Collision Course

by William Shatner

  Kirk glanced at the tables as they passed them. At most, couples were huddled intimately close in the soft red light of table orbs, kissing, embracing, oblivious to the fact they were in public view. The remainder of the tables were little different, except they hosted more than pairs.

  “C’mon,” Kirk said. “They’re young. In love.”

  “They’re creepy.”

  Kirk pointed to the side. “Here’s a free one.”

  Elissa sat down quickly, hunched forward, elbows on the small table. Kirk sat beside her, as closely as the other couples, wrapped his arm around her. She shrugged him off. “Don’t. Not here.”

  “Elissa, we have to fit in.”

  Elissa grimaced, but not with passion. She leaned her head on Kirk’s shoulder. “You are in such trouble with me.”

  Kirk was still filled with the exhilaration of his flight and, even more exciting, the knowledge that his override had proven Starfleet’s ineptitude. “It’s worth it,” he said, and nuzzled her soft brown hair. It smelled wonderful.

  That was too much for Elissa. She pulled back, stared at Kirk.

  “What?” he asked innocently.

  “You lied your way in here awfully easily.”

  “It wasn’t a lie. That guy knew I wasn’t twenty.”

  “He let you in.”

  “ ’Cause he could tell I wasn’t the kind to cause trouble.”

  Elissa snorted. “You.”

  “Sometimes I think you have the wrong idea about me.”

  “Lucky for me, I probably do.”

  “Yet here we are.”

  Elissa shook her head, her expression suddenly grave. “What’re you going to do with your life, Jim?”

  “Before you kill me? Get you back to the Academy by curfew.”

  “Not good enough. Try again.”

  Kirk suddenly swept Elissa into his arms and kissed her thoroughly, as if they were still alone in the bushes by the parking lot.

  She broke free, indignant. “I’m serious!”

  “So am I,” Kirk said. “We gotta make this look good.” He repeated his action and prolonged it till she understood, then released her.

  “What did you see?” Elissa’s voice was unsteady.

  Kirk’s condition was no better, but he mustered enough composure to nod at something over Elissa’s shoulder. “Check out the dancers.”

  Elissa shifted in her chair, eyes darting from one scandalous dancer to the next on the raised pedestals as if trying her best not to actually see them. Then Kirk saw her eyes widen. She turned back to him, aware now of what he’d noted: two harsh-faced men in gray suits and cloth caps—clothing that was clearly a uniform of some kind. One of them was holding up a glowing ID for a server who spoke with them, her antigrav tray of drinks floating beside her.

  Elissa’s lips brushed Kirk’s ear. “They don’t look like protectors,” she whispered. Her behavior, though protective camouflage, was not without effect on Kirk. He forced himself to concentrate on a new plan. “Maybe private security from the lot?”

  “Wouldn’t they be tracking the car?”

  Kirk didn’t voice his own worst-possible-case scenario—that Sam had been caught and these two security agents had backtracked his accomplices here. Backtracking was the only reasonable possibility. His brother would never give him up.

  “Elissa, I can handle these two.” Kirk bent his head to kiss the nape of her neck, marveling at the smoothness of her skin. “You’ve got to get back to Archer Hall.”

  Elissa closed, then opened her eyes with a sigh. “Understood. If they’re looking for a couple, it’s safer if we’re not together.”

  Kirk scanned the room. The two agents, unsmiling, had split up and were walking the perimeter of the club, eyes moving from patron to patron like high-intensity sensors. Elissa saw them, too. She turned to Kirk, unsure if she should move or not.

  Kirk edged her out. “Don’t hurry. If they notice you… I’ll distract them.” He nodded imperceptibly to a set of doors at the back that he guessed led to an outdoor seating area overlooking the bay. “Go out that way.”

  Elissa stood, eyes downcast. “I don’t like leaving you alone.”

  “I’ll call tomorrow at lunch. We can set up a meeting with your adviser.”

  Elissa suddenly leaned down and kissed him. “Be careful.”

  Kirk slouched in his chair. He waved over a server, using the opportunity to watch the progress of the agents. They were getting closer to him. “Go. Go!”

  Elissa walked away without looking back.

  Kirk had no intention of being careful.

  For Elissa and Sam, he had to win.

  5

  Spock had seen the men in gray as soon as they entered the Garden of Venus, and had immediately sunk back on the banquette beside Dala.

  “Now that’s more like it,” she said, and reached out to playfully stroke his thigh.

  Spock felt his heart race and hated the sensation and what it signified to him: not a physical response to Dala’s unwanted touch, of course, but an acknowledgment of the danger the men in gray represented.

  “Those two,” Spock said, indicating the new arrivals. He waited until Dala had seen them. “Consular agents.”

  Dala removed her hand from his leg. Spock’s relief was immediate. “They followed you?”

  “Unlikely. But I should not be found here.”

  “If this was a set-up…”

  Spock recognized the mixture of human emotions in Dala’s expression—anger tinged by apprehension—but he was ready, having rehearsed this part.

  “I assure you, I am in even more danger than you.” He rose to his feet, to bring this disquieting meeting to an end. “I will go. They have no reason to suspect you. And the next time we meet, I will choose the venue.”

  Dala’s expression shifted disagreeably from one of apprehension to sly knowing. “A more private one. I’d like that.”

  Spock pulled his cloak shut, as if sealing himself in an environmental suit. “Madam, good evening.”

  Dala’s dark eyes sparked with amusement. “My pleasure. And maybe next time, yours, too.” She blew him a kiss.

  Spock could not suppress his shudder, and as he walked away his sensitive hearing caught her throaty laugh.

  He shook off his discomfiture and quickly pinpointed the two agents, separated now, each patrolling the outside edges of the club’s huge room. The solution to avoiding their detection was obvious: He would cross through the middle of the room, between them.

  Gratified by the logic of the situation, Spock went down the few steps to the main floor and began walking purposefully toward the doors he had entered through. With each step, he also berated himself for feeling gratified. His human side had been vulnerable to the human female and her pheromonic perfume—more unwelcome evidence of his particular genetic weakness.

  He was almost at the entrance, close to freedom. His work here at an end. His plan, as he had predicted, now perfectly in play.

  Even as Kirk automatically flirted with the attractive server who had brought him a glassless column of distilled lunar water, he kept his attention on Elissa.

  She was walking toward the back too quickly, head down—the picture of someone who didn’t want to be noticed, which, of course, made everyone notice her. Including one of the men in gray.

  Kirk thanked the server, waved a credit wafer over the payment sensor on her tray, and tapped it twice to add a generous tip.

  “Nice,” the server said, and meant it, hovering to see if Kirk was open to more expensive transactions. But Kirk had already dropped her from his mind and the server moved on. He was busy visualizing the layout of the club like a chessboard whose primary pieces were Elissa, the security agents, and himself. Somehow, he had to set up an immediate diversionary tactic to upset his opponents’ attack on his queen.

  It was time to sacrifice a pawn.

  Fortunately, there was one headed his way.

  Kirk held his column of water wit
hout conscious awareness of the spongy sensation of the low-powered force field that kept it in place, and silently counted out the timing of his target’s footsteps.

  Then, at just the right moment, he commenced Plan A. He extended his foot and—

  The sullen youth with long black hair awkwardly sprawled onto Kirk’s table before righting himself.

  Kirk instantly leapt to his feet. “Hey, watch where you’re going!”

  For the briefest of moments, Kirk’s pawn looked flustered, but his response was brittle and, unfortunately, under control. “You deliberately attempted to trip me.”

  Kirk commenced Plan B. He threw the column of water at the teenager’s long, narrow face and the force field sparkled off, drenching his dark hair and clothing. The youth stared down at his sodden cloak, up at Kirk, down at his cloak again, but did nothing else, as if he were in shock. The nearby patrons who had paused for an expectant instant returned, disappointed, to their other pursuits.

  Now Kirk noticed that one of the security agents had obviously signaled the other, because both were converging on Elissa.

  Kirk couldn’t believe his bad luck. A few hundred people in this club and he’d picked the only one who was unused to bar fights.

  Kirk commenced Plan C.

  He swung his fist at the teenager’s jaw.

  Then it was Kirk’s turn for shock because in a move too fast to see, the youth caught his fist mid-swing.

  Kirk put his full weight into pushing his fist forward, but without seeming to expend the slightest effort, the skinny teenager slowly forced it down and to the side.

  “You are behaving in a most illogical manner.”

  Amazingly, the kid wasn’t even breathing hard. Yet.

  “You’re right. My mistake.” Kirk let his arm go limp.

  And as soon as he felt the grip on him loosen, Kirk charged forward, punching the teenager in the stomach at the same time as he delivered an upward head butt.

  Kirk’s stomach punch was deflected and his head butt only struck a shoulder, but as he and his pawn flew backward into another table, he finally heard the sounds of chaos. Some of the more boisterous patrons were flinging themselves enthusiastically into fights of their own. Others were scattering, heading for the exit.

  For the moment, though, Kirk was on his back, his reluctant accomplice pinning him with one hand to the floor. “What are you trying to accomplish?” the teenager asked calmly over the din. He flipped his soaked hair out of his eyes.

  Kirk had run out of plans so he resorted to the truth. “Those two guys in gray are after my girlfriend—they’re security agents. I needed a distraction.”

  Kirk’s erstwhile prey gave him a withering look. “The ‘agents’ are from the Vulcan Embassy. They are after me.”

  Sure enough, Kirk saw pointed ears through the youth’s flattened hair. “Five hundred people in this joint and I pick the one Vulcanian…”

  “Vulcan,” the Vulcan said.

  Kirk realized the crowd had stopped yelling and the music had stopped. Instead, he and the Vulcanian—Vulcan—were surrounded by an unmoving wall of official-looking legs.

  Kirk looked up to see the two men in gray, their cloth caps covering their ears. With them was the club greeter in the black tuxedo, and four protectors, blue-clad officers of San Francisco Protective Services.

  “You done now?” the heavy-set greeter asked him.

  “Looks that way,” Kirk said with a smile. If all these officers of the law were gathered here, the odds were better than good that his diversion had worked and that Elissa was already halfway back to the Academy.

  A protector motioned for the Vulcan to release him.

  Kirk swiftly calculated the odds of getting out of this particular entanglement, developed his strategy on the fly. He sat up from the floor, held up his hand to the Vulcan. “Hey, buddy…no hard feelings?”

  Reflexively, as Kirk had anticipated, the young Vulcan helped pull him to his feet. Kirk stumbled against him. “Whoa…sorry. You’re a lot stronger than you look.”

  “Vulcan is a high-gravity world and my species has evolved myostatin inhibitors to enhance—”

  Kirk interrupted what threatened to be a biology lecture. “Okay. That’s great.” He turned to the club greeter, held up his credit wafer. “For the mix-up. I’ll pay for the damage.”

  As the greeter sneered at Kirk unpleasantly, a protector took the wafer.

  “Yes, you will,” the officer said. “But not the way you think.”

  Kirk felt powerful hands grab his upper arms as two protectors frog-marched him toward the main doors. “Let’s take this outside,” one said.

  The two Vulcans from the embassy took up position on either side of the young Vulcan and encouraged him to go in the same direction.

  The Vulcan appeared unperturbed by his capture, and, for himself, Kirk didn’t care what happened next.

  Whatever it was, it couldn’t be worse than seeing a cloud of vaporized blood puff from the back of Edith Zaglada as the eight-year-old girl ran for—

  Kirk shook his head, forcing the familiar blur of horror from his mind.

  All that mattered here and now was Elissa. One way or another, she could use what he’d done tonight to prove her innocence.

  He’d outsmarted Starfleet.

  He just didn’t care about anything else.

  6

  Almost a century earlier, when the first dish-shaped component had been assembled 35,900 kilometers above the Pacific within perpetual line of sight to San Francisco and Starfleet Headquarters, the facility had been named for a heroic admiral who had successfully held back overwhelming Romulan forces at a beleaguered colony world.

  But just as nation-based armed conflict had long been relegated to Earth’s distant history, the success of the United Federation of Planets promised to bring the same fate to interstellar wars. So the orbiting structure had grown, with segment after segment added over the years, until it had become an immense white blossom of duranium plating and sublime technology, unarmed, a major hub of Starfleet’s vast network of logistical supply.

  The admiral’s statue remained in an alcove near the main transporter complex to greet each arrival if they cared to look. But with the drumbeats of war so faded, and the primary mission of Starfleet now, more than ever, one of exploration, the facility’s once-heroic name had been simplified, so that now throughout the fleet it was simply called Spacedock. Its main purpose was to offer protected berths for starships in port for replenishment, and a warren of corridors and cramped little offices to serve the intricate bureaucracy that enabled an interstellar fleet to function.

  One of those collections of small offices on a seldom-visited level in the first and largest level of the facility bore a simple sign, a few of its letters scratched. It was called the Department of General Services, a footnote to a footnote in Starfleet’s organizational charts, of no particular importance.

  In terms of spycraft, the DGS, perhaps one of the most important units of Starfleet, was hiding in plain sight.

  Eugene Mallory was fifty standard years old, but looked older. Even in this enlightened age, stress took its toll. While the Federation and Starfleet ably maintained the peace and well-being of hundreds of worlds united in common cause, there were those individuals whose task it was to look beyond the safe borders, to the frontier, and into the unknown. And if there was one thing all explorers knew, the unknown was often dangerous, sometimes deadly.

  It was the job of Mallory and the DGS to see that the unknown dangers of the frontier never took the Federation by surprise.

  Ten years in the job and his once dark hair was white. But even he had never seen images like those on his subspace communications screen right now.

  In the foreground was a Starfleet Security captain, still in adaptive armor scorched by weapons fire. His grime-streaked face was distraught and deeply troubled, and not just for the twelve comrades in arms he’d lost in a firefight three relative hours ago. That battle
had taken place on Helstrom III. It was a frontier colony planet, where a thousand humans had banded together to create a peaceful new world, and then were taken captive, held hostage, by a savage, hostile force.

  The captain was just finishing his report with words hard to come by. From time to time, the image and sound shimmered with subspace interference.

  “We couldn’t determine the enemy’s communication protocols…couldn’t tell how they were getting their orders…”

  Mallory asked the obvious question. “Are you certain the attackers were receiving orders?”

  The captain thought that over, wiped his face. “You mean, they were just left here to…to commit suicide like this?”

  Mallory sighed. “No. No. They likely thought reinforcements were on their way. They didn’t know it was a last stand.”

  The captain’s eyes flickered, and Mallory felt sure the battle he had just fought was replaying itself in his mind. “They wouldn’t surrender…”

  Mallory understood what was left unsaid, but what the Federation faced was greater than this one small skirmish. “You and your team saved the hostages, Captain. You saved the colony.”

  “This isn’t why we’re out here, Mallory. This isn’t who we are.”

  The captain moved back and away from the imager to reveal the bodies of the enemy, laid out respectfully by the captain’s medical corpsmen.

  The youngest of the dead was eight, the eldest no more than twelve.

  Each enemy soldier, each corpse, a human child.

  “You saved the hostages,” Mallory repeated firmly, though he knew it was little comfort. But anguish and remorse were the traits of Starfleet and the Federation, not those of this new enemy attacking the frontier.

  More than twice a hundred light-years away, the captain nodded his agreement, the gesture contradicted by his grim expression. “Alpha Team out.”

  The screen went blank.

  Mallory rocked back in his chair and thought of demons—humans who would send their young to commit such atrocities.

  The captain’s words seemed to echo in his office: This isn’t who we are.