by Greg Cox
“That’s all very well and good,” Dawson objected, “but we’re fighting for our lives and home here, or have you forgotten that? I think that warrants ‘disturbing’ your captain.”
“The timing of the captain’s injury is unfortunate,” Spock said. “But the situation cannot be helped. I assure you that Captain Kirk would speak with you were he able.”
His answer was apparently not good enough for Dawson. Bypassing Spock, she directed her queries to Qat Zaldana instead. “What’s going on there, Qat? Have you seen the captain? What’s wrong with him? How bad is it?”
The veiled scientist paused before answering. “I have no reason to doubt Dr. McCoy’s assessment,” she said diplomatically. “Given the current emergency, he would not restrict the captain to bed rest unless it was absolutely necessary.” She spoke calmly, without excess emotion or dramatics. “In the meantime, Mr. Spock and the rest of the crew are working around the clock on our behalf. I believe we are in good hands.”
Spock was grateful for her measured words. She had, after all, seen “Kirk” behaving erratically after his contact with the probe. A vivid description of those events, including the captain’s apparent amnesia, would have done little to assure Governor Dawson that the situation aboard the Enterprise was under control. It seemed that Qat Zaldana also understood that.
“If you say so,” Dawson grumbled. “A hell of a time for Kirk to get himself banged up, though, I have to say.” She let out an exasperated sigh. “I don’t mean to sound uncaring, Mr. Spock, but right now I’ve got an entire colony on the verge of panicking, so you’ll forgive me if I can’t afford to worry about how your captain is feeling.”
“Understood,” Spock said. “The preservation of Skagway must remain your top priority… and mine. The Enterprise is devoting every resource to this crisis, as the captain would have us do.”
If he were truly here, he amended silently.
Spock remained troubled by the uncertainty regarding Kirk’s fate. Although he had no doubt where his duty lay at the moment, he could not help wondering what had become of his captain — and his friend.
Where are you, Jim? Do you still exist?
Governor Dawson called him back to the present emergency. “And have you made any progress?” she asked. “Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate all of that fine skeet shooting you’ve been doing, but we’re still getting pummeled down here, and our shields are about shot. And they tell me this entire moon is circling the drain.”
An apt metaphor, Spock thought. “That is correct. Your orbit is contracting steadily, and you can expect to enter the inner rings in forty-nine-point-eight standard hours.”
“Fantastic,” Dawson said sarcastically. “As if we didn’t have enough to worry about.” She gazed at Spock hopefully. “I don’t suppose that high-powered starship of yours can nudge us back where we belong?”
“Regretfully, no,” Spock said. “Our tractor beams are insufficient to the task.”
“I was afraid of that.” She didn’t sound too surprised. “So, what else have you got?”
Qat Zaldana spoke up. With Spock now occupied commanding the Enterprise, the bulk of the scientific analysis had fallen on her. “We’re still studying the situation, but we’ve determined that the trouble with the rings — and our moon — may have something to do with an unusual phenomenon we’ve detected down on the planet.”
“What phenomenon?”
Qat Zaldana explained about the apparently simul — taneous contraction of the hexagonal vortex at the planet’s pole. The governor was familiar with the land-mark, naturally, but was clearly uncertain about the significance of this development.
“I don’t understand,” the governor said. “What does that damn hexagon have to do with us?”
Spock wished he knew. “I have given the matter some thought,” he informed her. “We lack the data to reach a definitive conclusion, but let us theorize that the hexagon — or whatever lies within it — was somehow instrumental in maintaining the gravitational integrity of the planet’s rings. If that is so, then perhaps that ancient mechanism is now malfunctioning, with the results that we are currently witnessing.”
“Maybe it’s finally just broken down after all these years,” Qat Zaldana speculated. “I’ve been reviewing the data on both Klondike VI and other ringed planets such as Saturn, and I’ve determined that the hexagons might well be an artificial phenomenon, possibly along with the rings themselves. We think we understand the gravitational forces creating the rings, but what if the mass of the planet’s core is actually much less stable than we’ve always believed? I mean, it’s not like anyone has ever actually visited the core of a gas giant; that’s beyond our technology, even today. What if Klondike VI and planets like it are actually much denser than we suspect, and the hexagons somehow act as counteragents creating the conditions that allow the rings to exist?”
Governor Dawson shook her head. “Is that even possible?”
“Conceivably,” Spock stated. “The mass and density of a planet are not always fixed constants. I have personally witnessed the disintegration of a dying planet, whose gravity fluctuated dramatically in its final days.” The planet in question, Psi 2000, no longer existed at all, and the Enterprise had nearly been caught in its gravitational death throes. “It may be that Klondike VI is similarly variable — without the stabilizing influence of the hexagon.”
Dawson nodded. “All right. So, how do we get the hexagon working again?”
“That has yet to be determined,” Spock confessed.
“Why did I know you were going to say that?” She groaned aloud. “Look, this is all very interesting scientifically, but what about my people and this colony? What’s our time frame here?”
“As I said, we have more than two days before Skagway enters the inner rings, which will increase the danger by several orders of magnitude, and perhaps another twenty-seven hours before the moon enters the planet’s atmosphere.” Spock considered whether the time to find a solution that would save the colony, and all of its inhabitants, was running out. “We should accelerate our plans to evacuate the colony.”
By his calculations, it would take sixteen-point-thirty-three hours to bring aboard as many evacuees as the Enterprise could safely transport. Even allowing for an adequate margin of error, they still had time to spare, but they needed to prepare for the worst.
“I’ve already begun drawing up lists of who gets to leave and who has to stay,” she admitted ruefully. “Children first, of course, but after that, the choices will break your heart. I know they have mine.” The strain of her position showed on her face. “I knew I should have retired years ago. I could be on New Pangea now, playing with my grandchildren, not deciding who lives and who dies.”
Spock was Vulcan, but he still grieved with her.
“Perhaps it still won’t come to that,” Qat Zaldana said, but her words rang hollow. Unknowable cosmic forces were in play, and they were running out of time.
A warning siren sounded in the governor’s office. She looked up in alarm as the room shuddered on the screen. Dust fell from the ceiling. A paperweight rolled off her desk. “Helfrost,” she muttered. “Not ag—”
The transmission was cut off abruptly.
“Governor!” Qat Zaldana exclaimed. “Skooka!”
The intercom whistled. Spock hit the speaker button on the viewer. “Spock here.”
“Sorry to interrupt, sir,” Sulu reported from the bridge. “But another barrage of meteoroids just hit the moon, about twenty kilometers west of the colony. Probably shook things up a bit.”
Spock overlooked Sulu’s typically human lack of precision. He had already deduced as much from the tremor that had cut off the transmission.
“And the colony itself?” he asked.
“No direct hits on the dome,” Sulu reported. “It’s still in one piece.”
For now, Spock thought.
But for how much longer?
Sixteen
2
020
The specs for the Lewis & Clark’s first-generation impulse engines were enough to give Scotty conniptions. Kirk couldn’t believe how primitive they were. Poring over the technical data on an old-fashioned “laptop” computer, he saw all sorts of ways to make the antique engines safer and more efficient. Perhaps by reconfiguring the drive coils to increase the plasma output…
Too bad he couldn’t share those innovations with the crew. He could spare generations of future spaceship engineers decades of trial and error. But humanity would have to discover those advances in its own good time, as he knew it would.
Provided he kept his mouth shut.
He floated in the middle of his quarters, stretched out facedown in the air, with the portable computer tethered to his wrists. A foot loop secured him to the wall. Scrolling through the files by means of a keyboard struck him as just as quaint and inefficient as those so-called engines. He missed the helpful female voice of the Enterprise’s computer. He hadn’t realized how much he had come to rely on it.
“You look comfortable,” Fontana interrupted. She hovered in the doorway. “Mind if I join you?”
“Not at all.”
“Great. Here I come.” She flew into his compartment, pausing to close the hatch behind her. Deft movements propelled her over to where he was floating. Executing a barrel roll to line up beside him, she peeked at the blueprints on the laptop’s monitor. “The tech manuals? Don’t you know that stuff by now?”
Kirk couldn’t admit that he had a lot of catching up to do. “What can I say? It relaxes me.”
He closed the lid on the computer, not averse to taking a break. His fingers and wrists were tired of pecking away at the keyboard. What was that peculiar-sounding ailment people suffered from in this era? Carpal-tunnel something?
“Really?” she said. “I thought spy novels were your vice of choice.” She spoke with easy familiarity. “I figured you’d be reading some trashy new cloak-and-dagger thriller.”
Good to know, Kirk thought, filing away that bit of personal trivia. That explained all those twenty-first-century espionage novels he had found loaded in the ship’s entertainment files. Most of them were potboilers destined for obscurity, but he had recognized the titles of a few future classics. The Chrysalis Experiment, for instance, and Assignment: Armageddon. Those books, by “Lincoln Roberts,” were still being read in his time.
“Just trying to expand my horizons, I guess.”
“By reading tech manuals for pleasure?” Fontana shook her head. “That doesn’t sound like the Shaun Christopher I know.”
He shrugged. “Maybe you don’t know me as well as you thought.”
“You know, I’m starting to think so.”
He sensed a serious undercurrent in her remark. “Something on your mind, Alice?”
If she was having doubts about him, he needed to remedy that. If possible.
She rolled over onto her side, the better to examine him. Striking green eyes met his. “Have you given any thought,” she said tentatively, “to what we talked about before? That time you were shaving?”
“About us, you mean?”
“Yes.” She glanced back over her shoulder at the closed hatchway. “Marcus is up on the flight deck, reviewing the telemetry on that damn probe, and the brat is downstairs updating her stupid blog.” She took hold of his jumpsuit to put herself closer to him. “We’ve got time for a heart-to-heart — and more, if you feel like it.”
“I see,” he hedged, uncertain how to proceed. He was not one to refuse the advances of an attractive woman, but this was another man’s love life he was in the middle of. Fontana wanted Shaun, not James Kirk. He was reluctant to romance her under false pretenses, even for the sake of maintaining the timeline. And then, of course, there was Zoe. What if she was the one Shaun was supposed to be with?
“Is something the matter?” she asked.
“I don’t know, Alice,” he said, holding himself back. “Don’t get me wrong. You’re a remarkable woman. Any man would be lucky to be with you, but… maybe now is not the right time.”
“Why? Because of the mission? NASA policy?” Her eyes narrowed. “No, that’s not it, is it? There’s something different about you, about us. There was always a spark between us, even after we called things off, but now… you’ve changed somehow.” A note of suspicion crept into her voice. “Is it her? The stowaway? Is there something going on between you two?”
Not that I know of, Kirk thought. Or at least, not yet.
“This isn’t about Zoe,” he said. “Things are just… complicated right now.”
“Complicated how?”
Before he could come up with a halfway plausible answer, a siren went off, startling them both. The ear-piercing wail echoed off the bulkheads.
“Oh my God!” she exclaimed. “That’s the fire alarm!”
Their awkward personal issues were instantly put on hold. A fire on a spaceship could be deadly even in his own time, let alone on an isolated, fragile vessel like the Lewis & Clark. This far out from Earth, with no Starfleet to rescue them, evacuation was not an option. The escape pod was only intended for near-Earth disasters. Out here, there was no hope of recovery and nowhere to flee to. They could end up stuck on a burning ship.
I don’t understand, Kirk thought. This wasn’t in the history tapes.
Then again, neither was he.
“Move it!” he ordered as they both went into red alert mode. Pushing off from him, Fontana dived for the hatch. She placed her palm against it, testing the temperature, before cautiously sliding it open. An acrid smell invaded the compartment.
“Smoke,” she reported.
Kirk smelled it, too. He lunged for the video-com. “Christopher to Command. What’s happening?”
O’Herlihy’s face appeared on the small screen. Thick gray smoke obscured his features. “There’s a fire in the mid-deck,” he reported, coughing hoarsely. “Downstairs!”
Kirk recalled that O’Herlihy was working on the flight deck. Standard shipboard fire-prevention measures, drilled into Kirk back at the Academy, flashed through his brain. “Kill the ventilation system,” he ordered, to slow the spread of the fire and smoke. Any flowing air currents would just speed up the danger. “And shut down all power to the mid-deck.”
“I’m on it!” O’Herlihy rasped. “Hurry!”
“Hang on!” Kirk said. “We’re on our way.”
Smoke was the immediate threat, he realized, even before the flames. In this confined environment, suffocation was a very real danger unless they took precautions in time. After all, they couldn’t exactly throw open a window.
“Respirators!” he called out to Fontana.
“Way ahead of you!” She unclasped a blue plastic case from a bulkhead and extracted a rubberized full-face breathing apparatus attached to a portable oxygen canister. He expected her to don it herself, but instead, she flew it across the room to him. “Catch!”
He snatched the mask out of the air. “What about you?”
“There’s another one in my compartment.” She flew out into the corridor. “Be right with you. Don’t wait for me!”
There wasn’t time to argue the point. He secured the mask to his face and made sure the seal was airtight. A toggle initiated the oxygen flow, and he breathed deeply of the uncontaminated air before exiting his quarters and heading for the hatch to the lower level. Smoke was already wafting up from below. He clicked on an attached searchlight to make his way.
He heard someone coughing downstairs. Zoe!
He dived headfirst through the hatch into the rec area and looked around hurriedly for the stowaway. The fans had gone silent, slowing the smoke’s progress, but a sooty haze still made it hard to see.
“Zoe!” he called out, but the mask muffled his voice. “Where are you?”
At first, he couldn’t find her, and he feared she was passed out or worse, but then she swam out of the smoke toward him. A wet rag was wrapped around the bottom half of her face, mak
ing her look like an old-time bandit. Sweat gleamed on her bare arms and legs, as though she had been working out on the treadmill. Her dark eyes were watering from the smoke. Despite the rag, he could hear her gasping for breath.
He fumbled with the straps on his mask, intending to share his oxygen with her, but Fontana beat him to the punch. Joining him in the smoke-filled compartment, she thrust a spare respirator at Zoe. Her own mask was already affixed to her face. He guessed that she had acquired the third unit from O’Herlihy’s quarters.
Good thinking, Kirk thought.
Zoe pulled the mask over her head. Kirk checked quickly to make sure that it was working. She gave him an encouraging thumbs-up, then saluted Fontana, who more than deserved it. The fact that Fontana, of all people, had possibly saved Zoe’s life was not lost on him. That was worth a commendation or two, as far as he was concerned.
Unfortunately, they still had the fire to deal with.
The respirators made verbal communication difficult, so they had to rely on hand signals. Kirk located a fire extinguisher and indicated that Fontana should grab one, too. Leading the way, he pushed off toward the command module. Zoe started to follow him, but Fontana held up her hand and pointed back at the hab emphatically. Her message was clear: Stay here.
She slammed the hatch shut, sealing Zoe in the hab, and trailed Kirk into the murky vestibule leading to the command module. A blast of intense heat hit Kirk as they cautiously approached the open hatch at the opposite end of the tunnel. His eyes widened behind his mask.
The blaze was worse than he had feared.
Unrestrained by gravity, a bright blue fireball, at least a foot in diameter, spread out from the center of the mid-deck, scorching the surrounding minilabs and payload racks. The roaring inferno fed eagerly on the ship’s air supply, throwing off fiery orange sparks and gouts of flame in all directions. Irreplaceable lab equipment crackled and burned. Chemical reagents in airtight containers exploded, blowing apart overheated cabinets. Rubber gloves bubbled and melted. A sealed containment box cracked, releasing toxic fumes. The bulkheads blackened alarmingly.
