The Entropy Effect

“I outrank all of you, including Spock,” Hunter said, “and if I have to pull rank to find out what’s going on, then consider it pulled. Dr. McCoy, do you have anything to say now?”

He started to answer her—but Spock had got away, and perhaps he needed only a few minutes to put everything right, but if he failed again and returned, he would be stopped if his plans were known.

McCoy could not take the chance of revealing what they were trying to do. He shook his head in defeat.

“Mr. Scott?” Hunter asked.

“I dinna ken what has happened. Dr. McCoy said Mr. Spock was deep asleep. He isna asleep, you saw that for yourself. That didna look like any transporter beam I ever saw before, either—and where could he go? I canna make his actions come out to make any sense in my mind. Unless Mr. Braithewaite’s suspicions are correct. I dinna want to believe them—but if they’re no’ true, why does Dr. McCoy want to go to Arcturus?”

“Arcturus!” Hunter said.

“Where’d you get the idea I wanted to go to Arcturus?” McCoy asked, baffled.

“Ye told me ye did,” Scott said, and then, when McCoy shook his head, “Ye said, if ye asked for warp four to Arcturus, would ye get it.”

“I didn’t mean it,” McCoy said. “I just picked the first example I could think of. But so what if I did want to go to Arcturus? What possible difference could that make?”

“Leonard,” Hunter said, “Arcturus is almost exactly equidistant from Federation, Romulan, and Klingon space. It’s neutral—most of the time, anyway. People go to Arcturus to make deals.”

“I don’t want to go to Arcturus,” McCoy said again. “I only wanted to know if the warp drive was on line.”

“He doesn’t even make up decent excuses!” Ian said.

“No, Mr. Braithewaite,” Hunter said, and she looked as if she were about to burst into laughter. “You’re right about that, Dr. McCoy doesn’t make up good excuses. But what do you have to say?”

“Spock’s been trying to free Mordreaux,” Braithewaite told her. “He was on Aleph right after the trial, I saw him. And he was monkeying around with the transporter just before Kirk was murdered. But Spock couldn’t get Mordreaux away, so he settled for escaping himself once things began to fall apart on him. He’d already drawn Dr. McCoy into his scheme. The security commander was involved, but they got rid of her—”

“The security commander? You can’t mean Mandala Flynn!”

“Yes—She wanted to command a ship like this so badly she could taste it. It was no secret, she even told Kirk. But he laughed at her. He must have known that a stateless person had no chance of advancing that far in Starfleet.”

“You’ve got some pretty strange ideas, Mr. Braithewaite.”

“But that’s what happened! Spock probably offered her the Enterprise in return for her help. They had to get rid of Kirk first. Dr. Mordreaux tried to kill him but failed, so Spock pressured McCoy into letting Kirk die.”

“Dammit, Braithewaite, he was dead! He was already dead!” McCoy’s voice broke and he turned away. In the following silence he managed to collect himself again. “I carried out his wishes. I followed the terms of his will. You can look at it if you want.”

“I intend to,” Hunter said. “Whatever you did or didn’t do afterwards, that doesn’t change the fact that Jim was assaulted.”

“You could have stopped them!” Ian cried. “Why didn’t you shoot Spock when you had the chance?”

Hunter glanced down at the pistol still in her hand, and slowly holstered it. “Do you think I’d kill a person on your say-so?”

Ian stood up and started toward the transporter console. “It still isn’t too late! We can still—” He halted just as McCoy was about to leap at him to prevent his revealing the time-changer’s auxiliary unit. Ian swayed, a lost, confused look on his face.

“What’s the matter?” Scott said. “Ian—”

The prosecutor collapsed, his body completely limp.

“The nerve-pinch—” Scott said.

“It isn’t that,” McCoy said, on his knees on the floor beside Braithewaite. He recognized the symptoms immediately, this second time in as many days. “It’s hypermorphic botulism! Help me with him, there isn’t time to wait for a stretcher!”

In the grip of the changer, Spock felt time pass. The sensation was very different from that of the

transporter alone, which was nothing more than a brief moment of dislocation at the end of the process. This felt as if he were falling through space, through hard vacuum, buffeted by every eddy of the solar wind, every current of each magnetic field, tossed by gravity waves, by light itself.

He materialized two meters above the ground, in Aleph Prime’s core park, and fell the rest of the way. He landed hard enough to knock the wind out of him, and he had to fight to keep from losing consciousness.