Worlds in Collision (18 page)

“Classified,” Kirk said with a smile, “though the point is taken. I doubt if any of my crew would misuse the authority to order self-destruct or any other potentially harmful procedure, but by limiting access to those procedures we do limit the possibilities for tragic errors.”

“So,” Nensi said after a moment, “history lessons aside, we need to find another common link to unite all the pieces in our puzzle.” He checked them off on his fingers. “Pathfinders. Memory Prime military emergency.
Enterprise
Alpha emergency.”

“Already linked by hints of an assassination attempt,” Scott added, “Nobel and Z. Magnees Prize nominees, and…?” He trailed off, trying to think of what other events merited inclusion in the list.

“Those are the broad conditions,” Kirk said, pacing once more. “Damn, we could use Spock down here.” He paused again. “Spock's arrest. The name or term T'Pel. What do they add to the equation?”

Romaine abruptly leaned forward and let go of Scott's hand. “Three of the Vulcans on my staff were placed under arrest by Commander Farl just before you arrived,” she said.

“What are their names?” Kirk asked excitedly.

“Specialist Lieutenant Stell, Specialist First-Class Slaan, and Dr. T'Lar,” Romaine recited. “A computer technician, computer technology historian, and a paleoexobiologist, respectively.”

“Now we're getting somewhere,” Kirk said. “Two Vulcan computer specialists and Spock is a Vulcan computer specialist. That's a connection.”

“Then why was a paleoexobiologist arrested, too, Jim?” McCoy asked.

“And of the four other Vulcans on my staff, three of them are also computer specialists.” Romaine shrugged at the disappointment Kirk struggled to hide on his face. “Sorry, but what do you expect at the Federation's largest computer complex?”

Kirk rubbed his hands over his face. “And no one else, no other Vulcans were arrested on the other ships transporting nominees here?”

“No,” Nensi said, suddenly thoughtful, “but some of the commanders did point out that they were operating with less than full crews. Let me check to see if there's a pattern among the crew members left behind.” He got up and went to the kitchen area, where a private wall com hung.

“And ask about the reasons why the crew was left behind,” Kirk called after him.

“Vulcans, Vulcans. Starfleet was worried that a Vulcan might have been involved in a threatened act of assassination. But why just
some
Vulcans? Why not all?”

“What reason did they give when Spock was arrested?” Romaine asked.

“Suspicion of involvement in the dilithium burnout,” Scott answered. “A crock if I ever heard one.”

“And what's going to happen to him?” Romaine continued.

“He'll be held until he can be turned over to appropriate Starfleet authorities,” Kirk said, resuming his pacing.

“What sort of appropriate Starfleet authorities?” Romaine pressed on.

Kirk answered without considering where the woman was going with her questions. “Starbase, I suppose,” he said.

“Prime could be a Starbase,” Romaine said.

Kirk stopped in midpace.

“It's a
base,”
Romaine explained. “And it
is
under Starfleet authority.”

Kirk walked over to Romaine and held his hands out as if he planned to lift her by her ears and kiss her. Fortunately, he checked his enthusiasm.

“And
you're
the base commander,” he said. “Brilliant!”

Scott looked confused.

“The lass is…” He turned to Romaine beside him. “You're the commander?”

“It's political,” she said to him. To the captain she added, “But only in a nonmilitary capacity.”

“Spock isn't Starfleet military personnel,” Kirk said, trying out his ideas as he voiced them. “Technically he's scientific services and the alleged attempted-assassination victim was a nonmilitary scientist.” He turned to McCoy, eyes twinkling. “It sounds like a
civil
offense to me. Definitely nonmilitary and therefore within Mira's jurisdiction. What do you think, Bones?”

McCoy nodded. “Go for it, Jim. With any luck Commander Farl will be out on maneuvers and won't be able to answer Wolfe's frenzied inquiries. Which I'm sure she'll make.”

“Are you up to taking on the Starfleet bureaucracy?” Kirk asked Romaine.

She pointed to the kitchen, where Nensi leaned over a counter, talking earnestly into a handset. “Taught by experts,” she said. “Bureaucracy is Uncle Sal's middle name.”

“Good,” Kirk said, “good.” He clapped his hands together, a decision made. He looked over to McCoy. “Well, Bones, you were right again. Out on the frontier, we'd go in with phasers blazing, but here we are, achieving victory by wrapping up the enemy with red tape. How's that for doing things within the system?”

“Achieving victory, Jim?” McCoy pulled himself out of the chair that had appeared ready to absorb him. “You're talking as if we've already won.”

“Believe me, Doctor, if I didn't think we were going to win, we'd still be sitting around trying to come up with another good idea instead of getting set to beam back up and spring Spock.”

Kirk flipped open his communicator and checked to see that Nensi was prepared for what was coming. The chief administrator replaced the handset on the wall com and headed back to the communal area. Kirk's communicator chirped as it opened the beam back channel.

“Kirk to
Enterprise,”
the captain announced. “Five to beam up, Mr. Kyle. These coordinates.”

Kirk slipped the communicator back onto his belt. The five of them stood silently in the apartment, waiting for the transporter beam to lock on.

After a few seconds of silence, McCoy reached out to touch Kirk's arm. “This delay isn't right, Jim.”

“Aye,” Scotty said.

Kirk reached back for his communicator again. He didn't have to say anything. He knew from their expressions that both Scotty and McCoy saw the understanding, the agreement in his eyes.

The transporter chime finally started just as Kirk was about to call back up, but its arrival did nothing to change his feeling that something had gone terribly wrong on board his ship.

 

The corridor leading to the brig was lined with five of Wolfe's starbase troopers and Kirk felt his rage expand exponentially with each additional trooper who appeared in Spock's cell. Spock himself was nowhere to be seen, but Commodore Wolfe was. She was watching carefully as a technician explained something to her on the library reader on Spock's desk. Kirk recognized the technician as Ensign Bregman, a trainee from Kyle's department.

“If you've let anything happen to Spock, Commodore, I'll—”

“Save the mutiny for your court-martial, Captain.” The tone Wolfe used to cut him off told Kirk her anger was no less than his own. “Your innocent science officer just escaped.”

Kirk was completely taken off guard. He stepped to the side as Romaine, Nensi, Scott, and McCoy crowded into the cell behind him. Commander Farl leaned against the far wall as if he hoped no one would see him.

“Escaped? How?” Kirk asked. He checked the security field frame around the doorway and saw it was intact.

“Beamed himself down,” Wolfe said. “Hooked into the transporter controls from his library reader.” She glared at Kirk. “The one
you
were so anxious to give him.”

“Now wait just a minute,” Scott said, pushing his way through the knot of people to get close to Wolfe. “I know every circuit on this ship and there's no way the transporter can be controlled by a reader. I'd stake my reputation on it.”

Wolfe laughed cynically. “You don't have a reputation anymore, Mr. Engineer. None of you do. This whole ship should be fumigated, then opened to space.” She turned to the technician who had been pointing to the reader's screen. “Again,” she ordered.

“Um, as near as I can figure out,” Ensign Bregman began, “Mr. Spock didn't actually control the transporter
from
the reader, but he did set up a snowball chain in the simulations program library.”

“A snowball chain?” McCoy asked dubiously.

“That's where one small program runs a slightly larger one, which runs an even larger one, and so on until a huge complex program is up and running. You see, he must have called up transporter simulation programs from the education upgrade files. The reader won't allow programming but does permit a user to store certain variables in the simulation files for playback of customized scenarios at a later time, so Mr. Spock set up all the coordinates he needed for a simulated transporter room to lock on to him here. See?” Bregman pointed to the screen again. “Here are the exact simulations he used with the coordinates of this cell still entered.”

Scott, Wolfe, Kirk, and Romaine crowded together to peer at the small screen and the flowchart the technician drew on it. He showed how Spock had chained the transporter simulations with a wargame scenario that postulated that the hardwired communication channels within the ship had been severed by enemy fire. That was chained to a rescue simulation in which ship mechanism controls usually monitored and adjusted by direct connection were instead remotely controlled by extremely short-range subspace transmissions. That, in turn, was chained to a programming bypass simulation that had the ship's computer damaged and capable only of carrying out direct requests. In this case, the direct requests were set up to be read from the transporter simulation.

Five more subsystem wiring-and-repair simulations joined the chain until only one two-line piece of code remained at the top of the snowball's path.

“And what do those two lines of code do?” Kirk asked just as he heard Scotty exhale with a combination of surprise and what sounded like admiration.

“It's just a small software flag that warns the computer that everything that follows is a simulation.” The technician dropped his voice. “Mr. Spock overwrote it by storing some of his library files in the wrong memory locations. The computer queried him but it accepted his priority override to allow him to commit the error.”

“The same override that lets me run the engines at warp eight when the computer says we dinna hae the power,” Scott said, shaking his head.

“So the computer operated all the controls on the real equipment and beamed him out,” Bregman said.

“But it still doesn't explain how he found another place to beam to,” Scott complained. “None of the ship's simulations would hold the exact coordinates for beaming down to Memory Prime, and even Mr. Spock couldn't calculate them without a locator beam.”

“He didn't have to,” Commander Farl said dryly from the side of the cell. “All he had to do was get within a few kilometerss of Prime on a low-path beam and our combat transporterss automatically pulled in hiss signal.” Farl sighed. “I have two unconsciouss trooperss by a transfer-point pad. The pad'ss log showss it received an incoming signal fifteen minutess ago. The same time as the Vulcan'ss unauthorized beam-down wass detected. He iss on Memory Prime.”

Kirk was filled with conflicting emotions. Spock would not defy Starfleet authority so brazenly by escaping what even he had admitted was legal, if improper, incarceration. Whatever had prompted him to act so out of character had to be big. Disastrously big. But whatever else he did or had to do, Kirk did not want to give any information at all to Wolfe. For some reason she had turned her “temporary” command of the
Enterprise
into a vendetta.

“Well,” Kirk said as he stepped back to leave the cell, “it's a small facility and Chief Technician Romaine and Mr. Nensi know it well. I don't think there'll be any problem in our finding him.”

“Just a minute,” Wolfe said, stopping him as he directed his entourage to the door. “You're not going anywhere.”

Kirk turned to face her. The cell was completely silent as the faceoff began. “I am going back to Memory Prime to locate my first officer,” he told her.

“All off-duty personnel are restricted to this ship, Captain.”

“I'm not off duty.”

“You are now, Captain. You're sure not commanding this ship any longer.”

Kirk had had enough. “You cannot relieve me of command on my own ship, Commodore.”

“Alpha emergency, Kirk. You're under my orders for the duration.”

“Without Starfleet confirmation of those orders,” Kirk recited, “it is my opinion that you might be endangering the health and safety of my crew, without proper authority.”

Instantly both Wolfe and Kirk turned to McCoy.

“I'm sure the ship's medical officer might find that grounds for relieving
you
of
your
command,” Kirk continued.