He found out soon enough, when the second torpedo evaded the lasers entirely. The Klingon missile exploded against the outer ridge of the saucer section, forcing the Enterprise’s already strained shields to absorb the full force of the atomic blast. April felt the floor of the bridge vibrate beneath the soles of his boots as the Enterprise yawed to starboard before leveling out once more. The whiplash motion tortured his spine, and the captain had seized his armrests with both hands to keep from being thrown from his chair.
“Shields down to forty-eight percent,” his first officer reported. The blast had disheveled her hair, so that a snow-white strand fell across her furrowed countenance. She gave April a pointed glance. “I don’t know about you, Captain, but I’m getting too old to get knocked around like this.”
“Point duly noted,” April said breezily, determined to maintain his crew’s morale. Beneath his blithe manner, however, frustration chafed at his composure. Unlike Kor, he was fighting a ticking clock as well; every minute wasted in this pointless conflict brought the starving people of Tarsus IV closer to extinction. I have to end this now, one way or another.
“Carlos,” he addressed the helmsman. “I want you to target everything we’ve got against the Klingons’ portside warp nacelle.”
“Everything?” Florida gulped.
“Lasers, torpedoes … the whole kit and kaboodle.” It was a risky strategy, the captain knew. Not only would the Enterprise be left essentially unarmed afterwards, aside from the capacity to self-destruct; there was still a lot that Starfleet didn’t know about the design of Klingon warships, and so the targeting computer could only make educated guesses at where to target their phasers and torpedoes—and hope for the best.
“Yes, Sir,” Florida said. He hastily pressed buttons and flicked switches on his console, lining up an all-out assault, just as the captain requested. “Just give me a second, Sir.”
For the first time, April found himself wishing that his wife had not joined him on the Enterprise. If this all-or-nothing tactic failed, he might have only a minute or two to say good-bye to Sarah before consigning them all to oblivion. Sorry, old girl, maybe you’d have been better off becoming an Earthbound veterinarian, just like you planned in the first place, before I sweet-talked you into Starfleet. Deep down inside, though, he knew that, despite the dangers involved, neither of them would have traded a single moment of their lives together—even if both ended here, countless light-years from Earth.
“Here goes nothing,” Florida whispered loud enough for April to hear. The press of a single button launched a coordinated strike that left everyone on the bridge speechless. Lasers sliced through the vacuum at the aft section of the battle cruiser, joined by a staggering salvo of fusion torpedoes. Explosion after explosion illuminated the besieged Klingon warship, which jerked gracelessly beneath the cataclysmic impact of the Enterprise’s unchecked firepower. A thick cloud of radioactive plasma and debris spread from the rear of the cruiser, obscuring April’s view of the enemy ship.
He peered anxiously into the roiling conflagration, forgetting to breathe as he waited to catch a glimpse of whatever damage their reckless bombardment might have inflicted on the Kut’luch. After several long seconds, the luminous plasma began to disperse, permitting April to discern the charred and sparking remains of a wrecked warp nacelle at the rear of the Klingon battle cruiser. “Smashing!” April exclaimed.
His daring tactic had succeeded. Although undoubtedly still armed to the teeth, Kor’s ship had been effectively stranded at sublight speeds. “Carlos,” April addressed Florida, “prepare to go to warp.”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” the helmsman chimed. His broad face was flushed with excitement and relief. “Just give me a second to get the engines back on-line.”
“With all deliberate speed,” April urged him. Fierce disruptor blasts lashed out from the becalmed battle cruiser, followed almost immediately by a direct transmission from Kor himself.
“April!” the irate Klingon roared from the viewscreen, looking somewhat the worse for wear. His greasy black hair was a disordered tangle, while his mustache and beard appeared distinctly singed at their edges. Beyond Kor’s head and shoulders, the bridge of the Kut’luch seemed even dimmer and smokier than before. April thought he heard frantic shouting in the background.
“Do not even think of retreating, human,” Kor snarled. “This battle is far from over, and only a coward would flee the field of honor while his foe still held arms against him. I will grapple with you to the last torpedo, then with hands and teeth if necessary. I challenge you, April: Stay and fight like a warrior!”
A most eloquent and compelling exhortation, the Starfleet captain thought, provided one thinks like a Klingon. As it happened, though, he had very different priorities. “My apologies, Kor, old chap,” he informed the other captain. “I know you want a battle to the death, but I’m afraid I simply haven’t time to oblige you.” He nodded meaningfully at Spirit Claw Sanaway, and the Apache officer promptly cut off the transmission, no doubt sparing them all an impressive stream of Klingon invective.
Beneath Carlos Florida’s able hands, the Enterprise’s warp engines surged back to life, instantly propelling the entire ship far away from Kor and his barbaric dreams of combat and glory, at least for now. In his heart, Robert April somehow knew that this would not be the last time that the Starship Enterprise would be forced to wage war against the Klingons. But that was a problem for another day, maybe even another captain….
Aboard the disabled Klingon vessel, Kor watched in fury as his enemy’s ship warped beyond the range of his weapons and his anger. He lurched from his chair and marched toward the main viewer, which now showed nothing but empty space and a thinning cloud of plasma and debris. Silently, he spun around to glare at his bridge crew, daring each and every one of them to challenge his authority by making even a single remark about the inglorious outcome of his assault on the Enterprise.
But not even the overreaching Kruge was ready to take on Kor directly; like the other warriors present, Kruge kept his mouth closed and his eyes dutifully intent upon his instruments and monitors. Just as well, Kor concluded; he was in no mood to deal with any petty insurrections.
“Hah!” he barked loudly, so that all could hear him. “It is true what they say. All humans are cowards.” His crew quickly muttered their assent, with varying degrees of sincerity, and Kor reclaimed his place in the captain’s seat. “Inform the empire that we are in need of repair,” he added in a conspicuously offhand manner.
For all his efforts to save face in front of his soldiers, inwardly Kor could not escape the certain knowledge that he had failed in his mission; the Kut’luch no longer stood between the Enterprise and the hunger-stricken planet the humans called Tarsus IV. Clenching his fists so hard that his palms bled, Kor was forced to admit that he had severely underestimated the Starfleet captain.
I will not make that mistake again, he vowed.
Light-years away from where the Klingons nursed their wounds and plotted vengeance, the Enterprise dropped out of warp as she entered the Tarsus system. Traveling at impulse alone, Carlos Florida deftly navigated past asteroids and gas giants until the bright blue orb of a Class-M planet appeared on the viewscreen.
Almost there, April thought, bent on delivering his ship’s cargo of salvation to the beleaguered colony as expeditiously as possible. Urgently, he consulted the closest chronometer; it was a close thing, but he calculated that they’d arrived barely in time to prevent massive loss of life among the hungry settlers. No thanks to the Klingons, he conceded. Kor’s craving for combat had cost the Starfleet team very nearly all their margin for error.
“Hail the planet, Claw,” April instructed. “Let them know we’ll be in transporter range shortly.” The governor of the colony was a man named Kodos, the captain recalled. He was anxious to contact Governor Kodos so they could begin coordinating the rescue operation. The sooner we can get some food to those poor souls, the better.
“I’m sorry, Captain,” Sanaway explained, “but Tarsus IV is not responding to our hails.” He shrugged his massive shoulders. “I can’t explain it, Sir. We’re definitely within range for ordinary communications, visual and verbal.”
April didn’t like the sound of this. It was possible, he supposed, that this was merely some form of technical difficulty, but a chill came over him nonetheless. “Try the emergency channels, plus some of the nonofficial frequencies to boot,” he ordered Sanaway, then turned toward his first officer. “Lorna, do me a favor and scan the planet for life-forms. Humanoid, I mean.”
“Yes, Captain,” she complied. April could tell from her voice that Simon was worried, too. Something is very wrong, he thought, feeling a terrible sense of foreboding work its way through his bones. I know it.
An uncharacteristic gasp from Loma Simon alerted him that the matronly first officer had discovered something shocking. “Captain,” she stated slowly, trying without much success to quell the tremor in her voice, “sensors report a little over four thousand humanoid lifeforms on Tarsus IV.”
“Dear Lord,” April murmured. He knew as well as Simon that the known population of the colony was at least twice that number. “What in heaven’s name happened to the rest of them?”
The answers came in swiftly after that, in the form of scattered audio reports from civilian transmitters, long-range evidence of mass graves beneath the planet’s surface, and, eventually, heartbreaking eyewitness testimony from traumatized survivors and refugees. At first, April feared that the Klingon Empire had staged a sneak attack on the vulnerable colony, but the truth proved to be far more disturbing:
The planet’s elected governor, the thoroughly human being they were already calling Kodos the Executioner, was responsible for the atrocity that the Enterprise had arrived too late to avert. Not trusting relief to arrive in time, Kodos had executed half his people in a desperate, brutal attempt to guarantee that there would be enough food for those remaining. The governor himself, April was soon informed, committed suicide upon hearing of the Enterprise’s timely arrival; his incinerated body had been reportedly found and identified by the first landing party on the scene.
April drew little solace from the news that the infamous executioner had joined his victims. Later, in their private quarters aboard the Enterprise, he shared his sorrow with his wife. “I don’t even know whom to blame, Sarah,” he commented, as they sat side by side on a treasured pre-World War III couch that April had once beamed up directly from a quaint little antique store in Bath. Reports, schedules, clipboards, and a seemingly endless list of fatalities littered the low, rectangular table before him. “Kodos, for resorting to such insane, draconian measures, or the Klingons for fatally delaying the Enterprise?” Clasping his wife’s hand, he contemplated the tragic massacre documented in the reports strewn atop the table. “This sort of ghastly awfulness shouldn’t happen anymore, not in the twenty-third century.” An anguished sigh slipped past his lips. “I thought we’d evolved beyond this.”
Dr. Sarah Poole April gently rested her husband’s head on her shoulder. “Maybe someday, Rob,” she said softly. Weariness echoed in her voice, matching the dark shadows beneath her moist, grape-green eyes. She had put in long hours since their arrival at Tarsus IV, supervising the medical end of the relief efforts. To her distress, she’d needed to convert two of the shuttle pads into auxiliary sickbays just to accommodate the many victims of shock and starvation. “Someday, but not just yet.”
“Someday,” the captain repeated, drawing strength from his beloved’s evocation of a better day ahead. As always, it was his unshakable faith in the future that sustained Robert April through the hardships and suffering that still accompanied humanity on its bold pilgrimage to the stars. “That’s right. It’s not too late after all. Someday, maybe even sooner than we think, all this tragedy will give way to a more civilized era, with more than enough time for peace and discovery.”
“And justice?” Sarah asked, looking away from the documents recording Kodos’s crimes for posterity. A simmering anger edged out the exhaustion in her voice and eyes. “What about justice?”
“Yes, that too,” April insisted. On one of the lists of survivors he noted again the name of James T. Kirk, the teenaged son of his good friend George Kirk; April had initially been horrified to discover young Jimmy among the refugees, but now it gave him no small measure of relief to know that, at the very least, his friend’s son had lived through the massacre and could now be safely returned to Earth. Remembering Jimmy Kirk’s brave face and courageous spirit, unbroken despite all the horrors the boy had endured on Tarsus IV, helped April muster the faith he needed to reassure both his wife and himself. “We cannot let the likes of Kor or Kodos kill our dreams and our ideals. No matter what, we must cling to the hope that someday, somehow, justice will be done.”
And one day, it was.
Captain Christopher Pike
U.S.S. Enterprise
“Chris, you set standards for yourself no one could meet. You treat everyone on board like a human being, except yourself.”
Dr. Philip Boyce, Star Trek
JERRY OLTION
There is more to being a captain than leading your men into battle. Author Jerry Oltion provides a change-of-pace look at Christopher Pike and his crew. While readers may be familiar with the early workings of this era—thanks to the award-winning “Menagerie” two-part episode of the Original Series—Jerry explores a little more of the crew’s dynamic. And while the presence of the Klingons may be comfortingly familiar, much seems a lot more innocent than later generations of crew would experience. After all, April and now Pike are helping write the book, the rules for starship captains to follow (or in Kirk’s case, break).
When not writing, Jerry has been a gardener, stone mason, carpenter, oil-field worker, forester, land surveyor, rock ‘n’ roll deejay, printer, proofreader, editor, publisher, computer consultant, movie extra, corporate secretary, and garbage truck driver. For the last eighteen years, he has also been a writer.
He is the author of over ninety published stories in Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and various other magazines and anthologies. His work has won the Nebula Award, and the Analog Readers’ Choice Award, and has been nominated for the Hugo Award. He has nine novels, the most recent of which is Where Sea Meets Sky, a Star Trek novel. He has two previous Star Trek novels, Twilight’s End and Mudd in Your Eye. He and his wife, Kathy, also collaborated on a novel in the Star Trek: New Earth series.
Conflicting Natures
The air stank with the smell of burning bridge. Captain Pike tried to ignore the pungent aroma of fried electronics and concentrate on the damage report that Yeoman Colt had given him, but the smoke had put a tickle in his throat that gave him a dry, persistent cough. It also made his eyes water, and he found himself wiping at them as if he were crying over the damage done to his starship.
As well he might. The Klingon battle cruiser had attacked the Enterprise without warning, punching through the Federation starship’s shields and overloading half its command consoles before Pike and his crew could return fire. The battle had raged for half an hour before they had managed to destroy the Klingon ship with a salvo of photon torpedoes, and there was practically no system on board left unaffected.
The bridge crew and an emergency engineering team were at work inside the equipment consoles. Sparks still flew as the workers cut away slagged components, adding to the general miasma in the air.
“Dammit, can’t somebody get the environmental controls on line?” Pike demanded.
Lieutenant Burnstein, the chief engineer whom Pike called “Burnie” after an unfortunate incident with an i
nfrared toaster, had his head and shoulders inside the helm console between Pike’s command chair and the forward viewscreen. “We can fix the air conditioning or we can get this bucket of bolts back into flying shape,” he said, his thick New York accent muffled from inside the console. “It’s your choice, Captain.”
Pike didn’t like that choice. The Enterprise was supposed to be the Federation’s top-of-the-line flagship, the finest example of multiplanet cooperation and technology available anywhere. It was barely nine years old, and he was only its second commander, after Captain April. The ship had been designed to be the shining light of freedom in the galaxy for decades to come, but here it sat dead in space after a single battle with the Klingons, and the repair crew couldn’t fix the life support system and the helm at the same time.
He coughed again, stopping only when he ran out of air. He forced himself to breathe shallowly, and had just about recovered well enough to speak when Communications Officer Dabisch said, “Incoming message from Starfleet.” Dabisch didn’t seem to be having any difficulty breathing, but then he was a purple-skinned Gallamite with a transparent cranium and who-knew-what for lungs. Apparently there were trade-offs.
Pike used his breath to say, “Onscreen.”
The forward screen lit up with the gray-bearded face of Commander Wilson, who took in the destruction on the bridge in a glance. “What in Cochrane’s name happened to you?”
Star Trek: Enterprise Logs Page 8
