“It is Doctor Marcus’ opinion that this is—that the Genesis effect has in some way regenerated—Captain Spock.”
Back on board the Grissom, J.T. Esteban clamped his jaw tight shut to keep it from dropping. He glanced over at his science officer, who stopped staring at the speaker from which Saavik’s announcement had come and met Esteban’s gaze with an expression of complete, bewildered, speechless perplexity.
“Ah, Saavik,” Esteban said, slowly, carefully, trying to figure out how to reply without saying that he thought she and David Marcus had gone stark staring bonkers. “That’s…ah…extraordinary. What would you, ah, like to do next?”
“Request permission to beam aboard immediately.”
He wanted to stall them for a bit. It was possible that some glitch in the Genesis programs bad produced powerful hallucinogens, or even that one of its denizens could take on the form of someone the observer would most desire to see. He could not take the chance of beaming such a thing on board. Of course there was always the possibility that what Saavik was describing was exactly what was happening….
“Saavik…do Doctor Marcus’ instruments show any chance of, er, radioactive contamination?”
After a short pause, Saavik replied, “None that he can detect, sir.”
“Well. All the same, I’m going to advise Starfleet and get instructions.”
“I am sure Starfleet would approve, sir,” Saavik said.
“Nevertheless…let’s do it by the book. Stand by on this channel.” He nodded to his communications officer. “Go.”
“Starfleet command, this is U.S.S. Grissom on subspace coded channel ninety-eight point eight. Come in, please.”
The comm officer flinched as a high whine came through the earpiece.
“Sir,” the comm officer said to Esteban, “something’s jamming our transmission. An energy surge.”
“What’s the location?”
“Astern, sir. Aft quarter.”
“On-screen.”
The viewscreen flickered from a forward view to the aft pickup. The starfield lay empty behind them, empty except for an odd interference pattern in one corner. Esteban frowned, wondering if the maintenance of the pickup had been let go.
The interference pattern suddenly coalesced and solidified.
Out of nothing, a ship appeared.
Down on the surface of Genesis, Saavik and David waited impatiently for a response from Esteban. To Saavik’s embarrassment, she was beginning to shiver from the cold. The child had stopped watching them. He hunched shivering in the black cloth, his eyelids drooping.
“Don’t sleep,” Saavik said, shaking him gently. He did not respond.
“Just like good old J.T. to leave us here freezing our butts off while he puts in a call to Starfleet,” David said. “Let’s get off this glacier, anyway.”
Saavik nodded. Between them, they got the child to his feet. His injured leg collapsed beneath him. They would have to carry him, then call Grissom back when they got to a more hospitable spot.
As she was about to put her communicator away, it shrieked and squealed.
“Oh, my God!” It was Esteban’s voice. “Red alert! Raise the shields!”
“Captain,” Saavik said, “what is it?”
“We’re under attack! Stand by for evasive—stand by for—”
The cracked voice dissolved in a rattle of static.
“Captain! Captain Esteban, come in please!”
Deep space replied to her with silence.
On the bridge of the Klingon fighter, Commander Kruge watched the Federation science ship open out like a flower with a center of flame. The wreckage exploded and expanded beyond the limits of his own ship’s port. Kruge’s anger was only a little less explosive.
He swung around toward his gunner.
“I told you,” he said dangerously, in the lowest of the low dialects, “engine section only!”
“A fortunate mistake,” the gunner said. His crest flared up in excitement until he realized how Kruge had spoken to him. “Sir…?”
“I wanted prisoners,” Kruge said, layering all the strata of his words with contempt. At his side, Warrigul growled.
The gunner’s crest flattened against his skull. Kruge gestured to Maltz.
“Offer him a chance to regain his honor,” Kruge said.
Maltz stopped before the gunner’s station and drew his ceremonial blade.
The gunner cringed. “Sir, please, no—it was an error!”
Maltz willed the gunner to get hold of himself and bow to the inevitable with grace. Maltz offered him his own honor blade. Every member of the crew watched, mesmerized.
Instead of accepting it and doing the proper thing, the gunner lurched backward from his station.
“Sir, no!” he cried. He stumbled toward Kruge, his hands outstretched in supplication. “Mercy, sir—”
Kruge drew his phaser and fired. The gunner disintegrated in a flare of energy.
“Animal,” Kruge muttered. Warrigul snorted in agreement and rubbed up against his leg.
Maltz sheathed his blade, glad that its edge had not been sullied with the blood of a coward.
“Sir,” Torg said, “may I suggest—”
Kruge whirled around to confront him. The commander still gripped the handle of his phaser, his frustration undiminished.
“Say the wrong thing, Torg, and I will kill you, too!”
“I only mean to say, my lord, that if it is prisoners you want, we interrupted a transmission from the planet’s surface. I have traced it.” He gestured to the screen. “These life signs may be the very scientists you seek.”
Kruge strode to his side, glared at the screen, and analyzed the readings. One was clearly human, the other two less distinctive. Vulcan, perhaps, or Romulan. Human was to be expected; humans were the troublemakers of the galaxy, as far as Kruge was concerned. It annoyed him thoroughly that the Romulans might be involved in this. No doubt they had abandoned their commitments to the Klingon Empire and rushed straight to conclude an alliance with the Federation, in return for a share in Genesis.
And he, Kruge, was about to catch them at the treachery.
“Very good,” he said to Torg, who stood even straighter with the pleasure of his commander’s approval. “Very good.”
The Vulcan boy huddled against Saavik’s side, unable to understand the events taking place overhead, unable even to understand that events were taking place overhead, but upset and frightened by David and Saavik’s reaction.
“Grissom, this is Saavik, come in please—”
The emergency channel replied with static. Suddenly Saavik snapped the communicator closed. Her transmission would clearly and easily mark their position.
“Saavik, my gods, what happened to them?”
“It would seem that Grissom was destroyed by an enemy attack,” she said.
Saavik thought with regret of Frederic, the Glaeziver, whose counsel she had grown to value in the short time she had known him. He had understood what Genesis might mean for him and his kind, and now he was gone.
“Destroyed…?” Stunned, David looked up, as if he might see the remains of the ship drifting dead in the new sky.
Saavik put away her communicator. It was useless now. She picked up the Vulcan child and started across the ice. She was very worried about the boy. He was so cold he had ceased even to shiver.
The ground quaked gently beneath her feet. Some distance away, ice shuddered, squealed, and ruptured. The child cried out weakly and began to tremble again. His pain did not ease until the temblor faded.
Saavik reached the place where, half an hour earlier, the snowfield had ended. Now it stretched onward and she could not see its edge. She hitched the child higher against her shoulder and ploughed on.
David caught up to her.
“Saavik—that means we’re stranded down here!”
“Logic indicates that is the case,” she said. The glacier seemed never-ending. It must be flowing at an incredible rate.
>
“How can you be logical at a time like this? We have to get the hell off this planet!”
“We must get out of the snow, first,” she said. “I think it likely that we would freeze before we would starve, on this world.”
“We have to get off Genesis!” David said again.
“That will be difficult,” Saavik said. It took considerable effort to make any headway through the deep, soft snow. She trudged on.
“Why don’t you just call for help!”
She looked at him. His demand was most curious, the result, no doubt, of panic. He knew her communicator was nothing but a local transceiver. Grissom had been the only Federation ship within its range. Whatever destroyed it was the only ship she would reach if she called again.
David’s reaction disturbed her greatly. He was more frightened of remaining on the world he had created than he was of transmitting a Mayday that would be picked up by enemies. He was more distressed by having to remain in a paradise he had helped design than he was by the destruction of an entire ship and its crew.
“I have already made one transmission too many,” she said.
David’s shocked expression revealed his comprehension. He did not ask her to call for help again.
The snow ended as abruptly as it had begun. The edge of the ice moved perceptibly, creeping and grinding its way across the desert floor. Saavik stepped out of cold and into abrupt, welcome heat. She carried the child across a hundred meters of the water-worn stones, to a place where he would be safe for at least a few minutes. The snow on her hair and the ice on her eyelashes melted quickly. Cold drops slid down her face. She lowered the child to the ground, brushed away the dissolving snow with half-numbed hands, and helped him to lie in a warm and sunny spot.
David sank down nearby, drew his knees to his chest, and laid his face against his folded arms.
Saavik sat on her heels beside him.
“David,” she said gently.
He said nothing.
“David, it is time for truth between us.” She put her hands on his shoulders in what she hoped might be a comforting gesture. But what did she know of comfort? She was neither Vulcan, never needing comfort, never able to give it, nor was she Romulan, able to give full rein to her passions. “This planet is neither what you intended nor what you hoped for, is it?”
David let his hands fall. “Not exactly,” he said.
“Is it what you feared?”
“I didn’t think this would happen—!”
“But you have not been surprised by anything we have discovered, no matter how bizarre.”
“There was one set of equations, I wasn’t quite certain about them….”
“You were overruled by the other members of the Genesis team?”
“I…I didn’t want to make a big thing of them….”
“Surely you pointed them out?”
“Why should I?” he snapped, on the defense. “I’m a mere biochemist, as my young genius physicist colleagues kept trying not to remind me. If Madison and March didn’t think their creation was going to dissolve back into protomatter—”
“Protomatter!” Saavik exclaimed. “David, you are saying the entire system is unstable—and dangerously unpredictable! As an ethical scientist—”
“It shouldn’t have happened! It hasn’t, yet, maybe it won’t. Maybe it wasn’t a mistake at all—”
“And perhaps the ground tremors are in our minds, and the harmonic vibrations we detected from Grissom were instrument malfunction…” She shook her head. “Oh, David.”
“I just figured, if it worked out for fusion, it would work out for us.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The first time anybody started a fusion reaction—the first time on Earth, I mean. It was a bomb, of course—”
“Naturally,” Saavik said.
“They didn’t know for sure if they’d set off a chain reaction of all the hydrogen in the atmosphere. But they took the chance. They did it anyway.”
“Indeed.”
“Well, at least there’s precedent.”
“I am glad to see you are able to maintain your sense of humor,” Saavik said.
“Dammit, Saavik, if those equations weren’t right, the whole project collapsed—permanently! All I had was a suspicion, and it was a suspicion about a probability function at that! There was only a one in a million chance that the worst would happen even if the worst could happen. Besides, if we’d tested Genesis the way we intended to, instead of having it blown up by your admiral’s—”
“Your father’s—”
“—friend Mister Khan, there wouldn’t have been anybody on the planet to be in danger!”
“You did not tell your collaborators,” Saavik said. “Even after detonation, you did not tell Carol—”
“If I had, it wouldn’t be just us stuck here! Mother would never have gone back to Earth, not if she’d known. She’d have taken the whole responsibility on herself…when it was mine to accept.”
“Just like your father…” Saavik said sadly. “You changed the rules.” She knew now that Genesis would never benefit anyone. It would never create new resources, it would never provide a new home for Frederic’s people, it would only, ever, cause grief and anguish and disaster.
“If I hadn’t, it might have been years—or never!”
All Saavik could think was that if Genesis had been delayed or abandoned, none of the recent events would have happened. Reliant would never have visited the world on which Khan Noonien Singh and his people were marooned. Khan would never have obtained a starship. He would never have led his people on his mission of vengeance. The scientists on Spacelab would not have been murdered. The Enterprise and its crew of children never would have been attacked. Peter Preston would still be alive. Genesis would not have existed to be used as a weapon, and Mister Spock would not have had to sacrifice his existence to save his ship and his crewmates.
Spock would not have died.
Nor would he have been resurrected. The child possessed the substance of her teacher, but he lacked his mind, his experience, his individuality.
Saavik rose to her feet and stood looking down at David. A dangerous fury began to form.
“And how many have paid the price for your impatience?” Saavik said. “How many have died? How much damage have you caused—and what is yet to come?”
He raised his head. His belligerence dissolved in grief and anguish, but Saavik was still too close to the madness to forgive him. She fled from him, her fists clenched so hard that her nails cut into her palms. When she had run a hundred paces she stopped.
Saavik cried out to the dying world, a long, hoarse shriek of rage and pain.
For a jail cell, it was not half bad.
Leonard McCoy lay on the bunk with his arm flung across his eyes.
The bunk was no wider than his shoulders, the floor was badly worn, gray, spongy linoleum, and he could not turn out the lights, but, still, it was not too bad. For a jail cell.
McCoy felt quite calm and rational and single-minded, despite having been forbidden any tranquilizers. After he had prowled the cell, pacing back and forth and inspecting every crack and corner of it, after he had come to the conclusion that he could not escape (that was the one other thing wrong with it, of course: he could not pass through the open doorway; the force field threw him back into the room at every try, more forcefully and more painfully each time. But, then, it was a jail cell), the compulsion to return to the Mutara Sector and Genesis had vanished as suddenly and completely as it had appeared.
He wondered about that. It seemed like a terribly logical reaction to have….
McCoy dozed off.
“You got a visitor, Doc.”
McCoy started out of troubled sleep, wondering where he was and how he had gotten there, and then remembering. Not a dream, after all. Too bad.
“Make it quick, Admiral,” the guard said. “They’re moving him to the Federation funny farm.”
<
br /> McCoy peered sideways from beneath his arm and saw the guard and Jim Kirk standing outlined by the force field. Jim shook his head sadly.
“Yes, my poor friend,” he said. “I hear he’s fruity as a nutcake.”
Oh, you do, do you? McCoy thought. A “funny farm,” eh? Is that the kind of respect anybody with a few problems gets in here? Besides, I know my rights—they can’t send me anywhere without a hearing.
However, they had put him in here without a hearing. Genesis had not only frightened the Federation and Starfleet, it had put them into a total panic. McCoy wondered what would happen when Jim called his lawyer for him, as McCoy intended to ask him to do. He wondered if the administration of this prison would even admit to an attorney that he was here.
“Two minutes,” the guard said.
McCoy watched the grid of the force field dim and fade. He had to struggle against the sudden compulsion to leap up and try to fight his way out. Since the guard was head and shoulders taller than he, and armed at that, such a course was definitely not logical. As Jim stepped inside the cell, the urge diminished in proportion to the strength of the reappearing energy barrier.
Jim knelt beside the cot.
“Jim—” McCoy said.
“Shh.” He raised his hand, shielding it from the surveillance camera. “How many fingers?”
His fingers parted in the Vulcan salute.
“That’s not very damned funny,” McCoy said.
“Good,” said Jim. “Your sense of humor has returned.” He reached into his pocket.
“The hell it has!” Two minutes, and Jim wanted to spend it trading one-liners. McCoy wanted a lawyer and he wanted out of here. It was ridiculous to maintain the pretense of being asleep, so he sat up.
Jim drew out a spray injector.
McCoy frowned. “What’s that?”
“Lexorin.”
“Lexorin! What for?”
“You’re suffering from a Vulcan mind-meld, Doctor.”
“Spock—?”
“That’s right.”
“That green-blooded, pointy-eared son of a bitch. It’s his revenge for all those arguments he lost—”
“Give me your arm. This will make you well enough to travel.” He fumbled around with the automatic hypo, putting himself in considerable danger of shooting himself in the hand. “How do you do this, anyway?”
Duty, Honor, Redemption Page 37