She was almost within reach.
“You know you want me,” Teilani whispered.
She was right, Kirk knew. But what he wanted, and what he had to do, were not the same.
Kirk reached into his robe for his combadge. He felt as if he were moving through heavy water.
Teilani’s arms stretched out for him, elongating, slithering, becoming tentacles again.
“Accept,” she pleaded. “Embrace….”
Kirk’s heart ached for his lost wife and he knew how easy, how blissful, it would be to fall into her embrace once more, no matter how false the sweet illusion.
“Kirk to Belle Reve,” Kirk said, stepping back from paradise. The hoarseness of his voice unnerved him. He couldn’t leave Vulcan. He couldn’t abandon his son. Teilani’s son.
“Scott here, Captain….”
The tendrils were almost touching him.
“Now, Scotty,” Kirk gasped. “Now!”
“James, no! Don’t leave me!” Teilani cried.
She rose up like a giant cobra, expanding to swallow him as the wind pushed him toward her.
But the glow of the searchlight was already merged with the shifting light of the transporter beam.
An agonizing moment-lifetime– later, Kirk bolted from the transporter pad on the Belle Reve, still moving as if to fend off the suffocating tendrils that had sought to claim him.
He halted, breathing hard, squinting in the brightness of the transporter room. The harsh light was almost painful after the dark Vulcan alley.
He hit his combadge again. “Scotty-full shields! Get us out of here now!”
The engineer’s response was exactly what Kirk had come to depend on.
At once he heard the thrum of the matter-antimatter reactor power up as the vessel’s shields went from standby navigational mode to battle strength.
By the time he reached the corridor, he could feel the characteristic lurch of the artificial gravity that indicated his ship had gone to warp. By the time he reached the ladder that ran up to the bridge, he felt the shudder and heard the surge of the shields as the Belle Reve was struck by enemy fire.
Twice on his climb to the bridge, Kirk almost lost his grip as the ship’s violent maneuvers strained the inertial dampers and threw him side to side. He counted three more hits, but the shields were holding. He felt certain that given the size of the Belle Reve and her apparent condition, his pursuers were more than likely surprised by his ship’s unexpected defenses.
On the bridge at last, Kirk jumped from the ladder and made straight for the navigation console, where Scott piloted the ship.
On the center screen, Kirk saw stars streak past at warp. On the left-hand screen, he saw three Vulcan cruisers in pursuit. On the right, a readout of the Belle Reve’s key systems showed all in the green.
One of the cruisers flashed with a pulse of green light.
“Torpedo closing,” Scott said calmly. “Doctors, if ye wouldn’t mind…”
Kirk looked over at the tactical consoles. The Emergency Medical Hologram expertly operated the weapons controls. Beside him, a surly Doctor McCoy watched over the shield settings.
“Deflecting,” the hologram said brightly, as if he was thoroughly enjoying his duties.
The left screen suddenly flared with golden light, though Kirk noted no other effect on the ship.
“Shields unchanged at ninety-seven percent,” McCoy reported.
Scott gave Kirk a smug smile. “They cannae keep up with us. Another five minutes and we’ll be out of range.”
Kirk patted his engineer’s shoulder. “Good work, Scotty.”
“Is there any particular heading ye’d like us to take once we’ve left them in our wake?”
Kirk touched the message player secure in a pocket in his cooling robe.
If there was no one in authority he could trust on Vulcan, then at least he could go to someone he could understand. Someone who could bend the rules as he did. Someone with the assets to extract every last bit of data from the Monitor transmission.
And someone no one would ever expect him to turn to for help, so that no trap could be set.
There was only one person who met that description.
Kirk gave his orders.
18
U.S.S. ENTERPRISE, SECTOR 001
STARDATE 58567.2
Sleeping was the worst.
Each night, Picard and Beverly Crusher were locked into the captain’s cabin under visual sensor surveillance as three guards stood watch in the corridor. Each officer assigned to this mission was required to follow the same routine.
The enlisted crew slept on bunks in the hangar bay, using the emergency supplies the Enterprise carried for humanitarian aid and mass evacuations. There could be no privacy, not even in the heads and showers.
Despite the forced company everyone on board had to endure, Picard was not the only one to note how empty his ship seemed to be.
Worf, La Forge, Beverly-they all had commented on the eerie sense of abandonment they felt.
Even with the need for trios of security guards, the crew complement was less than half its normal number. There were no non-Starfleet family members on board. The science departments had been closed and all staff reassigned to Mercury. In engineering, La Forge had kept only enough specialists for three skeleton shifts. With the warp core shut down, there was no need for warp engineers.
That, more than anything else, Picard decided, was what made his ship feel so lifeless: the constant, almost subliminal vibration of the warp engines was gone, as if the Enterprise had lost her pulse, her heart.
She was no longer a starship, just another spacecraft.
Lying quietly in the darkness of his quarters, Picard felt as if a part of himself had withered along with his ship, and he feared that soon the Federation would follow in this slow descent into helplessness. Not even the comforting presence of Beverly beside him could dispel his apprehension and his growing sense of vulnerability.
At 0300 ship’s time, it was those dark thoughts and not Picard’s sleep that was disturbed when Worf called him from the bridge.
Picard felt Beverly stir, turned his head to look at the com screen by his bunk, no need to open his eyes. “Go ahead, Mister Worf. I’m awake.”
“Captain, there is a ship approaching our coordinates at high warp. It’s on course for Earth. It will reach our position in thirty-three minutes.”
Picard sat up, eyes now open, staring at the image of his first officer on the bridge. Beverly got out of bed, used to the hours of a ship’s captain, little different from those of a chief medical officer.
After three days on picket duty in the Oort Cloud surrounding Earth’s solar system, the Enterprise hadn’t encountered a single warp vessel. The other ships enforcing the embargo of Sector 001 had reported only a handful of vessels requesting entry. All available information indicated the inexplicable warp-core malfunctions had continued to propagate as Doctor Muirhead had predicted. Older and less powerful cores were being affected now, stranding even more ships in interstellar space, a new diaspora.
“Is it a Starfleet vessel?” Picard asked.
“Technically, yes.”
” ‘Technically’?”
“It is a Q-ship. A Starfleet vessel with civilian registry. The Belle Reve.”
Picard knew the name well.
