Battlestations!, page 10
The culture itself has its colors. The buildings are of natural stone and wood, clothing reminiscent of Earth’s Middle East during the classical period. Veils, slippers, turbans, belly dancing, mosaics, simple musical instruments, and so on. Several Federation anthropological studies had been made on the hypothesis that the Argelians are one of a handful of human-origin races scattered around the galaxy by a superior culture who’d sought to preserve them. The biggest fly in that ointment was a faint but definite telepathic ability that appeared hereditary in some of the women. But none of that was my problem. Even though Argelius has only three major population clusters that could be called cities, the clusters are disorganized and very old. Some streets—many, in fact—had never been named even in the hundreds upon hundreds of Argelian years they’d been in use. There are no class structures; everybody is poor. As such, there is no quartering of Yelgor City, no way to guess which end of town might attract a group of fugitive scientists.
So, here we were. Orbiting. We were waiting for Mr.
Spock to devise a plan for finding the scientists. I suppose each of us assumed Spock would be the only one of us who would be able to solve the problem, a problem without many clues. As we watched him scan bits of new and old data about the scientists, trying to pick out some little propensity that would give a hint of where they might be hiding, we slowly digested the idea that even Spock, unfortunately, wasn’t made of magic.
He knew that too. It showed in the taut lines of his jaw as he calmly, even hypnotically, pored over screen after screen of drab information about Mornay and Perren. When that store was exhausted, he unceremoniously began the whole process again with reams of data about Yelgor City and the huddled villages that surrounded it like a litter. Dr. McCoy and Merete confiscated Spock’s information about the scientists and went to another terminal to go over it again, to apply their knowledge of human psychology. Maybe they could find something Spock missed. Meanwhile, Spock and I slowly analyzed the city itself. We looked for architectural styles that might be conducive to a band of renegade scientists, places that had multiple escape routes, natural shielding, seclusion within a populated area, that kind of thing. But it wasn’t easy to try to think like a renegade scientist, mostly because I wasn’t a scientist and Spock wasn’t a renegade.
Scanner, meanwhile, bided his time watching the readouts of the planet while we quietly orbited. Normal fluxes of magnetic and heat energy that heave and sigh as a planet turns were enough to keep him satisfied. Come to think of it (which until then I hadn’t) I’d never known Scanner to ask for more to do. So he had a hobby, and thus took his place as the least of my worries.
Only when Scanner suddenly stopped humming one of his obscure collection of folk songs and leaned forward did I realize how long we’d gone without uttering a word. His abrupt motion drew both Spock’s attention and mine. Scanner’s nose was almost touching his readout monitor. “What the blue peepin’ hell is that?”
Spock turned in his chair. “Mr. Sandage?”
Scanner blinked, shook his head, grimaced, then shrugged. “Sir … I’ve never seen a wave like this before.”
Spock keyed in his own viewscreen, giving us both a split-second glance at the computer’s simulation of jagged waves streaking upward from a small portion of the planet’s surface. The glance lasted only an instant thanks to Spock. He vaulted sideways, diving for Scanner’s navigational controls, long fingers dancing over the board. His shoulder struck the chair, sending Scanner tumbling onto the deck. Just before Scanner would have struck the port bulkhead, the ship around us tilted violently away from the planet, yanking free of our orbit.
The engines groaned and wheezed. The artificial gravity lost its center of balance, giving our individual weights to the centrifugal force that sent us crashing into the starboard bulkheads. Scanner was thrown the whole width of the cabin space, and the side of his head hit the emergency door handle as he slammed hard into the bulkhead between McCoy and Merete.
I clawed at one of the passenger chairs, but couldn’t hold on. I felt myself being sucked starboard. My shoulder hit the rim of the viewing portal and my own weight crushed me against Merete, who was trapped between my legs and the bulkhead. Dr. McCoy struggled against the crushing pressure to slip his hand under Scanner’s bleeding head, but that was the best he could do.
Banana Republic’s engines sounded like one of those old freight-train locomotives trying to drag an overload. Spock was still somehow holding himself to the control board, his cape flying across his shoulders, flapping toward the starboard side. Pure determination kept him clinging there as the ship wrenched herself and the attached shuttle out of orbit in a whine of strain.
My eyes watered. I forced them to stay open, trying to understand why Spock had inflicted such danger upon us. Just as the pressure began to slacken and the ship’s gravity to regain control, a shock wave hit us.
It came from outside, down there. I felt its alienness with an almost psychic intensity and knew that it hadn’t come from my ship. Nausea fluttered through me as wave upon wave rocked us—but these weren’t just waves of energy. With them came distortion. Detachment from reality. Before my eyes the walls of the ship stretched and yawned, even faded to show stars of the wrong colors and placement. My arms changed length, shape … then reality settled again, for an instant. Then another wave.
A hull seam somewhere on Rex’s outer skin suddenly ruptured. Loud hissing filled the cabin as the air spat out into space, then a sucking sound replaced it as the automatic sealants went to work. The ship, at least, was trying to take care of itself. But for us, the fabric of consciousness was fraying.
Between each wave was a moment of unsettling reality, as though the reality was the dream between waking times. Power waves, maybe. Dimensional tampering. Whatever it was, I hated it.
My nervous system buzzed. Everything in my body felt out of sync—heartbeat, breathing, every thing—I lost count of the energy waves wracking us as we drifted just out of orbital distance. Even this far out, the waves shuddered through us, horridly potent. Through my sluggish mind came the realization that Spock had just saved our lives by getting us out of direct contact with the power waves.
Finally the last wave grumbled through Rex’s shell, passed through our vibrating bodies, and passed out into space. We held our breaths, waiting for another wave, but no more came. I pushed myself off the bulkhead to Spock’s side.
“What happened? What did they do?”
Spock straightened, then immediately bent over the readout screen. He was ominously silent.
McCoy knelt beside Scanner, helping him to sit up.
“What did who do?”
“Mornay and the others,” I said. “Nobody else on Argelius could create that kind of power emanation.”
“Quite right,” Spock confirmed. In a move particularly human, he looked over the computer readout screen and gazed through the big main portal at the serene planet, almost as though he only partially trusted the computer. He tapped the controls to test them, then asked, “Commander, I suggest we veer back into orbit.”
I paused. “Sir, you’re senior officer on board.”
“Yes,” he said, “but you misunderstand the nature of the conditions under which this ship was commissioned for you. Captain Kirk arranged a special priority command for this transport. No one, regardless of rank, can supersede your authority on this vessel.”
My expression carried an unmistakable “you’re kidding,” but I forced myself not to say it. After a moment, I collected myself and asked, “What if I was killed?”
He tilted his head. “Obviously, the senior officer would have no choice but to take over. That officer would be authorized to command the ship, but not the mission. The ship itself is considered expendable. Your presence on this mission, however, is not. Shall I attain orbit?”
Dulled by his words and by his sense of courtesy, I simply nodded. I was about to ask, again what had happened to us, when Scanner moaned and drew my attention. McCoy was probing the head wound while Merete ran a Feinberger over Scanner for vital signs.
I crossed the deck and knelt beside them. “Got bonked, huh?” I uttered sympathetically.
Scanner leaned his head back against the bulkhead as McCoy tended the swollen spot on his temple and dabbed at the blood. Though pale and disoriented, Scanner gave me a best-effort shrug. “I guess I’ll just sit on the floor from now on. I keep endin’ up down here anyhow. What kinda high-intensity flush was that? I never saw nothin’ like that.”
“It disrupted our autonomic nervous systems,” McCoy said. “And if I’m not mistaken, attacked the brain thalamus too.”
“It didn’t seem real,” Merete commented, still tensely running the Feinberger over Scanner. “No concussion,” she said to McCoy. “Dural contusion, and very slight subdural bleeding.”
“I hope all that means ’headache,’” Scanner grumbled.
“Orbital status,” Spock reported. He continued contemplating the planet below us, one hand still resting on the controls.
“Mr. Spock?”
“Commander?”
“Was it … unreality?”
“Perhaps,” he said. “A crude description, but applicable.” He leaned forward, puzzling over the readouts as they flashed before him. The ship’s new computers were still waffling on what to tell him. Tensely then, Spock straightened. “It was the transwarp antimatter flux,” he said.
Evidently that announcement, coupled with the distortions we’d felt during the attack, meant more to McCoy than to the rest of us. Or maybe he simply read something in Spock’s tone that we hadn’t yet learned to hear. “You mean they’re down there tampering with the fabric of reality?” he said.
Scanner moved his legs gingerly and commented. “Reality’s gonna have stretch marks.”
Spock nodded thoughtfully. “I know comparatively little about the transwarp flux pattern,” he said. “However, I do know that the energy requires sophisticated housing in order to be safe. I believe we have just experienced the result of an accident.”
Stiff and cold, I murmured. “They must be trying to build it!”
Spock looked at me. The eyebrow went up in stern punctuation. “Undoubtedly.”
“But they can’t possibly have the right facilities on Argelius,” McCoy said. “Not for something like that!”
“Why would they want to actually build a transwarp device?” Merete asked.
I clenched my fists and answered, “To raise their advantage. Now they not only have the technology, but they have the threat.” I turned to Spock. “Unless the accident …”
Spock returned my stare, only to finally break it with a deep sigh. “Such contained antimatter power, engaged in a flux of that magnitude, could theoretically have obliterated the entire planet had it not somehow been focused out into space.”
“Including whatever Mornay is using as a laboratory,” I said. I didn’t mean to sound accusative, as though I might be blaming him in my rush of irrational human concerns, but I couldn’t help it. “It could’ve taken the whole lab with it, couldn’t it? They could all be dead. Couldn’t they?”
He saw the intensity of that thought tighten my face and knew what it meant to me that Sarda might already be dead, that all hopes to rescue him from a tangled situation might be nothing more than useless risks. Declining to give me the silly Vulcan statement that, yes, they could be, he pressed his lips together and lowered his eyes, assessing his long experience with humans and the honesty it had shown him how to use. He gave me the answer no other Vulcan might even have had the courage to:
“I don’t know.”
It was a long time ago. Maybe it wasn’t really so long ago, when the shadows of memory start to fold with time. Like warp drive—a thought, and you’re there.
The planetoid was hairy with jungle and brush. Inside that foliage lurked unspeakable danger. Enemies. Enemies who knew us, knew what we had and what we were capable of. We needed an advantage. Something they didn’t know about.
I felt Sarda beside me, looking over my shoulder through a hole in the heavy ferns. We watched as a pair of our enemies passed through the ravine below, too far away for our weapons to be of any use. These mock phasers were only good at a distance of ten meters. We needed that extra advantage if we were going to survive.
“Any ideas?” I asked, crouching low.
Sarda crouched also, keeping his head down. His light, brassy hair stood out too clearly amid the greenery, and he was careful not to let it give away our position. “We are all equally armed and provisioned. If you and I are to gain some advantage, it will not be through our possessions. We must find some way to pool our knowledge. Our particular talents are the only things we have that they do not also have.”
I sighed. “All right. What have we got?”
His amber eyes lost their focus for a moment as he analyzed us. Sarda and I had known each other all the way through Academy, but not particularly well. A greeting-in-the-corridor sort of association, along with a couple of terms as lab partners. And now we had been chosen as a team, pitted against the best of Star Fleet Academy. Even knowing each other better would have been an advantage, but we didn’t have it to call upon. We had no idea then that the future would weld us together with a bond of ordeals.
And this would be the first. Contrary to belief, truly enduring friendships are founded not on time, but on trial. Lasting relationships have to be forged, not simply discovered. We had no idea that this would be our first trial, this random pairing off for the Senior Field Endurance Maneuvers.
It was an exclusive privilege to be recommended for these maneuvers. With only reserved amusement and even a little contempt, upperclassmen referred to these as “Outlast” games, and intimately as “the Outlast.” That was the purpose, after all, to outlast the other teams. Not easy. These opponents of ours were the cream of Star Fleet’s crop. Each participant had to be not only recommended, but actually sponsored by a ranking member of the Academy faculty. We not only carried our own reputations, but the reputations of the officers who’d stuck their necks out to put us here. The odds were by no means equal. Though each team consisted of one command candidate and one science specialist, that’s where the equity ended. The command candidates could be anything from tactical geniuses to wizards of offensive improvisation. And each knew how to apply that specialty to incapacitate an enemy.
The science specialists filled an even wider spectrum: life science specialists in Earth or alien medicine, chemists, biologists and every other kind of -ologist, including neurophysiologists who could short-circuit a whole nervous system given the right circumstances, electrical experts, sound wave theorists, astrophysicists, speed/time people—anything beyond knitting, and sometimes they could even do that. And Star Fleet twisted itself into curls to keep any two teams from being alike during any one Outlast. There was no help, no planning ahead, no cramming for this test. Survive or don’t. We would endure solely on our talent for guerrilla improvisation. How well we could use and merge our respective talents would tell the test.
The Outlast was not exactly the kind of honor anyone really wished to get. One thing, however, was sure: if you got it, you’d better not turn it down. You might go in scared, sick, or alone, but you go.
“I am a specialist in energy-wave direction and mechanics. You are versed in the history and application of strategy and tactics,” Sarda began. “I am a Vulcan, therefore I have audio, visual, and muscular capabilities superior to those of our opponents. I can sense life form presence within roughly twenty meters. I have typical Vulcan sensory capabilities for estimating distance, volume, and speed. Since I am the only Vulcan participating in this particular Outlast, we may consider those to be advantages.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “What else?”
“You are human. All of our other opponents are also human, with the exception of the Skorr entomologist in team six. We may assume that they expect you to behave in a human fashion. You are not an Earth native. Three of the other team commanders are also not of Earth. Of the three, we are aware of only Vesco’s home planet, Altair Nine, which is primarily an ice planet. He will have no natural advantage in the jungles of this planetoid.” Sarda tipped his head, then, and looked directly at me in the midst of his analysis. “You, however, come from Proxima Beta, which is a swamp and jungle planet. This environment is more natural to you. How well can you reconnoiter in this kind of terrain?”
“Well enough,” I agreed. “I know how to move through thick growth without making noise. I know how to test the ground before putting my weight down. I know how to use plant organisms to make ropes, nets, camouflage, shelter, and a few other tricks.” I shrugged, hoping it would all mean something to him. Immediately, though, I was dissatisfied. “It’s not enough. We’ve got to have advantages, not tricks.”
Sarda sat down heavily in a way that, for a human, could have been interpreted as surrender. “We cannot gain advantage against the unknown.”
Then the rustling began … a sound both distant and near, as piercing as the Red Alert klaxon. Enemies!
Stunned, almost as though we’d forgotten, we stared at the gently waving ferns, then at each other, then scrambled for cover. It was early in the Outlast, a wise time to let someone else be the aggressor. Let them take each other out for a while and leave fewer teams for us to deal with. Of course, that also meant we would have to deal with the best teams.
But that was for later. For now—hide!
We squirmed backward, kneeling low, finally crawling on hands and knees. I caught a glimpse of one of our opponents, Gruegen, a honey-mouthed Norwegian who was much more clever than his demeanor signaled.
