by David Stern
Gurgis slammed into the energy curtain. Boyce heard the crackle of electricity, smelled ozone.
Gurgis took a step backward and grunted. Then he looked out through the energy curtain and began to laugh. “Cowards,” he said. “Weaklings.”
There were fresh bruises on his face, Boyce saw. No. Not bruises. Burns. From where he had run into the energy curtain. The skin on both of his cheeks was singed bright red; it had to be unbelievably painful.
It didn’t seem to bother him at all.
“Female.” Gurgis glared down at Deleen. “Tell the one who whelped you I am no longer in her thrall. Tell her my people will come for me, and I will make her my dog before she dies.”
Deleen sat on the ground, trembling, obviously terrified and trying not to show it.
“It’s all right,” Boyce said, reaching out his hand and helping her to her feet.
“No. It is not all right at all.” She got to her feet and looked over his shoulder at Gurgis, who still stood inches away from the energy curtain, breathing heavily. Breathing, if such a thing were possible, aggressively. Staring daggers at them.
“Now, Dr. Boyce,” Deleen said. “Now do you see what I mean?”
He opened his mouth to answer, but the girl had already turned to leave.
EIGHTEEN
Spock stepped up onto the transporter platform.
Number One stepped up alongside him, in a dark blue evac suit that matched his own, and secured her helmet.
Chief Pitcairn, still in his dress uniform, stood behind the transporter console, shaking his head.
“You sure about this?” he asked.
“Quite sure,” she said. “Mr. Spock?”
“Ready for transport, Commander.” He fastened his helmet and secured the straps on his backpack.
“Because I could definitely rig something up,” Pitcairn said. His voice sounded tinny and thin in the evac suit’s audio. “Just on the off chance …”
“We made a plan. Let’s stick to it.” Number One looked over at Spock and then faced forward once more. “Energize.”
Pitcairn’s hands went to the transporter controls. The chief’s modified communicator, propped on top of the operator panel, flashed blue. The chief’s hands began to move and then stopped.
He looked back up. “One hour.”
“Exactly,” Number One said. “We’ll be ready for beam-up in one hour.”
“Got it,” the chief said.
But still, his hands didn’t move. Pitcairn’s hesitation was understandable. They were breaking protocol here—several times over, in fact. Two of the ship’s senior officers beaming into a hostile environment, the chief the only person who knew where they were going . . .
“Secrecy is essential, Chief,” Spock said. “You know that.”
“I do, I do. It’s just that, well, secrecy’s one thing. This is hitting me more like stupidity. What if something happens to you? What if something happens to me? You could be stuck—”
“We talked about all this before, Chief,” Number One interrupted. And they had—first Spock and Pitcairn, in the chief’s quarters, and then the three of them, in the ship’s mess, using various electronic countermeasures to maintain their privacy. “Or weren’t you listening?”
“I was listening,” Pitcairn said.
“I thought you were. And I’m pretty sure you were no longer inebriated. Am I right? You weren’t drunk anymore?”
Pitcairn glared. “I wasn’t.”
“I didn’t think so.” She matched his glare with one of her own. “So, if you would … energize. Please,” she said, or started to say. The chief’s hands were moving as she started the second word, so that Spock heard the “Pl” just as he was thinking that he hadn’t seen the chief this angry in a long while, and the “ease” as the chief’s face vanished, and the twisted blackened wreckage of what they were now calling Building 8, the suspected weapons facility, appeared before him.
The images had not done the devastation justice.
Building 8, two stories tall when intact, was now less than half that. The upper level, what was left of it, had collapsed on top of the lower. Support beams and cable dangled before them. Here and there, a splash of color peeked through the gray—painted walls, coded strands of wire, torn fabric.
Beyond those splashes, and the silver and gray of the ruined structure, and the reddish sands of 55-Hamilton, loomed only the blackness of space and the bright white glitter of stars, light-years from where he stood.
One of them seemed particularly bright. More silver than white. Enterprise, he realized suddenly.
It seemed a long way off.
“This way,” Number One said, and started walking forward.
Spock followed in her wake.
During their initial survey, Commander Tuval’s landing party had noted the presence of what seemed to be an intact doorway. On reviewing tapes of that expedition, Spock and Number One immediately identified the doorway as their prime target, their best chance at getting deeper into the building’s ruins, finding more evidence of what Building 8 was—and wasn’t.
When they arrived at the door’s presumed coordinates, however, it was gone. Buried, Spock presumed, underneath a pile of rubble.
“This way.” Number One gestured to her left. “Maybe we could find another way inside.”
Spock looked over the scene before him. He understood Number One’s instinctual reaction. On this side of the building, the outer wall seemed largely intact, at least up to the second level, which meant, presumably, that the lower levels would be walkable. The fact that the door Commander Tuval had discovered was now gone, however, meant the structure might still be unstable. It certainly looked it.
“Given our limited time constraints, that does not seem feasible,” Spock said. “I suggest we concentrate our energies on a more detailed analysis of the materials available to us.”
“The wreckage? Commander Tuval did that already,” Number One responded. “Come on.”
She began walking to her left, around the outside of the building. Half walking, half bounding—the gravity on 55-Hamilton was practically nonexistent. Spock followed, careful not to exert too much energy. He felt, instinctually, as if he could leap upward and escape the asteroid’s gravitational pull entirely.
Number One stopped walking. “There’s something here. Looks like an exhaust vent of some kind.”
It did indeed look like a vent; it ran from ground level to a height of two meters and was perhaps half that width. What sort of device required a vent that big? A power generator was Spock’s first thought, although, as he remembered the plans for Starbase 18, there was a generator with more than sufficient capacity located in a sublevel of the command center. Could Building 8 have required its own separate power source? Recalling the four Alpha-class power cores delivered to 55-Hamilton, the answer to that question was obvious.
Number One laid a hand on the vent itself, felt around the edges gently, exactly as Spock would have done, taking great care not to exert force on the structure.
“We have to remove the facing.”
“How would you suggest we do that?”
“I was going to ask you,” she said.
“Not a phaser.” They would be unable to focus its energies precisely enough. “Perhaps we could use an engineering tool of some sort.”
“Perhaps.” She did not sound convinced.
“I will endeavor to find us something.” Spock set his pack down on the ground and opened the outer compartment. There were a lot of tools in there. None seemed entirely right. He closed the outer compartment and opened the inner one.
“Chief Pitcairn,” Number One said.
Spock looked up. “Excuse me?”
“What we could really use right now is Chief Pitcairn.” Number One had her back to him, hands on her hips, staring at the vent. “He’d know exactly what this was, how to get the facing off. Whether or not it was even worth doing that. For all we know, this could dead-end in
side a piece of machinery.”
“Chief Pitcairn is on Enterprise . Unreachable, for the next fifty-one minutes.”
“I know.” She turned to face him. “I overreacted before, didn’t I?”
“I do not know what you are referring to.”
“Chief Pitcairn. When he wouldn’t beam us down right away. I overreacted. Calling him a drunk.”
“You suggested he was still drunk,” Spock corrected. “Not that he was a drunk.”
“That’s a very subtle distinction.”
“But an important one.” He selected a tool—a micrograppler—and handed it to her.
She studied it a moment, then nodded. “This ought to do.”
Number One switched the grappler on. She directed the beam toward the top edge of the vent facing, which began, slowly, to bend.
“It appears to be working,” Spock said.
“Yes,” she said, and worked on for a moment in silence.
When the top edge of the vent had been entirely loosened, she stepped back for a moment. “Time?” she asked.
“Eleven minutes passed, forty-nine minutes till beam-up.”
“Good,” she said, and started in on the left side of the vent. At this rate of progress, they would have the vent off in another six minutes, which would give them approximately forty-three minutes inside the structure to examine it.
“I do owe him an apology, though, don’t you think?” Number One said abruptly. “The chief?”
Spock frowned. The commander was attempting to engage him in a personal conversation. Unusual.
He and Number One had never been close; on matters of command importance, he had always spoken with Captain Pike directly. Off-duty, he spent time with the chief and members of the science department.
He was not aware, exactly, of whom Number One spent her free time with.
“The intricacies of human interactions are not my area of expertise, Commander,” Spock said.
“Yes. Well … you may have noticed they’re not exactly mine, either.” She stepped forward and began to work on the left edge of the vent facing.
“Nonetheless,” Spock continued, “I feel safe in saying that whether or not you owe it to him, the chief would most certainly appreciate an apology from you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Spock.” She smiled at him. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Something made him look up then. Movement out of the corner of his eye. The wall above was swaying.
“Commander!” he yelled.
She looked not up but at him. The wall began to fall.
Spock made an instinctual calculation and an instantaneous decision. He leaped forward, pushing off the asteroid’s surface with all the strength in his leg muscles, slamming into Number One, wrapping his arms around her, driving her to the ground, which seemed to rumble beneath him as they rolled, over and over and over and then—
Stopped.
Something had landed on his leg, his left leg, the lower portion, halting his momentum. Something massive, something that instantly deadened all feeling in that limb.
He was aware that a cloud of dust had risen, obscuring his vision. At the same instant, he felt a sudden sense of cold.
He turned his head and looked over his shoulder. A support beam lay across his leg. His suit was torn. Vapor, atmosphere, life-giving oxygen was escaping into the vacuum around the asteroid.
He had landed on top of Number One. Her eyes were closed. She wasn’t moving. He tried to push himself off her and couldn’t. The weight of her body on his arms, the weight of the support beam on his leg … he was trapped. He turned and twisted and tried in vain to free himself.
Vulcans were capable of regulating their metabolism to a certain extent. Spock immediately lowered his, though, of course, that would do little good against the cold creeping into his bones, against the vacuum.
He closed his eyes and grimaced, trying to force his leg backward, to push it farther under the beam, to use the object’s own mass to help close the tear in his evac suit. No luck.
He closed his eyes and tried again.
He blinked and opened his eyes.
He was lying on his back, staring up at the stars. Still in his evac suit. Number One stood over him.
“You’re all right,” she said.
He sat up. “I appear to be.”
He glanced down at his suit, where the tear had been.
“I patched it,” Number One said. “You should be all right until we transport. In another”—she glanced at her tricorder—“twenty minutes, eleven seconds.”
Spock flexed his leg. It was sore where the beam had lain atop it. He sat up and attempted to judge the severity of the injury. “Deep muscle trauma,” he said. “Some swelling.”
“A sprain.”
Spock nodded. “I believe so. There might be a rudimentary first-aid kit in the pack.”
Number One checked. There wasn’t.
“No matter. Treatment is not imperative. The injury is hardly life-threatening.”
“But it could have been.” Number One, who had been kneeling down next to the pack, now stood. “A few centimeters one way or the other … you could have died.”
“Service aboard Enterprise —aboard any starship—is by nature hazardous.”
“But this hazard was my fault. My responsibility.” She shook her head. “This was a stupid idea, beaming down here. Chief Pitcairn was right.”
She truly blamed herself, Spock realized. And not just for this. Many of her actions over the last few days, inexplicable at the time, suddenly made sense to him.
“You consider yourself responsible for Captain Pike’s death,” he said.
“I was in charge. If I’d moved the ship sooner—”
“Crossed into the Borderland? Started a war?”
She was silent a moment. “The chain of events that led to Magellan and its occupants being lost … they are my responsibility.”
“I fail to see how you could have anticipated those occurrences.”
“I can see it very clearly.” She shook her head again. “Very clearly indeed.”
What Spock could see was that there would be no arguing with her on this point. He pushed himself to his feet—easy enough in the lighter gravity. The problem, he realized, would be maintaining his balance.
“You could use a crutch of some sort. We could use the phaser to cut one of those beams.” Number One gestured toward the wreckage behind them.
“Perhaps,” Spock said. Though what he could really use now was Dr. Boyce—or, rather, the doctor’s medikit. A simple hypo would take down the swelling quickly.
Dr. Boyce, however, was not there.
“Mr. Spock?” Number One was staring at him. “Is something the matter?”
“Dr. Boyce,” he said.
“What about Dr. Boyce?”
“His daughter.”
“Dr. Wandruska.”
“Yes. Her personnel record was not among those you accessed.”
“No.” He could hear the frown in her voice. “I don’t remember seeing her record at all, in fact.”
Spock tried to recall what he knew about the woman. What Boyce had told him about her. Dr. Jaya Wandruska, Starfleet medical researcher. Rank of lieutenant. A native of Argelius. Spock had seen a picture of her in Boyce’s office; she had the typical Argelian physiognomy. Lean, angular build. A triangular, strong-featured face. Ivory skin, reddish hair. A geneticist who had received numerous commendations for her work, related to the spread of nonspecies-specific pathogens throughout the Alpha Quadrant over the last few centuries. She was an expert in such pathogens, diseases capable of crossing the species barrier.
“Mr. Spock?” Number One asked again. “Is something wrong?”
He did not respond for a second. Was something wrong?
He believed the answer was yes.
In his mind, he added Lieutenant Wandruska to the list of personnel Number One had shown him earlier. Experts in the Klingon Empire, its weaknesses
, its strengths, its history.
A specialist in battlefield medicine.
A historian.
A geneticist.
He could see only one reason to assemble such a group. Such a unique conflux of talents.
The possibility was so chilling, so foreign to him, that he almost dared not speak it aloud.
“Biological warfare,” he said quietly.
“Say again?” Number One’s voice in his ear came as a surprise; he had forgotten the circuit was open.
“Biological warfare.” He turned and faced the wreckage. “This would explain the redundant power cores,” Spock said. “As well as the—”
There was a sudden humming noise. Electrical interference, of a kind that took Spock a moment to place. The transporter.
One second, he was looking up at the sky, where Enterprise was orbiting.
The next he was staring at the ceiling of the transporter room.
Chief Pitcairn was standing at the controls. Captain Vlasidovich was standing next to him, hands clasped behind his back, frowning.
“Space walk. At oh-three-hundred ship’s hours. What is purpose of this, may I ask?”
Spock looked to Number One. He saw her struggling for something to say.
Vlasidovich saw it, too. “Never mind,” the captain said. “You will tell me later. We will have long discussion. For now, come with me, please. Both of you. I have something I wish you to see.”
“Sir?” Spock asked.
“Your prototype, Mr. Spock. Black Snow. It is real. And we have it.” The captain smiled. “Remove suits, please. And come this way.”
NINETEEN
Ultimately, it didn’t change anything, Boyce realized. Whether he was trying to brew up the fountain of youth, a souped-up love potion, or a combination of the two. He could only work so fast. Besides which, the work, ultimately, was only a delaying tactic. He was buying time for Hoto, giving her the opportunity to hack her way deeper into the Orion system, to find a way to contact Enterprise, to get a fix on their current location … to stop a war.
He didn’t tell Deleen that, of course. He didn’t tell her much of anything. After they left Gurgis, she went her way, he went his, back to the medical wing, under escort.