DISCLAIMER: Star Trek and all related characters are the property of Paramount Pictures, Inc. No copyright infringement is intended. This work of fiction is for entertainment purposes only and no money has changed hands. The original characters and events are the sole property of the author and may not be used without permission.

STAR TREK:

THE GOD MACHINE

by Darrin Colbourne

A short time later, Pike walked out of the turbolift onto the Life Support Deck and made his way to the Decontamination Section. He'd asked Boyce to meet him there, so the Doctor was waiting for him outside the door. "How are they doing?" The Captain asked.

"No sign of infection so far." Boyce said as he led Pike inside. "I'm going to keep them in for at least 24 hours. If nothing nasty pops up after that time, I'll give 'em all full workups and, barring any anomalous results, I'll turn 'em loose."

The Decontamination Section was a room about two-thirds the size of Sick Bay. There was an isolation ward capable of accommodating four people in comfort and twenty people in an emergency on either side of the space. Each chamber was equipped to allow medics to monitor the people inside from without and several different airlocks to allow for the transfer of food and other supplies and equipment. Boyce had the Landing Party interned by gender, so Goren, Greenfield, Song, one research technician and the pilot and co-pilot of Hauler One were in the ward to the right, while the distaff members of the party were in the one on the left.

The outer wall of each chamber was built with a large window. Pike waved and smiled to the men through their window, then moved over to the chamber with the women. "How's Montoya?" He asked.

"Whatever happened to her down there gave her the equivalent of a bad blow to the head," Boyce said, "but that's all. I've got Lieutenant Flores watching her for signs of concussion, but I don't see any reason why she wouldn't be able to resume her duties after a little bedrest."

McDonald, sitting on a bed along the outer wall, noticed Pike first as he approached the window and stood up to face him. The researcher, sitting on another bed nearby, stood and came over to find out what she was looking at. Montoya was laying on a bed along the inner wall, with Flores sitting on the edge. They were too deep in conversation to notice Pike's arrival.

"Can I talk to her?" Pike said.

"Sure." Boyce said, then he noticed Pike was carrying a datapad. "What's on that?" He asked.

"Answers, hopefully." Pike said, then reached out and touched the intercom contact. "Welcome back, Number One." He said with a smile. "How was the field trip?"

McDonald hesitated for a moment, then smiled back, "Bracing, Sir. I prefer to take my shore leave in more tropical climes."

"I'll bet you do." He said, then became more serious. "How about you, Montoya? You up for answering some questions?"

Montoya sighed audibly. "I'm fine, Captain." She said. "Really. I tried to tell them that…"

Flores, now looking through the window at Pike, said, "You'll have to excuse Belle, Captain. She's that kind of patient."

"So's he." Boyce said, pointing to Pike. The jibes earned Flores a playful swat on the arm and the Doctor a quick glare from his Captain.

Pike turned back to the window. "You just stay down, Commander. In the meantime, would you like to tell me exactly what happened down there?"

"I'd love to, Sir, but I don't think you'll believe me."

"I'm willing to be open-minded about it. I'm going to send a 'pad through. I want you to look at some of the data we recorded." He opened the small supply airlock and slipped the 'pad in, then closed it and cycled the computer through. "You want to hand that to her, Crewman?"

The researcher took the pad out of the airlock, gave the screen a quick glance, then handed it over to Montoya. The other women gathered around to look on as the Science Officer scrolled through the still images.

"What are we seeing?" McDonald said. The images showed a dense cluster of planetoids, asteroids and smaller debris surrounding a bright, hazy cloud.

"That is what's left of Indira Four." Pike said.

McDonald looked toward the window. "It blew up? How?"

"I have no idea." Pike said.

"Neither do I," Montoya said as she handed the 'pad to Flores, "but it makes perfect sense."

"I'm glad someone thinks so. How about enlightening the rest of us?"

"Well, first off, you were right. It's good that we left the planet before those fighters could spot us."

"What fighters?" Flores said.

"You didn't tell them?" Pike said.

"Sorry, Sir." Montoya said. "I was a little…distracted."

"Never mind. Do you think the fighters had something to do with that?"

"Oh, no. The Warp-Futzers did that to the planet."

"You know," McDonald said as she went back to where she was sitting, "you really are going to have to come up with a proper name for them." This caused the other women to chuckle and Pike and Boyce to smile.

"We'll think of something creative for the After-Action Report." Pike said. "Now, what about that pyramid you saw? You say that's what interfered with us on the way here and when we got here? Do you think it also destroyed Indira Four?"

"I'm sure of it." Montoya said.

"How can you be?"

"I touched it, and I found myself…I honestly don't know where I was, but when I was there I saw something. Maybe it was one of them, or maybe a personification of the pyramid, but whatever it was touched me and filled my head with violent images. That's what knocked me out."

"Wait, Belle," Flores said, "you didn't 'go' anywhere! Ben and I were watching the whole time. You touched the pyramid, screamed and fell back."

"Really? Well, maybe I didn't go anywhere physically, but I was not on Indira Four when that thing shoved those images in my head."

"Why would it do that at all?" Pike said.

"To scare the hell out of me, most likely," Montoya said, "make me run screaming and not look back…and I guess that's what I did."

"So you knew this would happen?" Pike said.

"Not really. Not consciously…but I knew something would happen."

"Did they know?" Every turned at the question. It was Boyce. "The Indirans! Did they know their world was going to be destroyed?"

Montoya's voice became very sad. "They knew. It's what started the war."

"I'm still not following, Commander." Pike said.

"Well, Sir, what would you do if you knew your world was about to end?"

Pike thought for a moment. "I suppose I'd want to find some way to stop it."

"And if you knew for sure you couldn't?"

"I'd try to find a way to escape it." McDonald said.

Montoya nodded. "The pyramid had symbols on it. We never got a chance to translate them, but in the Indirans' language they probably said something unambiguous, like, 'The World Will End On Such and Such a Date!', or whatever. And the ground in the valley the pyramid was in was trampled, recently enough to still leave evidence of it. I think…I think that the pyramid was some kind of tourist attraction, maybe an old religious icon, but one that never eroded with age. It's possible that there was a different set of symbols on it at first, benign ones, and then one day someone went to the valley and found that the symbols had changed to the announcement of doom.

"Of course this is big news, so he goes and tells somebody and they come and look, and then they tell others and they come and look, and so on and so on until soon the military is involved, and the government, and then several militaries and governments, all trying to figure out why this thing that hasn't changed in so many millennia is saying all of a sudden that they're doomed. Naturally, there are some who don't believe the message, who think it's some kind of hoax, or that the symbols are being misinterpreted, but eventually enough think the threat is real and start looking for options.

"So first they look for a way to stop it, but they don't really know what 'it' is. They don't know how the world will end, just that it will. They can't find anything out from the pyramid because there's no way to scan it, and anyone who touches it would simply see…what I saw. So then comes the discussion of how to escape it, but a culture at this stage of development couldn't possibly devise an escape system for the entire populace. They might build a relative handful of spacecraft to get some of the populace off the planet and farther out into the system, but their time is short and the looming question is: 'Who gets to go?'

"Of course this causes the obvious problem: millions of people who know they're going to die and who also know that only a handful might survive are all going to decide they're the ones worthy of salvation. This will cause widespread panic, lawlessness, riots…and that's just the internal problems. Add to that the possibility that some nations aren't advanced enough to create their own escape systems, and look jealously at the ones that can…"

"And some launch wars of aggression," McDonald said, "to steal what the better-off nations have, or to destroy those systems to make sure everyone suffers the fate of the world equally."

"And under those circumstances the war can only end up a global one," Montoya said, "and that meant everyone was effectively trapped on the planet, at the very least until the conflict was settled."

"You know all this for a fact?" Pike said.

Montoya shook her head. "Total conjecture…but it's the only scenario that fits the facts."

"And how do we fit in? If all of that's true, what do we have to do with any of it? Why mess with our systems?"

Montoya turned her head to see Pike clearly. "Captain, it makes perfect sense if the pyramid's controllers didn't want any Indirans to escape."

"Explain."

"Well, there the pyramid was, all set to wipe out all life on that planet and there wasn't a thing the dominant life-forms could do about it. They couldn't stop it and they couldn't leave, and if genocide was the Warp-Futzers' goal, it wouldn't be long before that goal was achieved. And then here we come in our big, shiny, Warp-capable spaceship, about to ruin everything."

"How!" Flores said, indignant. "And I'm not saying I have a problem with ruining their little genocide plans, 'cause I would have loved to, but how could just coming here be a problem?"

Montoya smiled and spoke as calmly as she could. "Because we could have given the Indirans hope, Wendy. A warp-capable ship's re-entry into normal space would be detectable even to observation systems at their level of technological development. The people operating the systems wouldn't immediately know what they were seeing, but it wouldn't have been impossible for some really brilliant theorist to conjecture the way I've done, and come up with the notion of a Faster-Than-Light Spacecraft, one whose crew might be willing to evacuate some people or might be susceptible to attack. The chance of such a thing was slim, certainly, but not slim enough for the genocidal aliens' tastes."

"So when we tried to warp in," McDonald said, "it extended our jump so we re-entered at a point beyond the Indirans' scanning range."

"Three times." Montoya said through clenched teeth, then forced herself to calm down again.

"And they didn't bother us when we came in at Sub-light because they knew the Indirans wouldn't see us." Pike said.

"With that worry out of the way they might have been content to just let us observe what was happening and deal with us as time permitted, but that got screwed up when we…when I decided to intervene in the Indirans' nuclear war."

"How could stopping a nuclear war be wrong?" Flores asked.

"Don't you see, Gwendolyn?" Boyce said. "We expended all that energy to save a race that was going to die anyway from a self-inflicted holocaust. The pyramid's controllers must have thought we were insane."

"Or simply out-of-line," McDonald said, "and they whipped us to remind us of our place."

"But why?" Flores said. "Why did all of those people have to die?"

"Why did Sodom and Gomorrah have to burn?" Boyce said. "Why was there a Great Flood? We'll never know what sins the Indirans committed to aggravate their gods. Or maybe there were no real sins, and this was just the controllers being capricious."

Everyone was silent for a moment as that thought sunk in, then Pike said, "Commander, do you suppose…?"

"No, Sir." Montoya said. "We can search if you'd like, but we won't find any survivors."

Flores was fighting back tears. "There might be…there have to be! Maybe astronauts in orbital stations, or in a settlement on one of the other bodies…!"

Montoya took her hand and squeezed it gently. "Anything in orbit around Indira Four would have been destroyed when the planet exploded…and I have a feeling that if the Indirans had made it to another planet or moon, it would have been destroyed as well."

More silence, then Pike said, "Get some rest, Commander…all of you. We'll get underway once you're all back on duty." He turned off the intercom then and took a last look at Montoya, who was covering her face with her free hand and sobbing quietly. Then Pike and Boyce traded a worried look before they crossed over to the other chamber to fill in the rest of the Landing Party.

Ultimately, Pike's curiosity got the better of him, so while the Landing Party was in isolation he'd moved the Enterprise back into the system, taking station near the debris field that was once Indira Four. As Montoya had predicted, several scans had turned up no survivors. There was also no sign of the pyramid. It was possible that it had been destroyed along with the planet, but Pike thought it likely that it had simply returned to wherever it had come from after completing its task.

The Landing Party completed its isolation period without incident, and after a thorough examination and a series of lab tests Boyce declared everyone fit to return to duty. On hearing that, Pike informed his senior officers that they would depart at the start of the next Forenoon Watch to give everyone a little more time to come terms with what had happened. When that watch came, Pike had the Communications Officer announce "Departure Stations" as soon as he took over in Control.

Montoya and McDonald arrived in Control together a minute later. Pike stood up from the Command Chair when he saw them. He traded nods with McDonald as she went to take over the helm, then went over to the Science Station as Montoya was about to sit down.

"You sure you're feeling up to this, Commander?" He asked her quietly.

Montoya thought a moment, then faced him and smiled. "Yes, Captain. I'm sure. There was a brief time when I thought I couldn't go on, but something happened to give me courage."

"What was that?"

"I realized there was bright side to all of this."

She turned to look at the main viewer, prompting Pike to follow suit. The debris field was taking up the screen.

"The explosion was enough to blow the planet apart, but not enough to scatter the pieces very far. In a few thousand years the largest pieces will begin to form planetessimals. In a million years or so those planetessimals will form back into one large body. Over the following millions of years the ingredients for life will be drawn into that body." They turned to face each other again. "And that's the point. Indira Four will live again someday. I can't begin to imagine why our cosmic friends wanted to destroy this Indira Four, but if I'm forced to guess, I would say that they had a hand in the evolution of its life and were unsatisfied with the results, so they engineered this with the intent of starting over again…and the hope that the new Indirans will get it right."

"That's your guess?"

"Yes, Sir. That's my guess."

Pike glanced at the screen. "Do you think the rest of this cruise is going to go like this?"

Montoya glanced at the screen, then the two officers faced each other. The Science Officer hesitated, then smiled and shrugged.

"Right." Pike said as he smiled back. "Take your station."

"Aye, Sir." Montoya said, then sat down as Pike crossed back to the Command Chair. As he sat down, Doctor Boyce's words came back to him:

"A Long, Strange Trip", indeed.

"Set course for the next AOR." Pike ordered.

"Course plotted and laid in." The Navigator said.

McDonald moved the ship clear of the debris field and keyed her Intercraft control. "All Decks Prepare for Space Warp." She announced.

Pike waited a moment for the crew to get ready, then called out: "Engage!"

A second later the Space Warp Engines came to life, and the United Space Ship Enterprise sped away from Indira Four and flashed out of the system.