THE SMALL SHUTTLECRAFTColumbus sliced through the thin air high over the east coast of Centaurus's northern continent, New America.
"Our altitude is tventy thousand meters and holding, Mr. Spock," Chekov reported. "Braking sequence ended; speed is now seven hundred thirty kilometers per hour. Ve are subsonic."
Spock looked out the trisected forward ports. It was beautiful up here in this clear, clean sky. Columbus was flying well above the cloud cover, and so their little craft was surrounded by pleasant shadings of purest blue. Spock had not "cut sky" in quite a while; he found himself admitting—not without some embarrassment—that he liked it.
The first officer consulted his status board and saw that Galileo was making good speed westward. At this altitude the planet's damaged defense system would dismiss both shuttlecraft as friendly air traffic. Spock did not see the logic of that—there was no logic to it, because an invader was, in theory, as fully capable of mounting an air-to-ground attack as a space-to-ground assault—but the datum helped Spock build a mental picture of what the internal state of the defense system's computers must be. It bothered him that, even after hours of concentrated thought, he had still not found a sure, exploitable flaw in the system's logic. That was why he'd felt it necessary to come down to the surface … just as Captain Kirk had found it necessary to go to Mclverton for a face-to-face meeting with the leaders of the Centaurian government. He will deal with the broken human element, as I will deal with the mechanical, thought Spock. He cannot rely on this planet's new leaders to do right; neither can I rely on this planet's defense mechanism to work correctly. We must each confront our task directly. The spaceport explosion has left us both with massive damage to repair; we must repair it—but perhaps both of us will face insurmountable problems in our attempts to do so. And I have one other task …
"Mr. Spock?" Chekov said, interrupting the first officer's thoughts. "Ve vill be over the site of New Athens Spaceport in three minutes. Any instructions, sir?"
Spock nodded. "Yes, Ensign. Take us down below the clouds. I desire to make a visual inspection." Three minutes at this speed puts us at a distance of thirty-six point five kilometers from ground zero, Spock calculated. We ought to be able to see the fringes of the blast area by now; our course has us approaching from the southwest, bound for the site of the Defense Center.
Chekov pushed his joystick forward, and Columbus began a quick descent. She pierced the top of the cloud cover at eight thousand meters and plunged on through. The window revealed nothing but the gentle white interior of the cloud … and then, very suddenly, the cloud turned a deathly gray.
"Significant radiation readings, Mr. Spock," Chekov said.
"I see them, Ensign." Spock swiveled his chair to face aft and addressed the three others aboard. There was a gentle hiss of static under his words. "We are now entering the radiation-affected area of the blast. You will notice the greater tachyonic interference on our communicator frequency, but as we will be within very close range of one another at all times, it should not be a significant problem. With radiation in mind, I caution you once again to maintain the integrity of your pressure suits. The readings are rather higher than I might have expected, but they are still well within suit safety limits. It seems likely that weather patterns—high winds from the north, perhaps—have prevented an equal distribution of fallout in this general area. This gives some hope that the region to the north of us might be more free of contamination."
"Mr. Spock?" came a voice. It was Rawlings, one of the computer techs Spock had selected for the repair job; the thin technician appeared engulfed by his bulky pressure suit. "Is there any chance the Defense Center area will be clean enough to operate in without the suits?"
"I think not," Spock answered. "The site of the complex is quite near the spaceport and not sufficiently north of it to matter."
Next time I vill bring vith me a giant radiation-proof Baggie and live in it, after poking two holes in it for my eyes, thought Chekov. It could not be less comfortable, and at least I could have vith me a sandvich. And I could put some ice on my eye.
The cloud began to break into a wispy pattern of gray and deeper gray. Chekov spoke up. "Mr. Spock? Ve are beginning to see the ground. Range to spaceport is now twenty-three point four kilometers northeast of our present position."
"Thank you, Ensign." Spock gazed intently out the window as Rawlings, Nurse Iziharry and the other computer tech, a man named Hudson, watched the same scene on their video screens. Columbus continued downward.
And then, suddenly, they were in the open air.
"My God," Chekov breathed for all of them.
Columbus was two thousand meters above the ground. There was no green anywhere at all; there was no movement. There was nothing but black and gray, the charcoal colors of death. Everything below had been burned, blasted, and burned again; heavy black smoke still rose here and there. There had been buildings and houses and roads and cars and people below, once; all were now gone, cremated and covered. The area below Columbus was well outside the eight-kilometer circle of total destruction from the spaceport explosion, but secondary heat and blast effects had been more than enough to wipe out everything that had been here. If there had, somehow, been survivors, they'd fled long before now—and Spock, for one, could not imagine how anyone might have escaped. Perhaps by flitter, the aerial craft most often used on this planet, he considered. But how would one fly such a flimsy thing in the maelstrom that must have existed here? I believe they must have been forced to walk out … through a sea of radiation and death. No, there can be no one left.
Spock's face suddenly contorted with overwhelming emotional pain. He recovered almost immediately and realized his helmet had hidden his weakness from the others; no one had seen. Yet even in his personal shame he knew that there was no discipline, Vulcan or otherwise, which would allow a being to view this hell without cost.
"Tventy kilometers from the spaceport," Chekov said in a dazed voice. "No one down there, no one at all."
Spock opened his eyes—the pause had helped—and consulted his map of the area. The Enterprise's map storage banks had been lost in the ship's mysterious computer breakdown. What Spock had in hand now was a paper map of the area; he'd borrowed it from Lieutenant Siderakis, who was from New Athens. The relief helmsman had been reluctant to give it up, and Spock had understood that; the map had become a precious souvenir of a lost home town. But Siderakis had quickly come to see for himself the necessity of Spock's having the map for this mission, and had surrendered to the logic of the situation without argument. Spock had appreciated that, and planned to do his best to return the map undamaged.
The Vulcan took a quick look at the shuttle's coordinate plotter and mentally translated the figures onto the face of the map. Spock put a finger in the lower right quadrant of the map and showed it to Chekov. "Here we are, Ensign."
The young Russian took a quick look. "This used to be a protected park area?" he asked. He looked down at the flattened, charred landscape.
"Yes. It was called Athena Preserve. I believe Dr. McCoy maintained a residence here at one time."
"It's not there now," Chekov pointed out unnecessarily. Nothing was there.
Spock consulted the map again. "We appear to be two kilometers from the southernmost boundary of the spaceport." He looked at his board. "Radiation readings high, but still within safety limits. Outside temperature twenty-three standard degrees, and there are brisk winds from the north; I cannot determine a true wind velocity while we are in flight. Mr. Chekov, I suggest we cruise slowly over the spaceport to see what we might see."
"Yes, sir. But I don't think there'll be much to see; ve're now passing ower the lip of a crater."
And that was all there was below them for the next three kilometers—the glassy floor of a hole in the world, burned and chewed out in one unimaginable, terrible instant. The crater looked to be several hundred meters deep at its lowest point, but it was hard to tell; water had collected in it already. One day this might be a small, strangely circular—and dangerously radioactive—inland sea.
Columbus flew on slowly.
They passed the northeastern rim of the crater.
Spock was more watchful now; the Defense Center was nearby. Captain Kirk had been told that repair crews had been sent to fix the defense computers, but Spock saw no compelling reason to accept this. There was no direct evidence that the crews had ever arrived: The computers were still not fixed. It was too bad. Spock would have liked to rely on the crews' landed flitters as a clear landmark for the location of the entrance to the defense installation.
Spock did not want his party to spend very much time on the surface, even in pressure suits. The Vulcan wanted to find the entrance to the underground complex quickly; being below the surface would afford a great deal of protection against radiation, and that would gain them more time to solve the problem of the Defense Center.
But there were no landmarks left … not a lake, not a bridge, not a road. Dead reckoning would have to do—that, and a little guesswork. Spock looked again at the coordinates on his board and translated them to his map. The Defense Center site was not more than three hundred meters from their present position. "Mr. Chekov, please hover. We're very near the site, and I must get our bearings."
"Aye, aye, sir."
As Columbus stood by, Spock thought. There was nothing but rubble below and no evidence of any repair flitters—but wasn't there a little less rubble over that way, about two hundred and fifty meters to port? And wouldn't something like a defense site be relatively "unbuilt," with most of its facilities underground? Or was the clearing simply an accidental cancellation of blast patterns in one very small area?
There was only one way to find out. "There, Mr. Chekov," Spock said, pointing. "Overfly that area very slowly, please." Chekov nodded and complied; Columbus dropped closer to the ground, now moving about a meter per second, at a height no more than two meters above the scattered debris. Rawlings, Hudson and Iziharry left their seats and moved forward to stand behind Chekov and Spock. Connie Iziharry laid a trembling, pressure-gloved hand on Chekov's left shoulder; he never felt it. The five of them, together, watched the devastation flow slowly around them as they floated above it.
A few minutes later Hudson cried out, pointing. "There, at ten o'clock!"
Then they all saw a twisted, blackened sign welcoming visitors to Planetary Defense Command Headquarters. There was the remnant of a heavily protected entrance, and Chekov landed Columbus precisely in front of it.
The massive doors which should have shut the Defense Center off from the outside world upon detection of the spaceport explosion hadn't worked. They were still open, both sides of them scorched with terrible heat. The Columbus party walked on through, with Spock in the lead. The Vulcan's DayBrite lantern picked out heaps of rubble here and there—and, every so often, a corpse in military garb. The center had remained open to heat and radiation, and there had been no warning at all. The dead military personnel were the first casualties the five from the Enterprise had seen on Centaurus.
"There can't be anyone alive down here, can there?" Connie Iziharry asked.
"Perhaps lower down," Spock said doubtfully. "There may have been other protected areas … but, as we saw, the primary doors were open."
"Is it possible someone opened them after the explosion?" Rawlings wondered.
"I think not," Spock said. "Both sides of the doors were affected by great heat, and we saw rubble from the outside down the entryway. It could only have been thrown that far by the blast."
"Oh. Of course."
Hudson spoke up. "If that's so, then I wonder what condition we'll find the equipment here in. I thought we might be able to use some of the stuff they had here already."
Spock considered it. "Some might well be usable. Such electronics as we will find here are sometimes delicate, but I assume they were produced according to military specifications. I would also assume the central command center was protected somehow, although I cannot be sure those protective measures were effective."
"I vonder how many personnel vere stationed here," Chekov said.
"I don't know precisely, Ensign," Spock answered. "However, I once visited a similar defense installation on Big Top. That one had some forty officers and five hundred enlisted personnel."
Iziharry waved her medical tricorder. "There's really too much tachyonic interference to get a decent reading here, Mr. Spock. But I can tell you there's no one alive within fifty meters of this spot, except us."
"I do not expect survivors, Nurse Iziharry."
There was silence after that. The five of them trudged on and down into the Defense Center, Spock's lonely light leading the way.