by Diane Carey
brood. As a result, along with anger, out are ambition,
growth, technology, a free-market mentality of any
kind, and just about everything else that allow a soci-
ety to depend upon itself. They are nice people, but
they are helpless. They bring administrators in from
other planets because they can't administer them-
selves, trade their location and benevolent hospitality
for foodstuffs, medical services, in fact most neces-
sary goods and services of any kind. They are a
professional shore leave planet. It's all they do well.
The culture itself has its colors. The buildings are of
90
natural stone and wood, clothing reminiscent of
Earth's Middle East during the classical period. Veils,
slippers, turbans, belly dancing, mosaics, simple musi-
cal instruments, and so on. Several Federation anthro-
pological studies had been made on the hypothesis that
the Argelians are one of a handful of human-origin
races scattered around the galaxy by a superior culture
who'd sought to preserve them. The biggest fly in that
ointment was a faint but definite telepathic ability that
appeared hereditary in some of the women. But none
of that was my problem. Even though Argelius has
only three major population clusters that could be
called cities, the clusters are disorganized and very
old. Some streets--many, in fact--had never been
named even in the hundreds upon hundreds of Arge-
lien years they'd been in use. There are no class
structures; everybody is poor. As such, there is no
quartering of Yelgor City, no way to guess which end
of town might attract a group of fugitive scientists.
So, here we were. Orbiting. We were waiting for Mr.
Spock to devise a plan for finding the scientists. I
suppose each of us assumed Spock would be the only
one of us who would be able to solve the problem, a
problem without many clues. As we watched him scan
bits of new and old data about the scientists, trying to
pick out some little propensity that would give a hint of
where they might be hiding, we slowly digested the
idea that even Spock, unfortunately, wasn't made of
magic.
He knew that too. It showed in the taut lines of his
jaw as he calmly, even hypnotically, pored over screen
after screen of drab information about Mornay and
Perten. When that store was exhausted, he unceremo-
niously began the whole process again with reams of
data about Yelgor City and the huddled villages that
surrounded it like a litter. Dr. McCoy and Merete
confiscated Spock's information about the scientists
and went to another terminal to go over it again, to
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apply their knowledge of human psychology. Maybe
they could find something Spock missed. Meanwhile,
Spock and I slowly analyzed the city itself. We looked
for architectural styles that might be conducive to a
band of renegade scientists, places that had multiple
escape routes, natural shielding, seclusion within a
populated area, that kind of thing. But it wasn't easy to
try to think like a renegade scientist, mostly because I
wasn't a scientist and Spock wasn't a renegade.
Scanner, meanwhile, bided his time watching the
readouts of the planet while we quietly orbited. Nor-
mal fluxes of magnetic and heat energy that heave and
sigh as a planet turns were enough to keep him satis-
fied. Come to think of it (which until then I hadn't) I'd
never known Scanner to ask for more to do. So he had
a hobby, and thus took his place as the least of my
worries.
Only when Scanner suddenly stopped humming one
of his obscure collection of folk songs and leaned
forward did I realize how long we'd gone without
uttering a word. His abrupt motion drew both Spock's
attention and mine. Scanner's nose was almost touch-
ing his readout monitor. "What the blue peepin' hell is
that?"
Spock turned in his chair. "Mr. Sandage?"
Scanner blinked, shook his head, grimaced, then
shrugged. "Sir... I've never seen a wave like this
before."
Spock keyed in his own viewscreen, giving us both a
split-second glance at the computer's simulation of
jagged waves streaking upward from a small portion of
the planet's surface. The glance lasted only an instant
thanks to Spock. He vaulted sideways, diving for
Scanner's navigational controls, long fingers dancing
over the board. His shoulder struck the chair, sending
Scanner tumbling onto the deck. Just before Scanner
would have struck the port bulkhead, the ship around
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us tilted violently away from the planet, yanking free
of our orbit.
The engines groaned and wheezed. The artificial
gravity lost its center of balance, giving our individual
weights to the centrifugal force that sent us crashing
into the starboard bulkheads. Scanner was thrown the
whole width of the cabin space, and the side of his
head hit the emergency door handle as he slammed
hard into the bulkhead between McCoy and Merete.
I clawed at one of the passenger chairs, but couldn't
hold on. I felt myself being sucked starboard. My
shoulder hit the rim of the viewing portal and my own
weight crushed me against Merete, who was trapped
between my legs and the bulkhead. Dr. McCoy strug-
gled against the crushing pressure to slip his hand
under Scanner's bleeding head, but that was the best
he could do.
Banana Republic's engines sounded like one of
those old freight-train locomotives trying to drag an
overload. Spock was still somehow holding himself to
the control board, his cape flying across his shoulders,
flapping toward the starboard side. Pure determination
kept him clinging there as the ship wrenched herself
and the attached shuttle out of orbit in a whine of
strain.
My eyes watered. I forced them to stay open, trying
to understand why Spock had inflicted such danger
upon us. Just as the pressure began to slacken and the
ship's gravity to regain control, a shock wave hit us.
It came from outside, down there. I felt its alienness
with an almost psychic intensity and knew that it
hadn't come from my ship. Nausea fluttered through
me as wave upon wave rocked us--but these weren't
just waves of energy. With them came distortion.
Detachment from reality. Before my eyes the walls of
the ship stretched and yawned, even faded to show
stars of the wrong colors and placement. My arms
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changed length, shape... then reality settled again,
for an instant. Then another wave.
A hull seam somewhere on Rex's outer skin sud-
denly ruptured. Loud hissing filled the cabin as the air
spat out into space, then a sucking sound replaced it as
the automatic sealants went to work. The ship, at
/>
least, was trying to take care of itself. But for us, the
fabric of consciousness was fraying.
Between each wave was a moment of unsettling
reality, as though the reality was the dream between
waking times. Power waves, maybe. Dimensional tam-
pering. Whatever it was, I hated it.
My nervous system buzzed. Everything in my body
felt out of sync---heartbeat, breathing, everything--I
lost count of the energy waves wracking us as we
drifted just out of orbital distance. Even this far out,
the waves shuddered through us, horridly potent.
Through my sluggish mind came the realization that
Spock had just saved our lives by getting us out of
direct contact with the power waves.
Finally the last wave grumbled through Rex's shell,
passed through our vibrating bodies, and passed out
into space. We held our breaths, waiting for another
wave, but no more came. I pushed myself off the
bulkhead to Spock's side.
"What happened? What did they do?"
Spock straightened, then immediately bent over the
readout screen. He was ominously silent.
, McCoy knelt beside Scanner, helping him to sit up.
"What did who do?"
"Mornay and the others," I said. "Nobody else on
Argelius could create that kind of power emanation."
"Quite right," Spock confirmed. In a move particu-
larly human, he looked over the computer readout
screen and gazed through the big main portal at the
serene planet, almost as though he only partially
trusted the computer. He tapped the controls to test
them, then asked, "Commander, I suggest we veer
back into orbit."
I paused. "Sir, you're senior officer on board."
"Yes," he said, "but you misunderstand the nature
of the conditions under which this ship was commis-
sioned for you. Captain Kirk arranged a special prior-
ity command for this transport. No one, regardless of
rank, can supersede your authority on this vessel."
My expression carried an unmistakable "you're kid-
ding," but I forced myself not to say it. After a
moment, I collected myself and asked, "What if I was
killed?"
He tilted his head. "Obviously, the senior officer
would have no choice but to take over. That officer
would be authorized to command the ship, but not the
mission. The ship itself is considered expendable.
Your presence on this mission, however, is not. Shall I
attain orbit?"
Dulled by his words and by his sense of courtesy, I
simply nodded. I was about to ask again what had
happened to us, when Scanner moaned and drew my
attention. McCoy was probing the head wound while
Merete ran a Feinberger over Scanner for vital signs.
I crossed the deck and knelt beside them. "Got
bonked, huh?" I uttered sympathetically.
Scanner leaned his head back against the bulkhead
as McCoy tended the swollen spot on his temple and
dabbed at the blood. Though pale and disoriented,
Scanner gave me a best-effort shrug. "I guess I'!1 just
sit on the floor from now on. I keep endin' up down
here anyhow. What kinda high-intensity flush was
that? I never saw nothin' like that."
"It disrupted our autonomic nervous systems," Mc-
Coy said. "And if I'm not mistaken, attacked the brain
thalamus too."
"It didn't seem real," Merete commented, still
tensely running the Feinberger over Scanner. "No
94 95
concussion," she said to McCoy. "Dural contusion,
and very slight subdural bleeding."
"I hope all that means 'headache,'" Scanner
grumbled.
"Orbital status," Spock reported. He continued
contemplating the planet below us, one hand still
resting on the controls.
"Mr. Spock?"
"Commander?"
"Was it... unreality?"
"Perhaps," he said. "A crude description, but appli-
cable." He leaned forward, puzzling over the readouts
as they flashed before him. The ship's new computers
were still waffling on what to tell him. Tensely then,
Spock straightened. "It was the transwarp antimatter
flux," he said.
Evidently that announcement, coupled with the dis-
tortions we'd felt during the attack, meant more to
McCoy than to the rest of us. Or maybe he simply read
something in Spock's tone that we hadn't yet learned
to hear. "You mean they're down there tampering with
the fabric of reality?" he said.
Scanner moved his legs gingerly and commented.
"Reality's gonna have stretch marks."
Spock nodded thoughtfully. "I know comparatively
little about the transwarp flux pattern," he said.
"However, I do know that the energy requires sophis-
ticated housing in order to be safe. I believe we have
just experienced the result of an accident."
Stiff and cold, I murmured. "They must be trying to
build it!"
Spock looked at me. The eyebrow went up in stern
punctuation. "Undoubtedly."
"But they can't possibly have the right facilities on
Argelius," McCoy said. "Not for something like
that?'
"Why would they want to actually build a transwarp
device?" Merete asked.
96
I clenched my fists and answered, "To raise their
advantage. Now they not only have the technology,
but they have the threat." I turned to Spock. "Unless
the accident..."
Spock returned my stare, only to finally break it
with a deep sigh. "Such contained antimatter power,
engaged in a flux of that magnitude, could theoretically
have obliterated the entire planet had it not somehow
been focused out into space."
"Including whatever Mornay is using as a labora-
tory," I said. I didn't mean to sound accusative, as
though I might be blaming him in my rush of irrational
human concerns, but I couldn't help it. "It could've
taken the whole lab with it, couldn't it? They could all
be dead. Couldn't they?"
He saw the intensity of that thought tighten my face
and knew what it meant to me that Sarda might already
be dead, that all hopes to rescue him from a tangled
situation might be nothing more than useless risks.
Declining to give me the silly Vulcan statement that,
yes, they could be, he pressed his lips together and
lowered his eyes, assessing his long experience with
humans and the honesty it had shown him how to use.
He gave me the answer no other Vulcan might even
have had the courage to
"I don't know."
It was a long time ago. Maybe it wasn't really so
long ago, when the shadows of memory start to fold
with time. Like warp drive--a thought, and you're
there.
The planetoid was hairy with jungle and brush.
Inside that foliage lurked unspeakable danger. Ene-
mies. Enemies who knew us, knew what we had and
what we were capable of. We neede
d an advantage.
Something they didn't know about.
I felt Sarda beside me, looking over my shoulder
through a hole in the heavy ferns. We watched as a
97
pair of our enemies passed through the ravine below,
too far away for our weapons to be of any use. These
mock phasers were only good at a distance of ten
meters. We needed that extra advantage if we were
going to survive.
"Any ideas?" I asked, crouching low.
Sarda crouched also, keeping his head down. His
light, brassy hair stood out too clearly amid the green-
ery, and he was careful not to let it give away our
position. "We are all equally armed and provisioned.
If you and I are to gain some advantage, it will not be
through our possessions. We must find some way to
pool our knowledge. Our particular talents are the
only things we have that they do not also have." I sighed. "All right. What have we got?"
His amber eyes lost their focus for a moment as he
analyzed us. Sarda and I had known each other all the
way through Academy, but not particularly well. A
greeting-in-the-corridor sort of association, along with
a couple of terms as lab partners. And now we had
been chosen as a team, pitted against the best of Star
Fleet Academy. Even knowing each other better
would have been an advantage, but we didn't have it to
call upon. We had no idea then that the future would
weld us together with a bond of ordeals.
And this would be the first. Contrary to belief, truly
enduring friendships are founded not on time, but on
trial. Lasting relationships have to be forged, not
simply discovered. We had no idea that this would be
our first trial, this random pairing off for the Senior
Field Endurance Maneuvers.
It was an exclusive privilege to be recommended for
these maneuvers. With only reserved amusement and
even a little contempt, upperclassmen referred to
these as "Outlast" games, and intimately as "the
Outlast." That was the purpose, after all, to outlast the
other teams. Not easy. These opponents of ours were
the cream of Star Fieet's crop. Each participant had to
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be not only recommended, but actually sponsored by a
ranking member of the Academy faculty. We not only