Star Trek: The Original Series - 082 - Federation (32 page)

Cochrane spent the next few weeks using the supplies from his ship to build a shelter for the cloud, plant some seeds, and make things right. During that time, as he threw off the mental lethargy of the past forty days, he figured out what the cloud had done. It was more than just a dolphin or a lonely dog looking for company.

It had been quite shrewd. Its agenda had included him.

At another time in his life, Cochrane might have resented the manipulation. But that life was over. He had left so much that was old and unnecessary behind.

The planetoid seemed like an interesting place. The cloud was an interesting companion. And it felt good to have someonemor something—to care for. It was as if he had never felt that way before.

Because for all that the cloud took care of him, Cochrane had no illusions about what he was doing when the cloud embraced him.

He was taking care of the cloud, as well.

It seemed a fair bargain.

He decided his life might have room for one more challenge.

Once again, Zefram Cochrane realized he was looking forward to finding out what would happen next.

//.S.S. ENTERPRISE NCC-1701 RENDEZVOUS WITH THE CITY gF UTOPIA P//UVITI/I Stardate 3854.8 Earth Standard: November 2267

On the main viewer, the Klingon’s dark face was distorted by his forced smile. It twisted his stringy beard into an unnatural angle.

“Greetings, Captain Kirk of the U.S.S. Enterprise.” “Save it,” Kirk shot back. “Drop your shields and let us beam in the poor bastard you blew out the airlock.” The Klingon widened his eyes insincerely. “Ah, you noticed that, did you?” “Drop your shields now!” “And put myself at your fabled terran ‘mercy’? Come now, Captain. I may be Klingon, but that doesn’t make me stupid. We have other matters to discuss.” Kirk stood up from his chair. As far as he was concerned, there was only one thing Klingons understood, and the Enterprise was the ship to deliver it. “Drop your shields now/ Then we can discuss anything you want.”
he Klingon turned to the side and spat out some commands in his own guttural language.p>

“Keptin, their shields are weakening by the open airlock.” The Klingon smiled broadly. “You have five seconds, Captain Kirk. Any treachery will result in the deaths of even more of—”

“Spock! Now!” Kirk shouted.

Over the bridge speakers, Spock acknowledged from the transporter room. “Transporter locked, and energizing.” Chekov confirmed that the body had vanished from the side of the liner. A moment later Spock announced recovery and called for a medical team.

“Shields restored,” Chekov said.

“Spock here. The recovered human is dead, Captain. From his uniform, he was one of the crew members of the Planitia.” Kirk was enraged. “You killed him!” But the Klingon on the screen shook his head. “Not I, Captain Kirk. Au contraire, it was your unfortunate and unprovoked attack which caused such… unpleasantness.” “Your hijacked liner is no match for this ship,” Kirk said.

“But my hostages are more than a match for your conscience, Captain Kirk.” The Klingon settled back into his own command chair, an ornate, high-backed style popular on human civilian ships. “Now, I believe you said that once I dropped my shields to allow recovery of the body of the man you killed, we could talk.

And I would like to talk, Captain Kirk. About so many things.” Kirk had never run across a Klingon who liked to talk. “Shut him down, Uhura.” The screen jumped back to a view of the liner.

“Aren’t you going to negotiate with him?” The question came from Admiral Kabreigny. McCoy had positioned her at an unused navigation station on the upper level. Her color was better and she appeared to have recovered her composure. Just in case, McCoy hovered close by, a medical kit at his side. At Spock’s science station, the Companion sat hunched over, silent and still, face in her hands, breathing almost back to normal. The two security officers remained at ease by the turbolift doors.

“Klingons don’t negotiate,” Kirk said. “He’s just stalling for time.” “Why?” Kabreigny asked. The bridge crew braced themselves for a repeat of the earlier clash of wills.

But Kirk found it easier to answer, now that the command chair was his again. “He’d never make it back to the Empire in that liner. He must be heading for a rendezvous point.”

“No Klingon ship could get this far into Federation territory to meet him.” Kirk tapped his fingers against the arm of his chair, working out his options. “Admiral, he doesn’t need to rendezvous with a Klingon ship. The ship that attacked us was an Orion. It was fast enough to get him back home in a month and not even the Enterprise could have caught him.” McCoy leaned forward on the rail circling the upper level. “Do you think that ship we destroyed was his ride home?” “Possibly,” Kirk said. “But he’s bound to have a backup plan.

The question is, when does it go into effect?” He turned his chair around to face the Companion. “Companion, is the man near?” She sighed and spoke into her hands. “The man continues.” She looked up. Her one, unhandaged eye was full of pain. “Part of us wishes to tell you he is in the ship before us.” “Can you tell us where in the ship he is?” Kirk asked.

But the Companion shook her head. “We cannot,” she said sadly. “We only know that he is near.” Kirk stared at the liner on the screen. A clock was ticking. He had no idea what schedule it was on, but sooner or later another ship would be arriving to rendezvous with the Planitia. Cochrane had been kidnapped by Orions, but then brought to a hijacked liner under the command ofa Klingon. Kirk wouldn’t put it past the Orions to work with the Klingons—they specialized in playing both ends against the middle in any conflict. But what did the Klingon Empire want with Zefram Cochrane? Their level of warp technology was at least the equal of the Federation’s.

Cochrane would be a century and a half behind the times in the Empire, as well.

Then there was the matter of Admiral Kabreigny’s conspiracy.

What or who it involved, Kirk didn’t know. Only that Kabreigny still thought that he might be part of it, just as Kirk was still Worried that she was a part of another conspiracy. He bounced his fist on the arm of his chair. The only connection to all of this was Cochrane. Whatever else was going to happen, 7efram Cochrane had to come first.

But how could Kirk save one person from a ship filled with hostages and a bloodthirsty Klingon who wouldn’t balk at killing everyone? Kirk didn’t need Spock to tell him that the answer was that it couldn’t be done. Which meant, Kirk knew, he had to find another approach, he had to come up with a different question.

One that did have an answer.

Change the rules. Do the unthinkable.

The question came to him. The answer was outrageous. As outrageous as a commercial liner armed only with navigational phasers being able to keep a Constitution-class starship at bay.

“Admiral Kabreigny,” Kirk said as pleasantly as he could as he stepped down from his chair, “do you feel up to negotiating with a Klingon?” Kabreigny eyed him warily. “I thought you said Klingons don’t negotiate.” “They don’t,” Kirk agreed. “But then, you won’t be negotiating either. You’ll just be buying time.” “For what?” “So I can follow my orders and rescue Mr. Cochrane.” Kirk looked over at Uhura. “Lieutenant, cancel Red Alert. All hands stand down.” McCoy put his hands behind his back. “This is going to be good, isn’t it?” Kirk shrugged. Spectacular was a better word. Good or bad, win or lose, what he was planning was definitely going to be spectacular.

“Admiral, I’d like you to take the chair again. I’d like you to identify yourself to the Klingon and tell him that you have relieved me of duty because… I wanted to blow the liner out of space.” He guided the perplexed admiral to the chair. “Play it straight with him. You want to get those hostages back. But don’t let on in any way that you know about Cochrane. Give him that edge. It will make him feel in control.” Kabreigny settled back in the command chair. “And what Will you be doing during all this?” ‘Tll be in the Auxiliary Control Center.” He turned to the command console. “Mr. Chekov, Mr. Sulu, report to me there as soon as your replacements arrive.” The helmsman and navigator acknowledged their orders.

“Dr. McCoy, Companion, please accompany me.” Then Kirk ducked down to Uhura and whispered. “Lieutenant, monitor every word the admiral and the Klingon say. If you detect any hint of a code, or if the admiral says anything that could endanger the ship, close the channel and contact me at once.” Uhura nodded. “Aye-aye, Captain.” Kirk ushered the Companion and McCoy onto the turbolift.

“Admiral Kabreigny, you have the conn.” The doors swept closed and the lift began to descend. McCoy studied Kirk closely. “Now can you tell me what you’re planning?” “Spock and Scott had better hear it, too,” Kirk said. If he was going to have all of his senior officers think he was crazy, he wanted to get it over with at once.

Buried deep within the decks of the Enterprise, the Auxiliary Command Center was the ship’s backup command facility. From it, all basic command functions could be controlled in the event the main bridge was damaged or lost. But in this case, the main bridge was serving as the backdrop of a diversion carried out for the Klingon commander of the hijacked liner. As the Klingon conducted his negotiations with Kabreigny, Kirk and his officers prepared behind the scenes for the moment they would take control of the situation.

Just over an hour after Kirk had left the bridge, he was minutes away from enacting his plan. Spock gave it a thirty-three percent chance of success, much higher than Mr. Scott allowed. McCoy thought it was just plain impossible. But Kirk knew his crew and his ship. He was confident, and that confidence was contagious.

At the smaller command console in the cramped control center, Sulu and Chekov ran one final simulation. They reported a twelve-percent casualty rate.

“Not acceptable,” Kirk told them. But he knew there was no more time to rehearse. Whatever help the Klingon commander was obviously expecting could arrive at any moment. The Planitia was a soft target. There was no guarantee that what was coming to rendezvous with the liner would be as simple to overcome.

Kirk checked the readouts on the command console, scanning Mr. Scott’s data from the engine room. The warp-eight-point-three chase had cracked one of the dilithium crystals in the matter-antimatter converters and engine efficiency had dropped dramatically. The chief engineer couldn’t promise speed, but he did promise that all the power the captain’s plan needed would be available on demand.

McCoy was standing by in the main transporter room. Ten other emergency medical teams were at their positions throughout the ship. Everything had been arranged by runners. Kirk had not permitted any of the detailed planning stages to be transmitted over the ship’s intercom system. He presumed the Klingon’s crew would be attempting to monitor the Enterprise’s internal communications. He didn’t know if the liner had the capability for that, but they were close enough to each other that he didn’t wish to take the chance.

Kirk checked behind him. The Companion sat quietly, focusing all of her attention on her heart’s desire, less than a kilometer away through the void. “We’ll get him back,” he promised her.

Then at Kirk’s signal, Spock and the transporter chiefs confirmed their readiness by code.

Kirk took a breath, preparing himself. He knew he’d feel better if Spock had been able to verify that anything like this had been tried before. But the procedure books had nothing like it. As McCoy had dryly noted, it wasn’t as if trying something new was unusual for this ship.

Kirk touched a communications control so he could listen in to the admiral’s conversation with the Klingon.

“… escort back to the Empire,” she said, “but the City of Utopia Planitia is private property and must be returned to us at the border.” “Alas,” the Klingon replied, “that cuts to the core of any possibility of friendship between our two peoples. By transporting known Orion pirates, this liner has been used in crimes against the Empire, and we must have it for justice to be served.” Kirk rolled his eyes. It was all nonsense and obfuscation. The Klingon was claiming some cover story about the Planitia having been used to smuggle Orion criminals convicted in the Klingon Empire to safety in the Federation. At least Kabreigny was playing along, and the Klingon did seem to be delighted to be negotiating with a fleet admiral. Kirk decided the Klingon thought he’d be able to kidnap her as well. He frowned and turned down the volume of the negotiations, reducing them to a background whisper.

“One minute, gentlemen,” Kirk announced. The command chair in this facility was smaller and less comfortable than the one on the bridge, but it filled him with the same power.

“Science officer?” he asked. It was an innocuous request that would mean nothing to any unwanted listener.

“Spock here,” Spock replied over the intercom. The simple announcement meant all transporter circuits were on-line— every single one of them. “Engineer?” “Scott here.” The ship’s power plant was ready for what would be demanded of it. “Medical?” “McCoy here. But I still say—” “Thank you, Doctor,” Kirk said, quickly cutting off McCoy’s objections.

“Mr. Sulu,” Kirk asked his navigator, “are you ready with the tractor beams?” Sulu didn’t take his eyes off the board. “Target sites located, Captain.” “Mr. Chekov?” His hands were poised over his controls, ready for action.

“Torpedoes armed. Phasers ready for cold start.” Kirk leaned forward to better see the image of the Planitia on the reduced-size viewscreen in front of the command console. lhe instant he put this in motion, the lives of everyone on board the liner Planitia would rest with the skill of the Enterprise crew.

In fifty seconds, the operation would be successful, or more than one hundred innocent people would be dead. But Kirk would not accept that possibility, and neither would his crew. “Let’s make this one for the history books,” he said. “Mr. Spock, you may begin.” “Energizing,” Spock replied from the transporter room. There was no longer any need for communications security. One way or another, the Klingon would know what was happening within seconds.