Star Trek: The Original Series: The Shocks of Adversity (18 page)

“Of course I would want to go after their attackers,” Kirk said, “humans or not.”
He’d done so time and again in the past, following attacks by the Romulans on the
Neutral Zone listening stations, and by the Gorn on Cestus III. In such instances,
if one of his officers had cautioned restraint, he had refused to let that stand in
the way of doing what he felt was necessary.

“Well, then?” Laspas asked expectantly.

“
If
I were to agree to this,” Kirk said slowly, “I would be making a tremendous show
of faith in you, Laspas. The
Enterprise
is still recovering from our first encounter with the Taarpi . . .”

“But our combined abilities will give us a marked advantage over the vessel we’re
going after,” Laspas told him.

Kirk waved that claim away, and stared directly into the Goeg’s eyes, mustering all
the persuasive power he could. “Understand this: I have pledged my life to keep my
ship and my crew safe. If I’m to put the safety of my ship and the lives of my crew
in your hands, then I need you to make that very same pledge.”

“You have it, James,” Laspas said, lifting his muzzle high, showing his exposed throat
to Kirk as he said, “On my own life, I swear it.”

Kirk drew a deep sigh, and then slowly nodded. “All right then,” he said. “Let’s go
after them.”

*   *   *

“
Code 2-5, five minutes,”
said the voice over the
Enterprise
bridge speakers.

From the Domain ship, Commander Laspas replied,
“Standby code 2-2.”

“We’re approaching the Nalaing system,” Uhura interpreted for the benefit of Kirk
and the rest of the bridge crew, “and preparing to drop out of warp.”

Kirk nodded in silent acknowledgment as he paced a circle around the upper level of
the bridge. His nerves were on a razor’s edge, as they always were whenever heading
into a potentially dangerous situation. When he was a cadet, he’d
reprogrammed the
Kobayashi Maru
simulation test, doing away with some of the variables and allowing him to actually
beat the test, a feat never achieved before. In the years since, he’d come to realize
that he’d done himself a disservice. Out here, a captain didn’t have the luxury of
setting his own conditions, or picking and choosing the variables of any situation.
And now, there were even fewer variables he had any power to control.

“Execute code 2-2,”
Laspas ordered his crew, and a moment later, Kirk felt the change in the vibration
of the deck plates under his feet. On the main screen, the streaks of light shrank
back to small points, the brightest of which was the star the Goeg Domain designated
Star 12-982-09, and called Nalaing-Qo by the natives of the second planet. That planet,
called Nalaing, was a major center of interstellar commerce, and also long suspected
to be a safe haven for the Taarpi.

Kirk halted his circuit of the bridge beside Spock at the science station. “Any sign
of the Taarpi ship on scans?” he asked.

“Negative,” Spock answered. “The warp trail does indeed terminate here, but given
the significant volume of sublight starship traffic in this system, it is impossible
to determine where the vessel we have been pursuing may have gone from here.”

“Captain,” Sulu interjected, “the
814
is taking us on a heading toward Nalaing, half impulse speed.”

Kirk stepped down into the command well and hit the transmit key on his armrest. “Kirk
to Laspas. Have you identified the attacker?”

“Not yet,”
the Domain commander answered.
“We need to get into closer range.”

“Do we mean to engage the enemy in such close proximity to planetary orbit?” Kirk
asked as he took a step forward and looked at the readouts on the astrogation panel.
There were a number of ships in orbit, almost all of them civilian judging from their
transponder signals, and many appeared to match the general profile of the ship they’d
been pursuing.

“Don’t worry, Captain Kirk,”
Laspas said, making a point of using his proper title during this stage of their
operation.
“Once we manage to identify the Taarpi ship, they’ll run. They can be vicious when
preying on weaker vessels, but at heart they’re cowards. We only need to flush them
out, and then we’ll have them.”

Spock looked up from his viewer then and said, “It appears the commander’s prediction
has come true. A ship matching our target’s profile has made an abrupt break from
planetary orbit.”

“On-screen,” Kirk ordered.

The image of the planet on the screen switched from that of a distant bright disk
to a Class-M world colored in blues and whites, half shrouded in the darkness of night.
Computer augmentation highlighted a single small speck of light in motion across the
black semicircle.

“Captain,” Chekov said, first studying his console and then turning to look at Kirk
over his shoulder. “They are not running, sir.”

“Confirmed,” Spock reported. “They appear to be on an intercept course.”

“Yellow Alert,” Kirk called, at the same time Laspas, over the speakers, declared
what he assumed to be the equivalent status code. Kirk opened the channel to the other
ship again. “Kirk to Laspas. This is not quite what you planned, is it?”

Laspas answered with a sharp,
“Code 1-2,
Enterprise
! Code 1-2!”

Uhura was about to offer a translation, but that was one of the directives Kirk had
made sure he had memorized. “Red Alert!” Kirk ordered. “All hands to battle stations.
Screens up, extended configuration.”

Chekov punched two rows of buttons on his console. “Screens up, sir. Extended configuration
stable.” In their current joined configuration, the
814
’s dorsal shield emitters were being obstructed by the
Enterprise
, and likewise, the majority of the emitters on the engineering section’s ventral
hull were inoperative. The solution had been for the Starfleet ship, possessing the
superior shield technology, to boost the power to the lateral defenses, and use those
to shore up the Domain ship’s defenses.

“Shield strength along the overlap?” Kirk asked,
referring to the zone where the two ships’ defenses would be their weakest.

From the engineering station, Ensign Strassman reported, “Eighty-one percent.” Kirk
clenched and unclenched his jaw. They would just have to hope that would be enough.

“Enemy vessel at five thousand kilometers and closing,” Chekov reported. On the viewscreen,
the gray-green alien vessel was visibly drawing closer. It was of similar design to
the
814
, except smaller and with significantly less power. That didn’t make it any less of
a threat, though, as the remains of the transport had attested.

Uhura, holding her audio receiver in place, announced, “The
814
is firing, sir.” At the same time on the screen, Kirk witnessed an energy beam lancing
out from below the
Enterprise
and streaking past the Taarpi vessel by what looked like mere meters. The Taarpi
vessel then returned fire and, as the
Enterprise
offered a far larger profile, their beam scored a direct strike.

The lights dimmed marginally, but otherwise, the shields absorbed the brunt of the
assault. “Shields are holding,” Strassman called out.

A second later, the deck pitched. “What the hell was that?” Kirk demanded, gripping
the arms of his chair.

It was Uhura who answered, “Commander Laspas has ordered the
814
to take evasive maneuvers,”
just as the deck then tipped in the opposite direction.

“Careful . . .” Kirk said in a low voice, addressing a crew who could not hear him,
and who owed him no allegiance.

*   *   *

“Careful!” Scotty cried out as the
Enterprise
lurched again harder, throwing him against one of the orange webbed safety barriers
at the edge of the main engineering section. “Ye can’t jolt a ship of this size around
like a beach ball!”

“Your ‘wee bairns’ can handle a little rocking,”
Chief N’Mi snapped back at him over their open comm channel.
“More phaser hits like that last one, neither vessel can.”

Scotty bit back his reply. The Domain engineer had made it clear that they had very
different attitudes toward their respective ships, and that she considered him overly
attached to and protective of his ship. Unfamiliar as he was with the Liruq and the
idiosyncrasies of their language, he couldn’t be certain if her jibe had been meant
as humorous or if it was genuine mockery. Scotty had opted to assume it was the former,
though there was nothing friendly in the woman’s tone now. Not that he could blame
her—both their ships were endangered, and both were being hampered by the other in
their efforts to protect themselves.

The deck tilted again, and Scotty gripped the console before him as the lights and
control panels flickered. “Blast it! These relays are still too sluggish!” Scotty
hit a switch on his console companel. “Ogden, Farrell, we need that control circuit
back on line now!”

“We’ve almost—”

“Not ‘almost’—now!” Scotty cut Crewman Ogden off, then closed the channel as he noticed
another alert signal blinking on his situation board. “Bloody hell. N’Mi, are you
seeing this internal pressure spike in the starboard warp plasma umbilical?”

“Code 8-55 confirmed, Scott,”
she said, her tone reflecting Scott’s concern.
“Attempting to counteract. Stand by for code 8-40.”

Emergency warp core shutdown,
Scott translated silently as he started running for the main reactor control room.
“Acknowledged,” he shouted, and fought hard not to unleash any more caustic remarks.
They’d known there would be a high risk, if forced into an armed confrontation, of
overstressing the connections between the two ships. If the umbilical was compromised
too soon after dropping out of warp, before the warp drive had completely cycled down,
the results would be disastrous for both vessels. But a complete shutdown now would
mean a long restart procedure once the crisis had passed, and until then, both of
their ships
would be in the same situation the
Enterprise
had started in: stuck in a hostile star system without their FTL drives.

Except not really—the
814
could simply cut the
Enterprise
free, engage their own warp engine, and be on their merry way alone.

Scott wasn’t sure that was such a terrible possibility.

The engineer turned a corner, his boots almost slipping out from under him, and reached
the reactor control room. Once inside, he immediately slapped his hand against the
panel on the bulkhead, dropping the heavy containment hatch. A core shutdown wasn’t
a normally a dangerous procedure, but this wasn’t a normal circumstance. If anything
went wrong, the rest of the ship needed to be protected. As the hatch rumbled into
place and sealed Scotty inside alone, he hoped to heaven nothing went wrong.

Turning away from the hatch, he went to the small chamber’s situation panel and was
both surprised and relieved to see that the plasma pressure reading was already dropping
back toward normal. He reopened the channel to the Domain engine room and said, “Lass,
you did it.”

“Affirmative,”
N’Mi answered, her tone colored in relief. Then the deck shook again under Scotty’s
feet.
“But the danger is not yet over.”

“Aye,” Scott said as he unsealed and reopened the hatch to return to main engineering.
To himself,
he wondered where the most serious danger to the
Enterprise
was coming from.

*   *   *

“Dammit!” Sulu swore as the Taarpi ship dodged another of his phaser shots.

“Steady, Lieutenant,” Kirk said. “Don’t let them rattle you.” The ship shook again
as the
814
initiated another maneuver. Strassman at engineering had managed to fine-tune the
inertial dampers so as to minimize the worst effects of the jarring directional shifts,
though not to cancel them out entirely.

“They’re coming around for another pass,” Chekov said, just as the ship shook again,
this time under the enemy’s weapons fire. As the
Enterprise
presented a larger target than the
814
, they had taken the brunt of the assault.

“I see them,” Sulu said, sighting the Taarpi vessel through the extended stereoscopic
viewer at his console. He triggered the phasers again, and on the main viewer, beams
of blue phaser energy lanced out and struck home.

“Direct hit, amidships,” Chekov reported.

“Weapons and engines only, Mister Sulu,” Kirk reminded him of the orders he had given
at the outset of this engagement. The plan he and Laspas had agreed upon was to disable
the Taarpi shields and to use the
Enterprise
’s transporters to bring the Taarpi aboard for questioning, and eventually for trial.

“I’m trying, sir,” Sulu said, frustrated. “But with our targeting systems disassociated
from helm control, I’m being forced to compensate manually.”

Kirk keyed open the channel to the
814
as the ship was shaken by another blast. “Kirk to Laspas. We need you to transfer
helm control to us.”

There was a slight hesitation from the Goeg commander before he responded.
“Clarify.”

The captain was caught short by that. Was he really being asked to explain a request
to have control of his own ship given back to him? “Our weapons targeting is being
hampered by the segregation of the two systems. We have the wider range of fire; it
makes more sense for control to be given back to my bridge.”

There was another wait for a response from the Domain vessel, and Kirk was about to
ask Uhura if the link had been severed when Laspas finally said,
“Tie in all control stations with corresponding
Enterprise
bridge stations.”