for our hits must have disabled two of them; only four are following on warp drive. With another enemy I would expect someone to stay behind as a reserve, out of ordinary tactical common sense, but no Klingon would avoid a fight unless physically pinned down in one way or another.
Most battles in space are either over almost the instant they begin — as had evidently been the case with the two surprised Klingon vessels — or became very protracted affairs, because of the immense distances involved. (The first sentence of Starfleet Academy’s Fundamentals of Naval Engagement reads: “The chief obstacle facing a Starship Captain who wishes to join battle is that battle is almost impossible to join.”)
This one showed every sign of going on forever. None of the four surviving Klingon ships was as large as their quarry, whose phasers outranged theirs sufficiently to keep them at a respectful distance, while her deflectors easily swept aside the occasional Klingon torpedo. In short, a standoff.
Kirk knew from experience, however, that the standoff could not be a stalemate; the blasts of code being emitted steadily on subspace radio by the small Klingon vessels — three of them seemed to be corvettes, the other was perhaps as large as a cruiser — were obviously urgent calls for more high-powered help. Nor was there any further reason for the Enterprise to preserve radio silence.
“Inform Starfleet Command of our whereabouts,” he told Lieutenant Uhura. “Include a description of the Organian situation and a hologram of your best plate of the body in Organia’s orbit. Tell them we’re under attack and ask for orders. Second, as a separate message, send them Spock Two’s conclusions on current Klingon strategy. Third, route a flash Urgent straight through to the Scientific Advisory Board describing our superfluity of Spocks and exactly how it happened — with hard, full particulars from Mr. Scott — and ask them for analysis and advice…- By the way, how old is our most recent code?”
“Just a year old, Captain.”
“The Klingons will have broken that six ways from Sunday by now. Well, you’ll have to use it — but put the clear in Swahili and ask to get the answers the same way. That ought to give the Klingons pause.”
“It will indeed,” Uhura said, grinning. “But even modem Swahili lacks some of Scotty’s technical terms, Captain. There are Indo-European borrowings in every Earthly language — and the Klingons may be able to infer the rest of the message using them as contexts.”
“Blast and damn. Leaving the technicalities out will throw us right back on our own resources, and I can’t say we’ve done too well with those.”
“There’s an alternative, Captain, though it’s risky; we can translate the clear into Eurish.”
“What’s that? I never heard of it.”
“It’s the synthetic language James Joyce invented for his last novel, over two hundred years ago. It contains forty or fifty other languages, including slang in all of them. Nobody but an Earthman could possibly make sense of it, and there are only a few hundred of them who are fluent in it. There’s the risk; it may take Starfleet Command some time to run down an expert in it — if they even recognize it for what it is.”
Being a communications officer, Kirk realized anew, involved a good many fields of knowledge besides subspace radio. “Can it handle scientific terms?”
“Indeed it can. You know the elementary particle called the quark; well, that’s a Eurish word. Joyce himself predicted nuclear fission in the novel I mentioned. I can’t quote it precisely, but roughly it goes, ‘The abniliilisation of the etym expolodotonates through Parsuralia with an ivanmorinthorrorumble fragoromboassity amidwhiches general uttermosts confussion are perceivable moletons skaping with mulicules.’ There’s more, but I can’t recall it — it has been a long time since I last read the book.”
“That’s more than enough,” Kirk said hastily. “Go ahead — just as long as you’re sure you can read the answer.”
“Nobody’s ever dead sure of what Eurish means,” Uhura said. “But I can probably read more of it than the Klingons could. To them, it’ll be pure gibberish.”
And they won’t be alone, Kirk thought. Nevertheless, he could forget about it for the time being. That still left the problem of the Klingon ships on the tail of the Enterprise.
Sowing a mine field in the ship’s wake would be useless; the enemy craft doubtless had deflectors, and in any event the mines, being too small to carry their own warp generators, would simply fall out into normal space and become a hazard to peacetime navigation. But wait a minute…
“Mr. Spock, check me on something. When we put out a deflector beam when we’re on warp drive, the warp field flows along the beam to the limit of the surface area of the field. Then, theoretically, the field fails and we’re back in normal space. All right so far?”
“Yes, Captain, a simple inverse-square-law effect.”
“And contrariwise,” Kirk said, “using a tractor beam on warp drive pulls the field in around the beam, which gives us a little extra velocity but dangerously biases our heading.” Spock Two nodded. “All right, I think we’ve got the basis for a little experiment. I want to plant a mine right under the bow of that cruiser, using a deflector and a tractor beam in tandem, with a little more power on the deflector. At the same time, I want our velocity run up so that our warp field will fail just as the mine explodes. Fill in the parameters, including the cruiser’s pseudo distance and relative velocity, and see if it’s feasible.”
Spock Two turned to the computer and worked silently for a few moments. Then he said, “Yes, Captain, mathematically it is not a complex operation. But the library has no record of any Starship ever surviving the puncturing of its warp field by a deflector while under drive.”
“And when nearly balanced by a tractor?”
“No pertinent data. At best, I would estimate, the strain on the Enterprise would be severe.”
Yes, Kirk thought, and just maybe you don’t much want that Klingon cruiser knocked out, either.
“We’ll try it anyhow. Mr. Sulu, arm a mine and program the operation. Also — the instant we are back in normal space, give us maximum acceleration along our present heading on reaction drive.”
“That,” Spock Two said in the original Spock’s most neutral voice, “involves a high probability of shearing the command section free of the engineering section.”
“Why? We’ve done it before.”
“Because of the compounding of the shock incident upon the puncturing of the warp field, Captain.”
“We’ll take that chance too. In case it has escaped your attention, we happen to be in the middle of a battle. Lieutenant, warn ship’s personnel to beware shock. Stand to, all, and execute.”
Spock Two offered no further obstructions. Silently, Uhura set up on the main viewing screen a panorama of the sector in which the trap — if it worked — was to be sprung. The Klingon cruiser would have looked like a distorted mass of tubes and bulbs even close on, under the strange conditions of subspace; at its present distance, it was little more than a wobbly shadow.
Then the dense, irregular mass, made fuzzy with interference fringes, which was the best view they could hope to get of the mine, pushed its way onto the screen, held at the tip of two feathers of pale light, their pinnae pointing in opposite directions, which were the paired deflector and tractor beams (which in normal space would have been invisible). As the mine reached the inside surface of the warp field, that too became faintly visible, and in a moment was bulging toward the Klingon vessel. The impression it gave, of a monstrous balloon about to have a blowout, was alarming.
“Mr. Sulu, can the Klingon see what’s going on there from the outside, or otherwise sense it?”
“I don’t know, Captain. I wish I couldn’t.”
“Lieutenant Uhura?”
“It’s quite possible, Captain, considering how excited the warp field is becoming. But perhaps they won’t know how to interpret it. Like the library, I’ve never heard of this having been tried before, and maybe the Klingons haven’t either. But I’m only guessing.”
The bulge in the warp field grew, gradually becoming a blunt pseudopod groping into subspace. From the Enterprise it was like staring down a dim tunnel, with the twin beams as its axis. From the depths of his memory there came to Kirk a biology-class vision of the long glass spike of a radiolarian, a microscopic marine animal, with protoplasm streaming along it, mindless and voracious.
“Captain,” the intercom squawked. “I’ve got trouble down here already. My engines are croonin’ like kine with the indigestion.”
“Ride with it, Mr. Scott, there’s worse to come.”
The blunt projection became a finger, at the tip of which the mine, looking as harmless as a laburnum seed, dwindled into the false night of subspace. Very faintly, the hull of the Enterprise began to groan. It was the first
