STAR TREK: TOS #23 - Ishmael

by Barbara Hambly

  “Where are you—from?”

  Sarah asked. ...

  Spock shook his head wearily. “The name of the planet would mean nothing to you. Your astronomers have not even discovered the star yet.”

  “I see.” She looked down at her folded hands where they rested on the handle of the door. Then she looked up at him again. “I knew at the dance, you see.”

  Spock’s eyebrow lifted, startled. Sarah smiled a little.

  She reached out and took his hand in her long slim fingers ... then she released it and her fingers brushed lightly against his cheek. “That’s fever-hot,” she said clinically. “A hundred and three, a hundred and four. A—one of us—would have been raving. You were clearly having the time of your life. ... When you took my hand for the grand right and left, I noticed the scars on your hand had turned a sort of apple-green.”

  “In the future,” he found himself saying tiredly, “I must remember to avoid dancing. ...”

  POCKET BOOKS

  New York London Toronto Sydney Tokyo Singapore

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 1985 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

  STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of Paramount Pictures.

  This book is published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc., under exclusive license from Paramount Pictures.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN: 0-671-73587-X

  First Pocket Books printing May 1985

  14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  For M. Shannon, Nedra, and Tom

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  About the e-Book

  Chapter 1

  THE SOFT, INQUIRING NOTE of the door signal threaded apologetically into the dimness. Captain James T. Kirk, lying on his neat bunk looking at the ceiling of his quarters, almost didn’t answer it, except that as Captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise he felt obligated to do so, even when officially off duty and presumably asleep.

  He had not slept in two nights now. It was, he guessed, close to the end of the third. He had dozed, restlessly, skimming the surface of dreams that repeated the same scenes over and over in a nightmare treadmill of doubts and grief. And the dreams always ended the same way: with that implacable riddle, and final silence stretching away into the darkness of space.

  He hoped, for the thousandth time, that Spock was dead.

  He should be, he told himself. Twenty-four hours is a long time.

  But the other half of his mind whispered treacherously, He’s tough. And the Klingons are very skillful about things like that. Twenty-four hours isn’t all that long.

  Kirk closed his eyes, as if that could blot out some hellish inner vision, then opened them again and looked up at the ceiling in the dark. He had stared at it for most of this watch. But if the neutral, shadowy pearl of that surface held any comfort, or any answer, it had not so far manifested them.

  The door signal bleeped again. Kirk sighed. It was 0400 hours, the depths of the Enterprise’s artificial night. But then, most of the crew would know that Kirk wasn’t sleeping, and why. He touched the switch beside the bed.

  Bones McCoy stood silhouetted in the light of the corridor. “When you didn’t answer you got my hopes up,” he remarked accusingly, stepping inside. The door slid shut behind him. “Jim, let me ...”

  Kirk rolled to a sitting position on the rumpled bunk. “If you’re going to offer me a sedative again I’ll have you clapped in irons,” he said tiredly. “I don’t need a sedative, I just—need to think.”

  McCoy’s sharp blue gaze flickered over him, once, like a tricorder taking a reading, and a corner of his mouth twisted down. “If that’s what thinking’s done for you I’d recommend the sedative, but it’s up to you.” The small glow of the entry way light brushed an edge of blue from his uniform jersey as he passed under it; then he came to stand beside Kirk’s bunk, looking down at his friend. He said quietly, “There was nothing you could have done, Jim.”

  “I know.” Kirk sighed, and ran a tired hand through his hair. “It’s just that I keep thinking that there should have been.”

  On the other side of the room a small green light winked on. Automatically Kirk got to his feet and crossed to the desk. He touched a switch. “Kirk here.”

  “Captain?” The night communications officer didn’t seem surprised to find him awake at 0400 hours either. “We’ve got Starbase Twelve on visual, sir. ETA 1200.”

  “Pipe in visual, Lieutenant.”

  The small screen above the desk widened into life.

  Kirk stood in silence for a long time, gazing at the aphotic depths of interstellar space. Remote and untwinkling in the frozen emptiness of that terrible vacuum, stars stared back at him.

  Against those endless light-years of nothing, Starbase Twelve hung like a magic Christmas-tree ornament, the gnawed rock ball of the original planetoid sewn over with a silver mesh of the lights of the surface works. An attendant swarm of docked spacecraft surrounded the base like the flashing halo of electrons around an atomic nucleus. There was something warm about it, welcoming—the fires of home.

  It had been on Starbase Twelve, thought Kirk, that he had seen Spock for the last time.

  Like a lot of last times, he hadn’t expected it to be the last, had not even remotely dreamed of the possibility. Starbase Twelve was a completely routine stop, to deliver a couple of highly ranked astrophysicists and a load of scientific equipment to record the effects of the passage of a wandering white dwarf star through the so-called Tau Eridani Cloud—that vast, amorphous region of ion storms and unexplained gravitational anomalies which was Starbase Twelve’s raison d’être. That evening in the Wonder Bar there had been absolutely no thought in his mind that Spock might not be on the bridge of the Enterprise when they left.

  Gazing at the image of the base in the blackness of the tiny screen, he felt like a man who has lost a hand, but continues to reach for things with the stump.

  The memory of the Wonder Bar was vividly clear in his mind, cozy and dim and overpriced, with the tinkle of ragtime music in the background and the sweet taste of Aldebaran Depth Charges on his lips. He’d been there with Maria Kellogg, an old friend from his Academy days. McCoy had offered to squire Lieutenant Uhura. Spock had arrived alone, as he was generally alone; and, as usual, he did not drink, saying that if he wished to consume alcohol he could manufacture it far more cheaply in the laboratories of the Enterprise, and have a guarantee of quality as well.

  “You could probably metabolize it more efficiently if you took it intravenously, too,” commented McCoy, and Spock raised a prim eyebr
ow.

  “So I could,” he agreed in his most correct voice. “But it has always escaped me why anyone would wish to metabolize alcohol in the first place, much less to do so in the company of strangers who have, perhaps, overmetabolized.”

  At the bar on the other side of the grottolike room, a Gwirinthan astro-gravitational mathematician slid from its barstool to the floor with a squashy thump.

  “And yet here you are,” Uhura teased him.

  “Indeed,” Spock replied. “Where else would I find such an unparalleled opportunity to observe the vagaries of human behavior?”

  Uhura laughed, her dark eyes sparkling warmly. Spock leaned back a little in his chair, silhouetted against the red lights of the main room; a tall, thin, catlike shape, watching the human race in all its irrational glory with well-concealed fascination.

  Kirk had seen him do this, on hundreds of shore leaves, and on countless evenings in a corner of the main rec room on the Enterprise while Uhura played her harp or Ensign Reilley sang Irish ballads: Spock the observer, the outsider. A Vulcan forced to deal with humans, a cold logician stranded amid the chattering welter of random emotion.

  But Spock had saved Kirk’s life and soul and sanity more times than Kirk cared to think about; put himself in danger against hope and logic in situations where Kirk knew his own survival had been despaired of. And all out of an emotion that Spock would have denied to the death that he felt.

  A couple of Hokas waddled by, elaborately robed for one of their endless games. Over by the bar voices were raised as a scruffy-looking spice smuggler got involved in an argument over a girl with a pair of brown-uniformed pilots from some down-at-the-heels migrant fleet. McCoy, mellowed with good bourbon, raised his glass and commented, “You’ve got to admit, Spock, you’ll never find anything like this in all your logic.”

  “A fact which I find most comforting,” the Vulcan replied. “There are times, Doctor, when I feel as though I had been shanghaied by a shipful of Hokas—except that in the case of Hokas, once one has understood the rules of their current system of make-believe, one is fairly certain of what they will do next.”

  Kirk concealed his snort of laughter at McCoy’s outraged expression behind another Aldebaran Depth Charge. The comparison with that fanciful teddy-bear race was hardly a flattering one. The girl by the bar, he noticed, had watched calmly as the altercation between the pilots and smuggler had degenerated almost to the point of fisticuffs, then finished her drink and departed on the arm of a tall, curly-haired man in the eccentric garb typical of space-tramps—the combatants had continued their quarrel undeterred.

  Thinking back on that evening, Kirk could not remember anyone mentioning the Klingon ore transport at all.

  He’d made a mental note of it when he’d seen it listed on the base manifest, as a possible source of crew conflicts. It hadn’t seriously concerned him, though. Ore transports, though gigantic, are far too thinly manned to cause much trouble even had its whole crew come ashore at once. The crew of this one had kept to their ship.

  Maybe, like Sherlock Holmes’s dog, that was what had tipped off Spock. Something had.

  Kirk had been preparing to meet Maria Kellogg the next morning when Spock had contacted him. “Power readouts on the ore transport are running suspiciously high,” that deep, rather harsh voice had said over the communicator. “There would also seem to be about twice the usual number of crewmen listed. I should like to have a look at the inside of that vessel.”

  “You have a hunch something’s up?” Kirk threw an uneasy glance at the chronometer, settled in its wall niche slightly to the left of the door. The visiting officers’ quarters, like most of the older part of Starbase Twelve, had been remodeled from the far more ancient tunnelings that dated back to the days when the long-vanished Karsid Empire had used this planetoid as a base. Thus the rooms all had the slightly awkward feel of space created for nonhuman proportions, the wall niches all about half a meter lower or higher than they should have been. The chronometer itself said 1000 hours. Spock, Kirk thought, must have been up early. More likely he had sat up late the night before, scanning the readouts for the other ships on the base, curious about which governments were sending what kind of scientific crews to watch the latest fluctuations of the Tau Eridani Cloud and looking for the names of scientists whom he knew.

  Instead he had found—what?

  “Captain,” said Spock severely, “Vulcans do not have ‘hunches.’ There are enough subliminal clues to add up to a high order of probability that something is, as you say, ‘up.’ The base manifest lists the ship simply as an ore transport. The Klingons might be using it for scientific observation of the Tau Eridani Cloud, but why would they do so when they already have two legitimate research teams working on the base?”

  Kirk’s mind snapped suddenly to something else, with an almost audible mental click. “And the Klingon cruiser Rapache is due within eight hours,” he said. “ETA 1800, departure two hours later—no shore leaves.”

  “And the ore transport is scheduled to depart at 1800 hours,” said Spock’s voice thoughtfully. “Fascinating.”

  Personally, Kirk felt less fascinated than he did suspicious and apprehensive. But then, Spock was capable of being sincerely intrigued by processes simultaneously with being sincerely appalled by possible results. Kirk’s own mind was already scouting the ground, ticking off possibilities. Starbase Twelve was in Free Space; not even the base commander had the authority to inspect a properly registered ship. Moreover, on what grounds could he base the request for such a search? That his instincts, and Spock’s instincts, told him that something was afoot? And even if a search was made, who else on the base had Spock’s triple grounding in abstract scientific theory, Klingon computer systems and the workings of the Klingon military mind?

  All this went through his mind in a matter of seconds. Then he said, “Can you get on board?”

  “Affirmative, Captain. I have made arrangements to go aboard as part of the base technical crew. Our access will theoretically be limited to a very small area of the ship, but it will be possible for me to tap into the computer database.”

  After a long moment Kirk said quietly, “Mr. Spock—you know what that’s called.”

  “As I will be uniformed as a starbase technician, I believe ‘espionage’ is the correct term, Captain.”

  Kirk was silent, rapidly weighing alternatives in his mind and discarding them just as quickly. Kirk had had enough run-ins with alien weapons technology to know that the possibilities were hideously infinite, and the populated heart of the Federation was not so far away as to be out of danger if the Klingons had achieved some kind of major breakthrough. Yet the price of capture was unthinkable, not only to the lone spy himself, but to whoever had sent him. The Klingons had gone to a deal of trouble to keep secret whatever it was they had on the transport—how much more would they go to?

  We can’t know that, Kirk thought ironically, until we know what the thing is.

  “Mr. Spock ...” He hesitated. The knowledge that the risks involved in investigating the transport weighed small against the potential risks of not investigating made it no easier. If anything went wrong, he thought—if Spock didn’t manage to get off the transport, if he was caught in an area of the ship where he had no right to be, if the Klingons even suspected the motives behind that Vulcan technician’s nosiness—there would be absolutely nothing that Kirk could do to bail him out. “Be careful.”

  “Espionage is not something that one does carelessly, Captain,” Spock replied, after due consideration. “I will rendezvous with you at 1400 hours. Spock out.”

  Kirk realized he was still staring half-hypnotized at the small darkness of his cabin viewscreen and the glittering ball of lights that hung suspended in its center. He rubbed his eyes tiredly, and turned to see McCoy still behind him, one shoulder propped against the partition that divided the desk area from the rest of his quarters. The doctor’s cynical features looked very worn in the reflected glo
w from the screen.

  Kirk said quietly, “To this day I don’t know what I could have done differently.”

  “Nothing,” said McCoy.

  “Nothing,” Kirk repeated bitterly, “If I had done nothing we’d be exactly where we are now with regards to that transport. Only Spock would still be with us.” He turned to the galley-pipeline mechanism in a corner of the office cubicle, and prodded the coffee button. It didn’t always work, and occasionally what was delivered more closely resembled something that came out of reactor-coolant coils than a coffeepot, but at the moment Kirk was in no mood to seek out the more palatable alternatives available in the rec room or the galley. “You want some coffee, Bones? It’s nearly 0500 now and staying up looks simpler than getting up.”

  The corner of McCoy’s mouth turned down again as the pipeline made an indescribable noise and produced a cup of faintly steaming black fluid. “You can put a relief on standby until we reach the base, you know,” he reminded him.

  “To do what? Hold the con while I stay here and look at the ceiling some more?” Kirk turned away, leaving the coffee untasted to prowl across the narrow confines of his quarters. “I’ll be fine, Bones,” he added, more quietly. “It’s just that—I’ll be fine.”

  McCoy watched him keenly from where he still stood beside the desk. Then he said, “What about Spock’s transmissions?”

  Kirk paused in his pacing, his back to the doctor. McCoy’s clinical eye observed the straight line of the spine under the gold jersey, the tightening of the shoulder muscles and the way they relaxed suddenly in a long sigh as the captain turned back toward him. Kirk’s face, usually a little boyish, looked haggard. “You know, Bones, if it weren’t for those transmissions sometimes I’d think that transport never existed at all?”

  McCoy carried the coffee over to him. “Here,” he said. “Drink this if you’re determined to pollute your bloodstream rather than get the sleep you need. I’ll be back in a few hours with some vitamin B for your breakfast.”