by KATHY OLTION
“Are you saying that the Kauld ambushed their own people?” McCoy asked.
“It’s possible. It could be Vellyngaith’s way of ensuring that nobody compromised the mission. Leave no witnesses.”
Mr. Scott nodded. “It would fit with the information we got from Deloric and Terwolan. They weren’t told the purpose of the work they were doing, and they weren’t warned that the laser was about to be fired. If they hadn’t figured it out themselves and jumped ship, they’d have been out there.”
“Maybe it went off prematurely,” Sulu said. Everyone on the bridge looked over at him as he continued. “We could be worrying about nothing. If they pushed the button too soon, the beam will pass right by Belle Terre.”
McCoy nodded. “Which could be why they’re drilling their ships for a big battle. They know this isn’t going to do us any harm!” He grew more excited as he spoke. “Yeah, they blew it, but they’re hoping we waste all our time out here trying to stop it while they get into position to take us out with their fleet. Deloric and Terwolan were probably sent to us straight from the high command!”
Spock looked at him with narrowed eyes. “How easily you cling to false hope. According to your report, you saw the Kauld fleet conducting war games at nearly the same time the laser was fired. That fleet included three new ships and dozens of refitted ones—not an impromptu attack force. And unless the Kauld knew of your presence there and followed you—at warp 11—to Naresidan Station, how would they have known to plant their agents there?” He looked back at the two wrecked ships and the debris field surrounding them. “No, it is far more likely that they fired it just when they intended to, but they simply didn’t expect the flash to be as strong as it was.”
Kirk rubbed his chin again. “Intentional or not, we need to find the beam itself and find out exactly where it’s aimed before we dismiss it as a threat.”
“Indeed, Captain. To that end, I believe we should plant our remote probes along the wave front in the laser’s most likely path.”
Kirk nodded. “Give us your best estimate of where that would be, and let’s do it.”
Spock turned back to his monitors. They were now exactly 5.23 light-days out from Belle Terre. If he assumed the middle of the window of possibility for firing time, that would put the planet . . . there when the laser beam arrived. And if he drew a direct line from here to there, and stopped twenty-six light-hours out, that would be it.
He transferred the coordinates to the navigation console.
“Course locked in,” Thomsen said.
“Shields up,” Kirk said.
“Shields at maximum.”
“Engage.”
The Enterprise leaped into subspace. For just a second, they were flying blind, then they shook free of Gamma Night and locked on course.
Chapter Twenty-four
THE ENTERPRISE crossed the gap between waves of Gamma Night in only a few minutes. Kirk kept his eyes on the viewscreen as they swept on into the next area of sensor blackout. The chances of him seeing something before they hit it were infinitesimally small, but they were better going into this with his eyes open than completely blind.
Gamma Night had seemed like a personal affront to him from the very first time he had encountered it. Things were tough enough out here on the edge of nowhere; the universe really didn’t need to throw this periodic torment at him as well. But it did, and he was slowly learning how to deal with it.
So were his helmsman and navigator. Sulu and Thomsen had certainly earned their pay in the months since they had come to Belle Terre. With only a few nearby planets to provide reference points, and lightspeed lag to mask their true position at that, they were still able to take readings and calculate the ship’s position whenever they dropped back into normal space. Under warp they weren’t so lucky, but they knew the design parameters of the ship and could calculate its position, with a cumulative error of only ten or twenty thousand kilometers per minute.
No wonder Chekov had taken that position on board the Reliant.
“Coming up on the first drop point,” Thomsen said.
“Release the probe,” Kirk replied.
The Enterprise dropped out of warp. On the viewscreen a tiny spark of light shot away from the ship. When it was far enough away to escape the warp field, Sulu took them back into warp for the next drop point.
It took less than a second of flight to cover the distance, even at warp one. They weren’t talking about a lot of volume here, not on the cosmic scale of things. The beam could be as little as twelve thousand kilometers wide and still cover the entire planet. But that meant they had to drop a probe every twelve thousand kilometers if they wanted to detect it.
It would almost make sense to do it on impulse power alone. Almost, but not quite. They were planting the probes in a spiral, weaving a web ever outward from the beam’s most likely path. The total distance they had to travel was six times the target zone just for the first layer, and six times that for every extra layer they put on. It could take hours to cover that distance under impulse power. The beam could slip past before they got all their probes in place, and they would never know it.
Besides, without a gravity well to bend the ship’s path, flying in a spiral was incredibly wasteful of fuel. It also put Kirk on edge. He already felt like he was going in circles with this whole Belle Terre situation; he wasn’t about to start doing it literally.
They settled into a routine. Jump, drop, wait. Jump, drop, wait. Jump, drop—
Wham!
The viewscreen flashed brilliant white. The ship lurched sideways, throwing Kirk against the arm of his chair. McCoy flew up against the handrail around the command chair and did a spectacular gymnast’s flip, turning completely over before landing flat on his back on the other side of the rail. Thomsen wound up on the floor beside him, and Sulu wound up in Thomsen’s chair.
“Take us out of here!” Kirk shouted, his voice only a heartbeat ahead of half a dozen alarms.
In the intense glare from the viewscreen he saw Sulu slap at the controls, and a moment later they leaped into darkness.
He looked to see if McCoy had broken his back, but the doctor scrambled to his feet and moved like a man twenty years his junior, helping other crew members back to their seats and making sure that nobody was badly hurt.
Alarms screamed for attention from every control console. The entire bridge crew rushed back to their stations and began working frantically to correct the problems, but no sooner did they silence one alarm than two more took its place. The telltale smell of burnt electronics filled the air, and within a few seconds Kirk began to feel the heat seeping through the bulkhead and radiating from the walls. The outer hull had to be glowing like the surface of a star for that to happen.
Through the noise of the alarms, he heard McCoy say to Thomsen, “Lady, you’re bleeding.”
“I am?” The navigator raised a hand to her forehead, above her right eye. When she dropped her hand, her fingers were covered in blood. “It doesn’t hurt. I’ll be fine,” she said as she wiped her fingers on her black trousers.
“Let me at least put a topical coagulant on that, or you’ll be dripping into your controls and sending us off to who knows where,” McCoy said.
Thomsen didn’t argue with that. Kirk felt a trickle on his own brow, but when he wiped it away it was just sweat. It was growing uncomfortably warm in the bridge.
“Environmental controls?” he asked.
“Off-line,” Scotty said. “I’m working on ’em.”
“Shields?”
Sulu said, “They’re down. It was just an overload though, not a failure, so they’ll be okay as soon as the generators can radiate their excess heat.”
Maybe easier said than done. Kirk turned to Uhura. “How’s the rest of the ship?”
“Damage to the outer hull on all decks. Breaches on decks 14 through 21, and the portside warp nacelle.” She listened to the intercom for a moment, then said, “Injuries reported in engineerin
g.”
Scotty looked up from his console, but another alarm drew his attention back to the job at hand. Without prompting, McCoy ran for the turbolift.
“Spock?” Kirk asked.
“Forward and portside sensor arrays damaged. No response from the navigational deflector.”
Kirk remembered the ships they had seen near the comet—melted, twisted wrecks. The Enterprise hadn’t been exposed for as long, but she’d taken the laser full-on. All this time he’d been thinking of the search for the beam as looking for a needle in a haystack. Well, what better way to find that needle than to take a walk barefoot through the hay? Without trying, they’d flown the ship right into the path of the beam.
“Launch a probe,” he said.
“Sir?” Thomsen asked.
“I want to see what the hull looks like.”
“Oh! Yes, sir.”
The image on the viewscreen looked dim, but whether that was from damage to the display or simply from his eyes having not yet recovered from the flash Kirk didn’t know. He could see well enough to spot the probe moving away, but instead of rushing on into space, this one braked to a halt just off the bow, and the screen shifted to a view from its perspective.
The Enterprise’s light gray paint had flashed to vapor in the first few milliseconds; every surface that had faced the laser now showed the silvery luster of bare hullmetal. That was by design, but even 99.9% reflective alloy couldn’t withstand a laser of that intensity. The hull had been partially melted across the saucer section and the port warp nacelle. Any antenna arrays or equipment housings that had stuck out on that side had simply ceased to exist. Atmosphere was venting from the breaches in the secondary hull. And while the hull wasn’t white-hot, it was glowing a deep red; the color of perfect barbecue coals.
They had been in the beam for maybe two seconds. It had been strong enough to do all this in that brief moment, and strong enough to shove the Enterprise sideways as well. Light pressure had done that.
Kirk looked over at the science station. “Spock, did we get any useful information out of our . . . encounter?”
Spock looked up from his station. “Yes, Captain. We now have readings of our relative position at the time of impact with the leading edge of the laser. We also know the wavelength and the energy density. Unfortunately, many of our instruments failed before we could gather more data. Most importantly, we do not know the width nor the length of the beam.”
Those were the crucial details. Especially the length. Had the olivium laser expended its charge in one instantaneous burst, or had the carbon dioxide column continued to lase for a while? That would make a big difference in how they fought it.
They had actually been inside the laser beam for a moment, but they still didn’t know its extent. “Then our work out here is only half finished,” Kirk said.
“Less than that,” Spock replied.
He was right, of course. They were still at a loss as to how one goes about stopping a laser of any length from frying a planet. There were only so many ways to prevent a laser strike. Reflecting the beam away from the target, blocking it with something massive, or just not being in the path in the first place were the three standard defense tactics.
However, there was no mirror of sufficient dimension—or durability—available. Simply blocking the beam would take an ablative shield as wide as the planet, and who knew how thick? Maybe just a few meters if the beam was short, but it could take a few kilometers if the beam was more than a few minutes long. In either case it would have to have the mass of a good sized asteroid to cover the entire planet.
On the other hand, Belle Terre had eight moons. There had been nine to begin with, but shortly after the colonists had arrived here, Kirk had sacrificed one of them in the collision that released the internal pressure of the olivium moon before it could explode. The relatively minor release of energy from the collision had caused the Burn, but it had at least saved the planet from total destruction. Was there some way to sacrifice another moon to prevent destruction a second time?
It might be possible. Tow it into the right position and blow it into fragments that would absorb the worst of the light. . . . But even if they could do that, that wouldn’t prevent the beam from shoving the fragments into the planet at a high fraction of the speed of light. Even a vapor cloud hitting at that speed would flatten continents.
That left dodging it. If they could harness the total power of the olivium moon itself, that would probably be enough energy to hold back Belle Terre in its orbit long enough for the laser to slide harmlessly by. But even if that were possible, Kirk knew that the already fragile planet would suffer as much damage from that kind of manipulation as from the laser. Tides, winds, volcanos, landslides; they might as well let it burn.
He hoped Lilian and the governor were working toward an orderly evacuation. In light of the other options, it might be the only way to save the colonists’ lives. But it still wouldn’t save Belle Terre, and with the Kauld fleet waiting in the wings, the Federation would probably lose the olivium moon, too.
That left only option four: think of something else.
Chapter Twenty-five
SPOCK CHECKED his science station one final time. All but one of his optical sensors were operational. The data storage buffers were ready for input. The library computer was on-line and ready for heuristic analysis of the data.
The rest of the ship wasn’t in quite as good shape. It was capable of flight, but it would be days before many subsystems would be repaired. The environmental system was only now bringing the bridge back down to its normal, uncomfortably cool (for a Vulcan, at least) temperature, and the viewscreen was still much dimmer than usual. However, it would do for the task at hand.
Spock kept his eyes on the monitors as the Enterprise prepared for another look at the laser beam. They had found the leading edge of it easily enough, but the trailing edge would not be so simple. They couldn’t just wait for it to pass over them the way they had done with the front. For one thing, that would put them inside the beam while they waited, and they had already seen how well the ship could handle that.
They could park a probe ahead of the beam and wait for it to pop out the back, but there was no known material or force field strong enough to protect even the smallest probe from the onslaught of photons. Besides, anything less dense than neutronium would be shoved down the beam path by the light pressure, rendering any measurements it could make meaningless. For the same reason, they couldn’t just scatter dust in its path and watch the dust delineate its edges the way it might a less powerful beam. All they would see would be a scintillating disk receding at the speed of light as the wave front pushed the dust ahead of it.
They couldn’t sneak up on it from behind, either. They could approach under warp drive, but the moment they popped back into normal space they would either be inside the beam again or behind it. Neither possibility would be much help.
It had taken him a moment to convince himself that they couldn’t catch up with it using any combination of warp drive and impulse power, either. The beam was traveling ridiculously slow by warp drive standards, but by the rules of normal space it was traveling at the ultimate speed. Relativistic effects came into play at lightspeed, and they were as counterintuitive as any produced by quantum olivium.
For instance, no matter how fast the Enterprise travelled through normal space, they could never even keep pace with the light beam, much less catch it. The laser would always be receding at the speed of light, completely independent of the Enterprise’s velocity. If they launched a probe at 99 percent of light-speed and left another one at rest, the laser would outrun them both at the same velocity: light-speed. It was difficult to accept, but that was the way the universe worked. Such seeming paradoxes were the foundation of relativity and every one of them had been proven true by experiment.
So they were going to try a different method, starting at the end they could reach first and working their way back.
“Ready here.”
“Thomsen? Sulu?”
“Ready,” they both replied.
“All right, then. Take us in.”
Everyone seemed to be holding their breath as Sulu and Thomsen sent the ship into warp. They knew where one point along the leading edge was, but they didn’t know where along the beam’s considerable width that point was. It could have been dead center, or all the way to one side for all they knew, so they were planning to stop well outside the farthest likely distance, and well ahead of the beam.
Of course, with Gamma Night compromising their navigation, their safety margin could easily disappear in their margin of error.
When the ship popped out of subspace, everyone gripped the edges of their consoles for support, but space was as clear and serene as ever. “Let’s not waste time, gentlemen,” Kirk said, and Sulu immediately executed stage two of the plan.
Full impulse power barely shook the ship. Its gravity generators were designed to compensate for accelerations a thousand times greater. But Spock’s monitors showed what was happening outside, as the starship’s immense fusion engines poured their high-velocity exhaust out the back. Long streams of plasma shot out behind the ship, directly into the path of the oncoming laser beam.
Or so they hoped. It would be minutes before they Knew for sure. By then the Enterprise would be moving away from the laser at a significant fraction of lightspeed itself, and the evidence of the encounter would take even longer to reach them.
Uhura had put the aft view on the main screen. Nobody spoke as they waited to see what would happen. Waited to see if they had miscalculated and the laser was beating down on them and not the exhaust stream.
In the far distance the plasma trail grew less and less distinct as it expanded and cooled. Any time, Spock thought, then he chided himself for allowing the humans’ anxiety to affect his impartial reason. The time to impact was a datum, like any other. There was no reason to have an emotional stake in it. It would happen when it happened, and then they would know the cross-sectional area of the beam.