by Jerry Oltion
They were talking about the Enterprise!
Uhura swiveled around in her chair and said, "Ca—Spock—I mean, Captain, we're under attack!"
"Shields up," Spock ordered immediately. "Red alert. Lieutenant, visual on screen."
Ensigns Stanley and Brady, the new navigator and helmsman, weren't as fast as Chekov and Sulu, but they got the shields up within moments of Spock's order. Since she hadn't been monitoring on visual to begin with, Uhura took a bit longer to focus on the source of the transmissions and put the image on the viewscreen, but within a few seconds she had that as well.
Something was rising from the planet. Lots of somethings. Small, fast, wedge-shaped ground-to-orbit fighters, by the looks of them. As they drew closer, the ones in the lead began to fire at the warp engine nacelles, then more and more of them arrived and swarmed like angry wasps around the entire ship, firing at every section of it. The deck rocked under the blows.
"Damage report?" Spock asked, his voice as even as if he were asking for the time.
Uhura listened to the intraship channel, where reports were already coming in.
"Minor damage on decks seventeen and twenty," she said.
"Shield integrity deteriorating," Lieutenant Wolfe, the new science officer, said. "Down to eighty-five percent."
"Should we return fire?" Stanley asked, not taking his eyes off the viewscreen.
The tendons in Spock's neck stood out for a moment, as if he were clenching his jaw tightly to keep from speaking. Was he actually thinking about it? Uhura would never know, for a moment later he unclenched his jaw and said, "Negative. It would serve no useful purpose. Helm, take us out of orbit. Warp one. Put some distance between us and the warships."
"Yes, sir."
The Enterprise streaked away from Prastor, leaving the fighters far behind. When the planet was merely a bright disk among the stars, Spock said, "Full stop. Lieutenant, scan for pursuit."
Uhura did so, but after circling around the spot where the Enterprise had been for a few minutes, the warships shot away around the planet. Uhura saw the energy discharge of more disruptor fire, but she couldn't tell what they were shooting at. Whatever it was, it didn't fight back, and soon enough the fighters returned to the ground. "They've gone home," she reported.
Spock nodded. "Stand down to yellow alert. Lower shields. Lieutenant, prepare to send a message to Starfleet Command, code level forty-seven. I will prepare the message in the briefing room."
"Yes, sir." Code 47 was the highest level of encryption, used only for extremely sensitive and urgent communications. Spock was undoubtedly going to make his report on the captain's death, and didn't want the information to get into the wrong hands. Captain Kirk had been a major presence in the Quadrant for so long that news of his passing could destabilize the entire region if it were announced by the wrong people.
Uhura took some pride in that knowledge, but it was small comfort compared with the loss of the captain. And of Chekov and Sulu and Scotty.
She had never told them how much they meant to her. They would have all been embarrassed if she had, but just the same, she regretted never saying anything. She was the communications officer; she could have come up with some way to get the message across if she had tried.
Why did people always wait until it was too late to say the important things?
Simon Nordell removed the android's belly plate and set it carefully beside her on the workbench. It unnerved him to see winking lights and circuit boards inside a woman's body. Women had always seemed mysterious to him, and this only added to the impression.
He had left her clothing in place, not wishing for any more distraction than he already had. Besides, the android had been reluctant to allow even this minor violation of her personal space; Nordell wasn't sure she would allow access to other areas anyway. It had been all he could do to get her to lie down and let him work on her at all. Fortunately her main processing center was in her abdomen, rather than in her head.
He hoped the problem would be something simple to fix. He didn't have high hopes—this was, after all, an alien device—but he figured he could at least look for the obvious. Burned-out circuits or tripped breakers would probably be apparent no matter who had built them. Or it might even fix itself if he gave it enough time. The android's speech had improved considerably just in the last few minutes.
This was the first time he had worked on a machine that could tell him where it hurt. Not directly—her diagnostic and repair circuitry had apparently gone down when she'd overloaded—but she could at least report the results of his actions. It was simultaneously fascinating and terrifying, working on a sentient machine.
He didn't have to do this. Less than two hours after he had learned of his wife's death, no one would have faulted him for staying home and letting someone else cover for him. But the whole engineering department was still reeling from the news of Scotty's death, and besides, Nordell couldn't stand the thought of sitting in his and Leslie's quarters and listening to the silence. He kept replaying their last moments together and wishing he could change them. She had been angry when she left, and rightfully so. He had been a complete ass, sitting there at the table drinking his laliska when he should have been with her in the bedroom, down on his knees apologizing to her. But he had been too proud to apologize, and now he would forever wonder: Had her anger had anything to do with her death?
He needed to keep the android talking so he could tell if his adjustments did any good. And he needed to talk himself, to keep the question from burning up his own mind. So as he used his multiphase tricorder to analyze the circuitry he could reach from the access panel, he said, "So what's it like being an android, anyway?"
Potentials shifted along hundreds of data lines. Nordell watched, fascinated, as his tricorder traced a visual image of her thought processes.
Her answer surprised him, with both its speed and its forcefulness. And her voice took on a much more human—although irritating—timbre. "I am Stella Mudd. Harcourt's wife."
Her programming evidently ran deep. He didn't want to argue with her and throw her into another feedback loop, so he kept a straight face and said, "Yes, of course. How long have you been married?"
"Seven years, eight months, and six days, Terran standard."
Hardly any mental activity required for that one. She must keep a running tally, like some of the people Nordell knew who marked off on a calendar how much longer they had until shore leave. "Is it that bad?" he asked.
"Harcourt is a scoundrel," she answered, her voice taking on even more animation. "He drinks, he chases other women, he keeps unsavory business associates, and worst of all, he doesn't listen to me when I try to correct his behavior."
That struck a bit close to home. And it didn't seem to take any more effort than the previous question. Nordell decided to give her a tougher one, something that would exercise her brain but—he hoped—wouldn't overload anything. "Do you love him?"
Energy danced along the web of her electronic neurons. It took her a few seconds to respond. "I…of course I do. That's why I try to improve him. Or tried to."
Two data lines went into wild oscillation as she said those last three words. Nordell adjusted his tricorder to dampen the traffic along those lines, then said, "Why didn't you just learn to accept him for what he was?" He watched those two data lines closely to see if his use of the past tense would affect her.
"I…that's not what marriage is for," Stella replied. "Marriage is when two people who don't get along try for the rest of their lives to change each other's behavior."
God, I hope not, thought Nordell. He wondered how much the suppression of those two information pathways had affected her cognitive ability. But that statement had sounded pretty lucid to him. Scary, but lucid.
"What about companionship?" he asked. "I always thought marriage was when two people decided to live together because they liked each other."
Stella raised her head and speared him with an eagle
-eyed gaze. "What planet do you come from?"
"Mars," Nordell replied. "But that's not why I think that. My wife, Leslie, was from Venus, and she felt the same way. At least I thought she did, despite our last conversation." He added quietly, "I guess I'll never know for sure."
Stella's features softened—at least as much as they could on a face set in a perpetual scowl. "Why? Did she leave you, like that good-for-nothing Harry left me?"
Nordell shook his head. "No, she was killed on Distrel, trying to rescue your good-for-nothing Harry from execution."
The potential in the two data lines tried to rise again, but he kept them suppressed. Stella laid her head back down and said, her voice heavy with exasperation, "I always said he would come to a bad end. If he had listened to me, he—"
Nordell looked at his tricorder. The android appeared to have locked up, but data was flowing at a tremendous rate on every line. He reached for the adjustment on his tricorder to dampen them out, but before he could complete the motion Stella's right hand came up with lightning speed and snatched the tricorder away.
"Hey, what are you doing?" he shouted, startled.
"I must go back to Prastor," she replied. She sat up, took the belly panel from the table beside her, and fitted it into place, hiding the circuitry behind realistic skin and an equally realistic belly button.
"You can't go back there," Nordell said. "The war is still going on."
"All the more reason," Stella told him. "I tracked him there; he may still be—that's strange." She turned her head from side to side, then slid off the table and turned all the way around. "I can't locate him now."
She must have planted a homing device in him, Nordell realized. Apparently powered by his metabolism, if she couldn't pick up its signal now. "You can't locate him because he's dead," he told her. "I suppressed your memory of it, but it's true."
"I'll be the judge of that." She pushed past him toward the door. "That good-for-nothing con man has faked death to get away from me before." Thanks to his suppression of the data lines that led her to believe in his death, her Stella personality was in full control now, and in complete denial.
Nordell grabbed her arm and tried to stop her, but she shrugged him off without even turning around. He watched her stride out the door and turn toward the turbolifts.
He reached out to the intercom and punched the shipwide call. "Security," he called. "Security to engineering." Then the significance of his words struck home and he felt the weight of the entire universe come down on him. Security. Leslie would be answering that call if she were still alive.
Chapter Fourteen
HARRY HAD DIED and gone to Heaven. He was sure of it. He remembered dying clearly enough, although the last few moments of it were mercifully elusive from recollection, and this place where he found himself now was certainly Heaven. If it wasn't, he didn't care; it was good enough for him.
He had awakened in a pool of warm water. Rather hot water, in fact. The heat had concerned him for a few seconds until he realized that the temperature was just right for relaxing in, and that the jets of bubbles that shot out from the sides were already beginning to soothe the aches and pains from his recent exertion. Then when he looked up and saw the two Nevisian women standing at the foot of his bath, wearing only their smiles, he knew for certain he had gone to the right place.
Especially when the one on the left, light-haired and humanoid in all the right places, said, "Welcome to your new life. I am Aludra."
"And I am Cipriana," said her dark-haired companion.
"And I'm enchanted," Mudd said, sitting up and looking around.
Heaven appeared to be a large building filled with row upon row of tiled pools like the one he rested in. There were no windows, but skylights all along the ceiling let out steam and let in sunlight, which illuminated a multicolored tile mosaic landscape on the walls. There wasn't a stitch of clothing among the hundreds of people he saw soaking in the pools or standing beside them—a delightful sight even for a veteran spacehand who had seen similar situations many times before.
The only disconcerting sight was that everyone here was Nevisian. Their hair had the same hemispherical static-charge look common to Prastorians and Distrellians alike, and though the dampness had taken much of the stiffness out and made everyone appear a great deal more human at the moment, it was obvious that they weren't. And the tiled room echoed with the voices of people conversing in the Nevisian language.
As he watched, two more very surprised-looking people—both Nevisian—materialized in pools down the row from him, and attendants moved to welcome them.
Mudd had never been particularly religious. And it did seem a bit odd that everyone in Heaven spoke Nevisian. But then, he reasoned, he had died in the Nevis system, and the operative word was "died." This was somebody's afterlife, no matter what they called it. He was just glad it existed at all. If he wanted to find the human area he would probably have to take a celestial shuttle of some sort.
All in due time. He was in no hurry to go anywhere. Especially when the dark-haired woman at the foot of his pool, Cipriana, said, "We're here to give you a hero's welcome to your new home. Would you like us to bathe you?"
A hero's welcome, eh? Where he came from, that meant considerably more than just a bath, but he had to admit that would certainly make a good start. He lay back in the pool and smiled wide. "My dears, that would be divine."
They both bent down and slipped into the pool with him. From an alcove above his head they took thick padded mitts and drew them onto their hands, then began rubbing his chest and back and sides with the scratchy fabric.
"Oh yes," Mudd sighed, closing his eyes and letting them work their magic. "For this, I would die again and again."
The blond woman, Aludra, giggled. "Silly. If you die a second heroic death, you'll go straight to Arnhall; you know that."
"No, actually, I didn't," said Mudd. "Where's Arnhall? And do they have women as beautiful as you there?"
They both smiled, and Cipriana said, "When we finish our own heroic doublets they will."
"Ah, certainly." Mudd turned to put an itchy shoulder blade under Aludra's mitt. "How do you know I died heroically, anyway? I could have tripped on a stairway, couldn't I, and wound up here just the same?"
Aludra laughed, a high-pitched, musical sound that echoed on the tile walls. "It would have to be a pretty spectacular fall. Only heroes appear in the baths. Accident victims generally get a second chance on their homeworld. And of course cowards are dumped on the street."
"Of course," said Mudd.
She looked at him quizzically, then said, "You really didn't know, did you?"
"No," Mudd admitted.
"That's two of them," Cipriana said to Aludra. "I thought we might have this sort of problem when we started allowing aliens to join us." She said to Mudd, "Do you know Leslie Lebrun Ensign Three Two Seven Five Six Oh?"
"No," said Mudd. "At least I don't think so. Why?"
"Because she arrived just a few minutes ago, and she didn't know where she was, either." Cipriana pointed to Mudd's left. "She's right down there." Aside to Aludra she whispered, "So many names! She must have incredible stories to tell!"
Mudd squinted through the steam. He saw a few heads bobbing above the water, and attendants, both male and female, scrubbing away on their bodies.
And about five pools away he saw a woman with hair hanging down into eyes that were much deeper in their sockets than everyone else's here. Her face was much wider than usual and her ears were rounded on the edges rather than made of overlapping petals. She was, in short, human. Mudd recognized her as the security officer who had accompanied Kirk—and who had been vaporized in the crossfire only a minute or two before Mudd himself had been hit.
That clinched it. If she was here, then this was indeed the afterlife, for he had watched her die.
She didn't seem nearly as happy as he was about winding up here. She held her arms around her knees and her head bowed. Rat
her than bathing her, her attendants—a muscular young man and an older, motherly woman—sat on the edge of her pool with their feet dangling into the water and simply talked with her.
"Leslie?" Mudd said. "Miss Lebrun?"
She looked up, and her eyes lit with recognition. "Harry Mudd!" Then her brows furrowed and she said, "You didn't make it either."
"No," Mudd told her, "but I believe your sacrifice did save the lives of your crewmates." He couldn't know that for certain, but their absence from the baths seemed fair evidence. Kirk would, of course, go straight to Hell for his crimes, but certainly McCoy wouldn't, nor Spock or the other young security officer.
"I guess that's some consolation." She unwrapped her arms from her knees. "Could I…join you over there? No offense," she said to her attendants, "but I could use the human contact right now."
"Certainly, my dear," Mudd said. "I would be delighted."
The older woman said, "Of course you may. That's why people who fought together arrive here together, so you can talk about what happened before you go on to start life anew. Here." She and the man helped Lebrun out of her pool and over to Mudd's. Harry moved aside to give her room on the underwater bench, surprised to realize he was averting his eyes to protect her modesty. Death had apparently affected him as well, or perhaps it was merely the plethora of other delights to occupy his attention, but whatever the cause, she seemed too innocent and upset for him to add to her troubles by ogling her naked body.
Her attendants helped her into the pool, then left to help another person who materialized in a pool nearby. Cipriana and Aludra stayed in the water, though four bodies nearly made it overflow.
