Worlds in Collision (31 page)

“There are no tunnels,” Romaine said. “It's one of the interior bubbles formed when the asteroid condensed. It's completely sealed off except by transporter.”

“I am not aware of any transporter mechanism that can send a signal through twelve kilometers of nickel iron,” Spock stated.

“There's a monomolecular-wave guide wire for the beam,” Romaine explained. “It—” Her eyes grew round in amazement.
“That's the I/O channel!
That's how Pathfinder Two was able to send its consciousness up to interface with the associates. There is a thirteenth interface! Any of the Pathfinders could have been using it since they were sealed off!”

“Spock?” Kirk asked for support.

Spock nodded. “In the equipment room, Pathfinder Two reported that all transportation systems were to shut down within four minutes because of the discovery of an unauthorized transporter network. Approximately four minutes later, the Pathfinder's interface was cut off.”

“If tr'Nele could transport down there, so can we!” Kirk said. He hit the transmit switch.
“Enterprise,
beam the security team in the transporter room down here right away.” He ran over to the central transporter pad. “Spock, set the coordinates for the Interface Chamber. We're going in.”

Within seconds a transporter chime echoed in the access staging room and six armored security officers, this time wearing the unit insignia of the
Enterprise,
appeared.

“On the pad, gentlemen,” Kirk said. “Let's move it, Spock!”

Kirk jumped up to stand by the security team. Romaine followed him. “You'll need me to get past the security systems,” she said.

Kirk waved at Spock to join them. “Set it on automatic and come on.”

Spock looked up from the transporter console. “I regret to say that I am not receiving a bounce-back signal, Captain. The wave guide wire has been cut.” Spock stepped back from the console as though it were no longer logical to stand by it now that it had no function. “We cannot beam down. Tr'Nele has beaten us.”

“No!”
Kirk shouted from the transporter pad.
“Never!”
he cried, and his voice reverberated in the staging room. But his challenge was unanswered. It did not matter that as Kirk was unable to be beamed below, tr'Nele was also unable to escape. Escape was not a condition of victory to an Adept of T'Pel. The Romulan had won.

And then Spock said, “I have an idea.”

 

“I don't care what you think the risk is, Mr. Kyle! All I want you to tell me is: is it
possible?”

Kirk glared at the transporter chief. Part of him knew that he had fallen back into his habit of pushing his crew as much as he pushed himself. But he had to. Kirk had accepted that he was going to lose his ship to save his friend; that was an acceptable trade-off. But he had no intention of just
losing.
Not to a Romulan killer.

Kyle held his hands on his head, still standing on the staging room's transporter pad. Kirk had showered him with questions from the moment he had materialized as ordered.

“Come on, Kyle!” Kirk prodded. “Will it work?”

“Yes. Maybe,” Kyle hedged. “If you gave me a week of computer time. If we could run simulations, check out the equipment, run tests, check the literature—”

“No time, Kyle.” Kirk turned to Spock. “There's your confirmation, Spock. Let's get started.”

Spock raised an eyebrow in what passed as a hesitation.

“Spock,” McCoy said. “You can't let him do it! He'll be killed!”

“I shall be accompanying him, Doctor. I shall strive to prevent that fate for both of us.”

“And for McCoy, too,” Kirk added. He turned to the shocked doctor. “You're coming along, Bones. No telling how many injured we might have down there by now.”

“Jim,” Bones croaked. “Me…down there…like
that?”

Kirk showed a manic grin as he pulled on a new gold tunic to replace the one he had wrapped around the associate's eyestalk. “Look at it this way, Doctor. If it doesn't work, you'll never know it, and if it does, you'll never be afraid of a transporter again. Have whatever supplies you need beamed down from the ship and get into an environment suit.” He said the next for Spock's benefit as well as the doctor's. “Tr'Nele hasn't won yet.”

Within minutes, the first cargo pallet from the
Enterprise
had materialized and twenty of Scott's first team swarmed over it like bees constructing a hive. There was still no word on what had happened to Scott himself, though.

By the main transporter pad, antigrav units were piled four deep. Dr. M'Benga and Nurse Chapel swirled into solidity with medical supplies for McCoy. When M'Benga heard what Spock had planned, he volunteered to go in McCoy's place.

“Thank you, Doctor,” McCoy said, placing his gloved hand on his colleague's shoulder. “But Jim's right. If he and Spock are going to try this and it doesn't work out, I don't want to know about it.” He smiled. “One way or another, I'm going with them.”

When the last of the materials from the
Enterprise
had been beamed down, Spock flipped open his newly acquired communicator and gave the order for the next phase.

“Mr. Chekov, the central transporter pad has been cleared. Lock on to your targets and bring them here.”

“Aye, Mr. Spock,” Chekov replied from the ship, “targets are in transit…
now!”

Two technicians were helping Kirk into a silver environmental suit when the first of the targets materialized in the staging room. It was a portable combat transporter pad, snatched from wherever Farl's troops had placed it in the Prime facility and beamed here.

Two engineers ran up, slapped antigravs to the portable pad's sides, and floated it away. A second pad appeared and was removed. Fourteen more followed.

As each pad was floated over to a working area, the engineers immediately stripped off its control panel and began rewiring. The work continued after the first pad was completed and floated back onto the main pad. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Romaine, all encased in environmental suits as protection against what they would soon experience, waited beside the portable transporter as Kyle finished with their final briefing.

“You won't have to set any signals,” the transporter chief explained. “All the circuitry's been preset on the highest beam path for the greatest penetration. Each one we send down will automatically lock on to the next one in sequence. Just be sure the communicator attached to each panel is switched on so you can get a relay signal back to us.”

Kyle pointed to the locator screen on the pad's control panel. “This screen will light up when it's in use, so you shouldn't have any problem seeing it. All the next-beam targets you select should fall into the one-point-five-kilometer range between here and here. The exclusion space reading should be at least twenty-four cubic meters. Anything less than that and we'll hear the explosion when your fermions and the asteroid's fermions try to rewrite physics.” He held out his hand to the captain. “As soon as you arrive, we'll start laying another wave guide down the beam path to bring you back. That's it.”

Kyle shook hands with Kirk, McCoy, and Romaine, and held his hand in salute for Spock.

Kirk moved his hand against the resistance of his suit to signal the transporter operator to begin. Twenty minutes had passed since they had discovered the wave guide had been broken and feared that tr'Nele had won. And now they were in pursuit. Kirk had no doubt about it. The
Enterprise
and her crew were a miracle.

Kirk watched the first portable pad disappear from beside him. Watching the transporter effect through the meshlike pattern of the induction circuitry inlaid in his helmet's face shield created a three-dimensional moiré effect.

The access staging room dissolved in a cool swirl of sparkling energy as the transporter dissolved him, and in that quantum moment between one place and another, in the midst of action and chaos and the specter of death, Kirk knew he had found his center. He was at peace, and with that knowledge, before his next battle had even commenced, Kirk knew he had already won.

For just one second, Mira Romaine saw smooth walls of dark star metal shining with the radiance of the transporter effect, and then the utter darkness of the bubble deep within the asteroid closed in on her as if it had a physical form.

In the darkness of a portion of the universe that had not known light of any kind for hundreds of millions of years, Romaine felt something move against her and grab her arm. She wanted to scream but the darkness was too powerful, absorbing light, absorbing sound, absorbing all movement, all thought.

“Mira?” Kirk's voice crackled out from her helmet speaker. “Step aside from the transporter so Spock and McCoy can beam in.”

Kirk pulled on her arm again and the universe swam back into place for her.

Kirk found the switch for his suit torch before she did and she jerked her head in shock as the light filled the bubble that had been formed when the asteroid condensed. It was about twenty meters across, giving an ample safety margin for beaming in without risking materialization within solid material.

She found her own torch switch and a flat holo lens on top of her helmet added a second swath of brilliance to the completely spherical chamber. Incredibly, she noticed, just the touch of the light beam on the surface of the bubble's walls caused a layer of frozen particles to billow out and form a mist. Like a comet's tail, she thought, a tiny universe trapped with a larger one that was itself part of yet another.

She braced herself in the microgravity by holding on to the side of the transporter pad. She felt it move beneath her insulated hand as its inertial dampers released a fraction of momentum from the mass of Spock and McCoy as they materialized. Spock immediately kicked off from the transporter and McCoy followed, awkwardly banging his carryall of medical supplies against his leg.

“All clear,” Kirk broadcast. A larger shape took form on the transporter, until it appeared as if the first device were some type of mechanical cell that had just divided. The second portable transporter had been beamed down.

A small puff of gas grew silently from the thrusters on Spock's equipment harness as he floated silently back to the first transporter.

“Find us the next bubble, Mr. Spock,” Kirk said as the Vulcan's gloved fingers picked delicately among the dials and switches on the control panel.

After a few seconds, Spock said, “I have it. Eight hundred meters almost directly toward the center.” He pressed an activation control and the second transporter pad dissolved away, sending thin fingers of light through the mist that now swirled throughout the entire bubble, from the effect of the lights, the transporter energy, and the thrusters' gases.

Romaine looked at the shifting softness of the mist and lights, thinking that even though it appeared beautiful now, if she did not know she would be leaving within seconds, the panic that had threatened to surface when she first arrived would claim her totally. But she had faced worse dangers, and this time she knew who waited for her at mission's end.

Scott's name was on her silent lips as she slipped from one instant to the next, from one place to another, caught unknowing in the random flow of Datawell as the universe conspired once more to guide her to her heart's true destination.

 

The next bubble was at least thirty meters across. The one after that, only twelve. In the fifth bubble, Spock could not lock on to a large enough bubble leading into the Interface Chamber and so they had beamed to the side, losing time and distance, and knowing that there was a growing chance that they would not have enough transporters to complete their journey.

“Can we beam down the ones we've already used from the bubbles above us?” McCoy asked, puffing in his suit as he rotated in the microgravity from attempting to stop his carryall's motion.

“We would break our only contact with the surface,” Spock explained, “and if we found ourselves in another blind pathway, the storage batteries in these portable pads do not have enough energy to transport their own mass more than twice without a receiver at the destination.”

“I know, I know,” McCoy complained. “Pad-to-pad transfers use only ten percent of the energy a single-pad beam requires.”

“I am impressed, Doctor,” Spock said evenly. “After all these years of asking me to remember that you are a doctor—”

“Spock,” Kirk interrupted. “How much farther?”

“Three kilometers in a straight line, Captain. However, the frequency of suitably sized bubbles we have so far encountered suggests that we will have to travel at least eight kilometers through seven transfer points.”

“And we only have four more transporters up top, including the ones from the ship's stores,” Kirk said. “We've got to start reusing the pads like Bones suggested.”

“If we do not succeed in finding a path into the Interface Chamber,” Spock reminded Kirk, “there is no escape for us. Our life support will not last long enough for additional transporters to be shipped in and beamed down to us.”

Kirk looked around the bubble they floated in, mist swirling all around them, making solid lances of their torches and the display lights on the transporter's control panel. Chances are this asteroid will outlast Earth, he thought, probably make it as far as the Big Crunch, or simply evaporate as its protons decay. It was a tomb that would last quite literally until the end of time. But it held no fear for him.

“We've come too far, Spock,” Kirk said finally. “Start bringing the transporters down. We're going on.”

 

Seven transfers later, they were one-point-six-eight kilometers away from the Interface Chamber, tantalizingly out of range by less than two hundred meters, panting and exhausted. The last two bubbles had been just less than the minimum volume that Kyle had stated was the outer edge of safety and they had beamed through one at a time, lying across the face of the transporters. This bubble was a more comfortable eight meters in diameter and, Kirk thought, it might be the last. Three units in the network had already faded out of the system status indicators, their batteries exhausted.

“Nothing suitable in range, Captain,” Spock said. Even his voice had begun to sound on edge. “We will have to backtrack again.”

“How are the power reserves?” Kirk asked.

“Minimal.”

“How many transfers do we have left?”

“No more than five,” Spock answered without pausing to do a calculation. The situation was that plain.

“Tr'Nele has had almost an hour down there by now, Jim,” McCoy said. “For what it's worth, we're probably too late anyway.”

“I'm not giving up, Bones,” Kirk said slowly and carefully.
“We're
not giving up.” He thrust through the billowing mist of the bubble to float beside Spock by the transporter pad. “How far out of range are we?” he asked.

“Thirty-two meters,” Spock answered, reading the results of the pad's probing locator beam, “plus or minus eight percent to allow for density fluctuations in the asteroid's composition along the beam path.”

“Is there no way we can get an extra few meters out of this thing?” Kirk restrained himself from slamming his fist against the pad, knowing the reaction would shoot him across the bubble.

“If only one person went through,” Spock said, sounding reluctant, “then the effective range would increase by approximately twenty-eight meters, leaving us only four meters short, plus or minus the same eight percent.”

“Mira's the least massive,” Kirk said excitedly. “What if she went without her suit?”

Kirk could see Spock shake his head in his helmet. “Assuming she survived exposure to the near vacuum and the gases in this bubble, Captain, I estimate she would extend the transporter's range to the eight-percent error limit. It would be fifty-fifty. We, on the other hand, would be left with absolutely no power and no way out.”

“Mira?” Kirk asked. “Can you operate the transporter controls in the Interface Chamber? You could beam us out of here when—”

“It's a receiving pad only, Captain,” Mira interrupted. “We don't even know if it's powered up, and if—”

Kirk and Spock turned their heads to each other at the same time, setting up a vibration in the pad they held on to as they both reacted to what Romaine had said at the same time.

“Spock, what if you—”

“Captain, I can beam down the batteries—”

“—from the other transporters—”

“—and wire them in to bring this unit—”

“—to full strength—”

Together they said it: “—and beam us out of here.”

It took eight minutes to bring down the other operative pads in the network. Connecting their batteries was little more than disconnecting the internal power cables and running them from one set of batteries to another in series until the final connections were made on the pad they would use.

“All four of us will have to beam at the same time,” Spock explained as he made the connections, “because the oversurge will fuse the critical translators in the wave generator.”

“Is there enough power for the four of us?” McCoy asked.

“If we follow the captain's suggestion and beam without our environmental suits,” Spock said. “I calculate that we will be exposed to the vacuum of the bubble for no more than thirty seconds. I am confident that I can function that long.”

Before McCoy could make any comment, Kirk said, “Come on, Doctor, now we're going to find out how much you remember from basic vacuum training. What was your record?”

“Three seconds,” McCoy said.

“That was as long as you could hold your breath?” Kirk asked, suddenly worried about McCoy's chances.

“That was as long as I
wanted
to hold it. Oh, don't look like that. I've always wanted to see what Vulcan skin looks like when the capillaries go. Think I'm going to miss my big chance?”

Spock set the coordinates for the Interface Chamber and gave them their final instructions on vacuum survival. “When the beam takes us, be sure to be in a crouching position,” he concluded. “I will attempt to rotate our landing orientation to the Interface Chamber's artificial gravity but we should be prepared for a jolt.”

“Why a jolt?” McCoy asked, already beginning to feel dizzy.

“We have enough power to reach the Interface Chamber,” Spock said, “but I do not know if we have enough to reach its floor.”

Before McCoy or anyone else could make any response, Spock gave the order and popped his helmet. The last thing Kirk saw was a spray of what looked like snow shoot out from Spock's helmet seal and completely obscure his vision. Then he shut his eyes as tightly as he could and pulled on both of his own helmet tabs. The atmosphere rushed out of his suit, taking all sound and warmth with it. As he had often wished as a child, James T. Kirk was now in space.