“Of course there’s not,” Montcalm said, too forcefully. “He created the interstellar community single-handed. We owe our existence to him. Who could possibly want him dead?”
The light bar on the desk communicator flashed. Cochrane watched it. The farmhouse system would pick it up in a moment. But he nodded at Montcalm to answer.
The young man lifted the handset. The viewscreen remained dark. “Mr. Cochrane’s office,” he said. His eyes widened. He looked at Cochrane. “There’s been an accident, sir. At the Foundation.” He passed the handset to Sergei. “The fabrication crew is … dead, sir. All of them.”
Cochrane slumped back in his chair. The students on the fabrication team were the ones who engineered the latest theories, hand-wrapped the coils. They were the Foundation’s best. The brightest. Already Cochrane knew that whatever happened, this, too, had been no accident.
Sergei listened to the details. The others stood in agitation. Cochrane alone remained seated.
Sergei confirmed it. “It was a matter-antimatter blast,” he said.
Montcalm was confused. “They never have fuel in the fabrication facility.”
Sergei looked to Cochrane for confirmation. “He’s right,” Cochrane said. He closed his eyes and saw the faces of the fabrication team. Saw their parents’ faces. Their children’s. Was Micah Brack right? Did evil never die? Was the battle never over?
The communicator flashed again. Sergei grabbed it, identified himself. After a moment, he passed the handset to Cochrane. The viewscreen was still blank. Cochrane wondered bitterly who had died now.
“Cochrane here,” he said.
“You know what I want,” Adrik Thorsen answered. It had been thirty-nine years, but the voice, the tone, the cruelty were unmistakable. “You promised you’d use it against me if I came after you. And I am coming after you.”
Cochrane wanted to drop the handset but his body was paralyzed with shock. “You’re dead,” he said, his voice sounding older than even his years.
“You’re confused,” Thorsen said. “It’s your wife who’s dead. It’s your students who are dead. But you and I, we’re still alive.”
Cochrane was aware of the others in the room watching him. Sergei went to a home system panel and inserted his police ID card, punching numbers furiously into the keypad, trying to override the privacy circuits.
“One by one,” Thorsen said. “One by one, I promise you they’ll fall—until I have your attention.”
“You’ve got my attention!” Cochrane said to stop that terrible voice.
“Then give me what I want.”
“It doesn’t exist! It never has!”
“I don’t believe you, Mr. Cochrane. But I’ll make certain that you believe me.”
Cochrane stared at the handset. This couldn’t be happening again. It had ended in Battersea. In a blast of fusion fire. “You can’t …” he said, already knowing that if anyone could, it would be Thorsen.
“You’re weak, Mr. Cochrane. Weakness is not optimal. Perhaps I was weak to ever have admired you. But in—”
Sergei ripped the handset from Cochrane’s rigid hand. “Who is this?!” he shouted into it.
But from Sergei’s expression, Cochrane could see that Thorsen had already broken the circuit.
“Mr. Cochrane?” Sergei demanded. “Do you know who that was?”
“Could you leave, please,” Cochrane said. He felt exhausted.
But Sergei didn’t let go of the handset. “Does your home system automatically record calls?”
It didn’t. Monica hadn’t thought that was right. Few systems on Alpha Centauri were set for automatic record. But Cochrane didn’t say that. What was the point? “Leave,” he told his visitors. “Except you.” He pointed a shaking finger at Montcalm.
No one made a move to the door. Cochrane grabbed the handset from Sergei and slammed it down on his desk. The Vulcanian medallion bounced up and rolled off onto the floor, where it spun and clattered on the tile.
Sergei motioned to the others. Chulski and Ark followed him out, though both seemed uncertain it was the right thing to do.
Montcalm stood in front of Cochrane’s desk. The young man was tense, muscles bunched, ready to strike wherever his teacher directed. “Will you tell me who it was, sir?”
Cochrane wondered what it would be like to have youth again. He wondered what it would be like to have second chances. He wanted Montcalm to have a better life on Alpha Centauri. This horror pursuing him was something from the past. His past. It shouldn’t concern Montcalm or anyone here. “It was someone who … just wants me,” Cochrane said.
“There’re only two million people on this planet,” Montcalm answered earnestly. “We can find him. We can find anyone.”
But Cochrane shook his head. The truth was that his own arrogance had caught up with him.
Arrogance, he thought with sorrow. That final word he had felt compelled to have with Thorsen in the stadium, thirty-nine years ago. Turning back in the doorway to say that he would use his warp bomb if Thorsen ever came after him. Just to torment him, to hurt him, to be better than Thorsen ever could be. Monica had been right. He had become Thorsen. And that transformation had cost him her life and others, just beginning their journey.
Cochrane felt so weary. Here he had hoped that his invention might someday let humanity leave the worst of its inner nature behind, yet he himself was a repository for it. The cursed need to be better. He wondered if the Vulcans included that in their medallion.
“I want you to prep my ship,” Cochrane told Montcalm.
“You don’t have to run, sir. I can protect you. This whole world can protect you.”
Cochrane shook his head, tried to smile reassuringly. No need to disturb another life. “I’m not running. I want to go to … Stapledon Center. They have a good fabrication shop there. We’re going to need new staff.”
Montcalm studied Cochrane carefully. “Are you sure? What about that call? Aren’t you going to do anything about it?”
“Life has to go on,” Cochrane lied. Monica had always told him that. He hadn’t believed her then, he didn’t believe her now. But it was important to the safety of everyone he cared for on this world that Montcalm believe him at this moment. “Send a message pouch to Stapledon. Let them know I’m coming.”
“When do you want to go?”
“Right away,” Cochrane said. “Look after it for me?”
Montcalm nodded slowly, anxious to do something, anything, for his teacher. “Do you want to keep the trip a secret, sir? I mean, if there is someone after you …”
“I have nothing to hide,” Cochrane said. “That call … it was just a crank.” He looked around his study, all the books, the fiche, the computer cards, the building blocks of his mind, no longer with purpose. “I’ll feel better helping the Foundation. Really.”
“Can I at least post some guards around the house? I know they keep some old rifles out at the landing facilities.”
“That’s not necessary,” Cochrane said. “Increase security at the Foundation, that’s all. So there won’t be any more … accidents.”
Cochrane was relieved to see that whatever Montcalm believed about his real motives, he headed dutifully for the door.
“And, Montcalm?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Thank you. For everything.”
Montcalm studied Cochrane carefully. “You’re not thinking of doing something stupid, are you, sir?”
Now Cochrane smiled. “You know me better than that.”
Montcalm tried to smile back but his effort lacked sincerity. Then he was gone.
Cochrane remained at his desk for some time, staring into the years, remembering all the times Monica had come in here to tell him he had been working too long, too late. And all that time, Thorsen had been somewhere else in the galaxy, doing … what? Plotting what?
Why had it taken so long for his return? Cochrane wasn’t hiding out on Alpha Gentauri. Everyone knew it was his h
ome. But where had Thorsen’s home been since Battersea, since the world war? And why had he come here now, wanting a technology that, even if it did exist, could no longer give him the power he had craved? In the end, Cochrane decided, the madman’s motives were merely an abstraction—a mystery Cochrane would never comprehend in his lifetime, just another question to be placed aside, abandoned, with so many other unanswerable questions of youth.
Cochrane pressed the control that made his computer rise up from his desktop. He asked it to display his will. It would be remiss of him not to at least give some thought to the future, the future Monica had seen, and he had been blind to.
Then, with the changes made, leaving all that he had to the Foundation Micah Brack had established, Cochrane’s thoughts of the future came to an end.
Instead he remembered back to a time when he had wanted to take on the universe. He thought of that first night back in his home system, under the dome at Titan. So many possibilities, so much to do.
But now he was only tired. And alone.
He wanted to see the stars once more, then die.
He wondered if this feeling was something built into the human species, the sense that when death was inevitable, it must be accepted, embraced.
Or was it just his way of making certain someone like Adrik Thorsen could never win?
Cochrane had no answer. As much as it sickened him to admit it, the war that had begun on Earth so long ago still continued, and he was to blame.
He had given humanity the stars, and then he had defiled them.
But now, finally, that intrusion would end. For no matter how his friend Micah Brack might argue if he were here to do so, Zefram Cochrane believed there was still hope for humanity. That things could change.
For only a moment, he felt a brief twinge of regret that he would not live to see those changes. But his time was over. Alpha Centauri was no longer his home.
The stars would have to beckon to someone else.
He remembered another old, old poem his mother had read to him. It seemed to fit the moment.
Deep space was his dwelling place, and death his destination.
There was never any escape from that. Not for anyone.
FOURTEEN
U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701 LEAVING THE GAMMA CANARIS REGION
Stardate 3854.7
Earth Standard: ≈ November 2267
The Enterprise blazed through space so that the stars were rainbow smears of light around her. Kirk watched them pass on the main bridge viewscreen, knowing they had been a sight at first unknown to Zefram Cochrane in his early voyages.
The key to being able to perceive anything of normal space-time while in warp was directly related to the characteristics of the warp field itself. Cochrane had quickly learned that for warp propulsion to be efficient, a minimum of two fields must be generated, so that one overlapped the other, offset at oscillations on the order of the Planck interval—the smallest possible unit of measurable time. Unfortunately, when the two warp fields were of sufficiently different sizes, any photons from normal space-time that impinged on the outermost field generally were absorbed by what was, to them, a perfect radiation sink—the gap between the fields.
In the beginning, Cochrane had accepted this state of affairs because it neatly explained why Einsteinian notions of time dilation did not apply inside the warp field—with no possibility for the exchange of meaningful information, there was no conflict with established physics. The existence of information-free, faster-than-light phenomena such as this was well known, dating back to experimental confirmation of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox in the mid-1900s.
Thus, Cochrane’s first faster-than-light voyages had left him literally in the dark. Once he entered warp space, he lost all communication with the normal universe. Eventually, as his system became more efficient and the warp fields became more tightly focused and layered, photons were able to penetrate into the warp bubble, bringing with them the breathtaking image so dear to Kirk of stars passing by so quickly that they became little more than streaks of light. And, once scientists were able to exploit subspace as a medium in which they could propagate electromagnetic signals at speeds in excess of 190,000 times the speed of light, standard computer enhancement techniques created hyperreal images from subspace sensor scans, much the way old-fashioned radar systems on old Earth had created echoes of distant objects in centuries past.
Though science had not been Kirk’s first love in school, he could understand how scientists had arrived at these breakthrough innovations. Like Cochrane, they had not wasted their time running headlong into the solid walls of accepted theories. Instead, they had chosen to broaden their arena, change the rules, and step outside accepted boundaries. Kirk knew the approach well.
His ship was proof that the approach worked in physics. The fact that he commanded her was proof it worked in the world of human affairs as well.
But the fact that it was Admiral Kabreigny who still occupied the Enterprise’s command chair told Kirk that he still had some lessons to learn in applying the approach.
For now, Kirk stood at the admiral’s side, eyes fixed on the screen. The Companion, wearing a standard blue technician’s jumpsuit, sat behind him on the upper level, in the chair at Spock’s science station, guiding the Enterprise’s course by her mysterious contact with Cochrane, which Sulu had managed to translate to navigational charts. Spock was with her and McCoy was nearby with a fully stocked medical kit. So far, more than a day out from her home planetoid, the Companion’s stamina had not yet failed her. But McCoy wanted to be prepared for anything, and was.
“Keptin,” Chekov announced. “I mean, Admiral, I am picking up a wessel in the indicated flight path.”
“Onscreen,” Kabreigny ordered. “Full magnification.”
Sulu adjusted a control and the stars rippled as the viewer’s image expanded to include a tiny spot of light, clearly not a star. “She’s at the limit of our sensor range,” Sulu said.
Kirk glanced back at the Companion and Spock. The Companion held her hands to her face. She whispered something Kirk couldn’t hear. Spock nodded.
“That could be it,” Kirk said. He fought the urge to give the next orders as he reluctantly deferred to the admiral. Like most women in Starfleet’s upper echelons, Kabreigny had earned her rank in the science and support branches, meaning she had no frontline command experience. But that rank technically did allow her to take over the Enterprise, and after a day of seeing her in his chair, Kirk was getting better at remembering that state of affairs. Though he had no intention of getting used to it.
“Target vessel’s speed?” Kabreigny asked.
“Cruising at warp factor three,” Chekov said. “No indication that she’s seen us.”
“If it is the Planitia, her sensors won’t be effective at this range,” Kirk said.
“Zefram!” the Companion suddenly gasped. “The man is closer … so alone …”
Kabreigny leaned forward in the chair. “Navigator, I want you to slowly drop speed and match course with the target vessel. Come up behind like a sensor echo. It’s just a civilian ship so it shouldn’t be difficult.”
“Aye-aye, Admiral.” Sulu went to work on his board. The stars shifted as the Enterprise changed course.
Kirk watched the admiral closely, trying to fathom the reason for her order. “A luxury liner has no defenses or weapons that can stand up to the Enterprise, Admiral. Why the caution?”
“It’s not the liner I’m worried about,” Kabreigny said, not bothering to explain further. Without looking at Kirk, she added, “I presume you have a transporter team experienced in high-velocity transport.”
“I’ll put my chief engineer on it.”
But Kabreigny put her hand on Kirk’s arm before he could activate the chair’s intercom panel. “Leave Mr. Scott right where he is. We might need better than warp eight in a few minutes. Who’s your next choice?”
Kirk understood that for whatever reason, K
abreigny was preparing for a fast flyby and transporter retrieval of Cochrane. She didn’t want to risk a showdown. “Mr. Spock,” Kirk said.
“Will you be able to handle the Companion?”
“The Companion can handle herself quite well.”
Kabreigny ignored Kirk’s insubordinate tone. “Have Mr. Spock stand by in the transporter room and wait for my signal.”
Kirk did not acknowledge the order, but he went to Spock, explained what the admiral was preparing for, and took the science officer’s place at the Companion’s side. Spock left the bridge.
“We have matched course,” Sulu announced.
“Come up on her slowly, Navigator,” the admiral said sharply. “I want to see her onscreen as soon as we have her in range.”
Long moments passed. Kirk was aware only of the Companion’s erratic breathing. McCoy had earlier suggested it was the result of the connection she felt with Zefram Cochrane. It was Zefram Cochrane who was in bad enough shape that he was having difficulty breathing, wherever he was. The Companion’s health, so far, was fine.
“Wessel coming into range,” Chekov called out. “Onscreen.”
The target vessel was a civilian liner—an elongated ovoid about half the length of the Enterprise, with three nacelles in the same configuration as the missing City of Utopia Planitia.
“Are you receiving any identification signals?” Kabreigny asked.
Chekov answered without taking his eyes from his side of the command console. “Negative, Admiral. The liner is powered-down. No communications. But sensors confirm her warp signature as the Planitia.”
“Shield status?” the admiral asked.
Sulu answered. “I’m reading navigational shields only.”
Kabreigny spoke rapidly over her shoulder to Uhura. “ Communications: Relay that to Mr. Spock. I want him able to hear everything on this bridge from now on.”
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