by Diane Carey
“I don’t have any worries about that, Nick,” Lake claimed, raising his voice a little. “You’re loyal to me. We owe each other.”
Keller looked up. “I crossed the line.”
“Loyalty shifted? From me to them? That pack of vipers? I don’t believe it. Who got to you, Nick?”
With a huff of frustration, Keller allowed himself to moan it out. He set the cup of juice down on the desk nearby. For a moment he was no longer speaking to Lake. Lake was just overhearing.
“I always liked Starfleet discipline and loyalty. All of a sudden I was trapped between devotion and honor, and doing what was right. For the first time in my life, they weren’t the same. I’ll take a lot of crap on things that aren’t important. Decisions don’t have to be made instantly, but once I make them, they’re made. Decide to fight or to run, but once you decide, then really fight or really run. There’s bad and there’s worse. Pick the best thing and take the consequences. Am I going to rise to this and do my best, or am I going to duck the job I did agree to and shrug it onto somebody else?”
The tenor of subtle change rang like gongs for both men. Keller sensed the difference, and saw in Lake’s stony face that the captain did too.
Keller didn’t stand up yet, though his tone changed to something more ponderous.
“There’s a security guard outside your door. You’re confined to these quarters. You’re going to be under some kind of restriction. I haven’t figured out what yet. When Captain Kirk gets back, I’ll be asking him to convene a competency hearing.”
“Is this a mutiny?” Lake distilled, speaking suddenly sharply. He no longer moved, but lay perfectly still, as if encased in his blanket. “Are you trying to relieve me of my command?”
“You’d be relieved of command,” Keller confirmed, “if we had a ship left to command.”
Lake raised himself up on an elbow. “I’ll fix the ship. You’re dealing with the wrong man here. You think I’ll fold just like that?”
“There’s no ship to fix,” Keller preempted. “She’s smashed, wrecked. Her guts are blown out inside every trunk. Her arteries are fried. We just can’t have any more of you, Roger. You relieved the crew of their posts in the middle of action.”
“I did no such thing.”
Keller stalled up short. How could he deal with someone to whom the truth was so fluid? What could he do when somebody just stood there and said, “Up’s down”? He felt suddenly knocked out at the knees. How could a man look him right in the eye and believe something so vastly opposite of what had really happened? How delusional could a functioning mind become?
“You want to see the automatic log?” he condensed.
“So? Those things can be faked. Everybody knows that.”
“We can’t fix the ship, Roger. You can’t unburn the firewood.”
Lake’s eyes became like a badger’s. “You’re relieving me of my command and you’re trashing my ship? What then? You take over as senior Starfleet authority here? You’re not qualified to take over for me.”
“I’m not,” Keller acceded. “But I can listen to the people around me. Their jobs will be to make me understand what I need to understand. Then I’ll make the best decisions I can. I accepted this position. I have to handle it now.”
His voice deep and sluggish, Lake’s eyes were still sharp, his glare unforgiving. “We were one person. You, me, and Dee. You were both part of me.”
Keller nodded sadly. “We were. But in the end, I was more dedicated to a captain who didn’t deserve it than to a crew who did.”
Sourly Lake pressed his head back against the pillow. “That’s a poisoned thing for you to say to me. I’ll file a breach of privilege against you.”
“Wouldn’t blame you a bit.”
The friction between them rose like a wall. Lake clearly felt a thousand times betrayed. He rubbed his injured head, then passed his hands over his eyes. “Must be a burden, being so tenderhearted, hey?”
The erosion of a longtime friendship caught them each by the throat, but for two different reasons.
“I’ll never forget this,” Lake vowed. “Never.”
Keller slipped off the dresser and straightened to leave. “Neither will I.”
Chapter Sixteen
Planet Belle Terre
“JUST DUMP IT over there, with the other warp cores.”
Zane Bonifay, once bosun, then storage steward, then bosun again, now found himself in the unenviable role of salvage foreman. As he directed other workers, Starfleet and not, over the two-mile valley before him, he felt like a bouncing ball. In space, out of space, in again, out again.
The wrecked Peleliu was being parted out, here in this yard, a huge clearing house for the whole planet, holding the totaled-out wrecks of about sixty-five ships, remnants of the original Belle Terre Expedition. The remains of the dozens of vessels spewed out all over this open valley, taking whatever Belle Terre’s nutsy weather wanted to spit on it.
Today was an almost tolerable day. Not exactly nice, but nice days on Belle Terre were rare, even at the equator. Here, on the southern slope of the primary hemispheric mountain range, between the mountains and the desert, lay this valley. Partly protected from snowstorms by the mountain range, it was nevertheless a windswept place. Summer in this hemisphere made for an almost constant dry wind. Right now it was spring, and couldn’t make up its mind between hot and cold. So, every half hour, the temperature either rose or dropped. Bonifay had taken his jacket off three times in the past hour.
Everywhere among the piles and piles of junk buzzed dozens of little sorter robots, rolling around on their six wheels or floating on their antigravs, picking their way through the hulks and delivering what they found to specified sorting grids. Some were programmed to look for certain types of metal, others synthetics, glass, fabric, circuit material, plastics, celluloids, duranides—anything else anybody could think of that might’ve been built into the many ships whose blown mechanics were still here.
Over the past weeks of struggle, much of the vessels’ structures, furnishings, fabrics, windows, and other useful stuff had been stripped for planetary use in houses, shelters, barns, streets, or patched together into atmospheric shuttles and other vehicles for use around the planet. Most of the spacebearing mechanics was still here, much of it stressed beyond use.
Over to Bonifay’s left was the beaming site, where right now six more tons of former Peleliu were materializing. Beside the site, twenty-odd suited workmen waited with load lifters, clamps, antigravs, and whatever they needed to separate the pieces and distribute them wherever Bonifay wanted them.
Just this morning the hulk of Shucorion’s Plume had limped in, towed by a shuttle on automatic. It had arrived almost a week earlier than expected, because it didn’t have the sense to shut down during Gamma Night and had been lucky enough not to pile into an asteroid belt. Now it lay at the bottom of this ridge where Bonifay stood and supervised the dispersal of sections and parts, its wedge-like form missing a wing and part of its tail section. Obviously it was more than a spacecraft, if it needed wings and a tail. Or it used to be.
Not anymore.
A sharp hand of wind chiseled across the valley and raced up the ridge to hit him in the face as he looked down at the Plume. He winced and turned away, shielding his face with the padd he was holding.
When he looked up toward the beaming site, he saw Nick Keller walking toward him.
Keller didn’t look good. His uniform jacket was missing. So was the white high-necked shirt. Instead he wore a black Fleet-issue T-shirt and trousers, but with a simple gray flight jacket such as any docking attendant might wear.
“Mornin’, Badlands.”
“Hey, Zane.”
“You need a shave.”
“S’pose so. You need a haircut.” Keller turned and surveyed the sprawling acres of windblown wrecks. “You’ve got a new hobby, I see. What a mess.”
Bonifay leaned his padd on his hip, raised his chin, and narrowed
his eyes as if studying an art work. “It’s only a mess to the untrained eye. To those of us who know what we’re looking at, why . . . it’s pure putrefied hell.” He moved to the edge of the ridge, not exactly beside Keller. Together they scanned the acres of wreckage being tidily separated. “Out in that field of miserable clutter you see the thousands of dreams, aspirations, plans of thousands of people. Designers, the builders, the guys who made the blueprints, the engineers, loft techs, the guys who painted the Belle Terre Expedition logos and the UFP standards on the hulls, the families traveling out here without looking behind . . . lot of life stories out there.”
“And death stories,” Keller reminded. “Aren’t those the hull lights of the coroner ship over there?”
“Looks like them. Somebody took the hull and made a couple of houses out of it. Furniture and all. Same with most of the Conestogas. It’s a whole settlement outside of Port Bellamy.”
The wind pulled at Keller’s hair, mussing up the part. “I remember seeing Twilight Sentinel go past Peleliu and the other color-guard ships during the parade as the Expedition was embarking from Starbase Sixteen. Purple hull, soft gold and white running lights . . . she was elegant. Sad, but stately.”
On that thought he paused, braced against a sudden slice of wind. Together they scanned the wreckscape, but Keller was no longer paying much real attention.
Another blade of wind came down between the mountains, scraped the valley, and slapped them back a couple of steps. When it subsided, Keller was facing Bonifay instead of the valley. He stuffed his hands into his pockets. There was a little rasp in his voice.
“I know what you think of me,” he submitted. “Probably not much different from what I think of me. But we’ve got things to do. I need help from you to get them done.”
Squinting in an inhospitable streak of sunlight stabbing between the clouds, Bonifay diffidently asked, “Like what things, exactly?”
Keller spoke as if he’d been rehearsing. “It’ll be six months before Starfleet can send another ship, plus the two months it takes for a message to get back there that we even need another ship. The Kauld’ll be back sooner than that. All they have to do is shake off the effects of dealing with us, then come back and blow us from Monday to Christmas. We’ve got nothing left to stop them. But we still have a planet to protect, not to mention the olivium.”
“It’s stuck back in the Quake Moon.”
“Still ours to protect.” He sniffed at the raw dry wind, then grimaced thoughtfully. “I’ve got to get back out in space as soon as possible. If nothing else, I want to find out why we got a false signal from the mining ship. And who fired the shot that tipped us off to the Kauld presence. There’s something going on out there, and I don’t like being stuck here while it’s happening.”
“Planning to grow wings?” Bonifay asked. “I’m not saying it’s not possible.”
Keller steeled himself. “When I was a kid, I could build hoverskates with paper clips and spit.” He raised his hand and pointed. “Look over there. A perfectly good warp core. Half of one, anyway . . . just past it, aren’t those Starfleet nacelles?”
“From the CST Beowulf,” Bonifay confirmed. “That was my ship.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Me too.”
Keller looked at the ground, rocked on his heels, and nodded. “Part of Peleliu’s engineering section’s still intact, mostly the bottom half. And the saucer section’s perimeter structure didn’t get cracked. We’ve still got her bridge deck. Needs a new hat, though. . . .”
Bonifay pressed his lips, but didn’t comment.
“And I heard,” Keller moved on, “you’ve been collecting excelinide spheres for recharge, haven’t you?”
Sensing where this was headed, Bonifay cocked a hip. “Sure, there are almost seventy perfectly good ships out here. Problem is, they’re in fifty thousand blown-out pieces.”
Once again Keller turned to the open valley and squinted into the bite of breeze. “We’ve still got a problem to raise up to.”
“What’re we raising?”
“Huh? Ourselves, I guess.”
“Then it would be ‘rising.’ Intransitive verb.”
“Oh, of course. Silly me.”
“What about manpower? You might be the officer in tactical command, but there aren’t enough of Peleliu’s personnel left physically able to crew a moon transit, never mind a fighting ship. You got no bridge personnel, no medical, you got two junior engineers left, no helmsman, navigator’s laid up, and at last call the captain was recovering from a knot on the skull that matches a bruise on your thumb.”
Word had already spread halfway around the colony about what happened on Peleliu. The captain had been acting erratically, his first officer—actually second officer hastily promoted in action—had whacked him over the head and not even made up a good story. The ship had limped back and ultimately had to be towed into orbit, and the technical diagnosis had turned into an autopsy.
Nick Keller hadn’t uttered a word of protest. Not a syllable in his own defense. He hadn’t made up an excuse or quoted a regulation, hadn’t painted over the scratch marks or hidden behind smoke screens.
He didn’t do it now, either.
“I don’t have any of those,” Keller admitted, “but I know where there’s a heck of a bosun. If he’d have me.”
With his mind already on functional realities, Bonifay glossed over the compliment. “The parts won’t even work together. The tech won’t be compatible from ship to ship. There aren’t enough good Starfleet parts to—”
“We’ll make them work together.”
“How?”
“Don’t know yet. What do you say?”
“You’re the OTC. Why don’t you just give me an order?”
“Don’t feel like doing that.”
“Seems to me it’d be better to wait for help.”
“We don’t have time,” Keller said. “Besides, I don’t like to wait for help. We should paddle our own canoe.”
He didn’t explain further, but left any details to Bonifay’s intuition. After a few moments of silence, the revelation struck that Keller wasn’t going to say anything else and that he understood “no” might actually be an answer. He seemed willing to take it, even seemed to think he deserved abandonment.
Keller took out the Challenger coin and rubbed it between his palms, thinking about McAddis.
Striking a Napoleonic pose, Bonifay raised his animated black brows and narrowed his eyes. “Go ahead,” he encouraged. “Tell my future.”
Self-conscious, even a little pink in the face, Keller took hold of Bonifay’s hand, flipped the coin and slapped it onto Bonifay’s knuckles. Together they look at it.
“That’s a decision I can live with,” Bonifay said. He gave back the coin, then stuck out the same hand in an offer whose best voice was silence.
Some things were better unspoken.
Deeply moved by the vote of confidence he didn’t deserve, Keller clasped Bonifay’s hand. A distinct fear of the immediate future set in for both of them.
“So,” Bonifay bridged, “who’re you gonna get to pinch-hit as a design engineer for this Frankenstein ship?”
Port Bellamy Shuttle Yard
“You want to what?”
“We don’t have to start by winning, sir. All we have to do is show we can compete. If they know we have a ship, even if it’s not the best ship, maybe we can stall them or fend them off or maybe put up a good bluff until Captain Kirk gets back or some help arrives.”
“Lad, I’ve got barely enough here to build shuttles and planetary hovercraft and little buzzers back and forth to the moons, but a fighting ship?”
“We’ve got most of Peleliu—”
“What’s left of her. She’s cracked down the middle. Her skull and spine are broken. You want her to get up and walk, then dance a jig?”
Montgomery Scott carried with him almost as much legend as James Kirk and Mr. Spock, and in fact had his own
legend to go on just from his innovations in deep-space engineering. He’d virtually revamped the whole engineering division at Starfleet to suit his purposes, which had thundered down for decades to youngsters like Nick Keller.
Standing under the engine of a rebuilt shuttle, Keller fidgeted with the diagnostic-and-design padd he’d brought with him and tried to bury a shudder from his shoulders to his thighs. Just talking to somebody like Commander Scott made him nervous. Something about famous people, especially when they really deserved to be famous.
Scott’s age was lost in a strong barrel-like physique, salt-pepper hair, and a brushy mustache that framed his bright and also legendary smile, but Keller guessed at late fifties. Could be wrong. Never could guess age. The Scottish accent was thicker than Keller remembered from training tapes, but that was a while ago. Or perhaps with age Scott had settled into a colorful role and grown comfortable with the Aberdeen boatman image. Or maybe he just didn’t care anymore whether anyone understood him or not.
With all that Montgomery Scott had done for the Belle Terre Colonial Expedition, from enabling them by designing the mule engines that brought them here to rebuilding a useful atmospheric fleet to traffic the planet so no one would be too isolated, he could ask almost anybody on the planet to do this grunt work for him. One colonist even claimed that the commander had fixed their ancient toaster.
Yet here he stood, welding a circuit-bearing clinker plate onto the underbelly of a patched-together surface shuttle. Looked like a twenty-seater. Keller got the idea Scott liked doing the hands-on detail work just as much as he clearly enjoyed the vista of grand-scheme engineering.
Around them, a few dozen other workers strode or floated about, working on a dozen other pathetic-looking leftovers that were being formed into craft that might serve someone here. Lifters, crawlers, and anti-gravs on automatic hummed and clattered all over the yard. This was one of the places making use of the garbage Bonifay’s team was sorting. Other places on this side of Port Bellamy vying for parts were the mattress factory, the shelterworks, a twelve-acre horticulture hothouse, and six or seven independent metalyards.