“Excellent. Lorelei will be here in a moment and we can begin.”
Zarv snorted, then said, “Perhaps this won’t be a waste [65] of time, Lorritson. I can try out some of the reasonings we developed and see the reaction. The crew of a starship is likely to respond as those Orion Arm yokels will.”
“A fine chance to sharpen your histrionic skills,” agreed Lorritson.
Mek Jokkor slid into the room and stood under one of the floodlights, basking in it as only a plant can appreciate light. Kirk imagined he saw the photosynthesis strengthening arms and legs.
Spock took his captain’s arm and pulled him to one side, saying in a low voice, “Jim, there is still time to stop this ill-conceived meeting. If Lorelei is as I believe, then she will have the—”
“Lorelei!” called out Kirk, pulling away from Spock. The small, brown-haired woman glided into the room as if she rolled on wheels rather than walking on feet. Every move was graceful and coordinated. “You decided to participate in the discussion. I’m glad.” He grinned when he saw her expression. She did not appear the least bit happy.
“Captain, what I do does not please me, but for peace I do what I must.”
“We all do what we can—in the name of galactic peace.”
“Tell me about this.” She gestured toward the tri-vid cameras. “We do not have such things on Hyla.”
“Your three-dimensional image will be carried throughout the ship. All the wardrooms are equipped with receivers, and we installed them in several other meeting rooms.”
“My image will appear. As will my voice?”
“Of course. It wouldn’t do to show only your lovely form.”
“Captain, you are too good to me.” Kirk felt a warmth creeping inside him. She wasn’t even pretty, he finally decided, but attractive. Definitely attractive, and that [66] encompassed intellect, grace, dignity, so many items other than the elusive symmetrical quality known as beauty. A beauty of the soul, he decided, rather than merely physical.
“Let’s be done with this,” bellowed Zarv. “I still have much preparation to do before arrival in the Ammdon system, and Kirk insists on dawdling at virtually sublight speeds.”
“Begin when you like,” ordered Kirk. “Ambassador, do you wish to speak first?”
“Very well.”
The Tellarite’s manner changed as if he had dropped a completely new blanketing personality over himself. The truculence vanished the instant the indicator light glowed on the holographic camera. Zarv spoke decisively, concisely and with a conviction that made Kirk turn toward Spock and smile, as if telling his science officer that logic didn’t always work, that gut-level instinct and trust in others sometimes paid off handsomely.
Spock sidled up to his captain and said in a voice too low to be picked up by the microphones, “This is a mistake. Everyone on board is listening. You must not allow Lorelei to speak.”
“You worry too much. Listen to Zarv. That’s why he’s an ambassador. The man’s tongue caresses the words. He’s persuasive. You can even get over the fact that he looks like a pig.”
“His appearance is not in question, Captain.”
Kirk put an index finger over his lips to signal silence. Spock subsided, obviously uneasy. Kirk wanted nothing more than to listen to Zarv’s arguments for the Ammdon mission. They would put to rest all the critics aboard the Enterprise. At the end of a ten-minute presentation, Zarv finished, saying, “Thank you for allowing me the [67] opportunity to present the truth in this matter.” He sat down, and Lorelei moved into the focus of the cameras.
“See how ineffectual she looks?” Kirk said. “Compare her delivery techniques with those Zarv used. The Tellarite is a master diplomat. A master.”
Kirk leaned back and waited for Lorelei to begin. She’d not have a chance if he polled the crew as to their opinions afterward. Zarv was a professional, and she was hardly more than a girl.
The Speaker of Hyla began.
And James Kirk felt the surging power of her words, the deft precision, the urgency and the emotion. She drew him out, pushed him to the heights of ecstasy, drew tears from his eyes and then turned him inside out—and all with her words. For the first time he understood what Ammdon intended to do. The Enterprise was a pawn, of that she convinced him. The Romulan incursion would become a fact if the Enterprise entered the Ammdon system; Jurnamoria had no choice but to align itself with the Empire.
“Captain, stop this now,” urged Spock. “You are affected. Even I sense the potency of her words. What they are doing to the crew is incalculable.”
“But she’s right, Spock. How could we have been so misled? Listen! She’s showing us the truth.” Kirk leaned forward, as if this might get him even better understanding of the deadly situation. He ignored Zarv’s protests from the side. Donald Lorritson spoke rapidly to his superior, and they went into immediate conference. Mek Jokkor stood silently at one side, enjoying the radiance from the lamps more than anything else.
And James T. Kirk listened, really listened for the first time.
“She’s right, Spock. We must—”
[68] The ship shuddered as if a giant fist had seized it and had begun shaking. Seconds later the alarms went off, deafening everyone in the room. Lights flickered and emergency beams cut in.
Kirk rocketed to his feet and hit the intercom button. “Scotty, report. What the hell’s happened?”
“Sair,” came the engineer’s quavering voice. “We lost the magnetic bottle on the port side. I’ve had to shut down the power. Otherwise, we’d have been destroyed. Sair, the Enterprise is in mortal danger of blowin’ up!”
Chapter Five
Captain’s Log, Supplemental:
The extent of the damage to the Enterprise is as yet unknown. I fear that it will be both extensive and potentially dangerous for all on board. With the warp engines down, both our transporter and subspace radio capacity are drastically limited, if not destroyed. While there are other methods for alerting Starbase One of our plight, I’d prefer to remain under power and attempt completion of our mission. This might not be possible. If it is not, these will be the first orders I have been unable to obey. The possibility of failure is not one I easily accept.
“You’ll require a radiation suit before entering, Captain,” said Spock, halting James Kirk just outside the doorway [70] leading into the engineering section. Red lights flashed bale-fully and the shrill whine of a distant warning siren continued to assault his hearing. “The entire area around the warp engines is flooded with hard gamma and x-rays from the exposed antimatter.”
“Get me a suit,” he ordered one of the passing crewmen. The man appeared stunned but obeyed, moving as if all volition had been erased from him. Kirk quickly climbed into the bulky protective garment provided. By the time he pushed the button opening the door leading into the radiation-drenched area, Spock had donned a similar suit. Together they slipped into the engine room.
Kirk’s first impression was that he’d been the victim of a gigantic hoax. Everything appeared normal—until he saw Scotty’s crew frantically working at the control boards. They were decked out in radiation-resistant suits, and many taxed the powers of their suits’ air-conditioning units; faceplates fogged over from excess sweat. If that weren’t evidence enough, one look at the radiation counters mounted throughout the section convinced Kirk all was not normal.
The digital readings mounted higher than any he’d ever seen outside experimental-station laboratories.
“The radiation level is only a few orders of magnitude less than that attained in the center of the working matter-antimatter module,” said Spock. “We would die instantly without our suits.”
“Where’s Scotty? I want to speak with him.” Kirk and Spock skirted the struggling technicians and found Montgomery Scott and Heather McConel ripping open the guts of a panel and plunging into the maze of integrated and cubic circuitry with an abandon that startled Kirk. Scotty usually treated equipment with almost religious rever
ence. Now the ship’s master engineer tore loose fittings and discarded electronic parts as if they were so much junk.
[71] “The radiation has destroyed the functional capabilities,” explained Spock. “Mr. Scott is trying to reach the auxiliary bypass cutoff circuits. It is necessary to totally curtail power in both engines until damage can be assessed.”
“ ’Tis true, Captain,” said Chief McConel, momentarily looking up from her demolition activity in the complex electronic maze. “Commander Scott’s done all he could, but it does nae look so good.”
“Heather, your hands are smaller. Get to it.” Scotty backed away and let his assistant drop into the space he’d occupied. For the first time he saw Kirk and Spock. The man shook his head. “We might nae make it, Captain. ’Tis that bad.”
“Report.”
In a voice laced with infinite tiredness Scotty said, “The magnetic bottles did nae rupture as I’d feared, but spots in the bottle walls thinned to the point where enough radiation escaped into this compartment to fuse circuits. That triggered all the alarms. We’re workin’ to contain the radiation leakage and completely shut down the matter-antimatter reaction.”
“If you shut it down, it’ll require a starbase dry dock to restart!” protested Kirk. “We’re light-years from a starbase with adequate facilities. That’ll mean we’ll be stranded without faster-than-light drive capability.”
“If we dinna shut down, we’ll go poof!” Scotty gestured, indicating how the Enterprise would simply vanish in one dazzling actinic flare. “But I kenna if the engines can be restarted. Possibly.”
“Are you referring to the Rotsler technique?” asked Spock. “It is only a theoretical procedure and has never been attempted empirically during actual emergency conditions in space.”
“What is this, this Rotsler technique?” demanded Kirk. [72] “If Scotty shuts down the warp engines, are you saying we can restart them after repairs are made?”
“Possibly, though it requires materiel we do not have aboard ship. A considerable amount of shielding is necessary, simply for repairs. To approximate restart using the aforementioned method requires even more radiation blanketing. The engines must be totally encased in shielding, trapping all—or most—radiation until the environment heats to ignition point. It is not a cold-start procedure, but rather one characterized as warm start.”
“What kind of shielding? All we have is a few centimeters of lead shielding and some force-screen equipment.”
“Totally inadequate,” declared Spock.
“Aye, Captain, the Vulcan’s right. The kinda shieldin’ we’re requirin’ is a dozen meters of mercury or lead. Nothin’ less than this will do for us.”
“A dozen meters?” Kirk turned and looked back toward the doorway. He’d only come ten paces. Scotty required more than that distance of lead or mercury in thickness—and the engines were each” a hundred meters long.
“That’s impossible.”
“Aye, I’m afraid so,” said the Scotsman, his expression grim.
Kirk refused to consider the chance that they’d all be marooned in space, light-years away from home. What no one mentioned, although each knew it, was that their sub-space radio required warp power to operate. With warp-engine power off, their communications capabilities had been diminished severely. If a message packet were to be sent, it’d have to be soon. No matter what happened, they were going to be adrift for many months before aid reached them, even for simple abandonment and scuttling of the ship.
[73] “I will not abandon my vessel,” Kirk said forcefully. “And I refuse to believe that our mission cannot be carried out.”
Those nearby turned and looked skeptically at him.
“Mr. Scott, continue your work. Do what you can; then report in full. Mr. Spock, begin a detailed analysis of what you’d need to perform this Rotsler technique. And have Sulu and Uhura begin a comprehensive scan of nearby space. We might have overlooked something. This area is not well charted, for all the activity back and forth between the Federation and the Orion Arm.”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” said Spock. The Vulcan turned and left, his stride firm and unhindered by the bulky radiation suit. Scotty had already returned to his heartbreaking labors. Kirk was left in a sea of misery, staring at the seemingly unharmed engine room. Yet he knew full well that his ship was crippled—perhaps permanently—and that only his crew’s expertise prevented them all from being superheated atoms expanding throughout all of space.
He returned to the bridge, worrying as he went.
“Final check of the circuits, sir. Do you wish to confirm?” Spock peered into his computer screen as the steady march of numbers informed him of ship’s status.
“Proceed, Mr. Spock.” Kirk leaned back in his command seat. Never had it felt harder and more uncomfortable to him. The Enterprise had become little more than a derelict vessel helplessly drifting. Scotty had fully shut down the matter-antimatter engines, requiring them to run on only ten percent power, all supplied by emergency battery. This maintained life-support systems and little else until the impulse-power engines were brought to full operating capacity.
“Power coming up,” cried Chekov. “Impulse engines to [74] half, to three-quarters, impulse engines to full power. Sir, do you want me to switch over internal systems now?”
“Do so, Mr. Chekov. I want life support brought up to at least fifty percent norm. Shut down any equipment not performing an essential function. Mr. Spock, prepare a message packet for starbase. I want full computer records of all that’s happened included.”
“Sir, that does not appear to be possible.”
“What do you mean?” The message packet was a self-contained missile with inertial guidance locked on to the nearest starbase. In case of communication blackout, extreme damage as they’d just experienced or the need to send back small material items, the message packet was the preferred method of transport.
“Each of our five packets experienced damage.”
“That’s impossible, Spock. Those are shielded, protected, damn near coddled. What caused the damage?”
Spock looked up, a slight downward set to his lips. “I can hazard only a guess at this point, Captain. It appears to be an act of sabotage.”
Kirk slumped into his seat, pondering the possibilities. Spock never guessed, even if he said so. Hundreds—millions—of tiny bits of evidence went into his evaluation. Perhaps it would never stand up in a court, but Kirk had to believe it was indeed sabotage if Spock “guessed” that it was. He flirted with the idea that it had been Lorelei, but something made him mentally shy away from outright accusation. Others had been affected by her plea that the Enterprise’s presence in the Ammdon system would cause a war. The shutdown of the ship’s engines presented a perfect reason for not continuing their mission. Anyone listening to Lorelei after Ambassador Zarv had finished might be responsible for the message-packet destruction. [75] This assured that considerable time would elapse before the Federation sent another diplomatic mission.
Kirk didn’t want to even consider the possibility that the warp engines had also been sabotaged.
“Can the message packets be repaired?”
“Impossible. The destruction occurred in the warp-drive mechanisms. They are incapable of attaining light speed, just as the Enterprise itself is.”
“Dammit, Spock, give me some good news. We’re stranded in the middle of nowhere with only impulse power, we can’t contact Starbase One, we can’t finish our mission, there’s no way of repairing the warp engines without shielding we don’t have—isn’t there any good news?”
“Uh, Captain, I’m picking up something.” Sulu twiddled with dials and stroked his fingers over his computer console to bring a wavering picture to the forward viewscreen.
“What is it, Mr. Sulu?”
“It might be a planetary system. Faint star. G class. Obscured by a dust cloud.”
“Computing from Mr. Sulu’s data,” spoke up Spock. “Yes, Captain. You desired goo
d news. This might be it. The system Mr. Sulu has found possesses six planets, four stony and two gas giants. Range is too extreme to be certain, but there is a chance that one or more might be habitable.”
“Life forms?”
“Cannot reliably evaluate,” came the Vulcan’s immediate response.
“Uhura,” barked Kirk, “any radio signals? Anything on the bands we can still monitor?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“How far, at maximum impulse power, to this system, Mr. Sulu?”
“Working on it, sir. Got it.” The Oriental turned in his [76] seat and smiled broadly. “Three days at maximum impulse power.”
“Good. Lay in a course, Mr. Chekov. Get us there.” Kirk watched the activity flourish around him. They again had a purpose. They forgot the touchy question of the Ammdon diplomatic mission. This was the crew he’d trained and this was the crew that he took such pride in. His finger stabbed down onto the call button. “Bones, meet me on deck four for an informal inspection.” He heard the beginning of the doctor’s squawk of protest, smiled and released the button, shutting off any real argument.
This was more like it. One last glance at their destination, twinkling through the cloud of cosmic dust, and then James Kirk went to meet McCoy. An inspection tour might keep the doctor busy enough to forget to complain.
“I’ve got things to do, Jim, important things. This is a waste of time.” Leonard McCoy paced back and forth in front of his desk, hands clasped behind his back. “With the power cut to half—half!—I hardly have enough juice to keep the equipment in the surgery at functional capacity.”
“I’ll talk to Spock, in case you do need more. You don’t have any patients at the moment, do you?”
“None, now that Chief Andres is back at work. A miracle, though. I expected everyone to come in here fried like good ole country chicken after you let the engines fall apart like that. Radiation.” The man shivered. “It ought to be done away with.”
STAR TREK: TOS #12 - Mutiny on the Enterprise Page 6