by Greg Cox
“They appear to be unarmed, at least as far as energy weapons are concerned.”
Pogg and Scott both had their own phasers ready nevertheless, as Spock opened the starboard hatchway to admit the men. A tissue-thin force field kept the shuttle pressurized while allowing the surrendering Pavakians entrance to the spacecraft. Spock stood by, phaser drawn, as Pogg and Scott searched and secured the prisoners, placing them under restraint in the passenger cabin. Helmets were removed to reveal three unknown Pavakians . . . and the sneering countenance of Major Rav Takk.
“You had no right to attack a Pavakian outpost!” He sneered at Spock and Scotty. “Is this what the Federation calls peacekeeping?”
“No,” Spock replied. “This is what I would term carrying out our designated duties as weapons inspectors.” He lowered his phaser. “Where is the warhead, Major Takk?”
Takk smirked. “What warhead?”
“I believe you know to what I refer,” Spock said, troubled by Takk’s cocksure attitude. It was as though the man was relatively unconcerned at having been forced to surrender. “A missing protomatter warhead that you reportedly inspected back on Pavak. Unit Zero-Five-Seven, to be precise.”
Takk shrugged. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Blast it, soldier!” Pogg said, losing his patience. “That warhead was meant to be destroyed. We had a duty to carry out, whether we agreed with it or not. You had a duty. Now tell us where that warhead is!”
“Duty?” Takk regarded Pogg with open contempt. “Am I truly being lectured on duty by a traitor who has defied orders and allied himself with those who would disarm Pavak and embolden our mortal enemies?” He spat at Pogg’s feet. “I know who you are, Pogg, and what you have done. Do not presume to speak of duty to me. You have no authority here, moral or otherwise!”
Spock surveyed the faces of the other Pavakian prisoners. Their belligerent expressions made it clear that they were in sympathy with Takk and unlikely to cooperate as well. He suspected that the Sumno station had been deliberately seeded with personnel involved in the conspiracy, which implied a considerable degree of advance planning. He doubted that either Takk or his confederates would willingly volunteer the location of the warhead.
“We could search the entire outpost,” Scott suggested. “It won’t be easy or pleasant, let alone fast, with the heat and life-support knocked out, but it’s doable.”
Spock considered that option. Even if the warhead was hidden and physically shielded from their scans, they might be able to locate it eventually—if it was indeed on Sumno. The Pavakians’ unworried manner continued to disturb Spock. A distressing possibility struck him as increasingly probable.
“I fear we do not have time for an extensive search under these circumstances. The location of the warhead must be determined with all deliberate speed.”
“That may be easier said than done,” Takk said, “assuming I knew anything about a misplaced warhead, that is.”
“We shall see.” Spock approached Takk, his manner grave. “There are other methods of persuasion at my disposal, but I doubt you would welcome them.” He arched an eyebrow. “Perhaps you are familiar with the Vulcan death grip?”
Scott caught on to what Spock was attempting. “No, not that! Not the death grip!”
“I fear, Mister Scott, that we may have no other recourse. Sacrificing the major may convince his comrades to be more forthcoming.”
“But to kill a man in such a cold-blooded fashion?” Scott sounded appropriately appalled. “Are you truly prepared to go that far?”
“What?” Takk reacted in alarm. For the first time, his smug assurance fractured. “But you’re a Vulcan. You would never do such a thing!”
“I assure you, Major, that Vulcans are perfectly capable of killing, provided there is a logical reason to do so.” He placed his hand against Takk’s neck, as though to administer a nerve pinch. “Moreover, I am only half-Vulcan.”
“Wait! Stop!” Panic cracked Takk’s voice. “You want to know where the warhead is? I’ll tell you everything. Just keep that damn Vulcan away from me!”
“Talk quickly then,” Pogg said, taking charge. “Or I’ll have him snap your neck faster than a hangman’s noose!”
Spock withdrew to let Pogg further berate the suspect. Scott came up beside him and, relying on Spock’s superior hearing, spoke in a tone too low to be heard by Takk and the others.
“Mister Spock,” Scott whispered, “I wonder just when people are goin’ to discover there is no such thing as the Vulcan death grip?”
“A bluff worth trying, Mister Scott. A tactic I first learned from our captain.”
Spock returned to the task at hand.
“So you admit to stealing the warhead?” he asked Takk.
“Rescuing,” Takk insisted. “Granted, we had to wait until the Enterprise arrived and the disarmament process was under way before we had the opportunity to switch out the warhead and substitute a dummy . . . under the cover of the very operation intended to deprive us of such weapons.” Regaining much of his earlier confidence, he taunted Spock and the others. “I should thank you, actually. If not for such a massive undertaking, we would have never had the opportunity to get our hands on that warhead. It’s ironic when you think about it. Were it not for your craven ‘peace process,’ that game-changing weapon would still be sitting impotently in an underground missile silo, going unused by our so-called leaders, who lack the will to put it to its proper use!”
“Which would be?” Spock asked, growing steadily more concerned.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Takk sneered at their worried faces. “But you needn’t bother searching the outpost. The warhead is not here. In fact, it never was.”
“The devil you say!” Scott challenged him. “Then why head all the way out here in the first place?”
Spock feared he knew. “To create a false trail . . . in the event that the theft of the warhead was detected. To send us on a wild goose chase, as it were, following bread crumbs deliberately left behind to lead any investigators astray.”
Spock thought of the Pavakian contacts who had alerted Pogg to Takk’s new assignment piloting Outward Six to Sumno. He now wondered if those individuals had truly been assisting Pogg after all, or if they had actually been part of the conspiracy to divert attention to the farthest reaches of the solar system.
“Very good, Vulcan,” Takk said, gloating. “Your people’s legendary intellect lives up to its vaunted reputation. A shame, however, that you only just now perceived the truth. Yes, the intent was to keep you chasing in the wrong direction . . . while we waited for the moment to strike!”
“Damn you!” Pogg shook his fist at his fellow soldier. “Where is that warhead?”
“On Pavak, of course. It never left the planet. Mind you, it will be paying a visit to Oyolo soon. Their capital city, to be exact.”
“But how?” Scotty asked. “Without the impulse booster? A warhead does you no good without the rest of the missile.”
“Who needs a missile?” Takk replied. “The warhead is hidden aboard General Tem’s own diplomatic shuttle, currently ‘under repair’ on Pavak.”
Spock understood. “The shuttle itself is the delivery mechanism.”
“Exactly!” Takk declared. “Oh, our Pavakian shuttles may not be as fast or sophisticated as your Starfleet shuttlecrafts, but a shuttle crashing into Oyolo at full speed, bearing an armed protomatter warhead, will teach the Oyolu a lesson they will never forget!”
Spock had to agree. A direct strike on Yrary, the planet’s capital city, would kill millions and most likely extinguish any possibility of peace for generations to come. Yrary itself, as well as much of the surrounding area, would become a contaminated crater unsafe for any life-form. And the environmental danger posed by any surviving traces of protomatter was almost literally immeasurable.
/> “But the Enterprise is patrolling the buffer zone,” Scott recalled. “Surely they can intercept the shuttle before it strikes Oyolo.”
Takk snickered.
“I would not be so sure of that.”
Twenty-Five
Explosions rocked the Enterprise.
The unexpected blasts could be heard and felt in the briefing room, where the vibration toppled the water pitcher and caused Kirk and the others to grab onto the table to keep from falling. “What the devil?” McCoy exclaimed. The rapid-fire string of explosions, which seemed to come from more than one location on the ship, caught all present by surprise.
Except Colonel Gast. “Right on schedule,” she said.
Kirk shot her a furious look, but he had no time to confront her right away. He stabbed the intercom controls with his finger. “Kirk to Bridge. Status!”
“I’m getting multiple reports of small explosions throughout the nacelle support pylons and in the impulse engineering section,” Uhura responded almost immediately. “No reported casualties yet, but we’ve taken damage to the warp and impulse propulsion systems.”
Kirk recalled that Gast had once taken part in demolition missions on Oyolo. He had no doubt who the saboteur was: the other Demme Gast, who was still at large aboard the Enterprise.
“Copy that. I’m on my way to the bridge. Kirk out.” He switched off the comm unit and issued an order to Chekov. “Take Colonel Gast to the brig . . . and find her other half.” He jumped to his feet and headed for the exit. “Bones, you may be needed in sickbay. The rest of you, you’re with me.”
A turbolift brought them quickly to the bridge, which was abuzz with activity. Red alert lights flashed as damage reports flooded consoles and bridge personnel moved quickly to assess and compensate for the damage. The atmosphere was tense, but the crew responded to the crisis in a brisk and disciplined fashion. Riley followed Kirk into the command circle. Occupying the captain’s chair, Kirk noted that the starry void on the main viewer was surprisingly serene. No enemy or enemy fire disturbed the buffer zone. They were being attacked from within, not without. No amount of deflector screens could shield them.
“Captain,” Uhura said, “I’m being hailed by Mister Spock. He says it’s urgent.”
Spock’s timing left something to be desired, but Kirk trusted his friend’s judgment. “Put him through.”
Spock’s stoic visage appeared on the viewscreen. Despite his friend’s Vulcan reserve, Kirk could tell at once that this was serious. “What is it?”
“The warhead.” Spock concisely explained what the conspirators had been up to—and the immediate danger to Oyolo. “We have strong reason to believe the attack is imminent, if it has not already commenced.”
Riley went pale. “Captain, we can’t let this happen. Millions will die . . . and so will any chance of salvaging the peace process!”
That struck Kirk as a terrifyingly accurate assessment of the situation. “Where are you? We need you and Scotty back here!”
“We are en route in the Galileo.”
“Good,” Kirk said. “Make it fast.”
“We will endeavor to do so, Captain. Spock out.”
“Captain!” Ensign Dazim called out from Tactical. “A Pavakian shuttlecraft has entered the buffer zone, heading for Oyolo. Sensors indicate that it is unmanned. At its current rate of acceleration, it will crash into the planet in approximately thirty minutes.”
Spock’s estimate would have included at least three more decimal points, but Kirk got the idea. This was obviously the doomsday shuttle Spock had just warned him about. Complete with an armed protomatter warhead.
“Can we intercept the shuttle in time?” Kirk asked.
“Not at present,” Sulu reported from the helm. “Impulse engines are offline.”
“What about warp?” Kirk asked. Going to warp inside a solar system was risky and they could easily overshoot their target, but it would be a gamble worth taking if it meant stopping the bomb-laden shuttle from hitting Oyolo. “Don’t tell me that’s down, too.”
“I’m afraid so, sir.” Lieutenant Anne Magee was manning the engineering station in Scotty’s absence. Kirk did not know her well, but he knew that Scott trusted her. “The intermix chamber is intact, so there’s no danger of a warp core breach, but it’s going to take time to locate and repair the damage to the power transfer conduits in both pylons. Whoever rigged those explosions knew right where to place them to knock out our propulsion systems.”
Gast was a starship engineer as well as a demolitions expert, Kirk recalled. “Warn the repair crews to watch out for booby traps and time bombs. I wouldn’t put it past our saboteur to throw a few more nasty surprises in our path.”
It was obviously no coincidence that the bombs had gone off, taking the Enterprise out of the equation, just as Gast’s confederates on Pavak launched their sneak attack on Oyolo. This entire operation had been carefully planned, right down to sending the weapons inspectors on a wild goose chase and staging the assassinations aboard the Enterprise, which had served the dual purposes of disrupting the peace talks while simultaneously distracting Kirk and his crew as the saboteur went about her work. It was a brilliant scheme, Kirk had to admit. Almost Romulan in its deviousness.
“Can we target the shuttle with our weapons?” Kirk asked.
“Negative, Captain,” Dazim said. “The vessel is not passing within firing range of our current position.”
“Blast it!” Riley exclaimed. “They thought of everything.”
Kirk refused to accept that. There had to be some way to stop the doomsday shuttle, but how?
And to make matters worse, the other Gast was still unaccounted for.
• • •
The explosions were music to her ears.
Gast put down the handheld device she had used to remotely trigger the bombs and listened with satisfaction to the red alert sirens going off. The emergency lifepod she was hiding in rattled from the force of the explosions several decks above her, but she knew that she was safely distant from any real danger, exactly as planned. Oyolo was in peril, not her.
As it should be.
A starship the size of the Enterprise offered no shortage of places for a well-trained saboteur to hide, but the cozy lifepod, which was housed among several such one-person crafts on R Deck, had proved ideal for her purposes. Intended as a last-ditch survival measure for a crew member who was unable to reach the saucer before an emergency separation took place, the lifepod came equipped with an eight-day supply of food and water, a change of clothes, a survival suit, a basic toolkit, and even a working toilet. Employed only in disasters, and so unlikely to be inspected or disturbed, it had served as a highly convenient base of operations for her covert campaign of sabotage over the last few days and nights. She’d simply needed to refrain from activating the pod’s controls and life-support mechanisms to avoid detection. Granted, the pod had not come with a phaser—those were securely stored in the ship’s armory—but you couldn’t have everything. And she couldn’t fire a phaser without exposing herself anyway, thanks to the ship’s automated alarm system.
A nine-inch utility knife, commandeered from the pod’s survival kit, would have to suffice.
A smile came to her lips as she finally reaped the fruits of her labors, after days of furtively slinking through Jefferies tubes and emergency stairwells to prepare for this moment. Skills honed on various covert demolition missions on Oyolo had allowed her to slip like a ghost through unguarded access tunnels. That Montgomery Scott, the ship’s legendary chief engineer, was away on Pavak had been a boon as well. With the fastidious Scott not keeping watch over Engineering, her clandestine tampering with the ship’s propulsion systems had been far less likely to be detected.
Alas, the warp core and impulse reaction chambers had been too carefully monitored to risk getting too close to, so arrangi
ng a catastrophe capable of destroying the entire ship, or even Engineering, had not been possible. Fortunately, that hadn’t been necessary; she’d simply needed to bring about an emergency shutdown that would keep the Enterprise out of commission long enough for the attack on Oyolo to succeed.
So much for Starfleet’s so-called peacekeeping mission!
She consulted her personal chronometer. In theory, the warhead was already on its way to Oyolo, aimed straight at what was left of their government. Timing had been crucial to this operation; she’d had to wait until just the right moment, synchronized with the launch of the unmanned shuttlecraft, so that the Enterprise’s crew would be unable to fix their engines in time to interfere. She had not been idle while waiting, however; she had taken advantage of the time allowed to commit additional acts of sabotage to the ship’s backup systems that would hopefully keep Kirk’s people occupied for hours to come.
And then there were the booby traps . . .
Mission almost accomplished, she thought smugly. Now all that remained was living long enough to savor the destruction that was about to rain down on the Oyolu’s filthy heads. Her lip curled and her blood sang at the thought of the loathsome savages finally getting what they deserved. Pavak had been far too gentle with them all these years. We should have bombed them into utter submission decades ago!
Her only regret was that she couldn’t personally kill all of them!
She cautiously emerged from the lifepod after first peering out through a viewport to make sure the way was clear. In the interest of stealth, she had traded her Pavakian uniform for a “borrowed” white engineering suit complete with protective helmet. Her plan was to take advantage of the commotion she had generated to blend in with the other crew members dashing back and forth dealing with the crisis; if all went well, one extra technician in a rad suit and helmet would attract little attention.
