Star Trek Into Darkness Page 0,89
it? You helped Spock arrange for the torpedo to detonate?”
McCoy nodded, proud and without shame. “Who else? After all, I’m the only one who knows how to manually arm that entirely new type of weapon. Even if I did learn how to do so accidentally.” His grin widened. “As Spock would say, ‘a fortuitous coincidence, Doctor.’”
Kirk still couldn’t believe it. “He killed Khan’s crew. Frozen and unknowing though they were, he killed them.”
McCoy spoke up. “No, he didn’t. Spock’s cold, but he’s not that cold. I’ve got Khan’s crew.” He nodded and pointed to his left.
As Kirk followed McCoy’s gesture, he saw that the main recovery ward had been cleared out, all beds and other equipment either removed or pushed to one side. In its place and occupying the entire space were seventy-two cryoshells that had been removed from their protective torpedoes. Each one was occupied by a three-hundred-year-old genetically warped man or woman.
McCoy’s grin widened. “Seventy-two human popsicles, present and accounted for.”
Kirk could only stare. “Son of a bitch. How did you fool his internal sensors into convincing him that he had transported his crew over to the other ship? You must have known that he would run scans on at least some of them as soon as they were shipped over.”
McCoy explained. “As soon as I learned on that planetoid near Qo’noS that there were cryogenically preserved individuals in those torpedoes, I had in-depth dimensional bioscans run on all of them in case the opportunity arose to attempt revival and also just as part of normal records keeping. When Spock originally proposed his idea, I had the ship’s bio-repair system generate nominal simulacra of each of the frozen crew. You know—the same process we use to regrow lost or damaged body parts for personnel who have been injured but who aren’t beyond repair and for whom for various medical reasons standard regeneration or prosthetics aren’t an option. I then set the system to duplicate everything. The collagen-based simulacra weren’t perfect—not enough time for that. But I felt they were good enough to fool a quick external probe. We froze the results and had them inserted back into the torpedoes in place of his actual crew. When Khan scanned his transported torpedoes for his people, the sensors he was employing indicated the presence of long-frozen human components within the torpedo bodies.” He shook his head at the memory of it.
“If he had bothered to go and open one of the casings manually, he would have seen immediately how he’d been fooled. But Mr. Superman was in too much of a hurry to lord it over us lesser beings. He trusted the preliminary readings of his instrumentation instead of his own eyes.”
On the bridge, a greatly relieved Sulu turned toward the Vulcan seated in the command chair. “Sir—the internal explosions have completely neutralized the other ship’s weapons systems and shields, and quite possibly her ability to maneuver as well. It is my professional opinion that she is no longer a threat. At this point it should be possible to—”
The sound of power cutting out was immediately recognizable. Internal lighting failed for an instant, until it could be restored by emergency backup. From the Science station, a concerned ensign issued a hasty preliminary report. “Sir, we have inclusive warp core misalignment. The ship’s internal power grid is down.”
“Switch to auxiliary power,” Spock ordered.
A second ensign compounded the bad news. “Auxiliary power is heavily depleted and failing, sir. All backup systems were dangerously stressed in the course of taking evasive maneuvers.” She bit her lower lip. “There’s barely enough to sustain the ship’s life-support systems and minimal artificial gravity. We’ve nothing available for propulsion or maneuvering.”
As Spock was deciding that the ship’s status could not possibly get any worse, a third officer proved him wrong. “Sir, I’m afraid our final maneuvers brought us in to the point where we appear to be caught in the Earth’s gravity well.”
“Mr. Sulu: Position relative to orbital stations?”
The helmsman only had to glance at his readouts. “Given our present rate of descent, sir, there’s nothing near enough to get anything big enough to us in time to halt our dive.”
Spock absorbed this. “Can we change our angle of descent enough to enter a temporary orbit? Even a low one?”
Sulu stared at his helm controls, sat back. Red lights he could have dealt with, but . . . there were no lights at all. No readouts—nothing. A situation unprecedented in his experience—but that didn’t mean he was