Spock dismissed it as a matter of mere happenstance. One could find certain parallels between any number of unrelated situations if one selected the points of comparison arbitrarily enough. For instance, the V’Ger incident bore certain parallels, not only to this current situation, but to the encounter with Nomad a dozen years ago and to the rescue of the Mantilles colony from consumption by a sapient cloudlike cosmozoan a decade ago. It was in the nature of the intelligent mind to seek patterns and connections, but the process was prone to generate false positives that a rational thinker must disregard as irrelevant.
Yet another side of Spock—the side that his mother had instilled from childhood with an appreciation for art and literature—could not help but be struck by the resonance of his thoughts being drawn back to Nomad at the climax of a crisis indirectly precipitated by that probe’s assault on Nyota Uhura. That act, as traumatic as it had been for Uhura, had appeared at the time to be peripheral to the threat Nomad had posed, a minor atrocity compared to its planetary genocide in the Malurian system. Yet it had been that seemingly incidental act that now, through an unpredictable chain of circumstance, came close to fulfilling Nomad’s ultimate aim of wreaking destruction upon Earth.
It proved what Surak had taught: No life was incidental. The death of a foot soldier or an innocent bystander could have consequences greater than the death of a king or a general, for all lives were interconnected in intricate and unpredictable ways.
His thoughts turned to the Arcturian Warborn—a people created to be disposable, now seeking to discover their own value. Already, in their short time at Starfleet Academy, they had made a difference in many lives, for better or worse. Yet the value of their lives—of their participation in others’ lives, which came down to much the same thing—continued to be questioned, even by the Warborn themselves. One life had already been lost as a result, and there was no way to anticipate what further harm that loss could do in years to come, as its consequences rippled through the web of causality. Spock hoped that Admiral Kirk would succeed in resolving that conflict before more lives were ended.
For now, though, his own purpose was to ensure that the admiral had that chance. Even on separate missions, he and Kirk were still connected.
As we have been, and always shall be.
Chapter Nineteen
Starfleet Medical
Sulu closed his communicator and came back over to McCoy, who was running every analysis he could think of on the Arcturian DNA sample from the murder scene. “That was Admiral Kirk,” the younger man said. “Portia still hasn’t budged. I had to tell him we haven’t made any progress.”
“Jim should know by now just to let me get on with my goddamn work. I’ll tell him if and when we find something.” McCoy banged the side of the analyzer, aware that it was little more than a theatrical gesture. “This damn interference isn’t helping any. Tell Jim to bug Spock about getting that fixed!”
“Everyone’s doing all they can, Doctor. But I’m afraid I’m out of ideas.”
McCoy looked up at him, finally registering what he’d said. “You couldn’t find anything fishy about the security video?”
Sulu shook his head. “There’s no evidence the image was digitally altered. Spectroscopic analysis of the face is consistent with Arcturian tissues—no sign of prosthetic appliances or synthskin. And skeletal proportions and kinesics match someone raised under Arcturian gravity. That’s hard to fake.”
McCoy sighed. “Which means the killer is either an Arcturian, or someone who grew up on Arcturus, or someone from a planet with the same gravity as Arcturus. Doesn’t narrow it down that much.”
Sulu’s expression grew heavy. “I hate to say it, but could it have been one of the other Warborn? Aside from Bertram, just about any of them could be mistaken for Portia in the dark. And they’re trained martial artists—they could learn to imitate Portia’s movements.”
“It could be. But there are hundreds of other Arcturians on Earth. The killer could be someone from Rakatheema’s past—I don’t know, a vengeful ex-lover or something. There’s no way to narrow it down.”
“Doesn’t it at least have to be someone with access to Portia, so they could steal a sample of her DNA?”
“Not necessarily. The samples taken from Rakatheema’s home were degraded, contaminated. There’s enough of an allele match to Portia to support the other evidence against her, but not enough to conclusively rule out any other Arcturian. It could be from someone genetically similar, like a family member.”
Sulu perked up. “Warborn are always multiple births. Four to six at a time, sometimes more.” His face sank. “But they don’t raise them as siblings. They’re just mixed in with the whole population, raised in a group crèche. And their parentage is anonymous, so the ‘donors’ don’t form attachments.”
McCoy grimaced. “Barbaric process. Dehumanizing—well, depersonalizing the poor devils so nobody cares if they live or die.”
“You don’t have to tell me. The point is, there’s no way to identify who else Portia might be related to. What are the odds that one of the other few female Warborn here, picked randomly out of thousands, just happens to be Portia’s sister?”
McCoy shrugged. “It wasn’t random. They had to pass all the Starfleet entrance exams. You know how tough that is. If one batch of Warborn babies happened to be of particularly clever and adaptable stock, it’s possible more than one of them ended up here—even though they wouldn’t know they were related.”
Sulu grew excited again. “Then we just need permission to access their DNA records!”
The doctor bristled. “It’s not that simple, Sulu! They still have rights in the eyes of the law, even if their creators didn’t think so. We can’t just open up someone’s private genetic records without probable cause.”
“Oh. And we can’t get probable cause without the genetic data. It’s a vicious circle.”
McCoy thought it over. “There is one possibility. If we assume we’re looking for a female Warborn besides Portia, that narrows it down to Rosalind, Viola, and Kate. What I could try is to run a developmental simulation on the DNA sample. Project a range of possible physiognomies based on different possibilities for the missing alleles and epigenetic variations. If any of them match one of the other three, that could give us the probable cause we need.”
“Great! How long will that take?”
“Not long, with Starfleet Medical’s main computer working on it. Fifteen minutes—well, maybe twenty, with this interference. It’s even more powerful than the Enterprise computer.”
Sulu grinned. “I won’t tell Captain Spock you said that.”
“Oh, please do.” McCoy’s grin in return was wicked. He was finally starting to feel optimistic.
Twenty minutes later, his hopes were dashed. Not one of thousands of simulated facial and bodily structures was close enough to any of the three suspects, even given the superficial similarity of Warborn features. And a fair number of them were better than fifty percent matches to Portia’s facial structure.
Still, something nagged at McCoy. It was like there was something he’d noticed unconsciously and forgotten before it percolated to the surface. Probably just my anxiety about Ashley. Jim had better be keeping her safe.
“I really thought we were onto something,” Sulu said. “The reasoning all added up.”
“Oh, it was perfectly logical, Mister Sulu. That’s why I keep telling Spock you can’t rely on logic alone. A chain of argument can fit together perfectly and still be completely wrong. Logic is only as good as the assumptions you start out with. Make the wrong assumption and—”
He broke off, eyes going wide. Sulu peered at him. “Doc? You okay?”
McCoy snapped his fingers. “Assumptions! My friend, you and I have been making one of the biggest assumptions in the book. One we human men, myself included, are far too quick to make.”
“Which is?”
“That men and women are fundamentally different. That we
’re binary and opposite. The biological fact is, we’re just slight variations on a common theme. The same biology given different tweaks by the hormones in our mothers’ wombs. That’s why some people are nonbinary or transgender. There are different genetic and epigenetic factors that balance out to make us develop one way or the other, and sometimes they land somewhere in the middle instead, or the genes shape the brain one way while the hormones shape the body the other way.”
“Sure, I know that. My second cousin Mako changes pronouns almost as often as hairstyles. But what’s your point?”
“Well, think about it, Sulu. You were the one telling me about Warborn procreation. They’re parthenogenetic, right?”
“Right. A special hormone injection triggers self-fertilization in Arcturian females.”
“But that means there’s no male parent. No counterpart for the human Y chromosome in the Warborn’s DNA. Don’t you get it? Genetically, every Warborn is a hundred percent female! It’s only the epigenetics, the hormonal influences in the womb, that determine if their anatomy comes out male, female, or in between.”
Sulu’s eyes widened. “So we were assuming the female markers in the DNA sample narrowed it down to the four female Warborn… but it could be one of the men too!”
“Exactly!” McCoy turned back to the computer. “This time I’m going to run the simulations projecting for masculine development. Let’s see what we get.”
Just moments after he started entering the parameters, the lights, screens, and ventilation fans cut out for several seconds, then snapped back on again. The computer displayed multiple error messages, and McCoy had to wait while the simulator program shut down and restarted.
“Blast it! We don’t have time for this!” He prayed he could get a result—and use it to get a warrant—before Portia’s patience ran out, or a vacuum flare struck Earth.
At the moment, he wasn’t sure which of those outcomes frightened him more.
U.S.S. Enterprise
Cadet T’Lara flinched as the actinic streak of a microflare pierced the attitude control panel centimeters from her left hand, causing it to spark and flicker. Spock winced from the loud whipcrack sound it made as it superheated the air around it. Noting the pinpoint burn it had created just underneath the main viewscreen, he glanced back to confirm that it had pierced the lower portside status monitor of the internal security station.
“Status, Cadet?” he asked over the ringing in his ears, aware that hers was no doubt greater. As a full Vulcan, as well as a much younger adult, T’Lara most likely had aural sensitivity exceeding his own.
“Minimal damage, sir,” the cadet replied. “Stabilizing pitch control.”
Spock reflected that matters could be far worse. Thanks to Commander Scott’s verteron field, only four microflares had penetrated the bridge in the seventeen minutes since entry into the flare field, and all had been relatively mild. They had also been nearly instantaneous, for Spock had ordered T’Lara to dive into the flare field at high impulse. The theory was that the microflares would be able to do less damage to any compartment, apparatus, or crew member they passed through if they only intersected it for a few hundred nanoseconds. The fact that such near-instantaneous passages still generated such heat and noise was a testament to the intensity of the primordial energy leaking through the micro-wormholes, even with the verteron field damping their frequency and average intensity. Indeed, the visible streaks of light came not from the microflares themselves, which were present too briefly for the eye to register, but from the incandescent, ionized atmosphere they left in their wake.
With this in mind, Spock had ordered the ship’s internal air pressure reduced to minimum safe levels to lessen atmospheric transmission of shock and thermal damage, not to mention acoustic effects. Were the bridge at normal pressure, Spock and T’Lara would probably be deaf in their left ears by now.
The one place he had left at full pressurization was the communications lab, so as not to alter the conditions Commander Uhura relied on for memory assistance. Still, that was a gamble, for the lab was no more immune to microflare penetration than anywhere else on the ship. This would not be a good time for Uhura to suffer impairment of her exceptional hearing, or an injury should a microflare pierce her directly.
He had ordered all nonessential personnel to lie on the decks with their feet pointing toward the bow, to minimize the profile they presented to the oncoming microflares (or rather, the stationary microflares that the Enterprise passed through). This mission had a fairly small crew complement, though, so few were nonessential. It was only a matter of time, statistically speaking, before someone in the crew sustained a direct hit.
A proximity alert sounded. “A sizable cluster is forming in our path,” T’Lara reported, her voice raising only slightly. “Diverting… insufficient time to clear it.”
Spock opened the shipwide channel. “All personnel, brace for microflare cluster.” He leaned forward in the command chair, and the other bridge personnel hunkered down as best they could. It seemed almost quaint to defend against a subspatial quantum phenomenon using the same methods primitive Vulcans would have used to face a sandstorm or a hail of arrows. But the mathematics of probability and surface area were universal.
As the Enterprise passed through the cluster, Spock listened for system breach alerts from the damage control station. Several minor ones sounded over the first minute, accompanied by a single thunder crack of a flare passage through the bridge, well over the crew’s lowered heads. Yet before long, a major alarm sounded, after which the rate of breaches began to increase.
“Scott to bridge! One o’ those hailstones from Hell struck the field regulator. The verteron field’s gone down. It’ll take at least ten minutes to re-rig it—” A loud crack and a cry sounded behind him. “Oh, no… Lieutenant Kwan’s been hit! I need a medical team down here!”
Spock nodded to Ferat, who relayed the order to sickbay. “On their way, Mister Scott. Repair the verteron field as quickly as possible.”
“Easier said than done when we’re under fire!”
“Sir!” That was Cadet Nadel at the science station. “Another ship is closing on our course. Just now picked it up through the static. It’s… it’s taking position directly in front of us!”
In moments, the barrage of microflares began to ease. Spock straightened in his seat, raising a brow. As far as he could discern through the static on the viewscreen, the vessel in whose wake they now flew was of the Miranda class.
“They’re hailing, sir,” called Ferat. “I think… yes, it’s a laser-pulse communication. Just a moment…”
Though the Cygnian cadet was inexperienced with the alternative communication protocol, she nonetheless reconfigured her station with respectable alacrity. A moment later, a reasonably clear signal came through from the other bridge—the occupants of which were all unexpectedly attired in EV suits. Spock noted that the transmission was devoid of the normal background sounds of bridge equipment.
The captain, clad in an orange-and-brown EV suit, spoke through his helmet microphone. “This is Captain Clark Terrell of the U.S.S. Reliant. You look like you could use a hand, Captain Spock.”
Spock tugged on the hem of his uniform jacket. “Your arrival is timely, Captain. I presume you have a working verteron field?”
“That’s right. And we’ve depressurized to minimize the blast damage—and protect our ears.”
“We have done the same, though to a less drastic degree.”
“Understandable—your people have a lot of work to do. You need your freedom of movement.” He gestured around his bridge. “Whereas we’re just here to run interference. I figured you’d be better off with a second verteron field leading the way.” He smiled inside his helmet. “That is, if you hadn’t lost the first.”
“Indeed. But your arrival should facilitate the repair of our field. Your proposal is sound, provided we maintain a minimum separation. At this speed, that entails a degree of risk.”
Spock decided that Commander Chekov’s assessments of his new captain were not exaggerated. “Then I believe the proper vernacular is, ‘After you.’ ”
San Francisco
After listening to President Lorg’s static-laden speech to the people of Earth—solemnly advising them of the impending disaster and the limited defenses the planet had at its disposal, yet urging the people to be resolute and stand ready to assist their neighbors in need—Kirk decided that waiting out Portia and the Warborn hostage-takers was no longer an option. He strode out toward the building and called out, not bothering with a communicator. “Portia! This is Admiral Kirk. It’s urgent that we talk!”
Captain sh’Deslar hurried forward and caught his arm. “Admiral, is it wise to take an aggressive tone?”
He glanced over his shoulder at her. “A passive approach hasn’t worked. These are soldiers, Captain. Warriors born and bred. I have a feeling they’ll respond to strength and boldness.”
He moved farther forward, leaving her behind. Soon, a warning shot from a phaser struck the pavement near his feet, emanating from a small crack in one office window. He ignored it, stepping right over the burn mark in the pavement. “I’m here to parley! Are you afraid of a conversation?”
He kept walking. By the time he reached the door, it was pulled open from within, and Titus drew him inside and searched him. Soon, he was brought upstairs to where Portia waited in the hall.
“Do you have an answer for me, Admiral? Have you found the real killer? Or bothered to look?”
“Commander Sulu and Doctor McCoy are pursuing a lead. But that’s not why I’m here. Did you hear the president’s speech? Do you know what’s about to hit Earth in less than an hour?”
Portia shrugged. “I heard. What of it? Of all the places on Earth the flares could hit, the odds that they’d be here are low enough. And I’m sure San Francisco is under one of those verteron shields.”
Living Memory Page 26
