Crisis On Centaurus

by Brad Ferguson

  With the environmental chaos aboard the Enterprise, Spock had not had a chance to study the ship's computers themselves; the science officer had spent most of the day patching manual controls for ship's functions and interrogating the computer software to see if the source of the ship's problems lay there.

  It didn't. Spock had quickly found that all software errors could be attributed to a hardware breakdown of some sort. Spock wondered about that: In all his experience, he had never seen a computer hardware breakdown of such magnitude. The Vulcan had never heard of even a minor breakdown involving the quintuply-redundant computers aboard a Starfleet cruiser. If one component should fail, its four backups would handle traffic until someone could make a repair.

  In the Enterprise's case, all the main computer systems—except for navigation and a handful of others—had failed utterly; the backups had not taken over. Spock intended to find out why, and had gone down to the computer room to find out.

  The Vulcan was dressed in an immaculately clean coverall; he was gloved and booted, and he wore a face mask, tool belt, air tank and fishbowl helmet. His equipment had been carefully vacuumed. A grounded wire trailed Spock to carry static electricity away from his body. The precautions were not for Spock's benefit, but the computers'. No grime, no dust could be tolerated here. An operating theater was a germy pigsty compared to a Starfleet computer room.

  Spock had not been in the room in more than two years—not since he'd had to repair damage done to the primary memory banks by a disgruntled records officer named Finney. Finney'd been in and out of the computer room repeatedly, without having taken sanitary precautions; Spock had even found a food wrapper on the floor. The Vulcan had almost gotten angry.

  The Enterprise carried two hundred thirty-six computer banks, all tied together into one megasized electronic brain. The banks were closely stacked like a row of thin dominoes and were seated in a protective chamber set flush into a specially constructed bulkhead. Spock thought it not incorrect to liken the structure of the computer banks to a set of printed-on-paper books sitting on a library shelf—except that this shelf held the cultural inheritance of many planets and races.

  The capacity of the computers aboard the Enterprise was at least one hundred times greater than the total computer capacity available on Earth in the year 2200. The computer banks represented more than three hundred years of progress in the design and manufacture of artificial intelligence machines. Its incredible memory held all the knowledge the ship needed to function, an encyclopedia of all historical and scientific facts, a library of all major and many minor literary and artistic works from all Federation worlds—in short, everything anyone ever wanted or would need to know about anything.

  But now the computers were nearly mute and couldn't tell Spock much at all.

  The Vulcan faced the wall of computer banks and consulted his tricorder. His right eyebrow went up in surprise as the instrument's sensors began to wiggle. Radiation? the Vulcan thought. Primary, secondary, tertiary—characteristic of nuclear fission . . . very strange. Spock saw from his readings that he was in no danger; the radiation level was not harmful to a humanoid. But the radiation level in this protected room should have been zero.

  Spock noted that while the tricorder indicated the aftereffects of nuclear fission—or something like it—there was no trace of fissionable material anywhere in the room. The science officer quickly set his tricorder to make a full sweep of the computer room, using all sensors at once.

  Ah, Spock thought with some satisfaction. A temperature anomaly … in the direction of the computer banks. A very slight warmth. He looked at the long row of computer banks, set into the wall. Nothing seemed wrong, at least at first glance. By touch Spock located the inertial screwdriver on his tool belt and walked over to the middle of the computer banks. As he approached he looked the banks over carefully. Spock saw nothing.

  Spock stood before the thirty-fifth bank and touched it with the 'driver on the correct spot; the bank withdrew itself from the wall, sliding out easily. The waferlike bank was about as tall as he was, only six centimeters thick, and about a meter and a half wide; four centimeters of bulkhead insulated this bank from the next one in the series. The Vulcan touched his inertial 'driver to each of the small screws holding the cover of the bank onto its chassis. He watched as the 'driver disrupted the field attaching the screws to the chassis, allowing the screws to pop up for removal by hand. Spock pulled out the screws, gathered them together, and carefully placed them in a pouch on his tool belt. He then gripped the face of the bank and pulled it away from the chassis.

  Spock's right eyebrow rose in surprise. There was a tiny, clean, perfectly circular hole drilled into the super-tough material of the computer bank grid. As a result the bank was disrupted, shorted out, wiped clean: It was utterly dead.

  Spock inspected twenty more banks chosen at random before concluding that more than eighty-eight percent of the ship's computer capacity was irretrievably gone. All the affected banks had that mysterious, tiny hole in them in exactly the same place, just below and to the right of the center—and as small as it might be, a hole such as that was more than enough to shatter the delicate molecular balance of a grid; each bank depended on that critical balance for its rationality. The only banks still working were the fourteen leftmost and the twelve rightmost, where only a few of the ship's routines were stored. The ship still had navigational control because those routines were stored in banks five and six—but the gravity control routines, for instance, were stored in bank fifty-three, and that bank was dead.

  The Vulcan quickly satisfied himself that everything that had gone wrong aboard the Enterprise could be traced to the destruction of the computer hardware. Spock fretted at not being able to attack the problem immediately—and he was not sure what he could do, anyway—but the captain had to be informed that the brain of his ship was gone and could not be restored.

  Chapter Six:

  Near Centaurus

  Captain's log, stardate 7513.9:

  We are finally nearing the Alpha Centauri star system—and apparently just in the nick of time.

  I have received Mr. Spock's report on the condition of our computer banks. I am very disturbed by this—yet a full investigation must await the resolution of more immediate problems on Centaurus. My first thought was of sabotage, perhaps in connection with our current mission, so I have quietly ordered Security to be alert in watching for any such attempts.

  But it hardly seems that further sabotage—if there was any in the first place—is necessary. The ship's electrical systems have begun to fail again. Chief MacPherson is now using just about every internal communications channel to carry power—as he'd done on the bridge earlier—but the free water that was floating around the ship this morning seems to have gotten into everything, despite Mr. Scott's efforts at filtering. The ship may require a nearly complete rewiring … a job only a starbase can handle.

  Mr. Scott continues to keep a close watch on the matter-antimatter intermix for our warp engines—and he reports more and more trouble in keeping things balanced. With almost all computer systems irrational, Mr. Scott has been controlling the intermix manually—and no human can deliver the billionth-of-a-second balancing corrections needed for smooth operation of the engines. Those small imbalances are beginning to add up—and the best we can expect is an engine burnout, perhaps soon. The worst—well …

  The bridge crackled with anticipation as the main screen began picking up a visual of the triple-sun Alpha Centauri star group—the bright yellow star Alpha Centauri, half again as bright as Sol when seen from Earth; Beta Centauri, a fiery orange star bigger than Alpha but only a quarter as bright; and, very hard to see, Proxima Centauri, a small red dwarf orbiting Alpha and only 1/13,000th as bright as Sol, its closest stellar neighbor. The planet Centaurus—Alpha Centauri IV—orbited Alpha at an average distance of nearly two hundred million kilometers; those on the bridge strained to see it, but at that distance it was impossible
, even at full magnification.

  The Enterprise continued to make a steady warp five, thanks to the steady hand of Mr. Scott's manual intermix control, Sulu's smooth helmsmanship, and the superbly tolerant design of the ship's much-abused warp engines.

  But the ride couldn't last much longer.

  The three suns grew steadily larger as Kirk and the others on the bridge watched. Spock, again seated at his science station, looked steadily into his viewer for some faint sign of subspace communications with Centaurus. In her headphones Uhura heard only an occasional squawk or gasp that could have been a transmission—or mere star chatter.

  "Crossing into Alpha Centauri system now, Captain," Chekov reported.

  We made it, Kirk thought gratefully. "Mr. Sulu, reduce speed to warp one and take us in to Centaurus," he ordered. "Mr. Chekov, get us a course for a standard orbit around the planet; I want to slip in without delay or undue ship's movement. Lieutenant Uhura, begin full monitoring of non-subspace frequencies, as we discussed; we're only a few light-hours from Centaurus now."

  The orders were acknowledged and Kirk swung his chair to face Spock's station. "Anything, Mr. Spock?" Kirk asked.

  "No, Captain," the Vulcan replied, still gazing into his viewer. "I am picking up energetic tachyonic readings from the direction of Centaurus; I presume those are from the site of the explosion. I am also picking up a great quantity of subsidiary nuclear radiation, but I am not sure of its source … except to say that it is on or near the planet. Studying the data will give us a better idea of precisely what is going on—but without the computers to help, I feel we will be at Centaurus before I can come up with anything useful—"

  "Captain," Uhura interrupted. "I have a very weak transmission coming in from Centaurus in the kilohertz range."

  "Put it on audio, Lieutenant," Kirk ordered.

  A rush of sound came through the speakers on the bridge. There might have been a human voice, or a hundred, in there.

  "Can you filter that, Uhura?" Kirk asked, concentrating on that strange, echoing rush of sound. He left his chair and walked over to the communications station.

  "I'm trying, sir," the communications officer said over her shoulder. "We're stretching the sensors to the limit. Part of what you're hearing are four-year-old radio transmissions we're picking up from Earth and the other planets around Sol."

  Uhura bent to her task as the others on the bridge remained silent, their ears straining to pick something sensible out of that eerie, vast conglomeration of raw sound. Gradually Uhura whittled the noise down to a group of not more than a dozen transmissions; she played them in the clear one by one.

  Kirk listened as the first came up: a play-by-play report of a World Series baseball game between the Tokyo Giants and the Moscow Dynamos from four years before. That had made its way from Earth, of course, and Uhura squelched it. On the second try Uhura got a transmission from Sol's asteroid belt: a program of news and music for the lonely miners there.

  But the third try was the charm. A male voice, a bit shaken but authoritative for all that, came up on the speakers. It was very low, almost inaudible, and nearly swamped by static. "I'm sure that's Centaurus, Captain," Uhura reported. "It's very close. I'm getting it on an old shortwave distress frequency; they must be punching the signal through their atmosphere."

  "Can you clear it up any, Lieutenant?" Kirk asked.

  "I'll try, sir—wait! Emergency call from Mr. Scott!"

  Just then the ship shuddered badly; Kirk, the only one standing on the bridge, was thrown onto his hands and knees as Chief MacPherson, still at the Engineering station, gave a cry of betrayal and outrage. "Cap'n!" the big Scot shouted. "Everythin' is off the board! Engines beginnin' t' run wild—aye, and there's th' shutdown. Scotty's on it, all right." MacPherson sighed with relief.

  The bridge lights flickered and then went out; the emergency lights glowed redly. Kirk got to his feet in the gloom. "Put Mr. Scott on audio, Lieutenant."

  "Aye, aye, sir." Uhura threw the call from Scotty onto the bridge speakers. "Yes, Mr. Scott?" Kirk said into the air.

  "Cap'n, as ye must know, we've lost th' warp engines. Burned out, crystals an' all. I'm sorry, sir, but we did our level best. Th' imbalances just got t' be too much for th' poor babies."

  "Is there anything you can do?" Kirk asked.

  "There's nae way around not havin' th' dilithium crystals in th' system," Scotty replied. "They're th' one irreplaceable item we've got. I can get ye t' Centaurus on impulse power, it's safe enough—but I ask ye t' keep in mind we've an impulse-only ship now, not much good for fancy maneuverin', or fightin', for thot matter."

  Kirk sighed; he hadn't really expected a different answer. "Very well, Mr. Scott. I thank you for your efforts. Kirk out." The captain turned. "Mr. Sulu, best speed to Centaurus on the course Mr. Chekov's given you. Full impulse power."

  "Aye, aye, sir," Sulu replied. He consulted his helmsman's board; the ship still seemed quick and responsive to his touch. "She's handling pretty well, Captain."

  "That's all we can ask of her, Sulu," Kirk said. He resumed his command seat. "Uhura, let's have that Centaurian transmission back on audio."

  "Aye, aye, Captain." Uhura pushed a button and a thin, tinny voice came from the speakers. The howling and crackling died away gradually as Uhura twiddled dials and guesstimated reinforcement frequencies.

  And, all of a sudden, the voice came through clearly.

  "This is the Emergency Control Center at McIverton, Centaurus," the voice said. "A notice of non pratique is hereby given. Repeat, a notice of non pratique is hereby given. Federation craft take note: This is your code seven-ten. Repeating for Federation craft: This is your code seven-ten."

  "Code seven-ten?" Chekov wondered out loud. "Ve are forbidden to approach?"

  "Yes, Mr. Chekov," Spock answered from his station. "The 'non pratique' message is perhaps meant for ships registered in this system; it is an ancient, seagoing expression from Earth. It means that a ship is denied permission to enter a port." The Vulcan paused and bent over his viewer. "Captain?"

  Kirk swung his chair to face the science officer. "Yes, Mr. Spock?"

  "I was given to understand in your briefing that three Earth-registered medical ships were to arrive here before us?"

  "That's right."

  "I see no ships—but there is scattered debris in orbit around Centaurus which could be the remnants of such ships."

  Kirk looked at Spock, shocked. "Do you know what you're implying?"

  "I believe so, sir. I am not aware of any case in which a Federation ship has ever been fired upon by a Federation member—but I suspect we might have such a case here." Spock paused. "Or three of them."

  Kirk nodded and swiveled his chair to face frontward. "Red alert, Mr. Sulu," Kirk said determinedly. The bridge's emergency battle lights came on full, as red-alert sirens throughout the Enterprise began to wail. Kirk continued, "I want all available power channeled to the ship's shields. Lieutenant Uhura, try to raise that person in Mclverton. I want to talk to him now. Chekov, what's our distance to standard orbit around Centaurus?"

  "One point six million kilometers and closing quickly, Captain," the navigator replied.

  "Hold your course. Sulu, weapons status?"

  Sulu consulted his board. "With all available power to the shields, we can't manage more than one-eighth of full power on phasers, Captain. And that won't last long. But photon torpedoes are intact and ready to go. We'll have to aim and fire them manually, however."

  Kirk considered it. That should be enough to knock down incoming fire, he told himself, or slow it down enough so the shields can handle it. I'm not interested in attacking anything or anybody—yet. "Fine," he told the helmsman. "Stand by with photon torpedoes. I hope your aim's as good as it ever was, Mr. Sulu."

  "Captain," Uhura said, "I've gotten an audio signal through to a station that says it's the Ministry of Communications for the Centaurian government. The transmission is from the city of McIverton, si
r."

  Kirk nodded grimly. "That must be them, Lieutenant. Who will I be talking to?"

  "A man named Erikkson, sir. He says he's the president pro tem."

  "Put him on."

  Uhura did. Kirk addressed the air. "This is Captain James T. Kirk of the U.S.S. Enterprise. President Erikkson?"

  There was a brief crackkkkle of static as Kirk's voice, traveling over shortwave radio, made its way at the speed of light to the city of Mclverton. Kirk was used to the swift comeback speed of subspace communications; even the short delay involved in waiting for an answer from Centaurus fretted him.

  But it finally came. "Captain Kirk, this is Erikkson. No time! There's a code seven-ten in effect. For God's sake, move off before it's too late!"

  Kirk was startled at the urgency in the man's voice. "Just what is the problem, Mr. President—"

  It was at that moment that Sulu eased the Enterprise into a standard orbit around Centaurus—and a titanic explosion engulfed her.

  Chapter Seven:

  Gregory's Landing

  THE SMALL RESORT town of Gregory's Landing was spending the night under the same canopy of stars Old Earth had always known—except, of course, for the different planets that travel the Centaurian sky, and the bright yellow star in Cassiopeia that was Sol. Centaurus's red-dwarf third sun could also be seen dimly in the night sky, but it did nothing to inhibit the welcome darkness. There was a glow on the southern horizon that represented the millions of lights of McIverton; to the west there was nothing but the sleeping, dark sea.

  It was all very restful.

  But there was no sleep for five men hiding in a small neocolonial house at the foot of Elm Street, in the southern part of town. The men had been sitting in the darkened, shuttered room for many hours, not saying very much to one another. Two of the men had been smoking cigarettes, one after another; the air was stale with haze and the smell of nervous sweat.