“Hey, look—”
“Pozhalusta,” Chekov said, “help me. Bozhe moi! The ship has nothing but children on its crew!”
David hesitated. Chekov wondered if he would have to try to fight him to get out of sick bay. David slung Chekov’s arm across his shoulder and helped him toward the lift.
Chekov would never have made it to the bridge without Marcus’s help. Even half-supported, he felt like he was struggling through a whirlpool.
As the lift doors opened, Chekov drew away from David Marcus: Admiral Kirk would send him back if he could not even make it to the bridge on his own feet. David seemed to understand, and let him go without argument.
Chekov walked carefully across the upper level, took a deep breath, and managed to navigate the stairs without falling. At Kirk’s elbow, he stopped.
“Sir, could you use another hand?”
Kirk glanced at him, startled. Then he smiled.
“Take your place at the weapons console, Mr. Chekov.”
[197] “Thank you, sir.”
At the science officer’s station, Mr. Spock tried to make something of the distorted readings his sensors were receiving.
“Spock, can you find him?”
“The energy readings are sporadic and indeterminate, but they could indicate extreme radial acceleration under full impulse power. Port side, aft.”
“He won’t stop now,” Kirk said. “He’s followed me this far; he’ll be back. But where the hell from?”
Spock considered.
“Admiral,” he said. “Khan’s intelligence cannot make up for his lack of experience. All the maneuvering Reliant has done, bold though it may be, has occurred in a single plane. He takes advantage neither of the full abilities of his ship nor of the possibilities inherent in three degrees of freedom.”
Kirk glanced back at him and grinned. “A masterful analysis, Mr. Spock. Lieutenant Saavik, all stop.”
Saavik decelerated the ship to zero relative motion.
“All stop, sir.”
“Full thrust ninety degrees from our previous course: straight down.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Mr. Chekov, stand by photon torpedoes.”
“Aye, sir.”
The Enterprise plunged downward into the shadows of the nebula.
Khan sought any sign of Kirk in the mangled image on his viewscreen. All around him lay the wreckage of the bridge and the bodies of his people. A few moaned, still alive, but he no longer cared. This was a battle to the death. He would be glad to die if he took James Kirk with him.
He scanned the space surrounding Reliant, but found nothing. Nothing at all—only the impenetrable energy fields of the nebula.
[198] “Where is Kirk?” he cried. “Where in the land of Hades is he?”
Nothing, no one, replied.
The Enterprise hovered within the Mutara Nebula’s great dustcloud. The ship was blind and deaf. Jim Kirk forced himself to sit quiet and relaxed as if nothing worried him. It was the biggest act of his life. The ship was badly hurt; every score of Reliant’s weapons had touched him as painfully as any physical blow. And in truth, he had no idea what Khan would try next. He could only estimate, and guess, and hope.
At the helm, Saavik glanced at him with a questioning expression.
“Hold steady, Lieutenant,” he said.
She nodded once and turned back to her position. Chekov never moved. He hunched over Sulu’s weapons console. He had looked terrible when he came in, pale and sick and dizzy. But the truth was Kirk needed him; the ship needed him. With Sum gone—Kirk glanced around the bridge and saw that David had returned. He gestured to him. The young man came down the stairs and stopped beside the captain’s seat.
“How’s Sulu?”
“They don’t know yet,” David said. “His hands are a mess—he’ll be in therapy for a while. If he lives. They wouldn’t say. He might have brain damage.”
“You got to him fast,” Jim said. “He’d be dead if you hadn’t. You gave him the one chance he had. Whatever happens—David, I’m proud of you.”
To Jim’s surprise and shock, David reacted with a curse.
“What the hell right have you got to be proud of me?” he said angrily.
He stormed back to the upper level of the bridge and stood scowling with his arms folded across his chest. He ignored Jim Kirk’s gaze.
Jim turned back to the viewscreen, angry and hurt.
[199] “Stand by photon torpedoes,” he snapped at Chekov.
“Photon torpedoes ready, sir.”
The interchange with David had broken Jim’s concentration. He felt irritated and foolish to have tried to make peace and friends with the boy and to have been so thoroughly rebuffed. It served him right for thinking about personal matters when the ship was in danger. He forced himself back to the problem at hand.
“Lieutenant Saavik.”
“Aye, sir.”
He had been tempted to say, “Dive! dive! dive!” earlier, but refrained; now he kept himself from ordering the young Vulcan officer to let the ship surface. This was not, after all, a submarine, and they were not hunting an enemy U-boat.
Too many old novels, Jim, he thought.
If he failed, his crew would have not a comforting sea to receive them, but unforgiving vacuum filled with nothing but radiation.
“Accelerate. Full impulse power at course zero and plus ninety. Just until the sensors clear.” That would get them out of the worst of the dust. “Then all stop.”
“Aye, sir,” she said, and executed the command.
The artificial gravity was holding, but at a level tentative enough that Kirk could feel the acceleration: straight up. The viewscreen was still dead, but as they rose out of the gas cloud it slowly cleared.
The roiling mass of dust and gases draped away from Jim Kirk’s ship like the sea around the flanks of a huge ocean mammal. They rose: and Reliant lay full ahead.
Bull’s-eye! Jim Kirk thought.
“Mr. Chekov—!”
“Torpedoes ready, sir!”
“Fire!”
Chekov fired.
The torpedoes streaked away.
In the pure silence of hard vacuum, the torpedoes [200] touched the enemy ship and exploded. Reliant’s starboard engine nacelle collapsed, spun, tumbled, and gracefully, quietly, exploded.
Reliant responded not at all. The ship drifted steady on its course.
“Cease fire,” Kirk said. “Look sharp.”
The bridge crew reacted with silence, watching, waiting. Too soon to be certain. ...
“Match course, Lieutenant,” Kirk said to Saavik.
She obeyed: the Enterprise followed Reliant, maneuvering slightly till their relative speeds were zero, and Reliant appeared dead in space.
“Our power levels are extremely low, sir,” Lieutenant Saavik said.
Kirk switched the intercom to the engine room. “Mr. Scott, how long before you can get the mains back on-line?”
“At least ten minutes, sir, I canna send anyone in till after decontamination.”
Kirk glowered and snapped the channel off. “Commander Uhura, send to Commander, Reliant: Prepare to be boarded.”
“Aye, sir.”
Her long, fine hands moved on her instruments.
“Commander, Reliant, this is U.S.S. Enterprise. Surrender and stand by for boarding. I repeat: Stand by for boarding.”
Lying on the deck of the bridge of Reliant, Khan Singh heard the triumph of the Enterprise communications officer. He groaned and forced himself to sit up. He would not accept defeat. Blood ran down the side of his face, and his right arm was shattered. He could see the bone protruding from his forearm. He felt the pain and accepted it, then put it aside. Shock intoxicated him and put a fine edge on his anger.
He crawled to his feet. His crushed arm flopped against his side. He picked up his useless right hand and thrust it beneath his belt, holding it steady and out of his way.
[201] “No, Kirk,” he whispe
red. He smiled. “Our game is not over yet. I am not quite prepared to concede.”
“Reliant, stand by and prepare for boarding.” The viewscreen was dead, but Khan did not need it to know that the Enterprise was approaching him, secure and arrogant in the certainty of its conquest.
Khan staggered from the bridge, toward the storage bay. ...
Laughing.
Back on the Enterprise, Mr. Spock kept a close eye on his instruments and waited for a reply from Reliant. Perhaps Khan had been killed in the final barrage. Perhaps.
Spock did not believe it. The engines, both impulse and warp, were destroyed, and the bridge had been damaged, but he saw no evidence of a break in the hull in that area.
“Enterprise to Reliant,” Commander Uhura said again. “You are to surrender your vessel and prepare for boarding by order of Admiral James T. Kirk, Starfleet General Command.”
Nothing.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Uhura said. “No response.”
Kirk stood up. “We’ll beam aboard. Alert the transporter room.”
Spock’s attention was drawn to an odd energy pattern on one of his sensors. He focused and traced it: Reliant.
“Admiral, Reliant is emitting the wave form of an energy source I have never before encountered.”
David Marcus, from his place near the turbo-lift, frowned and hurried to the science officer’s station. He leaned over to look at Spock’s sensor.
“My God in heaven,” he said.
Spock raised one eyebrow.
“It’s the Genesis wave!” Marcus said.
“What?”
Marcus turned toward Admiral Kirk. His face paled.
[202] “Khan has Genesis!” David Marcus said. “He’s armed it! It’s building up to detonation!”
“How long—?”
“If he kept our programming ... four minutes.”
“Shit,” Kirk said. He leaped up the stairs and slammed his hand against the turbo-lift controls. “We can beam aboard and stop it! Mr. Spock—”
“You can’t stop it!” David cried. “Once it’s started there’s no turning back!”
Kirk rushed back to his place and stabbed the intercom buttons.
“Scotty!”
Kirk received no answer but static. He spoke anyway.
“Scotty, I need warp speed in three minutes or we’ve had it!”
The intercom crackled. No reply.
Spock watched all that occurred. He knew what Mr. Scott would say if he could even be reached: Decontamination would take at least another six minutes, and no human being would, last long enough in the radiation flux even to begin the jury-rigging necessary to bring main engines on-line. He knew, from studying the Marcuses’ data, the incredible velocity of the Genesis wave, and he knew the speed his ship could go under damaged impulse engines. It was no match.
“Scotty!”
Spock made a decision.
“Saavik!” Kirk said. “Get us out of here, full impulse power!”
“Aye, sir.” She was prepared: at the order, the Enterprise spun one hundred eighty degrees in place and crawled away from Reliant.
Spock permitted himself a moment of pride. Saavik would make a fine officer: she would fulfill the potential he had detected in the filthy, barbarous, half-breed Hellguard child. He wished he would be able to guide her a little further.
[203] But this way, she would be freer to find her own path.
When the doors to the turbo-lift opened, responding to Jim Kirk’s abandoned order, Spock stepped inside.
Khan Singh felt hot blood flowing from his temple, from his arm, inside his body. He coughed blood and spat it out. His cold hand caressed the Genesis torpedo. It was armed and ready.
He staggered and fell to his knees.
“No,” he said. “No, I will not die here. ...”
He stumbled into the turbo-lift. It pressed upward beneath him. When it reached the bridge, he had to crawl to leave it. He collapsed finally at the top of the stairs, but he could see the viewscreen.
The Enterprise crept away at a painfully slow speed. Khan began to laugh. The pain caught up to him, and he coughed. He was bleeding into his lungs, into his belly. He did not have much time. But it would be enough.
“You cannot escape me, James Kirk,” he murmured. “Hades has taken me, but from his heart I stab thee. ...”
He watched the Enterprise, turned tail and fleeing, terrified. He laughed.
Agony took him, and he cried.
“For hate’s sake ... I spit my last breath at thee. ...”
Joachim’s body lay only an arm’s length from him. His wife’s body, dust, lay half a light-year distant. Soon neither space nor time would have any meaning, and he would join his love and his friend.
He crawled to Joachim, reached out, and touched his rigid hand.
Darkness enclosed his spirit.
Spock entered the engine room. Scarlet warning lights flashed through it, bloodying the forms of its [204] crew. Dr. McCoy knelt in the middle of the main chamber, trying to save the life of an injured crew member.
The rest of the crew struggled to put more power to the impulse engines, knowing—they must know—that their efforts were useless. When the Genesis wave began, it would spread until it reached hard vacuum, engulfing and degrading every atom of matter within the Mutara Nebula, gas or solid, living or dead.
Without speaking or acknowledging his presence, Spock strode past Dr. McCoy to the main reactor room. He touched the override control.
“Are you out of your Vulcan mind?”
McCoy grabbed his shoulder and dragged him around by sheer force of will, for certainly the doctor’s strength could not match Spock’s.
Without replying, Spock looked at the doctor. He felt detached from everything: from the ship, from their peril, from the universe itself.
“No human can tolerate the radiation in there!” McCoy cried.
“But Doctor,” Spock said, feeling a certain terribly un-Vulcan affection for the man who opposed him, “you yourself are fond of pointing out that I am not human.”
“You can’t go in there, Spock!”
Spock smiled at Dr. McCoy. He was so completely and comfortingly predictable. Spock could go through their conversation in his mind and know everything the doctor would say, everything he himself would reply. The result was the same.
“I regret there is no time for logical argument, Doctor,” he said. “I have enjoyed our conversations in the past.”
With that peculiarly human atavistic instinct for danger, McCoy drew back, knowing what he planned. But Spock was too quick for him. His fingers found the nerve in the junction of McCoy’s neck and shoulder. He exerted pressure. McCoy’s eyes rolled back, and he [205] collapsed. Spock caught him and lowered him gently to the deck.
“You have been a worthy opponent and friend,” he said.
He finished the coding for the manual override of the reactor room and stepped into the screaming radiation flux.
At first it was quite pleasant, like sunlight. Spock moved toward the reactor. The radiation increased, and his body interpreted it as heat.
He reached toward the damping rods. An aura of radiation haloed his hands; the rays spread forward, outward, even back, penetrating his body. He could see his own blood vessels, his bones. It was most fascinating.
As he worked, he recalled the events in his life that had given him intellectual, and even—he could admit it now, and who was to despise him?—emotional pleasure. Fragments of music—Respighi, Q’orn, Chalmers—and particular insights in physics and mathematics. Bits of friendship, and even love, which he never could acknowledge.
He drew the rods from their clamps; the radiation caressed him like a betraying lover.
He accepted the regrets of his life, the expectations he had never been able to fulfill: neither Vulcan nor human, he was unable to satisfy either part of his heritage. Perhaps his uniqueness compensated in some small way. He had tried to convey that possibility to S
aavik, who must face and overcome the same trials.
Radiation sang in his ears, almost blocking the cries of Mr. Scott and Dr. McCoy, on the other side of the radiation-proof glass, shrieking at him to come out, come out.
“Captain, please—!” Scott screamed.
The only real captain of the Enterprise was and ever had been James Kirk. Spock had kept the ship in trust; but now it was time to return it to its true master.
Spock could feel the very cells of his body [206] succumbing to the radiation. He wiped the perspiration from his face and left a smear of dark blood on his sleeve. Mottled hematomata spread across his hands.
Pain crept from his nerve endings to his backbone, toward his mind, and he could no longer hold it distant.
He flexed his fingers around the manual control that would bring the main engines back into use. He strained against it, and the wheel began to turn. His tortured bones and flesh opposed the control under which he held himself. He could feel his skin disintegrating against the smooth metal, which grew slick with his blood.
“Dear God, Spock, get out of there, man!” McCoy pounded on the window.
Spock smiled to himself. It was far too late.
The main engines groaned and protested, and burst back into use.
The bridge main viewscreen showed Reliant receding, but slowly, so slowly.
“Time!” Jim Kirk said again. It could be no more than a minute since last he had asked: they had a few seconds left and no more.
“Three minutes, thirty seconds,” Saavik said.
“Distance from Reliant.”
“Four hundred kilometers,” Chekov said.
Jim glanced at David. Meeting his gaze, his son shook his head.
“Main engines on-line!” Chekov shouted.
“Bless you, Scotty,” Kirk said. “Saavik—go!”
She pushed the ship into warp speed without any proper preparation.
Reliant dwindled to a speck in the viewscreen.
The speck became light.
The Genesis wave hurtled toward them through the nebular dust, dissolving everything in its path. Jim watched, his hands clenched. Saavik forced one more warp factor out of the straining ship, and it plunged from the nebula into deep space.
STAR TREK: TOS #7 - Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan Page 19