Worlds in Collision (11 page)

Salman Nensi stretched his arms over his head and yawned like a Rigellian blood-worm.

Across the table from him, Mira Romaine watched and listened in amazement. So did everyone else at lunch in the cafeteria.

“What was that supposed to be?” Romaine asked as Nensi rubbed his hands over his face.

“I think I might finally be relaxing,” Nensi said. “I haven't had a call from the interface team for three days now.” He picked up a sloppy sprout-salad sandwich and bit into it happily.

“They're all still down in the Interface Chamber,” Romaine said, marveling at how much her friend could get into his mouth at once, “trying to find out why their precious Pathfinders wouldn't support their demands. Do you remember the expression on Garold's face?” So much for the old story of how only a specially trained, enhanced interface team member could understand the complexities of a Pathfinder. Garold had been taken completely by surprise.

“Let's hope they stay down there during the prize ceremonies. Then I could almost start enjoying this posting,” Nensi managed to say around his mouthful of sandwich. They shared a glance, though, that said enjoyment had fled. As they sat together, both knew that in Romaine's lab a small, secure computer was running its last simulation of Nensi's Pathfinder access scenarios. His conclusions were holding: the Pathfinders, of which Nensi and Romaine were ostensibly in charge, were lying to them.

Romaine glanced around the cafeteria at the others. They couldn't be told yet, best to keep up the appearance of normalcy. She handed Nensi a second napkin, and he immediately put it to good use.

“You know, Uncle Sal, I'm beginning to worry that you haven't been having enough meals in polite company.” Romaine delicately used her chopsticks to pick up a purple cube of stir-seared plomeek, to show him how it was done.

“Afraid I'll embarrass you at your dinner for Mr. Scott?”

“Ha!” Romaine laughed. “He's a dear sweet man but he's lived on board ship for so many years that I'm worried
he
might embarrass
you.”
She smiled to herself, remembering back to her too brief voyage on the
Enterprise.
The best part about those last romantic dinners she had shared with Scotty had not been the food. She could barely wait to have dinner with him again.

Nensi checked his chronometer. “So how much longer is it? Twelve hours till your engineer arrives?”

Thirteen hours, twenty-seven minutes,
Romaine thought, though she managed to look vague and say, “About that, I think.” She took a sip of her tea. “That's something I'll never understand,” she said. “The
Enterprise
travels two days of a five-day voyage out from Starbase Four and loses its dilithium, facing a couple of years of travel to get here on impulse. And then Starbase Four sends out a light cruiser with replacement crystals that reaches the ship within hours. They spend three days repairing the circuits and tuning the new crystals so they can power up the warp engines again. And then,
after
the three-day delay, the
Enterprise
will end up getting here only two hours late.”

“The wonders of warp factors,” Nensi said with a smile. “Beyond that, I can't tell you because I don't have the slightest idea how they do it and I'm too old to care.”

“But if the
Enterprise
had traveled at the same speed at the start of the voyage that she's traveling now to make up for the delay, she could have been here inside of a day to begin with.”

“Now that I can tell you something about,” Nensi said, gesturing with the other half of his sandwich. “Warp engines have a strictly rated lifetime of operational use, dependent on the factor at which they operate, not the distance they cover. The higher the factor, the shorter the life. More than half the cost of constructing a ship like the
Enterprise
is the expense of the warp engines. I spent five years in San Francisco processing refit requests from Starfleet, and let me say that there's a whole gang of accountants in the Federation finance department who'd be happy if all Fleet travel was done on impulse propulsion.”

“It always comes down to credits, doesn't it?” Romaine said. “How are we ever going to start accomplishing anything worthwhile in space exploration without the proper funding?”

“You're starting to sound like Garold and his friends,” Nensi cautioned. “No more talks about budgets until I get a proper viewscreen in my office, all right?”

“You
still
don't have one?” Romaine said with amazement. “Uncle Sal, I run my department through Starfleet, remember? And I'm the ranking officer. You want a viewscreen? You got it!” She snapped her fingers.

“You can do that?” Nensi asked. “I thought all Starfleet business had to go through Captain Farl?”

“He's the ranking officer for his squad of troopers, sure, but since this is officially a civilian installation, except during emergencies, the chief technician is in charge.” She pointed at the stripes on her blue sleeve. Romaine knew the position was strictly a political gesture to those council members who had wanted to play down the military aspect of Memory Prime and, usually, all she got out of the authority was a pile of extra screenwork at the end of each duty cycle. But being ranking officer over twenty-six other Starfleet science personnel did have a few perks. “I'll order a screen for your office this afternoon. You should get it next week.”

Nensi looked pleased. “Now I feel guilty I didn't pay for lunch.”

They were tidying up their trays when an associate rolled up to their table, eyestalk extended and ready light blinking.

“Chief Romaine,” it announced in an extremely realistic voice, “you are ordered to report to breakout area C.”

“Ordered?” Romaine asked. “Whose orders?”

“Captain Farl,” the associate replied. “This module is authorized to announce that Memory Prime is now on emergency alert.”

 

Uhura's face appeared on the desk viewscreen in the captain's quarters.

“I have Admiral Komack's reply from Starfleet Command,” the communications officer said.

“Go ahead,” Kirk told her, but Uhura's somber expression made it clear what that reply was.

“Regarding charges pressed against Commander Spock,” Uhura read, “Commodore Wolfe is authorized to take full responsibility for the prisoner until he can be placed in the custody of proper Starfleet authorities. Commodore Wolfe and her prisoner are to transfer to the
U.S.S. Srall
upon that vessel's arrival at Memory Prime. Upon the conclusion of the Nobel and Z. Magnees Prize Ceremonies, the
Enterprise
is to return to Starbase Four and await further orders. Signed Komack, Admiral, Starfleet Command.”

“That's it?” Kirk was surprised. “No personal addendum?”

“I'm sorry, sir. That's the full text.”

Kirk thanked the lieutenant and told her to leave the bridge. The viewscreen went dark and Kirk looked over to Dr. McCoy. “She stayed at her station eighteen hours so that message wouldn't be intercepted by one of Wolfe's troopers,” Kirk said, “for all the good it's done us. I can't understand why Komack left it so cut and dried. It's not like him. He knows Spock.”

McCoy leaned back in his chair and swung his legs up onto the edge of Kirk's bunk. “We already know that there's more to this than anyone's admitting. Wolfe's keeping her mouth shut. The security people on Prime aren't responding to your requests for more information. It's big, Jim. I'm not surprised that a command admiral is washing his hands of the whole thing. Whatever Spock's mixed up in, it's got a lot of people scared.”

“You're not sounding like the devil's advocate anymore. You're talking as if you really think he's guilty.” Kirk's temper was showing.

“And you're talking as if you won't even consider the possibility that he might be!” McCoy shot back. “Remember Talos Four. Spock deliberately risked the last death penalty on the books.”

“To do what he thought was right,” Kirk insisted.

“Exactly,” McCoy argued. “And maybe this time Spock is also caught up in something he thinks is right. You can't rule it out. If Starfleet wants Spock, it's because they have a good reason.”

“Then why won't they tell
me?”
Kirk pounded his fist on his desk.

McCoy swung his feet down to the deck and leaned forward. If he had been closer, Kirk got the distinct feeling the doctor might have grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and shaken him.

“Because you're a
captain,
Captain. And some of the decisions in this fleet are made by officers with higher ranks.” McCoy brought his own fist down on the table for good measure. He took advantage of Kirk's speechless surprise to draw a deep breath, then began again more calmly. But not by much.

“When I think of all the times I've come down here to help you wrestle with the problems of your command…and what have you learned? Nothing. No matter how bad it's been in the past, you keep looking to put more pressure on yourself. You've got to draw the line somewhere.”

Kirk narrowed his eyes at McCoy. If anyone else had taken this insubordinate tone with him, he'd be out the door and moved to the top of the transfer list. But McCoy had earned himself a few more words, a few more centimeters of rope. “And what would you suggest, Doctor?” Kirk said carefully, a tightness in his voice that few had heard before.

“I suggest you face facts, Jim. You're not a god. You're a starship captain. And if that's not enough for you, then give the
Enterprise
up! Transfer to command and get those extra stripes. Become an admiral. Hell, become
the
admiral and run the whole damned fleet of starships, if that's what you want. Then, and only then, when you're at the top of the whole glorious system, can you feel that all the problems of the universe are the personal problems of James T. Kirk!”

“I will never give up the
Enterprise,”
Kirk said slowly and precisely. “Never.” It carried the chilling conviction of a blood oath.

“Then pay the price for her, Captain. Give the orders to the people below you and accept the orders from the people above. Don't treat everything that doesn't go your way as a personal attack. Learn the rules of the system. Then you can learn how to bend them. But don't ever forget that the system is there. And that you owe your ship to it.”

“Finished?” Kirk asked coldly.

“Well, that's up to you, Captain, sir.” McCoy sat back in his chair and folded his arms. He looked as if he had just run a marathon on the gym's treadmill.

Kirk studied McCoy for a few silent seconds. He wanted to shout at the doctor, tell him how wrong he was, how he had completely misread the situation. But he couldn't. Because he knew McCoy was right. Kirk shuffled some hardcopies on his desk. He hated making a mistake, even more than he hated admitting he had made one. But he felt he owed McCoy an explanation.

“Out there,” Kirk finally said, “on the frontier, it sometimes does feel like I am…in charge of everything. We make first contact with a new civilization…I've got four hundred and thirty crew depending on me not to do something that will endanger the ship simply because I wasn't paying attention to some idiosyncrasy of an alien culture. Each time I think, will this be the one where I lose it? And each time, it isn't. After a while, it gets easy to think that the rest of the universe doesn't matter. There's only my crew, and my ship, and my next challenge.” He sighed. “Starfleet, the Federation, sometimes they're nothing more than a subspace channel.”

McCoy waited in silence, but Kirk said nothing more.

“The point being…?” McCoy prompted.

“The point being that you're right, Doctor. I've wasted three days trying to find out why someone's plotting against
me
by trying to take
my
first officer off
my
ship when I should be trying to work within the system to maintain the integrity of the Fleet and the
Enterprise.”

“I am greatly relieved to hear that, Captain.” The extent of McCoy's relief was evident in his voice and on his face. He had not often been forced to confront Kirk so directly.

“I'm relieved to hear it, too, Bones.” Kirk visibly relaxed as he looked across the table at his friend. “I mean it. Thank you.”

McCoy chewed thoughtfully on a corner of his lip. Kirk could tell the doctor was still angry, though he didn't know if that anger was directed at him or the commodore.

“So what are you going to do about it?” McCoy asked bluntly.

It was the old Kirk who answered, not the one who had been thrusting blindly in circles for the past few days, out of his element when it came to dealing with the command structure and the finely balanced nuances of give and take that it required. He felt directed now. His goal was clear. As were his methods.