STAR TREK: TOS - Enterprise, The First Adventure

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “We’ve got to get back to the Enterprise.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? What do you mean, why? Lindy, you shouldn’t have come here to begin with! You don’t know anything about this place, it’s about to move into hostile territory, a Klingon renegade has abducted Commander Spock, or arrested him as a spy—and she could have done the same with you!” He found himself shouting.

  “Mr. Spock! Is he—? I’ll bring Athene down.”

  She cupped her hands and whistled. Athene sailed higher and farther, a strangely shaped bird. Scarlet spiraled above her.

  Jim strode over to Stephen, who lounged arrogantly against the landing skid of his yacht.

  “It’s one thing for you to put yourself in danger, Stephen,” Jim said. “But Lindy? She’s got no off-earth experience—she has no way of knowing what you might get her into!”

  “I got her into keeping her horse from going insane,” Stephen said. “If I’d kept in communication with the Enterprise, I just would have had to listen to you rant at me. Aren’t you a little young—”

  “I’m a little tired of hearing that I’m a little young, is what I am!” Jim said.

  “—a little young to be so stodgy?” Stephen said.

  Jim began a retort, but took hold of his temper instead.

  “I’ve probably deserved that,” he said. “But not this time. Stephen, I need your help. The Enterprise can’t follow the worldship into Empire territory. Lindy’s got to get out of here.”

  “What Lindy does is her own affair. But I’m staying. I have a lot to learn from the worldship people.”

  “What do you mean? Stephen, what are you planning? After what happened to Spock—?”

  “I’m ... different. It’s none of your business. Maybe you can persuade Lindy to go back with you.”

  “I can’t go back yet.”

  “After all your lecturing—!”

  “Commander Spock has let himself be captured—[301] kidnapped—I don’t know what to call it. I will not have one of my officers paraded as a spy.” Far away on the plain, Athene touched down long enough for Lindy to swing up. The equiraptor cantered, galloped, glided. “Maybe I can persuade Lindy to transport back ...”

  “Forget it, unless you can transport Athene at the same time.”

  Jim knew Stephen was right. “Then it’s got to be up to you. Please, get her to safety. We don’t have the right to endanger her—”

  “We don’t have the right to dictate her life!” Stephen said.

  “We don’t have time to argue! The Enterprise will back off soon. If Lindy’s stranded here ... Look, if you want to come back afterwards, I can’t stop you. I give you my word not to try.”

  “And in the meantime, you’re taking a shuttlecraft after an armed fighter—to do what? Talk Spock free?”

  “I don’t know,” Jim admitted.

  “Sometimes,” Stephen said, “I think Vulcans are right after all, and human beings are crazy.” He hesitated. “All right. Let’s get going.”

  Jim stuck out his hand, forgetting Stephen was a Vulcan, but before he could draw back, Stephen met his hand and clasped it.

  Jim waved his arms, shouted for Scarlet, and sprinted for the shuttlecraft. Scarlet swooped down and followed him on board. As soon as the hatch closed, Copernicus lifted off.

  Athene slowed to a canter, her hooves barely touching the ground. With a touch of Lindy’s heels she would follow Copernicus into the sky. Instead, Lindy signaled for a halt with a shift of her weight. Athene spread her wings and slid to a standstill in front of Stephen.

  “Where’s Jim going?” Lindy slid from Athene’s back. “What about Mr. Spock?”

  “Jim went after him.”

  “Why didn’t he wait for us?”

  “Because you’re supposed to go back to the Enterprise.”

  “The hell I am!” Lindy said angrily. “Mr. Spock is lost out here somewhere. Let’s go help find him.”

  Athene clattered on board, Stephen powered up his ship, and Dionysus roared after Copernicus.

  [302] For a moment of calm in the midst of chaos, Lindy had nothing to do. She stroked Athene’s neck, but the equiraptor took the flight well and had no need of soothing. Lindy glanced at Stephen. He was completely involved in his ship, in navigating through this unfamiliar environment. His thin shiny shirt draped close around his shoulders; wisps of his fair soft hair curled over his collar.

  Her thoughts kept returning to what Jim had said in the null-grav node of the Enterprise’s arboretum, when she told him she hoped Stephen reciprocated her feelings: “If he doesn’t, you’ll have to be careful not to use your position against him.” Now she had to test the truth and strength of her own resolve not to let her disappointment make any difference. She would have to pretend that she had never offered and he had never refused, that she did not long to touch him, to feel his touch in return.

  It would not be easy, pretending not to hurt. But she had a lot of practice at it. She knew she could do it.

  But it would not be easy.

  Scarlet watched the trace of Quundar’s drive. “Spock has persuaded Koronin to take him to the center.”

  “But why?” Jim asked. “How does Spock know anything about the worldship’s center? You said it was wild ...”

  “Spock knows the same way he knew how to sail, and how to pass through the worldship’s wall: he has some of my knowledge, as I have some of his.”

  “What’s out there?”

  “I fear for him, James. He is seeking the silent ones.” Scarlet gazed unseeing at the trajectory formulae flickering across the screen.

  “I don’t know what you mean!”

  “When you choose the life of a silent one, you heal yourself ... or you die.”

  Jim scowled. “I doubt Koronin will let him do either.”

  On board Quundar, the pitiful animal cowered. He petted it. It feared him, yet desired his comfort. It clutched him, but trembled in terror of him. He whistled softly, trying to soothe it. How strange that it wore garments so similar to [303] his, though the upper garment he had dropped had been blue, while the animal’s was gold.

  A bit of knowledge crept into his consciousness: it was odd for an animal to wear clothing. But it was also unusual for people to wear garments when they did not need to be protected from space. So again he had the odd feeling of watching two incompatible images at the same time. He tried to make sense of them, but finally retreated in confusion and exhaustion.

  He continued to pet the animal. Knowing the pain of his own confusion, he helped it forget its own.

  “Vulcan—why are you crying?”

  He raised his head. He tried to think of a reply to the strange, bare-faced, copper-haired being who approached him. But he was not even certain the being meant to address him. He felt the tears on his face, he tasted their salt warmth on his lips. He knew that people could cry, but did not feel grief—but he knew also that people could not cry, though they felt grief deeply. With a groan of despair, he pressed his hands to his temples and tried to understand what had happened to him. The small animal plucked at his arm with its tiny hand and made a soft, singing sound. But he felt no comfort. He knew only that he had to reach the center.

  “They are waiting,” he said.

  Koronin cursed. If the Vulcan had lied about finding the rulers here, she would make him regret it. Other ways than pain could be found to distress him. Sensory deprivation might be a good place to start.

  She wanted to play with Starfleet—or perhaps she disliked seeing the primate so content with its new friend—but it was too much trouble to get Starfleet out of the forcefield imprisoning the Vulcan. She shrugged and turned her attention to her ship.

  Quundar reached the center of the worldship. The land below lay in jumbled destruction. If the worldship were made up of crustal plates like a real planet, then the plates jammed together here in the center. They crushed each other into abrupt mountain ranges, then crushed the ranges, working with such vio
lence and geologic speed that erosion never softened the edges of broken stone.

  [304] “Where now, Vulcan?” Koronin said, suspicious. “What kind of rulers would choose a wasteland for their palaces?”

  “Koronin!” The Serjeant drew her attention to the image in the scanner. A flyer spiraled in an updraft. “You asked that one be captured ...”

  “Let it go,” Koronin said. “No need to give the rulers warning of our power.”

  “To the ground,” the Vulcan said. “They are waiting.”

  She landed on a tilted stone slab that in normal gravity would have been too steep to use. Her ship sighed between the crags to land at the top of a precipitous cliff.

  Koronin permitted the Vulcan to walk out onto the warm stone.

  She scanned the broken land. “There’s nothing here, Vulcan. You’ve lied to me.”

  “I must ... call them,” he said. He breathed the thin air. In the mountains, the sky was very close. He searched the ravaged landscape with his gaze. He pointed to a solitary pinnacle, a broken corner of the slab on which they stood. It lay with its face almost perpendicular to the ground, at the edge of a cliff so high that the river at its base resembled a silver string. “There.”

  The wind scattered tiny stones at Koronin’s feet. Her unclasped veil fluttered at her throat. She did not trust the Vulcan, and she wondered if he had the strength to climb that pinnacle. He looked none too steady on his feet.

  “I’ve nothing to lose if you climb rocks to call to phantoms,” she said. “Go.”

  He crossed the gray stone and began to climb. The serjeant peered after him.

  “Koronin, these Vulcans, they’re clever—he’s planning some escape—”

  “What will he do, sprout wings? Even Vulcans aren’t that clever.”

  Bounding on all fours, Starfleet sped past her. She snatched at him, but her fingers only brushed the sleeve of his shirt. She took an angry step after him, but stopped. Like the Vulcan, her pet had nowhere to go.

  Copernicus followed the trace of Quundar across the worldship’s plain and over its central mountains.

  [305] “Lieutenant Uhura—see if you can raise the Enterprise.”

  Without replying, she bent over the console. She hummed an eerie phrase in an endless series of sequential variations. Every so often, Scarlet joined the melody with harmony or counterpoint or some accompaniment with no name.

  Jim wished they would stop.

  “No response, captain.”

  Scott’s backed off, Jim thought. That’s good. At least the ship is safe.

  “We’re making up distance, captain,” Sulu said. “Quundar isn’t designed to travel in the atmosphere—it has to move carefully.” Then the aft sensors showed Sulu something he had not expected. “Captain Kirk—”

  “One second,” the captain said to Sulu. “Uhura—contact Dionysus. Ask Stephen to relay us the position of the Enterprise as soon as he gets out of the worldship.”

  “Yes, sir.” She hummed as she complied.

  “Captain ...”

  “What is it, Mr. Sulu?”

  “Dionysus is right behind us.”

  “What!”

  Wrapped in her fur cloak, Koronin sat on her heels and sharpened the slagged blade of her dueling sword. The Vulcan toiled up the nearly vertical pillar of stone. Starfleet clambered ahead of him, then scampered back to his side, a bright patch of gold against gray.

  “Koronin, I could follow ...” her serjeant said.

  “When I want you to do something, I will tell you.”

  He subsided into a worried silence.

  Koronin, too, felt uneasy, but not because she feared the Vulcan could escape. At first she could not identify the reason for her unease. Then the subsonic throbbing increased to a perceptible level. She felt as if she were inside an enormous drum. Its beat crushed against her.

  She rose and looked into the sky.

  The pulsation intensified. Only the thinness of the atmosphere prevented the pressure waves from evolving into a violent windstorm.

  From beyond the peaks of distant mountains, a battle cruiser appeared. Above it, the light web sparked and [306] dissolved, painting the starship in luminous colors that lasted an instant, then bled away in rainbow discharges.

  The shock waves of the cruiser’s antigrav field pressed her cloak against her. The vibrations changed as the cruiser rotated, nosing toward her with its bulbous prow.

  Koronin strode toward Quundar. The serjeant stared at the cruiser, mesmerized.

  “Come! Hurry!” she said.

  “It might ... it might not find us if we stay—”

  “It will find us, you fool, if it hasn’t already!” Koronin spun the serjeant around and shoved him toward Quundar. “Do you want to be caught helpless on the ground?”

  He started toward the ship, then, irrational, he stopped. “The Vulcan—!”

  “Forget the Vulcan!” She sprang into Quundar and started the launch sequence. The hatch rose. She heard the serjeant scrabbling on the stairs. The idiot! What good did he think a Vulcan hostage would do her? She could imagine saying to the captain of the fleet, “You cannot fire on me because I hold hostage a member of the Federation of Planets.” The blast of a torpedo would reach her before she ever heard the laughter.

  The hatch sealed itself. Koronin noted with complete indifference that the serjeant had made it inside.

  “Station!” she shouted.

  She heard no activity on the transmission frequencies, no coordination of an attack formation, only the crackling patina of a jamming field. Perhaps a single ship had followed; perhaps it had not yet found Quundar against the chaos of the worldship’s center.

  The jamming field faded briefly on a single channel.

  “Koronin, surrender the ship and I’ll allow you to survive!”

  She hurried the preparations for liftoff. She did not believe the smooth promise. Survive? Yes, certainly—for as long as the oligarchs could contrive to make her life last. They would drag it from her atom by atom. She preferred a blast of flame and vacuum.

  “Shoot me down, if you can,” she replied. “Or are you as cowardly as the miserable captain who gave me this ship?”

  [307] Quundar lifted off and accelerated at a dangerous rate. The bow ports glowed with the heat of friction and the structure groaned with the strain of a full-power launch through the atmosphere. It plunged between the strands of the light web and gained the freedom of space.

  Beyond the light web, the sight of the rest of the fleet blasted her illusions of escape.

  In the flagship, the director dragged the captain away from the command console. In a fury, the captain tried to free himself and complete the attack sequence.

  “You’ll have her soon, captain. She’s trapped.” The director raised his open hand and slowly squeezed his fingers into a fist. “And your orders were not to fire!”

  “She insulted me—!”

  The director heard in the fleet captain’s tone the accusation of cowardice.

  “The empress gives no commendations for destroying our own prototypes.”

  “The renegade deserves to die!” the captain growled, trying to excuse his rashness.

  “And she will,” the director said, savoring the words. “She will beg for her death. She is not yet ready to beg.”

  Slowly, ponderously, the enormous dreadnought rose from the worldship. Koronin was trapped.

  Almost directly below, Sulu struggled to hold Copernicus steady against the turbulent antigravity pulses. The shuttlecraft plunged and bucked like a maddened animal, like one of Dr. McCoy’s rafts in a twisted four-dimensional waterfall.

  The pummeling ceased.

  The shuttlecraft sailed onward. The waterfall transformed itself into a limpid stream.

  Above Copernicus, the light webs re-formed. The dreadnought had passed over Copernicus and vanished as abruptly and as astonishingly as one of Lindy’s illusions.

  It had in sight more important quarry than Cop
ernicus: Koronin’s ship, fleeing into space just ahead of the dreadnought. With Commander Spock aboard.

  Jim cursed. The Empire would get incredible propaganda out of a captured Vulcan Starfleet officer. First they would wring a confession from him. Jim doubted even a Vulcan [308] could hold out against their methods of persuasion. As difficult as Jim found Commander Spock to deal with, he did not wish this fate on any being.

  “James ...” Scarlet said. “Spock must have convinced Koronin she would serve her own interests by bringing him here. He is seeking the sky. Perhaps he persuaded her to let him out ...”

  “—and maybe she took off without him—?”

  “It is possible.”

  Koronin had ascended from beyond a high, jagged peak. Copernicus circled the mountain and came upon fields of tumbled, broken rock, canyons, cliffs, a vast landscape of rubble in which Commander Spock might be lost. They followed Quundar’s trace as far as they could, but the backwash of its abrupt departure muddled the trail to its landing spot.

  Scarlet opened the shuttle hatch and dove out to fly, so their search area would be increased.

  “Mr. Sulu,” Jim said, “touch down long enough for me to get out. Lieutenant Uhura, do you feel up to a ground search?”

  “Certainly, Captain Kirk ... why shouldn’t I?”

  He was troubled by the distant look in her eyes, by her obsession with the language of the flyers. But she did not seem to have anything physically wrong with her.

  “Come with me. There are a million places Commander Spock could be hidden from the air.”

  “You can’t search a million places on foot, captain.”

  “I’m aware of that, Mr. Sulu.” He was also aware that he could turn back now. Koronin would soon be in the hands of the dreadnought. If Commander Spock was with her, then he was lost, and nothing Jim could do would save the Federation from an ugly public trial. If the Vulcan had escaped into the wasteland below, he might never be found. “I am aware of that,” Jim said again to Sulu. “Dammit! I didn’t come this far just to quit! We’ll stretch our resources to the limit for one hour. After that, we’ll have no choice but to return to the Enterprise.”

  Quundar sped out of the worldship. The fleet hemmed the fighter in. An escape into hyperspace would be useless, for [309] the larger craft could outdistance Quundar. Koronin’s ship had been designed for attack conditions: speed and agility and powerful acceleration in normal space.