The Wrath of Khan Page 4

  "They're four hundred years old. You don't find many with the lenses still intact."

  "Uh, Bones … what are they?"

  "Spectacles."

  Jim drank more ale. Maybe if he caught up with McCoy he would be able to figure out what he was talking about.

  "For your eyes," McCoy said. "They're almost as good as Retinax Five—"

  "But I'm allergic to Retinax," Jim said petulantly. After the buildup the doctor gave about restoring the flexibility of his eyes with the drug, Jim had been rather put out when he turned out to be unable to tolerate it.

  "Exactly!" McCoy refilled both their glasses. "Happy birthday!"

  Jim discovered that the spectacles unfolded. A curve of gold wire connected two little half-rounds of glass; hinged hooks attached to each side.

  "No, look, here, like this." McCoy slid one hook behind each of Jim's ears. The wire curve rested on his nose, holding the bits of glass beneath his eyes. "They're spectacles. Oh, and I was only kidding about the lenses being antique. They're designed for your eyes."

  Jim remembered a picture in an old book he had. He lowered the spectacles on the bridge of his nose.

  "That's it," McCoy said. "Look at me, over the top. Now look down, through the lenses. You ought to be able to read comfortably with those."

  Jim got them in the right position, did as McCoy said, and blinked with surprise. He picked up Spock's book, opened it, and found the tiny print in perfect focus.

  "That's amazing! Bones, I don't know what to say. . . ."

  "Say thank you."

  "Thank you," Jim said obediently.

  "Now have another drink." McCoy drained the bottle into their mugs.

  They sat and drank. The Romulan ale continued to perform up to its usual standard. Jim felt a bit as he had the first time he ever experienced zero gee—queasy and confused. He could not think of anything to say, though the silence felt heavy and awkward. Several times McCoy seemed on the verge of speaking, and several times he stopped. Jim had the feeling that whatever the doctor was working up to, he would prefer not to hear. He scowled into his glass. Now he was getting paranoid. Knowing it was the result of the drink did nothing to relieve his distress.

  "Damn it, Jim," McCoy said suddenly. "What the hell's the matter? Everybody has birthdays. Why are we treating yours like a funeral?"

  "Is that why you came over here?" Jim snapped. "I really don't want a lecture."

  "Then what do you want? What are you doing, sitting here all alone on your birthday? And don't give me that crap about 'games for the young' again, either! That's a crock, and you know it. This has nothing to do with age. It has to do with you jockeying a computer console instead of flying your ship through the galaxy!"

  "Spare me your notions of poetry, please. I've got a job to do—"

  "Bull. You never should have given up the Enterprise after Voyager."

  Jim took another drink of Romulan ale, wishing the first fine glow had lasted longer. Now he remembered why he never developed a taste for this stuff. The high at the beginning was almost good enough to compensate for the depression at the end. Almost, but not quite.

  He chuckled sadly. "Yeah, I'd've made a great pirate, Bones."

  "That's bull, too. If you'd made a few waves, they wouldn't have had any choice but to reassign you."

  "There's hardly a flag officer in Starfleet who wouldn't rather be flying than pushing bytes from one data bank to another."

  "We're not talking about every flag officer in Starfleet. We're talking about James T. Kirk—"

  "—who has a certain amount of notoriety. It wouldn't be fair to trade on that—"

  "Jim, ethics are one thing, but you're crucifying yourself on yours!"

  "There are rules, and regulations—"

  "Which you are hiding behind."

  "Oh yeah? And what am I hiding from?"

  "From yourself—Admiral."

  Jim held back an angry reply. After a long pause, he said, "I have a feeling you're going to give me more advice whether I want it or not."

  "Jim, I don't know if I think this is more important because I'm your doctor, or because I'm your friend. Get your ship back. Get it back before you really do get old. Before you turn into part of your own collection."

  Jim swirled the dregs of his drink around in his glass, then looked up and met McCoy's gaze.

  The wind nearly knocked Chekov over as soon as he lost the protection of the transporter beam. Alpha Ceti VI was one of the nastiest, most inhospitable places he had ever been. Alpha Ceti VI was worse even than Siberia in the winter.

  Driven by the storm, the sand screamed against his pressure suit. Captain Terrell materialized beside him, looked around, and opened a channel to Reliant.

  "Terrell to Reliant."

  "Reliant. Beach here, Captain." The transmission wavered. "Pretty poor reception, sir."

  "It will do, Stoney. We're down. No evidence of life—or anything else."

  "I copy, sir."

  "Look, I don't want to listen to this static all afternoon. I'll call you, say, every half hour."

  "… Aye, sir."

  Kyle broke in. "Remember about staying in the open, Captain."

  "Don't fuss, Mr. Kyle. Terrell out." He shut down the transmission and turned on his tricorder.

  Chekov stretched out his arm; his hand almost disappeared in the heavy blowing sand. Even if whatever they were seeking were macroscopic, rather than microbial, they would never find it visually. He, too, began scanning for the signal that had brought them to the surface of this wretched world.

  "You getting anything, Pavel?"

  Chekov could barely make out the captain's words, not because the transmission was faulty but because the wind and the sand were so loud they drowned out his voice.

  "No, sir, nothing yet."

  "You're sure these are the right coordinates?"

  "Remember that garden spot you mentioned, Captain? Well, this is it." Chekov took a few steps forward. Sand ground and squealed in the joints of his suit. They could not afford to stay on the surface very long, for these conditions would degrade even an almost indestructible material. Chekov knew what would happen if his suit were torn or punctured. The oxides of sulfur that formed so much of the atmosphere would contaminate his air and dissolve in the moisture in his lungs. Chekov intended to die in some far more pleasant way than by breathing sulfuric and sulfurous acids: some far more pleasant way, and some far more distant time in the future.

  "I can't see a damned thing," Terrell said. He started off toward the slight rise the tricorder indicated. Chekov trudged after him. The wind tried to push him faster than he could comfortably walk in the treacherous sand.

  Sweat ran down the sides of his face; his nose itched. No one yet had invented a pressure suit in which one could both use one's hands and scratch one's nose.

  "I'm getting nothing, Captain," Chekov said. Nothing but one case of creeps. "Let's go."

  He got no reply. He looked up. At the top of the hillock, Captain Terrell stood staring before him, his form vague and blurry in the sand. He gestured quickly. Chekov struggled up the sand dune, trying to run, sliding on the slick, sharp grains. He reached Terrell's side and stopped, astonished.

  The sand dune formed a windbreak for the small hollow before them, a sort of storm's eye of clearer air. Chekov could see perhaps a hundred meters.

  In that hundred meters lay a half-buried group of ruined buildings.

  Suddenly he shivered.

  "Whatever it is," Clark Terrell said, "it isn't prebiotic." He stepped over the knife-sharp crest of the dune and slid down its concave leeward side.

  After a moment, reluctantly, Chekov followed. The unpleasant feeling of apprehension that had teased and disturbed him ever since they started for Alpha Ceti gripped him tighter, growing toward dread.

  Terrell passed the first structure. Chekov discarded any hope that they might have come upon some weird formation of violent wind and alien geology. What they had f
ound was the wreckage of a spaceship.

  Chekov would have been willing to bet that it was a human-made spaceship, too. Its lines were familiar. Alien craft always appeared … alien.

  "These look like cargo carriers," Terrell said.

  Chekov leaned over to put his faceplate against a porthole, trying to see inside the ruined ship.

  A child popped up, laughed silently, and disappeared.

  "Bozhe moi!" Chekov cried, starting violently. He fell backward into the sand.

  "Chekov! What the hell—?" Terrell stumbled toward him.

  "Face! I saw—face of child!"

  He pointed, but the porthole was empty.

  Terrell helped him to his feet. "Come on. This place is getting to you."

  "But I saw it," Chekov said.

  "Look, there's the airlock. Let's check it out."

  "Captain, I have bad feeling—I think we should go back to Reliant and look for different test site and pretend we never came here. Lenin himself said 'better part of valor is discretion.'"

  "Come along," Terrell said. His tone forbade argument. "And anyway, it was Shakespeare."

  "No, Captain, Lenin. Perhaps other fellow—" Chekov stopped and reminded himself of the way Standard was constructed. "Perhaps the other fellow stole it."

  Terrell laughed, but even that did not make Chekov feel any easier.

  Though sand half covered most of the cargo modules, testifying to some considerable time since the crash, the airlock operated smoothly. In this environment, that was possible only if the mechanism had been maintained.

  Chekov hung back. "Captain, I don't think we should go in there. Mr. Kyle's warning—" The electrical disturbances in the atmosphere that had disrupted communications and made scanning so difficult gave problems to the transporter as well; Kyle had said that even a covering of tree branches, or a roof (knowing what they expected to find, Chekov and Terrell had both laughed at that caution), could change beaming up from "just barely possible" to "out of the question."

  "Mr. Kyle has one flaw," Terrell said, "and that is that he invariably errs far on the side of caution. Are you coming?"

  "I'll go in, Captain," Chekov said reluctantly. "But you stay outside, pazhalsta, and keep in contact with ship."

  "Pavel, this is ridiculous. Calm down. I can tell you're upset—"

  On Reliant, Chekov occasionally got teased for losing his Standard, in which he was ordinarily fluent, when he was angry or very tired.

  Or—though his shipmates had no way of knowing this—when he was terrified.

  "Look," Terrell said. "I'll go in. If you want to, you can stay out here on guard."

  Chekov knew that he could not let Terrell enter the cargo ship alone. Unwillingly, he followed the captain into the airlock.

  The inner doors slid open. Chekov had to wait a moment, but after his eyes adjusted to the dimness he saw beds and tables, a book, an empty coffee cup: people lived here. They must have survived the crash of the cargo ship. But where were they?

  "We've got a breathable atmosphere," Terrell said. He unfastened his helmet. Chekov glanced at his tricorder. Terrell was right: the proportions of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide were all normal, and there was barely a trace of the noxious chemicals that made up the outside air. Even so, Chekov opened his helmet seal half expecting the burning pungency of acid vapors.

  But the place smelled like every dormitory Chekov had ever been in: of sweat and dirty socks.

  Outside, the wind scattered sand against the walls. Terrell went farther into the reconverted cargo hold. His footsteps echoed. There were no sounds of habitation; yet the place did not feel deserted.

  It felt evil.

  "What the hell is all this? Did they crash? And where are they?"

  Terrell stopped in the entrance to the next chamber, a kitchen.

  On the stove, a faint cloud of steam rose from a pot of stew.

  Chekov stared at it.

  "Captain …"

  Terrell was gone. Chekov hurried after him, entering a laboratory, where Terrell poked around among the equipment. He stopped near a large glass tank full of sand. Chekov went toward him, hoping to persuade him to return to the ship, or at least call in a well-armed security team.

  "Christ!"

  Terrell leaped away from the tank.

  Chekov ripped his phaser from the suit's outer clip and crouched, waiting, ready, but there was nothing to fire at.

  "Captain—what—?"

  "There's something in that damned tank!" He approached it cautiously, his hand on his own phaser.

  The sand roiled like water. A long shape cut a stroke across the surface, and Chekov flinched back.

  "It's all right," Terrell said. "It's just some kind of animal or—"

  The quiet gurgle of a child, talking to itself, playing with sounds, cut him off as effectively as a shout or a scream.

  "I told you!" Chekov cried. "I told you I saw—"

  "Shh." Terrell started toward the sound, motioning Chekov to follow.

  Chekov obeyed, trying to calm himself. So what if there were a child? This was not a world where Chekov would wish to father and try to raise a baby, but obviously at least one couple among the survivors of the cargo ship crash had felt differently. Chekov's fear was reasonless, close to cowardice—

  He stepped through a crumpled and deformed passageway and peered into the next chamber.

  The crash had twisted the room around, leaving it tumbled on its side, one wall now the floor, the floor and the ceiling now walls. The change made the proportions odd and disconcerting; worse, the floor was not quite flat, the walls not quite straight.

  All alone, in the middle of the room, sitting on the floor—the wall—the baby reached out to them and gurgled and giggled with joy. Terrell climbed down from the sideways entrance and approached the child tentatively.

  "Well, kid, hi, didn't your folks even leave a babysitter?"

  Chekov looked around the room. The wall that the ceiling had turned into displayed a collection of sharp, shining swords; Chekov recognized only the wavy-bladed kris. He recognized few of the titles of the books on a shelf nearby: King Lear? That sounded like imperialist propaganda to him. Bible? Twentieth-century mythology, if he recalled correctly.

  And then he saw, hanging from the floor-wall, the ship's insignia, and the reason for his terror came at him in a crushing blow.

  Botany Bay.

  "Bozhemoi," Chekov whispered, "Botany Bay, no, it can't be. . . ."

  Terrell chucked the baby gently under the chin with his forefinger. "What'd you say, Pavel?"

  Chekov lunged forward, grabbed Terrell by the shoulder, and dragged him toward the passageway.

  "Wait a minute! What's the matter with you?"

  "We've got to get out of here! Now! Captain, please trust me, hurry!"

  He forcibly pushed the bigger man up and through the hatch and climbed after him. Angry now, Terrell tried to turn back.

  "But the child—"

  "I can't explain now!" Chekov cried. "No time! Hurry!" He pushed the captain down the battered companionway, which was too narrow to allow Terrell to put up much struggle. Chekov fumbled with his helmet, got it fastened, and turned on the suit's communicator.

  "Chekov to Reliant, come in Reliant. Mayday, mayday—"

  Static answered his pleas.

  By the time they reached the laboratory, Terrell had caught his urgency or decided to humor him now and bust him back to ensign later—Chekov did not care which. Terrell put on his helmet and fastened it as they reached the kitchen and ran into the connecting hall. The dormitory was still deserted. Chekov began to hope they might get outside and contact the ship in time. They plunged into the airlock. Chekov continued to call Reliant, hoping to get through, determined to reach it the instant he and Terrell left the building.

  The door opened. Chekov bolted forward.

  He stopped.

  They were surrounded by suited figures, each one armed, and every weapon pointed st
raight at them.

  "Beam us up!" Chekov cried into his transmitter.

  As he grabbed at his phaser, one of the suited figures lunged forward, disarmed him, and knocked him back into the airlock.

  High above, in Reliant, Mr. Kyle tried again to raise Terrell and Chekov. They had only been out of touch for a little while, true, but the conditions were so terrible on the surface of Alpha Ceti VI that he would have preferred continuous contact.

  "Try again," Beach said unnecessarily.

  "Reliant to Captain Terrell, Kyle here. Do you copy, Captain Terrell? Come in, Captain, please respond. . . ."

  He got no reply.

  Beach let out his breath in an irritated snort.

  "Let's give them a little more time."

  Kyle knew as well as Beach did how much Clark Terrell hated to be second-guessed; nevertheless, he was about to protest when a sudden squawk came through his headphone and echoed on the speakers. He flinched.

  "What was that?" Beach said. "Did you hear it?"

  "I heard it." He channeled the transmission through the computer, enhancing and filtering it. "Stoney, I want to put more power to the sensors."

  "You already overrode the alarm—much more and you'll blow out the circuits completely."

  "I think they're in trouble."

  The transmission returned from enhancement.

  "Eeeeebeeeesssss …" squealed out of the speaker. Kyle slapped his console and forced the signal through the program again.

  "Beeeeeeussss …"

  And again.

  Though flattened and distorted, it was Chekov's voice.

  "Beam us …"

  Kyle looked up at Beach.

  "Beam us …"

  "Okay—more power," Beach said. "Get a lock on them!"

  "Beam us …"

  "Beam us …"

  "Beam us …"

  Chapter 3

  When Captain Terrell tried to explain that he and Chekov had been looking for survivors, that they were, in effect, a rescue party, one of the survivors expressed gratitude by backhanding him with the full weight of body and arm and massive suit glove. Terrell sagged.