Star Trek: The Original Series - 082 - Federation (20 page)

A blue strobe light on the forward edge of the disk suddenly flashed three times.

“Clear!” Monica shouted. “Run!” Sir John took off with surprising speed and Cochrane, after a moment of startled hesitation, followed, trying not to pump his arms as he ran. He heard Monica right behind him.

Then a new sound swept through the stadium, so powerfully that Cochrane couldn’t tell where it came from. “Down?’ Monica shouted behind him.

He felt her arms hit his legs as she dove onto him from behind, pushing him to the ground with an explosion of pain that cut through him like red lightning.

He couldn’t talk, felt only the harsh spikes of the artificial turf pressing into his cheek. Monica was lying beside him, one arm across his back. “Sorry, sorry,” she said into his ear. “Sir John?” Cochrane suddenly gasped.

“He’s all right,” Monica answered, but there was worry in her eyes and voice.

Cochrane looked ahead. Another vehicle had entered the playing field, floating forward from a players’ entrance, fanjets flattening the turf below it.

He recognized it as an armored troop carrier, with a plasma cannon mounted at its back.

The carrier’s headlight strip blazed across the turf, turning it from green to white, catching the disk on its side.

The carrier’s cannon flared, and the stadium rocked with thtlnder as the plasma explosion hurled a projectile forward at supersonic velocity.

But the projectile exploded a heartbeat later in the far stands, as if it had ricocheted from the disk.

.’What’s that disk made of?.” Cochrane said faintly. He didn’t think he could keep talking much longer.

“The shell never hit the disk,” Monica said. “It’s generating an [M shield. Nothing physical can touch it.” Cochrane felt the stadium melting and twisting around him in time to his thundering pulse. “Then how can we get on board? Is it a selective frequency?” Even facing death, the drive for knowledge in him was still never far from the surface. u ‘Shh,” Monica said, sensing and soothing his confusion.

“Almost home.” Cochrane stared back at her. From that angle, he couldn’t see the wound on her other cheek. He tried to touch her face. She looked at him, surprised, but not troubled.

“Thank you,” he said, and he knew his words were almost inaudible, drifting off.

‘
For what?” she asked.

“Paying attention,” Cochrane mumbled. He wasn’t sure what it meant. but he did mean it.

Another flare of blinding light hit them. Wearily, Cochrane struggled to turn his head to see the light’s source.

There was an enormous gout of flame shooting up from the field From the point Sir John’s Rolls had been parked. The car was one.

“Betsy!” Sir John moaned as if he had lost an old family friend.

The fanjet carrier sped for the disk. When it had disappeared behind its bulk, Monica pulled Cochrane to his feet. He felt as if he were floating, losing touch with his body. He decided there was too much pain for his brain to deal with. He was disassociating.

He fought against the temptation of unconsciousness. But it was a difficult battle, so much easier to give up.

Abruptly, he rea!ized he was heading toward the disk, Monica
Upporting him, Sir John beside her. There was another explosion
Omewhere else, perhaps on the other side of the disk. He saw flickerings on the overhead roof. Monica told him the disk had hit the carrier. But to Cochrane, everything seemed to be happening to someone else. He was no longer in his body. He was no longer on Earth. He thought he saw Micah Brack before him, floating in microgravity, out by Neptune.

“This is the way it always goes,” Brack told him. “Fire and destruction.” “No,” Cochrane whispered to his absent friend. “No more.

We’ll change that. Can’t we?” Monica asked him what he had said.

Cochrane couldn’t remember.

And then he heard his name, blaring, echoing, coming at him from every surface in the stadium as if the gods themselves were calling for him.

They were almost at the disk, a gangplank was extended, but Cochrane stumbled, looked up to the side.

The giant visage of Adrik Thorsen looked down upon him.

“You will not leave/” Thorsen screamed. His enraged face was repeated on the display boards ringing the stadium, blotched by imperfect pixels, incomplete, flickering. His cruelly commanding voice echoed from everywhere all at once. “Air defense will destroy you a hundred meters from the ground.” “Don’t listen to him,” Monica shouted. She pulled on Cochrane’s arm. He cried in turn with pain. “You are the dead? Thorsen thundered.

The gangplank was almost before them. And then it disappeared in an eruption of fire.

Sir John whirled in a circle like a mad ballerina, a dozen small fires at work on his coat. He fell to the turf even as Monica doubled over atop him.

Cochrane staggered to a stop. He thought he heard plasma pulses, or were they just the echoes?

“You will never escape the Optimum!” Thorsen shouted. “You will never escape your destiny?’ Dimly, terrifyingly, Cochrane became aware that Thorsen’s last words l~ad not come from the displays. They had come from behind him. He turned.

Thorsen stood on the wall by home plate. He had a fistgun. It
as aimed directly at Cochrane.

-‘Earth will be your graveyard,” Thorsen said. “Unless you join me. Zefram Cochrane. Only I can unchain your science.” Cochrane listened, thought, considered. He half-convinced himself he was asleep on the John Cabal, that this was all a dream, a nightmare, deep within the crew quarters of the old ice freighter.

He leaned on Sir John’s cane to keep a semblance of his balance. His body shook as a sharp cough brought up bright red blood to spatter on the green turf. He realized he wasn’t dreaming. He realized he was going to die soon.

Thorsen jumped from the wall and began walking forward, tistgun held ready.

“Cochrane—think—your only possible future lies with me.” One of Thorsen’s hands held death. The other was outstretched in friendship. “Give me the warp bomb. Let me celebrate your genius. ‘bu need not die when that ship is shot down.” Cochrane heard the cane cycle up and reset itself.

He heard Monica moan. Smoke drifted up from Sir John’s still body.

Cochrane realized he could kill Thorsen.

In his mind, he heard Monica’s voice, telling him that by killing he would only become Thorsen.

Cochrane closed his eyes. This was all happening to someone else, anyway. Besides, he had made Thorsen. “I am Thorsen,” he said.

“Did xou say something?” Thorsen called out. He was only fifty meters distant.

”’
bu exist because of me/” Cochrane heard himself shout. He saw blood spray from his mouth in the brilliant blue light of the stadium, a halo of blood around him.

”’bu’re delirious, my friend,” Thorsen said. “Let me help.xou.” Cochrane raised the cane, aimed it at Thorsen from the hip.

Thorsen stopped moving forward. He turned sideways, decreasing the size of the target he offered. He raised the fistgun, keeping the barrel pointed up.

“There are still secrets to be discovered, Mr. Cochrane. Don’t let your work end here. Don’t let your life mean nothing.” Cochrane put his finger on the trigger stud. Suddenly, he realized he didn’t care about his work anymore, he didn’t care about secrets. He only cared about what he had done with his life.

And he was certain he had not done enough. Had not shared enough.

“You hurt Monica,” Cochrane said.

The capacitor in the cane built up to discharge level.

“What does the life of one person matter?” Thorsen called back. He began to lower the barrel of the fistgun, taking aim.

“Everyone matters,” Cochrane said, his voice so weak he knew he could no longer speak loudly enough for Thorsen to hear him.

“This is your last chance!” Thorsen screamed.

“I know,” Cochrane said.

He fired the cane, and even as the red laser hit Thorsen’s fistgun, Cochrane realized that as fast as that beam was, Thorsen had been faster.

The fistgun fired, then exploded.

Something burned past Cochrane’s cheek.

Thorsen’s scream pierced the air.

Cochrane felt hands grab him from behind. The sudden movement brought such intense pain that he dropped the cane, dropped from his body, became only an observer in his mind.

He felt himself carried up the gangplank into the disk. Somewhere, Monica’s voice still murmured. That meant she was still alive. That meant she would continue. Even without him. The knowledge made him feel better, somehow.

Gentle hands strapped him into a reclining chair, a blast couch, a display screen above it. Nearby, he thought he heard Monica call out her grandfather’s name. He thought he heard other people asking about Thorsen. But they had the name wrong, he could see that now.

“His name is Ozymandias,” Cochrane muttered. He remembered his mother reading that poem to him. It had made him think of history. Micah Brack could recite it as readily as if the industrialist had written it himself. “‘Look on my works, ye mighty,’” Cochrane said.

No one heard him.

An artificial voice ordered everyone to prepare for orbital insertion. Cochrane wished he could say good-bye to Monica. He wanted her to have a happy life. She deserved that. He wished he could give it to her.

The blast couch shook beneath him. On the screen above, he saw the stadium grow smaller. Then it disappeared in a gout of blue plasma, in waves of explosions.

In a far-off corner of his still lucid mind, Cochrane understood that was how the disk traveled from the earth to the moon.

Inertial gravity generators for landing and surface maneuvers, but an impulse drive for propulsion.

The fusion flames of the disk’s departure bathed whatever had been below it. He pictured Battersea Stadium melting as ira small sun had ignited within it. Baseball really was dead, he decided.

And so was Thorsen… or Ozymandias… whatever his name was. All would soon be incandescent. Back to the stuff of stars.

Cochrane felt a hand grip his. He looked through blurring, closing eyes to see Monica at his side. He heard the hiss of a spray hypo. but felt nothing.

“I wanted to do more,” he said to her. He knew she would understand.

She smiled at him. Her smile was beautiful. She would make someone very happy someday, he decided, and he tried to tell her so. Then he realized that he could not last until they cleared the atmosphere. Darkness rolled up for him like the clouds of Titan, bringing on the night. “The stars,” he said to her. “I wanted to see the stars again.” He could see her lips move as she said something back to him. but he could no longer hear.

Then Zefram Cochrane slowly closed his eyes and waited peacefully for death and history to claim him.

But history wasn’t finished with him yet.

Stardate 3853.2 Earth Standard: Nevember 2267

Kirk, Spock, and McCoy resolved from the transporter beam and set foot once again on Cochrane’s world. Without question, as sensors had indicated, things had changed.

The air, once a pleasant and constant 22oC, was cold. Frost covered the ground. Wispy clouds stretched like a web across the sky, dark now, almost as if it were dusk, though the planetoid’s sun was directly above at local high noon.

Kirk could guess what had happened, but he waited for Spock to confirm it with tricorder readings.

“Gravity is at eighty-two percent of what it was six months ago,” Spock announced, reading from the device’s tiny screen.

“Resulting in loss of atmosphere,” Kirk stated, not surprised.

“And heat,” Spock added. The energy once held by the dense air of the planetold had evaporated into space with the atmosphere.

“Any indication of what caused the change?” Kirk asked.

Spock moved the tricorder in an arc about them, watching it intently. “The tricorder detects no underlying cause.” “What about you, Spock? Any theories?” Spock looked’at McCoy. “Doctor, have you detected any life signs?”

McCoy studied the screen of his own medical tricorder, which Spook had adjusted so it would pick up life signs from the Companion as well. But the doctor shook his head. “Nothing, Mr.

Spock. No sign of Cochrane or the Companion.” Mr. Scott had beamed them down to the precise location where the Grdi/co shuttlecraft had been brought to a landing when the Companion had controlled it. Admiral Kabreigny had remained on the L’mcrprise, though she had approved the landing site as a reasonable place to begin an investigation. But Kirk knew something the admiral did not, that around the ridge to the west, Cochrane’s small shelter waited. He didn’t want to think what they’d find there. Especially given what Spock had uncovered about Cochrane’s final days on Centauri B II.

“Could it have been a symbiotic relationship between the Companion and this place?” Kirk asked as he reached for his communicator.

“Intriguing,” Spock said. “And possible.” The Companion had told them she was unable to leave the planetold for more than a tiny march of days, that she drew her life from this place. Perhaps the planetoid’s unusual gravity and climate had also been the result of the Companion’s presence as well, as if conditions here could no longer exist without her, as if life and habitat were one. So much about that type of energy-based creature was unknown.

Kirk flipped open his communicator. “Kirk to Enterprise.” “Kabreigny here.” Kirk frowned at that response, thankful that Starfleet consistently rejected requests to include standard optical sensors on communicators. He didn’t want to see her sitting in his chair on the bridge, and he certainly didn’t want her to see his expression as the spoke with her. “We’re at the Ga/i/eo landing site,” Kirk reported. “No energy readings of any kind.” But Kabreigny wasn’t going to give up easily. “What about the wreckage that sensors are showing about a kilometer to the west?”
he asked.

Kirk had known the admiral would see the sensor readings of Cochrane’s shelter, and so had prepared her for them by stating that they had previously discovered the crash site of an antique ship, apparently drawn off course the same way the shuttlecraft had been. For Kabreigny, the presence of the wreck was further indication that Kirk should have noted there was a chance that a permanent navigational hazard existed. But Kirk knew that if he had done so. within a year Starfleet would have dispatched a mapping and survey expedition to the area to determine the extent of the hazard, and they would inevitably have discovered Cochrane.