This choice: Continue reading "Double Double" • Go Back...Chapter #42Double Double (17) by: Seuzz   Chapter 17
KIRK SMILED TO HIMSELF as he surveyed the crew assembled on the bridge of the Rheingold.
No great revolution, he reminded himself, had ever been launched by professionals, for professionals, having so much to lose, never join a revolution until it is already accomplished. And when professionals ever do get a hankering for a revolution, they are always too clumsy to actually pull it off. No successful revolution was ever launched with finesse.
So it was always the ragtags and string-alongs who gave a revolution its first push, and carried it to success on their backs and shoulders. Ragtags and string-alongs; criminals and ruffians, in some cases. Or just plain rascals.
Well, he told himself, if it takes rascals to start a revolution, I could hardly have started with a more rascally bunch.
There was Meisner, bluff and blonde and big-boned, looking like he should be hauling machinery in some broken-down, backwater mining colony. Zimmerman, with his shock of soot-black hair and the radiation burns down one side of his face. Siemens, with pop eyes and fish lips set in a thin and worried face. Zhironovsky, looking wet and larval. Even Brown, with his scholarly background, was a nobody.
None of these men had a name outside the confines of this ship. None of them, if passed on a starbase, would attract a second glance. None of them would ever have amounted to anything, even by the base and abject standards of their own class and background.
If the Rheingold, on its way to Exo III, had fallen into a black hole, not an atom in the entire galaxy would have been disturbed.
But they were, in fact, the bringers of revolution. Midwives for a new galaxy. Such was the destiny that Kirk gifted them: an immortality beyond the physical. In the future, these men would be remembered as the first movers of the great, galactic civilization that the Creator had only been able to dream of.
And, of course, he would be remembered too.
"Mr. Zimmerman," he said, "how long can your engines spare you?"
"Indefinitely, sir." The left side of the android's face mimicked exactly the frozen muscles of his human template. But his gaze was calm, in contrast to the dark and darting anger his original had flashed as Kirk and Brown, with phasers lowered, had forced him onto the duplication platform. "The new fuel equations have stabilized the matrix. We can maintain warp three as long as required."
"Good. Mr. Zhironovsky, any danger of the pods separating?"
"No sir, there's no appreciable vibrations from the engines now, and the couplings themselves have always been strong enough. But I checked them directly myself before we departed Exo III."
Kirk looked amused. "I thought the Rheingold was unequipped with extra-vehicular environmental suits."
"Yes sir?" Zhironovsky looked confused. "I didn't use a suit."
"Oh. You made an extra-vehicular excursion, in orbit, bathed by radiation, at temperatures near absolute zero, in only your uniform."
"Yes sir."
"Well, don't tell anyone outside of us that you did."
Zhironovsky looked offended. "Of course not, sir."
"Mr. Siemens—"
"Auxiliary cables are now rerouting excess power to the cores stored in Pod One. They will be fully charged and ready for use when we reach our destination."
"Excellent. Speaking of which." Kirk turned to Meisner.
"We are little more than a day off at our current speed," the captain and helmsman said.
"Good. Start scanning the surface for a suitable location immediately on making orbit. Mr. Zhironovsky, we will begin the offloading procedure with— Mr. Siemens?" he asked as the assistant engineer tentatively raised his hand.
"The sensors—" he started to say.
"Have been repaired and recalibrated," Kirk said. "I saw to that myself."
He glanced around the bridge. So many other systems there were that could stand to be repaired, upgraded, or maybe just given a good screw-tightening. But there was neither time nor need for such. Only the basics had been taken care of.
Kirk resumed instructing Zhironovsky. They would have to start with only the basics—the duplication platform and its controls, the power cores, and the remaining material husks that had been made and stored so many millennia before by the dead civilization of Exo III. The rest would have to wait until they had assembled a work force—probably by making additional duplicates of the crew of the Rheingold.
When he was finished, he dismissed them to their stations.
Yes, they were a good crew, Kirk reflected afterward from the communications console, which he occupied when on the bridge in deference to the Rheingold's "captain." As ragged and slovenly as they appeared, they had worked quickly and efficiently to disassemble the machines and load them onto the Rheingold, and had performed just as well at refurbishing the ship itself.
And what a contrast they were to their human templates!
The human crew may have been just as ragged and slovenly in appearance, but to that they had added the vices of laziness, selfishness, cupidity, drunkenness, disdain for authority, and sheer, cussed stubbornness.
These were all very human traits, and the human Kirk had seen them drilled out of cadets at Starfleet Academy.
But that was a process that took years, and in many cases (as in Zhironovksy's) it never took at all; and even then it was understood that only a very select kind of being could ever so be molded.
And yet, with just a few minutes on a duplication platform, he had accomplished the same miracle on even worse subjects!
Here was decisive proof of the superiority of the Creator's plan for the galaxy. Any philosophy that could so transform the crew of the Rheingold must be embraced.
And enforced, even upon an unwilling populace.
It would come to that, there was no helping it. Which is why the conversion of the Federation's military arm—Starfleet—to the new philosophy was not only a paramount aim, but the decisive one. Not only was Starfleet the only institution capable of stopping the plan once it had begun to unfold, it would be the means by which the plan itself would be finally imposed upon the rest of the Federation and its member planets and populations.
But that too would have to be a process with an initiation point and a culmination.
Initiation would come with the establishment of a manufacturing colony where duplications could be performed at a mass scale, and where new machines could also be manufactured. The capture of a few very large freighters—the kind that dwarfed the Rheingold in size and mass—and the duplication of their crews, would allow these transports to double as manufacturing plants of their own. One such ship, Kirk mused, if parked at a Starbase or a Deep Space station, could gradually convert the entire facility, and then be used to convert the crews of any and all ships that passed through them. In this way not only could transports, ferries, and other vehicles be captured and converted, but Starfleet's own vessels could one by one be replaced with android crews.
After that would come the Admiralty ... the Federation Council ... the great trading guilds and corporations ... governmental bodies ... and finally the planets themselves. Andoria. Tellar. Bolarus IX. Alpha Centauri. Vulcan.
Earth.
But the initiation stage had to come first.
That stage might not be easiest, but it had been made easier by the decision having already been made by Doctor Korby himself, with the help of the first android Kirk.
The planet they had picked out was ideal. A world rich in natural and geological resources, devoid of a native civilization, and inhabited solely by a small colony of human settlers who had foresworn all post-twentieth century technologies, and who cordially shunned contact with the rest of the galaxy. Such a colony would be unlikely to notice another, even more secretive colony being established beyond its own outskirts; and it would be small enough to be seized and converted, but large enough to act as a work force after duplication and replacement had occurred; and it could turn away visitors without arousing suspicion until it was ready to begin seeding the galaxy with additional androids. It was relatively close by, too.
Had it been designed by the Creator for his purpose, Midos Five could hardly have been more perfect.
The tricky part, Kirk intuited, would be the early replacements. Colonists would have to be captured, duplicated, and infiltrated without arousing suspicion, and that would be a delicate task. Quick raids might have to be staged, unless isolated colonists happened to wander into the clutches of the Rheingold's crew. The latter would be safest approach, but as a passive tactic depending upon luck, it would also be a time-consuming one.
Well, time was something they could afford to spend.
As for luck ...
Kirk had noticed that his human template seemed to have an abundance of it, even after subtracting the kind of luck that is the residue of design. He hoped that he had caught some of it in the duplication process.
* * * * *
To continue investigating the room: "Disposing of Lucy"    indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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