by Judith
“What, Doctor?” Spock asked innocently.
Before McCoy could say anything more, the pressure equalization light came on above the shuttle’s door.
“Time to go, gentlemen,” Kirk said. He reached out to the shuttle’s control board and slowly turned down the artificial gravity field until all he felt was the moon’s point two natural field, slightly more powerful than that of the Earth’s moon. McCoy moaned as Kirk felt his own stomach rise into the new, lighter field. Then he popped the shuttle’s door.
As Kirk stepped out of the John Burke, Sulu, Chekov, Uhura, and Palamas were leaving the Galileo. Like Spock and McCoy, each carried one or two cases containing supplies or microtapes which they might or might not need over the next few hours. Kirk was suddenly conscious of his empty hands and even though he knew Uhura had no trouble handling them in the low gravity, he took one of her equipment diagnostics packs. It was not the time to offer to help carry Palamas’s gear again, after [133] that awkwardness in the corridor following her first A & A presentation.
As the landing party waited for an FCO official to greet them and direct them to wherever their briefings would begin, Sulu looked around the landing bay chamber appreciatively. Except for the main pressure door seals and the personnel and supply airlocks leading into the outpost itself, the chamber’s walls were bare black rock. Lighting rings on an exposed current conduit provided a soft, shadowless illumination. “How did they manage to build an outpost this big without the Talin knowing about it?”
Surprisingly, Palamas beat Spock to the answer. “Talin visual astronomy is limited to ground-based optical instruments. They can’t resolve any detail here much smaller than about a half kilometer.”
“And unlike the Earth’s moon,” Spock added, “this body rotates so that during each cycle, the outpost is out of view from the planet for approximately thirteen days. Usually, most traffic to and from the outpost is scheduled during those periods.”
McCoy was intrigued by Spock’s statement. “Then the fact that we’ve been brought in during the outpost’s exposed cycle could be another indication of the time pressure they’re under.”
Kirk nodded. Palamas looked puzzled. But before she could ask what McCoy had meant, Sulu whistled and began walking over to another section of the chamber.
“Now that’s what I call ‘traffic,’ ” the helmsman said enthusiastically.
Five Wraith-class atmospheric shuttles were parked against the chamber’s far wall. Kirk had seen spec reports on similar vehicles, but so far the Enterprise had never carried one. Each was a stubby winged vehicle, smoothly rounded as if partially melted, which could carry about half the cargo and crew of the Enterprise’s blocky Mark 12s. The finely ribbed, spaceblack skin of the craft made them virtually undetectable to anything less than advanced mass sensing technology. But it was the unique dual propulsion systems of the Wraith which gave it its [134] reputation of being one of the most difficult—and exhilarating—atmospheric flying machines ever built.
“Like it?” a voice asked from nowhere as the rest of the landing party joined Sulu in admiring the Wraiths.
Kirk turned to see a young, red-haired woman in a pilot’s flightsuit approaching. Her eyes went to the stripes on Kirk’s sleeves. “You must be Captain Kirk. I’m Carole Mallett, manager of sampling operations.” Her warm smile was an unexpected surprise given the type of reception Kirk had anticipated.
Kirk automatically looked for the rank markings on Mallett’s uniform before reminding himself that Starfleet ran the FCO as a completely independent operation, without ranks, answerable directly to the Admiralty and the Council. He shook her hand and introduced her to the rest of his party.
“Do you fly one of these?” Sulu asked, running his hand along the rough-finished leading edge of one of the Wraith’s wings.
“I wouldn’t exactly call it flying,” Mallett said. “When the anti-gravity drive is engaged, it’s more like choreographing a series of freefalls onto a trampoline.”
“I’ve heard they’re pretty hard to handle.”
“Understatement of the millennium,” Mallett said. “If it weren’t for the FCO’s unique requirements for covert sampling craft, I don’t think there’d be any reason to build them at all.”
“What’s so special about them?” McCoy asked.
Mallett led the doctor to the tail of the vehicle. There were no propulsion exhaust vents, just impulse baffles. “In space, not much. We run on a small impulse unit that can give us point oh oh one cee, which is good enough to get us to Talin in about half an hour. But once we hit the outer atmosphere, we switch to antigrav. The advantage is that there’s no engine noise, no exhaust trail, no radiation signature, no chemical emissions. It’s just the thing for exploration and sampling runs where the Prime Directive is in force and where there’s a moderately high level of native technology.”
[135] “And what are the disadvantages?” McCoy asked, hearing the pilot build up to them.
“If you’ve ever felt momentum lag effects in your starship during violent maneuvers, then you know how painfully sluggish artificial gee fields are. When you fly one of these things, you have to think about five seconds into the future. Basically, what you’re doing is gliding through a partially controlled fall, then hitting the antigrav to bounce back up before you hit the ground. And if you want to land, you have to time the antigrav reaction perfectly, otherwise you smash in at full speed or rebound like a bouncing ball. It’s terrible, trust me.”
“That doesn’t sound terrible,” Sulu said earnestly. “That sounds exciting.”
Mallett smiled at Sulu and shook her head. “They all say that. Until they fly them. If you’ve got time, we have a Wraith simulator you can try out. If you bring your own white bags.”
Sulu beamed and looked at Kirk. Kirk shrugged. For once, it wasn’t up to the captain. From the moment the Enterprise had entered orbit, her time and crew belonged to the FCO.
“Ms. Mallett,” Kirk said, “I think the first order of business will be to meet with Dr. Richter and begin finalizing your mission requirements. It is our estimate that you are operating under a severe time constraint.”
Mallett nodded, abruptly appearing inexplicably upset. “They’re waiting for you in the ready room off the main monitoring lab. I, uh, I’ll have to let the director fill you in, past what you’ve already been told in the formal reports.”
“And is the situation as bad as we’ve been led to believe?” Lieutenant Palamas asked.
“No matter what you’ve been told,” Mallett said sadly, “it’s worse. Far, far worse.”
The main monitoring lab was at the heart of the FCO outpost, five levels down from the landing chamber. To Kirk, it resembled a starship’s bridge enlarged ten times—a circular layout, ringed by at least fifty subsystem stations, with a central [136] command desk instead of a conn. Five technicians, outfitted with audio inputs, sat at the command desk constantly adjusting controls while observing a master viewscreen twice as tall and four times as wide as the bridge screen on the Enterprise. But instead of showing a single scene, the screen presented well over a hundred identically small, rectangular displays along with ten expanded ones. Kirk couldn’t make out what was being shown on most of the displays, but he did recognize adult Talin on some of the large ones. One display showed a close-up of a Talin’s face and, in the background drone of noise in the monitoring lab, Kirk heard a whispery and unfamiliar alien language that appeared to be in synch with the Talin’s mouth movements.
“What’s all that?” Kirk asked. The overall effect was overwhelming. There was far more information than could be assimilated at once.
Beside him, Mallett smiled. “How’s your knowledge of old technology? That’s what they used to call television.”
“Oh, of course,” Kirk said. He had read about it, even seen it on Planet 892-IV. “Two-dimensional image transmission by ... analog signals of electromagnetic energy.”
“That’s the technical end of
it,” Mallett said. “But just like late-twentieth-century Earth, there’s an incredible cultural component to it as well, which is still surprising considering that there is almost no capability for interaction.”
Kirk blinked. “You mean the Talin just watch those transmissions without the ability to alter them as they proceed?”
Mallett nodded.
Kirk wanted to ask why, but he had seen too many alien customs during his years of explorations to be truly surprised by any culture’s odd habits.
Mallett continued. “We have camouflaged electromagnetic reception antennae over three two-hundred-square-kilometer areas of this moon so that one is always pointing at Talin IV. It lets us pick up about three hundred of these television public transmission channels, and more than five thousand audio-only channels—what used to be called radio, if you’ve heard of [137] it”—Kirk nodded to answer her question—“as well as a few hundred thousand private communication channels every day,” she concluded.
Uhura’s eyes flashed with interest. “Every day? Can you process all those signals in realtime?”
Mallett could see a kindred spirit in the communications officer. “The staff here can personally handle less than one percent of all data channels, but our monitoring equipment tracks everything, checking for key words, phrases, and images, then flags transmissions we should analyze in more detail.”
“Listens to everything,” Uhura said, staring at the hundreds of flickering images on the main screen. “What systems are you using? What protocols? Are you on full duotronics?”
Mallett held up her hand. “I’ll have to get you together with Mario. He runs the entire communications system here and he can give you all the technical specs.”
As Mallett and Uhura continued their discussion of the outpost’s signal-intercept capabilities, Kirk looked at each system station in turn, testing himself to identify each one’s function from the layout of its controls and the type of data displays it had. He was surprised at the number of military monitors he saw. Then he was aware of Spock at his side.
“Captain, I believe you should look at the third large display from the right on the main screen.”
Kirk turned to it, along with everyone else in the landing party, and Mallett.
“Is that a pickup from a security sensor in the outpost?” Kirk asked as he stared at the image on the screen, not wanting to believe what the alternative was.
“No,” Mallett said, and all excitement had vanished from her voice. “That is what is called a news broadcast. It’s like a one-way update channel.”
It was then that Kirk understood the reason for the tension in his dealings with this outpost, and the reason for the unprecedented communications blackout—and they weren’t the reasons he had deduced. There on the screen, from a Talin news transmission, was a blurry but all-too-recognizable image of [138] what was unquestionably a Federation Wraith-class atmospheric shuttle in flight. It could only mean that the FCO itself was on the brink of compromising the Prime Directive, however inadvertently.
“I think we’ve done enough sightseeing for now,” Kirk said. “It’s time to meet Dr. Richter.”
The first thing Kirk thought when he saw Alonzo Richter was: No wonder he’s so old. He looks too mean to die.
The man was skeletally thin and his upper back and shoulders were hunched over, pugnaciously forcing his neck and head forward. He had a full head of white hair, but it was cut more severely short than a cadet’s first trim, giving him a harsh, militaristic look. And the folds of ancient flesh on his face had fallen to form a deep and perpetual scowl.
In centuries past, when normal aging had changed people’s appearances in this way, there was nothing that could be done. But the fact that Richter shuffled into the ready room supporting his low-gravity weight on a cane of black, gleaming wood, indicated that he was past the point where modern rejuvenation procedures would work, or that he had declined them.
Kirk and the others rose in respect for the man as the ready room doors slid shut behind him. Mallett went to help him to his chair at the head of the briefing table. But Richter pulled his arm away from her grasp and thumped his cane on the floor.
“You!” he snapped, and his voice sounded just as rough and as angry as when he had fought with Kirk over the tightbeam transmission. “You’re not fooling anyone!”
All heads followed the old man’s gaze to Dr. McCoy.
“Put that contraption away. All it’ll tell you is that I’m dying, but they tell me I’ve been doing that for the past twenty years.”
McCoy folded in the top of his medical tricorder. He had been trying to run it from where it hung at his side to take surreptitious readings of Richter.
“And sit down, all of you. I’m not some patak admiral.”
Kirk saw Uhura blink at the Klingon curse, then try to hide her amusement. Richter muttered a few more barely audible [139] Klingon epithets as he slowly made his way to his chair under his own power. He sat down with great difficulty, but with extreme satisfaction when he was finally in place. Then he sucked on his teeth, took his time looking at everyone around the table, and finally settled on Kirk.
“So you’re the young troublemaker who’s trying to announce his presence to the whole kreldan planet.”
Kirk glanced at Uhura but her only reaction was one of puzzlement. Obviously, “kreldan” was an alien curse which even she had never heard.
“As I explained when we talked before,” Kirk said patiently, “we were unaware of the Talin lunar mission because we had not received any emergency transmissions from this outpost.”
“Of course not,” Richter said. “Of course not. We were just beaming them at you nonstop for five days. Why would we expect you to pick them up?”
Kirk held his hands calmly together. “I have brought my communications officer down to run a full diagnostics on your equipment. It might have a malfunction.”
Richter sneered at Uhura. “There’s nothing wrong with our equipment down here. Go back to that ship of yours. Go back.”
Kirk shifted forward. “Dr. Richter, I suggest that in the interest of time, we let our respective technical specialists track down the reason for the communications failure. I believe we have more important matters to discuss.”
“We certainly do. We certainly do.” He held up his hand to his mouth and coughed deeply. Kirk saw McCoy quickly glance down to something he held beneath the table—probably still trying to take some medical readings.
Then they all sat in silence for a few moments.
“Well,” Kirk said, uncertainly, “perhaps I should begin with—”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” Richter said testily. “This is a First Contact Office outpost. A Prime Directive operation. Everything goes by the book. No exceptions. Too important.”
Spock folded his hands on the tabletop before him. “We are all aware of the gravity of the situation, Dr. Richter.”
[140] Richter strained his head forward and peered at Spock as if seeing him for the first time. “Yes, you would be. But for these other sal’tasnii ...” He shook his head and waved his hand, dismissing them all but Spock. “At least you know enough to wait for the outpost director and the communications manager to arrive.”
“Of course,” Spock said.
So that’s what we’re waiting for, Kirk thought.
“They’ll be here any moment,” Mallett explained. “They’re preparing some datafiles for you.”
A few more moments of silence passed by, broken only by the dry whistle of Richter’s breathing. Then the doors slid open again and two men entered.
Mallett stood. “Captain Kirk, may I introduce you and your crew to Zalan Wilforth, the outpost’s director, and Mario Cardinali, manager of communications.”
Kirk stood to greet the men. Wilforth was a young pale-skinned human and, going by his name, Kirk guessed he was of combined Earth and Centauran heritage. The Centauran part was confirmed when they shook hands and Kirk felt the extr
a joint in the director’s little finger.
Cardinali was a large human, powerfully built, probably from a high-gravity colony world. His sideburns were trimmed to an Academy point. Just on temporary assignment, Kirk thought. Mallett had the crispness of an Academy graduate about her, too. He was beginning to see a series of special conditions having being set at this outpost.
“So,” Wilforth began without preamble, “I understand you’ve seen the Talin television news broadcast.” He sat down to the right of Richter. Cardinali sat beside Mallett at the table’s other end.
“With the television images of the Wraith,” Kirk agreed. Wilforth frowned and nodded. “How much do the Talin know?”
“It’s not what you think, Captain Kirk,” Cardinali said.
Kirk didn’t know how it could be otherwise. “As far as the [141] Talin are concerned, they have an image of an alien spacecraft, don’t they?”
“Some think so,” Cardinali said. “Many Talin are forward thinking and their successes in orbital and lunar missions have awakened the ...” Cardinali shrugged. “Le rêve d’étoiles,” he finished, using the Academy phrase. Without question he had come up through Starfleet, Kirk decided.
“And, as on most spacefaring, pre-contact worlds,” Cardinali continued, “there is considerable public debate going on concerning the likelihood that other civilizations might exist around other stars.”
Even McCoy smiled at that. Kirk knew that there would be no one at the table who wouldn’t feel a special connection to a world in Talin’s position. Under ordinary circumstances, and with luck, some of the Talin alive today might see the day that the dream of stars was proven to be real. But Kirk knew that he and his people were there to discuss matters of a more practical, immediate nature.
Spock joined the conversation. “I take it, then, that also as on most spacefaring, pre-contact worlds, there is considerable intellectual resistance to the idea that other civilizations might exist?”