Star Trek: Duty, Honor, Redemption (62 page)

“Weapons systems?”

“Operational, Admiral,” Chekov said. “And cloaking device is now available in all modes of flight.”

“I’m impressed, Mister Chekov. A lot of effort for a short voyage.”

Chekov grinned. “We are in enemy vessel, sir. I didn’t wish to be shot down on way to our own funeral.”

“Most prudent,” Jim said. “Engine room. Report, Scotty.”

“We’re ready, sir. I’ve converted the dilithium sequencer into somethin’ less primitive. And, Admiral, I’ve replaced the Klingon food packs. They gi’ me sour stomach.”

“Appreciated by all, Mister Scott.”

In the silence that followed, Jim became aware that the attention of everyone on the bridge centered, expectantly, upon him.

“Prepare for departure,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone.

Sulu began the prelaunch checklist, and in a moment Jim was surrounded by the low, intense chatter of preparation. This was always the moment when the captain of a starship sat at storm’s eye, observing everything, responsible for everything, but with no physical tasks. He could only think of where he was taking his people, what he was taking them back to face.

He glanced around the bridge. In the shadows of the passageway that led into the neck of the
Bounty,
Saavik hesitated on the threshold, her uncertainty clear. She was not as unexpressive as a Vulcan.

Jim rose and joined her. “Well, Saavik, I guess this is good-bye.”

“I should accompany you back to Earth, Admiral,” she said hesitantly. “I have considered—I am prepared…I need nothing. I would request a moment to take my leave of Amanda.”

“No, Saavik. Starfleet’s put you on detached assignment to Vulcan, so you’re staying on detached assignment to Vulcan.” He spoke quickly to forestall her argument. She would undoubtedly present it with flawless logic, choosing responsibility over her own wishes. “There’s no point in another of us being brought up on charges of insubordination, now, is there?”

“But—”

“Your recorded deposition will be sufficient for the inquiry, Lieutenant. You’ll follow your orders. Is that understood?”

She raised her head, her dark eyes narrowing in a flash of anger and rebellion, but the moment’s lapse into emotion lasted only an instant before her Vulcan training overcame her Romulan upbringing.

“Yes, sir.”

The
Bounty
vibrated at a low, throbbing frequency as it prepared for liftoff.

“Hurry, now,” Jim said, trying to maintain a hearty cheerfulness. “You have a great deal to learn on Vulcan. Almost as much as Spock. And you’ll be a better Starfleet officer for your stay here. Besides, you’re the only one who knows everything that happened on Genesis—” His own memories swept in close around him. His cheer failed and his voice caught. He recovered himself, not as quickly as a Vulcan. “You may be able to help Spock regain access to his true memories.”

“My knowledge has not as yet been required in Captain Spock’s refusion,” Saavik said stiffly. “But I will follow my orders.”

“Apparently we won’t see Spock before we leave,” Jim said, keeping his voice neutral. “If the subject should come up, tell him I wished him…good-bye and good luck.”

“Should I converse with Captain Spock, Admiral, I shall endeavor to give him your message.”

Jim watched Saavik go. The hatch slid open at her approach. To Jim’s astonishment, Spock appeared in the hatchway. He wore his long, pale robe. Saavik stopped.

“Good day, Captain Spock,” Saavik said.

“Live long and prosper, Lieutenant,” Spock said, his voice and face expressionless.

He stepped past her, never glancing back. Saavik’s control faltered with deep pain. She watched Spock, but when her gaze intersected Jim’s, she brought herself up short, turned, and disappeared.

Apparently the Vulcans in charge of Spock’s memory training had not thought it desirable to remind him of Saavik and his importance in her childhood. Perhaps time would bring him the recollection.

Spock stopped before him. “Permission to come aboard, sir.”

“Permission granted,” Jim said. “But we’re preparing for liftoff, Spock. We’ve spent as much time on Vulcan as we can afford. I’m glad to have the chance to say good-bye—”

“I request permission to accompany you to Earth, sir.”

“To Earth? What about your retraining? What about the elders?”

“My retraining is as complete as study permits. The elders…would prefer that I stay, but I have declined their invitation. Subject to your decision, of course.”

“Of course I grant you permission, Spock. Welcome aboard.”

“Thank you, Admiral.”

“Jim, Spock.
Jim.
Remember…?” It startled Jim to have Spock revert to titles. “Your name is Jim,” Spock had said to him, after the refusion. Jim wondered if the elders’ program had re-formed Spock as a perfect Vulcan, without personality, character, or even the remnants of emotion to hold in check.

“It would be improper to refer to you as Jim while you are in command, Admiral.” Spock hesitated and glanced down at himself. “Also, I must apologize for my attire.” He frowned slightly. “I…I seem to have misplaced my uniform.”

“Well, I…find that understandable.” Spock was not the only member of the group without a uniform. Jim started to smile.

Spock raised one eyebrow, questioning.

“I mean,” Jim said, “you’ve been through a lot.”

Spock did not respond.

Jim sighed. “Station, please,” he said.

Spock crossed the bridge to the science station and took his position. Jim watched him, suddenly doubtful about the wisdom of taking Spock along. Spock did not yet seem to be quite his old self. But the trip to Earth should be uneventful, and Spock was not under a council directive to appear and explain his actions.

Maybe this trip is just what Spock needs,
Jim thought.
Maybe.

Besides, Spock had made his decision to leave Vulcan many years ago. Jim did not want to involve himself in complicity with the Vulcan elders, supporting an “invitation” that might keep Spock here into the unforeseeable future.

“You sure this is such a bright idea?”

McCoy had appeared silently at Jim’s shoulder. He gazed skeptically at Spock.

“What do you mean?” Jim said, irritated to have McCoy voice in such bald terms the same question he had been thinking.

“I mean
him,
back at his post, like nothing happened. I don’t know if you’ve got the whole picture, but he isn’t exactly working on all thrusters.”

“It’ll come back to him,” Jim said, still trying to persuade himself.

“Are you sure?”

Dissembling was one thing; lying directly to his old friend was another. Jim glanced across the bridge to where Spock sat, communing with his computer.

“That’s what I thought,” McCoy said.

“Mister Sulu,” Jim said abruptly. “Take us home.”

Saavik strode across the landing field. Behind her, the
Bounty
gathered itself for takeoff. Saavik did not alter her pace. Amanda waited at the edge of the landing pad, staring past her at the ship with an unreadable expression. The wind caught a stray lock of her hair and fluttered it against her throat.

Amanda held out her hand. Saavik hesitated, then grasped it and turned to stand with her as the ship lifted off. It rose on a cloud of dust and power, then plunged forward, climbing slowly as it vanished between the peaks and canyons of Mt. Seleya’s range.

Saavik glanced at Amanda when
Bounty
had disappeared. Saavik suddenly felt glad that she had stayed, for tears tracked Amanda’s cheeks, and her fingers felt very thin and frail in Saavik’s strong hand.

Chief Medical Officer Christine Chapel stood in the midst of the chaos of Starfleet Command’s major missions room. Huge curved windows presented a 180-degree view of San Francisco Bay, but no one inside could pay any attention to the calmness of the scene outside. Major missions vibrated with tense communication in many languages, many accents. All the news was bad.

An unknown object was approaching Earth with appalling speed and appalling power. It passed Starfleet ships, and the ships ceased to communicate. Nothing even slowed it down.

Chapel had spent the morning coordinating efforts to reach the crippled ships. But she was running out of personnel, she was running out of rescue ships, and communications became progressively more difficult. The probe showed no sign of running out of ways to stop Starfleet vessels on its headlong plunge toward Earth.

The president of the Federation Council entered. The chaos of the missions room hushed for a moment. The president joined Starfleet Commander Admiral Cartwright at the central command console. Chris hoped they knew something about the probe that she did not, but both men looked intent and grim.

Chapel joined Janice Rand at one of the consoles in the missions room.

“Janice?”

Rand looked up, her expression grim. “Every ship in ten days’ radius is already on its way back.”

She gestured toward her screen, a three-d representation of part of Federation space, centered on Earth. A multitude of ships moved toward that center at high warp speeds. Some had already begun to gather in a protective phalanx. The unknown signal plowed steadily toward the phalanx. It left in its wake a scattering of motionless, dimming sensor points.

“As for the more distant ships…at the rate this thing is going, Chris, by the time they return, there may not be anything to return
to
.”

“We don’t
know
what the probe’s intentions are,” Chris said. “We can’t be certain…”

Janice glanced up at her. Chris stopped grasping at spider-silk hopes that dissolved in her hands.

“If I call the ships back,” Janice said, “I may be calling them to their destruction.”

“We may need them,” Chapel said. “For evacuation.”

“They can’t evacuate anybody if they’re destroyed! We don’t even know what happened to the
Saratoga
and the others! That…that
thing
has completely disrupted communications from the entire sector.”

“It’s my job to be prepared,” Chapel said. “Evacuation may be our only choice.”

“But where can they go?” Rand said softly. She returned her attention to her console. “That thing is getting stronger, Chris,” Janice Rand said. Her shoulders slumped as she stared at the screen. “I wish Admiral Kirk were here now,” she said. “I wish he were here with the
Enterprise.
”

The traveler reached the star system of the nondescript blue planet. The voices it sought remained silent. It passed the system’s outer worlds, frozen rocky spheres and great gas giants, and it sang its grief to space and all worlds’ skies. Its sensors traced the planet’s surface, cutting through the electromagnetic radiation that often surrounded such worlds. It found several small spaceborne nodes of power and drained them.

This was a marginally acceptable world. The traveler could give it new voices. First its surface must be sterilized. The traveler would lower the temperature until glaciers covered the land and the seas froze solid. Whatever had destroyed the intelligence that once existed here would itself be destroyed. After a few eons, the traveler would permit the temperature to rise again, leaving a tropical world devoid of life. Then the traveler could reseed.

The traveler centered its attention on a wide expanse of ocean and began feeding power to the focus.

An enormous sea wave burst upward and exploded into steam. The traveler observed and approved the results. It intensified its power discharge, which plunged into the ocean and vaporized tremendous volumes of water. The vapor rose into the atmosphere and collected into a cloud cover that rapidly thickened and spread, obscuring the surface of the world.

On the surface of Earth, it began to rain.

The invincible probe crossed the orbit of Jupiter. The Federation waited in hope and fear.

With terrifying rapidity, clouds gathered over the surface of the earth. Rain scattered, pelted, scoured the land.

The last hopes faded with the proof of the probe’s malevolence.

Captain Styles pounded through the corridor and into the turbo-lift. His orders were specific and desperate: “Stop the intruder.” Starfleet Commander Cartwright’s intensity had penetrated the badly scrambled channel. “Captain, if you fail…it’s the end of life on Earth.”

Styles did not consider failure. The prospect of action excited him. His ship,
Excelsior,
Starfleet’s newest and most powerful, had been held in reserve as a last defense against the unknown. Now the waiting had ended.

It’s a good thing,
he thought,
that Montgomery Scott’s little trick with the engine control chips didn’t damage
Excelsior
permanently. If we were crippled now…. Helping steal the
Enterprise,
even losing the obsolete old bucket, is a trivial charge compared to sabotage. People care what happens to this ship.

Anyway, Styles cared. He cared what other people thought about it. He cared what people thought about him. He was determined to erase the memory of the humiliation Scott and Kirk had caused him.
Excelsior
would meet the unknown probe and vanquish it. Styles would save his homeworld, and everyone in the Federation would talk about
Excelsior
and its captain instead of bringing up the heyday of the
Enterprise
and James T. Kirk.

“Open channel to Spacedock control.”

“Channel open, sir.”

“Styles to Spacedock control.”

“You’re cleared to depart, Captain.”

The transmission broke into static as the controller ordered Spacedock doors to open.

“Would you like to clear up that channel a little, Lieutenant?” Styles said to his communications officer.

“I’m trying, sir. This is a direct hookup; it shouldn’t have any interference.”

“I’m aware of that—” A shriek of gibberish squealed through the speakers. The communications officer flinched. Styles cursed. “Helm, prepare for departure.”

The helm officer engaged the controls. “No response, sir!” she said. “
Excelsior
has no power!”

“Engineering!”

“Captain Styles, the impulse engines are drained, and warp potential is failing!”

“Excelsior,
stand by,”
Spacedock control said. The voice buzzed and jumped through the interference.
“Spacedock doors are inoperative! Repeat, malfunction on exit doors.”

“This is
Excelsior,
control. Never mind the damned doors—we’ve got no power! What’s going on?”

A second voice, almost indistinguishable, penetrated the weird interference.
“Space doors not responding. All emergency systems nonfunctional.”

Styles glanced up through the clear dome that covered
Excelsior
’s bridge. A Spacedock observation deck loomed overhead.

On it, all the lights were going out.

“Engage reserve power.”
Spacedock control was a whisper among screams of incomprehensible interference.
“Starfleet command, this is Spacedock on emergency channel. We have lost all internal power. Repeat, we have lost all power…”

The signal faded to nothingness.

The probe sped past Mars with little opposition and settled into orbit around the earth.

Tokyo: cloud cover ninety-five percent. The spattering rain froze to sleet.

Juneau: cloud cover ninety-seven percent. Icy snow plummeted from the sky.

Leningrad: cloud cover one hundred percent. It was too cold to snow. The city hunkered in the freezing darkness, as if for an early winter of conventional brutality. Its citizens, accustomed to their winters, were well prepared to survive till spring.

But this time, spring might never come.

Sarek of Vulcan stood on the observation platform of Starfleet’s major missions room. Through the hours he had watched as Federation personnel searched for some response to the probe, some way to stop or escape it. The hum of voices gradually receded before the increasingly frantic data stream from machines stretched to overload. The people were exhausted, for the information had been pouring in for hours and they had no response to give it.

Sarek stepped down from the platform and crossed the main floor, listening and watching, trying to form some synthesis of the data that might explain what had happened, and why. The probe’s incomprehensible cry resonated through the information channels, erratically disrupting communications.

He paused beside Christine Chapel, who was trying to direct rescue and evacuation on a world which ships could not leave. She stood by Janice Rand, staring in despair at the information that told her she would fail. Sarek gazed at the same information without comment or expression.

All over the globe the temperature dropped rapidly, and the curve kept growing steeper, with no indication of any plateau.

Chapel raised her head. “In medicine, no matter how good you are, no matter how much you know and how powerful your equipment is, you always come to times when you’re helpless. But…not like
this.
”

She put her hands on the back of Janice Rand’s chair. Sarek observed the trembling of her hands before she clenched her fingers and regained her control.

A few centuries before, a group of Earth scientists had calculated what would happen if a nuclear war blasted dirt and soot and water vapor into the atmosphere. The results would have been devastating: a years-long winter of total cloud cover, a nonexistent growing season, famine, plague, and death for human beings and most other species. That single paper offered understanding of the utter finality of nuclear war; it had helped human people learn to fight to understand each other as hard as they had previously fought to destroy each other. And so Earth and its population survived to join and enrich a civilization that spanned a large portion of an arm of the galaxy.

The calculations that had warned Earth’s powers of their folly had been made under the assumption that most of the bombs would explode in the northern hemisphere. In that event, most of the atmospheric debris would circulate through the wind and weather currents north of the equator, leaving the southern hemisphere less affected.

The probe was not so kind. Its disruption affected the earth from poles to equator.

“The rescue ships are getting close, Chris,” Janice Rand said. “We have to tell them something soon.”

“I know,” Chapel replied.

Rand’s screen revealed a small fleet of ships, several already within the orbit of Pluto. Perhaps they were already within the grasp of the probe, for no one could show any evidence of limits to its power.

Sarek glanced at Chapel, one eyebrow raised.

“No ship has approached the probe without being neutralized,” Chapel said to Sarek. “The approaching rescue ships may suffer the same fate. It seems unlikely that the probe will allow them to carry out any evacuation.”

Above, on the observation level, the council president stood with Starfleet Commander Cartwright. He had the whole planet to worry about, not just a few ships whose arrival would make little if any difference to the fate of the earth and its people.

“Try to get through to them,” Chapel said to Rand. “Tell them to stand off. Maybe if they wait, the probe will finish, and leave…”

Sarek nodded, approving of her logical conclusion. He turned without a word, climbed back to the observation level, and gazed out into the bay. Tall waves roughened the surface of the water, as if reaching to join the thick, dark clouds rolling in from the sea. Already the clouds had obscured the upper curves and peaks of the bridge. A bolt of lightning flashed across the water. Glass shivered and rattled in the rumble of thunder.

Nearby, the council president and Starfleet Commander Cartwright discussed the possibilities, which now were desperately limited. They had no more power than Chapel to overcome the probe. Perhaps it came from an intelligence so great that the Federation was nothing to it but an anthill or a beehive, or from an intelligence so cold that the destruction of sentient beings concerned it not at all. Perhaps it did not even perceive Earth’s transmissions as attempts at communication.

Sarek’s acute hearing sorted the familiar voices of Cartwright and the president from the constant gibberish of computers offering more and more information that became less and less useful. The two men had to decide what, if anything, to do. Whatever they decided, without sunlight the earth could not long survive.

“Status report, please,” the council president said.

His adjutant replied, his voice not quite steady. “The probe is over the South Pacific. No attempts at dissipating the clouds have had any effect. Estimate total cloud cover by next orbit.”

“Notify all stations,” Cartwright said suddenly. “Starfleet emergency, red alert. Switch power immediately to planetary reserves.”

“Yes, sir.”

The president joined Sarek by the observation window. “Sarek…Is there no answer we can give this probe?”

Sarek shook his head, for he had no resources to offer. “It is difficult to answer if you do not understand the question.” He could conceive of only one logical response. The president could not save Earth, but he might save other beings by offering a warning. If he transmitted all the information they possessed, some other world might discover a defense against the probe.

“Mister President, perhaps you should engage the terminal distress signal, while we still have time.”

The president gazed out the window. During his silence, the waves increased in amplitude and the rain increased its intensity. Huge drops hit with perceptible force and streaked down the glass as if to score its shining surface. When finally the president spoke again, his words surprised Sarek.

“You shouldn’t be here, Sarek,” he said. “You came to Earth to aid a friend. Not to die. I wish I could change things. I am sorry.”

“I see no reason to indulge in regrets for events I cannot alter,” Sarek said. “I would ask only one thing.”

“It’s yours, if it’s in my power to grant it.”

“A moment on a communications channel, after the warnings have been transmitted. To call Vulcan.”

“Of course.”

The data stream echoing through major missions suddenly failed to silence. The threnody of the probe reverberated through the chamber.

Over the bay, snow began to fall.

The
Bounty
sped toward Earth through warp space.

“Estimating planet Earth, one point six hours, present speed,” Sulu said.

“Continue on course,” Admiral Kirk replied.

“Aye, sir.” Sulu checked the systems. Some, especially the power plant, already showed signs of strain. The instrument readings hovered barely within normal ranges. The
Bounty
would convey the group to Earth, but Sulu doubted the ship could give much more. He felt sorry for that. Sulu had many ambitions, and almost all of them centered on Starfleet, space travel, exploration. But he suspected that Starfleet would forbid him to fly another starship for a very long time. Even flying a battered captured enemy ship was better than being grounded.

But the enemy ship could also get him and his companions killed. If the power blew, the cloaking device would go first. The
Bounty
would appear as an intruder. It was essential for Starfleet to be aware of their approach, and so far the Federation had not replied to Uhura’s subspace transmissions. Unusual interference permeated this region of space, and she had received in reply nothing but an eerie silence. So no one knew that the survivors of the
Enterprise
were flying to Earth in a Klingon fighter.