by Diane Carey
Shucorion pursed his lips in thought, his eyes fixed on Maidenshore. “Very passionate,” he uttered. “These warships . . . they’re strong? Powerful?”
Since he couldn’t see any screens or displays, Maidenshore swung his hand in the general direction of outthere. “You saw those two ships I came here with? Those are Orions. They’re the most powerful civilization in our part of the galaxy, except for the Federation. They’re the only ones who’ve been able to resist Federation imperialism. But those Orion ships out there, Federation’s finally got them beat. Those ships are nothing compared to the warships leading that armada out there.”
“Federation ships are better than Orion?”
“See those two ships? We started with five. We went up against one—just one—Federation ship. Now we’re down to this, and we had to run to live. Despite our damage, we came ahead at high warp to keep Starfleet from pillaging still another civilization.”
“Starfleet . . . Starfleet . . .”Shucorion tasted the word. He seemed to digest quickly whatever Maidenshore said.
Better watch out for that.
“I came ahead to warn you. That’s no colony—it’s an invasion! By the time they arrive, they’ll have all sixty thousand of those people brainwashed into fighting anybody for them. You’ll be facing an army of hypnotized slaves.”
Pausing briefly, Shucorion turned a little to look at another of his own kind, to share a silent communication before turning back to Maidenshore. “And you . . . what do you want?”
“For you to join us!” Maidenshore spread his hands in a welcoming embrace of all he saw. “Together, we can fight them! We already have an ace—see, they don’t expect me to be here. They won’t know you’ve been warned. If you can separate away the fighting ships, distract them, cut them away from the transports. Then the Orions and I can take the transports away. Maybe not all of them, but a few. Enough to wake them out of their hypnosis, maybe come back and help you keep fighting. I don’t know—I’m not a military man. All I know is they have to be stopped from spreading the disease of enslavement to another part of the galaxy.” He lowered his voice. “It is my mission in life . . . to stop this from happening to another culture.”
Shucorion stepped back, not very obviously, and took in the vision of this rough-shaven man who had been through some trial, judging by his stained clothing and his ruffled hair. Beneath the somewhat tattered exterior Shucorion saw a man who had until recently been well fed and in some favor. Other than the tattering, this Maidenshore’s clothing was expertly made, tailored, layered, and matched.
“A moment,” he requested, and began to turn to Dimion for a short council.
Maidenshore nodded. “If you don’t want to join me, at least get out of the way and I’ll save your people myself.”
Shucorion stopped turning, leaving Dimion confused. Instead, he held out his hand and pointed at the glaze-blade on Dimion’s belt.
Without a word, Dimion unlatched the weapon and placed it in his avedon’s hand.
Like a shot of energy arching between power sources, Shucorion drove the newcomer to his knees, engaging the glaze-blade’s electrodes against Maidenshore’s throat. The big man bent backward against Shucorion’s grip, but could not fall away. His arms flailed to his sides. His lips fell open in a silent gasp at the sensation of energy threatening his artery.
His own mind burning, Shucorion leaned close to this new person, so close he could smell the interior of the Orion ship lingering upon the man’s clothing. The glaze-blade sizzled in his hand. Through it he felt the thud of Maidenshore’s pulse.
“Truth,” he demanded.
A finger’s breadth from dying, Maidenshore gasped a pitiful breath and fixed his gaze on Shucorion’s. The Blood men watched. No one moved.
Maidenshore tried to swallow, but failed.
“I . . . I’m a criminal on the run—I came out here with the arma—the colonists. I made a deal with the Orions that they could have ten of those transports, but the deal went sour. I had to escape. The Orions are about to kill me. To save my skin I pretended to be working with you—I was going to turn myself over to Starfleet—until I saw your ships. . . . If you don’t go along and pretend to be on my side, the Orions’ll kill me.”
“You are of Federation?”
“Yes,” Maidenshore choked. “You—obviously—came here to—meet them—Why don’t you tell me what you need? I know a lot.”
Shucorion’s eyes narrowed as tension set into his face. He felt the stares of Dimion and the other Blood men, wondering what their avedon would do with this person who had come out of nowhere. Was this another flash of his personal magic? This Maidenshore had come out of nothing, a man of Federation, who knew what was on the way here.
“I want them to turn back,” he admitted.
Maidenshore grunted with effort as the pressure on his throat decreased a bit. “So do I. Except I want them broken up. What do you care if I take ten of those ships? As long as they go away? Right?”
“How will we know which are the fighting ships?”
“I’ll tell you.”
“And you will tell me how to get on board the Starfleet vessels?”
“Sure, we can come up with something.”
“And what I can do once I get there to make them turn back? You will give me information that will affect them? You understand the way they think?”
At this, in a single sudden flood, the fear dropped out of Maidenshore’s eyes. In spite of his being bent backward with a weapon to his neck, he became abruptly confident and met Shucorion’s eyes without a flinch.
“Buddy,” he gagged, “I understand them better than they understand themselves. And if you don’t want to believe that those people will eventually dominate this cluster, then go ahead and use that thing on me.”
Again, fortune worked on the side of a Blood, on the side of Shucorion because he dared to ask incautious questions. Out of the Blind a chance had arisen. Was it an advantage or part of the Blood Curse? He couldn’t tell, until he acted upon this new turn.
He knew Dimion was watching and longed to explain to him. If we are in a burning building, it’s less risky to jump off the roof than stay in the building. Come with me. Jump.
Clicking off the weapon, he brought it away from Maidenshore’s neck.
“I will save your . . . skin.” He stood back, and handed the glaze-blade back to Dimion.
His chest heaving, the man called Maidenshore struggled to his feet and wobbled briefly, then brushed the wrinkles out of his sleeves. He gazed at Shucorion with a strange expression.
“Had to come across the galaxy,” Maidenshore declared, “to meet a man I could respect.”
Enterprise
“Red alert. Advise Beowulf to go to yellow alert and stand by at the rear of the convoy.”
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
On the upper deck, seated at the science station, Spock turned and reported on the transfer of troubling data from way out there. “Sir, American Rover’s preliminary scans suggest massive external damage to the barges and to the lightship. Both barges have been hull-ruptured and the contents contaminated. Lightship’s hull is intact, but these data are inconclusive.”
Jim Kirk felt the shadows on his face from the bridge lights as the colors shifted to alert scarlet. Reducted lighting was one of the many ways the Expedition had been conserving power over the long weeks. “Our sensors’ll do better,” he grumbled.
Spock offered him a brand of sympathy. “Of course.”
“Any word about the lightship keeper? What’s his name again?”
“Sardoch, sir. Incoming life signs are variegated and inaccurate.”
“Sir,” Uhura broke in, her hand to her earpiece, “Captain Smith has sent a boarding party led by Colonel Glass and Mr. Carpenter to the Hatteras to investigate. . . . Sir, the supply barges have been hull-breached. Heavy damage . . . most of the supplies have been contaminated.”
She sounded tired, perhaps beyond shock.
The amount of bad news throughout this voyage had been oppressive enough without this one heavy slam. Only as she listened to the rest of the message did a flicker of hope come into her birdlike eyes. “Captain, they also say they have survivors.”
A twinge of both hope and despair caught Kirk in the gut. That could mean almost anything. “Survivors? More than one?”
“Apparently, sir.”
“Spock, was there more than one attendant at the lightship?”
“Only Sardoch, sir.”
“Then I hope the Rover went in armed.”
Both barges, contaminated. Kirk’s skin tightened. All their reserve supplies and rations for Gamma Night. The bad news meant an even harder voyage to Belle Terre. What had happened? There was no one else in this area of space for six sectors in any direction, no reports of territorial challenge, no spacefaring cultures, nobody to cause any trouble.
A lonely place, isolated and undisturbed, with a completely uneventful history, until now. A peaceful and purposeful journey through the velvet darkness of space. One direction, no course changes, no speed adjustments, just a stressless warp two all the way. What a joke.
They’d all looked forward to a boring voyage out to the Hatteras. Kirk had expected his biggest problems to involve the typical brawls and irritation that tended to break out when people unaccustomed to space travel were sardined into ships and told to sit down for a few months. His most likely problem would be the sheer boredom that came with traveling on ships.
If only. For weeks there had been nothing but bulkhead-to-bulkhead troubles. Just when he thought things were starting to go right, the lightship’s signal had gone dark. That was eight days ago. Kirk had immediately dispatched American Rover to plow ahead, but at her top speed of warp four, she had just arrived yesterday. At warp six, the starship could be much quicker, but space was very, very big. The Expedition would be several more days arriving.
Uhura broke him out of his silent complaints. “Sir, Governor Pardonnet has beamed aboard. He wants to know why we’re ordering the Expedition to stop.”
“That’s all I need,” Kirk muttered. “Tell him to come up here. Contact the privateer ships and tell them to maintain alert. Have the other vessels go to alert status, but maintain speed and formation. Halt all beamings. Command communications only. Mr. Sulu, break formation with the Expedition and let’s get to the Hatteras. Emergency warp six.”
Sulu glanced at him. “Warp six, sir.”
By the time Evan Pardonnet arrived on the bridge, the starship was already a quarter of the way across the gulf between the convoy and the lightship. The convoy would take another day at warp two.
“Why are we getting a yellow alert warning for the whole train?” the governor asked. Apparently the yellow alert had caught him out of the shower. He was wearing a T-shirt and drawstring pants, with hastily pulled-on boots. One pantleg was tucked in, the other running free. “And why is Enterprise pulling away? I just barely got on board before they shut down beaming authority!”
Kirk prowled the command deck. “We’ve had a report from our pathfinders that the lightship and the stock barges have been violated.”
The governor’s young face took on a sudden age. “Violated? What’s that mean?”
“Means attacked.”
“My God, our supplies! They were supposed to be safe way out here!”
“We thought they would be.” Kirk offered an apologetic glance that Pardonnet didn’t take well. “You don’t look good, Evan.”
The governor grimaced and drew a nauseated breath. “Just indigestion.”
“Have you seen the medic on Mable Stevens about it?”
“He says I’m still spacesick. Captain Chalker just sort of chuckles at me and winks at his wife.” Pardonnet braced himself on the ship’s rail. His expressive eyes were crimped with worry. “Are you sure about this? It’s not just a collision or a miscommunication?”
“American Rover’s at the scene. They’ve recovered the lightship keeper, injured and unconscious. Their medic is stabilizing him, but they can’t speak to him yet. They report they’ve scanned the barges and picked up residue of weapons discharge and that the supply barges’ hulls have multiple ruptures.”
“Oh, no . . .” Pardonnet’s hands began to shake. “What if all the supplies are compromised? What if we have nothing left? We counted on the food and medicine to get us through, then give us a jumpstart on the planet. How are we going to get the rest of the way?”
“The hard way.” A chill of responsibility ran up through Kirk’s spine and cramped his shoulders. He was determined to keep his temper. People expected more from him than the other captains. This could turn out to be a critical moment for the whole Expedition and the Belle Terre project, if he didn’t “handle it” right.
He approached Pardonnet passively. “You’re not giving up, are you?”
Inconsolable, Pardonnet shook his head. “Starfleet never should’ve sent the barges ahead. They should never have been let out of our sight! We could’ve protected them.”
“Governor, if I may,” Spock intruded from the upper deck, “the barges show signs of high-yield energy torch residue. That is a sign of a major conflagration. Whatever happened to them would certainly have cost lives had it come upon unprepared Expedition vessels. With this warning, we have the chance to reinforce ourselves and fend off future attacks.”
Confused, Pardonnet shifted his shoulders in discomfort and looked at Kirk. “What’d he just say?”
“He’s saying the barges acted as a buffer between us and whatever force attacked them. We have the chance to fortify ourselves, rearrange our formation for optimum—”
“But what about all our supplies!”
“We’ll have to do without them.”
“Captain, you can’t really expect . . . we can’t . . .”
The end of that sentence withered before it came out. Pardonnet’s hot face turned gray. He clamped his lips and fixed his eyes on the forward screen, hoping to see something other than what he knew must be coming out of the star-dotted darkness.
Attention instantly shifted from the civilian aspect of the voyage to the military. All eyes moved to Kirk, except Evan Pardonnet’s. The governor stared at the wide view of space before them, and at the suddenly uncertain future.
“ETA, Mr. Chekov?” Kirk requested.
“Seventeen minutes at this speed, sir,” Chekov answered.
A very long seventeen minutes.
Chapter Twenty
“SIR, ACCORDING to the autolog, the attack occurred eight days ago.”
“Just when the lightship beacon went dark.”
Jack Carpenter from the American Rover renewed a few of Kirk’s beliefs that Starfleet people weren’t the only ones who could get things right. By the time Kirk, Spock, and Pardonnet arrived on the lightship Hatteras, the beacon vessel was already secure and stationed with armed guards from the Rover.
Not that there was anything left to secure from. Whatever attack had struck here was eight days over with, according to the cold and dried-up residue that could still be tracked and the hull ruptures loaded with frozen self-sealant.
Secure situation? Kirk’s internal alarms said no. Trusting his instincts, he kept his hand on his phaser as he ran a glance along the line of unexpected occupants in the wide-bodied lightship. The usually empty signal vessel was crammed full of survivors, at least sixty of them. Aliens.
Right away Kirk noticed they were a handsome people, without mixed races. Obviously they were part of an isolated planetary system without much intermixing, or the intermixing had happened eons ago and was finished. Not unusual, but becoming less normal for the constantly fluid Federation.
This, though, wasn’t Federation space. Things in this star cluster would be different, like the early days of his first five-year exploratory mission, where anything around any corner was entirely new.
These people were humanoid, a strikingly typical formation in nature. McCoy had explained
it to him once, a while ago, when it mattered—evolution had discovered early that anything going against the stream needed the senses on one end and the propulsion on the other. Four limbs worked well because extra ones got in the way and fewer didn’t function as well. Two legs were best. Binocular vision, a braincase, upright pelvis, knees, elbows, fingers, the beautiful opposable thumb that made technology possible . . . humanoid.
Humanoid, but not human. Their complexions were sapphire to smoke gray, their hair mostly in the brown spectrum, some bending back toward the red. Good cheekbones. They wore simple pants, soft boots, and belted tunics in blocks of solid colors. No badges, no pins, no bands of rank, just patches of crayon colors. All of them were male.
Somehow it was both comforting and disturbing to see the similarities. Kirk also understood, from sheer experience, that sometimes humanoids, because of their natural passion and intellect, could be much more brutal about destroying each other than destroying anyone else. He didn’t know yet who they were, where in the equation of attack they belonged.
Outside, docked to the lightship, were two grimlooking supply barges, decimated. The amount of foodstuffs and supplies that could be salvaged would fit into a duffel bag. Not disaster, but the dawn of great stress for the Expedition.
“Any word on the lightship keeper?” Kirk asked.
“He’s still unconscious,” Carpenter said. “It’s a blunt-impact head trauma, not a weapon injury. He got knocked around pretty badly.”
“Remand him to Dr. M’Benga on the Mercy Ship right away.” Kirk scanned the line-up of bruised, battered, weak survivors. Now, questions.