Crisis On Centaurus

by Brad Ferguson

  Then Taylor looked up in astonishment as the sky erupted in nuclear fire and the buildings began to crumble. "I'm not in the mood to see this," Cogley mumbled. He snapped the 3V off; the omnitape rolled to a halt and clicked out of its holder.

  "I am," said Barclay.

  "Leave it," snapped Kirk. "Sulu, is dinner ready yet?"

  "Come and get it, Captain."

  They gathered around the table, sat, and attacked the meal. No one said anything. They finished, and Cogley helped Sulu clean up; Barclay was content to sit in his chair, fold his hands and look at his thumbnails through hooded eyes.

  Time passed slowly, but it was eventually time for bed. They didn't bother drawing straws for Kirk's double bed; Sulu and Cogley took that, and Kirk threw his spare bedroll in Barclay's direction. He knew that Barclay wouldn't draw straws with his men for that, either, and he was right.

  Kirk picked a book off the shelf and settled into a comfortable chair for his watch. The rest of them slept surprisingly well.

  Chapter Nineteen:

  The Enterprise

  THE BRIDGE WAS quiet with the hush of a routine watch.

  Uhura was worried.

  Captain Kirk had missed his morning check-in, and her efforts to reach him had not been successful. She had called President Erikkson's office over the shortwave transceiver several times and had been told repeatedly that the captain, Sulu and top government officials were in urgent meetings and could not be disturbed. Messages would be relayed, of course.

  Uhura didn't like that. She thought the captain would call back, if he could. . . .

  Now night was falling on the continent down below, and still she had heard nothing. She couldn't raise Erikkson's office at all on the shortwave. Communicator frequencies were still out. The transporters were not working yet, although Scotty had made their repair his top priority. Kirk and Sulu had taken Galileo, and Spock and Chekov still had Columbus. Right now Columbus was serving as a flying ambulance and cargo truck for the refugee camp Spock had found in New Athens.

  If there'd been a third shuttle, Uhura would have torn down to the surface and taken a look for herself; Scotty would take the conn, whether he wanted to or not.

  What galled Uhura was that things could be perfectly all right. Kirk could call on the president's transceiver, but was under no compulsion to do so; the Enterprise was no longer on alert. His only other way of talking to the ship would be to go out to the airfield and use the transceiver unit in Galileo. Kirk hadn't done that yet, but he had certainly been out of touch before under more pressing circumstances. The uncertainty of the situation gnawed at her.

  So this is what command is like, Uhura thought.

  She wished she could talk to Dr. McCoy about it, but he had assigned himself to detached duty at the New Athens camp, working with his daughter. Despite her worries, Uhura smiled. I'd like to be able to tell the captain about that, too, she thought.

  She tentatively decided to raise hell if, in the morning, Kirk hadn't checked in and Erikkson's office continued to stall her. And I can raise a lot of hell, she said to herself, with a decisive and self-satisfied nod of her head.

  Scott and MacPherson hadn't gotten much sleep in the past few days. It was becoming night aboard the ship as well, and the ship's two top engineers were still hard at work. Scotty had just finished uncrossing the last crossed circuit in the Jeffries tube, while MacPherson was still struggling with one of the Delaney valves that controlled the flow of coolant to the inboard port impulse engine.

  "How's it goin', laddie?" Scotty asked him.

  The big Celt snorted. "Balky as ever, Scotty. Th' upper-left quadrant is out o' phase, and I'm havin' t' shave th' lower-right quadrant t' fit. Tricky job, but I'll be done wi' it soon."

  Scotty nodded tiredly. "I've got th' other lads cleanin' up th' last o' th' shorts in th' electrical system." He sighed. "I've ne'er seen th' poor girl hurtin' so badly."

  MacPherson nodded. "You can be proud o' her, Scotty. Any other ship would have given up th' ghost an' just fallen apart if it'd gone through what this one has. This old girl o' yours ha' been fightin' like th' very devil, and she's come through it all in high style."

  Scotty nodded again, but this time with more than a trace of pride. "I tell people o'er and o'er thot th' Enterprise is a special sort of ship wi' a life o' her own. She's got personality, this one does."

  "I know. Th' Gagarin wasn't like her at all. No soul t' that bucket."

  "Ah, lad, we did all right together when we served on her. But I know what ye mean, sure enough." Scotty paused. "Gagarin was like a hundred other ships I've set foot on. When I get t' Earth an' take the British Air flight from Heathrow to visit the old home places, I don't care about which plane I'm on; I couldn't e'en tell ye which one it was." Scotty patted a wall. "Planes ha' nae personality. Most ships don't, either. But this ol' girl is different. I'll be takin' a piece o' her soul wi' me wherever I happen t' be goin'. She's got style, laddie, and that style's served us all, includin' the captain himself."

  "Hmmm." MacPherson tightened a connection on the Delaney valve and touched its coverplate here and there with a magnetic polarizer. "I think that'll do it," he said. "Let's try her out." The chief entered a series of codes onto a touchplate near the valve, and a green light winked on. MacPherson watched the valve carefully.

  "Telltales all green, coolant flow nominal." MacPherson nodded, satisfied. "Now if th' valve doesn't blow, I'd say th' impulse engines are as good as they e'er were."

  "Wish I could say th' same for the warp drive," Scotty replied. "But there's nae fixin' thot without a drydock and some new crystals. But th' impulse engines will get us t' Starbase Seven—not fast, but they'll get us there." He smiled. "An' when we get there, bucko, I'm goin' t' latch onto every gadget and gimcrack the latest catalog offers for a starship, and I'll be crammin' this darlin' t' th' overheads with th' best and most glitterin' things anyone ever saw."

  Scotty patted the wall again, affectionately. "The ol' girl deserves th' best, don'tcha think?"

  Dossie Flores was once again handling the helm and navigation stations; with the bridge roster stripped down for planetside duty, she and Peter Siderakis were working heel-and-toe watches. "Lieutenant Uhura?" she called. "Telltales indicate impulse engines are once again fully operational. Coolant circulation is nominal." She grinned. "If we have to beat it, we won't have to worry about springing a leak anymore."

  Uhura smiled back. "Thanks, Deadeye." Boneweary, she got up and went over to the science officer's station, where Scotty had thoughtfully rigged a coffeemaker. The galley's delivery tubes had gone out when the computers had been wrecked, and so the usual goodies that came the bridge's way now had to be fetched by hand. The coffeemaker had been provided as a convenience, but Uhura now saw it as a necessity.

  I don't know what I'd do without coffee, Uhura thought as she poured her sixth cup of the watch. I think I've been up—what, thirty hours straight? Her eyes were heavy with fatigue; she had grabbed a tenminute doze in the command chair earlier, and that had helped for a while, but she could use another. I don't think I've been this tired since I crammed for my Starfleet communicator's license exam.

  There wasn't any sugar left; Uhura didn't care. She added some whitener and sipped. Good.

  A light winked on her communications board: INCOMING TRAFFIC.The Starfleet channel? Uhura thought as she went over to answer it; she hadn't thought it necessary to man communications at all times, and Sergei Dominico had gratefully wobbled off to grab some sleep.

  She put on her earphone and settled herself in her chair. "Enterprise here, Lieutenant Uhura."

  Nothing. Just static.

  "This is the U.S.S. Enterprise, in orbit around Alpha Centauri IV. We are not receiving you. Please boost your signal."

  Did the static clear a tiny bit? Was there a voice in there somewhere? Uhura couldn't tell.

  The INCOMING TRAFFIC indicator went out. Reluctantly Uhura cleared her board. Almost casually, she pressed
the TRACE SIGNALcommand, hoping that what was left of the ship's computer complex had remembered to log the call and its direction. I hope it's not just a computer phantom, she thought. I don't think Scotty can cope with another repair, and Spock's not here to do it for him. God, I'm tired. She yawned widely; the coffee wasn't helping much anymore.

  An indicator panel lit. TRACE COMPLETE.

  "Origin of call?" Uhura asked aloud.

  COORDINATES 347 MARK 5. RANGE 3,210 KM. ERROR PLUS OR MINUS SIX PERCENT.

  Huh? thought Uhura, confused. That close aboard? The sensors showed nothing approaching them, and there was no one and nothing else in this sky. Just another computer glitch, I guess, she told herself, frustrated.

  Then it hit her, and she came fully awake with the shock of it. The coordinates! she realized. 'Mark 5' is straight down! That call made it through the tachyonic blanket!

  A few minutes later, after Uhura and Flores had done some quick figuring, they found where 347 mark 5 was, relative to the Enterprise: It was somewhere in the middle of New America, one-third of the distance between New Athens (where Spock was) and McIverton (where Kirk was). That didn't help Uhura at all. Who sent the call? she wondered. The captain, Mr. Spock, or somebody else? Or was it a computer phantom, after all? But the interference could be clearing a little; it's been days since the antimatter blast.

  What also didn't help was that the coordinates pinpointed a circle almost 630 kilometers around, or more than thirty thousand square kilometers in area. Uhura decided that pinpointed wasn't quite the word.

  It was all very mysterious.

  Chapter Twenty:

  McIverton

  THE CABINET HAD been up all night. If its members had been growing tired from their long and sometimes pointless discussions, the news of Kirk's successful escape that early morning had fully awakened them. They sat around the conference table. Some of the more brainless presidential appointees were still nattering uselessly about Centaurus's planetary rights and the pursuit of justice.

  But Burke was bent on revenge. That involved justice, but only coincidentally. He had concealed his impatience well—but it was time to act. Kirk had flown the coop, and here these people were, still arguing over whose fault it was.

  Perez, the defense minister, was at the table, silent as he usually was in Cabinet meetings. He used to take his cues directly from the president, thought Burke—referring to the deceased holder of that office, not the spineless idiot presently serving as chief executive—and now he rakes them from me. Good; I need him.

  Burke held Perez with his eyes for a moment; the defense minister nodded almost imperceptibly. Burke rose and cleared his throat in the middle of the statement by the minister of tourism.

  "Mr. President?" Burke said. "May I humbly suggest that, while we all appreciate the thoughts of the distinguished minister of tourism on the subject of our legal rights in this matter—and I personally thank her for those valuable thoughts—we are faced with a pressing problem that demands action. I would like to talk about that."

  The president sat impassively in his fine leather chair, looking at Burke. Erikkson, Burke's colleague in the old Cabinet, had always been impressed by Burke's single-minded approach to his work and had always respected him … and feared him a bit, too. Erikkson made no objection and gave no encouragement; that was enough for Burke, and he began. The minister of tourism, a large woman overdressed for an emergency Cabinet meeting, sat down, obviously miffed at being interrupted.

  "Here's the logistical situation," Burke said. "Kirk and Sulu have escaped their hotel in the company of Samuel Cogley. We have to catch them. We are not at war with the Federation, we are not mad at the Federation; I think everyone in this room will agree that we do not wish to offend the Federation any more than can be helped. But we do not want to see the people who helped destroy New Athens escape justice—and we will not allow it!"

  There was a murmur of approval in the room.

  "We all know Cogley's record," Burke continued.

  "There's a good chance that Barclay and his bunch will walk out of a Federation court with a ticket to a nice, soft rehab colony. My guess is that—and I'm backed by some legal opinion on this—if we ask a Federation court for Barclay and company's return to Centaurus for trial, our application to the court would be turned down. Federation policy prohibits the death penalty for terrorist murder; Centaurian law demands it. The Federation says its interests in this case override ours because an annihilation weapon was used. I don't agree; we're the ones who lost the people."

  The rumble of agreement was louder.

  "And I don't see the Federation returning prisoners to face a capital charge. It's as simple as that. So my job is to see that Barclay and his friends never leave this planet.

  "Let me be brief. We knew Reuben Barclay disappeared from his usual haunts in New Athens a week before Holtzman's deadline. With the other leaders of the League for a Pure Humanity still in the city, negotiating with the government, Barclay obviously figured he'd be the big man in the League if the worst happened. It did, and Barclay's the head of what's left of the League now; all the other leaders are dead. That, in fact, has led us to believe that the explosion was an accident—at least in its timing. It doesn't make sense that the top men in the League would hang around and wait to die; I think they were willing to postpone the deadline indefinitely—but something unexpected happened, and we'll probably never know just what it was.

  "I guessed—correctly, as it turned out—that Samuel Cogley's presence in McIverton for a seminar would trigger an approach by Barclay. Cogley is a well-known lawyer with a bent for accepting 'impossible' cases—and winning them. That would attract Barclay. So I put two of my best men on Cogley's trail, and it paid off: We saw two of Barclay's henchmen approach Cogley yesterday morning. Unfortunately, we lost the two flunkies; they turned out to be pretty good at shaking a tail. But we stayed with Cogley, who went to see Kirk last evening at his hotel. He talked with Kirk for most of the night; I suppose they were planning Barclay's surrender. We couldn't plant a bug in Kirk's room because there wasn't a chance to do so, and like most luxury hotels, the Hilton Inn West proofs its windows against laserdropping; business types don't like the competition reading voice vibrations off windows.

  "But one of my men noted that Kirk's shuttle pilot, Sulu, was out all night, presumably doing the town. On his own initiative, my man broke into Sulu's room, faked a note from Kirk, and left a packet of—well, it doesn't matter what. It's sufficient to say that Sulu was drugged in order to slow up Kirk, should Kirk decide to leave suddenly."

  "Wasn't that a rather extreme thing to do?" asked the finance minister—a rather prissy type, Burke thought.

  "I've already ordered a citation of merit issued to the agent involved," Burke said tersely. "To continue: Kirk overpowered the men I had watching him at the hotel, and Cogley picked him and Sulu off the roof in a flitter. They then disappeared into city traffic. Normally we'd run a trace through a spyeye using the flitter's transponder—but all the satellites were shot down by the defense system. We put out a radio alert, of course, but damn few police facilities have radios, and the normal communications bands are still swamped by tachyonic interference. Kirk, Sulu and Cogley got away, and they haven't been seen since. Their shuttle is still at the airfield, but it's useless to us."

  "So what can we do?" asked the labor minister.

  "It occurred to me," said Burke, "that the key to this whole situation was Kirk, but that we didn't know much about him at all. I ran his Starfleet records; the non-confidential stuff is all in the central databanks, and fortunately the New Athens 'banks were duplicated here as they were accumulated. Kirk's record is quite distinguished, but he's never had a job to do quite like this one. I doubt he likes it very much; the sense I get is that everything in him rebels against legal maneuvering—especially the possibility that guilty men might escape punishment for their crimes. Kirk is direct, a touch moralistic and, above all, ethical."
<
br />   "So?" the minister of tourism asked coldly.

  "So—I think that attitude will take the edge off Kirk's performance. His heart won't quite be in saving Barclay and his pals from us. Mind you, he has every intention of doing his duty, of bringing Barclay and the others to Earth for trial—but he's rebelling against that somewhere inside, where it counts. That gives us an edge.

  "But there was something else, something I didn't expect to find," Burke continued. "I think I know where Kirk is."

  Everyone in the room, except Perez, was startled. Finally the finance minister's voice rose above the others. "Well, where the hell is he, then?"

  "Kirk is a registered landowner here," Burke said. "He's got a beautiful piece of land in the middle of this continent; there's a Ministry of Land Management file on it a meter thick, all consisting of prefiled offers to buy, should Kirk fall behind on his taxes. He's even got a cabin there. If I were Kirk and running, I'd head there. I wouldn't expect anyone to make the connection, at least not before my ship could pick me up. And it was just damn lucky I did make the connection."

  "What do you need, Nathaniel?" Erikkson asked.

  Burke told him; Perez nodded approval. "All right, then," Erikkson said. "A small force, lightly armed, to arrest Barclay and the other four. I won't authorize the arrests of Kirk, Sulu or Cogley; they're just doing their jobs, and they could probably make a case against us. We'll just let them leave."