Ex Machina Read online

  So really, did he need McCoy’s guidance that badly now? With Spock back at his side, with a ship’s deck beneath his feet once more, was he ready to carry on without a certain old country doctor who grew more restless each day he spent away from said old country?

  McCoy was just about to drift off to sleep when the intercom whistled. He flailed around for the bedside switch and somehow managed to hit it. “McCoy.”

  “Dr. McCoy, there’s an incoming message for you,” came a voice he didn’t recognize, presumably whoever was on communications this shift. “It’s not real-time, but it’s marked urgent.”

  “Ohhhh,” he groaned. “Why is it that urgent messages never come at two in the afternoon?” He pulled himself up to where he could see the big viewscreen in the next room through the translucent partition. “Okay, put it through.”

  The rustic painting he’d set as the screen’s default display gave way to a face he’d never expected to see again— the regal, lovely face of a woman he’d married and divorced in a single day. “McCoy,” said Natira. “The People of Lorina need your help.”

  * * *

  “Lorina?” Kirk asked.

  “Daran IV,” McCoy explained, “where the Yonadans settled. It’s the Fabrini word for ‘promise.’ ”

  “Ahh. Of course.” Kirk’s hadn’t remembered the local name for the planet, but he recalled the Yonada incident vividly. It had been just after the Kettaract affair in the Lantaru sector, out on the fringes of explored space. On the way back, the Enterprise had encountered the generation ship Yonada on the outskirts of the Daran system. It had been on a collision course with the fifth planet, home to a sizable civilization—spaceflight-capable, but lacking the means to deflect an asteroid this size. The straightforward mission to redirect Yonada’s course had been complicated by the religious dogma imposed by its ruling computer, the Oracle—and by Dr. McCoy’s diagnosis with a terminal disease. Not to mention by his whirlwind courtship, marriage, and divorce with Yonada’s high priestess, Natira—a set of events Kirk wasn’t familiar with in much detail, since Bones had barely said a word about Natira afterward.

  But now here she was on Bones’ comm screen, looking elegantly disheveled as she sat up in her hospital bed, her mahogany tresses tumbling loose to her waist. “Computer, resume playback,” Kirk said.

  “…I am told you are with the Enterprise again,” Natira continued. She spoke in Standard now, but with the same kind of stilted formality with which the universal translators, in their ineffable wisdom, had rendered her Fabrini speech in their first encounter. “And I would request the help of your shipmates as well. Our world is facing a time of crisis. We are besieged by fanatics who will not let go of the Oracle’s lies, who wish to drag the People back into the darkness of the past. I myself was nearly a victim of their madness, saved only by your courageous colleague, Mr. Lindstrom.” Kirk remembered the hotheaded young sociologist he’d assigned to Beta III after the Landru affair, and was pleased to hear that he was acquitting himself well. “The explosion killed one of my loyal retainers, and would have left me grievously crippled if not for your Federation medicine.

  “But that was merely the first of the attacks. In the days since, more crude explosives have been set off at various state facilities. Over a dozen of the People have been slain by these cravens, and our security forces have been unable to locate them and bring an end to this madness.

  “I need your Starfleet’s aid in quelling this unrest, so that we may continue to bring the People forward into the future promised by the Creators.” Apparently her injury hadn’t impaired her capacity for oratory. Even in a sickbed, she stood on a dais. “And I wish your ministrations as I convalesce, McCoy. Not only as the finest physician ever to grace the World, but as… an old and dear friend, to comfort me in this time of hardsh—”

  “Viewer off,” McCoy interrupted. “Trust me, that’s all the important stuff. Except for some data files about the unrest.”

  “Let me take a look.”

  McCoy yielded the console to Kirk, but said, “Won’t make any difference. You’ve already made up your mind to go, haven’t you?”

  “What makes you say that?” Kirk asked.

  “Don’t give me that doe-eyed innocent look, you know it never works on me. You’ve been champin’ at the bit for some action.”

  “Bones, Daran IV is a Federation ally requesting our help, and there aren’t any other starships that far out. What are you saying, that you don’t want to help Natira?”

  “No, of course not, Jim. You know me, I can’t turn my back on a lady in distress. It’s just… well, this particular lady…”

  “As I recall,” Kirk said with a rakish grin, “you and this particular lady hit it off with spectacular ease.”

  “Well, that was…” McCoy wandered over to the cabinet and withdrew a bottle. “You want a drink?”

  “No, thanks, I’m on duty. I thought you were trying to cut down, for your health.”

  “I said a drink. No harm in just the one.” He poured. “Well, the second one.”

  “Bones—”

  “All right, all right. Don’t rush me.” He took a seat. “When I met Natira, I thought I was dying. I was… numb, I was in shock. All I saw ahead of me was bleakness. And then this gorgeous, classy lady I barely know starts goin’ on about wantin’ to spend her life with me. It was… She was offering me a future when I thought I didn’t have one. It gave me something to look forward to in the time I had left. I guess I was looking for comfort. And frankly, Jim, I didn’t see what I had to lose. Nothing mattered to me anymore. I was already a goner.”

  “So you didn’t love her.”

  “Jim, I was hardly feelin’ anything right then. Like I said, I was just looking for what comfort I could find.” He sighed, took a sip from his glass. “But then that blasted Oracle tried to fry my frontal lobe, and as soon as I woke up I was askin’ myself what the hell I’d gotten myself into. I mean, nothing against Natira, but I must’ve been out of my mind to agree to live in that kind of a police state, get a death trigger stuck in my skull so I couldn’t have any unpopular thoughts.” He chuckled. “Can you imagine? Me, only thinkin’ what’s popular to think?”

  Kirk joined in his laughter. “You wouldn’t last a day. In fact, you didn’t.”

  “Yeah… and then I realized what a fool I’d made of myself. I knew I couldn’t stay in that place. I offered to take Natira with me to the Enterprise, but she wouldn’t go, decided she had to help her people now that she knew the truth about Yonada. I made some stupidly noble offer to stay with her, but she saw that I couldn’t stay.” He shook his head. “Soon as she offered me an out, I seized it—spouted some cock-and-bull story about this noble quest I had to go on to find a cure for others like me. Then Spock comes in from the next room with the cure right there in his tricorder.” He gulped back the rest of the drink. Kirk watched with concern, but the doctor didn’t reach for the bottle again. “I no longer had an excuse not to stay, but I left anyway. I didn’t even have the guts to say good-bye to her face.”

  Kirk studied his friend. “I wondered why you never took me up on my offer to go back there once they made planet-fall.”

  “Well, that was a busy time for me. We’d just gotten through the Dramian plague, then Spock came down with choriocytosis…. But yeah, I was just as happy not to press the issue.”

  “Even though you obviously remembered the date.”

  McCoy blushed. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “But you did go back to Daran IV eventually.”

  “Yeah, after I resigned… there was this big medical mission organized to go there and study their ancient medicine, find more miracle cures. I couldn’t come up with a good excuse not to come along, especially since I’d had the bad sense to make myself the Federation’s leadin’ expert on the stuff.” He scoffed. “Though mainly by default.

  “So all the way out there, I was scared as a long-tailed cat in a room full o’ rocking chairs, dreading what�
�d happen when I saw Natira again. Turned out she was so busy gettin’ the new settlement set up, writin’ a constitution and so on, that she barely had any time for me. Don’t get me wrong, Jim—I could see in her eyes, she still had feelings for me. But she couldn’t spare a moment to pursue ’em. And I was just fine with that.

  “I wasted no time gettin’ as busy as I could myself, spending all my time out with the common people while Natira was walkin’ the halls of power. Learning about their folk remedies, watchin’ how they dealt with sickness and injuries. I helped out with the farming and building, too.” He smiled. “I grew to like it. That’s why I retired to the mountains when I came back to Earth. That and…” His smile faded. “Well, to be honest, Natira had been findin’ a bit more spare time, and had started to press me. I made some excuse about needing to go back to Earth, and… well, I guess you can go ahead and paint a yellow stripe down my back. I was hiding from a woman.”

  “Come on, Bones,” Kirk said. “You wouldn’t go to those lengths just to avoid one woman. I mean, you were already three hundred light-years away, what difference did it make whether you were in the Appalachians or San Francisco?”

  “Well, I guess it was more that… I just wanted to retreat. From space, from people, from relationships. I just wanted a simpler life. Nobody makin’ any demands on me.” He glared. “And I had it, too, till you came and dragged me back into the life. And now look where it’s got me. Two weeks back in civilization, and Natira’s found me again. And did you see that look in her eyes? She’s still smitten. And now…” He poured himself another drink. “Now I’m gonna have to go back there and look that poor woman in the eyes, and tell her that I never loved her. That I just used her to give myself some comfort. That everything I told her was a lie.” A convulsive movement, and the glass was empty again. “Jim, that woman worships truth above all else. She’s going to hate my living guts. And I’m gonna deserve it.”

  Kirk rose and took the bottle before McCoy could reach for it again. “Bones, has anyone ever told you you’re a melancholy drunk?”

  “Bull. I’m melancholy enough when I’m sober. I’m a charming drunk.”

  “No, you just think you are,” he teased. Taking McCoy by the shoulders, he addressed him seriously. “And you’re being too hard on yourself. Like you said, you were a wreck. Confused. You weren’t yourself, and you messed up. Natira’s a grown woman, a smart one. She can understand that. But the more you try to run from the truth, the more you have to compound the lie, and the worse it gets. It’s not the crime that gets you, it’s the cover-up.”

  McCoy’s vivid blue eyes met his, their focus still relatively undulled. “So you’re tellin’ me I should just go there and face her and admit I never loved her.”

  “That’s right.”

  The doctor glowered. “And why exactly did I agree to trust in your leadership again?”

  “Haven’t you heard?” Kirk said archly. “I’m a galactic hero!”

  Bones snorted. “Until the next flavor of the month comes along.”

  * * *

  As Kirk entered main engineering, his eyes were inexorably drawn (as always) to the tall intermix shaft which ran nearly the height of the ship, the light of the matter-antimatter reactions within it swirling and churning throughout its length, and through the equally long horizontal shaft that ran back to the warp engines. He couldn’t get over how fragile the narrow, glassy shafts appeared.

  Then, once Chief Sternbach had pointed out Mr. Scott’s location, about halfway back along the horizontal shaft, Kirk began to see the truth behind the illusion. Scotty crouched beside one of the cylindrical modules that made up the shaft, which had been pulled out and now rested on a maintenance dolly. In cross section, Kirk could see how thick the walls of the module actually were, with the dilithium swirl chamber just a narrow tube at the center of several solid, concentric layers of shielding and constrictor coils. He really shouldn’t have been surprised; of course the light that got out through the walls could only be a tiny fraction of the searing radiation emitted by total matter-antimatter annihilation. And of course in a narrower shaft, the particles and antiparticles had less space to miss each other in, so the reaction was more efficient. Still, the illusion was hard to overcome.

  At the moment, Scotty was peering intently down the swirl chamber, his back to Kirk. Chief Theresa Ross, a lissome blonde in a white jumpsuit, crouched beside him in a pose that Kirk took a moment to appreciate. “It’s a microscopic impurity, sir,” the chief said. “You don’t really expect to see it, do you? Or is this some sort of ‘communing with the engines’ thing?” There was no sarcasm in her voice, just curiosity.

  Scott chuckled. “No, lass, it’s just me bein’ silly, that’s all. And I already told you, call me Scotty. We’re all engineers here, no need to stand on rank.”

  “Present company excepted, I trust,” Kirk spoke up.

  “Captain Kirk, sir!” Scott said, rising from where he had been crouched.

  “At ease,” Kirk smiled. But Scott just stood there expectantly, looking eager to get back to work. “Is there something wrong with this unit, Scotty? I thought you said your repairs were almost complete.”

  “Aye, that I did, sir, but then Ross here picked up a trace impurity in the dilithium matrix. Probably got laid down in the vapor-deposition process. There are still a few bugs to be worked out in that.”

  Kirk peered more closely at the central shaft and caught Ross giving him a wry look. He straightened and asked, “Could it pose a danger to the ship?”

  “It’s more a question of efficiency, sir,” Ross explained. “There could be a slight dropoff in performance above warp 7.”

  “Above warp 7. I see.” He looked over the partly disassembled engine shaft again. “Did that really warrant taking the engine apart?”

  “Not to worry, sir,” Scott said in a businesslike tone. “Nicholson and Longbotham are bringing up a spare now.”

  “And how long will it take to get the engines back online?”

  Scott pondered. “Well… to get the spare module installed and align its magnetic field, no more than another two hours. But then we’d need to run some performance tests to make sure. And I’d like to test all the other modules for impurities.”

  “I’m afraid we don’t have time for that, Scotty. We have a mission. I need these engines powered up and ready for a trip to the Daran system at best speed.”

  “The Daran system?” Scott echoed with concern. “But…that’s a very long voyage, Captain. A couple of weeks, at least. It’s longer than we’ve run these engines for yet. Plus, it’s on the edge of the Lantaru sector. They’re still chartin’ the subspace ripples from that… natural disaster,” he finished, remembering to gloss over the classified details for Ross’s benefit. “There might be unexpected interactions, ye never can tell.”

  “Scotty, there are lives at stake on Daran IV and there aren’t any other starships out there.”

  Scott sighed. “Of course not. There never are, are there? Sir.”

  His tone made Kirk frown. “Is there a problem, Mr. Scott?”

  “No, sir. I have no doubt this ship can handle anything you throw at her.”

  Kirk was tempted to demand an explanation for that… though he supposed he didn’t need one. The ship’s hasty launch had led to two serious accidents—a transporter malfunction that had killed two good people (including one who had once been dear to Kirk) and a wormhole imbalance that could have destroyed the whole ship. Ever since then, Scott had become obsessive about testing and retesting every system on the ship, extending his estimates of the necessary shakedown time before the vessel could be declared truly ready. And the more Kirk pressed him, the more distant and coldly professional he became. He’d been treating Kirk like a stranger, avoiding him as much as his duties would allow. No doubt he blamed the captain for pushing too hard. And Kirk couldn’t really find it in himself to argue otherwise.

  “Very well,” he ended up saying. “How soon
can you have the engines up and running?”

  “Two hours, sir.”

  Kirk studied him a moment longer, then nodded formally. “Thank you, Engineer. We’ll be shipping out at 1800.” Then he headed back the way he’d come, his steps echoing bleakly through the long, cavernous tunnel.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Two and a half years as Chief of Starfleet Operations may have made me a little stale, Mr. Scott—but I wouldn’t exactly consider myself “untried.”

  —James T. Kirk

  LIEUTENANT PAVEL CHEKOV sat at the bridge tactical station, trying not to look bored.

  There wasn’t really that much to do at tactical while the ship was in dock. He couldn’t schedule any more security drills without disrupting departure preparations. And he’d already thoroughly confirmed the ship’s secure and ready status during the previous five tedious hours of his shift.

  In the past, he could have just turned to his left to chat with Hikaru Sulu, back when they’d shared the helm/nav console. But now Chekov was stuck out here on the outer rim of the bridge. True, he wasn’t exactly out of Sulu’s earshot, but there was a greater psychological distance. And Sulu was currently holding down the command chair anyway. Even when he wasn’t, he spent much of his time chatting with the new navigator, Marcella DiFalco, with whom he’d been hitting it off splendidly. Apparently they’d both traveled around space extensively while growing up, giving them many common experiences and interests. Chekov’s friendship with Sulu had always been defined more by contrasts, as Hikaru the Renaissance man had tried to broaden Chekov’s horizons, while Pavel had clung more and more assertively to his conviction that nothing the rest of the universe had to offer quite compared with the beauty of Mother Russia and her culture.