He looked up at her. “You mean—me?”
“Yes.”
Inexplicably, he burst into tears.
Pavel Chekov screamed.
Nothing happened. ...
His mind and his memory were sharp and clear. He was hyperaware of everything on the bridge of Reliant: Joachim beside him at the helm, Terrell sitting blank and trapped at first officer’s position, and Khan.
Khan lounged in the captain’s seat. The screen framed a full-aft view: Alpha Ceti V dwindled from a globe to a disk to a speck, then vanished from their sight. Reliant shifted into warp, and even Alpha Ceti, the star itself, shrank to a point and lost itself in the starfield.
“Steady on course,” Joachim said. “All systems normal.”
“It was kind of you to bring me a ship so like the Enterprise, Mr. Chekov,” Khan said.
Fifteen years before, Khan Singh had flipped through the technical data on the Enterprise; apparently he had memorized each page with one quick look. As far as Chekov could tell, Khan remembered the information perfectly to this day. With the knowledge, and with Terrell under his control, Khan had little trouble taking [80] over Reliant. Most of the crew had worked on unaware that anything was wrong, until Khan’s people came upon them, one by one, took them prisoner, and beamed them to the surface of Alpha Ceti V.
The engine room company remained, working in concert with each other, and with eels.
Out of three hundred people, Khan had found only ten troublesome enough to bother killing.
“Mr. Chekov, I have a few questions to ask of you.”
Don’t answer him, don’t answer him.
“Yes.”
The questions began.
He answered. He screamed inside his mind; he felt the creature writhing inside his skull; he answered.
Khan questioned Terrell only briefly, but it seemed to give him great pleasure to extract information from Chekov. By the time he finished, he knew each tiny detail of what precious little anyone on Reliant had been told about the classified Project Genesis. He knew where they had been, he knew where they were going, and he knew they reported to Dr. Carol Marcus.
“Very good, Mr. Chekov. I’m very pleased with you. But tell me one more thing. Might my old friend Admiral Kirk be involved in your project?”
“No.”
“Is he aware of it?”
“I do not know.”
With an edge in his voice, Khan asked, “Could he find out about it?”
Kirk was a member of the Fleet General Staff; he had access to any classified information he cared to look up. Chekov tried desperately to keep that knowledge from Khan Singh. His mind was working so fast and well that he knew, without any doubt, what Khan planned. He knew it and he feared it.
“Answer me, Mr. Chekov.”
“Yes.”
Khan chuckled softly, the sound like a caress.
[81] “Joachim, my friend, alter our course. We shall pay a visit to Regulus I.”
“My lord—!” Joachim faced his leader, protest in his voice.
“This does not suit your fancy?”
“Khan Singh, I am with you. We all are. But we’re free! This is what we’ve waited for for two hundred years! We have a ship; we can go where we will—”
“I made a promise fifteen years ago, Joachim. You were witness to my oath, then and when I repeated it. Until I keep my word to myself, and to my wife, I am not free.”
“Khan, my lord, she never desired revenge.”
“You overstep your bounds, Joachim,” Khan said dangerously.
The younger man caught his breath, but plunged on. “You escaped the prison James Kirk made for you! You’ve proved he couldn’t hold you, Khan, you’ve won!”
“He tasks me, Joachim. He tasks me, and I’ll have him.”
The two men stared at each other; Joachim wavered and turned his head away.
“In fifteen years, this is all I have asked for myself, Joachim,” Khan said. “I can have no new life, no new beginning, until I achieve it. I know that you love me, my friend. But if you feel I have no right to any quest, say so. I will free you from the oath you swore to me.”
“I’ll never break that oath, my lord.”
Khan Singh nodded. “Regulus I, Joachim,” he said gently.
“Yes, Khan.”
“That’s it,” Carol Marcus said to the main computer. “Genesis eight-two-eight-point-SBR. Final editing. Save it.”
“Ok,” the computer said.
Carol sighed with disbelief. Finally finished!
[82] “Fatal error,” the computer said calmly. “Memory cells full.”
“What do you mean, memory full?” She had checked memory space just the day before.
The damned machine began to recite to her the bonehead explanation of peripheral memory. “The memory is full when the size of the file in RAM exceeds—”
“Oh, stop,” Carol said.
“Ok.”
“Damn! David, I thought you were going to install the Monster’s new memory cells!”
All their computers stored information by arranging infinitesimal magnetic bubbles within a matrix held in a bath of liquid hydrogen near absolute zero. The storage was very efficient and very fast and the volume extremely large; yet from the beginning, Genesis had been plagued by insufficient storage. The programs and the data files were so enormous that every new shipment of memory filled up almost as quickly as it got installed. The situation was particularly critical with the Monster, their main computer. It was an order of magnitude faster than any other machine on the station, so of course everyone wanted to use it.
David hurried to her side. “I did,” he said. “I had to build a whole new bath for them, but I did it. Are they filled up already?”
“That’s what it says.”
He frowned and glanced around the lab.
“Anybody have anything in storage here they’ve just been dying to get rid of?”
Jedda, who was a Deltan and prone to quick reactions, strode over with an expression of alarm. “If you delete my quantum data I’ll be most distressed.”
“I don’t want to delete anything,” Carol said, “but I just spent six weeks debugging this subroutine, and I’ve got to have it.”
At a lab table nearby, Del March glanced at Vance Madison. Vance grimaced, and Carol caught him at it.
[83] “All right, you guys,” Carol said. “Del, have you been using my bubble bath again?”
Del approached, hanging his head; Vance followed, walking with his easy slouch. They’re like a couple of kids, Carol thought. Like kids? They are kids. They were only a few years older than David.
“Geez, Carol,” Del said, “it’s just a little something—”
“Del, there’s got to be ninety-three computers on Spacelab. Why do you have to put your games on the main machine?”
“They work a lot better,” Vance said in his soft, beautiful voice.
“You can’t play Boojum Hunt on anything less, Carol,” Del said. “Hey, you ought to look at what we did to it. It’s got a black hole with an accretion disk that will jump right out and grab you, and the graphics are fantastic. If I do say so myself. If we had a three-d display ...”
“Why do I put up with this?” Carol groaned. The answer to that was obvious: Vance Madison and Del March were the two sharpest quark chemists in the field, and when they worked together their talents did not simply add, but multiplied. Every time they published a paper, they got another load of invitations to scientific conferences. Genesis was lucky to have them, and Carol knew it.
The two young scientists played together as well as they worked; unfortunately, what they liked to play was computer games. Del had tried to get her to play one once; she was not merely uninterested, she was totally disinterested.
“What’s the file name?” she asked. She felt too tired for patience. She turned back to the console. “Prepare to kill a file,” she said to the computer.
“Ok,” it replied.
“Don’t kill it, Carol,” Del said. “Come on, give us a break.”
[84] She almost killed it anyway; Del’s flakiness got to her worst when she was exhausted.
“We’ll keep it out of your hair from now on, Carol,” Vance said. “I promise.”
Vance never said anything he did not mean. Carol relented.
“Oh—all right. What’s the file name?”
“BH,” Del said.
“Got one in there called BS, too?” David asked.
Del grinned sheepishly. Carol accessed one of the smaller lab computers.
“Uh, Carol,” Del said, “I don’t think it’ll fit in that one.”
“How big is it?”
“Well ... about fifty megs.”
“Christ on a crutch!” David said. “The program that swallowed Saturn.”
“We added a lot since you played it last,” Del said defensively.
“Me? I never play computer games!”
Vance chuckled. David colored. Carol hunted around for enough peripheral storage space and transferred the program.
“All right, twins,” she said. She liked to tease them by calling them twins: Vance was two meters tall, slender, black, intense, and calm, while Del was almost thirty centimeters shorter, compact, fair, manic, and quick-tempered.
“Thanks, Carol,” Vance said. He smiled.
Jedda folded his arms. “I trust this means my data is safe for another day.”
“Safe and sound.”
The deepspace communicator signaled, and he went to answer it.
Carol stored the Genesis subroutine again.
“Ok,” the computer said; and a moment later, “Command?”
Carol breathed a sigh of relief. “Load Genesis, complete.”
[85] A moment’s pause.
“Ok.”
“And run it.”
“Ok.”
“Now,” Carol said, “we wait.”
“Carol,” Jedda said at the communicator, “it’s Reliant.”
She got up quickly. Everyone followed her to the communicator. Jedda put the call up on the screen.
“Reliant to Spacelab, come in Spacelab.”
“Spacelab here, Commander Chekov. Go ahead.”
“Dr. Marcus, good. We’re en route to Regulus. Our ETA is three days from now.”
“Three days? Why so soon? What did you find on Alpha Ceti VI?”
Chekov stared into the screen. What’s wrong? Carol wondered. There shouldn’t be any time lag on the hyper channel.
“Has something happened? Pavel, do you read me? Has something happened?”
“No, nothing, Doctor. All went well. Alpha Ceti VI checked out.”
“Break out the beer!” Del said.
“But what about—”
Chekov cut her off. “We have new orders, Doctor. Upon our arrival at Spacelab, we will take all Project Genesis materials into military custody.”
“Bullshit!” David said.
“Shh, David,” Carol said automatically. “Commander Chekov, this is extremely irregular. Who gave this order?”
“Starfleet Command, Dr. Marcus. Direct from the General Staff.”
“This is a civilian project! This is my project—”
“I have my orders.”
“What gold-stripe lamebrain gave the order?” David shouted.
Chekov glanced away from the screen, then turned back.
[86] “Admiral James T. Kirk.”
Carol felt the blood drain from her face.
David pushed past her toward the screen.
“I knew you’d try to pull this!” he shouted. “Anything anybody does, you just can’t wait to get your hands on it and kill people with it!” He reached to cut off the communication.
Carol grabbed his hand. Keep hold of yourself, she thought, and took a deep breath.
“Commander Chekov, the order is improper. I’ll permit no military personnel access to my work.”
Chekov paused again, glanced away again.
What’s going on out there? Carol thought.
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Dr. Marcus,” Chekov said. “The orders are confirmed. Please be prepared to hand over Genesis upon our arrival in three days. Reliant out.”
He reached forward; the transmission faded.
On Spacelab, everyone started talking at once.
“Will everybody please shut up!” Carol said. “I can’t even think!”
The babble slowly subsided.
“It’s got to be a mistake,” Carol said.
“A mistake! Mother, for gods’ sake! It’s perfect! They came sucking up to us with a ship. ‘At our disposal!’ Ha!”
“Waiting to dispose of us looks more like it,” Jedda said.
“David—”
“And what better way to keep an eye on what we’re doing? All they had to do was wait till practically everybody is on leave; they can swoop in here and there’s only us to oppose them!”
“But—”
“They think we’re a bunch of pawns!”
“David, stop it! You’re always accusing the military of raving paranoia. What do you think you’re working up to? Starfleet’s kept the peace for a hundred years. ...”
[87] Silence fell. David could not deny what she had said. At the same time, Carol could not explain what had happened.
“Mistake or not,” Vance said, “if they get Genesis, they aren’t likely to give it back.”
“You’re right,” Carol said. She thought for a moment. “All right, everybody. Get your gear together. Start with lab notes and work down from there. Jedda, is Zinaida asleep?” Carol knew that Zinaida, Genesis’s mathematician, had been working on the dispersal equations until early that morning.
“She was when I left our room,” he said. Like Jedda, Zinaida was a Deltan. Deltans tended to work and travel in groups, or at the very least in pairs, for a Deltan alone was terribly isolated. They required emotional and physical closeness of such intensity that no other sentient being could long survive intimacy with one of them.
“Okay, you’d better wake her. Vance, Del, Misters Computer Wizards: I want you to start transferring everything in the computers to portable storage, because any program, any data we can’t move we’re going to kill—that goes for BH or BS or whatever it is, too. So get to work.”
“But where are we going?” Del asked.
“That’s for us to know and Reliant to find out. But we’ve only got three days. Let’s not waste time.”
The doors of the turbo-lift began to close.
“Hold, please!”
“Hold!” Jim Kirk said to the sensors. The doors opened obediently, sighing.
Lieutenant Saavik dashed inside.
“Thank you, sir.”
“My pleasure, Lieutenant.”
She gazed at him intently; Kirk began to feel uneasy.
“Admiral,” she said suddenly, “may I speak?”
“Lieutenant,” Kirk said, “self-expression does not seem to be one of your problems.”
[88] “I beg your pardon, sir?”
“Never mind. What was it you wanted to say?”
“I wish to ask you about the high efficiency rating.”
“You earned it.”
“I did not think so.”
“Because of the results of Kobayashi Maru?”
“I failed to resolve the situation,” Saavik said.
“You couldn’t. There isn’t any resolution. It’s a test of character.”
She considered that for a moment.
“Was the test a part of your training, Admiral?”
“It certainly was,” Jim Kirk said with a smile.
“May I ask how you dealt with it?”
“You may ask, Lieutenant.” Kirk laughed.
She froze.
“That was a little joke, Lieutenant,” Kirk said.
“Admiral,” she said carefully, “the jokes human beings make differ considerably from those with which I am familiar.”
“What jokes exactly do you mean?”
“The jokes of Romulans,” she said.
Do you want to know? Jim Kirk asked himself. You don’t want to know.
“Your concept, Admiral,” Saavik said, “the human concept, appears more complex and more difficult.”
Out of the blue, he thought, My God, she’s beautiful.
Watch it, he thought; and then, sarcastically, You’re an admiral.
“Well, Lieutenant, we learn by doing.”
She did not react to that, either. He decided to change the subject.
“Lieutenant, do you want my advice?”
“Yes,” she said in an odd tone of voice.
“You’re allowed to take the test more than once. If you’re dissatisfied with your performance, you should take it again.”
The lift slowed and stopped. The doors slid open and [89] Dr. McCoy, who had been waiting impatiently, stepped inside.
All this newfangled rebuilding, he thought, and look what comes of it: everything’s even slower.
“Who’s been holding up the damned elevator?—Oh!” he said when he saw Kirk and Saavik. “Hi.”
“Thank you, Admiral,” Saavik said as she stepped off the lift. “I appreciate your advice. Good day, Doctor.”
The doors closed.
Jim said nothing but stared abstractedly at the ceiling.
Doing his very best dirty old man imitation, McCoy waggled his eyebrows.
“Did she change her hair?”
“What?”
“I said—”
“I heard you, Bones. Grow up, why don’t you?”
Well, McCoy thought, that’s a change. Maybe not a change for the better, but at least a change.
“Wonderful stuff, that Romulan ale,” McCoy said with a touch of sarcasm.
Kirk returned from his abstraction. “It’s a great memory restorative,” he said.
“Oh—?”
“It made me remember why I never drink it.”
“That’s gratitude for you—”
“Admiral Kirk,” Uhura said over the intercom. “Urgent message for Admiral Kirk.”
Jim turned on the intercom. “Kirk here.”
“Sir, Regulus I Spacelab is on the hyperspace channel. Urgent. Dr. Carol Marcus.”
Jim started.
Carol Marcus? McCoy thought. Carol Marcus?
“Uh ... Uhura, I’ll take it in my quarters,” Jim said.
STAR TREK: TOS #7 - Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan Page 8