STAR TREK: NEW EARTH - CHALLENGER

by Diane Carey

  There was almost a street outside the yard fence, a hastily carved lane fitted with rolled sheet duranium. Not exactly like home, though. Not yet.

  “What about a crew?” Scott pointed bluntly. “There aren’t enough Starfleet personnel left on this planet—”

  “Sir,” Keller sighed heavily, “I beaned my captain over the head and took over. I’m not even sure I’m Starfleet anymore. Far as I can tell, my career’s so shredded already, there’s nothing left to lose. Starfleet’ll have to make a decision on me later. Till then, I’m the OTC of a problem right here and now. If I have to cobble together a ship, I guess I can cobble together a crew too.” He held up the D&D padd he was carrying. “Which reminds me, do you know what a ‘connection’ is?”

  “Sounds like one of the newfangled isolinears. The old ones were more stable.”

  “I’ve got to find one.”

  “Who for?”

  “Zoa. She’s the Rassua representative we brought out with us. I’ve asked her to be my tactical officer, temporarily. Tactical and weapons.”

  “Zoa . . . ah, the lass in the neo-bondage Wellies.”

  “That’s her.”

  “Temporary weapons officer, y’say?”

  “Yes, sir. All I really want to do is make a show.”

  “Might as well fly a hologram, lad.”

  “Has to be a little tougher than that. Sir, I realize I’m asking you to do the insane and incredible and impossible, to take all this and—”

  Scott waved him silent. “Third time this week.”

  Now that he’d done the sales part, Keller found he had to follow through. No point arguing. He paused, shrugged rather stupidly, then bluntly and stubbornly asked, “Where do we start?”

  Scott wagged the welding phaser at the side of his head, not looking at Keller. “We start with your figuring out what you want.”

  “Oh . . . I just thought you would—”

  “Not me, lad. When Enterprise rotates out of this cluster, I’ll be going with her. There are a thousand designs for a thousand purposes. If I take over, build a ship that fits me, then I leave, it’s all pointless. Figure out what you need, then build a ship to suit those needs. Do you need starship capabilities? You’re dreaming if you do. Maybe a destroyer’s picket talents or the composite tricks of a frigate? That’s closer. You’re the one who wants the ship. You got the rank, you make the choice, you get the blame. That’s my advantage—nobody blames the engineer. You figure out what you want, what you need, and what’d make you like her.”

  “Like her?”

  Scott’s eyes sparkled and crinkled at the corners. His voice took on a low rumble. “Well, y’gotta like her, lad . . . or you won’t fight for each other.”

  The concept worked on both of them, having its biggest effect on the young embattled member of the conversation.

  “Y’got no slush deuterium containment facility,” Scott contemplated, more or less talking to himself, “you got no straight duranium fastening rods, you’ll find yourself short of tripolymer for the sensor matrices, and you can’t fly in space without operational profiles and display—”

  “Sir,” Keller interrupted, “I generally do a lot better if I don’t think about what can’t be done. I’m thinking in terms of what we do have. We have parts of ships, we have workers from both the Federation and the Blood, and we have you. Maybe it’s not much in the plus column, but—”

  “You’ll have to tell me how you want your bridge configured. It’s got to fit your personality, your priorities, fit you like a glove.”

  “Oh . . . I see, yeah . . . well, I guess I’m comfortable with what I’m used to. A half-moon master situation theater, a sci-deck with optical banks up on the quarter . . . nothing too spread out—”

  “Another problem,” Scott threw in while he continued welding. “No spacedock at this planet yet. How you figure to build a sizable spacefaring vessel?”

  Not even two steps into this dilemma and already Keller was in a puddle. As if pulling his own tooth, he made his first real tactical command decision. “Build one that can land, then.”

  A million micro-troubles leaped into Scott’s expression, but he shrugged. “A’right. Top of the list—surface capability. Changes the hull structure, alters gravitational tolerance, thrust-to-stress ratio. What else?”

  “Ah . . . a strong frame, compact . . . something that can pivot inside her own overall length, like a lazy Susan or a turning drum.”

  “We might be able to rig mule engines into it,” Scott suggested. “She’ll be muscular. Fast in short bursts, but she’ll not be running any marathons.”

  “That’s what I need,” Keller quickly said. “A quarter horse, not a thoroughbred. But we’ll still need warp power, of course. We’ve got Beowulf’s nacelles—”

  Scott shook his head. “There you got trouble. We have very few operative warp cores, and most of them are in use as power stations around the planet.”

  “Can’t we confiscate one?”

  “Don’t belong to us, lad.”

  “Won’t the colonists be glad to give up one warp core to protect the whole planet?”

  “Might. Got a better idea, though.”

  “Sir?”

  “Use that Blood contraption that limped in the other day. The one you boys blew sky-high. She’s still got her—they call it dynadrive—mostly intact.”

  “Shucorion’s ship?” Keller paused, thinking, and after a moment smiled. “I kind of like the symbolism of that.”

  “It’ll be the devil to make ’em talk to Federation nacelles. I’ll see what I can do. You come up with the rest of the list. The ability to make a decision is valuable all by itself, Keller. Second thing you’ve got to find is somebody else who can make a decision as well as you can.”

  “I don’t understand, sir. . . .”

  “You need a first officer. Can’t do both jobs yourself. After all, chances are you’ll end up dead.”

  Keller pushed off the hull of the shuttle and sighed. “One monster at a time, Chief. I’ll be back.”

  As the welder buzzed in his hand, Montgomery Scott shook his head and chuckled. “I live in fear.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Enterprise

  THE ENTERPRISE shot across the emptiness of space, light-year after light-year, as if borne on a single untiring wave.

  “I know you’re doing something, Spock. Let’s talk it out.”

  James Kirk moved to his ship’s rail and hung himself on it like a coat.

  Before him, the knightly First Officer Spock, the Vulcan superpresence, the center of gravity on the bridge, sunk ever deeper into thought. It took him several seconds to bone up to answering the not-quite-question. He seemed more to be thinking aloud than actually speaking to Kirk. “This new information may supply a clue about the probe’s motive power. It has no thrust, which may mean that quantum flux is how it moves.”

  “How does that help us, Spock?”

  “We may be able to stabilize the flux, just as we used ionized plasma to disrupt it.”

  “How?” Kirk persisted. If he had to be on the spot, then so did everybody else.

  “The unique quality of olivium,” Spock explained, “is its constant random state of flux. It does not all exist in our universe at one time. Yet it must . . .”

  Turning back to his readings, troubled by his own puzzlement, Spock then did something he almost never did—he disapproved of his own line of thought and stopped talking in the middle of a sentence. He was fundamentally upset, not all that down deep.

  Kirk moved a little farther forward on the rail, to keep their conversation private. “So much of what we do is basic survival,” he mused, gently prodding. “Fight those we must fight, drive away monsters, weather storms . . . This is different, isn’t it, Spock?”

  “Yes, Captain. Very different.”

  Go ahead. Tell me.

  “This is a chance,” Spock finally said, “to improve life on a galactic scale. For friends, enemies, a
ll who live in our time and after. This will rank with the invention of sanitation, vaccine technology, warp power . . . if we lose it—”

  For a man who claimed to have no imagination, he was capable of letting Kirk imagine the end of that sentence. Or perhaps he simply couldn’t make himself say it.

  How sad for things to have come to this for Spock, who had so looked forward to studying the enticing Occult solar system, only to discover this weird material in quantum flux, buried in the womb of moon matter, that didn’t even read with conventional sensors. The moon was acting funny, constantly changing, altering the moon’s gravity. The moon was too small for volcanic activity and its core registered as solid, yet it had magma and tremors and constant tectonic action. Mass was changing. Pressure was building. How?

  Nobody knew, until Spock got a closer look and found a miracle. Megatons of this precious stuff, this ore, this brilliance born in the heart of a quasar. Spock had framed the value of a stable olivium source in his most high of adjectives—inestimable.

  Obviously he thought the loss would be that also. And that preyed upon him. Pressure was building again, and his friend Jim Kirk could not help him feel better.

  The least he could do was distract him some.

  “Spock, let’s try thinking in wild ideas, not theories. If they’re high-tech, why can’t we try something low-tech? Trick them somehow. Anything you can imagine about the speed of the thing, the interdimensionality, the fact that it comes halfway across the galaxy to collect rocks made out of the same kind of stuff it’s made of itself . . . which way it’s going, how massive it is—anything you think might be appropriate.”

  Bent over his boards, fine-tuning two dials at the same time while he peered into the sensor hood, Spock shook his head and sounded almost angry. “With the interdimensional flux quality, there seems no way to make any logical predictions.”

  So much for that. For Spock’s imagination anyway.

  Irritated that he hadn’t gotten anywhere with his new angle, Kirk grumbled, “And wouldn’t it be ironic if despite your trouble the universe didn’t behave in a logical manner after all.”

  “If that were the case,” Spock muttered, “then you would be right at home, Doctor.”

  At the helm, Sulu turned to look at them. The communications officer and Herne also both looked up.

  Kirk turned slowly, brows up. Ah, what mindless mutters could reveal . . .

  A good five seconds later, Spock’s shoulders went down some and he straightened, still facing the boards. Another couple of seconds, and he turned to peer down at Kirk. “Pardon me . . .”

  His captain’s reward, to both of them, was a warm smile.

  “I’ll take it as a compliment,” Kirk assured.

  But the tiny breach of etiquette, so rare for the impeccable among us, haunted the Vulcan as he turned back to his boards.

  Folding his arms, Kirk rubbed his mouth, pondering. “So that’s it . . .”

  The key snapped into the lock. The missing element, the conduit, the power arch. Spock had tried numerous times to throw away his humanity, and McCoy had always held it for him. No one ever needed McCoy more than Spock, or appreciated him more. Spock needed to depressurize, but that had never been Kirk’s role in their relationship and he stumbled over it now. Like popping the pressure valve on the Quake Moon to make it safe, McCoy had always been here to trip the switch for Spock. Instinctively Spock must have known the relief was good for him, because he put up with McCoy and in fact counted the prime badgerer as his second closest friend. No Vulcan really had to put up with a Leonard McCoy if he didn’t want to.

  Now the whole weight of the Federation was on Spock’s shoulders, and McCoy wasn’t here to ease the pressure. As a starship captain, an exploration spearhead, a military man and an admiral, Kirk was used to the burden, though he had come to hate it.

  Spock simply didn’t know how to bear so much consequence by himself. McCoy wasn’t here to needle him into relaxing a bit, so Spock would work harder and harder. No matter how Spock tried to be fully Vulcan, he was still part human and there were pressures working on him that would eventually crack. Humans needed some release. When he held his breath too long, a human—or anybody with a conscience—needed somebody to poke him and say, “Breathe, stupid!”

  But nobody was here to do that. And when everything collapsed, Spock would blame himself and refuse comfort. There was a spirit to Spock that even he would have denied.

  Reluctantly Kirk turned away from the science station when Johnny Herne dropped to the lower deck to hand over an engineering padd. “Sir, I’ve got the report from the damage investigation. Not bad.”

  Kirk scanned the padd’s screen, then advanced it and scanned further. “You’re got to be kidding. No significant damage?”

  “Starship’s tougher than I thought.”

  “Well, she’s tough, but she’s not this tough. No serious injuries either?”

  “No, sir.”

  The unhelpful padd went back into Herne’s hands. Kirk squinted at the forward screen. “Well, well. The sounds of attack, the sensations of energy, the feeling of injury, panic and fear . . . yet no significant damage.”

  Herne screwed up an expression. “Are you arguing? Ah—sir?”

  Kirk glanced at him, but he was really interested in hearing from Spock. He turned again to the rail near the science station. “If you want to scare a tribesman away from the cave you’re hiding in, you play the sounds of scary animals and things he understands as dangerous. The ship shook, all the boards lit up, we seemed to be taking prohibitive damage, but when we checked, it was a diagnostic malfunction. Therefore . . . is it a malfunction? Or are we listening to lions growling in the darkness?”

  Spock looked down at him. “Attempting to make us select the option of turning back?”

  Kirk snapped his fingers. “And what does that tell you? It says they can’t completely leave, so they were trying to make us leave instead. Maybe they can’t completely disappear! Maybe they have to . . . intersect with us, even just a little. Just a finger or a hair always sticking into this dimension. Like a periscope. If we’ve been chasing a periscope, that means there’s a whole submarine attached. How else could it take full phasers?”

  “Detection of phaser shifts does indicate a far more advanced civilization than ours.”

  “But not out of line with the type of thing we’ve encountered before. The Metrons, the Nomad probe, Trelane’s people, the Organians—it’s not unheard of.”

  “Not at all.”

  “But this one thing keeps coming back at me. If it could escape interdimensionally, why hasn’t it? If it has to keep a hair or an eyeball or a periscope in this dimension, then if it leaves entirely maybe it can’t come back in. And it doesn’t want to leave.” He leaned an elbow on the rail and rubbed his chin. “We have to find the hair and pull on it.”

  “That could be disastrous, Captain.”

  “What about a containment field? Can we use the antimatter plasma that way? A net?”

  “Only if we do so within the tractor beam field, very near the ship. If we succeed and the full object manifests itself that near to us—”

  “Then we’re dead. But if it wanted us dead, we’d be dead already.”

  “If it . . . wanted, sir?”

  “Yes, Spock, yes. It’s been trying to fool us into thinking we were in danger. They could’ve destroyed us anytime they wanted to. That’s how I know there’s an intelligence involved. Until now I thought it might be programming, but I don’t think so anymore. The ’bots are being directed. I mean to force the directors out into the open.”

  Anticipating a change, Spock stood up. “How?”

  “Mr. Herne, lower all defensive shields. That thing’s threatened to kill us. Let’s see if it has the stomach to follow through.” He settled into his chair like a warrior into a saddle. “Mr. Sulu, overtake the ’bot. Go to warp factor ten.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  EVER TRY surfing a t
idal wave on a toothpick?

  Keller felt like a clumsy magician juggling two dozen greased eggs. Every minute the toothpick was looking better. Because he had Commander Scott behind him—or at least in the life pod with him—a thousand things suddenly started to happen. Nobody questioned him anymore, uttered that immortal “Are you nuts?” that he kept asking himself, and a flurry of activity leaped up around him that kept him completely spinning. He didn’t get the luxury of handling the sweeping overview. Instead, he found himself sweeping the overview and also sweeping the billion crumbs of details rushing around. Nobody had any blueprints or diagrams or schematics to follow, so Keller became the hub of a scandalous spinning ball.

  Every minute somebody was pulling on the hem of his shirt wanting advice or a decision. Half the time he told them to do what they thought was best, mostly because the odds were that they knew as much about whatever-it-was as he did. He quickly discovered that his real value wasn’t in any particular bank of knowledge, but in his willingness to make a decision when others weren’t. Did he want flush plating or clinker plating on the dura-bonded sections? Did he want beam brackets or beam knees? Transverse bulkheads or running joiners? A bulb keel outside the ballast or an internal one? Who was going to be the administrative chain of command once the ship launched? What did he think of cannon grapples? How would the space-time driver coils work with the continuum distortion on a ship that could come into the atmosphere? Who would be his subordinate unit commanders? What did he want done with any contingency retention stock? Where did he want the bridge emergency transporter pad? Were full deflectors or full phaser power the biggest priority if he had to choose?

  Most were good questions. He just didn’t often have the thing that usually comes after a good question. He would listen to all sides of a problem, take all recommendations, then say, “Try that one.” If he was right fifty percent of the time, then half the ship would fly.

  Right now, he’d settle for half a ship. The Challenger coin worked overtime. Flip, flip, flip.

  As for the other half of the questions, he could only hope that Savannah, Zoa, and Bonifay were running their parts of the show. Occasionally he got a question about some preference he might have regarding medical, weapons, or provisioning and support, but otherwise they were handling their new burdens on their own. After all, what did Keller know about setting up a med arena? Or a weapons bank? Or a fortune-telling booth?