Star Trek - TOS - 79 - Invasion 1 - First Strike Page 13
and wait.
Hell of a long pause.
Were they making this up as they went along? Why not? I am.
The alien ship turned passively on the screen, drifting
not from power but on a breath of solar wind from the
distant red giant sun that drenched its purple fans in
bloody glow, and the leftover momentum from the battle
so shortly arrested.
"You may..."
The voice paused, as if listening. Kirk held his breath.
His crew did the same.
"... come here."
"One moment please."
A ges ture from him caused a click on Uhura's control
board that cut off the frequency.
"What's the atmosphere like over there?" he asked.
Chekov started looking for that, but from the subsystems
screen, Spock already had the answer. "Scanning .. reading oxygen, nitrogen, argon, with faint traces of
methane and other gases... rather thin and quite
warm. Breathable for controlled periods of time."
"How controlled? Bones?"
The doctor flinched as if coming out of a trance. "I'd
recommend an hour at a time, Captain."
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"Noted. Lieutenant Uhura, inform the transporter
room that we'll be visiting that vessel out there. I want
the coordinates kept updated at all times, in case we have
to come back in a hurry. The transporter officer'll have
to stay on his toes."
"Yes, sir."
"'Vergo of the Wrath,'" he muttered, narrowing his
eyes at the big quartz ship on the screen. "Could that
mean 'captain' of the Wrath? Could 'Wrath' be the
name of the ship?"
"Possibly," Spock answered from the monitor. "However,
I caution against applying our own use of words
and concepts based on something that sounds familiar,
sir."
Kirk sighed. "Never mind how complicated it might
end up being to deal with people who name their ship 'Wrath.""
He avoided looking at Kellen. The Klingons named
their own ships with words like that.
"Dr. McCoy, you come with me, and I want a Security
detail with us also. Palm phasers only. I don't want to
appear too threatening."
Placing a hand on the rail, he climbed the three steps
to the quarterdeck and stood over Uhura's station. She
continued to look at her board and tap at her fingerpads,
and that bothered him.
"Ship to ship," he said, and waited for the click from
Uhura's board before he spoke again to the unknowns.
"This is Captain Kirk. I will come to your ship with a
greeting party. We will come directly to your bridge,
unless you have other instructions."
Silence fell in. He got the feeling things were being
discussed over there and anticipated their changing their
minds, but--
"Come."
"Thank you. We'll be there in a few minutes. Kirk out.
Mr. Sulu, drop the hook. We'll be staying awhile."
"All systems stabilized, sir. Holding position."
"Secure from red alert. Stand by at yellow alert.
Damage-control teams get to work. General Kellen, you 110O
FIRST STRIKE
may communicate with your ships and assess their
damage. If they need any life-savine assistance, we'll
provide if." '
Kellen raised his neatly bearded chin. "Imagine my
gratitude."
"Inform them we're going aboard the unidentified
ship. If they make any aggressive movements, Mr. Scott
will drive them back again. Is that clear, Mr. Scott?"
"Crystal clear, Captain."
"General, do you want to join the boarding party?"
"IT' Kellen's face turned horrible. "I will never go
there again."
"Fine." Kirk turned away and looked at Uhura again.
"I need a linguist. Do we have one on board?"
"Yes, sir. Me."
"You?"
Her almond cheeks rounded in a smile. "What do you
think 'communications' means? 'Small talk'?"
"Sorry," he said. Then he hesitated. Take her along?
He paused for a moment and pressed down the twinge
in his stomach. "Lieutenant, I'd like you to join the
landing party."
Uhura's face lit up. She didn't get asked very often,
and the couple of times before had turned out to be near-disasters.
Still, she seemed excited.
Aye, sir, she said, for the same reason Scott had said
it, and in almost the same tone.
"Very good," he offered,,and moved around her. "Mr.
Spock, you have the conn. '
The crew's eyes came up to him in a nearly audible
snap. Silence from the monitor up starboard. Uneased,
nobody spoke. How inappropriate it would have been
for anyone, however well intended, to point out the
captain's colossal error.
Kirk scowled at himself. "Mr. Scott," he corrected,
"you have the conn."
Scott nodded with more sympathy than was comfortable
for either of them. "Aye aye, sir."
It was the eternal ideal response to a commanding
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officer, the one that saved any situation and would get
anybody off the hook. Didn't work quite so well at the
moment. It got Scott and Spock off the hook and relieved
the bridge crew of their tension, but did nothing for the
captain who had made the blunder.
He charged over it. "Uhura, bring along a tricorder
tied directly in to Mr. Spock's computer access channel,
so he can see what's going on. Let's go."
"Captain," Kellen broke in, coming to the rail below
the bright red turbolift doors, "you are out of order here.
I organized this mission. I am its commander."
"You're a guest on my ship," Kirk corrected. "You can
act that way, or you can go back to your own fleet and all
bets are off."
"This transport is folly," the general insisted. "No one
with any sense goes over to an enemy ship in the middle
of a battle!"
"It was your battle, not theirs. They didn't fire on us until you opened fire. And part of the mission of this
vessel is to contact new life forms on an amicable basis if
at all possible."
"It is impossible. This is the Havoc. There is no
amicable basis."
"We'll see. I'll be back in an hour. Gentlemen, let's
take a look at who these people are."
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What's the mission of this vessel? To seek out
and contact alien life and an opportunity
to demonstrate what our high-sounding words
mean.
James Kirk
Chapter Nine SOMETIMES THE STUNNING ART of transporting seemed to
move beyond physical science and into magic. And sometimes it seemed to take days instead of seconds.
This was one of those times.
Jim Kirk tapped a mental foot during those seconds. It
was always like this when a new form of life lay in wait
for discovery on the other side of immaterial state.
As his mind gathered itself and the transporter room
of the Enterprise dissolved into fog, he realized he
couldn't see and wondered for a he
art-snapping moment
if something had gone wrong. When he felt his feet
beneath him again and his arms at his sides, the fog was
still there. Had the transport been completed?
There was moisture here. He felt hot. At least all his
nerve endings were still with him.
Starting to think like McCoy. Scientist though he was,
McCoy was a medical biologist and physics often intimidated
him, especially when physics separated biology
into a billion bits of molecular energy and claimed to
reassemble it in perfect order. Some people still didn't
believe that planes could fly.
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Kirk blinked the anxiety away and waved his hand at
the fog in front of him, not so much to clear it but to
sense its texture. The tendrils of cloud moved like smoke
rather than moisture, but felt like moisture. What did
that mean?
Smelled like a pond in here. The deck under his feet
felt pulpy, but it was definitely flat as a floor and hard
underneath. There was a source of low light, but he
couldn't pin down the location. Immediately before him
were two more sources of light, one cranberry red, the
other a bleeding purple. He glanced to his left, at McCoy.
Washed in the blended light, the doctor stood staring
and disconcerted by the strange surroundings. The back
of his head and shoulders were bathed in soft pearly
light--another light source, this one behind them. Kirk
didn't look around. That would be the job of the Security
team.
For a moment he held still, with his hand up in the
middle of a wave, and listened.
A faint vibration came up through the soles of his feet,
a throbbing of mechanical regularity. Engines. Kellen
had been right. Motive power and tangible hardware.
Obvious now that the ship had been seen, but the
sensations here were familiar enough that Kirk guessed
the power sources might be similar to those of conventional
ships. At least they weren't dealing with a race so
different from their own as to make the contest one-sided.
Nearby was the murmur of other mechanical systems,
though much more subtle than any on the Enterprise. He
saw no ceiling, and though he felt the deck he couldn't
see it. The fog was thick up to his knees, then became a
lazy haze.
There was a smell too, but not like a ship smell.
Fungus? Weeds, mosses, moisture. Algae. Spock probably
could're told him what species. Yet the foresty smell
was overlaid with a chemical presence too, almost industrial,
like glue or cleanser, and it insisted there was a
technical presence here.
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His gut began to shrink, giving off warnings.
I'
ve seen aliens before, plenty of them. Some unthinkably
strange, defiant of any known evolutionary pattern. I
haven't even seen these people yet. Why am I already
flinching?
He knew the answer. Kellen. What could shake an
experienced spacefaring Klingon general with a long
record of bravery and a reputation for disarming composure?
Had Kellen set him up? The thought flashed, unwelcome
and distasteful, that he was failing into a trap. Was
he so distracted that he hadn't thought of that dimension?
Exhausted, losing so many crewmen, worried
about Spock--
Not good enough. There wasn't anything that would
take him off the hook for the entirety of his job, and here
he was, beamed in with a team, and only now thinking of
a seriously viable possibility.
On the other hand, this ship was here. Might as well
throttle up. If he had to strangle Kellen later, well, an
option was an option.
"Is this their bridge, sir?" Uhura asked just behind his
right elbow, speaking low, as if walking through a
graveyard and worried about waking someone.
"That was the plan," Kirk a nswered. "We homed in
on their communications signal. Tricorder."
She raised the powerful little unit hanging from the
strap over her shoulder and clicked it on. "Reading life-
forms, sir, lots of them."
"Proximity?"
"Nearby... the readings are.. 2' She paused,
frowned, tampered with the instrument. "I can't get a fiX."
"Jim," McCoy murmured at Kirk's side, scarcely
above a whisper. His blue eyes were wide, unblinking,
bizarre in the glowing fog.
Kirk looked at him.
"The ....
y re here, McCoy stud, his throat tight. "They're
in here now."
Put on edge by the doctor's intuition, Kirk lowered his
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right hand until it hovered near the small phaser hidden
on his belt. He didn't touch the weapon, but he kept his
hand there.
He took one step out from his boarding party and
raised his voice.
"I'm Captain Kirk," he said through the choking
humidity. "Is there anyone here?"
For several moments, possibly a minute, there was no
change at all, as if he had spoken firmly but pointlessly
into an empty cave.
The fog began to shift. For an absurd instant he
entertained the idea that the fog itself might be the life-form
they were seeking. A fog with a voice, though?
McCoy would have something to say about the vocal
chords of a fog.
No, not the fog. There was physical movement beyond
it. Shapes of upright beings began to form, broad shoulders,
high heads, like gray chalk etchings on concrete.
lbout our size, he noted instinctively. Six feet...
seven. . not out of line for humanoids.
The huge numbers of humanoids discovered by the
Federation in its outward expansion had upheld theories
of scientists who believed that intelligent industrial life
had to be of a certain size, not too big, but also not too
small, in order to develop industry and eventually space-flight.
There would have to be some form of propulsion
with which to go against the stream--legs--and some
form of sensors at the other end with which to avoid
running into walls--hands and eyes and sometimes a
nose. There would have to be at least two hands with
which to alter their environment, and at least two eyes
for depth perception.
So despite the thousands of planets out there, it hadn't
turned out so unusual that there were Klingons, Romulans,
Terrans, Orions, and others, each with roughly the
same appendages and a head each. Also not so strange
that the horta, a creature based on silicon, with no arms,
legs, head, or eye, though intelligent, had no industry.
Like Earth's cetaceans or Alpha Centauri's big mamma-118
FIRST STRIKE
1oids. Didn't matter how smart they were if they had
hooves or fins instead of hands and couldn't manipulate
their environment.
All this flashed through Kirk's mind as he waited for
the being
s to show themselves. He lay in the hope that he
was dealing with humanoids, with whom he automatically
had some common ground. For a civilization to
advance, there had to be some level of cooperation, they
had to take care of their offspring, and they had to have
common goals. Those communal elements were his
anchors in exploration. He could make himself understood
to beings who understood those.
He motioned to his boarding party to stand very still
and let the next movement be those of this ship's crew.
That was how he would want it on the...
Eyes. Yes--there they were.
Like a cat's stare catching candlelight, a dozen sets of
eyes came toward them. A cold stake of shock bolted
from Kirk's stomach to his feet. His innards shriveled at
the forms moving from the fog toward them.
McCoy stiffened beside him. Uhura drew a sharp
breath and tightened her arms to her sides, but didn't
step back.
A Pandora's box of demons pushed the vapor aside.
I'll-shaped and colossal, three of them were an amalgam
of triangles, with long bony faces and eyes the shapes of
sickles, and huge twisted ram's horns upon their heads,
as elegant and horrifying as could be. Between those,
other creatures appeared with dozens of serpentine
white tentacles undulating from their skulls as long as a
man's arm and freely moving, caressing the faces and
shoulders of the beings they decorated as if searching for
something.
To Kirk's left, another creature had two sets of arms
and an elongated face like a jade tiki. Behind that one
there were others, some skeletal, others swollen, and at
least one had no face at all that Kirk could see. This was
an utterly amalgamated crew.
And there were others he couldn't make out yet,
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except for the distorted shapes of their heads and their masklike faces east in shadows and highlights, caressed by fog.
Most of them wore some kind of clothing, and lots of jewelry. Recumbent half moons, demon-headed brooches like the things carved into the walls, and each one wore an engraved bronze medallion about three inches across with scrolled designs and a small handle, dangling from a long chain.