STARTREK®: NEW EARTH - WAGON TRAIN TO THE STARS Page 8

  “Don’t joke around,” Lucy shrieked. “You scare me when you talk like that. I’m your wife!”

  Leaning his wide shoulders as if to engulf her rounded form, Maidenshore rancorously asked, “Where’s it written? Think back.”

  Horror rose in her eyes, abruptly, like a light going on.

  Cruelly he turned his back on her and pressed Angus harder. “Either those pencilnecks get this Starfleet yokel off me, or I know what I’m gonna feed to the Orions when they show up and ask for their cargo. Is any of this getting through your leathery skull?”

  “It’s in, Billy,” Angus choked. “Shapinski and Van Duzen, they’re a good team, they didn’t never let you down before—”

  “Billy, talk to me,” Lucy whispered urgently. “You’re kidding, I mean, you’re just kidding. We been together eight years. I run two-thirds of this business!”

  Maidenshore paused and peered down at her. “Did I marry you? No. What comes next, it’s going to take sophistication. Charm. Things you lack. Be grateful you got eight years.”

  He turned to walk away from her, but found his eyes caught on the Starfleet bigwig prancing around the deck, giving orders to uniformed jumping beans. “Y’know . . . that reminds me. I never promised the Orions any particular kind of valuable cargo, did I?”

  Frantic, Lucy dug her sculpted nails into his arm. “Billy, you have to talk to me!”

  “Quiet, quiet.” He waved his cigar near enough that Lucy had to back off a step to avoid being burned. “I think I found a loophole here. Let me just think about this arrangement for a minute . . . yeah . . . yeah. Angus, come here. Get me information about this colonial business the sledge over there talked about.”

  Lucy pressed a hand to her forehead. “This whole thing is making me sick. Take me home, will you? I hate spaceships.”

  “Go where you want,” he said. “In about ten minutes I’ll have a whole new plan. In this business you’ve got to be flexible. That’s what I do best. That’s why I always win. It’s why you lose.”

  “Quit talking that way!” She struck him with a tiny pointed fist. “I’m sick, you hear me?”

  “Yeah, I hear you.” He took her elbow and turned her in the direction of the Starfleet team. “Right over there? See? Those needleheads’ll take you to a nice warm cell. Better start thinking about getting yourself a lawyer. Where I’m going, I won’t need complications. Angus, let’s crack.”

  “Billy!”

  “Tell her to be quiet. I’m thinking.”

  Belle Terre Expedition

  “Then it was Billy Maidenshore after all?” Spock asked as Kirk strode back onto the bridge like a fox into its den.

  “In person. I don’t know how he wheedled out of those charges, but when I get back I’m going to find out. Whatever good it’ll do, with him out at Belle Terre. He’s here because of me, Spock, I can feel it. I saw the mockery, the vengeance in his eyes. He takes me personally. Just what I wanted to do . . . jump-start a Garden of Eden by providing a built-in serpent.”

  “Maidenshore is a minor racketeer at best, Captain,” Spock assured. “Surely you won’t allow his presence to curdle this experience.”

  “No, I suppose not. He just strikes me as a symbol of all the lowlifes and petty troubles I was trying to leave behind. McCoy was right . . . now I have all new troubles.”

  At the navigation console, Chekov swiveled to them. “Sir, as chief of security, I should’ve been more thorough in screening the passenger manifests. This is my fault.”

  Spock tilted his head in that warning way he had. “That was not your responsibility, Mr. Chekov. That was for the governor’s office. This is a civilian operation, based upon nonjudgmentalism and the precepts of economic and cultural freedom.”

  Sulu turned halfway around from the helm. “It’s not the first time civilians didn’t understand the problems of travel in deep space. I wouldn’t worry, Captain. They’ll get over it.”

  “That’s right, sir,” Uhura bolstered from the comm station. “The governor’s just found himself in the middle instead of at the top for a change.”

  Letting himself sink into their comfortable presence here, Kirk absorbed the support, and their presence at their old duty stations despite overwhelming command postings. They had each asked to serve their Expedition posts with the starship’s bridge as their headquarters. He knew, though, that they each spent a full second watch running their assigned overseerships—Chekov with Expedition security, Sulu organizing all the helmsmen and pilots, Uhura on safety and evac, Spock coordinating all the first officers and their respective duties. Like him, this was the place where they could relax from all the other pressures.

  Somehow being here was better than being in a bunk someplace with music and a book. Only Scotty was missing, and only because he couldn’t run the vast engineering concerns of the Expedition from one station. He’d been moving about so much that Sulu had been forced to give him carte blanche on runabout movement, even within the complex, collision-tempting stacked-and-packed fleet formation.

  “Captain,” Chekov broke into his thoughts, “do you want me to put surveillance on this man?”

  “I could monitor Pandora’s Box’s communications,” Uhura offered. “Even onboard communiqués.”

  The offers, not exactly by the book, took Kirk by surprise. “I . . . don’t think we have due cause.”

  But he looked at Spock for an opinion. A moment later they were all looking at the Vulcan.

  “If Maidenshore, shall we say, ‘beat the rap,’ ” Spock began, “it becomes our duty to accept the decision of the legal system and allow him his chance at building a new life. Ideally, participants should be able to leave the past behind and begin anew.”

  “Are you suggesting,” Kirk needled, “that we should assume the best about a man who somehow silently gathered a fortune’s worth of contraband and slipped it past even border cutter and municipal treaty in four sectors before we found it? I think I’d rather assume the worst.”

  “As you wish. Certainly your instincts are superior regarding the criminal mind.”

  As Chekov and Sulu grinned silently and turned back to the helm, the aft turbolift hissed and a new voice drove away the unfinished conversation.

  “Captain Kirk!—good, you’re back.”

  “Governor,” Spock responded, sparing Kirk the bother. “Good morning.”

  Was it still morning? All this before lunch?

  “Yes, thank you.” The colony’s exuberant head of state, organizer, chief advocate, and first-line cheer-leader bounded down from the turbolift. Evan Pardonnet was barely thirty years old, narrow-faced and large-eyed, a good four inches taller than Kirk, with a crop of thick heroic brown hair, scrupulously neat, and an air of nervous sincerity. “I’ve had a grievance filed against you by the captain of the Pandora’s Box. He says you beamed aboard and harassed the ship’s owner without proper clearance.”

  “I don’t need clearance, Governor,” Kirk reminded. “I am the clearance. After four and a half months I thought we understood each other on that.”

  “For the first three months, we did. But lately—we’ve practically tested a new disagreement every day. Don’t forget, Captain, we didn’t want the Starfleet escort. You were more or less foisted upon us at the last minute. We were perfectly satisfied with the private protection.”

  Kirk glanced at Spock and modified his tone very carefully before turning to Pardonnet. Mellow, mellow. “And you seem to forget that you’re the senior official of a nation that doesn’t exist yet. It won’t exist until we debark on Belle Terre. Until then, this is a fleet. My fleet.”

  “It’s not working that way,” Pardonnet said. “This isn’t your average colonial settlement that takes twenty years to get rolling. We’re already rolling. We’re not going somewhere to be a colony—we’re already a colony. We’ve got everything from cowboys to metallurgists to sanitation engineers to architects, and all the raw materials to let them do what they do. With our factory ship
s, most of the construction for a whole spaceport will be ready to assemble upon arrival. We already have everything any other major city complex has. After all, we’re not going halfway across the galaxy to dig in the soil and raise goats.”

  Spock seemed puzzled by that, or at least pretended to be long enough to stir up trouble. “Agricultural colonies have been a staple for steady expansion, sir.”

  “I’ve never understood that template,” Pardonnet rebuffed. “Why does anybody need to go five hundred light-years to have a farm? We’re going to be a critical port city almost instantly. We’ll be a diplomatic and cultural hub, a literary mecca, a science center, headquarters for adventurers and entrepreneurs—anybody who wants to come and pull his weight. The Federation has never seen the likes of us before. You’re trying to run this operation as if it’s just another military mobilization. It’s not. I know what you’re doing and I appreciate your commitment to us, I really do, but—”

  “That’s a dangerous ‘but,’ ” Kirk anticipated, “out here in the middle of unprotected space.”

  “The ‘but’ is that we’ll be filing for independent Federation membership with planetary nation status almost immediately. That’s never been done before. I have to protect our individuality so no one in the Federation can say we relied on anyone but ourselves or asked anybody else to foot the bill. We’re committed never to leech off our neighbors . . .”

  As the governor went on speaking, caught up in his laudable goals, Kirk realized that the governor was using his strong beliefs to overcome his lack of confidence in himself. That was one of the traits that made Evan Pardonnet’s exuberance tolerable—he had more faith in his dreams than he did in himself, and let his dreams lead.

  While the governor spoke, Kirk’s eyes strayed to the forward screen. He’d caught sight of a movement there that he didn’t like. Which ship was that, breaking formation and moving off by itself? A melon-shaped vessel, one of the older ships, with a handle-like foil running around its aft end, had veered off from the flotilla pattern.

  Internal alarms rang in his head. Was something wrong over there? Loss of power? Control?

  Without moving more than his eyes, he connected attention with Spock, who shifted one foot and slightly turned his body toward Kirk, yet in such a way that Pardonnet couldn’t see that concerns had left the noble speech still going on.

  “We don’t want some agency offering grants,” Pardonnet proclaimed, “or subsidies to skew the results of ingenuity. There won’t be any cruisers telling us what we can’t take out or bring in. If somebody wants to build a porch on his house or a landing tarmac on his property, he’s not going to have to tithe the government to buy a permit.”

  “I like that idea,” Kirk shoved in, but he had now connected eyes with Sulu and Uhura. To Uhura, he tipped his head slightly forward, eyes crimped a little at the corners.

  Quietly, Uhura put her earpiece up and, keeping her movements small, peppered the communications board with one hand. A voiceless communiqué. Problem over there? And do they know about the gravity well we picked up this morning?

  “There’ll be no monoliths on Belle Terre, no Department of Settlement telling people where they can and can’t live or who they have to hire. That’s the kind of people who are on this convoy, Captain, not the kind who signed up for a set of rules and regulations.”

  Keeping his eye on the straying vessel, Kirk tried to remember the name of that ship as he placidly warned, “Governor, you’re having that same conversation with yourself again.”

  Flushed, Pardonnet faltered and held both palms up in self-deprecation. “I know I do that, I just want to do what’s right. These people are determined to be free of authoritarian forces. It disturbs them when Starfleet barges in on private property. They look to me to insure their dreams don’t get off on the wrong foot.”

  Abruptly put off, Kirk didn’t hide his insult. “I don’t suppose they mind Starfleet barging in on the lung flu crisis aboard the Yukon and Promontory Point.”

  The young governor pressed a foot up on the bridge step and grimaced. “Don’t be that way, Captain, when you know what I’m talking about. We’ve got something really unique here, a true first-time thing . . .”

  Mandrake Anachronae. That was it. A ship full of historic reenactors who studied ancient history and enjoyed the fun parts of reliving it. They left the blood, gore, starvation, and sickness to the pages of textbooks and enjoyed the chivalry, honor, jousting, swordplay, and fantasy that remained unrotted in this age of clean toilets and physicians who were more than glorified whisperers.

  So what were they doing moving off on an unplanned trajectory?

  Kirk had one eye on the Mandrake and the other on all the rest of the Expedition ships, moving off in a long flocking formation visible on several small screens around the bridge. A stab of fright raced through him, as it did sometimes in the middle of the night when he was supposed to be sleeping. He’d come out here to escape the fears of sedentary life at an admiral’s desk, and found himself in a swarm of other, newer fears, and these new ones all had real people’s faces on them. Look how many ships there were . . . and how few Kirks.

  I’ll have to talk to McCoy about having an eye installed in the back of my head.

  How close would the Mandrake stray to that gravity well? Had they paid attention to the warning bulletin this morning? Or were their sensors just too weak? Since the suction of a well couldn’t be accurately measured with standard sensors, no one, not even Spock, could predict its behavior.

  Kirk caught Sulu’s eyes again—not hard, because Sulu was already anticipating a move and was watching. With his fingers, Kirk made a motion of four. Change course. Mark four.

  Slowly, imperceptibly, the starship moved off to port, following the straying Mandrake. Kirk crooked his index finger where Sulu could see it. Be ready to throw traction on them if we have to.

  Sulu touched his board while Pardonnet continued.

  “. . . and we’re worried about mandates and statutes thundering down from On High and sending us the bill. It means, and again I’m sorry, that I have to keep you at arm’s length if I can. Can you understand?”

  “We understand perfectly,” Kirk countered. “It’s why you couldn’t set up shop within conventional Federation territory. The mandates would follow you. You want to make local decisions.”

  Rolling his eyes in relief, Pardonnet nodded and shrugged in a consummately fallible and savvy manner. “Right . . . and . . . well, we also want to go far enough out that if we completely screw up, we’re not going to hurt anybody else.”

  “Commendable,” Spock offered.

  Still without a clue that anything else was going on, Pardonnet accepted the compliment with a grace both humble and uncollapsible. “Well, we know how big this trick will be . . .”

  “Unfortunately,” Kirk added quickly, “you’re going to have to put up with an increasing amount of organizational tyranny if things don’t get better. The series of malfunctions has yet to be explained, a rampant viral disease has two Conestogas quarantined, there are mutterings of dissatisfaction around the Expedition—the colonists are hardly speaking in a singular voice. I, however, have very singular orders. I intend to get you to Belle Terre if I have to strap all of you down and carry you there. Your captains and their passengers are going to have to comply even more strictly in the next few weeks. We’ll have to prepare for Gamma Night.”

  At mention of the impending phenomenon, the governor’s expression changed. He glanced from Kirk to Spock and back again. “Why would a period of sensor darkness necessarily change the way we’re operating the fleet? We just go on through it and stop every night.”

  Kirk motioned to the helm. “Mr. Sulu? Would you mind?”

  “My pleasure.” Sulu pivoted only one shoulder toward the governor. He was still moving the ship on a pie-shaped course away from the Expedition flock, though Pardonnet hadn’t noticed the change. “Gamma Night is a navigational phenomenon caused by a neutr
on star and a black hole which are orbiting each other. Though we’ll be traveling nowhere near this anomaly, its effects are far-flung in the region engulfing the Sagittarius star cluster, and therefore the Occult star system and the planet Belle Terre.”

  “I know that’s why the star Occult got its name,” the governor mentioned. “Because it seems to flicker. We’ll have to adjust our spaceflight schedules once we settle on Belle Terre. I’m no pilot, of course.”

  “That’s all right.” Sulu offered a trademark smile. “As a spaceport, your whole colony will have to learn to live with the resulting physics. It causes a period of ‘nighttime’ for all ships’ sensors for ten hours out of thirty-two. Communication becomes spotty and dim. Movement of ships is done while virtually blind. Warp speed is unthinkably dangerous. Of course there’s no point moving at impulse, so you might as well heave to and wait it out. . . .”

  Sulu was speaking to the governor, but doing two other more important duties—keeping Pardonnet distracted, and piloting the starship in proximity of a gravity well—and as the well’s draw became something he could feel in the controls, his conversation fell away.

  One hand on the tractor-beam controls, Chekov shook out of his silence and took over. “The only way to move is by dead reckoning. If navigation is even slightly off, the results may be disastrous. The only way to detect vessels out of line of sight will be inaccurate readings of electromagnetic output. Vessels in the vicinity can be viewed, of course, by simply looking outside—”

  “By which time they’re right on top of you,” Kirk threw in, just to hurry things up. The distress light was going off on Mandrake. He looked to Uhura. She nodded.

  He crooked his finger again, and Chekov pressed his tractor-beam controls. On.

  “Ships’ routines and watch schedules,” Kirk continued, only halfway attending his own words, “will have to be altered to maximize efficiency. A standard round-the-clock watch schedule is pointless. There’s no sense, for instance, in having your most experienced helmsman on duty during Gamma Night.”