Death Count

by L. A. Graf

  “Um—” Haslev’s antennae quivered. “Well, there were a few minor details about the trans-shield anode I didn’t have time to explain.”

  “Such as?” Ondarken’s bronze eyes narrowed to slits.

  “Well, in the first place, you can only beam to the anode, not away from it.” Haslev swallowed. “And I’m afraid you can’t beam the transshield anode itself anywhere—you have to carry it to your intended destination.”

  “Not to mention the fact that it creates a subspace pulse on board ship every time you use it,” Sulu added.

  “What?” Kirk’s exasperated voice rose over the Orion commander’s growl. “Using the trans-shield anode was what made all our instruments go out?”

  “It’s only a minor flaw,” Haslev quavered, shrinking when Ondarken leaned over him with bared teeth. “I’m sure I can iron it out with just a little more research—”

  “I am afraid not, Mr. Haslev.” The note of certainty in Spock’s quiet voice sliced off the physicist’s spluttering. “Constance Duerring’s original theory of transporter electrodynamics clearly states that energy is generated whenever a transporter beam encounters a force shield.” The Vulcan thoughtfully steepled his long fingers in front of his chin. “In most cases, the energy is absorbed by the random rearrangement of molecules within the transported objects. Your anode device prevents that by diverting the energy to the surrounding subspace boson field, where it is re-emitted as low-frequency radiation.” Spock lifted a quizzical eyebrow. “Really, Mr. Haslev, you should know that you cannot evade the first law of thermodynamics. Energy can be neither created or destroyed, only transformed.”

  “Exactly so,” Pov Kanin agreed, his lean blue face creasing with a smug smile. “That’s why the Andorian government refused to fund Haslev’s transporter research to begin with.” He needled a malicious glance at the Orion commander. “We never thought other governments would be obtuse enough to believe Muav Haslev’s wild proposals—”

  Ondarken growled, spinning around to face the Andorian. “What did you just call me, weasel?”

  “Let me elaborate—”

  “Gentlemen!” Kirk stepped between them, apparently oblivious to the fact that either of the high-gravity aliens could have crushed him where he stood. His voice rang with stern authority. “We’re here to decide on the fate of Muav Haslev, not to squabble with each other.” He glanced at Kanin, ignoring the renegade physicist’s squeak of alarm. “The Orion commander has asked for permission to extradite Mr. Haslev so that his government can try him for treason.”

  “I must refuse,” the Andorian captain said politely. “On the grounds that Mr. Haslev committed treason against my government first.”

  Kirk’s mouth twitched up into a smile. “That certainly seems reasonable.” He turned to face Ondarken when the Orion commander growled in protest. “I’m sure that when Mr. Haslev has finished serving his prison sentence on Andor, they’ll be more than willing to let him face charges on Orion, as well.”

  “If he’s still alive by then.” Pov Kanin ignored Muav Haslev’s piteous groan from behind him. “Now, Captain Kirk, may I have your permission to find temporary housing for my crew on board your ship—and a secure cell for my prisoner?”

  “Permission granted.” Kirk glanced at Spock, amusement glittering in his eyes. “I’ll have my first officer arrange it for you, Captain Kanin. Perhaps he can explain the first law of thermodynamics to Mr. Haslev along the way.”

  “Thank you.” Kanin motioned to his crew to follow the Vulcan, pausing only long enough to cast a silent look of triumph at Ondarken before he went along. The Orion commander scowled after him, anger rumbling wordlessly in his throat.

  “I believe that concludes our business here, Commander Ondarken,” Kirk said crisply. “Unless you would like to stay to answer some questions about how your agent got on board—”

  “What about our stolen property?” The Orion glared down at Kirk. “What about the fate of the other criminals?”

  “Other criminals?” Kirk followed Ondarken’s glance to Sulu, and his mouth hardened. “Commander, my helmsman was carrying out Starfleet orders when he diverted your companion ship’s fire toward your ship.”

  “Not that!” howled the Orion in frustration. “What he did before, on Sigma One! He received the stolen property from Haslev’s conspirator, the human plant merchant who helped him escape from us. That’s how the trans-shield anode got smuggled aboard this ship!”

  “Oh, my God.” Sulu felt his stomach contract in shock when he realized what Ondarken meant. “The trans-shield anode must have been hidden inside my lily pond!”

  “Not that black marble thing Chekov kept calling a swimming pool?” Kirk looked equally stunned. “Oh, my God! That’s what he was trying to tell me—” He turned to meet the Orion’s scowl with a grim look of his own. “I’m afraid your stolen property is gone—blasted out into space along with the shuttle your agent rigged to destroy the Enterprise.”

  “Agent? What agent?” Ondarken tried to arrange his bushy eyebrows into an expression of surprise. “I deny all agents—”

  “Of course you do.” Kirk motioned the security guards forward. “Escort Commander Ondarken to the transporter room and see he gets back to his ship.”

  “Aye, sir.” Lemieux tugged at one beefy forearm, unintimidated by the glare she earned. “Let’s go, Commander Ondarken.”

  “My government will pursue the criminals on board your ship!” the Orion warned, shouting over his shoulder as he was led away. “We will sue for extradition and punish—”

  The turbolift doors cut off his diatribe midword, and Sulu felt his tense shoulders relax at last. He heard Kirk sigh, and suddenly realized how tired the captain looked. It was a mark of Kirk’s force of will that Sulu hadn’t noticed it at all during the confrontation.

  “Sir?” he asked tentatively. “May I have permission to see if Chekov is still in the bay?” Something deep inside him wouldn’t believe the Russian was really alive until he saw him.

  “Let’s both go.” Kirk headed down the vast shell of the shuttle bay, toward where engineers were rolling aside the multisectioned vacuum barrier. The volatile smell of spilled lubricant mingled with the sharp ozone scent of metal being hit by phaser torches. Bright lights among the shuttles showed where engineers still worked to cut them apart. Medical aides picked their way through the morass of twisted metal, a gravsled steadied between them. A single environmental-suited figure scrambled after them, her dark face vivid with concern.

  “The engineers must have just gotten him out.” Kirk lengthened his stride to meet them. “Bones! Is Chekov all right?”

  McCoy looked up from the blanketed form on the medical sled, his face lighting with a crooked smile. “Well, considering that I thought we were going to need a can opener to get him out, he’s doing pretty well. Some broken ribs, a whole raft of bumps and bruises—” He glanced down as Chekov made a bubbly mutter. “—and one punctured lung. Nothing I can’t fix.”

  Kirk paused beside the gravsled, Sulu crowding at his heels. Chekov looked awful—face red-purple with bruises where it wasn’t crusted with at least two colors of dried blood. His chest moved with painful shallowness beneath the blanket, thick, liquid gurgles catching in his throat with every breath. Sulu felt his own throat tighten in sympathy.

  The security officer squinted up at Kirk. “I heard—Orions.”

  “The commander of the Umyfymu came over to talk with the traitor-weasel Haslev.” Kirk’s voice turned wry. “And to demand his stolen property back.”

  “The lily pond—” Chekov coughed, then found his voice again. “I had to break it—I’m sorry, sir—”

  McCoy heaved a weary sigh. “Oh, not this again.”

  Kirk flicked an amused smile at Sulu. “I told you he was worried.”

  “Hey, Pavel, that’s okay.” Sulu crouched down beside the Russian, wishing there was some part of his friend that looked safe to touch. “I don’t need it now that my lily’
s dead.”

  “But the lizards—” Chekov’s voice held the stubbornly worried tone of someone fighting off shock. “We have to get them some other container—they can’t stay in my bathtub forever—”

  McCoy tugged meaningfully on the edge of the gravsled, scowling at Sulu until the helmsman climbed to his feet to back out of the way. “They can at least stay there until you get out of sickbay.”

  Uhura rose up on tiptoe to peek at McCoy over Sulu’s shoulder. “But, Doctor—”

  “No buts!” He stabbed a stern finger at Sulu, who backed up into Uhura in surprise. “You two go back to your cabins or something—find a home for those damned lizards!” He scowled down at Chekov when the security chief opened his mouth to protest. “You shut up and pass out before I sedate you.”

  “Bones—”

  “And you!” He fixed his fiercest glare of all on Kirk, and Sulu felt better when even the captain looked contrite. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll get up to the bridge and start back to Sigma One before these three can get us into any more trouble!”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  CHEKOV LOOKED UP from his bathroom floor when he heard Sulu enter the outer cabin.

  “Anybody home?”

  It occurred to the lieutenant that sitting on the floor of his bathroom in the dark—his dress uniform jacket tossed across the sink and his hand trailing in a bathtub full of warm water—was perhaps not the most dignified situation in which to let himself be found. After running around a hull breach in his stockinged feet, though, not to mention being cut out of an environmental suit by an engineering ensign with a phaser torch, he figured he probably didn’t have any dignity left worth worrying about. Besides, it wasn’t like Sulu was one of his security guards; he and the helmsman had known each other a long time. “I’m in here.”

  Sulu appeared in the doorway like a slim shadow, the light from the outer cabin silhouetting him until his face was too dark to see. “You okay?” he asked quietly, and Chekov nodded.

  “Just thinking.” He prodded a floating sponge with one finger and sent it drifting lazily across the bathtub, its load of passenger lizards chirping merrily. If his right arm hadn’t still been confined in a sling, he might have tried to reach their fish food from the floor. Trussed up as he was, though, the effort just didn’t seem to be worth it.

  “What are you thinking about?” Sulu asked, taking a seat on the floor across from him. He pulled up both knees to rest his chin in his hands. “The wonderful, exotic dinner Uhura and I have planned for you now that we’re back at Sigma One?”

  “No.” Considering everything that had happened since they left the space station, Chekov found the suggestion oddly amusing. “I’m thinking about what a terrible week this has been.”

  “Hey—” Although Sulu reached out to kick him in playful admonishment, the concern in the helmsman’s voice was real enough. “You promised the memorial service wouldn’t put you in a bad mood.”

  “It didn’t.” Chekov shook the water off his hand, and the lizards nearest his movement froze into a heartbeat of silence. He waited for them to start singing again before saying, “Really—I’m glad I went.”

  With a final toll of one hundred forty-three dead, the memorial service for the Kongo’s crew had taken all morning and had been held in one of Sigma One’s docking bays for lack of another place that could hold all the crew, Starfleet personnel, and station workers who wanted to attend. Chekov had gone to the huge gathering alone, a little afraid to confront the emotions he’d kept tightly locked inside since first hearing about the accident. On board the Enterprise, he’d been a solitary mourner among people who could only view the tragedy from sympathy’s comfortable distance. Today at the service, he’d been surrounded by people who had also lost friends, lovers, valued colleagues; it had been easy to touch them, talk with them, cry with them.

  “I got to meet the Kongo’s chief engineer,” he told Sulu. She hadn’t been at all like Montgomery Scott—small, thin, almost fragile in her paleness. “We talked a lot about Robert, and what happened the day he died.”

  Sulu nodded, looking a little uncertain about how he should respond. “Did she know him well?”

  “Well enough.” He wrapped his arms around his knees and looked across the darkness at Sulu. “She was supposed to go with the party that tried to unbolt the nacelles. Robert convinced their captain he could do her work just as well, and there wasn’t any need to send her along.” Bracing his free hand on the side of the bathtub, he pushed to his feet. “She had her children with her at the service.”

  Sulu stood along with him. “So he didn’t do it for nothing,” he said, following his friend out into the main cabin when Chekov went in search of his duty jacket. “If nothing else, he did it for her.”

  “I think so, yes.”

  Sulu snatched the jacket out from under Chekov’s hand when the lieutenant reached for it, earning a warning glower. “You think so?”

  “All right.” Chekov took the jacket back with an irritated tug. “Yes, she was grateful for what he did. And I’m glad something good came out of his sacrifice.”

  “That’s better.” Sulu took over Uhura’s unofficial job of fastening Chekov’s collar and straightening his jacket shoulders. “All points considered, I still like you better when you’re grumpy instead of depressed.”

  Sometimes, Chekov decided, trying to have meaningful conversations with your friends just wasn’t worth the effort. “I don’t know why I put up with you,” he grumbled, heading for the door.

  Sulu swung into step beside him, grinning in that bright, disarming way Chekov found so damnably hard to ignore. “Because my charm and wit enrich your life?”

  “No, that can’t be it.”

  “Because I feed you?”

  “I know that isn’t it.” He held open the door and waited for Sulu to move out into the hall. “Maybe,” he suggested with a smile, “it’s because you’re not going to argue with me when I tell you I’m keeping your lizards.”

  Sulu blinked at him. “Are you keeping my lizards?”

  “We can talk about it on the way to Sigma One.”

  Chekov hesitated in the doorway to the restaurant, not sure if he should follow Sulu any farther inside. He should have expected something like this, he realized. The junglelike profusion of blossoms and vines was just the sort of thing Sulu would love in a restaurant, and the copious lack of anything resembling a table probably struck Uhura as quaint. Chekov thought it all looked more like the sort of equatorial rainforest where security officers were routinely killed by natives, poisonous insects, and carnivorous plants.

  “So, where are you planning to keep them?” the helmsman asked, slowing only enough to catch Chekov’s empty sleeve and pull him along behind. “You yourself said they can’t live in your bathtub forever.”

  If it weren’t for Sulu being with him, Chekov probably could have returned to the Enterprise and claimed that he wasn’t able to find the restaurant. That’s something he’d have to keep in mind for future dinner dates. “I thought maybe you’d let me use that old fish tank of yours.”

  “The one in my quarters?” Sulu asked. He felt among the foliage as though searching for some sort of doorway in the green. “The one that went the way of all my other possessions when the hull breach evacuated Deck Six?”

  That did throw a bit of an obstacle into Chekov’s plans. “How about visiting a pet store before we leave the station?”

  Sulu grinned and pulled aside a swatch of jungle. “That sounds a little more reasonable.”

  The dining area beyond the living drapery was bigger than the lobby but no less tropical. Small, simple tables stood like quiet mushrooms among the green riot, and long trains of flowers snaked across the floor from every angle. Weaving among the plant-life, they came up behind the restaurant’s only human patron, and Sulu announced without prelude, “Chekov’s keeping my lizards.”

  Uhura leaned back to grin up at them, twirling a flower be
tween her fingers. “I thought you said all that chirping would keep you up at night,” she said to Chekov.

  He shrugged as he slid into the empty seat across from her. “I was wrong.”

  “Well, keep them with my blessing.” Sulu sat with as much energy as he did everything, slipping a flower out of the vase at the middle of the table and sniffing absently at it. “I don’t need them if I don’t have the lily pond. Besides—” He returned the flower in an obvious attempt at nonchalance. “I’m going to be too busy organizing a free-fall gymnastics group to spend much time with lizards.”

  Chekov smiled, but didn’t comment. So much for last week’s all-consuming hobby.

  “Have you thought about what you want to order?” Uhura asked them both, helping herself to another part of the arrangement. “I was beginning to think you weren’t coming.”

  Chekov tipped the flower vase far enough to see down the throats of various orchidlike blossoms, but couldn’t take the prospect of eating them very seriously. “If I’d known you were going to feed me houseplants, I probably wouldn’t have.” He let the vase rock upright again. “What is this—the only restaurant on Sigma One where it’s socially acceptable to eat with one hand?”

  This time it was Sulu’s turn to grin with evil pleasure. “Actually, you’re not supposed to use any hands at all. But the Tellerites understand that humans have underdeveloped snouts, so they give us a little leeway.”

  Chekov made a face that a Tellerite would probably have considered inadequate. “That’s disgusting.”

  “And that’s cultural arrogance,” Uhura countered. She nipped a trio of petals off the flower in her hand. “Some people consider sturgeon eggs and fermented cabbage disgusting, too, you know.”

  Chekov shrugged, and Sulu waved over a passing Tellerite waiter. “Maybe we can find some local cole crop for him to torture,” the helmsman suggested to Uhura. “That should keep him happy.”