Star Trek: Duty, Honor, Redemption (75 page)

“—but he’s no more a spy than—”

The guards were distracted by the argument. Pavel lunged and grabbed his phaser.

“Don’t move!” he shouted.

Everyone turned toward him, startled.

“Freeze!” Pavel said, hoping they would respond better to their own language.

Bond took one step forward. “Okay,” he said. “Make nice and give us the raygun.”

“I warn you,” Pavel said. “If you don’t lie on floor, I will have to stun you.”

“Go ahead.” The agent sounded tired. “Stun me.”

“I’m very sorry, but—” He fired the phaser.

The phaser gurgled and died.

“It must be radiation…” Pavel murmured.

Before they could draw their primitive weapons, he grabbed his communicator and I.D., bolted for the door, flung it open, and fled.

“Sound the alarm,” the agent yelled. “But don’t hurt the crazy bastard.”

Pavel ran. A patrol clattered after him. He dodged around a corner and kept running. Voices and footsteps closed in on him. He flung open a hatch and dogged it shut. Another hatch opened into darkness below; a ladder led upward. He swarmed up the ladder. If he could just elude them long enough to communicate with Mister Scott, if he could just stand still long enough for the transporter to lock onto him—

Booted feet clanged on the metal rungs below and behind him. He ran again. He burst out onto the hangar deck. Ranks of sleek jets filled the cavernous space. Even if he could steal a plane, he had no experience with antique aircraft. On the other side of the deck, misty moonlight stretched in a long rectangle. He fled toward it, ducking beneath backswept wings, around awkward landing wheels.

He plunged into the open air and down the gangway. Footsteps clattered behind him; footsteps clattered ahead. He stopped short. A second patrol ran toward him from shore. He was trapped.

A streak of dark water stretched between the dock and the ship. If he could dive in and swim under the pier—

He grabbed the rail. He started to vault, then tried to stop short when he saw what lay below. His boot caught on the decking. He stumbled, bounced into the rail, tumbled over it, flung out his hands to catch himself. The phaser and communicator arced out and splashed into the sea. The wind caught his I.D. and fluttered and spun it away. His fingertips slipped on the wire cable. He cried out.

He fell.

The FBI agent shouldered his way through the shore patrol. They all stood at the edge of the gangway, looking downward, stunned.

“Oh, damn! Get an ambulance!”

The crazy Russian lay sprawled on a barge moored below the gangway. Blood pooled on the deck around his head.

He did not move.

Frightened and frustrated, Uhura hovered at Scott’s elbow while he worked frantically over the transporter console.

“His communicator’s gone dead,” Scott said. “I canna locate him.”

“You’ve got to find him,” Uhura said.

“I know that, lass.”

Minutes passed without any trace of Chekov.

“I’m going up to the bridge,” Uhura said. “I’ll try to—”

Admiral Kirk strode into the transporter room. “What’s holding things up?” He spoke in this clipped, impatient tone only under conditions of the greatest stress.

“I ha’…lost Commander Chekov,” Scott said.

“You’ve
lost
him!”

“You’ve got to send me back!” Uhura said. “I’ll find him, and—”

“Absolutely not!” Admiral Kirk said.

“But, sir—”

“It’s out of the question. If he’s been taken prisoner, you’d be walking straight into the same trap. And if he’s all right, he’ll contact us or he’ll make his way back on his own.”

“I’m responsible—”

“We’re all responsible, Uhura! But he voted to take the risk with the rest of us. I need you here, Commander.” He inspected the photon collector. “This is it?”

“Aye, sir,” Scott said, still fiddling with the transporter controls.

“Then get it in place! Uhura, Scotty, I understand your concern for Chekov. But I’ve got to have full power in the ship, and I’ve got to have it soon!” He rose and put one hand on Scott’s shoulder. “Scotty, I’ll stay here and keep trying to reach Pavel. Go on now.”

“Aye, sir.” Scott picked up the photon collector. Shoulders slumped, despondent, he left the transporter room.

“Uhura,” the admiral said, “you listen in on official communications. If he
was
captured, you may be able to find him that way. But I’ll bet he turns up knocking on the hatch within the hour.”

“I hope so, sir.” Uhura hurried to the control chamber.

She set the computer to monitoring the cacophony of this world’s radio transmissions. It would signal when it detected key words. She scanned the frequencies by ear, listening for a few seconds at each channel. Uhura missed the computer on the
Enterprise.
She could have asked it to relay anything unusual to her; she could have explained to it what she meant by unusual. But the computer on the
Bounty
considered everything about the Federation of Planets to be unusual. The centuries-long time jump added to the problem.

Time passed.

“Any luck?”

Uhura started. Admiral Kirk stood beside her.

“Nothing,” she said. “I should never have left him.”

“Uhura, you did what was necessary. You got the collector back. It wouldn’t do any of us any good if you were both lost.” He tried to smile. “Keep trying. You’ll find him.”

The admiral sank into the command chair.

At the power chamber, Scott made a minuscule adjustment of the photon collector as it transferred energy to the dilithium crystals. With Spock’s help, Scott had managed to improve the cross-channeling rate. He hoped it was enough. Scott glanced through the observation window. He shook his head. He still could see no difference in the crystals, though both his instruments and Mister Spock claimed they had begun to recrystallize. That was, by a long way, the least that he had hoped for.

The intercom came on. “Mister Scott,” Admiral Kirk said, “you promised me an estimate on the dilithium crystals.”

Scott rose wearily to reply. “It’s going slow, sir, verra slow. It’ll be well into tomorrow.”

“Not good enough, Scotty! You’ve got to do better!”

Now I’m expected to speed up quantum reactions,
Scott thought.
Perhaps I’ll be wanted next to alter the value of Planck’s constant. Or the speed of light itself.

“I’ll try, sir. Scott out.” He squatted down beside Spock again. “Well now, he’s got himself in a bit of a snit, don’t he.”

“He is a man of deep feelings,” Spock said thoughtfully.

“So what else is new?” Grimly, Scott buried himself in the cross-channeling connector.

In the control room, Jim Kirk rubbed his face with both hands. Behind him, the voices Uhura monitored buzzed and jumped. For the first time since leaving Vulcan, Jim had nothing to do. Nothing to do but wait.

And that was the hardest thing of all.

Long past midnight, Gillian Taylor drove back toward Sausalito. She had a Springsteen tape playing on the tape deck, too loud as usual. More than twelve hours ago, she had left the Institute early to go home and stare at the ceiling. So much for that.

She would rather be with the whales. She envied the people fifteen or twenty years ago who had lived with dolphins in half-flooded houses in order to do research on human-cetacean communication. But no funding existed anymore for that sort of esoteric, Aquarian-age work. Sometimes Gillian felt like she had been born fifteen years too late.

Or maybe,
she thought,
three hundred years too early.

Then she laughed at herself for taking Kirk’s story seriously, even for a second.

She stopped at an intersection. The red light reflected into the Rover. Springsteen was singing “Dancing in the Dark.” Gillian turned it up even louder and glanced at her own reflection in the rearview mirror as he got to the line about wanting to change his clothes, his hair, his face.

Yeah,
she thought.
Sing it to me, Bruce.

She wished she could change herself so she could stay with the whales. She allowed herself a wild fantasy of diving into the cold Alaska water with George and Gracie, to help them adapt to their new life, never to be seen again.

No kidding, Gillian,
she thought.
Never to be seen again, indeed; you’d die of hypothermia in half an hour. Besides, you know less about whale society than Gracie and George do, even if they did get separated from it as calves. You know as much about them as anybody in the world. But it isn’t enough.

And if Mister Spock knew what he was talking about—which she tried to convince herself she did not believe for a minute—and humpbacks were soon to become extinct, human beings would never know much about the whales.

Her vision blurred. She angrily swiped her forearm across her eyes. The smear of tears glistened beneath the fine, sun-bleached hairs on her arm, changing from red to green with the traffic light. She put the Rover in gear and drove on.

If I could go with them,
she thought.
Or if I could protect them. If I could tell them, before they leave, to turn and swim away every time they hear the engine of a boat, or the propeller of a plane, or even a human voice.

That was what frightened her most. The two humpbacks had known only friendship from human beings. Unlike wild humpbacks, they might swim right up to a boat. They had no way of distinguishing between relatively benign whale-watchers and the cannon-armed harpoon ships of black market whale hunters.

And yet she felt glad that Gracie and George would experience freedom. She tried to reassure herself about their safety. Public opinion and consumer boycotts and just plain economics continued to push toward the end of all whaling. If Gracie and George could survive for a couple of years, they might be safe for the rest of their lives.

She slowed as she approached the turnoff to her house. She ought to go home. She would need to be rested in the morning if she wanted to withstand the stress of moving the whales, and dealing with the reporters that Briggs planned to let in on the story, and most of all saying good-bye.

Instead, she stayed on the main road that led to the Institute.

What the hell,
Gillian thought.
So I’ll be tired tomorrow. I don’t care what Bob Briggs thinks about my feelings for the whales. I’m going to sit on the deck by the tank and wait for sunrise. I’ll talk to George and Gracie. And watch them and listen to them. I’ll get the boom-box out of my office and let Willie Nelson sing “Blue Skies” to them. It will be the last time, but that’s all right. Because whatever happens, they’ll be free. And maybe George will sing again.

Gillian parked the Rover, entered the dark museum, and clattered up the spiral staircase to the deck around the tank. She peered into the darkness. The whales ought to be dozing. Every few minutes they would surface, blow gently, and breathe. But she could not find them.

Maybe they caught a case of nerves from me and everybody else. Maybe they don’t feel like sleeping any more than I do.

“Hey, you guys!”

She did not hear the blow and huff of their breathing.

Frightened, Gillian clattered down the spiral stairs to the viewing window. Surely nothing could have happened to them. Not now. Not with their freedom in sight. She pressed her hands against the cold glass, shading her eyes to peer into the tank, afraid she might see one whale dead or injured on the floor of the tank, the other nuzzling the body in grief and confusion and trying to help.

She heard footsteps. She turned.

Bob Briggs stood in the entrance to the viewing area.

“They left last night,” he said softly.

Gillian stared at him with complete incomprehension.

“We didn’t want a mob scene with the press,” he said. “It wouldn’t have been good for them. Besides, I thought it would be easier on you this way.”

“Easier on me!” She took one step toward him. “You sent them away? Without even letting me say good-bye?” Rage and grief and loss concentrated inside her.

The rage burst out and Gillian slapped Briggs as hard as she could. He staggered back.

“You son of a bitch!” she cried. She did not even wait to see if she had hurt him. “You stupid, condescending son of a bitch!” She fled.

In her car, she leaned her forehead against the steering wheel, sobbing uncontrollably. Her palm hurt. She had never punched anybody, but she wished she had struck Bob Briggs with her fist instead of her open hand.

George and Gracie were free. That was what she wanted. But she wanted them safe, too.

She raised her head. She reached the decision she had been approaching, roundabout and slowly, all night long, and she hoped she had not waited too long to make it. She started the Land Rover, threw it into gear, floored it, and peeled out of the parking lot.

Sulu hoisted the battered helicopter into the air. It flew as if it were a bumblebee and believed the old theory that bumblebees should not be able to fly. It reached the end of the harness around the acrylic sheeting.

The cable snapped tight, pitching the Huey forward with a jolt and a shudder. Adrenaline rushing, Sulu fought to keep the copter in the air. Gradually, it steadied.

Sulu edged the power up and took the copter higher. The acrylic sheeting rose. A breeze, imperceptible on the ground, caught the flat of it and started it swinging. The oscillation transferred to the Huey. Loaded, the copter was far more difficult to fly.

“How the hell did they ever keep these things in the air?” he muttered. He gave it a bit of forward momentum, which helped damp the swing. The sheeting turned edge on to the copter’s direction. More steadily now, the Huey clattered and chopped toward Golden Gate Park.

The Land Rover screeched to a stop in the parking lot by the meadow. Gillian leaped out, dodged a clump of garbage cans, and ran across the grass. Mist swirled around her, glowing silver in the dawn.

She stopped in the last place she had seen Kirk.

“Kirk!” She could hardly hear her own voice over the clattery racket of an approaching helicopter. “Kirk!” she cried in fury. “Damn you! If you’re a fake—if you lied to me—!”

Gillian turned in a complete circle, searching. But Kirk did not answer. There was nothing there, no Kirk, no strange friend, no invisible spaceship. Tears of anger burned her eyes. She did not even care that Kirk had made a fool of her. He had offered her safety for the humpbacks. She had wanted to believe him, she had made herself believe him, and he had lied.

A downward blast of wind turned the tear tracks cold and whipped her hair around her face. The helicopter, closer now, hovered over a landscaped terrace. A huge pane of glass hung from its cargo harness. The copter lowered the glass slowly toward the blossoming rhododendrons. Beneath it, a man gestured instructions.

Gillian gasped.

The man hung unsupported in the air. But from the waist down, he did not even exist. It was as if he were standing within a structure that could not be seen and that could conceal him as well. An invisible structure…

“Kirk!” Gillian cried. “Kirk, listen to me!”

She ran up the bank to the terrace, crashing through the shiny dark green leaves and fluorescent pink and scarlet flowers of the rhododendrons. They flicked back at her, showering her with dew.

Excited and amazed, she clambered headlong over the edge of the terrace. She ran smack into something. She fell, stunned, a metallic
clang
reverberating around her. Still dizzy, she reached out and encountered a strut, cold, hard, solid…and invisible. In wonder and joy, she clenched her hands around it and pulled herself to her feet.

The half-visible man above her guided the acrylic sheet, letting it descend into invisibility. He waved off the helicopter. It rose, spun, and clattered away. The prop wash and the noise decreased precipitously.

“Where’s Kirk?” Gillian shouted. “Kirk!” she shouted. “God, Kirk, I need you!”

The partly invisible man stared down at her, blinked, bent down, and vanished.

Gillian held the strut more tightly.
Kirk won’t disappear on me now,
she thought.
I won’t let him!

She waited a moment for the invisible man to become half-visible again, but he remained hidden and she saw no sign of Kirk. She reached up, feeling for handholds, wondering if she could climb the invisible framework supporting the invisible ship.

Fluid, insubstantial, the strut dissolved from beneath her hands. Her vision blurred and a tingly, excited feeling swept over her.

The park faded away, to be replaced by a bright chamber lit by fixtures of odd, angular construction. The proportions of the room seemed strange to her, and the quality of the light, and the colors.

Not strange,
Gillian thought.
Alien.
Alien.

She was standing on a small platform. The glow and hum of a beam of energy faded. In front of her, Kirk James reached up to the controls of a console built to be operated by someone much larger.

“Hello, Alice,” Kirk said. “Welcome to Wonderland.”

She pushed her tangled hair from her face.

“It is true,” she whispered. “It’s all true. Everything you said…”

“Yes. And I’m glad you’re here. Though I’ll admit, you picked a hell of a time to drop in.” He took her by the elbow. “Steady now. We need your help.”

“Have I flipped out?” Gillian asked. She stepped down from the platform, staring around her in amazement. A script she had never seen labeled the controls of the console, but bits of plastic hand-lettered in English were stuck beside some of them. “Is any of this real?”

“It’s all real,” Kirk said. He guided her around, led her through a corridor, and took her to an echoing enclosed space. Sunlight slanted through the hatch above. The half-invisible man, whole now, secured the large sheet of transparent plastic.

“This is my engineer, Mister Scott,” Kirk said.

Scott straightened up and stretched his back. “Aye, how d’ye do.” He spoke with a strong Scots burr. “ ’Tis finished, Admiral. An hour or so for the epoxy to cure, and it’ll hold slime devils, ne’er mind Doctor Taylor’s critters.”

“It’s a tank for the whales,” Kirk said to Gillian. “Good work, Scotty.”

“But, Kirk—” Gillian said.

“We’ll bring them up just like we brought you. It’s called a transporter beam—”

“Kirk, listen to me! They’re gone!”

He stared at her. “Gone?” he said.

“Briggs—my boss—sent them away last night. Without telling me. To ‘protect’ me, damn him! They’re in Alaska by now.”

“Damn.” Kirk pressed his closed fist very firmly and very quietly against the transparent surface of the plastic.

“But they’re tagged!” Gillian said. “I told you that. Can’t we go find them?”

“At the moment,” Kirk said, “we can’t go anywhere.”

Gillian scowled at him. “What kind of spaceship is this, anyway?”

“A spaceship with a missing man,” Kirk said.

Mister Spock entered the cargo bay. He still wore his white kimono, but he had taken off his headband. Gillian saw his ears and his eyebrows for the first time.

“Admiral, full power is restored.”

“Thank you, Spock,” Kirk said. “Gillian, you know Mister Spock.”

Gillian stared at him agape.

“Hello, Doctor Taylor,” Mister Spock said with perfect calm. “Welcome aboard.”

A woman’s voice, tense with strain, came over the intercom. “Admiral—are you there?”

Kirk answered. “Yes, Uhura. What’s wrong?”

“I’ve found Chekov, sir. He’s been injured. He’s going into emergency surgery right now.”

“Uhura,
where?
”

“Mercy Hospital.”

“That’s in the Mission District,” Gillian said.