by KATHY OLTION
“Not far. Ten, fifteen minutes at most.”
“Okay.”
Herman banked the plane farther north again, aiming for a snow-capped mountain peak in the heart of the range. Shadows from the late afternoon sun accentuated every ridge and cirque on its glacier-carved flanks, but Herman swung wide to the east of it and descended into a deep valley beyond.
It was mostly in shadow. It took Kirk a few seconds for his eyes to adapt, but when they did, it was as if someone had withdrawn a curtain from a mural. Huge trees rose up out of the valley, reaching straight and true into the air above a canopy of dense foliage. Hundreds of birds took wing as the airplane approached, wheeling around in tight formation and diving for cover. Out Kirk’s side, a waterfall tumbled off a high cliff and turned to mist before it reached the ground. The recovering vegetation elsewhere had been pretty, but this little patch of greenery was obviously the forest primeval.
“How did this survive the Burn?” Kirk asked.
“Orographic cloud cover,” Herman said. “The peak makes its own weather. Most days there’s a permanent cloud bank here. It must have been raining cats and dogs the day the moon blew, and that protected it.”
He circled around so Kirk and Lilian could get another look, then climbed back out of the valley and headed on toward home. Kirk felt his mood lifting with the plane, and when he looked back at Lilian she was smiling again.
“Want to try flying it again?” Herman asked Kirk.
“That’s all right,” he said. On the way out he had proved to everyone’s satisfaction why he was a starship captain and not a bush pilot. He had no doubt that he could master the skills required if he needed to, but he saw no need to subject Lilian to another bumpy ride.
She had ideas of her own, though. She leaned forward from the back seat and said, “Could, um, could I try it?”
Herman looked over at Kirk. Kirk would have to trade seats with her if she was going to take the controls.
“I . . . sure, why not?” he said, unbuckling his harness.
They had to squeeze past one another in the narrow confines of the cockpit. The shifting weight made the plane pitch and roll, and even though Herman tried to compensate for it, they wound up thrown together half a dozen times before they managed to exchange places. Kirk strapped himself into the seat behind Lilian, figuring the plane would balance better with his weight on that side.
She had to scoot the seat forward to reach the pedals. Herman went over the controls with her, giving her the same explanation he had given Kirk, then let her grasp the yoke, taking his hands off the one on his side.
The plane bounced upward and banked to the right. She overcorrected, but brought it back to level after that, then tried a few banks and turns on purpose.
“Remember the rudder,” Herman told her.
The plane suddenly yawed to the right, then to the left. “Yow!” she yelled. “It’s touchy!”
“Yep,” he said, grinning. That was just what Kirk had said, too.
She did a few S-turns, then banked the plane hard right, nosed down a few degrees, and did a slow spiral. While the world swirled around them, she asked, “Will it loop if I pull back hard enough?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Can I?”
Herman looked back at Kirk. “Captain?”
Oh sure, Kirk thought. Drop it on me. But obviously it was safe or Herman would have just said “No.” He looked out the window just to make sure that they had plenty of air below them, then nodded and said, “Go for it.”
“Here goes!” Lilian dropped the nose another few degrees, straightened out their bank, then pulled back on the yoke. The view out the windscreen rolled downward, the horizon flashed past, then it was sky . . . sky . . . sky while they grew lighter and lighter. Kirk felt himself falling into his harness, but it only lasted a second before the plane nosed over and centripetal force pressed him back into the seat.
“Wahoo!” Lilian yelled. The propeller revved higher as they fell down the back side of the loop, and the horizon swept past again, this time upside-down. For a moment they were looking straight down at the rough terrain, then the horizon came around again and she leveled the plane out.
All three of them cheered, though Kirk noticed Herman carefully checking the instruments as well.
“I always wanted to do that in my uncle Lee’s plane,” Lilian said, “but Mom would have had a heart attack.”
“Now it’ll be your kids having the heart attack if you tell them what you did,” Herman said. Then he laughed. “Actually, if Reynold finds out about this he’ll be pestering me to let him do it, too.”
“It’ll be our secret.” She turned part-way around toward Kirk. “Captain? No fair telling on me.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, grinning just as wide as she. Her smile was contagious. He felt lighter now, as if he had left half his worries behind in the loop.
They flew the rest of the way back in relative silence, watching the landscape slide past beneath them and the sun sink into the distant clouds. The horizon was turning pink by the time they landed. They endured the bone-rattling deceleration on the grass runway, then taxied to the hangar and switched off the motor. The propeller freewheeled to a stop, leaving them in a silence so profound that Kirk couldn’t be sure if his ears even worked anymore.
Then Lilian unbuckled her harness, the click filling the tiny cabin, and Herman popped open his door. “Home sweet home,” he said as he climbed out.
Kirk waited for Lilian to step down to the ground, then clambered out past her seat and stood beside her, stretching his arms out and feeling his joints pop.
“Thanks for the ride,” he told Herman. “And thank you, too,” he said to Lilian.
“Any time,” she said. To Herman she added, “I mean that. Any time you need a copilot, let me know. That was fun.”
He nodded. “I may take you up on that.”
Lilian held out her hand to Kirk. “I suppose we should get back to town and see if everything fell apart in our absence.”
He took her hand in his, and they walked back down the access road. “You seem to be a natural pilot,” he said. “Adventurous, too.”
She laughed. “For a librarian.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you were thinking it.”
He looked at her for a moment, enjoying her smile. “I was thinking how wonderful you looked at the controls, with the plane upside down and the whole world at your fingertips.”
“Hmm,” she said. “It’s been a long time since I felt ‘wonderful,’ much less looked it.”
“You still do,” he said.
She didn’t say anything to that. She might have blushed a bit, or it might have been the deepening red glow of sunset.
They walked to the edge of town in silence, just enjoying each other’s company, but as they passed the first houses, Lilian said, “So what’s on your agenda for the rest of the evening, Captain?”
He looked up into the sky. “I suppose I should get back to the ship and make my report.”
She laughed softly. “That’s going to be a little hard to do for the next few hours, isn’t it? Gamma Night won’t be over until almost midnight.”
Gamma Night. In the excitement, he’d completely forgotten. The Enterprise was on its own, and so was he. He’d made a few preliminary plans this morning, but he hadn’t finalized any of them. “Maybe I can catch the Governor at home and talk with him about the rebuilding effort,” he said.
“You could. Or you could catch the school administrator at home and talk with her about all the things you saw today. If you do, she might even ask you to stay for dinner.”
“She might, might she?” Kirk squeezed her hand. “I bet she’s a better cook than Pardonnet.”
She shrugged. “I wouldn’t know about that, but she hasn’t poisoned anybody yet.”
“Well then, I think I’d like that.”
They walked on into town a few more blocks, then L
ilian led the way down a side street full of single-story brick houses with stone walkways flanked by flowerbeds leading from the street to their front doors. A few had white picket fences, but most defined their boundaries with thick green hedges.
After all the devastation he had seen today, Kirk was glad for a little suburban tranquility. It felt good to see the colony as it was meant to be. The hedges and flower gardens were still young, and there wasn’t a tree taller than himself, but the place looked like it had a future.
Lilian turned in at a house with bright yellow sunflowers in front of it. Kirk glimpsed a vegetable garden in back with corn growing taller than the trees next to it. Tomatoes and squash provided splashes of color. He knew the colonists grew most of their own food in just such plots, but it hadn’t occurred to him that the gardens would be pretty as well as functional.
The inside of Lilian’s house was a bit less tidy than the outside. Perhaps having a ten-year-old boy had something to do with that. Just inside the door there was a living room filled with books, artwork, and toys; to the left a hallway led toward the back of the house, and an archway in the back wall of the living room led to the kitchen. Reynold called out from the room at the end of the hallway as soon as he heard the door open. “Mom, can I go over to Nathan’s house tonight? We’ve got to finish our science project.”
“We have a dinner guest,” she told him.
“Oh.” He stuck his head around the door jamb. “Oh! Hello, Captain.”
“Hello,” Kirk said. “What kind of science project are you working on?”
“It’s really bril,” Reynold said, and Kirk made a mental note to ask Lilian later if “bril” meant what he thought it did. “We’re putting a hologram projector and a force field generator side by side, and we’re going to see if we can use the force field to make a holographic image feel like it’s solid.”
“That’s . . . an ambitious project,” Kirk told him. “What do you intend to do with it if you get it to work?”
“Make movies!” Reynold said. “Wouldn’t it be just overly toom if you could actually walk around inside the scenes and feel what’s going on?”
Kirk imagined it would be toom indeed, whatever “toom” was. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more staggering the implications became. If it actually worked, Starfleet could use something like that for hand-to-hand combat training, or simulated first contact situations, or even recreation on long voyages.
“That sounds interesting,” he said. “Let me know how it goes.”
“I will. Can I go, Mom? It’s due tomorrow.”
“Did you finish your—”
“Yes.”
“All right, then. Be careful.”
“We will.” He disappeared into his room again, then reappeared with a box full of electronic parts. Kirk held the front door open, then closed it softly behind him.
“That really is an interesting idea,” he told Lilian as he followed her into the kitchen.
She laughed. “Oh, he’s never at a loss for those. Getting him to stick with anything for more than a day is the trick.” She stepped into the kitchen. “Come on, let’s see what we can find in the pantry.”
Chapter Sixteen
SCOTTY SAT in the pilot’s chair and turned the small ionic-exchange sensor over in his hands, examining the few parts of the component that could go wrong. It was a metal tube about two centimeters thick and ten long, and it operated the temperature circuit in the forward environmental controls. It was supposed to, at any rate, but for the last several hours the temperature had been rising, and nothing Scotty did had been able to stop it.
He checked the socket at the base of the sensor, tracing the data line from the connector through the port to the actual Maxwell exchange filter, but he wasn’t finding the problem he expected. The housing looked sound, he didn’t see any wear on the delicate connections, and the filtration sieve appeared to be rotating to specs. So why wasn’t it working?
He set the sensor aside and stretched his arms high over his head, only to have them smack into the ceiling panel. He’d forgotten he’d left it hanging open like that when he’d sat down, expecting a fast job tuning and reinstalling the errant sensor. He would have whacked his head a good one if he’d stood up too quickly.
He checked the time and realized that he should have awakened Doctor McCoy half an hour ago. They were taking turns sleeping and minding the Beater while she limped her way toward BTS 453. They’d been moving by leaps and stalls for a little over a day, but right now the engines purred like their stowaway cat when he scratched her behind the ears, and he was pretty sure they would stay fixed for a time. Then he checked the ship’s course and realized they didn’t need to. They were nearly there.
He dropped them out of warp and did a sensor sweep for other ships. Nothing. They were still light-hours out from the planet, farther than Jupiter was from Earth. That was far enough away to avoid being spotted by any of the locals’ defense sensors, and close enough to monitor their communications and get an idea of just how advanced their spacefaring abilities were. Plus they needed to learn where these folks stood in relation to either the Kauld or the Blood.
Scotty eased up out of the chair and swung the ceiling panel closed, then walked back to the dark crew quarters where he could hear snoring coming from McCoy’s bed. They’d left the doors open in the living spaces of the little ship in hopes that the air would circulate and give them a more comfortable temperature throughout. “Doctor?” he said, giving the door jamb a rap.
McCoy jolted awake. “What is it? Someone hurt?”
“No. ’Tis time to get up. We’ve arrived at the planet.”
“Oh. Right.” McCoy yawned. “You wouldn’t have managed to get the autogalley back on-line yet, by any chance? I could sure use a cup of coffee.”
“No. Sorry. We still have plenty of rations, and I thought we might want to be able to work in the control cabin without having to strip down to our skivvies.”
“Oh, so you got the temperature regulator fixed?”
“Doctor, could you just once ask me a question that I could answer positively?”
“Sorry.” McCoy tossed back his blanket and sat up, then stopped, a puzzled look crossing his face. “Here’s one. Do you know why I can’t move my legs?”
“Aye, that I do. The cat is sleeping on them.”
“She is?” McCoy pulled the blanket up again and there, stretched out across his legs, lay the gray-and-white cat. She yowled at McCoy, clearly cussing him out for awakening her so rudely; then she stood up and stretched so hard her whole body shook, jumped down from the bed, and stomped away in a huff.
“How can a three-kilogram cat be such an immovable object?” McCoy asked. He swung his feet to the floor and rubbed his eyes.
“Dinna you know? Cats generate their own gravity fields. That’s how we learned to make such fool-proof gravity generators on our starships—by studying cats.”
McCoy gave him a peeved look. “Don’t blow smoke at me this early in the morning.”
“Aye, Doctor.” Scotty left to let him dress with some privacy.
They were still calling their stowaway “Kitty,” but after observing her for a day or so they were getting closer to a name. They had both noticed a pattern to her behavior, at least. She’d be curled up on one of the bunks in the crew quarters taking a tongue-bath, or even sleeping peacefully in a quiet corner, then she’d suddenly burst into action and run full tilt through the galley into the control room. She’d be moving so fast that when she came to the backs of the pilot’s and copilot’s chairs she’d jump from the floor and hit a chair back with all four feet, twist in mid-rebound, and land with her feet already scrabbling for purchase to send her back the way she came. If she approached either man while in one of these high-energy states, she’d skid so that she stood sideways to him, back arched, ears back and tail twitching. The little toe dance she did would probably scare a mouse senseless, and Scotty discovered that she would stand her
ground even if he mimicked her sideways attack and advanced upon her.
Then just as quickly as it started, her energy level would drop back to normal and she’d resume her nap like nothing had ever happened. Scotty had suggested they call her Electron, because of her ability to jump to a higher energy state, but McCoy had said it would be damned silly going around calling, “Here Electron, Electron, Electron.”
As the Doctor emerged from the bunkroom, Scotty resumed the argument. “We could call her Ellie for short.”
McCoy staggered toward the autogalley, fumbling for his precious morning coffee. “We could call her The Queen of England and it probably wouldn’t matter to her.” He stared at the inert galley for a moment, then took his dirty mug from the countertop, filled it with fresh water from the tap, and stuck it into the molecular heating field. “Cats have an innate ability to ignore anything that doesn’t suit them,” he said while he waited for his water to heat.
“Aye,” Scotty said, “ ’tis true enough. But we canna go around just calling her ‘Kitty’ all the time. Where’s the imagination in that?”
McCoy pulled his mug out of the heat field, poured instant coffee powder into it straight from the ration pack, and stirred it with the same spoon he had used yesterday. “Weellll, I do like the idea of changing energy states.”
“So it would seem.”
The doctor slurped at his coffee. A little shudder went through him, then he sucked in a deep breath and continued as if nothing had happened. “So we’re there, eh? What do you know so far?”
“Nothing. We just arrived.”
McCoy stepped past him into the control cabin, his mug in his hand. He looked out the viewscreen at the small green-and-white marble ahead of them, then sat down in the copilot’s chair. “Woo-ee, it’s like a Georgia summer in here, isn’t it?” He tugged at his shirt collar, then took another sip of hot coffee. “Feels like home. What do we do first?”
Scotty looked at him in wonder for a moment before sitting down himself. Zero to warp ten in thirty seconds. Was that a doctor trick, or was it just McCoy?