Star Trek_ A Choice of Catastrophes - Michael Schuster [55]
“Mister Rawlins, any readings on what’s in that structure?”
The geologist shook his head. “Machinery of some type, Captain. I can barely get a reading through the hyper-bonded metal.”
Kirk nodded. Was it a facility for reawakening the Farrezzi? Were they getting ready to reclaim their planet?
It took a few moments for him to notice that his communicator was blinking—the UT was ready. At a level he could barely make out, a voice began emanating from the device. “Attention! Order: damage avoidance. Alternative: fatality!”
“Remorse.” The translator rendered both voices androgynous. “Speed increase attempt. Obedience.”
“Order: silence! Arrival intruders on planet, high-speed necessity for avoidance load-theft.”
Kirk shared a glance with Giotto, who asked, “Intruders? They have to be talking about Yüksel. But what did they mean by ‘load’?”
“Not-we knowledge of planet location nonexistent. Statement inclusion Orions. Load-theft impossibility.”
“Contradiction! Orions commerce contact time abundance then/now, century-plus. Intruder resemblance, exception: skin color.”
Orions? Saloniemi had said he’d found a reference to Farrezz in Orion records. Were they trading with the Farrezzi, after all this time? Were they here?
“Desire: completion loading process. Nonpossession: knowledge of waking procedure failure.”
Kirk had been watching the Farrezzi, trying to figure out which two were conversing. Finally, he managed to pick them out, by virtue of their moving, trunk-like appendages. One was pushing a cryopod with two of its limbs, waving the others in agitation, as another stood next to it, slightly taller, and waving three limbs in reply.
“Attention: avoidance of merchandise damage!”
The captain didn’t like the sound of that, not in connection with Orions. “Merchandise,” he repeated, careful not to raise his voice. “Seven Deers, double-check that.”
The ensign entered commands into her tricorder.
“They definitely said ‘merchandise,’ Captain,” she said. “Ninety-two percent certainty. They are calling those cryopods ‘merchandise.’”
“Does that mean what I think it means, Captain?” asked Rawlins.
“It means the Farrezzi inside those cryopods are slaves,” Kirk said. “These people are slave traders.”
A Vulcan mind is a disciplined one, able to concentrate on many different tasks at once. At the moment, Spock had to keep the Hofstadter under control, analyze the mysterious storm, work on the conundrum of the Farrezzi, and navigate to a safe location. Had he been human, he would have been relieved that Scott had succeeded in bypassing the burnt-out circuits in only 7.3 minutes. However, Spock was well aware of the engineer’s tendency to exaggerate his repair estimates and had expected a quick solution.
Lieutenant Jaeger’s report on the storm indicated that it had reached unexpected levels of power in a very short time. The air over the southern continent was continuously being agitated by an unknown phenomenon, which was the cause of the hurricane-like effects they were experiencing. With the shields impaired by interference, the storm was already dangerous to fly in.
Spock was flying low over a Farrezzi metropolis, speeding toward a building lower than the others, with a radius of over forty meters, possibly a storage facility. “We must land.”
“Aye, sir,” said Lieutenant Kologwe, who continued to man navigation. “Quickly, in order to avoid another one of those lightning strikes.” She pointed at her navigational plot, which displayed a massive swirl of meteorological activity across the entire region.
As Spock initiated the descent, his mind actively returned to one of the other problems he had been considering since the lightning strike. The shuttle’s autopilot did most of the work for standard landing maneuvers, enabling him to examine the mysterious interference. It was not present in the initial probe surveys, or the Hofstadter’s orbital sweep. Therefore, it had to derive from an outside