“Captain,” Spock said hoarsely, “we are being hailed.”
“The Klingons?” Kirk asked. “Already?”
“Negative, Captain. I believe it is the Enterprise.” Spock activated the comm receiver. “Spock to Enterprise, request emergency beam-out.”
Through the smoky haze, Kirk spied his ship in the distance. Just on the other side of the border?
“Aye, Mister Spock,” Scotty replied. Random bursts of static punctuated the transmission, distorting the chief engineer’s familiar accent. “That’s what we’ve been waiting for.”
Kirk didn’t know whether to scold Scotty or commend him for sticking around on the fringes of the disputed territory. He checked to make sure the Key was still tucked into his belt. They were going to need that if they were ever going to rescue Una and any others lost in that alien universe. Crackling flames, spreading toward the cockpit, made him wonder if they had reached Scotty a few moments too late. He felt the scorching heat of the blaze at his back. He choked on the suffocating black smoke, gasping for oxygen that wasn’t there anymore.
“Five seconds to warp containment failure,” Spock announced. “Four, three, two—”
A tingling sensation washed over Kirk with seconds to spare. He and Spock vacated the ship in a dazzle of golden sparks.
The Shimizu’s smoke-filled cockpit was instantly replaced by the cool and calm of the Enterprise’s transporter room. Gravity and fresh air made Kirk feel immediately at home, as did the sight of Doctor McCoy and Yeoman Bates waiting for him with Lieutenant Kyle over by the transporter controls.
A shock wave caused the transporter platform to briefly list beneath Kirk’s boots. He tensed, anticipating more trouble, but the tremor passed quickly and without lasting effect.
The Shimizu, he realized, exiting in a blaze of glory—after holding together just long enough to get us safely home.
He liked to think that Captain Una would be proud of her valiant little ship.
“So,” McCoy said impatiently, while simultaneously scanning them with a medical tricorder, “now are you going to tell me what this was all about?”
Kirk coughed the smoke from his lungs, and filled them with fresh air, before answering. “Soon, Bones, soon.”
“Are you all right, Captain?” Bates asked, as solicitous as ever. “Can I help you with anything?”
He checked again to make sure the Key was securely tucked into his belt and concealed beneath his sweaty gold command tunic. “No, thank you, Yeoman. I’m fine.”
Spock stepped down from the transporter platform. “Which would not have been the case, for either of us, had the transport been a few moments later. My gratitude, Lieutenant Kyle.”
“Thank you, sir,” Kyle said. “Just doing my duty.”
“We’ve been tracking the Shimizu ever since it showed up on our long-range sensors,” Bates explained. “Commander Scott refused to give up on you. None of us did.”
McCoy belatedly noticed that someone was missing. “Where is Captain Una?”
“That,” Kirk replied, sighing, “is a long story.”
Twenty-two
“There we go,” Kirk said. “Back where it belongs.”
He returned the Key to the hidden compartment in his quarters, which no longer felt quite as secure as it once had, despite Spock’s repairs to the breached vault, which had been discreetly executed during the crew’s postponed shore leave on Chippewa Prime. The decorative trapezoidal panel slid back into place, concealing the compartment and its singular contents from view once more. The Key was safely under lock and key.
“For now,” Spock observed. “It will be necessary to remove it from hiding again if and when we return to Usilde in hopes of retrieving Captain Una—and any surviving castaways—from the other universe.”
“Another universe,” McCoy murmured. “I still have trouble wrapping my head around that, despite that unsettling business on the other side of the looking glass a while back.” He regarded Spock with a critical eye. “For the record, I still think you looked better with a beard.”
“That is your opinion, Doctor,” Spock said. “You’ll forgive me if I regard that as less than definitive.”
Bowing to the inevitable, Kirk had finally let McCoy in on the secret, which, in retrospect, he probably should have done before. If I can’t trust Bones . . .
“So what are you telling Starfleet about this?” the doctor asked.
“Good question,” Kirk said. “At present, just that Captain Una returned to Usilde on a private mission to search for some old shipmates who had gone missing in action years ago and that she chose to remain behind to continue the search. I also felt obliged to mention the abandoned Jatohr citadel now that it’s fallen into the hands of the Klingons, but the Key is still our secret for the time being, although I confess to having second thoughts about that.” He contemplated the panel masking the Key’s hideaway. “Maybe there’s been too many secrets for too long.”
“I don’t know,” McCoy said. “From what you’ve told me, perhaps April was right to keep that Key under wraps. This poor universe is dangerous enough without some horrific new technology added to the mix.”
“Careful, Doctor,” Spock chided him, “or you may be mistaken for a Luddite.”
“Damn straight I am, at least when it comes to alien super-weapons from another reality!”
Kirk could see where McCoy was coming from. Starfleet was still coping with the revelation that the Romulans had developed a working cloaking device. The Key had the potential to dramatically shift the balance of power in the galaxy if it fell into the wrong hands—or even the right ones.
“Well, we kept it away from the Klingons,” Kirk said. “That’s something.”
“Indeed,” Spock agreed, “although the Klingons’ discovery of the Jatohr citadel presents significant challenges when it comes to returning to Usilde in the near future. I cannot imagine that the Klingons will soon abandon a find of such magnitude.”
“Nor can I,” Kirk said, “but we’ll have to find a way to get back to that control room. I fully intend to keep my promise to Una, if it’s at all possible.”
“That’s a big if, Jim,” McCoy said, “if you don’t mind me saying so.”
“You’re not wrong, Bones, although I wish I could say otherwise.” Kirk turned away from the hidden vault and headed for the exit. “Clearly, I’ve got a lot to think about.”
In the meantime, the bridge awaited him. No doubt Yeoman Bates had a fresh batch of reports and requisitions for him to sign off on.
* * *
The woman who called herself Lisa Bates waited until she was certain that Kirk’s quarters were empty before quietly letting herself into the suite. One of the many perks of being the captain’s yeoman was ready access to his quarters, which came in handy sometimes.
Particularly if you were a spy.
Major Sadira of the Tal Shiar, the elite Romulan intelligence service, was fully human, but her loyalty belonged to the Romulan Star Empire, who had gone to great lengths to create the false identity of “Lisa Bates.” In truth, she was descended from human prisoners captured during the first Earth-Romulan war and had been raised since birth to serve the praetor to the best of her abilities. Starfleet may have only recently gotten a good look at natural-born Romulans, and become aware of their shameful Vulcan roots, but her adopted people had been spying on the humans and Vulcans since long before the founding of the Federation, and she was hardly the only Tal Shiar operative under deep cover in Starfleet and elsewhere.
As she quietly made her way across Kirk’s quarters, she reflected, not for the first time, on how serving as the captain’s yeoman was the ideal posting for a spy. She saw all the paperwork requiring Kirk’s signature, was expected to take notes during crucial meetings and exploratory missions, and routinely came and went from his quarters, all while
flying under most everyone’s sensors. To use a human idiom, which she had assiduously absorbed into her repertoire, she was the proverbial fly on the wall, inconspicuously observing almost everything that went on aboard the ship, including a number of matters she was not supposed to know about.
Like the existence of the Transfer Key.
The bugs she had discreetly planted in Kirk’s quarters had paid off handsomely. She had been waiting patiently for an opportunity to acquire the device ever since Captain Una had first purloined it. Unlike that rogue captain, however, she did not have to employ anything as crude as a phaser to break into the hidden compartment. Careful examination of the covert surveillance footage captured by her spy-cams had yielded the combination to the locking mechanism hidden behind the trapezoidal panel.
Thank you, Mister Spock, she thought, for so helpfully demonstrating the new combination to the captain.
She smiled slyly as she removed the Key from the vault. Knowing Spock, it was highly likely that a silent alarm was now informing him and Kirk that the secret compartment had been accessed, but she had no intention of lingering long enough to get caught red-handed. It would take some time for Kirk and Spock to figure out who was responsible for this latest theft, and she planned to be long gone by then.
Holding on tightly to the Key, she took out the disguised communicator hidden in her beehive hairdo and set it to a certain top-secret frequency.
“Major Sadira to Velibor,” she said in Romulan. “The prize has been obtained. Request immediate retrieval.”
“We read you, Major,” a voice replied. “Stand by.”
Using the communicator aboard the Enterprise was a calculated risk. In general, she preferred to conduct any such communications via more indirect channels and from more secure locations—such as, say, while on shore leave. The Enterprise’s recent layover at Chippewa Prime had, in fact, provided her with an ideal opportunity to make all necessary arrangements for this very operation.
It was a shame that stealing the Key necessitated blowing her cover, but she judged the one-of-a-kind alien weapon to be worth it. An opportunity like this was why she had been planted on the Enterprise in the first place.
Plus, she was getting damn sick of fetching Kirk coffee.
* * *
Kirk couldn’t believe his eyes when the silent alarm blinked upon his armrest.
Again?
This time he did not hesitate to react immediately. He punched his chair’s comm switch. “Security to the captain’s quarters, on the double!”
He sprang from his chair. “Mister Sulu, you have the bridge. Spock, you’re with me.”
“I expected as much, Captain,” the first officer said, already relinquishing the science station to join Kirk.
They were halfway to the turbolift when Uhura called out.
“Captain! I’m detecting an unauthorized transmission coming from somewhere inside the ship.”
Kirk paused in his tracks. “Can you pinpoint the exact location?”
“In just a moment, sir.” Uhura isolated the signal, then looked at Kirk with a confused expression. “The transmission, it’s coming from . . . your quarters, sir.”
The Key, Kirk realized. Someone’s after the Key . . .
He started again for the turbolift, only to be halted by an urgent cry from Chekov.
“Captain! Ship uncloaking ten degrees to starboard.”
“What?”
Kirk whirled around in time to see the blackness of space shimmer like a mirage upon the main viewer before revealing the presence of a Romulan bird-of-prey within firing range of the Enterprise. He gaped in shock at the enemy warship, which took its name from the intimidating raptor painted upon its hull. A ship just like this one had attacked several Federation outposts only a year ago—and had nearly destroyed the Enterprise.
“Raise shields!” he ordered, hurrying back to his chair. “Full power.”
Chekov responded quickly. “Raising shields.”
Spock hastily returned to his station as well. He peered into his scope. “Captain, readings indicate that something—or someone—was beamed off the Enterprise in the instant before we raised our shields.”
Kirk had to be impressed by the split-second timing, even as he feared he knew where the unknown party had been transported from. “Let me guess. Somebody beamed from my quarters onto the ship.”
“Attempting to verify that now,” Spock said, “but the odds are your supposition is correct.”
So we know where and how, Kirk thought, but who . . . ?
“Captain, the Romulan vessel is hailing us,” Uhura said.
Kirk stared grimly at the bird-of-prey. “Put them through.”
“Aye, sir.”
Kirk expected the saturnine countenance of a Romulan commander to appear upon the screen, so he was taken aback when Lisa Bates, of all people, smirked at him from across space. Startled gasps from Uhura and others greeted the shocking visual. Even Spock looked momentarily taken aback.
“Hello, Captain,” Bates said, with a sardonic tone Kirk had never heard from her before. “Consider this my resignation.”
Kirk still couldn’t process this. “Bates?”
“That’s Major Sadira, if you please. I’m afraid the ever-attentive Yeoman Bates was something of a convenient fiction.” She plucked at the fabric of her red Starfleet uniform. “I confess I’m not going to miss this rather demeaning outfit, nor playing the servile yeoman, but both served their purpose.”
She held up the Key.
“Before I take my leave of you, Kirk, I can’t resist rubbing a little salt in the wound first, to make up for all the cream and sugar I had to put in your coffee. I have the Transfer Key, Kirk, and now so does the Romulan Star Empire.”
The bird-of-prey shimmered and vanished from sight.
Acknowledgments
I remember exactly how this project began for me. I was attending Shore Leave, one of my favorite fan-run Star Trek conventions, when I ran into Dave Mack, who was signing his latest novel at a dealer’s table. Dave quietly mentioned that he and a few other Trek authors were thinking of collaborating on a big, multi-volume saga in celebration of Star Trek’s upcoming fiftieth anniversary, and was I interested in getting in on the action?
“Definitely,” I replied. “Count me in.”
Many e-mails later, and after conferring with the good folks at Pocket Books and CBS, we hammered out an outline for what eventually became known as the Legacies trilogy. But that was just the beginning of the collaboration. As each of us got under way writing our respective volumes, we stayed in constant touch: throwing ideas and suggestions and new twists and details back and forth to each other in hopes of making Legacies everything we hoped it would be. In short, we had a blast.
So, many thanks to my esteemed and imaginative collaborators, Dave Mack, Dayton Ward, and Kevin Dilmore, without whom this book would literally have not have been written, and particularly to Dave for inviting me to take part in the first place.
But we weren’t in this alone. Thanks are also due to our expert editors, Ed Schlesinger and Margaret Clark, for guiding us through the process, and to my agent, Russ Galen, for handling my end of the contract. I also want to thank Diane Carey for fleshing out Captain Robert April’s crew in her own work, which I shamelessly cribbed from in this book.
Finally, and as always, I relied heavily on the support and encouragement of my girlfriend, Karen, as well as our two four-legged assistants: Sophie and Lyla.
Here’s hoping we can have just as much fun on Trek’s sixtieth anniversary!
* * *
STAR TREK: LEGACIES
* * *
WILL CONTINUE IN
BOOK 2:
BEST DEFENSE
by David Mack
Turn the page for an exciting excerpt . . .
Una limped alone in a land without shadow. Two merciless suns, high overhead, scorched the white salt flats. Had it been hours or days since she had crossed the dimensional barrier to this forsaken place? Time felt slow and elastic. The glaring orbs of day seemed never to move.
Perhaps this world is tidally locked to its parent stars.
It was a rational explanation for the endless noontime, yet it fell short of explaining what truly felt askew to Captain Una about this bizarre alien universe. Plodding toward a distant sprawl of hills backed by rugged mountains, she was plagued by the sensation of running while standing still, as if in a dream. Far ahead, haze-shrouded hilltops bobbed with her uneven steps and lurched in time with her wounded gait, as salt crystals crunched beneath the soles of her dusty, Starfleet standard-issue boots.
Both halves of her uniform—its black trousers and green command tunic—were ripped and frayed in several spots. It was all damage incurred on the planet Usilde in her home universe, during her harried escape through traps wrought from brambles, nettles, and thorns. To reach the citadel created by extradimensional invaders known as the Jatohr, Una had been forced to defy the taboos of the indigenous Usildar, who both feared and despised the alien fortress, which had appeared without warning years earlier in one of their rain forest’s larger lakes. What Una knew and the Usildar did not was that the alien stronghold was also the key to traveling between this blighted dimension and the one she called home—which meant it was also her only hope of rescuing the other members of an ill-fated Enterprise landing party, who had been exiled here eighteen years earlier while she had been forced to bear helpless witness.
I am no longer helpless. And I will bring my shipmates home.
She swept a lock of her raven hair from her eyes, noted the delicate sheen of perspiration on the back of her pale hand. Peering ahead, she found no tracks to follow, no road to guide her journey. Her training nagged at her. It demanded she proceed based on careful observation and rational deduction, but there were no facts here to parse. Only level sands and blank emptiness, stretching away to a faded horizon. And yet, Una knew she was moving in the right direction. It wasn’t that her Illyrian mental discipline gave her any special insight into this universum incognita; it was something more basic and less rational. It was instinct. A hunch. A feeling.