STAR TREK: NEW EARTH - CHALLENGER

by Diane Carey

  “This sector has twenty percent fewer stars generally than other segments of the galaxy,” he reported. “However, I read many other elements of clutter. Free-roaming planets, active local attractions, large gaps in the interstellar void . . . the Sagittarius Cluster is therefore unusual. It will provide much exploration of interest for the Starfleet contingent stationed here.”

  Strange—though Spock could utter those hopes and anticipations, a strong hint came through that he wasn’t really wishing to explore this area himself. He was unenchanted by the great unknown on the forward screen, and the tiny beacon from the ’bot they were following as it raced into the reaches. The Sagittarius Cluster was behind them now, the distance stretching out like an elastic string with every second that passed, yet the Vulcan’s mind was still back there, still on the missing olivium and these robots who were taking it away, now leading them out into uncharted space at speeds to spin the mind.

  Taking some of it away. The biggest portion was being reintegrated into the Quake Moon. Why? What interest did machines have in redepositing ejecta? There had to be a reason. Machines didn’t do irrational things.

  And when they were finished restocking the Quake Moon . . . then what?

  Certainly not just let it explode again. Machines weren’t that inefficient. Something else was going on.

  Shifting in his command chair, Kirk felt out of place for the first time in years. Probably all the missing faces. Oh, the posts were manned, but that wasn’t the same. He’d been spoiled by the loyalty of his primary crew, and was now crippled by their absence. Very bad. This was one of those situations that military structure struggled to avoid—people getting too close to each other, so personally bonded that they couldn’t function apart. As his fame had increased and the legend had kept their names together like Robin Hood’s men, he had let himself wallow in his privilege. Most captains didn’t keep the same people around them for decades, or even a few years. Fame had awarded him that. He and his merry band were an asset to Starfleet when they were together, not apart. Starfleet had never enacted its commonsense right to reassign.

  He wanted to fall back on formality, but something told him that wouldn’t fix the sense of urgent wrongness. He wanted to be having this conversation aloud, voice these thoughts and listen to the feedback he could count on, get peppered by McCoy and anchored by Spock, huffed at by Scott, beamed at by Chekov, scolded and worshiped at the same time by Uhura’s wordless regard. But if he spoke, he would just make Spock feel worse.

  Kirk suspected sabotage from within. The Vulcan disciplines made Spock far more passionate about things that really mattered to him, even more passionate than a human might be. When they embraced dispassion, they did so passionately. No other race had developed the Vulcan ways, probably because they didn’t have it in them. Every race found its way to survive. Vulcans physiologically had it in them to repress emotion, but Spock wasn’t physiologically pure. Just because he didn’t display emotions didn’t mean the emotional stress wasn’t working on him from the inside out.

  Being Vulcan meant his body could redirect energies to focus on particular needs, powered by the great muscle of the Vulcan mind. But Vulcans as a race hadn’t been good at handling emergencies of passion or need. They had learned to control and manage their planet so there wouldn’t be any crises. When one came up, they generally failed, lost, suffered.

  That was why the Federation had been so good for the Vulcans. They could ask for help. They made friends with people who could change a way of thinking in an instant, and knew what to do with passion when it hit. The Vulcans hadn’t done much in a hundred years or so before they met the humans. Together, the two had become the conglomerate that opened up the whole galaxy to cooperation, trade, expansion, exploration, and a rule of law. Spock was a microcosm of all that, a human-Vulcan hybrid, a little at odds with himself, somehow better than the sum of his parts.

  But Kirk knew something else. He knew that, in fact, Spock’s passion was unmatched. Humans would eventually reach a point where they would say, “I’ve done all I can.” Spock would never say that to himself. He would not accept fallibility. He would continue to say, “I have not done enough.” He might grasp his cause so unremittingly that he would destroy himself with his passions. Kirk was worried for him.

  “Are we gaining on the ’bot?”

  “Maintaining, presently. We’ve lost track of the second one. It pulled ahead.”

  “Mr. Sulu?”

  At the helm, Sulu came to life. “Confirmed, sir. I’ve still got a fix on the one, for now.”

  “Engineering?”

  At the console on the upper port deck, Senior Engineer Pro-Tem Johnny Herne reported, “Exceeding sixteen hundred cochranes. Crossfeed’s failing on four matter reactant injectors. We’re losing noticeable flux resolution and there’s some failure in the coolant loops on the subspace field distortion amplifiers.”

  “How much?”

  “Fifty millicochranes. Levels are topped off on three of the four field generators. Shield integrity is compromised, sensor focus reduced, and we’re redlined on all warp systems.”

  Kirk’s whole body seemed to sink an inch. “So everything’s fine, then?”

  Sulu managed a tentative smile that failed to hide his fears. “Good thing Scotty’s not here.”

  “I’m sure he’s getting psychic vibrations.”

  A few smiles. Not much else. Nobody wanted to blow up. Everybody knew they might.

  He pushed out of his chair and circled the lower bridge, slowly, memorizing the people here. At communications, Ensign Wilma Boisjoley had been Uhura’s apprentice for about a year. She could do the job. But she wasn’t family. Kirk realized he was spoiled, and tried to fight it.

  At engineering, Lieutenant Johnny Herne had been personally assigned by Montgomery Scott. Kirk already didn’t like him much, but that didn’t matter. Herne was barely a lieutenant, and had barely made the promotion. Everything he did seemed to be on an edge. His appearance was just barely inside regulations. Distractions of any sort were generally discouraged, along with blatant displays of personal attitude, but with so many aliens now joining Starfleet, demands for conformity among the humans and humanoids had taken some hits. Still, the uniform was not a bumper sticker. Military convention served a specific purpose and did its job very well. Compliance was important, sometimes critical.

  Herne was human—or was he? Kirk thought he was. Then again, who could tell anymore?

  “Captain!” Sulu called, “The thing’s slowing down! It’s turning, sir!”

  “Match course and speed, Mr. Sulu.”

  “Aye, sir, matching course and speed. Warp four . . . three . . .”

  Spock bent over his sensors. “Heading toward a small nebula. Sensors are reading several spatial bodies . . . large comets, asteroids, planetoids . . . no stars. Possibly some kind of gravitational force holding the bodies nearby.”

  “I see it.” Kirk pushed out of his chair and went around the side of the helm to watch the nebula racing toward them on the forward screen. “Minimum magnification.”

  “Minimum mag, sir. Warp one, sir. Dropping to sublight.”

  The nebula, a gleaming aqua bubble, oblong with jagged spokes of gas and a red ring, shifted to a smaller size but still dominated the screen. Only sensors could see the little nut of trouble leading them in.

  “Captain, the probe is circling us,” Spock warned, speaking quickly.

  “Turbulence, sir! Isopiestic flow’s compromised!”

  Sulu’s call of warning provided none. Before anyone could react, the Enterprise lurched more violently than she would’ve under a full disruptor attack, and she kept lurching—upward, then farther upward, as if suddenly climbing a steep incline.

  “Sir, we’re losing our inertial damping,” Herne warned. “SIF’s breaking up. IDF failure in twenty seconds if we don’t break this!”

  Kirk held on to the helm. “Ride it, Sulu, do a loop if you have to!”

 
Like a biplane screaming into a hammerhead stall, the ship seized raw space and heaved straight upward, gravitational system screaming to keep control, keep them on their feet instead of on their heads. Had the ’bot circled and finally attacked? Had it pushed them up this way or fired something at them?

  He didn’t badger the crew. If they knew anything, they’d speak up.

  The ship wailed so loud it hurt his ears. Suddenly the whine dropped to a horrid clatter and knock with a tympanum beat—bom bom bom bom bom bom bom—

  “Graviton polarity’s losing grip, Captain,” Herne added to his previous warnings. He had the same tone Scotty usually had at times like this.

  “We’re inside the nebula, sir!” Spock called above the thrum.

  “Shields up!”

  “The grid came up automatically, sir,” Sulu told him.

  “That means energy,” Kirk decided, choking out his words as he held tight to the helm. “We’re reading something, even if we can’t get a grip on—”

  He hit the deck on both knees when the ship abruptly stopped climbing and twisted into a lateral spin—an amazing stress for a starship, a move she was never meant to make. If only the struts held.

  Literally thrown back onto his feet and pressed into the rail behind him, Kirk felt the force change a third time when finally Sulu got control over it, or the power that had kicked the ship let go, or both.

  As Kirk hung on the rail like an ape, Spock was just getting back to his feet from some other ungainly position.

  “Heavy damage,” the science officer reported, his complexion flushed olive. “Mostly stress points . . . the space-frame . . . reading multiple sites of collateral damage.”

  “Some engine compromise on the warps,” Herne reported.

  Kirk glanced at him and nodded. Herne seemed to know the job well enough. “Keep on top of it,” he said unnecessarily, then turned to Spock. “Did it hit us?”

  “Unknown.” Spock straightened and looked at the main screen. “There it is.”

  They all turned to the forward vista just in time to see the ’bot cull out a single brown planetoid and curve toward it. Once its trajectory straightened out, the ’bot increased speed for an instant, and plowed straight into the planetoid, to be swallowed by the brown crust like a knife into frosting.

  “Spock! Did you see that?”

  “A force moving at that speed should have broken the planetoid into quarters!” Spock said, clearly very surprised and without the will to hide it.

  “Get readings on any changes,” Kirk ordered, hoping to keep him busy, “anything at all, no matter how nominal. Sulu, get us around the other side of the planetoid, minimum safe distance!”

  The ship howled again with the strain they now put upon it themselves, and scored itself a path around the planetoid to the other side.

  “Captain, there’s no sign of the ’bot!” Sulu snapped, frustrated, even angry. “How’s that possible? At twenty thousand miles per second, it should’ve come out almost instantly!”

  “All stop. Hold position. Well, damn . . . get me some damage reports. I want to know what it did to us.”

  Everyone else sank back to his work, to comply with the comforting order.

  The planetoid hung in front of them, turning lazily and winking its glossy mountain range in the light of a far-off star.

  And over there, not so far off, Spock had gone strangely silent. In fact, he was simply sitting now, in front of his quickly changing graphics and readings, one hand on the controls but not pushing any. He seemed hypnotized.

  With both hands on the rail to keep himself from poking the Vulcan in the arm, Kirk asked, “Spock? Something we should know? Something inside the planetoid?”

  For a long moment, Spock said nothing, but simply shook his head, slowly.

  “Captain . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Captain, I believe . . . these probes may be interdimensional.”

  A punch in the gut. Interdimensionality opened up a very smelly can of worms.

  “Based on what?” Kirk asked.

  “Something I . . . missed before.”

  The self-deprecation in Spock’s voice was touching, even a little scary. Kirk came around the rail and climbed to the upper deck and into Spock’s periphery.

  “It’s all right,” he mentioned quietly. “Go ahead. Tell me.”

  Spock didn’t meet his eyes. “They appear to travel with no thrust.”

  Such a simple thing, so obvious. So completely impossible.

  “What tipped you off now?” Kirk asked. Despite drilling the humiliation in a little farther, he had to know.

  “When the probe struck the planetoid, there was no ejecta. No solid matter thrown out in compensation to the impact. I should’ve seen this sooner.”

  “If they’re slipping between dimensions,” Kirk urged on, “might be why they don’t need any defense or offense, why we can’t hurt them or stop them. They just ignore us. We’ve seen that kind of thing before. If they can phase in and out of dimension at key moments, we might as well hit a warbird with a pillow.”

  “Yes. And it seems, based upon this, that the probes themselves have similar properties to the quantum olivium itself.”

  Suddenly interested in a whole new way, Kirk leaned back on the edge of the console and pressed the heels of his hand to the bumper. “That,” he congratulated, “makes a hell of a lot of sense. What properties?”

  “Subtle shifts in mass. Other traits that would normally lead us to believe our instruments were faulty, were we not now wiling to accept these types of readings. I could go into detail—”

  Kirk raised a quick hand. “I’ll trust you. The same traits as olivium . . .”He pushed off the rail and paced aft on the upper bridge, then found himself staring at Uhura’s chair with somebody else in it.

  Suddenly he was thinking about McCoy too. And now, therefore, Spock again. He felt like cracked glass.

  “Spock,” he said, pivoting quickly, “they’ve been taking olivium, they have similar physical traits to olivium, they change mass and shift interdimensionally—” He cut himself off and listened to the clatter of information jockey around in his head while Spock simply watched him, frowning unhappily. “But they don’t completely leave this dimension, or they wouldn’t have to travel in space at all, would they?”

  Spock clearly hadn’t added that up, and virtually exclaimed, “Yes, of course!”

  “And they didn’t pick on us until the Quake Moon exploded. The olivium must’ve been there a long time before that, correct?”

  “Yes, quite correct.”

  “So the explosion might have triggered some kind of—of sympathetic protocol and set them into motion. It summoned them from somewhere!”

  Feeling himself zero in on a target, Kirk held out a fierce finger in Spock’s face. “And they have to keep a hook or a hair or some piece in this dimension in order to stay in it.”

  “Although I’ve made no concrete correlation,” Spock threw in, “I suspect this interdimensionality may be why Gamma Night has no effect on the probes.”

  Kirk eyed the planet, feeling like a shark stalking an eel in its hole. “Can we . . . how can we force it to reveal itself in this dimension? Can we hold it here somehow? Magnetism? Ionization? Antimatter?”

  “Antimatter has some properties of interdimensionality,” Spock agreed. “I have been toying with a hypothesis, although I was . . . uncomfortable about revealing it. When antimatter comes in contact with any appreciable quantity of matter under uncontrolled conditions, there is a disrupting. Perhaps we can disrupt the probe’s quantum flux.”

  “No time like the present,” Kirk encouraged. “Assuming this isn’t its destination, and that it can’t just disappear or it would’ve by now, maybe we can give it a pinch, tease the eel out of his crevice.”

  “Is that your decision, then, sir?” Spock took refuge from his own experience with insecurity by falling back upon protocol.

  Kirk, however, wasn’t rea
dy yet to crawl back into the book. He dropped, almost jauntily, to the lower deck and slid into his chair. At last, something to do!

  “It’s always handy to keep a box of antimatter in your cupboard. Let’s do it.”

  Spock stood up immediately and faced the port side. “Mr. Herne, we will be boring a fissure down several miles, then beaming a capsule of ionized antimatter in a plasma state into the cusp of the fissure. As it cools, which will be nearly instantaneously, it may react with the probe and interfere with its quantum flux.” Having given his instruction, he looked now at Kirk. “It may work, it may destroy the probe, it may have no effect at all—”

  “But everything else we’ve done hasn’t had an effect,” Kirk said. “When everything else you’ve tried doesn’t work, you try hitting the thing with a hammer.”

  “This isn’t that far above magic,” Herne contributed.

  “I’ll settle for magic,” Kirk said, suddenly enthusiastic. “Mr. Sulu, set phasers and fire at will.”

  The planetoid didn’t just explode. It instantly crumbled into a hundred trillion individual pieces the size of softballs and blew outward in a fireworks shape, perfectly spherical, and perfectly demolished, almost making a pooff sound in their minds.

  On the upper deck, Johnny Herne dropped his Señor Cool act and shouted, “Mother! Wow!”

  Well, how often did you see a planet turn into a puffball right in front of you?

  “There it is!” Sulu cried.

  Sure enough, the ’bot’s tiny form burst out of the center of the puff and split for the reaches. With a flash of propulsionless acceleration, it was suddenly gone.

  “Going to warp again, sir!” Sulu scowled into his sensors. “Warp three . . . five . . . eight . . . leveling off at warp nine!” He peered over his shoulder at Kirk. “Should we turn back, sir?”

  Plainly, he didn’t want to. If Kirk could count on anybody not to turn back, that person was Sulu.