Captain's Blood

16

PROCESSING SEGMENT 3, STARDATE 57486.9

“Give me your cane,” Kirk said.

McCoy stared at him. “So you can leave me here in the corridor?”

“I will if you don’t give me your cane.” Kirk held out his hand, and McCoy slapped the curved handle into his grip. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Now what?”

Kirk stared at the blank wall of the shadowed corridor, the fourth such passage they had encountered since leaving the infirmary and the body of the Reman doctor. All the corridors had been linked to each other by empty rooms, most of them small and dark like the antechamber of Virron’s brightly lit meeting room. The last chamber that he and McCoy passed through, however, had been some type of storage area, and they had helped themselves to a couple of Reman dark-leather cloaks. Now their civilian clothes were less evident and their alien features were hidden within hoods.

“Do these corridors make sense to you?” Kirk asked.

“Nothing on this planet does,” McCoy answered.

“But the corridors, Bones. There should be a pattern to their layout.”

“They all look alike,” McCoy said. He tugged back his hood to look up and down the corridor. “All of them. The same curve. No signs. One useless light every ten meters. Always one door at one end and a second door at the other. It’s…it’s…”

“Go ahead, say it.”

McCoy sighed. “It’s illogical.”

“Exactly. And it can’t be. This is a mining operation. These corridors have to handle thousands of people moving back and forth. Which means there’s something here we’re not seeing.”

“In this light, I guarantee there’s plenty we’re not seeing.”

Kirk waved off McCoy’s complaints. “So let’s try this,” he said. He swung the green-metal cane over his head and smashed it against the corridor wall as hard as he could.

Kirk’s entire arm vibrated with the force of the strike.

Startled, McCoy jumped, looked up and down the corridor again as if hordes of Reman security guards were going to charge them any second. “What’re you doing?!”

Kirk regarded the cane with surprise. Its rigidity was unusual. He ran his hand over the wall, felt the indentation where the cane had struck. “Prospecting,” he said.

He moved a meter along the wall, swung again. This time, now that he knew what to look for, he could see the faint shadow of the new indentation.

Kirk kept moving along the wall, McCoy shuffling beside him.

“How long before you think someone’s going to come and investigate the racket you’re making?”

Kirk hefted the cane in his hand, determined to ignore the tingling in his elbow. “Listen to how quiet this corridor is. It has to be soundproofed. Probably with antinoise. No one’s going to hear this.” He struck again, looked at the wall. “Now we’re getting someplace,” he said.

“Mind telling me where?”

“Look at the wall, Bones. See where I hit it?”

McCoy peered up in the general area of the strike, shook his head. “No.”

Kirk ran his hand over the unmarked wall, smiled as he felt the indentation and saw the tips of his fingers appear to melt into the wall’s surface. “Holographic screen.”

McCoy actually smiled. “You’re kidding.”

Kirk reached under his cloak and into his jacket for an ultrasonic scalpel. “Are you amazed because there’s a holographic screen, or because I’m right?”

McCoy held out his own scalpel, thumbed it on. “I’ll reserve judgment for now.” He began to run his hand along the wall beneath the area Kirk searched.

Then Kirk felt what he knew had to be there—the vertical indentation of a doorway. “Doctor, if you please…”

McCoy found and traced the indentation, then with superb skill, slipped his ultrasonic scalpel along it.

Kirk marveled at the sight of the scalpel appearing to move through a solid wall. There was a familiar metallic pop, and a puff of smoke suddenly bulged from the smooth wall. A moment later, the wall shimmered and two sliding door panels were clearly revealed.

“Well, I’ll be.” McCoy was positively grinning now.

Kirk handed him back his cane. “And to think you doubted me.” Kirk began to push, and the door panels slid open, more easily than the ones connecting each corridor to its linking rooms.

On the other side of the concealed door was another narrow passageway, lined along one side with pipes of various sizes but identical gray-green color.

For a moment, Kirk wondered if they had only escaped to another frustrating loop of corridors. But then he heard something new. Noise.

“You hear that?” Kirk asked.

McCoy listened intently, pointed to the left. “Machinery? Coming from that direction.”

“Very good,” Kirk said, starting forward, anxious to move on.

“And that’s because…?” McCoy asked, awkwardly keeping pace with his cane.

“Remans live in darkness, Bones. They rely on sound. Their ears are sensitive, so the corridors they use are soundproofed. But this passageway isn’t. So chances are we’re in an area restricted to Romulan Assessors.”

McCoy understood what Kirk had concluded. He began to shuffle forward faster. “So if we’re headed toward machinery which only Assessors have access to, there might be a control room.”

“A control room with communications…maybe even a transporter.”

“On a slave planet?” McCoy asked. “You honestly think they’d allow a transporter down here?”

“There has to be one,” Kirk said with conviction. “Someone used a transporter to save my boy.”

McCoy fell silent and concentrated on his walking, asking no more questions.

After another two hundred meters, it wouldn’t have mattered if he had. The groans and shrieks of heavy machinery made the passageway so noisy conversation was impossible. And the din was increasing the farther they walked on.

After four hundred meters, McCoy was holding his cane under his arm so he could limp on with both hands pressed tightly over his ears. Kirk shielded his as well.

After six hundred meters, the passageway ended.

But what lay beyond seemed endless.

Ahead of them was a large viewport looking into an enormous black-rock crater.

By Kirk’s first estimation, the crater was at least two kilometers across, with sides perhaps five hundred meters high. Above its rim, there was a tenuous glow that held a scattering of pale stars. Perpetual dusk, Kirk thought. The boundary between perpetual day and perpetual night. The crater was located on the permanent terminator of Remus.

But the crater’s location was less important to Kirk than what was in it. No more than fifty meters below the viewport, on the crater’s smoothly excavated rock floor, Kirk saw spacecraft. At least five different classes, from enormous robotic ore haulers constructed from spiderweb lattices of open scaffolding, to sleek, eight-passenger atmospheric shuttles. Some of the craft were illuminated with running lights; others were dark. Some were connected to umbilicals and attended by workers in environmental suits, and others were isolated with no one near.

“A spaceport,” McCoy exclaimed.

“More like a cargo station,” Kirk amended. But terminology didn’t matter. He was a starship captain. He knew without doubt that he could tame any of the spacecraft on the crater floor. And once he had a spacecraft to command, he could do anything.

“We have to get down there,” Kirk said.

“Here’s a better plan,” McCoy suggested. “We have to get down there without being seen.”

Kirk held out his hand. “Give me your cane,” he said once more. It was time to go hunting for pressure suits.

It was too easy, and Kirk knew it. He didn’t even need McCoy to say it, but McCoy said it anyway.

“They have to know we’re here, Jim. It’s a setup, and I don’t need logic to tell me that.”

Kirk double-checked the power connections on the Romulan environmental suit he wore, then looked at the rack of helmets on the wall. The suit itself, along with its life-support pod, was bright yellow, scuffed here and there, stained with streaks of black and brown dust. The helmets were the same color, with visors that were little more than narrow slits instead of the full-face visors Kirk was used to. Again, there was nothing in the way of insignia or even safety and maintenance labels on any part of the equipment, except for the front of the helmets. Where a full visor would normally be, each helmet carried in green the symbol of the Romulan Star Empire—the raptor in flight grasping two worlds in its claws.

“So, what, you’re ignoring me now?” McCoy asked.

“No,” Kirk said as he took a helmet from the shelf, eyed the pressure ring to see if it was a match for his suit. “I agree with you. Except for the workers out in the crater, we haven’t seen anyone since we left the infirmary. That’s impossible.”

McCoy stood up in his own suit, needing only a helmet and gloves. “So what are they up to?”

Kirk had thought about nothing else since he and McCoy had stepped into the bright equipment room and found forty-five pressure suits hanging on the wall, much too conveniently. There wasn’t one empty suit stall.

“I can think of two reasons,” Kirk said.

“Enlighten me.”

“This is some kind of Romulan game. They’re toying with us. Either the suits are faulty, or they’re going to beam us back to the infirmary or a prison cell as soon as we step into the airlock.” Kirk selected another helmet from the shelf, handed it to McCoy.

“Or…?”

“They want us to go, Bones.”

McCoy snapped his helmet into place, turned it to seal it, and when he spoke, it sounded as if he were shouting up from a well. “Why would they want that?”

Kirk found it harder to voice the words than to think them. “Because it means I’m abandoning Joseph.”

Kirk pulled on his helmet sideways, felt it click into place, then rotated it to snap the seal. Through the high narrow visor—which was even more difficult to see through than he’d anticipated—he saw McCoy standing directly in front of him. The doctor leaned forward so their helmets touched and they could speak without shouting. “You’re not abandoning him,” McCoy said, his voice muffled but louder than before. “Your boy knows you’d never do that.”

Kirk simply nodded in reply, tried to smile at his friend and hoped his visor let enough of his expression of gratitude show through. But the truth was for all that Joseph was precocious in some ways, at heart he was still a child. And though Kirk had never let a day go by in his son’s short life without telling him how much he was loved by his father and his mother, that young innocence and trust was threatened.

Kirk tried not to dwell on what Joseph’s rescuers…captors…might be telling him now. How his father had abandoned him—proof that he had never been loved. How they were the only ones whom Joseph could rely on, because, after all, they had saved him where his father had failed. Kirk shrank from imagining the insidious whisperers laying siege to Joseph’s impressionable mind, ultimately convincing him he was their savior, their Shinzon, the answer to the Remans’ prayers.

Kirk had experienced the siren call of rank and privilege, had succumbed to it in his youth, knew better in his maturity. But what defenses were there for a child, with no experience in the ways of the world?

He feared for his son. Even as he twisted on his suit’s gloves and prepared to leave this world and Joseph, Kirk condemned himself for what he might be condemning Joseph to.

McCoy held up his gloved hands and Kirk suddenly heard a static crackle in his helmet. “Hey, Jim…has your helmet display switched on?”

Kirk blinked as his helmet filled with light and he suddenly saw the reason for the awkwardly constructed visor. It wasn’t intended for sight. Instead, built into the lower four-fifths of his helmet was a virtual screen, one that allowed him to see his immediate surroundings as clearly as if he wore no helmet at all.

At the bottom of the virtual image floated a series of symbols, which Kirk vaguely recognized as Romulan status indicators. As his eyes focused on them one by one, each smoothly expanded in size, and smaller figures appeared. The smaller figures were definitely Romulan numbers, and these Kirk could read. He just didn’t know to which suit functions they applied.

“Can you interpret the status lights?” Kirk asked.

“No,” McCoy answered. “But since they’re all red, and one of the Romulan danger colors is a vivid green, I’m going to say that all my systems are functioning properly. How about you?”

Kirk ran his eyes along the symbols, almost feeling dizzy as they expanded and contracted. “Nothing that’s vivid green—or a skull and crossbones.” Then the virtual screen seemed to flash. “Did you just get an image flicker?” Kirk asked.

“Jim, look!”

Kirk turned to see McCoy pointing to something on the wall above the rack of helmets. Colored light panels were flashing—amber, purple, amber. “I see it. Can you hear anything?”

“I don’t know how to switch on the external audio. Might be a time signal.”

“Or a warning,” Kirk said. “Maybe they think we’ve gone far enough.”

“Jim! Behind you!”

Kirk turned as quickly as he could in the cumbersome suit, in time to see the door he and McCoy had entered through slide open again.

A crowd of Romulans was entering, all dressed in simple jumpsuits. Work uniforms! Kirk thought. He looked back at the flashing lights, suddenly realized what they meant. “Bones, that’s a shift change! We must have come in here on their rest cycle. That’s why no one was around.”

Kirk looked back at the Romulans. They had to be Assessors. He recognized at least three of them from the gathering in Virron’s chambers. Another one waved at Kirk and McCoy, said something to the Romulan beside him, as if making a joke. Let’s hope they’re laughing at the guys who went to work ahead of schedule.

“Bones,” Kirk said, and though it made no sense under the circumstances, he found he was whispering. “Let’s get to the airlock as quickly as we can. And radio silence after this. We can’t let them hear us.”

McCoy didn’t reply, but he did give Kirk a small wave of acknowledgment. The airlock’s massive door was at the far end of the room, and McCoy determinedly hobbled for it. Kirk followed, quickly catching up, wishing McCoy could move faster.

Then he heard another burst of static in his helmet. A voice spoke in Romulan, then another. Kirk slowed, turned clumsily, looked back. And saw ten Romulans half-dressed in their suits, some already wearing helmets. More Romulans entering.

And then Kirk’s gaze stopped on a single Romulan holding McCoy’s cane, regarding it suspiciously. The rest happened almost in a blur of motion as another Romulan ran his hand over the shelf holding the helmets, clearly upset that something was missing, then turned to say something to the Romulan beside him, as the Romulan with the green-metal cane lifted it and pointed it straight at Kirk and McCoy.

Kirk was galvanized into action. So much for thinking it was a setup, he thought. He turned and grabbed McCoy’s arm, started pulling him toward the airlock.

Then something slapped his shoulder and he let go of McCoy, who continued on his own.

Kirk half-turned to see an angry Romulan waving McCoy’s cane and shouting at him, though the voice seemed distant through his helmet. Kirk pointed at an ear through his helmet, shook his head. Another Romulan stepped up behind the angry one, and pulled on a helmet. Now Kirk could hear someone shouting at him in Romulan over his internal speakers.

Kirk moved his hands in a meaningless gesture, said the first thing that came to mind. “Farr Jolan.”

The shouting stopped at once. The Romulan with the helmet touched the Romulan with the cane, bent close, saying something that wasn’t transmitted. Then Kirk heard a Romulan voice over his speakers, “Farr Jolan.” Then another, and another.

Kirk bobbed his head in his helmet, trying in vain to recall any hand gestures or body language from the gathering he’d attended. Then he had it. The salute! At once, he clenched his fist, brought it to his chest in the Romulan style.

The Romulans close enough to see the gesture actually took a step back. Three possibilities, Kirk thought. I’ve just committed a grave social blunder; I’m a high-ranking official; or I’m just insane.

Kirk decided not to give them a chance to make up their minds. Acting on their confusion, he grabbed McCoy’s cane from the surprised Romulan’s hand, saluted again, said, “Jolan True,” then wheeled about and hurried to the airlock, where as he’d hoped, McCoy already had the thick door open.

Kirk at once pushed through to join McCoy, then swung the armored door closed, pulled the lever handle, and wrenched it as hard as he could.

As a babble of excited Romulan voices exploded within his helmet, Kirk felt McCoy tap his arm, looked to see that he was pointing at the airlock’s second door. Beside it a display screen had come to life.

This time, the symbol was simple to interpret. An amber lozenge shape began to fade to a transparent green on a purple screen. Kirk glanced at the symbols on the bottom of his virtual screen, and sure enough saw another amber lozenge, obviously the symbol for atmospheric pressure.

Kirk moved to stand before the second door, waiting for the lozenge to stop changing color, at which point he presumed the airlock cycle would be finished.

He gave McCoy a thumbs-up sign, and McCoy replied with the same, then reached for the cane, but Kirk held it back. He pointed to the second door, opened his hand in a questioning gesture.

There were now a great many urgent Romulan voices transmitting back and forth. If he and McCoy had inadvertently gone this far because their movements had coincided with a rest cycle or shift change, then another shift of returning workers might be waiting outside.

The lozenge on the screen reached its palest color, then flashed as the floor beneath their feet began to vibrate. Kirk didn’t hesitate, deciding its most likely cause was that the safety interlock was being released from the second door.

He reached out, pumped the door lever. His assumption was confirmed. The door moved easily.

He pushed it open.

There were three towering figures waiting inside the rock-walled chamber beyond, wearing thick red vacuum suits with heavy armor plating.

Remans.

Now there was no way back and no way forward.

Kirk and McCoy were trapped.