Captain's Peril

by William Shatner

  “Dimensional engineering…” Lewinski said quietly. Starships could jump from normal space to warp space and back again. But no one had ever imagined it might be possible to build something that could stretch between the two different realms at the same time.

  “Three minutes, sir.”

  Lewinski straightened up in his chair, knowing that the last members of his crew would be watching him from engineering or from the sensor-relay rooms, where they awaited the inevitable.

  “Try hailing them again,” Lewinski said.

  “Aye, sir.” Terranova activated the linguacode communications sequence. “Unknown vessel, this is the U.S.S. Monitor. We are visitors in this region and request assistance.” She sat back as the computer translated the message into thousands of known languages and artificial-communication patterns across the entire subspace and electromagnetic energy spectrums.

  On the viewscreen, the Distortion continued its relentless approach.

  But then, for just an instant, what appeared to be a globe of blue light pulsed at the Distortion’s center.

  Lewinski leaned forward, asked excitedly, “What the hell was that?”

  “Optical radiation,” Terranova said. She worked her board, calling up science controls to analyze what had just happened.

  “Are they attempting to communicate with us?” Lewinski asked. Perhaps Starfleet linguacode was too primitive a method of communication for these beings. Perhaps they had just now realized the ship they approached had something to say.

  But again, Lewinski’s optimism, perhaps the driving ideal of Starfleet and the Federation, was misguided.

  “Something has left the Distortion field,” Terranova said.

  Lewinski made a fist against the arm of his command chair. Held one finger over the action control now set to trigger the compressed communications signal toward Earth. The longer he waited, the more energy it would have. Just as long as he didn’t wait too long and lose the opportunity to send it. “Is it a weapon?”

  “Unknown. Picking up a secondary distortion wave moving toward us.”

  Lewinski’s instinct was to raise shields, but there was no more power to maintain them. The warp drive was taking every last pulse of energy save for the absolute minimum required for environmental.

  “Sorry, Commander,” Lewinski said. Twenty years in Starfleet and he had never apologized for anything. But what was left for him to do?

  “Not your fault, sir.” Terranova didn’t look up from her board. “Impact in five…”

  Lewinski pressed the action control and at once the warp drive roared and the bridge lurched and the lights flickered as unimaginable power surged from propulsion to the sensor relays.

  Sirens screamed on the bridge as control surface after control surface erupted into sparks and flames. The ship trembled as the warp core was ejected.

  The viewscreen flickered and Lewinski knew the Distortion had overshot them and would be returning even now.

  “Message transmitted!” Terranova shouted. “All main sensor relays offline. Switching to backups.”

  Lewinski coughed as smoke from flames and mist from the fire-suppressing sprays clouded the bridge. On the screen, the Distortion was approaching from the opposite vector. It had reversed course instantly.

  “It’s dropped to sublight,” Terranova said. “Back on collision course. Eight seconds…”

  At least Starfleet will know, Lewinski thought. He just wished he could be sure they would know in time.

  “Four…three…two…impact.”

  Nothing happened.

  “Did it miss?” Lewinski asked.

  Terranova’s hands flew over the one section of her board that was still lit up and functional. Lewinski could see her tactical displays change configuration over and over as she sought to answer his question.

  Then Lewinski heard the hull creak. “Damage report,” he said.

  “Mass anomaly on the upper hull, sir.”

  Lewinski was as confused as Terranova sounded. “Mass anomaly?”

  “Switching to optical sensors.”

  The viewscreen changed from an image of space to a low angle showing the sweep of the Monitor’s dorsal hull. The image was indistinct, viewed in the almost nonexistent light from the surrounding galaxies and drastically enhanced by the computer.

  The image shifted as the optical sensor panned across the hull.

  Lewinski saw an object that didn’t belong. “There! Freeze. Move in. Enhance.”

  The object grew as the sensor’s field of vision shrank. Slowly the image became clearer as the computer’s visual enhancement routines made sense of the low-light conditions.

  “What the hell is that?” Lewinski asked.

  It looked as if a sandpile was growing on the hull, like a barnacle. Then, what was at first a featureless mound began to take on the shape of a structure formed of stacked cubes, most only a decimeter or so across, even as what appeared to be sand spread out from that mound, covering the rest of the hull.

  “Sir…sensors show it’s mostly carbon…traces of hydrogen…some helium…right up the periodic table to carbon. It’s just…undistinguished matter.”

  The hull creaked again, and the bridge seemed to cant a few degrees to port, as if the artificial-gravity generators were beginning to go out of alignment. Eerily, smoke and mist began to drift into that corner of the bridge, as if running downhill.

  “Where’s it coming from?” Lewinski asked, bracing himself in his chair. “Are they beaming it onto us?”

  “No indication of that, sir. The matter seems to be just…growing out of the vacuum.”

  “How is that possible?”

  The bridge lurched as a loud bang echoed through the ship.

  “Hull breach on deck one, sir.”

  Lewinski knew it was hopeless, but his instincts and his training could not be denied. “Seal all pressure doors.”

  A second series of loud thumps echoed—atmospheric containment doors slid shut all through the ship. Isolating the crew at their final duty stations.

  The creaking continued.

  “Mass anomalies are increasing, sir. Three more growth points on the hull.”

  “No,” Lewinski said as his ship seemed to twist and sigh all around him. He pointed to the ceiling of the bridge. “Not on the hull…”

  Terranova looked up to see what Lewinski pointed to.

  A blemish on the ceiling, spreading out, reaching down, like space-black sand, appearing from nowhere, each particle sliding toward others to grow into cubes that acquired shape and mass.

  Lewinski could hear the soft scrape of the impossible matter as it moved across the surface of the ceiling, spreading out to the bulkheads.

  “Nanites?” he asked. Was he seeing his ship being taken apart by voracious nano-machines?

  “No, sir. Sensors detect no variation in composition. No sign of movement or dataprocessing. The anomaly is just…cubes of matter.”

  The bridge suddenly went dark as somewhere a power conduit failed. Emergency lights flickered into life and gravity lessened, spilling the mist and low-lying smoke back into the center of the bridge.

  “Are they in engineering?” Lewinski asked.

  Terranova didn’t answer.

  Lewinski stood up as the bridge shuddered. Went to his second-in-command, placed his hand on her shoulder. “Commander—are they in…”

  Her shoulder was soft, spongy, as if made of sand.

  He pulled her around and when she swiveled in her chair, he saw her face slide off as if she were no more than something formed from dust and blown away to join the smoke and mist.

  Lewinski stepped back, looked at the viewscreen.

  The distortion covered all the galaxies before him. It was all around his ship. All around him.

  “No…” Lewinski whispered as the viewscreen went dark and crumbled.

  He stumbled to one side as the science stations to his right suddenly collapsed through the deck plates in a shower of sparks a
nd cloud of dark sand.

  “What are you?” Lewinski demanded of the darkness that streamed across the bridge deck, tendrils of black sand rising up from the mist to reach for him.

  He heard explosions deep in his ship. Heard a rush of wind, felt his ears pop as the pressure dropped.

  The hull had been fully breached.

  The Monitor was dying.

  Lewinski held up his hand.

  Watched the flesh of it powder and swirl away.

  “What are you?” he cried out in the last pocket of air, even as he felt his own legs dissolve and he dropped into an endless, eternal fall.

  Not long after, the last glittering particles of the Monitor and her crew gently spun away, forming a cloud that would expand forever, mixing with what remained of the first robot probe to Kelva, and the sparse, intergalactic molecules of primordial hydrogen.

  Not long after, the Influence moved back to the course it had been following, slipped from one set of dimensions to another, and once again sped through the transwarp corridor that linked Andromeda to Earth’s own galaxy.

  The Influence continued on its way, satisfied that it had fulfilled its instinctive drive to bring the peace of the Totality to all.

  Behind it, Andromeda was already at peace.

  Before it, the Milky Way awaited.

  Other Influences were shaping events there, and the Sharing had already begun.

  The Totality would come to this new galaxy, to the worlds of the Federation, and to James T. Kirk.

  Kirk had escaped once.

  But he would not escape again.

  The Peace of the Totality was coming.

  James T. Kirk will return in

  Star Trek: Captain’s Blood

  For further information about William Shatner, science fiction, new technologies, and upcoming William Shatner books, log on to

  www.williamshatner.com