Trials and Tribble-ations Read online

  Ah, Koloth. And his first officer, too.

  Swinging to face them, Kirk snapped, "What do you want?"

  The Klingon seemed to think he had something on him. "An official apology addressed to the Klingon High Command. I expect you to assume full responsibility or the persecution of Klingon nationals in this quadrant."

  Kirk eyed him, unflapped. "An apology?"

  "Yes. You've harassed my men. You've treated them like criminals. You've been most uncourteous, Captain Kirk. If you wish to avoid a diplomatic incident—"

  "No, Kirk!" Barris pushed in from where he had been standing nearby. "You can't let him! That'll give them the wedge they need to claim Sherman's Planet!"

  Spock, his voice like a balm on the abrasions of the moment, pointed out, "I believe that more than the word of an aggrieved Klingon commander would be necessary for that, Mr. Barris."

  Kirk glanced over his shoulder at him gratefully.

  "Mr. Spock," Koloth said, "as far as Sherman's Planet is concerned, Captain Kirk has already given it to us."

  "Well, we'll see about that," Kirk told him. "But before I take any official action, I'd like to know just what happened." Attention turned to Cyrano Jones as Kirk stepped toward him. "Who put the tribbles in the quadrotriticale? And what was in the grain that killed them?"

  "Captain Kirk, before you go on, may I make a request?"

  "Yes?"

  He pointed at the tribbles in Cyrano Jones's arms. "Can you get those things out of here?"

  Not so much to ask. McCoy had reported that the tribbles seemed to have a particularly jarring effect on Klingons, cutting to the core of their nervous systems with what sounded like pleasant trilling to everyone else.

  Kirk motioned to the security guards, who plucked up the trilling balls and headed for the door. As the door opened, the guards had to step aside for Arne Darvin.

  The stiff young assistant behaved as if startled that someone was crossing his path at a common door, then bodily flinched again as the tribbles in the guards' hands suddenly quivered and screamed.

  The guards held back, and Darvin tried to step past them, but the tribbles shrieked fitfully.

  "Remarkable—" Spock intoned.

  "Hold on a minute!" Kirk ordered. He turned to Jones. "I thought you said tribbles liked everybody."

  "They do!" Jones protested in a surprisingly honest tone. "The last time I saw one act this way was in the bar."

  "What was in the bar?"

  "Klingons! Him, for one," Jones said, pointing at Koloth's first officer, the man Kirk knew had been the chief antagonist in the bar fight.

  Kirk went to the doorway and took two tribbles from the nearest guard. Darvin stood there unmoving, his arms tightly folded. Kirk strode back into the room, deliberately moving too close to Koloth's first officer. Sure enough, the tribbles rattled and screamed in his hands.

  "Why, you're right, Mr. Jones," Kirk observed with undisguised glee. "They don't like Klingons!"

  The door opened and Dr. McCoy came in, which enhanced Kirk's idea. He walked to Spock, and the tribbles purred happily. "But they do like Vulcans."

  "Obviously tribbles are very perceptive creatures, Captain," Spock offered, playing along with style.

  "Obviously." He turned and extended his experiment to Barris. "Mr. Barris, they like you … well, there's no accounting for taste."

  Like a cat who'd just caught the neighborhood rat, Kirk turned to Darvin and the tribbles rewarded him with a piercing squeal.

  "They don't like you, Mr. Darvin. I wonder why? Bones?"

  McCoy brought his medical tricorder to Darvin and turned it on. "Heartbeat is all wrong … his body temperature is—Jim, this man is a Klingon!"

  "Klingon?" Barris gasped.

  Swelling with joy, Kirk leveled a victorious gaze on him. "I wonder what Starfleet Command will have to say about that. What about the grain, Bones?"

  McCoy turned to him. "Oh, yes … it was poisoned."

  Absorbing one more shock, Barris breathed, "Poisoned …"

  "Yes, it's been impregnated with a virus. The virus turns into an inert material in the bloodstream. The more the organism eats, the more inert matter is built up. So, after two or three days it would reach a point where they couldn't take in enough nourishment to survive."

  "They starved to death," Kirk concluded. "In a storage compartment full of grain, they starved to death."

  "That is essentially it," McCoy said, rocking on a heel.

  Prowling, Kirk fixed eyes with Darvin. Slowly he prowled the disguised young Klingon. "Darvin, you talk?"

  The clean-cut spy attempted, "I have nothing to say."

  Kirk shoved the tribbles into his face. They sirened and waggled until Darvin winced.

  "All right! I poisoned the grain! Take them away."

  "And the tribbles had nothing to do with it."

  "I don't know. I never saw one before in my life. And I hope I never see one of those fuzzy miserable things again."

  "I'm certain that can be arranged, Darvin," Barris said indignantly. "Guards!"

  The two security men sprang to life, now with a real criminal to guard, and shuffled Darvin out of the room.

  Barris offered Kirk an almost polite farewell. "If you'll excuse me, Captain."

  He followed the guards out, his attention on a new target of his antagonism now.

  "Captain Koloth," Kirk began, "about that apology …"

  "Yes?"

  "You have six hours to get your ship out of Federation territory."

  Anger flared across Koloth's face, but Kirk pushed the tribbles an inch closer, enough to set them off.

  As physical pain and emotional infuriation streaked across Koloth's face, the Klingon offered a bare salute and hurried out of the room, with his first officer virtually running after.

  As Spock, Jones, and McCoy surrounded him, Kirk felt the annoyances of the past few hours pour off him just as the tribbles had poured out of the storage bin.

  "Y'know," he said happily, "I think I could learn to like tribbles!"

  CHAPTER 14

  "AFTER THE BOMB was detonated, history resumed its course."

  As Ben Sisko wrapped up his story, he delightedly noted that the time cops had aged a couple of years in about an hour. Lucsly looked ill and Dulmur just looked older.

  "Captain Kirk confronted Darvin," he continued, "and uncovered the fact that he was a spy. Captain Koloth took his ship back to the Empire with his tail between his legs, and by the time we returned to the Defiant, Major Kira had discovered how to use the Orb to bring us back to our own time. She found the key in one of the passages from the Prophecy of Kandal—"

  "And that's when you returned to the present?" Dulmur asked, hoping, exhausted.

  Sisko paused, studied their two faces and tried to measure whether or not they could take one more shock. He got a sudden vision of the two of them each in their own quarters in the dull offices of the Time Investigations Bureau, waking up in cold sweats for the next month.

  Oh, what the hell.

  "Well," he said, "not exactly. Before we left, I realized there was one last thing I had to do. Something I'd been thinking about ever since I saw that ship on the viewscreen …"

  The bridge was appealing, nostalgic. The proportion was just perfect. Captain's chair at the center; helm officers in front so the captain could give orders quietly to them, but they would never fail to hear him, science station at his right, communications behind him, engineering at his left; and other systems monitors flanking the brilliant panorama of space on the main screen directly before the command arena.

  As he stood amid the simple beauty of the old bridge, Ben Sisko felt as if he had stepped into a truly new frontier, the days when even near-space was a furnace, when rules and regulations were far away and the captain had to be autonomous whether he liked it or not.

  A thrill surged through him as he realized the tantalizing adventures that still lay before these people around him, and he fought down
a thunderous desire to stay here with them, and go.

  The thrill turned electrical as the lift panel opened and Captain James Kirk took command of his bridge, pausing briefly on the aft quarterdeck. Sisko realized as he stood at the forward monitors that he was looking at Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. Leonard McCoy, and Engineer Scott standing together within a pace of each other.

  "Captain," Spock greeted from the engineering station, and the captain paused. "Starfleet was able to divert that freighter."

  "Good. That means Sherman's Planet will get its quadrotriticale only a few weeks late."

  Spock followed him as Kirk dropped to his command platform and vectored into his chair-at the last second, he stopped, braced on the chair's arms, and looked at the seat. Nothing in the captain's seat but the captain's … seat.

  And no musical pigeon coo anywhere.

  He glanced about with a new eye. "I don't see any tribbles around here."

  From the upper bridge beside Scott, Dr. McCoy happily told him, "And you won't find a tribble on this entire ship, Jim."

  "Bones!" Kirk lauded joyously. "How did you do that?"

  McCoy sauntered to the lower deck, arms folded passively. "Well, I cannot take credit for another man's work. Scotty did it."

  "Scotty!" Kirk chimed. "Where are the tribbles?"

  Scott paled a shade or two and shifted the responsibility again. "Oh … Captain, it was Mr. Spock's recommendation."

  "Of course." Kirk looked around to his right. "Mr. Spock."

  Spock parried, "Based on computer analysis, of course, taking into account the possibilities of—"

  "Gentlemen," Kirk broke in, "I don't want to interrupt this mutual admiration society, but I'd like to know where the tribbles are."

  "Tell him, Spock," McCoy urged.

  Hesitating, Spock grew uncharacteristically stiff. "Well, it was Mr. Scott who performed the actual engineering."

  "Mr. Scott."

  The engineer uneasily crossed to the steps and came down to the captain's left side as Kirk insisted, "Where … are … the tribbles?"

  Scott's expression was pathetic. "I used the transporter, Captain."

  "You used the transporter?"

  "Aye."

  "Well, where did you transport them?"

  Getting the idea there was an answer no one wanted to tell him, Kirk's eyes flared as he looked from Scott to McCoy, who suddenly gained an interest in the ceiling, then to Spock, then instantly back to the engineer, and he shifted in his chair. "Scott, you didn't transport them into space, did you?"

  "Captain Kirk!" the engineer said hurtfully. "That'd be inhuman!"

  "Well, where are they?"

  "I gave them a very good home, sir."

  "WHERE?"

  "I gave them to the Klingons, sir."

  Kirk's eyes widened, brows up. He gushed, "You gave them to the Klingons?"

  "Yes, sir. Just before they went into warp, I beamed the whole kit and caboodle into their engine room. Where they'll be no tribble a'tall."

  Every breath was held, every person wondering what the captain would say, what he would do, what he would conclude. Sisko found himself watching Engineer Scott, sure he'd seen that same expression on Miles O'Brien at least once.

  Then Kirk crossed his legs, rested back, and smiled.

  Behind them, Communications Officer Uhura let out a little sniff of laughter, which traveled virally to McCoy, then to Scott, still on the hot seat.

  Kirk glanced at Spock, then cuffed Scott in the breadbasket and laughed, too.

  Even Spock, standing at the captain's side with his arms emblematically folded, rocked from one foot to the other in sudden relaxation.

  At the fore of the bridge, Sisko broke out in a smile as he hovered over his sensor hood, pretending to work. Kirk had a sense of humor! And so, apparently, did Mr. Spock. He made a mental note to add this poignant detail to the official historical logs. Posterity should know about something like that.

  After a few elongated moments of mutual entertainment, Kirk said, "All right, we can consider ourselves absolved. Helm, make your course six-five mark two and adjust for arch. Let's sweep the Klingon border once before we move on."

  "Aye, sir," Chekov said, still grinning.

  Spock went to his station at the science console, Uhura went back to hers, Scott escaped all the way out to the turbolift, and McCoy went with him.

  The captain sat grinning for several more minutes, and it took Sisko every one of those seconds to mount up the urge to go through with his daring though simple plan.

  Shoring himself up with a deep breath, he picked up the nearest padd and a stylus, then turned and stepped down to the lower deck.

  The instant Sisko encroached upon the command sphere, Kirk's sharp hazel eyes lanced to him. Struck with the import of that attention, Sisko almost backed up.

  No, there would be no second chance.

  "Excuse me, Captain," he said, dismayed that his voice sounded hoarse.

  Kirk blinked. "Lieutenant … Lieutenant—"

  "Benjamin Sisko, sir." He handed Kirk the stylus and padd, hoping the captain would just sign it without bothering to read it. "I've been on temporary assignment here," Sisko said tentatively. "Before I leave, I just wanted to say … it's been an honor to serve with you."

  Kirk finished signing, then handed the padd back to Sisko and smiled. "All right, Lieutenant. Carry on."

  Sisko wanted to say more, but at that moment Mr. Spock turned and came to the rail as if about to address the captain, and that was just pushing too much. Without further dawdle or gawk, Sisko mounted the aft steps and marched into the waiting turbolift.

  He quivered with satisfaction as the lift doors closed and he raised his communicator to signal the Defiant, and drew his last long sigh of Enterprise air. Now he had the one prize he had always imagined to be out of reach—

  Captain James T. Kirk's autograph.

  "Captain."

  "Mr. Spock."

  "I thought you might like to know," Spock said as he came to the lower bridge, "Captain Koloth's ship has just crossed back into Klingon space and shows no sign of reducing speed or altering course."

  "Mmm," Kirk acknowledged. "I wonder if he knew about Darvin."

  "Possibly," Spock said. "His boldness at demanding shore leave on a Federation station was unprecedented. It's possible to theorize that his presence here was calculated, allowing him to take possession of Sherman's Planet once the poisoned grain was distributed. A Klingon presence in the sector would be difficult to play down. Dr. McCoy suspects the poison in the grain may be of the brand which would contaminate the soil, and not just the yield, thereby rendering the planet useless for at least a solar year, giving the Klingons ample time to establish claim."

  "Well, I'm glad we stopped it," Kirk said casually. "It's somebody else's headache now. Nils Barris's, I hope. By the way, Spock—"

  "Sir?"

  "Who was that lieutenant who just left the bridge?"

  "Pardon me?"

  "That tall fellow who just left. What'd he say his name was? Brisko? Operations?"

  "I'm not familiar with any Lieutenant Brisko in the operations division, sir."

  "He said he was on temporary assignment."

  Spock nodded. "We did do a recent exchange with the Hood, and Captain Dodge told me he was passing along some officers for additional training who had come to him from another starship. I cannot confirm at the moment that one of them was Brisko. I will do so, if you have concerns."

  "No, no, don't bother," Kirk said, and paused. "It's just that … he didn't carry himself like a lieutenant."

  Having no response to such subjectivity, Spock simply waited for the captain to come to a conclusion.

  After a moment, Kirk dismissed the question and offered his first officer a canceling wave. "Not important, Spock. Don't let it trouble you."

  CHAPTER 15

  "NOW, IF YOU want to put a letter of reprimand in my file for that," Sisko said, "go ahead."


  Dulmur and Lucsly exchanged a look of helpless concern, communicating to each other and to Sisko that there really wasn't anything they could do about all this, even if Sisko had decided to stay in the past beyond the requirements of his mission.

  They could confiscate his autograph, though, and thus he wasn't about to tell them he had it.

  "We'll have to review the case," Lucsly said eventually, as if there were much else he could say, "before making any recommendations."

  "However," Dulmur put in, "I don't think there was any harm done." When both Sisko and Lucsly looked at him, he admitted, "I probably would've done the same thing myself."

  Dulmur blushed at his own ultimate transgression, but Lucsly didn't say anything.

  Lucsly closed his briefcase in silent conclusion and stood up. The two time cops let Sisko lead them to the door without further comment on the terrible crime of having pushed the envelope of risk in time.

  "There is one thing, Captain," Dulmur asked as the door opened before them.

  "Yes?" Sisko encouraged.

  Dulmur slowly began, "In regard to Captain Kirk … what color was his uniform?"

  Sisko looked at them blankly for a moment, giving them an instant of terror that he hadn't paid any attention. Then he simply said, "Green."

  The time guys looked at each other again, eyes wide with secret pleasure. Lucsly smiled and made a diagonal motion across his own chest—and, yes, Kirk's shirt had been the wraparound kind.

  Dulmur swallowed a giggle.

  "What does that have to do with the case?" Sisko tormented.

  Instantly the two dropped their delight and tried to act serious.

  "Nothing," Lucsly admitted.

  "The important thing," Dulmur said, "is that your trip into the past had no lasting repercussions here in the present."

  Uneasily, forcing himself not to grin, Sisko shifted and led them out of the office, through Ops, toward the turbolift. In the background, Dax and Kira looked up expectantly, then controlled their curiosity.

  "You'll be receiving our report in about a month," Dulmur said. "But based on what you've told us, I don't think you have anything to worry about."

  "I'm glad to hear it," Sisko said.