by KATHY OLTION
“I got ’em to draw us a star map of what they could see from their point of view while they were working on it, so that ought to narrow it down, but it won’t do you any good to find it.”
“Why not?”
“Because if we can believe the two Kauld soldiers that told us about it, they’ve already fired it. The beam is on its way.”
Kirk looked out the window at the starlight painting the front yard in delicate shades of silver. Some of that light had been millennia in transit from the stars that emitted it. Space was full of crisscrossing light rays sliding along at Einstein’s speed limit—and now it apparently contained one enormous laser beam as well.
“How long ago did they fire it?” he asked.
“About a day. Maybe less.”
So they still had time. Four days to . . . to what? How could they stop something like that?
“Where are you now?” he asked.
“On our way back,” McCoy answered. “Scotty’s got us up to warp 12, so we should be there in just a few hours, if we don’t blow ourselves up first.”
“Good.” Kirk had no idea what, if anything, they could do, but he would be glad to have his chief engineer and medical officer back on board when things got ugly. And they would get ugly; he had no doubt of that. At the moment he could think of no way of saving the colonists except evacuation, and he knew what that would be like. Trying to stuff sixty thousand colonists back into the ships that had brought them here would be about as easy as putting a mushroom cloud back into the bomb casing.
“Anything else I should know before you get here?” he asked.
“I think that about covers it,” McCoy said.
“I certainly hope so. All right, then, I’ll see you when you get back. Kirk out.”
He closed the communicator and stood quietly for a moment, still looking out at the starlit yard. Why did peace and beauty always have to be so fragile?
He heard a rustle of motion behind him. When he turned he saw Lilian standing in the bedroom doorway, looking ghostly in a white robe against the darkness behind her. “I heard,” she said.
“We’ll think of something,” he said. “Big mirrors to bounce it right back at them, or . . . I don’t know, but we’ll think of something.”
“And the fleet behind that?”
“We’ll take care of them, too.”
She shivered. “I don’t doubt your ability, but I wonder if it’s worth it. Belle Terre, deep-space colonization, quantum olivium—is any of it worth turning this whole sector into a battleground?”
“I don’t know,” Kirk admitted. “Sometimes I think it’s not. Other times I think places like this are the future of the entire Federation. If you’re not going forward, you’re going backward.”
She dabbed at an eye with her sleeve, the motion barely visible in the darkness. “My father told me ‘You can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs.’ Tom and I laughed. We all thought it was funny. Now here we are, and here comes the—what, the third? fourth? fifth arrow? And this one’s on fire.” She sniffed.
Kirk stepped closer and gathered her into his arms. “It’s all right,” he said. “We’ll find a shield. Then we’ll go hunting archers.”
He could feel her shivering as she held him. “I have a son,” she whispered. “My little boy is one of the targets.”
Kirk said, “I will protect his life with my own.”
“That’s . . . that’s what I’m afraid of.”
He held her a minute longer, his bare skin cooling in the night air, then he gently let her go and stepped past her into the bedroom. “I have to get back to the ship.”
She dabbed her eyes again. “Yes, I know. You’ve got to save the world.”
He didn’t know if she meant that to be sarcastic or if she was just stating the obvious. As he began pulling on his clothing he said, “I’m certainly going to try. But just in case I don’t manage it, I’m going to need you to help organize the evacuation. If it’s done carefully, we can get everyone to safety before the wave front gets here, but if people start to panic we could kill more than the laser will.”
“No pressure,” she said.
“I’ve seen you in action. You keep your head during the excitement. You’ll do fine.”
“I guess I’ll have to, won’t I?”
“Pardonnet will help, once he realizes the severity of the danger.” He pulled on his boots, then went back to the foot of the bed to give her one last squeeze and a long, lingering kiss. “We’ll get through this,” he said, then he flipped open his communicator and took a couple of steps back. “Kirk to Enterprise. One to beam up.”
He saw the shimmering colors of the transporter illuminate her for just an instant as the confinement beam locked onto him, then he was squinting in the bright lights of the transporter room. He stepped down from the stage and rushed for the turbolift, nodding to Ensign Vagle at the controls as he swept past.
“Uh . . . sir?” Vagle said.
He stopped himself with one hand on the door frame. “Yes?”
“Your . . . uh . . . jacket?”
He looked down and saw that he had it on inside-out. “Thank you, Ensign.”
“Any time, sir.”
Another day, Kirk would have told him to wipe that silly grin off his face, but he had no time. He pulled off the jacket as he ran for the lift, ordered the car to the bridge, and donned it correctly on the way.
The bridge was a hive of activity. Uhura was busy coordinating reports from ships spread throughout the system, by the sound of it. Sulu and Thomsen were running deep-space scans of the volume of space five lightdays out, no doubt trying to find any energy signatures that would indicate the position of the laser or the beam it had fired. Other officers filled the engineering, weapons, environmental, and security stations, all lending their expertise to the problem. Only Spock, seated at his science station and staring silently into a data screen, seemed immune to the sudden frenetic pace.
“Report,” Kirk said as he dropped into his command chair.
Despite his relative calm, Spock was the first to speak. “We are attempting to corroborate Doctor McCoy’s story through subspace scans, energy flux readings, gravitational anomalies, and direct optical observation. So far none of our methods have been successful. Lieutenant Uhura is attempting to ascertain if anyone was outside the influence of Gamma Night when the laser was fired. If so, their sensor logs may contain evidence of the energy discharge. Ship’s status is operational, all systems on-line and operating at nominal capacity.”
“Ready for action, and no idea where to go,” Kirk said. “What about that starmap McCoy said he got? Doesn’t that help any?”
“Yes, Captain. It narrows the search to a cone only 30 degrees wide. At five light-days’ distance, and not knowing the length of the light column, that computes to a target area approximately 1.29 × 1011 kilometers in diameter and 2.6 × 1010 kilometers deep.”
“I get the picture,” Kirk said. They were looking for a needle in a haystack, but this particular needle couldn’t even be seen. Laser beams were practically impossible to detect from the side even in an atmosphere; in space they were invisible unless they hit something and some of their light was scattered toward an observer. Plus this one was coming straight at them, and since everything in normal space traveled at the speed of light, that meant none of that scattered evidence would reach them any sooner than the beam itself. They would have to use warp drive to post observers all through the space where it might be travelling, and hope it hit something natural before it hit an observer.
Or something unmanned.
“How about remote probes?” he asked.
“We are preparing them,” Spock said, “but even they will only improve our odds a hundredfold.”
“Only a hundredfold?” Kirk asked. “That sounds pretty good to me.”
“Not when they start out at thirty-seven million to one against us.”
“Oh.” Kirk leaned back in his chair an
d rubbed his chin. It was rough; he hadn’t shaved since yesterday morning and it was well into the next day now. He ignored it and tried to think of other contingencies. Could they trust this information that McCoy and Scotty had gotten? Or was it a lie designed to send the Enterprise off on a wild-goose chase while the Kauld fleet swept in and took Belle Terre right out from under them?
“Keep doing long-range scans for incoming warships, too,” he said. “I don’t want to get caught with our pants down.”
“Indeed,” Spock said, his tone of voice absolutely flat. If it had been anyone else but him, Kirk would have sworn that he was being ribbed, but the Vulcan couldn’t possibly be kidding. McCoy, yes, but not Spock.
But everyone on the bridge could probably guess where he had been, and his disheveled appearance only lent credence to their speculation. Not that it mattered, but it wouldn’t hurt to clean up a bit, he thought. It had been a long day, and who knew when he would next have the chance for a shower. “Let me know the moment you have something,” he said, standing up again and heading for the turbolift. “I’ll be in my quarters.”
Chapter Twenty-two
THE ENTERPRISE had never looked so good to Scotty as she did when he pulled the Beater up alongside her and prepared to transfer across. The last six hours had been a harrowing roller-coaster ride halfway across the sector, punctuated by two moments of relative calm when the warp coils had fallen out of tune and he’d had to drop back into normal space to readjust them. The heat in the tiny control cabin had been stifling by then. And the shaking. Good God, the shaking! His teeth still ached from it all. At warp 12 even the best gravity generators could barely keep up with the fluctuations as the ship skipped through gravity waves from stellar collisions and supernovas a hundred thousand light-years away.
McCoy had cursed the whole way. So had the cat, when she wasn’t hiding under one of the beds. Scotty didn’t blame them, but he wasn’t about to slow down. Not after what he had learned from Deloric and Terwolan.
He had wanted to bring them along, but they would have none of that. They had bolted for the door at the first mention of it, and only when he’d promised to let them stay at the outpost had they come back to finish their tale. They really didn’t know that much more, anyway. They described how they’d mined the comet and had created the light-minutes-long stream of carbon dioxide, and how the silvered face of the comet and the olivium light source had turned it into a planet-burning laser. It had all seemed incredibly far-fetched to Scotty, but he had to admit it was possible. Practically anything would lase if you hit it with enough light. Carbon dioxide didn’t even need that much provocation. It was one of the best light-collimating materials known.
Deloric and Terwolan had given the best description they could of which stars were directly overhead while they worked on the comet, and they had described the firing in hair-raising detail. They had even described the Kauld warship that had supervised the firing. There was nothing left to glean from them that couldn’t be discovered on-site.
But now, as he stood in the galley beside Dr. McCoy and waited for the transporter beam, he wondered if he’d made a mistake. Space was vast, even the little bit of it around a solar system. There were millions of comets out there, any one of which could be the source of the death ray. Even if everything the Kauld soldiers said was true—and accurate—it would be nearly impossible to find the one that had been used. If there was anything more that he could have gotten from them, any detail he had misheard or misunderstood, he couldn’t go back and ask them now.
McCoy held the cat, who seemed no more eager to face the transporter than he did. Nova squirmed in his grip, meowing pitifully and trying to claw her way up to his shoulders, but he held her close to his chest and gripped her paws so she couldn’t scratch him.
At last the Beater faded from sight, replaced by the Enterprise’s familiar transporter room. McCoy immediately strode across the hall into sickbay, while Scotty headed straight for the turbolift and engineering.
He found it fully staffed, even though it was the middle of ship’s night. Technicians were going over every system, running diagnostics and making sure everything was ready for battle. He noted with satisfaction that they were paying special attention to the shields. If the ship found itself in the path of that laser beam, they would need all the shield efficiency they could get.
He had left Lieutenant Hanson, one of his most competent engineers, in charge while he was gone, but now he found her running field tests of the deflector array. By the rumpled look of her uniform and the wild disarray of her short brown hair, it looked like she’d been at it awhile.
“What’re you wasting your time here for?” he asked. “You canna stop a laser beam with a deflector.”
“Good to see you again, too, sir,” Hanson said. “I don’t expect to stop laser beams with it, but it would be nice to be able to shove comets out of the way if we have to. We’re going to be running back and forth through some pretty dirty space.” She pointed to the diagnostic readings, which were way out of spec. “Mr. Spock has been fooling with the system again, trying to boost its gain with olivium-powered sensors. Every time he does that, it knocks the whole works out of whack.”
“Out o’ whack, eh?” Scotty said. “I suppose that’s a technical term.”
Hanson reddened. “Yes, sir. With olivium in the circuit, that’s about as accurate a description as you can get. Its quantum instability causes some pretty strange macroscopic effects.”
“Like what?”
“Like neutrino bursts, for one. Spock blew up his detector the first time he tried it, and he still can’t figure out where the neutrinos are coming from.”
Scotty looked at the diagnostic readout again. “Neutrinos? They’ve got to be coming from the olivium itself, don’t they?”
“That’s what you’d think, but we can get a directional fix on them, and they’re definitely not originating on board. Get this: they come from wherever we happen to be pointing the deflector at the time.”
“What? That’s impossible. It takes a nuclear reaction to produce neutrinos, and they’re almost impossible to deflect. They can pass through a dozen light-years of lead without bouncing off a single nucleus. Nothing we can do would just attract a swarm of neutrinos. They’d have to have been on their way toward us long before we pointed our detector at them, and the odds against that happening even once are astronomical.”
“That’s right.” She grinned wickedly. “Now you can start pulling your hair out, too.”
He grinned right back at her. “Fortunately, I don’t have time for that at the moment. Our first priority is to find that laser beam and figure out how to stop it. And you can bet your life we’ll be the ones expected to come up with a miracle when the time comes, so keep your mind on the business at hand.”
“Yes, sir.”
Satisfied that his department was in good shape, he left Hanson at her job and headed for the bridge, which he found just as busy as engineering, but in a different way. Everyone here was getting ready to take the ship out of orbit and go hunting for photons. Everyone but Spock, at least; the Vulcan was not at his science station. Was he still fooling with the deflector army? Scotty had assumed Lieutenant Hanson was patching things up after the last test, but now he realized she was trying to keep up with Spook in real time. No wonder her hair was frazzled.
Captain Kirk greeted Scotty the moment he stepped out of the lift with, “Good, you’re here. Mr. Sulu, set course for the middle of our target area, warp factor three. Thomsen, get ready to release the probes.”
Warp three seemed ridiculously slow to someone who had just bored a warp-12 hole across half a sector, but Scotty knew it was plenty fast to get around inside a solar system. Fifteen minutes of flight time would take them anywhere they wanted to go. But where were they going first? Four light-days out to look for the flash of the laser being fired? Four-and-a-half to look for scintillation from the beam hitting dust grains on its way insystem? Five to l
ook for the comet it had come from?
“What’s our plan?” he asked the captain.
Kirk said, “From the star map you sent us we know what quadrant the beam is in. We’re going to spread a couple of hundred optical sensors through that volume and hope they pick up a reflection. Then we’re going to head farther out-system and look for anomalous energy readings. The workers who built the laser had to have left equipment behind. If there’s a functioning power source anywhere out there, we should be able to spot it fairly quickly.”
“Ah,” Scotty said. The sensors were a good idea, but looking for power sources could be a total waste of time. After the flash that Deloric and Terwolan had described, there might not be anything left but debris. “That’s a mighty big ‘if,’ ” he said.
“I’m aware of that, Scotty,” Kirk said. “But power readings are the only thing we can search for with subspace sensors, since they warp the curvature of space. Everything else propagates at the speed of light, and catching the wave front of the flash as it passed by would be pure chance. Of course I’d love to have a better option if you can think of one.”
Scotty nodded. It wasn’t a challenge, not exactly, but as he went to the bridge’s engineering station and began catching up on what had happened in his absence, he set himself to work on the problem.
They had a weapon at an unknown point, firing at a moving target. Belle Terre’s orbital motion carried it one planetary diameter every . . . what? . . . seven minutes? Eight? Depending on when the laser was fired, it could be pointed at any spot along an arc a few hours long. If they knew exactly when it was fired, and the exact distance to the target, they could calculate the point in its orbit where Belle Terre would intercept the laser beam, but they wouldn’t know that until after they found the weapon. In the meantime, the beam itself could be anywhere in a vast region of space, slowly converging on Belle Terre.
So finding its source was the top priority, but the comet’s location was also the least constrained variable. Deloric had remembered that Belle Terre’s sun was in the constellation of the snake from his perspective, but not exactly where along the serpent’s coiled length it had been. “Not in the middle,” he had said, which hardly helped at all.