Chapter Twenty-six

THE BEST SEATS in the house, it turned out, were in the bathhouse, where she would arrive. Harry didn’t particularly care; perhaps he could take some amusement at seeing Stella slip in the tub.

He had already witnessed perhaps the most amusing spectacle of all: Spock trying to hide his emotion when he discovered that Kirk wasn’t trapped in the computer buffer as they had thought. Dr. McCoy at least had the grace to weep for joy, though why anyone should shed a tear for the likes of Kirk was beyond Harry. But Spock had been forced to stand there like an android himself and say, “I am pleased to see you, Captain,” and shake his hand like a politician stumping for votes.

Ah, what fools these mortals be, Mudd thought. Always hiding this, apologizing for that, bickering over something else. No one could say or do what they really wanted to, and all for what? Some misguided sense of duty or honor or decorum? What a crock! Far better to just let it all hang out, thumb your nose at phony obligations, and concentrate on what mattered. Like getting rich and having fun. If everybody did that it would be a merrier galaxy, that much was certain.

The Distrellians had shut down their shield generator so the Enterprise could beam the android away and beam Stella directly into its place. Spock and Scotty were monitoring the “gods’ eyes” for their particular emission signature, while Kirk and the Grand General and the Padishah stood beside the empty pool. The Padishah looked a bit stunned—apparently they had shown him the face of God just a few minutes earlier and he was still trying to decide what to think. He kept wiping his face with the backs of his decorative gloves, even though the heat in the room had long since dissipated.

Mudd and Ensign Lebrun and her husband, Lieutenant Nordell, stood on the other side of the tub, while a few dozen Distrellians had gathered around a bit farther back.

“Transporter sequence starting,” Spock announced, his voice loud in the tiled bathhouse.

“Get ready,” Kirk said into his communicator.

“Matter stream initiated,” said Spock.

Kirk waited while the flickering shape in the tub took on form. The moment it solidified, he said “Now!” and the Enterprise’s transporter locked on to the android, which shuddered and sparked in the confinement beam but didn’t fall to the floor. It faded away, and right on its heels—beaming in from the other transporter on board the ship—came the real Stella. She was in the same orientation as the android, angled slightly backward in a position that would be comfortable in water, but was awkward as could be in air. Even though she had been told to expect it, she flailed her arms and squawked like a surprised chicken before landing with a thump on the thick pad they had placed on the bottom of the tub.

She stood up and brushed off her dignity, then accepted the Grand General’s hand out of the tub. He was smiling at her again, Mudd noted. The old goat. Well, if he kept her out of Mudd’s hair as well as he’d kept the android, then he was welcome to her.

“Well,” she asked. “Did it work?”

Everyone turned this way and that, looking expectantly into the other pools for the host of soldiers who should be materializing in them at any moment. Someone coughed, and after a few seconds, whispering started up, but nothing appeared in the water.

“What’s wrong?” asked the Grand General.

“I don’t know,” said Kirk. “Spock? Scotty?”

“It shoulda worked, Captain,” Scotty said, thumping his tricorder and taking another reading of the gods’ eye.

“It obviously didn’t.”

Spock said, “I will go see if I can determine what has happened.” He headed for the transport station, and presumably the palace.

There was an embarrassed silence while they waited for him to reach the computers in the caverns. The Padishah finally broke it, saying to the Grand General, “If this is a trick, I promise you will be the first one we send into oblivion when we annihilate your entire planet.”

“If this is a trick,” said the Grand General, “you can have this planet, because I and everyone else here are heading for Arnhall, with weapons drawn.”

“And just how do you plan to get there?” asked the Padishah.

The Grand General laughed halfheartedly. “I hadn’t thought of that. If it’s a trick, we’re stuck here, aren’t we?”

Kirk’s communicator chirped at him. “Kirk here,” he said.

“Spock here. I am in the computer center, and I believe I have found the problem. The system is no longer running its self-test program. It has apparently reloaded its main program, and awaits only the proper input to resume processing.”

“So what’s the input?” Kirk asked.

“It appears to be…” Spock hesitated.

“What?”

“Unfortunately, it appears that someone must die in battle.”

“Oh,” said Kirk.

“That is not the worst of our problems,” said Spock. “I have examined the transporter patterns in storage, and have discovered an alarming degradation of the signal. Apparently these memory devices were never intended for long-term storage. There was an error-correction routine in effect while the self-check was active, but now that the main program is back on line, the error-correction routine is no longer operating. By my calculation, we have less than ten minutes before the signal degradation becomes too severe to allow reconstruction of the stored patterns.”

Kirk looked unbelievingly at his communicator. “Any more bad news?”

“Yes,” Spock said, apparently unaware of the concept of a rhetorical question. “The way the memory devices are configured, all of the patterns are decaying at the same rate. Whoever dies to restart the resurrections will stand the same risk as those people already here.”

The Padishah looked at Kirk, then at the Grand General. “I can arrange plenty of deaths just as soon as you like.”

“No, no, please,” said the Grand General. “There’s got to be a better way.” He looked at Kirk imploringly.

“Spock?” asked Kirk.

“I wish there were, Captain, but this computer is hardwired. There is no altering its program. And it requires a death to trigger the resurrection process.”

Kirk looked over at Harry, and Harry could see the gleam of the wolf in his eye. “Who, me?” he asked, backing away, but Kirk had already looked away. Mudd nearly went over backward into the next pool of water, but Lebrun rescued him from that indignity.

Kirk said, “I can’t ask anyone else to do this. And I can’t let your two planets go back to war to solve a problem that was brought on by outsiders. But it doesn’t matter whose fault this is”—and he looked at Harry again—”it’s the duty of a Starfleet officer to give his life for the cause of peace if that becomes necessary. We all know the risks, and we all know it could come at any time, no matter…”

What a blowhard, thought Mudd, tuning him out. Kirk was going to puff himself up to heroic proportions and then get someone to shoot him, and he’d come out of this with a commendation and a cushy desk job back home. Mudd knew his type. He’d probably set this all up with Spock ahead of time. There was no more danger here than trimming a fingernail.

Well, okay, trimming it with a phaser set on high, but really. And the rewards—dear lord, the rewards!

Almost against his will, Mudd found himself edging forward. Kirk was winding down now, saying, “…and so I say look not to the past, but to your future, and remember the sacrifices of the people who have come before you. As long as you build on the foundation they lay, as long as—”

Mudd cleared his throat. “As long as you keep blathering on about it, Kirk, we’ll never get the job done. Do please close your face and let a real man show you how it’s done.”

Kirk couldn’t believe his ears. Mudd was going to take responsibility for something? It was almost worth the insult just to witness it. And if Harry meant what Kirk thought he meant, this could be a red-letter day indeed. “What do you want, Harry?” he asked. “You and me, mano a mano?”

Mudd looked at him disdainfully. “I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction, Kirk.” He stepped past—shoved Kirk aside!—and reached instead toward the Padishah. The Padishah looked as astonished as Kirk. What could Mudd want with him? But that became clear when Mudd took his gloves from his unresisting fingers, separated one out and returned it, then turned with the other to the Grand General.

“You’ve been paying far too much attention to my wife,” Mudd said. “Where I come from, that’s a matter of honor.” And he slapped the Grand General in the face with his glove.

The Grand General narrowed his eyes. “What is the significance of this?”

“He’s challenged you to a duel,” Kirk said, awestruck.

Stella looked as if she might faint. “Harry…I didn’t know you cared.”

Harry smiled an enigmatic little smile at her, then said to the Grand General, “Well, are you willing to fight for her?”

The Grand General looked out at the faces turned toward him, especially at the Padishah and his retinue, suspicious and ready to go to war at a moment’s notice. The logical choice would be for the Padishah and the Grand General to fight the duel, but that would only trigger the war no matter who won. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I see it now. This is the way it must end. Very well.”

Mudd returned the Padishah’s other glove and asked, “May I borrow your weapon, sir?”

“What? Oh, yes, certainly,” said the Padishah. He drew his disruptor pistol from its holster and handed it over.

“Thank you.” Mudd stepped back to the walkway between tubs. As he passed Lebrun and Nordell he said, “Be good to each other. Don’t make the same mistakes Stella and I did.”

Nordell put his arm around Lebrun. “We’ll try,” she said.

Mudd turned to the Grand General. “We start out back to back, take ten paces, turn and shoot. Come on, we’re about out of time. Kirk, you may count.”

Kirk couldn’t believe this was the same Harry Mudd he had come to know. Fighting a duel? Impossible! But he and the Grand General moved into position, and everyone else moved away to give them room. Kirk said, “Harry, I can’t let you do this. You’ve never fired a weapon in your life, have you?”

Mudd aimed at the ceiling and pulled the trigger. A bright white bolt of energy caromed off the tile, showering everyone with debris. “Sure I have,” said Mudd.

“But—but—”

“Okay,” Mudd told the Grand General, “each time he says ‘but,’ we take a step. When we get to ten—”

Laughter drowned out whatever else he said.

All right then, if this was how he wanted it, who was Kirk to stop him? It was Harry’s responsibility, after all. It was just such a shock to see him actually admit to it. Kirk waited for the laughter to die down, then said, “Ready? One…two…three…”

Mudd and the Grand General took slow, even steps. When they got to ten they turned, and everything seemed to freeze for a moment as they eyed one another across twenty yards of space. Then both men raised their weapons and fired. Kirk flinched as Mudd’s shot went wild and blew more tile off the wall just over his head, but the Grand General’s aim was true: Mudd fell to the floor with a smoking hole in the center of his chest.

“Harry!” screamed Stella. She ran to him, bent over his inert body, and said, “Oh, my poor Harry, oh, my dearest—”

Harry raised his head, struggled to speak, managed to croak, “Goodbye, cruel world,” then fell back to the tile.

Everyone rushed forward, but before they could reach him he shimmered into a column of light and was gone.

“Something has happened,” Spock said through Kirk’s communicator. “I’m reading massive memory transfer out of the buffers.”

As he spoke, there was a splash off to Kirk’s left, and a Nevisian woman appeared in the water. Another splash, and a man appeared just beyond her. Then another and another beyond them.

A babble of voices broke the silence that had followed Mudd’s death, but Stella’s shout overrode them all. “You idiots!” she screamed. “You let him get away again!”

Kirk looked at her, then at the spot where Harry had been. Of course she was right; in their fear of the worst-case scenario they had overlooked the most likely outcome of all this. Everyone but Harry, who was no doubt reappearing in a tub of his own somewhere. Not on Prastor, either, Kirk suspected. This was Mudd’s third time through the system, and though his second time hadn’t been heroic enough to send him to Arnhall, this one certainly qualified.

And from there Mudd could beam to any planet he wanted to, no doubt taking as many secrets of Nevisian technology with him as he could carry. Kirk really should try to stop him, but there was just one problem with that: he had no idea where Arnhall was. And he really didn’t want to die again to find out. Too many people in the Nevis system had already died trying to reach Arnhall.