STAR TREK: TOS - Prime Directive Read online

  POCKET BOOKS

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  The plot and background details of Prime Directive are solely the authors’ interpretation of the universe of STAR TREK® and vary in some respects from the universe as created by Gene Roddenberry.

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 1990 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

  STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of Paramount Pictures.

  This book is published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc., under exclusive license from Paramount Pictures.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN: 0-671-70772-8

  First Pocket Books hardcover printing September 1990

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  FOR PEGGY

  For our second home in New York City

  and for being there when inspiration struck.

  L.L. & P.

  Contents

  HISTORIAN’S NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  Part One

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  Part Two

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  Part Three

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  Part Four

  ONE

  TWO

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the e-Book

  HISTORIAN’S NOTE

  The events of this book take place in the final year of the Enterprise’s original five-year mission.

  space is infinite

  without ending

  all within it

  just beginning

  VULCAN CHILD’S KOAN

  traditional

  PROLOGUE

  LE REVE D’ETOILES

  Extract from A Historical Analysis of the Five-Year Missions Admiral Glynis Kestell Tabor, Stellar Institute Press, Paris, Earth

  According to the records as they existed at that time, of the original twelve Constitution-class starships that had embarked on Starfleet’s visionary program of five-year missions, five had already been lost in the service of the United Federation of Planets: the USS Constellation as the last casualty of an ancient war, the Intrepid in the Gamma 7A system, the Excalibur in war-game maneuvers, the Defiant in the Tholian Annex, and the Enterprise during the incident at Talin IV.

  No one denied that these losses had been heavy, in lives and material, but among the dozens of planning commissions that set the Federation’s long-term goals and policies, there was no serious doubt that the five-year missions would continue with new ships and new crews. Because, despite the high cost of such epic exploration and expansion, the returns these activities brought to the Federation were always greater.

  In a period of only four standard years, the records showed that thousands of strange new worlds had been explored, hundreds of new civilizations had been discovered, and the [2] Federation’s boundaries had grown to encompass a volume of space nearly five times that which had been charted as of stardate 00.1. Given these results, ways could always be found to commission new starships, and as for the new crews those ships would require, they were the secret of the Federation’s unprecedented strength.

  It was the same secret shared by all great political movements in the histories of a thousand worlds. The Federation was founded not by force, nor by expediency, nor in response to an outside threat. It was founded on a dream—a dream of greater goals and greater good, of common purpose and cooperation, but beyond all else, it was a dream to know more, a dream to explore to the farthest limits and then go beyond.

  They called it le rêve d’étoiles—the dream of stars.

  Like all profound ideas, this dream of stars was irresistible, and the Federation’s planners were aware of its attraction. They recognized its presence in the more than twelve thousand applications Starfleet received for each Academy opening. They felt its pull within themselves.

  But dreams alone were not enough to sustain the Federation’s goals, and fortunately the planners also understood what else was needed and how to obtain it. They understood that throughout the worlds of the Federation there were beings in whom the dream burned brightest. Invariably, all of these individuals had known instantly where their destinies lay from the moment they had first looked up to the lights of the night sky. In every language in all the worlds, the words were always the same: the dream of stars. Not traveling to them, not stopping at them, but moving among them, ever outward, always farther, no end to space or to their quest. Or to the dream.

  At Starfleet Academy, the planners were careful to set in place the challenges and the system that would guide the best of those called by the dream to the only position that they could hold, the position to which each had been born.

  Starship captain.

  There could be no greater embodiment of the dream, and it [3] was upon this foundation that the Federation was ultimately based and its future assured.

  The system was not perfect. At the time of the Talin IV tragedy, the planners knew that for every Robert April or Christopher Pike the Academy produced, there would be a Ron Tracey or a James T. Kirk. But that was to be expected when dealing with exceptional beings whose very nature put them at odds with most definitions of what was deemed predictable or normal behavior. On the whole, the planners felt the system worked, and reason and logic—much to the Vulcans’ chagrin—had nothing to do with it.

  So the Federation’s planners set their course for the future, building new ships, setting new missions, knowing that there would be no end to those who would volunteer to take part, because the dream of stars, once acknowledged, could never be denied.

  But at that time, in the aftermath of Talin IV, what the planners did not yet know was that once that dream had been experienced, neither could it ever be willingly surrendered.

  In accordance with the Federation’s goals for the gathering of knowledge, it was a lesson the planners were eventually due to learn, and their system had already created the man who would teach it to them.

  Once and for all.

  Part One

  AFTERMATH

  ONE

  Humans, Glissa thought suddenly, as she caught the first unmistakable scent of their approach. You can’t live with them and you can’t live without them, but by Kera and Phinda, you can certainly smell them.

  The short Tellarite shift boss looked away from the viewscreen blueprint she studied, then narrowed her deepset, solid black eyes to squint into the distance. All around her, she felt the thrumming of the thin air that passed for an atmosphere within the hollowed-out
S-type asteroid. It was the pulse of the machines and fellow workers remaking its interior into a living world, a home for thousands. For Glissa, there was excitement in this job of world making, and fulfillment. Which is why the unexpected scent of humans was so unsettling. With them around, she feared the excitement would soon give way to drudgery.

  The Tellarite twitched her broad, porcine nose as she tasted the circulating breeze, seeking more details of the human presence she had detected. In the soft, seasonless mists of her home world, natural selection had not been inspired to evolve keen eyesight. As an adult of her species, Glissa had long since lost the ability to see past two meters with any clarity. But she [8] could hear with an acuity that surpassed most Vulcans, and could decipher scents and airborne pheromones at a speed and rate of accuracy to challenge all but the most sensitive tricorder.

  It was those other fine senses that now confirmed for her what she had feared—the telltale odor of the dreadfully omnivorous humans came to her from what could only be her second-shift crew of rockriggers. Even Glissa’s near-useless eyes could make out the brilliant yellow streak of the safety cable that linked the blurry figures. The cable traced a sinuous route around the wide yellow warning bands that marked the overlaps of the artificial gravity fields on the asteroid’s inner surface. Spinning the rock to produce centripetal pseudo-gravity would make working inside the asteroid much easier, but until the final bracing supports were in place, the engineers didn’t want to subject the shell to the additional strain. So, in the interim, the asteroid’s outer surface was studded with portable artificial-gravity generators, creating both amplified and null-gravity zones within the rock. As if that crazy-quilt arrangement didn’t produce enough strain on its own.

  Glissa sighed and the sound she made in her barrel chest was deep and guttural—like the prelude to a particularly invigorating string of invective. But there was no such joy behind her sigh. She hadn’t realized that the first shift was already over, let alone that it was time for the second to begin. And the lake-support pylons for the rock’s eventual basin of freshwater supply were still not in place. They hadn’t even appeared on the massive cargo-transporter platform waiting empty at the edge of the work site. At the rate her division was falling behind schedule, Glissa calculated she was going to have to endure at least another tenday of overtime before she had the slightest chance of taking a few shifts off to enjoy a good wallow in the communal baths on the rec station. And from the smell of things, it was definitely going to be another tenday of working with humans.

  Of course, Glissa had nothing against humans personally, but not being from one of Miracht’s ambassadorial tribes, she found it extremely unsettling to work with them. Who wouldn’t [9] have difficulty working with beings who could never seem to tell the obvious differences between time-honored constructive insults and improper personal attacks on their parentage, and whose lack of a sense of humor was second only to the Vulcans? Still, it took all kinds to make the worlds go round and, to be fair, she knew of few Tellarites who had the appetite to administer the monstrous bureaucracies that kept the Federation functioning.

  She sighed again and rippled the sensitive underpad nodes of her hoof against the viewscreen’s control panel—one of dozens of similar viewscreens that were mounted on light poles ringing the work site. After erasing the blueprint from the two-meter-by-one-meter display, she sniffed the air more slowly to determine which particular humans she had been cursed with this time.

  The twelve approaching rockriggers were still too far away for Glissa to recognize any features other than their individual yellow safety harnesses and helmets, but she could identify most of them by their scents. Seven, thank the Moons, were Tellarites themselves—client workers from the Quaker commune that had hired Interworld Construction to reform this rock into a Lagrange colony. At least half the workforce on this project were client workers providing the commune with substantial labor savings.

  But of the other five workers approaching, Glissa scented, all were human, and that was unfortunate because rockrigging and humans were never a happy combination.

  The task of asteroid reformation was one of the few remaining hazardous occupations within the Federation that legally could not be done more efficiently or less expensively by drone machines. If the Council ever decided to relax the Federation’s prohibitions on slavery to allow true synthetic consciousnesses to control robots, then perhaps the industry itself would be transformed. But until that unlikely day, rockrigging would remain the exclusive province of two basic types of laborers: dedicated client workers who welcomed the chance to literally carve out a world with their own bare hooves, and the hardcases [10] who signed on with Interworld because they had exhausted all other options.

  As far as Glissa was concerned, the hardcase humans who worked for Interworld—some fugitive, all desperate—might just as well be Klingons for all the honor and diligence they exhibited. But the making of worlds was honorable work for a Tellarite, and no one had said it would ever be easy. So humans, with their unique and unfathomable mix of Vulcan logic and Andorian passion, were officially tolerated by Interworld, even if it meant that Glissa and the other shift bosses did have to watch their language.

  As Glissa turned back to the viewscreen to call up current work assignments and detailed plans for the second shift, the shift-change alarm sounded from speakers in the towering lightpoles that encircled the five-hundred-meter-wide work site. She looked up to squint at the wall of the rock four kilometers over her head, and could just make out the smeared constellations of the lightpoles surrounding the work sites on the airless half of the rock’s interior as they flickered to signal shift change for those workers in environmental suits who could not use sound alarms.

  Puzzled, Glissa checked her chronometer and saw that the change signals were on time. But that meant the second shift crew was also arriving on time, and in all the years Glissa had spent with Interworld, one of the few things she had learned to count on was that hardcase humans were never on time. It was almost a religion with them.

  For a moment she was concerned at the break in tradition and order—few things were worse to a Tellarite than an unexplained mystery. She quickly retasted the air, but there was no denying the scent of humans in the approaching workers. She sniffed again, deeply, questioningly ... and then the answer came.

  Glissa raised her hoof to the unfocused form of the human who led the team and waved. “Sam?” she growled. “Sam Jameson?”

  The lead figure raised his much too long and scrawny arm to [11] return the wave and Glissa felt a sudden thrill of hope. If Sam Jameson had been promoted to work as her second-shift team leader then there was an excellent chance that Glissa’s division might make up for lost time. He had only been with the company for four tendays but had already proven himself to be a most remarkable being, human or otherwise.

  “I thought I smelled the foul stink of your furless human meat!” the Tellarite blared deafeningly as Sam finally came within range of her vision.

  “It’s a miracle you can smell anything through the stench of that slime-encrusted skrak pelt you call fur!” Sam shouted back.

  Glissa’s huge nostrils flared with pleasure. Here, at last, was the exception to the rule: a cultured human who truly understood the subtle nuances of Civil Conversation. She could almost feel the hot mud of the rec station oozing up around her as she anticipated the rewards of meeting her schedule.

  The Tellarite held out her hoof and Sam Jameson grasped it without hesitation, returning the proper ripple of greeting against Glissa’s underpad nodes as best as any human could, considering how the creatures were crippled by the ungainly and limited manipulatory organs they called fingers. If Glissa actually stopped to think about it, it was a wonder any human could pick up a tool let alone invent one. They might as well have arms that ended with seaweed fronds.

  As the second-shift crew gathered behind their team leader and began disengaging the safety cable from their harness
es, Glissa thought for a moment to come up with an appropriate statement of Civil words to convey her satisfaction that she would once again be working with Sam. She looked up at the human, nervously smoothed the fine golden fur of her beard, and hoped that her pronunciation would be correct.

  “Damn it, Sam, why the hall are they punishing me by making you work my shift?”

  Glissa could tell from the quick smile that crossed Sam’s face that she had got something wrong. Odd that Sam’s face was so easily read, though. The long, soft brown hair and thick beard [12] he wore certainly helped, making Sam look less like a dormant tree slug than most barefaced humans did, and much more like an intelligent being. Too bad about the puny down-turned nose though, and those human eyes, beady little brown dots ringed by white like those of a week-old Tellarite corpse ... they could make Glissa shudder if she stared at them too long.

  But Sam looked away to the iron wall beneath his feet and leaned forward, dropping his voice to a whisper low enough that only a Tellarite could hear him.

  “Hell, Glissa,” Sam said gently. “You meant to say ‘hell,’ not ‘hall.’ ”

  Glissa nodded thoughtfully, appreciative that Sam had kept this part of their conversation private. “Which one is the underworld and which is the corridor?”

  “Hell is the underworld. Humans don’t get too excited about corridors. At least, not in Civil insults.”

  Glissa decided she would have to start making some notes if she were to keep up with Sam. “But the ‘damn it’ ... ?”

  “Perfect,” Sam said, still whispering. “Proper place in the sentence, good intonation, very impressive. ...” But then he stepped back in midsentence, looked up from the ground, and raised his voice again for all to hear. “For a beerswilling, gutbellied warthog, that is.”