STAR TREK: NEW EARTH - CHALLENGER Page 9

  “There are other doctors to kidnap,” Maidenshore bluntly claimed. “Don’t make me go get somebody younger and dumber for you to protect. The stand-in’s first duty will be to jettison Dr. McCoy’s scrawny carcass into space, just to make sure I’m completely understood. So broadcast.”

  But he lowered the knife. She didn’t know why he did that.

  The threat remained, though, because she knew he had her with that one. Maidenshore knew how much James Kirk’s core crew cared about each other, and he was willing to use that as a weapon. As the color began to return to McCoy’s squarish features, Uhura moved to her tattered chair and passed her large hands over the controls.

  She pulled herself up to the comm station.

  This station had been rigged before she came here, put into place by whatever agents Maidenshore had on this ship who knew anything about electronics and computers. They’d set it up, but hadn’t been able to use it effectively to do what he wanted. They could fool the planet into thinking their mine ship was merrily loping around the solar system, collecting stray chunks of olivium—which it was—and they could skim olivium without arousing suspicion. But without a skilled communications officer, they hadn’t been able to redirect olivium from other sources, which was what Billy wanted.

  He’d captured Uhura and gotten McCoy as a bonus as their shuttle passed by. Over the past weeks, he’d used her to send false messages that kept up appearances and allowed him to skim far more olivium from the planetary sources than this one ship could collect in space. What a racket.

  Maidenshore had been using Uhura to keep up the mask, but also to redirect and redistribute other caches of olivium.

  Fleeting ideas of sabotage teased her for the tenth time today, but she resisted them. The buttons and pressure pads were warm under her fingers. Lights changed. She felt them play across her face. The channels opened. Redirectionals cued up and waited for her to send her message.

  “Don’t use your voice,” Maidenshore warned at the last second.

  Too bad he’d thought of that.

  She scowled briefly and went about tapping out the message that Billy Maidenshore, consequently escaped and now on Belle Terre’s first Most Wanted list, had been tracked to the North Forest Peninsula. The site is being investigated. Further information will be forthcoming.

  “All right, it’s gone,” she sighed.

  “Good. Now send the one I wrote up this morning. I’m listening. Identify yourself nice and clear this time.”

  “Yes, fine.” She touched her console again, aware of McCoy’s unhappy glare. “Lieutenant Commander Uhura here. All subcontinental precinct stations, pack and transport no less than four thousand grams to the nearest collection point. Authorization ZXY-90, Code 24. Confirm on Channel Zebra-Echo and contact with three-second quickflash when you’re ready. This is Central Processing standing by.”

  “I like that one,” Billy Maidenshore congratulated. “That was good, how you did that. Now send a message from Dr. McCoy to yourself. Make it a cheery one. He’s off in the tundra, things are cold, little boring, but he’s getting a lot done. He’ll take another four weeks before he can be sure there’s no residual effects from the olivium exposure and the moon collision, say hi to Spock, yak, yak, yak, bumble, bumble, and he can’t possibly get back before, oh, maybe spring. Make it eleven weeks. Nice uneven number. Then you send the relay to Mr. Spock and tell him how much you’re enjoying yourself in your duty station waaaaaayyy out here and you got a new boyfriend, so you don’t want no company. Got it, queen bee? Send, send.”

  She did it, without a single word. When she was finished, Maidenshore was ready with the next one.

  “Third,” he continued, “send out a message that Pandora’s Box is finished mining the sector seven and we’re moving on to the next two. Crew is working very diligently, using all safety precautions, and will be shipping thirty more tons of contained raw olivium that got sprayed all over the belt, very rich deposits, good cache, men working well, guards having great time, et cetera et cetera and thus’n’such. You know the drill. We’ll hold back ten tons and the idiots’ll never know the difference.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Once again she tapped her board with his report, geared to fool the people back on Belle Terre into thinking their little floating rehabilitation effort was actually doing some good. Didn’t take long, actually. At first, she had bothered to make the messages long and sluggish, wasting as much time as possible, but soon she’d found this added up to no more than minutes here and there and had no effect. She had also tried to send wrong messages, coded messages, and even exaggerations, but he had read every one over her shoulder and made McCoy suffer. She didn’t do that anymore. She sent what he said, just as he meant it. No codes, no clues, no tricks.

  She leaned back when she was finished. “That’s it, Mr. Maidenshore. Every communiqué’s been accepted and confirmed. You can extort, skim, and shave quantum olivium off those shipments as they pass through the outlets you’ve set up. For all the good it’ll do you.”

  His smile fell away to a sort of wounded look. “Why would you say that? It’ll do me plenty of good. Belle Terre’s going to be the diamond belt of the Federation. And I’m going to own the buckle.”

  McCoy knuckled his bruised lip. “How long do you think this can go on before Captain Kirk figures out what you’re doing, Billy?”

  “He’s not going to figure it out. He thinks he won. As long as I let him keep thinking it, he won’t come looking for any of us. Jimmy’s got his hands full. You’d think I dreamed this month up and stamped MAIDENSHORE on it and got the blessing of Olympus.” He moved to the door and coded the magnetic locking system, which had been reintegrated to his personal specifications. “Don’t entertain any ideas about escaping. This ship has been fully converted for maximum-security incarceration.”

  As Maidenshore pulled the cartridge out, once again darkening the bank of outgoing signal readouts, McCoy droned, “How’d you manage to escape?”

  Maidenshore put his unlit cigar in his teeth and held it there. “That’s the beauty of the rumor. I never did escape. I just hijacked the ship and sent out an APB on myself. Every guard’s been bribed or replaced, the warden knows I can scorch his family to cinders any time if he doesn’t behave. Off the little Starfleet soldiers go, searching the reaches for the escaped racketeer Billy Maidenshore, while I keep living right here, in the last place they’ll ever look. Okay, so it’s not exactly splendor, but I eat good. The last report you picked up was priceless—how they suspect I’ve taken up residence with the Kauld, maybe! Can you imagine me living with those blueberries? How perfect is this? Your pals don’t even monitor the signals coming from here. After all, what’s a mining ship got to say? Goddissimo, I love a simple plan.”

  “What can you do with the ore you’re skimming?” McCoy asked. “No one’s going to deal with you for olivium when we’ve got a whole hemisphere shot with the stuff—”

  Maidenshore waved his unlit cigar. “You think all wrong, Doc. If you can steal one percent of a diamond mine, you’re going to be pretty damn powerful.”

  “You won’t be able to hold on, Billy. You can’t do this alone.”

  “Who’s alone? All these men incarcerated around you who couldn’t make it any other way, they’ll be royalty at Chez Maidenshore after they help me take over this little piece of heaven. So don’t forget, Doc. If I die, these men’ll carry out their orders on your girlfriend here.” Leaving the door once again, Maidenshore came back to loom over Uhura, finally to stare down at her. “And you, queen bee,” he warned, “if the codes are wrong and the signals get shady, the doctor here’s going to be in a whole new experiment. Both of you understand, I can see it in your beady eyes. Keep on understanding and you might see another Christmas.”

  She shook her head in cold disgust. “You’re a whole other kind of artwork, Billy,” she said. “Humanity doesn’t deserve you.”

  “Got that right,” he approved. “Redistr
ibuting of wealth is a time-tried method of stealing. I’m only doing what politicians have done since Man discovered slavery. This is just the modern form—the approval of the slaves. I love suckers. ‘Take my life’s earnings and do anything you want with it, just keep blowing in my ear.’ The priceless part is that they beg you do to it. Priceless! I made a joke. Get it? Priceless.”

  He paused, still looking at her, and now kicked over an empty supply cannister that had been sitting here the whole time she’d lived in this room. Lowering to sit on it, he clasped his hands around the cigar and leaned his elbows on his knees.

  “You know, gingerbread,” he began, “I won’t be in this filthy business forever . . . the last thing I want is to stay out here and hobnob with the common. I’m building up a nest egg. Enough wealth and power to set up my own planet, then be left alone without society gumming up the scenery. I’m only doing all this so I can blast free, and there’s no legitimate way to do it fast. I want to go away and be able to protect myself. Captain Kirk put the squash on my motherlode. Now I need a new one, to build an organization big enough that everybody’ll have to leave me alone. Is that so wrong? Who’ve I really hurt?”

  His pathological innocence was amazing. He really didn’t think he’d done anything wrong. Of course, that was because anything done for Billy Maidenshore couldn’t possibly be wrong. As Uhura sat here returning his gaze, she found herself wondering what kind of a mother he must’ve had.

  “What do you care, really, about these people for?” he went on. “Humanity’s just a pack of technological apes. It’s not just Humanity, either. I tried other races. You just get technological lizards or technological seed pods or some other brand of plop. Sure, they develop warp speed, but they just use it to go get more bananas.”

  A scent of cologne wafted from him as he shifted on the cannister. Despite the wear and tear of his operation, he was still trying day after day to appear in control and to maintain his physical appeal. That was the only manifestation of caring what anyone else thought. His pewter hair was always immaculate, despite the worry lines on his face or the lingering aroma of cigar tobacco that eternally clung to him. Other than seeming a little nauseated, he was trying to keep up a front as he spoke to her.

  “Me, I’m not interested in the petty,” he continued. His eyes never wavered from hers. Few people could look someone in the eyes this long and never flinch. “I don’t want to spend my life out on a rock running a piddly syndicate. You know what I love? Classical art. It’s the only true sign of civilization. Not population, not factories, not commerce, not sanitation, not cities or sports or any of the things people think of. Only art is a sign that once every million or so apes, a virtuoso is born. Just enough to keep civilization pretending it’s worth something.”

  Uhura shifted back an inch or two, away from him, angling away from McCoy to keep Maidenshore from noticing the doctor, whom he seemed to have dismissed during this private conversation.

  “Well,” she said, “even a snake likes sunshine.”

  He grinned, but she didn’t think he understood her meaning. “I had a private collection before Jimmy Kirk busted my motherlode and confiscated everything. Now my da Vincis and Laviolettes and Michelangelos are marking time in museums. Can you think of a stupider place for a work of art?”

  He lowered his head a little more, his brows drawn in a kind of beckoning question.

  “I’ve known a whole parade of women,” he said. “But you, you’re different from all of ’em. You don’t give in. I like that. You don’t want me to hurt people? Okay, I won’t hurt ’em. You want me to leave them alone? The sooner I get my motherlode and bug out of here, the sooner they’ll be left alone. You can help me do that. And when it’s over, I’ll surround you with masterpieces.” He leaned a little closer, and his voice grew softer. “I can put the stars back in your eyes.”

  Pressing his lower lip inward against his teeth, he nodded in agreement with himself, as if listening to music he liked.

  In the background, Uhura noticed McCoy’s expression screw up. She prayed he wouldn’t say anything.

  Maidenshore slapped his knees. “Gotta go. Need a shower. I’m expecting company. Bye.”

  As if suddenly uneasy, he simply tapped the door controls and ducked out. The door slid shut behind him, and the magnetic lock whistled its security confirmation.

  “He is a work of art,” Uhura grumbled. She turned to McCoy and touched a bruise on the side of his face. “Have you been volunteering for tackle dummy again?”

  “Why don’t you ask your boyfriend?” he suggested.

  She glowered. “He’s just putting on an act.”

  McCoy clasped his arms tightly and rubbed the circulation back into them. “I don’t think so.”

  “Are you kidding?” she blurted.

  “I’ve been paying attention. He talks an awful lot around you.”

  “He talks a lot anyway.”

  “No, no. I mean he talks excessively when you’re around. Compulsively. You have an effect on him.”

  “You mean when he looks like he’s about to give birth through his face? I certainly don’t like the angle of this conversation. Pardon while I get back to doing absolutely nothing of any consequence.”

  “Uhura,” McCoy said with a sigh, “if it comes down to it and you have a chance to warn the planet of what he’s doing . . . let him kill me. You think I want to live to be a hundred and thirty?”

  She settled back at her chair before the console of equipment that once again locked her out. “I’m not letting him kill you, Leonard. It’s just stones. I don’t care how precious they are, they’re just stones. I’m not letting him kill you over stones. The olivium’s not being destroyed, it’s just being moved around. Eventually we’ll move it back. So be quiet and live.”

  McCoy shook his aching head. “Another chronic optimist. You people are a plague.”

  “Optimist?” She gave him a saucy expression. “Don’t mistake my anger for something else. He’s using my personal authority to skim ore from the planet’s repositories. Mine, not yours.”

  “Mine wouldn’t work. It’s a medical priority.”

  “And he knows that. That’s why he’s keeping me alive, to use as leverage against you, so you’ll keep treating him.”

  “Oh, he’ll keep you alive,” McCoy guaranteed, “because I won’t treat him if he harms you, and killing me means he dies of the Klepstow’s neuropathy he contracted when he really did try to escape. If I hadn’t been the one to come here to treat him, none of this would’ve happened.”

  “He would’ve tried it with someone else,” she said. “You heard what he said about another doctor.”

  “He knows I’m the only one outside of Federation central with Klepstow experience. That’s why he intercepted the shuttle with both of us on it. He wanted you for communications and me for treatment. We were sitting ducks.”

  “Doesn’t mean he won’t do something worse to you than just kill you,” she pointed out. “Men like him have twisted imaginations. He didn’t look very good,” she added. “Are you sure you’re treating his neuropathy right?”

  McCoy’s blue eyes mustered up a twinkle. “Oh, yes. In fact, he’s been cured for two weeks. He just doesn’t know it. All he’s had lately is morning sickness. Next week he gets a maddening itch.”

  Uhura swiveled toward him and looked into McCoy’s tired eyes, worried about his pallor, his slumped shoulders, his papery skin. Did she look the same to him? Had her usually lustrous dark complexion gone tawny with fatigue and almost constant dimness in this chilly compartment? Was his cell any warmer? Could he hold on under these conditions, day after day?

  “We have to keep this up,” she encouraged. “It’s our duty to stay alive. We’re the best hope of stopping Maidenshore’s long-range plans.”

  He sagged down to sit on the edge of her cot. “Suppose you’re right about that. Nobody realizes that Pandora’s Box has been hijacked. Maidenshore’s skimming olivium and sh
ipping it—what’s he doing with it? Do we know?”

  “I’m not sure. We’re collecting it and skimming off a certain percentage, but since he’s in charge of how much gets collected, he could be skimming fifty percent and no one would know. I’d guess he’s walking the line of sending just enough to keep suspicion from rising. Since Pandora’s Box is supposed to be moving around, earning its keep, no one notices our travels.”

  McCoy frowned at the truth in her words. This actually could go on for months. “We’ve got to get a message out somehow.”

  Sweeping her hand across the communication units, Uhura shook her head. “You saw. He took the enabler with him. He only lets me send when he’s here. All this system can do now is receive. I can listen, but I can’t broadcast. I’ve tried to override his systems, but he’s anticipated every move. The system’s so simplified now that I can’t undercut the efficiency. He’s smart, Doctor, along with all his other magnificence.”

  “He’s certainly happy with himself—” McCoy grasped the carved bunk support as a loud chunking noise rumbled through the ship from deep below decks. “What was that?”

  “Sounds like docking clamps,” Uhura told him. “But there’s no other ship this far out, is there?”

  “There shouldn’t be.”

  “Let’s have a look around.”

  “How?” McCoy asked.

  “Just a few tricks I’ve been inventing when our friend Billy wasn’t looking. Watch that little screen. I tied into the interior sensors. He doesn’t figure I’d want to look around inside the ship.”

  McCoy pulled up the cannister Maidenshore had been sitting on and positioned himself beside Uhura, to watch the small screen she indicated.

  “First, the passenger lounge.” She tapped the controls. On the screen appeared a view of the lounge area, converted from a comfortable sitting and viewing area to an exercise run for the miners. A few of Maidenshore’s lackeys were enjoying a wrestling match. There was no sign of Maidenshore.