STAR TREK - TOS - Prime Directive

POCKETBOOKS

New YorkLondonToronto Sydney TokyoSingapore

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the

authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons,

living or dead, is coincidental.

The plot and background details ofPrime Directive are solely the authors’ interpretation of the universe

of STAR TREK® and vary in some respects from the universe as created by Gene Roddenberry.

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. 1230 Avenue of theAmericas ,New

York,NY10020

STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of Paramount Pictures.

This book is published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc., under exclusive license

from Paramount Pictures.

For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of theAmericas ,New York,NY10020

ISBN: 0-671-70772-8

First Pocket Books hardcover printing September 1990

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

Printed in theU.S.A.

FOR PEGGY

For our second home inNew York City

and for being there when inspiration struck.

L.L. & P.

Contents

HISTORIAN’S NOTE.5

PROLOGUE.8

Part One.10

ONE.11

TWO..21

THREE.30

FOUR..33

FIVE.42

SIX..46

SEVEN..55

Part Two.66

ONE.67

TWO..77

THREE.87

FOUR..99

FIVE.104

SIX..115

SEVEN..119

EIGHT.124

NINE.132

TEN..139

Part Three.141

ONE.142

TWO..149

THREE.159

FOUR..166

FIVE.174

SIX..179

SEVEN..188

EIGHT.196

NINE.203

TEN..218

ELEVEN..225

TWELVE.233

THIRTEEN..237

Part Four244

ONE.245

TWO..250

EPILOGUE.252

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.253

About the e-Book.254

HISTORIAN’S NOTE

The events of this book take place in the final year of theEnterprise’s original five-year mission.

space is infinite

without ending

all within it

just beginning

VULCAN CHILD’S KOAN

traditional

PROLOGUE

LE REVE D’ETOILES

Extract fromA Historical Analysis of the Five-Year Missions Admiral Glynis Kestell Tabor,

Stellar Institute Press, Paris, Earth

According to the records as they existed at that time, of the original twelve Constitution-class starships

that had embarked on Starfleet’s visionary program of five-year missions, five had already been lost in

the service of the United Federation of Planets: the USSConstellation as the last casualty of an ancient

war, theIntrepid in the Gamma 7A system, theExcalibur in war-game maneuvers, theDefiant in the

Tholian Annex, and theEnterprise during the incident at Talin IV.

No one denied that these losses had been heavy, in lives and material, but among the dozens of planning

commissions that set the Federation’s long-term goals and policies, there was no serious doubt that the

five-year missions would continue with new ships and new crews. Because, despite the high cost of such

epic exploration and expansion, the returns these activities brought to the Federation were always

greater.

In a period of only four standard years, the records showed that thousands of strange new worlds had

been explored, hundreds of new civilizations had been discovered, and the[2]Federation’s boundaries

had grown to encompass a volume of space nearly five times that which had been charted as of stardate

00.1. Given these results, ways could always be found to commission new starships, and as for the new

crews those ships would require, they were the secret of the Federation’s unprecedented strength.

It was the same secret shared by all great political movements in the histories of a thousand worlds. The

Federation was founded not by force, nor by expediency, nor in response to an outside threat. It was

founded on a dream—a dream of greater goals and greater good, of common purpose and cooperation,

but beyond all else, it was a dream to know more, a dream to explore to the farthest limits and then go

beyond.

They called itle rêve d’étoiles—the dream of stars.

Like all profound ideas, this dream of stars was irresistible, and the Federation’s planners were aware of

its attraction. They recognized its presence in the more than twelve thousand applications Starfleet

received for each Academy opening. They felt its pull within themselves.

But dreams alone were not enough to sustain the Federation’s goals, and fortunately the planners also

understood what else was needed and how to obtain it. They understood that throughout the worlds of

the Federation there were beings in whom the dream burned brightest. Invariably, all of these individuals

had known instantly where their destinies lay from the moment they had first looked up to the lights of the

night sky. In every language in all the worlds, the words were always the same: the dream of stars. Not

traveling to them, not stopping at them, but moving among them, ever outward, always farther, no end to

space or to their quest. Or to the dream.

AtStarfleetAcademy , the planners were careful to set in place the challenges and the system that would

guide the best of those called by the dream to the only position that they could hold, the position to which

each had been born.

Starship captain.

There could be no greater embodiment of the dream, and it[3]was upon this foundation that the

Federation was ultimately based and its future assured.

The system was not perfect. At the time of the Talin IV tragedy, the planners knew that for every Robert

April or Christopher Pike the Academy produced, there would be a Ron Tracey or a James T. Kirk. But

that was to be expected when dealing with exceptional beings whose very nature put them at odds with

most definitions of what was deemed predictable or normal behavior. On the whole, the planners felt the

system worked, and reason and logic—much to the Vulcans’ chagrin—had nothing to do with it.

So the Federation’s planners set their course for the future, building new ships, setting new missions,

knowing that there would be no end to those who would volunteer to take part, because the dream of

stars, once acknowledged, could never be denied.

But at that time, in the aftermath of Talin IV, what the planners did not yet know was that once that

dream had been experienced, neither could it ever be willingly surrendered.

In accordance with the Federation’s goals for the gathering of knowledge, it was a lesson the planners

were eventually due to learn, and their system had already created the man who would teach it to them.

Once and for all.

Part One

AFTERMATH

ONE

Humans,Glissathought suddenly, as she caught the first unmistakable scent of their approach.You can’t

live with them and you can’t live without them, but by Kera and Phinda, you can certainly smell

them.

The short Tellarite shift boss looked away from the viewscreen blueprint she studied, then narrowed her

deepset, solid black eyes to squint into the distance. All around her, she felt the thrumming of the thin air

that passed for an atmosphere within the hollowed-out S-type asteroid. It was the pulse of the machines

and fellow workers remaking its interior into a living world, a home for thousands. ForGlissa,there was

excitement in this job of world making, and fulfillment. Which is why the unexpected scent of humans was

so unsettling. With them around, she feared the excitement would soon give way to drudgery.

The Tellarite twitched her broad, porcine nose as she tasted the circulating breeze, seeking more details

of the human presence she had detected. In the soft, seasonless mists of her home world, natural

selection had not been inspired to evolve keen eyesight. As an adult of her species,Glissahad long since

lost the ability to see past two meters with any clarity. But she[8]could hear with an acuity that surpassed

most Vulcans, and could decipher scents and airborne pheromones at a speed and rate of accuracy to

challenge all but the most sensitive tricorder.

It was those other fine senses that now confirmed for her what she had feared—the telltale odor of the

dreadfully omnivorous humans came to her from what could only be her second-shift crew of

rockriggers. Even Glissa’s near-useless eyes could make out the brilliant yellow streak of the safety cable

that linked the blurry figures. The cable traced a sinuous route around the wide yellow warning bands that

marked the overlaps of the artificial gravity fields on the asteroid’s inner surface. Spinning the rock to

produce centripetal pseudo-gravity would make working inside the asteroid much easier, but until the

final bracing supports were in place, the engineers didn’t want to subject the shell to the additional strain.

So, in the interim, the asteroid’s outer surface was studded with portable artificial-gravity generators,

creating both amplified and null-gravity zones within the rock. As if that crazy-quilt arrangement didn’t

produce enough strain on its own.

Glissasighed and the sound she made in her barrel chest was deep and guttural—like the prelude to a

particularly invigorating string of invective. But there was no such joy behind her sigh. She hadn’t realized

that the first shift was already over, let alone that it was time for the second to begin. And the

lake-support pylons for the rock’s eventual basin of freshwater supply were still not in place. They hadn’t

even appeared on the massive cargo-transporter platform waiting empty at the edge of the work site. At

the rate her division was falling behind schedule,Glissacalculated she was going to have to endure at least

another tenday of overtime before she had the slightest chance of taking a few shifts off to enjoy a good

wallow in the communal baths on the rec station. And from the smell of things, it was definitely going to

be another tenday of working with humans.

Of course,Glissahad nothing against humans personally, but not being from one of Miracht’s

ambassadorial tribes, she found it extremely unsettling to work with them. Who wouldn’t[9]have difficulty

working with beings who could never seem to tell the obvious differences between time-honored

constructive insults and improper personal attacks on their parentage, and whose lack of a sense of

humor was second only to the Vulcans? Still, it took all kinds to make the worlds go round and, to be

fair, she knew of few Tellarites who had the appetite to administer the monstrous bureaucracies that kept

the Federation functioning.

She sighed again and rippled the sensitive underpad nodes of her hoof against the viewscreen’s control

panel—one of dozens of similar viewscreens that were mounted on light poles ringing the work site. After

erasing the blueprint from the two-meter-by-one-meter display, she sniffed the air more slowly to

determine which particular humans she had been cursed with this time.

The twelve approaching rockriggers were still too far away forGlissato recognize any features other than

their individual yellow safety harnesses and helmets, but she could identify most of them by their scents.

Seven, thank the Moons, were Tellarites themselves—client workers from the Quaker commune that had

hired Interworld Construction to reform this rock into a Lagrange colony. At least half the workforce on

this project were client workers providing the commune with substantial labor savings.

But of the other five workers approaching,Glissascented, all were human, and that was unfortunate

because rockrigging and humans were never a happy combination.

The task of asteroid reformation was one of the few remaining hazardous occupations within the

Federation that legally could not be done more efficiently or less expensively by drone machines. If the

Council ever decided to relax the Federation’s prohibitions on slavery to allow true synthetic

consciousnesses to control robots, then perhaps the industry itself would be transformed. But until that

unlikely day, rockrigging would remain the exclusive province of two basic types of laborers: dedicated

client workers who welcomed the chance to literally carve out a world with their own bare hooves, and

the hardcases[10]who signed on with Interworld because they had exhausted all other options.

As far asGlissawas concerned, the hardcase humans who worked for Interworld—some fugitive, all

desperate—might just as well be Klingons for all the honor and diligence they exhibited. But the making

of worlds was honorable work for a Tellarite, and no one had said it would ever be easy. So humans,

with their unique and unfathomable mix of Vulcan logic and Andorian passion, were officially tolerated by

Interworld, even if it meant thatGlissaand the other shift bosses did have to watch their language.

AsGlissaturned back to the viewscreen to call up current work assignments and detailed plans for the

second shift, the shift-change alarm sounded from speakers in the towering lightpoles that encircled the

five-hundred-meter-wide work site. She looked up to squint at the wall of the rock four kilometers over

her head, and could just make out the smeared constellations of the lightpoles surrounding the work sites

on the airless half of the rock’s interior as they flickered to signal shift change for those workers in

environmental suits who could not use sound alarms.

Puzzled,Glissachecked her chronometer and saw that the change signals were on time. But that meant

the second shift crew was also arriving on time, and in all the yearsGlissahad spent with Interworld, one

of the few things she had learned to count on was that hardcase humans were never on time. It was

almost a religion with them.

For a moment she was concerned at the break in tradition and order—few things were worse to a

Tellarite than an unexplained mystery. She quickly retasted the air, but there was no denying the scent of

humans in the approaching workers. She sniffed again, deeply, questioningly ... and then the answer

came.

Glissaraised her hoof to the unfocused form of the human who led the team and waved. “Sam?” she

growled. “Sam Jameson?”

The lead figure raised his much too long and scrawny arm to[11]return the wave andGlissafelt a sudden

thrill of hope. If Sam Jameson had been promoted to work as her second-shift team leader then there

was an excellent chance that Glissa’s division might make up for lost time. He had only been with the

company for four tendays but had already proven himself to be a most remarkable being, human or

otherwise.

“I thought I smelled the foul stink of your furless human meat!” the Tellarite blared deafeningly as Sam

finally came within range of her vision.

“It’s a miracle you can smell anything through the stench of that slime-encrustedskrak pelt you call fur!”

Sam shouted back.

Glissa’s huge nostrils flared with pleasure. Here, at last, was the exception to the rule: a cultured human

who truly understood the subtle nuances of Civil Conversation. She could almost feel the hot mud of the

rec station oozing up around her as she anticipated the rewards of meeting her schedule.

The Tellarite held out her hoof and Sam Jameson grasped it without hesitation, returning the proper

ripple of greeting against Glissa’s underpad nodes as best as any human could, considering how the

creatures were crippled by the ungainly and limited manipulatory organs they called fingers. IfGlissa

actually stopped to think about it, it was a wonder any human could pick up a tool let alone invent one.

They might as well have arms that ended with seaweed fronds.

As the second-shift crew gathered behind their team leader and began disengaging the safety cable from

their harnesses,Glissathought for a moment to come up with an appropriate statement of Civil words to

convey her satisfaction that she would once again be working with Sam. She looked up at the human,

nervously smoothed the fine golden fur of her beard, and hoped that her pronunciation would be correct.

“Damn it, Sam, why the hall are they punishing me by making you work my shift?”

Glissacould tell from the quick smile that crossed Sam’s face that she had got something wrong. Odd

that Sam’s face was so easily read, though. The long, soft brown hair and thick beard[12]he wore

certainly helped, making Sam look less like a dormant tree slug than most barefaced humans did, and

much more like an intelligent being. Too bad about the puny down-turned nose though, and those human

eyes, beady little brown dots ringed by white like those of a week-old Tellarite corpse ... they could

makeGlissashudder if she stared at them too long.

But Sam looked away to the iron wall beneath his feet and leaned forward, dropping his voice to a

whisper low enough that only a Tellarite could hear him.

“Hell,Glissa,”Sam said gently. “You meant to say ‘hell,’ not ‘hall.’ ”

Glissanodded thoughtfully, appreciative that Sam had kept this part of their conversation private. “Which

one is the underworld and which is the corridor?”

“Hell is the underworld. Humans don’t get too excited about corridors. At least, not in Civil insults.”

Glissadecided she would have to start making some notes if she were to keep up with Sam. “But the

‘damn it’ ... ?”

“Perfect,” Sam said, still whispering. “Proper place in the sentence, good intonation, very impressive. ...”

But then he stepped back in midsentence, looked up from the ground, and raised his voice again for all to

hear. “For a beerswilling, gutbellied warthog, that is.”

Glissa’s cheeks ballooned out into tiny pink spheres as she snorted her delight. She wondered if Sam

liked mud wallows. Perhaps he might like to be invited to join her in one. For the moment, though, there

was work to do, and clever repartee and Civil Conversation must be put aside. But at least with Sam

Jameson taking part, she felt sure the excitement of her job would remain. There would be time enough

for friendship later.

After the shift briefing had been completed—in record time thanks to the way Sam was able to

reinterpret the shift’s goals for the other, more typical humans on the crew—the incoming chime of the

cargo transporter finally sounded. It was deeper than the sound that came from most systems, since to

save credits this project used only low-frequency models—less power hungry but not certified for

biological transport. As[13]Glissawatched the first load of twenty-meter-long, black fiber support pylons

materialize, she felt certain that her division’s schedule would finally come back on line within a few shifts.

Sam Jameson didn’t disappoint her.

Cajoling the Tellarite client workers with appropriate Civil insults and adopting a more conciliatory tone

for the humans, Sam had the crew latch antigravs to the pylons and clear the pad in record time, load

after load.Glissawas still amazed at how easily the rockriggers took his orders. Perhaps his secret was

that he used a subtly different approach with each individual, acknowledging that each was worthy of

individual respect. Perhaps it was the way he moved among them, never shirking his turn at heavy labor

the way some other shift leaders did. However he accomplished it,Glissawas impressed, and saddened,

too. For whatever Sam Jameson had been before he came to Interworld, she was certain of one thing: he

had not been a rockrigger.

By the time the main meal break came, a full shift’s work had already been accomplished and, under

Sam’s direction, the crew actually seemed eager for more. For onceGlissawas able to sit down to hertak

and bloodrinds without feeling panic over the swiftness of time. She wished that she might share her meal

break with Sam—she had thought of something exceptionally vile to call him and was looking forward to

an equally inventive response—but she saw that he, as always, took his meal alone.

The other humans on the crew sat together, talking among themselves, occasionally glancing over at Sam

where he sat against a large boulder. On the other hoof, the Tellarite client workers stood around and

stared into the distance. Through one of the hundreds of visual sensors which fed images to the

viewscreens in deference to the limits of Tellarite vision,Glissaobserved them sampling the air with

twitching noses.

Then she saw what they were waiting for. Two Tellarite pups—barely out of the litter pen—waddled

along a safety path, guiding a small tractor wagon stacked with food trays. In actual fact, the meter-long

tractor wagon guided the toddlers through the maze of gravity warning bands and the viewscreen[14]

showed that both were securely attached to the wagon by their harnesses.

STAR TREK - TOS - Prime Directive

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: