Worlds in Collision Page 16

  “No,” Nensi said, suddenly thoughtful, “but some of the commanders did point out that they were operating with less than full crews. Let me check to see if there’s a pattern among the crew members left behind.” He got up and went to the kitchen area, where a private wall com hung.

  “And ask about the reasons why the crew was left behind,” Kirk called after him.

  “Vulcans, Vulcans. Starfleet was worried that a Vulcan might have been involved in a threatened act of assassination. But why just some Vulcans? Why not all?”

  “What reason did they give when Spock was arrested?” Romaine asked.

  “Suspicion of involvement in the dilithium burnout,” Scott answered. “A crock if I ever heard one.”

  “And what’s going to happen to him?” Romaine continued.

  “He’ll be held until he can be turned over to appropriate Starfleet authorities,” Kirk said, resuming his pacing.

  “What sort of appropriate Starfleet authorities?” Romaine pressed on.

  Kirk answered without considering where the woman was going with her questions. “Starbase, I suppose,” he said.

  “Prime could be a Starbase,” Romaine said.

  Kirk stopped in midpace.

  “It’s a base,” Romaine explained. “And it is under Starfleet authority.”

  Kirk walked over to Romaine and held his hands out as if he planned to lift her by her ears and kiss her. Fortunately, he checked his enthusiasm.

  “And you’re the base commander,” he said. “Brilliant!”

  Scott looked confused.

  “The lass is…” He turned to Romaine beside him. “You’re the commander?”

  “It’s political,” she said to him. To the captain she added, “But only in a nonmilitary capacity.”

  “Spock isn’t Starfleet military personnel,” Kirk said, trying out his ideas as he voiced them. “Technically he’s scientific services and the alleged attempted-assassination victim was a nonmilitary scientist.” He turned to McCoy, eyes twinkling. “It sounds like a civil offense to me. Definitely nonmilitary and therefore within Mira’s jurisdiction. What do you think, Bones?”

  McCoy nodded. “Go for it, Jim. With any luck Commander Farl will be out on maneuvers and won’t be able to answer Wolfe’s frenzied inquiries. Which I’m sure she’ll make.”

  “Are you up to taking on the Starfleet bureaucracy?” Kirk asked Romaine.

  She pointed to the kitchen, where Nensi leaned over a counter, talking earnestly into a handset. “Taught by experts,” she said. “Bureaucracy is Uncle Sal’s middle name.”

  “Good,” Kirk said, “good.” He clapped his hands together, a decision made. He looked over to McCoy. “Well, Bones, you were right again. Out on the frontier, we’d go in with phasers blazing, but here we are, achieving victory by wrapping up the enemy with red tape. How’s that for doing things within the system?”

  “Achieving victory, Jim?” McCoy pulled himself out of the chair that had appeared ready to absorb him. “You’re talking as if we’ve already won.”

  “Believe me, Doctor, if I didn’t think we were going to win, we’d still be sitting around trying to come up with another good idea instead of getting set to beam back up and spring Spock.”

  Kirk flipped open his communicator and checked to see that Nensi was prepared for what was coming. The chief administrator replaced the handset on the wall com and headed back to the communal area. Kirk’s communicator chirped as it opened the beam back channel.

  “Kirk to Enterprise,” the captain announced. “Five to beam up, Mr. Kyle. These coordinates.”

  Kirk slipped the communicator back onto his belt. The five of them stood silently in the apartment, waiting for the transporter beam to lock on.

  After a few seconds of silence, McCoy reached out to touch Kirk’s arm. “This delay isn’t right, Jim.”

  “Aye,” Scotty said.

  Kirk reached back for his communicator again. He didn’t have to say anything. He knew from their expressions that both Scotty and McCoy saw the understanding, the agreement in his eyes.

  The transporter chime finally started just as Kirk was about to call back up, but its arrival did nothing to change his feeling that something had gone terribly wrong on board his ship.

  The corridor leading to the brig was lined with five of Wolfe’s starbase troopers and Kirk felt his rage expand exponentially with each additional trooper who appeared in Spock’s cell. Spock himself was nowhere to be seen, but Commodore Wolfe was. She was watching carefully as a technician explained something to her on the library reader on Spock’s desk. Kirk recognized the technician as Ensign Bregman, a trainee from Kyle’s department.

  “If you’ve let anything happen to Spock, Commodore, I’ll—”

  “Save the mutiny for your court-martial, Captain.” The tone Wolfe used to cut him off told Kirk her anger was no less than his own. “Your innocent science officer just escaped.”

  Kirk was completely taken off guard. He stepped to the side as Romaine, Nensi, Scott, and McCoy crowded into the cell behind him. Commander Farl leaned against the far wall as if he hoped no one would see him.

  “Escaped? How?” Kirk asked. He checked the security field frame around the doorway and saw it was intact.

  “Beamed himself down,” Wolfe said. “Hooked into the transporter controls from his library reader.” She glared at Kirk. “The one you were so anxious to give him.”

  “Now wait just a minute,” Scott said, pushing his way through the knot of people to get close to Wolfe. “I know every circuit on this ship and there’s no way the transporter can be controlled by a reader. I’d stake my reputation on it.”

  Wolfe laughed cynically. “You don’t have a reputation anymore, Mr. Engineer. None of you do. This whole ship should be fumigated, then opened to space.” She turned to the technician who had been pointing to the reader’s screen. “Again,” she ordered.

  “Um, as near as I can figure out,” Ensign Bregman began, “Mr. Spock didn’t actually control the transporter from the reader, but he did set up a snowball chain in the simulations program library.”

  “A snowball chain?” McCoy asked dubiously.

  “That’s where one small program runs a slightly larger one, which runs an even larger one, and so on until a huge complex program is up and running. You see, he must have called up transporter simulation programs from the education upgrade files. The reader won’t allow programming but does permit a user to store certain variables in the simulation files for playback of customized scenarios at a later time, so Mr. Spock set up all the coordinates he needed for a simulated transporter room to lock on to him here. See?” Bregman pointed to the screen again. “Here are the exact simulations he used with the coordinates of this cell still entered.”

  Scott, Wolfe, Kirk, and Romaine crowded together to peer at the small screen and the flowchart the technician drew on it. He showed how Spock had chained the transporter simulations with a wargame scenario that postulated that the hardwired communication channels within the ship had been severed by enemy fire. That was chained to a rescue simulation in which ship mechanism controls usually monitored and adjusted by direct connection were instead remotely controlled by extremely short-range subspace transmissions. That, in turn, was chained to a programming bypass simulation that had the ship’s computer damaged and capable only of carrying out direct requests. In this case, the direct requests were set up to be read from the transporter simulation.

  Five more subsystem wiring-and-repair simulations joined the chain until only one two-line piece of code remained at the top of the snowball’s path.

  “And what do those two lines of code do?” Kirk asked just as he heard Scotty exhale with a combination of surprise and what sounded like admiration.

  “It’s just a small software flag that warns the computer that everything that follows is a simulation.” The technician dropped his voice. “Mr. Spock overwrote it by storing some of his library files in the wrong memory
locations. The computer queried him but it accepted his priority override to allow him to commit the error.”

  “The same override that lets me run the engines at warp eight when the computer says we dinna hae the power,” Scott said, shaking his head.

  “So the computer operated all the controls on the real equipment and beamed him out,” Bregman said.

  “But it still doesn’t explain how he found another place to beam to,” Scott complained. “None of the ship’s simulations would hold the exact coordinates for beaming down to Memory Prime, and even Mr. Spock couldn’t calculate them without a locator beam.”

  “He didn’t have to,” Commander Farl said dryly from the side of the cell. “All he had to do was get within a few kilometerss of Prime on a low-path beam and our combat transporterss automatically pulled in hiss signal.” Farl sighed. “I have two unconsciouss trooperss by a transfer-point pad. The pad’ss log showss it received an incoming signal fifteen minutess ago. The same time as the Vulcan’ss unauthorized beam-down wass detected. He iss on Memory Prime.”

  Kirk was filled with conflicting emotions. Spock would not defy Starfleet authority so brazenly by escaping what even he had admitted was legal, if improper, incarceration. Whatever had prompted him to act so out of character had to be big. Disastrously big. But whatever else he did or had to do, Kirk did not want to give any information at all to Wolfe. For some reason she had turned her “temporary” command of the Enterprise into a vendetta.

  “Well,” Kirk said as he stepped back to leave the cell, “it’s a small facility and Chief Technician Romaine and Mr. Nensi know it well. I don’t think there’ll be any problem in our finding him.”

  “Just a minute,” Wolfe said, stopping him as he directed his entourage to the door. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  Kirk turned to face her. The cell was completely silent as the faceoff began. “I am going back to Memory Prime to locate my first officer,” he told her.

  “All off-duty personnel are restricted to this ship, Captain.”

  “I’m not off duty.”

  “You are now, Captain. You’re sure not commanding this ship any longer.”

  Kirk had had enough. “You cannot relieve me of command on my own ship, Commodore.”

  “Alpha emergency, Kirk. You’re under my orders for the duration.”

  “Without Starfleet confirmation of those orders,” Kirk recited, “it is my opinion that you might be endangering the health and safety of my crew, without proper authority.”

  Instantly both Wolfe and Kirk turned to McCoy.

  “I’m sure the ship’s medical officer might find that grounds for relieving you of your command,” Kirk continued.

  “This ship has no medical officer,” Wolfe countered. “Dr. McCoy, you are relieved of duty for suspicion of aiding in a prisoner’s escape. Next move’s yours, Captain. Want to see how many more it takes before you’re in here in place of your science officer?”

  Kirk knew enough to back off if it meant keeping his freedom. That could be the key to another confrontation, one that he could orchestrate and win. But not here, and not now.

  “All right, Commodore,” he said, holding his hands out as if to show he wasn’t armed. “For the duration.” He watched as she looked around the room once more, making sure all of her people met her eyes to acknowledge that she had squared off against the fabled James T. Kirk and had won.

  “Good boy,” she said icily. “Maybe Command will just accept a resignation and let you crawl off quietly.” Then she turned away and called to Farl. “Prepare to have the search parties fan out from the pad the Vulcan landed at,” she said. “You can have five troopers from my contingent to help with the operation.” Farl began whispering in an Andorian combat dialect into his battle helmet communicator.

  Kirk started backing out of the cell. He had to organize his response for when Spock was returned to the ship and they could plan their next move together. But he stopped, blood freezing in his veins when he heard Farl’s next question and the commodore’s response.

  “Disposition of the prisoner when he iss recaptured?” Farl asked.

  “There will be no prisoner, Commander Farl,” Wolfe stated plainly. “With who we’ve got down on Memory Prime, we can’t afford to take any more chances. At my order, when your troopers run the escaped prisoner to ground, I want your phasers set to force three.”

  She turned to stare directly into Kirk’s eyes.

  “To kill,” she said.

  Seventeen

  The Klingons loved to tell the story of al Fred ber’nhard Nob’l, the tera’ngan inventor who, as had happened so many times on so many worlds, once felt he had gone too far and had created the ultimate weapon.

  Faced with nightmares of a world ruined by the destructive forces he had called into being, Nob’l attempted to salve his conscience and bring forth the best in humans by using the profits from his inventions to award prizes in honor of the most outstanding achievements in science and peace. Of course, in typical tera’ngan fashion, as the Klingons were quick to point out, those profits were not set aside for that purpose until after the inventor’s death.

  As the long Terran years passed, Nob’l’s inventions served the warlords of Earth well. Despite his fears, other ultimate weapons came and went with predictable regularity—mustard gas, fusion bombs, particle curtains, and smart bacteria—until his devices lay beside the rocks and sharpened sticks in museums. In fact, and this invariably had the Klingons brushing the tears of laughter from their eyes no matter how many times they heard the story, the only real casualty of the great Terran wars fueled by Nob’l’s inventions over the century in which his prizes were awarded, were the prizes themselves. Three times they were suspended because of hostilities between nations. The third time, as Earth shuddered beneath the multiple onslaughts of its warriors Klingons admired most—k’Han and g’Reen—the suspended prizes were not resurrected, and lay buried amid the ashes of so much of the Earth that the Klingons considered foul and weak and better lost

  For the events a few light-years removed from Earth, the Klingons had a bit more respect. Two centuries before Nob’l lay awake in foolish terror over destroying his world with a few tonnes of C3H5(NO3)3, the warlord Zalar Mag’nees, ruler of her planet’s greatest city state, realized that the nature of combat in her world was changing and that ideas as well as strength and armaments must be brought to battle.

  Mag’nees established an elaborate educational system designed to attract the greatest intellects among her citizens to the problems of war. Those who contributed the best new work achieved the highest honor: a commission in the warlord’s personal corps of scientists.

  Under her rule, with the brilliant work of her honored scientists and engineers, the whole of the planet was soon united, or conquered, as the Klingons told it, under one ruler. Though the warlord’s commissions were discontinued after almost two centuries of global peace and their war-born heritage forgotten, the philosophy of subterfuge and protective concealment that had proved so useful in establishing the undisputed rule of Mag’nees, still pervaded all levels of her planet’s society. Thus, when electromagnetic communication systems were discovered,, it went without question that the signals would travel by wire instead of by atmospheric transmissions open to any unsuspected enemy’s receivers. Power plants were buried as a matter of course and fiberoptic transmission of all signals was enthusiastically adopted as soon as the technology became available. It was this in-born need for concealment that prevented tera’ngan scientists, in almost a century of scanning, from ever picking up the slightest datum that would indicate that a comparable, perhaps even related civilization was thriving in the Alpha Centauran system, fewer than five light-years distant.

  The Klingons bitterly regretted that circumstance of history. For when at last the first slower-than-light Earth ship arrived in the Centauran system, the tera’ngan humans were too tired of war, the centaur’ngan humans long unschooled. To the Klingons’
everlasting disappointment, in this one instance of first contact, unlike most others, peace was inevitable.

  In the decades that followed, as the two planets discovered all the suspicious similarities between them, cultural and scientific exchange programs burgeoned. Zeyafram Co’akran’s brilliant insights into warp theory were applied at the venerable Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Earth, and within seven years of the two planets’ first contact, the light barrier had fallen before their mutual onslaught. Plays and literature were easily translated and meaningful to the two races and—hinting at interference from another spacefaring race thousands of years earlier—interbreeding was simple and pleasurable to all concerned, requiring none of the heroic efforts that would later be needed by humans and Vulcans.

  More and more the two cultures grew together. Common goals were quickly decided and impressively established. The joint colonization of the second life-bearing world in the Centauran system was accomplished with goodwill and an almost unbelievable absence of territorial discord. Klingon psychologists who had studied that abnormal enterprise felt the experience was what had most influenced the incomprehensible optimism and peaceful nature of the Federation when it was first formed.

  As the tera’ngan and centaur’ngan association grew, both looked to their pasts and dusted off the legacy of Nob’l and Mag’nees. Freed of their military legacy, joined in the best wishes of two worlds, and expanded to include sciences unimagined at the time the awards were first created, the Nob’l and Z. Mag’nees Prizes became the first human competition to celebrate the achievements, scientific and cultural, of two different worlds, and drive them forward in peace.

  Upon its formation, the Federation Council eagerly accepted authority over the competition, opening it up to all members of all species. In an interplanetary association in which athletic competitions had ceased to have any meaning, except among those rare few who voluntarily chose to restrict themselves to absolutely identical advantages of gravity, genetics, and pharmaceutical enhancement, the Nob’l and Z. Mag’nees competition of the mind quickly came to stand for all the ideals for which the Federation strove. Calling on another ancient tradition, the prizes were awarded every four standard years. The winners, chosen through secret ballot by their peers who shared in the nomination for each prize, were among the most honored of Federation citizens. And true to the Federation’s long-term goals, pressure was mounting to offer the Klingons a chance to participate.