time in years that Kirk had heard his ship betray any signs of structural strain serious enough to be audible.
“Thirty seconds to breakout,” Spock Two said.
“The Klingon’s peeling off!” Uhura cried. “He’s detected something he doesn’t like, that’s for sure. And he’s under full drive. If…”
Was the mine close enough? Never mind, it would never be any closer.
“Fire, Mr. Sulu,” Kirk said.
An immense ball of flame blossomed on the view screen — and then vanished as the Enterprise dropped into normal space. One second later, deprived of the ship’s warp field, the fireball, too, was back again.
“Got him!” Sulu crowed.
The fireball swelled intolerably as the matter and anti-matter in the doomed Klingon’s warp-drive pods fused and added their violence to the raging hydrogen explosion of the mine. The viewing screen dimmed the light hurriedly, but finally could accomodate it no longer, and blacked out entirely.
At the same time, the Enterprise rang with the blowtorch howling of the reaction engines coming up to full thrust, and a colossal lurch threw them all to the deck. The light flickered.
“Posts!” Kirk shouted, scrambling back to his command chair. “All department heads, report!”
The ship was screaming so fearfully in all its members that he could not have heard the answers even had his staff been able to hear the order. But a sweeping glance over the boards told him the bare-knuckle essentials; the rest could wait though not for long.
The Enterprise had held together — just barely. The three surviving Klingon corvettes had taken several seconds to react to the destruction of their command cruiser and the disappearance of their quarry. They had dropped out of warp drive now, but in those few seconds had overshot their target by nearly a million miles, and the long, separating arcs they were executing now to retrace their steps were eloquent of caution and bafflement — and, if Kirk knew his Klingons, of mind-clouding fury.
The Enterprise, so fleet on warp drive, was something of a pig under reaction thrust, but she was wallowing forward bravely, and gaining legs with every stride. Within only a few minutes she would be plowing through the very midst of her erstwhile harriers.
“Klingons launching missiles, Captain,” Uhura reported.
Pure, random desperation. “Disregard. Mr. Sulu, engage the enemy and fire at will. When you’re through with them, I don’t want one single atom left sticking to another.”
“Yes, sir,” Sulu said, a wolfish grin on his normally cheerful face. This was the opportunity of a lifetime for a Starship gunnery officer, and he was obviously enjoying it thoroughly.
As the Enterprise picked up speed, she responded better to her helm; in that respect she did not differ much from a nineteenth-century clipper ship on the high seas, though the comparison failed utterly on warp drive. And she had a tremendous amount of energy to expand — indeed, even to waste — through her reaction engines. The Klingons apparently were stunned to see her bearing down on them, but their stupor didn’t matter now. The corvettes could not have reformed in time to meet her, even had their commanders understood the situation instantly.
Sulu’s hands danced over the studs before him. A stabbing barrage of phaser fire shot out from the Enterprise. The deflector screens of the corvettes fought back with coruscating brilliance; the viewing screen, which had crept cautiously back into operation after the death of the cruiser, dimmed hastily again.
Then there were no Klingon corvettes — only clouds of incandescent gas, through which the Enterprise sailed as majestically as an ancient Spanish galleon over a placid Caribbean bay.
“Very good, ladies and gentlemen,” Kirk said. “Assess damage and report to the First Officer. Mr. Sulu, relay course for Organia at Warp Three, to a position in opposition to the present calculated position of the planet. Lieutenant Uhura, open all lines to the staff — including Spock One. I want a conference, as of right now.”
“I’ll give you a report, Captain Kirk, and it’s a twenty-four carat dilly,” Leonard McCoy’s voice said out of the middle of the air. “I can now tell you how to determine which Spock is the ringer.”
Kirk shot a glance at Spock Two, but the incumbent First Officer showed no reaction whatsoever. Well, that was in character, as far as it went; Kirk had expected nothing else.
“Belay that,” Kirk told McCoy evenly. “Our present business is much more urgent, and I want both Spocks to hear it.”
“But, Jim — !” McCoy’s voice said, almost as if in shock. Then there was a sound of swallowing, and the surgeon started over again. “Captain, this matter in my opinion has the highest possible urgency.”
“Belay it. And attend, all.”
Chapter Eight — SPOCKS ON TRIAL
From the Captain’s Log, Star Date 4794.4:
Despite Spock Two’s alarming predictions, the damage to the ship from the maneuver of this morning appears to be minimal, consisting chiefly of a deflector generator failure and some even less important burnouts of scattered sensor units. All of this is easily reparable from ship’s stores, Mr. Scott reports. In the meantime, there appear to be no Klingon vessels in or near this arc of Organia’s orbit, and I mean to use the breather this affords us to bring several other matters to a head — and high time, too.
Those sensors that were still alive — a large majority — were at full extension and tied in to an automatic flight plan; the bridge staff were at their consoles; and lines were open to the engineering bridge, to the sick bay, to McCoy’s laboratory, and to the transporter room. Kirk looked at each of his physically present department chiefs in turn, and his expression was glacial.
“We have been acting first, and thinking afterward, entirely too much,” he said, “and I do not except myself. Nor am I blaming anyone, since we’ve been under Continuous pressure, both of emotion and of event. But it’s time for a casting up of accounts.
“First of all, I find that Klingon reception committee highly peculiar. There are two ways of regarding it, as far as I can see:
“One: that it was a trap that had been set for us. This implies advance knowledge of where we were going to be, and I think it’s safe to say that the Klingons couldn’t have come by such knowledge unless somebody aboard the Enterprise got it to them, somehow.
“Two: that the Klingon force was stationed in this area anyhow, and jumped us as a matter of course when we showed up. The main difficulty with that theory is that it requires another one, and I’m no fonder of ad hoc assumptions than Mr. Spock is. Why should the Klingons post five ships — a cruiser, three corvettes and a fifth ship of unknown size — so far from the main battle area? We already know that their forces are penetrating deeply, and with great daring, into Federation space. If those five ships were simply part of a reserve, why were they stationed here, a good long way away from any Klingon base big enough to supply them, and so far away from Federation territory that they couldn’t have been thrown into any battle fast enough to reinforce a Klingon fleet in trouble? That’s utterly uncharacteristic of them, and it doesn’t make sense any other way, either.”
There was dead silence. Kirk let his expression soften a little, and added, “Anyone who wishes to volunteer an opinion is at liberty to do so.”
“In that case, Captain, I have a third hypothesis to suggest,” said the voice of Spock One.
“With no price tag?”
“None, Captain. I ask for my price only on what I know to be the case. At present, what I have to offer is only a possible alternative to your theories. It is this:
“The Klingons may well have invested the Organian system because they regard it as a sensitive area. They may no more understand what has happened to the planet than we do; but they certainly know that should the Organians choose to come back from wherever they have gone, or whatever state or condition they may be in, the war would be over. And worse; since the Klingons started the war in defiance of the Organian Peace Treaty, their return would place the Klingons, as an old Earth expression has it, in the soup.”
“No possible or even imaginable Klingon naval force could prevent the Organians from taking action if they chose to do so,” Spock Two said, “and it is elementary games theory to assume that the Klingons know this.”
