by David Mack
Prang raised his arms in celebration. “Qapla’, Kirk!” Behind him, the other Klingons echoed his cheer, drawing fearful stares from many of the nearby civilians.
Being praised by Klingons heightened Kirk’s visible lingering discomfort regarding the day’s events. “You’re welcome. But that’s not—”
“This is the second time today we’ve had to reconsider our opinions of your kind,” Prang continued. “My colleagues and I would be dead if not for the bravery of Sarek.”
That news prompted Spock to lift an eyebrow in surprise. “How so?”
“He charged into a burning building,” said Durok, “shot his way through flaming debris, and led us out of the inferno.”
Anger twisted Prang’s features. “Then those Romulan petaQpu’ murdered him and that human woman with their cowards’ weapon.” He spit on the ground. “Fek’lhr take them all.” He lifted his chin as he added, “But your father died with honor, Spock. If his spirit should find the gates of Sto-Vo-Kor, my ancestors will welcome him.”
“Most kind,” Spock said. “Though we are not yet certain the ambassador is dead.” The Klingons exchanged confused looks, prompting Spock to explain further. “We believe the weapon used by the bird-of-prey displaces persons into an alternate universe—one from which it might be possible to return.”
Prang immediately grasped the possibilities implicit in that notion. “If that’s so . . . then it might be possible to bring back Councillor Gorkon, as well.”
Kirk nodded. “We hope so, yes.”
“Most intriguing.” Prang lost himself briefly in thought. “Bring back Sarek and Gorkon, and maybe these talks will resume. Until then, fight and die with honor, Kirk.” He turned and marched away, with the Klingon delegation tight around him, as the channel closed and the image on-screen reverted to the orbital view of Centaurus.
“So much for the peace talks,” Kirk grumped.
Reflecting upon the Klingons’ furtive glances and hunched body language, McCoy couldn’t help but suspect they were once again up to no good. He muttered to Kirk, “Are you sure telling them the truth about the Transfer Key was a good idea?”
Spock’s expression betrayed a hint of regret. “Time will tell, Doctor.” To Kirk he added, “With your permission, I would like to beam down to be with my mother.”
The captain nodded. “Of course, Spock.”
The first officer headed for the turbolift. McCoy waited until Spock was away before he pulled Kirk aside. “Jim . . . didn’t Prang say Sarek and Amanda were both disappeared by the Transfer Key?” The look on Kirk’s face turned from concern to pity. It was clear he knew something McCoy didn’t—something terrible. “Jim . . . what is it? What’s happened?”
Kirk lowered his voice, which was heavy with regret. “Bones . . . the woman who vanished with Sarek . . . wasn’t his wife. It was the student nurse tending his wounds.”
Bitter understanding dawned. At once, McCoy understood the reason for Kirk’s urgent summons, yet he refused to believe it. “No. . . . Jim, it can’t be. There has to be some mistake!”
Kirk shook his head. “I’m sorry, Bones. It was Joanna.”
McCoy’s stomach became an abyss of acid. Breathing in became impossible. It felt as if his feet had turned to lead and his knees to rubber. He began to sink to the deck. Kirk caught his shoulders but couldn’t hold him up—the weight of McCoy’s anguish was too great for anyone to bear. Driven to his knees by sorrow, he buried his face in his hands. “I tried to warn her, Jim. I did all I could . . . but it wasn’t enough. Now she’s gone . . . and it’s my fault.”
“No,” Kirk insisted, “it’s not. This was not your fault, Bones. And it wasn’t hers.”
Fury swelled inside him, overpowering his grief. “Romulan bastards!” The bridge crew averted their eyes as McCoy raged, “They took her from me, Jim! Took my little girl!”
“I know they did,” Kirk said, looking McCoy in the eye, as if that might let McCoy share some of his courage and certainty. “But she’s still alive, Bones. I know it. And so do you.”
In the face of failure, all McCoy wanted to do was fall apart. But he knew that wasn’t an option, not for him. He was a doctor. A Starfleet officer. A father. He would get up and do whatever was necessary to get his daughter back. He swallowed hard, collected himself with a deep breath. “You’re right, Jim. She’s alive, and she needs our help. So what do we do now?”
Kirk clasped McCoy’s shoulder. “We move heaven and earth—and we bring her home.”
* * *
Spock greeted his materialization on Centaurus with a wince as ragged drifts of smoke stung his eyes and burned inside his nostrils. The New Athens University campus had been reduced to a smoldering war zone. Its quad now was bordered by half-imploded buildings whose wreckage was scored with carbonized streaks from the Romulan ship’s disruptors. Firefighters squelched several small blazes still crackling at various points around the site, and a legion of police and medical personnel had arrived to tend the wounded now that the shooting was over.
Locating his mother amid the chaos proved easy enough for Spock—a few simple inquiries was all it had required. The difficulty lay, as he had known it would, in contending with her torrent of desperate emotions.
“One moment they were there, then a flash! And they were just gone,” she recounted, her manner verging upon hysteria. In spite of knowing Spock’s preference for eschewing physical contact, she had thrown herself against him the moment she saw him. Now she clung to him like a stranded sailor to a hunk of flotsam bobbing in the sea. “They just disappeared, Spock!”
“I am aware of what happened, Mother. I witnessed the event from the Enterprise.”
Shocked, she pulled back and fixed him with an accusatory stare. “And you didn’t do anything to stop it?”
“There was nothing I could have done. The Enterprise was beyond transporter range of the planet’s surface, and though I have tried to devise a means of blocking the device responsible for the abductions, my efforts have, so far, been unsuccessful.”
A cascade of emotions played across her features—anger, frustration, fear—until at last she slumped into a melancholy despair. “Forgive me, Spock. I know I shouldn’t have blamed you. It wasn’t your fault.” Tears fell from her blue eyes. “I just can’t believe he’s gone.”
He wondered how much he dared confide to her. Some of the secrets to which he was privileged might offer her solace. But sharing classified intelligence with her would be a grave violation of Starfleet protocols.
His hard-won Vulcan discipline, refined by decades of emotional training, told him to say nothing, to comfort his mother with platitudes—as if parroting empty phrases could make her forget the sorrow of thinking her husband had been slain before her eyes.
The buried part of his soul that was human wanted nothing more at that moment than to give his beloved mother a reason to dry her tears.
“Sarek might yet live, Mother.”
Shock, then a glimmer of hope. “How, Spock?”
“The weapon Sadira used . . . was a dimensional shifter. It moves people from one universe to another. And before the bird-of-prey was destroyed . . . we captured the device.”
She revived at once and seized the front of Spock’s tunic. “Does it still work? Can you really bring him back?”
“I have reason to think it might be within the realm of possibility.”
Her sadness reasserted itself, but Spock could see her subdue her darker emotions with a conscious choice of courage. “Promise me, Spock. Promise you’ll bring him home.”
“I give you my word—as a Starfleet officer, and as a Vulcan—that my shipmates and I will do all that we can to bring home the victims of the device.”
A single nod conveyed her faith in him. “I know you will, Spock.” She relaxed her grip on his shirt. “If anyone can save them, it’ll be
you.”
“And when I do, Sarek will no doubt expect you there to welcome him back.” He took a half step away from Amanda and pulled out his communicator. “We should return to the Enterprise, Mother.”
“You go on ahead. I’ll follow after I gather your father’s effects.”
“As you wish. Signal the Enterprise when you’re ready for transport.” He flipped open his communicator. “Spock to Enterprise. One to beam up.”
In the delay before the transporter beam engaged, Amanda said, “I love you, Spock.”
He stood frozen, at a loss for a response. He knew what she wanted him to say, but he had spent his entire life being conditioned not to express such sentiments. Could love possibly have any office more lonely and austere than that of mother to a Vulcan child? All Spock could do was look into Amanda’s eyes and hope she understood his boundless affection for her.
The champagne-colored sparkle and musical wash of the transporter field enveloped him.
Watching his mother fade from his sight, Spock thought again of Sarek’s displacement into a strange and hostile universe, and resolved to do whatever proved necessary to bring him home. Not for Sarek’s sake, or for his own, but for Amanda’s.
I will not fail you, Mother.
* * *
Anxious, expectant stares greeted Kirk’s return to the bridge of the Enterprise. Damage-control teams had removed most of the debris, but the bulkheads and work stations still bore the dark scars of battle damage. Scott and McCoy were huddled over the scorched wreck of the engineering console to his left. On his right, Uhura looked up from her post just as Sulu and Chekov swiveled around from the conn. Evincing a bit more restraint, Spock was the last to turn his attention toward Kirk as he stood from the command chair.
McCoy was the first to say what they all were thinking. “Well? What’d they say?”
Kirk knew better than to sugarcoat the outcome of his subspace-radio conference with Starfleet Command. “As we feared,” he said, descending the steps to his chair, “the Klingons once again embody the phrase, ‘No good deed goes unpunished.’ They’ve put the peace talks on hold, and they’re still blaming us for the disappearance of Gorkon.”
Scott erupted in righteous indignation. “Have they lost their minds? What about the Romulans? They saw them, clear as day!”
“Apparently, the HoS’leth survivors experienced a collective memory failure after we beamed them down to the planet,” Kirk said. “Once they were debriefed by Councillor Prang, none of them could recall what type of ship attacked them—so they can’t ‘rule out the possibility’ it was one of ours.”
Horror contorted Chekov’s face. “They must be joking! There are witnesses! Evidence!”
“All of which they will claim have been falsified,” Spock said. “They are maneuvering for political advantage.”
“And doing a bang-up job of it,” Kirk said as he pivoted into his chair. “If Prang gets his way, we’ll be daring the Organians to cripple our fleets any day now.”
McCoy moved to Spock’s side next to Kirk’s chair. “But the Transfer Key—what did the brass say about that?”
“They want us to hand it over to Starfleet Research and Development.”
The doctor fumed, but it was Scotty whose temper flared first. “You cannae do that, sir! If it goes in there, we’ll never see it again!”
“I concur, Mister Scott. There’s a reason the device was kept off the books and on the Enterprise all those years. Just between us, the last thing I want to see is someone reverse-engineering that thing.”
Sulu had the quality of a spring coiled for action. “What do we do, sir?”
Kirk had pondered this predicament on the walk from his quarters to the bridge. The longer he considered the facts, the more inescapable his conclusion became.
He looked at McCoy, who wore his anguish on his sleeve, and at Spock, who buried his pain so deep that it might be a mystery even to himself. Two men with loved ones now trapped in a mysterious parallel universe, along with a Klingon diplomat whose life was now more valuable than ever, a fellow Starfleet captain on her own mission of redemption, and any number of other innocent souls condemned to extradimensional exile. Kirk weighed his oaths of service against the magnitude of their losses, and he knew without a doubt what his loyalty demanded.
“Without Sarek and Gorkon, there’s no way to salvage the peace talks,” he told his crew. “Not in time to prevent a war that would ruin both sides.” A tired sigh. “I tried reasoning with admirals; I failed. Meanwhile, the Federation Council minces words with the Klingons, who gave up on peace the moment Prang realized the military potential of the citadel on Usilde.”
Kirk looked at the viewscreen, as if the answers to his troubles lay hidden in the dark between the stars. “There’s only one path left to us, whether we like it or not. We need to rescue our people from the alternate universe—without starting a war.”
He swiveled his chair so he could face aft. “Lieutenant Uhura, send a priority message to Starfleet Command. Tell them I’m taking the Transfer Key and the Enterprise back to the Libros system.” Turning forward, he gave the only order that made sense to him now.
“Mister Sulu . . . set course for Usilde.”
Acknowledgments
First, I must thank my wife, Kara, who remains my sounding board, my cheerleader, and my rock during the long labor that is crafting a novel.
I owe a major debt of gratitude to my literary co-conspirators: Dayton Ward, who conceived this project, and his writing accomplice, Kevin Dilmore; and Greg Cox, who agreed to join the three of us on this damned-fool idealistic fiftieth-anniversary crusade. This wasn’t the first time the bunch of us have collaborated, and I certainly hope it won’t be the last.
Riding the next float in my thank-you parade is John Van Citters of CBS Television Licensing. Or, as we writers like to think of him, “the man with a plan.” His enthusiasm for this trilogy helped it go from being a mere gleam in our authorial eyes to an ink-on-paper (or pixels-on-screens) reality. Muchas gracias, John!
Our hardworking editors, Margaret Clark and Ed Schlesinger, also deserve their fair shares of gratitude and congratulations for jobs well done. Thanks, you two!
Let me also say merci beaucoup to my superb agent, Lucienne Diver, who ties up all the loose ends of my business dealings so I don’t have to.
Also, thank you, vodka. This book would not exist without you.
Last but not least, live long and prosper, Trek fans!
* * *
STAR TREK: LEGACIES
* * *
WILL CONCLUDE IN
BOOK 3:
PURGATORY’S KEY
by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore
Turn the page for an exciting excerpt . . .
Pivoting on her heel and flattening the wooden training bat’leth as she lifted it from its resting place on her left shoulder, Visla swung the weapon with her right arm and let its heavy blade arc across her body. The impact against her opponent’s simulated blade made her arm shudder, but she ignored it. Instinct guided her to her left and she ducked under her adversary’s counterattack, feeling the rush of air as the training weapon sliced through the air above her head. Adjusting her stance and raising her own bat’leth in preparation for another attack, Visla realized something about her counterpart’s movements was not quite right.
“Mev!”
The response to her command was immediate, with her opponent, Lieutenant Koveq, halting his own movements and returning to a basic ready stance. With both hands, he held his bat’leth before him, cutting edge pointed toward the deck plating.
“Commander?”
Visla eyed him. “You do not attack me with full force. Why?”
“I do not understand,” replied Koveq, his heavy brow furrowing in confusion. “This was to be an exercise interval.”
“I
have no wish to be coddled like a child.” Feeling her grip tighten on her own weapon, she relished the anger flowing through her for another moment. “Attack me. Spare none of your strength and skill.”
Regarding her with obvious doubt, her weapons officer replied, “Are you certain, Commander?”
It was not an unreasonable question, Visla conceded. Her subordinate was well trained in close combat, both with bladed weapons and his own hands. He outweighed her by a considerable margin, and there was no denying that his brute physical strength was superior to her own. There also was the simple fact that she had engaged Koveq in this exercise as a training bout for which there were rules and protocols in order to reduce the number of preventable, even stupid injuries.
She cared nothing about any of that today.
“Stop questioning my orders, attack me!”
In response to her command, Koveq said nothing more. His expression darkened and Visla recognized the determined set to his jaw. He raised his bat’leth blade, angling the weapon so that the end to Visla’s left was higher and tilted toward her. With skill born from countless hours of training and actual combat, he advanced, neither rushing his movements nor offering any insight into what he was planning. Visla felt her pulse quicken in anticipation, and she could not resist a small smile of satisfaction as she hefted her blade and began stepping to her right.
She expected Koveq to feint to his left before launching an assault to her left flank, but the weapons officer surprised her by lunging left, shifting the angle of his bat’leth, and then continuing with his original attack angle. Visla brought her blade up and over in time to block the strike, by which time Kotaq was pivoting away, using his momentum to swing his weapon with one hand back toward her head. She parried that attack, backpedaling to give herself maneuvering room, but her subordinate had already gathered himself and was charging again. She started to counter his move, but he spun at the last instant, turning away from her blade as she took one step too far and overextended her reach. Koveq’s bat’leth swung across his body, and Visla felt the sting of the training weapon across her back. The force of the strike pushed her off her feet, and she stumbled, stopping her fall with her free hand and pushing herself back to her feet.