by L. A. Graf
that something was amiss. "What do you need, Captain?"
"I want to change direction, Scotty, and I can't.use the helm to do it.
Is there any way we can maneuver the ship with just the impulse engine
controls?"
Scott sounded doubtful. "Well, I could flip the polarization of the
impulse engines so that they'll thrust the ship in reverse. But that
won't give you any maneuverability, sir--that'll only put you one
hundred eighty degrees off the heading you're already locked onto."
Sulu scanned his helm screen, then swung around to glance at Kirk. "That
would get us clear of Sigma One, Captain."
Kirk pursed his lips and nodded. "Get to work on it, Scotty."
"Aye-aye, sir." There was a pause, and the murmur of distant orders
given. "We've started on it now, Captain. It'll take a few minutes to
get to all the switches."
"You have two minutes, Mr. Scott." A thread of laughter flared
unexpectedly in Kirk's voice. "Be efficient."
Sulu glanced at the warp drive controls he had almost touched, and
shivered. Even a fraction of a
second at warp speed would have sent the Enterprise crashing into Sigma
One, given the course setting they were locked on. When he looked up
again, it was to find Lieutenant Bhutto staring at him. "How did you
know the helm computer had malfunctioned, sir?" she asked below the
shrill blare of the last remaining
'Tm not sure." Sulu frowned at the viewscreen. Sigma One blinked its
spidery lights at them, then suddenly went dark. The station commander
must have started emergency procedures, closing bulkheads and shutting
down power lines to minimize damage from the impact. "A course of mark
three should have brought us around toward the Orion nebula, but I
didn't see it cross the screen."
Kirk gave him a noncommittal look. "Mr. ulu, at this distance, the
Orion nebula should look like any other star out there."
"I know, sir," admitted Sulu. "I'm not sure how I recognize it, but I
usually can."
"One and a half minutes to impact, Captain," Uhura reported quietly.
Kirk grunted and turned his back on the blackness of the station with a
calm that amazed Sulu. Behind him, John Taylor had retreated to the
turbolift doors, his face ashen and his hands clamped on the bridge
railing as if he didn't quite trust the ship on which he rode. Beside
him, Purviance just looked worried.
"Any luck with reprogramming Spock?"
"I have made some progress in restoring computer functions, Captain, but
I have not yet managed to restore helm control to the bridge." The
Vulcan never took his eyes from the computer codes scrolling across his
screen. "We remain locked on a collision course with Sigma One."
"That won't matter if we can throw the impulse engines in reverse." Kirk
hit the ship communicator again. "Scotty, have you repolarized the
engines?"
"We're almost there, sir." A faint quiver ran through the Enterprise,
whatever noise it made lost ben eath the drone of the last alarm. "Engine
polarization complete, Captain. She'll run in reverse of whatever your
helm setting is now."
"Good." Kirk spun on his heel, striding back down toward the helm.
"Three-quarters impulse power, Mr. Sulu."
"Aye, sir." Gritting his teeth in silent prayer, Sulu brought the
impulse drive on line. With the slightest of jerks, the Enterprise
reversed course, pulling away from the station with her usual swift
power. Sulu let out the tense breath he'd been holding as Sigma One
dwindled from a massive presence in the sky to a retreating patch of
darkness against the stars.
"Sigma One is back on line, Captain." Even as Uhura spoke, Sulu could
see approach lights blossom across the space station's outflung
gantries. "They want to know if we require assistance with our helm
malfunction."
Kirk glanced inquiringly at his first officer. "Do we require
assistance, Mr. Spock?"
"I do not believe so, Captain." Spock tapped a final command into his
console, then turned toward Sulu. "Mr. Sulu, if you check your helm
computer, I think you will find it is now operational'Y
Sulu toggled one course adjustment switch and watched the piloting panel
respond with a swift flicker as it changed headings. "Affirmative, sir.
We can engage warp drive now."
"Not yet." Kirk swung around in a slow circle, scanning every panel on
the bridge. "Before we go
anywhere, I want to know why that last damn alarm is still active." He
paused, facing the security panel and its stubbornly flashing screens.
"Well, Mr. Howard?"
The tall security guard looked desperately over his shoulder. "I can't
seem to make it turn off, sir. I've tried everything I can think of."
Kirk's eyebrows rose. "Then maybe it's not a false alarm. What seems
to be triggering it?"
"According to this, it's--" Howard checked the screen and his voice
faltered briefly. "--it's an intruder alert, sir."
The Kongo's primary engine room glowed in the sickly plasma-light of
core overload. Ripples of superheated gas blurred the central warp
chamber, and the trans-steel alloy of the engine room walls was pitted
and strained by radiation flares. Alarms howled like tortured souls;
only the dim black shadows of engineers remained to hear them, trapped
forever against the blasted walls in a tableau of startled inaction.
"The core's pretty hot, but I think we can reach it." The face on the
comm screen--seared shiny red, with eyes burned a deep, unforgiving
black--was fractured by washes of static. If he'd been calling anywhere
farther away than the Kongo's bridge, no one would ever have seen his
transmission at all. "I'm going out the lock in the Number Two
Jefferids tube, Mr. Stein's going out the lock in Number One." A bloom
of brilliant light swelled up in the chamber behind him, and the man
ducked reflexively, not even turning around. "We'll call back as soon
as we're finished. Cecil out."
Almost on cue, the lights in the narrow communications booth went black,
and the eomm picture in front
of Chekov snapped down to a pingrick, like a star left behind at warp
speed. Chekov shook himself out of the morass of horrid images--a
corridor-long pile of charred bodies, the twisted engine breaches
revealed by the Kongo's diagnostics, his friend's face still open to
hope even as he turned away from the comm screen to die.
We'll call back as soon as we're finished.
Chekov knew now it had been a mistake to call the Kongo for details.
Power flooded back into the comm booth's system, and, with it, the
raucous squall of the ship's intruder alert. Still too close to
secondhand memories of the Kongo's disaster, Chekov had to fight down a
wave of dread as he punched the intercom next to his terminal. "Chekov
to Lemieux."
"Deck Six," she reported without having to be asked. "Sector
thirty-nine."
Barely around the corner from the booth in which
he sat. "Send a team. I'm on my way."
"Aye-aye, sir."
The empty corri
dors enlarged the alarm's voice, battering sound all over
the section. Chekov cut down the corridor to section ten while the
noise would still cover the sound of his approach. The automatic
systems would shut down deck exits, but it would shorten pursuit if he
could get the intruder in sight as soon after detection as possible.
Chekov rounded the last corner just as a lean, dark figure spun to meet
him, the small device in its hand swinging to center on his chest.
Adrenaline seared through him at the sight of a potential weapon.
Twisting aside, he threw his shoulder against the intruder's
outstretched arm and
pinned it tight against the wall. He blocked a wild swing to his head,
and struck back in the same moment Aaron Kelly's voice yelped in panic.
Chekov felt every muscle in his left arm twinge as he stopped his blow
just short of a full extension. He knew even before Kelly hit the deck
that he'd broken the auditor's nose, but hoped for both their sakes that
he hadn't done anything worse.
"Get up, Kelly." Chekov caught Kelly by the front of his dark suit and
hauled him to his feet, wishing he had time to be more gracious. "You've
got to get out of here."
Kelly slumped groggily against a doorway with his hand clamped over his
nose. "What are you doing here?" he slurred in confusion. Blood
dripped from under his hand to splatter all over the deck and his shoes.
He seemed almost as interested in those Rorschach patterns as in
Chekov's attempts to push him back into the doorway's relative safety.
"Did you come from Deck Seven?"
Leaning an arm against Kelly to hold him still, Chekov hissed the
auditor into silence. "There's an intruder alert," he whispered,
peering up and down the hall for signs of movement. No one, and
probably no chance of surprising anyone now, intruder or otherwise. "I
was down the hall when it went off."
"Ohm" Kelly surged unsteadily against Chekov's hold, trying to swing his
right hand up in front of his eyes. "Oh, Lieutenant Chekov, this is
terrible!"
Chekov glanced irritably at Kelly, and at the bright metal device in
Kelly's hand. A stopwatch, he realized. He'd just brokeh a man's nose
on account of a digital stopwatch.
The sound of running feet reached them ahead of the small security squad
that appeared at either end of
the corridor only an instant later. "This'11 probably ruin everything,"
Kelly lisped as the guards came to cluster around him. He sniffed a
little, then winced and depressed one of the watch's buttons with his
thumb. "Mr. Taylor isn't going to like this at all when he hears."
Chekov had a feeling he didn't like this already. "Mr. Kelly, what are
you talking about?"
Kelly blinked at him with pain-watered brown eyes. "The test." He swayed
a little when Chekov released him to stand on his own. "I'm fairly sure
your being here invalidates the test, Lieutenant."
The guards exchanged uncertain looks, but Chekov only braced his hands
against either side of the doorway and asked grimly, "Did you set off
that intruder alert, Mr. Kelly?"
The auditor nodded limply.
Suddenly deprived of any real emergency, Chekov's tension flared inside
him as cold anger. "You falsified a shipwide alert? For what?" He
snatched Kelly's wrist and jerked the stopwatch up between them. "To
time security's response?"
He could feel the auditor trembling through his grip on Kelly's wrist.
"It's an essential component to determining efficiency," Kelly offered
in a tiny, blurry voice.
"Damn your efficiency!" Chekov sharply released Kelly's hand, resisting
an urge to reach out and shake the man. "Is efficiency worth
endangering personnel with false security alerts? Is it worth getting
yourself killed? My God!" He pounded both hands against the jambs, then
pushed away from the doorway to pace in frustration. "Why is it that we
have people lining up to waste themselves just to prove they can?"
"But Mr. Taylorre"
Chekov spun to glare at Kelly, and the auditor choked down into silence.
"Did Taylor put you up to this idiocy?"
Kelly, eyes wide behind his hand, nodded. "He needs some sort of data
for his recommendation, and you won't let me into anywhere else in your
division."
"Recommendation?" Chekov came to stand in frout of him again, hands kept
carefully at his sides. "What kind of recommendation?"
"His recommendation to the Auditor General." Kelly's eyes darted back
and forth among the collected guards, finally coming to rest on Chekov
as though terrified of what was coming. "About when and how to
restructure your department when we get back to Sigma One."
"You're telling me this entire investigation is because you don't like
the way I run my division?"
"That," Taylor admitted from one of the sickbay's diagnostic tables,
"and other things. But mostly that." He waved irritably at Purviance to
silence whatever the liaison officer had opened his mouth to say.
"Frankly, Lieutenant," Taylor said, sitting up and glaring across the
foot of the table at Chekov, "your division is a mess."
As near as Chekov could tell, the only advantage Taylor had at the
moment was that they were all in sickbay, so there'd be a medic team
nearby when Chekov decided to tear the auditor limb from limb. "Captain
Kirk has had no complaints."
"Of course he hasn't," Taylor said through a sneer. "For a ship as
highly regarded as the Enterprise, an awful lot around here could stand
redefining. Your captain is no doubt the main reason." He hopped to his
feet, chin high. "That's why I'm here."
"You're here to audit ship efficiency," Purviance intervened.
Chekov tried to appreciate the awkward good intentions that made
Purviance step in front of Taylor, but instead found himself resenting
the other's intrusion. "Maybe if you kept your people to their official
duties, unfortunate run-ins li ke this wouldn't happen."
"Maybe if you minded your own business," Taylor snapped, "we could spend
more time working and less time kissing up to Captain Kirk."
At the edge of his vision, Chekov saw McCoy glance up from setting
Kelly's broken nose; he made himself repress his temper before the
doctor interfered. Being scolded by the ship's chief medical officer
wouldn't do much for his credibility in Taylor's eyes. "Have you ever
served in Starfleet, Mr. Taylor?"
The auditor crossed his arms with a frown. "Of course not. But--"
"No," Chekov cut him off, "no buts. Until you've served on a starship
and faced the things that come up here every day, you haven't any idea
what constitutes a well-run department."
"Ah, but that's where you're wrong." Arms still crossed, Taylor paced
slowly to his right, moving from behind Purviance and forcing Chekov to
either turn to face him or wait for the auditor to circle back around in
front of him. Chekov decided to wait for him. "Regulations tell me
everything I need to know, Lieutenant. When I see personnel exhibiting
continual, flagrant disregard for regulat
ions concerning duty
assignments, scheduling, division of responsibility--well, it's my job
to ferret out whatever causes those problems." He planted himself in
front of Chekov and poked the lieutenant once in the chest. "Take a
guess what that cause usually is."
"Mr'. Taylor," Purviance objected weakly.
Chekov curled his hands into fists so tight his wrists ached. "If you
really care about efficiency," he said slowly, "you should be judging us
on our performance, not on our adherence to every minor regulation."
Taylor gave a short bark of laughter. "Performance such as nearly
killing one of my junior auditors?"
"Yes!" Turning away from Taylor's infuriating scowl, Chekov gestured
to-Kelly on the bed across the room. "What was our response time?"
"Fantastic!" Kelly popped into a sitting position despite McCoy's
colorful protests, and leaned around the doctor to make eye contact with
Taylor. "Lieutenant Chekov reached my position in just under
seventy-eight seconds, and the official squad got there only about a
minute later." He grinned at Chekov, the growing bruises under his eyes
making him look sleepy but pleased. "That's the best time for any
starship I've ever tested."
"In Other words," McCoy said over his shoulder to Taylor, "if it ain't
broke, don't fix it." He pushed Kelly flat to the bed again. "Lie
down!"
