“And one of the most hidebound,” Grey said. “She lacks imagination.”
“Is that a bad thing, Jan?” He smiled. “Take it from someone who’s been in this business a few years—it’s easy to let your imagination run away with you. I’ve seen personnel burn out or break down because they couldn’t deal with the idea that our lives and histories are mutable. I’ve seen them fall into depression because they were convinced that every decision was meaningless if it was just going to be made differently in an alternate timeline. No, the people who do best at this work are the ones with the most restrained imaginations. The ones who can focus strictly on the facts, the science, or their duties.” He leaned closer. “Who don’t let extraneous concerns or personal histories cloud their objective judgment.”
He saw that Grey caught his subtext. “I’ll talk to Doctor T’Viss,” she conceded. “As long as she’s able to work within a framework of caution toward the prospect of historical alteration . . .”
“Jan, let me tell you something about T’Viss. She doesn’t care one whit about the applications of temporal theory. The pure science is all that matters to her, and everything else is beneath her notice. She may scoff at your operating assumptions, but she won’t bother to get in your way. And could it really hurt you to have a resident gadfly? Caution is a sound policy, but for all we know, her models may still be the right ones.” He spread his hands. “Or not. But that’s a question for the researchers to hash out among them. And that’s part of this department’s mandate, isn’t it? To oversee temporal research?”
“Theoretical research, yes. But I know what you’re fishing for, Admiral,” Grey told him. “You’re hoping to convince me to allow further experimentation. No, don’t give me the speech,” she added, holding up a hand to forestall him. “Yes, you have made valid points about temporal defense, and about the possibilities of temporal observation of the future. But any experimentation this department might authorize would have to be along those lines. The Council is adamant: no more mucking about in the past.”
Delgado found it significant that she pinned that decision on the Council, as if to distance herself from it. He suppressed a smile. He knew the yearning still existed within her. Delgado was content to develop temporal science for the greater good, as a positive legacy he could leave to atone for his mistakes. He believed there was a real chance that he was helping the universe work toward some specific goal, something that the forces of time themselves were pushing him toward; but he saw his role as that of a facilitator. Jan Grey, on the other hand, still yearned to visit the past she had spent her life studying. She was conscious of that urge, suspicious of it, determined to ignore it for what she considered the good of the Federation. But the urge still existed. Grey wasn’t a bureaucrat afraid of the unknown, but a scientist, an explorer. More: he suspected she was a closet romantic. The way she streaked her hair or donned discreet jewelry to keep fashionable suggested that she still had aspirations beyond her cool professionalism, hopes that her unlikely yearnings could be made real. And he could tell from her body language, from the way she studied him when she thought he wasn’t looking, that she might be more receptive to him on a personal level than she was professionally. If he played his cards right, there was a chance that this Department of Temporal Investigations could become a boon to Delgado’s work rather than an impediment.
“Fine,” he said. “The future it is. Or alternate presents, if we can find a way to reach them without going back in time and creating them.” To date, his teams had had no luck re-creating the transporter accident that had accessed the Terran Empire timeline; it seemed to require unique spatial and subspatial conditions that were impossible to replicate with existing technology. And the subspace confluence, as T’Viss called it, that had brought the Onlies’ Earth into this timeline remained maddeningly resistant to analysis. It didn’t seem to be a natural phenomenon, but there was no sign of anything artificial that could be generating and sustaining it—not on this side of the confluence, at least. “But the Guardian refuses to show any era beyond the present—”
“The Guardian is off-limits anyway. No travel, no passive scans, no communication with it whatsoever.”
“I know. I’ve read the legislation in great detail, believe me.”
“Looking for loopholes?”
He deflected the question with a joke. “Well, the Guardian is a pretty big loophole. Or is it a knothole?”
Grey closed off. “If you ask me, it’s a—it’s just a hole. A big, empty hole.”
Delgado winced at his poor choice of diversions. He hadn’t appreciated how much she still blamed herself for, as she saw it, almost erasing Commander Spock from existence. It was a reminder that he’d have to tread carefully to win and keep her trust.
Which meant that trying to capitalize on her attraction to him would probably be a bad idea. He could be very persuasive with women, but holding on to their trust was a different matter. That could only be earned by giving them his own loyalty, but that meant placing them above his own agendas and ambitions. He’d had trouble enough doing that even with women he wasn’t actively manipulating. If what he sought was a short-term gain, he could live with that. But he needed to cultivate Jan Grey as a long-term ally. So he’d have to approach her with delicacy, do what he could to cultivate her positive feelings toward him without complicating things with an actual relationship.
Which was just as well. He could do far better than this sour-faced woman who thought that streaking her hair like a “real now” teenager could make her attractive. In fact, he had a lively evening planned with the comely young Councillor Moi, in pursuit of political and personal gains that were entirely short-term.
So he wrapped up the meeting as courteously as possible and left. He chuckled as he looked around at the sparse facilities the DTI had been given, still full of storage cases waiting to be unpacked, consoles waiting to be hooked up, and seats waiting to be filled. Even this small space was virtually empty of staff, aside from Simok and a lanky, young-looking Rhaandarite female taking inventory of the cases. This handful of people in a small room was what the Federation Council hoped could prevent the perfection of time travel? He hadn’t felt this good about his chances since the hearings had begun.
Still, with the Guardian interdicted, his choice of experimental subjects was essentially narrowed to one: the U.S.S. Enterprise. Or, more precisely, its special, time-capable engines. But Kirk and his crew had made up their minds; they wouldn’t cooperate in any further temporal research. And with Bob Comsol’s retirement last year, he’d lost his most powerful ally in Starfleet Command. The new commanding officer, Heihachiro Nogura, was not an easy man to get close to; prior to achieving his current post, he had been one of the Admiralty’s senior military planners, and most of his work, sometimes even his whereabouts, had been classified from those without a need to know. His current post gave him a more public profile, but as yet, Delgado had not been able to establish a relationship with him. No doubt Nogura was a shrewd man, though, not easily manipulated. Delgado would have to proceed with care if he wanted to convince Nogura to give him access to the Enterprise’s engines.
But there were always options. If he recalled correctly, the Enterprise had been on its current survey and patrol tour for nearly five years, the recommended maximum interval between major overhauls. Knowing Kirk, he’d want to push his ship beyond that conservative limit. And given his enviable record of successes, he just might have the clout to pull it off.
So Delgado would simply have to find a way to bring the Enterprise home.
V
U.S.S. Enterprise
Stardate 6921.4
November 2270
Captain’s log, Supplemental:
The situation on Pelos is worse than we could have imagined. With the sun dimmed by the cosmic dust cloud that has engulfed this system, agriculture has failed planetwide and famine grips the population. Worse, the pressure of the cloud triggers increased solar fl
ares and suppresses the stellar magnetosphere that protects the planet from cosmic rays. Between the famine and the radiation, the Pelosians’ immune systems are ravaged and plagues run rampant. The death toll is horrendous—and accelerating.
But the worst of it is not the natural disaster. The collapse of governments across Pelos has allowed the strongest nation, under the rule of Queen Palchelle, to conquer what remains of this world. Palchelle wields power by exploiting the Pelosians’ belief that this disaster is punishment from their gods. And under her religion, only the gods may determine who lives and who dies. All forms of medicine have been outlawed, all the physicians rounded up and executed. Spock and McCoy estimate that without medical care, too few Pelosians will survive the plagues to avoid extinction once the dust cloud passes. This hardy, determined species could survive the worst that the cosmos has to throw at them—but their queen’s fanaticism will destroy them.
It was a great relief to Montgomery Scott when Lieutenant Uhura reported that Kirk was calling in from the surface of Pelos. Scott had grown accustomed to keeping the center seat warm while Kirk went haring off into danger, but it was not a job he’d ever want to hold on a permanent basis, and certainly not as a result of Kirk and Spock getting themselves killed on some godforsaken rock in space. It was a particularly unwelcome task on this mission, since Starfleet had sent an inspector, Commodore Harriet Griswold, to evaluate Kirk’s request to extend the Enterprise’s current exploration tour. Griswold was a staff officer rather than line, a classic deskbound bureaucrat resistant to the idea of lengthening the tour beyond the recommended five years between overhauls. Kirk had pointed out repeatedly that the Enterprise had undergone a thorough overhaul at Earth Spacedock less than four years ago, after that first to-do with the Black Star, so the ship was entitled to at least another year on the frontier. True, the crew was tired, and a rest would be appreciated; but if the ship returned home for a refit, it might be months before she set out again and many in the crew might take other assignments. The captain had made clear his feelings that the Enterprise’s current crew was the finest he’d ever worked with, and he was in no hurry to see it broken up. Tired or not, Scott felt the same way, and he knew that nearly every man and woman aboard this ship did as well.
But Griswold, a small, pug-faced woman with tightly curled hair the color of old parchment, resisted any change from standard procedure, at least without a thorough performance evaluation of both ship and crew. Insisting that people as well as machines have their limits, she was watching the crew like a hawk for signs of excessive stress, fatigue, or trauma. It wasn’t Scott’s place to say so, but he had the feeling she was looking for any excuse to reject Kirk’s request and order the crew back home. Between her and the recent visit from that DTI bureaucrat Manners—who’d questioned them relentlessly about the legality and necessity of their actions to rescue Captain Kirk when his consciousness was trapped in the past during the Skagway mission—Scott was starting to feel a bit persecuted.
Now Scott tried to ignore the commodore looming over his shoulder as he hit the intercom button on the command chair’s arm. “Captain! We were gettin’ worried, sir. When you didn’t call in—”
“We’re all okay, Scotty,” Kirk’s voice assured him. “We had a little run-in with the queen’s enforcers. Doctor McCoy couldn’t resist trying to treat some plague victims, and that’s apparently grounds for summary execution around here.”
McCoy’s voice butted in. “For someone who says life and death are in the gods’ hands, she’s awfully willing to deal out the latter herself.”
Kirk resumed his account. “Which means, luckily for us, that there are a lot of Pelosians eager to see the queen removed from power. A band of rebels helped us escape the guards. We’re with them now.”
“Glad I am to hear it, sir.”
Griswold stepped forward, inserting herself into the conversation. “Captain Kirk, this is Griswold. Are you saying you have joined forces with the rebels?”
“No, Commodore, I’m saying they saved our lives and helped us elude capture. For now, at least. Mister Scott, ship status?”
“Holdin’ steady up here, sir. We’re keeping our orbit clear o’ dust with the navigational deflector. And if I may, sir—Mister Chekov and I have been thinking that if we boost the deflector dish to maximum power, we could thin out this dust cloud quite a bit, maybe help the star get back to normal that much faster. We’d have to break orbit, of course, and it could take several days, but—”
“That’s a great idea, Scotty. Proceed at your discretion.” At the navigation station, the young Russian ensign turned to grin at Scott. “But there’s something we need first. The rebels have been doing what they can to provide medical care to the survivors, but they’re stretched thin and their knowledge of radiation sickness is lacking. McCoy has a list of medications he’ll need delivered to the surface. A long list. Tell Nurse Chapel to prepare to beam down with them.”
“Aye, sir.” Scott didn’t consider questioning the perils involved. He’d come to learn that was simply James Kirk’s way. Pull him out of the jaws of death and he’d unhesitatingly leap back in if he thought he could pull someone else free.
But Commodore Griswold was another matter. “Captain, I must protest! Offering modern medical aid to a pre-spaceflight world is a clear violation of the Prime Directive.”
“I don’t agree, ma’am. We don’t have to tell them where the medicines come from. Entire nations have been wiped out already. We can claim that we and Nurse Chapel are survivors from one of those areas, tell the rebels that our medicines are new breakthroughs that came just before the disaster struck. We can help them without revealing where the help is coming from.”
“That is not how General Order One is supposed to work, Captain.”
“General Order One is supposed to protect other cultures from harm due to outside interference,” Kirk said. “I don’t see how preventing extinction qualifies as harm.”
“Captain—”
“With all due respect, Commodore Griswold, you are here as an observer only. The decision is mine, and it’s been made. Scotty, you have your orders.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Kirk out.”
Griswold turned to face Scott, her small gray eyes flaring in disapproval. “This is highly irregular.”
“Welcome to life in space, ma’am. Now if you want to assess how efficiently we can do our jobs, then I respectfully suggest you stand back and let us do them.”
She stared at him sourly for another moment, then turned and left the bridge. But she was scribbling fiercely on her data slate as she did so.
Imperial Palace, Pelos
Stardate 6922.8
Queen Palchelle’s throne room was a shrine to excess. The queen adorned its rough-hewn stone walls and interior space with paintings, tapestries, sculptures, furniture, and adornments plundered from all over the globe, as well as slaves from all of Pelos’s surviving ethnic groups. The Pelosians were basically humanoid, with a pair of small horns jutting from each temple and eyebrows that stretched out to merge with their hairlines, but their skin tones ranged from a light auburn to a rich maroon and the horns varied in size and sharpness from one racial group to another. The different populations had become jumbled together as survivors and refugees had congregated in the remaining stably governed lands, so McCoy’s effort to disguise the landing party with an average Pelosian appearance had inadvertently created a look which the Pelosians saw as exotic. Far from being a problem, that had made it easier for Kirk and his party to pass themselves off as refugees from a far land.
The distinction didn’t seem to matter to Palchelle now, though, as she gazed down from her ornate throne. Kirk couldn’t help but notice how healthy she and her nobles appeared next to the slaves that attended them, let alone the refugee populations beyond. They showed little sign of the malnutrition, fatigue, anemia, hair loss, or susceptibility to infection that ran rampant through the population. True, the no
bles had retreated to underground bunkers as soon as they had realized that exposure to the skies hastened the sickness, but that alone couldn’t explain their robust health.
Palchelle flowed to her feet and sashayed down from the royal dais, her piercing blue-gray eyes roving over Kirk. She was a tall brunette, well-nourished enough to be voluptuous, a fact made vividly apparent by the translucent silks she wore. Elaborate jewelry, the plunder of a world, adorned her brow and body and shimmered in the glow of the throne room’s oil lamps as she undulated closer. “So,” she purred. “You are the leader of the heretics.”
“You mean my friends?” he responded, keeping his tone even. “The ones you’ve sentenced to death for trying to save lives?”
“I merely carry out the will of the Originators,” she said with feigned apology. “They have sent these ordeals to us as a test of our faith. If we do not trust in them to save us, then their wrath will continue until all unbelievers have fallen.” She stroked his cheek. “I know it can be difficult to bear the suffering, but that is how we are tested.”
“Are you so sure, Your Highness? What if the Originators are actually testing our initiative? Our ability to take care of ourselves?”
“You speak of matters you do not understand, Kirk. The plagues are a warning that we must renounce all sin and doubt, reaffirm our faith in Original law, or lose everything.”
“And is that why you and your court are so healthy, Your Highness? Through faith alone? Not through the use of the medicines you confiscate?”
Palchelle lowered her hand, her gaze growing harder. “We are the Pure. Our faith has already been affirmed beyond question. And we are rewarded for our devotion.” Catching herself, she softened her tone again, circling him at close range, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her body. “There is room for others who demonstrate the same devotion, Kirk. Who have not yet been damned by heresy.”
He shrugged. “But I’m the leader of the heretics.”
Star Trek: DTI: Forgotten History Page 9