A security guard lounged at the front desk. Spock made no comment when she quickly put aside her pocket computer; he had no interest in her activities on duty, whether it was to read some fictional nonsense of the sort humans spent so much time with, or to game with the machine.
“Can I help you?”
“I am Spock, first officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise. I have come to interview Dr. Georges Mordreaux before we take him on board.”
She frowned. “Mordreaux ... ? The name sounds familiar but I don’t think we’ve got him here.” She glanced at the reception sensor and directed her voice toward it. “Is Georges Mordreaux in detention?”
“No such inmate,” the sensor said.
“Sorry,” the guard said. “I didn’t think we had anybody scheduled to go offstation. Just the usual collection of rowdies. Payday was yesterday.”
“Some error has been made,” Spock said. “Dr. Mordreaux’s trial tapes are not available from public records. Perhaps he is here but the documents have been lost.”
“I remember where I heard that name!” she said. “They arrested him for murder. But his lawyer invoked the privacy act so they shut down coverage. She was pleading insanity for him.”
“Then he is here.”
“No, if that’s how he was convicted he wouldn’t be here, he’d be at the hospital. But you can look for him if you like.” She gestured toward the bank of screens, one per cell, which gave her an overview of the entire jail wing. Spock saw no one who resembled his former teacher, so he took the guard’s advice and went looking at the hospital instead.
“Sure, he’s here,” the duty attendant said in response to Spock’s query. “But you’ll have a hard time interviewing him.”
“What is the difficulty?”
“Severe depression. They’ve got him on therapy but they haven’t got the dosage right yet. He’s not very coherent.”
“I wish to speak with him,” Spock said.
“I guess that’s okay. Try not to upset him, though.” The attendant verified Spock’s identity, then led him down the hall and unlocked the door. “I’ll keep an eye on the screen,” he said.
“That is unnecessary.”
“Maybe, but it’s my job.” He let Spock go inside.
The hospital cell looked like an inexpensive room at a medium-priced hotel on an out-of-the-way world. It had a bed, armchairs, meals dispenser, even a terminal, though on the latter the control keyboard was limited to the simplest commands for entertainment and information. Mordreaux’s jailers were taking no chances that he could work his way into the city’s computer programs and use his knowledge to free himself.
The professor lay on the bed, his arms by his sides and his eyes wide open. He was a man of medium height, and he was still spare; he still let his hair grow in a rumpled halo, but it had grayed. His luminous brown eyes no longer glowed with the excitement of discovery; now they revealed distress and despair.
“Dr. Mordreaux?”
The professor did not answer; he did not even blink.
Stress-induced catatonia? Spock wondered. Meditative trance? No, of course it must be the drugs.
Spock had done some of his advanced work in physics at the Makropyrios, one of the finest universities in the Federation. Dr. Mordreaux was a research professor there, but every year he taught a single very small and very concentrated seminar. The year Spock attended, Dr. Mordreaux accepted only fifteen students, and he stretched and challenged them all, even Spock, to their limits.
Dr. Mordreaux had early reached a pinnacle in his career, and what was more remained there; his papers frequently stunned his colleagues, and honors befell him with monotonous regularity.
“Professor Mordreaux, I must speak with you.”
For a long time Dr. Mordreaux did not reply, but, finally, he made a harsh, ugly noise that took Spock several seconds to identify as a laugh. He remembered Dr. Mordreaux’s laugh, from years ago: it had been full of pleasure and delight; it was almost enough to make a young Vulcan try to understand both humor and joy.
Like so much else, it had changed.
“Why did you come to Aleph Prime, Mr. Spock?”
Dr. Mordreaux pressed his hands flat against the bed and pushed himself to a sitting position.
“I did not think you would remember me, Professor.”
“I remember you.”
“The ship on which I serve was called to take you on board.”
Spock stopped, for large tears began to flow slowly down Dr. Mordreaux’s cheeks.
“To take me to prison,” he said. “To rehabilitate me.”
“What happened, Professor? I find the accusations against you unlikely at best.”
Mordreaux lay down on the bed again, curling up in fetal position, crying and laughing the strange harsh laugh, both at the same time.
“Go away,” he said. “Go away and leave me alone, I’ve told you before I only wanted to help people, I only did what they wanted.”
“Professor,” Spock said, “I have come here to try to help you. Please cooperate with me.”
“You want to betray me, like everybody else, you want to betray me, and you want me to betray my friends. I won’t, I tell you! Go away!”
The door slid open and the attendant hurried in. “The doctor’s on the way,” he said. “You’ll have to leave. I told you he wouldn’t be coherent.” He shooed Spock out of the room.
Spock did not protest, for he could do nothing more here. He left the hospital, carefully considering what the professor had said. It contained little enough information, but what was that about betraying his friends? Could it possibly be true that he had done research on intelligent subjects, and that they had been hurt, or even died? In his madness, could the professor be denying, in his own mind, events that had actually happened? What could he mean, he had only intended to help people?
Spock had no answers. He would have to wait until Dr. Mordreaux came on board the Enterprise; he would have to hope the professor became more rational before it was too late.
The science officer drew out his communicator, then changed his mind about returning to the ship immediately. No logical reason demanded that this trip to Aleph Prime be completely wasted. He put his communicator away again and headed toward another part of the station.
As Jim Kirk prepared to call the Enterprise, the paging signal went off so unexpectedly that he nearly dropped his communicator.
“Good timing,” he said to Hunter with a grin. “And they’ve let me alone all afternoon, I’ll give them that.”
Hunter tensed automatically. Aerfen did not call her, when she was off the ship, except in a serious emergency: virtually everyone in her crew was capable of taking over when she was not there. She had made sure of that, for Aerfen’s assignments left it exposed to the possibility of stunning casualties at any time. Hunter was always, on some level, aware of that fact, and, by extension, of her own mortality. For the good of her ship, she could not afford to be indispensable. She was secure enough in her ability to command to give all her people more responsibility than was strictly essential, or even strictly allowed. The last time Starfleet called her on the carpet, it was for teaching a new ensign, with talent but without the proper formal training credentials, how to pilot Aerfen in warp drive.
As a result, Hunter’s communicator seldom signalled for her when she was planetside; hearing Jim’s go off she unconsciously assumed the call was an emergency. He might need help: her reflexes prepared her for action.
“Kirk here,” he said.
Hunter remembered the first time they had met.
He was so spit-and-polish, she thought, and I—I practically still had dust between my toes.
They had regarded each other with equal disdain.
“Captain,” said a voice from Jim’s communicator, “I have some equipment for the Enterprise, but your signature is required before I may beam it on board.”
“What kind of equipment, Mr. Spock?”
“Bio
electronic, sir.”
“What for?”
“To incorporate into the apparatus for the singularity observations.”
“Oh,” Kirk said. “All right. Where are you?”
“At the crystal growth station in the zero-g section of Aleph Prime.”
“You really need me there right now, Spock?”
“It is quite important, Captain.”
Jim glanced at Hunter and grimaced. She shrugged, with understanding, and let herself relax again. No emergency.
“All right, Mr. Spock. I’ll meet you there in a few minutes.” He closed his communicator. “I’m sorry,” he said to Hunter. “Spock worked so hard on those blasted observations, just to have them jerked out from under him. The least I can do is humor him if he wants to put in more equipment.”
“I understand,” she said. “There’s no problem.”
“This shouldn’t take me too long ...”
“Jim, it’s okay,” she said. “I’ll go on up to Aerfen and take care of a couple of things, then beam directly over to the Enterprise.”
“All right,” he said. “I’ll see you there in a little while.”
She gave him directions for getting to where he was going—Aleph’s volumetric spherical grid pattern was not nearly as straightforward as it sounded; besides, she knew a good shortcut—and watched him walk away across the field.
Hunter took out her communicator. “Hunter to Aerfen. Please beam me up, Ilya.”
Waiting for the beam to track her, Hunter thought back over the afternoon. She was glad to see Jim Kirk again, though, as always, a bit surprised that their friendship endured despite their differences, differences that had been obvious from the moment of their acquaintance in the same first-year platoon at the Academy. Jim Kirk was a star student, fitting in with that cosmopolitan homeworld flair; Hunter was in trouble even before she arrived, a colonist with proud, prickly, defensive arrogance, who went by a single name and refused to record any other.
Their commander, a senior-class student (whose name mutated instantly from Friendly, which was ridiculous, to Frenzy, which made a certain amount of sense), took exception to her family’s tradition of names, and, even more, to the feather Hunter always wore in her hair. By freedom of religion she was entitled to it, but he ordered her to remove it. She refused; he charged her with being out of uniform and with showing contempt for a superior officer.
She had been tempted to plead guilty to the second accusation.
Lawyers were not a custom among Hunter’s people, and she did not intend to involve anyone else in her difficulties with the hierarchy. But the court-martial would not convene without a defense counsel. To Hunter’s disgust, James T. Kirk volunteered.
Hunter had him firmly typed as the same sort of self-satisfied prig as the platoon commander; he upheld her judgment of him with the first words he spoke.
“I think you’re making a big mistake,” he said. “I think probably if you apologize to Frenzy he’ll cancel the trial.”
“Apologize! For what?”
He glanced at her braid of black hair, at the small blacktipped scarlet feather bound to its end. “Look,” he said, “if Frenzy adds lying to the charges, you’ll be finished.”
“Lying!” she shouted. She leapt out of her chair and faced him off across the table, pressing her hands flat on the surface so she would not clench them into fists.
“No one,” she said softly, “no one, in the entire world, in my entire life, has ever accused me of lying, and right now I need one good reason, very quick, not to throw you through the wall.”
He reached toward the feather. She pulled away, flinging her head back so the braid flipped over her shoulder.
“Don’t touch that!”
“I know you don’t believe I’m on your side,” he said. “But I am. I really am. I did some reading last night and I know what the feather is supposed to mean. It’s the last in a long series of tests that only a few people ever complete. I’m not saying you didn’t do it—but that feather isn’t the real thing. However important it is, it would be better to go without till you can get another real one, because if the board finds out you’ve made all this fuss over something that has in itself no intrinsic meaning, they’ll throw the book at you.”
Hunter frowned at him. “Wherever did you get the idea that it isn’t real?”
He pulled a text out of his briefcase, slid it into a reader, and keyed up a page. “There,” he said, pointing to a picture of a phoenix eagle gliding in the wind, so beautiful Hunter had to fight off a wave of homesickness. Jim Kirk’s forefinger touched the white tip of a wing feather. “And there.” He keyed up a photo of a young woman. Hunter blinked in surprise. It was her great-aunt, perfectly recognizable. She had been almost as elegant and dignified at that age as she had been well into her eighties, when Hunter first met her. Kirk touched the feather in the photograph: a long one, the span of a hand, with a white tip.
“You see what I mean,” he said, nodding toward Hunter’s feather, which, though red, was black-tipped, barely the length of her thumb, and far different in shape.
“Either you’ve got a crappy book, or you missed some spots,” she said. “Wearing one of the primaries just means the eagles have accepted you as a reasoning adult being.” She stabbed at the reader keyboard, brought back the first picture, and traced her finger along the eagle’s crest, which looked darker red through being formed of black-tipped plumage.
“What I wear is a crest feather. It means ... it’s too complicated to explain everything it means. The eagles accept me as a friend.”
Kirk looked at her. “One of the eagles gave you the feather?” He sounded rather stunned.
Hunter scowled again. “That’s right—good gods, what did you think it was? A trophy?” She was repelled by the idea of injuring one of the magnificent, totally alien, gentle, fierce beings. “They’re as intelligent as we are. Maybe more so.”
Kirk sat down slowly. “I think I understand now,” he said. “I apologize. I jumped to conclusions, and I was wrong. Will you accept my apology?”
Hunter nodded curtly. But her dislike began to ease, for she too had jumped to conclusions, and she too had been wrong.
The next day, at Hunter’s court-martial, the senior platoon commander slowly but surely and irrevocably destroyed his credibility with his superiors. Freedom of religion was a touchy subject with Starfleet. They were committed to it on a theoretical basis, but, practically, it was difficult to administer. Aside from the sheer number of belief systems, the rituals ranged from virtually nonexistent to thoroughly bizarre. So when a stiffnecked undergraduate with his first minor command proved himself guilty of harassing a pantheist whose disruption consisted of wearing a feather in her hair, they showed him very little sympathy at all.
Though she often could have got away with it, Hunter never claimed a religious exemption for her other nonconforming behavior. She succeeded in acting as she thought right, and as she wished, through a combination of fast moves, of giving not a damn about demerits, and of pure, solid, unimpeachable excellence in her performance.
She put aside old memories as she materialized on the transporter platform of her own ship. Her senior weapons officer nodded a greeting to her and tossed his long blond hair back off his forehead.
“Hi, Ilya,” Hunter said. “All quiet?”
“I have no complaints,” he said, in his clipped, controlled voice. But a moment later, when they passed the aft viewport, he added, “Except one.”
“What?”
“Hunter, I would like that damned monster ship off our tail. It makes me very nervous.”
Hunter glanced out the port at the Enterprise, orbiting behind and above them. She laughed. “Ilya Nikolaievich, they’re on our side.”
Chapter 2
Mr. Sulu was not above imagining himself truly commanding the Enterprise, not merely the random high-ranking officer of a crew of all of twenty people. Mandala Flynn had beamed down with the last fo
ur security officers, to honor her promise to buy their dinner. Sulu hoped he could join her later.
On the darkened bridge, he slid into the captain’s seat and gazed out the viewscreen. The Enterprise was oriented so that, with respect to the ship’s gravitational field, Aleph Prime loomed overhead, a huge shining Christmas tree ornament set spinning, to Sulu’s eyes, by the ship’s motion around it; and then, framed by space and multicolored stars, Aerfen hung suspended. Aerfen, Minerva, grey-eyed Athene, defending battle-goddess.
“ ‘In such likeness Pallas Athene swept flashing earthward,’ ” Sulu said aloud.
“Hunter to Enterprise, permission to beam aboard?”
Sulu started, feeling the blood rush to his face, but of course she could not have heard him quoting Homer aloud on the bridge of a starship, no one could have heard him; he was all alone.
“Enterprise, Sulu here, permission granted, of course, Captain.” Sulu called for someone to relieve him, on the double, and hurried to the transporter room.
Hunter glittered into reality. Sulu knew instinctively that she would despise effusion. When she stepped down from the platform, he took her outstretched hand and said his name in response to her own introduction. But he bowed to her as well, just slightly, perhaps a breach of Starfleet protocol, but a gesture of respect in his family’s traditions. She was not as tall as he expected—he had put her in his mind as some overwhelming demigod or giant, and he was rather relieved that her physical presence was not quite what he had imagined. Her hand was hard and firm, with traces of callus on the palm, and a long angry scar that led up the back of her hand and disappeared beneath her shirt cuff at the wrist. Her silver vest made her shoulders gleam, as if she wore armor.
STAR TREK: TOS #2 - The Entropy Effect Page 5