Star Trek: Signature Edition: Worlds in Collision (Star Trek: The Original Series) - Softcover

Reeves-Stevens, Judith

 
9780743485098: Star Trek: Signature Edition: Worlds in Collision (Star Trek: The Original Series)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0743485092 ISBN 13: 9780743485098
Verlag: Gallery Books, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

The Star Trek: Signature Edition series continues with this thrilling adventure featuring Commander Spock, Captain Kirk, and the U.S.S. Enterprise.

Of all the experiences shared by Captain Kirk and the crew of the Starship Enterprise™ during their first five-year mission, two were among the most perilous: a journey to the nonphysical realm of Transition where the massive computer known as Memory Prime was situated, and the nightmarish mission to Talin IV, a world poised on the brink of destruction that Kirk was forbidden to save.

In the twenty-third century, a hundred years before a sentient artificial life-form would be allowed to earn a Starfleet commission, the Federation considers the use of self-aware artificial intelligences to be little more than slavery, except for the immense computer system of Memory Prime—the key hub in the Federation's vast network of interstellar library planets. There, the A.I.s known as Pathfinders inhabit Transition—a virtual world so different from our universe that the A.I.s themselves debate whether or not the physical universe is real. But when an ancient enemy reaches out from the shadows of Vulcan's darkest history and threatens to destroy the Federation, Spock must risk his career, and his life, to enter the Pathfinders' realm.

Technologically and politically, Talin IV is little different from late-twentieth century Earth. But as a series of mysterious events pushes that world closer to self-annihilation, the Prime Directive prevents Captain Kirk and his crew from doing anything to prevent it. When the worst appears to happen and Kirk takes desperate action to give the Talin a chance to step back from the nuclear abyss, Talin IV is consumed by radioactive fire. Now, with a world destroyed and the Enterprise dead in space, the careers of Kirk and his crew are over. Disgraced and despised, Kirk has only one chance to redeem himself and his crew: Somehow, he must make his way back to Talin IV and discover what really happened, even if it means proving that a world died because he broke Starfleet's most sacred law.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens are the authors of more than thirty books, including numerous New York Times bestselling Star Trek novels. For more information, please visit Reeves-Stevens.com.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

Humans, Glissa thought suddenly, as she caught the first unmistakable scent of their approach. You can't live with them and you can't live without them, but by Kera and Phinda, you can certainly smell them.

The short Tellarite shift boss looked away from the viewscreen blueprint she studied, then narrowed her deepset, solid black eyes to squint into the distance. All around her, she felt the thrumming of the thin air that passed for an atmosphere within the hollowed-out S-type asteroid. It was the pulse of the machines and fellow workers remaking its interior into a living world, a home for thousands. For Glissa, there was excitement in this job of world making, and fulfillment. Which is why the unexpected scent of humans was so unsettling. With them around, she feared the excitement would soon give way to drudgery.

The Tellarite twitched her broad, porcine nose as she tasted the circulating breeze, seeking more details of the human presence she had detected. In the soft, seasonless mists of her home world, natural selection had not been inspired to evolve keen eyesight. As an adult of her species, Glissa had long since lost the ability to see past two meters with any clarity. But she could hear with an acuity that surpassed most Vulcans, and could decipher scents and airborne pheromones at a speed and rate of accuracy to challenge all but the most sensitive tricorder.

It was those other fine senses that now confirmed for her what she had feared -- the telltale odor of the dreadfully omnivorous humans came to her from what could only be her second-shift crew of rockriggers. Even Glissa's near-useless eyes could make out the brilliant yellow streak of the safety cable that linked the blurry figures. The cable traced a sinuous route around the wide yellow warning bands that marked the overlaps of the artificial gravity fields on the asteroid's inner surface. Spinning the rock to produce centripetal pseudo-gravity would make working inside the asteroid much easier, but until the final bracing supports were in place, the engineers didn't want to subject the shell to the additional strain. So, in the interim, the asteroid's outer surface was studded with portable artificial-gravity generators, creating both amplified and null-gravity zones within the rock. As if that crazy-quilt arrangement didn't produce enough strain on its own.

Glissa sighed and the sound she made in her barrel chest was deep and guttural -- like the prelude to a particularly invigorating string of invective. But there was no such joy behind her sigh. She hadn't realized that the first shift was already over, let alone that it was time for the second to begin. And the lake-support pylons for the rock's eventual basin of freshwater supply were still not in place. They hadn't even appeared on the massive cargo-transporter platform waiting empty at the edge of the work site. At the rate her division was falling behind schedule, Glissa calculated she was going to have to endure at least another tenday of overtime before she had the slightest chance of taking a few shifts off to enjoy a good wallow in the communal baths on the rec station. And from the smell of things, it was definitely going to be another tenday of working with humans.

Of course, Glissa had nothing against humans personally, but not being from one of Miracht's ambassadorial tribes, she found it disagreeable to work with them. Who wouldn't have difficulty working with beings who could never seem to tell the obvious differences between time-honored constructive insults and improper personal attacks on their parentage, and whose lack of a sense of humor was second only to the Vulcans? Still, it took all kinds to make the worlds go round and, to be fair, she knew of few Tellarites who had the appetite to administer the monstrous bureaucracies that kept the Federation functioning.

She sighed again and rippled the sensitive underpad nodes of her hoof against the viewscreen's control panel -- one of dozens of similar viewscreens that were mounted on light poles ringing the work site. After erasing the blueprint from the two-meter-by-one-meter display, she sniffed the air more slowly to determine which particular humans she had been cursed with this time.

The twelve approaching rockriggers were still too far away for Glissa to recognize any features other than their individual yellow safety harnesses and helmets, but she could identify most of them by their scents. Seven, thank the Moons, were Tellarites themselves -- client workers from the Quaker commune that had hired Interworld Construction to reform this rock into a Lagrange colony. At least half the workforce on this project were client workers providing the commune with substantial labor savings.

But of the other five workers approaching, Glissa scented, all were human, and that was unfortunate because rockrigging and humans were never a happy combination.

The task of asteroid reformation was one of the few remaining hazardous occupations within the Federation that legally could not be done more efficiently or less expensively by drone machines. If the Council ever decided to relax the Federation's prohibitions on slavery to allow true synthetic consciousnesses to control robots, then perhaps the industry itself would be transformed. But until that unlikely day, rockrigging would remain the exclusive province of two basic types of laborers: dedicated client workers who welcomed the chance to literally carve out a world with their own bare hooves, and the hardcases who signed on with Interworld because they had exhausted all other options.

As far as Glissa was concerned, the hardcase humans who worked for Interworld -- some fugitive, all desperate -- might just as well be Klingons for all the honor and diligence they exhibited. But the making of worlds was honorable work for a Tellarite, and no one had said it would ever be easy. So humans, with their unique and unfathomable mix of Vulcan logic and Andorian passion, were officially tolerated by Interworld, even if it meant that Glissa and the other shift bosses did have to watch their language.

As Glissa turned back to the viewscreen to call up current work assignments and detailed plans for the second shift, the shift-change alarm sounded from speakers in the towering lightpoles that encircled the five-hundred-meter-wide work site. She peered up at the wall of the rock four kilometers over her head, and could just make out the smeared constellations of the lightpoles surrounding the work sites on the airless half of the rock's interior as they flickered to signal shift change for those workers in environmental suits who could not use sound alarms.

Puzzled, Glissa checked her chronometer and saw that the change signals were on time. But that meant the second shift crew was also arriving on time, and in all the years Glissa had spent with Interworld, one of the few things she had learned to count on was that hardcase humans were never on time. It was almost a religion with them.

For a moment she was concerned at the break in tradition and order -- few things were worse to a Tellarite than an unexplained mystery. She quickly retasted the air, but there was no denying the scent of humans in the approaching workers. She sniffed again, deeply, questioningly...and then the answer came.

0 Glissa raised her hoof to the unfocused form of the human who led the team and waved. "Sam?" she growled. "Sam Jameson?"

The lead figure raised his much too long and scrawny arm to return the wave and Glissa felt a sudden thrill of hope. If Sam Jameson had been promoted to work as her second-shift team leader then there was an excellent chance that Glissa's division might make up for lost time. He had only been with the company for four tendays but had already proven himself to be a most remarkable...

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Verlag
Gallery Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0743485092
ISBN 13 
9780743485098
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
432
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande