Worlds in Collision Read online

  The Klingons, not surprisingly, would have nothing to do with the Nob’l and Z. Mag’nees Prizes. The whole concept of the competition was alien and repugnant to them. The Klingons did have their own competitions for scientific achievement that, on first study, seemed somewhat similar to the Federation’s awards; each decade on Klinzhai, a great celebration was held for those workers who had won the coveted Emperor’s Decoration for Science in Aid of Destruction of the Enemy.

  The Klingons could easily understand the concept of honoring the winners, but what they could never comprehend was why, in the human competition, the losers were allowed to live.

  Eighteen

  Kirk smiled broadly as he walked down the corridor leading to the brig. McCoy accompanied him but certainly wasn’t grinning; in fact he was having trouble keeping the scowl off his face.

  “It’ll be all right, Bones,” Kirk said, elbowing his friend in the side. “Trust me.”

  McCoy rolled his eyes. “Remind me to do that when we’re locked up on Tantalus playing poker with each other for twenty years.”

  Kirk and McCoy rounded the corner to the corridor that ran to the holding cells. As Kirk had been able to determine by checking the ship’s computer, only two of Wolfe’s troopers remained stationed there. The others who had been milling around, investigating Spock’s escape twenty minutes ago, were already down on Memory Prime, searching for Spock, their phasers set to kill.

  “Sergeant Gilmartin,” Kirk said in a friendly tone. “We’re back. General Regulation Document two hundred and twenty-seven again. Paragraphs B and C.”

  Gilmartin turned to look at the other trooper standing at attention on the other side of the holding-cell door. Kirk glanced through the open doorway, its perimeter glowing with the security-field frame, and nodded slightly to Uhura, indicating that she should go along with whatever was to happen next.

  Gilmartin turned back to Kirk. “Begging the captain’s pardon, sir, but I believe Dr. McCoy has been relieved of duty.” The trooper looked nervous but he was bound to follow his orders.

  “As chief medical officer,” Kirk agreed. “But he’s still a doctor and able to act as such.” Kirk read the trooper’s eyes for a moment, then continued. “I’m Lieutenant Uhura’s counsel now and she is entitled to a medical examination while being held. Regulations require it.”

  Gilmartin took a deep breath. “I’ll have to check it out with the Commodore, Captain.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you not to, Sergeant,” Kirk said graciously, and gestured to the intercom panel.

  As Gilmartin stepped over to the intercom, it was clear that talking to the commodore was the last thing he wanted to do. Kirk stepped in front of the holding-cell doorway and lifted his hand as if to wave in greeting to Uhura. Then he brought his arm down and around the neck of the second trooper by the side of the doorway and flipped him into the security field.

  Gilmartin spun at the sound of the crackling repulser screen just as McCoy held a spray hypo to his neck. By the time Gilmartin could bring his hand up to try and knock the hypo away, it was too late. McCoy gently lowered the trooper to the ground and Kirk caught the second guard, now unconscious, as he bounced back from the field. Then the captain went back to the doorway to speak to Uhura.

  “Listen very carefully,” he said quickly. “A contingent of troopers is hunting for Spock on Memory Prime. With orders to kill.” He paused a moment to let that sink in. “All Enterprise personnel are ordered restricted to the ship. McCoy, Scott, and I are disobeying those orders and going down to try and locate Spock before the troopers do. We’ll have help down there, but no matter what happens, we will be disobeying a direct order from a superior officer. Do you understand?”

  Uhura’s expression was serious but displayed no fear. “Yes sir,” she said.

  “The best that can happen to us is that we will save Spock’s life and he will then be proven innocent of all charges. In that case, those of us who left the ship to find him will be given severe reprimands and probably lose rank. For what it’s worth, I believe there’s a good chance that the commodore has either misunderstood her orders or has received false ones. We can’t use that as a defense, but it might make Starfleet more lenient.” Kirk paused to consider his next words. “Nyota, this is not an order. It can’t be an order. But I could use your help.”

  Uhura began to reply but Kirk shook his head and held up a silencing finger.

  “As long as this field is on and you remain in the cell,” he told her, “you’re safe and protected. As soon as the field goes off, you’re on the run with us. Understand?”

  “Understood, sir,” Uhura said evenly. “Request permission to accompany the captain.”

  Scott was standing by in the starboard cargo transporter room when McCoy, Kirk, and Uhura rushed in.

  “Ready, Scotty?” Kirk asked as he passed out the small hand phasers and communicators that Scott had brought.

  “Aye, Captain,” Scott replied, checking the chronometer on the transporter console. “Fifteen more seconds. Coordinates are set for Mr. Nensi’s office.”

  Kirk, McCoy, and Uhura quickly took their places. Exactly fifteen seconds after Scott had given the chronometer’s reading, the light strips flickered and the engineer’s hands flew over the controls.

  “What was that?” Uhura asked as the lights came back to normal intensity.

  “Och,” Scott said as he ran to the oversized platform. “That was a clumsy ensign who just happened to drop a circuit plaser on a disassembled junction switch in a forward Jefferies tube.”

  “What does that do?”

  Scott smiled as the transporter effect sparkled around him.

  “It shuts down the shields, lass,” he said, and they were gone.

  Kirk and Scott materialized on a two-pad portable combat transporter in a small equipment storage bay. Two starbase troopers in full battle armor were waiting for them, phaser rifles at the ready, the impenetrable black visor of their helmets making each look like an impassive Cyclops.

  Without having to be told, Kirk and Scott raised their hands above their heads.

  “Sorry, Scotty,” Kirk said.

  “My fault, Captain. I was sure I had gone to a beam path high enough to override this devil’s capture mode. They must hae modified th—”

  “Enough talking,” one of the troopers said over a suit communicator. The slightly distorted voice echoed against the metal walls of the storage bay.

  “Step down.” The closer trooper gestured with the phaser barrel.

  Kirk kept his hands in the air and hopped down the half meter from the small platform to the bay flooring. He turned his head to say, “Careful with your leg, Scotty. You know what happened last time.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Scott said as he carefully moved to the edge of the transporter unit and gingerly stepped down from it. He lowered one hand and rubbed his right knee with a grimace. “It’s still pretty bunged up, sir,” he said.

  While the first trooper kept the prisoners covered, the second trooper harnessed his rifle and removed two sets of magnatomic adhesion manacles. “Hands back up,” he growled to Scott as he approached.

  Scott complied, favoring his leg. The trooper stood to the side to give his companion a clear shot if the prisoners tried anything. He held out the first manacle, palmed the activate switch on the control surface of the bar, and said to Scott, “Turn around.”

  Kirk’s eyes met Scott’s as the engineer slowly turned. Suddenly Scott’s leg buckled and he collapsed to the floor with a moan of pain, reaching out for support and grabbing on to the first trooper’s arm.

  As the first trooper tried to pull back, Kirk leaned down as if to grab Scott’s other arm and stepped into the second trooper’s line of fire and of sight. He couldn’t shoot now without risking a hit on his companion.

  “Move away!” the second trooper ordered. “Back off, now!”

  Scotty moaned in terrible agony and refused to relinquish his grip.

  “Her
e, let me,” Kirk said as he went to pull up on Scott’s arm. Instead he grabbed the activated manacle and slapped it against the first trooper’s helmet. The impact immediately triggered the charge release in the device and the bar flowed around the trooper’s helmet until the two ends met and joined. The bar quickly flattened and spread across the visor, rendering the trooper blind. He stumbled backward, clawing at the manacle. With a crash, he tripped over a low cargo crate and pitched to the flooring.

  The second trooper backed away and held his rifle on Kirk. But by then, both Scott and Kirk held their phasers on the trooper.

  “One or the other,” Kirk said bluntly, “but not both. Put down your rifle, soldier.”

  The trooper hesitated, his intentions impossible to read through his visor.

  “I don’t want to say this twice,” Kirk said.

  The trooper raised his rifle.

  “You’re not giving us any choice,” Kirk continued. “On the count of three, Mr. Scott. One.”

  As Kirk said “Two,” he and his engineer both fired at the trooper’s phaser rifle, blasting it from the unprepared trooper’s hands.

  “Keep going, full power!” Kirk called out to Scott over the whine of their phasers, then stopped firing his weapon and adjusted its setting wheel to “sweep.”

  When Kirk fired again, a low-power standing wave of phased radiation engulfed the trooper front and back. Combined with the full-power output of Scott’s weapon, the absorbed and redirected energy that coursed through the trooper’s protective induction mesh had nowhere to go, resonating throughout the armor’s circuitry until the regulator overloaded and the energy locked in phase with the trooper’s nervous system.

  The trooper crumpled and Kirk and Scott stopped firing. Other than a slight ringing in their ears from the phasers’ whine, the storage room was silent. But only for a moment.

  “Turn slowly,” a voice in the shadows commanded, “and drop your phasers.”

  Kirk and Scott spun to see the first trooper step out from beside a tall stack of glittering alignment alloy shipping crates. He held a phaser II leveled at them and he had removed his helmet.

  Kirk realized that another piece of the puzzle was about to fall into place. The trooper was a Vulcan.

  “Where’s the Captain?” Nensi asked.

  “And Scotty?” Romaine added.

  McCoy and Uhura looked around the chief administrator’s office and saw at once that Kirk and Scott had not materialized with them.

  “They were right beside us,” Uhura said. “I was just talking with Mr. Scott.”

  “The Enterprise’s shields?” Nensi asked grimly, fearing the worst.

  “Mr. Scott arranged to have them shut down,” McCoy said. “Besides, we were all in the same beam. If Uhura and I got through, then they must have, too.”

  “Farl’s combat pads?” Romaine asked Nensi.

  “Possible,” Nensi said, “though I’m sure Mr. Scott would have been able to override them with the Enterprise’s system.”

  There was a moment of confused silence, finally broken by McCoy.

  “Look, wherever they are, they’re going to be looking for Spock. We have no way of tracking them because we have no way of knowing where they came down and we can’t raise them by communicator without giving the troopers a chance to trace our signals. But we do know where Spock came down thirty minutes ago. I say we start there.”

  Nensi felt McCoy’s call to action galvanize the group. For all his country-doctor ways, he was still a Starfleet officer and knew how to act like one.

  Romaine held out her hand. “Who brought Spock’s file?” she asked. Nensi could see she was hoping it wasn’t with Kirk or Scott.

  McCoy handed over a computer data wafer and Romaine went to Nensi’s desk, inserted the wafer in the reader, and began to input on the keypad.

  “Pardon,” a mechanically flat voice said as an associate trundled through the door to Nensi’s office.

  “What’s that?” Uhura asked as the machine rolled over to Romaine and extended an eyestalk.

  “An associate,” Nensi explained. “We have special dispensation from the Department of Labor to use robot workers, at least until the facilities are completed and we can bring in enough personnel without overtaxing the environmental systems.”

  “How autonomous are they?” McCoy asked, watching Romaine talk with the device.

  “Not very,” Nensi said. “Their onboard brain is a standard duotronic Sprite model, good for basic problem solving and conversation. A central control computer sets up their goals and schedules, based on researcher and staff requests, then dispatches them to carry out their work on their own. Just like all those repair drones at spacedock, but modified to operate under benign environmental conditions. It actually cost more to buy them that way, without all the extra armor and shielding. We have a couple hundred of them.”

  “What’s Mira doing with it?” Uhura asked.

  “The associates are also a message relay system. The computer downloads dispatch requests to the associates, and if the associates happen to come across a person who has a dispatch waiting, then the machine can upload it and pass it along. It’s not very cost effective, but they’re rolling around anyway, so it makes sense.”

  “Ah,” Uhura said as she made the connection. “That’s why you wanted Mr. Spock’s data file. It includes his identification holos and now all the associates are going to be looking for him as well.” She turned to Nensi. “But what kind of message can you pass on to him that will convince him it’s not the commodore trying to locate him?”

  “I’m not sure,” Nensi said. “Apparently your captain has a large variety of codes that he’s established with you people to cover all sorts of eventualities—” McCoy and Uhura nodded “—and he said he’d include one on the data file. Presumably, Mr. Spock will be able to determine the message’s authenticity and send a suitable reply.”

  “So we’ll be able to talk through the associates without Wolfe’s people being aware of it?” McCoy asked.

  “As long as we don’t do it in real time,” Romaine said as she stepped away from the desk and joined the others. “Voice communication is out but stored messages are encrypted. I don’t think Farl will think to intercept those communications and I’m certain Wolfe doesn’t even know about them.”

  “This module has other duties,” the associate said as it lowered its eyestalk and wheeled in front of Nensi’s desk. “Pardon, pardon.” It rolled past to the door.

  “So now what?” Romaine asked the doctor, unconsciously deferring to him as the group’s commanding officer.

  “First, we get out of our uniforms,” McCoy said. Nensi gestured to a stack of clothes that Kirk had requested, resting on a visitor’s chair by the wall. “Then we start looking for Spock,” McCoy continued, “beginning with the areas around the portable transporter pad he was traced to.”

  “I’ve got the maps on the desk screen,” Romaine said as Nensi handed a technician’s jumpsuit to McCoy and one of Romaine’s off-duty outfits to Uhura.

  The two Enterprise officers held the clothes awkwardly for a moment. Then McCoy turned to Uhura, smiled, and said, “It’s all right, Lieutenant, I’m a doctor.” For a moment, it seemed as if McCoy was about to say something more, but didn’t. Judging from the way the officers then laughed, Nensi felt there must have been something else to the doctor’s comment than was apparent on the surface, but he shrugged it off and went over to study the maps with Romaine, leaving the two to quickly change.

  A few minutes later, Romaine traced out a section of corridors that she had indicated in red on the desktop display screen. McCoy, Uhura, and Nensi studied them closely.

  “I can’t pretend to match a Vulcan’s logic,” Romaine said, “but I’m assuming that Mr. Spock’s first priority will be to escape recapture, therefore he will attempt to increase, as quickly as possible, the area in which he might be found. This service corridor handles all the waste-disposal and energy-distribution nee
ds of the residential domes, interconnecting with them all. If he gets into it, then within the hour he could have access to almost half the nonrestricted facility.”

  “Would Spock know that?” McCoy asked.

  “Prime is patterned on standard starbase weapons labs. I’m assuming that Spock would know the layouts of those and act accordingly.”

  “So with half the facility to choose from, where should we start our search?” Uhura asked.

  “Again,” Romaine began, “I’m assuming that his second goal is to escape. I’m hoping that Farl will also do the logical thing and concentrate his search in this direction to cut off Spock’s access to the shuttle landing bay and the main transporter station.”

  “And if Farl’s doing the logical thing, what in blazes is Spock supposed to do?” McCoy asked in annoyance.

  “Head in this direction,” Romaine said, running her finger along a twisting chain of tunnels that led away from the transport center of Prime. “Weapons-lab emergency-evacuation transporter modules are located on the perimeters of each of these domes.”

  “But this isn’t a weapons lab,” McCoy protested. “Why would they build evacuation transporters in a facility where there’s no chance of it blowing up?”

  Romaine looked across at McCoy, staring intently into his eyes. “You were at Memory Alpha, Dr. McCoy. You saw what happened to those people.”

  McCoy nodded his head in silent understanding.

  “That isn’t going to happen again,” Romaine said. “Not to me. Not to anyone.”