Trials and Tribble-ations Read online

  "Easy," Sisko said, "except that we don't know exactly where he is right now."

  "He went to Mr. Lurry's office, didn't he?"

  "That's what he said, but by the time we have Kira beam us over there, he could be back here."

  "Or he could be right next to the bomb right now, and if we beam over, we could be killed, too."

  "Old man," Sisko said, sighing roughly, "have I ever told you that your logic is a pain in the backside?"

  "Daily, in one way or another."

  "Yes, well … I'll contact Odo and have them check Lurry's office. If the captain's still there, they can track him. You and I will stay here in case he comes back."

  He snapped his communicator open again, and realized that his hand was shaking.

  "Captain Kirk, I'm mystified at your tone of voice! I've done nothing to warrant such severe treatment!"

  "Oh, really?"

  Jim Kirk wheeled around, noting a ring of desperation and a crack of fear in the voice of merchant Cyrano Jones.

  Jones was a charming con man, an everybody's uncle, a licensed prospector, and a general haberdasher, and Kirk had an easy time rattling him by merely pacing in front of him.

  In contrast to Kirk's tense pacing, Spock stood apocalyptically still with his hands behind his back. "Surely you must've realized what would've happened if you removed the tribbles from their predator-filled environment to an environment where their natural multiplicative proclivities would have no restraining factors."

  Frantic, Jones gave Spock a pathetic, whole-body chuckle. "Well, of cour—what did you say?"

  Spock blinked, glanced at Kirk, and tried again. "By removing the tribbles from their natural habitat, you have, so to speak, removed the cork from the bottle and allowed the genie to escape."

  "If by that you mean do they breed quickly, well, of course, that's how I maintain my stock. But breeding animals isn't against regulations—only breeding dangerous ones. And tribbles aren't dangerous …" The big gentle man held up a tribble and cooed like a carnival caller appealing to children, desperate to make himself innocent in what had developed into a colossal pain in the neck.

  "Just incredibly prolific," Kirk complained, having to grudgingly accept that there was some sense in what Jones said. He hadn't broken any regulations.

  "Precisely!" Jones chimed. "And at six credits a head—that is, a body—it mounts up. Now, if you'll excuse me …" He got up and rounded for the door. "You should sell an instruction and maintenance manual with this thing," Kirk muttered, as Jones handed him the tribble.

  Realizing he was off the hook, Cyrano Jones's voice changed tenor. "If I did, what would happen to man's search for knowledge?" He punctuated the moment with a clap against one of his pockets, and said, "Well, I must be tending my ship. Au revoir."

  He swashed out of the room, crossing paths at the door with Nils Barris and Arne Darvin, who cast the prospector a cutting glare, then hurried into the room. Darvin gave Barris an encouraging shove. "Go ahead, sir, tell him!"

  "Captain Kirk," Barris began, shored up, "I consider your security measures a disgrace. In my opinion, you have taken this entire very important project far too lightly!"

  Kirk bobbed his eyebrows and actually started to enjoy himself. "On the contrary, sir, I … I think of this project as very important. It is you I take lightly." Fuming now, Barris leveled a finger at him. "I am going to report fully to the proper authorities that you have given free access to this station to a man who is quite probably a Klingon spy!"

  His attitude shifted as Kirk said, "Now, that's a very serious charge. To whom are you referring?"

  "To that man who just walked out of here."

  "Cyrano Jones? A Klingon agent?"

  "Did you hear me?"

  "I heard you."

  In the spirit of the moment, Spock supplied, "He simply could not believe his ears."

  Kirk looked at him quizzically, and they exchanged a moment of mutual entertainment before he turned back to Barris. "What evidence do you have against Mr. Jones?"

  Barris motioned toward Darvin. "My assistant here has kept Mr. Jones under close surveillance for quite some time and his actions have been most suspicious. I believe he was involved in that little altercation between your men and the—"

  "Yes, yes, go on. What else do you have?"

  "Well, Captain," Darvin began, "I checked his ship's log and it seems he was in the Klingon sphere of influence less than four months ago."

  "The man is an independent scout, Captain," Barris persisted. "It's quite possible that he is also a Klingon spy."

  Kirk handed the subject to Spock with a glance, and the first officer took over.

  "We have already checked on the background of Mr. Cyrano Jones," Spock said with studious efficiency. "He is a licensed asteroid locator and prospector. He's never broken the law, at least not severely, and for the past seven years with his one-man spaceship he has obtained a marginal living by engaging in the buying and selling of rare merchandise, including, unfortunately, tribbles."

  Barris would've pounded a table if he'd been standing near one. "But he is after my grain!"

  "Do you have any proof of that?" Kirk shot back.

  Darvin insisted, "You can't deny he's disrupted this station!"

  "People have disrupted stations before without being Klingon agents. Sometimes all they need is a title, Mr. Barris. Unfortunately, disrupting a station is not an offense. Now if you'll excuse me …" Kirk handed the tribble to Spock, and gave a clap on an imaginary waistcoat. "I have a ship to tend to. Au revoir."

  "Are you sure he was headed in this direction?"

  Sisko sat nervously at the rec room table and looked around at the other Enterprise crew enjoying their off-watch hours by plucking, stroking, and cuddling tribbles.

  Tribbles, tribbles, everywhere … on the deck, on the tables, on the processors, and even dotting the walls. He had no idea how they were crawling up the walls. He hadn't yet been able to find anything resembling a foot or tentacle or suction cup.

  Dax sat across from him, tensely watching the door. "Odo tracked them to the station's transporter room. I tracked them out of the ship's. They came out of the transporter room and came down this corridor. I deduced they were coming right here. They could've stopped off at the sickbay, I suppose …"

  "The man's life is in our hands," Sisko said, worried. "The life of one of the most famous men in Starfleet history. He has things yet to do that had better get done, or our universe is going to turn upside down the hard way. We've got to do better than this. If Darvin's estimation of an hour was right, we have less than ten minutes. And we can't even scan any of these tribbles without giving ourselves away."

  "What do you intend to do, then? If we find Captain Kirk, and trail him to the tribble with the bomb, what can we do without attracting attention?"

  "I'll attract it if I have to," Sisko told her, "to save his life."

  She narrowed her eyes. "How are you going to explain that?"

  Miserably, he sighed. "Feign insanity, I suppose."

  What feign? Here they were, one hundred years in the past, trying to find an adorable fuzzy bomb before it killed one of the greatest adventurers in history and put an end to the universe as they knew it. Reality couldn't be this weird. Obviously, Sisko was strapped to a bed in some asylum, having paranoid delusions.

  Feeling each second tick by a pulse at a time, his whole body tightened as the door panel opened and Kirk and Spock strode in together.

  Suddenly lightheaded with relief, Sisko glanced at Dax, then watched the captain go to the wall replicators. "I'm so glad to see him," he murmured. "He's all right, so far."

  "And Darvin's on the station, the young Darvin I mean, so how would he have known where the captain would be at this moment?" Dax murmured back. "It's got to be somewhere else."

  "Shh …"

  "My chicken sandwich and coffee …"

  Kirk was holding a food plate loaded not with food, but with tribbles. H
e raised his coffee cup, with a little brown tribble stuffed into it.

  He swung around to Spock. "This is my chicken sandwich and coffee!"

  The Vulcan gazed down at his own plateful of tribbles. "Fascinating …"

  "I want these things off the ship—I don't care if it takes every man we've got, I want them off the ship!"

  Before Spock could respond, the door opened again and Engineer Scott shuffled in, with an armload of tribbles from his hips to his neck. "Aye, they're into the machinery, all right," he said. "And they're probably in all the other food processors, too."

  "How?" Kirk asked.

  "Probably through one of the air vents."

  "Captain," Spock said urgently, "there are vents of that type on the space station."

  A light came on in Kirk's face. "And in the storage compartments!"

  At the table, Sisko hissed, "Storage compartments!"

  He pushed to his feet, skirting the wall and leading Dax to the door as Captain Kirk ditched his tribbles and went immediately to a comm unit on a table.

  As Sisko hurried out, he heard the captain's urgent orders filter away behind him.

  "This is Kirk. Contact Manager Lurry and Nils Barris. Have them meet us near the storage compartments. We're beaming down. Come on, Spock!"

  CHAPTER 12

  THEY BEAMED DOWN to the station via Defiant's transporter, then climbed down an access ladder through a dusty conduit, and the whole time Sisko felt as if he had to sneeze.

  He didn't dare.

  The deck gave under his boots as he lowered himself into the darkened storage vault, and he flinched as he realized he was stepping on a carpet of tribbles. Gently he lowered himself into a sea of fur and looked around, waiting for his eyes to adjust.

  There was absolutely no grain left in the entire compartment. He couldn't speak for the other storage areas, but this one had been completely cleaned out by tribbles.

  At least they were neat.

  Without a word, he and Dax began scanning with their tricorders.

  Sisko picked up a tribble, gave it a gentle squeeze. "Most of these tribbles," he observed, "are dead!"

  The impact made him cold. Had the old Darvin done something? Were the tribbles supposed to be dead, or did Sisko have more timeline contamination on his hands?

  They looked at each other. Had the tribbles suffocated? Crushed each other with their own weight? No, that didn't add up. Had they been electrocuted? Chewed into open circuits? Why would they be dead? Sisko glanced at his tricorder and found the answer: "The grain's been poisoned."

  Dax checked her own tricorder. "I'm picking up a faint tricobalt signature," she said quietly. "I can't lock in on the signal, but the bomb's somewhere under here."

  "Guard, is that door secure?"

  Voices from outside, the deck below …

  "Yes, sir. Nothing could get in."

  "Good. Open it up."

  Chirp.

  Sisko looked up. "What's that?"

  Lowering her voice urgently, Dax said, "Someone's trying to open one of the bay doors!"

  The two backed up against a wall to avoid being seen once the hopper doors opened. This bay was built on angles, with doors at the bottoms of the sides, so anything inside would spill out automatically, like the old railroad hopper cars that carried grain. He and Dax edged away from those doors barely in time.

  Should he try to hold the doors closed? If all these tribbles cascaded onto Jim Kirk and then one blew up, Jim Kirk's last moment was going to be a very undignified one.

  The chirping noise came again, then again, and the doors slid laterally open beneath the mound of tribbles.

  Like soup going down a drain, the tribbles siphoned downward, cascading out into the open corridor below.

  Holding his breath and waiting for the big boom, Sisko dared a peek through the center of the drain and saw the top of James Kirk's head as tribbles by the hundreds poured upon him.

  "Benjamin!" Dax motioned to the tribbles still waiting to fall. "It's right here—within a meter of where I'm standing!"

  She started checking tribbles. Sisko scooted over to help, and to scoop tribbles away from the open hatch in hopes of keeping the critical deadly one from falling on Kirk.

  Below, as the trainload of tribbles exhausted itself onto Captain Kirk, the captain's head and one shoulder emerged from a gloriously silly ten-foot-wide mound of furballs. Now just a few tribbles tumbled, one or two at a time.

  What if the bomb had fallen? Sisko looked at Dax, but she was still testing tribbles remaining in the vault—the bomb must still be up here, or her readings would've changed.

  He kept glancing down below, to keep aware of the situation, just as James Kirk turned his dismayed face upward.

  He grabbed a small white tribble, scanned it and tossed it down. It hit Kirk on the top of the head and kept him from looking up.

  Below, Commander Spock's voice filtered through the muted trilling of the few remaining live tribbles. "They appear to be gorged."

  "Gorged?" Nils Barris was standing nearby, panic in his voice. "On my grain!"

  Dax threw a large brown tribble out the door after testing it. Bounce—it enjoyed a perfect encounter with Jim Kirk.

  "Kirk, I am going to hold you responsible! There must be thousands of them …"

  "Hundreds of thousands," Kirk complained.

  Spock evenly informed, "One million seven hundred seventy-one thousand five hundred sixty-one."

  Sisko looked at Dax—a moment of congratulation as they hunted the trouble tribble.

  Below, Spock explained, "That's assuming one tribble multiplying with an average litter of ten, producing a new generation every twelve hours for a period of three days."

  Sisko dropped another tribble down the hole. It landed on Kirk's shoulder with a squeak, but the captain didn't look up this time.

  "And that's assuming they got here three days ago," Kirk contributed, as Dax tossed another tribble down upon him.

  "And allowing for the amount of grain consumed and the volume of the storage compartment."

  "Kirk, you should've known!" Barris raged, as Dax pitched a big pink tribble out the hatch for a perfect four-pointer on Kirk's noggin. "You are responsible for turning the development project into a total disaster!"

  "Mr. Barris—"

  "And I am through being intimidated, Kirk! Now, you have insulted me, you've ignored me, you've—you've walked all over me!" Barris bubbled with fury as Sisko tested a little white tribble, found it bombless, and pitched it out. "You've abused your authority and you have rejected my requests! And this—this is the result!"

  Kirk glanced at the white tribble and began. "Now, I—"

  "I am going to hold you responsible for—"

  "Mr. Barris, I'll hold you in irons if you don't shut up."

  "Jim!" Dr. McCoy came into the corridor as Sisko peeked down. McCoy was smiling. "I think I've got it! All we have to do is quit feeding them! We quit feeding them, they stop breeding!"

  Silence briefly filled the corridor, with the exception of a squawk from a medium-sized blue-gray tribble as Sisko pitched it overboard.

  Mournfully Kirk uttered, "Now he tells me …"

  "Captain," Spock began, "this tribble is dead. And so are these."

  "A lot of 'em are dead," McCoy noted. "A lot of them are alive, but they won't be for long."

  "The logical assumption is there's something in the grain."

  "Yes," Kirk said with a touch of purpose. "Bones, I want the tribbles, the grain, everything analyzed. I want to know what killed these tribbles."

  "I haven't figured out what keeps them alive yet!"

  Sisko dared to look down, accidentally pushing a white tribble down onto the captain. It squawked as it bounced off his shoulder.

  Kirk didn't look up. He was strafing McCoy with a glare.

  "All right." The doctor sighed. "If I find out anything, I'll let you know."

  Dax tricordered a big brown tribble and ditched it out
the door.

  Suddenly Sisko blinked at his tricorder and at the tribble in his own hand. Was he seeing right in the dimness? Yes!

  "Found it!" He pulled out his communicator. "Sisko to Defiant."

  "It's dead," Dax said, fingering the bomb tribble. "Go ahead, sir," Kira's voice came over the communicator.

  "We found the bomb," Sisko whispered urgently. "Lock on to my tricorder's signal and beam it into space!"

  "Acknowledged."

  Instantly the tribble and the tricorder both buzzed with transporter energy. To hide the sound, Dax pitched more tribbles down onto Captain Kirk. The tribble and tricorder disappeared, and Sisko held his breath, half expecting to hear and feel the detonation—but it would happen as far out in space as Kira could send it.

  "That isn't going to do you any good, Kirk!" Barris said, gleefully furious. "This project is ruined! And Starfleet is going to hear about it! And when they do, they will have a board of inquiry and they will roast you alive!"

  "Yes, well—" Kirk was cut off as Sisko pitched a tribble out.

  "And I am going to be there, Kirk! To enjoy every minute of it!"

  "Kira to Sisko. It worked!"

  Sisko almost collapsed with relief and tried to start thinking again. They didn't dare to beam out themselves. That would take too much energy and make too much noise. They'd have to wait. In order to keep attention from turning up to them, he rolled the last few tribbles out the door to bounce off Jim Kirk.

  "Yes, until that board of inquiry, I'm still the captain," Kirk proclaimed forcedly. "And as captain, I want two things done. First, find Cyrano Jones. And second—"

  Sisko tossed one more tribble.

  Raising a beseeching hand, Kirk begged, "Close that door …"

  CHAPTER 13

  "REALLY, CAPTAIN KIRK, I must protest this treatment!"

  Jim Kirk looked around as two security guards hustled a protesting Cyrano Jones, cradling several tribbles, into Manager Lurry's office. "Ah, Mr. Jones, with an armful. A few questions—"

  As the security guards put Jones in a chair, another voice burst through the opening door.

  "Captain Kirk!"