Star Trek V: The Final Frontier Read Online Free PDF Page A

voice shook.
    “For God’s sake, take it easy, Bones. I’m all right.”
    “What would have happened?”
McCoy demanded, as if Jim’s life depended on the answer. He gestured accusingly up at the mountain.
    Jim didn’t want to surrender his sudden good humor. He lifted—or rather, lowered—his hands and shoulders in a sheepish gesture. His palms grazed the rocky ground. When McCoy folded his arms and intensified his glare, Jim answered: “All right, I would have been killed. Does that satisfy you? But I wasn’t. Spock caught me.”
    Spock lowered himself and Kirk gently to the ground. Jim righted himself on the rocks and pine needles and sat, trying not to be too obvious about massaging his bruised right ankle. The backs and knuckles of his hands were skinned and bloody. He’d be sore as hell tomorrow.
    “Dammit, Jim!” McCoy exploded. “What’s
with
you? Yesterday you tried to kill us both in the rapids—don’t deny it! And today you throw yourself off the side of a mountain. Are you really all that anxious to meet your Maker?”
    He turned on the heel of his hiking boot and stomped angrily back into the forest. Spock gazed after him with a quizzical expression.
    Jim wasn’t all that sure he knew the answer to McCoy’s question.
    J’Onn was slightly breathless by the time he reached the top of the sand dune. He had crossed the desert during the most intense heat of the day, and the journey had been a long one. But J’Onn was not at all tired: he felt exhilarated and very young.
    The desert was as grim and lifeless as ever, but today he saw only its stark beauty and its promise. For the first time in his life he had a purpose other than maintaining a meager existence. He smiled gratefully up at his benefactor.
    The Vulcan had said his name was Sybok. Other than that, he would answer no questions about himself, about whether he had come here as a homesteader, about why he had chosen—if it was true that he was not an accused criminal—to come to Nimbus III.
    Whatever the reason, J’Onn was glad the Vulcan had come. For if ever a place was in dire need of a messiah, it was Nimbus III, and if ever there was a messiah with the strength to save such a miserable planet, it was this Vulcan, Sybok.
    Others, too, had recognized Sybok’s power and followed; as he had said, “There are more of us thanyou know.” J’Onn had not climbed the dune alone. Beside him, behind him, marched at least a hundred homesteaders—like him, poor, ruined by the drought. The group comprised every possible alien race, all of them united by a common cause: their gratitude to Sybok.
    The Vulcan reined in his steed; the two poised majestically at the crest of the highest dune. Behind him, the small ragged army of homesteaders kicked up dust. J’Onn stopped and gazed up expectantly at his master.
    Sybok smiled down at him, then raised a powerful arm and pointed straight ahead into the distance. J’Onn squinted and saw nothing but black waves of heat rising from the yellow sand.
    “My friends,” Sybok cried, his voice clear and ringing. “Behold Paradise!”
    And then J’Onn saw: the high, worn walls of a ramshackle village, a single outpost rising up in the heart of the desert. For no reason he clearly understood, the sight brought him unutterable joy.
    Sybok spurred his horse onward, and his army followed.

Chapter Three
    T HE WOMAN PAUSED at the entrance of the Paradise Saloon to gather herself. The front doors were oddly constructed—they came only as high as her collarbone and as low as her knees, so that her view of the saloon’s interior was unobstructed. And what she saw of it was daunting indeed.
    The patrons were hostile-looking homesteaders, unwashed, dressed in rags, and conspicuously displaying illegal homemade weaponry. At least, the woman told herself, the composition of the crowd was laudably heterogeneous: Romulans, Klingons, humans, Andorians, Tellarites, and representatives of a dozen more races, all under