Kirk only had time to nod toward the back of the shop as he unclipped his own IDIC. But Marinta understood.
Kirk sprang out of his crouch, sprinted toward the shopkeeper’s desk, Marinta right behind him.
Another phaser beam flashed in the darkness, but it was too late. Kirk and Marinta were already beside the trembling Tiburons.
“It’s all right,” Kirk whispered. “They’re after us, not you.” He waved the shopkeepers up. “Get out of here. You’ll be all right.”
The humanoids’ webbed earflaps quivered in fear. In the Alpha Quadrant, Vulcan, like Earth, was a world renowned for having banished all criminal behavior.
“Go!” Marinta hissed.
As if electrified, the Tiburons leapt to their feet and ran toward the front door.
Kirk counted to three before phasers fired again and both Tiburons thudded to the floor, heavily stunned.
Then slow and deliberate footsteps advanced into the shop.
Kirk needed no further proof that Marinta was correct. Vulcans did not shoot first and check their targets second. Whoever the security officers were, they weren’t Vulcan.
But that realization did nothing to alter the next step of Kirk’s plan.
Swiftly and silently, he and Marinta unlocked and opened all the sehlat cages they could reach.
Though only a few months old, bristling with short fur and still without fangs, the sehlat cubs growled and spit as they broke for freedom.
Kirk swept two up and clipped an IDIC to each of their collars, then just as quickly dropped them, but not before their tiny claws had slashed him. As soon as the snarling sehlats hit the floor, they disappeared under the counters and displays, their short stubby legs keeping them low to the ground.
“They’re getting away!” a security officer shouted.
Kirk peered out from behind the table and saw several of his pursuers aiming tracking tricorders toward the other side of the shop. As he’d anticipated, the officers had set their devices to scan for the false biosignatures generated by the IDICs.
Running footsteps, the crash of crates, the squeal of sehlats.
A perfect diversion.
Kirk and Marinta ran for the curtained doorway at the back of the shop. But before they reached it, an officer sprang at them from the shadows.
An iron hand closed on Kirk’s throat.
Kirk twisted, struggled, but the grip was unbreakable.
He could see the officer’s Vulcan features in the pale orange glow of the marketplace light. The officer opened his mouth, began to shout: “They’re here!”
But before the last syllable left the officer’s lips, Marinta’s knuckles slammed into his throat, left him gasping.
His grip on Kirk failed. Kirk spun to confront his attacker. But Marinta’s hand was already inside the neck of the man’s uniform, her fingers seeking contact with the unprotected flesh of his shoulder.
Kirk knew what she was doing but was still amazed-a Vulcan nerve pinch delivered by a Romulan.
The man collapsed with a strangled moan, his attempted cry of warning unheard in the noisy confusion of the ongoing search of customers, enhanced by the snarls of fleeing sehlats.
Kirk and Marinta rushed through the curtained doorway, escaped the shop.
The small alley behind the row of shops offered no place to hide.
Kirk paused to get his bearings.
Marinta studied the dark canopy of sky, agitated. “When they realize they’ve been fooled by false biosignatures, they’ll start scanning again. Probably from orbit.”
Kirk guessed what she was about to propose, didn’t agree. “It’s too dangerous to split up.”
“Captain, they’ll be scanning for two individuals traveling together-human and Vulcan. From orbit, that’s how I’ll appear to them.” She handed him the message player. “You have to get this to someone with the ability to extract all possible information. Someone you can trust.”
Kirk hefted the player in his hand, judging the weight of it-not mass, but the power it might have to stop the Totality. “There’s no one on Vulcan who can be trusted,” he said.
“You’re a starship captain. You have a ship. Use it.”
The air trembled. Something big and dark was moving through the sky. Kirk recognized the glow of an aerial searchlight approaching as whatever vehicle hovered over the shop began to change position.
“My child is on Vulcan,” Kirk said quietly. “I won’t leave him.”
Marinta pulled her hood up, hiding her features, preparing for flight. “You have to! The only way you can save Joseph and Spock is to defeat the Totality. The answer’s in that message. If you stay on Vulcan, you’ll lose it.”
Marinta suddenly reached up to touch Kirk’s face as if she meant to meld with him again. “I felt the echo of Spock in you. You know what he’d want you to do. You know what you have to do. Not just for your son and your friend, but for all life in this galaxy.”
Kirk pulled back from her. In his mind he knew she was right, but his heart couldn’t accept it.
“Joseph’smychild….”
“And if you save Joseph and lose the galaxy, what will you have gained? What legacy will you have left him?”
A sudden wind blew through the alley. A blinding spotlight stabbed the rough paving stones just ahead of them.
“You know what you have to do,” Marinta said. And then she turned and ran into the spotlight, rushed through it, kept moving.
The flying craft above the alley, its silhouette indistinct against the Vulcan stars, rotated as it banked to change direction, its spotlight sweeping forward, following Marinta.
Kirk forced himself to turn away from her, to run down the alley in the opposite direction. He wouldn’t leave Vulcan. He wouldn’t abandon his son.
And then he saw the shadows of the alley peel away from the walls and the trash bins and empty crates, rising into the air before him, knit together like living tentacles.
Kirk stumbled to a stop.
From some far distance behind him, he heard a woman scream, knew instantly it was Marinta.
He wheeled to see only a flare of blue reflected from the twisted alley walls and the belly of the craft that hung in the air like a storm cloud.
Kirk turned back to see that the tentacles of darkness were gone. In their place, a woman.
A creature.
“James…” Norinda said. Her voice was Teilani’s, tearing at his heart.
She moved toward him and with every step he saw her more clearly as the glow of the searchlight came closer.
The wind quickened.
She was almost within reach.
“You know you want me,” Teilani whispered.
She was right, Kirk knew. But what he wanted, and what he had to do, were not the same.
Kirk reached into his robe for his combadge. He felt as if he were moving through heavy water.
Teilani’s arms stretched out for him, elongating, slithering, becoming tentacles again.
“Accept,” she pleaded. “Embrace….”
Kirk’s heart ached for his lost wife and he knew how easy, how blissful, it would be to fall into her embrace once more, no matter how false the sweet illusion.
“Kirk to Belle Reve,” Kirk said, stepping back from paradise. The hoarseness of his voice unnerved him. He couldn’t leave Vulcan. He couldn’t abandon his son. Teilani’s son.
“Scott here, Captain….”
The tendrils were almost touching him.
“Now, Scotty,” Kirk gasped. “Now!”
“James, no! Don’t leave me!” Teilani cried.
She rose up like a giant cobra, expanding to swallow him as the wind pushed him toward her.
But the glow of the searchlight was already merged with the shifting light of the transporter beam.
An agonizing moment-lifetime– later, Kirk bolted from the transporter pad on the Belle Reve, still moving as if to fend off the suffocating tendrils that had sought to claim him.
He hit his combadge again. “Scotty-full shields! Get us out of here now!”
The engineer’s response was exactly what Kirk had come to depend on.
At once he heard the thrum of the matter-antimatter reactor power up as the vessel’s shields went from standby navigational mode to battle strength.
By the time he reached the corridor, he could feel the characteristic lurch of the artificial gravity that indicated his ship had gone to warp. By the time he reached the ladder that ran up to the bridge, he felt the shudder and heard the surge of the shields as the Belle Reve was struck by enemy fire.
Twice on his climb to the bridge, Kirk almost lost his grip as the ship’s violent maneuvers strained the inertial dampers and threw him side to side. He counted three more hits, but the shields were holding. He felt certain that given the size of the Belle Reve and her apparent condition, his pursuers were more than likely surprised by his ship’s unexpected defenses.
On the bridge at last, Kirk jumped from the ladder and made straight for the navigation console, where Scott piloted the ship.
On the center screen, Kirk saw stars streak past at warp. On the left-hand screen, he saw three Vulcan cruisers in pursuit. On the right, a readout of the Belle Reve’s key systems showed all in the green.
One of the cruisers flashed with a pulse of green light.
“Torpedo closing,” Scott said calmly. “Doctors, if ye wouldn’t mind…”
Kirk looked over at the tactical consoles. The Emergency Medical Hologram expertly operated the weapons controls. Beside him, a surly Doctor McCoy watched over the shield settings.
“Deflecting,” the hologram said brightly, as if he was thoroughly enjoying his duties.
The left screen suddenly flared with golden light, though Kirk noted no other effect on the ship.
“Shields unchanged at ninety-seven percent,” McCoy reported.
Scott gave Kirk a smug smile. “They cannae keep up with us. Another five minutes and we’ll be out of range.”
Kirk patted his engineer’s shoulder. “Good work, Scotty.”
“Is there any particular heading ye’d like us to take once we’ve left them in our wake?”
Kirk touched the message player secure in a pocket in his cooling robe.
If there was no one in authority he could trust on Vulcan, then at least he could go to someone he could understand. Someone who could bend the rules as he did. Someone with the assets to extract every last bit of data from the Monitor transmission.
And someone no one would ever expect him to turn to for help, so that no trap could be set.
There was only one person who met that description.
Kirk gave his orders.
18
U.S.S. ENTERPRISE, SECTOR 001
STARDATE 58567.2
Sleeping was the worst.
Each night, Picard and Beverly Crusher were locked into the captain’s cabin under visual sensor surveillance as three guards stood watch in the corridor. Each officer assigned to this mission was required to follow the same routine.
The enlisted crew slept on bunks in the hangar bay, using the emergency supplies the Enterprise carried for humanitarian aid and mass evacuations. There could be no privacy, not even in the heads and showers.
Despite the forced company everyone on board had to endure, Picard was not the only one to note how empty his ship seemed to be.
Worf, La Forge, Beverly-they all had commented on the eerie sense of abandonment they felt.
Even with the need for trios of security guards, the crew complement was less than half its normal number. There were no non-Starfleet family members on board. The science departments had been closed and all staff reassigned to Mercury. In engineering, La Forge had kept only enough specialists for three skeleton shifts. With the warp core shut down, there was no need for warp engineers.
That, more than anything else, Picard decided, was what made his ship feel so lifeless: the constant, almost subliminal vibration of the warp engines was gone, as if the Enterprise had lost her pulse, her heart.
She was no longer a starship, just another spacecraft.
Lying quietly in the darkness of his quarters, Picard felt as if a part of himself had withered along with his ship, and he feared that soon the Federation would follow in this slow descent into helplessness. Not even the comforting presence of Beverly beside him could dispel his apprehension and his growing sense of vulnerability.
At 0300 ship’s time, it was those dark thoughts and not Picard’s sleep that was disturbed when Worf called him from the bridge.
Picard felt Beverly stir, turned his head to look at the com screen by his bunk, no need to open his eyes. “Go ahead, Mister Worf. I’m awake.”
“Captain, there is a ship approaching our coordinates at high warp. It’s on course for Earth. It will reach our position in thirty-three minutes.”
Picard sat up, eyes now open, staring at the image of his first officer on the bridge. Beverly got out of bed, used to the hours of a ship’s captain, little different from those of a chief medical officer.
After three days on picket duty in the Oort Cloud surrounding Earth’s solar system, the Enterprise hadn’t encountered a single warp vessel. The other ships enforcing the embargo of Sector 001 had reported only a handful of vessels requesting entry. All available information indicated the inexplicable warp-core malfunctions had continued to propagate as Doctor Muirhead had predicted. Older and less powerful cores were being affected now, stranding even more ships in interstellar space, a new diaspora.
“Is it a Starfleet vessel?” Picard asked.
“Technically, yes.”
” ‘Technically’?”
“It is a Q-ship. A Starfleet vessel with civilian registry. The Belle Reve.”
Picard knew the name well.
“That’s Kirk’s ship,” Beverly said.
“So he claims,” Worf replied.
Picard headed for his private lavatory as Beverly stood by the cabin’s small replicator, ordering Earl Grey and coffee. He understood Worf’s skepticism. Under the current rules of engagement, no Starfleet vessel was to accept the identity of the crew or passengers of an approaching ship until genetic identity had been confirmed and somatic continuity had been established.
The lavatory door slipped open as Picard approached. “I’ll be on the bridge in a few minutes. Tell Captain Kirk I look forward to his arrival.”
“I don’t think he is planning on rendezvousing with us.”
Picard paused in the doorway, looked back at the com screen.
“Kirk does understand the current situation, does he?”
Picard couldn’t see Worf on the screen, but he heard his barely constrained frustration. Apparently, he had had a conversation with Kirk. “He was not… forthcoming. I believe you will have to discuss the matter with him yourself.”
“Understood. Ten minutes.”
Picard set the sonics for a quick, bracing shower.
He had a feeling he’d need to be on his toes.
When it came to James T. Kirk, nothing was ever easy.
The Belle Reve sped for Earth at battle stations.
Kirk had spent four days focused solely on events at Vulcan. Nothing had intruded on his quest to find Spock and to rescue his child.
And in that time, the Federation had been brought to the brink of collapse.
The details Kirk had received during his conversation with Worf had left him stunned. The situation seemed unreal. And yet Marinta’s words came back to him, giving him perspective, as if she had known the full scope of the threat they faced when he had seen only the personal.
“If you save Joseph and lose the galaxy, what will you have gained? What legacy will you have left him?”
The Federation in danger. The interaction of the entire galactic culture at an end.
The Totality was not just his enemy. It was everyone’s.
But even knowing that was not enough to change his plan.
“Jim, are you sure about this?” McCoy asked.
Kirk was at the navigation console on the bridge of his ship. Scott was back in engineering; the warp engines would likely need some adjustments in the next hour.
The Emergency Medical Hologram was at tactical. Doctor McCoy, who was one of the medical experts whose personality and knowledge had been used to help create the EMH, stood at Kirk’s side.
“If what Worf said is true,” Kirk explained, “then the Belle Reve could be the only warp vessel within twenty light-years of Earth. If we rendezvous with the Enterprise… as soon as we stop, we’re a target.”
McCoy frowned. “That’s assuming the Enterprise has been compromised or taken over. You don’t have any evidence of that.”
As far as Kirk was concerned, he had all the evidence he needed and was surprised McCoy didn’t understand. “Then where’s Jean-Luc? You saw the bridge crew when Worf hailed us-other than him, did you recognize anyone?”
“It’s ship’s night,” McCoy argued. “Worf said Picard’s on his way to the bridge.”
“Then when he arrives, I’ll reconsider. In the meantime, Bones, I want you and the Doctor to stand by on shields and weapons.”
The hologram spoke up from the tactical console. “I, for one, would feel more comfortable changing course to avoid the Enterprise altogether.” He shrugged at Kirk. “I will not direct lethal fire at a fellow Starfleet vessel.”
“Understood,” Kirk said. They had already had that conversation. If the need should arise, Kirk would take over the weapons, shooting only to disable.
“Then why ask for a confrontation?” the hologram persisted.
Kirk called up a tactical display on the right-hand screen. It showed the Oort Cloud-a spherical shell of icy material left over from the formation of Earth’s solar system, fully three light-years across. But it was the interior boundary of the cloud, stretching between thirty to fifty astronomical units from the sun, that Kirk was concerned with.
There, the collection of primordial material was the densest. Thousands of bodies, many larger than Pluto, and which would have qualified as planets in their own right had they been closer to the sun, moved in vast, slow orbits. It was from this shell that the majority of the system’s comets originated. Since the Romulan War, centuries earlier, it was considered Sector 001’s first line of defense against invasion.
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