STAR TREK®: NEW EARTH - THE FLAMING ARROW

by KATHY OLTION

  “We have ten days to prepare. On day eleven, Belle Terre and its olivium moon will be ours.”

  Chapter Ten

  CAPTAIN KIRK paused at the door to the library. Through the window he could see half a dozen school children crowded around the front desk, where Lilian Coates was reading aloud to them from a picture book. They were young, maybe seven or eight years old, though Kirk was not good at judging children’s age.

  This didn’t seem a good time to interrupt, but as he turned away from the window he saw Lilian turn the book around so the kids could look at the pictures, and he saw that she only had three or four more pages to go. She was reading them Archie Echidna Goes to Arcturus, a book that had been popular when Kirk was a boy. He smiled as he remembered the spiny marsupial’s adventures among the vegetable people, and how Archie had fallen in love with a sea urchin.

  He looked at his own book while Lilian read the next page of hers and showed her audience the pictures. He’d smoothed out the dog-eared page and finished reading it, but his mind hadn’t really been on the story. He’d been running through contingency plans for defending the colony under any conceivable attack scenario, trying to tally the numbers of available ships and potential crews.

  He leaned against the wall next to the door. The faint noises of school activity echoed down from the classrooms along either side of the hallway, while thoughts of training a citizen’s defense network mingled with thoughts on the tactics of gaining Governor Pardonnet’s support for the program. Both men had the colony’s best interests at heart, but they disagreed on what posed the biggest threat to its well-being. They were both trying to predict the future, but there were only a limited number of resources to go around, and neither man wanted to waste them on the wrong project.

  One aspect of the future of which Kirk was certain: they had not seen the end of trouble from the Kauld. This lull in activity only meant they were regrouping for more aggression to come, and the longer they waited the bigger that trouble would be. The suicidal run of the lone Kauld ship nearly a week ago still bothered him, too. That was a radical departure from their normal tactics. It hadn’t worked, but he couldn’t help wondering what else they might try. What other unexpected approaches should he expect?

  “Holding up the wall, Captain?” Lilian asked. She had opened the door so softly he hadn’t even noticed. She was smiling mischievously, her light skin and blonde hair aglow in the overhead light.

  “I, ah, was just checking for gravitational anomalies,” he said as he straightened up. He decided that sounded lame the moment he said it, but she smiled anyway.

  “Always nice to know you’re looking out for us.”

  “Actually, I saw you reading to the kids and didn’t want to interrupt.”

  “Ah. That was very thoughtful of you. We’re done now.” She held the door open for him.

  “I was just bringing back a book,” he said, handing it to her, but he followed her inside as she walked toward her desk. By virtue of its age, the library didn’t smell like others that Kirk had visited. The books were all too new to have that dusty, closed-in smell. Instead, he imagined that this was more like what a late twentieth-century Earth bookstore or print shop might have smelled like. Fresh paper, wet ink, and bindery glue.

  She set the book on the polished wooden top along with dozens of others to be checked back in, but she didn’t go around behind the desk. She leaned back against the rounded edge, her hands resting there beside her hips, and said, “I heard that Shucorion’s people are going to help the flood survivors with emergency building materials.”

  “That’s right,” he said, proud of that little bit of negotiation.

  “Any chance of tacking on a couple hundred desks and chairs to that order?”

  “I . . . hadn’t thought of that. Are you short that many?”

  “We’re not, since not many of the refugees came this far, but most of the schools between here and there are donating equipment to resupply what they lost, and I’m coordinating the effort. I’ve asked Bill Thorpe about building new furniture, but he says most of the good lumber trees were destroyed in the Burn, so we don’t have a lot of spare wood to build replacements with.”

  “Furniture,” Kirk said, shaking his head. “Every time I think I’ve got a handle on the extent of things, something new pops up that I’ve forgotten.”

  “You can’t think of everything,” Lilian said. “It’s not your responsibility anyway. I should have put in my request through normal channels.”

  “No, no, that’s all right,” he said. ‘I’ll look into it. It’ll probably amuse Shucorion to be asked for something so mundane.”

  “The mundane can seem pretty important when you have to do without it.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest. “I feel so bad for all the people along the Big Muddy. I wish there was more I could do for them.”

  “So do I.”

  “I’ve seen pictures, but I don’t really know what it’s like for the survivors.”

  Kirk thought it over for a moment before he said, “I’m going out there for a look at their defense situation. I’m taking an airplane so I can get a feel for the territory. Would you like to come along? Maybe it’ll give you a better idea of what they need, too.”

  She was already saying, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly,” when she stopped herself, frowning, then said, “All right. They can do without me for a while here. Let me tell the principal where I’m going.”

  She went around to the other side of her desk and pressed an intercom button on the recessed communications panel. “Paul, it’s Lilian. I’m taking the afternoon off.”

  By the sound of his voice, Paul seemed nearly as surprised as Kirk had been. “You are? That’s—that’s great! Have fun.”

  “It’s not for fun,” she said. “I’m going on a tour of the Big Muddy with Captain Kirk.” Then she looked up at Kirk, realizing how that sounded, and blushed. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  Kirk smiled and said, “That’s okay. I know what you mean. Besides, once we get to Big Muddy, I suspect there won’t be too much to enjoy. But the trip to and from can be quite pleasant, and it looks like it should be a nice day for flying.”

  Lilian glanced over her shoulder at the small window behind her desk. Kirk followed her gaze. Bright rays of early afternoon sunlight sparkled against the small ripples and irregularities in the glass.

  “It’s been a lovely week. Such a relief from the rainy season,” she said. She turned back to her desk and tucked in her chair. “Well, shall we go? Or did you want to check out another book?”

  He looked longingly at the shelves of books, their spines all straight and even with each other. “Later, maybe. I have too many other things on my mind at the moment to be able to read for pleasure.”

  They left the building and started walking the several blocks to the airstrip. It seemed only fitting that a pioneer town like Buena Vista would have something as quaint as an airstrip. The colonies had had a fleet of shuttles when they first arrived, but due to poor planning most of them had been lost in the Big Muddy flood. Kirk thought of the incident as the All Your Eggs In One Basket Disaster, but thanks to Sulu’s ingenuity the colonies still had a quick means of transportation between towns, using his propeller-driven airplanes.

  “Have you ever been in one of the colony’s planes?” Kirk asked Lilian.

  She looked at him and said, “Not yet. But I have flown before. My Uncle Lee had a pilot’s license back when I was just a kid. He’d show up at family gatherings and take whoever wanted to go on plane rides.” She smiled at the memory. “He could only take one at a time, so all my siblings and cousins would argue about who’d get to go first.”

  “Must have been a small plane.”

  “Very small. It was a replica of an old gasoline-powered model. A something-or-other Kitten, or maybe it was a Cub. Some little animal name, anyway. It had an electric engine, of course, but I remember the propeller still made a lot of noise.”

&nbs
p; “So I’ve heard,” Kirk agreed.

  “There were just two seats, one in front and one behind.” Her eyes went all dreamy, recalling her childhood. “The first time he took me for a ride, I must have been about eight, not much older than those children I was reading to. It was late autumn, and he made me put on this heavy denim overall because he said it’d get cold up there. He helped me roll up the sleeves and the legs, and then boosted me into the front seat of the plane. My first thought was, ‘He’s going to let me drive!’ ”

  “Not, ‘I don’t know how’?” Kirk asked, grinning.

  “That was my next thought.” She laughed and said, “Before I could embarrass myself, Uncle Lee told me that he always flew from the back seat. I still remember the feeling I had then, relief and disappointment all at once. But that all went away when we took off and I saw what our town looked like from the air. All the leaves on the trees were turning color, and I could see my school and our house. It was pure magic.”

  “It sounds like it.”

  She nodded. “My mother would get all nervous about us flying in that plane, because Uncle Lee had built it himself and the shell was just canvas stretched around the frame. She was sure it was a deathtrap. But she let us go anyway. My brothers and I thought she was such a worrywart, but I look back on it now and think she was a brave woman.”

  They turned off the main road and walked toward the airstrip, where a bright orange wind sock extended at a shallow angle out to the west from a high pole beside the grass runway, and a boxy gray airplane waited on the ground outside a metal hangar. Its angular fuselage and straight wings had been riveted together from pieces of old cargo containers, and its windshield was made of two flat panes of glass set at an angle. The whole works only stood a little taller than a person, even counting its three spindly legs. The single propeller in front looked far too small to pull even such a tiny vehicle through the air, but these planes had already proven themselves time and time again long before the flood wiped out the regular shuttle fleet.

  The pilot was walking slowly around the plane, examining the control surfaces and their linkages. Kirk was glad to see him doing that, since there were no automatic diagnostics and no way to make in-flight repairs if something went wrong.

  The pilot saw Kirk and Lilian walking up to the plane and straightened up to say “Hi,” but he forgot he was standing under the wing and his head hit the hollow surface with a loud bong!

  “Oh, are you all right?” Lilian said, rushing up to him.

  He blushed red as a brick. “I’m fine, thanks. Name’s Herman. I’ll be your pilot.”

  “Here, let me see,” Lilian said, standing on tiptoe to look at the top of his head.

  While she fussed over the pilot, Kirk looked up at the wing. Herman was a tall, stocky man; if anything had been harmed, that would be where the damage was.

  There were no obvious dents in the wing, and apparently none in his scalp either. He finally succeeded in fending off Lilian’s attentions and coaxing her and Kirk into the plane.

  There were two seats in back and two in front. Kirk helped Lilian into the back seat behind the pilot’s chair, then took the copilot’s seat for himself. He pulled the wide shoulder belts down from either side of the seat back, crossed them over his chest, and buckled them into sockets at either side of his hips. A third belt went across his lap, tying him down securely. He looked back to make sure Lilian was belted in as well, and she flashed him a thumbs-up.

  He looked back at the control panel in front of him. There was a dual set of everything, but he had no intention of touching any of it, except in an emergency. The U-shaped steering yoke moved in all three dimensions, there were control pedals for his feet as well, and enough dials and gauges on the panel in front of him to give a starship navigator a nervous breakdown.

  “Have you flown before, Captain?” asked Herman as he climbed into the seat next to him. The entire plane shifted under his weight. It couldn’t mass more than a couple hundred kilograms—probably less than the combined mass of its passengers.

  “Not one of these,” Kirk admitted.

  From behind him, Lilian said, “I thought you had done this before!”

  “I’ve flown planes,” Kirk said. “And shuttles and fighters and starships. I flew a planet once. But never a plane quite like this.”

  “It’s a kick in the pants,” Herman said as he pressed the start switch and the propeller started spinning. “Once I get ’er in the air, I’ll show you how.”

  Kirk felt the same electric tingle of anticipation that he’d felt the first time he commanded a starship out of space dock, but as the plane shook in the propeller’s backwash, he also felt for the communicator on his hip. In an emergency, he could always call for a beam-out. Then he remembered why he’d scheduled the plane ride when he had: Gamma Night was just about to hit. He had decided to get something useful done during the blackout for a change. The Enterprise would be safe enough with Spock in command, and the colony’s airplanes were primitive enough that they weren’t affected by the particle storm, so it made sense to use the time for flying.

  It had made sense while he was on board the Enterprise, at least. Now that he sat in the cobbled-together contraption and contemplated riding it into the sky, it didn’t seem quite so bright an idea, but he wasn’t about to back out now.

  Herman shoved the control yoke all the way forward, pulled it all the way back, and rotated it from side to side, watching the ailerons and elevator respond out on the wings. The controls on Kirk’s side mimicked his motion, momentarily giving him the uncomfortable feeling that a ghost was sitting on his lap.

  Then Herman released the parking brake and let the plane roll forward, bouncing gently over the irregularities in the ground until they reached the runway. He looked to the right—the direction the orange wind sock on its high pole was blowing—then to the left, and when he was satisfied that the air was clear, he turned right and taxied down to the end of the runway. As he maneuvered the plane around, Kirk could see bumps and low spots down the strip. Though he knew the ground had been rolled flat and the grass mowed short when the airstrip was built, it didn’t look like anyone had smoothed the surface since the last rainstorm.

  Before he could point this out to Herman, the pilot pushed on the right foot pedal and ramped up the engine, spinning the tiny plane around in a tight half-circle until they were pointed back down the runway. Then he shoved the throttle all the way forward for takeoff. The noise from the props was as loud as Lilian had described, and Kirk could see that Herman was concentrating on the job at hand.

  The little plane bounced down the runway, gaining speed. Kirk’s teeth rattled and he was glad for the seat belt that kept him from banging his head against the rippling metal roof. He glanced back at Lilian, worried that she’d be upset by all the jouncing, but she was peering out the window, watching with a broad smile on her delicate face as the landscape rushed by.

  Just when Kirk was sure the contraption was going to shake itself to pieces, Herman pulled back on the yoke to bring the plane’s nose skyward, and the rest of it followed. As soon as the wheels left the ground the shaking stopped, and the plane’s engine sounded smooth and strong. The horizon took on a less-than-horizontal angle as they climbed.

  Herman banked the plane and blue sky filled most of the view from Kirk’s side, while Lilian’s side of the plane got a breathtaking view of the countryside below. He could see her studying the features of the land; then she looked up at him all excited.

  She pointed at the ground and said something, but the drone of the engine and propeller drowned her words. He couldn’t quite read her lips, either. Was she saying, ‘a bee tattoo!’?

  His confusion must have been evident. She loosened her harness and scooted close enough that he could smell the minty scent of her hair. She said into his ear, “I can see the school!”

  “Oh!” he shouted back.

  She didn’t wait for him to say more. With a smile befitting an exci
ted eight-year-old, she pressed her nose back to the window.

  Chapter Eleven

  MCCOY PEERED past Scotty’s shoulders, trying to see what the engineer was doing inside the cramped access panel. From the curses and thumps emanating from within, it sounded like Scotty was battling an infestation of Gorsonian zools, but he swore he was merely recalibrating the thermal dampers on the plasma-flow couplings.

  It might as well have been zools for all McCoy knew. In fact, if it had been zools, he might actually have been able to help. As it was, he’d been stuck holding the light while Scotty crawled in up to his waist inside the engines and battled entropy on his own.

  The engine room was the size of a cargo bay, but there was barely room enough for two people to stand abreast anywhere in it. Huge hulks of gray, humming machinery loomed out from all sides, and more receded into the darkness beneath the wire mesh catwalk on which McCoy stood. Pipes and cables connected them all together in a jumble worse than any nervous system he had ever seen, and the air smelled of hot metal where something had burned. There had once been lights overhead, but only two of them still worked, both on the far side of the cavernous room. A parallelogram of light spilled off to the side from the open doorway into the crew quarters, just forward of the engine room, but it shone at the wrong angle to help either McCoy or Scotty see what they were doing.

  The place had all the atmosphere of a cemetery on a muggy night. McCoy would have sworn he heard something moving back there among the reactors and the generators, but he knew there couldn’t be. Scotty and his engineering team had practically rebuilt the ship from the viewscreen back; they would have spotted anything bigger than a mouse.