STAR TREK: NEW EARTH - CHALLENGER Read online

  If they could hold out till Gamma Night ended, survive without being cut in half by a ten-mile-wide asteroid or an icy meteor or a tendril flare, they’d have twenty full hours before the next sensor blackout and he would have time to work on his problem.

  Problems, plural.

  The science board bleeped and twittered. McAddis had to be careful, switch over only certain screens, or the other bridge crew would start making reports that they were no longer scanning aft with their best sensors. Or Lake himself would notice.

  As each screen shifted, Keller felt his innards turn over. Even from down here, Keller could look up at the top row of McAddis’s dynoscanners. He pointed at the mass/density screen and murmured to Savannah.

  “What’s that look like to you?”

  “Looks like . . . gravity.”

  McAddis frowned. “Could be just another magnetic cloud. We’ve gone through ten of them already.”

  “Pretend it’s gravity,” Keller said. “There’s only one thing that causes gravity, right?”

  “Mass.” McAddis stiffened. “God—you don’t think there’s something solid in front of us and we can’t see it. . . .”

  “If he’s right and we’re being pursued, why wouldn’t they just attack us like they did before?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “How long till Gamma Night’s over?”

  “Only seven or eight minutes,” McAddis said. “Long enough to get killed.”

  Keller looked at the scatter on the forward screen, and at Roger Lake, who was now hovering over Makarios at the helm. “Why would they start showing up behind us again now?”

  Savannah’s eyes narrowed as she inferred information from his tone. “Because . . . we’re . . . being herded?”

  Keller rewarded her with a squeeze around the shoulders. He touched the comm again. “Tracy, patch me through to Hurley again, ultra-low.”

  Without acknowledging, Tracy Chan winked at him from communications and worked her controls.

  A light came on next to Hurley’s right hand. He pressed the button.

  “Don’t talk, Joe,” Keller whispered before Hurley said anything. “Plot emergency vector courses, four different directions . . . just be ready.”

  Toiling at inconspicuousness, Joe Hurley lowered his chin, his fingers poised on the multicolored control chips. His arms moved slowly, cautiously. His fingers tapped one directional sensor. A second. Then he had to adjust.

  Keller barely breathed. This was a court-martial offense if they were wrong, to countermand orders in a battle situation. If the captain’s suspicions were right, they’d be giving the enemy an opening to attack.

  He stiffened. Hurley had stopped what he was doing.

  Roger Lake was pacing around the helm, scanning Hurley’s and Makarios’s boards, and their hands, prowling like a dog in a junkyard. At the helm, Anton Makarios looked perfectly terrified and wasn’t able to hide it. Keller wanted to sell him a poker face.

  Slowly, Lake passed by the helm and circled around to the communications station, where he bent to look at Chan’s frequency data.

  Hurley began to work again. His left hand on the astrogator. Click, click . . . click. Three.

  Now the last one.

  Four lifelines, just in case, if they could know early enough to use them.

  Now the courses had to be logged into the nav computer. Hurley moved with deliberation, while beside him Makarios mopped his drenched face and breathed in little sucks.

  Heading . . . mark . . . adjust . . . auto-helm response . . .connect to thruster . . . guidance system . . . cued . . .

  Lake snapped alert at the bleeps of the guidance computer. “What? What is that!”

  Keller and McAddis spun to the rail.

  Below them, Lake knocked Chan right out of the comm chair to get down to Hurley, then drove his arm into Hurley’s neck. He twisted his fists into Hurley’s collar and hauled him halfway out of his chair. “What’re you doing! What’re you changing!”

  Hurley’s face flushed. “Plotting—alternate—courses, sir, in case you need them.”

  “You’re trying to escape, aren’t you?” Lake drove him backward, punishing the navigator’s spine against the tilted chair. “You’re going to abandon me and Nick out here in the middle of nothing! Nick, get a security team up here! This man’s under arrest!”

  Stunned by the order, Keller grasped the rail with both hands and begged, “Captain!”

  “Sir!” McAddis called. “Sensors clearing!”

  Like desert venturers recklessly stumbling into an oasis, the screens all around them began to flash and suck information previously denied. Free-flowing data raced around the horseshoe of optical displays. Graphics went suddenly from blank to optimal, and instantly shot to red-line. Alarms began to clang.

  On the forward screen, the static blinked, then cleared. It showed not the black starry velvet of space, but instead a perfect view of wall-to-wall sulfur storms and blinding fume.

  At the pilot’s bench, Makarios quacked out a shout.

  “Gas giant dead ahead!”

  Chapter Four

  Planet Belle Terre

  WIND MOANED across the ice desert. Bits of broken branches twisted into tumbleweed and ran like billiard balls after the break. Under the wind’s grief there was another sound, a deep pulse that came into James Kirk’s skull as if someone were knocking on a distant door.

  He sensed it first, then actually heard it. Regular, mechanical, but somehow also a natural hum with the asymphony of bees on the swarm. A throbbing sound, with a saw-blade irritation inside. As his teeth grated at the sound, he opened his eyes and looked through the hoversled’s windshield. There really was something coming. It hadn’t been just a mirage on the local sensors.

  And he’d made a bet with himself when the Starfleet attendant at this silo had notified the starship about the surge in impulses on their security screens. Now he was here, leading a contingent of hoversleds, trying to chase down a demon.

  But darkness had crashed in on the afflicted prairie. The pinkish-yellow sun had chickened out. Kirk squinted, saw only a breath of tumbleweeds rush past the tormented terraces, a sad echo of the beauty this planet had been. There used to be meadow flowers sweeping from bank to bank across this valley. Now there was ice dust. Beautiful Earth.

  As the cold sunset closed up, there was no more distance. Invisible mountains were shrouded in advancing night. The buzz-saw noise took on a second chorus, a sound like a human voice, high-pitched, crying a single unending note—a sound that if heard from a castle tower or an opera stage would strike the ear as enticing, haunting.

  Throaty gusts hammered his face, drove his hair into a wicked weapon that slapped his scalp, and he was forced to pilot his hoversled backward out of the storm. When he opened his eyes they watered and hurt. He strained to look out again onto the featureless prairie.

  Within the arms of blowing ice-sand, a vortex began to take some shape against the mud-brown night. The knotted mass was visible only because some kind of shale bits or glass particles were caught in it and were reflecting Belle Terre’s angry formation of moons just now coming up over the western horizon.

  Kirk spoke into his hoversled’s high-gain comm, which connected him to the other six sleds and their pilots. “Target the center and fire!”

  Just before the flash of phaser fire lit up the night, he realized he should’ve made sure none of the hoversleds were in each other’s line of fire. Some things did have to be left up to the guy behind the trigger. That’s what training was for.

  Since no streak of energy came to cut off his head, he figured they had the sense to look out for each other. Flanking the vortex, the horseshoe of hoversleds were engaged in a race with a force that was traveling in a clear lateral course from the direction of the wind, thus nothing natural, not a storm, not a twister. Though the readings hadn’t been clear, there was something unnatural inside that storm.

  Before them, growing swiftly nearer, the hoppe
r silo reached three hundred feet into the unhappy skies over Belle Terre. The structure began horridly to sway and shudder. Despite a certain amount of movement built in to tolerate winds, the silo cried and screeched. This was no prairie wind.

  As the churning mass drew closer and the hoversleds became more than just slashes of white and blue plasticore against the night, Kirk made out the other forms in the open-canopied cockpits, Starfleet personnel wearing desert goggles with their standard-issue, holding their phaser rifles and shooting them freely. The hoversleds surfed wildly on waves of white sand, throwing the pilots back and forth even as they fired their weapons again and again.

  Kirk closed one eye from the bruising wind and forced himself to focus on the sled at his far right—Spock’s—and to move aside himself, thus giving the sharpshooting Vulcan a clear shot at the nose of the vortex.

  His stocky form braced with his knees against the edge of the cockpit, Kirk led the running battle against the unidentified force at the epicenter of that storm. Like an electric shock, the storm surged right up to the open door of the bunker at the foot of the silo—just as quick as that, as if summoned, as if pushed, swept by a titan’s hand along the ice desert’s skirt.

  There, in the open sliding door of the bunker, Kirk saw three young Starfleet persons of unidentifiable rank, except that the woman among them was with the security division. He could see her molded torso shield even through the storm.

  Beside the woman were two young men, one built like a moose, the other like Robin Hood, and they were both raising their hand phasers. The leaner of the two was an ensign, Kirk could see now.

  Phaser rifles had no effect—what did those kids think they could do against the invader with a couple of handhelds? Besides get themselves mowed down—

  “All stop!” Kirk shouted, and held his left arm high in the air for the other pilots to see. “Hold your fire! Ensign, hold your fire!”

  Shots rang from the ensign’s phaser.

  “Zane!” the young woman barked. As the wind pulled at her dirty-blond hair, she grabbed the brave kid’s arm and pushed his phaser high. The last two shots broke into the clouded night sky.

  As the whole bizarre entourage came to a sudden halt outside the silo, the ice-dust spun and began quickly to settle, weighted by its many complex heavy particles. Within a couple of breaths, most of the shroud dropped.

  The hoversleds buzzed in place. The dust in the middle settled too, sheeting off a metallic form. At last, the monster in the mist was revealed and Kirk stood staring at his nemesis.

  The contraption showed no signs of life at all, nor any place even to put life if it wanted a ride. In fact, the thing was no more than the now recognizable three arched table legs without a table, attached at one end by a buffed green trunklike drum with some indistinguishable carvings. Each table leg had an extension that looked like a foot coming off a leg, but it didn’t set itself down onto these feet. Instead it hovered, then pivoted until the legs were pointed out the back and the top of the trunk now pointed at the bunker. The whole mechanism couldn’t have been more than five feet on its longest side.

  And it was still singing.

  “What the hell is that little thing?” the security woman blurted. She stepped out of the bunker with her phaser raised.

  “Hold fire, crewman!” Kirk jumped down from his hoversled and stopped every movement with his presence alone. Behind him, around him, the other sleds hovered as if frozen in the air.

  Of all the armed men and women stocking the sleds, only Spock moved. The Vulcan stepped down to the ground, frosted sand pelting his legs, his phaser rifle braced and ready against his narrow torso.

  At the mouth of the bunker, the wiry ensign shoved his two companions to the sides of the bunker doors. He clearly ranked them both, and was making a decision, the kind Kirk recognized even without words. Then the young man prepared to stand his ground.

  He made a bizarre sight, Kirk noted—over his shoulders, right over his uniform jacket, the ensign wore a brightly striped shawl or scarf with a mane of gold fringe that whipped mercilessly, slapping the kid about the head and body. Why would anybody wear such a thing over a Starfleet uniform while he was on duty?

  The table-leg thing hung in the air about four feet over the ground. The maw of its drum faced the ensign. Its three flying buttresses splayed out behind, with one aimed directly at the ground, a gathering of drum and sticks that had no apparent purpose. It was still humming, buzzing, with the almost human voice singing under the sound. Inside the maw he could see a spinning light show of crystal bits, a miniature of the thing’s travel across the ice desert. Was it about to eat him?

  Skin prickled at the back of Kirk’s neck. Only the ensign stood between the ’bot and the silo.

  Inside the maw, the crystal centrifuge spun faster, faster, then even faster. The suction pulled at the ensign’s black hair, the skin of his face and the fabric of his uniform jacket, and finally his entire body.

  The ’bot shuddered, began moving forward. Kirk waved his phaser rifle and shouted, “Clear out, you three!”

  The security woman and the huge muscular crewman shifted out of the way. The ensign in the middle seemed not to hear him.

  “Bonifay!” the big one called. As Kirk’s sled drew nearer he saw that this young man wasn’t just big—he was thick.

  The woman also shouted. “Zane, move!”

  But the black-haired ensign was caught in the suction and the other two were being pushed back by a secondary force blown sideways by the ’bot.

  The ensign couldn’t move his head or his arms. His knees bent, but froze in place. The force of suction distorted his face and sent a percussive shudder across his whole body. The ’bot bared its spinning gullet inches from his face. It sang to him, cruel and tempting. He tried to close his eyes, to shut out the promise of being rendered into pieces like a chicken caught in a saw blade. His eyelids were blown open again by the sheer impact of suction and pressure.

  All the young man could do, in the end, was part his aching jaws and bellow a warning. At the last moment Kirk saw the face of the Starfleet ensign distorted into a gargoyle of sheer will.

  Determined not to lose the ensign, Kirk jumped out of his hoversled and charged the ’bot, aimed his phaser rifle and fired, even though he knew the force would be rejected or absorbed, or whatever that robot did with the energy. He sucked for air and got ice crystals instead.

  Despite his bravado, the ’bot ignored him. Of all the insolence.

  Thrum thrum thrum . . . the ’bot flew into the bunker. When it got inside, only inches over the ensign’s outstretched arms, the thing rolled like a doorknob turning, then upended again to put its flying buttresses downward as if it meant to stand upon them.

  Under it, the ensign winced and writhed, his face driven sideways into the deck by some force blowing downward. He lashed out with both legs, only to flail at empty air.

  If only the singing would stop! If only it would roar or hiss or make some kind of ugly sound instead of doing its opera imitation—there was something unheroic about being killed by something that was trilling a melody.

  The drumstick started moving away, moving up, toward the bottom loading hatch of the hopper silo. If it opened that hatch without activating the antigrav loaders, four hundred gross tons of raw olivium pellets would pour down on them! The container strata would automatically fill from each successive level until the hopper was drained.

  “We’ll—be—buried alive!” the ensign squawked.

  His voice was sucked away, leaving him dry-throated and gagging. The hatch whined as it was yanked open with sheer force of suction. A swishing sound descended. Ore pellets shifting!

  “Captain!” Spock called.

  “Stand back and hold your fire!” Kirk left Spock with the distasteful order and charged the ’bot. What could he do if a phaser had no effect?

  Yes, he was being irrational in a way. But something inside him demanded that he get in there, show those
young people that even the admirals and captains and famous icons were willing to die with them, even in the age of light-year communication.

  He skidded onto his side under the ’bot, and landed beside the ensign twisting underneath.

  Unlike the ensign, Kirk didn’t try to fight the forces pinning them down. He wanted something different from escape—he wanted information.

  Overhead, as he lay here on his back, he saw a tornado of polished olivium pellets whirl in gorgeous and deadly form. But they weren’t falling. Jangling furiously, the pellets were sucked into the maw of the drumstick as it hovered, shuddering merrily, a few inches from his dust-caked face. Ton after ton of olivium pellets drained into the maw, flushing into an opening far too small to accommodate the sheer volume of stored ore going in. The drumstick was sucking up a thousand times its own volume of the valuable ore. Where was it going? It was being stolen, but how? How could a two-ounce rat eat a hundred-pound pig?

  A few stray pellets fell next to his head and boinked around in the spinning force from overhead. The jangle sound faded down to nothing, leaving only the drumstick’s singing voice. Just like that, it ate its fill of the stored olivium, sheer tons of it, until over their heads the silo was empty.

  Without a bit of ceremony, threat, or apology, the drumstick stopped its sucking noises, folded its flying buttresses into a kind of point, turned on its side again, and floated out of the bunker like a cannon being hauled over a rampart.

  Just as simple as that.

  Outside, in front of the confused detail of uniformed personnel who were now out of their sleds, the thing turned with a little twinkle of delight, and vaulted straight upward into the dark sky. Gone. Just like that.

  How humiliating!

  His ego thoroughly scratched, Kirk coughed some air into his compressed lungs and rolled over. He managed to roll onto his knees, and something hard bit into his right kneecap. He was kneeling on a candle. Next to it was something that looked like a wooden clothespin he’d seen once on another colony planet. What would anybody want with a candle and a clothespin out here?