A slim hand went up from another of the bridge’s occupied stations. The face beneath it was even more unlined than that of the starship’s other new officers.
“Chekov, sir. Pavel Andreievich.”
Uhura glanced over from her station. The ensign had not been part of her group from the Academy. Judging from his thick Urals accent, he had probably been recruited straight from the venerable Star City Conservatory outside Moscow.
“Right—Chekov.” Pike acknowledged the identification. “You are familiar with the details of the Vulcan transmission, Mister Chekov?”
“Yes, sir, I have it memorized completely.”
The captain was indulgent. “Very commendable, Mister Chekov. Can you please provide a verbal summary for the crew?”
“Certainly, sir.” Turning back to his console, he addressed himself to the integrated pickup. “Chekov, Pavel A. Ensign, authorization code nine-five-wiktor-wiktor-two.”
The computer responded promptly. “Authorization not recognized—please try again. Speak clearly and distinctly.”
“I am speaking clearly and distinctly. Agh, this is the twenty-third century. What good is voice recognition that doesn’t recognize your voice?” Since the rhetorical question failed to make the slightest impression on the computer’s programming, he was compelled to try again.
“Nine-five-victor-victor-two.”
“Access granted. Ensign Chekov, you are recognized.”
“Oh thank you so wery, wery much,” he responded mockingly. “Actiwate—activate intraship communications. All channels.”
Throughout the ship the ensign’s face appeared on every active monitor, his youthful visage replacing everything from engineering readouts to entertaining fancies. In engineering, technicians and supervisors paused what they were doing to look and listen. Around them inconceivable amounts of energy roared within their containment fields as they worked to twist space around the ship.
“Your attention, please,” the young officer on the screens was saying. “This is Ensign Pavel Chekov speaking to you from the bridge. The keptin has asked me to brief you on our rescue mission.”
In the main tactical bay, weapons masters looked up from their work at the nearest screen. Around them was concentrated enough destructive power to level a fair segment of a small continent. Since its proximity did not disturb them, they were unlikely to be unsettled by anything the ensign had to say. But their interest was the equal of anyone else’s on board.
“At twenty-two hundred hours GMT,” Chekov broadcast, “long-range sensors detected an energy surge of astronomical proportions in the Vulcan quadrant of Federation space. It was described as ‘a lightning storm in space.’ As there were and still are no known stellar phenomena in the area capable of producing such a surge on such short notice, this eruption immediately attracted the attention of a broad spectrum of Federation scientists. Soon after, Starfleet Command decoded a distress signal from the Vulcan High Council declaring that seismic sensors situated across the entire surface of the planet were predicting massive tectonic shifts within the planetary crust that could trigger immense earthquakes and unprecedented volcanic activity.” He cleared his throat.
“Our mission is to confirm the tectonic shifts with an eye toward possible interdiction of dangerous continental plate mow—plate movement, and to be prepared to assist in evacuations should the need arise.”
In the main medical bay, staff were putting the final touches on a triage setup while paying close attention to the transmission from the bridge. No one was paying closer attention than Kirk, who lay there listening to the remainder of the ensign’s briefing.
“Please review all report details thoroughly before our arrival,” Chekov concluded. “Thank you for your attention.”
Behind Kirk two of the medical technicians returned to their labors. “Wonder what could be causing an energy surge like that? Sounds like Starfleet thinks it’s connected to the trouble they’re having on Vulcan.”
His colleague nodded meaningfully. “Mighty strange coincidence if it’s not. Spatial consequences of unpredicted gravitational distortions aren’t a specialty of mine. If they are linked, let’s hope the phenomenon is a transitory one.”
“If it is,” her associate observed, “there won’t be much for us to do when we get to Vulcan—which would suit me just fine.”
“Not to mention the Vulcans.” The other tech’s comment was heartfelt. She had never met a Vulcan and had yet to encounter the newly commissioned Enterprise’s celebrated science officer. His kind were reputed to be a cold, distant people—but they were Federation, just like humans.
Kirk’s thought processes were recovering along with the rest of him. Lying there silently off to one side, he had made the same connections as the two techs, as doubtless had everyone else on board who had even a passing interest in geoscience. The ensign’s broadcast had instructed all departments to familiarize themselves with the complete body of information that had been transmitted from Vulcan. Swinging his legs off the gurney on which he had been resting, he wandered over to an unoccupied console and pulled up the extensive file.
It seemed reasonably straightforward. The energy anomaly, the consequent tectonic disruptions on Vulcan, the related forces involved—all what one would expect given the urgency of the message. It was all there in cold electronic print. According to the interleaved explication it had been translated from the Vulcan prior to transmission. A caveat he had committed to heart during his first year at the Academy flashed through his mind.
“To be certain of accuracy when drawing conclusions, whether in the lab or in combat, always take care to refer at least once to the original information.”
A lightning storm in space. Where had he read a description of an energy surge like that before?
No, it couldn’t be, could it? Kirk sat up fast, too fast, his head pounding. He hurt so much he wondered why it was so important…wondered why the room had suddenly gotten so bright.
Ever the solicitous doctor, and hoping that he could divert the med tech’s attention away from his “patient,” McCoy stepped over. “Oh good, Jim, you’re awake. How ’ya feel?” Kirk’s moaning in pain ensured everyone would remember him, but before McCoy could berate his friend for overreacting, he noticed the size of his hands. “Good God, man!”
“What?” Kirk knew something was wrong. He felt it, he just couldn’t see it. He lifted his hands up; they had swollen to elephantine proportions. “What the hell’s this?”
“A reaction to the vaccine, damnit.”
What he was looking at was a translated electronic file. If he entered the appropriate command, the monitor would provide a hard copy—but it would still be the same translated electronic file. What about the original transmission? Not that he was in a position to do anything about it one way or the other, but…
Ever since he had once memorized, just for fun, the instruction manual for a certain antique automobile, he had always been a firm believer in acting on original information.
It took only a second to pull up the actual broadcast. Unusually, there was no accompanying visual and the words were distorted due to distance and having been relayed several times prior to decoding. He listened intently, and the longer he listened the more he could sense the hairs on the back of his neck starting to rise. His lips parted in disbelief.
“Holy…!”
Now he remembered where he had heard of “a lightning storm in space.”
McCoy was furiously scanning Kirk. The readings were not good; now his friend had become his patient.
“We gotta stop the ship!”
Kirk whirled, and managed a stride and a half before nearly knocking down McCoy. The doctor glared at him, started to say something, then changed tack as he saw the look on his friend’s face.
“What the hell are you d—?”
“Something’s not right,” Kirk shot back at him. “In fact, if I’m right, it’s real wrong. Serious wrong.” He grabbed at McCoy�
�s arm. “Come with me, Bones—hurry!”
“What?” The doctor jerked free of the younger man’s grasp. “Jim, I said low profile! That means you should…”
But Kirk was already out the door and moving fast, leaving him behind. Flustered and fearing for his friend, McCoy rushed after him.
“Jim—slow down! Wait a goddamned minute! Jim, I’m not kidding—we need to keep your heart rate down.”
Kirk located a computer interface; he found his fingers had gotten larger. There followed an impressive string of words not exclusively but most emphatically of the four-letter kind. Only when the long exclamation finally concluded did he bark an order at the console.
“Computer, locate crew member and communications specialist Uhura!”
“As an officer Lieutenant Uhura’s location is privatized unless…”
“DO IT!” He forced himself to take a deep breath. “Analyze urgency in request tone and calibrate accordingly!”
The ship responded without hesitation. “Intimations of exigency have been analyzed and their source has been noted for the record. Lieutenant Uhura is presently at communications monitoring station twelve, deck four.”
“I haven’t seen a reaction this severe since med school.”
“We’re flying into a trap!”
Fumbling in his medkit for the correct medication, the doctor looked up and noticed that his patient was gone.
Racing down the corridor, McCoy rounded a turn just in time to see the lift doors sliding shut in front of Kirk. The doctor caught up in time to meet the younger man’s eyes, but not in time to make it into the lift with him. He took a step back, forced to wait for another lift to arrive.
“Dammit, Jim!”
You try to help someone, McCoy thought to himself. But if the patient won’t listen to his doctor, then he sure as hell is unlikely to listen to himself.
Communications twelve was occupied by a mix of junior officers and ensigns, all preoccupied with their current assignments. That did not prevent several of them from looking up curiously as Kirk burst in.
Nearly out of breath, McCoy arrived in the entryway. Spotting Kirk racing to Uhura’s station, the doctor caught up with him.
“Are you out of your mind? What’s going on here?” Reaching out, he wrapped his fingers around Kirk’s upper right arm. “Maybe, just maybe, if we can get you back to sickbay without being intercepted, I can…”
Kirk met his friend’s gaze. “Bones, trust me.”
McCoy didn’t hear him. “Are you trying to get us both discharged from the service? On our first day on duty? I don’t mind my name going into the books, but not attached to a record like that!”
“I’m trying to save your ass.”
McCoy stiffened, and regarded his friend. “Damnit, Jim, stand still!” He injected Kirk and released him.
“Ow, stop it.”
Racing down the crowded section, Kirk kept looking for the one person he knew would confirm his conclusion. Finally, he located Uhura. Any other time he would have found amusing the shock that registered on her face as she recognized him.
“Sorry. Listen, I need to talk to you.”
She gaped at him in astonishment. “No way.”
“You gotta listen to me.” Couldn’t she hear the desperation in his voice? Was there no communication in communications?
“No!” she shot back. “I don’t ‘gotta’ listen to you, James Kirk. You—you can’t even be on this ship! How did you get on?”
“Later.” He moved as close to her as he dared. His voice rose to a shout. Now everyone in the room was looking at him. Leaning to the side, one of the officers had begun whispering urgently into a pickup. Kirk knew he didn’t have much time. They would haul him back to medical, and if not McCoy, some other doctor would then pump him full of sedative.
“The transmission from the Klingon prison planet—what exactly…”
Kirk might be insane, but he wasn’t kidding. She shook her head. She stared hard at him. “Oh my God! What happened to your hands?”
He had to get her to understand now. “Who?”
“Your hands…”
Behind him, McCoy was dividing his attention between his friend, the communications officer he was badgering, his medical scanner, and the portal that somehow still remained devoid of a security detail.
Kirk knew his time was running out. “Who is responsible for the Klingon attack?” He leaned toward her, heedless of how she might react. He didn’t care if she punched him out so long as she concentrated.
“Was the ship woluam?”
Uhura was shaking her head slowly and frowning; she could tell from his inflections that Kirk was deadly serious. “Was the ship what?”
“What’s happening to my mouth?”
“You got numb tongue?” the doctor asked.
Horrified that something so stupid could stop Uhura from understanding, Kirk asked, “Numb tongue?”
“I can fix that,” McCoy promised.
“Was the ship what?” Uhura asked, concerned that she would never understand Kirk.
Trying to form the word slowly and clearly, Kirk asked, “Wolumn?”
“What?”
“Wolmun?”
This time the communication specialist looked at his lips, seeing how he was forming the word. “Romulan?”
He nodded urgently. “Yea.”
“Yes.”
“Yes!”
It was not the earthquake itself that drew Amanda Grayson from the interior of her home out onto the porch. It was the realization that whatever was causing the ground to shake was not a normal seismic tremor. It neither rolled nor heaved in the manner of a natural disturbance. Instead, the trembling mounted to a certain level and held there, steady and unvarying. Ignoring toppling sculptures, trembling furniture, and the cracks that the walls strove to automatically repair, she hurried outside.
Across the desert landscape rocks were tumbling and bouncing down hillsides of brown and ochre. Cliffs cracked away as the inspirational pinnacles and spires she had known for most of her adult life began to crumble like columns of stale cake. And all the while the ground beneath her feet continued to quake with a terrifying constancy.
All of that she could have dealt with. All of that she could have handled—there could be some natural law to explain it. But she could find nothing in her store of knowledge to account for the gigantic pillar of swirling energy that was visible in the distance. Fire and fury, it appeared to be drilling into the ground as if the rocky surface of Vulcan were made of nothing more substantial than the Viennese schlag of which Sarek was so fond.
Tilting back her head, she traced the colossal column of energy upward into the clear sky. It appeared to be descending from a metal disk whose proportions and details she was unable to discern. The disk in turn dangled from an irregular metallic thread that must have been of considerable diameter in order to be viewable at such a distance. As for the suspending cables, they vanished into high clouds and distance, their terminus invisible from where she was standing outside her home.
Had she been able to track it to its source, she would have seen that the massive control and support line from which the plasma drill was suspended hung beneath a gargantuan ship of half-mad design. Equally unstable was its captain, who at present was standing in the most secure compartment of the entire enormous vessel, looking on as his chief science officer supervised the extraction process.
Suspended and held within a small yet immensely powerful magnetic field were a number of tiny red spheres. The spheres were the visible manifestation of what they themselves in turn kept in check within their own individual containment fields—minuscule specks of the most unstable material known to galactic science. As an isolation needle penetrated the surrounding dampening fluid to extract the material from its inner containment sphere, a sub-officer appeared and saluted.
“Captain Nero, drilling has begun.”
The captain of the Narada evinced no sign of satisfac
tion. He had long since given up hope of experiencing again that particular emotion. Ignoring the sub-officer, he addressed himself to the ship’s science chief.
“I want the Red Matter injected into a core pod.” Implacable and expectant, he turned to the waiting officer. “Let me know when we reach core depth.”
McCoy and Uhura both tried to catch up to Kirk, but the cadet was moving too fast for them—mentally as well as physically. By the time they succeeded in closing the gap between them, he was already bursting out of a lift. Crew members stationed on the bridge who did not know him looked up in confusion at the unexpected arrival. Those who did recognize the intruder gazed across at him in horror. Unauthorized entry onto the bridge was by itself a court-martial–worthy offense.
None of which was on Kirk’s mind as he rushed toward the command chair. “Captain Pike! The energy surge near Vulcan…!”
A startled Pike stared at him in disbelief. “Cadet Kirk? How did you…?”
The lift disgorged McCoy and Uhura. “It’s my fault, sir.” In the race from communications twelve to the bridge, the doctor had resigned himself to one of the shortest careers in the history of Starfleet Medical. “I brought him aboard. At the time I felt it would be a harmless and unnoticed subterfuge. Given the Red Alert situation I thought Starfleet could use every available hand. I gave him a—”
Pike broke in tellingly. “I don’t want to know how, I want to know why.” His gaze bored into Kirk, and it was evident the cadet would have one fleeting chance to explain himself before being assigned to the brig for the duration of the voyage. “Not why you’re on board, but why you’re standing here in front of me right now, looking like someone who just met himself coming. And,” he added in a low, dangerous voice, “it better be good.”
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