“Anybody who starts flinging torpedoes at an unknown starship deserves to have their ship blown away,” Kirk said in a clipped impatient tone. “It just better not be Scott who does the flinging.”
Spock regarded James Kirk with a grudging admiration. He knew human beings were more emotional than Vulcans; he had never before realized that they could also be much colder.
“Your equanimity is ... impressive, captain. Even a Vulcan would have difficulty contemplating this magnitude of destruction with dispassion.”
“The loss of a ship and its crew is tragic, of course,” Kirk said quickly. “But—”
Spock realized that Captain Kirk did not yet comprehend the enormous destructive potential of the worldship.
“Captain, we are not speaking of the loss of a single ship. If violent attack causes the worldship to reach threshold, the universe will displace itself by approximately one hundred thousand light-years. An uncontrolled change of state of the universe would result in the destruction, by nova or collapse, of every star that passed the worldship for approximately one hundred light-years.”
Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura stared at Spock, uncomprehending.
“Captain ... if the forces outside have engaged in battle, it is likely that the worldship is—that we are—unimaginably distant from our homes. It is likely that the worldship left devastation—”
Jim flung Copernicus into full forward acceleration. He rammed it through the light web, through the energy currents. He plunged into space, seeking a familiar sky, or the constellations of a universe a hundred thousand light-years away.
The shuttlecraft emerged from the worldship. The worldship remained where it had been, drifting through the territory disputed by Federation and Empire. But instead of a single dreadnought, a whole fleet surrounded the worldship. As the ships closed in, Quundar dodged and feinted, taunted and teased. Copernicus lay right in the path of the chase.
[319] The sensors picked up the Enterprise, poised at the edge of Federation space as if ready to plunge forward.
“Good work, Scott!” Jim exclaimed. “Keep it up, don’t lose your nerve, stay there.” But Scott could not hear him. “Uhura, put every bit of transmission power on one hailing channel. We’ve got to try to break the jamming!”
She sang a few words under her breath; in a moment he had the channel he requested.
“James Kirk of the starship Enterprise calling fleet captain. Do not fire! I repeat, do not fire. The worldship meets attack with attack. The consequences are inconceivable!”
The fleet was so close that Jim felt his transmission must get through. It was so close he felt as if he ought to be able to shout at them, violate the laws of physics, and have the sound penetrate the vacuum. They had not fired yet, but Koronin continued to taunt and evade them. If one weapons-master decided he no longer cared if they took her alive—
The fleet pulled its net tight, contracting around Quundar and Copernicus as well. Jim knew how it must look to Scott aboard the Enterprise.
Would I have the nerve to stand still under these conditions? Jim wondered. He could not answer.
Koronin abruptly decelerated.
Quundar hung dead in space, waiting for the net to haul it in.
Jim stopped shouting his warning and sagged back in the pilot’s seat. He was drenched with sweat.
The danger was over.
At Koronin’s command, Quundar decelerated and drifted, dead in space. She looked at her star map, considering. If the Vulcan had told her the truth, she could power Quundar to the extremes of acceleration and aim it into the worldship wall. If the Vulcan had told her the truth, the worldship would drag the universe across a transverse vector and rip a swath of destruction through space-time. She could choose the direction: plunging into one side would cause it to react toward the Federation; the opposite would wreak destruction through the center of the Klingon Empire, a path a hundred light-years long of novaed stars and cindered planets.
[320] She began to understand the satisfaction of an unobserved revenge.
She caressed the controls of Quundar.
On board Copernicus, Jim saw the flicker of rocket ignition. “My gods,” he said. “Does she prefer suicide to capture?”
“Quite possibly, captain,” Spock said.
Quundar slowly spun toward the worldship.
“She knows,” Spock said suddenly.
“What?”
“She knows, captain! She knows of the worldship’s ultimate reaction. She intends suicide—and when she rams Quundar into the worldship, she will take half the Klingon Empire with her!”
Quundar hurtled toward the worldship.
Jim had not an instant’s doubt of the truth of Spock’s statement. Quundar would pass the shuttlecraft, slam into the worldship wall, and force a reaction from the flyers’ home. Jim, and the Enterprise, and the Klingon fleet would have nothing left to do but watch the beginning of absolute destruction.
Jim’s hand hesitated above a control. He had one choice left to make. If he did nothing, he must watch from safety as the worldship’s reaction destroyed the suns and worlds of a hundred different star systems, systems inhabited by people who thought of him as the enemy. If he acted, he gambled death for Uhura and Stephen and Spock and himself against the minuscule chance of stopping Quundar.
The image of blood, ruby and emerald, swept over his sight.
Jim’s hand shook. He cursed himself and slammed his palm against the control.
“Secure for impact!”
He rammed on every bit of power the shuttlecraft possessed.
The gravity died under the strain. It was just like Ghioghe again, the zero g, the punishing acceleration of the engines, and the sense of time coming to a halt.
Piloting Stephen’s ship, Sulu saw Copernicus’s change of course. He cut acceleration and turned Dionysus toward the worldship, keeping his touch light. For all its battered [321] appearance, it responded instantly and with an on-edge tremble of power in reserve. It was no ordinary decommissioned admiral’s yacht.
Sulu groaned a curse. Koronin planned suicide, and Captain Kirk was going to try to stop her. The shuttlecraft did not have a chance against the Klingon fighter. Sulu lunged for an unobtrusive set of controls: Dionysus was not as toothless as Stephen had claimed.
But then Sulu hesitated. He could shoot Quundar out of the sky. But James Kirk’s first and strongest order had been to forbid the use of weapons. Sulu believed himself strong enough to disobey an order if he thought the cause right. But here and now, James Kirk was right. Firing on an Empire ship—even a renegade Empire ship—in Empire territory could too easily be misinterpreted as an act of war. Captain Kirk’s order had been in the service of peace.
Sulu did not know why the captain turned Copernicus toward Quundar, why he chose to try to save Koronin’s life at the risk of everyone on board his ship. But he did know that in only a few days’ acquaintance, James Kirk had inspired in him a deep, strong trust. Sulu had only a few seconds in which to make his decision, a decision that could mean the deaths of four people he had already begun to admire, respect, and care for.
He withdrew his hands from Dionysus’s firing controls.
As Quundar sped toward Copernicus and the end of their violent, silent dance, Sulu cried out and turned away.
Quundar swept in from behind Copernicus with terrifying speed. Jim engaged the ventral steering rockets and wrenched his ship toward Koronin’s.
The two spacecraft touched. The contact, for an instant, felt quite gentle. Then the hull transmitted the roar of Quundar’s engines and Quundar dragged itself across Copernicus’s dorsal surface with a shriek of rending metal. A glowing shower of molten alloy shards flew over their bow. Jim groaned, hearing and feeling the damage to his little ship, fearing that his desperation move had not perceptibly altered Quundar’s course. The aft section of Quundar rammed into Copernicus’s stern, catching the shuttlecraft and dragging it on toward the worldship. Jim shunted the sh
uttlecraft’s drive force into the steering rockets. The lights [322] flickered and failed. Reflected light from the web of the worldship provided the only illumination.
The wall of the worldship plunged toward him.
With a shout of rage and grief, his hands clenched on the controls, Jim willed the locked ships to turn.
The skid of Copernicus smashed against one wall-sphere. A tremendous explosion sent shuttlecraft and fighter tumbling. The impact flung Jim against a bulkhead.
The wail and scream of Quundar’s engines and the whisper of the steering rockets ceased, leaving Copernicus silent and dark.
Chapter 13
RELEASED FROM STRESS, tortured metal creaked. The air reeked of ozone. Friction and overstrained engines penetrated the shielding with oppressive heat. The disorienting spin of a ship tumbling out of control gave a sense of erratic gravity, first strong, then almost nonexistent. Jim felt his body being pressed to the bulkhead, released to drift, then pulled down again, as if a tide, the memory of Ghioghe, had come to wash him away.
He tried not to open his eyes. He thought, If I never wake up, that means it’s all a dream, it never happened, it never will happen, it isn’t happening again. He let himself sink into the warmth and the oblivion.
A frightful cry of pain echoed through his darkness. Uncertain of what he had heard, whom he had heard, he dragged himself back to awareness.
A flash of light blinded him. He blinked, trying to get his bearings, trying to clear his sight. As the ship tumbled and the sensation of gravity pulsed, a single source poured light through the port for a few degrees of every spin. In the strobe-light illumination, Jim crawled toward the sound of crying.
Someone grasped his arm. His whole body chilled with the visceral memory, repeating: one of his crew members, dying, had reached out for help and found him, and died.
“Are you hurt? Gary—? Someone’s hurt—”
“It’s only Ilya, he’s just meowing.”
The voice dissolved his visions. It was a voice from some other time, some other place, a beautiful voice. He could not [324] quite recognize it. He knew it meant he was not still at Ghioghe. But he knew it meant he was part of an even worse disaster.
“The worldship ...” he whispered.
“It’s all right,” Uhura said. “You stopped Koronin, the worldship’s still here.”
Jim gasped, his breath nearly a sob. He shuddered with relief and abruptly released strain. Uhura reached toward him in a gesture of understanding, of comfort. At that moment the only thing Jim wanted was to collapse into her arms and let her soothe away the nightmares.
But James Kirk caught his breath and flung himself around, turning his back to her, embarrassed by his impulse. If he broke down now, how could he ever trust himself again, how could he ever call himself a captain? He grabbed the back of the pilot’s chair and clenched his fingers around it. The ridge cut into his palms. The gravity rose and fell and the light of the worldship flashed each time the port faced it. He must try the engines, slow the spin, and get the tumbling shuttlecraft and himself back under control. But he could not make himself stop shaking. His vision blurred.
Behind him, Uhura sang a few wordless notes, slipping back into the flyers’ language.
The high-frequency hum of a tractor beam filled the cabin. Another tractor beam cut in. The frequencies beat together, heterodyning, but the dizzying tumble slowed and finally stopped. The power systems of Copernicus began to recover. The emergency lights glowed faintly and gravity returned at a few percent of normal.
Jim wiped his forearm across his eyes, as if dashing the tears quickly away would make them never have existed. He straightened up and faced Uhura again.
“Lieutenant Uhura, I—”
She knew she should have pretended never to have seen the brief moment of pain in his eyes. She knew she had embarrassed him by witnessing his despair. She could not comfort him, she could not help him. She could do nothing more than pretend the last thirty seconds had never happened.
“Yes, captain. I’ll—I’ll contact the Enterprise immediately.”
[325] Spock heard the voices of Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura and knew they had survived. James Kirk’s impulsive act had turned Quundar’s suicide crash into a glancing blow.
Spock climbed through the erratic gravity to the aft cabin of the shuttlecraft. The forest cat had retreated to a corner. He howled piteously, but the strength of his cries indicated that he was unhurt. Spock was not so certain of Stephen. The crash had flung him from the bench. He lay on the floor, still huddled around himself, shivering.
The tractor beams slowed and stopped the spin of Copernicus. Spock carried Stephen to the fold-out bunk and found a blanket in a storage bay.
When he returned, Ilya had left his hiding place. He curled in the crook of Stephen’s elbow, purring as if to call the attention of enemies to the threat he posed. Ilya blinked at Spock, slowly, grandly, and deigned to permit him to approach.
As Spock spread the blanket over Stephen, he contemplated the other Vulcan. The tenuous family connections between Stephen and Spock could hardly explain why Stephen had chosen to endanger himself. Helping Spock escape the powerful enchantment of the flyer’s mind could have pulled Stephen into the same complex fugue. Stephen had chosen to risk death in return for an emotional experience.
But perhaps Stephen had known all along that he would only be tantalized by the experience that had overwhelmed Spock. As he had when they were children, Spock envied the underlying equanimity that Stephen tried so hard to break.
Spock wondered if he would ever understand Stephen on even the most superficial level. He doubted it.
Spock admitted to himself a reaction of embarrassment at having permitted Scarlet’s experiences to overwhelm him. He should have been stronger. Given time, he would have brought the alien feelings and knowledge under control without Stephen’s help. He felt sure of it. Nearly sure ... fairly sure.
Spock realized he had nothing on from the waist up but the shredded remains of his black singlet. This, too, embarrassed him. His uniform shirt had been tossed onto one of [326] the seats. It was dusty from being dropped in the tunnel of the worldship wall, but otherwise undamaged. He pulled off the ruined singlet and put on his uniform shirt.
“Commander Spock.”
Spock turned. “Yes, captain.”
“Is Stephen injured?”
“No, captain. He is asleep.”
“Asleep? He wasn’t injured by the ... ordeal?”
“As I explained to you, Captain Kirk, he is a pursuer of sensation, emotional or physical. Whatever he experienced, he sought out.”
“You speak very coldly of a man who saved your life.”
“You asked me a question. I answered it.”
“You appear to have come out of this unscathed.”
“I am physically and intellectually undamaged. I was in control of my faculties when I set out upon this course of action. Therefore, on my return to the Enterprise, I will submit myself to Security, preparatory to a court-martial.”
Kirk frowned. “A court-martial!”
“Certainly, captain.” Spock wondered if Kirk truly had not thought beyond this moment, if his mind worked on such an intense focus that he had to be told the consequences of what Spock had done. “You have no choice but to court-martial me.”
“There are always choices, Spock,” Captain Kirk said gently.
“I disagree. Sometimes circumstances demand a single course of action. I believe that if you consider the problem logically, you will come to the same conclusion. Though I confess,” Spock said, curiosity in his tone, “that I do not understand how any conceivable logical progression of thought caused you to behave as you did.”
“What particular behavior are you questioning, commander?” Kirk said sharply.
Spock wondered what had caused the captain’s tone of voice to change so suddenly. “Your decision to come to the worldship. Your pursuit of Quundar. Your fligh
t to the rock pinnacle.”
“I came to the worldship to get Lindy. It had nothing to do with you. But—you allowed yourself to be captured. The Empire would have submitted you to coercion, and then [327] they would have tried you for espionage! Didn’t you realize you were compromising yourself—and Starfleet, and the whole Federation—with your irrational acts?”
“I performed no irrational act,” Spock said.
“You don’t call mind-melding with a completely unknown alien species an irrational, impulsive act?”
“Certainly not, captain. It was obvious that we could never begin to communicate with the flying people until someone took drastic action. Once a decision is made, it is pointless to delay implementing it.”
“You endangered yourself, and you endangered my ship.” He paused, and his expression hardened. “Perhaps you’re right—perhaps you’d better prepare yourself to accept the consequences of those actions.”
“As I have already stated, I am prepared. But you, too, endangered yourself by what you did. Some might judge that you also risked the ship. Captain, you have not explained why you prevented me from falling from the pinnacle.”
Kirk gave him a strange look. “Maybe I’m just a thrill-seeker, like Stephen.”
Jim returned to the main cabin of Copernicus and tried to get some reaction from the control panel of the shuttlecraft, while Uhura attempted to resuscitate communications. He could hear her humming under her breath as she worked.
Irrational acts, Jim thought. My decision to keep Commander Spock from falling was different—different in kind—from his decision to mind-meld with Scarlet. Wasn’t it?
The shining sparkle of a transporter beam cast its illumination over Copernicus’s instrument panel. A Klingon noble materialized in the shuttlecraft main cabin and loomed over Jim and Uhura.
Jim, having chosen to visit the worldship unarmed, was all too aware of the blaster fastened to the noble’s sapphire belt.
“Who are you?” Jim said.
“Why did you stop her?” the noble said.
STAR TREK: TOS - Enterprise, The First Adventure Page 36