STAR TREK: NEW EARTH - CHALLENGER Read online

  The people who now lived on Belle Terre had come for a whole other reason—a dream to establish a Mecca, a cultural hub, to live with their own laws and polish up the tenets of basic individual freedom. They hadn’t come for the olivium. They hadn’t known it was here.

  The unstable Quake Moon had spewed its wondrous shimmering prize all over the planet, to be mined at the will of the human occupants, but it had also made Belle Terre a target for those who would use and abuse the olivium. That meant this was still Jim Kirk’s problem.

  Even if there were no Federation citizens here, he couldn’t leave the olivium until the area was secure. This was one resource which couldn’t be allowed to fall into the hands of hostile cultures unless it was also in the hands of everybody else. The colonists had bitten off a pretty volatile mouthful.

  “Still,” he went on, aloud, “for people who signed up for paradise and got stuck with a woolly frontier shagtown, the colonists digested the turn of events and plowed ahead. I hadn’t really expected that of them. Sometimes we intrepid starship types get the idea that everyone else is a pampered citizen used to secure homes and a threatless existence. These folks, I have to admit, tightened the ranks, explained the tragedy to their children, locked their knees and faced all the problems. They gave up their chance to turn around and go home, even with all the attacks on the planet. They’re not really colonists anymore, supported by the Federation. They’re as much on their own as anyone in history ever has been. They’re citizens of an independent planet, in their own right. They refused to let that go, even though things turned sour. You’ve got to give them credit. Of course, they now hold the claim to the richest diamond mine in the universe. If this planet doesn’t kill them in the next couple of years, they’ll all live very good lives eventually.”

  “Yes, sir.” Spock barely muttered his response.

  Kirk paused and looked at him. Spock wasn’t listening. Hunched over a computer terminal with twelve interconnected screens feeding information from over a thousand recovery points and storage sites on Belle Terre, the Vulcan remained consumed by his quest to solve their newest problem.

  A big problem. A collision of moons had been the citizens’ only chance to save their far-flung planet, but that collision had left Belle Terre storm-swept and inclement. Though disappointment showed on every face for the shining spaceport that for now had to be backpocketed, plain human resilience had risen and sustained them.

  Theirs was a noble enough mission, as packed with activity as any he had led. Yet somehow he felt like half a person, missing critical limbs that he needed to walk, talk, live. Somehow he imagined that if McCoy, Scotty, Sulu, Uhura, and the others could be here on the ship and still do their jobs, he would feel better. With all the family members dispersed around the perimeter, the house had a sad echo.

  Of course, the other portion of this feeling in his stomach had do with the fact that he didn’t know which action to take, or how even to begin solving the problem of the missing olivium. He knew what the problem was—he just didn’t know what to do about it.

  He pivoted on a boot heel and crossed the deck to Spock, deliberately coming around into Spock’s periphery so the Vulcan would see him clearly.

  “Any luck?” he prodded.

  Beneath the straight eave of black hair, Spock’s brow was creased and his complexion pallid. His eyes were wedges of worry, squinted and dull. Even his deep-red Starfleet jacket seemed to sag.

  He leaned back in his chair. “I’ve no idea how these disappearances are happening,” he said, listless and ragged. He was completely discouraged, and as baffled as Kirk had ever seen him. “If I had any information . . . knew how these shortages were being perpetrated, I could form a hypothesis. With even one clue, I could begin to—”

  “Don’t apologize,” Kirk interrupted. “Even Vulcans can’t form theories with information they don’t possess.”

  Frustrated, Spock tilted his head. “Yes, but, Captain, you must understand. The shortfall cannot simply happen within a closed storage system. It must be caused by outside forces. The containers are unbreachable by conventional means, yet none shows any sign of rupture. In spite of this, we have a steadily decreasing amount of olivium. The loss does seem to occur in transit . . .”

  Kirk straightened. “Well, that’s something, isn’t it? We’ll start looking between the mining operations and the storage facilities. Who’s handling that?”

  “Commander Uhura is the coordinator. She’s traveling around the planet, overseeing all the preparations for shipment and processing. We get regular reports, and she has mentioned no security breach or other troubles, despite being notified about the steady decreases.”

  Prowling around Spock’s computer table, Kirk shrugged. “Mmm, we know she’s probably not stealing it.” He’d experienced palpable tension before, but this business of stalking around while waiting for a computer to cough up answers that he sensed just weren’t in there was irritating.

  He ran his finger along the back of Spock’s console. “When this is over, we both need a vacation. How about if after we get back into Federation space, we lay off in some quiet solar system for about a month, and not tell anybody where we are?”

  Spock just sat there, ignoring or not even registering Kirk’s grumbles.

  As Kirk parted his lips to make a comment of his own, what came out was the honking emergency klaxon so familiar and so dreaded aboard a ship. Red alert!

  Spock came to his feet. Around them, the scarlet light panels began flashing, determined not to be missed.

  Danger, destruction, and disaster. At last! Kirk plunged for the nearest comm unit and hammered it.

  “Kirk here. What’s going on?”

  “Bridge, sir—hull breach on deck eight.”

  “Nature of the breach?”

  “Unknown—the automatic alerts just popped on and the sensors reported a rupture! Sir, there’s minimal atmospheric loss—I don’t understand these readings!”

  “Alert security and damage control teams. Get visual confirmation. Clear those areas and seal those breaches.”

  “Aye, sir!”

  “I’m heading to deck eight.” Kirk bolted toward the turbolift at the far end of the shuttle bay, stopping along the way to grab two phasers from the weapons locker.

  Spock didn’t wait. He crossed to the shipboard terminals and cued up the graphics of ship’s integrity. Even he couldn’t contain a reaction as the graphics showed him what was happening. Across the bay he called, “Rupture now on deck nine, Captain!”

  Boots skidding under him, Kirk scratched around. “Are you sure?”

  “Another one, on deck ten,” Spock called. “Deck eleven!”

  “Phasers, Spock!” Kirk drew his sidearm and looked up at the hood of the hangar bay.

  “I hear it!” Clapping a hand to one of his elegantly upswept ears, Spock used the other hand.

  “Hear what?” Kirk squinted and strained to listen. Yes—there it was! A thrumming sound, pulsing through the body of the ship. He couldn’t exactly hear it. Instead he felt it in his bones, his nerve endings, every sinew, every brain cell, so tightly attuned to the fiber of the Enterprise that the two were nearly one. Something indeed was coming, punching through his second body, layer by layer.

  A moment later, he heard the whining sound that had shaken Spock’s more sensitive hearing. Spock—he was still picking at his controls, zeroing in with sensor analysis.

  “Spock,” Kirk called, “arm yourself!”

  He no longer had to run to meet the crisis. Whatever it was, the force was smashing its way through the ship and was on its way to them.

  Above his head, the ceiling structure began to dissolve. Ringed with phosphorescence that cast a glow on Kirk’s face and Spock’s, a hole appeared and spread its edges, burning away the deck layer by layer. Jagged rims of structural material peeled back as if the ceiling were exacting a maniacal grin, showing its teeth of superhard reinforcements that were the last to burn back.
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br />   James Kirk had seen in his time many strange things, innocent things that turned out to be deadly, horror that turned out placid, and he fought to hold back his drive to open fire on the unknown force drilling its way through his ship. How many were dead up there, in the decks where this thing had come in? Were his crewmen being sucked out the gaps punched into the ship’s skin? How many of these young people wouldn’t settle into their bunks tonight? To how many parents, wives, husbands, children would he as their captain be writing personal notes of consolation?

  These thoughts rocketed through his mind as quick as that, within the three or four seconds it took for that hole to burn itself a wide presence in his hangar bay.

  Down through the hole floated a glowing, whining, metallic mechanism, completely unfamiliar in form, and not very big. Only a couple of meters long by the time it got its legs through the hole, the thing had a cylindrical structure that fanned at its opening, and behind it were three legs that arched out and back in undeniably artistic curves. Its metallic surface kept changing colors, and Kirk wasted a few seconds figuring out that the effect wasn’t just reflection.

  “Robotic!” Spock called, glancing at the sensors on the screen, now out of reach. “No life readings!”

  “Stay back!”

  Unfortunately, though Spock did obey the order by backing away, he backed in the direction of the olivium casks. Kirk realized a millisecond too late what was happening.

  The ’bot swung its maw around to the casks without paying the slightest attention to Kirk and his obviously pointed phaser. Over the singing shriek, Kirk shouted, “Spock, get out of the line of fire!”

  But the noise was too loud. He could barely hear his own voice. The electrical thrumming—was a maddening sound! It almost had a human quality, as if some Rigoletto tenor were being strangled.

  Leaving Kirk behind, the ’bot swerved past Spock’s makeshift computer setup and for some reason bothered to steer around a parked shuttle. Why would it drill right through the ship’s body, then politely avoid wrecking a shuttle?

  Raising his phaser to eye level, Kirk opened fire. Set to kill, the phaser should easily destroy the flying object.

  The whining sound increased slightly. That was the only effect. He might as well have been spraying it with water. The ’bot didn’t even slow down, but made its way with determination toward the casks. Just before it would’ve run them over, it paused and spewed out a vertical search beam with a scream of its own. The beam washed back and forth across the casks of olivium, then over Spock. The storm of energy knocked him flat on his back and somehow held him down while the vertical beam panned back and forth along the entire hangar bay in an obvious search pattern.

  “Fire on it!” Kirk shouted.

  He squeezed his own phaser again.

  Again the searing beam struck the ’bot’s legs, its crotch, its cylindrical body, and had no effect at all except to cause an increased whine. Did it have shields? He saw no shield reaction, but that might mean nothing.

  Spock rolled over and crawled to his knees, then was drummed down by the glowing blue energy beam. He managed to twist around, aimed his phaser into the thing’s maw, and opened fire.

  The blue beam stopped, but the thing swallowed Spock’s phaser beam without a belch. It moved in on the olivium casks. Using a second kind of beam, this one with sizable floating particles that sprayed onto the casks and began to sizzle the containment systems, the thing cracked every cask like an egg.

  As Kirk and Spock watched, unable to act, chunks of gleaming raw olivium swam out of the cracked casks and twisted into a long thin tornado and flew inside the ’bot’s maw. Hundreds of pounds of ore was sucked into a structure the size of a shuttle nacelle. How?

  Spock shielded his face against sprinkles of ore and bits of the stuff that had cracked the casks. He flinched as the spray burned his raised hand.

  Dropping to his knees, Kirk shuffled ferociously under the thrumming ’bot, ignoring the crackle of energy on his head and back, and reached for Spock’s ankle.

  Just as he grasped it, as he was about to pull Spock out of the funnel of energy, the last of the olivium spun into the maw. Everything shut down. The beam, the sound, the whine, the particles—cut off sharply.

  Now silent, the ’bot hovered over them passively, as if deciding what to do next. Kirk blinked up at it.

  A little hatch opened up in the more or less front of the shiny cylinder, on the bottom. A nozzle popped out. Kirk ducked back.

  A lather of greenish-white foam splattered Spock where he lay. Only a last-ditch reflex allowed him to hide his face. The green stuff bubbled a bit, then quickly began drying.

  Over them, the ’bot upended, shined its vertical beam on the nearest bulkheads until it found something it wanted, then impudently burned itself an escape hatch in the bay door.

  Lying on the deck, Kirk braced himself to be sucked into space, a sudden death he hadn’t anticipated.

  Instead, the gaping hole grew big enough to accommodate the ’bot, which pleasantly flew through the gash into open space. The last Kirk saw of it was a plume of webbing spat from the three arching legs. The webbing formed itself into a crude sheet and sealed the gash in the bay door with a clouded bandage.

  As he gathered his legs and stood up, Kirk realized his limbs were tingling. Felt like an electrical charge. Some kind of converted power had been at work here, despite the fact that he hadn’t seen anything big enough to do that kind of work. Just their curious visitation, a device about as long as Kirk was tall. Of course, the power of a phaser wasn’t obvious in its size either.

  Most phasers. He looked down at his hand weapon and glowered at it.

  His knees shuddered. He stepped to Spock and knelt beside him.

  “Spock, you hurt?”

  “No . . . I am . . . quite . . .” The once-tidy Vulcan looked down at the foam dripping in moist cakes from his clothing to the deck.

  Kirk pulled him to his feet, then wiped his hand on his jacket. “What is this mess?”

  Thoroughly annoyed, Spock picked up a tricorder from his desk area and turned it on. “Reads as inert . . . blend of petroleum gel, chloromas cellular bond, and semi-fibrous particles . . . some trace readings . . . some kind of decontaminant.”

  Glancing up at the ceiling, then at the shimmering web that sealed the hole in the bay door, Kirk scowled and sighed. “That thing took our rocks.”

  Sadness and disappointment weighted Spock’s expression. He said nothing.

  Kirk stepped to the comm button. “Kirk to damage control. What’s the condition of those hull breaches?”

  “Captain, Ensign Baker, sir. My damage-control teams report that the hull breaches have been sealed. Whatever that thing was, it plugged up the holes as it came through. The patches are some kind of filament, rough to the touch. Seem to be holding though.”

  “Don’t believe what you see. Reinforce them. Kirk out.” He turned again to Spock, sympathized briefly with the indignity suffered by his unprovincial companion, and forced the subject forward. “Ever seen anything like that before?”

  Dripping, Spock shook his head. Far-flung implications showed in his troubled eyes. “I will investigate further.”

  “I’m not waiting,” Kirk declared. “We’ll decentralize the ore storage. Find some bosuns to organize the changes. Let’s see if we can hide the olivium from . . . whatever that was and whoever’s running it.”

  “Very well, sir,” Spock murmured. He sounded doubtful. His eyes fixed sorrowfully upon the remains of the cracked-open storage casks.

  With the toe of his boot, Kirk flipped over a piece of plating from one of the destroyed casks. It buzzed with residual energy, then went silent. He peered into the empty receptacle.

  “Well,” he offered, “you have what you wanted. Back home in Iowa, this is what we refer to as ‘a clue.’ ”

  Chapter Three

  Peleliu

  IT WAS Tim McAddis’s hand that pulled Nick Keller out of the lift
, but the first face he saw was Savannah Ring’s. She was running a diagnostic scanner over him even before he got both legs through the hatch, which Ring had opened with a cutting torch.

  “Hold still, sheriff,” she said, trying to read the scanner.

  “Stop that!” He knocked her hand away. “Derek’s down there. Go, go!”

  “Climb up to Tim,” she told him. “Don’t come down again. I work alone.”

  The cavity was clogged halfway across by a safety rig of cables to keep the lift from continuing its drop if the twisted guides decided to crack. Savannah Ring’s stocky figure and straight redwood hair disappeared without assistance. McAddis climbed up to the bridge, then pulled Keller up after him.

  Keller grasped the science officer by the arm. “What’s the story?”

  “Phasers seized up,” McAddis said, keeping his voice low. “We’re at all-stop. He’s got the engineers working on the phaser banks. He wants to keep shooting. Savannah came up through the companionway, but now the automatic hatches are sealed, so we’re stuck here.”

  “Why? Did we have a pressure drop?”

  “Big one, deck four. We’re trapped on the bridge with the Mask of Tut.” McAddis cast a punitive glare up at Zoa, where she still hovered near the sci-deck rail.

  Just a few steps away, Captain Roger Lake fixed his eyes on the forward screen even though there was still nothing to see. The bridge was hot, sticky. Life-support was still on, but the comfort index had been tapped and rerouted to the suffering sensors on the outer skin of the ship, scooping the beach of space for invisible grains.

  “What did Savannah say about below deck?”

  McAddis lowered his voice even more. “Thirteen dead, thirty-four wounded.”

  As if he’d been gut-shot, Keller clamped his eyes shut and groaned. Thirteen. Thirty-four.