STAR TREK - TOS - 23 - Ishmael

VIP免费

2024-12-20 1 0 453.2KB 130 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

“Where are you—from?”

Sarah asked. ...

Spock shook his head wearily. “The name of the planet would mean nothing to you. Your astronomers

have not even discovered the star yet.”

“I see.” She looked down at her folded hands where they rested on the handle of the door. Then she

looked up at him again. “I knew at the dance, you see.”

Spock’s eyebrow lifted, startled. Sarah smiled a little.

She reached out and took his hand in her long slim fingers ... then she released it and her fingers brushed

lightly against his cheek. “That’s fever-hot,” she said clinically. “A hundred and three, a hundred and four.

A—one of us—would have been raving. You were clearly having the time of your life. ... When you took

my hand for the grand right and left, I noticed the scars on your hand had turned a sort of apple-green.”

“In the future,” he found himself saying tiredly, “I must remember to avoid dancing. ...”

POCKET BOOKS

New York London Toronto Sydney Tokyo Singapore

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

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

living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Anoriginal Publication of POCKET BOOKS

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

York, NY 10020

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 the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN: 0-671-73587-X

First Pocket Books printing May 1985

14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6

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

Printed in the U.S.A.

For M. Shannon, Nedra, and Tom

Contents

Chapter 1.6

Chapter 2.13

Chapter 3.20

Chapter 4.24

Chapter 5.29

Chapter 6.33

Chapter 7.40

Chapter 8.43

Chapter 9.48

Chapter 10.51

Chapter 11.54

Chapter 12.58

Chapter 13.64

Chapter 14.72

Chapter 15.76

Chapter 16.81

Chapter 17.88

Chapter 18.91

Chapter 19.96

About the e-Book.101

Chapter 1

THE SOFT, INQUIRING NOTEof the door signalthreaded apologetically into the dimness. Captain

James T. Kirk, lying on his neat bunk looking at the ceiling of his quarters, almost didn’t answer it, except

that as Captain of the U.S.S.Enterprise he felt obligated to do so, even when officially off duty and

presumably asleep.

He had not slept in two nights now. It was, he guessed, close to the end of the third. He had dozed,

restlessly, skimming the surface of dreams that repeated the same scenes over and over in a nightmare

treadmill of doubts and grief. And the dreams always ended the same way: with that implacable riddle,

and final silence stretching away into the darkness of space.

He hoped, for the thousandth time, that Spock was dead.

He should be,he told himself.Twenty-four hours is a long time.

But the other half of his mind whispered treacherously,He’s tough. And the Klingons are very skillful

about things like that. Twenty-four hours isn’t all that long.

Kirk closed his eyes, as if that could blot out some hellish inner vision, then opened them again and

looked up at the ceiling in the dark. He had stared at it for most of this watch. But if the neutral, shadowy

pearl of that surface held any comfort, or any answer, it had not so far manifested them.

The door signal bleeped again. Kirk sighed. It was 0400 hours, the depths of theEnterprise’s artificial

night. But then, most of the crew would know that Kirk wasn’t sleeping, and why. He touched the switch

beside the bed.

Bones McCoy stood silhouetted in the light of the corridor. “When you didn’t answer you got my hopes

up,” he remarked accusingly, stepping inside. The door slid shut behind him. “Jim, let me ...”

Kirk rolled to a sitting position on the rumpled bunk. “If you’re going to offer me a sedative again I’ll

have you clapped in irons,” he said tiredly. “I don’t need a sedative, I just—need to think.”

McCoy’s sharp blue gaze flickered over him, once, like a tricorder taking a reading, and a corner of his

mouth twisted down. “If that’s what thinking’s done for you I’d recommend the sedative, but it’s up to

you.” The small glow of the entry way light brushed an edge of blue from his uniform jersey as he passed

under it; then he came to stand beside Kirk’s bunk, looking down at his friend. He said quietly, “There

was nothing you could have done, Jim.”

“I know.” Kirk sighed, and ran a tired hand through his hair. “It’s just that I keep thinking that there

should have been.”

On the other side of the room a small green light winked on. Automatically Kirk got to his feet and

crossed to the desk. He touched a switch. “Kirk here.”

“Captain?” The night communications officer didn’t seem surprised to find him awake at 0400 hours

either. “We’ve got Starbase Twelve on visual, sir. ETA 1200.”

“Pipe in visual, Lieutenant.”

The small screen above the desk widened into life.

Kirk stood in silence for a long time, gazing at the aphotic depths of interstellar space. Remote and

untwinkling in the frozen emptiness of that terrible vacuum, stars stared back at him.

Against those endless light-years of nothing, Starbase Twelve hung like a magic Christmas-tree

ornament, the gnawed rock ball of the original planetoid sewn over with a silver mesh of the lights of the

surface works. An attendant swarm of docked spacecraft surrounded the base like the flashing halo of

electrons around an atomic nucleus. There was something warm about it, welcoming—the fires of home.

It had been on Starbase Twelve, thought Kirk, that he had seen Spock for the last time.

Like a lot of last times, he hadn’t expected it to be the last, had not even remotely dreamed of the

possibility. Starbase Twelve was a completely routine stop, to deliver a couple of highly ranked

astrophysicists and a load of scientific equipment to record the effects of the passage of a wandering

white dwarf star through the so-called Tau Eridani Cloud—that vast, amorphous region of ion storms and

unexplained gravitational anomalies which was Starbase Twelve’sraison d’être. That evening in the

Wonder Bar there had been absolutely no thought in his mind that Spock might not be on the bridge of

theEnterprise when they left.

Gazing at the image of the base in the blackness ofthe tiny screen, he felt like a man who has lost a hand,

but continues to reach for things with the stump.

The memory of the Wonder Bar was vividly clear in his mind, cozy and dim and overpriced, with the

tinkle of ragtime music in the background and the sweet taste of Aldebaran Depth Charges on his lips.

He’d been there with Maria Kellogg, an old friend from his Academy days. McCoy had offered to squire

Lieutenant Uhura. Spock had arrived alone, as he was generally alone; and, as usual, he did not drink,

saying that if he wished to consume alcohol he could manufacture it far more cheaply in the laboratories

of theEnterprise, and have a guarantee of quality as well.

“You could probably metabolize it more efficiently if you took it intravenously, too,” commented

McCoy, and Spock raised a prim eyebrow.

“So I could,” he agreed in his most correct voice. “But it has always escaped me why anyone would

wish to metabolize alcohol in the first place, much less to do so in the company of strangers who have,

perhaps, overmetabolized.”

At the bar on the other side of the grottolike room, a Gwirinthan astro-gravitational mathematician slid

from its barstool to the floor with a squashy thump.

“And yet here you are,” Uhura teased him.

“Indeed,” Spock replied. “Where else would I find such an unparalleled opportunity to observe the

vagaries of human behavior?”

Uhura laughed, her dark eyes sparkling warmly. Spock leaned back a little in his chair, silhouetted

against the red lights of the main room; a tall, thin, catlike shape, watching the human race in all its

irrational glory with well-concealed fascination.

Kirk had seen him do this, on hundreds of shore leaves, and on countless evenings in a corner of the

main rec room on theEnterprise while Uhura played her harp or Ensign Reilley sang Irish ballads: Spock

the observer, the outsider. A Vulcan forced to deal with humans, a cold logician stranded amid the

chattering welter of random emotion.

But Spock had saved Kirk’s life and soul and sanity more times than Kirk cared to think about; put

himself in danger against hope and logic in situations where Kirk knew his own survival had been

despaired of. And all out of an emotion that Spock would have denied to the death that he felt.

A couple of Hokas waddled by, elaborately robed for one of their endless games. Over by the bar

voices were raised as a scruffy-looking spice smuggler got involved in an argument over a girl with a pair

of brown-uniformed pilots from some down-at-the-heels migrant fleet. McCoy, mellowed with good

bourbon, raised his glass and commented, “You’ve got to admit, Spock, you’ll never find anything like

this in all your logic.”

“A fact which I find most comforting,” the Vulcan replied. “There are times, Doctor, when I feel as

though I had been shanghaied by a shipful of Hokas—except that in the case of Hokas, once one has

understood the rules of their current system of make-believe, one is fairly certain of what they will do

next.”

Kirk concealed his snort of laughter at McCoy’s outraged expression behind another Aldebaran Depth

Charge. The comparison with that fanciful teddy-bear race was hardly a flattering one. The girl by the

bar, he noticed, had watched calmly as the altercation between the pilots and smuggler had degenerated

almost to the point of fisticuffs, then finished her drink and departed on the arm of a tall, curly-haired man

in the eccentric garb typical of space-tramps—the combatants had continued their quarrel undeterred.

Thinking back on that evening, Kirk could not remember anyone mentioning the Klingon ore transport

at all.

He’d made a mental note of it when he’d seen it listed on the base manifest, as a possible source of

crew conflicts. It hadn’t seriously concerned him, though. Ore transports, though gigantic, are far too

thinly manned to cause much trouble even had its whole crew come ashore at once. The crew of this one

had kept to their ship.

Maybe, like Sherlock Holmes’s dog, that was what had tipped off Spock. Something had.

Kirk had been preparing to meet Maria Kellogg the next morning when Spock had contacted him.

“Power readouts on the ore transport are running suspiciously high,” that deep, rather harsh voice had

said over the communicator. “There would also seem to be about twice the usual number of crewmen

listed. I should like to have a look at the inside of that vessel.”

“You have a hunch something’s up?” Kirk threw an uneasy glance at the chronometer, settled in its wall

niche slightly to the left of the door. The visiting officers’ quarters, like most of the older part of Starbase

Twelve, had been remodeled from the far more ancient tunnelings that dated back to the days when the

long-vanished Karsid Empire had used this planetoid as a base. Thus the rooms all had the slightly

awkward feel of space created for nonhuman proportions, the wall niches all about half a meter lower or

higher than they should have been. The chronometer itself said 1000 hours. Spock, Kirk thought, must

have been up early. More likely he had sat up late the night before, scanning the readouts for the other

ships on the base, curious about which governments were sending what kind of scientific crews to watch

the latest fluctuations of the Tau Eridani Cloud and looking for the names of scientists whom he knew.

Instead he had found—what?

“Captain,” said Spock severely, “Vulcans do not have ‘hunches.’ There are enough subliminal clues to

add up to a high order of probability that something is, as you say, ‘up.’ The base manifest lists the ship

simply as an ore transport. The Klingons might be using it for scientific observation of the Tau Eridani

Cloud, but why would they do so when they already have two legitimate research teams working on the

base?”

Kirk’s mind snapped suddenly to something else, with an almost audible mentalclick. “And the Klingon

cruiserRapache is due within eight hours,” he said. “ETA 1800, departure two hours later—no shore

leaves.”

“And the ore transport is scheduled to depart at 1800 hours,” said Spock’s voice thoughtfully.

“Fascinating.”

Personally, Kirk felt less fascinated than he did suspicious and apprehensive. But then, Spock was

capable of being sincerely intrigued by processes simultaneously with being sincerely appalled by possible

results. Kirk’s own mind was already scouting the ground, ticking off possibilities. Starbase Twelve was

in Free Space; not even the base commander had the authority to inspect a properly registered ship.

Moreover, on what grounds could he base the request for such a search? That his instincts, and Spock’s

instincts, told him that something was afoot? And even if a search was made, who else on the base had

Spock’s triple grounding in abstract scientific theory, Klingon computer systems and the workings of the

Klingon military mind?

All this went through his mind in a matter of seconds. Then he said, “Can you get on board?”

“Affirmative, Captain. I have made arrangements to go aboard as part of the base technical crew. Our

access will theoretically be limited to a very small area of the ship, but it will be possible for me to tap into

the computer database.”

After a long moment Kirk said quietly, “Mr. Spock—you know what that’s called.”

“As I will be uniformed as a starbase technician, I believe ‘espionage’ is the correct term, Captain.”

Kirk was silent, rapidly weighing alternatives in his mind and discarding them just as quickly. Kirk had

had enough run-ins with alien weapons technology to know that the possibilities were hideously infinite,

and the populated heart of the Federation was not so far away as to be out of danger if the Klingons had

achieved some kind of major breakthrough. Yet the price of capture was unthinkable, not only to the

lone spy himself, but to whoever had sent him. The Klingons had gone to a deal of trouble to keep secret

whatever it was they had on the transport—how much more would they go to?

We can’t know that,Kirk thought ironically,until we know what the thing is.

“Mr. Spock ...” He hesitated. The knowledge that the risks involved in investigating the transport

weighed small against the potential risks of not investigating made it no easier. If anything went wrong, he

thought—if Spock didn’t manage to get off the transport, if he was caught in an area of the ship where he

had no right to be, if the Klingons even suspected the motives behind that Vulcan technician’s

nosiness—there would be absolutely nothing that Kirk could do to bail him out. “Be careful.”

“Espionage is not something that one does carelessly, Captain,” Spock replied, after due consideration.

“I will rendezvous with you at 1400 hours. Spock out.”

Kirk realized he was still staring half-hypnotized at the small darkness of his cabin viewscreen and the

glittering ball of lights that hung suspended in its center. He rubbed his eyes tiredly, and turned to see

McCoy still behind him, one shoulder propped against the partition that divided the desk area from the

rest of his quarters. The doctor’s cynical features looked very worn in the reflected glow from the screen.

Kirk said quietly, “To this day I don’t know what I could have done differently.”

“Nothing,” said McCoy.

“Nothing,” Kirk repeated bitterly, “If I had done nothing we’d be exactly where we are now with

regards to that transport. Only Spock would still be with us.” He turned to the galley-pipeline mechanism

in a corner of the office cubicle, and prodded the coffee button. It didn’t always work, and occasionally

what was delivered more closely resembled something that came out of reactor-coolant coils than a

coffeepot, but at the moment Kirk was in no mood to seek out the more palatable alternatives available

in the rec room or the galley. “You want some coffee, Bones? It’s nearly 0500 now and staying up looks

simpler than getting up.”

The corner of McCoy’s mouth turned down again as the pipeline made an indescribable noise and

produced a cup of faintly steaming black fluid. “You can put a relief on standby until we reach the base,

you know,” he reminded him.

“To do what? Hold the con while I stay here and look at the ceiling some more?” Kirk turned away,

leaving the coffee untasted to prowl across the narrow confines of his quarters. “I’ll be fine, Bones,” he

added, more quietly. “It’s just that—I’ll be fine.”

McCoy watched him keenly from where he still stood beside the desk. Then he said, “What about

Spock’s transmissions?”

Kirk paused in his pacing, his back to the doctor. McCoy’s clinical eye observed the straight line of the

spine under the gold jersey, the tightening of the shoulder muscles and the way they relaxed suddenly in a

long sigh as the captain turned back toward him. Kirk’s face, usually a little boyish, looked haggard.

“You know, Bones, if it weren’t for those transmissions sometimes I’d think that transport never existed

at all?”

McCoy carried the coffee over to him. “Here,” he said. “Drink this if you’re determined to pollute your

bloodstream rather than get the sleep you need. I’ll be back in a few hours with some vitamin B for your

breakfast.”

Kirk expelled his breath in a faint sound that could have been a laugh, and sipped at the murky brew in

the cup. “It should take that long for me to figure out what I’m going to report to the base commander,”

he said. Then, as the doctor turned to leave, he added, “Thank you, Bones.”

McCoy paused in the doorway, studying him for a moment without speaking. All that he could have said

had been said, by his own presence in the captain’s quarters at a time when, by his own advice, he, too,

should have been sleeping. So he turned and left, and Kirk prowled restlessly back to sit on the edge of

the bunk, his mind worrying again at the problem of Spock’s transmissions from the Klingon ore

transport.

It was there that the half a grain of phylozine that McCoy had slipped into his coffee while his back was

turned took hold, and he slid almost without knowing it back into a heavy sleep tortured by too-familiar

dreams.

Spock’s first transmission had come as the last of theEnterprise crew members were beaming aboard.

Kirk had returned early to the visiting officers’ quarters on the base, and had paced the oddly shaped

rooms like a tiger caged by time. Fourteen hundred hours had come and gone—fifteen hundred. Driven

by restlessness, he had had the image of the ore transport piped into his quarters’ viewscreen: an

unwieldy black giant of a ship, a floating mountain. In the distance behind it Kirk could glimpse the deadly

silver angularity of the Klingon battle cruiserRapache, which had arrived at the base inexplicably early

and was now in orbit, hanging like a hawk upon the winds of night.

Still Spock had not come.

At 1540 Kirk had tapped back into Base Control, to learn that the ore transport had just lumbered out

of orbit, and was headed in the direction of the Tau Eridani Cloud.

At 1730 Kirk began canceling shore leaves, calling all personnel unobtrusively back to theEnterprise.

After a final, cautious communicator scan of the base he returned to the ship himself and took his post on

the bridge, preparing the ship to leave orbit, watching the gleaming shape of theRapache still riding in its

orbit, mentally weighing possibilities against inevitable consequences.

TheRapache was a heavily armed fighting ship, capable of mauling theEnterprise badly in a pitched

battle. He had put himself and the Federation in the wrong by sending Spock aboard the transport to

begin with. The Klingons didn’t know that, of course, but if they found it out ... what was their secret

worth to them?

He did not want to think about how they might find it out.

“Mr. Sulu,” he said quietly. “Lay in a course for Alpha Eridani III.”

“Aye, sir.” The helmsman’s voice was impassive, but Kirk felt the flicker of those dark eyes. The tension

that crackled under the bridge crew’s usual calm efficiency was almost strong enough to pick up on a

voltmeter. Instinct—or, as Spock would have insisted, subliminal clues—told them that there was

something behind this sudden change of course other than new orders from the Fleet.

Kirk studied the wide-range readouts on the small screen on the arm of his chair. A course for Alpha

Eridani III would parallel the transport’s along the fringes of the disruptive field of the cloud, but was a

perfectly legitimate bearing for a Federation ship. The Klingons might have their suspicions, but could

hardly prove that theEnterprise had some reason to follow the transport. If the transport changed

course, Kirk knew, and headed deeper into the cloud, he would have the choice of abandoning the

pursuit or playing tag with some unknown weapon through that mazelike welter of shifting navigation

points with theRapache very likely on his back—neither of which course of action would help Spock

any.

With a sudden harsh crack of static theEnterprise communicator came to life. Even through the

distortion, Spock’s voice was recognizable. The message was short.

“White dwarf, Khlaru, Tillman’s Factor, Guardian.” A flash of static, and silence. The whole had taken

less than two seconds of transmit time.

“What—” Kirk began, and Uhura said, “It’s a generalized subspace broadcast from the direction ofthe

Tau Eridani Cloud, Captain.” The dark wings of her brows pulled together. “Was that—”

“That was Mr. Spock, Lieutenant. He’s aboard that Klingon ore transport. He had only a hand

communicator. ...”

“He could have wired it through their communications system via a centralized computer,” said the

communications officer thoughtfully. “Only—transports don’t carry that type of sophisticated equipment.”

“No,” said Kirk grimly, “they don’t. Did you get a tape?”

She touched a button, rose from her station to hand him a tiny spool.

“Yeoman Donnelly—take this down to Shock’s pet whiz kids in Science. Get them to play it

backwards, forwards, sideways if they have to: find out what he means and get it back to me. Lieutenant

Uhura—was that message traceable to theEnterprise?”

“No, sir. It was a wide-band frequency. It could have been for anyone on the base.”

“Could they have traced Spock’s position on the transport from it?”

She was silent a moment, thinking, her long hands resting lightly on the complex patterns of her console.

Then she said, “I don’t think so, Captain. He could have wired through the computer at any point on the

ship. But now they know that he’s aboard, and they’ll be watching. If he makes another transmission

they’ll be able to fix his position.”

That had been the beginning of the nightmare. As Starbase Twelve dwindled on the rear viewscreens

Kirk could see theRapache peel out of orbit behind them, dogging them on the farthest limits of their

scanners but lying between them and any Federation outpost. Kirk kept to the bridge through three

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

“Whereareyou—from?”Sarahasked.... Spockshookhisheadwearily.“Thenameoftheplanetwouldmeannothingtoyou.Yourastronomershavenotevendiscoveredthestaryet.”“Isee.”Shelookeddownatherfoldedhandswheretheyrestedonthehandleofthedoor.Thenshelookedupathimagain.“Iknewatthedance,yousee.”Spock’seyebrowlifted,startled...

展开>> 收起<<

STAR TREK - TOS - 23 - Ishmael.pdf

共130页,预览26页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

STAR TREK - TOS - 23 - Ishmael

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: