Captain's Peril

by William Shatner

  “Coming into orbital range,” Lieutenant Alden announced.

  “Standard orbit,” Kirk said. He looked over at Spock again. “Any signs of the alien ship?”

  Spock sat back from his station. “Not yet.”

  “Any chance it might have landed down there? Be hidden beneath the storm clouds?”

  “That is one of the possibilities I am pursuing,” Spock confirmed. “However, I can detect no sign of propellant exhaust in the planet’s atmosphere.”

  “What if they use antigravity for planetary maneuvers?” Kirk asked. “Or their warp engines can work directly on a planet’s surface?”

  Spock kept his expression neutral, though Kirk seemed to sense a tightness in his reply. “I am pursuing more than one possibility, sir.”

  Kirk realized he had once again pushed one step too far. If Spock kept score the way he did, now the captain would be up a point, which meant Kirk could expect a return salvo from Spock at any time.

  Then Kelso spoke up again. “Captain…I’m picking up an object ahead. Orbital track.”

  “Onscreen,” Kirk said.

  The viewscreen wavered as a magnified view appeared. At the bottom of the screen—placed there by convention and having little to do with the Enterprise’s actual orientation—the planet’s surface appeared, slowly rolling past, showing storms, bands of clouds, and endless stretches of lifeless brown rock. Wherever the atmosphere had come from in so short a time, the planet’s surface had unquestionably been scoured clean by its sun’s nova.

  Above the planet’s surface, Kirk saw stars, but nothing else.

  “You said there was an object, Mr. Kelso?”

  Kelso’s hands moved over his controls. “Yes, sir. But it’s small…no…no, sir, there’s the problem…it’s fragmentary. Going to full magnification.”

  The viewscreen wavered again, and Kirk stood up in his chair.

  The object was a body. Without an environmental suit of any kind.

  “Spock, analysis.”

  “Andorian, sir. Quite dead. Most probable cause, explosive decompression.”

  “Any sign of his ship?”

  “Scanning,” Spock said.

  “Sweeping with tractor beam,” Alden added. “Multiple contacts, sir.”

  Kirk sat back down. He hated mysteries. “Isolate the largest pieces. Let’s take a look.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “I have the debris now, Captain,” Spock said. “Plates of duranium, nucleated ceramic tiles…”

  “Those are used as heat shields, aren’t they?” Kirk asked.

  “Yes, sir. In small, atmospheric-entry vehicles.”

  “I’ve got tractor-beam contact with a big chunk of it, sir,” Alden said.

  The viewscreen image rippled as a new sensor angle filled it.

  The object in the tractor beam looked like half an egg, made of metal, trailing cables, wires, other debris.

  “What is that?” Kirk asked. “Give me a scale.”

  Before Alden or Spock could answer, the object rotated enough to give Kirk the information he needed.

  There was a second Andorian body strapped into a deceleration couch. The object was only about five meters across.

  “Escape pod?” Kirk asked.

  Spock confirmed his conclusion. “Andorian in design. Judging from the temperature, it decompressed approximately eighty minutes ago.”

  Kirk worked out the relativistic timing in his head. “So, allowing for the speed-of-light travel of the alpha-radiation bursts you detected, that would mean the pod was destroyed about an hour after the detonations took place, so it could have been attacked by the Klingons.”

  Kirk decided that Spock’s reaction—he raised both eyebrows a few millimeters—was that of a flabbergasted Vulcan. “Your calculations are…remarkably correct.”

  Another point for the captain, Kirk thought. “But what about the logic of the situation, Spock? What pattern of events accounts for what we’ve found?”

  Spock thoughtfully regarded the damaged Andorian escape pod as it tumbled on the viewscreen. “One possibility is a space battle, fought in orbit of this planet with primitive fission weapons, between the Andorians and someone other than the Klingons. The Andorian corsair might have been badly damaged. Then, approximately an hour after the fission attack ended, two of the crew attempted to escape in this pod, and the Klingons became involved in the conflict by destroying it.”

  Like the rest of his bridge crew, Kirk was transfixed by the wreckage on the viewscreen. But he couldn’t help feeling the possibility Spock had outlined was only half the story.

  “Mr. Alden,” Kirk said, “can you get a spectral readout from the broken edge of the pod’s main hull?”

  “Yes, sir,” Alden acknowledged promptly. He adjusted controls, looked back at Spock. “Mr. Spock, I’m sending the results to your station.”

  Spock called up the readout on his center screen.

  “What’s the verdict, Mr. Spock?” Kirk asked. “That isn’t a structural fracture, is it?”

  Spock turned to Kirk. “No, sir. The spectral pattern of the duranium indicates the hull was cut open by exposure to a beamed weapon.”

  Kirk felt a chill raise gooseflesh on his skin. The mission was more than first contact, now. It could very well be war. “Tell me, Mr. Spock…what kind of an enemy picks off the escape pods of a ship it never battled?”

  “Logically, an opportunistic enemy who wishes to stay on the winning side,” Spock answered.

  Then Lee Kelso gave the precise answer Kirk had been waiting for. “Captain, coming up on the horizon! Klingon battlecruiser!”

  Kirk’s response was automatic. “Red alert. Battle stations.” Behind Kirk, Lieutenant Tanaka immediately complied and at once red lights flashed and sirens pulsed throughout the ship.

  Kirk braced himself in his chair, spoke loud enough to be heard over the alarms. “I want that ship onscreen, Mr. Alden. Shields up and phasers on standby.”

  The viewscreen wavered again, and the ominous silhouette of a D-6 cruiser appeared against the stars. Its slender neck and teardrop command-and-weapons center stretched out from a squat and solid propulsion unit to create the impression of a crouching predator ready to spring or a deadly snake about to strike. Either way, pure Klingon.

  But even as Kirk prepared himself to give the order that would propel himself, his ship, and his crew into battle, he saw there was another possibility which neither he nor Spock had stopped to consider.

  The Klingon ship was not alone.

  It orbited in formation with a craft five times its size; long, sleek, each line and segment flowing smoothly into the next, all of it covered in a featureless, completely reflective hull within which the Klingon ship appeared in shimmering distortion.

  “That’s not a ship I recognize,” Kirk said quietly, despite the clamor of alarms.

  “That configuration is not in any of the identification lists,” Spock confirmed.

  Even though Kirk knew he should now wait for more information and further analysis, he also realized he had found the object of his race, and that the Klingons had found it first.

  “Orders, Captain?” Spock asked.

  Kirk faced his decision. A battle mission against the Klingons, or a first contact mission with the aliens in the remarkable ship?

  He knew what he wanted to do.

  But he also knew what was right.

  “All crew stand down from red alert,” Kirk said. “Lieutenant Tanaka, open hailing frequencies.”

  “Aye, sir,” Tanaka said. The alarms stopped. The red lights ceased flashing.

  “We are getting a response from the alien vessel,” Tanaka said. “Visual signal coming in.”

  “Onscreen,” Kirk said.

  The viewscreen wavered, and the two vessels vanished, replaced by an image that made Kirk open his mouth in surprise.

  “My name is Norinda,” the alien said, and her voice was as warm, and soft, and seductive as she was beautiful.
<
br />   Kirk tried to speak, but his throat was suddenly dry. He had never seen any woman so…incredibly attractive.

  “What’s the matter?” Norinda said teasingly, as if she knew every thought and image flashing through Kirk’s racing mind. “Does your species not speak?”

  “I’m…” Kirk coughed. “I’m Captain Jim Kirk of the Enterprise. I…” He couldn’t finish.

  Norinda delicately licked her lips and smiled brilliantly. “I’m so happy you came to visit me, Captain Kirk. You did come to visit me, didn’t you?”

  Kirk nodded, his breath and voice deserting him.

  “Oh, good,” Norinda said. “I’ve been waiting for someone just like you.” She smiled again, and Kirk felt his chest melt. “Come see me, Captain Kirk. I want to play.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  BAJOR, STARDATE 55596.5

  KIRK LIFTED HIS FACE to the sun and inhaled the thick, green, living scent of the Inland Sea. Each time the small boat’s pointed prow splashed over a swell, another spray of water mist enveloped him, and the sensation of its cooling and drying on his face, the taste of its salt on his lips, they connected him to this world and this time as if he could be no other place.

  He looked over at Picard, sitting opposite on the rounded gunwale of the air-inflated boat, saw he was doing the same—face into the wind and the sun and the spray.

  “This is the only thing missing from the bridge of a starship,” Kirk called out to Picard.

  Picard grinned at him. “Just what I was thinking.”

  Then the deep purr of the propulser unit diminished and Kirk rocked forward, the boat slowing. He glanced back at Sedge Nirra, where the white-haired Bajoran stood beside the propulser at the boat’s stern.

  “Almost there,” Sedge shouted. He pointed ahead.

  Kirk and Picard both looked forward to see a series of small, inverted orange pyramids bobbing in the water. There were two dozen at least, Kirk counted, spread out over about a hectare of the surface.

  “Foundation markers,” Picard explained. “Each one of those buoys indicates an intersection of walls or roadways in the site below.”

  “Correct, Picard,” Sedge said. “The yellow markers indicate an artifact field. Over there…and there…”

  Kirk looked to port to see that some of the markers in that direction were yellow, though the deepening rust of the sky was beginning to make it difficult to distinguish between the yellow and orange. He looked back, past Sedge, to see the beach about two hundred meters distant. Beyond it, up a small rise, the rounded outlines of the camp’s tents. And at the far horizon, the eastern sky already indigo.

  Reflexively, Kirk looked up to check the stars. He could see two of Bajor’s moons, each half the apparent size of Earth’s, one of them silver, another intriguingly banded green and blue. Near them, he saw a cluster of four twinkling stars, and he watched carefully to see if any moved, marking them as satellites or spacecraft.

  Sedge must have seen what had caught his attention, and called out, “We call those the Five Brothers.”

  Kirk answered, “I only see four.”

  Sedge laughed, pointed southeast toward the one Bajoran constellation Kirk knew: Denorios. “Because the fifth brother was the wisest one. He’s missing because he dwells in the Temple.”

  “Why are the other four up there?” Kirk asked.

  “The first was vain,” Sedge said. He twisted the control wand that angled up from the propulser and the motor cut out entirely. “The second was greedy.” He tossed a small inertial anchor from the stern. “The third was…well, there’s no Standard word for it. Let’s say he was…unmindful of his father-in-law’s advice regarding the gathering of bateret leaves.” Kirk looked over at Picard, but Picard shrugged, apparently not knowing what that meant, either, though it was obviously a serious transgression on Bajor.

  “What about the fourth one?” Kirk asked.

  Sedge crouched down to move forward in the small boat, so he could sit near Kirk and Picard. “Ah, well, he’s B’ath b’Etel. The smallest, dimmest star—the one to the left. The farthest from Bajor and the Temple.”

  “What was his crime?” Picard asked.

  “Oh, not a crime,” Sedge said, obviously enjoying his recounting of Bajoran folklore. “The brothers were turned into stars for their sins. That’s an important cultural distinction in the old stories. Crimes are against people and property. Sins are against the Prophets and their guidance.”

  “All right,” Kirk said, “what was B’ath b’Etel’s sin?”

  “The cruelest of all. He found a Tear of the Prophets, and he tried to keep it for himself.”

  Picard glanced to the southeast where the first pale glow of the Denorios Belt was beginning to stand out from the dusk-darkened sky. “Let me guess. The fifth brother found it and gave it to the Bajoran people.”

  “Not quite. He found it, but it had been…spoiled, I suppose the word would be…by being the object of a sin. That meant it was not fit to be shared by the Bajoran people. So the fifth brother, B’ath h’Ram, returned it to the Temple, and he dwells there still.”

  Kirk tried to find the moral in the story, but it eluded him. “So the Bajoran people were denied a Tear of the Prophets because of one man’s sin?”

  Sedge nodded. “Oh, yes. We Bajorans are a deeply spiritual people, Kirk. We are taught from birth that a sin against the Prophets not only brings spiritual harm to ourselves as individuals, but to all the members of our community.”

  “Sounds harsh,” Kirk said.

  “But inspires conformity,” Sedge replied. “Without that trait, I doubt Bajoran culture would have survived virtually unchanged for tens of thousands of years as it has.”

  Kirk chose not to respond. This was no time to share with his host his own personal belief in the necessity of change.

  Sedge seemed to realize it was time for another topic of discussion. “Politics and religion, hmm, Kirk? Inseparable on Bajor. But not the best choice among strangers at sea.” He leaned carefully over the side of the boat near Picard. “The water’s very clear today. Can you see down there…follow the rope from the marker…”

  Kirk looked down from his side of the boat, and saw that Sedge was correct. Though the sun was low in the sky, it still was bright enough to show bottom, where wild loops and curves of refracted light shimmered across rippled dunes of sand. “What’s the depth?” Kirk asked, not yet used to the interplay of Bajoran sunlight, atmosphere, and seawater. The optical characteristics of each Class-M world tended to be slightly different.

  “Here…fifteen meters more or less,” Sedge said. “Do you see the wall?”

  Kirk found the anchor for the marker’s rope, and beside it saw a straight line of shadow. “I see it.”

  “It’s the boundary wall of a large complex of enclosed furnaces used to fire clay tablets,” Sedge explained.

  “Written tablets?” Picard asked.

  “Tabulations, bills of lading, promissory notes, and histories among others. One of the richest treasure troves of artifacts is about fifty meters farther out—the facility’s trash pile. If a tablet broke during firing, they tossed it into a series of pits. We have enough pieces to keep a generation of undergraduate students busy for years, reconstructing the business records and literature of this place.”

  Kirk could hear the pride and the wonder in Sedge’s voice. This wasn’t a dead city in the waters beneath them. To Sedge Nirra, it was alive.

  “Where would archaeology be without trash heaps,” Picard said lightly.

  Sedge laughed.

  “But this isn’t why we came out here,” Picard added.

  “No,” Sedge agreed as he settled into a crouch on the thin floor of the boat. The rubberlike material moved up and down as the gentle swells passed under it.

  “So what did happen to Professor Nilan?” Picard asked.

  “On that point, there is no disagreement,” Sedge answered. “The poor fellow was recharging batteries and one of them was defectiv
e. When he pressed it into the power converter…well, he probably never knew what happened.”

  “Then at what point does the disagreement begin?” Picard continued.

  Kirk was content to keep his place and his silence. Picard had a detective’s mind and eye for detail, and Kirk let him conduct the hunt for clues. Kirk was more interested in watching Sedge as he spoke with Picard, looking for signs that the man was or wasn’t saying all that he knew.

  To Kirk, the businessman was a bit too eager to change the subject. But whether that meant he had something to hide, or simply preferred not to talk about Nilan’s death, Kirk couldn’t be sure.

  “The disagreement begins seventy years ago.” Sedge’s odd, short laugh caught Kirk’s attention.

  “With the occupation?” Picard asked.

  “More than a decade free of Cardassians,” Sedge said, “but some of my fellow Bajorans are still quick to see their gray hands everywhere.”

  Picard spoke slowly, as if not quite certain what Sedge was implying. Kirk wasn’t sure himself. “Professor Rowhn believes Professor Nilan was murdered by the Cardassians?”

  “Murdered at their behest is more like it.”

  “Why?”

  Sedge sat back on his heels before he spread his arms as if to encompass the entire Inland Sea. “Choose your conspiracy, Picard. Nilan led a resistance cell responsible for the deaths of scores of Cardassians. His murder was one of revenge. Or, the Cardassian Ministry of Agricultural Reform chose to flood this valley in order to cover up a mass grave of Bajoran civilians, and the Cardassian officers responsible are determined to keep the truth of their atrocities concealed. Or…” Sedge resumed his hunched-forward position on the boat’s thin floor, looked at Picard. “Do you really want me to continue?”

  Picard was about to bring Sedge’s litany to an end, but Kirk wasn’t ready. “Yes. I’d like to hear more.”

  “Would you?” It was more of a challenge than a question.

  “As far as I know,” Kirk said, “the Cardassian military is nowhere near its former, pre-Dominion War strength. With a world to rebuild, how could they possibly gather the resources to mount a clandestine assassination attempt on Bajor?”