Star Trek: The Original Series: The Shocks of Adversity Read online

  Thank you for downloading this Gallery Books eBook.

  * * *

  Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Gallery Books and Simon & Schuster.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  or visit us online to sign up at

  eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

  To Chris, Karl, Teri, Laura, and Mike

  “Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.”

  —George Washington

  One

  The deck fell out from under James Kirk’s feet, and for a moment he was left suspended weightless in midair.

  In the next instant, the ship’s artificial gravity field reasserted itself, and he hit the gymnasium floor with a loud whoomph. Despite the padding that covered the deck underneath him, his head struck hard enough to send a barrage of shooting stars streaming across his field of vision. Well, I asked for that, he silently reprimanded himself.

  “Captain!” As the shooting stars began to clear away, he saw Lieutenant Joseph D’Abruzzo bent over him, wearing a look of worry on his young face. “Are you all right, sir?”

  “Oh, just fine,” Kirk replied, trying to sound as though he hadn’t just had the wind forced out of him. “Why do you ask?”

  He raised his right hand up toward D’Abruzzo, who grasped Kirk’s hand and helped pull him back up onto his stocking feet. “I am sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to throw you that hard, really.”

  “Don’t apologize, Mister D’Abruzzo,” Kirk told the younger man. He adjusted the shoulders of his bright orange judo gi, which matched the one worn by the lieutenant. “I invited you to be my sparring partner specifically because I knew you would challenge me.” D’Abruzzo had been the captain of the Starfleet Academy martial arts team, and had been instrumental in leading them to the United Earth Intercollegiate Championship in his graduating year. “The last thing I want is for you to hold anything back. Come on,” he said, stepping to the opposite side of the mat and standing on the short white line that marked his starting position. D’Abruzzo took his place on the opposite mark, then the two men bowed before advancing to meet at the center of the mat.

  Five seconds later, Kirk was flat on the deck again. Well, maybe holding back isn’t the last thing I want him to do, he considered silently.

  “Well, at least you didn’t go airborne that time.”

  Kirk raised his head and turned it in the direction of where Leonard McCoy stood watching. Bones was leaning against the wall by the gymnasium doors, his eyes bright with mischievous amusement as he grinned like a madman. Kirk slowly pushed himself back up to his feet, this time ignoring D’Abruzzo’s extended hand. “Don’t you have some other, better things to do, Doctor?”

  “Other things, sure,” McCoy answered. “Better things? I have to say this is at the top of that list.”

  “You know, Bones,” Kirk said, as he rotated his right shoulder, trying to work some of the low ache away, “for someone who is so insistent about his patients’ getting regular exercise, it seems to me that the only reason you ever visit the gym is to mock others.”

  “I’ll have you know that I practice my own daily calisthenics routine every morning before breakfast,” McCoy told him. “You’re more than welcome to join me if you like. Very low impact, probably more appropriate for you.”

  Giving McCoy the tightest of smiles, Kirk turned back to D’Abruzzo. “Again?” The lieutenant, who had been watching the exchange between captain and chief surgeon with the reaction-free face of a cadet undergoing inspection, nodded and moved into position again.

  The deck lurched under Kirk’s feet again, but this time, D’Abruzzo had nothing to do with it—he was also thrown off balance, along with McCoy and everyone else in the gymnasium, by what the captain assumed was a sudden and unexpected failure of the ship’s inertial dampers. “What the hell?” McCoy blurted, pushing himself away from the nearby bulkhead he’d been tossed against.

  Once the ship and Kirk had both regained their steady bearing, the captain crossed to the closest wall-mounted companel and punched the transmit toggle. “Kirk to bridge. What’s happening up there?”

  Commander Spock’s cool, unflappable voice answered him from the speaker grille: “The Enterprise just dropped out of warp, Captain, and encountered some unanticipated subspace turbulence during the transition to normal space.”

  “Another of the Nystrom Anomaly’s surprises?” Kirk asked.

  “It would appear so, sir.”

  “I’ll be right there. Kirk out.” He closed the open circuit, and then turned back to where D’Abruzzo stood and waited. “I’m afraid we’ll need to cut this session short, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, sir,” D’Abruzzo said as he bent forward in the traditional low bow. Kirk returned it before heading to the locker area, tugging at the knotted cloth belt around his waist and freeing it. He shrugged the gi off and turned to toss it into the clothing reclamator by the doorway, noticing only then that McCoy had been following right behind him.

  “You know, Jim,” the doctor said, handing Kirk a towel, “you really ought to lighten up a bit on D’Abruzzo.”

  “What?” Kirk asked as he accepted the proffered piece of terrycloth, and proceeded to rub it over his sweat-slicked chest and sore, aching shoulders.

  “Just . . . go a little easy on him.”

  Kirk stopped and stared at McCoy, stunned. “Me, go easy on him?” he said. “Did you not see what he did to me out there?”

  “Yes, I saw what he did,” McCoy agreed. “And I saw the look you gave him when he did.”

  “What look?”

  “The look that said, ‘Keep tossing your commanding officer around like an old rag doll, and don’t be surprised to find yourself reassigned to waste extraction for the rest of this mission.’ ”

  “But at least I didn’t say it aloud,” Kirk joked, and tossed the towel back to McCoy. “You have to give me credit for that.” The captain turned and opened the locker where he had stashed his uniform and boots before the start of his workout, and began to dress.

  “No, you weren’t that plain,” McCoy said. “But the way you kept addressing him as ‘Lieutenant’ and ‘Mister D’Abruzzo,’ making sure he didn’t forget his place in the chain of command.”

  Kirk paused, shirt in his hands, looking at McCoy. “You’re not saying I was purposely trying to intimidate him, are you, Bones?”

  “Not intentionally, no, Jim,” McCoy allowed. “But you are the captain; that alone is pretty intimidating to most of these kids. Then you put D’Abruzzo in the position you did, where he really had no choice but to hold back on you.”

  “Oh, no, he wasn’t holding back.” His abused muscles complained as Kirk put his arms through the sleeves of his green, wraparound uniform tunic.

  “Okay. If that’s what you want to believe,” McCoy told him, in such a way that Kirk had to seriously consider the possibility that he was not kidding. “My point is,” he continued, “you’ve got to keep in mind who and what you are to your crew. These have an effect on people”—reaching out, McCoy plucked at the rows of golden braids that circled his wrist—“even when you’re not wearing them.”

  Kirk considered McCoy silently for a moment. Ironic that such counsel should come from the one man aboard on whom his rank seemed to have the least effect. “You’re right. Thank you, Bones.”

  McCoy nodded, and left Kirk alone in th
e locker room with his own thoughts. While Bones had certainly meant well, he hardly needed to remind Kirk how set apart he was from the rest of the crew. A starship captain was first and foremost a leader, one who had to require obedience from his crew and make difficult, if not impossible, choices on a regular basis. It was not the sort of environment that allowed a captain to form many close friendships. McCoy was an exception, due to his decidedly non-Starfleet personality. And Spock, too, of course . . . though as much as he valued the Vulcan’s friendship, it could never be compared to the one he’d shared with Gary Mitchell. The two had been inseparable for much of their early careers, and when Kirk was given his first command, he brought his closest friend aboard as a bridge officer. And when Gary had been transformed during the Enterprise’s encounter with the galactic barrier, it was Kirk who had to kill him.

  The captain gave his head a quick shake, dispelling those old memories, then finished pulling on his boots and left the gymnasium. He strode down the corridor, passing by crew members in groups of two and three. Kirk gave them all only the curtest of nods in acknowledgment as he moved on to the turbolift, and then rode to the bridge alone.

  * * *

  The Nystrom Anomaly appeared on the bridge’s main viewscreen as little more than a luminous oval smudge against the starscape beyond. Even with the Enterprise’s state-of-the-art sensors and computerized color image enhancers, the picture they generated revealed little more scientific data than had been collected by Friendship 1, the first-generation warp probe that had discovered the stellar object eighty-nine years earlier.

  At first, the only remarkable thing about those original images was that the ancient pre-Federation probe had still been operational and able to capture and transmit them back to Earth. At first glance, the unnamed stellar object had been identified as a small planetary nebula, consisting of a shell of hydrogen and other stellar gases ejected by a star transforming from a red giant into a white dwarf. But Doctor Loretta Nystrom, a junior researcher assigned to the long-running mission, noted that over the course of Friendship’s long-distance flyby, the nebula displayed no evidence of either expanding outward or contracting back in on itself. Instead, it appeared that it was an almost completely stable accretion disk, holding static at five billion kilometers in diameter.

  Naturally, this data was deemed unreliable because of suspected signal degradation over the vast distances and because the probe was by then in its twelfth decade of operation. The data from Friendship 1 had cut off only months later, and it was assumed that the probe had finally failed and was lost. However, when subsequent Federation deep-space probes were dispatched to follow up on those initial surveys, they confirmed the earlier readings, and also discovered additional inexplicable peculiarities.

  Over the decades, the Nystrom Anomaly had remained one of the more curious mysteries within the Federation’s astronomic community. Some had theorized that the Nystrom Anomaly was composed of an undiscovered form of dark matter, or that it was an exotic extradimensional construct. Others posited that it did not exist at all and was a mere sensor shadow. It was these debates that had led to the Enterprise crew’s current assignment: to serve as the anomaly’s first live observers and to uncover the answers to these long-standing questions. Thus far, though, the answers had remained elusive.

  Spock studied the image of the anomaly from his present position in the bridge’s command chair, while Ensign Pavel Chekov manned the science station. Unable to glean any meaningful information from the indistinct visual representation, the first officer found himself turning to look at the young human officer, hunched over the hooded viewer. Spock felt the illogical urge to ask for a report, though he knew with certainty that any new findings would be promptly relayed to him. All the same, the Vulcan was finding the viewscreen less worthy of observation than the shifts and twitches of Chekov’s back and shoulders as he continued his silent examination.

  From behind him, Spock heard the turbolift doors slide open. Determining with a ninety-nine point thirty-nine percent certainty that this was Captain Kirk come to relieve him, Spock vacated the captain’s chair. “Captain,” he said in greeting, and as Kirk stepped down into the command well, Spock moved to relieve Chekov from his temporary post.

  “Spock,” Kirk returned the acknowledgment. “Report.”

  “We are approximately three billion kilometers from the Nystrom Anomaly,” Spock said as he took his first survey of the science station’s readings. “Unfortunately, the information being gathered by our sensors is woefully lacking.”

  “So, we can’t chalk the mystery up to poor quality equipment on the old probes,” Kirk noted as he assumed his place in the captain’s chair. Turning his full attention to the viewscreen, he asked, “Is this the best resolution we can manage?”

  “Yes, sir,” Chekov said as he slipped into the navigator’s seat, next to Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu at the helm. “Whatever the anomaly is, it’s almost impervious to all our scans. It’s like they used to say about Vladivostok: there is no there there.”

  “What about that subspace turbulence we hit earlier?” Kirk asked. “That was something new.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sulu reported, without turning his attention from his console. “We’re still encountering a good deal of subspace distortion, but I’m compensating.”

  “Well done, Mister Sulu; I don’t feel a thing,” Kirk praised the helmsman with a smile. The captain then turned to his first officer. “Shouldn’t the old probes have detected subspace distortions in the vicinity, even at their ranges? For that matter, shouldn’t we have?”

  “One would have expected so, sir,” Spock answered, looking up from his console. “The pattern of the subspace distortion we are currently encountering would appear to indicate that the Nystrom Anomaly is bending local space-time and subspace, as stars and other high-mass objects do. And yet, there is not a concomitant gravitational effect.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” Kirk said thoughtfully as he turned back to the enigmatic object showing in the forward viewscreen. “Mister Sulu, how bad are these subspace distortions?”

  “Not very, sir,” Sulu replied. “Just a bit unpredictable.”

  Kirk nodded and asked, “Current speed of approach?”

  “One-quarter impulse.”

  “Let’s strap in and take her up to half impulse.”

  “Aye, sir,” Sulu said as he keyed the commands into his console. “Half impulse.”

  The deck began to shudder perceptibly as the ship accelerated through a series of subspace resonance waves that should not have been present. As Spock analyzed the subspace readings that were now being relayed to his station at a steady rate, the beginnings of a hypothesis began to take shape. As the science officer continued to collate data and extrapolate the possible conclusions to be drawn, his focus was drawn away by the captain, who had moved from his seat over to the red rail that separated the raised stations from the center of the bridge. “Spock . . . is it just me . . . or is the center of the anomaly getting brighter?”

  Spock turned and looked at the main viewer. His left eyebrow lifted above the right, and he told the captain, “You would appear to be correct.” He turned back to his monitors and referred to the older readings, comparing them to the current ones. “Peak luminosity in that specific area of the anomaly has increased fifteen point eight percent since we began our approach.”

  “But what we are looking at here is a computer-generated and -enhanced visual interpretation of our stellar sensor array,” Kirk said.

  “You are correct, sir,” Spock answered. “The sensor array’s subroutines are programmed to compensate for subjective distance and make any corrections necessary for the accuracy of scientific study. Likewise, such variations in areas of luminosity should not be affected by proximity.”

  Turning back to the main viewer with a thoughtful expression on his face, Kirk observed, “This is the same way the probes studied the Nystrom Anomaly. What if we were to look at this just in the
visible light spectrum?”

  Spock, knowing that the captain’s remark was not an invitation to speculation, reached for his console controls and deactivated the sensor display protocols. When he turned back, the difference was minor, but still marked. The bulk of the anomaly now appeared as a translucent field surrounding a single, large light-emitting source at its center.

  “A star,” Kirk said. “A star system, surrounded by . . . something.”

  The science officer shook his head. “We are not picking up any gravimetric readings, or other associated readings which would be expected in a star system. It could simply be an illusion.”

  Kirk shrugged. “What is the old Vulcan saying, Spock? ‘The evidence of the eyes is often immune to logic.’ ”

  Spock, impressed by the captain’s knowledge, let one corner of his mouth bend upward slightly. “Yes. Or, as the human aphorism has it, ‘Seeing is believing.’ ”

  Kirk smiled and asked, “And if what we are seeing here is a star system whose gravitational field is being restrained by some sort of shield? We need to take a much closer look.” The captain turned to Sulu, ordering, “Helm, full impulse. Bring us right up to the edge of the anomaly.”

  * * *

  The journey in was a rough one, or at least it was rougher than Sulu would have liked. He prided himself on his abilities as a starship pilot, and he considered every slightest bit of turbulence as a shortcoming on his part. He winced silently as the ship momentarily lurched, its impulse engines reacting to an unanticipated subspace energy wave. But he made the needed compensations on the fly, bringing the Enterprise quickly back to an even keel. It was a challenge, to say the least, to guide a starship into a system that did not follow any of the established rules. He had been able to smooth their ride to a large degree by determining—from the small amount of sensor readings they were able to gather from the Nystrom Anomaly—that the star at its center was likely a type M1 subdwarf and plotting his helm corrections accordingly. It was very much how he imagined his long-ago ancestors had navigated their way across the Pacific Ocean, guided only by the North Star, a small degree of meteorological information, and pure intuition.