Strange New Worlds VIII

by Dean Wesley Smith

  Kirk hesitated. He knew exactly what they had to do. It was the only thing they could do. He just hated saying it. “We have to destroy the Enterprise.”

  The others stared at him silently, then nodded in agreement.

  “But, sir, how can we order self-destruct without the computer?”

  “Simple, Mister Chekov . . . we don’t use the computer.” Before anyone could reply, Kirk pressed his com button. “Kirk to Scott.”

  “Aye, Captain?”

  “Where are you now?”

  “In the corridor outside engineering.”

  “All right.” Kirk nodded. “I’ve got an idea on how to stop this thing, but I’ll need your help.”

  “Anything, Captain. I’m itching to get that thing off the ship so we can get her home for repairs.”

  Kirk took a breath and frowned. “No, Scotty . . . if my plan works, the Enterprise won’t be going anywhere . . . ever again.”

  There was a deep pause on the other end, and Kirk could almost hear the sound of Scotty’s heart shattering at the thought of losing the ship. “Aye, sir . . . I understand.”

  “Good. Here’s what I need . . . .”

  The bridge crew listened as Kirk explained what he had in mind. When he finished, Scotty acknowledged the orders. “I’ll get right on it, Captain. Scott out.”

  “Captain,” cried Uhura, “life-support is being shut down on all decks!”

  That thing is trying to kill my crew, Kirk thought. “Uhura, order everyone to abandon ship!”

  Sulu looked at the captain. “Sir, launching escape pods while the ship is in warp is extremely dangerous.”

  “We have no choice. Order the evacuation, Uhura.” Kirk contacted Scott again. “We’re abandoning ship, Scotty. Once you’ve completed my orders, get your people to escape pods. Understood?”

  “Captain, I can’t just leave—”

  “That’s an order, Scotty. No arguments.” Then Kirk cut communications before Scott could say another word.

  “Captain,” said Sulu, “you’ll need help and we volunteer to stay behind.”

  Kirk smiled. “Gentlemen, I appreciate your devotion, but I want you all out of here as soon as possible.” He turned to look at Uhura. “You’ve done everything you can. Now follow me.”

  Kirk led them to an emergency access hatch. He felt it was a safer way to travel in case the turbolifts suddenly malfunctioned. After popping open the hatch, they crawled down a narrow ladder.

  On deck four, Kirk bid the others a final good luck and stepped into the corridor. As he jogged off, he noticed his breathing was harder. The physical exertion coupled with the thinning oxygen made it difficult to breathe. The air was much colder, too. Rubbing his hands together for warmth, he hurried on—and almost slammed right into a crewman wearing an environmental suit.

  “Captain?”

  Kirk peered into the large translucent faceplate and saw Mister Scott staring back. “Scotty—” he began, then stopped to catch his breath.

  Grabbing Kirk’s arm to support him, Scott held up another environmental suit. “Here, sir, you’ll be needing this.”

  Nodding, Kirk donned the bulky garb and activated it. Fresh oxygen filled his mask and he took a deep, welcome breath.

  “They’re ready for you, sir,” proclaimed Scott.

  “And how do I activate them?”

  “With this.” Scott handed him a tricorder. “Just enter this code—” He indicated the sequence. “—and you have ten minutes to get off the ship.”

  “I don’t want ten minutes. I want a reaction to occur the moment I enter the code.”

  “But, sir,” Scotty looked horror stricken, “how can you get off the ship if—?”

  “I won’t be leaving the ship, Scotty. We only have one chance at this. If it doesn’t work the first time, I need to be here to reprogram the tricorder for a second try.”

  The chief engineer stared at his captain for a moment; then he nodded. “Aye. In that case, you’ll be needing someone who knows how to reprogram it, sir . . . and that would be me.”

  Kirk was about to argue, then stopped and sighed. “Thank you, Scotty. Now let’s go check out your handiwork.”

  The two officers moved as quickly as the suits would allow. Soon they reached a large doorway at the end of the corridor. It slid open and Kirk examined the bay inside. Secured racks lined the walls as far as he could see. And each was filled with large, black cylindrical objects.

  Photon torpedoes.

  Just one was powerful enough to destroy an unprotected starship—and Kirk planned to detonate all of them.

  Steeling themselves for what was about to come, they stepped into the bay and the doors slid shut behind them.

  “I’ve reprogrammed the tricorder,” said Scott, handing it to Kirk. “Once you enter the sequence, the torpedoes will detonate immediately.”

  “Good.” Kirk nodded. “Everyone should be safely away by now . . . so let’s do it!”

  His fingers hovered over the tricorder a moment; then he turned to the man beside him. “Scotty . . . ”

  A silent message passed between them. “Aye, Captain, I know. It’s been an honor for me, as well. Now . . . let’s send this beastie back to hell—”

  And then the doors exploded inward. They hit Scotty full force, slamming him against the bulkhead. Kirk wasn’t hit, but the explosion knocked him back several feet, and knocked the tricorder from his hand. If not for the strap wrapped around his wrist, it would have scattered across the deck.

  Shaking his head to clear the ringing in his ears, Kirk turned toward Scott. But he could tell by the way the engineer’s body was bent that the man was dead.

  With a flash of anger, Kirk turned to see a sphere of cerulean energy filling the damaged doorway. The alien.

  A glowing tendril, like the tentacle of some hellish sea creature, snaked toward him. Quickly, he tugged hard at the tricorder strap and pulled the unit to him. Then he held it up, entered all but the last number in the code—

  The alien reached him.

  Kirk screamed as every nerve in his body seemed to rupture. The entity held him against the deck as a tremendous energy bombarded him relentlessly.

  Suddenly, he heard a voice—or something like a voice—inside his head. It told him that he had failed. The ship belonged to it—and his entire crew was dead. Over two hundred people were now dead, because the alien had destroyed the escape pods right after they launched.

  McCoy. Uhura. Sulu. Chekov.

  Everyone . . . dead!

  “NO!!” Kirk screamed.

  The voice told him that he, too, would die, and it would continue on to his homeworld. Images of more death and destruction flooded Kirk’s mind. Billions of people suffering and dying.

  As if the being could read his thoughts, the alien told him that there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  Then, even through the excruciating pain, Kirk remembered the tricorder. He was not going to fail. His crew was gone, but he would do everything in his power to prevent the loss of Earth.

  Somehow he willed his trembling thumb to move to the tricorder. With one final defiant cry, Kirk completed the destruct code—

  —and his entire world vanished in a flash of light.

  * * *

  Opening his eyes, James T. Kirk looked around—and wondered where the hell he was.

  All he could make out were blurred images and a very bright light. He raised an arm to shield his eyes, and one of the blurred images moved toward him. It was a humanoid . . . with pointed ears.

  “Spock?” he whispered weakly.

  “No, Captain,” replied a deep, calm voice. “Please rest. It will take a few moments for the effects to wear off.”

  Kirk blinked and the figure came into sharper focus. It was a Vulcan. But not Spock. Spock was dead.

  His entire crew was dead.

  But . . . why aren’t I dead?

  He realized he was lying on some sort of reclining chair. Gathering his strength,
he sat up. Swallowing, Kirk tried to moisten his dry lips. “Effects? What effects?”

  “Here, drink this.”

  The Vulcan gave him a cup of water, which he sipped slowly. Looking around again, Kirk saw that he was in the center of a dark room. The only illumination was a lamp somewhere above, surrounding him in a circle of light.

  “Where am I? Is this a Starfleet vessel? Did you beam me over before my ship blew?” And then he added anxiously, “Did you manage to rescue anyone else?”

  “Don’t worry, Jim,” a different voice said. “The Enterprise is fine . . . and so is your crew.”

  Squinting, Kirk tried to locate the source of the voice. “Who . . . ?”

  A man stepped into the circle of light. A man Kirk recognized immediately. “Commodore Wesley? . . . Bob?”

  “Jim. It’s been a while.”

  The last time Kirk saw Wesley was during the M-5 fiasco. The Federation’s “ultimate computer” had taken control of the Enterprise and attacked three other starships, including Wesley’s own, the Lexington. The irony of the similarities between that situation and this one was not lost on Kirk.

  “With all due respect, Commodore, what the hell is going on? Why am I not dead?”

  “Perhaps you should rest before—”

  Kirk stood up. “I’m ready to talk now.”

  The commodore could tell by the edge in Kirk’s voice that it was more than a request. “Fine. Follow me.”

  As Wesley turned and stepped away, the room was suddenly filled with light. Kirk blinked a moment as his eyes adjusted, then surveyed his surroundings. It didn’t look like a starship cabin. It looked more like an office on a starbase.

  Wesley walked behind a single desk and motioned to a chair in front of it. “Have a seat.”

  Kirk took one more sip of water and turned to set it down; then his blood ran cold when he realized exactly what he had been sitting on. It was a large metallic chair with two circular appendages rising up from the top and positioned on both sides of where his head had been. He had seen a chair like it only one other time in his life, on the Tantalus V penal colony when Doctor Tristan Adams used it—to try and empty his mind.

  “I see you recognize our equipment,” said Wesley as he sat down.

  Kirk nodded. “A neural neutralizer.” He turned and gave Wesley a cold, hard stare. “Exactly where am I, Commodore? And what is this thing doing here? I thought it was destroyed.”

  “The original was destroyed, yes, but not the technology. It was too valuable to discard.”

  “Valuable? For what?”

  “To do exactly what we just did, Jim. Determine whether or not you have the psychological strength we need.”

  Kirk walked over and plopped the cup of water on the desk, ignoring the fact that a good deal of it splattered on the surface. “You’re not making any sense, Commodore. I want to know exactly what happened to my crew, and I want to know now!”

  “Of course,” Wesley smiled and motioned to the other chair again. “Please . . . .” After Kirk finally sat, Wesley leaned back. “It’s actually pretty simple, Jim. What you just experienced wasn’t real . . . it was a test.”

  Kirk frowned. “A . . . test? You aren’t making any sense. I told you I wanted to know what happened to my crew.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you, Jim. Your crew is fine. They’re right here with us.”

  “Where is ‘here’?” Kirk asked.

  “Starbase 9.”

  “We were brought back to the starbase?”

  “You never left.”

  During his years as captain of the Enterprise, Kirk had made first contact with dozens of alien life-forms, some speaking the strangest languages he had ever heard. Yet every single one of them had still made a hell of a lot more sense to him than Wesley was making at that point.

  “I can understand how confusing this must be, so let me start from the beginning.” Leaning forward, the commodore began, “I was recently assigned to a covert-operations group known as Section 31.”

  “I’ve never heard of Section 31.”

  “Very few people have, and that’s the way we want it. Our organization handles very . . . special assignments, Jim. Assignments that fall outside Starfleet parameters. Assignments that deal with problems that can’t be resolved by following the standard rules and regulations the rest of Starfleet must follow.”

  “You’re a shadow-operations group.”

  Wesley shrugged. “You could say that.”

  “Commodore,” Kirk said, rubbing a knot in his neck, “this is all very interesting, but what does this have to do with my ship and crew?”

  “I told you, Jim, your crew is fine. As I said before, what you experienced wasn’t real. It was all part of an evaluation. Think of it as a variation—albeit a far more advanced variation—of the Kobayashi Maru scenario, designed to determine how you’d react to a no-win situation. Only, you can’t fix this one, Jim, not like you did at the Academy. After all, how can you change the outcome of a test . . . if you don’t know you’re taking it?”

  Kirk shook his head. “That was no test, Commodore. I saw—”

  “What you saw . . . was all in your mind.”

  “My—?” Kirk’s eyes darkened as he suddenly understood what Wesley was implying. He turned and stared at the neural neutralizer. “You used that . . . on me?”

  “Yes. But not just that . . . it was a combination of the neutralizer and a Vulcan mind-meld.”

  Kirk saw the Vulcan standing to the right of the neutralizer, arms resting behind his back. He was older than Spock, with a streak of gray in his jet black hair.

  “This is Doctor Syral,” said Wesley. “He’s a civilian member of my team. A brilliant psychologist.”

  The Vulcan merely nodded.

  “We’ve improved upon the technology behind the neutralizer,” explained Wesley. “It’s much more advanced than the one you saw on Tantalus V.”

  Kirk turned to face the commodore. “You mean the one that almost killed me?”

  Wesley ignored the comment. “We programmed it with what we call the ‘Demon’ scenario, in which an indestructible alien being takes over your starship. Then we enter psychological profiles of your crew so that their reactions will seem more natural. The program is then actually run within your mind. It’s much like a dream, though you think it is real, and we can adjust and control the outcome. At the same time Doctor Syral performs a mind-meld to control the direction of the scenario and monitor your reactions.”

  Kirk couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “How long have I been here? When did this scenario of yours begin?”

  “Right after you had drinks with Commander Offutt,” answered Wesley. “Bumping into your old friend wasn’t a coincidence, Jim . . . Mark Offutt works with us.”

  Kirk was silent, yet the look on his face betrayed his feeling of shock.

  “It’s true,” said Wesley. “You’d be surprised to learn who works with us. Anyway, the commander slipped a sedative into your drink—”

  “A sedative?” Kirk frowned. “That explains why I got drunk so fast.”

  “Correct. But rather than taking you to a hotel, as you ‘remember,’ he brought you to us.”

  Kirk gritted his teeth. The more he heard about Wesley’s test, the more it angered him. “Why did you do this to me?”

  “Your five-year mission is about to end,” explained Wesley, “and when you return to Earth in two months, we know that Starfleet Command will be promoting you to rear admiral once you relinquish command of the Enterprise.”

  “Rear admiral?” Kirk shook his head. “I’ll be damned if I’ll spend the rest of my career wasting time behind some desk.”

  “We agree,” said Wesley. “It would be a waste . . . of your talent and experience. That’s why we wanted you with us, Jim, to join our organization as head of a task force. But before we offered you the position, we needed to know if you were psychologically fit to handle it.”

 
; “I experienced the death of every member of my crew,” Kirk stated slowly, “just so you could determine whether or not I was ready to join your team?”

  “Exactly.”

  Kirk stood and leaned over the desk, fury igniting his eyes. “Who the hell do you think are, Wesley?”

  The commodore’s face darkened. “I am your superior officer . . . Captain! And you will give me the respect due that rank. Is that clear?”

  Kirk fought the urge to tell him what he could do with his rank. Clenching his fist, he forced himself to sit.

  “The test is necessary, Jim. As a task-force commander you would encounter dangers worse than anything a standard Starfleet officer faces. Not only that, but you would be utilizing weaponry and technology only we have access to. We can’t allow them to fall into the wrong hands. That’s why you must be willing to sacrifice your crew and your ship at a moment’s notice. So we had to know if you are capable of doing that—without hesitation.”

  “I’ve been in more than one situation where I’ve ordered the self-destruct of my ship, Commodore,” Kirk retorted. “So why subject me to this test of yours?”

  “Because you’ve never actually followed through with it,” replied Wesley. “You’ve always managed to find another option so the self-destruct order wasn’t necessary. That in itself is a quality we’re looking for, but we had to know that if you truly faced a no-win scenario, you would actually push the button, so to speak.”

  Kirk had had enough. He stood again and stared at Wesley. “Dammit, Commodore, using this type of technology to play with people’s minds was wrong on Tantalus V, and it’s wrong now! It’s a violation of my rights and my mind!”

  “I’m not here to debate the ethical use of the neutralizer, Captain. I’m here to decide if you’re the right person for Section 31. To see if you live up to our ideals.”

  “Then don’t waste your time, Commodore,” Kirk spat out. “Or mine! I’m not interested in you or your group. Anyone who would treat me or anyone else like this doesn’t live up to my ideals. I want nothing to do with you!”

  The commodore raised his eyebrows. “And what makes you think you actually passed the test?”

  Kirk blinked. “What?”

  “To put it bluntly, you failed.” Wesley stood to face Kirk. “Oh, we were very impressed with your performance, but Doctor Syral informed me that you have a few character flaws that disqualify you.”