Its Hour Come Round Read online

  Star Trek™: Mere Anarchy

  Book 1: Things Fall Apart by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore

  Book 2: The Centre Cannot Hold by Mike W. Barr

  Book 3: Shadows of the Indignant by Dave Galanter

  Book 4: The Darkness Drops Again by Christopher L. Bennett

  Book 5: The Blood-Dimmed Tide by Howard Weinstein

  Book 6: Its Hour Come Round by Margaret Wander Bonanno

  FOR MORE STAR TREK EBOOKS,

  SEE THE END OF THIS VOLUME

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2007 by CBS Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved.

  STAR TREK and related marks are trademarks of CBS Studios Inc.

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  All Rights Reserved.

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  ISBN: 1-4165-3454-7

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  With thanks to Keith R.A. DeCandido for

  inviting me along for the ride. Thanks to

  the Boyz—Dayton, Kevin, Mike, Dave,

  Christopher, and Howie—for making the

  ride so much fun.

  Dedicated to Thira Grace Corona,

  just for being herself.

  CHAPTER

  1

  Raya elMora hooked her four thumbs into the buckle of the shoulder harness and snapped it into place.

  “Computer? How much time before the Federation delegation arrives in vosTraal?”

  “Starship Excelsior scheduled to make orbit in approximately two hours, Jo’Zamestaad,” the onboard computer replied crisply. “Estimate time for necessary formalities before beam-down, additional six to twelve minutes.”

  “Thank you,” Raya said, considering.

  A Mestikan hour was one hundred and forty-four minutes. A low-altitude orbit of her world, Raya knew, could be accomplished in approximately ninety-six minutes. Side trips to investigate particular phenomena would add to that time. And she did have to land the orbital flyer and get back to her quarters to change from the borrowed flight suit into her diplomatic best before the delegation arrived.

  Raya sighed. One orbit it was, then. Waiting while the computer checked wind speed and direction, she adjusted the wing cameras that would gather the information she was seeking, feed it back into the central computers in vosTraal, and digest it into the brief document she would present at the opening ceremonies of the Plenary Council tomorrow. Manually setting course and speed, she allowed the little craft to rise straight up to the desired altitude, then hovered for a moment to look around at her city in the rising sun before the thrusters kicked in and she headed out on her mission.

  What she was doing today was an indulgence, she knew. Better-trained pilots scanned the surface of her world daily to report on the progress of its recovery from the passage of a rogue pulsar two twelveyears ago—a phenomenon so devastating that only the intervention of a Federation starship had kept the pulsar—or as Mestiko’s citizens, the Payav, referred to it, “the Pulse”—from destroying the planet entirely.

  Despite the Enterprise’s intervention, the destruction had been considerable, the immediate casualties staggeringly high; and the ensuing nuclear winter, with its toxic atmosphere and frigid temperatures, had claimed still more lives over the ensuing years. The total death toll might never be known.

  And yet, the Payav were still here, a proud and stubborn people, aided by that same Federation in recovering their world and their autonomy.

  And that, Raya thought, her thoughts grim despite the sheer beauty of the landscape below her, was where the current troubles began—and, she hoped, ended.

  In any event, an indulgence. There was enough data from the regular pilots’ runs to include in her opening remarks, but she’d wanted to come up here and see for herself. Paperwork had kept her at her desk until the last possible moment, and so these two hours of a pristine morning were all the time she had.

  She’d tried not to notice the knowing smiles when she’d shown up in a flight suit just before dawn, the exchanged glances among the veteran pilots that said, Yes, of course. Let the Jo’Zamestaad take the new prototype craft out on a morning survey run. The onboard computer will do most of the work, and if she gets into trouble we can send another craft out to help her. Let her see what we’ve been doing these past months to catalog every hectare of land on Mestiko and compare what is now with what was and has been since the Pulse nearly destroyed us two twelveyears ago.

  Raya knew her piloting skills were only average and a recent acquisition. Her elor had loved to fly, and in homage to Elee after her death, Raya had gradually overcome her own fear of heights and mastered the rudimentary skills. After all, she reasoned, she had been on starships, visited other worlds, even been exiled on one of them. Could learning to fly a craft on her own be that much more frightening?

  Besides, the course was laid in automatically, and if she instructed it to, the computer would do everything for her, even sparing her the effort of steering around the occasional flock of birds.

  Her first thought was: At least now there are birds. This wasn’t always so. Having been introduced from other worlds, they may not look like the birds we of the generation before the Pulse remember, but they are better than skies filled with toxic dust, and no birds at all.

  Her second thought—as she said “Computer, manual,” and allowed herself to test the controls, dipping the nose and coming back up again just for practice—was: The prototype responds far better than anything the Federation’s given us.

  Was the thought disloyal to that nation that had saved so many Payav lives in the wake of the greatest natural disaster ever to befall the planet?

  It is, Raya thought, and it isn’t. And there, as the Dinpayav would say, is the rub. For everything the Federation has done for us, there is, some would argue, more they could have done. And, still others would argue, less they should have done, so that we could claim our recovery for our own.

  Raya’s elor used to say, “Put two Payav in a room and you end up with three arguments.” It was as true in the recovery following the Pulse as it had been before any Payav knew such things lurked in the far reaches of space, deciding in a very short time who would live and who would die.

  During the early recovery years, the Payav hadn’t had the luxury of argument. Tribal and regional differences were forgotten in the daily struggle for survival. However, that hadn’t stopped religious fanatics in the form of the mar-Atyya, represented by her old school chum Asal Janto, from fomenting revolution, sending Raya and those loyal to her into exile for years until they could take their planet back.

  Since then, the more their world recovered and returned to normal, it seemed, the more Payav found to squabble about.

  And now, Raya thought, banking the little craft to starboard as she cleared the last of the structures in the suburbs and headed out over open land before returning the controls to the
computer, we will bring their internecine squabbles under the scrutiny of our neighbors, as for the next month—or longer, if necessary—representatives of both the Federation and the Klingon Empire sit with us in an attempt to determine our future.

  Were they ready? As ready as they’d ever be. Left to their own devices, Payav would argue into the next grossyear. Besides, there was a matter of some urgency in the Federation’s request for a Plenary Council. It seemed the Klingons had recently suffered a similar disaster, the explosion of one of their moons called Praxis, which had compromised the atmosphere of their homeworld Qo’noS, meaning it would have to be evacuated within the next fifty years.

  At least, Raya thought, noting with satisfaction that the forward screen adapted to the light as the small craft turned into the sun, the Klingons have the luxury not only of taking their time leaving their homeworld, but of choosing among other planets within their empire upon which to relocate. We on Mestiko were not so fortunate.

  This raised another thought. If the Pulse had never passed their world, might the Payav already have chosen membership in the Federation? Their fate then might have been a very different one. Was this sufficient argument for joining the Federation now?

  Because that was the crux of this Plenary Council: for the Payav to decide whether or not they wished to join the Federation.

  The Klingons would be there, officially to learn from the Payav how to cope with a disaster of the magnitude of the Pulse or the explosion of Praxis. But there was no mistaking that, if the Payav and the Federation parted company at the end of the Council, the Klingons would be waiting in the wings.

  As for whether their intentions were peaceful…Raya had studied the Klingons. If their intentions were peaceful, that would be a first in their long and bloody history.

  The whir and beep of the onboard computer “talking” to the wing cameras shook her out of her reverie. The cameras had been programmed to begin gathering data when her little craft reached the first of the areas most devastated by the Pulse.

  Below her the Kemong River meandered through its littoral. Once a flourishing agricultural region, later reduced to frigid desert in the wake of the Pulse, the area had at last been restored to grazelands and grain fields. Like most of the planet, it had been reclaimed from devastation, but it would never be the same.

  Everything—the number of Dinpayav (humans, Vulcans, Klingons, Kazarites, and a dozen other species Raya didn’t even recognize) in the cities and even the remote areas; the introduction of new species, from Dr. Lon’s Martian ice-mosses to far more complex forms; the attempts to reintroduce native species—had resulted in a patchwork of failed and successful and partly successful experiments. Good or bad, everything was different.

  Was that necessarily good or bad? Raya wondered. Once again, the only answer she could come up with was “yes.” And “no.”

  Monitoring the data-feeds from the wing cameras, she wondered: Did she want her people to decide to join the Federation or not? She honestly didn’t know.

  Well, if nothing else came of the Plenary Council, she thought, at least it would be good to see James again.

  She stayed out longer than she’d planned, and barely had time to make it back to vosTraal to change into her formal clothes before the arrival of the Federation delegation. After fastening the several small buttons on the cuffs of the first new robe she’d allowed herself this year—with so many of her people still emerging from hardship, after having done without so much for so long, it didn’t seem appropriate to acquire more—she checked in with her office staff to make sure everything was still on schedule.

  “We’ve received a communication from Captain Sulu of the U.S.S. Excelsior, Jo’Zamestaad,” an aide informed her. “The starship is in synchronous orbit above vosTraal, and the delegation has requested permission to beam down.”

  “Permission granted, of course.” Raya beamed, genuinely excited. “Just give me a minute to get to the reception area without running….”

  The Martian scientist Dr. Lon—or Cart etDeja, as he had been known since becoming a citizen of Mestiko—was there ahead of her, as was the Federation’s ambassador, the ever-jovial Ana’siuolo named Settoon, and Raya exchanged the traditional two-handed greeting with each in turn. On her way here she had passed through the public corridor, where about a third of the various regional representatives—governors and Servants and tribal leaders of various persuasions—who had been invited to observe the Summit in conjunction between the Zamestaad and representatives of the Federation and the Klingon Empire had begun to gather. The rest would arrive within the next day or two.

  Greeting each of them personally, making certain not to slight anyone—tempers were touchy enough, given that many from the more remote regions could not get there for the opening ceremonies and had to be persuaded that their opinions would be taken just as seriously over video feed as they would have been in person—Raya had barely had time to reach the reception area before she heard the familiar-after-so-many-years sound of a Federation transporter.

  Three figures materialized before her. She had been expecting four.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Consciously or not, Spock, McCoy, and Uhura had beamed down in the Missing Man formation.

  Begun among Earth’s air forces during the early era of flight, the tradition of leaving an empty space in a delta formation where a fallen comrade’s plane should have been had been carried forward into the era of spaceflight. Not being from Earth, Raya elMora could be forgiven for not recognizing the tradition or its significance and, if asked, Spock himself would have been surprised to find that he and his companions had unconsciously left a space for one more person when they had stepped onto Excelsior’s transporter platform.

  Raya had last seen Spock in a Starfleet uniform, not civilian clothes. A distinguished diplomatic career, as well as his past involvement with the fate of Mestiko, had made it inevitable that he would be the Federation’s chief negotiator at the Summit. On either side and slightly behind him were Dr. McCoy and Commander Uhura. But immediately to his left there was a blank space, as if someone else had once stood there, but no more. Consciously or unconsciously, Kirk’s friends and longtime crewmates had left a place for him when they’d beamed down.

  Wordlessly, Raya looked to Spock, whose expression was unreadable. It wasn’t until she saw the expression in McCoy’s eyes that she knew.

  James T. Kirk was dead.

  The news had spread throughout the fleet, both via official sources and by word of mouth, from Scotty and Chekov, who were there when it happened, to Sulu aboard Excelsior, to Uhura and McCoy and Spock.

  Scotty had been all but inconsolable.

  “It should’ve been me, lass!” Tears coursed unashamedly down his weathered face on Uhura’s commscreen. He knew she’d heard it through official channels, but he seemed to need to talk to someone, to explain himself. “But there’s him giving orders and me obeying without thinking until it’s too late. I thought I’d seen everything in my years, but the sight of open space where he’d been standing only moments before…it sent a shock right through me I can still feel.” The veteran engineer mopped at his face and sighed. “Ah, lass, I should’ve gone myself.”

  “Sometimes it takes just as much courage to stay as to go” was all Uhura could offer him.

  Scotty had muttered something about finding a bottle of Saurian brandy big enough to drown himself in and never setting foot on a starship again, then terminated the transmission.

  On the way to Mestiko, in an eerie repetition of a scene that had taken place in Kirk’s apartment on Earth almost a decade ago, the rest of his shipmates had gathered in the officers’ lounge aboard Excelsior. This time it was Sulu who led the toast to “absent friends.” No one seemed to know what to say after that, until Chekov broke the silence.

  “Captain Kirk was a hero,” he announced solemnly. “Heroes are not supposed to die.”

  The voyage to Mestiko was meant to have
been a festive occasion, a celebration. Captain Kirk, as the Starfleet liaison to the Payav through all their troubles, was to have accompanied Ambassador Spock to the Summit. Dr. McCoy had been assigned to follow up on his original study of the physical and mental health of Mestiko’s inhabitants, and Commander Uhura would be overseeing the final synchronization of the planet’s global communications grid with Starfleet configurations. Excelsior was to have brought them to Mestiko, with time for a rare reunion en route.

  The reunion had now become a memorial service.

  “I disagree,” Sulu said somberly. “It’s the heroes who step into the path of danger in place of us ordinary mortals.”

  It wasn’t the first time he and Chekov had disagreed about something, and it wouldn’t be the last. Not for the first time, Sulu found himself questioning the ambition that had driven him to pursue the captaincy of his own ship even as it separated him from his friends.

  “I still can’t believe he’s really gone” was all Uhura said. “It’s as if we expected him to live forever.”

  The thought had crossed all their minds. How many times had Kirk diced with death and won?

  Not this time, apparently.

  It was McCoy who took Raya aside and told her about the accident aboard the Enterprise-B and Kirk’s heroic actions, sacrificing himself to save the ship. It was McCoy who took her elbow and steadied her when she paled and it looked as if her knees might buckle.

  “The Zamestaad will not be happy,” Raya finally said once she’d recovered herself. It was an under-statement, to say the least. Kirk’s absence could only complicate an already precarious situation. But Kirk’s death could not delay the Summit, which was why his companions, grieving though they might be, were here.

  It had been difficult enough settling regional squabbles in order to determine which nations could send how many delegates and which among those hundreds of delegates would be invited to the table and which would have to content themselves with participation by video link. Once Payav were gathered around the conference with Dinpayav, an uneasy spirit of cooperation could be hoped for, but not guaranteed.