STAR TREK - TOS (39 page)

‘resuming nuclear testing in the South Pacific,’ end quote.” She shook her head in disbelief. “I’m still amazed that we managed to get the French government to go along with that cover story.”

“Better than admitting that they leased their facilities to a genetically engineered terrorist who almost destroyed the world.” A somber tone entered Seven’s voice as he recalled the enormous sacrifice made by Chen Tiejun and her amazons. “We should have never let matters get that far.”

“It’s not like we had a lot of choice,” Roberta reminded him. “Khan is a tough customer, with plenty of smarts and manpower on his side. He wasn’t going to let us just waltz in and shut down his precious

[352]germ warfare program.” She sat down in an upholstered wooden chair opposite Seven’s desk.

“Look at it this way. This is twice now we’ve stopped someone from spreading that nasty flesh-eating bacteria. Not a bad track record.”

“And all it’s taken is two nuclear explosions,” he pointed out dryly.

Roberta shrugged, determined to lift Seven’s spirits. “What’s a couple of nukes between friends, especially considering all the times we’ve prevented World War Three? I figure history owes us a mushroom cloud or two.”

“Let’s hope the Aegis agrees,” Seven said. He appreciated Roberta’s sunny attitude more than ever these days. “The more worrisome part, of course, is that Khan is still out there. We won a costly battle at Muroroa, but not the war.”

“True, but look at all the other power-hungry supermen who have bit the dust.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “Hunyadi, Amin, Gomez, Morrison, Arcturus. Unless I’ve forgotten somebody, Khan is the only one left with any real following.”

“And Morning Star,” he reminded her. “Don’t forget that.” Although he had contingencies in place should Khan ever attempt to carry out his ultimate doomsday scenario, Seven was all too aware that even the best of plans could go awry. As long as Morning Star remained in orbit, carefully watched and guarded by Khan’s fanatical underlings, Earth’s entire ozone layer remained at risk.

Until now, the world’s superpowers had kept their hands off Chandigarh, for fear of provoking Khan’s wrath, but, as news of the close call at Muroroa[353]inevitably made its way through the intelligence networks of the United States, Russia, China, and their various allies, how much longer would it be before someone took the risky step of calling Khan’s bluff?

Seven sensed time running out, all the more so because he knew one thing that he feared the rest of the world didn’t.

Khan wasn’t bluffing.

NEVADA

UNITED STATES

JANUARY 5, 1996

“CONGRATULATIONS ON A JOB WELL DONE!”

Shannon O’Donnell applauded enthusiastically as Dr. Carlson uncorked a bottle of Château Picard and began filling everyone’s glasses, slopping a bit over the rim in his eagerness to make sure everyone got a drink. The rich bouquet of the expensive French wine teased her nostrils, tempting her lips.

The entire team—O’Donnell, Doc Carlson, Walter Nichols, Jackson Roykirk, and Shaun Christopher—had gathered in the conference room for an informal celebration. Brightly colored streamers brightened up the dull wood paneling of the room, while helium-filled balloons, bearing the images of stars, comets, and nebulae, bobbed against the ceiling. A frosted[355]white cake in the shape of the DY-100 occupied a place of honor upon the oblong table, prompting Shannon to wonder where Carlson found a baker with that high a security clearance.

“Toast! Toast!”

Blushing slightly, Carlson cleared his throat. “Our esteemed president talks a lot about a bridge to the twenty-first century, but it took everyone in this room to actually build that bridge—and with five years to spare! At the beginning of this decade, an impulse-powered sleeper ship was just a dream, but you have all helped to make that fantasy a reality. Lady and gentlemen,” he said proudly, raising his glass, “I give you the DY-100, the first true interstellar spacecraft—and the prototype for many more to come!”

“Hear! Hear!” Shannon and the others chorused enthusiastically Even Jackson seemed to be caught up in the spirit of the occasion, the usually dour and antisocial cyberneticist grinning just as giddily at the rest of them. Shannon sipped her wine, feeling a warm glow of accomplishment and camaraderie. To think, after all these years, slaving away in secret, the ship was finally ready!

Too bad Helen can’t be here,she thought wistfully. But, aside from Carlson, the rest of the team remained unaware of the help they had received from the mysterious older woman.
We couldn’t have
done it without her, though.

“I don’t know about the rest of you,” Shaun declared, giving Walter a hearty pat on the back, “but I can’t wait to give that baby a test-drive.”

[356]Shannon held up her hand like a traffic cop. “Hold on there, flyboy! We still need to run a few tests on the navigational systems, make sure we’ve gotten all the kinks out.”

“Oh, you just don’t want me to make it into space before you,” he teased her. “Don’t worry, I’ll leave you a few planets to explore ... maybe.”

“Dibs on Alpha Centauri!” she joked back. The wine was already going to her head, adding to her elation. “Besides, the DY-100 doesn’t need a pilot anyway. We’re all just going to snooze our way to the stars!”

“Ouch!” Shaun winced, clutching his heart as if he didn’t already know that the sleeper ship was capable of flying under full automation, while its crew rested in suspended animation. “Obsolete already!”

Seriously, though, she couldn’t imagine a better test pilot for the DY-100’s initial trials than Shaun Christopher. She looked forward to watching him blast off in just a few short days, then maybe joining him years from now on a manned mission to Saturn and beyond. “Well, if you’re good, we’ll think about letting you land the ship once we get where we’re going.”

“After all our hard work,” Walter interjected with a chuckle, “I could use a thirty-year nap in a hibernation niche!”

Jackson snorted. “I still think manned missions are a waste of time and money.” He pointed to a nearby poster of Viking II, ascending into space atop an expendable Titan-Centaur rocket. “That’s the future of space exploration: unmanned robotic probes.” Cold-blooded and aloof, he sounded a bit like a robot himself. “Sending people into deep space is a sentimental anachronism.”

[357]“Are you kidding?” Shaun asked, appalled. “Where’s the fun, the adventure, in that?” He gesticulated wildly, causing the wine in his glass to slosh precariously. “Do you think Columbus would have been happy sending an empty boat to the New World, with maybe a friendly note from Queen Isabella tacked to its mast?”

Oh God,Shannon thought, rolling her eyes.
Not this old argument again.
Shaun and Jackson had debated the pros and cons of manned versus unmanned space probes since the day they first met, and she didn’t expect that the pilot and the robotics expert would ever see eye to eye on the issue. At times she wondered why Jackson even deigned to work on the DY-100, given his views, but figured that Area 51’s unlimited budget and resources pretty much answered the question. Where else would Jackson get a chance to examine captured alien hardware?

“Boys, boys!” Carlson chided them in an avuncular manner. The elderly scientist approached the ship-shaped cake with a stainless-steel pastry carver in hand. “Stop quarreling and have some of this delicious cake.”

Sounds good to me,Shannon thought, her mouth watering already. She was just stepping forward to help Carlson with the cake when, unexpectedly, the pen in the breast pocket of her lab coat vibrated against her chest.
What?
she thought in surprise.
Now?

The pen vibrated again, with apparent impatience. “Excuse me, guys,” she improvised hastily, “but I have to make a pit stop.” Bent over the cake, Carlson peered at Shannon over the tops of his bifocals, as if suspecting something was up, but the younger men[358]seemed to take her at her word. “Save me some cake!” she told them as she slipped out of the conference room.

She hurried down the hall to the nearest ladies’ room, one of the few places at Area 51 that was not (she hoped) under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Hiding out in a stall, relieved to discover that she had the restroom to herself, Shannon pulled up the vibrating silver pen and held it near her lips. “Helen?”

It was silly question. Who else contacted her via a fountain pen?

The voice of the woman Shannon knew only as “Helen Swanson” emerged from the pen.
“I need to see
you right away,”
she said without preamble, unusual for the typically gregarious mystery woman. This alone worried Shannon, never mind the obvious stress she heard in Helen’s voice. Has something gone wrong? The redheaded astronaut trainee had always been afraid that this cloak-and-dagger business would-blow up in her face someday.

“Where?” she asked hesitantly. Now was really not a good time to be leaving the base.

“Not far,”Helen said, with a trace of her usual humor.
“Meet me at S-4, Launch Control.”

Huh?Shannon couldn’t believe her ears. She felt like one of those slasher movie victims who suddenly discovers that a threatening call is coming from inside their own house. “Are you serious?” she asked the pen.

“Serious as an ozone alert,”the other woman quipped.
“Don’t be long.”

Putting away the pen, which had ceased vibrating once Shannon had answered Helen’s insistent page, the young aeronautics engineer took a second to[359]assimilate what she’d just heard.
S-4? What in the
world was Helen doing there?

At least Shannon didn’t have far to go. A high-speed underground monorail connected this part of Area 51 with the facility code-named S-4, a concealed hangar and launch pad built into a spiny mountain ridge overlooking a dry lake bed known as Papoose Lake. On the surface, it was thirty-minute trip by Jeep, but the monorail got her there in less than ten.

The guards posted at the entrance to S-4 knew Shannon by sight, but still asked to see her ID before letting her proceed. “Just can’t stay away, huh?” asked one of the guards, Sergeant Steven Muckerheide, who had been working security at the base for years.

“Guess not,” she replied as lightly as she could manage. It dawned on her that, by coincidence, Muck had been on duty the first time Helen broke in to Area 51, back in 1986. Then the mystifying stranger had stolen a “phaser” and a “tricorder” (as Shannon had later learned they were called). Shannon couldn’t imagine what Helen was after now.

After passing the usual fingerprint and retina scans, Shannon took an empty elevator cage up to Launch Control. Despite her mounting anxiety about this unscheduled (and highly illegal) rendezvous, she couldn’t help but admire once more the underground hangar’s most impressive occupant.

Gleaming brightly, the DY-100 rested upright upon the reinforced concrete launch pad. Over four hundred feet high, the completed prototype resembled a missile with mumps, the spacious hibernation compartments bulging outward beneath the sleeper ship’s bullet-shaped prow. Four fusion-powered deuterium[360]boosters were strapped onto the vessel’s lower fuselage, ready to help the DY-100

achieve escape velocity as soon as the first flight test was approved. Its heat-resistant, blue ceramic finish gave the prototype an appropriately shiny, right-out-of-the-box luster.

The DY-100 was more than state-of-the-art, it was a sneak preview of a brand-new era Shannon hoped to be a part of. Its revolutionary “impulse” engine, based on alien technology observed at Roswell, with an uncredited assist from whomever Helen Swanson was working for, was theoretically capable of achieving velocities thrillingly close to the speed of light. Built-in hibernation niches, improving upon Walter Nichols’s original cryosatellite designs, promised to hold some eighty-five passengers in suspended animation while the fully automated computer system (Jackson Roykirk’s pride and joy) piloted the sleeper ship to unknown worlds light-years from Earth.

The sight still took Shannon’s breath away.
Too bad this whole project is still so hush-hush,
she thought. She wanted to show the magnificent starship off to the entire world.
Maybe someday, once all
the secrecy is lifted, billions of television viewers will watch a DY-100 take off for the stars.

The elevator lurched to a halt and Shannon exited the cage, right outside a door labeled: S-4.LAUNCH

CONTROL. Another guard should have been standing watch over the entrance, so she was surprised to find the door unattended.
Curiouser and curiouser,
she thought, as she slid her own key card into the lock and entered today’s password into the electronic keypad. “Hello?” she asked uneasily, as the door slid open.

[361]It was past eleven on a Friday night. With the earliest lift-off date still days away, Launch Control should have been completely deserted. And, indeed, rows of unoccupied computer control stations looked out on the launch site through a gallery window made of six-inch-thick transparent aluminum, strong enough to withstand even the tremendous heat and force of a blast-off. The consoles were all switched off, giving the launch gallery a sepulchral feel, lacking its usual flashing lights and humming circuitry.

But the control room was not entirely empty. Helen Swanson, wearing (of all things!) an orange NASA flight suit, lounged in one of the rolling bucket seats used by the launch technicians, her booted feet resting atop an inactive keyboard. Next to her, in the adjacent seat, a uniformed guard snored contentedly, his head slumped onto the console in front of him. An inane grin was plastered on his face, and a tiny river of drool trickled from the corner of his mouth.

“Don’t worry about him,” Helen assured her, nodding at the oblivious sentry. His gun, Shannon noted, was resting on another console, safely out of arm’s reach. “Trust me, he’s having very pleasant dreams right now.”

Tell me about it,Shannon thought, having been on the receiving end of one of Helen’s weirdo tranquilizer beams back in ’86; she had never slept quite so well in her life. “What’s this all about, Helen?” she whispered urgently. “What are you doing here?”