Star Trek: The Original Series: The Shocks of Adversity (28 page)

“On speaker,” Kirk ordered.

Uhura complied, and Laspas’s voice filled the bridge.
“Nalaing! This is the Goeg Domain Defense Corps Starvessel Class III/
814
. It has been long suspected that the leadership of the terrorist organization Taarpi
has been given refuge and material support on your world. We now have evidence proving
the native government of Nalaing has been knowingly sheltering these enemies. . . .”

“Evidence they probably tortured out of that poor woman,” McCoy said angrily.

Kirk was inclined to believe that, just as he was inclined to disbelieve whatever
“evidence” Ghalif might have surrendered. “Hail them, Uhura,” he said, as Laspas paused
in his broadcast.

Uhura had already turned back and started manipulating her console. “Starvessel
814
, this is the
U.S.S. Enter—”
she said, before a loud crackling blast of static sounded over the comm. Uhura winced
in pain as she quickly yanked the remote receiver out of her ear.

“What was that?” Kirk asked. “What happened?”

“That,” Spock answered from the science station, “was the detonation of a photon weapon,
in high orbit above Nalaing.”

“This was a demonstration of the power that will be brought to bear should the native
government refuse to surrender the Taarpi criminals,”
Laspas then continued,
“and those who have acted to shield them from justice, to us immediately.”

“Damn!” McCoy said. “Did he just threaten to use a photon torpedo on a populated planet?”

“Open a channel!” Kirk told Uhura, grabbing the back of her chair and leaning over
her station. Once he saw that she had established a connection to the other ship,
he shouted, “Laspas! Commander Laspas, this is James Kirk. Respond!”

“They are receiving, sir,” Uhura told him after several seconds without a response.

Kirk leaned in even closer to the audio pickup on Uhura’s console. “Laspas, hold your
fire! You can’t detonate a photon torpedo inside a planetary atmosphere! If you do,
you will kill every living thing on that planet!”

Kirk and Uhura both watched the controls that would indicate a hail being received.
After what seemed like an interminable pause, it finally illuminated. Uhura punched
the control, and Kirk turned to the image of the
814
command center that now filled the main viewscreen. Laspas and Satrav stood front
and center. Just behind Laspas, Kirk noticed Chief N’Mi looking on, her expression
serious and agitated. “Laspas!” Kirk said, marching to the front of the bridge.

But the Goeg commander was pointedly not looking at the captain. Rather, he looked
past him, toward the starboard side of the bridge.
“Mister Spock,”
he said,
“Chief N’Mi informs me that you Vulcans do not lie. Is this so?”

Spock stood up from his seat and answered, “Yes, Commander.”

“And what Kirk just said about using photon weapons on a planet’s surface? Was that
true?”

Spock looked almost as surprised to be called upon as the arbiter of scientific truth
as Kirk felt. “Yes, it is,” he told Laspas. “Unlike the strikes you have previously
witnessed, against a relatively small ship in the vacuum of space, a photonic detonation
inside the matter-rich environment of a planetary atmosphere would result in an uncontrolled
matter/antimatter chain reaction—”

“Of course he’s going to support his superior’s claims,”
Satrav interrupted.
“How can we believe that a man who says, ‘I am not lying,’ is not a liar?”

“Because he is saying the same thing I told—”

“Chief!”
Laspas snapped irritably at N’Mi. The Liruq engineer dropped her chin to her chest
and fell silent, though from the way her jaw and neck muscles tensed, it was taking
a significant effort on her part to keep her tongue still. Laspas, however, noticed
none of this as he turned away from her and back to Kirk.
“Why tell us this now?”
he asked.
“This seems like the kind of information you should have shared when you offered these
weapons to us.”

Kirk was sure that the universal translator had suddenly malfunctioned, and turned,
mouth agape, toward Uhura. “Those weapons were stolen off my ship,” Kirk said as he
turned back, making sure he spoke each individual word as clearly as possible. “They
were never offered.”

Then it was Laspas who looked to have been shocked by what he was hearing. But before
he could say anything, Satrav snarled,
“This is outrageous! Now you regret the deal you struck with Fallag to ensure the
repair of your ship, and so you make this accusation against us to try and save your
Taarpi confederates!”

Laspas looked from Kirk to his executive officer, the expression of shock on his face
shifting as it slowly dawned on him that it hadn’t been the Federation strangers who
were lying to him. Before he could express his thoughts aloud, the voice of an unseen
third party joined in.

“Defense Corps Starvessel: this is highly unusual. Nalaingers have long been partners
to our Domain allies, and have always done all, within reason, to cooperate with you.
We would be willing, as always, to enter into negotiations to consider your grievances
and—”

“Code 8-9!”
Satrav called out to his communications technician, and the voice of the Nalaing
spokesperson was cut off midsentence. The second commander pointed then to another
of the crew members arrayed behind him.
“Weapons! Standby code 3-1.”

“Bozhe moi,”
Chekov said. “There are seven billion people on that planet!”

“Commander Laspas,” Kirk shouted, drawing the Goeg’s attention back to him. “You remember
the conversation we had after the first time you used our photon torpedoes against
the Taarpi. Surely you must realize that I never would have agreed to just hand those
weapons over.”

“How we got them is irrelevant,”
Satrav sneered at Kirk, and then turned to Laspas, meeting his look of disillusion
and disappointment with defiance.
“We have the means to eradicate the Taarpi now.”

“Along with all seven billion sentient beings on that planet,” Kirk reminded him,
“the vast majority of whom have absolutely nothing to do with the Taarpi! Laspas,
whatever disputes we have, whatever the differences between us, I know what we
share is the importance we place on what we do, the decisions we make. We agonize
over our choices before we act, and long after. Think about what you’re about to do,
and about how you’re going to live with it for the rest of your life.”

Laspas stared at Kirk, his expression unreadable. Then he turned away, and called
out to his crew,
“Weapons, counter code 3-1. Communications, code 8-11.”

The muscles all up and down Kirk’s back and neck released their tension at once. Behind
him, he thought he heard more than one sigh of relief. He turned to Uhura to confirm
that code 8-11 was an order to reestablish communications with the Nalaingers on the
planet.

“Commander Laspas, code 10!”

On hearing Satrav give the order relieving Laspas of duty, Kirk turned back to the
viewer to see the second commander now holding a handheld weapon on his superior.
“Satrav,”
Laspas growled in disbelief,
“what do you think—”

“You’ve let yourself be swayed by these . . . aliens,”
Satrav told him.
“I have no other choice. Code 10, Commander.”

Laspas clenched and unclenched his fist as he stared daggers at his mutinous executive
officer.
“All this time we’ve served together, Satrav, I never would have thought you capable
of something like this.”

“I cannot allow a compromised leader to continue
to lead. We have our orders, and we will carry them out.”

As the confrontation played out on the viewscreen, Kirk felt the shift in the vibration
of the deck under his feet and the telltale signals that the ship was dropping out
of warp. He leaned over Sulu’s station to take a quick look at the readout. They had
finally reached the Nalaing system and were on approach to the planet at full impulse.
“Sulu,” he said in a rushed whisper, “once we reach orbit, put us between them and
the planet, and raise shields.” Sulu nodded quickly and initiated the maneuver.

But they were too late.
“Code 3-1,”
Satrav ordered his weapons officer.

“Don’t!”
said another voice, and when Kirk turned back to the viewer, he saw Chief N’Mi at
the weapons station, grabbing the wrist of the Rokean stationed there. The weapons
officer looked from her to the two opposing Goeg, at a complete loss as to what to
do and whose orders to follow.

“You are way out of line, Chief,”
Satrav told her, baring his teeth at her while at the same time keeping one eye—and
his weapon—on Laspas. The commander continued to clench and unclench his hands, clearly
frustrated by the powerlessness he was feeling.

“You’re holding a pistol on the vessel commander,”
she shot back fearlessly.
“I’m not the one who’s out of line.”

“Keep your Liruq mouth shut,
pyurb,
unless you—”

Suddenly, the communications link was severed, and the viewscreen switched to an image
of the
814
above Nalaing, growing closer as Sulu brought them into defensive position. Kirk
pivoted toward the communications officer. “Uhura, what happened?”

“I cut them off, sir.” Before Kirk could ask why, she answered, saying, “I believe
Laspas was trying to send us a message, the way he was flexing his fist. He was flashing
three fingers, one finger, then a fist, same pattern repeated.”

Kirk cast his mind back, and realized that, yes, he had noticed the variation in his
hand movements.
3-1. The same code Satrav had issued to the weapons officer: launch weapons
. That couldn’t have been what Laspas was trying to communicate, though. Why would
he order the
Enterprise . . . ?

“Sulu, are we in place yet?” Kirk asked.

The helmsman nodded as he manipulated the impulse drive controls on his board. “Now
positioned directly below the
814
, sir,” he confirmed.

Kirk turned to Chekov and ordered, “Target their main power generators and fire phasers.”

Without hesitation, the ensign powered the phaser banks and announced, “Firing,” as
he launched a salvo against the
814
. On the viewer, phasers shot out from the
Enterprise
emitters and
struck the Domain vessel amidships. A section of new hull plating—one of the hastily
applied patches that covered one of the points where the vessel had been physically
connected to the
Enterprise
—went spinning away, burning a bright streak in the planet’s upper atmosphere.

“The
814
is returning fire,” Spock reported, and in the same instant a small flash of light
blinked from the
814
’s bow.

“Yes!” Kirk exclaimed, drawing curious looks from around the bridge. Their provocation
had momentarily distracted the
814
from the nonthreatening planet below, and triggered an automatic retaliatory response
with the weapon they had at the ready. “All hands, brace for impact,” Kirk ordered,
his eyes glued forward as the stolen photon warhead was returned to them.

The Domain missile flew in a spiraling pattern, no doubt to confuse any attempt at
evasive maneuvers by its target. The
Enterprise
held steady, though, and took the full brunt of its impact and explosion on her forward
shields. The deck rocked under Kirk’s feet, and the bridge lights flickered briefly,
but otherwise, the defensive systems had protected the ship from the worst of it,
and more importantly, had protected the planet below. Kirk let out the breath he was
only dimly aware that he’d been holding.

His relief, it turned out, was premature. “They’re launching another volley!” Chekov
shouted.

“Not more photon weapons?” Kirk asked. As focused as he had been on the two stolen
warheads, he hadn’t stopped to reason that, for a society on the technological level
of the Goeg, it would have been reasonably simple, once they had the advanced weapon
in their possession, to reverse engineer and manufacture their own.

“Negative,” Spock answered. “They are armed with standard cobalt fusion warheads.”

“Oh, what a relief,” Bones cracked from where he stood in the back of the bridge.

“And we are no longer their primary target,” Spock added.

Kirk saw Spock was right: the missile volley was spread in such a way that three of
the four incoming weapons would miss the ship on their way down to the planet. “Phasers,
Mister Chekov. Knock them down before they get past us.” The lower-yield weapons would
not do as much harm to the planet as the photon warheads would, but they could still
obliterate major cities and trigger a nuclear winter—a slow planetary death as opposed
to a quick one.

Phaser beams lanced out from the
Enterprise
. Chekov’s expertise destroyed all three of the warheads intended for Nalaing. The
fourth and last one, though, he could not target in time before it hit the ship’s
defensive screen and exploded. The force of the blast, though a fraction of a typical
photonic detonation, was enough to knock out the closest shield
emitter and trigger a string of failures throughout the ship’s overtaxed systems.
The bridge went dark, and Kirk felt the hold of artificial gravity momentarily slip
before the emergency power kicked in and he could plant his feet back firmly on the
deck. “Report,” he called out as he took his seat again.

“Captain,” Spock was the first to respond, “our shields are gone.”

Kirk did not like the tone of finality he heard in his first officer’s voice. “Gone?”