“I said no,” she shouted, voice quaking.
“Admiral,” Kirk said quickly, trying to mollify her, “the warp bomb is an illusion. An engineering impossibility.”
The admiral snapped her head around to confront Kirk. And in that moment, seeing the look that passed from her to the captain, Cochrane had the horrible realization that both he and the captain had been wrong—the warp bomb was not an impossibility.
Somehow, in this future time, it had become real.
And it was still a secret.
Kirk looked over at the Vulcan. “Spock, it is an impossibility, isn’t it?”
Spock studied the admiral with interest. Cochrane guessed he had interpreted the look that the admiral had given the captain in the same way he had. “To the best of my knowledge,” Spock said, “it is.”
“Admiral Kabreigny,” Kirk said quietly, “it is apparent that you are under a great deal of strain. With respect, I must insist that you explain yourself, or leave my bridge.”
The admiral closed her hand into a fist. “Starfleet is all that stands between the United Federation of Planets and … anarchy, Captain. I am a Fleet admiral. I will not explain myself to you.”
Kirk shook his head, as if trying to find something to say and not succeeding. “I’m sorry, Admiral. I really am.” He touched the arm of his chair. “Dr. McCoy to the bridge. Medical emergency.”
“You traitor,” the admiral said to Kirk. Cochrane had the feeling he had stepped into the middle of a conflict that had been going on for years. If not between the admiral and Kirk, then between the two factions they represented. “You’re part of it, aren’t you? That’s why those ships haven’t attacked. Because they know you’re going to turn him over!”
The admiral made a move as if to strike Kirk. Kirk grabbed her wrists, awkwardly holding her back. “Admiral, please,” he begged her. “I’m not part of anything. I assure you I will not turn Mr. Cochrane over to—”
“Liar!” the admiral said. She struggled in Kirk’s grasp, her situation all the more maddening to her because it was so evident that she did not have the strength to free herself.
Mr. Spock moved behind the admiral and put his hand on her shoulder as if about to give her an encouraging pat. But suddenly, the admiral groaned, arched back, then fell limp into Spock’s arms.
Cochrane was appalled. The admiral had worked herself into a heart attack. Once again, his life’s work had disturbed the balance.
Spock lifted the admiral into his arms as if she were a doll.
“Shouldn’t you start CPR?” Cochrane asked. Surely that wasn’t a lost art.
Kirk put his hand on Cochrane’s shoulder. “It’s not a heart attack. A Vulcan nerve pinch. The admiral’s health is not … robust.”
Cochrane twisted his head to see Kirk’s hand on his shoulder. He had heard that Vulcans had strange mental powers. He wondered if they could be taught to humans.
Kirk saw what Cochrane was looking at. He removed his hand. “Relax. I can’t do it. And despite what the admiral said, I’m not your enemy.”
McCoy rushed out of the turbolift, followed by what Cochrane took to be two other medical workers in blue shirts. In moments the doctor was gesturing over the admiral’s unconscious form with his glittering instruments while his assistants carefully took the admiral from Mr. Spock and laid her gently on the deck.
Spock told McCoy about the nerve pinch; McCoy agreed it had been a good decision, something about the admiral’s heart; then he touched a standard spray hypo against her arm. Cochrane was surprised to see such an antique device in the doctor’s arsenal. It looked barely different from the spray hypos he remembered as a child, though he assumed it had to be far more sophisticated on the inside.
“Could anyone tell me what all that was about?” Cochrane asked. He was beginning to think all he was good for any more was asking questions. But old habits died hard. Perhaps something he might learn would give him a clue to his role in this new age.
“Secrecy has taken its toll,” Spock answered, after Kirk nodded at him to do so. “There is apparently some conspiracy afoot which involves both you and a purported warp bomb. The senior officers of this ship were concerned that the admiral was part of that conspiracy. On the other hand, it appears that she was equally worried that we were in fact the conspirators.”
“So who are the conspirators?” Cochrane asked.
“Presumably, whoever is on those ships,” Spock said.
Cochrane studied the viewscreen image of the three battle cruisers, as Kirk had called them. “And they won’t talk to you?”
“Not so far,” Kirk said.
“Because they can’t be sure if I’m on board?”
“There has to be some reason why they didn’t continue their attack,” Kirk said. “If you go by the numbers, in our present condition we’re no match for them.”
Cochrane liked the qualification in Kirk’s assessment, as if Kirk still believed he and his ship were a match for whatever they faced. “You don’t strike me as someone who goes by the numbers very often, Captain Kirk.”
Kirk grinned at him, and in that moment Cochrane felt again that they could be friends. They seemed alike in many ways, their different paths the result of their different times. Cochrane had had no rules to play by, everything about interplanetary exploration had been new. But Kirk also seemed to him to be the same unrestrained, questing spirit he himself had once been, though Kirk was obviously forced to work within a bureaucracy of exploration. Cochrane was bemused by the concept—interplanetary exploration becoming so commonplace that it was run by the twenty-third-century equivalent of civil servants.
“Do I detect a suggestion, Mr. Cochrane?”
Cochrane smiled back at the captain. His gradually returning calm was having an effect on the Companion, still vigilant at his side. She no longer looked as if she were ready to kill the admiral. “Let them know I’m here,” he said. “Then they won’t attack.”
Kirk nodded thoughtfully. “I’ve considered that. The drawback is: What if they want to kill you?”
“Wouldn’t they have done that on the other spaceship?”
“Not necessarily,” Spock said. “At that time, you were in their control. If you had secrets, they could be extracted from you. However, now you are in our control. Depending on how valuable —or how dangerous—our opponents consider you, they might conclude it is better to kill you than allow you to remain in our hands.”
Kirk gave Cochrane a commiserating look, as if those had been his thoughts exactly. “Do you have any such secrets, Mr. Cochrane?” He nodded at the admiral’s still form. “Admiral Kabreigny obviously thought you did.”
But Cochrane shook his head. “None that I know of. Judging from those technical manuals you left me, my knowledge of what you call warp propulsion is at the same level as what a schoolchild probably starts with these days.”
“So you never worked on a warp bomb?”
“I think those rumors go back to an accident at Kashishowa Station, back in the fifties. The twenty-fifties.”
Kirk looked at Spock. Spock looked at Cochrane.
“What accident would that be, Mr. Cochrane?”
Without knowing why, Cochrane was troubled by the question. “It was a test facility on the moon’s surface. About one hundred kilometers outside Kashishowa, but that was our base. Anyway, the lithium converter failed. We had a runaway continuum distortion too close to the sun’s gravity well and everything in the field got pulled into what I think was a wormhole.” He didn’t understand Spock’s look of concentration. “There must be records. That’s when we moved all our research to an old ice freighter so we could work out past Neptune.”
Kirk had the same expression of concentration, as if he were trying to recall hearing anything about the incident. “Check it out, Spock.”
The Vulcan went back to the bridge’s upper level to access what Cochrane assumed was some sort of computer. McCoy and his medical assistants carried Adm
iral Kabreigny to the turbolift. The rest of the bridge crew worked on with remarkable concentration as if there had been no change in their operating conditions.
“Did I miss something?” Cochrane asked.
“Probably not,” Kirk said as he settled back into his chair. “But anything that might tell us what our friends out there are thinking could help us.”
Cochrane again studied the battle cruisers on the screen. Combat, it seemed, had not changed much in the future, either. Long periods of waiting broken only by short bursts of violence. “Captain?” he asked. “What are the primary weapons of the day?”
“For this ship, phasers,” Kirk answered, eyes also on the screen. “Um, phased energy rectification. Basically, a concentrated nadion beam that interrupts the nuclear binding forces, strong and weak. At low power, it can disrupt cellular processes to stun or kill. At high power, it can cause the constituent components of matter to disassociate without a resulting release of energy.”
Cochrane had never heard of nadions, but he understood the implications of what Kirk described. If the Optimum had had a weapon like that …
“In addition to phasers, photon torpedoes. Essentially a matter-antimatter bomb, but with a warp-capable casing.”
Cochrane understood the implications of that, too. “So you fight battles at warp speeds?”
Kirk understood the meaning behind Cochrane’s question. “Technology is neutral, Mr. Cochrane. It’s what we choose to do with it that gives it a military application or not.”
“I’ve heard the argument,” Cochrane said. He decided Micah Brack would have liked Kirk, too.
Then Spock looked up from the computer station he had used. “Captain, there is no record of a catastrophic warp research failure at Kashishowa Station in the 2050s, or at any time.”
“But that’s not possible,” Cochrane protested. “I was there, two kilometers from the test dome, when it … it disappeared.”
Kirk tried to explain. “Many records were lost in the Third World War, Mr. Cochrane.”
“On the moon?” Cochrane asked. “On Centauri B II?”
“What about it, Spock?”
Spock looked thoughtful for a moment, then touched a control at the computer station. “Spock to Engineering. Mr. Scott, do you have a moment?”
A Scotsman answered. Cochrane found the distinctive accent and attitude reassuring. Like the spray hypo, engineers at least hadn’t changed at all in this future time.
“Not bloody likely, Mr. Spock. Not if you expect me t’ get this—”
“A moment only, Mr. Scott,” Spock said, unperturbed. “In your studies of the history of warp propulsion, do you have any recollection of an early setback, in the 2050s, involving the inadvertent creation of what might have been an unstable static warp field on the Earth’s moon?”
“Aye,” the Scotsman replied hesitantly. “As I recall, it was what led Zefram Cochrane’s team t’ conduct further experiments out of the sun’s gravity well. Can I ask ye what this has t’ do with anything?”
Spock looked impressed, in a quiet, Vulcan manner. “Do you happen to know when and how you first heard of the incident?” he asked.
The unseen Scotsman sighed. “I canna tell ye, Mr. Spock. At the Academy, perhaps, one of the first-year courses. Look, I’ve got a lot of work t’ do down here, and—”
“Very good, Mr. Scott,” Spock said. “Please carry on.” He took his finger off the control and the engineer’s voice cut out.
Kirk looked at Cochrane. “Curiouser and curiouser. It used to be known to Starfleet, but now it’s no longer in the computer. A worm program, Mr. Spock?”
“Perhaps, Captain.”
Cochrane was lost. Kirk saw the incomprehension on his face. “In the past few days, we’ve discovered that Starfleet’s main computer system may have been infected with programs designed to locate references to you,” he explained. “And, perhaps, to selectively erase elements of your work.”
“What about printed records?” Cochrane said. “Or computers not connected to yours?”
“Printed records would be unaffected,” Spock said. “As for other computers, it would depend on the nature of the worm program itself, and whether or not it had the capability to move between different systems and remain effective.”
“But why?” Cochrane said. It made no sense to him. Both he and Micah Brack had seen to it that the records of continuumdistortion propulsion development were disseminated throughout the known worlds without restriction. How could anyone hope to contain that information? Why would anyone want to?
“Theories, Spock?” the captain said.
“In the past, there have been many instances where a scientific discovery has been overlooked at the time data were accumulated, only to come to light when the data were reexamined. Lasers, so-called black holes, many astronomical sightings, naturally occurring translator phenomena, all were found to be supported by experimental data obtained well before their ’ official’ discovery.”
Cochrane didn’t like the sound of that at all. “You’re saying that a warp bomb is possible? That whatever happened at Kashishowa Station wasn’t what I thought it was?”
“I merely suggest that other parties might believe that in your findings of the time, there might be data which would reveal a different explanation of the event if they were examined today.”
Kirk seemed to be no more convinced than Cochrane felt. “After one hundred and fifty years, Spock?”
“Science is a gradual process, Captain.”
Kirk shook his head dismissively. “Going back all that time doesn’t sound like science. It sounds like obsession.”
Cochrane didn’t know what to believe. He squeezed the Companion’s hand in his. “The Optimum Movement excelled at obsession, Captain.”
But Kirk was not convinced. “Flawed organizations like that tend to reinvent themselves over time, Mr. Cochrane. There’s no clear-cut set of ideals to be handed down from one generation to the next. Goals change, especially if they’re based on political expediency. Even if the Optimum Movement did still exist today, it would be in name only. Colonel Green and his kind are long dead.”
Cochrane pointed out the one key flaw in Kirk’s argument. “I’m still here.”
Kirk looked at him with a crooked smile, as if acknowledging the point Cochrane had made.
Then the Russian called out—“Keptin! Wessel approaching at high warp speed. Configuration matches the ship we destroyed earlier … and the ship that followed us to Babel, sir.”
To Cochrane, it felt as if the bridge had been electrified, but Kirk betrayed no sense of urgency. “Ready on shields, Chekov. Let’s not use full power until we have to.”
“There, Keptin!” Chekov said as a twinkling orange dot of light flew across the screen and vanished behind the center battle cruiser. “Docking in progress.”
Kirk spoke over his shoulder. “What do you say, Mr. Spock? Their commander has arrived to take care of things personally?”
“That would be a logical development, Captain.” Spock sat down at the computer station. Cochrane saw him stare into the small viewer of what seemed to be a holographic display. He knew vulcans had developed an elaborate system of processing three-dimensional data. Cochrane remembered trying one of their viewers once, and only getting a headache. “There is increased intraship communication,” Spock reported. “Hard to make out with all the jamming.”
“Enemy wessels changing formation again, Keptin.”
The Asian navigator added, “Weapons systems powering up.”
“Keep what’s left of the Planitia between us, Mr. Sulu,” Kirk said. He touched a control on the arm of his chair. “Mr. Scott, we’re just about out of time. What’s the best speed you can give us?”
The Scotsman answered. “I can give ye warp factor seven, but only for a few hours, sir. Anything faster and the port strut will fracture; anything longer, and we’ll lose our dilithium.”
“Understood,” Kirk said. He gla
nced at Cochrane.
“Warp seven,” Cochrane said. “Is that a time-warp multiplier factor?”
Kirk nodded. “We called them time-warp factors in my cadet days. Now just warp factors.”
“That’s still pretty fast,” Cochrane said.
“Those ships are faster,” Kirk answered. “It won’t pay to run.”
“Even with a head start?”
“It would have to be a big one,” Kirk said. “And even then it’s only delaying the inevitable. Help’s too far away.”
Then the black woman seated at the station behind Kirk spoke. “Captain, they are finally responding to our hails. Requesting visual communication.”
Cochrane sensed a quick feeling of relief from the captain. “Show us their visual, Lieutenant, but only send audio.” He looked at Cochrane and held his finger to his lips. “Let’s not give them any information we don’t have to.” Then he looked toward the screen.
“This is Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise to unidentified Klingon cruisers.”
Cochrane liked the sound of “starship.” It had an almost magical connotation. He wondered if the people of this day thought the same, or if they had become jaded by the wonders of their age.
The captain continued. “You are in Federation space without authorization. You must identify yourselves.”
Then the image on the screen changed, no longer showing the three battle cruisers, and Cochrane felt as he had when he learned he had been converted to energy and re-formed—completely disoriented, without any sense of order or control.
The face on the screen was as far out of time as Cochrane himself.
The commander of the alien force was Adrik Thorsen.
There was no escape from the Optimum.
FIVE
U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701 ENGAGED WITH THE ENEMY
Stardate 3855
Earth Standard: ≈ November 2267
Kirk heard Cochrane’s intake of breath and instantly knew that the scientist recognized the commander of the Klingon ships. But he had no idea how that was possible. And there was no time to ask him, either.
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