Home Is the Hunter Page 2

  "No. No problem."

  Lieutenant Garrovick smiled. "The captain has his own way of doing things, and tends to set his own schedule."

  Kirk glanced slyly at the lieutenant. Most subordinate officers tended to walk on eggshells with Kirk, but not Garrovick, who had served with Kirk before. In fact, Garrovick had seen Kirk when the captain was probably at his lowest point emotionally, dealing with his guilt over his failure to respond to a threat, a bloodsucking cloud. It had been with the help of then-ensign Garrovick that Kirk had been able to finally destroy the creature.

  Garrovick had received Kirk's highest recommendations and had been briskly promoted. Now, when Kirk's return to the Enterprise had been announced, Garrovick had requested transfer to the starship that had been his first deep-space assignment. Kirk had cheerfully welcomed him aboard, and Garrovick had been made Chekov's right-hand man.

  In that position, Garrovick qualified as a member of the landing party for the Cragon expedition. Montgomery Scott had been selected for his engineering expertise and his ability to assess firsthand the technological state of Cragon—and, most importantly, whether the Klingons had seriously affected the status quo of the planet. Sulu was there too, since he had once been assigned—early in his career—to a threemonth observation of a planet remarkably similar to Cragon. Chekov and Garrovick were there to provide security support. Kirk would have liked to bring a platoon, but attention to the Prime Directive meant trying not to come stomping through people's backyards with a veritable army. It would give the wrong impression of the Federation, since that type of force was not what the Federation was all about.

  A pity, Kirk had thought glumly, that the Klingons felt no similar constraint.

  "Quite right, Mr. Garrovick," the captain said briskly. "A schedule that we have to keep. Let's press on, gentlemen."

  "The castle is just ahead, Keptin," Chekov informed him, stepping carefully through the underbrush.

  "Good," said Kirk, carefully picking a bramble from his uniform.

  Scotty was muttering under his breath. "What the devil is the good of transporter technology if it drops us off in the middle of nowhere?"

  Kirk didn't bother to answer. Scotty knew the answer perfectly well—with less developed societies, the Federation felt it was best not to openly display advanced technology.

  The castle was indeed ahead, perched high atop a steep hill. Scotty's breathing was labored and he thumped his stomach. "Glory, I'm out of shape. Only one thing for it."

  "Exercise?" suggested Sulu. "You could take up running, or perhaps fencing …"

  "Exercise, Mr. Sulu?" Scotty looked at him with exaggerated disdain. "I'm talking shore leave. Some time away."

  "This from the man who used to turn down shore leave so he could read technical journals," Kirk said, brushing leaves out of his hair. He stopped to kick mud off his boots against a tree.

  "I know how he feels," said Sulu. "I could use some heavy duty R and R myself."

  "Maybe a week on a pleasure planet?" Chekov asked wistfully.

  "No, home. I really want to go home for a while."

  "San Francisco?" Scotty asked.

  "No, I mean a real home. Japan, the way it was a few hundred years ago." Sulu's eyes glistened. "Yes, someplace where a man could really believe in living and dying for his king and country. Sometimes I almost envy the Romulans, and the Klingons, too. Their life is simple."

  Scotty was about to chide Sulu for his rather militaristic outlook at life. But then he thought of the claymore that hung on the wall of his cabin. As much as he pooh-poohed Sulu for his fencing and romantic pretensions, Scott's heart swelled with pride at the long tradition of the Scots soldiers, a simple world of right and wrong.

  "Yes," Chekov said thoughtfully, "a week in my homeland, sitting in a dacha with a glass of vodka, and a pretty girl, and the sound of balalaika music …" But what he saw in his mind was the last Pan-Soviet May Day Parade he had attended. And the strains of his national anthem hummed in his mind. How much his nation had endured, and how proud he was.

  If they were lesser officers, Kirk would have reminded them that they should be on their toes. But he knew that their easy familiarity and chat was not distracting one iota from their attention to their duty and to their surroundings. Nevertheless, as they climbed up the steep hill that led to the castle where the ruler of Cragon was ostensibly in residence, Kirk felt constrained to say something.

  "Careful, gentlemen," he said with humor. "You should always be wary of what you wish for. You may get it."

  Chapter Three

  Scotland, 1746

  SCOTT WOKE UP with a galactic headache, and a peculiar chill to his hindquarters. He reached down and felt a bare hairy leg. That woke him, and he sat up, the contents of his brain pan lurching around like thick coolant.

  "Ach," he groaned, covering his eyes protectively with one hand, his other propping him up on the very muddy ground. The chill wind was making his sinuses ache, and the light was bright enough to make his eyes throb. The thing that was supposed to be his brain was trying to figure out why the deck of a starship was wet, bumpy, and gritty, but two thoughts were one and a half too many in his current state, and he got back to the mystery of the hairy leg.

  He opened one eye tentatively and looked around, the apparent cloud cover doing little to mitigate the glare of a planetary sun.

  "What in heaven's name!" the engineer muttered, trying to take in the scene and analyze his position. He reached for his communicator, but found himself groping the fabric of a coarse shirt. Well, at least I'm not stark naked.

  Exploring further, he reached a mass of even coarser wool gathered around his middle.

  "Well, I'll be damned," he muttered, struggling to his feet, making a jaw-clenching, tooth-gritting effort to ignore the waves of coolant sloshing in his head. The folds of the gray and muddy-brown garment fell down to his knees, at least relieving the chill from the most tender part of his lower half. It was, no doubt, a great kilt, the old and traditional version of the neat, pleated small kilt that Scott had affected as part of his dress uniform. What he had draped over him now was little more than a blanket held in place by a heavy leather belt and a leather thong that tied the long loose end up around his shoulders. All in all, it was a primitive arrangement of haberdashery, at best.

  Now … what the hell was he doing wearing it?

  He searched his memory, his beautiful memory that enabled him to recall, at any given moment, any bit of detail he needed to maintain and repair the most complex vehicle in the galaxy. It was very disconcerting to find a hole in that selfsame memory.

  He racked his brains. There had been a planet … and then a failed mission, and a fight … and they'd returned to the ship … But how did he get here?

  He knocked on the side of his head as if to wake up memories that were sleeping in there. Nothing stirred.

  He looked around with a deliberateness meant to calm the rising panic. He was about a hundred yards from a primitive two-story building—an inn, from the look of it. The creak of the sign about the door drew Scott's attention. A crude painting adorned the rough board, of a woman in a mob cap, bodice, and long petticoats, hanging from a gallows. In case the message wasn't clear, the words The Hanged Woman were crudely lettered below.

  "Now there's a cheery thought," Scotty muttered, suppressing a chill that rippled up his spine, one not due to the cold. A wind with a hint of snow was blowing, sending the folds of the kilt flapping around his loins, the loose end snapping like a flag. He was alone without communications, on a planet heaven only knew where. "Oh, Montgomery," Scott said aloud, trying to hold on to his voice as a stanchion of reality, "this has got to be a dream." But his eyes were open, and he knew he was not going to wake up on the bridge of the Enterprise.

  He walked, or rather wobbled, up the road to the door of The Hanged Woman, but his legs gave out just short of his goal and he collapsed again onto the road, his face splashing into a rain-filled pothole. He d
ragged himself forward enough to keep from drowning. Part of his brain was telling him that he had better move before he started to shake from shock and hypothermia, while the other part was telling him it didn't really care.

  The upstairs window creaked open. Scott ignored it until the chill, smelly splash of a bucket of slops hit him squarely in the back. That finally did it. Pain or no pain, he was on his feet and scrabbling for cover against any further assault to his health and dignity.

  "Argh," he growled. It could have been worse, he conjectured, as he examined the offal that tumbled off him and identified the bits as dinner scraps and scrub water, not the contents of a chamber pot.

  "Hey, you! Move on!" Scott looked up to see a chunky woman with weather-raw red cheeks leaning out over the window ledge. She still held the basin in her massive muscular arms, which stuck out from rolled-up sleeves, testifying to a life of hard work.

  "Who are you?" Scott shouted back, his burr becoming thicker by the moment. "What am I doing here?!"

  "Screaming like a fool idiot," she shouted back. "I'll not have the likes of ye here. Be off or I'll fetch the master and he'll have a lead ball whizzing through your thick head in no time."

  Scotty drew a breath to argue the point, but it seemed useless, and, even though the sun was getting higher—which meant he had a full day ahead of him—it was also getting colder. The sooner he got under way, the sooner he could find shelter before he froze. The problem of where he was, and why, would have to wait.

  It was snowing hard before he was even out of sight of the inn. The engineer's feet, which were bare, were swelling and roughly the color of beets, except he couldn't even feel them for the numbing cold. And the wet wool that he wore was doing more harm than good in keeping the bitter wind from his body. It was The Hanged Woman, or death from exposure.

  He chugged back up the road, his breath vaporizing before him in little dense puffs, his feet dragging painfully, leaving a long wavy track in the new-fallen snow.

  There was a stable across the yard from the main house, and a screen of bushes, probably some ornamental hedgerow, which gave the grim inn some summer beauty as it marched untidily up to the stable wall. Using the cover, he slipped in unseen.

  And not a moment too soon. Through a crack in the rough stable wall, Scotty watched a slender boy in his mid-teens come out of the rear door of the inn carrying a pair of empty wooden buckets. Scott half prayed, "Please don't come here. Please. Go away."

  The boy went to the well in the middle of the yard and dropped the bucket with a splash, then turned the crank to bring the water up with a noisy creak. He did this until the two pails were full, and then, his chore done, returned to the house. Scotty let out his breath.

  The warm manure smell of the barn swept over him with a kind of nostalgic friendliness which belied the fact that he had spent most of his adult years in a relatively sterile and scentless starship. A horse neighed in the nearest stall, stomping with impatience, hoping perhaps for a run on spring grass which was not yet grown.

  A rickety ladder led up to the hay loft, but negotiating the ladder was more than Mr. Scott had counted on with aching freezing toes, and it was two stumbling false starts until the sheer fear of being caught gave him the energy to make his way painfully up and into the loft. It was deserted except for a small pigeon coop.

  He crawled to the far wall, buried himself in a soft pile of straw, and fell asleep to the gentle cooing of the birds.

  It was dark but for the beams of moonlight, silver and cold stripes in the darkness, when Scott moaned awake, trying to remember something very important. What was it, now? The headache was back. Oh, yes, he thought, with a clammy shudder. He was somewhere … somewhere a lot like northern England or the Scots Lowlands, but as they were a long time ago.

  He thought back to his ship, but there still was no clue to what had brought him to this place.

  Scotty crawled across the loft to the ladder. He was stiff and achy from the cramped lumpy bed of old grass. His lips were parched and his mouth dry. The horse was gone from the stall below. The barn was still and empty. He slipped down the ladder, trying to be quiet, wincing when he missed the last step and clattered to the ground. He winced even more when he pushed the door open with a loud creak.

  The well was too noisy to draw water, but luckily one of the buckets was still outside, covered only by a thin crust of ice. Food was next. Scotty tried the kitchen door, but it was bolted shut. The noise woke up the dog again. He was about to give up and make do when he noticed that the window was unlatched. Scotty's stomach growled loudly enough to wake the dead; or the dog, at least. He decided he would risk it.

  Scott found the door to the pantry by following his nose, which led him to the overwhelming scent of hams and sausage which hung tantalizingly overhead and out of reach, along with sweet braids of onions.

  A soft footfall behind him suddenly alerted him.

  Scotty turned just in time to see the barrel end of a rifle swing toward him, and then it smashed into the side of his head.

  He staggered back, his head spinning, and reached for his phaser, which of course wasn't there.

  There was a roar in the darkness, a loud curse, and then another shout from a boy. Maybe the boy from before, he thought.

  Then Scott was struck in the head again, a wave of nausea overwhelming him. He wretched and staggered forward. He felt blood trickling down his face, and his hands were suddenly closing on the front of somebody's clothes.

  "Let go of me!" shouted Scott's attacker, and the engineer shoved him as hard as he could. Scotty heard a crashing of furniture and then staggered for the window.

  Everything was spinning around, and he lurched drunkenly and smashed his poor head a third time against the edge of the window. He fell forward and out, landing face first in the dirt, his headache nearly overwhelming him.

  He staggered back to the barn and pulled the door shut behind him. A boy's voice cried out, "I saw him! Plain as day! Tall fellow he was, with red hair and a beard! Ran down the road!"

  Scotty was utterly confused and utterly sick. He couldn't put two words together in his head, and it was nothing short of a miracle that he managed to climb into the loft to hide. And there, consciousness fled.

  Chapter Four

  Centuries Later …

  IN ORBIT AROUND CRAGON—a planet which, in future years, would be uttered as a curse by Klingons, along with the name of Organia and the home planet of tribbles—the bridge and instruments of the Klingon battle cruiser were under attack.

  The attacker was Commander Kral. He was entitled, since after all it was his ship.

  Relatively young for a Klingon commander, his age did not deter Kral from venting a rage worthy of the most experienced. At that moment he was smashing both of his massive, armored fists into the weapons console. "Useless!" he howled. "All the weaponry at my fingertips, rendered useless by that thrice damned Weyland! May he die with festering boils!"

  Behind Kral, First Officer Kbrex stood with impassive calm, his hands draped behind his back. "Festering boils, Commander," he intoned.

  "May the Bloating Sickness force his entrails oozing from every bodily orifice!"

  "Every orifice, as you say, Commander."

  His tone was silky, deferential, and entirely too … what? Kral glanced at his first officer with suspicion and then suddenly turned on him and snapped, "What could I have done to avoid this calamity, eh, Kbrex? What step should I have taken? What plans should I have made?"

  Kbrex never blinked. His face was absolutely unreadable. "No Klingon is psychic, Commander," he said quietly. "In some situations, there is simply no one to blame."

  Kral considered that a moment, then nodded brusquely and left the bridge, leaving the smoldering ruins of the weapons console in his wake.

  Kbrex watched him go, then turned to the chief engineer. When he spoke now, the carefully controlled deference was no longer in evidence. Instead there was a sharp cunning and a modulated energy.
"Get to work repairing that immediately," he said. "You never know when we may need it."

  Kirk stared at the empty glass in his hand. He had been relating the events on Cragon to McCoy, but now his voice had trailed off as he remembered his eerily prophetic words to his men.

  "Be careful what you wish for," Kirk said, shaking his head. "You may get it. Lord, Bones … if I'd only known."

  "Was there any way you could have, Jim? Was there any warning?"

  Kirk tried to come up with something.

  "I don't know, Bones. I just … don't know. Perhaps I should have known when I met Weyland. But there was no way …" He looked to McCoy for an answer the doctor could not provide. "Was there?"

  Garrovick, who had taken point, suddenly put up a hand. "Hold it," he said, and pointed just ahead of them. "There. You see it?"

  At first Kirk didn't, but then he did see it, hidden by a trick of the light. A trip wire, rigged just ahead of them.

  "Anyone care to take a guess as to what that's connected to?" asked Kirk dryly.

  "Some nasty little piece of work," Scotty commented.

  "And I think we can surmise the folks who set it. Look there." Kirk pointed to a tree that was next to the wire. Carved into it, unobtrusively, was an unmistakable letter of the Klingon alphabet. "They've been through here, all right. Watch the trees for more warning symbols, gentlemen. If they have left themselves guides, we can make use of them, too."

  Chekov glanced around, feeling as if every shadow was now hiding a potential enemy. "Why did they set it, Keptin?"

  "One or both of two reasons." Kirk ticked them off on his hand. "First, they may have wanted to demonstrate to the inhabitants of Cragon V how one goes about setting lethal booby traps for an enemy—which implies that the Klingons have been stirring up civil unrest while they were here. The second is that the Klingons anticipated unwanted visitors of their own."