Dreadnought! Page 4

  He took a breath. “Anyone who could mastermind the theft of such a project is no petty adversary.” Oh, I loved those funny Rs. “I cannae say I’d like Enterprise to be the test target of a war machine guided by people who know the inner workings of Star Fleet. I suggest a slow approach and some distance till we figger out wha’ we’re up against.”

  “I see.” Kirk scanned the faces around him, and I swore, despite the circumstances, that I saw a not-smiling smile. “Mr. Spock, I see something hovering around you. Comments?”

  Spock folded his arms and assimilated his opinion. “Astute, Captain. I must agree with Mr. Scott. The dreadnought is a purely military contrivance, devoid of labs, rec decks, or any facility that might distract from a given purpose. As such, there is no chance of our emerging victorious against her in conventional combat.”

  “Then,” Kirk announced, “we’ll have to be unconventional.”

  McCoy drawled, “Again?” All eyes turned to him, so he pushed on with opinions that might otherwise have remained unvoiced. “This all smells fishy to me, Jim,” he complained. “A superstarship pilfered by people we assume are terrorists or spies, but we know they’re Federation personnel. We don’t know why they took it. Are they going to sell it to the Klingons? Are they going to turn on us? Are they going to hold the galaxy hostage? So the question arises; do we fight and hope for a show of strength against a vessel that outguns us four to one, or do we dangle that sugar cube you keep in your back pocket and hope they nibble?”

  “Make your point, Bones,” Kirk said.

  “My point is the phenomenon of coincidence. They just happen to steal a starship on the very day we sail into spacedock, when we just happen to be the only heavy cruiser in the sector, when we just happen to be available for in-space trainee evaluations. For the first time in a solar year, Captain James Kirk is home and they know it. Or did they assume Rittenhouse would use Enterprise as his flagship? Is it Enterprise? Or is it you, Jim? Or is it all just coincidence? Spock, aren’t you the man who doesn’t believe in coincidences?”

  Mr. Spock inhaled, sounding drily annoyed. “Doctor McCoy, your homiletics point out initial concauses, yet you fail to see that no one element can stand alone in a progressive equation. We must not only discover the sequence of events leading up to the theft of Star Empire, but also evaluate them and predict the events that will solve the problem passively.”

  “If half your brain wasn’t circuitry, Spock, you’d be able to say we have to find out what happened and mend it.”

  “I did say that. As usual, you insist upon simplistic answers to complex situations.”

  Suddenly, watching this, I got very nervous. Why were they sniping at each other? Was the situation grave enough to drag vexation out of a Vulcan?

  “Aren’t you the one who’s always spouting bald definitions?” McCoy said.

  “I shall be moved to amazement, Doctor, if someday you should refrain from probing the obvious.”

  “Mr. Spock,” Scott said with a quirkish, scolding expression, “y’must admit he hit on all the logical questions.”

  McCoy lounged back. “Maybe it was just a coincidence, Scotty. Like this whole affair. A great big inevitable coincidence.” He skillfully ignored the look of contained aggravation rising under Spock’s eyebrow.

  It didn’t seem like any of this was a surprise to Kirk. His face was a herding of pseudomilitary pomp and dashes of amusement, not to mention the evident respect he had for these people’s opinions. I kept expecting him to stand up and make a decision; instead, he just sat and listened, jabbing the discussion on whenever it faltered. That said something about him. I wasn’t sure what yet, but it was talking to me.

  He turned to the backyard grin of Scott. “What about the technology, Scotty? What do you know about the dreadnought?”

  “Eh …” Scott shrugged his opinion. “It’s a firecracker, sir, but since we don’t know who stole the bloody beast, we also don’t know how powerful she is, or how dangerous.”

  “Spock?”

  “I agree,” the Vulcan said casually. “The danger quotient is directly proportional to the skills of those who have stolen the ship.”

  “Is it logical,” Kirk said, using the word cannily, “to assume the ship was stolen by a full-capacity crew?”

  “No, sir.” Spock tipped his head. “Her crew complement is five hundred. The odds against so many people developing leftist attitudes simultaneously, at one starbase, without a leak, are nine thousand—”

  “About the same odds as your giving us an answer without decimal points,” McCoy barbed. “I think we’ve been baited.”

  Spock went on with polished, pointed stubbornness. “It is apparent, Captain, that whoever stole the ship has some awareness of her firepower and may at this moment be learning how to use it, if indeed they do not already know.”

  “How much of that knowledge do we have?”

  Spock swiveled his gaze. “Mr. Sulu?”

  This was the man Sarda was standing behind. He was Earth Oriental, and one of the most affable people around, judging by the few times we’d spoken during a special seminar he taught at Academy. The subject was “The Helm and Spaceborne Weaponry.” It taught us how maneuvering a ship correlated with trajectories of phaser beams and photon torps. Martial arts was a hobby of his, enough to be considered an avocation. It was evidently in this capacity that he was here today. Sarda had been serving under him for five months now.

  “I’ve ordered up schematics on Star Empire’s offense/defense systems. It’s all security-one prohibited, so it’ll take some time, but we should be receiving transmission before we reach the rendezvous.”

  “Will that be enough time to assimilate the information, Sulu?”

  Sulu gave him a dubious look. “Let’s hope they think so.”

  “Which brings us,” Kirk said, turning in increments with each word, “to … our Lieutenant Piper.”

  My face went bone-white.

  “How do you fit into all this?”

  Where was the spotlight? The thumbscrews? I swallowed and handed back the exact answer.

  “Sloppily.”

  Mr. Scott chuckled. So did Sulu. Beside him, Uhura winked. Spock’s eyebrow elevated. So did McCoy’s, but differently. Sarda rocked on his heels. Had I made a fool of myself or scored a point?

  The Captain’s shoulders moved as he measured my face. There was a joining of our eyes, our understandings and sensibilities. There must have been. I couldn’t be imagining it, because he straightened and said, “We’re going to do something about that. Expect it.”

  “Captain,” Spock said, “it may be impossible to assess the situation at all until we discover the identities of the terrorists.”

  McCoy leaned forward. “But you said they probably know how to use the thing, Spock.”

  “I said it was apparent. Not that it was true.”

  Kirk washed a soluble grin over his longtime friends, then immediately replaced it with a steady urgency. When he spoke, his eyes were gripping me. “That’s all, ladies and gentlemen. Prepare for battlestations.”

  Chapter Four

  RIDICULOUS. NONSENSICAL. ENIGMATIC. Unexplainable. Absurd.

  In …

  Ex …

  Ob …

  “Adjectives … adjectives …”

  Make a mental note to requisition new carpet. These quarters were going to need it.

  Dreadnought. A stolen dreadnought. Rittenhouse, Rittenhouse, never heard of him … what tribblepate would commission a ship like that anyway … Star Empire … stupid name for a Federation ship … Majestic, Embassy, Valiant, Ramage … those are names for ships. My biocode! Mine. Damn.

  “Excuse me.”

  I hadn’t heard him come in. No surprise, since I wouldn’t have necessarily noticed a supernova in view of my self-preoccupation. His ice-warm voice sliced through my thoughts like a meld.

  “Sarda,” I began. “I’ve been thinking about you.”

  His half-turn include
d only the barest of acknowledgements. “Unlikely.”

  Damn Vulcan correctitude. Not only was he correct, but he was also right. Hating to be caught in a lie, I followed him across the room to his quarter, a painfully featureless place whose vacantness only accentuated his plans not to stay long. “Do you know what’s going on?” I pestered. “Have you heard anything new? How could they have built a superstarship at the base without anyone knowing about it? When are we going to reach this rendezvous point?”

  He replied tersely. “I do not. I have not. In great secrecy. Sixteen hours, twelve minutes from now.”

  I huffed, then hoped he couldn’t hear it, all the while knowing that he could. If I’d been an animal, canines would have been securely affixed to his ankle. “You’re not much help.”

  “Help is not my purpose.” He divested himself of his uniform, neatly stowing it away, and skimmed into a darkly intriguing meditation cloak, a hanging garment that made use of the thready physical makeup typical of Vulcans. Shadowy purple fabric, something like velvet, picked up the depth in Sarda’s glossy, brassy hair, and made a shocking contrast to his bottomless topaz eyes. Sarda was pure Vulcan, but of a race of Vulcans fairer than the city dwellers who usually gravitated toward Star Fleet. Though there were few Vulcans in the Fleet (more each year, however), there were even fewer of Sarda’s kith among us. Still, he was innately Vulcan. I saw that for the hundredth time as he turned to me, both hands folded around a tattered manual. The effect was breathtakingly different from the martinet who had walked in moments ago. “If I am called for, assuming you will be here, I shall be in the aft hangar deck.”

  “Why there?” Intruding, yes, I was.

  “Lieutenant, I will be meditating.”

  In his voice there was no hint of the insult he found in having to share quarters. The idea that he had to escape to the hangar deck was … de-Vulcanizing.

  “Kolinahr again?” I shot at him, desperate for a score, or possibly so tense with anticipation as to drag out a cruelty in myself I hated to resort to.

  He stopped before he reached the door. His shoulder blades moved closer together and his head came back slightly as he battled to control the sting. Actually it was I who winced.

  Ever so graciously, he faced me. The planes of his face were made geometric by the doorway safety light. “You have an irritating habit of equating Kolinahr with all that is Vulcan. You are in error. I have not reached the discipline, though I hold in honor those who have. I have not achieved it, nor do I deserve to be the pawn of your inaccurate references to it. Please delete it from your vocabulary.”

  “I was just observing … drawing conclusions. You know … analyzing.”

  “Incorrect. Analysis is based upon available facts. You were speculating. You continually exude opinions, yet in fact you have learned nothing of Vulcan or Vulcans. I resent this.”

  The velvet swayed. There was no ceremony. It hurt that he retreated, but the bigger hurt was Sarda’s.

  Like a predator, I pursued. “I thought resentment was a human trait.” Scales and mulch, what was wrong with me?

  Sarda pursed his lips until control returned, and tipped his chin slightly upward again, a gesture imperceptible to anyone not watching for it. Again he turned, surrendering his escape to making a point. “I have said this to you before. This will be the last time.” Not shall. Not may. Not should. Will. “You do not understand Vulcan training. As such, your assumptions fail to reach even a level of speculation. I will eliminate myself as your target by telling you this: I am only at the level of Sele-an-t’lee, which is only secondary adult discipline. Kolinahr is years beyond my reach. There is, in fact, poor chance that I shall ever attain it. Please cease enticing me to poison that which I have achieved.”

  He was exercising much greater control than he knew, if only by not referring openly to his age. A Vulcan of only thirty-five Earth-standards was a stripling and rarely did one so young leave Vulcan at all. But Vulcan had excised him in its proper, exacting way, and he had taken refuge at Star Fleet, which quickly learned to adore a Vulcan with Sarda’s peculiar talents.

  That is, once I ignorantly let them know about it.

  This time he made good his escape, and I let him go. He had made clear to me the continuous pain my ignorance caused him.

  Merete AndrusTaurus slipped in the door before it closed, gazing thoughtfully after Sarda striding with deliberation down the corridor in that elegant Vulcan livery. Merete’s short platinum hair gleamed (her eyes a laughing comparison to the brooding ones just gone.

  “Evening,” she said, clicking the two computer tapes she’d brought in.

  “Is it?” I deposited myself on my bunk in a position suitable for grumbling.

  “You all right? I heard about all the surprises.”

  “I’ll be all right when I’m not surprised anymore.”

  She nodded, holding up on of the tapes. “Present. I thought you might need one.” She relaxed on her own bunk, maneuvered the tape into the computer terminal and clicked it on, they lay back. I ignored the motion, expecting music or some other aesthetic recording.

  Until the walls started melting.

  Moss grew where the doors joined their frames, soon consumed in ferns growing like multiplying crystals. A green stream evolved and cut between our bunks, which were becoming silt beds, and with it came the aroma of seawater, the smell of brackish organic soup and varieties of life in birth and decay from protozoa to grasshoppers. Lepidodendron scale trees grew before our eyes, developing sparse, arching spires and a hair of dripping moss; plants grew vascular support systems and sucked carbon dioxide through leaf pores; conifers and cycads bloomed at our elbows. More than anything, our room was mimicking prehistoric Earth, right around the early Mesozoic Period, say mid-Triassic, with incongruent bits of pre-Cambrian tossed in for color. I half expected to see a coal forest over the mounds of club moss or put my feet down in the path of a passing coelacanth. Blue-green algae, lichen, moss, fronds, rushes, arm-long dragonflies, mats of stromatolites, sediments trapped in sparkling algae pools secreting a limestone matrix … all green.

  All wonderful. Out of sheer empathy I almost started to sweat.

  “Oh!” I propped myself up. “Proxima!”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Like it? I’m home! How did you do it?”

  “Image projection. It’s a new technology in holography. As a matter of fact, it was the brainchild of Vice-Admiral Rittenhouse himself. That was what clinched his being given full control over the dreadnought project. It’s actually a weaponry concept, but it was picked up and used by recreation designers; thus, viola, Proxima. Or Rigel. Or Cestus. Or anywhere else you wish to spend time. It’s only visual reality, but give them time.”

  “I thought the dreadnought design was all so secret.”

  She shrugged, brushing aside the image of a fern, which cooperated by pretending to waft out of her way. “Not since yesterday. It’s spread like a fireglacier now. You know how contagious military data is.”

  We paused to watch a horsetail fern as it grew through the ceiling until it was a good sixty meters high.

  “Merete, I needed this.”

  “Welcome.”

  “Merete, are you human?”

  She grinned. “I’ve lost my accent finally, have I? No. I’m Palkeo Est from Altair Four. We’re like you, but we can’t mate with you. Well … not successfully, anyway. We’ve tried,” she laughed. “By the way, what is it between you and Lieutenant Sarda?”

  I sensed this was Merete’s way of distracting me from the mists of conspiracy I had been thrust into. Strange, but I wasn’t bothered by her bluntness, nor she by mine. I was command and she was medical; bluntness was inherent in our pursuits, typical of captains and ships’ doctors for generations. We would both have to get used to taking it as well as dishing it out.

  Melting back into my algae bed and swearing it felt soggy, I fixed on the veins of a sigillaria and poured thoughts at her.

&nbs
p; “I … we went through most of Academy together. I suppose I radiated to him out of curiosity. He never returned it, but we did become lab mates and got as close to being friends as a Vulcan will usually allow.”

  “Speaks nicely of you.”

  I shook my head, as though I had just figured it out. “I was ignorant. Sarda paid for it. He’s right to resent me, my presence here …”

  “What is it he fears?”

  “There’s no more fear in him. Only insult. Resentment. Memory of those.” Why? I saw it in her expression. Was it right for me to divulge Sarda’s privacy to anyone? But then, thanks to me, it wasn’t a secret anymore, hadn’t been for a solar year. “How was I to know it was sacrilegious on Vulcan? I thought I was doing him a favor!” Oh, that felt good. Merete observed me in silence. Once the tirade ended, I decided it was time to explain. “The Vulcan Science Academy politely rejected him. They said it would be illogical to waste his talent, yet immoral to nurture it. In other words, they turned a well-bred back on him. Star Fleet was glad to take him—you know how they feel about Vulcans—and there was me, not understanding Vulcan cultural scruples against bloodletting or punitive solutions to problems …”

  “What is he? A mass murderer?” She meant it as a joke.

  “He thinks he is.” My fist struck the mattress under the image of club moss. “Damn it … I just didn’t know. I thought I was doing Sarda a favor when I told our training captain about his fascination for … weapons design.”

  Merete made a low sound of empathy in her throat, but didn’t interrupt me. In its way, it was a signal for me to go on.

  “I never saw such humiliation as rose in his face when he was awarded ‘the position he desired’ in front of our entire graduating class. I didn’t understand Vulcan morals. I had to learn by watching his face go olive with shame. Now he’s not only denied by his planet’s scholars, but he’s ostracized by others of his kind at Star Fleet as well. Thanks to me, he’s completely alone.”

  A synthetic breeze blew through a hall of angiosperms.

  Merete sighed. “I see why your friendship ran aground. He is Vulcan, though. Maybe it’s better foundered.”