Dreadnought!

by Diane Carey

  “Standin’, sittin’, and hangin’ by.”

  “It sounds like she’ll be all right,” I murmured to Sarda, or to myself, or to Wooden Shoe, or to the stars.

  He nodded thoughtfully. “Her reaction would not be unusual for a Vulcan, though a Vulcan would conceal such revulsion from anyone but another Vulcan. It is not my experience that humans or their cultural counterparts react so extravagantly to the fortunes of self-defense.”

  “Well, I don’t know much about the Palkeo Est, but Merete’s reaction went beyond culture into something else. It was her own reaction, not a learned habit. At least, I got that feeling.”

  “The Palkeo culture reflects the human in most ways, though their physiology more closely matches that of native Denevans.”

  “Too bad we all couldn’t reflect your culture instead of each other’s. We’d all be better off.”

  His jeweled eyes flashed, and he visibly tried to contain a deeply personal reaction and succeeded. Instead of rupturing his façade, he drew a stiffer shield over it. “Such a goal is illogical.”

  Surprising both him and myself, I forced the issue. “Why? Why would it be so illogical if we all acted as disciplined and civilized as the Vulcans, Sarda?”

  At first no answer came from my faceted companion, and for many moments it seemed none would. As his jaw tightened I began to regret pushing him. But Sarda rose above my petty pestering once again. “Because such a goal defies the most refined of Vulcan philosophies. The principle of infinite diversity rejoicing in one another, growing and benefiting from their infinite combinations. Vulcan philosophy is for those of Vulcan heritage. There are limited exceptions. Other cultures must remain free to evolve as they will.”

  Dazedly I nodded. “Sounds familiar,” I moaned, but he didn’t hear. Or maybe he did, with his Vulcan hearing. “Am I right about Rittenhouse? Reacting on the basis of my own studies? It seems so obvious to me, Sarda.”

  His Vulcan mind turned on my doubts, changing his face little but greatly variegating something behind the stoic expression. When he spoke again, the depth of tone and meaning moved me in spite of the chill that had been living in me for hours, even though the words were shaded in sobriety. “Your conclusions seem comprised of equal portions of logic and intuition. And … I am beginning to trust your intuition.”

  Warmth filled me from a source which should have carried none. His eyes spread over mine in a soul-completing gaze. Suddenly I understood the wholeness of Vulcan companionship, a loyalty I didn’t deserve. Through my astonishment I realized Sarda was less crippled by his Vulcanness than he believed. Or, far beneath the shadows, than I believed.

  “If I may,” he began then with some hesitation, “I have a small gift.”

  A hand-sized book, bound in silver mesh, appeared between us. I gawked at it several beats longer than necessary.

  “Sarda … after all I’ve done to you?”

  “Please do not indulge in sentiment. Simply accept it. The words have provided some stimulae for my race and, in that capacity, may deepen your understanding of Vulcans.”

  “Explorations,” I read, “by Lyras. This looks like poetry.”

  “It is.”

  “Vulcans writing poetry?”

  “Poetry is an exceedingly measured art, Lieutenant, and Lyras a primary Vulcan philosopher. These are not nursery rhymes.”

  “And I’m not a Vulcan.”

  “If you recall, I mentioned limited exceptions.”

  “Oh. I see. Sarda, I don’t know what to say.”

  He put his attention back on the navicomp, and found refuge in piloting the sled. “Then silence is in order.”

  I smiled at him and he knew it.

  Also more comfortable in silence, I sat back with my book and opened it with a strange decisiveness, not flipping through as I usually did with new books—a bad habit, looking at the middle of a book first. Vulcan poetry … anticipation gripped me, and I read the neat, unornamented printing.

  This is the sixth element,

  time crossing time

  until all stands still

  and we may think.

  Study, but touch.

  Learn, and later know.

  Tame the craggy agonies of toil’s time.

  Memory and memoring comes late,

  comes shattery, scattery.

  When all is done, it is not

  to die—

  It is to die well.

  Power came through those words, though I had no literary training and didn’t really understand them. I suspected even Earth litterateurs would have difficulty, since some of the phrases seemed rooted in Vulcan history and Vulcan vernacular. Yet I felt better having read them, for no apparent reason.

  I closed the book, held it loosely, leaned back with my knuckles pressed against my lips, and let those words roll in my mind. I ended up with a headache, and … new thoughts.

  To die well.

  Even in translation, the Vulcan effect came through.

  “What makes you uncertain of your deductions?” Sarda asked then.

  A very good question, difficult to sort out. “I feel like my awareness of the events leading to World War Three might be making me see things that aren’t there, or read things wrong, or … he can’t be the only deviled egg in the nest. He fits a pattern I recognize—all those underlings in key Fleet posts can’t be coincidental.”

  “Self-doubt is your worry?”

  “Not really,” I murmured, not sure at all, “but what bothers me is that the pattern seems so obvious to me.”

  “Such deductive accuracy should not be regarded as unfortunate.”

  “No … but why hasn’t anyone else picked up his plans before now?”

  The voicing of that nagging doubt, a small cancerous awareness that my being the first to recognize the pattern might be a sign of error on my part, cleared my thoughts and helped organize them. Even more help came when I turned and saw in Sarda’s expression that my misgivings had already done time in his thoughts and been dismissed. A peculiar turn of his head guided both our gazes out to the Star Empire. It hovered in deep space like a finely sculpted medallion. “Perhaps someone has.”

  “Calibrating for final approach to Star Empire. We may now attempt bypass of the com block.”

  On the echo of Sarda’s suggestion I jolted to life and mashed the com button. “Star Empire, this is Arco sled Wooden Shoe, emissaries from Enterprise. Please come in.”

  Interspace crackled through the speakers. I winced at the grating noise but still hoped for the semblance of human voice. “We copy, Wooden Shoe. Please identify yourselves personally.”

  “Damn you, Brian Silayna! You drop those goddamned shields or I’ll tell everybody about last December at Starbase Three and I’m not joking!”

  Ninginginging. It reverberated through space.

  “Their aft shields are dropping. Docking bay doors are opening.” Sarda eyed me. A shadowy upturn bothered the corners of his lips.

  I avoided meeting his regard as I relaxed my posture and tried to be nonchalant. “I guess they know it’s me now.”

  “Evidently.”

  We maneuvered along the port side of an impossibly mammoth ship, designed with density in mind. So gigantic it took us several minutes to pass, the dreadnought’s size made it seem unmanageably beefy. Its nacelles and hulls were streamlined, for aesthetics, of course, but equally hulking.

  “What a bull elephant,” I murmured. The thought that its firepower matched its whopping size was frightening.

  “An uncomplimentary epithet,” Sarda mentioned.

  My mind filled with the thundering grace of a charging African elephant, ears flying, tusks gleaming, head tossing, and the great trumpet roar of mastery in its primitive state. “Then you’ve never seen a bull elephant.”

  “Have you?”

  “On training maneuvers in Kenya, on Earth.”

  “I shall consider going there.”

  “You won’t regret it.”

&nb
sp; Wooden Shoe and Polliwog entered the hangar bay and settled onto the deck with a breathy sound. We waited as the bay doors closed and the area pressurized around us. The four of us climbed out of the fighter and sled and ran for the door, which slid open to reveal a drawn, tense face. He ran toward us. I kept running toward him, toward that special face—and into special arms.

  Salvation slammed between us and locked itself in the thudding of our hearts. But this kind of passion felt wholly different from any ever shared before.

  “Brian,” I choked, clutching him.

  His hand pressed my head to his shoulder. “You made it! I didn’t think you could possibly get away.”

  “I couldn’t.” The desire to bury myself in his warm strength almost overwhelmed me and I almost gave in. Resisting that, I pushed him back a pace. “Will you please tell me what’s going on?”

  “Not me. Burch will.” He held my arm as the five of us ran through a corridor ribbed with bulky struts, twice the thickness of any I’d seen on a ship or station anywhere. Everything was structured to take extra stress, built massively, in chunky parcels and fitted together, even to the very walls, which were fibercoil blocks in a herringbone pattern. Everything else, even the struts, went around us in the hexagonal shape of a beehive. From experience with the beekeepers on Proxima, whom we’d brought in to care for the imported bees that pollinated our vegetables, I knew the beehive structure hadn’t ever been improved upon for raw bracing strength from outside pressure. The massive structure created an illusion of crampedness in the corridor even though it was actually rather wide for a ship’s interior arteries, and I had to consciously avoid crouching as we ran for the turbolift.

  “Why me, Brian?” I demanded, using the time as the lift raced for the upper decks. “Was it your idea to put me on the hot seat?”

  He glanced subconsciously at the eyes around us—at Scanner, Sarda, and Merete—but I brought him back with a punch on the arm, of respectable force. “Damn it, tell me! How dare you drag me into this without talking to me first! You knew all along!”

  “I didn’t want to get you involved,” he began lamely.

  I slugged his arm again, this time in earnest. Anger merged with insult, relief with indignance. “We were lovers, Brian! How could you be involved with terrorists and never slip a word of it to me?” Suddenly I realized what he’d just said. “Did I hear you say you didn’t want to get me involved? Is that what I heard you say? Is that what you said? Because I’m involved and people are going to die now and I want to know if it’s my fault.”

  “Piper,” he soothed, gripping my arms.

  I jerked away. “Get your hands off me.”

  Around us my friends tried to be fascinated with the lift walls, though my least concern was embarrassment.

  “Piper, please.” That tone. He knew he could get me with that dulcifying tone. “I didn’t tell you because I wanted to protect you. We weren’t that sure of ourselves. I didn’t have the right to risk your career too.”

  “Then why engage my biocode?”

  “Once we left port we realized we didn’t know who to trust at Star Fleet. Rittenhouse has cronies all over the service, bought and paid for with commissions and commands and promotions—”

  “I know. I figured it out. Keep talking.”

  “There was no way for us to know where his influence went, who was or wasn’t—”

  “Brian!”

  “Burch trusts me and I trust you, that’s all.”

  “That’s it? That’s the whole story?”

  “We knew our only chance of blowing the corruption open would be to convince Kirk, and Kirk was impressed with you. We figured you’d believe me, and then you could convince him. It was a gut decision. I’m sorry.”

  Not sorry enough.

  My voice became suddenly calm, funereal. “You trust me to risk my life,” I said, “but not enough to leave my career in my own hands. Not enough to have shared this with me before it turned critical. Don’t make any more decisions for me, ever. Do you understand?”

  He stepped toward me, saying, “Piper, come on—”

  My hand met his chest. “Some things don’t mend, Brian.”

  Mercifully the turbolift slowed and opened. We spilled out onto a wide, anemic bridge, austerely colored and without comforts, built chunkily like the rest of the ship. Only five people turned to look at us, an ethnic assortment that immediately made me think of Rittenhouse, including Terry Broxon at the helm. She turned to me, her face a matt of guilt—carefully absent of any real shame. A fine line indeed.

  “Terry!” I blurted. “You too?”

  She stood up and moved to the command chair, where the seated man was just turning to face us. Shadows ruled his face, the greyness of fatigue and unaccustomed responsibility, the smudge of an unshaven beard, circles under his pale green eyes, a lock of hair flipped down from a receding hairline. The last emotion I expected to feel suddenly shot through me: pity.

  “Lieutenant Piper,” Terry introduced, “this is Commander Burch.”

  Burch seemed to crawl out of the command chair to take my hand in both of his. “Thank God you got here. I’m so glad, Lieutenant.” His accent was thickly English, his voice unexpectedly mild.

  “You’d better have a talk with your god, sir, before you start thanking him for things, because we’re in deep trouble.” Okay, so I’d never be begged to join the diplomatic corps. “There are four ships out there thinking some very unsavory thoughts.”

  He swallowed hard and nodded. “Yes, I … I know. I realize this move was rash, stealing the dreadnought, but it had to be kept out of Rittenhouse’s hands. He fancies himself a savior, Lieutenant, wants to unify everything, liquidate the sovereignty of the Klingons, Romulans, Orions, Mengenites, Perseans—”

  “I know about that, sir.”

  “Oh … good. I’m sorry you had to be used, but I didn’t know what else to do … there are splinter groups all over Star Fleet who believe the Federation should move in on so-called enemy cultures before they become too strong to control. Rittenhouse has been knitting them together. I figured it out a couple of years ago, but without the dreadnought Rittenhouse’s plan lacked a trigger, so he started building it. I couldn’t approach anyone officially, I simply couldn’t … his influence is too covert. So I started my own little conspiracy with my own friends and students.” Burch paced around the lower deck, nervous, fatigued, running on a fading second wind and plagued by obvious helplessness and inexperience. “The only person I could be reasonably sure of was Kirk. He’s the only person to ever turn down promotion. They’ve been pressuring him to accept a position in the Admiralty, but he’s been resisting. He’s not yet ruled by his ambitions. And his reputation—” Burch paused, rubbing his knuckles nervously, and seemed to run out of words. “But even he wouldn’t necessarily believe a tale like this unless we showed him and all of Command we were willing to put our lives on the line.”

  “And you thought I could convince him?”

  “Silayna thought so.”

  I refused to look at Brian. I stepped down to Burch’s level. “Sir, you underestimated Captain Kirk. He figured it out for himself. None of this was necessary.”

  “Oh, but it was! Even Kirk’s influence at Star Fleet Command wouldn’t outweigh all of Rittenhouse’s voices. We had to draw the galaxy’s attention to this bloody machine and Rittenhouse’s plot. The people who built this menace are hungry to use it. We must act against them. The integrity of Star Fleet must be reestablished.”

  “May I ask what your plan is?”

  “Plan? I have no plan! I didn’t think he’d actually pull in three heavy cruisers—I can’t fight them all—I’m a desk pilot.”

  “You did a good job against the Klingons….”

  “Good job?” He chuckled mirthlessly, mocking his success. “Did you think we were making a Shakespearean entrance?”

  Brian stepped down to me and explained, “When the Klingons showed up we put up the image of Star Em
pire and let it take the beating while we hid in the asteroids, but when Enterprise appeared, it took us fifteen minutes just to figure out how to aim the phasers and photons.”

  I stared at Burch. “You don’t know how to work this ship?”

  “Very basically. I can make it fly a straight course and I know something about the image projector—Lieutenant Sarda surpasses me there, though.”

  “Does anyone on board know?”

  He shook his head, his chin stiffening pathetically. “Most of these people are my students and advisees from Academy. A few decent technicians, but no specialists. And there are only forty-eight of us on a ship that normally crews five hundred.”

  I clenched my hands to hide the trembling when it started again. “I’ll help if I can,” was all I could say.

  “And your friends?”

  “We’re with y’all,” Scanner said, not bothering to consult Merete or Sarda. They seemed agreeable.

  “Are you specialists in anything?”

  Merete remained painfully silent, as though unable to say her profession, but Scanner piped up, “I know a stitch or two about sensors.”

  “Then get down to the sensory. Sarda, we could use you at the auxiliary weapons turret. Do you remember the layout well enough?”

  “Quite well, Commander.”

  “Go.”

  The turbolift swallowed those two, leaving the bridge even emptier.

  “All right, Piper,” Burch sighed, “let’s try talking to Captain Kirk.”

  “We may have to move closer,” I said. “Rittenhouse is blocking communications somehow. Scrambling interspace with static.”

  “Take the helm.”

  Where had I heard those gruesome little words before?

  My body grew cold. The helm chair and console felt like ice around and beneath me. Terry Broxon took the seat at navigations. A glance at her reawakened my amazement that she and Brian, two old friends, could be so close to me, even go through the attempt at the Kobayashi Maru test at my side, and still not let me in on Burch’s radical plans. True, they both had taken Burch’s classes in management and bureaucratic policy-making at Academy and I’d never even met him, but such an excuse waxed flimsy in the light of personal trust. I felt betrayed and was in no mood to shake it off. Self-pity made me angry. I needed anger right now. Anger provided strength.