Worlds in Collision (37 page)

“What do you mean?” Glissa demanded as she knelt to cradle Sam's hands in her hooves. “He saved those pups.”

“Use your eyes,” a second human said. Female this time, as big as the one with the tattoo. “Didn't you see him on the viewscreens?”

“Of course,” Glissa answered uncertainly.

“And you didn't recognize him? From the holos? From the updates? Before he grew the beard?”

Glissa turned to Sam. “What are they saying?”

The woman kicked a stone toward Sam. “Go ahead. Tell her what we're saying. If you've got the stomach for it.”

“Sam?”

“That's not
his
name, Boss,” a third human said scornfully. He was shorter, rounder, more compact, from a high-g world, and he moved forward to stand before Sam and Glissa. He glared down at the wounded human and the Tellarite beside him.

“You're Kirk, aren't you?” the short human said, and Glissa's nostrils flared at the mention of that terrible name. “The one who was captain of the
Enterprise,
aren't you?”

Glissa stared deep into Sam's eyes. “No,” she whispered. “No, not you.”

But his eyes held that one answer at least.

Glissa let the human's hands slip away from her hooves.

“Murderer!” the human woman said as she kicked another stone at the wounded man's side.

“Butcher!” The short human spat on the wounded man's boots.

Glissa stood up, torn, dismayed, but knowing that her job had to come first. “That's enough!” she growled at the rockriggers. “We've still got half a shift to put in and I want you back at work—
now!”

They hesitated and Glissa gave them a snarl that needed no translation. Muttering among themselves, they left the lake bed.

The human she had known as Sam Jameson looked up at her as if to speak, but she raised a hoof to silence him, trying to suppress the shudder of revulsion that passed through her. This monster already had a world named after him. “There is nothing more to be said. I will have your account closed out and book your passage on the next outbound shuttle. You should…you should leave here as quickly as possible. Before too many others find out.” She had to look away from him. “The company will not be able to guarantee your safety.”

The human said nothing. Glissa left him to join the client workers and explain what had happened for those who didn't understand Standard. As if the name Kirk needed translation. As if the entire universe didn't know of his crimes.

While Glissa and the other Tellarites talked in low grunts and whispers, the two pups slowly approached the wounded human, watching with concern in their large black eyes as he stood up unsteadily and his blood dripped slowly to splatter on the ground.

One of the youngsters, braver than the other, stepped forward and solemnly untied his scarf. With tiny hooves, he held it out to the human, who stared at the scarf, as if uncertain about accepting it.

“Please,” the young Tellarite said. “Let me help.”

The human started, and as Glissa and the other Tellarites watched, he looked down into the pup's earnest eyes almost as if he were seeing someone else's face, hearing words that someone else might have said to him long ago. He spoke gently to the pup as he took the scarf and held it to his wounds. Then he turned and walked away, head upright, each step certain.

Glissa felt unexpected tears roll from her eyes as she watched him leave, for in all the worlds in all of space, she knew there was no place left for James T. Kirk to go.

It had not been a clean death for his beauty. She had not, as he sometimes imagined she might, been swallowed by a nova, or been lost by braving the unimaginable depths of a black hole. Nor, perhaps most noble of all, by giving her life so that others might live.

Instead, the
Enterprise
had been butchered—stripped of her power and her speed and cruelly deformed between the opposing infinities of normal space and the Cochrane subset. Much of the ship still remained, but her heart and her soul were lost.

Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott found himself thinking that it might have been better if the ship had died all at once. And he with her.

In the silence of the aft observation lounge, deserted in the ship's early morning cycle, Scott leaned his head against the cool smoothness of the viewport. He closed his eyes, thinking of another time when he might have touched any part of the ship and felt within her the hum of her generators, powered by the wedding song of matter and antimatter. But there were no vibrations now. That life had fled. The emergency lights strung haphazardly through the ship were powered by batteries beamed in from other vessels, and the occasional movement lags of the gravity generators fighting the inertial dampeners came from the rough handling of shuttle tugs and not the smooth pulse of the ship's own thrusters.

Scott opened his eyes again. His breath had fogged the viewport and the haze it made suddenly flared silver white as the
Enterprise'
s orbit took her over the terminator of the moon below, into the full reflected light of Talin's sun. Scott's torment at seeing the ship suddenly painted with the brilliant light reflected from the airless desert moving 500 kilometers beneath her was still as intense as the first time he had stared out and seen what had been done to her.

The bluewhite gleam of her hull metal was streaked with carbonized traceries from the energy arcs that had penetrated her overloaded shields. And the dark scarring was constantly being augmented by the thrusters of the workbee shuttles that hovered around her, carrying out emergency repairs so the ship could be safely towed back to the spacedock at Starbase 29—if and when the decision to fully repair her was finally made.

Scott's trained eye scanned the upper surface of the engineering hull, evaluating the inelegant arrangement of roughly bonded pressure plates and repair bands. He cringed at the imperfection of the work. No real crew member of the
Enterprise
would dare treat her that way, so inconsiderately, as if she were no more than metal and machinery. It was an attitude he might have had to remind new ensigns about in their first few weeks on board. But after a month or so, even the greenest recruits had needed no reminding about how to treat this ship. They felt it. They knew it. Not like those starbase mechanics who bounced from job to job and who were working on her now. Scott and a handful of others on board were all that remained of the
Enterprise'
s original crew.

The starboard support pylon was canted aft at least eight degrees from true, and Scott sighed as he watched the workbees' mechanical grippers attaching the large black panels of tractor-beam collectors to the surface of it. The mechanics planned to
force
the pylon back into position to restore warp balance to the ship's super-structure, so she could be towed at warp speed. But Scott couldn't see the point. Not with the starboard warp-propulsion nacelle completely gone—the one that Spock had managed to jettison in time. Unlike the port nacelle.

The port nacelle was the reason why the
Enterprise
was still in orbit around Talin's moon—kept there so she could be studied in the same way Karunda coroner beetles swarmed to dissect the corpses of their prey. She was the first ship to have engaged warp drive while still within the Danylkiw Limit of a planet's gravity well and survive, even partially. Three and a half months earlier, Scott would have said that such a thing would not be possible. After all, until they had been properly tuned and balanced, it was still foolhardy to run tandem warp engines within the Danylkiw Limit of a solar system, let alone a class-M planet. And though the tuning procedures were improving each year as the technicians zeroed in on the theoretical upper limits of warp efficiency, Scott was certain that for at least the next ten years any ship attempting a tandem test run too close to a star would run the risk of falling into either an Einsteinian wormhole or a Danylkiw Singularity.

Certainly modern warp engines—properly tuned and broken-in, of course—could be engaged within gravity wells at depths corresponding to standard orbits, but it was almost unthinkable to imagine the day when a warp drive could be engaged so deep within a planet's gravity well as to be in atmosphere. At least, those had been Scott's thoughts at the time. But three and a half months ago, the
Enterprise
had done just that—engaged warp drive within the atmosphere of Talin IV. And the proof of it was the nightmarish remains of her port nacelle.

The forward section of the nacelle was still in perfect condition. At the time of the incident, the propulsion dome-disperser pylon had been deployed for routine discharge maintenance and the stubby projection was still in place, unbent and undisturbed. But thirty meters back from the lip of the dome, the first rippling deformations in the nacelle's cylindrical hull became apparent. Fifty meters back, and the hull took on the appearance of a piece of stretched taffy, just like the candy Sulu had once spent six months cooking and sculpting into birds and dragons on the ends of sticks. By sixty meters, the rest of the nacelle was completely gone, supposedly compressed to a point through the inconceivable multidimensional pathways that led out of four-dimensional spacetime and into the other realms in which warp speeds were possible.

Where the rest of the nacelle was actually located was still a matter of debate. Twelve experts from the Cochrane Institute on Centaurus had been brought in to study the wreckage, along with representatives from Starfleet Operations, its Science and Engineering Divisions, and the Space Safety Board. The first arguments among the twenty-being task force had apparently been settled when two weeks' worth of sensor readings convinced the experts that the nacelle continued to be drawn into warp space at the rate of about one atomic diameter a day. Scott had been outraged at the interpretation of the findings because any child knew that the secret of warp transition was that it was instantaneous. You were in or you were out, but you could never be halfway. He had tried to convince the experts that the phenomenon they were witnessing was somehow related to the fusion blasts the
Enterprise
had been subjected to, or the unfathomable subspace pulse that had burned out every centimeter of translator circuitry in her, but the experts' only response had been to hold their subsequent meetings in private and continue to chart the slow disappearance of the ship, molecule by molecule.

As far as Scott could determine, cut off as he was from the experts and their planning sessions, the current debate raging through Starfleet Engineering was whether the remainder of the port nacelle could be detached from the
Enterprise
without triggering a slingshot reaction which would destroy the rest of her, or whether the ship should simply be decommissioned and serve out the rest of her days as a sacrificial experimental model, constantly monitored to see how far her gradual evaporation would proceed.

Scott rubbed his hands against his face, trying to bring order to his thoughts. Just thinking about the mad ideas of the know-nothing, planetbound, viewscreen jockeys who had the power to decide the
Enterprise'
s fate made his head swim. He had never felt such frustration, such helplessness.
At least,
he thought for the thousandth time,
at least if I had been on the bridge, then this would be over for me, too, and I'd be with the captain. Wherever the poor lad is.

Scott put his hand to the viewport, only centimeters separating him from the emptiness of space. Somewhere James Kirk was out there. And somewhere, there were answers. Just beyond the reach of his hand.

Behind him, the observation lounge doors puffed open. Scott recognized the swagger in the steps of the officer who entered, and sighed.

“Good morning, Mr. Scott. The work is proceeding nicely, wouldn't you say?”

Scott took a breath to calm himself. In the viewport's reflection he saw the glowing lights of that damned swagger stick spin through the air as Lieutenant Styles flipped it under his arm. Scott didn't care if the insufferable, self-righteous ass
had
wrested the stick away from a Klingon in hand-to-hand combat. It was still a damned annoying affectation on a ship at least a hundred light-years from the nearest equine creature.

“Aye, I suppose it is.” Scott couldn't bring himself to look at the man. The lieutenant didn't belong in charge of the
Enterprise.
Only one person did. Only one person ever would.

Styles stood beside Scott at the viewport and bounced twice on his toes. He crossed his hands behind his back and waved the swagger stick around behind his back, as if scaring away flies. The chief engineer thought dark thoughts of a transporter beam set to maximum dispersion.

“You don't sound too pleased, Mr. Scott.”

Scott stared at the lieutenant in the reflection, hating the smug smile that split the man's sharp features.

“There's only one way to treat this ship, Mr. Styles.”

Styles rapped his stick against the viewport, indicating the swarm of workbees thrusting around the starboard pylon. “And you don't feel those chaps are treating this ship the right way?”

“I have already submitted my reports and my recommendations.”

Styles turned to the engineer and Scott glanced at him. Then stared in shock as he saw that Styles no longer wore the stylized comet insignia of the
U.S.S. Monitor
on his gold command shirt. He wore the insignia of the
Enterprise.

“Like it?” Styles asked, seeing the surprise in Scott's eyes.

“I…dinna understand.”

“Now, Mr. Scott, how difficult can it be? Starfleet has reassigned me. I'm commanding the
Enterprise
now.”

No,
Scott thought.
Never.
“A ship needs a captain, Lieutenant.”

Styles smiled again with far too many teeth. “An
operational
ship needs a captain, Mr. Scott. And the
Enterprise
is anything but.”

“The ‘experts' haven't made up their minds, then?”

Styles rocked his head back and forth. “In a manner of speaking. The decision has been made to detach what's remaining of the port nacelle. Of course, the tugs will take the ship out of the system first, just in case….”

Scott had to look away. They were gambling with all that was left of the
Enterprise.
“In case she slingshots into warp? What do they think is going to happen to her then, that hasn't happened already?” He kept the remainder of what he wanted to say about the starbase mechanics to himself. No matter how badly he felt, he was still a Starfleet officer.

Styles tapped his swagger stick thoughtfully against the side of his neck, apparently oblivious to Scott's imperfectly concealed rage. “If the ship does slingshot, then it's apt to be an unfocused transition. The Cochrane people have calculated that the starbow effect could be quite…spectacular and the First Contact officials feel that every step should be taken to ensure that the event is not observable from the surface of Talin IV. The Prime Directive's taken enough of a beating down there as it is, wouldn't you say?” Styles chuckled. “Not that anyone thinks it's very likely that the Talin are putting much effort into astronomy these days.”

“And if the ship doesn't slingshot?” Which she won't, Scott knew. There was more chance of her sprouting wings and flapping her way back to a starbase.

The lieutenant's cheeriness was intolerable. “Then there happen to be two Constitution-rated warp nacelles at Earth Spacedock—”

“Intended for the
Intrepid II,”
Scott interrupted. He kept up with the production reports.

Styles shook his head. “Come now, Mr. Scott. It would take more than a year to finish a new ship from scratch. But with new nacelles and a full wiring team of construction drones, the
Enterprise
could be back in service in a tenth the time.”

Scott stared at the man, suddenly seeing the real reason for his good spirits. “And then, of course, she'd be needing a new captain, wouldn't she?”

Styles reached out to pat Scott's shoulder. “Thank you for your vote of confidence, Mr. Scott, though I'm afraid I'd just be first officer to begin with. But in time…she would be mine. Oh, yes. And then we'd see how the
Enterprise
could perform with a real captain at her helm.”

Scott had a difficult decision to make and, in the end, he decided not to deck Styles. There were more honorable ways to attempt to leave the service than by striking a superior officer. He was an engineer, after all, and not Dr. McCoy. “Lieutenant Styles, sir?”