Constellations (32 page)

“It certainly does,” Kirk agreed. He swiveled in his chair to look at his communications officer. “But they wouldn't have dealt with it at all if it weren't for someone forcing them to face the truth and cope with the Grid situation. You did an excellent job down there, Lieutenant.”

Uhura smiled widely. “Thank you, Captain. But I didn't do it alone.” She looked over at Scotty, who looked back at her warmly. “In fact, if there's one thing I learned down on Donico II, it's that confidence isn't about being independent and sticking your head in the sand, pretending everything is okay. It's knowing when to go to someone else for help.”

“I couldn't agree more,” Scotty affirmed.

As Kirk ordered Sulu to take them to their next destination, the competent, confident communications officer of the
Starship Enterprise
tended to her duties and looked forward to her next assignment.

Dave Galanter has authored various
Star Trek
projects, among these the
Voyager
book
Battle Lines,
the
Next Generation
duology
Maximum Warp,
the
S.C.E.
titles
Ambush
and
Bitter Medicine,
and a short story in the
Tales of the Dominion War
anthology entitled “Eleven Hours Out.”

His not-so-secret Fortress of Solitude is in Michigan, from where he pretends to have a hand in managing the message board websites he co-owns: ComicBoards.com, a comic book discussion site, and TVShowBoards.com, a similar site dedicated to television and movies. He also edits and is the main contributor to his own blogsite, SnarkBait.com, on which he babbles about philosophy and politics.

Dave spends his non-day-job time with family and friends, or burying himself in other writing projects. He enjoys feedback on his writing, positive or negative, and would appreciate seeing any comments you have on his work. Feel free to e-mail him at [email protected].

“Mr. Sulu, could you look at this?” Ensign Sam Kerby's request wasn't too far above a whisper, but the
Copernicus
was a small shuttle and the words reverberated loudly enough for all to hear. Lieutenant Sulu rose instantly from his chair and slid himself easily into the copilot's station.

As Sulu and Kerby began some discussion or another, Dr. Leonard McCoy found himself speaking
at
his captain rather than to him. James Kirk's eyes flicked toward the helm and his ear cocked forward to listen. McCoy knew there was little he could say to win back the captain's attention.

When Kirk finally swiveled himself half away and pushed himself up toward Sulu and their pilot, McCoy protested.

“We
were
having a discussion.”

“You were psychoanalyzing, Doctor,” Kirk said as he turned away. “I was politely pretending to listen.”

“There's a difference?” McCoy muttered.

How big was the shuttlecraft anyway? Fifty cubic meters? Did it really take an ensign, a lieutenant, and a starship captain to pilot her? Of course not. McCoy had known Kirk too long and too well not to recognize when the captain was battening down his emotional hatches. Captain James T. Kirk: no man more passionate, and yet on the subject of death none more psychologically cloistered west of his half-Vulcan first officer. Maybe that was it—Kirk had been taking repression lessons from Spock during their chess games.

McCoy frowned and twisted the ring on his little finger. He wasn't sure which was more harrowing: that they'd lost a crewman on their last mission, or that he, Kirk, and Sulu all had to testify at the required hearing. The young woman's family had come to the starbase to attend—traveled all that way from New Cairo. Some people need to put a period and move on, and that was one of the ways. Kirk didn't have such a method. In every crewman's face he'd see that of not only the last person lost under his command, but every person who had died on his watch. And he'd rarely talk about any of it.

“What do you see, Ensign?” Kirk was leaning down toward Kerby's console, and Sulu had been bending in from the copilot seat, so now all three were huddling over what was probably a nonexistent problem. Other than Kerby now being overly nervous, with both his captain and Sulu checking his work.

“Um, I'm not sure, sir.”

Which is why the young man asked Sulu to look,
McCoy thought. Kirk didn't need to insinuate himself into the problem unless Sulu brought it to him; he was just trying to avoid the pointed questions of his doctor.

Kirk didn't dawdle with Kerby. “Mr. Sulu?”

“Kerby made a minor course correction, Captain. When he did”—Sulu gestured toward a replay of the sensor readings—“there was a brief disruption in our ion trail.”

McCoy saw the muscles in Jim Kirk's back tighten just slightly.

“What would cause that?” the doctor asked, and as Kerby looked at Sulu, and Sulu at Kirk, and Kirk at the console, no one actually answered McCoy's question.

Now McCoy rose and took a step toward the already crowded fore of the shuttle. “Jim?”

“Probably nothing, Doctor.” Kirk tapped at the navigation console and nodded to Kerby. “Steady as she goes, Ensign.”

“Aye, sir.” That order given, Kerby was now more at ease and had obviously decided that if it didn't bother the captain, it wasn't going to bother him. McCoy wasn't as easily placated. He hadn't imagined that change in Kirk's tension level, and he wasn't now imagining the slight concern in Sulu's expression.

“‘Nothing' doesn't usually have everyone up and out of their seats,” McCoy said, and with that Kirk went back to his chair in the aft cabin. Sulu, however, remained at the console. Kirk hadn't asked him to stay there, but there was an unspoken language between captain and bridge crew, and Sulu obviously knew that Kirk wanted him to look over Kerby's shoulder.

“What
could
it mean?” McCoy asked, hovering over his chair but refusing to sit. He looked down at Kirk, trying to pull the captain's attention from a small computer screen that was probably replaying a sensor sweep recording.

Kirk almost shrugged, but not quite. “Among other things, an ion trail can be disrupted by another ion trail crossing its path.”

McCoy played with that idea a moment, then finally sat. “Wouldn't another ship show on our sensors?”

“This isn't the
Enterprise.
Scanners are more limited on a shuttlecraft. Power is shifted mostly into deflectors when at warp speed. We tend to trust transponder beacons to alert us to vessels behind us.”

“So a ship without a beacon could hide itself behind us.”

“Enough to hope we wouldn't notice. Kerby's inexperience could be what revealed this—whatever it is.”

McCoy shook his head. “I don't follow.”

“It was a maneuver that Sulu would have left for a while, until it was necessary to make. Kerby's a bit overeager. As the”—Kirk paused a moment, looked up at neither McCoy nor Kerby, just into his own thoughts—“young often are.”

The look in Kirk's eyes was one with which McCoy had too much familiarity: regret. And he knew it wasn't about anything other than the death of the crewman they'd recently lost.

Despite having wanted Kirk to open up about his feelings on the matter, suddenly McCoy felt like changing the subject. “So why is it a problem if our ion trail was disrupted?”

“Because for us to notice it means that the trail was still tight. That means someone crossed it recently, Doctor. And they don't have a transponder beacon running, which means they don't want to be seen.”

“We're being followed,” McCoy concluded.

Kirk pushed out a heavy breath and punched at the computer's console. “No record of any inhabited planets in this area, but no ship has visited either. There's a Class-M moon in a nearby system. Long-range scans from the starbase haven't recorded signs of civilization.”

“We're pretty far out,” McCoy said. “What about a new, unknown civilization?”

“Somehow I'm more concerned it would be a known one.”

McCoy chewed his lower lip. “Maybe it was a—I don't know—don't we come across anomalies or space oddities all the time? How do we know for certain it was another ship?”

“We find out.” Kirk twisted toward the helm. “Ensign, plot a new course.”

Kerby kept his hands on the console but turned his head slightly back to the captain. “Sir?”

Kirk glanced only a moment at the navigational computer for a reference. “Two-four-one, mark seventeen.”

“Where exactly does this get us?” McCoy asked.

“Toward that nearby system.” Kirk motioned toward the side computer screen near his seat.

“There's more to navigate around in a star system,” Sulu said, partly for McCoy's benefit, and partly for Kerby's. “We can maneuver more, and if a ship is following, they'll have to compensate.”

“They might give themselves away,” Kirk said.

Kerby chuckled. “That's pretty smart.”

Sulu leaned toward the ensign, a slight smile playing at his lips. “That's why he gets the big credits.”

“Mr. Sulu, signal the
Enterprise.
Say we're going to make a quick survey of the system at the coordinates listed, but should still make our rendezvous time.”

Poking at the comm for a few moments, Sulu finally replied, “Message sent, sir.”

McCoy didn't fully understand why they couldn't just turn their full scanners aft and learn who was following, so he asked just that question as he anxiously rose again and watched over Kerby's shoulder.

“Good question, Bones,” Kirk said. “Mr. Kerby, why don't you answer the doctor?”

McCoy glanced back at Kirk a moment and found him half smiling—a bemused little look he got when “teaching class.”

Hesitating awkwardly, Kerby wasn't quick with the answer. But he tried. “Well…we're moving…which makes them move…” McCoy could almost see the gears clicking in the young man's head. “And that will, um, force them to move in a way that, uh…tells us something?” In the end it was far less a statement than a question.

“If he's reacting to us, we get information,” Kirk said. “If we're reacting to him, all we're doing is giving up information.”

McCoy rolled his eyes. “Is everything chess to you?”

Kirk shook his head. “This isn't chess—it's poker. I'm looking for a tell. To know what's in his hand without giving away my own.”

“I should've asked if everything was a game,” McCoy said under his breath.

Schra-boooom!
An explosion kicked McCoy against Sulu's copilot seat and then onto the deck.

Kirk was pulling him up a millisecond later. “This is no game, Doctor.” He maneuvered McCoy to his seat and pivoted back to Sulu. “Concussive blast from a photon torpedo?”

“Negative.” Sulu shook his dark head, and a strand of hair fell across his brow. “Internal explosion aft section, toward the outer hull. Thrusters and internal sensors are off-line.”

“Full scanners,” Kirk ordered Kerby, and with the flip of a switch he swapped the controls of Sulu's console for the ensign's. “Sulu, evasive action.”

“Captain, navigation is sluggish. Impossible to determine why with internal sensors off-line.”

“Scanners indicate a small vessel,” Kerby said, just a hint of adrenaline fracturing his voice. “Bearing: zero-two-eight, mark three.”

Kirk leaned toward the readout. “Identification?”

“I've never seen it before, sir.”

“Klingon design,” Sulu said with a quick glance to Kerby's sensor screen.

Kirk concurred. “But not imperial—maybe clan, maybe private.”

“Power signature suggests standard disruptors and maybe a photon sling.” Kerby was getting into the rhythm of battle that had become almost second nature to Kirk and Sulu.

“We're outgunned,” Sulu said, and looked to Kirk.

“What about the Organian Peace Treaty?” Kerby asked, and another explosion pitched the ship forward with a sharp jolt.

Kirk gripped Sulu's chair tightly until the course was almost smooth again. “I'd say whoever's behind us didn't sign it.”

“We're losing warp power,” Sulu said. “Temps are rising. Could be a coolant leak.”

“What about the
Enterprise
?” McCoy asked.

Lips pressed into a thin line, Kirk was disenchanted with the prospects. “If the Klingons let the last message out, they won't let the next one go, and she's otherwise hours away.”

Another explosion sliced into
Copernicus,
this time from without rather than within.

“Disruptor blast,” Sulu reported almost matter-of-factly. Spock was rubbing off on that boy, too, McCoy thought. “We've dropped out of warp.”

“Damage?”

“Port nacelle.” Sulu's nimble digits danced their waltz across the console. “There's a power surge in the intermix assembly.”

“We're going to lose antimatter containment,” Kerby said with a gasp, and was probably expressing himself more emotionally than he wished.

“Hold it together, Ensign.” Kirk wasn't just talking about the ship, but the growing panic in Kerby's voice.

Turning on a heel, Kirk pushed himself aft and grabbed McCoy's arm as he went. “Gimme a hand, Bones.”

“What're we doing?”

“Hand me that kit.” Kirk pointed to a sealed box of tools that protruded from the small engineering bulkhead of the shuttle as he revealed an access panel with his fingertips.