by Diane Carey
was happening here.
"Zennor! Back off!." Kirk called, disappointed that a
struggle and a quest that had gone on for millennia now
apparently came down to a physical fight between leaders
of two factions. He always wanted things to be loftier
than that, and so often complex circumstances came
down to shows of muscle, driven to victory or failure
only by the intensity of belief driving them.
Grudgeful and clearly vexed, Zennor gave the Dana's
convulsing form one last shove, then stepped away.
The creature called Morien and a dozen others
plunged in to scoop up the choking Dana, who was too
weak to struggle against them, and to Kirk's shock they
shoved Garamanus through the burning slats of wood
and strands of straw and into the burning leg of the
colossus.
224 FIRST STRIKE
In a moment, the hall began to echo with the screams
of the Dana as he was burned alive.
Zennor covered the space between the giant's legs in
three strides, then grasped the unburned straw of the
right leg. His hand began to shine and show its bones
with that inner energy he could somehow generate when
he was irreconcilable. There were appar ently advantages
to being hopping mad on the other side of the galaxy.
Propulsively Kirk hurried behind him, his own hand
hot on his phaser.
Yanking hard on the straw line, Zennor snapped the
straw cord at the place where he had burned it. He did
this again, then again, gradually chewing his way upward
as far as he could reach.
"Bones!" Kirk called. "Climb down! Can you hear
me? Follow my voice!"
Through the curtain of boiling smoke he couldn't tell
if McCoy were even still conscious.
Continuing to burn and yank, Zennor systematically
opened a jagged gash in the straw giant's knee.
"Bones!" Kirk pawed at the smoke. It was hot--getting
hotter. Sweat drained down his face and under
his uniform shirt.
A hand, human, came out of the smoke, then a blue sleeve dusted with soot and smoldering matter.
Kirk grabbed it and pulled.
Scratched in the face by the rough burning edges that
Zennor had broken away, McCoy tumbled out of the
straw knee and drove Kirk to the ground. They sprawled
into the smoldering twigs.
Feeling the heat burning through his resistant uniform,
Kirk rolled to his feet, still holding McCoy's arm,
and hauled away.
The doctor came flying out of the kindling and stumbled
against the wall. Kirk hauled him up and held him
away from the flames. McCoy blinked his watering eyes
and grasped his right thigh as if it were hurt, but he was
standing on his own. Together they turned and looked.
"Where's--"
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"They threw him in there," Kirk said.
Astonishment rocketed across McCoy's face. "My
God! He was innocent!"
Zennor followed them away from the straw giant. Now
it was burning and the Furies were building to a shrieking
frenzy. "Go back the way we came, through the
Barrow and into the Ritual Shafts. That area is not
shielded and you will be able to beam out. Go now,
before they notice."
"I want our files," Kirk attempted corrosively.
For the first time, Zennor reached out and touched
him. His hand was a shock of dry cold despite the
temperature here and the moisture of the air. "There is
no time. I will find them and destroy them. Go away...
go now!"
Towering over them, the straw giant was now a giant of
fire. Black and yellow flame rolled along its arms and
coiled in its wide legs. The basic structure had apparently
been built to survive until the last minute, so the
thing would remain standing while the innards were
consumed. Along with whoever they had decided to put
in there. How many "criminals" had been disposed of in
this way over the past five thousand years."?
"My mama always warned me I'd end up here if I
wasn't good," McCoy wheezed.
Kirk blinked into the stinging smoke. "Let's go."
"They'll burn their ship ...."
Glancing upward at the ceiling, where the smoke was
separating into four distinct funnels and being sucked
out before it could gather, Kirk told him, "It's venting.
They've done this before."
Deeply troubled, he looked at the other leg of the straw
man, and saw the outline of the Dana, sketched in flame,
and knew he was watching the torture of an innocent
person and that he had failed to stop it.
Though he took the doctor's arm, McCoy was unable
to resist hovering briefly, just to take in the full sight of a
sixty-foot man-shaped inferno, flames going on its arms
226 FIRST STRIKE
like rolling pins, and the wild-eyed wraiths rallying and
howling around it, thudding their drums. Together they
watched the holocaust of the colossus.
McCoy's face glowed. "Captain, this may be the most
poignant log entry of your career... 'Jim Kirk discovers
Hell.""
227
It's hard to dance with the Devil on your back.
--"Lord of the Dance,"
a folk song
Chapter Seventeen
"YELLOW ALERT. Mr. Donnier, lay in a direct course back
to--Mr. Spock."
Donnier and Byers turned to gaze at him, caught
briefly in the concept of laying in a course to the first
officer, but that was what being on edge could do to
concentration.
Jim Kirk paused on the middle step down toward his
command chair, pulled himself back to the upper deck, and moved forward on the starboard side.
"Mr. Spock.. 2'
"Captain."
Standing much too straight for comfort, Spock
swiveled unevenly on a heel. He looked supremely in
place here, living a life before the wind.
For the first time Kirk noticed a dull bruise shading
the right side of Spock's face from the bad roll he'd taken
on Capella IV. Somehow he hadn't seen that yet.
"Mr. Spock, you haven't been released from sick-bay."
"Considering the circumstances, sir," Spock said with
undertones, "when you left the ship, I invoked Special
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Order Number Four Two Seven, Subsection J-Three,
regarding the right of senior officers to override any
departmental authority in a crisis."
"There's no such subsection."
"But Nurse Chapel did not know that. And since I am
here already, I suggest we not embarrass her."
"As opposed to McCoy's reprimanding her when he
finds you gone?"
"Is the doctor all right?"
"A little scorched, and don't change the subject."
Spock nodded, only once and with monkish reserve,
being careful of his condition and trying not to move or
twist, but he gazed at the deck for a moment, thoughtfully.
"I am ineffective in sickbay, sir."
"But you're
injured. Patients in sickbay aren't supposed
to be effective, Spock. I want you back in recovery.
I appreciate your dedication, but you're providing the
wrong kind of example. The rest of the crew deserves to
know that they're valuable too."
While nothing else would've gotten to Spock, that last
bit did. There were some advantages to their knowing
each other too well.
He lowered his eyes again and murmured, "Yes, sir, I
understand." Then he looked up again as if just remembering.
"Sir, did you retrieve the files?"
"No," Kirk sighed, and paced around to the other side
of Spock. "It was all we could do to get out of there with
our skins. Zennor killed Garamanus."
He felt the guilt rise on his face.
"Indeed," Spock murmured. "To free McCoy?"
"Partly. There was a power play going on. I think it
had been going on a long time. Not just the two of them, but everything they both stand for. Now he's got command
of the ship and possession of the files. I'll just have
to trust him."
Almost as he said it, he realized how foolish that was.
Wanting to trust someone and actually being able to
were entirely different game boards.
He glanced at the helm. "Shields up, Mr. Donnier."
232
FIRST STRIKE
"Shields up, sir."
The turbolift slid open and McCoy hurried in, cranky
and agitated, spotted them, and angled toward them, a
sling on his right arm and a computer cartridge in his left
hand.
"Subsection J, my backside, Mr. Spock," he scolded.
"Nurse Chapel is a lot more upset than she deserves to
be."
"I apologize for my deception, Doctor, and I will be
returning to sickbay."
"Yes, you will be." McCoy handed him the cartridge.
"That's all the information I collected on my medical
tricorder over in that other ship. Jim, I confirmed
everything. The ages of those bone fragments and hair,
the biological roots and the planetary origins. There's no
doubt about it. Those people had some contact with this
quadrant on the order of four to seven thousand years
ago."
Conveniently forgetting to remind them that he'd
been ordered off the bridge by the only two people who
could do that, Spock had turned stiffly to his library
computer and inserted the cartridge, and was looking
through his sensor hood at the readouts, probably running
them through about five times faster than Kirk
could've read them.
Kirk couldn't see inside the hood, but he heard the
machine whir faintly, or imagined he did.
His movements hampered by pain, Spock slowly straightened and faced them again, his face expressive
and heavy with import. He didn't like what he'd seen.
"This is unprecedented. Obviously the track we were
on before is far more accurate than we guessed."
"Do you have a conclusion?" Kirk asked.
"I have a hypothesis."
"I'll take it."
"If there was some massive interstellar war roughly
five thousand years ago and these people were the losers
and they were banished, as Zennor insists, we might
postulate that some survivors could have been stranded
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"Or snakes in their heads," McCoy filled in.
"If these were advanced beings who only wanted to
survive," Spock went on, "among the nomadic Klingons,
early Terrans, Vulcans, and Orions, and possessed powers
unknown to these ancients--for instance, energy.
weapons,,, extreme speed, advanced healing techniques
Again McCoy interrupted. "Acts which in those days
could only be taken as miracles."
"Or sorcery," Spock agreed. "Natural powers taken as
supernatural. The 'Furies,' if you will. Trying to escape
the mass relocation, they may have hidden on our
worlds, and as they lived and died slowly, they floated
into our mythos. These refugees may well have been the
pathways along which legends have come down to us,
and why we feel we 'recognize' them. Their physical
traits could easily have been taken as animal parts, skull
extensions as antlers or horns, feeding tendrils as snakes,
stings for the power to turn people to stone, cooling skins
for wings, bony feet for hooves."
"And in the changes of religion on these planets,"
Kirk uttered, thinking hard, trying to encompass millennia
in his concrete mind, "they would have had to be
considered. That druid Horned God. Zennor s raThe
Hunter Go d was ultimately absorbed by Christianity,
but they had no place for him in their pantheon. In
order to turn the lay public to the new religion, the
priests painted him as a devil. Satan."
The bell rang so loudly in Kirk's head that he almost
glanced for the red-alert flash.
"This is not guesswork, Captain," Spock said, seeing
Kirk's reaction. "We do know this happened." He gazed
into his sensor hood briefly. "The woman's household
tools were turned into elements of witchcraft when male
physicians wanted to take over the healing arts. Now we
have the image of the soot-darkened woman flying on a
234 FIRST STRIKE
kitchen utensil and casting spells from a cooking pot. In
the same way, the Horned God's pitchfork, a symbol of
male toil, became associated with devils when Christianity
moved him out of their way. These things are
relatively easy to track."
McCoy's eyes were wide. "I'll bet the jewelry these
people wear is the same kind of thing! All attached to
something symbolic. Like those little mirrors."
"To look at the damned." Pacing past them, Kirk
rubbed the dozen tiny burns on his knuckles. "Satan...
wizards... witches, druid priests... all nothing more
than remnants of a war in space during a superstitious
time. It's mind-boggling."
Spock shifted his shoulders a little. "Before science
and medicine upgraded the quality of daily life, there
was little to turn to but superstition, Captain. Unfortunately
, these innocent refugees fell victim to that."
Kirk looked at him. "You really believe this?"
"It is not a matter of belief. Long ago, Vulcan was
indeed occupied, for a time, by beings we called Ok'San.
They resembled the Furies in many ways, and their
impact was keenly felt. Many Vulcans retain a distant
memory of the turmoil they brought us."
Kirk nodded. "Yes... we've also run up on this kind
of thing before. We know it's possible. According to
Zennor, the losing civilization was banished, unceremoniously
dumped on a handful of neighboring planets half
the galaxy away. They fell into a dark age, crawled out of
it, found each other, fought with each other, then found
out they had similar backgrounds and that they'd all
been kicked out at the same time. And during that time,
we caught up with them technologically."
"And now they're back," McCoy said. "And we're all
here together."
Kirk spun to him. "But it wasn't them!" He gestured
as if to point through the bulkheads of the starship to the
huge ship flanking them. "And it certainly wasn't us.
The winning civilization is dead and gone, and all its war
crimes are gone with it. I refuse to take responsibility for
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any action by anyone other than myself or my crew, and
I only take on the crew's because I'm the commanding
officer. We certainly don't owe them anything and they
don't deserve to take what's ours. Times change, history
moves along. No one is 'owed' by the children of others.
This is as silly as if I went back to some coruer of Roman
Britain and claimed it as my own, because some ancestor
of mine owned it a thousand years ago. I don't buy this
collective-memory group-rights mind-set."
"We have to accept that Zennor's people do buy it,"
Spock said. "And that will be our stumbling block. The
fixation on having been banished or punished is not a
new one. Neither is the link to fire which you both
encountered so intimately."
"How astute," McCoy drawled, and rubbed his sore
arlB.
"The concept of burning the guilty, or the 'damned,'"
Spock went on, ignoring him, "has a logical source.
'Gehenna' was a pit outside of Jerusalem where refuse
was buried. Parents frequently threatened children with
'sending them to Gehenna' if they failed to behave.
Hence the images of flame in a place of punishment.
Over the generations on Earth, that image took on