by Gene DeWeese
Or, he wondered, could they be hoping to lead the Enterprise into a trap? Now that it was clear they could not destroy the Federation ship on their own, not even with their kamikaze maneuver, did they hope that whoever had been on the receiving end of those subspace radio bursts could do the job?
Dr. Jason Crandall lay fully dressed on his bed, futilely trying to decide which was worse—the terrifying nightmare from which he had just awakened or the bleak reality that had replaced it.
The nightmare, he thought grimly, had at least come to an end, just as the dozen before it had done. Its repeated scenes of his own grisly death on one outlandishly alien world after another had left him bathed in icy perspiration, but they had ended. What passed for reality, on the other hand, showed no signs of ending. He was imprisoned on a ship of hostile strangers a lifetime away from everything and everyone he was familiar with, and that very real imprisonment, he was now convinced, could have no end but his own equally real death.
He had come to accept that fact more than a dozen standard days ago, shortly after the Enterprise had finally and briefly returned to its starting point in this alien sector of space. Instead of staying and using the remaining supply of probes in an attempt to locate the gate that had brought them here, Kirk had almost immediately ordered a resumption of his pointless search for the remnants of some civilization which, if it had ever existed at all, had almost certainly been destroyed thousands if not millions of years ago.
Until then, Crandall had often fostered the forlorn hope that the gate was not truly missing, that its disappearance had all been a fiction generated by Kirk to give him an excuse to play the explorer for a few days or weeks more. Even though that hope had faded further with each new scene of devastation that appeared on the viewscreens, he had managed to keep it alive throughout those first days.
But then, with one mindless order, Kirk had shattered that hope. After sending the Enterprise on a halfdozen uneventful runs through the spot where the gate had once been, he had ordered the search resumed, this time not limiting it to the nearby stars but moving straight out through the cluster at a warp factor that he doubted the ship could safely maintain for any length of time. At that point there had no longer been any doubt in Crandall's mind that his predicament was real. Unless the mad captain's pipe dream of finding the so-called gate civilization came true, the whole lot of them would be destroyed out here in this interstellar no-man's land.
And then, less than five standard hours ago, Kirk had taken yet another giant step toward that destruction. The Enterprise had made its first contact with a spacefaring race in this sector. Not with another of those decaying relics of past destruction they called booby traps but with an actual ship, under the control of living, sentient beings.
Predictably, the encounter had been a disaster, even based on the drastically censored version Crandall and the crew had been given. And, to make matters worse, Kirk was now intent on playing some insane game of interstellar cat and mouse. Despite all common sense, he was trailing the retreating alien, sublimely overconfident that the Enterprise could handle whatever he was blindly leading it into.
A knock on the door of the living quarters section of Crandall's stateroom snapped him upright on the bed, his booted feet hitting the carpeted floor with a thud. Pulling in a deep breath, he sat quietly for a long moment, composing himself. Now that he had come to accept the depressing fact that the Enterprise was going to be his home for the rest of his life, he had no intention of letting his emotions once again get out of hand, as they had in his earlier, uncontrolled outbursts. Those had done quite enough damage to his image, making him seem not only impatiently autocratic but, worse, childishly fearful, even weak. From now on, his personal feelings would remain just that—personal. Whatever emotions he displayed would be, as they had been throughout his career in public life, limited to those that would further his own ends, no more and no less.
Standing up, he smoothed his green tunic and hurriedly wiped the remaining beads of perspiration from his forehead as he strode past the room divider between his sleeping quarters and his equally sparsely finished living quarters.
"Enter," he said, and a moment later the door hissed open.
A young ensign, blond with uneasy gray eyes, stepped hesitantly into the stateroom, casting a nervous glance over her shoulder as the door closed behind her.
Crandall suppressed a frown as he searched his memory for the ensign's name. Normally, among civilians and their varied dress and hair styles, he would have no trouble making the mental associations that would allow him to put a name to any one of hundreds of people he was introduced to, but here on the Enterprise, where uniforms and regulations cut individuality to the bone, he felt lucky to keep the officers and their duties separate in his mind, let alone the names and functions of the hundreds of others who swarmed the ship's corridors. He could only remember that this particular ensign had been one of a group of a dozen or so who had been pointed out to him as being fresh out of Starfleet Academy, the Enterprise their first spacegoing assignment.
"Yes, Ensign, what can I do for you?" he asked.
"I'm sorry to bother you, Dr. Crandall," she said, obviously having trouble forcing the words out, "but I felt that I had to speak to you."
Crandall softened his own expression a fraction, suddenly sensing that in this young woman he might have found his first ally. She was obviously upset, but equally obviously she was not upset with him but with something about the Enterprise.
"That's perfectly all right, Ensign. Won't you have a seat?" Motioning her to the lounge chair in the corner of the stateroom, he sat casually on the edge of the trapezoidal desk in one corner of the room. "For a start, how about telling me your name?"
"I'm sorry," she said, blushing as she sat down. "My name is Davis, sir."
"No need for the 'sir,' Miss Davis. I'm just a civilian, not an officer."
"I know, sir, but as a representative of the Council—"
"Only unofficially, as I'm sure you are aware, Ensign," he said, letting just a trace of his annoyance with that state of affairs color his voice.
"But tell me, Miss Davis, what is it you wish to speak to me about?" he continued, arranging his features into a rueful smile. "Much as I'd like to, I'm afraid getting you—or myself—shore leave is a bit beyond my current capabilities."
A nervous, answering smile flickered across her softly rounded features. "I realize that, of course, sir. And I don't want you to think that I'm being disloyal to the captain in any way by coming to speak to you."
"Of course not!" he said, giving her a reassuring smile. "In any case," he added in a confidential tone, "one's ultimate loyalty is to the Federation itself, not to any one individual. So please, feel free to be completely open and honest with me. Whatever you say will be just between us—unless you specifically tell me otherwise."
For just a moment, as he had spoken of loyalty to the Federation as opposed to loyalty to Kirk, a new kind of tension had flickered across her expressive features, and he wondered if he had overplayed his hand and lost her.
"Please, go ahead," he said softly. "Why not begin by telling me about yourself? How is it that you're on the Enterprise, for instance? I seem to recall being told that this is your first assignment out of Starfleet Academy."
With those questions, he could see her visibly relax, and he allowed himself a mental sigh of relief. Then she was pulling in a deep breath and raising her eyes to meet his.
"That's right, sir. I graduated just three months ago.
And I don't know how I happened to be assigned to the Enterprise. The luck of the draw, I imagine. Even so, it was quite an honor."
"I'm sure it was. The Enterprise is, after all, a rather highly regarded vessel."
She nodded, a shy smile flickering around her lips and eyes as memories drove some of her current tensions away. "All my classmates were green with envy. There wasn't one who didn't want the chance of serving with Captain Kirk."
Suppressing his
impulse to laugh derisively, Crandall nodded his encouragement instead. "But you weren't counting on anything like this," he suggested.
For a moment, she was totally silent, the faint smile vanishing as she was reminded of the reasons that had brought her to Crandall. "No, I wasn't," she said, and suddenly her voice was tight with emotion. "This was supposed to be strictly a scientific mission! We were supposed to be back on earth in only a few weeks! My fiancé graduated last year, and he's on the Krieger, and we were both scheduled for duty on the Republic next year. His family knows Captain Halston, and—"
As abruptly as the emotions had broken free, she clamped down on them, pressing her lips together into a tense line, blinking back a tear as she averted his eyes in embarrassment. "I'm sorry," she said.
"No need to be," Crandall said, debating briefly whether or not he should put a comforting hand on her shoulder. "Graduating from the Academy doesn't mean you have to stop being human."
"Thank you, sir."
"You have nothing to thank me for, Miss Davis. Believe me, I know how you feel. I don't have a fiancée waiting for me at home, but I do have friends and family."
Slowly, she looked up at him, and he could see in her eyes that, no matter what her training or her uniform said, he had gained her trust. She was—and with careful handling would remain—his ally.
Favoring her with another smile, this one a mixture of reassurance and sympathy, he stood up from where he had been half seated on the corner of the trapezoidal desk and lowered himself into the other lounge chair. After a moment, he hitched it forward and turned it a fraction so he was facing her more directly.
Leaning forward but still not reaching out to touch her, he said, in his best just-between-friends tone, "You said you felt you had to speak with me, Miss Davis. I hope you haven't changed your mind."
"No, it's just that—"
"Whatever it is, you can tell me. As I said, it will go no farther than these walls unless you want it to."
"As I understand it," she said hesitantly, "you're an expert on the gravitational anomalies the Enterprise was investigating—the anomalies that—that got us where we are now."
"I know a little about them, yes. I was in charge of the laboratory that developed the detectors the Enterprise was using." He didn't add that his function had been purely administrative and that, until the announcement that the Enterprise would use the detectors on this special mission, he had barely known of the existence of either the anomalies or the detectors.
"I—I understand that you don't agree with the captain's assessment of our situation," she said, "and, well, I would just like to know what you think our chances are. Based on your knowledge of the anomalies, do you think we can ever get back to the Federation?"
"I rather doubt it," he said cautiously, letting his eyes flicker upward in the general direction of the bridge as he added, "at least not under the present command structure."
And then, when she didn't bridle at his implied criticism of Kirk, he went on, his voice firmer. "As you said, I have my disagreements with Captain Kirk. In the first place, I strongly suspect that we are wasting precious time chasing after this mythical gate civilization that he hopes still exists. What's even more disturbing to me, however, is the fact that, if I'm to believe what the captain announced over the intercom a few hours ago, he's begun playing some kind of cat-and-mouse game with the alien ship that attacked us. To tell the truth—and here I'm trusting you not to let my words go any farther—I think the captain's course of action is not only putting us in unnecessary danger of another, more serious attack but is virtually destroying what little chance we do have of getting home."
As he spoke, he watched her eyes, ready to backtrack at the first sign that her Academy-instilled obedience to rank was staging a comeback, but none came.
"Unfortunately," he went on, "I am in no position to do anything about it. As the captain has pointed out, I am on board strictly as an observer, despite my being, in effect, a representative of the Federation itself."
"But there must be something you can do," she said, some of the restrained emotion escaping once again into her words. "Captain Kirk would certainly listen to anything you have to say. With your knowledge of the anomalies…"
Her voice trailed off as she saw him shake his head grimly. "In the first place," he said, "I fear he does not share your estimate of my knowledge. In the second, starship captains are not known for their receptiveness to unsolicited advice from unwelcome civilians. And in his eyes—and in the eyes of his officers, I'm sure—that is precisely what I am." He gave a minuscule shrug. "Not that I can fault them for that, of course. Or the rest of the crew for seeing me in the same light."
"I'm sure not everyone feels that way," she protested. "I certainly don't."
"I thank you for your confidence," he said, allowing just a touch of sarcasm into his tone but following his words almost immediately with his best apologetic look. "In any event, there's little either of us can do about the situation except watch and listen."
"Watch and listen? I don't understand."
He was silent a long moment, as if debating whether or not to take her into his confidence. Finally, he leaned toward her again. "Has it ever occurred to you," he said conspiratorially, "that the briefing we've all been given concerning our contact with the alien ship is not the complete story?"
She shook her head. "I'm sorry, but I still don't understand."
"What I'm saying is, while I'm sure the captain wouldn't lie, I can't help but fear that there are a few things that he's simply not telling us." He held up his hand to forestall the protest he saw building in her face.
"Believe me," he went on, "I've often dealt with people in positions of power, both military and nonmilitary, and they virtually never tell the public—or their subordinates—the whole truth."
Pausing, he gave her a self-deprecating smile. "And I include myself in that category, Miss Davis. I have to admit that I have not always been one-hundred percent open. Truthfully, no one in power—no one, for that matter, in the public eye at all—can afford to be totally open. Now, I'm not saying I ever did anything that I didn't honestly believe was in the best interests of the Federation in the long run, and I'm certainly not suggesting that Captain Kirk would ever do anything he didn't firmly believe was in the best interests of his ship and crew. There have been starship captains who might put their own interests above that of their people, but Captain Kirk, I'm sure, is not one of them. His reputation for integrity and competence is among the best in Starfleet, as I'm sure you're aware. No, all I'm saying is that, probably for what he sees as the best of motives, he's not letting us know everything that is happening, either with the alien craft or with the anomalies themselves. The problem is that, since he is probably not as knowledgeable as he could be concerning the anomalies, he just might be keeping to himself the one piece of information that, in the hands of someone more knowledgeable, could be the key to our return to the Federation."
As he spoke, he continued to watch the play of emotions across her guileless face, and it came to him once again that, unless he fumbled badly, Ensign Davis was firmly in his camp. And with that recurring thought, he realized that, sometime in the last few minutes, some of the bleakness of his imprisonment had begun to lift. He still could see little hope of ever returning to the Federation; the gate had in all probability simply vanished, never to return, or perhaps it only operated in the one direction.
But now he was not totally alone. In Ensign Davis he had an ally, a useful ally in what he had in that moment begun to think of as a campaign. His Enterprise campaign. For a moment, nostalgic memories of those long-ago campaigns that had launched him on his public career filled his thoughts. Then strategies began to leap into his mind, almost unbidden, and he wondered suddenly why he had been so slow to take that final mental step.
But at last he had taken it. With the realization that he had established a firm toehold in the enemy ranks, he had taken it. And now, u
sing the kind of maneuvering he knew best, he could build on that toehold. His life, he realized with an inner smile, once more had a purpose.
Chapter Six
ALMOST PRECISELY THIRTY-SIX standard hours after the first contact with the alien ship, Kirk was snatched from a dreamless sleep by the excited voice of Lieutenant Jameson, the third-watch science officer.
"Captain Kirk, to the bridge," Jameson's staccato voice crackled over the intercom. "Five more alien craft detected, apparently rendezvousing with the first."
Within minutes, Kirk, brushing his still-rumpled hair back from his forehead with a quick motion of his fingers, emerged onto the bridge only to find Mr. Spock already at the science station, absorbed in the readouts and looking as if he had been there throughout the watch. Lieutenant Jameson, standing back out of the way of his superior, turned briefly toward the turbolift as Kirk entered. Despite a firmly neutral expression on Jameson's face, Kirk could see in the young officer's quick glance and in the fractional stiffness of his motions that he was not pleased to have been displaced, even by Spock. This, however, was neither the time nor the place to call him on an attitude problem.
"Situation, Mr. Spock," Kirk said, sliding into the command chair vacated seconds before by Lieutenant Tanaka, who moved smoothly to a point beyond the circular handrail, never taking his eyes from the forward screen.
"As Mr. Jameson first stated, Captain, five craft, traveling in formation, appear to be rendezvousing with the craft we have been tracking."
"Rendezvousing? Not attacking?"
"It would seem not. They are all within range of each other now, and no hostilities have been initiated by either side."
"Reinforcements? These are the ships those subspace radio bursts were intended for?"
"In all likelihood, Captain. From the limited sensor data available, all five craft appear to be identical to the first. However, based on the formation in which the five craft were traveling, it would appear that one of those craft was being purposely shielded by the others. The craft we have been following has joined that protective formation."
