Vonda McIntyre - The Entropy Effect

until it was over.

Kirk thought, with unfocussed gratitude, that at least he could begin to think of the assignment in terms of hours rather than weeks or days. Like the rest of the crew, he would be glad when it was finished.

“Captain Kirk?”

Kirk reached out and opened the channel. The image of the singularity faded out and Lieutenant Uhura appeared on the screen.

“Yes, Lieutenant?—Uhura, what’s wrong?”

“We’re receiving a subspace transmission, Captain. It’s scrambled—”

“Put it through. What’s the code?”

“Ultimate, sir.”

He sat up abruptly. “Ultimatel”

“Yes, sir, ultimate override, from mining colony Aleph Prime. It came through once, then cut off before it could repeat.” She glanced at her instruments and fed the recording to his terminal.

“Thank you, Lieutenant.”

The unscrambling key came up out of his memory unbidden. He was prohibited from keeping a written record of it. He was not even allowed to enter it into the ship’s computer for automatic decoding. With pencil and paper, he began the laborious job of transforming the jumble of letters and symbols until they sorted themselves out into a coherent message.

Lieutenant Commander Mandala Flynn changed into her judo gi and hung her uniform pants and shirt in her locker. For once, her long curly red hair had not begun to stray from its tight knot. She knew she ought to cut it. The border patrol, her last assignment, encouraged a good deal more wildness in appearance, and behavior, than was customary on the Enterprise : customary, or, probably, tolerated. She had only been on board two months, and most of her time and attention so far had centered on putting the security team back into some semblance of coherent shape. Consequently, she had not yet felt out the precise informal limitations of life on the Enterprise . She did not intend to fit in on the ship, she intended to stand out. But she wanted her visibility to be due to her professionalism and her competence, not to her eccentricities.

She wondered if Mr. Sulu were tired of their half-joking agreement, that she would not cut her waist-length red hair if he would let his hair grow. So far he had kept up his end of the bargain: his hair already touched his shoulders, and he had started a mustache as well. But Flynn did not want him to feel trapped by their deal if he were being harassed or even teased.

She went to the ship’sdojo , stopping just inside to bow in the traditional way.

On the judo mat, Mr. Sulu completed a sit-up, hands clasped behind his neck, elbows touching knees. But there he stopped, and let his hands fall limply to the floor.

Flynn sat on her heels beside him. “You okay?”

He did not look up. “Ms. Flynn, I’d rather beat off Klingons with a stick than balance a starship around a naked singularity. Not to mention balancing it between Mr. Spock and Mr. Scott.”

“It’s been entertaining,” Flynn said. “Walking innocently along and all of a sudden you’re floating through the air.”

Mr. Sulu stretched his body and arms forward in a yoga exercise, touching his forehead to his knees.

“Mr. Scott doesn’t think the gravity fluctuations, or the power hits, or the rest of the problems are all that funny,” he said in a muffled voice. The quilted jacket of his gi had hiked up around his ears. He sounded as though he would just as soon stay bundled up as ever come out again. “Mr. Scott’s convinced the next time we go through an X-ray storm, the overload on the shields will explode the engines.” He grunted in pain and sat up slowly. “All Mr. Spock wants, of course, is a perfectly circular orbit, storms or not.”

Flynn nodded in sympathy. It was not as if the danger were something one could stand up to. The responsibility for their course, and therefore for their safety, lay almost entirely on Mr. Sulu’s shoulders. He was overworked and overstressed.

“Do you want to skip your lesson?” Flynn asked. “I hate for you to stop when you’re doing so well, but it really wouldn’t hurt.”

“No! I’ve been looking forward to it all day. Whether it’s your fencing lesson or my judo lesson, they’re about the only thing that’s kept me going the last couple of weeks.”

“Okay,” she said. Taking his hand, she rose and helped him to his feet. After they had warmed up, Sulu, the student, bowed to Flynn, the instructor. Then they bowed formally to each other, opponent to opponent.

In fencing, Mandala Flynn was just getting the feel of parry six with the foil; Mr. Sulu could get through her guard with ease. In judo, their positions were reversed. Flynn had a fifth-degree black belt in the art, while Mr. Sulu was not too far past the stage of learning how to fall safely.

But today, the first time he came out of a shoulder-throw Flynn felt the position going wrong. She tried to catch him, but she had not expected clumsiness from him. Mr. Sulu hit badly and hard without rolling or slapping at all. Flynn glared down at him, her fists clenched, as he stared blankly up at the ceiling.

“Dammit!” she said. “Have you forgotten everything you’ve learned in the past two months?” Immediately sorry, she damped her anger. Learning to control her violent temper was one of the reasons she had taken up the discipline ofjudo. Usually it worked. She knelt beside Mr. Sulu. “Are you all right?”

He pushed himself up, looking embarrassed. “That was dumb.”

“I shouldn’t have yelled at you,” Flynn said, embarrassed herself. “Look, this is no good, you’re way too tense, you’re going to hurt yourself if we keep it up.”

She started to rub his back and shoulders. He made a sound of protest as her thumbs dug into knotted muscles.

“I thought I’d warmed up,” he said.

“Warming up wouldn’t help.” She made him take off his jacket and lie face-down on the mat, then straddled his hips and began to massage his back and neck and shoulders.

At first he flinched every time she kneaded a muscle, but gradually the tightness began to ease and he lay quiet under her hands, his eyes closed. A lock of his glossy black hair fell across his cheek. She would have liked to reach out and brush it back, but instead continued the massage.

When the fierce tautness of his body had relaxed, and her own hands began to cramp, she patted his shoulders gently and sat crosslegged beside him. He did not move.

“Still alive?”

He opened one eye slowly, and smiled. “Just barely.”

Flynn laughed. “Come on,” she said. “You need a good long soak a whole lot more than you need to be thrown around the gym for an hour.”

A few minutes later, they both sank down into the deep hot water of the Japanese-style bath. Flynn untied her hair and let it fall around her shoulders. The water drifted the strands against her back, tickling her; the heat soothed the faint ache where her collarbone had been shattered several years before. Absentmindedly, she rubbed the scar that radiated across her shoulder, silver-white streaks on her light brown skin. The bone had healed adequately, but some day she should go into therapy and get it re-grown. Not now, though. She did not have time for that now.

Sulu stretched luxuriously. “You’re right,” he said. “Just this once, the soak without the workout feels good.” He grinned.

She returned the smile.

“Do you realize,” Flynn said, “that we’ve known each other two months, and we still call each other ‘Mr. Sulu’ and ‘Ms. Flynn’?”

Mr. Sulu hesitated. “I did realize it, yes. I didn’t think it was .. . proper, for me to initiate any informality.”

As commander of security, Flynn was in no analysis of the hierarchy Sulu’s immediate superior. If she had been, she would never have permitted herself to find him attractive. But she was used to the traditions of the border patrol, where the established crew decided when to invite new people to use informal names. Rank was not a factor. Here was another case where the Enterprise ran along more strictly traditional military lines. Flynn outranked Sulu by a grade.