by David Stern
“Impressive.”
“I have a level five certification from Starfleet.”
“Ah.” Boyce smiled. Level five. The mention brought to mind an argument he’d witnessed one night in the officers’ mess, an argument between Mr. Spock and Chief Pitcairn regarding the relevance of those certification tests. The chief, who hadn’t formally been graded in years, dismissed them as singularly unimportant. Spock thought just the opposite, and had gone into mind-numbing detail about why.
“So what are we looking at here?”
Hoto regarded him with suspicion a moment, then continued. “This is control code for some of the ship’s systems here, on the left.” She pointed to the numbers. “And databases associated with those systems here, on the right.” She pointed to the text. “I have learned many things. The control keypads for various cell doors on this floor, for example, can be opened by entering zeph-zeph-gramma—these numbers here.” She pointed again.
“Various cell doors. Like that one?” Boyce gestured toward the door M’Lor had just left through.
“I believe so.”
“Impressive.”
“Thank you, Doctor. Now, the consequences of your decision? To what was M’Lor referring?”
“It’s a long story,” Boyce said. “I’ll give you the short version.”
He did. Hoto was frowning when he finished.
“Immortality,” she said. “It is a physical impossibility. And yet given the undeniable fact of Liyan’s own considerable longevity … perhaps …”
Boyce sighed. “I don’t know what to believe, to tell you the truth. It doesn’t really matter anyway.”
“Why not?”
“Why not?” He looked at her, a little incredulous. “Because—you heard what I just said, didn’t you? What happened to Captain Pike and the landing party?”
“I did hear. But—”
“And the part about the image projector? How they used that to attack Starbase Eighteen?”
“I did hear, sir. However—”
“Eighty-seven people died there, Lieutenant.”
“Including your daughter.”
“Yes. Including my daughter.”
“I regret the loss of life. But it cannot be the sole factor in your determination.”
“You ever had kids?”
“I am twenty-three standard years of age.”
“That’s a no, then.”
“That is a no.”
“Then you can’t possibly know how I feel.”
“Mr. Spock would say you must set aside your feelings, sir.”
“Not all of us want to be Vulcans when we grow up, Lieutenant.”
“Sir.” Hoto pulled aside the sheet on her bed with her remaining hand and swung her feet onto the floor. “In gaining access to the Orion mainframe, I have had opportunity to familiarize myself with their historical database as well. I have read news briefs, diplomatic reports, battle summaries, and the like.”
“So?”
“Liyan’s rule has been beneficial on many levels.”
“Beneficial to whom?”
“The Federation, for one.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Under the tallith’s leadership, pirate attacks in the Borderland and nearby territories have declined nearly two hundred percent.”
“What does that mean exactly?”
“In the fifty years prior to her consolidation of power, more than a thousand lives were lost in such attacks. Since then, there have been roughly three hundred fatalities. Most of which came in a single assault orchestrated by the Orion syndicate.”
“You’re implying she saved seven hundred lives?”
“Approximately. Yes.”
“That’s faulty reasoning,” Boyce said. “You can’t count on attacks like that occurring.”
“Liyan has instituted policies specifically penalizing clans for them.”
Boyce frowned.
“In addition, wars between the clans have almost stopped entirely. There is peace among the Orion peoples for the first time in nearly two hundred years.”
“Most of the Orion peoples, anyway,” Boyce said, thinking of the Singhino.
“Sir?”
“Never mind. Okay. Her rule has been beneficial on some levels. I’ll agree there. That still doesn’t mean—”
“There is more,” Hoto said. “The Klingons.”
Boyce sighed. He’d had a feeling the Klingons would come up again. “What about the Klingons?”
“The presence of a stable, functioning Orion government in the Borderland is a considerable deterrent to further expansion by the Empire in this sector. Which is perhaps the single most important reason—”
He threw up his hands.
“What?” Hoto asked. “Is my reasoning faulty?”
“No. It’s her reasoning, too. Which is why I don’t necessarily buy it.”
“It is a compelling argument. And there is another factor to consider as well. Further reason for you to cooperate with the tallith.”
“Go on.”
“She will most likely kill both of us if you don’t.”
Boyce had to laugh. “That I agree with.”
“It is no joking matter, Doctor,” Hoto said. “If we are dead, there is no one alive to tell the Federation that the Empire was not responsible for the attack on Starbase Eighteen.”
“I’m aware of that,” Boyce said.
“If you cooperate, there is a chance we can contact Enterprise . Tell them that—”
“Contact Enterprise ?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
Hoto walked back over to her bed and touched the terminal.
“Through the Orion mainframe. Given enough time, I believe I will be able to access the ship’s communication system. Control it long enough to send out a simple message.”
Boyce shook his head. “Which in all likelihood no one will hear. For all we know, we’re completely out of the sector by now.”
“You may be correct. I will know for certain shortly.” Now she smiled. “I am currently running a subroutine designed to poll the ship’s sensors for location data. Within the hour, I expect I will have a fairly accurate picture of our current location, as well as that of the nearest Federation outpost.”
“And if we’re not near a Federation outpost?”
“I will contact the Klingons.”
“And tell them what?”
“The truth.” Hoto regarded him impassively. “I sympathize with your dilemma, Doctor. But to prevent an unjust war from occurring, to serve the Federation’s larger stragetic imperatives—”
“No.” He shook his head. “I’m not going to do it.”
Hoto sat back down on her bed.
The two of them stared at each other a moment.
Then Hoto shrugged. “Very well. I do not wish to leave my death to the Orions. I have had experience with their savagery already. I believe that within this room, there are chemicals you can use to euthanize—”
“Stop it,” Boyce said.
“I will not,” Hoto said. “There are consequences to your decisions, Doctor. I am merely laying those out in order to help you reach your determination.”
She was right, of course. Boyce knew that. But it didn’t matter. He turned away from her. He had to have time to think, space to think, without Hoto staring at him, without the guards or Zandar or M’Lor leaning over him.
But there was, of course, nowhere to go.
He looked at the door and the keypad next to it.
Zeph-zeph-gramma.
He strode quickly toward the door.
“Dr. Boyce!” Hoto called after him. “Where are you going?”
“Somewhere else,” he said. He entered the code and stepped out into the hall.
Even as the door closed behind him, Boyce realized he was making a terrible mistake, that there would be guards patrolling the corridor, that they would wonder how he had gotten the exit code, that they would discover Hoto
’s trespasses and kill both of them no matter his decision.
But he was wrong.
The hall was empty; whatever guards there were, he realized, must be on the main entrance to the medical wing. He was all alone.
Okay, Doctor, he told himself. Here’s that time and space you wanted. Now what?
He had to face facts. Uncomfortable as they were. Hoto was right, wasn’t she? He didn’t have a choice here. Helping Liyan was the only course of action that made sense right now, distasteful as it was. Though distasteful was nowhere near strong enough a word; revolting was closer.
A fountain of youth. A five-hundred-year life span.
Never mind the political, strategic consequences, the whole thing was just wrong. Unnatural.
And didn’t that bring back memories.
Your work on Argelius is well known, Doctor.
Boyce leaned back against the wall and sighed.
He was standing, he realized then, in almost exactly the same spot he’d stood that first day, when he’d taken a break from treating the Orion wounded and wound up walking into a nightmare. Collins’s death. His imprisonment.
His gaze traveled down the hall again now. To the three doors directly opposite the entrance to the medical wing. The one facing him was still closed, with the control pad next to it blinking red. One to the left and one to the right. The girl Deleen’s room.
The lights came on, low intensity, as soon as he walked into the room. She was no longer in there, of course. The LeKarz was gone as well. And there were bloodstains against the far wall—Collins’s blood. Otherwise, though, it looked exactly the same. The diagnostic cot, the analysis screen …
He looked down at the empty cot and in his mind’s eye saw Deleen lying there again.
I’m here to help.
Familiar words; they rang a bell. It took him a few seconds, but then he had it.
Argelius. The Mobile 7 lab. Three years into the assignment that would take up seventeen years of his professional life.
He closed his eyes and remembered.
Boyce was alone in the main research room; the other members of his team were down on the planet’s surface. He was staring at the LeKarz data screen, at a three-column list—flora, fauna, native population—of deviations from the planet’s underlying genetic code. There were mutations everywhere. Dezzla’s syndrome—the immediate cause for concern, the immediate cause for their presence there—was just the tip of the iceberg. A horrible tip, to be sure—a hideous, deforming, ultimately fatal skin condition that had been spreading like wildfire among the population of the southern continent the last ten years—but still, just the tip. The real problem went far deeper than that. The real problem was that the ecosystem, the processes that had evolved over the last billion years of Argelius’s life span—no longer worked. Nature itself was broken. And there didn’t seem to be any way to fix it.
Boyce leaned back from the LeKarz, rubbed his eyes, and looked out the window.
And almost had a heart attack.
A little face—a thin, pale-skinned, green-eyed face—was staring at him through the lab’s main viewport. Which was quite a surprise.
Mobile 7 was thirty feet off the ground.
“Hey!” he yelled. “Hey! Get off there! That’s not safe!”
The child—it was only later he found out it was a girl—waved at him. Waved. She was hanging by one hand from the superstructure.
She yelled something back at him. The lab glass wasn’t soundproof. What the girl yelled back was a single word: “Food!”
Boyce ended up bringing her into the lab and feeding her.
“Good?” he asked, as she sat at the mess table, shoveling in soup from a bowl as fast as her hands could move.
She nodded and kept eating.
“I’m Philip Boyce, by the way,” he said.
The girl was dressed, if you could call it that, in what looked like an old tablecloth, strategically folded over and tied together in several spots. From the way she was attacking the food, Boyce guessed she hadn’t eaten in days. Not a big surprise. Planetary civilization on Argelius had broken down a few decades back. On the northern continent, remnants of it—cities, here and there rudimentary government—survived, but here, on the southern continent, things were a lot more chaotic. More dangerous. One of the reasons they kept Mobile 7 up off the surface.
She had long, stringy, pale white hair. Boyce put her age at ten or eleven. On the verge of adolescence and puberty. Which in her case would be fatal.
She already had the characteristic red spots of Dezzla’s syndrome on the insides of both arms.
“I have more, if you want it,” he said. “The soup.”
She grunted. Boyce took that as a yes and poured some into her bowl.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
The girl glanced up quickly from the bowl. “Jaya,” she said.
“Jaya. I’m Dr. Boyce.”
“Doctor.” She said the word slowly, almost as if she’d never heard it before.
“That’s right.” He smiled at her. “I’m here to help.”
She smiled, too.
The memory faded.
The empty room came back into focus.
Boyce glanced at the display and was surprised to see he’d been standing there for almost half an hour. He was surprised to see something else, too. The screen appeared to be on standby mode. He waved a hand over it, and the screen came to life.
It took him a few minutes, but eventually, he was able to bring up Deleen’s information again. The readings he’d been looking at before Collins was killed. He had a little more time now to study them. To go beyond the vitals—temperature, blood pressure, body pH—and look closely at the details. Blood chemistry, for instance. This last set of readings—taken, if memory served, about an hour and a half before he had entered the room—was disturbing. Puzzling. Completely out of whack, if his memory of the basic components of Orion blood material was correct. Levels of certain hormones were way too high, levels of certain immune factors so low as to be almost nonexistent.
Those imbalances could, he realized, account for the discoloration of her veins. Liyan was suffering from the same condition. Did that mean her body chemistry looked the same? That she was suffering from the same imbalances? The fact that the sentry had the same thing—had it much worse, Boyce thought, remembering how swollen and distended her veins had seemed—suggested a connection between the condition and the serum. So the girl was taking the serum? That made no sense. There were only drops left in the last of the three vials they’d found; surely Liyan needed those until more could be made. If more could be made. Which, Boyce supposed, was up to him.
Liyan had found the shuttle—the serum—seventy-five years ago. The Orions were a good dozen years behind the Federation technologically, but they were still capable scientists. They must have been trying to duplicate the serum for years, trying pretty hard, in fact; running all sorts of different …
Experiments.
A chill ran down his spine.
He looked down at the cot again and back up at the display screen. The numbers flashed through his mind—hormones up, other factors down, blood chemistry completely out of whack. And now he knew why.
The girl had been taking the serum, all right. They’d probably given her dozens of different versions of it, in fact. Trying to find one that worked. Petri had lied. Deleen wasn’t a patient.
She was a guinea pig.
TWELVE
Morning found Spock standing inside the open doorway of Shuttlebay 2, looking at Number One, who stood inside the bay, next to the wreck of Magellan. She’d been there for a good five minutes, studying it in silence. Spock thought he knew why. Although there would undoubtedly be a memorial of some sort constructed back on Earth—Captain Pike’s roots there were long and deep—for now, this chamber, which only yesterday had served as the site for the captain’s service, and that of the other members of the landing party who’d perished along with
him, was the closest thing Christopher Pike had to a grave.
Enterprise ’s first officer stretched out a hand and ran it over the gaping hole in the shuttle’s fuselage. The sight sparked memories. Spock himself had done the exact same thing when they’d pulled the wreckage in by tractor beam two days earlier. The size of the hole had told him decompression had been instantaneous; everyone inside the shuttlecraft had been sucked out into space within seconds. They’d died within seconds, died in the vast, unforgiving vacuum of space, their bodies never to be recovered. The facts were undeniable, and yet they felt wrong to him somehow, both at the service and now.
Captain Pike dead.
It did not seem logical.
“Mr. Spock.” Number One lowered her hand and turned to face him.
“Commander.” Spock took a step forward, the sound of his boots on metal echoing throughout the cavernous chamber. “Please forgive the interruption.”
“Not at all.” She attempted a smile; it looked forced. No surprise. Number One did not smile frequently; the sight of the expression on her face was no more natural, he supposed, than it would be on his. “I was just leaving. I’ll let you have some time to pay your respects.”
“I have done so already. In point of fact, I came here looking for you.”
“Me.”
“Yes. I wish to discuss a query you recently sent to the Archives.”
Number One’s eyes flickered. She hesitated a second before replying.
Spock knew what she was going to say even before she opened her mouth.
“Recently?” She shook her head. “I cannot recall sending any recent queries to Archives.”
“This one was transmitted three days ago. Shall I quote the text, to refresh your memory? ‘Explanation sought for discrepancy between Starfleet records and evidentiary findings on fifty-five Hamilton.’ That was the text of the query. It was accompanied by several image files.” Which had taken him several hours to reconstruct, in total. It had taken him several more hours to trace the physical source of the transmission, the location aboard Enterprise from which the query had been made. Ironically, once he had that information and the time of transmission in hand, he realized he had actually witnessed the message being sent.