Star Trek - TOS - 79 - Invasion 1 - First Strike Page 3
begun again.
"Aragor," he said. "Aragor, are you there?"
The long silence was unfriendly. Had the same tragedy
happened to Qul as to Shukar? He began to look from
screen to screen.
"Aragor, sir," the comm system rasped. "The... sun
has moved several millions of miles... recoalesced
because of its size once gravity and mass returned... It
is no longer actually a sun, but a hot cloud of gas
beginning to act again as nature intended The
planets
are gone....
Random
observations, coming as Aragor thought of them.
He was deeply shaken.
"Everything
has stopped," the science officer continued
before Kellen has a chance to encourage him on. "The
velocity must have been reduced to its previous levels
somehow as the mass returned .... It must have something
to do with natural conservation of energy.
.. Energy has to come from somewhere... it cannot
just appear .... As long as we maintained the slightest mass, we remained... intact..."
He was searching for words. Saying what they were all
thinkingwthat these things cannot happen, but they just
had. Where had the energy come from that had caused
this?
"What stopped the effect, Aragor?" Kellen prodded.
More silence came back at him. He glanced at Karn,
who stared at him, waiting for Aragor to bear the weight.
16
FIRST STRIKE
"Nature stopped it."
Another stretch of silence
Kellen could sense Aragor thinking and thinking. "Mass... energy. and velocity are all related.
When mass was taken away, nature balanced with more
velocity, all the way to light speed When the mass
suddenly returned, velocity of the matter substantially
decreased."
"But velocity is only measured relative to other
things," Kellen broke in. "It decreased relative to what?"
They were all staring at him now. He felt the tense
stares of men on the other ships too. They were all
waiting for him and his science officer to find the answer.
"I do not know. "Aragor sounded whipped. He hadn't
wanted to say that. 'I could be completely wrong. I see
it, I can describe it... but I cannot explain it."
"Sir!" Ruhl gasped, moving on shaky legs back toward
his own command chair to where Kellen stood near the
helm. "Could it have been a weapon?"
"If it was theirs," Kellen said, "they have destroyed
themselves with it. If it was someone else's, then we have
a new war on our hands."
Ruhl came to hunch beside him over the shuddering
helm. "Starfleet?"
Kellen did not respond There were some things even a
Klingon preferred not to guess.
Starfleet. Their old enemy His oldest. Certainly those
people were capable of developing a mass-blanking
weapon, but he wondered if Starfleet would use such a
thing. Yes, but not without provocation, and there had
been none lately.
Kellen knew that, because he had asked to do some
provoking and been turned down.
The solar system remained in chaos. As the sun
broiled fiercely during its reintegration, alone in space
now.
Nothing left to conquer. Had the predator been
starved by the prey's self-immolation?
17
Diane Carey
If not a weapon, then what?
He turned to Ruhl, and found himself about to speak
to a shag of reddish hair, and it threw him off for a
moment. He shook his own combed locks as if in
example.
"RUM, at least get your hair out of your face when I
speak to you."
Pawing his hair out of his face, RuM caught part of his
long mustache on a fingernail and ended up with one
hand caught near his ear. He shook it loose, embarrassed,
wondering if he had just been given an order or
only a suggestion, and muttered, "Yes... yes, sir."
Rather than appease him with acknowledgment,
Kellen said "Assess damage in the fleet and make a full
sensor scan of the area."
Ruhl's small eyes grew wide. "What shall we scan
for?"
"Whatever you find."
"Yes, Commander .... "
"Karn," Kellen began, and turned to face the startled
science officer of this ship, so Karn would not look bad
in the eyes of his own crewmates. "Was the suspension
limited to this solar system? How far did it reach?"
Karn struggled to avoid thanking the general for his
attention, and poured himself into the readouts. "Long-range
sensors suggest it reached at least sixteen light-days."
"Dispatch immediate reports of all this to the Empire."
"Yes, General."
"General," Ruhl interrupted, "we should tell them the
Uri Taug star system is now devoid of life. Otherwise
they'll wonder why we failed to conquer."
Kellen held a hand toward the godlike ruin on the
screens. "We'll tell them we did conquer. After all, the
system is ours now. What's left of it."
"Sir!"
Both Kellen and Ruhl turned toward Karn. "Yes?"
18
FIRST STRIKE
"Sir... sir!"
Kellen swatted the young man's arm. "We are both
here. Say something!"
"A... a... change!"
The baffled science officer stepped aside with forgivable
gratitude as Kellen pressed toward the science station
and Ruhl pushed in after him.
In the middle distance, reading only a light-year away,
a core of turbulence had opened up on their screens. On
each screen it looked different, for each screen picked up
different elements--spectra, energy, spatial disruption.
Not a swirl, but not a crack, yet still it moved. Like a
piece of woman's fabric strung in space and waved by a
giant hand, it taunted them.
Squinting, Kellen wondered aloud, "What is that?"
"Some kind of... storm?" Ruhl sounded compelled
to invent an answer.
"A storm with good timing? I doubt that."
"Then what do you think?"
"I think we're seeing the cause of what he have just
felt." Kellen straightened and reacted briefly to a sharp
pain in his left shoulder from their experience. "I should
be on my own flagship for whatever is coming. Continue
to monitor that phenomenon. Remain at battle configuration."
"Yes, sir," Ruhl said.
"Aragor, are you still standing by?"
"Yes, General.t"
"Are you reading this phenomenon?"
'I.... see it, sir."
That was Aragor's way of admitting to Kellen that he
hadn't a clue what the waving veil was.
Using the confusion of the moment to shade the fact
that he didn't feel like walking all the way to the
transporter room, Kellen plucked his handheld communicator
from its holster and snapped it open.
"Pick up my coordinates and beam me back directly
to the bridge immediately. We will find out what did
19
; Diane Carey this. If it is an accident, we will explain it. If it is a
weapon, we will own it. Activate transporter beams
now."
"Transporter officer, energize beams. Bring the general
directly to the bridge."
Aboard the Border Fleet flagship Qul, Science Officer
Aragor drew a long breath of relief that soon General
Kellen would be back aboard and would take command
during this strange time. Though he tried to appear
supremely Klingon in front of the bridge crew, Aragor
was frightened. The impossible had just happened before
his eyes, and his whole body was still quaking. Had
the mass drop continued a few more seconds, they would
have become part of an uncontrolled whirl of hyperlight.
A drop in mass! Unthinkable! It couldn't possibly
happen naturally.
The general would figure it out. He would find the
answers. The two of them would piece together the data,
and Kellen would decide what happened. Kellen was the
smartest warrior in the universe.
The whine of transporter energy chewed at Aragor's
ears, and he turned toward the open area of the bridge to
which Kellen was being beamed. Seconds now.
A pillar of expanding lights appeared, many bands,
bringing the disassembled atoms of their commander
across the emptiness of space, to be reconstructed here.
The pillar coalesced into shoulders draped with fabric, a
broad torso clad in stiff metallic fiber. For a moment
there was a short clean-cut beard and bronze hair
trimmed above the shoulder. A thin mustache, as if
stenciled on.
Then, the wide pillar of light began to fade. The whine
rose to a scream. The lights thinned out.
"What is this!" Aragor struck the communications
pad. "Transporter officer! What are you doing?"
There was no response. Before him, General Kellen's
partially formed face frowned as if sensing the transpor
20 FIRST STRIKE
tation going wrong. His right hand turned slightly outward
from his robe, toward Aragor, and the fingers
opened in beckoning.
"Transporter!" Aragor called. "Bring him in!"
"Trying," the comm buzzed. "There is interference,
sir!"
"Fight for him!" Aragor waved the other bridge personnel
back, away from the pillar of sparkling light, so no
one etse's physical presence would attract any of the
particles trying so desperately to reassemble.
What was happening? The transporter should easily
be able to do this. Ship-to-ship transportation at this
distance was nothing. Nothing!
The pillar of lights surged once as if succeeding, but
then suddenly sizzled completely away. The dim bridge
lighting seemed somehow much dimmer now.
Aragor swung around to glare at the main screen,
which showed a picture of the fleet ships. "Ruhl! Do you
have him?"
"Not here," the other captain's voice came back, high
with tension. "We do not have him!"
"Where is he? Where is he?" With the heel of his hand
Aragor struck the intraship unit. "Transporter! Where is
he!"
His transporter officer's voice was thready, shocked.
"Sir, the beams... they went into that twisting form
out there. I do not understand how it could happenmhe
was drawn in, as if magnetized!"
Aragor jumped to his science station, where he was
met by the tactical officer, and together they stared into
the science readout screen.
More of the impossible--the transporter beams,
presented in an image of chittering energy, looped like
the tail of a running animal, then were swallowed by the
phenomenon out there.
As they stood together and watched the screen, a form
began to take shape, emerge from the gash in open space.
A solid form. A vessel... a ship...
21
Diane Carey
"Taken," the tactical officer murmured. "Absorbed!"
With both hands Aragor gripped the rubber rim of the monitor. "I want him back, Vagh "
He
plunged to the helm, hammered the controls until the
main viewer switched to a sheet of black space incised
by the waving valence of new energy.
He
stared into the vision. His wall rattled the bones of his
crewmates.
"I
want my general back!"
Chapter
Two
22 VOLCANIC
WIND... perfumed, reeking atmosphere... and
a sound of engines.
Kellen materialized
gagging.
As soon
as the transporter beams released him, he stumbled back
against a hard surface, and choked. The air here
was heavy, vaporous; the surface against which he leaned
was mossy. He huddled against it until his eyes adjusted to
the dimness.
The ceiling
was only an arm's length over his head. Higher in
some places. A tunnel of some sort? A cave?
Hard ground
beneath his feet. Skin itching. Plant life--sedge, burrs
and creepers, algae, spotted cabbage, puffballs,
adder's tongue... He recognized some of them;
others were familiar but had the wrong color, the
wrong shape, or the wrong smell. He was no botanist.
Pungent
odors...
If he could only get a whole breath. Then he
could think.
Think, think.
Cling to self-control.
He had
been transporting from Ruhl's ship to his own. Now he
was on some planet, in a cave.
23
Diane Carey
"But there were no planets left," he rasped. The sound
of his own voice anchored him. "Especially none with
life ...."
He pressed his hand to the wall. Parasites jumped
from the moss onto his hand and skitt ered in confusion.
Life.
Small life, but company was company.
At least he could eat.
He pushed off the cave wall. He took one step, then
stopped as he thought of something else. Kneeling, he
peered at the ground. There was growth here too, but
vetchy, flattened growth. Flattened by other footsteps?
Where he could walk, so could others.
Others...
He brushed the ground with the side of his hand, to
tidy it a little, then stood up. That soundmhe remembered
it now, and in remembering heard it again. After
so many years in spaceships he had come to ignore the necessary thrum of power generation.
"Engines," he validated.
His experienced ears knew the sound of a power
source, but he could see none, nor discover any specific
direction from which the dim thrumming came. He
must be near a factory of some kind. A power generator.
If there was power, he could use it to get back to his
fleet, or at least to send a signal.
So the mass drop must have been some kind of
weapon or distraction, and now he, the fleet leader, was
kidnapped.
Speculating made him unea
sy. He would deal only
with the facts. Footmarks and power, on a planet with
aves.
And light? Where was the light coming from? Another
power source? The sun they had watched blow up and
shrink back?
He paused to see whether the light changed at all. It
remained hazy, but steady. No way to judge whether it
was natural or not. No draft, no wind, yet the air was
tolerable now that he was breathing more slowly.
24 FIRST STRIKE
Where was he? A planet with atmosphere.
A momentary panic struck him that he could be on a
distant outer planet, waiting for the second wave of
gravity gap to wash outward from the sun for a second
apocalypse, yet he had seen those planets shatter, and
even if they were balled up again there could be no life,
no moss or insects left.
No. We reached zero mass. There is no planet left here.
Dismissing the possibility that he could still be in that
mutilated solar system, he selected a branch of the cave
at random and moved through it. The tunnel was
narrow, but roomy above his head. Within twenty steps
he found himself in another open area. Here the sound
of the power source was stronger and he became more
sure that he recognized the tenor of it. In fact, he noted
the pitch was higher than normal... normal for what?
There was nothing here but another tunnel. He went
through it into a darkness that nearly turned him back.
As the blackness closed in, he paused to let his eyes