Captain's Peril

by William Shatner

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” Kirk said, accepting the wedge-shaped, black clipboard offered him by his communications officer. He also thanked Yeoman Jones for the coffee but declined it, then took his place in the center chair and used the stylus to enter his authorization code.

  The Code Five message instantly appeared on the clipboard’s screen.

  Kirk swiftly scanned it, adrenaline sweeping through him.

  Five months, three days into his mission, and his first serious assignment had finally come through.

  Kirk couldn’t help himself. He grinned.

  Then he looked up and saw everyone else on the bridge suddenly look back at their own stations or at the main screen.

  Kirk’s grin spread as he realized what they had been doing.

  Everyone on the bridge had been watching the captain of the Enterprise, their captain, who was right where he belonged—in the center of everything.

  “Lieutenant Tanaka,” Kirk said as he rose from his chair. “I want you and all department heads in the main conference room in five minutes.”

  “Yes, sir,” Tanaka answered.

  Kirk stepped behind Alden. “Lieutenant, lay in a new course. Heading one seven five, mark eighty. Warp factor four.”

  Even as the lieutenant entered the new heading, he glanced up at Kirk and said, “Captain…there’s nothing out there.”

  Kirk smiled as he watched the stars slip across the main screen as the ship came about, then suddenly begin to accelerate out from an invisible vanishing point dead ahead.

  “You’re mistaken, Lieutenant,” Kirk said, already feeling the fire of action and purpose within him. “Everything’s out there.”

  Kirk didn’t like the conference room on the Enterprise. He felt it was a waste of space on a ship so crowded.

  Back in Pike’s day, the Enterprise had carried a crew of just over two hundred, with more than half the ship’s volume turned over to life support and warp subsystems.

  But the most recent refit reflected the latest breakthroughs in synthetic food production and a new generation of Cochrane engines that consumed less antimatter while generating more tightly focused warp fields. Time dilation anomalies at high-warp factors had become a thing of the past.

  Yet, while some old veterans like Dr. Piper had stopped referring to time-warp factors during long voyages, Kirk knew there were many others who would never give up on old-fashioned nomenclature. Even though the Enterprise’s upgraded transporter array represented a completely new approach to quantum tunneling of macroscopic objects, among Kirk’s crew only his chief engineer was purist enough to refer to the new system by its official name, the “materializer.” It was a battle Kirk felt that Mr. Scott was losing, especially since the refit crew had never even bothered to replace the sign over the main transporter room’s door. “Transporter” had entered the Standard lexicon as inalterably as the word “car” and “phaser,” though neither of those devices today bore any more resemblance to their original namesakes than did the transporters of a century ago to the most modern versions.

  More important to Kirk than the fashions of terminology was what came hand in hand with the new advancements and efficiencies—an increase of available volume within the Enterprise. The refit ship contained fourteen science labs compared to Pike’s five, along with a commensurate increase in science workers, specialists, and maintenance and support staff. The ship was now designed to function with a crew of 430, which also left enough staterooms for several dozen passengers, civilian or diplomatic, plus the capacity to ferry up to an additional 250 personnel under more Spartan conditions, in the event of a refugee or evacuation emergency, or, in these troubled times, troop movement.

  Judging from the gigaquads of bureaucratic correspondence generated by the ship’s support departments, theoretically available for Kirk’s review each day, he sometimes felt he wasn’t commanding a starship so much as he was functioning as the mayor of a small town.

  No, Kirk amended as he watched his department heads enter the large, circular conference room with its enormous table of Centauran redwood, Not mayor, feudal lord. As Spock had been keen to point out, a starship commander was not elected.

  Tanaka, as the only nondepartment head present, was the last to take his seat at the table, joining Scott for engineering, Piper for life sciences, Sulu for physics, Spock as chief science officer and second-in-command, and Kirk.

  Kirk didn’t waste time.

  “Gentlemen, we have received a Code Five message from command. We have already changed our heading in response, and jumped to warp four.” Kirk looked to his chief engineer. “Mr. Scott, I’ll want you to get us to maximum warp as soon as possible after this meeting.”

  As Kirk knew he would, Scott beamed at the challenge. “Maximum warp” was a completely different prospect for the engineer than if Kirk had simply said “warp seven.”

  “Ye’ll have warp six-point-five within the hour,” Scott said enthusiastically, “and by the end of shift…well, I have been wanting to try a minor rerouting of the—”

  “I’m sure you’ll coax every last decimal place from her,” Kirk said.

  “That I will, sir.”

  “May I ask where we’re headed,” Sulu said.

  It was never a surprise when the young scientist asked the first question at meetings. Kirk had quickly come to learn that Sulu was insatiably curious about every aspect of the ship, indeed, about every aspect of everything. He took on new hobbies and became expert in them the way other people changed clothes, and more than once Kirk had gone to the bridge on the dogwatch to find Sulu cross-training at someone else’s station.

  It was clear to Kirk that Sulu would be wasted in Starfleet unless he was given his own science vessel to command. Very soon, Kirk knew, he should have a talk with Sulu to suggest he switch over to a command track for that very reason. Unless the young man accumulated several years of bridge duty, the waiting list for science specialists hoping for their own ships would only grow longer. A command specialty just might put Sulu closer to the top.

  Kirk nodded to Spock, and Spock tapped a control that switched on the conference room’s wall screen across from the table. A standard Vulcan coordinate map appeared of the ship’s destination: T’Pel’s New Catalog 671–53609.

  “That’s an old Vulcan chart,” Sulu said.

  “Correct,” Kirk confirmed. “The system has not been mapped by Federation vessels.”

  “Not mapped,” Sulu agreed, “but TNC six-seven-one-dash-five-three-six-oh-nine has been charted. By John Burke, one hundred fifty-three years ago.”

  “Is that so.” Kirk, as always, was intrigued by Sulu’s ability to possess some rare and usually inconsequential fact about almost any subject. The support files accompanying the Code Five message referred only to the Vulcan chart, not to any Earth designation.

  “Burke called it the Mandylion Rift.”

  “And why is that?” Kirk asked, certain that Sulu would have the answer.

  Sulu didn’t disappoint. “The central star is a white dwarf, which can’t be directly observed from Earth. That’s because it’s at the center of a gaseous nebula created when the primary went nova, perhaps fifty thousand years ago. Burke was able to resolve the eddies in that nebula, allowing him to infer the mass and number of bodies that still existed within it. That is, the central white dwarf star, two gas giants, and at least fifteen planetisimals, ranging in size between Earth’s moon and Mars. Most likely the nova-burned cores of the system’s original planets.” Sulu smiled, as if pleased that he had been able to give his lecture without interruption.

  Kirk brought him back on point. “And the reason it’s called Mandylion, Lieutenant?”

  Sulu appeared to suppress a flash of panic as he realized that after his lengthy discourse, he’d neglected to answer the captain’s question. “The, uh, shape of the gas cloud,” he quickly added. “Apparently, at the time of Burke’s observations, he thought it resembled a face, and the Mandylion was an arti
fact from Earth history that was supposed to carry the image of a face.”

  Amazing, Kirk thought. Why would anyone possibly know this sort of thing?

  Then Piper asked a more pertinent question. “Not that I don’t find this all fascinating,” he said, leaving no doubt that he found it nothing of the kind, “but as the head of life sciences, may I ask why I’m at a meeting about a system where there’s unlikely to be life?”

  “Not indigenous life,” Kirk said.

  That got everyone’s attention, and Kirk went directly to the main point.

  “Three days ago, the subspace relay network in Sector five-two-three was disrupted by a powerful gamma burst.”

  “A nova?” Sulu asked.

  “More powerful than that,” Kirk said. “Starfleet Astronomics first thought they had detected a quasar collision.”

  Sulu whistled and even Spock raised an eyebrow.

  “But by the time the network was reestablished,” Kirk continued, “all natural causes of the burst had been discounted.”

  “A ship?” Scott asked in a hushed tone.

  Kirk nodded.

  “With a gamma-signature at quasar strength?” Sulu asked, incredulous.

  Spock folded his hands on the conference table. “Was Starfleet able to derive a velocity for the ship?”

  Kirk watched his people carefully as he gave the answer that had put all of Starfleet on alert.

  “Long-range sensors caught the ship slowing at an estimated velocity in excess of warp factor fifteen.”

  Even Dr. Piper looked surprised, and alarmed, by that revelation.

  “What its speed was before detection, Astronomics declines to speculate,” Kirk explained. “Neither can they state what its original heading was, though they believe it was most likely extragalactic.”

  “But clearly,” Spock interjected, “regardless of where it came from, the ship—or whatever the object might be—has come to rest in the Mandylion Rift. And we are being sent there to investigate.”

  “More than investigate,” Kirk said. “If the ship, or object, is inhabited, we are to initiate contact with its crew, and attempt to make a full engineering analysis of its…astounding capabilities.”

  Mr. Scott’s expression brightened even more than when Kirk had asked him for maximum warp.

  Beside him, though, Kirk noted Lieutenant Tanaka’s frown. As the chief communications officer, Tanaka would be responsible for the initial first-contact procedures, and Kirk didn’t want to think that the specialist was already seeing potential trouble.

  “Something on your mind, Mr. Tanaka?”

  “What about the Prime Directive?” the lieutenant asked.

  Spock answered for Kirk. “The occupants of the unknown ship are clearly a space-going, warp-capable culture, Lieutenant. The Prime Directive does not apply.”

  But Tanaka shook his head. “I don’t mean our Prime Directive. I mean, what if they have one?” He looked at Scott. “Is warp fifteen something that’s even theoretically possible with our engines?”

  Scott shook his head. “Laddie, I wouldnae even be able to guess what her warp-field configuration might look like, let alone how it stays focused at that factor. It’s beyond our current technological abilities, and our theoretical understanding.”

  Tanaka looked back at Kirk. “So, if they’re so far ahead of us, what if their ‘Starfleet’ won’t let them interfere in our development?”

  Kirk wondered how much more to say. Tanaka had revealed the critical nature of this new mission—the one element that changed it from a Code Ten Unanticipated First Contact assignment, to a Code Five priority.

  But why hold back now? Kirk asked himself. Being open with Spock had brought about unexpected, but welcome results.

  “Our mission is to obtain the technical readouts of the alien ship’s warp drive, if not the warp drive itself. If the aliens do have a version of the Prime Directive, we are ordered to do everything except take hostile action in order to convince them to circumvent it, as quickly as possible.”

  Piper snorted. “I knew this would happen when they started fitting these things with multiple phaser banks and photon torpedo tubes. Whatever happened to establishing long-term diplomatic relationships? Forging friendships? Building trust through negotiation?”

  “Doctor,” Kirk said evenly, “the alien ship generated a gamma burst as powerful as a quasar. We are not the only ones to have detected it. We are not the only ship making way to the Mandylion Rift.”

  Piper scowled. “Who else is invited to the party?”

  Kirk gave him the facts as they had been outlined in his Code Five message. “As of Stardate 1003.0, Starfleet confirms at least two other ships are proceeding toward the Mandylion Rift at high warp. One Andorian corsair…”

  Piper’s scowl deepened. Andorian corsairs were technically private vessels, so whatever their actions, the Andorian Blood Council could claim they had no control over private citizens. That gave the corsairs free rein to do just about anything, including outright piracy.

  But Andorian corsairs were the least of their worries.

  “…and a Klingon D-6 battle cruiser,” Kirk added.

  Everyone sat at attention. While Starfleet’s official position was one of cautious optimism when it came to dealing with the Klingon Empire, there wasn’t an officer or enlisted man who didn’t believe that war was inevitable.

  Piper volunteered the only question worth asking.

  “What are our chances of getting there first?”

  Kirk looked again to his chief engineer. “The answer to that, Mr. Scott, is in your hands.”

  With that, the meeting was over.

  And the race was on.

  Chapter Eight

  BAJOR, STARDATE 55595.7

  “EXACTLY HOW FAST was warp fifteen?” Picard asked.

  Kirk wiped the sweat from his forehead, blinking as a few drops reached his eyes. There was only one small white cloud in the deep blue Bajoran sky, and it was nowhere near the blazing orb of the sun. “Under the new calibration, the old warp fifteen would be…warp nine with a few decimal places. Spock would know exactly.”

  “What was the top speed of your Enterprise back then?”

  Kirk considered the relentlessly flat and white terrain, thinking how like Spock Picard truly was, in the way his mind operated. Picard’s appetite for detail was just as voracious as the Vulcan’s, as if only by knowing the facts and figures of a situation could he then turn to its emotional dynamic. Fortunately, the texts and manuals Kirk had studied at the beginning of his career were burned into his memory. Like Picard, he knew that when a split-second command decision was required on the bridge of a starship, there was not often time to ask the chief engineer for a review of technical specifications.

  “At the beginning of the first mission, we’d cruise at warp six. Warp eight was just at the edge of our capabilities, though Scotty usually managed to work a miracle or two.”

  “So I’ve heard.” Picard stopped and pointed ahead, about five degrees south of their due-west heading. “Jim…can you see something on the horizon over there?”

  Kirk squinted. The Bajoran desert horizon was constantly in flux, like water on a shoreline, shifting and melting in the heat-distorted atmosphere. But there was one black speck that did seem to come and go in the same place. “You’re right,” he agreed. “It looks like something’s there.”

  Picard touched Kirk’s arm. “A hill? Boulder? Could mean shade and a higher vantage point.”

  Kirk shrugged. “Could also be a sign for ‘Quark’s Desert Adventure Excursions. Coming soon to this location.’”

  But Picard wasn’t playing. “As long as it isn’t a mirage.”

  Without any need for discussion, Kirk changed direction for the unknown object, knowing Picard would do the same. Bajor was slightly larger than Earth, but given the desert’s haze and heat, Kirk estimated the visible horizon as no more than five kilometers from their present position.

  “Getti
ng back to your story,” Picard said. “How did Mr. Scott respond to your request for ‘maximum warp?’”

  Kirk shook his head. “I can give you the specs on everything they taught me at the Academy, but when it comes to what speed we hit on the way to the Mandylion Rift…”

  “I should ask Spock?” Picard suggested.

  “Details like that were Sulu’s specialty. Anything with numbers.”

  “But I take it you got to the Rift in record time.”

  Kirk hated to admit, even to himself, how many of those days in the familiar gray corridors of his ship actually ran together when he tried to recollect them individually; so much of that five-year mission mere routine and drills, endless rehearsals for the brief bursts of intense effort that could rarely be anticipated.

  In sharp contrast to the lost details, however, the emotions of that time were as real to him today as they had ever been. To have achieved a dream, to be working with respected professionals and good friends, to wake each day, never really knowing what might happen in the next twenty-four hours…those experiences of his youth had never left him, made him young to this day. He could always access those memories. No matter that some of them were darker, painful.

  His thoughts strayed now to what had happened in the Mandylion Rift.

  “We got there,” Kirk said simply. He shot a sharp glance at Picard. “Jean-Luc, are you really interested in what happened next? Or are you just trying to distract us both from the fact that we might die in this desert?”