Ship of the Line - Diane Carey [88]
Briefing Room—U.S.S. Enterprise
(Holographic Simulation)
“Captain Kirk?”
The briefing room was solemn as a church. Dust-blue walls and the cool efficiency of an undecorated table didn’t help the mood any. Black chairs, brown table, simple triscreen computer display in the middle.
Picard moved around the table to a place across from where Captain James Kirk sat with his shoulders slumped and his hands limp upon the tabletop. His olive-green tunic was more casual than the topaz one, a little less formal perhaps.
This didn’t look like the same man at all. There was no fire in these eyes. Not a muscle twitched. The charioteer was gone from inside him, all the energy sapped. He sat as if harnessed there, staring at the table before him. For a moment, it seemed almost as if the holoprogram had frozen.
Then, Kirk sighed.
“Captain?” Picard attempted again. “Are you all right?”
Kirk didn’t look up. He uttered only a weak, “No.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Transporter accident. I’ve been split in two.”
Perplexed, Picard tilted a little to one side and checked. “You look all right …”
With an annoyed flicker in his dull eyes, Kirk glanced at him. “You’re looking at half a man.”
The irritation instantly faded, and Kirk’s eyes fell again. There he sat, an echo of the man Picard would have recognized, the captain who was mellow but intense, sedate until riled, an allegory to the ship he commanded. Today, something was very wrong.
“I don’t understand,” Picard said. “What made you this way?”
Rather than respond directly, James Kirk tapped the controls of a desktop panel.
“Captain’s log,” he began, “stardate 1672.1. Specimen-gathering mission on planet Alfa 177. Unknown to any of us during this time, a duplicate of me, some strange alter ego, had been created by the computer malfunction. The duplicate isn’t really a duplicate as such … he’s … half of me. Half of my personality. We only discovered the accident when Scott beamed a local animal on board, and a few moments later the transporter activated itself, and a second animal beamed aboard. Except it wasn’t a duplicate—it was an opposite. Shortly thereafter, Yeoman Rand and Geological Technician Fisher were assaulted … apparently by me. Crew members report that the counterpart is temperamental, but clever. Apparently, I have a dark twin aboard. We think his base instincts are in control. He’s loose on my ship. And he knows the ship as well as I do. Even worse … I seem to be losing the will to fight him.”
He paused, apparently also losing the will to continue his log entry. After a moment, he simply clicked the mechanism off and sat still again.
“I’ve got men trapped on the surface below,” Kirk said. “The temperature’s dropping. We can’t use the transporter until we find out how to make it stop splitting anyone who uses it. It’s a frozen waste down there … I feel so distracted … I keep forgetting things. My strength of will is slipping … The crew is losing faith in me. My command …”
“Can’t you use a shuttlecraft to bring those men up?”
“The ionosphere’s crystalized. Can’t get through.”
“You could blast your way through with phasers.”
“And risk atmospheric shock waves on my men? We have to fix the transporter … somehow …”
The briefing room door parted without a signal and Mr. Spock strode in, clearly grim with the day’s events. It seemed unbelievable, but in this time of technological wonders and strange uncharted science, such things were possible.
Spock paused, gazed at his captain briefly, then, much as Picard has asked, he wondered, “Are you all right, Captain?”
“Check on the men, Spock,” Kirk said immediately. “Never mind me.”
Not contented by that, Spock went to the end of the table, to a computer terminal, and punched the comm. “Mr. Sulu, report your status.”
“Sulu here … all hands accounted for. The blankets you beamed down were shredded by the transporter process.”
Kirk tapped the comm nearest him. “Scotty’s working on the transporter. How’s it going down there, Mr. Sulu?”
“It’s already twenty degrees below zero … can’t exactly call it balmy …”