by Diane Carey
"Here."
Kellen bristled, but didn't interfere, though he stared a burning hole into Kirk's head.
"According to our history, our laws and treaties," Kirk attempted, "this area is claimed by the Klingon Empire. Nearby is a neutral area of space, beyond which is space charted and occupied by the United Federation of Planets. We have no records of the configuration of your ship, or any planets in this vicinity which could support advanced life. Can you give us the location of your home planet?"
"We do not … know it."
Putting one foot on the platform that held his command chair, Kirk cranked around to Uhura. "Can't you fix that translator? We're not making sense here."
She shook her head in frustration and touched her earpiece. "I don't think it's in the system, sir. I think it's endemic to their language or their brain-wave patterns."
"Scotty, take a look."
"Aye, sir."
As the engineer crossed the deck behind him, Kirk pressed an elbow to his chair's arm and grimaced. What would help?
"Our communications equipment has visual capabilities," he said, speaking a little slower and more clearly. "Will you allow us to open our screens so we can look at each other?"
Another pause.
Kellen looked at him. Kirk ignored him.
"It is against our custom," the booming voice came finally, "to display living faces on screens. . . ."
The voice drifted off as the translator struggled along after it.
All right, next step.
"Very well," Kirk responded, measuring his tone. "Perhaps we can meet face-to-face. Will you come to this ship as our guests?"
"No—" Kellen choked, balling his fists.
Waving him silent, Kirk went on, "We have the ability to transport you here in minutes."
He stopped and waited. Over the years he'd learned that extra talking didn't usually serve. Make the statement, and wait.
Hell of a long pause.
Were they making this up as they went along?
Why not? I am.
The alien ship turned passively on the screen, drifting not from power but on a breath of solar wind from the distant red giant sun that drenched its purple fans in bloody glow, and the leftover momentum from the battle so shortly arrested.
"You may …"
The voice paused, as if listening. Kirk held his breath. His crew did the same.
" … come here."
"One moment please."
A gesture from him caused a click on Uhura's control board that cut off the frequency.
"What's the atmosphere like over there?" he asked.
Chekov started looking for that, but from the subsystems screen, Spock already had the answer. "Scanning … reading oxygen, nitrogen, argon, with faint traces of methane and other gases … rather thin and quite warm. Breathable for controlled periods of time."
"How controlled? Bones?"
The doctor flinched as if coming out of a trance. "I'd recommend an hour at a time, Captain."
"Noted. Lieutenant Uhura, inform the transporter room that we'll be visiting that vessel out there. I want the coordinates kept updated at all times, in case we have to come back in a hurry. The transporter officer'll have to stay on his toes."
"Yes, sir."
"'Vergo of the Wrath,"' he muttered, narrowing his eyes at the big quartz ship on the screen. "Could that mean 'captain' of the Wrath? Could 'Wrath' be the name of the ship?"
"Possibly," Spock answered from the monitor. "However, I caution against applying our own use of words and concepts based on something that sounds familiar, sir."
Kirk sighed. "Never mind how complicated it might end up being to deal with people who name their ship 'Wrath.'"
He avoided looking at Kellen. The Klingons named their own ships with words like that.
"Dr. McCoy, you come with me, and I want a Security detail with us also. Palm phasers only. I don't want to appear too threatening."
Placing a hand on the rail, he climbed the three steps to the quarterdeck and stood over Uhura's station. She continued to look at her board and tap at her fingerpads, and that bothered him.
"Ship to ship," he said, and waited for the click from Uhura's board before he spoke again to the unknowns. "This is Captain Kirk. I will come to your ship with a greeting party. We will come directly to your bridge, unless you have other instructions."
Silence fell in. He got the feeling things were being discussed over there and anticipated their changing their minds, but—
"Come."
"Thank you. We'll be there in a few minutes. Kirk out. Mr. Sulu, drop the hook. We'll be staying awhile."
"All systems stabilized, sir. Holding position."
"Secure from red alert. Stand by at yellow alert. Damage-control teams get to work. General Kellen, you may communicate with your ships and assess their damage. If they need any lifesaving assistance, we'll provide it."
Kellen raised his neatly bearded chin. "Imagine my gratitude."
"Inform them we're going aboard the unidentified ship. If they make any aggressive movements, Mr. Scott will drive them back again. Is that clear, Mr. Scott?"
"Crystal clear, Captain."
"General, do you want to join the boarding party?"
"I?" Kellen's face turned horrible. "I will never go there again."
"Fine." Kirk turned away and looked at Uhura again. "I need a linguist. Do we have one on board?"
"Yes, sir. Me."
"You?"
Her almond cheeks rounded in a smile. "What do you think 'communications' means? 'Small talk'?"
"Sorry," he said. Then he hesitated. Take her along?
He paused for a moment and pressed down the twinge in his stomach. "Lieutenant, I'd like you to join the landing party."
Uhura's face lit up. She didn't get asked very often, and the couple of times before had turned out to be near-disasters. Still, she seemed excited.
"Aye, sir," she said, for the same reason Scott had said it, and in almost the same tone.
"Very good," he offered, and moved around her. "Mr. Spock, you have the conn."
The crew's eyes came up to him in a nearly audible snap. Silence from the monitor up starboard. Uneased, nobody spoke. How inappropriate it would have been for anyone, however well intended, to point out the captain's colossal error.
Kirk scowled at himself. "Mr. Scott," he corrected, "you have the conn."
Scott nodded with more sympathy than was comfortable for either of them. "Aye aye, sir."
It was the eternal ideal response to a commanding officer, the one that saved any situation and would get anybody off the hook. Didn't work quite so well at the moment. It got Scott and Spock off the hook and relieved the bridge crew of their tension, but did nothing for the captain who had made the blunder.
He charged over it. "Uhura, bring along a tricorder tied directly in to Mr. Spock's computer access channel, so he can see what's going on. Let's go."
"Captain," Kellen broke in, coming to the rail below the bright red turbolift doors, "you are out of order here. I organized this mission. I am its commander."
"You're a guest on my ship," Kirk corrected. "You can act that way, or you can go back to your own fleet and all bets are off."
"This transport is folly," the general insisted. "No one with any sense goes over to an enemy ship in the middle of a battle!"
"It was your battle, not theirs. They didn't fire on us until you opened fire. And part of the mission of this vessel is to contact new life forms on an amicable basis if at all possible."
"It is impossible. This is the Havoc. There is no amicable basis."
"We'll see. I'll be back in an hour. Gentlemen, let's take a look at who these people are."
What's the mission of this vessel? To seek out and contact alien life … and an opportunity to demonstrate what our high-sounding words mean.
—James Kirk
Chapter Nine
SOMETIMES THE STUNNING ART of transporting seemed
to move beyond physical science and into magic. And sometimes it seemed to take days instead of seconds.
This was one of those times.
Jim Kirk tapped a mental foot during those seconds. It was always like this when a new form of life lay in wait for discovery on the other side of immaterial state.
As his mind gathered itself and the transporter room of the Enterprise dissolved into fog, he realized he couldn't see and wondered for a heart-snapping moment if something had gone wrong. When he felt his feet beneath him again and his arms at his sides, the fog was still there. Had the transport been completed?
There was moisture here. He felt hot. At least all his nerve endings were still with him.
Starting to think like McCoy. Scientist though he was, McCoy was a medical biologist and physics often intimidated him, especially when physics separated biology into a billion bits of molecular energy and claimed to reassemble it in perfect order. Some people still didn't believe that planes could fly.
Kirk blinked the anxiety away and waved his hand at the fog in front of him, not so much to clear it but to sense its texture. The tendrils of cloud moved like smoke rather than moisture, but felt like moisture. What did that mean?
Smelled like a pond in here. The deck under his feet felt pulpy, but it was definitely flat as a floor and hard underneath. There was a source of low light, but he couldn't pin down the location. Immediately before him were two more sources of light, one cranberry red, the other a bleeding purple. He glanced to his left, at McCoy.
Washed in the blended light, the doctor stood staring and disconcerted by the strange surroundings. The back of his head and shoulders were bathed in soft pearly light—another light source, this one behind them. Kirk didn't look around. That would be the job of the Security team.
For a moment he held still, with his hand up in the middle of a wave, and listened.
A faint vibration came up through the soles of his feet, a throbbing of mechanical regularity. Engines. Kellen had been right. Motive power and tangible hardware. Obvious now that the ship had been seen, but the sensations here were familiar enough that Kirk guessed the power sources might be similar to those of conventional ships. At least they weren't dealing with a race so different from their own as to make the contest one-sided.
Nearby was the murmur of other mechanical systems, though much more subtle than any on the Enterprise. He saw no ceiling, and though he felt the deck he couldn't see it. The fog was thick up to his knees, then became a lazy haze.
There was a smell too, but not like a ship smell. Fungus? Weeds, mosses, moisture. Algae. Spock probably could've told him what species. Yet the forest smell was overlaid with a chemical presence too, almost industrial, like glue or cleanser, and it insisted there was a technical presence here.
His gut began to shrink, giving off warnings.
I've seen aliens before, plenty of them. Some unthinkably strange, defiant of any known evolutionary pattern. I haven't even seen these people yet. Why am I already flinching?
He knew the answer. Kellen. What could shake an experienced spacefaring Klingon general with a long record of bravery and a reputation for disarming composure?
Had Kellen set him up? The thought flashed, unwelcome and distasteful, that he was falling into a trap. Was he so distracted that he hadn't thought of that dimension? Exhausted, losing so many crewmen, worried about Spock—
Not good enough. There wasn't anything that would take him off the hook for the entirety of his job, and here he was, beamed in with a team, and only now thinking of a seriously viable possibility.
On the other hand, this ship was here. Might as well throttle up. If he had to strangle Kellen later, well, an option was an option.
"Is this their bridge, sir?" Uhura asked just behind his right elbow, speaking low, as if walking through a graveyard and worried about waking someone.
"That was the plan," Kirk answered. "We homed in on their communications signal. Tricorder."
She raised the powerful little unit hanging from the strap over her shoulder and clicked it on. "Reading life-forms, sir, lots of them."
"Proximity?"
"Nearby … the readings are …" She paused, frowned, tampered with the instrument. "I can't get a fix."
"Jim," McCoy murmured at Kirk's side, scarcely above a whisper. His blue eyes were wide, unblinking, bizarre in the glowing fog.
Kirk looked at him.
"They're here," McCoy said, his throat tight. "They're in here now."
Put on edge by the doctor's intuition, Kirk lowered his right hand until it hovered near the small phaser hidden on his belt. He didn't touch the weapon, but he kept his hand there.
He took one step out from his boarding party and raised his voice.
"I'm Captain Kirk," he said through the choking humidity. "Is there anyone here?"
For several moments, possibly a minute, there was no change at all, as if he had spoken firmly but pointlessly into an empty cave.
The fog began to shift. For an absurd instant he entertained the idea that the fog itself might be the life-form they were seeking. A fog with a voice, though? McCoy would have something to say about the vocal chords of a fog.
No, not the fog. There was physical movement beyond it. Shapes of upright beings began to form, broad shoulders, high heads, like gray chalk etchings on concrete.
About our size, he noted instinctively. Six feet … seven … not out of line for humanoids.
The huge numbers of humanoids discovered by the Federation in its outward expansion had upheld theories of scientists who believed that intelligent industrial life had to be of a certain size, not too big, but also not too small, in order to develop industry and eventually space-flight. There would have to be some form of propulsion with which to go against the stream—legs—and some form of sensors at the other end with which to avoid running into walls—hands and eyes and sometimes a nose. There would have to be at least two hands with which to alter their environment, and at least two eyes for depth perception.
So despite the thousands of planets out there, it hadn't turned out so unusual that there were Klingons, Romulans, Terrans, Orions, and others, each with roughly the same appendages and a head each. Also not so strange that the horta, a creature based on silicon, with no arms, legs, head, or eye, though intelligent, had no industry. Like Earth's cetaceans or Alpha Centauri's big mammaloids. Didn't matter how smart they were if they had hooves or fins instead of hands and couldn't manipulate their environment.
All this flashed through Kirk's mind as he waited for the beings to show themselves. He lay in the hope that he was dealing with humanoids, with whom he automatically had some common ground. For a civilization to advance, there had to be some level of cooperation, they had to take care of their offspring, and they had to have common goals. Those communal elements were his anchors in exploration. He could make himself understood to beings who understood those.
He motioned to his boarding party to stand very still and let the next movement be those of this ship's crew. That was how he would want it on the …
Eyes. Yes—there they were.
Like a cat's stare catching candlelight, a dozen sets of eyes came toward them. A cold stake of shock bolted from Kirk's stomach to his feet. His innards shriveled at the forms moving from the fog toward them.
McCoy stiffened beside him. Uhura drew a sharp breath and tightened her arms to her sides, but didn't step back.
A Pandora's box of demons pushed the vapor aside. III-shaped and colossal, three of them were an amalgam of triangles, with long bony faces and eyes the shapes of sickles, and huge twisted ram's horns upon their heads, as elegant and horrifying as could be. Between those, other creatures appeared with dozens of serpentine white tentacles undulating from their skulls as long as a man's arm and freely moving, caressing the faces and shoulders of the beings they decorated as if searching for something.
To Kirk's left, another creature had two sets of arms and an elongated face like
a jade tiki. Behind that one there were others, some skeletal, others swollen, and at least one had no face at all that Kirk could see. This was an utterly amalgamated crew.
And there were others he couldn't make out yet, except for the distorted shapes of their heads and their masklike faces cast in shadows and highlights, caressed by fog.
Most of them wore some kind of clothing, and lots of jewelry. Recumbent half moons, demon-headed brooches like the things carved into the walls, and each one wore an engraved bronze medallion about three inches across with scrolled designs and a small handle, dangling from a long chain.
Two of the creatures moved forward of the rest. They were both of the same species, each head heavy with arching horns, but one was a watercolor ghost of the other. Totally different colors. One had eyes of rum yellow and a complexion of bronze and rattan. The other was paler, with face of bony moon-gray and ivory slashes for eyes.
Kirk cleared his throat, but paused. Did they want to make the first gesture or not?
Stiff as a statue, McCoy managed to lean toward him. "Come on, we got used to Spock, after all. . . ."
At the doctor's mumble, the splendid golden demon moved one of his elongated hands. At least he only had two of those. So far so good.
The heavy voice thrummed, the same voice they had heard on the message over the Enterprise's comm system.
"Are you having trouble … seeing?"
What a voice. Translators were working all right at the moment. Any little reassurance in a storm.
Kirk found his own voice. "Yes. A little."
The creature turned his disturbing head. Fog rolled around his horns. "Light."
A mechanical sound, not a beep but more of a twinkle, chittered in the background, though they saw none of these creatures move. There must be others here too.
Almost imperceptibly at first, the haze began to change. Slow as dawn, the area around them became easier to see. The sources of colored light intensified gradually until distinction came to the place where they stood and the creatures before them gained dimension.
