed, not collimated. Multiple points of discharge. Building to release in the next twenty seconds.”
Kirk’s hands tightened into fists. “Sound strategy. First it threw everything it had at us. When that didn’t destroy us like it did with the probe, it changed the attack pattern.”
“A scattershot approach?” offered Sulu.
“And I have an idea of how to deflect it.” Kirk climbed out of the command chair. “A firebreak.” He placed a hand on Sulu’s shoulder. “Torpedo status?”
“Two birds in the tubes, Captain . . .” Spock never quite understood the human desire to name unlike devices after animal forms, but he refrained from commenting. “Weapons control appears to be active. Sir, I can fire those shots but after that, nothing. The loading system is nonoperational.”
“Mister Sulu, we save those photons right now and we may not live to regret it.” Kirk gave Spock a look, and the Vulcan returned a nod. The captain’s plan, while crude, had the clear merit of being the most expedient. “Set warheads for timed fusing, full-force detonation, and put them between us and the object.”
“Aye, sir.” Sulu set to work, tapping out the settings.
“Time to next discharge?” Kirk turned back to his science officer.
“Imminent,” Spock reported. “Captain, I must remind you that we are still without full warp drive capability.”
“Foremost in my mind, Spock,” Kirk replied.
“Here it comes!” shouted Zyla, eyes wide and fearful. “Look!”
On the screen, it appeared briefly that the planetoid had grown a forest of towering, shivering white trees, their branches reaching into the dark to blanket the space around the Enterprise with a mesh of electroplasma the starship would be unable to avoid.
Kirk gave the order. “Fire when ready, Sulu!”
The helmsman nodded once, and the twin thuds of the heavy antimatter warheads launching rumbled through the deck plates. Spock saw two white blobs streak away from beneath the starship’s primary hull and, a moment later, blossom into a storm of fire.
Out in the vacuum, the staged detonation of the torpedoes threw up a wall of expanding energy that met the oncoming blasts from the planetoid in a collision of incredible forces. The captain’s “firebreak” lit up the sky, reflecting off the inner surface of the Veil, brightly enough that observers on Syhaar Prime would see it through their telescopes several minutes hence.
Spock hoped that they would not soon after witness a second, brighter flash as the Enterprise went to a bleak fate.
“This ship has a charmed life,” Kirk said, as if he were intuiting the Vulcan’s thoughts. “And I’m about to prove that once again.” He stabbed a button on the arm of his chair. “Scotty! I’ve played my aces up here. Tell me you can give me some speed.”
The stress tonality in the chief engineer’s reply was severe, Spock noted, but as ever Mister Scott proved himself up to the challenge. “Aye, I can give you what you want, sir. But not for long. A short burst of acceleration, warp one and little better. Anything more than that, and we’re wreckage.”
“I’ll take it,” said Kirk, switching to intraship address. “All hands, this is the captain. Look sharp and hold your stations. That is all.” The order was a simple one, yet it seemed to have an immediate effect.
Curious, Spock thought, how just a few words can stimulate the courage of others. He kept his own logical evaluation of the situation to himself. In the next few moments, they would be alive and clear of the intruder’s reach, or they would fail to escape and then nothing said or done would be of consequence.
“We’re ready,” Sulu announced.
Spock saw the telltale readings showing another buildup of power occurring in the mantle of the planetoid, but said nothing. He looked up as the helmsman turned the ship away, aiming it toward the core worlds of the Sya system.
“Go,” said Kirk.
With a wounded, shuddering moan of tortured tritanium, the Enterprise threw itself beyond the speed of light—and fled.
Five
Kirk swallowed a mouthful of strong coffee and leaned forward in his chair as his first officer continued his report.
“Our present heading places us here,” Spock was saying, indicating a tactical display on the briefing room’s viewscreen. The image put a blinking dot of light close to the orbit of Hokaar, the barren outermost world of the Sya system. “The . . . leviathan appears to have reversed course and passed back into the Veil.” A second dot illuminated in the band of fuzzy gray that denoted the dense dust cloud.
“How does a planetoid reverse course?” demanded McCoy, shaking his head. “I may have just barely passed my astrogeology elective at the Academy, but even I know that rocks the size of a moon don’t wander back and forth like lost dogs!”
“Nothing about that object is by the book, Doctor,” said Sulu, scowling. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“That is not, in the strictest sense, correct,” Spock went on. “This ship and this crew have encou
ntered phenomena of similar scope in the past.”
“Rogue planets?” said Kirk. “Once or twice, that’s true. But this is unprecedented.”
“Simply put, I do not believe an errant planetoid is what we are dealing with,” Spock replied. He flicked a switch built into the surface of the briefing room’s table. There was a media slot nearby, and he exchanged the data card plugged into it for another. The screen display became a complex series of sensor images, one overlaying the other. Each built a ghostly model of the leviathan, piece by piece. “I believe this object is a form of alien life.”
“That’s a bit of a reach for you, Spock,” said McCoy with a snort. “Wild theories aren’t exactly your strong suit!”
“Bones.” Kirk silenced the doctor with a wave of his hand. “Let him talk.”
Spock paused, and his captain knew that spoke volumes. McCoy was right, the Vulcan was not given to speculation, but the sparse data the Enterprise’s scanners had been able to fish from the sea of subspace interference did not lend itself to a definitive explanation. Kirk knew that on some level, that frustrated his taciturn first officer. “We have little to go on,” Spock continued. “But given the behavior we have witnessed, I suggest that the object is a hitherto unknown variety of cosmozoan entity. A spaceborne creature of great mass and power.”
“A living planet?” McCoy couldn’t hide his surprise. “You’re serious?”
The Latter Fire Page 8
