Worlds in Collision (20 page)

“I'm not sure,” Nensi said. “Apparently your captain has a large variety of codes that he's established with you people to cover all sorts of eventualities—” McCoy and Uhura nodded “—and he said he'd include one on the data file. Presumably, Mr. Spock will be able to determine the message's authenticity and send a suitable reply.”

“So we'll be able to talk through the associates without Wolfe's people being aware of it?” McCoy asked.

“As long as we don't do it in real time,” Romaine said as she stepped away from the desk and joined the others. “Voice communication is out but stored messages are encrypted. I don't think Farl will think to intercept those communications and I'm certain Wolfe doesn't even know about them.”

“This module has other duties,” the associate said as it lowered its eyestalk and wheeled in front of Nensi's desk. “Pardon, pardon.” It rolled past to the door.

“So now what?” Romaine asked the doctor, unconsciously deferring to him as the group's commanding officer.

“First, we get out of our uniforms,” McCoy said. Nensi gestured to a stack of clothes that Kirk had requested, resting on a visitor's chair by the wall. “Then we start looking for Spock,” McCoy continued, “beginning with the areas around the portable transporter pad he was traced to.”

“I've got the maps on the desk screen,” Romaine said as Nensi handed a technician's jumpsuit to McCoy and one of Romaine's off-duty outfits to Uhura.

The two
Enterprise
officers held the clothes awkwardly for a moment. Then McCoy turned to Uhura, smiled, and said, “It's all right, Lieutenant, I'm a doctor.” For a moment, it seemed as if McCoy was about to say something more, but didn't. Judging from the way the officers then laughed, Nensi felt there must have been something else to the doctor's comment than was apparent on the surface, but he shrugged it off and went over to study the maps with Romaine, leaving the two to quickly change.

A few minutes later, Romaine traced out a section of corridors that she had indicated in red on the desktop display screen. McCoy, Uhura, and Nensi studied them closely.

“I can't pretend to match a Vulcan's logic,” Romaine said, “but I'm assuming that Mr. Spock's first priority will be to escape recapture, therefore he will attempt to increase, as quickly as possible, the area in which he might be found. This service corridor handles all the waste-disposal and energy-distribution needs of the residential domes, interconnecting with them all. If he gets into it, then within the hour he could have access to almost half the nonrestricted facility.”

“Would Spock know that?” McCoy asked.

“Prime is patterned on standard starbase weapons labs. I'm assuming that Spock would know the layouts of those and act accordingly.”

“So with half the facility to choose from, where should we start
our
search?” Uhura asked.

“Again,” Romaine began, “I'm assuming that his second goal is to escape. I'm hoping that Farl will also do the logical thing and concentrate his search in this direction to cut off Spock's access to the shuttle landing bay and the main transporter station.”

“And if Farl's doing the logical thing, what in blazes is Spock supposed to do?” McCoy asked in annoyance.

“Head in this direction,” Romaine said, running her finger along a twisting chain of tunnels that led away from the transport center of Prime. “Weapons-lab emergency-evacuation transporter modules are located on the perimeters of each of these domes.”

“But this isn't a weapons lab,” McCoy protested. “Why would they build evacuation transporters in a facility where there's no chance of it blowing up?”

Romaine looked across at McCoy, staring intently into his eyes. “You were at Memory Alpha, Dr. McCoy. You saw what happened to those people.”

McCoy nodded his head in silent understanding.

“That isn't going to happen again,” Romaine said. “Not to me. Not to anyone.”

“Mira was on the implementation team,” Nensi added. “The evacuation modules are there because of her.”

“Then Farl will know about them, too?” Uhura asked.

“Yes,” Romaine agreed. “But he'll still have to concentrate his troops on the shuttle bay and main transporters because they offer more opportunities for escape. The evacuation modules offer only one chance, so he'll send fewer troopers there. Given a choice between betting on a few troopers or Mr. Spock, my credits are on Spock.” She looked around the desk. “That's it.”

“Then let's go,” McCoy said. “and hope the captain can re-create your reasoning.”

“With luck, he won't have to,” Romaine said as the four of them left Nensi's office. “I had a holo of Mr. Scott to feed into the associate's message center. If an associate runs into him, the whole plan's laid out in a dispatch.”

McCoy peered intently at the side of Romaine's head.

“Something wrong, Doctor?” she asked suspiciously.

“Just checking to see how pointed your ears are, my dear,” McCoy said with a twisted smile.

 

Captain Kirk did not believe in leaving to chance anything that could be controlled. For that reason, he often practiced throwing phasers away in the ship's gym, and then retrieving them. If he threw a phaser too far away, then it was gone forever. Any attempt to lunge for it would be cut short by returning fire. If he threw the phaser so it landed too close to him, assuming that an enemy would let it remain there, he would not be able to gather enough momentum to roll back to his feet, firing after diving to pick it up.

But the practicing had paid off more than once and, he thought, it would soon pay off again. Without taking his eyes off the Vulcan who held a phaser II on him, Kirk flipped his own phaser I away and heard it hit the flooring of the equipment bay precisely where he needed it. Once the captain had accepted, years earlier, that enemies could force weapons from his hands, he'd perfected a means by which those same weapons would still be less than a second away from use.

The captain prepared to make his move.

Keeping his own dark eyes impassively locked on Kirk's, the Vulcan jerked his hand to the side and blasted the captain's discarded phaser into a pile of sparking slag. The Vulcan's young face, topped by black hair cut far shorter than Spock's, remained inexpressive, even though a powerful message had just been delivered.

Kirk hurriedly reconsidered his options. No matter how good he felt he was, he realized he would be a fool not to acknowledge that the Vulcan had just shown he was better.

“Hands on your heads,” the Vulcan ordered, his voice calm and measured. “Move together until two meters separate you. Keep your eyes on me.”

Kirk and Scott edged together until the Vulcan told them to stop.

“Who are you?” Kirk asked. “What do you want?”

“Remain silent,” the Vulcan said, and gracefully stepped toward his stunned companion. Again without taking his eyes or his phaser off Kirk, the Vulcan used his free hand to remove a small scanner from an equipment pouch on his armor's belt and held it over the fallen trooper's body. He pinched the scanner, which reminded Kirk of one of McCoy's instruments, though oddly different, and its sensor node began to sparkle as it emitted, then received its reflected radiations.

After a few seconds, the Vulcan turned the scanner off and held it in the corner of his field of vision, obviously reading the device's display.

Both Kirk and Scotty tensed with surprise and shock as the Vulcan suddenly swung his phaser around and shot the trooper on the flooring, causing the body to swell with phased radiation and dissociate into a quantum mist that gently winked out of existence.

“He couldn't have been dead!” Kirk shouted. “Our weapons were set for stun. It was just feedback shock!”

“Remain silent,” the Vulcan repeated evenly.

Kirk and Scott complied. When a Vulcan repeated himself, intelligent people took it as the worst possible threat.

“You are from the
Enterprise,”
the Vulcan stated. “You are aware of the location of your shipmate Spock. You will tell me his location.”

“We don't know his location,” Kirk said. “We beamed down to look for him ourselves.”

The Vulcan considered the captain's reply for a moment, then reached out, adjusted the intensity setting on his weapon, and fired.

Beside Kirk, Scott grunted as he was thrown violently back against the transporter platform.

“You bastard!”
Kirk shouted as he lunged toward the Vulcan, only to be thrown back himself by a half-force phaser blast.

Kirk pushed himself up from the flooring, ignoring the pounding in his head and the dull pain that throbbed in his chest with each beat of his heart. “You…bastard…” he whispered, pulling against a storage box to regain his feet and step over to Scott. The engineer sat on the side of the transporter platform, hunched over and rocking with deep, rasping gasps.

The Vulcan adjusted the intensity setting again. “I now raise the output level by one half stop,” he announced. “You will tell me Spock's location.”

Kirk looked up from Scott. “We don't know where he is, and if you fire that again we're not going to be able to tell you anything.” He checked to make sure that Scott's breathing was easing up, then turned back to the Vulcan. “What do you want with Spock?”

“He is an assassin sent to kill Professor Zoareem La'kara,” the Vulcan said. “He must be stopped before he is allowed to act.”

Kirk's eyes narrowed. “How is it you
know
Spock plans to kill La'kara when even Commodore Wolfe only suspects him?”

The Vulcan seemed to blank out for a second. Kirk tapped Scott's shoulder. This was their chance.

Suddenly the incoming warning chime sounded on the transporter pad and an exclusion field ballooned out from the unit, pushing Kirk and Scott away from the materialization zone. The Vulcan didn't move as two forms coalesced on the pad.

Kirk looked between the figures on the pads and the Vulcan, about to make his decision which to go for, when he saw the Vulcan blink back to life. Kirk hit the flooring, dragging Scott with him as the Vulcan blasted at the person on the left pad.

On the transporter platform, Commander Farl's induction mesh crackled with phased energy as both he and Commodore Wolfe hit the Vulcan in the chest with lances of blue radiation from their own drawn phasers.

Without his helmet to complete the circuit, the Vulcan's armor was useless. His chest erupted in sparks and he flew backward to smash against the wall by the stack of alignment alloy shipping crates.

Wolfe stepped down from the transporter and slapped her phaser to her belt, gloating over Kirk. “So much for your precious Mr. Spock,” she said, sneering.

“It wasn't Spock,” Kirk said, warily keeping track of Farl's phaser as he stood with Scott.

The commodore looked puzzled for a moment. “Keep these two covered, Commander,” she said to Farl, then walked over to the crumpled body of the Vulcan against the wall, smoke still curling from the pitted entrance scorch on his chest plate.

Kirk and Scott moved back in response to Farl's gesture. His eyes were unreadable through his dark visor.

Then the high-pitched whine of a phaser echoed in the room again.

“Commodore!” Kirk shouted as he wheeled, expecting to see Wolfe consumed by the Vulcan's dying shot.

Instead he saw Wolfe jumping back from the glowing dissolution of the Vulcan's body.

“He killed himself,” she said in surprise.

“The way we hit him, he should have been dead before he hit the wall,” Farl said warily.

“And he wasn't Vulcan,” the commodore said. “Look at this.”

Farl told Kirk and Scott to slowly cross the room to the commodore.

“Vulcan blood is green,” Wolfe said as Farl looked down by her feet.

Kirk could see what the commodore meant. Splatters of blue liquid glistened on the flooring where the supposed Vulcan had fallen.

“Andorian,” the commodore concluded, stepping away. “Looked like a Vulcan but with surgery…skin grafts…” She looked at Farl with a sigh. “Let's take these two in and then we can figure out where this unauthorized transporter pad came from and what it's doing here. Obviously we're dealing with more than just a renegade science officer now.” She suddenly scowled at Scott. “What's the matter? All choked up over your friend buying it?”

Scott stopped sniffing the air and looked startled. “Och, no,” he started to say, but the commodore cut him off.

“These two are yours, Commander. Keep them down here. They know their way around the
Enterprise
too well to be locked up on it again.”

“Yess, Commodore,” Farl said, and brought Kirk and Scott back to the transporter pad.

“Thiss iss Farl,” the Andorian spoke into his communicator. “Inform scanning, that the Commodore and I have located the unauthorized transporter terminal and have captured Kirk and Scott. Any word on the other two or Spock?”