From the Captain’s Log, Star Date 4202.0:
I do not suppose anyone will ever piece together exactly what happened on all the battlefronts at the moment the Organians were let loose from their planet-wide prison. Some of the myriads of incidents, however, are reflected in reports which reached the Enterprise officially, or were intercepted, and were duly entered by Sulu as Captain pro tern. Even most of these, of course, are virtually incomprehensible, but in some cases we had previously encountered the Klingon officers who were involved and can guess how they might have behaved or what they were confronted with; and in others we can reconstruct approximately what happened with the aid of the computer. But the total picture must be left to the imagination, and the computer has none — perhaps fortunately for us.
If the universe were shrinking at the rate of a centimeter a day, and all our measuring rods were contracting with it at an equivalent rate, how could we even suspect that anything was happening?
Commander Koloth sat before the viewing screen of the Klingon battleship Destruction as silent and motionless as a stone image. In the navigation tank to his left, points of green light showed the deployment of the rest of his force, faithfully keeping to the formation — an inverted hemisphere — he had ordered when they had left the Organian system, but he never looked at them. He knew that the squadron was following his orders — indeed, the thought that they might not be never entered his head. In any event, all his attention was focused on the quarry, the tiny red spot in the center of the viewscreen, a spot which represented The mightiest machine ever conceived by Terran humanity — and soon to be nothing but a cloud of radioactive gas.
Days ago, he had determined that the Federation ship he was pursuing was the USS Enterprise, a discovery which had transformed his feeling for the chase from ordinary military pleasure to one of almost savage joy. He had encountered — and been defeated by — James Kirk and his command on two previous occasions: the affair of the Xixobrax Jewelworm, and the dispute over the colonization of Sherman’s Planet. The latter occasion had been the most serious defeat for the Empire, and therefore for Commander Koloth, for the Empire most correctly was not forgiving of failure; but what rankled with Koloth personally was not any diplomatic consideration, nor even the setback to his own career, but the fact that as a last gesture of seeming contempt, Kirk had somehow managed to inflict upon Koleth’s vessel an infestation of loathsome, incredibly fertile vermin called tribbles. It had taken the better part of a lunation to get them all cleaned out.
He repressed a shudder and touched a toggle on the board before him. “Korax.”
His first officer appeared as if by magic. “Lord Commander?”
“Any broadcasts from the enemy?”
“None, Lord Commander, or I would have informed you instantly. Nor have they changed course or relative velocity.”
“I can see that much. In extremity, Federation vessels drop a buoy containing the Captain’s Log, for later recovery. I see no chance that the Federation could ever pick it up in this situation. However, neither do I want it destroyed in battle. See to it that we detect the drop, and pick up that buoy.”
“We are at extreme sensor range for so small an object, Lord Commander.”
“All the more reason to exercise extreme vigilance. The buoy will emit some sort of recognition signal; scan for it.”
Korax saluted and vanished. Koloth continued watching the screen. Nothing could save the Enterprise this time; she was moving straight into a trap — she could in fact do nothing else — which would crack her like a nut. He hoped that he would be the man to make the actual kill, but it seemed probable that the admiral in charge of the much larger Empire force awaiting ahead would claim that privilege. Net only was that normal — rank has its privileges — but Koloth knew that Admiral Kor also cherished personal desires to rid the universe of Kirk and his ship, or at least had reason to.
Well, that was not of final importance. What counted was not who obliterated the Enterprise, but the fact of the obliteration itself. And that end would soon be accomplished…
For what Koloth did not know was that it had taken him a Klingon year simply to call Korax; that the entire galaxy had made its twenty-seventh rotation since its birth around its center during the course of their conversation; and that since then, it had gone around three and a third times more. For the Destruction and all aboard her, Time was slowing down on an asymptotic curve; and for Commander Koloth, the chase would never end.
…and Koloth would never knew it.
Koloth’s estimate for Kor had been mistaken; that was one reason why Koloth was still a Commander — and would remain one now, forever and ever, even after the whole of the universe had died — while Kor was now an Admiral. It had been Kor who had been involved with Kirk in the struggle on Organia which had resulted unpleasantly in the Organian Peace Treaty, but Kor harbored no resentment.
He did not regard that outcome as a defeat, but simply as a frustration. Federation and Empire forces had been positioned for the final struggle when the Organians struck them all powerless, on both sides, and imposed their terms; and Kirk, Kor judged, had been as offended at the intervention as Kor had been. These Federation officers tended to strike one as milksops until fighting was inevitable, but thereafter they were formidable antagonists. The penetration of the Enterprise this far into Empire territory spoke for itself: an act of great daring, and worthy of a warrior’s respect.
That it was also foolhardy did not bulk very large in Kor’s opinion; only cowards avoid battle when the odds are against them. Kor also knew that Federation starship captains had more freedom to act against orders, more discretionary powers than he would ever be allowed to exercise; though he was sure that this fact would contribute to the downfall of the Federation in the long run — and perhaps very soon now — it made him all the more appreciative of Kirk’s boldness, to say nothing of his ingenuity.
It would be interesting to know what Kirk had hoped to gain by such a foray. Insofar as Kor had been told, there was no such place as Organia any more, and the Organian system was no longer in a strategic quadrant; yet the Enterprise had ducked and dodged to get there with enormous doggedness, and in the process had quite failed to do any of the damage to real military targets within the Empire which Kor would have obliterated en route as a matter of course, especially on a suicide mission.
One could allow only a certain weight to ordinary curiosity — after all, Kirk could not have been sure that Organia was extinct; why, then, had he not gone in shooting? He could, for example, have knocked out Bosklave, which was well within his reach and unprepared for a starship attack. Surely he knew where it was, and that its destruction would have been a bad blow to the Empire. But instead, he had done nothing but wipe out the token Organian garrison — a rather neat piece of entrapment, that — and then go right back to the Organian system, thus setting himself up for the present cul-de-sac without charging the Empire any real price for it. Wasteful — and more than wasteful: mysterious.
But that was the trouble with democratic societies: they shared with the Empire all of the disadvantages of bureaucracies, and none of the advantages of hierarchy and centralization. Sooner or later, even a brave but prudent commander like Kirk, and a multimillion-stellor investment like the Enterprise, would be lost to some piece of bad judgment, or even to a whim. Fighting the Federation had been interesting, certainly. but Kor was just as glad that the long war — or, until recently, non-war — was about to be over. Fighting the Romulans, the next society on the Empire’s timetable of conquest, would be more fun; the Romulans were short on imagination, but they were as brave as eglons, and they had the military virtues — discipline, a hierarchy of respect, a readiness to place society above self, an ernest poetic willingness to live with tragedy, and above all the good sense to realize that good government consists of weighing heads, not just counting them.
Under the present circumstances, it would be possible to capture the Federation ship, which would be a valuable prize. The odds against her were now hopeless, and Kirk would not sacrifice the four hundred and thirty people in his crew — mere than a third of them female, a most irrational Federation custom — in a suicide stand; few Federation captains would. But Kor’s orders from the High Command were for complete destruction.
He did not even think of asking questions, but no amount of loyalty or discipline can prevent a humanoid creature from speculating. He could only conclude that Kirk and his officers had found some piece of information so important that the High Command was willing to throw away a Class One starship to make certain that it never reached the Federation, or even could. Whatever the information, Kor himself would no doubt never find out what it was…
“On the contrary,” a gentle voice said behind him. “I believe I can help you there.”
Even before turning in his command chair, Kor knew the voice was familiar, though it was not that of any of
