The Price of the Phoenix

CHAPTER I

Dr. McCoy had one thought in his mind: Spock must be spared this! He turned hastily to the next transporter position and took Spock by the arm.

The Vulcan did not even protest as McCoy led him off the platform. McCoy wanted to steer him through the corridors of the Enterprise, hustle him to the haven of Sickbay—anything but let the Vulcan stay and see the security men bringing up the stretcher with the bodybag.

But Spock stopped at the transporter console. He planted himself like a rock with that immovable Vulcan strength, and now his peculiar immobility amounted almost to catatonia.

“Energize,” Spock said, in a shockingly normal voice.

Scotty stood at the control console himself. He looked blasted, empty, suddenly old. His shoulders struggled to hold themselves at attention, as if they were an honor guard. His hands worked the controls with special care… as if it could matter now.

Uhura stood inside the door, neither explaining her presence nor apologizing for the tears which ran quietly down the beautiful dark face.

The transporter shimmered.

The two Enterprise security men materialized, took a firmer grip on the anti-grav lifts, and stepped carefully off the platform with the stretcher that bore the body of Captain James T. Kirk.

Spock followed them through the door, his eyes not moving from the stretcher. McCoy clung to his arm, not sure whether he was giving support or getting it He could feel the Vulcan’s strength. But was it fully sane?

Leonard McCoy knew that he would always remember that quiet procession as nightmare, but it was nothing to the nightmare of going to the planet and collecting the charred body, nothing at all to the nightmare Spock had seen.

Enterprise personnel lined the corridors, stood beside the turbo-lift.

They knew, of course.

Omne had made sure that they knew.

The owner of the hole-in-the-wall planet had announced it bluntly, brutally, sending his special signal through his impenetrable shields which cut off all other communication and piped directly into the ship’s intercom. “Captain Kirk is dead. Permission granted for Enterprise physician and party to attend.”

The crew had not believed it. Their Captain could not die!

Now they read the finality in McCoy’s face and in Spock’s.

McCoy stopped Spock at the door as the body was carried into the small, sterile autopsy room.

The purpose of the room was only too well known to Spock as a scientist. Standard. All violent or sudden deaths. Dr. McCoy’s own strictest rule.

Dr. M’benga was there, raising an inquiring, offering eyebrow at McCoy.

McCoy shook his head. That he would do himself. It was the last thing he would do for Jim Kirk.

The Vulcan First Officer looked at him with perfect comprehension. “Thank you, Doctor,” Spock said. “He would want that from you.”

McCoy found himself without words.

But the Vulcan had spoken—for the first time except for the single order in the transporter room.

McCoy must catch that thread of sanity, draw the Vulcan back somehow to some hold on life.

“Spock—” he began, but the Vulcan was gone again, lapsing into the rigid stare with which he had watched the recovery of Kirk’s body from the ashes. The fixed eyes spoke of murder, madness, some terrible release for what could not be released and could not be endured.

McCoy felt certain that Spock’s very life was in danger. The Vulcan had survived believing that Kirk was dead once on Vulcan, when Spock thought that he himself had killed his Captain and friend. But the terrible Vulcan emotional control had broken completely in this very room when Spock saw Jim reappear through the door alive. And that was years and many layers of friendship ago. McCoy was not sure that Spock had ever fully believed that Kirk was dead when the Captain had disappeared in the Tholian sector and McCoy and Spock had listened to Jim’s recorded last orders together. But Spock had risked the ship on an impossible chance to get Jim back. Still years ago—and what would he risk now, if there were any chance? How would he live with the fact that now there was no chance at all?

The Vulcan repression of emotion was a weakness as much as it was a strength. God knew it had carried the Vulcan through terrible times—sometimes carried them all. But McCoy had always known that it could break down explosively. He had given Spock hell often enough trying to break it down bit by bit before that day would come. This day.

McCoy knew with bleak certainty that this could do it, was probably the only thing which could. He, too, had lost his closest friend. But Spock had lost the only man he had ever permitted really to reach into his self-imposed prison of Vulcan restraint and to touch his naked soul.

McCoy dropped on one knee beside Spock’s chair. “Hold on, Spock,” he said very softly in the tone of a quotation and almost in another man’s voice. “Don’t let it break you. Hold on.”

The Vulcan shuddered and his eyes reached for the look of comfort Kirk would have offered.

“Thanks, Bones,” Spock said very deliberately in the same voice, using the name Kirk would have used.

Then his eyes blazed suddenly with such ferocity as McCoy had only glimpsed. He locked his hands behind his back. “I shall have to “hold on,’ Doctor. Murder has been done, and all hell is about to break loose.”

“Murder?” McCoy gasped. “But surely it was an accident? My God, Spock, not even Omne would set that up as a trap. A suttee, Sandorian-style? Burn the whole house? The wife? The baby? The woman really died, Spock. No trick. Jim just couldn’t stand it—not the baby. It was an accident’

“Or an exact calculation of the Captain’s psychology,” Spock said grimly. “It was Omne who staged the delegates’ tour or the alien enclaves, lectured us on the Federation’s Noninterference Directive—claiming no Human honored it—marched us in and kept the Captain close, explained to him the custom of immolation, just as the house was fired and the woman dashed in carrying the child. It was Omne’s Romulan mercenaries who blocked me when I tried to go after Jim.”

He broke off, and McCoy could almost see the flames flare high behind his eyes. McCoy could see behind his own the glowing ashes and Spock still standing locked between burly Romulan renegades, Vulcanoid and as strong as he. Spock still holding a screaming, naked boy baby perhaps six months old. Spock, who couldn’t hold a tribble or a cat without petting it, holding the baby and quite oblivious to it McCoy had taken it from him, parked it almost as obliviously with some woman, tried to question Spock, finally gotten the stock in fragments from witnesses: Spock bowling down Romulans like tenpins, reaching the door, seeing Kirk with the mother clawing at him, holding him. Kirk had pitched the baby to Spock, who caught it just as the Romulans caught him again, and just as the flaming house collapsed with Kirk inside.

McCoy closed his eyes. It didn’t help.

But if Spock thought that he had seen murder-maybe his sanity really had snapped. Maybe he had to have somebody to kill. And what would that do to his Vulcan philosophy of peace? Spock’s face showed nothing of Vulcan’s thousand years of peace. It was the face of his savage heritage, five thousand years deep—or five million.

McCoy’s legs were not doing too well. He shifted to the chair behind the desk. Spock was a walking mass of grief, but he was in command of the Enterprise now, with power to destroy a planet. There was a war brewing here anyway. This miserable outlaw planet was the intrigue center of the galaxy. And McCoy doubted that Omne’s Black Hole was safe now, even behind its impregnable shields.

Spock glanced up and caught McCoy’s fixed look. The Vulcan stopped abruptly. He came and settled on a hip on the corner of McCoy’s desk—an uncharacteristic pose for him.

“Check my logic, Doctor,” he said, “I am not fully-functional.”

“Check your logic?”

The Vulcan looked at McCoy gravely. “I do not believe that we will need his last orders—this time. Do you?”

“No, Spock. Not this time.”

Spock nodded. ‘Then hear me.” He drew back his shoulders until they crackled. “Point one: It is possible that I am being paranoid, but I do not think so. My intuition senses a deeper plot than we knew. Of course, we have confirmed the suspicion that brought us here—that this whole conference of strange delegates, outlaws, renegades, revolutionaries, governments in exile, dissident factions is aimed at breaking up the Federation, perhaps taking many planets into an alliance with the Romulans and enabling them to go to war again. Omne makes no bones about favoring that, nor about his contempt for the Federation. Yet you recall that he greeted us on the viewscreen saving that he was pleased that we had ‘accepted his invitation’—implying that he had carefully arranged things so that we would try, as the Captain said, to ‘crash the party.’ You could not see his first curiously excessive cordiality to the Captain and myself, but when he finally beamed you down to join us on our private tour at the hospital—” Spock cut himself off. What do you make of him, Doctor?”

“Medical opinion?” McCoy frowned, sourly remembering how he had been left standing foolishly on the transporter while the other two shimmered out and how he had spent a frantic time with Scott while the Engineer determined that the transporter which took them was actually on the planet, working right through the impenetrable shields, and working as if it were the Enterprise transporter and responded to its controls. But it was not and did not, and would not take McCoy until he was summoned. Then he saw Omne in the flesh.

“First thought: madman,” McCoy said. “Megalomaniac. Delusions of omnipotence. Maybe where he gets the name.” He shook his head. “Second thought: not crazy. I know the place is all laid out with the trappings of melodrama and legend, but it has a weird kind of point to it. All the Wild West stuff-” he pointed to the six-shooters on Spock’s hip and his own—”but it’s ‘check your guns at the door’—only equal guns cheerfully provided by the host. Makes for polite society, he says. No law but challenge, and the old equalizers; no back-shooting and the Romulan guards to keep everybody honest. But there are alien enclaves where no guns are allowed, customs strictly their own business. And more than one legend. I saw an ancient Greek section, something that looked Renaissance, the Great Age of Deneb Five.”

Pre-Reform Vulcan,” Spock added. “And the time of Surak.”

“Looks to me like the old idea of a proprietary community,” McCoy said. “Minimum order provided by the host, protection against outside force—the shields. There doesn’t seem to be offensive armament on the same scale or a space navy, but the stories have it that a ship cutting up trouble within fifty thousand miles buys the farm. So now it’s a free port, a stone’s throw from the Romulan neutral zone. Look at us. Three Romulan ships in orbit, and we haven’t shot each other up yet. And nearly a hundred other alien ships bringing delegates from three times that many planets.”

Ninety-three. Three-point-two times, the Vulcan corrected automatically.

McCoy nodded. “The man who can do that is taken seriously—and is a serious man. And that hospital—I saw things there I’d give my eyeteeth for—things that don’t exist yet in the civilized galaxy. That implies a research capability of a high order. Omne doesn’t give himself any title, but he has to be an M.D.”

“And a Ph.D. in several scientific fields,” Spock added.

“Linguist. Galactic man. Steeped in the languages and literatures of Lord knows how many worlds. Knows colloquial English and slang as well as you do—but he admits it.”

Spock raised an eyebrow, but it looked impatient. “Also he speaks Vulcan like a Vulcan. But where does that leave us? A man of power, but to what purpose?”

McCoy remembered the fear which had made him try to keep Jim and Spock from going back for the second meeting, to which he was pointedly not invited. It was almost a physical fear, caused by the mere physical presence of the giant in black, against the costumed and painted backdrop of the private world he had created. The plain black jumpsuit, boots, gloves; the black hair and the unfathomable black eyes; the massive muscle and almost overpowering masculinity. Omne looked Human, but there was something alien under the layers of galactic man. The man was ageless. And there was some aura of brooding, black grief and rage, decades deep.

McCoy shook his head. “Omne scares hell out of me, Spock. He’s not crazy, but there’s a fixed purpose that’s almost as bad. He’s—an owner, Spock. He wants to own his world, his way, price no object. Whatever he wants, he’d destroy himself or the galaxy to get it.”

Spock nodded. “Poetic, Doctor, but my impression as well.”

“Something else, Spock. He’s—an alpha male. You know the idea of ranking the dominant males in a primate group alpha, beta, gamma. Jim and I always figured it works for men, too. But this Omne—he’s so alpha he’d have a tough time even finding a contest. Maybe I’m crazy, and that doesn’t have anything to do with it, But I had the feeling he wanted to take us on.”

The—Captain,” Spock said with effort.

“And maybe you. Or what you both stand for, the Federation. He has that fixed idea about trampling customs. It seems to be the key issue of the conference. You’ve even had trouble with it on Vulcan. And that semiofficial Vulcan delegation here—”

“My thought also, Doctor. If a Federation Starship Captain were killed seeming to violate the Prime Directive—”

McCoy drew a deep breath. “But, it didn’t have to be murder. A test, a trap, but—” He shook his head. “We’d never be able to prove it. Yes, I think Omne could kill. But did be?”

“That,” Spock said, “is what I have to find out.” He stood up abruptly and McCoy went on Red Alert

“Wait, Spock. HOW?”

Spock paused with the look of barely leashed restraint. “There is more, Doctor. No time to tell you since—the last beam down. The three Romulan ships are, indeed, commanded by our old—friend—the Fleet Commander. She has not forgotten us, nor forgiven.

But she—renewed her offer to me, with variations. Wanting me to defect—and to bring the Captain. I believe that she was trying to warn me of something, as if she knew of it, but could not—or would not—stop it.” Spock stopped and the Vulcan jaw set “Kirks murder,” he said flatly, and there was murder in his eyes.

He turned on his heel and strode through the door.

After a stunned moment McCoy heaved himself up to go after him. But Spock had reached the turbo-lift.

By the time McCoy skated into the transporter room, Scotty was watching a shimmer and turning to say to McCoy, “Would you credit that he left me in command?”

McCoy nodded heavily. “Aye, Mr. Scott, and I wish you joy of it.” He slammed his hand on the console. Damn it to hell, Scotty!”

“Aye,” Scott said. “Doctor, is he all right?”

“Are any of us?” McCoy straightened and mounted the transporter. “Give it a try, Scotty.” But it was obstinately silent. Spock must have been expected, he thought, and didn’t like the thought. He climbed down slowly and collected Scott with a nod. “Come on. I’ll prescribe a drink for you. You’ll need one. We both will.”