Sondra Marshak: The Price of the Phoenix

Omne nodded as if he understood completely, as perhaps he did, with what he knew from Spock’s mind. “Fascinating. It would require fine tuning. Time. One could calculate the interval.” He nodded again with a gesture oddly like a Vulcan with curiosity satisfied. The pain caught him. “Why didn’t you shoot me in the first moment?”

“Nobility,” the Commander said. “I cannot tell you how tired I am of nobility.”

James caught the blaze in her mind at the risk to him, and there was a flame in his mind, too, and the picture of her charging Omne’s phaser. He pulled himself to the bleak control of understanding. “Even Omne had to have his chance. Or it’s still—jungle.”

Omne laughed silently to her. “Nobility. My dear, I’m afraid you are stuck with it.” He looked at James.

“They will not be stuck with looking over their shoulders for you” Kirk said. “Nor will the galaxy. We could not have that.”

“You see, noble Captain,” Omne breathed, “there was a price for which you would do murder.”

“Yes,” Kirk said. “But I did not.”

“No,” Omne said, as if it were loaded with more than agreement.

“He has defeated you, Omne,” the Vulcan said, “with more than muscle. He is the man you might have been—and for what you might have been, I could wish that the price had not been so high.”

Omne smiled. “You have much yet to learn about the man I might have been, and am—and about the price of the Phoenix.”

McCoy straightened with the scanner. I’m sorry,” he said in the manner of the doctor. “I can’t do anything for you. It is final.”

And indeed the light in the great black eyes seemed to be fading.

Omne laughed.

It was an undying echo of the great bull roar, and the smile on the dying face was the smile of the wolf.

The Commander felt a chill investigate her spine, and she drew James closer.

Omne caught his breath on the last note of the laugh.

“Is it?” he said.

Then his hand caught at some small device on his belt.

The obsidian eyes went opaque.

The great body began to topple like a tree.

Then it vanished in silence.

McCoy turned to the four.

There was only one question in all the eyes, Vulcan, Romulan, Human.

Is it final?

Nightmare, McCoy thought.

“He was dead,” he said aloud. “I’d swear it. Final”

“Logic, Doctor,” the Vulcan said, not as baiting but with the tone of an old nightmare, or a new one. He bent stiffly to pick up the small device which had dropped from Omne’s belt. “The process works from a transporter effect. We do not know that the ‘emanations’ cannot also be beamed as transporter-coded information. It would be the logical solution.”

“But—he was already dead,” McCoy said doggedly.

“Was he?” Spock was examining the device.

“Spock—it’s not—a belt recorder?” Kirk said rather hollowly, looking at the little device as if it might contain the soul of Black Omne.

“No,” the Vulcan said, “although he might have worn one—clipped to the back of his belt, concealed in a boot. We do not know how far he had gone with miniaturization. But it may have been simpler than that. He could easily devise an open transporter tracer-beam, a signaling device—”

“Spock,” McCoy said irritably, “what the devil are you getting at? And what is that you’ve got there?”

Spock looked up with bland Vulcan innocence. “Doctor, it is—a dead-man switch.”

“What?”

“A device which depends upon the continuing life of its user for its operation, Spock explained patiently. “The earliest mechancial versions stopped a steam locomotive if its operator died. Considering Omne’s strength, this one did approximately the same.”

“Spock, will you talk English?” McCoy grumbled.

“I believe I did, Doctor. Spock’s tone was infinite weariness.

The Commander took the open device from the Vulcan’s nerveless hands, looked at it. “Gravity operated with a drop of mercury,” she translated. “Simple. So long as Omne stayed alive and on his feet, it sent out a signal to the transporter beam not to take him. If he died—or even if we had overpowered him or stunned him—it would signal the beam to lock on.” She looked at Kirk, at the others.

“He left it for us,” Kirk said slowly, “to raise the question: Is it?”

“Precisely,” Spock said.

“So,” James said, “We have to face that question again.”

“Not quite,” Kirk said. “There was no question before. He would not have killed himself if he were not virtually certain. But we did surprise him. Here, at the edge or his transporter range, away from his equipment, dead, we believe, before the beam took him—” He straightened. “We might just have done it.”

“Or might not,” McCoy murmured, looking at the four and seeing a long vista. Never look behind you. Something might be gaining on you.

Omne.

“We will not know,” Spock said, “until and unless he is ready—if he does live. This time he will go to ground. The delegates’ commission reported only moments before he came; they verify the death of Omne; his estate is in the hands of trustees; he is mourned by those to whom he gave refuge, and in some quarters, where short memories will forget or disbelieve small matters like kidnapping, he may yet be mourned as a martyr to freedom.

Kirk frowned. “But you said you would mourn Omnedon. What was all that, Spock?”

“One day I will tell you all of it,” Spock said. “Omne wanted to be known, to the last. Omnedon was his name. It unlocked a memory I did not know I had from him. It must have been part of the final exchange at the moment of death—a memory he had virtually locked away from himself.” Spock’s eyes looked distant. “There was a time when Omnedon laughed, not with the sound of the wolf. He was a man of power, but not of force. A giant—not only of size, and not of evil. He was—the Alexander of his world, but not by conquest—almost—the Surak, uniting warring realms under a philosophy of peace and freedom. When the Federation came—a very early contact—he embraced it. The science, the technology, the diversity, the chance at the stars. He became a leading scientific mind, and the first advocate of bringing the benefits of change to his people. He ran into the stone wall of custom. Finally it broke him, and his world, and he never forgave himself. It was he who was the leading breaker of the Prime Directive.”

Spock returned as if from a distance. He looked at Kirk. “But what he did not forgive himself—or you, was that he reached a point when he—quit.”

Kirk was silent for a long moment. He has learned that lesson,” he said finally. “He didn’t quit today, even against death. He will not quit again.”

“No, Spock agreed. “Perhaps that is what he wanted to learn from you.”

“You’re talking about him as if he didn’t die,” McCoy said.

Kirk almost smiled. “Even if he did, he didn’t quit. I wish we could go back and reach—Omnedon. The man was a giant Or—is. There aren’t very many of them.”

“He was a monster,” McCoy growled.

“That, too.” Kirk made a small movement, as if to shake something off. “All right,” he said in the command tone, “we just have to get on with it. If he lives, he is a more serious enemy even than we knew. A conqueror with designs on dictatorship we might more easily fight. But the most sinister swindle in all history has always been to claim to advocate freedom—at the point of a gun. And the most dangerous man is the man who believes in his own swindle. Now we have a man who believes, and a man who will cram his version of freedom down the galaxy’s throat—at the point of his process. Moreover, now he has Spock’s powers. Superlatively dangerous. We must do what we planned—but in spades, and never knowing fully whether we may find Omne around any corner. The alliance—”