Spock gazed at him with sharp-eyed significance. “Eric, you underrate yourself and it makes you hesitate.”
“I hesitate because I get things wrong so much,” Stiles said. “And I don’t want to get things so wrong it gets somebody killed. Or a whole lot of somebodies.”
“That is what everyone likes about you.”
Stiles looked up. “Huh?”
“Your reputation among the captains of front-line ships is well known. Every service commander knows you are a Medal of Valor winner. You could have pushed, jockeyed for position, used your commendation to leap over the heads of everyone on the promotions list. Even in civilian life you might have used your hero status to become a senator or gain other power. You could easily have become one of those people with much rank and little experience, but you chose a wiser and less vainglorious way. You went back out into space for more experience, working your way up rather than forcing your way up. You may not realize it, but you are deeply respected and liked by the people who get all the attention. They speak of you fondly. They hope Eric Stiles is the one who comes to repair their ships.”
Astonished to his socks, Stiles gawked in complete stupid amazement. His men had said things like that to him, but he thought that was in-house loyalty and dusted it off with the debris of a day’s work.
“Sir,” he began, “there’s something the history tapes don’t show about you.”
“What would that be?”
Stiles’s voice was low and sincere. “You’re a nice person.”
Though Spock’s face remained passive, his eyes dropped their guard. “A supreme compliment,” he said. “Thank you. Now I suggest we vacate this cell.”
“I’m ready,” Stiles said. “How do we do it?”
Offering a moment to absorb what they had said to each other, the ambassador raised a brow in punctuation. Then he brought his right hand to his ear and pressed the skin just behind his earlobe, and said, “Spock to Saskatoon.”
For two or three seconds there was nothing. Then, out of nowhere, the very faint buzz of a voice, unmistakably human, spoke up from thin air, sizzling as if on a grill.
“McCoy here. What are you clowns waiting for? We’ve had you located for a half hour! Why’d you wait so long to signal us? You always did have lousy Vulcan timing.”
Touching his ear in a different place, Spock tilted his head to clear the signal a little more. “The comm link has been charging, doctor.”
“Have you found that Romulan yet?”
“Not yet. We have been incarcerated, but will be remedying that momentarily and effecting a search. Are you and the ship under cover?”
“You bet we are. You can track us with this signal, can’t you?”
“Yes. Stand by. No unnecessary signals.”
“Standing by. McCoy out.”
Astonished all over again, Stiles squawked, “How’d you do that! How could you contact—”
“A micro-transponder embedded in my cochlear cavity.” Spock gestured to his right ear as if to display something that couldn’t possibly be seen.
“But the guards scanned us!” Stiles asked, “How’d they miss something with a broadcast range?”
“The mechanism was nonactive. Dr. McCoy was under orders to activate a charge by remote after two hours had passed, with short-range microburst—”
“Remote? From the ship? Wouldn’t it get interference?”
“The good doctor has many connections on this planet who owe him favors. I suspect he had the signal relayed through several private sources.”
“You ‘suspect’?”
“He delights in not telling me.”
“But can’t the Pojjana key in on an outside signal like that?”
“Why should they?” Spock pointed out. “Until today, there were no Federation frequency combinations being used on the planet. Why would they militate against it?”
As he spoke, the ambassador firmly gripped one of the symbolic polished stones on his jacket. The large stone unscrewed as if it were the top of a jar and came off in Spock’s hand. He turned it bottom up. In the center of what had looked perfectly well like a real stone was instead a molded chamber, and in that chamber was a black mechanical nugget which Spock plucked out and examined.
Overwhelmed, Stiles stared at the black nugget and recognized it, the little green “charged” light glowing against his skin.
“You’ve got a utility phaser!”
Surveying the little palm-sized weapon with satisfaction, Spock said, “Like the comm link, it needed time to charge. Enough time for us to beam down and clear all the security scans. If we had allowed ourselves to be captured with the link and weapon charged, the Pojjana guards would’ve detected the active energy. Also, I supposed the shield might neutralize them if they were precharged—”
“So you’re saying you knew they probably wouldn’t deal with us. And you knew that ahead of time.”
Spock eyed him cannily. “Of course, Mr. Stiles. One hopes for the best, but prepares for the worst.”
At the sounds of those casual words, put across so matter-of-factly by one of the last living pioneers of space exploration, shock descended upon Eric Stiles as if he were under a collapsing bridge. It pressed the breath from his lungs and displayed a shame within him and a smoldering anger that for much more than a decade he had suppressed. Now, today, finally, it sparked.
Prepare for the worst.
He leaned forward on the rusty cot, gazing downward at the empty floor. His knees before him might as well have been distant planets. What had he done all his life? Revere the best, expect the worst, and be prepared…for neither.
His skin felt tight, preformed. He drew another breath, huffed it out.
Across the cell, Spock pressed against the brick wall, moving slowly from place to place. He seemed to be listening for outside activity. Listening…trying to decide where to aim the phaser, how to break them out.
His own breath rumbled in his ears. Just outgoing, in huffs, short and hot. Dry lips.
As if in a dream he watched Spock prime the freshly charged little palm phaser. Green light, blue, yellow…
The Vulcan now stood sideways to present a narrow profile to the blast field, and extended his arm to aim at the portion of the wall he had chosen as their best bet to open an escape route without bringing the building or the Pojjana army down upon them. Orange…red.
“Sir!” Stiles bolted to his feet.
The ambassador hesitated and held fire. “Something?”
Shadows lay across Spock’s Vulcan features, harsh limited light on the other side, a life-size paper doll of ideals Stiles had thought were bigger than life.
“I’m sorry about this,” Stiles announced. He met Spock’s gaze without flinching. “From now on I’m thinking ahead.”
“What does that mean, specifically?” the Vulcan asked.
“It means you don’t have permission to open fire.”
This time both of Spock’s brows went up. “I beg your pardon?”
Putting out a cold hand, Stiles noted that at least now he wasn’t trembling.
“So you’ve got a phaser. So what? Once we get out of the cell, they’ve got energy detectors, tiers of fences, guards, weapons. We’ll never get through.”
“You have a suggestion for me?” Spock asked.
“No, sir,” Stiles said. “I have an order for you. This is a military mission. I’m the ranking Starfleet officer here. This is probably the most boneheaded thing I’ve ever done in my life, and I don’t know if…yes, I do know. I’ve been deferring to you for half my life whether you were there or not, and it’s time for that to stop. They’re expecting us to escape but, sir, we’re not here to escape.”
Another step brought him right up to Mr. Spock, face to face, man to man.
“I’ve been acting like a kid ever since I first saw your face on a history screen. It’s time for me to start acting like the commander of this mission.”
He turned his hand pa
lm up and did not lower it.
Standing before him in what appeared to be amazement and a few other emotions Stiles couldn’t quite identify, Spock passed the next few moments without moving so much as a facial muscle.
His eyes moved first, shifting down to the phaser in his grip. He gazed at the nugget-shaped weapon for several seconds as if it were the mean center of the universe.
Then, quite accommodatingly, he placed the weapon in Stiles’s open hand. “As you wish.”
Stiles found himself in the middle of a prison cell, holding the center of the universe.
Limping back a step or two, the ambassador gave Stiles room to use the phaser. There was a particular quality to his voice as he asked, “What is your plan, Commander?”
As he checked the phaser to be sure it was set where he thought it was, Stiles felt suddenly warm all over, and strong.
“Orsova thinks he’s being cute putting me back in the same cell. He’s an idiot. I spent years here. I helped rebuild this place after my first Constrictor. I know more about it than he does or any guard ever did. It’s his big mistake. I’m not a twenty-one-year-old kid anymore.”
“And this is an epiphany for you?”
Stiles blinked at him. That look was back on the Vulcan’s face, that almost-smile, with the sparkle behind the eyes.
Amusement? Or something else?
“Your men knew their lives were in danger,” the ambassador said, “yet you gave them confidence without deception. You marched them past the frozen moment that kills so many, and gave them a chance to fight for their ship and their lives. Against the checklist that counts more than legends, with all flaws and hesitations understood as cells of the whole…you are a captain.”
Had the lights changed in here? Was it warmer?
Both peeved and flattered, Stiles shifted his weight and waved a hand at the cot. “You mean, all this time you believed in me and you let me sit there and snivel?”
“It was never enough for me to believe in you,” Spock said handily. “You had to believe—”
“Please!” Stiles laughed. “Don’t finish that! I smell a cliché.”
Spock rewarded him with that hint of a smile and a very slight bow. “I stand rebuked.”
Bewildered and amazed that he was actually smiling, Stiles sighed roughly and looked down at the utility phaser in his hand. He aimed it, but not at the wall. Instead, he pointed its bluntly conical nose in a completely illogical direction.
The ambassador looked at the concrete floor. “Where are we going?”
“Sir, we’re going straight down.”
And the cell lit up in a million lights, and the floor blew up, and the ceiling shredded. And Eric Stiles was in charge.
Chapter Twenty-two
BLISTERING HEAT SHOT through the cell. Pressure struck Stiles from all sides and spun him silly. The floor tilted, then disappeared under his feet and gravity dragged him down. It almost felt like a Constrictor.
He struck the griddle of hot rock with his right hipbone and scraped down fifteen feet until a carpet of muck received him up to the ankles. Somehow he managed to stay on his feet, leaning sideways on a nubby slab that was suddenly very familiar. Funny how the years rushed up to remind him of things.
Took out too much of the floor—probably shouldn’t have used the full-destruct setting. Too late now.
“Where’s the phaser? Oh, I still got it. Couldn’t feel my hand….”
No wonder. His whole forearm was tingling. Probably bumped the funny bone. His fingers had convulsed around the utility phaser, luckily, and he still had it. He craned his neck to look up at the hole they’d created. Had anybody heard the cracking and crashing of stone? There hadn’t been a blast noise, instead just the whine of the phaser before the rock cracked. If there wasn’t a guard on the floor, maybe the crash hadn’t been noticed. Please, please, please.
Where was the ambassador?
Not waiting for his eyes to adjust, Stiles glanced around in the dimness, then started pawing at the broken flooring. Six feet away, the rocks shifted. Springing over there, Stiles tripped and landed on a knee. Recovering, he dug until a Vulcan ear appeared, luckily still attached to a Vulcan head.
“Sir!” he called.
Now, how would this look! Eric Stiles, the man who let First Officer Spock get buried alive!
The rubble scratched his hands. Some of the stones were hot to the touch as he pushed them off the ambassador.
“Sir? Are you hurt?”
Dust and pebbles sheeted into the muck and Spock sat up. “Quite well, thank you…where are we?”
Stretching off to both sides of them, bending into infinity not far away, the octagonal passageway was lit only by mediocre pencils of light through wrist-width drainage holes. Stiles knew that they could only see at all because the sun was almost directly overhead and the sky had cleared. In another couple of hours, the tunnels would be pitch dark.
“It’s a network of tunnels. We built them right after my first Constrictor. The civil engineers thought the gravity effect would be lessened by a layer of planet strata and that maybe people could hide below, but it didn’t work. They were deathtraps. Eventually we just gave up and sealed them. I used to imagine using it to escape.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“And go where?”
“Mmm…pardon me.”
“I couldn’t get off the planet and nobody would help an alien. And I didn’t exactly have a way of cutting through the floor either.”
Spock accepted Stiles’s support as he got carefully to his feet and tested his injured leg. “How long do you suppose our escape will go undiscovered?”
“Depends on whether Orsova wants to auction off a visit now or later. We’ll know, because we’ll hear the alarms go off. Until then, we can just make our way through to the fresh-water ducts and get out. Darker in here than I remembered…looks like the roots are getting in too. Watch your step, Ambassador. With that comm link implant, can you tell me the direction the CST is in?”
“Yes.” Spock paused a moment, and even though it seemed that he was doing something psychic, Stiles knew there was nothing like that going on. “East northeast…by north. Four miles…one eighth.”
“East by—four miles from here?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Very.”
“Perfect. I know just what they’re doing.”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because we’re splitting up.”
“That may not be wise,” Spock protested.
“Well, it wouldn’t be my first time,” Stiles flatly told him, and left no room for alternatives. “Come this way.”
Picking through the crushed flooring into the muck-layered tunnel bottom, even with Spock’s bad leg they moved along faster than Stiles expected. The stink was incredible. Heavy roots searched their way down from the surface, hairlike ancillary tendrils unbroken until his hand tore them away, proving that no one had come down here in years. He led Spock in a direction he knew the search would never go if they were discovered gone. That was the plan, all part of where he had told Travis to bring the ship down—away from the mountains, which was the natural place to hide. Hmm…been thinking ahead all this time and never knew it.
“Up at that intersection there,” he said to Spock, “you go left. You’ll be able to get out in about a half mile. That’s where the municipal slab ends. I’ll go to the right and find Zevon and catch up, and I’ll be better alone in case it’s a trap. All due respect, you’ll slow me down and I’m tired of being slow. I’m sorry if this isn’t what you had in mind.”
“I had nothing in mind.”
What’d he say?
Must be clogged ears. Didn’t hear right. Stiles looked over his shoulder, seeing only the gray silhouette of the Vulcan two steps back. As he held aside a thick root for the ambassador to step by, he heard that sentence again in his head and finally just asked.
“You didn’t h
ave a plan? I thought the great amazing Mr. Spock always had a plan.”
The ambassador tipped his head in a kind of shrug and spoke as they picked their way along.
“You remember what I told you about captains. I know my shortcomings. Discipline can be limiting. This is why Vulcans, with all our stringent codes of behavior, have not generally prevailed as great leaders, and humans, with your elastic spirits, have. I’ve learned over the years to provide information and opportunity, then step aside and rely upon the more vibrant among us for actual tactics. I hoped you would rise to the occasion.”
“Are you saying,” Stiles marveled, “you just fake it?”
In a shaft of light from a drain hole, Spock’s black eyes flickered smartly. “No. I trusted you to fake it.”
The ambassador offered that canny look for several seconds without even taking a step. Apparently he wanted a point made.
Overwhelmed, Stiles hovered in the middle of a step. Only a brainless drizzle of water somewhere in the underground system drew him out of his amazement and reminded him of what had to be done, and done soon.
“Said Frankenstein to the monster,” he cracked. “Bear left and you’ll get out. Once you get outside, keep to the low trail. They’ll be looking high first, the way to the mountains. We’ll rendezvous east northeast at the lake.”
Spock reached out to grasp a root, ready to pull himself forward. “Aye aye, captain.”
Flushed with delight and newly emboldened, Stiles looked up and laughed. “Thanks!”
Beverly Crusher took her latest series of biological readings on the shuddering body of the Romulan empress, and compared them with the readings from one hour ago. In the room, only the snap of the fireplace and the bleep of Data’s computer, as he processed more information and sent what they had discovered onward to the other physicians across the empire, could be heard. There was not that much more that could be done.
For days now she had kept the empress and dozens of others alive by treating the symptoms. Over the past day, success had noticeably shrunk.