Assignment: Eternity

by Greg Cox

  “What?” she said, still slightly disoriented. “Oh yeah.” She plopped back down into the captain’s chair, then jumped back up again, having forgotten that the crystal cube was still resting where she had just sat. “Oops!” She picked up the cube and raised it in front of her face. The green glow gave her features a curiously Vulcan tint. “Computer, return control of the ship to, um, First Officer Spock.”

  “And other authorized personnel,” Spock suggested.

  “Right. And other authorized personnel,” she repeated and the cube beeped in response. Stepping away from the captain’s chair, she gestured toward the now-empty seat. “All yours.”

  “Thank you, Miss Lincoln,” Spock replied. He assumed command once more, resting his back against the padding of the chair. Bits and pieces of Roberta’s memories continued to spiral across his consciousness, like stray leaves blown about by the wind. Chocolate mint ice cream. Fireworks on the Fourth of July. A torchlight parade through the streets of Seattle. Central Park in winter. The flare of a machine gun. A yellow submarine . . . Spock blinked his eyes once, clearing his mind of such psychic residue. There was too much at stake. He could not afford to be distracted by the memorabilia of another’s mind, no matter how intriguing. “Lieutenant Rodriguez, what is our status?”

  “The helm is responding, sir,” Rodriguez said. “I’m awaiting your command.”

  “So, where were we anyway?” McCoy said sarcastically, placing a hand on the back of Spock’s chair. “Oh yes, that’s right. You were just about to leave Jim and the others high and dry.”

  Roberta looked stricken and about to protest, but Spock spoke first. “No longer, Doctor. Our priorities have changed. I have decided, on the basis of the information I received from Miss Lincoln, that the threat to future history is something worth risking the Enterprise for. We will remain in this orbit to render whatever assistance Captain Kirk—or Gary Seven—may require to complete their mission.”

  A misty-eyed Roberta grinned widely and looked like she wanted to hug Spock. To his relief, she refrained from doing so. “I knew it!” she said. “I knew you couldn’t go through with it.”

  McCoy was rendered speechless, if only for a moment. “You mean it? We’re not leaving?” Astonishment showed in his baggy eyes. “What the devil changed your mind? Not that I’m complaining, mind you.”

  “Granted,” Spock explained, “the facts of the matter, as relayed to us by Gary Seven, have not changed essentially. But, through my exchange with Miss Lincoln, I have gained a substantially greater faith in Mr. Seven’s judgment and reliability. Based on his conduct in other situations, as shared with me by Miss Lincoln, I can only conclude that Gary Seven would not have acted as he has done unless it was absolutely vital to the natural progression of history.”

  “You’re not just saying that,” McCoy asked skeptically, “because now you know your own future is on the line?”

  Spock felt stung by the suggestion, although he suppressed the response so swiftly that it could hardly have been said to have existed at all. “That would be reasoning unworthy of a Starfleet officer,” he responded. “Furthermore, from a standpoint of strict self-interest, it would be highly illogical to risk my existence today to preserve my life some twenty-four years hence.”

  “If you say so,” McCoy said. He looked unconvinced, but Spock perceived no need to further justify his decision to the doctor. There were better uses for his time.

  “Mr. Spock,” Lt. Uhura spoke up. “Should I call for Security?” she asked, looking pointedly at Roberta. There was, after all, the not-insignificant matter of her illegal takeover of the Enterprise.

  “That will not be necessary, Lieutenant,” Spock declared, seeing no advantage to confining Roberta to the brig. “Miss Lincoln’s insights may prove valuable as this mission proceeds.” He pointed towards the science station he usually manned. “Miss Lincoln, perhaps you would care to occupy that seat?”

  “Got it,” she assented. Cube in hand, she scurried across the bridge to take a place at the science station. Her eyes widened as she inspected an impressive array of displays, switches, and knobs. “Wow, I know what all this stuff is now! This is the command functions slave panel, that’s the computer audio output control, those are the sensor display input logs . . .”

  Spock was faintly alarmed at the speed with which Roberta had assimilated his technical knowledge. Uhura merely looked bemused, until she suddenly stiffened in her chair and held her earpiece closer to her head. “Mr. Spock! It’s Gladiator. She’s coming around again, and heading straight for the planet.”

  “Confirmed,” Ensign Gates reported from her station at navigation. “Sensors indicate that Gladiator is approaching us at one-quarter impulse.”

  Spock was not surprised to hear that the Romulan battle cruiser was still in pursuit of the Enterprise. He doubted that Commander Motak would give up easily. “Is there any indication,” he asked, “that they are aware of our location?”

  “Negative,” Uhura stated, shaking her head. “They’re still searching for some sign of us, and demanding our surrender at regular intervals.”

  “Romulans are known for their punctuality,” Spock observed, “as well as their persistence.” He considered going to red alert, but decided he needed more data first. “What is their weapons status?” he asked automatically—and was surprised to hear Roberta answer him.

  “Er, their shields are up,” she announced, staring at the long-range sensor display. She fiddled with the controls to the high-resolution EM scanner. “Their disruptors are fully charged, but not targeted.” She shrugged her shoulders. “At least that’s what these doohickeys say.”

  “Lord help us all,” McCoy exclaimed, openly dumbfounded by Roberta’s performance. “Now I’ve seen everything. Next we’ll be putting the blasted cat at the helm . . . !”

  The cat, Spock thought. There was something in Roberta’s memories, an oddness regarding the cat, that he had not fully addressed just yet. What was Isis indeed? Merely a pet or something far more significant? The mystery nagged at the back of his mind, as though it ought to be more important than it seemed, but there was no time to think about the cat now, nor to share Dr. McCoy’s fascination with Roberta’s newfound proficiency with starship technology. Gladiator posed the immediate threat. All other concerns were secondary.

  He had to assume that Commander Motak had not yet detected the presence of the cloaked world. It appeared, though, as if he was about to do so, at which point he would also pose a threat to Captain Kirk, Gary Seven, and the rest of the landing party, not to mention their chances of completing their mission successfully and preventing any alteration to future history. That was an outcome even less desirable than the total destruction of the Enterprise and all aboard her. We are expendable, he thought. Gary Seven is not.

  If nothing else, no one will be able to assassinate me in the future if I die in battle today. I can only hope that Seven will be able to repair any damage to the timeline caused by my premature demise.

  “They’re getting closer,” Ensign Gates announced. Under stress, her voice betrayed a slight Brooklyn accent. “Gladiator is only minutes away from intercepting the perimeter of the cloaking field.”

  Spock briefly wondered if it would be possible to lure Motak into crashing Gladiator into the planet itself, but quickly rejected the notion. The obliteration of an entire battle cruiser would result in a tremendous and inexcusable loss of life among the Romulans. He reminded himself that Motak was merely defending his home against a suspicious intruder. It would be dishonorable to condemn his entire crew to death simply for performing their duty. However innocent of hostile intent, the Enterprise was the ship on the wrong side of the Neutral Zone, and a legitimate target for the Romulans.

  Furthermore, it occurred to him, the crash of a battle cruiser into a thriving, class-M planet would be comparable to the catastrophic impact of the asteroid that destroyed Earth’s prehistoric dinosaurs. The potential for massive ecological damage
, including mass extinctions, was too grievous to even consider inflicting on a living world.

  We must protect the planet from Gladiator and Gladiator from the planet, all without endangering Captain Kirk as well. He saw only one way to achieve that aim. “Lieutenant Rodriguez, take us out of the cloaking field.”

  “What?” McCoy blurted. “Spock, what are you doing?”

  “We must lure Gladiator away from the planet,” he explained. “The best way to do so is by giving it something to chase.”

  “Like us, for instance?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Here we go,” Rodriguez said, directing the impulse engines by means of the control panel at his fingertips. The Enterprise shot out from its orbit around the cloaked world, leaving both the planet’s atmosphere and its protective shield of invisibility behind. On the main viewer, an image of the planet’s upper hemisphere dropped out of sight, giving way to the starry backdrop of outer space. Distant suns glittered like diamonds against the endless blackness, and a Romulan battle cruiser, its warp nacelles gleaming on opposite sides of the kilometers-long, dagger-like structure that connected its engines to its prow, came rushing towards them, undaunted and seemingly unavoidable.

  “So, Spock,” McCoy drawled, as the enemy ship grew ever larger on the screen before them, “I suppose that, now that you know how crucial you are to the future of the galaxy, you’re going to be even more impossible to live with?”

  “Possibly,” Spock replied, “but unless we can devise a means of outwitting Commander Motak in the next few moments, you will not have to worry about that very much longer.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  THE LAST THING Kirk remembered was a flash like a supernova. Emerging from a dreamless sleep, he awoke to find himself surrounded by over a half-dozen Romulan soldiers. I suppose it’s too much to hope that this is just a bad dream, he thought, like that one where I keep finding myself back at Starfleet Academy with Finnegan. . . .

  He glanced around, swiftly taking in the situation, which looked far from advantageous. The command center was filled with Romulans, all in full military uniforms and bearing weapons, except for an older-looking Romulan wearing a white lab coat and apparently preoccupied with repairing the damage to the control panel caused by the Romulan Commander’s disruptor beam. Kirk prayed that damage was beyond the balding scientist’s ability to undo, although he could hardly count on such a convenient solution to the crisis. That would be too easy, he thought.

  “Are you well, Captain?” Gary Seven asked. He occupied a sitting position on the floor a few meters away, and looked as though he had regained consciousness only a few minutes before. His face had been reddened by the heat of the blast, inspiring Kirk to raise a hand to his own face. The skin felt dry and itchy, like a bad case of sunburn. Could be worse, Kirk decided; at least he had retained his vision. Blind and surrounded, now that would have been a tight fix!

  “Well enough,” he answered before the nearest guard jabbed the muzzle of a disruptor between Kirk’s eyes, ordering him to silence and prodding Kirk hard enough to make his eyes water. Kirk had to fight the temptation to jump up and feed the Romulan his own disruptor, but that, he realized, was probably not the best long-range strategy, no matter how satisfying it might be in the short term. Instead he looked around for his phaser, only to see it resting in the grip of another Romulan soldier who was examining the foreign weapon with great interest. Kirk guessed that he was not likely to get the phaser back anytime soon. Checking his pocket, he was not surprised to find Seven’s servo missing too.

  A groan caught his attention and he turned to observe the Romulan Commander—Dellas, he recalled—being helped to her feet by two of her underlings. Kirk assumed that she had taken the brunt of the blast since she had been the closest to her discarded disruptor when it overloaded, a sacrifice she had evidently been willing to make in order to render Kirk and Seven defenseless as well. A bold but effective ploy, he conceded reluctantly, resolving never to underestimate this particular foe.

  He inspected Commander Dellas more closely. The disruptor burst had darkened her face and seared away her eyebrows, which looked even odder on a Romulan than it would on human. Her uniform was torn and burnt in numerous places, confirming Kirk’s suspicions that not too much time had passed since the overload knocked out everyone in the room. He didn’t recognize the ebony cloak over her right shoulder nor the insignia upon her collar; then again, there was a lot Starfleet still didn’t know about the Romulan military.

  The commander’s personality asserted itself quickly. Shrugging off the aftereffects of the blast, she angrily yanked her arms free from the grip of the solicitous guards, preferring to stand on her own. “Enough,” she barked. “You should be watching over our prisoners, not me.” The soldiers backed away, exchanging glances nervously and looking more than a little bit frightened of their own commander.

  Everything he saw just confirmed Kirk’s original assessment of Dellas. He may not have known much about Romulans, but he knew a killer when he saw one. There was a homicidal gleam in this woman’s eyes that went beyond the usual Romulan suspicion of outsiders. The Romulan commanders he had encountered in the past, including Motak, had displayed no excessive malice; they had been honorable antagonists, simply doing their duty as they saw it. But this woman was different, he could tell just by looking in her eyes. She reminded him less of the dignified Romulan starship commander he had defeated in the Neutral Zone two years ago and more like such unscrupulous sociopaths as the late Colonel Green, the pseudo-Nazis of Ekos, or even his own crew’s machiavellian counterparts in the Mirror Universe. No wonder Gary Seven doesn’t want her using his technology, Kirk thought. Looks like he was telling the truth so far.

  “Doctor Vithrok,” she demanded briskly, glancing over at the older Romulan scientist. “What is the status of the transporter controls?”

  Gary Seven eyed Vithrok intently. He appeared even more keen to hear the scientist’s response than Dellas herself. Of course, Kirk realized, the transporter is the time machine. That’s how she’s planning to change the future—but change it how? He couldn’t begin to guess when and where she intended to tinker with history, but it seemed safe to assume that what was good for Commander Dellas and the Romulan Star Empire would be bad for the rest of the galaxy.

  Watching the scientist and assessing his potential as an adversary, Kirk spotted the tip of Seven’s servo emerging from a pocket on Vithrok’s lab jacket. So that’s where it went, he thought. He guessed that Seven had spied his weapon as well. Too bad neither of them was in a position to reclaim it.

  “I think it’s fixed,” Vithrok announced, stepping away from the control panel. “The damage was fairly serious, but it appears as if someone else had already repaired the major components.” He contemplated Dellas with a quizzical expression on his face. “Commander, I don’t suppose that . . . that is, can I ask whether you made any changes to—”

  Kirk wondered if Dellas would admit to accidentally blasting the panel herself while liquidating the unfortunate Supervisor 146. Probably not, he guessed; he doubted that one rose far in the Romulan command without shrewder political instincts than that.

  “The equipment was injured during my apprehension of these intruders,” she said obliquely. “This one”—she nodded toward Seven—“was attempting to repair the transporter for his own corrupt purposes when I set my disruptor to explode.”

  Kirk briefly considered dispelling Dellas’s evasions with the truth, but he couldn’t see any obvious advantage to it. Dellas seemed to have her subordinates too cowed to contradict her, regardless of the facts. Instead he decided to try to coax out whatever information he could from his captors. “On behalf of the United Federation of Planets, I protest our treatment here and demand to be put in touch with the proper diplomatic authorities.”

  Dellas laughed out loud. “This must be that celebrated human sense of humor you seem so proud of. As you must be aware, you can hardly demand anythin
g, legally or otherwise. You were captured in a blatant attempt to infiltrate and sabotage this installation.”

  “But this isn’t a Romulan military installation, is it?” Kirk challenged.

  “It is now,” she replied, “although you are right that it does not appear anywhere in our computers. Not even the Praetor knows this planet exists, nor about this operation.” She smiled coldly. “I am the highest authority here, and well within my rights to have you executed on the spot.”

  “Oh, I doubt that you’re likely to do that,” Kirk said. “A Starfleet captain, especially one who has eluded the Empire twice before, is too valuable a prize to consign to an unmarked grave on a nonexistent world. That’s true no matter how well-connected you think you are.”

  Dellas regarded him thoughtfully, a scowl upon her radiation-baked, hairless face, and Kirk wondered for a moment if he’d pushed his luck too far. Better too far than not enough, he thought, and hoped that he hadn’t just devised his own ideal epitaph.

  “Perhaps,” she said finally, then turned to face a centurion standing to one side. “Is the Enterprise still in orbit above us?”

  “Yes, Commander,” the soldier replied. He had removed his helmet, which he held against his chest. “They have repeatedly attempted to hail their captain, but we continue to jam their transmissions.”

  “Good,” she said tersely. “And the force field?”

  “Still at full strength,” he reported. “They have fired none of their weapons against it.”

  Kirk was stunned to hear that the Enterprise was still orbiting the planet, but he was careful not to let his surprise show upon his face. What are you waiting for, Spock? Me? He would have preferred to hear that his ship was safely away from here, although, from a more selfish point of view, it was good to know that the landing party still had a way off this planet, assuming he could just find a way to disable that force field. Judging from what he had heard so far, it sounded like Chekov and Sulu had successfully eluded the Romulan patrols. They must be hiding out in the jungle, waiting for further word from their captain. He didn’t intend to let them down. We’re not dead yet, he thought. All I need is a chance.