by Greg Cox
“But listen to me ramble on,” Naylis said. “I hope I’m not boring you.”
“I’m all ears.” Sulu considered his options once he got his arm free. Could he manage to liberate the other one without Naylis catching on? And then what? He was still unarmed and at a severe disadvantage. “It’s not like I’m going anywhere soon.”
“True,” Naylis conceded. “But let me ensure that I have your full attention.”
He flicked a switch on the control panel, activating it. Sulu realized in horror that the time for stalling was over. A hum, growing rapidly in volume, signaled that the neutralizer was warming up. Desperate to avoid being neutralized, he yanked his left hand out from beneath the loose strap holding it in place. He reached frantically to undo the strap trapping his other arm, terrified that it was already too late.
It was.
The beam projector lit up overhead. Energy surged through the concentric circles defining the apparatus. Don’t look, Sulu thought, attempting to avert his eyes, but an invisible beam overcame his resistance. He sank back into the padded seat, his gaze irresistibly drawn to the glowing rings of light, which exercised a practically hypnotic pull on him so that he couldn’t look away. It was like a gravity well, seizing his concentration, dragging his thoughts into an inescapable vortex. His body tensed as he fought against the pull, but his mind grew sluggish, like an unresponsive helm, leaving him adrift and alone, barely able to hear his own thoughts, let alone hold on to them. The universe went away—except for Naylis’s voice.
“Everything is as it should be. There is no sabotage, no saboteur, just a string of unfortunate accidents. You investigated the matter and found nothing. Naylis is innocent. You were wrong to suspect him . . .”
Sulu tried to tune the Voice out, but it was all there was, filling the growing emptiness inside his mind, so that it became harder and harder to distinguish his own thoughts from the Voice. His mind and the Voice were becoming one and the same.
“You can trust Naylis. You should listen to him, follow his advice. He and Grandle know what they’re doing. They’ll take care of everything. Just do as they say, believe what they tell you . . .”
Sulu couldn’t look away. He couldn’t stop listening. But he refused to surrender to the Voice, to have his will hijacked yet again. Captain Kirk had fought the neutralizer, so he could too. And possibly someone else as well . . . ?
“Grandle!” he shouted over the Voice. “Fight this! You can do it!”
Just stringing the words together cost him. Pain racked his body as he convulsed in the chair, gripping the armrests with white knuckles. His head throbbed as the lights spun faster and faster above him, the beam increasing in intensity. His jaw clenched.
“Hush. Relax. It only hurts when you struggle. Just give in and all will be well. Just trust Naylis and you’ll be fine . . .”
Sulu bit down on his lip. Resistance was excruciating. In desperation, he latched onto a single image to anchor him in the emptiness: the helm of the Starship Enterprise. He clung to that visual even as the Voice buffeted his mind, trying to shake him loose from himself. He just needed to stay on course for as long as he could. He forced his jaws open one last time.
“Fight it, Grandle. Fight . . . !”
* * *
Ensign Peggy Knox was tortured by the sight of Sulu being tortured. She longed to go to his rescue, do her duty as a security officer, but Naylis and Grandle had the upper hand at the moment. Her hands were tied behind her back, her phaser had been taken from her, and Grandle had a tight grip on her arm and was watching Knox like a hawk.
Or was she?
Knox felt Grandle stiffen beside her. Tearing her anxious gaze away from Sulu’s torment, the ensign saw that Grandle appeared to be showing signs of strain, as though Sulu’s urgent appeals were getting to her. The security chief was practically vibrating with tension, her face betraying hints of some inner conflict. She blinked repeatedly and began to rock back and forth on her heels. Her hand tightened around Knox’s upper arm, her fingers digging into the flesh beneath Knox’s bright red sleeve to steady herself. Her head swayed as though she was feeling dizzy.
“Fight it, Grandle! Fight!”
Knox experienced a twinge of hope. She studied Grandle closely, waiting for an opportunity. Sulu had explained to her about neural neutralizers earlier. He had also mentioned that some people had been known to push back against their conditioning, although never easily.
“No more words, Sulu. Just sit back and listen,” Naylis said into a microphone at the control panel. Intent on brainwashing Sulu, he paid no attention to what was going on with Grandle, trusting the security chief to watch over Knox until it was the ensign’s turn in the chair. He turned a dial on the control panel, presumably to increase the force of the beam. The hum turned into a high-pitched whirring. “You have nothing to fear. There is no saboteur. You’ve proven that already. You know that now . . .”
Sulu screamed in anguish, thrashing violently in the chair. Knox wondered how long he could hold out against the neutralizer. He was obviously going through hell to keep from surrendering to the device. His suffering tore at her heart.
“Give it up, Sulu,” Naylis said. “You can’t fight it. No one can.”
“No . . . one,” Grandle muttered under her breath. “No . . . NO!”
The security chief swung her phaser toward the neutralizer chamber. For a second, Knox feared that Grandle was about to put Sulu out of his misery, but then a sizzling red phaser beam struck the beam projector above the chair, disintegrating it along with a chunk of the ceiling. The blast triggered a fire alarm that wailed like a Hibernian banshee. The smell of burning cables and circuitry polluted the air.
Yes! Knox thought. Sulu got through to Grandle, beam or no beam.
“What the devil?!”
Naylis turned away from his console to stare in shock at Grandle, who was losing it, big-time. She waved the phaser, which was obviously not set on stun anymore, about wildly. Her eyes bulged from her sockets, as though she’d just received an overdose of cordrazine, and her face was flushed. Naylis turned a paler shade of green, his own eyes anxiously tracking the business end of the phaser as it swung from side to side. His voice quavered as he tried to talk the crazed security chief down.
“Calm down, Grandle. Listen to me . . .”
“Shut up, all of you!” She reeled unsteadily, sweating profusely. “I can’t hear myself think! My brain is tearing apart!”
She clutched her head, letting go of Knox’s arm in the process. The ensign took advantage of the tumult to break away from Grandle and charge at Naylis. Even with her arms tied behind her back, she still made a decent battering ram, slamming into the corrupt merchant and knocking him backward into the sturdy control console. His head smacked loudly against the control panel, shaking the microphone, and he slid unconscious to the floor. Knox kicked him in the ribs just to make sure he wasn’t playing possum.
Serves him right for taking my phaser, she thought. Left me no choice but to play rough.
But she wasn’t out of the woods yet. Grandle was still waving her phaser around like a madwoman, posing an obvious danger to herself and others. She seemed unable to distinguish friend from foe.
“Make it stop!” she ranted over the blaring alarm. “You’re driving me insane!”
A frantic phaser blast fried the control panel, igniting a fountain of white-hot sparks, as Knox scrambled out of the line of fire. She realized that, ironically enough, she had possibly saved Naylis’s life by knocking him to the floor.
Not that he’s likely to appreciate it.
“Take it easy, Chief,” Knox said in the most soothing tone she could muster under the circumstances. Trying to reason with Grandle was possibly a lost cause, but a phaser and a mental meltdown were a bad combination. She had to at least try to de-escalate this crisis. “Let’s just get you to the infirmary, okay?”
“Shut up! You’re just trying to confuse me! You all are!” She swu
ng the phaser at Knox, who found herself cornered in the refurbished storeroom. Spittle sprayed from Grandle’s lip. “Why can’t you leave me alone?”
In desperation, Knox threw a high kick at Grandle, hoping to knock the phaser from the other woman’s grip, but the security chief had not lost her own fighting skills. She caught Knox’s ankle with her other hand and twisted it, causing Knox to topple backward onto the floor. The crash knocked the breath out of Knox, who looked up to see Grandle’s phaser aimed straight at her face.
“Um, mind setting that on stun at least?”
“Trespasser! Intruder! I’ll make you leave me alone!”
Oh, crap, Knox thought. I’m toast.
Before Grandle could fire the weapon, however, Sulu suddenly appeared behind her. A karate chop to Grandle’s neck worked better than a tranquilizer, causing her to crumple to the floor. Sulu stood over her, looking more than a little unsteady himself. Knox assumed that he had somehow liberated himself from the chair just in time.
“Thanks, Lieutenant! Glad to see you’re still you!”
“Am I?” he asked uncertainly. He was blinking and sweating, too, although not nearly as badly as Grandle had been. He looked logy and confused, like someone only gradually emerging from a bad dream that didn’t want to let go of them. His gaze swung back and forth between the fallen forms of Grandle and Naylis. Bewilderment was written all over his face.
“I’m . . . confused. I can trust Grandle, but . . . she was threatening you . . . but everything is fine, Naylis said so . . .”
He was clearly still feeling the effects of the neutralizer beam. Knox thanked her lucky stars that his first instinct had been to come to her defense anyway.
“It’s all right, Lieutenant. It will make sense eventually, once Doctor M’Benga helps you through this.”
She glanced over at Naylis to make sure he was still unconscious; even with the neutralizer trashed, she didn’t want the unscrupulous Troyian to mess with Sulu’s head any further. The sooner she got both him and Grandle under wraps the better.
“In the meantime, maybe you can help me back onto my feet?”
Twenty-Five
Baldur III
“Welcome to the bridge of the Thunderbird! Have you ever wondered how your grandparents and great-grandparents first came to Baldur III? Today we’re going to take an amazing journey into history . . .”
What appeared to be an educational vid appeared on the reactivated viewscreen as Scott and Galligan hurried to reconnect ancient circuits and relays in order to get the bridge controls operational for the first time in decades. Galligan switched off the recording.
“Sorry about that,” he said sheepishly. “Up until recently, this place mostly hosted field trips.”
Scott recalled that Thunderbird has been preserved as a historical relic and museum before being pressed back into service as a power plant. At the moment, he was grateful that the colonists’ old ship had been preserved so scrupulously. Aside from the historical plaques and signage now adorning various walls and consoles, the bridge looked much as it must have when the ship first touched down on the planet generations ago. He could only hope that Thunderbird’s vintage impulse engines had been just as carefully maintained.
Otherwise they were as good as dead, along with most of Jackpot City.
“Approximately fifteen minutes to warp core detonation,” the ship’s computer announced in a calm masculine tone that only reminded Scott that he wasn’t on the Enterprise, not that the update would have been any less alarming delivered by a more familiar voice. “Please report to emergency escape pods.”
“Fat lot of good those would do us here on the ground,” Scott muttered.
He assumed that Spears had heard the announcement as well. The young technician was still in the control room, monitoring the feverish warp core, while Scott and Galligan worked on the bridge in their radiation suits. The cumbersome suits did not make a rush job any easier, so Scott was sorely tempted to shed it just for the sake of efficiency. As is, his gloves were tucked into his work belt. He figured he’d put them back on if his skin started burning.
“You really think this will work?” Galligan tossed a bronze plaque onto the floor in order to access a service panel at the bridge’s main engineering station. A speaker in his hood allowed Scotty to hear him.
“It’s our best shot,” Scotty said.
As on the Enterprise, the impulse engines functioned independently of the warp propulsion system, which meant that, with any luck, they had been isolated from the cascade malfunctions that had turned the warp core into a ticking time bomb. The nuclear fusion reactors powering the impulse drive were already fueled and operational; Galligan and his people had prepped the reactors weeks ago, with an eye toward using them as a backup generator in the event the warp core failed. The challenge now had been to redirect the reactors’ potential output from the colony’s EPS grid back to the ship’s long-inactive propulsion system, while bringing the helm and navigational controls back online as well, all the while hoping that Thunderbird could still take wing after her long slumber.
And before it was too late.
“When was the last time this ship flew?” he asked.
“2168? 2169?” Galligan guessed, suggesting that he was a better engineer than historian. “Before I was born, certainly. It’s been grounded for as long as anyone can—” He froze as though suddenly placed in stasis. “Oh, no.”
Scott knew a worried tone when he heard one. “What is it?”
“I just remembered! The landing struts were bolted to the ground decades ago. They’re secured to concrete blocks!” He turned away from the engineering station and started toward the exit at the rear of the bridge. “Perhaps we can cut through the bolts with a laser torch?”
“There’s no time!” Scott said. Cutting through the bolts on all four struts would be an arduous, time-consuming task in itself, never mind dashing back and forth between them in the lower reaches of the ship. “We’re just going to have to tear ourselves loose from them when we launch . . . and hope that it’s only the bolts that snap.”
Galligan swallowed hard. “Are we going to have enough power to do that?”
You tell me, Scott thought. This is your ship.
“If we can muster enough power to achieve escape velocity,” he said instead, “I doubt a few bolts can nail us down.”
Scott spoke more confidently than he felt, for Galligan’s sake. The plant’s manager was a good man, but life-or-death crises were new to him. In fact, Scott saw a bumpy launch ahead, assuming a massive matter-antimatter explosion didn’t vaporize them all first.
“Approximately ten minutes to warp core detonation,” the computer said. “Repeat: approximately ten minutes to warp core detonation.”
“I heard ye the first time,” Scott grumbled.
It was that “approximately” that preyed on his nerves. A few minutes plus or minus could mean the difference between disaster and deliverance, which meant they couldn’t waste a single second. Finishing up with the helm controls, he skipped rebooting the astrogator and other navigational aids. One way or another, this wasn’t going to be a long voyage; they didn’t need to plot a course across the sector, just off the planet.
As fast as humanly possible.
“Spears,” he ordered via the ship’s intercom. “Get yourself to the bridge, on the double. We’re almost ready to take off.”
In theory.
* * *
“We’re counting down to launch, Captain, while racing another countdown.”
On the bridge, Kirk listened to Scott’s voice intently. That he was safe aboard the Enterprise while his friend and chief engineer faced imminent peril ate at Kirk; he had never been comfortable delegating danger to others.
“Understood, Mister Scott. Our sensors are locked on Thunderbird. We are monitoring your situation and prepared to offer assistance at any time.”
“Thank ye, Captain, but it’s not just me ye have to worry ab
out, but the city as well. Even if we get the warp core off-planet before it breaches, we’re likely to cause a fair amount of damage blasting off from the middle of town. This isn’t going to be like quietly piloting a ship out of spacedock on impulse. We’re going to have to fire the engines at full blast to tear Thunderbird loose from her moorings and escape the planet’s gravity in a matter of moments. All that superheated exhaust firing from the engines, propelling us into space . . . it’s going to leave a mark, sir. Not as bad as a warp core explosion, to be sure, but tell me you’ve evacuated the area around the park, sir.”
“The evacuation is underway,” Kirk said. He trusted Uhura and the other crew members on the planet to assist in every way possible. “Leave that to us.”
“And the orbits directly above the city, sir? We’re going to be coming up hard and fast, Captain, and I can’t vouch for how well this old bird steers after all this time. Not sure how much helm control we’ll have over this flight.”
“We’re clearing you all the room in space you need,” Kirk said, “and have notified the spaceport to halt all arrivals and departures until further notice.”
On the viewscreen, he saw a few stray vessels still in orbit above Jackpot City. He put Scott on hold and turned toward Lieutenant Palmer, who was still filling in for Uhura at the comm station. “Why haven’t those ships broken orbit yet? Did they receive our emergency directive to clear that space?”
“They received it, sir,” Palmer answered. “They’re just . . . quibbling. They’re asking questions. They want more information. They don’t want to lose their places in line.”
Kirk didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t have time for this. Scotty didn’t have time for this.
“They want more details? Tell them that a self-destructing, radioactive, one-hundred-year-old starship with a melting-down warp core is about to rocket right up their backsides—unless they get the hell out of the way as fast as they can. And you can quote me on that, Lieutenant.”