by Diane Carey
“Got it.”
“They—we—know it’ll change your technology a whole bunch over the next century or two or ten. They—we—gave warp capacity to the Blood and the Kauld, thinking it’d help them out of their repeating cycle of damn bloody wars. Didn’t work out that way–made it worse. So they’re a little antsy about doing it again.”
“Wait,” Kirk snapped, seizing the opportunity, the thinnest thread of a chance. “I have a proposal for your Multimillennial friends, Captain Dogan.”
“Does it involve wrestling?”
“If necessary. You don’t want to leave a messy galaxy. Fine. Let us sweep up. Let us keep the olivium. Then this Cold Factor neutralizer won’t have to pose a danger to anyone anymore.”
“That’s the problem. We can’t talk to it anymore. It’s broke. It won’t answer the recall. We can track it, but they can’t go get it without a physical presence at the locale. Something about contact physics, I dunno. They don’t know how exactly to go get it or talk it into coming home so they can throw a leash around it. Everybody don’t know everything, y’know.”
“Well,” Kirk lobbied again, “let us earn it, then. You don’t know how to use ships anymore . . . I have a starship. Let me locate the Neutralizer for you. You let us keep the olivium and deal with the repercussions.”
“Sounds good. Okay, let me talk to ’em for a second.” He closed his eyes and took a long draw on his pipe, his lower lip puffing away. “Okay, they say that the Council of Ten Thousand will take up your proposal.”
Kirk’s gut twisted. “Ten thousand bureaucrats? How long will that take?”
Dogan opened his eyes. “They’ve agreed.”
Sulu pressed a hand over his eyes, overwhelmed.
Passing a weakened glance at Spock, Kirk commented, “Apparently their bureaucrats are better than ours.”
“While two days may pass for us,” Spock said, quite excited, “hundreds of thousands of years may have passed for them. Yet somehow they grasp our perspective of what is occurring in our own time, here today.”
“Do you understand any of this?”
“In theory.”
“We can’t possibly think their way, can we?”
“No, sir.”
“Then I won’t try.”
Dogan laughed. “Actually, Kirk, they conferred for over two hundred years just now, in the fourth dimension! Bureaucrats are still bureaucrats!”
What else was there to do? Now that he’d found his quarry, Kirk found himself caught in a swirl of events that seemed to be happening whether he wanted into the deal or not. And actually, he did.
“How do we do it?” he asked, fanning his arms a little. “Can you give us a heading?”
“Better’n that,” Dogan offered. “They’re gonna mount the Yorktown here with all kinds of conversion equipment that’ll make it temporarily fourth-dimensional. You’ll get spoiled.”
“This is the Enterprise, Captain Dogan,” Sulu passively corrected, probably figuring that neither Kirk nor Spock would bother.
“Oh—sure! What was I thinkin’? Been a long time. Y’know how it is.”
While he spouted, another living being—not even close to Human—came squishing down the interdimensional ramp, flipping its snorkles and leading a whole team of people who were definitely human, humanoid, a few aliens Kirk recognized and a few he didn’t. They were carrying tools of some sort, and a metallic octagonal box that seemed to be no more than a box, except that it had no lid.
Impatience got to him again as his mind shot back to Belle Terre and what was about to happen there. “How long will this conversion take?”
“It’s all done,” Dogan said.
The team of workers was already marching back into the interdimensional doorway. All they had done, as far as Kirk could tell, was put the octagonal box on the helm, touch parts of the bridge with some of their tools, then turn around and leave.
“Thanks, Roib!” Dogan called up the passageway. “Thanks, fellas! Good job! You’re gettin’ fast!”
Dogan waved merrily and came back down to the command arena, apparently meaning to follow his friends back into the interdimensional vortex. “You need anythin’ else? Wanna come and have breakfast for a decade or two before you go?”
Tempting as that was, Kirk already had plenty to digest. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather get going.”
“Yeah, I get it.” Dogan wobbled back to the doorway and put one foot on the glossy ramp. “Now, when you find the thing, we’ll take over. But look, don’t get too close too fast, or it’ll freeze your fanny! I sure hope you’re in time to keep the Factor from chompin’ down that pretty planet. Lotsa luck. Nice t’meet you, damn sure. Don’t get up—I’ll close the door behind me.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
KELLER FLEW out of his chair. “Increase our speed.”
Shucorion returned quickly to the helm, but had nothing hopeful to offer. “Speed remains at six, Commander.”
“Bonifay, choke some more out of it! Zoa, can you give us an aft view on this screen?”
He hoped she could figure it out, so Bonifay wouldn’t have to take his attention away from the engines.
She did, though it took several seconds.
On the forward screen, the water balloon filled nearly half the screen.
“Speed, Zane,” Keller begged.
“Maybe warp seven,” Bonifay gasped. “Maybe.”
Keller’s chest seemed to cave in as he stood there gripping the unoccupied nav chair. “Not far enough . . . we’ve got to get farther!”
“The thing’s at warp eight.” Bonifay’s announcement chilled them all.
There was no warp eight in this ship, not yet, not with a Blood warp core and muscular but cumbersome towing engines and a crew who didn’t know the mismatched systems well enough.
The balloon was coming to get its olivium. Any second now the ship would die of power drain and the thing would be on them.
He looked around. Zoa was on her feet, searching the weapons board for a possibility. She found none.
On the sci-deck Savannah gripped the engineering pulpit, but she had no experience to do anything with it. Shucorion did his best to pilot the ship, but there was only one course, one speed. He too could only stare at the oncoming threat.
Vellyngaith stood on the port side of the command deck, one hand on the rail, his eyes closed, and his chin raised.
The balloon filled the whole screen in seconds.
“Hell with this.” Keller kicked the nav chair, climbed to the engineering console and shoved Savannah brutishly out of his way and began hammering the controls.
“What are you doing!” Savannah cried.
“Flying a big bomb, that’s what. I’ve got a warp core. Matter and antimatter are only this far from blowing up half the time anyway. It wants energy? I’ll give it a gut full.”
An instant later, Bonifay squirreled to the sci-deck at Keller’s side. “Rig to overload?”
Keller could only nod and strike the right buttons. The warning system popped on. The ship took herself to red alert—something he had completely forgotten to do, yet another symptom of his inexperience. She knew she was about to blow up.
They’d thrown the ship together so fast that she had no safeties, no reason to abort their orders, and she didn’t need any authorization to rip herself into a billion glowing shards. She would go happily, and very bright. She was brand new, and somehow she was already a good old warhorse, running herself into the ground at her master’s whim.
“Thirty seconds to—to detonation,” he gagged. Even though he had committed himself, this was hard to do.
“Ready,” Bonifay whispered. He cleared his throat and spoke a little louder. “I’m ready. Guess you can spit and swear now.”
Somehow a smile popped up on Keller’s sweatglazed cheeks. He couldn’t look up. He didn’t want to see Bonifay’s expressive eyes.
“It’s on us, Nick.”
Savannah’s wo
rds from behind him were surprisingly soft.
He didn’t turn. “I’ll push the button, Zane. Get your hand away.”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Commander Keller.”
The strange defiance made him look up. Who had said that?
Something pulled at his half-numb brain. He straightened, and looked around.
“Captain Kirk!”
James Kirk had welcomed himself aboard the frigate. On the starboard side of the command deck, right at the foot of the fan-shaped steps to the tactical station, the captain stood in an unframed doorway through which Keller and his crew clearly saw the last thing they might’ve imagined—the bridge of the Enterprise.
Behind Captain Kirk, Mr. Sulu stood near the starship’s helm. The two men looked supremely authoritative in their crisp red jackets and white collars.
Stunned like a fish, Keller thumped down to the lower arena. Was this a trick? A dream? Dead already? Where was the tunnel with the light? Granny? Is that you?
On the forward screen, the picture of the bloated water balloon was gone. The screen was now placid, showing a vision of sparkling space, but everything in it seemed distorted, as though looking through a prism.
Zoa clumped forward. Keller motioned her back, but moved forward himself.
“Captain?” he tested.
Kirk offered him a snide grin. “Welcome aboard? I suppose I should say the same.” He pointed at the engineering board. “You’d better turn off the destruct mode, Mr. Bonifay. And Mr. Shucorion, I think your commander would like to go to all stop now. He’s getting nowhere fast.”
Keller nodded, hoping they both saw his confirmation, but he still couldn’t make himself turn away from the remarkable sight. Through the rimless doorway, the bridge of the Enterprise seemed a beautiful and ethereal place compared with the ill-fitted, rough, wornedged frigate bridge.
James Kirk held out a beckoning hand. “Come with me, please, Nick.”
Keller swallowed his astonishment and asked, “Where?”
“To deck three. I have something to show you.”
“Spacefaring ability is one of the talents the Multimillennials lost in their extreme advancement. Ten thousand years ago, when they decided to leave, they built a collector/neutralizer that we call the Cold Factor. Later they found they couldn’t control those very well, so they converted to the smaller ’bot probes. But this one last Cold Factor was out roaming around, looking for their waste product.”
“Olivium, I bet.”
“Yes.”
“We were trying to lure it away from the Cluster. Guess we failed.”
“No, you didn’t have the chance to fail. We overtook you. I’d say your odds were fair of succeeding. At least in drawing it away for several months, maybe years.”
“Not enough.”
“No. Not enough. Eventually it would’ve come back and left Belle Terre and possibly the whole solar system cold and barren. They converted the Enterprise to a fourth-dimensional vessel in order to come back here. We’ve actually been six weeks at high warp to get back.”
“You’ve barely been gone that long!”
“It’s hard to explain.”
Forcing himself back to the immediate problem, not at all sure it was solved, Keller asked, “Now what? How can we stop it now?”
“Come this way.”
On deck two, James Kirk led him through the Enterprise’s sparkling corridors, the spongy carpet giving a lift to their steps, to a curved ladder that led to the lower deck. Kirk stepped jauntily onto the ladder, glanced up to make sure Keller followed, then disappeared.
Numb and trembling, Keller almost fell twice. “Where are we going?”
“I told you. Deck three.”
But when they got there, deck three was gone. In its place was an entire solar system.
Stars, sun, planets—and they were standing on a platform of completely open space.
Keller’s arms flared and he staggered back, but Kirk caught him and pulled him forward again.
“You’ll get your spacelegs in a minute,” the captain said. “Don’t worry.”
“You’re enjoying this!” Keller accused.
“You will too.”
“Captain!” A third voice broke, with a slight echo.
There stood Mr. Spock, two planets down.
Keller choked down a rock. “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. . . .”
“This way, gentlemen,” the Vulcan directed.
Kirk pulled Keller along. Keller was breathing in gasps, but he managed to stumble along on the big empty. When they got to Mr. Spock, he motioned beyond the second planet.
“There’s your problem,” Kirk announced.
Floating in some kind of containment field, as big as any of the planets, was the water balloon. It still rolled and bumped around inside its cage, looking for a way out, but it couldn’t break free.
Keller shuddered. “Oh, m’God . . .”
“It’s all right,” Kirk told him passively. “They’ve got it tethered now. They’ll be taking it home. And we get to keep the olivium.”
Spock strode over to them, as if he skated solar systems every day. “Good afternoon, Commander Keller. Where is the Peleliu?”
“Oh—” Keller blinked. “That’s not a real good story, sir.”
At his side, Kirk pivoted to face him. “Try us.”
Epilogue
U.F.P. Frigate Challenger
NICK KELLER sat in his command chair, relaxed for the first time in weeks. They weren’t going anywhere. In fact, the ship was once again propped in her scaffold on the planet Belle Terre, getting work done on her that should’ve been done before she ever left the solar system. She deserved it.
And he was having some work done on himself as well. His sweater lay across his knees, and the sleeve of his black T-shirt was rolled up on his left arm as he flinched and winced his way through the current adventure.
Beside him, Zoa hammered tiny needles into his arm, embedding colored dye in the shape of the frigate.
“Understand you,” she said, concentrating, “this be not right place for thy first witness.”
“Never mind—just never mind,” he drawled. “The arm is fine.”
Zane Bonifay stomped past them then, without a greeting, carrying some tools in each hand, and crossed directly to the nav station, where he dumped his tools and started working with a small drill. Keller craned some to see what he was doing, but Zoa kneed him in the thigh and he decided holding still was better.
“What’re you doing, Zane?”
“Installing a precautionary unit.”
“A what?”
“Stand by.”
“Nick.” Savannah Ring came onto the bridge from the lift. “Captain Kirk wants to see you down on the surface.”
“When?”
“Right now. He’s down there.”
Keller sighed. “I can guess what this is about. Zoa, better wrap it up. You can do the other nacelle later.”
Without a word she backed away and turned off her dye injector.
Twisting to look at his own arm, Keller smiled at the inspiring picture of the funny frigate, looking much better in artistic rendition than in real life. “Thanks,” he said. “This is foxy.”
Zoa stonily said, “You will have many witnesses. I will inflict them.”
“Bet that’s right,” Bonifay grumbled. His drill whizzed, then finally stopped.
Keller stood up and flexed his stiff legs, then stepped down to Bonifay. “What’re you up to, trouble?”
“I told you.” Bonifay stepped aside. “Precaution.”
Mounted now on the kidney-shaped nav console, up where it was out of the way, stood the Shuttle Challenger half-dollar. It was framed in a specially fashioned lollipop-shaped stand with the stick embedded in the console, allowing the coin to show both its sides.
Self-conscious and touched, Keller chuckled. “Now, what is this supposed to be on the bridge of a fighting ship?”
“A talisman,” Bonifay said.
“Figurehead,” Savannah corrected.
On the sci-deck, Montgomery Scott unfolded himself out of a trunk and contributed, “Hood ornament.” When Keller could only offer a flattered smile and a nod, Scott added, “Better get crackin’, lad. Captain Kirk doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
“After a while, you won’t even notice it,” Bonifay said, and spun away, proud of himself.
Keller moved forward to commune briefly with the mounted coin. His new “witness” stung some as he reached out and thumbed the raised image of the space shuttle.
“Thanks, Tim.”
On the planet’s surface, the cluttered shuttleyard bore its biggest burden with sturdy grace. The enormous frigate was far bigger than anything else being worked on.
When Keller got down there, he saw the Federation’s favorite headliner standing near the port nacelle, peering up, up, up to the underside of the saucer section with its mismatched hull plates. Way up there, workers in hoversuits were affixing letters and call numbers onto the skin of the ship.
U.F.P.F. Challenger. OV91951-L.
After a deep breath to sustain him, Keller strode over there.
The rakish Jim Kirk didn’t even look at him. “You call this a ship?” he asked.
Keller broke into a laugh. “Snob . . .”
“Who came up with the phony serial number?”
“I did. It’s the serial number off the Shuttle Challenger combined with its last mission number.”
“An excellent choice.”
“You wanted to speak to me, sir?”
Might as well get the worst over with.
“Yes,” Kirk said. “Very commendable work you’ve done here. Not having a ship or crew is pretty big odds. Patching one together out of what’s lying around, that’s above and beyond the call. You remained at your post and held the stability of your jurisdiction against insurmountable odds.”