Worlds in Collision (49 page)

“But since Dr. Richter could just as easily reevaluate someone else's rating assignation from the Richter Institute offices on Mars, it appears that there is indeed a time constraint in operation. And the most logical time constraint is the threat of hostilities on Talin IV.”

“Just a minute,” Kirk suddenly said. “Remember what Carolyn—Lieutenant Palamas—was saying a few days ago? About how some of the crew were hoping that this might turn into a first contact mission?”

McCoy grinned. “Yes, I remember
Carolyn
mentioning that.”

“Suppose the FCO is also thinking along those lines?”

“That would be most improper, Captain. According to the Richter rating of Talin IV—”

“But that's just it, Spock! That original rating which said that the Talin are still several decades from being contacted by the Federation is apparently under review. For a civilization that is this far along, a change in its Richter rating could open the door to a Federation first contact message.”

Spock shook his head, unconvinced. “I will admit that I understand why the idea of preventing a world war is appealing, but the technological-threshold boundaries that would allow the Federation to open communication channels to the Talin are stringent and the Talin have not achieved them.”

“But what if they're
about
to, Spock?”

Spock eyed Kirk thoughtfully. “I take it you mean: What if the Talin are about to exceed the contact thresholds within the immediate future, perhaps over the next few months, instead of over the next few decades?”

“Exactly.” Kirk's speech became more rapid as he realized he had found the explanation for Richter's presence and all the other peculiar conditions surrounding the mission to Talin. “Think of the blackout conditions. It's completely standard procedures not to use deflectors when entering an uncontacted system in which radio-astronomy technology exists. But how often have we been told to also shut down intrusive sensors and subspace communications other than tightbeam?”

Spock answered instantly. “Except under battle-ready conditions, never in my tour of duty under Captain Pike or yourself.”

“And how often have we been ordered not to use transporters within line of sight of an uncontacted planet?”

Spock took a few moments to think about that. “I am not aware of any ship in Starfleet ever receiving similar orders except, again, under battle-ready conditions.”

“So what does that tell us?” Kirk asked, already knowing the answer.

So did McCoy. “That along with the technology to detect ordinary radiation signals in the electromagnetic spectrum, the Talin have the ability to detect subspace signals.”

“Impossible,” Spock said. “There is absolutely no indication in any of the technological briefs I have read that the Talin have progressed to the point of building transtators, let alone applying the multidimensional mathematics which describe their function. And without transtator technology, the subspace spectrum of energies we use in faster-than-light communications,
and
sensing,
and
matter transmission, is unequivocally impossible.”

For a few seconds, the only sound in the shuttle was the soft hum of the impulse engine running at less than two percent of its rated output. “Impossible or not, Spock, I submit that in light of the unprecedented blackout conditions and Alonzo Richter's presence, that somewhere on Talin IV right now is a device that is capable of detecting subspace frequencies. It might be the first of its kind. It might be a single crude transtator the size of this shuttle, but it's down there. It's the only logical explanation.”

Spock looked uncomfortable. “It is indeed logical, Captain, but it also remains impossible.”

“Is there anything worse than a stubborn Vulcan,” McCoy said to the shuttle's roof.

“Several things, Doctor, including a physician who—”

But Kirk held his hand out. “Really, Spock. What other explanation could there be?”

“I cannot think of one at the moment, but my inability to suggest a second reason in no way implies that no other exists.”

“But if my conclusion is correct,” Kirk said, “and there is a working transtator-based receiver somewhere down on that planet, then you know what that means, don't you?”

Spock nodded his head, admitting the inevitability of Kirk's argument, if not its accuracy. “If such a device exists, then it is only a matter of days before the Talin will use it to detect stray subspace transmissions which, by their regularity and coding, will be easily identified as components of a vast interstellar communications network.”

“And…?” Kirk prodded.

Spock's words were a slight rephrasing of the preamble to the charter of the First Contact Office, as if he did not wish to take personal responsibility for adding more weight to Kirk's argument. “And, since the Talin will then become aware of the existence of an interstellar community of planets because of the results of their own efforts without extraplanetary interference, then according to the conditions set out in the Prime Directive, the initial first contact technological threshold will have been passed and Starfleet, through the First Contact Office, will be empowered to transmit to the Talin a message of greeting, and so begin an official, open, and nondirective dialogue between that planet and the Federation.”

Kirk sat back with a look of satisfaction. “And that could all happen within the next few days.”

Spock's expression did not change. “As could the Talin's self-destruction as a race.”

Before Kirk could respond, the navigation computer sounded the landing-alert chime and Kirk took over the controls of the
John Burke.

The time for talk is past,
he thought,
and now it's time to test the two competing theories—Spock's and mine.
Surprisingly, he found that for all he liked the challenge of competition and the thrill of winning, Spock was the only being to whom he never minded losing.

Thus, as Kirk brought the shuttle down toward the FCO outpost, he knew that he was in a no-lose scenario, since whatever they found out next would bring victory to either Spock or himself. He smiled to himself at the controls. It was a rare and not unwelcome feeling.

As the landing-pad acquisition signal flashed, Kirk expertly guided the shuttle directly at a jagged outcropping of heavily shadowed lunar rock and, ignoring McCoy's sudden surprised protest, he flew straight into it.

“I hate holograms,” McCoy groused as the
John Burke
settled gently to the landing pad. “They're getting too damn real. Whatever happened to the days when you could see them flicker from the corner of your eye?”

Spock stood up in the now motionless shuttle and began to unstow the two carry cases of computer files that he had brought for the FCO's databanks. The communications blackout made extensive subspace downloading of data impossible. “Dr. McCoy, if the holographic projection of a mountain wall did exhibit a detectable flicker, then it would serve no useful purpose as a camouflage technique to hide the outpost's presence.”

“I didn't say I didn't understand why it was there, Spock. I simply said I don't like them.” McCoy squeezed past Spock in the narrow aisle between the shuttle's two rows of seats to gather together his medical supplies. As standard procedure, he would be making medical checks of as many outpost personnel as time allowed and, because he could not have any required supplies beamed down on demand, he had been forced to bring a broad general assortment and hope for the best.

Kirk watched through the shuttle's forward viewports as the
Galileo
under Sulu's skilled guidance silently glided through the holographic mountain wall to join the first shuttle on the pad. As soon as the craft had come to rest, Kirk saw two large pressure doors begin to slide together. The outpost's landing pad chamber was just slightly larger than the
Enterprise'
s hangar bay.

Within seconds of the towering metal doors sealing, Kirk heard the whistle of air outside as the chamber was pressurized. At the same time, now that all transmissions would be kept safely within the bounds of the lunar mountain, the communications speaker came to life. “Full atmosphere will be achieved in twenty-two seconds. Stand by.” It was a woman's voice, not Alonzo Richter's.

Kirk stood up and stretched. “Not the most cordial greeting we've ever received.”

McCoy shrugged. “If your guess about what's going on is right, then I wouldn't be surprised if all personnel were standing on their heads trying to—” McCoy broke off and stared at Spock. “Don't say it.”

“What, Doctor?” Spock asked innocently.

Before McCoy could say anything more, the pressure equalization light came on above the shuttle's door.

“Time to go, gentlemen,” Kirk said. He reached out to the shuttle's control board and slowly turned down the artificial gravity field until all he felt was the moon's point two natural field, slightly more powerful than that of the Earth's moon. McCoy moaned as Kirk felt his own stomach rise into the new, lighter field. Then he popped the shuttle's door.

As Kirk stepped out of the
John Burke,
Sulu, Chekov, Uhura, and Palamas were leaving the
Galileo.
Like Spock and McCoy, each carried one or two cases containing supplies or microtapes which they might or might not need over the next few hours. Kirk was suddenly conscious of his empty hands and even though he knew Uhura had no trouble handling them in the low gravity, he took one of her equipment diagnostics packs. It was not the time to offer to help carry Palamas's gear again, after that awkwardness in the corridor following her first A & A presentation.

As the landing party waited for an FCO official to greet them and direct them to wherever their briefings would begin, Sulu looked around the landing bay chamber appreciatively. Except for the main pressure door seals and the personnel and supply airlocks leading into the outpost itself, the chamber's walls were bare black rock. Lighting rings on an exposed current conduit provided a soft, shadow-less illumination. “How did they manage to build an outpost this big without the Talin knowing about it?”

Surprisingly, Palamas beat Spock to the answer. “Talin visual astronomy is limited to ground-based optical instruments. They can't resolve any detail here much smaller than about a half kilometer.”

“And unlike the Earth's moon,” Spock added, “this body rotates so that during each cycle, the outpost is out of view from the planet for approximately thirteen days. Usually, most traffic to and from the outpost is scheduled during those periods.”

McCoy was intrigued by Spock's statement. “Then the fact that we've been brought in during the outpost's exposed cycle could be another indication of the time pressure they're under.”

Kirk nodded. Palamas looked puzzled. But before she could ask what McCoy had meant, Sulu whistled and began walking over to another section of the chamber.

“Now that's what I call ‘traffic,' ” the helmsman said enthusiastically.

Five
Wraith
-class atmospheric shuttles were parked against the chamber's far wall. Kirk had seen spec reports on similar vehicles, but so far the
Enterprise
had never carried one. Each was a stubby winged vehicle, smoothly rounded as if partially melted, which could carry about half the cargo and crew of the
Enterprise'
s blocky Mark 12s. The finely ribbed, spaceblack skin of the craft made them virtually undetectable to anything less than advanced mass sensing technology. But it was the unique dual propulsion systems of the Wraith which gave it its reputation of being one of the most difficult—and exhilarating—atmospheric flying machines ever built.

“Like it?” a voice asked from nowhere as the rest of the landing party joined Sulu in admiring the Wraiths.

Kirk turned to see a young, red-haired woman in a pilot's flightsuit approaching. Her eyes went to the stripes on Kirk's sleeves. “You must be Captain Kirk. I'm Carole Mallett, manager of sampling operations.” Her warm smile was an unexpected surprise given the type of reception Kirk had anticipated.

Kirk automatically looked for the rank markings on Mallett's uniform before reminding himself that Starfleet ran the FCO as a completely independent operation, without ranks, answerable directly to the Admiralty and the Council. He shook her hand and introduced her to the rest of his party.

“Do you fly one of these?” Sulu asked, running his hand along the rough-finished leading edge of one of the Wraith's wings.

“I wouldn't exactly call it flying,” Mallett said. “When the anti-gravity drive is engaged, it's more like choreographing a series of freefalls onto a trampoline.”

“I've heard they're pretty hard to handle.”

“Understatement of the millennium,” Mallett said. “If it weren't for the FCO's unique requirements for covert sampling craft, I don't think there'd be any reason to build them at all.”

“What's so special about them?” McCoy asked.

Mallett led the doctor to the tail of the vehicle. There were no propulsion exhaust vents, just impulse baffles. “In space, not much. We run on a small impulse unit that can give us point-oh-oh-one cee, which is good enough to get us to Talin in about half an hour. But once we hit the outer atmosphere, we switch to antigrav. The advantage is that there's no engine noise, no exhaust trail, no radiation signature, no chemical emissions. It's just the thing for exploration and sampling runs where the Prime Directive is in force and where there's a moderately high level of native technology.”

“And what are the disadvantages?” McCoy asked, hearing the pilot build up to them.

“If you've ever felt momentum lag effects in your starship during violent maneuvers, then you know how painfully sluggish artificial gee fields are. When you fly one of these things, you have to think about five seconds into the future. Basically, what you're doing is gliding through a partially controlled fall, then hitting the antigrav to bounce back up before you hit the ground. And if you want to land, you have to time the antigrav reaction perfectly, otherwise you smash in at full speed or rebound like a bouncing ball. It's terrible, trust me.”

“That doesn't sound terrible,” Sulu said earnestly. “That sounds exciting.”

Mallett smiled at Sulu and shook her head. “They all say that. Until they fly them. If you've got time, we have a Wraith simulator you can try out. If you bring your own white bags.”

Sulu beamed and looked at Kirk. Kirk shrugged. For once, it wasn't up to the captain. From the moment the
Enterprise
had entered orbit, her time and crew belonged to the FCO.

“Ms. Mallett,” Kirk said, “I think the first order of business will be to meet with Dr. Richter and begin finalizing your mission requirements. It is our estimate that you are operating under a severe time constraint.”

Mallett nodded, abruptly appearing inexplicably upset. “They're waiting for you in the ready room off the main monitoring lab. I, uh, I'll have to let the director fill you in, past what you've already been told in the formal reports.”

“And is the situation as bad as we've been led to believe?” Lieutenant Palamas asked.

“No matter what you've been told,” Mallett said sadly, “it's worse. Far, far worse.”

 

The main monitoring lab was at the heart of the FCO outpost, five levels down from the landing chamber. To Kirk, it resembled a starship's bridge enlarged ten times—a circular layout, ringed by at least fifty subsystem stations, with a central command desk instead of a conn. Five technicians, outfitted with audio inputs, sat at the command desk constantly adjusting controls while observing a master viewscreen twice as tall and four times as wide as the bridge screen on the
Enterprise.
But instead of showing a single scene, the screen presented well over a hundred identically small, rectangular displays along with ten expanded ones. Kirk couldn't make out what was being shown on most of the displays, but he did recognize adult Talin on some of the large ones. One display showed a close-up of a Talin's face and, in the background drone of noise in the monitoring lab, Kirk heard a whispery and unfamiliar alien language that appeared to be in synch with the Talin's mouth movements.

“What's all that?” Kirk asked. The overall effect was overwhelming. There was far more information than could be assimilated at once.

Beside him, Mallett smiled. “How's your knowledge of old technology? That's what they used to call television.”

“Oh, of course,” Kirk said. He had read about it, even seen it on Planet 892-IV. “Two-dimensional image transmission by…analog signals of electromagnetic energy.”

“That's the technical end of it,” Mallett said. “But just like late-twentieth-century Earth, there's an incredible cultural component to it as well, which is still surprising considering that there is almost no capability for interaction.”

Kirk blinked. “You mean the Talin just
watch
those transmissions without the ability to alter them as they proceed?”

Mallett nodded.

Kirk wanted to ask why, but he had seen too many alien customs during his years of explorations to be truly surprised by any culture's odd habits.

Mallett continued. “We have camouflaged electromagnetic reception antennae over three two-hundred-square-kilometer areas of this moon so that one is always pointing at Talin IV. It lets us pick up about three hundred of these television public transmission channels, and more than five thousand audio-only channels—what used to be called radio, if you've heard of it”—Kirk nodded to answer her question—“as well as a few hundred thousand private communication channels every day,” she concluded.

Uhura's eyes flashed with interest. “Every day? Can you process all those signals in realtime?”

Mallett could see a kindred spirit in the communications officer. “The staff here can personally handle less than one percent of all data channels, but our monitoring equipment tracks everything, checking for key words, phrases, and images, then flags transmissions we should analyze in more detail.”

“Listens to everything,” Uhura said, staring at the hundreds of flickering images on the main screen. “What systems are you using? What protocols? Are you on full duotronics?”

Mallett smiled. “I'll have to get you together with Mario. He runs the entire communications system here and he can give you all the technical specs.”

As Mallett and Uhura continued their discussion of the outpost's signal-intercept capabilities, Kirk looked at each system station in turn, testing himself to identify each one's function from the layout of its controls and the type of data displays it had. He was surprised at the number of military monitors he saw. Then he was aware of Spock at his side.

“Captain, I believe you should look at the third large display from the right on the main screen.”

Kirk turned to it, along with everyone else in the landing party, and Mallett.

“Is that a pickup from a security sensor in the outpost?” Kirk asked as he stared at the image on the screen, not wanting to believe what the alternative was.

“No,” Mallett said, and all excitement had vanished from her voice. “That is what is called a news broadcast. It's like a one-way update channel.”

It was then that Kirk understood the reason for the tension in his dealings with this outpost, and the reason for the unprecedented communications blackout—and they weren't the reasons he had deduced. There on the screen, from a Talin news transmission, was a blurry but all-too-recognizable image of what was unquestionably a Federation
Wraith
-class atmospheric shuttle in flight. It could only mean that the FCO itself was on the brink of compromising the Prime Directive, however inadvertently.