by Diane Carey
His shoulders knotted, aware of the accusing impatience of Evan Pardonnet, Kirk simply stepped to the lineup of aliens, picked one, and squared off with him.
“Take me to your leader.”
“We are Blood Many. Things were changing all around us. We had made an alliance with our eternal enemies, the Kauld, but they betrayed us. We live in a double-starred system—you know what I mean by this?”
“A binary,” Spock delivered to the Blood man who said he was in charge. “Your stars orbit each other. Though still very far away, suns are extremely powerful forces.”
The alien leader’s dark eyes lit beneath expressive brows. “We have gravity distortion and many natural disasters. Sometimes space bodies are pulled from their orbits and strike our world.”
Spock looked at Kirk. “Such a situation would cause cataclysmic disasters on a common schedule. Extra heat, tidal waves, thunderstorms, extinctions, high-level storms, and earthquakes.”
“That’s a pretty grim picture.” Evan Pardonnet gazed with both sympathy and suspicion at the leader of the survivors.
“We have weather disruptions every few days,” the blue-skinned man said. “Normal seasons are sometimes moved by months. We spend most of our time struggling to live another season. Droughts last for years. Sometimes we have no winter. Crops die, famine, ocean storms, slides . . .”
“And every few years, a war?” Jim Kirk broke into the conversation with his intuition ringing. He was determined to keep the briefing on the best track for what he had to do next.
“Then you understand,” the Blood man presumed. “Technology came slowly, but it came. We could prepare for disaster better, store more food, build better structures, recover sooner. Soon we began to look at the sky and at the god which came eventually to ravage us. We discovered it was not god, but a second sun, and that it had a planet. We concentrated on space travel, hoping to go out and find a new place to live, or at least a place of rest. We fixed to the one glimmer of hope. When we went out, we found no rest. We found only quarrelsome neighbors. They wouldn’t share what we needed, and they took what we had. Suddenly the wars started. As well as every other curse, we had war every few generations.”
“How long was the interval between wars?” Spock asked.
“If my calculations are right, about twenty-four of your years. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Not only did we have natural disasters, but we knew the enemy was coming. We built bigger weapons and prepared, sometimes struck first, because it was inevitable.”
“Who are these Kauld?” Kirk asked. “Are they different from you? What do they look like?”
“They look nothing like us. They wear decorations. Uniforms. Their skin is pale. They are weaker, because they don’t have to work as hard. They have time to entertain. They read stories. And they eat too much.”
Come to think of it, all these blue survivors were very lean. Unlike chronically hungry people, though, they were strong and bright-eyed. Their hair had luster. Possibly they were generations acclimated to subsistence living and had learned to thrive on very little. Explained the fact that having no food didn’t bother them much. No air, though . . .
“What changed that brought you this far out?” Kirk asked, forcing himself forward.
“We were given a terrible gift. Star-drive.”
“Warp power,” Kirk confirmed. “Matter-antimatter propulsion?”
“Yes. The Formless gave it to us. They thought they were doing a good thing. I suppose it would be wondrous, for anyone but Blood and Kauld.”
Kirk held up a hand. “I think I understand. With hyperlight speed, you didn’t have to wait for a twenty-four-year ellipse to bring you together anymore.”
“We knew we had to use it, because Kauld would. Now we must work even harder. And we have no recovery period. The brief hope of technology betrayed us. Now we have a continuous war, instead of war only when the ellipse brings Blood and Kauld near. Star-drive is a terrible gift for my people. The warfare will never end now.”
Though he was boiling inside, Kirk kept his tone keel-even. “Oh, we’ve found there are as many ways to end wars as there are ways to start them.”
The man looked at him. “We had to find a way, or there would be a single war until one side was finished. We made an alliance which no one enjoyed. I thought there was hope. But Kauld betrayed us. As soon as we made contact with your beacon ship, they attacked us, here, too far to run for help. Blood believed we had made a pact, an agreement to deal with the newcomers together. Kauld betrayed us. Our ship was crippled, your supply ships wrecked, my crew injured. We escaped to your beacon ship. I believe they think they killed us all, or they would have destroyed everything.”
“Where’s the wreck of your ship?”
“They towed it away. They’ll use it.”
“Did you come in a life pod?”
“Yes, a containment envelope.”
“Where is it?”
“We had to discard it because of your beacon ship’s boarding mechanism. They were incompatible.”
“Yes . . . just a moment, please. Spock—” With a nod that brought him alongside, Kirk clasped Jack Carpenter by the elbow and maneuvered the young man far enough away that they could speak privately. “What about it?”
“As far as we can detect,” Carpenter said, “he’s telling some version of the truth. We won’t know for sure until the lightship keeper wakes up, if he does. We don’t have any of the lightship’s logs.”
They paused as Evan Pardonnet, pale and over-whelmed, came to listen.
“No records survived at all?” Kirk asked Carpenter.
“Nothing. It’s completely missing. The whole bridge is mostly gutted and part of it was sheared off, completely gone. Lucky a lightship’s bridge isn’t manned, or we’d be counting corpses.”
“If we could find them.”
Dissatisfying. Not good, relying on eyewitnesses. There were too many illusions, too many ways in the active galaxy for the eye to be fooled.
Kirk tried to remain clinical, since that seemed to be where the answers lay. “What’s their general condition?”
“Bruises, a concussion, few cuts, one broken arm.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s all.”
Kirk looked at Spock for confirmation of what he was about to say. “Seems a little light for a ship-wrecking battle, doesn’t it?”
“Well, they’re tough guys,” Carpenter reckoned, as if he’d already thought of things that were just now occurring to Kirk, which was entirely probable. “These are the most industrious people any of us have ever even heard of. They’d just been through a battle, had their ship hijacked, and were left for dead on another derelict. No hope for rescue from their own culture—they said nobody knew they’d come out this far. Any survival training I’ve ever had involves stabilize your wounds, sit down, and don’t suck up all the air and wait for rescue.”
Pardonnet wiped his hand across his sweat-pearled face. “What did they do instead?”
“Look around,” Carpenter said. “They cleaned.”
Kirk glanced at the interior of the lightship. “Now that you mention it, this does seem tidy for a war zone. . . .”
Carpenter pointed as he spoke. “They’ve cleaned, sorted, fixed, mended, sealed all the cracks, labeled all of it, and even re-wove the torn carpet. In less than a week, they’ve done two-thirds of the necessary repairs to make this ship space-functional again. Can you believe sitting there weaving carpet when the odds are you’re about to suffocate and/or starve?”
Although he usually liked a testimonial of valiant behavior, Kirk didn’t warm up much to what he was hearing. “Guess I’d better start imagining it.”
“Despite the failing life-support system and no food,” Carpenter went on, “they kept working. You should see the lightship’s freight hold. Everything’s organized into piles, even though they didn’t know what some things even were. They stacked the Kleinfeld coils with the charged plugs. Nob
ody who knew what they were doing would ever put those together.”
“They demagnetize each other,” Spock agreed unnecessarily.
Carpenter looked up at him and nodded. “Right, but since they look alike, these guys stacked them perfectly over in that closet. They hung up every piece of a garment shipment that fell out of its crates. They built hangers and racks out of salvage to hang the clothes on, then built armoirs out of damaged bulkhead material so the clothes wouldn’t get dusty. They even catalogued the scrap that should’ve been jettisoned.”
Spock offered a perplexed look and asked, “I beg your pardon?”
“They kept scrap?” Kirk simultaneously asked.
“Oh, yeah!” Carpenter declared. “We couldn’t believe it. Their captain told me his people always keep everything. They never throw away anything because they never know when they might need it. And they work at using whatever they’ve kept. They really think about it. No doubt, they saved the lightship by plugging up all the leaks and cracks and repressurizing. There’s just one thing we can’t figure out, though.”
“What’s that?”
Carpenter shifted his weight thoughtfully. “Why would they work so hard? As far as they knew, they were going to die out here. There were only a couple of days’ breathable air left in the day tanks, and no food at all. It’s just luck you sent us ahead on Rover. They gave themselves a little more time by repairing everything they could figure out, but the drives were smashed, they were running out of air, they were waiting to die, but they didn’t just sit and wait. Even the port-side engine’s running again. Wouldn’t do ’em any good without a way to steer, but it’ll power up. That’s how they had enough heat to keep alive, even though the work used up more oxygen. They couldn’t work on saving themselves, so they worked on other things. They even repainted.”
“Who would do that?” Pardonnet wondered. “Who would do interior decor in a life-and-death situation? Why use up the energy?”
“One way or the other,” Carpenter confirmed with a cryptic shrug, “far as they knew, they were dead.”
“Repainted,” Kirk murmured, contemplating all he’d heard. His mind rushing, he looked at Spock. “Everybody dies sometime . . . they wanted to die working.”
“Captain Kirk,” the governor fretted, “what are we going to do now? Our supplies are gone, we’re running low on the foodstuffs, fuel, medical supplies, and everything the barges were supposed to restock, and now we’ve got—what, sixty?—more men to feed and house and treat. What does that mean?”
“It means we buckle down and get ready for a hard, hungry road.” Kirk made sure his tone was as pleasant as he could make it. A hopeful ring was elusive, but he tried. “We’ll have to use what we have instead of what we hoped to have.”
“Some of the cattle, for instance,” Spock suggested. Pardonnet gritted his teeth, tormented. “Those animals are meant to seed whole ranches and dairies once we get to Belle Terre! We don’t even have one head to a person!”
“Very small rations of protein will go a long way, Governor,” Spock suggested. “Your husbandry specialists, I’m sure, will have suggestions.”
“This is a disaster. . . .”
“It’s a setback.” Kirk glanced back at the alien leader, who was waiting patiently for whatever decision would be rendered. “An entire civilization based on grim resolution. Always recovering from one conflict while preparing for the next. Float away from each other, spend the next eighty-four years recovering, get ready to fight again . . . it’s quite a story.”
“We have encountered such things before, Captain,” Spock reminded. “Eminiar and Vendikar, for instance. People learning to live with generational warfare, acclimating to what they saw as their only path—”
“It explains their work ethic,” Pardonnet suggested, knotting his hands nervously. “Success and survival come through hard work, and that is all. Have to admire it—”
“Hard work is something you obviously don’t shy away from, Evan,” Kirk bothered to say, sensing the governor might need that muscle of resolution very soon, and right here.
Ignoring the compliment, Pardonnet asked, “What’re we going to do now?”
“We’re going to forge on.”
“With sixty more mouths to feed? How can I tell our citizens that?”
“The only alternative,” Spock suggested, “would be to remand the survivors to the custody of the Republic or Beowulf and send them back to the Federation.”
“Possibly,” Kirk considered. “At intervals of emergency warp, they might make it in a couple months.”
“No—” Pardonnet put his hand on Kirk’s arm, changing his mind very suddenly. He seemed to be getting a headache. “We can’t do that . . . they’re refugees now. This is their home space. We’re trying to make friends in the Sagittarius Star Cluster, not enemies. We have to live there from now on.”
Kirk felt his brow tighten. “We’re not that sure.”
Pardonnet looked up. “Of what?”
“Of anything he’s said.”
“Well, no, but . . . who’d make all that up? Neighbor relations is a local government issue. I’m the local government. You won’t be staying on Belle Terre, but we will be, for the rest of our lives. You’ll have to defer to me on things that affect our futures and not yours.”
“It’s my job to make sure you have a future,” Kirk vowed. “Don’t forget that.”
Though his arms ached with tension, Kirk tried to appear casual as he strode back to the Blood man leader. He knew he wasn’t fooling anybody. He wasn’t trying hard enough. His posture was stiff, eyes hard and hot, his jaw set. He stood before the taller man and glared into the dark brown eyes, daring the bruise on the man’s cheek to be a fake, a lie, a trick. “Did you know the life-support on this ship was failing?”
“Of course we knew.”
“And that your activity would shorten your time to live?”
“Yes, we knew.”
“Didn’t you want to survive?”
“We try not to want.”
Kirk paused. “Pardon me?”
“When we expect little, we’re delighted with what we get. Wanting asks for failure.”
Curious way of thinking. Thinly masking his sarcasm, Kirk commented, “You did very nicely considering you had a disaster on your hands. Everything but stenciling borders on the walls.”
“Disaster is always coming,” the Blood man said. “If we complain, bad events can always become worse. We ask your hospitality. Our men are very hungry and will consume much as long as we have it.”
“I thought you said your people were used to living on a subsistence level.”
“We eat when we have it. Don’t you?”
An irritable grumble came up from Kirk’s throat, not exactly an agreement, not exactly approval.
“We understand, certainly,” the Blood went on, “that you will now be turning back. We know you must take us to your space rather than ours, but we are prepared to deal with this.”
“You’d come back with us?” Pardonnet asked, plumbing the problem, not really comprehending the vastness they were talking about.
“We must. You know now that there are horrors ahead. Kauld will take you as a threat, the same as they take us. Your food supplies are gone now, and everything else with them. You must not go on into the Blind. You’ll have to lie still for many hours out of every day. You’ve come here with so many people . . . and space is a terrible place to die.”
Aggravating. The look on Evan Pardonnet’s face was enough to start animal sacrifices by. Which wasn’t all that far a possibility.
Unsatisfied by the half-answers he thought he was getting, Kirk resisted another urge to glance at Spock for confirmation that suspicion and doubt were orders of the moment.
Rather than making any commitments, he opted for the general. “We’ll have our medical staff take care of your wounded. You’ll be treated as guests, but you’ll be under surveillance and your access to the passenge
r ships will be strictly limited until your story is confirmed. There are certain vessels from which you may come and go, others which will require escort, and still others from which you are banned. Do you understand all that?”
“Oh, yes. Our thanks.”
“Very well. Prepare your people to transfer to the convoy. By the way . . . what’s your name?”
“My name is Shucorion.”
Chapter Twenty-one
“THERE WAS a story I heard once, about a man who inherited his grandfather’s favorite clock. He put it in his living room, and soon discovered that the clock made a loud TOCK TOCK TOCK all the time. He tried to ignore it, but eventually it was too much to take. He didn’t want to get rid of the family clock, so he called his doctor and asked what to do. Should he get hypnotized? Should he get earplugs? The doctor told him to get five chickens and put them in the living room.
“Strange prescription, but doctor’s orders, you know . . . the man went out and bought five chickens. The cackling of the chickens was so incessant that the man couldn’t take a nap or eat a meal. After a week of this, he called the doctor again, who told him to put two cows in the living room. He did that, and before long the cows’ constant mooing and stomping was louder than the TOCK and the CACKLE.
“The man was going out of his mind. He called the doctor and shouted about the TOCK CACKLE MOO. The doctor told him to get a power drill and keep it running all the time. You can imagine how that sounded. Well, this process continued until the man had a TOCK CACKLE MOO BUZZ BARK YOWL RING HOOT JANGLE BONG.
“After a month of living like this, he called his doctor and bellowed that he was about to crack and blow-torch the whole house. The doctor said, ‘Yes, you’ve reached tolerance. Open the front door and shove out everything except the clock.’ In a blind rage, the man emptied his living room of everything that made noise except his clock.
“All at once—why, a churchlike peace descended! There was complete tranquility. The man was amazed that the grandfather clock had changed! It now only made a soft, gentle tick tick tick. He called the doctor and said, ‘Sir, you are a wonder! The house is quiet now and I’m sleeping like a baby.’ And the man lived happily ever after, with his grandfather’s favorite clock ticking away peacefully in his corner.”