by KATHY OLTION
Scotty agreed that looking for the flash was pointless. Oh, they could eventually find it that way by simply planting a string of probes and waiting for the wave front to cross one of them, but that would be a little like dropping a rock in a pond and then scattering leaves over the surface to see which one bobbed up and down first. Except this particular pond was filled with molasses as far as the Enterprise was concerned. The speed of light was so slow compared to a starship.
What they needed was some way to determine instantly if the wave front had already passed. The Enterprise could then simply jump from place to place in the target volume and make a quick sensor sweep. Except the laser had been fired during Gamma Night, which also propagated at the speed of light. He modified his mental picture: the wave front was like the splash from a rock thrown in the ocean, not a pond, with gamma night sweeping through like waves from the infinite distance. One wave held the tiny ripple they were looking for, but they could only work with any efficiency in the troughs between the waves. Even his hypothetical string of buoys watching for the flash wouldn’t be able to report until after gamma night had passed.
He groaned as the sudden realization hit him: even after they figured out where the beam had to be, they might never be able actually to find it. Like the flash of light that had created it, the beam itself was in the middle of gamma night! The Enterprise’s navigational sensors wouldn’t work there. They would be flying blind, trying to pinpoint their position with nothing more than optical measurements of distant planets to go by.
Not that he had any idea what they would do when they found it. How could they stop a laser beam the width of a planet? That was the big question. He wished he had an answer.
Deloric’s and Terwolan’s burned faces rose to haunt him again. He had been seeing them every time he closed his eyes, imagining every colonist on Belle Terre burned even worse. The Kauld ice miners hadn’t even been caught in the direct beam. The flash alone had done that to them.
Scotty wondered again what would be left of the comet when they found it. Would there even be debris, or would everything have been vaporized into an expanding cloud of gas?
An expanding cloud of hot gas.
“Stupid!” he said, slapping himself on the forehead. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!”
“Mr. Scott?” Kirk’s voice was a blend of alarm and amusement.
Scotty turned around to face him. “What’s left of the comet should be glowin’ like a beacon in the infrared spectrum. We don’t have to look for the flash, or for power sources. We can look for heat.”
He saw the realization hit everyone at once. Plain old optical astronomy, practically obsolete since the invention of warp technology and subspace observation techniques, could serve them here. “All we have to do,” he said, thinking aloud, “is make a series of jumps around the area we think it’s in. If we look for the heat signature, we dinna have to catch the wave front. It’ll be visible from anywhere inside the sphere of expanding light.”
“Which is one light-day wide now and getting bigger all the time,” said Kirk. “That . . . makes a great deal of sense.”
“Thank you,” Scotty said. He was apparently getting used to thinking in terms of primitive science. He wasn’t sure he liked that, but it did have its advantages at the moment. And for my next trick, I’ll use a soldering iron and bailing wire to fix a toaster. The moment he got back to civilization, he swore he would kiss the ground.
Kirk turned to Sulu and Thomsen. “Belay the probe drop. Take us straight for the comet’s most likely position. Shields up.”
“Yes, sir.” The helmsman and navigator got to work, and the Enterprise veered onto its new course.
The sensors went dark as they crossed through a zone of gamma night, then came back on-line for a couple of minutes before darkening again. They were plowing through the waves head-on on their way out of the system, a ten-light-hour-wide band of disruption followed by twenty light-hours of clear sailing, all compressed into a few minutes of tension as the ship bore through it at warp speed. If they hit anything during those dark moments they would never know it. The shields might deflect a rock at ultralight velocity, but nothing bigger. And if there was something bigger in their path, Belle Terre would have a brief new star in its night sky for a few minutes . . . and certain death four days later.
They could be flying right through the laser beam at the moment and they would never know it. Not in subspace. The column of photons was crawling toward Belle Terre entirely through normal space.
Sulu was muttering softly, and Scotty realized he was counting the waves. If Thomsen’s navigation equipment couldn’t handle the recurring blackouts, he would at least know when to stop the ship. Scotty watched his fingers draw closer and closer to the control panel, and he was already reaching out to bring them out of warp when Thomsen said, “We’re there.”
The Enterprise dropped out of warp in a calm spot between waves. They could do optical scans during Gamma Night, but there was no sense hindering themselves needlessly until they had exhausted the search areas in the clear.
“Start scanning, people,” Kirk said, but Scotty was already turning back to his console to do just that.
They had no luck on their first jump, nor on the next five, but on their seventh sweep the omnidirectional infrared detector gave a beep, and a cheer went up around the bridge. Not bad, Scotty thought, considering the odds were about forty-to-one against them. That’s how many one-light-day volumes there were inside the search area, but they were spiraling out from the region of most likelihood, so he supposed the true odds were more like fifteen- or twenty-to-one. Spock would be able to tell him exactly, but it didn’t matter. They had found it.
Scotty immediately moved to isolate it, and sure enough, there was a single radiation source. It was a bright, hot source, too, which meant they had dropped in close to the edge of the expanding light sphere. They were probably seeing it within an hour after the laser had been fired.
He did some quick distance measurements. Sure enough, the comet was nearly a light-day away. Almost all the way across the clear space between waves of gamma night.
“Uh-oh,” he said.
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Kirk said.
Scotty shook his head. “I dinna like it either. I’ve found the comet, but we’ve only got about fifteen minutes to get there and take whatever sensor readings we can before Gamma Night hits it.”
Chapter Twenty-three
SPOCK FELT the ship sweeping through the successive layers of Gamma Night. In the science lab the effect was a slight but noticeable difference in the way the deflector array responded to his commands. Much of the signal processing was done on-site, and the onslaught of subspace distortion that accompanied the normal-space effects of the phenomenon played havoc with the exposed computers. Calculations that normally required a single algorithm had to be cross-checked for accuracy using a second method, and sometimes a third when the results didn’t match.
He wondered if he was wasting his time here. He might be of more use on the bridge, assisting in the search for the laser beam. That was only the beginning of their problem, however, and he felt sure that the rest of the bridge crew could handle it competently without him. He also felt that someone needed to work on the next and most important question: how could they stop the laser beam from striking Belle Terre once they discovered it?
He didn’t know how watching the deflector activity during their successive Gamma Night crossings would help, but there was no sense wasting the opportunity to gather data. He hadn’t had the chance to test his olivium-powered sensors since rebuilding them after the neutrino overload; now he could test them four times in a quarter-hour.
They didn’t overload on the first transit. That was a good sign, but they didn’t report any neutrino bursts, either. On the second transit he set them scanning all the way through the electromagnetic spectrum for the echo frequency, but they were only halfway through when the ship crossed back in
to clear subspace. On the third transit he finished the scan, finding a peak in the X-ray range that he was able to measure more accurately on the fourth pass.
X-rays in hyperspace. And he had been sending out Berthold rays. It made no more sense than sending out radio and getting back neutrinos.
There were no more Gamma Night crossings to test it in. Spock settled in to analyze the data he had gathered, noting from the flickering of the lights that the ship was now making short hyperspace jumps. They were either dropping probes or searching for the comet from whence the laser beam had come.
Then the intercom whistled, and the captain said, “Bridge to Spock.”
He reached out and pressed the reply switch. “Spock here, Captain.”
“Get up here on the double. We’ve found the laser, but we’ve only got fifteen minutes to study it before Gamma Night hits.”
Fifteen minutes. That wasn’t nearly long enough to do a thorough examination, but one didn’t argue with the universe. If that was all they had, they would have to make the best use of it they could. “On my way,” he said, standing up and heading for the door without even taking the time to switch off his equipment. It could wait until he returned.
When the turbolift doors opened, he saw Dr. McCoy in the car. The doctor nodded to Spock and stood aside; as the door slid closed behind him he said, “I thought I’d come up and see what all the commotion is about.”
“All the ‘commotion’ is about the comet. We’ve found it.”
“Aha. This soon? That’s a good sign.”
“Take heart in this minor bit of good fortune. It may be the only one we get.”
McCoy gave him a critical look, a penetrating, human look of the sort that always made Spock feel uncomfortable. He knew just enough about humans—was just human enough himself—to understand what it meant. The doctor was about to make a snap character judgement.
McCoy surprised him, which was almost as annoying as the character judgement would have been. “Want a cat?” he asked.
Spock nearly said, “I beg your pardon?” but then he remembered that McCoy and Mr. Scott had found an abandoned cat on board their exploration ship, which meant he had in fact heard the doctor correctly. He shook his head. “I have no need of a pet.”
“You should think about it. She’s kind of prickly. Like you.”
Spock almost smiled. McCoy hadn’t failed him after all.
The door onto the bridge opened, saving him the necessity of a response. He looked immediately to the main viewscreen, where the remains of the comet were displayed. There was no ice left. Chunks of rock, none larger than a shuttlecraft, tumbled slowly among an immense tangle of metal that must have been the olivium-powered exciter for the laser.
Spock gave it only a moment’s examination, then went to his science station and immediately got to work with the sensors. He could use his eyes later, during gamma night. For now they needed every electronic measurement they could make before they lost the capability.
He took a molecular scan of the entire debris field, calling out the more interesting details in the data that streamed across the monitors before him. “The heat of the exciter burst was strong enough to vaporize the outer ten centimeters of rock facing it, and melt the rest into slag. My calculations would put it at roughly forty thousand degrees.”
“How does that translate into destructive power of the beam itself?” Kirk asked.
That was a very good question, and one which required more information than he had for a precise answer, but he knew enough to speculate. “The amount of energy necessary to reach that kind of temperature is phenomenal, especially when we remember that this was the leakage from the exciter, which no doubt directed nearly all its energy down the carbon dioxide column. The evidence here correlates with the data provided to Mr. Scott and Dr. McCoy. I cannot give you a precise energy density for the laser beam, but I agree with the Kauld informants’ assessment of its strength. It would indeed be sufficient to destroy Belle Terre.”
Nobody responded to that statement. Spock turned back to the sensor displays and called out more observations as they came in. “As expected, I am picking up strong olivium decay signatures. I am unable to determine the amount of olivium the Kauld used, but I suspect it was more than sufficient to ensure the cohesiveness of the laser.”
“Cohesiveness?” Kirk asked.
“A laser beam of sufficient power is self-focusing,” Spock told him. “It will not spread the way a normal laser would.”
Scotty cleared his throat, another human trait that Spock recognized instantly. It meant he was about to contradict what Spock had just said. “Self-focusing works in crystals,” he said, “because the light alters the index of refraction inside the beam, but how could that work in space?”
Spock kept the sensors going while he answered. “It’s a gravitational effect, not a refractive one. A beam of sufficient energy density actually acts as a solid object, according to the equation e = mc2. The energy’s equivalent mass creates gravity, which does affect photons. At a sufficiently high power level, that gravity would be enough to keep the beam from spreading.”
Scotty whistled softly. “Aye, I can see how it could, but the amount of power you’re talking about would have to be enormous.”
“Indeed,” Spock said. He looked back to his monitors, studying the data stream from a dozen different scans. Electron, polaron, gravimetric and even temporal disturbances all swept by with dizzying speed. He double-checked that the computer was storing all the data. This was a treasure-trove of information on the reactivity and characteristics of olivium. The information he gathered from this site would have taken several years of careful development—or an unfortunate accident—to accumulate. Due to olivium’s unpredictable nature, he would not have been able to simulate experiments leading to most of this information.
Spock found himself in a surprising moral dilemma. He had great admiration for the people who designed and engineered this feat. The efficient use of existing resources would please any logical being. Likewise, the decision to build a self-consuming device for a one-time need reflected in their favor. The Kauld had built something extraordinary; yet even the fact that they had done it in an elegant manner was of no consequence. What they’d produced was a weapon powerful enough to destroy a planet and all who lived on it. Worse yet, they had fired it at Belle Terre and the people the Enterprise was there to protect. It was not his job to admire the craftsmanship but to determine how to stop it before it reached its target.
“Can you pinpoint the time when the laser was actually fired?” Kirk asked.
Spock looked at the radiation decay figures from the rocky debris. “I can only narrow it down to a time between twenty-five and twenty-seven hours ago.”
McCoy, who had taken up his customary position behind the captain’s left shoulder, said, “What the heck kind of answer is that? Where’s your ‘approximately 25.48762 hours’ accuracy?”
Spock tore his attention from the incoming numbers scrolling across his data charts long enough to say to McCoy, “I assure you, doctor, if there had been more precision to be gleaned from these readings, I would have given it. Perhaps if you could provide me with a chronometer conveniently stopped by the blast, or a reflection from an object at a calibrated distance, my work would be more accurate.”
McCoy didn’t answer back, but the look on his face told Spock that his explanation had had the desired effect. With any luck, it would be some time before the good doctor felt compelled to interrupt his work with any more frivolous comments.
He turned back to his monitors and noticed that the data streams were slowing down. Sensors were double-checking their readings and rejecting some outright as unreliable. “Gamma Night is nearly upon us,” he said.
“Hmph.” said Kirk. He sat in the command chair, rubbing his chin with his right fist, his eyes glued to the viewscreen, searching every piece of debris. Spock had seen that look on his face before. The captain was pondering his
options, weighing his possible moves, just as he did when the two of them played a game of three-dimensional chess. He was also waiting for more information from Spock.
Spock turned back to his consoles. There was still plenty to be observed in the visual spectrum. He peered into the debris field with the ship’s main telescope, noting how the separate pieces drifted away at varying speeds according to their density. From that he could probably calculate the strength of the final explosion that wrecked the olivium-powered exciter beam, but the fact that there was any debris left at all proved that the explosion was only a tiny fraction of the total energy delivered into the laser. He looked for more revealing objects, and eventually found them nearly twenty kilometers distant. “It appears that at least two other vessels were caught in the flash of the laser and destroyed. They appear to be Kauld ships.”
“On screen,” Kirk ordered.
Spock complied. The charred and broken remains of two ships hung like shadowy ghosts amid an expanding sea of small—those weren’t rocks. They were all the same size, and they had arms and legs. Those ships hadn’t merely been staffed; they had been jammed full of people.
Spock closed his eyes against the sight, then forced himself to look. There could be valuable information here. The ship closest to the comet was little more than cinders and pieces of broken frame, but the hull of the second one showed an interesting burn pattern as it tumbled slowly end over end.
Kirk saw it too. “It looks like they were caught completely off-guard when the laser was fired.”
“How do you figure?” McCoy asked.
“Well, aside from the fact that they were here at all with that many people on board, the farthest one sustained all its damage on its starboard side. That means it was stationed side-on to the comet. It wasn’t even trying to escape, or it would have been burned on the backside. If they’d known what was coming, they would have at least tried to get out of here.”
