Star Trek - TOS - 79 - Invasion 1 - First Strike

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.

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  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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  Diane Carey

  "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

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  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."

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  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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  Diane Carey on Earth, Vulcan, and other planets that supported humanoid life. Beings with 'horns', or 'wings'm"

  "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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  Diane Carey

  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