by KATHY OLTION
“What did you do?”
“When I planted these seedlings, I added some lime to the soil. The difference is like night and day.” She stood and offered him her hand. He took it as he got up and followed her back into the kitchen, where he took the vegetables out of the basket and rinsed them in the sink.
“What is that wonderful smell?” he asked.
Lilian was at the stove, stirring a pale yellow sauce in a gleaming pot. “This?” she asked, taking the pot from the heat and holding it under his nose.
Light steam rose from the pot, and it brought with it a tangy aroma that made his mouth water. “Oh yes. That.”
She smiled and resumed her stirring. “It’s the lemon brundel sauce for the pasta primavera.”
“Brundel?” he asked as he sliced tomatoes for their salad.
“It’s an herb that tastes like lemon. It’s easier to grow than lemons are, doesn’t need the warm tropical climate real lemons do. Are you done shelling the peas?”
“Coming up.”
The meal went together quickly, complete with crusty rolls and a dessert of rhubarb crunch. They sat across from each other at the dinner table.
“More pasta?” Lilian asked after they had slowed down a bit.
“Yes, please. This is delicious!”
“I didn’t realize how hungry I was,” she said. She loaded more onto his plate and took another scoop for herself.
“It takes a lot of energy to be a pilot,” Kirk said. “Besides, it was a busy afternoon on the ground, too.”
She nodded. “My heart goes out to those poor people. I think I’d be more useful to them if I went out and helped shovel muck than I am sitting here and ordering furniture for them.”
“But they’ll need that just as much,” Kirk said.
They ate dessert as they watched the brilliant colors of the sunset through the window. As the room fell into twilight, Lilian lit two white candles and placed them on the table.
“Nice,” Kirk said. He gazed at Lilian’s delicate face in the soft glow of the candles. He liked the way the flickering flame made her eyes sparkle. “I haven’t dined by candlelight in a long time.”
“You haven’t been on the surface much, then,” she said with a laugh. “We decided to go with a central power supply instead of independent home units, thinking it’d be much more efficient, but now with all the wind and rain taking out our transmission lines, we’re seeing the downside of the idea.”
“There seems to be a downside to a lot of good ideas,” Kirk said.
“Such as?”
He looked into the candle flame. “Well, the governor can find a whole host of good reasons to dismiss most of my suggestions.”
Lilian chased the last of the crumbs from her dessert across her plate with her fork. “And you can find equally good reasons to dismiss his plans too?” she asked, looking up from her plate.
“Touché. I’m afraid it’s true. It sounds like what we envision for Belle Terre’s future is mutually exclusive, but I can’t believe it is.” He folded his napkin and placed it beside his empty plate. “After all, we both want the colony to succeed.”
“What sort of plans are you clashing over? Or is this a confidential subject?”
Kirk smiled. “Not all that confidential, really. What it all boils down to is that I think Belle Terre is still in danger from the Kauld. I don’t want to scare you, but they want that olivium and I can’t believe they’ve given up on it.”
“But Pardonnet feels that the threat is over?”
“He feels that the Kauld are my problem. He has too many problems of his own. And he does. You saw what a disaster the Big Muddy area is. The cleanup job alone will take a huge effort, and the rebuilding will take even more. The problem is, we both need more manpower than we’ve got.”
Kirk fell silent. He cursed himself for letting business interfere with what had started out as such a pleasant evening. Maybe it wasn’t too late to steer the conversation away from the Kauld and Pardonnet. “I’m sorry. I don’t need to bother you with these kinds of things.”
“It’s quite all right. I have my own issues with the governor and some of the decisions he’s made in the past.” She stood and gathered the dishes from the table. Kirk wondered if she had issues with some of his own decisions as well. He stood also and started to help, but she said, “I’ll finish this. Why don’t you have a seat in the living room, and I’ll bring us a glass of wine.”
“That sounds good.”
The living room was lined with books. Kirk turned on the pole lamp closest to the shelves to see what kind of books a librarian chose to own, and the answer became quickly obvious. This one, anyway, read . . . everything. The top three shelves held fiction, from the Greek classics to Charles Dickens and Ernest Hemingway to the latest murder mysteries from Mars. The next shelf had histories of humans, Vulcans, and Romulans, and even a thin volume of Klingon history bound in what looked to be targhide. That must have been a hard book to come across.
The “how-to” books filled another three shelves, covering subjects like her beloved garden, bicycle repair, beer- and winemaking, and carpentry. She even had a copy of Jayne’s Guide to Non-Federation Ships.
The bottom shelf of every bookcase was littered with children’s books. Unlike the others, which showed careful handling and little if any wear, these books had been well loved. The covers were tattered and some of the spines were broken. He could see pages sticking out at odd angles, no longer bound with the rest. Some little boy had spent a lot of time with these colorful friends.
He was just thumbing out a crumbling copy of nursery rhymes when Lilian returned with two crystal glasses of dark red wine.
“You like books, too, don’t you, Captain?” she said, as she handed him a glass.
“Please call me Jim. And yes, I do. I appreciate being able to use the colony library.”
“I’m glad you do. If kids see someone like you coming to check out books, they’ll be more likely to do the same.”
“I didn’t know I had that much influence.”
“You do, and not just with the children.” She turned on the lamp on the end table and set her wine glass down. She picked up a box of rocks and a jacket from the couch and sat down, patting the cushion beside her. “I had to fight for the cargo space to bring real books here, you know.”
He took the hint and settled in next to her. “I didn’t realize . . . is that one of the issues you have with the governor?”
“It was. Once word got around that he thought we should only bring duotronic memory modules, I started a campaign to convince him that was a bad idea. What if the electronic readers couldn’t function properly out here? All that information would be useless, irretrievable.” She took a sip of her wine.
He sat quietly for a moment, contemplating a world without any kind of written word. The Enterprise didn’t have the room to hold a paper communal library, but the computer stored millions of works electronically. If the computer malfunctioned, the loss of literature would be the least of their worries. Still, Kirk kept a few “real” books, as he thought of them, in his quarters.
“As long as we’re stationed here, I’ll be happy to set an example for the locals.” He smiled and reached for his wine.
The lights suddenly winked out. Kirk instantly snatched his communicator from his belt, then he realized it was still Gamma Night and stuck it back in place.
He started to stand up, but Lilian reached out and found his arm in the dark. “It’s all right,” she said. “This happens a lot during Gamma Night. We’re not under attack.”
“It’s certainly . . . startling,” he said, sitting back down.
“You get used to it.”
The only light was from the candles in the dining room, and what little starlight filtered in through the windows. Lilian still held onto his arm. After a moment she said, “I should bring the candles in here.”
Kirk’s eyes were already adapting to the darkness. He turned towa
rd her and saw the faint halo around the edge of her hair and the twin sparkles of her eyes. “I have a better idea,” he said, leaning forward to kiss her.
There was an awkward moment when he thought he had misread her, but then her lips met his and her hand slid up his arm to cradle the back of his neck. “I do like your ideas,” she murmured. “Got any others?”
Chapter Nineteen
THEY WERE almost two-thirds of the way to the outpost when the alarm sounded. McCoy jumped up from his seat in the galley, scattering Nova off his lap, and rushed for the control cabin. The status monitor in the middle of the console blinked a warning: subspace activity detected.
“Well I’ll be damned,” he muttered. Nothing like tripping over what you were looking for on the way to the flashlight.
He checked the direction it was coming from. Not ahead of them. It was in a star system off to the side half a light-year and already receding. He slowed the Beater’s speed down to warp four and scanned for more information, smiling when he saw the number of warp signatures. Fifty-five ships! That had to be an entire civilization.
“A bird in hand is worth two in the bush,” he said, turning the shuttle toward the source and running the speed back to warp ten. He kept the scanners on maximum as he approached, looking to see where the ships were travelling to and from, but the warp signatures were all confined within a tiny area of space around one of the outer planets. All fifty-five ships were making tiny jumps, warping in and out and looping around one another like a hive full of angry bees.
“What the heck?” he muttered. He watched the solar system draw closer on the navigation display, then dropped out of warp while he was still a light-day out.
There was nothing visible in the optical; just a star and its planets, with no evidence of activity around any of them. Even at high magnification, there was nothing to see. Whatever was going on in there had started less than a day ago, and it had come from out-system.
The subspace sensors were full of activity. McCoy worked with the controls, cursing his rusty skills with this sort of thing. Where was Spock when you needed him, anyway? Irritating as the Vulcan could be at times, there was no denying his skill with a sensor sweep. McCoy thought about waking Scotty, but he decided to give it another few minutes before he did that. He at least wanted to be able to say what he’d found.
The computer began piecing together an image as more data came in. The individual ships were just points of light milling around, but tiny barbs of energy lanced back and forth between them, and every few seconds a brilliant flare would burst out.
“Uh-oh,” he whispered. He had seen this sort of thing before. Many times before, both in simulation and in real life. Somebody was fighting a major space battle.
He gauged the distance and decided to risk a closer look. They were so intent on each other, he didn’t think they would see a momentary jump from his angle.
He took the shuttle into warp again, held it for five seconds, then dropped back into normal space. That still put him a few light-hours away, but the subspace signals were much stronger now. He could actually see the ships in the high-intensity scan. Sure enough, they were fighting, though nobody seemed to be doing much damage. There were a lot of direct hits, but nothing strong enough to penetrate shields. It looked like they were running battle drills.
He squinted, trying to see the ships’ outlines in the false-color image. They looked familiar.
He broke into a sweat that had nothing to do with the malfunctioning environmental controls. Good God, those were Kauld warships.
“Scotty!” he yelled. He heard a scrabbling sound and turned around in his chair, but it was just the cat. Nova had been about to jump into his lap again, but she tore off into the darkened crew quarters, and a moment later Scotty yelled, “Hey! Ow!”
Nova came barreling back into the galley, the engineer right behind her.
“We’ve got trouble,” McCoy said.
“Aye, I’ll show you trouble,” Scotty said, holding up his right hand, where a red streak across the knuckles dripped blood. “That little creature got me with her claws.”
“The Kauld are going to get Belle Terre with more than that,” McCoy said. “Have a look.”
Scotty looked over his shoulder at the displays, then he sank slowly into the pilot’s chair. “Have ye warned the Enterprise yet?”
“I just now discovered it.”
Scotty tapped at the control board, dumping the video buffer into permanent storage. “Let’s give it another few minutes, then back away to a safe distance and send this to ’em.”
“Good idea.”
They watched in silence as the mock battle progressed. Some of the ships were slow and boxy, obviously pressed into duty from civilian use, but well over half of them were the familiar Kauld warships. Three were brand new, and represented a complete departure from the others. They were fast, sleek, and deadly.
Scotty frowned as he watched them in action. He zoomed in as much as he could, tapping his fingers nervously on the control board as he collected the information, then finally he said, “Let’s not press our luck. Time to warn the Captain.” He swirled the shuttle around and engaged the warp engines, throwing them back into interstellar space.
While he piloted them away from the Kauld fleet, McCoy powered up the subspace communications equipment and adjusted it for a narrow-beam transmission, triply encoded, to the Belle Terre system. “McCoy to Enterprise,” he said. “Come in Enterprise.”
He waited for a response, but got nothing even after two more hails. Then he checked the time.
“Hell, it’s the middle of Gamma Night back there.”
“Oh,” said Scotty. “Sure it is.”
“Should we head back?”
Scotty rubbed his hand, scratching absently at the dried blood from Nova’s claw marks. “No,” he said finally. “Gamma night will be over before we could get there, so a subspace radio message would still beat us home. And we haven’t learned much we didn’t already know, really. The Captain already guessed the Kauld were building up another fleet. He’s sure to order us on with our mission, if for no other reason than to see if we can find out whether that’s all of them or if this is part of something even bigger.”
“Do we still want to head for that outpost?”
“I think so.” Scotty checked the navigation display. “It’s less than two hours away at top speed. If we’re quick about it, we can check it out and report what we find there, too, when Gamma Night’s over.”
McCoy stared at the blank viewscreen. Light-years away from home with bad news and no way to report it; he hadn’t felt quite so isolated in years. Suddenly the trip had lost what little charm it had possessed.
He was still fretting when they arrived at the outpost. From communications traffic as they approached, they learned that it was called Naresidan. McCoy thought “Scrap Pile” would have been a more descriptive term, but maybe that’s what “Naresidan” meant in the owners’ native tongue. The place looked like an architect’s nightmare. Starships of all sizes and styles were docked to booms sticking out haphazardly in all directions. Most of the ships were blocked from moving by the ones parked next to them, and it wasn’t until he checked at high magnification that he realized that most of the blocked ones were welded in place. The inner ones were barely recognizable as spacecraft; they had been modified, added to, joined together, and in some cases split open like clam shells and welded to the outer surfaces of still larger ships.
At the center of it all, nearly obscured by the others, rested a cylindrical drum at least five miles across and twice as long. It rotated slowly, no doubt providing gravity on its inner surface by centrifugal force. It was a primitive trick, but it worked. And so did everything else in the outpost, it seemed. The place was a frenzy of activity, with ships coming and going almost continually. No two were alike, either.
“I guess we found what we were looking for,” McCoy said softly.
“Aye, that we have,
” Scotty agreed. “Now if we can just figure where to park without becoming a permanent part o’ all that.”
McCoy got on the comm and requested permission to land, and the controller talked them into a berth inside one of the long spines. As they edged into a landing bay and nestled down between two bulky cargo freighters, McCoy muttered, “I feel like a bug crawling into the Statue of Liberty.”
Scotty brought them in with hardly a bump. The external sensors registered atmosphere inside the bay. McCoy checked it for toxicity, but while there were plenty of organic compounds, it looked breathable enough.
“Well, let’s go take the tour,” he said, getting up and heading for the airlock.
He opened both doors at once, and was just stepping out when a gray streak darted between his legs and Nova bounded down the ramp.
“Hey, come back here!” he shouted, but the cat didn’t even slow down.
“Nova!” He ran down the ramp after her, but that just urged her on. She ducked around one of the freighters and disappeared.
“Dammit!” he said. “Nova, come back here.” He rounded the corner after her, but she was nowhere in sight. There was a crew busy unloading wooden crates from the back of one of the freighters. They were of three different species, all of them rippling with muscle. They looked at McCoy for a moment, then went back to work.
“Did you see which way she went?” he asked.
One of them, a fanged, blunt-nosed fruit bat sort of creature, said, “See which way who went?”
“My cat. Little furry thing, about this big.” He held his arms out, hands apart. “She came right past here just a second ago.”
The bat-creature wrinkled his nose. “I didn’t see it. Sorry.” The others didn’t even stop working.
McCoy walked on past them, looking into nooks and crannies, but the landing bay was all nooks and crannies, and open doorways and corridors leading deeper into the station. Nova could be anywhere.
