STAR TREK: THE FLAMING ARROW
by
KATHY AND JERRY OLTION


THE FLAMING ARROW

BY KATHY AND JERRY OLTION

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This book is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places and
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 Chapter One

CAPTAiN KJRK was in his quarters when the Kauld ship attacked.  It was
late in the evening-past eleven-and he had been trying for the last
hour to put down the twenty-first-century potboiler he had picked up
for a little mindless entertainment before bedtime, but Ryan Hughes's
tale of piracy and romance in the early Lunar colonies had proven more
engaging than he'd expected.  He was three-quarters of the way into it
when the inter com whistled for his attention.

He pressed the reply button on the wall panel beside his bed.  "Kirk
here."

"Captain," Spock said.  "Sensors have picked up a Kauld warship
approaching the planet.  It is a single vessel traveling through normal
space under half impulse power.  It does not respond to our hails."

For a moment Kirk couldn't make sense of it.  Kauld ships on Luna?  In
the twenty-first century?  But then his own reality reasserted itself
and he remembered where he was.  This was the Belle Terre system, and
the Kauld had been harassing the Federation colonists ever since they
had arrived here, nearly a year ago.  " Go to yellow alert"' Kirk said.
"Move to intercept.  I , 11 be right there."

"Acknowledged."

Y.irk looked for a bookmark, but there was nothing within reach that
would work.  He fingered the pages real paper, printed especially for
the colony library then dog-eared page 248 and set the book on his bed.
He would probably hear no end of grief about that from the librarian,
but it was either that or lay the book facedown and risk breaking the
spine.  That would probably lose him his library card, one of the few
pleasures this colony world, far beyond the edge of civilization, had
to offer.

He was alone in the turbolift on the way to the bridge.  This time of
night, most of the crew were in their quarters or at their
graveyard-shift duty stations.  He wondered if the Kauld knew that, and
if they expected it to affect the Enterprise's ability to respond.  If
so, they would get a rude surprise.  The same people who worked the day
shift rotated through night duty as well; there wasn't an inexperienced
crew member on board.

And few of them would regret kicking some Kauld butt in the name of
defense.  It wasn't professional, it wasn't Starfleet, but there it
was.  These sapphire skinned bad-tempered, antagonistic aliens had been
a thorn in the Enterprise's side ever since the colony convoy had
entered the Sagittarian sector.  What had oginally been intended as a
simple escort mission while on her way into deeper space had instead
become an extended peacekeeping jo&-in part because of these alien
troublemakers.

The turbolift doors opened and Kirk stepped onto the bridge.  Nominally
at this hour, the lights would have been at half-intensity to simulate
a diurnal schedule, but during a yellow alert everything went back to
full operational status.  He noted that Sulu was at the helm and
Thomsen was at the navigation console.  Thomsen was less experienced
than Sulu, but she was a good navigator, and she had been gaining much
more experience since Chekov had left to join the Reliant.

Spock was seated in the captain's chair, but he vacated it as Kirk
stepped forward.

"Report," Kirk said.

Spock stepped through the gap in the railing around the captain's chair
and stood by his science station.  "No change.  The Kauld ship is
continuing on course toward the planet and refuses to respond to our
warnings."  He studied one of his displays for a moment, then added,
"Deep-space scans do not reveal any other supporting ships.  It appears
that they are acting alone."

Kirk looked past the helmsman and navigator to the main viewsereen,
which showed the boxy, utilitarian Kauld fighter as it sped toward its
goal: the Federation colony planet Belle Terre.  Was this some kind of
renegade attack?  Surely the Kauld crew knew they were outgunned.
Besides the Enterprise, there were a couple of dozen other starships
orbiting the planet; mostly colony freighters, but the Kauld had
learned before that those ships were far from helpless.

"They usually gang up five to one"' Kirk said.  "This doesn't feel
right."

"It is most illogical, even for Kauld Spock agreed.

"Helm, fire a warning shot across their bow," Kirk ordered.  "Let's see
if that gets their attention."

"Aye, sir," said Sulu.  His fingers danced on the control console, and
a bright red phaser beam lanced out just kilometers ahead of the
warship.

Kirk didn't have to ask his crew for the information he needed.  They
reported without prompting.

"No change in velocity or trajectory, Captain," said Thomsen.  '-The
Kauld have activated their weapons," Spock said.

"No response to our hails, sir"' said Jolley, the relief communications
officer.

"They can hear us.  Open a channel," Kirk ordered.

"Channel open."  '-Mis is Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise.  You
are intruding in Federation space.  Turnback now, or we'll be forced to
interpret your actions as aggressive and act accordingly."

Cold silence answered back.

"The Kauld ship is 28,500 kilometers from the planet's atmosphere and
closing rapidly," Spock said.  "And there is a further anomaly in their
attack strategy: I read only a skeleton crew on board."

"You think it's a kamikaze ship?"  Kirk asked.  '-That seems likely."

If that was the aliens' game, Kirk felt sorry for them.  He didn't like
the idea of firing on a poorly defended ship, but he would do it if he
had to.  There were sixty thousand colonists on Belle Terre who
depended on him for their safety; he wouldn't risk their lives to spare
a hostile intruder just because it wasn't sporting.

There was also the quasar olivium mine to consider.  That, not the
planet, was what the Kauld wanted so badly, and it was a prize worth
fighting for.  There was enough quasi matter in the core of Belle
Terre's largest moon to power the entire Federation for decades.  It
could also power the Kauld, their rivals the Blood, the Klingon Empire,
the Romulan Empire, and half a dozen other enemies as well.  Kirk
wasn't going to risk that out of misguided sympathy for a suicide crew.
Several shipments of olivium had been intercepted by pirates on the
long trip back to Federation space; if the Kauld had been behind the
pirates-as Kirk suspected they were-then they already had enough to put
a doomsday-type bomb on board that ship.

But since it was just one ship, there might be a chance to stop them
without bloodshed.  "Get a tractor beam on them," he said.

Sulu complied, but the moment the Kauld felt the effect, they fired on
the Enterprise.  Shields flared as the disrupter beam struck, and the
bridge shook as the inertial dampers fought to counteract the impact.

Another disruptor shot pounded the same spot.

"Tractor beam is off-line " Sulu called out.

"Shields down to sixty percent"' Thomsen said.

The Kauld had signed their own death warrant.  "Lock phasers on
target," Kirk said.

"Locked and ready," Sulu replied.

"Fire."

The bright red beam lanced out again, this time striking the warship
directly in the port flank.  Its shields flared bright as they radiated
the energy, but Sulu kept the beam centered until it burned through and
sliced deep into the ship's interior.  Bright flame shot out of the
gash, dissipating immediately in the vacuum of space ... then an
explosion ripped the ship in half and sent the two pieces tumbling in
opposite directions, spewing debris from their interiors as they
spun.

"Survivors?"  Kirk asked.

"No life-forms register," said Spock.

"What about anomalous energy signatures?  Is there a bomb on board?"

"None in evidence, but at this distance they could shield it from our
sensors' "

"That's what I thought.  Sulu, Thomsen, target both halves.  Carve them
into pieces."

"Aye, sir."

The bridge crew watched as the helmsman and navigator each took a
target and proceeded to reduce them to debris.  They only had a few
seconds before the pieces hit atmosphere, but they crisscrossed the
halves of the hull with phaser fire until they fell open like
blossoming flowers, then played the phasers over the exposed interiors.
Power sources erupted in bright red explosions, contributing yet more
destruction, but they triggered nothing resembling a true bomb.

"Cease fire," Kirk said when the first of the pieces txgan to strike
atmosphere.  They hit near the twilight band and left bright streaks of
ionized air in their wakes.  That would be a great light show from the
gound.  Some of the pieces skipped off the atmosphere and burned again
farther into the daylight side of the planet.

He sat in his chair, still staring at the screen long after the last of
the pieces had burned out.  This had been too easy.

"Any life pods launched?"  he asked.

"Negative said Spock.

"Signals?  Did they send any messages or beam anything out before we
hit them?"

"No, sir," said Jolley.

"Then what exactly were they trying to accomplish here?"

Nobody spoke.  Kirk looked at the screen again, which still showed the
planet turning serenely below as the Enterprise slid from the night
side into day.  '-They didn't just throw a warship away for nothing. 
What did they get out of it?

They already know our weapons capabilities.  They knew we would fire on
them.  What did they gain just now?"

"Allies?"  suggested Thomsen.

"How so?"

"Maybe they wanted to show someone how ruthless we are."

Kirk rubbed his chin, thinking.  The scratchy day's growth of whiskers
felt good on his hand, which he only now realized he'd been holding
clenched since he entered the bridge.

"Are there any Kauld observers in evidence?  Or

Blood?"  he asked.

"Nothing within the planetary system"' Spock said.  "I detect faint
energy signatures in deep space nearly five light-days out, but even
they are not conclusively Kauld or Blood "

"They wouldn't want to wait five days to find out how things came down
here," said Kirk.  "Keep a continual scan going for warp signatures
along the wave front as the light from this heads through the solar
system.  And listen for subspace signals from spies on the ground@r on
the moons or the outer planets.  They might already have put observers
in place."

He leaned back in his command chair and looked out at the planet again.
White clouds over blue ocean and green-brown land; it was an oasis in a
vast desert of empty space far, far away from the rest of the
Federation.  It had taken the colonists over nine months at warp speed
just to get here.  They hadn't come for the olivium, but once it was
discovered they had had no choice but to protect it from the aliens who
wanted it for themselves.  It was too powerful to allow it to fall into
the wrong hands.  So now the colonists were caught in a struggle for
survival in a star system so far away they couldn't even see Earth's
sun with a telescope.  They had enough raw power to destroy every
planet between here and there-but without the technical infrastructure
to harness it, it was useless to them.

Still, they had become custodians of the most sought after element in
the Alpha Quadrant.  Belle Terre was already becoming a crossroads, and
by the time the olivium was mined out it would be a commercial hub for
light-years around.

Provided it didn't fall to the Kauld first.  And the only thing
preventing that was the Enterprise.

What if Thomsen was right?  If the Kauld had finally admitted that they
couldn't win this battle by themselves, then they might be trying to
win allies.  That might be harder to do than it sounded, though. Before
the human colonists had entered their midst, they had been busy trying
to conquer every other race in their sector.  Kirk doubted if anyone
would join them without major concessions ahead of time, and after
decades of war the Kauld had nothing to give.

Their only bargaining chip would be the promise of a share in the
olivium if they won, but Kirk couldn't imagine anyone stupid enough to
believe that the Kauld would actually keep that promise.

No, gaining allies wasn't their way.  They were up to something else.
But what was it?

Chapter Two

WMN His communicator beeped for attention, Dr.  McCoy cursed and set
his mint julep on the grass.  The motion nearly tipped him out of his
hammock, but he regained his balance at the last moment without
spilling his drink or himself on the ground.

He tugged the communicator off his belt, flipped it open, and said,
"McCoy here."

"Doctor," said the thin, reedy voice of Baedrick Neville, the colony's
chief surgeon.  "We've got a bit of a situation here.  I wonder if you
could come take a look at it."  "Weeellll McCoy drawled, "that depends
on what sort of a situation it is.  Have you got an outbreak of Rigehan
fever?"  "No, its' "A neural parasite taking over everyone's minds?"
"No, not that either.  It's@'

"How 'bout a virus that accelerates aging, or radiation exposure that
gives everyone synesthesia?"

"No, nothing like that.  It's-" "ilen I don't see why you need me.  I'm
sure you're perfectly capable of handling anything else that comes
along."

"Yes, but-"

"And I'm on vacation."

Dr.  Neville was silent for a moment.  McCoy could picture him in the
hospital, his tricorder in hand, probably displaying sensor readings
that revealed everything but his patient's kindergarten grade.  Yet
Neville insisted on getting McCoy's confirmation on anything more
serious than an ingrown toenail.  It was a mystery how the man had ever
gotten out of medical school without a good dose of self-confidence.

He said, "I'm sorry to have bothered you, Doctor, but I thought you'd
want to know.  It appears to be a spaceborne pathogen' "

McCoy's right eyebrow jerked upward.  "Spacehome?  How do you
figure?"

"The patient is a ten-year-old male who came in complaining of a
headache and upset stomach.  Not interesting in itself, but his story
is.  He says he was swimming in Lake Lytle when something fell out of
the sky and nearly hit him.  He thought it was a meteor and dived to
retrieve it, but grew sick almost immediately."

That didn't sound like a meteor to McCoy.  The park where he had been
trying to relax was on a hillside to the north of town; he looked out
over the red tile rooftops to the blue lake on the valley floor beyond.
He could see nothing unusual from this distance, but that didn't
necessarily mean anything.  "Have you found the pathogen?"

"Not yet.  We got some unusual readings at first, but now diagnostics
reveal nothing wrong.  Reynold seems to have recovered on his own, but
the case was unusual enough that I wanted to check with.  you in case
I've rrssed something."

The name made McCoy sit up even straighter.  "Reynold?  Reynold Coates?
Lilian's boy?"

"That's the one."

"I'll be right there.  McCoy out."  He snapped his communicator shut,
and with a heavy sigh rolled out of the hammock.  His julep glass sat
in the grass, beads of moisture grown heavy on its sides.  He picked it
up, took one more small sip of the sweet iced whiskey, then dropped it
in the recycler on his way out of the park.  He promised himself that
he'd throw his communicator away next time he came here, just so he
could enjoy his next mint julep to the end.

Neville had been right, though.  This was one situation he wanted to
see for himself.

Over the duration of this interminable mission, he'd had ample time to
get acquainted with most of the colony's members, but few of them had
impressed him as much as Reynold Coates and his mother.  In many ways
Reunold was a typical ten-year-old boy, full of curiosity and spunk,
but after his father was killed in an ambush during the journey to
Belle Terre, he had been forced into a much more adult role than most
kids his age.  Lilian possessed a true pioneer's spirit and de
termination, carrying on after her husband's death without complaint,
but raising a son on her own was a tough job even with a boy like
Reynold.  Her family's dreams had been shattered during that one tragic
moment in space, and McCoy wasn't about to let some errant meteor deal
them any more problems.

He could see the hospital's flat roof from where he stood.  Governor
Pardonnet had ordered that each of the major settlements on Belle Terre
should build their medical center close to the middle of town, figuring
it should be near as many people as possible.  There was a transporter
on site, but you couldn't always count on a transporter working when
you needed it, especially here.  For ten hours of every thirty, a
stellar phenomenon called Gamma Night disrupted the signal so badly you
couldn't transport a jug of water a quarter mile.  The source of the
interference was a neutron star orbiting a black hole a few light-years
away and spraying a beam of charged particles into the Belle Terre
system with each revolution, but knowing the source didn't help shield
against it.

Nor did it improve McCoy's skepticism about transporters in general. He
had never liked having his body converted to energy and squirted
through space, but having it done unreliably held no attraction
whatsoever.

Fortunately, there were other means of transportation.  Most colonists
traveled by foot or bicycle, or even horseback, especially if they were
homesteading in the green rolling hills.  It wasn't so much because of
the Gamma Night, either.  The colonists' intentions had always included
a simpler, more peaceful lifestyle.  McCoy applauded their efforts and
walked as much as he could.  But just now he needed to get to the
hospital faster than his feet could take him, so he opted to use one of
the colony's publicly owned bicycles.  They were scattered all through
town, three or four of them on average in every bicycle rack.  It was
easy to tell which bikes were public ones by the eye-burningly bright
yellow paint.  Nobody in their right mind would own a bike that color,
which was exactly why they had been painted that way.  Despite their
prevalence at every street corner, nobody ever stole them.

Nobody ever maintained them either, it seemed.  He had to reject two
with flat tires before he found one in good working order, and its seat
was stuck in the lowest position.  He shrugged and climbed aboard
anyway It was all downhill from here; as long as he was just coasting
he could scrunch up.

The road followed the brook that trickled out of the foothills into the
lake.  McCoy loved to feel the wind in his hair and listen to the water
splashing over rocks beside him as he rode into town.  The vegetation
on the hillsides was green again, recovering nicely from the explosion
on the planet's moon that had flash-burned the entire continent shortly
after the colonists arrived.  The weather had settled down to the point
where a person could count on it for days at a time, and people were
outside enjoying it.

McCoy smiled and waved at them on his way past, and they returned his
greeting with friendly "hellos" and waves of their own.  He felt just
like a local, and it suddenly occurred to him that he was a local. He'd
been here just as long as anyone.  The Enterprise had escorted the
colonists out here from Earth, and ongoing problems had kept the ship
attached to the colony ever since.  McCoy had been treating the
situation like a temporary assigm-nent, but it had been over a year now
and there was no sign that they would be leaving anytime soon.  This
was as much a home as he had experienced since joining Starfleet.

He found that thought both comforting and disquieting.  A whole year of
his career spent guarding a single colony from hostile natives.  No
wonder he wanted Dr.  Neville to fill his own shoes as chief medical
officer.

He found the doctor and his young patient in a small exam room near the
back of the hospital.  Even before he entered, he could hear Dr.
Neville asking Reynold for more details about his swim in the lake.
Reynold was a good kid, but he was still ten years old, and now that he
was feeling fine again his attention span was definitely reaching its
limits.

"Afternoon, Dr.  Neville.  Hello there, Reunold," McCoy said as he
stepped into the room.

"Hi, Dr.  McCoy" Reunold said.  He sat on the examination bench,
shirtless, his bare feet swinging back and forth.  His thick dark hair,
cut short enough to stay out of his eyes, stuck up at odd angles from
his head, a result of his interrupted swim in the lake.

"Doctor, I'm glad you could come," Neville said as he stood to shake
McCoy's hand.  He was a tail, slender man, just as his voice might lead
one to imagine.  His hands were long and thin, but his grip was firm. A
good sign that he could hold his surgical tools with fine control.

"Yes.  Well, Reynold, I hear you were feeling kind of punk a little bit
ago," McCoy said.  He sat down on a stool in front of the boy.

"Yes, sir.  I'm feeling better now, though."

McCoy waved his own tricorder across Reynolds body and studied the
results.  "That's what my instruments tell me, too."  He smiled, then
said, "Dr.  Neville said you were swimming in Lake Lytle when something
fell into the lake and you went after it."

"That's right."

"Did you manage to retrieve whatever it was?"

"No, sir.  I didn't even get close to it before my head started
hurting."  Reunold looked up at the clock on the wall and said, "Is it
okay if I leave?  Mom's expecting me to finish my chores before
dinner."

"Oh no you don't " McCoy said sternly.  "I notice you carefully avoidi
saying that you would be going straight home to do those chores.  I
don't want you going back to that lake until we've found what made you
sick " He turned to Neville.  "Anybody else, either.  Is anyone down
there checking it out?"  "Er ... not yet," said Neville.

"Get someone on it.  Reunold, can you show them where it landed?"

"Yes, sir!"  said the boy, even more excited to be included in an
official search than to do it on his own.

Dr.  Neville nodded.  "Very well.  I called your mother when you first
got here, so she should be here any minute to pick you up.  I'll ask
her to take you back by the lake, and I'll send a science team down to
meet you there.  Don't go in the water again!  Understood?"

"Yes, sir."  Reunold squirmed uncomfortably on the exam table, then
said, "And thanks for calling my mom, but I didn't want her to get
worried.  Especially since I'm better now."  " in sure she'll want to
know what happened, even so.  And I didn't want you walking home alone,
in case you started feeling bad again."

"Yes, sir.  It's just ... well, I don't'

"Dr.  Neville's right," Lilian Coates said.  She stood in the doorway,
her eyes moving from person to person in the room, assessing her son's
physical well-being by the doctors' stance as well as his own
appearance.  Her shoulder-length blonde hair had been swept up into a
ponytail held in place by a blue kerchief, and she wore a cotton
workshirt and a pair of jeans, the knees of which still had rich, brown
soil caked on them.  She must have been working in her garden when she
got the call that her son was at the hospital.

She stepped into the room and smiled at both of the men as they stood,
but her first words were for Reunold.  "You look fine now, but until we
Icnow what made you sick in the first place I want to keep an eye on
you.  Doctors?  Do you have any more information than when you
called?"

"I'm afraid not"' said McCoy.

"But we're looking for the meteor," Neville added quickly.  "That may
tell us something."

"They want me to show the search team where it landed"' Reynold said,
his voice filled with pride.

"Is it okay for him to go back there?"  she asked.

Dr.  Neville looked at McCoy, but McCoy waited for him to answer.
Reynold was his patient.  At last Neville said, "We think so, but the
cause of his sudden illness is still unknown.  If you don't want him to
go, that's understandable."

She ran a hand through her hair, loosening a strand from her ponytail.
"Of course I don't want him to, but I suppose he should.  The sooner we
find out what happened, the better we'll all feel "

McCoy agreed wholeheartedly.  There was nothing he hated quite so much
as an unknown pathogen loose in a population he was supposed to keep
healthy.  The stream that fed Lake Lytle also provided the town's
water; if something happened to that, everyone could be in trouble in a
big hurry.

"Thank you," he said.  "We'll check back with you tonight."

Reynold jumped off the table and headed for the door, pulling his
mother behind him in his eagerness to go help the search team.  As they
receded down the hall way, his voice echoed off the walls: "You
should've seen it, Ma.  It made a splash that went halfway across the
lake!"

Both men looked at the empty doorway a moment or two longer, then McCoy
turned back to Neville.  "well.  Don't just sit there with your teeth
in your mouth.  Show me the readings you got earlier from this 'space
pathogen."

 Chapter Three

DELOPJC WAVED his fellow Kauld workers aside, aimed his energy pick at
the comet's surface, and drew its disruptor tip in a line down the face
of the ice wall in front of him.  Chips of frozen carbon dioxide flew
past him, flashing white in the beam of his helmet light for just a
second as they shot out of the crevice, propelled by the vaporized
material in the direct path of the disrupter.  He tried to hold it
steady, carving a straight line an arm's span away from the last cut
and defining a block about the size of a coffin standing on end-a block
just like the hundreds of others he and the two others in his mining
team had already sliced free today.

Join the fleet, see the universe!  He snorted at the thought.  So far,
all he'd seen was the operator's end of a lot of hand tools.  He was
the foreman of his team, but that only meant he had responsibility as
well as hard work to deal with.  What a joke!  If he'd wanted to be a
miner, he could have stayed back home, made twice the pay, and had a
comfortable bed to sleep in at the end of the day.

Instead here he was, anchored to tills dirty travelling dry-ice cube,
carving it up and sending the pieces off to make a chain out in the
middle of empty space.  There were dozens of other teams doing the same
thing, enough to create a steady stream of ice blocks stretching off
into infinity.

He gave the dirty white chunk before him a kick, thankful for the
gravity boots that kept him from flying off into space himself, but he
failed to dislodge it.

Terwolan's voice hissed in his ear through his helmet's intercom.  "You
missed a spot' "

She was standing atop the block.  He looked up, his light sliding up
her legs and across her spacesuited body until he could see her arm
pointing into the crack he had just cut.  He peered back into the
crevice.  Sure enough, his pick hadn't reached deep enough to finish
the job.  He checked the recharge light on the handle.  It was going to
take another half a minute to come up to full power.

"Get the directional jets attached while we're waiting," he ordered
her.  She and Nialerad, the third miner in the team, moved to the task,
and he took the moment to back away from the ice face and lo4ok up.
There wasn't much nearby; they were five light-days away from the
nearest star-forty times as distant as its farthest planet-which made
the view all the more breathtaking.  The velvety blackness of space was
interrupted only by the glittering sprinkle of jeweled stars, This, he
reminded himself, was why he had joined the fleet, not for the heroics
or "Hey, dreamer!  Wake up!  Your pick's charged, let's get on with
this!"  -mr the drudge work  The others had finished their job; the
jets were in place, screwed directly into the carbon-dioxide ice. 
Deloric aimed the pick again and fired into the offending crack.  It
took two more passes before the block broke loose.

"Stand clear!"  Terwolan called.  The control unit blinked with red and
blue status indicators in the palm of her gloved hand.  Deloric and
Nialerad backed care frilly away from the slowly tumbling cube they'd
created while she triggered the command that would send the ice block
to join the others.

With a flash of white light from the tail ends of the jets, it oriented
itself and sailed away.  All three miners watched as it set out on its
journey: Terwolan to be sure that she'd programmed the jets correctly,
Deloric because it was the sign of a job well done-not to mention that
it was a beautiful sight.  He could only guess at what Nialerad
thought.  He wasn't the talkative sort.

They allowed themselves those few moments of rest, but their orders
were explicit: keep slicing up this dirty ice ball and sending the
pieces to their new coordinates until they were told to stop.  Even
before the block they had just released grew too small to see, Deloric
said, "All right, let's get back to it."

The crew started working on the next block in line.  They had already
removed the comet's irregular surface, and were now peeling it a layer
at a time, spiraling their way from the sunward point to the
terminator.  Deloric couldn't help but wonder what was going on, but he
knew enough not to ask the reasons for their assignments.  He might be
a dreamer, but he was no fool.  His job was to do what he was told, no
questions asked.  All the same, it was intriguing, all this activity.
Though what made it even more intriguing was the added order not to go
to the other side of the comet.  What?  Was the ice over on that side
inferior?  If ever there was a way to raise curiosity, it was to issue
an order like that.  it was an he could do not to discuss it with his
crewmates.  He'd worked with them for weeks now, but he didn't know
them, not like that anyway.  Some people thought it subversive to
speculate on the reason for any order.  They might rePOrt such
speculations to a higher authority, and nobody wanted that to happen. A
soldier true to the cause didn't question orders.  Not everyone felt
that way, he hoped, but enough did to keep every one's mouth quiet.

It wasn't enough to keep his mind from running through the
possibilities while he worked at liberating the new piece of ice, and
the piece after that, and the one after that.  He knew this star
system: it was the one that held the otivium moon mine.  All of the
Kauld efforts of late had been attempts to reclaim the moon from the
invaders.  So far all their attempts had failed, but that was something
else good soldiers never discussed.

Deloric wasn't a scientist, so the finer aspects of what the olivium
was good for were lost on him, but the bottom line was clear.  It would
give great power to whoever controlled it.  That was all he needed to
know in order to understand his leaders' motivation.  And when they
wrested the moon free from the humans, he would no doubt have a new
job: mining olivium.

He needed to make a clean break.  Do something heroic and get promoted,
or do something stupid and get kicked out of the fleet, but this was a
dead end.  He had better things to do with his life than wield an
energy pick.  He wanted to help crew a scout ship, seeing strange new
worlds and meeting exotic new aliens.  He had heard stories of
blue-skinned Andofians with antennae on their heads, green-skinned
Orions whose women were reputed to be the most alluring in the galaxy,
and other beings without even bodies in the normal sense.

He imagined himself as an ambassador to new races, learning how to
cooperate rather than fight with them.  That would be far more
difficult than mining comets, but far more rewarding.  He could see
himself, Deloric the Great in his elder years, dispensing the wisdom of
a long, exciting life to young new recruits about to embark on their
own voyages into the vastness of space.  That was the life for him!

"TWenty minutes to nighttime " Terwolan announced.

He looked up.  They had worked nearly a third of the way around the
comet.  The relief crew would be here shortly, so that Deloric's crew
could leave and get back to the bunk ship before the Blind made
navigating between the comet and the ship too dangerous to attempt.  He
was glad that someone kept tabs on things like the time.  Once he got
into a job, he just kept at it until it was finished.  That was no
doubt why he had been made foreman, but it probably irritated his crew,
who didn't seem to have his daydreams to keep their minds occupied
while their bodies were providing cheap labor for the cause.

He packed up his tools and watched as the shuttle deposited the next
batch of workers.  The commander had forbidden any energy use that
could be detected from within the star system, so all travel was to be
done by rocket-chemical rockets at that!-and all conununications kept
to minimal power, detectable only within a few light-seconds.

He stole one more look at the space around him.  He couldn't see the
pearly string of comet chunks, but he knew where they were.  And he
knew what they were aimed at.  It was just a point in space a few light
minutes to the side of the sun at the moment, but in fifteen days Belle
Terre, the world around which the olivium moon orbited, would sweep
through that spot.

It didn't make any sense, though.  At the meager speed their chemical
rockets could boost them to, the chunks of frozen carbon dioxide would
be nowhere near Belle Terre in ten days.  They would barely make it a
few light-seconds away from the comet in that time.  It would take
decades for them to drift all the way in system and by the time they
did, gravitational perturbation from the outer planets would bend their
traject ones every which way.  enough: they were aimed at the There was
no doubt, the planet.  Deloric was willing to bet that the Federation
colony there would be on the side facing them when it crossed through
the spot they were pointing at, too.  He just couldn't figure out what
difference it would make.

"Hey, are you coming or not?"  Terwolan asked.  She was standing in the
hatchway of the shuttle, her helmet light making little zigzags on the
ice as she shook her head.

"Yes, Mother."  He trudged toward the shuttle, thinking.

 Chapter Four

CHIEF ENGINEER Montgomery Scott scowled at the toaster on the workbench
before him.  It was a simple, unassuming device designed to accept two
slices of bread onto a spring-loaded pedestal that lowered them into a
small chamber where they were exposed to radiant heat.  The heaters
performed the same job a conventional toaster would do with an infrared
laser, giving the light, soft bread a smoothly browned surface perfect
for holding melted butter and fresh preserves.

In theory, anyway.  This one wouldn't heat, wouldn't raise or lower the
bread platform, and wouldn't respond to any of his diagnostic probes.
If he had been on board the Enterprise he could have scanned it and had
the computer analyze it and pinpoint the problem in seconds, but he
wasn't on board the ship.  He was in the blacksmith's shop, trying to
prevent William Thorpe from destroying a family heirloom with his
horseshoe tongs and ball-peen hammer.

Thorpe was gone for the moment, but Scotty had noticed the antique
bread warmer on his workbench when he'd stopped in to say hello, and he
knew that the blacksmith was over at the saloon working up his courage
to tackle the delicate repair job.  The only way to rescue the toaster
was to fix it himself and then claim he'd just been killing time until
Thorpe returned He couldn't take it to the Enterprise now that he'd
begun, either.  Gamma Night was due any moment now, and if it caught
him in mid transport he'd be stuck in the pattern buffer until the
particle storm's disruptive influence was over.  It was theoretically
possible to survive a lengthy stay in the buffer, but he wasn't willing
to try it for anything less than a life-or-death emergency, which this
was not.

Kaylene Brandon thought it was, but then it was her toaster.  According
to the kids who liked to gather around the blacksmith's shop-and who
now stood in a semicircle around him offering helpful suggestions as he
worked-she had brought it with her to Belle Terre, figuring to add a
little authentic nostalgia to her family's homesteading days.  Now it
apparently symbolized everything about colony life for her.  If it
failed, so would her faith in the colony.  ScottY understood how
someone could develop an emotional attachment to a well-designed
machine, but that seemed a bit over the top to him.  If she had to fall
for something, it ought to at least have an auxiliary power source.

The toaster didn't use any of the standard power supplies that Scotty
was used to, but the Brandons had brought along a converter that
produced alternating current from a phaser battery.  Scotty knew that
was working; it had burned out his tricorder when he'd connected it up
directly to check the voltage.  He'd forgotten how unforgiving
alternating current could be to delicate electronics.

Now he was on his own, man against machine, with no technological
crutches to help him.  He didn't mind; he actually liked the challenge
of it.  This was even more fun than catching up on his technical
manuals, and definitely better than helping build smelters and
fabrication plants for the colony, which he had been doing earlier in
the day.  He had to get back to that eventually, but for now he was
happy to take a little engineers holiday" and tinker a bit.

He bent happily to the task.  If the power supply worked, then the
problem was probably something mechanical, a broken wire or a bent
linkage.  The device's internal sensors apparently couldn't detect that
sort of damage, if indeed it had sensors.  They were either more
cleverly hidden than Scotty had ever seen before, or nonexistent.

He had decided that maybe there had to be a piece of bread on the
pedestal before it would operate, so he had sent one of the children
over to the bakery for a loaf.  When the boy returned with it, fresh
out of the oven and smelling wonderful, it turned out to be much
tougher than it looked to cut it into even slices that would fit in the
toaster's slots.  Scotty had finally gotten two usable if a bit ragged
slabs, and the children had happily eaten the evidence of his mistakes,
so he made sure the power converter was switched on and set the two
slices on the platforms.

"Stand back now"' he admonished the kids, but there was no need to
worry.  Nothing happened.  "All right then, we'll try manual override,"
he muttered, pushing down the plunger at the end of the toaster.  The
bread descended into the slots and a soft humming sound came from
inside the silvery case, but when he held his hand over the slots he
felt no heat.

He couldn't see past the bread, so he took the knife that he had used
to carve it and slid the blade in beside one of the slices, intending
to peer in and see if the characteristic red glow of radiant heat was
present, but the tip of the blade must have contacted the heating
element instead.

There was a loud snap!  and he jerked backward, his whole body suddenly
tingling as if he'd been hit with a phaser set on stun.  The children's
mouths gaped open like singers in a choir, then a moment later they
burst into laughter.

"Oh, so its funny, is it?"  he said, his teeth still vibrating from the
alternating current.

A little girl with blonde pigtails pointed upward.

"It's your hair!"

He reached up to feel the top of his head and found his hair standing
on end.

"Do ye know what causes that?"  he asked.

"Sticking a knife in the toaster!"  the same girl said.

"Aye, that was how it happened," he admitted, "but that's not what
happened.  The electricity left a charge on the surface of my body, and
some of the electrons went up to my hair where they make the strands
repel each other."

"Can I try it?"  asked the boy beside her.  "Uhhh ... that's not a good
idea " Scotty said.  "If the frequency was just a wee bit lower, it
could cook you from the inside out "

"Oh " The children backed away a step.

Scotty slicked down his hair again and grounded himself on the
workbench's metal edge, then looked at the knife he still clutched in
his hand.  He had burned a small notch in the tip of the blade, but it
could be repaired.

The toaster was another story.  He lifted the manual override lever and
removed the bread, then peered inside.  The heating element he'd
touched was missing a good centimeter of wire, completely vaporized by
the short circuit.  He would have to take the whole thing apart now and
reroute the wire to get enough length to splice it back together
again.

He turned it over, looking for helical tensors or magna plane
fasteners, but the case was held together with Phillips-head screws. 
"Well," he muttered, "it looks like I'm in the right place after all,"
for the walls of the smithy were festooned with screwdrivers, pliers,
hammers, and tongs.  Scotty had a wonderful collection of similar tools
in his quarters on board the ship, but he would no more use them than
the captain would use one of his precious paper books to prop up a
gimpy table leg.  Here, though, Thorpe used his all the time.  They
were scratched and pitted and in some cases bent from being pressed
into service as pry bars.  The blacksmith wouldn't care a bit if Scotty
did the same.

Whistling softly, he selected the appropriate-size screwdriver from the
tool rack and set to work, but he had barely removed the first screw
when Thorpe showed up, his massive shoulders, curly black hair, and
thickly bearded face eclipsing the light coming in through the open
doorway.

"Ah, good," he said, hardly glancing at what Scotty was doing.  "I was
looking for you.  Something funny fell into the lake, and Dr.  Neville
wants us to go investigate' Something funny?"  Scotty asked.  "Funny
how?"

"He didn't say, but I'd guess funny strange.  Neville doesn't strike me
as the kind who's interested in funny ha-ha' "

That wasn't what Scotty had meant by his question, but it looked like
that was all the answer he was going to get.  Thorpe snatched his
tricorder off its peg by the door and stepped out into the street,
followed by the kids who had been watching Scotty.  They had the right
idea; it was either tag along or hear the story secondhand, so Scotty
shut off the toaster's power supply and followed them down to the
lake.

Reynold Coates and his mother were already there, standing on the end
of the short pier that extended a few meters out over the water.  The
children all ran up to them, and Reynold pointed out over the water,
then everyone shaded their eyes and looked.  Scotty peered out into the
lake as well, and after his eyes had adjusted to the glare of the
afternoon sun on the rippling surface, he realized that a small patch
of water about a stone's throw out from the pier was bubbling.  it
looked like Some kind of gas was being released from below.

Four or five fish floated on their sides near the disturbed surface.
Were they poisoned or cooked?  If a hot reactor core had fallen into
the water, that gas could be steam.

"What's the radiation reading?"  he asked Thorpe as he strode out onto
the pier.

Thorpe lifted his tricorder and pushed the power button with a
calloused thumb, then laboriously poked at the sensor controls until he
got a radiation scan.  "Just normal background," he said.  "Which is
sky-high at the moment.  Gamma Night's starting."

Scotty looked at the sky, but the bright blue atmosphere revealed no
evidence of the energy sleeting into it from space.  Not visually at
least-but the effects were easy to detect in other ways. Communications
would be down for the next ten hours, and the rising ionic imbalance
would ultimately knock out even hand-held devices like Thorpe's
tricorder.  They would have to take what readings they could within the
next few minutes, or wait until tomorrow.

"Chemical reading?"  he asked.

"Umm, just a minute."  The blacksmith prodded the controls again, then
realized what the problem was and blew a thick layer of dust off the
display.  "Nothing unusual,"hereported.  "Silica,but..."Hewavedhish (I
an through the dust cloud.

Scotty resisted the urge to take the tricorder from him and try it
himself.  His own tricorder lay on Thorpe's workbench, burned out
through his own carelessness; he had no right to demand that someone
else relinquish theirs.

He looked out at the bubbling water again.  They needed to get out
there and take a sample directly from the source.  There was a
flat-bottomed boat tied to the side of the pier; Scotty had no idea
whose it was, but he didn't think they'd begrudge him the use of it to
investigate something like this.

"Into the boat he said to Thorpe.

"I want to go too!"  one of the kids said, but Scotty shook his head.

"No, laddie.  A great big baim like you will swamp a wee boat like that
one."

Everyone laughed, then laughed even louder when Thorpe and Scotty both
climbed in.  There was only a hand's width of freeboard left, and that
varied considerably as the two men wobbled for balance while they
unshipped the oars.  They didn't bother to put them in the locks; they
just paddled toward the bubbling water, Thorpe holding his oar in one
massive hand while he worked the tricorder with his other.

"I'm still picking up a silica compound," he said as they drew closer.
"Says here it's heavily oxygenated, molecular weight up in the
thousands.  That can't be right, can it?"

"It could if it were a polymer of some sort," Scotty said.  "Can you
get a structural reading?"

"Yeah, but it doesn't look like anything I've ever seen" He held out
the tricorder for Scotty to examine.  The'screen showed the schematic
of a huge molecule composed of mostly silicon and oxygen atoms, but it
wasn't anything Scotty was familiar with either, and it changed even as
he watched.  Some of that was just interference from Gamma Night, but
some of it was actual molecular activity.  Then he noticed the warning
line blinking in the corner of the screen.  Explosive gas.

"Aha!"  he said, watching the molecule grow.  "Something's reacting
with the lake bed  It's breaking down the sand, combining it with
oxygen from the water, and bubbling off free hydrogen.  Purely chemical
reaction.  Can you get a reading of the parent material?"

"I'll try."  Thorpe leaned over the side of the boat and aimed the
tricorder into the water.  Scotty leaned the other way to keep them
from capsizing while Thorpe waved the tricorder back and forth, but the
blacksmith was unable to get a lock on anything through the meters of
water.  "Fraces of tungsten, aluminum, magnesium, and so on"' he said,
sitting upright again and nearly pitching Scotty out the other side
before he could compensate, "but I can't locate a parent mass.  It
looks like it's completely dissolved."

"Then why is the water still bubbling?"  Scotty asked.

"You got me.  Here, you're better at this sort of thing.  You try."
Thorpe handed Scotty the tricorder.

Scotty took it eagerly and began scanning for more clues.  He had no
more luck than Thorpe with chemical analysis or direct mass sensing,
but there were a few unusual spikes in the high-frequency energy
spectrum.  Trouble was, they were so diffuse there was no way to tell
whether they were coming from the lake or from space.

One of the dead fish floated past, so he scanned it, too.  It was a
rainbow trout, planted here from Earth stock.  A medical tricorder
would have given him more useful data, but even with Thorpe's primitive
scanner and Gamma Night interfering with its beam, it was obvious that
the fish had been asphyxiated.  The ongoing chemical reaction had
apparently pulled all the dissolved oxygen from the water before it had
set to work dissociating the water molecules themselves.

The bubbles were dying down.  Scotty set the tricorder's range to
maximum and aimed it out over the lake.  Through the rising static, he
could detect low level molecular activity all through the water.
"Whatever it is, it's dissipating," he said.

"Good," Thorpe replied.  Without prompting, he started paddling for
shore again, and Scotty had to set the tricorder down and help so they
wouldn't go around in circles.  He looked back out at the lake, wishing
he had better equipment, and wishing gamma night hadn't cut short what
readings he had been able to get.  if wishes were fishes, he thought,
looking back over his shoulder at the dead trout, then he would be back
on board the Enterprise, pushing the engines to maximum output while
the great starship streaked from star to star on a mission of galactic
importance, not stuck here on some backwater
planet-literally!-repairing toasters and investigating swamp gas while
the last years of his career ticked slowly by.  This little oddity was
mildly interesting, but he was sure it would ultimately turn out to be
a simple natural phenomenon, of no great concern to anyone but a
hydrologist.

 Chapter Five

THE BRMGE Of the Enterprise was eerily silent.  Tje steady ping of the
subspace scanners had stopped.  Missing also were the various hums,
bleeps, and twitters from the communications, helm, and science
stations.  On all sides, snow-filled monitors hissed softly, awaiting
reacquisition of signal.  Gamma Night had shut them all down, its flood
of charged particles reducing the ship's sensing ability to the most
basic system of all: the naked eye.

Captain Kirk leaned back in his command chair and stretched his arms
over his head, feeling joints pop and muscles release all the way down
into his rib cage.  Gamma Night always affected him like this.  Dr.
McCoy swore that there were no physiological effects from it, but every
time the radiation storm sprayed through the Belle Terre system and
interrupted the ship's sensors, Kirk felt as if his own body was under
siege.

He hated flying blind.  That attitude had been drilled into him from
his earliest days at the academy: they didn't call it "dead reckoning"
for nothing.  At flight speed, any random piece of debris could punch
right through a ship before they even knew what hit them.  The only
solution was to reduce your velocity as much as possible, just drift in
space and hope that nothing else was moving relative to you.  It was a
frustrating choice, but it was the best they could do.

Spock was experimenting with olivium-powered sensors that could cut
through the interference, but he was finding the unstable quasi matter
much trickier to work with than he had anticipated.  Instead of simply
extending an instrument's range, the new power source seemed to affect
its very nature, giving the sensors new and unpredictable side effects.
Kirk was confident that his science officer would eventually figure it
out, but in the meantime, Gamma Night still shut them down for ten
hours out of every thirty.

As a stopgap measure, Spock had rigged up a low frequency radar unit
using the forward deflector, but a wavelength long enough to penetrate
the particle storm was practically useless for detecting anything
smaller than a battle cruiser.  Nonetheless, the Vulcan kept his eye on
the fuzzy green monitor as its refresh line swept around and around in
a slow circle.  Sulu and Thomson directed their attention to the main
viewscreen, while Joiley coordinated lookouts on observation decks
throughout the ship.  If anyone spotted anything moving against the
stellar background, Joiley would put it on the main screen under high
magnification, and Thomsen would calculate its course manually.

It was a hell of a way to run a starship, Kirk thought as he stood up
and paced once around the bridge.  He might as well paint concentric
red rings around the top of the saucer section.

Captain," Spock said as he started a second lap, may I remind you that
your presence is required in-" "know."

Spock turned back to his sensor screen, his already green face
practically fluorescent in the monitor's phosphor glow.  Kirk knew he
was stalling, but it was hard to leave the bridge when his ship was so
exposed to danger.

Besides, he had an ulterior motive.  He knew that Governor Pardonnet
was waiting in the Enterprise's conference room, cooling his heels and
making small talk with Shucorion, the former alien spymaster turned
ally.  The young governing head of the Belle Terre colony would not be
happy with the wait, nor with the company, but Kirk wanted to make a
point.  He'd invited the governor to this meeting days ago to discuss
the need for a stronger defensive system for the planet, and
Pardonnet's own schedule had determined the meeting time.  He had
insisted on putting it at the end of his workday, symbolically giving
it the lowest status of his many appointments and no doubt hoping that
Kirk would cancel it because of the on-board hour.

A small smile tugged at Kirk's lips as he strode into the turbolift. No
chance of that.  He couldn't have planned it better himself Timing was
everything, after all.  " You have the bridge," he said to Spock, then
the turtwlift doors slid closed and he rode it down to deck 7 and the
briefing room where Pardonnet waited.

The door had barely opened before Pardonnet said, "Captain, I am a busy
man.  I don't have the time to sit around this ship waiting for you-"

"It's good to see you too, Governor," Kirk said.  "You're looking
well." In reality, the usually calm,

well-dressed young man appeared somewhat rumpled, as though he'd spent
all of Saturday night in his Sun day best.

Kirk looked at the stocky, blue-skinned alien sitting two seats to
Pardonnet's right.  "Shucorion, thank you for joining us."

The alien bowed his head in the traditional greeting of the Blood, as
his people called themselves.  "At your service," he replied.

At your service.  Sure.  Only so far as that service furthered his own
goals of supremacy for the Blood over their longtime enemies, the
Kauld, Kirk thought, but he merely nodded and took his seat across from
the two leaders.  They had chosen to sit with their backs to the
viewport, ignoring the sight of Belle Terre floating serenely in space
only thirty thousand kilometers away.  Was it the frontier mentality of
never putting your back to a door, or were they both tired of looking
at the source of all their troubles?

Kirk didn't mind.  This was his ship, and a planet seen from
geosynchronous orbit was beautiful no matter how much trouble it was.

"Captain, can we get on with this?"  Pardonnet asked.

"Of course.  My apologies for being late, but we were securing the
bridge for Gamma Night."  "what?"  Pardonnet checked his wrist
chronometer.  "For the love of ... I can't be stuck here for the next
ten hours!"

"I'm afraid you have no choice.  Notto worry though.  You can have
access to the recreation areas when we're finished, or if you prefer,
I'm sure we have a free room where you can rest."

A look of resignation slid over Pardonnet's face.  "We'll worry about
that later.  Let's get started."

"Very well, Governor, I'll cut right to the heart of the matter.  We
have to start building up our defenses again.  The Eau Clair flood
wiped out over half of your ground-based shuttle fleet He pointedly
used the official name for the river valley, rather than the colonists'
own term for it: the Big Muddy.

Pardonnet opened his mouth to speak, but Kirk kept going without pause.
"You've decommissioned three of the remaining space freighters just in
the last week.  I know it was in the original mission plan to use the
cargo ships for raw materials once we arrived here, but the situation
is different now.  We're sitting on top of a gold mine, and everybody
wants a piece of it.  Even if we can keep the prospectors at bay, the
Blood and the Kauld could resume hostilities at any moment, and if they
do we'll find ourselves in the middle of it within hours."

Shucorion didn't even blink, which by itself told Kirk he'd hit
uncomfortably close to the mark.  The Blood leader had allied his
people with the Federation for one reason only: protection from their
enemies, and everyone knew it.  Neither race was native to Belle
Terre-their star system was light-years distant-ut ever since the
discovery of quasar olivium deep inside Belle Terre's moon, they had
conspired as much to keep each another away from the new resource as to
gain it for themselves.  If the Kauld ever gained a toehold in the
Belle Terre system, there would be some "regrettable incident" that
would spark a battle, and Shucorion would scream for military
assistance from Kirk and the Belle Terre colony until they were driven
away.

Kirk looked back to Pardonnet.  "We need to refit all of our space
worthy ships with phasers and beef up their shields.  Likewise, the
colonists should all be trained to handle a ground invasion.  I don't
know if it'll be human or Kauld or somebody we haven't even heard of,
but it's only a matter of time before somebody tries to pick your plum,
and we've got to be ready for them."

Pardonnet steepled his fingers in front of him on the tabletop.
"Captain, I appreciate your concern, and if I've learned anything from
you in our..  . shall we say tempestuous' past, it's not to
underestimate your assessment of a military situation.  However, I
don't really think this is a military situation' "

"We just shot down another hostile ship less than an hour ago," Kirk
reminded him.

"I heard.  It was a single ship, wasn't it?  A few overeager privateers
now and then hardly comprise a significant threat.  Besides, even that
will soon stop now that we've begun mining olivium and selling it to
the highest bidder.  Our prices are high, and the risk of piracy en
route to the developed sectors of the galaxy no doubt makes the price
even higher by the time it reaches the open market, but surely it can't
cost as much to simply buy the product as it would cost to fight a
prolonged battle over interstellar distances for it."

Kirk admired his reasoning.  If everyone looked at the universe the way
he did, there would be no need for a military buildup.  Unfortunately,
not everyone was quite so logical in their thinking.

"You're being libertarian again," he said.  "It would be a fine system
if everyone was a nice guy, but some people like taking things without
paying for them.  The only way to StOp people like that from doing what
they want is to make it physically impossible.  Maybe if we make a big
enough show of our preparations, they'll see it's impossible before
they try, but either way we've got to make our military presence strong
enough that we can win the battle whether it happens or not."

"Spoken like a true soldier," Pardonnet said.

Kirk felt those words strike home.  He didn't want to be a soldier, and
Pardonnet knew it.  Noffng would please Kirk more than taking the
Enterprise out into unexplored territory again, to search for strange
new worlds instead of babysitting a bunch of colonists who had gotten
in over their heads.  Given a choice, he would do just that; but he
didn't have a choice, and Pardonnet knew that, too.  They were stuck
with each other until the situation changed, and like an old married
couple they simply enjoyed pushing each other's hot buttons once in a
while.

Kirk resisted the urge to return fire.  He merely stated the obvious.
"At the moment, a soldier is what you need.  Believe me, the instant my
presence is no longer necessary, I'm warp nine for deep space, but
until that time I'm your guardian angel."

Shucorion coughed politely.  "The Blood would gladly augment your
defense force with more ships of our own' "

Kirk suppressed a sardonic grin.  "I'm sure you would.  Unfortunately,
that would precipitate the very conflict with the Kauld that we're
trying to avoid.  We need our own ships, staffed from the colony."

"What?"  Pardonnet said indignantly.  "You want my people, too?  We're
already shorthanded everywhere!"

Shucorion ignored his outburst.  "Or you need a neutral third party,"
said the alien.  "Fourth, in this case' "

"Hire peacekeepers?"  Kirk asked.  The idea had never even occurred to
him.  "Where?"

"There are many other races in this sector."

"And what's to keep them from taking the olivium for themselves if we
let them in here with warships?"

"We are.  The Blood, the Federation, and yes, even the Kauld.  If none
of us can win on our own, we will work together to ensure that no one
else does, either."

Kirk thought it over for all of two seconds.  "No.  That sort of thing
has been tried before all through human history, but it always falls
apart.  The different sides make temporary alliances and gang up on
each other until everybody's at war with everybody else.  We need one
very powerful force here, not half a dozen small ones."

"And who guarantees the loyalty of the force?"  asked Pardonnet.

"I do " Kirk said flatly.  lmdonnet nodded.  "Your word is as good as
the deed.  So is your first officer's.  In fact, I believe I could
trust nearly every member of your crew to uphold the principles of the
Federation against the greatest temptation.  But what happens if this
ship is destroyed?  Suppose a spy gets on board with an antimatter
bomb?"  His eyes flicked momentarily to Shucorion, then back to Kirk.
"Or suppose some errant asteroid smashes you out of orbit during Gamma
Night.  What then?  Who takes your role, and what is their agenda?"

"We'll establish a chain of command "

"Which will only be as strong as its weakest link.  No, Captain.  I
much prefer a society without arms at an to a society where everyone
holds a phaser to his neighbor's head."

"People have tried that, too' " Kirk reminded him.  "Remember Nantes
IR?  Providence Prime?  Felicity Alpha?"

Pardonnet narrowed his eyes.  "No."

"Not surprising"' Kirk said.  "They don't exist anymore.  The first
hostile force that came along wiped out every colony."

Shucorion stared at both men in open astonishment.  "You left colonies
undefended?,"

Kirk snorted.  "Many tiMeS- Humanity has more than its share of
idiots."  He looked quickly at Pardonnet.

"And no, Governor, that was not a barb at you.  But those who forget
history are doomed to repeat it."

Pardonnet nodded.  "I understand the need for security, and I agree
with you in principle.  I'm just trying to balance that against the
colony's need for resources.  Our forests all went up in smoke during
the Burn, the chaotic weather wipes out any crops we don't keep under
cover, and we lost entire communities during the flood.  We've got
nothing to rebuild with except brick and whatever we can scrounge from
the cargo ships.  If we turn them all into gunships, I'm afraid there
won't be a colony to protect."

"We're getting smelters on-line"' Kirk reminded him.  "It won't be long
before they'll outpace any salvage operation."  " "Not long' to you is
an eternity to someone living in a tent " Pardonnet pointed out.

Kirk i@ked out the viewport at the planet below.  From here it looked
like paradise.  He wouldn't mind staying in a tent on one of the
far-side islands that had missed the brunt of the blast when the
olivium moon had exploded, but doing it in a refugee camp would be
another story.  Pardonnet definitely had a point, but dammit, so did
he. They could both have what they wanted if they could just wait a
while, but neither could afford to do that.

He looked over to Shucorion.  "How about a different kind of assistance
besides military?"  he asked.

Shucorion cocked his head to the side, a trace of amusement sparkling
in his eyes.  "You would accept emergency housing from us?"

"I don't see why not," Kirk said, glancing from him to Pardonnet, who
had already opened his mouth to protest.  "It would be a good chance
for the colony to use some of its newfound wealth, and the influx of
ohvium into your economy would do you a world of good, too.  Plus the
shipments of building material would allow us to demonstrate your
ability to field a fleet on short notice, but would do it without
threatening the Kauld.  We would all win."

"Indeed," said Shucorion.  He seemed quite pleased, as well he should.
There were far more subtle implications to the deal than a simple
trade.  Shucorion's people had started out opposed to the Federation
presence on Belle Terre.  They had later become allies, but uneasy
ones, still unsure how they would fare in dealing with a power that
spanned hundreds of stars.  By asking this simple favor, the colony
would be taking the first step toward making them true confederates,
not just the weaker partners in a marriage of convenience.

Of course there would be complications.

"Captain " Pardonnet said.  "No offense to Shucorion, but have yo'll
seen what the Blood consider housingt' "No," Kirk said.  He'd been too
busy with the colony to look at anything outside the Belle Terre
system.  "But it's got to be better than tents."  "that's a matter of
opinion " the governor said.

Shucorion laughed.  "Don't worry.  Mud huts don't travel well.  We will
bring prefabricated plast eel panels that you can assemble as you
wish."

"At what price?"

Shucorion yawned.  "I'm afraid I don't deal directly in such
trivialities, but I can assure you that the price will not be
exorbitant.  I will have my people call your people and work out the
details' "

Pardonnet blushed slightly, and Kirk suppressed a smile.  One of the
hardest things for a leader to learn was how to delegate the details.

"Good"' Kirk said, laying his hands flat on the table.

"That's solved.  You'll get your building materials, and we'll keep the
colony ships in orbit for defense.  Now let's talk about training
ground troops."

Pardonnet looked again at his wrist chron  "Must we?"

"You're stuck here until gamma night's over," Kirk said.  "We might as
well take advantage of the opportunity."

Pardonnet leaned toward Shucorion.  " "Opportunity," he calls it.  Very
well, then, lay on, Macduff."

"Okay, here's what I was thinking...."  Kkk began, but as he settled in
for a long round of negotiations, his mind was already thinking ahead
to the next problem he had to solve.  He'd been so worried about the
Kauld and about profiteers from back home that he had completely
ignored the threat from other quarters, but Shucorion's innocent
suggestion had shown him his oversight.  Even if he didn't hire
peacekeepers from among the locals, he needed to learn who was out
there and how they felt about the Federation presence on Belle Terre.

He would have to part with at least one starship for a survey of local
space.  And that ship would need a crew.  Who should he send on the
mission?

Chapter Six

"YOU'RE KIDDING, RIGHT?"  Dr.  McCoy rubbed the sleep from his eyes and
regarded Kirk's face in the viewscreen, but he could detect no si.In of
a joke in his captain's features.  In fact, Kirk looked a bit haggard,
as if he had been up all night.  That would explain the dawn call-it
was already midmorning up there, and Kirk had probably decided if he
couldn't sleep, nobody else would either.  Good thing Gamma Night had
disrupted communications through the night or he would surely have
called even earlier.

"No, I'm not kidding, Bones," said Kirk.  "I need someone who can
assess a situation quickly with whatever data they've got on hand,
instead of waiting for every detail before they make a decision."

"I'm not sure if I take that as a compliment," McCoy drawled. "Shootin'
from the hip is a good way to get people killed."

Kirk shook his head.  "This is a scouting mission, not an in-depth
study.  I just want to know who's out there, and I want the information
to come from my crew members, not Shucorion.  We can send out another
expedition to investigate anything interesting you turn up, but this is
just a first glance."

"What you're saying is, you want me to perform triage on the entire
Sagittarian sector."

"Right

McCoy drummed his fingers on the edge of the communications console.
"Who are you sending with me?"

"Scotty."

That was a relief.  At least they would get there, wherever "there"
was.  "And who else?"  he asked.

"That's it.  We're sending you out in a refitted cargo tug.  It's all
engines and very little living space, but it's fast, and there's more
than enough room for two."

"I guess I should be thankful you didn't bottle me up with that
pointy-eared computer," McCoy muttered as he stood up and reached for
his clothing.

Then he heard a bleep from the subspace scanners and realized Kirk was
on the bridge.  "No offense intended, Spock," he said, turning around
to draw on his pants.

"None taken, Doctor," the Vulcan said from off screen.  "I assure you,
I am similarly relieved."

He pulled on his green turtleneck, buckled his pants, and turned around
again.  "When do we leave?"

"As soon as Scotty gets everything on line.  He says he can't possibly
do it in less than two days."

"So I should expect him to be ready sometime this afternoon," McCoy
asserted.

Kirk smiled.  "At the latest."

"I'll pack my bags."

"Good.  Kirk out."

After the screen winked off, McCoy sat down on the edge of the bed and
rubbed his face again.  It was a hospital bed in one of the unused
rooms on the second floor, a place to bunk down for the night and
little more, but it had become a home-away-from-home during his
extended "shore leave."  He had grown used to the quiet peacefulness of
it after hours, the view of rolling hills out the window during the
day, and the convenience of living in the midst of the colony's largest
city.

The food was about as good as cafeteria food anywhere, but it beat the
rations he and Scotty would be eating on board their converted cargo
tug.  He sighed and headed down the hall into the 'fresher, then went
on down to breakfast.  Might as well have one last real egg before he
left.

He found Lilian Coates there, delivering fresh produce from her garden
on the way to the school, where she was both the librarian and the
chief administrator.  Everyone wore multiple hats in the colony, but
McCoy wondered how she balanced two careers and still had time for
gardening.

"Good morning," he said as they met in the doorway.  "Here, let me help
you with that."  He took one of the two baskets she was carrying,
admiring the ripe tomatoes that filled it to the brim.  Her basket was
equally full of inn green peppers.

"Thank you, Doctor," she said.

He couldn't help admiring her as well, as she stepped past him.  She
looked radiant in the early morning light streaming in through the
windows.  Her light blonde hair glowed like a halo around her, and her
smooth skin and slender face gave her a delicate, almost fragile
appearance.

"How's, uh, how's Reunold this morning?"

"He seems fine.  I made him go to school today, but I'm going to tell
his teacher to keep an eye on him just in case."

"That's a good idea.  We couldn't find anything wrong yesterday, but
something made him feel bad."

"I just hope it's not contagious.  I don't want everyone in the entire
school coming down with the flu."

"They won't," McCoy assured her.  "But even if they did, I'm sure Dr.
Neville could handle it."

She nodded.  "I'm sure he can, but I have to say I'm glad to have
Starfleet's best medical officer in town as well."

"What?"  McCoy said in mock surprise.  "Is he here, too?  This town's
got more doctors than a golf course on Wednesday.  Good thing I'm
headed into space again soon, or next thing you know there'll be
lawyers."

His joke didn't have quite the effect he'd hoped for.  Lilian dropped
her basket, scattering peppers all across the floor.  "You're leaving?"
she asked.

There were maybe a dozen people seated at various tables, and two
servers in white aprons behind the counter across the room.  They all
looked up at the noise, then looked away as McCoy set down his basket
and began to gather up the peppers.  "Not the whole ship"' he said.
"Just me, and only for a few ... well, I don't know how long it'll be,
actually.  Probably a few weeks."

She bent down next to him.  "A few weeks.  Where are you going?"  She
didn't sound all that relieved at the news.

"Just a little scouting mission"' he said airily.  "The captain thinks
it's time we called on our neighbors and checked 'em out up close."

"I see."  They stacked the peppers back in her basket,

and he helped her to her feet again.  She held onto his hand a moment
longer than necessary.  "Be careful."  "Well, now," he said, "I always
am."

"Good."  She turned toward the serving line, where she set the peppers
on the counter.  "I'm sorry," she said.  to the servers, "but they'll
have to be washed again."

"That's all right, honey," said the older of the two women.  She
narrowed her eyes and added, "You look like you've seen a ghost."

"I have," she said, turning away.

McCoy set his basket on the counter beside hers and followed her to the
door.  "I'm sorry.  I brought back bad memories."

She shook her head.  "It's not your fault.  You'd think after this much
time I'd be able to get over it."

They walked down the corridor to the front door, and he followed her
outside.  "You don't just 'get over' the loss of a husband.  It can
take years to even accept it.  You're coping quite well under the
circumstances."

"Am I?"  She stopped and looked up at the eastern hillsides, still in
shadow this early in the morning.  The sun shone directly into her
face, but she didn't even blink.  "I sometimes still feel Tom's arms
around me at night.  When I'm in a noisy room, I hear his voice among
the others.  When Reunold pops around a corner, I see Tom's face first.
Is that normal?"

"For you, it apparently is.  Everybody handles grief differently' "

She turned her face toward him, and for a moment her pupils were tiny
pinpricks before they opened up.  "If this is 'handling it," then I'd
hate to watch somebody fall apart."

Her words hung between them like thick fog in the morning air.  McCoy
cursed himself for a fool.  He should have seen this coming, but he had
been so impressed by her fortitude that he had completely missed the
warning signs.  She wasn't working through her grief, she was
overworking herself to the point of exhaustion so she could forget.

"You should take some time off," he said.  "Go visit one of the other
settlements, or-" "don't-"

"Or just stay at home and read if you'd rather.  But you should set
aside some time for your sell You haven't had a spare moment since you
got here."

"I don't want a spare mo men

"Tell me what you want, then."

She started walking toward the school again.

"I'm serious," he said, keeping pace with her.  "You know better than
anyone else what would do you the most good.  Think about it.  What do
you want?"

She stopped so quickly he nearly ran into her.  She took a deep breath,
then said, "I want to go home.  Coming here was a mistake, and staying
here is an even bigger one.  This place isn't just dangerous; it's
deadly.  It's one big natural disaster after another, from the olivium
in the moon to the weather.  I'm tired of watching everyone I care
about die one by one.  I want to go home."

"That ... could be arranged," he said slowly.  "If that's what you
truly think best.  It wouldn't be a comfortable trip, but you could
probably hitch a ride on an olivium freighter."

"And be attacked by pirates the moment we crossed into unguarded space?
No, thank you.  I've had my fill of that."  She ran a hand through her
hair and said, "I guess what I really want is to already be there.  Or
better yet, to have never come here in the first place-as long as I'm
asking the impossible."

"Going home isn't impossible;' he said as they started walking again.
"But you should think it over carefully before you make a decision one
way or the other.  Make sure it's what you really want to do.  Make
sure you're going toward something and not just running away."

"Doctor, I've been going toward something all my life.  I wanted to be
there by now, but that something keeps changing, keeps moving out of my
grasp.  The irony is that I had what I wanted all along and didn't
realize it.  Now part of what I had is permanently lost."  She crossed
her arms and hugged herself in the chilly morning air.  "I'm sorry to
have unloaded on you like this, but you did ask."

"Yes, I did," McCoy admitted.  "I won't badger you about it, but I
"Want you to think about this while I'm away.  When I get back we can
talk some more.  In the meantime, why don't you give yourself a break?
Take a few days away from the school and find something that you like
to do and haven't done in a long time.  Relax and enjoy yourself."

She gave him a look that said, "Easy for you to say' but before she
could protest, he said, "Uh-uh.  Those are doctor's orders."

"Yes, Doctor," she said.  Her face softened and she added, "I'll look
forward to your return.  Maybe you can have dinner with us?"

"I'd be delighted."

She turned away from him and walked toward the low, brick schoolhouse.
Several children were playing tag on the hard-packed playground, their
laughter and squeals piercing the morning air.

McCoy watched until she disappeared into the school.  The gnawing in Is
gut was partially the effect of having one of those difficult
discussions that doesn't seem to have any good solution, and partially
from anxiety over his upcoming mission with Scotty, but there was a
third component he could not only identify but cure fairly easily: he
was downright hungry.  As he returned to the cafeteria, he wondered
what his chances were of sweet-talking one of the cooks into making an
omelette with some of those fresh tomatoes and peppers.

Chapter Seven

IT WAS AMAZFNG how quickly a mine could change the look of a place.
Even more so when the whole place was a mine.  Deloric sat by the tiny
window of the shuttle and watched the devastated landscape of the comet
slide by.  They'd been slicing away at the seemingly endless
carbon-dioxide ice for at least four days.  Now, he could see that the
constant work by hundreds of miners had carved away one whole face of
the comet.

Halfway through, he thought.  Four more days of cutting, and then what?
He still had no clue what this was all about.

Terwolan sat behind him, her booted foot pushing against the back of
his seat in a constant rhythm.  He found it both annoying and
comforting.  Annoying that he had to put up with that kind of
distraction and comforting that someone he knew was close by.  She had
no more clue to what was going on than he did.  Somehow that helped
soothe his irritation.  At least he wasn't the only one in the dark
here.

The shuttle landed with a thud as its gravity skids locked onto the
ice.  Deloric could see the workers from the previous shift gathering
to board the shuttle once his shift cleared the airlock.  There was
something different about the way they stood, waiting to get on board,
but he couldn't put a finger on what it was.

With heavy sighs of resi,nation, the miners inside the shuttle rubbed
their eyes and adjusted their ears one last time before latching down
their suit helmets for the duration of the shift.  Deloric found that
while he didn't like not being able to touch his head for hours at a
stretch, the suit had benefits other than the obvious one of keeping
him alive in the vacuum of space.  For one thing, he only had to smell
his own recycled air.  For the duration of his shift, he was free of
the stink that occurred when too many hardworking bodies lived for too
long in too small a ship.

He switched on the suit's power pack and tested the lamp and comm
units.  All working.  He was ready to fling more ice into space.

But as he descended the shuttle's ramp and headed toward the tool
locker to get his energy pick, the project overseer stepped up to the
group.  "Never mind the picks and jets"' she said over the common
frequency.  The last of the ice got sent off about mid shift  Team
leaders, go to channel two."

Deloric reached over to the control pad on his left wrist and keyed his
radio to the private channel.  A dozen others did the same.  Terwolan
and Nialerad stood there beside him, waiting for him to relay their
orders.  He wondered what they thought he learned about the project
during these beginning-of-shift briefings and whether they would be
amused or alarmed to learn that he was just as ignorant as they.

When the team leaders had switched over, the overseer said, "The rough
work is done.  We're installing the disrupter now."  She gestured over
her right shoulder toward the center of the comet's flat face.  Deloric
could see a hole carved there, one big enough for ten or fifteen people
to huddle in if they didn't mind working close together.  In the middle
of the hole stood a turret gun from a Kauld battleship.  What were they
going to do with that, defend the universe's biggest snow fort?  From
whom?  Who would want it?

He itched to ask, but instead waited for more instructions.  "Teams one
through thirteen will The overseer said,

make a topographic survey of the exposed face, finding the lowest spot
in each sector.  Teams thirty-one through fifty-five will sink pylons
into the ice inside the central crater and fuse them in place while
teams fifty-six through sixty attach the disrupter to those pylons,
mounting it so that it can be raised and lowered as well as rotated all
the way around.  We're going to slice a thevel just below the lowest in
layer off the face at a I point.  We want those pylons solid, and we
want the disruptor absolutely stable when it makes the cut.  We want
perfectly flat when you're done."  the exposed face to be ec y

Deloric looked out at the ice.  It extended for three or four rho, far
enough for a person on the opposite edge to be a mere speck.  The
miners had followed survey lines as they removed the carbon dioxide
blocks, but they had still left behind a rough surface crisscrossed
with gouges and cuts.  There were knee-deep valleys where overeager
crews had dug deeper than their neighbors, and there were voids where
pockets of methane ice had boiled off from the heat of the mining
activity.  He spoke up.  "If we cut deep enough we can take care of the
surface irregularities, but what about the voids?  We've been hitting
those all the way through.  There are bound to be some at whatever
level we make the cut."

The overseer said, "Fill those in with waste material from the part we
cut away, then make one final pass to polish it flat.  We're talking
optically flat here.  Deviation of half a wavelength of light or less'
"

"Half a wavelength?"  he said softly, awed at the idea of smoothing
something this big that precisely.  "What for?"

"You don't need to know."  Her tone of voice made it clear he shouldn't
have even asked.

"Right.  Sorry.  We'll make it flat."

"Good

She reached out to her arm and clicked her radio control back over to
the common channel.  He did the same.  "All right, people, get to
work."

Deloc's team was number twenty-three.  He switched his radio to the
team's private channel and said, "We're surveyors today, marking low
spots.  Terwolan, you take the rod.  Nialerad, you set points and
record their elevation.  I'll run the level."

"Oh, sure, you take the cushy job Terwolan said.

He knew she was just kidding, but he didn't know how to answer her
except with the truth.  "I take the job with the most responsibility.
That way if we mess up, they only shout at me.  You want to swap places
and get into the loop?"

She snorted.  "Hah.  They don't pay me enough to be responsible."

The three of them walked over to the tool locker,

their footsteps slow and deliberate with only the gravity boots to hold
them to the ice.  They had taken their turn as surveyors before, so
they already knew what to do without further instruction.  Edging
around a stack of paint drums that hadn't been there yesterday-silver,
Deloric noted-he picked out a level from the shelves of equipment,
looking for one that had less dings and wear-and-tear than some of its
neighbors.  Nialerad and Terwolan didn't seem to care as much about the
condition of their tools.  They just grabbed for stuff-a mallet, a bag
of stakes, a data pad and a graduated range pole.  He was about to tell
Terwolan to get a different rod since the one she snatched was bowed,
but attitude or not, she was an observant worker.  She sighted down its
length before heading out, quickly saw the flaw, and replaced it.

Deloric conferred with the other team leaders, and they decided to
divide the surface of the comet into (I" pie-shaped wedges, one for
each crew.  Everyone headed out to the middle to start, kicking off and
drifting over the ice rather than trudging along its surface.  They
traveled in a close pack, always within reach of someone else in case
someone drifted too far from the ice to reach it with a gravity boot.

As they approached the crater with the disrupter in it, Deloric
realized just how big the gun was.  The business mulator was end was as
wide as his body, and the accu easily d= times his length.  This was a
heavy assault weapon, designed to overload an enemy starship's shields
and slice aB the way through the hull beneath.  Carbondioxide ice would
be as U& as smoke as far as that gun was concerned.  Even at low power,
it would slice off the face of the comet without a whisper of
resistance.

Was this the only tool they had for the job?  That seemed unlikely.  If
they had access to this kind of weapon, they had access to tactical
beams as well.  And given the heavy losses that the fleet had taken in
their battles with Federation, no commander would sacrifice even a
single big gun without a very good reason.

They needed this one right where it was.  That meant they expected to
use it for more than just leveling the comet's face.  He looked upward,
toward the star five light-days away.  He wouldn't be able to spot a
hostile ship until it disengaged its dynadrive right over their heads,
but he couldn't help wondering if he should be expecting company.

Not on this shift, he decided, or the overseers would be working
everyone harder.

He stretched out and touched his toe to the ice behind him, letting his
boots' angled gravity field provide enough drag to slow him to a stop
just short of the crater.  The others skidded to a stop around him,
except for Nialerad, who misjudged and skidded out over the edge.
Without a word, he whirled around and got his hands in front of him in
time to bounce off the disruptor barrel, then pushed himself back
beside his crew.

"Good reflexes"' Deloric told him, well aware that everyone else was
laughing on their own private channels.

"Boot caught a void," Nialerad said.

"Ah."  Deloric led the way around to the point of the section they'd be
surveying and set up his level while Terwolan and ?4ialerad trudged out
a few hundred paces.  He enjoyed surveying.  It wasn't rocket science,
but it made more use of his brain than pick work.  He sighted in on
three of the reference beacons set around the perimeter of the comet's
face, establishing the same datum as everyone else, then focused on the
graduated rod that Terwolan held in a shallow depression.  "Seven point
six two," he said, reading the marks off the scale.  Nialerad entered
the elevation into his data pad then marked it with a stake while
Terwolan walked on to ward the next low SpOt They quickly learned that
Deloric could see the depressions much more easily from a distance than
the other two could when they were right over them.  He began directing
them from spot to spot, zigzagging them back and forth in an
ever-broadening pattern as their pie-wedge opened out before them.

The first dozen stakes went quickly, but they soon realized their part
of the comet was riddled with small voids.  The crew who'd mined here
must have been cursing their bad luck while trying to get an acceptable
ri kl piece of ice to ship off.  Delo c's crew quic y began to curse
theirs too, because they repeatedly had to make judgment calls as to
which ones could be filled and which ones should be undercut.

As the crews expanded outward and the team leaders reported back their
lowest readings, the job became easier and easier.  Since the whole
purpose of what they were doing was to find the level at which the
disruptor would make its slice, there was no point in marking anything
that wasn't lower than what someone had already found, so they quickly
switched into a competitive rush to break the current record.  It
became a game, with people shouting their results over the common
frequency and people betting on the final winner.

Over it all, the turret gun hunched menacingly at the center of all
their antics, like a grim ruler Overseeing his loyal but ignorant serfs
as they toiled for his secret mission.  Whatever that mission was, it
continued to elude Deloric.  He examined the mount, admiring the way
the emitter could swing through a complete circle in every direction.
It had been designed to go on the tip of a warship's fin, where it
would be able to defend the most area around the vessel.  Here it would
punch holes clear through what was left of the comet if it fired
downward-a definite surprise for anyone on the other side!-but Deloric
doubted if that was its purpose.  They wouldn't have needed to cut away
so much ice just to do that.

No, whatever the disruptor was supposed to shoot at after it leveled
the comet's face, it would be on this side.  Except that there was only
one thing within range: the long stream of carbon dioxide ice they had
been sending in-system.

The disrupter beam would vaporize that in an instant.  He could see no
good reason to do that.  It wasn't like it would explode or anything;
it would just become an expanding column of carbon dioxide vapor.

Aimed right at the Federation colony planet.

With an optically flat surface at one end.

An ugly suspicion began to grow in his mind.  He'd seen the barrels of
silver paint, waiting beside the tool locker.  He was willing to bet
that their next job would be to spray the face of the comet with it.
"Hey"' Terwolan said.  "I'm standing here."  "Hmm?"  He looked down,
disoriented.  "You want to call out the shot?"  The shot.  Holy father
of terror, the shot.

Chapter Eight

"GET READY, DOCTOR," SCOtty said as he reached for the tug's warp
controls.  '-This may be a wee bit rougher than you're used to."

"How rough?"  McCoy asked, his eyes narrowing and wrinkles appearing in
his forehead.  He was seated in the copilot's chair before the
wraparound control board, but he was studiously avoiding contact with
anything vital.  Scotty was happy to see that; after all the
modifications he'd done to this pile of scrap, piloting it was going to
be tricky enough without conflicting commands from an inexperienced
copilot "I'd lean back in my chair if I were you," he said.  "At least
until the inertial dampers adapt to the engines' new performance
figures."

McCoy didn't look happy about that.  He apparently knew enough about
engineering to know what could happen if the inertial dampers were off
by more than a few hundredths of a percent when a ship went into warp.
Even his superb medical skills couldn't help a person who was smeared
into strawberry jam against the rear bulkhead.

"Wait a minute," the doctor said.  "I think I forgot my razor back on
the Enterprise.  Why don't I go get it while you make a test flight or
two?"

Scotty looked at him askance.  "You can borrow mine.  Hang on, here we
go."  He shoved the lever forward, feeling the electrical contacts
connect with the smooth swish of copper sliding on copper.

Hard wiring, he thought.  What have I gotten myself into?  All the
same, he felt a thrill as the tug responded and leaped into warp.  True
to his warning, the little ship shimmied and bucked like a targ on a
tether.  He glanced up at the viewscreen and saw not the normal smooth,
straight streaks of hyperspace shooting past them, but an insane jumble
of bright zigzags.  The small control cabin creaked and groaned as
engines designed to haul huge cargo containers from star to star poured
all their power into just the tug.

That alone would have made for a bumpy ride, since Scotty had stripped
the tug down to the bare minimum, leaving practically no inertial mass
to smooth things out when spatial anomalies influenced the warp field;
but he had made one other modification to the craft that affected it
even more.  The engines normally ran on antimatter, but antimatter was
in short supply this far from civilization.  There was, however, a lot
of quantum olivium just waiting for a good home, and that was even more
powerful than antimatter.  Where antimatter merely released its energy
by annihilation with normal matter, quantum olivium catalyzed the
annihilation of space itself.  It was like having a miniature Big Bang
continually erupting inside your containment field.  He hoped it would
stay inside the containment field.

That was the tricky part.

Squinting to read the bluny displays, he adjusted the Schofield
converters to route more POwer into the field generating coils.

After the longest eight seconds in history, the inertial dampers'
active logic matrix finally adapted to the new thrust parameters, and
with a last swift kick in the rear as the new program took effect, the
buffeting settled down.  Scotty called up the status monitors and
double checked the ship's major systems.  Navigation, communications,
shields, and what weapons arrays they had were all optimal.  The
external sensors needed calibration, and the autogailey had gone
off-line during the ride, but other than that they were in the green.

"Hah!  Not bad for a derelict old can of bolts, don't ye think, Doctor?
Doctor?"

He turned to see Dr.  McCoy taking deep breaths and slowly releasing
his grip, finger by finger, from the worn armrests of the copilot's
chair.  His eyes were wide, and his eyebrows were knotted together over
the bridge of his nose.  "Not bad?  I just saw my whole life flash
before my eyes."

"Really?"  ScottY made a show of checking the readouts.  "Must ha' been
a leak in the chroniton flux generators McCoy eyed him stonily.
"There's no such thing."  "Ah.  Well, then, that explains it."  Scotty
looked at the navigation display for real.  we're doing warp eleven
point eight:' he reported happily.  "At this pace, we'll reach our
first target star in less than a day."

"What's the name of it?"

"BTS 453."

"That's not a name."

"It's all we've got.  It stands for "Belle Terre Survey' object number
453.  Spock's been doing deep space scans when Gamma Night lets up, and
this star apparently has evidence of a technological civilization on
one of its planets."

McCoy flexed his hands.  "Spock.  I should have known.  "BTS 453' is
exactly the sort of fond, endearing name he'd give a star with people
living around it."

"We could give it our own name, I suppose," Scotty said.

McCoy thought it over, then shook his head.  "No point in it.  We'll
learn what the natives call it soon enough

That was certainly true, Scotty thought with pride, but from his tone
of voice, McCoy didn't seem to appreciate just how fast they were
going.  At her normal cruising speed, it would have taken the
Enterprise five days to cover the distance they would be covering in
one.  The Enterprise couldn't even reach warp 11.8 without risking
severe damage; to maintain that speed for more than a few minutes would
be suicidal.  This converted tug however, with its souped-up engines
and tight, form-fitting little warp field, could keep it up
indefinitely.

A sudden thought made him cock his head and say, "I'll tell you what
else could use a name, though."  "What?"

"This ship."

"Didn't it come with one?"

"It was called the Selenite when it was in service, but the nameplate
was on a hull section we left behind, to cut down on mass.  At the
moment we're just BTR 23."  "Let me guess.  Belle Terre Reserve?"

"Registry."

"Ah" McCoy rubbed his chin and stared out at the white streaks that
space debris made as it swept pas them in hyperspace.  "Well, it's
fast, so why don't we just make a play off the initials and call it
Beater?

Scotty snorted.

"What?"  asked McCoy, frowning.

"You, ah, weren't into garage mechanics when you were young, were
you?"

"No."

"A 'beater' is what you call something that's worn out, held together
with wire and prayers, and is gener about you but I was certainly
praying just a minute ago' Scotty patted the bulkhead at his side.
"Aye, but I was just bein' affectionate.  We don't want to-"

An alarm drowned him out in mid-sentence.  He looked to the control
board, saw that the plasma-flow couplings were starting to overheat,
and adjusted the thermal dampers to compensate; but that overloaded the
power transducer, which in turn sent a ripple of overloads through the
accumulator buffers, the Heisenberg baffles, and the phase-control
monitors.  Half of the controls were manual; Scotty busied himself with
adjusting things back into operating range, but the computer kept
overcompensating with the systems it still controlled, and the values
began to oscillate back and forth as he struggled to outguess it.

The ride grew bumpy again.  "Now what?"  McCoy demanded, but Scotty
ignored him.  He needed all his concentration on the controls.  But
even that wasn't enough.  The oscillations grew wilder and wilder until
finally, just before the olivium reaction went critical, he slapped the
emergency abort switch and yanked back on the T-handle.

There was a stomach-wrenching twist as they turn bled back into normal
space, then the buzzing alarms quieted one by one until the cockpit was
silent.  " On second thought," Scotty said, "I think Beater suits it
just fine."  He stood up and squeezed past McCoy's chair to the access
door into the tiny crew quarters and the engine room beyond.  "Come on,
Doctor.  Let's go see what we need to wire back into place."

Chapter Nine

VELLYNGAITH, the commander of the All Kauld fleet, he was giving to the
room full of paused in the speech his warship captains.  They had come
here at his orders, though some were less than enthusiastic about the
meeting.  He knew many of them were disillusioned with the way the war
with the humans had gone.  Several had sustained major damage to their
ships and lost many fine members of their crews.  But he could see that
despite themselves, they were very interested in what he'd been saying.
By Kurzot, they should be.

These Federation vermin were proving tougher to dispatch than
Vellyngaith had estimated.  By all rights, it should have been as easy
as a steeth taking out a sick zagette that had strayed too far from the
herd.  Obviously, this particular zagette wasn't as lame as he had
thought, but there had to be a Iffit.  He suspected it was well below
the power he was bringing to bear this time.

The last major offensive had nearly worked, but Kirk had managed to
turn the tide of battle at the last moment.  The Kauld fleet had
sustained tremendous damage and had ultimately been forced to withdraw,
but not before seeing the colony and their Starfleet protectors suffer
as well.  Even so, Kirk still controlled the olivium mines on the
colony planet's moon.  Every time he thought of that travesty,
Vellyngaith's blood churned and he ground his jaws in anger.

He looked about the room and realized that every other Kauld here felt
the same way.  Many of those in this audience had crossed paths with
that annoying human, and none of them had come away any more victorious
than Vellyngaith.  Kirk seemed blessed by fate, favored by the gods,
and luckier than chance itself That alone would make him an obvious
target for anyone with a sense of proportion, but he also had an ego
the size of the galaxy.  He was just begging to be knocked down.  Even
if he didn't control the most valuable prize in this sector of
space-the Kauld's sector at that-he would attract the attention of
every warship commander in this room.

He would continue to win, too, unless a radical new battle tactic were
employed.  One like Vellyngaith was about to unveil.

"The humans;' he spat the word as though it tasted foul, "have had luck
on their side.  But it is they who are in the wrong here.  It is they
who have taken what is not theirs to take.  It is our moral obligation
to make a stand and take back what is rightfully ours."

The assembled captains cheered his words.  He basked in their response
to his pep talk.  What he'd said so far was nothing that any of them
hadn't thought of on their own.  Perhaps that was why they cheered,

because someone of his level had underscored their own feelings.  Well,
the best part was still to come.

He clasped his hands together behind his back and, leaned forward.  "I
need not tell you how the humans have humiliated us, time and again.
But I tell you now,

their time has run out."

"What makes you so sure?"  The voice was deep, resonant and full of
scorn Vellyngaith spotted the heckler in the crowd.  Gongalen, captain
of the Shar s f, at, arms crossed and waiting for an answer.
Vellyngaith recognized him as a tough Kauld with a sharp mind and a
sharper tongue that often brought him more than his share of trouble,
but his battle record spoke for itself.  And his timing is perfect,
Vellyngaith thought.

"My sources inform me that the humans have sustained heavy losses due
to severe weather on the planet.  They underestimated how badly the
climate was affected when the explosion on the olivium moon flash
burned the planet's one main supercontinent.  Ever since they landed,
they have struggled for mere survival, but they are slowly losing the
battle.  For instance, they apparently parked most of their
ground-to-orbit craft on low ground.  Several settlements, including
one of the four largest, were also in the same valley.  All were
completely wiped out by a flood."

He advanced the wall screen's display to show reconnaissance photos of
the devastation.  The explosion on the moon had blown huge chunks of
regolith free, some of which had impacted the planet below, creating
craters that had filled with water during the torrential r walls were
highly un rains that followed.  Those crate stable, and one had finally
given way, flooding the entire valley below it within minutes.

"This is only the latest of many natural disasters to befall them.  And
with every such setback, the colonists have concentrated on rebuilding
their settlements rather than their defenses.  We, on the other hand,
have kept a low profile after our last near-win, thus adding to their
false sense of security."  He paused again, letting the crowd's
anticipation grow just to the edge of annoyance before flipping the
wall screen to the next sequence.

"During this time, not only have we repaired our ships and trained new
recruits, we have built another fleet' " He timed his announcement to
coincide with a display of several shiny new Kauld warships.

The commanders erupted in bedlam at the sight of such an array of
ships, but a loud, grating voice cut through the others like a knife
through unantiored flesh.  '-Ms is a simulation.  Such a fleet would
take years to build.  By the time they are finished, we -will have
already won It was Yanorada, whose own plan of attack had just been
triggered a few days earlier.

Vellyngaith acknowledged his statement with a slight bow.  "So we
thought, which was why we approved your plan.  But then we realized the
flaw in our thinking.  We don't need to build a fleet of ships from
scratch.  We need only to fortify that which is already available to
us. In reality, only three ships will see their maiden voyage.  The
rest are either exploration vessels, cargo transports, or mining barges
that have been refitted with armor and weapons, using the newest
technology available.  And I do mean the newest olivium technology."

The murmur rose from the assembly as they digested this new piece of
information.  It was the reaction Vellyngaith expected.  If all went
well with the rest of his presentation, there would be many similar
reactions from the audience.  By the end of the session, he planned to
have each and every one of these captains believing that he was the
greatest tactician his people had ever known.

He wasn't there yet.  Gongalen spoke up again.  "Technology is only
part of a successful battle.  The finest ships alone cannot win if the
enemy is clever.  It is the Kauld behind the controls that makes the
difference.  The captain of a cargo ship may do his job well, but that
doesn't mean he can win a battle."  Some captains nodded, while others
whispered in their neighbor's ear.

"I can't agree with you morel" Vellyngaith said, regaining the floor.
"W%eh is another reason you are all here.  It .  will be with your
input that I will issue the new promotions and assignments-"

More murmurs and whisperings rose from the audience.  This could affect
them directly.  Someone had to fly those pretty new ships!

"And then there is our secret weapon."  He pressed the control that
would advance the display again, at the same time saying, "Yanorada's
plan will destroy the planet's atmosphere, but it will take time.  Time
we don't have.  My plan will destroy the atmosphere, wipe out the human
colony, and burn the surface down to bedrock-in seconds."

The screen showed the planet resting serenely in space, swirls of cloud
scattered across its day side, the terminator drawing a dark curve
around its bulging flank.  Then, without warning, the scene turned
brilliant blue, and the clouds were ripped away like leaves in a
hurricane.  The entire atmosphere churned, slid sideways, and streamed
out into space, while the continents beneath were charred black and the
exposed oceans began to boil.

He let it go for a few more seconds, then froze the image.  "None of
you need to know how this will be accomplished.  All you need to know
is that it will happen.  My weapon will wipe out the colony once and
for all."

This time the entire room erupted in shouted questions and accusations,
but Vellyngaith merely let them go on for a few seconds, then said
loudly, "I stake my future upon this.  It will work.  But I will not
risk a leak from any source, not until the ... device ... has already
been triggered."  The room settled down, if only so people could hear
him.

He didn't answer their questions, merely went on with his presentation.
"As I said, I will wipe out the colony, and I will do it without the
loss of a single Kauld ship.  Unfortunately, that cannot be said of the
final phase of the attack:'

He flicked the screen to the next simulation.  The Enterprise leaped
toward the assembled captains, drawing a strangled cry of dismay from a
few and growls of anger from the rest.  Behind the Enterprise, dozens
more Federation ships swooped into view, their shields shimmering
around them.

"Given enough time, our secret weapon can also burn through a
starship's shields.  We may be lucky enough to kill one or two before
they scurry for cover, but as I noted earlier, luck seems to favor the
Federation. Therefore we will not rely on luck.  We will rely on our
own skill and our newly augmented fleet to finish them in ship-to ship
combat."  The simulation showed the All Kauld warships swooping around
the Federation ships, whittling away at their defenses until a final
barrage of disruptor fire blew them apart one by one, like the grand
finale in a fireworks display.  He let it run until the last ship was
an expanding cloud of debris, then shut off the screen.

"We have ten days to prepare.  On day eleven, Belle Terre and its
olivium moon will be ours."

 Chapter Ten

CAP,rMN KJRK paused at the door to the library.  Through the window he
could see half a dozen school children crowded around the front desk,
where Lilian Coates was reading aloud to them from a picture book. 
They were young, maybe seven or eight years old, though Kirk was not
good at judging children's age.

This didn't seem a good time to interrupt, but as he turned away from
the window he saw Lilian turn the book around so the kids could look at
the pictures, and he saw that she only had three or four more pages to
go.  She was reading them Archie Echidna Goes to Arcturus, a book that
had been popular when Kirk was a boy.  He smiled as he remembered the
spiny marsupial's adventures among the vegetable people, and how Archie
had fallen in love with a sea urchin.

He looked at his own book while Lilian read the next page of hers and
showed her audience the pictures.

He'd smoothed out the dog-eared page and finished reading it, but his
mind hadn't really Meen on the story.  He'd been running through
contingency plans for defending the colony under any conceivable attack
scenario, trying to tally the numbers of available ships and potential
crews.

He leaned against the wall next to the door.  The faint noises of
school activity echoed down from the classrooms along either side of
the hallway, while thoughts of training a citizen's defense network
mingled with thoughts on the tactics of gaining Governor Pardonnet's
support for the program.  Both men had the colony's best interests at
heart, but they disagreed on what posed the biggest threat to its
well-being.  They were both trying to predict the future, but there
were only a limited number of resources to go around, and neither man
wanted to waste them on the wrong project.

One aspect of the future of which Kirk was certain: they had not seen
the end of trouble from the Kauld.  This lull in activity only meant
they were regrouping for more aggression to come, and the longer they
waited the bigger that trouble would be.  The suicidal run of the lone
Kauld ship nearly a week ago still bothered him, too.  That was a
radical departure from their normal tactics.  It hadn't worked, but he
couldn't help wondering what else they might try.  What other
unexpected approaches should he expect?

"Holding up the wall, Captain?"  Lilian asked.  She had opened the door
so softly he hadn't even noticed.  She was smiling mischievously, her
light skin and blonde hair aglow in the overhead light.

"I, ah, was just checking for gravitational anomalies"' he said as he
straightened up.  He decided that sounded lame the moment he said it,
but she smiled anyway.

"Always nice to know you're looking out for us."

"Actually, I saw you reading to the kids and didn It want to
interrupt."

"Ah.  That was very thoughtful of you.  We're done now."  She held the
door open for him.

"I was just bringing back a book," he said, handing it to her, but he
followed her inside as she walked toward her desk.  By virtue of its
age, the library didn't smell like others that Kirk had visited.  The
books were all too new to have that dusty, closed-in smell ' Instead,
he imagined that this was more like what a late twentieth-century Earth
bookstore or print shop might have smelled like.  Fresh paper, wet ink,
and bindery glue.

She set the book on the polished wooden top along with dozens of others
to be checked back in, but she didn't go around behind the desk.  She
leaned back against the rounded edge, her hands resting there beside
her hips, and said, "I heard that Shucorion's people are going to help
the flood survivors with emergency building materials."

"That's right," he said, proud of that little bit of timegotiation.

"Any chance of tacking on a couple hundred desks and chairs to that
order?"

"I ... hadn't thought of that.  Are you short that many?"

"We're not, since not many of the refugees came this far, but most of
the schools between here and there are donating equipment to resupply
what they lost, and I'm coordinating the effort.  I've asked Bill
Thorpe about building new furniture, but he says most of the good
lumber trees were destroyed in the Burn, so we don't have a lot of
spare wood to build replacements with."

"Furniture " Kirk said, shaking his head.  "Every time I think I've got
a handle on the extent-of things, something new pops up that I've
forgotten."

"You can't think of everything," Lilian said.  "It's not your
responsibility.  anyway.  I should have put in my request through
normal channels."  "I'll look into it.

"No, no, that's all right," he said.  It'll probably amuse Shucorion to
be asked for something so mundane."

"The mundane can seem pretty important when you have to do without it."
She crossed her arms in front of her chest.  "I feel so bad for all the
people along the Big Muddy.  I wish there was more I could do for
them."

"I've seen pie res, but I don't really ow like for the survivors."

Kirk thought it over for a moment before he said, "I'm going out there
for a look at their defense situation.  I'm taking an airplane so I can
get a feel for the territory.  Would you like to come along?  Maybe
it'll give you a better idea of what they need, too."

She was already saying, "Oh, I couldn't possibly:' when she stopped
herself, frowning, then said, "All right.  They can do without me for a
while here.  Let me tell the principal where I'm going."

She went around to the other side of her desk and pressed an intercom
button on the recessed communications panel.  "Paul, it's Lilian.  I'm
taking the after noon off."

By the sound of his voice, Paul seemed nearly as surprised as Kirk had
been.  You are?  That's-that's great!  Have fun."

"It's not for fun," she said.  "I'm going on a tour of the Big Muddy
with Captain Kirk."  Then she looked up at Kirk, realizing how that
sounded, and blushed.  "I didn't mean it that way."

Kirk smiled and said, "That's okay.  I know what you mean.  Besides,
once we get to Big Muddy, I suspect there won't be too much to enjoy.
But the trip to and from can be quite pleasant, and it looks like it
should be a nice day for flying."

Lilian glanced over her shoulder at the small window behind her desk.
Kirk followed her gaze.  Bright rays of early afternoon sunlight
sparkled against the small ripples and irregularities in the glass.

"It's been a lovely week.  Such a relief from the rainy season"' she
said.  She turned back to her desk and tucked in her chair.  "Well,
shall we go?  Or did you want to check out another book?"

He looked longingly at the shelves of books, their spines all straight
and even with each other.  "Later, maybe.  I have too many other things
on my mind at the moment to be able to read for pleasure."

They left the building and started walking the several blocks to the
airstrip.  It seemed only fitting that a pioneer town like Buena Vista
would have something as quaint as an airstrip.  The colonies had had a
fleet of shuttles when they first arrived, but due to poor planning
most of them had been lost in the Big Muddy flood.  Kirk thought of the
incident as the All Your Eggs In One Basket Disaster, but thanks to
Sulu's ingenuity the colonies still had a quick means of transportation
between towns, using his propeller-driven airplanes.  "Have you ever
been in one of the colony's planes?  Kirk asked Lilian.  She looked at
him and said, "Not yet.  But I have flown before.  My Uncle Lee had a
pilot's license back when I was just a kid.  He'd show up at family
gather(I take whoever wanted to go on plane fides."  ings an She smiled
at the memory.  "He could only take one at a time, so all my siblings
and cousins would argue about who'd get to go first."

"Must have been a small plane."

"Very small.  It was a replica of an old gasoline powered model.  A
something-or-other Kitten, or maybe it was a Cub.  Some little animal
name, anyway.  It had an electric engine, of course, but I remember the
propeller still made a lot of noise."

"So I've heard"' Kirk agreed.

"There were just two seats, one in front and one behind " Her eyes went
all dreamy, recalling her childhood.  '-The first time he took me for a
ride, I must have been about eight, not much older than those children
I was reading to.  It was late autumn, and he made me put on this heavy
denim overall because he said it'd get cold up there.  He helped me
roll up the sleeves and the legs, and then boosted me into the front
seat of the plane.  My first thought was, "He going to let me drive!"
"

"Not, "I don't know how'?"  Kirk asked, grinning.

"That was my next thought."  She laughed and said, "Before I could
embarrass myself, Uncle Lee told me that he always flew from the back
seat.  I still remember the feeling I had then, relief and
disappointment all at once.  B-ut that all went away when we took off
and I saw what our town looked like from the air.  All the leaves on
the trees were tun-ring color, and I could see my school and our house.
It was pure manic."

"It sounds like it."

She nodded.  "My mother would get all nervous about us flying in that
plane, because Uncle Lee had built it himself and the shell was just
canvas stretched around the frame.  She was sure it was a deathtrap.
But she let us go anyway.  My brothers and I thought she was such a
worrywart, but I look back on it now and think she was a brave
woman."

They turned off the main road and walked toward the airstrip, where a
bright orange wind sock extended at a shallow angle out to the west
from a high pole beside the grass runway, and a boxy gray airplane
waited on the ground outside a metal hangar.  Its angular fuselage and
straight wings had been riveted together from pieces of old cargo
containers, and its windshield was made of two flat panes of glass set
at an angle.  The whole works only stood a little taller than a person,
even counting its three spindly legs.  The single propeller in front
looked far too small to pull even such a tiny vehicle through the air,
but these planes had already proven themselves time and time again long
before the flood wiped out the regular shuttle fleet.

The pilot was walking slowly around the plane, examining the control
surfaces and their linkages.  Kirk was glad to see him doing that,
since there were no alltomatic diagnostics and no way to make in-flight
repairs if something went wrong.

The pilot saw Kirk and Lilian walking up to the plane and straightened
up to say "Hi"' but he forgot he was standing under the wing and his
head hit the hoi low surface with a loud bong!

"Oh, are you all right?"  Lilian said, rushing up to him.

He blushed red as a brick.  "I'm fine, thanks.  Name's Herman.  I'll be
your pilot."

"Here, let me see," Lilian said, standing on tiptoe to look at the top
of his head.

While she fussed over the pilot, Kirk looked up at the wing.  Herman
was a tall, stocky man; if anything had been harmed, that would be
where the damage was.

There were no obvious dents in the wing, and apparently none in his
scalp either.  He finally supceeded in fending off Lilian's attentions
and coaxing her and Kirk into the planets Ki

There were two sea in back and two in front.  rk helped Lilian into the
back seat behind the pilot's chair,

then took the copilot's seat for himself.  He pulled the wide shoulder
belts down from either side of the seat back, crossed them over his
chest, and buckled them into sc>ckets at either side of his hips.  A
third belt went across his lap, tying him down securely.  He looked
back to make sure Lilian was belted in as well, and she flashed him a
thumbs-up.

He looked back at the control panel in front of him.  There was a dual
set of everything, but he had no intenlion of touching any of it,
except in an emergency.  The U-shaped steering yoke moved in all three
dimensions, there were control pedals for his feet as well, and enough
dials and gauges on the panel in front of him to give a starship
navigator a nervous breakdown.

"Have you flown before, Captain?"  asked Herman as he climbed into the
seat next to him.  The entire plane shifted under his weight.  It
couldn't mass more than a couple hundred kilograms-probably less than
the combined mass of its passengers "Not one of these"' Kirk
admitted.

From behind him, Lilian said, "I thought you had done this before!"

"I've flown planes," Kirk said.  "And shuttles and fighters and
starships.  I flew a planet once.  But never a plane quite like
this."

"It's a kick in the pants"' Herman said as he pressed the start switch
and the propeller started spinning.  "Once I get erin the air, I'll
show you how."

Kirk felt the same electric tingle of anticipation that he'd felt the
fhst time he commanded a starship out of space dock, but as the plane
shook in the propeller's backwash, he also felt for the communicator on
his hip.  In an emergency, he could always call for a beam-out.  Then
he remembered why he'd scheduled the plane ride when he had: Gamma
Night was just about to hit.  He had decided to get something useful
done during the blackout for a change.  The Enterprise would be safe
enough with Spock in command, and the colony's airplanes were
pffiffitive enough that they weren't affected by the particle storm, so
it made sense to use the time for flying.

It had made sense while he was on board the Enterprise, at least.  Now
that he sat in the cobbled-together contraption and contemplated riding
it into the sky, it didn't seem quite so bright an idea, but he wasn't
about to back out now.

Herman shoved the control yoke all the way forward, pulled it all the
way back, and rotated it from side to side, watching the ailerons and
elevator respond out on the wings.  The controls on Kirk's side
mimicked his motion, momentarily giving him the uncomfortable feeling
that a ghost was sitting on his lap.

Then Herman released the parking brake and let the plane roll forward,
bouncing gently over the irregularities in the ground until they
reached the runway.  He looked to the right-the direction the orange
wind sock on its high pole was blowing-then to the left, and when he
was satisfied that the air was clear, he turned right and taxied down
to the end of the runway.  As he maneuvered the plane around, Kirk
could see bumps and low spots down the strip.  Though he knew the
ground had been rolled flat and the grass mowed short when the airstrip
was built, it didn't look like anyone had smoothed the surface since
the last rainstorm.

Before he could point this out to Herman, the pilot pushed on the right
foot pedal and ramped up the engine, spinning the tiny plane around in
a tight half circle until they were pointed back down the runway.  Then
he shoved the throttle all the way forward for takeoff.  The noise from
the props was as loud as Lilian had described, and Kirk could see that
Herman was concentrating on the job at hand.

The little plane bounced down the runway, gaining speed.  Kirk's teeth
rattled and he was glad for the seat belt that kept him from banging
his head against the rippling metal roof.  He glanced back at Lilian,
worried that she'd be upset by all the jouncing, but she was peering
out the window, watching with a broad smile on her delicate face as the
landscape rushed by.  just when Kirk was sure the contraption was going
to shake itself to pieces, Herman pulled back on the yoke to bring the
plane's nose skyward, and the rest of it followed.  As soon as the
wheels left the ground the shaking stopped, and the plane's engine
sounded smooth and strong.  The horizon took on a less-than horizontal
angle as they climbed.

Herman banked the plane and blue sky filled most of the view from
Kirk's side, while Lilian's side of the plane got a breathtaking view
of the countryside below.  He could see her studying the features of
the land; then she looked up at him all excited.

She pointed at the ground and said something" but the drone of the
engine and propeller drowned her words.  He couldn't quite read her
lips, either.  Was she saying, 'a bee tattoo!"?

His confusion must have been evident.  She loosened her harness and
scooted close enough that he could smell the minty scent of her hair.
She said into his ear, "I can see the school!"

"Oh!"  he shouted back.

She didn't wait for him to say more.  With a smile befitting an excited
eight-year-old, she pressed her nose back to the window.

Chapter Eleven

MCCoy PEERED past Scotty's shoulders, trying to see what the engineer
was doing inside the cramped access panel.  From the curses and thumps
emanating from within, it sounded like Scotty was battling an
infestation of Gorsonian zools, but he swore he was merely
recalibrating the thermal dampers on the plasma-flow couplings.

It might as well have been zools for all McCoy knew.  In fact, if it
had been zools, he might actually have been able to help.  As it was,
he'd been stuck holding the light while Scotty crawled in up to his
waist inside the engines and battled entropy on his own.

The engine room was the size of a cargo bay, but there was barely room
enough for two people to stand abreast anywhere in it.  Huge hulks of
gray, humming machinery loomed out from all sides, and more receded
into the darkness beneath the wire mesh catwalk on which McCoy stood.
Pipes and cables connected them all together in a jumble worse than any
nervous system he had ever seen, and the air smelled of hot metal where
something had burned.  There had once been lights overhead, but only
two of them still worked, both on the far side of the cavernous room. A
parallelogram of light spilled off to the side from the open doorway
into the crew quarters, just forward of the engine room, but it shone
at the wrong angle to help either McCoy or Scotty see what they were
doing.

The place had all the atmosphere of a cemetery on a muggy night.  McCoy
would have sworn he heard something moving back there among the
reactors and the generators, but he knew there couldn't be.  Scotty and
his engineering team had practically rebuilt the ship from the
viewscreen back; they would have spotted anything bigger than a
mouse.

"Could ye hold the light a wee bit more to the left?"  Scotty said for
maybe the tenth time in as many minutes.

McCoy obligingly shifted the beam, but the access hatch was too small
for him to move it more than a couple of centimeters before the light
was shining on the outside of the engine housing instead of the inner
workings..  'enat's as far as it'll go."

"Try the other side, then," Scotty said.  "I've got a loose helical
coupling and I can't see to get the torque amplifier on it."

McCoy shifted the light again and held it steady while he tried to
parse out the engineer's words.  Helical couplings and torque
amplifiers sounded so techy, but he was a scientist; he should be able
to figure them out.  He tried to imagine what they would be.  A helix
would be like a DNA molecule, and a coupling would be something that
joined two other things together.  And a torque amplifier... "Wait a
minute," he said.  "You're talking about a bolt and a wrench."

Scotty snorted.  "Aye, that I am, but a helical coupling bears about as
much resemblance to a simple bolt as a subdermal hematoma does to an
'owie."  "

"A subdermal hematoma generally is an 'owie," McCoy said.  "Except when
it's idiopathic."

Scotty considered that a moment.  "What's 'idiopathic?"  "

"It's a fancy word for 'we don't know what causes it.  "Vkat's a torque
amplifier?"

"It's a fancy wrench."  Scotty wriggled sideways, shoved his right hand
out the hatch, and waved the long, slender instrument he held in his
fingers.  It was about thirty centimeters long, tapered to a blunt
point on one end, and had at least a dozen thumb switches along the
handle.  A glowing display beneath the switches registered 0 Newtons.

"When I touch it to a helical coupling, it reads the torque
specifications from the coupling's embedded microchip and adjusts its
force field to the proper range, then either loosens or tightens it as
necessary.  %Uch is why I don't want t' be fooling around with it in
the dark.  If I accidentally remove an engine mount, we could wind up
with a serious problem next time we call for thrust."

"Oh," said McCoy, holding the light a little steadier while Scotty
pulled the tool back inside the engine compartment with him.  "Why
don't they put a light on the end of the wrench?"

Scotty laughed softly.  "If they did, there'd be nothing for assistants
to do."

McCoy looked nervously over his shoulder.  "I could go looking for
whatever's making that clicking sound back there' "

"It's just the Heisenberg baffles resetting themselves," Scotty said.
"Nothing to worry about."

"That's easy for you to say," McCoy muttered.  The hair on the back of
his neck was standing straight out, and even though he knew it was
ridiculous, his subconscious mind kept waiting for some alien monster
to swing down out of the darkness and bite his head off in one gulp. He
longed to shine the flashlight out there, but the thought of Scotty
unscrewing the wrong 'helical coupling kept him aiming it into the
tight workspace instead.

"There," Scotty said.  "Hold it right ... there .. . got it.  One down.
Only four more t' go."

Four more?  They'd been at this at least two lifetimes already.  McCoy
used his free hand to rub the small of his back, but he stopped in mi
drub when he heard a screeching sound near his feet.  He jerked the
light downward just as he realized that it was Scotty whistling.
Doctor?"  Scotty said patiently.  "The light?"  "Sorry.  You startled
me."  He aimed the light back where Scotty was working.

"I dinna think Loch Lomond was all that spooky a song."

McCoy ignored his sarcasm.  "How can you whistle when we're stuck out
here in the middle of nowhere with a broken engine?"

"Same way I whistle any other time.  A little higher, please.  Thank
you."  He banged on something solid, and even the metallic ring it made
sounded somehow cheery.  41 You're having the time of your life, aren't
you?"  McCoy asked him.

"Well now, I'm not sure I'd go that far," Scotty said, "but I have had
worse assignments.  And after all the time we've been spending on the
ground lately, any excuse to get back into space for a while is fine by
me."

McCoy wished he could say the same.  He'd joined Starfleet to get away
from a bad marriage and a bitter divorce, not because he had any
burning desire to see the galaxy.  He had eventually come to enjoy the
'strange new worlds" part of the fleet charter, but he had never cared
for the "boldly going" bit.  As far as he was concerned, the only thing
worse than wrapping a spaceship inside a hyperspace bubble and
squirting it through the either was tearing a body apart molecule by
molecule and beaming it through a transporter.  He would much rather
ride a bicycle wherever he needed to go, or use his own two feet.

He knew better than to tell that to Scotty.  The Enterprise's chief
engineer had started fights over less.  The two of them had to live
practically in each other's laps for who knew how long; there was no
sense irritating him.

Something made a soft thud off in the darkness.  me coy twitched, but
he forced himself to ignore it.  No doubt one of the phlogiston
deframmulators had merely changed polarity.

He forced his own lips into a circle and whistled softly, not sure he
liked the echoes of his own noise any more than the random sounds of
the ship.

Then he felt the creature brush his leg.  He cried Out "Yeow!"  and
leaped backward, swinging the light around in an are designed to either
illuminate or eliminate whatever it was, he wasn't sure which.

Metal rang again from inside the engine compartment as Scotty twitched
in reflexive reaction, but McCoy swept the light down the catwalk as a
gray and white blur streaked off into the darkness again.

"Doctor McCoy," Scotty said, scooting out of the access hole and
rubbing his bruised head, "I really have to-"

"There's a cat in here!"  McCoy said.

"A cat?"

"Felis domesticus.  Small, slender, long tail..  .

"I know what a cat is."

"Well one just rubbed up against my leg."

"Did he, now?"  Scotty looked into the distance, where McCoy's
flashlight beam cast deep shadows in which anything could be hiding.
"Are you sure?"  " It was either that or a damned hairy ghost."  McCoy
shined the light down on his leg, where three or four silvery hairs,
each a couple of centimeters long, clung to his pants.

Scotty nodded slowly.  "Well, that would explain my missing
field-strength meter."  He held up his right hand and wiggled his
little finger, on which an oversized ring sported a circular gauge.  "I
lost it two days ago, and it turned up this morning right in the middle
of the pilot's chair.  I didn't think I'd dropped it there."

"How long since this ship's regular crew left?"  McCoy asked.

:"A week, at least," Scotty said.

"The poor thing must be starving."  McCoy knelt down and reached out
toward the darkness.  "Here kitty.  Kitty, kitty, kitty."  "After that
shriek o' yours, I doubt if he'll be very eager to come back "I didn't
shriek."  Scotty rubbed the back of his head.  "Dinna shriek?  My God,
man, I thought you'd been eaten alive."  " Well, for a second there I
thought the same thing.  Here, kitty, kitty."  "You should try offering
it some food.  And don't aim the light in its face.  Aim it at yourself
so it can see you,

instead "

"Now there's an idea:, McCoy said.  "Here."  He handed Scotty the
flashlight, then stood up and went into the living quarters.  The
bright overhead light nearly blinded him after the dark engine room,
but he found the auto galley-still off-line-and rummaged through the
emergency supplies stored beneath it until he found a foil pouch of
dried meat.  The fine print identified it as emu strips, vacuum-sealed
and preserved by irradiation over six years earlier.  He scanned it
with his tricorder, which reported no toxins, so he took it back into
the engine room and tore open the package.

The aroma was as strong as the live emu.  He pulled out a rubbery
finger-sized strip of meat and held it in front of him, saying, "He
ought to have no problem smelling this.  Here kitty, kitty."

They didn't have to wait long.  Within a minute, the cat stuck its head
around the side of a pipe, its eyes glowing green in the dim light.  It
shunned the corrugated metal catwalk, tiptoeing gracefully along a
wiring conduit and leaping from machine to machine until it stood
partially obscured by a turned heat radiator just out Of reach.  Its
short fur was most'Y gray, with faint black stripes on its sides and
tail and white under its chin and along its belly.

"Come on"' McCoy urged it.  "Just a little closer."  He set the bag
down by his feet so his left hand was free.

"You're not going to try to grab it are ye?"  Scotty asked.

"No, I'm not going to grab it," McCoy answered.  "I do know something
about cats."

He held the meat out.  The cat clearly wanted him to reach out to where
it waited, but he held his hand steady, and at last the cat leaned
forward and jumped to the metal grating in front of him, then stepped
cautiously closer.  It sniffed the strip of meat, then licked at it.

"Must not be as hungry as we thought," Scotty said softly.

"Cats are careful," McCoy whispered back.  "It just wants to know what
I've got before it eats it."

Satisfied that the smelly stuff was edible, the cat took it in its
teeth and backed away.  McCoy kept hold of his end, but the cat growled
and kept tugging, so he let it go.  The cat backed away a few steps and
hunkered down to eat, its fangs making short work of the meat strip.

McCoy was ready with a second one when the first was done.  The cat
came right up to him this time and took it from his hands without
sniffing it first, then backed off and finished it just as quickly.
McCoy held onto the third one and made the cat let him pet it before he
let go, then he backed up and led it into the living quarters before he
would feed it again.

The cat hesitated at the door, sniffing cautiously, but its hunger
finally overpowered its fear of the new people on board its ship and it
stepped on through, tail high.  Scotty came in behind it and closed the
door.

"Now what?"  he asked.

McCoy looked for a collar, but there was none.  He scratched the cat
between the ears and said, "I guess we give it a name."

Chapter Twelve

pringiness.  When DELORIC S BUNK had long ago lost its s he lay down on
it, it creaked and groaned.  When he got up from it, he creaked and
groaned.  Even sitting on the edge of it like he was now caused his
hips to ache.

Had he been the sole user of the bed, the problem wouldn't exist.  His
mother had described him as small boned  His father said he was a runt.
His first girlfriend, Shayla, said he was built the way a Kauld should
be built.  Nottoo skinny, and certainly not overly muscled.  He missed
Shayla.  In fact, if Shayla were here, then there would be a good
reason for his bunk's broken springs.  He smiled at the thought, but it
was short-lived.

The real reason his bed was in such sad shape was because Kertenold
used it while Deloric toiled away on the comet's surface.  To be fair,
Kertenold probably felt the same sense of ownership of the bed and that
it was Deloric who slept soundly while he worked hard.  But

Kertenold stood a head taller than Deloric and weighed half again what
he did: he was bound to wear things out faster.  At least he didn't
sleep in the bunk above.  It would ruin Deloric's night to have someone
Kertenold's size and their bunk land on top of him.

The thought of hot-bedding with someone else originally disgusted him.
He was a fastidious sort, and he'd been certain that whoever used the
bed before him would contaminate it.  The first few nights on board he
had changed the bedding before crawling in, but once the work on the
comet started he was too tired to care.  Some sleep shifts, he was so
exhausted that he would probably not have noticed if anyone else, male
or female, was still in the bed.

Tonight would be different.  He'd been thinking so hard since the last
work shift he was sure his brain would melt.  When he had nights like
this back home, sleep would sometimes elude him for days.

About half his shifunates were still up, milling around the cramped
ship.  In the lounge, some of the crewmembers were rolling hexies in a
game of chance, betting the hard, dry cakes that served as dessert from
dinner.  The winner didn't have to eat them.  In the far corner, three
or four others were swapping dirty jokes.  Deloric had already heard
them, or some variation, and grew weary of the laughter.

He thought maybe a glass of warm yeered milk would allow him to sleep,
but the cafeteria had already closed and the dispenser in the lounge
was empty.  Clearly, the universe was against him tonight.  But as he
turned to leave, he heard someone quietly playing a banter and singing
an old folk song  "Re young woman sat near the lounge door and started
in on the second verse.  It took a moment, but Deloric finally realized
she was singing "Teeth of the Taiar," an antigovernment anthem from
four or five generations back.  The only way she could get away with
singing such a song was because it was against the old government,
which the current government had overthrown.

The singer's voice was soft, but certain of the notes she hit.  Deloric
admired anyone who could make music.  He'd tried three or four
different instruments, only to give up on them within days, and his
singing voice would scare a rock.  Hers was pretty, even if the words
she sang were harsh.  He listened to her sing about greed and the lust
for power and the evil it led to.  The song made just as much sense
today as it had the day it was written.  It was just as true-and just
as damning.  He wondered if the singer had chosen it on purpose, if it
was her way of telling the rest of them that she had figured out what
their hard work over the last week would ultimately be used for.

She wouldn't look up.  She couldn't afford to let a glance confirm his
suspicion, for anyone could be a spy, even him.  She was taking a risk
just playing the song.  He was just aSS glad that she didn't look at
him, for he knew he couldn't hide his feelings from her, either.  He
lingered by the door and listened to three more verses, then headed for
his bunk, humming quietly.

There was no single moment when it became clear what he had to do.  He
only knew he had to do something.  The lights were already dimmed in
the bunk room, so he shuffled his way down the aisle of beds, but
instead of removing his clothing, he just pulled back the covers,
crawled in, and waited until he heard the room fill with the sounds of
sleep.  Kertenold would kill him if he ever found out, but Deloric was
beyond caring.

He thought about destroying the giant mirror he had helped build, but
the only way he could think of to do that was to crash the bunk ship
into it, killing everyone including the crew out there at work on it
now.  He couldn't bring himself to do that.  He thought about breaking
radio silence and warning the human colony five light-days away, but
they were in the Blind.  His message would be buried in the wave of
charged particles streaking toward the planet, and they would never
detect it.  Besides, that would be treason, and no matter what he
thought of the project, he couldn't bring himself to betray his own
people.

That left only one choice.  When the last of the gamers turned out the
lights, he eased from his bunk, took his small flashlight from the tiny
personal locker at his feet, and headed for the door.  He was
two-thirds of the way there when someone in an upper bunk snorted awake
and grabbed his shoulder.

"Hey!  Hey!  Is it time to get up already?"  came the sleep-thickened
voice.  It sounded a little like Nialerad.

"No, it's okay.  Go back to sleep," Deloric whispered.

"Where you going?"

"Shhh.  To the little miner's room."

The what?"

"I got to use the toilet.  Too much yeerid milk," he lied.

"But they're at the other end of the room."

What was this guy?  The self-appointed hall monitor?  "Someone got sick
in there.  I'm going to use the ones in the next dorm."

"Oh ... that's good."  The guy's voice sounded muffled, like he was
talking through a pillow and his words were slurred together.

"Now go back to sleep," Deloric whispered.  Heavy, steady breathing was
the response he got.  People were so weird when they were almost
asleep.  He slid out from under the man's heavy hand and cautiously
resumed his mission.

The hallways were dimly lit and deserted.  The bunk ship was small
compared to the Kauld warships, but bunk ships were much more efficient
in this sort of off world mining situation.  They were designed to
serve as a satellite hotel rather than a ship, since they spent the
majority of their time in orbit around the mine.

That worked to Deloric's advantage in a couple of ways.  As small as
the bunk ship was, it wouldn't take him very long to get to the shuttle
bay, and he wouldn't have time to back out of his plan.

Instead of taking the lift, he opted for the stairs, thinking that his
chances of running into anyone else would be practically all.  But he
regretted that choice almost instantly.  A single lamp illuminated each
landing, and the garish light cast odd shadows through the metallic
mesh of the stairs, sending chilis up his spine at every turn.  Worse,
each step he took echoed like thunder, no matter how gingerly he
moved.

He tiptoed up the two flights to the shuttle deck, then eased the heavy
door shut and leaned against the wall, feeling the cool, smooth metal
against his head, hands, and back.  His heart was beating hard and
fast, and he was surprised at how ragged his breathing had become, even
though he had done nothing strenuous.  But within a few moments he
gained control over his body again and moved cautiously down the hall.
The bay itself was at the far end of the now darkened hallway and back
behind the suit lockers.

The silvery suits hung in rows on metal hooks.  He was already reaching
for his out of habit when he realized he probably wouldn't need it
where he was going.

He grasped the empty gloves, taking a moment to say goodbye to his
tonner life, then he turned toward the shuttle bay and was about to
step through the doorway when something made him stop.  His skin
tingled as though someone had tickled his back with a feather.

Down a different hallway and around a corner to his right, the lift
doors slid o pen with a barely perceptible whoosh.  Careful footsteps
padded his way.  Who else could be roaming around up here at this time
of the sleep cycle?

What if it was a guard, coming to get him?  His heartbeat shot up and
his skin broke into a sweat, but he forced himself to calm down.  He
hadn't done anything wrong.  Not yet.  This wasn't a prison ship,
though at first glance there wasn't that much to distinguish it from
one.  He had as much right as anyone to wander the halls at night.

So did whoever had just arrived.  It was probably someone who couldn't
sleep, out perwubulating, trying to relax while they had the chance.
But the image of a prison wouldn't leave his rffind.  The other
person's steps slowed the closer they got to the intersection of the
halls.  It wasn't the gait of someone on a casual stroll around the
ship.  That person was she ng?

aki .

Deloric cautiously sidled up to the wall so that he would be behind the
corner as the intruder came around.  He felt woefully unarmed, with
just his palm sized flashlight to use as a club.  His only other
advantage would be surprise.  Maybe.

The other's footfalls stopped just short of turning the corner.
Deloric's body tensed like a bandar string about to break.  Any moment
... any moment.... A female Kauld stepped out from the shadows and
Deloric sprang in front of her, shining his light at its brightest
setting smack in her face.

She yelped, high-pitched and short.  And in return, his pent-up nerves
made him jump back and shout, "Yaaa!"  Then he regained his senses
enough to recognize his intruder: Terwolan.  He quickly clamped his
free hand over her mouth and urged her to "shhhhh!"  She didn't shhhh.
She twisted her head and tried to

bite his fingers, while simultaneously swinging a fist at him and
kicking out with her right foot.  Deloric dodged back, but not before
she'd clipped him on the shoulder.

"Hey, it's met" he hissed.  "Stop it!"  He grabbed her arm before she
could hit him again.

Terwolan kept struggling, and he finally realized that the light in her
eyes kept her from seeing who he was.  He turned his flashlight toward
his own face, then, aimed it at the ceiling.  There was a moment of
startled recognition on her part, marked by her wide eyes, then he felt
her relax.

"What are you doing here?"  she whispered when he let her go.

"I could ask the same question of you," he whispered back.

"I couldn't sleep," she said, her voice full of defiance.

"Me either."  That was true enough.

They stared at one another for a morkent, sizing each other up in a way
they never had in their weeks of 'de working si -by-side.  Terwolan
looked tired, but there was something else in her expression, an
oppressive weight that hadn't been there before.  Deloric finally said,
"You figured out what we're building out there, didn't you?"

Her eyes shifted to the shuttle bay door, then back to him.  She
swallowed and said, "Maybe."

"So have l."  hey stared at one another again, Deloric It,-eng the
first glimmer of hope he'd had all night.  He didn't believe Terwolan
was a spy, but how could he know for sure?  And how could he convince
her he wasn't one himself?

"The way I see it," he said carefully, "A person who didn't like it
would have two choices: treason or exile."

"I notice you didn't give him the option to just go back to bed and
forget about it," she pointed out.

"I ... urn... don't think he could do that."  He looked into her eyes,
desperately searching for confirmation there, but he just couldn't
tell.  "They're going to fire it tonight."

That got a reaction.  Her eyes widened, and her expression darkened.
"How do you know?"

"We're five light-days out.  The human colony will be in direct line
with the carbon dioxide stream in five days.  And it's the middle of
the Blind time, both here and there.  Nobody will be able to detect the
energy release."

She nodded slowly.  "That makes sense.  So what are we going to do?"

He relaxed just a little.  She had said "we."  His flashlight was
growing heavy; he shifted it from his right hand to his left and said,
"I can't bring myself to commit treason, but I can't be part of this
any more either.  I was going to take one of the long-range shuttles
and head for deep space."

She smiled.  To Deloric it was like the sun coming up.  "Great minds
think alike:' she said.  "Let's go."

She took her spacesuit.  Delofic revised his plan and did the same. You
never knew when you might need to do an EVA.  They didn't put them on,
just hung them inside the shuttle's airlock as they entered.  They
hurried on through the small passenger cargo bay and into the control
room, lights automatically turning on ahead of them as they went.

"Do you know how to fly one of these?"  Terwolan asked him as they sat
in the control chairs before the instrument panel.

"Not this particular kind, but I've flown shuttles before," he told
her.  "How about you?"  "I've flown this model before."  "You're the
pilot, then."

She nodded and got to work bringing the engines online.  Deloric
switched on the navigation computer and scrolled through the list of
preprogrammed destinations, looking for anything that might offer safe
refuge to a couple of deserters.  He hated thinking of himself in those
terms, but that's what it would look like to anyone else.

The Blood homeworld slid by, highlighted orange.  It was interdicted,
of course.  No contact was allowed with the Blood Many except under
direct orders from the High Command.  Deloric didn't want to run to the
Kauld's oldest enemies anyway.  He just wanted out of this whole
militaristic mess.

"Launch in ten"' Terwolan said.

He looked out through the viewport.  The hangar doors were opening.
This was it.  Alarms would already be sounding in the communication
center.  Books and games and mugs of skath would be flying as bored
controllers leaped up from their raid shift diversions to see what was
going on.

He thought about trying to bluff their way clear, but he knew he'd
never be able to pull it off.  He had no reason to be leaving the bunk
ship at this hour, especially not in a long-range shuttle. Besides,
inter ship communications wouldn't work beyond the shuttle bay anyway,
not during the Blind.  He left the communications panel switched off
and peered out at the widening swath of st any space, figuring he could
help spot trouble by eye if there was any.

Terwolan took them out fast, banking hard just beyond the doors and
accelerating away in case anyone tried to fire on them.  The comet was
a pale half-circle sweeping across their field of view, growing more
full as they swung around behind it.  Now Deloric could see what he had
been forbidden to look at before: a tall tower stuck out the back side,
circular coils ringing it all the way up from the base to the tip.  It
was an accelerator of some sort, and it was aimed straight through the
comet's central hole.

"Uh-oh " Terwolan said.  Deloric glanced over at her, saw that she
wasn't even looking at the comet, and followed her gaze upward to the
immense Kauld battleship keeping station just a few rho away.

His breath caught in his throat.  The battleship was too far away for
him to see its gun turrets, but he could imagine them well enough, all
swiveling around to track the tiny shuttle.

"Evasive maneuvers!"  he said.

"It's Blind time," she reminded him.  "They couldn't hit another
battleship at this distance without their tracking sensors."
Nonetheless, she swung the shuttle through another are and fed more
power to the engines.

She was just in time.  A bright red disrupter bolt sizzled through the
space where they had just been.  Another drew a ragged line between
them and the ball of ice.  Either the gunners were getting lucky, or
they were better shots than Terwolan had thought.  "Duck behind the
comet " he urged.  "Good idea."  She bzked them around until its bumpy
surface eclipsed the warship, then aimed straight out into space and
held their acceleration at maximum.  In the rear-facing viewscreen, the
comet shrank precipitously behind them, shrinking from a wall of ice to
a snowball to a pebble.  The warship edged out from behind it, but
Terwolan cut the engines, effectively reducing their visibility to
nothing before the gunners could take aim.  She used the steering jets
to alter their course a few more degrees, but that wasn't even
necessary.  The warship didn't fire again, and after a tense couple of
minutes, its nose swiveled back to point down the line of carbon
dioxide ice stretching in-system.

"They're not even chasing us?"  Deloric asked in disbelief.

"They must have bigger things on the nd," Terwolan said.  She rotated
the ship around so they could see the comet straight on.  They were way
off to the side now, and receding fast.  The battleship was almost as
distant on the opposite side.  The bunk ships were much closer, but
also out of the line of fire.  The string of ice that the miners had
launched into space should have been invisible, but it suddenly flared
bright red, like a thin knife blade slashing open the fabric of space
for as far as the eye could see.

"They fired the disrupter at the core," he said.  "That vaporized the
carbon dioxide."

An instant later, the back side of the comet glowed white.  The whole
thing lit up from inside, but that was nothing compared to the
brilliance of the light beam that shone through the central core and
down the long column of vaporized ice.  It was so intense Deloric threw
his hands over his eyes for protection, but even then it was too
bright.  The flesh of his hands wasn't enough to block it; only the
bones did that.  He turned away, eyelids slammed shut even against the
reflections inside the shuttle, but he felt the back of his head grow
hot in the glare.

"Get us out of here!"  he shouted.

Terwolan groped blindly for the control board.  The shuttle turned
slowly, the swath of intense light sliding up the back wall as it did.
They could actually hear its progress by the sizzling of plastic
controls and trim panels, and they could feel the heat of it burning
their skin.

And this was just the leakage from the laser beam.

"I can't find the warp controls!"  Terwolan shouted.  "I'm blind!"

Deloric peered through the slit between two fingers, wincing in pain.
He couldn't see anything but brilliant white, either, but after another
few seconds the ship tota ted around so its bulk cut off the worst of
the light.  He blinked, stuck his face right next to the control board,
and peered at the labels until he found the "engage" button.  There was
no course set yet, but he didn't care.  He mashed the button with his
entire fist, then fell back into his chair as the engines wrapped the
ship in their magnetic embrace and threw them into darkness.

Chapter Thirteen

SPOCK WAS hunched over the conglomeration of electronics parts he'd
cobbled together in the science lab, examining his connections with an
inductive logic probe.  Something was wired improperly, but this was
his second pass through the system and so far he had been unable to
find the problem.

It had to be a connection.  Everything else was working as it should.
The signal generators in the deflector dish at the front of the ship's
secondary hull had been modified to accept greater output from the
olivium power source, the data processors checked out when he ran a
self-test, and everything worked individually.  It was only when he
hooked it all together and tried to run his modified radar unit at full
power that the system malfunctioned.

Gamma Night had once more reduced the ship's sensor range to
uselessness.  Crew members with binoculars outperformed even his
low-frequency radar, which was the only electronic scanning device that
worked at all under the onslaught of charged particles from out system
And both systems were limited to the speed of light.  Anything could
sneak up under warp power, and nobody would know until it had dropped
into normal space right on top of them.

The Enterprise desperately needed subspace scanning capability during
Gamma Night.  Spock didn't normally consider brute force an acceptable
alternative to elegance, but in this case brute force seemed the only
possible answer to the problem.  He needed sensors powerful enough to
cut through the interference and return a clear signal, even when they
were being inundated by noise.

Gaining the requisite power was not the issue; olivium-enhanced
emitters provided more than enough.  The problem lay in processing the
reflected signals when they returned.  If they returned.  Energy was
pouring into sub spec-at least, it was if the power indications could
be believed-but precious little of it was retunaing.  At the power
level he was using, his signal should have been bouncing off
everything, including the tiny gravity wells around individual hydrogen
atoms.  The receivers should have been overloaded with echoes even if
the signal was only reflecting off the gravity wells around the
planets; instead, they registered only 2 percent above background, even
when the whole system was running wide open.

There had to be a data error somewhere.  That much energy couldn't just
disappear.  Spock was pumping the equivalent of a small sun's output
into space-it had to be going somewhere.  He suspected it was, and he
suspected it was coming back to the detectors, too.  They just weren't
prograrmned to handle the intense signal in addition to the intense
background noise.  They were apparently cutting out when the incoming
data grew too complex to process.

Trouble was, he could find no instruction in their programs that would
make them do that.  Logic probes made while the system was running
showed no sign of overload.  The system behaved as though it simply
wasn't getting a signal back.

Spock set the probe down on the bench beside the breadboard circuitry
and rubbed his eyes.  He'd been at this for hours.  He should be
asleep, but Gwnma Night didn't arrive on a convenient schedule, and he
didn't want to wait for another cycle to test his modifications.

He took a few deep breaths to oxygenate his blood.

There was no problem with the connections.  He had to believe the
evidence: energy was pouring out into subspace but not coming back. How
could that be?

It had to be the olivium.  Every time he had tried to power something
with it, he had had unexpected problems.  Mr.  Scott had succeeded in
overdriving warp engines with it, but the material's space-time
altering nature merely enhanced what a warp engine was sup I posed to
do anyway, Sensors were supposed to do the opposite, and therein lay
the problem.  Sensors were supposed to bounce signals off the subspace
manifestations of whatever real-space objects were out there and read
the reflections, all without actually altering whatever they were
reading.  The Vulcan P'tar-and

Heisenberg on Earth-had proved that every act of measurement altered
the experiment, but normally the effect was of no consequence on a
large scale.  Long-range subspace scans didn't run afoul of the
uncertainty principle.

With quantum olivium in the circuit, however, that wasn't necessarily
true.  Spock suspected that the emit ted signal was doing something he
hadn't anticipated.  Its power wasn't just disappearing.

Where was it going, though?  Anything that absorbed that much energy
should shine like a beacon, in both normal space and subspace.

There was only one logical answer: He wasn't using the right detector.
Low-frequency gravity-wave detectors obviously weren't picking up
anything, even though that was what he was broadcasting.
Electromagnetic waves weren't any more useful.  There was just as
obviously nothing returning to the ship in visual wavelengths, or the
spotters posted at the observation ports would have reported it.  That
left ultraviolet and even higher-frequency ranges.

The ultraviolet and X-ray bands were easy to check, and just as easy to
dismiss.  There was nothing there.  And beyond that there wasn't an
electromagnetic spectrum.  At ultra-high frequencies, the boundary
between energy and matter started to break down.  He might as well
start looking for exotic particles-quarks and the like.

He could, of course.  The range of detectable frequencies went all the
way up to matter waves.  He just hadn't believed that it was possible
for a signal to be transformed that far from its initial form.  But now
it was the next logical thing to check.

It was the work of a moment to adjust the detectors.  He slowly raised
the frequency, and with it the energy content of the particles he was
searching for, through the elemental quarks, into the lepton range,
searching for electrons, positrons, neutrinos.... There was a flash of
light, a loud bang, and the entire breadboard circuit on the workbench
erupted in flame.  Spock grabbed the extinguisher from the wall beside
the bench and efficiently smothered the fire,

then silenced the alarm and called an "all clear" to security.

The acrid smell of burnt plastic and electronics quickly dissipated
through the ship's ventilation, but a hint of it remained on Spock's
hands.  He could detect it as he settled back into a chair and steepled
his fingers before his nose in a pose he often took when concentrating
on a puzzle.

The theory was simple: the outgoing signal travels from the emitter,
encounters either matter itself or its sub spatial distortion, then
bounces off and returns to the detectors as a signal that the data
processors turn into meaningful information.  The exploding circuit
indicated an overload, proving to Spock that a signal was indeed being
detected and that the amplification stare of the detectors was
functioning correctly.  That the overload occurred while he was
scanning the ultra-high frequencies would lend credence to the theory
that the signal was being transformed.  On the other hand, it could
simply mean that he had detected an extraordinarily large, naturally
occurring neutrino burst.

Either way, he had some work to do.  He picked up the scorched circuit
board and studied it.  There was enough damage that he would have to
build another.  It would not take long to reconstruct, but he wanted to
determine that the original design of the board was sound.

He checked the time.  There were still a few more hours of Gamma Night
left.  If he worked quickly, he might be able to make another test run
before it ended.  He rubbed his eyes again and set to work.

 Chapter Fourteen

STARLIGHT FXTERED thinly in through the forward viewport of the
darkened observation deck as the battleship Tonclin took its position.
Vellyngaith stood front and center, admiring the sculpted comet and all
that it represented.  He stood alone, a man with his thoughts only a
few minutes from the firing of the laser.  It was the pinnacle of his
career so far, and he wanted time to relish that accomplishment.

The rest of the All Kauld fleet were in an uninhabited star system
nearby, running drills and testing out their newly refitted ships for
the big battle that would take place in five days time.  He'd laid down
the master plan of attack and left the details to the captains
themselves to work out-and fight over.  They were the ones, after all,
who knew their own strengths.  Those who were taking over the refitted
ships that had started out as nonmilitary had the biggest task ahead of
them.  They had to learn how these ships handled under their new
drives, and what kind of limitations they might have.

The captains of the three new warships had been I children given agray
'cycles for their birthdays when all they had asked for were sleds. The
reports they'd sent back to Vellyngaith had all been positive so far,
and tinged with a sense of awe.  Not since the Tholians' gift of
dynadrive had the Kauld seen this kind of leap in abilities.  And this
time, the Kauld had developed it themselves, using the olivium, they
had liberated from the human mining operation.

And it was a small amount of olivium they had managed to take back from
the humans, at that.  By fights it should have all belonged to the
Kauld.  Then there was that traitor, Shucorion.  Not that Vellyngaith
had expected any better of him.  In fact, he'd proven mildly helpful to
a point.  Even so, once the hurfians were gone, Vellyngaith would turn
his full attention toward Shucorion and the rest of his sorry race.

The door into the observation deck opened quietly.  The light from the
corridor reflected on the forward viewport, and Vellyngaith saw the
silhouette of his attendant, Celemeth.  Without turning around
Vellyngaith said, "What is it?"

"The viewing party is getting restless, sir.  They would like to know
when they can enter."

Vellyngaith suppressed a sigh.  This moment of quiet contemplation
would be over too quickly as it was.  He glanced over his right
shoulder toward the silhouette and said, "Soon, soon.  Break out the
katanga liquor if you think they need a diversion; I will signal when
it is time."

"Very good," Celemeth said and closed the door.

Vellyngaith looked back toward what was left of the comet.  It was a
magnificent piece of work.  The carved face shone, its highly polished
surface aimed down the light-minutes-long column of ice.  The last of
the work crews had been picked up from the comet's surface and brought
aboard the Tonclin, where they would be housed until they could be
reassigned.

Beyond the comet, several rho away, sat the bunk ships  Iley hadn't
been removed yet, and wouldn't be immediately.  Once the battle was
over, they would continue to serve their purpose while the Kauld mined
the rest of the olivium from the moon, then as the last of the deposits
were recovered from the planet's surface.

No, reverse that, he thought.  Mine the planet first, before Yanorada's
plan made it too difficult-unless there was some way to reverse it now
that it had been triggered.  But Yanorada had sworn it couldn't be
stopped.

Just like Vellyngaith's plan.

He was ready now.  He checked his wrist chron  It was time.  He stepped
to the wall and pressed the inter com button.  "Celemeth, you may now
escort my guests to the observation deck."  He didn't wait to hear
Celerneth's response before he turned back to the viewports.

An unexpected motion caught Vellyngaith's eye.  A Kauld long-range
shuttle popped into view from around the restructured comet.  The view
shifted as the Tonclin responded to orders from the bridge, no doubt
from his second-in-command, Tenoweth.  He watched as the shuttle took
evasive measures and managed to escape the disruptor beams fired at it.
He frowned.  His gunners should have hit it at this range, even with
the Blind muddling their targeting computers.  Perhaps Tenoweth had
ordered a wanting shot, since communications were out as well.

The shuttle slid behind the comet, and Vellyngaith didn't see it
reemerge.  He wondered what it was doing out in this remote part of
space during the Blind, and then realized that it probably came from
one of the bunk ships

Was something wrong with the laser?  The very possibility inftuiated
him.  There couldn't be.  Not now.  Everything depended on perfect
timing.  And everything was ready.  The carbon dioxide stream was
extended to the optimal length, the exciter beam was ready, and the
target would be in position moment wily- All systems were go.

Could someone be trying to sabotage it?  He snorted in derision.  Let
them try.  The weapon was ready to fire.  Even a direct hit on the
accelerator would only set it off, and once that happened, there would
be no stopping it.

Besides, it would be faster to simply fire it now rather than chase off
after the trespasser.  Vellyngaith reached for the intercom button on
the wall beside the viewport, but before he could call his
second-in-command and tell him to let the shuttle go, the view out the
'port slid back to where it had been before.  He smiled in
satisfaction.  It comforted him that his second had reacted in the same
manner as he would have himself.

He made a mental note to check with the bunk ships and see who was
missing a shuttle and a worker or two.  If the fool survived his
joyride, he'd wish he hadn't when he learned what his punishment would
be.

The doors opened, and his guests entered the observation deck.  He went
to the control panel on the wall to his left and turned on the lights
to a dim glow to allow enough visibility so that people wouldn't trip
over the few chairs and tables in the room, but not enough to compete
with the view outside.  The observers were few but very influential,
mostly dignitaries who would be able to go back to the homeworld after
the show today and report to the masses the magnificent feat their own
Vellyngaith had performed for their welfare.  Vellyn gaith wanted to be
sure they saw every detail of his gem us

"Welcome' " he said.  "Please, come forward and behold our victory over
Federation."

Gasps and other sounds of appreciation escaped from the people as their
brains registered what they were seeing.  One decorated old warrior,
aged but far from feeble, approached Vellyngaith and said, "This is
your doing?"  He pointed a crooked finger at the comet, and held a
stern look in his brown eyes.

"I gave the order to build it, yes."  Vellyngaith held his elder's
gaze, eye to eye.

A long moment passed before the old man cracked a smile and said, "I
knew we could count on you!"

"Then let's not waste any more time.  We have endured the usurpers'
presence long enough."  There was no point in speechitying.  Nothing he
could say would match the weapon itself.  Vellyngaith pressed the inter
com button on the wall beside him and said the only word that was
necessary: "Fire!"

Another collective gasp arose from the small gathering as a beautiful
bright red light momentarily illuminated the column of frozen carbon
dioxide.  It glittered brilliantly, like a string of rubies across the
black drape of space.

The cheering and applause had already begun when the accelerator on the
comet's back side luminesced white, the glow shooting through the core
and down the now-vaporized trail of ice.  The light from the core grew
bright to the point of being painful, then continued to blaze.

Vellyngaith squinted against the glare.  It was magnificent!  The raw
power of it all-and he commanded it!

The others in the observation deck no longer made sounds of inspired
approval.  The gasps turned into moans and cries.  Most of his guests
now shielded their faces with their hands and arms.  One had dropped to
the floor and used the bulkhead to.  hide from the intense light.  The
room grew noticeably hotter with each passing second.

At last, Vellyngaith admit ted to himself that the leakage from the
laser was too much.  "Polarize the viewports!"  he ordered into his
intercom.

The windows responded so quickly that he suspected the helmsman had his
finger poised on the control, anticipating the order.  The brilliance
from his creation dimmed, but not enough.

"More polarization," he ordered.

"Sir, we're already at full."

Vellyngaith laughed.  These viewports could block out the light of a
sun from within its own corona.  His laser was more powerful than a
sun-from the side!

He opened his eyes a sliver.  The pain!  And the heat.  He could hear
the whine of the room coolers working in vain.  Haht These aristocrats
would have a story to tell when they returned home.

But he wanted them impressed, not blinded.  Reluctantly, he said,
"Lower the blast shields."

A heavy panel slid down from overhead, its hardened composite hull
material doing what simple polarizers could not.  Darkness swept across
the ceiling as it lowered into place, but it stopped three-quarters of
the way down.

"All the way," Vellyngaith ordered.

"It's stuck, sir."  He heard the panic in the helmsman's voice.  The
shield rose partway, then lowered again, but it didn't gain any ground.
"The tracks must be warped from the heat, sir.  The entire port side of
the ship is overheating."

"Roll us sideways " he ordered.  "Now!"

He felt his ship lurch into motion.  The brilliant swath of light swept
upward, narrowed to a thin line, then disappeared as if a switch had
been thrown.  The bulk of the ship shadowed them now.

It was pitch-black inside the observation room.  Vellyngaith found the
light controls by feel and turned them up all the way, wincing as the
touch panel burned his fingers.  It was still barely enough to see by
after the intensity of a moment before, but it soothed his guests'
panic.  They were rubbing their eyes, tears streaming down their faces.
But the Kauld were a tough species.  There would be no complaining from
them, especially in light, as it were, of their success.

"I apologize for your discomfort," he said.  "The weapon is obviously
more powerful than even I had expected.  What we felt was just the
glare from it, but imagine what will happen when the beam itself
strikes the human colony.  The entire planet will feel more than mere
discomfort."

They seemed little mollified, but he didn't care.  He had more
important things to worry about.  The ship was still moving, even
though he had only ordered a roll.  What was going on up there on the
bridge?  Were those fools actually backing off?.  A hot streak of anger
ran through him.  His orders had been to maintain their position during
the unveiling and firing of his laser.

He motioned to Celemeth and instructed him to aid his guests and return
them to their cabins to rest; then, hands clenched into fists, he
stormed toward the door into the corridor, but it wouldn't open more
than a hand's width apart.  He jammed his fingers into the crack to
pull it open, only to find the metal too hot to touch.

He jerked his hands free, sticking his fingers in his mouth to cool
them, then shoved his booted foot into the crack and pushed.  The doors
squealed and lurched apart, and he stalked down the corridor to the
lift.

"What's the meaning of this?"  he hissed into the intercom the moment
he stepped into the lift car.

"Sir," his second-in-command replied, "the ship sustained heavy damage
down the port flank, and the starboard side was starting to go as well
after we rolled."  Vellyngaith could barely hear him over the alarms
going off on the bridge.  "We had to move or be cooked."

Damage?  To his ship?  The spell the laser had cast over him finally
began to lift.  He'd been so enthralled with the sheer enormity of his
accomplishment that he'd allowed his vanity to overcome his sense.

"If you wish, I'll hand you my resignation when you return to the
bridge."  "What?"

"I did break a direct order," Tenoweth pointed out.

True enough.  But to what degree?  Tenoweth had kept the ship stationed
until it was too dangerous to remain.  Everyone had seen enough to
understand what was in store for the humans.  And his prompt action
might have saved the ship.

"We'll discuss that when the time is right," Vellyngaith said.  A
moment later the lift deposited him on the bridge.  Tenoweth stood at
attention, arms folded behind his back.

"What's our status?"  Vellyngaith growled.

"Decks 3 through 10 are reporting hull damage along the port side,
almost all external sensors were overloaded, and the crew lounge is on
fire.  I've ordered it vented to space as soon as everyone is out."

"Injuries?"

"A few, mostly burns on those who were working close to the hull."

Vellyngaith's own fingers throbbed.  He'd take care of that later. "Get
crews moving on the repairs as soon as we're at a safe distance." He
looked around the bridge, saw everyone busy taking care of their own
stations, and relaxed slightly.  He'd made a mistake but it hadn't been
deadly.

"Re Blind is still knocking out communications Tenoweth said.  "It will
be some time yet before we can contact the bunk ships and see what kind
of damage they've sustained.  We may have to take on their crews."

Vellyngaith paused to think, then said, "Run the visual recordings we
took of the ng sequence."

The image of the comet appeared on the forward viewscreen just as
Vellyngaith remembered it.  He studied it now for other details.  The
bunk ships could be seen on the other side, then the runaway shuttle,
the ship's disrupter beam chasing it.  No other trace of it as it
swooped behind the comet.  He studied the image when the bunk ships
were visible again and felt a knot twist his gut.  They were stationed
closer to the laser than the Tonclin had been.  They wouldn't have been
able to get their engines on-line fast enough to escape the heatwave
that poured from the laser.  Those bunkers were gone.

He didn't need to continue the recording, but he did.  The red flash,
then the white hot light reached out and-there was no more.  The
recording device had obviously been destroyed at that point.

Vellyngaith's enthusiasm, though a bit dampened by the unexpected loss
of the work crews, emerged once again at the sight of such raw power.
He already had a way to use the total destruction of the bunk ships in
his favor.  One of the biggest problems with his plan was that there
would be no martyrs for the common people back home to honor and sing
songs about; well, now they had plenty.

A sudden thought made him pause.  "How far away are we?"  he asked.

"Five light-minutes.  I didn't want to go farther during the Blind."
Vellyngaith looked at his wrist chron  Five minutes, eh?

"Carry on.  Get those repairs underway and report when the Blind is
over."

"Yes, sir."

He walked through the bridge and took the private lift to his cabin,
just overhead.  It was a mess inside; paintings scorched brown by the
heat, papers actually burned, plastic melted.  He ignored it all and
climbed up the stairs to his private observation bubble, a full-circle
dome on the ship's forward point that gave him a better view-though
unenhanced-than he could get from the bridge itself.

He turned once around, watching, not sure what he would see from this
distance, nor just when the light would catch up to the ship.  But when
it came it was unmistakable.  A bright point blossomed among the stars,
then a white streak lanced out across the night, extending for as far
as the eye could see.

Not quite.  Way down the line, at a place so distant it almost looked
like the vanishing point, the beam faded away.  That would be the last
of the carbon dioxide column.  Beyond that was empty space, and as
anyone who had fought a laser battle knew, a pure light beam-even one
as powerful as this-was invisible in a vacuum.

He smiled and rubbed his palms together, despite the pain.  The humans
would never know what hit them.

 Chapter Fifteen

THE BIG MUDDY PD VER was living up to its name.  Kirk and Lilian and
their pilot had visited five town sites along its banks, and every one
of them had been knee deep in sticky brown muck flushed downriver by
the flood.  The sixth was proving impossible to find a landing site
near, though a few low passes overhead made Kirk wonder what the point
would be even if they did.  There was practically nothing left here to
salvage, and certainly nothing to defend from interstellar marauders.

Nonetheless, people were down there sifting through the wreckage,
scavenging what they could.  A few gray tents rippled in the breeze on
a bank above the high-water mark; the people down there weren't going
to let themselves get caught by the same disaster a second time.

They looked up and waved as the plane flew over.  The pilot, Henuan,
waved back with the wings, tilting them left and right, then he
straightened out and climbed higher above the valley floor.  "Do you
want to make another pass?"  he asked Kirk, shouting to be heard over
the noise of the propeller.

"No Kirk said, shaking his head in exaggerated motions in case the
pilot couldn't hear him.  He'd seen enough.  In fact, he'd seen enough
of the whole vallev-enough to know that Governor Pardonnet hadn't
overstated the problem when he'd described the reconstruction effort.

He twisted around in his seat to look at Lilian.  "Ready to call it a
day?"  he asked.

She nodded.  She certainly looked like she was.  Her childlike
eagerness to go flying had been smothered under the ache of sympathy
for all the destruction they'd seen today.  Kirk almost wished he
hadn't offered to bring her along, but they had had fun on the flight
out, and besides, as the school administrator she needed to see the
situation first-hand.

Herman took the plane up and over the ridge to the north, then turned
west toward Buena Vista.  Green mountainsides and steep canyons
replaced the gray floodplain, reminding everyone that only one river
valley had flooded.  Kirk took special encouragement in the realization
that the rest of the continent looked this good less than a year after
the Burn.  It meant the Big Muddy would recover as well.

Herman must have been thinking similar thoughts.  "Hey, " he said, "you
want to see something that'll put a smile back on your faces?"

"How far out of the way is it?"  Kirk asked.

"Not far.  Ten, fifteen minutes at most."

"Okay."

Herman banked the plane farther north again, aiming for a snow-capped
mountain peak in the heart of the range.  Shadows from the late
afternoon sun accentuated every ridge and cirque on its glacier-carved
flanks, but Herman swung wide to the east of it and descended into a
deep valley beyond.

It was mostly in shadow.  It took Kirk a few seconds for Is eyes to
adapt, but when they did, it was as if someone had withdrawn a curtain
from a mural.  Huge trees rose up out of the valley, reaching straight
and true into the air above a canopy of dense foliage.  Hundreds of
birds took wing as the airplane approached, wheeling around in tight
formation and diving for cover.  Out Kirk's side, a waterfall tumbled
off a high cliff and turned to mist before it reached the ground.  The
recovering vegetation elsewhere had been pretty, but this little patch
of greenery was obviously the forest primeval.

"How did this survive the Burn?"  Kirk asked.

"Orographic cloud cover," Herman said.  "The peak makes its own
weather.  Most days there's a permanent cloud bank here.  It must have
been raining cats and dogs the day the moon blew, and that protected it
"

He circled around so Kirk and Liban could get another look, then
climbed back out of the valley and headed on toward home.  Kirk felt
his mood lifting with the plane, and when he looked back at Lilian she
was smiling again.

"Want to try flying it again?"  Herman asked Kirk.

"That's all right," he said.  On the way out he had proved to
everyone's satisfaction why he was a starship captain and not a bush
pilot.  He had no doubt that he could master the skills required if he
needed to, but he saw no need to subject Lilian to another bumpy
fide.

She had ideas of her own, though.  She leaned forward from the back
seat and said, "Could, urn, could I try it?"  Herman looked over at
Kirk.  Kirk would have to trade seats with her if she was going to take
the controls 111..  . sure, why not?"  he said, unbuckling his
harness.

They had to squeeze past one another in the narrow confines of the
cockpit.  The shifting weight made the plane pitch and roll, and even
though Herman tried to compensate for it, they wound up thrown together
half a dozen times before they managed to exchange places.  Kirk
strapped himself into the seat behind Lilian, figuring the plane would
balance better with his weight on that side.

She had to scoot the seat forward to reach the pedals.  Henuan went
over the controls with her, giving her the same explanation he had
given Kirk, then let her grasp the yoke, taking his hands off the one
on his side.

The plane bounced upward and banked to the right.  She over corrected
but brought it back to level after that, then tried a few banks and
turns on purpose.

"Remember the rudder," Herman told her.

The plane suddenly yawed to the right, then to the left.  "Yowl"  she
yelled.  "It's touchy!"

"Yep," he said, grinning.  That was just what Kirk had said, too.

She did a few S-turns, then banked the plane hard right, nosed down a
few degrees, and did a slow spiral.  )Wle the world swirled around
them, she asked, "Will it loop if I pull back hard enough?"

"Yeah, but'

"Can I?"

Herman looked back at Kirk.  "Captain?"

Oh sure, Kirk thought.  Drop it on me.  But obvious'Y it was safe or
Herman would have just said "No."  He looked out the window just to
make sure that they had plenty of air below them, then nodded and said,
"Go for it."

"Here goes!"  Lilian dropped the nose another few degrees, straightened
out their bank, then pulled back on the yoke.  The view out the
windscreen rolled downward, the horizon flashed past, then it was sky
.. . sky ... sky while they grew lighter and lighter.  Kirk felt
himself failing into his harness, but it only lasted a second before
the plane nosed over and centripetal force pressed him back into the
seat.

Wahoo!"  Lilian yelled.  The propeller rewed higher as they fell down
the back side of the loop, and the horizon swept past again, this time
upside-down.  For a moment they were looking straight down at the rough
terrain, then the horizon came around again and she leveled the plane
out.

All three of them cheered, though Kirk noticed Herman carefully
checking the instruments as well.

"I always wanted to do that in my uncle Lee's plane," Lilian said, "but
Mom would have had a heart attack."

"Now it'll be your kids having the heart attack if you tell them what
you did," Herman said.  Then he laughed.  "Actually, if Reynold finds
out about this he'll be pestering me to let him do it, too."

"It'll be our secret."  She turned part-way around toward Kirk.
"Captain?  No fair telling on me."

"I wouldn't dream of it," he said, grinning just as wide as she.  Her
smile was contagious.  He felt lighter now, as if he had left half his
worries behind in the loop.

They flew the rest of the way back in relative silence, watching the
landscape slide past beneath them and the sun sink into the distant
clouds.  The horizon was turning pink by the time they landed.  They
endured the bO time- rattl n, deceleration on the crass runway, then
taxied to the han,ar and switched off the motor.  The propeller
freewheeled to a stop, leaving them a silence so profound that Kirk
couldn't be sure if his ears even worked anymore.

Then Lilian unbuckled her harness, the click fillin, the tiny cabin,
and Herman popped open 11/2is door.  "Home sweet home," he said as he
eli!ilbed out.

Kirk waited for Lilian to step down to the-round, then clambered out
past her seat and stood beside her, stretchin" his arms out and fee
ting his joints pop.  0 fori in .  "And thank

"Thanks r the de," he to (I Her an you, too," he said to Lilian.

"Any time," she said.  To Herma.I she added, "I mean that.  Any time
you need a copillot, let me know.  That was fun."

He nodded.  "I may take you up ozi that."

Lilian held out her hand to Kirk.  "suppose we should get back to town
and see if everything fell apart in our absence."

He took her hand in his, and they walked back down the access road.
"You seem to be a atura, pilot," he said.  "Adventurous, too."

She laughed.  "For a librarian."

"I didn't say that."

"But you were thinking it"

He looked at her for a moment, enjoying her smile.  "was thinking how
wonderful you looked at the controls, with the plane upside down and
the whole world at your fingertips."

"Hrnm," she said.  "It's been a long time since I felt 'wonderful,"-
much less looked it."

"You still do," he said.

She didn't say anything to that.  She ill-, lit have blushed a bit, or
it might have been the deepening red glow of sunset.

They walked to the edge of town in silence, just enjoying each other's
company, but as they passed the first houses, Lilian said, "So what's
on your agenda for the rest of the evening, Captain?"

He looked up into the sky.  "I suppose I should get back to the ship
and make my report."

She laughed softly.  "That's going to be a little hard to do for the
next few hours, isn't it?  Gamma Night won't be over until almost
midnight."

Gamma Night.  In the excitement, he'd completely forgotten.  The
Enterprise was on its own, and so was he.  He'd made a few preliminary
plans this morning, but he hadn't finalized any of them.  "Maybe I can
catch the Governor at home and talk with him about the rebuilding
effort"' he said.

"You could.  Or you could catch the school administrator at home and
talk with her about all the things you saw today.  If you do, she might
even ask you to stay for dinner."

"She might, might she?"  Kirk squeezed her hand.  "I bet she's a better
cook than Pardonnet."

She shrugged.  "I wouldn't know about that, but she hasn't poisoned
anybody yet."

"Well then, I think I'd like that."

They walked on into town a few more blocks, then Lilian led the way
down a side street full of single story brick houses with stone
walkways flanked by flowerlieds leading from the street to their front
doors.  A few had white picket fences, but most defined their
boundaries with thick green hedges.

After all the devastation he had seen today, Kirk was glad for a little
suburban tranquility.  It felt good to see the colony as it was meant
to be.  The hedges and flower gardens were still young, and there
wasn't a tree taller than himself, but the place looked like it had a
future.

Lilian turned in at a house with bright yellow sunflowers in front of
it.  Kirk glimpsed a vegetable garden in back with corn growing taller
than the trees next to it.  Tomatoes and squash provided splashes of
color.  He knew the colonists grew most of their own food in just such
plots, but it hadn't occurred to him that the gardens would be pretty
as well as functional.

The inside of Lilian's house was a bit less tidy than the outside.
Perhaps having a ten-year-old boy had something to do with that.  Just
inside the door there was a living room filled with books, artwork, and
toys; to the left a hallway led toward the back of the house, and an
archway in the back wall of the living room led to the kitchen. Reynold
called out from the room at the end of the hallway as soon as he heard
the door open.  "Mom, can I go over to Nathan's house tonight? We've
got to finish our science project."

"We have a dinner guest " she told him.

"Oh."  He stuck his head around the door jamb.  "Oh!  Hello,
Captain."

"Hello"' Kirk said.  "What kind of science project are you working
on?"

"It's really bril"' Reunold said, and Kirk made a mental note to ask
Lilian later if "bril" meant what he thought it did.  "We're putting a
hologram projector and a force field generator side by side, and we're
going to see if we can use the force field to make a holographic image
feel like it's solid."  '-That's ... an ambitious project"' Kirk told
him.  "What do you intend to do with it if you get it to work?"

"Make movies!"  Reynold said.  "Wouldn't it be jus overly loom if you
could actually walk around inside the scenes and feel what's going
on?"

Kirk imagined it would be loom indeed, whatever "loom" was.  In fact,
the more he thought about it, the more staggering the implications
became.  If it actually worked, Starfleet could use something like that
for hand-to-hand combat training, or simulated first contact
situations, or even recreation on long voyages.

"That sounds interesting," he said.  "Let me know how it goes."

"I will.  Can I go, Mom?  It's due tomorrow."

"Did you finish your-"

"Yes.

"All right, then.  Be careful."

"We will."  He disappeared into his room again, then reappeared with a
box full of electronic parts.  Kirk held the front door open, then
closed it softly behind him.

"That really is an interesting idea," he told Lilian as he followed her
into the kitchen.

She laughed.  "Oh, he's never at a loss for those.  Getting him to
stick with anything for more than a day is the trick."  She stepped
into the kitchen.  "Come on, let's see what we can find in the
pantry."

Chapter Sixteen

ScoTry sAT in the pilot's chair and turned the small ionic-exchange
sensor over in his hands, examining the few parts of the component that
could go wrong.  It was a metal tube about two centimeters thick and
ten long, and it operated the temperature circuit in the forward
environmental controls.  It was supposed to, at any rate, but for the
last several hours the temperature had been rising, and nothing Scotty
did had been able to stop it.

He checked the socket at the base of the sensor, tracing the data line
from the connector through the port to the actual Maxwell exchange
filter, but he wasn't finding the problem he expected.  The housing
looked sound, he didn't see any wear on the delicate connections, and
the filtration sieve appeared to be rotating to specs.  So why wasn't
it working?

He set the sensor aside and stretched his arms high over his head, only
to have them smack into the ceiling panel.  He'd forgotten he'd left it
hanging open like that when he'd sat down, expecting a fast job tuning
and reinstalling the errant sensor.  He would have whacked his head a
good one if he'd stood up too quickly.

He checked the time and ceafized that he should have awakened Doctor
McCoy half an hour ago.  They were taking turns sleeping and minding
the Beater while she limped her way toward BTS 453.  They'd been moving
by leaps and stalls for a little over a day, but right now the engines
puffed like their stowaway cat when he scratched her behind the ears,
and he was pretty sure they would stay fixed for a time.  Then he
checked the ship's course and realized they didn't need to.  They were
nearly there.

He dropped them out of warp and did a sensor sweep for other ships.
Nothing.  They were still light-hours out from the planet, farther than
Jupiter was from Earth.  That was far enough away to avoid being
spotted by any of the locals' defense sensors, and close enough to
monitor their communications and get an idea of just how advanced their
spacefaring abilities were.  Plus they needed to learn where these
folks stood in relation to either the Kauld or the Blood.

Scotty eased up out of the chair and swung the ceiling panel closed,
then walked back to the dark crew quarters where he could hear snoring
coming from McCoy's bed.  They'd left the doors open in the living
spaces of the little ship in hopes that the air would circulate and
give them a more comfortable temperature throughout.  "Doctor?"  he
said, giving the door jamb a rap.

McCoy jolted awake.  "What is it?  Someone hurt?"  No.  "Tis time to
get up.  We've arrived at the planet "Oh.  Right " McCoy yawned.  "You
wouldn't have managed to get the autogailey back on-line yet, by any
chance?  I could sure use a cup of coffee."

"No.  Sorry.  We still have plenty of rations, and I thought we might
want to be able to work in the control cabin without having to strip
down to our skivies."  "Oh, so you got the temperature regulator
fixed?"

"Doctor, could you just once ask me a question that I could answer
positively?"

"Sorry' " McCoy tossed back his blanket and sat up, then stopped, a
puzzled look crossing his face.  "Here's one.  Do you know why I can't
move my legs?"

"Aye, that I do.  The cat is sleeping on them."

"She is?"  McCoy pulled the blanket up again and there, stretched out
across his legs, lay the gray-and white cat.  She yowled at McCoy,
clearly cussing him out for awakening her so rudely; then she stood up
and stretched so hard her whole body shook, jumped down from the bed,
and stomped away in a huff.

"How can a three-kilogram cat be such an immovable object?"  McCoy
asked.  He swung his feet to the floor and rubbed his eyes.

"Dinna you know?  Cats generate their own gravity fields.  That's how
we learned to make such fool-proof gravity generators on our
starship-by studying cats."

McCoy gave him a peeved look.  "Don't blow smoke at me this early in
the morning."

"Aye, Doctor."  Scotty left to let him dress with some privacy.

They were still calling their stowaway "Kitty," but after observing her
for a day or so they were getting closer to a name.  They had both
noticed a pattern to her behavior, at least.  She'd be curled up on one
of the bunks in the crew quarters taking a tongue-bath, or even
sleeping peacefully in a quiet corner, then she'd suddenly burst into
action and run full tilt through the galley into the control room.
She'd be moving so fast that when she came to the backs of the pilot's
and copilot's chairs she'd jump from the floor and tat a chair back
with all four feet, twist in mid-rebound, and land with her feet
already scrabbling for purchase to send her back the way she came.  If
she approached either man while in one of these high-energy states,
she'd skid so that she stood sideways to him, back arched, ears back
and tail twitching.  The little toe dance she did would probably scare
a mouse senseless, and Scotty discovered that she would stand her
ground even if he mimicked her sideways attack and advanced upon her.

Then just as quickly as it started, her energy level would drop back to
normal and she'd resume her nap like nothing had ever happened.  Scotty
had suggested they call her Electron, because of her ability to jump to
a higher energy state, but McCoy had said it would be damned silly
going around calling, "Here Electron, Electron, Electron' "

As the Doctor emerged from the bunk room Scotty resumed the argument.
"We could call her Ellie for short' "

McCoy staggered toward the auto galley fumbling for his precious
morning coffee.  "We could call her The Queen of England and it
probably wouldn't matter to her" He stared at the inert galley for a
moment, then took his dirty mug from the countertop, filled it with
fresh water from the tap, and stuck it into the molecular heating
field.  "Cats have an innate ability to ignore anything that doesn't
suit them"' he said while he waited for tUs water to heat.

"Aye," Scotty said, " 'tis true enough.  But we canna go around just
calling her "Kitty' all the time.  Where's the imagination in that?"

McCoy pulled his mug out of the heat field, poured instant coffee
powder into it straight from the ration pack, and stiffed it with the
same spoon he had used yesterday.  "Weellll, I do like the idea of
changing energy states."

"So it would seem."

The doctor slurped at his coffee.  A little shudder went through him,
then he sucked in a deep breath and continued as if nothing had
happened.  "So we're there, eh?  What do you know so far?"

"Nothing.  We just arrived."

McCoy stepped past him into the control cabin, his mug in his hand.  He
looked out the viewscreen at the small green-and-white marble ahead of
them, then sat down in the copilot's chair.  "Woo-ee, it's like a
Georgia summer in here, isn't it?"  He tugged at his shirt collar, then
took another sip of hot coffee.  "Feels like home.  What do we do
first?"

Scotty looked at him in wonder for a moment before sitting down
himself.  Zero to warp ten in thirty seconds.  Was that a doctor trick,
or was it just McCoy?

"Let's check for energy usage and communications," Scotty said, setting
to work at the sensors.

"Right.  I'll take communications."  McCoy put the universal
translator's earpiece in his left ear and bent over his console, slowly
tuning through the electromagnetic spectrum.  Scotty brought the
long-range scanners on line and began sifting for power sources.  There
were thousands of them on the ground, and quite a few in orbit as well.
It looked like the locals were technologically advanced enough to have
a network of communication satellites.  A quick survey of the companion
moons showed outposts there as well, so they were also advanced enough
to have gained at least some space travel capabilities.

"So what else does that quantum shift thingt' McCoy asked.

Scotty looked up.  "What?"

"Electrons.  Cats.  What else changes energy states like that?"

Doctors, Scotty thought, but he held his tongue.  A bead of sweat
rolled down his forehead, reminding him of the stubborn Maxwell filter,
so he said, "Ions."  The heat sent his thoughts back to the Brandons'
heirloom toaster.  He winced, remembering that it still sat unusable in
a cabinet back on the Enterprise.  At least it wasn't in the blacksmith
shop with old Thorpe tempted to try his hand at fixing it.

He turned back to his scanners, but he kept thinking about McCoy's
question.  What other name would capture the spirit of their little
stowaway?  Heating element?  And the doctor'd thought Electron was a
mouthful!  Toaster?  Not bloody likely.... "It'd be nice if we could
find something ... celestial," McCoy said.  "You know, since we found
her while we were in space."

"We could call her "Quasar."

"Nope."

"Wormbole."

"No

"Pulsar'

"TA-Uh.  How about "Supernova'?  No, wait, just "Nova."

Anything if it lets us get back to work, Scotty thought, but he had to
admit that "Nova" was better than anything they'd come up with so far.
And by the twinkle in McCoy's eye, Scotty knew that the doctor was
pretty pleased with the name, and with himself for thinking of it.

"Nova," he said.  "Hnu-inn.  Well it surely passes the 'here Nova,
Nova, Nova' test' " The more Scotty rolled the name off his tongue, the
better he liked it.  And naming her after a flaring star worked, too.
"Sure.  Nova it is."

He looked back into the crew quarters, but she was nowhere in sight.

They set back to work at the sensors, and a few minutes later Scotty
had at least an idea of what kind of place they had found.  BTS 453 was
approximately half land, half water, with roughly two-thirds of the
land mass occupying the southern hemisphere.  There were mdimentary ice
caps at the poles, and the atmosphere's content was similar to Earth's.
Weatherwise it was also similar to Earth, with cyclonic disturbances
and evidence of jet streams and areas of high and low air pressure.
There was also a bit of an industrial pollution problem, from the looks
of things.

The heaviest population densities appeared to be located not along the
coasts, as it was on most inhabited planets, but near the center of
each continent.  Upon closer inspection, he found why that was.  Most
of the continents had a central network of large lakes connected by
rivers.

He detected a lot of life in the oceans as well, but not of the type he
found in the obviously urban areas of the planet.  The oceanic
life-forms were either much larger or much smaller than those he
suspected were the technologically adept life-forms on the round.

Scotty then turned his attention to the three moons.  The closest was
small, about three hundred kilometers in diameter.  His sensors picked
up two manned stations, one in either hemisphere.  The second moon sat
farther out and had one manned outpost.  The distance to the third and
largest moon was an order of magnitude farther than that of the inner
ones, and he didn't detect any signs of life there at all.

He set the sensors for a subspace scan, already knowing he would find
nothing there, and leaned back in his chair.

"Any luck, Doctor?"

"Terrific, if you call cataloging 417 channels of apparent
entertainment and 123 supposed news broadcasts lucky.  The lower end of
the spectrum seems to be reserved for transportation com ms  Airplane
controls and taxi service and the like' " McCoy took the translator
earpiece out and gave his ear a good rubbing, then took a drink from
his mug, draining it.  "The highlights I garnered from the news
centered mostly around land boundary conflicts, ecological disasters,
and political elections.  Not a word about Kauld or Blood or
olivium."

"Anything about interplanetary relations?"

"Only that one of the stations on the closest moon the one they call
"Ulu," is due for a change of personnel.  Apparently it's a science
station and there are no permanent residents, no one's trying to
colonize it.  Oh, and by the way, the natives call their planet
"Casail., Let's be sure to tell Spock."

Scotty sighed.  "It sounds like we've found a pre warp society here."

"I'd agree to that.  What did you discover?"

Scotty related the information he had gathered, then when he saw
McCoy's glazed expression he said, "My God, man.  That sounded just
like an encyclopedia entry, didn't it?"

McCoy laughed.  "Yes, but you left out the gross national product."

"No, no.  I have that, too.  Just didn't think ye'd be interested."

"Well, if it'll make you feel any better, I'm sure this information
probably will be included in the next encyclopedia."

Scotty shook his head.  "I'm so glad I've been assigned to an
exploration ship rather than to a survey team."  He got up and
stretched his legs.  "I mean, reading sensors all the time, just
cataloging data, not getting to really see what you've found.  That's
not the life for me."

McCoy chuckled.  "I think I know what you're saying.  But there is a
certain appeal to the other side of exploration.  It'd give a man a
chance to think, to ponder his place in the universe.  To reflect on
his own choices in life' "

"MY, aren't we getting a wee bit philosophical so early in the
morning?"

"It's hardly morning any more.  It's time for some lunch."  McCoy got
up and squeezed past Scotty to the store of rations.  Over his shoulder
he said, "I think it's obvious that we're not going to find help or
allies here."

Scotty joined him, both men sorting through the stack of rectangular
self-heating food containers, looking at the labels.

"Interesting that they've escaped notice by the Kauld," McCoy said.
"Chickenla king.  Tiat'll do."

"This place isn't exactly on the way to anywhere," Scotty reminded him,
"and they're technologically far enough behind the Kauld or even the
Blood that neither o' them scoundrels would bother with them.  Yet."

"You're not going to eat another packet of that stuff, are you?"  McCoy
asked.

"What's wrong with Vulcan latica?  It reminds- time of haggis."

"I rest my case

"Ha.  Well then, it just means more for me."

Within seconds of opening the containers, the cat appeared, sniffing
the air, leaning on their legs and reaching high with her front paws.

Not if she has anything to do with it," McCoy laughed.  He was already
fishing out bits of chicken from his meal and putting them on a small
access panel that they used for feeding her.

"Dinna ye mother teach ye better than to beg?"  Scotty asked the cat as
he held a chunk of latica out for her.  "By the way, we've named you
"Nova."  If the cat cared, she didn't show it.

"I'm assuming our job here is done," McCoy said.  "Where do we go
next?"

Scotty wiped the corner of his mouth and said, "The next likely planet
is two light-years away, according to the data that Mr.  Spock supplied
us with."

"How many more 'likely planets' does he have listed?"

"Let me check."  Scotty moved back to the control panel.  "He gave us
thirty-seven."

"Thirty-seven!  By the time we get through all those, Belle Terre will
be a thriving crossroads.  There's got to be a better way to get the
information we need."

Scotty agreed.  He pulled up more of the data that Spock had supplied
them with and studied the maps.  There were several isolated places
listed, but he figured that the isolation would increase the chances of
those worlds being like Casail: populated with people just taking their
first few steps out of the cradle.  McCoy came up behind him and looked
over the information, too.

Scotty said, "I think we'll have better luck if we keep to these areas
here.  In fact," he said, pausing to take a closer look at a section
where a lot of space travel was likely, "I think we should set our
heading for right here."  He pointed out the coordinates to McCoy.

"Why?"  McCoy asked, one eyebrow rising to punctuate the question.

"To an old space-dog like me, Doctor, that looks like an oasis.  It's
central to several active planets, but it isn't a planet itself.  I'll
bet it's some sort of outpost.  That's where we'll find what we need.
We can sit tight and let the warp-capable civilizations come to us."

"Sounds fine by me."

Scotty programmed the coordinates into the ship's navigational computer
and set it on a fast pace toward their next destination.  "Now, if
you'll excuse me," he said after the warp field had settled down and
subspace was streaking past outside, "I'm going to take myself a wee
bit of a nap."

"Hey!"  McCoy said.  "What about the heat in here?

It's stifling' "

"Aye, you're right."  Scotty picked up the Maxwell exchange filter and
handed it to McCoy.  "All ye need to do is find out why this isn't
working, then just plug it in."  He pointed to the ceiling panel above
the pilot's chair, then turned away toward the crew quarters.

 Chapter Seventeen

THE SHUT ME had been badly damaged.  Deloric and Terwolan floated in
their spacesuits beside it, making a visual.  Tispection to see just
how bad it was.  All around them the stars were tiny points of silvery
light, but in their soft glow the shuttle showed what too much light
could do.  Every surface that had been exposed to the laser's fury had
either melted or charred.  Access hatches had welded themselves to the
hull; thruster ports were clogged, and most of the sensors were
unrecognizable lumps.

Deloric and Terwolan weren't in much better shape themselves.  They had
both been burned on their faces and arms so badly that the skin was
blistering.  Their hair was coming off in crisp chunks.  They could see
again, but every time he blinked, Deloric could still see the laser
beam slicing across his Field of vision.  It had been torture putting
on his spacesuit, but they needed to know how badly the shuttle had
been dam aged.

Their blind jump had taken them a few light-hours away.  They were
still on the edge of the same star system they had been in, but they
had gone far enough to be outside the Blind.  Deloric was glad of that.
The Blind was theoretically not dangerous to a properly protected
person, but he had taken about all the radiation damage he was willing
to endure for a while.

"You know anything about warp engines?"  Terwolan asked him, pointing
at the partially melted bulge on the shuttle's underside.

"No " he said, "but I know it's working or we wouldn't be here' "

"The control panel doesn't even acknowledge its existence " she pointed
out.

"It's got to be just a sensor glitch.  We know it's getting
commands."

"It's going to be mighty hard piloting this thing without feedback."

"Yeah."  He looked at the reaction engines at the back.  The
bell-shaped nozzles were okay-after all, they were designed to
withstand far more heat than they had received today-but the fuel lines
leading to them were partially melted.  "It's going to be hard doing it
without normal-space engines, too, but I think we'd better try.  If
those fuel lines rupture, we're dead."

Terwolan pulled herself around back for a closer look.  "It's just the
left engine.  The right side is okay."

"So we can go in spirals.  That's good news."

"We can shift the center of gravity to the right as much as possible by
moving things around inside.  And the forward steering jets are still
good, so I can compensate with those, too.  It'll be enough to get us
into port somewhere."

So long as they didn't try to land on a planet, but that went without
saying.

"We're not going to get much in trade for it when we get wherever we're
going," he said.

"Trade?"  She looked over at him, her head tilted to the side inside
her helmet.

"I don't know about you, but I'm not exactly rich at the moment, and
we're not going to be able to access our payroll unless we want to trip
every security alert in the sector.  We'll have to sell the shuttle for
room and board until we can find work and set up new lives.  And anyone
we could sell it to will know it's stolen, so they won't be
generous."

She was silent for a moment, then she let out a long sigh.  "I hadn't
thought that far ahead, but you're right.  We're criminals now.  We'll
have to start over from the beginning with new identities, new friends,
the whole works.  I won't be able to see my family again."

"It may not be that bad," he said, trying to reassure her, "but we do
have to be careful."

They moved forward again, pulling themselves along using the partially
melted handholds set in the hull.  Deloric inspected the frames around
the front windows and decided they would probably hold against air
pressure from inside for as long as they needed to, and Terwolan
checked the landing skids to make sure they wouldn't buckle under the
shuttle's weight in a gravity field.

After they had seen all they needed to, they went back inside.  The
airlock door lurched closed behind them, sticking twice before sealing
tight enough to allow the lock to be pressurized.  When they stepped
through into the shuttle, Deloric closed the inner door behind them as
well, just as a safety precaution.

Removing their suits was agonizing.  When Deloric bumped his burned
nose on his helmet's neck ring, he thought he would pass out from the
pain.  He gritted his teeth and peeled off the rest of his suit, then
went to the medical locker and found a burn ointment with a topical
anesthetic in it.  He and Terwolan slathered it over their hands,
forearms, and faces, then sat down at the control panel and went over
their options.

Deloric called up the list of preprogrammed destinations.  Whether or
not the autopilot could fly the ship without feedback from the engines
was anybody's guess, but it would certainly help to know the course to
follow even if the ship couldn't do it on its own.  Most of the choices
were military bases and supply depots, but there were a few neutral
worlds and commercial ports of call.  He looked for something nearby;
nearby and busy.  If they had to blend in with the crowd, it would help
to have a crowd to blend in with.

Terwolan was looking over her shoulder.  "How about Hingal IV?"  she
asked.  "It's a major commercial center."

He had been there once, and still remembered the customs procedure.
They had inventoried everything including his teeth!-to make sure he
wasn't trying to smuggle anything in or out.  "Too much security," he
said.  "How about the Fenorik Ring?  It's a moon-sized space station.
People come and go there all the time."

"It's also the home base for the Arecta syndicate.  I may be a
criminal, but I don't want to deal with them."

"Good point."  They scrolled on through the list.  There were hundreds
of possible worlds and space stations to choose from, but it was
alarming how quickly most of them could be eliminated.  The end of the
list was scrolling onto the screen when he finally saw it.

"Naresidan Cluster," he said, just as Terwolan pointed at the same
entry and said, "There!"

It was perfect.  The original Naresidan was an old slow boat a
cylindrical canister a dozen rho across that had conied a thousand
Naresi colonists across ten light years of space over the course of
generations.  It was so prin-titi ve it actually rotated for gravity,
but it was built to last, and it was so much a home to the colonists by
the time they arrived at their prospective colony world that only
thirty of them even attempted to live on the planet.  The fifteen
survivors returned to the ship within a year, and the Naresi had lived
in orbit ever.  since.  They added to their living space from time to
time, at first mining the asteroids for more raw materials but later
buying old cargo ships from neighboring star systems after they had
been discovered by dynadrivepropelled travellers.  The resulting
conglomeration of habitat modules and ships looked more like an
industrial accident than a space station, but it was a free port, and
its owners accepted anybody who wanted to join them, no questions
asked.

The shuttle wouldn't even exist a day after they got there.  Anything
salvageable would be sold to pay for their cubic, and the rest would be
melted down and used to build more living space.  "Let's do it,"
Deloric said.  Terwolan reached for the controls.

Chapter Eighteen

WHAT THEY FOUND in the pantry turned into a gourmet meal, as far as
Kirk was concerned.  With a generous serving from her stash of semolina
flour and a few eggs from the neighbor's hens, Lilian made fresh pasta,
then sent Kirk out to the garden with a reed basket to collect whatever
vegetables looked ready to pick.  He found a double handful of cherry
tomatoes, a green pepper, something akin to a head of broccoli, and
some peas practically bursting from their pods.

Lilian joined him and began picking leaves of lettuce and endive. "It's
odd," she said, pushing foliage aside in search of a ripe salad tomato,
"how the mineral content in soil will affect the way a vegetable will
grow."

"How do you mean?"  Kirk asked.  He laid the greens on top of the other
vegetables he'd put in the basket.

She plucked a good-size tomato from the vine and handed it to him.  It
was smooth and solid in his hand.  A strong, pungent smell waited from
the tomato's leaves.  '-fake a look at the bottom," she said.

"Looks good to me' "

"That's not an accident.  The first tomatoes I grew here were all
misshapen.  The plants were spindly and the fruit would rot from the
bottom up.  When I talked to our botanist, she said the Burn left the
soil too acidic.  All the ash, I guess."  What did you do?"  "When I
planted these seedlings, I added some lime to the soil.  The difference
is like night and day."  She stood and offered him her hand.  He took
it as he got up and followed her back into the kitchen, where he took
the vegetables out of the basket and rinsed them in the sink.

"What is that wonderful smell?"  he asked.

Lilian was at the stove, stirring a pale yellow sauce in a glearrng
pot.  "This?"  she asked, taking the pot from the heat and holding it
under his nose.

Light steam rose from the pot, and it brought with it a tangy aroma
that made his mouth water.  "Oh yes.  That."

She smiled and resumed her stirring.  "It's the lemon brundel sauce for
the pasta pmavera."

"Brundel?"  he asked as he sliced tomatoes for their salad.

"It's an herb that tastes like lemon.  It's easier to grow than lemons
are, doesn't need the warm tropical climate real lemons do.  Are you
done shelling the peas?"

"Coming up."

The meal went together quickly, complete with crusty rolls and a
dessert of rhubarb crunch.  They sat across from each other at the
dinner table.

"More pasta?"  Lilian asked after they had slowed down a bit.  "Yes,
please.  This is delicious!"

"I didn't realize how hungry I was"' she said.  She loaded more onto
his plate and took another scoop for herself

"It takes a lot of energy to be a pilot," Kirk said.  "Besides, it was
a busy afternoon on the ground, too."

She nodded.  "My heart goes out to those poor people.  I think I'd be
more useful to them if I went out and helped shovel muck than I am
sitting here and ordering ftumiture for them."

"But they'll need that just as much," Kirk said.

They ate dessert as they watched the brilliant colors of the sunset
through the window.  As the room fell into twilight, Lilian lit two
white candles and placed them on the table.

"Nice," Kirk said.  He gazed at Lilian's delicate face in the soft glow
of the candles.  He liked the way the flickering flame made her eyes
sparkle.  "I haven't dined by candlelight in a long time

"You haven't been on the surface much, then"' she said with a laugh.
"We decided to go with a central power supply instead of independent
home units, thinking it'd be much more efficient, but now with all the
wind and rain taking out our transmission lines, we're seeing the
downside of the idea."

"There seems to be a downside to a lot of good ideas' " Kirk said.

"Such as?"

He looked into the candle flame.  "Well, the governor can find a whole
host of good reasons to dismiss most of my suggestions."

Lilian chased the last of the crumbs from her dessert across her plate
with her fork.  "And you can find equally good reasons to dismiss his
plans too?"  she asked, looking up from her plate.

"Touchd.  I'm afraid it's true.  It sounds like what we envision for
Belle Terre's future is mutually exclusive, but I can't believe it is."
He folded his napkin and placed it beside his empty plate.  "After all,
we both want the colony to succeed."

"What sort of plans are you clashing over?  Or is this a confidential
subject?"

Kirk smiled.  "Not all that confidential, really.  What it all boils
down to is that I think Belle Terre is still in danger from the Kauld.
I don't want to scare you, but they want that olivium and I can't
believe they've given up on it."

"But Pardonnet feels that the threat is over?"

"He feels that the Kauld are my problem.  He has too many problems of
his own.  And he does.  You saw what a disaster the Big Muddy area is.
The cleanup job alone will take a huge effort, and the rebuilding will
take even more.  The problem is, we both need more manpower than we've
got."

Kirk fell silent.  He cursed himself for letting business interfere
with what had started out as such a pleasant evening.  Maybe it wasn't
too late to steer the conversation away from the Kauld and Pardonnet.
"I'm sonny.  I don't need to bother you with these kinds of things."

"It's quite all right.  I have my own issues with the governor and some
of the decisions he's made in the past."  She stood and gathered the
dishes from the table.  Kirk wondered if she had issues with some of
his own decisions as well.  He stood also and started to help, but she
said, "I'll finish this.  Why don't you have a seat in the living room,
and I'll brin, us a glass of wine."

"That sounds good."

The living room was lined with books.  Kirk turned on the pole lamp
closest to the shelves to see what kind of books a librarian chose to
own, and the answer became quickly obvious.  This one, anyway, read ...
everything.  The top three shelves held fiction, from the Greek
classics to Charles Dickens and Ernest Hemingway to the latest murder
mysteries from Mars.  The next shelf had histories of humans, Vulcans,
and Romulans, and even a thin volume of Klingon history bound in what
looked to be targhide.  That must have been a hard book to come
across.

The "how-to" books filled another three shelves, covering subjects like
her beloved garden, bicycle repair, beer- and wine making and
carpentry.  She even had a copy of Jayne's Guide to Non-Federation
Ships.

The bottom shelf of every bookcase was littered with children's books.
Unlike the others, which showed careful handling and little if any
wear, these books had been well loved.  The covers were tattered and
some of the spines were broken.  He could see pages sticking out at odd
angles, no longer bound with the rest.  Some little boy had spent a lot
of time with these colorful friends.

He was just thumbing out a crumbling copy of nursery rhymes when Lilian
returned with two crystal glasses of dark red wine.

"You like books, too, don't you, Captain?"  she said, as she handed him
a glass.

"Please call me Jim.  And yes, I do.  I appreciate being able to use
the colony library."

"I'm glad you do.  If kids see someone like you coming to check out
books, they'll be more likely to do the same."

"I didn't know I had that much influence."

"You do, and not just with the children."  She turned on the lamp on
the end table and set her wine glass down.  She picked up a box of
rocks and a jacket from the couch and sat down, patting the cushion
beside her.  "I had to fight for the cargo space to bring real books
here, you know."

He took the hint and settled in next to her.  "I didn't realize ... is
that one of the issues you have with the governor?"

"It was.  Once word got around that he thought we should only bring
duotronic memory modules, I started a ewnpaign to convince him that was
a bad idea.  What if the electronic readers couldn't function properly
out here?  All that information would be useless, irretrievable."  She
took a sip of her wine.

He sat quietly for a moment, contemplating a world without any kind of
written word.  The Enterprise didn't have the room to hold a paper
communal library, but the computer stored millions of works
electronically.  If the computer malfunctioned, the loss of literature
would be the least of their worries.  Still, Kirk kept a few "real"
books, as he thought of them, in his quarters.

"As long as we're stationed here, I'll be happy to set an example for
the locals."  He smiled and reached for his wine.

The lights suddenly winked out.  Kirk instantly snatched his
communicator from his belt, then he realized it was still Gamma Night
and stuck lit back in place.

He started to stand up, but Lilian reached out and found his arm in the
dark.  "It's all right," she said.

'-This happens a lot during Gamma Night.  We're not under attack."

"It's certainly ... startling," he said, sitting back down.

"You get used to it."

The only light was from the candles in the dinipg room, and what little
starlight filtered in through the windows.  Lilian still held onto his
arm.  After a moment she said, "I should lifing the candles in here."

Kirk's eyes were already adapting to the daricnessHe turned toward her
and saw the faint halo around the edge of her hair and the twin
sparkles of her eyes.  "I have a better idea he said, leaning forward
to kiss her.

There was an awkward moment when he thought he had misread her, but
then her lips met his and her hand slid up his arm to cradle the back
of his neck.  "I do like your ideas," she murmured.  "Got any
others?"

 Chapter Nineteen

THEY WERE almost two-thirds of the way to the outpost when the alarm
sounded.  McCoy jumped up from his seat in the galley, scattering Nova
off his lap, and rushed for the control cabin.  The status monitor in
the middle of the console blinked a warning: subspace activity
detected

"Well I'll be damned," he muttered.  Nothing like nipping over what you
were looking for on the way to the flashlight.

He checked the direction it was coming from.  Not ahead of them.  It
was in a star system off to the side half a light-year and already
receding.  He slowed the Beater's speed down to warp four and scanned
for more inforination, smiling when he saw the number of warp
signatures.  Fifty-five ships!  That had to be an entire
civilization.

"A bird in hand is worth two in the bush," he said, turning the shuttle
toward the source and running the

9M back to warp ten.  He kept the scanners on ma-wmum as he approached,
looking to see where the ships ere travelling to and from, but the warp
signatures were all confined within a tiny area of space around one of
the outer planets.  All fifty-five ships were making tiny jumps,
warping in and out and looping around one another like a hive full of
angry bees.

"What the heck?"  he muttered.  He watched the solar system draw closer
on the navigation display, then dropped out of warp while he was still
a light-day out.

There was nothing visible in the optical; just a star and its planets,
with no evidence of activity around any of them.  Even at high
magnification, there was nothing to see.  Whatever was going on in
there had started less than a day ago, and it had come from
out-system.

The subspace sensors were full of activity.  McCoy worked with the
controls, cursing his rusty skills with this sort of thing.  Where was
Spock when you needed him, anyway?  hfitating as the Vulcan could be at
times, there was no denying his skill with a sensor sweep.  McCoy
thought about waking Scotty, but he decided to give it another few
minutes before he did that.  He at least wanted to be able to say what
he'd found.

The computer began piecing together an image as more data came in.  The
individual ships were just points of light milling around, but tiny
barbs of energy lanced back and forth between them, and every few
seconds a brilliant flare would burst out.

"Uh-oh," he whispered.  He had seen this sort of thing before.  Many
times before, both in simulation and in real life.  Somebody was
fighting a major space battle.

He gauged the distance and decided to risk a closer look.  They were so
intent on each other, he didn't think they would see a momentary jump
from his angle.

He took the shuttle into warp again, held it for five seconds, then
dropped back into nominal space.  Thatstill put him a few light-hours
away, but the subspace signals were much stronger now.  He could
actually see the ships in the high-intensity scan.  Sure enough, they
were fighting, though nobody seemed to be doing much damage.  There
were a lot of direct hits, but nothing strong enough to penetrate
shields.  It looked like they were running battle drills.

He squinted, trying to see the ships' outlines in the false-color
image.  They looked familiar.

He broke into a sweat that had nothing to do with the malfunctioning
environmental controls.  Good God, those were Kauld warships.

"Scotty!"  he yelled.  He heard a scrabbling sound and turned around in
his chair, but it was just the cat.  Nova had been about to jump into
his lap again, but she tore off into the darkened crew quarters, and a
moment later Scotty yelled, "Hey!  Owl"

Nova came barreling back into the galley, the engineer right behind
her.

"We've got trouble," McCoy said.

"Aye, I'll show you trouble," Scotty said, holding up his right hand,
where a red streak across the knuckles dripped blood.  "That little
creature got me with her claws."

"The Kauld are going to get Belle Terre with more than that," McCoy
said.  "Have a look."

Scotty looked over his shoulder at the displays, then he sank slowly
into the pilot's chair.  "Have ye warned the Enterprise yet?"  "I just
now discovered it."

Scotty tapped at the control board, dumping the video buffer into
permanent storage.  "Let's give it another few minutes, then back away
to a safe distance this to 'em."

and send

"Good idea."

They watched in silence as the mock battle pro grassed  Some of the
ships were slow and boxy, obviously pressed into duty from civilian
use, but well over half of them were the familiar Kauld warships. Three
were brand new, and represented a complete departure from the others. 
They were fast, sleek, and deadly.

Scotty frowned as he watched them in action.  He zoomed in as much as
he could, tapping his fingers nervously on the control board as he
collected the information, then finally he said, "Let's not press our
luck.  Time to warn the Captain."  He swirled the shuttle around and
engaged the warp engines, throwing them back into interstellar space.

While he piloted them away from the Kauld fleet, McCoy powered up the
subspace communications equipment and adjusted it for a narrow-hewn
transnssion, triply encoded, to the Belle Terre system.  "McCoy to
Enterprise," he said.  "Come in Enterprise."

He waited for a response, but got nothing even after two more hails.
Then he checked the time.

"Hell, it's the middle of Gamma Night back there."

"Oh," said Scotty.  "Sure it is."

"Should we head back?"

Scotty rubbed his hand, scratching absently at the dried blood from
Nova's claw marks.  "No' " he said finally.  "Gamma night will be over
before we could get there, so a subspace radio message would still beat
us home.  And we haven't learned much we didn't already know, really.
the Captain already guessed the Kauld were building up another fleet.
He's sure to order us on with our mission, if for no other reason than
to see if we can find out whether that's all of them or if this is part
of something even bigger."

"Do we still want to head for that outpost?"

"I think so."  Scotty checked the navigation display.  "It's less than
two hours away at top speed.  If we're quick about it, we can check it
out and report what we find there, too, when Gamma Night's over."

McCoy stared at the blank viewscreen.  Light-years away from home with
bad news and no way to report it; he hadn't felt quite so isolated in
years.  Suddenly the trip had lost what little charm it had
possessed.

He was still fretting when they arrived at the outpost.  From
communications traffic as they approached, they learned that it was
called Naresidan.  McCoy thought "Scrap Pile" would have been a more
descriptive term, but maybe that's what "Naresidan" meant in the
owners' native tongue.  The place looked like an architect's nightmare.
Starships of all sizes and styles were docked to booms sticking out
haphazardly in all directions.  Most of the ships were blocked from
moving by the ones parked next to them, and it wasn't until he checked
at high magnification that he realized that most of the blocked ones
were welded in place.  The inner ones were barely recognizable as
spacecraft; they had been modified, added to, joined together, and in
some cases split open like clam shells and welded to the outer surfaces
of still larger ships.

At the center of it all, nearly obscured by the others, rested a
cylindrical drum at least five miles across and twice as long.  It
rotated slowly, no doubt providing gravity on its inner surface by
centrifugal force.  It was a primitive tack, but it worked.  And so did
everything else in the outpost, it seemed.  The place was a frenzy of
activity, with ships coming and going almost continually.  No two were
alike, either.

"I guess we found what we were looking for," McCoy said softly.

"Aye, that we have," Scotty agreed.  "Now if we can just figure where
to park without becoming a permanent part o' all that."

McCoy got on the coi-inn and requested pen-mission 'to land, and the
controller talked them into a berth inside one of the long spines.  As
they edged into a landing bay.  and nestled down between two bulky
cargo freighters, McCoy muttered, "I feel like a bug crawling into the
Statue of Liberty."

Scotty brought them in with hardly a bump.  The external sensors
registered atmosphere inside the bay.  McCoy checked it for toxicity,
but while there were plenty of organic compounds, it looked breathable
enough.

"Well, let's go take the tour," he said, getting up and heading for the
airlock.

He opened both doors at once, and was just steppin out when a gray
streak darted between his legs and Nova bounded down the ramp.

"Hey, come back here!"  he shouted, but the cat didn't even slow
down.

"Nova!"  He ran down the ramp after her, but that just urged her on.
She ducked around one of the freighters and disappeared.

"Danu-nit!"  he said.  "Nova, come back here."  He rounded the corner
after her, but she was nowhere in sight.  There was a crew busy
unloading wooden crates from the back of one of the freighters.  They
were of three different species, all of them rippling with muscle. They
looked at McCoy for a moment, then went back to work.

"Did you see which way she went?"  he asked.

One of them, a fanged, blunt-nosed fruit bat sort of creature, said,
"See which way who went?"

"My cat.  Little furry thing, about this big."  He held his arms out,
hands apart.  "She came right past here just a second ago."

The bat-creature wrinkled his nose.  "I didn't see it.  Sony."  The
others didn't even stop working.

McCoy walked on past them, looking into nooks and crannies, but the
landing bay was all nooks and crannies, and open doorways and corridors
leading deeper into the station.  Nova could be anywhere.

"Dammit " he muttered again, turning once around.  A tricorder' right
find her, but he had left his in the shuttle, and by the time he got it
and came back, she could be another hundred yards away.

Scotty came running up to him.  "Did ye catch her?"

"No."

"Nova!"  Scotty called.

They looked for a few minutes, but there was no sign of her.  McCoy
went back for his tricorder, but that didn't help.  Finally he said,
"She's gone.  We'll just have to keep the door open and hope she comes
back."

"What if somebody catches her?"  Scotty said.  "They might mistake her
for vermin."

He had a point.  McCoy thought about it for a moment, frowning.  "Then
we'll just have to put up posters."

He led the way back to the shuttle.  It was the work of a moment to
call up an image of a gray tabby cat from the data banks, but it took a
bit longer for the computer to translate the message "Lost cat-please
return to landing bay 7405, space 93" into the local trade langua,e.
The result looked like flyspecks and bird tracks around the photo, but
the computer assured them it was the proper translation.

McCoy dithered a moment, then told it to add "reward offered" to the
bottom.  This was a trading station, after an.  He couldn't expect
anyone to do anything for free.

They printed out two dozen posters and stuck them all around the cargo
bay and in the hallways, then went back to the shuttle and closed the
doors until only a hand's width remained for Nova to slip through if
she returned.  Scotty pulled the power module from the door to make
sure nobody could open it any farther, then he turned back toward the
station side of the bay and said, "Now we'd best go find us a watering
hole and listen for news."

McCoy liked the sound of that.  If there was anything like a mint julep
to be had around here, he could gladly spend some time sipping one and
listening for information.

 Chapter Twenty

"WHO EVER HEARD of a tavern that wouldn't serve a paying customer?"
Deloric asked.  He and Terwolan trudged down the long corridor toward
the landing bay where their ship waited.  Their footsteps echoed in the
metal confines, but they had to compete for volume with the growling of
their stomachs.  The shuttle hadn't been stocked with food, and the
only tavern they could find within walking distance didn't take Kauld
military ration chits in trade.

"We'll find a currency exchange booth tomorrow", Terwolan said.  "Or a
pawnshop.  There's plenty of mining equipment we can sell."  "Yes, but
I'm hungry now," he reminded her.

"Me too, but we'll just have to tough it out.  Nothing's open now."

"This is Naresidan!  How can all the pawnshops be closed?"

She shrugged.  "Maybe it's a religious holiday."

They emerged into the landing bay.  Deloric shielded his eyes against
the glare from the overhead lights until he spotted their shuttle, then
led the way down the cargo choked dock toward it.  He considered trying
to bum a muon pack from one of the dock hands unloading a ship a few
berths down from theirs, and he was still working up his courage when
he saw the creature sniffing around the partially melted forward
landing leg of their shuttle.

There!"  he said, conying to a stop and holding out an arm to keep
Terwolan from getting any closer and scaring it away.

"Where?"  she asked.  "What do you see?"

"Dinner," he whispered.  He pointed toward the gray, furry thing.  It
looked a bit thin, and that tail would have practically no meat on it,
but there had to be enough on its haunches to take the edge off until
morning.

Terwolan snorted.  "What?  I may be hungry, but I'm not desperate.
Besides, it looks faster and meaner than either of us.  How would you
catch it?"

The creature lifted its head and looked at them with wide green eyes,
then it stood and rubbed up against the landing strut.  It did look
like it could move quickly if it had to.

"Maybe if I go around behind it, we could come at it from both
sides."

Terwolan pointed at the countless bolt-holes among the unloaded cargo
containers that the creature could run into.  "We'd have to-hey, wait a
minute."  She walked over to the wall and pulled down a sheet of paper
stuck there.  "Look at this.  It's somebody's pet."

Deloric looked at the photo.  It certainly did look like the creature.
Then he noticed the words at the bottom: "Reward offered."

"I wonder what it's worth?"  he asked.

:"A meal would be good enough for me."

The too."  He walked slowly closer, then knelt down and held out his
hand.  "Here, little creature.  Come here."

The thing took a step toward him and sniffed, then backed away.

"It can probably sense what you wanted to do to it," Terwolan said.
"Let me try."  She took a couple more steps toward it, then bent down
and held out her hand and the creature trotted right up to her.  She
rubbed the fur on the back of its head, then stroked its sides.  "It's
soft," she said.  "Let's see if it'll let me pick it up."

It did.  Then it climbed up her arm and settled in across her
shoulders, holding itself in place on her clothing with tiny hooked
claws.  "Uh ... where did that poster say the owners' ship is parked?"
she asked nervously.

"Space 93.  Only five down from ours."

"Good.  Let's go before it eats me."  Terwolan stood up slowly and set
off down the landing bay, walking carefully.

They found the ship easy enough-a modified freighter or tug of some
sort that was all engines now but there was no one home.  Both airlock
doors were ajar, obviously left that way so the creature could come and
go, but nobody answered when Deloric yelled in through the opening.

"Now what?"  he asked.

"It's squirming," Terwolan said.  "It-Aw!"  The creature dropped off
her shoulder and slipped inside the airlock.

"Oh, great.  There goes our reward."

Terwolan looked at the airlock, then at the poster in

Deloric's hand.  She tugged it out of Is grip and sat down on the ramp
with her foot covering the bottom most part of the opening.  "Maybe
not"' she said.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean we brought their-" she looked at the poster again it-their cat
home.  We put it inside where it belongs.  Now we're guarding the
door."

Deloric looked around at the landing bay, empty except for the team
unloading the one cargo ship.  "It could be a long wait."

"We can either go back to our shuttle and listen to our stomachs growl,
or do it here and hope for a meal.  N%eh would you rather?"

"Well, when you put it like that...."  He sat down next to her and
stuck his foot in the crack above hers.  It felt awkward, and the
creature could probably jump right over both of their feet if it wanted
to, but they might be able to stop it if they were quick.

They didn't have to try.  Only a few minutes after they sat down, they
heard footsteps in the corridor and a voice saying, "Who ever heard of
a tavern that wouldn't serve a paying customer?"

Two tall, pinkish bipeds entered the cargo bay and headed straight for
Deloric and Terwolan.  Both wore red leggings; one of them was also
dressed in red from the waist up, the other in green.

"Hey now, what are you two doing there?"  said the one in red.

Deloric felt the blood drain from his face.  He had seen their kind
before.

"You're human " he said.

"Aye, an' you're Kauld.  What kind of mischief are ye up to with our
ship?"  The human held his hand near his weapon, but he hadn't drawn it
yet.

Terwolan held up the poster, moving slowly to keep from startling him.
"We found your pet.  It ran inside when we set it down, and we were
making sure it didn't get out again."

"Did ye, now?"  The human didn't relax, but the one behind him
unclipped a rectangular sensing device from his belt and held it out
toward the ship.  It whistled a warbling two-tone note for a few
seconds, then the human holding it lowered the gadget and said to the
other one, "She's inside the shuttle, all right.  And you two:' he said
to Deloric and Terwolan, "have second and third-degree radiation burns
all over your faces and arms.  What happened to you?"

Delon looked over at Terwolan.  Her smooth blue skin was now an angry
violet, with blisters beginning to form on her forehead and cheeks. Her
forearms were starting to peel.  The human could see all that, but
could it see the real injury?  Deloric could.  The haunted look in her
eyes no doubt mirrored his own.  They had thought they could run away
from it, but it had followed them all the way to Naresidan.

His mouth grew dry.  To speak would be treason!  But to remain silent
would be the death of his honor.  He heard the rustle of paper as
Terwolan crumpled the poster in her fist, and knew she was fighting the
same battle.

"What happened?"  the human asked again.

He could at least answer that.  "We were hit with a laser."

"It sure looks like it.  Haven't you done anything for "It'?"

Nothing can be done, he wanted to say.  It's already been fired  But he
held his tongue.

Terwolan said, "There was an ointment in our medical kit, but we used
it up."  She flattened the poster again and held it out to him.  "You
promise a reward.  If you will pay us, we can seek medical help."

Deloric's stomach chose that mo nient to growl.  "And food:' he said.

The human stuck his sensor back on his belt.  "Why don't we cut out the
middleman?  I'm a doctor, and if you don't mind ration packs, we've got
food inside."  The other human said, "But these are Kauld!"  "And they
brought our c;it back."  '-Fhey did that before they knew we were
human.  We can't trust 'em on board our ship."

Choosing his words carefully, Deloric said, "Not all of us feel the
same way about you.  We-the two of us-have renounced the war."

The one in red didn't look mollified, but the one in green said,
"According to my scan, they're not carrying any weapons.  We can feed
'em and heal 'em and send em on their way."

"That's fraternizing with the enemy," the other protested.

"The Kauld declared war on us, not the other way around.  It's my own
choice how I act toward them, at"(I these two are injured.  I won't
turn them away."

The tension between the humans was palpable.  Deloric and Terwolan said
nothing, waiting for them to make up their minds.

At last the one in red said, "All right.  Be it on your head if there's
trouble.  If you two would move aside for a moment..  .."

They stepped off the ramp.  Keeping his eye on them., he plugged a
power module into the door controls and opened the airlock, disappeared
inside for a moment, then came out again, his hand still hovering near
his weapon.  "Come on in"' he said, "but don't touch anything."

That was hard to do.  The interior of the ship was cramped even for
two.  With four people on board it was like a locker room.  It was hot
enough to be a locker room, too.  No wonder their pet had run away; it
would be sweltering under all that fur.  It was nowhere in evidence
now, either, but Deloric assumed it was locked in one of the back rooms
to keep it from running away again.  All the doors were closed, hiding
bunks and engine compartments and who knew what else.

The red-shirted human stood in front of the closed door to the control
room.  That must have been what he had done before letting Deloric and
Terwolan in; sealed off everything but the tiny common area.

There was a tiny table with a padded bench on either side and a set of
cabinets covered with food-preparation equipment.  Deloric's mouth
watered at the sight of it.

The doctor motioned them to sit at the table, then he went into one of
the back rooms and returned with a metal case full of medical
instruments, one of which he switched on and waved in front of
Terwolan's face.

"This will help the burned tissue to heal instead of flake off," he
said.

An expression of wonder spread across her face, almost as if the
instrument were repainting her features.  "It's stopped hurting!"

"Good" The doctor turned his attention to Deloric, and he could feel
the effect immediately.  The tension in his muscles released, and the
constant fiery heat faded back to normal.

"Now your arms " said the doctor, and both Deloric and Terwolan laid
their arms out so quickly that everyone-even the human in
red-laughed.

The doctor switched to a smaller instrument and went over the same
areas again.  "This'll cut down on the chance for infection," he
explained.  He looked at Terwolan's eyes, then nodded, apparently
satisfied with what he saw there.  "What's your name?"  he asked.
"Terwolan," she replied.  "Deloric," Deloric said before the doctor
could ask.  "Mine's McCoy.  That's Mr.  Scott."

Deloric noted the honorific.  Anyone holding him at gunpoint could be
"Mister" as far as he was concerned.

"Now to take care of your other problem," McCoy said.  He unclipped the
rectangular scanner from his belt again and examined them both, then
nodded.  "Looks like anything but shellfish ought to be fine.  You like
emu?"

Deloric shrugged.  "I..

"That was a joke, son."  McCoy opened one of the cabinets, selected two
ration packs, and set them down in front of his guests.  He peeled the
top off of one and held it up for them to sniff as the self-heating
contents began to steam.  It was some kind of brown meat strips on a
bed of white grain.  Delofic's stomach rumbled again, and Terwolan had
to swallow to keep from drooling.

"That will do fine," she said, taking the packet from the human's
hands.

McCoy opened the other one and handed it to Deloric, then gave them
each a curved, multi pointed tool to eat it with.

"So, what brings you to Naresidan Station?"  McCoy asked as they set
to.

Deloric was swallowing as the human spoke, but the food suddenly stuck
in his throat.  He coughed, tried to swallow again, but couldn't manage
it.

"Easy, man!"  Mr.  Scott said.  "Take your time."

"Wa ... water!"  Deloric gasped as Terwolan pounded him on the back.

McCoy turned back to the galley, filled a mug that was sitting on the
counter, and handed it to him.  The water tasted of something burned,
but he didn't care; he swallowed a big gulp, washing down the lump in
his throat.

"You all right?"  McCoy asked.

Deloric nodded.  He looked at the human, standing there before him so
friendly and solicitous, even though the Kauld had caused his people
immeasurable harm.  He looked over to Terwolan and saw her staring at
her food, unable to take another bite either.

"We have to tell them"' Deloric said.

She stiffened, but didn't look up.

"Tell us what?"  Mr.  Scott asked.

Deloric took a deep breath.  This was treason.  But he had already
committed himself He looked back at McCoy and said, "In four days, a
laser beam the width of the planet will strike your colony world, Belle
Terre, burning everything in its path down to bedrock."

The humans' expressions were unreadable.  McCoy seemed to grow paler,
but Mr.  Scott merely snorted and said, "A beam the size of a planet?
Who are you trying to fool?  With that kind of spread, it'd be lucky to
melt snow."

"It started out as wide as this station"' Deloric told him.  "It
doesn't have to spread much to cover the planet by the time it gets
there.  And it'll have more than enough power.  The energy source was
an olivium chain reaction."

"Was?"  Mr.  Scott seemed paler now, too.

"Was.  We were burned by the flash.  The laser has already been
fired."

Chapter Twenty-one

KJRK AWOKE to the insistent beepin, of a communicator.  It took him a
moment to place where he was; the room was pitch dark, and it didn't
have the familiar acoustics of his shipboard cabin.

Then he smelled the waxy candle smoke and the flowery, feminine aroma
that could be found only in a woman's bedroom, and he remembered where
he was.  He slipped out of bed and felt for his clothing on the chair
beneath the window, found the communicator, and stepped into the living
room before flipping it open.  "Kirk here," he said softly.

"Captain," said Lieutenant Uhura.  "I've got an incoming message from
Dr.  McCoy."

McCoy?  What would Bones be calling him for at this hour?  It was even
later ship's time than here on the planet.  "Put him through," he said,
already dreading the news.

"Jim?"  came the doctor's voice.

"What is it, Bones?"

"Well, I wish I could tell you I've got good news and bad news, but the
fact is, I've got bad news and bad news.  Which do you want first?"

Kirk moved deeper into the living room.  "I'm not in the mood for
jokes"' he said.

"Well, that's good, 'cause that's the only humor you're likely to hear
for a while.  We found that Kauld fleet you were so sure was out
here."

Kirk felt the hair at the back of his neck start to stand out.  "You
did?  Are you all right?"

"They didn't spot us.  They were doing war games, breaking in three new
ships that look like they can beat the pants off the Enterprise.  But
that's not going to be our first problem.  According to somebody we met
out here, the Kauld built a great big laser about five light-days out
from Belle Terre.  Olivium-powered, and big enough to fry the whole
damn planet when the beam hits."

He felt like he'd been hit already, sucker-punched in the gut.  Five
light-days out.  That was the edge of interstellar space.  Nobody had
thought to look for problems out there, because nobody went there
except to pass -through under warp power on the way to somewhere else.
[f the builders were careful with their energy leakage they wouldn't
even need Gamma Night to hide their activity until they fired it.  That
would make a subspace ripple big enough to trigger alarms, but of
course if they timed it right, every subspace sensor in the Belle Terre
system would be blanked out at the time.

The Enterprise had to find it before they fired it, but a spherical
shell five light-days out was a big volume to search.  "Do you know
what direction it's in?"

"I got 'em to draw us a star map of what they could see from their
point of view while they were working on it, so that ought to narrow it
down, but it won't do you any good to find it."

"Why not?"

"Because if we can believe the two Kauld soldiers that told us about
it, they've already fired it.  The beam is on its way."

Kirk looked out the window at the starlight painting the front yard in
delicate shades of silver.  Some of that light had been millennia in
transit from the stars that emitted it.  Space was full of
crisscrossing light rays sliding along at Einstein's speed limit-and
now it apparently contained one enormous laser beam as well.

"How long ago did they fire it?"  he asked.

"About a day.  Maybe less."

So they still had time.  Four days to ... to what?  How could they stop
something like that?

"Where are you now?"  he asked.

"On our way back" McCoy answered.  "Scotty's got us up to warp 12,
so'we should be there in just a few hours, if we don't blow ourselves
up first."

"Good."  Kirk had no idea what, if anything, they could do, but he
would be glad to have his chief engineer and medical officer back on
board when things got ugly.  And they would get ugly; he had no doubt
of that.  At the moment he could think of no way of saving the
colonists except evacuation, and he knew what that would be like. 
Trying to stuff sixty thousand colonists back into the ships that had
brought them here would be about as easy as putting a mushroom cloud
back into the bomb casing.  " Anything else I should know before you et
here?"

he asked.

"I think that about covers it," McCoy said.

"I certainly hope so.  All right, then, I'll see you when you get back.
Kirk out."

He closed the coi-nrrunicator and stood quietly for a moment, still
looking out at the starlit yard.  Why did peace and beauty always have
to be so fragile?

He heard a rustle of motion behind him.  When he turned he saw Lilian
standing in the bedroom doorway, looking ghostly in a white robe
against the darkness behind her.  "I heard," she said.

"We'll think of something," he said.  "Big mirrors to bounce it right
back at them, or ... I don't know, but we'll think of something."

"And the fleet behind that?"

"We'll take care of them, too."

She shivered.  "I don't doubt your ability, but I wonder if it's worth
it.  Belle Terre, deep-space colonization, quantum olivium-is any of it
worth turning this whole sector into a battleground?"

"I don't Icnow," Kirk admitted.  "Sometimes I think it's not.  Other
times I think places like this are the future of the entire Federation.
If you're not going forward, you're going backward."

She dabbed at an eye with her sleeve, the motion barely visible in the
darkness.  "My father told me "You can tell the pioneers by the arrows
in their backs."  Tom and I laughed.  We all thought it was funny.  Now
here we are, and here comes the-what, the third?  fourth?  fifth arrow?
And this one's on fire."  She sniffed.

Kirk, stepped closer and gathered her into his arms.  "It's all right,"
he said.  "We'll find a shield.  Then we'll go hunting archers."

He could feel her shivering as she held him.  "I have a son," she
whispered.  "My little boy is one of the targets."

Kirk said, "I will protect his life with my own."

"That's ... that's what I'm afraid of."

He held her a minute longer, his bare skin cooling in the night air,
then he gently let her go and stepped past her into the bedroom.  "I
have to get back to the ship."

She dabbed her eyes again.  "Yes, I know.  You've got to save the
world."

He didn't know if she meant that to be sarcastic or it' she was just
statin, the obvious.  As he began pulling on his clothing he said, "I'm
certainly going to try.  But just in case I don't manage it, I'm going
to need you to help organize the evacuation.  If it's done carefully,
we can get everyone to safety before the wave front gets here, but if
people start to panic we could kill more than the laser will."

"No pressure," she said.

"I've seen you in action.  You keep your head durin, the excitement.
You'll do fine."

"I guess I'll have to, won't I?"

"Pardonnet will help, once he realizes the severity of the danger."  He
pulled on his boots, then went back to the foot of the bed to give her
one last squeeze and a long, lingering kiss.  "We'll get through this,"
he said, then he flipped open his communicator and took a couple of
steps back.  "Kirk to Enterprise.  One to beam up."

He saw the shimmering colors of the transporter illuminate her for just
an instant as the confinement beam locked onto him, then he was
squinting in the bright lights of the transporter room.  He stepped
down from the stage and rushed for the turbolift, nodding to Ensign
Vagle at the controls as he swept past.

"Uh ... sir?"  Vagle said.

He stopped himself with one hand on the door frame.  "Yes?"

"Your ... uh ... jacket?"

He looked down and saw that he had it on inside-out.  "Thank you,
Ensign

"Any time, sir."

Another day, Kirk would have told him to wipe that silly grin off his
face, but he had no time.  He pulled off the jacket as he ran for the
lift, ordered the car to the bridge, and donned it correctly on the
way.

The bridge was a hive of activity.  Uhura was busy coordinating reports
from ships spread throughout the system, by the sound of it.  Sulu and
Thomsen were running deep-space scans of the volume of space five light
days out, no doubt trying to find any energy signatures that would
indicate the position of the laser or the beam it had fired.  Other
officers filled the engineering, weapons, environmental, and security
stations, all lending their expertise to the problem.  Only Spock,
seated at his science station and staring silently into a data screen,
seemed immune to the sudden frenetic pace.

"Report"' Kirk said as he dropped into his command chair.

Despite his relative calm, Spock was the first to speak.  "We are
attempting to corroborate Doctor McCoy's story through subspace scans,
energy flux readings, gravitational anomalies, and direct optical
observation' So far none of our methods have been successful.
Lieutenant LThura is attempting to ascertain if anyone was outside the
influence of Gamma Night when the laser was fired.  If so, their sensor
logs may contain evidence of the energy discharge.  Ship's status is
operational, all systems on-line and operating at nominal capacity."

"Ready for action, and no idea where to go," Kirk said.  "What about
that star map McCoy said he got?  Doesn't that help any?"

"Yes, Captain.  It narrows the search to a cone only 30 degrees wide.
At five light-days' distance, and not knowing the length of the light
column, that computes to a target area approximately I.29 X 1011
kilometers in diameter and 2.6 x 1010 kilometers deep."

"I get the picture," Kirk said.  They were looking for a needle in a
haystack, but this particular needle couldn't even be seen.  Laser
beams were practically impossible to detect from the side even in an
atmosphere; in space they were invisible unless they hit something and
some of their light was scattered toward an observer.  Plus this one
was coming straight at them, and since everything in normal space
traveled at the speed of light, that meant none of that scattered
evidence would reach them any sooner than the beam itself They would
have to use warp drive to post observers all through the space where it
might be travelling, and hope it hit something natural before it hit an
observer.  Or something unmanned.  "How about remote probes?"  he
asked.

"We are preparing them," Spock said, "but even they will only improve
our odds a hundredfold."

"Only a hundredfold?"  Kirk asked.  "That sounds pretty good to me."

"Not when they start out at thirty-seven million to one against us."

"Oh " Kirk leaned back in his chair and rubbed his chin.  It was rough;
he hadn't shaved since yesterday morning and it was well into the next
day now.  He Ignored it and tried to think of other contingencies.
Could they trust this information that McCoy and Scotty had gotten?  Or
was it a lie designed to send the Enterprise off on a wild-goose chase
while the Kauld fleet swept in and took Belle Terre right out from
under them?

"Keep doing long-range scans for incoming warships, too," he said.  "I
don't want to get caught with our pants down."

"Indeed," Spock said, his tone of voice absolutely flat.  If it had
been anyone else but him, Kkk would have sworn that he was being
ribbed, but the Vulcan couldn't possibly be kidding.  McCoy, yes, but
not Spock.

But everyone on the bridge could probably guess where he had been, and
his disheveled appearance only lent credence to their speculation.  Not
that it mattered, but it wouldn't hurt to clean up a bit, he thought.
It had been along day, and who knew when he would next have the chance
for a shower.  "Let me know the moment you have something," he said,
standing up again and heading for the turbolift.  "I'll be in my
quarters."

Chapter Twenty-two

THE ENTERPRisE had never looked so good to Scotty as she did when he
pulled the Beater up alongside her and prepared to transfer across. The
last six hours had been a harrowing roller-coaster fide halfway across
the sector, punctuated by two moments of relative calm when the warp
coils had fallen out of tune and he'd had to drop back into normal
space to readjust them.  The heat in the tiny control cabin had been
stifling by then.  And the shaking.  Good God, the shaking!  His teeth
still ached from it all.  At warp 12 even the best gravity generators
could barely keep up with the fluctuations as the ship skipped through
gravity waves from stellar collisions and supernovas a hundred thousand
light-years away.

McCoy had cursed the whole way.  So had the cat, when she wasn't hiding
under one of the beds.  Scotty didn't blame them, but he wasn't about
to slow down.

Not after what he had learned from Deloric and Terwolan.

He had wanted to bring them along, but they would have none of that.
They had bolted for the door at the first mention of it, and only when
he'd promised to let them stay at the outpost had they come back to
finish their tale.  They really didn't know that much more, anyway.
They described how they'd mined the comet and had created the
light-minutes-long strewn of carbon dioxide, and how the silvered face
of the comet and the olivium light source had turned it into a
planet-burning laser.  It had all seemed incredibly far-fetched to
Scotty, but he had to admit it was possible.  Practically anything
would lase if you hit it with enough light.  Carbon dioxide didn't even
need that much provocation.  It was one of the best light-collimating
materials known.

Deloric and Terwolan had given the best description they could of which
stars were directly overhead while they worked on the comet, and they
had described the firing in hair-raising detail.  They had even
described the Kauld warship that had supervised the firing.  There was
nothing left to glean from them that couldn't be discovered on-site.

But now, as he stood in the galley beside Dr.  McCoy and waited for the
transporter beam, he wondered if he'd made a mistake.  Space was vast,
even the little bit of it around a solar system.  There were millions
of comets out there, any one of which could be the source of the death
ray.  Even if everything the Kauld soldiers said was true-and
accurate-it would be nearly impossible to find the one that had been
used.  If there was anything more that he could have gotten from them,
any detail he had misheard or misunderstood, he couldn't go back and
ask them now.

McCoy held the cat, who seemed no more eager to face the transporter
than he did.  Nova squirmed in his grip, meowing pitifully and trying
to claw her way up to his shoulders, but he held her close to his chest
and gripped her paws so she couldn't scratch him.

At last the Beater faded from sight, replaced by the Enterprise's
familiar transporter room.  McCoy immediately strode across the hall
into sickbay, while Scotty headed straight for the turbolift and
engineering.

He found it fully staffed, even though it was the middle of ship's
night.  Technicians were going over every system, running diagnostics
and making sure everything was ready for battle.  He noted with
satisfaction that they were paying special attention to the shields. If
the ship found itself in the path of that laser beam, they would need
all the shield efficiency they could get.

He had left Lieutenant Hanson, one of his most competent engineers, in
charge while he was gone, but now he found her running field tests of
the deflector array.  By the rumpled look of her uniform and the wild
disarray of her short brown hair, it looked like she'd been at it
awhile.

"What're you wasting your time here for?"  he asked.  "You canna stop a
laser beam with a deflector."

"Good to see you again, too, sir," Hanson said.  "I don't expect to
stop laser beams with it, but it would be nice to be able to shove
comets out of the way if we have to.  We're going to be running back
and forth through some pretty dirty space."  She pointed to the
diagnostic readings, which were way out of spec.  "Mr.  Spock has been
fooling with the system again, trying to boost its gain with
olivium-powered sensors.  Every time he does that, it knocks the whole
works out of whack."

"Out o' whack, eh?"  Scotty said.  "I suppose that's a technical
term."

Hanson reddened.  "Yes, sir.  With olivium in the circuit, that's about
as accurate a description as you can get.  Its quantum instability
causes some pretty strange macroscopic effects."

"Like what?"

"Like neutrino bursts, for one.  Spock blew up his de rector the first
time he tried it, and he still can't figure out where the neutrinos are
coming from."

Scotty looked at the diagnostic readout again.  "Neutrinos?  They've
got to be coming from the olivium itself, don't they?"

"That's what you'd think, but we can get a directional fix on them, and
they're definitely not originating on board.  Get this: they come from
wherever we hap- I, pen to be pointing the deflector at the time."

"What?  That's impossible.  It takes a nuclear reaction to produce
neutrinos, and they're almost impossible to deflect.  They can pass
through a dozen light-years of lead without bouncing off a single
nucleus.  Nothing we can do would just attract a swarm of neutrinos.
They'd have to have been on their way toward us long before we pointed
our detector at them, and the odds against that happening even once are
astronomical."  " That's right."  She grinned wickedly.  "Now you can
start pulling your hair out, too."

He grinned right back at her.  "Fortunately, I don't have time for that
at the moment.  Our first priority is to find that laser beam and
figure out how to stop it.  And you can bet your life we'll be the ones
expected to come up with a miracle when the time comes, so keep your
mind on the business at hand."

"Yes, sir."

Satisfied that his department was in good shape, he left Hanson at her
job and headed for the bridge, which he found just as busy as
engineering, but in a different way.  Everyone here was getting ready
to take the ship out of orbit and go hunting for photons.  Everyone but
Spock, at least; the Vulcan was not at his science station.  Was he
still fooling with the deflector array?  Scotty had assumed Lieutenant
Hanson was patching things up after the last test, but now he realized
she was trying to keep up with Spock in real time.  No wonder her hair
was frazzled.

Captain Kirk greeted Scotty the moment he stepped out of the lift with,
"Good, you're here.  Mr.  Sulu, set course for the middle of our target
area, warp factor three.  Thomsen, get ready to release the probes."

Warp three seemed ridiculously slow to someor!e who had just bored a
warp12 hole across half a sector, but Scotty knew it was plenty fast to
get around inside a solar system.  Fifteen minutes of flight time would
take them anywhere they wanted to go.  But where were they going first?
Four light-days out to look for the f',ash of the laser being fired?
Four-and-a-half to look for scintillation from the beam hitting dust
grains on its way in system  Five to look for the comet it had come
from?

"What's our plan?"  he asked the captain.

Kirk said, "From the star map you sent us we know what quadrant the
beam is in.  We're going to spread a couple of hundred optical sensors
through that volume and hope they pick up a reflection.  Then we're
going to head farther out-system and look for anomalous energy
readings.  The workers who built the laser had to have left equipment
behind.  If there's a functioning power source anywhere out there, we
should be able to spot it fairly quickly' " "Ah," Scotty said.  The
sensors were a good idea, but looking for power sources could be a
total waste of time.  After the flash that Deloric and Terwolan had
described, there might not be anything left but debris.  '-That's a
mighty big 'if," " he said.

"I'm aware of that, Scotty," Kirk said.  "But power readings are the
only thing we can search for with subspace sensors, since they warp the
curvature of space.  Everything else propagates at the speed of light,
and catching the wave front of the flash as it passed by would be pure
chance.  Of course I'd love to have a better option if you can think of
one."

Scotty nodded.  It wasn't a challenge, not exactly, but as he went to
the bridge's engineering station and began catching up on what had
happened in his absence, he set himself to work on the problem.

They had a weapon at an unknown point, firing at a moving target. 
Belle Terre's orbital motion conied it one planetary diameter every ...
what? ... seven minutes?  Eight?  Depending on when the laser was
fired, it could be pointed at any spot along an are a few hours long. 
If they knew exactly when it was fired, and the exact distance to the
target, they could calculate the point in its orbit where Belle Terre
would intercept the laser beam, but they wouldn't know that until after
they found the weapon.  In the meantime, the beam itself could be
anywhere in a vast region of space, slowly converging on Belle Terre.

So finding its source was the top priority, but the comet's location
was also the least constrained variable.  Deloric had remembered that
Belle Terre's sun was in the constellation of the snake from his
perspective, but not exactly where along the serpent's coiled length it
had been.  "Not in the middle," he had said, which hardly helped at
all.

Scotty agreed that looking for the flash was point less.  Oh, they
could eventually find it that way by simply planting a string of probes
and waiting for the wave front to cross one of them, but that would be
a little like dropping a rock in a pond and then scattering leaves over
the surface to see which one bobbed up and down first.  Except this
particular pond was filled with mo lasses as far as the Enterprise was
concerned.  The speed of light was so slow compared to a starship.

What they needed was some way to determine instantly if the wave front
had already passed.  The Enterpnse could then simply jump from place to
place in the target volume and make a quick sensor sweep.  Except the
laser had been fired during Gamma Night, which also propagated at the
speed of light.  He modified his mental picture: the wave front was
like the splash from a rock thrown in the ocean, not a pond, with gamma
night sweeping through like waves from the infinite distance.  One wave
held the tiny ripple they were looking for, but they could only work
with any efficiency in the troughs between the waves.  Even his
hypothetical string of buoys watching for the flash wouldn't be able to
report until after gamma night had passed.

He groaned as the sudden realization hit him: even after they figured
out where the beam had to be, they might never be able actually to find
it.  Like the flash of light that had created it, the beam itself was
in the middle of gamma night!  The Enterprise's navigational sensors
wouldn't work there.  They would be flying blind.  trying to pinpoint
their position with nothing more than optical measurements of distant
planets to go by.

Not that he had any idea what they would do when they found it.  How
could they stop a laser beam the width of a planet?  That was the big
question.  He wished he had an answer.

Deloric's and Terwolan's burned faces rose to haunt him again.  He had
been seeing them every time he closed his eyes, imagining every
colonist on Belle Terre burned even worse.  The Kauld ice miners hadn't
even been caught in the direct beam.  The flash alone had done that to
them.

Scotty wondered again what would be left of the comet when they found
it.  Would there even be debris, or would everything have been
vaporized into an expanding cloud of gas?

An expanding cloud of hot gas.

"Stupid!"  he said, slapping himself on the forehead.  "Stupid, stupid,
stupid!"

"Mr.  Scott?"  Kirk's voice was a blend of alarm and amusement.

Scotty iumed around to face him.  "What's left of the comet should be
glowin' like a beacon in the infrared spectrum.  We don't have to look
for the flash, or for power sources.  We can look for heat."

He saw the realization hit everyone at once.  Plain old optical
astronomy, practically obsolete since the invention of warp technology
and subspace observation techniques, could serve them here.  "All we
have to do," he said, thinkin, aloud, "is make a series of jumps around
the area we think it's in.  If we look for the heat signature, we dinna
have to catch the wave front.  It'll be visible from anywhere inside
the sphere of expanding light."

"Which is one light-day wide now and getting bigger all the time," said
Kirk.  "That ... makes a great deal of sense."

"Thank you," Scotty said.  He was apparently getting used to thinking
in terms of primitive science.  He wasn't sure he liked that, but it
did have its advantages at the moment.  Andfor my next trick, I'll use
a soldering iron and bailing wire to fix a toaster The moment he got
back to civilization, he swore he would kiss the ground.

Kirk turned to Sulu and Thomsen.  "Belay the probe drop.  Take us
straight for the comet's most likely position.  Shields up."

"Yes, sir."  The helmsman and navigator otto work, and the Enterprise
veered onto its new course.

The sensors went dark as they crossed through a zone of gamma night,
then came back on-line for a couple of minutes before darkening again.
They were plowing through the waves head-on on their way out of the
system, a ten-light-hour-wide band of disruption followed by twenty
light-hours of clear sailing, all compressed into a few minutes of
tension as the ship bore through it at warp speed.  If they hit
anything during those dark moments they would never know it.  The
shields might deflect a rock at ultralight velocity, but nothing
bigger.  And if there was something bigger in their path, Belle Terre
would have a brief new star in its night sky for a few minutes ... and
certain death four days later.

They could be flying right through the laser bew-n at the moment and
they would never know it.  Not in subspace.  The column of photons was
crawling toward Belle Terre entirely through normal space.

Sulu was muttering softly, and Scotty realized he was counting the
waves.  If Thomsen's navigation equipment couldn't handle the recumin,
blackouts, he would at least know when to stop the ship.  Scotty
watched his fingers draw closer and closer to the controls, reaching
out to brine,

o pane , and he was al read them out of warp when Thomsen said, "We're
there."

The Enterprise dropped out of warp in a calm spot between waves.  They
could do optical scans during

Gamma Night, but there was no sense hindering themselves needlessly
until they had exhausted the search areas in the clear.

"Start scanning, people"' Kirk said, but Scotty was already turning
back to his console to do just that.

They had no luck on their first jump, nor on the next five, but on
their seventh sweep the omnidirectional in feared detector gave a beep,
and a cheer went up around the bridge.  Not bad, Scotty thought,
considering the odds were about forty-to-one against fllem.  That's how
many one-light-day volumes there were inside the search area, but they
were spiraling out from the region of most likelihood, so he supposed
the true odds were more like fifteen- or twenty-to-one.  Spock would be
able to tell him exactly, but it didn't matter.  They had found it.

Scotty immediately moved to isolate it, and sure enough, there was a
single radiation source.  It was a bright, hot source, too, which meant
they had dropped in close to the edge of the expanding light sphere.
They were probably seeing it within an hour after the laser had been
fired.

He did some quick distance measurements.  Sure enough, the comet was
nearly a light-day away.  Almost all the way across the clear space
between waves of gamma night.

"Uh-oh," he said.

"I don't like the sound of that Kirk said.

Scotty shook his head.  "I dinna like it either.  I've found the comet,
but we've only got about fifteen minutes to get there and take whatever
sensor readings we can before Gamma Night hits it."

Chapter Twenty-three

SPOCK FELT the ship sweeping through the successive layers of Gamma
Night.  In the science lab the effect was a slight but noticeable
difference in the way the deflector array responded to his commands.
Much of the signal processing was done on-site, and the onslaught of
subspace distortion that accompanied the normal space effects of the
phenomenon played havoc with the exposed computers.  Calculations that
normally required a single algorithm had to be cross-checked for
accuracy using a second method, and sometimes a third when the results
didn't match.

He wondered if he was wasting his time here.  He might be of more use
on the bridge, assisting in the search for the laser beam.  That was
only the beginning of their problem, however, and he felt sure that the
rest of the bridge crew could handle it competently without him.  He
also felt that someone needed to work on the next and most important
question: how could they stop the laser beam from striking Belle Terre
once they discovered it?

He didn't know how watching the deflector activity during their
successive Gamma Night crossings would help, but there was no sense
wasting the opportunity to gather data.  He hadn't had the chance to
test his olivium-powered sensors since rebuilding them after the
neutrino overload; now he could test them four times in a
quarter-hour.

They didn't overload on the first transit.  That was a good sign, but
they didn't report any neutrino bursts, either.  On the second transit
he set them scanning all the way through the electromagnetic spectrum
for the echo frequency, but they were only halfway through when the
ship crossed back into clear subspace.  On the third transit he
finished the scan, finding a peak in the X-ray range that he was able
to measure more accurately on the fourth pass.

X-rays in hyperspace.  And he had been sending out Berthold rays.  It
made no more sense than sending out radio and getting back neutrinos.

There were no more Gamma Night crossings to test it in.  Spock settled
in to analyze the data he had gathered, noting from the flickering of
the lights that the ship was now making short hyperspace jumps.  They
were either dropping probes or searching for the comet from whence the
laser beam had come.

Tien the intercom whistled, and the captain said, "Bridge to Spock."

He reached out and pressed the reply switch.  "Spock here, Captain."

"Get up here on the double.  We've found the laser,

but we've only got fifteen minutes to study it before Gamma Night
hits."

Fifteen minutes.  That wasn't nearly long enough to do a thorough
examination, but one didn't argue with the universe.  If that was a I
they had, they would have to make the best use of it they could. "On my
way," he said, standing up and heading for the door without even taking
the o nipment.  It could time to switch If his eq wait until he
returned.

When the turbolift doors opened he saw Dr.  McCoy in the car.  The
doctor nodded to Spock and stood aside, as the door slid closed behind
him he said, "I thought I'd come up and see what all the commotion is
about."

"All the 'commotion' is about the comet.  We've found it."

"Aha.  This soon?  That's a good sign."

"Take heart in this minor bit of good fortune.  It may be the only one
we get."

McCoy gave him a critical look, a penetrating, human look of the sort
that always made Spock fee, uncomfortable.  He knew just enough about
humans-was just human enough himself-to understand what it meant.  The
doctor was about to make a snap character judgement.

McCoy surprised him, which was almost as annoying as the character
judgement would have been.  "Want a cat?"  he asked.

Spock nearly said, "I beg your pardon?"  but then he remembered that
McCoy and Mr.  Scott had found an abandoned cat on board their
exploration ship, which meant he had in fact heard the doctor
correctly.  He shook his head.  "I have no need of a pet."

"You should think about it.  She's kind of prickly.  Like you."

Spock almost smiled.  McCoy hadn't failed him after all.

The door onto the bridge opened, saving him the timecessity of a
response.  He looked immediately to the main viewscreen, where the
remains of the comet were displayed.  There was no ice left.  Chunks of
rock, none larger than a shuttlecraft, tumbled slowly among an immense
tangle of metal that must have been the oliviumpowered exciter for the
laser.

Spock gave it only a moment's examination, then went to his science
station and immediately got to work with the sensors.  He could use his
eyes later, during gamma night.  For now they needed every electronic
measurement they could make before they lost the capability.

He took a molecular scan of the entire debris field, calling out the
more interesting details in the data that streamed across the monitors
before him.  "The heat of the exciter burst was strong enough to
vaporize the outer ten centimeters of rock facing it, and melt the rest
into slag.  My calculations would put it at roughly forty thousand
degrees."

"How does that translate into destructive power of the beam itself.?"
Kirk asked.

That was a very good question, and one which required more information
than he had for a precise answer, but he knew enough to speculate. "The
amount of energy necessary to reach that kind of temperature is
phenomenal, especially when we remember that this was the leakage from
the exciter, which no doubt directed nearly all its energy down the
carbon dioxide column.  The evidence here correlates with the data
provided to Mr.  Scott and Dr.  McCoy.  I cannot give you a precise
energy density for the laser beam, but I agree with the Kauld
informants' assessment of its strength.  It would indeed be sufficient
to destroy Belle Terre."

Nobody responded to that statement.  Spock turned back to the sensor
displays and called out more observations as they came in.  "As
expected, I am picking up strong olivium decay signatures.  I am unable
to determine the amount of olivium the Kauld used, but I suspect it was
more than sufficient to ensure the cohesiveness of the laser."

"Cohesiveness?"  Kirk asked.

"A laser beam of sufficient power is self-focusing:' Spock told him.
"It will not spread the way a normal laser would."

Scotty cleared his throat, another human trait that Spock recognized
instantly.  It meant he was about to contradict what Spock had just
said.  "Self-focusing works in crystals," he said, "because the light
alters the index of refraction inside the beam, but how could that work
in space?"

Spock kept the sensors going while he answered.  "It's a gravitational
effect, not a refractive one.  A beam of sufficient energy density
actually acts as a solid object, according to the equation e = me!. The
energy's equivalent mass creates gravity, which does affect photons. 
At a sufficiently high power level, that gravity would be enough to
keep the beam from spreading."

Scotty whistled softly.  "Aye, I can see how it could, but the amount
of power you're talking about would have to be enormous."

"Indeed," Spock said.  He looked back to his monitors, studying the
data stream from a dozen different scans.  Electron, polaron,
gravimetric and even temporal disturbances all swept by with dizzying
speed.  He double-checked that the computer was storing all the data.

This was a treasure-trove of information on the reactivity and
characteristics of olivium.  The information he rathe red from this
site would have taken several years of careful development-or an
unfortunate accident to accumulate.  Due to olivium's unpredictable
nature, he would not have been able to simulate experiments leading to
most of this information.

Spock found himself in a surprising moral dilemma.  He had great
admiration for the people who designed and ensineered this feat.  The
efficient use of existing resources would please any Ionical being.
Likewise, the decision to build a self-consuming device for a onetime
need reflected in their favor.  The Kauld had built something
extraordinary; yet even the fact that they had done it in an elegant
manner was of no consequence.  What they'd produced was a weapon
powerful enough to destroy a planet and all who lived on it.  Worse
yet, they had fired it at Belle Terre and the people the Enterprise was
there to protect.  It was not his job to admire the craftsmanship but
to determine how to stop it before it reached its target.

"Can you- pinpoint the time when the laser was actually fired?"  Kirk
asked.

Spock looked at the radiation decay figures from the rocky debris.  "I
can only narrow it down to a time between twenty-five and twenty-seven
hours ago."

McCoy, who had taken up his customary position behind the captain's
left shoulder, said, "What the heck kind of answer is that?  Where's
your 'approximately 25.48762 hours' accuracy?"

Spock tore his attention from the in coming numbers scrolling across
his data charts long enough to say to McCoy, "I assure you, doctor, if
there had been more precision to be gleaned from these readings, I
would have given it.  Perhaps if you could provide me wit[, "I
chronometer conveniently stopped by the blast, or a I-eflection from an
object at a calibrated distance, my work would be more accurate."

McCoy didn't answer back, but the look on his face told Spock that his
explanation had had the desired effect.  With any luck, it would be
some time before the good doctor felt compelled to interrupt his work
with any more frivolous comments.

He turned back to his monitors and noticed that the tr n. Sensors were
double data s earns were s owing dow checking their readings and
rejecting some outri,lit as unreliable.  "Gamma Ni,lit is nearly upon
us:' he said.

"Hmph."  said Kirk.  He sat in the command chair.  rubbing his chin
with his right fist, his eyes "Iucd to the viewscreen, searching every
piece of debris.  Spock had seen that look on his face before.  The
captain was pondering his options, weighing his possible moves, just as
he did when the two of them played a game of three dimensional chess. 
He was also waitipg for more information from Spock.  poe turne e

S k (I back to s consols.  There was stall plenty to be observed in the
visual spectrum.  He peered into the debris field with the ship's main
telescope, ?,.otlr,-, how the separate pieces drifted away at vwying
speeds according to their density.  From that he could probably
calculate the strength of the final explosion that wrecked the
olivium-powered exciter beam, but the fact that there was."  any debris
left at all proved that the explosion was only a tiny fraction of the
total energy delivered into the laser.  He looked for more revealing
objects, and eventually found them nearly twenty kilometers distant.
"It appears that at least two other vessels were caught in the flash of
the laser and destroyed.  They appear to be Kauld ships."

"On screen"' Kirk ordered.

Spock complied.  The charred and broken remains of two ships hung like
shadowy ghosts amid an expanding sea of small-those weren't rocks. They
were all the same size, and they had arms and legs.  Those ships hadn't
merely been staffed; they had been jammed full of people.

Spock closed his eyes against the sight, then forced himself to look.
There could be valuable information here.  The ship closest to the
comet was little more than cinders and pieces of broken frame, but the
hull of the second one showed an interesting burn pattern as it tumbled
slowly end over end.

Kirk saw it too.  "It looks like they were caught completely off-guard
when the laser was fired."

"How do you figure?"  McCoy asked.

"Well, aside from the fact that they were here at all with that many
people on board, the farthest one sustained all its damage on its
starboard side.  That means it was stationed side-on to the comet.  It
wasn't even trying to escape, or it would have been burned on the
backside.  If they'd known what was coming, they would have at least
tried to get out of here."

"Are you saying that the Kauld ambushed their own people?"  McCoy
asked.

"It's possible.  It could be Vellyngaith's way of ensuring that nobody
compromised the mission.  Leave no witnesses."

Mr.  Scott nodded.  "It would fit with the information we got from
Delofic and Terwolan.  They weren't told the purpose of the work they
were doing, and they weren't warned that the laser was about to be
fired.  If they hadn't figured it out themselves and jumped ship,

they'd have been out there."

"Maybe it went off prematurely," Sulu said.  Everyone on the bridge
looked over at him as he continued.  -We could be worrying about
nothing.  If they pushed the button too soon, the beam will pass right
by Belle

Terre' " McCoy nodded.  "Which could be why they're diming their ships
for a big battle.  Iley know this isn't going to do us any harm!"  He
grew more excited as he spoke.  "Yeah, they blew it, but they're hoping
we waste all our time out here trying to stop it while they get into
position to take us out with their fleet.  Deloric and Terwolan were
probably sent to us straight from the high command!"

Spock looked at him with narrowed eyes.  "How easi]Y you cling to false
hope.  According to your report, you saw the Kauld fleet conducting war
games at nearly theame me th as fire 11 n luded Lee s tie laser w (I. 
at fleetc hr new ships and dozens of refitted ones-not an impromptu
attack force.  And unless the Kauld knew of your presence there and
followed you-at warp I '-to Naresidan Station, how would they have
known to plant their agents there?"  He looked back at the two wrecked
ships and the debris field surrounding them.  "No, it is far more
likely that they fired it just when they intended to, but they simply
didn't expect the flash to be as strong as it was."

Kirk rubbed his chin again.  "Intentional or not, we need to find the
beam itself and find out exactly where it's aimed before we dismiss it
as a threat."

"Indeed, Captain.  To that end, I believe we should plant our remote
probes along the wave front in the laser's most likely path."

Kirk nodded.  "Give us your best estimate of where that would be, and
let's do it."

Spock turned back to his monitors.  They were now exactly 5.23
light-days out from Belle Terre.  If he assumed the middle of the
window of possibility for firing tine, that would put the planet ...
there when the laser beam arrived.  And if he drew a direct line from
here to there, and stopped twenty-six light-hours out, that would be
it.

He transferred the coordinates to the navigation console.

"Course locked in," Thomsen said.

"Shields up," Kirk said.

"Shields at !naxirnum."

"Engace."  The Enterlgrive leaped into subspace.  For just a second,
they were flying, blind, then they shook free of Gamma Ni,lit aF"(I
locked on course.

Chapter Twenty-four

THE ENTERPRISE crossed the gap between waves of Gamma Night in only a
few minutes.  Kirk kept his eyes on the viewscreen as they swept on
into the next area of sensor blackout.  The chances of him seeing
something before they hit it were infinitesimally small, but they were
better going into this with his eyes open than completely blind.
personal affront to

Gamma Night had seemed like a him from the very first time he had
encountered it.  Things were tough enough out here on the edge of
nowhere; the universe really didn't need to throw this periodic torment
at him as well.  But it did, and he was slowly learning how to deal
with it.

So were his helmsman and navigator.  Sulu and Thomsen had certainly
earned their pay in the months since they had come to Belle Terre. With
only a few nearby planets to provide reference points, and light speed
lag to mask their true position at that, they were still able to take
readings and calculate the ship's position whenever they dropped back
into normal space.

Under warp they weren't so lucky, but they knew the design parameters
of the ship and could calculate its position, with a cumulative error
of only ten or twenty thousand kilometers per minute.

No wonder Chekov had taken that position on board the Reliant.

"Coming up on the first drop point," Thomsen said.

"Release the probe," Kirk replied.

The Enterprise dropped out of warp.  On the viewscreen a tiny spark of
light shot away from the ship.  When it was far enough away to escape
the warp field, Sulu took them back into warp for the next drop
point.

It took less than a second of flight to cover the distance, even at
warp one.  They weren't talking about a lot of volume here, not on the
cosmic scale of things.  The beam could be as little as twelve thousand
kilometers wide and still cover the entire planet.  But that meant they
had to drop a probe every twelve thousand kilometers if they wanted to
detect it.

It would almost make sense to do it on impulse power alone.  Almost,
but not quite.  They were planting the probes in a spiral, weaving a
web ever outward from the beam's most likely path.  The total distance
they had to travel was six times the target zone just for the first
layer, and six times that for every extra layer they put on.  It could
take hours to cover that distance under impulse power.  The beam could
slip past before they got all their probes in place, and they would
never know it.

Besides, without a gravity well to bend the ship's path, flying in a
spiral was incredibly wasteful of fuel.  It also put Kirk on edge.  He
already felt like he was going in circles with this whole Belle Terre
situation; he wasn't about to start doing it literally.

They settled into a routine.  Jump, drop, wait.  Jump, drop, wait. 
jump drop

Wham!

The viewscreen flashed brilliant white.  The ship lurched sideways,
throwing Kid against the arm of his chair.  McCoy flew up against the
handrail around the command chair and did a spectacular gymnast's flip,
turning completely over before landing flat on his back on the other
side of the rail.  Thomsen wound up on the floor beside him, and Sulu
wound up in Thomsen's chair.

"Take us out of here!"  Kirk shouted, his voice only a heartbeat ahead
of half a dozen alarms In the intense glare from the viewscreen he saw
Sulu slap at the controls, and a moment later they leaped into
darkness.

He looked to see if McCoy had broken his back, but the doctor scrambled
to his feet and moved like a man twenty years his junior, helping other
crew members back to their seats and making sure that nobody was badly
hurt.

Alarms screamed for attention from every control console.  The entire
bridge crew rushed back to their stations and began working frantically
to correct the problems, but no sooner did they silence one alarm than
two more took its place.  The telltale smell of burnt electronics
filled the air, and within a few seconds Kirk began to feel the heat
seeping through the bulkhead and radiating from the walls.  The outer
hull had to be glowing like the surface of a star for that to happen.

Through the noise of the alarms, he heard McCoy say to Thomsen, "Lady,
you're bleeding."  "am?"  The navigator raised a hand to her
forehead,

above her right eye.  When she dropped her hand, her fingers were
covered in blood.  "It doesn't hurt.  I'll be fine," she said as she
wiped her fingers on her black trousers.

"Let me at least put a topical coagulant on that, or you'll be dripping
into your controls and sending us off to who knows where," McCoy
said.

Thomsen didn't argue with that.  Kirk felt a trickle on his own brow,
but when he wiped it away it was just sweat.  It was growing
uncomfortably warm in the budge.  "Environmental controls?"  he
asked.

"Off-line," Scotty said.  "I'm working on 'em."

"Shields?"

Sulu said, "They're down.  It was just an overload though, not a
failure, so they'll be okay as soon as the generators can radiate their
excess heat."

Maybe easier said than done.  Kirk turned to Uhura.  "How's the rest of
the ship?"

"Damage to the outer hull on all decks.  Breaches on decks 14 through
21, and the portside warp nacelle."  She listened to the intercom for a
moment, then said, "Injuries reported in engineering."

Scotty looked up from his console, but another alarm drew his attention
back to the job at hand.  Without prompting, McCoy ran for the
turbolift.

"Spock?"  Kirk asked.

"Forward and portside sensor arrays damaged.  No response from the
navigational deflector."

Kirk remembered the ships they had seen near the comet-melted, twisted
wrecks.  The Enterprise hadn't been exposed for as long, but she'd
taken the laser full on  All this time he'd been thinking of the search
for the beam as looking for a needle in a haystack.  Well, what better
way to find that needle than to take a walk barefoot through the hay?
Without trying, they'd flown the ship right into the path of the beam.
"Launch a probe," he said.  "Sir?"  Thomsen asked.  "I want to see what
the hull looks like."  "Oh!  Yes, sir."

The image on the viewscreen looked dim, but whether that was from
damage to the display or simply from his eyes having not yet recovered
from the flash Kirk didn't know.  He could see well enough to spot the
probe moving away, but instead of rushing on into space, this one
braked to a halt just off the bow, and the screen shifted to a view
from its perspective.

The Enterprise's light gray paint had flashed to vapor in the first few
milliseconds; every surface that had faced the laser now showed the
silvery luster of bare hull metal- That was by design, but even 99.9%
reflective alloy couldn't withstand a laser of that intensity.  The
hull had been partially melted across the saucer section and the port
warp nacelle.  Any antenna arrays or equipment housings that had stuck
out on that side had simply ceased to exist.  Atmosphere was venting
from the breaches in the secondary hull.  And while the hull wasn't
white-hot, it was glowing a deep red; the color of perfect barbecue
coals.

They had been in the beam for maybe two seconds.  It had been strong
enough to do all this in that brief moment, and strong enough to shove
the Enterprise sideways as well.  Light pressure had done that.

Kirk looked over at the science station.  "Spock, did we get any useful
information out of our ... encounter?"

Spock looked up from his station.  "Yes, Captain.  We now have readings
of our relative position at the time of impact with the leading edge of
the laser.  We also know the wavelength and the energy density.
Unfortunately, many of our instruments failed before we could gather
more data.  Most importantly, we do not know the width nor the length
of the beam."

Those were the crucial details.  Especially the length.  Had the
olivium laser expended its charge in one instantaneous burst, or had
the carbon dioxide column continued to lase for a while?  That would
make a big difference in how they fought it.

They had actually been inside the laser beam for a moment, but they
still didn't know its extent.  "Then our work out here is only half
finished," Kirk said.

"Less than that," Spock replied.

He was right, of course.  They were still at a loss as to how one goes
about stopping a laser of any length from frying a planet.  There were
only so many ways to prevent a laser strike.  Reflecting the beam away
from the target, blocking it with something massive, or just not being
in the path in the first place were the three standard defense
tactics.

However, there was no rniffor of sufficient dimension@r
durability-available.  Simply blocking the beam would take an ablative
shield as wide as the planet, and who knew how thick?  Maybe just a few
meters if the beam was short, but it could take a few kilometers if the
beam was more than a few minutes long.  In either case it would have to
have the mass of a good sized asteroid to cover the entire planet.  On
the other hand, Belle Terre had eight moons.  There had been nine to
begin with, but shortly after the colonists had arrived here, Kirk had
sacrificed one of them in the collision that released the internal
pressure of the olivium moon before it could explode.  The relatively
minor release of energy from the collision had caused the Burn, but it
had at least saved the planet from total destruction.  Was there some
way to sacrifice another moon to prevent destruction a second time?

It might be possible.  Tow it into the right position and blow it into
fragments that would absorb the worst of the light.... But even if they
could do that, that wouldn't prevent the beam from shoving the
fragments into the planet at a high fraction of the speed of light.
Even a vapor cloud hitting at that speed would flatten continents.  the
total

That left dodging it.  If they could harness power of the olivium moon
itself, that would probably be enough energy to hold back Belle Terre
in its orbit long enough for the laser to slide harmlessly by.  But
even if that were possible, Kirk knew that the already fragile planet
would suffer as much damage from that kind of manipulation as from the
laser.  Tides, winds, volcanos, landslides; they might as well let it
burn.

He hoped Lilian and the governor were working toward an orderly
evacuation.  In light of the other options, it might be the only way to
save the colonists' lives.  But it still wouldn't save Belle Terre, and
with the Kauld fleet waiting in the wings, the Federation would
probably lose the olivium moon, too.

That left only option four: think of something else.

 Chapter Twenty-five

SPOCK CHECKED his science station one final time.  All but one of his
optical sensors were operational.  The data storage buffers were ready
for input.  The library computer was on-line and ready for heuristic
analysis of the data.

The rest of the ship wasn't in quite as good shape.  It was capable of
flight, but it would be days before many subsystems would be repaired.
The environmental system was only now bringing the bridge back down to
its normal, uncomfortably cool (for a Vulcan, at least) temperature,
and the viewscreen was still much dimmer than usual.  However, it would
do for the task at hand.

Spock kept his eyes on the monitors as the Enterprise prepared for
another look at the laser beam.  They had found the leading edge of it
easily enough, but the trailing edge would not be so simple.  They
couldn't just wait for it to pass over them the way they had done with
the front.  For one thing, that would put them inside the beam while
they waited, and they had already seen how well the ship could handle
that.

They could park a probe ahead of the beam and wait for it to pop out
the back, but there was no known material or force field strong enough
to protect even the smallest probe from the onslaught of photons.
Besides, anything less dense than neutronium would be shoved down the
beam path by the light pressure, rendering any measurements it could
make meaningless.  For the same reason, they couldn't just scatter dust
in its path and watch the dust delineate its edges the way it might a
less powerful beam.  All they would see would be a scintillating disk
receding at the speed of light as the wave front pushed the dust ahead
of it.

They couldn't sneak up on it from behind, either.  They could approach
under warp drive, but the moment they popped back into normal space
they would either be inside the beam again or behind it.  Neither
possibility would be much help.

It had taken him a moment to convince himself that they couldn't catch
up with it using any combination of warp drive and impulse power,
either.  The beam was traveling ridiculously slow by warp drive
standards, but by the rules of normal space it was traveling at the
ultimate speed.  Relativistic effects came into play at light speed and
they were as counterintuitive as any produced by quantum olivium.

For instance, no matter how fast the Enterprise travelled through
normal space, they could never even keep pace with the light beam, much
less catch it.  The laser would always be receding at the speed of
light, completely independent of the Enterprise's velocity.  If they
launched a probe at 99 percent of light-speed and left another one at
rest, the laser would outrun them both at the same velocity:
light-speed.  It was difficult to accept, but that was the way the
universe worked.  Such seeming paradoxes were the foundation of
relativity, and every one of them had been proven true by experiment.

So they were going to try a different method, starting at the end they
could reach first and working their way back.

"Ready, Spock?"  Kirk asked.

"Ready here."

"Thomsen?  Sulu?"

"Ready," they both replied.

"All right, then.  Take us in."

Everyone seemed to be holding their breath as Sulu and Thomsen sent the
ship into warp.  They knew where one point along the leading edge was,
but they didn't know where along the beam's considerable width that
point was.  It could have been dead center, or all the way to one side
for all they knew, so they were planning to stop well outside the
farthest likely distance, and well ahead of the beam.

Of course, with Gamma Night compromising their navigation, their
safety'mar'in could easily disappear in their margin of error.

When the ship popped out of subspace, everyone gripped the edges of
their consoles for support, but space was as clear and serene as ever.
"Let's not waste time, gentlemen," Kirk, said, and Sulu immediately
executed stage two of the plan.

Full impulse power barely shook the ship.  Its gravity generators were
designed to compensate for accelerations a thousand times greater.  But
Spock's monitors showed what was happening outside, as the starship's
immense fusion engines poured their high-velocity exhaust out the back.
Long streams of plasma shot out behind the ship, directly into the
path of the oncotmng laser beam.

Or so they hoped.  it would be minutes before they knew for sure.  By
then the Enterprise would be moving away from the laser at a
significant fraction of light speed itself, and the evidence of the
encounter would take even longer to reach them.

Uhura had put the aft view on the main screen.  Nobody spoke as they
waited to see.  what would happen.  Waited to see if they had
miscalculated and the laser was bearing down on them and not the
exhaust stream.

In the far distance the plasma trail grew less and less distinct as it
expanded and cooled.  Any time, Spock thought, then he chided himself
for allowing the humans' anxiety to affect his impartial reason.  The
time to impact was a datum, like any other.  There was no reason to
have an emotional stake in it.  It would happen when it happened, and
then they would know the cross sectional area of the beam.

Captain Kirk shifted in his command chair.  "Any time," he said.  his
order, an oblong patch of As if responding to light blossomed in the
distance, then immediately streaked away to the right, toward the inner
solar system.  It was bright as a strobe light, and left an afterimage
in Spock's eyes.

No, that was a true image.  It stayed put when he moved.  Somehow, he
was seeing the length of the laser beam itself, not just the leading
edge, as it reheated the exhaust plume to incandescence and swept it
out of the way.  But how could that be?  The exhaust stream couldn't be
moving fast enough for more than a few molecules to hit any given
kilometer of the beam's flank as it flashed past.  He had expected that
much had counted on it, and had planned on reviewing his recordings at
high amplification to determine the structure of the beam later-but
this was far more illumination than he had expected.

And the beam was far wider than he'd imagined it, too.  Not just a line
in the distance; it was a scintillating wall blocking out a quarter of
the starfield.  Of course if it was the width of a planet, that should
not have been surprising, but his mental picture had not accounted for
the scale of it, seen from only a few thousand kilometers away.

Scotty said, "Kind o' pretty, isn't it?  In a deadly sort of way."

"It's very puzzling," Spock replied.  "We should not be seeing the side
of the beam that clearly.  It's almost as if' He stopped, his mental
picture of the situation shifting yet again.

"Spock?"  asked Kirk.

"The beam is angled."

There was a moment of silence, then Kirk said, "Explain."

Visualizing it even as he spoke, he said, "We have been thinking of the
laser beam as a straight line drawn between the emitter and its target.
That is usually a close approximation to reality when the travel time
is measured in milliseconds, but in this case we have a beam of
apparently some seconds' duration, aimed at a moving target.  The Kauld
would have been tracking that target, pivoting the exciter beam inside
the carbon dioxide column as it lased.  The result is a laser beam that
moves sideways as it moves forward."

Scotty nodded.  "Like sprayi n' water from a hose and swingin' it
around at the same time."

"A crude analogy, but yes.  The actual angle is less than-" he did a
quick calculation "-three minutes of are, but it is a significant
deviation from true.  Significant enough that the side of the beam is
colliding with our exhaust stream, rather than the other way around."
"I notice it's still doing it"' Kirk said.  "How long has it been?"  rt
nds,"

Spock consulted his readouts.  "Thi y-two seco he said.

The beam continued to roar past.

"Forty seconds "

"Are we in any danger here?"  Kirk asked.

"No " Spock said.  "We are moving away faster than it is moving toward
us' " Of course they were, he realized as soon as he said that.  The
beam was tracking the planet, and even a few seconds of impulse power
would get the ship moving much faster than a planet's orbital velocity
around its sun.

Spock watched the chronometer.  "Sixty seconds."

The beam grew smaller as they raced away from it, but it was still
quite visible as a bright blue, almost ultraviolet streak against the
black backdrop of space.

"Do we need to keep thirustin' away, or should we turn back and get a
closer look?"  Scotty asked.

"We do not yet know the duration of the beam," Spock said.  "We must
keep a continuous exhaust stream pouring into it until it passes."

n an pie o' minutes long,

"It can a be more than a couple can it?"

Spock looked back to his chronometer.  "Two minutes and twelve seconds
and counting."

Uhura upped the magnification on the viewscreen.  The beam looked like
a searchlight shining through fog.

"There is structure to the flank," Spock reported.  "The significance
of that?"  Kirk asked.

"Unknown.  No, wait.  It must mean that the carbon dioxide column was
growing turbulent from the thermal effects."

Kirk shook his head.  "No, I meant what's the significance for us?
How's that going to affect our ability to deal with it?"

The question brought Spock up short.  How would it?  He thought about
it for a moment, but came up blank.  "Since we have no idea what our
strategy will be, I cannot speculate."

"Great," said Kirk.  His tone of voice made it clear it was anything
but.

They watched the beam slide past.  Three minutes.  Five.  Ten.  Ubura
kept raising the magnification on the main screen to keep the beam
about the same width as a person's forearm held out in front of them,
but on his own monitor Spock periodically checked the direct,
unmagnified view.  From the Enterprise's distance of nearly a million
kilometers, the beam was a bright gash in space, extending in-system as
far as the eye could follow.  It was tens of millions of kilometers
long, and still coming.

How could they stop such a thing?  With each passing minute, the
immensity of the task grew more apparent.  It was ten minutes-now
fifteen@f pure destruction, any second of which could wipe out all life
on the planet.

And yet, despite its magnitude, it was still just a streak in the
distance.  If he thought of it in the right terms, it almost seemed
manageable.  After all, it was only the width of a planet.  A small,
terrestrial planet at that.  Its length might seem vast even on that
scale, but compared to the solar system itself, it was no more than one
or two percent of the total diameter.  And if it missed Belle Terre and
swept on through the system, it would be quickly lost in the vastness
of interstellar space.  It wasn't even aimed along the plane of the
galaxy, but outward, into intergalactic space.  The odds of it
encountering anything ever again were infinitesimally small.

If it would just miss the planet.

He double- and triple-checked its position.  No such luck.  The Kauld
had taken very careful aim.  Not only would it hit Belle Terre; it
would do so when the main city, Buena Vista, was facing directly into
the beam.  It would be just a few minutes past midnight there.

And the olivium moon?  Spock displayed the visual ephemeris for that
moment.  It .yould be on the other side of Belle Terre, of course.
Safely protected from harm by the bulk of the planet.  The Kauld, it
seemed,

had thought of everything.

Twenty minutes.  Spock struggled against a growing sense of annoyance.
Surely this was overkill.  What little admiration he had for the
elegance of their construction faded under the continual barrage of its
product.  They had failed to understand the fundamental principle
behind artistic beauty: enough is enough.

At last the fluorescing exhaust stream began to lose its sharp-edged
definition, and a moment later it winked out as the last of the laser
beam receded into the distance.  Spock checked the chronometer.

He read the number aloud for all to hear.  "Twenty-one minutes,
fourteen seconds."

Mr.  Scott was standing beside his engineering station with his fists
planted on his hips.  "Good God"' he said.  "Do ye realize that's more
firepower than all o'

the weapons in all o' the fleets in all o' the Federation put together?
What could we possibly do to stop' that?"

Spock had no answer for him.  Neither did the captain.  Kirk rubbed his
chin thoughtfully, then said sorry to Sulu, "Take us home."

Chapter Twenty-six

THE cLiTmRING vision of the laser lingered as an afterimage whenever
Kirk closed his eyes.  He didn't need

Spock's assessment to know that the beam was powerful.  Powerful and
unstoppable.  He clenched his hand into a fist, pushing all his
frustrations into the spaces between his fingers.

Once again the Enterprise rode the waves of Gamma

Night back to the beleaguered fort that was Belle Terre.

Spock immersed himself in the data that scrolled in a constant stream
across his instruments.  The rest of the bridge crew waited in
unnatural silence while Sulu flew them home.  Kirk suspected that they
had more on their minds besides the wild ride.  He certainly did.

The moment they dropped out of warp, however, the bridge resumed a more
normal level of activity.

Uhura's fingers danced across her communications panel, imposing order
on the confusion of the dozens of incoming hails they were receiving
all at once.  Scotty, apparently satisfied with the state of the
bridge's repairs, set off for engineering.

The viewscreen now displayed an image of Belle Terre, three of its
eight remaining moons visible from their position.  From here, the Burn
wasn't apparent.  Kirk could see clouds forming over the ocean,
building up at the coastline.  It seemed like such a peaceful place. 
The thought of it being burned to a crisp made his stomach roil.

"Captain, I have Governor Pardonnet for you," Uhura said.

"Onscreen."

Pardonnet's handsome face replaced the blue-and white planet. 
"Captain, what the hell's going on!  I got a message from you telling
me to start evacuation procedures, but when I try to contact you, poof!
 You're gone!  Out of communication and it isn't even Gamma Night!"

Maybe not where you were, Kirk thought.  "Sorry, Governor, but it
couldn't be helped.  You couldn't be reached at the time, and we
couldn't wait for you.  I hope you've already started on that
evacuation, because we don't have time to waste."

"No, we haven't started!  I'm not about to abandon everything on your
say-so.  My office is working with Dr.  Neville, Mrs.  Coates, and the
mayors of our various settlements to form a plan, but they're waiting
on my go-ahead before they implement anything.  I've got to tell you
Captain, this had better be damned goo el I'm not about to crush what's
left of the colonists' spirit with this kind of defeat, being chased
from our homes like vermin."  The muscles along Pardonnet's jaw
clenched.

Kirk wished the governor's sheer determination could actually help this
time, but after what he had just seen he knew it couldn't.  "Trust me,"
he said, "evacuation is the only option available.  We've got to get
these people loaded up and headed back to Federation space' " "thought
we were in Federation space."

"We're trying to make it that way, but the Kauld are trying just as
hard to prevent it.  Unfortunately, I think they just outgunned us.
Uhura, play the video of the laser.  Give me audio."

"Yes, sir."

Kirk heard the electronic bleep from her console, noted Pardonnet's
eyes shifting slightly to account for the change in his view, and said,
"What you are seeing here is a laser that's over twenty light-minutes
long aimed directly at Belle Terre.  We sustained substantial damage
during an exposure of only a second or two

The governor was silent a long minute while he watched the screen.  At
last he spoke.  "Twenty light rrnutes long, you say."

"Yes.  And if you can think of a way to stop it, I'm all ears.

"I ... see," he said, all of his bluster evaporating like the paint
from the Enterprise's hull.  "How much time before it hits?"

Kirk softened his own tone.  "Approximately three days.  We've got to
move on this now."

"So that's it.  This is how we lose Belle Terre, by turning our tails
and running."  Pardonnet shook his head sadly.  "There are people down
here who won't run, you know.  They've paid for Belle Terre over and
over again with their sweat, their tears and blood, and the blood of
their loved ones.  They would rather die than evacuate."

"I'm well aware of people's attitudes, but I can guarantee that anybody
who chooses to stay will die.  They can burrow into the deepest cave on
the planet and they'll still be cooked.  Even if they somehow manage to
survive the twenty minutes of inferno, there won't be a breathable
atmosphere left.  We've seen the result of the Burn, how devastated
that left the planet.  Well, that'll be a walk through paradise
compared to this burn."  He shook his head.  "I have orders.  I've been
charged with protecting the planet of Belle Terre, but when I can no
longer do so, I will protect the colonists' lives any way I can.  I
believe those were your orders as well, were they not?"

Pardonnet looked down and nodded.

Kirk took the quiet moment as an opportunity to drive forward.  "We'll
need to get all the Conestogaclass vessels loaded as soon as possible,
even those without drive capability.  We can tow them far enough away
to escape the laser and get them travel-worthy once the dust clears.
Everything that can be salvaged from the planet will have to be packed
up, too.  There won't be anything worth coming back for."

The look that crossed Pardonnet's face was his "are you crazy?"  look.
But to the man's credit, he didn't say it.  Instead he said, "This is
going to take a full-blown mobilization effort.  Getting people moving
without panicking them is going to be nearly impossible.  We'll need to
find ways to store fresh food for the duration of the trip.  We'll need
refrigeration equipment, medical equipment-the whole infrastructure. We
can't wedge it all into the remaining Conestogas in three days."

He was right.  It had taken months to off-load everything.  There was
no way they could put it all back in the time they had left.  "You'll
just have to beam it into space, then," Kirk said.

"What?"  Pardonnet's eyebrows tried to disappear over the top of his
head.  "Did I hear you correctly?  Beam it into space?"

"That's right.  Put it in the Lagrangian point between Belle Terre and
the olivium moon.  It'll be in the planet's shadow when the laser hits,
so it should be safe there.  We can come back and pick it up
afterward."

"But ... but ... do you know what exposure to vacuum and extremes of
heat and cold can do to things?"

"Oh, I have some ideal" Kirk replied, and he heard Uhura stifle a
snicker.  "Believe me, it's better than what they'll face on the
ground.  Imagine what it would be like if the sun went supernova.
That's what it's going to be like under that laser beam.  Get anything
you want saved in the shadow of the planet

Pardonnet swallowed hard, then nodded.  "Very well."  He reached
forward to switch off, but stopped with his hand halfway to the button.
"What about the moont' he asked.

"It should be safe," Kirk said.  "The Kauld timed their shot so it
would be in the planet's shadow, too."

That's what I mean.  We aren't going to just leave it for them, are we?
The most concentrated energy source in the universe in the hands of
hostiles?"

"It's either that or blow it up on our way out," Kirk said.  "It's
tempting, but that's not the way the Federation does things."

"And why not?"

Kirk suppressed a sigh.  Starfleet spent years drilling the ethics of
engagement into their cadets, and here he was trying to explain it to
Pardonnet in a few seconds.  "Because that olivium could offer a wealth
of opportunity to every civilization in the galaxy, that's why not. 
The Kauld may not be the best stewards of it, but we would be no better
if we destroyed it just to keep them from getting their hands on it.
Besides, if we leave it intact, there's always the possibility that we
could take it back at a later date."

Pardonnet nodded his grudging acceptance.  "Maybe so, but do the Kauld
know we think that way?"

"Probably not.  What's your point?"

"My point is, they'll expect us to blow it up.  They're going to try to
stop us."

Kirk stared at the governor for a moment, his opinion of the man rising
another notch.  Kirk would have thought of that eventually, but
Pardonnet had beat him to it.  "You're right," he said.  "And now the
last piece of the puzzle has clicked into place.  Lieutenant?"  He
turned toward Uhura.  "The fleet video."  Yes, sir."  Another bleep
from her console.  "Mr.  Scott and Dr.  McCoy discovered this while
doing some reconnaissance in neighboring star systems.  I was wondering
why they were still building up their fleet when they had just fired
their ultimate weapon, but now I know.  They expect they'll have to
prevent us from destroying the moon before we go."

Pardonnet seemed to go a little paler as he watched the enemy warships
in action.  "That does seem likely," he agreed.

"YWeh means we'll be fighting a battle while we evacuate unless we're
already gone when they get here.  We need to be ready in two days, not
three."

Chapter Twenty-seven

SpocK STACKED his olivium-powered sensor experiment on the far end of
the science lab's counter.  He could work on that later, during the
long flight home.  He suppressed a shudder at the thought of escorting
twenty Conestogas full of angry, defeated colonists back to
civilization, but there truly seemed no other option.  Everyone
expected the Enterprise to work some miracle to save them, and Spock
would work right up to the final hour to give them that miracle, but
the final hour was now less than three days away.

Even if it had been three weeks away, the odds of success would not be
good.  How could they stop the Kauld super weapon  How could any number
of ships stop such a thing?

Mirrors, mass, and motion.  Those were the traditional methods for
defending against laser attacks, and none of them would work here.

That left more exotic methods.  Spock rested his hands on the bare
tabletop before him, facing the gray board covered with tools at the
back of the workspace, then closed his eyes and considered the
possibilities.  Despite the laser beam's size, it was still made up of
photons, and the individual photons were still subject to quantum
effects.  They behaved like both particles and waves, depending upon
the circumstances.  They would, for instance, create interference
patterns if they passed through two side-by-side slits.  Their own
wave-forms would cancel one another out in narrow bands of
interference, and amplify one another in alternate bands.

He didn't bother calculating the size of the slits required to create
an interference pattern big enough to neutralize a light beam this
size.  If they could make a diffraction grating that big, they could
make a nffor that big.

What else?  He let his mind go blank, allowing the synapses to seek new
connections on their own, letting the quantum uncertainty of raw
creativity work for him where logic was little help.

The laboratory door slid open behind him.  Footsteps, then: "I should
have known I'd find you here.  Looks like you're working hard."  The
Southern drawl and the derision it carried were unmistakable.

Spock didn't open his eyes.  "It may be difficult for you to fathom,
Doctor, but yes, I am indeed working hard."

"Yeah, I can practically smell the smoke."  Another three footsteps.
McCoy stood just behind his left shoulder now.  "What are you working
on?  Looks like all your equipment is at the other end of the bench."

"That is another experiment, irrelevant to the matter at hand."

"Oh?  What's it do?"

Spock took a deep breath.  "It was an attempt to increase our ship's
long-range sensing capabilities utilizing the quantum instability and
extreme energy density of an olivium power supply.  Unfortunately, it
does not function as designed."

"VAY not?"

Spock opened his eyes and turned his head toward the doctor.  "Did you
have a purpose in coming here other than to disrupt my thought
processes?"

"Not really' " Instead of taking the hint, McCoy came around and sat on
the countertop beside him.  "I've got everybody patched up as best I
can after our little encounter with the laser beam out there, so I
thought I'd check out the wounds that aren't so obvious on the
surface."

T'plana-Hath save me, thought Spock.  He's talking about human
psychology.

Sure enough, McCoy said, "We're lookin' defeat in the eye and we
haven't got so much as a pop-gun to even the odds.  The depression
around here is thick enough to cut with a knife.  And you and the
captain are under the most pressure of all.  I wanted to see how you
were holding up."

"Thank you for your concern"' Spock said.  "I am fine' "

"I'm the doctor.  Let me be the judge of that.  Are you eating okay?
Sleeping at all?  Sleeping too much?"

Spock thought of the anti phase wave cancellation headphones resting
against the gray board just a half meter away.  He could put them on,
adjust them to the pitch of a human voice, and Dr.  McCoy could ask all
the questions he wanted.  The headphones would generate an exact
duplicate of the sound waves that made up his voice, only out of phase
with the original, effectively cancelling it out.  McCoy could natter
on at length, and Spock could get on with the business of figuring out
how to neutralize the laser.

Unfortunately, decorum and basic civility required that he endure the
doctor's personal inquisition instead.

"My caloric intake is adequate.  I have not slept in seventy-nine
hours, but this is not unusual for a Vulcan.  "

"You're half human.  We need eight hours a day; you should get at least
four."

Antiphase wave cancellation, Spock thought.  Then he suddenly said it
aloud.  "Antiphase wave cancellation."  He nearly inflected his voice
with excitement, but McCoy would never let him hear the end of it if he
did.

"What?"

Spock stood up.  "Thank you, doctor.  You have provided the solution to
our dilemma."

"I have?  How?"

"Lasers are collimated light beams, with all the waveforms aligned
peak-to-peak.  We merely need to fire another laser beam of exactly the
same frequency' but out of phase with the first, along the same path as
the original.  The two beams will cancel one another Out."

McCoy squinted at him as if he had confessed to an emotional fondness
for Klingons.  "You, uh, want to fire another laser at Belle Terre?"
His right hand edged nervously toward his communicator.

"It would work"' Spock said.  He moved down to the end of the bench and
carried his sensor experiment back to the center.  It hadn't behaved as
he had designed it, but with a little more modification it might
suffice to detect the wavefront of the approaching laser beam.  "Men
light waves cancel out, they leave no trace.  Both beams would simply
cease to exist."

"If they cancelled out.  I don't know a whole lot about optics, but
isn't it true that two light waves can reinforce each other just as
easily?"

Spock nodded.  "That is true, but only if they are in phase.  We will
be sure not to allow that to happen."

McCoy slid off the bench to give him room to set his breadboarded
circuitry.  "How are you going to do that?  A wavelength of light is,
what, a couple of microns across?  How are you going to position your
second laser that accurately?  It'd be impossible under the best of
conditions, but yours would have to be fired during Gamma Night!  We'd
be lucky if we got within a country mile of where we needed to be."

"That is what this equipment is for," Spock said.  "I believe I can
modify it to provide a subspace echo off the laser beam.  Its
efficiency is less than two percent, which makes it useless for general
scanning because of the poor signal-to-noise ratio, but since we
already know roughly where the beam is, we should be able to filter out
extraneous signals and eventually locate it with the necesswy
precision."

"You think- You're going to trust people's lives to an untested
gadget?"

Spock started plugging in his equipment.  "No, Doctor, I plan to trust
their lives to a tested one, which will be much easier to do if you
allow me to get to work."

"You're nuts!  You've cracked under the pressure.

YOU,

"Is that your professional evaluation?"

"It is."

Spock counted slowly to ten.  As the ship's chief surgeon, McCoy could
order him to sickbay for mental evaluation.  It could be hours before
his monitors proved that there was no pathological illness, if indeed
the doctor believed his monitors.  By the time Spock was free of his
clutches, the point could be moot.

Choosing his words with care, he said, "I propose to fire a second
laser beam at a planet that is already doomed if we do nothing.  If we
fail, we do no harm.  If we succeed, we save the planet, the colony,
and with it the Federation's control of perhaps the most valuable
resource in the galaxy.  I believe the idea has enough merit to at
least do a feasibility study."

McCoy cocked his head to the side.  Listening to inner voices, perhaps.
But whatever they told him, they were apparently on Spock's side. "All
right," McCoy said.  "I agree that the concept has merit.  But even if
you could fire a second beam with enough precision to do the job, we
can't build the laser in the time we've got left.  We'd have to drag a
comet down here ahead of it, cut it in half, silver it, build the light
source ... it can't be done.  Not in three days."

"You are correct"' Spock said, powering up the sensor array.

"Look, I'm telling you-what?"

"Your logic is impeccable.  We will do it another way."

"I ... how?"

"I do not yet know, but the sooner you allow me to begin
experimentation, the sooner I will."

"Oh.  Right."  McCoy shook his head as if he were trying to coax a
different answer out of it, but at last he took a few steps toward the
door.  He turned around halfway there.  "Do sleep on it before you do
anything drastic, okay?"

"I will"' Spock promised.  As he watched the doctor leave the science
lab, he vowed to keep that promise, too.  But he had made no promise
regarding how long he would sleep.

 Chapter Twenty-eight

ScoT-ry LOOKED sadly at the immense starship before him.  He was in one
of the shuttles, coasting backwards nearly five kilometers ahead of her
in orbit, but even from that distance the damage was obvious.  Half the
ship was still its normal light gray, but the other half was the
pearlescent silver of bare hull.  Tiny specks of light on the silver
side showed where work crews were busy repairing the damage, but Scotty
knew they were only patching holes.  There was more damage inside that
couldn't be fixed, not this far from a starbase.  They were at the far
end of a tenuous supply chain, and they could only stockpile so much
equipment.

He cursed Vellyngaith, cursed the laser the Kauld had built, cursed the
damage it had done to Scotty's beautiful ship.  So the very notion of
sitting here in space and waiting for the signal to fire another laser
at her felt like betrayal of the worst sort.

Still, Spock had the only plan going.  It had about as much chance of
working as an arrow had of stopping a cannonball, but if the cannonball
was on its way, he supposed the archer might as well shoot.  A last act
of defiance if nothing else.

Besides, Scotty had set the shuttlecraft's laser to a tiny fraction of
its maximum-rated power.  At this setting, it would barely warm the
Enterprise's hull even if it missed the target: a light sensor mounted
dead square in the middle of the deflector array.  Scotty wondered how
valid a test this would be of their ability to cancel out a beam of the
strength that was bearing down on them, but he supposed they had to
start somewhere.

The Vulcan's voice came over the comm.  "Ready here, Mr.  Scott."

"Aye:' Scotty replied, reaching for the firing stud.  "Here goes
nothin'."

The laser fired, and in the swue instant the interior of the shuttle
lit up with grainy red light.  Scotty had scattered a couple kilograms
of atomic iron dust on his way out here so the ship's sensors could
track the light beams, but the scatter shouldn't have been anything
like this.  "Hey!"  he yelled.  "You hit me!"  '-That shouldn't have
happened " Spock said.

"You're dam tootin' it shouldn't!"  Scotty said, blinking rapidly and
watching the afterimages flash in his field of vision.  That had been
bright.  "What was your energy setting?"  Spock asked.

Scotty read the digital meter.  "One watt, just like we agreed."  "My
beam was one watt as well.  Wavelength?"  "Six hundred nanometers."

"Mine also.  They should have cancelled-wait a moment."

")Wat?"

"Mine apparently did cancel yours.  Unless you missed the target."

"I can shoot a laser, laddie buck

Spock took a moment before he replied.  "Let's run the test again."  "
Just a sec."  Scotty polarized the window to cut down on the glare if
he was hit again, then made doubly sure he was aimed at the target.
"Ready."

"Fire at will."

He pressed the stud again.  Brilliant light flooded the cabin for just
an instant; not as bad as before, but only because of the polarizing
filter.  The Enterprise's beam had hit him again.

"Interesting"' Spock said.

"I still got zapped over here.  Did my beam get cancelled out again?"

"I don't believe it did either time.  Yours seems to have disappeared
before mine reached it."

Scotty rubbed his eyes.  "Notto contradict you, but that's flat-out
impossible, isn't it?"

"Apparently not " Spock said.

Scotty thought through the stages of the test.  When he fired his
laser, Spock's souped-up subspace scanner would detect the energy pulse
as the leading edge of the beam plowed through the dust.  It would
return a very faint but detectable subspace echo that would pinpoint
the advancing beam long before it reached the ship.  That would trigger
the Enterprise's return beam, which should have met Scotty's beam
head-on.  Normally that would do no good, since light beams have to be
travelling in the same direction to interfere with one another, but
they had used an old trick known as temporal waveform inversion to make
the outgoing wave look like an incoming wave.  And since the two were
out of phase and had the same power level, they should have cancelled
each other out.

Okay, so where in that process could Scotty's beam have been cancelled
out prematurely?

"It's got to be your scanner pulse," he said.  "That's the only other
thing that's hitting my incoming beam."

"There is also the dust," Spock reminded him.

"Aye, but we've been firing lasers through dust for centuries and
nobody's ever had one disappear on 'em before.  Not at this thin a
density."

"It does seem unlikely that the dust is the cause"' Spock admitted.
"That would leave the questing beam, as you say."

There were a few seconds of silence as both men tried to puzzle out
what was going on.  Scotty watched the Enterprise floating before him
in space while his mind soared farther and farther away ... but his
thoughts swooped back to the present when Spock said, "Neutrinos?"
"What about neutrinos?"

"When I first tried an olivium-enhanced scanner, I detected a large
pulse of neutrinos every time I sent out a signal.  I was unable to
determine where the neutrinos were coming from.  What if they were
ordinary photons, quantum-shifted by the olivium?"

Scotty tried to imagine how that would work.  "That's not just a
quantum shift; that's a shift from one kind o' fundamental particle to
another."

"Not a uncommon occurrence," Spock reminded him.

"Not in a nuclear reaction, maybe, but in free space it certainly is."
Scotty chewed his lower lip in thought, then said, "We ought to be able
to test that theory easily enough.  Set up your receiver to look for
neutrinos, and

I'll fire another laser at you.  If the neutrino count spikes when I
shoot, we'll know that's it."

He could hear Spock tinkering with the circuitry, then, "Ready."

"Here we-wait a second."  Scotty stopped with his finger poised over
the button.  "Have you shut off your laser?  There's no need o' me
getting blinded for this one."

"Good point.  The laser is now off-line."

"Here goes' " Scotty fired the laser.  This time he could see the beam
lance out toward the Enterprise, but it never connected.  About a third
of the way between the shuttle and the starship, the bright red thread
of light simply faded out.  Neutrino burst detected Spock said.  "Let's
try a patterned pulse," Scotty said, "just to make sure it's not
coincidence."  He tapped the fire button once, then twice in quick
succession, then three times, then five, then seven, then eleven.

"I am receiving a sequence of prime numbers"' Spock said.

"That's what I sent."  A sudden thought made Scotty laugh.

"What do you find amusing about prime numbers?"  Spock asked.

"I'm thinking about where these neutrinos might wind up.  They can
travel right through a planet without being absorbed.  That sequence of
prime numbers could make it halfway across the universe before they
finally hit something.  Can you imagine what could happen if somebody
in another galaxy detects them?"

"They would think they were being hailed by an intelligent entity. Yes,
I see the irony."

Scotty frowned.  "Spock, you have an uncanny way with words, do you
know that?"

"My apologies, Mr.  Scott.  It was not my intention to insult you.  I
was merely pointing out the-"

"Aye, never mind."  He didn't really care.  They had just discovered an
unexplained new phenomenon that might just save their collective bacon
from the fire.  He said, "It looks like we've got a magic transmutation
ray that'll turn photons into neutrinos.  Are you thinkin' what I'm
thinkin'?"

"Unfortunately, the distance between us is too great to allow a
mind-meld, but if you are proposing to aim our olivium-enhanced sensor
array at the oncoming Kauld laser beam, then the answer is yes.  But
before we do that, we should test its ability to transmute photon
streams at the energy density required."

"Which means shootin' a bigger laser beam at the Enterprise."

"That is correct.  Also, we should determine whether or not the
neutrinos stay neutrinos outside of the influence of the modified
sensor array."

"You could send a probe out in the opposite direction from me."

"I will do so' " Scotty heard Spock tapping at the science lab's
control station, then he saw a bright spark shoot away from the back of
the Enterprise and disappear into warp drive.

"I am steering the probe into position one light second away," Spock
reported.  "Checking alignment ... on station.  You may fire when
ready."

"I'm setting it at one kilowatt," Scotty said.  If a beam of that
strength hit the Enterprise, it would do some damage to the target, but
not to the hull behind it.  "Firing."  He pressed the fire button.

The streak of red light was much brighter this time,

but it disappeared in the same place as far as he could tell.

"Neutrino burst detected here," said Spock.  "Probe data coming in.
This is ... fascinating."

"What?"

"Your laser beam destroyed the probe."  It turned back into photons?"

"That would seem to be the case."

Scotty slumped back in his chair.  So close.  For a moment there he had
allowed himself to believe Wat they had found a way to beat the Kauld's
super weapon but it wouldn't work if the beam reappeared the moment it
left the influence of the olivium-powered scanners.  It would just
reappear a few meters underground, and would cook the planet just as
well as if it hit from space.

Spock said, "That is not encouraging, but the neutrinos did make it all
the way through the Enterprise's primary hull before they reverted to
their original state.  That implies a definite duration beyond the
influence Of my sensors.  We should experiment with probes closer to
the ship and see if we can determine the point at which the transition
occurs."

"Aye, that we should," Scotty said.  They'd had their moment of
serendipity; now it was time to do the science to see if it would
amount to anything.  It was going to be a long afternoon.

Chapter Twenty-nine

"WAIT A M Kirk said.  "You want us to do what?"  He had been at his
desk in his briefing room, going over progress reports on the repair
and refitting of the colony's starships, when Spock and Scotty had come
up from the science lab with the most bizarre cock-and-bull story he'd
ever heard.

"Use the deflector array to turn the laser beam into neutrinos"' Spock
repeated.  "Mr.  Scott and I have determined the parameters of the
effect, and we believe that a sufficient number of olivium-enhanced
deflector units can effect a temporary transmutation of the beam long
enough to allow it to pass harmlessly through the planet."

Kirk couldn't read the Vulcan's poker face at all.  He looked over at
Scotty, who was grinning like a rube with four aces.  "You actually
think this could work?"  he asked.

"Yes, sir.  I know it sounds a wee bit daft, but we've tested it every
which way and it's a real phenomenon."  " "Wee bit deft' doesn't begin
to describe it"' Kirk said.  "You're asking us to risk every-"

The intercom whistled for attention.  Kirk reached out and snapped it
on, and Uhura's voice said, "Captain, incoming message from
Shucorion."

Oh damn.  In all the excitement, he had completely forgotten the Blood
leader.  "Put him on."

Shucorion's blue face filled the desktop monitor.  "Captain!  I'm proud
to report that we are on our way with your emergency building
materials.  We've managed to fill your school administrator's request
for desks and chairs as well."

"that's, urn, that's wonderful," Kirk said.  He couldn't tell Shucorion
to stay home and save himself the trouble, not on an open channel.  He
couldn't tell him even on a secure channel, because there were bound to
be Kauld spies on board his ships, and he couldn't afford to tip off
the Kauld that they had learned about the laser.  "When will you
arrive?"  he asked.

"Two days," Shucorion said.

Just in time for the fireworks.  "Wonderful," he said.  "Watch out for
Kauld ships on the way.  We believe they're building up their presence
again."  That was for any Kauld who might be listening.  It didn't give
away anything, but if the enemy thought Kirk was expecting them, they
might wait until after the laser strike to attack, in the hopes that
some of the Federation ships would be taken out by the beam.

"It is the Blood way, to watch out for the Kauld.  My thanks for the
thought."  Shucorion signed off.

Kirk turned his attention back to his senior officers.  "As I was
saying, 'deft' is too mild a word.  You're actually suggesting that we
place ourselves in the path of the laser in order to convert it to
neutrinos with modified deflectors?"

"Aye," Scotty said, still grinning.

"How many ships do you think you'd need to make it work?"

Scotty lost his smile and held a hand to his lips while he cleared his
throat.  Kirk stared at him impatiently, wailing for an answer, but it
was Spock who said, "All of them."

Those three words hung like a soap bubble between them.  Kirk spoke
first.  "You mean all of the fighters."

Scotty found his voice.  "No, sir.  He means every ship we have left.
Even the Conestogas and tugs.  We need them all to cover the area of
the beam."

"Couldn't the Enterprise and a few other ships make multiple passes
through it?"

Scotty and Spock exchanged glances.

Kirk recognized that look.  This wasn't going to be good news.  "What?
Out with it."

"The effect is temporary," Spock said.  "It lasts for less than a tenth
of a second before the neutrinos turn 'back into photons."

"A tenth of a second!"  Kirk's jaw dropped.

Scotty said, "It doesn't sound like much, but light and
neutrinos-travel thirty thousand kilometers in a tenth of a second. 
More than far enough to pass through the planet."

"But we'd have to wait until just before the beam hit," Kirk
protested.

"That is correct," said Spock.

Kirk digested this new information.  It would mean the end of the
evacuation.  There would be no point in putting everyone on the ships,
then putting the ships right back in the path of destruction.  He was
faced with an either/or situation.  He looked back at Spock and asked,
"What are the odds that we'll succeed?"

"Approximately two point three to one."

"For or against?"

"Against.  A great deal of the uncertainty depends upon the timing of
the Kauld invasion.  If left to our own devices, our odds of success
become nearly even."

Even those weren't the odds he was hoping for, but they were frankly
better than the odds of successfully getting everyone off the planet
and all the way back to Federation space.  And it certainly beat
running away with their tails between their legs.

"Get ready to move on this, but find a way to do it with fewer ships.
The Kauld aren't likely to leave us alone once they see that their
laser beam isn't hitting the planet, so we're going to need some
defense capability."

"Aye"' said Scotty.  "There's truth in that.  We'll see what we can
do."

"Good.  Now if you will excuse me, I have to do a little adjusting of
the governor's vision of events here.  I'll get back to you."

As Scotty and Spock left the briefing room, Kirk took a deep breath to
steel himself for the call he would make to Pardonnet.  Once the man
got moving on a plan, it was nearly impossible to get him to switch
horses in midstream.  That was generally considered a virtue, but
sometimes Pardonnet's determination bordered on the hidebound.  Well,
Kirk would just have to ruffle his hide.  He toggled the intercom.
"Lieutenant Uhura, get me Governor Pardonnet."  "Yes, sir."  The screen
blanked out while she made the connection, then Pardonnet's harried
visage appeared.  "What now, Captain?"  he demanded.  He rustled the
sheets of paper on his desk, pointedly letting him know how busy he
was.

"Good news for a change," said Kirk.  "You wanted an alternative to
evacuation; my science officer and chief engineer have come up with
one."

That got his attention.  "What kind of alternative?"

"They've discovered how to turn the laser into neutrinos, which will
pass harmlessly through the planet before turning back into photons on
the far side."

"They ... have?"  Pardonnet didn't look any more credulous than Kirk
had been at first.

"They have.  Problem is, it's going to take every ship we've got,
including the Conestogas, and it requires putting them right in the
path of the beam.  We won't have a Plan B if anything goes wrong."

"That's unacceptable " Pardonnet said.  "I won't risk my people to a
mad scientist's experiment."

"That's what I told Mr.  Spock.  Good enough, then; we'll continue the
evacuation.  That will be a lot easier for us, anyway.  I just didn't
want to make your decision for you without at least giving you the
chance to think it over."

"Chance to think it over?"  Pardonnet said indignantly.  "You just told
me about it!"

"And you've already made your customary snap judgement:' Kirk replied.
"As I expected, and quite frankly, as I was counting on.  Sorry, but
I've got it recorded in case you start comp lining later when the going
gets tough "

Pardonnet's face turned red.  "Now just one damned minute!  I re rise
to be railroaded here.  I demand to hear the details of this plan
before you so blithely assume what my response will be."

"It's a moot point," Kirk said.  "You've already decided."

"I have not!  Give me enough h information to make an informed
decision, then I'll decide."

Kirk gave a theatrical sigh, then described what Spock and Scotty had
found.  "Trouble is he concluded, we have to wait until literally the
last second before we start the conversion process, and even then we
can't protect the moon.  The neutrinos will turn back into photons well
before they reach it.  It won't set the olivium off, but we'll lose our
mining facilities there for sure."

That was the icing on the cake for Pardonnet.  He had never wanted the
mining operation to begin with; his interest was in the colony.  Still,
he made a great show of thinking it over before he finally said, "I
understand that sacrifices may have to be made, but this plan does at
least preserve the colony."

"Provided it works"' Kirk said.

"Yes, yes, provided.  But whatever I may think of your priorities, I
have learned that you do at least take your job seriously.  Protecting
the lives of the colonists is your job and if you thought this was more
dangerous than evacuation, then you wouldn't have suggested it."  He
looked straight at Kirk, trying for the image of a stern conscience.
"If you think this will work, then it's your duty to do it, no matter
how difficult it may be."

"I see," said Kirk.  "And that's your final word."

"Yes."

Another theatrical sigh.  Then he nodded and said, "All right.  I'll
put Spock and Scotty to work on the modifications to the Conestogas.
You'll have to off load whatever supplies you've stowed already.  We'll
need those ships light and maneuverable.  And you'd better beam back
anything you've parked in space."

"That, ah, won't be a problem," Pardonnet said.

Kirk bet it wouldn't.  He hadn't beamed anything up yet.  He'd been too
busy "organizing" things.  Kirk didn't say anything about that; he had
gotten what he wanted from the governor.  "All right, then.  We'll do
it your way.  Kirk out."

He looked out the viewport at the planet below.  Two days.  Sighing for
real this time, he picked up the status reports and began sifting
through the ship rosters, hying to decide which ships to put on the
firing line and which to reserve for battling the Kauld; but he had
hardly begun the process before the intercom whistled and Lieutenant
Uhura said, "Incoming transmission from Lilian Coates."

He felt a lump rise in his throat.  He hadn't called her since he'd
returned.  He swallowed, then said, "Put her through."

She looked even worse than Pardonnet.  She had evidently been spending
her time actually working as well as organizing the evacuation.

"I assume you've heard the word?"  he asked her.

A puzzled expression crossed her face.  "What word?  I just called to
talk to you about logistics.  I need to know what to pack into which
ships."

"We're ... not evacuating after all."

She blinked a couple of times.  "Oh.  I see.  How long have you known
this?"

"About two minutes.  I just talked with Pardonnet."

"Oh.  How did he convince you to let him stay?  Isn't there a death ray
headed right for us?"

Kirk nodded.  "There is, but we think we know how to stop it."

"You think."

"We're pretty sure.  It worked when we tested it."  He described to her
what they were planning to do.

She listened quietly, then when he was done she said, "And we're
supposed to just wait down here at ground zero to see if it works?"

"It wouldn't make any sense to put the colonists into the Conestogas,"
he told her, "because the Conestogas are going to be right in front of
the laser, too.  So is the Enterprise.  I'm stationing it right over
Buena Vista."  He hadn't realized he was going to do that until he
heard the words coming out of his own mouth, but he instantly knew it
was the right choice.  The only way anything would happen to the
colony's largest town would be if the Enterprise went up in smoke
first.

She didn't say anything, just looked at him, biting her lower lip.

"If you'd like, you can ride it out up here with us.  it won't be any
safer, but I'd be glad to have you aboard."

She shook her head.  "It wouldn't look good.  Whether it's any safer or
not, people would think I was trying to save my own skin at their
expense.  And they'd jump to conclusions about us."

Kirk almost said, "Let them," but he realized it wasn't that simple.
Not for her.  This was a frontier society, and she ran the schools; if
there was even a hint of impropriety, she could find herself in serious
trouble.  He suddenly realized the risk she had taken in simply
spending a day with him, much less most of a night.  Thank heavens he
had beamed out of her living room rather than simply walking out her
front door in the morning.  '-That would make things difficult for
you:' he acknowledged.  "I'm ... sorry if I've complicated your
life."

That brought a faint smile to her face.  "Don't apologize.  Some
complications are worth the trouble."

"And others aren't," he said.  "I do apologize about the wild-goose
chase, but I really did think we were going to have to evacuate until
just a few minutes ago."

She nodded.  "I hope this is the right decision."

"Me too," he told her.  "Me too."

 Chapter Thirty

"You MEAN this is it?"  Scotty asked Kirk, as the captain delivered the
specs of all the ships that were available for modification.  "Notto be
ungrateful, sir, but I dinna know how we're going to cover the entire
area with only twenty-four ships.  At the power levels we can sustain,
the transmutation effect is only good for about a thousand kilometers
on a side."

Scotty leaned back in his chair and felt the vertebrae between his
shoulders pop.  He'd been bent over his workstation in engineering for
hours now, coordinating the efforts of his crew.

With a shrug, Kirk said, "We have to make do with what we have."  He
pointed to the top left corner of the data pad and added, "These ships
have essential systems missing.  Pardonnet started dismantling them for
ground shelter before I could stop him.  And I have to hold some ships
back for defense.  The ones on the front line are going to be sitting
ducks for twenty minutes: '

Scotty pulled up the schematics and studied the revisions.  "Aye,
you're right about that, but except for the Greeley, none of the others
are missing their deflector arrays.  There's no need for engines; we
caD tow 'em into place and they'll be usable as they are."

"Good.  That gives you flffy-two ships.  Will that be enough?"

Scotty didn't know.  There would be practically no overlap in coverage
that way.  If even one ship failed, a section of the laser beam a
couple thousand kilometers across could reach the planet's surface.
That was only three percent of the total area, but could Belle Terre
survive even that much damage to its ecosystem?  "I guess it'll have
to"' he said.

"How are the modifications going?"

Scotty stretched his arms out in front of him and said, "I have sixteen
teams out on as many ships installing Mr.  Spock's modified sensors.
We've had crews working constantly on producing and testing the new
units'

"How are you testing these units?"  Kirk asked, his brows knotted over
the bridge of his nose.

"Carefully," Scott answered, deadpan.

Kirk looked at him in silence a moment longer and finally said,
"Good."

Scotty couldn't remain straight faced  He cracked a smile and said,
"Notto worry, Captain.  We've taken every precaution.  Just because
we're sholl on time doesn't mean we've taken leave of our senses."

Kirk smiled back, then said as he headed toward the door, "I'm glad to
see you can still maintain a sense of humor.  Keep me posted on your
progress."

"Aye, sir."

Scotty's smile faded as he turned back to the roster of ships.  It was
going to be a long shift getting everything installed and tested.

He returned to his schematics.  There were so many kinds of ships and
just as many different sensor arrays that he and his crew had to be
able to manipulate in order to get everything to work properly.
Fortunately Lieutenant Hanson was in charge of tuning the units after
the installation crew finished.  She seemed the likely candidate for
the job, since she had had so much experience recalibrating the sensors
on the Enterprise while Mr.  Spock had them tied up in his experiments.
Besides, she did a good job of keeping focused on the problems at
hand.

There were plenty of those to go around.  Scotty had originally planned
to adapt the most defendable, maneuverable ships, leaving the slow
Conestogas and tugs to take as many evacuees as possible and get them
out of the line of fire.  But when Spock finished his calculations, it
had become obvious that there could be no evacuation-myery ship was
needed in the front line to face the laser.  That meant that every ship
needed modifying.  Some of these buckets of bolts barely had the
sophistication of a handcart, and he was supposed to turn them into
anti laser defense platforms.

His communicator beeped.  "Lieutenant Hanson to Mr.  Scott."

"Scott here.  What is it, Lieutenant?"

"I'm on the Hudson, trying to finish the calibration on the new
sensors."  Trying?"  "We're getting background interference.  Nothing
I've tried takes care of it."

Background interference?  "Did you check the phase rotation?"

"First thing."  "The inverter angle?"  "It checks out."

"It's not Gamma Night, or I wouldn't be hearing from you."

"Obviously."

"Have ye checked the leads?  It's not installed backwards, is it?"

She let a note of exasperation creep into her voice.  "I can tell red
wires from black.  It's installed correctly.  ""Check the sensor
itself. Are there any physical anomalies in the antenna array?"

"Negative."

"How about-"

"Excuse me, sir, but I've run down the entire troubleshooting list. I'm
at the point where I have to call tech support.  Tag.  You're it."

He sighed heavily and said, "I'll be right there, Lieutenant.  Scott
out."

The change would do him some good, he supposed.  Get out, stretch his
legs a bit.  He left orders with Ensign Young to start replacing the
missing deflector on the Greeley, and headed for the transporter
room.

By now, Scotty's face had become well known to most of the other ships'
engineers over the duration of the mission.  They had to work together,
and though some at first had felt insulted that Scotty had authority to
go in and tell them what to do, most of them were becomin, good
friends.  This wasn't the case with the Hudson's crew, the most
sullen-faced roup to pilot a supply ship this side of the Alpha
Quadrant.  The head ensineer, a big burly man from the Martian
Settlements by the name of Jonder, had never accepted Scotty as his
superior.

The Enterprise's transporter room faded away to be replaced with the
Hudson's unkempt, cramped equivalent.  As soon as the confinement beam
released him, Scotty's nose was assaulted with a sour odor.

"My God, what's wrong with your environmental controls?"  he asked the
transport tech.

"Sorry sir" the young man replied.  "The ventilation has been off-line
for a couple of days now.  Jonder's been too busy realigning the warp
coils to get to it."

"He could ha' asked for help.  I could have sent somebody from the
Enterprise to work on it for you."

The technician snickered.  "No offense, sir, but I doubt that the idea
ever crossed his mind."

Scotty rolled his eyes and shook his head.  "I suppose you're right.
Well, if my crew has to work on board, yell have breathable air."  He
flipped open his communicator.  "Scott to Ensign Young."

"Young here."

"Ensign, the Hudson is in need of environmental repair.  Send over
someone who can fix it quickly."

"Aye, sir."

Scotty hung his communicator back on his belt "That ought to do it:' he
said to the technician, then he left the transporter room for the
ship's engineering level.

He found Hanson sitting cross-legged on the floor by the main deflector
electronics housing.  Her short hair was once again in disarray from
her habit of running her fingers through it while she thought.  She'd
apparently been doing a lot of thinking.

"Any luck, Lieutenant?"

"No sir.  I've uninstalled it, reinstalled it, run every known
diagnostic on it, reinstalled it backwards on purpose, and just now I
installed a whole new unit.  All to no avail."

Over his shoulder, Scotty heard Jonder's nasty laugh.  "What's the
matter, Mr.  Scott?  Can't get cher toy to run?"

Scotty's already tight shoulder muscles tensed further.  He didn't have
time to get into an argument today.  "I canna take credit for this
one"' Scotty said.  He certainly couldn't.  The device was wholly the
work of Mr.  Spock.  He'd be hard pressed to explain its basic prerrse,
let alone the intricate details of how it worked.  What he did know was
how to install and debug them.  He hoped.

"Oh, don't be modest.  And don't be shy.  If you need help I'll be over
here with the warp engines."  Jonder walked away, laughing.  The man
obviously hadn't been told what the modifications to his ship were for,
or he wouldn't have that cocky grin on his face.

Scotty watched him leave, the tension in his neck leaving with him.  He
turned back to the problem at hand.  "Let's see what's going on here:'
he said as he waved his tricorder over the recalcitrant sensor,
flipping from scale to scale to check its various subsystems in
operation.

Lieutenant Hanson's assessment was correct.  The unit appeared to be
functioning properly, but the sign alto-noise ratio was atrocious.  No
amount of adjusting could clean up the dirty background.

Scotty had been leaning over the whole time; now he sat down on the
deck with his back against a support beam and wiped his brow with his
forearm.  Either someone from the Enterprise had already fixed the
ventilation, or he had grown used to the smell, but that didn't take
care of the heat down here in engineering.  He looked over at
Lieutenant Hanson, who looked just as uncomfortable as he felt.  "As
Mr.  Spock would say, there's got to be a logical explanation for
this"' he said.

Hanson smiled weakly.  "Great.  Maybe he should come on over and join
the party."

"Let's give it a minute before we call him.  It's time to think about
what the diagnostics are tellin' us:' He stood up with a groan.  "I'm
not as young as I was last week.  I've got to get up and stretch my
legs a wee bit."  He headed out the engineering room door and down the
corridor, meaning to walk its length a time or two and study his
tricorder readings, but the instrument's display flickered like a bad
light fixture.  He'd hate to think that it was on the blink.

He ran a self-diagnostic check, then a background check.  Then he ran
it again.  The energy readings were astronomical.  He rushed back to
engineering and down to the warp controls.  "Mr.  Jonder, what has the
Hudson been doing lately?"

Jonder turned from his console to face Scotty with a scowl.  "What do
you mean, what have we been doing?  Working hard, I'll tell you."

"I don't doubt that, man.  I merely want to know what it is that ye've
been working hard at."  "We've been loading up ore, that's what."
"Olivium..  . ore?"

"None other.  We were almost full, too.  Woulda been on our way back
home by now if your captain hadn't stopped us."  He turned away from
Scotty.

Well, that would explain the interference.  "Ye gods, man.  We canna
have you full of olivium on the front line.  Tell your captain he'll
have to unload."

"Tell him yourself."

The insolence of this man was unbelievable.  "I'll do you one better."
Scotty grabbed his communicator.  "Scott to Enterprise."  Uhura
answered, "Enterprise here, go ahead."

"Tell the captain that we've got a bomb ship in our midst:'

The briefest of pauses passed before Kirk said, "Scotty, what's going
on?"

"I just found out that the Hudson's cargo hold is full of olivium ore.
It's playing havoc with the new sensors and it'll play more havoc if it
gets hit during battle."

"Understood.  I'll have a word with her captain.  Kirk out

Scotty closed his communicator and hung it back on his belt.  A glance
in Hanson's direction confirmed his suspicion.  She shook from the
effort of suppressing laughter.

Jonder wasn't laughing.  "Front lines?  Hit during bat de  I thought we
were preparing for an evacuation."

"And you figured a few tons of olivium ore wouldn't take up that much
extra room, eh?"  Scotty shook his head.  "Be glad we caught it, or
you'd have gone up in a flash o' light to rival the Big Bang, and
probably taken the rest of us with you."

He helped Hanson pick up her tools.  When she appeared to be in control
of herself again, he said, "Lieutenant, why don't we move on to the
next ship and leave these kind gentlemen to their unloading.  You can
come back when they're finished."

She smiled and said, "I'd be delighted."

Well, he thought as they walked to the transporter room, on to the next
problem.

 Chapter Thirty-one

DR.  MCCOY took a deep breath of the fresh evening air as he walked
down the main street of Buena Vista.  It had rained earlier that day;
nothing much, but enough to knock down the dust and the afternoon heat.
Now a couple of dozen people walked along the sidewalks, coming and
going from shops and public buildings.  No one hurried.  There was no
sign of trouble, no sign that anything was wrong unless a person looked
closely.

Up close he could see the chinks in the facade.  Nobody was smiling.
Their purchases tended to be luxury items: bottles of genuine Earth
vintage wine, caviar, cultured roses.  McCoy would have liked to think
that people were planning to celebrate the great victory over the
Kauld's sneak attack, but he suspected most of that wine and food would
be gone before midnight.

Five hours and counting.  In five hours and a couple of minutes,
everyone would either be celebrating for real or vaporized.  Including
McCoy.  He had decided he would be more use on the planet's surface
than in orbit.  If through some miracle Spock's crazy notion worked,
there was a great potential for injury from the very revelry that would
erupt in the wake of the threat.  And if it didn't work-well, McCoy
would have preferred to end his days with his friends on board the
Enterprise, but he could take what little comfort there was in knowing
that he would only outlive them by one four-thousandth of a second
before the laser beam got him, too.

A few colonists were hiding in a cave a few kilometers up the valley.
Others had roofed their houses in bright metallic foil.  The universe
had no shortage of fools, he thought, but he had to admit that the
glittering foil provided interesting punctuation to the sunset that
slowly stretched out from the western sky.

There was one other sign of the recent trouble.  Everyone's garden
looked abandoned.  Apparently nobody had thought it worthwhile to water
them if they were just going to leave them behind anyway.  McCoy
wouldn't have guessed that the plants would be so fragile that they
would show the neglect so quickly, but he wasn't a gardener.

He looked at the school as he passed it.  The windows were dark.
Everyone was home with their families, waiting to see what would
happen.

The hospital, in contrast, was brightly lit and busy.  Fortunately,
most of the people were coming and going from the cafeteria wing, not
the medical wing.  It would be hours before the traffic shifted over,
if it ever did.  But if that happened, McCoy and Dr.  Neville and the
rest of the staff were ready.

He entered the cafeteria himself, joining the line of people waiting
for food.  Might as well stoke up for the long night.  It looked like
everyone else had the same idea, too.  The hospital cafeteria was one
of the biggest meeting halls in town, and it had the added advantage of
hot food.  Reunold Coates waved to him from a table in the corner, and
he waved back.  When he had filled his tray with steak and vegetables
and a slice of chocolate cake for dessert, he went on over and sat down
beside the boy.  Lilian was sitting across from him with her back to
the room; he hadn't realized it was her until he sat down.

"May I?"  he asked.

"Of course," she replied.

"How're you feeling?"  he asked Reunold.

"Fine, sir," Reunold replied.  "I think I must have just swallowed some
muddy water or something."

"Or something," McCoy agreed.  "Well, I'm glad nothing came of it."

"Me too."

McCoy turned to his food for a moment, asking between bites, "So,
Lilian, how're you feeling?"

She smiled faintly.  "You mean aside from being scared to death?"

He looked into her eyes.  If she was scared, she sure didn't show it.
"I mean how are you coping with all this back-and-forth business?
Gearing up to go back home, then being told you have to stay put." That
was as much as he could say in front of her son, but she had to know
what he was really talking about.

"It's been difficult," she said.  "I thought I would be happy to go,
after all we've been through, but when it came time to pack I started
to realize just how much of myself I've planted here.  And your advice
to get out and do something fun helped me put things in perspective a
little bit, too."

"She went flying with Captain Kirk!"  Reynold said loudly.  Lilian
blushed, and Reynold lowered his voice conspiratorially to whisper to
McCoy, "I think she's sweet on him."

"Reynold!"  she said.  "I don't go around telling everyone you're sweet
on Kelly Taylor."

"Mom!"  "Oh, I'm sorry, was that a secret?"

McCoy laughed.  She certainly had mothering down to a science.

He also noticed that she hadn't denied her affection for the captain.
What was it with him, anyway?  McCoy had watched him woo his way across
half the Alpha Quadrant, and he still didn't understand how Kirk did
it.  He'd gone so far as to check him for pheremones during a routine
medical evaluation, but there had been no sign of anything unusual
about him.  The man simply attracted women the way a light attracts
moths.  if it had been anyone else, McCoy might have felt jealous.
Hell, maybe just this once he did feel a little bit jealous.  He had
grown fond of Lilian himself during their months of contact.  He'd come
to care about her welfare.  Yet when he had encouraged her to go out
and live a little, who was the first person she had turned to?

It was a mystery.  If he and Kirk were together another twenty years,
he would probably never figure it out.

He hoped he would have the chance to try.  While he sliced another
piece of steak, the lights flickered, and the voices in the cafeteria
all stilled for a moment.  He knew what everyone was thinking.

Gamma Night.  Four hours and thirty minutes before impact.

 Chapter Thirty-two

IT'S AMAZING what lasers can do, Kirk thought as he watched the fleet
of colony ships assemble in space between Belle Terre and its olivium
moon.  They were in the thick of Gamma Night now.  Radio was useless,
both the normal and the subspace variety, but the ships stayed linked
through message lasers beamed directly from ship to ship.  It was a
cumbersome system that required constant adjusting for position, but it
worked like a charm when it worked, and it had one big advantage: the
Kauld couldn't listen in on their transmissions.

He knew they were out there, hovering at the edge of the system and
watching to see how their plan was progressing.  Every few minutes a
lookout would report a ship warping in close to Belle Terre for an
instant before disappearing again, physically entering the gamma
blocked section of the solar system to gather information and then
warping back out to report to the rest of the Kauld fleet.

Hopefully, what they saw would both puzzle and trouble them.  Kirk had
assembled his ships on the wrong side of the planet!  The fact that he
was hiding in the planet's shadow gave away the fact that he knew about
the oncoming laser beam, but it must look damned strange for him to be
hiding there without even attempting to evacuate or even shield the
colonists on the exposed side.  It could only mean that he had been
caught by surprise, and was desperately saving his own skin.

Would they make the next logical conclusion, as Governor Pardonnet
had?

Kirk looked at the time.  Only ten minutes left.  The Kauld weren't
taking the bait.

Time for Plan B. "Mr.  Sulu, the moment the next Kauld observer warps
into range, fire a low-yield photon torpedo at the moon."

"At the moon, not the Kauld ship, sir?"  Sulu asked.

"That's right."

The miners had been evacuated hours ago.  Most of their equipment was
on the farside, where the impact that caused the Burn had exposed raw
olivium veins.  A photon torpedo fired from this angle would hardly
damage a thing, but the Kauld wouldn't know that.  They would just see
a big flash, and would think that Kirk was destroying the moon so they
couldn't have it.

Uhura, listening to the field reports, announced, "Kauld ship."  Sulu
hit the fire button, and a bright ball of light shot out from the
Enterprise, illuminating the moon's dark night side with its approach
and impacting on the rough gray surface in a bright explosion.

"Kauld ship just warped out:' Uhura said.

Kirk felt his heartbeat start to rise.  This was it.  "All ships,
battle stations," he said.  "Shields to maximum.  Engage the enemy
until T minus one minute, then take your positions on the laser side of
the planet.  Nonmodified defenders, continue engaging the enemy until I
minus five seconds, then get to safety."  That was cutting it close,
but it was the only way to play this one.  They couldn't give the Kauld
time to react.

He barely had time to give the orders.  Space was suddenly filled with
battleships.  The computer immediately began identifying targets, and
it quickly became clear that the entire fleet had warped in at once.
Even Vellyngaith's command ship had joined the party.

The Federation ships leaped into action, firing and dodging, firing and
dodging, sometimes warping out for mere milliseconds, then reappearing
behind the enemy and firing again.  Phaser fire splayed across enemy
shields, pinpointing weaknesses and overloading them one after another,
leaving the ships wide open for the next shot to rupture the hull.

The Kauld weren't having nearly as much luck hit ting the Federation
ships.  Of course they didn't have the advantage the Federation had,
either: nearly half an hour of sensor readings of their enemy's fleet
in action during their most recent war games.  Kirk had distributed
Scotty and McCoy's surveillance information to all his ships, and the
captains and gunners had all pored over it to learn the Kauld strategy,
capability, and soft spots.

Space filled with debris as ship after ship erupted in fiery balls of
destruction.  There was no communication now; not even Uhura could keep
track of targets that kept warping in and out of normal space every few
seconds.

Not surprisingly, the Enterprise was the Kauld's biggest target.  Sulu
and Thomsen flew the immense starship like an atmospheric fighter,
swooping, banking and corkscrewing around the attackers while
simultaneously pounding them with phaser fire and the occasional photon
torpedo.  The viewscreen filled with images of Belle Terre's day side,
blue oceans and white sky shining brightly, then the dark of space,
then the planet again, as the starship took evasive action.  TThe
shields flared every few seconds, their power ratings steadily
dropping, but the Kauld paid dearly for every shot.

Vellyngaith's flagship dogged them through every maneuver, but the
three new olivium-powered ships were a worse threat.  If Kirk hadn't
watched them in action, he would have been hard pressed to fight even
one of them.  As it was, they more than made up for his strategic
advantage with sheer speed and power.  The Enterprise shuddered under
blow after blow from their disruptors, and warning alarms began
sounding at the engineering and life-support stations.  Kirk ordered
return fire with everything he had, but when their captains realized
that the Enterprise wasn't giving up easily, all three of the new ships
focused their attack on it at once.

"Phasers, wide spread"' Kirk ordered as the ships swooped in from three
different directions.  "Blind them."  Everyone was limited to optical
maneuvering here; not even the new ships could see to navigate through
a flaring shield.  Even as the phasers were reaching out, he said,
"Keep firing, and fire photon torpedoes on the one dead ahead.  Full
salvo.  Hit 'em while they're blind."

A string of blight stars shot out toward the enemy ship, each one
impacting on the shields in the same spot.  Not even olivium-enhanced
generators could withstand that many hits; the third shot flared
through, and the fourth one buried itself deep in the ship itself
before exploding and ripping it into two ragged halves.

The fifth and sixth torpedoes raced right through the debris and onward
toward the Hudson until Sulu detonated them remotely.

"Thwo minutes to laser impact," Spock said from his science station.

Had it been eight minutes already since the start of battle?  It felt
more like eight seconds, but Kirk knew how time could telescope in a
fight.  "Rush the moon"' he said.  "Let's look like we mean to destroy
it."

Sulu turned the Enterprise toward the pocked gray surface and
accelerated at one-quarter impulse power.  The other ships, taking
their cue, all turned toward it as well.  The Kauld ships in front of
them pulled together into what looked like a solid wall of defense,
while the ones behind poured fire into the Federation ships' aft
shields. The Federation returned fire in both directions, giving it
everything they had for another sixty seconds and blasting at least a
dozen more Kauld out of space, then Spock said, "One minute:' and Kirk
said, "Hard around to the far side!  Go, go, go!"

The Enterprise swooped into warp drive.  Sulu guided the ship around
the planet in a precalculated are, bringing them out just a thousand
kilometers above the surface and directly in the path of the oncoming
laser.  There was nothing to be seen yet, of course, not in visual
wavelengths, but Spock was ready with his modified sensors and he
instantly took a reading.  "Forty-five seconds to impact " he said.

Forty-five light-seconds ahead of them, a patch of the laser beam
quantum-shifted into neutrinos, then a tenth of a second later shifted
back to photons.  At least Kirk hoped it had.  If it hadn't, everyone
was in deep trouble.

Thomsen quickly checked the Enterprise's location with respect to
optical beacons on the ground, and Sulu flew them the few hundred
kilometers it took to put them directly over Buena Vista.

"Other ships are taking up position"' Uhura said.  Kirk wished he could
see what was going on on the other side of the planet, but without
subspace sensors, he was blind.  That worked both ways, though; so were
the Kauld.  From their point of view, the Enterprise and most of her
support ships had just fled the battle; even if Vellyngaith had
stationed observers on this side of Belle Terre-a suicidal
proposition-they would never spot the Federation ships against the
night side of the planet.  And the remaining ships were still fighting,
leading the Kauld into a tight knot between BeHe Terre and the moon
while their captains counted down the last few seconds.

"Ten."  Spock said.  "Deflectors on line.  Five.  Four.  Three.  Two.
Now."  He hit the manual override button in the same instant that the
computer triggered the enhenced sensor beam.

Kirk held his breath.  Enough energy to vaporize him was pouring right
through his body, but neutrinos reacted so poorly with normal matter
that all but the tiniest fraction of them passed right through-and
right through the planet as well.  There would have been no sign that
anything at all was happening if the Enterpyise hadn't salted the beam
front with its impulse drive exhaust four days earlier; but those ions
were still being pushed along by the front of the beam, and they hadn't
turned into neutrinos.  They had been accelerated almost to light
speed, but not quite; they lagged behind by a couple of seconds, just
long enough to let the crew begin exhaling before a sudden wall of gas
slammed into the Enterprise, rocking it backward.

Involuntary screams echoed around the bridge.

"Keep station!"  Kirk ordered, and Sulu brought them back into position
again.

The night side of Belle Terre momentarily lit up as the gas layer
struck the atmosphere, and the ground sparked in places as sections of
the laser beam slipped past the suddenly jostled ships, but the light
show only lasted a moment.  A few thousand square kilometers had just
gotten cooked, but it had been nothing like what the full force of the
beam would have done.

Kirk imagined what was happening on the other side of the planet.  The
neutrinos, about a third of the way between planet and moon, would turn
back into photons, which would slam at full intensity into the remains
of the Kauld fleet, who would have stayed put, thinking they would be
safe in the shadow of the planet.

That mental picture burst like a balloon when Uhura said, "Shipboard
spotters report Kauld vessels appearing ten to fifteen thousand
kilometers to the side of the beam."

"They jumped away," Kirk growled.

"Some of them did," Uhura said.  "We're only spotting about half of the
ones we left behind, and most of those are badly burned."

"Good " They were well outside the path of the laser beam, he noted,
but they must be curious as hell about why it was cooking the moon on
the other side of the planet and not even in evidence on this side. Let
'em wonder.

Kirk realized that Spock was tapping furiously at his controls and
speaking softly on a private channel to engineering.  He turned toward
the science station.  "Spock, is there a problem?"

"I am detecting a 12 percent variation in output power," the Vulcan
replied.  "I believe the emitter might have been damaged in the
battle."

Before Kirk could say anything about that, Sulu yelled, "Incoming
ships!"

"On screen!"  Kirk ordered.

The main viewscreen lit up with the view from Sulu's console.  On it,
three Kauld warships, including one of the new ones, were rushing
toward the Federation fleet.

"All ships hold your positions!"  Kirk warned.  If anyone turned to
fight, they would be instantly cooked by the laser beam.  They could,
on the other hand, narrow the beam they were emitting.... Just as the
lead Kauld ship approached within firing range Of The Federation ship
closest to it, that ship, the privateer Zavada, shifted its deflector a
few decrees inward.  In an instant, the Kauld ship flared brilliant
white, then exploded in a shower of melting fragments.  It had been
just outside the diameter of the planet; the Zavada's maneuver hadn't
even exposed the surface to the laser.

The other two Kauld ships veered away, but another one from farther out
rushed toward the planet, duckin, in low and flying beneath the
Federation shield before anyone could maneuver to burn him.

"Aft phasers," Kirk ordered.  "All ships concentrate fire on that
intruder!"

Two dozen phasers lanced out toward the ship, but without active sensor
guidance to lock them on target, only a few hit.  The enemy ship
snapped off a shot at the Enterprise that rocked them sideways, but the
shields held.

"Spock, can you angle our deflector to burn that uy""

"Not at the moment," Spock replied.  "Mr.  Scott and I are currently
having difficulty maintaining emissions at all.  If we try to alter the
beam, we could destabilize the tuning to the point where the entire
system goes down:' Yeow.  Kirk felt his heart skip a beat at that news.
The deflector had to work for over twenty-one iffinutes.  If it was
starting to flake out on them now, they were in big trouble.

The Kauld ship fired again at the Enterprise, but three more phaser
beams caught it in a crossfire and it veered away before it could do
more damage.  The phasers didn't destroy it, though, and its success
encouraged others to follow it.  Soon there were five Kauld ships
darting around beneath them, including the new olivium-powered one that
had attempted to cross into the beam's path moments before.

Things were getting dicey fast.  The Federation ships were sitting
ducks; they couldn't budge without letting major sections of the planet
burn, and without mobility their fighting capability was severely
limited.

"Where are those damned reserve ships?"  Kirk demanded.  Had they been
caught in the beam?

"Unknown," Uhura replied, "but our spotters report twenty more Kauld
vessels coming out of warp."

"What?  Where did they come from?"  The entire Kauld fleet had been
committed to the battle.  Unless Vellyngaith had held some ships in
reserve even from the war games, the ones they had been fighting were
the only ones the Kauld had.

Disrupter beams lanced into the fray, but they were aimed at the Kauld
ships, not the Federation defenders.

"Disrupter patterns indicate Blood vessels, not Kauld," Spock said.  A
moment later the viewscreen image swirled around to show twenty ships
accelerating hard toward them, and twenty immense cargo containers
tumbling free in space behind them.

"Shucorion"' Kirk whispered.  "That son of a bitch used warships to
haul the cargo hulls."  He had never been so glad to see an order
disobeyed in his life.

Two of the Kauld ships flared and died under the assault.  The others
blinked out under warp drive, then Uhura said, "We're being hailed."

"Put him on."

Shucorion's smiling face filled a quarter of the viewscreen, while the
tactical display remained in place around him.  "Greetings, captain"'
the Blood leader said.  "My apologies for shooting first and asking
questions later, but it looked as if you were in trouble there.  May I
ask why your ships are all facing away from the obvious danger?"

"Because we're stopping an even worse one from overhead," Kirk replied.
"Whatever you do, don't send any of your ships out beyond our
cordon."

"Why not?  I see no danger there."

Just then, the Kauld super ship warped back into position and fired a
full disruptor barrage at the Zavada.  The ship's shields went down
almost instantly, and a moment later the ship itself exploded.  There
was barely time to blink at the flash before the scene grew brighter
still: the section of laser it had been converting blasted through its
space unchanged, vaporizing the fragments of starship and slamming into
the planet below.

The Zavada had been over ocean.  Instantly, huge gouts of stewn rose up
off the water as the surface boiled.  The white vapor scattered the
beam in all directions, but the lion's share of its energy punched
right through.  In a few seconds, it would spawn major hurricanes; a
few more seconds would change the global climate for years to come.

"All ships, increase power and close up that gap!"  Kirk ordered.  They
had planned for this contingency.  There was a little bit of overlap in
deflector coverage; now the defenders shifted sideways until that
overlap was all but gone, but the combined extension of range was
enough to cover the area that had been the Zavada's.  The laser light
blinked out again, and the ocean below ceased boiling.

"You've convinced me," Shucorion said.  "We'll stay well clear of
that!"

"Take a look on the other side of the planet" Kirk said.  "Something
has happened to our support ships over there' "

"We'll check into it," Shucofion said.  His fleet peeled away, and
another video image sprang into place on the main screen as he relayed
what his scouts saw: the olivium moon glowing like a magnesium torch
under the brunt of the laser, and dozens of tiny specks of light
milling around in its starkly defined shadow.  Aggressors and defenders
had both taken refuge there when the laser hit, and like bugs in a jar,
they were fighting one another to the death.

The Blood ships moved closer, cautiously testing the space ahead of
them with probes until they found the edge of the laser beam, then they
parked just beyond it and opened fire on the Kauld.

Hit from two sides, the Kauld ships were immediately overpowered.  Four
of them flared and died, and the rest turned and ran.  About half of
them-including Vellyngaith's flagship-warped away, but the rest used
impulse power to flee down the long column of shadow.  Their warp
nacelles had evidently been damaged in battle or by the beam.

"Let them go," Kirk said.  If they couldn't warp out,

they would be easy to catch later.  It might even be possible to
capture them intact.

But Shucorion wasn't interested in that.  His ships kept pounding the
Kauld, blasting one after another as they attempted to flee.  One
veered sideways out of the vapor in the laser shadow and instantly
flashed into beam.  "That's enough!"  Kirk ordered.  "Let them go!"
Shucorion shook his head.  "This is my fight," he said.  "I will do it
my way."

"Damn it, that's not' Kirk began, but Spock's voice stopped him cold.
&"Captain, we have a problem."

 Chapter Thirty-three

SPOCK WAS keenly aware of the battle raging around him, and he knew he
could probably be of considerable use in a tactical capacity, but he
was already fighting a battle with equally serious consequences
entirely on board the ship.  Something was wrong with the modified
sensor array.  Power levels were fluctuating, and worse, the signal
from the various antenna elements was drifting in and out of phase.
Twice the condition had reached the critical point where the photon
neutrino transmutation effect became unstable, and twice he-and Mr. 
Scott down in engineering-Mad pulled it back into operational
parameters with only moments to spare.  Their fixes were only
temporary; the oscillations were starting up again, and this time they
were building faster than before.

"We are treating the symptoms," he said on his private link to
engineering, speaking softly so he wouldn't interfere with the bridge
activity around him.  "We must find the source of the problem and fix
it if we expect the deflector to last another fifteen minutes."

"We're tryin' to!"  Scott answered.  "I've got people checkin' every
circuit between here and the deflector dish, but we're not finding
anything wrong.  The problem's outside."  "Then you must go outside to
fix it."

"Do you have any idea how much energy is pouring through that dish?"
Scott asked.

Spock consulted his data displays.  "At the moment, 14.6 megawatts, but
that is diminishing at an alarming rate.  In another 2.5 minutes, the
power level will drop below the critical threshold, and we will begin
receiving a thousand times that much energy in the form of laser
radiation."

"Aye, I can see that"' Mr.  Scott said.  "We'll have to go outside, all
right, but we can't do that with the antenna active.  We'll have to
close up the gap and drop out of formation while we shut 'er down and
replace the Klystrons."

Spock tried to think of another way, but after a full ten seconds he
came up blank.  "You are correct.  Prepare for EVA " He looked up at
the captain, who was busy arguing with Shucorion.  There was no time to
spare; he interrupted Kirk in mid-sentence and said, "Captain, we have
a problem."

The captain gave him his full attention.  "What is it, Spock?"

"We must stand down and make repairs to the deflector array."

"Stand down?  We can't just duck out for repairs.  We're shielding
Buena Vista!"

"The other ships will have to cover for us.  I estimate our down time
at no more than three minutes, but if we don't make the repair, we will
suffer systems failure before half the beam is past."

Kirk didn't waste time arguing.  "All ships," he ordered, "Increase
power again and shift to cover the Enterprise's position."

In the exterior view, Spock could see the other ships moving into new
positions.  He calculated their deflector paths based on their design
parameters, and the moment they overlapped, he shut down the
Enterprise's array and said to Mr.  Scott, "We are covered.  Commence
your repairs."

"Aye, here goes."

Spock noted transporter activity on the ship's status monitor.  Good;
Mr.  Scott was wasting no time.  It was risky during Gamma Night, but
it would probably work over such a short distance.  Radio wouldn't,
though.  4 From outside the ship there would be no progress reports.
Spock directed an outer hull camera down at the deflector and zoomed in
until he could see four spacesuited figures around the central emitter
housing.  They didn't bother with the bolts.  One of them merely phase
red the housing loose and tung it out into space, then all four people
leaped upon the Klystrons and began ripping them loose, replacing them
with new units that continuously beamed into easy reach beside them.

Then the figures backed away, and a second later they vanished in a
sparkle of the transporter beam.

Spock immediately powered the array back up, noting with satisfaction
that the phase instability was much less prominent.  "That seems to
have done it," he said.

"Good," replied Mr.  Scott.  "Now let's get back into place and finish
the job."

"Agreed."  Spock relayed the message to the captain, and within seconds
they were back on the front line.

"Time?"  Kirk asked.

Spock directed the computer to answer.  "Ten minutes twenty-four
seconds to laser terminus."

They were just under halfway into the beam.  Even to Spock, whose time
sense was exquisitely accurate, this ordeal had already felt like
forever.

He checked his monitors again.  "I read a 15.21 percent increase in
power.  However the focus is not Optimal."

"I'm on it," Scotty said.

Suddenly the Enterprise lurched, throwing everyone on the bridge from
their chairs.  Spock grabbed the edge of the console before him and
managed to keep upright.  He helped Uhura back to her chair, then
returned to his station.

"Report!"  Kirk ordered as he got up from the floor.

LThura listened for a moment to her intra ship monitor, then said, "We
took a hit portside from a Kauld disruptor.  It looks like Shucorion
must have missed one."

"Shields down twenty-five percent," Sulu said.

"Compensating:' Spock said, trading precious energy from the deflector
array.  They could spare what Mr.  Scott had just gained.

LJhura said, "Minor damage restricted to decks seven through nine.  No
injuries reported."

"Find that Kauld ship," Kirk ordered.  "Knock him out before he hits us
again."

Shucorion's face vanished off the screen as the tactical display
expanded to fill the entire space.  It was hard to spot the Kauld
against the dark planet below, but the moment they fired again, a
streak of red light pointed straight at them.  Sulu was ready for them;
he swiveled the Enterprise's phasers to the source of the beam and
fired at full power.  Two other ships did the same, and the night lit
up momentarily as the Kauld ship detonated in a bright flash.

"Eight minutes to laser term-tin us the computer said.

Spock checked his monitors again.  "Deflector efficiency has dropped to
ninety-two percent."

"I'll have to recalibrate it, but it'll continue to drop until I'm
finished," Scotty warned.

"Understood.  I'll boost the power input for the duration."

"Shields down thirty percent"' Sulu reported as he did so.

Kirk said, "Thomsen, start routing power from auxiliary sources.  We've
got to keep both our shields and our deflector going on max."

"Yes, sir."

Spock could feel the humans' anxiety as everyone watched the tactical
display for enemy ships.  Without their usual sensors, they were
clearly distressed, worried about sneak attacks.  He wondered if that
was an instinctive response to the unknown, learned when their kind
huddled in caves at night to avoid nocturnal predators, or if, like
him, theirs was an intellectual fear based on a logical assessment of
their danger.

The captain said, "Uhura, tell Shucorion to get back over here where
he'll do the most good."

"Yes, sir."

"Seven minutes to laser terminus"' the computer said.

Spock kept his eyes glued to the internal monitors, watching the power
fluctuate to the deflector array.  "Mr.  Scott, we are still losing
stability."

"Hold onto your britches.  We're about done here."

The signal degradation continued for two more minutes before it
bottomed out at seventy-six percent, then it just as slowly began to
improve.  "bat seems to have done it"' Spock said.  ith streaks of
light.

Suddenly the viewscreen filled w The Kauld were rallying for one final
attack before their master weapon was neutralized completely.  But this
time the remains of the Federation's mobile defenders were hot on their
tails, and Shucotion's fleet swooped in from all sides to join the
battle directly beneath the anti laser shield.

It must have been a spectacular sight from the ground.  Space battles
were usually distant sparks and glints of light for all but the
participants, but this time it raged across the night sky of the whole
planet.  Antimatter explosions actually lit up the ground like day for
seconds at a time, and debris from disintegrating ships rained down in
showers of multicolored meteors.  '6Four minutes to laser terminus,"
the computer re ported.

Vellyngaith's ship suddenly winked into view, plowing through the
defenders as it built up ramming speed straight for the Enterprise. The
Kauld leader had put all his ship's energy into shields and engines,
but at the last moment he couldn't resist firing a disrupter at his
nemesis as it hung there unmoving before him.  In that moment of
vulnerability, Kirk ordered full phasers from every ship in the fleet
concentrated on the battleship, and its shields flared out.  One of
Shucorion's ships fired at it at close range, blasting a huge section
out of its flank, and a moment later the Kauld warship vanished back
into warp drive.

Three minutes to laser terminus."

Vellyngaith's flight broke the resolve of the Kauld attack force, and
the rest of tUs ships fled the battle right behind him.  Shucorion's
ships patrolled back and forth across the dark face of the planet,
reminding Spock of a pack of sehlats strutting their stuff during
mating season.  Or a pack of humans, for that matter.

The power readings continued to fluctuate, but with Mr.  Scott's
assistance they were able to keep the deflector array well within
operating parameters.  The computer counted down the final few minutes,
then the final few seconds.  At last it said, "Laser terminus has
passed," and a cheer erupted around the bridge.  Spock was mortified to
realize that he had nearly joined in, but he stopped the impulse at the
last moment and stoically accepted the backslapping and the hugging
that humans felt obliged to perform when things worked out as
planned.

Chapter Thirty-four

ENGINEERING looked like a cyclone had hit it.  Scotty and his crew had
removed several access panels under the various workstations in his
need to keep the deflector array running.  He left them where they lay
as markers for repairs that would have to be completed.  Bluish smoke
rose in thin columns from the master engineering console as well as
from the environmental controls.  it could all be fixed, and would be
soon, but just now it didn't matter.  They were alive, and they'd
managed to beat the laser.

Cheering filled the room as the reality of their success dawned on
everyone, and Kirk's voice echoed through the ship wide network: "We
made it."

Scotty wiped his brow with the back of his hand and felt the muscles in
his neck truly relax for the first time since he and Dr.  McCoy had
found the

Kauld fleet practicing their war games.  He glanced over at the master
engineering station again.  All the major components it took to keep
the Enterprise intact and operational were up and running, if not
pretty.  Around him, other engineering crew members were starting to
poke around their stations too, reconnecting the obviously
disconnected.  They could take care of themselves for the moment.

The flashing red lights in the corners of the room shut off, indicating
that the captain had taken them off alert status.  Lieutenant Hanson
nearly ran him over as she came around from behind with an armful of
helical tensors.  "Sorry, sir," she said, dropping a tensor from her
cache.

He bent over to retrieve it for her.  "Watch where you're going, lass,
or you'll be spending all o' your time fixing what you crash into."

"And thank you for your help too, sir," she said, a smile tugging at
her lips.

Scotty smiled back.  "Aye.  Good work out there on the EVA.  Spock's
right.  We'd never have made it with the array in the shape it was
in."

"Tensors?"  a voice called out from deeper into the room.

"Gotta go' " Hanson said.

Scotty peered through the thinning smoke and watched as his crew
stepped over debris and pushed aside ruined displays to make room for
replacements.  He proudly listened to them discuss their options,
debate the merits of each, and come to the same conclusions he would
have. They were indeed a fine crew.

His communicator whistled for his attention.  "Scott here."

"How long before the warp drive is up again?"  Kirk asked.  "Captain, I
canna

He looked at the status monitor.  possibly have it fixed before Gamma
Night is over.  Another five or six hours, anyway."  That ought to we
the laddies working on it time enough.

"That'll do.  Keep me posted.  Kirk out."

Scotty returned his communicator to his belt and turned once around,
looking for the job that needed him most, but he realized everything
that needed doing was already being done.  He might actually have a
moipent to breathe before the next crisis came along.  A moment, even,
to relax.

He turned to the wall where the storage lockers held sets of
specialized tools, the rare personal item for the crew members on duty,
or even-in this case-an heirloom.  He cleared a space on the nearest
workbench, then cautiously opened the locker that held the Brandons'
toaster.  It had survived the hubbub of the fight with the Kauld and
the defending of Belle Terre without so much as a scratch.  It had
already survived the trip out here and the blacksmith's shop.  it would
probably outlast the Enterprise herself.  Kaylene Brandon had placed
her faith wisely after all.  If her family was anything like her
toaster, they were a tough lot.

Carefully placing it on the bench, Scotty crabbed a stool and sat down
to admire the toaster's antiquity.

Lieutenant Hanson came up beside him, her arms free of their load. "Are
you okay, sir?"

He angled his head slightly to look at her.  "I'm tine, Lieutenant. I'm
just taking a little time to relax, and I happen to have this
unfinished project that's been bothering me."

She looked at the silvery object, recognition absent from her face. She
fir ally said, "Okay.  Call me if I can help," and disappeared into the
melee.

"Now then:' he said to himself, turning back to the toaster.  "I need a
Phillips screwdriver, and a soldering gun, and..

Chapter Thirty-five

GovERNOR PARDON NET office looked like a blizzard had hit it.  Kirk had
never seen so much paper in one room outside of a library, and never so
much of it lying loose on desktops, chairs, and filing cabinets.  There
was no place to sit for anyone but Pardonnet, but the governor made no
apology for it.

"This is the way I do things," he said when he saw lark's expression.
"I know it would all fit .  into one data pad but if I can't see it
nagging me for attention, I'll never get to it."

Kirk looked at a few sheets.  Inventories, status reports,
schedules-the detritus of a bureaucratic job.

Kirk wondered how big a pile the contents of his data pad would make if
he printed it all out.

That pile would be a bit smaller today than yesterday, at least.  He
could cross saving the world off his list.  And patching, it up, too.
He smiled at the ovemor,

then turned to Shucorion and Lilian, who stood by his side.

"Shucorion has brought all the building supplies he could fit into his
ships," he said.  "Plus the furnishings for new schools, medical
centers, and community halls' " He looked askance at the Blood leader
and said, "Quite a packing job, considering the cargo containers were
form-fit around the hulls of his warships."

"You're complaining?"  Shucorion asked.

"No.  I make it a point not to complain when somebody pulls my bacon
out of the fire.  But I do wonder what made you think you could get
away with it before you knew what the Kauld had planned."

Shucorion shrugged.  "I have my sources.  I didn't know exactly what
they had planned, but I knew they were about to spring it on either you
or us.  Travelling armed seemed a prudent precaution."

"Well, it certainly was"' Kirk admitted.  "And I thank you."

"The colony thanks you as well"' Pardonnet said.

"Helping defeat the Kauld was my pleasure," Shucorion said.  "But the
building supplies were a business deal, and there is now the matter of
payment.  Your olivium mine is temporarily shut down.  How long before
you can resume production?"

Pardonnet narrowed his brows, then began searching among the papers on
his desk.  "I have that report here somewhere.  Just a moment."

Kirk took that as his cue to make a graceful exit.  He turned to Lilian
and said, "Why don't we leave them to their business."

"Certainly," she said.  "Would you care to walk me home?"

"I'd be delighted."

Pardonnet glanced up at them, his eyes full of questions, but he said
nothing- Kirk held the door for Lilian, and they walked out of the
building and into the street.

He was a bit surprised when she reached for his hand, but he accepted
the familiarity.  If she wanted to be seen this way in public, that was
fine with him.

"That was quite a light show in the night sky," she said as they walked
toward her house.

"It was pretty exciting from overhead, tool" Kirk replied.

She nodded.  "I imagine it was."

They walked a couple blocks in silence, just enjoying each other's
company.  They were about to turn Off the main street when Kirk spotted
the familiar figure Of Dr.  McCoy walking toward them from the other
direction.  He was carrying something gray in his anus, and when he
drew closer Kirk could see that it was a cat.

"Hello, Lilian"' McCoy said when he came closer.  "Jim.  Fancy meetin'
you here."

"Likewise," Kirk said.  "Looks like you've found a friend."

"I'm looking for a good home for her," McCoy said.  "Sickbay is no
place for a cat.  She's getting into everything.  And I refuse to let
Scotty keep her in engineering, either.  She'd get herself
electrocuted, first thing."  He held her up so Lilian could see her. 
"So I thought I'd see if you could use a mouser."

Lilian started to shake her head, but then she looked at McCoy again
and stopped in mid motion  "I don't know " she said.  "Maybe.  Why
don't you bring her up to the house and we'll see how she takes to it."
She took his arm in her free hand and started walking again between the
two men.  Why don't you both stay for dinner?  My garden is looking
kind of shabby at the moment, but I'm sure we can rustle up something
worth eating."

McCoy scratched the cat between the ears and said, "I'll never turn
down a home-cooked meal."

"Sounds wonderful," said Kirk.  As they walked on up the street, he
couldn't help thinking how close they had come to losing all this.
Pardonnet and Lilian and the others were building a real community
here, and for the first time since he'd taken this mission he
understood why they had gone to all the trouble to do it.  Life wasn't
all duty and honor and glory; someone had to live the life that people
like him fought to protect, or the whole thing would be meaningless.

He wasn't about to give up the glory, but just this once, for a little
while, he was happy to stop and smell the roses.

Chapter Thirty-six

THE OUTPOST TAVERN thumped and gyrated to the sound of squealing
yeerids in heat@r perhaps it was alien music.  Deloric couldn't tell.
He and Terwolan had finally managed to exchange their pay chits for
local currency, and were now busy trying to learn enough about their
new home to find a niche they could fill while they planned their new
lives, but it was proving more complicated than they had hoped.

Deloric was still a bit stunned to think that he was no longer a
soldier, and equally stunned to think that a woman like Terwolan would
cast her lot with him.  In all the time they had worked together, he
had never guessed the depth of her thoughts, nor their similarity to
his own.  Now he could hardly imagine life without her, no matter where
that life might lead.

He was just about to ask her to dance with him when two Kauld soldiers
entered the bar.

He turned away and whispered to her, "Don't look, but trouble just
walked in."

Neither he nor she were wearing their uniforms anymore.  Those had been
the first things they had gotten rid of Still, they were the only other
blue-skinned bipeds in the bar.  He tried to look nonchalant as the
soldiers stomped through the bar right past him and pulled up chairs at
the empty table behind his back.

A large-eared, peg-toothed trader at the next table over said, "I hear
the Kauld got their butts kicked a couple of days ago in the Beltar
system.  Any truth to that?"

The soldiers looked at one another, then in one fluid motion they rose
up and grabbed the trader.

"Hey!"  he squealed as they carried him to the door.  "I was just
making conversation!"

"Make it outside," one of the soldiers said, and they heaved him out
the door.

"Damn ear-flapper," the other one said as they came back to their table
and sat down again.  "The news must be all over the sector by now."

"It doesn't matter"' said the first.  "It's a setback, nothing more."

"Oh?  Does Vellyngaith have another bright idea up his sleeve?"  The
one who spoke punched his companion on the shoulder.  "Get it?  Bright?
Huh, huh, huh."

The optimistic one ignored him.  "I don't know about Vellyngaith, but I
know Yanorada's got one, and the clock's already ticking.  Those humans
may be laughing now, but they just traded a fast death for a slow one,
that's all."

Deloric looked at Terwolan.  She raised her glass and drained it, then
stood up.  "Time to go," she said softly.

"Right."  He dropped a half-credit on the table and followed her out
into the corridor toward their apartment.

"Those poor sons of bitches she said when they were out of earshot of
the bar.  "Who, the soldiers?"  asked Deloric.

"No, the humans.  They've stepped into the middle of another mess."

"They do seem to have a talent for that," Delofic said.  "Do you think
we should try to warn them?"

She snorted.  "VZhat are we, their guardian angels?  We paid off our
debt to them already.  They're not our problem anymore."

"I suppose not."  He followed her toward their apartment, but his eyes
weren't seeing the space station any more.  He was remembering the view
from the comet, how Belle Terre's sun was just a bright star in the
sky, and how the planet had been a barely visible speck of light beside
it.  Just one planet among millions, circling a nondescript star in an
average sector of the galaxy.  By all rights, a person should be able
to go through his entire life without encountering another of its
inhabitants ever again, but he got the feeling he hadn't heard the last
of these humans.  They might be the newcomers here, but they were by no
means helpless.  No matter what this Yanorada's plan was, Delofic was
glad he was on their good side.