The Entropy Effect Read online

  Well, then, Scott thought, with the irritation of generations of lower officers kept in the dark by red tape, high brass, and their own immediate superiors: Well then, so there is something unusual going on, after all;

  this isna a foul-up; this isna a mere courier run. Doubtless I’ll find out all abou’ it eventually. And perhaps I’ll even learn the truth for mysel’ wi’out waiting for anyone to deign to say what it may be.

  He left the bridge, knowing that the science officer was following him with his gaze, assuming Kirk was even now saying privately to Spock, with admiration and respect, “Well, we can’t keep anything from Scotty very long, can we?” and Spock replying, “No, Captain; he has deductive faculties of a power unusual in human beings.” Scott entered the lift to return to his quarters, looking forward to a shower—a water shower, hot water, too—and to the quick drink he had denied himself earlier. Then he intended to take a long nap.

  He still could not figure out how Spock had got past him from the transporter room to the bridge. For that was what he had done, whether he was admitting it or not.

  Back on the bridge, Kirk would have liked to ask Spock what that scene with Scotty had been all about, but he had to turn his attention immediately to Ian Braithewaite.

  “Captain Kirk— arewe travelling at sublight speed?”

  Kirk sighed. “Mr. Braithewaite, Rehab Seven is so close to Aleph Prime—relatively speaking—that if we tried to reach it at warp speed, we’d overshoot. We’d strain the engines far past the danger point with such rapid acceleration and deceleration.”

  “Wait, Captain, I wasn’t objecting—I’ve never been on a starship before, I’m glad to have the chance to look around. I kind of hoped I’d experience warp speed once in my life, though,” he said wistfully.

  Kirk began to find it extremely difficult to maintain his irritation at Ian Braithewaite.

  “Well, you never know what opportunities will come up,” he said. “But you asked to discuss security. I thought Commander Flynn should be here, too.”

  Flynn had kept her silence; now she stepped forward to join them.

  Ian pulled a folded slip of paper from his pocket. “This came while you were asleep, Captain.” He handed it over.

  Kirk read it: another Aleph citizen had come down with hypermorphic botulism.

  “Do you think Aleph will need my ship’s medical facilities as backup? Are you worried about an epidemic?”

  “I almost wish I were,” Ian said. “But since my friend Lee was Dr. Mordreaux’s defense counsel, and Judge Desmoulins heard the case, I have to think it could be deliberate.”

  “Someonepoisoned them?”

  “I have no proof. But I think it’s at least possible.”

  “Why?”

  “At this point I could only speculate. But the coincidence makes me very uncomfortable. And scared.

  The possibility that troubles me most is that someone might be trying to free Dr. Mordreaux. I think we should intensify security.”

  “Ian,” Kirk said tolerantly, “I can certainly understand why you’re upset. But you’re perfectly safe on the Enterprise , and Commander Flynn has Dr. Mordreaux’s security well in hand.” He glanced at Flynn for confirmation, but she avoided his eyes. “Commander Flynn?”

  She looked at him straight on, with her crystalline green gaze. “I’d prefer to discuss security less publicly, Captain.”

  “Oh,” said Kirk, and he understood that she expected him to take a hint—that she was not happy with the security arrangements—just as he had counted on her to take hints since this assignment started. “Well. All right. But after all Dr. Mordreaux is an elderly man—”

  “Commander Flynn,” Braithewaite said, “Dr. Mordreaux is my responsibility as much as yours, and I don’t think it’s fair to exclude me from discussions about him. Captain Kirk—”

  “Kirk!”

  Braithewaite spoke at the same moment as the shriek: for an instant Flynn thought it was he who had screamed Kirk’s name.

  “You destroyed me, Kirk! You deserve to die!”

  In shock, everyone turned.

  Dr. Mordreaux, wild-eyed, stood at the entrance to the bridge. He thrust out an ugly, heavy pistol, and gestured to Flynn and Braithewaite with its muzzle. “You two, out of the way.”

  “Dr. Mordreaux,” Braithewaite said, “don’t make things worse for yourself—”

  In the hypersensitivity of a rush of adrenaline, Flynn saw the pistol steady as Braithewaite started toward Mordreaux. She thought, Wrong, wrong, that is just the wrong thing to do, brave but stupid, damn all amateurs; as the hammer cocked she had already flung herself forward. Her momentum rammed Braithewaite out of the line of fire and carried her to the upper level of the bridge. One more second’s hesitation in Mordreaux and her hand would clamp around his wrist, one more second—Damn Kirk for not telling her what was going on, damn him for making this sound trivial, if he had not she would have kept her phaser on and to hell with general regulations. Another instant—

  The gun went off.

  The explosion of sound surprised her more than the crushing jolt that hurled her to the deck.

  Jim Kirk leaped to his feet. The gun went off a second time, the sound cutting through the cacophonous disorder on the bridge. The bullet smashed into him, engulfing him in a nova-bright haze of pain.

  Mordreaux stepped backwards into the lift and the doors closed, a moment before Spock reached them. The science officer did not waste time trying to force them open. He leaped back down the stairs, past Commander Flynn struggling to her feet, and slapped the paging switch.

  “Dr. McCoy to the bridge immediately! Trauma team, emergency nine!”

  Spock knelt beside Jim Kirk.

  “Jim...”

  The bridge was in chaos around them. Blood spattered deck and bulkheads and glistened on the illuminated data screens. The security commander, her hand clamped over the wound in her shoulder, gave orders crisply over the intercom, deploying her forces to apprehend Mordreaux. Blood dripped between her fingers and sprinkled the floor beside Spock, like rain.

  The second bullet had taken Kirk full in the chest. His blood gushed fresh with each beat of his heart. That meant at least that his heart was still beating.

  “Spock...” Jim fought his way up through massive scarlet light, until he forced enough of it away to see beyond it.

  “Lie still, Jim. Dr. McCoy is on his way.”

  Spock tried to stop the bleeding. Jim cried out and fumbled for Spock’s wrist. “Don’t,” he said.

  “Please...” He felt the blood bubbling up in his lungs.

  The wound was too deep, too bad, to quell by direct pressure. Spock ceased the futile effort that only caused pain. Jim felt himself gently lifted, gently supported, and the sensation of drowning eased just perceptibly.

  “Is anyone else hurt? Mandala...?”

  “I’m all right, Captain.” She started up the stairs again.

  “Commander Flynn!” Spock said without glancing back.

  “What?”

  “Do not summon the lift—Dr. McCoy must not be delayed.”

  She needed to get below to help her people: she needed to, it was like an instinct. But Spock was right. She waited, swaying unsteadily.

  “Mandala, let me help you.” Uhura’s gentle hands guided her around and a few steps forward before she balked.

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Mandala—”

  “Uhura,” she whispered, “Uhura, if I sit down I don’t know if I’ll be able to get back up.”

  “Lieutenant Uhura,” Spock snapped, “page Dr. McCoy again.”

  Spock did not want to move Jim without a stretcher, but if it and Dr. McCoy did not arrive in another thirty seconds he was going to carry Jim Kirk to sick bay himself.

  “What happened, Spock?” Jim whispered. “This was supposed to be... a milk run.” A light pink froth formed on his lips. The bullet had punctured his lungs. His breathing was irregular, and when he tried to
draw breath, pain racked him.

  “I don’t know, Jim. Please be quiet.”

  Jim was slipping down into shock, and there was no more time to lose.

  The doors opened and McCoy rushed onto the bridge.

  “What happened? Oh, my god—” He saw Flynn first and started toward her.

  “Not me,” she said. “It’s the captain.”

  He hesitated only a moment, but saw that the blood covering her uniform shirt and spattering her face and hands and hair concealed a high and non-critical shoulder wound; he hurried to Kirk’s side.

  Flynn walked into the lift and the doors closed behind her.

  McCoy knelt beside Jim.

  “Take it easy, Jim, boy,” he said. “We’ll have you in sick bay so fast—”

  Kirk had never been so aware of his own pulse, throbbing like a thunderstorm through his body.

  “Bones... I...”

  “Quiet!”

  “You were right. What we talked about... I was going to tell Hunter...”

  “You’ll still be able to. Shut up, what kind of talk is this?” McCoy waved the tricorder across Kirk’s body. Jim’s heart was undamaged, but the artery was half severed. The sensor showed a pierced lung, but that was obvious without any mechanical information. The essential thing was to get him on oxygen as fast as possible, then hook him up to a fluid replacer, a heme carrier: he was bleeding so badly that oxygen starvation was the biggest danger.

  “Where is the trauma unit?” Spock said, his voice tight.

  “On its way,” McCoy said, defending his people though he was angry himself that they were not yet here. But he knew he could save Jim Kirk.

  “You’ll be okay, Jim,” he said, and this time he meant it.

  But there was something else, a danger signal from the tricorder. McCoy thought immediately of poison, but the readings were in the wrong range. He had never seen anything like this signal before. “What the devil...”

  Jim thought he had blood in his eyes. A shimmering cloud passed across his vision.

  “I can’t see,” he said. He reached blindly out.

  Spock grasped his hand, holding him strongly, deliberately leaving open all the mental and emotional shields he had built during his long association with human beings.

  “You will be all right, Jim,” Spock said. He put his right hand to Jim’s temple, completing the telepathic, mystical circuit linking him with his friend. Pain, fear, and regret welled out into him. He accepted it willingly, and felt it ease in Jim. “My strength to yours,” he whispered, too softly for anyone to hear, the words a hypnotic reminder of the techniques he was using. “My strength to yours, my will to yours.”

  McCoy saw Spock’s eyelids lower and his eyes roll back till only a crescent of the whites still showed. But he could not pay any attention to what the Vulcan was doing. The lift doors opened and the trauma team rushed in with the support equipment.

  “Get down here!” McCoy shouted. They hurried to obey.

  They hooked up the trauma unit and oxygen flooded Jim’s body. His starving nerves spread new agony through him. He gasped, and blood choked him. Spock’s long fingers clasped his hand. The pain eased infinitesimally, but Jim’s sight faded almost to pure darkness.

  “Spock?”

  “I am here, Jim.”

  His friend’s hand pressed gently against his temple and the side of his face. Jim felt the closeness, the strength that was keeping him alive. He could no longer see, even in his mind, but in some other, unnamed way he sensed the precision of Spock’s thoughts, their order twisted by Jim’s own pain and fear.

  Jim Kirk knew that he was going to die, and that Spock would follow him down the accelerating spiral until he had fallen too deep to return. He would willingly choose death to try to save Kirk’s life.

  James Kirk, too, had one choice left.

  “Spock ...” he whispered, “take good care ... of my ship.”

  He feared he had waited too long, but that terror gave him the strength he needed. He wrenched away from Spock, breaking their contact, forsaking Spock’s strength and will, and giving himself up alone to agony, despair, and death.

  The physical resonance of emotional force flung Spock backward. His body thudded against the railing, and he slumped to the floor. He lay still, gathering his strength. The deck felt cool against the side of his face and his outflung hands. The echoes of Jim Kirk’s wounds slowly ebbed. Spock opened his eyes to a gray haze. He blinked, and blinked again: the nictitating membrane swept across the irises, and finally he could see. Spock pushed himself to his feet, fighting to hide his reactions.

  Jim’s body now lay on the stretcher of the trauma unit, hooked up to fluid and respirator, breathing but otherwise motionless. His eyes—his eyes, wide open, had clouded over with silver-gray.

  “Dr. McCoy—”

  “Not now, Spock.”

  Spock felt himself trembling. He clenched his fists.

  McCoy and part of his medical team floated the trauma unit into the lift, while two of the paramedics stayed behind to take Braithewaite, knocked unconscious in his fall, down to sick bay.

  The captain’s body was alive; it could be kept alive indefinitely now.

  But Spock had felt Jim Kirk die.

  Mandala Flynn leaned against the back bulkhead of the turbo lift, closing her eyes and seeking out the damage to her body in her mind. The bullet tracked diagonally from her collarbone in front on the left, across her back and down, and lodged against her lower ribs like a molten bit of lead. As far as she could tell, it had cut through without doing critical damage. But her collarbone was shattered, again: she knew what that felt like.

  She cursed. The bullet had entered almost exactly where the shrapnel had got her two years before. Now she would have to waste a month in therapy; the jigsawpuzzle of bone would never return to its original strength.

  Her blood pressure was way down: she had to will herself not to go into shock. The biofeedback techniques were working. So far she had even succeeded in holding the pain, most of it, back one level short of consciousness.

  She was well aware that she could not stay on her feet much longer. She had lost too much blood, and even with biocontrol, the human body has limits which she had nearly reached.

  The lift doors slid open onto an empty corridor.

  There should be guards at every level! Fury rose in her, fury and shame, because however badly or insignificantly Captain Kirk was hurt, the responsibility was hers alone. Even if no one at all had been hurt, the prisoner had escaped. There was no excuse for that: she had thought her command of the security force was competent, even outstanding. She had watched morale rise from nothing, but here she was, revealed as a sham.

  Face it, Flynn, she told herself savagely, they could have replaced your predecessor with a rock, and morale would have gone up. That doesn’t make you adequate to lead. They ought to bust you back to ensign, that’s where you belong. They were right all the time.

  A lunatic wth a pistol was running around loose in the ship, and not so much as a single guard stood at the bloody-bedamned lift doors.

  She stepped out into the hallway. Her feet were numb, as if they had fallen asleep, and her knees felt wobbly and funny.

  Is this shock? she wondered. This isn’t a symptom of shock. What’s going on?

  She took a few steps forward. Mordreaux’s cabin was right around the corner. Cliches about locking barns after horses got loose crept through her mind along with her usual uncertainty about what a horse actually looked like ... or a barn ... she forcibly pulled her attention back. If her people were not at the

  lift, Mordreaux’s cabin was as good a place as any to begin looking for them. And him.

  Could this be a planned assault? she wondered. Was Braithewaite right? All the security people taken on and eliminated, silently, one by one, in an attempt to free Mordreaux? In logistical terms it made no sense to assault a starship instead of the negligible security of Aleph Prime. Here, an attack fo
rce would have to get undetected through the ship’s sensors; the force would have to board the Enterprise through warning systems that included several layers of redundancy, and it would have had to do its work too swiftly, too perfectly, for anyone to be left to set off an alarm.

  Mandala stumbled and fell to her knees, but felt nothing. Her legs were numb almost all the way to the hips. She looked stupidly down. That was no help. Somehow she managed to get back to her feet.

  An assault made no sense in human terms; in human terms, it was impossible. But she had learned—one of the first lessons she had learned in her life—that the human consciousness was in the minority, and that limiting oneself to thinking in human terms was the quickest way to prove oneself a fool.

  Still she had seen no one. She could call them on her communicator, but she was too angry to speak to any of her people any way but face to face. And, truth to tell, she did not think she could lift her left hand. All the strength and feeling had vanished from that arm.

  She turned the corer.

  There, in front of Mordreaux’s cabin, several security people gathered, milling in confusion.

  “What the hell is going on?” she said, just loud enough for them to hear. “Mordreaux is loose and you’re all standing around like—like—”

  Beranardi al Auriga, stooping to peer through the observation port of the V.I.P. cabin’s new security door, straightened up. He was head and shoulders taller than his superior. He saw the blood spreading between her fingers and down her arm and side.

  “Mandala—Commander, what—? Let me help you—”

  “Answer my questions” Flynn could just barely feel the heat of her own blood. The pain had gone.

  “Mordreaux is right here, Commander,” al Auriga said. He unlocked the cabin so she could see. She looked inside.

  Lying on his bunk, braced on his elbow as if he had just been awakened, Mordreaux gazed blearily out at them.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. “What’s all the commotion?”

  “Neon,” Mandala said, “lift, portal, guards?”

  “Commander,” Neon said in her silvery voice, “prisoner, cell, Neon, intersection; alarm.”

  “What...?” Flynn’s confusion was not because she did not understand Neon’s unusual English. Neon had said not only that Mordreaux was in his cell, but that Neon had been guarding him when the alarm sounded.