STAR TREK: TOS #2 - The Entropy Effect

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  Shouting incoherently, Jim Kirk sat up in his bunk. He clutched at his face: something was trying to get at his eyes—

  The lights rose gradually in response to his motion; he was in his cabin, in his ship, he was all right. It was nothing but a nightmare.

  He lay down again and rubbed his face with both hands. He was soaked with sweat. That was the most realistic dream he had had in a long time. The terrorism he had seen at the very beginning of his Starfleet career had haunted him for years, in dreams just like this one. A shadowy figure appeared, pointed a gun at him, and fired, then, as if he were two separate people, he watched himself die and felt himself die as a spiderweb slowly infiltrated his brain. The dream always ended as silver-gray death clouded his hazel eyes.

  He rubbed his chest, right over the breastbone, where the bullet had entered, in this dream. “Could at least have killed me instantly,” he said aloud, reaching very far for even bitter humor, and failing to grasp any.

  The dream before the nightmare, though, that was different. It was another dream he had not had for a long time: he had dreamed of Hunter. He tried not even to think of her, most of the time. He had so nearly destroyed their friendship with his immaturity; he had certainly destroyed their intimacy.

  Why don’t you grow up, Jim? he thought. Your dreams don’t just come along to entertain you, they’re there to give you good advice. You’ve been warned of your mortality, though if you’re lucky you’ll have a better death than that one. But you are mortal—and so is she. She’s in more danger than you are, more of the time: what if something happens to her and you’ve never told her how you feel, or at least that you know you were a damned fool?

  He ordered the lights out again and lay in the darkness trying to get back to sleep. But he knew that in the morning he would not forget the dreams he had tonight.

  In her darkened cabin, Hunter looked up from the backlighted reading screen and shivered. Had she dozed off? She did not think so. She leaned back, stretched, rubbed her temples, and returned her attention to the reader. The paper it displayed was hard going, all these years past her formal physics training, but the work was bizarre enough to interest her. She had always thought Georges Mordreaux was a little crazy, and this work confirmed her suspicions. The fourth paper in a series of five, it had a publication date two years past. Hunter could find no reference to any succeeding monograph, to paper number five.

  She wondered what had happened to Mordreaux after he quit the Makropyrios in a fit of pique and bruised ego. He always signed his papers, but never added any location.

  Hunter felt too restless to concentrate on physics. She turned off the reader, folded it against the wall, and went up to the cockpit to prepare Aerfen for docking with Aleph Prime.

  Her crew needed replacements even worse than Aerfen needed fixing, but Starfleet had her request and had not yet deigned to answer. Every time Hunter ran into the bureaucracy, which she did more and more frequently the more responsibility she earned, she daydreamed about resigning. She could always join the free commandoes. Or just go home and stay for a while. She was not due for a sabbatical for two more years; the best she could hope for in the meantime was a few weeks home with her family, with her daughter; and a few days by herself, in the mountains, to renew her friendship with the phoenix eagle who had watched over her while she found her dream-name.

  Hunter shook her head. She could get hopelessly sentimental sometimes; if she got any more maudlin she would start thinking about Jim Kirk, and that would bring on a bad case of “if onlies.”

  If only he were a completely different person, Hunter thought. If only I were, too. Then it would have worked out perfectly.

  Strolling toward his office, Ian Braithewaite stopped and stuck his head into the office of Aleph Prime’s public defender.

  “Hi, Lee, how you feeling today?”

  “Better,” she said. “I must have started to get a bug, but it’s gone now.”

  “Good.”

  “Anything interesting coming up?” she asked. “I’m tired of pleading fines for drunken miners. Why don’t you turn up a good smuggling case?”

  “Don’t I wish,” he said.

  “Want to go for coffee later?”

  “Sure,” Ian said. “I’ll meet you after court.”

  He went on down the hall and to his office, to start in on his moderately heavy load of massively boring cases, day after day, always the same.

  Without a sound, without a motion, Mandala woke. She went from deep dreaming sleep to complete wakefulness in an instant. She felt cold, with the sweat of fear.

  Almost as quickly as she awakened, she remembered where she was: her own cabin, on the Enterprise, her new assignment. Not back in the patrol, not in the midst of a fire-fight. She rubbed the ache beneath the scar on her left shoulder. She must have strained the old break during a workout. She really should find time to regrow the bone. It was silly to put up with the discomfort. And this time the twinge of pain had prodded memory and brought on her nightmare.

  But it was just a nightmare. She had faced and overcome its dangers just as she had beaten other perils, real ones, and the struggle and victory had suffused her with a fierce joy.

  Hikaru slept peacefully beside her. The faint light gleamed on his shoulders. He lay face-down with his head pillowed on his arms, turned toward her. Yesterday, they had both realized they wanted, and needed, to spend as much time together as they could, even if he were soon to leave the Enterprise.

  He was so gentle ... Mandala did not like to think of him hardened by the violence he would encounter in his next assignment. But she could not say so to him. Her reasons were too selfish; and she would, in effect, be telling him to give up his ambitions.

  He might be strong enough to come through the experience unchanged. It was possible. But it was about as likely as his chances of advancing farther without making the transfer at all.

  She pushed away the depressing thoughts, for she still felt exhilarated by her dream. Her heart beat quickly; she was excited. She leaned down and kissed the point of Hikaru’s shoulder. She kissed the corner of his jaw, his ear, his temple. His eyes opened, closed, opened.

  He drew in a long breath. “I’m glad you woke me up.”

  “I’m glad you woke up.” She brushed her fingertips languorously up and down his back. He shivered.

  “You got me out of some nightmare,” he said.

  “Bad?”

  “It seems like it ... but I can’t remember anything about it, now.”

  She moved closer to him and put her arm around his shoulders, cuddling him. He hugged her tight, burying his face in her long loose hair, until he had shaken off the unease, and began to respond to her.

  She leaned over him, letting her hair fall down in a curtain around them. When it tickled his neck and shoulders, he smiled. She caressed him, drawing warm patterns with her fingers and cool ones with her ruby ring.

  “You are so beautiful,” Mandala said, and bent down to kiss him again before he could think of anything to say.

  Jenniver Aristeides and Snnanagfashtalli sat across from each other in the duty room, playing chess. They both preferred the classical two-dimensional board to the 3-D versions; it was somehow cleaner and less fussy, but it retained its infinite complexity.

  “At least if I ask Mandala Flynn for a transfer she won’t spit in my face,” Jenniver said.

  “No,” said Fashtall. “She is not like the other one, she is not the spitting type.”

  “It’s just that I have such a hard time getting anybody to believe I don’t like to pound people into the ground every chance I get.” Jenniver shrugged. “I guess I can’t blame them.”

  Fashtall raised her sleek head and gazed across the table at her, the pupils in her maroon eyes widening. “I believe,” she said. ‘They will not say they do not believe you, when I am around. And no one will spit in your face.”

  “He never actually did, you know,” Jenniver said mildly. “He couldn�
�t reach that far anyway.”

  “Mandala Flynn’s predecessor is gone,” Fashtall said. “And Mandala Flynn is our officer. If she does not give you a transfer to Botany, she will tell you a reason, at least. I do not think she will hold you in place longer than she must, if she knows you are unhappy.”

  “I’m scared to talk to her,” Jenniver said.

  “She will not hurt you. And you will not hurt her. Have you watched her, at judo? No ordinary human on the ship could defeat her, not even the captain.”

  “Could you?” Jenniver asked.

  Fashtall blinked at her. “I do not play fair, by those rules.”

  The Changeling laughed. Reflecting that Fashtall had far more sense of humor than anyone else gave her credit for, Jenniver moved her queen’s pawn.

  After a moment, Fashtall growled.

  Jenniver smiled. “You’re not even in check.”

  “I will soon be. Driven by a pawn!” She made another irritated noise. “You think a move farther ahead than I, friend Jenniver, and I envy you.”

  She suddenly turned, the spotted fur at the back of her neck rising, bristling.

  “What is it?”

  “Something fell. Someone. In the observatory.”

  Fashtall bounded out of the duty room on all fours, and Jenniver followed, running easily in the absurdly light gravity. She passed Fashtall and reached the observatory first.

  Mr. Spock stood swaying in the middle of the dimly-lit room, his eyes rolled back so far they showed nothing but white crescents, his hair disarrayed, blood running down the side of his face from a gash in his left temple, and, most strangely of all—once Jenniver noticed it—out of uniform, wearing a flowing, dark-brown tunic rather than his uniform shirt. She hurried toward him: her boot crunched on a shard that cracked like plastic. She hesitated, afraid as she often was that she had inadvertently damaged some fragile possession of the frail people around her. But the floor was littered with the amber fragments: whatever the damage was, it was not something she had caused.

  Spock’s knees buckled and Jenniver forgot the broken bits around her: she leaped forward and caught the science officer before he fell. She held him up. Fashtall rose on her hind legs and touched his forehead.

  “Fever,” she said. “High—much too high even for a Vulcan.”

  Spock raised his head. “My observations ...” he said. “Entropy ...” There was a wild, confused look in his eyes. “Captain Kirk—”

  “Fashtall, you go wake up Dr. McCoy. I’ll help Mr. Spock to sick bay.”

  Snnanagfashtalli’s white whiskers bristled out: a gesture of agreement. She sprang over the broken instrument and disappeared into the corridor.

  “I am all right,” Spock said.

  “You’re bleeding, Mr. Spock.”

  He put his hand to his temple; his fingers came away wet with blood. Then he looked at his sleeve, brown silk, not blue velour.

  “Let me take you to sick bay,” she said. “Please.”

  “I am not in need of assistance!”

  She thought she was being cruel but she could not think of anything else to do but obey him. She was supporting most of his weight: she let him go, as slowly as she dared so he would have as much chance as she could give him to keep his feet. But as she had feared, his legs would not support him. He collapsed again, and again she kept him from falling.

  She looked at the wall across the room, not meeting his eyes: if she pretended she had not noticed, perhaps he could pretend she had not seen.

  “I am going to sick bay,” she said. “Will you come with me?”

  “Ensign Aristeides,” he said softly, “my pride does not require quite so much protection. I would be grateful for your help.”

  Leonard McCoy paced back and forth in his office, wondering what he had done to deserve such insomnia. The inexplicable period of unconsciousness in the transporter room, whatever that was all about, had done nothing to alleviate his tiredness; it only made it worse. And it made him worry about it more. He felt as if he had gone on a binge such as he had not indulged in since he was a peach-fuzzed undergraduate, despite his reputation—and his pose—as a hard drinker of the old southern school. But he had not had anything stronger than coffee—and precious little of that since he had begun having trouble sleeping—since coffee and brandy at the officers’ reception for Mandala Flynn: hardly an indulgence to come back and haunt him two months later.

  “Dr. McCoy!” Snnanagfashtalli rose up gracefully on her hind legs from the running position. “Mr. Spock is ill. Fever, at least three degrees Centigrade—”

  “He always has a fever of at least three degrees Centigrade.”

  “As do I,” Snarl said, flattening her ears. “In human terms.”

  Snarl was not a being to trade witticisms with; McCoy grew very serious very quickly.

  “Where is he?”

  “He remained conscious, so Ensign Aristeides is helping him to sick bay.”

  “Good. Thank you.” McCoy felt relieved when Snarl pricked up her tufted ears again.

  Jenniver Aristeides strode in, carrying Spock. The Vulcan lay unconscious in her arms, his long hands limp, his head thrown back. Every few seconds a drop of blood spattered on the floor.

  “He passed out just a minute ago.” Though the ensign loomed head and shoulders over McCoy, she spoke hesitantly. “I thought it was better to bring him than wait for a stretcher.”

  “You showed good judgment.” McCoy sighed. “I was afraid of this, he’s worked himself right into a fit of the vapors.”

  Epilogue

  Jim Kirk sat by Spock’s bedside, turning the strangely shaped bit of broken equipment over and over in his hands. He had never seen anything remotely like it before and he could not figure out what it was—or what it had been. This was the only piece large enough to inspect; the other shattered fragments lay jumbled together in a box nearby.

  McCoy came in and sat down, rubbing his eyes tiredly.

  “Bones,” Jim said, “I’ll call you when he starts to wake up. Why don’t you go get some sleep?”

  “That’s just the trouble, I’ve been trying,” McCoy said. “Whatever Spock did to himself so he wouldn’t need sleep, I think he gave it to me, too.”

  Jim rubbed his fingertip along the smooth curved amber surface, stopping at a broken edge.

  “I’ve felt uneasy for the last couple of days,” McCoy said. “As if something awful is about to happen, and I can’t do anything about it. Or it’s already happened, and I don’t even know about it.”

  Kirk grinned. “You’ve only felt it for a couple of days? I’ve been like that since we got within grabbing distance of that damned singularity.” He glanced at Spock, who had not moved at all since Kirk had come into the room. “Is he going to be all right, Bones?”

  “I think so.”

  “Aren’t you certain?” Kirk asked, startled, for he had only asked the question to get a reassuring answer.

  “I’m reasonably certain,” McCoy said, “but I don’t see how he got himself into this state to begin with. I’ve been expecting somebody to have to cart him in here with exhaustion for days—”

  “You knew he was going without sleep—”

  “Yeah.”

  “—and you didn’t tell me?”

  “What would you have done? Forbade it?” McCoy grinned. “I didn’t tell you because of medical ethics. Doctor-patient confidentiality. Not wanting to get my head bitten off by my captain.”

  “All right, all right. But what’s wrong with him, if it isn’t exhaustion?”

  “It is exhaustion, but it’s the sort I’d expect if he’d been through tremendous physical exertion. A couple of Vulcan marathons, say—a hundred kilometres through the desert. The scalp wound is completely inexplicable. He didn’t get it when he fell—he reopened a graze that was already partly healed. And it was patched with hybrid skin synthetic. Spock knew I made some to match his genotype. He could have used it himself. Only he didn’t; the packet was stil
l in storage, unopened.” He stopped, and shrugged. “Shall I go on?”

  “No. I can do that myself. He was out of uniform—I’ve never seen him out of uniform on the ship. And—” He hefted the weird piece of equipment—“this is nothing I’ve ever seen before. Scotty doesn’t know what it does. It’s mostly bioelectronics, which are so new they’re hard to come by. I’ve never signed a requisition for them, and there’s no record that we ever brought any on board the ship.”

  Mr. Spock, his awareness rising slowly through the depths of sleep, gradually became aware of the voices around him. They were discussing him, but as yet he could make no sense of the individual words. He tried to concentrate.

  “Something very strange is going on,” Jim Kirk said. “Something I don’t understand. And I don’t like that at all.”

  “Jim!” Spock sat up so quickly that every muscle and joint and sinew shrieked: he was aware of the sensation but impervious to it, as he should be, but for all the wrong reasons. He grabbed Jim Kirk’s arm. It was solid and real. Relief, and, yes, joy, overwhelmed the Vulcan. He slid his hand up Jim’s arm; he started to reach up to him, to lay his hand along the side of his face to feel the unsettling energy of Jim’s undamaged mind.

  He pulled back abruptly, shocked by his own impulses; he turned away, toward the wall, struggling to control himself.

  “Spock, what’s wrong? Bones—”

  “Well, you wanted him to wake up,” McCoy said drily.

  “Nothing is wrong, Captain,” Spock said. He eased himself back down onto the bunk. His voice was steady enough not to reveal that he was on the brink of laughter, of tears. “I am merely ... very glad to see you.”

  “I’m glad to see you, too.” Kirk’s expression was quizzical. “You’ve been out quite a while.”

  “How long, Captain?” Spock asked urgently.

  “A couple of hours. Why?”

  Spock relaxed. “Because, sir, the singularity is in the process of converting itself into a very small black hole, what you would call, in Earth tradition, a Hawking black hole. When the conversion is complete, the system will explode.”