Worlds in Collision (66 page)

There was a moan from the center of the bridge as Lasslanlin unsteadily tried to crawl out from beneath the helm console where he had tried to escape the wild gravity fluctuations. Chekov braced himself against the center chair and checked to make sure his small phaser was set to light stun. But even as he aimed the phaser at the Orion mate, Lasslanlin's eyelids fluttered and he fell over, out cold.

Sulu walked stiffly to Chekov's side. “Good work, Chekov. I only have one question.”

“What's that?”

“Did you have the slightest idea of what you were doing?”

Chekov tried his best to look indignant. “Of course, I had it planned wery carefully all along.”

“Sure you did,” Sulu said, but patted Chekov's shoulder in congratulations anyway.

Then Krulmadden moaned and both men turned to him.

For a second, Chekov almost forgot where he was. Black Ire and his mate were standing by Krulmadden's vast body. They looked familiar somehow. But the woman was doing something completely unfamiliar with her eyes. She was picking at them. Then Chekov saw why. She held two blue lenses in her hands.

“Don't you think you should do something for him?” the woman asked Black Ire.

Chekov's mouth fell open. He knew that voice.

“I don't see why,” Black Ire said as he reached up to unhook his translator mask and goggles. “I'm a pirate, not a doctor.”

“Dr. McCoy?” Chekov stammered.

“Uhura?” Sulu gasped.

Uhura tossed her contact lenses aside and pulled off her veil. McCoy yanked his battle helmet off and left his hair in wild disarray.

“I hope you two know how to fly this blasted thing,” McCoy said. “Because this big oaf just blew up my retirement savings.”

“You
paid
for that hulk?” Sulu asked in disbelief.

“Do you have any idea how much it cost to buy a used spaceship and send out hours of subspace messages to build the legend of Black Ire?”

Chekov and Uhura caught each other's eye and began to snicker as Sulu and McCoy traded complaints.

“What's so damn funny, Ensign?”

“Why, nothing, Dr. McCoy,” Chekov said. “I was just thinking how wery glad I was to see you, too.”

For once, the bridge of the
Queen Mary
rang with the sound of
human
laughter.

Thunderous applause reverberated in the hallway outside the Federation General Council chamber. The large, white marble–tiled hallway itself was almost deserted, making the noise that filtered out through the double-height wooden doors oddly out of place.

Sitting motionless on a padded bench beside the speakers' entrance to the chamber, Spock waited patiently. He judged that the ovation had greeted the announcement by the delegate from the Antares Corona Worlds that her system would be supporting the new agricultural trade proposals tabled by the Federation Resource Management Board. The Antares commitment had been seen as necessary to prevent a recurrence of the bottleneck transport problems that had contributed to the near-famine on Sherman's Planet. Once again the worlds of the Federation had become a bit closer knit, and once again the Federation had become stronger.

Spock reviewed the agenda he had memorized when it had been posted that morning. After the Antares declaration, the delegate from the Centaurus Concordium was scheduled to move that the Council issue its congratulations to Hudson's World on the occasion of its fiftieth year of independence. That motion would be followed by a unanimous voice vote, and then the meeting would be thrown open to civilian petitions, as authorized by their respective official representatives. Spock had been the third speaker set for the day, though he had since learned that the two speakers who were to have preceded him had now withdrawn. He estimated that four minutes and thirty seconds remained before he would be requested to enter the chamber. He trusted Dr. Richter was capable of performing the same calculation.

Penn Grossman walked over to Spock. His new shoes squeaked on the marble floor and he wore his dress tunic uncomfortably, ruining its line by jamming his hands in its pockets.

“Face it, Mr. Spock,” the student said, “he's not going to show.”

“Yes, he will,” Marita answered before Spock could speak. She scrunched up her face and held her baby close to her. “Won't he, Alexander? Won't he?” The baby gurgled and clapped his hands. “See? Alexander knows Dr. Richter won't let us down.”

Penn took a few steps away, then turned and came back. He rubbed nervously at his short dark hair as if trying to stay awake. “How can you sit there like that, Marita? Can't you see we've been tricked?”

Spock said nothing. He had tried explaining what he had done three times already. It wasn't that Penn was not intelligent, it was that he was stubborn—one human attribute with which Spock had dealt many times, thanks to the able help of Dr. McCoy.

“Mr. Spock had his reasons for doing this, Penn. I'm not mad at him.”

“But you're missing out on your one chance to talk to the Federation Council! Do you know how many billion beings are going to be watching the update tapes of this meeting?” Penn wiped his sweaty hands on the back of his tunic.

“And they're going to listen to Dr. Richter a lot more carefully than they would to me,” Marita said.

Spock was impressed with the young woman's powers of comprehension. When he had broached the possibility that Dr. Richter replace Marita as Spock's associate-to-be-named, she, not Penn, had immediately understood that that had been Spock's intention from the beginning.

“That's why you took me to the Vulcan Embassy, isn't it?” she had said after the first meeting with Richter. “You knew that Ambassador Sytok would warn you not to put my name on the credentials, and that was supposed to make me understand why my name shouldn't be listed. But what you really wanted to do all along was have an open accreditation form so that
Dr. Richter
could go before the Council as your associate. And his name couldn't go on the credentials because he's under Starfleet authority, and they could have prevented him from speaking if anyone had suspected that that was what he was going to do. Damn sneaky, Spock. And very logical.”

Spock had politely accepted her compliment without correcting her assumptions.

But Penn wasn't supporting Marita's acceptance of the changed situation. “Look, I don't care how buddy-buddy you want to get with this alien, but the fact is that Mr. Spock the Vulcan
lied
to you. He used the SSP as a way to gain support for this appearance. And he planned to cut us all out from the start.”

“He didn't lie, Penn. He just didn't tell the whole truth.”

“Big difference!”

Marita jiggled Alexander on her knee. “Mr. Spock, when you go in to address the Council, are you going to speak against the Prime Directive?”

“Yes,” Spock said.

“Truthfully?” Penn asked.

“Penn, I regret to say that you have learned nothing about logic in the time you have spent with me. However, to answer your question in the spirit in which it was asked, yes, truthfully, I will speak against the Prime Directive.”

The hallway echoed with the sound of the Council delivering a unanimous voice vote. Spock calculated that now only one minute, ten seconds remained.

Marita continued. “And Dr. Richter, when he goes in there, will he also speak against the Prime Directive?”

“I do not expect Dr. Richter to say much to the Council, but his presence with me will lend great support to what I have to say.”

Marita looked reprovingly at Penn. “There. It shouldn't matter who does the job, as long as it gets done. Your problem, Penn Grossman, is that you're jealous.”

Penn put his hand to his forehead and stared wildly around the hall as if he had just been accused of being a Romulan spy. “I am not! Why does everyone keep saying that?”

Because it is true,
Spock thought, and once again he was grateful that the students' emotional turmoil had kept them from continuing their questioning of him in detail.

Spock stood up moments before the door of the speakers' entrance swung open and a Council page appeared, dressed in a traditional gray suit and white scarf. Spock handed the page the microtape of his embassy forms.

“Please note that this form is open, giving me the right to have associates accompany me.”

The page slipped the tape into the reader and read through the forms, though obviously she had been briefed on what to expect. “Are these two with you?” she asked.

“Yes,” Spock said. “They will not be addressing the Council with me, but by rights they are allowed to enter the meeting with me.”

“How about the baby?” the page asked dubiously.

“Well, I'm certainly not leaving him out here,” Marita said.

“As you wish,” the page said. She flipped up the large brass wreath which was the doorpull and a hidden mechanism smoothly swung the door open again. The sound of a hundred whispered voices came out in a wall of soft noise.

“One last thing,” Spock said, just before entering. “Some members of my party have been delayed. Please let them in when they arrive.”

The page glanced down at her reader again and nodded. “Sure,” she said. “How many?”

“Five,” Spock said. He entered the chamber.

In actual voting delegates, the membership of the Federation Council numbered in the thousands. Every world, every colony dome, every LaGrange outpost, every species on shared worlds, all were entitled to representation and the Federation took heroic measures to see that as many who wanted to take part could take part. But to streamline the running of the day-to-day affairs of the Federation, the Council split itself up into hundreds of specialist committees organized along regional lines and common concerns. Full gatherings of the complete membership occurred only rarely.

In matters of more pressing importance, it was necessary for a governing body to be able to meet quickly and efficiently, and that was the purpose of the General Council. Each block of members from local regions—usually at the united system level—selected one delegate to represent them. There were fewer than two hundred and fifty of them—more than half nonhuman, but they were the power brokers of the most successful interstellar union known in the history of a thousand worlds, and it was they whom Spock prepared to address.

The meeting chamber for so impressive a body was a simple affair, two facing tiers of benches, a communications wall, a guest area in which Spock saw Ambassador Sytok standing, and a speakers' area where those who were not members of the Council—or even of the Federation—were able to make an address.

Spock waited in that last area as the Speaker of the Council read Spock's consular civilian credentials to Sukio Hirashito, this session's Council President. Marita, carrying Alexander, and Penn, hands still jammed in his pockets, waited a few meters away, closer to the speakers' door.

The Speaker, a tall Maori wearing a traditional black parliamentary robe, returned to Spock and handed him back his papers. Then he turned to face the Council members.

“The Council recognizes Spock, citizen of Vulcan, citizen of the United Federation of Planets. Bear witness, all who are in attendance.” The Speaker turned back to Spock as the subtle drone of a hundred universal translators hummed alien versions of what had been said. “Come forward, Spock. The Council waits on you.”

Spock went forward, knowing that each member who sat before him already knew what he was going to say, and knowing that each of them was wrong. He began his address to the Council.

“Madame President, Mr. Speaker, distinguished members of the General Council, I come before you today to inform you of a grievous wrong which has been perpetrated on the United Federation of Planets, and by the United Federation of Planets, and which demands immediate and compassionate resolution for the sake of peace.”

Startled, some Council members leaned close together and spoke among themselves. This was not starting out as they had expected—with a plea to repeal the Prime Directive. By stating that he was informing them of a wrong committed against the Federation and by the Federation, Spock had spoken the formal words generally used to give warning of a real or threatened internal treaty violation. And there had not been a serious internal treaty violation within the Federation for decades.

The Speaker of the Council walked up to Spock, sensor microphones in the ceiling swiveling to capture his voice and amplify it through the chamber.

“Spock, you were to talk about the Prime Directive.”

“I am aware of no topic being entered on my credentials,” Spock said. “I have the floor.”

The Speaker glanced back at the President, who nodded once.

“Spock, according to the words you have used, it appears that you intend to talk to the Council about matters of treaty. That is a legal matter.”

“I am quite aware of that, Mr. Speaker.”

“But this is a citizens' forum intended for the debate of general concerns. If you wish to use it as a legal forum, I must ask you to state your legal grounds or give up the floor.”

Good,
Spock thought. He would not have been able to introduce his next topic without that question being asked. But now the way was open.

“Mr. Speaker,” Spock announced so all could hear, sensor pickups or not, “I invoke as my legal grounds the Fundamental Declarations of the Martian Colonies.”

Not a member of the Council was silent. Two Tellarites jumped to their feet. The Speaker had to call to order twice to quiet the members. No one had any idea what would happen now, and that made the power brokers uneasy.

“Mr. Speaker,” Spock said, “I believe I still have the floor.”

The Speaker retreated, walking away with head bowed.

“A founding precept of this Federation is that different cultures be allowed to progress in their own time, according to their own needs and desires. Indeed, the Prime Directive is a direct extension of this principle.” There was a strong murmur of satisfaction that at last Spock had mentioned what all had assumed would be his main topic.

“However, by accepting this principle of self-determination, the entrenchment of specific inequities is inevitable. That is, those cultures that achieve a certain level of technological achievement before another can claim an unfair share of natural resources.” More murmurs, this time, of confusion. Was this a talk about treaties or the Prime Directive?

“This conflict was first addressed in the Fundamental Declarations of the Martian Colonies, in which the signatory bodies agreed that, in recognition of the Colonies' inability to field a full mining force, certain sections of the asteroid belt would be set aside in trust for future exploitation by Mars as their technological capability progressed and their cultural needs developed.

“This first, interplanetary recognition of the importance of resource allocation over time, has since gone on to become entrenched in all facets of Federation law. I point out to you that there is not a member of the Federation who does not have set aside by treaty, in trust, natural resources for future exploitation. In fact, such trust allocations of natural resources are automatic upon being admitted to the Federation, and are a right of every new member.”

A Tellarite held two hooves to his mouth and bellowed, “Get on with it!”

“This right, originally meant to confer mining claims, has since grown to include the right of colonization. It is recognized that worlds at an early stage of space exploration cannot afford the cost of colonizing nearby systems. However, if they delay, there is the danger that other worlds might expand around them and cut-off all possible colonization possibilities. Therefore, the Federation routinely allocates colony worlds within its own boundaries for the future exclusive use of those worlds not yet ready to undertake colonization.”