Star Trek: The Original Series: The Shocks of Adversity

BOOK: Star Trek: The Original Series: The Shocks of Adversity
8.29Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Thank you for downloading this Gallery Books eBook.

Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other
great books from Gallery Books and Simon & Schuster.

or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

To Chris, Karl, Teri, Laura, and Mike

“Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before
you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must
undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.”

—George Washington

One

The deck fell out from under James Kirk’s feet, and for a moment he was left suspended
weightless in midair.

In the next instant, the ship’s artificial gravity field reasserted itself, and he
hit the gymnasium floor with a loud
whoomph
. Despite the padding that covered the deck underneath him, his head struck hard enough
to send a barrage of shooting stars streaming across his field of vision.
Well, I asked for that
, he silently reprimanded himself.

“Captain!” As the shooting stars began to clear away, he saw Lieutenant Joseph D’Abruzzo
bent over him, wearing a look of worry on his young face. “Are you all right, sir?”

“Oh, just fine,” Kirk replied, trying to sound as though he hadn’t just had the wind
forced out of him. “Why do you ask?”

He raised his right hand up toward D’Abruzzo, who grasped Kirk’s hand and helped pull
him back up onto his stocking feet. “I am sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to throw you that
hard, really.”

“Don’t apologize, Mister D’Abruzzo,” Kirk told the younger man. He adjusted the shoulders
of his bright orange judo
gi
, which matched the one worn by the lieutenant. “I invited you to be my sparring partner
specifically because I knew you would challenge me.” D’Abruzzo had been the captain
of the Starfleet Academy martial arts team, and had been instrumental in leading them
to the United Earth Intercollegiate Championship in his graduating year. “The last
thing I want is for you to hold anything back. Come on,” he said, stepping to the
opposite side of the mat and standing on the short white line that marked his starting
position. D’Abruzzo took his place on the opposite mark, then the two men bowed before
advancing to meet at the center of the mat.

Five seconds later, Kirk was flat on the deck again.
Well, maybe holding back isn’t the
last
thing I want him to do
, he considered silently.

“Well, at least you didn’t go airborne that time.”

Kirk raised his head and turned it in the direction of where Leonard McCoy stood watching.
Bones was leaning against the wall by the gymnasium doors, his eyes bright with mischievous
amusement as he grinned like a madman. Kirk slowly pushed himself back up to his feet,
this time ignoring D’Abruzzo’s extended hand. “Don’t you have some other, better things
to do, Doctor?”

“Other things, sure,” McCoy answered. “Better things? I have to say this is at the
top of that list.”

“You know, Bones,” Kirk said, as he rotated his right shoulder, trying to work some
of the low ache away, “for someone who is so insistent about his patients’ getting
regular exercise, it seems to me that the only reason you ever visit the gym is to
mock others.”

“I’ll have you know that I practice my own daily calisthenics routine every morning
before breakfast,” McCoy told him. “You’re more than welcome to join me if you like.
Very low impact, probably more appropriate for you.”

Giving McCoy the tightest of smiles, Kirk turned back to D’Abruzzo. “Again?” The lieutenant,
who had been watching the exchange between captain and chief surgeon with the reaction-free
face of a cadet undergoing inspection, nodded and moved into position again.

The deck lurched under Kirk’s feet again, but this time, D’Abruzzo had nothing to
do with it—he was also thrown off balance, along with McCoy and everyone else in the
gymnasium, by what the captain assumed was a sudden and unexpected failure of the
ship’s inertial dampers. “What the hell?” McCoy blurted, pushing himself away from
the nearby bulkhead he’d been tossed against.

Once the ship and Kirk had both regained their steady bearing, the captain crossed
to the closest
wall-mounted companel and punched the transmit toggle. “Kirk to bridge. What’s happening
up there?”

Commander Spock’s cool, unflappable voice answered him from the speaker grille:
“The
Enterprise
just dropped out of warp, Captain, and encountered some unanticipated subspace turbulence
during the transition to normal space.”

“Another of the Nystrom Anomaly’s surprises?” Kirk asked.

“It would appear so, sir.”

“I’ll be right there. Kirk out.” He closed the open circuit, and then turned back
to where D’Abruzzo stood and waited. “I’m afraid we’ll need to cut this session short,
Lieutenant.”

“Yes, sir,” D’Abruzzo said as he bent forward in the traditional low bow. Kirk returned
it before heading to the locker area, tugging at the knotted cloth belt around his
waist and freeing it. He shrugged the
gi
off and turned to toss it into the clothing reclamator by the doorway, noticing only
then that McCoy had been following right behind him.

“You know, Jim,” the doctor said, handing Kirk a towel, “you really ought to lighten
up a bit on D’Abruzzo.”

“What?” Kirk asked as he accepted the proffered piece of terrycloth, and proceeded
to rub it over his sweat-slicked chest and sore, aching shoulders.

“Just . . . go a little easy on him.”

Kirk stopped and stared at McCoy, stunned. “Me, go easy on
him
?” he said. “Did you not see what he did to me out there?”

“Yes, I saw what he did,” McCoy agreed. “And I saw the look you gave him when he did.”

“What look?”

“The look that said, ‘Keep tossing your commanding officer around like an old rag
doll, and don’t be surprised to find yourself reassigned to waste extraction for the
rest of this mission.’ ”

“But at least I didn’t say it aloud,” Kirk joked, and tossed the towel back to McCoy.
“You have to give me credit for that.” The captain turned and opened the locker where
he had stashed his uniform and boots before the start of his workout, and began to
dress.

“No, you weren’t that plain,” McCoy said. “But the way you kept addressing him as
‘Lieutenant’ and ‘Mister D’Abruzzo,’ making sure he didn’t forget his place in the
chain of command.”

Kirk paused, shirt in his hands, looking at McCoy. “You’re not saying I was purposely
trying to intimidate him, are you, Bones?”

“Not intentionally, no, Jim,” McCoy allowed. “But you are the captain; that alone
is pretty intimidating to most of these kids. Then you put D’Abruzzo in the position
you did, where he really had no choice but to hold back on you.”

“Oh, no, he wasn’t holding back.” His abused muscles complained as Kirk put his arms
through the sleeves of his green, wraparound uniform tunic.

“Okay. If that’s what you want to believe,” McCoy told him, in such a way that Kirk
had to seriously consider the possibility that he was not kidding. “My point is,”
he continued, “you’ve got to keep in mind who and what you are to your crew. These
have an effect on people”—reaching out, McCoy plucked at the rows of golden braids
that circled his wrist—“even when you’re not wearing them.”

Kirk considered McCoy silently for a moment. Ironic that such counsel should come
from the one man aboard on whom his rank seemed to have the least effect. “You’re
right. Thank you, Bones.”

McCoy nodded, and left Kirk alone in the locker room with his own thoughts. While
Bones had certainly meant well, he hardly needed to remind Kirk how set apart he was
from the rest of the crew. A starship captain was first and foremost a leader, one
who had to require obedience from his crew and make difficult, if not impossible,
choices on a regular basis. It was not the sort of environment that allowed a captain
to form many close friendships. McCoy was an exception, due to his decidedly non-Starfleet
personality. And Spock, too, of course . . . though as much as he valued the Vulcan’s
friendship, it could never be compared to the one he’d shared with Gary Mitchell.
The two had been
inseparable for much of their early careers, and when Kirk was given his first command,
he brought his closest friend aboard as a bridge officer. And when Gary had been transformed
during the
Enterprise
’s encounter with the galactic barrier, it was Kirk who had to kill him.

The captain gave his head a quick shake, dispelling those old memories, then finished
pulling on his boots and left the gymnasium. He strode down the corridor, passing
by crew members in groups of two and three. Kirk gave them all only the curtest of
nods in acknowledgment as he moved on to the turbolift, and then rode to the bridge
alone.

*   *   *

The Nystrom Anomaly appeared on the bridge’s main viewscreen as little more than a
luminous oval smudge against the starscape beyond. Even with the
Enterprise
’s state-of-the-art sensors and computerized color image enhancers, the picture they
generated revealed little more scientific data than had been collected by
Friendship 1
, the first-generation warp probe that had discovered the stellar object eighty-nine
years earlier.

At first, the only remarkable thing about those original images was that the ancient
pre-Federation probe had still been operational and able to capture and transmit them
back to Earth. At first glance, the unnamed stellar object had been identified as
a small planetary nebula, consisting of a shell of hydrogen and other stellar gases
ejected by a star transforming from a red giant into a white dwarf. But Doctor Loretta
Nystrom, a junior researcher assigned to the long-running mission, noted that over
the course of
Friendship
’s long-distance flyby, the nebula displayed no evidence of either expanding outward
or contracting back in on itself. Instead, it appeared that it was an almost completely
stable accretion disk, holding static at five billion kilometers in diameter.

Naturally, this data was deemed unreliable because of suspected signal degradation
over the vast distances and because the probe was by then in its twelfth decade of
operation. The data from
Friendship 1
had cut off only months later, and it was assumed that the probe had finally failed
and was lost. However, when subsequent Federation deep-space probes were dispatched
to follow up on those initial surveys, they confirmed the earlier readings, and also
discovered additional inexplicable peculiarities.

Over the decades, the Nystrom Anomaly had remained one of the more curious mysteries
within the Federation’s astronomic community. Some had theorized that the Nystrom
Anomaly was composed of an undiscovered form of dark matter, or that it was an exotic
extradimensional construct. Others posited that it did not exist at all and was a
mere sensor shadow. It was these debates that had led to the
Enterprise
crew’s current assignment: to serve as the anomaly’s first live observers and to
uncover the answers to these long-standing questions. Thus far, though, the answers
had remained elusive.

Spock studied the image of the anomaly from his present position in the bridge’s command
chair, while Ensign Pavel Chekov manned the science station. Unable to glean any meaningful
information from the indistinct visual representation, the first officer found himself
turning to look at the young human officer, hunched over the hooded viewer. Spock
felt the illogical urge to ask for a report, though he knew with certainty that any
new findings would be promptly relayed to him. All the same, the Vulcan was finding
the viewscreen less worthy of observation than the shifts and twitches of Chekov’s
back and shoulders as he continued his silent examination.

BOOK: Star Trek: The Original Series: The Shocks of Adversity
8.29Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Touch of Innocents by Michael Dobbs
Lorraine Heath by Texas Destiny
Long Hard Ride by James, Lorelei
Astray by Amy Christine Parker
Last Whisper by Carlene Thompson
Minor Demons by Randall J. Morris
Inquisition by Alfredo Colitto