by Jerry Oltion
When Lebrun had slipped into the water and the jets once again veiled her in bubbles, Mudd smiled at her and said, "I must thank you for your bravery and courage in attempting to rescue me—and I fear I must apologize as well for delaying our departure. I allowed my…ah…my natural attraction for precious treasures to cloud my judgment."
"Your greed, you mean?" Lebrun said, a trace of a smile on her lips.
Mudd laughed. "You and your captain were cut from the same mold. He always preferred such terms as well. But really, I believe life is what you make of it, and what you call a thing says a great deal about your attitude toward it."
"Life. Right. And what do you call this?" Lebrun held her arms out to include the whole building, and by implication the whole situation that had brought them here.
"An opportunity," said Mudd. "For one, I have escaped that damnable android chaperone of mine. For another, we do seem to have physical bodies again, which is more than I was led to expect. We might even be able to contact our former companions in life and continue our business as usual if we wished, though—"
"No communication is permitted with those you left behind," said Cipriana. "You must leave your former life in the past."
"As I was saying," Mudd finished, "given the circumstances, I for one am glad to be quit of it. A fresh start, that's what I call this."
"I was married the day before yesterday," Lebrun said quietly. "I'm not quite so eager to give that up."
Mudd snorted. "Believe me, if your marriage was anything like mine, another day or two would have been all it would take to change your opinion."
Aludra looked puzzled. "What is marriage?"
"It's when two people agree to share everything, and spend the rest of their lives together," said Lebrun.
"In theory," Mudd corrected. "In practice, it's when two people agree to make life miserable for each other."
Cipriana frowned. "How could you agree to spend your lives together?" she asked Lebrun. "You know you'll be separated the first time one of you is killed."
"I…I didn't expect to be…killed," Lebrun said. She sniffed, and wiped at her eyes with a wet hand. Cipriana wrung out her bath mitt and handed it to her to dry her eyes with.
"Nobody does, the first time," Aludra said. "But it eventually happens to all of us. It can be very difficult if you've formed strong attachments, but you always have a happy reunion in Arnhall to look forward to."
"That's the second time I've heard you mention—" Mudd began, but a sudden commotion far down toward the other end of the building stopped him in mid question. It sounded as if someone was banging on a door. Banging hard. Had they locked an avenging angel out by mistake?
Perhaps they had, for a second later a bright rectangle of light appeared in the wall as the door burst inward. People shouted in alarm, and the blue bolts of disruptor fire speared outward through the sudden gap.
Disruptors in Heaven? That shocked Mudd more than anything he had seen or heard so far.
The shooting died down, and a babble of voices rose to replace its noise. It was difficult to see clearly through the steam, but Mudd thought he could see five or six clothed people near the door—all wearing red.
An ugly suspicion rose in his mind. "Just a minute," he said, turning to Aludra. "Where are we, exactly?"
"Exactly?" Aludra asked, reluctantly looking away from the commotion. "We're in pool seventy-three in hero's reception hall nine, in the city of Novanar, on the southern continent of Kelso. On Prastor," she added helpfully.
"On Prastor," Mudd repeated. He could actually feel his worldview reorient itself to accommodate the news that he hadn't gone to Heaven. It felt a bit like going into warp drive with a badly tuned engine.
Somehow he was still alive, miraculously healed of his disruptor wounds—and back in the same universe he had thought was safely behind him. "Dammit," he said, then, embarrassed at having sworn in the presence of three ladies, he said, "Pardon my Klingon, but I believe our troubles are not over after all."
"Are you kidding?" Lebrun said excitedly. "If this is Prastor, then we can get back in touch with the Enterprise. And I can join my husband again."
"That's precisely what I was talking about," Mudd said. He leaned back in the water and let the jets work the renewed tension from his muscles. He had the unpleasant suspicion that he would need all the relaxation he could store up to get through the days ahead.
Chapter Fifteen
KIRK FLINCHED HARD at the touch of hot water, splashing gallons of it out over the rim of the tub to wash down the tiled walkway and lap at the ankles of the dozens of nude people who stood before the other tubs. He looked down, and when he couldn't see beneath the swirling bubbles he felt with his hands and discovered that he was naked as well.
And whole. He should have been a cloud of ions after taking that many disruptor hits all at once. But he couldn't remember actually being shot. Just the entire crowd of people, Distrellians and Prastorians alike, aiming at him.
Two nude women noticed him and walked up to the foot of the tub. One was young, tall, and thin; the other was shorter and closer to Kirk's age. "Hello," they said, smiling. "Wel—"
"Where am I?" Kirk asked.
"—come to Distrel," the tall one finished.
"Distrel?" Kirk turned once around in his tub, but the interior of the bathhouse gave no clue to his location. The women looked Distrellian enough, with their narrow faces and wide eyes and stand-up hair—but they looked human enough in other ways to make that an uncertain conclusion.
"How did I get here?" he asked.
The older woman said, "You must have been killed in battle. Weren't you?"
Kirk shrugged. "I was certainly in the right place for it. I thought I'd talked my way out of trouble, but right at the last there, somebody shouted, 'Let's send him to Arnhall!' and they all pulled their guns on me."
"Ah!" said the same woman, smiling brightly. "They gave you a hero's send-off. Whatever you said must have been very impressive. But this must be your first death."
"I—" At her words, all the close calls in his life flashed through his mind. The space battles, the hand-to-hand fights, the hostile aliens—the myriad ways an explorer endangered his life every day. But none of them had actually managed to do him in. And the fact that he was here, apparently on Distrel again, convinced him he wasn't dead this time either. Apparently the Enterprise had managed to beam him away just in the nick of time, but he hadn't gone back to the ship. "There must have been a transporter accident," he said.
"No," the woman replied. "If this is your first time, you're in the right place. In fact, I believe these other gentlemen must be friends of yours." She nodded toward Kirk's right.
He looked in that direction, but the steam obscured his vision. Sound traveled quite well through it, though, and just at that moment Kirk heard a voice with a distinctly Russian accent say, "Yes, up just a bit…now over to the left…there. Ah, yes, now keep doing that for the rest of the week."
Could it be? "Chekov?" Kirk called out, hardly daring to hope.
He heard a splash and a female voice squeal in surprise, then, "Captain?"
"Captain Kirk?" asked another voice with a Scottish burr.
"Scotty! And Sulu?"
"Here, Captain!"
This was flat-out impossible, but at the moment Kirk didn't care. Something had rolled back the clock to a moment before they had died and whisked them here to this Roman-style bath, and he wasn't going to question it. He climbed out of his pool, thanked the two women who had greeted him, and walked through the mist until he saw his three officers. Scotty and Sulu were standing waist-deep in the water at the edge of their pools, looking excitedly toward Kirk, but Chekov, in the farthest of the three pools, lay back in the water while two attractive young women rubbed him down with stiff sponges.
He did at least wave when he saw Kirk approach, and he said, "Captain, come on in. The water's fine!"
"I can see that, Ensign." Kirk knelt down at
the edge of the water so they wouldn't have to crane their necks to talk with him, then in a what-the-hell mood slid on in and sat on the underwater shelf at Chekov's feet. The place was apparently safe for the moment, and he could certainly use the relaxation.
Sulu and Scotty each had a pair of female attendants as well, who resumed scrubbing their backs with sponges. One of Chekov's delightful pair asked Kirk, "Would you like a pool and assistants of your own? We can find four baths side by side."
"No, thanks," Kirk said. The hot water was pleasure enough, and tempting as it might be, he didn't need the distraction. He needed to figure out what to do next.
"If you prefer men, that's no problem," the woman said.
Sulu snorted, and Kirk laughed. "No, that won't be necessary. I'm quite comfortable as it is. But if someone could bring me a communicator, I'd like to send a message to my ship."
"Your ship?" the woman asked.
"Starship," Kirk said. "The Enterprise. We're from the United Federation of Planets. We came to talk with the Grand General when we learned that you and Prastor had stopped fighting. But unfortunately, we were caught up in the hostilities when war broke out again."
The woman's brow furrowed. "Wait, let me get this straight. You were here, on Distrel, when you died? If that's so, then you should have been sent to Prastor. Or Arnhall if it was your second death. Unless it was a coward's death, in which case you should have gone to Prastor as well, but straight back into battle to try it again."
Kirk shook his head, trying just as hard as her to make sense of things. "No," he said, "we were on Prastor at the time. It's a long story. But we were all…Dammit, how could we have been revived after what happened to us there? Chekov, maybe—he wasn't hit that badly—but not Sulu or me. And Scotty; I saw Scotty blown to bits by an overloaded phaser. Nothing could rejuvenate a man after that."
"The Gods can," the woman said simply. "They do it all the time." She pointed toward an empty pool in the next row over, and after only a few seconds a woman materialized in the water. She looked startled for a moment, then tilted back her head and laughed. "Oh, wow," she said. "That was wild."
Kirk bet it was, if her experience had been anything like his. There was obviously some kind of resurrection legend at work here—only this one was apparently based on a real phenomenon. Well, they would soon get to the bottom of it. He turned back to Chekov's attendant and said, "Whatever happened to us, we need to get back to our ship."
Her face took on a horrified expression, as if he had just suggested they kill someone as a practical joke. "No, that's—you can't do that," she stammered. "Nobody is allowed to contact anyone from their former life. You're Distrellians now. You live here, and work here, and you fight for Distrel next time you go to war."
That explained the bathhouse. In a society where a person's home planet determined what colors they wore, someone who arrived without clothing would start right off with one fewer tie to home. And if they were unarmed they couldn't cause much trouble even if they did still think of themselves as enemies. But from what Kirk saw around him, these people had been conditioned to abandon everything when they "died," to accept their new home enthusiastically as a step on the way to an even better life.
"And when we die a second time we go to Arnhall," he said, the picture finally coming clear for him. "I'm afraid that's not an acceptable choice."
"It's the only choice you've got."
Kirk found it a bit distracting to argue with a nude woman, especially one he didn't know, but the seriousness of the situation helped him concentrate. "Look," he said, "we're not Nevisian. We got caught up in this whole affair by accident. We don't belong here. Let us contact our ship and we'll go on about our business, and leave you to continue yours."
"There aren't any exceptions," the woman said. "The rules are very strict about that. If you try to contact your ship, you'll be put in jail."
Kirk sat back to think it over. This seemed like a simple misunderstanding, but his experience with other aliens led him to think it probably wasn't. Most isolated races were surprisingly intolerant of alternative customs, insisting that visitors live—and apparently die—according to local ways.
Scotty had been listening patiently to the entire exchange between Kirk and the woman, but now that Kirk had fallen silent he said, "There's just a wee problem with all o' that. The people on board the Enterprise don't know we're still alive. They'll search for our bodies, but they'll be searchin' the wrong planet. Eventually they'll give up and go on about their duty, and we'll be stranded here. No reunion in Arnhall for us."
The woman shrugged. "Loss is part of war. That's what the system is designed to teach us."
"What about their loss?" Sulu asked. "They'll mourn our deaths, never knowing we actually survived. That's worse than anything you people have to endure."
"Hmm," said the woman. She thought about that a moment, but before she could reply one of Sulu's own attendants said, "But it's not more than your people are used to enduring, is it?"
"What do you mean by that?" he asked her.
"I mean if your people don't normally have an afterlife, then their reaction to your deaths will be just what it would normally have been whether you were resurrected here or not. Nothing has really changed for them. And for you, it's a second chance. A fresh start."
"We were doing quite well the first time around," Kirk told her.
"And you will undoubtedly do well again," she replied.
Kirk could see she just didn't understand what the fuss was about. None of the Nevisians did. These people didn't see the problem because to them death was no big deal. Like some of the religious fanatics back on Earth in earlier centuries, they were so sure they would be rewarded in the afterlife that they didn't care about this one.
Whatever the truth, one thing was certain: arguing about it with the Valkyries wasn't going to get them anywhere. They needed to buck their way up the chain of command a ways—or slip out from under it entirely.
"All right," Kirk said, holding out his hands as if giving in. "We'll do it your way. But we're not getting anywhere by soaking in hot water all day so—"
"Oh, I wouldn't say that," murmured Chekov.
"—so let's get on with it," Kirk continued, ignoring him. "What comes next? Orientation? Debriefing? Or do you just give us a set of clothes and a disruptor and send us back to the front lines?"
The women all seemed surprised that he would want to cut short his time in the baths, but they had obviously been trained to accede to newcomers' requests, so long as they weren't too outlandish. And Kirk suspected they would be glad to foist these troublesome aliens off on someone else.
"Very well," said the woman he'd been arguing with. "The next step is clothing, followed by aptitude testing and job placement. You're not sent into battle for at least ten years, but of course the battle might come to you sooner. If you're ready, I'll take you to the fitting room and we can get started."
Kirk found the idea of an aptitude test amusing, in a wry sort of way. He wondered what they would find for a starship captain to do.
Spock recognized Lieutenant Nordell's voice calling for security. He punched the intercom button in the armrest of the command chair—he had to look for it, since he didn't yet have the captain's almost instinctive familiarity with the controls—and said, "Spock to engineering. What has happened?"
"It's the android, sir," Nordell replied. "She just suddenly got up and left. I couldn't stop her."
"In what direction was she headed?"
"For the turbolifts, but the last thing she said before she left was 'I've got to go back to Prastor.' I was suppressing data transfer on the lines that carried her knowledge of Harry Mudd's death, so I think she believes he's still alive and somehow on Prastor."
"Security to transporter rooms," Spock said. They could catch her there. She wouldn't be able to beam away from this distance.
A beep from the science station drew his attention, but that was no longer his dut
y. Lieutenant Wolfe could take care of the situation there while he was engaged in recapturing the android. But a moment later the new navigator, Stanley, got something on his board as well.
"Report, Ensign," Spock said.
"Something just appeared on my scanner, sir. Extremely short-range. It's—oh, it's going away. It's a shuttlecraft!"
That was undoubtedly what the science station had detected: the shuttlebay doors opening. The android had known they were out of transporter range and had gone straight for a shuttle. Spock had underestimated its resourcefulness.
"Get a tractor beam on it," he ordered, and the new crew members moved to comply, but before they could focus the beam on the departing shuttle, it had slipped out of range.
"Follow it!" Spock said, putting more urgency in his voice. Humans often needed that extra urging to perform at their peak.
But it didn't matter. Not even Chekov and Sulu could have caught the shuttle before it reached Prastor. At this close a proximity, human reaction time was the limiting factor. The Enterprise streaked after it only a few seconds behind, but by then the shuttle had entered the atmosphere, leaving a glowing ion trail behind it as the android piloted it at top speed to the surface. She was headed straight for a city—the same city she had beamed to before from her own ship.
The bridge crew tried again to snare it in the tractor beam, but the ion trail and the atmosphere interfered too much for a steady hold, and the shuttle began to veer wildly as the android fought to escape.
"Stop the tractor beam," Spock ordered. If they kept it up, she would crash into a building and probably kill people on the ground. For the same reason, they couldn't just shoot the shuttle down. "Transporter room," Spock said, "can you lock on to the shuttle and beam the android out of it as soon as she lands?"
"I'll try…No, sir. It's entered a shielded area. The same one as before."
That left only one choice. "Security," Spock said, knowing at least two officers would be in the transporter room by now, "beam a safe distance from those coordinates. Set phasers on maximum. Fire the moment you spot the android, and make sure you've disabled it, but do not enter the shielded area. Stay in direct communicator contact, and transporter room, stand by to beam them back at the first sign of trouble."
