Its Hour Come Round Read online

  When Uhura woke him in the middle of the night, the pieces began to fall into place.

  “Leonard, you’ve got to see this for yourself.”

  “In my ample spare time,” McCoy groused. “Until we can figure out what the hell’s causing this mutation, all I’m doing is—”

  “What if I told you I might have your answer?”

  “Say again?”

  “I’m no medical expert, but I think I’m looking at a roomful of documentation about medical experiments conducted on animals more than fifty years ago. There’s one whole file on ‘Accelerated Aging.’”

  There was a long silence, so long that Uhura checked the frequency.

  “Leonard, did you hear me?”

  “Damn right I heard you. Where the hell are you? What are you waiting for? Hook me up and relay the stuff to me, can’t you?”

  “Even if I could, I wouldn’t trust it to remain secure. The grid’s still too compromised. If the media got hold of it, or—”

  McCoy hadn’t thought of that.

  “Besides,” Uhura added. “It’s all on paper.”

  “Old-fashioned paper printouts…” McCoy mused with a kind of wonder in his voice. “Now that’s something I never thought I’d see.”

  Once more Uhura had had to go and retrieve him, flying low over the hills in the dead of night and spiriting him away in the tiny skimmer. What she’d found was exactly what she’d thought it was, and McCoy was as excited as she’d seen him since this mission began.

  It would take a while to read through all of it, but the documentation was all here. The Alangabi government had been conducting bioweapons experiments—long before the Pulse and, according to the stacks of paper McCoy was rummaging through, only on lab animals. But some of their stored materials had disappeared—either lost or stolen—in the chaos immediately following the Pulse.

  “And I’m guessing some of that got into the aquifer on this side of the mountains and leached into the underground water supply the Nehdi were dependent on during the nuclear winter,” McCoy said.

  “Is there enough material here to help?” Uhura asked, scarcely believing their good fortune.

  “There should be. Pity it’s all on paper; it’ll take that much longer to read through, much less the inconvenience of transporting it out of here. Too bad none of Spock’s ability to memorize data stuck in my brain. Anyhow, let’s put it all together. Shouldn’t take more than a couple of trips in the skimmer to get it out of here.

  “It never ceases to amaze me,” he went on, scooping files into what looked like a wastebasket he’d scrounged from under a table somewhere, “the capacity for otherwise intelligent beings to expend so much of their time and energy playing ‘Gotcha!’ with people they don’t like….”

  Having filled the wastebasket, he went rummaging for something else, and came up with a storage box full of odds and ends so dusty they made him sneeze. There were a lot of files.

  “…Used to think it was just humans, until I got out into space and realized there’s a pattern to the evolution of damn near every species except possibly the Halkans. Scratch and claw for survival for a few million years, then when things get peaceful and you have enough to eat and land to grow it on, you sit around the fire in the evenings thinking of ways to kill your neighbor….”

  “Leonard…” Uhura said quietly.

  “I know, I know—I’m hurrying! Maybe if you gave me a hand instead of playing lookout in the middle of the night in a facility in the middle of nowhere that hasn’t been occupied except by desert rats for at least a generation—”

  The slide and click of an old-fashioned disruptor—the kind the Klingons had probably left behind during Traal’s brief reign—shut him up. Hyperfocused on gathering as many bulky paper files as he could, he’d neither heard nor seen the return of the wild ones Uhura had frightened off earlier in the day. They filled the small bunker and had their weapons trained on both of them.

  “Oh, damn!” McCoy muttered.

  He’d been among the Nehdi long enough to know those weren’t Nehdi tattoos. The twining red-and-blue thorny-vine below the left earlobe was a distinctly Alangabi design. There was something else disturbing about this group, too. None of them looked well.

  Payav as a species, once you accepted the pallor and the hairlessness and the longer necks as a normal part of their body habitus, were for the most part beautiful, from both a medical and an aesthetic point of view. There was something fawnlike about them: large-eyed, graceful, innately gentle—until they started quarreling.

  And until the Pulse, which brought many kinds of scarring—burns, blinding cataracts, frostbite, the long-term effects of hunger and lack of sunlight—one hadn’t seen any deformities among these people. McCoy had never seen them this way—his first exposure to Mestiko was a couple of years after the Pulse hit—but he’d studied the records gathered by the Federation observation team before the pulsar was discovered. The Payav had been an eminent example of a case in which nature had gotten it right.

  Not so these children—and that was really all they were. The eldest, a spindly male at the forefront who was obviously the leader, couldn’t have been more than an adolescent on the cusp of adulthood. But in each of them, on the cursory glance McCoy allowed himself past the muzzles of outdated weapons pointed at him by a gaggle of unsteady adolescents, there was something off, something more than the effects of being born and raised in darkness and cold and inadequate nutrition. It wasn’t even necessarily anything physical—a limp, a squint, a twisted limb—but some emotional darkness that made the good doctor profoundly uneasy.

  Setting the storage box he’d been stuffing full of documents down on the floor beside the overflowing wastebasket, he tried his best grin and the old McCoy charm.

  “My guess is y’all are wondering who we are and what we’re doing here,” he began. “I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I told you we’re part of a cleanup crew that’s—”

  “Silence!” the tall spindly one said predictably. “Get away from those papers. Stand next to the female.”

  McCoy did as he was told. If he’d known how long he’d have to stand there….

  Mentally he assessed each of his captors’ physical state. Prolonged malnutrition during the growing years for that one, some sort of chronic neuropathic skin condition for that one, poor diet and lack of sunlight for that one.

  “What’s the matter?” the spindly one said, noticing the scrutiny. “Don’t like looking at us? Do we offend you? We’re not as pretty as your Nehdi hosts over the mountains. Do you want to know why? It’s because in the worst times they would not share their resources with us. They made us this way.”

  “Not so!” one of the females said suddenly. “What I heard was—”

  “Lies!” one of the younger boys piped up. “Government lies, Nehdi lies!”

  “Dear God…” McCoy said out of the side of his mouth, shifting his feet restlessly. “I’d rather they killed us outright than argued us to death….”

  “They’re not going to kill us,” Uhura said pragmatically. The youngsters were arguing so loudly they could talk underneath them, and if there hadn’t been so many of them and they hadn’t been blocking the only way out, some sort of escape could have been attempted. “They need us as bargaining chips. There are still reporters snooping around these parts. I repaired the relay station. If I could just get to the controls…”

  She was standing quite still, centered, her eyes on the youngest male, who was probably no older than McCoy’s newfound friend Chimeji, and who kept wiping his runny nose on his sleeve. At least the others hadn’t trusted him with a weapon; all he had was a long stick. If she could charm him…

  “And if they don’t get what they want?” McCoy said a little too loudly.

  “Let’s not get caught up in ‘ifs’ right now…” Uhura started to say, but suddenly all nine of their captors seemed to be talking at once, in an obscure dialect that McCoy couldn’t follow. A barely perce
ptible shake of her head told him Uhura couldn’t understand it, either. But judging from the body language, including a great deal of gesticulating from one of the females, the gist of the conversation seemed to be “Oh, great! Just what we need, hostages! Can’t we just burn the papers and send these two on their way? Who’s going to believe Dinpayav, anyway?”

  This was no doubt followed by, “It’s not just the papers, you idiot. The very fact that these two are here means there’ll be news crews as soon as we release them. They’ll bring in research teams and run tests, and then we’re doomed.”

  “Who’s ‘we’? This is something that happened in our elors’ era. It’s got nothing to do with us.”

  “Your elor or mine?” That was followed by a startled silence. “Yes, now you see the size of the problem. Our people did this. And even if it was a long time ago, people are dying now. We’ll be blamed. We can’t let these two leave here.”

  “So who’s going to kill them? It won’t be me, and I doubt it’ll be you. Or did you plan to keep them and feed them for the rest of their lives?”

  “Dear God!” McCoy interjected finally, and all nine pairs of eyes turned to him. “Look, I realize we’ve put y’all in a situation here, but either kill us and get it over with, or put us somewhere while you figure it out—”

  “Leonard!” Uhura whispered. McCoy was suddenly grateful he wasn’t close enough for her to kick him.

  “—because I for one am not a young man, and it’s past my bedtime and I need to sit down. We could also do with some food and water and maybe a hot bath after digging through these dusty old papers all night and—”

  He’d pushed it too far. The leader made an impatient noise and waved his weapon at them again.

  “Quiet! Get in the storage room. Both of you, now!”

  Two of the others searched them and confiscated anything that could be used as a weapon or a means of communicating, including the comm unit Uhura had secreted in her boot while McCoy had been speechifying. There was barely enough time to see that the room they were being shoved into was about two meters square and full of gardening equipment and not much else before the door was slammed and locked behind them, plunging them into all but total darkness. A rim of light around the door and the murmur of voices told them their captors weren’t going anywhere.

  CHAPTER

  9

  “Can’t say I blame them,” McCoy said once the door had closed and locked between them and their captors. “Given their history with the Nehdi, the least this kind of information could do is heat up the old hostilities. But with the Summit meeting and the eyes of the quadrant on them—”

  “Which is why we have to convince them we’re not going to run to the media with this,” Uhura said. The door had barely closed when she’d begun groping her way around the walls, looking for…well, she wasn’t sure what, but she had to keep moving.

  “Exactly. Although how we’re supposed to do that from in here…All we want to do is work backwards from the data in those files to—ow!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Tripped over something. Feels like a garden hoe. And is that…Oh, please tell me that’s not manure!”

  Uhura gritted her teeth to keep from snapping at him. “Look, why don’t you stay still and let me do this before we end up bumping into each other?”

  “No, dammit! You stand still. Go over by the door and try your charms on them. God knows I’ve failed, but communication is your thing.”

  Uhura banged her palms on the door. “Hello? Can I talk to you for a minute? Someone? The last thing we want to do is start up old hostilities. We just want that information so we can help the people who are sick. Can’t you let us out so we can talk?”

  Her words were met by a loud banging from the other side.

  “Be quiet in there!” It was the leader again. “We need to discuss this among ourselves. Someone will feed you in a little while, but only if you don’t say another word.”

  With that the murmuring on the other side began anew.

  “They’re just children…” Uhura said.

  “Children with guns,” McCoy pointed out, mindful of Miri and her friends. Uhura hadn’t been in the landing party that time.

  When the haranguing outside finally subsided and one of the females came in with food, Uhura deliberately did not look toward the light from the opening door. That way, she was able to retain her night vision and find an escape route.

  “There’s a draft from somewhere up there,” she told McCoy once they were locked in again and the arguing outside resumed, though with less intensity. “Has to be an air vent, or even a window. I didn’t have time to see when they tossed us in here, but I noticed it now. They have to get tired of arguing and sleep eventually.”

  “Good luck with that!” was McCoy’s opinion.

  “Actually,” Uhura said, already moving while she ruminated, “it might be better to investigate this while they’re arguing. That way if we make any noise, they won’t hear us….”

  “And if they’ve posted a guard outside?”

  “It would just be one of them. A kid. Are you saying we can’t sneak up on and overpower a kid?”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” McCoy demanded. “I can boost you up there, but you can’t haul me up after you. I’m not going anywhere. Just go!”

  “Just long enough to get back to the skimmer and alert the Jo’Zamestaad,” Uhura promised. “You know I won’t leave you here.”

  “Whatever,” McCoy said. “Let’s get on with this!”

  There was in fact a window, neither locked nor barred, but half-open and just big enough for Uhura to crawl through. McCoy made a stirrup of his hands, and Uhura scrabbled up the earthen wall and pulled herself up by the window frame, cursing under her breath as she felt several nails break and realized her palms were full of splinters. But she got over and out to discover that, as they’d hoped, the window was at ground level and hidden by overgrown shrubbery. She was free.

  “You okay?” she heard McCoy’s voice below.

  “I’m out,” she said. “But—”

  “Just go, willya?” he said, not giving her a chance to finish with I don’t want to leave you behind. “These are Payav, remember? They won’t kill me without arguing about it for at least another three days. I expect you to come rescue me before that.”

  “You know I will,” she whispered, then brushed the dirt off her knees, looked around, and listened for a moment before slipping through the branches and out toward where she thought she remembered the road.

  Amateurs, she thought gratefully. There had been no guard, and her little skimmer was right where she’d left it. She risked a short burst of power, just enough to let it roll down the incline for several hundred yards without another sound. Then she fiddled with the comm until she found a frequency she didn’t think the Alangabi would use, and patched in to Raya elMora’s personal transceiver.

  Matters moved swiftly from there. Bouncing a signal off the nearest comm satellite, Uhura activated the relay station where the kids were holding McCoy, and it came to life. On a secure frequency, Jo’Zamestaad elMora came straight to the point.

  “What is your name, Young One?” she demanded of the apparently Alangabi ringleader.

  “S-Stenho etLaja, J-Jo’Zamestaad,” he stuttered, his cheeks suffusing such an uncharacteristic pink that several of his followers giggled.

  “You do realize you’re on the verge of causing an interstellar incident, do you not?”

  “An inter—what? We are holding two Dinpayav intruders who were attempting to slander our people with accusations of germ warfare. We expected the Jo’Zamestaad to reward us, not accuse us of—”

  “One,” Raya couldn’t resist. Something of James T. Kirk’s best persuasive manner arose from her memory, and she used it. “One ‘intruder,’ or should I say ‘hostage’? You haven’t even managed to do that much right.”

  This produced a flurry of activity in the relay station, and finally
the youngsters, chagrined that they hadn’t even noticed that one of their hostages had escaped, produced a sleepy-looking McCoy, hair and clothes rumpled, blinking in the unaccustomed light.

  “Are you all right, Doctor?” Raya demanded.

  “I suppose so,” McCoy muttered, scratching his head. “Listen, the little I was able to read of that documentation we tried to confiscate—”

  Raya cut him off. “—you should not discuss on an open frequency, however secure. First we get you out of there, then we worry about—”

  “Forget me! You’ve got to find the source of the pathogen. My guess is that somewhere around here you’ll find the experimental batches that the original scientists left behind. Then you can—”

  “Doctor, please shut up!” Raya said tightly. “Let me talk to Stenho again.”

  When the now obviously completely flummoxed young man returned to the screen, she scolded him the way a mother might a wayward adolescent.

  “Now, you listen to me, young man!” Bless you, James! she thought, perversely enjoying the moment despite its seriousness. “Commander Uhura has gotten the global comm grid back online, and I am this close to letting the news media descend on you. You will release Dr. McCoy at once and return him to the Nehdi. You will evacuate the relay center, because at the very least you are trespassing and at the very worst you are impeding an investigation into a catastrophic medical situation. Now, you and your friends have one minute exactly to evacuate the premises. Go! Shoo!”

  CHAPTER

  10

  “There,” Cart etDeja said, pointing to the anomaly. From orbit, the river did indeed glow against the dark of the background readout. “Seepage into the aquifer that feeds the Nehdi irrigation system. Something in the pathogen makes it phosphoresce under spectral analysis. When we trace it backwards, we’ll probably find a cache of long-forgotten Alangabi chemicals buried somewhere.”

  And so they did. Hidden within a concrete bunker not far from the relay center where McCoy had spent an uncomfortable night, the missing bioweapons material had been rather hastily hidden, sealed in what at the time were assumed to be damage-proof storage drums. But the years of intense cold following the Pulse, along with seismic activity in the region, had damaged the bunker, allowing the ice and snow in and corroding the temporary containers. Some had seeped into the water table and thence into the underground streams that supplied the Nehdi Valley with water.