Star Trek The Original Series From History's Shadow (34 page)

Not giving Abrenn any chance to recover, Kirk drove his boot onto the colonel’s helmet faceplate, feeling the transparent material yield beneath his heel. A hairline crack appeared across the protective screen, enough to make Abrenn’s eyes widen in concern as he rolled away. He swept his leg to catch Kirk behind his knees, taking his feet out from under him. Kirk, his balance gone, crashed to the deck. Training and experience prepared him for the fall and he was able to absorb most of the impact, already coming up onto one knee and pushing himself back to his feet when an energy blast shrieked past him. It was Abrenn’s companion, standing at the
Balatir
’s open hatch. The Tandaran was adjusting his aim to fire again when Kirk heard the familiar whine of a phaser beam. It passed him and struck the Tandaran in his chest, pushing him against the Certoss vessel’s hull, where he then slid unconscious to the deck.

“Abrenn!” Kirk shouted as he saw the colonel regaining his own footing. “It’s over!” Hearing footsteps behind him, he glanced over to see Giotto stepping into view, his phaser aimed at the Tandaran. “Your people are in custody and there’s nowhere for you to go. There’s no need for
any
of this!”

For the first time, he saw Abrenn display genuine emotion, his anger evident on his features as he glared at Kirk through his helmet’s damaged faceplate. “I’m acting to protect my people!”

“Your people are safe!” Kirk snapped. “You’re responding to a threat that doesn’t exist! How can you not see that?”

Abrenn sneered. “You have no comprehension of the dangers I see, Captain. The threat is real, lurking beyond your ability to see or understand. That was the reality of the war we fought—will fight, and
lose
—if we do not act against that possibility.” He gestured toward the
Balatir
. “
That
is what you’re protecting. There’s no way to know what chaos that fugitive represents, or can bring down upon us all.”

“She’s just one person,” Kirk said. “Cut off from everything and everyone she’s ever known. Even if there was a way to send her forward to her own time, her own planet—its history and culture—is unrecognizable to her.”

Sighing, Abrenn shook his head. “You simply have no idea, Kirk.” Reaching up, he pressed a control embedded into his suit’s chest plate. “And you give me no choice.”

“Wait!” Kirk snapped, holding out his hand. Not waiting for an order, Giotto fired his phaser, catching Abrenn in the torso and knocking the Tandaran unconscious. He fell, but Giotto was able to catch him and lower him gently to the deck. “What did he do?”

The security chief shook his head. “I don’t know, sir.” Reaching for his tricorder, he activated it and waved it over Abrenn’s chest armor. “It’s some kind of burst transmitter. A distress beacon, maybe?”

Alarm klaxons wailed once more across the hangar bay, followed by the harried voice of Lieutenant Sulu booming through the intercom system. “
All hands, brace for impact! The Tandaran vessel is on a collision course!
 ”

TWENTY-EIGHT

Cocoa Beach, Florida

March 29, 1968

With dawn peeking over the horizon and stretching across the Atlantic Ocean, the giant Saturn rocket gleamed in the distance at nearby McKinley Rocket Base, just visible over the treetops with the first rays of the sun. It was, James Wainwright conceded, magnificent; a triumph of modern technology and resolve. Soon, rockets like the one now towering into the morning sky would carry men to the moon, in keeping with the bold challenge thrown down by President John Kennedy just seven years earlier. While the president himself was gone, struck down in a moment of horror by an assassin’s bullet, his dream persisted, willed into reality by the hundreds of thousands of men and women and billions of dollars committed to the effort.

“It’s really quite something, isn’t it?” asked Allison Marshall, standing behind him and leaning against the fender of their government-issued blue Ford sedan.

Standing with his hands in his pockets, he looked over his shoulder at her and smiled. “I used to dream about stuff like this when I was a kid, reading all those stories and watching those movies. I wanted to be Flash Gordon, or Buck Rogers, or Captain Proton. Hell, I wanted to be Alan Shepard or John Glenn. I still do.” It was a notion that made him smile.
Approaching his fifty-first birthday, he still enjoyed reading the fictional exploits of space adventurers, and he had followed the various missions of the Mercury and Gemini space programs and their progress toward meeting Kennedy’s goal by the end of the decade. Still, much of that had lost its allure in the face of the truth about space travel as presented to him by his own job. Despite his best efforts, Wainwright had failed to separate his work from other aspects of his life, and as a consequence the fantasies—and fun—of his youth were forever lost.

What the hell are you doing? Get back to work
.

Drawing a deep breath, Wainwright blew it out before returning his focus to the matter at hand. “Okay, let’s get to it.” He turned back to the car and the briefcase Marshall already had placed on its hood. “You take the scanner this time. Damned thing gave me fits yesterday.” Eyeing the clipboard-sized device given to them by Mestral, he shook his head as he recalled his troubles while attempting to master its functions, which he knew were quite simple in keeping with their Vulcan friend’s intentions. As designed, the scanner would be able to detect the presence of any non-human. After studying the odd harness belonging to the Certoss killed by Wainwright and Marshall in Yuma fifteen years earlier, Mestral had been able to key the scanner so that it should work even when the target was using such a harness to appear human.

At least, I hope so.

“Let’s go,” he said, eyeing the apartment complex’s parking lot that still was near capacity even at this early hour. “People are going to be heading to work soon.” A background check on the apartment village revealed that, like the three such complexes they had investigated the previous
day, a significant number of tenants worked for NASA or one of the government agencies or civilian firms attached to the various efforts under way at McKinley as well as Cape Canaveral just a few miles farther up the Florida coast. The day would be one filled with all manner of final preparations for the launch scheduled to take place later that afternoon. Wainwright and Marshall had passed several trucks outside the McKinley gates, with reporters and camera operators from the various radio and television news bureaus, and he had seen a satellite parking lot for journalists and other members of the media already filled to overflowing. While there could be no hiding the fact that a rocket was launching today, Wainwright knew that only a fraction of the people on the base were aware of what really was taking place, and the truth of the rocket’s classified payload. The question, of course, was which of those people were not native to this planet.

“Ready?” Marshall asked.

Wainwright nodded. “As ready as ever, I guess.” After years of attempting to track the Certoss agents’ movements, along with the occasional fragment of information provided by Cal Sutherland’s various contacts within the NASA community, he and Marshall—with help from Mestral—had spent weeks putting together a plan for hunting the aliens. Their strategy hinged on the assumption that the operatives, wanting to avoid undue attention while working on the nuclear weapons platform project, would have found roles and jobs that would keep them from anything resembling a “spotlight.” Mestral had suggested that an engineering or other technical role, something offering access to the rockets’ hardware and computer support systems, was the ideal cover identity. It was a sensible notion, though it only narrowed the
field of potential targets to several hundred suspects just here in the Cocoa Beach area.

So, we should probably get started
.

•   •   •

The scanner in Marshall’s hand went off within the first five minutes.

“Really?” Wainwright asked, his eyes widening as he regarded his partner.

Nodding, Marshall held up the scanner for him to see. The needle on the unit’s display—a gauge repurposed from an old Geiger counter so that the numbers on its face now represented distance from their target—had pegged out at the scanner’s maximum detection range. “He’s within one hundred feet.”

“That could be anywhere around here,” Wainwright said, lamenting the scanner’s one obvious detriment of being unable to determine the direction of their target. Like the Geiger counters from which most of its parts had been taken, only sweeping the device so that its forward sensing component could focus on the object of their search provided any hint as to the correct bearing. Sighing, Wainwright studied the catwalk on which they stood, which encircled the apartment building’s third floor. A dozen closed doors lay ahead of them. The Certoss agents could be in any of the first half of those or in a corresponding apartment on either of the neighboring floors.

Marshall shrugged. “Let’s keep moving and see what happens.”

As they walked, Wainwright glanced at the scanner, eyeing the moving gauge needle as it indicated a decrease in distance between them and their target. That they might have stumbled across at least one of their quarry with so little
difficulty already had him feeling suspicious, and this only furthered his worry. Without his thinking about it, his right hand moved up to reach beneath his jacket for the snap holding the pistol in its holster beneath his arm.

At the far end of the catwalk, less than fifty feet from them, one of the apartment doors opened and a man stepped out. He looked to be in his forties, balding and with a thick midsection barely contained by his short-sleeved white dress shirt. His tie, thin and black, was too short, as were the cuffs of his black trousers. To Wainwright he could have been any of the hundreds of employees on NASA’s payroll.

When he turned in their direction, Marshall was the first to react to the gun in the man’s hand.

“Look out!”

The man’s right hand rose toward them and Wainwright saw the pistol’s muzzle the instant before it flashed and the gunshot echoed off the concrete walls. Then Marshall cried out in pain. He saw her falling backward but he kept his attention on the other man, drawing his .45 and firing a quick shot down the catwalk. The round went wide but the man ducked anyway, giving Wainwright the chance he needed to better his aim. His next shot struck the man’s right arm, pushing him off balance and throwing him sideways against the wall near the catwalk’s far end. Wainwright caught sight of something dark spattering the painted concrete; too dark to be human blood.

“Stop right there!” Wainwright shouted, firing again as the man turned a corner and disappeared. His first instinct was to give chase, but then his mind snapped back into gear.
Allison!

He knelt beside Marshall where she had fallen to the ground, clasping her right hand at the point where her left
arm met her shoulder. Blood seeped between her fingers, and her expression was a mask of pain.

“Hold on,” Wainwright said, pulling the handkerchief from his breast pocket and pressing it to her wound. Marshall laid her bloody hand atop his, squeezing shut her eyes and gritting her teeth. There was blood beneath her body, and a quick check revealed the exit wound on the back of her shoulder. He pulled back his free hand to see his fingers stained red. “It went through. We need to get you to a hospital.”

Doors had opened behind him and he looked up to see a young woman peering out at him from her own apartment. “Call an ambulance!”

“Who the hell are you?” the woman asked.

“I’m with the Air Force. Someone just shot my partner. Now call me a damned ambulance!”

The woman disappeared back into her apartment, but another man now was running the length of the catwalk behind him. Wainwright looked up to see that it was an army captain, his uniform shirt unbuttoned and untucked. He likely lived here and had come running in response to the shots.

“What happened?” he asked as he came closer. “Who shot her?”

“A spy,” Marshall replied. It was close enough to the truth. She nodded toward the catwalk’s far end. “He went that way.”

Instead of running off, the captain instead took off his uniform shirt, leaving him in a white undershirt as he folded the other garment into a square. Kneeling next to Marshall, he applied his makeshift bandage to the wound on her back. “This’ll hold her until the ambulance gets here.”

Looking up at Wainwright from where she lay on the floor, Marshall whispered, “Jim, you need to go after him.”
Her eyes were glazed and heavy, and he heard the slur in her words. She was going into shock.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Wainwright said. “Besides, he’s already long gone. I’ll never find him.”

She reached up to grip his arm. “McKinley. He’s got to be going there.” Hesitating, she glanced at the captain before adding, “You know why.”

“He could hide anywhere.” A sense of dread and failure was beginning to grip him. Was this encounter enough to send the Certoss running for cover? What if they already had done whatever task was required to put into motion their plans for the nuclear platform stored aboard the rocket? Perhaps everything, including Marshall’s being shot, had all been for nothing, and it already was too late. “I’ll never find them.”

“We may be able to help with that.”

Startled, Wainwright looked up to see two men, and his mouth dropped open. “You?” Agent 937, the thirty-something brown-haired man with the intense hazel eyes, and his stoic companion in the fedora, Agent 176, now stood before him. Where the hell had they come from? Both men wore dark gray suits of similar cut, and it took Wainwright a moment to realize that they looked almost exactly the same as the last time he had seen them. How long ago had that been? A year? “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Believe it or not,” replied Agent 937, “we’re here for the same reason you are.”

TWENTY-NINE

Highway 949, Cocoa Beach, Florida