STARTREK®: NEW EARTH - WAGON TRAIN TO THE STARS

by Diane Carey

  RESPONSIBILITIES:

  Zone Control.

  Establishment of markers, signal devices.

  Planetary exploration.

  Security of immediate flight path.

  COMMAND DUTY ROSTER—TENDER/TRANSPORT MOVEMENT

  Chief Fleet Coxswain: DAN MARKS, Capt.

  Duty station: Conestoga Tender Polynesian

  RESPONSIBILITIES:

  All small boat and tenders movement.

  Shifting of mules, runabouts, pods on board and off board larger vessels.

  Provisioning, all tenders.

  Safety, all tenders and personnel.

  COMMAND DUTY ROSTER—VIP TRANSPORT

  Host: NED CHALKER, Capt.

  BEVERLY CHALKER, Cdr.

  Duty Station: S. S. Mable Stevens

  RESPONSIBILITIES:

  Colonial Governor’s transport.

  Security and safe conduct for high-level dignitaries and guests.

  Delivery of specialized technical data.

  Host ship, Officers’ Arrival Banquet.

  * * *

  Chapter Ten

  “CAPTAIN KILVENNAN, welcome back to the Enterprise.”

  Over his shoulder, Jim Kirk heard Spock’s mild greeting and knew he was being watched from the aft of the bridge again. Seated here in his command chair, he was usually protected as if in a bubble. He could feel Michael Kilvennan behind him, drilling holes in his spine from aft, while Governor Pardonnet hovered on the upper starboard side, signing a requisition for Uhura. No, Pardonnet wasn’t looking at him right now—at least, not with his eyes.

  Was Spock being sincere or just trying to grease the skids? Or remind Kilvennan of where he stood? More likely he was using the mask of greeting to warn Kirk of the privateer captain’s presence.

  Even before turning to scope the other captain’s expression, Kirk sensed Kilvennan’s insult at having to come here again. For Kilvennan and the other enforcement captains, the bridge of the Enterprise was probably an oppressive place. All the other captains had signed on with the idea of being led out into deep space. The privateers had signed on with the idea of leading. Then, at the last minute, once the finicky UFP Council had swallowed the idea that the Belle Terre Expedition would launch with or without official blessing, the Council had decided to insist upon Starfleet escort. They didn’t want to look like spoilsports, but ended up looking like pushy parents instead, forcing the privateers to choke down admiralty authority. Governor Pardonnet had made them agree. They were stuck, obliged to let James Kirk or his command staff make every decision.

  As he sat here, knowing Kilvennan was behind him, Kirk realized he could’ve handled this more sympathetically—or at least, more courteously. It would’ve been better for Kirk to have visited Hunter’s Moon, and let Kilvennan rule the turf for a change.

  Oh, well . . . too late.

  On the walkway, Governor Pardonnet looked up at Kilvennan, sensed the tension, but didn’t interfere. In his periphery Kirk saw the governor offer a nod of recognition to the privateer. It was good that he wasn’t interfering. The governor didn’t like to be here either, Kirk knew, preferring to separate the civilian and Starfleet authorities as much as possible, but some things required his presence whether he liked it or not. The line of separation had blurred more and more with every malfunction, every accident, contamination, or theft that plagued the Expedition. Starfleet had moved more and more into clear control. The privateers and even the governor himself had been pushed out of the enforcement command loop.

  Once he couldn’t get away with further stalling, Kirk swiveled his chair around. “Captain Kilvennan, I see you’ve been cleared out of quarantine.”

  “Yeah,” Kilvennan responded drably. “McCoy cleared the whole Conestoga.”

  “I haven’t seen his report yet. I hope this means the lung-flu problem is solved.”

  “Some parts of it are. The rest, I guess he’ll have to tell you for himself. Me, I’ve got another problem. Scott cleared my mother of tampering suspicion. The phasers on the factor drone were enhanced, but not with my mother’s code or Stefan Webb’s, or anybody else authorized by Kilvennan-Webb. The access didn’t cross-check with anything we recognized.”

  “A relief, I assume,” Kirk offered.

  Kilvennan stepped a little closer to the rail. “It is, but the charges you levied against my mother haven’t been dropped. It’s time to drop them.”

  “Not yet,” Kirk disavowed. “There’s an investigation pending. I intend to see it out.”

  Kilvennan flushed with anger. “My mother and her husband run an appliance industry, not an assassination service! We didn’t have anything to do with that drone malfunction! What do you think that accusation is doing to my family?”

  Keeping a grip on the command chair, Kirk stood up and faced him. No, that wasn’t good enough. He let go of the chair and climbed the little steps to the upper deck, where he faced Kilvennan, aware that the two of them must make an odd pair of bookends indeed to the others who were watching.

  “How desperate was your mother to get medication for your family?” Kirk bluntly asked. “It’s possible she sent that drone out as a distraction while she arranged for the medicine to be stolen or contrabanded. Those events happened about the same time.”

  Kilvennan’s eyes narrowed. “What are you really up to? Trying to smoke out criminals by charging innocent people and hoping the real thieves relax enough to try something else? I’ve heard you do that sort of thing.”

  Like a rock out of a slingshot, Kirk felt his own expression change. “I’ve been hearing things too. I’ve heard your children were cured first, along with selected families on the Yukon, even before they’d been treated by Dr. McCoy. Is that true?”

  Chafing at the ring of truth, Kilvennan hesitated. “Contraband medicine was being distributed,” he admitted. “What could I do? Stand by while our kids suffered? You wouldn’t either. Nobody’s that noble.”

  Unaffected by the accusation, Kirk stepped closer in a way he hoped was strict if not threatening. “I want to know where you got it.”

  Kilvennan refused to be intimidated—actually a pretty good sign. “From people who helped us. They gave it to us, they didn’t sell it. I won’t betray them.”

  “Instead you’ll betray us all?” Kirk countered. “That’s not what I expected of a man who’s been hired to enforce the law, Captain.”

  “Spirit of the law,” the privateer disclaimed, “not the letter of it.”

  The turbolift hissed open and interrupted the standoff. At first Kilvennan didn’t look to see who was coming, until his name was called by a voice he recognized. “Michael?”

  A sheepish young fellow came out, pushed onward by McCoy. The boy wore camouflage trousers and a buffalo plaid shirt—a pioneer if ever there was one in the stereotype file.

  “Quinn!” Kilvennan spun around and grasped the newcomer.

  Behind them, McCoy got Kirk’s attention, motioned at the younger fellow, and mouthed, His brother.

  Something about the meeting let steam out of Michael Kilvennan. Kirk could guess what the younger brother must’ve been like on the Yukon, among all the other wildly feverish passengers. There’d been something wrong with them, something abnormal, McCoy had reported, and now Kirk chafed to get the whole story. There was a certain sensitive timing to a moment like this. He opted to wait a few seconds, give the brothers a chance to downshift.

  “Feeling better?” Kilvennan asked.

  Quinn Kilvennan shook his head, deeply embarrassed. “I acted like some kind of possessed soul! I didn’t even . . . recognize myself!”

  “Didn’t recognize you either.” His brother patted Quinn’s arms, showing in every possible demonstration that he was forgiven for the messy behavior on the Conestoga, yet failed to massage the lingering humiliation in Quinn’s eyes. “Everybody acted like animals, not just you. Thought Mae was going to crack in half. Did you see Tom Coates, roaring like a stuck bull?”

  “Why
would anybody do that to us?” Quinn’s doleful eyes implored answers. He looked past his brother, to James Kirk.

  Kirk raised his brows, and shifted his eyes to McCoy. The buck passed again.

  “Atmospheric contamination,” McCoy crowed, happy with himself. “And, Jim, there’s no chance it was random or accidental. Nothing so formula-specific could be a malfunction. The adjustment was geared to elicit exactly the response we saw.” He pointed casually at Quinn Kilvennan.

  “What did you see?” Kirk prodded impatiently.

  “Well, you know we put all sorts of atmospheric mixtures together for space travel. The air in our ships has antibiotics, vitamin supplements, corpuscle stimulants, extra oxygen, the usual things. Apparently the computer system for infusion tanks on the Yukon was fed a revised program, causing an intoxicant effect very similar to Zenite gas.”

  “Zenite,” Kirk murmured. “How well I remember . . .” Sudden empathy for Quinn Kilvennan got him by the throat. He remembered that awful nauseous feeling of mindless anger. And what if McCoy hadn’t found it soon enough? The drug-crazed citizens might’ve turned the Conestoga’s minimal weapons on their innocent neighbors.

  “Right,” McCoy said. “You almost took that other man’s skin as a souvenir of Stratos City.”

  Michael Kilvennan pulled his brother aside so he could ask McCoy, “Why didn’t Yukon’s filter alarms go off?”

  “The filter system was programmed to ignore the gas.”

  On the side deck, Governor Pardonnet sank into the nearest chair. “We’ve got to find out who’s doing all these things, and more importantly, why.”

  “Out of sixty-four thousand people?” Kilvennan asked. “With so many scientists, mechanics, architects, and technicians, how do we find out who’s doing things that are clever and technical? The skill to make them happen isn’t exactly rare on this Expedition. We’re towing our own hospital, factories, and labs, with resident geniuses in every one of them, for Christ’s sake!”

  Quinn put his hand on his brother’s arm. “The Lord’s name, Michael.”

  “Sorry.” Kilvennan gave him a moment’s attention, but turned to Kirk now, wanting a theory if not an answer.

  Kirk, also in need of theories, turned to Starfleet’s theory machine—Spock.

  Spock came forward without bidding.

  “Commander Giotto’s detectives,” he explained, “are investigating these problems under Mr. Chekov’s strict eye. So far they’ve only managed to track down the causes, not the perpetrators.”

  Near Kilvennan, Kirk rubbed the knuckles of his right hand, aching to punch somebody. He felt his brows come down, lips press tight, and knew he was giving away his worries. “Yes,” he grumbled, almost to himself. “It limits the circle of people I can trust.”

  In fact, that circle was just about all here, on this bridge. Scott was working on the mule tender, Sulu was off somewhere in the fleet, and Chekov was trying to iron out this very problem. Everybody else . . . his circle of confidence had grown small indeed. Having so few people to depend upon—the closing tunnel was chilly. Out in space almost all his life, with an ocean of admirers and a wall of accolades, a whole civilization depending upon his actions, yet a truly limited pool of real friends, and no family to notice, he suddenly felt isolated, chased by night terrors. The pool was shrinking.

  “Who’d want to do this to us?” Governor Pardonnet broke into Kirk’s thoughts. “Who would want to ruin our future?”

  Before Kirk could stop anyone from posing an unpolished answer to a rhetorical question, McCoy had already turned and said, “Don’t be naive, Governor. This mission can be seen as the first wave of a massive Federation expansion. Hell, that’s how I see it. Lots of forces in the galaxy would like to see you fail.”

  “Fail we might,” Kilvennan said. “People are talking seriously about turning back.”

  Evan Pardonnet looked up, and the flame of determination came back into his words. “We can’t allow that kind of talk to take over our minds. We’ll soon come into Gamma Night. We need to believe we can get through this together.”

  Drawing the center of attention back to himself, Kirk strode in front of the Kilvennan brothers and positioned himself between McCoy and the governor, but faced Michael Kilvennan. “You sure it’s not the lingering effects of this contaminant speaking for them?”

  “Dead sure,” Kilvennan claimed. “I knew when they weren’t themselves, and I know when they are. These people don’t belong to you, or to you, Governor. You can’t force them to stay if they decide to turn back. This isn’t a Starfleet operation.”

  Kirk clamped his lips tight. He wanted it to be a Starfleet operation, wanted problems solved by being able to just give orders, throw his weight around, not be questioned. He’d never liked diplomats before, but was abruptly beginning to appreciate them. Tough job—holding someone’s hand when you really want to break his arm.

  “I won’t allow the Expedition to split up,” he vowed. “We’re under mysterious assault. If we split up, I can’t protect both sides.”

  “Could send the cutter back as an escort,” Kilvennan suggested. “And I’ll go with them too.”

  “Michael,” Quinn hedged, “you sure?”

  “If Mom and Mae want to turn back, I’m not going out to some dustbowl planet without my family. The other privateers think the same.”

  Kirk stepped to him, giving him that tigerlike glare which had served him so well in the past. “We need you to patrol the perimeter. Report to Captain Briggs or any of his sons on Norfolk Rebel. They’re coordinating the outer patrol.”

  Defiant, Kilvennan shook his head. “I’m not reporting to your Wreckmasters. How long before one of these disasters takes three thousand lives and you can’t catch it in time? Another couple of weeks, there’s going to be a shortage of food. Think we haven’t figured that out? We’re willing to admit maybe this whole project was a mistake in the first place.”

  Pardonnet stood up. “You signed on to protect us. You signed a legal contract.”

  “What good is ‘legal’ out here in the middle of nothing? I’ve got kids to think about. When we get back to Earth, you can sue me.”

  Kirk moved slightly to his left, just enough to come between Kilvennan and Pardonnet, so that the privateer captain had no choice but to look at him, and only him. “Your assignment,” he said, “is to patrol the perimeter. You’re not officially deputized. You can be the chief constable, but you’re in.”

  “I’m not yours to order,” Kilvennan reminded, “or yours to promote.”

  “All the privateers will submit crew manifests to Lieutenant Chekov for a new security clearance background check.”

  Kilvennan shifted his weight. “Aren’t you listening?”

  Kirk didn’t look at anybody else. He’d had his fill of committee command. Pick one opponent, one target, and deal with it. “Oh, I’m listening. I’m just not entertaining any talk of splitting up or turning back. Things aren’t that bad yet.”

  “Not yet,” Kilvennan repeated. “That’s what we’re afraid of. If there’s an accident out here, it’s not just a ship’s crew, it’s a three-thousand-person critical mass. We all know about your reputation, but you can’t reach into the past and pull forward the power to keep together a caravan of sixty-four thousand people under conditions that are deteriorating. My whole family was put at risk when the atmosphere went bad on Yukon. How long before life-support goes out completely on one of those moving mountains?”

  From behind Kirk, Spock offered, “Conestoga life-support is phenomenally reliable, Captain Kilvennan. All the machinery with the exception of shields is devoted to it. That’s one of the benefits of Mr. Scott’s independent mule engines.”

  “There’ve been a hundred little breakdowns,” Kilvennan pursued. “Contamination grids rupturing, isolation compromised, half the lung-flu medication contaminated, hot things running too hot, cold things freezing solid, trouble with the sanitation systems—and you’re going to take these p
eople forward into Gamma Night?”

  “These aren’t accidents,” Kirk said, determined to get that one point, if no other, across. “There’s sabotage going on. Very possibly the criminals you’re protecting.”

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  Kirk couldn’t help a miniature swagger. “I feel it in my gut.”

  Smoothly, Spock added, “The odds, in fact, against all these types of breakdowns, in this length of time, with this particular variety of equipment, are roughly eighty-nine thousand six hundred twelve to one.”

  Jabbing a finger over his shoulder, Kirk drawled, “He feels it in his gut too.”

  To one side, McCoy said, “Spock’s gut has always had more decimal places.”

  Kilvennan folded his arms as his brother watched with a paling face. “Glad you can still laugh.”

  Growing even more grim, Kirk warned, “You can go to the perimeter, or you can go to the brig.”

  Did he mean it? He wasn’t sure himself. A risky bluff if it was called.

  Okay, then apparently he meant it.

  Though neither of them really moved, somehow another inch closed between them.

  “You agreed to protect these people,” Kirk went on. “We’re living under duress. By Federation law, that gives me the right to confiscate any ship, including yours. A privateer crew has to be able to trust its captain to keep his word . . . if you leave after promising to see us through, their trust in you will begin to erode. After that, it’s just a matter of time.”

  He chose his words carefully, consciously trying not to frame a true threat, yet provide the kind of rumor that would get around. On the bridge, everyone’s posture changed—subtle, small, but notable.

  The silence ground like a mill, enhanced by the twitter of bridge noises in the background. Only when the whistle of the comm system broke through did Kirk allow himself to be pulled from the confrontation.

  “Sir,” Uhura interrupted, “Mr. Sulu’s hailing from the Normandy.”