STARTREK®: NEW EARTH - WAGON TRAIN TO THE STARS Read online

  “Captain,” the governor pressed, “I know what you’re thinking and I don’t like it. The colonists are depending on those drones. Webb Three’s the only one manufacturing appliance subsystems. The Webbs have spacedock facilities, computer components, all sorts of things critical to our setting up a viable spaceport in record time! Please don’t fire on their factory drone!”

  Ignoring him, Kirk turned to the privateer captain. “When did you first notice its erratic behavior, Mr. Kilvennan?”

  “It’s Captain Kilvennan, and my mother’s sensors noticed the rogue at the same time you did, Captain Kirk.”

  Suddenly ferocious, Kirk snapped, “Don’t get provoked with me. I’m having a bad week and I’m not in a good mood.”

  Though Kilvennan visibly boiled under the skin, he offered helpful information. “My first mate wondered if maybe the lightship’s signal scrambled Webb Three’s autonav. I told him I didn’t think we were picking up a signal yet from the Hatteras.”

  Spock turned to him. “We’ve been receiving a phase-distant homing signal from the lightship for nearly four days, Captain Kilvennan. Only this morning it finally went to proximity one. The lightship uses extreme-range sensors to gather information, then broadcast them to anyone who might need them.”

  “Not now, Spock,” Kirk preempted. “We’re not sure what set that drone off, but no stray signal’s going to change level-six torches to level-three disruptive phasers. So somebody’s been tampering. Now the ship’s gone rogue and it’s trying to cut up a people-mover with three thousand passengers on board.”

  Governor Pardonnet sweated as he watched the Conestoga on the main screen. “Can’t we have one day without an accident?”

  “This is no accident,” Kirk rejected. “If it were just a malfunction, that drone would’ve snatched one of its own line of drones or some ship close to it. Instead it went right for the Oregon Trail, ignoring ten other vessels in its way.”

  Before them as the starship drew cautiously nearer, the chunky manufacturer ship, with its thick arms and pods extended like claws, assaulted the helpless Conestoga. Flashes of torch phasers, five times brighter than they should be, brightened the flanks of both vessels. At the helm, Sulu settled down to concentrate on moving just the starship now that the rest of the Expedition ships were out of the way.

  Kilvennan asked, “Can’t you fry its autopilot with a microburst?”

  “As you pointed out,” Spock answered, “enhanced phasers are quirkish. A burst might set them into critical mode.”

  Hearing their voices as if detached by a thousand miles, James Kirk gripped the back of his command chair as the starship pulled closer, narrowing the distance between itself and the crazed drone. The Conestoga loomed so large on the screen that he could count its hull bolts.

  “When it flew off on its own,” Kilvennan offered, “my mother contacted me and told me to broadcast commands in our private code when it came past Hunter’s Moon, but it wouldn’t accept. Instead it passed right by the other ships and went for Oregon and started opening up.”

  “Seven minutes,” Spock reminded.

  Kirk almost snarled at him to quit counting, but held back. “Chekov, go down to auxiliary control and use the battle targeting computer to take a pinpoint firing fix on that drone. Contact us the minute you’ve pulled it up.”

  “I’ll be there in thirty seconds, sir!” Chekov brushed past Kilvennan and plunged into the lift. With a hiss he was gone, and the young privateer captain stood alone on the aft walkway.

  “Mr. Kilvennan,” Kirk summoned, “would you come down here and take his post at weapons and navigation.”

  Startled, Kilvennan stepped back. “Nah, you don’t want me. Never even been on a starship’s bridge.”

  “And I’ve never been a privateer. The seat’s right here. You’re the one who wants to blow it up, and I need somebody to push the button when I give the order.”

  Making a decision he didn’t like, Michael Kilvennan stepped down to the lower deck, grumbling, “Bet you haven’t heard the word ‘no’ in twenty years.” He slipped into the nav chair next to Sulu and tried to make sense of the multilights on the board before him. “Why don’t we just blow it up now? Why wait?”

  “We’ve got to get it off Oregon Trail’s hull,” Kirk said, “or it’ll rip a hole in that ship the size of a gymnasium. There’s Chekov’s tie-in. He just connected.”

  Pointing at a grid on the right side of the board, Kirk moved around to Kilvennan’s side, feeling compact and chiseled in comparison to the lanky hired gun with his long hair and rugged clothing.

  “You’re in my way,” Kilvennan accused.

  But Kirk didn’t move. He paused in midstep, fingertips of his left hand poised on the nav console. He was looking up at the science station.

  The ultimate of verticality, Spock continued to look down at him as if they had all the time ever made. Had they both stopped breathing? Kirk felt the eyes of Scott and Uhura, who knew them both so well. Governor Pardonnet was watching him too, but in a completely different way. So was Kilvennan.

  “It did go straight for the Oregon Trail,” Kirk murmured. “Didn’t it?”

  Spock peered at him. “The ID beacon?”

  Kirk slapped the helm with a flat palm. “Try it, Spock! Sulu, shields down!”

  “Our shields, sir?” Sulu asked. “Oh—of course! Shields down, sir!”

  “Phaser overload on the drone,” Spock ticked off, “within six minutes.”

  Six minutes, and the factory drone would blow itself up without help.

  “What’s going on?” Kilvennan asked.

  Spinning to face the main screen again, Kirk quickly said, “Something must’ve told that drone which ship to attack. That means specific signal identification!”

  “And that means programming,” Scott punctuated.

  Suddenly they were all milking their consoles, concentrating on prying that dangerous drone off the skin of the Conestoga. Again Kirk took his spare two seconds to empathize with the people on board that dorm ship—emergency evac drills, abandon-ship procedures, waking the children and fitting them with EV units—

  And Uhura sitting up there at her post as if she were just a switchboard operator, showing none of the fabulous power of action she possessed as the Expedition’s drillmaster and safety tsar. Were her drills coming to good use over there? Would lives be saved?

  “Sir,” she called, “Mr. Chekov signals he’s ready.”

  “Have him stand by.” Kirk’s voice was gravelly with anticipation. He wanted to shoot at something. “You heard that, Kilvennan?”

  “Still trying to figure out these lights. Don’t count on me.”

  “Right there.” Kirk pointed at an amber control grid. “That’s the important one for you.”

  “Got it.”

  “Spock?”

  One wrist pressed to the edge of his board, Spock pecked at the controls. He frowned, dissatisfied. “I’m unable to shut down the Conestoga’s beacon by remote. There’s some sort of signal refusal.”

  Cranking around, Kirk grasped the back of his command chair. “Ship to ship, Uhura, quickly. Oregon Trail, this is Enterprise. Shut down your ID beacon immediately. That drone is homing in on your code.”

  “Enterprise, Captain Trautner. We figured that out, but our beacon won’t neutralize. It’s locked up. It’ll take hours to purge the system. That thing’s cutting through our hull!”

  “Evacuate passengers to the other side of—”

  “And shut the hatches. I did, but if it breaches the hull in the wrong place, we’ll have a pressure detonation. Can’t you blast it?”

  “Negative. The explosion would take out your port quarter. Keep working on that signal. Spock, broadcast the Conestoga’s signal anyway. Maybe we can confuse that thing into letting go if it gets the signal from two sources.”

  Kilvennan looked up. “Why are you dropping your shields?”

  “If we don’t,” Scott answered, “the drone won’t be
able to tractor onto us and it’ll go looking for the Conestoga again.”

  Kirk’s shoulders bunched under the uniform jacket. “Target phasers.”

  “About time,” Kilvennan reminded, his hand poised over the firing control.

  “Bring the ship to—”

  “Captain, please!” Governor Pardonnet’s brown hair flopped forward. “We’ll be cooking over open fires for a year while we rebuild that infrastructure. There’s got to be a way to neutralize it—”

  “You’re going to have to let me finish a sentence one of these days, Governor.” Kirk gave him a mellow glance. “Mr. Kilvennan, target our phasers and prepare to detonate the beam, and only the beam, if that drone fires on us, understood? Chekov’ll provide pinpoint coordinates on your upper left.”

  “Left . . . got it.”

  “Spock, are we broadcasting?”

  “Yes, sir. The drone is unresponsive. It believes it has found its quarry and won’t release.”

  “Boost the signal. Overwhelm the Conestoga’s signal with the same code. Blast that thing in the ears. Pull in close, Sulu.”

  “Proximity range in thirteen seconds, sir,” Sulu said, tipping his shoulders as he turned the ship.

  Almost coming out of his chair, Kilvennan snatched a quick breath. “It’s breaking free of the Conestoga!”

  Sometimes victory could be horrifying. The angry drone ship, with its claws extended and its mechanical mind focused, clunked free of the dorm ship and turned its attack on the starship. Moving closer and growing larger by the millisecond, it was on them in instants. The starship jolted suddenly as it was struck by a phaser hit. Even a level-three phaser at this nearness could deal a bad blow. If it hit a nacelle—

  “Firing on us,” Sulu mentioned casually.

  Spock watched his console instead of the gigantic crawling monster on the screen as it approached, then dipped below the ship’s saucer-shaped primary hull. “Drone is tractoring on our engineering section. Five minutes to phaser-critical.”

  Tensely Kirk lowered his chin and digested the fact that they were now aboard the powerful drone’s chosen target. “Mr. Sulu, bear off from the Expedition ships. Give us room to maneuver.”

  “Room to blow up, you mean,” Kilvennan openly stated, and met Kirk’s glare fearlessly.

  “Target the drone’s shield assembly,” Kirk gnashed to him, “and fire, right now.”

  Kilvennan’s hand went to the amber grid.

  Phasers lashed from the starship’s underbelly to the drone now clamped to her engineering hull. On the main screen now was a view of the drone latched freakishly on. The phaser cut a fiery line across the gap, struck the drone’s shield array, and the array disintegrated. Only a scorched bruise, smoking and sparking, remained where the assembly had been mounted on the drone’s bow.

  “Drone’s shields are down,” Spock confirmed. “It’s still compromising our hull. Opening fire now . . . four minutes thirty seconds to critical.”

  “I’ll take care of it.” Kirk took Kilvennan by the arm and yanked him out of his chair.

  “What—” Kilvennan tripped on the steps leading to the upper deck.

  Kirk dragged him the rest of the way, kicked open a maintenance trunk, fished around, and pulled out a magnetic oct-shank cyclospanner, a heavy hand tool, cast in traditional black ore, that only saw use about once every decade but was the only one for the job when it was needed. It was the right shape, and didn’t conduct.

  “Spock, beam us over there right now.”

  Kilvennan wrenched his arm away. “You crazy?”

  “You’re coming with me, like it or not,” Kirk told him. “You know your way around inside that thing.”

  “Beam over there four minutes from critical? You’re nuts! I’m not one of your crew to order around!”

  “In that case, when I come back I’m arresting your mother.”

  “Hell—you mean when we get back.”

  “Spock, the guidance-control section, right now!”

  Beside Kirk as the buzz of transport filled their ears, Kilvennan stripped out of his sheepskin vest and dumped it on the deck. “Shoulda stayed in Chicago!”

  Chapter Two

  “THE GREAT Captain Kirk, and this was the best idea you had? Drag me into this steam oven and get me killed for a shipload of pots and pans? I didn’t sign on for this!”

  “You signed on to protect these people,” Kirk said as Kilvennan led the way, crawling through the low-slung bowels of the factory drone. “Keeping them from starving or freezing once they arrive on the colony falls into that category. That means making sure your mother’s business succeeds in supplying these parts. Keep moving. Three minutes thirty.”

  “Not that sure of the way. Haven’t been in one of these—it’s been a while. Don’t work in the family business anymore.”

  The drone’s mighty engines roared in their ears. Instantly drenched in sweat, Kirk paused only a moment to strip out of his uniform jacket. Kilvennan didn’t wait for him.

  What a place. A knot of sweaty metal and sputtering vents, this kind of ship was never meant to be crawled through, but only worked on from the outside in some nice safe pressurized bay. Braying madly around them was the high-pitched pppew ppew of the torch phasers, screaming their way to overload. Their yammer almost peeled Kirk’s skull inside out. The drone wasn’t insulated for sound. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone inside. There was only air in here because the machinery was designed with air intakes for coolants, and not necessarily good air. The drone also had artificial gravity, because the units it was building would have to work on a planet’s surface.

  Fifteen seconds of crawling brought him and Kilvennan to the bow section. Pausing before Kirk, Kilvennan pressed his hands to his ears for a minute, looked around to get his bearings, then started to climb. Up through the complex of cables and grafting equipment, somewhere, was the cutting-phaser housing and the firing coupling.

  “Still say,” Kilvennan shouted, already panting, “we should disengage it from the hull, get off, and blast it. We’re not gonna make three minutes. Take forty seconds just to break the flow.”

  The harsh climb now leveled off to another length of crawling. Tight quarters. “Then climb faster,” Kirk insisted from right behind.

  Wet tendrils of black hair strung down against Kilvennan’s neck. “Whoever convinced you to come out here anyway? Take a starship out of retirement, lead a bunch of private ships and people-movers? Take sixty thousand colonists and their whole support system a zillion light-years into space to settle a planet that’s hardly been explored? Why would Admiral James T. Kirk leave fame and fortune on Earth and become a captain again to lead a mangled mess like this has been so far?”

  “For the chance to crawl through a broiling metal box with a hired gun. What else? Move faster.”

  “All these months in space and nothing but trouble all the way,” Kilvennan muttered. “Disagreements over everything from traffic patterns to cargo distribution, conflicts of authority between the privateers and Starfleet, two Conestogas hit by Rocky Nebula spotted fever or the Pioneers’ plague or whatever it is—”

  “It’s not funny, Captain.” Kirk scowled as his knees began to ache against the hard-shelled crawlway.

  “Hell, no, it’s not,” Kilvennan shot back. “My little sister and my son both have the damned thing. Funny? That lung flu hits children the hardest. We’ve already had two teenagers die of it. Now my two kids stand to lose their dad for a shipload of subsystems, thanks to you.”

  “We both have bigger things to worry about than our own skins,” Kirk reminded. “The disease has spread to a third Conestoga.”

  “What?” As he cranked to look at Kirk, Kilvennan’s right arm folded under him and he stumbled. “But Dr. McCoy ordered a quarantine of the two Contestogas! How could it spread?”

  Fielding a kind of ricochet of guilt at not having any magic wands, Kirk stole a precious second to wipe his sleeve across his forehead. “Quarantine didn’t wor
k. We’re considering extending it to medical personnel too. Less than two minutes. Move, move.”

  “But Maidenshore told us— Ow!” An electrical charge snapped through Kilvennan’s left thigh. He jolted hard and slammed down on his right side, clutching at his stinging leg.

  Kirk reached forward and caught Kilvennan’s ankle. “What’d you just say?”

  “Vermin protocol’s active! The rat-zap just bit me!”

  “No, before that. You said ‘Maidenshore’—Billy Maidenshore?”

  “Yeah, what about him?”

  A grumble of nearly forgotten irritation burst up in Kirk’s chest. There was a name he hadn’t expected to hear again. “Big man, big mouth, enough charisma to choke an opera audience?”

  “That’s the guy. He’s on the Pandora’s Box.”

  “Impossible. He’s in jail.”

  “No, he’s here.”

  “Pandora’s Box is listed as commanded by a Captain Blaine and owned by someone named William Relick.”

  “That’s him,” Kilvennan said. “Uses aliases to avoid the media.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Friend of my parents’. Says he’s had a lot of bad press because of politicians who want to ruin him. He’s done a lot to keep Yukon’s passengers calm in the crisis. Everybody likes him. My mother does, for sure. Don’t you even know who’s on this convoy?”

  Kirk’s voice had a built-in scowl, no matter how he tried to shield it. “I thought I did.”

  “Sixty-four thousand people—guess you couldn’t memorize them all. Do you know him?”

  “Well enough to have put him away for interstellar racketeering.”

  “Since when are you into local law enforcement?”

  “Since he had my private shuttle stolen.” Now thoroughly consumed with the will to squash this latest trouble, Kirk gestured ahead with the cyclospanner. “Keep moving. I suddenly have a new reason to live.”

  All they could do was ignore the rat-zappers, tuck their legs and elbows close to their bodies, and keep crawling. By the time they got to the right section, both men had burning bruises along their arms, legs, and sides.