Assassination Game (31 page)

A series of phaser blasts knocked them around, and a part of Sulu’s console sparked. He waved the smoke away and tapped at it, a pit of dread forming in his stomach.

“We’ve lost impulse engines!” he announced. “Thrusters only!”

“We’re dead,” Tikhonov said.

“No,” said Sulu. He pointed to an enormous asteroid on the viewscreen. “Chekov, what’s the mass of that asteroid? The big one there?”

“Its mass?” Chekov tapped at his sensor readout. “Four times ten to the sixteenth kilograms. I suggest we not run into it.”

“I’m not planning to,” Sulu said, but his actions proved otherwise. He heard Chekov gasp beside him as he used the
Yorktown
’s existing impulse inertia and the ship’s thrusters to aim straight for it, ignoring the smaller asteroids that banged off the shields and hull on the way.

“No, no!” Tikhonov cried. “I said stay
away
from the big ones!”

“We’re going to turn,” Sulu announced. “You might want to put all energy to the port shields.”

“I—” Tikhonov said, ready to argue, but as the asteroid loomed large in front of them, Sulu hit the forward starboard thrusters and the aft port thrusters hard, swinging the back end of the
Yorktown
around the orbit of the asteroid, like a car losing its back wheels on wet pavement. The asteroid stayed in front of them the whole time as they swung around it, but their port side was exposed to the still-attacking Romulan ships.

“Energy to port shields, aye!” Chekov said.

The Romulan ships peppered them with phaser shots, but soon they were behind the moon-sized asteroid, and Sulu hit the forward thrusters, pushing them backward away from the asteroid—and backward out of the asteroid belt.

“You used the asteroid’s gravity to propel us out!” Chekov cried.

It had worked, but Sulu knew they weren’t out of
the woods yet. On the viewscreen ahead of them, the Romulan scout ships dipped under and around the giant asteroid and came straight at them.

“Go to warp! Go to warp!” Tikhonov said.

Sulu was already laying in the coordinates. As soon as the
Yorktown
’s nose went below the outer edge of the asteroid field, he punched it, the starfield in front of them streaking away to a blur.

The viewscreen went black, and the red-alert sirens stopped as the simulation ended and the lights came up. The sim crew breathed its usual sigh of relief, and Tikhonov celebrated.

“We did it!”

Chekov turned to shake Sulu’s hand.

“Fantastic!” Chekov said.

Sulu grinned. “Thanks.”

The door to the observation room opened, and an Academy instructor came in the room. “Nice job,” she said. “Particularly there at the end.”

“It was a simple matter of physics,” Tikhonov said. “I knew that if we—”

“Actually, that was my idea,” Sulu said, speaking up. “We didn’t have impulse engines anymore, but we still had the forward momentum. All we needed was a little help from our big friend there. We didn’t have time to talk about it, so I just did it.”

“Nice job, Mr.”—the commander checked her PADD—“Sulu. And well done, everyone. You’re dismissed.”

Tikhonov wasn’t thrilled about Sulu taking the credit for the maneuver, he could tell, but he was happy to tell everyone about all the other brilliant decisions he’d made as he escorted them out. At the lockers outside, Chekov congratulated Sulu again—this time for not letting Tikhonov hog all the credit.

“Well,” Chekov said. “Good-bye until next class, then.”

“Pavel, wait,” Sulu said, catching the young cadet before he was gone. “Did you hear about this Assassination Game, where cadets run around trying to ‘kill’ one another with sporks from the cafeteria?”

“Aye,” Chekov said. “But it is over. The admiral made them stop.”

Sulu put his arm around Chekov’s shoulder. “He made
them
stop. But not us. What do you say we start our own?”

“I say, we can do this! But are you sure? You are always saying you do not have the time for such things.”

“Plans change,” Sulu said. “Now, what do you think about water pistols as weapons …?”

Kirk and Bones got some strange looks on the trolley. Perhaps not surprisingly, they had one whole side of it to themselves, too.

Kirk was sure it had nothing to do with the Varkolak sitting between them.

Lartal’s tongue lolled out the side of his mouth as the streetcar rattled up and down San Francisco’s hills, and Kirk suddenly had visions of a dog hanging its head out the window of a car, tail wagging, tongue flapping in the wind. He smiled to himself, then tried his best to put the thought away. Very, very far away.

The streetcar came to a stop outside the Dragon Gate, and the conductor announced the stop: Chinatown.

“This is us,” Kirk told them.

“You think she is
here
?” Lartal asked Kirk when they were out on the sidewalk.

“Look. I started to think about it,” Kirk told him. “You triangulated her position. You know she’s inside a twenty-five-square-block radius. But that’s a lot of ground to cover, especially since you …” Kirk looked for a polite way to put it.

“Were recently public enemy number one,” Bones filled in.

“Thanks, Bones.”

Bones shrugged, as if to say,
Well? Am I wrong?

“So, you can’t just go roaming around the city again, or you might cause a riot. But I got to thinking, the way you track is by sense of smell, isn’t it?”

“Mostly,” Lartal said.

“So once your mate picked a planet to hide on, she would choose some place crowded to lay low, where she’d be hard to find.
And
,” Kirk said, waving a hand at the Dragon Gate, “some place with lots of new smells to mask her scent.”

Lartal sniffed at the air with his snout. Even from here, Kirk could smell roast duck and incense, bundled herbs and rotting vegetables, baking fortune cookies, ramen and dim sum.

“Yes!” Lartal said, taking off at a run. “She is here!”

“Whoa! Hey!” Kirk called, but Lartal wouldn’t be stopped. Instead, Kirk and Bones ran with him as best they could as he followed his nose through the neighborhood. He would stop to sniff at a lamppost or a fire hydrant, then be off again just as quickly, following a scent.

“For crying out loud,” Bones said as he pulled up panting alongside Kirk on one of their frequent stops. “The only thing I can smell anymore is the garbage.”

Kirk had to agree. Chinatown might be full of wonderous sights and smells, but it was equally full of disgusting ones. And it didn’t help that it was apparently trash collection day.

Lartal’s nose led them to Portsmouth Square, the big public park in the heart of Chinatown. The place was full of people of all races and species. A group of Andorians practiced
ushaan-to
beside Chinese San Franciscans doing
tai chi. Some Rigelians played Frisbee, and an aged Vulcan and a human child played three-dimensional chess.

Lartal slid off into the trees.

“Wait a minute, what’s he—” Bones started to say, but Kirk shushed him, pointing.

Sitting on a bench beneath the statue of the Goddess of Democracy was someone in a dark brown cloak that covered her face.

And most of her tail.

She sat on the bench reading a PADD as Lartal stalked closer. Before either Kirk or Bones could gasp, she was up and running, Lartal at her heels. But she wasn’t running the way you ran when you wanted to get away from somebody; she was running the way you did when you were playing with them, leading them on a chase. She wove in and out of souvenir stalls and food carts, jumped benches and retaining walls, scattered bocce players and jugglers.

Lartal finally caught up with her in the middle of a grassy lawn, bowling her over and nipping at her, like two dogs at play. Kirk and Bones ran up to where they lay, still pawing and wrestling with each other, and Kirk suddenly got the feeling he was intruding on something private.

“Bones, wait,” Kirk said. “Maybe we should just, you know …” He nodded away from them.

“Wait!” Lartal said, laughing. “Kirk, meet my mate, Gren.”

The two Varkolak got up from the ground and tried to make themselves presentable. When her cloak was shed, Kirk saw that Gren’s fur was a startling white with gray-brown patches, almost a complement to Lartal’s patterning. Her face was thinner and longer, her tail bushier and shorter, and, though it seemed strange for Kirk to think it, she was altogether rather beautiful.

“Charmed, I’m sure,” Gren said, giving Kirk her paw.

“My friend Bones,” Kirk said. Gren’s eyes grew wide at the word.

“Leonard McCoy,” Bones told her. “Nice to meet you.”

Lartal and Gren nipped and nuzzled each other, and Kirk definitely began to feel like he and Bones were a third nacelle.

“So, we’ll just leave you alone so you can have some privacy, then,” Kirk said, realizing that there was little privacy to be had in the middle of Portsmouth Square. “Although, you might want to try those trees over there …”

Lartal laughed. “The trees, Kirk?”

Kirk groaned. If Lartal and his mate did what he thought they were about to do, it would be an interplanetary incident all over again.

“Come on, Lartal,” Gren told him. “I have a room at the Huntington.”

“The Huntington?” Kirk asked. That was one of the
oldest, fanciest hotels in San Francisco.

“What did you think, Kirk?” said Lartal. “We’re not animals.”

“Well, Bones,” Kirk said after they’d left Lartal and his mate. “This is one for our memoirs.”

“Yeah,” McCoy said. “I think I’ll call this chapter ‘Heartbreak at Cavallo Point.’”

“Still torn up about Nadja, Bones? Don’t be. She wasn’t the right girl for you. You know how I could tell?”

“No.”

“She stole your access code, tried to frame you for attempted murder, and then shot you.”

“Thanks,” McCoy told him. “I’ll watch out for that in the future. In fact, I’ll lead with that next time. ‘Say, you don’t happen to be interested in me only because I have Level Two med-lab clearance and I’m a sucker for a pretty face, do you?’”

“Aw, come on, Bones. You just need to find the right girl. As a matter of fact, me and Braxxy and a couple of the guys were thinking about hitting the Warp Core tonight….”

“Oh no,” McCoy said. “I’m done with women for the foreseeable future. As in the next century.”

They hopped a streetcar for Golden Gate and made
their way to a pair of empty seats at the back.

“Got your lab work to keep you warm, is that it?” Kirk said.

“I’ll manage,” McCoy replied. “A lot better without women than with.”

They sat down and found themselves staring into the eyes of the most beautiful girl Leonard McCoy had ever seen. She was curvy and petite, with short black hair the color of licorice and eyes the color of a New Orleans morning.

“Hey,” Kirk said to the girl. “Aren’t you in my Interspecies Protocol class?”

She smiled, her dimples forming little quasars of cute in her cheeks. “Yeah. I’m Amy Westin.”

“Jim Kirk. This here’s Leonard McCoy. Say hello, Leonard.”

“Huh? What?” McCoy said. He hadn’t been listening.

He was head over heels in love.