Space | Saturday FT
A determined Jim likewise came in rigidly, but the hard touchdown did not disable him or send him tumbling over the side, unlike the unfortunate and foolish Olson. As air pulled him sideways he quickly hit the retract control on his suit. Slits immediately materialized in his chute to virtually eliminate drag just before it retracted cleanly back into its compact storage compartment. As he scrambled to his feet he realized they had caught another break: even at this altitude the air was still and there was virtually no wind.
A shout in his helmet drew his attention to the far side of the platform. Having deployed his chute just a second or so before Jim had caused Sulu to become entangled in the support strand and its main subsidiary cables. Now he was hanging upside down as the wind blew him back and forth. Strong as they were, his chute cables began to abrade against several metal strands.
Unsealing his helmet and putting it aside, Jim rushed to help his companion.
"Hang on! I'm coming for you!" he shouted upward.
As his chute cables started to part, one by one, Sulu struggled to climb up them in search of a stable perch. As he worked to right himself, movement near Jim drew his attention.
"Behind you!"
Jim spun just in time to see a startled Romulan rising from a hatch in the previously unbroken surface. Having detected the intruder, the guard started to raise the heavy rifle he was carrying.
With less time to remove his own sidearm from its sealed compartment in his dropsuit, all Jim could do was charge and hope. As he tackled the bigger humanoid, they both went down, grappling, punching, and kicking at each other atop the disk-shaped metal platform thousands of kilometers above the ground. There was no railing, nothing to keep either or both of them from sliding off into oblivion. Still wearing his suit, Jim would probably survive the fall, but that would leave only Sulu to try and complete the mission on his own.
As they fought, a second guard emerged from another hatch and started to take aim with his own weapon. Desperately Jim fought to keep the body of the Romulan with whom he was wrestling between himself and the newcomer. At the same time, his opponent was intent on doing the opposite: trying to present the human's back to his cohort.
He was on the verge of doing so when Sulu landed atop the second guard and knocked his weapon out of his hands. Instead of rushing to try and recover it, thereby exposing his back to his assailant, the guard drew a vrelnac from its scabbard. The ceremonial sword would make slower but more satisfying work of the intruder. Keeping his eyes on the weapon, Sulu backed away warily. There was little space in which to retreat.
Reaching around his stymied adversary, Jim managed to pull the Romulan's own vrelnac and skim it across the platform. Seeing it sliding toward the standing human, the Romulan confronting Sulu tried to cut short both the fight and his opponent. He never did quite figure out how the helmsman managed to avoid the strike he leveled, get around him, roll, and return to a standing position with the other guard's sword held in one hand.
He was not the first foe to find himself taken aback by Sulu's unexpected fighting prowess.
While the two exchanged blows, Jim found himself tiring under the weight of his adversary.
Struggling to break free, he caught first one punch and then another. Rocked by the impacts, he staggered backward, slipped-and went over the edge. At the last instant he managed to deploy his suit chute, only to see it snag on a projection. Reaching up desperately he managed to catch the edge of the platform.
He was caught between a fall of thousands of kilometers and one triumphant Romulan.
He only just managed to avoid the booted foot that descended toward one hand. Amused and relaxed now, the guard took his time raising the other foot before bringing it down. Guessing correctly, Jim shifted his other hand to one side just in time to avoid the crunch. His adversary frowned. A short game to begin with, it was already growing tiresome. Next time he wouldn't miss.
A most peculiar expression came over his face. Lowering his gaze, he was startled to see the business end of his own vrelnac protruding from his chest. As Sulu drew it back out, the dying guard tumbled forward past Jim on the start of his journey toward the planetary surface far below, trailed by a few choice words from the human he had nearly killed. While Sulu whirled to deal with the remaining guard, Jim hit a control on his suit. Retracting into its compartment, the jammed chute dragged him back up onto the platform. A short burst from his own sidearm finished the second guard.
Alone and alive together on the platform with the drill roaring away beneath them, they examined their surroundings anxiously.
"What now?" Sulu wondered aloud. "Olson had all of the explosives."
Jim considered Sulu's query for about a second before moving to pick up one of the dropped Romulan weapons. Since it had been designed and manufactured to accommodate humanoid, if not human, limbs and hands, it was simple enough to figure out what made it go bang.
"Look what I found." Turning, he aimed the rifle at the junction of support cables and platform and pulled the trigger. A blast of energy tore into the structure. The 'off' switch."
A grinning Sulu recovered the other rifle and joined in. Together the two men methodically began to pick apart and blow to pieces every corner of the platform that looked as if it might have anything whatsoever to do with the actual operation of the drill. After the strain of hand-to-hand combat that had nearly resulted in his death, Jim was not surprised to discover that he was enjoying himself. He only hoped that the destruction he and Sulu were wreaking was enough to put a stop to whatever the Romulans had been up to.
A few minutes of continual and conscientious fire from the heavy rifles was enough to start fires raging within the platform. Another couple of minutes and the mammoth device stopped vibrating altogether. A glance over the side revealed that the downthrusting column of ravening, penetrating energy had ceased.
As he and Sulu waited to be beamed back aboard the Enterprise, a sound caused Jim to look up and squint at the sky. A high-pitched whine that rapidly became a shriek, it trailed behind a small solid object that was plunging toward them. For one nerve-racking instant he feared it was going to hit the drill platform. Could the Romulans have divined their presence on the disk? But even if they had, he told himself, it was unlikely they would destroy such a complex piece of equipment just to get rid of two human interlopers. Sulu also saw the descending object and raised a hand to point.
Plunging planetward at high velocity, it shot past them. Moving carefully to the edge of the platform, both men followed its trajectory downward. At their present altitude it was difficult to make out fine details on the planet's surface, but both agreed that had the falling object struck the surface, there would have been a visible impact. Instead, moments passed without any indication that there had been contact at all.
Nothing traveling at that speed from this altitude could possibly make a soft landing, Jim told himself.
Even as the realization struck him, far below a puff of gas billowed upward. It marked the spot, which both men had noted earlier, where the plasma drill had been piercing the planet's crust.
Some kind of bomb? Jim wondered.
Then the shock wave struck, knocking both men off their feet and forcing them to struggle to stay on the platform. The wave's effects did not last long, but to feel something so powerful at this altitude, on a platform rigged to remain steady in the strongest winds, suggested that something far more intense than a simple thermonuclear device had been sent rocketing into the borehole far below.
Having disabled the drill and thereby terminated the interference it had been generating, he fully expected his communicator to work. He was more than slightly relieved when it made a connection.
"Jim to Enterprise! They just launched something into the planet." He glanced over at his companion, who nodded confirmation. "Helmsman Sulu validates. Whatever it was, it went right down the borehole they've been drilling. Time delay was followed by severe atmospheric shock wave. Size and composition of subsurface discharge unknown. There was no visible flash, so it must have detonated at considerable depth."
Sulu was now leaning over the side of the platform and beckoning. "Jim, get over here. You've got to see this." Scrambling on hands and knees, Jim joined the helmsman in gazing at the terrain far below.
Beneath them, Vulcan was starting to break up.
Huge fissures opened across the desert landscape. Mountains began to crumple in upon themselves. Light flared in multiple locations as previously inert summits were transformed into active volcanoes. The threatening yellow-red glow of fresh lava appeared as magma boiled to the surface.
Neither man was prepared when the drill platform lurched sharply and unexpectedly upward.
Leaning over the side of the disk as they studied the planetary surface, they were completely engrossed in the catastrophe that continued to escalate below them. Knocked sideways, Jim managed to keep his balance. As he steadied himself, he looked in his companion's direction.
There was the briefest instant of eye contact.
Then the helmsman was gone over the side.
"SULU!"
If Jim had thought about it, he might have acted differently. Instead, he simply reacted. Crew-
in danger-death. Without hesitating, he leaped after the rapidly plummeting helmsman.
Sulu's training had been no less thorough than Jim's. Though extinction was rushing toward him at well over a hundred kilometers an hour, his task as a trained crewman and as a human being was to postpone that apparent inevitability for as long as possible. Spreading his arms and legs wide and keeping parallel to the ground, he did what little he could to slow his plunge as much as possible.
Above him, Jim was doing exactly the opposite. Legs held together, face forward into the shrieking wind, and hands pressed to his sides, he dropped like a stone. Even as he closed on the helms man, he knew he would have only one shot at what he was going to try. Streak past Sulu and it was unlikely they would have enough time to try the midair maneuver again.
Left arm out slightly to adjust his angle of descent, head up and chest out to slow as much as possible-wham! It was not a gentle rendezvous, but Sulu did not complain. With his arms locked around the helmsman, Jim screamed into the other man's face.
"I GOTCHA-PULL MY CHUTE!"
Nodding vigorously to show that he had heard and understood, his left arm wrapped around Jim's waist, Sulu reached down and fumbled until his fingers made contact with the requisite control. A firm touch was all it took to cause Jim's chute to snap out of its container. Billowing, it expanded above, jerking them to a momentary halt.
Momentary, because an instant later their combined weight coupled with the inertia acquired during their plunge proved too much for the chute to handle. While the fabric remained largely intact, the cords that connected it to Jim's suit, already stressed from the demand that had been put on them by the space drop, snapped. Direction, velocity, and plunging toward imminent death resumed straightaway.
"Enterprise, we're falling without a chute! Beam us up or we're dead!"
Far below, Jim noted with interest that they had now dropped farther than the peak of a nearby mountain. He chose this method of estimating their present position because the alternative would have been to look groundward. This he preferred not to do, having decided that when the impact came he would rather it arrive unexpectedly.
"Enterprise, now, now, now!"
"Boost the waveform on the gain stream!" Uhura was shouting. "I need more signal in order to lock!"
"Trying!" Chekov yelled back. An instant later, "Got 'em-toopik!" His free hand slammed down on a large control disk.
On the other side of the bridge one junior officer frowned at another. "Did he just say 'toothpick'?"
His companion ran a terrestrial language quick-check through his own console, then glanced up.
"Russian's his ancestral language. Toopik-it means 'dead end.'"
His expression one of deep concern, the other officer looked in the tactical officer's direction. "I hope he meant that in a good way."
In the Enterprise's main transporter room, several technicians glanced up apprehensively from the consoles and instruments they were monitoring. The sensitive curved chamber before them still stood empty. According to their readouts, entanglement had been successful. Far below the ship, two falling bodies supposedly had vanished. If that information was accurate, then their exact duplicates ought to be…
It was not a neat rematerialization. Not at all regulation, no. Instead of arriving in upright stances, faces forward, hands behind back, the two bodies slammed into the deck with considerable force.
But not, if the pained grunts that issued from each man were to be believed, lethal force.
Though the tech crew was stunned by the manner of arrival, they were not nearly as stunned as the two officers. Both men slowly peeled themselves off the transporter deck. Holding himself, Sulu blinked in Jim's direction.
"Th-thanks."
"Uh-huh," his colleague replied weakly. Starting at his head and working his way downward, Jim checked himself, not overlooking a single bone. By the time his examining fingers had traveled as far as his thighs he was becoming convinced he had somehow made it intact. "I swear we were so close I could smell the dirt."
Sulu was formulating a reply when the transporter room portal parted to admit the ship's science officer. Jim gaped as the Vulcan strode purposefully past him, turned, and positioned himself for departure.
"Step-or roll-aside. I'm going to the surface." Without waiting to see if the men on the floor were complying, Spock addressed himself to the transporter's chief engineer. "You should already have received coordinates for a specific disaster shelter located near the city of Shi'Kahr.
While physical design constraints prevent putting me down inside, get me as close to the entrance as you can."
"I'll do my best, sir." The transporter chief bent to work.
Drawing himself into an upright position as he staggered away from the transporter platform, Jim could only gape at the self-possessed figure standing in the exact center of one of the modules.
"The surface of what? You're going down there? Are you nuts?"
As was his wont, the science officer was not prone to acknowledging rhetorical questions. His attention remained focused on the transporter engineer.
"Energize."
In an instant he was gone, leaving in his wake a grim team of transporter techs, an exhausted and seriously woozy helmsman, and one disbelieving junior officer.
*_*_*
Vulcan was folding in upon itself.
"Spock to Enterprise. Emergency transport for seven additional in my immediate vicinity together with large object they are carrying-now."
On the bridge of the orbiting starship Chekov strained to simultaneously and accurately lock in a transport room full of strangers along with their cargo. He needed more time. On the other side of the bridge a junior helmsman was staring fixedly at his instrumentation. Jim couldn't help with this. All he could do was stand there and stare at Chekov like that might help him move faster.
"Thirty seconds before we must leave-or we never will."
"Locking signatures," Chekov announced. "Transport in five, four, three…"
The eight vanished, their signatures to reappear elsewhere. Seven rematerialized on board the Starship Enterprise. The eighth…
The eighth had become one with the compacted body of Vulcan.
In the main transporter bay technicians worked furiously to finalize the progression. Seven shapes began to take form. One of them emerged in an awkward, ungainly position, body bent forward with an arm extended as if reaching for something. Sarek and the other Elders gazed around them and took stock of their new surroundings. Only Spock continued to stare into the distance, searching for something that was not there. A moment ago she had been barely an arm's length away, directly in front of him. Now-she was gone. Forever. There was no Restore control for a human being.
On the bridge an agonized Chekov spun around to bellow at the acting helmsman. He had tried, desperately, to bring eight signatures on board. "Transport complete!"
"Maximum warp-engaging emergency power!" Engineering would scream in protest at that, he knew. He was not worried. At least they would be able to scream.
As the starship bolted in the general direction of the center of the Milky Way, its rear-facing sensors recorded a disruption that was insignificant on the galactic scale but terrifying in human terms. Soundlessly, crumpling in upon itself like a candy wrapper in a child's hand, Vulcan imploded. Deserts, atmosphere, oceans-all the familiar geological features that combined to give the surface of a world its character-vanished, along with cities and infrastructure and the people who had built them. In their place a brief blaze of intense light lingered on the retinas of those looking on-the last glow of the planet's molten core. Then it, too, was gone. Only a very small black hole remained at the interstellar coordinates where once a high civilization had thrived. Despite having swallowed an entire world, the perpetrator was visible only to those astronomical instruments capable of recording its occultation of a few background stars.
The incredible gravitational strength of the indiscernible monster that was the singularity reached out in all directions. It licked at the fleeing Enterprise, but the range of its all-consuming grasp extended only to a zone from which the starship had already fled. Behind lay the rest of the Vulcan system-and memories of a world that was no more.
While the other Elders murmured among themselves, father and son embraced. From the expression on their faces, it was impossible to tell what Sarek and Spock were thinking.
Impossible to tell, but easy enough to imagine.
Jim found himself moving toward them. One small part of Academy training dealt with the ways in which a senior officer could personally comfort family members on the loss of a loved one in battle or on general duty. There was nothing in the manuals that he could recall that dealt with how to console survivors on the loss of their entire world. Spock had just lost both. In lieu of precedent, Jim spoke as he would have if he had been trying to comfort a neighbor back in Iowa.
"Spock, I'm sorry."
The ship's chief science officer did not respond. Perhaps, Jim thought, he was finding comfort in his own thoughts. Or more likely, in the Vulcan way of responding to tragedy-by retreating into logic. Spock's first comment on being brought back aboard more or less confirmed Jim's supposition as the science officer removed his recorder and spoke into it.
"Acting captain's log, stardate twenty-two fifty-eight-point forty-three. In the absence of Captain Christopher Pike, and pursuant to the relevant Starfleet regulations, I have assumed command of the Enterprise. We've received no word from Captain Pike since he was taken aboard the atypical Romulan vessel known as the Narada. I have therefore classified him as a hostage of the war criminal known as Nero.
"Based on readings taken as the enemy vessel departed and in consultation with the Enterprise's computational facilities, it is hypothesized that its next destination may be the Sol system-and, presumably, Earth. Further updates will be forthcoming as new information becomes available."
Clicking off the recorder, he stepped down from the transporter platform. He did not look in Jim's direction as he departed, nor did Jim try to intercept him.
For one of the very few times in his life, the younger officer could think of nothing to say.
[NFB, NFI. Taken from the Star Trek novelization.]
A shout in his helmet drew his attention to the far side of the platform. Having deployed his chute just a second or so before Jim had caused Sulu to become entangled in the support strand and its main subsidiary cables. Now he was hanging upside down as the wind blew him back and forth. Strong as they were, his chute cables began to abrade against several metal strands.
Unsealing his helmet and putting it aside, Jim rushed to help his companion.
"Hang on! I'm coming for you!" he shouted upward.
As his chute cables started to part, one by one, Sulu struggled to climb up them in search of a stable perch. As he worked to right himself, movement near Jim drew his attention.
"Behind you!"
Jim spun just in time to see a startled Romulan rising from a hatch in the previously unbroken surface. Having detected the intruder, the guard started to raise the heavy rifle he was carrying.
With less time to remove his own sidearm from its sealed compartment in his dropsuit, all Jim could do was charge and hope. As he tackled the bigger humanoid, they both went down, grappling, punching, and kicking at each other atop the disk-shaped metal platform thousands of kilometers above the ground. There was no railing, nothing to keep either or both of them from sliding off into oblivion. Still wearing his suit, Jim would probably survive the fall, but that would leave only Sulu to try and complete the mission on his own.
As they fought, a second guard emerged from another hatch and started to take aim with his own weapon. Desperately Jim fought to keep the body of the Romulan with whom he was wrestling between himself and the newcomer. At the same time, his opponent was intent on doing the opposite: trying to present the human's back to his cohort.
He was on the verge of doing so when Sulu landed atop the second guard and knocked his weapon out of his hands. Instead of rushing to try and recover it, thereby exposing his back to his assailant, the guard drew a vrelnac from its scabbard. The ceremonial sword would make slower but more satisfying work of the intruder. Keeping his eyes on the weapon, Sulu backed away warily. There was little space in which to retreat.
Reaching around his stymied adversary, Jim managed to pull the Romulan's own vrelnac and skim it across the platform. Seeing it sliding toward the standing human, the Romulan confronting Sulu tried to cut short both the fight and his opponent. He never did quite figure out how the helmsman managed to avoid the strike he leveled, get around him, roll, and return to a standing position with the other guard's sword held in one hand.
He was not the first foe to find himself taken aback by Sulu's unexpected fighting prowess.
While the two exchanged blows, Jim found himself tiring under the weight of his adversary.
Struggling to break free, he caught first one punch and then another. Rocked by the impacts, he staggered backward, slipped-and went over the edge. At the last instant he managed to deploy his suit chute, only to see it snag on a projection. Reaching up desperately he managed to catch the edge of the platform.
He was caught between a fall of thousands of kilometers and one triumphant Romulan.
He only just managed to avoid the booted foot that descended toward one hand. Amused and relaxed now, the guard took his time raising the other foot before bringing it down. Guessing correctly, Jim shifted his other hand to one side just in time to avoid the crunch. His adversary frowned. A short game to begin with, it was already growing tiresome. Next time he wouldn't miss.
A most peculiar expression came over his face. Lowering his gaze, he was startled to see the business end of his own vrelnac protruding from his chest. As Sulu drew it back out, the dying guard tumbled forward past Jim on the start of his journey toward the planetary surface far below, trailed by a few choice words from the human he had nearly killed. While Sulu whirled to deal with the remaining guard, Jim hit a control on his suit. Retracting into its compartment, the jammed chute dragged him back up onto the platform. A short burst from his own sidearm finished the second guard.
Alone and alive together on the platform with the drill roaring away beneath them, they examined their surroundings anxiously.
"What now?" Sulu wondered aloud. "Olson had all of the explosives."
Jim considered Sulu's query for about a second before moving to pick up one of the dropped Romulan weapons. Since it had been designed and manufactured to accommodate humanoid, if not human, limbs and hands, it was simple enough to figure out what made it go bang.
"Look what I found." Turning, he aimed the rifle at the junction of support cables and platform and pulled the trigger. A blast of energy tore into the structure. The 'off' switch."
A grinning Sulu recovered the other rifle and joined in. Together the two men methodically began to pick apart and blow to pieces every corner of the platform that looked as if it might have anything whatsoever to do with the actual operation of the drill. After the strain of hand-to-hand combat that had nearly resulted in his death, Jim was not surprised to discover that he was enjoying himself. He only hoped that the destruction he and Sulu were wreaking was enough to put a stop to whatever the Romulans had been up to.
A few minutes of continual and conscientious fire from the heavy rifles was enough to start fires raging within the platform. Another couple of minutes and the mammoth device stopped vibrating altogether. A glance over the side revealed that the downthrusting column of ravening, penetrating energy had ceased.
As he and Sulu waited to be beamed back aboard the Enterprise, a sound caused Jim to look up and squint at the sky. A high-pitched whine that rapidly became a shriek, it trailed behind a small solid object that was plunging toward them. For one nerve-racking instant he feared it was going to hit the drill platform. Could the Romulans have divined their presence on the disk? But even if they had, he told himself, it was unlikely they would destroy such a complex piece of equipment just to get rid of two human interlopers. Sulu also saw the descending object and raised a hand to point.
Plunging planetward at high velocity, it shot past them. Moving carefully to the edge of the platform, both men followed its trajectory downward. At their present altitude it was difficult to make out fine details on the planet's surface, but both agreed that had the falling object struck the surface, there would have been a visible impact. Instead, moments passed without any indication that there had been contact at all.
Nothing traveling at that speed from this altitude could possibly make a soft landing, Jim told himself.
Even as the realization struck him, far below a puff of gas billowed upward. It marked the spot, which both men had noted earlier, where the plasma drill had been piercing the planet's crust.
Some kind of bomb? Jim wondered.
Then the shock wave struck, knocking both men off their feet and forcing them to struggle to stay on the platform. The wave's effects did not last long, but to feel something so powerful at this altitude, on a platform rigged to remain steady in the strongest winds, suggested that something far more intense than a simple thermonuclear device had been sent rocketing into the borehole far below.
Having disabled the drill and thereby terminated the interference it had been generating, he fully expected his communicator to work. He was more than slightly relieved when it made a connection.
"Jim to Enterprise! They just launched something into the planet." He glanced over at his companion, who nodded confirmation. "Helmsman Sulu validates. Whatever it was, it went right down the borehole they've been drilling. Time delay was followed by severe atmospheric shock wave. Size and composition of subsurface discharge unknown. There was no visible flash, so it must have detonated at considerable depth."
Sulu was now leaning over the side of the platform and beckoning. "Jim, get over here. You've got to see this." Scrambling on hands and knees, Jim joined the helmsman in gazing at the terrain far below.
Beneath them, Vulcan was starting to break up.
Huge fissures opened across the desert landscape. Mountains began to crumple in upon themselves. Light flared in multiple locations as previously inert summits were transformed into active volcanoes. The threatening yellow-red glow of fresh lava appeared as magma boiled to the surface.
Neither man was prepared when the drill platform lurched sharply and unexpectedly upward.
Leaning over the side of the disk as they studied the planetary surface, they were completely engrossed in the catastrophe that continued to escalate below them. Knocked sideways, Jim managed to keep his balance. As he steadied himself, he looked in his companion's direction.
There was the briefest instant of eye contact.
Then the helmsman was gone over the side.
"SULU!"
If Jim had thought about it, he might have acted differently. Instead, he simply reacted. Crew-
in danger-death. Without hesitating, he leaped after the rapidly plummeting helmsman.
Sulu's training had been no less thorough than Jim's. Though extinction was rushing toward him at well over a hundred kilometers an hour, his task as a trained crewman and as a human being was to postpone that apparent inevitability for as long as possible. Spreading his arms and legs wide and keeping parallel to the ground, he did what little he could to slow his plunge as much as possible.
Above him, Jim was doing exactly the opposite. Legs held together, face forward into the shrieking wind, and hands pressed to his sides, he dropped like a stone. Even as he closed on the helms man, he knew he would have only one shot at what he was going to try. Streak past Sulu and it was unlikely they would have enough time to try the midair maneuver again.
Left arm out slightly to adjust his angle of descent, head up and chest out to slow as much as possible-wham! It was not a gentle rendezvous, but Sulu did not complain. With his arms locked around the helmsman, Jim screamed into the other man's face.
"I GOTCHA-PULL MY CHUTE!"
Nodding vigorously to show that he had heard and understood, his left arm wrapped around Jim's waist, Sulu reached down and fumbled until his fingers made contact with the requisite control. A firm touch was all it took to cause Jim's chute to snap out of its container. Billowing, it expanded above, jerking them to a momentary halt.
Momentary, because an instant later their combined weight coupled with the inertia acquired during their plunge proved too much for the chute to handle. While the fabric remained largely intact, the cords that connected it to Jim's suit, already stressed from the demand that had been put on them by the space drop, snapped. Direction, velocity, and plunging toward imminent death resumed straightaway.
"Enterprise, we're falling without a chute! Beam us up or we're dead!"
Far below, Jim noted with interest that they had now dropped farther than the peak of a nearby mountain. He chose this method of estimating their present position because the alternative would have been to look groundward. This he preferred not to do, having decided that when the impact came he would rather it arrive unexpectedly.
"Enterprise, now, now, now!"
"Boost the waveform on the gain stream!" Uhura was shouting. "I need more signal in order to lock!"
"Trying!" Chekov yelled back. An instant later, "Got 'em-toopik!" His free hand slammed down on a large control disk.
On the other side of the bridge one junior officer frowned at another. "Did he just say 'toothpick'?"
His companion ran a terrestrial language quick-check through his own console, then glanced up.
"Russian's his ancestral language. Toopik-it means 'dead end.'"
His expression one of deep concern, the other officer looked in the tactical officer's direction. "I hope he meant that in a good way."
In the Enterprise's main transporter room, several technicians glanced up apprehensively from the consoles and instruments they were monitoring. The sensitive curved chamber before them still stood empty. According to their readouts, entanglement had been successful. Far below the ship, two falling bodies supposedly had vanished. If that information was accurate, then their exact duplicates ought to be…
It was not a neat rematerialization. Not at all regulation, no. Instead of arriving in upright stances, faces forward, hands behind back, the two bodies slammed into the deck with considerable force.
But not, if the pained grunts that issued from each man were to be believed, lethal force.
Though the tech crew was stunned by the manner of arrival, they were not nearly as stunned as the two officers. Both men slowly peeled themselves off the transporter deck. Holding himself, Sulu blinked in Jim's direction.
"Th-thanks."
"Uh-huh," his colleague replied weakly. Starting at his head and working his way downward, Jim checked himself, not overlooking a single bone. By the time his examining fingers had traveled as far as his thighs he was becoming convinced he had somehow made it intact. "I swear we were so close I could smell the dirt."
Sulu was formulating a reply when the transporter room portal parted to admit the ship's science officer. Jim gaped as the Vulcan strode purposefully past him, turned, and positioned himself for departure.
"Step-or roll-aside. I'm going to the surface." Without waiting to see if the men on the floor were complying, Spock addressed himself to the transporter's chief engineer. "You should already have received coordinates for a specific disaster shelter located near the city of Shi'Kahr.
While physical design constraints prevent putting me down inside, get me as close to the entrance as you can."
"I'll do my best, sir." The transporter chief bent to work.
Drawing himself into an upright position as he staggered away from the transporter platform, Jim could only gape at the self-possessed figure standing in the exact center of one of the modules.
"The surface of what? You're going down there? Are you nuts?"
As was his wont, the science officer was not prone to acknowledging rhetorical questions. His attention remained focused on the transporter engineer.
"Energize."
In an instant he was gone, leaving in his wake a grim team of transporter techs, an exhausted and seriously woozy helmsman, and one disbelieving junior officer.
*_*_*
Vulcan was folding in upon itself.
"Spock to Enterprise. Emergency transport for seven additional in my immediate vicinity together with large object they are carrying-now."
On the bridge of the orbiting starship Chekov strained to simultaneously and accurately lock in a transport room full of strangers along with their cargo. He needed more time. On the other side of the bridge a junior helmsman was staring fixedly at his instrumentation. Jim couldn't help with this. All he could do was stand there and stare at Chekov like that might help him move faster.
"Thirty seconds before we must leave-or we never will."
"Locking signatures," Chekov announced. "Transport in five, four, three…"
The eight vanished, their signatures to reappear elsewhere. Seven rematerialized on board the Starship Enterprise. The eighth…
The eighth had become one with the compacted body of Vulcan.
In the main transporter bay technicians worked furiously to finalize the progression. Seven shapes began to take form. One of them emerged in an awkward, ungainly position, body bent forward with an arm extended as if reaching for something. Sarek and the other Elders gazed around them and took stock of their new surroundings. Only Spock continued to stare into the distance, searching for something that was not there. A moment ago she had been barely an arm's length away, directly in front of him. Now-she was gone. Forever. There was no Restore control for a human being.
On the bridge an agonized Chekov spun around to bellow at the acting helmsman. He had tried, desperately, to bring eight signatures on board. "Transport complete!"
"Maximum warp-engaging emergency power!" Engineering would scream in protest at that, he knew. He was not worried. At least they would be able to scream.
As the starship bolted in the general direction of the center of the Milky Way, its rear-facing sensors recorded a disruption that was insignificant on the galactic scale but terrifying in human terms. Soundlessly, crumpling in upon itself like a candy wrapper in a child's hand, Vulcan imploded. Deserts, atmosphere, oceans-all the familiar geological features that combined to give the surface of a world its character-vanished, along with cities and infrastructure and the people who had built them. In their place a brief blaze of intense light lingered on the retinas of those looking on-the last glow of the planet's molten core. Then it, too, was gone. Only a very small black hole remained at the interstellar coordinates where once a high civilization had thrived. Despite having swallowed an entire world, the perpetrator was visible only to those astronomical instruments capable of recording its occultation of a few background stars.
The incredible gravitational strength of the indiscernible monster that was the singularity reached out in all directions. It licked at the fleeing Enterprise, but the range of its all-consuming grasp extended only to a zone from which the starship had already fled. Behind lay the rest of the Vulcan system-and memories of a world that was no more.
While the other Elders murmured among themselves, father and son embraced. From the expression on their faces, it was impossible to tell what Sarek and Spock were thinking.
Impossible to tell, but easy enough to imagine.
Jim found himself moving toward them. One small part of Academy training dealt with the ways in which a senior officer could personally comfort family members on the loss of a loved one in battle or on general duty. There was nothing in the manuals that he could recall that dealt with how to console survivors on the loss of their entire world. Spock had just lost both. In lieu of precedent, Jim spoke as he would have if he had been trying to comfort a neighbor back in Iowa.
"Spock, I'm sorry."
The ship's chief science officer did not respond. Perhaps, Jim thought, he was finding comfort in his own thoughts. Or more likely, in the Vulcan way of responding to tragedy-by retreating into logic. Spock's first comment on being brought back aboard more or less confirmed Jim's supposition as the science officer removed his recorder and spoke into it.
"Acting captain's log, stardate twenty-two fifty-eight-point forty-three. In the absence of Captain Christopher Pike, and pursuant to the relevant Starfleet regulations, I have assumed command of the Enterprise. We've received no word from Captain Pike since he was taken aboard the atypical Romulan vessel known as the Narada. I have therefore classified him as a hostage of the war criminal known as Nero.
"Based on readings taken as the enemy vessel departed and in consultation with the Enterprise's computational facilities, it is hypothesized that its next destination may be the Sol system-and, presumably, Earth. Further updates will be forthcoming as new information becomes available."
Clicking off the recorder, he stepped down from the transporter platform. He did not look in Jim's direction as he departed, nor did Jim try to intercept him.
For one of the very few times in his life, the younger officer could think of nothing to say.
[NFB, NFI. Taken from the Star Trek novelization.]