The Entropy Effect Read online

  “I remember you.”

  “The ship on which I serve was called to take you on board.”

  Spock stopped, for large tears began to flow slowly down Dr. Mordreaux’s cheeks.

  “To take me to prison,” he said. “To rehabilitate me.”

  “What happened, Professor? I find the accusations against you unlikely at best.”

  Mordreaux lay down on the bed again, curling up in fetal position, crying and laughing the strange harsh laugh, both at the same time.

  “Go away,” he said. “Go away and leave me alone, I’ve told you before I only wanted to help people, I only did what they wanted.”

  “Professor,” Spock said, “I have come here to try to help you. Please cooperate with me.”

  “You want to betray me, like everybody else, you want to betray me, and you want me to betray my friends. I won’t, I tell you! Go away!”

  The door slid open and the attendant hurried in. “The doctor’s on the way,” he said. “You’ll have to leave. I told you he wouldn’t be coherent.” He shooed Spock out of the room.

  Spock did not protest, for he could do nothing more here. He left the hospital, carefully considering what the professor had said. It contained little enough information, but what was that about betraying his friends? Could it possibly be true that he had done research on intelligent subjects, and that they had been hurt, or even died? In his madness, could the professor be denying, in his own mind, events that had actually happened? What could he mean, he had only intended to help people?

  Spock had no answers. He would have to wait until Dr. Mordreaux came on board the Enterprise ; he would have to hope the professor became more rational before it was too late.

  The science officer drew out his communicator, then changed his mind about returning to the ship immediately. No logical reason demanded that this trip to Aleph Prime be completely wasted. He put his communicator away again and headed toward another part of the station.

  As Jim Kirk prepared to call the Enterprise , the paging signal went off so unexpectedly that he nearly dropped his communicator.

  “Good timing,” he said to Hunter with a grin. “And they’ve let me alone all afternoon, I’ll give them that.”

  Hunter tensed automatically. Aerfen did not call her, when she was off the ship, except in a serious emergency: virtually everyone in her crew was capable of taking over when she was not there. She had made sure of that, for Aerfen ’s assignments left it exposed to the possibility of stunning casualties at any time. Hunter was always, on some level, aware of that fact, and, by extension, of her own mortality. For the good of her ship, she could not afford to be indispensable. She was secure enough in her ability to command to give all her people more responsibility than was strictly essential, or even strictly allowed. The last time Starfleet called her on the carpet, it was for teaching a new ensign, with talent but without the proper formal training credentials, how to pilot Aerfen in warp drive.

  As a result, Hunter’s communicator seldom signalled for her when she was planetside; hearing Jim’s go off she unconsciously assumed the call was an emergency. He might need help: her reflexes prepared her for action.

  “Kirk here,” he said.

  Hunter remembered the first time they had met.

  He was so spit-and-polish, she thought, and I—I practically still had dust between my toes.

  They had regarded each other with equal disdain.

  “Captain,” said a voice from Jim’s communicator, “I have some equipment for the Enterprise , but your signature is required before I may beam it on board.”

  “What kind of equipment, Mr. Spock?”

  “Bioelectronic, sir.”

  “What for?”

  “To incorporate into the apparatus for the singularity observations.”

  “Oh,” Kirk said. “All right. Where are you?”

  “At the crystal growth station in the zero-g section of Aleph Prime.”

  “You really need me there right now, Spock?”

  “It is quite important, Captain.”

  Jim glanced at Hunter and grimaced. She shrugged, with understanding, and let herself relax again. No emergency.

  “All right, Mr. Spock. I’ll meet you there in a few minutes.” He closed his communicator. “I’m sorry,” he said to Hunter. “Spock worked so hard on those blasted observations, just to have them jerked out from under him. The least I can do is humor him if he wants to put in more equipment.”

  “I understand,” she said. “There’s no problem.”

  “This shouldn’t take me too long ...”

  “Jim, it’s okay,” she said. “I’ll go on up to Aerfen and take care of a couple of things, then beam directly over to the Enterprise .”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll see you there in a little while.”

  She gave him directions for getting to where he was going—Aleph’s volumetric spherical grid pattern was not nearly as straightforward as it sounded; besides, she knew a good shortcut—and watched him walk away across the field.

  Hunter took out her communicator. “Hunter to Aerfen . Please beam me up, Ilya.”

  Waiting for the beam to track her, Hunter thought back over the afternoon. She was glad to see Jim Kirk again, though, as always, a bit surprised that their friendship endured despite their differences, differences that had been obvious from the moment of their acquaintance in the same first-year platoon at the Academy. Jim Kirk was a star student, fitting in with that cosmopolitan home-world flair; Hunter was in trouble even before she arrived, a colonist with proud, prickly, defensive arrogance, who went by a single name and refused to record any other.

  Their commander, a senior-class student (whose name mutated instantly from Friendly, which was ridiculous, to Frenzy, which made a certain amount of sense), took exception to her family’s tradition of names, and, even more, to the feather Hunter always wore in her hair. By freedom of religion she was entitled to it, but he ordered her to remove it. She refused; he charged her with being out of uniform and with showing contempt for a superior officer.

  She had been tempted to plead guilty to the second accusation.

  Lawyers were not a custom among Hunter’s people, and she did not intend to involve anyone else in her difficulties with the hierarchy. But the court-martial would not convene without a defense counsel. To Hunter’s disgust, James T. Kirk volunteered.

  Hunter had him firmly typed as the same sort of self-satisfied prig as the platoon commander; he upheld her judgment of him with the first words he spoke.

  “I think you’re making a big mistake,” he said. “I think probably if you apologize to Frenzy he’ll cancel the trial.”

  “Apologize! For what?”

  He glanced at her braid of black hair, at the small blacktipped scarlet feather bound to its end. “Look,” he said, “if Frenzy adds lying to the charges, you’ll be finished.”

  “Lying!” she shouted. She leapt out of her chair and faced him off across the table, pressing her hands flat on the surface so she would not clench them into fists.

  “No one,” she said softly, “no one, in the entire world, in my entire life, has ever accused me of lying, and right now I need one good reason, very quick, not to throw you through the wall.”

  He reached toward the feather. She pulled away, flinging her head back so the braid flipped over her shoulder.

  “Don’t touch that!”

  “I know you don’t believe I’m on your side,” he said. “But I am. I really am. I did some reading last night and I know what the feather is supposed to mean. It’s the last in a long series of tests that only a few people ever complete. I’m not saying you didn’t do it—but that feather isn’t the real thing. However important it is, it would be better to go without till you can get another real one, because if the board finds out you’ve made all this fuss over something that has in itself no intrinsic meaning, they’ll throw the book at you.”

  Hunter frowned at him. “Wherever did y
ou get the idea that it isn’t real?”

  He pulled a text out of his briefcase, slid it into a reader, and keyed up a page. “There,” he said, pointing to a picture of a phoenix eagle gliding in the wind, so beautiful Hunter had to fight off a wave of homesickness. Jim Kirk’s forefinger touched the white tip of a wing feather. “And there.” He keyed up a photo of a young woman. Hunter blinked in surprise. It was her great-aunt, perfectly recognizable. She had been almost as elegant and dignified at that age as she had been well into her eighties, when Hunter first met her. Kirk touched the feather in the photograph: a long one, the span of a hand, with a white tip.

  “You see what I mean,” he said, nodding toward Hunter’s feather, which, though red, was black-tipped, barely the length of her thumb, and far different in shape.

  “Either you’ve got a crappy book, or you missed some spots,” she said. “Wearing one of the primaries just means the eagles have accepted you as a reasoning adult being.” She stabbed at the reader keyboard, brought back the first picture, and traced her finger along the eagle’s crest, which looked darker red through being formed of black-tipped plumage.

  “What I wear is a crest feather. It means ... it’s too complicated to explain everything it means. The eagles accept me as a friend.”

  Kirk looked at her. “One of the eagles gave you the feather?” He sounded rather stunned.

  Hunter scowled again. “That’s right—good gods, what did you think it was? A trophy?” She was repelled by the idea of injuring one of the magnificent, totally alien, gentle, fierce beings. “They’re as intelligent as we are. Maybe more so.”

  Kirk sat down slowly. “I think I understand now,” he said. “I apologize. I jumped to conclusions, and I was wrong. Will you accept my apology?”

  Hunter nodded curtly. But her dislike began to ease, for she too had jumped to conclusions, and she too had been wrong.

  The next day, at Hunter’s court-martial, the senior platoon commander slowly but surely and irrevocably destroyed his credibility with his superiors. Freedom of religion was a touchy subject with Starfleet. They were committed to it on a theoretical basis, but, practically, it was difficult to administer. Aside from the sheer number of belief systems, the rituals ranged from virtually nonexistent to thoroughly bizarre. So when a stiffnecked undergraduate with his first minor command proved himself guilty of harassing a pantheist whose disruption consisted of wearing a feather in her hair, they showed him very little sympathy at all.

  Though she often could have got away with it, Hunter never claimed a religious exemption for her other nonconforming behavior. She succeeded in acting as she thought right, and as she wished, through a combination of fast moves, of giving not a damn about demerits, and of pure, solid, unimpeachable excellence in her performance.

  She put aside old memories as she materialized on the transporter platform of her own ship. Her senior weapons officer nodded a greeting to her and tossed his long blond hair back off his forehead.

  “Hi, Ilya,” Hunter said. “All quiet?”

  “I have no complaints,” he said, in his clipped, controlled voice. But a moment later, when they passed the aft viewport, he added, “Except one.”

  What?

  “Hunter, I would like that damned monster ship off our tail. It makes me very nervous.”

  Hunter glanced out the port at the Enterprise , orbiting behind and above them. She laughed. “Ilya Nikolaievich, they’re on our side.”

  Mr. Sulu was not above imagining himself truly commanding the Enterprise , not merely the random high-ranking officer of a crew of all of twenty people. Mandala Flynn had beamed down with the last four security officers, to honor her promise to buy their dinner. Sulu hoped he could join her later.

  On the darkened bridge, he slid into the captain’s seat and gazed out the viewscreen. The Enterprise was oriented so that, with respect to the ship’s gravitational field, Aleph Prime loomed overhead, a huge shining Christmas tree ornament set spinning, to Sulu’s eyes, by the ship’s motion around it; and then, framed by space and multicolored stars, Aerfen hung suspended. Aerfen, Minerva, grey-eyed Athene, defending battle-goddess.

  “’In such likeness Pallas Athene swept flashing earthward,’” Sulu said aloud.

  “Hunter toEnterprise , permission to beam aboard?”

  Sulu started, feeling the blood rush to his face, but of course she could not have heard him quoting Homer aloud on the bridge of a starship, no one could have heard him; he was all alone.

  “ Enterprise, Sulu here, permission granted, of course, Captain.” Sulu called for someone to relieve him, on the double, and hurried to the transporter room.

  Hunter glittered into reality. Sulu knew instinctively that she would despise effusion. When she stepped down from the platform, he took her outstretched hand and said his name in response to her own introduction. But he bowed to her as well, just slightly, perhaps a breach of Starfleet protocol, but a gesture of respect in his family’s traditions. She was not as tall as he expected—he had put her in his mind as some overwhelming demigod or giant, and he was rather relieved that her physical presence was not quite what he had imagined. Her hand was hard and firm, with traces of callus on the palm, and a long angry scar that led up the back of her hand and disappeared beneath her shirt cuff at the wrist. Her silver vest made her shoulders gleam, as if she wore armor.

  “Mr. Sulu,” she said. “I’m pleased to meet you. Jim spoke of you with a great deal of regard.”

  Sulu could not think of anything to answer to that; he was too surprised and flattered. “Thank you,” he said, finally, lamely. “Captain Kirk hasn’t returned from Aleph Prime yet, Captain Hunter. May I show you to the officers’ lounge?”

  “That would be fine, Mr. Sulu.”

  They got into the lift, descended, and walked down a long corridor. The Enterprise seemed deserted, haunted, surreal, with its crew on liberty and its lights dimmed.

  “It isn’t shown off at its best right now,” Sulu said apologetically.

  “Never mind,” Hunter said. “A ship like this doesn’t need much showing off.”

  They chatted about Aerfen and the Enterprise until they reached the lounge. Sulu offered her a drink, or a glass of wine, which she declined; they ended up both with coffee, sitting over a port with a view of deep space, still talking ships.

  “That’s a nasty gash on Aerfen ’s side,” Sulu said. “I hope there wasn’t too much damage.”

  Hunter looked away. “Not to the ship,” she said. “I lost two good people in that fight.”

  “Captain—I’m sorry, I didn’t know ...”

  “How could you? Mr. Sulu, no one volunteers for this particular assignment without knowing the risks.”

  She appeared, suddenly, very human and very tired, and Sulu’s regard for her increased. To fill the silence, because he did not know what to say, he got up and refilled their cups.

  “Where are you from, Mr. Sulu?” she asked when he returned. Only a hint of tightness in her voice betrayed her. “I feel like I should be able to place your accent, but it’s so faint I can’t.”

  “It isn’t so much faint as a complete muddle. I lived in a lot of different places when I was a kid, but longest on Shinpai.” He used the colloquial name without even thinking.

  “Shinpai!” Hunter said. “Ganjitsu? I’ve been there.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Sulu said. “I know. I remember. No one there will forget for a long time.” It was his turn to look away; he had not meant to tell her anything about himself or the debt he and a lot of other people owed her, and now he realized why.

  I’m afraid she’ll say it was nothing, he thought. I’m afraid she’ll shrug it all off and laugh at me.

  “Thank you, Mr. Sulu.”

  He looked slowly back at her. Shadows across her face obscured her gray eyes.

  “In this career—you must know—you sometimes come to feel like everything you do, the conflict, the friends you lose, it’s all for the glory of some fac
eless, meaningless set of rules and regulations. And that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter a damn. It only matters when you know it makes a difference to a person.”

  “It made a difference,” Sulu said. “Never think it didn’t make a difference.”

  Jim Kirk had to put down the awkward boxes of bioelectronic crystals before he could get out his communicator.

  “Couldn’t you at least have had this stuff delivered, Mr. Spock?” he asked.

  “Of course, Captain, but I thought you would not wish to stay at Aleph Prime for several more days.” Kirk grumbled something inarticulate and flipped open his communicator. “Kirk to Enterprise .”

  “ Enterprise. Sulu here, Captain.”

  “Mr. Spock and I are ready to beam up, Mr. Sulu.”

  A few minutes later, Kirk, Spock, and the assorted boxes materialized on the transporter platform. Kirk stepped down to greet Hunter, who had accompanied Sulu to the transporter room.

  “You’ve met Mr. Sulu, I see,” Jim said. “This is Mr. Spock, my first officer.”

  “Mr. Spock,” she said, nodding to him. “It’s good to meet you after hearing about you for so many years.”

  “I am honored,” Spock said.

  Kirk noticed Sulu moving slowly, and, he thought, rather reluctantly, toward the door.

  “Mr. Sulu,” he said on impulse, “have you had dinner?”

  “Dinner?” Sulu asked, surprised by the unusual question. “Captain, I’m afraid my system lost track of time about when we went into the sixth week around the singularity. I wouldn’t know what to call the last meal I had.”

  Kirk chuckled. “I know how you feel. I’m going to show Captain Hunter around the ship, and then she and I and Mr. Spock are going to dine on the observation deck. Hunter, I want you to meet my officers. Mr. Sulu, would you see who else is on board? And would you join us yourself?”

  “I’d love to,” Sulu said. “Thank you, Captain.”

  When Kirk and Hunter and Spock had taken the new equipment and left the transporter room, Sulu hurried to the console and opened a channel to Aleph Prime.

  “Sulu to Flynn, come in, Commander.”

  The pause dragged on so long he began to worry; he was about to try calling again when Mandala’s voice came through.