“It was difficult for him at first,” Spock replied with an ease ill-fitting the words. “Sarek believes deeply in our traditions. He once refused to address me as his son for eighteen years after I chose to enter Starfleet instead of following the path he had carefully prepared for me. But we reconciled thereafter, and I believe he did not wish to repeat the same mistake. Once I assured him that I did not intend to abandon logic as his first son did”—for here, with her, he could speak even of forbidden things like the half brother that even his closest friends knew nothing of—“he proved able to keep an open mind. He still does not quite understand the path I have chosen. I can hardly blame him, for I myself do not fully understand it yet. But he accepts now that I am not he, and that the path I choose must be my own. He accepts that family is not conditional upon the fulfillment of preconceptions.” He allowed himself a smile. “Of course, my mother is delighted. Although she would deny it, she has always felt on some level that my denial of emotion was a repudiation of the parts of me that came from her. Perhaps there was some truth to that, though I never wished it to be so. But it is no longer the case. I am what I am: Vulcan and human, logical and emotional. I should integrate both and be complete.”
“It is a difficult perspective to conceive,” T’Pring admitted. “I never knew what a human was until days ago. And I have never considered that the Vulcan way could have an equal, or could be permitted to merge with the philosophies of another, more emotional race. Yet you, Spock, are unlike any Vulcan I have known—and it certainly does not make you inferior.”
“My Vulcan has taken a different path from yours,” Spock said. “A path of peace, as Surak originally intended.”
T’Pring grew subdued, nestling against him. “That you could know that for a fact . . . it is remarkable. My mother was denounced for endorsing that interpretation of Surak’s doctrines. For teaching that melding was an act of harmony, not an assault. When my father discovered her attempts to awaken telepathy in me, he had her charged with the corruption of a minor. She was sent away for rehabilitation.” She held his gaze. “I envy you for having a father who, even belatedly, was willing to accept your departure from the norm. My father annulled his marriage and took me to live on Coridan to escape the shame of my mother’s acts. I had to learn to reject everything she had taught me lest I earn the disapproval of the only parent I had left.”
“Is peace so shameful?”
“Passivity is. We are taught that it is our logical duty to create order, to protect the galaxy against chaos. And it is logical to use whatever methods serve that goal, including force.”
Spock pondered. “Do you believe it was logical for your mother to be taken from you as a consequence of that policy?”
Here, in this safe space where inhibitions were on hold, T’Pring’s eyes glistened with moisture. “My father conditioned me to accept that it was. But since Stonn was taken from me, I have grown less tolerant of loss.” She pulled him closer. “If your Surak offered an alternative that would have let me keep them both, I cannot deny the worth of his words.”
Spock stroked her hair and whispered in her ear. “He was your Surak too. You have simply forgotten. But perhaps that can be remedied.”
U.S.S. Enterprise
Stardate inapplicable
The repairs to the Enterprise had become a cat-and-mouse game between the Compact engineers, who dragged their heels on repairs to critical systems in order to keep the ship hobbled while still offering the pretense of cooperation in case an alliance was still possible, and the Enterprise repair personnel, who tried to hasten repairs to critical systems while concealing their work from the Compact teams. On top of that, the Starfleet crew now had to prepare for their imminent escape without giving the Compact advance warning. It was an excellent exercise in strategic planning for Sulu, and for Kirk as well. But they were both master tacticians, and they had the resourcefulness of a brilliant crew to draw on as well.
The first stage came courtesy of Chief Theresa Ross from engineering, who devised a shipwide field that resonated with the crystals in the Andorian-issue chronometers worn by the KAC technicians, subtly speeding them up. Scott accelerated the ship’s chronometers by the same amount. As a result, the morning shift broke for midday meal four minutes early, before the next shift had beamed to the repair dock. Noting the anomaly, the dock’s Andorian transporter operator hailed the surface, but Crewman th’Clane had surreptitiously placed a signal interceptor under her console while flirting with her earlier, so while she thought she was reporting the problem to ground control, she was actually speaking to Crewman Shuuri’ik of communications, a Betelgeusian who had reprogrammed his voder to replicate the voice of the surface transporter chief and assured her that everything was being taken care of. Meanwhile, security hurried out the last of the stragglers and sealed the main gangway hatch behind them.
That left a brief window for assistant chief engineer Cleary to power up the impulse engines—drawing power solely from the fusion reactors that were already powering basic ship systems, so there was no spike to alert the dock personnel. At the same time, the rest of Scott’s engineers were running the warp reactor through as much of its prestart process as they could without actually engaging the matter/antimatter intermix. Luckily the new warp reactor could more easily handle a cold restart than the old. Since it was a swirl-chamber design with the reaction proceeding gradually throughout the length of the dilithiumlined shaft rather than focused on a discrete dilithium matrix, it used colder plasma streams to begin with.
But the critical job belonged to the work bee crews under Sulu’s coordination. Four of the Enterprise’s six single-operator maintenance craft were in use outside the ship at the time of the shift change, using their built-in waldoes or grabber sled attachments to replace deflector grid circuits and phaser emitters, rebond hull plates, and so forth. At the appointed moments, the work bee pilots locked their small yellow craft onto collision courses with the four connection points anchoring the Enterprise to the repair dock, primed the explosives they had installed in the stalwart craft (under protest, for the pilots were rather attached to the sturdy little vehicles), and signaled for beam-out. Chief Janice Rand beamed them all safely to the main transporter pad moments before the work bees made their noble sacrifice and blasted the Enterprise free of the connectors.
At that exact moment, Chekov raised shields and fired all four forward phasers to take out the clawlike protuberances blocking the Enterprise’s egress from the repair dock, and Sulu thrust forward at maximum impulse, shooting the ship out of the drydock like a torpedo. Chekov fired a spread of photon mines from the torpedo tubes to delay pursuit. They were set to home in on pursuing ships and detonate a good distance away, enough to blind them and hopefully damage their sensors or deflectors, but not destroy them. Although relations with them had quickly turned sour, the Andorians were largely victims here and Kirk wished them no harm.
Their initial course was tangentially outward from Chasav III’s orbit, but under cover of the mine detonations, Sulu veered toward Regulus (for it was the same star whatever it was called) and took the ship into low warp. Regulus was a hot blue star, its habitable zone a considerable distance away, so the journey would have taken hours at high impulse. Even at warp 2, it wasn’t long before the Compact ships began closing in.
As they dove toward the fast-spinning star, McCoy clutched the bridge rail behind Kirk and stared at it as it grew on the viewscreen, a distinctive orb shaped like a fat discus, hotter and brighter at the poles than the equator. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Jim,” he said. “The last thing we need is to get flung back in time on top of everything else.”
“Unlikely, Doctor,” T’Viss said from where she stood nearby. “Mister Scott has calibrated the engines according to my computations, to negate any closed timelike curves. After all, without the unique properties of your old engines, this vessel could not survive a Tipler warp.”
“Don’t worry, Doc,” Sul
u said from the helm. “We’re just using Regulus’s frame-dragging effect to help throw off pursuit.”
“You’ll have to explain that to me sometime!” McCoy said.
“First things first,” Sulu said. “Coming up on Regulus Ab. Slowing to impulse in five . . . four . . .”
Seconds later, the extrapolated image of Regulus on the screen gave way to a rainbow flash and a real-time optical image. Next to the looming main star, the white dwarf companion that hugged it at a third of an AU grew larger in the viewscreen. Sensor enhancement highlighted the thin atmosphere of hydrogen that had collected around the white dwarf, culled from Regulus’s stellar wind by the powerful gravity of the dense remnant star.
“Pursuers have dropped to impulse,” Chekov reported. “Three hundred thousand kilometers and closing rapidly.”
“Range in five,” Sulu said, and counted down.
“All aft sensors in shutdown,” Uuvu’it announced from sciences.
“All antennae secured from pulse,” Uhura reported.
“Fire!” Sulu cried.
As the Enterprise soared past Regulus Ab, Chekov fired a volley of torpedoes toward its surface, all concentrated on a single point. The impact triggered a fusion reaction in the dense hydrogen layer, a mini-nova that surely blinded the unprepared pursuers and would force them to break off.
But Scott had already calibrated the engines to take the nova energy into account in shaping the warp metric. As the Enterprise skimmed close to Regulus, Sulu threw her into warp again smoothly. Once the aft sensors were reactivated, Uuvu’it reported, “Good one, sir! That’s pulled up a massive flare that should slow them further.”
Sulu turned to the doctor. “And going to warp inside the frame-dragging zone should make it harder for them to predict our warp vector. The star’s gravity pulls spacetime into a bit of a spin around it, and that introduces a random element—”
“Yeah, yeah,” McCoy said. “I didn’t mean it about explaining. Good grief, are all first officers required to be long-winded?”
But his ribbing was good-natured, for the maneuver had worked. The Enterprise had escaped the repair dock and eluded pursuit with no serious damage or loss of life, hopefully on either side. Kirk had rarely been more proud of his crew. He tended to think of Spock as the one indispensable man, but the personnel of the Enterprise had proved how capable and resourceful they could be without him.
Still, Kirk reminded himself, what we just did was the easy part.
V.H.C. Muroc
Stardate 7586.2
Assistant Director Simok had been unsure what to expect from Commander Spock when the half-Vulcan officer requested to join the Hypatia’s mission. Spock was a prominent figure among Vulcans for multiple reasons—he was a member of the clan of T’Pau, the son of Ambassador Sarek, the great-grandson of Vulcan’s first ambassador to Earth, the first successful Vulcan-human hybrid, one of the first Vulcans to serve within a mostly human Starfleet crew, and an accomplished scientist in his own right. Moreover, he had been at the heart of the V’Ger affair, an event whose details and ramifications were still being discussed and debated across the Federation. It was well-known that Spock had failed Kolinahr, though such matters were normally kept private. And though few Vulcans would admit to engaging in anything so petty as the human “grapevine,” an awareness had osmosed through Vulcan society that Spock’s encounter with V’Ger had changed him, leading him to embrace the emotions he had so recently failed to purge. There had been murmurs that a pattern within Sarek’s family was repeating itself, though none would speak openly of the renegade Sybok, Sarek’s first son, long since disowned and banished. Yet in the subsequent months, Spock had done nothing overtly scandalous, and he remained in Sarek’s good favor.
At first, when Simok had seen the intensity of Spock’s reactions to Subcommander T’Pring, he had believed them to be a sign that Spock’s acceptance of emotion was compromising his discipline and reason. He had been obliged to revise that hypothesis when he had noted the same responses from T’Pring—and recalled that seven standard years had elapsed since Spock’s marriage to this timeline’s T’Pring had failed to occur according to plan. Understanding that their Time was upon them, Simok had covered for them with the Hypatia’s captain and crew when they had gone into seclusion together for nearly two days. He had told Captain Danehl that the two were immersed in an in-depth examination of matters essential to the solution of the confluence problem. This had been reasonably truthful, for resolving their pon farr had been essential were they to remain capable of solving the problem, and they had surely examined one another in great depth.
Now that they had emerged from seclusion, both Spock and T’Pring were able to perform with their Vulcan control and discipline intact—though Simok could see the signs of continuing affinity between them which would be lost on a human observer. As the three of them and Watley continued their studies of the Vedala confluence drive aboard the Muroc, Simok found that, while Spock’s emotions were evident as an undercurrent in his behavior, they did not impede his intellectual discipline or lead him to irrational actions or conclusions. Other Vulcans who had attempted emotional openness in the past had tended to let their passions overwhelm them, leading them in dysfunctional directions. Indeed, it was the dangerous intensity of Vulcan emotion that had required them to embrace Surak’s disciplines in the first place. But Spock seemed to have achieved a synthesis that eluded most Vulcans. Simok had learned over his long years to maintain an open mind, and he began to contemplate the possibility that, while Spock’s half-human neurology might have undermined his capacity for conventional Vulcan methods of emotional partitioning and sublimation, it might actually be a boon to his current efforts at emotional engagement, tempering his Vulcan fire to the more manageable intensity of human emotion.
In any case, Spock and T’Pring were now functioning with considerably greater efficiency. Not only was the distraction of incipient pon farr no longer an issue, but they meshed quite smoothly as a team, functioning almost as one mind with the combined knowledge and experience of two. It substantially enhanced the science team’s efforts to understand the confluence drive.
Although that was not saying a great deal, for their understanding of the drive was very limited. Simok was well-versed in the relative state formulation of quantum mechanics and its consequence of parallel histories, as well as in the ways in which quantum gravitational theory applied in subspace domains. And yet an understanding of how the Vedala device achieved its effects eluded him. He had some theoretical grasp of how it could generate a subspace manifold that operated as a bijective map between two domains of normal spacetime, rendering them effectively isomorphic so that a particle occupying one domain would simultaneously occupy the other, even without any spatial fold or wormhole connecting them. But the specifics of the mechanism the drive employed, the way it directed energy to achieve the effect, remained beyond him. And he could not grasp how the device could simultaneously achieve an interphase between parallel timelines. Insofar as Simok could understand the mechanism, its configuration should be incapable of that.
It was Spock who had the key insight. “Perhaps the reason this particular confluence drive lacks interphasic capability is that it is not the drive responsible for achieving the interphase. Consider: it was one of multiple such devices implanted in the Vedala planetoid’s crust. It is entangled with its sister devices on the other side of the dimensional divide, and that is why the Muroc was transposed with the planetoid when it jumped between timelines. The logical conclusion is that the drive units that are configured to permit an interphasic confluence—whether through design or through malfunction—remain on the planetoid in the Protectorate’s timeline.”
“Oh, no,” Dierdre Watley said. “That would mean the only hope of getting the Enterprise back is on the other side.”
“Which is not cause for pessimism,” Spock told her, growing animated. “We may assume with a fair degree of confidence that Captain Kirk
and the Enterprise crew, along with Doctor T’Viss, have been studying the Vedala planetoid and its confluence drives.”
“That seems unlikely,” T’Pring replied. “The Protectorate would surely have sent ships to investigate our disappearance. As an unfamiliar craft that could not account for its presence, the Enterprise would surely be detained, its crew interrogated.”
“I am sure the attempt would be made,” Spock said. “Which might require us to revise the expected timetable. My own absence from the Enterprise could well delay things further. However, Captain Kirk is not a man from whom it is logical to expect failure. He will most likely find a way to gain access to those drives, if he has not already done so. My science team, Mister Scott’s engineers, and Doctor T’Viss will be studying them and are likely to discover a means of reactivating the confluence effect.”
“So we just have to sit back and wait for them to fix things?” Watley asked. “Seems a little too easy, doesn’t it?”
“The previous confluence,” said T’Pring, “occurred through no action of the Muroc’s crew. The drive activated spontaneously and transferred us here.”
“Still, we cannot rely on that happening again,” Spock told her. “Quantum entanglement can be an ephemeral thing. The more interaction these drives have with their respective continuums, the weaker the link between them may grow. Through our own investigations of the drive, and those performed on the other side, we may have weakened the connection.”
“And given the evident interconnectedness of these devices,” Simok said, “the drives on the planetoid may not function unless this one is in the quantum circuit with them.”
“Yes. We need to reinforce that connection through coordinated action with the Enterprise team on the other side.”
“Which would require communication with them,” T’Pring said. “While the entanglement may be weakening . . .”
Star Trek: DTI: Forgotten History Page 20