by Rick Barba
“I’ll freeze them, you shoot!” shouted McCoy.
He had entered the atrium holding the sound emitter and quickly flicked it on. Above them, the smoke froze in place.
“It works!” cried Kirk.
“Of course it works!” yelled McCoy. “It’s lab tested! Now shoot the bastards, will you?”
Kirk raised his phaser and squeezed off a shot. The widespread discharge of nadium particles instantly incinerated the swarm. Charred bits dropped from the sky in a shower of ashes. Kirk and McCoy were coated in dusty gray and started coughing.
“Great jumping goats!” said McCoy, brushing ash out of his eyes and hair. “It gets you even when it’s dead.”
“Let’s move, Bones!” said Kirk. “He knows we’re here now.”
The two cadets started up the spiral staircase. The higher they climbed, the narrower and steeper the stairs grew. Both wore hands-free, voice-activated headsets to keep contact with Bogenn and Uhura at the command desk. About a hundred feet up, Kirk spotted another tendril of black haze dropping rapidly toward them from the top of the spire. It was narrower, so getting a good phaser shot would be tricky.
“Here it comes,” called Kirk, pointing at the plume.
McCoy, just below him, wielded the sound emitter. Again, the jagged cloud froze. Kirk aimed carefully, but couldn’t find a shot angle where he’d miss the stairs above.
“I’ll have to climb up and shoot out away from the staircase,” said Kirk as he clambered up the steps.
When he reached the same height as the quivering black cloud, he narrowed the phaser’s spread and aimed carefully. Before he fired, he heard the swarm’s noise—an eerie cross between a vibrating hum and a hiss. When he pulled the trigger, the blast vaporized the swarm . . . and melted a gaping hole about ten feet wide in the clear lumenite spire.
“Crap,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it. Let’s go!” called McCoy, pounding up the stairs from below.
They continued their climb. Another fifty feet up, Kirk suddenly stopped.
“Listen,” he said. “Do you hear that?”
McCoy listened. “I hear a hum,” he said, looking down at his feet. “Right there.”
Kirk’s eyes widened in alarm. He aimed the phaser at McCoy’s feet.
“Jump!” he shouted. “Jump down! Quick!”
Just as McCoy leaped, a black hissing swarm rose from the spot where he’d just been standing. It was an ambush. Kirk held his fire; the nanites were too close. McCoy quickly activated the sound emitter just as strands of oily smoke surged around him like the tentacles of a black octopus. The cloud froze again, but a few smears of black dust stained McCoy’s clothing.
“Damn!” he said, looking down. “It’s on me.”
Kirk reached in his backpack, pulled out the hose, and turned on the vacuum. He waved it around McCoy, and its powerful suction cleaned the air of black bits in just seconds. Then he carefully dabbed it at the dark smudges on McCoy’s clothes. It sucked up the nanites but also tore off two patches of the doctor’s Starfleet jumpsuit.
“Ouch. I told you it was powerful,” said McCoy, examining a reddened patch of now-exposed skin on his arm.
They continued upward, stopping every few steps to listen for signs of another ambush. The spiral of the stairs grew tighter and steeper, and the lumenite glass angled in closer on all sides as they climbed. Finally Kirk could see the landing at the bottom of the twenty-foot ladder that ran up into the beacon chamber at the top of the spire.
“Almost there, Bones,” he called down.
“Yeah, and then what?” asked McCoy.
Kirk had no answer. But he got one soon enough. As Kirk rounded the last curve of stairs and stepped onto the ladder landing, he heard a deep, metallic murmur and a hissing directly above. He looked up to see the hooded head of a dark figure looking down through the opening at the top of the ladder.
McCoy stepped up next to Kirk.
“It’s him,” hissed Kirk.
McCoy nodded. He raised his phaser and pointed it at the figure.
“Come on down, mister,” he called. “You’re now a prisoner of the United Federation of Planets.”
A second hooded head appeared in the opening, then a third. The odd metallic moan grew louder.
Kirk sighed. “This feels vaguely familiar,” he muttered.
All three figures remained motionless. The metallic moan intensified.
“Okay, so all three of you are under arrest,” called McCoy. “Are you gonna just stare at us and moan? Come on down!”
As if prompted by McCoy’s invitation, all three figures moved down through the opening. They appeared Humanoid, with black arms pulling them through the chamber hatch. All three were huge, like the seven-footer Kirk had seen attacking Gaila. But they crawled with a fluidity that gave Kirk a shiver of dread. This was inhuman, almost insectlike movement, light and weightless. As each figure cleared the chamber hatch, it crawled like a great fly away from the ladder and across the underside of the platform to the nearest lumenite wall. All three entities stopped suddenly and hovered there. They looked like vapory shadows on the spire’s glassy translucent surfaces.
“I don’t like this, Bones,” said Kirk.
Then another head appeared in the opening above. And another.
“We’re up to five,” said McCoy.
Bogenn’s voice barked in his ear. “Give me a sit rep, Cadet,” he ordered.
“We’ve got five Doctors,” reported McCoy.
“They’re . . . hanging on the inside of the spire,” said Kirk.
“What?” growled Bogenn. “Repeat that!”
“Would you call this a fair fight, Jim?” said McCoy.
“Almost,” said Kirk.
Suddenly another swarm rose up from the platform.
“Another damned booby trap!” cried McCoy as he whipped out his sound emitter and the cloud froze. But then, slowly, the swarm started swirling again, as if in slow motion.
“Good god, Jim, it’s evolving a tolerance for the frequency!” yelled McCoy in alarm.
Above them, the dark figures clinging to the glass emitted their own cacophony of sounds, hissing and moaning as before, then adding a piercing, nails-on-a-blackboard screech as well.
McCoy winced at the sounds. He looked at Kirk. “This could be very bad for us.”
Kirk raised his phaser and blasted the slow-swirling swarm into ash.
“But worse for them,” he said.
Then he swung the weapon upward. One of the figures was creeping down the glass toward them.
“I have a hunch about these guys,” he said.
Kirk fired again, vaporizing the approaching figure and burning a hole in the lumenite spire behind it. At this, one of the other figures seemed to explode, blowing apart in a puff of black smoke like an artillery air burst. Then the smoke began to swirl.
McCoy watched in horror.
“They’re all swarms!” he said.
Kirk fired again, targeting the swirling smoke. A bright flash, not seen in the other phaser strikes, erupted as the shot hit. Again, the incinerated bits dropped to the platform. Two of the remaining three figures broke apart into swarms and mingled together into a single swarm. Kirk aimed and fired. This time, the phaser’s nadion discharge seemed to flow like a fluid around the dark cloud.
“It’s adapting again,” said McCoy, “evolving some kind of shield.” McCoy pulled out his phaser and twisted the settings knob. “Parag said a smart swarm might do that.”
Kirk grimaced. “Did he say what we should do about it?”
“Yes, this,” said McCoy. He fired a more focused blast that burned a large swath through the swarm. “Adjust your phaser modulation to a higher frequency, Jim. It may only work for a few shots before—”
Suddenly Kirk’s backpack exploded.
A hissing swarm burst out. Kirk dove away and rolled hard into a wall. The swarm was all over him. He managed to activate his sound emitter, but it seemed to have little effect no
w. Meanwhile, the surviving bits of the swarm above dove like a downburst of wind in McCoy’s face, blinding him. Both cadets were coughing hard. Kirk felt the crawl of subcellular bits creeping across his skin, penetrating and migrating into his chest and abdomen. A wave of nausea racked him. Next to him, McCoy was starting to convulse. Both Kirk and McCoy knew they had only seconds left. Kirk felt himself on the edge of consciousness.
Looking up, he saw the Doctor’s face. The figure had descended, and stood over him. The “hood” was actually a swirling swarm, and from it a face appeared. It was the face of a woman he did not know. And then the face morphed before his eyes into . . . his own face. A pale, waxy, masked version of his face. It was the creepiest thing Kirk had ever seen.
“James T. Kirk,” spoke the figure. Just like the night by the Palace of Fine Arts.
What a lousy way to go out, he thought. Mocked by my own face.
He groped for his phaser, thinking to set it on overload. The massive explosion might tear off the top of the building, but at least he could take out this deadly mocking menace that was killing him now.
But his phaser was nowhere to be found.
And then he heard the voice again; the words were unintelligible. The last thing Kirk felt before blacking out was the reverse migration of nanites from his torso. The last thing he saw was a black torus of smoke hovering above his body.
Uhura, sitting next to Detective Bogenn at the command console on the thirtieth floor, heard the Doctor’s voice in the console speakers via Kirk’s microphone. The minute she did, she bracketed the coded clip and copied it to a sound file separate from the ongoing recording.
“We got that recorded,” she said.
“Give me a report, boys,” said Bogenn into a console mike. “Hey, Cadets! What’s going on?”
Uhura immediately created a spectrograph of the statement and then ran it through her translation loops. The whole process took just forty-five seconds.
“Here it is,” said Uhura. “The translation reads: ‘Assimilation is not advisable at this time. More five-six-one-eight study required. Terminate process and proceed to recharging chamber.’”
Uhura and Bogenn listened to the silence coming through the console.
“Kirk?” called Uhura. “Do you read me, over? Dr. McCoy?”
Kirk struggled to his feet.
Directly above him, he could hear the whine of a propulsion system powering up. He looked frantically for his phaser—still no sign of it. He scrambled up the ladder rungs into the beacon chamber.
“He’s running, Bones,” he said, panting. “He’s leaving.”
“Kirk, what’s happening?” called Uhura’s voice in his earpiece.
“There’s a flyer up here,” reported Kirk.
Kirk could see the flashing red strobe of the aviation beacon glowing around the edges of the ceiling shield platform. But as the engine whine grew louder, the red flashing stopped. Then it hit him: The beacon is a starship, he thought. The swarm had somehow assimilated the aviation strobe—the perfect disguise.
“Uhura, call Starfleet Operations,” said Kirk. “Get a sensor lock on that ship.”
Below him, McCoy groaned on the landing. Kirk looked down and saw him grab a railing with one hand and pull himself up to his knees. Amazingly, McCoy still had his phaser.
“Bones!” shouted Kirk over the rising engine whine. “Toss me your phaser!”
Kirk reached out. McCoy swung and hit Kirk’s hand with a perfect toss. Kirk cranked the phaser’s setting knob to sixteen, full power, and narrowed the firing spread. Then he stepped back down through the opening, dropped five rungs down the ladder, aimed the phaser straight up at the starship, and fired.
It was a spectacular blast.
Kirk’s shot blew off the entire top of the spire. The sturdy lumenite glass cone shattered like a delicate crystal goblet. Debris blew straight up . . . and then curved downward in fiery arcs as it tumbled in all directions.
Kirk clung to the ladder rungs and covered his face as the spire superstructure shuddered. Jagged chunks of cone glass dropped back through the blown-open top. Below him, McCoy was curled in a protective crouch against the wall on the landing. When debris stopped falling, Kirk glanced up through the jagged hole.
The west wind now whistled into the spire.
Directly above, a cube the size of a small hut hovered in the air, as if inspecting the damage. Its surface was textured with geometric patterns, and a ghostly, greenish light lit it from within. After a few seconds the cube slowly rose, rotating gently.
It looked so bizarre and unthreatening—a floating green cube—that Kirk just watched in fascination for a few seconds. Then he realized, That’s the swarm. But before he could draw another bead, the cube suddenly zipped upward at unimaginable speed.
It disappeared in less than two seconds.
CH.12.12
After the Dust Settles
Two days later, Cadet Uhura laid her hands flat on her workstation console in the Institute of Xenology’s xenolinguistics lab. A satisfied smile slowly spread over her face.
“Computer?” she said. “Please welcome me back.”
“Welcome back, Cadet Uhura,” said the console.
She felt good. This was home. Her participation in the hunt for the Doctor was rewarding. She’d helped crack the case. Now she could dive back into her work.
It was all good.
“Computer, please run a search for the number string five-six-one-eight,” she said.
“In what database?” asked the console.
“All databases,” replied Uhura.
“Acknowledged,” said the computer.
The door hissed open behind her. She swiveled her chair around. Her satisfied smile grew slightly wider.
“Hello, Commander,” she said.
“Cadet,” said Spock. “You look pleased.”
Uhura checked her smile. “Well, I am,” she said, patting the console.
“You should be,” said Spock. Arms folded, he stepped up beside her and noted what was on the monitor. “I am told you performed most admirably in the police case,” he said. “I am not surprised.”
“Well, I couldn’t let you down, Commander,” she said, folding her arms too.
“Oh, that is not possible.” He waited a moment and then quickly said, “I thought you should know about the results of the sensor trace, since you were the one who called it in.”
“You mean on the alien starship, sir?” she asked. “Because actually, I just passed along the request. That was made by—”
“Search completed,” said the console. “No significant results.”
Uhura looked surprised. “Really?” she said. “You checked all your databases?”
“Yes,” said the computer.
“Everything in the Starfleet neural network?” asked Uhura.
“Yes, everything that was not classified,” said the computer.
“Hmm,” murmured Uhura.
After a short pause, the console said, “We interpret that as a request for a verification search scan.”
Uhura laughed. “You really have me figured out, don’t you?”
“Beginning verification scan,” said the computer.
Spock found the exchange amusing. He nodded at the screen and said, “If I may ask, why the interest in that number?”
Uhura looked at the screen: 5618. “The alien nano-swarm had this identifier,” she said. “And my last translation from the swarm intelligence included the phrase ‘Assimilation is not advisable at this time. More five-six-one-eight study required.’ It communicated this immediately before withdrawing.”
“Fascinating,” said Spock.
“Do you have a theory, Commander?” asked Uhura.
“Regretfully, I do not,” said Spock. “Clearly the alien entity is referring to that which it was sent to study.”
“Well, it has a pretty nasty way of ‘studying’ folks,” said Uhura. “So, you were telling me about the sensor tr
ace on the alien ship?”
“Yes,” said Spock. “Starfleet Operations managed to get a vector lock on the craft before it escaped. A remarkable achievement in such a constricted time frame.”
Uhura brightened. “So where did it go?”
“Unknown,” said Spock.
“But you said they got a vector lock on it,” said Uhura, confused.
“They did,” said Spock. “But then it disappeared, almost literally. The sensor readings at its last known waypoints indicated a transwarp velocity almost beyond comprehension.”
Uhura shook her head in amazement.
“So do you think it’s headed back to the Delta Quadrant?” she asked.
Spock tilted his head sideways a bit, considering the idea. “Could very well be,” he said.
Their eyes met for a couple of seconds.
“Commander,” said Uhura.
“Yes, Cadet?” replied Spock.
“I think I have some very interesting data on the phonology of Klingon aggressive-mode speech patterns you might enjoy reviewing.”
“Excellent,” said Spock. “I have fifty-seven minutes until my faculty meeting.”
“Perfect,” said Uhura.
And then they got to work.
At the Brewsky’s counter, Kirk cleared his throat a few times. Yes, the irritation was still there from his dust-storm encounters, two nights prior. But he had another motive.
“What’s a guy gotta do to get some service around here?” he called out.
After a few seconds, Hannah stepped out of the backroom.
“Hey, you,” she said, walking slowly toward him.
“Hello, barista,” said Kirk. “I see you still work here.”
“Apparently,” she said. “They handed me this apron when I walked in.” She gestured to her apron, which wasn’t much longer than her little miniskirt.
“That’s a good sign.” Kirk tried not to focus on her legs.
She stepped to the espresso machine, dumped three big scoops of fine-ground coffee in the filter basket, and then rammed the handle of the metal portafilter into place to start the brew. She glanced over her shoulder and smiled at Kirk.
Kirk said, “Hey, I didn’t say please.”