by Jerry Oltion
Sulu and Chekov had come up on either side of him. "Do you see anything that looks like a spaceport?" he asked them.
"Hmm…" said Chekov, leaning closer to the map.
"Captain," said Scotty, "it's a transporter all right, but I'll be blessed if I can see any activation mechanism for it. People must carry some kind of personal control device, as near as I can figure."
"Which we didn't stick around to be issued," Kirk said. It looked like they might have to walk the whole way, or rob an innocent bystander of his bus pass—but that wouldn't help a bit if they couldn't figure out which direction to go.
"What about this?" Sulu asked, tapping at the map. Kirk looked to see what he had found, but a sudden change in the lighting made him flinch back and look out.
They had moved. They were now in one of a long row of transporter stations on the edge of a wide stone courtyard. Across the way were hundreds of stores, and thousands of people carrying packages under their arms or in wheeled carts. It wasn't raining here, and though the sky was still cloudy it was much brighter.
"You touch the map!" Scotty exclaimed. "Brilliant!"
"This isn't a spaceport," Sulu pointed out.
"No, but it's a good start," said Kirk. "Excuse me." He leaned out of the transporter station and called to an older woman walking past. "We're trying to reach the spaceport, but we've gotten a bit lost. Could you show us where it is?"
She looked him over carefully, then nodded. "You look like the type, all right. It's up here." She stepped up to the edge of the station and pointed high up on the map. "That green spot there."
"Ah, thank you," Kirk said.
"Any time."
He waited for her to back away from the door, then reached up and tapped the spot, just as Chekov asked, "I wonder what green means?"
The light changed again. Kirk looked outside and saw row upon row of wedge-shaped fighter craft, painted black and streamlined for atmospheric flight. "Jackpot," he said. "Come on."
But the moment he stepped out of the transport station, a jangling alarm went off.
"That's what green meant," he said, stepping back up. "We evidently need security clearance to get through. Quick, get us out of here."
Sulu thumped the map at random, but nothing happened. Kirk pressed his finger more deliberately against the spot that had taken them to the shopping center, but that did nothing either.
"Control lockout," Scotty said. "We're trapped."
"Not yet we aren't," Kirk said, pulling from his waistband the disruptor that Chekov had appropriated from the immigration instructor and charging out across the pavement toward the closest row of ships. He didn't see any fences or forcefields; if they could make it across the first fifty yards or so of open space it looked like they could hide among the ships themselves.
He heard shouts from off to the right and turned his head to see soldiers pouring out of a guard shack a few dozen yards away. The guards didn't fire immediately, perhaps reluctant to shoot someone wearing their own colors, and by the time they decided to, Kirk and the others were too far away to present good targets. Disruptor bolts zipped past and blew chips of rock out of the pavement, and one struck a wingtip that jutted out toward them.
"Chekov, Sulu," Kirk said as all four of them raced into cover behind the first fighter ship, "you and I will draw off the pursuit. Scotty, you hot-wire one of the ships and beat it for the Enterprise. We'll try to hide out here at the spaceport until you can beam us aboard, but if we're not here you'll just have to scan for us wherever they send us."
"Aye, Captain," Scotty said grimly, acknowledging the unspoken thought that they might be back on Prastor by then if what they had been told about the rules of war around here was true.
Kirk led the way farther down the line of fighters, dodging out into the open a couple of times to make sure the guards saw him. Disruptor bolts lanced out at him each time he did, one of them singeing off most of his hair on the right side of his head. Too close, he thought, ducking back into cover and firing a few shots back at their pursuers to slow them down.
He was just turning to put some more distance between them when he saw someone else materialize out in the open only a few yards back the way he had come. Someone wearing Prastorian red and flailing wildly for balance.
"—was kidding!" the man shouted, and Kirk recognized the voice and his ample outline at the same moment.
"Harry," he shouted, "take cover!" He fired past Mudd at the spaceport guards and sent them skittering for cover themselves, but the blue energy bolts whizzing past made Mudd freeze rather than jump behind one of the ships. That split-second hesitation cost him; one of the guards hit him in the left leg with a lucky shot and Mudd fell, howling, to the pavement.
Kirk fired a couple more times at the guards, then tossed the disruptor to Sulu. "Cover me," he said, then jumped out and raced toward Mudd. Disruptor bolts zipped past all around him, but Kirk ran straight for Mudd, grabbed an arm, and strained to drag him behind one of the fighter ships' landing skids.
"Ow, my shoulder!" Mudd yelled. Then, when he saw who had grabbed him, he said, "What are you doing here?"
"Saving your worthless hide," Kirk told him as he heaved Mudd's massive bulk closer to safety. Just one more tug would do it. "For the second time. You owe me one, Har—" Kirk said, but he never finished the sentence. The disruptor bolt must have caught him in the head; he never even felt this one.
Chapter Eighteen
LEBRUN TURNED at the door of the shuttlecraft to see how Mudd was doing, and was horrified to see him running the other way. "No, Harry, this way!" she shouted, adding her voice to Stella's. What devotion, she thought. Stella had flown right into the middle of a battle to save her husband.
Suddenly she was shoved aside, and Stella took off at a dead run straight for Harry. She seemed impossibly fast, and her feet ripped up foot-sized divots of lawn with every step, but she couldn't outrun disruptor bolts. Half a dozen beams shot past the shuttle, one striking Stella square in the back and two more hitting Harry.
Stella didn't even slow down. Harry, on the other hand, pitched forward, dematerializing on the way.
That did for Stella what the disruptor bolt in the back didn't. She stopped, tilted her head left and right as if listening or looking for something just out of sight; then she turned around as if to run back to the shuttle, but before she could move, two bright red phaser beams lanced out from the tree-lined path off to the side and speared her in the side and chest.
Phaser beams, not disruptors, Lebrun realized. She looked to the left and saw two Enterprise security officers—she recognized Smith and Rusch—firing steadily at Stella.
"No, she's one of ours!" Lebrun shouted, but it was too late.
Or maybe not. Incredibly, Stella turned toward the source of the beams, and even took a few steps toward them. Then a disruptor bolt hit her left arm and blew it away at the elbow, and Lebrun realized why she was able to withstand so much fire. Circuitry dangled from the wound, and sparks shot out from the bare wires.
Stella turned again, and the phasers followed her. The spot where they hit glowed cherry red, then white, but still she didn't go down. She was definitely damaged, though. She took a few more stumbling steps toward the shuttle, then fell to her knees. Another disruptor bolt hit her in the shoulder and her head slumped to the side, but she stood up again and took a few more steps before something inside finally overloaded and she froze up. She fell like a tree, face first, and the ground shook when she hit.
Lebrun looked over toward Smith and Rusch just as they shimmered away in a transporter beam. She waited a couple of seconds to see if the Enterprise would beam her away as well, but when nothing happened she stepped back up into the shuttle doorway. She could hear heavy footfalls and shouts as the Nevisians approached from the other side.
Even though Stella was only an android, and Captain Kirk had evidently ordered her eliminated, Lebrun was reluctant to leave without her. She had come here to save her husba
nd, after all. Whatever had happened on the ship could have been a big misunderstanding, or a case of divided loyalty. After all the thinking Lebrun had done about marriage—and despite Harry's insistence that his and Stella's was a match made in Hell—Lebrun didn't feel that she could just abandon Stella after watching her try so hard to save him.
But the Nevisian battle gods took the matter out of Lebrun's hands. Just as she was steeling herself for a rescue attempt, Stella's body faded away, leaving a six-inch-deep depression in the ground: a perfect mold of her features in crushed fern.
A Distrellian soldier skidded around the front of the shuttle, saw Lebrun, and fired wildly toward her. She leaped back inside and punched the door closed, then jumped toward the controls and lifted off without even sitting in the pilot's chair. Bracing herself against its back, she slapped the control for maximum lift, then when she was high enough not to be a target anymore she struggled into the seat and steered for orbit.
Her breathing had just begun to slow when the shuttle rocked under heavy fire, and a black wedge-shaped fighter screamed past only inches from the viewscreen.
Spock had been watching the ground battle at high magnification on the main viewer. It was difficult to identify individuals from the overhead angle, but he saw the shuttle land, saw the Stella android emerge and chase after someone on the ground and nearly reach them before the security team fired on her. When she had fallen he had recalled the security team, then watched as a Prastorian entered the shuttle and moments later took off. That seemed odd; shuttle controls were deliberately designed for ease of use, but a Prastorian shouldn't have been able to figure them out that quickly.
It looked like their cleverness might not save them even so; while the shuttle was still only a few miles above ground, five sleek interceptor craft rose from the spaceport to the north of the city and streaked toward it, firing as they lanced past, then arched around for another run.
He was just turning to Lieutenant Uhura to request that she contact the shuttle when she said, "We're being hailed. It's—it can't be. It's Ensign Lebrun."
"On screen," Spock ordered. Uhura routed the signal to the viewer, and sure enough, there was Ensign Lebrun seated before the shuttle controls.
"I'm under attack," she reported. "Shields deteriorating, and I took some engine damage before I got them up. I'm not sure I can make orbit."
"Acknowledged," Spock said, suppressing the urge to ask her how she had survived the disruptor attack that he had watched vaporize her in the Grand General's palace. First things first. "Get a tractor beam on that shuttle," he ordered the helmsman. "And lay down a burst of phaser fire around those interceptors. Lieutenant, tactical view again."
The viewscreen shifted back to the overhead view, and Spock watched phaser beams stab down into the atmosphere toward the swirling specks of the fighter craft.
"They're not leaving," Lebrun reported a second later. "They're fire—" Her signal washed out in static, then came back. "—down to twenty percent now. I don't think I can take another hit."
Spock considered using the tractor beam to push the attackers away, but they couldn't simultaneously lift the shuttle and push away five other objects. Nor could they simply beam Lebrun out of the shuttle, not without her lowering her shields and risking instant annihilation with the next attack before they could lock on to her.
Spock could see only one solution and he didn't hesitate to order it. "Target the interceptors," he said. "Shoot to disable if possible, but don't let them attack the shuttle again."
More phaser fire lanced down into the atmosphere as the helmsman and navigator complied with his order. Three explosions lit up the screen, and the two surviving craft tumbled out of control. Before Spock could order the pilots beamed to safety, two parachutes opened. Good; that was one less thing to worry about.
"Pull the shuttle to safety," he ordered. "Put Ensign Lebrun back onscreen." Her image replaced the planetscape. She looked a bit disheveled, but not injured. "Ensign, report," Spock said.
"Yes, sir." She ran a hand through her hair, leaving portions of it to resemble the Nevisian style. "Wow, where to begin. Let's see—"
"Begin with how you survived the attack on Distrel, and how you came to be on Prastor," Spock advised.
"Right. Well, apparently what happened was…"
Spock listened, fascinated, as she described how she and Harry Mudd had both survived and had been forced into the Nevisian society. If she weren't there onscreen before him, he wouldn't have believed it for a moment. But she was, and her story even answered one mystery that had been bothering him since they had arrived. He had wondered how two planets kept apart by millennia of war could have maintained a single language, and now he knew. The population of both planets apparently mixed so thoroughly that no linguistic split could develop.
That it happened through apparently supernatural means bothered him, but he was sure there was a rational explanation for that as well. In the meantime, Lebrun's very existence implied still further miracles. "If I understand correctly," he said, "then the captain and the others are probably alive on Distrel. And Harry Mudd as well, if he hasn't been killed yet again after arriving in mid-battle."
"The captain?" asked Lebrun. "Was he killed?"
"Yes," Spock said. "And Scott, Sulu, and Chekov as well. But apparently that was not as permanent a condition as we believed." He realized as he spoke that he was uncomfortably close to grinning. Really, these emotions were getting out of hand. He would have to meditate for a week once this was all over.
But that wouldn't be for a while yet. The captain and the others were still at large on Distrel, and it would take hours to search the entire planet for them. Unless he could get some help from the Distrellian government.
"Contact the Grand General," he said to Uhura.
It took a few minutes, during which the shuttle docked with the Enterprise and Spock heard cries of joy and laughter and weeping over the intercom as Ensign Lebrun and her husband, Lieutenant Nordell, were reunited. Shamelessly emotional, Spock thought as he switched off to give them privacy.
The Grand General looked even more wide-eyed than usual when he finally appeared onscreen. He was seated in a much smaller chair than the throne in which Spock had last seen him, and in a much smaller room, by the looks of things. Evidently the Prastorian invasion had forced him to retreat. He didn't wait for Spock to greet him, but immediately demanded, "What have you done?"
"I have rescued one of my officers from Prastor, and learned that more of them are being held against their will on Distrel," Spock replied. "I demand that you release them to us immediately."
The Grand General looked surprised. "I don't know a thing about that. Were they killed on Prastor?"
"Yes."
"Then they're probably here somewhere. And yes, you can have 'em back." He scowled at Spock and leaned forward into the video pickup. "You could have just asked. You didn't have to threaten us."
"I have made no threats," Spock said.
"No threats? Then what do you call what you've done?" The Grand General's voice rose to a shout. "What about your precious Prime Directive? If this isn't interference with a society, I don't know what is."
"Calm yourself," Spock told him. "We fired upon five interceptor craft that were threatening the life of one of our crew members. We regret that three of those craft were destroyed before their pilots could eject, but I hardly consider that a violation of the Prime Directive. It was an act of self-defense."
"I'm not talking about interceptors!" the Grand General shouted, rising from his chair.
"Then what are you talking about?" asked Spock, frankly puzzled by the man's behavior.
"I'm talking about the resurrections! They've stopped. People are dying for real, and you're responsible for it."
The resurrections had stopped? Spock had found them hard enough to believe in to begin with; could his skepticism have influenced something? It hardly seemed likely. "I fail to see how any of our actions
could have affected your…peculiar adaptation to an afterlife," Spock said. "In any event, we have done nothing intentional to upset it. Perhaps if you could provide us with more information, we could—"
"I don't have any more information," the Grand General snapped. "The resurrections just stopped. I've contacted Prastor and they've stopped there, too. We've called a halt to the fighting, at least for the moment, but of course the Padishah thinks I'm behind it all, so he's threatened to attack us anyway if I don't make things right again. And thousands of people died before we issued the order, and they're still dead. Including two bathhouse receptionists who were electrocuted when your damned mechanical copy of Stella Mudd appeared in the water with them."
"The android was resurrected?" Spock asked. That seemed even stranger than the human resurrections, though they were all decidedly strange.
"Twice," the Grand General said. Someone approached and whispered something to him, then he looked back to Spock. "Make that three times. What's going on?"
"I don't know," Spock admitted. "I will endeavor to find out. But first I would like to recover my captain and crew members."
The Grand General sat back down. "Fine," he said. He beckoned someone close, whispered to them, and when they hurried away he said, "We'll search our records and see where they appeared. If they appeared. In the meantime, I want you to undo whatever it is you've done and get our people back."
Spock nodded. "If we are in fact responsible in some way for the problem, we will attempt to rectify it, but we must first learn what caused it."
"You people caused it. You and Mudd, messing around in other people's business where you didn't belong."
His assessment did carry a certain logic with it. Mudd and the Enterprise crew were probably the biggest disrupting factor Nevisian society had seen in recent times; it stood to reason that they might have inadvertently influenced something. But what could they have done to affect something as unusual as this? Had they angered a vengeful god? Disrupted the collective unconscious? Where did you start looking to find out why people weren't reborn anymore? As far as Spock knew this was the only spot in the universe where it actually happened in the first place.