“Stop it, all of you.”
The three men fell silent, recognizing the tone of someone who had earned obedience and respect.
“I outrank all of you, including Spock,” Hunter said, “and if I have to pull rank to find out what’s going on, then consider it pulled. Dr. McCoy, do you have anything to say now?”
He started to answer her—but Spock had got away, and perhaps he needed only a few minutes to put everything right, but if he failed again and returned, he would be stopped if his plans were known.
McCoy could not take the chance of revealing what they were trying to do. He shook his head in defeat.
“Mr. Scott?” Hunter asked.
“I dinna ken what has happened. Dr. McCoy said Mr. Spock was deep asleep. He isna asleep, you saw that for yourself. That didna look like any transporter beam I ever saw before, either—and where could he go? I canna make his actions come out to make any sense in my mind. Unless Mr. Braithewaite’s suspicions are correct. I dinna want to believe them—but if they’re no’ true, why does Dr. McCoy want to go to Arcturus?”
“Arcturus!” Hunter said.
“Where’d you get the idea I wanted to go to Arcturus?” McCoy asked, baffled.
“Ye told me ye did,” Scott said, and then, when McCoy shook his head, “Ye said, if ye asked for warp four to Arcturus, would ye get it.”
“I didn’t mean it,” McCoy said. “I just picked the first example I could think of. But so what if I did want to go to Arcturus? What possible difference could that make?”
“Leonard,” Hunter said, “Arcturus is almost exactly equidistant from Federation, Romulan, and Klingon space. It’s neutral—most of the time, anyway. People go to Arcturus to make deals.”
“I don’t want to go to Arcturus,” McCoy said again. “I only wanted to know if the warp drive was on line.”
“He doesn’t even make up decent excuses!” Ian said.
“No, Mr. Braithewaite,” Hunter said, and she looked as if she were about to burst into laughter. “You’re right about that, Dr. McCoy doesn’t make up good excuses. But what do you have to say?”
“Spock’s been trying to free Mordreaux,” Braithewaite told her. “He was on Aleph right after the trial, I saw him. And he was monkeying around with the transporter just before Kirk was murdered. But Spock couldn’t get Mordreaux away, so he settled for escaping himself once things began to fall apart on him. He’d already drawn Dr. McCoy into his scheme. The security commander was involved, but they got rid of her—”
“The security commander? You can’t mean Mandala Flynn!”
“Yes—She wanted to command a ship like this so badly she could taste it. It was no secret, she even told Kirk. But he laughed at her. He must have known that a stateless person had no chance of advancing that far in Starfleet.”
“You’ve got some pretty strange ideas, Mr. Braithewaite.”
“But that’s what happened! Spock probably offered her the Enterprise in return for her help. They had to get rid of Kirk first. Dr. Mordreaux tried to kill him but failed, so Spock pressured McCoy into letting Kirk die.”
“Dammit, Braithewaite, he was dead! He was already dead!” McCoy’s voice broke and he turned away. In the following silence he managed to collect himself again. “I carried out his wishes. I followed the terms of his will. You can look at it if you want.”
“I intend to,” Hunter said. “Whatever you did or didn’t do afterwards, that doesn’t change the fact that Jim was assaulted.”
“You could have stopped them!” Ian cried. “Why didn’t you shoot Spock when you had the chance?”
Hunter glanced down at the pistol still in her hand, and slowly holstered it. “Do you think I’d kill a person on your say-so?”
Ian stood up and started toward the transporter console. “It still isn’t too late! We can still—” He halted just as McCoy was about to leap at him to prevent his revealing the time-changer’s auxiliary unit. Ian swayed, a lost, confused look on his face.
“What’s the matter?” Scott said. “Ian—”
The prosecutor collapsed, his body completely limp.
“The nerve-pinch—” Scott said.
“It isn’t that,” McCoy said, on his knees on the floor beside Braithewaite. He recognized the symptoms immediately, this second time in as many days. “It’s hypermorphic botulism! Help me with him, there isn’t time to wait for a stretcher!”
In the grip of the changer, Spock felt time pass. The sensation was very different from that of the
transporter alone, which was nothing more than a brief moment of dislocation at the end of the process. This felt as if he were falling through space, through hard vacuum, buffeted by every eddy of the solar wind, every current of each magnetic field, tossed by gravity waves, by light itself.
He materialized two meters above the ground, in Aleph Prime’s core park, and fell the rest of the way. He landed hard enough to knock the wind out of him, and he had to fight to keep from losing consciousness.
It could have been worse. He knew he could not calibrate the device with total precision—getting from a moving starship to the place where Aleph had been several days before was accomplishment enough—so he had chosen to appear in open space. That way he had a better chance of not reincorporating inside a wall. He would have preferred to appear in the emergency transmitter room, but felt the chances against succeeding were too large to challenge. He got up, brushing himself off, glancing around to discover whether or not he had been seen.
He had chosen darkness as well as open space: the park mimicked a diurnal cycle, and right now it imitated night. An artificial moon hung in the dull black starless sky.
Leaving the park behind, Spock entered one of the maze of corridors that formed Aleph Prime. He passed a public information terminal and requested the time: he had arrived, as he intended, approximately an hour before the emergency message to the Enterprise had been transmitted.
In the pre-dawn hours, even revelers on leave from the ships and transports and mining operations centered around Aleph had mostly gone to their beds, but the few beings Spock did pass paid him no attention. McCoy had been right about the uniform; it would have made him more conspicuous. He was well aware of the human penchant for comparing assignments, ships, commanders: had he been in uniform it would not have been long before some overfriendly inebriated human raised more questions than he could answer.
The small government sector was even quieter than the rest of the station. He knew where the emergency transmitter was, but it was inaccessible to anyone without the proper code. He walked slowly down a hallway lined with glass-walled offices, all dark and deserted: customs, security, Federation, Starfleet, the public defender’s office, the prosecutor’s office—
The lights flicked on; Ian Braithewaite left an inner chamber and entered the main room. Spock froze, but it was too late to get out of sight. Clutching briefcase, portable reader, and a handful of transcript flimsies, Braithewaite came into the hall. The lights faded out when he closed the door. He noticed Spock only when he nearly ran into him; he glanced down distractedly.
“Sorry,” he said. “Can I help you? Are you looking for somebody?”
Of course, Spock thought. He has not met me yet; he does not know who I am, and he has no suspicions about me. Tomorrow, when the Enterprise arrives, he will remember that he has seen me.
Does this mean I fail here, too?
“Where is the Vulcan consulate?” Spock asked.
Braithewaite pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “Oh. Right. You’re in the wrong sector, all the consulates are in a higher-class part of the station entirely.” He gave directions to an area in Aleph Prime’s north polar region. Spock thanked him, and Braithewaite left, reading one of the
transcripts as he walked. It was no wonder it took him time to recall where he had seen Spock before.
Once the prosecutor was out of sight, Spock tried the door to the emergency transmitter. It was, of course, locked, and the computer that guarded it demanded identifications. He was careful not to speak to it or palm the sensor; he did not want it to have legally admissible proof of his presence.
For a moment he thought about returning to the public information cubicle, accessing the computer, and breaking through its guards to open the transmitter room. He had deceived the Aleph Prime systems before, or, more accurately, he would do it in the future; he could do it now.
But that was exactly what Dr. Mordreaux would do. It was the simplest, most direct way of getting to the
