"Captain," Spock said softly, "these men have not yet said a word to us."
Kirk nodded. "Yes. They'll talk treason to Godor, but we're strangers, and they still don't trust us. I hope they won't lose their nerve." He asked himself the question Spock had left unspoken: Have I really found rebels I can rely on?
The tide was rising; water lapped about the base of the wall of cliff the fishermen led them to. They walked through the ankle-deep water to skirt the cliffs, an occasional wave splashing up to their knees, and sometimes their waists, and breaking against the cliff face with a roar. Kirk staggered under the impact of one of the higher waves and would have fallen had Spock not caught his arm. "I'll take the seas of space," Kirk said, forcing a smile. He repressed the urge to tell their guides to hurry up, before the tide rose any higher. It was not so much the water itself that bothered him; the sea was generally calm, except for the occasional swell, the beach was still near, and he was a strong swimmer. Rather, it was the everpresent idea that the calm, rolling surface, with the moon marking a beautiful, silver trail upon it, hid the mysterious, deadly Sealons. This sea was suddenly not a friendly one. It belonged to the unseen enemy.
At last they reached an opening in the cliff face and turned inwards, away from the open sea, into a small cove where the water was even calmer. The moonlight flooded in through the opening in the cliff face, illuminating the small, concave beach and the large fishing boat pulled up on it.
Kirk pulled Godor aside and said to him, "Isn't there some kind of gemot to control fishing? Why do these men operate from this place instead of a built-up harbor?"
Godor shook his hand off. "Why do you care? Of course there's a gemot, and it doesn't allow men like these to own a boat or go fishing on their own. They have to work in secrecy, and sell their fish secretly."
Kirk grimaced. "I should have guessed. Do they understand that this might destroy their boat?"
"Yes. I explained that. Right now, they can't use it at all, because the Sealons destroy any boat that goes out far enough to reach the good fishing grounds. They have nothing to lose. I told them that when we've killed the Sealons, we'll join the Federation and destroy the gemots, and then they can have their pick of the fancy fishing boats in the harbors."
Kirk looked at him in astonishment but held his peace. After a pause, he said, "All right. Let's get that gadget loaded and push off."
They placed Godor's box carefully in the boat, and then Kirk, Spock, and Godor climbed in to adjust and set the mechanism contained in the box. When they were finished and straightened from their work, they found themselves alone on the beach. The fishermen's courage had deserted them at last, and they had silently faded away, using the hidden paths up the cliff face that only they knew. Godor cursed them for their desertion, but Kirk, in reaction to the controlled tension of the past hours, burst into a hearty laugh and could not make himself stop. Godor looked at him openmouthed, but Spock, raising one eyebrow, provided the needed verbal slap: "Sir, I must say that levity seems inappropriate."
Kirk sobered instantly. "Right as always, Spock. Now, if you'll climb out on the beach again and help me push this thing off the sand and into the water, I'll show you how to row a boat."
As they were straining against the boat's reluctant bulk, their feet slipping on the sand, Spock managed to gasp, "Surely, Captain, many rowers are required for a boat of this size."
Kirk, sweating heavily with the effort in the chill, damp air, grunted and said, "Star Fleet warned you that being first mate is a tough job, Mister."
Spock said nothing in reply. He threw his great Vulcan strength even more fully into the job and the boat, accelerating suddenly, slid the last few feet into the water and sat rocking gently on the slow swells of the sheltered cove. Kirk whooped with joy and waded into the waist-deep water and pulled himself over the side into the boat. Spock followed him, and as Kirk leaned over to offer him a hand to help, Spock was amazed to see that his captain's face wore a broad grin. It was something beyond simple levity or the release of long-suppressed tension, Spock thought; it seemed more the joy of a young boy on a long-awaited, long-delayed holiday. Spock's attitude toward naked human feelings had always been complex, a mixture of envy at the freedom humans possessed and revulsion at their lack of self-control. In James Kirk, he had found a human being he could admire, one who, with no Vulcan blood at all, seemed remarkably able to control his emotions for the sake of a higher goal, an integrated personality, a fine example of the ideal defined by an ancient Earth philosopher—"a life guided by reason and inspired by emotion." Now, suddenly, the control seemed to have disappeared. In this earnest, deadly business, James Kirk was behaving with boyish glee rather than the calm determination Spock might have expected. Kirk was dropping to the level of the average human, and Spock, who would have been greatly insulted had anyone suggested to him that he was capable of hero-worship, was deeply disturbed.
Dr. Leonard McCoy wrapped up his brief staff meeting at his operational headquarters and watched his Trellisanian assistants drag themselves from the room. No one had complained about the long hours and the psychological burden, but even without their obvious physical deterioration, McCoy could guess how they felt. Their feelings and state of health, he knew, matched his own. No, he thought, theirs was probably worse than his: he had at least the toughening effect of his Star Fleet background; no matter how deeply he might feel the pain of others, he had at least seen the effects of war so often that his reaction must be mild compared with that of these Trellisanian medical men.
The irony was that the current flood of victims would very soon abate, and it was that that worried him most. The bombardments from space had slackened and would probably soon stop. The Sealon ships that arrived now were more invasion craft, rather than attack ships; even the smaller ships that came to Trellisane from Sealon must be supply ships for the Sealon bases being built and expanded on the ocean floors, for the new spaceships landed in the seas rather than bothering with bombing runs against land targets. The current glut of bombing victims would probably be the end of it, and when they healed up enough to go home, the logistics of the situation would improve remarkably.
But McCoy was even more worried about the inevitable next stage. The psychological effects of the invasion were already appearing, and those were much harder to deal with. The gemot leaders seemed paralyzed by their loss of communication with their colleagues, and he suspected that paralysis would soon be followed by a deeper and more serious form of mental breakdown. But most of all he awaited with dread the apparently inevitable mass starvation his Trellisanian subordinates assured him was on its way. The world depended so heavily on food from the sea, that the loss of the oceans to the Sealons would probably prove to be a mortal blow.
Once, before realizing how futile it was, McCoy had exploded at them. "Well then, why not do something about it, damn it all! Start right now with extensive agricultural programs and food rationing. And attack the Sealons on the sea bottoms. For God's sake, let's take the fight to them! You can't just roll over and die!"
But they could do just that; they almost seemed to want to do it. McCoy's own organization was virtually the only functioning government left on the planet. It was, however, not that disorganization that gave him most of his problems, but rather the Trellisanian nature itself: malleable, retiring, timid, and so excessively humane that they would rather suffer pain from their enemies than inflict it.
The war between the two worlds—if "war" was even the right word, given the lack of any Trellisanian defense—reminded McCoy painfully of the time James Kirk had been split into two beings by a transporter malfunction. One had been the beast, the wolf in every man, the animal left in us from our most primitive days, amoral, wanting only the satiation of every desire. The other being had been the softer side of man, what Spock had called "the positive side"; but it had been unable to make decisions, especially the harder, less humane ones. Together, the two beings were the remarkable and admirable
Captain James T. Kirk; apart, neither could survive for long, and both had come near to dying before a transporter repair had made it possible to recombine them. He saw Trellisane and Sealon as the same sort of division: one society overly bestial, the other overly humane. And perhaps both were doomed if they could not somehow unite, unlikely as any such union looked now. Sealon, probably, would complete the destruction of Trellisane and would then be itself destroyed by Klingon.
McCoy sighed, put his arms on the table, and leaned his head on them for a moment's rest. Beneath the cynic was the hopeful romantic, but this time cynicism seemed more justified. Pessimism, rather. Unity through diversity, he thought as he drifted away into sleep. That's what that pointy-eared, green-blooded walking computer likes to espouse. What does he know about it? If he could convince the Sealons and the Trellisanians to try it … His dreams were filled with explosions and blood.
Far from shore, surrounded only by the gently swelling, moonlit ocean, the three men in the fishing boat waited tensely for an explosion to end their own voyage in blood. They had already journeyed further from the shore without being detected and destroyed by the Sealons beneath them than Spock had predicted they would. The oars had been wrapped in cloths to muffle their sound, in the small hope that this would make the Sealons' detection devices and computers dismiss them as insignificant. They had not spoken to each other except in an occasional whisper.
Now they halted and sat still in the boat for a few minutes. Spock had laid his tricorder at his feet and, at regular intervals during their trip away from the shore, had pointed it downwards. Now he did so again. "Well?" Kirk whispered. "Anything stronger here?"
"Yes, Captain. The earlier readings indicated the fringes of a base beneath us, but now we must be near the center. The readings may not be reliable through this depth of water, but the density of life forms and machinery here is remarkable."
Kirk could almost hear McCoy's voice muttering, "Long-winded son-of-a-gun, isn't he?" Kirk's own euphoria continued, had even increased since they'd left the shore, and he grinned at the imagined conversation. "Let's get this overboard," he whispered, pointing at the box at their feet.
The three of them picked up Godor's box and, all leaning over the side together and ignoring the extreme tilt this gave to the boat, they lowered it onto the calm surface of the water and let it go. With only a faint splash, it sank beneath the surface and dropped quickly out of sight. "Row!" Kirk ordered. He and Spock grabbed their oars and bent their backs to the task, while Godor kept nervously scanning the water's surface for Sealons. Had all the fishermen been with them, as Kirk had planned, they could have made good speed, but as it was, the boat moved away from the site of their primitive depth-charge with agonizing slowness.
An enormous concussion slammed the boat upwards. Kirk and Spock were tumbled from their seats onto the boards, but Godor, who had been half standing to see further, shot out of the boat into the water. He surfaced instantly, his face filled with terror, and screamed wordlessly at them.
Kirk gathered himself quickly and dove in. He swam to Godor, who was still screaming, and who now looked at Kirk with blank fear and tried to keep him away. Cursing, Kirk grabbed the Trellisanian's clothing with his left hand and punched him savagely on the jaw with his right. Godor's eyes rolled upwards and he went slack in the water. Pulling him by the hair, Kirk drew him back toward the boat. Spock drew them both back onboard.
"I would recommend warp speed, Captain," Spock said, calmly picking up his oar again. Kirk granted him one brief look of surprise, but picked up his own oar and began rowing vigorously without comment. Spock's rare attempts at humor, he thought, came at strange times, almost as if the Vulcan wanted to point out to his human companions just how immune he was to panic or any other overemotional reaction to circumstances.
Behind them, the sea heaved itself up in a huge bubble that turned white and then exploded into a fountain of spray. It rose high into the air and then rained down on the surface of the sea and into their boat, almost swamping them. Unidentifiable bits of metal pattered on the water and the boat and its occupants. Something much like a human hand landed on Kirk's lap. Half repelled, half fascinated, he picked it up and stared at it.
"Webbed," Spock observed quietly. "We seem to have found our target."
Suddenly overcome with disgust, Kirk threw the hand overboard and began rowing again. "Let's get the Hell out of here, Spock," he said through gritted teeth.
The slave's name was Spenreed. His friends had brought him to McCoy, and he was suffering from nothing more than a minor leg wound that had become infected. It was bad enough by now, though, that he couldn't put any weight on the leg and needed support from a fellow slave on each side, and he was drowsy, obviously having trouble with clouded thoughts. Clearly, without treatment he would die quite soon. McCoy had already deduced that slaves were generally not given treatment, except in those rare cases where they were both vital and irreplaceable; in most cases, though, the vast pool of replacements made it easier to let them die. I wonder if we're fighting on the right side, he kept asking himself. I don't see how the Sealons can be any more callous than this.
Word of McCoy's treating slaves' wounds had got around, following the branches of one of those mysterious grapevines that slave classes always seem to develop on any planet and in any age. As a result, more and more of them were bringing sick or injured fellows to him. He could usually fit them in, leaving his Trellisanian assistants to take care of the patients who weren't slaves. It couldn't continue, of course: as word spread further, he'd quickly be overwhelmed; after all, his assistants would refuse in horror to help him in this work, were he to make the mistake of asking them.
McCoy followed what had become his usual practice. He beckoned Spenreed's bearers to follow him with their burden, and he led them into a small operating room, lined with shelves, where they would be uninterrupted. This had been a storeroom before McCoy's appearance. The two slaves helped Spenreed onto the table, and McCoy applied the hypospray to his arm. Spenreed went under immediately. Whistling, McCoy set to work on cleaning and dressing the leg wound. Of the two slaves, standing by the operating table, only one turned pale. The other watched what McCoy was doing with interest. McCoy grunted. "Look carefully. Maybe you'll be this world's first slave surgeon." The slave grinned and nodded.
Making sure the slave was watching what he was doing, McCoy opened up Spenreed's head. Gently, he reached a microprobe into the brain and extracted a small capsule. He held it up for the openmouthed slave to see, then closed Spenreed up again. He busily applied glue and synthetic skin, then reached over to the nearby wall and dropped the capsule onto a shelf, into the dozen or so that were already scattered there.
The watching slave clenched his jaw. "Three days after birth, our children are taken away for a medical examination. The defective ones aren't brought back. The others …" He bent his head toward the scattering of capsules.
McCoy nodded. "Um-hmm." He used the hypospray again, and Spenreed opened his eyes, groaned, and struggled to sit up. "How do you feel?" McCoy asked him.
Spenreed groaned again. "I've got a headache," he complained.
McCoy chuckled. "You shouldn't. I just exorcised you."
Chapter Eleven
Security couldn't pull itself together. If Kinitz had had one serious failing, it was his inability to delegate authority properly. He had had two prime assistants, either of whom could have taken over Security section upon his death, but both were now unconscious and close to death in Medical. Beyond them, Kinitz had not provided for command in case of his death, for that situation—his defeat and death—had been simply unimaginable to him. That personality flaw of overconfidence had proved to be his fatal one.
Now a power struggle was underway in Security section. The surviving subordinates, all nominally of equal rank, were squabbling, each trying to assert his own claim to temporary command. They needed a strong-willed superior to enforce order upon them, and now Kinit
z was gone. The matter could have been settled quickly enough by an appeal to the bridge, and they tried that, but the bridge was strangely uncommunicative. Calls up there were always answered by Sulu, who they knew had the con in the captain's absence, and he consistently refused to issue an order that would halt the confusion. "Wait until the alert is over" was all they could get out of him.
Kinitz would have been made suspicious by this, but the men struggling for control of Security were not. Nor did they correlate Sulu's unresponsiveness with the escape of their prisoners. Star Fleet Security's recruitment and training emphasized physical strength and competence and an unquestioning acceptance of a superior's orders; original thought was not a Security man's strong point.
Chief Engineer Scott uttered a mighty curse and slammed his hand down onto the metal housing of the warp reactor monitoring computer. One of his assistants, working nearby, looked at him in amazement and almost asked for a translation into English of Scott's exclamation, but then thought better of it and went on silently with his work.
Scott had caught the glance, however. "Aye, you may well ask, lad," he grumbled. "Here we are heading off somewhere under warp drive, leaving the captain down there in the middle of a war, and Mr. Sulu up on the bridge won't tell me what's going on. The alert's still on, and I don't understand that, either. I've asked for permission to turn it off for a few hours for maintenance, and he won't even let me do that! I can't get a straight answer out of him. I've a mind to go up there myself and force it out of him."
His subordinate was appalled. "But, sir, there's a Red Alert on! You're supposed to stay here."
Scott snorted in disgust. "An alert! That's fishy, too, I'm telling you. I've decided. I'm going up there and put a stop to all this right now." He listened to the faint sounds of the laboring warp drive reactor and shook his head in mixed annoyance and concern. He didn't need the monitoring computer to tell him all was not well. He headed for the exit, grumbling to himself, and made for the nearest elevator. As soon as it opened, he stepped in and snapped "Bridge!" at it, putting all his frustration and anger into the word.
The Trellisane Confrontation Page 8