STAR TREK: NEW EARTH - CHALLENGER Read online

  “It’s incredible what they did,” Roger Lake said, squinting in respect at the screen. “They use all their ships, or most of them, to alter the moon’s orbit just a little by adding energy. The moon collided with a smaller moon, and ruptured in a controlled manner. The pressure went pssssshhhhh—right out into space!”

  “Played hell and high water with the planet’s weather, I’ll bet,” Keller commented, fidgeting. “I guess it’s not a very nice place anymore.”

  “It’ll settle down in a few years. Shh. Here comes the rest of it.”

  “When the moon collided,” Spock’s voice went on, narrating a stunning vision of what he was talking about, “there was a momentary burst of gamma radiation bombarding the planet. We could only protect our livestock and civilians, and hope that when we stepped outside, the planet would allow us to continue living.”

  The screen went to several more protocols, flashed the UFP standard with its leaf-brackets and star chart, then a shimmering delta shield, and finally the receiver frame of Peleliu’s call letters and a confirmation of delivery.

  “That was a hell of a thing, by golly, Nick,” Lake evulsed. “In the lunar blast furnace, the olivium was even more unstable. The more unstable, the less they could anticipate orbital status. They had to coordinate like a damned dance teacher! Effect the maneuver to make the moons collide a glancing blow, but not be knocked out of orbit, or slow the orbits so much that they crashed into the planet. I can’t imagine it! What a day that must’ve been! Damn, I wish we’d been there!”

  “I don’t,” Keller told him. “I hear there were glacial repercussions, tectonic shifts, blizzards—”

  “Hell, the air remained breathable and the oceans stayed pretty much in place, give or take the odd tidal wave.”

  “Well, I’m from Santa Fe. I don’t do blizzards.” Trying to steady himself and keep anchored to the reason he’d come here, Keller found himself instead recalling Mr. Spock’s intelligent face and animated eyes from the beginning of the tape. What was going on at Belle Terre that could shake a tempered obelisk like Spock? The phenomenon of stable quantum olivium had made interstellar news all over the Federation. Every scientist in thirty star systems was salivating. And Spock was right there.

  “They should’ve turned back,” Lake proclaimed. “That’s what I’d have done. They sacrificed almost every one of their ships to that moon move, and then they got attacked by the Kauld twice. If the planet had been unlivable, what the devil would they have done with sixty-four thousand civilians?”

  “How could they turn back?” Keller asked. “Kirk found himself holding a bag full of the most valuable scientific discovery since I don’t know when. He couldn’t just fly off and leave it unguarded. Besides, he’s not the type to back off. I hear he’s got an ego that bends light.”

  Lake shrugged. “A captain can do anything he wants. His only responsibility is his ship.”

  “How can you say that?” Keller quarreled. “The whole Federation’s future is tied to that hunk of hot stone. If a hostile power gets to develop the olivium, we could be on the edge of a whole new age of tyranny.”

  Lake wiped his face with his bare hand. “Well, we got our own problems anyway.” Stretching his arms, he pulled down the chest placquet of his jacket, then decided to shrug the jacket completely off. “That was something, what happened today. It’s been a long time since I was in a battle. I forgot how tough it is. Getting old, I guess.”

  The humility, the doubt, peppered with a sense of sidewise victory, somehow soured on the vine.

  “You’re only sixty-two,” Keller said. “Not exactly Moses. There might be something else at work—”

  “I just need to remember how to stop doing everything myself and depend more on you, like I depended on Dee. Guess I was just shook when we lost him. Still am. Look how good you did your job, catching that gas giant thing.”

  Getting nowhere, warp six.

  Carefully, Keller asked, “What about the . . . Klingons?”

  Lake looked up and scowled. “Klingons? There’s not a Klingon within eight months of here. You mean the Kauld. Get it right, Nick. You’ll have to deal with those people once we get to the cluster.”

  He shifted from the lounge chair over to his desk and called up the crew manifest and started scanning the names, pausing over certain personnel files and reading them as if he hadn’t read them before.

  “Roger,” Keller attempted, “you need rest . . .”

  “You do too,” Lake said. “Go ahead and put McAddis in charge of the next watch and get some shut-eye. It’s not like he’s got a job to do out here in Emptyville. We’ll get to Belle Terre, take over planetary security for a few months, let the Enterprise get back to starship business, and then rotate out of there and stick somebody else with the Sagittarian trash heap.”

  Who turned down the temperature? The sweat in Keller’s shirt turned cold against his skin. His shoulders sank. “That’s the spirit,” he stewed.

  Lake sputtered an unintelligible agreement, then kicked off his boots and toed them under the bunk. “But what are we going to do about the rest of the crew?”

  Keller’s blood turned to paste. “What . . . about them?”

  The captain’s gray eyes flared. “You saw. They purposely followed my orders slowly, moving us in the wrong directions, heading us toward the gas giant to make me look bad. You think one of ’em’s a spy?”

  Without looking at Keller, Lake pivoted the monitor more to face him and tapped his computer’s controls, not using the voicelink for some reason which Keller didn’t want to know.

  On the screen, though Keller could see it only at an angle now, scan sheets of the personnel came up. Why?

  “They’re plotting against us,” Lake went on. “I think a mutiny’s brewing. You’re the only one I can trust. You should see this manifest. I’ve been going over it. I keep seeing new things in their backgrounds that I didn’t notice before.”

  Was the chair shrinking? Keller’s hands turned clammy. His ears buzzed.

  “I’ve been watching Savannah Ring,” Lake said. “The way she looks at me. I checked her record. She’s had nothing but trouble in her past. We better arrest her before she takes actions we’ll regret. Put her in the brig, will you?”

  “Roger, Savannah’s not a member of the crew. She’s a passenger. She’s got an assignment waiting at Belle Terre.”

  “Wouldn’t stop her from sabotaging us. I want her locked up.”

  “On what charge?”

  “Her whole personnel file is faked. None of this is true. Haz-mat specialist, emergency rescue field training, experience in toxins, fungae, spores, plague manifestations—nobody does that kind of thing in real life. This is all fake. She can’t do this stuff. She faked the record so she could escape to Belle Terre.”

  “Escape from who?”

  “From me. Who else?” Lake pressed forward and put his hand on Keller’s wrist. “Nick,” he said sincerely, “you’re the only person who’s not trying to betray me.”

  There it was, in a nutshell. In his mind, Lake wasn’t linking Keller to the crew’s actions. The only person Lake didn’t see as a threat was the one who would take over if dismissal became unavoidable.

  For now, Keller’s job was to find a way to avoid it, to find a way to make the situation work, use what was left of Lake’s good qualities and talents to their advantage, and play down the bad things that were surfacing. Lake had been around the block more than once. That couldn’t be tossed out the airlock. His behavior, though, would not remain secret for long.

  How could the crew’s resolve be kept from shattering?

  “And one more thing,” Lake added. “Dr. Harrison.”

  Keller stiffened. “What about him?”

  “You know when I had the flu last week?”

  “You had a flare-up of that viral infection you caught on Berengaria.”

  “He tried to poison me.”

  “Harrison? He cured it in a day!”
<
br />   Lake’s eyes, now red-ringed with exhaustion and glazed over, met Keller’s. “He said it was an infection. I know it was poison. I quit taking his medicine, and that’s why I got better.”

  “Great snakes . . .”

  “I was hoping we could make the end of this voyage, then put these people on trial and let Kirk and Spock adjudicate the courts-martial. I was hoping we could get there before these people get us.”

  “Get us . . .” Keller’s stomach cramped at the nice tidy paranoid delusion blooming before him. “Captain, the only real problem we have here is this business of forward progress during Gamma Night. We’ve got to do something about it.”

  “Oh, we will,” Lake said. “We’re going to keep changing the orders and surprising the crew, so nobody can get a pattern out of our behavior. That’s the first thing you do when you have an enemy. Become unpredictable. Don’t let anybody anticipate—”

  “Bridge to Captain Lake! Emergency!”

  Keller sat bolt upright, barely restraining himself from answering the call before Lake did.

  Lake tapped the comm. “Yeah, what?”

  “Incoming vessel, unfamiliar design, approaching from vector nine-one-seven, speed warp factor three!”

  “Yeah, all right. Red alert. Battle stations, Nick.”

  With every fiber in his body on edge, Keller shot to his feet and hit the shipwide. “Red alert. All hands to general quarters. Everybody saddle up—here we go again!”

  Chapter Six

  Converted Olivium Chaser

  Pandora’s Box

  ENTER BILLY MAIDENSHORE, Belle Terre’s answer to the mug books.

  Lieutenant Commander Uhura swiveled around in the only chair provided to her as the big man with the chinchilla hair, rosy complexion, and swaggering eyes, the universal snake-oil salesman, the user-ultimate, strode into her converted stateroom dragging Dr. McCoy in one of his paws.

  Dr. McCoy had borne the suffering Uhura had been spared. His narrow body had been denied rest and proper food, his skills forced into use on behalf of the lowlifes, stooges, criminals, and thugs keeping company here on this converted olivium chaser. His frosted brown hair was dulled, his blue eyes bagged, shoulders stooped, while somehow his spirit remained vibrant and his cynical mind quick as ever. The fascination of the problem around them kept him going, and the drive to get out alive hadn’t flagged in Leonard McCoy over the weeks they’d been trapped here. Whenever Uhura saw him, though her heart shriveled at his discomfort, she got an injection of hope and determination fostered in those years of adventure with James Kirk and Mr. Spock, flashing back on the many times when the situation seemed so wicked, hopeless, yet somehow could still be forged into unexpected wins. She clung to that, because she saw McCoy clinging to it.

  Their autocratic captor didn’t look as good as he thought he did. Not anymore. Looks were important to Billy Maidenshore. The past several weeks of upheaval had taken a toll on him which he didn’t seem to perceive. He had overrun the prison facility so hastily constructed on Belle Terre. Nobody even knew yet that the prison had been taken over by the prisoners. But Billy hadn’t escaped—he’d simply confiscated an asset. He’d stayed right there at the prison, pretending everything was fine, while he killed or bribed every guard. When the olivium chaser Pandora’s Box had appeared to pick up a work force of released prisoners for its mining operations at the asteroids, Billy had simply taken over that asset too, with great joy at the irony of confiscating a ship he had once owned under an assumed name. Now he had a ship, one of very few available to the Belle Terre community, and a ship that could mine the splatter of olivium thrown around the solar system by the moon explosion.

  He’d cleverly kept up the illusion of order, established his system, and gotten it working. Everything was a machine to Maidenshore, from far-ranging human desires to getting daily things done. He’d been incarcerated here, in a ship he previously owned under an assumed name, a private olivium chaser that had been converted with some gleeful irony into a mining ship. Maidenshore and his crime connections were the colony’s only hard criminals, give or take a few stragglers, those who had used the colonial movement to escape trial back in Federation space. There were always those, in every wagon train, caravan, or outpost, as far back as time remembered. Those types of people quickly gave themselves away.

  And now they had their own ship.

  Unfortunately, Uhura and McCoy had stumbled into a mess when they’d come out to rendezvous with the mining vessel on its supposed mining run. All they’d wanted was to check for radiation and set up communications boosters.

  Now Uhura was locked in these quarters, once the captain’s quarters, fairly luxurious but now generally stripped. Other than a blanket and sheets on the bunk, there were none of the decorations the ship had previously enjoyed. Almost all electrical connections had been stripped out, the hatches converted to manual controls with coded magnetic locks. The hold and other cabins had been converted to racks for miners, the galley and lounges also stripped for minimal comfort and rigged for almost constant use. The ship now housed escaped convicts, a working force of criminals who should be somewhere else.

  Here, nothing was elastic. Billy Maidenshore had taken over. In fact, the former prisoners here were still incarcerated. They thought they were working for themselves, with Billy as their benefactor, but stupid people often thought those things. With a savvy for politics, charismatic bottom feeders like Billy Maidenshore often remained in power despite flagrant acts of betrayal.

  “Howdy, ma’am,” Maidenshore crowed. “The doctor and I need to talk to you again.”

  He tossed McCoy onto the bunk, where the doctor managed weakly to push himself to a sitting position, probably just to retain a thread of dignity.

  Uhura immediately went to McCoy, not bothering to pretend she didn’t care. “What did you do to him this time?”

  Maidenshore puffed up as she looked at him. “Me? Nothing. I never do the messy work myself. Other people do things for me. Half the time I don’t even have to ask. Just brought him in so you’d know he’s still alive. I’ll leave him here for a while. You two can get reacquainted and talk about me behind my back.” He stepped closer and tucked his chin to gaze at her. “Brought you a pillow, see? Velvet. Got little leaves on it. Ivy or something.”

  In a bizarre boyish gesture, he held out a plush bolster that didn’t seem as if it had gone with anything here. He’d probably pulled it out of a bribery shipment.

  “Thanks,” she said, and took it. No point making trouble. “What I really want is a makeup kit. How else can a girl keep up her maidenly airs?”

  “I’ll get one for you.” He smiled and wobbled his silver brows. “You shorted out my listening devices again.”

  “That’s right,” Uhura told him firmly. “I gave them a triple feedback on a charged frequency this time. Just one of a thousand tricks. Learn from this, Mr. Maidenshore. Nobody listens to me when I don’t want them to. You can hold me here, you can threaten me, you can torment my friends . . . but you may not eavesdrop on me.”

  His eyes crinkled as he indulged in his effective and disarming smile. “I like that. That’s good.”

  He continued gazing at her in some kind of appreciation, but somehow this was more as if he were looking in a mirror than at another human being. He was a swaggering, self-involved man who joyed in the confusion of others, to whom lies were legal tender, yet who somehow had the formidable gift of charm and deception that made people trust him when there was no reason to, usually by convincing them that he could get them everything they wanted if only they would hand him all they had. The wizardry of convincing people that making them poorer could make them richer had carried Billy Maidenshore and men like him to places of influence, but always with a trail of trodden victims crawling behind. Somehow people fell for the charm of Billy Maidenshore. This insecure planet was the perfect playground for a smart man with no conscience.

  “Hey, Doc, how about a cigar?” Maidenshore atte
mpted. “We can hate each other, but no reason we can’t be friends.”

  McCoy cleared his throat. “Ah . . . no thanks. I think I’ll just live longer.”

  “Your loss. I need Milady here to go to work again.”

  Waiting until Uhura met his eyes, he slipped a computer cartridge into the intake. It was his personal encryption, which allowed the outgoing signals to come back on line. A whole bank of lights and screens flashed to life.

  “I put another APB out on myself this morning,” he said, “including charges of felony flight and, oh, about six others. So I need you to send a message from Commander Giotto’s northern continental unit on the planet, notifying him that they found an abandoned camp and it had my prints all over it. That ought to keep them busy looking for another couple of weeks, sled dogs and all. If they think I’m on the planet, and where else would I be, they’ll part every blade of grass like the good little beagles they are.”

  “Pretty clever, Billy,” McCoy rasped. “Stage an escape that never happened and engineer the illusion of a fugitive without taking a step outside this ship. I have to give you credit for this one.”

  “Why run around when you don’t have to waste the energy?” Maidenshore said. “Let them waste theirs. And this—it’s a perfect place to hide. A ship that’s still doing its job is the one place they’ll never look for an escaped convict.”

  “I admit,” McCoy went on, “I wouldn’t have thought of it.”

  “Think of this.” Maidenshore raised his hand. In it was a simple but quite deadly laser knife, which he knuckled up to McCoy’s gullet as the doctor stiffened. The laser blade buzzed and fritzed its very real threat, causing a visible burn on McCoy’s skin even without contact. How could a man hold a blade at another man’s throat and never even change his expression? Maidenshore looked at Uhura. “Send the message, Cleopatra. Or I’ll guillotine Hippocrates right here and now.”

  Uhura tried to keep her regurgitating horror from showing in her eyes. “If you kill him, he can’t treat your neuropathy,” she told him. The pretense of fearlessness wasn’t working. She knew her terror showed clearly, no matter how she controlled her voice.