Star Trek: The Original Series: The Shocks of Adversity (3 page)

“The viewscreen did not do this justice,” Kirk told him, sounding equally awed by
the sight. “It just goes to prove, there really is no substitute for sending people
out here, seeing things like this up close, close enough to touch.” Then the captain
tore his eyes away and turned to Scott. “So . . . let’s touch one.”

“Aye, sir,” Scott said as he turned his attention to the targeting panel before him.
“At least the fishing pond is well stocked.” The grappler had been built in the day
when its operator would more often than not have to rely on visual targeting, so Scott
was able to pick out a reasonably sized, slow-moving asteroid from the field, track
its trajectory, and as it reached the center of his field of vision, hit the launch
trigger.

Trailing a carbon-fiber tether, the large duranium claw flew out the open hatch and
made impact. The four-meter-long, pencil-shaped sliver began to tumble away, but not
before the grappler head engaged and secured itself, finding purchase in a small fissure
or micrometeor pockmark. Scotty slapped the control that stopped any more line from
reeling out and gritted his teeth as the mass the grappler had attached itself to
pulled the cable taut. The cable held, though, and after a moment it slackened again,
the asteroid’s kinetic energy spent. “Nicely done, Mister Scott,” Kirk said, impressed.

Scott shrugged modestly and pressed another control on the panel to start slowly reeling
the line back into the ship. The crystal was drawn closer, meter by meter, bringing
it gently toward the open bay doors. Scotty fired one of the miniature positioning
jets that formed a ring around the base of the grappler’s claw head, adjusting the
captured object’s angle of approach, in order to bring it in cleanly through the open
hatch. He misjudged only slightly, and triggered the opposite thruster to compensate.

That one, however, only sputtered feebly before failing. “Damn,” he said, just as
all of the control readings from the grappler’s remote assembly went dead.

“What is it?” Kirk asked.

“I don’t know, sir,” Scotty said as he hit more controls and found them all unresponsive.
“I don’t know if it was the impact or the age of the blasted machine, but I can’t
work the remote maneuvering system.”

“Is the crystal interfering with your command transmissions?” Kirk posited. The reason
wasn’t especially important at the moment; the immediate concern was that they had
a large asteroid coming at them that could no longer be controlled. The ship’s shields
were of no use against the energy-absorbing object, and it was on a path to hit lengthwise
against the outer edge of the open hatch, doing serious damage.

The engineer’s first thought was to cut it loose, but inertia would only make that
a futile act. As the options raced through Scotty’s head, none struck him as particularly
good. But one was the most likely to accomplish the task at hand. “Captain, ye may
want to get down,” he said, and then boosted the speed of the grappler tether retrieval
to maximum. The straining of the intake reel could be heard through the transparent
bulkhead as the line went tight again, and the crystal was pulled around, so that
it was coming at the
Enterprise
straight on, like an oversized harpoon.

“Scotty, what . . . ?”

Watching the velocity of the incoming object as it increased, Scott ignored the second
thoughts shouting to be heard from the back of his mind. The long and disturbingly
pointed crystal shard had now been pulled into a straight trajectory into the open
bay, and Scotty stopped the spinning reel. The asteroid stopped accelerating, but
it was still coming at them at close to thirty meters per second.

“Down!” Scotty shouted, as he slammed the button to rapidly repressurize the loading
bay, and at the same time tackled the captain, knocking him flat onto the deck. On
the opposite side of the bulkhead, air vents opened wide, filling the bay with gas,
much of which quickly blew out the open doors into space. The jet of oxygen offered
enough resistance to slow the incoming asteroid fractionally, but
it still struck the loading bay deck with a mighty crash, bounced, and hit the transparent
bulkhead with enough force to crack it. Air started hissing out of the control room,
and Scotty disentangled himself from the captain in order to reach up and get the
space doors closed. Within seconds they were sealed, and Scotty peered out the still
largely intact observation window to see their prize broken into roughly a dozen sharp-edged
pieces, none longer than one meter, scattered across the deck. Scott let out a long,
noisy breath of relief.

Then, from the deck beside him, he heard the captain groan and then say, “You know,
I’m getting a little tired of having my officers knock me to the floor today. . . .”

Spock sighted his target down the barrel of his phaser rifle and fired.

The beam struck the precise center of the crystal fragment held in an elevated brace
at the far end of the laboratory, at first having no apparent effect on the sample.
After 8.8 seconds at a constant sustained setting, however, visible fractures began
to form and grow. After 20 seconds, it broke into pieces, not in an explosive blast
as would have been anticipated, but simply splitting and falling away. The thin chips
that separated from the large sample sounded like chimes as they landed on the deck.

Spock lifted his forefinger from the firing stud and turned to Kirk, who was standing
behind him. “As you can see, the amount of directed energy these crystals are able
to absorb is not unlimited,” Spock observed.

“Still, that’s a lot of phaser fire you had to pour into it,” Kirk said, walking down
to the other end of the improvised firing range and squatting down to examine the
broken pieces. “Any theories on where all that energy is going?”

“It appears that it is being shifted into a dimension of subspace,” Spock said. “There
are molecular similarities to dilithium, though it does not have the same effect on
subspace.”

Kirk asked, “Can we get through to the other side of the field without it posing a
risk to the ship?”

Spock shook his head. “The energy displacement effect is not a risk factor. We do
still need to take into account the physical damage the crystals can inflict.”

“And even if we were to try using the ship’s phasers to blast a path through the field,”
Kirk said, standing up again, his palm outstretched, holding a small pile of crystal
chips, “we’d just end up with that many more pieces of this nystromite to worry about.”

“Yes, sir,” Spock answered, not bothering to protest the captain’s use of the term
“nystromite.” The other scientists on his team had coined it during their initial
experimentations, even before they had determined its actual molecular makeup and
could formulate a more apt scientific designation. But now that the name was being
used by the captain, there was little chance of a new one being accepted into common
usage.

The captain clenched his fist around the chips and began pacing the laboratory in
a characteristic demonstration of frustration. “Mister Spock, we have only scratched
the surface here of one of the
Federation’s longest enduring scientific mysteries. I’m not keen on the idea of abandoning
it so easily.”

“Nor am I suggesting we do so, sir,” Spock assured him. “The focus of my study has
been the ways that nystromite absorbs energy, and while resistant to most, there is
one form of energy to which it is still susceptible.”

Kirk turned back to Spock. “What is it?”

Spock answered by holding his open palm out to Kirk. After a moment, the captain poured
the small pieces from his hand into Spock’s. In turn, the science officer selected
the largest of the pieces, turned, and threw it across the lab. He hit the large target
sample directly, but this time sent it and its brace falling over. “Kinetic energy,
sir.”

*   *   *

“Kinetic energy,” Pavel Chekov muttered under his breath, only just loud enough for
Sulu to hear.

Sulu looked back at him and shrugged. “Hey, if it works, it works.”

“I know, but still . . .” Chekov said, and gestured to the viewscreen. “We’ve been
reduced to literally throwing rocks.”

That rock—a large, common nickel-iron asteroid located among the nystromite crystals
that dominated the field before them—was being directed by the
Enterprise
’s tractor beam off its natural path and into the thick of the field. Smaller
crystals were knocked aside as it penetrated deeper, leaving a clear path behind.

“Disengage tractor,” Spock ordered.

“Tractor beam disengaged,” Chekov confirmed as he depressed the cutoff button and
stifled a sigh. The science team’s research with nystromite had allowed them to make
minor refinements to the sensors. The readings were still indistinct—more like sensor
shadows than genuine reports of objects in space—but clear enough that Chekov could
see that the cleared path was far too narrow for the
Enterprise
to follow. They would need to repeat this exercise with a rock as big as or bigger
than the
Enterprise
itself, assuming an object of that mass wouldn’t overtax and burn out the tractor
beam emitters. Chekov found it hard to comprehend why Spock had even bothered with
such an obviously futile effort.

“Mister Chekov,” the captain said, “arm one photon torpedo, maximum yield and dispersal
pattern.”

Then, the Russian understood. “Photon torpedo ready,” he said after quickly keying
in the program, and silently apologized to Spock for ever doubting him.

“Fire.”

The torpedo launched from its firing tube and followed the cleared path all the way
to the surface of the asteroid, where it detonated. The resulting
blast lit up the forward viewscreen, and once the computer activated the protective
polarizing light filters, they were greeted by the sight of an open tunnel leading
inside the Nystrom Anomaly. It seemed as if every station encircling the center well
had suddenly been reactivated, as a flood of new sensor data began to stream into
the computer banks to be processed and analyzed. Chekov was shocked to realize just
how quiet the bridge had been until then.

“So it
is
an M1 subdwarf in there!” Sulu declared as he read the new information being fed
to their astronavigation console, with not a small amount of pride for having predicted
the star’s presence earlier.

“Indeed,” Spock confirmed from the science station. “Along with at least six planets
and eight planetoids. The fourth planet may be Class-M.”

“
May
be, Spock?” Kirk asked.

Spock seemed to hesitate before elaborating. “It appears that the Nystrom system beyond
this field is not entirely free of nystromite,” he reported. “It is in particulate
form, and is having the effect of degrading our sensor resolution.”

“Would this particulate nystromite pose a danger to the ship?” Kirk asked. “Can we
take the
Enterprise
into the system? Take a closer look at that planet?”

Spock’s mouth pressed into a thin line. “Since
the particulate nystromite is in combination with the more common varieties of space
dust, I believe that our navigational deflectors will be reliably effective within
this environment. I do need to caution, however, that our studies of this new substance
are still very preliminary. There is no way to guarantee—”

Spock was cut off by Uhura saying, “Captain?”

The captain turned, asking, “Lieutenant, what is it?”

“I’m not entirely certain, given what Mister Spock was just saying,” she said as she
pressed her Feinberg receiver to her ear, “but I believe I’m picking up subspace radio
signals from the fourth planet.”

“What?” Kirk stood up from his chair and stepped up to where the communications officer
sat.

“The signal is faint, and there’s a lot of interference,” she said, “but it has all
the earmarks of intelligent communication.”

“Sentient life, in here,” Kirk said, and the glint in his eye was enough that he didn’t
even have to speak the next order. Chekov turned back to his panel and had already
entered the necessary commands by the time Kirk called out, “Mister Chekov, plot a
course through the field and to the fourth planet.”

“Course plotted and laid in, sir,” he answered immediately.

Sulu smiled sidewise at him. “About time,” the helmsman whispered as he engaged the
impulse engines and the
Enterprise
headed in.

*   *   *

Nystrom IV did turn out to be a Class-M planet, and although Uhura did not pick up
any further radio transmissions, what they did find, once the
Enterprise
achieved orbit, was readings of an artificial power source on the surface. However,
although scans were infinitely clearer at this closer range, there was still enough
particulate nystromite in the planet’s atmosphere to call into question any of those
readings, including the negative readings they’d found for any advanced life-forms.

“If you can’t even get a decent sensor scan through that stuff,” McCoy growled as
he followed Kirk and Spock on their way to the transporter room, “why in hell would
you trust that blasted machine to get your atoms through in working order?”

“Doctor, I am continually astonished by your ignorance of even the most basic operational
principles of transporter technology,” Spock said without turning back or breaking
his stride. “The same annular confinement beam used to clear the transporter target
coordinates of any matter which may interfere with the rematerialization process—”

“And I’m continually astonished by your refusal to allow anything in this universe
to astonish you.
You really have no idea if the transporter will work in this system.”

“Bones,” Kirk interceded in his best calming manner, “I’ve already said you don’t
need to come along.”

“For which I thank you,” McCoy said, sounding anything but grateful. “But now we’re
talking about you, and the rest of the landing party.”