by KATHY OLTION
“Sorry sir,” the young man replied. “The ventilation has been off-line for a couple of days now. Jonder’s been too busy realigning the warp coils to get to it.”
“He could ha’ asked for help. I could have sent somebody from the Enterprise to work on it for you.”
The technician snickered. “No offense, sir, but I doubt that the idea ever crossed his mind.”
Scotty rolled his eyes and shook his head. “I suppose you’re right. Well, if my crew has to work on board, ye’ll have breathable air.” He flipped open his communicator. “Scott to Ensign Young.”
“Young here.”
“Ensign, the Hudson is in need of environmental repair. Send over someone who can fix it quickly.”
“Aye, sir.”
Scotty hung his communicator back on his belt. “That ought to do it,” he said to the technician, then he left the transporter room for the ship’s engineering level.
He found Hanson sitting cross-legged on the floor by the main deflector electronics housing. Her short hair was once again in disarray from her habit of running her fingers through it while she thought. She’d apparently been doing a lot of thinking.
“Any luck, Lieutenant?”
“No sir. I’ve uninstalled it, reinstalled it, run every known diagnostic on it, reinstalled it backwards on purpose, and just now I installed a whole new unit. All to no avail.”
Over his shoulder, Scotty heard Jonder’s nasty laugh. “What’s the matter, Mr. Scott? Can’t getcher toy to run?”
Scotty’s already tight shoulder muscles tensed further. He didn’t have time to get into an argument today. “I canna take credit for this one,” Scotty said. He certainly couldn’t. The device was wholly the work of Mr. Spock. He’d be hard pressed to explain its basic premise, let alone the intricate details of how it worked. What he did know was how to install and debug them. He hoped.
“Oh, don’t be modest. And don’t be shy. If you need help I’ll be over here with the warp engines.” Jonder walked away, laughing. The man obviously hadn’t been told what the modifications to his ship were for, or he wouldn’t have that cocky grin on his face.
Scotty watched him leave, the tension in his neck leaving with him. He turned back to the problem at hand. “Let’s see what’s going on here,” he said as he waved his tricorder over the recalcitrant sensor, flipping from scale to scale to check its various subsystems in operation.
Lieutenant Hanson’s assessment was correct. The unit appeared to be functioning properly, but the signal-to-noise ratio was atrocious. No amount of adjusting could clean up the dirty background.
Scotty had been leaning over the whole time; now he sat down on the deck with his back against a support beam and wiped his brow with his forearm. Either someone from the Enterprise had already fixed the ventilation, or he had grown used to the smell, but that didn’t take care of the heat down here in engineering. He looked over at Lieutenant Hanson, who looked just as uncomfortable as he felt. “As Mr. Spock would say, there’s got to be a logical explanation for this,” he said.
Hanson smiled weakly. “Great. Maybe he should come on over and join the party.”
“Let’s give it a minute before we call him. It’s time to think about what the diagnostics are tellin’ us.” He stood up with a groan. “I’m not as young as I was last week. I’ve got to get up and stretch my legs a wee bit.” He headed out the engineering room door and down the corridor, meaning to walk its length a time or two and study his tricorder readings, but the instrument’s display flickered like a bad light fixture. He’d hate to think that it was on the blink.
He ran a self-diagnostic check, then a background check. Then he ran it again. The energy readings were astronomical. He rushed back to engineering and down to the warp controls. “Mr. Jonder, what has the Hudson been doing lately?”
Jonder turned from his console to face Scotty with a scowl. “What do you mean, what have we been doing? Working hard, I’ll tell you.”
“I don’t doubt that, man. I merely want to know what it is that ye’ve been working hard at.”
“We’ve been loading up ore, that’s what.”
“Olivium . . . ore?”
“None other. We were almost full, too. Woulda been on our way back home by now if your captain hadn’t stopped us.” He turned away from Scotty.
Well, that would explain the interference. “Ye gods, man. We canna have you full of olivium on the front line. Tell your captain he’ll have to unload.”
“Tell him yourself.”
The insolence of this man was unbelievable. “I’ll do you one better.” Scotty grabbed his communicator. “Scott to Enterprise.”
Uhura answered, “Enterprise here, go ahead.”
“Tell the captain that we’ve got a bombship in our midst.”
The briefest of pauses passed before Kirk said, “Scotty, what’s going on?”
“I just found out that the Hudson’s cargo hold is full of olivium ore. It’s playing havoc with the new sensors and it’ll play more havoc if it gets hit during battle.”
“Understood. I’ll have a word with her captain. Kirk out.”
Scotty closed his communicator and hung it back on his belt. A glance in Hanson’s direction confirmed his suspicion. She shook from the effort of suppressing laughter.
Jonder wasn’t laughing. “Front lines? Hit during battle? I thought we were preparing for an evacuation.”
“And you figured a few tons of olivium ore wouldn’t take up that much extra room, eh?” Scotty shook his head. “Be glad we caught it, or you’d have gone up in a flash o’ light to rival the Big Bang, and probably taken the rest of us with you.”
He helped Hanson pick up her tools. When she appeared to be in control of herself again, he said, “Lieutenant, why don’t we move on to the next ship and leave these kind gentlemen to their unloading. You can come back when they’re finished.”
She smiled and said, “I’d be delighted.”
Well, he thought as they walked to the transporter room, on to the next problem.
Chapter Thirty-one
DR. MCCOY took a deep breath of the fresh evening air as he walked down the main street of Buena Vista. It had rained earlier that day; nothing much, but enough to knock down the dust and the afternoon heat. Now a couple of dozen people walked along the sidewalks, coming and going from shops and public buildings. No one hurried. There was no sign of trouble, no sign that anything was wrong unless a person looked closely.
Up close he could see the chinks in the façade. Nobody was smiling. Their purchases tended to be luxury items: bottles of genuine Earth vintage wine, caviar, cultured roses. McCoy would have liked to think that people were planning to celebrate the great victory over the Kauld’s sneak attack, but he suspected most of that wine and food would be gone before midnight.
Five hours and counting. In five hours and a couple of minutes, everyone would either be celebrating for real or vaporized. Including McCoy. He had decided he would be more use on the planet’s surface than in orbit. If through some miracle Spock’s crazy notion worked, there was a great potential for injury from the very revelry that would erupt in the wake of the threat. And if it didn’t work—well, McCoy would have preferred to end his days with his friends on board the Enterprise, but he could take what little comfort there was in knowing that he would only outlive them by one four-thousandth of a second before the laser beam got him, too.
A few colonists were hiding in a cave a few kilometers up the valley. Others had roofed their houses in bright metallic foil. The universe had no shortage of fools, he thought, but he had to admit that the glittering foil provided interesting punctuation to the sunset that slowly stretched out from the western sky.
There was one other sign of the recent trouble. Everyone’s garden looked abandoned. Apparently nobody had thought it worthwhile to water them if they were just going to leave them behind anyway. McCoy wouldn’t have guessed that the plants would be so fragile that they would sh
ow the neglect so quickly, but he wasn’t a gardener.
He looked at the school as he passed it. The windows were dark. Everyone was home with their families, waiting to see what would happen.
The hospital, in contrast, was brightly lit and busy. Fortunately, most of the people were coming and going from the cafeteria wing, not the medical wing. It would be hours before the traffic shifted over, if it ever did. But if that happened, McCoy and Dr. Neville and the rest of the staff were ready.
He entered the cafeteria himself, joining the line of people waiting for food. Might as well stoke up for the long night. It looked like everyone else had the same idea, too. The hospital cafeteria was one of the biggest meeting halls in town, and it had the added advantage of hot food. Reynold Coates waved to him from a table in the corner, and he waved back. When he had filled his tray with steak and vegetables and a slice of chocolate cake for dessert, he went on over and sat down beside the boy. Lilian was sitting across from him with her back to the room; he hadn’t realized it was her until he sat down.
“May I?” he asked.
“Of course,” she replied.
“How’re you feeling?” he asked Reynold.
“Fine, sir,” Reynold replied. “I think I must have just swallowed some muddy water or something.”
“Or something,” McCoy agreed. “Well, I’m glad nothing came of it.”
“Me too.”
McCoy turned to his food for a moment, asking between bites, “So, Lilian, how’re you feeling?”
She smiled faintly. “You mean aside from being scared to death?”
He looked into her eyes. If she was scared, she sure didn’t show it. “I mean how are you coping with all this back-and-forth business? Gearing up to go back home, then being told you have to stay put.” That was as much as he could say in front of her son, but she had to know what he was really talking about.
“It’s been difficult,” she said. “I thought I would be happy to go, after all we’ve been through, but when it came time to pack I started to realize just how much of myself I’ve planted here. And your advice to get out and do something fun helped me put things in perspective a little bit, too.”
“She went flying with Captain Kirk!” Reynold said loudly. Lilian blushed, and Reynold lowered his voice conspiratorially to whisper to McCoy, “I think she’s sweet on him.”
“Reynold!” she said. “I don’t go around telling everyone you’re sweet on Kelly Taylor.”
“Mom!”
“Oh, I’m sorry, was that a secret?”
McCoy laughed. She certainly had mothering down to a science.
He also noticed that she hadn’t denied her affection for the captain. What was it with him, anyway? McCoy had watched him woo his way across half the Alpha Quadrant, and he still didn’t understand how Kirk did it. He’d gone so far as to check him for pheremones during a routine medical evaluation, but there had been no sign of anything unusual about him. The man simply attracted women the way a light attracts moths.
If it had been anyone else, McCoy might have felt jealous. Hell, maybe just this once he did feel a little bit jealous. He had grown fond of Lilian himself during their months of contact. He’d come to care about her welfare. Yet when he had encouraged her to go out and live a little, who was the first person she had turned to?
It was a mystery. If he and Kirk were together another twenty years, he would probably never figure it out.
He hoped he would have the chance to try. While he sliced another piece of steak, the lights flickered, and the voices in the cafeteria all stilled for a moment. He knew what everyone was thinking.
Gamma Night. Four hours and thirty minutes before impact.
Chapter Thirty-two
IT’S AMAZING what lasers can do, Kirk thought as he watched the fleet of colony ships assemble in space between Belle Terre and its olivium moon. They were in the thick of Gamma Night now. Radio was useless, both the normal and the subspace variety, but the ships stayed linked through message lasers beamed directly from ship to ship. It was a cumbersome system that required constant adjusting for position, but it worked like a charm when it worked, and it had one big advantage: the Kauld couldn’t listen in on their transmissions.
He knew they were out there, hovering at the edge of the system and watching to see how their plan was progressing. Every few minutes a lookout would report a ship warping in close to Belle Terre for an instant before disappearing again, physically entering the gamma-blocked section of the solar system to gather information and then warping back out to report to the rest of the Kauld fleet.
Hopefully, what they saw would both puzzle and trouble them. Kirk had assembled his ships on the wrong side of the planet! The fact that he was hiding in the planet’s shadow gave away the fact that he knew about the oncoming laser beam, but it must look damned strange for him to be hiding there without even attempting to evacuate or even shield the colonists on the exposed side. It could only mean that he had been caught by surprise, and was desperately saving his own skin.
Would they make the next logical conclusion, as Governor Pardonnet had?
Kirk looked at the time. Only ten minutes left. The Kauld weren’t taking the bait.
Time for Plan B. “Mr. Sulu, the moment the next Kauld observer warps into range, fire a low-yield photon torpedo at the moon.”
“At the moon, not the Kauld ship, sir?” Sulu asked.
“That’s right.”
The miners had been evacuated hours ago. Most of their equipment was on the farside, where the impact that caused the Burn had exposed raw olivium veins. A photon torpedo fired from this angle would hardly damage a thing, but the Kauld wouldn’t know that. They would just see a big flash, and would think that Kirk was destroying the moon so they couldn’t have it.
Uhura, listening to the field reports, announced, “Kauld ship.” Sulu hit the fire button, and a bright ball of light shot out from the Enterprise, illuminating the moon’s dark night side with its approach and impacting on the rough gray surface in a bright explosion.
“Kauld ship just warped out,” Uhura said.
Kirk felt his heartbeat start to rise. This was it. “All ships, battle stations,” he said. “Shields to maximum. Engage the enemy until T minus one minute, then take your positions on the laser side of the planet. Nonmodified defenders, continue engaging the enemy until T minus five seconds, then get to safety.” That was cutting it close, but it was the only way to play this one. They couldn’t give the Kauld time to react.
He barely had time to give the orders. Space was suddenly filled with battleships. The computer immediately began identifying targets, and it quickly became clear that the entire fleet had warped in at once. Even Vellyngaith’s command ship had joined the party.
The Federation ships leaped into action, firing and dodging, firing and dodging, sometimes warping out for mere milliseconds, then reappearing behind the enemy and firing again. Phaser fire splayed across enemy shields, pinpointing weaknesses and overloading them one after another, leaving the ships wide open for the next shot to rupture the hull.
The Kauld weren’t having nearly as much luck hitting the Federation ships. Of course they didn’t have the advantage the Federation had, either: nearly half an hour of sensor readings of their enemy’s fleet in action during their most recent war games. Kirk had distributed Scotty and McCoy’s surveillance information to all his ships, and the captains and gunners had all pored over it to learn the Kauld strategy, capability, and soft spots.
Space filled with debris as ship after ship erupted in fiery balls of destruction. There was no communication now; not even Uhura could keep track of targets that kept warping in and out of normal space every few seconds.
Not surprisingly, the Enterprise was the Kauld’s biggest target. Sulu and Thomsen flew the immense starship like an atmospheric fighter, swooping, banking, and corkscrewing around the attackers while simultaneously pounding them with phaser fire and the occasional photon torpedo. Th
e viewscreen filled with images of Belle Terre’s day side, blue oceans and white sky shining brightly, then the dark of space, then the planet again, as the starship took evasive action. The shields flared every few seconds, their power ratings steadily dropping, but the Kauld paid dearly for every shot.
Vellyngaith’s flagship dogged them through every maneuver, but the three new olivium-powered ships were a worse threat. If Kirk hadn’t watched them in action, he would have been hard pressed to fight even one of them. As it was, they more than made up for his strategic advantage with sheer speed and power. The Enterprise shuddered under blow after blow from their disruptors, and warning alarms began sounding at the engineering and life-support stations. Kirk ordered return fire with everything he had, but when their captains realized that the Enterprise wasn’t giving up easily, all three of the new ships focused their attack on it at once.
“Phasers, wide spread,” Kirk ordered as the ships swooped in from three different directions. “Blind them.” Everyone was limited to optical maneuvering here; not even the new ships could see to navigate through a flaring shield. Even as the phasers were reaching out, he said, “Keep firing, and fire photon torpedoes on the one dead ahead. Full salvo. Hit ’em while they’re blind.”
A string of bright stars shot out toward the enemy ship, each one impacting on the shields in the same spot. Not even olivium-enhanced generators could withstand that many hits; the third shot flared through, and the fourth one buried itself deep in the ship itself before exploding and ripping it into two ragged halves. The fifth and sixth torpedoes raced right through the debris and onward toward the Hudson until Sulu detonated them remotely.
“Two minutes to laser impact,” Spock said from his science station.
Had it been eight minutes already since the start of battle? It felt more like eight seconds, but Kirk knew how time could telescope in a fight. “Rush the moon,” he said. “Let’s look like we mean to destroy it.”
Sulu turned the Enterprise toward the pocked gray surface and accelerated at one-quarter impulse power. The other ships, taking their cue, all turned toward it as well. The Kauld ships in front of them pulled together into what looked like a solid wall of defense, while the ones behind poured fire into the Federation ships’ aft shields. The Federation returned fire in both directions, giving it everything they had for another sixty seconds and blasting at least a dozen more Kauld out of space, then Spock said, “One minute,” and Kirk said, “Hard around to the far side! Go, go, go!”
