Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: Movie Tie-In Novelization (Star Trek: The Original Series Book 17) by McIntyre Vonda N

Author:McIntyre, Vonda N.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pocket Books/Star Trek
Published: 2000-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Saavik followed the blurry, half-obscured tracks across the snow. The wind blew ice crystals against her face, whipping them across her cheeks and freezing them to her eyelashes. She squinted to try to see into the blizzard. Movement caught her eye, and she headed toward it. The snow made ghosts all around her. She would have believed she were seeing phantoms if David's tricorder had not continued to bleat rhythmically.

She trudged through the snow, cold and unhappy, trying to ignore both sensations. But she discovered that once she had released her self-discipline, even for only a few days, she could not easily regain the complete Vulcan control she had worked so hard to learn.

With the discovery of the creatures around Spock's coffin, her hopes had crashed; a few moments later, when she saw that the coffin was intact, unsealed, and empty, her hopes had risen just as abruptly. This emotionalism was dangerous; in addition, it was illogical, for even when she dropped her mental shields completely, she could find no sense of Spock anywhere.

She knew she had erred. Whatever happened, whatever she and David found, she must re-establish dominance over her feelings and aspire to eradicating them.

Now she understood why Vulcans denied themselves any indulgence in passion. It was to protect themselves from pain.

Saavik shivered and pressed forward against the howling wind and the snow.

The ground rose beneath her. She was climbing the flank of a glacier. In only a few kilometers' distance it had changed from a thin blanket of snow to a sheet of ice many meters thick.

The frequency of the tricorder's output increased until it was nearly a continuous shriek, even louder than the wind. Saavik stopped and motioned for David to turn the thing off.

Beneath the ragged whine of the wind, the skittering of snow across the ground, the creaking of the ice beneath her feet, Saavik heard a weak and frightened whimper. She walked toward it. Her boots crunched through the frozen crust. The snow reached halfway to her knees. The uneven footprints before her trailed atop the surface. She wondered if she were following some small and vicious predator that a member of the Genesis team had made up as "a little joke," a little joke that now perhaps was injured and desperate. Saavik was growing impatient with the collective humor of the group. Her phaser made a comforting weight in her hand.

A great mass of stone, one moment concealed by the snow, the next a wall of tumbled gray blocks before her, thrust abruptly from the surface of the glacier. The ice had crumpled and cracked all around it, piling up in great heaps to either side.

Saavik saw the child.

He crouched in the meager shelter of a rock overhang, naked, shuddering uncontrollably with the cold. He saw her and tried to scrabble deeper into the cleft, clumsy on his injured leg.

David saw the boy and gasped.

"Your comrades appear to have added a humanoid species to the Genesis matrix," Saavik said. She crushed out the spark of fury that rose in her against such presumption.

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