The Price of the Phoenix
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The Price of the Phoenix by Myrna Culbreath and Sondra Marshak is an original novel based upon the 1960s television series Star Trek. It was first published by Bantam Books in 1977. A sequel, The Fate of the Phoenix, followed in 1979.
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[edit] Plot summary
[edit] A shocking death
Captain Kirk's dead body is beamed aboard the Enterprise after a house fire on an unnamed planet in which he has died trying to save a baby. Spock beams down to the planet in order to confront its ruler, Omne. Unexpectedly, Omne reveals that he has pioneered the “Phoenix process”, a modification of Transporter technology to create a duplicate of a living person – and he offers Spock a recent copy of Kirk, recorded shortly before his death. Spock has reservations as to the authenticity of this supposed Kirk and is given leave for a brief mind meld. Although Spock verifies that it is indeed Kirk’s mind he is melding with, he is still unable to dismiss his reservations and so calls this Kirk “James”, in contrast to the form of his captain’s forename that he usually uses. Even so, Spock accepts Omne’s offer of this resurrected Kirk, although Omne makes it plain that his price will be extremely high and in effect require Spock to betray the Federation.
[edit] The deception
It soon transpires that Spock was right to be suspicious regarding James’s identity, as the original Kirk is indeed alive and well, having sustained only minor though visible injuries in the house fire before being beamed to safety and replaced by an incomplete Phoenix-duplicate. He determines to rescue both Kirk and James, and in this he has the assistance of the female Romulan Commander whom Spock and Kirk bested in the TV episode “The Enterprise Incident”. Omne has been employing Romulan guards on his planet, but the Commander is sympathetic enough to Spock and Kirk to switch sides.
[edit] Omne defeated
Spock fights Omne bare-handed and defeats him after a brutal battle in which both parties are gravely injured. He forces a mind meld on Omne in order to purge him of all memory of his experiences with Kirk; but before this psychic surgery is complete, the crippled Omne succeeds in shooting himself in the head. (One of Omne’s affectations is that every visitor to the planet, barring a few privileged Romulans, may go armed only with locally-manufactured gunpowder weapons after the fashion of the Wild West.) Realizing that Omne would have done this only because he trusted the Phoenix device to resurrect him, Spock, Kirk, James and the Commander retreat to the Enterprise.
[edit] Too many Kirks spoil the broth
There they hastily draw up plans both to establish a new life for James and to deal with Omne’s inevitable reappearance. James is surgically altered to pass for Romulan and is to accompany the Commander back to the Empire. She explains that there are colony worlds where men are “very properly considered the weaker sex and not permitted to fight”, and he is to be represented as one of these. (This is not the authoresses’ only experimentation with non-traditional gender roles. In a short story “The Procrustean Petard”, Kirk temporarily changes sex.)
[edit] Resurrection
However, before James and the Commander depart, Omne transports himself aboard the Enterprise. The Phoenix device has indeed recreated him, and he is in perfect physical condition. A short fistfight follows in which Omne beats everyone present, Spock still being injured despite earlier recourse to the Vulcan healing trance (previously seen in “A Private Little War”), and captures James, holding him hostage with a gun at his head. He announces his intention to return to his planet with James, where it will be impossible to pursue him. Surprisingly, Kirk chooses this moment to warn Omne to mend his ways, which Omne dismisses with incredulity and scorn. Kirk then gives the signal for Mr. Scott, supposed by Omne to have been unaware of his presence, to transport the weapon out of Omne’s hand, and using this moment of surprise the Commander snatches James away and Kirk, equipped with one of Omne’s own guns, outdraws him.
[edit] Omne defeated?
Killed a second time aboard the Enterprise and supposedly out of range of his Phoenix device, Omne is supposed to be dead; but there is ample room for doubt in view of the technology Omne has already shown. There is, however, no more to be done for the present. Omne’s planet is for all present purposes impenetrable, and if he will come back from the dead yet again, that eventuality must be addressed when it arises.
[edit] Omne
[edit] What he isn't
Previous speculation on this page that Omne is a member of the Q Continuum, or a similar order of creature, must be viewed as fanciful. He possesses technology sufficient to render his planet immune to direct assault by a starship, and can block sensor scans and the Transporter as he pleases, but he is not even the most technologically-advanced near-human that the Enterprise encountered. That plaudit properly belongs to Flint, the ageless human exile met in “Requiem for Methuselah”, who possessed the power to reduce the Enterprise and all aboard her to toy size in an instant, violating conservation of mass and momentum, all with no apparent effort on his part, and to restore her to full size and her former orbit with equal facility. He certainly does not exhibit any of the gross manifestations of quasi-divine powers exemplified by Trelane (who could move planets as he pleased so as to obstruct a starship moving at warp speed; seen in "The Squire of Gothos"), the Organians (who could halt a battle between two fleets of starships by an exercise of will; seen in "Errand of Mercy") or Q himself (who could fling the Enterprise D thousands of light-years in a matter of seconds, who spoke of “changing the gravitational constant of the universe” as though it were a trivial matter, and who repeatedly demonstrated similarly miraculous feats in his several encounters with the Federation in ST: TNG, ST: DS9 and ST: VOY).
[edit] What he is
For all that, Omne is a doughty opponent. As stated, he has rendered his planet immune to sensor probes, casual incursion via transporter, and direct attack from space, and it is rumoured that he is capable of destroying hostile vessels a considerable distance from his world. He is physically an impressive specimen, as strong pound for pound as a Vulcan and considerably taller and heavier than most Vulcans or humans. He exhibits a native-like familiarity with the languages and customs of both Earth and Vulcan and can reasonably be assumed to be quite as adept with other cultures. In addition to the Phoenix device, Omne has pioneered a superior version of the transporter and a number of minor technological marvels, including a healing spray capable of repairing quite severe injuries and a portable recording device hypothesised to enable the Phoenix device to operate at orbital distances.
[edit] Why the hate?
It is not made clear in the story exactly what Omne’s grudge is against the Federation or against Kirk. There are hints that Omne lost family, and probably much more, owing to Federation interference, and he speaks disparagingly of the Federation’s lack of respect for its own Prime Directive. (Indeed, Kirk’s supposed death at the beginning of the story is a result of his own ignoring of this, as the house-fire in question was a ritual suicide not unlike suttee.) In dying while mind-linked with Spock, Omne established a kind of psychic link with him, and on the occasion of his second death, Omne bade Spock look within his own mind to see what was revealed by the name “Omnedon”. Spock did so and told Omne that he would mourn him; but the reader is not told what the memories were.
[edit] Summary
As a driven, obsessed, physically formidable and highly-accomplished foe, Omne certainly stakes a claim for a place as one of the most dangerous threats ever encountered by Kirk and company, though the entire adventure is of course non-canonical.
