With that sip of smooth-tasting wine, McCoy could feel the ghosts of the injured and dead survivors being pushed back into the past where they belonged. He could feel his body relaxing and the exhaustion creeping up. Billions of lives had been lost in the Tautee system, but somehow, he found a sense of fulfillment in the fact that the Enterprise, the Farragut, and the Klingon ships had saved enough lives for the Tautee race to continue. He felt good that he was a part of such a rescue.
But it was now time to do as Scotty had done with the cargo bay. McCoy had to clear the decks and move on. Besides, he had a medical experiment he needed to finish. Right after he took a very long nap.
McCoy glanced out over at the golf course on the monitor between the machines. What a peaceful place it seemed. He felt as if he wanted to just walk out there and keep walking. Maybe, when he took his next leave, he’d play a round of golf.
“Now,” Kirk said, his voice carrying over the talking. “I expect this party to last all night.”
Spock gave the captain a sour look and McCoy laughed. The longer it lasted, the better. That sounded perfect. Even Spock’s doleful expression was perfect.
Especially Spock’s doleful expression.
McCoy grinned. This was the best party he could remember attending in a long, long time.
About the Authors
When Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch met at a writing workshop in New Mexico, they already had a few publishing credentials to their names. Dean had sold over a hundred poems and short stories to The Twilight Zone, Night Cry, and Writers ofthe Future, Vol. 1. Kris had sold more nonfiction than she could count and stories to Aboriginal SF and Amazing Stories. Their writing careers flourished after their romance started. Dean has sold over sixty short stories and seven novels, including Carnage in New York and Laying the Music to Rest. Kris doesn’t count the short-story sales any more than she counted the nonfiction, but she has sold eleven novels. The most recent are The Fey: Sacrifice (Bantam) and The Devil’s Churn (Dell).
Dean and Kris collaborated on a publishing company, Pulphouse Publishing. That joint venture has brought them one World Fantasy Award, another nomination, a Hugo nomination, and a house full of books (including numerous copies of The Best of Pulphouse, from St. Martin’s Press). Kris has stopped editing for Pulphouse, and now edits The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (for which she won the Hugo award in 1994). Dean publishes all the Pulphouse products and edits Pulphouse: A Fiction Magazine.
In 1991, they started to collaborate on fiction. “Model Lover,” their first attempt, appeared in Ghosttide. Another collaborative story appeared in the Twilight Zone Anthology from DAW. Their most recent collaboration is in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine series: The Long Night. Pocket Books also published their collaborative novels The Escape (in the Voyager series) and, under the pen name Sandy Schofield, The Big Game (in the Deep Space Nine series). They, under their own names and under Sandy’s name, have several more novels in the works.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Copyright © 1996 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
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ISBN: 0-671-00171-X
ISBN: 978-0-743-42029-7 (eBook)
First Pocket Books printing May 1996
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The Rings Of Tautee Page 17
