STAR TREK: TOS - Enterprise, The First Adventure

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  Unlike any member of the Klingon military, this citizen of the Empire dressed in flamboyant garments of bright flowing fabric and silver-filigreed leather. Her coppery hair fanned over her shoulders, loose and wild beneath her headband, and she had highlighted her brow ridges with glittery gold makeup. She carried unique weapons: an old-fashioned and overpowered blaster on one hip, an edged weapon—could it be a blood sword? Spock had heard of them, but had never seen one—on her other side. The sword and blaster depended from a belt inlaid with an intricate pattern of precious stones. A fringe of small mica disks also hung from the belt, as if to add to the decoration. But Spock recognized the crystal circles as something far more significant than tasteless excess. The disks formed a trophy fringe, a claim to all who could read it of the owner’s exploits. Among the colored disks glistened an appalling number of clear ones: disks that represented lives taken in direct combat. She had [237] acquired one quite recently, for its colors had not completely cleared.

  “I am Captain James T. Kirk,” the captain said to the intruder. “Your ship has strayed into Federation space. Starfleet is charged with maintaining those boundaries.”

  “I am Koronin, owner of Quundar. The Empire might disagree with you about the boundaries.” She glanced to one side and snapped her fingers. “Starfleet!”

  A monkey-sized pink primate dressed in miniature Starfleet uniform leaped into her arms. She twitched the leash attached to its collar, forcing its head up. It yelped and whimpered.

  “You see,” Koronin said, “how fond I am of Starfleet.”

  “I think you’d find the Enterprise a stronger opponent than a helpless pet,” James Kirk said. Even Spock recognized tense anger in the captain’s voice.

  Analyzing Koronin’s dress, her physical form, her accent, Spock identified her as a member of the Rumaiy group, a political and ethnic minority of the Klingon home world. The highest class of Rumaiy often veiled themselves in public, and indeed Koronin carried a veil. But she wore it unfastened, draping from her headdress like a scarf, an announcement to all who could understand it that she rejected the customs of her people. A renegade, then. Spock sensed difficulties ahead.

  “Don’t underestimate me, Federation captain,” Koronin said. “Or my ship. You’d be making a serious mistake. Were I representing the government, I would invite you to depart our space, and I would enforce the invitation. But I represent myself. I have no interest in scarring my ship’s pretty new paint in a battle.”

  “No one is suggesting battles,” Kirk said.

  “Excellent. Then neither of us will trouble the other. We may each explore the interesting construct before us. It is certainly large enough to permit two landing parties.”

  I do not believe, Spock thought, that this renegade will prove overinterested in advances in scientific knowledge, or in the opportunities inherent in peaceful interspecies contact.

  “What is your earth phrase?” Koronin said. “You are [238] from earth, I believe, captain? A human being?” She chucked her primate pet roughly beneath the chin. “Ah, yes, I wish you ‘happy hunting.’ ” She laughed.

  Kirk rose in protest as Koronin’s transmission faded. “Damn! If she goes down there, armed, looking for who knows what ... anything could happen.”

  “Anything could happen when we go down there, captain,” Spock said. “We know little more about the worldship people than she does.”

  “How did she get that ship? The Empire certainly didn’t give it to her—could she be undercover?”

  “No undercover operative would advertise her position by flying a state-of-the-art military vessel,” Spock said.

  “Unless that’s what they want us to think,” Kirk said.

  “We cannot guess the labyrinthine plots of the most secret minds of the Klingon oligarchy,” Spock said. “That way lies madness. We must wait, and observe, until we possess more information.”

  “Captain Kirk ...”

  “Yes, Mr. Sulu?”

  “Just a possibility, sir ... Maybe the same thing happened to Quundar as happened to the Enterprise—dragged off course, warp drive blown ... Maybe Koronin couldn’t get out of Federation space if she wanted to. Maybe she’s vamping till she can fix her ship.”

  “Vamping?”

  Sulu blushed. “Sorry, sir—it’s a word the people in Lindy’s company use to mean stalling till they’re ready to start.”

  “I see.” Captain Kirk leaned back in his chair.

  On the viewscreen, the worldship drifted in perfect peace. Spock was all too aware that it could become a pawn, a flashpoint for war. Much would depend on the actions of the young human captain of the Enterprise.

  The science officer created an interface between his tricorder and ship’s computer and began to analyze the data. The new people possessed unusual abilities.

  “Fascinating,” Spock murmured.

  “What is it, Spock?”

  “The scarlet being transmitted the images we see on our [239] screen. It created the radio-frequency energy from its own body. Biological control over electromagnetic radiation. Most unusual.”

  “I don’t know,” McCoy said. “Back on earth, electric eels do the same thing.”

  “Dr. McCoy,” Spock said, disbelieving, “your contempt for unknown beings does not become you.”

  “Mr. Spock—”

  “Their control is precise. It is unprecedented. They create images, they transmit them, without benefit of what we would recognize as technology.”

  “Commander Spock—!”

  “I think what Mr. Spock is trying to tell you, Bones, is that electric eels don’t project home movies.”

  “It was a joke, Mr. Spock! A joke!” McCoy said. “Didn’t you think it was funny?”

  “Certainly not,” Spock replied.

  “See if I ever tell you a joke again!”

  Spock regarded him dispassionately. “I will consider that a promise. I will be grateful if you keep it.” He turned his back and proceeded to ignore Dr. McCoy.

  Jim turned his back and ignored both of them. He gazed at the worldship. “Incredible.” But staring at it would not get him any closer to understanding it, or to communicating with its inhabitants, or even to protecting his ship and crew from the intruding Klingon ship.

  “Mr. Spock,” Jim said, “how soon can you prepare to return to the worldship? I want to explore it—I want to see what its outer structure is made of. Lieutenant Uhura will accompany us as communications adviser, and—”

  Spock interrupted. “Captain, you have made dangerous assumptions.”

  “Just what do you mean by that, Spock?” McCoy said.

  “You speak of research strategies as if we were visiting an average planet of average preindustrial culture. But this is not a planet. The beings may or may not now employ mechanical and electronic technology similar to ours, but they are certainly not preindustrial. They built the worldship. We cannot pick up our sampling devices and intrude upon their civilization. We have not been invited.”

  [240] “We have, though, in a manner of speaking,” Kirk said.

  “You are of course free to look at the situation that way,” Spock said. “But I suggest contemplating how we would react if we invited the worldship people to visit us, and they materialized on the bridge and began taking samples of our air, our blood, and the very fabric of our ship.”

  Kirk gazed at Spock thoughtfully. “You feel strongly about this, don’t you, Commander Spock?”

  “Certainly not, captain,” Spock said, wondering if Kirk was insulting him deliberately or in ignorance. “But I wish to point out that while we can study a pre-electronic culture in any way—ethical or not, considerate or not—we choose, simply because the culture has no defense against us, we cannot presume to treat this culture in a cavalier fashion. On the evidence of their spacecraft, we may safely conclude that their technology is in advance of ours. I suggest that we mind our manners.”

  “What evidence do we have,” McCoy said, “that the p
eople you and Jim talked to—”

  “Communicated with,” Spock said. “Through their inherent abilities, not ours.”

  McCoy glared at him. “—that you and Jim talked to are the same people who built the worldship?”

  Spock fell speechless. McCoy had seen the data, and still he asked this question? Spock had encountered situations in which a single pointed query had changed his perceptions completely and irrevocably.

  This was not one of those times.

  “Our brief communication convinced me that the inhabitants built the worldship,” he said.

  “Translation: You guess they built it.”

  “It is my opinion.”

  “And it’s just slightly different from your previous opinion that the worldship could be a natural occurrence.”

  “It could have been,” Spock said. “It is not. I altered my opinion on the strength of additional evidence.”

  “You referred to inherent abilities. Suppose building is inherent—instinctual for them? Suppose the beings created the worldship without conscious thought?”

  “As you cannot be proposing that the worldship is a [241] gigantic beehive,” Spock said, “I must conclude that you have broken your promise not to beleaguer me with jokes.”

  Captain Kirk chuckled and Lieutenant Uhura smiled. Their amusement gave Spock no pleasure.

  “I’m not telling you any jokes,” McCoy said petulantly. “And it could be an instinctive creation. It’s possible.”

  “As is your suggestion that someone other than the worldship people built it. What scenario do you propose? That aliens from outer space built it for them? I would be fascinated to know your conception of the aliens from outer space. I do not doubt you see them as primates.”

  “Now look here, Spock—!” McCoy exclaimed.

  “Commander Spock, Dr. McCoy,” Kirk said, “there’s no reason to fight over speculation. We won’t have to speculate, if we decipher their language.”

  “I believe their language originated outside the local unconscious,” Spock said.

  “If that’s true,” Uhura said, “then ... we may never be able to translate their language at all.”

  “The local unconscious!” McCoy laughed. “You don’t—you can’t—believe such a flight of theoretical fancy!”

  “I find it aesthetically satisfying,” Spock said. “As you are perhaps aware, the most aesthetically satisfying theory often proves the true one.”

  “The local unconscious is an intriguing theory, Dr. McCoy,” Uhura said.

  “It’s mush!”

  “You are entitled to your opinion,” Spock said coldly. “Even if it is intellectually bigoted.”

  McCoy sputtered.

  “Would you care to let me in on this theory, Spock?” Kirk said. “What is the local unconscious?”

  “It is the proposition that all beings within a local area are united in a way such that their intellectual processes are connected at a basic level. That is why—the theory proposes—languages from a different evolutionary system prove amenable to translation.”

  “On earth it’s Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious,” Kirk said. “Whether you believe it or not, it’s hardly controversial.”

  [242] “The ideas are similar, sir. But in this case the word ‘local’ encompasses more than a single species, a single planet, even a group of stars.”

  “What he’s saying,” McCoy said, “is that he thinks these beings came from another galaxy.”

  “I think it extremely likely,” Spock said.

  “Wonderful!” McCoy said. “Creatures from a star system outside the limits of our exploration isn’t enough! You have to find a species from another galaxy! Why don’t you go all the way and decide they’re from another universe?”

  “I have no empirical evidence of the existence of other universes,” Spock said.

  “Commander Spock, if this theory is true and we can’t translate their language, we’ll never be able to communicate with them at all.”

  “On the contrary, captain,” Spock said. “The theory proposes that a language outside the local unconscious cannot be translated. It does not say it cannot be learned.”

  “I don’t know about the local unconscious, Commander Spock,” Kirk said, “but your points about the worldship are well taken. Perhaps we can get the inhabitants to give us permission to study their world. In the meantime, we’d all better reassess our strategies in regard to ... minding our manners.”

  “Captain Kirk!”

  “Yes, Mr. Sulu?”

  “Sir, a ship’s approaching—”

  “Koronin again? Warn her to back off.”

  “It isn’t Quundar, sir—it’s a very small ship, a boat ... a sort of sailboat ... from the worldship.”

  The tiny ship, like a spiny pearl attached to a huge silken sail, sped toward them on the viewscreen.

  Kirk glanced at Spock. “I wonder,” he said, “if our new guests come bearing sampling devices?”

  Chapter 10

  THE WORLDSHIP PEOPLE carried nothing: no sampling devices, no communications equipment.

  Their little sailboat floated toward the Enterprise on a beam of power. On Hearing the starship, it balanced itself delicately between the worldship’s gravitational attraction and the beam. The worldship people transmitted a detailed visual message to the Enterprise, making clear their wish to be transported on board.

  “What about your precious regulations now, Mr. Spock?” Dr. McCoy said. “If Jim lets those folks on board the Enterprise, we’ll be busting the prime directive six ways from Sunday.”

  “The prime directive is meant to protect younger, developing cultures from the shock of encountering advanced technology,” Spock said. “But perhaps you are correct for once, Dr. McCoy. Perhaps we require protection from the shock of meeting the worldship people, and should invoke the prime directive in our own defense.”

  “That’s absurd!”

  “Is it, doctor?”

  Kirk broke in to forestall another argument. “Maybe I ought to invoke the prime directive to protect you two from each other—but I have plenty of evidence that the worldship people don’t need its protection.”

  Aboard Quundar, Koronin observed the sailboat of the newly discovered aliens as it left the giant ship and floated toward the Federation starship Enterprise. She swore a [244] dreadful curse. If the Federation believed she would stand by and do nothing while they tricked the new aliens into an alliance, they were worse fools than she thought. She strode from one end of the command balcony to the other, her attention on the observation ports. The work crew labored feverishly on the hyperspace engines. Starfleet scampered at her heels and whined for petting and food.

  “Go!” she shouted. “Be still and be quiet, or it’s back on the leash for you!” The primate slinked to her bed, huddled on its fur blanket, and watched her every motion.

  “Stations!”

  The crew leaped to her command.

  “N-space engines!”

  Quundar thundered into motion.

  “Captain—Quundar is powering up engines.”

  Helpless, Jim watched the renegade fighter approach the Enterprise and hover, provocatively within range. Where, he wondered, does Koronin think she’s going with that ship and her creepy primate pet? Jim could do nothing, not even raise shields, till the worldship people arrived.

  “Keep an eye and all your sensors on her, Mr. Sulu,” Jim said. “That’s all we can do for now.” He rose and, with McCoy, headed for the transporter room to wait. Lieutenant Uhura and Commander Spock followed.

  The worldship people show no evidence of possessing anything like the transporter, Spock thought. Yet they treat it as something mundane, perhaps even primitive.

  Spock had no doubt that they could duplicate it if they found it to their convenience.

  Spock had begun to make his own assumptions about the worldship people, assumptions he knew quite well he had formed from insufficient data. But he prepared himse
lf to cast aside any assumptions that proved untenable, as many would in the inevitable course of things. In the meantime, he needed some base from which to work.

  He interpreted the sailboat as an instrument of play. The worldship people could have transmitted a request to beam directly to the Enterprise. They chose instead to arrive on a small craft propelled by the reflection of photons against a [245] sail. Though this struck Spock as a frivolous way to travel, and though he would have preferred to meet a people as single-mindedly dedicated to rationality as Vulcans, an ability to play served his argument with Dr. McCoy well: he doubted the doctor would again compare the society of the worldship people to that of bees. McCoy still might attribute their high level of technology to outside influence, but that obvious misapprehension would soon fall to the evidence.

  Sleek, naked, empty-handed, the tall scarlet being began to form on the transporter platform.

  Spock realized the mistake he had made.

  “Wait! The gravity—” Spock leaped forward and caught the being as it materialized in a gravity field several times what it was used to. The frailty of its bones, the insubstantiality of its body, astonished him. The physical touch brought him into abrupt contact with its mind. Its power crushed his defenses utterly. Only his strength and well-schooled reflexes kept him and the being on their feet.

  “Mr. Kyle!” Kirk shouted. “Beam our guests to the shuttlecraft deck. Now!”

  Kyle caught his breath. The danger—! But as the other worldship people materialized, the gravity dragged at them and they cried out in a high keening song. Kyle responded.

  The beam swept Spock and the beings to the tenth-g environment of the shuttlecraft deck.

  Spock let the scarlet being go and collapsed to his knees, his body stunned by the power of its mind.

  Three other beings re-formed near Athene and Amelinda Lukarian. One had cream-colored fur, the fur of another was patterned in narrow stripes of gold and brown, and the third’s fur swirled in an intricate paisley pattern.