by Diane Carey
the pressure got to him.
"I don't know," Kirk said. "But I have to decide the
next move, or Kellen will decide it for me."
"How could he get off without tripping some alarm
somewhere?"
"I'd get off."
"Captain, bridge. The Klingons refuse to answer our
hail, sir."
"Any movement out there?"
"None yet, sir."
"Notify me if there's the slightest change. Kirk out."
Stiff-lipped and severe, he circled the foot end of the
corpse.
Its pale hands were chalky with lack of life, long
fingernails nearly blue now, and there seemed to have
been very little blood, or whatever fluids this creature
possessed. Its clothing was nearly pristine. There hadn't
been much of a struggle, but considering Kellen's
strength and experience, that was no surprise.
"You didn't do an autopsy, did you?"
"I wouldn't do that without consent," McCoy said
with a touch of pique. "I sterilized the body and had the
scene of the crime searched and sealed off. If they want it
back, or want back any of this jewelry it's wearing, we're
prepared to comply. By the way, look at this." He
plucked up the round bronze piece hanging from the
FIRST STRIKE
chain, similar to Zennor's and all the others'. "This
medallion isn't a medallion. Did you notice? It's a mirror."
He turned the oblong disk over to the undecorated
side, and sure enough there was a crudely polished
surface there that could be used as a mirror when held up
by what now looked like a small handle.
"They each carry a little mirror?" Kirk looked, but
didn't touch. "Why would they do that?"
"I certainly don't know. Would you carry a mirror if
you looked like that? But, Jim, there's something else. If
you'll come with me..."
He led the way into a smaller examining room, where
a normally clean metal experimentation table was cluttered
with a matte of shredded cloth and separated piles
of what appeared to be dried leaves, nuts, hair, and some
kind of chips.
"What's all this?"
"I found it on the body. Take a look."
At closer examination Kirk realized what he was
looking at. "It's the doll. Each of them carries one. You
dissected a doll? This is a new low for you, isn't it?"
"It's more efficient than reading the handwriting on a
wall. Besides, it smelled funny and I wanted to see why.
Now, take a closer look."
"Yes, I see it. It's got strings in its head and clothes like
that. The doll looks like them."
"No, no. It looks like him." McCoy pointed at the
headless corpse. "With the head on, I mean. Look at
it."
Irritated and impatient, Kirk pointed at the doll,
whose guts lay spread all over the table, but whose little
wormy head was still mostly intact. "I don't get your
meaning."
"That corpse is of that species and the doll is also, but
look closer. It's got the same features, the same coloring,
the same hair--well, yarn--and it's missing the same
finger that the corpse has been missing for most of his
life."
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Diane Carey
"You mean, if one of them loses a finger he cuts it off
his doll?"
"A finger, or whatever they've got. And one leg is a
little shorter than the other, just like the corpse, and it's
got the same scars marked on it as the real body has. And
it's wearing tiny versions of the same jewelry that's on
the body. Jim, this doll isn't just any doll. It's a poppet."
Kirk looked up and let silence ask his question before
he barked it out.
Getting the message, McCoy held one hand over the
piles of hair and leaves and bits. "All these things filled
the doll. It's not just stuffing. You could throw this in a
pot and make soup. Here you've got bits of hair,
fingernails--not from the same person--buttons, something
that might be a kind of bullet, pulverized nutshells,
candle wax, caraway seeds, dried rosebuds, berry leaves,
various worts, cloves, spider's web, and over here is the
dried heart of some kind of small animal. And these
things didn't all come from the same planet." The doctor
looked up at him and meaningfully said, "I think this is a
chronologue of this creature's life. They're relics of his
experiences. If I didn't have the body, I could even
roughly guess his age from just this mannequin. It's a
facsimile of that very person over there."
"Yes," Kirk murmured, glancing back. "Zennor's has
little antlers, a crescent brooch, bands on its wrists, and
it wears his clothing. If it gets filled gradually, over a
lifetime, older beings would have more items inside their
doll than younger beings." He paced around the table
again, thinking. "So Garamanus is older than Zennor."
Seeming satisfied that he was getting his analysis across, McCoy sighed and nodded. "Very likely so."
"What was that other word you used?"
"Poppet. I was getting to that. It's a medieval practice
that came out of witchcraft and sorcery, which basically
was the first practice of medicine. Poppets were one
method of mixing mysticism with herbal medicine,
invoking sympathetic magic."
166 FIRST STRIKE
"But that's Earth. It's trillions of miles away from
where these people come from. What're you getting at?"
"That's what I'm getting at." McCoy leaned over the
table. "I'm talking about Earth. That other one--they introduced him as Garamanus Drovid, right?"
"Yes. So?"
"I did a little skipping around in my medical-history
files and there's a match. The word 'drovid' has roots in
Old English, and that was where I found the references
to poppets and midwives and sympathetic medicine."
"Bones, make your point before I stuff this mess back
in the doll and stuff it down your throat."
"First ask me where the other two wise men are."
The doctor stood back a step, pointed at the piles of
herbs and bits, then swept his hand toward the corpse on
the table in the next chamber.
"Drovid," he said. "The drovids. The 'infernal of our
past, the sinister, the banished'? Jim, don't you hear it?
These people are druids!"
167
Chapter Thirteen
"THAT'S THE WILDEST leap of logic I've ever heard," Kirk
accused. "As near as we can calculate, it's a leap across
galactic quadrants."
'I' agree." With typical sleepless diligence, Spock
scanned the information McCoy had handed over for
analysis.
Druids?
Every time Kirk heard the word in his head, he
squinted as if looking through a fog. How many times in
his career had he been faced with the inconceivable and
asked his crew to believe? Now he couldn't seem to give
himself that much cooperation.
He rubbed his sweaty palms and waited for Spock to
do the dirty wor
k.
Spock's hands and eyes moved as he keyed information
into the monitor mounted over his head. The
screens rolled with gory pictures of ancient myths that
bore startling resemblances to Zennor's crew.
"With uncharacteristic efficiency," the Vulcan barbed,
"the good doctor has stumbled upon some interesting
data."
168
FIRST STRIKE
"I do not 'stumble,' sir," McCoy aggrandized. "I am a
superior scholar in my field. I know my poppets."
Abandoning what may have been an effort to ease
pressure on the captain, Spock became suddenly clinical
and looked at Kirk with disclosed sympathy. "Lieutenant
Uhura is still working on some o the nomenclature
and linguistics using Dr. McCoy's theory, focusing on
the crossover between the old woodland religions of
western Europe and the encroachment of Christianity.
The simple folk of those times easily believed in both."
"Old religions die hard," Kirk said. "Zennor's people
are living proof. They're hanging on to theirs and looking
for scientific data to back it up."
"Real scientists do not form a theory first and look for
data second, Captain," Spock said. "However, I would
be deluding myself to deny the surprising similarities
between Zennor's race and the pantheon of Celtic folklore."
"Specifically?"
Spock hesitated, as if walking on thin ice, but offered
his typical straightforwardness. "Specifically, the
Horned God, ruling deity of winter and the hunt. It was
a beastly vehicle, usually portrayed in stag form, with
horns."
"And Zennor... sure has horns," Kirk said. "But
some of those beings have wings. Doesn't make them
angels."
"No, of course not," the doctor agreed, "but I think
this is the key to a peck of trouble. You've been going
about this all wrong, Mr. Spock, looking at arrangements
of stars and searching for archaeological evidence. These
beings look a lot like common archetypes in humanoid
culture, but not just any archetypes. Specifically archetypes
of evil. Antlers, horns, snakes, skulls -- they'll find
so much that looks like them that they'll say, 'See? We're
from here." People who are this much into their myths
will be very convinced by ours. Jim, you'd better disprove
this, because if I were them, all this Celtic stuff
would bother me."
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Diane Carey
"Celtic," Spock said unsparingly.
McCoy looked at him. "Pardon me?"
"You said 'Soltic,' Doctor. The word is 'Kltic." The
'C' had a hard sound in the ancient Gaelic language. It is
often mispronounced by the ignorant."
"Now wait a minute, Mahatma. Didn't there used to
be a baseball team called the Boston 'Soltics'?"
"Basketball," Kirk corrected, and was instantly mad
at himself for bothering.
Keenly Spock raised one punctuating brow. "An ideal
case in point."
McCoy's squarish features deployed a barrage, but he
didn't say anything.
Tilting a scowl at an innocent wall, Kirk squeezed
back a headache and reached for the nearest comm.
"Kirk to engineering."
,, ' ' Hadley, sir."
Engineering,
"Request Mr. Scott join me in the sickbay right away."
'
irn"
"Yes, sir, I'll find him.
Impatient, Kirk paced a few steps away, as if to
distance his officers from the stain of his responsibility
and the tilt of this conversation. Myths.. gods of this
and that... poppets and witchcraft. he didn't like
any of it as a basis for any decision.
"Zennor's people seem very fierce, but tolerant of each
other, as races go. They've had to live together and work
toward this common cause, and as such they've had to
believe in it, proven or not. It forced them to respect
each other's various cultural habits. They're actually
better at tolerance than the Federation, except for this
one clubfoot. This group-space idea. Zennor is smart
enough to realize the holes in all that."
"Who did they have this war with?" McCoy asked.
"Do we have the foggiest idea?"
"It was five thousand years ago," Kirk mourned.
"Maybe more than that."
"Could it have been one of the early Klingon cultures,
and maybe that's why it seems to fulfill a legend of
Chaos?"
170
FIRST STRIKE
"Havoc," Spock adjusted. "I doubt that. The Klingons
had no spacefaring capabilities in their sectors that long
ago. I suspect it was some advanced race, now long
gone."
"Or still there, in some other part of the galaxy," Kirk
pointed out. "Don't make their mistake and assume this
is the right place. Zennor said their archeologists pretty
much proved they didn't evolve on their planets. They
were all transplants. After all this time, there's no way
even to know whether they were persecuted, or if they
lost a legitimate war."
"Legends become distorted over five thousand years,"
Spock said. "The people writing them tend to skew them
in their favor. Havoc, heresy... all these are inventions
of those who wish to maintain control through threat of
supernatural punishment. In fact, the word 'heresy' is
from the Greek. It means 'free choice.""
"Well, they're exercising free choice right now, that's
for sure."
Kirk scuffed his boot heel on the deck and anchored
himself to the sound, the hard sensation of his ship
around him. The hollow ache of having lost crewmen,
especially young Brown, ate at him. And what was he
going to do with that headless body in there?
"Spock, what about their ship? What exactly are we up
against?"
"I have done extensive sweeps, but there is much
sensor masking. The ship remains essentially an unknown.
I do believe they have the raw power to push
back the Enterprise, but could they push back all of the
Klingon squadron and us as well? I have no conclusions."
"Neither do I," Kirk told him, "and I can't put my
finger on it, but there's something about his ship that
Zennor's not telling."
"Intuition, Captain?"
"If necessary."
The Vulcan frowned into his monitor screens. "I am
also questioning Garamanus's astronomical data regard-
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Diane Carey
ing the Klingon solar system as seen from the other side
of the galaxy, given the distorted nature of the galactic
core. It can not even be seen through. To send out a
probe of any effect would take hundreds
He moved one arm to tap an order to his computers,
and apparently moved too much. He suddenly stopped
speaking, choked silent by a spasm somewhere in his
injured body. Kirk covered the space to the bedside in
one step, but somehow McCoy got there first and hurriedly
adjusted the antigravs t
o take some pressure off.
So much for pain being a thing of the mind.
"Are you all right?" Kirk asked.
"Well enough, Captain." The voice was a scratch now,
still twisted with effort, and more seconds passed before
the pinch left Spock's narrow eyes and his hands began
to relax again on the fingerpads.
As they waited, the outer door parted and Chief
Engineer Scott thumped in, looking untidy and frustrated
with the day's tensions. His emblematic red shirt
was rumpled and bore the burns of a splatter of sparks.
He clearly didn't want to be here.
"You wanted me, sir?" He reached up to check the
mountings on the monitor. "All right with this, Mr.
Spock?"
Kirk squared off behind him. "Scotty, what do you
know about Celtic mythology?"
Scott twisted around, one hand still poised overhead.
"Celtic what, sir?"
"Druidic myths of supernatural beings," Spock filled
in, burying his effort. "The primary deity of hunting and
survival. The Horned God."
"Me?" The engineer looked from each to the other.
"Not much. Where'd you ever come up with all that,
sir?"
"We just wondered if all this meant anything to you,"
Kirk told him, keeping his tone even, not wanting to
hedge his bet.
"Because I'm Scottish?"
"Any port in a storm."
172
FIRST STRIKE
"Oh..." Scott's expression turned pained. "Sir...
you're barking up the wrong kilt. That Celtic druid stuff,
that's a lot of hooey!"
"That hooey may be the key to our situation. You have
druid ruins in Scotland, don't you?"
"Have we. We hang our laundry from 'em. That'n
postcards is about all they're good for."
Kirk simmered. "You don't know anything at all about
that folklore."
Glancing with a pathetic face, Scott's round eyes
