by Judith
“For trials first, of course,” the vice admiral said. “The warp engines will have to be tuned over the next few weeks before she can be classified operational again. But Styles says she’ll be ready to break orbit in six hours.”
“I see, sir.”
Hammersmith put his hand on Scott’s shoulder. “We had an agreement, engineer. I brought back as many of your crew as I could, and I gave you your week—and a few days more—to try and come up with more evidence for your claim that the Enterprise had been attacked. Now you owe me the services of a chief engineer.”
Scott looked back in at the controlled excitement of the workroom. Spock must be on to something, he thought in despair.
“Have you found any evidence to back your claim, engineer?”
“No, sir,” Scott admitted. “But with Mr. Spock here and—”
Hammersmith shook his head. “I’m afraid Mr. Spock is here on a completely different matter. He is no longer associated with Starfleet. The only reason he was allowed through the blockade at all is because the Talin ambassadors have appointed him and these other people with him as their consular officials.”
“But this outpost is Starfleet property,” Scott said. He couldn’t imagine Spock no longer being in Starfleet.
“Not any more,” Hammersmith corrected. “This moon was held in trust for Talin IV’s future exploitation and the ambassadors have invoked their right to claim it. The outpost is forfeit.”
“I don’t understand,” Scott said.
“Mr. Scott, the repairs to the Enterprise went smoothly and so I had no problem assigning you to help Spock here as a gesture of goodwill from Starfleet to the Talin. However, until [327] the Council debate over the status of Talin is concluded one way or another, there is nothing more to be done here. The Federation is more than just this one planet in this one system. Starfleet has too many ships and personnel here already. We need the Enterprise out doing her job and we need you on her doing yours.”
“Please, Vice Admiral, I know that with just a few more days I could—”
“Lieutenant-Commander Scott, I have given you all the latitude that my orders allow. Now, you, sir, are ordered to report to Lieutenant Styles, in temporary command of the Enterprise, in six hours, to prepare her for operational trials and return to full duty. Do you understand, Mr. Scott?”
Scott’s shoulders slumped. He had come so close only to lose again. “Aye, Vice Admiral. I shall report aboard the Enterprise in six hours. Thank you for your patience, sir.”
“Good man, engineer.” Then Hammersmith offered Scott one last piece of hope. “Of course, if you do manage to come up with something in the next six hours, I have been known to change my mind.”
“Aye, sir. Thank you, sir,” Scott said glumly.
Hammersmith nodded in dismissal, then entered the workroom. Scott and Cardinali left for the main monitor lab.
“What was the vice admiral saying about you trying to prove that the Enterprise had been attacked? Didn’t the bridge logs show that the nuclear missiles were aimed directly at her?” Cardinali asked.
“Aye, but we weren’t talking about the missiles.” Scott explained to Cardinali about the unnatural pattern of damage which had been found throughout the Enterprise—how the most vital twenty percent of her transtator circuitry had been destroyed, but nothing else.
“And you think it’s possible a focused subspace pulse was used as a weapon?” Cardinali asked when Scott was through.
“You’re a communications expert. What do you think?”
Cardinali paused in the corridor and put his hand on his chin. “Theoretically, it makes sense. But I don’t know anything [328] that could generate that kind of power without setting off every energy sensor from here to the Neutral Zone. If it happened that way, then it’s something that’s never been reported before. And other than that, Mr. Scott, you’ve got me.” He began to walk on.
Scott hurried to catch up with the big man’s long strides. “Well, what exactly is it that you and Mr. Spock are doing for those Talin? I thought perhaps he had read my report on the subspace pulse and was coming to do some work of his own on it.”
“He hasn’t said anything about that.” Cardinali stood in front of the monitoring lab’s doors and helped them open with a strong shove. “Basically, Seerl and Orr say they were launched on their joint lunar mission because their respective governments thought something strange was going on up here on Talin’s moon. I’m surprised Dr. Richter didn’t suspect that it was a joint mission in the first place, I mean with their ship not carrying the colors of either nation. As far as I know right now, what we’re all trying to help Spock do is find out exactly what chain of events set off that final exchange of weapons.
“Seerl and Orr want to know because they still can’t believe that their governments actually went to war on their own and, I’m guessing here, Spock seems to think that if he can give the Talin the answers that they want, he can also prove that the Enterprise was not to blame for what happened either. But I don’t know all the details.” ,
Scott shrugged. “Well, at least we’re trying to do the same thing, if not exactly in the same way.” He stared around at the huge circular lab, ten times the size of the Enterprise’s bridge. Every one of its hundreds of screens was black.
“All right then, laddie,” the chief engineer sighed, “I’ve got six hours to give you. Where’s the ‘on’ switch for all this?”
One hour before Scott was to report back to the Enterprise, Spock entered the monitoring lab alone. Scott and Cardinali worked together at the center command console facing the [329] master viewscreen, and did not notice his arrival until he was beside them.
Spock looked approvingly around the lab—all displays were now functional. The viewscreen flickered with a hundred focus patterns, awaiting input.
“We’re ready for your datafiles anytime,” Scott said.
“Please try input channel forty-five,” Spock said.
Cardinali punched in the file number and ten of the smaller image areas on the master screen dissolved into one larger one. A computer graphic formed in it. To Scott, it appeared to be an illustration of the orbital mechanics of Talin IV and its moon. Also plotted on the chart were several small objects orbiting the planet, but Scott couldn’t tell what they were supposed to be.
“Good work, Mr. Scott. I shall begin transferring the rest of my files here as soon as the others arrive.”
“The others?” Scott asked.
“Yes,” Spock said. “If my calculations are correct, they should be arriving at any moment.”
“Who?”
Spock turned to the chief engineer, but before he could answer, a transporter chime filled the lab. Scott blinked as three figures took form.
Spock greeted them when the beam had faded. “Welcome, Dr. Richter, Ms. Mallett, Mr. Wilforth.”
The outpost’s former manager of sampling operations came forward to the command console. Behind her, the old scientist tapped his cane against the dark carpeted floor of the lab, then spit on it. “Pah. Four months later and it still stinks like fladge down here. Hello, Mr. Spock.” He squinted at Scott. “What? You lose your narflin job, too, Mr. Scott?”
“Unfortunately not, Dr. Richter.” Scott stood up to shake the scientist’s hand but the man declined to offer it. Mallett and Cardinali hugged in greeting.
Wilforth gazed around the room with longing, then folded his hands together. “I never thought I’d see this room again.”
“How are Seerl and Orr?” Mallett asked.
[330] “Adjusting well,” Spock answered. “Their guidance has helped eliminate more than forty percent of the recordings on file at this outpost from unproductive study. Apparently many of the update broadcasts which the FCO studied had a reputation on Talin for being less than truthful.”
“That’s something you should know about, isn’t it, Mr. Spock?” a woman’s voice asked.
Scott turned to see that the young woman who had be
en passing out rations had entered the lab. This time, she was carrying her baby herself. The Talin ambassadors walked majestically at her side, each carrying the silver tube of a translator.
“Mr. Scott,” Spock said, “may I introduce Marita Llorente, organizer of Students for Stars for the People.”
Marita extended her hand to Scott, balancing her baby on her hip. “And advisor at large to the Talin Embassy,” she added, shaking Scott’s hand with a forceful grip. “But these days, who isn’t?”
“A pleasure,” Scott said. Then he was aware that as Marita stepped back, the two Talin drew near. Both had extended their taloned hands in a duplication of Marita’s action.
Makes sense, Scott thought. Though he had seen the Talin before, he had not been formally introduced. He reached out and took the closer Talin’s hand, startled by how soft and warm the heavily textured folds of reddish skin were, and how sharp the talons were. He was more careful shaking hands with the next.
The shorter of the two was about Scott’s height and spoke into its silver translator. The Talin’s voice was a melodic, whispery whistle. The translator’s interpretation of it was clipped and mechanical.
“Welcome to our moon,” the first Talin had said.
The second Talin spoke into its translator. “You wear a manly shirt.”
Scott smiled at the compliment. He guessed red might be a favorite color.
[331] The first Talin looked around the lab and its skin rippled, then quickly changed to a sky-blue shade. Then that one’s Orr’s, Scott thought, the female.
“Is this the place where observation was done?” Orr’s translator asked.
“Yes,” Spock said. “Virtually all of your planet’s communications channels were monitored from this facility.”
Seerl held the translator to his wide mouth. “Yet you still have no answers.”
“Soon,” Spock promised.
Scott checked the time readout on the console chronometer. In forty minutes he’d be beaming back up to the Enterprise. “What answers, Mr. Spock?”
“The same answers you look for, Mr. Scott. Who attacked the Enterprise. And who attacked Talin.”
“Hold on,” Marita interrupted. “Talin destroyed itself. Its nuclear warheads didn’t come from anywhere else. That’s why the Prime Directive has got to be thrown away. So the Federation won’t stand back and let something like this happen again.” She looked directly at Spock. “Right, Mr. Spock?”
“Ms. Llorente, please,” Wilforth said in distress. Scott had noticed the man standing at the side, trying to avoid confrontation.
Scott was bewildered by the way Marita had made her last comment. “You don’t agree with that, do ye, Mr. Spock?” Had he changed over the last four months, after all?
“No, Mr. Scott. Marita and I have only agreed to disagree. I admit I used her organization’s resources to further my attempts to speak to the Council about Talin IV. And I admit that I told her that I would be speaking against the Prime Directive, which is her organization’s goal.”
Marita shifted her baby from one arm to the other. “But what he did do was speak against the Prime Directive only as it applied to Talin. Not quite a lie. Not quite the truth. But all Vulcan.”
“And you’re not upset with him for that?” Scott asked.
[332] “It’s a start,” Marita said. “A small step forward. The Prime Directive’s grip on the Federation has become weaker because of what Spock has done in Council. Someday it will be abolished altogether.”
Spock crossed his arms over his chest. “As I have said before, Marita, since the Prime Directive should not have been enforced on Talin IV in the first place, nothing that has transpired here will undermine it in any way. In the years to come, the Prime Directive can only become stronger, as a policy, and as an ideal.”
Marita turned away from Spock and looked at her baby. “Well, we’ll see about that, won’t we, Alexander?”
As the Talin began to ask more technical questions about the communications facility, Scott motioned to Spock to join him away from the others. “I’ve been ordered back to the Enterprise, Mr. Spock, and I’m afraid that this might be the last time I get a chance to talk with you in the next few weeks.”
“What do you wish to say?”
Och, someday he’ll learn, Scott told himself. “I want to know if you have any proof of what you were mentioning about whatever attacked the Enterprise and Talin IV.”
“I am working on it, Mr. Scott.”
“Any chance of coming up with something in the next thirty minutes?”
“Unquestionably,” Spock stated.
The answer took Scott by surprise. “What? You mean that? You’ll have the answer that quickly?”
“Part of the answer at any rate, Mr. Scott.” From the center of the lab, another transporter chime sounded. It was louder than before—multiple beams coming in.
“As I said earlier,” Spock continued. “I have just been waiting for the others to arrive.”
Scott followed Spock’s gaze to the lab’s center where five golden shafts of light and matter swirled into being. The sound they made was like a song.
“Captain Kirk!” Scott cried out in delight.
The last of the beams faded and Kirk looked over to Scott [333] and raised his hand. Around the captain, Chekov, McCoy, Sulu, and Uhura did the same.
“You’re back! All of you!” Scott shouted again. Without thinking he slapped Spock joyously on the back, accompanying the action with a wordless whoop of excitement.
Spock froze in position, half bent forward by the force of Scott’s blow.
“Oops, sorry, Mr. Spock, sorry,” Scott said, reaching out to take Spock’s shoulders, then realizing that he shouldn’t, then thinking that he should. “Och!” he finally said and hurried across the room to his friends—the latest additions to Talin’s embassy staff, as approved by Mr. Spock earlier that day when the SS Ian Shelton and RRV Queen Mary had reached the edge of the Talin system.
Uhura’s hug was the longest and most intensely felt of the greetings Scott gave and received. He was suddenly struck by the thought that of all of them, Uhura was the one he had missed most. But the loud and joyful celebration was not the time to consider those thoughts. It was a time of feeling, not thinking.
Like a statue, Spock stood motionless apart from the crush of people as the returning Enterprise crew reunited with Richter and Cardinali and Mallett and Wilforth, and made new acquaintances as well.
It was Kirk who approached the Talin first. “You are the lunar astronauts, are you not?”
Chekov tried to correct him. “The word is cosmonaut, Keptin.”
But Kirk didn’t hear as he shook hands with the saurians. He looked from Mallett to Cardinali. “They’re why you smashed through the doors of my hangar bay, aren’t they? You went to rescue them before they could do anything in reaction to what they saw happen on their planet.”
“It was Dr. Richter’s plan,” Mallett acknowledged.
“Did the doctor also work out the plan for getting them to Earth for their appearance before Council?” Kirk asked.
“Partially,” Mallett confessed. “Mario and I managed to get [334] them down to the outpost and hidden before the rescue teams from Starbase 29 came into the system. Then, with all the confusion of the next few days, we were able to beam them up to the private ship from the Richter Institute which came for Dr. Richter. They stayed aboard until Dr. Richter was able to get into contact with Mr. Spock to work out the rest of the details.”
Kirk nodded, “When I read the update reports of what happened in Council, I thought I detected Mr. Spock’s flair for the dramatic.”
“We all had a hand in what went on,” Mallet said earnestly. “But no matter how it was going to turn out, when Mario and I saw what had happened on Talin IV, we knew we weren’t going to let the lunar explorers die. One way or another, with or with out Dr. Richter, we would have saved them.”
Cardinali added, “You should have s
een the looks on their faces when the Wraith matched orbit beside their ship. But it only lasted a few seconds. Almost as if they were waiting for us.”
Orr stepped carefully among the humans. “We were waiting for you,” her translator said. “All of our lives.”
Seerl joined Orr. “But mostly since your tractor beam disturbed our mass detectors and triggered an automatic evasive orbit change.”
Cardinali laughed and patted Seerl on his back. Scott was struck by how natural the gesture seemed, even between human and saurian. Perhaps that was the true legacy of space exploration, he thought. By entering a realm where everything was different, similarities became what was most important—cooperation, not conflict.
McCoy at last came to Spock. “Well, Mr. Spock, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you weren’t happy to see me.”
“I am not, Doctor.” Spock’s words stopped the conversations around him. “I calculated there was a seventy-five-percent probability that Cap—” He stumbled over the word, then apparently decided he meant what he said. “That Captain Kirk would arrive in the Talin system within one hundred and twenty standard days after our departure, which he has done.”
[335] Kirk acted disappointed. “Only seventy-five percent, Spock?”
“There was a twenty-five-percent chance that you would die in an accident involving manual labor or cargo handling.”
“Oh,” Kirk said quietly.
Scott reminded himself to ask the captain what he had been doing these last few months.
“Chekov had a fifty-percent chance of arriving here within the same timeframe,” Spock continued. “Most probably in the company of Orion pirates. Sulu had a forty-eight-percent chance of doing the same.”
“Why did I have less chance than Chekov?” Sulu asked indignantly.
“I estimated that there was a two-percent chance that you would, indeed, decide to become a pirate.”
Chekov howled with laughter. Sulu didn’t seem to want to argue the odds.
“As for Uhura,” Spock said, “I regret that Dr. Richter’s revelation to me that he and Mallett and Cardinali had smuggled the Talin lunar explorers back to Earth resulted in my sudden change of plans, requiring that I not contact anyone involved with the Talin incident. However, Uhura, I assumed that upon your release from Starfleet detention, you would arrive here about this time as part of the civilian relief effort.”