by Diane Carey
“Try to close the distance between us and Enterprise,” Burch said, more a suggestion than an order, “and give those others a wide berth. We have only two advantages and we must use them.”
“Which are?” Brian prodded from the engineering station.
“First of all, Rittenhouse doesn’t know how poorly we know this ship. Secondly, he does know me. I might be a third-rate bureaucrat, but I never give up trying and he knows I won’t. He also knows I’m no longer intimidated by him as his captains are. We must employ those things.”
Good for you! I thought as I urged the massive beast into sublight movement. Even a bureaucrat can wield a sword if he thinks he can! Suddenly I felt surging pride in the Star Fleet that had produced a Paul Burch, and became that much more determined to preserve the good institution that he proved still existed beneath the crust of corruption.
“Three-quarters sublight, sir,” I told him as the great ship turned beneath my fingertips and swept forward.
“Maintain.” He sat nervously in the command chair, still rubbing his knuckles. Several endless minutes passed as the massive ship moved through space toward the cluster of starships. “Ensign Novelwry, open a hailing frequency.”
“Aye, sir. Frequency open.”
“Enterprise, come in please. This is Commander Burch. Please answer.”
But the voice that rasped back at us had none of Kirk’s subdued tones. “Burch, this is Rittenhouse. Give up, right now, or we’ll blast you out of the sector.”
Burch winced. “Sorry, Vice-Admiral. I’m quite committed. The only way to stop me now is to make good on your threat.”
A very good ploy, I noticed. Burch gave Rittenhouse no choice: cease hostilities and admit defeat, or fire on us and open an official can of worms as wide as the Horsehead Nebula. Threats were one thing, but to actually open fire was something else entirely. Burch plowed through his own bluff. “Enterprise—Captain Kirk—do you read us? Please respond.”
“This is Kirk. Can you boost your gain? We’re being blocked. Barely reading you.”
“Boost our signal, Ensign.”
“Trying, sir. There’s a lot of static.”
“It’s Pompeii blocking our frequency. Enterprise, we must confer! ‘Captain Kirk, Star Fleet Command must be made aware—”
Crrrrrraaaaack!
The Star Empire shuddered under us as terrible thunderbolts struck her weakest points. Some of the bridge panels started sizzling.
“Good God!” Burch choked, “I didn’t think he’d actually do it!”
“Sir, order red alert!” I yelled.
“Yes … red alert. Thank you. Go to red alert.”
Everything turned red under the emergency system, giving a hellish appearance to a hellish situation.
We took another hit, a long, sustained round of phaser fire, and the dreadnought trembled again.
“A hit in communications, sir!” Novelwry gasped, fanning smoke. “The main couplings at the outlet belowdecks.”
“He’s not going to let us talk to Kirk,” Burch said. “Carr, have you found the full shields yet?”
We only had half shielding? No wonder the hits shook us up!
“Not yet,” said one of the ensigns, a thin boy old enough to take charge of any sandbox. “All the controls are tied in to the computer and can’t be run manually unless the computer is disengaged.”
“Any of you know how to do that?”
We were spared answering by another hard, long phaser strike. We hung in sizzling limbo, gripping our flashing panels, until it ceased.
“That can’t be Pompeii,” I said, shouting unnecessarily. “Mr. Scott sabotaged their phaser banks.”
Burch turned in the chair. “Hopton?”
“Confirmed,” said the stocky ensign at weapons control. “The first shot came from Pompeii. After that, they came from Lincoln.”
“Oh God, oh God … Piper … go down below. See if you can’t patch communications back together. We’ve got to get Kirk on our side!”
I stumbled toward the turbolift, hoping the dreadnought was as tough as Boma theorized. Merete swung in after me, saying, “I’ll go with you. Maybe I can help.”
Just before the door hissed shut, we heard Ensign Carr report, “Sir, they took out the outside optical unit of the image projector!”
I slumped against the lift wall and closed my eyes. “What a nightmare.”
Merete started to say something, but it drowned in the next endless phaser hit. The lights blinked off, then on again. Big struts roared and moaned like thunder in our heads. Then the ship lurched sideways. Merete and I slammed into the closed door and were pinned there until the artificial gravity could recover and compensate.
I pulled Merete to her feet. “Are you okay?”
“If you hadn’t told him to go to red alert, the ship’s systems wouldn’t be on emergency standby.”
“Boma must be directing the attack. Hitting the ship’s weakest points. We couldn’t have a more formidable enemy than the people who really do know how to use this ship. I don’t think Burch even knows how to use the weapons very well.”
“You heard them say they’re having trouble bypassing the computer.”
“I wish I was home.”
The lift bumped hard then, but didn’t stop. The lights flickered again. “This ship is bent,” I decided. “The lift tube is actually twisted a little. Rittenhouse picked the right man when he brought Boma along.”
“He won’t kill us, Piper.”
I stared at her. “Rittenhouse? Are you crazy?”
She hesitated. “He really does think he’s doing the right thing. I feel like that, anyway … he’s just trying to scare us.”
Perhaps she couldn’t deal with impending death and had to convince herself it wasn’t coming. Her inability to handle her mortality frightened me even more than having to face my own. Somehow, Merete had seemed more stable to me than this.
“We’ll fight,” I assured her. I tried to believe it. “He’ll have to face the whole impact of his plans. If we die, at least Rittenhouse will face a shakedown at Fleet Headquarters that might stop him in his tracks. We can only hope.”
“Yes,” she murmured with false certainty.
Minutes later we were running through the technical stations of the lower decks, trying to find the communications outlet. The hull of the ship hadn’t yet been ruptured, but Boma’s instruction had blown up countless panels, leaving frayed lines and snapping circuits where working machinery had been. The ship was virtually empty, with only fifty or so people crawling in her thick, endless innards. The feeling of aloneness unsettled me. I tried to ignore it. After several wrong turns we finally found the right room—and a twisted mass of overloaded circuitry, mutilated by blasts on key points outside and blown out by the rush of energy.
I moaned when I saw it.
“That can’t be fixed,” Merete said.
“What a mess … well, it can’t hurt to try. Help me clear these panels away. Be careful of the stripped cables. Keep insulated. Don’t let that leaking coolant touch your skin.”
“I won’t. Piper, you shouldn’t try it.”
“I’m going to try it.”
It took a good twenty minutes to sort out everything, but once I’d cleared away the burned debris I discovered the real damage was only to the outermost circuits, those designed for long-distance subspace channels. Every time the circuits sparked Merete begged me to stop trying, especially since Rittenhouse’s captains were still firing on us. She had a point. If they hit here again, I would be incinerated. Every few minutes the ship would jolt around us and the lights would flicker. Back-up systems clicked, whirred, and struggled all over the ship. Occasionally Burch would return fire, though I knew he didn’t have the grit to fire seriously on other Fleet people. He hadn’t come out here to kill, but to prevent killing. Whether he could drum up the necessary mettle to wage a true battle remained to be seen. At least the problem was his and not mine anymore.
And what about Captain Kirk? What would he do now that shots had been fired? He would have to take one side or the other, square off with us or surrender to Rittenhouse. I had a hunch he wouldn’t readily do Rittenhouse any favors, not after what occurred on Pompeii. Burch had judged Kirk correctly. The captain of Enterprise was a free-thinking maverick who commanded in high style, not easily bluffed, not prone to alarmist apprehensions. He deserved every accolade Star Fleet could shower on him, very much deserved the admiralty he’d been offered. Curiosity rose in me about why he resisted promotion. Could he be unambitious, as Burch guessed? Or did the idea of functioning in the upper echelon of a corrupt fleet repulse him as much as it did me? Had he known about the creeping miscreance even before this incident began? Had Rittenhouse made the mistake of approaching him? It all made sense. But if Kirk had been working on hunches and feelings, this incident had finally forced him to home in on the details, just as Sarda and I did.
“I think I’ve almost got it, Merete.” The instruments scorched my hands as I fought to replace fried fuses and reconnect severed coils. Neither electrical nor mechanical engineering was my specialty, but I did my best to make sense of the puzzle, to give paths to the currents which would carry our voices to Enterprise and theirs to us.
“You mean you can really repair this mutilation?” she asked.
“Maybe not repair it, but I think I can rig a skip circuit in the fitting under here. Are there any Jesus clips out there?”
“A what clip?”
“It’s a little metal clip about the size of your fingernail, with a loop on one end and one of the tines bent sideways. See any?”
There were some scuffling sounds as she sifted through the debris, while I waited with my fingers cramping around joined scab-triodes. I knew she was doing her best, but I still ended up sweating before her hand poked into the crawl space with two of those wretched little helpers.
“Do you call them that because they’re shaped like J’s?” she asked.
“Huh? Oh, I guess they are, at that. No, that’s not why.”
“Then why?”
“Some Earth-native technician named them when they first were standardized about twenty years ago or so. He got annoyed at them. Did you notice how tensile the loop is? They’ve got a lot of spring for their size. They hold very tightly if—if—you can get them in place without having them go ping! and fly off somewhere. Once they’ve sprung, somehow you can never find them. Somewhere in the bowels of every Federation ship, there’s a Jesus clip graveyard yet to be discovered.”
Merete paused, and I could hear her thought processes trying to make the connection. “But why would you call them that?”
“Because,” I explained, “When they go ping! you go Jeeeeeeesus!”
“I see,” she said.
“The absolute truth, I swear. See if you can find a coupling out there that would fit a beta-eight switch. I’ve got to have something that size or near it to shield the skip circuit.”
“Here.” She handed in a similar piece. “This is beta-eight sized. What’s a skip circuit?”
“It’s a circuit that joins other connections, but takes its power from anywhere it finds energy flowing. It’ll look through the system till it finds free-flowing electricity and galvanize it into its own system.”
“Sounds cannibalistic.”
“That’s pretty much accurate. Hand me a pincer if you can fine one.”
“Come out, Piper.”
“What’d you say? Here … pull this conduit shell out of my way.”
“Piper?”
“Huh?”
“Please come out. I can’t let you finish.”
Only then did I sort out her meaning. I ducked my head under the panel and looked at my friend. “Oh, Merete.”
My friend with a phaser drawn on me.
“Please come out. I don’t want to have to hurt you,” she said, moving back so I could climb out.
Through my shock I unfolded myself, stood up, and faced her. “Merete, what is this? How can you turn a phaser on me after what happened on Pompeii?”
Tears welled in her eyes. Her voice remained steady. “It’s set and locked on stun. I’m so sorry, Piper … I can’t let you restore the com system.”
“Would you like to tell me why?”
“I doubt you’d understand.”
“Merete …”
“Piper, please. Trust me.”
“But we’ve got to talk to Kirk. Surely you understand that.”
“I understand what it means to fall prey to unbound pirate cultures. You don’t.”
“Are you talking about the Klingons?”
“Partly.”
“Merete, Rittenhouse is a conqueror-dictator on the make. He wants to flatten the galaxy into one homogeneous pancake with himself in charge.”
The tears flowed on her cheeks now. “They have to be controlled, Piper. We can’t negotiate with them … they can’t be trusted, those kinds of beings. They strike and run, and the Federation is too benevolent to answer acts of war with military retaliation. We’ve become slaves to our principles. We try to punish them in diplomatic ways. But we don’t trade with them so they don’t care if we cut them off. We can’t hurt them, but they go on hurting us.”
“Who, Merete?” I prodded gently.
“The Orions!” She flinched at her own outburst.
“Did they hurt you?”
“Please don’t patronize me.”
“I won’t. At least tell me. I’d like to hear.”
Now her voice cracked with effort where before there had been only tears to carry her pain. She inclined her head slightly, as though leaning mentally away. In her pale eyes shone the razor image of memory.
“I was the Palkeo equivalent of six Earth-years old, Piper. Only six. I was a baby, traveling with my parents on the textile freighter Perceptive, heading for Deep Space Station K-Seven. We were boarded by Orions. At the last second my mother shoved me into a cabinet and told me not to come out. I waited there in the dark for nine hours, listening to the screams as the crew and passengers were murdered. Brutally. Piper …”
“Merete …”
“Then I had to listen to the silence for more hours. I was afraid to leave the cabinet. When I finally crawled out, I couldn’t walk because my legs had been so cramped. I had to lie on the floor beside the first officer’s body. His … I sat in his blood. My parents were … worse … when I found them in the hold. Everybody was dead. And the pirates got a handful of fabric bolts in exchange for all those lives.”
“You don’t have to go on,” I whispered.
She licked her lower lip, catching a tear as it rolled downward. “I stayed on that ship for seventeen days before a Federation border patrol found us. Seventeen days of decomposing corpses. Seventeen days of terror that the pirates would come back and kill me too. Seventeen days wishing I could mend the rotting bodies and make them alive again. Remember, Piper, how a child’s mind works? I found a sewing kit during the second week and spent two days … I thought if they were hooked together again, they would come alive. But they didn’t. My parents didn’t … the Captain didn’t … Commodore Nash’s son didn’t …”
Merete’s form, her short platinum hair, the medical insignia, the phaser, blurred into a single column of tears and I blinked to clear my eyes.
Beyond shock, I murmured, “Nash’s son?”
“His son was hitching a ride on the Perceptive.”
“And after all these years,” I added, “they approached you?”
“I’m the only survivor of any Orion raid. The only one, Piper. I was old enough to understand the crime, but too young to be acceptable as a formal witness to an act of war. The Orions guard their neutrality cagily, so they can go on pirating from all sides and still do business with whom they please. They spit in the face of common decency and racial order, and the Federation is too nice to confront them. Rittenhouse promises to put an end to their raids … end the breakages of treaty by
both the Klingons and Romulans. It needs to be done … the galaxy has to be unified. The aggression won’t take long now that we have the dreadnought. You can see that, can’t you?”
My eyes drifted shut briefly. Various textbook explanations washed in and out, none adequate. Nothing could erase the mutilation of her parents, of her psyche, during that horrid time. Inadequacy made me nauseous. Tears turned my cheeks into stiff sheets. How could I make her see through the torture, bypass the years? I searched for words both kind and potent.
“Merete,” I bridged softly, “Rittenhouse can’t be the gentle dictator he imagines. No one can be. The principle doesn’t work.”
“But it can. We all have to cooperate—grow into one strong body—”
“And become pirates like those Orions, except on a galactic scale? Oh, my friend, listen to me. His system is already starting to fall apart. We buck against him and suddenly he tells all his guards to set their phasers on kill. That’s not the action of a benevolent father-figure, is it? Burch challenged him, and now he’s firing on us. You feel those hits—it’s the ship he needs, not us! He’s out to kill us! Merete, we’re in his way. What happens when a whole race gets in his way? Klingon families, Orions, Romulans—they have the right to be what they are.”
Through a sob she choked, “At our expense?”
“No, but the opposite kind of massacre is just as bad, isn’t it? Piracy with a banner is still piracy.” Another phaser blast bolted Star Empire’s outer hull, breaking the half shields easily and chewing away at the fibercoil-quantobirilium skin. It punctuated my words. “Feel that? Full phaser on bare hull, Merete. At least two ships are sustaining fire on us. He means to kill us. And after us, everyone else who balks at his utopia.”
Her eyes filled with tears until she could no longer see me. The phaser drooped in her hand. She listened to me over and over again in her mind, felt the phaser bolts, and knew she had been propagandized. Only her trust in me stood between her and Rittenhouse’s seduction. I urged quietly, “Think about the Orion children. And give me the phaser, okay?”
