STAR TREK®: NEW EARTH - THE FLAMING ARROW

by KATHY OLTION

  Kirk couldn’t read the Vulcan’s poker face at all. He looked over at Scotty, who was grinning like a rube with four aces. “You actually think this could work?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir. I know it sounds a wee bit daft, but we’ve tested it every which way and it’s a real phenomenon.”

  “ ‘Wee bit daft’ doesn’t begin to describe it,” Kirk said. “You’re asking us to risk every—”

  The intercom whistled for attention. Kirk reached out and snapped it on, and Uhura’s voice said, “Captain, incoming message from Shucorion.”

  Oh damn. In all the excitement, he had completely forgotten the Blood leader. “Put him on.”

  Shucorion’s blue face filled the desktop monitor. “Captain! I’m proud to report that we are on our way with your emergency building materials. We’ve managed to fill your school administrator’s request for desks and chairs as well.”

  “That’s, um, that’s wonderful,” Kirk said. He couldn’t tell Shucorion to stay home and save himself the trouble, not on an open channel. He couldn’t tell him even on a secure channel, because there were bound to be Kauld spies on board his ships, and he couldn’t afford to tip off the Kauld that they had learned about the laser. “When will you arrive?” he asked.

  “Two days,” Shucorion said.

  Just in time for the fireworks. “Wonderful,” he said. “Watch out for Kauld ships on the way. We believe they’re building up their presence again.” That was for any Kauld who might be listening. It didn’t give away anything, but if the enemy thought Kirk was expecting them, they might wait until after the laser strike to attack, in the hopes that some of the Federation ships would be taken out by the beam.

  “It is the Blood way, to watch out for the Kauld. My thanks for the thought.” Shucorion signed off.

  Kirk turned his attention back to his senior officers. “As I was saying, ‘daft’ is too mild a word. You’re actually suggesting that we place ourselves in the path of the laser in order to convert it to neutrinos with modified deflectors?”

  “Aye,” Scotty said, still grinning.

  “How many ships do you think you’d need to make it work?”

  Scotty lost his smile and held a hand to his lips while he cleared his throat. Kirk stared at him impatiently, waiting for an answer, but it was Spock who said, “All of them.”

  Those three words hung like a soap bubble between them. Kirk spoke first. “You mean all of the fighters.”

  Scotty found his voice. “No, sir. He means every ship we have left. Even the Conestogas and tugs. We need them all to cover the area of the beam.”

  “Couldn’t the Enterprise and a few other ships make multiple passes through it?”

  Scotty and Spock exchanged glances.

  Kirk recognized that look. This wasn’t going to be good news. “What? Out with it.”

  “The effect is temporary,” Spock said. “It lasts for less than a tenth of a second before the neutrinos turn back into photons.”

  “A tenth of a second!” Kirk’s jaw dropped.

  Scotty said, “It doesn’t sound like much, but light— and neutrinos—travel thirty thousand kilometers in a tenth of a second. More than far enough to pass through the planet.”

  “But we’d have to wait until just before the beam hit,” Kirk protested.

  “That is correct,” said Spock.

  Kirk digested this new information. It would mean the end of the evacuation. There would be no point in putting everyone on the ships, then putting the ships right back in the path of destruction. He was faced with an either/or situation. He looked back at Spock and asked, “What are the odds that we’ll succeed?”

  “Approximately two point three to one.”

  “For or against?”

  “Against. A great deal of the uncertainty depends upon the timing of the Kauld invasion. If left to our own devices, our odds of success become nearly even.”

  Even those weren’t the odds he was hoping for, but they were frankly better than the odds of successfully getting everyone off the planet and all the way back to Federation space. And it certainly beat running away with their tails between their legs.

  “Get ready to move on this, but find a way to do it with fewer ships. The Kauld aren’t likely to leave us alone once they see that their laser beam isn’t hitting the planet, so we’re going to need some defense capability.”

  “Aye,” said Scotty. “There’s truth in that. We’ll see what we can do.”

  “Good. Now if you will excuse me, I have to do a little adjusting of the governor’s vision of events here. I’ll get back to you.”

  As Scotty and Spock left the briefing room, Kirk took a deep breath to steel himself for the call he would make to Pardonnet. Once the man got moving on a plan, it was nearly impossible to get him to switch horses in midstream. That was generally considered a virtue, but sometimes Pardonnet’s determination bordered on the hidebound.

  Well, Kirk would just have to ruffle his hide.

  He toggled the intercom. “Lieutenant Uhura, get me Governor Pardonnet.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The screen blanked out while she made the connection, then Pardonnet’s harried visage appeared. “What now, Captain?” he demanded. He rustled the sheets of paper on his desk, pointedly letting him know how busy he was.

  “Good news for a change,” said Kirk. “You wanted an alternative to evacuation; my science officer and chief engineer have come up with one.”

  That got his attention. “What kind of alternative?”

  “They’ve discovered how to turn the laser into neutrinos, which will pass harmlessly through the planet before turning back into photons on the far side.”

  “They . . . have?” Pardonnet didn’t look any more credulous than Kirk had been at first.

  “They have. Problem is, it’s going to take every ship we’ve got, including the Conestogas, and it requires putting them right in the path of the beam. We won’t have a Plan B if anything goes wrong.”

  “That’s unacceptable,” Pardonnet said. “I won’t risk my people to a mad scientist’s experiment.”

  “That’s what I told Mr. Spock. Good enough, then; we’ll continue the evacuation. That will be a lot easier for us, anyway. I just didn’t want to make your decision for you without at least giving you the chance to think it over.”

  “Chance to think it over?” Pardonnet said indignantly. “You just told me about it!”

  “And you’ve already made your customary snap judgement,” Kirk replied. “As I expected, and quite frankly, as I was counting on. Sorry, but I’ve got it recorded in case you start complaining later when the going gets tough.”

  Pardonnet’s face turned red. “Now just one damned minute! I refuse to be railroaded here. I demand to hear the details of this plan before you so blithely assume what my response will be.”

  “It’s a moot point,” Kirk said. “You’ve already decided.”

  “I have not! Give me enough information to make an informed decision, then I’ll decide.”

  Kirk gave a theatrical sigh, then described what Spock and Scotty had found. “Trouble is,” he concluded, “we have to wait until literally the last second before we start the conversion process, and even then we can’t protect the moon. The neutrinos will turn back into photons well before they reach it. It won’t set the olivium off, but we’ll lose our mining facilities there for sure.”

  That was the icing on the cake for Pardonnet. He had never wanted the mining operation to begin with; his interest was in the colony. Still, he made a great show of thinking it over before he finally said, “I understand that sacrifices may have to be made, but this plan does at least preserve the colony.”

  “Provided it works,” Kirk said.

  “Yes, yes, provided. But whatever I may think of your priorities, I have learned that you do at least take your job seriously. Protecting the lives of the colonists is your job, and if you thought this was more dangerous than evacuation, then you wouldn�
��t have suggested it.” He looked straight at Kirk, trying for the image of a stern conscience. “If you think this will work, then it’s your duty to do it, no matter how difficult it may be.”

  “I see,” said Kirk. “And that’s your final word.”

  “Yes.”

  Another theatrical sigh. Then he nodded and said, “All right. I’ll put Spock and Scotty to work on the modifications to the Conestogas. You’ll have to offload whatever supplies you’ve stowed already. We’ll need those ships light and maneuverable. And you’d better beam back anything you’ve parked in space.”

  “That, ah, won’t be a problem,” Pardonnet said.

  Kirk bet it wouldn’t. He hadn’t beamed anything up yet. He’d been too busy “organizing” things. Kirk didn’t say anything about that; he had gotten what he wanted from the governor. “All right, then. We’ll do it your way. Kirk out.”

  He looked out the viewport at the planet below. Two days. Sighing for real this time, he picked up the status reports and began sifting through the ship rosters, trying to decide which ships to put on the firing line and which to reserve for battling the Kauld; but he had hardly begun the process before the intercom whistled and Lieutenant Uhura said, “Incoming transmission from Lilian Coates.”

  He felt a lump rise in his throat. He hadn’t called her since he’d returned. He swallowed, then said, “Put her through.”

  She looked even worse than Pardonnet. She had evidently been spending her time actually working as well as organizing the evacuation.

  “I assume you’ve heard the word?” he asked her.

  A puzzled expression crossed her face. “What word? I just called to talk to you about logistics. I need to know what to pack into which ships.”

  “We’re . . . not evacuating after all.”

  She blinked a couple of times. “Oh. I see. How long have you known this?”

  “About two minutes. I just talked with Pardonnet.”

  “Oh. How did he convince you to let him stay? Isn’t there a death ray headed right for us?”

  Kirk nodded. “There is, but we think we know how to stop it.”

  “You think.”

  “We’re pretty sure. It worked when we tested it.” He described to her what they were planning to do.

  She listened quietly, then when he was done she said, “And we’re supposed to just wait down here at ground zero to see if it works?”

  “It wouldn’t make any sense to put the colonists into the Conestogas,” he told her, “because the Conestogas are going to be right in front of the laser, too. So is the Enterprise. I’m stationing it right over Buena Vista.” He hadn’t realized he was going to do that until he heard the words coming out of his own mouth, but he instantly knew it was the right choice. The only way anything would happen to the colony’s largest town would be if the Enterprise went up in smoke first.

  She didn’t say anything, just looked at him, biting her lower lip.

  “If you’d like, you can ride it out up here with us. It won’t be any safer, but I’d be glad to have you aboard.”

  She shook her head. “It wouldn’t look good. Whether it’s any safer or not, people would think I was trying to save my own skin at their expense. And they’d jump to conclusions about us.”

  Kirk almost said, “Let them,” but he realized it wasn’t that simple. Not for her. This was a frontier society, and she ran the schools; if there was even a hint of impropriety, she could find herself in serious trouble. He suddenly realized the risk she had taken in simply spending a day with him, much less most of a night. Thank heavens he had beamed out of her living room rather than simply walking out her front door in the morning.

  “That would make things difficult for you,” he acknowledged. “I’m . . . sorry if I’ve complicated your life.”

  That brought a faint smile to her face. “Don’t apologize. Some complications are worth the trouble.”

  “And others aren’t,” he said. “I do apologize about the wild-goose chase, but I really did think we were going to have to evacuate until just a few minutes ago.”

  She nodded. “I hope this is the right decision.”

  “Me too,” he told her. “Me too.”

  Chapter Thirty

  “YOU MEAN this is it?” Scotty asked Kirk, as the captain delivered the specs of all the ships that were available for modification. “Not to be ungrateful, sir, but I dinna know how we’re going to cover the entire area with only twenty-four ships. At the power levels we can sustain, the transmutation effect is only good for about a thousand kilometers on a side.”

  Scotty leaned back in his chair and felt the vertebrae between his shoulders pop. He’d been bent over his workstation in engineering for hours now, coordinating the efforts of his crew.

  With a shrug, Kirk said, “We have to make do with what we have.” He pointed to the top left corner of the data pad and added, “These ships have essential systems missing. Pardonnet started dismantling them for ground shelter before I could stop him. And I have to hold some ships back for defense. The ones on the front line are going to be sitting ducks for twenty minutes.”

  Scotty pulled up the schematics and studied the revisions. “Aye, you’re right about that, but except for the Greeley, none of the others are missing their deflector arrays. There’s no need for engines; we can tow ’em into place and they’ll be usable as they are.”

  “Good. That gives you thirty-two ships. Will that be enough?”

  Scotty didn’t know. There would be practically no overlap in coverage that way. If even one ship failed, a section of the laser beam a couple thousand kilometers across could reach the planet’s surface. That was only three percent of the total area, but could Belle Terre survive even that much damage to its ecosystem? “I guess it’ll have to,” he said.

  “How are the modifications going?”

  Scotty stretched his arms out in front of him and said, “I have sixteen teams out on as many ships installing Mr. Spock’s modified sensors. We’ve had crews working constantly on producing and testing the new units—”

  “How are you testing these units?” Kirk asked, his brows knotted over the bridge of his nose.

  “Carefully,” Scott answered, deadpan.

  Kirk looked at him in silence a moment longer and finally said, “Good.”

  Scotty couldn’t remain straightfaced. He cracked a smile and said, “Not to worry, Captain. We’ve taken every precaution. Just because we’re short on time doesn’t mean we’ve taken leave of our senses.”

  Kirk smiled back, then said as he headed toward the door, “I’m glad to see you can still maintain a sense of humor. Keep me posted on your progress.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Scotty’s smile faded as he turned back to the roster of ships. It was going to be a long shift getting everything installed and tested.

  He returned to his schematics. There were so many kinds of ships and just as many different sensor arrays that he and his crew had to be able to manipulate in order to get everything to work properly. Fortunately Lieutenant Hanson was in charge of tuning the units after the installation crew finished. She seemed the likely candidate for the job, since she had had so much experience recalibrating the sensors on the Enterprise while Mr. Spock had them tied up in his experiments. Besides, she did a good job of keeping focused on the problems at hand.

  There were plenty of those to go around. Scotty had originally planned to adapt the most defendable, maneuverable ships, leaving the slow Conestogas and tugs to take as many evacuees as possible and get them out of the line of fire. But when Spock finished his calculations, it had become obvious that there could be no evacuation—every ship was needed in the front line to face the laser. That meant that every ship needed modifying. Some of these buckets of bolts barely had the sophistication of a handcart, and he was supposed to turn them into antilaser defense platforms.

  His communicator beeped. “Lieutenant Hanson to Mr. Scott.”

  “Scott here. Wha
t is it, Lieutenant?”

  “I’m on the Hudson, trying to finish the calibration on the new sensors.”

  “Trying?”

  “We’re getting background interference. Nothing I’ve tried takes care of it.”

  Background interference? “Did you check the phase rotation?”

  “First thing.”

  “The inverter angle?”

  “It checks out.”

  “It’s not Gamma Night, or I wouldn’t be hearing from you.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Have ye checked the leads? It’s not installed backwards, is it?”

  She let a note of exasperation creep into her voice. “I can tell red wires from black. It’s installed correctly.”

  “Check the sensor itself. Are there any physical anomalies in the antenna array?”

  “Negative.”

  “How about—”

  “Excuse me, sir, but I’ve run down the entire troubleshooting list. I’m at the point where I have to call tech support. Tag. You’re it.”

  He sighed heavily and said, “I’ll be right there, Lieutenant. Scott out.”

  The change would do him some good, he supposed. Get out, stretch his legs a bit. He left orders with Ensign Young to start replacing the missing deflector on the Greeley, and headed for the transporter room.

  By now, Scotty’s face had become well known to most of the other ships’ engineers over the duration of the mission. They had to work together, and though some at first had felt insulted that Scotty had authority to go in and tell them what to do, most of them were becoming good friends. This wasn’t the case with the Hudson’s crew, the most sullen-faced group to pilot a supply ship this side of the Alpha Quadrant. The head engineer, a big burly man from the Martian Settlements by the name of Jonder, had never accepted Scotty as his superior.

  The Enterprise’s transporter room faded away to be replaced with the Hudson’s unkempt, cramped equivalent. As soon as the confinement beam released him, Scotty’s nose was assaulted with a sour odor.

  “My God, what’s wrong with your environmental controls?” he asked the transport tech.