The Rings of Tautee (7 page)

69 Chapter Ten THE TINY NOISES she made seemed overwhelming in the cavernous room.

Prescott had crawled underneath the main-screen control panel. She had portable lights attached to her wrists[*thorngg'she couldn't find any helmet lamps[*thorngg'and she had been working for some time. She had discovered that Pollers philosophy was right; it was better to be busy. That way, she didn't have time to dwell on the hopelessness of their situation.

Or on its cause.

When she had crawled under the panel, she had been surprised. Despite the shaking and dust, the panel appeared to be in fine shape. The problem was with the lack of power (how ironic), the shattered connections to the surface, and the 70 THE RINGS OF TAUTEE aboveground cameras, as she had expected. Still, she double-checked every circuit, every system, and every chip.

"Any success?" Folle's voice rang to her from above. She hadn't even heard him enter. That pleased her. She had been concentrating hard.

She shut off her wrist lights, pushed herself free of the access panel, and half-floated into an upright position. Her hands were covered with dust, and she knew the sweat on her face was also making black lines in the layers of dirt.

"Everything here is fine," she said. "I was about to check to see if I could draw enough power from the emergency field to connect to an outside camera, if any are still out there."

Folle had turned and was holding on to the back of her chair. "Good idea," he said. "Let me[*thorn]" He started to push off from the chair to move to the emergency power panel on the far wall when suddenly his entire body started to shimmer.

The shocked look on his face told Prescott that she wasn't imagining the effect. His entire body really was shimmering, as if she were looking at him through a layer of water and someone was stirring the water up.

Then he was gone.

No noise.

No pop.

Nothing.

Gone.

One moment he was there and the next moment he wasn't.

Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch "Folle?" she said, starting toward his last position out of instinct.

He was gone.

She stopped, holding on to the back of her chair.

Maybe her mind was gone as well. The guilt and stress of the last few weeks would have driven anyone insane. Why would she think she'd be any different?

"Folle?" she called out once more, only to have her voice echo through the empty chamber. Was this what happened when people died? Did the billions of people who were alive when the waves hit remain in place for a few moments, a few days, and then shimmer into nothingness?

Or had she imagined him in the first place?

Maybe he hadn't come at all.

"You're starting to lose it," she said to the emptiness. "Hang in there just a little longer."

Long enough to find him. He had to be on the station somewhere. And if he wasn't, well, then maybe she would have to examine his disappearance as a death.

Another death caused by the experiment.

She gripped her chair, about to push herself toward the door, when the station started to rumble and shake.

Several chunks of steel fell from the ceiling.

Dust floated around her. The emergency lights flickered.

And she knew she was going to die.

She swung around into her chair and held on. Every since she had followed Folle's advice, her survival instincts had kicked in. She didn't want to die.

THE RINGS OF TAUTEE Not anymore.

Even though she really didn't deserve to live.

Then the rumbling stopped and the dust began to settle again, coating her and everything in the room with another fine layer of gray.

In front of her the blank screens taunted her, laughed at her, told her by their very emptiness that she wasn't dead. Yet.

Inside, she was still shaking. Folle's disappearance terrified her more than she wanted to admit.

She had spent the last five years with him on this research facility. They had been together most of that time.

He was helping her through this, and she had thought they would die together.

She brushed a strand of hair out of her face with her wrist lamp, its plastic cool against her forehead, and forced herself to take a deep breath. She didn't know he was dead yet. She had to search first.

She was a scientist. Scientists waited for evidence.

She hadn't touched him when he was here the last time.

She had been working. She had been under a lot of strain. People who were under stress imagined things.

Like that odd feeling all over her body, as if something very small were breathing on her skin.

All of her skin.

She brought her arm down, and stared at it. It was composed of multicolored light. And it was shimmering.

She opened her mouth to call for help when[*thorn] [*thorngg'everything went black. 73 Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch Then almost instantly, she was in bright light. She blinked. The air was clear here, and it smelled fresh.

"Captain," said a strange voice with an even stranger accent. "I've got one more set to go."

She blinked again. Red and green spots danced in her vision.

"Excellent, Scotty. Do it quickly. I'd like to be out of here as soon as possible." The second voice had a tinny quality and a completely different accent, another one she had never heard before.

Slowly the glare eased and she could see. She was standing on a platform with several circles on it.

Directly across from her a man in a red uniform stood behind a console. He grinned at her, an infectious twinkle in his eyes. His skin was pale, and his hair was a shade of black she had never seen before.

Two other red-uniformed people stood beside an open door. Beyond it was a yellow corridor.

She swallowed and glanced at her arm[*thorn] surreptitiously, she hoped. It was normal, as dustcovered as it had been in the main control room. Then she saw movement beside her. On the platform, three other members of her staff stood.

She could have sworn they weren't there when she first arrived.

"And that's the last of them," the man said. He spoke loudly, as if he were addressing someone else. But the people at the door were staring straight ahead, like guards, and no one else appeared to be in the room.

THE RINGS OF TAUTEE Except Folle, standing in the shadows to her left.

"Folle," she said, breathing his name like a lifeline.

Scatty grinned, stepped forward, and held out his hand to help her down from the platform. "Welcome to the Starship Enterprise, was he said.

Chapter Eleven THE ENTERPRISE SWUNG out of the debris field left from the breakup of the fifth planet and its moon. Kirk let his grip on his chair relax slightly. Taking a starship twisting and weaving in through a thousand floating mountains, all moving in different directions at different speeds, was not his idea of excitement.

However, he couldn't contain his elation.

They had rescued the survivors. Scotty had pulled them from their asteroid tomb, and they would be able to go on with their lives.

Very different lives from the ones they had before, but lives just the same.

Still, he couldn't let the elation overtake him. The Enterprise wasn't out of this mess yet.

The slowly forming rings surrounding the Tautee

THE RINGS OF TAUTEE sun stretched out on the viewscreen. Kirk felt like he was staring out over the top of a desert wasteland. Such devastation, and it had happened so quickly.

"Take us back to the Farragut's position, Mister Sulu. As quickly as you safely can."

"Aye, sir." The strain of manually maneuvering around the huge asteroids had formed tiny exhaustion lines around Sulu's eyes. Still, his concentration never seemed to waver. At moments like this Kirk was very proud of his crew.

"Both Klingon vessels are still following us," Chekov said, almost sneering in disgust.

"Let them," Kirk said. The Klingon shadows annoyed him, too. "As long as they stay out of the way."

"Captain?" Spock said. He had an odd note in his voice.

Kirk glanced at him. Spock never showed elation[*thorngg'he rarely showed any emotion at all[*thorngg'b Kirk had learned to read the subtle nuances in Spock's inflections.

Kirk didn't like the sound of this one.

He swiveled his ch air to make sure he could see his science officer clearly. For a moment he almost thought he saw a troubled expression on Spock's face, then dismissed the idea. Spock looked as impassive as always.

"I have been scanning a few of the larger asteroids in the rings created after the breakup of the four inhabited planets."

"Looking for survivors," Kirk said, feeling an odd fluttering sensation in his stomach. He wanted 77 Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch to find more survivors, wanted the destruction to be less serious than it seemed.

But he also knew that the Enterprise and the Farragut had serious limitations in the rescue effort, and if more survivors were out there, they would need to be pulled off those asteroids immediately.

"I have found six other possible pockets of survivors," Spock said. "The survivors would seem to be in underground bunkers on larger asteroids. Based on these observations, I believe there may be as many as a dozen more bunkers and cavities filled with survivors among the asteroids."

A dozen more. They had rescued almost one hundred people off this one. The Enterprise barely had room for them.

Kirk pushed himself out of his chair, and hurried toward the science station. He leaned over the console, but saw no numbers. As usual, Spock had done the calculations in his head.

"Are you sure?" Kirk asked.

Spock's long face suddenly seemed even longer. He raised one eyebrow as if he couldn't believe that the captain had questioned him.

"Absolutely, Captain," Spock said.

"But at these distances, Mister Spock, how can you get accurate readings?" Chekov asked the question from his post near the screen.

Uhura was watching them.

Sulu had his head cocked, so that he could keep an eye on his work while monitoring the conversation.

THE RINGS OF TAUTEE They all understood the risks behind finding new survivors.

"At these distances," Spock said, in his slow, pedantic, I-cannot-believe-anyone-would-ask-thisquestion voice, "and with these subspace disturbances, I cannot get actual readings of humanoid forms9" "Oh," Kirk said.

Spock glanced around, and when no one else said a word, he continued. "However, I have searched the asteroids for such places as the bunker we just found, places that would hold atmosphere, and would sustain life since the planets' breakup. We must also calculate the incalculable factors as well.

We found a moon base. I am looking at the planets only. We must assume there are other moon bases, and perhaps even a spaceship or two which survived unscathed. We[*thorn]" "How many survivors?" Kirk asked.

He had grown tired of the explanation. He wanted to know what was before him. He wanted to know what decisions he faced next.

"I cannot give you a precise figure," Spock said.

Kirk groaned.

Spock pressed on. "There are too many varia-bles. But the survivors of this incident may number in the thousands, possibly more."

"The thousands, possibly more." Kirk said, repeating Spock's words, not believing his ears.

He took a step backward. His stomach ached, and his mind swirled.

"Thousands?"

Dean Wesiey Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch "Yes, Captain," Spock said. "Thousands."

Kirk staggered to his chair, and sat down. Between the Farragut and the Enterprise, they might be able to rescue five hundred.

But thousands were not possible without help.

A lot of help.

"Captain," Spock said. "Time is of the essence. With every subspace wave, the threat to these survivors grows."

"I know, Spock." Kirk took a deep breath. The main screen displayed the Farragut and four Klingon cruisers. Even if the Klingons deigned to help them, there wouldn't be enough room on the ships for thousands of survivors. The Federation had to send more ships.

But he didn't know if they would.

The Prime Directive. Admiral Hoffman's warning came back clearly to his mind.

Rescuing a few hundred survivors of a subwarp culture was one thing, but rescuing thousands and thousands would, through an odd twist of fate, violate the Prime Directive.

The Prime Directive stated that cultures had to live without interference from more advanced peoples.

That allowed the cultures to develop at their own pace. Part of that development for many cultures, including Earth's, meant flirting with their own destruction. Famine, flood, and war threatened each culture at various times. It was natural.

The Federation could save the remaining hundred or so of a race because the culture was effectively dead.

But to beam up thousands meant 80 THE RINGS OF TAUTEE that this pre-warp culture would continue and suddenly learn about the existence of starships and warp drive and humans and Vulcans and Klingons.

Saving thousands meant violating the Prime Directive.

It meant a direct involvement in lives that should have no involvement at all.

The Federation had discovered the hard way that it was better to let the race suffer through its own natural existence[*thorngg'whatever that might be[*thorngg'than to interfere.

But in this case, the "natural existence" meant certain death for thousands.

He couldn't let thousands die.

But he didn't really have a choice. His orders were that he had to.

Chapter Twelve BRUISES, CUTS, BROKEN BONES.

And filth.

McCoy hadn't seen that much filth since he went back in time to old Earth. Although these people couldn't be blamed for the dirt. They had lived for weeks in a crisis situation.

McCoy was working in the cargo decks. The hundred survivors fit better in here than they did in sickbay. Security was carrying the worst of the wounded[*thorngg'^th with shattered limbs, gangrenous infections[*thorn)'ffsickbay, where Nurse Chapel would sedate them until McCoy could get there.