Spectre

by William Shatner

  Picard didn't know who it was that Teilani had just shot, but he pushed his way through the first door on the left, into the control room, and swept his weapon back and forth, ready to shoot Rutal if she was still present.

  And she was. Alone. Her arrogance assuming she could dispatch a mere Terran like Picard by herself. Starship captain or not.

  The armor in the Gul's chest piece still glowed from Teilani's beam. But her armor had held and now Rutal raised her disruptor at Picard. "A pity you won't live to see me in command of your ship," she said.

  Picard fired.

  A golden halo of energy flared around her.

  But didn't stop her.

  Picard's disruptor cut out, recycling.

  "My turn," Rutal said with a terrible smile. She raised her weapon.

  Picard lurched to the side as he heard the air crackle beside him.

  "You're merely delaying the inevitable," Rutal said.

  Picard knelt behind a small console, hearing her footsteps clump nearer.

  The console creaked as Rutal fired directly into it. Picard leapt up and fired back.

  Again the Gul was enveloped by energy. Again her armor protected her.

  But then the glow around Rutal suddenly increased as a second beam hit her from behind.

  Teilani.

  Rutal's eyes widened in surprise and she whirled around to see Teilani in the middle doorway, firing point-blank.

  Quickly, Picard seized his chance to set his disruptor to full discharge.

  As Rutal raised her weapon against Teilani, Picard moved forward.

  No matter how effective Rutal's armor was against disruption, it would not be able to dissipate the heat generated from two full-power beams.

  The Gul dropped to her knees, mouth open, gasping for air.

  But Picard and Teilani kept up their joint barrage.

  Rutal's armor failed.

  For a brief, shining moment, the Gul was replaced by a glowing sculpture of herself, a final echo of the energy that consumed her.

  Then she was gone.

  Picard didn't even waste time staring at the empty space she had occupied. He moved swiftly to the closest console, sounded out the Cardassian script on it, selected WORK OPERATIONS from the menu it described.

  He punched in the commands that would accelerate the shift change.

  Even in the control room, insulated within the camp's command building, Picard heard the three loud bellows of the shift alert.

  It was one of the signals his crew had been instructed to respond to.

  He watched the console displays as sudden images of insurrection appeared.

  Two prisoners suddenly turned on a guard. Another guard was jumped before he could draw his weapon.

  More prisoners scattered across the asteroid's surface, heading for the gravity tether that led to the Enterprise.

  "It's working," Teilani said beside him.

  "Best crew in the Fleet," Picard said with proud satisfaction.

  Then the control-room floor shook with the sound of a distant explosion.

  Picard beamed. He and Data had assumed it would take at least twenty minutes for the prisoners to be able to sabotage the camp's main generators powering the tractor beams that held the Enterprise in place. "They're well ahead of schedule." The backup generators would be more than enough to contain the atmosphere.

  And then another explosion, closer, more powerful, shook not only the floor, but the whole control room.

  "That wasn't part of the plan," Picard said to himself.

  "Look," Teilani said. "On that screen. . . ."

  Picard saw where she was pointing, saw the display there.

  And seeing it, realized that his and Teilani's actions, his team's brave efforts, all had been for naught.

  In helpless rage, Picard could only watch as his careful plan was destroyed, as the mirror Voyager descended, phaser banks afire.

  Ruining everything.

  Kirk withdrew to the back of the bridge. He had set this in motion but he was no longer part of it. The people of this era had to learn for themselves. They had to experience for themselves the true price of existence.

  The Voyager echoed with the constant discharge of her phasers.

  Once they were through the atmospheric forcefield, no other energy screens protected the ground installations. The backup generators were all easy targets.

  The main sensor screen was not distorted at this close range, as the small starship slipped over the camp, targeting all energy systems. Kirk saw the camp's prisoners scattering as explosions erupted around them. He saw the camp guards attempting to fire up at the ship or down on their escaping charges. He saw people begin to die.

  "Jim!"

  Kirk looked over at McCoy, now seated at the operations station.

  "Look at this!"

  But Kirk shook his head. He knew what was happening, who was dying. Starfleet officers. Mirror-universe counterparts. Klingons. Guards who would argue they were simply doing their jobs. Some who deserved to die. Some who didn't. It didn't matter. He didn't want to know. Their deaths were all part of the price that had to be paid to prevent an even worse horror.

  Death for life. The real currency of the twenty-fourth century. A basic fact of human history that never seemed to change. Despite any and all individual efforts to make that change.

  "Get over here, man!" McCoy insisted. "It's Teilani!"

  Kirk braced himself against the safety railing as T'Val's maneuvers made the starship groan. Then, in a heartbeat, he crossed the bridge, looked down at McCoy's screen.

  "That's . . . that's impossible. I scanned for her. I scanned everyone down there."

  "You're not a doctor, you idiot," McCoy said as his hands moved quickly over the controls. "You're not a programmer or a sensor specialist. But you tried to do everything yourself anyway, just as you always have . . . and you did it wrong!"

  "Bones, I made the computer compare every individual— everyone —with Teilani's life-sign signature. There . . . was . . . no . . . match."

  "Not with her old signature," McCoy agreed. "But you were too strict with your parameters. You didn't allow any room for change. That's why the computer didn't find anything."

  Kirk felt his legs weaken. "What change, Bones? How is she different?"

  McCoy placed a finger on a life-sign profile labeled with Teilani's name. The readings on it were confused, as if a second signal were mixed with the first and—

  "She's pregnant, Jim," McCoy said quietly.

  Shocked to his depths, Kirk stared past McCoy to the main screen, where a fireball roiled up from a blazing generator station. Where Teilani now was. With their unborn child. Because of him.

  There was no time for thought. No time for anguish. No time for anything but action.

  He turned his back on the bridge as if turning his back on his past life.

  I have a plan, he heard Teilani whisper in his ear as they stood together in the clearing. You might be leaving Chal, but you will always be here with me.

  Only now did Kirk understand what she had meant.

  Only now did Kirk understand that hell had many levels.

  He headed for the transporter room, pursued by the screams of the dying that echoed in his mind.

  The price of existence had just been raised.

  Picard and Teilani froze as a new alarm blared in the control room. Red lights spun and flashed.

  Picard read the warning that flashed on every screen.

  Atmosphere failure.

  "Can you find out what's happened?" Teilani asked.

  Picard put his weapon aside. He called up the unfamiliar Cardassian screens, read the reports.

  "My people were to hit the main generators, to force the camp to go to backups, and give us time to retreat to the barracks and get up to the Enterprise." He called up a second screen. "But the Voyager! . . . She attacked the backup generators first. The whole camp's lost its power supply. The forcefield's down and—"

/>   He was cut off by a rising whistle of wind.

  "We're losing atmosphere," Teilani said, understanding their situation at once.

  The command building had just lost pressure integrity.

  If they stayed here, they would suffocate.

  "We're also losing whatever was keeping the Enterprise in place above us."

  Picard and Teilani looked at each other, knowing they had only minutes to act. Only seconds.

  Then the control room lost all power and the screens went dark.

  The whistle of the escaping air had become the shriek of a storm.

  "I have to get you to a barracks for shelter," Picard said.

  Teilani disagreed. "You have to get to the Enterprise."

  Together, they ran for the airlock. Kirk materialized in fire.

  He had set the transporter to beam him through a standard shield cycle as the Voyager had fired her phasers. But to achieve the precision of timing necessary to punch through that momentary gap in the shields, he had surrendered any chance of accuracy in selecting his beam-down position.

  And he appeared in the midst of a fireball.

  But as quickly as he became solid, the fireball passed before it could consume him.

  He looked around, coughing, getting his bearings.

  And this time, when he heard screaming, it was not just in his mind.

  Fires blazed everywhere.

  Hundreds of people fled across the metallic surface of the asteroid.

  From portions of elevated walkways, guards fired down at those who tried to escape them.

  The Voyager roared by overhead. Tendrils of plasma stretched out from the surrounding storms of the discontinuity, erupting around her shields as if she, too, were on fire.

  And everywhere, in every direction, a terrible wind blew.

  Kirk held his bandaged hands close against his chest, struggling to breathe, struggling to understand.

  This is necessary, he told himself. This attack is all that will save the billions of the mirror universe.

  That was the cold hard logic of survival.

  But now that he was in the middle of the storm—now that the woman he loved beyond all else, now that the child they had created as the promise of a future he had not understood was what he truly wanted—now that both of these pieces of his heart faced that same hard logic, everything was different.

  Everything.

  Kirk called out for Teilani. Called out for that lost future, swallowed by this mad and deadly present he had brought into being.

  He looked around wildly, ash and debris whipping around him in the howling wind. He had to be within a few hundred meters of Teilani. He knew he had locked on to her life sign— her life signs— as his target.

  There! To his left!

  Two people stumbled toward a circular building.

  One a Klingon male, though a rather slightly built one.

  The other a female.

  Teilani.

  The child.

  "Jean-Luc! Hold me!"

  Picard turned to Teilani, shocked as he saw her long hair begin to rise from her scalp.

  She wasn't wearing a discharge suit.

  A deadly charge was already building within her.

  They were a hundred meters from the barracks that was their destination, and without breaking pace, Picard swept her up into his arms to break her contact with the metal asteroid. He ducked reflexively as the Voyager roared past overhead. His stride did not falter as Teilani's hair began to fall back around her shoulders as the charge diminished in the rapidly thinning air.

  "I'm all right, Jean-Luc," Teilani said. "It's passed. Put me down."

  Unwilling, but aware she was right, Picard let her slide to the ground, but then he took her hand before she could protest. With Teilani beside him, Picard charged onward, faster now that he was freed of her extra weight. Both gasping desperately for oxygen that was rapidly disappearing into space.

  Picard risked a fast look upward at his ship.

  The Enterprise was now half within the crossover device and both were spinning in a slow downward spiral, both bodies larger than they had appeared before as they fell ever closer to the prison-camp asteroid.

  And beyond them, the second asteroid was also getting larger, moving closer.

  Even if he got Teilani to a barracks, Picard knew it would shield her for an hour at most.

  And then—

  —impact.

  The asteroids would meet. The Enterprise would be crushed. And everyone in this cursed camp would die. Horribly.

  But he had to get Teilani to shelter. He couldn't stop trying.

  Until he felt the hand strike his shoulder to make him release his hold on her.

  Picard looked down.

  It wasn't a hand. It was a filthy bundle of blood-crusted rags and as it spun him around, he raised his arm to block the blow he knew was coming even as he raised his disruptor to—

  Kirk blinked in surprise as he realized why the male Klingon with Teilani was not Klingon in size.

  "Jean-Luc?"

  "Jim?"

  Then Teilani pulled at them both. "We can't stop!"

  "She's right," Picard said, and he again began to run. "She usually is," Kirk said, as he kept pace beside them.

  But Kirk's eyes were on Teilani, almost unable to believe that she lived, that he had found her, that she was here, so close beside him.

  "I love you," he shouted at her as wind roared around them and the Voyager screamed and generators exploded and disrupters fired and guards and prisoners shrieked in bloody battle.

  And even as they rushed onward, on their hopeless mission, Teilani turned her glorious face to him.

  In it was answer enough for them both.

  As if new life had suddenly burst within him as well, Kirk pushed ahead, leading the way.

  THIRTY

  Kirk, Picard, and Teilani gasped for breath as the circular airlock door of the barracks building rolled open. They squeezed through as soon as the space was wide enough, and Picard ran for the controls to start the next step of the airlock sequence.

  As the door began rolling shut, Kirk heard the sounds of the explosions and the rumble of the Voyager diminishing. Here, too, the air was almost gone.

  But then he felt the solid vibration of the door sealing and heard the rush of new air being pumped in.

  He squeezed his arm around Teilani's as he drew in great lungfuls of air, of life.

  Kirk found Picard staring at him. "You know, Jim, the worst part about us meeting again like this, is that I can't say I'm surprised."

  "Did I ever thank you for the horse?" Kirk asked.

  Picard held up his hand. The pressurization sequence had ended. The inner door was about to open.

  Kirk knew what Picard's concern was.

  They had seen dozens of people running into this barracks before them. But neither Kirk nor Picard had any way of knowing how many of them had been prisoners or guards.

  When the airlock's inner door opened, they could be facing friends or enemies.

  Picard held his disruptor ready.

  Kirk stood in front of Teilani to shield her.

  She gave him a look of annoyance and moved forward to shield him.

  The door began rolling open and beyond—

  —there was no one.

  Picard edged forward, disruptor pointed straight up. He stepped into the barracks.

  Then he waved Kirk and Teilani in.

  The one-room building was empty, except for long lines of cots and a terrible smell.

  "They've been transported," Kirk said. It was the only answer.

  "Yes," Picard agreed. "But by whom?"

  Then Kirk heard the phased harmonic of a transporter beam begin. "We're about to find out," he said.

  "Mr. Scott!" Picard said as he jumped down from the transporter platform. "A pleasure to meet you again." Picard looked around the transporter chamber, recognized it. "I take it we're back on the duplicate Voyager?"


  "Aye," Scott said. Then he looked startled and pushed past Picard to help Kirk help Teilani down from the platform.

  Picard suddenly did the same.

  But Teilani pulled back from the three men, shaking their arms free from hers. "I am quite capable of getting off a transporter platform by myself," she said.

  Picard was intrigued by the look of real concern on Kirk. "But . . . you're pregnant."

  "You are?" Picard said.

  Scott made another effort to take her arm. "Then ye really should be sitting down, lass."

  But Teilani held her hands up and retreated. "It's pheromones, gentlemen. A little bit of genetic baggage from my Romulan half. They had such a violent early history that pregnant females began producing pheromones that inspire males of any age to protect them at any cost. An advantage in the past, perhaps. But certainly not now."

  "Pheromones," Picard said with huge relief. "Then that explains . . ." He stopped as he saw that Kirk was looking at him intently.

  "Explains what?" Kirk asked.

  "Absolutely nothing," Picard said, clearing his throat. There was no need to discuss how compelling Teilani had appeared to him. Not if he wanted his friendship with Kirk to continue. He looked at Scott. "How many did you manage to transport to safety?"

  Scott frowned. "Maybe half. There're a lot still in the pressurized buildings. More than we can handle on this ship."

  "The asteroids are moving together," Kirk said. "We've got an hour to get those people out of there."

  "Tell me how, and I'll do it," Scott said. "But not even the Enterprise could stop the asteroids from colliding, not when they're this close."

  "What is the Enterprise's condition?" Picard asked. There was so much else he wanted to know, but that was the question to be answered before all others.

  Scott sighed. "It's almost totally within that thing they've built. Mr. Spock is picking up power readings from it and he thinks it's getting ready to ... to do whatever it's supposed to do."

  "Scotty, we can't let them have that ship," Kirk said.

  But Scott shook his head in defeat. "Captain Kirk, I don't think we have a choice in the matter."

  Kirk burst onto the bridge of the Voyager to see the Enterprise in the center of the screen.