The Rings Of Tautee Read online

  Chapter Eleven

  THE ENTERPRISE SWUNG out of the debris field left from the breakup of the fifth planet and its moon. Kirk let his grip on his chair relax slightly. Taking a starship twisting and weaving in through a thousand floating mountains, all moving in different directions at different speeds, was not his idea of excitement.

  However, he couldn’t contain his elation. They had rescued the survivors. Scotty had pulled them from their asteroid tomb, and they would be able to go on with their lives.

  Very different lives from the ones they had before, but lives just the same.

  Still, he couldn’t let the elation overtake him. The Enterprise wasn’t out of this mess yet.

  The slowly forming rings surrounding the Tautee sun stretched out on the viewscreen. Kirk felt like he was staring out over the top of a desert wasteland. Such devastation, and it had happened so quickly.

  “Take us back to the Farragut’s position, Mister Sulu. As quickly as you safely can.”

  “Aye, sir.” The strain of manually maneuvering around the huge asteroids had formed tiny exhaustion lines around Sulu’s eyes. Still, his concentration never seemed to waver. At moments like this Kirk was very proud of his crew.

  “Both Klingon vessels are still following us,” Chekov said, almost sneering in disgust.

  “Let them,” Kirk said. The Klingon shadows annoyed him, too. “As long as they stay out of the way.”

  “Captain?” Spock said. He had an odd note in his voice.

  Kirk glanced at him. Spock never showed elation—he rarely showed any emotion at all—but Kirk had learned to read the subtle nuances in Spock’s inflections.

  Kirk didn’t like the sound of this one.

  He swiveled his chair to make sure he could see his science officer clearly. For a moment he almost thought he saw a troubled expression on Spock’s face, then dismissed the idea. Spock looked as impassive as always.

  “I have been scanning a few of the larger asteroids in the rings created after the breakup of the four inhabited planets.”

  “Looking for survivors,” Kirk said, feeling an odd fluttering sensation in his stomach. He wanted to find more survivors, wanted the destruction to be less serious than it seemed.

  But he also knew that the Enterprise and the Farragut had serious limitations in the rescue effort, and if more survivors were out there, they would need to be pulled off those asteroids immediately.

  “I have found six other possible pockets of survivors,” Spock said. “The survivors would seem to be in underground bunkers on larger asteroids. Based on these observations, I believe there may be as many as a dozen more bunkers and cavities filled with survivors among the asteroids.”

  A dozen more. They had rescued almost one hundred people off this one. The Enterprise barely had room for them.

  Kirk pushed himself out of his chair, and hurried toward the science station. He leaned over the console, but saw no numbers. As usual, Spock had done the calculations in his head.

  “Are you sure?” Kirk asked.

  Spock’s long face suddenly seemed even longer. He raised one eyebrow as if he couldn’t believe that the captain had questioned him.

  “Absolutely, Captain,” Spock said.

  “But at these distances, Mister Spock, how can you get accurate readings?” Chekov asked the question from his post near the screen.

  Uhura was watching them.

  Sulu had his head cocked, so that he could keep an eye on his work while monitoring the conversation.

  They all understood the risks behind finding new survivors.

  “At these distances,” Spock said, in his slow, pedantic, I-cannot-believe-anyone-would-ask-this-question voice, “and with these subspace disturbances, I cannot get actual readings of humanoid forms.”

  “Oh,” Kirk said.

  Spock glanced around, and when no one else said a word, he continued. “However, I have searched the asteroids for such places as the bunker we just found, places that would hold atmosphere, and would sustain life since the planets’ breakup. We must also calculate the incalculable factors as well. We found a moon base. I am looking at the planets only. We must assume there are other moon bases, and perhaps even a spaceship or two which survived unscathed. We—”

  “How many survivors?” Kirk asked. He had grown tired of the explanation. He wanted to know what was before him. He wanted to know what decisions he faced next.

  “I cannot give you a precise figure,” Spock said.

  Kirk groaned.

  Spock pressed on. “There are too many variables. But the survivors of this incident may number in the thousands, possibly more.”

  “The thousands, possibly more.” Kirk said, repeating Spock’s words, not believing his ears.

  He took a step backward. His stomach ached, and his mind swirled.

  “Thousands?”

  “Yes, Captain,” Spock said. “Thousands.”

  Kirk staggered to his chair, and sat down. Between the Farragut and the Enterprise, they might be able to rescue five hundred.

  But thousands were not possible without help.

  A lot of help.

  “Captain,” Spock said. “Time is of the essence. With every subspace wave, the threat to these survivors grows.”

  “I know, Spock.” Kirk took a deep breath. The main screen displayed the Farragut and four Klingon cruisers. Even if the Klingons deigned to help them, there wouldn’t be enough room on the ships for thousands of survivors. The Federation had to send more ships.

  But he didn’t know if they would.

  The Prime Directive. Admiral Hoffman’s warning came back clearly to his mind.

  Rescuing a few hundred survivors of a subwarp culture was one thing, but rescuing thousands and thousands would, through an odd twist of fate, violate the Prime Directive.

  The Prime Directive stated that cultures had to live without interference from more advanced peoples. That allowed the cultures to develop at their own pace. Part of that development for many cultures, including Earth’s, meant flirting with their own destruction. Famine, flood, and war threatened each culture at various times. It was natural.

  The Federation could save the remaining hundred or so of a race because the culture was effectively dead. But to beam up thousands meant that this pre-warp culture would continue and suddenly learn about the existence of starships and warp drive and humans and Vulcans and Klingons.

  Saving thousands meant violating the Prime Directive.

  It meant a direct involvement in lives that should have no involvement at all.

  The Federation had discovered the hard way that it was better to let the race suffer through its own natural existence—whatever that might be—than to interfere.

  But in this case, the “natural existence” meant certain death for thousands.

  He couldn’t let thousands die.

  But he didn’t really have a choice. His orders were that he had to.

  Chapter Twelve

  BRUISES, CUTS, BROKEN BONES.

  And filth.

  McCoy hadn’t seen that much filth since he went back in time to old Earth. Although these people couldn’t be blamed for the dirt. They had lived for weeks in a crisis situation.

  McCoy was working in the cargo decks. The hundred survivors fit better in here than they did in sickbay. Security was carrying the worst of the wounded—those with shattered limbs, gangrenous infections—to sickbay, where Nurse Chapel would sedate them until McCoy could get there.

  Fortunately he had found no internal injuries yet. And even more fortunately, Scotty’s golf contraption was disassembled. Instead of fake green grass and mist off the sea, the deck had been transformed into a makeshift hospital and refugee area full of beds, blankets, and wounded.

  Tauteeans leaned against walls, and lay, eyes closed, on beds. A few sat on chairs, their short legs unable to reach the ground. They didn’t look like children, though. They looked like shrunken humans.

  But they weren’t
human.

  Tauteeans were a thin-boned, almost birdlike people. He doubted that the heaviest of them weighed more than a normal ten-year-old child. The men were no more than five feet tall, and the women were shorter than that. But they had a compelling attractiveness that had something to do with their frailty, and with their delicate bodies. Something that made McCoy want to protect them.

  Maybe it was the sense of despair around them.

  McCoy had been on rescue missions before, and the survivors always celebrated when they were lifted away from certain death. Then, days—sometimes months—later, they felt survivors’ guilt. But these people seemed to be feeling it already. Even the ones who weren’t seriously wounded closed their eyes and didn’t speak much to those around them.

  The silence in the bays was unnerving. His voice, blended with that of his current patient, would bounce against the high ceiling, sending mocking echoes throughout.

  No one looked, no one watched, not even to see if a colleague was all right. Not even after a subspace wave hit, and they all clutched the nearest post, the nearest wall, for balance.

  McCoy would have to monitor all of his patients carefully. Despair this deep made a shallow cut deadly; he had learned long ago that people who wished to die often could force their bodies to cease functioning properly.

  In fact, he was more worried about their mental conditions than their physical ones. The loss of a house, a dwelling, a plot of land, was bad enough. The loss of a country was devastating. The loss of a planet, and the destruction of a solar system, was beyond his comprehension.

  Not only was the beloved dwelling gone, but so were the land that it rested on and the air that surrounded it. He hadn’t returned to his family home, his Earth, in a long time, but if he received news that Earth and her sister planets were gone—well, the thought made his breath catch in his throat.

  McCoy was working on a man who had cuts all over his hands and arms. One long gash ran down the side of his cheek, and bumps rose from his forehead as if he had been hit with a dozen rocks. The cuts were dirty but not yet infected. McCoy shot the man full of antibiotics and gingerly picked up the man’s left hand. McCoy was leery of these fine bones. If he gripped them too hard, he felt he would shatter them with his simple touch.

  The man had moaned once, when McCoy touched a particularly deep slash in the upper arm, and then had said nothing else. His breathing sounded loud in the cargo bay’s stillness.

  Then McCoy heard a chair clang. He glanced to his left, past the rows of barrels that Scotty kept for some unknown purpose, and watched a slender dark-haired woman move from person to person. She touched each Tauteean she passed, and spoke softly. They smiled in response. Sad smiles, but smiles nonetheless.

  The woman moved with both leadership and apology, as if she were accepting responsibility for everything. McCoy had seen Jim Kirk do the same in difficult situations. The leadership seemed to give the others strength, and the apology was an acknowledgment of their pain.

  McCoy smiled to himself and went back to his work. Her low voice soothed even him. Her touch with these people would probably help them more than McCoy could.

  He had finished with the man’s arms and had just reached for the long gash when he felt a presence beside him. McCoy looked down. The woman was running her fingers over the man’s healed skin.

  “Be careful,” McCoy said. “It’ll still be a bit tender.”

  She looked up at him, her dark eyes intense and shadowed at the same time. “It looks healed,” she said. Her voice was rich, deep, and musical.

  “It is,” McCoy said. “But the memory of the pain remains for about an hour.”

  A man came up behind her. He was as tall as she was. He put a hand possessively on her shoulder. She didn’t shrug him off, but she didn’t acknowledge him either. The man didn’t seem to mind.

  She watched for another minute, then seemed to gather herself. She obviously hadn’t come to talk about the wounded. She had come for something else.

  McCoy finished cleaning the gash, then pinched its edges together and mended the skin. The other man gasped—obviously this technology was beyond them—but the woman didn’t. She waited until McCoy was finished.

  He glanced down at her, and she lifted her chin, clearly ready to ask her question.

  “I would like to speak to your …” The woman hesitated for a moment before finding the right word. “… captain. Is there some way you can help me do this?”

  Suddenly the ship rocked and shuddered as another subspace wave crashed into it. The room seemed to rumble, and people fought to keep their feet. McCoy spread his feet and managed to remain standing over his patient out of almost sheer will. The woman in front of him also remained standing, while the man following her was knocked to the deck. Screams and cries resounded against the walls as wounds were reopened, and people fell.

  McCoy also sensed an undercurrent of deep fear. These people were afraid the subspace waves would kill them. They had a right to be afraid.

  And all reacted accordingly. All except this alien woman beside him. She withstood the shuddering and shaking of the deck as if it were only a passing annoyance and not important in the scheme of things.

  Almost as quickly as it hit, the shuddering passed. The cries stopped, and the silence returned. The woman was still looking at him as if they hadn’t been interrupted.

  McCoy cleared his throat. “The captain is pretty busy at the moment, as you might guess. I can take you to him later when things are calmer.”

  “I think your captain will want to see me,” the woman said. “I am the leader of these people. I also have information that might be helpful about the shock waves.”

  McCoy nodded and glanced around. This room was under control. The survivors in the other cargo bay weren’t as badly injured as the folks here. He needed to go to sickbay, to mend the broken bones and work on the serious infections, but he could take a detour to the bridge. It wouldn’t take long, and it might turn out interesting.

  “All right,” he said. “I’m sure the captain would appreciate the help. I’ll take you to him.” He put out his hand. “I’m Dr. Leonard McCoy.”

  The woman hesitated for a moment, then put her surprisingly small hand in his, like a queen at a Regency ball. “Prescott,” she said, and, indicating the man behind her, added, “This is Folle.”

  McCoy nodded at her companion, and resisted the urge to bow over her hand like a courtly gentleman. Her strength attracted him, but her fragility and sense of loss made him protective. The man watched him warily.

  McCoy reluctantly released her hand.

  She was studying his face with puzzlement.

  “Have I done something to offend you?” he asked, suddenly worried that touching hands might have a different significance in her culture than it did in his.

  She shook her head. “Dr. Leonard McCoy, why do you have three names?”

  McCoy opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again. Why did he have three names? He suddenly couldn’t think of a good answer.

  She watched him with a seriousness that made him feel as if his life depended on his answer.

  Finally he just laughed and said, “My people have never been known for doing anything the easy way.”

  Her puzzled frown kept him chuckling to himself all the way to the turbolift.

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE BRIDGE OF THE Enterprise was as silent as a tomb.

  It felt as if time had stopped.

  Uhura held a hand over her communications console.

  Sulu was still watching the screen, but his head was tilted oddly as if he were trying to see the captain out of the corner of his eye.

  Chekov was watching him, eyes wide.

  The three other ensigns on the bridge had swiveled their chairs so that they could see the captain.

  And Spock was studying him as if he were a particularly interesting—and possibly dangerous—extraterrestrial bug.

  Kirk was used to the sc
rutiny, and he appreciated the silence. He had to decide whether or not to rescue the remaining survivors of the Tautee disaster—and how.

  Spock said there might be thousands.

  Thousands were more than the Enterprise and Farragut could handle. And with that many survivors of a pre-warp culture, a rescue attempt would be violating the Prime Directive, and the Federation would no doubt order him to back off if he asked for more help.

  But there had to be a way around the rules. He had beaten the Kobayashi Maru and he could beat this.

  On the main screen in front of him the four Klingon cruisers hung. They seemed to be just waiting also. But why and for what, Kirk had no idea.

  Maybe the Klingons were the key to solving the survivors’ problem. Kirk swiveled around to face his science officer. “Spock, any theory as to what caused this destruction?”

  Spock raised an eyebrow as if that were not what he expected the captain to ask. “I have no concrete theory yet, Captain. I do not know what caused the destruction. It may have been caused by the Tauteeans. It may have been a natural disaster of a type we have not seen before. I just do not know, and at this moment I am unwilling to speculate.”

  “You could have just said no,” Kirk muttered.

  Spock swiveled, and glanced into his scope.

  Kirk steepled his fingers. Thousands of lives rested on this next decision.

  Of course, his old colleague and nemesis, Admiral William Banning, would have said that Kirk did not trust the process well enough. The Federation’s guidelines were simple: A pre-warp culture had to develop naturally. If a natural disaster wiped it out, then that was part of “naturally.” If a natural disaster hit, and only a few survived, they needed the opportunity to save themselves without help.

  But Kirk wasn’t convinced this disaster was natural. And the Federation had no real guidelines for what to do with the pre-warp survivors of an attack by a more advanced race.

  “Captain,” Spock said, his voice calm as always. “Another subspace wave shall hit us in ten seconds.”