“It’s still too early to tell,” Akins said.
The same thing he had told her.
Captain Skaerbaek leaned forward right into Akins’s face. “Doctor, when will you know for sure? When they are all dead?”
Tegan wanted to shout for joy and give the captain a massive hug. It was the exact question she would have asked, if anyone would have listened.
Akins’s face turned red and he actually sputtered. The little man swallowed and glanced around, but the captain didn’t back away.
“I want an answer, Doctor,” Skaerbaek said. “How long were you intending to wait before you were convinced the shielding wasn’t helping these patients?”
Akins took a deep breath and stared right back at the captain. Tegan could tell that the doctor was not used to the captain treating him this way.
“This is a medical problem,” Akins said. “A brand-new one that has never been dealt with before. There are no guidelines, no prescribed treatments for this. I was using the best judgment I could. I believe that given enough time, the shields of this ship will help the patients.”
“All right,” the captain said, “that aside, let me ask you this. Are you fairly certain that removing these patients from the proximity of olivium would save them?”
“Yes, I think it would,” Akins said. “But we can’t be sure of even that.”
“So why haven’t you asked me to move this ship out of this system to test that theory? Or even suggested that possibility to me? It wasn’t until I was talking to Ms. Welch just a short time ago that it dawned on me that you hadn’t even planned for such a contingency.”
Tegan wanted to rush forward and slap the little doctor, then take his stubby neck in her hands and break it off. He had told her that they would move the ship if needed. Now the captain was saying that he hadn’t even been asked for such a thing. No wonder her accusations had struck a nerve with the captain.
“It wasn’t necessary yet, sir,” Akins said, weakly.
“A man died today, Doctor!” the captain shouted right in Akins’s face. “How much more necessary does it get?”
“Captain, there’s something else going on here,” Tegan said.
Akins shrunk back, sputtered denials, and then decided to say nothing.
“I’m beginning to think there must be,” the captain agreed. On a hunch, he used the intercom to call to the bridge. “Captain here. Requesting a scan of the interior of the ship for the presence of olivium.”
“Aye, sir,” the reply came back. “Sir,” the excited crewmen’s voice said on the intercom, “showing significant quantifies of olivium in the cargo hold.”
Captain Skaerbaek stood. “So that’s it. What was going on, Doctor? Picking up a little spaceborne olivium for your back pocket?” He turned to Tegan. “You were right. Something was going on. This bastard has something rigged to pick up olivium left over in orbit.
“So,” the captain continued, “if we moved the ship, and the patients kept dying, we’d know something was wrong. We’d find his secret stash. Is that about right, Doctor?”
Akins had no reply. He simply stared at his feet.
“Doctor, you are under arrest.” The captain used the intercom to summon a security team. “You will be rotated to the surface to face colonial justice on a murder charge.”
“You can’t do that!” Atkins shouted. “I was going to be rich. . . .”
“Yes, I can,” Skaerbaek said, staring at the shorter man without the slightest bit of worry. “And I just did.”
Akins stared at Skaerbaek for a moment; then the security team arrived and he was taken away.
Silence filled the lounge, and then Captain Skaerbaek turned to her and smiled. “Don’t worry. The olivium in the cargo hold will be dumped now. Dr. Immi will take over Charles’s treatment. As soon as Gamma Night is over, I’ll move the ship out of the system. Far enough that the subspace effects of olivium are at a minimum.”
All Tegan could do was just stare at him and smile. She wanted to cry, but wasn’t going to allow herself to do that. Not until Charles had recovered. Finally she managed to say, “Thank you, Captain.”
He smiled at her. “So you won’t take my shuttle now?”
He might as well have hooked her up to an electric current and thrown the switch. She actually staggered backward, then looked into his eyes. “You knew?”
“I suspected,” he said, trying not to smile.
“How?”
“They don’t make you a captain for nothing. I’m sure you want to go check on Charles now. And if you’ll excuse me,” the captain said grimly, “I have to go talk to Betty Sterling and explain why her husband really died.”
Pardonnet walked the edge of the canyon as the sun came up over the desert. The air was surprisingly cold and crisp and smelled fresh. The graveyard shift was just heading for dinner and the morning crews were taking their places. He had three shifts of workers going around the clock, putting the roof over this canyon, carving out rooms in the rock walls, building a sewer and a water supply system. Putting together a town large enough to hold sixty thousand people was no easy task, especially when the time to do it was growing shorter by the hour.
Already almost half of the colony’s entire population lived here in one fashion or another. Many were in makeshift shelters on the desert, but some had started to live below. More would move into the canyon today.
The roof now covered a full kilometer of the canyon, stretching off behind him like a flat, gray bubble on the desert floor. It had been tested successfully for leaks of any kind, and his engineers promised him the roof would stay in place in hurricane-level winds.
He forced himself to stop and take a few, long breaths of the morning air, trying to clear his mind. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept more than an hour, and he had no doubt he wasn’t going to get much more than that today. In just under thirty minutes, Gamma Night was going to clear and he would get an updated report of the spread of the siliconic gel over the planet. It was moving far, far faster than anyone had thought it would.
Luckily, the desert area was one of the least contaminated areas, but even this desert would be swallowed by the siliconic gel in three or four days. The canyon city was going to have to be bundled up tight by then.
Also, when the communication lines opened, he hoped to hear if one, maybe two of the mule colony ships were ready for habitation. Both the Starfleet engineering crews and some of his best people had been working around the clock trying to put back together a few of the ships. If one or two of those ships were ready, he was planning on sending a percentage of the people back up there.
For some reason it just felt safer that way. He would feel better if the colony population was in three or four places, but he would settle for two at the moment. And then hope the scientists could figure out a way to stop the siliconic gel, break it down, before the planet became a wasteland.
Two more deep breaths and he headed back along the finished edge of the canyon’s roof toward his command center. He needed to be there when Gamma Night cleared.
To his right the sun broke over the horizon, sending reddish streaks of light over the desert around him. Someday soon he hoped to stand on Belle Terre and enjoy a sunrise without having to worry about thousands of people just surviving to the end of the day.
Assuming of course, there was a planet left to stand on when this was all over.
Chapter Fourteen
THIRTY-FIVE MINUTES before Gamma Night was about to lift, Spock walked back onto the Enterprise bridge. For the last half-hour Kirk had been in his command chair, going over the plan to capture the Kauld asteroid observation station. Sulu was again at the helm beside Thomsen at navigation, and Uhura was at communications.
Scotty would be beaming back from the mule ship the instant Gamma Night lifted. Scotty didn’t know that yet, but with what they were going to do, Kirk wanted Scotty on board just in case he was needed.
He glanced around as Spock
went to his station and stood ready. Spock had worked for nine hours straight on trying to discover a way to break down the siliconic gel and stop the nanoassemblers from creating more siliconic gel polymers in the soil. Kirk had spent most of the ten hours in sickbay, sitting with Lilian. Her condition hadn’t changed. That might be a good sign or a bad sign. McCoy said he had no way of knowing.
Kirk pushed himself out of his chair and moved up beside his science officer. “Anything to report?”
“I was able to take apart a number of the nanoassemblers,” Spock said. “Any builder of self-replicating nanomachines logically puts in a fail-safe stop device. I looked for such a mechanism and found it.”
“Great,” Kirk said. “So we can stop them?”
“The nanoassemblers can be stopped by an exact, ultrasonic combination of seven sounds. In the last six hours I have tried fourteen thousand, six hundred and ten such combinations without success.”
“Oh,” Kirk said. “How many more possible combinations are there?”
“Captain,” Spock said, “at this rate I estimate we will run through all the possible sound combinations in approximately six years and nineteen days.”
Kirk couldn’t believe that figure. “Six years?”
“And nineteen days,” Spock said, calmly, as if repeating that number were going to make the slightest difference at all.
“Just about six years too late to save this planet,” Kirk said, disgusted.
“It was an ingenious fail-safe method,” Spock said. “I am impressed by the Kauld construction and creative thought that went into building the nanoassemblers.”
“I’m glad,” Kirk said, shaking his head and looking at the fuzzy image on the big screen. “You can tell them when you see them. Do you have any other good news to report?”
“No, Captain,” Spock said.
“Thank heavens,” Kirk said. “I’m not sure if I could take any more.”
Sulu laughed.
“Looks to me as if we’re going to have to go get the sound combination from the Kauld,” Kirk said, returning to his chair. “Mr. Sulu, I want you to have a course laid in that will put us between that asteroid and those Kauld warships before they even know we’re coming.”
“Understood,” Sulu said, “but it will take jumping to warp inside a system.”
“Do it,” Kirk said. “Mr. Spock, I want you and an armed security team to be ready to beam inside that asteroid the instant we are in range. I want the information to stop those nanoassemblers and I don’t care how you get it.”
“Understood, Captain,” Spock said, heading for the lift. At the door Spock stopped and turned. “Captain, you realize that the Kauld, once they know the station has been captured, will do everything in their power to destroy it.”
“I’m counting on that, Mr. Spock,” Kirk said.
Spock nodded and left the bridge.
Kirk sat and stared at the fuzzy, Gamma Night– blocked image on the screen. The outcome of what they were about to try might just be the very survival of Belle Terre. They had to find a way to stop those nanoassemblers, and quickly. Even a week from now Belle Terre would be a dead planet.
“Uhura, I want Chief Engineer Scott on board five seconds after Gamma Night drops, and I don’t care what he’s doing at the time. Don’t even warn him. Just lock on to him and beam him over. And I want an open line to the Royal York and Hunter’s Moon.”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“Ten minutes until Gamma Night clears,” Sulu said.
Kirk went back over the positions of those Kauld warships in his head. The Enterprise and the other two Starfleet ships were going to be on the Kauld ships almost instantly, as far as the Kauld were concerned. The Enterprise could handle two or three of them, especially with the element of surprise, but not all six. The other privateers were going to have to take a few of the warships on. No matter what happened, he had to protect that asteroid, if the information he expected was on there. And if it was, Mr. Spock would find it.
Yanorada stared at the main screen, still fuzzy. Over the last ten hours he had sat and fumed and planned and then fumed some more. In all his life he had never been so frustrated and angry. His life was information, yet now, at the peak moment of his greatest victory, he was sitting blind and deaf. An intolerable situation. And if he remained on the normal plan, he would be forced to sit inside this rock, remaining dumb and blind, for another twenty hours waiting for the next Blind. Twenty hours without information, and with no guarantee it would come in even then.
That situation was not possible for him to endure.
Since the military had been stupid enough to send ships to protect him, he figured he might as well use them for just that. When the Blind lifted, he and his two assistants would be ready to run full, open-frequency scans of what was happening on Belle Terre. And how the humans were reacting to it.
The scans would give away their position clearly, to anyone looking, but he would have the six warships take up a new position between the asteroid and the planet. If any humans thought to attack the station and stop the scanning, they would first have to deal with the Kauld warships.
“One minute until the passing of the Blind,” Relaagith said.
“Ready all scanning equipment,” Yanorada ordered. “I want a direct link into the laser relay station first, to download the information there, then a summary of the current planetwide situation.”
Yanorada sat back and smiled at the empty screens in front of him. Soon his wait would be over. Soon he would be able to see how his brilliance was working against the humans. And how many of them were dead.
The screen in front of Kirk suddenly cleared, showing the asteroid observation station and the six Kauld warships, still all in the same position as ten hours earlier. It felt wonderful to be able to see again. Someday they were going to figure out a way to get around this Gamma Night problem. The sooner the better, as far as he was concerned.
“Chief Engineer Scott is on board,” Uhura said.
“Sulu, put us between those ships and that asteroid.”
“You got it, Captain,” Sulu said. His hands seemed to fly across the board. The Enterprise appeared to jump at the Kauld ships. Kirk knew that Sulu was making a warp jump inside a system. That was not something normally done, but allowed under certain emergency circumstances. And this was clearly one of those circumstances.
“Open a channel to the privateers,” Kirk ordered, watching the screen intently for any change in the enemy ships. So far they weren’t moving. He doubted if the report that they were moving had even reached a command person yet.
“Channel open,” Uhura reported.
“Enterprise to Royal York and Hunter’s Moon. Battle stations. Follow us.”
“Right behind you,” Captain Kilvennan of the Hunter’s Moon said. “Already under way.”
“Lead the way,” Captain Gillespie replied.
“Both ships have matched our speed,” Sulu reported. “They must have been ready.”
Kirk laughed. “All good minds think alike.”
“We’ll arrive in position in twelve seconds,” Sulu said.
“Battle stations,” Kirk said. “Arm phasers and torpedoes and stand by for my orders.”
“Armed and ready,” Sulu said. “Within transporter range of the asteroid observation station in five seconds.”
Kirk jammed his finger on the com button. “Ready, Mr. Spock?”
“Ready, sir,” Spock’s calm voice came back. “Sensors read three inhabitants of the observation station.”
Kirk nodded. That was fewer than he had hoped. Good.
“In range,” Sulu said.
“Do it, Spock,” Kirk ordered.
“In position,” Sulu reported a few moments later. “All stop.”
“Hunter’s Moon and Royal York are taking up positions on either side of us,” Uhura said.
Kirk stared at the six Kauld warships spread out in front of him. Behind him, inside the asteroid obse
rvation station, he hoped Mr. Spock and the security team were securing the three inhabitants. If the Kauld had not traced the beam-in, then possibly they would not be anxious to destroy the asteroid right away.
“Open a hailing frequency to the Kauld warships,” Kirk ordered.
“Open,” Uhura said.
“On screen,” Kirk said, standing.
The image of a Kauld warlord filled the screen. “What is the meaning of this?”
“I was about to ask you the same thing,” Kirk said. “Why have you stationed six warships on the edge of this system? You have no business here.”
The Kauld captain looked slightly confused for an instant. He glanced at something offscreen; then his composure returned.
Kirk figured the Kauld captain was wondering if the asteroid observation station was still secret. So he pressed the issue before the Kauld had a chance to answer. “You have no visible reason for being in this system unless it is to attack us again. We have no desire for a fight, but we will not hesitate in defending ourselves. And you know we can do that.”
Again the Kauld captain looked slightly confused. Finally he smiled at Kirk. “We understood you are having some environmental problems on your planet. We were only observing.”
“The problems of the Belle Terre colony are not something I ever intend discussing with you,” Kirk said. “And our problems are none of your business. Now, leave the area!”
“No,” the Kauld captain said.
The Kauld cut the connection. The image of the six warships again filled the screen.
“Target the engine room of that main ship and fire phasers,” Kirk said, dropping down into his chair. “Keep us between them and that asteroid no matter what you do.”
“Understand, sir,” Sulu said as the phaser fire hit the closest Kauld warship.
The Royal York and the Hunter’s Moon opened fire a second behind the Enterprise, both at the same time, on the same ship.
It was overkill, plain and simple.
The Kauld warship’s screens flashed through the color spectrum and went down. The Enterprise’s phasers tore apart the Kauld engine room while the other Starfleet ships cut into the body.
STAR TREK®: NEW EARTH - THIN AIR Page 11
