"Dammit Jim, they can't keep doing this to us!" Leonard McCoy, chief medical officer for the Federation Starship Enterprise, slapped his hand on the vacant diagnostic table that separated him from his captain. The sound echoed in the conspicuously empty sickbay; Nurse Chapel had already fled from the doctor's wrath, taking the room's single patient with her, ostensibly for physical therapy.

McCoy didn't care. He was getting tired of holding back his frustrations, and now that he'd finally let himself blow up, it felt good to clear the room as well as the air. He pointed a finger at Kirk and said, "If we keep missing supply ships, pretty soon I won't have enough equipment to treat a skinned knuckle. My portable protoplaser is down to its last emitter coil, and my genetic scanner is off-line more often than it's on. Even my tricorder has a flicker in the display. We need to take on new supplies, and we need to do it now, not when Starfleet finally gets around to letting us off the hook."

Captain Kirk held his hands out, palms toward McCoy. "I know, Bones, and I argued hard with Admiral York to let us make our supply rendezvous first, but he couldn't do it. Rimillia needs our help now. They've got a major terraforming project that's stalled at the most crucial time. Their chief scientist has been kidnapped by extremists, and some of the equipment has been sabotaged. They're on the verge of civil war over it. They need our help now, not next week."

McCoy turned away and faced the blank monitor over the head of the diagnostic table. Its flat, dark surface reflected the rest of sickbay, with its neat rows of surgical instruments lined up for use and its test equipment waiting, pilot lights blinking on standby. He could hear the ever-present chorus of beeps and whirs that the machinery made, too. It gave a false sense of readiness to someone who didn't have to count on it all to function at the right moment, but McCoy knew the real situation. In a crisis, he could be up to his neck in alligators in no time. "And just what kind of help can we give them with a poorly supplied ship?" he demanded.

"We can rescue their scientist. Repair the sabotage. Maybe even negotiate a settlement between the pro-terraforming and the anti-terraforming factions."

"Don't count on it," McCoy said sourly. He looked back at Kirk. "You're always so eager to charge straight into every new situation and set things straight, but I'm the guy who has to sew up all the people who get hurt in the process. And now you're taking us right into the middle of a war. I don't like it one bit, even if we were fresh out of spacedock, but especially not now."

Kirk sighed. "Bones, we're a little short on a few things; we're not a derelict. And it's not a war -- yet. That's why we need to go there now, to prevent it from becoming one. If we do our job right, we can prevent hostilities, and there won't be so much as a snuffle for you to treat."

"I'll believe that when I see it," said McCoy. He glared at Jim for a moment, but the captain just glared right back. Finally McCoy said, "If you're waiting for me to say, 'Oh, I understand, don't worry about me, I'll make do somehow,' then you're going to have a long wait. You've given me my orders, and I'll carry them out, but don't push your luck. I've been patient long enough."

Kirk smiled. "I know you've been patient, Bones. That's why I made Admiral York promise us a full week of R and R just as soon as we're done on Rimillia."

McCoy's spirits improved considerably at the mention of R and R, but he wasn't about to let Jim know it. He crossed his arms over his chest and said, "Hah. I'll believe that when I see it, too."

"You will, don't worry." Kirk nodded to McCoy and stepped toward the door, but he turned just as it opened and said, "And if you stay patient, the mint juleps will be on me."

"I'll remember that," McCoy said, smiling slightly. But as the door slid shut behind the captain, his smile slowly faded.

Kirk sighed long and deep as he walked back to the turbolift. He hated wrangling with Bones over situations like this. If there'd been any option of meeting their resupply rendezvous, he would have taken it, and they both knew that, but Bones just wasn't the sort to accept the inevitable without a fight. That was one of the things Kirk admired about his chief medical officer, but it was also one characteristic he hated finding himself at odds with.

Actually, it had gone better than he'd expected with McCoy. The old carrot-on-the-stick ploy had worked once again, and he hadn't had to promise anything he hadn't planned to deliver anyway. And now that the doctor had had his say, he would do everything he could to keep his department running smoothly despite the hardship. He would even come to Kirk's defense if anyone else complained; that, too, was his way.

Yes, the meeting with McCoy had gone better than Kirk had expected. But how was he going to break the news to Scotty?

He considered his options while he rode the turbolift down to engineering. I've got good news and bad news. Trouble was, there wasn't any good news, at least from Scotty's perspective. He needed new supplies just as badly as McCoy did. There's been a little change in plans sounded better, but Scotty had been around long enough to know what was coming next. Not that it mattered, of course; Scotty was every bit as professional as McCoy, and would do whatever was required of him without complaint, but Kirk wanted to soften the blow if he could. After all, good morale started with the senior officers, and the happier he could make Scotty feel about their new mission, the happier the rest of engineering would be.

Maybe he was looking at it from the wrong angle. Sure, the missed rendezvous would be an inconvenience, and the job that now faced the Enterprise was mind-boggling when you thought about it, but there was also the technical challenge to consider. Scotty always loved a challenge.

Yes, that would do it. Focus on the incredible opportunity to participate in an engineering marvel. Get him interested first. Then drop the bomb.

When the turbolift deposited him outside engineering, he found his chief engineer on his back beneath the tractor-beam control console, only his black service boots sticking out from the access panel. The rest of the staff were busy monitoring the engines and the power-distribution and environmental subsystems throughout the ship, doing the routine jobs that kept the mechanical heart of the Enterprise beating.

Kirk cleared his throat. "Mr. Scott."

He heard a thump from within the control console, and a muffled curse. Then Scotty's familiar brogue: "Aye, Captain. Just a moment." The legs began to wiggle, and soon the entire Montgomery Scott slid into view. His red tunic was rumpled, and he held a scuffed cylindrical circuit probe in his right hand. "Yes, sir?" he asked.

"I've got a job for you," Kirk replied, suppressing a grin as he reached out and helped the engineer to his feet.

Scotty rubbed the top of his head where he'd banged it when he'd been startled. No lump -- yet. "What sort of job?" he asked, hoping it didn't have anything to do with tractor beams. He'd been working on them all morning, trying to lock down a phase shift in the graviton collimator, and he was having no luck at it.

"A big one," the captain replied. "But it's right up your alley."

"Is it, now? And what alley might that be?"

"Propulsion systems. Specifically impulse engines."

"Aye," Scotty admitted, relieved at the news. "I do know a wee bit about that."

"More than just a wee bit, Mr. Scott." Kirk smiled, and Scotty felt himself blushing. He was always uncomfortable when people called attention to his abilities. Besides which, he hadn't been born yesterday; he knew something was up. He'd noticed the course change a few minutes ago, and he'd heard the engines change pitch when they shifted to warp eight. He'd already known the Enterprise was off to yet another exotic new spot in the galaxy, probably someplace dangerous as well, and having Kirk show up in person to tell him about it just confirmed that.

"You said 'big,' " he asked. "How big?"

Kirk pursed his lips and glanced at the ceiling, then looked back at Scotty. "Well, pretty big."

"Pretty big?" Scotty echoed.

"Very big, actually." A hint of a grin was struggling to break through the captain's straight face.

"I see. And just how 'very' is it?"

"Quite. You might even say enormous. But it's a fascinating project, and most of the work is already done."

Scotty laughed. "I know where you're leadin' me, Captain. Why don't we just cut to the chase and be done with it? What have you got us into this time?"

Kirk laughed, too. He leaned back against the edge of a computer systems monitor station and said, "All right. Have you ever heard of a planet called Rimillia?"

Scotty leaned against the tractor-beam console. "No, sir. I can't say as I have."

"It's a small planet, class L, tidally locked to its primary."

"Class L?" Scotty frowned. Class L planets were considered marginally habitable without artificial life-support. Not as habitable as the Earthlike class M's, but people could usually live on them, if they didn't mind a harsh environment. Scotty rubbed his hands on his pants to wipe off the dust and asked, "How can a tidally locked planet be class L? One face would be hot enough to melt rock, and the other would be cold enough to freeze oxygen. The entire atmosphere would freeze out on the dark side. There'd be nothing to breathe."

Kirk nodded. "Normally that's the case, but Rimillia doesn't have a dark side, technically speaking. It's part of a binary star system, and though the secondary star is a red dwarf in a long elliptical orbit, it still provides enough heat to keep the atmosphere from freezing."

Scotty pictured the situation in his mind. A world with one hemisphere perpetually facing its sun, the way Earth's moon faced Earth, with a second sun orbiting farther out, say Jupiter's distance, or Saturn's. The second sun wouldn't provide much heat, but it might be enough to vaporize oxygen and nitrogen on the dark side. That would give the planet an atmosphere, but it still wouldn't do anything to mitigate the outrageous extremes of temperature between the day and night sides. There would be only one environment on the whole world where people could live in the open: along the narrow band of shadow where day and night met.

"They live on the terminator?" Scotty asked incredulously.

"They do." Kirk shrugged as if to say he could hardly believe it, either.

"Why, it'd always be dawn there."

"More like dusk," replied Kirk. "They're dying out. They've overtaxed the ecology in their narrow biosphere, and it's rapidly declining to class K."

Class K worlds were only habitable with some kind of active life-support, like environment suits or domes over the cities. For a whole planet to switch over to artificial environments -- even a planet with as low a population as Rimillia must have -- would be an incredible task. It would take years. Could that be what they wanted assistance with? But no, the captain had said it had something to do with impulse engines.

"They're going to evacuate?" Scotty asked, puzzled. "With impulse engines? Besides needin' thousands of ships, at subwarp speed it'd take 'em generations to get anywhere!"

Kirk crossed his arms over his chest. "No, that's how their ancestors got there in the first place, about five hundred years ago, in a generation-style colony ship, and they're not willing to do it again. They've got more ambitious plans this time." Kirk's eyes twinkled the way they did when he was about to tell a particularly good joke.

"What then?" Scotty asked, his patience growing thin.

"They've decided to increase their living space."

"And how do they plan to do that?"

Kirk shrugged, as if he were discussing an abstract theoretical concept instead of the fate of an entire planet's population. "They've installed about thirty thousand impulse engines all over the planet's surface, and they're going to spin it back up to speed."

Scotty saw a brief image of a planet with thousands of engines sticking up from its surface like hair on an unshaven chin; then he burst out laughing. It was too ridiculous for words. "Hah, that's a good one, Captain. Now tell me, what are they really going to do?"

Kirk looked directly into Scotty's eyes. "They're really going to use impulse engines to spin it up to speed. Except the scientist in charge of the project has been kidnapped and the control systems have been sabotaged. They're up against the wall now, and time is running out. That's where you come in. They need someone to take over the project."

Scotty slowly set his circuit probe down on the tractor-beam console. Suddenly a phase shift in a graviton collimator didn't seem like so big a deal anymore. These people had gambled the fate of their entire population on a single plan? A single outrageous plan? And then they had let someone sabotage it? Scotty shook his head in disbelief. "Aye, Captain. It sounds like they do need my help, at that."

Copyright © 1990 by Paramount Pictures