They were obviously holding back. Of course, we might have seen the Talons in real field action sooner if their pitcher had let any of the Pioneers actually hit anything during those first three innings. All we knew for sure by then was that their pitcher had the accuracy of a MACO sharpshooter, and had speed to match.
But they didn’t leave us wondering what they could do for long. When they went to bat at the top of the fourth, we got our first real sense of how much damage technology-caste Gorns could really do. I hoped at the time that that first Gorn home run would turn out to be just a lucky fluke, but somehow I could already tell that I was indulging in pure wishful thinking. Maybe the Gorn had only been toying with us at the start of the game, testing us even though that cost them five base hits and two batted-in runs. Or maybe Lipinski was already starting to get tired up on the mound. Whatever the reason, that first solid Gorn hit put the Pioneers squarely on notice—along with several of the spectators in the right-field bleachers, who nearly got mowed down by that first ballistic home run. Fortunately, the only injury was to another Gorn bat, which was just about vaporized in the hitter’s claws—along with Blaithin Lipinski’s prospect of earning her sixth perfect game that day.
According to the holobroadcasts of this game, and even some of the more speculative holoprograms it has inspired over the years, that Gorn home run marks the moment when all hell began to break loose for the Pike City Pioneers.
That’s not far from the truth. The Talons immediately went into overdrive. Either they’d decided to quit toying with us at last, or their game had finally begun to click. Either way, they started scoring one railgun-fast hit after another. Nearly all of their swings were not only connecting, they were staying well out of foul territory. A few hits went on long, high arcs that were easy pickings for the Pioneers’ fielding staff. But most of them were legitimate doubles and triples, in-the-park home runs, or out-of-the-ballpark, damned-near-escape-velocity homers.
Of course, the Talons didn’t chalk up so many triples and in-the-park homers because their baserunners couldn’t get around the diamond quickly.
You should forget all about the slowpoke warrior-caste Gorn. The Talons’ baserunners made Talarian whippets look like paraplegic voles. These guys were fast. By the time the Pioneers got another turn at the plate, the Gorn had evened the score, passed the home team, and left ’em six runs behind. And that was only the beginning of the Pioneers’ humiliations, even after Kornelius rotated Lipinski off the mound and replaced her with Hank Gordimer, the relief pitcher.
And the Pioneers’ secret weapon, as it turned out.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Jake. Anyway, by the seventh-inning stretch, the score stood at seventeen to four, in the Talons’ favor. And the Gorn were poised to go right on widening their lead once they picked up their bats again for the eighth inning. Even though Gordimer, with his at least theoretically fresh arm, was on the mound, the Talons’ hitting had swept over the Pioneers like a force of nature. No organic creature, let alone a reptilian one, had any right to have such lightning-quick reflexes, or such perfect hand-eye… er, claw-eye coordination.
A lot of games would have been effectively finished long before this point. The trailing team would have been just too demoralized to do anything but go through the motions—until a last death-blow pitch finally put them out of their misery.
That’s not the Pioneers. Too much of the blood of Cestus III’s original settlers flows through their veins.
As bad as the game was going for them, the Pioneers did manage to score two more runs during the middle third of the game—right in the midst of receiving what Pioneers third baseman Yusef Farouk used to call a “clobberation” from the Gorn batting rotation. Was the Talons’ pitching starting to get soft?
That’s the likeliest scenario, given what happened in the bottom of the eighth. I suppose that’s why this particular game has become such a popular jumping-off point for holoprogrammers over the years. What would have happened if the game had been played right through to the end? If the circumstances had worked out just a little differently, would the Pioneers have found a way to exploit the weakness on the mound that Kornelius told me he’d seen as early as inning five? Would the Pioneers have somehow got their second wind and evened up the score? Would they have pulled ahead of the Talons after that surprise eighth-inning meltdown? Like your father always said, you can never overestimate the role of contingency in the outcome of a baseball game.
Let’s talk about that “meltdown on the mound” the Talons suffered during inning eight. How much of it were you able to see?
At least as much as anybody who was there and paying close attention to the field, instead of slipping out early to try to beat the hovercar traffic, or running to the concession stands for one last beer. As a matter of fact, what happened on the mound at the bottom of the eighth made me wonder if I’d had one too many. At least at first.
Can you describe what you saw?
It was the creepiest thing I’d seen since the Dominion’s Founders were at our throats. The Talons’ pitcher started to look unsteady, weaving on his big, clawed feet. Then his uniform and his skin began to ripple, as though I was watching him through the haze that rises off spaceport tarmacs during the hottest weeks of Cestus III’s northern summer.
But it wasn’t the air that was distorting my vision. The Gorn pitcher’s body was… changing, right before my eyes. His head lengthened and his limbs were extending, as though his entire body had just transformed into so much taffy, and an invisible giant had started pulling on it from both ends. He even sprouted a third leg while I was watching. He seemed to be in agony.
He must have been undergoing the process called “reversion.” The Gorn had just learned the hard way that they had an Undine infiltrator in their midst.
And it was quite a diplomatic embarrassment for the Gorn, believe me. That little revelation happened right before the watchful eyes of two entire quadrants.
Most of the holos taken after that point in the game don’t shed much light on what happened immediately after the S’Yahazah City Talons’ pitcher reverted to his natural form. I know that Cestus III’s Starfleet garrison and the planet’s civil defense authorities dispatched first responders to help with the spectator evacuation, and with the effort to keep the creature contained inside the stadium.
You can still see the scorch marks from the disruptors the Talons used to bring the creature down, way out there on the left-field fence.
So the Gorn didn’t wait for Starfleet or the local fire department to handle the problem.
Well, a lot of us thought the way the Gorn handled it was better than possibly giving an Undine agent an opportunity to rampage across Pike City, where the thing might have assumed a new human identity. Or it might have tried to sneak off the planet disguised as a member of the Klingon diplomatic team. Looking back, I think that would have served Ja’rod right. Or Ambassador B’vat, depending on the creature’s preference.
The Cestus Baseball League officials initially handed the game to the Pike City Pioneers, since the Talons had disqualified themselves.
They had deviated from the approved team roster they’d laid out in the pregame agreement, which specified that the Talons were to play with an all-Gorn squad. And even if they hadn’t, the genetic treatments that the Undine pitcher had to undergo in order to pass as a Gorn were the functional equivalent of a violation of the long-standing rule against performance-enhancing drugs.
That official ruling never seemed very sporting to me. I mean, the Gorn didn’t violate the roster rule intentionally. They were deceived by an Undine infiltrator, just like what happened to so many others throughout the Long War.
That’s true. But sneaking disruptor weapons into Ruth Field was no innocent mistake on the Gorns’ part. That offense alone would have got the Talons booted from the park, and the Pioneers would have been handed a default victory that way.
But none of that mattered to the Gorn. All
King Slathis cared about was that the Talons were ahead when the game ended, through no fault of his team. He was treating the game’s outcome as the Gorn victory regardless of the officials, and wanted the victor’s due per the formal diplomatic agreement governing the game. He threatened to declare all-out war against the Klingon Empire if Chancellor Martok refused to cede all the disputed border worlds to the Gorn Hegemony immediately. If some of the Gorn Hegemony’s most powerful allies and trading partners—the Romulans, the Tholians, the Breen, the Tzenkethi, and the Kinshaya—hadn’t pressured Slathis to calm down and accept Federation mediation of his Klingon disputes, Cestus III would have become ground zero in the biggest Gorn-Klingon conflict anybody had ever seen up to that point. And it all would have hit the fan immediately after the Big Game.
And it all would have been because of the Big Game, at least arguably.
If that had happened, it would have been a hell of a blotch on the sport’s reputation. Worse than any betting scandal, or the nanotech doping incident of 2035.
Why were the Romulans, the Breen, and the Gorn Hegemony’s other allies suddenly so averse to a Gorn-Klingon war?
I’m no expert, but I imagine it has to do with one of our diplomats—I think it might have been Jean-Luc Picard—pointing out to them that they all had mutual defense pacts with the Gorn Hegemony. And that that would have made King Slathis’s costly vanity war their costly vanity war.
Having the Gorn crowing that they’d won couldn’t have pleased Martok very much. The entire episode must have been something of an embarrassment to him.
Well, I don’t have any inside knowledge about that, but you’re probably right. But at least Martok could take his frustrations out on Ambassador B’vat, the man he’d assigned to oversee the whole affair.
Let’s put galactic politics and diplomacy aside for a moment. The Big Game of ’Eighty-Nine officially entered the history books as a heavily asterisked draw rather than as a clear-cut victory for the Pioneers. Nobody would say why officialdom decided to log the game that way—until very recently.
Ah. You must have heard about [the late Pike City Pioneers relief pitcher] Hank Gordimer’s funeral three weeks ago.
I have a copy of the letter he’d asked to be read aloud at his eulogy. The letter that finally cleared up the mystery surrounding the outcome of the Big Game of ’Eighty-Nine.
Well, I suppose Hank wasn’t telling tales out of school when he read that letter out loud. The league officials only asked us—Kornelius, me, the Pioneers themselves, and anybody else who happened to be in the know—not to talk about the real reasoning behind the league’s decision. They wanted us all to keep quiet about it for the rest of our lives. But they couldn’t very well stop Hank from talking after he was dead. Of course, if you’d known Hank you’d know how hard it could be to stop him from doing anything once his mind was made up.
Then just to keep you from getting sideways with the Cestus Baseball League, I’ll tell the rest of the story, for the record. Gordimer had that case of Gorn-brewed, syrupy blue booze that you mentioned earlier (Meridor is what they call the stuff, by the way). And he’d heard that some of the Talons had a real weakness for it—perhaps even their starting pitcher. So he had one of the water boys keep bringing the stuff to the Gorn dugout throughout the game. By the fifth inning, the Talons’ hurler was already so tipsy that Uncle Kornelius had noticed it from the Pioneers’ dugout. By the seventh-inning stretch, that pitcher was probably seeing double.
You’d think a life-form that hails from a place called “fluidic space” would be able to handle its liquor better than that.
Yeah, you’d think. But by inning eight, he was inebriated enough to start having trouble maintaining his molecular cohesion—and that’s no alcohol-fueled metaphor. This is the kind of thing that can only happen in baseball.
Is this a wonderful sport, or what?
Let’s return to the subject of the Klingons for a moment: You hinted earlier that Chancellor Martok might have taken his Gorn frustrations out on Ambassador B’vat.
I don’t know all the details, of course, but it’s pretty clear that all the Gorn saber-rattling that followed the Big Game marked B’vat as a huge failure in Martok’s eyes. B’vat was summarily recalled to Qo’noS the day after the game, and I’m sure Martok called him on the carpet loudly once he arrived.
But fortunately for B’vat, the ambassador had somebody handy he could take his frustrations out on before he left Cestus III.
Who was that?
Ja’rod, son of Lursa, of course. He soon found the only way he could regain the honor he’d lost because of the Gorn debacle was to serve for a few years in the Klingon Defense Force. And rumor has it that Ja’rod’s finest tour of duty aboard the I.K.S. Kang involved a lengthy assignment doing something that every Klingon alive dreads.
Okay, I give up, Kas. What was Ja’rod’s assignment?
Tribble eradication duty. It seems those fuzzy little things have been proliferating across the Alpha and Beta Quadrants ever since your father returned from an excursion to the twenty-third century he took a few decades back.
Do you think the Pioneers might be up for a rematch with the Gorns someday—provided, of course, they can keep the mound free of alcoholic saboteurs from fluidic space?
Kornelius is still one of the team owners, and he’s even more cantankerous now than he was back then. If the Gorn ever issued a challenge like that, you can be sure that Korny would take it up. In fact, you can ask him about that tonight at dinner. He might even ask you why he should insist on keeping the Undine out of the game this time. After all, those alien doppelgängers would have a pretty tough time handling nine determined Cestans. Like your father always said, baseball is all about heart.
And if the Undine didn’t have the heart to beat us in the Long War, why should we worry about what they might do to us out on the diamond, right?
Let the other team worry, whether they’ve got scales, claws, or three legs. Bring ’em on. After all, lots of things in life are worse than losing a baseball game.
Kasidy and I have dinner that evening with her brother—my uncle Kornelius—and my younger half-sister, Rebecca. Unfortunately, my travel schedule won’t let me linger over coffee and dessert after the meal. As my transport ship departs from Pike City’s Robbins Spaceport, my mind starts replaying some of the observations Dad made about baseball over the years. The first to spring to mind is, “Baseball is a lot like life, because in baseball, anything can happen.” That includes, I assume, a human victory over terrifying and determined adversaries like the Undine.
My ship reaches orbit, providing me with a spectacular vista of the ocher-and-blue world that has nurtured baseball’s rebirth and renewed growth for so many years. I look out to the sun-dappled horizon, across vast swaths of cobalt ocean, golden desert, and olive-and-emerald hickorash forests.
And I breathe a silent prayer of thanks that the game of baseball was not among the many things humanity had to sacrifice during the Long War against the Undine.
EXCERPTED FROM AN OFFICIAL KLINGON COMMUNIQUé, RECEIVED STARDATE 76429.4*
FROM: J’mpok, son of Q’thoq, Chancellor of the Klingon Empire and leader of the High Council
TO: The Federation Security Council
… On multiple occasions, Empire has officially requested the Federation’s aid in seeking out qa’meH quv [Undine] infiltrators. The Federation has refused us such assistance each time, demonstrating that the Khitomer Accords are not worth the replicated papers that carry their outmoded text.
Therefore, in the furtherance of the Klingon Empire’s security, as well as its self-evident right to expand its boundaries, I hereby consign those papers to the flames that forge our bat’leths.…
EARTH
THE HOME FRONT
Federation News Service
DATELINE—LYNNWOOD, WASHINGTON STATE,
EARTH STARDATE 76815.8*
Julietta Harter turned herself in to local police yesterday mor
ning, in connection with the murder of Kenneth Lawrence Shore, whom family members discovered in his apartment last Thursday, dead as a result of multiple stab wounds.
Until this morning, the police had assumed that Shore had struggled with a burglar, who had fled with a number of valuables from the apartment. But the police will probably revise that working theory in light of Ms. Harter’s public statement, in which she claimed to have taken the missing items from Shore’s apartment to disguise what she herself has called “an act of premeditated murder” as the result of a burglary.
An anonymous police source has admitted that detectives considered Harter a “person of interest” from the outset of their investigation, but that they had failed to locate her for several days after Shore’s death. The reliability of Harter’s confession may be in doubt, however, since she reportedly has a history of making “wild claims” about her neighbors, including Shore.
“I told the police exactly who and what Ken really was,” Harter said in her public statement. “But they didn’t want to believe one of those giant Undine bugs was living across the street from me, right under everybody’s noses, in disguise.”
When asked whether she could produce any evidence that might corroborate her assertion that Shore was a clandestine Undine agent, she said only, “Can you prove to me that he wasn’t?”
JAKE SISKO, DATA ROD #P-26
Paris, France, Earth
The silver-haired woman who greets me in the shadow of the Palais de la Concorde, the sleekly vertical nerve center of the Federation government, has to be in her seventies by now. But Esperanza Piñiero appears ageless, her effervescent smile revealing the boundless energy and enthusiasm that made her such an asset to Nanietta Bacco during her many years of service as Bacco’s chief of staff, both during Bacco’s tenure as Cestus III’s governor and as the Federation’s thirty-eighth president. As we exchange handshakes and pleasantries in the broad public courtyard that fronts the Palais, I wonder if Ms. Piñiero’s infectiously upbeat manner stems from having a first name that translates into Federation Standard as “hope.”
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