Star Trek: The Original Series - 147 - Devil’s Bargain (16 page)

“Captain, I was picking up a power drain from some unknown source, and then I noticed that there was a pressure change associated with it. I ran a scan, and, believe it or not, we have a breach. I’m attempting to pinpoint it.”

A hull breach. The worst disaster in space. It was almost unheard of in Starfleet. Ships were not only made of extremely tough stuff necessary for interstellar travel, but the exterior was reinforced with force fields to contain atmosphere and to keep out the radiation that a breach might produce.

“Where, Scotty? Have you found it?” Kirk asked. He felt the adrenaline rising within him.

“
Captain, you’re not gonna like this, but the breach is in the shuttle bay,”
Mister Scott reported.
“Do you think one of the Horta has somehow disregarded our warnings and burned a hole in a bulkhead?”

“I don’t think so,” Kirk answered. “How bad is it?”

“From the power drain, I’d say it’s fairly large,”
Scotty said.
“I’ll get a team on it right now. It looks like the shuttle bay doors failed.”

“That’s impossible. That thing has a dozen failsafes,” Kirk said. He shook his head. This smelled very fishy, and he wanted to investigate himself. “I’ll head for the shuttle bay. Have an EV suit standing by.”

“Aye, sir,”
Scotty said.

“Full stop, Mister Sulu! Take us out of warp and maintain our position.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You have the bridge, Sulu.” Kirk rose from his chair.

Chekov was manning the science station. “Ensign, get every sensor we have on the area we just passed through. Backtrack as far as you can.”

“Yes, Captain.”

Kirk strode quickly to the turbolift, almost running into Spock. “Come with me, Spock,” said Kirk. “We have a situation in the shuttle bay.”

When Kirk arrived, he saw that the interior airlock was fully engaged, cutting off the crew from the main shuttle bay area. It was only possible to open the airlock without expelling atmosphere if the shuttle bay shields were working, but that was
not the case. The doors were partway open—this much could be seen through the airlock port—and the atmospheric gauge beside the airlock read near zero for the interior. Kirk turned and asked Spock, “What do we know about the Horta and a vacuum? Can they withstand it?”

Spock reached over and touched the door. A troubled expression crossed his face for a moment, but then he returned to his usual placid indifference. “I am too far away for anything but the most tentative of communication. I am detecting signs of distress within, however, but not due to suffocation or other physical deterioration. What I feel is dismay and fright.”

“Captain, this is the bridge,”
said Chekov’s voice over intership.
“Sensors indicate that several Horta have been ejected from the shuttle bay and have fallen out of hyperspace into Newtonian space-time.”

“Life signs, Mister Chekov.”

After a moment’s delay, Chekov reported back:
“Sir, I am detecting fifteen independent readings.”

“They’re alive?”

“For the time being,”
Chekov answered.

“Can you get a lock to beam them aboard?”

“Not yet, sir. They are too far, three groups clumped together, but each scattered over ten thousand four hundred kilometers.”

“Captain, this is Sulu. I have brought the ship about. We should be in range within minutes.”

“Let’s hope they have minutes,” Kirk said. “All right. Good work, bridge. Report any changes to me.”

“Can we get the force field up?”

“The shuttle bay force field is intended only to maintain atmospheric pressure for the time it takes for a shuttle to pass through. If we are unable to close the shuttle bay doors, pressurizing the bay will be ineffective. The force field will fail and the air will be expelled.”

“Then we have to get the doors closed, and fast,” Kirk said.

“Affirmative, Captain,” said Spock.

The repair team was now suited up, and Kirk began to step into the suit they had brought for him.

“If I may, sir,” said Spock.

Kirk cut him off. “Spock? ”

“Captain, it makes more sense for
me
to accompany the rescue crew,” Spock said. “I have a rapport with the Horta, and their aid may be essential in resolving the situation.”

Kirk considered. There was something telling him viscerally to do something.

Spock was right. “Agreed.” He thrust the EV suit at Spock. “Get going.”

•   •   •

The repair team opened the airlock door, stepped inside, and closed it behind them. Then there was a
whoosh
as the exterior door opened and the small
atmosphere inside the airlock rushed into the vacuum of the shuttle bay. They sensibly held on to avoid being pulled forward by the negative air pressure.

The crew rushed into the shuttle bay toward the crescent-shaped opening on the right side of the hatch. As Spock approached it, he observed that the doors were not fully open. One of the flanged components of the iris door had been retracted, leaving a space that was 3.02 meters wide. The width was just enough for a Horta to be sucked through.

As Spock and the crew drew nearer to the huge bay doors, the emergency lights, still functioning overhead even in the hard vacuum, revealed that the way forward was blocked. Huddled Horta surrounded the shuttle bay door. Judging from the arrangement, it seemed the Horta had been pulled toward the open door by the huge rush of atmospheric discharge and were now clumped together at the opening.

The problem now was to get the shuttle bay door closed. But first Spock must assess the state of the remaining Horta. They were not moving. When Spock reached the first of them, he saw the reason for this.

The Horta had not merely held on, they had dissolved part of the deck in order to weld themselves inside the shuttle bay. Each of the creatures was sunken in a Horta-shaped declivity of nearly
a half-meter depth, and they looked as if they were resting in their own giant footprints. They had made their own safety holds, in effect, in order to not be pulled out into space.

Clever,
Spock thought.
Also extremely logical.

Spock allowed himself to dip once more into the Horta collective consciousness.

Alarm, alarm! The sucking, pulling winds! The flow outward into the void! Falling, falling! We must stick tight.

Stick tight. Fuse. Hold to the not-rock under our carapace!

Spock made his presence known to the Horta with a quick signal of thought—Spock pictured this signal as a blue flame within his mind—and then spoke directly to the Horta hive mind.

We will discover the cause of what has happened and attempt to resolve the problem,
Spock thought to them.

Speaker from the Stars, All Mother to Be, you have come to save us!

I am not the All Mother, and I may never be,
Spock thought back to them.
But I will do my best to help. It is necessary that I make my way by climbing over you.

All is forgiven, Speaker from the Stars. He is the savior. The bringer of truth! The All Mother is here to protect us!

I am
not
your mother,
Spock thought one final
time, but he could feel that it was a useless pronouncement at the moment. These Horta were frightened, and the only safety they had previously known was the All Mother’s benign presence.

Spock keyed on the microphone in his EV suit helmet. “Repair team, this is Spock. I’m afraid were going to have to do something that may disconcert our alien guests. I can see no other way to the shuttle bay control room than to walk over the backs of the Horta.”

“Walk on their backs, sir?”
said one of the rescue squad members.
“Won’t we dissolve into them, like if we stepped into lava or something?”

“Negative,” said Spock. “The dangerous portion of the creature is on the bottom, Ensign.” Spock considered that, in this instance, showing might be better than telling. He leaped up onto the back of the nearest Horta and perched there, as if he were on the shell of an enormous turtle. “Follow me, Officers.”

He stepped from Horta to Horta as if they were stones in a brook crossing and made his way across the shuttle bay until he reached his intended destination: shuttle bay auxiliary control, where the manual override was located.

Auxiliary control was normally a pressurized cabin in which an operator could open and close the enormous shuttle bay doors safely in atmospheric confinement. The door to the control panel
booth was jammed, and the rescue crew immediately set about torching it open with phasers to get inside. Spock peered through the window to the control panel within.

The shuttle bay manual override, which was set in a panel within the control room, was only for emergency use, and when it was engaged the assumption was that the atmosphere in the shuttle bay had already been cleared out, or that whoever was in the shuttle bay was prepared for the evacuation of the air. Nobody in his right mind would engage the mechanism without adequate warning and a direct order. In fact, it was locked against accidental triggering by a see-through covering. Spock saw that this covering shield had disintegrated entirely, as if it had been neatly cut from its support structure by a knife that could cut through pure crystal.

Spock’s Academy-trained mind immediately recognized this for what it was.

Military nanotechnology.

Spock spoke rapidly into his EV suit communicator. “Repair and rescue crew, this is Spock. Immediately back away from the shuttle bay doors control room and form a line to prevent any Horta from venturing in this direction. Repeat, immediately retreat and form a cordon at least three meters from the doorway. Military-grade nanotechnology is suspected.”

Spock looked outside and saw the repair crew
stopped in their tracks. Nano was frightening stuff. And the use of military nano was a war crime within the Federation. “Quickly,” Spock told them.

Spock’s orders seemed to wake them and the engineers did as instructed. Spock entered the cubicle and examined the control panel. It was not visibly damaged.

He reached down and brushed the surface. The metal—at least it
had
been metal—crumbled beneath the brush of his gloved hand to reveal the electronic innards of the controls.

Fused. Destroyed.

And yet the damage seemed self-contained. Someone who knew how to use nanotechnology had done this.

“Interesting,” Spock said. Trailing out from the fused mass of wires and circuitry was a tiny silver strand, a filament no more than a hair’s breadth thick. It hung down across the manual override panel like a long, wispy hair from a horse’s mane.

Spock keyed his suit transceiver to engage with the ship’s communication system and called up Scott. “Engineering, this is Spock. I have discovered a nanotechnological deployment in the auxiliary shuttle bay door control. It appears to be low-grade nanotech that requires activation from an outside source—”

“Aye,”
said Mister Scott, after presumably taking a moment to digest what Spock was reporting.
The first officer was impressed by how quickly Scott grasped complex situations involving technology and machinery.
“So have you found an antenna?”

“Astute, Mister Scott,” replied Spock. “I have indeed. It is monofilament—” Spock looked at his tricorder readings. “And appears to be pure pergium.”

“Mister Spock, you’re not saying . . . could the Horta have done this? That is the main mineral they’re mining on Janus VI, after all.”

“Negative, Mister Scott,” Spock replied. “Pergium is used extensively in both transporter and subspace communication equipment.”

“It’s a subspace receiver.”

“That is my tentative conclusion. A part of the triggering mechanism.”

“
Can we . . . untrigger it? Have the nano rebuild the control panel?”

Spock again checked his tricorder readout on the material.

“Negative. The nano has deactivated and scrambled its previous programming. Someone was attempting to cover his tracks, Mister Scott. However, for this size subspace antenna to function would require a subspace receiver keyed to very high frequencies and within relatively close range, judging by the diameter of the antenna. The transmitter must be located on the ship, yet use frequencies very different from those commonly used aboard.”

“You’re talking sabotage from within, Mister Spock,”
said Mister Scott.

“Indeed.”

Spock continued, “Mister Scott, I am going to destroy this antenna. I would like for you to monitor and observe whether this elicits a subspace callback. If it does, you should be able to pinpoint the source.”

“
Aye, sir,”
Scotty said.
“That I can do. Standing by.”

Spock realized his phaser was too powerful for what he intended to do. He looked around for another tool and his eyes lit upon a glassed-in cabinet that contained a titanium hammer. This was not standard issue for the control room but another one of Mister Scott’s personal design upgrades to the
Enterprise,
one Spock was very glad of at the moment. The glass case had a label: “For Emergency Use Only. Break Glass.” Spock used his elbow to shatter the glass, then retrieved the hammer. With a deft stroke, he brought it down in the middle of the little monofilament wire. Like all pergium, its tensile strength was virtually nonexistent, and it shattered into fragments as if it were of crystalline structure.

“Antenna destroyed. Anything, Mister Scott?” Spock asked.

“Sir, I got the smallest flash of the return signal,”
said Scott.
“Almost as if someone thought the thing had failed and was trying to turn it back on, then realized their mistake and shut down quickly. I don’t know what to make of it.”

“Did you locate the source?”

“
Deck five, corridor two, compartments A through G, sir.”