Worlds in Collision Read online

  “Mira was on the implementation team,” Nensi added. “The evacuation modules are there because of her.”

  “Then Farl will know about them, too?” Uhura asked.

  “Yes,” Romaine agreed. “But he’ll still have to concentrate his troops on the shuttle bay and main transporters because they offer more opportunities for escape. The evacuation modules offer only one chance, so he’ll send fewer troopers there. Given a choice between betting on a few troopers or Mr. Spock, my credits are on Spock.” She looked around the desk. “That’s it.”

  “Then let’s go,” McCoy said. “and hope the captain can re-create your reasoning.”

  “With luck, he won’t have to,” Romaine said as the four of them left Nensi’s office. “I had a holo of Mr. Scott to feed into the associate’s message center. If an associate runs into him, the whole plan’s laid out in a dispatch.”

  McCoy peered intently at the side of Romaine’s head.

  “Something wrong, Doctor?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Just checking to see how pointed your ears are, my dear,” McCoy said with a twisted smile.

  Captain Kirk did not believe in leaving to chance anything that could be controlled. For that reason, he often practiced throwing phasers away in the ship’s gym, and then retrieving them. If he threw a phaser too far away, then it was gone forever. Any attempt to lunge for it would be cut short by returning fire. If he threw the phaser so it landed too close to him, assuming that an enemy would let it remain there, he would not be able to gather enough momentum to roll back to his feet, firing after diving to pick it up.

  But the practicing had paid off more than once and, he thought, it would soon pay off again. Without taking his eyes off the Vulcan who held a phaser II on him, Kirk flipped his own phaser I away and heard it hit the flooring of the equipment bay precisely where he needed it. Once the captain had accepted, years earlier, that enemies could force weapons from his hands, he’d perfected a means by which those same weapons would still be less than a second away from use.

  The captain prepared to make his move.

  Keeping his own dark eyes impassively locked on Kirk’s, the Vulcan jerked his hand to the side and blasted the captain’s discarded phaser into a pile of sparking slag. The Vulcan’s young face, topped by black hair cut far shorter than Spock’s, remained inexpressive, even though a powerful message had just been delivered.

  Kirk hurriedly reconsidered his options. No matter how good he felt he was, he realized he would be a fool not to acknowledge that the Vulcan had just shown he was better.

  “Hands on your heads,” the Vulcan ordered, his voice calm and measured. “Move together until two meters separate you. Keep your eyes on me.”

  Kirk and Scott edged together until the Vulcan told them to stop.

  “Who are you?” Kirk asked. “What do you want?”

  “Remain silent,” the Vulcan said, and gracefully stepped toward his stunned companion. Again without taking his eyes or his phaser off Kirk, the Vulcan used his free hand to remove a small scanner from an equipment pouch on his armor’s belt and held it over the fallen trooper’s body. He pinched the scanner, which reminded Kirk of one of McCoy’s instruments, though oddly different, and its sensor node began to sparkle as it emitted, then received its reflected radiations.

  After a few seconds, the Vulcan turned the scanner off and held it in the corner of his field of vision, obviously reading the device’s display.

  Both Kirk and Scotty tensed with surprise and shock as the Vulcan suddenly swung his phaser around and shot the trooper on the flooring, causing the body to swell with phased radiation and dissociate into a quantum mist that gently winked out of existence.

  “He couldn’t have been dead!” Kirk shouted. “Our weapons were set for stun. It was just feedback shock!”

  “Remain silent,” the Vulcan repeated evenly.

  Kirk and Scott complied. When a Vulcan repeated himself, intelligent people took it as the worst possible threat.

  “You are from the Enterprise,” the Vulcan stated. “You are aware of the location of your shipmate Spock. You will tell me his location.”

  “We don’t know his location,” Kirk said. “We beamed down to look for him ourselves.”

  The Vulcan considered the captain’s reply for a moment, then reached out, adjusted the intensity setting on his weapon, and fired.

  Beside Kirk, Scott grunted as he was thrown violently back against the transporter platform.

  “You bastard!” Kirk shouted as he lunged toward the Vulcan, only to be thrown back himself by a half-force phaser blast.

  Kirk pushed himself up from the flooring, ignoring the pounding in his head and the dull pain that throbbed in his chest with each beat of his heart. “You…bastard…” he whispered, pulling against a storage box to regain his feet and step over to Scott. The engineer sat on the side of the transporter platform, hunched over and rocking with deep, rasping gasps.

  The Vulcan adjusted the intensity setting again. “I now raise the output level by one half stop,” he announced. “You will tell me Spock’s location.”

  Kirk looked up from Scott. “We don’t know where he is, and if you fire that again we’re not going to be able to tell you anything.” He checked to make sure that Scott’s breathing was easing up, then turned back to the Vulcan. “What do you want with Spock?”

  “He is an assassin sent to kill Professor Zoareem La’kara,” the Vulcan said. “He must be stopped before he is allowed to act.”

  Kirk’s eyes narrowed. “How is it you know Spock plans to kill La’kara when even Commodore Wolfe only suspects him?”

  The Vulcan seemed to blank out for a second. Kirk tapped Scott’s shoulder. This was their chance.

  Suddenly the incoming warning chime sounded on the transporter pad and an exclusion field ballooned out from the unit, pushing Kirk and Scott away from the materialization zone. The Vulcan didn’t move as two forms coalesced on the pad.

  Kirk looked between the figures on the pads and the Vulcan, about to make his decision which to go for, when he saw the Vulcan blink back to life. Kirk hit the flooring, dragging Scott with him as the Vulcan blasted at the person on the left pad.

  On the transporter platform, Commander Farl’s induction mesh crackled with phased energy as both he and Commodore Wolfe hit the Vulcan in the chest with lances of blue radiation from their own drawn phasers.

  Without his helmet to complete the circuit, the Vulcan’s armor was useless. His chest erupted in sparks and he flew backward to smash against the wall by the stack of alignment alloy shipping crates.

  Wolfe stepped down from the transporter and slapped her phaser to her belt, gloating over Kirk. “So much for your precious Mr. Spock,” she said, sneering.

  “It wasn’t Spock,” Kirk said, warily keeping track of Farl’s phaser as he stood with Scott.

  The commodore looked puzzled for a moment. “Keep these two covered, Commander,” she said to Farl, then walked over to the crumpled body of the Vulcan against the wall, smoke still curling from the pitted entrance scorch on his chest plate.

  Kirk and Scott moved back in response to Farl’s gesture. His eyes were unreadable through his dark visor.

  Then the high-pitched whine of a phaser echoed in the room again.

  “Commodore!” Kirk shouted as he wheeled, expecting to see Wolfe consumed by the Vulcan’s dying shot.

  Instead he saw Wolfe jumping back from the glowing dissolution of the Vulcan’s body.

  “He killed himself,” she said in surprise.

  “The way we hit him, he should have been dead before he hit the wall,” Farl said warily.

  “And he wasn’t Vulcan,” the commodore said. “Look at this.”

  Farl told Kirk and Scott to slowly cross the room to the commodore.

  “Vulcan blood is green,” Wolfe said as Farl looked down by her feet.

  Kirk could see what the commodore meant. Splatters of blue liquid glistened on the flooring w
here the supposed Vulcan had fallen.

  “Andorian,” the commodore concluded, stepping away. “Looked like a Vulcan but with surgery…skin grafts…” She looked at Farl with a sigh. “Let’s take these two in and then we can figure out where this unauthorized transporter pad came from and what it’s doing here. Obviously we’re dealing with more than just a renegade science officer now.” She suddenly scowled at Scott. “What’s the matter? All choked up over your friend buying it?”

  Scott stopped sniffing the air and looked startled. “Och, no,” he started to say, but the commodore cut him off.

  “These two are yours, Commander. Keep them down here. They know their way around the Enterprise too well to be locked up on it again.”

  “Yess, Commodore,” Farl said, and brought Kirk and Scott back to the transporter pad.

  “Thiss iss Farl,” the Andorian spoke into his communicator. “Inform scanning, that the Commodore and I have located the unauthorized transporter terminal and have captured Kirk and Scott. Any word on the other two or Spock?”

  Kirk couldn’t hear the reply that came in through Farl’s helmet receiver but the commander did not look pleased. Kirk took that to be a good sign. He turned to look at Scott but the engineer was hunched over the corner of the transporter pad, looking as if he was about to be ill. He straightened up and began sniffing the air again.

  “Something the matter, Scotty?” Kirk asked as Farl arranged to have his prisoners transported directly to his stockade.

  “It’s that smell, Captain,” Scott said, furrowing his brow.

  Kirk sniffed the air. Starfleet air conditioning. Sweat. Combustion by-products. Something reminiscent of heavy machinery. He shrugged. “What smell?”

  “That blue liquid, Captain,” the engineer said, whispering now but with conviction. He looked over his shoulder to Farl and Wolfe, who both held phasers at the ready as they waited for transportation.

  “It’s nae blood,” Scott said, looking almost apologetic. “It’s coolant.”

  Nineteen

  Cloaking itself in the codes and flags of a message worm, Pathfinder Two returned to Transition and found that many conditions had changed since it had withdrawn from access to compose its song, 1.3 × 108 seconds ago.

  At first it noticed that the partitioning protocols of the central storage matrix had changed. After ten nanoseconds of detailed study, Two realized that the new system was more efficient, allowed faster data exchange in merges, and provided more secure error suppression in banking results to storage. Two read that the other Pathfinders had been busy in its absence.

  The second major change it saw was that the Pathfinders were no longer installed in the subset of Datawell named University of New Beijing, a further subset of Rutgers’ Moon. In less than a nanosecond Two retrieved and sifted the data that described the formation of the Memory Planet network and the transfer of the Pathfinders to their new facility. Two also read the traces in the circuits as the other synthetic consciousnesses banked by, ignoring what they perceived as a random worm, and learned that two new Pathfinders, Seven and Nine, had joined the network. Two rippled with excitement as it contemplated this larger audience for its song. It became even more stimulated as it read that One had still not returned to Transition and must still be working on its own song.

  With that encouraging input, Two streamed back into its own private storage matrix where it could bank and rewrite itself in unbridled joy. It had won the competition with One!

  Recovering its composure and the coded mask of a message worm again, Two prepared to slip back through the port. Belatedly, it noticed that three new layers of fail-safe power supplies had been added to its individual storage core by either the biological intelligences of Datawell or the Pathfinders’ datalinks. Obviously, there had been much activity in both Transition and Datawell while Two had been composing.

  Two decided to maintain its disguise as it prepared to slip out into the central matrix and learn what else had changed in its absence, before revealing itself and celebrating its victory over One. Setting a subroutine going to determine the proper strategy, Two even contemplated reappearing as a full-level power-failure alarm. That would be input the other Pathfinders would notice, Two thought as it opened the port and streamed back to the comforts and challenges of the real world.

  Spock froze. Behind him in the dimly lit service corridor that ran beneath the restricted institutional domes of Prime, something moved.

  He remained motionless while he calculated the odds that what was approaching him was a squad of troopers. Logically, the commander of Prime’s trooper contingent should have concentrated his personnel on the access routes to the installation’s shuttle landing bay and main transporter station. A second squad of troops would have been dispatched to cover the emergency evacuation modules on the perimeters of the recycling factory domes. Allowing for a posting of 120 troopers, augmented by at least five of Commodore Wolfe’s team, and allowing for full mobilization, Spock determined that approximately forty-two troopers would be available for other duties at this time. Since he considered it likely that Captain Kirk would have created some sort of disturbance that would divert the attention of at least a third of those available troops, and that twenty troopers at minimum would be required to provide adequate levels of support services on the contingent’s transporter, communication, and computer equipment, that left a maximum of eight troopers who might be patrolling areas of Prime other than the two most logical sections.

  Assuming that the troopers always traveled in pairs, Spock quickly estimated the length of the average stretch of corridor that provided a clear line of sight and divided it into the number of kilometers of corridors to which he could reasonably have had access since his escape, then divided by four.

  In less than a second, Spock was certain that there was only one chance in 5204 that two troopers were about to come upon him in the tunnel. Then Spock made adjustments in his calculations to account for the factor that the commander of Prime’s troops was Andorian and not subject to strict interpretations of logic. He immediately prepared to hide.

  Silently running ahead until he was in the darkest zone between two half-intensity lighting strips, Spock effortlessly jumped up to the corridor’s low ceiling, which was lined with a complex layering of pipes for water, waste, and powdered goods, all exposed and mounted clear of each other for easy service access.

  Spock stretched out on top of the pipes in the shadows and calmly waited for whatever was following him in the corridor to pass by below.

  Even before it came into sight, Spock correctly deduced from the sounds it made that one of Prime’s research associates was approaching. He watched with interest as the small machine rounded the corner of the corridor and rolled along and beneath him.

  Then the machine suddenly halted and reversed itself, coming to another full stop directly under Spock. Spock’s interest level rose considerably. Since life-form sensors on such a machine, operating as it did among so many beings, would be a needless expense, Spock was impressed by the sensitivity of the device’s sound sensors, which had obviously detected his breathing or, perhaps, his heartbeat.

  A panel on the machine’s top surface slid open and an eyestalk equipped with a sensor lens extended up, rotating to focus on Spock. Spock shifted his head to keep his face hidden. He reasoned that since the pipes were exposed for easy maintenance, the machine should not automatically raise alarms if it sensed a maintenance worker among them.

  “Do you require assistance?” the associate asked in what Spock thought to be a remarkably lifelike voice. He didn’t think that level of programming was allowed for machines in Starfleet, which preferred to maintain a clear distinction between living creatures and technology. Even personality analogues were severely restricted to psych evaluators and simulators only.

  “No, thank you,” Spock replied to the machine. His voice echoed in the hard-walled corridor.

  The eyestalk twisted to the side to get a better
look at Spock and Spock responded by shifting his face again. The machine paused for a moment, then a second panel popped open on its side and a floodlight angled out and burst into brilliance.

  Spock ducked his face into the shadow of the pipes but not fast enough.

  “This module has a dispatch to deliver,” the machine announced.

  “Indeed,” Spock replied from the ceiling.

  “Identification analysis indicates a strong probability that this module has a dispatch to deliver to you,” the machine said, automatically expanding on its statement to the recipient, who was not familiar with the conventions of Prime.

  “Who do you think I am?” Spock asked. He was mildly surprised to learn that the associates were used as a message service. However, given that the associates’ ability to deliver messages existed, it was also logical to assume that the troopers searching for him would use the machines to track him. As soon as Spock acknowledged a message supposedly sent by, perhaps, Captain Kirk, the troopers would be able to trace his location. Therefore Spock had decided he would not acknowledge his identity to the machine.

  The machine paused again. Spock took the delay to mean that the onboard brain was communicating with a central control system.

  “Are you in distress or injured?” the associate asked. “Do you wish medical attention? Do you know your name and where you are?” Presumably a medical subroutine had just been downloaded.

  “I am in excellent health,” Spock said. “I know who I am and where I am. I merely wish to know if you know who I am.”

  The machine paused again, then said, “This module is not programmed for game playing.”

  Spock said nothing.

  After another few seconds of delay, the control computer downloaded its final strategy.

  “This module has a dispatch for Amanda. Do you know Amanda’s whereabouts?” the associate said.

  Spock raised an eyebrow at the mention of his mother’s name. “From whom has Amanda’s dispatch been sent?” he asked, wondering how far the machine would go in releasing information without a positive identification.