Star Trek: Double Helix #3: Red Sector
by Diane Carey



p.311 "ATTENTION! THIS IS A STARFLEET SPECIAL SECURITY FORCES EVACUATION SQUAD! WE ARE ABOUT TO LAND A DIPLOMATIC COACH AND FIFE FIGHTER ESCORTS. ALL CIVILIANS MUST CLEAR THE COURTYARD IMMEDIATELY! ANYONE REMAINING WILL BE STUNNED AND MOVED TO A SECURITY BRIG! ALL PERSONS... ATTENTION! ... THEY'RE NOT CLEARING OUT. CAN THEY EVEN HEAR ME? PERRATON, IS THE TRANSLATOR ON? PECAN, GET YOUR WING BACK INTO FORMATION! WHERE'S THE BROADCAST GREENLIGHT? WHAT KIND OF DUNSELS INSTALLED THIS SYSTEM?"
     "AH, PERRATON HERE...STILES, BE AWARE THE BROADCASTING SYSTEM IS GREEN AND TRANSLATING. YOU JUST CALLED THE WHOLE PLANET A BUNCH OF DUNSELS."
     "SHUT IT DOWN!"
     "OAK ONE, THIS IS BRAZIL. FORMATION'S SHIFTING STARBOARD. THE EMBASSY'S GOT A BIG GARGOYLE ON IT AND I'M ABOUT T CLEAN ITS TEETH."
     "LATERAL THRUST. ABORT LANDING PATTERN--PERRATON, WOULD YOU RED THE P.A. BEFORE I COUGH UP A LUNG?"

p.313 "Secure the coach and scramble the evac squad. Nuts Oak One. Remain in your cockpits. Do not get out, understood? Sit and let Oak Squad flush the dignitaries. I'll escort Ambassador Spock personally."
     "They're pushing on my struts. Our light-stun phasers can--"
     "Negative!" Stiles broiled. "Let 'em crowd you. Keep finger shields activated in case they touch the wings. And all of you shut up! I don't want the ambassador to hear the slightest disrespect."
     "Oh, we respect you. Don't you respect him, Cashew?"
     "I drip respect."
     "As you were!"
     "As I was? Did I change? I like me this way. Did you change, Acorn?"
     "Animals," Stiles grumbled. "I'd like to get you disrespectful slugs on starship duty for five minutes, just five minutes..."

p.314 "Heads up" His voice cracked. "There's a riot going on outside. Some kind of local political trouble. The embassy is beam-shielded, so we have to go in the security door. As we approach, the guard will drop the door shields. We'll have go go in and come out in single file. We're going to put the dignitaries between us, at two or three in a row. There are about twenty of these people, so the seven of us'll be just about right. I'll go last, with the ambassador right in front of me. He's the primary person to guard, and if he gets so much as a hangnail, somebody's gonna answer to me in a dark alley. After we get--shut up, Foster!"
     "I didn't say anything!" Bill Foster protested.
     "Quit snickering! This is... this is--"
     "Serious," Perraton supplied.
     "I know, Eric," Foster muttered.
     "You will call me 'Ensign,' mister!"      "Aye eye, Ensign Mister."

p.320 All the men turned to face the hall to their left as a crowd of elegant dignitaries bobbed toward them. In the midst of them was the tall, instantly recognizable figure of the famous Ambassador Spock.
     Bow? Kneel? Handshake?
     "Don't faint! Eric, stand at attention!"
     Perraton's anxious whisper boomed in Stiles's ear like a foghorn.
     "Stand at attention!"
     "Attention..." Stiles planted his boots on the tile, but he wasn't able to get them together. He squared his shoulders, raised his chin, held his breath, clutched his rifle, and forced an appearance of adept steadiness and control. Cool. Calm. Military. Crisp. In control. In charge. Confident. Smelly.

p.353 Slowly, more slowly than the trickling of thought or water, his body adjusted to the constant pain. As he stopped struggling, stopped trying to lift himself, gradually his arm settled from searing mind-numbing agony to an acceptable throb with his fingers numb. The numbness itself hurt, but after a time he was able to concentrate on the hazy light far overhead and play mental games with it. He endured its mockery, accused it of fickleness, fielded its insults, and claimed it was impotent. Surging in and out of awareness, he conducted a conversation with the faint light and imagined that it was singing to him.

p.367 "Well, here we are then," Stiles groaned. "A senior duty ensign who finagled his way into command of a landing party because of a family connection with Ambassador Spock. Big me, I thought I could distinguish myself. You know what I see when I look up the ladder? Captain Stiles, Lieutenant Stiles, Lieutenant Commander Stiles, heroes of the Romulan wars, officers on starship service, and little Ensign Stiles who died in the pit after botching a simple evac." He let his head drop back and gazed up, far up, to the patch of dim light at the top of thehole. "I wish I were Ensign Anybody Else."
     "Surrounded by giants," Zevon offered. "No wonder you could barely see."

p.419 "Did you bring the results of all these tests? I'd like to examine them."
     He patted his satchel. "Along with a cache of Scaffold Mints for the wardroom."
     "As ever," Spock commented, "you keep your eye on the future."
     "Watch it, pal, or I'll sit on you and give you a lecture on how long two cockroaches can live off the glue on the back of a postage stamp."

p.424 "The arbitrariness of battle is for you to worry about, Captain, thank the god of problems."
     "He said cheerily, Travis Perraton edited [...]"

p.442 "enushmi" -- 'crappola' in Romulan

p.443-444 "You ever been a prisoner of war?"
     His question moved softly between them as if made of music. Travis had no reason to supply an answer.
     Stiles watched the foam bubbles pop up in his mug.
     "You live together in a way that no two people ever do. You mop the other's guy's blood and mend his wounds, listen to his dreams and watch his hopes decay... you can't get away from the smells, the sweat, the fears crawling on you like cancer... after awhile you run out of words to hold each other's brains inside, so you just stop talking. You start communicating without words. Just a look, or a touch... or you just sit there together. The intimacy can't be described. You see each other so raw, so demolished... more than you ever wanted anybody to see you. Weak, sick, scared, dobbing... crushed by loneliness like a plague, till you finally turn to each other and pray the other guy's lonely too."
     He raised his eyes. Deeply moving to the point of sorrow was the expression on Travis's face, a shivering guilt that threaded its way to the distant past and prevented forgetting.
     "I survived because of two forces moving in my life," Stiles continued. "One was the ghost of Ambassador Spock in my mind, telling me I could survive, I could rise above all this, that he'd be proud of me if I did... I heard his voice every night for the whole four years, narrating the plan for how I would behave and what he expected of me. I don't have any idea if it was all in my mind and I was making it up in some kind of hero-worship fantasy, but Travis, I swear to eternity it kept me alive. Just knowing what he expected of me and hearing his voice from the other side of the snow... calling me by my first name... he kept me alive by making me believe it was my duty and that I could prevail. The other force, he added softly, "was Zevon. Whenever the ambassador's image faded and that leash started to fray, Zevon would be there in the haze, some kind of echo of Spock, holding himself above the trouble we were in, always reminding me without even saying it that something bigger was expected of me. I needed him and h e needed me, and together we worked for a common purpose. He gave me a reason to struggle out of my cot morning after morning. If I didn't come, he came to get me and made me get up. If he's out there somewhere, sick, maybe dying... I can't let him face it without me."

p.504 "The logs, the legends, the tall tales, the song and story--these are spirit-charging powers for us all. But legend is selective and usually written by the winners. The legends of the first Enterprise... they reflect the heroic, not the human aspects, of our life together in those years... Jim Kirk, Dr. McCoy, the others, and myself. Legend is a great filter. The traits that shame us the most, the ones we leave out of the stories, are often the flaws that give us texture. Without them, we would be only pictures."
     Spock leaned back on an elbow, maneuvered his leg to a better position, and considered the past through scopes in his mind.
     "I have come over these many years to understand what it means to be a captain not so much in rank but in manner. There are captains of rank, captains of ships, and captains of crews. A few men are captains of all three. I once commanded the Enterprise as her captain. I was capable of giving the proper orders and expecting proper behavior, but I was never captain of the crew's hopes and devotions. That is a different passion. A different manner of man than I."
     At first it seemed Spock might be selling himself short, judging the past too harshly--but no. Stiles knew too well the symptoms of that, and didn't see them here. This, instead, was a kind of personal honesty, a stunning depth of self-respect.
     He wanted it. He wanted to know how to do that. Spock was so graceful at understanding subtle differences that mattered, and didn't recoil from knowing his talents and limitations.
     "Different how?" Stiles asked, somewhat abrasive.
     Spock tipped his head in thought. "I see chess," he said. "You see poker."
     Broiling with envy and impatience, Stiles rubbed his cracked hands on his trousers. He didn't understand that, exactly, but something about it lit a fire under him.

p.505 "Sir," he began, "there's something the history tapes don't show about you."
     "What would that be?"
     Stiles's voice was low and sincere. "You're a nice person."
     Though Spock's face remained passive, his eyes dropped their guard. "A supreme compliment," he said. "Thank you. Now I suggest we vacate this cell."

p.508-509 "Orsova thinks he's being cute putting me back in the same cell. He's an idiot. I spent years here. I helped rebuild this place after my first Constrictor. I know more about it than he does or any guard ever did. It's his big mistake. I'm not a twenty-one-year-old kid anymore."
     "And this is an epiphany for you?
     Stiles blinked at him. That look was back on the Vulcan's face, that almost-smile, with the sparkle behind his eyes.
     Amusement? Or something else?
     "Your men knew their lives were in danger," the ambassador said, "yet you gave them confidence without deception. You marched them past the frozen moment that kills so many, and gave them a chance to fight for their ship and their lives. Against the checklist that counts more than legends, with all flaws and hesitations understood as cells of the whole...you are a captain."
     Had the lights changed in here? Was it warmer?
     Both peeved and flattered, Stiles shifted his weight and waved a hand at the cot. "You mean all this time you believed in me and you let me sit there and snivel?"
     "It was never enough for me to believe in you," Spock said handily. "You have to believe--"
     "Please!" Stiles laughed. "Don't finish that! I smell a cliché."
     Spock rewarded him with that hint of a smile and a very slight bow. "I stand rebuked."

512 "Up at that intersection there," he said to Spock, "you go left. You'll be able to get out in about half a mile. That's where the municipal slab ends. I'll go to the right and find Zevon and catch up, and I'll be better alone in case it's a trap. All due respect, you'll slow me down and I'm tired of being slow. I'm sorry if this isn't what you had in mind."
     "I had nothing in mind."
     What'd he say?
     Must be clogged ears. Didn't hear right. Stiles looked over his shoulder, seeing only the gray silhouette of the Vulcan two steps back. As he held aside a thick root for the ambassador to step by, he heard that sentence in his head and finally just asked.
     "You didn't have a plan? I thought the great amazing Mr. Spock had a plan."
     The ambassador tipped his head in a kind of shrug and spoke as they picked their way along.
     "You remember what I said about captains. I know my shortcomings. Discipline can be limiting. That is why Vulcans, with all our stringent codes of behavior, have not generally prevailed as great leaders, and humans, with your elastic spirits, have. I've learned over the years to provide information and opportunity, then step aside and rely upon the more vibrant among us for actual tactics. I hoped you would rise to the occasion."
     "Are you saying," Stiles marveled, "you just fake it?"
     In a shaft of light from a drain hole, Spock's black eyes flickered smartly. "No, I trusted you to fake it."

p.517 Through the thickness of semiconsciousness Zevon heard the voice that had come to him so many times in the broken hours of early morning.
     "Plenty of seats down in front. Welcome to the opening night of 'Prepare for the Worst,' starring the always effervescent Eric John Stiles. Reset your phasers and enjoy the show."

p.525 "What's wrong with the transporters?" Stiles asked.
     "Is there something wrong with the transporter?"
     "Yup. You broke 'em when you beamed through that reflector envelope. They're under repair."
     Politely Spock asked, "Permission to grant them permission to land?"
     "Permission granted to grant permission," Stiles responded.
     The ambassador seemed impressed, maybe a little embarrassed that he hadn't thought of this, and cued his microlink. "You have permission to set down, Mr. Perraton. We shall stand by."

p.549 "After the first eight or nine decades, you learn to keep your mouth shut. Now, I know what you should name him, y'see. You've got to pick something flashy and unique. Leonard James Eric Spock Beverly Saskatoon the First. He'll be the only one of his kind. Wanna see it written down? Hey, kid, got a pen?"

 

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