STAR TREK - TOS - 77 - Twilight's End

VIP免费
2024-12-20 0 0 358.76KB 130 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
Star Trek - TOS 077 - Twilight's End
Chapter One
"dammit, jim, they can't keep doing this to us!" Leonard McCoy, chief medical officer for the Federa-tion
Starship Enterprise, slapped his hand on the vacant diagnostic table that separated him from his captain.
The sound echoed in the conspicuously emp-ty sickbay; Nurse Chapel had already fled from the doctor's
wrath, taking the room's single patient with her, ostensibly for physical therapy.
McCoy didn't care. He was getting tired of holding back his frustrations, and now that he'd finally let
himself blow up, it felt good to clear the room as well as the air. He pointed a finger at Kirk and said, "If
we keep missing supply ships, pretty soon I won't have enough equipment to treat a skinned knuckle. My
portable protoplaser is down to its last emitter coil, and my genetic scanner is off-line more often than it's
on. Even my tricorder has a flicker in the display. We
need to take on new supplies, and we need to do it now, not when Starfleet finally gets around to letting
us off the hook."
Captain Kirk held his hands out, palms toward McCoy. "I know, Bones, and I argued hard with Admiral
York to let us make our supply rendezvous first, but he couldn't do it. Rimillia needs our help now.
They've got a major terraforming project that's stalled at the most crucial time. Their chief scientist has
been kidnapped by extremists, and some of the equipment has been sabotaged. They're on the verge of
civil war over it. They need our help now, not next week."
McCoy turned away and faced the blank monitor over the head of the diagnostic table. Its flat, dark
surface reflected the rest of sickbay, with its neat rows of surgical instruments lined up for use and its test
equipment waiting, pilot lights blinking on standby. He could hear the ever-present chorus of beeps and
whirs that the machinery made, too. It gave a false sense of readiness to someone who didn't have to
count on it all to function at the right moment, but McCoy knew the real situation. In a crisis, he could be
up to his neck in alligators in no time. "And just what kind of help can we give them with a poorly
supplied ship?" he demanded.
"We can rescue their scientist. Repair the sabotage. Maybe even negotiate a settlement between the
pro-terraforming and the anti-terraforming factions."
"Don't count on it," McCoy said sourly. He looked back at Kirk. "You're always so eager to charge
straight into every new situation and set things straight, but I'm the guy who has to sew up all the
people who get hurt in the process. And now you're taking us right into the middle of a war. I don't like it
one bit, even if we were fresh out of spacedock, but especially not now."
Kirk sighed. "Bones, we're a little short on a few things; we're not a derelict. And it's not a war-yet.
That's why we need to go there now, to prevent it from becoming one. If we do our job right, we can
prevent hostilities, and there won't be so much as a snuffle for you to treat."
"I'll believe that when I see it," said McCoy. He glared at Jim for a moment, but the captain just glared
right back. Finally McCoy said, "If you're waiting for me to say, 'Oh, I understand, don't worry about
me, I'll make do somehow,' then you're going to have a long wait. You've given me my orders, and I'll
carry them out, but don't push your luck. I've been patient long enough."
Kirk smiled. "I know you've been patient, Bones. That's why I made Admiral York promise us a full
week of R and R just as soon as we're done on Rimillia."
McCoy's spirits improved considerably at the men-tion of R and R, but he wasn't about to let Jim know
it. He crossed his arms over his chest and said, "Hah. I'll believe that when I see it, too."
"You will, don't worry." Kirk nodded to McCoy and stepped toward the door, but he turned just as its
opened and said, "And if you stay patient, the mint juleps will be on me."
"I'll remember that," McCoy said, smiling slightly." But as the door slid shut behind the captain, his smile
slowly faded.
* * *
Kirk sighed long and deep as he walked back to the turbolift. He hated wrangling with Bones over
situa-tions like this. If there'd been any option of meeting their resupply rendezvous, he would have taken
it, and they both knew that, but Bones just wasn't the sort to accept the inevitable without a fight. That
was one of the things Kirk admired about his chief medi-cal officer, but it was also one characteristic he
hated finding himself at odds with.
Actually, it had gone better than he'd expected with McCoy. The old carrot-on-the-stick ploy had
worked once again, and he hadn't had to promise anything he hadn't planned to deliver anyway. And
now that the doctor had had his say, he would do everything he could to keep his department running
smoothly de-spite the hardship. He would even come to Kirk's defense if anyone else complained; that,
too, was his way.
Yes, the meeting with McCoy had gone better than Kirk had expected. But how was he going to break
the news to Scotty?
He considered his options while he rode the turbolift down to engineering. I've got good news and bad
news. Trouble was, there wasn't any good news, at least from Scotty's perspective. He needed new
sup-plies just as badly as McCoy did. There's been a little change in plans sounded better, but Scotty
had been around long enough to know what was coming next. Not that it mattered, of course; Scotty
was every bit as professional as McCoy, and would do whatever was required of him without complaint,
but Kirk wanted to soften the blow if he could. After all, good morale started with the senior officers, and
the happier he
could make Scotty feel about their new mission, the happier the rest of engineering would be.
Maybe he was looking at it from the wrong angle. Sure, the missed rendezvous would be an
inconve-nience, and the job that now faced the Enterprise was mind-boggling when you thought about it,
but there was also the technical challenge to consider. Scotty always loved a challenge.
Yes, that would do it. Focus on the incredible opportunity to participate in an engineering marvel. Get
him interested first. Then drop the bomb.
When the turbolift deposited him outside engineer-ing, he found his chief engineer on his back beneath
the tractor-beam control console, only his black ser-vice boots sticking out from the access panel. The
rest of the staff were busy monitoring the engines and the power-distribution and environmental
subsystems throughout the ship, doing the routine jobs that kept the mechanical heart of the Enterprise
beating.
Kirk cleared his throat. "Mr. Scott."
He heard a thump from within the control console, and a muffled curse. Then Scotty's familiar brogue:
"Aye, Captain. Just a moment." The legs began to wiggle, and soon the entire Montgomery Scott slid into
view. His red tunic was rumpled, and he held a scuffed cylindrical circuit probe in his right hand. "Yes,
sir?" he asked.
"I've got a job for you," Kirk replied, suppressing a grin as he reached out and helped the engineer to his
feet.
Scotty rubbed the top of his head where he'd banged it when he'd been startled. No lump-yet.
"What sort of job?" he asked, hoping it didn't have anything to do with tractor beams. He'd been working
on them all morning, trying to lock down a phase shift in the graviton collimator, and he was having no
luck at it.
"A big one," the captain replied. "But it's right up your alley."
"Is it, now? And what alley might that be?"
"Propulsion systems. Specifically impulse engines."
"Aye," Scotty admitted, relieved at the news. "I do know a wee bit about that."
"More than just a wee bit, Mr. Scott." Kirk smiled, and Scotty felt himself blushing. He was always
un-comfortable when people called attention to his abili-ties. Besides which, he hadn't been born
yesterday; he knew something was up. He'd noticed the course change a few minutes ago, and he'd
heard the engines change pitch when they shifted to warp eight. He'd already known the Enterprise was
off to yet another exotic new spot in the galaxy, probably someplace dangerous as well, and having Kirk
show up in person tell him about it just confirmed that.
"You said 'big,'" he asked. "How big?"
Kirk pursed his lips and glanced at the ceiling, then looked back at Scotty. "Well, pretty big."
"Pretty big?" Scotty echoed.
"Very big, actually." A hint of a grin was struggling to break through the captain's straight face.
"I see. And just how 'very' is it?"
Quite. You might even say enormous. But it's a fascinating project, and most of the work is already
done."
Scotty laughed. "I know where you're leadin' me,
Captain. Why don't we just cut to the chase and be done with it? What have you got us into this time?"
Kirk laughed, too. He leaned back against the edge of a computer systems monitor station and said, "All
right. Have you ever heard of a planet called Rimillia?"
Scotty leaned against the tractor-beam console. "No, sir. I can't say as I have."
"It's a small planet, class L, tidally locked to its primary."
"Class L?" Scotty frowned. Class L planets were considered marginally habitable without artificial
life-support. Not as habitable as the Earthlike class M's, but people could usually live on them, if they
didn't mind a harsh environment. Scotty rubbed his hands on his pants to wipe off the dust and asked,
"How can a tidally locked planet be class L? One face would be hot enough to melt rock, and the other
would be cold enough to freeze oxygen. The entire atmosphere would freeze out on the dark side.
There'd be nothing to breathe."
Kirk nodded. "Normally that's the case, but Rimillia doesn't have a dark side, technically speak-ing. It's
part of a binary star system, and though the secondary star is a red dwarf in a long elliptical orbit, it still
provides enough heat to keep the atmosphere from freezing."
Scotty pictured the situation in his mind. A world with one hemisphere perpetually facing its sun, the way
Earth's moon faced Earth, with a second sun orbiting farther out, say Jupiter's distance, or Saturn's. The
second sun wouldn't provide much heat, but it might be enough to vaporize oxygen and
nitrogen on the dark side. That would give the planet an atmosphere, but it still wouldn't do anything to
mitigate the outrageous extremes of temperature be-tween the day and night sides. There would be only
one environment on the whole world where people could live in the open: along the narrow band of
shadow where day and night met.
"They live on the terminator?" Scotty asked incred-ulously.
"They do." Kirk shrugged as if to say he could hardly believe it, either.
"Why, it'd always be dawn there."
"More like dusk," replied Kirk. "They're dying out. They've overtaxed the ecology in their narrow
bio-sphere, and it's rapidly declining to class K."
Class K worlds were only habitable with some kind of active life-support, like environment suits or
domes over the cities. For a whole planet to switch over to artificial environments-even a planet with as
low a population as Rimillia must have-would be an incredible task. It would take years. Could that be
what they wanted assistance with? But no, the captain had said it had something to do with impulse
engines.
"They're going to evacuate?" Scotty asked, puzzled. "With impulse engines? Besides needin' thousands of
ships, at subwarp speed it'd take 'em generations to get anywhere!"
Kirk crossed his arms over his chest. "No, that's how their ancestors got there in the first place, about
five hundred years ago, in a generation-style colony ship, and they're not willing to do it again. They've
got more ambitious plans this time." Kirk's eyes twinkled the way they did when he was about to tell a
particularly good joke.
"What then?" Scotty asked, his patience growing thin.
"They've decided to increase their living space."
"And how do they plan to do that?"
Kirk shrugged, as if he were discussing an abstract theoretical concept instead of the fate of an entire
planet's population. "They've installed about thirty thousand impulse engines all over the planet's sur-face,
and they're going to spin it back up to speed."
Scotty saw a brief image of a planet with thousands of engines sticking up from its surface like hair on an
unshaven chin; then he burst out laughing. It was too ridiculous for words. "Hah, that's a good one,
Cap-tain. Now tell me, what are they really going to do?"
Kirk looked directly into Scotty's eyes. "They're really going to use impulse engines to spin it up to
speed. Except the scientist in charge of the project has been kidnapped and the control systems have
been sabotaged. They're up against the wall now, and time is running out. That's where you come in.
They need someone to take over the project."
Scotty slowly set his circuit probe down on the tractor-beam console. Suddenly a phase shift in a
graviton collimator didn't seem like so big a deal anymore. These people had gambled the fate of their
entire population on a single plan? A single outra-geous plan? And then they had let someone sabotage
it? Scotty shook his head in disbelief. "Aye, Captain. It sounds like they do need my help, at that."
Chapter Two
science officer spock found the whole situation fascinating. Big engineering projects did not impress him
by their sheer magnitude, but what those projects said about the minds of the people who built them was
often more intriguing than the projects themselves. What kind of people would try to rotate a tidally
locked planet? And what kind of people would try to stop that from happening?
He sat at his science console on the upper level of the Enterprise's bridge, reading through the
comput-er's files on Rimillia. Nominally in charge of the ship while the captain was off the bridge, he paid
little.attention to the monitors or to Chekov or Sulu or Uhura or any of the other bridge personnel at their
duty stations. They needed no supervision for the routine task of directing the ship from point A to point
B. The bleeps and pings of the ship's controls
were no distraction either; in fact, they helped Spock focus. He would know by auditory stimulus if
any-thing required his attention, so until then he could apply himself completely to the task at hand..;
Unfortunately, the computer files held very little data. Rimillia wasn't yet a Federation planet, so the only
information was in the report filed by the survey
ship that had discovered them nearly thirty years earlier. At that time, the planet had been classified as
ale-industrial-age in its development, with limited spaceflight capability. Curiously, in this case the term
"limited" resulted not from an inability to produce warp-driven spacecraft, but rather from a lack of desire
to do so. The Rimillians were descended from space travelers who had made the long crossing from their
homeworld the hard way, through normal space, and now that they had found a place to call home they
- ere not eager to strike out again, even in exploration. Spock knew the danger in saying "the people"
wish this or that. Too often major decisions like the devel-rpment of spacecraft were made by a relatively
small group of individuals who held the actual power. But in this case the government seemed to be a true
republic,
with representatives who answered to their constitu-ents in regular elections. Presumably if they did not
follow the will of the people, they would soon be
thrown out of office. That would seem to indicate that the majority of
the Rimillians were in fact not interested in space-light. Yet when their home became threatened by
ecological collapse they were willing to attempt an engineering project of even greater magnitude to
repair it. On the surface, that seemed to be a contra-ction in temperament, but Spock was sure a good
explanation could be found if he looked hard enough. He looked forward to answering the puzzle.
Unfortu-nately, that solution would have to wait until he arrived at Rimillia and could examine the situation
himself.
The turbolift doors swished open, and Spock looked up to see Captain Kirk enter the bridge. As usual,
his timing was impeccable: only moments after he sat in his command chair, Sulu announced,
"Approaching Rimillia, Captain."
Kirk leaned back in his chair. "Very good, Mr. Sulu. Bring us out of warp. Mr. Chekov, establish a polar
orbit over the terminator. Lieutenant Uhura, put the planet on the main viewer, please."
The main screen at the front of the bridge flickered, then steadied out with the view from the forward
optical telescope. The Enterprise was approaching from out-system, so consequently most of the
hemi-sphere facing them was dark, but a narrow crescent of bright white reflected sunlight from the
primary.
Spock looked to the computer readout for its local name: the Torch. Or simply Torch. Appropriate. It
was a G-0 star, only slightly brighter than Sol, and actually somewhat dimmer than Vulcan's primary, but
for anyone on the planet's sunward face it would indeed seem like a torch aimed directly at them.
The secondary sun, a dim M-3 star called the Spark, was not visible on the viewer. Spock checked its
location on the long-range sensor grid and saw that it was currently on the far side of the Torch. That
meant Rimillia's dark face was now at its coldest. The atmosphere would be slowly condensing there in
great rainstorms of liquid nitrogen and oxygen, pooling in
shallow seas until the Spark came around in its orbit to vaporize it again. Fortunately the Spark's orbit
around the Torch had a period of only sixteen years- far too short to allow more than a fraction of the
planet's atmosphere to rain out.
A ragged cluster of other points on the sensor grid drew Spock's attention. Curious. All six of the
sys-tem's planets were also on the opposite side of the sun, approaching that rare state of conjunction
known as syzygy when they all lined up in a straight procession outward from the primary. In another four
days, they would line up nearly exactly.
Rimillia alone marred the perfection of the syzygy. Instead of joining its planetary brethren in their stately
procession, in a week it would be directly opposite them in its orbit, as far away from them as it could
possibly get. If Spock were an animist, he would say that the other planets were hiding out against the
possibility that Rimillia would blow up when its inhabitants activated their impulse engines to begin its
rotation, but he wasn't an animist, and he under-stood planetary motion perfectly well without resort-ing
to untested hypotheses. Multiple planetary conjunctions were rare, but not impossible. Given the number
of star systems he had visited in his years with Starfleet, he was bound to see one sooner or later.
He bent over the sensor display for a closer look. Fascinating.
When the captain asked for a polar orbit, Chekov cursed himself for a fool. He'd been about to set up a
standard synchronous orbit around the equator, which on this planet would have meant a period of
exactly a year, at a distance of over a hundred million kilometers. Not exactly within transporter range...
The captain was absolutely right; a faster, closer orbit was required here, and as long as they couldn't
keep station with any point on the surface anyway, a polar orbit at least gave them the opportunity to
overfly the narrow strip of habitable land along the terminator. That would keep them in contact with
every populated spot on the planet once per orbit. He quickly calculated the proper course and fed it to
Sulu, then watched the viewer as Sulu flew the massive Starship smoothly into position.
The planet grew in size until it nearly filled the screen, the dark half an inky black semicircle against the
stars, the sunlit half so blindingly bright that all detail was washed out. The fuzzy line separating them was
the only feature that the eye could fix on, but without magnification it showed no sign of habitation. Uhura
made an adjustment and the contrast lessened, revealing cloud patterns in great streaks across both faces
of the planet. Without Coriolis force to bend air currents into curves, the storm systems crossed direct-ly
from high- to low-pressure zones. Most of them clustered across the shadow line, where the steep
energy gradient pumped them up to hurricane force.
"What a hellhole," Chekov muttered. "Compared to this, Siberia is paradise. No wonder they want to
rotate it."
.As Sulu stabilized their orbit with a final course correction, he said, "I still don't understand why they're
going to the trouble. There are plenty of habitable planets in this sector; why don't they just evacuate this
one and start over?"
From behind them, Spock's even voice said, "That would be impractical." Chekov turned to look at him
as he addressed Sulu: "At their current population of one-point-seven-eight billion, it would take the
Enter-prise four million, one hundred and thirty-nine thou-sand, five hundred and thirty-five trips to carry
them all to safety. That is assuming a birth rate of zero during the evacuation. If the Rimillians continue to
procreate, as humanoids are wont to do even in times of crisis, then the evacuation would take
considerably longer."
"Considerably, Mr. Spock?" Captain Kirk asked playfully, but the science officer didn't rise to the bait.
In a stunned voice, Uhura asked, "One-point-seven billion? All squeezed onto that tiny little strip of
land?"
"'Squeezed' would not be the term I would choose," Spock replied. "Even at their admittedly high
population density, there are only six hundred and fifty-nine people per square kilometer. Less than in
some of the nations on your own home planet."
"Oh, well, only six hundred and fifty-nine," Chekov said sarcastically, waving his hands in dismissal. 'That
would almost give you room to swing a cat without hitting anyone."
Spock looked from Uhura to Chekov, a puzzled frown on his face. "What purpose would swinging a cat
achieve, Mr. Chekov?"
Deadpan, Chekov replied, "It's an old Russian custom, started by an ancestor of mine named Anton
Pavlovich. He claimed it would-"
"We're being hailed," Uhura interrupted him.
"On screen," Kirk said, then in a quick aside to
Chekov before Uhura could make the transfer, he said, "I didn't think Anton Pavlovich liked cats, Mr.
Chekov."
"That's why he swung them, sir," Chekov replied softly.
The viewer came to life with the image of a woman. She looked to be in her mid-thirties, and near the
Terran end of the spectrum for humanoid body shape. Her head was oval, her forehead smooth and high,
her cheekbones and jawline prominent but not alarmingly so. Her eyes were her most unusual feature;
they were larger than normal by about half, and their pupils extended out into violet irises in six-sided
starbursts. Her ears were set high on her head, and they rose to graceful points, but unlike Spock's they
were rimmed with a fine line of silvery fur. Her hair was also silver, and hung down to her shoulders in
thick curls.
She wore a dark blue bodysuit, sleeveless on one side and plunging well below her bare arm. From what
Chekov could see, she looked pretty Terran all the way down to her navel, also exposed, just above the
heavy wooden desk behind which she sat.
"I am Nashira Joray, world coordinator of Rimillia," she said. Her voice was low, but deeply inflected,
with an accent that seemed to place most of the emphasis in her words on the vowels. It reminded
Chekov a little of Scandinavian.
Kirk smiled, plainly appreciating what he saw. "James Kirk, captain of the Federation Starship
En-terprise. "
"We are honored by your presence, Captain. We have prepared a complete briefing for you. Would you
care to beam down to our meeting hall to receive it?"
"Of course, Coordinator."
All business, eh? Chekov had known women like that. Cold as ice at first, but once the ice thawed, look
out.
A flicker of motion drew his attention to his naviga-tion console, where the short-range scanner had
picked up an object leaving the sunlit face of the planet under heavy acceleration. Straight for the
Enterprise. The intense brightness of the missile left no doubt as to its identity: someone had launched a
photon torpedo.
Instinct, or academy training, instantly took over. "Incoming!" Chekov shouted, and he jabbed at the
switch that activated the defensive shields.
"Red alert!" Kirk said. "Lock phasers on to that tor-"
But there was no time to shoot it down. There had barely been time enough to raise the shields. The
energy field was still powering up when the torpedo hit, but it had stabilized enough to absorb the brunt
of the explosion. The ship rocked as its internal gravity generators struggled to compensate for the
sudden blow. Chekov hung on to his navigation console until it steadied out, then immediately checked
for more danger. No one had launched a second shot, but the intense matter-antimatter detonation had
knocked the Enterprise off course. Struggling to keep his hands steady under the sudden adrenaline rush,
Chekov plotted a return to their previous orbit and fed the coordinates to Sulu.
Ignoring the world coordinator for the moment, Kirk turned to Spock and said, "Sensors on constant
sweep for more launches. Report?" he asked Uhura.
"Minor damage to decks nine and ten," she replied, cocking her head and listening to her ear receiver.
"No injuries yet reported."
"Good." To the entire bridge crew he said, "Contin-ue red alert. Do not return fire-yet." He turned back
to Coordinator Joray. "Quite a welcome you've pre-pared for us. Do you have an explanation?"
Her starburst eyes had narrowed to tiny slits. "The Denialists," she said, almost snarling the word. "The
same outlaws who sabotaged our project. It has to be them."
Kirk punched the intercom button on his command chair. "Transporter room, get a lock on anyone you
can find at the launch location, and prepare to beam them directly to security."
The ensign on duty said, "They're heavily shielded, sir. Sensors won't penetrate... wait a minute. Shields
are down."
"So is the facility," said Spock. "There has been an explosion at the launch site. From the lack of organic
debris, I surmise it was an automated station, set to attack when we identified ourselves, and to
self-destruct when scanned."
Kirk sighed. "Leaving no trace, and no evidence. Clever. Very well, stand down to yellow alert.
Coordi-nator, my chief engineer and medical officer and I will beam down to your meeting hall. You will
understand if we bring our own security team?"
If she was insulted by his bluntness, she didn't show it. She merely said, "Of course, Captain. You will be
welcomed properly when you arrive."
"I look forward to it. Kirk out."
The screen switched back to the orbital view. Kirk stood up and said, "Mr. Spock, you have the conn."
With no further instructions, he entered the turbolift, leaving the crew to deal with the situation however
they saw fit.
Chekov swallowed to wet his dry mouth, and took a couple of deep breaths. "I'm not sure I care for
Rimillian hospitality," he muttered to Sulu.
"Get used to it," the helmsman replied. "By the looks of things, we might be here awhile."
Chapter Three
the rimillian government buildings were an exercise in opulence. They were built of quarried stone that
had been polished until its swirling gray-and-amber surfaces gleamed like mirrors. The ceilings were at
least a dozen meters high, and long windows ran the entire height. Prisms in the windows cast sunlight
into all corners of the rooms, highlighting countless sculp-tures, paintings, and cultural displays along the
walls. They could set it up so intricately, Kirk realized, only because the sun never moved. But that would
change once they spun the planet up to speed. It was already changing, in fact, as people removed the
valuable artifacts for storage while the rotation was under way. That was no doubt a good plan; there
would probably be earthquakes from the tidal stress and maybe from the engines themselves, and there
could be periods of intense heat and cold before the speed built up enough to even that out.
There was still plenty to gawk at. Even the floors?" were works of art. Multicolored mosaic tiles-all soft
hues, so they wouldn't jar the eye-depicted scenes from life on Rimillia. Forests of strangely twisted trees,
people farming beneath banks of mirrors that reflected the low-angled sunlight down on their crops,
buildings under construction, and so on. Kirk took them in quickly while he and Scotty and McCoy
followed Coordinator Joray from the anteroom where they had met into the actual meeting hall where
they would be filled in on the current situation.
Government officials as well as packing people moved back and forth through the great halls. Few of
them even paused to look at the star travelers in their midst. Most were dressed in much simpler attire
than Joray: loose blouses, simple pants, the occasional skirt. Most of the building's occupants were
female, Kirk noted. What few men he saw were as a rule hurrying faster than their female counterparts,
and carrying more paper. Minor functionaries, by the looks of things.
The side corridors were less crowded, but no less ornate. The place looked like a museum. Kirk
ex-pected buildings like this one to smell old and musty, but there was a different aroma to the air, a
chemical odor that caught in his throat and made him feel constantly short of breath. He wondered if it
was some kind of cleaning solvent the custodians had used in preparation for their guests, or if the smell
came from the general atmosphere. He hoped it was the former; it would take a while to get used to this
if the
smell was worldwide. He would have to find a good moment to ask McCoy for an analysis, but it
wouldn't do to simply ask "Bones, what's that smell?" in front of the world coordinator.
His and McCoy's and Scotty's footsteps, and those of the two security officers who followed behind
them, made no echoes even among all the stone. The floors felt as solid as the planet itself, and thick
tapestries on the walls absorbed what little sound their boots made. Joray made no noise as she walked,
either, save when she spoke to point out a particularly spectacular or historically significant work of art.
"This mural," she said, stopping in a circular chamber at least ten meters across, whose walls were
covered all the way around with scenes of a class-M planet in space, "depicts the destruction of our
home planet, Duma, over five hundred years ago."
Kirk and Scotty and McCoy peered at the mural, startled. "Destroyed?" Scotty asked. "How?"
Joray laughed, and waved her right hand toward the walls. "Let us see if our artists were worth their
commission. You tell me."
It seemed to Kirk like a waste of valuable time, but he reminded himself that he was the guest here, and
Joray obviously wanted to impress him with her palace. He and Scotty and McCoy stepped closer to the
walls, starting near the archway they had entered by. The security officers stayed put, back-to-back in
the center of the chamber.
The mural was done in colored glass, painstakingly fused to the wall in shards no larger than a fingernail,
摘要：

StarTrek-TOS077-Twilight'sEndChapterOne"dammit,jim,theycan'tkeepdoingthistous!"LeonardMcCoy,chiefmedicalofficerfortheFedera-tionStarshipEnterprise,slappedhishandonthevacantdiagnostictablethatseparatedhimfromhiscaptain.Thesoundechoedintheconspicuouslyemp-tysickbay;NurseChapelhadalreadyfledfromthedoct...

展开>> 收起<<
STAR TREK - TOS - 77 - Twilight's End.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！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：130 页 大小：358.76KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-20

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 130
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注