Star Trek: The Original Series - 082 - Federation (36 page)

“Dr. McCoy!” The doctor looked up from a patient stretched out on a bed.

The patient’s gold shirt was ripped open, smeared with dark red blood. Cochrane could see more blood pulsing weakly out through a charred, ragged gash on the man’s chest. “What are you doing here?” McCoy said abruptly.

Cochrane felt even more confused. “I… I was brought here.

Captain Kirk said the Companion would—” McCoy didn’t let him finish. “We’re under attack. The captain’s on the bridge and that’s where you should be.” He turned back to his patient, waving a glittering device over the bloodied chest as if he were some kind of witch doctor, never once touching the torn flesh.

“But who’s attacking us?” Cochrane asked plaintively. He stared in puzzled fascination as the patient’s bleeding seemed to slow, then stop, all without the doctor appearing to do anything but gesture at the wound.

“Damned Klingons!” McCoy muttered. He looked to the blond woman at his side. “Close this one up.” He looked out over the room. “Where’s the compound fracture?” A blue shirt waved the doctor over to another ravaged body on another bed. Some sort of medical display flashed and blinked above the second victim.

Cochrane wondered how anyone could function in the room’s chaos, yet somehow the doctor seemed to be in control of everything at once without effort.

He followed McCoy to his next patient. The doctor still wasn’t touching flesh or bone as he treated the man with the broken leg.

“Dr. McCoy, please—how do I get to the bridge?” McCoy looked around angrily. Cochrane couldn’t tell if it was real anger, or just the result of interrupted concentration. The doctor jabbed a finger in the direction of a young woman with her arm in a sling and a red uniform that consisted only of a shockingly brief dress. Cochrane wondered if she had been changing when she had been injured and hadn’t had time to finish dressing. By the early-twenty-second-century standards of Centauri B II, the woman might as well have been naked. “Ensign!” McCoy barked. “This man’s to report to the captain. Take him to the bridge.” The ensign was clearly in pain, but she instantly sprang to her feet and nodded at Cochrane. “This way, sir,” she said, and led him rapidly past the crowd outside, then around another corner.

“What are Klingons?” Cochrane asked as he tried again to catch his breath.

The ensign glanced at him sharply. “Where’re you from?” she asked.

Cochrane understood her reaction. Apparently, everyone knew what Klingons were. Except people from the twenty-second century.

“Never mind,” Cochrane said. This wasn’t the time for a history lesson. But maybe he had been wrong about Kyle’s apparent reticence to discuss how he had come here. “Ensign, can you at least tell me what a transporter is?” The ensign stopped in front of a set of flush-mounted doors.

They sprang apart to reveal a tiny room no larger than a closet.

After a moment, Cochrane realized it was an elevator, and felt foolish. He had been expecting more twenty-third-century wiz-ardry.

“You been frozen or something?” the ensign asked curiously as she stepped inside.

“How’d you guess?” Cochrane said, grasping her question and seeing in it a chance to escape further suspicion. The technical manuals Kirk had left behind had contained only vague allusions to the politics of the day, and there had been so much to do in order to prepare to support himself and the Companion that Cochrane had never gotten around to reading the history updateS.

He hadn’t been all that interested, either. “I’m from 2117. I don t know a thing past that.” The ensign whistled. “Twenty-one seventeen? That’s a long time.” She grabbed a downward-projecting handle and said, “Bridge.”

The elevator doors closed and Cochrane felt the car move sideways. “What is this?” he gasped as he grabbed for another handle.

“Turbolift,” the ensign said. “Like. a… an elevationer, I think they were called back in your day.” u ‘Elevator,” Cochrane corrected. The car stopped moving sideways and began moving up. He watched the lights flashing by the frosted window, wondering if each flash could represent a deck. If so. the ship was monstrous. “So, what’s a transporter?” Cochrane asked, no longer caring how out of touch he seemed. Information was information, and he’d always been a quick study.

“Matter-energy conversion,” the ensign answered. She shifted her arm, apparently trying to find a more comfortable position than the sling would allow. “Converts you to energy, beams you to a new location, reconverts, and there you are.” Cochrane felt his stomach drop out of him, and it wasn’t the turbolift. He stared at his hand. It looked like the same one he’d been born with.

“Are you all right, sir?” “That’s terrible.” “What?” Cochrane was appalled. Had human life become so cheap? So meaningless? “Each time you’re converted to energy, you’re killed,” Cochrane said. “What comes out the other end is just a duplicate that thinks it’s the original.” The ensign gave him a wide-eyed look that she might have reserved for a child. “You’re thinking about old-fashioned matter replication, sir. In replication, the original is destroyed so that duplicates can be reconstructed at any time. But the transporter process operates on a quantum level. You’re not destroyed and recreated; your actual, original molecules are tunneled to a new location. You’re still you, sir. Believe me. We do things differently these days.” Cochrane could believe it. He felt marginally better. The lift doors opened.

“Bridge, sir. This is where the doctor said you were to report.” Something flew at Cochrane. He whirled in time to seca “Zefrarn/”

—the Companion.

All thought left Cochrane as he embraced her. The attack at home, the interrogation, the imprisonment, conversion to energy —all of it left him as if the universe itself no longer mattered. He held the Companion in his arms. He had been afraid to even think of what had happened to her, had not dared to hope of being reunited, until Kirk had said she would be here.

“Oh, Zefram, we were so frightened,” she whispered into his chest.

“Shh,” he comforted her. He placed his hand to her head, wincing as he felt the bandage there. “What’s happened to you?

How long have you been away from our home?” She gazed up at him with one luminous eye, the other hidden beneath the sparkling fabric that wrapped her head. “Nothing’s wrong, Zefram,” she said. “And we have not been gone long. Dr.

McCoy said we’re strong, getting better. And we are, now that you’re with us.” Then Cochrane was aware of someone standing outside the turbolift—the Vulcan who had accompanied Kirk.

“Mr. Spock,” Cochrane said. “Is the captain here?” “This way, please,” Spock said. The ensign remained in the turbolift, most likely to return to sickbay.

Cochrane stepped forward, his arm securely around the Companion’s frail shoulder, and his mouth opened in shock.

The bridge of Kirk’s ship was larger than the total living area had been on the Bonaventure. He gazed at it with delight. Beside him, above a dedication plaque, there was a schematic of a vessel.

He recognized the twin nacelles as a classic continuum-distortion configuration, but the rest of the clean design was a revelation. So many problems of distortion-field stability were solved just by comparing the proportions of the lead saucer to the secondary hull from which the superimpellor nacelles sprang. He wanted to reach out and touch the image. Could it really be he was aboard this vessel?

“Mr. Cochrane, if you please,” the Vulcan insisted.

Cochrane moved forward, his fingers just brushing the image of the ship. Then the stairs took him by surprise. He nearly lost his footing when he reached them, so intent was his gaze at the viewscreen before him. There was some kind of wreckage displayed on it, rotating in microgravity—what had been another spaceship, he decided. Beyond the wreckage, three other ships hung poised in space, a different design from any other he had seen so far. But if the level of continuum-distortion propulsion today had been properly represented by the schematic back by the elevator, then the only reason the three ships on the screen looked the way they did—stretched out in two dimensions with a precariously long forward section—was that they were warships.

That inefficient design could only be acceptable in order to provide a smaller target silhouette in head-on attacks. Cochrane had no idea about the politics of this era, but physics were physics.

With the Companion still nestled close at his side, Cochrane saw Kirk in the center chair. He realized he would have expected to see him nowhere else.

“Captain Kirk?” he said.

Kirk glanced at him, then moved his eyes back to the screen.

“Glad to have you aboard, Mr. Cochrane. My apologies for the rough ride.” He leaned forward. “Mr. Sulu, status on the shields on the number-three ship?” An Asian human at the center console replied, “Eighty-seven percent, Captain. We won’t be able to touch them if they try it again.” Kirk bit his lip, deep in thought. But for all the confusion Cochrane had seen so far, the captain was an oasis of calm and the bridge and its crew were a natural extension of him. “Are those… Klingons?” Cochrane asked.

‘
Yhey’re Klingon ships,” Kirk answered. “But since they don’t appear interested in communicating with us, I can’t tell you who’s on board.” “What are they after?” Kirk looked at Cochrane again. “They’re after you.”

Cochrane swayed, but the Companion steadied him. He closed his eyes. He ha( wanted this all behind him.

When Monica had died, he, too, had wanted to die, rather than continue the fight. It had cost him too much already. But then, when the Companion had found him, rescued him, he had allowed himself to believe that the battle that had consumed his life might, in fact, be over. The time spent with the Companion, even in the strangely appealing energy pattern in which she had originally appeared to him, had been like a second life, a dream filled with a contentment and satisfaction he had never thought possible; a sharing of thoughts and ideas and emotions so healing, he had been freed from his past, missing only, ironically, the rituals of conversation and social interaction that he had always avoided before.

Thus, when she had brought Kirk and the others to him, and the Companion had miraculously become flesh and blood in the form of Commissioner Nancy Hedford, Cochrane had felt his life move toward true completeness.

Finally holding the Companion in his arms, knowing that the pure mind that had captivated and delighted him was encased in a physical body that entranced him… he was overcome.

There was nothing more that he had wanted, nothing more that he—the scientist who had never felt there would be time enough to do and learn all that he might—felt compelled to do. Whatever name the poets wished to give the feeling that had come upon him then, it was to him one thing and one thing only— Zefram Cochrane was at peace.

Once, as a child, he had dreamed of a bubble twisting within a bubble so that both twisted up together somewhere else. From that dream he had given humanity the stars.

But there had been another dream in Cochrane, a dream encoded in his cells, perhaps in the very structure of the universe that had caused him to come into being.

In the Companion he had found that dream made real.

But now his past was reaching out once more to steal that dream from him, as it had stolen the lives of his wife and his friends a century and a half before.

“They’re not Klingons,” Cochrane said with inexpressible sadness.

“Indeed.” Spock said beside him.

Cochrane opened his eyes. An old woman stepped up to him.

She was dressed in a gold-shirted uniform like Kirk’s, but the decorations on her sleeves were different, and the emblem on her chest was a rainbow-hued starburst, not the asymmetric field-distortion symbol Kirk and his crew wore.

“Am I to take it you know who’s after you, Mr. Cochrane?” the old woman asked imperiously, as if she were used to being answered.

Cochrane looked at Kirk, seeking direction. u ‘This is Fleet Admiral Quario Kabreigny,” Kirk said.

Cochrane supposed he should be surprised, but the surprises of the twenty-third century were beginning to wear him down. He knew that in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, women had literally fought to be in the military. But after the nightmare of World War III, with the preservation of the species at the forefront of everyone’s minds, the conservative influence of the colony worlds had placed females back in a protected category. At the time, Cochrane had read that it was all part of some grand sociological cycle in gender roles, and he wondered now if the abbreviated uniform he had seen on the ensign was an indication of another move toward greater independence for women in this era. Still, for someone of his time period, he found it difficult to truly accept that this older woman was in a position to give orders to Kirk.

“The admiral has taken quite an interest in your career, after our disappearance,” Kirk continued. “If you can clear up any of her questions, it will probably help all of us.” “Should I repeat the question?” the admiral said pointedly.

Now Cochrane definitely had the feeling that the old woman was not used to having to repeat herself.

‘
That’s not necessary,” Cochrane said. “I had hoped that the Optimum Movement would have died out by now. That we would have grown smarter, stronger than that.”
‘The Optimum Movement?” Kirk said.

$pock placed his hands behind his back and began to recite historical facts. “The name given to a collection of loosely a~liated fascist political organizations that sprang up on Earth in the early to mid-twenty-first century,” Spock said. “Among its adherents were the infamous Colonel Green—”

But Kirk stopped him. “I know what the Optimum Movement is, Spock.” Cochrane was puzzled that an alien would know so much about Earth history. Kirk had an equally puzzled expression. “Mr.

Cochrane, the Optimum Movement’s takeover of certain countries is widely considered to be a contributing cause of World War III. At the beginning of the reconstruction, the movement was thoroughly discredited. Its leaders captured and tried. It’s dead and gone.” “It was still alive in 2117, Captain. They killed my wife and students on Centauri B II. I was supposed to be next.” “That’s why you disappeared? To die in space?” Cochrane felt his body tremble as the old sense of futility hit him again. He felt the Companion draw closer to him, wanting to protect him from all that was bad in this universe, in whatever time. It was unbearable to him that she, in turn, should be placed at risk, because of him.