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  To Michael Stackpole, with thanks for years of guidance and support

  The world itself to some men is a prison, our narrow seas as so many ditches; and when they have compassed the globe of the Earth, they would fain go see what is done in the Moon. . . . What is a ship but a prison?

  —ROBERT BURTON

  THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY

  HISTORIAN’S NOTE

  * * *

  The main events in this story begin in October 2256, five months after the Battle of the Binary Stars—and two years after the Enterprise’s first mission to Talos IV.

  Prologue

  * * *

  2236

  I’m dead. They buried me.

  Christopher Pike awoke to those thoughts—and to pain. He felt as if the world had fallen in on him and, indeed, a portion of it had. Alone in the dark, on his belly with blood streaming from his chin and a mountain crushing his back, he found every breath a chore. No asthmatic episode from his childhood compared with the agony he felt now.

  But he felt it, and that told him something.

  I’m not dead. I just can’t move.

  The seventeen-year-old blinked dust from his eyes and fought to focus. There was nothing to see. He remembered in disjointed flashes. He’d started running when the rumbling began. In truth, “running” had meant skittering like a prairie dog, ducking tunnel ceilings barely a meter high in places. “Rumbling,” too, barely described what had felt like being sealed inside a snare drum. Then he had tripped and fallen flat, losing his flashlight.

  How long ago had that been?

  He called out. Nothing. Pike wilted. He could barely hear his own voice, the way the mountain was still groaning.

  He turned his attention to uncovering his left arm, numb and partially pinned under debris. Doing something cleared his head. He recalled the hot California morning, and how he’d given up an afternoon on horseback to break a few laws and visit a local shrine to perseverance.

  The tunnel was the work of a lone twentieth-century miner, William “Burro” Schmidt, whose nickname came from the animals that carried his gold ore across the El Paso Mountains to Pike’s hometown of Mojave. Seeking a shortcut, Burro had burrowed, using hand tools and explosives to hew a narrow passage into a ridge. Long after a road through Last Chance Canyon eliminated the need for his tunnel, the miner had kept at it, finally punching through nearly a kilometer of granite after more than three decades. The man some called the “human mole” never transported a load of ore through it—but he had succeeded.

  Such a combination of determination and defiance was irresistible to Pike and his friends—particularly one Evan Hondo. A Starfleet dropout, the twenty-year-old Hondo served as ringleader for area kids with time on their hands. Having entered the tunnel before, he’d proposed the adventure not as a dare, but an expedition—a framing sure to interest Pike. So as not to be tracked during their trespass, they’d left their communication devices at home.

  Pike soon understood why the entry had been barricaded. In an earlier time, the United States had festooned the Mojave Desert with military bases: tempting targets during the Third World War. The Hermosa Quake of 2047 had also weakened many underground features. And while modern spelunkers had cleared paths with phasers, they’d also added side tunnels of questionable stability—as Pike had painfully discovered. He’d never been claustrophobic; now, he could only think that evolution had failed him by not instilling in him a preternatural dread of confined spaces.

  Buried but not dead, he thought again as he flexed his freed left arm to restore blood flow. It felt like caressing a porcupine. Palms down, he tried to push himself up. Pain erupted again as something moved in his chest. The weight on his midsection shifted, but not enough to free him. He’d have to pull himself out.

  He clawed at the surface in front of him. Something metallic was in the rubble. It was a rail, a remnant of the line Schmidt had laid for his ore cart. Pike dug with his fingernails until he could curl his hands around it—and then heaved.

  You’ve done a million chin-ups, Chris. Pull!

  Pike screamed in agony as he dragged his body forward and into the main tunnel. Farther behind, more of the passage gave way, proof he had acted just in time. He crawled to the opposite wall of the tunnel and rolled over, bracing himself against the surface in an attempt to sit up. More blinding pain, as something inside him shifted again. Finally upright, he sat petrified in the dark, clutching at his chest. A broken rib for sure, maybe two. His legs seemed fine, although leaning over to examine them nearly caused him to black out.

  He needed medical help—but he couldn’t think about that now.

  “Hondo! Freena! Dosh!”

  Still nothing. Freena and her boyfriend, Hondo, inseparable, had gone ahead on their own. Sick of listening to the teenage know-it-all Dosh, Pike had sent the chatty Tellarite off to join them. Wincing as he stood, Pike hoped to hear Dosh’s nasal voice again. He used the craggy wall for support as he worked his way farther into the darkness, meter by miserable meter.

  He passed one phaser-cut corridor after another, hearing only his own voice when he called out. Down the fourth passage, he heard weeping. Pike moved down it, teeth clenched against the pain. There was a pile of debris ahead—and beyond it, a light. Pike pitched against the pile of rubble and methodically cleared a person-wide opening.

  Through it, he saw Dosh sitting against the wall, arms clutching his knees, tearful and disoriented as he stared at a lantern on the floor in front of him. “Dosh, are you all right?”

  “N-no. I mean, yes.”

  He didn’t look all right. Pike could see Dosh had tried to dig himself out, only to give up. “It’s okay, pal. Just hold on.” Steeling himself, Pike shimmied through the aperture. More agony. He crawled down the rock pile to Dosh’s side. “Where’s Evan and Freena?”

  Dosh gestured weakly. “Ahead. They left me.”

  Pike looked up the phaser-cut tunnel. “We’ve got to find them.”

  Dosh didn’t respond. The kid was shaken, shattered. He wasn’t going anywhere, not alone. “Wait here,” Pike finally said.

  “D-don’t take my light.”

  “I won’t.”

  That made it harder. The mountain rattled some more as he fumbled forward in the dark. But he heard something: coughing. It had to be Freena. A few dozen meters later, around a turn, he saw light again. Pike hurried toward it. His eyes adjusting, Pike called out to her. She was on the ground at the end of the chamber, facing the wall and looking down.

  “Chris!” She tried to stand, but faltered. He caught her. Caked in dust, she looked rough. “Hondo’s there!
” she said, pointing at the dead end.

  The passage stopped at a sheer wall, slick to the touch. Pike stared, confused, before Freena pointed again. “Look down!”

  At the foot of the wall was half a meter of blackness. Pike peered into the nothingness. “It’s the rest of the tunnel!” He got on his hands and knees and peered down inside. “Hondo?”

  “Chrissy!” a voice called out from below. Only one person called him by that hated nickname. “Buddy! That you?”

  “Yeah.” Pike brought Freena’s lantern to the opening. Several meters below, he beheld Hondo’s smiling face. “It’s like the mountain just shifted down—and took half the tunnel with it.”

  “I guess I got a little happy with the phaser,” Hondo said.

  Phaser? Pike looked to Freena.

  She shook her head. “Hondo wanted to cut a new passage.”

  “Took Burro thirty-plus years,” Hondo said. “Hey, everybody tries it.”

  “Well, now you’re in a hole,” Pike said.

  Another rumble. Freena clutched Pike’s shoulder to steady him. “Every time there’s shaking,” she said, “the tunnel shifts down some more.”

  Blanching against the pain, Pike dropped to his stomach and stuck his arm over the ledge. “Hondo, can you reach me?”

  “Can’t. It’s too high. And I think my leg’s broken.”

  And no medical kit at all on this trip, to go along with no communicators. Pike had harbored serious reservations from the start. How different might it have been if he were in charge?

  He couldn’t think about that. He had to act. “Hondo, I have to get Freena and Dosh out. But I’ll bring help. Okay?”

  “You just want to be the hero,” Hondo said.

  That was the furthest thing from Pike’s mind, but he wasn’t going to argue. “Maybe that’s it.” He stood.

  Shaking, Freena objected. “I’m not leaving him.”

  “Go with Chrissy,” Hondo called out from below. “It’s all right.”

  Pike touched her wrist. “I swear, we’ll come back.”

  She looked down for a long moment, before nodding. “Okay.”

  “Hey, if you find a phaser,” Hondo yelled, “I want it back.”

  Pike’s path back up the tunnel was much slower with the hobbling Freena in tow. All the while, he calculated. Mojave had an emergency services shuttle, one with an onboard transporter. He’d find a way to call them from outside, and then head back in, providing information on where Hondo was. Would that be enough for them to get a lock? Could transporters do that? He didn’t know. But he had to find out.

  Finding Dosh unmoved from his location, Pike and Freena worked to clear a larger opening to the main tunnel. All that time—and during the trio’s long rush back toward the entrance—the creaking ridge reminded them to hurry. Every little tremor nearly sent Freena back for Hondo, but Pike kept the group moving onward.

  Finally, he saw the light—blinding and brilliant. Muscles tensed up since the start of the ordeal began to relax. It would work out. He was getting the others out of the mountain. He’d get Hondo out too.

  And then he’d have a serious reassessment of his friendship with him.

  * * *

  It had not worked out.

  With Dosh and Freena collapsed outside the entrance, Pike staggered to the old miner’s dwelling, where Hondo had hidden his vehicle. He activated the emergency communicator on board. A hovercraft arrived minutes later, followed by another, and another; more authorities than he ever expected to see, so swiftly. Pike was elated—

  —at first. He learned they were in the vicinity because of the Garlock Fault, which ran across the northern edge of the Mojave Desert. It wasn’t an especially active system; Pike had never felt a quake while living in the area. But it was prone to sympathetic seismic events, responding to stimuli as small as ill-advised disintegrations.

  And before the authorities could get a transporter fix on Hondo, it had responded again. Sensor readings suggested his death was instantaneous.

  For an hour, Pike sat outside the miner’s shelter, feeling numb—and not from what the medic had treated him with. He’d consoled his tearful friends as best he could—until they realized he needed consoling too.

  “They just told me they’re calling off the search.” Pike shook his head. “I wasn’t fast enough.”

  “Don’t say that,” Dosh said. “You were helping us.”

  “Then I should have tried something else. I should have shimmied down to help him out.”

  “Then you’d be gone too,” Freena said. “We all would be.” Her blue eyes were all cried out. “Chris, I love him and I didn’t stay.”

  Yeah, but I promised. Pike looked back at the tunnel opening. He was counting on me. I just wasn’t smart enough.

  With the adults gathering, he knew the trouble was only beginning. There would be explanations. Angry parents and guardians. Sanctions from the authorities who managed the land.

  Pike had already decided he would take it all on himself.

  It was going to be bad—real bad. The sort of thing that might well put an end to his hopes for the future. Piloting shuttles. Running his own ranch. Starfleet? It would be foolish to dream of anything now. His destiny was buried under a mountain of granite.

  Buried, but not dead.

  He would keep on digging.

  DETONATION

  * * *

  October 2256

  INCOMING TRANSMISSION

  TO: CAPTAIN C. PIKE • U.S.S. ENTERPRISE • NCC-1701

  FROM: VICE ADMIRAL K. CORNWELL, STARFLEET COMMAND

  ALERT. HOSTILITIES OPENED WITH KLINGON EMPIRE. STATE OF WAR EXISTS.

  LOSSES INCLUDE CLARKE, EDISON, EUROPA, SHENZHOU, SHRAN, T’PLANA-HATH, YEAGER.

  REGRET TO INFORM YOU CAPTAIN GEORGIOU MIA/PRESUMED KIA.

  ENTERPRISE TO REMAIN IN PERGAMUM NEBULA, MISSION UNALTERED. DO NOT RETURN.

  ENCRYPT ALL FUTURE COMMUNICATIONS PER REGULATION 46A.

  END TRANSMISSION

  1

  * * *

  U.S.S. Enterprise

  Pergamum Nebula

  “Ram us through!”

  Captain Christopher Pike called out a second warning to the Starship Enterprise bridge crew, but even he couldn’t hear it. The black cloud that had loomed on the main viewer for the last few minutes devoured the screen—and the vessel shook wildly. The ship’s gentle sonorous hum gave way to the din of quaking bulkheads.

  “Kappa band entered!” shouted Lieutenant Jamila Amin. One of several recent additions to the crew, the navigator was barely audible despite sitting meters away from the captain’s chair. “External boundary breach in twenty seconds!”

  I don’t care for the word “breach” in the current circumstance, Pike thought to respond—but against the roar he worried someone would think he was trying to say something more important. He looked up and around. Pike had grown accustomed to nearly everything the universe had to throw at a starship, but flying through dense material was his least favorite by far.

  Enterprise was up to it, of course; space wasn’t fully a vacuum, and a starship needed to be able to traverse areas of plasma unscathed. But a starship still responded to the outside environs, buffeting as material impacted its shields. Accelerating quickly through a thick medium somehow managed to transfer enough stress through the shields and hull to make the bulkheads complain.

  Some Starfleeters had likened the eerie sound to the creaking of a wooden ship of old. To Pike, it was like being back inside a mountain that didn’t want him there.

  Slowly, the shaking and racket subsided, and the viewscreen image shifted from oily black to just oily. “Kappa nebular band cleared,” Lieutenant Raden said from the helm. “But we may want to go back and pick up the rest of the hull!”

  “Relax, Raden,” Amin said. “Your beauty’s intact.”

  “I’ll believe that when I can inspect it myself,” the Ktarian replied. “Not before!”

  Pike’s forward stati
on was completely new, with Yoshi Ohara and the veteran José Tyler off to well-deserved commands of their own. While Amin had settled in, Raden still treated Enterprise like his parents’ hovercraft—one he was terrified to leave a scratch on. That had given the otherwise fully competent helmsman a jittery demeanor to match his animated golden eyes.

  “Lambda band detected,” called out the wavy-haired young man from the science station. “Measuring particulate velocity, direction, and composition.”

  “Thank you, Mister Connolly,” Pike said. “Sad news for you, Mister Raden. This wall of guck has as many layers as the Greeks had letters.”

  Two fewer, actually, but Spock wasn’t there to correct him. That was just as well: the Vulcan was where he needed to be. Pike had ordered Enterprise’s premature return the second after he’d read the message from Starfleet about the declaration of war. At the time, Spock had been forward in the stardrive section, working on a new program for the navigational deflector. Pike expected he was still there, shoveling facts into the system to adjust for every new region they encountered.

  “Lambda region readings confirmed. Conveying to engineering and nav,” Connolly said. “Carbon monoxide and nitrogen, dust particles in suspension. Less ammonia in this one. Outer boundary is majority formaldehyde.”

  “That’s fine. I’m feeling ready to be embalmed.” Pike grinned at the lieutenant. He never liked to show concern before the young ones—especially in a place as hellish as the Pergamum Nebula.

  The adjective was apt. The colossal astronomical body known on deck just as the Pergamum was named for the city that held Satan’s throne in the Book of Revelation. It lived up to the title. Superheated reds and oranges alternated with deep blacks of absorption formations, giving it such a levels-of-hell feel that even Starfleet’s staid astronomical naming body felt the need to get poetic. While distant from the core of Federation space, it stood near the intersection of routes popular with civilian prospectors—and a number of vessels had never returned from the region. Pike’s orders had been to find out why, while conducting a comprehensive survey designed to take an entire year.