Star Trek: Duty, Honor, Redemption (63 page)

Or they know, Sulu thought, and they’ve decided to let us sweat for a while.

“Mister Chekov, any signs of Federation escort?” Kirk said.

And if we do get an escort,
Sulu thought,
will it escort us—or put us under arrest?

“No, sir,” Chekov said. “And no Federation vessels on assigned patrols.”

“That’s odd,” Kirk said.

“Admiral, may I speak with you?” Uhura said.

“Certainly, Commander.” Kirk rose and joined Uhura at her station.

“What have you got, Uhura?”

“I’m getting something awfully strange,” Uhura said. “And very active. Overlapping multiphasic transmissions…. It’s nothing I can translate. It’s gibberish.”

“Can you separate them?” Kirk said.

“I’ve been trying, sir. They’re unfocused, and they’re so strong they bleed out into adjacent frequencies and harmonics. And their positions…lead in the direction of Earth.”

“Earth!”

“Yes, sir. I’m trying to sort it out.”

Like Sulu and everyone else in the command chamber, Spock overheard the conversation between Admiral Kirk and Commander Uhura. Curious, Spock picked up an earphone and listened in as Uhura attempted to extract a comprehensible message from the garble that filled the frequencies.

When Leonard McCoy appeared at the entrance to the control chamber, then strolled in, Spock took care to show no reaction. He had not spoken directly to McCoy since…before. He had not even been in his presence without T’Lar as a barrier between them. Speaking to McCoy should be no different from speaking to any other human being, and yet Spock felt a strange reluctance to do so.

“Hi,” McCoy said. “Busy?”

“Commander Uhura is busy,” Spock said. “I am monitoring.”

McCoy looked at him with a strange expression. “Well. Just wanted to say—nice to have your
katra
back in your head, not in mine.”

McCoy smiled. Spock could not imagine why.

“I mean,” McCoy said, “I may have carried your soul, but I sure couldn’t fill your shoes.”

“My shoes?” Spock said. “What would you intend to fill my shoes with? And why?” Spock seldom wore shoes. On shipboard, in uniform, he wore boots. On Vulcan he ordinarily wore sandals. “I am wearing sandals,” Spock said. This seemed wrong to him. “How would one go about filling a pair of sandals?”

“Forget it,” McCoy said abruptly. “How about covering a little philosophical ground?”

Spock tried to reconcile McCoy’s words and tone, which he interpreted as flippant, with the tension in his body, the intensity in his gaze.

“Life. Death. Life,” McCoy said. “Things of that nature.”

“I did not have time on Vulcan for deep study of the philosophical disciplines.”

“Spock, it’s me!” McCoy exclaimed. “I mean—our experience was unique.”

“My experience was unique,” Spock said. “Your experience was essentially the same as that of anyone accompanying a Vulcan to that Vulcan’s death. It is true that you were untrained and unprepared; this caused T’Lar great difficulty in freeing my
katra
—”

“T’Lar!” McCoy exclaimed. “What about me? I thought I was going crazy! I was arrested, drugged, thrown in jail—”

“—and it caused you some distress,” Spock said. “For this I apologize, but I could see no other choice.”

“Never
mind
that,” McCoy said. “Do you think I’m complaining about helping save your life? But, Spock—you really have gone where no man has ever gone before. And in some small part, I shared that experience. Can’t you tell me what it felt like?”

The Vulcan elders had asked him the same question, and he had not replied. He continued to resist the demand that he delve into his memory of the subject. Yet he had no logical reason for his reluctance.

Even if he did force himself to recall the experience, he doubted he could express it to McCoy in words the doctor or any human—except perhaps Amanda Grayson, who had studied Vulcan philosophy—could understand. Spock was not altogether sure he could express it to any sentient being.

“It would be impossible to discuss the subject without a common frame of reference.”

“You’re joking!” McCoy exclaimed.

“A joke…” Spock said, sorting through his memory, “is a story with a humorous climax.” He wondered why McCoy had accused him of making a joke. In the first place the comment seemed an utter non sequitur. Spock could not understand how it followed from their previous discussion. In the second place, McCoy must be under some serious misapprehension if he thought Spock would deliberately attempt to make a joke.

“Do you mean to tell me,” McCoy said, “that I have to die before you’ll deign to discuss your insights on death?”

The chaotic tangle of sound suddenly sorted itself out, distracting Spock from McCoy’s unanswerable questions. “Most strange,” Spock murmured.

“Spock!” McCoy said.

“Pardon me, Doctor,” Spock replied. “I am hearing many calls of distress.”

“I heard a call of distress, too, and I answered it,” McCoy said angrily. “You—” He cut off his furious protest. “What do you mean? What calls of distress?”

“Captain!” Uhura exclaimed.

Kirk strode to her side. “What did you find?”

“Overlapping distress calls. Maydays from starships, and—”

“Let’s hear them!” Kirk said. “Have you got any visuals? Put them on-screen.”

Uhura complied. The Maydays flicked onto the holographic viewing area, each overriding the next, each different but very much the same: starships overtaken and drained by a huge spacegoing object that blasted their power supplies and sailed past at high warp, without answering their greetings or their supplications.

The blurry image of the president of the Federation Council formed before them. His message broke and dissolved, but Uhura had captured enough that its meaning could not be mistaken.

“This is…president of…grave warning: Do not approach planet Earth…To all starships, repeat, do not approach!”

Shocked, Admiral Kirk cursed under his breath.

The president’s image faded and the strange spacegoing construct replaced him.

“Orbiting probe…unknown energy waves…transmission is directed at our oceans. Ionized our atmosphere…all power sources failing. Starships are powerless.” Suddenly the transmission came through with utter clarity. The president leaned forward, intent and intense.

“Total cloud cover has enveloped our world. The result is heavy rain and flooding. The temperature is dropping to a critical level. The planet cannot survive beneath the probe’s force. Probe transmissions dominate all standard channels. Communication is becoming impossible. Earth evacuation plans are impossible. Save yourselves. Avoid the planet Earth.” He paused, closing his eyes wearily, opening them again to stare blankly from the screen. “Farewell.”

Jim Kirk listened to the transmission with disbelief. What
is
that thing? he thought. “Uhura, can you let us hear the probe’s transmissions?”

“Yes, sir. On speakers.”

A blast of sound overwhelmed them with its eerie strangeness.

“Nothing we have can translate it,” Uhura said. “Neither the
Bounty
’s original computer nor our universal translator.”

“Spock, what do you make of it?” Jim said.

“Most unusual,” Spock said. He gazed at the visual transmission, taking in all the available information, analyzing it, trying to synthesize a hypothesis. “An unknown form of energy, great intelligence, great power. I find it illogical that its intentions are hostile…”

“Really?” McCoy said sarcastically. “You think this is its way of saying ‘Hi there’ to the people of Earth?”

“There are other intelligent life forms on Earth, doctor. Only human arrogance would assume the message was meant for humanity.”

McCoy scowled. He glanced sidelong at Jim. “I liked him better before he died.”

“Bones!” Jim said in protest, knowing Spock could not help but have heard.

“Face it, Jim!” McCoy said. “Everything he used to have that made him more than a green-blooded computer, they’ve left out this time.” He stalked away and stopped near the visual transmission, staring morosely at the images of destruction.

“Spock,” Jim said, “are you suggesting that this transmission is meant for a life form other than human beings?”

“It is at least a possibility, Admiral. The president did say that the transmission was directed at the Earth’s oceans.”

Jim frowned, considering. “Uhura, can you modify the probe’s signals by accounting for density, temperature, and salinity?”

“For underwater propagation? I’ll try, sir.”

He waited impatiently as Uhura played the communications console like a complex musical instrument, like a synthesizer creating an entire orchestra. The probe’s signal mutated as she filtered it, altered its frequency, enhanced some parts of the sound envelope, and suppressed others. Slowly it changed, till it wailed and cried in a different voice, still alien, yet strangely and tantalizingly familiar. Jim searched his memory for the song, but the knowledge remained out of reach.

“This is what it would sound like underwater?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Fascinating,” Spock said. “If my suspicion is correct, there can be no response to this message.” He strode toward the exit hatch of the control chamber.

“You recognize it, Spock?” Jim asked, but Spock offered no response. “Spock! Where are you going?”

“To the onboard computer room. To confirm my suspicions.” He vanished through the hatchway without a word of explanation.

Jim headed after him. When he realized McCoy was following, he stopped and turned back. He was as concerned about McCoy’s mental state as he was about Spock’s. For all their vast knowledge and long history, Vulcans were neither omniscient nor omnipotent. They might not have freed McCoy as completely as they claimed.

And Bones might be right, Jim thought, trying to persuade himself that he was worrying to no purpose. Maybe they did use the opportunity of retraining Spock’s mind to create the perfect Vulcan, a being of complete logic and no emotion at all…

“Stay here, Bones,” he said.

“No way,” McCoy said. “Somebody has to keep an eye on him.”

“Yes. Me.”

“Oh, no,” McCoy said. “
You
think he’s all right.”

Spock gazed at the computer screen, waiting for the results. He felt as if he were taking still another memory test. He wondered if he would pass it. The result would be of intellectual interest.

Admiral Kirk and Doctor McCoy stood close behind, their anxiety disquieting. He wondered why they were acting this way, for he had already told them that his hypothesis, even if true, could have no effect.

The computer replayed the probe’s song, then played another, not identical but similar: a melody of rising cries and whistles, clicks and groans. He had heard it before, but only in a fragmented, half-remembered form.

The computer displayed the image of a huge creature, an inhabitant of Earth’s seas, and identified it:
Megaptera novaeangliae.

Spock had passed his own memory test.

“Spock?” Admiral Kirk said, his voice tight.

“As I suspected,” Spock said. “The probe’s transmissions are the songs sung by whales.”

“Whales?”

“In particular, the humpback whale,
Megaptera novaeangliae.
”

“That’s crazy!” McCoy exclaimed.

Spock found McCoy’s highly emotional state to be most discomforting. He tried to ignore it.

“Who would send a probe hundreds of light-years to talk to a whale?” McCoy said.

“It’s possible,” Admiral Kirk said thoughtfully. “Whales evolved on Earth far earlier than human beings.”

“Ten millions of years earlier,” Spock said. “Human beings regarded them, as they regarded everything else on the planet, as resources to be exploited. Humans hunted the whale, even after its intelligence had been noted, even after other resources took the place of what humans took from whales. The culture of whales—”

“No one ever proved whales
have
a culture!” McCoy exclaimed.

“No. Because you destroyed them before you had the wisdom to obtain the knowledge that might form the proof.” McCoy started to object again, but Spock spoke over him. “The languages of the smaller species of cetaceans contain tantalizing hints of a high intellectual civilization. Lost, all lost. In any event, the pressure upon the population was too great for the whales to withstand. The humpback species became extinct in the twenty-first century.”

He glanced at the screen. The computer displayed the immense form of a humpback whale, bloated and graceless in death. Human beings flensed the carcass. Great thick chunks of the whale’s body flopped onto the deck, and the whale’s blood stained the sea dark red. Spock observed his colleagues. Kirk and McCoy watched, fascinated and horrified, unable to resist the scene of an intelligent creature’s death and dismemberment.