Worlds in Collision Read online

Twenty-seven

  For just one second, Mira Romaine saw smooth walls of dark star metal shining with the radiance of the transporter effect, and then the utter darkness of the bubble deep within the asteroid closed in on her as if it had a physical form.

  In the darkness of a portion of the universe that had not known light of any kind for hundreds of millions of years, Romaine felt something move against her and grab her arm. She wanted to scream but the darkness was too powerful, absorbing light, absorbing sound, absorbing all movement, all thought.

  “Mira?” Kirk’s voice crackled out from her helmet speaker. “Step aside from the transporter so Spock and McCoy can beam in.”

  Kirk pulled on her arm again and the universe swam back into place for her.

  Kirk found the switch for his suit torch before she did and she jerked her head in shock as the light filled the bubble that had been formed when the asteroid condensed. It was about twenty meters across, giving an ample safety margin for beaming in without risking materialization within solid material.

  She found her own torch switch and a flat holo lens on top of her helmet added a second swath of brilliance to the completely spherical chamber. Incredibly, she noticed, just the touch of the light beam on the surface of the bubble’s walls caused a layer of frozen particles to billow out and form a mist. Like a comet’s tail, she thought, a tiny universe trapped with a larger one that was itself part of yet another.

  She braced herself in the microgravity by holding on to the side of the transporter pad. She felt it move beneath her insulated hand as its inertial dampers released a fraction of momentum from the mass of Spock and McCoy as they materialized. Spock immediately kicked off from the transporter and McCoy followed, awkwardly banging his carryall of medical supplies against his leg.

  “All clear,” Kirk broadcast. A larger shape took form on the transporter, until it appeared as if the first device were some type of mechanical cell that had just divided. The second portable transporter had been beamed down.

  A small puff of gas grew silently from the thrusters on Spock’s equipment harness as he floated silently back to the first transporter.

  “Find us the next bubble, Mr. Spock,” Kirk said as the Vulcan’s gloved fingers picked delicately among the dials and switches on the control panel.

  After a few seconds, Spock said, “I have it. Eight hundred meters almost directly toward the center.” He pressed an activation control and the second transporter pad dissolved away, sending thin fingers of light through the mist that now swirled throughout the entire bubble, from the effect of the lights, the transporter energy, and the thrusters’ gases.

  Romaine looked at the shifting softness of the mist and lights, thinking that even though it appeared beautiful now, if she did not know she would be leaving within seconds, the panic that had threatened to surface when she first arrived would claim her totally. But she had faced worse dangers, and this time she knew who waited for her at mission’s end.

  Scott’s name was on her silent lips as she slipped from one instant to the next, from one place to another, caught unknowing in the random flow of Datawell as the universe conspired once more to guide her to her heart’s true destination.

  The next bubble was at least thirty meters across. The one after that, only twelve. In the fifth bubble, Spock could not lock on to a large enough bubble leading into the Interface Chamber and so they had beamed to the side, losing time and distance, and knowing that there was a growing chance that they would not have enough transporters to complete their journey.

  “Can we beam down the ones we’ve already used from the bubbles above us?” McCoy asked, puffing in his suit as he rotated in the microgravity from attempting to stop his carryall’s motion.

  “We would break our only contact with the surface,” Spock explained, “and if we found ourselves in another blind pathway, the storage batteries in these portable pads do not have enough energy to transport their own mass more than twice without a receiver at the destination.”

  “I know, I know,” McCoy complained. “Pad-to-pad transfers use only ten percent of the energy a single-pad beam requires.”

  “I am impressed, Doctor,” Spock said evenly. “After all these years of asking me to remember that you are a doctor—”

  “Spock,” Kirk interrupted. “How much farther?”

  “Three kilometers in a straight line, Captain. However, the frequency of suitably sized bubbles we have so far encountered suggests that we will have to travel at least eight kilometers through seven transfer points.”

  “And we only have four more transporters up top, including the ones from the ship’s stores,” Kirk said. “We’ve got to start reusing the pads like Bones suggested.”

  “If we do not succeed in finding a path into the Interface Chamber,” Spock reminded Kirk, “there is no escape for us. Our life support will not last long enough for additional transporters to be shipped in and beamed down to us.”

  Kirk looked around the bubble they floated in, mist swirling all around them, making solid lances of their torches and the display lights on the transporter’s control panel. Chances are this asteroid will outlast Earth, he thought, probably make it as far as the Big Crunch, or simply evaporate as its protons decay. It was a tomb that would last quite literally until the end of time. But it held no fear for him.

  “We’ve come too far, Spock,” Kirk said finally. “Start bringing the transporters down. We’re going on.”

  Seven transfers later, they were one-point-six-eight kilometers away from the Interface Chamber, tantalizingly out of range by less than two hundred meters, panting and exhausted. The last two bubbles had been just less than the minimum volume that Kyle had stated was the outer edge of safety and they had beamed through one at a time, lying across the face of the transporters. This bubble was a more comfortable eight meters in diameter and, Kirk thought, it might be the last. Three units in the network had already faded out of the system status indicators, their batteries exhausted.

  “Nothing suitable in range, Captain,” Spock said. Even his voice had begun to sound on edge. “We will have to backtrack again.”

  “How are the power reserves?” Kirk asked.

  “Minimal.”

  “How many transfers do we have left?”

  “No more than five,” Spock answered without pausing to do a calculation. The situation was that plain.

  “Tr’Nele has had almost an hour down there by now, Jim,” McCoy said. “For what it’s worth, we’re probably too late anyway.”

  “I’m not giving up, Bones,” Kirk said slowly and carefully. “We’re not giving up.” He thrust through the billowing mist of the bubble to float beside Spock by the transporter pad. “How far out of range are we?” he asked.

  “Thirty-two meters,” Spock answered, reading the results of the pad’s probing locator beam, “plus or minus eight percent to allow for density fluctuations in the asteroid’s composition along the beam path.”

  “Is there no way we can get an extra few meters out of this thing?” Kirk restrained himself from slamming his fist against the pad, knowing the reaction would shoot him across the bubble.

  “If only one person went through,” Spock said, sounding reluctant, “then the effective range would increase by approximately twenty-eight meters, leaving us only four meters short, plus or minus the same eight percent.”

  “Mira’s the least massive,” Kirk said excitedly. “What if she went without her suit?”

  Kirk could see Spock shake his head in his helmet. “Assuming she survived exposure to the near vacuum and the gases in this bubble, Captain, I estimate she would extend the transporter’s range to the eight-percent error limit. It would be fifty-fifty. We, on the other hand, would be left with absolutely no power and no way out.”

  “Mira?” Kirk asked. “Can you operate the transporter controls in the Interface Chamber? You could beam us out of here when—”

  “It’s a receiving pad only, Captain,” Mira inter
rupted. “We don’t even know if it’s powered up, and if—”

  Kirk and Spock turned their heads to each other at the same time, setting up a vibration in the pad they held on to as they both reacted to what Romaine had said at the same time.

  “Spock, what if you—”

  “Captain, I can beam down the batteries—”

  “—from the other transporters—”

  “—and wire them in to bring this unit—”

  “—to full strength—”

  Together they said it: “—and beam us out of here.”

  It took eight minutes to bring down the other operative pads in the network. Connecting their batteries was little more than disconnecting the internal power cables and running them from one set of batteries to another in series until the final connections were made on the pad they would use.

  “All four of us will have to beam at the same time,” Spock explained as he made the connections, “because the oversurge will fuse the critical translators in the wave generator.”

  “Is there enough power for the four of us?” McCoy asked.

  “If we follow the captain’s suggestion and beam without our environmental suits,” Spock said. “I calculate that we will be exposed to the vacuum of the bubble for no more than thirty seconds. I am confident that I can function that long.”

  Before McCoy could make any comment, Kirk said, “Come on, Doctor, now we’re going to find out how much you remember from basic vacuum training. What was your record?”

  “Three seconds,” McCoy said.

  “That was as long as you could hold your breath?” Kirk asked, suddenly worried about McCoy’s chances.

  “That was as long as I wanted to hold it. Oh, don’t look like that. I’ve always wanted to see what Vulcan skin looks like when the capillaries go. Think I’m going to miss my big chance?”

  Spock set the coordinates for the Interface Chamber and gave them their final instructions on vacuum survival. “When the beam takes us, be sure to be in a crouching position,” he concluded. “I will attempt to rotate our landing orientation to the Interface Chamber’s artificial gravity but we should be prepared for a jolt.”

  “Why a jolt?” McCoy asked, already beginning to feel dizzy.

  “We have enough power to reach the Interface Chamber,” Spock said, “but I do not know if we have enough to reach its floor.”

  Before McCoy or anyone else could make any response, Spock gave the order and popped his helmet. The last thing Kirk saw was a spray of what looked like snow shoot out from Spock’s helmet seal and completely obscure his vision. Then he shut his eyes as tightly as he could and pulled on both of his own helmet tabs. The atmosphere rushed out of his suit, taking all sound and warmth with it. As he had often wished as a child, James T. Kirk was now in space.

  Twenty-eight

  This time, his name was tr’Nele. Not Starn, not Sradek, nor any of the false guises he had worn as smoothly and as mutably as the skies of ch’Havran wore their clouds.

  Tr’Nele crawled out of the narrow service access tunnel that opened back into the Interface Chamber. Two kilometers down that tunnel, the charges were in place; the contract was within moments of being fulfilled. Then, somewhere twenty light-years from the small backwater planet where it had all begun, a flagless freighter would receive the signal and two hundred Iopene Cutters with feedback shields would be delivered to the others of tr’Nele’s clan, his real clan, the Adepts of T’Pel.

  Tr’Nele straightened up and stood for the first time in more than an hour, letting the circulation return to his cramped arms and legs as he stretched and surveyed the Interface Chamber. He was clad only in a tight black jumpsuit, all his weaponry and defenses discarded with his clothes in the interface booth he had chosen for the final stage.

  For the moment, all was subdued in the chamber. The cavernous room glittered with its endless banks of status lights and displays, thrummed with the steady, almost subliminal rhythm of its fusion generators and recycling fans. It seemed peaceful. Too peaceful. Tr’Nele shouted out in a mindless scream devoid of any semblance of logic, filling the chamber with his power and his presence, and laughing as he saw the bound forms of the five cowering humans he had captured tremble in fear.

  It was those humans, pitiful creatures that they were, who would give him his escape from this place. Until the moment when the Federation’s Vulcan toadie had seen through his disguise, tr’Nele’s plans and actions had been flawless. His client had provided the power to intercept Starfleet messages and create false ones in their stead. His client had provided the secret transporter network used by the robots that had infiltrated this installation and so many others in the Federation.

  The robots had almost succeeded in capturing the human Kirk and his trained Vulcan, stealing the two from the air itself. But robots were not Romulans. There was yet to be a machine that could match the millennia of cunning and trickery that had been instilled in any of the Adept.

  Still, tr’Nele thought as he stood over his captives, watching their silvered fingernails tremble in terror, his last robot aide had served its purpose. Once it had detected that the subspace jamming and the false emergency messages that were propagated through all the computers in Prime had been terminated with the destruction of the main generators, it had obediently destroyed the monomolecular-wire wave guide, guaranteeing that no one could beam down to the Interface Chamber in time to stop the successful execution of the plan.

  Tr’nele had made that decision without regret, even though he knew that he would not be able to escape and share in the glory of future madness, fueled by the invincible weapons of Iopene. But then he had found the pitiful humans and discovered a new way out.

  After the contract was completed and tribute paid to T’Pel, tr’Nele would take a bundle of charged wires, sparking with transtator current, and lightly brush it against the metal input leads of the humans who talked with computers. He smiled as he pictured their responses. They would twitch and writhe as the current tore through their circuitry, reaching into their very brains to fuse and arc and destroy all intellect but not all life.

  The humans would be left as living, breathing slabs of protoplasm, and when the inevitable rescue teams came for them, instead of five injured talkers to computers, they would find six. With a helmet to hide his ears and scorch marks to hide his face, a quick investigation would not be able to distinguish tr’Nele from the others until he was back on the surface. By then, with the help of the robots, it would be too late. Tr’Nele would escape, T’Pel would be honored, and the galaxy would soon tremble as whole worlds were engulfed by senseless destruction.

  Tr’Nele held his arms over his captives and screamed again in triumph and in victory. But this time the sound he made was lost beneath another.

  As his cry faded, it was joined and then drowned out by an impossible musical sound that intensified as tr’Nele looked up with shock to see four shimmering columns of light form above him, as in the ancient legends of heaven’s wrath.

  The universe took shape around Kirk, bringing with it sound, and sight, and warmth. And the sensation of falling.

  By the time he realized what had happened, he had already hit the floor of the chamber, knees tucked up and instinctively rolling with the impact of a four-meter drop. Behind him he heard a cry from Romaine and a gasp from McCoy. He turned to check on Spock but the Vulcan was already standing, staring off at…

  …Tr’Nele. Kirk looked up from his crouching position on the floor and saw the Romulan standing by the bound forms of members of the interface team. Tr’Nele’s mouth was open in shock and Kirk knew why.

  He and Spock, McCoy, and Romaine looked as if they had come through hell. Their hair was frosted with frozen vapor from the vacuum of the bubble. Their clothes were cracked and torn where they had been frozen but still forced to bend. Their eyes were bruised and their cheeks blotched with the damage of their ruptured capillary veins that had not withstood the absence of atmospheric pressure
. They looked dead, looked torn apart, looked as if they had come from hell to drag the Romulan back with them.

  Tr’Nele disappeared into the Interface Chamber.

  Spock chased after him with blinding speed.

  Kirk jumped to his feet and saw the floor come back up at him. He hit hard, stunned more from the shock of realizing it had happened than the shock of hitting the floor.

  “Captain!” Romaine called out to him, running to his side.

  “Help Spock!” Kirk said, waving her on. “Go help Spock!” His voice sounded hoarse, roughened by the explosion of air from his lungs that had escaped in the vacuum.

  He pushed himself to his hands and knees. What was wrong with him?

  McCoy ran up to him, listing to the side. Kirk looked up and saw blood running from the doctor’s nose and ears. He held out his hand. Kirk took it.

  McCoy pulled Kirk up, and as he tried to stand, Kirk again felt himself begin to fall. McCoy pulled back and Kirk was able to feel that he had lost the support of his right knee.

  Kirk looked at his friend, saw the conflict in his eyes. It was no use.

  “Go Bones! Go!” he said, voice clogged with anguish. “Help him!”

  McCoy eased his hands away from Kirk, then ran after Romaine and Spock.

  “Damn it!” Kirk cried as he fell again. This time he could bear the tearing in his knee. Thankfully the shock of the injury had left it numb.

  He heard shouts from the direction in which everyone had run.

  “No!” he grunted. “I…will not…give up!”

  Kirk pushed against the floor, straining his left leg to carry him forward. He hopped over to the sweeping wall that wrapped the interface booths clustered around the chamber’s central core.

  He put his right hand in a gap that ran horizontally between the wall panels and the viewing windows. Using his hand and arm to replace his useless leg, he stumbled after his friends, toward the sound of battle.

  A stupendous eruption of clear plastic exploded from a window three booths along as a body flew through it. Kirk felt his chest tighten and his heart race as he saw it was McCoy who lay rolling feebly among the shards.