Worlds in Collision Page 2

  “Iopene,” Starn answered. Another dead world whose now-extinct indigenous life had proven to be too competent in building lethal weapons. Even the empire banned Iopene relics from all but the noblest houses. The cutter that Starn carried had been the “present” that had convinced him to take the invitation to come to TNC 50 seriously.

  “Thiss way,” the girl said, and headed for the back of the tavern. Starn followed. Behind him, he could hear the mercenaries begin to laugh again.

  The girl slipped quickly through a series of dark corridors. Starn kept up with her, ducking his head beneath the low Tellarite ceilings. They passed an entrance to a smaller serving area where Starn could hear Orion dancing music pulse in time to the cries from an unseen audience. He detected the scent of drugs outlawed on a hundred worlds, heard screams of pain and pleasure above the hum of cranial inducers, and committed to memory every twist and turn, every dark stairwell, for the long run back.

  At last the girl stopped by an unmarked door. She gripped a gleaming gold handle on the doorframe and trembled as the embedded sensors read her palm prints and analyzed her sweat. The door clicked, then slipped open. The girl entered and motioned for Starn to follow.

  A young Klingon waited behind a simple desk. A single glowpatch lit the room from directly above him and his eyes were deeply shadowed beneath his prominent crest. The Andorian scuttled to a corner. The Klingon rose gracefully and waved toward a chair across from his desk.

  “Good of you to come, Trader Starn,” the Klingon said in Standard. “I am Karth.”

  Starn took the offered chair, comfortably proportioned and padded for humanoids, and studied his host. Even for a Klingon, the being was large. The taut fabric of his tunic stretched across an impressively muscled physique. Starn compared the tunic with hundreds of military designs he had memorized in order to place his host within the Klingon hierarchy. With something close to amazement, he finally realized that what Karth wore was that rarest of Klingon garb—a civilian outfit.

  “Do you want something?” Karth gestured to a serving unit on the wall. “Perhaps…water?” The Klingon smiled, respectfully keeping his teeth unbared.

  “Sensors in the fire pit?” the trader asked.

  “Of course. The crime rate in Town is one of the lowest in the Federation.”

  “And in the empire?”

  “Trader Starn,” Karth began seriously, “all beings know there is no crime in the empire.” Then he smiled again. “Though if you had touched that server’s spittle to your head and become betrothed to him before all those witnesses, that would have qualified him for criminal proceedings. A very clever way out of a potentially disastrous situation. Kai the trader.”

  “Kai the Karth who gives such generous presents.”

  The Klingon settled back in his chair. The chair was massive, but Starn’s sensitive ears heard it creak.

  “As there is no crime in the empire,” the Klingon said, “there are no presents, either. The Iopene Cutter is a down payment.”

  “Understood. What service do you require?”

  Karth shook his head. “This is a foul language. So many ways around the point. Nothing direct. What service do you think, trader?”

  “ChotneS,” Starn replied instantly.

  Karth glanced over at the Andorian girl. “We shall stay with this tera’ngan chirping. She speaks Hol much better than Standard.” The girl stared blankly. Karth shifted his gaze back to Starn. “I want no heads of state removed, no leaders killed. This will be a simple act of murder, trader, not assassination.”

  “Whatever you wish to call it, the service is the same.” Starn shrugged. “Who is to be the victim?”

  “Don’t you want to know the price?”

  “After I know the victim.”

  Karth shook his head again, hands moving slowly to the edge of the desk. “You accept the contract now. You accept the price now. There will be no negotiation once the victim is revealed.”

  Starn considered his options. It was probable he could walk away from this now. But the opportunity for expansion that this meeting offered might not come again. However, if he did commit to the contract, in the end he would still be able to make a final decision concerning who would be the more difficult victim: the one who was now unrevealed, or a certain Klingon civilian.

  “Very well,” Starn agreed. Karth moved his hands back to the center of the desk. “But since I cannot know the cost or effort involved in this service, I must call on Klingon honor to seal our bargain. State your price.” Starn was puzzled when he could detect no physiological response to his subtle insult. For a non-Klingon to bargain on Klingon honor implied either that the non-Klingon was an equal of a Klingon or that Klingon honor was suitable for animals. At the very least, Karth should have demanded a test of blood, if not death, but Starn could not hear any quickening of Karth’s breathing rate or see any change in his skin color.

  “Two hundred Iopene Cutters with feedback shields.”

  Two hundred! Starn concentrated on not disrupting his own breathing rate. Whole planets could be taken with a handful of cutters whose beams could tunnel through any force shield by turning the shield’s own energy against itself in perfect counterphase.

  “I was not aware that there were that many in existence,” Starn said flatly. Two hundred!

  “Do you doubt my word?” Now Starn picked up an immediate flush in Karth’s face and a rapid escalation in breathing rate.

  “I simply stated a fact. For such a price I will accept your contract. Again I ask, who is the victim?”

  Karth motioned for Starn to approach the desk. He touched a keypad and images formed on the desk’s surface. Starn watched intently.

  At first he was stunned. Then impressed. The concept was brilliant. By this one single action Starfleet could be reduced to an uncoordinated swarm of helpless ships and starbases. The entire Federation could be brought to its knees. So many past wrongs would be repaid. Starn knew he would have accepted this contract without fee.

  He leaned over the desk, studying the words and pictures, memorizing the diagrams and timetables. Already a plan was forming. It could be done. He was just about to step back from the table when he noticed Karth’s hand on the keypad.

  “Bring up the initial timetable again?” Starn asked.

  Karth tapped out a three-key sequence. Starn watched the Klingon’s exact hand movements carefully, then stepped back.

  “I will be proud to carry out this service,” Starn stated. “But I do have a question.”

  “I expect you to have many.”

  “Federation officials will not rest until they discover who is behind this action.”

  “That is not a precise question.”

  “What do you wish the officials to find out?”

  “That is not a clear question.”

  “Should I leave evidence implicating the empire in this crime?”

  Karth leaned back and snorted. He gestured to his dark face. “Who has set this crime in motion, trader? What do you think?”

  Starn took his opening. “I think it is intriguing that I am being hired to commit this crime by a mechanical device attempting to pass itself off as a Klingon.”

  Karth’s hands disappeared beneath the desk with unnatural speed. Starn twisted sideways and reached beneath his cloak. Karth jumped back from the desk, aiming a disruptor at Starn. The cutter’s particle beam sliced through the air with a thunderous crackle, disassociating dust and smoke molecules. But Karth dodged! The beam erupted on his shoulder instead of his chest.

  Starn stumbled back against his chair. The cutter whined as it cycled up to discharge again but it would take too many seconds. Karth’s shoulder dripped with thick blue coolant. Wires and transtators glowed and sparked in the mechanical ruin. The Klingon robot leveled its disruptor and fired. Starn braced himself for disruption. The Andorian girl was engulfed in a sputtering orange corona and collapsed onto the floor. The robot placed the disruptor on the desk.


  Starn looked over to the Andorian. Her body had not disintegrated. She was still breathing. A Klingon disruptor set for stun? What kind of madness was this?

  “Neural disruption only,” the robot said. “She won’t remember anything of the last twelve hours. She didn’t know.” It pointed to its shoulder.

  The cutter beeped its ready signal in Starn’s hand.

  “You won’t need that,” the robot said, pushing small silver tendrils back into its shoulder. The arm beneath fluttered erratically, then jerked once and hung limply.

  Starn replaced the cutter beneath his cloak. “You didn’t kill her?” he asked.

  “Low crime rate in Town. She’d be missed. There’d be questions. The important thing is that there be no witnesses.” A flesh-colored foam sprayed from the robot’s good hand to cover the open circuitry of its blasted shoulder. “Not now, and not when you carry out your contract.”

  Starn watched with fascination as the robot began to repair itself. He suddenly doubted that the Klingons had anything at all to do with this.

  “That sounds quite…logical,” Starn said and, thinking of the image that hung above the tavern door, he began to laugh.

  Two

  Spock did not need logic to know that another attempt was going to be made. The only question was, who was behind it: the captain or the doctor? He finally decided that the instigator would be the one who entered the Enterprise’s recreation lounge last. Satisfied, Spock returned to his meal. His theory was disproved when the lounge door puffed open and Kirk and McCoy entered together. Spock realized then that they were both in on it. Whatever this one was going to be, it was going to be big.

  “Mr. Spock, mind if I join you?” Kirk was already seated by the time Spock could swallow and begin his reply. McCoy sat beside the captain, not even bothering to ask Spock’s permission. The table for eight was now filled. As were the two tables closest to it. The fact that the two chairs across from Spock had been left empty, even as other crew members decided to sit as close to him as possible, indicated that everyone else knew that Kirk and McCoy were expected. It had also been Spock’s first clue that he was, as McCoy would put it, being set up.

  “Well, Captain?” Spock decided to play white and take the advantage of the opening move.

  “Well what, Spock?” Kirk’s wide-eyed innocence confirmed his guilt.

  “I merely assume that you have come to tell me something and I wonder what it is.”

  Kirk pursed his lips. “Tell you something?” He looked over to McCoy. “Bones? Did you have anything to say to Spock?”

  McCoy smiled brightly, his expression calculatingly cheerful. “Not a thing, Jim.”

  The captain and the doctor smiled at Spock. Spock constructed a decision tree. He could excuse himself and return to his station, though he concluded that would be interpreted as a resignation from whatever game was being played. Or he could regroup his position.

  He took another forkful of salad.

  “Good salad, Spock?” Kirk asked.

  Spock chewed carefully and nodded warily, assessing the captain’s counteropening gambit. He prepared himself for the next attack. But the captain turned back to McCoy instead.

  “So, Bones, who do you think is going to take the top spot for the Nobel and Z. Magnees Prize in medicine?”

  So that was it, Spock realized. Something to do with the prizes. But what? He had not been nominated, and his work would likely remain too specialized to ever qualify. Sarek, his father, had been awarded the Peace Prize more than twenty years ago but, logically, that had nothing at all to do with Spock. So what were they hinting at?

  “Well now, Jim, I think that Lenda Weiss has made a remarkable contribution to our understanding of resonance fields. Half my portable scanners are based on her work. I really don’t see how she has any competition.”

  “Not even from Forella?” Kirk suggested. “I hear his work with shaped stasis fields will make the protoplaser obsolete in just a few years.”

  “I’ll believe that when I see it,” McCoy said definitively. “Dr. Weiss is the front runner. No doubt about it.”

  “I believe you’ll find the work of Stlur and T’Vann merits the attention of the prize committee as well,” Spock offered. He suspected he shouldn’t get involved but logically he could see no other choice. The captain and the doctor were grievously misinformed. “They have opened up the whole new field of transporter-based surgery. Surgeons might never—”

  “Stlur and T’Vann?” Kirk interrupted. “A Vulcan team?”

  “Department heads at the Academy of Science,” Spock added.

  “So you follow the prizes, do you, Spock?”

  “Doctor, the winners of the Nobel and Z. Magnees Prizes represent the forward thrust of Federation science and culture. From their work today it is possible to deduce the shape of tomorrow. They represent the finest minds of all the worlds of the Federation. Who would not follow them?”

  Kirk and McCoy exchanged glances. Spock observed them and felt as he did when he stepped into one of the captain’s intuitive mates in three-dimensional chess, but he still couldn’t determine what Kirk and McCoy were trying to accomplish.

  “I suppose you keep up with all the latest news about the prizes then?” Kirk asked.

  For a chilling moment, Spock was afraid he was about to be informed that Dr. McCoy had been named a nominee, but quickly discounted the notion. The prize committee had some standards, after all. There were Vulcans on it.

  “I follow the news as much as I am able, Captain,” Spock replied.

  “And you know about the ceremonies coming up?”

  “I have read about them in the updates.”

  “Ah, good then. You know all about it. C’mon, Bones.” Kirk started to stand. McCoy followed.

  Is that all? Spock thought. Where was the logic in creating an elaborate setup such as this just to determine if he had been keeping up with the news about the prize ceremonies? Had he missed something?

  “Excuse me—know all about what?” he asked, knowing the odds were overwhelming that he shouldn’t.

  “The prize ceremonies,” Kirk said.

  “The scientists who will be there,” McCoy added.

  “Where it’s being held.”

  “How they’re all getting there.”

  “You do know, don’t you, Spock?”

  Spock prepared himself for the worst. “I’m afraid I must say I obviously do not know. Please be so good as to inform me.” Kirk and McCoy exchanged glances one more time.

  “Why certainly, Spock,” Kirk began, then paused for a moment. Everyone in the lounge looked at Spock expectantly.

  “The Enterprise has been assigned to carry a delegation of sixty prize-nominated scientists to the ceremonies on Memory Prime.”

  Checkmate, Spock thought. Again. “That is indeed splendid news,” he managed to say evenly.

  Kirk turned to McCoy. “Well?”

  “He blinked, Jim. I’m sure of it.”

  “How about a smile? A little one?”

  “Maybe. But the blink was definite. I think he’s excited. Think of it, an excited Vulcan! And we were there.”

  Spock stood up from the table. “Captain, may I ask what arrangements have been made to accommodate the delegation on board?”

  “You may ask, but I can’t answer. The person in charge hasn’t told me what’s been planned yet.”

  “I see. And who is the person in charge?”

  “You are.” Kirk checked with McCoy. “Another blink?”

  “I might have to write this up.”

  Kirk looked back to Spock. “If that’s all right with you, that is?”

  “I shall be honored, Captain.”

  Kirk smiled. This time it was genuine. “I know, Spock. We all know.”

  “If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I find I have considerable new work to attend to.”

  “Of course, Mr. Spock. Carry on.”

  Spock nodded, took his tray to the recycler, and
headed for the lounge door. As he stepped out into the corridor, he could hear McCoy complaining.

  “I was sure we were going to get a smile out of him this time. I’ll admit two blinks are a good start but—” The doctor’s voice was lost in the puff of the lounge door.

  Spock walked through the ship’s corridors at a measured pace, contemplating his feelings. Despite what most of his crewmates believed, Vulcans did have emotions. It was just that they chose not to express them. Though Spock supposed that Dr. McCoy would be surprised to discover how close he had come to seeing Spock smile back in the lounge.

  In fact, if Kirk and McCoy had not made it so obvious that they were setting him up, Spock thought he might well have been startled and pleased enough at the news of the prize nominees to have actually smiled in public. Then again, Spock thought, perhaps that’s why the captain had made it so obvious, so his friend would be forewarned and spared committing an unseemly act.

  The captain has such an illogical way of being logical, Spock thought. He knew he would think about that for a long time, though he doubted he would ever totally understand. And as in most of his personal dealings with the captain, Spock decided that understanding probably wasn’t necessary.

  “Transporter malfunction!”

  There weren’t many words that could shock the chief engineer of the Enterprise awake with such forcefulness, but those two never failed.

  Scott jumped out of his bunk and slammed his hand against the desk com panel. The room lights brightened automatically as they detected his movements. That voice hadn’t been Kyle’s. He peered at the nervous face on the desk screen.

  “Scott here…Sulu?” What was Sulu doing in the main transporter room? “Report!” Scott hopped around his quarters, trying to pull on his shirt and his boots at the same time as Sulu’s tense voice filtered through the speaker.

  “The…carrier wave transmitter just shut down, Mr. Scott. Every pad in the ship is out.”

  “Ochh, no,” Scott moaned. Years ago on another ship he had seen a landing party evulsed by a carrier-wave collapse. He had personally seen to it that such a malfunction would be virtually impossible on his Enterprise, no matter what McCoy might think.