McCoy shook his head, as if flinging away Spock’s words without even trying to understand them. “We’d save Jim’s life.”
“We would do more damage than we would repair.”
“We’ve done it before! We did it to help other people—why can’t we do it to help a friend?”
“Dr. McCoy ... the other times we were forced to interfere with the flow of events—and we did not always help other people—we did it to return the continuum to its line of maximum probability. Not to divert it.”
“So what?”
“We did it to prevent the future’s being changed. This time, if we change the past, we change the future
as well.”
“But that was the future that had already occurred. We were living in it. For us now the future hasn’t happened yet.”
“That is what the people whose lives we affected in the past would have said to us.”
“You’re saying that the future is irrevocably set—that nothing we do makes any difference because it can’t make a difference.”
“I am saying no such thing. I am saying there are tracks of maximum probability that cannot be stopped and restarted again at will. To do so would cause a discontinuity—a kind of singularity, if you like, no different in effect and in destructive potential from the singularity we orbited only a few days ago. It could drag us to our destruction. Is that what you wish for the future?”
“Right now I don’t care about the future! We’re living in the present. What difference does it make if something we do now changes it, or something we do a few hours ago?” McCoy frowned, trying, failing, to sort out his verb tenses.
“It makes a difference. That is implicit in every theory put forth about the workings of time, from the Vulcan extrapolations of a millennium ago to the extensions of general relativity in Earth’s twenty-first century all the way through even to Dr. Mordreaux’s last published work.”
McCoy stared at him. “Mordreaux! You’re citing his work to prove we can’t undo the crime he committed!”
“In effect, that is true.”
McCoy lurched to his feet. “To hell with you. You’re not the only one on this ship who knows about the whiplash effect. I’m going to find Scotty and—”
Spock halted him with one hand on his shoulder, and McCoy felt a chill down his spine as Spock pressed gently on the nerve at the junction of his neck and shoulder.
“I do not wish to incapacitate you, Dr. McCoy. In your condition it would endanger you. But I will if I am forced to.”
“You can’t keep me unconscious or locked up forever—”
“No. I cannot.”
“So how do you think you’re going to stop me?”
“I will confine you to quarters tonight if necessary. I cannot overemphasize the danger of what you are contemplating.”
“And after tonight?”
“I hope that in the morning you will be more receptive to reasoning.”
“Don’t count on it.” “Dr. McCoy, I forbid you to pursue this course of action.”
McCoy spun around and turned on Spock in a fury.
“And you think you can command me, now, do you? Because you’re the captain? You’ll never be the captain of this ship!” His voice was a whiskey-hoarse shout, and only anger kept him from collapse.
Spock took a step backward, then recovered his poise.
“Dr. McCoy, I ask you to give me your word as a Starfleet officer that tonight you will not carry out the action you have threatened.” Spock left his own threat unspoken.
McCoy glared at him, then relaxed suddenly and shrugged. “Sure. I won’t do anything tonight. I give you my word. What do I care?” He laughed, a sound like tortured steel. “I have all the time in the world!” He turned around and wandered out into sick bay. “What happened to my bottle?”
Lieutenant Uhura sat at her station on the bridge, ready to scream.
LieutenantUhura, she told herself. Remember that. Keep remembering that.
She knew perfectly well that she would neither scream nor find something to throw at Pavel Chekov, though she wished she could do both. As the strain of the last few hours increased, the excitable Russian distracted himself by alternating incomprehensible mutters in his native language with whistles so tuneless that he must not even be aware of what he was doing. Uhura had perfect pitch; Chekov whistled flat. To Uhura the sound was like the constant scratching of fingernails down blackboards.
Uhura knew, too, that her irritation over Chekov’s nervous habits was her own attempt to stop worrying about the captain. Dr. McCoy had issued no bulletin on his condition since immediately after surgery, and that was hours ago. She did not know whether to treat the silence as a hopeful sign, or a sinister one.
It was not so much that Chekov whistled half a phrase of a tune over and over again, or even that he whistled it in the wrong key for the mood of the piece, but that the longer he continued, the flatter his notes became.
Spock had not returned, and Uhura had heard nothing of him over the ship’s communicator circuits since he left the bridge. Nor had she heard anything of Mandala Flynn. She must be in sick bay, for Beranardi al Auriga was coordinating the search for an accomplice of the attacker.
Uhura shivered. Spiderweb was little more than a rumor to her; she was from Earth, where there had been no terrorism in decades. She knew what spiderweb was supposed to do; still, she assumed the reports were exaggerated. Captain Kirk and Mandala Flynn were both down in sick bay, perhaps seriously hurt, but they would recover. Uhura was certain of it. After all, Mandala had walked out of here under her own power, so she could hardly be critically wounded.
Pavel hit a particularly off-key note and Uhura glared down at him in annoyance.
The turbo lift doors opened. Pavel stopped whistling.
Mr. Spock walked onto the bridge, and Uhura knew immediately, with an overwhelming wave of despair, that everything had gone terribly wrong.
Without a word, Spock stepped down to the lower level of the bridge. He stopped for a moment, and then he sat in the captain’s seat.
Uhura clenched her long fingers. She had an irrational urge to leap up and run from her post, to a place where she would not have to hear what Mr. Spock was about to say.
But Spock had opened the emergency paging circuits: when he spoke, everyone on the Enterprise would hear him. There was nowhere to run. Pavel had turned around: he too sensed disaster and his face had paled to a sickly shade.
The silence and the tension increased.
Spock closed his hooded eyes, opened them again, and gazed straight ahead.
“This is Commander Spock.”
He hardly ever refers to himself by his rank, Uhura thought, only by his position, science officer, first officer—
“It is my duty to tell you that a few minutes ago, James T. Kirk, captain of the U.S.S.Enterprise , died. He was injured beyond hope. He did not regain consciousness after he was taken from the bridge. He experienced no further pain.”
Uhura withdrew as far as she could into her own mind, letting the words slide over her consciousness and skid across the slick shiny surface she put up to protect her from the hurt. The realization would have to sink in slowly; for now, she could not accept it.
“In attempting to defend the captain, Commander of Security Mandala Flynn was mortally wounded.
She died in the performance of her duty.
“The suspect in the murders is in custody. No concrete evidence of an accomplice has been discovered.”
Spock paused, as if searching for some unfamiliar word of comfort to offer to the crew. He failed to find any. He shut off the circuits; the switch made a decisive snap.
“The captain—is dead?” Pavel Chekov spoke in a low and unbelieving tone.
“Yes, Mr. Chekov.”
“But—what will we do?”
“We will proceed with our mission,” Spock said. “Lieutenant Uhura—”
She looked at him blankly, and replied, finally
, as if she had to travel a very long distance just to hear him. “Yes, Mr. Spock?”
“Notify Starfleet of what has happened ... and the civilian authorities. Mr. al Auriga will undoubtedly wish to take all our statements within the next few hours. We must all do our best to report accurately
what occurred.”
“Yes, sir,” Uhura said dully.
Sulu crept quietly into the minuscule cabin he shared with the senior weapons officer, Ilya Nikolaievich. The cabin was half the size of his private quarters in the Enterprise . Perhaps eventually he would find sharing a room unpleasant, but right now his excitement at being on Aerfen was impenetrable. Besides, during normal times, when they were on patrol, he and Ilya Nikolaievich would be on watch at different hours and each would have the room to himself for at least a while each day.
Sulu had not felt so good, nor so tired, in years. He had worked for eighteen hours with hardly a break, refamiliarizing himself with the weaponry carried by Aerfen and its sibling ships, weapons that depended on precision and finesse rather than brute force, as did those of the Enterprise . He was pleased with his first set of practice scores, but nowhere near satisfied, and he would not be happy till he met or exceeded the scores of the ship’s two other weapons officers. The rivalry was a friendly one, but it was rivalry nonetheless.
Ilya slept as peacefully as a child. When he was awake his square-jawed sculptured face held hints of suspicion, watchfulness, and even cruelty. He demonstrated procedures to Sulu efficiently, straightforwardly, and neutrally, showing neither resentment of his new colleague nor enthusiasm for him. Other members of the crew called him Ilyushka, but as he did not invite Sulu to use the diminutive of his name, Sulu stayed carefully with the formal first name and patronymic. Sulu knew he would have to prove himself to everyone: to Hunter, of course, and maybe particularly to Ilya Nikolaievich.
Ilya was shorter than Sulu, but similar in build: compact and well-proportioned, slender but muscular.
His heavy straight blond hair fell across his forehead, nearly to his eyebrows, and below his collar in back. He reminded Sulu of Spock, he held himself in such tight control. He was no less somber now, asleep, then he had been earlier, but the tension had gone from his face. He was a human being: the only Vulcan in him, he had put deliberately into his character.
Sulu took off his shirt, then sat down to pull off his boots. They were rather tight and as the left one slid off, his hand slipped. The boot spiralled out of his grasp. He lunged forward to catch it knowing he could not, and winced as the clatter broke the silence of the ship.
Ilya leaped from his bunk, crouching, a knife glinting in his hand. Sulu froze, leaning down with one hand still stretched out toward his boot.
“Sorry,” he said, embarrassed, feeling the blood rise to his cheeks.
Ilya straightened up, scowling, and lowered the knife.
“Never mind,” he said. “I should have warned you. I spent two years behind the lines during the Orion border skirmish.” He slipped his knife back under his pillow. “But please do not touch me when I am asleep, or come up behind me without warning. Do you understand? I react by reflex and I might hurt you.”
“I’ll remember,” Sulu said.
Ilya nodded. The high-collared thigh-length Russian tunic he wore gaped open above its loose sash, revealing a livid scar that ran down his chest and across his abdomen. Sulu could not help staring, and
Ilya noticed his gaze. He shrugged.
“A souvenir,” he said, got back into bed, and fell asleep without another word.
Sulu finished undressing and climbed into his own cramped bunk as quietly as he could. He stretched, and rubbed the back of his neck, and closed his eyes for a few moments. But he did not want to go to sleep yet. He pulled the reader away from the wall so it hung suspended over his lap. He had not even had time to program it to his voice, and besides it was bad manners to talk to a computer when someone else was trying to sleep in the same room. He used the keyboard to pull up the schematics for Aerfen .
He studied for several hours, memorizing the plans and making note of the differences between this ship and the others in the squadron.
While he read, he pushed Mandala’s ruby ring around and around on his finger, around and around. He missed her. He did not miss the Enterprise yet, and that astonished him. But, oh, he did miss Mandala Flynn. Things kept happening that he wanted to tell her about, he kept thinking, At her fencing lesson, or At my judo lesson, or When I see her later. .. and then remembering that at least for now those times, their times together, were over.
Finally, nearly twenty-four hours after he had come on board Captain Hunter’s ship, he fell deeply asleep, with the pale light of the reading screen shining in his face.
Commander Spock walked down the wide corridor of the ship that was, now, his. He was not an unambitious being, but his ambitions lay in other directions than commanding a ship crewed primarily by often incomprehensible human beings. McCoy was right: he was, in fact if not in name, the captain of the Enterprise . He would do the job as best he could for as long as he was forced to; he would transfer, as science officer, to another ship as soon as possible. It never entered his mind that he could stay on the Enterprise ; it did not even occur to him that staying on the Enterprise under another captain would be the most logical course of action. With the death of Jim Kirk, this part of Spock’s life as well had come to an end, and he saw no point in struggling to prolong it.
He tried to make out what had happened, and how, but failed completely. Every reasonable train of thought ended in paradox or impossibility. No evidence whatever of an accomplice had been found, nor did it appear possible that one could have gained access to the ship and subsequently escaped. In contradiction to this, Mordreaux could not have escaped from his cabin unassisted, yet apparently he had done so. The medical records on Jenniver Aristeides were peculiar. She had been so seriously ill that Spock rejected the possibility that she had freed Mordreaux, then taken poison to cover her guilt. But she could have been a conspirator who was betrayed. It seemed within the limits of possibility, if not probability.
The gun had not been found. Nor had it been disposed of: no anomalous amounts of any unusual element had been found in analyses of the recycling systems.
Had the mysterious accomplice, or even Dr. Mordreaux, somehow managed to get to an airlock before all exits from the ship were put under guard? The gun could then have been sucked away into space, and lost. Or perhaps it had been beamed off the Enterprise to no destination, so its subatomic particles were now spread irretrievably over a huge volume of space. That was beginning to look like the only possible conclusion. Yet Mordreaux himself had had no time to perform such a task: Spock could not even work out time enough for him to have done what he was seen to have done.
Spock was slowly coming to the reluctant conclusion that a crew member had arranged and perhaps
even performed the so far motiveless crime.
But could he trust his conclusions? He had the evidence of his own observations to prove Mordreaux committed the murder; but he had the evidence of his own observations and what should have been reasonable conclusions to make him believe Mordreaux was not a violent man: and that conclusion, too, appeared false.
Spock hoped Mordreaux had by now recovered. He needed to talk to the professor; he needed to know his perception of the events. Spock strode toward the V.I.P. stateroom.
What had happened on the Enterprise bore certain discomforting similarities to what Spock had discovered to be implicit in his observations of the naked singularity. The analysis had seemed to indicate that entropy was increasing far faster than it should; that, in fact, the very rate of increase was growing. Spock found the results extremely difficult to believe, so much so that if he had ever permitted himself to feel either relief or anger he would have been more relieved than enraged when the new orders halted his mission. He needed time to go over his observational apparatus again, to determine if the results
were merely an artifact.
The events on the Enterprise had that same disquieting aura of wrongness, of occurrences that should not, indeed could not, happen the way they appeared to.
Just as he could make no final determination on the entropy results without more data, he could not understand the events of the past hours without more information. Spock would observe, question, and investigate before he tried to draw more conclusions. Any other plan would be futile.
He would know what happened, and why; he would understand the cause.
The Vulcan language contained no word that corresponded to “coincidence.”
“Mr. Spock!”
Spock faced the cry. Snnanagfashtalli bounded down the corridor toward him, on all fours. Furred crew members were not expected to wear uniforms standard-issue for humanoids; Snarl wore a soft leather harness that carried Enterprise insignia, communicator, phaser attachment. She came to a silent, smooth halt, muscles rippling beneath maroon and scarlet spots. Her long thin fingers knuckled up in running form, and when she flexed her hands the claws extended.
“Please follow. There is great cause for apprehension.” Spock raised one eyebrow. Snarl spoke in fluent Vulcan, with barely a trace of accent, and none of the lisp that flawed her standard English. Vulcan sibilants were pronounced much differently.
“What is the matter?” He, too, spoke in Vulcan.
“Friend Jenniver. The illness has ... unsettled her mind. Disarray is in her, and around her, and she sees only one path to her honor.”
Spock saw no reason at all to believe Snarl did not understand exactly what that phrase meant.
Snarl switched to English. “She is in despair, Mr. Spock.” That could not be expressed in Vulcan, except by recourse to archaic words. “She wishes only to die.”
“Take me to her,” Spock said. “Quickly.”
Jenniver Aristeides gazed at a painting of her home. It hung on the wall, as if it were a window. She had done it herself, at a time when she felt miserably homesick and lonely, weak and incompetent. Painting was an accomplishment not much admired on her home world, and at times she felt contemptuous of herself for indulging in it. But the scene, a landscape, gave her some comfort. She had almost decided to paint the pasture behind her house, with the ponies out to graze after the day’s plowing. But that would have been hopelessly sentimental. And the picture would have been static; in a painting, the powerful creatures, twenty-four hands high, massing two metric tons apiece, would never prick up their ears, toss their manes, and gallop to the far fence kicking their heels like a group of foals. That was how she liked to remember them, not frozen in time. She needed a painting she could pretend might be reality.
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