CO
STAR TREK
BEST DESTINY
Diane Carey
POCKET BOOKS
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Tokyo Singapore
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
places and incidents are
either products of the author's imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual events or locales or
persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon and
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Copyright [*copyright'1992 by Paramount
Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of
Paramount Pictures.
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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number

ISBN 0-671-79587-2
First Pocket Books hardcover printing
November 1992


POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks
of
Simon and Schuster Inc.
Printed in the U.s.a.
Dedicated to the young men and women
in the Vision Quest program, and to the crews of
the Schooners
New Way
and
Bill of Rights,
who prove that troubled youth can not only be saved .
they can save themselves
What you from your fathers have inherited,
Earn it, in order to possess it.
comGoethe
Commanding a starship is your first best destiny.
comCaptain Spock to Admiral James Kirk in
Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan
HISTORIAN'S NOTE
This story takes place shortly after the events
chronicled in
Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country.
FOREWORD
Ahhhh! We're back and it sure feels good!
Diane and I have been on sabbatical for four
years from the Star
Trek universe, but we haven't been idle. We
traveled back in time to
write a three-book series set during the
American Civil War.
Though we are once more flying around in the future for
humanity's
best destiny, we're still working in the past-this time
James Kirk's
past.
At first we thought we would just swing back into Star
Trek,
concerned only about changes in Trek. We didn't
realize we were
bringing so many changes in ourselves.
Nor did we expect any connection between the genres
... but the
past and the future were way ahead of us. They had
something else
in mind.
After a few thousand pages of raking our
Civil-War-era characters
over the coals, the two of us found ourselves burgeoning
with
unexpected insight into what might have shaped the life
of Captain James Kirk. Tiny events, not
big ones, can ultimately make a hero,
or fail to make one. Suddenly the tiny
things were important, all
because we had become so sensitive to the small events
that shaped
our own history. In writing our Civil War
series,
Distant Drums,
Rise Defiant,
and
Hail Nation
(bantam Books, 1991, "92, '93),
Diane and I have been hammered by the very lesson
Star Trek
has
been trying to teach us all along.
xi
Just as "the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many,"
the
actions of the one can overwhelm the actions of the many.
Let me
show you how.
In 1861 the European aristocracy saw the New
World cracking in
two, and smiled. The Confederate States of
American, they felt, were the inevitable winners of the
conflict. History gurgled with examples
of weaker powers emerging victorious when defending
their home soil. More significant, however, it
seemed impossible to
drag the rebellious states back into a
"voluntary" union. To the European elite the
United States of America-the big experiment
in mob rule-was at an end. Now the Europeans
would be justified
in crushing any rising democratic sentiment on their
own continent. They'd simply point over here and
say, "See? Won't work."
Dismemberment of the United States was too tempting
for the European powers to ignore. By 1862
Britain and France were poised to recognize the
Confederacy and offer monetary and military aid to the
new country-fan those flames! Watch that nation
crumble!
They hedged their bets, however. They waited for one
big Confederate military victory to prove the
Confederacy's ability to not only survive
Northern aggression, but end it. In a daring move that
took advantage of infuriatingly timid Union
General McClellan's turtlelike military
pace, General Lee split his smaller army of
grays into three parts and invaded the North.
As the gods looked down upon the impending battle,
the odds against the
survival of western democracy were very long.
The gods and the aristocracy lost their collective
shirts that day!
The North was dealt a wild card. One of General
Lee's men lost a
few pieces of paper that contained a complete set of
orders for the
impending battle. Now, if a cow had happened upon
the orders and
eaten them, this would have come to nothing but a historically
insignificant belch. But instead, the lost orders
ended up in General
McClellan's hands, and the future history of the
world was changed.
With Lee's battle plans in hand, a blind man on
a three-legged horse could have led the Union Army
to a flashing victory and ended the war then and there.
Since it was McClellan who had the paper, the
Union managed only a stalemate.
Because that accident with the piece of paper and
McClellan's
xii
personality got together on the same day,
North and South had to endure three more years of
wartime carnage. The Confederate
Army was turned back and the European powers never
considered intervention so seriously again.
A minor incident in a day's work
...
a careless Confederate
courier can't keep his paws on a few pieces of
paper, so the United States of America
survives its greatest trial.
If not for this one clumsy moment, there might not be a
single
unified nation here today, but a handful of squabbling
nation-states
each jealously guarding its borders. We'd spend
our time suspicious
of every bit of trade, every law, every traveler, arguing
over who got
to take advantage of whom, who got to set which
rule, who should
patrol which road, who got to toll which river. We
would never have
been able to pull together to build a society or
nurse a flourishing
economy.
There would be no "we."
How different would the world look today if the United
States had not existed to play its role in the
economic and military
developments of the last century?
And what makes a hero? Single people can turn
events, even if they're not dropping battle
plans out of their map cases.
Later in the war President Lincoln finally found
a hero for his
war-weary country. A non-McClellan emerged,
willing to fight with
the firmness needed to end the civil conflict and
reunite the nation.
It was General U. S. (unconditional
Surrender) Grant. While Grant lacked
General Lee's military acuteness, he made
up for it with a pit bull's tenacity and the dispassion of a
surgeon.
If we were inventing Grant's past from scratch, as
we had the chance to do with Jim Kirk, would we create
a polished youth, a
successful collegiate, a square-shouldered
officer?
Probably. But history taught us something
else, just in time.
General Grant, later to become President
Grant, had no success early in life; in
fact, before the Civil War his life was marked by
failure after failure. He was completely out of
place in civilian life,
and could barely feed his family during those days without
a uniform. The war was Grant's last chance to avoid
stunning
mediocrity.
How might events have been different if Grant had
been success-
xiii
ful and wealthy at the advent of the war? Would he have
been as
driven toward success, having already had it?
Why was President Lincoln willing to take any
personal or
political risk to reunite the country? What is
it that forges heroes
like U. S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, or,
as we have tried to
extrapolate, James T. Kirk?
Best Destiny
is a Star Trek historical novel. Like
the heroes of the
real-life past, we know much about the deeds of
Captain James
Kirk. Through the television series, movies,
books, and comics,
Kirk and crew have been dragged through and survived a
multitude
of adventures.
But why them? What in our characters' pasts gives them that
extra pinch of determination and guile it takes
to survive the trials
of space travel? What minor events and twists
of fate, like those in
the American Civil War, piled one upon another,
resulted in Captain Kirk rather than Chief
Surveyor Kirk, or Sixth Level
Accountant Kirk, or Mr. J. T. Kirk,
101 No Particular Avenue?
Best Destiny
is not a complete picture by any means. However,
Diane and I do hope we've developed an
insightful and entertaining
peek into the steel personality of James Kirk
while he was still raw
iron and coal.
So join us in the future, and explore the
Star Trek
past. If you
enjoy
Best Destiny,
perhaps we'll do more of the past
...
in the
future.
And don't throw away any marching orders that fall
into your
hands. They might affect the path to your own best
destiny.
Gregory Brodeur
USS
Enterprise
1701-A
United Federation of Planets Starship,
Constitution-Class
Naval Construction Contract 1701-A
Captain James T. Kirk, Commanding
"You'll retire with extraordinary honors and the
boundless gratitude
of an unfolding Federation. We have a real chance for
prosperity in
the galaxy... a large portion of that chance is due
to your vitality of
will, your fundamentally of purpose, and your belief in
us, Captain
Kirk."
"Thank you, Mr. President. I don't know
what to say."
On the starship's forward viewscreen, the president
of the
Federation took an uncustomary pause. His white
eyes never'
flickered within his whey complexion and the frame of
long,
chalk-white hair, but today hope did luminate in
them.
"still
could suggest something,"
he said,
"if you were willing."
An "aw-shucks" grin creased James Kirk's
face, and he fingered
the armrests of his command chair for one of the last times.
"Thank you again, sir," he said. "We've had our
time in the light.
It's time for others now."
The president offered his idea of a nod, barely a
movement at all.
His Deltan albinism made almost any expression
something only
the perceptive would notice.
"We shall speak again,"
he said,
"and privately raise a glass to
your career, sir, and to your officers. Starfleet
Command has
authorized Starbase One's interior occulting
light to flash in alter
nate white and gold, as salute to the
Enterprise.
I shall consider it my
privilege to sign your Bell Book personally in
note of arrival, as this
will be her last time coming in."
"When we return to Starbase One," Captain
Kirk pointed out.
"At your discretion. No authority will supersede your
own as to the
final cruise of the
Enterprise.
Enjoy it."
The president nodded his elegant shaggy head, those
alien eyes
seeming not to really see.
The screen suddenly went black. Only the audio
system operated
for a last few seconds, in the voice of an
official communications
person.
"United Federation of Planets, Office of the
President, Starbase One, out."
Captain James Kirk wagged a finger toward the
bridge communi
cations station, noted the acknowledgment, and settled
a little too
calmly back into his command chair.
"I want to speak to Mr. Scott," he said.
No one acknowledged him. No one wanted to.
Somehow proto
col didn't fit just then. A moment later the
communication tie-in on
the command chair's armrest spoke for itself.
"Scott here, sir."
"Condition of the ship, Scotty."
"Aye, sir. We've got all damaged decks
evacuated and sealed off
and isolated priority repairs. Warp engines are
fine. Cosmetic repairs
can wait, but I'll have the ship's engineering up
to full integrity
within twenty hours."
The captain leaned an elbow on that armrest and lowered
his
voice. "Mr. Scott. . . you understand the ship is
being decommis
sioned upon our return to Starbase One."
"still
do, sir. But if Starfleet Command is going
to retire a space-
worthy
Enterprise
without my corpse rotting in her hull, I
guarandamntee yeh they'll have pain doing it. I
intend to make them
go down on record as having decommissioned a
service-ready
starship."
Silence pooled on the bridge. There was no echo,
but there might
as well have been.
The captain was gazing at nothing, as though
preparing to follow
his vessel into that nothing. He and the chief engineer.
Their ship.
"I understand," he said. "You carry on, Mr.
Scott."
"Thank you, sir, I will and a half. Scott out."
The captain crossed his legs and leaned back as
though to digest
what he had heard, and what he had uttered back.
"Steady as she goes," he said to the helm before him.
On the quarterdeck behind him, a very thin man with eyes
the
color of water and hair that had gone merrily gray
felt his own
square features harden up. Dr. Leonard
McCoy had waited all his
life to become a country codger, and he was enjoying
it. He could
scowl openly at such exchanges. He could snarl
at anybody, and not
get hit in the mouth.
With an aggravated frown he stepped sideways to the
science
station, as he had a hundred times before in years past,

muttered again to the same person who had heard his
mutters those
hundred times.
"What can we say to him, Spock?" McCoy
began, easily loud
enough for the captain to hear.
A figure straightened inside the science station
cowl. The entire
bridge seemed to inhale as the alien presence
turned to the ship's
fore. Small, alert eyes brushed the bridge,
set in the triangular
features of his face that McCoy had once
regarded as hard, cold, built deliberately on
angles. Sober and thrifty-that underpinned
the study of being Vulcan.
How old was the Vulcan now? McCoy skimmed the
medical
records he kept handy in his mind and tried
to equate Vulcan years
with human years. Failed, as usual. They just
didn't equate. Spock's
straight hair, once stove-black, was now a
dignified sealskin gray.
His quill-straight brows were still dark, still
angled up and away, but
were shaggier than in his youth, though they still made the
Vulcan
look to McCoy as did all Vulcans-like tall,
skinny bats with
clothes on.
Add them to the one feature that had made Vulcans
so hard to
take seriously ... the elongated ears that came
to points. McCoy
had decided those ears were the reason Vulcans had
given up
emotion. They couldn't stand being teased.
Suddenly McCoy felt lucky to be standing beside this
man.
Despite the years of mutual antagonism, he
and Spock had been
through every form of effort, every kind of death, every kind of
life
together; each offered himself in sacrifice for the other time
after
time, and somehow they were both lucky enough to still be standing
there.
McCoy knew he was also lucky to be standing next
to the first
Vulcan in Starfleet, the first of what had turned
out to be many. The
Vulcans had always tried to be unimpressible and
self-contained, but because of this one, they had changed their
minds.
Because of the young Spock, the impertinent radical who
had
shunned his race's Olympian seclusion,
Vulcans no longer prided
themselves on inaccessibility. They'd discovered that
Starfleet,
though founded by those silly humans and still primarily
run by
them, wasn't quite the lawless fluster the Vulcans had
assigned
humanity in the past, and that it didn't cause
concussion to the art
of being Vulcan. In fact, they'd found out that
Starfleet emblemized
law in settled space, was counted upon by dozens of
defenseless
worlds in a touch-and-go galaxy. The Federation was the
great castle
that protected them, and Starfleet was its
knighthood.
Even enemies knew it. That was why there had been
affluent
peace for so long. Starfleet insisted upon it, had the
muscle to back
it up.
The Vulcans were now proud, yes, proud to be part
of Starfleet, to
actively defend the Federation, to participate in the
strength that
prosperity insisted upon, and they too bristled when that
path was
blocked. Those who had once turned their very straight
backs on
Spock in his Starfleet uniform now nudged their own
sons and
daughters into Starfleet Academy, eager to see
them answer a bugle
call they themselves had once rejected, and to see them
participate
in the spaceborne operations a thriving interstellar
community
simply had to have gone on.
Yes, things had changed.
Though he was standing right beside McCoy, Spock also
didn't
bother to mutter, or even to lower his voice, on the
bridge. This
critical deck was built for acoustic perfection,
so no order went
unheard, no whisper unconsidered, no buzz
unanswered.
On top of that, there was the captain's damned
alertness. Like a
leopard at rest.
"What can we say," McCoy sighed, "to make it
easy to watch all
the
Enterprise
fade into history?"
Spock shifted his weight. "The Constitution-class
starship is no
longer considered state-of-the-art in
patrolstexploration craft, Doctor. That
accolade now goes to the Excelsior-class."
"Excelsior-class," McCoy grumbled.
"Looks like a swollen-up party balloon at a
Starfleet shoving-off party."
The captain glanced at them, stood up, and casually
circled his
command chair, running his hands along the soft
back.
"All things change, gentlemen," he said. "All
things grow. It's our
duty to be gracious."
He hesitated, gazing at the viewscreen and the
enormity of space.
"How would it look to the young," he added, "if we
botched our
final duty?"
USS
Bill of Rights
United Federation of Planets Starship,
Excelsior-Class
Naval Exploration Extension 2010
Captain Alma Anne Roth, Commanding
"Contact Starfleet! Level One distress,
immediately!"
"Trying, Captain! No power on normal
channels! No power at
all!"
"Then use abnormal channels! Get a
message out before it's too
late!" "Aye, aye-switching to telemetry!"
James Kirk's hair had gone darker with age
instead of lighter, as
had his temperament, yet he still bore the tan of a
sailor and the
browns of a fox-acorn, walnut, toast, bone,
berry-in his cheeks
and hair. He had always been on the foliage side
of the color wheel.
It was dark in the forest today.
"Jim," McCoy attempted, "just because you're
retiring from
command doesn't mean you have nothing to give. The
Federation
doesn't want you to retire from Starfleet-nobody
does."
"Nobody?" James Kirk responded. "I've
lived not only a good
life, but a great one. I've cheated death a
hundred times in the field,
beaten the perils of space, and now the people who were kids
when I
was in my prime are in
their
prime. It's their turn. I can't take mine
and theirs too. I've spent my time behind a desk and
in front of a
classroom, and neither of those are for me,
Bones. They're decom
missioning this entire class of starship in favor of the
Excelsior-class
heavier design, and without a ship
...
the best part of my life is
over."
His two closest friends regarded him somberly. They
were seeing
all the changes in each other, and not so much how things
had
stayed the same. They were still together after twenty-five
years, yes.
Their legacy was approaching what appeared to be a
close. They had all learned to look forward
to retirement.
St.. .
"I'm going to be an officer and a gentleman about
it," Kirk said.
He didn't look up at them. "It's time to lower
the pennant, spend
time on the family farm, rediscover old friends
...
go out on the
oceans of my home planet and do some
serious adventure of
another kind."
Not even his two closest friends could decipher how
deeply he
meant those words.
"Captain, excuse me," Uhura said. Long
familiarity with her
deep, clear voice told them she was distur bed.
Her chocolate
features and those fashion-runway eyes gave the
bridge a flavor of
the exotic. "I'm picking up an echo of
communication from
Bill of Rights."
Kirk angled away from Spock and McCoy as
though he was glad
to be changing course.
"Are we authorized to intercept that?" he asked.
"No, sir, not technically."
"Then why are you doing it?"
"Sir, it's coming in on the coded emergency
channel, over
telemetry," she enunciated carefully. "I'd
say their audio was down,
except that it's coming over the lowest grade
signal capacity. In the Academy, communications
students sometimes refer to that as the
"panic channel" because it reads like a last
resort. Permission to
accept and decipher?"
"Quickly." His brows came together and he spoke
fast. Suddenly
everyone who knew him was tense. They'd seen his
instincts at
work before. "Well? Haven't you got-was
"Sir-receiving an SOS from them!"
She worked more swiftly as stillness came over the
bridge, leaving
only the hums, chirrs, and buzzes of her systems
at work and the
sounds of a starship's bridge on automatic,
running the ship as best it could while the people were
busy-waiting-worried.
Then suddenly she wailed, "I've lost them!"
"Sir?" a young ensign interrupted from the starboard
upper deck
as she peered into her viewer. She frowned into her
screen and
didn't say anything else. But there was something in that
one
syllable.
And an instant later-
"Captain! Antiproton flushback!"
The head of every experienced person on the bridge
suddenly
shot around at her, as though she had cursed at a
kitten-then
killed it.
"Shields up!" Kirk barked at the helm, then
spun around.
"Spock, confirm that!"
The Vulcan was already laying his large hands upon the
long-
range sensor panel on the quarterdeck, while the
other bridge
officers were scrambling to go into pre-alert, as always
when the
commander ordered shields.
Kirk wasn't waiting. He dropped into the command
chair on one
thigh and snapped, "Chekov, lay in a course for the
source of the
flushback and engage!" Then he regained control
over his tone and
added, "Prepare for emergency warp speed."
The compactly built Russian at the helm
pursed his lips but kept
his voice in control. "Emergency warp, aye."
"Flushback confirmed, Captain," Spock
reported. There was
dark trouble in his tone now.
Kirk slammed his chair's comm link with a fist.
"Engineer Scott,
prepare our shields for forward-intense against
antiproton
flushback." Then he cast back at Uhura,
"All hands on deck. Code
one emergency."
She didn't nod, but went straight to her controls.
Her voice
thrummed through the huge vessel with an evenness that
somehow intensified the urgency.
"This is the bridge. . . all hands on deck. .
. all hands on
deck . . . code one emergency, repeat, code
one emergency!"
The emergency alert panels began to flash a
steely electric-blue
light. As it flashed, a familiar voice plunged
up like a Celtic
drumroll through the system.
"Scott to bridge! Repeat and verify that
forward-intense order. Did
you say flushback?"
"Kirk here, Scotty. Verified."
"Aye, sir!"
"Uhura, close all outgoing communications. Log
the Perils of
Space Rescue Response Clause, the time,
stardate, circumstances,
and decision to act without headquarters contact."
"Aye, sir, logging."
"Sensors on long-range, wide dispersal, Mr.
Chekov."
"Long-range wide, aye."
McCoy frowned. He knew those tones too well
from people with
whom he'd spent a half century on the not
particularly welcoming
doormats of space.
"What's going on?" he asked.
No one paid any attention to him.
He was used to that too.
Careful not to trip or bump anyone as the bridge
erupted into a
flurry, the doctor moved cautiously back up
to the quarterdeck and
went sideways to the science station and its poised
alien officer.
There, he leaned on an elbow to make sure he was
out of the way,
and lowered his voice.
"Spock, what does it mean?" he asked.
"I've never heard of
antiproton flashback before-was
"Flushback," Spock corrected him. His mind
was on more than
just the word, yet he frowned as he said it. Even through
Spock's
poise, McCoy could tell it was a hated word.
"You haven't heard it, Doctor," he said
heavily, "because anti-
proton flushback cannot occur in nature."
"When
can
it occur?"
Spock straightened then, posture tight, and looked
at the forward
screen as the ship shot into warp speed, and the galaxy
blew by. He
gazed at the long streaks of distortion as though all were
new and very frightening. His angular brows drew
tightly inward, and for some reason too personal to be
voiced, he gazed at the back of James
Kirk's head, the back of a captain intensely
occupied with
whatever lay before them.
The answer, even in its Vulcan reserve, was
bitter.
"To our science ... only in the explosion of warp
engines."
Silence clacked between them. A sentence like that demanded
silence, murdered for it, thrived upon it.
But this was a starship's bridge, and something was on their
wind.
Silence couldn't reign here.
Voices, voices, all over, from the depths.
Sounds. Technology leaping to the call of men and
women. Men and women leaping to the call of trouble.
Reports. Different voices. Each its own
purpose.
"Science decks checking in, Captain. All
hands ready."
"Engineering reports all hands on deck, sir."
"At warp two, Captain. Chief engineer
signals ready for emergen
cy acceleration on your signal."
The captain's voice.
"Emergency warp speed."
"Emergency warp, aye ..."
The ship began a low whine, from her bowels.
"Warp three ... warp four ..."
"Emergency jump," the captain said. "Go to warp
nine."
A pause. A nervous confirmation.
The surge of speed, eruptions of successive
warping, without
pause, without rest-
crack, crack, crack, crack.
"Warp nine, Captain. Stressed, but holding."
"Go to yellow alert."
"Yellow alert, aye!"
"Yellow alert, yellow alert
...
a
hands to emergency
stations... yellow alert, yellow alert
..."
Part One
DEAD RECKONING
ONE
Tension on the bridge could have been lifted and
carried.
It would have cast the people into chaos, except for the anchor
of
the captain's voice. The captain on any ship was
the only reason the
crews could ever sleep or eat, for no one can
sleep or eat where there
isn't the anchor.
With that anchor on board, no storm was too bad,
no fog too
thick, no silence too damning.
Knowing the ship around them was screaming through space at
warp nine, piercing through increasing waves of
antiproton flush and heading not away from that
horrifying fact of death but right
into it, the crew clung to the captain's voice.
"Mr. Chekov, project our course and report
what's there in a
funnel of fifty light-years in diameter.
Specify any outposts, Federa
tion or otherwise, areas of contention, reported
storms, and call up
manifests of any shipping that has passed
through that area in the
past ten days."
"Aye, sir, projecting the course. I'll have that
for you in a few moments."
"Short moments, Mr. Chekov."
"Aye, sir."
On the quarterdeck, the ensign who had first noticed
the
flushback swallowed obvious guilt at having
been the bearer of
awful news. Wasn't her name Dimitrios?
Demarris? De-something.
McCoy knew that look, had carried it plenty of
times himself.
With nothing to do-yet-in this emergency, he stepped
away
from the science station and over to the other side of the
bridge to
the young woman.
She was trying to get some moisture back into her mouth
while she tracked the surging waves of flushback
and tried to pinpoint
their source. Not an exact science at all, if
her expression was any
clue. Her hands were shaking.
"Don't drink coffee," McCoy suggested.
The ensign blinked, glared at him, confused. Then
she turned back to her screen and squinted into it.
"I don't know what you mean, sir."
"Don't drink any coffee until whatever's
happening isn't happen
ing anymore."
She bit her lip, then only said, "Thank you,
sir."
McCoy shifted his feet, watching the bridge
personnel move tightly at their stations and the lights
and panels of the bridge
crackle with activity. A ship at warp nine was
plenty active.
"It'll make you nervous," he added, "and you'll have
to-was
"Yes, sir," the ensign snapped. "I understand.
Thank you."
She wanted him to go away, and Leonard McCoy
wasn't the
go-away type.
"What's bothering you, Ensign ..."
"Devereaux, sir."
She swallowed a couple more times, resisted the urge
to glance at
him and damn him for his doctor's intuition, but then
she lowered her voice and let it out.
"If there's something out there that made an
Excelsior-class ship
blow up," the ensign said, "what chance do we have?"
McCoy offered the girl an annoyed glare, then
swaggered a step
closer to her, took her elbow, and turned her away
from her console.
She gawked at him as if he were crazy.
The doctor didn't care that he was interrupting her
work. Didn't
care that she had been the one to tell everybody that a
sister starship
might have just been blown to bits. He was concerned about
something else.
He nodded down toward the main deck, to the command
chair,
and to the man in it.
"Kid," he said,
"that
is our chance."
Ensign Devereaux looked down there too. Through his
grip on
her elbow, McCoy could feel some of her
trembling go away as she
watched James Kirk in his command chair.
There was just something about Captain Kirk.
The ensign cleared her throat, licked her lips,
and turned back
toward her station. Halfway there she paused, and
gazed at Dr.
McCoy. She was still afraid, but not in quite the same
way.
"Thank you, sir," she said. "I won't forget."
At the navigation station on the upper deck, Commander
Chekov
straightened from his backbreaking hover and turned
to look at the
heart of the bridge also.
"Captain ," the Russian said, speaking around his own
accent as
much as possible. "I have put up the merchant marine
manifests on
this screen for you to review. There are very few, sir.
And there are
no storms, no contested areas, no border disputes,
no reported hazards in the specified funnel of
space, no Starfleet outposts,
no unfrly settlements, and only two star
systems within a
hundred light-years. One is uninhabited, and on
the other there is
only a Federation archaeological excavation on a
small outside
planet."
Captain Kirk came up out of his chair. He had
always had trouble
sitting when there was action going on.
"Name the project," he ordered.
"I have never heard of it before, sir," came the
clipped answer.
"It is logged as
...
Faramond."
If McCoy was any judge of people he knew and people
he didn't
know, no one else on board had heard of that place
either. One
glance around the bridge told him that.
But then he looked down again at the captain.
On the face of the man he knew so well,
McCoy saw a glitter of
dangerous recognition.
The captain turned like a policeman about
to make an arrest. He
paced behind his command chair, caressing it. He glared
forward
into the rage of warp nine as stars and space debris
blistered past
the main viewscreen. His brows drew together and his
eyes nar
rowed. A fire came into them which his friends thought talk
of
retirement might already have killed.
Though he watched the screen before him, he was gazing
into the
past. His lips parted and he spoke, but not to anyone
there.
"Faramond . .."
TWO
Forty-five years earlier. . .
A rope footbridge over the swollen North
Skunk River,
Mahaska County, Iowa
"Stick with me and you'll get the ride of your
lives."
A surly clutch of teenagers clung to those words as
tightly as they
clung to the tatters of the ages-old jute
footbridge. Beneath them,
the swollen Skunk River lazily whispered
dare you, dare you, dare
you
and suggested they fall on in.
"Don't look down! Nobody look down."
Immediately the grunts and complaints went silent.
Nobody wanted to get chewed out by the stocky boy
with the sawdust-
colored curls and the stingers in his eyes.
"Keep moving," he added. "No looking down."
"It'll be our luck a tourist tram floats by and
sees us," Zack
Malkin said. He wanted to scratch his neck, but
he didn't dare let
go. "We're on the Tramway's historical
trail, you know."
"They won't."
"What if they do?" Lucy Pogue spat. Her
soggy, bloodshot eyes
were wide and her hands twitched on the prickly
ropes. "You didn't
think of that did you, genius?"
"We'll wave at "em, all right?" their leader
snapped, scowling
from under the brim of his grandfather's touring cap. With a
shift of his shoulders he rearranged his high school
jacket to free his arms a little. "Shut up and keep
moving. One step at a time. And don't look
down."
"I don't like this, Jimmy," said a brittle,
fragile boy who had
trouble breathing. He didn't look down, but he
did glance back over
the third of the walkway they'd already crossed.
"Nobody told us
we'd have to cross something like this."
"There's going to be a lot out there that nobody tells
us about.
We've got to find out for ourselves," their leader said,
"before it's
too late."
Tom Beauvais squinted into the sun and cracked,
"You mean
before we get caught."
"We could just sit at home," Jimmy shot back.
"Be real safe that
way."
The only person ahead of him was a girl whose
powdery
complexion barely picked up the light of the western
sun. Her small
eyes were like clear gelatin-hardly any color but
lots of shine-
and they were tightened with fear. Her cheeks were large, the
shape
and color of eggshells, and on a less swanlike
creature might have
been ghastly.
Shivering, she murmured, "Jimmy ..."
"Keep moving," he told her softly. "Don't
try to hurry. We're not going to move any faster
than you can go. That's why I had you go
first. I'm right here next to you, Emily. Nothing can
possibly
happen."
Their muscular leader curled his fingers around the jute
and
packtwine ropes and willed the sixty-foot-long
footbridge to hold
up.
It stretched from one cliff to another, east to west
over the river. It had two sides for handholds and a
walkway on the bottom that once
had been tight and safe-a
long
time ago. Now it was rotting. An adventure, or
a death wish.
Jimmy gritted his teeth at it. It'd been there for
two decades, so it
could just stay there another ten minutes. He'd argued
them down
about how this was the best way to cross the Skunk without
getting
caught, and how the authorities would be after them by now,
and anything else he could tell them to keep them in
line. He tried to
make this look easy, to pretend the old ropes
weren't scratching his
palms and to act light on his feet.
Giving the others his voice to concentrate on, he
kept talking.
"Always think four or five moves ahead. That's the
trick."
"If it's such a good trick," Tom countered, "why
didn't you think
of one of us going across this wreck first to see if it would
hold up?"
His brow in a permanent furrow, Jimmy tightened
his eyes and
tried to slip around the truth. "Better this way.
Even distribution of
weight."
He held his breath, hoping nobody would notice
how little sense that made. He squinted into the west and
ignored the sun's glow off
his own peach-fuzzed cheeks.
Peach fuzz. That was his father's phrase. Peach
fuzz, baby face,
greenhorn. Damn his cheeks for fitting that
description. Deliberate
ly he looked away from the sunlight.
"We're pioneers," he said. "We're going
straight up the Oregon
Trail, just like the people who settled this country and put
in the
railroads and the towns like Riverside across this part of
Iowa. Only
instead of horses or steel, we're hopping the
Stampede."
Though he had played for team spirit, his only reward
was a nasty
grunt from Tom. "Sure. We're going to hop
onto the fastest train in North America while
it's doing nine hundred kpm five
centimeters
above the ground,
in
a tube. That'll be a whole new definition of
'friction.""
"Glad you're paying attention, Beauvais."
"Glad you can fly, Kirk."
Jimmy shot a glare at him. Warning.
"Even the Stampede stops once in a while," he
said. "All we have
to do is make Omaha at loading time and we're
aboard. Next stop,
Oregon, and next after that... South America."
"What're we gonna do when we get to South
America?" Quentin Monroe asked.
"Anything we damned well please." Jimmy
glanced past Lucy
and Zack again to see how Quentin was doing, and hoped
Beauvais
would look after the little guy.
Quentin's brown face was ink-spotted with big
black freckles,
enhanced by his spongy black hair and perpetually
worried eyes,
which in this light looked like two more inkspots.
Jimmy hadn't
wanted to bring him along. Quentin was only fourteen
and every
body else in the gang was sixteen, he'd never
held his own in a fight,
and he hadn't even been to the city, but there was something
about
the frail black boy that said I'm okay, I'll
grow, I'll learn.
So here he was, on the great adventure with the big
kids, and Jimmy had to live with the decision. There was
no turning back
now.
"Maybe we'll become archaeologists," he said.
He tightened his
brow and nodded in agreement with himself. Inch by inch he
urged
them toward the middle of the rope walk. "Hack through
rain
forests looking for the ancient Mayan city-states.
Find out why they
went extinct after a thousand years of-was
"They found those."
Jimmy stopped. So did everybody else. The
bridge shuddered.
"What?" he snapped. "What'd you say?"
Quentin clung to the ropes and blinked. "They found
them. The
Mayan palaces. A long time ago. You know .
.. how the twentieth-
century archaeologists found lance heads in the
walls, and later they proved that the city was under
siege, and how the siege forced them to do all their
farming behind the walls, and how the crop yields fell
off, and how-was
"Where'd you hear all this?"
"It was ... in our history of science book."
"Books!" Jimmy spat out. "You're going
to believe what you read
in some book? Why waste your time with a book when you can
get
out and live!"
Quentin fell silent, ashamed that he had wasted his
time.
Jimmy shook his head and barked, "Keep moving."
Suddenly an arm of wind swept downriver, pushing
the bridge with its enormous hand. The ropes started
whining and the whole
footbridge began to sway.
"Damn, I almost dropped my pack!"
Zack complained, and tried
to rearrange his load.
"Don't do that," Jimmy said. "You've got the
fake ID'S."
"How'd you get those, Zack?" Quentin asked.
"Tapped into the voting records for people who hadn't
voted in
five years. Figured they were long gone, so we
took the ID'S of any
children they had who were the right age five years ago to be
eighteen now. Took their numbers, and
bing-
we're legal."
"Damn. Good idea."
"It was Jimmy's idea. I just did the hardware."
"Told you," Jimmy said. "You don't have to worry
about
anything. I've got it all stitched up."
Lucy grimaced. "These ropes stink! What if
they're rotten? What
if they break? We'll die here like some goddamned
trout in that
rolling throw-up down there."
"We're only thirty feet over the water."
"Water can break your neck if you hit it
at the wrong angle," Zack
provided.
Lucy let her lips peel back and broke the
looking-down rule. "My
astrologer
told
me not to do anything dangerous this week. I
knew
I
should've paid attention to the signs-now look where I
am."
With a stern scowl Jimmy said, "Don't believe in
it."
Zack nudged Lucy another sidestep west and
called to Jimmy over the wind as it howled between them.
"You don't believe in
destiny?"
"Didn't say that," Jimmy called. "Said I
don't believe in
stvedestiny."
"Why not?"
"Becaus e somebody else has to tell me what mine
is. That means
somebody else is in charge. Means somebody else
knows more
about me than I do. Malkin, see this main line?"
He put his hand on
the only braided line on the side of the rope
bridge. "That's the one
you hang on to. No, the other one. Look at
me.
This
one."
Lucy's voice sounded a little steadier when she
spoke again. "I
know there's something about the stars and when you're born and
all. I've
seen
enough. I've had crazy things happen that can't be
coincidence. Like when they advised me to start packing
a knife,
and the next week I had to use it."
Glad he had managed to distract her, Jimmy
said, "The stars care
whether Lucy Pogue carries a knife? We know
what stars are. We
know that's one." He spared a hand and poked a forefinger
at the
bright golden sky. "Am I supposed to believe
some arrangement of things in the sky makes
life just a package deal? A frame-up all
set
before we're born? What if your mother trips on a
pig like mine did
and you're born a month early? Which date sets
destiny-my
birthday, or a month later? Which stars should I
look at? A batch of
hot atoms a billion light-years away has
some influence on my
future?" He snorted.
Some of the gang nodded. Others didn't. So he
continued talking
as long as they were moving.
"Destiny and predestiny are two different things.
Predestiny is
pointless. If it's true, we might as well
turn around right now, go back to Riverside, and sit
on our bulkheads, because whatever's
going to happen's gonna happen anyway."
"How's destiny any different?" Tom Beauvais
challenged.
A crooked grin danced on Jimmy's face as he
leered back at them.
"That's the one
I'm
in charge of."
From the west, the sun buttered his apricot curls and
sweat
glittered on his brow. To the others, he looked like a
demon with a
license to smile. If anyone in the group wondered
how he had talked
them into running away, a moment like this snuffed the thought.
Something in the ballistics of Jimmy Kirk was tough
enough and
vivid enough to keep them going across the shabby old rope
bridge,
stepping one by one over their better judgments.
Zack coughed as the wind filled his lungs, and he
forced himself
to move along the ropes, to stay distracted, and not
to look down. "Sounds like plain luck to me."
"It sounds like that, but it's not," Jimmy said. He
held out one
hand, fingers spread, as though gripping the imaginary
brick with
which he would lay his foundation. "Luck is blind chance.
Destiny . . .

you
build."
He eyed them, one by one, even Beauvais, until
the belief
returned to each face.
Then he said, "Move along. Twenty more feet and
we're there."
The river whispered below. They moved slowly toward the
west
bank, a few inches at a time, each burdened with a
backpack of
survival supplies and foodstuffs.
Lucy's voice showed she was trying to keep control
as she asked,
"How are we going to find our way to Omaha?"
Jimmy helped Emily find a handhold. "Dead
reckoning."
"Dead what?"
"Basic sail training."
"Who's gonna sail?" Tom cracked. "We're
going on a cargo
carrier!"
"It's basic seamanship, Beauvais. Get used
to it. The captain's
going to expect us to know this stuff. The STD
formula. Speed,
time, distance. If you know your constant speed and distance,
like
how far you'll go and how fast, you can figure how long
it'll take. If
you know your time and speed, you can figure how far-was
"Maybe we should go to space instead," Zack
suggested.
"Space? Cold and empty. We got it all right
here."
He dismissed the subject with his tone and twisted
forward,
watching Emily's tiny feet custodially. He
moved his own feet
carefully after hers, along the miserable knots and
fraying lines that
once had been sturdy enough to carry teams of Girl
Scouts and Boy
Scouts across the Skunk River. Long abandoned,
the sixty-foot
ropewalk had been left up for sentimental value
as part of the
Tram view of the Oregon Trail. He and
Zack had worked for almost
an hour breaking through the protective grating
that kept hikers off
the old footbridge. Zack could break into anything.
That's how
they'd gotten the food in the backpacks-it was how
they'd gotten
the backpacks. That's how they'd finagled tickets
for the Stampede
Tubetrain.
All they had to do was get to Omaha without being
spotted for
runaways, and they'd never be seen again.
Jimmy shook his head and forced himself to stop thinking about
what they'd stolen. What choice did they have? They
hadn't been
given anything, so they just had to take somebody
else's. That was
fair.
Snap
"Ah-ah-Jimmyyyyy!"
The shriek cracked across the ravine at the same
moment as the
rope bridge waggled hideously to the snap of parting
jute-and
Quentin went over backward. His hand clawed
uselessly at a broken
line, then at open air.
Lucy screamed, driving the needle of terror under
all their skin.
Jimmy cranked around in time to see Quentin bounce
against the
ropes on the other side of the bridge and bend them
almost all the
way down to the level of the walkway. Part of the
braided walkway
caught the small of Quentin's back and bounced him
stiffly, but
finally held. And there he was, hanging.
The boy was arched backward over the outermost strands,
his
upper body in midair, hanging halfway out over
the greedy water.
His loaded pack yanked at his shoulders and held his
arms straight out sideways. The whole bridge
wobbled back and forth, back and
forth, in a sickening bounce.
None of them did any more than freeze in place,
clinging to their
own ropes.
"Nobody move!" Jimmy bellowed. "I'll do
it!"
"Goddammit!" Beauvais shouted. His face
twisted. "This was
your stupid idea! We could've just taken the long
way, over ground,
but no! We had to do it Kirk's way! Why does
anybody listen to a
blowfish like you!"
"Cram it, bulkhead. I'm busy." Jimmy
unkinked his fingers from
the scratchy ropes and forced himself to move back
toward Lucy.
"Please, Jimmy," Emily murmured, "don't
let him fall..."
Jimmy pressed her hand just before she was out of reach.
"I'm
not going to let him fall. Nobody else move.
Quentin, hold still."
They were only a couple of stories up, but Jimmy
knew it was
enough to kill. Below, the muddy water chewed and gurgled.
Jimmy maneuvered around Lucy, then around Zack,
careful not
to dislodge either of them from their hold. The ropes
shivered, but
no more parted or frayed.
"It'll be all right," he said steadily.
"Everybody stay calm. He just
put his foot on the wrong braid. Nothing else
is breaking."
"Tell the ropes," Beauvais snarled.
Jimmy's face flamed, and he stopped moving
toward Quentin.
"I'm telling the damn ropes!" he bellowed.
"Leave me alone and let
me do this."
Beauvais rearranged his grip and muttered,
"Okay, okay .. . just get him."
Below them Quentin dangled backward, his hips
tangled in the
old ropes, and gasped as though he couldn't
remember how to
breathe. "J-J-Jimmy-was
"I'm almost there. Don't whine."
Jimmy reached Quentin and lowered himself to the braided
cordage, his own breath coming in rags. Old
tendons wobbled and
grated against the cross-braids, threatening to open beneath
him.
By the time he got above the dangling boy, his palms
were bleeding.
Quentin's left foot was caught between two braids
that had
twisted as he went backward. If he turned his
foot now, it would slip
through and he would be tossed out like a circus performer on
a springboard. No one wanted to point that out; they
all saw it.
A finger, a limb, a joint at a time, Jimmy
lowered himself to his
hands and knees onto the walkway of the bridge. The
old jute cut
into the flesh of his kneecaps right through his clothing. He
bit his
lip, ignored the pain, and searched for a secure
position over
Quentin's entangled legs.
There wasn't one.
The ropes quivered defiantly under him, refusing
to cooperate. Ultimately he arranged himself on
his stomach across the braids,
right beside Quentin's leg. He shoved an arm through the
side ropes
of the bridge.
"Monroe, give me your hand."
Nothing happened. Spread halfway out in
open air, the younger
boy was muttering unintelligible sounds.
"Monroe, what are you doing?"
"P-p-praying."
"Well, do that later, will you? Give me your hand."
"I can't-move-was
Jimmy lowered his voice, literally made it darker,
grittier, meaner. "This is one of those times when
you've got two possible
destinies, right?"
"Mmmm .. ."
"Pick the best one."
No one else breathed, no matter how the rising
wind pushed air
between their clenched teeth.
"Now!" Jimmy ordered.
A brown hand arched upward toward the sky. Jimmy
caught it,
and hauled.
"My arm! My arm!" Quentin bellowed as his body
cranked
sideways, upward.
Jimmy twisted his fingers into the boy's shirt
collar. "Beauvais,
take his backpack. The rest of you, keep
moving. Zack, you're in
charge."
"What? I don't want to be in chaise."
"You don't have any choice, do you?"
"This was your idea."
"Fine. Lucy can be in charge."
The bridge waggled.
"I don't want it either!" Lucy protested.
"We're more than halfway across!" Jimmy shouted.
"All you
have to do is go twenty more feet! How many decisions do
you have
to make?"
"I'll be in charge," Tom said as he slung the
extra backpack over
his shoulder.
Jimmy cranked upward the other way. "I
didn't pick you!"
"We didn't "pick" you either."
"Yes, you did. This was all
my
plan."
"Some plan! We're not even out of Iowa and we're
already in
trouble. You're all gas, Kirk."
"Look, any time you're ready to turn back-was
"Jimmy..."
The soft beck from above drifted down and silenced the
dishar
mony.
Jimmy twisted back toward the others. "What is
it, Emily?"
The girl stood with each narrow white hand on a
side of the bridge, unable to push back her hair as
the wind blew it forward
over her cheeks and into her eyes. "Quentin," she
murmured.
"I know, I've got him," he grumbled, and
returned his attention
to where it should have been.
Quentin's brown face had gone to clay by the time
Jimmy hauled
him up and pulled his legs out of the ropes he'd
gotten tangled in.
He had both eyes knotted shut and refused to open
them until
Jimmy threatened to leave him in the middle of the
bridge.
Then Jimmy took him by the shoulders and almost broke

shoulder blades. "Quentin, this is how it is," he
said. "We're going
on. It's just rope. We're not going to be beaten
by rope. Are you with me?"
He didn't wait for an answer. He
straightened, placed Quentin's
hands on the side support lines, nodded toward the
bank, and
started picking his way westward again. He didn't
look back.
Quentin would follow, or be left out there.
But through his boots he felt the pressure on the
braided rope behind him, and knew he would win that
bet.
On the bank Tom Beauvais was the last to jump
onto solid
ground. They turned to watch Jimmy bring Quentin
all the way in.
Jimmy jumped onto the hard, rocky ground,
pulled Quentin up
behind him, then stepped aside as Zack and Lucy
came forward to
help Quentin stumble onto the grass.
When he turned and looked up at Tom
Beauvais, there was
mercury in his eyes. He took two steps forward,
and
boom-
A roundhouse right pitched Tom's head backward,
and he staggered but didn't go down. He gathered himself
and let fly a
rabbit punch to Jimmy's midriff, but Jimmy
saw the punch coming
in time to tighten up. He had the advantage of
not
being too lean.
His buff curls flickered, his brow drew in, his
eyes turned to
arrowheads, and the heels of his hands struck Tom in the
shoulder
hollows. Another flash spun Tom around, and
Jimmy had his
challenger's wrist forced halfway up his spine.
Tom ground out a senseless protest and arched his
back, then
bellowed in pain.
Forcing the arm upward another inch, Jimmy asked,
"Your way
or my way?"
"Okay, okay, your way! Don't break
it!"
Jimmy shoved him off and dropped back a pace,
satisfied.
Holding his arm and swearing, Tom stumbled away.
"I'll break it next time," Jimmy said.
The others looked away from both boys, embarrassed
and unsure
about their adventure.
He pushed through the others to Quentin, and his entire
demeanor changed as he took Quentin by the shoulder
and said, "Take a deep breath. Now take another
one ... you did it. You beat it."
Quentin managed a nod.
Jimmy turned him to look at the shaggy rope
bridge as it waved in
the wind as though to say good-bye. "There it is
...
everything you
were afraid of. You went one step at a time and you
trusted
somebody. Now it's all behind you. Understand?"
As Quentin looked at the rope bridge, at how
far it was back to the other cliff, and at how far he
had come, his trembling slowly
faded away.
It
was
behind him. He never had to cross it again. He'd done
it.
He cleared his throat and said, "You're stronger than
you look."
Jimmy smiled. "All right, everybody, mount up.
Get your packs on and let's get moving.
We've got a schedule to keep."
He strode cockily away from Quentin, leaving
most of the group
to stare at the back of his head, closed almost his whole
hand around Emily's upper arm, and started walking her
west.
"I," he said, "will take care of you. You don't
need anybody. You
don't need your teachers, you don't need your
parents, you don't need your sisters ... you need
only me. By morning we'll be in Omaha. Then,
four hours on the Stampede, and
zam-
we're in Bremerton, Oregon, signing on as
deckhands of dynacarrier
Sir
Christopher Cockerell."
"How old you are?"
"Old enough to get here on our own."
"From where you come?"
"From over two thousand miles. You guess the
direction. We
want to sign on. Work our passage."
As the six young people stood on the windy dock, looking
very
small, oafish, and overwhelmed beside the
58,000-ton dynacarrier,
the German first mate gazed down on them from far
above. The
ship's rail was two stories up, and he wasn't
going to waste time
going down to the dock to talk to these children, no matter
how they
had demanded audience with an "officer." Suddenly he
wished he could be wearing a uniform instead of denim and
deck shoes. That would be funny. He could scare them
even more.
He paused to light a cigar, shoved back his shaggy
yellow hair,
and tried not to laugh. Only two of the teenagers
looked fit for duty at sea.
The others were ... uncertain. He could see
it in their eyes.
"You got your mama's okay to come here?"
Without a pause the boy shot back, "You got
yours?"
The mate paced a few steps.
"This is no toy boat," he said. "What will you do
on big merchant
ship?"
"Whatever it takes," said the boy with the chamois
curls who appeared to speak for all. He stood with
one foot on a piling,
leaning forward on that knee, boiling with the know-it-all
cockiness
of youth.
The first mate sucked on his cigar and strode a few
feet along the
ship's rail, turned casually away to get that
smile out of his cheeks,
then faced them again and paused. "Deckhands?"
"That's right," the boy said.
"What do you know about a dynacarrier? What I
tell the captain I
am bring on his ship?"
"You can tell him it's got a hull design that can
be adjusted in
sections by the navigation computer, and that she carries
harvested
crab, shrimp, and fish from the continental hatcheries
to the statis
outposts so they can be preserved and sent to our
colonies in space.
Tell him she's got telescoping masts with
duckwing stabilizers that fold back in harbors and
expand on the open sea. Robotics do most
of the work and that she goes out of the harbor on
antigravs and you
turn off the antigravs and settle into the open
water, because
somebody figured out that cargo carriers don't have
to be fast, just
efficient. And tell him he's got six
apprentices who want to learn to
run the robotics."
The first mate wasn't particularly impressed, but
he
was
amused.
The boy had a belittling tone in his voice and an
uncharming bitterness in his eye, but he'd obviously
done his homework, prepared for this moment.
Cheap labor. Hmmm ...
"What you want for pay?"
"I told you," the boy said. "Passage, berths,
food... and no
questions."
Real cheap.
The first mate shrugged with his expression.
"I see what I can do."
Down on the dock Jimmy repressed any sign
of victory and kept a
stiff scowl on his face. He was sure the others were
amazed.
Deliberately he didn't look at them.
"How can you know all that stuff, Jimmy?" Quentin
asked. "How
did you know how to get us here on the train? It was a
great trip! I
want to go on that train again someday, don't you,
everybody? I
can't believe all the stuff you know, Jimmy!"
Jimmy narrowed his eyes and gazed up at the looming
panorama
that was their future-a red and gray sea monster
stretching across
their entire field of vision, loaded to the
gunwales with ocean
harvest, and rumbling.
"It's my business to know," he crowed.
Quentin appeared in his periphery. "What I mean
is
...
how can
you know if you don't read any books?"
Color flared in Jimmy's cheeks.
He buried his embarrassment in a cough and brought his
foot
down off the piling. He felt the heat in his face and
turned away
quickly to hide it. Above, three sea gulls
circled, whistling with
laughter.
"Well," he pushed out, "you ... gotta read the
right books."
He buried his blushing complexion by fussing with
supplies and
packs they'd dumped a few feet back on the
dock.
"Jimmy?"
"Yeah?" He straightened suddenly, and found himself
looking
into Lucy's overused, overmade-up, over-everythinged
face. It took some hard looking to see past the
cake and lipstick and see she was
still young. He lowered his voice. "What's the matter,
Lucy?"
"You didn't tell certain people that this son of a bitch
would be so
big,"
she said. "There was nothing like this in Riverside."
"That's the point," Jimmy said firmly. "We're
not in Iowa
anymore, Toto."
"Why do we have to go on the ocean? I don't want
to barf all the
way to South America. Why can't they just fly cargo
around?"
He felt the eyes of the others on him. Answers.
They always
wanted answers. Reasons to keep doing what they
had decided to
do.
Then he would give them reasons.
"You want to know why we don't fly?" he began.
"If you're at the
bottom of a well and you want to get to the
other side of the well, do
you climb all the way to the top, then walk around,
then climb all
the way down again?"
Lucy snarled. "Oh, sure."
"Why wouldn't you?"
She shrugged one shoulder. "Because it'd be
brain-dead."
"Because it'd be a brain-dead waste of energy, right?"
"What's that got to do with this?"
"Earth's at the bottom of a well of gravity.
If you want to move a
half-million tons of harvested seafood, you
don't use up energy lifting it thirty thousand
feet in the air just to bring it down to the same level
later, do you?"
"I guess not."
"That's why we don't fly cargo around."
"Hey! You, down there!"
He and Lucy turned, as did the others, looked
up, and saw the first mate grinning down at them with a
weird, devious glint in his
eye.
"Hey! Captain say he won't notice if you
come on board. Then we
get a look at you."
"Attention,
Cockerell!
This is Port Authority. You are being
detained on suspicion of illegally transporting
minors into interna
tional waters. Put your engines in neutral,
fall off your course, and
prepare to be boarded."
Garish fog-cutting spotlights jabbed from the Port
Authority
hovercraft as it hissed toward the dynacarrier.
Its aircatcher
quivered like a sea slug's skirt.
The big hovercraft was dwarfed by the dynacarrier, but
there was
no doubt as to who was in charge.
At the
Cockerelfs
bridge rail, the cap tain frowned at his first mate
and said, "Damn you, Klein. These deckhands you
brought on
board-have they brought false identifications we can
point at?"
"They all claim to be eighteen years
old. I saw the cards, with
pictures," the German responded. Then he
grinned. "Just like last time."
"Stick to the story. Where are these children?"
The mate grinned wider, crookedly. "In the
galley ... scrubbing mouse shit from the corners."
The captain grunted. "Hmm. Thought they would be on
sail
computers, and they end up scrubbing-who is
that!"
He pressed
forward against the upper deckhouse rail and peered down
onto the
deck of the hovercraft as it came alongside their
boarding ladder.
"What is Starfleet doing here!"
Before the mate could answer, the captain was on the
stairs to the
lower deck.
"Contact the galley! Lock up those children!" he
shouted as he
dropped to the deck. He didn't wait for the
mate's confirmation,
but just hoped the ship's comm was buzzing.
The captain met the hovercraft, having
worked down only part of the dread on his stubbly
face-if only he'd shaved today! He barely
managed to choke out a civil greeting to the
Starfleet Security
Division team as they stepped aboard.
Three men and two women, neat as a picket fence,
none
particularly amused or affording his ship the usual
visitors' appreci
ation.
They weren't there to visit.
The highest-ranking officer was a muscular man with
iron-red
hair and no fun in his face, who obviously took
this situation
personally.
"Captain," the officer said, "you picked up six
teenagers in
Bremerton, just outside of the naval base. Where
are they?"
"In custody, Lieutenant!" the captain said
quickly. He pointed at
a little coffee station near the middle of the ship. "We
put them in
the midships deckhouse as soon as we saw
that their identifications
were fake. We didn't know when we hired them-was
"Save it, Captain," was the growling response.
"And I'm a
commander."
He tapped his rank insignia with a forefinger.
"You can take it up with the Coast Guard," he said.
"They'll be
here in ten minutes to lodge charges against you and your
parent
company for antagonizing the laws of your host
government and for
illegal international transport of minors. This
practice is going to
stop. You're going to have to pay the competitive price
for consent
ing adult labor, and that's it. Now," he added,
"where are those
kids?"
Sweating and turning purple, the captain snapped his
fingers at
the mate and shouted, "Get them!"
"Bringing them now!" the mate called instantly.
Coming toward them were several crewmen of the dynaship,
flanking the teenagers, all of whom were
particularly grim. There'd
been a fight. Two of the
Cockerelfs
crewmen were dabbing at
bruises on their faces. Another was holding his arm
and trying not
to wince.
The Starfleet commander squinted, then glowered. "There
are
only five. Where's the other one?"
Viciously the captain shouted, "That bulldog!
Where is he?"
One of the crewmen gestured back at the shabby white
deck
house. "He's fighting. Kicking and spitting.
Crazy. Like a barbarian
or something. Won't come out. No respect for
nothing."
Everyone paused, and sure enough the deckhouse was
physically
rattling. From inside, the muffled noises of contention
boomed. Bodies hit the old plank walls.
Coffee spilled under the door and
spread onto the deck. The door clapped and
squawked against its
hinges.
"Don't worry," the captain said, pulling at his
mustache. "We have control, don't worry .. .
we'll get him out."
But the commander gestured to the captain, the sailors, and
his
own people to stay behind, and he stepped forward himself.
"stHis get him out."
The teenagers averted their gazes and didn't meet
his eyes as he stalked past them.
The captain and his sailors gathered closely and
watched the Starfleet man get smaller on the
huge deck. The man's fists were
knotted, his thighs grinding like pistons, his head
forward and his
shoulders set, the wind picking up his
blood-colored hair and
Sopping it down with every step.
"I wouldn't want to be that bulldog boy," the
captain muttered.
One of the sailors rubbed a sore jaw and said, "I
wouldn't want to
be the Starfleet man."
The commander caught the deckhouse door handle at that
instant and raked the door open so sharply that
the others heard it
shriek all the way across the deck. He disappeared
inside.
Everyone winced in anticipation and waited, making
bets inside
their heads and wondering if they had time to make them out
loud.
Almost at once the deckhouse stopped lurching.
Another ten seconds trickled by.
The deckhouse door scratched open, and three
battered sailors
slogged out with obvious relief, happy to leave that
under-aged
terror to somebody who was armed.
But suddenly there was no more thunder from inside.
Instead, the door opened one last time, and the
Starfleet officer
stepped into the spilled coffee, dragging Jimmy
Kirk by the collar of
his jacket so hard that the jacket was nearly being
pulled off.
The boy allowed himself to be hauled, but like a convict
in the hands of an abusive guard. He refused
to look at his captor, only
blinked into the sea wind as he was made
to pass by his bitter
comrades and stand before the captain and the Starfleet
Security
team.
"You see the problem we had!" the captain insisted
to the
commander. "We saw the mistake, but too late!
Tell me-how did
you get him to come out? We had to fight! It was
terrible. You see my
men's faces-all scratched and hit. How did you
do it?"
The Starfleet man swallowed several times and stood
braced
against the ocean wind, holding the boy's arm with each of
them
standing as far from the other as possible.
"I didn't have a choice," he said. He looked
at the boy then, and spoke with a digging shame.
"He's my son."
THREE
"Petty theft... fraud ... shoplifting ...
leaving school without
permission ... falsifying identification ... breach
of public security ... unauthorized
use of private credit lines ... invasion
of official records and illegal use of accessed
information."
George Kirk's forefinger drummed on the
galley's scratched
tabletop, his face bayed by anger. With a flop of
oxblood hair
hanging in his face, brown eyes scowling, and his
scarlet and white
Security Division jacket collar bunched up
under his chin, he
looked like a mad rooster.
Under his boot soles, the rumble of the hovercraft
provided a
constant ugly drone. He was glad the two of them were
alone.
"You strike off to see the world and this is the gang you
follow? Lucy Pogue? Her juvenile record
didn't give you a hint that maybe
she was somebody you should avoid? Zack Malkin?
He's got a
computer crime file as long as his leg. Quentin
Monroe? A skinny,
sick kid. Brilliant choice. Tom
Beauvais? The only thing lower than
that backslider's goals are his grades. And
Emily!
You
talked her
into going, didn't you? A girl like that, on a
dynaship! You not only follow these junior-league
swindlers, but you entice somebody like Emily to go
along? What were you thinking?"
He hesitated, but got no answer.
After a few seconds he lowered his voice. "You
don't have a clue
how to pick the right people to be close to, do you?"
At the corner of the table, against the bulkhead, as far
down the
bench as he could get, Jimmy Kirk sat with his
knees flopped apart
and his touring cap pulled low over his eyes,
doomfully silent.
His father paused, ticked off five seconds, then
shifted his feet.
"Nothing to say?"
Like a prisoner of war, Jimmy remained
resolute, stony, and
refused to meet his interrogator's eyes. His
wait-it-out posture was
damningly effective.
"Okay, let's have it." Pacing across the tiny
cabin, George
demanded, "Who's the ringleader?"
Jimmy turned his head so his father wouldn't see the
smirk that
erupted on one side of his mouth. He tapped his
thumbs on the seat
of the chair, rattled his imaginary handcuffs, and
remained uncoop
erative.
"Who was it that invaded the voting records? Zack,
right? Was it
Beauvais's plan? Are you going to waste your life
following Tom
Beauvais around?"
Jimmy folded his arms, belittling his father with his
disinterest,
and slumped further.
"How were you expecting to survive once that ship
docked in
South America and those people were done with you?" George
demanded. "Do you have any clue how tough it is
to make a living down there?"
"I'd have been fine."
George stopped, gaped down at the unenchanting
representative
of youth, and wondered what button he'd pushed
to get an answer
that time.
"Fine?" he echoed. "Okay, let's say you'd have
been fine. Then
tell me what's down there for you. Why would you want
to go
there?"
"Didn't want to live at home anymore."
"Why not? What's so bad about home? It's a
decent little town,
isn't it? Lots of fresh air, polite Amish
neighbors still farming with
horses, close to enough cities that there's plenty for
you to
do-
legally . . .
how do you think this is affecting your mother?"
The touring cap's brim came up just enough for George
to see his
son's broiling eyes masked by a band of shadow. The
voice was a
grim dare.
"Leave her out of this."
Another light snapped on in George's head.
He widened his eyes
and nodded.
"Leave your mother out. Sure. Easy. Like she's not
home
worrying about you. Like she got up yesterday morning and
said,
'Oh, Jimmy's run away from home. Guess
I'll fry a couple less eggs
for breakfast today."" He paused and changed to a
tone that put this
issue on the top of the list of crimes. "You
should've heard her voice
when she contacted me," he said. "If you had, you
wouldn't say, "Leave her out of this.""
Stern as a circus firebreather, Jimmy folded
his arms tighter and
changed the subject.
"How'd you find us?"
George parted his lips to tell him, maybe get a
good gloat out of
all this, but then he changed his mind.
"Why? So we won't find you the next time? Forget
it."
He continued pacing.
"Now you'll be looking for ways to avoid being found
again, right? Why don't you tag along behind some
light-fingered punk
with a bright idea to
beam
out of Iowa? Does that sound fancy and
intriguing enough for you? Violate beaming regulations,
scramble
the patterns? Adventure enough for you? It's real
fast, y'know. I
sure couldn't trace you, not that it would make much
difference." He slapped his own thigh and added, "Your
leg'll end up on some
old lady's neck and I won't be able to do a thing
for you anyway. Sooner or later you're just going
to be too big for the safety net,
Jimmy, and you're going to fall through."
He leaned forward on the galley table and glared at
his son.
"Jimmy," he asked, "when is it going to dawn on
you that rules exist for a reason?"
The words settled poorly against the hovercraft's
hum.
He straightened. His head came into the
direct line of the cooking
light near the galley stove, turning part of his
hair carrot-red as though in punctuation.
"What is it you want?" he asked. "What're you
doing all this for?
What do you
want?"
Jimmy's eyes were cold. "Respect."
"I can't give that to you. You've got to earn it."
"Whooo," Jimmy mocked. "A zinger from the book
of parental
cliches. I'm burned."
His father straightened and swallowed hard. "I'm real
disgusted
with you, I want you to know that. Nothing like this is ever
going to
happen again. And when we get back to Riverside,
we're going to
figure out what to do about this."
Jimmy shifted his feet and, if possible, turned
farther away. "You
can try," he said doomfully. "But it's all just a
broken mirror to me,
"I don't know what to do."
George fingered the kitchen curtains and
looked out across the
tenant farmland he owned and the two Amish farms between
there
and Riverside. Off to his left he could see the
English River almost flowing out of its banks.
A fleeting memory of crossing that river on a
rented road-and-
float vehicle flicked back at him. There he
was, barely an adult
himself, with his wife, a toddling son, and a brand-new
baby boy,
antigravving across a swollen creek that laughed at
him for moving
in the spring instead of waiting two months until the
water dried up.
George and Winona Kirk, and their boys,
George Samuel, Junior,
and James Tiberius.
George winced. Poor kid, named after a
constellation . . .
"James T. Kirk . . . say it, pal!
Jimmy, look at me, buddy. Can you
say "James"? Say James Teee
..."
Images of their young family and the
anticipation of the future
shriveled as he realized what his younger son was
becoming.
"What can I do?" he asked quietly. "He's
too big to spank
...
I
can't lock him in his room, can't give him extra
chores . . . you can
do things to a six-year-old that you just can't do to a
sixteen-year-old
...
I can make him come home but I can't make
him stay. I can't help feeling that he's
salvageable, but he's fallen in
with the wrong crowd and now he's tight-lipped as a
convict. He's
going to turn into one if he stays on this track, and
I don't know
what to do to head it off. The beardless twirp won't
even talk to me.
What can I
do?"
Deep in the nearby farmlands, their Amish tenant and
his four
sons tilled the cornfields with horses and plows,
mirroring a more distant past than George could
imagine anymore. His mind was used to another kind
of field, a field of stars, tilled by cranky,
hard-working space vehicles held together with spit and
spare parts,
by people who rarely set foot on a real planet
anymore. Only on leave ... only in
emergencies ...
"I'm scared, Winn," he murmured. "My
boy's turning into a gangster, and I can't stop it."
Behind him, Winona Kirk stood with her arms folded
and her
one shoulder poetically against the wall. She was a
leaner, always
had been, always had her shoulder or her elbow or a
hand propped
against something, and did her best thinking while holding
up a
building.
"Sam was never like this," she said. "Jimmy's strong
and he's
rebellious, always a smoke-chaser, looking for
trouble and calling it
fun ... he's so much more skeptical than
Sam ever was, so much less fulfilled ..."
George turned and started to say something, but his
wife's appearance there in the natural light struck
him silent.
Her hair, a mass of tight buff curls, was
too much like Jimmy's. She even had her arms
folded the same way the boy did-both
hands tucked under, fists knotted-not in relaxation, but
in tension
and thought. Neither she nor Jimmy ever folded their
arms just to get them out of the way like most people did.
She still had her lab coat on and she didn't look
so different from the girl he'd eloped with-how long
ago? Almost twenty
years?
And after twenty years, the only things they had in
common were
the two boys. No animosity ... just not much in
common.
It hadn't been a problem when they were eighteen years
old.
Being married had been impressive all by itself at that
age. They'd
wanted to be completely grown-up, big man and
big woman. They
hadn't seen reality lurking behind the wedding
pictures. Prestige was the only trophy at that
age.
Then one year, two, three, a couple of children ...
and they'd discovered that being together at eighteen and being
together at twenty-five...
Between themselves, they'd made it work. For the children-
He sighed and walked toward her. "My emergency
leave won't last forever, you know."
"I know," she said. "Forty-eight hours, eighteen
of them gone
already."
Her voice was utterly passive. She'd gotten
used to his not being
around. They both had.
But this .. . this was too much for her to handle alone.
They both
felt that.
He paced right past her and halfway into the dining
room.
"Maybe I should leave Starfleet."
"Oh, cripe, there's an echo in here," Winn said.
"How many
times have I heard that?"
She turned to lean against the other shoulder so
she could still be
facing him.
"How is it going to help Jimmy to see his father
wandering
around the farm, bothering the Amish workers, knowing you
gave up your career because of him? And it'll straighten
him right out to see Mom and Dad carping at each
other." She smiled ruefully, but
her eyes were forgiving. "You know how we get when
we're too close
together for too long."
"Well, I'm not helping him from out there, am I?"
George
desperately bellowed.
She shrugged. "You're having some kind of effect on
him. First
chance he got, he headed for open water, didn't
he? All that sailing
stuff when he was little-not wasted, apparently."
"And not enough, apparently," he grunted. "Well,
you know
Jimmy best. I'll help if I can, Winn.
If he'll accept it-but I won't
make any bets. Got any suggestions?"
She pushed off the wall without unfolding her
arms. She
moseyed around the room, staring at the carpet and biting
her
lip.
When she turned, she looked squarely into her
husband's eyes.
"Take him into deep space with you."
George almost choked. "What?"
"It's an idea."
"Deep space? I can't do that! I'm in the
Diplomatic Corps's
Security Division! Our missions are touchy!
We deal with unstable
cultures, unknown sectors, border disputes,
angry representatives,
assassination attempts-nothing you take a
civilian on, much less a
kid
civilian! You get court-martialed for that! I go
dangerous
places!"
Her left shoulder went down and her eyebrows went
up.
"Then go someplace not so dangerous this once," she
said. She
paused, strode to the window at his side, and leaned
there for a
change. "We'd better show him there's something
better out there
than what happened to him the first time he went in
space, don't
you think? There must be something that's routine to you, but that
a sixteen-year-old will think is kind of enchanting.
Isn't there?
You've been promising him for years."
"I promised ... but you know what happened ...
whole sec
tions of space started to open up
...
I got called away-besides, he
didn't seem all that disappointed. He didn't
seem like he really
wanted to go."
"George, look back. You know what it's like to be
a boy. It's taboo
to show emotions like those. He saw that Sam wasn't
particularly
bothered by not going, and he didn't want to throw a
tantrum while
his big brother stayed cool-you know how that
is."
"Yeah, I know how that is." .
"And he didn't want to make you feel guilty
when you couldn't
work it out. Eventually, I guess he realized it
probably wouldn't
happen." She paused, tightened her arms around
herself, blinked
out the window, and frowned. "Come to think of it
...
that may
have been when he started to close up."
Turning a troubled gaze on his wife, George
let the revelation hit
him full in the face.
"Oh, God, is it my fault?" he murmured.
"Is it all my fault?"
She seemed troubled as he said that, and faced him.
"That's not
what I was after," she said quietly. "He's
responsible too. He's
sixteen, after all. I know it's an age when you
blame other people,
but still..."
"I've got to do something," George said,
pacing tightly. "I've got
to fix this."
"I always knew he would go away someday ... there's
something
in his eyes. He can't stay home." Winona
pulled at one of her own curls and twisted it while
she helped him feel guilty. "Use some of
those connections of yours. Why don't you do it,
George? Your son
needs more than just me these days. He needs to see a
man
work,
not a woman. He needs to see his father at work. And
you need to
spend time with him too. Go ahead ... take
Jimmy into space on
some safe little cakewalk. It'll be good for both of
you."
Ten hours later. . .
A Federation utility ground-to-space
stratotractor, in
space over the U.s.-Mexican border
Jimmy Kirk sat smoldering where he'd been
left in the miserable excuse for a galley, going
over how his father could have caught
him.
The porthole was thick and scratched and had
evidently served
duty as a dart board, because it had little round dirty
spots all over
it. Through those dirty spots, Jimmy looked down
at Earth.
Around him the stratotractor growled and burped. The
chunky,
squared-off utility crawler had looked more like a
sleeping rhino
than a space vehicle when he'd first seen it
only an hour earlier. But
yes, it launched into space, and yes, it made
orbit. When had vessels
gotten so ugly? Didn't anybody care what
ships looked like any
more?
Below, the planet was particularly sleepy. The sun
was just setting
over America, and there was a chalk-dusting of clouds
in the north.
Otherwise, not a storm to be seen.
Except here, in his own head.
He felt his mouth set hard and his teeth
grind. It awakened
something.
Here he was, in space. Big deal.
The walls were cold, the engines were a dull grumble,
the view of
space was empty and black, Earth looked like a
lonely old woman with white hair, and every ship
he'd seen so far was a battered old barge with too
many space hours in its log.
"Damned depressing," he proclaimed to the
porthole and the
planet, and the walls. Obeying the twist of
determination inside, he
got up, and his eyes went into a stiff squint.
"I'm not going. I'm
getting off this junkheap."
He pulled his cap low over his eyes, raised his
jacket collar like a
cat burglar trying to hide his face, and started going
through the
crew's lockers.
FOUR
"George! You crimson dragon! How are you?"
"Don't ask."
"Contentious as ever, eh?"
"Robert, please. Couldn't you be a little less
jolly once in a
while?"
A lanky forty-some-year-old fellow in a sweater
tilted sideways to
see past his cross-grained old friend and peer from under
an awning
of fluffy brown hair at the stratotractor's
foredeck lift. The opening
was small, as was usual in these planetary station
grunt vehicles, so
it couldn't hide much.
"Where's Jimmy?"
"Below."
"Of course-good for you! Taking no chances. Don't
want him to see you bashing dignitaries with a
pole-ax like you did the last time,
eh?"
"Quit rubbing that in! The greenhorn punk just
wouldn't come
up, that's all."
"Cat-and-doggish as ever, the two of you. What would
I do if George were not George and Jimmy were not
Jimmy? Ah, the
Kirks!"
Robert April shoved his hands into his cardigan
pockets, bunch
ing the shawl collar up around his jawline, shoved the
sweater
forward until it nearly hid his gold command tunic,
and regarded
George with open affection.
He rocked on his heels and grinned sentimentally.
Lean and
casual, his expression always neighborly,
Captain April still carried
a forbearance that betrayed him as a Coventry
uppercruster. He
was a happy, broad-gauged English string-puller
whose steady hand
had kept Starfleet on good footing since the
beginnings of the
long-range exploration program. Easily
imagined as Sir Robert or
Lord Robert, he had come to be regarded by his
crews as something
closer to Uncle Robert. He was a man to whom
life was a jubilee,
who could even take the jading tedium of space
travel without a hint
of wear, and he was as comfortable here on a maintenance
tractor's
foredeck as he was on the command bridge of a ship of the
line.
He'd ushered hundreds of young inductees into space
exploration as the Federation of Planets expanded,
simply by treating them as though they really could do this
remarkable thing and do it plenty
well.
To that dauntlessness George now pinned his last chance.
"Have you got a mission for me?" he asked.
Robert tilted a little forward as though sharing a
secret. "I've got
...
Faramond."
It sounded mysterious, especially the way he said it.
George tried
to get it in context, but there wasn't any.
"You got what?" he asked.
"Faramond," Robert repeated, smiling.
"Faramond. It's a planet.
And on it there's a newly discovered archaeological
mecca. A
massive project. George, wait until you
see it!" He spread his hands
illustratively. "They're dealing with an ancient
advanced
race.
Think of it! With an ordinary dig we'd have to be
careful, but we'd
never stumble upon anything we didn't understand. But this-this
is remarkable! The information at Faramond could boost
Federation science and medicine forward immeasurably.
It's comparable to scientists of Columbus's time
stumbling upon a sunken nuclear carrier, complete with
computers."
George tucked his chin and blinked. "Wow."
"Yes, very wow. And listen to this part-Faramond is a
cold
planet. No volcanic activity whatsoever for
ten million years, and
it's far from its star, so it had no heat to speak of at
all. We've had to build huge atmospheric
domes to work under. We're just now ready
to start the actual archaeology."
"Why would some advanced culture bother with
colonizing a
planet they had to heat up? That's a hell of a lot
of wasted energy,
isn't it?"
"That's what we want to know," Robert
corroborated. "If they
were interested in it, perhaps we'd better be also. It
wasn't used for
farming or mining, yet it was a massive complex,
obviously far beyond us. Then all at once the
entire culture packed up and left. And here's the
clinch
...
we haven't the frailest idea how
they left."
""How"? You mean "why"?"
"No, George," the captain insisted.
"How."
George squinted at him. "Are you telling me
there's no vessel
residue?"
"No vessel residue, no technological
droppings, no fossilized
dock casualties, in fact no remnants of
docks at all, no fuel film, no
space markers, nothing to take care of a ship,"
Robert said, and
paused. He spread his elbows in a shrug without
taking his hands
out of the pockets. "So how did they leave? It's a
sociological
mystery. And, George, we are finally ready to start
solving it. The Federation has asked me to break
ground with the "golden shovel,"
so to speak. Very easy on our parts, nothing to it."
He hesitated, sighed.
"I'm so wrapped up in the starship program, I
was thinking of turning them down until you contacted me
about Jimmy, and I thought how much he might grow at
seeing such a place, so far away. It's a minor
diplomatic mission ... well, I suppose
it's not minor to the fellows involved, is it? Glad
I thought of that," he added. "I wouldn't want
to disappoint anyone."
George, even in this choleric mood, couldn't
resist an appreciative chuckle and wondered how
a gate-crasher like him had ended
up with a friend like Robert. The thought eased him somewhat.
Robert April was well known to shun the lionizing
offered by a
grateful Federation of Planets as it bloomed
outward like a rose
bush, wanted little to do with the celebrity he deserved,
but he did
understand people's natural need to fuss and cheer.
George knew
Robert believed that's what kept the blooms on the
roses-the
spirit of exploration, as much as the purpose.
Drawing a breath that betrayed the tight hopes chewing
at him, George heard himself say, "I'll go
get the little gangster."
"Go easy on him, now," Robert admonished.
"He's probably
sitting alone, making a lip hang."
"Yeah, he thinks he's been bushwhacked. I'll
be right back."
"George-was
He spun on a heel. "Yes, sir?"
Robert's mouth quirked and he raised both
eyebrows. "I have a surprise for you."
As though he couldn't take a surprise, George
held still and asked
with his silence.
The captain grinned slyly. "We're going to take
her
out again."
For a moment George didn't understand. Then he
felt his nerves twist and realized what was
being waved before him.
"Are you kidding me?" he asked, staring.
Robert grinned wider.
Stepping feebly toward him, George gasped,
"Are you telling
me ... that my boy
...
is going to get to ride on
her?"
The silence between them tingled.
"I've gotten you out of your hitch with the
Diplomatic Corps,"
Robert said, "temporarily at least, and you're
going to be one of my
officers again. Won't that be like old times? Here we
are, thick as thieves, all set for adventure and
chivalry. Be quite something for
Jimmy to see, eh?"
He hadn't been told anything. Just asked a
favor. Hadn't been
given the details. Yet, Robert knew. Had
sensed, pieced it all
together, the needs of old friends. Even though he had
too many
other friends to count, Robert April had
known what two particular
friends needed.
How many strings had he pulled? How many favors
had he
cashed in?
She
was going to fly again, for the Kirk boys.
Overwhelmed and unable to hide it, George simply
murmured,
"I don't know what to say ..."
The captain gazed warmly at him. "She's
spacedocked. We're
almost there."
George's mouth dropped open. "You mean now?
Right now?"
"Right now."
"Oh, this is-this is
...
I'll get Jimmy! He's gotta see her from
the outside! How close are we? Where's she
docked? No-forget
that-it doesn't matter! This is great! Slow us
down, will you? No,
never mind! I'll move fast!"
He took the captain's nod as permission
to leave the deck, and
hopped the lift doubleqk, and just before the panel slid
shut he
stuck his head back out.
"Robert, you really know how to ice a cake!"
On a station stratotractor, from anywhere to anywhere was
a very
short jog. A matter of seconds put George
on the utility deck,
stepping between mooring harnesses and powerloaders to the little
crew galley where he'd left Jimmy sitting
alone.
"All right, champ, on your feet. Wait'aa you
see-was
He stepped in, and another second told him the
rest. There was
nothing in here but the gurgling snack dispenser.
"Ohhhhh-no!"
He left the galley on the run, stumbled over
two triaxial coils and
a spooled umbilical, and this time didn't wait
for the lift. This time
he climbed the companionway ladders, s queezing
past pitch adjust
ers, going directly from the trunk deck
to the anchoring deck to the tonnage deck, right into and
then past the crew saloons. He peeked
into every portal, every cargo gate, platform, hatch, and
hole, and
got strange glances from the crew. They weren't used
to anyone
hurrying, much less a Starfleet Security guy,
because nothing
ever
happened on a stratotractor.
Of course, they probably weren't used
to Starfleet officers hitch
ing rides on maintenance craft either.
He didn't stop, except for a brief few
seconds in one of the six
dispatch silos, where he spied a compact fellow in
a Security
uniform being pressed against a stored antigrav
pontoon by two
Neanderthal mechanics.
"Hey!" George shouted, stumbling off the ladder.
"What's this
about?"
Cocoa eyes and a burnished face turned to him and
called in
clipped Trinidad English, adding a West
Indies spice to the dull
deck. "Commander! Lieutenant Francis Drake
Reed reporting for
assault and battery! Kiss the stars at your timely
arrival! Tell these
walking rocks that my father was a priest and I never
cheat!"
George waved at the mechanics and barked,
"Back off, you
animals. He's under my command."
The mechanics were bigger than any four of
George, but obvious
ly weren't used to being ordered around by a Starfleet
officer.
George snapped at his subordinate and said,
"Trouble. Fall in."
"But I've-was
"I said trouble! Jimmy's gone!"
"Cow poo. Where can he go on a flying garage?"
"That's what scares me!"
Drake Reed dropped a bow at the two
mechanics he'd just fleeced
and started to make an exit statement.
"Pardon, all the thunderclap and shivaree,
but duty caaaa-was
And choked when George grabbed him by the collar and
hauled
him down that ladder.
In seconds they were clattering between decks.
"I told you it'd take two of us to watch that
kid!" George
blustered. "Why didn't you meet us at the
embarkation port?"
"I didn't even know you were on board yet,"
Drake protested. "A
witch doctor, am I? Brain juju? I can see
through walls?"
"And I told you not to run any games while you've
got your
uniform on. All I need is a complaint from the
dock superintendent
against my own lieutenant for gambling on duty.
What's the matter
with you? They could yank this tractor's dock
warrants for that! Do you know what a mess it is
to try to get your license out from under
a complaint? Every person on board can be waylaid
indefinitely!
Climb faster, will you?"
"I am a gentleman, not a lizard. Where could the
unripe lambkin
be?"
"I've got a hunch he's trying to get off the
stratotractor while
we're still in the spacedock area."
"Hunch away. I shall follow."
They dropped onto the messy shipment deck, and
George gave his assistant a push through crated
parts and structural segments.
"Check the removable airlocks! I'll check the
workbees!"
"Right." Drake started away, then spun around.
"What on a
spice rack could he do in a removable airlock?
They're only used for
transfer of pressure-sensitive cargo, yes?"
"Don't underestimate that snot. If it leaves the
ship, he could be
in it."
"But they have no thrusters!"
"Go!"
George waved him off with a frantic thrash and ran
in the other
direction, toward the row of four one-man
work pods that common
ly peppered space around docked vessels. Ugly
with claws, magnets,
antigravs, and hooks, the acorn-shaped bees could
attach to almost
any section of any kind of ship or dock section
while the man inside did mechanical or
electrical repairs. Otherwise, the bees were
pretty
low-tech. So small they were nicknamed potatoes and
their bays
were called pantries, they couldn't get far on their
own.
Barely far enough for a boy to blow away from a
stratotractor.
After that-a very hard landing.
Crossing with some difficulty into each pantry and
checking the
old-style hatches that took a workman's badge
code to get open,
George satisfied himself that two of the bees'
hatches hadn't been
tampered with.
The third one, though, was locked from inside.
He yanked his markline spike from its sheath
on his holster and
hammered the blunt end on the hatch.
"Jimmy! Open up! Open up, goddammit!"
There was no response from inside, but the on-line
lights were blinking on the external skin of the workbee.
It was preparing to
jump.
"Drake! Drake, over here!" he shouted, and
poked hopelessly at the outer control panels.
Nothing worked.
He started to shout again, then heard Drake's boots
thudding on
the deck behind him, and kept his attention on the hatch.
Risking detachment of the workbee with a ruptured seal,
George
turned his markline spike to the pointy end and started
prying at
the flexible seals around the airlock hatch. All the
fancy, flashy
weapons in the galaxy couldn't match a simple
eight-inch pointed
steel spike at moments like this. If he could just
rupture the seal
enough-before the workbee jumped free of its cowls-the
safety
system would take over and the big metal things holding
the
workbee wouldn't detach it.
Just enough-
Hshshshshshs
"Got it!"
When the airlock seal suddenly hissed, both
Security men felt the
rush of jackpot and alarm that comes only at moments
of truth. As
the hatch gave against his shoulder, George's
instincts and training
took over and his Fleet-issue laser pistol
swept out of its holster and
into his hands as though it had a life of its own.
He plunged in, locked both legs, fell
into aim-and-fire posture, and shouted, "Hold it!"
"George!" Drake blared.
Instantly George yanked up the barrel,
stumbled, and gasped,
"Jesus, what am I
doing!"
He and Drake gawked at each other. Could have been
funny.
Should have been.
Then they both looked again into the workbee's pilot
cubby.
There, not quite filling the man-size shell, cooking with
resent
ments, plots, and plans, Jimmy Kirk was
ready to make his escape.
He seemed more disgusted than embarrassed at having
been
caught, and he didn't move or attempt to cover
up what he'd been
doing. Maybe he was even proud of it.
Amber eyes that had once gazed at George in
adoration and
respect now burned with thankless acrimony-and it
took some of
the red out of George's hair to see it.
The boy was dry ice.
"You're pulling a weapon," he said, "on your own
son."
Jimmy's bulky, muscular body never flinched as
he glared at his
father. Still half-hidden between the touring cap and the raised
collar of his high school jacket, his eyes showed
belief in his own
sentiments. He had moved forward on his
decisions with all the
force of a teenager, and apparently he had no concern
that his
judgment might be bad or his course off.
He remained silent, pillorying his father with a full
load of
mean-mindedness.
Knowing when to keep his clapper tongue quiet,
Drake Reed
cautiously reached out and removed the laser pistol from
his
superior officer's hand.
His chest withering, George stared at his son and held
out his
bare palm.
"Jimmy, I
...
I'm sorry .. ."
Brooding, letting his victory burn, Jimmy
refused to show his
father the slightest sympathy.
Seconds ticked by without relief, until he
finally said, "Didn't
know the word was in your rule book."
George jabbed a finger at the boy's
face.
"Look, you retract your bristles, bud! What
were you thinking
anyway? These potatoes aren't toys! There are a
lot of ways to die in
space, but the worst one is to die of stupidity. You
can't get around
the security on this thing. The jump codes are-was
ENABLED ENABLED ENABLED
"How'd you do that? I'm
in
Security and I couldn't break this
security!"
The boy got up slowly.
"Too bad," he said.
He stepped past, barely brushing his father with a very
cold
shoulder, and got out of the workbee.
George sagged against the curved interior shell,
touched a hand
to his head, and groaned, "He's gonna be a
criminal..."
Drake clapped him on the back. "Buck up,
George. He can take my place as a
Starfleet legend."
He left George near the hatch and moved into the
cubby to shut
the potato down and buzz for a repair crew before
anything went
wrong.
At least, that was his cover. George knew Drake
was really giving
him time to go out there and handle his son alone.
Not just time, but a push.
He swallowed a couple of hard lumps, then
stepped out onto the
deck, feeling as though he had a butt full of
duckshot.
As far down the cluttered deck as could be, Jimmy
had retreated
to a coffin-size niche between two big
cargo-antigravs. There, he was waiting.
George approached without theatrics, and stood just out
of the
niche.
In the mirror of Jimmy's expression,
George's hopes saw them
selves and shivered. The resistance was palpable.
"Life's just one giant setback to you, isn't
it?" he asked.
The boy looked away from him, shoulders down, a
foot braced casually on one antigrav's
trunk.
"You knew which bricks to pull out," George began
again. "You'd have breached the couplings and gone off in the
potato without anybody knowing you were out there, without
following
any pattern, without announcing your presence in the
maintenance
channels-if you even got out of the pantry alive.
You could've
killed yourself detaching that piece of junk the wrong
way. Or you
could've killed somebody else if the pressurizing
went wrong in
here. You could've killed Drake or me."
He paused, searching for reaction. There was
absolutely none.
"Do you even care about that?" George added.
Jimmy folded his arms morbidly. He seemed
proud that he had used neither hindsight nor foresight,
and remained deaf to reason.
"You know what my dad always says," he answered.
was "In space,
you take your chances.""
He stalked farther into the niche, like walking rocket
fuel.
"Maybe you can help me a little here," George
said. "What'll
work with you?"
Jimmy's cheek was barely visible as he tossed a
response over his shoulder.
"How about raising the side of my crib?"
"Y'know, there's a lot to see in space if you'd just
unclench your tight ass and open your eyes!"
George struggled.
"Thanks for the advice."
"How old do you figure sixteen is? Wait
till you hit twenty. In the
Academy they give you tests you can't even win!"
The boy turned, scowled at him, and refused to be
impressed.
"Any game can be won."
"Oh, is that right? How'11 you ever know if you can't
even get past
the entrance exam?"
"I could get into Starfleet's monkey farm
if I
wanted to. Who says I couldn't?"
"Your grades, that's who." George
pointed back at the workbee.
"Why don't you put some of those smarts into your
schoolwork?
You mother enrolled you in the pre-Academy program
so you'd
have a little direction, not so you'd have a reason to go
become
some half-cocked vagabond on Earth. You mother and
I have
always tried not to compare you to Sam, but-was
"What do you know about how things are on Earth?" the
boy
challenged. "What do you know about Mom and Sam?
We've
gotten along just fine without you. Our names aren't in
your Fleet
manual."
George flopped his arms at his sides. "So
you're just going to
sneak back to Riverside and follow that pack of
delinquents around
until you hatchet your life. Good plan."
"Guess I better spend my life dodging
black holes and pretending
aliens don't smell. Thanks for the
advice."
The tone was completely composed, even dry. There
wasn't even
the satisfaction of scorn for George to cling to.
He stepped back, giving Jimmy room to not get
close. "All right, come out of there. Captain
April's waiting to see you. That's how it
is, you know, when you come on board a ship, you
report to your
commanding officer."
"So now he's captain of a station tractor?" the
boy commented as he moved with damning slowness toward his
father. "Thought he'd
be doing better by now."
"These things don't have captains, and you know it,"
George
said. "Now, move. We're going to show you what he
is
captain of."
FIVE
"Jimmy, hello! Why, you look as if you've
lost your dog."
Captain April spread his arms in welcome as
George pushed his
son out of the lift.
Jimmy Kirk wagged a hand but refused to speak.
Before him,
framed by struts and strings of lights outside-were
those part of
the spacedock?-Robert April gazed at him with
complete under
standing and tolerance, and the last thing Jimmy wanted right
now
was to be understood or tolerated.
A shove between his shoulder blades told him he
wasn't moving
fast enough.
He stepped down to the foredeck, putting space between
himself
and his father.
Captain April was already gesturing him forward.
"Take a look at
the moored vessels, Jimmy. And the service
docks. It's all quite
stirring in its labyrinthan way."
Bitter refusals popped into Jimmy's head
while he was trying to
envision whatever
labyrinthan
meant, but he couldn't push out any
cracks as Captain April gathered him toward the
wide, curved
viewportal.
Jimmy was stiff, but he couldn't help seeing. If
he turned around,
all he'd see was his father.
Out there, in geo-somethingerother orbit over Africa,
was a
tangle of spacedockage whose organization wasn't
immediately
clear.
"Looks like a girder factory puked," he said.
"Yes, doesn't it?" the captain said with a grin.
"All around here
are merchant ships in for repairs or refits.
They'll go a few at a time
into the structural docks . .. and that bunch of
angular things is the
LBR complex for spacefaring vehicles not carrying
passengers.
Loading, building, repair. Isn't it pretty
in its industrial way?"
The strings of docklights were garish, but the dock
girders
themselves didn't catch any light, not even
the sunlight, and had
probably been painted with low-reflective paint
to keep unexpected
flashes from being mistaken for docking lights or
buoys.
At least, that's what I would do,
Jimmy thought, and mentally
retreated for a moment to imagine building a thing like this
if he had to.
Rather than going around the skeleton of red and blue
girders, the
stratotractor plodded right through the center,
apparently having all its passage warrants in
order. Jimmy had tried not to pay attention, but
he'd picked up enough casual conversation to know that
warrants and patterns were the only way to keep
robotic
vessels, or any kind of vessels, from knocking
into one another and
into the dock brackets.
He cleared his throat and pressed his lips tight,
annoyed with himself for having paid attention without meaning
to.
"These funny-looking beams have names," the captain
explained, pointing as he spoke. "They
seem snarled up, but they're
not really. Those extra-long ones are longitudinal
antigravity pon
toons. They're always in line with the longitudes on
the planet's
surface-don't ask me why. But the entire
dockage can be dropped out of orbit and landed on the
planet, or taken apart and pieces of it
landed, with vessels inside. Doesn't happen very
often, but now and
again it's handy. Oh, look there. No, no,
directly above us
...
crane
your neck a bit-that curved area above us-see it?"
"I see it."
"That's called a head wall. The curved bows of
most Federation-
standard vessels fit right in there. See the slings and
clews that hold
a large ship in place on the cutting stage? And
those over there are
built-beams we call backbones. All these
ships are being worked on
in some capacity. You can see that each one
is flashing a blue light
directly between two red lights, vertical to the
ship's lines? Those are their not-under-command lights."
Still aware of his father standing silent behind them, Jimmy
only
grunted, determined to remain undazzled.
As they passed through the metallic mess, stringed
lights sprin
kled their colors on Captain April's face and
made the smile lines crease around his eyes. He
pointed at several vessels, all different
shapes and sizes, which weren't in the dock complex, but
were
floating free in space, tethered by umbilicals
to orbiting tanks.
"Those barges and clippers are in for resupply,"
Captain April
said. "That's why they're at external moorings.
There's no reason to
take up dockspace with them. Most of these are
merchantmen
under contracts of affreightment with the Federation. The
large
ones are the clippers. They'll go from here to the DLO
ports, which
means "dispatch and loading only." The big ones
carry bale cargo.
That's raw material that comes wrapped in bunches.
Their holds are
called bale capacity or bale cubic. Makes
sense, doesn't it?"
"Yeah, great," Jimmy chewed out of the corner of his
mouth.
"The smaller ones, the barges, usually carry bulk
cargo," April
went on, "which is anything stored loose, not boxed,
baled, crated,
or casked. Flowing stuff, like liquid fuel, for
instance, or even water
for outposts. They can get their Bill of Entry
directly from the
dockmaster, along with certificates of registry,
bond notes, ware
housing tickets, and Bills of Lading, without having
to set foot
planetside. All the customs inspections,
trade appraisals, and
damage surveys can be done right here on the spot.
It's really all
very smart and allows for what we call
"customary dispatch." That's
the quick, lawful, and diligent loading and discharge of
vessels." He
drew a long breath as though inhaling in a garden, then
let it out
slowly. "Ah, it still gives me a chill to see how
well we carry on such
things!"
Jimmy bit the inside of his cheek to keep from
reacting. Trying
not to show on his face that half of that information had just
flushed
in one ear and out the other without stopping to check in, he
suddenly felt very small. The trick of getting
himself and five
friends from Iowa to Oregon had seemed tough enough.
Now it withered against the problems of moving a spaceship
and cargo
from here to there. Space had seemed drawing-board
simple while
he was sitting on Earth ... bills of what? What
kind of tickets?
Surveys? Notes?
Luckily, Captain April didn't look at
him, but instead was waving
a hand appreciatively across their view.
"All these are involved in what we call the coasting
trade," he
added. "That's moving cargo within the Federation of
Planets, or to
colonies settled by our member planets."
Jimmy tried to spit a "Who cares?" but couldn't.
If it had been
anybody else talking to him-
April's hand curled over Jimmy's shoulder.
"And there," the captain added proudly, "is
Starbase One."
As the stratotractor left the tangle of
dockage and came out into
open space again, they saw before them the majesty of
what
mankind had built on its own doorstep.
A hard lump of air made Jimmy tuck his chin
when he had to
swallow.
Starbase One ...
A man-made heaven, beside Earth.
A giant silver spool with thread of lights,
rotating slowly on its
own axis, whispering into a boy's ears,
First of my kind, first of my
kind, welcome, welcome.
Jimmy swallowed a smile. He offered Starbase
One only a
constricted eagle eye.
He tried not to listen, just as he had ignored the
whispering of the Skunk River, but these things spoke
to him somehow and he could
never forget. That's how it had always been. The distance
had
always whispered to him. The sunset, the howling wind, the
hum of
aircraft, the shiver of sails. Anything a
hundred miles beyond
wherever he was standing. Testimonials to the great
outside had
always whispered to Jimmy Kirk.
He gazed down through the popcorn clouds at the
planet below,
at the detail offered to him by the special windows and the
cameras
that brought pictures up to the monitors above himself and
Captain
April, and, trying to keep a handle on his
narrowmindedness, he
muttered, "Guess you can't bathe nude in your
backyard any
more."
"Mmm, guess not," April responded. "In
fact, Starfleet has expressly requested that
officers not do that."
A smile pulled, but Jimmy chewed it down.
"Before many more years," April went on, "I hope
to have officers who won't have to worry about that sort of
thing . .. you know, the kind who don't have clothes
to take off."
Jimmy leered at him. "Huh?"
"Aliens. I hope to attract more aliens
into Starfleet."
"Why? Who needs "em?"
"Don't you think that would make service more interesting?
More noninsular, so to speak?"
"Not for me. I wouldn't want to spend my time working
next to some slimy lieutenant with a tentacle."
"Well, why not? You, the adventurous type who
doesn't care what's around the next tree? Why,
I'd have thought you'd be the
type clawing to get out to space, Jimmy."
The boy turned suddenly and purposely dark.
"I've been to space," he said sourly.
"Once."
New silence broke out as the forward area opened up
and showed
spines.
April shifted uneasily, realizing his error.
"Oh," he uttered. "Yes ... of course you have.
Sorry."
Jimmy bathed in the syrup of satisfaction while
keeping his face
bitter, then coldly added, "Don't apologize
to me. I'm one of the ones that lived."
Great. Played right into his hands. He knew his father
was back there, holding his breath, hoping for a reaction.
There would be none. There would be only a prisoner's
glower, only disdain for that which had taken him away from
where he wanted to be, when they all knew he had a
fair reason for never wanting to go into space again.
They were taking him away from Earth, away from
Emily, away from those who did what he told them
to do.
Though he was seeing the glittering spacedocks and the
magnifi
cence of Starbase One, Jimmy peered only through his
own savage
tunnel vision. He worked so hard to keep
his face barren that his
cheeks got stiff and his eye muscles actually
hurt. Squinting them a
little in the docklights helped, and he hoped it
looked like a frown.
No matter how the struts glowed in the sun's
aurora or how the
strings of docklights shimmered on the transport
ships, he refused to be impressed. He kept his
body stiff and aweless.
It took every ounce of his willpower to deny his father even
the
smallest satisfaction. Keeping his face a
practice in nonwonder, he
stood before Niagara Falls and felt no spray.
After a few more seconds of calculated nothing,
Jimmy got his
reward.
"I'll go make sure Drake's all right," his
father said from behind
them. "Don't want him accidentally locked inside
a damaged
potato. I'll
...
be right back."
A twinge of victory ran up Jimmy's spine.
His father sounded
defeated.
Captain April turned. "George, didn't you
want to see
...
you
know."
As the lift panel slid open, George Kirk
appeared surly and
crestfallen.
"I don't know if I want to see her or not right
now, Robert," he
muttered, and simply left.
The panel sighed shut. Now Jimmy was alone with
Captain April
and that field of astonishments out there. They looked at
each
other.
No matter how he tried, Jimmy couldn't muster
the same rude disregard for Robert April that he
gave his father. So he kept his
father in mind in order to keep the chill on his face.
"Who's 'her"?" he asked, bristling.
Captain April blinked.
"Beg pardon? Oh!" Then he chuckled. "Oh,
you'll see soon
enough. An old friend of your father's and mine, you might
say.
He'll perk up when he sees her, don't you
worry."
"I don't care."
"You don't care? That's no way to talk, my
boy."
"Isn't it? He held a gun on me."
"Oh, now, Jimmy!" the captain admonished.
"Is this the same
family I spend Christmases with?"
Jimmy shrugged. "Shows how he thinks of me, that's
all I know."
"Certain it wasn't just instinct at work?" His grin
twisted
warmly. "A Security commander has to go on instinct
more than most of us. Don't you realize that?"
Eyes still hard, Jimmy charged, "Is that a
reason?"
"No, no, of course not... let's try to forget
it, shall we? We're all
starting out on a wonderful adventure. We won't
let a bit of
domestic sandpaper spoil it, will we? Of course
not. Oh, look! See
those little one- and two-man worker vehicles? We have
funny
names for those, like potatoes and hedgehogs and
sandbaggers-was
"Sandbaggers," Jimmy repeated. "That comes from
wooden
racing boats."
The captain looked at him. "Does it? How so?"
Suddenly on the spot, Jimmy sifted for a nearly
faded memory.
"The East Coast. . . sandbaggers were racing
sloops in the 1860's, I
think. They had big sails with extra-long booms,
and they used
sandbags for movable ballast. Every time the boat
tacked, they'd
toss the sandbags to windward."
"Really! What a spartan way to run a race!
Must've taken a great
deal of skill and timing. Where'd you learn about such a
thing?"
Sensing he was being cornered, Jimmy shoved his
enthusiasm
into retreat. He wasn't about to say where he'd
learned that. It
would mean mentioning his father.
"Just happened to hear about it," he muttered.
"It's champion that you know these things," Captain
April said
genuinely. "Spacefaring is just an extension of
basic seamanship.
Good fellow. Proud of you!"
He clapped a congratulations on Jimmy's
shoulder and kept his hand there as he gazed at
Starbase One.
Jimmy felt heat rising in his cheeks. He stewed
in silence as the stratotractor moved across the
starbase's main doors.
And didn't go in.
When he realized that, Jimmy straightened and
frowned.
"What's going on? Where are we going?"
A cagey grin appeared on Captain April's
lips. "We're going
around to the other side of the base, to the Starfleet box
dock."
"Why? I thought we were going someplace on this-was
Bucket of bolts.
"comship."
"Oh, no. We're going on another ship, my
boy. Another ship altogether. Look . .."
The stratotractor was just coming around the starbase,
breaking
out into open space with the planet glowing at their left,
half in
daylight and half in night. In the coal-black
distance shimmered the
thing April had called the box dock.
It was an elongated red hexagon hovering there in the
blackness,
peaceful and separate, glowing with rectangular
lighting bars much
softer than the strings of lights on the merchant
spacedocks.
There was something inside it.
Something white.
Jimmy pressed his shoulder against the rim of the
viewport and
determined to remain composed. He would offer a nodding
accept
ance to whatever Robert April showed him, and an
open derisive
ness to whatever his father showed him. He made
promises to
himself. He folded his arms and let his hands go limp
at his sides to
show how bored he was.
"This is Captain April aboard Strato 838,
requesting permission
to approach."
"Acknowledged, Captain. You're free
to approach. Please use the
port side arrival patterns and fall
into magnetic tractor beam
port-four for docking. We'll do the rest."
"I will, thank you. April out."
A few more clips and taps, and the robotic piloting
took over.
They drew closer and closer to the box dock, moving
higher into orbit, up, up, up toward the box
dock-until the angle of the dock's
ribs could no longer hide what hovered inside.
Robert leaned forward in nothing but love.
Bathed in beaconage, there
she
was. The gazingstock of Starfleet,
With the diamondlike poise of a resting Lippizaner
stallion, a
huge milk-white ship beguiled the blackness.
Two pencil-shaped
warp nacelles pierced back from her lower hull,
implying speed.
The lower hull, where mankind's genius of engineering
found
expression, provided the ship's sense of ballast.
Robert knew those
impressions had been designed into her in defiance of
common-
place understanding that a ship in space could be shaped like
almost anything. There was no wind resistance to consider
here. Here, such
a ship was designed for only two things purpose
. . . and raw
inspiration.
He knew. He had been there at the beginning. Seen
the design
plans. Seen the flash in the eyes of the designers.
Heard their gasps
of hope. He had touched Starfleet in its
embryonic years, known
and worked with the intrepid designers who dared have ideas,
and
this was the brilliant white mystery that came
from those ideas.
As they came around to the fore of the ship, Robert gazed
up and
smiled at the primary hull, spreading above their
approach like the
bell of a great bass horn waiting for a tuning
note. For the first time
they were given a view of the entire ship, without
interruption by
dock struts.
There was a sound at his side, barely audible. One
of those little
human sounds there's no name for but that all humans
recognize.
Robert glanced-and noticed the change.
Beside him, Jimmy Kirk was canted forward over the
panel,
committing the deadly sin of enthusiasm. He forgot his
sworn duty
to melancholy, and stared.
Robert April placed a warm hand on the boy's
hunched shoulder,
and spoke with quiet adoration.
"We call her
...
Enterprise."
"She's a starship, Jimmy... isn't that a
masterful word?
Starship ... her express purpose is to roam
free to untouched stars.
And she has the power to do it too. She and her kind will
hammer
through the frontiers of space, approach and contact
faraway
civilizations, bridge cultures, learn, share,
grow ... she's a flintbox
for the firewalkers among us. The starship
Enterprise."
He hesitated, drew another breath, then sighed
heavily.
"Isn't she a royal flush," he murmured.
Before them was the calm, elegant antithesis of
Iowa. Jimmy
knew his lips were hanging open, knew his shoulders were
chinked
forward and that he was leaning on both hands as though he
wanted
to break right through this viewport and touch her-he knew
all
that.
And could no more stop it than get out and fly.
He was going to go aboard
that...
"She's a testimony to just how much good mankind can
do,"
Captain April went on. "The first of her kind.
Our flagship. Her engine s are the first full
time-warp commodities. She's built for
constant thrust, none of the usual getting up to a
speed, then going
on momentum. She just keeps going faster and faster
until the
captain tells her not to. We're not even sure
how fast she'll be able to go eventually. Until now
she's been on a few stressing-out missions,
but soon she'll be embarking on a series of
five-year missions in
deep space. We're going to go out, take our
technology with us, our
medicine, our dreams, our tenacity, our willingness
to help and the
wisdom we've gotten from our own mistakes ...
we're going to
climb aboard that mastercraft, and we're going
to head out. In time
there'll be a dozen like her, going in a dozen
directions for years at a
time. They'll be like the first pioneers who went out in a
reed
boat
...
no contact with anyone, no help nearby, relying
on their
own spit and thatch to survive. That's adventure,
Jimmy ... real
adventure. Isn't she something to write home
about?"
Behind them, George Kirk stood in silence with
Drake Reed.
Robert and the boy hadn't heard them come back
in-or
were too captivated to notice. George's own
attention was swal
lowed up too by the giant white angel, shellacked
and mounted
on ebony before them. He and Drake barely breathed
at the
sight of her.
George hadn't seen the starship in almost five
years. Not since all
the decals, pennants, and insignia had been added.
He had known
her only as a white-on-white masterpiece with
lights. Now, though,
she was decorated with red nail polish and black
eyebrow pencil in
fine, unblended lines, and she said who she was and who
had made
her, and she said it with all the simplicity and pride
of naval
tradition.
NCC1701. . . USS Enterprise . . .
Starfleet, United Federation of
Planets.
But even this wasn't the shock of the day for George
Kirk.
Now he gazed no longer at the ship, not at
Robert, who was softly
talking, but at his own son-
-
who was
listening.
Jimmy the unbeguiled, Jimmy the hard, Jimmy
the cold ... was
leaning so far forward he was almost climbing on
the control panels.
He was poised on all ten fingertips, his face a
sheen of reflections from the starship.
For the first time in years, George saw his son's
brick wall of
disillusionment begin to crack.
"I don't understand the doomsayers among us,"
Robert was saying softly, "those who think of our
culture as some kind of
disease, who say we should hide and not inflict ourselves
upon the
galaxy ... after all, look what we've done!"
The boy was looking. He didn't blink. Couldn't
turn away.
Couldn't belittle what he saw.
Beside him, Robert April smiled, let his voice
go higher with excitement, and added, "If that was
circling above your planet,
wouldn't you
want
to talk to her?"
The four stood, two in front, two behind, as the
stratotractor
followed a prenegotiated path on invisible
magnetic beams
along the starship's port side. The cold-cream
hide of the ship
reflected the docklights in blurred pools and
cast them back on
their faces.
Then, there were voices again.
"This is Captain April, requesting permission
to come aboard
this lovely lady of ours."
A raspy but competent voice responded, one that
seemed very
used to the jargon of such moments.
"Simon here, Captain. Permission granted and
welcome back.
We've got you on approach. You're clear for
docking, port torpedo loading bay."
"Thank you,
Enterprise.
Pleasure's all ours. April out."
Robert angled away from the viewport, and only
then noticed George and Drake.
"Ah, gentlemen, you're back. That was my first
officer. You'll like
her. She's almost as old as Starfleet and twice as
experienced. She's
a grandmother too, so she knows how to handle peppery little
boys!"
He poked Jimmy, but withdrew his hand quickly when the
boy
winced and smashed backward into the wall as though he'd
been hit
with an electric shock.
"Oh, Jimmy!" Robert said. "Sorry-didn't
meant to startle
you."
The boy gaped at him, seemed confused, then
noticed his father
and Drake, and fought to get control of himself again.
Deliberately
he did
not
look back out the viewport. He avoided watching
as the
vessel they were in approached the starship's gleaming
secondary
hull.
Now there was nothing but panels of hull material,
faintly dotted
with rivets and fitted bandings, little flashing lights,
and the portal to which some part of this ship would go in
like a foot
into a shoe.
Then they would be on board the starship, and Jimmy
wouldn't have to look at her from out here again.
He seemed to be holding his breath, waiting for that, so
he could get control again.
"Jimmy, you all right?" Robert asked with a
sympathetic grin.
Before their very eyes, the portcullis of resentment
slammed
down again between them and George's son. The sensation was
so
strong, so obvious, that Robert actually backed
away a step and George had to buck an urge
to leap inside before the gate came
down.
He didn't make it. They could almost hear the
clang.
"If I was all right," the boy snarled, "I
wouldn't be here."
George felt his whole body tighten. "You watch
your lip, buster.
That's Captain April you're talking to."
If the reprimand had any effect on Jimmy, they
couldn't see
it-except that he didn't say anything else.
He held very still a moment, broiling, then stepped
around his
father toward the lift.
"Keep track of him, Drake," George
snapped.
Drake nodded, but it was Jimmy who turned and
spoke.
"Don't worry," the boy said. "He's got me
in custody."
He stepped to the lift, the panel opened, he got
in, Drake
followed, and that was that.
Once the lift panel breathed shut, George
sagged as though he'd
just survived a bar fight.
Robert sidled toward him, both hands balled in his
cardigan's
pockets, his expression one of affection and even
amusement.
"George, he's a wonderful boy."
"He's a brat!"
"Oh, yes
...
but he's a
wonderful
brat!"
Part Two
THE BRIDGE
SIX
USS
Enterprise
1701-A
"Hard to think of
Bill of Rights
as one of a whole new breed of
starship, isn't it?"
"No," Jim Kirk said. "It's hard to think of
kids like Alma Roth
commanding ships of their own. There's a difference."
"Well... that's what I meant."
Leonard McCoy kept his voice down as he
joined the captain on
the command deck. With everything going on, it was easy for
him to
remain ignored. Attempting to ease this awful
time-the time that
was always awful, the interim of travel between realizing
there was
trouble and getting to the trouble-he tugged the
breast flap of his
uniform jacket down from his throat into its informal
position.
He thought he was helping the moment, but the captain's
voice
told him there wasn't any way to cotton-dab the
sensation of dread
they both had.
"Alma Roth's not a kid, Jim," he said.
"She's thirty-six ...
thirty-seven, by now, isn't she?"
"A kid," the captain sighed. "They're all
kids. All the midship
men and ensigns who signed on my ships and let me
risk their lives
for them ... they're all my kids."
McCoy grunted. "Maybe you've gotta be young
to let somebody else make decisions for you. Beats
me. It's not like I remember after
all these years. Like you said, Jim, things change.
Styles change ... starships change."
"What is it you want, Bones?" Kirk said.
"Want to hear me say
I'm jealous of another breed of ship? All right.
. . I'm jealous. I
wish Roth was back on the engineering deck below just like
she was
for ten of those thirty-seven years, helping us get
through this
flushback. She gave me years of devoted
service with no questions,
and when she asked for a recommendation to command school,
I
gave her one. How many of those make it to a starship
command?
Two percent? Three? But she had the strong
recommendation of a
starship commander. I may have put more on her than she
could
carry. Now she's out there, in the middle of whatever's
happening.
Probably dead, along with four hundred and ninety
other young
crewmen. How many were mine, Bones? How many did
I train to
go out there and take these wild risks?"
McCoy squirmed self-consciously. "Didn't
mean to bring up a
sore subject, Jim."
"It's not a sore subject," Kirk
said. "You know I don't believe in wishes. But
she's out there, and her crew, and her ship, maybe in
a
million pieces, and that's what I hate."
His tone turned bitter, grinding, and his eyes grew
harder. He
glared at the screen, because he couldn't give another
person this look that had a captain's despise at
its core.
"They're telling me the
Enterprise
and the entire Constitution-
class of starship is going to be decommissioned,
eclipsed by a new
breed of ship, new technology, new everything.
They're saying skis
can replace a toboggan. Or the other way around,
for that matter.
Depends on prevailing conditions. On who's
traveling. And what
the mission is. Every design of ship has a unique
purpose, and a
balance of ability all to itself."
McCoy groaned in some kind of agreement. "But you
know as
well as I do the Federation's dazzled by all the
labs and science and
fancy analytical gear on those big ships.
They've got exploration on
their minds, and not much else. I don't think they're
remembering how flexible a starship needs to be these
days. Some people don't
want to face the facts."
"Federation delegates haven't been out in rough seas
like we have,
Bones," Kirk agreed. "Damned few people see the
back alleys of
space. It took Starfleet to go out and get in the
dirt. We were cavalry.
We went out first."
The doctor tried to conjure something to say out of his
black bag
of psychological potions, but he was too set
back by the captain's
use of past tense.
Went. Were.
Kirk broiled that hard glare of his at the
panorama of passing
space before them. He looked at nothing else.
"Not only Roth, b ut all the other people
aboard that ship who
started out on the
Enterprise,"
he said. "I owe them."
"I think they owe you," McCoy corrected.
Kirk tucked his lower lip and shook his head.
"That's not the way a captain sees it. When
crewmen give their youths to a commander
and a ship, they're owed something back. Even if it
happens later.
No matter where it happens," he added, "or how
much later."
Brow puckering with curiosity now, McCoy
determined to fill in
the holes that were still gaping for him.
"Do you know something about this place?" he asked.
"I've
never heard of Farmon."
Kirk glanced at him, annoyed, then away again.
"Faramond."
"Jim, can't you take a hint? I've been inside
kicking distance of
you for twenty-five years and I've never heard of this
place. If I had
to testify, I'd say you've never been
there."
"I never have been," Kirk said.
Yet, his old friend could read that it wasn't just
evasion. It was
some tainted sentiment at work. A memory of a
burn.
"Never quite made it," the captain added.
"Okay ... why not?" McCoy prodded. "What
got in the way?"
In spite of the storm cones fluttering in their heads,
the alarms
and whistles and horns going off all over the ship that
somehow they
could hear right through the soundproof decks-because their
years here had better senses than their ears
did-both men had
their minds on something else entirely.
It shone in the captain's hazel eyes ...
resentment of space, yet
the inability to stay away from it. They had both been
drawn to the
fire. They had given up everything for it. Their youth.
A chance for
anchorage. Family. Home. Children.
Magnetism of space. Adventure always
one light-year beyond
wherever they stopped. Just one more light-year. Just one more
after that.
The captain parted his lips and spoke to the flowing
distance. "I
was busy," he said, "finding out I wasn't
perfect."
"Well, George? How did you like seeing the ship
with all her decals
and insignia and emblems in place? Her name on her
bow, her
lights encoded-was
"Great. Fine."
George tried to knuckle away a flop of his
argumentative sienna
shag as it fell in his face, but it wouldn't go. He
felt his facial
features stiff as rock beneath it. That was all he
needed. To stalk
around the
Enterprise
looking like a chip that fell off Mount Rushmore
...
"Sorry," he said as they turned the corridor
corner toward the
turbolift.
"Not at all," Robert brushed off.
George stepped aside to let the captain board the
turbolift first. "Where's the brat?"
"I believe Drake is showing him around engineering just
to keep
him busy. They'll be meeting us on the bridge."
As the lift door
gushed closed, Robert asked again, "Well? You
didn't answer my question."
"What question?" George groused. "Oh-the ship.
She looks
different, Robert, real different. Gorgeous ...
kinda scary."
"Really? How do you mean?"
"I don't know ... pretty, but
...
she's got authority now. She's
got all that Starfleet makeup on her hull now,
all those red streaks
and blue things, and all those lights shining, and her name
right out
there, and her construction contract number . . . you
know, I didn't
remember her being so
...
so goddamned
big."
Robert chuckled. "You were right about letting Jimmy
get a look at her in spacedock. A ship
doesn't look quite the same from inside,
does it? A wise sailor," he said, fanning his
arms, "will one time
stand upon the shore and watch his ship sail by, that he
shall from
then on appreciate not being left behind." He
grinned and added,
"Eh?"
George gave him a little grimace. "Who's that?
Melville? Or C. S.
Forrester?"
"It's me!" Robert complained. "Can't I be
profound now and
again?"
"Hell, no."
"Why not?"
"Because you're still alive. Gotta be dead to be
profound."
"You're unchivalrous, George."
"Yeah, I know."
"All that savage Celtic blood in you. Same
color as your hair.
Good thing Jimmy looks like his mother."
"Mmm," George grunted. "He's still got the
blood though. That's
the problem. Winona gave all her nice pink
civilized blood to Sam."
"Yes, how is Sam?" Robert asked affably.
"Qualified for the Science Academy in
biosciences. Can you
believe that? I can't even spell it."
"Same girlfriend?"
"Sure, same one. All the way through high
school, two years of
college, swears he's going to marry her after they
both graduate.
What I wouldn't give to see some of that consistency in
Jimmy.
Every
week,
a new scheme and a new girl."
"Ah, well," Robert sighed, "that's because he's-was
"A Casanova. I know, I know."
"No, George, no." Smiling and using that
twinkle he kept in his
eyes for just such moments, Robert leaned back against
the lift wall and gave him one of those looks that
made people think of him as a
kindly uncle. "Not one of those at all."
"Okay. Don Juan."
"Oh, George, you're missing my point."
"What point? That my son's a wolf? I don't
think he's seen me
and Winn together enough in his life, Robert. She and I
were better
off apart, but I never thought-was Unexpected pain
came into
George's expression, and he sighed in a disturbed
way. "I guess it's
one of the ways I
...
butchered my family life."
"George," Robert uttered with scolding
sympathy. "You're a bit
clumsy at being a parent, but you want to catch the
boy before he
goes over the side."
"Can you blame me?" George tried to keep
control, but his voice rippled. He sighed to cover
it. "In space one time, and that one time
he witnessed a mass ... mass ..."
"Execution," Robert assisted, "by a man who
thought thousands
of lives could be better run from a central power.
The lesson was
well taken by the Federation, at very least. We saw in
a painful manner that no power at the top can do
better than thousands of
individuals all scrambling and deciding and trying
and sweating for
themselves, not even in a situation as desperate as
Tarsus Four that
day. Better to starve with a bit of hope than be
marched off and
slaughtered in the name of nobility."
Robert paused, stuck his hands into his sweater
pockets, then
pushed them out and poked along, gazing at his feet as
though
picking his way across cobblestones.
"Kodos the Executioner... they, um, never found
him, did
they?"
"No," George choked.
"I'd
like to find the bastard-what he put
my family through, and me through ... wondering if my
wife and
sons would be found among the survivors or among the
charred
corpses-was He crushed his eyes shut and winced.
"Nobody-
nobody-should decide what somebody else's
sacrifice is going to
be! Dammit, I wasn't going to think about this-was
"Didn't mean to fan an old flame, George,
but you can't beat
some things down."
"I don't want to talk about it, okay? I
don't want to step out onto
the bridge, talking about this."
"All right, as you wish."
The lift eased to a stop and the doors brushed open,
and Robert
stepped out first, but not before nipping, "We'll talk
about it later."
George lingered in the lift until he gained
control over his
scowl of response. He was always surprised by that
little bird of
persistence nesting under the thatch in Robert April's
country
cottage. It inevitably came out and flitted
by him at moments when
he couldn't do a damn thing about it.
The lift's red doors almost closed again. The sound
shook George
out of his thoughts, and he jumped forward. The doors
shot open
again with a hissing automatic apology for almost
closing on him.
Before him, Robert paused. "What's burning?"
Someone from the port side said, "We've got a
bad circuit here,
sir. Electrical problems with one of the
overrides. Some dock turkey
misconnected it."
Robert immediately stepped off in that direction.
Left alone in the "visitors' section," the porch
in front of the
turbolift, George drew a deep breath. It
came out shuddering.
The bridge of the
Enterprise.
A place with a real, audible, tangible
heartbeat. A living, breathing place that was the envy
and desire of
every cadet. The first of its kind.
Oh, there were other starships on the move out in space
these
days, or having their hulls laid even now, but this was
the first. There wouldn't ever be another first starship
Enterprise.
There
would never be another ship whose diagnostic panels
pulsed back to
the earliest date of starships, and at some point this
ship would be
known as the oldest of her kind. Someday ... she'd be
history.
Today she was the future. She seemed to know it too.
Her
diagnostics and subsystems monitors twittered
and chirped and pulsed in beautiful but seemingly
senseless patterns, like jungle
birds singing. Little squares of red and blue, white
and yellow lights
and colored bands on black backgrounds patched the
circle of black
computer control boards all the way around the
middle of the
bridge in a big headband, flashing in happy
nonsynchrony. Each
pattern was reporting from some remote part of the ship,
blinking
diligently and waiting to be needed. Above them,
mounted on the
blue matte walls under soft ceiling lights, were
displayed sectors of
the known galaxy, known star systems and nebulae,
anomalies and
gas giants, maps and charts, prettier than any
an.
There were shadows too. The lights here were
deliberately
subdued to allow for shadows. Shadows of overhanging
panels,
shadows of chairs, shadows of people standing, turning,
walking.
Life-forms who grew up on worlds with trees and
mountains liked
shadows, liked a sense of depth, a memory of
sunrise and sunset. The starship's designers
hadn't ignored that. Because of the shad
ows, the bridge was a warm place that
allowed for retreat and
thought.
George figured there would have to be a lot of thought
going on here over the next few decades. A lot
of decisions would be made
here, about many lives, and it was fitting that the place
where those decisions happe ned should remind people about life.
Shadows and
soft lights could do that. The bridge did that.
As he watched Robert move around, George
gazed at the
luminous arena, the braintrust of the starship, and all the
memories
of trouble stirred up by this ship came flapping back
at him. The
ship's an example of how machines don't need
humans anymore.
It's too powerful. It's a big weapon that
flies. It's a big computer that thinks. It's a
flying bomb. It's a sign of mankind writing
himself out.
The wrong people will get their hands on it, it's too big
to handle,
it's going to get out of control, it can kill a whole
planet on a whim,
humanity's a kid and kids can't handle anything with
an impact
over two years, gripe, gripe, doom, doom,
doom.
Hadn't happened. None of it. The ship had been out
on a few trial
stressing runs for spaceworthiness, and while the
designers were at
it, they'd executed a few darn nice missions and
proven that
humanity could make a wise decision, in fact a
lot of wise decisions,
and perfectly well understood the future impact of
things present.
But today George wasn't concerned about the future of
human
ity. He was concerned only with the future of one boy
on the
edge. He shook all the memories out of his head and
tried to
focus.
The bridge had more people on it than the last time
George was
here-one, two, three-helm, science station,
navigation, engi
neering, two guys at tactical, a girl up
to both armpits in an access
on the floor, and over there just a pair of legs
sticking out of a hatch under the impulse propulsion
systems console. Except for one man
picking at the helm station, George didn't
recognize any of these
people at all.
They all looked so young....
Suddenly he became aware of how long five years
could be.
He stayed on the back of the quarterdeck,
overwhelmed by his
thoughts, watching Robert step down the two little
stairs to the
command deck. The captain caressed the parrot-red
bridge rail,
then the black and gray command chair. He looked like
a visiting
dignitary, his ivory sweater still hiding most of his
command
uniform.
Somehow it was comforting to see him down there.
Another deep breath let George inhale the
crisp electrical smell,
the scent of people at work, and he started to relax. In
its way, it was
a good smell. The smell of correction,
accomplishment.
He hadn't expected to come back here. He'd been
her first officer
for a couple of minutes, but knew it was temporary and
never
anticipated coming back. He hadn't been ready
to be second in
command of a ship like this back then, and he knew he still
wasn't-
A terrible thought almost knocked him over. He
unclenched his
fists, leaned forward on the red rail, and crouched
to speak to
Robert without anybody else hearing.
"Rob-Captain!" he snarled, just in case
anybody
did
hear.
Robert turned, brows up. "Yes, George?"
"You haven't-I mean, you don't expect me
to-I
mean ... have you
got
a first officer?"
"Oh," Robert said, and gave him a reassuring
nod. "Yes, we have a wonderful first officer.
You'll like her." He winked conspiratorial-
ly. "Don't worry. You're not on that hook this
time."
"Who is it?"
"You don't know her. She's been out on policing
missions
between Federation colonies. You know, I thought she was
here-was He glanced around the bridge, then finally
addressed one of the men
working at tactical. "Bill? Excuse me."
The larger of the two turned. "Sir?"
"Where's Loraa?"
"I'm under here, sir," a voice called from the
floor. One of the
feet sticking out of the impulse propulsion hatch
rose and wagged.
Robert bent down and asked, "Getting the ship all
natty and
trim, are you?"
"Some last-minute trouble with the deuterium flow to one
of the
reactor chambers. We've almost got it, sir."
"Why are you in the hole instead of having one of the
impulse
engineers go down there?"
The engineers on the deck looked around guiltily,
but the voice in
the hole said, "Happened to be here, is all."
"I see," Robert droned. "I have someone for you
to meet."
"Sorry, can't hear you."
"I have someone here I'd like you to meet!"
"Oh-was
"George, that's First Officer Lorna Simon
down there. Lorna,
Commander George Kirk."
The foot wagged again and a voice croaked, "How are
ya?"
"I'm," George called from the back, "just great.
You?"
"Arthritis. And I can barely breathe down here-was
Robert smiled and stood up again. "George,
meet the rest of the
officer complement and the bridge crew. Bill
Thorvaldsen and
Larry Marvick beside you at engineering
subsystems, our chief
impulse engineer and chief warp drive engineer,
respectively. And
you remember Carlos Florida, our helmsman
since the beginning and still holding on. Carlos, look
who's back."
The stout, dark-haired Latino fellow at the helm
offered George a
friendly wave of recognition and filled in,
"How've you been, sir?"
George nodded uneasily, but he was inwardly
damned relieved to
see a face he recognized. "Great. You?"
Florida returned the nod, smiled, and made
George feel a little
more welcome.
"Over there is Ensign Isaac Soulian, our
navigator." Robert
gestured to a young skinny Arabic type, or
Lebanese, or something,
with one of those beards that wouldn't go away no matter
how much
he shaved. He nodded at George, but both hands
were busy as he handed tools to-
"Ensign Veronica Hall," Robert
went on, noting the young
woman on the deck, "is our astrotelemetrist and
communications
officer."
"Hello, Commander," the girl said in her quiet
voice, wagging a
stylus-type instrument, then pushed aside one of a
dozen blond
braids-supposedly braided to keep the short
hair
out
of her face,
and apparently failing at that.
George nodded down at her, noting that she wasn't
much older
than Jimmy, and was assaulted by all the other
why-couldn'ts that came with such a realization about young people.
Three or four years ago, this girl hadn't been
on the verge of criminal behavior, that was sure.
Why couldn't-
"All our women seem to be on the floor today,"
Robert said. "Gentlemen, you're failing at your
courtly duty."
Smiles rippled. The good mood started to seep
over George and
smother his doubts.
Until the turbolift doors opened again.
He turned, and was hit by a blast of cold
teenager.
Jimmy Kirk stepped onto the bridge of the
starship
Enterprise,
absorbed the active colored lights, the fog of
shadows above and below, drew in a breath, and wrinkled
his nose in contempt.
"It stinks in here," he said.
The deck turned to concrete. The words dropped and
clattered.
Several members of the bridge crew heard. They
turned to get a
look at the jacketed, capped, eagle-eyed snot
who spoke that way about their bridge.
Already they didn't like him.
A few paces away from his son, George Kirk
felt his muscles turn
to thread. He drew his brows together in a kind of
warning.
"They're doing electrical work," he said. "You
know...
accomplishing something."
"Watch your tongue, son," a voice crackled from
the lower
forward deck. "Somebody might say the same thing
about your ship
someday."
For the first time since George came in, the first
officer showed
herself out of that hole in the deck. Lorna Simon
let herself be
hauled to her feet by Florida and Soulian, but her
eyes were already
on Jimmy.
She was a very stout woman with a shaggy hat of white
hair and
long time lines arguing between scowls and smiles etched
into her
roundish face. Everything on her was round, in fact.
Hair, face,
figure, fingers-a mushroom of officer material-and
she would've
had to tease that hair to make five feet.
George held his breath, terrified of what
Jimmy might say to such
an unlikely person.
Maybe there was a lingering resemblance
to somebody he re
spected, or maybe Simon looked like a teacher
he was scared of, but
the boy clammed up suddenly and glared at her.
She didn't give him a second glance after that.
She turned to the
captain and said, "Permission to go below and adjust that
thing at
the source?"
"Certainly," Robert said. "I'd like you back on
the bridge after
we leave the star system."
"Aye, sir," she said. "I'll be back in time
to spank any little ass
who gets out of line."
She tossed a very short but puncturing glance at the
somebody
she had in mind, then toddled into the turbolift and
disappeared.
Only after she'd gone did Jimmy muster the nerve
to speak again.
"What's somebody's grandmother doing on your ship?"
"That's Commander Simon," Robert said. "First
officer."
"First officer? Seems more like first warden of the
women's
block."
"She's been offered a captaincy with a ship command
nine times. Turned down every one."
Jimmy's expression changed from trying to gather up
his spilled
respect to real amazement. "Why would anybody
turn down a
chance to be a captain?"
Robert offered a supple librarian's shrug.
"She didn't want it."
"That's stupid," the boy said, and was gratified
to catch his
father's wince in his periphery. "Why wouldn't you want
to be in
charge?"
"Charge means responsibility, Jimmy,
decisions. Maybe lives on
your hands. You could kill someone just docking a ship
incorrectly.
The prospect of command is enthralling, but there's a
certain shine
that comes off the function. Lorna's just smarter than
I am," he
added with a grin.
"Where's Lieutenant Reed?" George
interrupted, turning to
Jimmy.
His son shrugged, not in a polite way. "He sent
me up here. I
don't know where he went."
"He just sent you up alone?"
Jimmy ironed him with a glower that said he understood that
his
father didn't trust him.
"He said he'd sell me to a reggae drum section
if I didn't come straight up. Whatever that
means."
George set his jaw and tried not to snap back an
answer, but it
was Robert who took care of the ugly moment.
The captain didn't seem at all bothered by the
boy's tone. He
swept his bridge crew with a series of glances.
"All right, everyone, let's say we heave tight
and fetch some headway, shall we? Bill, sound the
farewell whistles in the
dockmaster's office and request clearance."
"Aye, sir."
"Ensign Hall, get up off the deck,
dear, and help us clear for
making way."
"Yes, sir."
Hall clamped the access panel shut, squirmed
to her feet, and wriggled over to the communications station,
straightening her
uniform girlishly as she went.
George tried to keep his eyes off her, but in
spite of being very thin and small-boned, she was all
girl. Seemed too soft and
flowerlike to be in the service. Hard to ignore in
this environment.
He noticed Jimmy watching her too.
Behind him, the turbolift doors parted, and George
stepped aside
as quite another kind of woman stalked onto the
bridge. This one was blond too, only
straw-colored blond while Hall's hair was
creamier.
Somehow it fit. George always thought that color had
suited this
particular lady from the moment he first met her.
"Robert!" the newcomer cried. "You're
late!-oh, George. Hello.
What in blue hell are you doing here?"
"Came to see you again, Sarah, why else?"
George said.
"I know," the woman said. "It's always wonderful
to see me. Robert, that sickbay's a mess! You
said my surgical team was
cleared for duty on this ship, and they're not!" She
shook a yellow
computer recording disk at him. "I've got four
complaints from
planetside Starfleet hospitals saying I'd
appropriated their person
nel without ample notice. They're bitching at me
about the Third Interstellar Convention for Safety of
Life in Space and quoting bylaws at me!
What am I supposed to do at this late date?
We're about to take off, for crying out loud!"
Robert turned a glad eye on her and said,
"Ah, Sarah darling, yes.
Veronica, would you patch my authorization through to those
hospitals, please? And notify Starfleet
Headquarters that it's all
clear?"
Hall put out a hand for the yellow disk. "I'll
take that for you, Doctor."
"Report for me, Sarah?" Robert
asked. "All squared away in
sickbay?"
"Well," the doctor grumbled, "I guess so.
I just hate coming back
to these details."
Robert stepped onto the upper deck and took both
her hands.
"Isn't she lovely, George? Gotten
prettier every day since we welded
the old nuptial bargain, eh?"
Sarah April softened visibly, sank against him
a little, and
lowered her voice.
"Cut it out
...
making me look bad."
"So lovely," he murmured, and pecked her
cheek.
"That's not regulation, Captain," George commented
from one
side.
Sarah leaned back and cast him a casual look.
"Who asked you,
volcano? Hey-is that Jimmy back there?"
George stepped aside, but didn't
look at his son.
Sarah backed away from Robert, though still holding
one of his
hands, and spoke to Jimmy. "Last time I saw you,
you were sailing
paper boats on the puddle behind your farmhouse.
What are you
doing here?"
"Not much," was all Jimmy said, and he put some
space between
himself and the adults.
"Well, let me know when you get spacesick."
She pushed off her
husband and headed for the turbolift without ceremony.
"It's
always like that when there's a young crew. Barf, barf,
barf. I keep
telling those idiots at headquarters that artificial
gravity is never going to take the place of some
nice chunky planet. I'm going to check the
medical stores. I don't trust the manifests
they sent me. And
please
be sure to have the department heads tell the new
recruits where sickbay is, because I
don't want to be running all
over this ship, looking for some confused midshipman.
You can get
lost with a bad left turn on this monster. Don't
forget!"
The lift doors almost cut off her last words, but
she pushed them
out in time.
"Oh, brother," George grunted. "One of the
great universal
constants."
"Ah, there she goes," Robert said, "twittering like
a mistlethrush.
What would I do without her?" He circled back
onto the lower deck,
turned the command chair, then settled into it and crossed
his legs.
"Short range scan, on visual."
There were responsive bleeps, and the big
viewscreen before
them came to life-a view of one open end of the box
dock, the
moon way out there, and after that... space.
Robert seemed notably more content at having had a
few seconds
with his wife. There was an extra lilt in his voice
and a grin tugging
at his cheeks as he casually said, "Batten down
all external
maintenance systems and confirm all running lights
on, please."
"Confirming, sir," helmsman Florida said.
"Battened and con
firmed, sir."
"Thank you, Carlos. Let's get under way,
then-oh, Jimmy,
come down here. Want to watch?"
The boy stepped down as beckoned, but his attitude
didn't
improve. "What's to watch?"
"It's complicated," Robert said, "but very
interesting."
"What's complicated about it? You just pull the ship
out, and
once you're out, there's nothing in space but more
nothing."
"Seems like that," the captain agreed, "but you don't
just bear off with a ship like this and assume everyone will get
out of your way.
Even on the ocean there are rules of the
road. "Pass port to port,"
"red right returning," things like that. Aren't there?"
"Well... yeah."
"I envy you knowing about such things. I learned it all
in space. Never spent much time out on the water other
than the occasional fishing curragh in Ireland. I more
or less cling to the land, myself. Never heard of a
continent sinking, you know!" He swung around
to the communications station and spoke to the young girl who
looked so small against those controls. "Are we
cleared by the
dockmaster?"
"Clearance is coming in now, sir. All dockworkers
and mainte
nance personnel are accounted for."
"Good, very good. Thank you, Veronica. Oh,
Carlos, remember
that we have to arrange our departure around the orbit of
that new
powerplant."
"Yes, sir, I'm working out a trajectory
to avoid it," Florida said.
"I'll be glad when they figure out a better
place to hang that thing."
"What's a powerplant doing in orbit?"
Jimmy demanded.
"Jimmy!" George spat from behind. "Don't
interrupt."
But Robert tossed him a glance that said he had
expected, and
maybe even intended, this to happen.
"That's what he's here for." He looked at
Jimmy and said, "It's a
starship-type powerplant. There are several of them in
orbit several
thousand miles farther out than we are. The power is
tight-beamed back to Earth. We have to be careful not
to knock into them as we
leave, and of course not to fly through one of those tight
beams.
That'd be spine-chilling, wouldn't it?"
He rolled his eyes, and the bridge crew chuckled
and rolled theirs.
George was the only person standing stiff, almost at
attention,
consumed by nerves. Everyone else was hovering over his
station
with a hip cocked or a hand on a belt, poking at
controls and overseeing monitors, every face showing a
hint of satisfaction. Something about the
launching of a ship, no matter where, no matter how
long or how short a time she'd been at anchor-there
was just something about it.
Their casualness made them seem particularly
capable. They had
the attitude of people who really knew the ropes.
George almost dared relax-but then-
"Why don't they just put the powerplant down on the
planet?"
Jimmy persisted. "That's where the power gets used,
isn't it? Why
bother to orbit it?"
"For one thing, they're ugly," Robert answered.
"Who wants to live next to one now that we have an
alternative? But most important, these are
antimatter-type powerplants. We didn't dare
use them for planetary power until we figured out
how to keep them
in orbit and funnel just the power down. Wouldn't
want something
like that sitting on the planet's surface, where all
the people live,
would we?"
"Why not?" Jimmy jabbed back. "We're sitting
inside one, aren't
we?"
On the quarterdeck behind them, George closed his
eyes in misery and knew the nightmare wasn't going
to end.
Below him, Robert was peering at Jimmy, trying
to see under the
cap's brim into that shadow where the eyes were burning, and
he slapped the arm of his chair.
"By St. Christopher, everyone, he's right!" he
said. "Let's turn
back."
The crew laughed and made exaggerated nods and
somebody muttered, "Too late. We're
doomed."
George watched his son.
Suddenly a hillbilly at dinner, Jimmy's
face turned hard and humiliation scorched his
cheeks. The chuckles of the bridge crew made him
seem dirty and oafish.
George couldn't help but empathize as Jimmy
backed off a step,
behind the captain's chair, and made a look that said
he didn't want
to be talked to. Suddenly, George felt bad
for his son-then also remembered that this was why
he had brought the boy here.
"Captain," Veronica Hall said, "the
dockmaster's hailing with a correction from the barging
port. He asks if we can wait for a hydrohaul
to pass us."
"Of course we can. Signal affirmative.
Jimmy, come here and look
at what's passing by us," Robert called,
seemingly unaware of the black cloud over Lake
James. He pointed at the forward screen, paused
a moment, and waited, then kept pointing as a long,
ugly blue and gray ship came across the bow.
"That's a barge, Jimmy,
heading out to one of our colonies in another star
system. Oh-see
that little blue and white decal? That's a mail
pennant. It means
she's carrying mail for her port of destination, and
possibly ports in
between. That little sticker makes it a UFP offense
to tamper with
her in any way, rather than only a criminal
offense. Quite a vision of
accomplishment, isn't it? There's a whole stasis
warehouse inside, with live fish and
everything."
"Fish?" Jimmy snorted. "Why?"
"Watch."
As an answer, the big rectangular barge went out
the other side of
the screen and showed what it was to wing.
Jimmy squinted disdainfully. "A block of
ice?"
"Frozen saltwater. Several hundred thousand
tons. Essentially an
iceberg. They just beam it up, it freezes, they
warehouse as many
live fish as they can, and off they go to a colony.
They're going to
establish a saltwater hatchery."
"Don't they cover it up? Put it in a tank or
something?"
The captain cranked around toward him. "Why?"
Unable to think of anything, Jimmy clammed up.
After all, it was
just ice.
"Doesn't seem to be any reason to go to all that
expense," Captain April commented. "Nothing
sticks to it in space, after all..."
Jimmy buried his bungle in another
accusatory question. "They just beam up a couple
cubic kilometers of ocean and take it?"
The captain looked puzzled for a moment, then said,
"Oh, no, my
boy, no! That would be a catastrophe! They have
to beam it up a
little at a time, in slices, essentially."
"Why?"
"Well, beaming isn't a net energy loss of
zero, you know ..." He
paused again, surveyed his guest, then said, "No,
I don't suppose
you do know, do you?"
"Sure he does," the navigator grumbled without
turning.
"Knows everything," somebody else underbreathed from for
ward starboard.
On the upper deck, George was beyond wincing. The
heat flushed
out of his body and into the deck. He'd made some
mistakes before
in his life, but
this-
"There's a tremendous energy exchange involved in
transport
ing," Captain April said, ignoring the comments.
"We make the
universe unstable for a moment. We take mass and
move it. There
has to be an equalization and absorption somewhere
else. Theoreti
cally the transporter takes a bit of where it's
going and moves it
...
it's very complicated, Jim, and dangerous unless you
know
quite well what you're doing. That's why a
transporter's not exactly a household tool.
Perhaps your father back there can show you the
ship's data on the subject after we get under
way, eh, George?
George, you still back there?"
"Yes, sir," George said, surprised.
"Yes, I'm still here, I guess."
"Captain," Hall said, touching her earcom unit,
"the barging
port signals their vessel is cleared of our
trajectory and they send
their thank-you. Dockmaster confirms area is clear
now."
"Acknowledge both of them."
"Aye, sir, acknowledging."
Robert turned his chair forward. "Carlos, clear
all moorings,
cables, and antigravity support systems."
"Moorings cleared, sir."
"Lay in standard angle of departure."
"Laid in."
"Move us out, one-fifth sublight."
"Point two zero sublight... here we go."
As if a drumroll suddenly erupted in all their
heads, the bridge
crew straightened their shoulders. No one wanted
to slouch as the
Federation's flagship embarked.
From deep within the heart of the giant ship, a low hum
began. As
a great sleeping swan raising her neck, stretching
her wings, and
pushing forward through the pond, the starship
Enterprise
glided
forward and let the spacedock fall away at her
sides.
Before them, the moon gave them a milky
salute, then also slid
away to starboard, and left open space before them.
The solar system was like a concert accompanying the
swan, with
subtle tones of the French horn and the bass, as she
slid past each of
the planets that happened to be in the path before them. The
planets of the Sol system, particularly pretty
to all humans because
they were the first any human child learned about. They had
been
the first vision of "space" for everyone on the bridge
right now.
George wished he could enjoy the sight more, but he was
too
aware of too many things.
Aware of Robert, who had stuck his neck out and
pulled some very long strings to get Jimmy aboard, and
who had bothered to
take a mission he had intended to turn down just to do
an old friend
a favor.
Not even a Starfleet favor. A
trouble-on-the-farm favor.
And there was Jimmy, clinging to the ship's
rail and glaring at the
planets. He looked like he was afraid he'd
fall off.
Either that, or he hated all this as much as he
pretended to.
Maybe he
wasn't
pretending. Maybe he really did hate it.
Maybe
he hated George all the more for dragging him up
here....
George felt himself start to sweat under his Security
suit. He drew
a careful breath and spoke quietly but firmly.
"Jimmy," he said, "step up here."
His son blinked a couple of times, then leered up
at him. "Why
should I?" he asked.
George gritted his teeth. "Get up
out
of the command deck,
dammit."
Jimmy looked around, but his sixteen-year-old
smart-ass fatalism
prevented him from noting that he was the only
intruder in what
was traditionally and functionally the captain's
private area.
He glared up at his father with that question on his face, and
still
didn't move.
George snapped his fingers and pointed at the upper
deck, beside
himself.
"Quit lipping off and get
...
up
...
here."
Hard crust rose on Jimmy's face and his
horns came up. He
didn't like being ordered around in public. He
barely put up with it
in private.
He stepped up onto the quarterdeck, leering at his
father.
"Fine," he said. "You want me out of there? How
"bout if I leave
altogether?"
Without stopping, he stalked past his father and
right to the
turbolift, which opened accommodatingly and then
closed as the
boy turned and stabbed George with a final glare, the
kind of glare
that said he was a boy who'd been making too many
decisions for
himself in life.
Regret gripped George as he watched the lift
doors close and
swallowed that glare the hard way. He shook his
head, touched his
brow, and turned around again-
To find Robert gazing up at him. The captain was
out of his command chair now, leaning on the bridge
rail, framed by the
outermost parts of the solar system as the ship cruised
for open
space.
"Ah, the rocketry of youth," the captain sighed.
"Makes my heart
swell."
George gave him a frustrated, embarrassed
shrug. "He doesn't
like being told to do something when he doesn't
personally see a reason to do it. That'll get him
killed someday, if he doesn't learn better-I
thought maybe seeing the solar system .. . this was a
mistake. I knew it. I should've followed my
instincts when they told
me to turn around and go back home."
"Really, my friend," Robert chuckled.
He grinned sagely and joined him on the upper
deck, so they
could have a semblance of privacy.
"Take that wasp out of your shorts and relax," he
said. "It's going
to be a charming little cruise, we'll do the Golden
Shovel at Faramond, we'll cruise right
back, and your boy will have seen
things he never imagined. You see? Perfectly
harmless. So don't get
in a pucker. Whatever's into the boy, we'll iron
it out. After all, he's only been on board an
hour. Don't want to ask too much of him all
in one dose of medicine, do you? He's only
sixteen! He has
so
far yet
to grow."
"I'm glad you can see something in there," George
said, "'cuz I
sure can't."
"Oh, I see lots in there," Robert agreed.
"Take a little heart, George. Remember, it's
the belligerent children among us who become the greatest
leaders ... Elizabeth the First, Alexander the
Great... this kind of person naturally has conflict
with parents. Sometimes violent conflict. Why,
Alexander was suspected of
conspiring in his father's assassination."
"Please, Robert!" George wailed. "Don't
give my kid any ideas!"
EIGHT
"Kirk here. Liaison Cutter 4 requesting
clearance for launch."
"Acknowledged, LC 4. Attention, all hangar
deck personnel-
clear the bay for depressurizing. Repeat, clear
the bay and prepare for
launch."
Alarms began to ring, piercing the entire aft end of the
starship's
secondary hull, warning that the bay doors would
soon open and
any living thing left in the hangar deck would be
blown to bits if he,
she, or it were not inside the thirty-foot utility
ship about to launch.
To some inside the small ship, those bells sounded like
school was
in session again.
To one in particular.
"Jimmy, are you strapped in?"
"I'm trapped, if that's what you mean."
George Kirk cranked around from the
copilotstnavigator's seat to
look aft at his son, who was sitting behind Robert
in the row of
passengerstcrew seats. Now in a Starfleet
off-duty suit, obviously
missing the jacket he liked so much and the cap he could
hide
under, Jimmy glared back at him. He was
unstrapped and apparent
ly intending to remain that way. Teenagers were
indestructible,
after all.
"Regulations," George said, somehow containing what
he really
wanted to say. "I know you don't care much for the
law, but the rest
of us do. Buckle up."
"Probably a good idea, Jimmy," Robert
April said from his own
seat in the crew section behind Carlos Florida's
helm seat.
Letting them know with jerks and yanks that he didn't
want to be
doing this, Jimmy buckled up rather than argue with
Captain April.
Every little defiance seemed to have a limit after which it
became
impotent. He liked to make points one at a
time.
Any point he wanted to make here, though, would have
to be
carefully measured. It was close quarters, and there
were people
here who wouldn't understand him.
There were only seven aboard. Jimmy, his father, and
Captain
April, of course ... Ensign Hall, who was
close enough to Jimmy's
age to make Jimmy unexclusive in the
young club; Lieutenant
Florida, Chief Impulse Engineer
Thorvaldsen, and a somewhat
fleshy-faced engineering technician he had brought with
him named
Jennings or Bennings or Dennings or something. All
here, in this
cookie box with seats.
The two engineers were acting weird, Jimmy noted.
Glancing at
each other and grinning and whispering as though making
plans. He
recognized it, because those were the same motions and
whispers his gang made before their attempt to escape
from Iowa.
But these guys weren't going to run away, so there was
something
else they w ere excited about.
"Hangar Chief to LC 4."
Beside Jimmy, sitting directly behind Robert,
Veronica Hall
touched the comm and said, "Go ahead, Hangar Chief."
"The bay is secured. You're cleared for launch.
Commander Simon
is standing by to verify your flight schedule."
"Acknowledged," Hall said.
"Depressurizing the bay... now."
There was no sound or sensation except for the warning
bells, but everyone on board tensed anyway. As the
deck depressurized, even
the sound of the bells faded away, to be finally no
sound at all. The
dead silence of space, where no sound can travel.
No matter how technology smoothed out moments like
this,
launch was still launch. Still a dive into a place that
didn't want life. In a moment those hangar
doors would slide open, and they would
be in the unforgiving, inclement realm of space. They
wouldn't have
the advantage of a big ship, so big that the sensations
of imminent
danger seemed far away. This little ship was more like
taking a
rowboat out on the ocean.
Seated in the pilot's seat beside George, Carlos
Florida powered
up the cutter and placed his fingertips on the
controls, just feeling them for a few seconds. He
flattened his lips and shook his head.
"This new design," he complained. "Kinda
clumsy on the
power-to-thrust ratios. I can feel it."
"As long as you can steer it," George commented.
"I'm going to recommend they reconsider this in
favor of the
smaller design. They're calling it a
shuttlecraft."
"Did they ask you?"
"LC 4, Chief... I'm going to open the bay
doors."
"Chief, LC 4. Ready when you are,"
Florida said. Then he
grinned at George. "Hell, no, they didn't
ask me."
On the computer-generated viewing screen, which looked
to
anyone inside like a big window, the starship's
dome-shaped hangar bay doors parted and showed the
shocking emptiness of open space. It was black, it
was big, it was diamond-studded-and it was
empty.
Sitting inside his self-constructed shell, Jimmy
Kirk kept the
scowl firmly on his features as he
felt the ship lift off the deck and
move toward the great open space. To his left there
was a schematic
of the ship he was riding, and he tried to concentrate on
it so his nervousness wouldn't show. Blunt bow,
streamlined sextagonal
body, probably flatsided for storage
reasons-he remembered his
father talking about Starfleet's attempts to conserve
space by
stacking utility craft. A detachable freight
hold underneath made the ship look pregnant. On
the top of the control section, outside, was a sensor
pod for research purposes or something, so the ship
looked like a pregnant whale with a tumor on its
head.
An impulse engine in back, two low-warp
engines on either side of it, the whole thing painted
eggshell white-warp engines? How
fast could this thing go?
A carnival-ride surge jolted him back to what
was happening. His
grips tightened on the arms of his seat and he tried
to swallow but
couldn't.
To know there was nothing between him and that deadly
depressurized eternity out there but the thin skin of this
small ship ... sure wasn't the same as chugging
around Earth in some nice, safe orbital path.
"Feels funny the first time," Veronica Hall
offered. Her enormous
pale blue eyes flapped at him.
Jimmy looked at her and clung to what he saw.
Better than a
schematic, her features were very plain, except for the
size of those
eyes. She had almost no eyelashes, almost no
color in her cheeks,
and her lips were pale. Her blond hair was short,
pulled back on top,
and the rest of it was made into about a dozen little braids
that brushed the nape of her neck. She looked
to Jimmy like the medieval painting in the hallway of
his high school, and he imagined her wearing one of those
funny cone-shaped hats with a piece of silk
hanging out of the point and a long dress with a high
waist and no cleavage. Pretty, in a way.
Different.
He clung to the sight of her and tried to imagine
himself as a knight riding beside her, hired by the
king to protect her.
Only then did he realize he was breathing too
heavily, giving away
his fear. And he was digging his fingernails into the arms of
his seat
now.
still
can't act scared. I can't be scared. I'm not
scared.
Yet he couldn't muster up a voice as the cutter
bore off to the right
at a notable tilt against its own artificial
gravity. One of the smaller
auxiliary viewers showed the
Enterprise
hanging in space behind
them, getting farther and farther away. All they had
between them
and the cold of space was this thirty-foot city bus with
impulse drive
and another bus-size hold attached to its bottom.
Not much to cling
to.
He cleared his throat. "What kind ... what kind
of ship is this
thing we're in?"
"It's a low-warp multiduty ship we use when
we want to soft-land
or do aerial mapping of a planet, or scout an
area," she said. "Goes
about warp two, max."
"I thought they could just beam down to wherever they wanted
to
go from a starship."
"They can. But a transport or a shuttlecraft
or one of these
cutters, they're used to take a controlled
environment along with
you until you see what you're getting into. Can't
beam everywhere until you take a peek first."
"But we know where we're going," Jimmy countered.
"Don't
we?"
"Yes, Jimmy, we do," Robert said, twisting
around in his straps. "This time, though, your father wanted
you to see a few of the remarkable natural wonders of
this sector. The
Enterprise
is going at high warp to settle a border dispute
on the far side of the sector while we do
our diplomatic tea party on Faramond.
We'll rendezvous with them after-"
"LC 4, this is the bridge. Do you read?"
"Reading you, bridge," Veronica said into the comm.
After the acknowledgment, the voice changed to that of First
Officer Simon.
"Confirming your flight schedule, sir. Five
hours at low warp on
the set course, approximately forty-eight hours
on Faramond Colony,
and rendezvous with us in orbit at Faramond."
"Confirm," Robert said.
Veronica tapped her unit, bothering to reach across with
her left
hand, which meant she had to lean forward. "That's
confirmed,
bridge."
"See you in two days, then. Bridge out."
Even as she spoke, the
Enterprise
veered smoothly off, and left
their auxiliary screen.
"Liaison Cutter 4 out." She looked forward
to the pilot station. "Cleared, sir."
"Okay," George said. "Let's get
our bearings on the Rosette
navigational buoy."
"Aye, sir," Florida responded, and told the
helm what to do.
Using only the one hand again, Veronica tapped a
record of the
conversation into the cutter's log, then grinned at
Jimmy and
shrugged as though to show him how routine it all was.
He didn't like that. A girl trying to make him
feel at ease instead of the other way around.
He hunkered down, wishing he could hide in the
raised collar of his jacket, but the jacket was on
its way to a border dispute. So he
just clammed up and listened to the conversation at the helm.
His
father's voice, and Florida's.
"Searching," Florida was saying. "Got it. Wow,
it's a real clear
beacon."
"Position?" Jimmy's father asked.
"Bearing three points on the starboard quarter."
"Come about. Bring it two points abaft the starboard
beam and
take another one."
"Coming about, aye. Two points abaft starboard
beam ... stand
by
...
mark."
"Log that, then keep going."
"Logged. Now it's broad on the starboard
beam-correction-
one point abaft starboard ... coming on the beam now
..."
Jimmy bit his lip unconsciously, trying
to feel the ship turning. It
had to be turning, unless that navy buoy out there was
flying around
drunk.
Staring at the readings, Florida went on. "Coming
one point
forward ... two ... three ... broad on the
starboard bow
... three points, two, one ... Rosette
Nebula buoy is dead ahead,
sir."
"Cross-sect and get a running fix by bow and beam
bearings."
"Aye, cross-secting ... three ...
two ... one ... mark. That's
our heading, sir."
"Lock it in."
"Locked in."
"Ahead standard."
"Standard cruise speed, aye," Florida
concluded. He gazed at the
big emptiness on the viewscreen, "Here we go."
Amidships, Jimmy Kirk pressed his shoulders
deeply into the
cushion of his seat. There wasn't much to feel, but
there was a
sense
of mechanical life coming up into his legs from the
heart of the
small ship. He didn't know how to measure it,
how to judge it-
"Know what all that was?"
Jimmy shook himself and looked to his side at
Veronica Hall.
He collected himself and answered, "I don't care
what they're
doing."
"Really?" She rolled her eyes. "You should. A
small error in
defining a fix can mean a large error in position."
"I'm not driving, so I don't care."
"Okay. That's you, I guess," she said. "Where
are you from?"
"Riverside."
"Sounds pretty. Is it a Federation colony?"
Abruptly self-conscious, Jimmy realized he
hadn't added the
main part of his address. He was used to being with people who
already knew.
"No . .. it's in Iowa."
"Oh! Sorry. The way you said it, I got the
wrong idea." She shook
her head. "I guess being out in space all the time
stretches my
perspective. You know what I mean? I'm from
Minnesota, but I
haven't been back in a long time."
Jimmy leaned toward her and quietly said, "We
could go back
together . .. just for a visit."
"Nothing to go back to," she said with a blush. "My
family's
scattered all over Federation settlements. What
are you doing
here?" she asked. "A term paper or something?"
Jimmy looked forward to see that the others seemed
involved in
getting the cutter on course, except for the two
engineers who were
tampering with hand-held equipment they had brought with
them.
Lowering his voice to a grumble just above a whisper, he
leaned
toward Veronica. "My father dragged me here so he
wouldn't feel so
guilty about ignoring us."
Her pale, straight brows ca me together. "You mean
you don't
want to be here?"
"Do you?" he countered.
"I'd rather die than be anywhere else."
Skewering her with a courtroom glare, Jimmy lowered
his voice.
"Isn't that just a little crazy for a pretty,
promising .. . officer?"
She smiled. "What's crazy about it?"
"You just said you'd rather be dead and I don't believe
it."
Veronica settled her small shoulders
against the back cushion of her seat. "I guess you
don't have to believe it. I'm the only one that
has to."
A fair point, as Jimmy sat thinking about it.
He couldn't come up
with any better argument than calling her crazy again,
and he'd
already used that one.
She apparently noted that he still didn't understand.
She sighed
and filled in. "I like the chance to see sectors of
space like the one
we're passing on the way to the Faramond system."
Hoping it sounded more like a dare than interest, Jimmy
asked, "What's so fancy about this sector of
space?"
This time he spoke loud enough to reach the front of the
cutter.
Even from two rows back he caught his father's glance
and grimace.
"One of the most impressive natural wonders
around," the fleshy-faced engineering technician
provided. "A trinary star in
the Rosette Nebula, neighboring Faramond.
Most of the stars in the
Rosette are fairly young, but it's got two
suns orbiting a neutron star. Quickly! Who can
tell me the gases? Quickly, now! Hup!
Hup! Hup!"
Veronica spoke up before any of the men. "Green
ionized oxygen,
formaldehyde, ammonia, methyl alcohol,
carbon monoxide, water
...
oh, no-that's Orion, isn't it? Darn it!"
"Yes, that's what makes the Orion Trapezium
appear green."
The engineering tech chuckled and said, "Also why the
Orions are so ornery."
"You would be too," Thorvaldsen said, "if you
evolved in that
mess."
The others chuckled too, sharing a mutual
entertainment that Jimmy didn't understand.
He hunched down, taking it personally.
"We'll be going right past Orion," Captain
April continued, "so
we'll be able to take a good long look and compare it
to the young
stars in the Rosette Nebula. I never
tire of nebulae ... they're so particularly
foudroyant... worth a voyage just to see one."
"Rosette's gorgeous. I've seen it once
before," Carlos Florida
said. "Glowing agitated helium. Makes it all
red."
The tech added, "Hydrogen cyanide too."
"Nitrogen and sulfur!" Veronica finished with a
lilt of victory now that she had the right nebula in
mind.
"You guys are giving me a chemical headache,"
Jimmy's father contributed. "Why does every errand have
to be a classroom?"
The crew laughed.
"Now, now, George," the captain admonished,
"you of all
people, now of all times."
Everybody knew what he was hinting at, and they
laughed again.
Thorvaldsen glanced back at Jimmy then and said,
"You're a lucky little bast-I mean, you're lucky
to be here."
Then he and his assistant shared one of those so-are-we
glances.
Pinched by the condescension he was getting from
them, Jimmy shifted his feet and shrugged.
"Seen one star," he cracked, "seen 'em all."
He might as well have thrown liquid fuel on a
fire. The entire
shipload of eyes hit him.
Slap.
Especially Thorvaldsen and his assistant.
They were looking at him as though he was turning
polka-dotted
in front of their very eyes. What had he said?
"Well, maybe you haven't seen 'em
all,
"Thorvaldsen commented
with a mean glare.
Before things got out of hand, Captain April
interrupted and dampered the response that pushed at
Jimmy's lips.
"The neutron star," he said, "is a very massive
sun that's gone through its supernova stage. It
swirls so fast that it can't be seen. The little devil
constantly sucks matter off the other two suns as
they produce it. We're going to do some analysis
as long as we're
going right past it. Quite something to witness. Very rare in the
known galaxy."
Calculating his response down to the last blink,
Jimmy Kirk
turned away and grumbled, "Yippee."
Because they had to go around a star system experiencing high
sunspot activity that could even screw up a ship
in warp, it was more like seven hours than five before the
navigational beeper
roused them all from an on-board nap. Carlos
Florida was the first
to rouse and wake up enough to decipher the flashes and
notices on
his controls.
"Coming up on the trinary, sir," he said
to George.
"Take us off autopilot."
"Autopilot off, aye."
"Take us out of warp speed. Go to point five
sublight."
"Point five sublight, aye. Reducing speed."
There was a notable whine, but almost no physical
sensation as
the ship dropped out of warp. Though Jimmy stiffened
and waited to be pressed against his straps, it never
happened. How could that
be? How could they go from serious zooming to a
crawl without
feeling anything? What kind of compensators did this
tub have?
"Well?" His father was leaning forward, scanning the
upper part
of the screen. "Where is it?"
Only then did Jimmy notice that the screen had
changed. There
was no longer the image of space matter passing
by, but now the business of stationary nebulae and stars
in the distance.
Then...
"There it is," Florida said. Awe closed his
throat on his own
words. "There it is!"
The two men in front had the best view, and they
seemed
suddenly hypnotized with appreciation. The engineers
unstrapped themselves, got up, and went to look.
Before them, though the cutter was crossing laterally and not
daring to get any closer, was the trinary star system.
Everyone but Jimmy was leaning forward. Somehow he was
forcing himself not to do that. Even from inside his bubble of
disinterest he could feel himself magnetized by what he
could see.
Two suns, one yellow-orange, one scarlet
red, different sizes,
stood sentinel in space, burning hard and hot. Like
two Irish
women's long red hair in high wind, their heat was
being sucked off
and dragged in two great tails, swirling down into a
dark central
point, resembling the stuff that pours out of
volcanoes.
Just above a whisper, Carlos Florida said, "It
must be billions of
years old . . ."
George nodded. "Must've been here already when the
Rosette's
baby suns started to form."
"Federation Astrophysics thinks it was a neutron
star a billion
years before those two other ones were even formed,"
Thorvaldsen
was saying softly. "Probably a first-generation star,
formed when
the galaxy formed. Those two probably condensed out
of the
Rosette, and all three attracted each
other and went into a mutual
orbit. Jesus, it's really the last place a
human being was ever meant
to be, isn't it?"
The awe was uncloaked in their voices.
"Go ahead, gentlemen," Robert April said as
he smiled at the
engineers. "Have at her."
Thorvaldsen and his assistant almost giggled with sheer
excite
ment. Their eyes flashed and they bit their lips and
couldn't stop
making victorious noises as they disappeared into the
companion-
way aft. A few seconds-literally only
seconds-later, they came up again, hauling
satchels and containers of sensory equipment.
"Gonna get some readings, gonna get some
facts," Thorvaldsen
bubbled, "gonna get some readings, and take my star
back! Do-ron-
ron-ron, da-do-ron-ron!"
Laughter crackled through the ship. The excitement
could've
been planted and rooted.
Veronica Hall was already opening a sliding panel
in the cutter's ceiling and drawing down a ladder. The
engineers started handing her their equipment, and she stuffed
it topside, into the sensor pod.
One particularly heavy crate made her wince, and
she stepped out of the way, favoring a hand and uttering,
"Ow, ow, ouch."
The two engineers eagerly took her place.
"See you later!" the engineering tech said as he
jumped onto the
ladder and took it two rungs at a time, boiling
to get up there and start looking at this thing.
Jimmy watched all this and tried to figure out why
they were all so
excited. Wasn't it just one of those space things?
Just another nebula
nobody could dare go into?
Thorvaldsen stood back briefly, held both
arms open, and huskily
propositioned, "Come to Papa, darlin"!"
Then he was on the ladder and up there.
"I'm next!" Veronica called, still holding on
to her strained hand.
"You'll have to kill us first!"
The others laughed again. Jimmy just shook his
head and kept
wondering as the ladder disappeared topside and
Thorvaldsen's
hands appeared to tug the insulated panel shut.
"Ouch, ouch, ouch," Veronica mumbled as she
plunked down
across from Jimmy again. She was holding her right wrist.
The hand
was completely extended in a spasm, fingers out as far
and straight
as possible-even farther than possible. Out and bending
back
ward.
She manipulated the wrist, then complained under her
breath
and . . . took the hand
off.
Jimmy gasped, jolted against his side of the craft,
and choked,
"Wha-to "
She looked up. "Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot
you didn't know."
As he gaped, horrified, she waved the disembodied
hand. "The
whole lower arm is prosthetic. Pretty
good imitation, isn't it? You
didn't notice I've been mostly using one hand,
did you?" She
nodded in agreement with herself and murmured, "That's because
I only have one."
Gaping like an idiot, Jimmy choked, "How'd .
. . how . . ."
"Oh," she groaned, "I just did something stupid,
that's all, back
when I was sixteen."
Jimmy struggled to shove down the quiver running up
his spine. Sixteen . . .
She gazed almost sentimentally at her prosthetic and
said, "I
swear, it was another person entirely, sometimes. I
went canoeing
alone, after I promised my parents I wouldn't.
I went over on some
rocks and opened my arm pretty bad, then I
didn't tell anybody.
Tried to take care of it myself. You know, I knew
everything, of
course. Even when it got infected, I didn't
tell anybody. I tried to
handle it myself for over a week. Finally I
got feverish and passed
out, and nobody found me for almost a whole day. I was
lucky to
keep the elbow."
Trying to think of this soft-spoken, feminine, flowerish
girl lying
feverish in some back alley, Jimmy asked,
"How'd you qualify for
...
I mean, with only one
...
uh
..."
"Starfleet? By taking the requirements one at a
time, that's all. I
can't give myself a manicure and I'll never play
a fiddle, but I can do
a cartwheel, and I can even climb a rope if I
have to. I just didn't
want to give up my biggest dream. The prosthetic
works all right,
but I had to prove to Starfleet that I could do without it
in an
emergency. You know, prove I don't always need
an extra hand."
While she busied herself getting the fake limb
to relax its spasm,
Jimmy sank back and cradled his own right arm.
"Extra-was he echoed softly.
"She's our one-armed bandit," Captain April
interrupted. He
was looking back at them with mischief in his eyes.
"You should see
her manipulate a laser pistol and a communicator
at the same
time."
"Silly thing," Veronica commented, smiling at the
captain.
"State-of-the-science synthetic fingers. Sometimes it
seizes up on
me."
Gazing down at his two plain human hands, flexing
his own
fingers and making fists, Jimmy tried to think of one
of his hands as
"extra."
"Here." Veronica turned toward him. She seemed
to be having a
good time when she said, "Give it a shake."
He hesitated, but didn't want
to insult her, so he twisted and gave
the fake thing a good Iowa handshake-and it almost lifted
him out
of his seat.
"Wow! That thing's got a grip
like
a gorilla!"
"Sure does." She settled back and said,
"Here. Hold hands with it
for me while I get the seizure out of it, will you?"
Jimmy took the hand and held it open end out to her as
she went
to work inside the narrow little wrist that fit her so
well.
"You make it all sound so easy," he said.
"It wasn't," she admitted. "I had sixteen
years to get used to
having more than one. I've had only since then
to get used to having
one to work with, but my mother always said easy things don't
get
any appreciation. That's why I appreciate
Starfleet so much,
y'know?"
"Yeah . . . sure, I know."
"They didn't hold it against me," she said as she
worked, then emphatically added, "Of course, I
didn't get any favors. I had to
come up to everybody else's standards and meet the
same requirements as anybody else."
Jimmy scowled and said, "That's not very fair."
She struck him with a wide-eyed look, pursed her
lips, and admonished. "Then you don't know what
"fair" really means. It doesn't mean lowering
standards to meet somebody's hopes. It means
you
raising your own hopes to meet standards. What if
somebody's life depended on me someday? What if
I could get
along with the faker, but not very well without it? I mean,
if one
hand can get chewed off, there's no reason this one
couldn't.
Accidents happen, you know. Standards stayed up. I
met "em." Suddenly she smiled. "Preach,
preach, preach, right? Well, I'm
kinda proud of myself, I guess. How old are you
anyway?"
"Si-was
Sixteen. Sixteen. Say it, coward.
"Seventeen."
"Oh, hey! Won't be long, then. You'll be in the
Academy before
you know it."
Not if I can help it.
"Right. Won't be long."
The words were barely out of Jimmy's mouth before he
heard his
father's voice in the forward section.
"Carlos," George was saying quietly, "would you
mind . . ."
"Oh, sure. No problem."
Florida unstrapped, got up, and crouched back
behind his own
seat.
"Jim," George called.
Stiffening, Jimmy had to beat down a jolt of
surprise and keep a leash on his tone.
"What?"
"Come up here to the pilot's seat and take a look
at this thing."
Jimmy shook Veronica out of his head and fought
to concentrate
on his main message of the day.
"I can see fine," he said.
There was some shuffling on the forward deck.
"Not after I pound that snotty tone out of you," his father
said. "Get up here, and I mean right now."
Jimmy thought about balking again. His father had never
laid a
violent hand on him, and they both knew it. The
walls, the
furniture, the occasional farm animal, yes, but
his kids, no.
Something about being in front of these professionals,
though,
made Jimmy get to his feet so he wouldn't have
to be groused at
again. He could always count on his father for a second
grouse. If
only he could get up there and take a look at this
thing without
seeming too interested . . . that was the trick.
He collapsed into the pilot's seat so hard that the
swivel mecha
nism shrieked. Then he slumped way, way down,
still holding on to
his right wrist. After a few seconds of calculated
boredom, he
looked up at the big main screen.
Before him, all of nature swirled.
The two suns, their hair streams being ripped off and
sucked in
two great gaseous spirals, the halo effect of
three violent gravitation
al forces working against each other, glowing disks of
residual
matter spiraling slowly to a common center-what a
mess.
But what a pretty mess . . .
"That's the neutron star," his father said. "The small
dark area.
It's a whole sun, millions of kilometers
across, collapsed down to a
rock only a few kilometers in diameter.
All its elemental matter is
crushed down that far."
"Son-of-a-bitch density," Florida murmured.
"Yeah, and it's spinning so fast it can't even be
seen. Because it's
still acquiring matter, taking it right off those other two
stars, it'll
eventually have enough gravity to collapse all the way
down into a
black hole. It could go at any moment."
Jimmy watched the churning, sparkling phenomenon out
there,
and half expected it to go and take all of them with it.
Every time he
saw a flash, his nerves jumped.
"We lost a good many advance exploration ships in
storms like
that," Robert added, "before we learned how to avoid
them. Lot of decent people fell off that mountain so the
rest of us could sit here
and look without worrying. . . ."
His voice trailed off into respectful silence.
The neutron star twisted energy into tight braids as
fast as the two suns could produce it, then ate it.
The yellow-orange sun's orbit was
elliptical and on a different plane from the red
giant, and the red
giant's higher gravity was also ripping matter off
the smaller sun
even as its own energy and matter was being sucked into the
neutron star. A competition of the most primitive
order.
All around the area was a blue haze that resembled
fog, except
that it sparkled with charged solar plasma. The
whole thing made a wacky sight, and baffled
Jimmy's imagination as he looked.
"What are those guys doing on top of us?" he
asked.
"Looking at it," Captain April said.
"Measuring it, analyzing it,
and so on. The sensor pod has a retractable
window with special
screening. They're able to look at it with their naked
eyes. They're
taking readings of it in order for the Federation
to.justify posting
long-term cameras and sensor monitors on
buoys, in hope of
witnessing the event when the neutron collapses into a
black hole."
Jimmy's father mistily commented, "It could happen
anytime in
the next two minutes or the next thousand years."
"A thousand years?" Jimmy abruptly complained.
"Then what's the big deal!"
"That's nothing in the billion-year life of a sun,
my boy," the
captain said. "The next thousand years is any
moment. We stand a
fair chance of recording the event if we can get
sentinel buoys out
here. They have an operational life of almost a hundred
years." He
leaned back in his seat and whispered, "Wouldn't that be
some
thing!"
"Thorvaldsen and Bennings are having kittens,
they're so ex
cited," Veronica said.
"But
you
aren't interested," Florida tossed back at her,
grinning.
She shrugged and squeezed her shoulders girlishly.
"Didn't you
hear the meows from my seat?"
"This Blue Zone is a computer-enhanced image,"
Jimmy's father went on, pointing, "to show us the action
of the energy out there so
we can avoid it. It's not really blue. If you were
looking at it with
your naked eye, you'd see the suns and a hole, but
all you'd see
around them is a slight electrical
discharge."
"You wouldn't even realize you were in danger until
too late,"
Robert added.
"Right. But since this is a warp ship, the screen is
computer-
generated. The computer translates this according
to temperature.
So it looks blue from in here. No ship can go in
there. Our science
doesn't know of any shielding that can survive
inside that. The high
gravity and radiation and solar wind would even rip through
the
starship's shielding. Solar wind is made of charged
particles of
plasma shooting off from the sun itself-was
"How do you know?" Jimmy challenged.
"What?"
"How do you know a starship can't survive in there? That
thing
back there's the first starship, isn't it? Why don't
you just go in
anyway and try it."
His father drew his shoulders tight in anger and
leered at him
sidelong.
"Because we'd be dead, that's why," he snarled. "You
can't get
past that smart-ass fatalism of yours, can you?"
"Maybe I just have an adventurous spirit."
The collective annoyance could've been packaged
and shipped.
The idea that Jimmy would refer to the
Enterprise
as "that thing
back there"--
Eyes suddenly hard as walnuts, his father turned more
toward
him and lowered his voice.
"Is it asking so much that you relax and enjoy some of
these
things we're showing you?"
Jimmy let his own expression go hard.
"You drag me up here against my will," he said, "and
I'm
supposed to enjoy it?"
"Can't you at least try? You're not here for
my
good, you know."
"Oh, right, forgot. I'm here for mine."
He got a mixed victory for his efforts
to exterminate his father's
efforts when George slumped, scowled bitterly,
and jabbed a thumb
toward the back.
"Get out," he growled, his teeth together.
Satisf ied, but pushing down the nervousness that came with
such
a win, Jimmy took his time getting up. There was a
certain stage
timing to these things. The sooner he could manage
to dismantle his
father's hopes in all this, the sooner he could get
back to Earth and get on with his life, his way.
He took care not to give that fantastic sight more
than a passing
last glance as he got up, crouching to keep from
knocking his head on the low forward ceiling.
But that last glance . . .
He stopped short.
Staring-
what the hell!
"What's the matter with you?" his father asked. "G."
Jimmy tried to say something, but though his
lips were hanging
open, his throat was locked up tight. All he could
do was blink, and
point.
Point at the ship coming at them
right out of the Blue Zone!
Even as Jimmy pointed, the cutter's sensor
alarms went off-
warning of intrusion into their flight space.
"Carlos!" George called.
Gaping, Jimmy couldn't move and was shocked when
four hands
grabbed him, yanked him away from the helm, and stuffed
him
behind the navigation seat. He had no idea who had
grabbed him, and he couldn't take his eyes off the
screen to check.
Carlos Florida slammed himself into the pilot's
seat, gasping,
"That's impossible! It's impossible!"
Two neon-orange glows appeared on the
greenstblack hull of the
intruder-and suddenly the cutter rocked under them and
filled
with the screams of electrical reactions.
Over it all, Jimmy heard his father's voice.
"They're firing on us!"
Part Three
FLUSHBACK
USS
Enterprise

comA
"I ought to slingshot around the sun, go back
forty-five years, and
slap myself."
Leonard McCoy turned at the captain's
grumble and asked,
"Pardon me?"
Shifting uneasily, James Kirk drew a long
breath. The taste of
regret.
"I said
...
I ought to go back and slap myself for the first words I
spoke on the bridge. They weren't exactly
poetry."
"Why? What were the words?"
Smears of rosy humiliation ruddied the captain's
cheeks. Kirk
was a hard man to embarrass, but he could still
embarrass himself.
He pressed his lips tight, then parted them, then
pressed them
tight again.
"I said the bridge smelled."
The taste came rushing back. Beside him, McCoy
winced.
Suddenly they were both glad the yellow-alert alarms
were
honking in the background.
In spite of that, the two men might as well have been
alone on the
bridge. In spite of the bustling activity around
them, the crew busy
with a ship in alert, tense wth anticipation of
horror and the
Starfleet officer's nightmare of antimatter
flushback, the two felt
alone in their reverie.
Even the concerned regard of First Officer Spock from
the raised
quarterdeck behind them failed to invade, and certainly
failed to
comfort. They knew why he wasn't stepping
down. They knew he
had picked up the captain's mood, but wasn't
inviting himself into
the conversation. Yet.
There were some moments only humans could understand-and
only some humans at that-as they drew upon a common
heritage,
the special union with vessels that had carried them
since the
Vikings.
Jim Kirk's brow puckered, and he gazed forward
at the vista of
deep space as the ship raced forward at
incomprehensible speed
toward a place whose name made the years peel away
at light speed.
A place where another starship may have just died.
"Bones
...
do you know what it is to feel that a ship is alive?"
The doctor's silence prodded the captain further
into thoughts that couldn't be measured. Kirk didn't
look at him. Didn't really
want an answer.
"When I took command," he said, "and came
back onto the
bridge for the first time as an adult
...
I wondered if she remem
bered."
He blinked, and looked around the bridge now, a
superstitious
seaman unable to throttle down those feelings about
ships that
somehow got into the blood of everyone who depended upon
them.
To depend on a ship for one's very life made it
ugly to think of the
ship as just parts and forms, wood, bolts, and
mechanics. No one
wanted his life clinging to heartless metal and wood.
After all the
years of vehicles in history, a pulse of the
living had seeped into
those manufactured pieces, and there wasn't a
sailor alive who
could deny it without being a liar.
The ship around him now wasn't that same starship, but
her
namesake and her design twin. Beautiful,
yes, but not the ship to
which he owned the apology. That ship-he had sent
to destruc
tion, spiraling down into the atmosphere of a
hostile new planet,
avoiding the necessity of bringing her home to be
decommissioned
after more than forty years of service. Shunted aside
by new
designs, caught in the spin of change, now destined
to be brought
home and picked apart in some drydock somewhere, like a
whale
decomposing out of water.
He had taken her out without permission, against orders.
In some
ways, he was pleased to spare her that fate. She
deserved to die in
space, where she had lived, where she had made it
safe for countless
millions to live.
Circumstance had forced him to send her in and let her
burn, to
let her go to sleep in space, where she belonged.
Almost as though the ship possessed a
heartbeat-
Sailors
...
a little moonhappy, all of them.
Now this ship was being decommissioned too, and she
wasn't that old. The design again. Everybody said
the design was being
superseded by a whole new batch of technology.
Obsolete, suppos
edly.
Forty-some years was a long time, wasn't it?
"I was only thirty years old," he went on.
"The Fleet's youngest
starship commander. The ship was box-docked when I first
came on
board, the same as she had been when I boarded her
at the age of
sixteen. But the bridge looked smaller than when
I'd seen it
before . . . darker and quieter . . . and there was no
one there but
me. Only me and the bridge. It was like being alone
with a woman
I'd slept with but failed to appreciate. I
felt guilty and unworthy of her. And I
wondered if she remembered those first words."
He hesitated, his eyes fixed on the past, hands
hanging just above
the arm of the new command chair without actually touching it.
"I wondered," he added, "if she'd forgiven me."
Alert whistles chirped in the background, demanding
attention
like young eagles in the nest. Personnel ran on and
off the bridge, each doing a small specific
thing. Add the small things up
...
one
very big thing. Survival in space.
Dr. McCoy shifted his feet, bobbed his
eyebrows in puzzlement,
and leaned back against the bridge rail, not exactly
relaxed under
these conditions.
"I used to think a person would have to be crazy to command
a
ship in deep space," he said. "Now I'm sure
of it."
TEN
Forty-five years earlier . . .
"Evasive! Get some shields up!
Everybody take cover!"
"Astonishing!" Robert April's voice flushed
between the crack
ling sensors and howling alarms.
Carlos Florida gasped, "They hit our pod!"
"Get the panel open!" George shouted. "Get
those men out of
there!"
"I'll get it!" Veronica yelled back, and
vaulted to the middle of
the ship, where she started working on the ceiling panel.
The control board sparked, knocking George
sideways.
"There goes our hyperlight communications-was
Florida said.
Robert crouched between George and Florida to see
the chunky, unidentifiable black and green ship coming
toward them out of the
Blue Zone. "What kind of design is that?
Looks like it's built of triangles. I don't
recognize it at all-was
"Checking!" Veronica Hall called from behind. With
her real hand on the panel she was trying to open, she
reached down with her fake hand and poked in a code,
then went back to the panel.
Her small computer screen went wild with
diagnostic pictures, ship after ship, design
after design, schematics and mechanical
skeletons, picking out pieces here and there and
putting them in
boxes. Veronica finally frowned down at it, doing
two things at
once.
"No known configuration!" she said, shouting above the
crackle
as a laser struck their outer hull.
Florida transferred her readings forward to his own
screen. "According to this, it's built piecemeal from
several designs.
There's at least one Starfleet thruster on it
...
a private-shipping
cargo train . . . but according to the thruster-exhaust
reading, their power formula appears to be what the
Andorians are using."
"Are they Andorians?"
"No way to confirm that, sir." His voice
cracked, but he kept
control.
Jimmy felt his face turn parchmenty with
terror. He was on his
butt, on the deck, not even in a seat, and couldn't
move, not even to
crawl away. His eyes were big and hurting as he
stared at the
forward screen.
The intruder's gargoylish ship, green parts
flickering bronze in
the ugly lights from the trinary, was crowding down upon
them on
collision course. Its outer hull, shielded by a
faint grayish outline
that was apparently some kind of shielding, crackled with
clinging
energy from the Blue Zone.
"Damn! Where are our combat shields!" his father
blurted out.
He and Florida were frantically maneuvering back
from the en
croaching ship.
"We don't have any," Florida said.
"What do you mean, we don't have any! No combat
shields?"
"Only navigational ones. Just enough to keep the space
particles
off us in low warp. I told you this model was
silly! It's meant for
peaceful, boring cruises in known spacelanes!"
"Warm up the lasers! Where are they! Where are the
goddamn
firing controls?"
Florida bent downward. "All we have is
industrial cutting lasers.
They're under here."
"What are they doing down there!"
"Open a frequency, George!" Captain
April ordered. "Hail
them!"
"Hall, do it!"
Amidships, Veronica scrambled to do that.
"Frequency open, sir," she said.
"George, take it. You're the captain here."
Jimmy looked at Captain April, then at his
father in confusion. There was somethi ng both scary and odd about
that
realization . . . that his father was the captain in this
vessel. How
did these things work?
Another neon bolt shot from the stranger and hit the
upper
hull-
"I can't get this!" Veronica shouted, still yanking
on the panel's
manual latch.
Suddenly they were all thrown sideways, except
her and George,
who were still strapped in. Jimmy found himself folded
up like an
envelope against the starboard bulkhead, and realized the
whole
cutter was turning against its artificial gravity and
whining in
protest.
His father slammed a fist on his own control board,
either in rage
or tapping himself in, or both.
Probably both.
"Attention, unidentified vessel! This is Commander
George Kirk of the United Federation of
Planets Starfleet, goddammit! I demand
to know the meaning of this unlawful discharge of your
weapons!
You're in Federation space and you're also in violation
of about
twenty statutes of the Interstellar Maritime
Laws! Cease fire and
identify yourselves!"
Sweat trickled down his face.
Sudden silence fell.
The green and black industrial animal out there
stopped firing. Its
laser ports glowed as though it were ready, waiting.
Maybe thinking.
Maybe something George had said was having an
effect.
Jimmy knuckled his own face-and found a wet,
hot film.
Something had happened to the life support. The
temperature
control-
Smoke poured out of places where there shouldn't even be
places.
Instantly everybody was coughing.
The ceiling hatch! It was kinked partly open and
smoke was
billowing down from there.
"Dad! Up there!" Jimmy yelled.
George struggled to his feet, stepped over
Robert and Jimmy,
motioned Veronica out of the way, and yanked
on the stuck hatch.
"Thorvaldsen! Bennings!"
"Bill!" Robert called.
"Forward life support going on automatic
backup!" Veronica called. She cleared her
throat. "That last hit-oh, there goes the
main-cabin oxygen!"
George didn't look at her, didn't take his
eyes off the ceiling
panel. "Seal off all sections!"
Carlos spoke from a dried mouth. "Why are they just
hanging out
there?"
"How's the cargo unit, Ensign?" Robert
asked, twisting to
address Veronica.
She fingered her controls with one hand while waving at
the
smoke with the other. "Secure so far."
"Seal that off too. Do whatever you must, but make
sure it's not a
target for their sensors. No point giving away
information."
"Aye, sir, sealing off cargo level and shutting
down activity
there."
He got up and tried to help George get the
pod's hatch open. "See
if you mightn't be able to do something about this smoke
also."
"Aye, sir, ventilating!"
The small ship's engines caterwauled with strain and the
ship
bucked. Veronica was thrown backward and landed
hard, but
almost immediately crawled back to her controls.
George hung on to the ceiling handle, twisting on
his toes.
"Tractor beams!" he shouted. "They've got
us!"
The cutter wailed around them with sheer mechanical
effort,
bucking harder and harder until everyone had to hang
on to
something, strapped in or not.
"Sir, our engines!" Florida choked out. He
pointed spasmodical
ly at the attacking ship with one hand and at the
impulse systems
monitor with the other. The indicator bands were
washing back and
forth crazily. "That monster's ten times our size!
We'll overload if
we fight a thing like that!"
"Cut the power!" George answered. "We can't
afford a burnout."
Florida pounded his controls. The bucking eased and
gave way to
a nasty teeth-on-edge whistle deep inside the
ship.
"We'll have to find some other way," Robert said.
Setting his jaw, George yanked open a wall
panel, grabbed a piece
of equipment that had a point, and started levering at the
hinge.
"Yeah. If we had a transporter, I'd beam
over there and
explain
it to
them. With my bare knuckles. Thorvaldsen!
Answer me!"
His tool flew forward as the panel cracked, then
opened with a
godawful squawk. He yanked the ladder down,
waved at the smoke,
and climbed up.
Almost instantly he slid back down and landed flat
on both feet.
Jimmy and the others stared at him.
George Kirk had turned into a ghost. Whatever
he had seen up
there took every cell of blood from his face, left his
mouth gaping,
his eyes wide, watering, stinging, and red. Robert and
Carlos
Florida caught his arms, because he looked like he was
about to go
over.
"George?" the captain dared.
Florida stepped past them and started to go up, but
George
caught him.
"Don't-don't-was he stammered. He shook his
head and
crushed his eyes closed for a moment.
Florida's round face crumpled. His shoulders
sagged and he
muttered something unintelligible.
Grief limned every face as Jimmy watched. Why
weren't they
going up there? Why weren't they making sure there
wasn't a single
thing left to do for those two men?
Florida pushed Jim's father back down into his
seat, where he sat
stiff as a mannequin.
Captain April clung to the back of that seat,
hugging it. His eyes
were closed too, and he was gasping in little breaths.
After a moment he wiped his mouth with a palm and looked
up at the
screen again, at the ship that had fired on them.
"I simply can't believe it. How could they
survive in the Blue
Zone? How could they possibly survive? They
came out of there like
a trap-door spider!"
"Doesn't make a shred of sense," Florida
filled in. His voice was
quiet with fear. Perspiration burnished his face and
plastered his
black hair across his forehead. "As if any of this
made a shred of
sense
..."
"Why do you think they ceased fire?" Robert
wondered.
Florida trembled, but managed a shrug.
"Suppose somebody
staked a claim on this area and they think we're doing
the
intruding? Maybe they didn't know this is Federation
space."
Rousing himself, George unpursed his lips and said,
"Anybody
who could get into space would have to be able to pick up
transmissions. They'd know the Federation runs this
sector.
When's the last time you saw Aborigines inventing a
space vessel?
Communication always comes before space flight. I can't
believe
they didn't know."
"Right. . . good point."
"Whatever else they're doing, they're talking about
us. That's for
sure."
"You don't suppose you said something just right, do you?"
Still in a lump on the deck carpet, Jimmy stared
at the adults and
past them at the invading ship. How could they talk so
casually?
How could they talk at all?
He saw the fear in their eyes, but it wasn't coming out
in their
voices, not even when they shouted.
Not much, anyway.
What did come out was shudders of anger and grief.
He knew
what those sounded like.
He placed his shaking hands on the deck, flat,
fingers spread. He
shifted his weight and started to get onto his knees,
pressing the
carpet and using it for some kind of ballast. At least
he was
relatively sure where the carpet was.
And here was the bottom of the pod ladder.
With a glance at the others to make sure nobody was
watching him, he used the ladder to stand up, then started
climbing it.
The pod was still stenchy and filled with smoke, the
atmospheric
compensators whizzing a futile battle to save
whoever was up there,
and the seals frantically trying to keep open space out
even as they
cracked more and more.
Jimmy sensed the danger and forced himself in up to his
shoulders. He waved at the smoke.
Something wet sprayed his face, then a flap of
oily strings hit him
across the cheek and mouth. He clawed at the strings,
pulled them
off, cast them aside wildly as he might cast
away a big caterpillar
crawling across his face.
And he found a hand!
"I got him!" he called over the whine and shriek
of the ship trying
to save itself. "I got one of them! Dad!"
He grabbed the hand and pulled, putting his thick arms
to their
best use. Save a life, save a life-
He leaned back against the hatch edge and drew hard
on the
weight of whomever he had hold of. Maybe the
gravity was flooey in
here because there wasn't much resistance. Maybe he could
get one
of these guys below!
With one more heave he could get this person into the
hatchway
comj one-
A wet mass suddenly released and flew against him,
striking him
and driving him backward against the edge of the hatch.
He choked. A disembodied arm, shoulder, and half
a rib cage
anchored itself around his throat.
Flailing senselessly, Jimmy felt his mind go
numb and leave him
to pure panic. His hands smacked wildly at
everything, including
his own face, his own hair, his own chest, until the
gory mass fell off
and was sucked back upward into the tornado of air and
supplies
twisting around the broken seals.
Jimmy lost his footing and dropped straight to the
main deck,
curling and gagging.
The cutter might as well have been on the end of a
whistling
string. Jimmy couldn't get up, couldn't
get a thought, couldn't open
his eyes. All he saw in his head was Thorvaldsen
and Bennings and
what was left of them. . . .
There were voices around him, but his brain was turned
off.
Until that ship out there fired on them again.
The cutter rocked violently. Jimmy pitched and
hit the nearest
wall just as he heard his father yell
"So much for saying something right!"
WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP
"Hull rupture!" Florida shouted over the
hideous alarm. "Sixty-
four seconds to atmospheric zero!"
Even more hideous than the alarms was a telltale
hsssss
from
somewhere in the superstructure of the cabin.
George made a sweeping gesture. "Go, go!"
"Aft, everybody!" Robert called at almost the
same instant. The
shouts overlapped, but the message was the same.
"Open the seals
to the hold!"
"They're open!" Florida responded.
"Get below! Seal off!" George shouted.
Jimmy felt his father grip his arms and almost
instinctively pulled
back from it, but there was no fighting the determined force
above
him. His father hauled him to his feet without even
looking at him,
because he was busy shouting orders to the others as they
scrambled
across the tilted deck toward the aft companionway that
led down
into the freight hold.
Staggering, Jimmy grabbed the seats for balance and
hated
feeling his father holding him upright, but he was too
terrified and
sickened to argue about it. When his father let go,
Jimmy turned to
see what was wrong.
George was half turned back toward the pilot
station, yelling,
"Carlos! Come on!"
"Take 'em!" Florida shouted back, waving.
"I'll fire an SOS!"
"You can't! Communications are out!"
"I'll launch a buoy!"
"Hurry!"
"I will!"
Jimmy gagged a protest. "But he'll be-was
fc
*st""

"dis!"'*
Go!
His father gave him a shove between the shoulder blades that
sent
him flying toward the aft companionway with most of his
air
knocked out of his lungs so he couldn't protest.
His hands bloodless and his breath coming in chunks,
Jimmy
fought to control the trembling of his thighs and shoulders as
he
climbed down the companionway tube after Captain
April.
It seemed like a long, long climb. Eight feet?
Ten?
The companionway was nothing more than a tube with a
ladder
in it and a hatch at the top and another at the bottom
that could be
shut and made into a contained airlock. It led down
into the
twenty-five-foot tin can of a freight hold
attached to the underside
of the flight section, but they might as well have
crawled through a looking-glass into another dimension.
The only company here was
crate after box after stack of supplies bound for the
colony at
Faramond. Out of the environment friendly to people, with
cushioned seats and carpet, warmth, lights, and
fresh air, they crawled
into a cold, echoing metallic rectangle whose
minimalist control
panels were meant to be used only in emergencies.
As Jimmy dropped into the hold, he heard his father
shout above
him.
"Carlos! Get down here!"
George's legs appeared, but he didn't come
all the way down.
Stumbling aside, Jimmy found himself staring at a
flashing panel
bright yellow in the wall.
WARNING-AIRLOCK AUTO SEAL-CLEAR
PASSAGEWAY
It repeated, but he already had the message.
"Dad! Get down!" he bellowed. Lunging
forward, he grabbed his
father's left leg and yanked.
Jimmy wasn't a skinny boy, so his weight
meant something in
spite of his age. With a gulp of protest George
came tumbling down
and crumpled on top of him in a heap.
Overhead, the secondary hatch slammed shut
automatically. The
bolts clacked-and that was it.
"No!" George howled. He shoved Jimmy off,
but it was too late.
Barely five seconds later they heard the
second automatic slam-
and more bolts ramming home. The upper hatch!
"Oh, God-was Captain April gasped.
The panel on the wall changed, and flashed red
instead of yellow.
MAIN CABIN DEPRESSURIZED-DANGER-DO NOT
OPEN
SEALS-DANGER
George vaulted to his feet.
"Carlos!"
"It's wrecked! The sensor pod! Wrecked!"
With ten long fingers stabbed up against the viewscreen and
his
eyes in slivers, Roy John Moss spat
saliva across his own knuckles as he shouted.
"Do you know how much that pod was worth? How many times
do I have to show you porks how to aim these weapons!"
He took a breath to continue yelling-
But someone grabbed him by the ponytail and hauled him
backward, then yanked him sideways and knocked
him out of the way with a cuff across his cheek. He fell
onto both knees.
"Down in front, bobbysox."
The drone was an insult in itself.
Roy Moss rubbed his slick raisin-brown hair
now that his scalp
was aching, and began again to despise.
He despised the captain for that tone of voice.
Despised the crew
as they gawked beyond him to their victims on the
viewscreen.
Despised himself for being only nineteen.
In the dark porchlike cubicle, which could only be
called a bridge
in a card game conversation, a piecemeal gaggle of
racketeers glared
out their own viewport at the sleek white cutter
they'd just grabbed.
In the captain's seat, Angus Burgoyne chewed
on the end of his
long mustache and offered no more attention to the annoyance
he'd
just kicked out of the way.
At Burgoyne's left, old Lou Caskie
clunked forward on two
arthritic legs. "What you worried about? We're
the Sharks, ain't we?
We take what comes past here. Federation!" He
spat onto the deck.
"Probably got a woman running it. Deserve
what they get."
"Daon't spit on moy deck, pig,"
Burgoyne commented.
His Australian accent clipped his words, left the
ends off most of
them, and changed the angle of all his vowels. He
broadened his
accent on purpose, to sound like a legend with an
eyepatch and a hook. He had neither, so he relied
on the accent.
Caskie leaned back and spoke past him.
"Don't you think that,
Okenga? Ain't I right?"
Behind Burgoyne, an Andorian engineer's two
antennae turned
forward slightly in reaction and his blue face
darkened almost to
indigo. His enunciation forced him to speak slowly.
English was far,
far
from his native language, and his tongue didn't
want anything to
do with it.
"We take old merchant barges," he said,
hitting the consonants too hard. "Cargo tanks,
private sloops, transports-was
"That's no Federation barge, you lardhead," a heavy
bass voice
argued from behind.
Virtually the medical-textbook antithesis of his
skinny son, Big
Rex Moss turned his
three-hundred-plus pounds and stabbed a fat
finger between the Andorian and Burgoyne.
"We got a Starfleet reconnaissance cutter,"
he went on. "These
people aren't gonna just die. We should drop this and beat
it out of
here while the beatin's good."
"And they will go back to say all about us," Okenga
said with cold
irony.
"I see no Starfleet signs," said a short,
thick Klingon built like a
New York City antique fire hydrant.
Burgoyne jabbed his finger forward and spat his
mustache out so he could speak.
"It's roight theh, Dazzo," he said. "See it,
mollyhead? "UFP
Sta'fleet." Plain as bloody dayloight.
That's what you get for
spinding too much time behoind bahs."
Daring to wander forward again, still fascinated by the chemical
destruction and the frozen atmosphere pouring out of the
Starfleet vessel, young Roy Moss quietly
mocked, "What's a "baaaah"?"
Burgoyne ground his teeth and knocked the
young man aside
again, this time with a foot.
"Hey, Mr. Nobody! I said git your
Tracking becksoide outta my
way! I can't frackin' see through your skinny
butt, can I? The
captain's supposed t'be ayble that'see, ain't
he?"
Roy leveled a bitter glare on the back of
Burgoyne's head, and felt
his father's disgust from across the bridge. He enjoyed a
moment of
contemplation, imagining his father as a parade balloon
and
Burgoyne as Ichabod Crane. His father floated
by, bumping into
buildings, and Burgoyne, who was all neck and no
chin, was
constantly being suctioned from above. Eventually he would
just suck all the way up and be gone for good, and Big
Rex would be
pierced by a flagpole and explode.
Roy fought a grin and waited until Big Rex
lost interest in the
altercation and looked forward again at the
Starfleet craft slowly turning and gushing the last
cloud of its frozen air into space.
"No," he murmured, "you can't see through me."
"Carlos! Carlos!"
George pounded on the locked overhead hatch.
"Dear God" was Robert April's shredded
whisper. "Carlos . . ."
He closed his eyes and brought a shaking hand to his
mouth. "What
shall I tell his poor mother . . ."
Jimmy stared at April and was suddenly aware of his
own
mother. He watched the captain and wondered if the line
was some
kind of joke or exaggeration. It wasn't.
Backing away until the cold metal wall
stopped him, Jimmy
shook until he thought he would shake apart.
His reaction was punctuated by his father's hammering
on the
hatch and angry shouts. Over that terrible noise there
was another
noise-the whine of lasers and the hum of that tractor
beam.
"What are they doing?" Veronica Hall
gulped as she huddled among the crates near the
opposite bulkhead. "Why did they do
this?"
Captain April finally stepped into the hatch cubby
and took hold
of the raging creature there.
"George, stop!" he said. "Stop. . . don't
harm yourself. If we
don't rock the boat, so to speak, they won't know
we're here. This
hold is sensor-immune for security reasons.
They won't be able to
read our life signs, and they won't notice us
if we remain calm."
His soft English trill made the warning sound like a
reading of
poetry.
It had the right effect.
Swallowing his agony whole, George sank down
to a crouch,
gritted his teeth, and crammed his eyes shut to lock
inside what he
was feeling. He boiled and seethed, fighting for
control. The single
yellow utility hatch light, very small and
direct, shined on his hair
and turned it to copper. His features looked harsh in
that light,
skeletal, like a boy playing with a flashlight under his
covers.
Finally he grated, "We've been losing ships in
this sector for
years! All the time we thought it was because of the Blue
Zone. How
many went to these bastards? How many good people! And three
more today!"
He slammed his knuckles on the deck.
"George, your voice," the captain admonished.
Teeth still gritted, George crouched there, breathing
like an
animal, quaking with misery and rage.
"Everyone sit down," Robert said. "We've got
to think. Is
everyone all right?"
In the corner Jimmy Kirk sat, staring death in the
face. His wits
were in shreds. He barely understood what was happening
around
him and his limbs wouldn't move anymore. His own
who-cares-if-
we-live-or-die attitudes came rushing back
to haunt him. At sixteen,
he thought he had lived all of life. Lived it
all, and none of it had
been under his control.
His friends felt that way too. A friend had committed
suicide last
school year, and one more had attempted it.
Suddenly he felt foolish, having thought he
understood their
motivations and for mocking the adults who tried to save
them. The
paramedics, the police, the parents, the teachers.
He remembered standing on the school grounds with his
gang, as
though they had a secret language that no adult
could speak,
plotting subterfuge. Who wanted to live a life
that was in some
teacher's control, or some parent's, or some case
worker's?
"Better to control your own death, at least,"
he and his friends had
concluded.
"Better to go out with your name in the
headlines."
It had sounded right back then. Somehow, he thought it
might
not hold today, though.
Seeing his father's reaction to the deaths of three people,
two of
whom he had just met, abrupt shame washed over
Jimmy. The
shame was a shock. He felt oxish and unfledged.
Realized there was
nothing
he
could do to change this.
He bent into a ball and stared over his knees down the
fifteen-by-
thirty-foot chamber at the aft bulkhead.
Trembling. The metal wall
was trembling. The thin doors on the storage
closets and the cramped toilet were rattling. Something
had the cutter by the
throat.
For the first time in his life, Jimmy saw what it was like
to
really
not be in control.
Thorvaldsen, Bennings . . . Florida . . .
"We'd better get our radiation suits on," his
father said ultimate
ly, "just in case."
He got up and nearly ripped the door off a
rattly utility cabinet
next to the toilet. Inside were eight white
spacesuits, adjustable for
size and loaded with hookups. On a shelf above were
eight
headpieces, and on the side were eight double sets of
narrow oxygen
tanks, each about the size of a woman's forearm.
He started pulling the suits off their hangers and
tossing them
across the deck.
"Everybody put a suit on. Never mind the
helmets and tanks for
now."
Halfway across the hold, Captain April
caught his suit and
Veronica's, then crouched near her, looked into her
eyes, and was
apparently satisfied at what he saw there.
Jimmy was barely aware of his father's
approach until the
off-white protective suit appeared beside him.
Suddenly the twelve or so feet between them and the others
was an ocean of separation, and the two were sorely
alone.
"Here," his father said quietly. "Can you get this on?"
Fighting against himself, Jimmy grabbed the suit. He
didn't meet
his father's eyes, afraid the scared
sixteen-year-old was showing
through his protective shell as he made a
Herculean effort to hide
his fear.
"I could've been cut in half by that hatch,"
George said. He
lowered his voice even more. "You probably saved my
life. Don't
worry. I've been in worse . . . I'll get
you out of this."
Resentful of parent-to-kid lies, Jimmy
crawled back into his
self-imposed mental seclusion and saw lying there a
prime oppor
tunity to stab. His voice was stern, black.
"You got me into it."
A hit-low, sharp, and hard. The truth was a
poison stinger
today.
Jimmy watched in unanticipated surprise as his
father failed to
react the way he expected. Instead, George
stopped in the middle of
a step. He looked stricken. Instead of leaning
closer, he leaned away,
and turned. Put space between them. Slowly. The
walk of a
wounded man.
How could something that sounded so right feel so wrong?
Jimmy
watched and watched, perplexed. For the first time, he
felt bad
about getting a win. He'd been wanting to hurt his
father for years.. . .
So why didn't it feel any better than this?
As though he'd smashed his own head against a wall,
he realized
for the first time that he wasn't the only one with feelings.
He kept watching, baffled, as his father wandered past
Robert
April and Veronica.
April was settling against the wall beside Veronica,
glancing
around at their makeshift coffin as they both pulled the
safety suits
on. With one leg in, he paused to listen.
"Do you hear that?" he said. "They're turning us for
proper
tractoring. They must think we're all dead."
Struggling to find the armholes inside her jump
suit, Veronica
took a deep breath. "Why would they tow the ship if
they think
we're dead?"
His face still puckered in distress, George Kirk
took a couple of
deep breaths, then looked up at the creaks and
moans of their
vessel.
"I think I know," he said bitterly. "I think
we're being salvaged."
"We told you, don't get in the way, you skinny
shit."
Big Rex Moss's voice boomed as he
stretched his wide torso
forward, got his son by the ponytail-their
favorite handle when
dealing with Roy-and yanked him well to the side.
Offering his father only the smallest glance, Moss the
younger
didn't move any farther back than his father pushed
him, and he
kept talking, more to himself than to the others.
"It might still have decoders we can sell," he said.
Then he
plunged into thought. "Think of what those can be worth on
the gray market. State-of-the-art chips . . .
maybe a reaction-control
magnathruster . . . just the hull and ducting
material's worth salvage
...
we should move it out of the area and get it parted
before its home ship comes back-was
"What home ship?" Caskie demanded.
"You don't think something that size got all the way
out here by
itself, do you? What am I saying? Someone like you
would
think-was
"Nobody asked you," Rex grunted in his very deep
voice. He
gestured at his son, then jabbed a thumb aft. "You
go back and sit
and mind your shields."
Roy stepped into the cabin portal, but didn't
leave. He watched the adults and reminded himself that
many a conqueror had been
only nineteen. He sent them a mental warning and
wished they
were psychic.
But they were too stupid to be aware of anything but
themselves.
That was his safety net. They were all watching the
screen as though
they'd never seen a Federation ship before.
"Keep the tractor on," Burgoyne said. "We
got no choice. Slice
those ingines off the main body and bring "em round
to ayour hold.
Caskie, you're gonna have to find the registry
mahks and burn 'em
off or nobody'll dare buy from us. We're
gonna have to pynt the
flippin" thing as well. Lookit all the trouble
it's gonna cost us. What's Starfleet doing
belchin' round in the Zone, innyway?
Deadnecks dunno to steer clear or what?"
"Deserve what they get," Caskie repeated.
"Deserve it, that's
all."
He licked his thin lips and hungered at the idea of
cutting and
burning.
Behind the Sharks, Roy Moss rubbed the fuzzy
juvenile beard he
was trying to grow and imagined it as thick and woolly.
Someday he'd be given that beard.
Someday he'd be given everything, by everyone around him.
Until then . . . he'd have to mark time, and
take.
"Salvaged? Isn't that rather a leap of logic?"
Robert April rearranged his legs on the hard
deck and glanced
around at his tiny audience.
"I'm in Security, remember?" George
grunted.
"Oh . . . sometimes that does slip my mind about
you. Sorry. Go
on."
"I'm talking about the gray market. It's a
spaceborne black
market run by a mixed-bag splinter group.
Klingons, Andorians,
Orions, Terrans, anybody. Usually people who
can't even make it in
their own culture. They just band up together. They fence
stolen equipment or illegally salvage wrecks.
It's called a "gray" market
because it deals half the time in legal circles. It
runs in such wide
boundaries it's almost impossible to crack down.
Makes me sick."
George raked a fingernail on the deck until it
hurt. Helped him
think.
"Until now I've never heard of them creating their
own salvage
by attacking operational ships on the cruise.
Makes me wonder how
many vessels are logged as lost for unknown reasons
but are really
attacked, the crews slaughtered, and the ship ends up
being parted
out so they can't be recognized, then sold back
into legitimate parts
markets. Damn, it gives me the
floods to think about it."
He choked on the last phrase and fell silent
until he collected
himself.
They were all sitting now, conserving energy and letting
their
environmental suits warm up so they could at least
function in this
cold tank. The suits made them all look
slimmer than usual, even
over their clothes-a pleasant illusion that came with the
insulated
one-piecers.
When he spoke again, his voice was calmer, more
insidious. His
eyes narrowed, and he looked up at Robert.
"It also makes me want to survive so they can't do
this to
anybody else. And I've been thinking. If they
think we're dead,
they're going to want to part out the electronics and
hull of the ship.
If they drag us very far away, any hope for help
gets pretty damn
thin."
"Have you got a plan?" the captain asked.
"I'm going to bet they've never stumbled onto a
Starfleet ship
before and they don't realize what they're up against.
That was the
pause after I hailed them. They realized they were in
trouble and
they didn't know what to do about it. Bet they were shouting
at each
other, too. Finally they decided they were committed, so
they went
ahead and knocked us out. They figure we're dead.
They think
they're towing a hulk, and that gives us a little time.
If we can use
that time to build weapons, just enough to disable them-was
"That's a big ship out there, sir," Veronica said.
"Size doesn't matter. The ship doesn't
matter." George waved a
hand and scooted a little closer, fostering a sense of
conspiracy that
was as good as an injection of vitamins right now.
"It's the people
inside we're fighting. This kind of group is hard
to keep together.
They're not exactly famous for loyalty to one
another." He lowered
his voice, then added, "I'm going to get them to fight
among
themselves."
Tap.
"The only catch," he added, "is that once we do
anything, they'll know we're still alive."
Tap. Tap, tap.
Their heads swiveled, all in different directions,
brows puckering.
Tap . . . tap . . . tap, tap.
Veronica voiced a near whisper. "What is that?"
"It's not mechanical," Robert offered, puzzled.
"Too irregular.
George, do you think-was
But George was already twisting toward the
companionway. He gasped, "The airlock!
Carlos!"
Vaulting to his feet, he was at the hatch
mechanism in a second.
"George, no, wait!" Robert scrambled up and
grabbed him.
"He's in there! He's gotta be in there!"
"Wait a moment," Robert insisted. They
squared off in the cubby. "If you're wrong and you
open that hatch . . . we're all
dead."
Across the hold, Jimmy Kirk watched the
expression on his
father's face. Was the sound made by somebody in the
airlock? One
of the intruders boarding their cutter? Had the upper
hatch been
ruptured? If so, there was instant suicide in
opening this lower
hatch.
Was it just the quirky noise of the lasers or the
tractor beam on
the damaged hull? Or was it what his father thought it
was?
Risk all their lives for one person? Was that how
these things
worked? He'd never heard of that before. He'd heard of
one person risking everything for many, but never the other
way around. That didn't make sense.
His father wanted to open the hatch. Captain April
didn't. Who
was the captain now that the mission had gone crooked?
Which
would prevail?
What would I do?
"I'm opening it," George said. "Everybody
back."
Without further argument, Robert herded the two young people
aft, handed them helmets and oxygen masks and
helped them get
those on. Then he put on his own, and nodded at
George.
George didn't have his on, but he didn't care.
He was fixated on that noise.
Tap, tap
...
tap
...
He glanced back to see if the others were as far
away as possible
and had their units on.
Then he grabbed a basic wrench out of the tool caddy
and banged
on the hatch. Once. Twice.
Tap, tap.
Determination tightened his muscles. He pawed through
the
caddy for a magnetic lock turtle, found
one, and clunked it onto the
hatch, where it stuck like a trooper. A few
seconds, and it had the
right numbers. Then it flashed a tiny green light
at him, and he
cranked on the hatch handle.
The hatch opened so fast, it almost broke
George's arm-and the
weight that piled on top of his drove him to the deck
and almost
broke everything else. He shoved it off instantly,
shot to his feet,
slammed the hatch shut again, then bent over.
"Carlos!"
Lying in a heap under him, Carlos Florida tried
to turn over.
There was a small emergency oxygen mask strapped
to his face,
sweat pouring down his neck and saturating his gold
uniform shirt,
and he looked like he'd been beaten, but he was
alive.
George turned him over frantically, and by the time
he got him
into a sitting position, Robert had tossed
off his helmet and was
kneeling there also and helping.
"Carlos?" the captain began. "Are you all right,
my boy?"
Drained of every last thread of strength, Carlos forced
his eyes open and tried to nod. He tugged weakly
at the mask on his face,
now probably doing more harm than good.
"I'll get it," George said, and pulled it off
him. He dropped the
mask and began rubbing Carlos's half-frozen arms
and shoulders.
"You okay?"
Carlos sucked air, nodded again, and whispered,
"Thanks
. . . thanks."
"Is the cabin blown?" Robert asked.
"No . . . still on
...
no air, though .. ."
"The airlock?"
"Okay
...
so far .. ."
"And you got in at the last moment?"
Veronica showed up with a blanket and handed it
to Robert, who
wrapped it around the shadow of a man.
"They . . . targeted . . . engines and life . .
. life support," Carlos gasped.
"Purposely left our main section intact."
While he stopped for breath, George said, "We
know. We figure
they're parts pirates. They're salvaging the
cutter, but they don't
know we're still here. Did you get the SOS out?"
Carlos shook his head. "They hit the
...
the SOS buoy . . . soon
as it jettisoned. Knew just what to do
...
I guess they didn't like me
swearing at them in Spanish. They hit the cabin and
that was it
...
I saw the laser port heat up
...
barely made it in there in
time."
He gestured sluggishly upward at the
hatch.
Digesting everything, George sighed and grumbled,
"No SOS."
"Nope
..."
"Well, never mind. We're gonna find some other
way. I'm sure
glad you're here."
He rubbed Carlos's shoulders, stirring up that
precious circulation, and venting some of his own
frustration and relief.
"Damn, am I ever," he added. "Thought we'd
lost you, pal.
That's not what we came out for, y'know?"
Carlos blinked up at him and panted around a grin.
"Thanks," he
croaked. "I know it was a risk, opening up the
hatch for me."
"Not enough of one," George said quietly. "Not even
close to
enough."
Still aft, still in his helmet, Jimmy stared. His father
wasn't the
tender type. So what was he looking at?
As he warmed up, Carlos reached out and
offered a solemn
handshake to George.
"What're we gonna do now?" he asked.
George Kirk straightened up, got right to his
feet, and stood there
like a gunfighter.
"I'll tell you what we're going to do," he said.
"We're going to rip
the wall off this hold and get directly into the
engines and nav
mechanisms, and we're gonna drive this beast from
down here.
They can tractor us all over hell for all I
care, but you can bet your
mother's silk underwear it's going to be the nastiest
bitch of a ride those spiders have ever had."
TWELVE
"Can you make out a heading? Where are they dragging us
to?"
Crammed into a rectangular hole in the wall
sheeting they'd just
ripped away, George Kirk and Carlos
Florida muttered back and
forth at each other.
"Laterally," Carlos answered. "They're
dragging us across the
edge of the Blue Zone."
"Probably to a place where they can dismantle us."
"Please, George," Robert April commented from
outside the
hole, where he was trying to hold a flashlight on the
work they were
doing. "Don't use phrases like "dismantle
us." You may find it
shatteringly accurate if we aren't very industrious."
If he was kidding, he was doing it dryly.
"Or damn lucky," George commented. "You know
what's
strange about all this? They came out of the Zone at
light-speed.
Why aren't they going at light-speed now?"
"Maybe their mechanical set-up is
...
I don't know what."
"I do," George said. "I'll bet their tech is
so piecemeal, they can't
work the tractor and the warp drive at the same time.
I've heard of
that happening. At least, not without a complicated
warm-up
process. Maybe that's what they're doing. Warming
up for warp.
That gives us a little time, but I don't know how
much."
"I'll take it," the captain said. "It's all
we've got. George, it might
also explain why we're being pulled along the edge
of the Blue Zone.
They may be giving themselves a way out in case any
other ship
appears."
"You mean if we get lucky and the
Enterprise
comes back to find
out why we never showed up on Fara-was
"Yes. We'll be smartly pulled in there,
merrily crushed, and no
one will have a clue what happened. They might ruin
their catch
this time, but they'll remain on the hunt."
"Not if I can help it," George said. "I'm not
going to wait for an
opening. If they figure out at the wrong moment that
we're still
alive, it's all over. We've got
to be in charge of that moment." He
fought with a stuck cap on one laser emitter and
groused, "Y'know,
sometimes I'd be happier not being able to figure out how
criminals
think."
"Oh-we have something here," Robert said, squinting at
a
flicker on the bared machinery. "George, do you
see this? They've
shut down their tractor beam to twenty percent. We
must be coming
up to speed."
Confused, Jimmy spoke up against his own plan.
"Why would
they shut it off? I thought they were pulling us!"
"They think we're dead," Carlos pointed out.
"So what?"
"So they're conserving energy," Captain April
said. "If they knew
we were alive, they could keep the tractor on and
prevent us veering
off."
Inside the wall, George's voice snarled,
"I'm betting they're
taking the time to reroute their tractor from impulse
to the warp engines, getting ready to go into light-speed.
That's all the time
we've got."
"I'm working as fast as I can, sir," Carlos
added.
"I know you are. Shut up and concentrate."
What sounded like a reprimand to Jimmy apparently
wasn't taken that way. Carlos was chuckling and
muttering, "You're
getting power crazy, aren't you, sir?"
Beside Jimmy, Robert April smiled.
A smile, at a time like this!
Jimmy shook his head and grumbled, "I don't
get it."
The captain looked at him. "It's only at warp
speed that one must
keep constant thrust. At sublight you get up
to speed and whatever
you're towing will fly on in a straight line . . .
oh, almost forever.
Warp speed isn't natural, you see. Sublight
and hyperlight are rather
like the difference between rolling down and rolling up a
hill. At
sublight there's no resistance. Nothing to slow us
down in the void
of space. The only time you would use more power is
to turn or stop
or speed up. Until some force acts upon us,
we'll coast at this speed indefinitely. I'm
surprised you haven't gotten that in school. It's
one
of Newton's basic laws."
Jimmy clamped his mouth shut. All he needed was
to blurt some
comment about how seldom he paid attention in school.
Or how
often he skipped. What could he say? That he
knew Newton's laws
but hadn't bothered to think about applying them? Great.
"Don't worry," his father promised from inside the
wall. "We're gonna get acted upon."
"I don't know what the big deal is," Jimmy
said. "These are just
stupid pirates. How come it's so hard to figure
out what they're
thinking?"
"Stupid people don't survive in space," his father
cracked from
inside the wall. "Never underestimate your enemy."
Beside him, Carlos sank back after failing to gain
access to
whatever he was working on, and sighed in frustration.
Pausing, George asked, "You all right?"
"Let me
...
rest my arms . . . I'll be-was
"Ensign Hall! Know anything about laser
emitters?"
Beside Jimmy, Veronica got up, crossed the
deck, and crouched
before the opening. "Yes, sir, I do."
"Carlos, back out of here."
Jimmy watched from his corner as Captain April
helped Florida
out. Veronica crawled right in. The hole was
small and her legs were
tangled with his father's legs. Jimmy scowled. He
didn't know why,
but he didn't like the sight of it.
"What is it we're trying to do?" she asked, her
voice muffled now.
"We're surviving, that's what. We've got
to live long enough to
warn the Federation about these snakes. Fries my
fanny that our lost
ships could've been pirated rather than lost fair and
square in
space."
"Sir
...
I mean, what are we trying to do in here."
"First order of battle, Ensign. Disable your
enemy."
"Sir, they're about ten times our size."
"They're not ten times madder than I am right now.
We're going
to take off all the safeties and funnel all our
power into one surge through these happy little chopper
lasers. One blast at combat intensity, that's all
I want."
"That's all you'll get," Carlos said from where he
sat resting
between Robert April and Jimmy. "These cutters
aren't exactly the
cavalry or even the covered wagons. These are the
choo-choo trains
meant to go in well
after
an area is secured. You can jury-rig until
that star collapses, and there won't be enough juice on
this whole ship for more than one combat blast. And,
sir? We don't really know what it'll do to this
ship, do we? Could knock out life support . .
. the whole emissions systems might blow . . .
who
knows what we'll have left? After that-was
"After that we'll do something else."
The answer was accompanied by a shriek of
mechanical strain-
metal against metal.
Carlos let his head fall back against the wall and
murmured, "He's not going to listen, is he,
sir?"
With a glance back at the work going on, Robert
April said, "Not
if we're lucky . . ."
Sitting nearer to them than he wanted to be, Jimmy
Kirk couldn't
resist an urge that nipped at him when he heard
that. He leaned
toward them and kept his voice down.
"What's so lucky about it?" he asked.
Captain April pressed a dirty
cloth against Florida's forehead and
tried to mop up some of the sweat pouring off the
helmsman.
"Those individuals in that other ship have their hands
full," he said. "They did it to themselves when they
turned us toward that
Blue Zone. That's what changed everything."
He turned then, and watched as George Kirk
cranked down on a
bolt with both hands and double-barreled rage. Elbows
shuddering.
Muscles knotted beneath the red uniform tunic.
"A commander with nothing to lose," Captain April
added, "is a
very dangerous man."
""Ey! Bobbysox! Wot about them shields?"
"When I'm ready . . . I'll tell you."
Roy Moss lay lengthwise across the bridge
floor, working upward
like Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel. The
work was almost as exacting and twice as hard on the
arms.
"Well, wot's the rush?" Angus Burgoyne
insisted.
Twisting until he could see the captain's face,
Roy stopped
working, let his hands and tools rest on his chest, and
paused to
speak as though addressing a kindergarten class.
"These shields," he said, "are not for rushing.
They're not a wall
against anything and everything. They take
very
delicate constant adjustment against anything trying
to get through
second by sec
ond."
He lay back and gazed up at his
microcircuits. For a moment he was a poet
regarding a lake, a young man in passion.
"What we must look like to them
...
to anyone seeing us come
out of the Blue Zone alive . . . our witnesses
are nothing but
primitive tribesmen watching in awe as a man in
underwater
equipment rises from the sea
...
he is a god. He is a sign. He is
all-powerful. He is astonishing and indestructible.
Yet. . . they
can't possibly realize how delicate, how
vulnerable, he is. They
don't understand that he can kill himself in four feet of
water if he's
not very . . . very .. . careful. That's what we are
...
the delicate
diver."
He touched both forefingers to the specialized maze
above his
eyes and thought about what it all meant to him. How
long it would
take to build up the revenue he needed for his
long-term plans.
Thought about how efficiently he was using these moronic
toad
pirates to his own purposes, and they were too
stupid to realize it. Too stupid to see real
threats coming. Too stupid. Period.
"These shields," he uttered softly, "these are not a
shell. They're
a mirror. They reflect the danger of the
Blue Zone, but they can be
so easily smashed."
Angus Burgoyne licked his mustache, used his
tongue to pull the
end into his mouth, and started chewing on it.
"Dreamy tail-headed runt," he said. "Some
genius. Talkin" like a
bloke on smoke. Just get'm goin' agin." He
shoved out of his
command seat and went to yell down the shaft to engineering.
""Ey,
Dazzo! Cut the tractor beam a hundred
percent. What is this 'eighty
percent" bilge, anyway? We got that
Sta'fleet rumrunner up to speed
by now, don' we?"
Coming instantly out of his prayer, Roy wiped his bare
brow with
a wrist and cast mental disparagement onto
Burgoyne, who was
now bent over at the waist, yelling down the hole
at the Klingon.
Roy raised his aching arms and got back to work with a
final
mutter.
"Deserves to drown."
"Here you go. Time to stop being a passenger."
Carlos Florida was still weak, but wide awake as
he placed the last
of eight mismatched monitors on the deck in
front of Jimmy.
Jimmy frowned at the monitors lying cockeyed
on the deck, and
the wires and cables connecting all eight to different
parts of
exposed machinery in the torn-apart walls. Now there
was a sea of
cables and connections that everyone had to step through.
"You watch these," Carlos said. "Everything here is
measuring
something about that ship out there. That's your job, understand?"
"But I don't know what these are," Jimmy
protested. "I can't
read them."
He fanned both hands across the field of little
screens and
graphics and numbers, all flickering, flashing,
distorted, competing
for sparse power.
"We don't have automated equipment down
here," Carlos said,
"so we have to do it ourselves. This is the graphic image
of the
ship itself. That one is the distance from us and speed. Over
there is energy flux by wavelengths . . . this one is
the macro-diagnostic . . . this one is
power-to-mass. . . . Over there is the
energy measure-was
He stopped, read the display crystals on the
monitor, and called,
"Mr. Kirk?"
"Yeah?" George called from somewhere inside the
forward wall.
"The tractor beam! Sir, they've shut it down
completely!"
"Great. Thanks."
"That's the opportunity we need, George,"
Robert called from
behind some crate somewhere.
Carlos shrugged and turned back to Jimmy. "The
round one shows what I think is their intermix-listen,
you know what?
Forget what they're for. Doesn't matter. If
any of them change, just
tell us. Simple." He straightened
up, obviously still uncomfortable.
"You saw that ship first. You watch it. If nobody
claims it in ten days . . . it's all yours."
He turned, winced, braced a sore hip with the
heel of his hand,
and picked his way between the cables.
Jimmy watched him, marveling that Carlos could joke
at a time
like this, after what he'd been through.
"What are you going to do?" Jimmy asked him.
Carlos gestured to a cracked-open panel a few
paces from where the others were working. "We're trying
to get maneuverability into
our hands down here. There's no auxiliary control
on a boat like
this. We'll have to do everything from under the hood."
"Why do you call it that?"
"Beats me."
With a fatigued shrug, Carlos moved away.
They were all working, except Jimmy. He was
supremely aware of
that, and was glad to finally have something to do. He looked
at the
monitors one by one, and tried to rationalize what
each one was
telling him.
And might as well have been trying to read
Egyptian. All at once
he wished he'd paid more attention in advanced computer
science
class. He'd always figured the basics would be
enough, and hadn't
bothered paying attention to anything more complicated. Just
as he
could pilot a vehicle but not build one, he could
make a computer go but didn't know why or how it
went.
Suddenly he wanted to know how
and
why.
Across the deck Veronica Hall let out a yip of
victory. "Mr. Kirk?
I've think I've got most of the power diverted."
George wriggled out of a very tiny hole and grunted,
"Percent
age?"
"I'd say fifty-five percent of combat
intensity."
"Fifty-five, fifty-five," George
muttered, thinking. "Won't de
stroy them, but they'll be good'n shook."
He picked through the cables and wires, and knelt
to look into the maze of machinery where Veronica was
working.
"Show me."
"Here's where I got a connection through to our warp
engines'
power core. And up
...
there . .
."
"I see it. Don't strain."
"comis the utility laser housing-was
"Damn, is that ever small. Are you sure that's the
right thing? Look at that little sucker."
"Yes, sir. If you follow this up to
...
right here, this is the trickle
of power to the energy-focus matrix. We can do our
beam-force heat
adjustment from this. At least, I
think
we can. But I don't have any
predictions about what it'll do to us."
"We're disabled," George said.
"If
they're disabled too, then at
least we'll be on even ground with them. We might be
trying to have
a swordfight while we're up to our elbows in
quicksand, but at least
they'll be in the quicksand too."
Veronica accepted his help in slithering out of the
hole-and
J immy winced when he saw his father grab the girl's
prosthetic hand
to pull her up. He expected it to pop off and start
running around
the deck on two fingers.
"Okay, huddle," George said. "What do we
shoot at?"
They collected around Carlos Florida, who was
on his side, crouched in the exposed machinery inside
another of the ripped-
out pieces of hull sheeting, working on something.
Jimmy almost got up and left his gauges, until
an overwhelming
sensation pressed him down. He wasn't wanted
over there. He wasn't welcome. He wasn't a
member of the crew. They not only didn't
want him . . . they didn't need him.
He drew his knees up tightly to his body,
ducked his head a little,
turned back to his gauges, and listened.
"What do we hit?" his father was asking.
"Suggestions?"
"What about their warp engines?" Veronica said.
"If
they go to warp, we'll never get our shot."
"No good. We knock out their warp, they figure out
we're still here, they turn and kill us, and duck into the
Blue Zone to hide. Doesn't get us anything.
Gimme this-was
He made a long reach, snatched one of Jimmy's
monitors, and
dragged it back to the huddle. Jimmy scowled at
him possessively,
but had no time to think of anything to say.
His father, Captain April, and the others peered at the
monitor,
which showed a flickering graphic of the spider ship.
They were
pointing at it and trying to identify what was what.
"Where can we hit that'll foul them up most
smartly?" Robert
April murmured, following Veronica's finger on
the graphic display.
"An impulse hit?" she said. "Wrecks their
maneuverability."
Robert nodded. "But nothing else, my dear. They
could still turn
on us."
Next Jimmy heard his father's voice. Very
quiet. Not the usual
grumble or roar.
"What's on the outside that affects the inside?
Come on, people.
Think."
"Sir," Veronica said, "I remember something from
my Intro to
Propulsion Engineering . . ."
"Well, don't make me tickle it out of you,
Ensign. Shoot."
"Coolant? Isn't that right? Without coolant they
can't run
anything."
Robert clapped George on the back.
"Coolant, by God."
George was gaping back at him. "Coolant
compressors! That'll
shut down everything!" Then he paused, ""we can
shoot through their shields. That's the big question. Those
shields can keep them alive inside the Blue
Zone."
"Then what'll we do?" Carlos asked.
"We'll assume they think we're dead so they
don't think they
need shields."
"That's a devil of an assumption, George,"
Robert warned.
George flung his hands wide. "What d'you
want? Shields like that
have got to be a hell of a drain. I wouldn't run
them all the time,
would you?"
"No, I suppose not. . . but they're a complete
mystery," the
captain added. "We're guessing about how they do
something they
simply
can't
do. Heaven's sake, how do you fight something that's
utterly impossible?"
"Don't confuse me. Okay, let's find that
duct."
The finger-pointing on the monitor started again as they
elimi
nated possibilities one by one and questioned others,
while behind
them Jimmy shifted his haunches on the cold
floor and felt left out.
He frowned at them. They hadn't even
congratulated Veronica on
coming up with the coolant idea. Didn't anybody in
Starfleet care
how a person felt?
He watched coldly as they mumbled and pointed, using
their
fingers to follow the design, trying to eliminate the
places where the
duct couldn't be, then trying to conclude where it
could
be.
"That's got to be it."
"Starboard side, on the aft quarter?"
"What else could it be?"
"Mmmmm
...
I dunno . . ."
"It's got to be something important . .
."
"C'mon, it could be just an exhaust port-was
"Could be food storage. We'd be shooting at their
dinner."
"A food port with signal lights for repair
workers to see?"
"I don't see any lights."
"Right there. And there."
"That's static on our monitor."
"Steady static?"
"Listen, we've got to make a decision."
"No,
we
don't."
They all looked up, and Jimmy held his breath as
his father's
voice took on a sharp finality. His father was
getting up and pulling
Carlos up with one hand and Robert with the other.
"I'm the one who has to decide," he said. "On
your feet,
everybody. We'll knock out that port and hope
it's their cooling
system, then we'll move away."
Carlos struggled up and sighed, "If we
can still move."
"We'll move if I have to get out and push. I
intend to still be here
when the
Enterprise
comes looking, and I want those greedy
bastards to be here too." George stood to his
full height in spite of the low ceiling, squinted in
raw rage, and gritted his teeth. "I want
to arrest them with my own bare hands."
Way, way down on the floor, down underneath the
big red giant
erupting at close proximity, the little yellow son
blinked up and
wondered if that was really his father talking. He was used
to a scowling fellow who didn't have enough to occupy himself
on
leaves.
This wasn't the same man.
Lately it didn't seem so hard for Jimmy
to keep quiet. He hadn't
made a nasty crack for well over an hour. Not
since that one he
couldn't forget.
He saw it rolling in every one of his
scanners.
You got me into it.
You got me into it. You got me into it.
"Shut up," he muttered, and raked both hands over
his hot face.
Since when did guilt have sweat glands?
"Robert," his father asked, turning.
Captain April looked up. "Yes,
George?"
"Before it's too late, do you see any implications
in this that I'm
not seeing?"
"None at all, my friend," the captain said. Sad
clarity swam in his
eyes, which had long ago forfeited their sparkle for the
reality he
had to accept. "There is no excuse for piratical
acts, and should be
no leniency. We must. . . fight."
"Positions, everybody."
Jimmy watched from his seclusion inside the
semicircle of
monitors as the Starfleet people scattered to different
parts of the
exposed machinery.
"Oh, my friends!" Captain April said then.
"We're forgetting one
detail. We haven't the power to overtake them, and
we can't strike
that port from astern of them. How shall we entice them
to turn and
present the port to us?"
Immediately Jimmy cranked around to see what his father
would
say to that.
George Kirk was bent on one knee near the
torn-apart access
caves where Carlos was buried in the guts of the ship.
"You just said it. We're going to make them present it
to us.
Carlos? In position? Hall?"
Their responses were muffled inside the caves.
"Aye, sir."
"I'm ready, sir."
"Quite ready, George."
With a false steadiness George said, "Carlos,
take a fix on that portal."
"Fix, aye."
"Robert, can you steer from in there?"
"I can do some lively guessing and
generalizing, certainly,
George."
"What?"
"I said I'll do my best!"
"Okay, this is it, folks. Robert! Turn us
forty degrees to starboard
and let's move! Full speed!"
"Turning." Robert's voice came up from back
there. "Best speed
is point zero zero four of sublight."
"Well, full crawl, then! Jimmy! Watch that
monitor!"
Holding on to his skin somehow, Jimmy jolted up
onto both
knees. "Which one!"
Swinging toward him, his father bellowed, "That one! That
one right there! Is it doing anything?"
"No-yes!" His mouth dried up and he choked,
"They're
turning!"
"They're coming about to fire at us!" Carlos
confirmed. "I can see
their starboard side! Sir, their laser ports are
heating up!"
George swung away again. "Target that
starboard compressor,
Ensign!"
"I've got to eyeball it," Veronica warned,
her voice muffled.
"Do your best. Funnel your power through the system.
Give it
everything!"
"Tunneling, Mr. Kirk. Ten . . . nine .
. . eight . . . seven-was
"Get ready-was
"Five
...
four .. ."
"Aim-was
"Two
...
one
...
full power!"
"Fire!"
-- * --
"They're alive!"
Angus Burgoyne, without even leaving his
captain's chair, reeled
out to his right and smashed Okenga across the
face so hard that the
Andorian engineer went down on the deck, rolling.
Electricity
vomited all over the ship. The bridge was lit like
the Fourth of July,
and the ship was rocking and spinning off its course. Around
him,
members of his sparse crew were hanging on as the
deck pitched.
Sirens whined and sparks flew everywhere, on everyone.
"They're alive! You said they'd be dead! Damn
your face,
Okenga, you said they'd be dead! They're not dead!
They're frackin"
alive!"
Around them their ship rocked and tilted against its own
artificial
gravity as all systems went haywire. Alarms
rang and rang, as if the
living things on board didn't know they'd just been
hit, and hit
hard.
Roy Moss, unwelcome because of his age,
unrespected because of
his age, held in contempt for his
abilities and kept around for the
same reason, clung to a companionway rail behind
the others,
watching.
With his elbows against his ribs as he clung to the
rail, he
muttered, "I'd be alive."
"Fire!"
"I can't fire again! There's no power!"
"Not
that
kind of fire! Get the extinguishers! Hall, get
out of
there!"
George Kirk pulled Veronica out of the wall
only seconds before
her mechanical cave flushed with smoke and sparks
and flames. The
gravity went crazy, and suddenly the ship was turning
on its side
according to the perception of any living thing inside. Open
space
might not care, but the crew sure did.
An instant later Robert was there with two small
fire extinguish
ers, literally walking on the starboard wall. He
tossed one to
George, and both men stood with legs braced wide
as the cutter
tilted under them, spraying up a snowstorm.
Smoke billowed from a dozen cracks and three of the
four
peeled-back pieces of hull sheeting.
"Sir, you did it!" Carlos squinted to read the
sensors at the
source-with jabs of electricity, no screen. He
poked his head out
of the hole he was half in, wiped away the
sweat-plastered hair.
"They' re disabled! It might be quicksand, but it's
our
quicksand!
They're stuck, but good!"
Victory blended with pure hatred as George
tucked his chin and
growled, "I'd like to stick "em somewhere. All right,
crew-we're on
a better footing, but we just gave ourselves away.
They know we're
here. It's a cockfight."
"You dirty son of a scarecrow, Burgoyne, I
warned you! I
told
your dirty, smelly ass what would happen if we
didn't move out,
and now look."
"Watch'er mouth, Moss. I'm still in command."
"Command the warp drive back into place, then, since
you can
do magic! Command the weapons on line! Command this
hulk back
to full power. There's coolant foaming all over the
lower level, for
Christ sake!"
"Warm up the laser!" Burgoyne shouted. "Fire
at them!"
"Laser with no coolant?" Rex Moss said through
gritted teeth.
"We'll go up like a nova!"
"Back your fat self away from me. And lookit
who's talkin" about
smell."
As the two powerful men thundered at each other, those of the
crew still on the bridge now turned to their work, even
if they didn't
have any. Nobody wanted to get dragged in, to get
in the middle of a
dispute. Nobody knew which one would win, and didn't
want to be
attached to the loser.
Besides, if anybody got killed, there was more for the
rest of
them.
"Warp drive is forget it!" Okenga called from
down inside the
engineering area. "Weapons are very bad."
"How long?" Burgoyne called without taking his
eyes off Rex
Moss. "How long to fix the warp?"
"Five day. Six."
"What do we have left?"
Eager to throttle Burgoyne with bad news, the
Klingon technician
climbed up out of the companionway, waving at the
reddish-yellow
chemical smoke that puffed up before him, and leered at
their
captain.
"We can crawl around like a twenty-first-century
tugger, doing a
hundred thousand kilometers an hour. Half of one
percent of
light-speed. You can get out and swim faster."
Still staring at Rex, Burgoyne grumbled to the
Klingon, "Go take
a wizz, Dazzo. Nobody asked your filthy
face."
At the back of the bridge, Roy raised an
eyebrow and murmured,
"The Sharks are now snails."
Burgoyne shot a glare at him and spat
saliva. "Get back to your
goddamned shields, boy!"
"You were so sure they were dead," Big Rex Moss
boomed to
Burgoyne. Sweat broke from his enormous bulk
and added to the
steam in the small, hot quarter. "So sure, so
sure.
"Go aheeeeed,"
you said. "Smack 'em again." Well, we
smacked "em, and they
smacked back. Starfleet people don't roll over and
kick like sailors
on some merchant scow, but would you listen?
Now look at us! No
warp speed! No power! No weapons! You want
to crawl out of here
at a tenth of impulse? Go ahead, Angus.
Let's see
...
how you
crawl."
He moved closer in the cramped bridge, his last
sentence a snarl
of challenge.
Angus Burgoyne caught the serious note, the
threat in that tone,
and pushed out of his chair. He put his back to the
viewscreen-
And a butcher knife in between himself and his hulking
crewmate.
There had always been contention between them, always a tight
string vibrating about who was the better to be in command, but
contention usually faded in the light of money in their
pockets and
bourbon in their bellies.
Today they had neither. And their quarry was slipping onto
a
dangerously equal footing.
No one looked up. No one wanted into it.
Except a bony boy huddling beside the shielding
portal where he
was working.
Roy Moss watched his father from the side of one eye
and judged
the movements of Burgoyne with his pure senses.
He could barely
see the huge butcher blade flickering, glowing from the
viewscreen's
picture of the trinary. He dared not turn, for that would
be
uncalculated and unwise. He might distract
them.
And he didn't want them distracted. He had
waited too long for
someone to legitimately challenge Burgoyne.
If it was his own
father, then it brought him closer to being in charge. If
Big Rex was
in command, then Roy knew he would get at least some
respect, if only through fallout. No, Big
Rex would give him none .. . but the other
malletheads might.
Burgoyne turned the wide blade before his
nose as he glared past
it at his challenger.
Cloaked in fingers of steam and crackling
electrical gushers from
the shattered machinery behind him, Big Rex Moss was
a monu
ment to threat. He was big, he was hot, he was every
bit as muscular
as he was wide, as mean as he was heavy, and he cut
a dinosauric
figure with the nebula's lights and the bridge's
darkness arguing in the folds of his neck. He never
blinked. He took one step at a time. Almost a
sense of music. A step for every sentence.
"We'll drag them in," he said. "Drag them
into the Blue Zone and
crush the life out. That'll give us time for fixing this
hog."
Bending forward to put the knife closer to Rex,
Burgoyne spat,
"And no profit. We drag it in, we get nothing
out. That's not wot I'm
in this business fo". But what do you know about
business? You
talked us into keepin' this snot-nosey
whelp o' yours on board,
gettin' a full share of our take-was
"That snotnose is the only reason we can go
inside the Zone and come out alive," Big Rex
said. Another step.
"He should be getting part of your share," Burgoyne
insisted,
"instead of a whole share of his own. You know it's
true, that's why
you're always kickin' the punk around. Admit it,
y'grotesque
maggot."
Roy listened, and this time he turned to watch. He
stood up slowly. Since they were talking about him,
they wouldn't be
surprised if he took interest or notice if
he moved himself into a
better position. He enjoyed these little moments so.
...
Share. I should be getting their shares on top of my
own. I'm the only one who keeps them in business.
I'm the shielding genius. I'm
the piloting genius. I'm the weapons genius.
What could they do
without me? Use this ship for a giant chamber
pot, is all.
Big Rex took another step. "We're going
to drag them into the
Zone. We're going to get out while we still can.
We're going to hide
and repair. You're gonna step aside."
That was when he brought out the Orion magnatomic
pistol and
pointed all twenty inches of it right at
Burgoyne's funnel-shaped head. Where he'd
hidden it until now, only his folds of flesh and
shabby layers of sweat-stained clothing knew. Only
the chains on
his wrists really cared.
Burgoyne started to shake. His big blade
wasn't big enough
suddenly.
His lips peeled back and twitched. His lack of a
chin began to
wobble.
"Put the butch down, slug," Rex told him.
Hatred boiling through him, Burgoyne discovered he
had no
choice.
Roy held his breath and continued to watch
without pretending not to.
Shaking so hard his bones almost rattled, Burgoyne
slowly
deposited the knife on what had minutes ago
been his captain's
seat. He knew it was the last thing of his that would sit
there.
At least for now.
That was how fast things could change.
Big Rex never flinched. He didn't look at
the knife, but waited
until Burgoyne backed away from the seat.
Then, satisfied, Rex nodded and said, "Don't you
ever pull nothing like that again on me
...
or you won't live to hear the
echo."
Without the slightest regard for what Burgoyne
might do to Roy,
Big Rex chuckled to let them know he wasn't
too
mad, but that he
was victorious for now. He tapped the barrel of the
Orion pistol on
his brow in a kind of warning, then turned and
headed for the
companionway.
Burgoyne let out part of a sigh of relief-
Only part of it.
Because Roy Moss saw his opportunity. He
lunged forward,
grabbed the butcher knife, and gave it a drastic
fling toward the
wide target of his father's shoulders.
Burgoyne's gasp of astonishment and panic was
particularly
satisfying to Roy, but Roy had his eye on the
blade he had cast.
The blade turned sideways and didn't lodge,
but hit hard enough
at the right angle to take a slice out of the back of
Rex's neck.
Rex grabbed his neck with his free hand and spun around
at
astonishing speed for a man his size.
Horrified, Burgoyne threw his hands out before him
in a gesture
of innocence, sucked in a gasp to explain that he
hadn't done it-
shhhhhhhwazzzzzz
A scream of pure agony, a glowing pillar of
heat and stench, and
Angus Burgoyne was suddenly the stuff of
legend. Literally-he was
now a pile of black flesh flakes and scorched
bones whose tendons
had been incinerated, settling and sizzling on the
deck.
"Always thought cremation was the best way to go," Big
Rex
Moss commented. He waved his pistol in the air
to cool it, and
turned away again. "All right, you Sharks! Guess
who's in charge
now?"
Behind him, his son licked his lips and smiled.
"This one's changing! Hey! Dad! Captain!
Somebody! This one's
changing."
Jimmy waved and pointed frantically until
Veronica Hall
dropped beside him and looked at the blinking numbers,
reading
them through static on the screen. "They're changing
course!" she
confirmed.
"What's the new course?" George asked.
"Carlos? Have you got
it?"
"I was afraid of this," Carlos said. He stopped
and swallowed
hard. "They're trying to get back into tractor
range. If they can get a
grip on us, they'll drag us right into the Blue
Zone. I'd bet on it."
"How long?" George demanded. "At this speed,
how long have
we got?"
"Well
...
I
...
wouldn't bother to start roasting a turkey, sir."
"What's that? Six hours?"
Carlos looked at him with a quizzical frown on
his face.
"Sir," Veronica began.
She never got the chance to finish, because George
blustered,
"Well, how long does it take to cook
a turkey? My wife always takes
six hours!"
"Closer to four, George," Robert supplied.
A sentimental grin
tugged at his mouth.
Carlos nodded, but it was more like a hopeless shrug.
"At the very
outside."
Hands on his hips, George stared at t he deck and
paced back and
forth between stacked and strapped supply crates. Four
hours of
disabled ship and disabled enemy.
Four hours to gain an upper hand. Four hours
to maybe lose that
upper hand.
Ultimately he stopped, turned, and faced them.
His eyes were
slim and angry, but a roulette wheel was spinning in
them. There
was a competitive sting in his voice.
"Then it's a race," he said.
Jimmy looked at him and almost-
almost-
smiled. "Thought
you said it was a cockfight."
"Almost nothing left."
"Us or them?"
"Both."
"At least they don't have weapons yet."
"How do you know?"
"They're not shooting at us, are they?"
"Oh . . . right."
"I'd
be shooting."
The voices of his father and Carlos Florida did
little anymore to comfort Jimmy as he sat on the
deck, getting stiffer and stiffer and
more antsy by the minute. Forced to lean back on an
elbow because
the pitch adjusters were still broken and the ship was still
tilted, he
watched as the two men crawled around the deck from one
exposed
outlet to another, pushing wires out of the way and
splicing cables
snapped by the power surge when they took their one
shot.
"We've got to keep them buffaloed," George was
saying.
"Sir, we're moving away, but at a sick
excuse for sublight,"
Veronica said from inside the same wall Jimmy was
leaning against.
He couldn't even see her legs anymore. Only
the toe of one boot
showed under a mass of disconnected chip shells.
"Maybe one or
two percent sublight. We're a mess."
"But so are they," Carlos added.
Jimmy craned his neck but couldn't see where
Carlos or Robert
April were at all.
The hold had gone from a neat garage carrying sealed
crates to a
hangar of parts and cannibalized goods. Crate
lids now blocked
most of his view, set aside so that any tools or
parts inside could be
put to use. Some had slid across the tilted deck and
were crowded
on one side. Edges of the lids had been torn off
and were being used
as knives or screwdrivers.
"They're dogging us at a little better than
our speed," Carlos
called over a snapping of damaged circuits.
"Sooner or later they
will
catch us."
From the other side of an archaeology implements
crate, Robert
called, "Count your blessings. It's a
good
thing our propulsion's
barely working."
"Why's that?"
"Because our navigational shields are down, my
boy."
"Oh . . . right. Darn, that's right. . ."
"Hey."
Jimmy looked to his other side, where the "hey"
had come from,
but there wasn't anybody there.
"Hey, Jimmy? Jimmy."
He turned on a hip, then scooted away from the
wall-
And there was Veronica's face, visible through a
mailbox-size
electrical-adjuster hatch.
"Can you push a vise-grips in here to me?" she
asked.
He bent over, almost down to the floor. "I can't
believe there's
enough room for you to be in there!"
She batted those big pale eyes and grinned.
"Barely. Could you
get that, please?"
"You mean a regular old vise-grips? You
don't want the one with
the magnetic controls in it, or the timer, or
anything?"
"No, I just need a grab-and-holder. You know
...
an "extra
hand." Can you find it?"
Knowing he was being teased, he mumbled, "Yeah,
sure," and got
up.
Feeling green and raw, he ended up rummaging through
four
crates of excavation tools. His hands were scratched
and lacerated
before he found what she needed, and then it was too big.
Eventually he had to lower himself to asking his
father where he
could find what she needed, and got little more than a finger
pointed
at a wall rack of hand tools.
Finally he was poking the correct grips through the tiny
hatch at
Veronica's face.
One of her prosthetic fingers caught it by its metal
teeth and
pulled it in. "Thank you very much," she said.
Jimmy got down on his stomach and peered in. "Can
I ask you
something?"
"Sure you can."
He lowered his voice. "How come it's good that we're
not going
very fast?"
"What? Oh
...
I see what you mean!" Louder than Jimmy
wanted her to be talking, she asked, "Don't you
know what
navigational shields are for?"
He winced, knowing everyone else could hear her even
though she was inside the wall.
"Navigating, I thought."
"No, no. They're for safe travel at
sublight," she said. "If we go
much faster than this without navigational deflectors,
any two
molecules of space debris could slam through our
hull like bullets
through cheese."
Behind Jimmy, his father got up, stretched his aching
legs, and stepped to them. "Hall, say that again."
"Pardon, sir?"
"The shielding."
"Sir, I don't understand. I was just explaining
to-was
"Bullets through cheese . . ." George
knuckled a lock of sweaty
dark red hair over his eyes and gazed at the deck.
"That gives me an
idea . . ."
Suddenly the dim utility lighting flickered, just before
they heard
Robert's gasp from somewhere in the tumble of equipment
toward the aft.
"Ouch! Oh, my lord!"
A second later Robert April
tumbled from the open ceiling where
he had been working, and landed somewhere back there on the
cluttered deck behind some of the crates. Several
pieces of small but
heavy equipment fell out on top of him.
That sent Jim's father plunging across the tipped
deck, around
the crates, shoving aside anything that was in his way.
"Robert, what happened? Don't move-don't!
Let me get this off
you. What happened up there?"
"Bit of a backfire, I'm afraid . . ."
There was a shuffle behind the crates.
Then George lifted him to his feet. "You all
right? Can you
stand?"
"Just a twist. . . that's why I had to become a
captain, I
always say. I'm a country gardener when it comes to
mechanics-oh . . . lord, the shoulder . . ."
Jimmy tensed and got up on one knee in case his
father needed
help with Robert. Losing the two engineers and almost
losing
Carlos had left them all on edge.
But his father's voice, when it came again, was heavy with
relief.
"Go sit down for a few minutes. I'll do this."
"Oh, George, you're already trying to do so much-was
"Look, don't argue with me. I've got ten
perfectly good thumbs to
work with."
"Mmmm . . . suppose I can't challenge
self-confidence of that
caliber, can I?"
Over the crates Robert April appeared and
straightened up. His
gentle features were crushed in discomfort, brown
eyes pinched and
dull as he supported himself on the angled wall and
moved away
from where he had been working. His brown hair was
mussed, but
he was on his feet. Wincing several times, he
managed to pull out of
his smudged Irish cardigan and drape it over a
piece of bent-back
sheeting. Rubbing his left shoulder, he stepped back
so that
Jimmy's father could climb up into the
ceiling-or practically walk
up, the way the ship was tilted. George's upper
half vanished into
the ceiling right under the impulse engine, one of those
places where
mistakes really counted.
Huddling in self-imposed seclusion in the corner,
Jimmy turned away and settled back to watching his
eight disembodied monitors
rather than having to witness the technical activities
he couldn't
help with.
The monitors-just as disturbing. They flashed,
crackled,
buzzed, and snapped at him, trying to get power from
each other
through the web of wires. Machines just didn't have it in
them to
cooperate or share, or work together in any way.
There was
something profound about that right now, but Jimmy didn't
feel
like being poetic.
He ended up staring at the monitor that showed the
relentless
pursuit of the spider ship, coming closer by the minute
in the
emptiness of space.
A glance showed him his father's legs dangling from the
open
ceiling, never quite relaxed, always with a strained
purchase on the
hold's flooring, and he glared with bitterness.
He turned away again.
It's his fault. We wouldn't be here if he hadn't
come up with this
stupid idea. The captain wouldn't be here. Maybe
Thorvaldsen and
that other guy wouldn "t be dead. They said they only
came out here
because April wanted to do Dad a favor. Give
him an excuse to haul
me into space. That's the only reason he's working so
hard to get us
out of this. It's his fault and he knows it.
He talked and talked and talked to himself, feeling
sorrier by the
moment for the fellow he was talking to, but no matter
what, he
couldn't get past the fact that everybody
else was handling the fear and working through it.
But here he was, stricken silent and unable to make
himself
useful, so he was blaming his father.
Useful? He couldn't even think straight.
"Jimmy Tiberius."
With a flinch, Jimmy looked up.
Robert April sat down beside him, holding his
left arm and
moving stiffly. "Feel all right?"
Jimmy shifted and wrapped his arms around his knees.
"I guess,"
he said. Then he pointed at the captain's arm.
"I should ask
you
that."
"Oh, I'll get along, never fear." He
settled and tried to find the
best position possible on a floor that was meant for
crated cargo. "So . . . they've made you master
of the hold, have they?"
"What?"
"You're in charge of the ship's hold." With his good hand
he
indicated the arc of monitors flickering
around them. "Every ship must have a master of the hold, a
ship's boatswain, chiefs of deck,
people to whom responsibilities have been delegated.
No duty is too
small or too menial aboard a ship. If a
chap fails to do his duty, then
someone else
must
do it. Things can't go undone, not even the
tiniest thing. Quite old traditions, and quite efficient."
"Even on a starship?" Jimmy asked.
"Especially," Robert said, "on a starship. You
know," he went
on, "your father came up with the name for the
Enterprise.
Did you
know that?"
Perplexed by the change of subject, Jimmy tried
to be cold. "No, I
didn't know that."
"Oh, yes. He was involved in her first mission.
We rescued a
distressed colony from their disabled ship far within a very
nasty
area of space. I had been planning t o name
the starship
Constitu
tion,
but after George risked so much, I thought he
deserved
...
oh,
a little reward, let's call it."
"That's some reward," Jimmy droned, trying not
to be impressed
while still at least being passably polite to the
captain. "What was
the big risk?"
The captain looked at him, brows up. "You mean
he never told
you?"
"Never told me. Surprise, surprise."
"I see
...
I suppose he took it seriously that some parts of the
mission remain top secret. . . but not the part about
the rescue. I
went down with a head injury, and your father took over the
whole
operation. And it was a great deal dirtier
than anything on the
books, I can tell you."
Jimmy gave him a sly look. "But that's all you
can tell me, right?"
"Well . . . yes."
"That's what I thought. What are they doing over
there?"
He pointed to where Carlos was joining his father at the
aft end of
the hold.
"They're cannibalizing some of the interior flux
conductors and
rechargeable gadgetry in there."
"How come . . ."
"Beg pardon? How come they're doing it?"
Lowering his voice, Jimmy dared to ask, "How come
. . . you're not in charge?"
Modestly, the captain tilted his head and said,
"Oh, there can be
only one captain to a mission, my boy."
"So what? You rank my dad, don't you? Why's
he making all the
decisions?"
"I do, yes, but this is his assignment, not mine, you
see." Robert
let his head drop back against the hold wall and
tried to relax. "I
appointed him charge of the cutter, observation of the
trinary, and
the voyage to Faramond. I can't arbitrarily
take it back now, can I?
We would lose the consistency of command. All sorts
of things
could go wrong. Someday I'll turn the entire
starship over to
someone else, and the future of Federation space will be
in hands
other than mine. There are styles of command as surely
as there are
styles of dance. Any good commander must understand that, as
must any good crew."
Jimmy glowered and fixed his gaze on his father and
Carlos as
they tampered with the mechanisms.
After a moment he asked, "How are you going to keep
other
people from using the starship and all that power in ways you
didn't
intend?"
"Oh, I'm not!" the captain said
emphatically. "Diversity isn't any
good if it's only one man's diversity. Now, is
it?"
Such a quick answer, so well thought out. Obviously
this wasn't
the first time such a problem had dogged Robert
April's conscience.
Yet he seemed utterly comfortable with what he had just
said.
The idea settled softly around them, all its open
possibilities and its inherent strifes gurgling with
promise.
Unable to pop off a challenge-probably because there
really
wasn't a good one-Jimmy tucked his chin between his
knees and
muttered, "Guess not."
He felt the captain smiling at him. Maybe
saw it out of the corner
of his eye.
"You see, Jimmy," Robert said on a
philosophical sigh, "I think
humanity is all right. Mankind is cunning and
artful, enthusiastic,
and ultimately smart. Oh, we blunder from
time to time, sometimes
a bit butterfingered while we build on some
unclear vision, but we
always learn from our blunders and we rarely forget. And
we never,
ever . . .
stop trying."
The enthusiasm in his voice, the faith in his tone, the
ease of
his
posture, all belied this environment and the damnable
hum of their
straining engines.
"So we're stubborn," Jimmy said. "So what?"
The captain ignored all the so-whats coming out of this
boy and
smiled warmly again.
"There are a dozen other civilizations more advanced
than
humanity, just in known space," he said. "The
Vulcans, Orions,
Andorians, the Alpha Centaurians
...
a few others. Yet they keep to themselves while
looking down their noses at us. What good
is
that? Humans have been the only ones to reach out, to ask
others to
join us in our common future. We're the only
ones to initiate a
galactic unity. Oh, how I love the sound of
that. . . ."
Jimmy didn't want to look at him, but couldn't
help sensing him
there and feeling him there, and drawing strength from him.
Somehow Robert April made the death around the
corner seem a
light-year away.
Just when Jimmy was thinking he might get out of this
conversa
tion with his ego intact, that gentle voice came
back with a new
suggestion.
"You don't trust others very readily, do you,
Jimmy?"
Cold warnings flushed through him at the captain's
statement. He
swallowed hard.
Then he asked, "Who've I got to trust?"
A long, burdened silence picked at them.
Jimmy's own words lay
hard around him until he could feel the weight on his
legs and his
heart.
Then the captain asked, "What about your father?"
This was the question he dreaded most, and had known would
inflict itself upon him sometime in this conversation. He thought
he
was ready for it.
"What about him?" he challenged. "I don't see
him that often."
"Don't you? That's odd . . . I remember
signing several leaves for
him. How much is 'enough," according to you?"
Embarrassed to find he had no answer, Jimmy
offered a shrug as a
miserable facsimile.
"He left my mother," he said finally.
"Ah, that lets a little light in," the captain said.
"You've resented
your father on your mother's behalf? Not on your own?"
"I can take care of myself," Jimmy indignantly
verified. "She
can't."
"Can't she? That's odd . . . she married
him while he was a guard
at Starfleet Headquarters. She always knew what
it meant. There
was some difficulty at first, of course-they were both so
young
...
in fact, they were on the edge of divorce until he
went
into the Security Division. Their relationship has
always been best
off at
...
well, at a distance, if you understand." Captain
April
paused, thinking back with a puzzled nostalgia on his
face. "As a
matter of fact, I don't recall their having
any serious strain between
them until
...
oh, I'd say two years ago. Perhaps three."
Color raged across Jimmy's freckled cheeks.
He didn't have to
think back to realize who had been the cause of the
two or three
years of tension.
"He didn't have to drag me into space," he said.
"I like Earth. I
like sailing. On real water. It's always space with
him. He can have
it."
"Oh, yes
...
space is a jealous concubine, I know," Robert
said.
"It demands a whole heart from those of us who tend it.
You see, the
Federation doesn't have an iron-bound coast. It's
incumbent upon
Starfleet to constable the settled galaxy wherever
we're called upon.
Our colonists depend on us, as do our allies,
and, frankly, anyone else who needs help, friend
or foe. There's so much to be done, so
many fragile details to tend
...
no one's life is perfect. If you're
waiting for perfection, you're liable to spend your life
deeply
disappointed."
"I might never get the chance to get disappointed,"
Jimmy said.
"Not if we're going to sit here and-was
"And get whitewashed, yes. I understand. But it
certainly isn't
your poor father's fault."
"He's the one who hauled me out here, isn't he?
He's the one who
had to be in Starfleet, had to go off to space.
He's the one, not me."
Robert lay a hand on his own chest in a knightly
fashion. "If you
want to blame someone," he said, "blame me. I
dragged your father kicking and screaming into Starfleet.
Then I talked him into staying
when he pondered going back to Earth. It's
my
fault, Jimmy."
He tapped his chest with the flat of his hand, as though
to borrow
a bit of his heartbeat to swear his oath upon.
Then he added solemnly, "Men like your father don't
come out of every dozen. A man willing to gamble, willing
to take his turn at the
wheel
...
we simply need people like him so very badly."
They sat in silence for a few minutes, aware of the
disembodied
monitors flickering and burping in front of them.
The captain
leaned forward once, adjusting something he didn't like
on one of
the screens, then settled back again.
"A Security Division commander has plenty on his
hands these days, with more and more interstellar traffic
launching every day,
every minute." He gestured forward, at the only
screen that showed
a staticky picture of the enemy ship closing on
them. "These fellows
out there, they know they're in trouble. That bit of
hesitation after
your father hailed them .. . they know they've stumbled upon
Starfleet. That means they're not only in trouble for
attacking us,
but even if they can explain that-claiming they thought we
were
someone else or some such crockery-they're still
subject to the
theory of infection and contracts of affreightment and
other laws of
interstellar commerce . . . likely they don't have
those things, so
they can't let us go now even if they made some kind
of mistake in the attack. It's like picking an
argument in a pub and finding you've
picked one with a professional boxer. All the little
laws and
regulations and treatises we've had to hammer
into shape to form
interstellar law-each one has been an adventure
in itself. I'm sure
your father's told you about some of them in his letters-that
reminds me! Did your brother Sam manage
to stick out those
insidious ten-hour sessions in the lab and get his
extra embryology credit?"
Irritated at hearing about his smart older brother,
Jimmy hugged
his knees and grumbled, "I don't know. I guess
so."
"Oh-that reminds me about something else. How did the
fishing pond work out? The one you dug out behind your barn?
Quite industrious for a boy of fourteen. I
recall George reading that
and asking if I had a connection whereby he could get
fish eggs to
stock that pond for you. My goodness, seems like
yesterday . . . did
the eggs take? Did you get any fish out of it?"
Puzzled at the way the conversation had turned,
Jimmy drew his
brows together and muttered, "Got some trout out of it."
The captain chuckled softly and gazed at the deck.
Fina lly he
shook his head and smiled.
"Oh, the ribbing your poor father takes for those letters!"
he went
on. "For going to the trouble of sending real paper letters
instead of
transmissions . . . he's endured more hounding than
a plebe at the
Academy, but that connection is precious to him
...
to know that
his family is touching the paper that he touched."
Sitting on needles, Jimmy fidgeted and stared
past his knees to
where his father and the others were working at such a
fevered pace,
but all he saw was the past.
"How do you know so much about my family?" he asked.
"How?" Robert raised his soft brows as though
he'd been asked
how fish swim. "My dear boy . . . you're all
he talks about."
Those words floated around them like the last stanza of a
patriotic song, carrying a sentiment above the ground
and refusing
to let it fade.
Troubled, pensive, and thoughtful, Jimmy found out
what shame
tasted like. His lips parted, dry. The moisture they
needed was in
his eyes.
For the first time since leaving Earth, there was no razor
blade in
his response.
"I
...
quit reading the letters."
He sounded like a criminal confessing a crime.
Felt like one too.
Beside him, Robert April's soft voice
turned bleak and disen
chanted.
"Oh, Jimmy . . ."
"Where's my goddamned tractor beam, boy?"
Big Rex settled with appropriate grunts
into a chair meant for a
much thinner man.
The captain's chair. Though this was satisfying after
all these
months of putting up with a scavenging dog like
Burgoyne, Rex had
to do some down and dirty tucking to get himself between the
chair's arms.
"Boy!" he called again. Now that he was in the
chair, he couldn't
turn any farther than the chair would turn, which
wasn't much of a
swivel on this model.
"I'm right behind you. No reason to bellow." Roy
Moss buried
his contempt in steadiness and glanced at the back of his
father's
bloated neck. "We have only ten percent
tractor beam. We can pull
them, but we'll have to get very, very close
to get a good grip."
"Let's do it, then. Okenga! Dazzo! Can't you
idiots get any more
speed out of this hog?"
The Klingon poked his head up from the engine room.
"Not before the coolant compressor is back to twenty
percent.
You want to push it? Come and do it yourself, human."
Down he went, without waiting for a comment from the new
leader.
Unlike Burgoyne, who would've demanded more speed
at any
cost and taken offense at being called "human" even
though he was
human, Rex Moss didn't argue. The engineers
would want to catch
that Starfleet ship as much as he did. They didn't
dare let it go.
They'd work hard enough without his hammering at them, and
probably work better.
Behind him, his son noticed the silence and paused
to cautiously
evaluate it. After a moment Roy ventured,
"Aren't you forgetting
something?"
Big Rex tilted his large head without turning.
"Like what?"
"Like trying a few . . . other things before we
decide to drag them
into the Zone. Things that may let us keep that ship and
its
mechanisms. Those alloys and the new programming .
. . wait until
the shields are usable-was
The captain's chair cranked to its full third
around. Now Rex
could glare at his son sidelong, hard, mean.
Suspicion and familiarity did mutual damage
between them. Big
Rex deserved every nickname he had ever been given,
yet there was
a keen, diamondlike edge to his sense of what
others were thinking,
especially when he felt threatened.
He could
smell
subterfuge.
His eyes carried an immutable dare as he looked
at Roy now. In
spite of the difficulty of getting into that
chair, he grunted forward
and levered his bulk out of it. He never took his eyes
off Roy as he
stood up and turned away from the main screen.
Backdropped by the flickering image of the ship they were
pursuing, he moved toward his son.
One step, another.
Still holding his micromechanical tools, Roy
didn't get up. That
could get him killed, and he knew it. This wasn't
a good time to be
three inches taller than his father. The slightest hint
of challenge,
the wrong kind of flinch-
His father's wide shadow fell upon him, blotted out
what pathetic
light was left on the bridge. In the harsh threads
of red and blue
worklights stabbing from the deck rims and the garish
contribution
of the Rosette Nebula from outside, this massive
man became a
gargoyle in a burning temple.
"Are you telling me," he began, "that you agreed with
that bag of
kangaroo crap . . . and you didn't say
anything?"
When Roy didn't speak, but only stared up at his
father with a
calculating eye, Big Rex took that as an
answer in itself.
A yes.
The huge man's eyes grew even thinner. His
face glistened with
sweat under the tiny backup lights. He took
another step, up onto
the work level, butchering his son with his glare.
Slowly, he grilled,
"Why . . . not?"
Throat drying up, Roy knew he'd better come
up with something
comj the right something. His father wouldn't buy platitudes
or tolerate lies, and knew what both sounded like.
Roy knew better
than to wave the bloody shirt of challenge when his
father had his
innate radar so obviously clicked on.
"You wouldn't have listened to me."
Roy took great care not to shrug as he said it. He
needed to seem
submissive without showing too clearly that he was
pretending. His
father knew him, but how well?
Well enough to know there was more to his motivations?
At moments like this, Roy Moss couldn't simply
shrug off his
father as the same kind of moron as the rest of the crew.
He couldn't
comfort himself with dreams of having been switched at
birth and
imagine that he was really carrying the brains of some
unknown
genius.
At a moment like this one, he could clearly see whose
sense of
self-preservation he had inherited.
The scarlet-blue mountain of skepticism moved
another step
closer, squashing Roy's drifting thoughts and yanking
him back to
the moment. If Angus Burgoyne had been
dangerous because he
was quarrelsome, Big Rex Moss was dangerous for a
dozen better reasons, all subtle.
Below, Roy tried not to give away the
fact that a parent could still
terrorize, no matter how old a child became.
All of a sudden,
nineteen wasn't old enough.
Rex Moss glowered, grinding his teeth as he
digested his own
suspicions.
"You
wanted
him dead," he surmised finally. "You wanted that,
didn't you?"
It was no question. He rolled his tongue inside a
fleshy cheek and
added two plus two. His eyes fermented as he
leered down at his
own son and asked the ugliest question of a voyage that was
turning
ugly.
"Who . . . threw that knife?"
"They're gaining on us, Mr. Kirk. If they
grab us with their tractor
again-was
"Don't remind me," George snapped.
"I've got an idea. Where's
the jettison tube on this model?"
Carlos puckered his brow and said, "Abeam on both
sides."
"Okay." Clearly hatching a plot, he stooped
near Jimmy and looked at the monitors. "Which one
of these is the mass-to-thrust ratio of that ship out
there?"
Although Jimmy had been watching the monitors for a
long time,
he suddenly realized he knew nothing about them. With
his father hanging over him, he felt particularly
unfledged.
"There it is," George said, picking on one very
small monitor with a divided screen showing two
wobbling graphs. "Good . . . just might work.
Heads up! Here's the project. I want you
all to collect anything that's expendable. Anything
broken, anything
we don't need. What's in these crates
anyway?"
"Archaeological implements for Faramond,"
Robert provided. "Toys for the children, farming and
gardening tools, household
appliances for the colony-was
"All of it, into the tube."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Hall! Get out of the wall. Carlos, come here!
Jimmy, get up and
help with this."
For twenty minutes they did the craziest thing
Jimmy had ever
seen. They ripped the bent-back sheeting right off the
walls and
stuffed it into the port side jettison tube. They
stuffed everything in
there from little bolts and pins to big saws, pitchforks,
shovels,
computer parts, spatulas, kids' toys, and even
their garbage from
lunch.
He only paused once to ask why they were
transporting all these
hand tools to a modern colony, and all he got
back was Robert
April's British lilt-"No one's ever
improved on a good old shovel,
dear boy."
So he quit asking questions.
All the time they were doing it, Jimmy was trying to
think.
This
had something to do with those two molecules Veronica
had
mentioned, and something to do with the thrust-to-mass gauge.
He
found himself plunging whole-soul into helping his father
peel back
pieces of the ship itself and cut them off and stuff them
into the
tube. Somehow this wasn't the same as going through the
motions
of building a fish pond or stepping a sloop's
mast, though he had done those things with his father too. This
wasn't the same as his
father doing something
for
him, or him doing something because
Dad said so, or because Dad had come back from space
to put time
in with the family.
Suddenly he winced-and not because he'd scratched himself
on
the sheeting.
Is that the way I always saw it? Damn-did I
ever say it
to him that way?
He glanced at his dad's face, blotchy with
effort, hair shaggy as red seaweed, arms straining,
and for the first time he saw some of
himself-if only in the shape of his father's shoulders and the
way
the muscles knotted up. They had the same
muscles, the same knots. The same furrow in the
brow, the same mouth when it
tightened with effort, with determination.
For the first time, Jimmy looked at his father and saw some
of
himself.
Always . . . always . . . "Jimmy, you look just like
your mother!"
"Why, Winn, he's the spitting image of you."
"I don't believe how
much you boys look like your mother. George, didn't
they get
anything of yours? "
There was always laughter following lines like those. Some
joke
between his parents and their friends.
Suddenly he wanted desperately to have something of his
fa
ther's. A muscle. An expression. A
bad habit. Anything.
Our eyes aren't even the same brown-
"Enemy ship is getting awfully close,
Commander." Veronica's
announcement cracked a diligent silence that had
fallen as they
stuffed anything and everything into the tube.
Jimmy paused, panting, and stared at her. Enemy
. . .
"How close?" his father barked.
Kneeling at the monitors, Veronica said,
"They're nine hundred
sixty thousand kilometers behind us and closing at about
three
thousand kilometers per second."
"Damn! They're on top of us."
"Gives us about five minutes," Carlos added.
"Likely they're attempting to close in to use a
weakened tractor
system, George," Robert pointed out.
Jimmy was about to ask a question-probably a stupid
one-
when he pulled open a breadbox-size hatch in the
forward bulkhead
and found himself staring at four beautifully
mounted hand lasers.
He backed off a step and stared at them. Weapons
. . . why was
everything so new all of a sudden? Why were his knees
locked and
aching?
Somebody moved beside him, and without turning his head from
the row of lasers, he asked, "Are these supposed
to go
...
with the
rest?"
Please don't let it be Dad next to me-
"Pardon me? Oh, Jimmy, the hand lasers, of
course," Robert
April uttered. "No, my boy, those we keep."
"But they're in a whole other ship. We'll never
get to use them.
Shouldn't we shuck all the weight we can?" Jimmy
said.
"No, no," the captain said. "There's a
spacefarer's rule of thumb
that started, oh, a century or so ago, I
believe, with our first
establishment of space forts. We call it
"W and W". . . water and
weapons. At all cost, in a survival situation
those two elements you must keep. You can do without food
much longer than you can do
without water, so you must keep water. Weapons can
provide
protection, power, and heat in space, which has no
heat or power."
He wagged a finger toward the neat row of hand lasers.
"Two ships
or not. . .
those
we keep."
"Okay, that's enough!" George bellowed from behind
them.
Jimmy flinched, thinking maybe he and the captain had
stopped to talk too long. Then he turned and
realized his father was talking
about enough stuff being pushed into the jettison tube.
His father closed the double-thick hatch, shoving in the
jagged
corner of a cracked lamp lens before he could get the
thing closed.
"It's a brilliant plan, George," Robert
said as the hatch clacked.
"The king would approve."
Jimmy cranked around. "What plan? I don't
get it. Aren't we just
shucking extra weight?"
The captain hung his good arm over Jimmy's
shoulders, steered
him toward the monitors and gauges, and pointed at
the one with
the shattery graphic of the enemy ship.
"Watch."
George Kirk straightened up in his son's
periphery and said,
"Carlos! A hundred and eighty degrees about."
"One-eighty, aye. Coming full about, sir."
The irritating hum of the strained impulse engine
strained even
more as thrusters pushed and burped against the natural
course.
That was the "force" acting upon the vessel-and it was
turning.
The captain's arm over his shoulders was suddenly
pitiful protec
tion as Jimmy felt his jaw drop and his heart
fall to his socks. He felt
suddenly cold-he even shivered.
"We're going to play chicken," he gasped, "with a
ship ten times
our size?"
"Look at this. Hey, Caskie, get a blink
on this."
"What?"
"The idiots are turning around."
Big Rex hunched forward in the command seat as much as
his
bulk allowed, and threaded his fingers as though
anticipating a hot
meal.
Beside him, Lou Caskie's nearly toothless grin
broke wide as the
old man gaped at the forward viewscreen.
"Walkin' right into our tractor beam. Walk right
in, walk right in."
"They know they can't outrun us. By damn, they're
gonna fight."
Together, and knowing their Andorian engineer was standing on
the engine room ladder, also looking, they watched the
Starfleet hulk complete its turn and begin an
approach.
Yes, it was a hulk-a wreck. The proud white
neo-enamel coating
on the outer skin was streaked with burns and ruptures
now. A recognizable pennant that had once said
"Starfleet" now said only "leet." The sensor
pod on top was open like a used eggshell, still
drooling threads of fluid and frozen atmosphere.
A magnification inset showed the limbless gore
left over from two, maybe three people still strapped
into what might have been observation harnesses. The main
cabin wasn't much better after a direct laser
cut, with a surgical slit opening it from bow
to amidships. Random electrical threads and
sparks still searched for a connection.
Behind the captain's station of their own damaged ship,
now filthy with scorches and oil stains, bleeding out the
corner of his
mouth, Roy Moss kept his voice low.
"We don't have shields," he warned quietly.
His father's glare burned into his back.
The young man turned.
Big Rex sat in the command seat, bulbous and huge
and angry, still rubbing his knuckles from the little
reprimand he'd given his
boy.
Roy gazed back at him sidelong and touched a
tongue to his bleeding mouth. Reprimands were
such interesting times, such times of study. Would he ever
be bigger than his father? He was
already taller, but when Big Rex stood before him and
said, "Come over here," there was nothing to be done but
walk over there and be
punished.
Roy knew about that. Once, he had refused.
Not anymore.
Who threw that knife? Who threw that knife?
They both still heard it in their heads.
Both knew the answer now. But the question still rang and
rang,
because there was defiance at its core. The real kind, not
just the
smart-mouthed kid snapping back because he was
annoyed.
Rex glared and rubbed, and his son heard the message
of the
knuckles.
Never again, tail. Don't manipulate me again.
I'll find out.
A shudder crawled through Roy. His sore, recently
beaten thighs
and shoulders told him to keep quiet and do his job.
His father turned away finally and squinted at
the ravaged
Federation vehicle.
"Whoever's left over there, they gotta be in the
hold," he chewed
out. "Driving the mechanics hands-on."
"Cannot be done," Okenga said from the ladder. "Must have
computer control."
Still keeping his voice on low guard, Roy tried
to get on his father's good side by saying, "He's not
talking about Andorian
scavenger engineers. He's talking about Starfleet
pilots. They don't
just steal technology. They invent it."
Without taking his eyes off the Federation's crippled
ship as it
hobbled closer on the viewscreen, Big Rex
warned, "Back to your
work, runt. I'm not through with you. Right now I want
that tractor
beam."
"You're going to need deflectors."
Lou Caskie dropped his rotted grin and advised,
"Nobody asked
you. Didn't hear nobody ask you."
He didn't turn around. Neither did
Big Rex.
Rex's enormous body jiggled in a dozen
places as he suddenly
laughed at what he saw on the screen. "These
weeners are going to
play chicken with
me.
I love when suckers play my game
...
my
way."
Okenga abruptly jumped, looked down, scowled,
then climbed to the top of the ladder and made room for
Dazzo to come up. But not
enough room apparently. The two argued and snarled,
each trying
to get the best position to see the screen. When they
noticed Roy
watching them in contempt, the Klingon pushed Okenga
aside, put
his teeth together, and ordered, "Back to your
deflectors, boy!"
Settling onto both knees and pretending to do as he
had been told, the younger Moss reasoned not to argue
aloud with these
wastes of time. He spoke only to his tools and the
quivering circuits
in the open floor beneath him. "My name
...
is
Roy,"
he mur
mured.
He made a few halfhearted adjustments on the
crashed deflector system-his perfect,
beautiful, delicate, special brand of shielding
program that let them go places no one else dared
go. He would
mend them, yes. But he would hold back. Make
sure these porks
kept on needing him. At least, as long as he
needed them.
In the privacy of his mind he relegated repairs
to one side and
kept doing them, but indulged in adding up how much
he'd
skimmed off these porkers' stash. They were so
mallet-headed, they
didn't even realize he'd been stealing from them even
while they
were stealing from their victims. When he had enough . . . that
would be a day with one sun. Himself.
No one was paying attention to him anymore. He
slowly stood up
and turned to the viewscreen.
On the screen, the Federation ship was heading straight
at them,
closing fast even for open space.
"What do you think, boss?" Caskie was asking.
"What they
doing?"
"Assuming we're stupid, that's what," Big
Rex huffed. "They
don't know how to think dirty. That's their problem.
Always has
been. Gonna be a bigger problem for "em the
further they fly."
"Farther," grumbled an unwelcome correction from
behind.
"Warm up the pokers," Big Rex said, waving his
right arm at the
Klingon.
Dazzo limped to the shabby, pieced-together mass they
called a
weapons control board and checked their power.
"Some. Less than
one quarter."
Satisfied, Rex wobbled his head from side to side
and grinned
with one corner of his mouth.
"That's all I need."
They fell into a predatory silence. The ship out there
looked
mighty small.
Roy stood up and moved forward, his eyes, his mind,
his sense of
survival all on that screen.
"Back off," he said. "Stop us."
Big Rex said, "I don't back off."
"You'd better. Something's going on." He moved
another step
forward. "They've got something up their sleeves."
"Like what?" his father argued. "They know they can't
outrun us, so they're turning and pretending they've
got something left to fight with! It's that stupid
nobility coming at us. Starfleet white knights."
"You'd better stop this ship."
"Shut your mouth or I'll shut it for you! We'll
crumple them like a
piece of paper!"
Abruptly Roy spun to his father and shrieked,
"Don't you think
they know that, you moron! This is Starfleet you're
laughing at!"
Glaring up from his seat, Rex Moss slashed out so
hard and with
such impulse that he almost rolled onto the deck, and
struck his son
across the cheekbone. Reeling, Roy stumbled and
caught himself somehow on Dazzo, who shoved him off,
then slapped him hard
enough to drive him to the deck.
When Roy turned over, bleeding and dazed, his father's
wide
shadow fell across him and he blinked up at a
mountain of a man.
"What'd you call me?" Rex demanded. "What
...
did you call
me? Call me that again."
The shadow fell darker, closer.
"They're practically on top of us!" Caskie
called. "I got the laser locked on 'em. You
want me to shoot?"
Big Rex ignored him and moved closer
to Roy with a surprising
sense of drama for a man his size. He glared
down.
"I want to hear it again," he said. "Let's hear
that word come out
of your skinny neck again, smart boy."
Roy scooted backward, but dared say, "How did
you survive
before me? Don't you understand the physics of space?"
Rex paused. Anger gave way to experience with his
son-he
narrowed his eyes, thinking, sensing.
Roy took those seconds to crawl to the manual
controls and get
himself to his feet, never taking his eyes off his father.
"Hey!" Caskie called then. "Hey, they're
doing something!"
Big Rex turned. "Doing what?"
"Opened their jettison tube . . ."
Shock breaking on his wide face, Rex lumbered
around again,
pointed at his son, and shouted, "Cover! Cover!
Give me shields!"
Behind the command center Roy twisted a lean upper
body so
fast that his own ponytail slapped him in the face.
Hands on
deflector controls he knew were still useless, he
skewered his father
with a demonic glare.
"There . . . are . . . none!"
Finally, too late, it sank into Rex that what they
really needed was
protection and not size. Size had always helped
him, and for the
first time was failing. He pulled himself around, gripping
the back
of his chair so hard that it squawked, and howled at the
horror on
the viewscreen.
Suddenly the Federation ship ducked straight down and
vanished
from the screen at point-blank range. And in its
place-
Pitchforks, jagged metal, jars, buttons,
cans, broken glass,
cracked parts-
"Turn!" Big Rex bellowed. "Evasive!
Turn!" He plunged and got
Caskie by the back of the neck. "Turn,
goddamn you!"
"I'm trying!" Caskie howled. "Can't do it!
Can't do it fast
enough!"
Dazzo shoved away from his console and bellowed,
"Debris! Still
moving at their speed!"
"Lasers! Fire the lasers! Fire! Fire!"
"At what!" Dazzo demanded.
Crrrraaackckclatatatatat-
Big Rex's unintelligible bellow was sore
accompaniment as their
ship was turned into a dartboard.
Bits of junk moving at thirty thousand miles per
second slammed
into their hull like buckshot, puncturing it in dozens
of places.
Chemical fountains spewed and hot sparks erupted
all over the
forward portions of the ship, coughing smoke until they
could
barely breathe or see.
"Fire!" Big Rex kept choking. "Fire at
those bastards!"
The ship tilted upward as though it had
taken a punch under the chin, and started to spin. The
crew shouted and blamed each other
while desperately trying to get control back.
Somehow, in the
middle of chaos, Roy Moss dragged himself from the
deflector
access to the weapons panel and did what his father had
instructed.
His hand came down on the targeting preset, twisted
the beam-
width to maximum, and slammed the firing mechanism.
Even as he went down on the deck hard on his
side, as the ship buckled beneath him, he knew what
he'd done.
He knew he'd made a hit.
If he lived . . . both ships were his
...
Part Four
COMMAND SENSE
"Spock, step down here."
When the captain called, the other captain-who was
acting as
first officer, science officer in his old, most
familiar, most comfortable capacity-turned fluidly
and stepped down to the center of the
bridge as though expecting the call.
The two of them had been like that for a long, long time.
Decades,
now. Fluid together. Been like that through promotions and
medals
and commendations, even promotions that had put them up
too
high for a time, to positions neither wanted nor enjoyed.
Flattering,
but just not right.
Not right? How could anyone not want to go from commander to
captain and take on the glory of commanding a ship?
How could
anyone not want to give up the day-to-day drudgery
of ship
command to be admitted to the Admiralty of
Starfleet?
As the two men came side by side now, James
Kirk silently
reviewed all the reasons, and the fact that so few of
those reasons
could be effectively voiced. They'd both been
asked, plenty of
times, and both had stood blinking, looking for words that
would
make sense.
But this didn't make sense to any who hadn't been
on a ship, in a
trench, in a lifeboat, or clinging to a mountainside
when flags were
down and instincts were on line. Command through the ages had
been tinctured by a tiny fact that some people were under- or
overpromoted, and other than in the field itself. . .
there was no
way to know. How many sergeants had been followed
by gasping
lieutenants, frantic when the moment came down
to decisions?
How many resentful glances had he himself gotten when
given not
only a captaincy at the age of thirty, but command
of the first
Enterprise?
How many experienced and deserving forty- and
fifty-year-olds had wondered what connections he
had-and whispered
in dark corners about his father's friendship with Robert
April?
Why else would Starfleet hand over one of only
twelve fabulous new
ships to a thirty-year-old? Couldn't be any other
reason. April's
hand in the pie.
Oh, well, those were past whispers. He had gone
past the
I showed
'em
stage, and into the
Who could blame them?
stage. Even the
echoes were dead, killed by James Kirk's
time-after-time survival,
discovery upon discovery, and his bearlike parentage of
anyone
within the realm of his command. April may have pulled a
string or
two, may have steered the path to a particular ship because
Robert
April was a sentimental man as well as a wise
one, but Jim Kirk had
pulled mountains down in the course of proving himself,
and April
had been standing by for a long time. Nobody had whispered
for
years.
Through it all, even before they'd known each other well,
Spock
was the only one who had never questioned him, never pushed
or pulled him, had stood silent behind his shoulder,
right where Kirk
needed him-in spite of the fact that Spock might
indeed have
made a more sensible and stable captain many, many times.
Spock had never wanted it. Still didn't. Some people
just didn't.
And there had to be a little bit of arrogant
want. . .
Kirk knew
the taste of it. There had to be a bit of grated
jealously from
somebody else's shelf on top of his Captain
Cake, that was part of
the recipe.
Captain April had told him something like that, way
back then,
hadn't he? The echoes started turning in his head.
He shifted from leaning on one elbow to leaning on the
other, and
looked at Spock.
"I've got a file," he said. "It's
a technical file, high science section,
half-century old. I need you to investigate it,
analyze it, and get
familiar with the science and the theories it's built upon.
We may
need you to recognize and extrapolate. I'll
punch the recognition
words right into my chairside, but you might have to do some
hunting."
Spock, standing there as he had a thousand times, his hands
casually clasped behind him, simply nodded, but also
closed his
eyes and opened them again as though in some kind of mellow
salute.
"I shall do my best," he said.
Jim Kirk nodded back at him.
Permission to step back updeck.
Permission to go up there and back me up.
Spock turned to the quarterdeck again, then nested
himself in the
science cubicle and accepted the punch-in from the
captain's chair
computer access.
Just that simple. Ask, get. Spock knew there was
something
deeply significant to the captain about what he was
doing, yet he
would do it as though in a cloak, as though striding along
the brick
down a dark street after a rain at night. Why?
Because he knew it was important and he knew it was
private.
Spock and instinct.
"Logic, hell," Kirk grumbled. He twisted
to the other side.
"Commander Uhura?"
She turned and responded, "Sir?"
"Tie me directly into Starfleet's computer
banks, historical
section. Then notify Dr. McCoy that I'm
going to want him to
review something in a moment. Tell him it's
private."
"Aye, sir
...
tied in
...
and . . ."
Bleep, blip, knock, knock,
mutter, mutter.
"Dr. McCoy is standing by."
Then he punched the comm on the other armrest. "Dr.
McCoy?"
"I'm here, Jim, in my office. Privacy
assured."
"I've got a psychological file I want you
to review and analyze."
"Go ahead. Whose is it?"
"You'll find out."
"Oh-you want
me
to do the identifying."
"Could say that. I want your unadulterated
opinion, Bones."
"Send it down, Jim. I'll do everything I can for
you."
"Uhura will send it as soon as we get it from the
historical
archives. Commander?"
"Aye, Captain," Uhura anticipated.
"Receiving. . . relaying to
sickbay. Completed, sir. Starfleet
acknowledges."
"Acknowledge receipt."
"Aye, sir."
"Jim? This is a half a century old!"
"Darn near," Kirk said, leaning and lowering his
voice a little
more. "It was in the archives almost that long. Some of it
is
personal."
"Oh . . . yes, I see. I'll keep it that
way, Captain. Be right back to you. McCoy out."
Kirk ja bbed the comm off line, then looked forward at
the helm
of his ship, a ship that was highballing through open space
at
unthinkable, inhuman velocity, just because he told it
to.
SEVENTEEN
Forty-five years earlier . . .
USS
Enterprise,
orbiting Vega 9 as Federation
presence to deflate a planet-possession dispute
"Commander Simon, message coming in over
subspace. Priority
two."
"Hmm? What?"
"Message, ma'am," Isaac Soulian
repeated from his navigation
console. He got out of his seat, went around her,
stepped updeck to
the unmanned communications station, and tapped into the
signal.
"Recorded message, sent via long-distance
subspace."
"Oh, put it on, put it right on. Ought to retire
here and now, go
down to garden deck, put me up a little Mexican
hammock, get a nice nap-was
"Enterprise, this is Faramond Archaeological
Sub-base, date April
27 on Earth-standard calendar . . . Requesting
location of Captain
Robert April and party . . . We expected the
cutter to arrive twenty
hours ago . . . Our Starfleet intrasystem
cruiser has been unable to
find them anywhere near our star system. Signal
buoys have been
posted, but we thought you should know. Please notify us
if you have
information and tell us what we should do. Thank you.
Faramond
out."
Lorna Simon shook off her doze and sat bolt
upright-well, as
upright as old bones would bolt.
"Verify that!"
Soulian tampered quickly with the console, then said,
"Fed
eration channel
...
an authorized signature numbers as re
quired . . . and . . . the encoded identification
checks out." He
turned and added, "It's definitely them."
Simon pressed down a puff of her white hair.
"Twenty hours-is
that what they said? I didn't hear that wrong?"
"They said twenty hours, Commander," he confirmed.
There was
clear worry in his voice as he turned to face the
command arena.
"What could've stopped them from getting there? There's
nothing hostile in that area
...
all they were doing was observation of the trinary-how could
anything go wrong with something that sim
ple?"
"Get Lieutenant Jamaica up here."
"Ma'am?" Soulian looked at her, puzzled,
then said, "Oh! You mean Lieutenant Trinidad.
I mean Lieutenant Reed."
"Whichever. Bring him up here."
"Lieutenant Reed, report to the bridge
immediately. Lieutenant
Reed, report to the bridge."
Simon stretched her short legs and got out of the
command chair.
She didn't like to sit down while she was trying
to think.
"Dang arthritis," she complained. "Wide-range
scan of space in the direction of the Rosette.
Look for SOS signals
...
or residue of
explosion . . . and send emergency calls to all
bases and colonies in
this quadrant to do the same. Hard telling how far a
little ship like that can go off course. Don't want
to take chances. Yeoman-I'm sorry, I forgot
your name-was
On the upper deck, a very young science
intern stepped forward
to face the woman half his height and three times his
age. He had a
very high voice and hadn't yet learned not to stand at
attention on
the bridge. "Jones, ma'am!"
"Jones-seems like I could remember that. You don't
look like a
Jones. Duck down to my quarters and get the
arthritis pills on my bed stand. Deck Nine,
Cabin Four. And a glass of water."
"Aye-aye, Commander!"
"With a slice of lime in it."
He nodded, shouted, "Lime, yes, ma'am!" just
before the lift
doors opened, then he stepped aside to let
Drake Reed onto the
bridge. They changed places, then the lift
doors hissed shut again.
"Lieutenant Francis Drake Reed reporting
as howled at,
madam."
"You always talk like that?" Simon asked. "Like you're
directing
a band while you talk?"
"There is reggae in my blood, madam. Not my
fault."
"You men in Security, you spend too much time standing
guard, I
think. Step down here."
Drake's tawny face expressed surprise and
confusion, and he
paused up there. The walkway light overhead
flickered on his curly
black hair and made him look like a puppet about
to dance.
Simon noticed the pause and didn't like it.
"Well?"
"Oh-coming," he said as he stepped down to her.
"Have I done
something naughty?"
"No, no. You were assigned to watch the
Delta-Vegans, weren't
you? Where are they?"
"On the observation deck, in their eighth or ninth
hour of spitting
at the mayor of the settlement over the Federation
adjudicator's
head."
She waved her hand. "Kick them all off
the ship."
Drake put a hand to his heart and grimaced.
"Kick them? You
did say 'kick them"? I don't think we are
authorized for diplomat-
kicking, madam."
"We're leaving orbit. If they can't solve their
problem in the next
five minutes, they'll have to find somebody else
to transport them back to Starbase One."
"Eh, pardon me, but
...
is this a Starfleet Command order,
madam?"
"No, it's my order. This ship isn't just a
taxicab, you know. The
starship program isn't meant for carting
diplomatic baggage
around. Today we're going to make sure that becomes a
good solid
precedent."
With a shrug Drake started to turn. "As you wish.
I shall
commence kicking."
"That's not all I called you up here for."
He turned again. "Sorry. My brain is soft from
standing guard."
"I need you to tell me something."
"And that is?"
"How well do you know this George character?"
"George? My George?" Drake pursed his
lips in thought, then
something else came into his mind and he let go of
any remarks that
were about to pop out. He stared at her, buzzers going
off in his
head. "Why
...
do you ask?"
The old woman hesitated, but knew all along that
there were
some things that couldn't be eased into or made to sound
nice. He
was looking at her, so she went ahead and let some of the
natural
worry show up in her face. Human nature would
take over-he
would see the worry, and that would be the segue.
As his brows knitted slightly, she knew he was
getting the sense of
events.
"They never arrived on Faramond," she said.
"They're twenty
hours late."
The animation dropped from Drake's dark face.
She looked past him to the communications station and
ordered,
"Ike, tell the flight deck to warm up a
transport. And tell those
diplomats that they're having dinner on the planet
instead of here."
Soulian nodded and sat down at the comm station to do
all that.
"Aye, Commander."
"And get somebody up here to man the communications.
Just get
the whole bridge crew. We need the duty engineer
and helmsman
back up here on the double."
Simon could tell she was making Drake nervous,
ringing the
chords no one wants to hear. Decades of
Starfleet experience sent
her instincts in a dozen directions at once. She
wanted to protect
Reed from what she was seeing in his eyes, but she also
needed the
raw truth on her side.
"I know Robert April," she said as she
contemplated the cocky
Security officer. "He's not given to bad
judgment, or even bad luck.
And now he's missing. That leaves something for you
to tell me
...
what do you know about the luck and judgment of this
George of yours?"
Swept by momentary flashes about what could have gone
wrong,
how the utility cutter could be stuck somewhere with a
malfunction,
or just off course, or trapped in a storm, or so
caught up in viewing
the trinary that they lost track of time, Drake found
himself in a tornado of fears and imaginings and
wishes.
His throat tightened up. He had to clear it and
swallow a couple of times before he could speak.
"If there is a hornet's nest anywhere on the
sugar plantation," he admitted,
"George Kirk
will
step in it."
Lorna Simon's fifty-plus years of
experience didn't like that answer, but she did understand
it. She'd seen plenty of that type of person in
Starfleet since the beginning-in fact, that was the very
type Starfleet attracted with its thousand pretty
flickers in the night
sky.
"How is he," she asked, "at fielding a
disaster?"
The choice of words wasn't exactly reassuring
to anyone on the
bridge.
Least of all, Drake Reed. Suddenly the
lieutenant looked very
young to her.
His expression crumpled with worry. "Usually he
has me at hand, with whom he beats off the hornets
. . ."
She distilled that comment, along with a sense that Drake
really
wasn't meaning to joke, but that some inner guard had
clicked on to
keep him from panicking.
She'd seen that before too.
She poked the comm panel on the captain's chair
with a finger that hadn't always been so crooked.
"Transporter room, this is First Officer
Simon. Tell the flight deck
to forget about using the transport. We're in a
hurry. Beam those diplomats directly off this
ship and tell them they're on their own. Then advise
Starfleet that we're warping out."
The bridge came to life as people and systems jumped
to comply
and calls for officers to report to the bridge
thrummed through the
huge white ship.
These were always the worst moments-between discovering a problem
and being able to move on it. The moments of tidying up
bothersome details that had to be swept off the
bridge before action
could take over.
It was during these tight few moments that Simon
allowed herself
to look again at Drake Reed.
She watched him for a long time, because he didn't
notice her. He
was staring at space beyond the planet, on the big
forward
viewscreen. His dark eyes had no glint in them
now, and even failed
to reflect the distant stars.
His whisper barely surfaced over the bridge
noise.
"George
..."
"Lock it down!"
"They did the same thing! They hit our
coolants!"
"Are the failsafes coming on?"
"Where are they down here?"
"Port aft control access!"
"Stay out of the stream! Carlos, get your head
down!"
"I'll get the environmental support-was
"Why aren't the emergency lights coming on?"
"Cryogenic environmental-backups-was
"Just do it!"
"Stay down, Jimmy, stay out of the way."
"Failsafes coming on!"
"Get out of that smoke, Ensign!"
"Li fe support on secondary
backup-switching priority to respi
ratory systems . . . grav generator is down
to one-eighth. Inertial
potential varying-was
"See if you can't bleed it for stability."
"Aye, sir!"
"Robert? Where are you!"
"I'm starboard of you, I believe."
"Are you okay?"
"I believe so."
"Can you reach the ventilators?"
"Ah . . . yes."
"Be careful of your arm. Don't hurt yourself again."
"Thank you for thinking of that, George."
"Everybody sit down till we can see."
"I feel like I'm floating-was
"Well, hang on to something until he gets over
there."
Click-
Little frantic ventilators began to whine in three
places, and
grayish-brown smoke piled in those directions. It
never did clear
completely, but in a few seconds the crew could at
least make each
other out in the near darkness and move without tripping
over one
another.
A moment later a few of the last-ditch emergency
lights flickered
on in the forward side of the hold.
None of them was spared the shock of what they looked like
to
each other after the laser hit. They were smeared with
filth,
coughing, beaten, and bruised, as though they'd spent a
month in
the woods without a decent meal. The hold around them
had erupted into a junkyard of detached plates,
burn streaks on the
walls, crates turning lazily on their edges as
though floating along a
streambed, and squirts of fluid, gas, and sparks
from a dozen
broken conduits and power veins.
Carlos and Veronica immediately started pushing around the
cabin, closing off whatever they could.
Jimmy was clinging to a loading dock utility handle
when his
father pulled himself around a smoldering crate,
lowered his voice,
and asked, "You all right, Jim?"
Blinking the sting out of his eyes, Jimmy hoped the
moisture
wouldn't be mistaken for tears. "I guess. Got
something in my
eyes."
"Chemical fumes. We'll put the air on
priority as soon as we
stabilize the gravity."
"The gravity's out? Is that why I feel like I
weigh thirty pounds?"
"It's on, but not much," his father said.
Jimmy managed a shrug, and only then noticed that
his arms
were trembling. He tried to ignore that and said,
"Well, it's one way
to lose weight."
His father looked at him, paused, wiped a dirty
hand across his
own mouth, then said, "Great-great. Try to hang on.
You're doing
fine."
He moved away, toward where Carlos was
shoulder-deep in the
open wall.
Jimmy blinked after him and wondered what he was doing
fine at. Not panicking? He didn't dare.
Nobody else was.
Guess we'll all panic later. Maybe that's
how it works. Just keep
putting it off.
That had to be it, because he sure wasn't being much
help.
Great. He was doing a fine job not being an
annoyance. There was
something to take home.
If they ever got to go home . . .
Home. The place he'd tried to get away from.
He shoved himself away from the handhold. "Dad?"
George turned. "Yeah?"
"Do you want me to try to stop some of those coolant
leaks?
Maybe I could plug them up some way."
"No," George said. "Only trained personnel
are allowed to tamper with exposed coolant tanks.
You just sit tight. But
. . . thanks."
Frustrated, Jimmy settled back and realized that
all he was good
for was staying out of everybody else's way. Not a very
noble way to
go. Not much of a story to tell later.
Maybe he could help Veronica.
More swimming than walking, he bounced awkwardly
across the
cabin and took a hell of a lot longer than he
expected to get to her.
Halfway there, he felt like something was pulling him
back, and two
feet later felt like he was being tugged upward.
Nauseating, but he
ignored it.
"Can I help you with anything?" he asked when he
finally got
over there and pulled himself down to where she was working
inside a hole in the flooring.
Veronica looked up at him, managed a
halfhearted smile, but
immediately went back to her work. "Oh, I don't
think there's
room . . . well, know what you could do? Hold my
legs down, can
you?"
"Oh . . ." Hoping for something more
glamorous, Jimmy started
to feel disappointed, then decided not to, and put
himself to use
where he was needed-ballast. "What is it you're doing
down
there?"
"Trying to stabilize the gravity."
"No, I mean what are you . . . y'know-
doing."
"Can you see this saucer-shaped thing under my elbow?"
"Uh-the red and black thing with the manufacturer's name
on
the side?"
"Right. That's the superconductor. A gravity
generator. Inside,
there's a pressurized gas. It spins around and
provides a gravity
field. Basically, it's not able to spin fast enough
to give us what we need to feel normal. All
I'm trying to do right now is make it work
enough so we don't get smashed up if we manage
to get the cutter
moving."
"Why would we get smashed up just from moving?" he
asked.
"Wouldn't it make more sense just to turn it off
completely and float
around, and put all our power into life support?
Or the engines?"
"Gravity
is
life support," she said. "If Florida gets
even part of
the propulsion going, we'll need artificial
gravity or our acceleration
would have to be so slow that we'll never get away."
Jimmy frowned, annoyed that these things weren't making
sense
fast enough for him. Any other time he would have just ignored
whatever he didn't understand.
This wasn't any other time. "Gravity has something
to do with acceleration?"
"Artificial gravity is what compensates for
acceleration," she
said, wincing as she tugged on something down inside the
hole. "If
you accelerate in a matter of moments even to something like
one
percent sublight, you'd be slammed through the back of the
ship.
Unless gravity is tugging you in the other direction,
compensating
like crazy, I mean. Even in airplanes a long
time ago-jets-they
could turn so fast that the pilots would black out. So
they wore
special suits that squeezed the body during a
banking turn and kept
the blood pushed up into the brain. And one percent
sublight is a lot
faster than they went. Artificial gravity is just
something we've got
to have. If this thing isn't generating at minimum
rpms, we might as
well hand ourselves over to those people out there."
All of a sudden a bit of reality that Jimmy had
almost ignored
turned on him and got particularly unignorable.
He watched her work with the generator, and noticed he
was
listening to his father, Robert, and Carlos talking behind
him as
they surveyed what few were left of the monitors and
gauges.
"Life support's on secondary
backup. I wish we had more
light-was
"We've beastly little technical integrity left
to be repaired."
"And nothing to repair it with . . ."
"We can pick at things indefinitely . . . but not
if there's no air to
breathe."
"What condition are our friends in? Can we tell?"
"Look at this screen. They're barely two
kilometers away. I'm not
even using the magnification. They're right
there,
hanging off our
bow."
"And they're still alive. Some of them, at least."
"How can you tell?"
"They're not spinning . . . their failsafes are coming
on. See the
spurts cutting off one by one? Some sections are
ruptured, but their
automatics are still protecting somebody."
"There've got to be places to hold out on a ship
like that."
"We're both floating hulks. Can't
seem to get an upper hand,
either of us."
"And they've got a lot more to work with than we do."
"Hall? How're you doing over there?"
Under Jimmy, Veronica pushed onto an elbow,
rested a moment,
then said, "Nineteen percent, sir."
She nodded at Jimmy to let her up, but suddenly
Carlos Florida
pointed at one of the gauges and yelled-
"Mother a' God, the compressor! It's not holding!
It's gonna
blow! It's gonna blow!"
Drowning him out, a plume of supercoolant broke
from the
burned upper part of a port side sectional tank
and turned loose a
solid blue-white sheet of spray, cutting
Jimmy and Veronica off
from the others and splattering them all with what felt like
needles
of ice. If it filled the cabin-
Frantic shouts erupted almost as loud as the
dangerous gush.
"Lock it down again!"
"The discharge buffer grip's on the other side!"
"Veronica!"
But Jimmy realized he was still lying on top of her,
holding her
down against the minimal gravity, and that put him in the
best
position to move. He held an arm near his eyes
to take the spray and
looked for the discharge cutoff next to the tank. Was that
it? That
red handle under the two blue ones? Had to be!
SECTIONAL COOLANT GRIP -- AUTHORIZED
USE ONLY
Made sense-if he could pull that handle down, the
sections of
the tank would seal off. At least, that's what he
figured would
happen, and things couldn't get any worse, so he
determined to take
the risk himself.
"I'll get it!"
He pushed off Veronica, forgot all about the
gravity, and virtually
flew toward that handle-almost flying into the spray. He
caught
the handle with one finger and kept himself from plunging right
through the spray, and levered himself back.
"Wo,
no!"
Was someone shouting at him? Was it the hiss of
coolant spewing
six inches from his head?
He fumbled for a grip and to get his feet against the
wall for
leverage. Something hit him from behind just as he got the
leverage
he needed and cranked down on the handle. A force
hit his
shoulder, shoved him sideways, and at the last
second he glimpsed
Veronica's synthetic hand close around a bright
orange compensa
tor fishtail and crank it sideways.
The plume of spray turned into an umbrella and
enveloped half
of Veronica's body!
She screamed-it was a horrid, gulping scream-as
she was
blown in a heap toward the opposite side of the
hold. An instant
later the spray dropped to a bitter hiss and the last
of it was slurped
back inside the tank's cracked shell in some kind
of automatic
suction.
Jimmy pulled himself over the top of a seed storage
box and tried
to see t hrough his watering eyes.
The girl lay on her side in a puddle of
expended coolant fluid that
was quickly changing its chemical composition with
exposure to
air. It changed, as they stared, from ice-blue to a
wine-pink as the
supercold crystals melted. In moments, even before
anyone could move, it would be inert.
But not soon enough for Veronica.
She lay with her pale hair soaking up the fluid.
Stunned, as they all were, George Kirk was the
first to move to
her, to touch her. Carlos stepped in behind him and
knelt there.
Pushed her over, gently . . .
Her prosthetic hand stuck to the frozen metal
floor-and tore
part of her arm off with it. Hair on the right side of
her head
snapped like dry straw. Her right thigh tore almost in
half length
wise, clothing and all, leaving a gaudy section of
torn muscle on one
side and a patch of gore on the other.
George sucked a breath through his teeth. Carlos
shuddered,
fighting not to throw up on what was left of his
crewmate.
They hovered over her, helpless, as the torn thigh and
arm
crinkled with crystallized blood and skin cells.
Mind empty, hands spread, legs bent, breath coming
in puffs,
Jimmy hovered a few feet away, staring in some
kind of automatic
disbelief.
He barely felt the hands on his shoulders.
"Jimmy," the captain said, "come away from there.
Come with
me."
"She-she's-was
"I know, my boy. Come with me."
"But that's not
...
that's not how it's supposed to be
...
the
girl's not supposed to . . . it's supposed
to be the guys who-who-
get-was
"Our poor Jimmy," Captain April sighed,
"you're an old-
fashioned lad, I'm afraid. . . ."
Letting himself be led away, Jimmy went on
mumbling over and
over.
"That's not right. . . it's not right, it's not the right
way-that's
not supposed to be how it is-was Then he suddenly
gasped, "What happened? What'd I do wrong?"
"You didn't understand."
"Tell me
...
I've gotta know . . ."
"The pressure compensator has to be in the on
position before
the safety buffer is activated. Or the
whole tank could blow up
under the pressure of sudden cutoff."
Only authorized personnel are allowed to tamper
with exposed
coolant tanks.
"I didn't know . . ."
"We realize that, my boy. We understand. Sit
down . . . that's
right. Don't move for a while. I'm going to see
to the others."
Trembling so hard he thought his bones would fall out,
and only
vaguely noticing Robert moving away from him,
Jimmy stared
across the deck at Veronica Hall's mutilated
form. His mouth hung
open, his throat drying.
He wanted to make this feel unreal, like a dream,
that's how it
was supposed to feel-
But it didn't.
It felt damn real. Damn real. She was
dead?
And all for him. She'd knocked him aside so he
wouldn't be lying
on the floor, half frozen.
Until now, giving lives for others had always been
song lyrics.
He'd never seen a group like this Starfleet bunch.
They weren't
losing their heads. They weren't giving in to the terror
chewing at
them all. They were obeying orders one by one, step
by step, to
accomplish something very specific. They even obeyed
orders when
there didn't seem to be a reason to do a particular
thing. They
didn't ask why. They asked what, but never why.
When are you going to realize that rules exist for a
reason?
The echo of his father's voice
...
he looked for his father,
needing to see him.
And there he was.
Crumpled in a corner with his back against the hull and
his knees
up, his arms braced across his bent knees, his head
down. The
perfect quintessence of misery.
Robert April was kneeling beside him, touching
George's shoul
der, gripping his friend's trembling wrist in a
simple human bond, ready to listen, since there
wasn't much to say that would help.
Before long a pathetic sound rattled from George.
He didn't look
up.
"Robert, what've I done?"
In a soft, scolding, troubled tone that couldn't
nurture away the
guilt, Robert simply murmured, "Oh,
George."
George shook his head and pressed his other hand to the
back of
his neck.
"I can't do this . . . Robert, I can't handle this
. . . she's just a
kid
...
it could've been Jimmy
...
it could've been
my
kid
...
what the hell have I done?"
There wasn't a sliver of hardness or rigidity
left in him. His
saw-file temper was utterly gone, invisible. His
face was parchment,
his eyes glass, ready to shatter. Insufficiency
weighed him down.
"There's nothing left to fight with," he said. "Nothing
we can do
is enough . . . can't save ourselves . . . can't stop
those bastards
from doing this to anybody else . . ."
His voice fell away as though expended, and he
closed his eyes,
consumed by the impoverishment of hope from the bottom of
his
soul.
Even in the big hold, even with broken machinery
hissing and
crackling and spitting, Jimmy heard his father's
voice as though
tuned specifically in.
"What'd I drag him out here for?"
George Kirk murmured.
"You couldn't have known," the captain said. "There could be
accidents on Earth just as easily."
"This isn't an 'accident." This is plain wrong.
You and I know the
risks. We chose this for ourselves. He didn't
want to come and I
made him. I chose for him and that's not fair.
He's right
...
I got
him into this."
His heart twisting, Jimmy heard his own words and
felt them
rush back to bite him, to infect him.
"You got me into this."
When he'd said those words he was after the quickest, sharpest
hurt he could inflict. He hadn't given a thought
to how long words
can last. The future had always been ten or twenty
minutes. He
rarely considered that something he said could come back to do
damage later.
At a moment when there might be no "later," he was
finding out
how long words could go on hurting. As he saw how
bad his father
felt, he realized that he would have to learn when
not
to talk-when things he might say could last a hell
of a lot longer than the anger or
passion that made him speak.
He knew he'd lied in that old fit of anger.
He knew he'd gotten
himself into this.
Yet never once had his father said, "I wouldn't be in
this mess if you'd behaved yourself."
He gazed at the two men who had tried to change
him against his
own will and suddenly saw a vision of his father that was
utterly
new.
still
thought he was goofing off on some pretty planet with
some pretty
technician
...

thought he left us and went off for fun and games
and irresponsibility in space
...

thought space was easy for him.
But his father hadn't been out gambling or taking dips
in an alien lake or schmoozing on some cushy
starbase.
He was out here. Doing hard, hard things.
Staying on Earth would have been the easy choice.
The easy choice . . .
It left a bad taste. Jimmy bit his lip and
tried to get the flavor of cowardice out of his mouth.
These people-people he'd come to
admire-Captain April, Carlos Florida,
Uncle Drake, First Officer
Simon, the engineers, Veronica
...
his dad
...
all said they
wouldn't want to be anywhere else, in spite of the
risk.
They can't all be stupid. For all these people to go out so
far . . . there must be a lot out there.
Robert was holding on to George as though one of them

going over a cliff, and it was hard to tell which one.
His expression
ran through changes, from pain to empathy, to a sad,
regretful
Mona Lisa smile that had some true misery behind
it. Somehow
right on Robert April's gentle face, it still
wasn't even close to what
smiles were for.
Finally he regained control, patted George's
shoulder as though
to awaken him, and asked a question both official and
personal.
"Would you like me to take command, George?"
Jimmy's attention snapped around. He held his
breath and stared
at his father. What would happen?
He never found out.
Carlos's sudden cry was both dream and nightmare.
"George!
Come here, quick! She's alive!"
Jimmy sucked in one sharp breath, then quit
breathing until his
chest started hurting and reminded him to start again. Two
shocks
hit him-that Veronica could somehow still be alive, and that
Carlos was so moved as to call George by his first
name.
George scratched to his feet and shot
to Carlos's side with Robert
right behind him.
"She's got a heartbeat," Carlos gasped.
"Let's do it. Can we do
it?"
They were all trembling, breathing in little gusts, trying
to think straight, trying to stay calm.
"We have no facility to treat this," Robert said.
"Supercold
burns . . . blood cells crystallized . . .
detroyed
...
ice crystals in
the cells themselves-exposure killed the flesh and
muscle . . ."
"She'll never use the right eye again," Carlos
added.
The tones of voice were recognizable on almost an
instinctive level. No hope-but responsibility
to try? Try to save her under
these conditions, only to die later
because
of the conditions?
"What should we do?" George asked.
Jimmy winced. He felt crushed between the
half-dozen terrible
answers to that question. History class. World War
II. Troops
struggling on foreign soil, behind enemy lines, in the
middle of battle, when choices were nightmarishly
few. Soldiers so badly
mutilated that their unit mates gave them
morphine-then more
morphine-then all the morphine-until death came
to help them
all.
Decent people forced to do these things-
Was that what the question meant?
To face death
...
to see someone mutilated nearly to death-
two different things, two distinct horrors, and a
weird sense of
choice.
Then he heard his father ask, "What would Sarah do?"
"Oh, Sarah . . ." Robert murmured
his wife's name under his
breath as though wishing she were there at the same instant
as being
glad she wasn't. "Immobilize that arm, wrap
the leg, stabilize the
vitals, first-aid that facial burn. Make her
comfortable."
"Thermal sheets?" Carlos suggested.
George swallowed a clump of frustration. "We
jettiso ned them.
Damn, that was stupid!"
"Maybe the pressure suit. We can warm her
up, strap the wounds,
keep her from bleeding to death, but. . ."
There's nothing we can do, not here, not like this.
The unspoken truth dangled around them, twisting with
residual
puffs of electrical smoke.
They felt a jolt from outside the ship-a yank that
almost would
have thrown them off their feet if they hadn't already been
down.
Without being asked, Carlos crawled toward a
monitor that was sitting on the deck with its own cable
twisted around it. He studied
the grainy image, then frowned and spoke as though he
couldn't be surprised anymore.
"Tractor beam's on us again . . . only about one
quarter its
original power." He turned to the others. "But I
don't think we've got anything left to break it
with."
George blinked painfully, his eyes creased.
"They're going to pull
us into the Blue Zone. They're going to crush us
once and for all."
Beside him, Robert April touched the forehead of the
injured girl
as she began to move her head and to groan faintly.
Gently he said, "We must face facts . . ."
"Jimmy," George called. "Jim, can you give
Robert a hand?"
Maybe they were trying to keep him busy.
Jimmy wasn't interested in reasons anymore.
He pulled Veroni
ca's spacesuit back out of the locker, along with
two of the personal
emergency medical kits, moving like a zombie in a
strictly-for-scare campfire story.
Elsewhere in the ravaged hold, his father and
Carlos Florida were
doggedly trying to repair their haven before the
atmosphere all
leaked out, plugging holes the autosealers couldn't
handle, welding
torn sheets of the inner hull in case there was another
laser hit,
generally seeing what was left.
Moving numbly and without thinking, Jimmy felt as
if his mind
was on magnification 10. Details, exaggerated
before his eyes,
possessed him as though crowding out the encroachment of
bigger
truths. As though dressing a doll, he helped
Robert draw the suit
onto Veronica's body, over the wrapped
remains of her leg and the
tourniquet on the stump of her right arm, now
destroyed almost to
the shoulder.
By the time he and the captain closed the suit over the
girl's chest,
taunted by her shallow breathing, too steady because of the
painkillers they'd given her almost to the
point of overdose, Jimmy
couldn't even remember putting the suit on her
legs and arms.
The suit had a built-in retractable cervical
collar that the captain
gently tugged out to hold Veronica's head
immobile. He had to be
careful around the right side of her head-her
fluid-caked hair and what was left of her eye now
covered by one of several patches on
that half of her face.
The patches didn't look right. This wasn't the
way a hospital
would put them on
...
no one here was a doctor. . . .
Dulled by shock, Jimmy just watched as Robert
broke the silver seal marked "Emergency Only"
and poked at the tiny controls that
put the suit into medical mode. Jimmy heard the
captain's calm explanation of what the suit was
doing every step of the way-
automatic monitoring of her vital signs,
ongoing intravenous feed
of medications, and anything else the captain
put into the suit's
medi-guard brackets. From the medical kits he
took several finger-
size vials and attached them to the brackets. One
of them was
anesthetic, one was blood coagulant, one was
antibiotics, another was something else . . .
Jimmy heard, but couldn't listen.
"If her heart or breathing stops," Robert was
saying, "the suit will
even do cardiopulmonary resuscitation. There are
pumps and
respirators built in. They have a limited
functional time once on the go, of course, but
they've saved plenty of lives in space during these
critical first few hours."
Jimmy nodded, but most of it went around him. The
suit would
take care of her.
Hours. We don't have hours. . . .
"Captain?"
"Yes, dear."
Feeling his forehead crinkle, Jimmy blinked and
shook himself.
He hadn't said anything. As he opened his
mouth to ask what was going on, he saw Robert
April's pliantly animated face easing the
moment, gazing downward, touching the girl's left
cheek-
comz Veronica blinked up at him with her remaining
eye.
An electrical flinch went through Jimmy's
body. She was awake! She was not only alive-she
was
awake.
His mouth dried up as he realized he might have
to talk to her.
What could he possibly say?
Veronica's undamaged left eye was slightly
dilated, and she
focused with some effort on Robert as he pampered
her with his
gentle expression.
"I got lucky again, didn't I?" she
murmured.
Robert managed a very peaceful grin.
"Veronica," he coddled,
"brave as ever."
She swallowed with great trouble and licked the side of
her mouth
that wasn't taped under the patches. "What've I
...
got left?"
Even through his shock Jimmy could tell that Robert was
battling
to press the misery out of his expression.
"Mmm, yes," the captain began, "your right thigh
is a bit torn up,
and part of the same hip. I can't tell about your eye,
but I'm
certainly no expert. However, there's . . . not much
left of the right arm, darling."
She digested his expression through the fog of medication.
"That's okay," she whispered. "It's . . . still under
. . . warranty."
Robert chuckled, but he was fighting himself. Several
moments
went by as he gathered his composure and fought to keep his
expression benign. He leaned a little closer and
brushed her one
bare cheek with his knuckles, clearly frustrated that
it was the only
part of her that he could touch. He couldn't even dare
hold the hand
she had left.
"Is it any wonder," he said finally, "why
Starfleet wanted you so
badly?"
He wiped a bit of moisture from her left eye,
and her cheek puifed
into a little white ball as she tried to smile.
"At least," she began, "it didn't get my good
arm."
Jimmy sucked a painful breath as his chest
tightened. How could
she lie there with half the cells in her body
killed, the ship around her falling apart, and say
something like that?
"How do you feel, dear?" Robert asked her.
"Don't feel much," she said, as though she knew that
was what he
wanted to hear. Even in that condition she was trying
to make the
captain think he'd done enough for her.
Incredible.
A clatter rang through the metal walls from forward,
and he
flinched out of his thoughts and turned to look.
Under the forward airlock his father and Carlos were doing
something to the hatch that had apparently just
fallen off.
Jimmy shook himself and forced a lucid thought out of the
cotton
wadding in his head. Fallen off? The hatch wouldn't
fall off. They
must have taken it off on purpose. Maybe they were
going to use it
for a big bullet. He couldn't guess anymore.
He'd never imagined all
the bizarre jury-rigging they'd done in the past few
hours, or the
strange ways they'd found to use seemingly ordinary
things that
were lying around. When he first came down, he'd have
sworn the
hold was barren of anything that could be used in a fight,
yet here
they were, hours after the first deadly attack, still
alive, still picking
their way forward, and they'd even managed a couple of
counterat
tacks.
Maybe not enough, but it was something.
"Jim," Robert said, "stay with her. I'm going
to help your dad if I can."
Jimmy scooted a little closer to Veronica and said,
"Yes, sir."
In a moment he and Veronica were alone. She was
trying to turn
her head, to look at him now that the captain was gone.
Sensing that she needed a human face to cling to,
Jimmy moved
even closer and leaned over her, no matter how it
squeezed his heart
to have to look at her damaged face.
"Hi," he began.
She whispered back, "Hi."
When she smiled at him, he almost choked. "I'm .
. . I'm really
sorry . . ."
That was all he could get out before his throat knotted
up.
"Oh," she murmured slowly, "they'll fix me.
One arm . . . one
eye . . . just call me Admiral Nelson."
He frowned. "Who?"
Picking back through endless classes he'd sworn were
too boring
to commit to memory, he sifted out the lesson about
events in
history that changed history. If this hadn't
happened, that never
would have. If so-and-so hadn't been decisive, or
had lived two
years longer, or had given up when he lost that
battle or that
argument, or that arm or that eye
...
"Yeah," he uttered, "Horatio Nelson! I
remember that! The
ship-my dad wanted to take me to see that ship of
his. It's still
sitting in cement in England! God, I remember
that-was
"Classic navy," she said. "He was . . . always
my inspira
tion
...
at the Academy. You know . . . one arm."
"That's right," Jimmy breathed. "He lost an arm
in a battle at
sea. And then he lost an eye, and he still commanded the
whole
British fleet. Hey!" He snapped his fingers.
"Trafalgar, right?"
"Right," she gurgled. She drew several long,
even breaths,
mercifully dazed by the medication, but wasn't fighting
what the
suit was doing for her.
"I can't believe I remember that," he went on,
fixing his eyes on
the medical cartridges but seeing something else. "I
failed the
stupid test. . . how come I'm remembering it
now?"
""Cuz you need to," she said. "Makes all the
difference."
She pulled the answer out as easily as drawing a
business
card-as though she kept it handy in the emotional
survival kit
she'd built for herself.
She licked her swollen lips again. "Did you get
to see it?"
Jimmy came back to the present abruptly.
"See what?"
"The
Victory?"
"Oh," he uttered. "No, we never
made it. Kind of a
...
busy summer that year."
"Maybe we'll go sometime," she said.
He shook off the self-embattlement and forced himself
to look
squarely at her. "If I have anything to do with it,"
he said, "we sure
will."
Her sore mouth tugged into a smile again, and her
whisper had a tiny, courageous lilt.
"Hey . . . something to live for!"
So much bravery in such a weak noise. The steel
rod of it went through Jimmy, and he clung to it and
determined that it would straighten his spine and that the fear
would be backpocketed from
now on.
Used to thinking of himself as the only person bearing a
load, he was suddenly aware of the banging and creaking
behind him as his
father worked to save them all. There wasn't anything in
his father or in any of the others that was concern for themselves.
He had blamed his father for this tragedy, for the deaths of the
engineers,
and been completely wrong to do that. These were
Starfleet people
and they all knew their chances of dying in space. They
were doing
what they believed was best and right, death or not.
All these other people-they left their families too.
Maybe he
thought that was normal
...
or
worth it. . . all he saw around him
were Starstleet people doing the same thing.
Jimmy knotted his fists, and relived the awful
lesson that things
he said didn't necessarily go away thirty
seconds later and he
couldn't do damage control on whatever popped out of
his mouth
when he wanted a fast sting.
You got me into it.
"I'll apologize," he muttered, eyes wide
and fixed again on the
survival cartridges.
Veronica blinked her one dilated eye at him.
"Mmmm?"
"I'll find the time," he said. "There's
gotta still be time-there's gotta be a couple
seconds. I'll get him alone for a couple
seconds
and just say it."
"Jimmy, come here for a minute."
His father's voice was a trumpet out of the night, and
suddenly
Jimmy couldn't wait to do anything they asked him
to do-
anything. They needed him! They needed his help! He
still had a
chance.
He spattered an insensible phrase to Veronica,
and she uttered
back that he should go without worrying about her, and he was
on
his feet, scrambling his way forward to where the three
men were
huddled under the open companionway.
"What can I do?" he asked.
Robert April took hold of Jimmy by an
elbow and said, "It won't be easy, my boy."
"That's fine," Jimmy shot back. "I'll do
anything."
Hearing that seemed to disturb them more than
reassure them.
Just as he was wondering what to do about that, his father sighed
and said, "Well, okay . .. Carlos, explain it
to him."
Obviously on edge, he gestured with the
screwdriver in his hand
at the hatch they were just now reattaching to the bottom
of the
companionway, and he busied himself working on it. His
lips
flattened with effort and his elbow went up and down as
he put his strength into what he was doing.
Carlos faced Jimmy and pointed up at the
companionway. "This
tube is airtight, and it's detachable for easy
maintenance. We're
almost done jury-rigging a portable life-support
system-I don't
guess you need to know all the details . . . but
it's kind of a lifeboat
now. Kind of an escape pod. We hooked up
an automatic SOS beacon, and emergency
flares. We also attached several little
candlepower thrusters which we pulled off the docking
directionals
of this hold we're in. I'm trying to get them
to work."
"They'll work," George ground out with determination.
"I think so. It'll be a decent lifeboat if
we can just find a way to
clamp that respiratory support unit onto the
regulators."
"There's got to be some way to do it."
Carlos turned back to Jimmy. "The
Enterprise
should be back in
this sector in about thirty hours, and they should be able
to pick up
the beacon-was
"You're sending me out?" Jimmy choked. "You're
ejecting me in
that thing?"
"It's your best chance to survive," Robert said
sedately. "You'll
have to accept the chance, my boy."
Frantic that they didn't understand, Jimmy said,
"Oh, I'll do it!
I'll bring them back for the rest of you! I can do it!"
He almost bounced on the hope of it. Finally-something
he
could do right!
Then he paused in the middle of his excitement and
jabbed a
finger upward. "But what about those outlaws? Are you
going to be
able to hold them off till I get back?"
Nobody answered him.
He looked at Robert, then Carlos, then back
again at Robert. Why
weren't they answering?
The captain seemed thinner and emotionally drained, his
brows
moving like soft caterpillars, his maple-sugar hair
glittering with
metallic dust under one of the meager utility lights
that was still
working. He looked at George, eyes full of
something that only
George Kirk could decide, commander or not.
Only then did Jimmy notice that the cranking of the
screwdriver
had stopped in the middle of a crank.
His father was kneeling there under the hatch on one knee,
elbow
up, where it had stopped, the glow from that same
little light
turning his hair a dirty terra-cotta, and he was
looking at Robert
from underneath that arm. He resembled a bad boy who'd
been
caught breaking into the toy chest.
The arm went down. His shoulders sagged. He tapped
the palm of
his bruised hand with the screwdriver and struggled through some
inner argument with himself.
Then he said, "Tell him the truth."
Senses suddenly on fire, Jimmy started to pull
away. His shoulder
bumped an open panel and stopped him. "No . .
."
"They're pulling us into the Blue Zone, Jim,"
Robert said.
"We've barely two hours before we're swallowed
up."
"After we eject you in the airlock," Carlos said,
"we'll flush the
impulse drive with any power we've got left and
blow off the aft end
and slam forward through their tractor beam right into that
ship.
The explosion'll take care of them." He tipped
his head toward the
outside, where their attackers chugged relentlessly through
space.
"And us too."
"No-was Jimmy repeated. "I can-I can bring the
starship back!"
"There won't be time," his father said. "As soon as they
pull us
into the Blue Zone, we're all dead anyway."
Robert nodded and patted Jimmy's shoulder.
"It'll be your job to
advise Starfleet of what's happened here."
Seeing the protest rise on his son's face,
George went on. "We're
going to do what we have to do. As soon as you're out of
range, we'll
blow the aft end, ram into that ship, and demolish them
so they
don't have a chance to throw another tractor on you.
We'll all go up
and that'll be that. At least they won't do this to anyone
else." He
stopped, took a harsh breath, collected himself, and
added, "You'll understand someday."
Jimmy stood before them with his mouth gaping and nothing
coming out of it. Thoughts clogged his head, excuses,
arguments,
defiances-
But nothing that would make any sense.
Two hours. The
Enterprise
coming back in thirty.
As soon as they entered that Blue Zone, they were
dead. Even if
they managed to launch him in the airlock, the others
were still
dead. Captain April, Lieutenant
Florida, Dad . . . Veronica, who
had already paid her price . . .
He licked his lips and could almost taste the nobility
with which
the others were facing death for his sake. His sense of
obligation
started to scream. If anyone should sacrifice, it
should be him. He
was the only one who hadn't given anything yet.
Forcing himself not to stammer, he asked, "Why don't you
send Captain April? He's got a better
chance than I do. He knows more about-was
"Jimmy, we don't have time for this," George said.
"You're just going to have to do what I say."
He stuffed an O-2 canister into Jimmy's hand.
Standing there holding the canister, Jimmy squinted at
him.
What had just happened?
There was something seriously different about his father's
voice. A no-kidding difference. A this-is-it
difference.
"We'll be ready in about five minutes," Robert
said, steering
Jimmy away. "You go and get into a pressure
suit. You'll need to
have it on as a backup. Go ahead
...
see if you can't get used to the
idea, eh?"
Just like that. Get used to it?
He stood a few steps away, holding the canister
in one hand and
nothing in the other, without a clue what to say to make
the
situation any better.
Someone handed him a pressure suit-he didn't
even notice
who. Limb by limb he pulled it on, staring mostly
at the deck.
The others were back to work, as though they'd just told him
he was going to have to be late for team wrestling
practice.
"I still need a clamp."
"Where are those vise-grips Veronica was using
earlier?"
"Welded into the wall, holding the ship together."
"What about the other ones?"
"In the walls."
"Damn."
"Gentlemen, there must be one last bit of
resourcefulness left
between us to hold this in place, surely."
"Can't we tape it into place? Medical tape,
maybe?"
"Wouldn't hold. The unit vibrates."
"Maybe it can free-float."
"I wouldn't trust it. One bump, and it could start
leaking. Cut his
survival time in half."
"There's gotta be something left. There's
gotta
be something."
"Sir
...
sir .. ."
Out of the jumble of voices Jimmy found himself roused
by the weakest one. He spun around, and saw
Veronica blinking at them from across the deck, where she
lay in the puffy white spacesuit.
Surprisingly, it was George who pushed his way
past the others,
past Jim, and knelt at her side.
"Yeah, honey? What do you need?"
"Use my hand," she said weakly. "You know
...
as a clamp."
George gazed at her.
Not four feet away, the disembodied prosthetic hand
lay on the
deck in the puddle of pink fluid, looking pasty but
too human, right
down to the end of the wrist, where the attachment cowl showed
its
synthetic muscles and connections still partly attached
to the
torn-off piece of her forearm. The fingers were still
spread in that
position of shock and surprise, reminding them all
of what Veronica
must have felt as the coolant blew over half her
body. The ring
finger was even twitching a little.
No one else moved.
Veronica seemed to sense the reluctance, and she was
ready. She
blinked up at George.
"It's just a tool," she murmured. "Let me
help save him."
A few feet away , listening, Jimmy Kirk
grew up ten years in ten
seconds.
He watched as his father flattened his lips in a
regretful excuse for
a grin, brushed Veronica Hall's bangs out of
her remaining eye, then
made very little ceremony about doing what she asked.
He simply
reached over her, scooped the prosthetic hand from the
deck, shook
the pink fluid and torn muscle tissue off, and
got up.
"Good suggestion, Ensign," he said.
"Thank you, sir," she gurgled up at him.
"He's
...
a good
shipmate."
George nodded awkwardly-the moment was very hard for
him,
hard for them all. Then he hurried toward the
airlock.
As he passed, he took Jimmy's arm.
"Come on, pal. Let's do this."
Carlos Florida strained to point into the
two-foot-diameter
airlock at what he was talking about, without crowding
his student out entirely.
"You've got these little candlepower thrusters here, here
.. . there, and up there. They swivel, like this. I've
got them set
to steer you away from the trinary and back toward the
spacelanes.
Here's the light. Sorry there isn't any more than
that. It's on a very
small battery, but I know nobody likes to sit
in the dark. Up there is the observation window. It's
narrow, but it goes all the way around,
although I don't know what you're going to have to look
at. On the
bottom left is your SOS attachment. It'll
automatically broadcast
on subspace, and you don't even have to touch it. We
couldn't get it
to fit very well, so try to not bump it or anything.
Somebody"'11 spot
you easy. The
Enterprise,
or somebody. Think you understand
everything? The SOS? The flares? The distress
signals? And how to
alter your course?"
Carlos wrapped up his crash course in
survival, and couldn't keep
his emotions from bumping up against a touch of pride that
they'd managed to do this.
Unable to speak as his own throat dried up, Jimmy
managed a
nod. He knelt there at the bottom of the
airlock, holding his survival helmet, all the
lessons about how to work it still floating loose in his
brain. Pull it on, yank this latch, it'll
automatically attach itself to
the suit's cowl, the airlock could rupture, the
suit'll offer another ten
hours of such-and-such. The whole contraption,
airlock, suit, and
all, the whole plan wasn't exactly
foolproof. The whole thing
assumed their attackers were too damaged to throw
another tractor
beam on the airlock as it puffed merrily away from
the scene of their
crime.
Carlos fidgeted. All these things were going through his
head too.
"Now, you realize .. . could be days before anybody
spots your
signal. . . right?"
Obviously he was afraid a sixteen-year-old
who'd never been
hungry might not understand.
Determined to make him feel better, Jimmy said,
"Well, you
know how teenagers are always trying to get time alone."
There was some ballast in seeing that Carlos seemed
reassured.
"Wish you luck," Carlos said. He
offered a handshake. "You're a
good shipmate, Jim."
The handshake was surprisingly soulful in this chilly,
struggling
environment.
Jimmy started to point to Veronica and stammered,
"That's what
she-was
He cut himself off and just returned the handshake as
warmheartedly as he could, not wanting to diminish
Carlos's
compliment. He was absolutely set on not complaining
or arguing
or saying the wrong thing, or doing more than he already
had to
make anybody feel bad.
That effort almost twisted his neck off as they led him
to the airlock and prepared the vaultlike panels that
would come down
just before the airlock could be detached.
As Carlos and George worked on the vault
panels, Robert April
collected Jimmy to one side and plied him with that
soft-spirited
gaze.
"Best of British luck, old fellow," the
captain said. "Brace up, be
stalwart. Just do your job, no questions . . . it's
all that's asked of a
member of the crew, eh?"
Jimmy cleared his throat and said, "Yes, sir
...
I'll do my best."
"That's the spirit."
Dauntlessly, Robert didn't make a scene in
spite of the sensibili
ties bubbling on his face. He offered an
emboldening handshake,
just as Carlos had, then patted Jimmy's hand once
he got hold of it.
"Proud to have had you aboard, my boy," he said.
"You've been a
good shipmate."
Jimmy couldn't manage to respond. Was there something
about that phrase?
Or maybe just the idea . . .
Shame chewed at his ankles. What if they were just
being nice to
him so he wouldn't feel bad that they were all going
to die for him?
Worst of all was the half-truth. He sure
hadn't started out to be a very good shipmate. Suddenly
all he wanted was to
really
be one.
"Panels are set, sir," Carlos said from the
port side.
George nodded and simply said, "Thanks." Then
he motioned
Jimmy toward the airlock hatch.
The others left father and son to do this alone.
Typically a man to whom tender moments were faux
pas waiting
to happen, George Kirk simply pressed his
lips tight, furrowed his brow, and when the right words
eluded him yet again, called upon the simplest ones.
The two stood simply looking, as though trying
to memorize each
other's face.
He swallowed, parted his lips, and said, "I just
want one thing."
Jimmy squinted in empathy, shrugged, and uttered,
"Guess I can
handle one thing."
George blinked at the floor, then found
whatever he needed
inside himself to look up again.
"Promise you won't watch."
As though caught in two nets, neither moved. The
sound rolled
and rolled. The idea haunted their imaginations.
Then George added, "I'm sorry, son."
A sound of pain. The words hurt him, simple or
not. The pain
showed in his face.
Helplessly, he motioned Jimmy up into the
companionway.
Perhaps a kind of shock took over; there would never be
a
satisfactory compilation of the emotions gripping either
of them at
that moment, but Jimmy found himself up inside the
tube, where
there was room to turn around, but not much more. The ladder
had
been padded into a kind of cot, and he was lying on it,
wondering
how the longest hours of his life suddenly seemed to have
flashed by. Wasn't he going to get a few more
minutes? He needed only a
couple more-
Below, George reached up, rubbed his son's knee
the way he used
to when little Jimmy was afraid at night.
He tried to speak, but couldn't.
Jimmy gazed back at him from the top of the tube.
Then someone said something. Robert April's
priestly voice. The
captain's hand came into the picture, and George
stepped away.
His father's face
...
the last thing Jimmy saw before the hatch
bumped closed and the vault panels were drawn
to make the hold
safe once the airlock was blown.
That was it. That was the difference! The new thing he heard
in
his father's voice-a tone that said they would never see
each other
again. The past no longer mattered, because now there was no
future for them together.
In the nearly dark tube, lit only by two small
orange backup
lights, Jimmy touched the inner skin of the
airlock. "Dad?"
They couldn't hear him. They were right out there, inches
away, but they couldn't hear him. The airlock was
soundproof, airtight-
"Dad?" he said again, louder.
"I'm sorry, son . . . I'm sorry, son."
Jimmy stared at the tiny thruster switches and the
blinking lights.
Right, left, up, down, reverse. Like a child's
toy.
He stared and stared.
For the first time in his life he saw a true choice of
paths-and he
had his hands on the controls.
TWENTY
"They're launching something!"
"You're spacesick. That's a research cutter.
How can they have
anything to launch?"
"You come and see for yourself, then."
Big Rex took a long time to hoist himself from his
seat and appear
at Lou Caskie's side and shove him away so
they could both see the
secondary screen. The crackly main
viewer in front of the corn
mand station was now showing only a corner of the Starfleet
ship,
enough to prove it was still being pulled along behind them.
The little viewer, clearer than the main one, showed a
little blue and silver tube slowly moving on its
own.
Big Rex squinted at the frosty screen.
"Maybe it's another SOS
buoy. Split the main screen and stick it up
there."
Caskie swore at his controls as he pecked and
pulled at them. The main screen fizzed, flashed,
then divided to show a poor view of the
ejected tube over the partial view of the cutter.
"How big is it?" Roy craned his neck and
called from where he
was feverishly trying to restore their shields.
Caskie shrugged his knobby shoulders. "Size of a
coffin."
"Oh, that's all," Big Rex said. "They're
giving themselves a
funeral!"
Laughter rolled around the dark helm area.
Behind Big Rex and Caskie, the
Andorian engineer and a handful
of the crew from below decks had come up to watch the win-a
kind of tradition among thieves-and now they laughed
and shook
each other's hands. Big Rex's body wobbled like
a pile of water
balloons as he chuckled his way back to his command
seat.
Behind them all, Roy hunkered at the deflector
auxiliary, tight-
lipped with sequestered rage. Progressive
stupidity had allowed
them to damage their prize, and now he had to get the
shields back
before they could go into the Blue Zone and finish wrecking
it. Just
to survive. That was all they'd get out of this one.
If these fools had listened to him, they'd have hulled
the Starfleet
cutter in several small places with a surgical
laser, let the crew die,
then collected their "salvage." Instead, the
morons were laughing and backslapping each other and
celebrating a disaster as though
they'd won something.
But this. Th.
Pushing his moment of control further and further into the
future, just as he had drawn it to his fingertips.
Keep the goal in mind. Do whatever it requires.
Tolerate anyone.
He felt the future ticking. This Starfleet
cutter must have been a
supply ship for Faramond. Nobody would come out
here just to
look at a couple of stars immolating each other.
They were going to
poke around Faramond with the rest of those
archaeological
bughunters. They thought they were just looking for
artifacts and
small cultural revelations from an old
civilization.
How long before one of the fools found out what he had
found
out?
A race against time and chance, but a race that he could
run just
so fast. Maybe a year. Maybe six months.
Everyone would get out of
his way.
He crawled out from where he was working, unfolded his
legs,
and looked past the back of his father's fleshy neck
at the
viewscreen.
"Hit it with the laser," somebody from the crew said.
"Coolants are blown," the Andorian engineer said.
"All we can do to make the tractor work."
Lou Caskie dabbed at the open cut on his head from
the buckshot
hits they'd taken before. "Why don't we dump the
cutter and suck
on that little thing? They're dead in space anyway.
Ain't going
nowhere."
"Even a rabbit can smell a trap," Roy
spoke up. Contempt
dripped from his tone. "They could want us to bring it on
board."
Before his father could snap an insult, a skeletal
human from the
crew, whose name Roy didn't even know, blurted,
"A bomb? You
mean it's a bomb?"
Roy lifted one shoulder. "I might do it
if I were them." Then he
eyed the mob he was reluctantly running with, and
added, "Consid
ering."
"Let's push it away, then!" The bony man
twisted around,
looking from one to the other of the crew, trying to find
somebody
to agree with him.
"If it's an SOS," Big Rex said, "they could
be wanting us to push
it away for them."
"That's right," Roy said.
He enjoyed how everyone stared at him, surprised.
Defending his
father? Ah, to keep them guessing, to remain
unpredictable-a
good game.
"They hit our coolants," he added. "They know
we have tractors
but no lasers."
Their cook, a mask-faced, pug-nosed
Tellarite, asked, "How do
they know?"
Roy's delight fizzled. He glared at
the Tellarite and spelled out,
"Are we shooting at them?"
The Tellarite blinked around, trying to see through his
receded
eyes, which Tellarites couldn't do very well, and was
typically
insulted just by being answered in some other way than he
wanted,
but said nothing else. He was new enough in the crew that
he hadn't
started an argument yet, though he and the Klingon had
been
spitting at each other so much, the rest of the crew
wouldn't even
walk between them unless they had their backs to each other.
"If it's a bomb," Big Rex went on,
"it'll just blow up out in space.
If it's an SOS, it would take fifty years just
to get out of the solar
system on those tiny thrusters. They're betting
we'll get nervous and
spin it out of the area and do their job for "em." He
hunkered down
and glared at the split screen. "Why don't we have
a backup tractor
beam?"
"Why use up time and power?" Dazzo rumbled from the
port
side controls. "We never needed backup
tractors before. We attack
only one thing at a time."
Big Rex slumped forward, shook his head, and
complained,
"Can't you measles ever think ahead?"
Staying where nobody could hear him, Roy arched his
aching
back. "Question answers itself."
When nothing happened in the next few seconds and that
small
blue and silver tube just puffed and turned on the
split screen, their
unappointed new leader shoved out of his chair and
lumbered
toward the aft of the bridge, one eye on the forward
screen as he
made his decision.
"We'll be in the Blue before that little turd gets ten
thousand
miles out. It'll be a hundred years before
anybody stumbles on a pea
pod that size in a sector this wide." He waved
his sausage-thick
fingers at the screen and added, "Just let it float
away. You slugs get back to work. We've got
a sucking mess to repair all over this crate.
We'll go back and blow that thing up later."
He hoisted himself to the upper gallery, where his sparse
hair
brushed the ceiling and made him feel taller than
he was wide for a
change.
There, he stopped.
He glared at his son's face.
At the grayish eyes of a woman he'd sworn he
would forget. At the
tag-along hatreds he'd run away from.
Suspicion, which to Rex was the same as knowing, had
told him
his son had manipulated him into killing
Burgoyne. In an odd way,
he was proud. He'd have had to ax Burgoyne
sooner or later
anyway. The ponytail had just provided the right
excuse.
If he wasn't my own kid, I'd be
scared of him.
Roy was glaring back in that silence he did so
well. The kind that
whined in everybody's ears. That said he was thinking about
whoever he was looking at. Making decisions.
Judgments. Plans.
Calling them names in his head.
Big Rex balanced most of his considerable weight
on one foot.
Sweat tracked his wide face in two places.
Acrimony crusted his
warning.
"You can stay right there," he said. "We don't need
your help."
The airlock turned slowly. The tiny thrusters
alternately puffed
and then shut off, seeking their prerecorded heading.
Through the clear band of unbreakable aluminum that made
a
window, a boy's eyes creased.
As his tiny metal prison turned in space, he
lay on his back
against the padding, arms down, fingers closed on the
sides of the
ladder so hard that his hands were cramping. How
far away would
he have to be before his father would blow the cutter into a
million
pieces?
were they waiting until he was on the other side of the
cutter, so
the explosion would push him in the right direction-away
from
the Blue Zone and toward the spacelanes?
The thoughts were ugly, unavoidable, and persistent.
He didn't
expect to see beauty ever again.
Yet there it was.
It came to get him as his tube stopped turning and
found its
course.
Came even in the middle of tragedy. A savage
beauty, but a
beauty he could finally see. Glazed fire in
space, pearly in the
centers, licking outward at each other, then braiding
and twisting
toward a common center.
His lips tugged apart, and he breathed, "Wow . .
."
The trinary.
The hungry neutron star pulled and sucked at its
two compan
ions, and would keep on even after its witnesses were
long gone.
In the core of crisis, Jimmy discovered in himself
the ability to
pause for a few seconds, suspend all
worries, and appreciate beauty.
Better to have had those few seconds, in case things
didn't work
out.
"I'll remember," he whispered. "Dad, I
see it now ..."
He stared at the gorgeous fire of the trinary and
wanted desper
ately to tell somebody. He didn't want to have his
father die without
knowing that his son finally
saw.
He didn't want to have his father die. Period.
The first time, he had run back home and cowered on
Earth and
in his unconnected, irrational fourteen-year-old
mind had blamed his father for his having to see
what happened on Tarsus.
Now he was two years older, and this time he felt
different about
what was happening. He'd once thought all his growing
up was
done, except for getting a little taller. He'd
seen an execution, so
he'd seen it all. He'd seen space. There
wasn't anything more. Go
back to Earth and act damaged.
But this time he was two years older and knew this was the
fault
of those pillagers out there and not his father.
Two years, that was all. Two years, and he saw
everything
differently than the last time. He'd never noticed
before today, but
he was changing with every month that went by.
What would be the difference between sixteen and eighteen?
Eighteen and twenty? How much would he change?
Why had he always admired the pioneers of the
American West
but not the pioneers of space? Too close,
probably. Too familiar
with people who'd been there. History tended
to make heroism
bigger and cleaner.
But it was the same thing. His father and the others-would they
retreat? Veronica sure wouldn't. Jim had seen
that his father
wouldn't. Because they were Starfleet, and this was their
reason.
Starfleet smoothing out the rough spots in space, the
U.s. Army
setting up forts and hammering out the American
frontier for the
pioneers, the Canadian Mounties-all the
forerunners going out in
remote areas, into the spines of danger, insisting that
even way out there the laws of common decency and
individual rights should be
adhered to. He realized how easy it had always
been for him and his
friends to crow about being advanced, but somebody else had
gone
out before them and taken the big risk, stood up, and
demanded that civilization be civilized. They'd gone
out and done the hard
part of their era. They'd averaged a grave every
hundred yards, but
the pioneers had never stopped pioneering. They
hadn't run home
and acted damaged.
Where would humanity be otherwise? If not for the
Robert Aprils
and George Kirks of Earth's past?
Still shivering in the alleys of Europe, probably.
And here he was, holding a chance to do the hard part of
his own
era.
What if he'd been two years wiser and two
years angrier and had
been there to take some wild cowboy action against the
executioner
on Tarsus?
What would he do today?
"Something, that's what," he said aloud. "I'll be a
stampede of
one."
He didn't know, and neither had the others known, whether
he
could survive at all in this tin can, so why waste the
chance he might
have to change the moment? He'd seen their faces when
they told
him he'd be all right in here, that it would all hold
together. Then
they put him in a pressure suit and gave him that
kind of handshake
that everybody recognizes.
One plus one equaled four of them and one of him, which
didn't add up.
"It's not right. . . it's not
right."
His own voice buzzed in his ears like something coming over
a speaker, but he clung to the sound.
Moving in the cramped space, under the tiny faint
lights, with
Veronica's disembodied hand clamped onto the
respirator unit an inch from his face, he nudged
the thrusters and turned his capsule
until he could see the ship that had attacked them.
He saw its
engines. Not so different from any he'd seen before.
He knew what
engine exhausts looked like, impulse or warp.
Those were basically
the same anywhere, anytime, any ship.
And being basically the same,
any
engine could build up to
explosion . . . especially with a detachable
airlock crammed up its
back end.
He didn't listen to the little voices shrieking in his
head. The voice that made him always protect himself,
always consider
himself first-he wasn't going to listen anymore. He
was ready to
give.
In spite of the clumsy work gloves attached to the
pressure suit,
he got his hands snugly around the thruster controls.
This was going
to take more than just puffing and turning.
This would take steering and ramming.
"Well, Dad," he uttered, "I promised you
I wouldn't watch, and
I'm not going to. I'm too busy."
He aimed the capsule as best he could using only
his hands and
eyes. When he thought he was pointed right and
trajectory was
right, he fired up all the thrusters.
Suddenly the crawly green and black ship
in front of him was very
big and getting bigger damned fast.
The engines" exhaust expanded before his eyes as though
made of
rubber, stretching in all directions. Inside, there
was the Hades of violent energy popping and boiling
unsteadily. That unsteadiness was the destruction his father
had done to their enemies.
Wider, hotter-closer-
Jimmy crammed his eyes shut. He was two years
older, yes. But
still not old enough to want to watch death coming.
"No! Jimmy! No, no!"
"George!"
Robert April held on to the bigger man and dug
his heels into the
deck, trying to prevent this unthinkable turn of
events from killing
the father as well as the son, and called across the darkened
hold.
"Carlos! Are you sure?"
Carlos Florida gripped the breadbox-size
monitor with both
hands as though about to crawl into the screen. "He's
turning-he's
under power and heading right for their engine exhaust!"
"My God, I gotta stop him!" George
bellowed, yanking free and plunging for the gaping
exposed machinery in the forward hull.
Robert scraped after him and got him by the arm again.
"You
can't! You'll tear us apart if you counterthrust that
tractor beam!
George!"
"Let me go!"
Then Carlos's voice, heavy and beaten, cut right
through them
both.
"It's gone."
Locked in a grapple, the other two men froze and
glared at
him-two distinct expressions, the postures of
devastation.
"I can't see it anymore," Carlos said. He
couldn't look up. "I
can't see it at all
...
might have bounced off and disinte
grated . .. crashed
...
or it could've gone into their engine core
and-was
The captain cut him off by simply saying,
"Carlos."
Carlos let his shoulders sink and dropped the
officiality he was clinging to. "Sorry, sir."
Robert wanted to be in two places at once, but
George needed
him more than Carlos did.
George Kirk's face turned almost as red as his
uniform. His hand
bit hard into the bent-back hull sheeting, so hard that
the ragged
edges cut him. Blood broke between his knuckles,
slowly traced his
fingers, then gathered and trailed down the gray
metal.
"Why'd he do that?" he gasped. "Why'd he do that
..."
"For us, I'm afraid," Robert balmed.
As George sank to his knees on the deck,
doubled over by
anguish, Robert forced him to loosen his lacerated
hands before
permanent damage took over-as if it
hadn't already.
George never even felt his hands being cut, or the
cuts being
wrapped with gauze. He sat slumped on the
deck, filthy with dust
and metal shavings from the drills they'd used to try
to save
themselves, and he stared at his own bent knee.
Past it, he saw Veronica's supine form lying in
its white survival
suit, mutilated for the sake of Jimmy.
"His mother'll never even know what happened
..."
"Where the hell is it!" Rex Moss thrust his
huge body forward to
the edge of the creaking command seat and bugged his eyes at
the screen. "Where'd it go? Caskie, find out where it
went!"
"Got no sensors on that side!"
"It bounced off and fell apart," Dazzo cracked
from the port side.
"Sensors are not working on that quarter."
Big Rex twisted against his own bulk. "No
viewers? No nothing?
What are you pigs good for?"
"We're so banged up," Caskie said, "beats
me we can move at
all."
"Keep looking for it."
"How? A little thing like that?"
Dazzo backed off from his controls a step and kicked
the housing.
"Half our sensors down and no shields! How can
we tell you where it went?"
"I'm the captain," Rex said. "I ask, you find
the answers."
"Captain the sensors back on line, then."
"Drop dead."
He stood up. Not a castaway task.
The forward viewscreen was his enemy. He stared it
down. His
voice was smoke.
"I'm done putting up with this bullshit," he said.
"Screw the Blue
Zone. Get me some engine power and let's turn this
crate around."
Caskie and the Klingon both turned, glowered at the
unexpected
order, and didn't move to follow it. Caskie
asked, "What're you
gonna do?"
Sour red and yellow lights cloisonned Rex's
domineering mass in
the center of the control room.
"I'm gonna do what I should've done in the first
place," he said.
"I'm gonna put the construction claw on those
suckers, rip the
sheets off their hull, and kill "em all right
now."
"Jimmy, what were you thinking
..."
Unshrouded agony pressed George Kirk to where
he sat on the
deck and held him down. His surly talent for
digesting the unthink
able almost immediately betrayed him this time just by existing.
No shock. Just raw, unpadded devastation.
At his side, demanding composure of himself, Robert
April
labored through his own grief, clutched to the core by the
sound of his friend's misery.
He arranged himself off his aching knee and sat down
beside
George, against the tilted wall.
"Jimmy didn't want to watch the game from the
bench," he said
pacifically. "He knew we meant to sacrifice
ourselves for him and
for any who might stumble this way in the future.
He's the same
blood and thunder as you are
...
a prodigality you should be proud
of tonight." He swallowed dryly and added, "We must
be proud of
them both tonight."
Together he and George gazed across the dim hold at
the white
spacesuit and the motionless girl whose face was
fortuitously
turned away from them. Her chest moved up and down in
carefully
regulated shallow respiration.
At least she wasn't awake to know what had
happened to Jimmy,
to know that her sacrifice had been for nothing.
Across the deck, Carlos Florida looked also,
then turned away
and huddled even closer to his monitors,
doing a job that a few
small hours ago had been Jimmy's.
The hold divided into private places.
Robert allowed himself a cemetery sigh. "He
knew Veronica
risked her life for him, and perhaps hoped to return the
gesture. At least he believed he did that much.
Our two young people . . . both
valiant under fire."
"Both dead," George trembled out. "Like us."
His face felt like shriveled fruit. Pain
drummed behind his eyes,
and around his heart, which his son had thought was made of
marble.
Robert let his own throbbing head drop back against
the hull
wall. A ruddy British pink appled his cheeks,
and his otter-brown
eyes filled with warm esteem.
"When an officer disobeys direct orders for the
sake of his crew,
he's either hanged
...
or promoted. That's because of the character
of decisions made in the unkind arbiter of the
field. Jimmy chose to march into a cannon's mouth
on our behalf. And he knew we could see it all
happening .. . perhaps he left a message for you in
his final
defiance. He wanted to show you that he'd learned what
you
brought him here to learn."
Despite the timbre of his words, his Coventry
accent painted a
quiet English lane for them to stroll, made
sparrows sing where
there were only sparks, made a lake with reeds where
there was only
puddled lubricant, and flew flags where there was no
wind.
"You understand, don't you, George?" Robert
hoped. Salient
emotion rose on his face, drew him through a
half-dozen expres
sions, any one of which might have been a tearstain upon
a letter
home. He turned and pliantly gripped his old
friend's hand, in spite
of bandages, in spite of blood, to put to flesh the
precious thing for which a boy had sacrificed
himself. "He was thinking like a man."
He tensed. He waited for it. Wondered if it would
hurt much.
Brrraaackkk-
were all the superstitions and wishful thinking right? Was
there life after death? If he opened his eyes, would
he see heaven?
With my record? Better keep the eyes closed.
He'd felt the strike, the airlock hitting the
enemy ship, felt the
muscles of metal give, then the jolt of hitting
something tougher
than the thing he was in, and a sudden stop. No sound
other than
the shriek of his tiny, pressurized tomb as it was
crammed beyond
its capacity to withstand. Just a hard hit, and a hard
stop.
He opened one eye.
And found himself alive.
That didn't make any sense. How could he still be
alive inside a
big hot engine?
There was only one answer to that. So he opened the other
eye
and looked around.
Both boots smashed against the inside of his tube.
"A garbage dump!" he grated. "I killed
myself in a garbage
dump!"
Looked like a junkyard with walls. Except that the
piles of junk
were strapped to the walls and the floor and the ceiling with
elastic
straps and industrial webbing, and anything else that could
hold it.
His voice rang bitter and ugly in his ears.
"Great job. Now we know what legends are made
of."
Another failure. He'd failed
again.
He grumbled at himself, giving himself a sound to cling
to, and a
sense that maybe he wasn't as terrified as his
insides were telling
him. He was cold and realized he was trembling with in
his survival
suit, his spine straight and locked, his legs the
same. Hard to breathe
...
his chest hurt.
He'd missed somehow! Missed the engine exhaust
entirely, and smashed through one of the gashes in the ship.
Probably one his
own father had put in this ship with his buckshot trick.
Through his
narrow viewband he could barely see the ragged edge of
torn metal
and shredded insulation and layered hull material, now
a colorful mess like a club sandwich with a big
bite taken out of it and the
mustard leaking.
Now what?
Color-there was some light in here.
Jimmy craned his neck and spotted two small
intermittent docking lights or maybe loading
lights, both yellow, both blinking sluggishly.
Between them, they made some light most of the time.
That was why the hull insulation looked like mustard.
Yellow
lights.
Hssssssssss
Jimmy heard it-but only for a few seconds. The
sound was
fading away. The sound of leakage.
The tube! Leaking!
He scrambled for his helmet. Hadn't even bothered
to put it on-he hadn't needed a helmet on to go
blow himself up.
Where was it? Mounted behind his head. Right. He cranked
backward, arching his spine, which ached and told him how
tense
he'd been until now, how tense he still was.
Clumsily he pulled the
helmet on and yanked the thing Carlos had pointed
to. The cowl
activated itself instantly with an airy
thok,
and the suit sucked tight
on his body. All at once he had oxygen-rich
air to breathe and a sensation of lightheadedness.
Pressurized.
Now what?
They were going to barge in here, find him trapped
inside a stupid-looking cocoon, and they were going
to slaughter him.
"Well, they're not gonna kill me in here," he
snapped. He
pounded the viewport material and shouted, "You're not
gonna kill
me in here!"
Was there a way out from the inside? There hadn't been
much to
work with. What if there were no way out? They'd be down
here any
second-
He looked up at the vault hatch. No handle.
The original had
been cannibalized for the propulsion unit-there
hadn't been
anything left to make another one. He tried
to bend, but there was
no way for him to reach the bottom hatch. With boots
on, he had no
way to pull the latch off its housing with his feet.
That meant
...
no way to get out.
The pirates were on their way down, and he was a
sitting duck!
In anguish he hammered his fists against the sides of
what could
very well be his coffin, even now-and his right knuckles
bumped
what felt like flesh. It startled him, and
he looked. Beside his face,
valiantly clamping the respiration unit, was
Veronica's pale hand.
Yellow lights from out there buttered the skin. The
crafted fingernails looked like hers. Unpainted and
slightly tattered. The fingers
were long-boned and waxy, knuckles pronounced and a
little pink.
"Okay, all right," Jimmy huffed.
Even with gloves on he was bothered by the idea of
touching the
hand. If it hadn't been attached to a friend once,
things might be
different.
He forced himself to grab the bare wrist. Lubricant
squirted back
on his glove and he flinched, but didn't let go.
Holding the wrist
with one hand, he reached inside the open end with his other
fingers
and tried to find whatever mechanism made the limb
work like a
real hand. There had to be something mechanical. It
couldn't all be
computer signals. Somewhere inside, there had
to be strings that
acted like muscles and a structure that pretended to be
bones and joints. He had to find those-fast.
"Uch
...
oh, this is sweet. . ." He winced as though it were
his
own hand being violated. "Sorry, sorry,
sorry-was
All at once the hand undamped, fingers flying as
though startled, muscle reaction thrust it backward
into Jimmy's face shield, and he
batted it off in a childish reflex action, then
barely managed to catch
it before it got knocked to the other end of the tube, where
he
couldn't reach. That would be too stupid. Then he'd have
to kill
himself again just to avoid letting the story get around.
Bending upward, he arranged the hand's fingers on the
housing
where the vault latch had been taken off, then stuck
his own wet,
gloved fingers back inside the wrist and hunted
awkwardly for those
contracting muscles. A moment later, the strong
mechanism so
daintily disguised as a woman's hand was doing a
great imitation of a pipe wrench.
"Please hold, that's all," Jimmy muttered as
he grasped the wrist
firmly with both hands. "One, two . . ."
He cranked hard. The delicate-looking hand
held, but so did the
latch housing. Sweat broke on his face. He
kept cranking, his legs
braced against the inside of the tube until he thought
he was
breaking his own kneecaps. His teeth grated
fiercely, but he didn't
stop. More and more muscles in his body knotted against
the strain.
He had to get out. He had to. Any minute they
could come in and
hit him with a laser. If he could get out, he might
still die, but he
wouldn't die idle.
His arms suddenly flew sideways as though he'd
thrown a punch
at a bad dream and missed. His entire
body twisted, and half his
muscles pulled. There was fluid on his face
mask.
The latch! It was down!
Without pausing, he put his shoulder to the vault hatch
and
shoved-
And found himself flying across the open area, right into a
pile of
garbage.
Then he bounced off that pile and flew sideways
into another pile,
then a wall, then caught himself with one hand on a
parted-out tail
fin from some kind of atmospheric aircraft.
He hovered there, panting, sweating inside the suit,
gathering his
wits, trying to figure out what had just happened.
Across the open
area he saw his tube, stuck halfway through a
horrible gash in the skin of this ship.
"Weightless," he gasped. "Why didn't I think
of that? Why don't
I
think
of things?"
Made sense. Why waste energy putting gravity and
pressure in a
storage deck used for storing salvage? This way,
all they'd have to
do was open those big segmented folding doors over there
and
swallow up any ship they . . .
Suddenly his arbitrary analysis turned deeply
personal. Resent
ment surfaced, and anger came close under. Anger
made him
determined.
He let himself be angry. It was easier than being
afraid and made
him want to do something.
Trying to assess where he was, he forced himself
to calm down, to
breathe deeply and slowly in spite of the
claustrophobia of being inside a helmet, and
to look around.
On two sides of the big, dirty, cluttered area
were stenciled the
words
trunk deck.
Clear enough. Below that were handwritten
numbers on a board, the words
LOAD DRAFT, HEATED CARGO
AREA,
and the letters
L. D. P.
Familiar words, but didn't apply to what was being
stored there.
This might once have been a Federation loading deck,
though
nothing around indicated Starfleet. Probably an
Earth merchant
vessel. Probably old.
Old, and full to the gills with parts of hulks,
whole engines, entire
computer cores and pieces of others, struts,
sheeting, ribs, rolled
insulation, small warp nacelles from little interstellar
ships, genera
tors, jacketing, coils, frames, shield
grids-almost anything, in no
particular order, most of it broken.
So his father was right. This was a salvage ship that
attacked
ships, wrecked them, killed the crews, and
thereby created its own
salvage for a melting-down market with no questions.
All around the trunk deck was the evidence. Jimmy
pulled
himself slowly along the industrial webbing, and discovered
a tragic
gallery opening beneath him.
Pieces of vessels, torn apart so they couldn't be
identified,
huddled against each other, cold and shamed, stolen from the
dignity of transportation and shoved into the realm of
contraband.
Jimmy touched the ripped side of a personnel
transport-he
knew that's what it was because there were two windows still in it
and a bolt where a seat had once been attached. A
seat where a
living person had been sitting. A seat where terror
had gotten
somebody by the throat.
He turned above the blackened, scorched
transport section and
floated to the other side of it, and there he held himself
still for a
moment, his heart beating in his throat.
Blood was smeared across the broken part. Some of it was
just a
grotesque spray. The rest was even more gripping,
for it was
smeared into letters, drawn by a human finger.
HELP
SOS
ATTACKED OR-ROS AX-8
DEC

HELP
Jimmy shuddered and sucked his breath as though he'd
run a
mile. The reality of danger and the violence around him
plunged back on him and made him cold again. This
was real blood. The
blood of a slaughtered crewman. Maybe a
family member
...
a
mother, a child, a father. It was all they'd possessed with
which to
write a message no one would ever be able to answer.
December 4.
Which year?
No year. Of course not. Nobody would put a
year on an SOS.
Whoever they were, they'd hoped to live longer than
another
month.
Nauseated, haunted by thoughts of what he'd been
wasting his
time doing back in December, Jimmy dug deep
through regurgitat
ing fear for that anger he'd had a few minutes
ago. He needed it.
With his gloved hand he touched the long-frozen, crusted
plea for
help, and drew the anger from there, from the blood of those
he
hadn't been there for. Maybe all they'd needed was a
quarrelsome
plain dealer with a good right hook.
They'd needed him, or his dad.
They handed him their hope and their strength through the
connection of crusted blood. He hovered there and got
angrier and angrier, adding their loss to those he'd
already endured. He would
need this rage to get out of the trunk deck and do something
for his
own people that had come too late for these.
In his heart he made a promise to the blood people.
They were part of his crew now, and they hadn't died for
nothing.
Through his anger came another sensation. One th at filled
him up, one that helped. If only he had been there
for those others, he
could have changed everything. He was glad he could be there
for his father and his friends, and suddenly wanted to be there for
any
who came after. A glimmer of why they had all come
to space, why
Starfleet was here at all, expanding like crazy,
flashed in his head,
and warmed him up fast.
In fact, he was hot now. Good and hot.
Hot to get at the targets of his anger-the foul
lowlifes who didn't
even have enough dignity to wipe up the blood of their
victims.
He could still change everything! He had a chance
to survive! If
he did things right, maybe they could all survive!
Dammit, they
could all still live-he might still have the chance
to make every
thing up to his father, make it up to his mother, tell
them what a jerk
he'd been
...
go back to Tom Beauvais and Quentin and Zack and
Emily and all the others, and tell them everything, go
back and
show the whole world that he wasn't an idiot after
all! He had to
survive, and he had to make sure his father
survived.
But the Blue Zone burned too close. The
cutter was going to be
blown up any second.
He pushed himself off with a snap of aggravation, and
deter
mined that if he didn't find a door, he'd chew
his way right through the wall and teach these scavenging
maggots a lesson.
There it was.
His way out. A man-size vault door, a big
version of the hatch on
his tube. A conventional airlock-a way out.
With a shove he flew off the plundered pile
and back past his
tube, where he caught hold long enough to retrieve
Veronica's
prosthetic hand from the hatch housing. He wasn't
going to leave
any part of her in this dump, and if possible he was
going to give the
hand back to her. This sorry excuse for a voyage
wasn't going to cost
her any more than it already had.
Tucking the hand into the straps that would ordinarily be
used for
tools, he yanked a jagged piece off an
unidentifiable piece of junk
and swung it like a bat a few times. He now had a
weapon.
"That'll work," he breathed.
It would have to work. They must be waiting for him to come out.
They must not have pressure suits, so they were waiting
outside that
airlock for him to come dodging through.
Preparing himself for the street fight of all street
fights, he shoved
off again for the vault door.
Expecting trouble with the door, he got a
surprise when the thing
opened with a simple one-two-three combination that was right
on
the wall beside it. Apparently these pirates didn't
expect problems
down here. Probably they'd just never thought about it.
Jimmy paused, glowering inwardly, his eyes
tightening to
crescents.
"I can use that
...
I can
use
it. There's got to be a way to use
that."
There was only one of him. He couldn't punch them
each in the
face-well, he
could-
but there had to be a better, smarter way. He
decided to start collecting anything these guys
didn't think enough
about.
It had no pressure, but there was gravity
activated in the airlock.
He knew, because he stepped through the vault door and
fell flat on
his butt. His weapon clunked over his shin, and he
found out it was
doggoned heavy.
He sat on the floor of the airlock, gasping and
trying to remember
what it was like to weigh this much. He hadn't felt his
normal
weight since the laser attack. This was like dropping
onto the dock
after being stranded in water for a day.
With arms heavy as iron bars, he crawled to the
trunk deck hatch
and put what felt like tremendous effort into yanking it
shut. The
gaskets compressed, and he hauled down on the
locking handle.
One down.
On hands and knees he turned around, pulling his
weapon along
with him, and crawled the four feet to the inner vault
door that he
hoped led to a pressurized deck or a corridor
and not out into some
ripped-open section. This ship was almost salvage
bait itself, thanks
to Dad and Captain April.
He hesitated. Once he opened that door, he'd
have to be ready to
fight. There had to be somebody out there, setting a
trap, and here he was with bricks for arms and legs.
He struggled to his feet, then lifted his jagged
piece of metal into
swinging position.
"What the hell," he grumbled. "Been dead once
already."
Feeling as though there were a buffalo corpse on his
back, he got a
one-handed grip on the other hatch handle-a bolt of
shock went
through him when the handle snapped down and the gaskets
expanded!
"What the hell-was he gasped.
Open! The vault door was open! Why hadn't it
waited for him to
tap in the open signal?
He looked accusatorily back at the other
airlock door. Why
hadn't the safeties come on? One hatch
open should automatically
prevent the other from being opened without proper
pressurization.
Any decent airlock had double and triple
backups! At the very least,
both doors wouldn't be allowed to open at the same
time. He could
just walk back there and open up that trunk deck
door, and
whooosh-
depressurization. The whole section of the ship would
collapse on itself.
Either this ship was busted up bad, or these jerkweeds
didn't even
bother with safeties on their airlocks.
Shivers numbed Jimmy's arms, and he called these
guys names in
his head. He knew the type a lot more intimately
than he wanted to
recall right now. He could too easily look
back, not very far, and
hear himself saying, "Forget the safeties. Who
needs 'em? We know
what we're doing."
Rules exist for a reason.
Authorized use only.
With his hands on the heavy white latch handle,
Jimmy closed his
eyes for a moment, drew a steadying breath, and demanded
of
himself that he not forget.
He shoved the flat of his upper arm against the vault
door, raised his jagged bat, pushed-
And spilled himself out into a dimly lit corridor,
legs spread,
weapon back, and yelling, "Hah!"
Holding his breath as he waited to be hit by a guard
or caught in a
trap, he looked from side to side.
Nothing. Not a thing. Nobody.
No safeties. No warning lights. No red
alert. Big ship, little tube,
no pressurization backups, no shields, no
alarms. No organized
damage control, nobody here to attack him . . .
The revelation went up like a flare.
"I don't believe it!" he choked. "They don't
even realize I'm
here!"
Possibilities spun in his head. This was
a whole new game all of a
sudden, with new rules.
This meant he could make setbacks for them,
provide unseen
chances for his own team. He could be
tricky.
His dad and Captain
April would figure out ways to take advantage
. . . sure they would!
As long as they didn't blow themselves up or get
dragged into the Blue Zone before he could do something-he
suddenly had double
the chance.
The stupidpisspots don't even know I'm here!
Don't do anything, Dad! Don't blow up the
cutter! I'm working! I'm working!
He started thinking ahead. What could he do for his team
if they
did get dragged in? He'd have to be ready for that.
A click, and his helmet dropped to the black
deck. He glanced one way, then the other. A
triangular corridor with a black floor of some
kind of hard rubber, ribbed with red structural
members whose
padding was sparse and worn, and lit from a
single long panel in the
bottom of each section. Some of the panels were
flickering. Some
were completely dark.
"It's going to get a lot darker," Jimmy
promised through gritted teeth. "These pigs got a
hundred-sixty-pound worm in their apple
now."
Cradling Veronica's disembodied hand to his chest,
he picked a direction and ran off down the narrow
corridor.
"We're going to do it."
"I beg your pardon?" Robert blinked himself out of
his sad reverie about Oxford and Coventry and fishing in
the Cotswolds and Jimmy and never being able to show his
godson a few simple
things before life got too complex. He looked again
to his left, at his
greatest immediate concern. "Sorry, George?"
George didn't look back at him. He thrust
himself up on numb legs and wavered, but there was nothing
unsteady in his face.
"We're going to do what we planned to do. We're
not going into that Blue Zone. We'll blow the whole
sector apart if that's what it
takes, but my son's not dying alone out here.
We're going with him,
and we're taking those black-hearted bastards with us."
He gathered every ounce of fury to push down the grief
so he could function, and crossed the deck.
Carlos was lying prone on the deck, his head resting
on one outstretched arm as he watched the monitor with
reddened eyes.
Kneeling beside him, George touched him and said, "Still
with
us, pal?"
The other man flinched, glanced at him, regained
control over his
expression, and sat up. "Oh, yes, sir
...
I'm with you all the way."
Warmed by the devotion on Carlos's face, the
willingness to go
with him into the fires of hell if that's what he chose
as their leader
today, George had to swallow a couple of times before
he could talk.
"You know what we have to do, right?"
"Yes, sir," Carlos said quietly. "Sure
do."
"Want help?"
"No, sir. I think this is one I'd like to do
by myself. I don't want to
have time to
...
ask myself any questions, if you know what I
mean."
Solemnly, George nodded. "Yeah. I know
what you mean."
He helped Carlos to his feet and only then
noticed that the
starship helmsman was still limping.
"You okay?" George asked.
Carlos hesitated, almost answered, then gave him
a quirky little
smile of all things, and commented, "What difference
does it
make?"
Something about that smile, without a touch of irony or
resent
ment, made George's own mouth tug upward on
one side. "Not
much, huh?"
They chuckled briefly, then moved to two different
parts of the
hold deck.
George joined Robert at Veronica Hall's
side. The captain was
running his finger pointlessly along the medical
cartridges that were
trying so hard to keep the body inside alive.
O ther than her chest
moving slightly up and down, there were no signs of
life from
Veronica now. She was pale and clearly on the
edge.
"I was about to change the life-support
cartridges," he said, "then
I realized . . ."
"Just be glad she's unconscious." George
gazed at the girl, let his
eyes go out of focus, and thought about Jimmy, who'd
been wide
awake at the worst moment. His chest squeezed
hard.
He felt Robert watching him. They both knew
there was nothing
more to be said.
They got up and started to walk together, but George
paused,
looking at Robert.
"Something's wrong," he grumbled.
Robert's brows popped up. "Excuse me?"
"Here." George reached over an open crate and
retrieved the
Ba* cardigan that was now dusty with insulation fuzz.
"Put your
sweater on."
"Why?"
"I don't know. Just looks right."
"Oh
...
of course. Thank you, George." The captain
winced as George slipped the cardigan over the
injured arm and up onto his
shoulders.
"There," George said. "That's how I want to-was
He made a
feeble gesture, but stopped talking, not wanting to sound
as if they'd
have a chance to remember this. "It just. . . looks
right."
But Robert grinned that sentimental grin of his, and
took the
moment to appreciate that he meant so much
to George. He patted George's back as they
walked together across the tipped deck.
Carlos Florida sat cross-legged before the open
panel where
double insulation had been cut away to expose the
critical machinery to the engines" reaction-control
flow. Though he had his fingers
on the mechanisms, he wasn't doing much. Most
of the work had
already been done and was waiting for them to make that final
decision.
He knew George and Robert were behind him, but
didn't look up
at them.
"All set, Commander," he said. "On your order .
. . I'll flush all
our power trickles into the impulse system and
overload it. They're
small engines and they're pretty sick right now, but
they've got
enough juice to make a nice big boom. All we have
to do is point at
them and follow their own tractor emission right up to the
source."
He shrugged, then sighed. "Wish it sounded
a little fancier, but I
guess . . . ready when you are."
George nodded stiffly. "Thanks, Carlos."
He and Robert retreated into a slow, solemn
handshake that
lasted a few seconds longer than either intended.
Soft brown thatch on one side, a whip of
oxblood red on the
other, one face made of pipe smoke and tweed, the
other of hatchets
and hammers, brown eyes, both, but not the same.
They stood
there, the extract of the Federation dream-different people,
different goals, different ideas, different styles
. . .
Diversity.
Still holding Robert's hand, George put his other
palm on
Carlos's shoulder.
Simply and firmly, he said, "Blow "em."
Raise hell. Rattle them at every turn. Make
them mad. They
couldn't think if they were mad.
That was the theory, anyway.
Of course, Jimmy was mad and
he
was still thinking.
Sort of. In a panicky, press-lipped,
nose-breathing sort of way.
He had to get as far from the trunk deck as he could
without being
found. That meant keeping low, ducking past open or
broken door
panels, not making noise any louder than the
bangs and shouts of
these sidewinders as they fought to keep their ship in one
piece long enough to win.
The amount of damage over here was staggering. A few
little
Starfleet cowboy tricks, pulled off with rubber
bands and fingernails, had knocked these people on their ears
and bashed this ship
into a knot of gasping sections. As Jimmy dodged
and sneaked and
ducked around, half the doors and sections he
passed were bolted
off and red-flagged for nonentry. Probably breached
to open space,
or contaminated.
Some of the smoke was rancid and chemical.
Some of it was from
simple burning. That meant two kinds of damage.
If only he knew
about chemicals . . . he'd heard engineers and
mechanics talking
about being able to smell what was wrong, but he'd always
figured they were nuts.
He rounded a corner, filled up with conflicting
thoughts, and
tripped on something big and thick. Before he even
realized what
had happened, he was lying on his side on the deck,
wincing and
confused.
Turning over, he found himself staring into a pair of
bugged eyes
and a mouth open in shock.
Stunned, Jimmy jolted backward, away from the
corpse. Human
or humanoid-he couldn't even tell. The body was
too battered
and too burned, stiff and pasty. In death it had
released its bowels.
He'd heard of that. The smell almost sent him
retching.
He held his breath, stumbled to his feet, and ran.
How many were left? How many people were still alive on this
ship for him to face? How many thieves were in the den?
Again he wished he had paid better attention at the
important
times in his life. How many people did a ship this size
and type take
to run?
"What difference does it make?" he sputtered as
he skidded around a corner and paused, glancing
back and forth along the groaning walls. "Ten or
ten thousand. They're just second-story
burglars. Doesn't take any brains."
Even rough and grumbling, his own voice was an
anchor line and
he hung on to it in spite of the hurricane he'd
steered into.
Again he ran through the twisting, smoky corridors,
then slowed
to a tiptoe stride when he thought he heard
voices-too close.
Imagination?
No-definitely voices.
And coming closer!
He ducked into a bulkhead crack under the
strut that had fallen
and cracked it.
Two aliens and two humans ran toward him,
involved in their own argument, shouting at each other about
repairs and calling
each other names while they came closer and closer.
Panting, Jimmy flattened himself behind the shifted
strut and tried to get control over his breathing.
Didn't want to be heard
gulping for air, and wanted to be ready if he had
to fight. Behind his
strut, as his breathing fought him and his heart throttled
against his
ribs, Jimmy realized they couldn't possibly
miss him. They'd see him, and he'd be dead, just like
that.
He balled his fists. Maybe he could just take one
of them before-
"Hey!" a voice shot out of the creaking, moaning
ship. "You
savages, where do you think you're going?"
As Jimmy peeked down the smoky corridor, the
four men stopped running at a T-intersection with
another corridor and
looked down it. The voice was coming from there.
"Why do you care?" one of the men responded.
"I care. Why is none of your business."
The voice materialized into a young man-very young in
fact,
fairly tall, with brown hair sloppily yanked
back into a ponytail. A
kid! Hardly much older than Jimmy. Maybe
eighteen. Maybe a little
more. A kid, barking at these pirates as though he
thought they
should be listening to him.
"Why won't the tractor beam release?" he
demanded of them.
"It's locked on, that's why," one of the thieves
said. "Locked on and jammed."
A Tellarite poked a finger up at the kid and
snarled, "What
difference does it make? Where we go, they go!"
The kid wasn't intimidated. "We're going to come
about and
smash that ship up right here and now. It's going to be a
starboard
turn, so get your flabby thighs moving and secure
that tractor
beam."
One of the humans held out a hand and asked, "Why
don't we just turn around and smack 'em?"
The kid cocked a hip, annoyed. "Because our
maneuvering
thrusters are damaged. We're going to have to push out and
come around in a wide arc. Want me to draw a
picture for you and your
little buddies, McKelvie? I'm going back to the
bridge, and you
better be ready to recalibrate when I get there.
Go on."
Nobody moved. They didn't seem to like taking
orders from him.
The kid paused as they stared fiercely at him, then
drew a harsh
gust of breath and shrieked, "Go . . .
on!"
Jimmy felt his skin contracting at the kid's tone
of voice and the
undisguised insane flare in those eyes. The kid
wanted to be listened
to, was frustrated that the men might not listen, and there
was a
dangerous intensity about him.
Not in charge . . . but someone to watch.
The four criminals glanced at each other, then two
of them
about-faced and headed back the way they'd come; one of
them
went with the kid down the T-angle, and the Tellarite
headed
toward Jimmy.
A Tellarite. They'd fight at the untying of a
present if it wasn't
untied their way. Jimmy would have his hands full if
he didn't get
the jump.
So Jimmy ticked off the paces, then flew out of
his hiding place
and yanked the broken strut down on top of the stumpy
alien. They both went down.
The Tellarite sucked a gasp, reared back, but
too late. The strut hit him in his squared chest,
and he was pushed down backward.
His furry head hit the deck, and he was out before
Jimmy could
even get back on his feet.
Jimmy scampered to the alien, yanked the
Tellarite's braided belt
from his thick waist, and wrapped it around the
neck. Then he
started to twist it, tighter and tighter.
And . . . gritted his teeth, then stopped.
Kill him, you idiot.
He tightened the belt again. The unconscious
Tellarite started to
gurgle through his porkish nose.
"Aw, dammit!" Jimmy thrust the ends of the belt
down on the
Tellarite's masky face. "I've got no
guts!"
Life-or-death situation or not, he pushed off the
deck and stood staring down at the unconscious
alien, not knowing whether to be
proud or ashamed.
Should he waste precious moments tying the
Tellarite up and
hiding him, since he didn't have the nerve to do what
he knew he
should? Confused, he grabbed the belt from around the
Tellarite's
throat-then changed his mind again. There wasn't time.
As soon as they could get this horse and buggy turned
around,
they were going to kill the Starfleet ship.
He didn't have a week to
pick off these guys one at a time. He knew he
couldn't just run, hide,
and run.
Stuffing the leather belt next to Veronica's hand in
his shoulder
strap, he dashed down the corridor again,
deliberately not going in
the direction that
kid
had gone. That was the way to the bridge, and
he didn't want to get trapped up where the command
center was.
He had to stay down here, in the core of the ship, and
do
something. Hurt these people.
Gas? Poison the air? Kill them all?
"Damn," he snarled. "Why didn't I keep
my helmet-was
Starboard turn, starboard turn . . .
His cold hands and the shuddering in his thighs told him he
wasn't as ready to die as he thought when he touched the
thruster
controls in his tube. He'd accidentally lived, and
now simple animal
fear was ahold of him again when he thought about dying.
Funny
how nerve could come and go.
On the defensive-hiding-wouldn't do him any good
...
he could stow away all year and it wouldn't help his
father and the
others. He had to do something, anything, now, before these
dirty
dogs could act on their plan to slice up the
cutter.
Anything. Anything to throw these quarreling animals
off their
track.
Something his father and Captain April would be able to see
on
the little screen. Something, something-some-
ENVIRONMENT MAINTENANCE CELL
Gas 'em . . . poison 'em . . . black
'em out somehow . . .
Maybe if he could get in there, an idea would
surface that he
could live through himself. He had to survive. There were people
to
talk to and a hand to return.
He scooted across to the environmental cell door.
It swung on a
full-length metallic hinge, or should have. Stuck,
jammed, bent, jarred slightly open-he put his
shoulder to it and summoned his
strength. The door budged a couple of inches, hinge
squawking like
an alarm, but then Jimmy was plunging forward. He
landed on his
forearms and knees on top of the collapsed door
inside the garbling,
noisy roomful of struggling equipment.
Pain dazed him and he stayed down too long. The
survival suit
might be happy to keep him breathing out in the vacuum
of space,
but it sure didn't do anything against bruises.
Both elbows
throbbed, both knees were jarred, and the outside edge of
his hand
was lacerated on the ripped hinge. Blood
splattered when he shook
his hand as though to push away the wound.
Trembling, he rose to his knees and looked. The
side of his hand
was gashed open the long way. A garnet flow ran
down his arm. He
was used to blood coming out of the corner of his mouth after a
fistfight, or the side of his head after a scrape,
or a kneecap after a
fall, but not this.
Brash understanding struck him of how slow and gruesome a
death could come his way here. He might not get that
sudden heroic
way out that people would want to write stories about or
tell their
children. He could die here in a way that nobody ever
wanted to
describe to a child. If he was having even the tiniest
shred of fun or
adventure underneath the danger, that shred dissolved now
and
suddenly.
His heart pounded fiercely. He could feel it in his
head, neck, and
chest. What looked like a lot of blood was
dripping, smearing all
over the floor. They'd find him if they saw. He
was leaving traces of
his presence, his whereabouts-
His heart throttled harder. Breath came in gusts.
Do something, do something . . .
He shook his hand again. Blood splattered on the
scuffed floor, and spotted the red base of a
cylindrical mechanism and the black
polymer legs that held the housing in place.
Saucer-shaped. Red. Black . . .
Pressing his cut hand against his thigh to slow the bleeding,
Jimmy gathered his wits and crawled closer. Was this
what he
thought it was?
Looked the same . . . bigger, but in general the
same. Even the
same colors. Probably contracted by somebody in
the Federation.
On the far side was the stenciled word
superstator.
Stator, stator, super . . .
"Superconductor!" he blurted out.
"Veronica!"
With his good hand he gripped the synthetic hand tucked
in his
shoulder strap and offered a victorious squeeze.
Smaller stencils said
electroplasma, cryon gas,
something about
dampers and conduits and wavelengths, and lots of
hands-off
warnings and maintenance directions.
Veronica's voice tickled his mind-what gravity
compensators
were for
...
why they needed this during acceleration and decelera
tion or
...
a turn . . .
"I'm no environmental engineer," he rasped.
"Guess I might
break something."
All he had to do was
hurt
it.
Lips pressed flat, eyes kinked into knives,
he looked around the
small room as though suspicious of the walls
themselves. He needed
something that could hurt.
How long did he have before they turned off the
tractor beam and
started to turn? What was it Veronica had tried
to explain to him
about physics and gravity?
For the ship to accelerate or turn, this would have to be
working.
He had only minutes, or only moments.
As if to taunt and call him, the gravity
compensator began to hum, then hum louder. Glaring
at it, he gritted his teeth and
narrowed his eyes in bitter rage. The turn!
Staggering to his feet suddenly, Jimmy pushed off
the floor, slipped on his own blood, but in
seconds he had a wall-mounted
hand-held emergency fire extinguisher in his grasp.
Simple, basic, easy. A heavy little canister
that shot stuff out of it.
Hadn't changed in a couple of centuries.
Science had come up with
a dozen fancy chemical mixtures to put out more
fire, faster, with
more damage to the flame and less to the thing that was
burning,
but the stuff inside still had to come out of one end of a
canister and
come out fast. That meant pressure.
Pressure. Enough of it could keep delicate
life-forms alive where they were never meant to live.
Too much of it could melt steel into
putty. It could save or destroy. Depending on
how it was used.
And Jimmy Kirk had a handful of it.
With that and a hatchet, he could save the universe.
A tremor of anticipation almost knocked him off his
feet as he
stumbled over the collapsed door to the opposite
side of the cell.
He needed a tool. Heavy, preferably with an
edge.
The best he found was a set of antimagnetic
screws. Not enough.
Slumping back against a heating system, Jimmy
shuddered and
closed his eyes as he dealt with the pain in his hand and
both arms.
Injuries he hadn't felt happen were starting
to surface. His body ached until he couldn't
tell the difference between what he was
feeling and the constant throb and hum of struggling
environmental systems that confused
him
and clouded his thoughts. Fatigue made
him dizzy, demanded that he rest.
No time. He forced himself to his knees again and
ignored the
aches that twisted down into his calves. There was some
way. He
had to find it. Or make it.
All he had to do was cut the valve off the top, and
he'd have a little
rocket.
"Cut it off, or knock it off." He chewed his
lip as he fought to keep
his head clear. "Where's a rock when you need one?"
He looked around again, and reset his thinking. He
wasn't going
to get the right tool. He'd have to settle for a wrong
one. What he
needed right now was a Frenchman with a portable
guillotine in his
pocket.
There had to be something in there that he could use. Sure
couldn't risk tiptoeing all over this ship, hoping
to find-
A maintenance dumbwaiter!
With a door that slid upward. A
heavy
door.
Heavy enough?
Jimmy shot across the environment cell again, shoving
piled
parts aside to reach the wall and the dumbwaiter. It was
mechani
cal, not meant to be hand-hoisted, and so the door was
solid as a
frontier iron stove.
"Perfect," Jimmy gushed. Ignoring his injured
hand, he forced
the thick black door up a few inches, enough to cram
the fire
extinguisher under it and keep it open. The door
squawked and
moaned as though to complain that it hadn't been used in
years. A puff of dust came out and choked him.
He backed off and paused to gather the strength he would
need,
then used the time to overturn a little portable light stand
and rip
one of its three legs off.
Leaning the leg against the wall under the dumbwaiter,
he
ignored his own huffing and puffing and once again put
all the power
he had into raising the dense door as high as it would
go. More dust
and cobwebs wheezed out and clouded around him. He
coughed,
tried to find clear air, then held his breath. Using
his shoulder to
keep the door up, he struggled to grab the leg-not
knock it over
and have to do this again-then he crammed the leg under the
door. It had to go in at an angle because it was a little
too long, but it
did keep the door up.
Not for long, though-under so much solid weight, the
hollow
rod was already bowing under the strain.
That meant he had only seconds more before his own time
ran
out, as well as his father's.
Confiscating two insulation pads from a tool
locker, he dragged
them back to the dumbwaiter and put them to one side,
where he
could reach them. Working so fast his fingers
tangled, he positioned the fire extinguisher with the
valve facing into the dumbwaiter shaft
and the bottom of the canister facing the gravity
generator housing.
Then he tied one end of the Tellarite's belt around
the light stand's leg, and backed off to the other end.
If only he could feel the ship turning . . . but
there was only the
taunting hum from the stator spinning in its casing. A
starboard
turn. He had to brace against-that wall over there.
Using one hand, he put the insulation pads up against
the wall to
his right, the starboard wall, toward the back. He could
barely reach
the back part of the cell. He'd probably be
crushed a few paces in that direction, but it was best
he could do.
The stator was still humming. Now it was working for him
instead of against him. They were still turning for the kill.
He closed his eyes briefly, then gasped, "One
. . . two . . .
three!"
With both arms he yanked t he belt.
The leg shrieked and popped out. The dense
door panel came
down-yes, just like a guillotine blade-and smashed the
valve.
The extinguisher canister jiggled crazily for an
instant, then shot
across the cell like a missile, spraying a yeasty
mist all over the cell
and Jimmy.
Flattened against the insulation pads, holding his
breath, Jimmy saw the canister hit the gravity
casing.
A giant fist hit the ship.
A seizure of raw natural power smacked the
vessel bodily in the gut with cyclone force. Its
whirlwind outbreak made a mockery of
technology and turned the universe into a senseless
lather.
Nausea flushed Jimmy a fraction before he was
pulled off the wall
by a sucking force and propelled across the cell and right
out the
open door, angled upward toward the corridor
ceiling, helpless even
to pull his arms and legs forward. Pieces of the ship
went with
him-anything that wasn't tied down flew for
freedom, heedless of
its path, or whether or not there even was a path.
Bolted-down
equipment ripped right off housings and hurtled in the
most direct
line, smashing through the walls as though everything had been
changed into a bullet.
Whatever couldn't smash through was destroyed by the walls.
The weaker force was destroyed, whatever it was,
alive or not.
Sounds of smashing and crashing, breakage, explosion,
and screams
erupted all around him, but he was caught like a leaf
in the cyclone.
The door frame whipped past. All the lighting
changed. The
corridor wall rushed at his face, struts
spreading like the arms of a
great black bear.
The last thought Jimmy had was about the physics of a
starboard
turn, that the wall rushing at him was the one he should be
braced against, and how this was a really pointless way
to die.
"They're on to us! They're moving off!"
Dripping sweat, Carlos Florida raked a wet
hand across his
forehead.
"Now, Carlos!" George shouted. "Blow the
engines!"
Carlos gritted his teeth and winced as he hit the
switch.
Nothing happened.
George shoved past him and slammed the switch with his
fist. And again. "What the hell's wrong! What's
wrong with it!"
On the small screen before them, the enemy ship was
already hundreds of kilometers away and coming around in
a wide semi
circle.
Carlos frowned and said, "They're coming about."
"I don't believe this," George groaned.
Despondent, Carlos shook his head gravely.
"There must be a
leak in our system. The buildup's being purged
somewhere. It won't
blow up."
George plastered a palm over his eyes and
battled the sudden draining weakness that made
him lean forward on Carlos and groan.
Unfulfilled anticipation sucked the strength from his
back and down into his legs and right out the bottom of the
cutter. His
head sagged and breath came in shallow gusts.
"God," he wheezed. "I can't even commit
suicide right. . . ."
This sorrow-sick noise was the voice of the
brokenhearted. Worse
than the concept of sacrifice and dying for this cause
was the
prospect of somehow surviving a situation that had
taken the life of
his youngest son.
Burdened and guilty, driven spiritless by the failure
of their final act, he knew none of them would get
back the strength to do this a
second time. Such resolve was hard to stoke and almost
impossible
to rekindle. Could he ask of Robert and Carlos
to try again?
The enemy ship was racing nearer with every second, and was
again practically on top of them. There was no more time,
no
chance to do anything else.
"They've got us," he murmured. "We've
lost."
He felt Robert's hand on his elbow and a
squeeze that was meant
to be some kind of support or sympathy, but there was
nothing to
say that would wipe away the fact that they'd failed.
From now on, when these criminals attacked any other
ship in the future, it would
somehow be Commander George Kirk's fault. He
and his son and
his crew, and his friend Captain April, the founder of the
Federa
tion Starship Program, would simply disappear and
become a
mysterious statistic in the history of space
exploration. This area of
space would become known as some kind of quicksand, but
nobody
would know why.
Under his wet palm, Carlos suddenly stiffened.
"Look!"
Before their eyes the attack ship buckled against itself in
the
middle of its swing around, spitting
flotsam like an animal vomiting bones.
Crystallized air sprayed out of scissures all
over, and in other
places the hull material caved in even as they were
watching. Slits
opened up along seams, and some chambers blew open
and spewed
everything inside.
"Good God!" Robert uttered as they all leaned
closer to the little
staticky picture. "What on earth-?"
"Right in the middle of a turn!" Carlos choked out.
"Their
gravity compensation went!"
And a hideous sight it was. The enemy ship spun
sickeningly on a
point, pocked with holes torn by entire consoles that
had come off
their mountings and smashed through deck after deck to shoot
right
out the hull. Whole sections were blown open.
Atmosphere sprayed
in frozen funnels from a dozen places. Squinting
in empathy, they
watched the backups shutting off portions
of the ship where
atmosphere spat. Some funnels puttered and
closed off quickly, but others sprayed until the
atmosphere in that area simply petered out.
The two circumstances looked different somehow
to trained
eyes . . . one had a little more control than the other
in a situation
where control was a shabby wish.
Chunks of ship and machinery, tools and parts, food
and lamps
and boots and bottles, flew outward from the enemy
vessel, small,
large, and even the grotesque remains of crewmen
slaughtered by
the impact, some blown out holes while still alive and
then torn
apart by the vacuum of space, others crushed by flying
machinery,
then driven through the shattered hulls crammed into open
space. Headless bodies, bodiless heads,
limbless torsos-all had a sort of
expression of horror endemic to living creatures,
bodies in a state of
surprise, the last second's emotion
recognizable by anyone who
lived and breathed and saw.
A wild, demonic ship's nightmare. A
tempest of physics. A ship
with its gravity shut down in the middle of a turn.
"What happened?" George rasped. "What
happened to them?"
Robert April closed the few inches between them.
"I'll tell you
what happened, old boy-was
He coiled an arm around George's shoulders and
howled enthusiastically.
"Your
son
happened!"
Klaxons honked obscenely, shrieking what the
crew already knew.
Alarms demanded attention that wouldn't come soon.
Nerve-
ripping screams and frantic shouts from below shot up
through the
crawlways.
"What happened! Caskie! What stopped us!"
"How d'l know?"
Lou Caskie spat broken teeth out of his
mouth and fingered his
nose and a cheekbone, both broken. Smoke poured
from some
where and nearly blinded him. The bridge stank and the
heat was
almost unbearable. Through it all he heard Rex
badgering him
again.
"Ask Okenga, then!"
"I ain't asking him!"
"Why'n hell not?"
was 'Cuz he's . . . ask him yourself."
"Aw, Jesus Christ, why can't that blood-sucking
yorker stay on
those engines, where he belongs! Okenga! Get up
off your back, son
of a bitch!"
Big Rex Moss stumbled forward, off balance because
the deck was
hoisted up to nearly a twenty-degree angle, which
made him
virtually lift his own bulk and pull himself along the
destroyed
control panels. He skidded on something slick and
looked down to
curse the flow of lubricant.
But it wasn't lubricant under his shoes. It was
Okenga's innards.
The Andorian wasn't on his back on the deck.
In fact, he was still
standing, fitted grotesquely into an indentation in the
side-mounted
starboard control center, a dent that was form-fitted because
his
form had crushed it in. Across his lower body lay a
three-foot shard
of torn computer casing, half of the navigational
console torn right
out of its base and thrown across the bridge into the
consoles on the
other side. Only Okenga had been standing there in the
way.
He looked sag-eyed at Rex with a perfect
opera-house stare, waiting for the music to start. His
blue complexion was pasty, stumpy antennae
shifting slowly, lips hanging open and oozing
fluid, but moving-open, shut, open, shut-as though
trying to
form a sentence.
The alien reached out toward Rex. Beryl
fingers gnawed the air. A
plea, an accusation-all this was on his mottled face
as it rapidly changed from blue to bleached white.
On his hand, tangled in
fingers that should have been mending machinery, hung a vine
of
intestine.
Open, shut, open, shut.
"Christ!" Rex gagged. He staggered backward,
away, wagging his
hands. "Don't touch me! God!"
The whine of the ship trying to keep itself from falling apart,
blowing up, or blowing out smothered his shouts.
He dragged himself past Caskie to the crawlway,
straddled it, and
shouted down into the billowing smoke and fumes in the
engine
room.
"Dazzo! Munkwhite! Smith! Gowan! Get
up here! Clear out this
junk and get this corpse off the bridge!"
There were no answers. Only howls for help,
groaning, panicked
accusations, the crashing of broken machinery and whole
sections
collapsing fifty feet below him.
From the deck, a voice cut through him, quiet and
stable.
"At least give him a chance to die first."
Purple with rage, Big Rex thrust around to snarl
at his son. "If we
had those shields, none of this would be happening! We'd
be in the
Blue by now!"
Lowering his voice, though he was in no position
to challenge,
Roy had to ask, "What've my shields got to do
with this? The
gravity
went haywire!"
"Find out what happened," Big Rex snarled.
"You, boy, you find out. They did something to us! I
don't know what and I don't know
how, but they did something! They made the gravity
turn itself off."
Panting as if he'd run through the ship, Roy
pulled up from where
he lay with legs curled under him and his knuckles
crushed against a
spurting vein in his left calf and gave his
father a you're-stupid look.
"Gravity doesn't turn itself off," he said.
"There's compensation
as long as the stator is spinning. Either plasma power
has to be cut
or the housing has to be ruptured. The power wasn't
turned off. The backup compensators are still working,
since we have some gravity
left, but the main system-was
"What's all that mean?" his father bellowed. "Quit
sucking your tail and give me an answer! What
does it mean?"
Shuddering under his father's vast shadow and the form that cast
it, Roy licked at the salty taste of blood in
his mouth before he could
answer.
Then he said, "It means we've got a worm."
George Kirk stared at the small screen. His
legs were thready,
eyes red and moist, his voice heart-pricking.
"He's . . . alive?"
The pathetic whisper wanted desperately to be an
answer and not
a question, but there simply wasn't enough assurance in it
to carry
beyond the small sound of a parent's hope. His hands
trembled and had nothing to do. He opened and closed them
in nervous spasms.
"At least," Carlos said, "he was a minute
ago."
The fact struck them all as they pushed for a view
of the tiny
screen and the sickening picture of the ship.
Robert uttered, "Somewhat of a determinist, isn't
he? My Lord,
look at it. They must've had a shattering blow . .
. perhaps they're
ready for a stand-down."
With a taste of irony in his mouth, George
complained, "What're
you gonna do? Swim over there and say,
'Checkmate"?"
Indulging a passive grin, Robert said,
"Wouldn't that be a jolly
moment. Well, we can't destroy ourselves in such a
way that we
would take them with us, and we can't cross the little mile
between
us and board them, so what can we do? We'll have
to reassess the
situation, gentlemen, but I warn you, we're still
dancing on a hot
griddle."
"Sir?" Carlos grunted as he stood up and
faced them. "If there's a
purge in the power system, that means there's enough
coolant left in
the system somewhere to keep the failsafes on line so
we couldn't
overload."
He looked from one to the other of his commanding officers, and
knew his analysis hit its mark when Robert
strode off a pace or two
and muttered, "Oh, dear."
"So," George said, looking at Robert then
back at Carlos.
"What's that mean?"
Carlos shifted nervously. "Well, it means I
might be able to find
some electroplasma in the system and funnel it
into the cutting
torches. I might be able to get you a couple of
low-power laser shots.
At this distance," he said, pointing at the very close
enemy ship on
the monitor, "even industrial lasers'll slice
that ship in half."
Knowing what he was suggesting, he paused then and
spoke more
quietly, only to George. "If you . . .
want to, I mean."
The moment's irreducible weight sat again on
George Kirk. He
breathed heavily through cracked lips, and stared at the
cluttered
deck. Wrapped in the thorns of his problem, he
felt his two
shipmates' sympathetic eyes, but couldn't force
himself to look up and meet them.
Cutting lasers at less than two kilometers.
It'd kill everybody over
there, no question. One last-ditch hair-brained idea.
One last
chance-again. How many last chances would they get before their
deadlock was broken and they started backsliding? How
long before
somebody else would pay the price?
"Get on it," he said. "Get me a shot before they
get their shields back up."
His voice cracked. His expression was
heart-melting, crusting
over quickly as he summoned his saw-file temper
to protect himself.
Putting space between himself and the others, he warned them
with
his posture to leave him alone.
"Aye, sir," Carlos said sadly.
Robert saw the dark wall descending, and stepped
across the
deck. "George-was
But the other man didn't look at him. Words
snapped between
them like the crack of a leather whip.
"Don't talk to me, Robert."
The galaxy moaned in the rapture of
unconsciousness. Pain
misted its stars. Plenty of stars, everywhere.
Vibrations tortured the vessel. A relentless
force, wave after
wave.
Jimmy swam back to awareness through a contaminated
sea. He
groped through darkness, stroked for the surface, lungs
crying for
relief. Salty bubbles clogged his mouth
and nose. He moaned aloud
and nearly choked, but the sound gave him something to swim
toward.
A relentless force held his arms and legs down. His
muscles were
helpless to do their jobs, and they whined with frustration and
effort. Paralyzed?
In a daze, he moved his head from side to side.
His tongue
worked inside swollen lips. Moisture squished
between his teeth.
The bubbling, and the warm, salty taste, was blood.
Internal
damage. Maybe his lungs. Maybe his face or
his head. Why couldn't
he feel the pain? He had a moment ago
...
he felt his eyes blinking
now, but though vaguely aware of straining lights above
him, he
couldn't see through a pinkish blur.
Was he blind?
If Veronica could take being ripped in half, then
he could take
being blind. He made that decision before he
even attempted to sit
up and account for his injuries. Whatever it was, he
would get
through it.
As thoughts about Veronica and his father and the others came
back, so did the pain.
Nothing to worry about. Dad would take care of it.
The thought bulldozed him. He hadn't had a thought like
it for years . . . this idea that he was being taken care
of
...
that he was better off than somebody else might be
...
that he owed anyone
anything . . .
His chest pounded. He groaned aloud again. The sound
pulled
him up fast, like being pushed upward out of a grave
into the light of
consciousness. Lying on hard rubber . . . faint
bands of light, in no
particular direction. The smoke. The smell-
The corridor. The enemy ship. The gravity
compensator!
What a mess he must have made. The whole
ship was whining,
groaning, hissing spray and smoke from ruptures
up and down the
adjoining corridors. His chest pounded from inhaling
whatever
gases and fumes were spitting out.
"God . . . damn . . . was . . . that. . .
stupid. .
."
He had pinpointed the gravity thing, tried to imagine
ahead of
time what would happen to the ship, tried to recall
everything
Veronica had explained to him so that he would get it
right, and
kept the presence of mind to brace himself against the
wall.
"The wrong wall," he sputtered.
New rule. . . always, always,
always keep a mental map of your ship. Three
dimensions, jackass.
Three of them.
"Wait'aaa
...
tell Dad."
Jimmy laughed at himself as he lay there, fighting
delirium. He laughed first at his mistake, then
laughed again at the anticipation
of telling his father, so they could laugh together.
The ship whined beneath him. The ceiling creaked and sounded
as if it wanted to cave in on him. He'd done it.
He'd hurt them. The
confusion was palpable right through the hard rubber deck, and
announced itself in a dozen alarms, crackles of
shattered machin
ery, warning whoops, and howls of life-forms in
agony.
All around him, the trumpet of destruction
proclaimed his
win-at least, for the moment.
He'd bought this moment for himself and his shipmates.
What
could be done with it, he hadn't the slightest clue.
His plan hadn't gone into the what-next part of the
tourist map.
And he was still flat on his back, gasping. He
felt his own weight,
so the backup gravity must have come on already. But the
ship- he'd made a mess.
Air raked in and out of his damaged innards,
each breath a
shudder. He felt the stretch of every muscle and the
expansion of
every rib, then each contraction. The heat here was like a
closet in
August. Stuffy, hot, moist. Feeling as though
he were being cooked
inside his survival suit, he began senselessly
clawing at the straps
and closures until the suit relaxed its grip
on his chest. Without
complete awareness of what he was doing, Jimmy
clumsily peeled
the suit off. He was on hands and knees in drenched
off-duty
clothes, his head sagging. Blood pushed into his head
and rolled
him toward blackout again.
Consciousness surged, faded, surged. Jimmy fought
to keep it
when it surged, and to stay on his hands and knees
until the waves
passed and he thought he might be able to get up.
The survival suit was puddled under him, a moist,
shimmering
white rag. In a fold, Veronica's hand waved
at him, fingers out and
thumb folded in as though showing him the number four.
It must
have been crushed between his body and the corridor
structure
when he hit, he figured.
Four . . . four seconds . . . four minutes
...
no, that didn't make any sense. The hand wasn't
telling him anything. But did remind
him that he was on borrowed time now. These outlaws would
struggle to recover from the damage, fight to put
themselves and
their ship back together, and they would come looking for the
saboteur.
Jimmy Kirk, worm in the apple.
He had to move. Get away from here. This was where
they'd look
first.
Determined not to make the kind of mistakes he'd
been making,
Jimmy crawled to a crack in the corridor wall
sections, dragging his
survival suit with him, and stuffed the suit
into the crack. He wished
he'd had the presence of mind or the experience to have
done the
same with his helmet. If they found it, they'd know
what to look for.
He could only hope they wouldn't be looking down in
that
unpressurized storage section until later.
He hoped they wouldn't
have time.
As he got to his feet, he recognized the
sensation of weighing less
than he was used to. That made sense-he'd
blitzed their gravity
system. Probably relying on partial power, or
backups, if these
morons had any backups.
Supporting himself on the wall, fighting to ignore the
pain in his
chest and legs, J immy scooped up Veronica's
hand and tucked it
into the elastic belt of his trousers. At least if
they found him, they'd
wonder for a minute what kind of mutant they'd
picked up.
What the hell . . . maybe it'd give him a
moment's advantage.
Flushed with fever, limping, gasping, fighting
blurred eyesight and a foggy, thunderous pain in his
head, Jimmy struggled down
the corridor. He had to get as far as he could from this
section of the
enemy ship.
He had to hide.
"Dad," he gurgled, "we'll laugh together about this
. . . even if it
kills me. . . ."
"George, turn around."
"I'm serious! Don't talk to me."
Gnawing dread crawled through the hold. The sense of
backslid
ing offered an almost physical pressure.
Not even hotheaded petulance could hide a father's
anguish
under a commander's responsibility, nor could it
disguise the
ruptures and fissures of simple human doubt.
George's hands dug hard into the edge of a crate
lid. His cheeks
were blotched and ruby with heat, his hair
clawing his forehead in damp claret thorns. He
didn't look up as he felt Robert's
unwanted
attention and responded with another snap.
"Don't look at me either."
But Robert April was a commander of souls as well
as ships, and
he wasn't about to turn away from this. He did not,
however, come
any closer.
Before him, George boiled like stew. His bandaged
hands
clenched hard and his knuckles went as white as the
gauze. His
shoulders and ribs constricted within the scarlet
Starfleet tunic with
such exaggeration that the tunic itself seemed alive and
writhing.
A wrong moment. Perhaps the moment would never come right for
them, but Robert stepped off to the side, knelt beside
Veronica,
and consumed the moment by replacing the spent medical car
tridges.
The girl was unconscious, pale, and breathing very
shallowly. Her
face was clammy and cool, her eyebrows slightly
raised as though
dreaming. The survival suit in its
medical-nurse mode struggled
visibly to keep her alive, applying doses of
whatever was needed to
counter losses it read in her body, keeping dabs
of silver nitrate on
her slaughtered limbs to reduce bleeding. In
spite of all that, the
right side of the suit was beginning to turn cherry as
blood defied
effort and soaked slowly through.
As he stood up again, Robert noted that Carlos was
deep inside
the mechanics again, applying himself to his purpose,
only his legs
showing as he attempted to follow an order that had them
all by the
throat.
There would be no good time, so he turned again to the
surging
lava.
"You're not thinking, George."
"That's a lie," the crust shifted.
George pushed off and paced the length of the hold.
Robert watched him but made no attempt to close
him in.
Seconds ticked away. Both men were barbed with
awareness of each
other.
"There's only one way out of some things," George
finally said.
"We've got a responsibility to people who come after
us. If it were
anybody else on that ship-was
"It's not anybody else," Robert said forthrightly.
"It's your son. No one would ask you to do this."
"We're not sure he's alive."
"We're fairly sure. Don't ask more of yourself
than anyone else
would ask of you."
"I don't have a choice."
Passively, Robert repeated, "No one
expects you to kill your own
son. It's not part of the oath."
"Yes, it is."
"No . . . it's not. Now, listen to me."
"I can't listen to you, goddammit! These people are
dangerous!
They've killed before and they'll kill again if we
don't stop them
now. If that gravity slam didn't kill
Jimmy, they've probably found
him by now-how long do you think they'll let him stay
alive on
their ship? I can't make this decision based on
...
on a guess."
His throat almost twisted apart with the emotion surging through
it. The words came out skinned and raw.
Robert pushed his hands into his cardigan pockets
as though
to supplement the tension with a dose of calm. "You're
over-
compensating, my friend. If he weren't your son, you'd
be clearer-
headed. You're trying too hard to go by the book-was
George wrenched around, one hand out in a bitter
plea, his brows
knotted into a single copper pipe.
"What do you want me to do? Let those bastards
live because I
hope
Jimmy's still alive? What if he
is
alive? You want me to leave
him over there and ignore what they might do to him?
Torture him? Murder him? We don't know who
or what's driving that ship! They
could be slave traders! They could be cannibals!"
"George, stop that kind of talk!"
"Why are you making this hard on me? You know I'm
right!" A bandaged fist slammed into the hold wall,
and way down the deck
made Carlos's legs flinch. "If I could,
I'd stand in front of them
myself, and you know it!"
"I do know it, yes."
"Then don't get in my way. Carlos, what've
you got?"
From the wall, the answer was "Maybe one blast,
maybe a third
power, sir. This close . . . it'll do the job."
Robert shook his head slowly, firmly, and moved
closer. "George,
you'll have to pay attention. If it were me over there or
if it were a
stranger, you'd consider another option. You're not
allowing your
self that. Your judgment's clouded. You're not even
giving Jimmy the consideration you would give a
stranger."
"Don't you get it?" George jammed a finger
toward open space.
"He's probably dead! One of those"-he couldn't
say the words,
but waved his hand frantically-"was probably him!"
"We don't have those facts. We're guessing.
You're so aware it's
your boy that you're afraid of making a decision
based on that fact.
You're afraid others might die in the future, but
we're not liable for
the future at moments like this. You must make yourself under
stand, George. Some junctures have no precedent
to call upon. We
have to make one to fit-was
"Fine!
You
invent how we're going to get across the mile of
vacuum between us and them! Out of all of outer space
we've got
this one little mile, and we can't do anything about it
except fire at
them!"
The subject was shifting, becoming confused, garbled.
Science and physics were sneaking in where Robert
didn't want them. He lowered his voice to a tone
that said he wasn't going to argue.
"No, George," he said gravely. "Jimmy's
not only your son. He's
an underage civilian who swore no oaths of
risk or enlisted with
reasonable perspective. He's not Starfleet. You
can't apply the same articles to him. As your
commander, I'm not letting you sacrifice an
innocent civilian, and as your friend . . . I'm not
letting you kill
your son."
"Carlos! Get the laser on line and bring us around
to firing
position!"
The exhausted helm engineer crawled out of his hole,
sat sweating
on the deck, and looked with dismay at them both.
He'd heard it all, of course. He looked from his
captain to his commander, then back
again.
"Carlos," Robert overruled, "get the
laser on line, but there will
be no firing yet."
George spun at him and whined, "Don't put him
in the middle!
That's not-what-what're you doing? What kind of
behavior is
that?"
"Mine, I s'pose."
"This isn't a joke!"
"Believe me, I am
not
joking." True to his words, Robert was
uncommonly grim as he lowered his chin
to schoolmaster level and
added, "It's not up for debate."
Undeniable plangency gave weight to his tone, his
years of
experience rising as they rarely did even at such
times. His eyes
were utterly still.
Astounded and speechless at what he was hearing,
George
gawked at him.
Only after seconds of disbelief, he stammered.
"Are you
...
are you pulling rank on me?"
"That's right. Sorry."
It seemed absurd, with Robert standing there on a
cocked hip,
hands pocketed in the much-beleaguered Irish sweater,
the cream
wool collar bunched up around the back of his neck
and his brown
hair just brushing it. His natural probity stood
behind him like an army of trees that refused the storm.
He might as well have been
standing on a reedy shoreline holding a fishing pole,
saying "sorry"
for having put the wrong bait in his creel.
Battling astonishment, eyes ringed and glaring,
George shook
with frustration.
"You-you don't have any right!" he breathed. "There's
no
regulation that lets you take command at this point!"
"I don't care about that."
"I'm not injured, I'm not irrational, I'm not-was
"Regardless," Robert said. "You can keep command, but

simply may not make this decision. I won't
allow it."
George aimed a shoulder at him and mocked,
"What're you
gonna do? Duke it out with me?"
"We're not
doing
it, George. Find another option."
The grist of their problem gurgled and broiled, and
refused to be
dismissed. The worst of all moral dilemmas
crushed in on them
from two directions. Not a right and a wrong, but two
wrongs. Kill
Jimmy, or leave him to these people to kill him and chance
these
criminals killing others in the future.
Two terrible options, knocking up against each other,
both
relying on guesses and hopes.
Now what?
Soulsore, George cranked away from the others and
found a
corner. There were no rules to fit this situation. The
rules that did
exist were inadequate to the grave emotions and
plagues on him
now.
"Captain!" Carlos called suddenly. "The energy
readings-was
He was squinting through the dimness at the monitors on
the
floor.
"Yes?" Robert asked, turning. "What is it?"
"The sensor screen, sir! Third from the right. I
think their shields
are starting to go back up!"
A lead ball landed in the pit of every stomach. If
those shields
were going up-
George plowed out of the shadows. "Fire! Fire,
Carlos!"
"No!" Robert challenged. "I told you, we're
not doing it."
Carlos had his arms inside the wall, hands on the
connections to
make a laser bolt happen for them, but he looked
back and forth at
them, baffled.
"I said fire!" George called.
Robert was damningly calm. "Absolutely not."
"Sirs, their shield s are activating!" Carlos
cried. "I've got to know
for sure what to do! We've got just a second!"
"It's not for you to decide!" George bellowed down
at him. "This
isn't gonna happen to anyone else! You're under
my command
here!"
"No, Carlos," Robert said, "you're not."
"Oh, God," Carlos moaned. "Please
...
I
...
I can't-was
George rounded on the captain. "I told you I
don't want him in
the middle! You don't put your crew in the middle
of something like
this!"
"There is no middle," Robert reminded sternly.
"We're not firing
to destroy a ship where an innocent child has been
captured. I'm
not doing it. Nor are you."
Sweat pouring down his face from the effort of the decision
itself,
George panted out a savage frustration. It had
to be now-now
or-
"That's it," Carlos said, crawling to the row of
monitors and
tampering until he was sure of what he saw.
"Yeah, that's it," he
sighed. "They've got a higher level of screening
back on line than
we've got laser power. Wouldn't do any good
to fire on them now, even with full torches. We just
. . . waited too long." He looked up
at them both. "Sorry, sirs."
Lips pressed like two parts of an iron pot,
George glowered at
him, then at Robert. His eyes could have lit
matches.
Hounded by the loss of a chance, he gestured at
Carlos, glared at
Robert, flopped his arms in anger, and stormed
farther away from
them, all the way to the other end of the hold again.
No matter how many simulations Starfleet
gave its trainees, they
never had to kill more than numbers going up and down
on a chart.
Training told
what
to do, but never could say whether a person had
the mettle to actually do it.
Robert saw that unfortunate kink in the noble armor
right before
his eyes today. Here with him was a man who had the
mettle, and
whom fate would test if allowed. Now they had lost
their chance to
know which was the better answer.
To prevent fate from getting its way, Robert had
stepped in, and
now they might never know. He had learned a long time
ago that he
could turn comets if he stepped at the proper
moment. Even if the
comet was about to self-immolate.
He glanced back and tactfully said, "Carlos,
see what you can do
about rerouting what you had there and gathering us a little
maneuverability, as long as we've found
some power in the system."
Uneasy, Carlos hesitated, and grumbled,
"Aye, sir."
He drew a couple of weak breaths, then disappeared
inside the
wall again.
That element taken care of, authority in place for the
moment,
Robert strolled across the deck to where he was trying
to mix oil and water in a very hot caldron.
With that truepenny candidness glowing in his eyes, he
leaned one elbow on a crate, hands still balled in his
pockets, and hoped
the subservient position would give him a tad of an
edge as he gazed
at the man he had just shot down.
"George . . . please try to understand. We're not
merely corn
mentators to how life and law will be in space," he
said. "There are no precedents, because we're the ones
out here first, making them."
A humane pause gave a lift to his condolence
before he softly added,
"That's why you don't know what to do."
Seconds broiled past in silence.
Anxiety chewed at them both, each feeling at some
distance the
soldierly stoutheartedness of the other, yet neither able
to give in,
until George found it in himself to speak the most
bitter sentence he
had ever tasted in his own mouth.
"I
did know
what to do," he ground out. "I managed to make the
hardest decision of my life . . . and you stopped
me."
He pressed his cheek to the quivering metal and wept
with joy. The
metal moaned and shuddered as though responding to his
nearness
and his touch.
Beneath his outstretched body, the ship was staggering,
limping,
dazed, but
his
part was right again. They had come back to him and
were ready to give again. Joy came back, because his
personhood was knitted to these coils and conductors.
"Oh, my shields . . . my shields .
. ."
Tears broke from Roy's closed eyes and dripped
the few inches to
the deck he lay upon, and he murmured senseless
blessings to his machines for their coming back to life.
He had suckled and cooed
them back, in spite of the invertebrates around him and
their
weak-minded shilly-shallying, in spite of the victims
fighting back
this time and the worm in the ship.
His guardian angels were back. His Blue
guardians that made his future surge and swell.
He would have all these jugsuckers indebted
to him someday. Soon-months, perhaps weeks. They would
all rely upon him and speak well to him and call him
"sir." There
would be shameless extravagance of gratitude to him.
He felt tired in his mind. Tired of somebody
else being in charge
his
whole life.
"I'll get it," he whispered.
The deflector mechanism hummed softly back
at him as it
pressed into his cheek. He heard a
corresponding velvet bip-bip-bip, and knew the
beautiful blue light on the control panel above
was going on, off, on, off, its activity proof that
there were shields again. This was the only beauty on the
bridge of the
Shark.
The
Shark.
As if this was one ship, and not a stitched-together
Frankenstein without a soul. That's why nobody
knew for sure what
the ship looked like-because it was constantly changing,
weekly
added to or subtracted from, built upon or
repaired. None of their
victims had survived so far, and even if they had,
there would be no
describing the
Shark,
because the looks of the ship kept changing.
So his shields had to keep changing. Bigger,
smaller, angled beam fragments, intensified here,
reduced there. And no one knew how to
make it work but him.
"You can get what I need," he murmured.
"We'll have a reputa
tion of our own. Our destiny will arrive."
"Who you talking to, tail?"
Big
Rex's
bark bit off the moment of adoration. His vast form
loomed overhead, carrying with it its own smell and a
corona of
heat. "Don't you know how freakish it looks to other
people when
you talk to the scrap? There's always been something wrong
with you. Swear I'd pay to fix it if I knew
what it was."
He backed away, since he was too big to turn
in this cramped
section of the bridge, then lumbered away on his
tree stumps.
Roy ticked off the paces until he was safe,
then grumbled,
"Devotion on the hoof."
Having his father in charge had rallied him the resentful
silence
of the others, but not the respect he coveted. No one
seemed to
realize that his shields were the only reason they could
hide and
pounce as they had, make careers for themselves rather than
shoveling manure on some subsidized colony, which
was where
most of them belonged. They
knew
his special delicate deflectors
were their lifeline, yet they didn't quite
realize
how heavily they
already relied on him.
Nothing else had gone right this trip, and they were back
to
relying on him, whether they knew it or not. The ship
was stumbling
around, blown open in a dozen spots, a third of the
crew dead or
dying on the deck. They were back to relying on him and
his shields
to pull the Starfleet cutter into the Blue Zone and
crush it.
They should realize their dependence. He shouldn't have
to tell
them. He shouldn't always have to remind them,
"It's all because of
me, and only because of me."
The words buzzed on the end of his tongue day after day,
and
especially at moments like this, when he could still sniff
the essence
of Big Rex lingering on his own clothes like smoke.
He'd stopped
saying it out loud long ago. Ever since he was
fourteen he'd said it,
then somebody would hit him. So he stopped saying it
aloud.
Five years . . .
He lowered again to his task, his body stretched out
on the deck
as he shouldered his way deeper under the cracked and
chipped
control panel, and parted his lips against the cool,
murmuring
deflector mechanism.
"Sooner or later," he whispered, "we'll
convince them they can't
survive without us. They won't have any choice.
It's on our
calendar . . . it's fate. It's
destiny." A squint through damage haze
showed him the sweaty, stubbly rolls of his father's
neck. "He'll learn. Even he can learn.
We'll convince him
...
to let
me
be in
charge."
Pure common sense, after all. At barely
nineteen, he had more
intellect and better brains than any ten of these
others. They just didn't know brains from beans, or
they'd put him in charge right
now. Everywhere, it was like that. Recognition. That's
all he
needed. The whole Federation would be indebted to him
someday.
"It's on my calendar," he murmured, and turned
back to his
fine-tuning.
"Shut up, I said!" Rex glared at him with one
eye, because he
couldn't turn all the way around in the command chair.
The eye was glistening grotesquely in the
bad light from the main viewscreen, on
which the ravaged Starfleet cutter hung helpless.
A handful of other
men on the bridge twitched when he waved at them
also and blared, "Keep working!"
Lou Caskie interrupted as he appeared in the open
crawlway and
cried, "We found blood!"
Coming up the rest of the way, he showed Big Rex a
piece of
shattered plastic with blood splattered diagonally
across it.
"We found it in the E-cell. He was there! The
main stator casing
has a hole in it!"
"Can you patch up the hole?" Big Rex asked.
"Well, yah, but all we got is backup
gravity, backup respir-was
"Do it, then. If you can't live on backup, get
out of space."
Behind them, the voice of aggravated youth clipped,
"There was
a hole?"
The two antitheses turned to him. "Said that,
didn't I?" Caskie
lisped at him.
"No weapon," Roy muttered. "What kind of
blood is it?"
"Who cares?" Big Rex huffed.
"Maybe it's his," Caskie bug-eyed, then
laughed, showing where
some of his teeth had been knocked out-the ones he'd
had at the
start of this, at least.
"Go retch," Roy snappe d back as he got
to his feet and tried to see through the stinking tendrils
of smoke. "Is it red?"
"Red," his father said, "pink, green, who gives a
rat's ass."
"Dark red?"
"Here!" Big Rex held the plastic out at him.
"You wanna lick it and see what it tastes like
too?"
Roy screwed his brows together, looking at the
splatters.
"Red . . . dark red."
Caskie gurgled another laugh, but Big Rex
paused. "Mean
something to you?"
Straightening his tortured back muscles,
Roy paused too, enjoyed
the moment, and let it go on as long as he could. When
he spoke, he
did so in such a way as to make theatrical use of the
curling haze and
the silence on the bridge.
"It means," he said, "we're looking for
...
a human."
Big Rex threw his arms up. "Well,
goddamn! Think of that! We're
looking for a human! And to think we've got only
thirty-nine people
on board and only thirty of "em are human!
Why, hell, why didn't
we think of that! What were the odds! I'm surprised
enough to shoot
my cookies! Damn, boy, damn."
Burning under the sarcasm, Roy felt his face go
hot. The other
workers paused, and were looking at him.
He shifted uneasily, bitterness rising in his
mouth.
"It means we can flush him out," he attempted.
"We know what
air he needs to breathe, and how often he needs
to eat, and what will
kill him."
The strategic line of thinking didn't impress
Big Rex at all. "If we
were a shipload of Tholians, that might do some good.
What do you
want me to do? Let all the oxygen out and see who
chokes? That's
great."
"It's great," Roy responded, "considering there are
only sixteen
of the thirty-nine left on their feet since you took
command. Don't
you even know your manpower numbers?"
Heavy silence erupted and held them all hostage
for a few
seconds-the terrible kind of silence that says
throats are being
held the hard way.
Lou Caskie backed off a few steps, just in
case. The other crew
barely breathed. Some were poised in the middle of
carrying a part
or twisting a bolt, but they had stopped and
were watching to see
whose orders they'd be taking ten minutes from now. On
this
ship-ten minutes was about average.
But Big Rex only glared at his son for a beat,
then said, "Thanks
for telling me. Couldn't keep your mouth shut, could
you? Had to
blare it all over that we're down. Yeah, boy,
that's command material. I ought to just step aside, eh?
Hand the old crown on
down. People used to say you were a smart little kid. I'd
like to have
'em here now and let 'em listen."
Roy flinched so violently that the clipping tool in
his hand bit his
thigh and drew blood from the big muscle.
Human blood.
The pain gave him purpose.
"I'll find him," he said. "I'll find him and
show you."
The hand-held tracer wasn't exactly
state-of-the-art, but it had
been confiscated from one of the less sophisticated
ships they'd
plundered a year ago, and he'd been tampering with it.
He had it set
to pinpoint blood of the type found in the E-cell,
and project the
find visually on a small screen, with the blood
showing up as green on the black and white screen.
Worked fairly well.
Well enough, since he hadn't showed anyone else
how to use the tracer and they'd all have to tell him he
was smart for knowing how
to track a chemical compound.
He looked forward to that. If it didn't come today, it
would come
months from now, when he took over and they thought back
on
these events. Sooner or later, it would come.
He moved one step at a time through the ship, having
started at
the place where the worm had done the sabotage. Not
easy-the
crew were already repairing the G-stator, stomping their
big fat feet
all over the traces of evidence. Good thing he'd
gotten there in time
to get a big enough sample for his tracer
to read.
Then he found lots more of the same blood anyway,
out in the
corridor. The tracer lay in his palm, happily
displaying chartreuse
smears. The worm had taken a pounding out there.
Caught in his
own gravity trick.
Roy snickered and enjoyed, thought about how he would have
avoided the same mistake, then turn his tracer
on the corridors.
Three directions, one at a time-
There was a dot. Very small, but very green. Roy
followed it.
No weapon, and injured. So the worm would want
to stay low,
probably the bowels of the ship. Probably
engineering. Clever
enough to use the fire extinguisher to smash the stator
housing, but
not smart enough to hide the pressure suit helmet
they'd found
outside the trunk deck. Forward thinking only.
That meant. . . more destruction. The same trick
twice, that's
what people with forward-only thinking would do. Not a
takeover attempt, or a capture or a trap,
but destruction. Physical damage to
stall the ship. What this worm had done once, this
worm would try
to do again.
What
would he try to damage?
Engineering.
Roy licked his lips with anticipation and let his
logic guide him to
choose the right corridors when there was no dot, no
smear of blood
for his tracer to pick up. His intellect served him,
as always. Where
there were expanses with no blood, he would aim for
engineering,
and ultimately there would be a dot or a streak of
green, and he
would know he was right.
The bowels of the ship. That's where a saboteur who
had no
weapon would go. Wounded too. Time might be a
factor, weakness,
fatigue, success the first time
...
all these were elements to consid
er. Roy had a good time considering them and playing his
game of
plot and stealth, until it paid off.
He peeked into an eight-inch-diameter porthole
in the door of an
engineering subroom, and there was his-
A kid? A curly-haired teenager with dirt on
his face and a crowbar
in his hands, working at ripping and smashing the mechanics
in
there? A squirrel storing nuts.
"Oh, this is too easy," Roy mouthed in near
silence.
Also in silence, he reached sideways to the door
panel controls
and very quietly turned the locking mechanism. Then
he fingered the intercom.
"If you had any brains at all, you'd realize
there's no power in
there. We already rerouted."
Inside the subroom, Jimmy Kirk slammed
backward with shock
and dropped his crowbar. It clattered as
though to call attention to
the smug face in the eight-inch window. He knew that
face already.
He knew the two wings of brown hair flopping from
the middle
part. He knew those eyes.
He knew he was sunk.
"Disorderly conduct," the face said snidely. "Just
pranks. I
realized I could take your one little naughty as a
pattern, and it
worked. I found you. Here you are, trapped like a
bug."
"Who are you!" Jimmy demanded.
"I'm Roy John Moss and I'm about to kill
you. Say good-bye."
"Oh, yeah? Well, I'm Jim Kirk and I'm
about to spit in your
face."
And he did.
Saliva dribbled on the window, mixed with blood,
illustrating
how it would have gone right into Roy's left eye if he
hadn't been
cowering behind glass.
Jimmy sheered with satisfaction. He'd seen this
Roy flinch when
he spat. There wasn't as much confidence on the other
side of the
wall as the bluff pretended.
Maybe he could stall.
"I had a good time," Jimmy said, and waited to see
if curiosity
popped up in the face.
Roy frowned. "Doing what?"
"Being a worm in your apple."
"Worm?" Roy shorted. "That's what I called
you."
"Guess we think alike."
Roy grimaced with true distaste and muttered,
"Oh, go retch. As
soon as the engines have enough maneuverability, we're
going to
pull your pals into the Blue Zone and crush the
guts out of them. Then I'm going to open up a
solid waste chute and flush you too,
maggot."
"Come on in here and we'll see who's about to kill
who," Jimmy
added.
"You . . .
have picked on the wrong people."
A match flickered in the other young man's eyes.
Brown brows
closed together.
"Just say good-bye," Roy insisted.
Fear crept in on Jimmy and squeezed his throat
shut so he
couldn't say anything else. He was trapped, and there
was no fixing
that fast enough.
The face, Roy John Moss's face, was still
steaming up the
window, but Jimmy could see the shoulder moving out there
and
knew Roy was doing something with the controls to this
subroom.
When it got hard to breathe, he knew what was being
done.
And his pressure suit was gone now. And he'd
left his helmet in
the back alleys of this ship.
Pressure
...
he felt it now . . . the air was slowly
being sucked
out of this room.
In his mind he imagined the dial on the side of the
wall there, outside the door, and Roy's hand on the
dial. It was an old-type
mechanism, meant for a medical unit, and made
to fit onto this
engineering cubicle. So was the door, and the
porthole. He could
scoop up his crowbar-break the window-then came the
realiza
tion that a confiscated medical pressure-chamber
door wouldn't
have a breakable window in it.
Mustering his most defiant expression, he tried not
to show how
much the effects of depressurization were starting
to hurt. His ears
popping and crackling
...
his eyes hurting, starting to push
out. . . head pounding
...
his lungs crying, expanding . . . like
flying too high, too fast
...
it was getting hard
...
to breathe . . .
Black barn doors closed slowly in on his
vision. At least he would
be unconscious when the truly gruesome part came and
his body
was blown apart from the inside.
As the blackness engulfed him, he focused through the
strip of
vision on the face of Roy Moss, and his last thought
was to curse
himself for having been predictable.
"George?"
"Hmm."
Robert knelt beside his personal thundercloud, but
made no such
commitment as sitting down, for both their sakes at the
moment.
Mellowed by his natural Lake District
affability, he gazed at George
in genuine concern, and tried to read an expression that
to a stranger would be simple crankiness served on a
slab of crust.
Robert knew George Kirk, and knew there was
much more going on
behind that ruddy face.
Ultimately he asked, "Are you all right?"
George didn't look up. The answer was a
rasp. "I guess."
"Awfully quiet, is all."
"Yeah, I'm quiet."
"Any reason?"
"Because there isn't much left to say, Robert."
"Oh, now . . . mustn't pout. Why don't we
stop all this crepe-
hanging and say our sorries, eh?"
"Because I was right."
The ramrod statement hit hard. Hit them both.
Robert's
forbearant grin dropped like stone.
After a pause he did sit down, for they were at
least back on some
common ground.
"Never said you weren't," he offered, and quirked a
scolding,
amused gaze that didn't really fit the moment, then
a sigh of regret
to show he knew it didn't fit. "Now,
did I?"
"Guess not."
"Listen, old boy, Carlos has a new twist for
you. He's found that
he can turn on our tractor beam, what's left
of it, and in combina
tion with theirs it might pull us closer to that ship out
there without
their realizing it straight off. We can move in on
them slowly. What
do you think?"
"How slowly?"
"One to one and a quarter meter per second. We should
close the
distance between us in roughly-was
"Twenty minutes."
"That's they don't happen to notice our closing
in."
"How the hell can they
not
notice?"
"We'll do whatever you want, George," Robert
said, "although
I'm not certain there are many cards left to draw."
They fell back into the pitiless,
unyielding silence neither of them liked. There wasn't
anything to like. It wasn't really a lack of words,
but a silence of the soul.
"Well?"
"Well, what?"
Robert smiled, though not at ease. "Shall I tell
him to do it?"
A half-dozen snide replies flashed on
George's face as he ran
through childhood tantrums, the strain of puberty,
and the ground
work of what it was to be an adult all over again in
about four
seconds. Maturity forced him to be more resilient
than he either felt
or looked at the moment.
After an uncomfortable few more seconds he sighed and
simply
said, "Yeah, tell him to do it."
Relieved, Robert raised his head and waved a
hopeless hand at
the smoke that still snaked around the hold as though confused
by
one-third gravity.
"You have the go-ahead, Carlos," he
called. "See if we can't get
up against them. Perhaps we can find a way to disentangle
ourselves
from this yet."
"Aye, aye, sir," Carlos called back, then
retreated somewhere
among the machinery behind the shattered and scattered
crates.
So the two of them were alone again, listening to Carlos
clacking
and tapping back there.
Robert perfectly well knew from experience that there
was more
than just cantankerousness keeping George silent.
Though dis
turbed, the captain couldn't bring himself to regret his
decisions or
his actions.
Somehow, he knew, his lack of regret was coming across
in his
tone, and he tried to curtail it as he turned
to his old friend and
again tried to douse the burning thatch.
"George," he prodded softly. "George,
we've known each other a
long while. Your sons are my godsons, our
wives have become
friends because they both knew they couldn't pry us apart .
. . you
and I have trod together through passages I wouldn't wish
on a pair
of geese slotted for a harvest table. Please
let's not have this one be
our tide level from here on in, eh?"
He waited for a response, but received only
blustering cold, so he
shifted, wrapped his aching arms around his knees, and
tried again,
lubricating the moment with that poet's touch he kept
in not very
tight reserve.
"Oh, don't do this, George," he went on.
"You'd have put a
staying hand on me as well, had the score been
reversed. Isn't it
better, after all, to err on the side of caution? Be
a bit canny on these things?"
"There's a difference between being canny and being downright
tentative," George chopped. "Everybody out in
space is
somebody's son or daughter. Jimmy's
probably dead, and I've accepted that, whether you have
or not. If the situation was
reversed, I'd be advising you, not taking over, even
if sometimes I
advise with my fists instead of my head. Advise
is different from
what you did to me. Everything's different now."
He stood up in a manner clearly abortive,
then loomed down at
Robert.
"From now on," he finished, "I won't know which
decisions
you're going to allow me to make. It's dangerous,
Robert, damn
dangerous. And I don't know what to do about it."
"Hey, Dad! Got the oars?"
"I got oars, I got sandwiches, I got the
rods and reels, you name it, I
got it. You, me, Sam, the Upper Peninsula,
Hiawatha National
Forest, canoeing the Millecoquins and a whole lot
of places with
really old names! What d'you say we hit the
skylanes and get there
before noon?"
"I say go, go, go!"
"Get your brother out of his book and let's fly."
Go, go.
Warm rubber underneath. Fresh water lapping on the
canoe's
side. Dunes backdropping the fishing trawlers.
Then home again.
Always home again too soon.
"Sometimes I think you're all better off without me
than with
me. . . Sometimes I think I can be a better
example for the boys at a
distance. Sad clowns don't look very good close
up.
...
I know I'm
rash and brusk- his
"And temperamental."
"I just admitted that, didn't I?"
"And caustic, and unsatisfied, and always on a slow
burn- his
"Thanks, Winn, I got afaceful of it tonight. I
don't need to hear
any more from you. I always take care of the
three of you, don't I?"
"Yes, you do. You always have the boys'best interest in
mind. I tell
everybody that, George. I can't help it if you
take every glance and
look from our family and friends and my colleagues as
some covert
attack. If we didn 't live in such a rural
place, you wouldn 't notice. It's
just that almost everybody here is home most of the time-was
"And everybody out in space leaves their family to go
do what we
do out there! When I'm in space, I feel like I
should be home. When
I'm home, I feel like I'm dumping my duty
on somebody else. How
come I don't feel right in either place?"
"Shhh. The boys'll hear us."
It was a hot world with cold sheets to lie on.
Acrid smells rolled in
the air, confusing the nature of dreams and guiding them
in wrong
directions. Was he at home? Was he canoeing in
Michigan?
Sam? Mom? Dad. . . Dad? Are you
there?. . .
"Did you see the look on Jimmy's face today?!
never saw that look
before."
"George, you're imagining things."
"Like hell I am."
"Will you at least keep your voice down?"
"What difference does it make now what he hears?
He hates my
guts, Winn . . . my own son hates my
guts."
Air clogged in his throat.
He choked.
I don't! Dad! Dad!
Had he yelled the confession out, or was it still itching in
his
throat?
Dad, we're not better off without you-
Now there were more voices, the voices of strangers, and
Jimmy
knew he wasn't at home.
"He's coming around. Back off."
"What do you drag him around the ship for? Why did you
fail to
kill him when you had the chance?"
"We need a hostage."
"We need no hostage! We have shields and in
minutes we'll have
engines again. We'll haul the Fleeters into the
Blue Zone and crush
their meat."
The venom of contempt dripping through Jimmy's veil
made him rouse to reality. The veil was
unconsciousness again. He recognized
it from the last time. He was still alive?
A bestial growl and a dirty body odor told
him there was a
Klingon bending over him. The other voice,
unsolicitous and grim,
was the one he'd heard before. Roy John Moss.
He didn't open his eyes. He just listened to the
acrimony in the
voices and made his deductions. A plan started
to form in his
clearing mind.
"Well, I'm glad you're here to tell me all
about dinnertime on
Klingon, Dazzo. How many times have we said that,
only to have
them pop up with some new trick? Oh! I
forgot. If you learned from
mistakes, you'd still be in the Klingon fleet instead
of scraping a
living off the Federation's garbage pail lid,
wouldn't you?"
"You smell, boy."
"Lick it, Dazzo. You can't do anything to me and you
know it."
The contempt wasn't just for the Starfleet people who had
foiled
the scavengers" plans. These two had open and
obvious contempt
for each other. A sour excuse for crewmanship.
Jimmy hadn't heard anything like this from anyone in
Starfleet, so he clung to it as something he might be
able to use.
As he breathed and his battered ribs expanded and
contracted, he forced himself to deduce where
Veronica's fake hand was pressing
against his breastbone, inside the partially open front of
his suit.
Where were his own arms?
Eyes still closed, keeping his face passive, he
twitched his fingers
imperceptibly, just to see where they were.
Right arm almost
straight out to his side, left arm kinked between his
side and the
Klingon's boot.
On his left. He made calculations in his mind.
Rehearsed his plan
a couple times, then-
"Yaaaaaaaa!"
His shout took the two other by complete surprise-and
there's
nothing as grotesque-looking as a surprised
Klingon.
The Klingon, the one called Dazzo, was a lot more
surprised
when an Earth teenager vaulted at him from flat on
the floor, drove
him back against the wall, and clamped an
artificial hand at his
throat.
With all the force of his legs and body driving against the
shocked
alien, Jimmy gritted his teeth, thrust his bent
elbows forward on
either side of the Klingon's head, pushed his hand into the
fake
hand's wrist cowl, and cranked.
The Klingon's wolfish howl of shock and fury was
cut into a
gargling choke as Veronica's fingers popped the skin
of his throat
and clamped together on the inner side of his
esophagus, then
clawed it apart.
Air and pink blood sputtered and spat all over
Jimmy Kirk and
the astounded Roy Moss behind him. He knew Roy
was there, but he also knew he had a chance of fighting a
human close to his o wn
age, and no hope of fisting down a Klingon in a
fair fight. The
Klingon simply had to go first, and he would take his
chance with
the other one.
The plan was pretty good, and Jimmy missed only
one element that didn't hit him until the splatter
of blood hit him too He hadn't ever killed
anybody. Certainly not with his bare hands.
The blood surprised him almost as much as he had
surprised
Dazzo, and he thrust off the Klingon's
sinking form. Dazzo scraped
down the wall, clutching with frantic ferocity at the
artificial claws
deep in his throat, but there was no getting the thing
loose. He
reached toward Roy for help, but the other teenager
did nothing but
stand a few paces back in nothing but mild disgust,
watching the
Klingon gag to death.
Gasping, Jimmy also sagged against the opposite
wall, and let his
best chance for another surprise sink away. His
hands, his bare
hands . . . Veronica's wonderful miracle,
used to murder . . .
Roy moved a few steps closer, as though
fascinated by what was
happening to Dazzo. The Klingon lay in the crease
between the wall
and the deck, gawking up at Roy and reaching for him with
one
hand, while the other hand clawed uselessly at the thing
at his
throat. Every time he pulled at
Veronica's hand, his ripped wind
pipe bowed out and gurgled.
This didn't go on very long.
Roy enjoyed every second and all but licked his lips
when the last
rattle came out of the Klingon and Dazzo's pleading
arm fell to the
deck.
Finally, Roy backed off a pace.
"Hmm," he huffed. "Darwin would understand."
Jimmy collected the bland profundity of it from
Roy's smirk and
the fact that these people weren't willing to put themselves on the
line for one another.
Roy watched a few seconds longer, then without
taking his eyes
off Dazzo's intriguing remains, he drew an
electrical stunner from
his belt pack of tools.
Even though Jimmy hadn't seen one like that before, the
shape of
the little weapon and its pronged business end had a very
obvious
purpose.
"This'll knock you buzzy," Roy said,
"so don't try anything. You
might not have the rocks to go through with what you start, but I
do." He looked up and down at Jimmy's
now-filthy suit, with its
burgundy trousers, white shirt, and brown
waistcoat, and said,
"What do you call that Star-fancy-fleet uniform?
Doesn't look like
one."
"It's an off-duty uniform," Jimmy said
caddishly. "You wanted
me in standard issue, didn't you? So you could show me
off? Tough
luck, bub."
With only a rude glower, Roy snipped, "It
doesn't matter! Now,
turn around. Walk in that direction. I'm going
to parade your little
Federation butt in front of my father."
"That ship's getting closer."
"No, it ain't."
"Like hell it ain't," Big Rex Moss insisted.
"Look at that screen!"
"You're lookin' at magnification," Caskie
told him. "It's all
bollixed up. Visual's banged up inside."
"Get Dazzo to fix it, then!"
Jimmy heard the voices and measured them as argument
long before he was forced up the ladder at the point of that
stunner of
Roy's, through a hole, and onto what was apparently
the bridge of this Frankenstein ship. Unlike some
of the other parts of the ship,
the bridge hadn't been taken off any type of
vessel that he
recognized, and it was manned by a mismatched gaggle
who had
nothing in common but the dirt on their clothes.
Roy Moss shoved up behind him and pushed his way in
front.
"Dazzo's dead," he said.
The gaggle of subhumans all turned to look at
him.
The announcement was taken with accusative glares that
made
him shrug and add, "Death by stupidity. It was just
evolution at
work."
By their expressions, the others let out the little secret
that they
were pretty sure he was crazy.
An enormous man, enormous in every possible
direction,
grunted out of the command seat and hoisted around to glare at
the
chunky boy who had just stepped out from behind Roy.
"Who'n hell is that?"
"Prisoner," his son crowed. "I found him. Said
I would, didn't I? I can find anything. See
what he's wearing?"
The big man lumbered a step closer and bellowed,
"What about
it?"
"That's a Starfleet off-duty suit."
"Looks like a who-cares suit to me."
Ignoring the sting, Roy pointed at the Starfleet
cutter on the
screen. "That ship
is
getting closer."
"It's not getting closer. We've got
malfunctions."
"Picture, but bad readings," a wide-shouldered
man on the upper
deck grumbled down.
Keeping to one side in a place where the odds were too
much
against him, Jimmy bit his lower lip to keep his mouth
shut, but
noticed that the ship did look awfully close.
Could've been just enhancement on the flooey, but. . .
The bridge seemed undermanned by the five hands on
it, and he
assumed they were down on manpower and couldn't watch every
thing. The way this tin can was put together and the way it had
been
torn apart in the past twelve hours, nobody could
watch enough to
know what was really going on inside the mechanics.
Over to one side, at what might be part of the
engineering
section-never mind that the whole console was smashed in and
stinking with moist gore from some poor dead
stooge-Jimmy
shifted his eyes to the submonitors and tried to read
the ones that
were still working.
Picture, but no readings? No numbers? He
tried to add up what
he knew about graphic readouts to what was
going on around him,
tried to remember the hours he spent reading the
monitors Carlos
Florida had given him to watch, and tried to pick
out which of these
just might be the distance between this ship and the Starfleet
cutter.
Could have been either of two, he decided. One of them
showed
no changes at all. But the other one
...
the numbers were slowly
decreasing. A few decimals per minute.
Maybe the cutter
was
getting closer. How? Had his father and
Captain April figured out something new? Found a
way to make use
of the extra minutes he'd yanked out of nowhere for
them?
Maybe his father was trying to get over here!
A father whom he had once thought didn't care.
Everything he'd done, and his dad was still taking crazy
chances,
risking everything to get to him.
If it was true, then these people were misreading their own
gadgets-or maybe they just didn't trust one
another to know what
was going on. He thought he heard that in their voices.
If so, was
there a way to keep them guessing? Prevent them from
trusting one
another?
Possible with these others, but Roy Moss was smart enough
to
notice the statistics sooner or later. Roy was
definitely the smartest kid in class.
Not if I keep him distracted. Needle him,
irritate him, don't let him
think-
"Well, kill him. Break his neck."
Jimmy snapped back to the moment as he heard those
words,
because he knew they were about the wrong "him."
"You'll like it," the huge man said. "It feels
great to break a neck
with your bare hands."
"We haven't won yet," Roy argued. "Until
the Starfleeters are
dead, we might need a wild card!"
"The tail might be right, Rex," the wide-shouldered
man said.
"Keep the punk around. Hostage."
"Mind your own party, Munkwhite." The man
called Rex didn't
even turn around to toss the comment back. He glared
at Jimmy
with the look a hungry bear gives a turkey with a
broken leg.
"Fine," Munkwhite gruffed. "Do what you
want."
He turned back to the battered controls.
Jimmy felt as if he'd been abandoned, even
though he would
gladly have stuffed a shoe down any face in there,
including one that
suggested they keep him alive.
The man called Rex, the one apparently in charge,
had to use
both hands to hoist himself up the step to Jimmy's
level.
"Yeah," the big man said, "I think I'll
exercise my grip. C'mere, kid. I want
to teach my boy something."
Jimmy backed up, but there was nowhere
to back to. The head of
this crew was enormous, outweighed him by two hundred
pounds
easily, and intended to use him to show Roy how
to murder.
"No!" Roy stepped between Jimmy and the approaching
moun
tain.
Rex Moss jolted. "What're you doing?" he
bellowed at his son,
jowls shaking.
"It's too good a chance!" Roy countered. He
extended a hand
toward Jimmy. "Look at him! He's a
snot-nosed whelp! He's a
cherub! A kid! They'll try to save a kid!
Don't you get it?"
"If you're not man enough to do it," the father said, "then
move aside, ponytail."
Roy did step aside, but only as far as a
particular panel with an
open mechanical cave under it. He reached down under
there
without taking his eyes off the big man, and did something
with his
fingers.
Plink-
"Deflectors just went off again!" Munkwhite
wailed. He spun at Roy. "You peach-ass
punk! We're almost into the Blue Zone!"
Then, from the hole that led to engineering, an Orion
popped up
and hoarsely howled, "What happened
to deflectors! Get deflectors
back! Blue Zone is right here! We'll crush!"
"Turn "em back on, tail," the man called
Rex said. "Don't you
defy us."
"Not until I get my way," Roy countered.
"I'm not giving him up.
He's my prisoner. He's
mine.
I found him. If you kill him, fix the
shields yourselves."
Rex's small eyes turned catlike, and he
leered at his son.
Even from the side Jimmy recognized the kind of
anger. He'd seen it broiling under his own father's
skin-but there had always
been control.
There was no control here.
"You pick a pretty piss-poor way to try to be
a man," Rex rumbled. "I'm not gonna forget
this."
Roy twitched, but didn't back down.
"We're getting awful damn close to that Zone,"
Munkwhite ground out. Again he glared at Rex.
"He's your kid . . . you do something about him!"
Apparently affected by the hint that just maybe some of this
was
his fault, Rex forced himself to back off a step. But
he never took his eyes off his son.
"Keep your pet hamster if you want to," the
huge man said, "but
you mind him and keep control of him. Now, turn your
s hields back
the hell on."
Jimmy caught Roy's eyes at the last second
as the tall young man stooped enough to put his hand under again,
and did his
magic.
A few things changed on the bridge-lights here and
there, buzzing and humming that hadn't been there a moment
ago, and that Jimmy hadn't noticed until now.
"Hey!" Munkwhite shouted again.
"Look!"
They all turned.
On the main screen, well beyond the possibility of
screen illusion,
the Starfleet cutter appeared to be flying into their very
faces.
"It's not the magnification!" Munkwhite spat out.
"I tried to tell you it wasn't! They're getting
closer! They're trying to dock with
us!"
"Speed up!" Rex blasted. "Get us into the
Blue! If they get aboard
this ship, we'll have a goddamned civil war on our
hands!"
"Everybody secure? Suits? Helmets? All
secure? Carlos, you got Ensign Hall?"
"Affirmative, sir! Ready when you are."
George yanked his own helmet over his head and
secured it, then waited the longest four seconds of
his life while the suit pressurized
and became independent of the ship they were about to abandon.
"Robert! Distance?"
"Twenty-eight meters and closing! We're almost
on them,
George!"
"Get ready!"
"I don't believe they let us get this close,"
Carlos muttered as he
pulled Veronica tight against him and made sure
her helmet and suit were properly pressurized on
top of trying to keep her alive medically. That
suit had a lot to do.
George flashed him a glance from inside the
helmet's shield. "I
don't believe we found a way to use our hand
lasers in a fight out in
space. Okay, Robert, you give the word at ten
meters. I'm going to
pop the hatch. You stay at least fifteen feet behind
me."
"Affirmative . . . twenty . . . eighteen .
. . fifteen
...
ten
...
eight
comsix, five, four-was
"Here goes!"
They were hit by a tornado of spinning crates and
monitors and
general trash from their troubles as George dropped the
hatch
where once his son had been imprisoned in a
removable airlock,
and let the pressure out into open space.
They huddled until the hold equalized-equal to the
vacuum of
space-then George climbed up.
But now there was no airlock. There was nothing but the
shat
tered, open area that a few hours ago had been the
pilot cabin, now
torn to the point of the unrecognizable. Even the
observation pod
was entirely gone, along with most of the upper half,
and in its
place, looming bigger and nearer than George ever
hoped to see it,
was the spider ship that had pounced on them out of the
impossible.
And there was a tractor beam-wide as a tree
trunk, gory, ugly, a
gigantic klieg light of contracted phosphine
yellow, the beam spilled
like arsenic over the cutter's magnetic
center, making the hulk shimmer and tremble-and right there
was the port where it
emitted from.
The only place on the spider ship that wasn't
covered by
impenetrable shielding.
Without pausing to be scared or impressed, George
crawled out
of the ripped hull, grabbing for sparse and unforgiving
handholds in
the zero-g, and trying to keep himself from floating in the
wrong
direction. He made his way toward that beam,
carrying with him an
industrial extender claw and a neat little grenade
cannibalized from
the four on-board hand lasers. What people couldn't do
when they got desperate enough . . .
He edged closer. The beam would happily,
hungrily, crush a
living body, or anything without enough tonnage or the
right alloys in its construction to fight back. Too
close . . . hard to
move . . . even through his pressure suit he
felt the tractor beam
licking at him, sucking for him, tasting him. He
edged closer as the
last few inches closed and the two ships physically
bumped.
A shower of electrical reaction rained over him as
the cutter
rubbed against the enemy ship's special shields.
Suddenly it was
like fighting with a prisoner and bumping up against the brig
shielding.
The cutter waved off a few inches, but kept
brushing those
shields, kept throwing electrical spray over
him every few seconds.
He moved sideways against the ravaged hull of his
own ship, or what was left of it, trying not to touch the
shields of the other ship.
Who knew what would happen to an environmental
suit if it rubbed
up against those shields?
It took him an eternity to reach the tractor beam
source, but he
did reach it.
Then he stretched toward the emitter port and pushed

industrial claw outward, with the makeshift grenade
in its teeth. For
a horrid few seconds he could barely hold
on-and he had to. He
had to make sure the grenade went deep into the
tractor beam, not
just caught in the edge.
"All the way," he grunted, teeth clamped,
"all the way in-was
His arms were almost yanked out of their sockets as the
tractor
got a good grip on the banded laser weapons, and
suddenly reality
turned a bitter yellow. George let go not at
the last second, but
during it. The claw went too, and almost took him with
it, striking
his rib cage as it flipped and was yanked into the
emitter core.
An instant later the laser grenade ignited,
ruptured by the tractor
beam and the impact of being sucked in there.
The explosion blew outward like a giant's last
gush. What had
been an orderly, if fuming, yellow
tractor beam now became a savage red hell.
George felt his body lifted and slammed to the
opposite side of the cutter's remains, then
sucked back again into
the core as energies conflicted.
In a flash of irrationality he tried to signal
to Robert to follow him
into the two-meter rupture with the others before the
deflectors
closed over the hole, but he was thrown forward hard
into a wall of
smoke and shattered inner core.
There was a tremor of activity around him-the others?
He
couldn't see, couldn't feel anymore. He groped
his way forward
before automatic shutdowns in the tractor
mechanism took over
and trapped them all outside.
Like a fireman moving through the visionless void of a
burning
building, feeling and groping and hoping his way,
George stumbled
forward until the tug of outer space left his body
and he thought he
might be in a pressurized area. How could that be?
In a vacuum one
moment, inside the ship in another-
Was that what Jimmy had gone through? Thrust by violence
into
more violence?
A great shudder rocked through the skin of the vessel around
him, and his instincts started ringing. The Blue Zone!
It had them! They were in, they were committed. The
cutter was a
crushed pancake, just a few feet back there. That
was the crunch
he'd felt through the deck-
Robert! Had the others made it in? They were just a
few feet
behind him-but a few feet in a situation like this . . .
Had they gotten Veronica in?
All at once a force grabbed him and pulled him
down.
Gravity!
It drove him to his knees. Frustrated at not
being able to see, he
tore off his helmet and collapsed, waving weakly
at gushes of smoke.
He waved and crawled, or at least he
thought he was crawling. He
felt pressure down there on his knees. Where was the
ceiling? Which
way was up?
"George! George!"
Robert's voice . . . Robert's hands . . .
"George, you all right?"
"Are we in?" he choked. "Are we inside?"
"Yes, we got in! We got in a few
seconds behind you, just as you
calculated. The shields closed right behind us.
Look at me-are you
all right?"
With both arms coiled around his plundered rib cage,
George
sucked at air he couldn't get enough of and shoved himself
up on
one elbow. He was lying on his side, his eyes
focusing on a sheet of
black deck insulation.
"Robert, quit-asking me that-will you? I'm a
wreck-that's
how I am. This whole-situation's
...
a wreck. What happened?
Why is there air in here?"
Robert knelt beside him and held on to him. "I
told you. Because
the shields closed as soon as our ship was destroyed
by the Blue
Zone, and this ship repressurized. It was a
remarkable lesson in
timing, old boy! Just remarkable."
"Great-let's get moving."
"No, don't move! George, you're hurt. You
can't ignore it."
"Wanna bet? Don't make me feel fragile
right now! I wanna feel
mean."
Taking that as hopeful, Robert hoisted him to his
knees, then to
his feet, and managed to keep him up by leaning him
against a
scorched wall. Unable to stand without the wall,
George blinked
and tried to get his burning eyes to operate again.
Robert's helmet was off too. How long had those
few seconds
been?
Out of the brownish-green billows Carlos
Florida stumbled at
them, yanking off his own helmet, and grabbed
George by an arm
and gasped, "George, you all right, sir?"
"Oh, for cripes" sake!" George pushed off
from between them and
staggered away.
Gaping helplessly at him and then at Robert,
Carlos babbled,
"Wha-what'd I say wrong?"
"Nothing at all we can help, my boy," Robert
soothed, stepping
close to look him over too. "How about yourself?
Hurt anywhere?"
Ignoring what was going on behind him, George winced
his way
out of his survival suit.
"Damn, I hate these constricting things," he
groused as he stomped the suit to a shimmering lump
under him. "Is Hall in
here?" he called. "Is she safe?"
Carlos turned. "Over there. Still alive, sir."
"Where are we?"
"Inside, someplace. And we better move out.
If they figure out
what we did, all they have to do is turn off their
deflectors and all
our air is gone."
"They can't," Robert said. "We're inside the
Blue Zone. The
deflectors have to stay up from now on. It buys us
a few moments, at
least."
"If this ship's designed anything like a Federation
ship," Carlos
said, "the tractor emitter core would be on the lower
decks, forward
of impulse, but topside of warp drive."
After clearing his throat, George said, "I'm not
making any assumptions. Look around. Find out for
sure where we are in
relation to
...
anything we can use."
"Aye, sir, I will."
George pointed a warning finger at him. "You be
careful."
Smiling hesitantly, Carlos muttered,
"Thanks . . . I'll do that
too."
Limping back to where Robert was just peeling off his own
scorched pressure suit and confiscating its
reserve packs for Veroni
ca, George breathed heavily and winced out his words.
"Well, that took care of our hand weapons.
We're down to
thumbnails and spit."
Robert nodded and straightened up to eye him. "You
sure you're
all right, George? You don't look good."
"I don't feel good, okay? I might be
horn-mad and jaundiced, but
at least I'm consistent. We're on level ground
with these ax
murderers now, and I intend to make use of that."
"Let's think calmly, shall we? See if we can't
get ourselves
disentangled from this after all. Perhaps we should find a
place to hide and rest for a few moments."
"I'm not waiting a few moments. They've got my
son. And
nobody . . . takes my son."
"That's your father?" Jimmy asked, leering at his
captor.
Roy Moss gritted his teeth. "Let's
just say I came out of a woman
he used to know."
Now, with his hands tied, Jimmy had only his best
cold-teenager
particularization to aim at Roy Moss as they
climbed down to the
lower decks. "What kind of a woman would get
close to that?"
"Shut up!" Roy roared. "I might have to drag you
around, but I
don't have to listen to you."
"What're you going to do? Stick a shock collar on
me?"
"I might," Roy grated. "Just shut up. I'm
busy."
"Busy keeping those deflectors up, right?"
Jimmy nagged. "We
hurt you, didn't we? We smashed you up. Now
you've got to tamper
all the time to keep the shields up. Glad I'm
here to come along and
watch. Maybe I'll learn something."
Below decks, through the dimness and the smoke, Jimmy
allowed
himself to be shoved through the scavenger ship,
all the while
memorizing the layout and counting whatever pirates were
still
walking around. When his father and Captain April
needed infor
mation, Jimmy was determined to have it. Those oxygen-
deprivation dreams had reminded him of things
bitterness and
selfishness had caused him to forget-that adults had a
life to live
too. That his father hadn't come home and spent his
leaves sitting
around, relaxing. He'd come home armed with outdoor
gear or a
ticket to an adventure park or a new museum.
Always doing things
with his boys, that was George Kirk . . . until
his oldest boy grew up
and his youngest boy decided to count only the hours
apart.
Guilt burned under his skin.
But now he knew the key. The memories were helping
him. He
understood Roy Moss as though looking at a
horror story that
flashed his own future. Roy was provokable, and
Jimmy set out to heckle the skin off him.
"You'll learn something," Roy grumbled. "Your
shipmates might
be on this ship someplace."
"They're aboard and you know it," Jimmy crowed,
hope rising in
his heart. He pushed it down and kept his tone
belligerent. "And you're all dead."
"Maybe they are! Fine! I've still got you! I
don't intend to run into
them and have nothing to bribe them off me with. You're my
personal little shield. So shut up and shield!"
"Why should I shut up?" Jimmy kept pestering.
"Why do
anything you say? You're just their hatchet man. I can
go back to
Starfleet with my father. At least he's a commander and
supposed to
tell people what to do."
"Mine's a captain!" Roy shot back.
Through a grinding pause, Jimmy actually smiled.
The right kind
of smile, the dissecting kind that everybody told him
he would
outgrow.
"A captain?" he snorted. "Your father's no
captain."
Teeth on edge, Roy bristled. "He's
...
in charge
...
of this
ship."
"I used to be in charge of a gang too. Didn't
make me a captain,"
Jimmy said, "and it didn't make them a crew.
I found out what a
real captain and crew are when you insects swarmed
us. You people
have the ethics of swamp lice." Fulfilling his
role as Roy's personal fault-finder, he
ticked off a couple of seconds, then added,
"Guess I
should thank you for that."
They went down the next corridor to the engine with
Jimmy
heel-nipping all the way and Roy snapping more than
once, "Leave
me alone! Leave me alone, I said."
Finally he shoved Jimmy aside in an engineering
subroom, aside,
where he could keep an eye on him, then knelt under
a console and
tried to work.
"Captain April called you trap-door
spiders," Jimmy badgered.
"He was right. That's all you are. A shipload of
dirty dealers."
"April?" Roy blurted. He suddenly stood
to his full height and
stiffened. "Robert April? Founder of the starship
program?" He
thrust himself closer to Jimmy, armed with a rude
glower. "Are you
off a starship? Are you off the
Enterprise?"
Realizing he'd said too much, Jimmy kept
red-flagging the bull in
a different direction. "Aww, what's the matter?
Miss your chance
for cushy duty like that? Talk to your father, why don't
you? At least
my father came out here to make things better for other people.
Yours came out here to make things worse."
"At least mine kept me with him. Yours was just
another Starfleet
widow maker. I know the type."
Jimmy bristled at Roy's intuitive pinning of the
truth. "We were
all right and he knew it," he said. "He went out
where he was
really needed. He didn't have to provide a
perfect life for me. He
was out here trying to build something better for everybody.
Me . . . you . . . we're the same kind.
We're the cause of our own
problems."
"Don't try to distract me! I know that's what
you're doing." Roy
stumbled past him and hit a wall comm unit with his
fist. "Bridge!
Bridge! Does anybody hear me up there?"
"What d'you want?"
"I think there's a starship after us!"
USS
Enterprise
1701-A
James Kirk got up and paced around his command
chair. Damn, if
only he had more to do than just stare into that screen.
He opened and closed his fist. Nothing to do with them.
That was Command's biggest problem-no
job
to do. No hand on the wheel. No hand on anything,
really. On a ship with a crew bigger than ten, the
captain really didn't touch anything. Been like
that for centuries
...
so why wasn't he used to it?
"Captain?"
He spun around, toward Spock. "Yes?"
The arrowlike eyes were reassuring. Spock
didn't come down. "I've analyzed this entire
file, and reviewed all encyclopedic files
related, and found I had to trace it through
fundamental Starfleet
Engineering archives. This is a basic anchor in
exploration, and
aggressive and defensive engineering science for
starships. It is the
main reason starships can broach areas impenetrable for
other
types of craft, and endure situations of violence
intolerable to lesser
mounted vessels. It is a structural member in
Federation expan
sion."
"I realize that," Kirk said. "Do you understand the
science itself?
The deflector technology and everything else that
came out of those
incidents involving Faramond?"
Spock nodded. "To the molecular level," he
assured Kirk.
Kirk sighed with relief. Having Spock
know
made a big difference. It would continue to do so when
things got dicey.
"Captain." Pavel Chekov spoke up in a
tone that said he could
tell he was interrupting private thoughts.
Kirk nodded to Spock, then turned to Chekov.
"Report."
"Reading the planetary system of Faramond on the
long-range
sensors, sir. No reading of the
Bill of Rights
yet."
"Secure from warp speed in five
minutes," Kirk said. "Ahead
standard sublight."
"Secure from warp speed in five minutes, aye,"
the new helms
man said. "Ahead, point eight sublight. . .
arrival at Faramond
Colony is approximately twenty minutes
to orbit, sir."
"Keep the crew at stations at least until we come
within hail of
her," Kirk said, "assuming we find her."
"Aye, sir," Uhura responded from behind him.
"Maintaining full
alert and emergency stations," she echoed.
Then the disturbing quiet fell again, and the high-speed
waiting
resumed.
Kirk wished there were more to be said. Getting used to the
few
words required for efficient command of a ship had been
one of the hardest lessons Starfleet had taught
him. What was he about to find
in that solar system? Was he about to discover that he had
failed to
be there when Roth needed help? He still saw
Alma Roth as an
ensign . . . and he still felt parental.
He rubbed his palms. They were moist. Cold. The
palms of a
frustrated man whose arms were never quite long enough.
Trying to compose his dread, he turned away from the
main
screen and found himself once again looking updeck.
"What am I going to find, Spock?" he asked
quietly.
Spock stepped closer, lowered his voice. They
both knew how to
converse in such a way that no one else heard, even
in the confined
environment of a ship's bridge. And there was something
about a
conversation between anyone and the captain that made others
turn
their faces away and allow the privacy. Any ship
was like that. Crew
learned this one thing fast-there were some moments the captain
didn't want to be approached.
"I have been isolating and arranging scattered data
on Faramond,
sir," Spock said, his tone even and perhaps
sympathetic. "It is an
archaeological dig of an ancient culture which was
highly advanced,
far beyond us, but they are extinct
...
or have gone away. It is a
multispecies dig, quite a vast project, in
fact, and-was
"And Captain April is supposed to break ground
with the Golden
Shovel," Kirk murmured.
Spock's brows gathered like two fireplace
pokers falling together.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Nothing. Go on."
"As in most archaeology," Spock continued
fluidly, "writing is a
critical link. Any recording material that
survives is considered
valuable. Commonality is the key. Discovery of the
same language
on two continents is an indication of seafaring, and on
two planets
is an indication of possible space travel, yet
raises endemic ques
tions. For ins tance, discovering Sanskrit on Mars
. . . did we go
there, or did they come here?"
"We went there," Kirk prodded, intolerant of
illustrations today.
"Go on."
Something in his voice made Spock pause, then
step down to the
lower level with him. The Vulcan's posture was
relaxed, as though
to silently comment on the captain's impatience, and that
some
things would have to be explained point by point, slowly.
"Not everyone carves on stone," he said. "Some people
write on
the backs of envelopes, or jot notes on table
napkins. With the
advent of computers into daily life of the average
person, such
things tended to lessen with time, but use of paper, as you
know, has
never lost its appeal and tends not to in societal
cultures. This is
fortunate since formal records are rare in
archaeology."
"I know," the captain said. "What do we have from
ancient
Crete? We have inventory of the king's olives and
oils and breads. We don't have the letter the king sent
to the high priest of Jupiter."
Spock frowned, this time for a different reason.
"High priest of Jupiter, sir?"
"It's a joke. Move along."
"Yes . . . you have the essence. We have political
graffiti, but we
do not have Sophocles's plays."
"Are you being facetious?"
Pausing, Spock appeared to understand the accusation without
understanding how anyone could possibly have any good
reason to
be facetious. "Not at all," he assured
Kirk. "You must understand
that volumes of poetry are nearly unheard of in
archaeology.
Library material is simply not found.
Archaeologists build their careers upon the middens of
vanished peoples. . . refuse
heaps . . . things in intestines of mummies. That's
why finds such
as the Fabrini Lexicons or the
Rosetta Stone are considered so
precious."
"I get it," Kirk said impatiently. "We have
the scratchings about
who to elect and how they were going to liberate one
another from
whatever religion had hold of them, and my
ancestor invented the
wheel but unfortunately he didn't leave me a
note. What's your
point?"
Spock shifted and rearranged his hands behind his back.
"At Faramond, the archaeologists have been working for
forty-five
years, and last year reported a major leap in the
dig."
"Which was what? A shoehorn with the manufacturer's
name?
The word for "toilet bowl" is the same in two
places? Don't make me
beg, Spock."
Spock stepped closer. He dropped his
attempts to preface and
simply blurted out what he had to say.
"They think they have discovered a basic
chemistry book," he
said. "Perhaps a children's text."
Kirk paused to remember his grade school
chemistry and get an
idea of what might be in the book, then forced himself
to sound more patient. "What does that mean to them?"
"It means we can begin to read the language. We
are now on the way to translating the language,
by way of universals."
"Universals," Kirk interrupted. "The laws of
gravitation, physics
comsimple science?"
"Yes, sir. Water is water, hydrogen is
hydrogen. That is the key to
an alien language . . . there are no
metaphors for the laws of physics and chemistry.
Newton's law of gravitation cannot be described in
a parable. We know this Old Culture was a
spacefaring culture, and a people who can't communicate
in basic science terms can never get
into space. With science, we can communicate
brilliantly without a single vocalized word."
"So we're on the verge of discovering what was the big
attraction
on a cold planet." Kirk paced a
step or two away, then back.
"Always wondered myself."
"Yes." Spock seemed somewhat relieved. "The
planet has long
been inert. Any settlers had to bring their own heat
and respiration,
which lessens its appeal for any kind of work. We have
been baffled
as to the reasons the Old Culture settled there at
all, and especially how they left. There is no
evidence of ships. No fuel or lubrication
residue, no vessel technology, no docks,
no markers for spacefaring,
no maintenance facilities, and no remains of
workers or farers. That
has been the standing confusion of Faramond for nearly
half a
century. We know they departed in a single exodus,
but we do not
understand how. An enduring question for Federation
archaeologists, Captain."
"I have a different question," Kirk said, pacing again.
"What
happened between the discovery of that chemistry book and the
Bill
of Rights'
arrival? A cold planet, in a cold solar
system, that had to
have domes built on it before a single pick could be
stuck in the
ground, that wasn't used for farming or mining, but was
developed.
What's there? What's there that caused antiproton
flushback, when
the only thing known to our science that causes
flushback is the
explosion of warp engines? I hate it, Spock
...
I hate asking myself
what's on Faramond that could've caused the
Bill of Rights
to
explode. An Excelsior-class starship
doesn't. . . just explode."
He knew he sounded angry. He'd been through this
before-the
death of an entire ship, of an entire planet,
or a solar system-but
that didn't make it any easier for him to swallow
or even to
comprehend. Not even forty-five years' experience
could sweeten that poison.
He knew it showed on his face, and didn't care.
"You may have to make a bet, sir," Spock said.
Kirk paused, turned, and squinted. "You're
telling me to make a
bet?"
His Vulcan friend gazed at him steadily with a
reassuring
quiescence.
"Yes," he said.
He didn't have to say anything else.
More than logic was at work. Hope was at work.
Defiance of
hazard was at work. Belief in the skills of Roth
and those young
people who had trained under Jim Kirk was at work.
Serving with
Kirk and these humans over the decades had taught
Spock to do the
one special thing that humans did better than
anybody else in the
known galaxy.
Gamble on themselves.
Abruptly the main bridge entryway
hissed open, and something
told Kirk to swing his chair and look.
There stood a presence of glowering weight. Skinny,
but glower
ing.
A moment, and McCoy had brought his glower down.
"Bones?" Kirk prodded.
McCoy closed his eyes in illustration, shook his
head, then
opened the pale blue glower again. "Biggest
psychological spider web I've stumbled into in
years," he said. "I think you'd better fill
me all the way in. And at this speed, you'd better
talk fast."
Forty-five years earlier . . .
USS
Enterprise
1701-A
"Picking up body parts, Commander Simon!"
"Specify! Human or what?"
"Difficult to specify, but definitely organic
tissue masses in small
amounts. Some of it could be legs or arms. Also
getting debris
that's nonorganic . . . hull
material. . . mechanical parts, includ
ing some pieces that are clearly identifiable as
Starfleet issue."
"How clearly, Jones?"
There was a pause. One of those that anybody can read.
Then . . .
"Stake my rank on it, ma'am."
Lorna Simon, under any other circumstances, would
have enjoyed pointing out how that wasn't much of a
testimonial coming
from just an ensign, but this time there was more on her mind
than
a cheap joke.
"Order battlestations," she said.
The bridge jumped to action at key points, and an
instant later,
the entire starship echoed.
"Red alert. Red alert! All hands come
to battlestations. Battle-
stations!"
The starship
Enterprise
hovered just outside the Blue Zone, her
red sensor disk washing the area down, her crew
disturbed by what
was coming out in the rinse.
None more than Drake Reed, who had watched his
best friend
and a boy he felt he'd raised go out into this bizarre
area of space only a few hours ago and was
wondering if he would be able to see them come back.
Now came the bad moments of imagining how long his
friends had suffered-or how short a time-and if they were still
suffering just out of his reach. Or
if mankind should stay out of space unless there was a
starship
like this around them. But how many of these special ships
would
there ever be to go around? And not even a starship could be in
ten places at once.
He'd been through times like this with George Kirk before,
but
this time . . .
"A ship! Commander! I'm picking up something just
inside the
Blue Zone!"
Simon cranked her ancient frame around with
notable difficulty
and more than a little cantankerousness, and barked at the
cub
minding the science station.
"Inside?
Repeat that!"
"Affirmative-inside! And intact! Moving under
power, I
mean!"
"Impossible."
"Correction!"
"I thought so."
"It's not one ship! It's two!"
"You sure you're reading that thing right, son?"
"Clearly power-regular .. . not just debris."
"You're telling me they were just pulled into that mess?"
"It reads as the cutter and some other . . . thing.
It's just pulling them along in there."
"Are they docked?"
"Appear to be docked, yes."
"Oh, that's enough! Let me have a look at that."
Simon hobbled
to the upper deck, peered into the submonitor, then
shook her head.
"I'll be slam-dunked . . ."
"Tremendous interference," Ensign Jones said, "but
regular
signals. I don't know what to make of
it. Maybe leakage ... but it wasn't just torn
apart in there. I don't know how," he added, "but
they're still in there."
"Pinpoint the source."
"I tried. It won't pinpoint."
"Hey, Trinidad. Step up here."
Drake spun around from his hopeless gaze at the
natural terror on
the main screen, the trinary and its dead zone, and
knew his friends
were in there and that nothing could survive in there.
Reluctant to
move backward instead of forward, even though that made
no sense
at all, he did as he was bade and joined Lorna
Simon on the
quarterdeck. He felt the sensor readout making
odd lights on his
tawny complexion.
"Madame Simon, ma'am?"
"This loose screw George of yours."
"Ah . . ."
"Troublemaker?"
"Oh, tut
...
not maker, per se . . . attractor, perhaps . . .
handler, possibly . . ."
"He's good at handli ng trouble?"
"Oh, better than handling normalness, I might
say! A good rascal
to have on your side."
"Doesn't give up at the drop of a hat?"
"Ma'am, this George of mine doesn't give up
at the drop of an
anvil."
"Even to finding a way to survive inside the Blue
Zone?"
Drake put a hand on his chest and said, "Commander, you
ask
big questions for a mere continental like
moi.
But I see these screens, and I see something pulsing
in a place where nothing
should pulse." He hesitated, measured his chances of
finishing the
next sentence, then said, "George Kirk would be out
here betting on
us with all his credits if the situation were backward."
The weathered woman glared at him for a long count
to see if he
would back down in his faith, and he didn't.
She nodded once, then stepped down to the command arena.
"Here's what we do," she said as she settled back
into the
command chair as though she'd been there for decades. Which
she
had. "Channel as much of the warp-drive power as you can
through
the tractor beam."
"Warp drive?" Isaac Soulian raised his head
from the science
station. "You want us to reroute it?"
"Engineering'11 know how. Get Marvick on it."
Ensign Jones gave her the kind of look nobody
should ever give an
officer. "Just ask the circuits to do something they
weren't made to
do?"
She cast him a glance. "We're not under drive,
are we?"
"No, Commander-was
"Then use the power for something else. Just do it, son,
they'll
figure it out downstairs. I want the strongest
possible traction with
the best possible beam integrity."
"Yes, ma'am . . ."
"I want you to start "plucking" at the Blue
Zone." She used her
craggy old hand to pick at the air as an
example, although their faces
said they all had the idea. "See if you can . . .
grab
anything."
"Florida! What've you got?"
"We've got a one-way ticket, sir,"
Carlos said as he joined George
Kirk in an isolated corridor. They were both
scouting ahead while
Captain April stayed behind with their injured
Veronica. "Our ship reads as falling apart.
What I wouldn't give for a ten-second glance
into the formula for these shields-was
"What about the recon?"
"The what?"
"Reconnaissance. Looking around in here. What've
we got
here?"
"Half the compartments on this ship are open to space,
so they're
blocked off. We'll have to find our way around
indirectly. It's a
pretty sizable ship, but it's all battered up.
We'll have to be
careful. . . not open any locked panels or
hatches. A lot are sealing
off ruptured areas."
"We also have to be careful not to damage the ship itself
too
much. Hurt these shields, and we're all dead."
"Oh-that's true . . . and also they know their way
around, but
we don't. Those are our disadvantages."
"And no hand weapons."
"Oh . . . right. Sorry, Mr. Kirk. I'm
just not used to this kind of
thing."
"After serving with a luck-buster like me? Sure you
are."
Carlos smiled, shrugged, and turned a little red at
the reminder
that his only forays into near-death had been at
George Kirk's side.
"Here's how it goes," George told him. "I
scout ahead about fifty
yards at a time. You come next, and fifty yards
later, Robert'aa do his
best with our little girl. Got it?"
"Got it, sir. You can count on me."
"Let's get the captain and the girl, and find my
son, and get our behinds out of here."
"Fine. I admit it. There's a starship coming after
you. You're
sunk. Starfleet's coming after you now."
"What do you know about it?" Roy snapped at his
prisoner's
relentless picking as he prodded Jim Kirk
to walk in front of him
through the ship.
Why did the ship seem so empty? And it was too
quiet for a full
ship with a lot going on. The damage was obvious, but
where were
all the men? Where were all the white and black and
brown and blue
and mottled faces he usually found handy to cuss out?
"I don't have to listen to you," he said to his only
company,
grabbing for a moment's assurance. "You're going to be
dead and I'm going to still be alive."
They stepped over two badly burned bodies.
Roy tried not to be
affected by the bodies, though he was noticing there were
fewer and
fewer of the crew visible in the corridors. Where was
everybody?
"No," Jim Kirk tossed over his shoulder, "not
this time. You've
blown it this time. You attacked a Starfleet
research cutter. You got
caught-you're in the brig or dead. And there's not
any border
patrol coming after you. There's a starship. They won't
buy guesses
about ships getting lost or sucked into the trinary.
They know a
Starfleet crew doesn't just "get lost."
What can a pack of racketeers do about it? You're
thieves. You're nothing but pirates."
"We're
not
pirates!"
"Why not? Because you don't call yourselves that? You only
do everything pirates do. Sorry. My mistake."
"We're Vikings."
"And murderers. You justify your actions by convincing
yourselves that your victims deserve what they get.
You're smugglers.
Hoods."
"Leave me alone! Or I'll take my father's
suggestion!"
Roy's shout stabbed through the barren, smelly
corridor as he
forced Jimmy to walk. Jimmy did as he was
bade, walked where he
was told, climbed whichever ladders were put before him,
stood aside and worked at the tough vinyl bindings on
his wrists when
Roy had to stop and fix something, but he wouldn't shut
up. He
wouldn't quit picking at the malignance he'd seen
between Roy and
the others on this ship. Unlike those moments on
board the
Enterprise
or the cutter, here he knew what to do. These people
were people he understood-too well, he was ashamed
to realize.
These were what he had been headed toward becoming
until a few
short hours ago.
He could still get out of it, and get his father and his friends out
of
it with whole skins. To do that, the one to watch, the one
to
manipulate, would be Roy Moss.
Following a few classic moves of strategy and
some not so classic,
George Kirk sneaked through the enemy ship one
corridor at a
time, doing everything possible to annoy anybody who
might go
before or come after him-anything, at least, that would not
damage the outer protection of this ship. That had
to stay.
But everything else-he turned off lights, he dried
wet areas and
wet down dry ones, broke every corridor access
control panel he
passed, and when possible he locked any doors and
panels. Maybe
he couldn't fight every one of these people, but he could sure
lock them in and hinder their paths and keep them from
talking to one
another.
He kept the others moving about a half corridor
behind him, and
made them duck and hide frequently while he
scouted ahead.
Ordinarily that wouldn't have been necessary, but they had
Veroni
ca Hall to carry and to protect, and that meant being more
responsible for their own well-being. A man could always
be more
reckless when he had only himself to care for.
He had scouted the upcoming corridor and was about
to wave a
come-ahead to Robert and Carlos, when he suddenly
found himself waving them back and ducking for cover himself.
He heard voices.
One . . . two voices.
He ducked under a piece of collapsed ceiling,
then craned his neck to see if the others had managed
to double back and hide. They must have-he couldn't see
them.
"You know, I never used to get mad just on
principle," one voice
said, "I always like stories about the Old West-was
George almost shouted. Jimmy! His son's
voice!
Alive! Jimmy was alive!
He forced himself to remain hidden until he could case
the situation . . . now he heard footsteps!
"Goody," a second voice spat out.
"comp stumbling on each other and clashing," Jimmy
went
on, "border disputes, culture wars, conflicts
over law and land, the
way the future's going to be etched out and whose rules
are going to
be the best for everybody . . . but is that what you're
doing? No. You lowlifes are just trying to make a
few coins for your pockets. This is no interstellar
dispute, no encroachment on somebody's space.
It's just brainless piracy."
George ducked and held his breath. He had no
weapon other than
a short pipe. All he could do was peek out and
see-
The tall, thin man shoving Jimmy around a corner!
No-not a man. Another boy. Hardly older than
Jimmy, at second glance. Maybe a year or
two older, with the teasings of a mustache that hadn't
really grown yet, shoulders that would be
wider by the month, no waist at all, and
long brown hair pulled back
in a ponytail. Both boys were battered and looked
as if they'd been
picking through a junkyard for parts.
A knot twisted George's heart. Jimmy's
hands were tied, his
clothes filthy and bloodied, his face smeared with
blood too, and the
tall boy was holding some kind of palm weapon on
him.
"I'm warning you," the tall boy said. "Keep your
mouth shut."
"Take it, then," Jimmy whiplashed. "Why are you
hanging
around with these people? Ever since we left the bridge
you've been
steaming and spitting about these lugheads you have
to yes-sir.
They're just a gang. No purpose. Just ganging
together because
nobody else in a civilized place'll take
"em. Not what I'd want to do
with my life. These dumb funguses around you-they're
not a
team. They use your talent and your
inventions, but they don't give
you any respect. What are you really getting?"
"B. . . out!" Roy breathed through flaring nostrils.
Suck, hiss,
suck, hiss. "Nobody"'11 ever tell me what
to do again. That's what
power gets you. You just shut up and . . . shut up."
Jimmy knew he was hearing just the right level of
annoyance in
Roy's voice, and stopped dead in his tracks. As
George watched, not daring to breathe, his son turned
on the other young man and stood him down right there in the
smoky corridor.
"You resent that you're not in charge, don't you?"
Jimmy
challenged him. "You don't like following rules you
didn't invent or
don't see reasons for you rself. You can't get anything
past me. I
know all the excuses by heart. You're annoyed with
life and you
want to get on with it. So why don't you?"
Backing off a telltale step, the other boy
demanded, "Why don't
I
...
what?"
"You want something. You want more than this," Jimmy
bad
gered. He felt his hazel eyes burn in a
glare. "What are you doing
here with these idiots? Anyone who would hang around here
has to
be an idiot himself. I don't know what you want and
I don't care, but I know you'll never get it
here."
He paused after the last statement to see the reaction
to it.
And there was one. A good one.
Jimmy's eyes narrowed, and he was reading the other
boy's face.
"I'm using these people!" he insisted. "This is
temporary! It's just
bad luck that I'm here for the moment!"
"I don't believe in luck," Jimmy said.
"Show me "luck" and I'll beat it."
"What about you!" Roy accused Jimmy. "What're
you
doing
here? You could've escaped in that pod! You
think those idiots in
that other ship appreciate what you did?"
Jimmy pushed forward so fast and so suddenly, with
eyes so
enraged, the other boy stepped back a pace.
"Those people were willing to lay their lives on the line for
me!
They're not perfect, but at least they're trying!
They have as much
in common with you and your crew as a stallion with a
cockroach!"
George clamped his mouth shut tightly and begged
for the
situation to change so he could go out there and grab his
boy and
hug him. The words warmed his aching ribs and made him
grin in spite of what was happening.
Jimmy had paused and realized he was losing
control, and
quickly changed to get it back. He lowered his voice
for a touch of
drama.
"Then there's these pigs you ship with," he added. "Ever
dawn on
you they might be using you?"
The tall boy stood there stiff, boiling, staring, with the
hell being annoyed out of him.
As George hid and watched, he tried to deduce
what was
happening so he could help his son, and figured that
Jimmy was
jockeying for position.
And not just position for fists and kicks-position for a
psycho
logical advantage!
"I'll be damned," George whispered as he
skewered the tall
quarry and tried to analyze that face.
Whoever the captor was, he wasn't a happy
captor. Jimmy was
getting to him.
George watched as his antagonistic son wagged
bound hands in front of his captor's flaming eyes.
"Never thought of any of this, did you?" Jimmy
persisted. "How
much have
you
gotten out of this? I can guess that you invented
those shields, not these other clowns. You're so
stupid, you don't
even realize what you've got. You've found a way
to survive inside
the Blue Zone and you're trying to pick parts of a
salvage and sell
them? You're the only one who can work on them, right?
What's it gotten you? The pennies you can scrape
up out here in deep space?
You know how much that's worth? Talk about stepping over
dollars! You could've sold that science and had anything
you want!
Not only could you have had anything you want, but you'd have
been Roy Moss, the hero!"
George almost got up and applauded. He had
to fight the
inclination and force himself to keep hidden and keep
collecting
information.
So
that
was the story-this kid had invented the special
shields.
The one called Roy Moss stood there, virulent,
jaundiced,
gawking at a brutal fist of reality that had
bruised him square in the
face. His eyes went glassy-this meant something
to him.
A hero . . .
George saw Jimmy grate his teeth with
satisfaction, and realized
his son had this other boy figured out. This
pony-tailed wetsock
wanted people thinking well of him. That was the key.
Jimmy had the key in his hands.
Dig, dig, dig-
"You've been with criminals all your life,
haven't you?" Jimmy
picked at him. "It never occurred to you to go
legitimate, did it?
You could've had people thinking well of you all over the
galaxy!
What are you instead? A common crook. Now you'll
be lucky just
to live long enough to grow a beard."
Roy Moss looked like a child about to have a panic
attack. He
seemed to know the other boy could read his reactions, and
looked
as if he were fractured in a dozen places. He
aimed a finger at his
antagonist's freckles.
"Look, razormouth," he growled, "someday they're
all going to owe me! I'm just making sure I get
what I deserve."
Jimmy retreated into satisfied silence, but not before
George
heard him mutter, "So am I."
George twitched until his legs hurt. His
teeth ground and his jaws
ached.
Jump them! Go on-one, two, three. . . . Do
it right
now. . . . Nobody takes my son.
His legs wouldn't work. Training had drilled bolts
through his
knees. He couldn't go up against a wild-eyed
kidnapper with a
weapon after finally seeing proof that Jimmy was all
right.
Down the corridor where the two boys had gone,
doors swished
and squawked. His chance was gone.
Now what? Had he done right?
This scouting-ahead business had its drawbacks.
He couldn't be just Jimmy's father right now.
He couldn't
suspend Robert and Carlos and an injured girl
who were trailing a
corridor or two behind him. There was a job to do,
four people
under his command, not just one.
And Jimmy . . . wasn't exactly whimpering and
crying for
Daddy.
George backed up a step and forced himself to think.
Keep
gathering information, get familiar with the terrain, find the
point
of command and the points of weakness, don't leave anything
unchecked-
"Hold it! Freeze!"
Including the corridor behind him-
Damn!
Caught off guard, George did as he was
told-froze solid in the middle of the nasty,
broken, smoky, damage-littered corridor, just
as he was ordered by the sizable individual of questionable
plane
tary background who spotted him.
There was proof. Thinking too much about one
member of the
crew instead of the whole plan-and he'd let himself
get spotted.
Okay . . . shift to plan two.
He turned slowly, hands up.
In front of him was a craggy human holding some
type of
mean-looking hand laser. George didn't
recognize the make, but the
weapon made him hungry.
He wanted it.
He'd burned his up in the tractor beam, and now
he wanted that
one.
His son was on this ship, working on weakening a key
mind; it
was up to George to weaken other things.
Ticking off five seconds, he hoped Robert
and the others were
using the seconds to hide. Then he put both his
hands up and said,
"I give up."
The crag lumbered toward him.
George put all his experience to work and tried
to look submis
sive. He dropped his pipe and put his hands on the
wall and spread
his legs, just as he liked his own prisoners to do.
"I give," he repeated. "I'm lost. I can't
find my way around your
ship."
"Yeah," the large, dirty man said. "We like it that
way." As he approached George, he paused and
poked a wall communication
panel. "Bridge! This is Munkwhite. I got
one of "em! They're down
here on the anchor deck!"
He waited, but there was nothing but static responding.
He punched the buttons harder.
"Bridge! This is Munkwhite! Somebody answer
me!"
Static. Crackles.
"Damn it, what's the matter with this thing?" He
kept an eye on George while cranking on the
tuning knobs for a few seconds and
cursing.
"I busted your system," George offered, peeking
over his own shoulder. "Didn't want you creeps
talking to each other."
"Sure you did! Shut up!" The man
turned his frustrated attention
back to his captive, came toward George, and
started patting him
down for weapons.
George didn't resist. In fact, he held his
breath, hoping-
Pssshhht
Munkwhite's expression of anger turned to one of
surprise. His
eyes went wide, he staggered back, gasping,
"That's not fair! That's
not f-was
His eyes glazed over as he stared at the hand he'd
been using to
pat at George's clothes. He staggered back,
legs spread, then fell
over like a stone and hit the deck full-length.
George drew a long breath and pushed off the
wall, wincing at his
own wounds and trying to control his limp.
"Good idea," he commented. "Always pat a prisoner
down."
From his pocket he'd pulled his booby trap one
of Veronica
Hall's medical hypodermics. He
expended the used cartridge which
Munk-what's-his-name had so accommodatingly
injected into his
own hand, then replaced it with another dose, just in
case some
body else got a jump on them too.
Of course, now he was armed . . . with the laser
weapon he had so
recently coveted. Then he opened a wall
storage panel and ungra
ciously crammed Munkwhite into the wall to sleep
it off where he
wouldn't leave a trail, andwitha few not-very-kind
shoves man
aged to close the panel almost all the way and get it
nice and
jammed.
"Don't worry," George added. "Three or
four hours and you'll
feel . . . just terrible. Besides, nobody promised
you 'fair." Robert!
Come on! I'm going to corner these bastards on their
own bridge!"
When Roy Moss dragged Jimmy back to the
bridge to report to
Big Rex that everything was broken or sabotaged and a
lot of the
crew were missing or unconscious, there was a distinct
difference in
the tone of voice from the nineteen-year-old knot of
frustrations.
Jimmy deduced it might be one of the first times, if
not
the
first time, that somebody had gotten the best of Roy in
an argument
without using fists. These deadnecks around here had never
been
any competition for Roy, and he didn't like being
told he was an
idiot by somebody smart. His intellect was all he
had to hold over
these other bandits. He wasn't big like his father, or
tough, or
powerful. He was used to being the smartest kid in
class. Everyone else had fallen easily under his
"everybody else is stupid" catch-all.
Now Roy had this Kirk kid around, who might not be
a science wizard, but who knew how to plumb for
feelings and annoy them
out. He wasn't used to having someone around who could
smell
traps and figure things out and anticipate trouble.
This Jim Kirk
had an amazing survival instinct and was trying to get
under his
skin and find out
why
he was doing what he was doing. Whenever
Roy had said anything, it hadn't gone over
Kirk's head like it did all
these brutes around them. Jim Kirk caught and
deduced every
thing. Not just words, but glances, looks, grunts,
grumbles, posture.
Figuring out mechanics was one thing, but being able
to sift
motivations . . .
"The whole ship's falling apart!" Rex Moss was
howling as the
two boys came back onto the bridge. He
rounded on his son.
"Haven't you got the intercom mended yet?"
"You said it yourself," Roy grumbled. "The ship's
falling apart."
"Well, get it back together!"
Roy had started to pick at the control boards, but
now turned to look past the frantic bridge
crew, what few of them were left, and
glared down at his huge father.
"Don't you understand?" he accused him. "It's
them!
They're
sabotaging the ship! I warned you every step of the way,
but you
didn't listen! They're on board now, and I
don't know what I can do
for you!"
"Nothing," Jimmy piped up. "You can't fight
Starfleet on equal
terms and win."
Both Mosses turned at the same time and howled,
"Shut up!"
Jimmy settled back in satisfaction, one eye
on Big Rex Moss, and
one eye on Little Roy Moss, and enjoyed the steam
coming from
both. The malignance between father and son was like a
sumptuous
appetizer, and he wallowed in his talent for
siccing them on each other. There was enough antagonism
on this bridge to stoke and
light, and Jimmy felt strangely at home in the
odium. He felt an evil
side rising in himself, a side that knew just what to do,
just how
churlish to be, and just how to tease acrimony
into erupting. There
was a brute inside him, a cad who seldom got
the chance to fledge,
and now was its perfect time. Pick, pick,
pick-that's what Jimmy
Kirk did well.
Suddenly somebody screamed, "Antimatter
leakage!"
The alien who had yelled was down the deck from
Jimmy, arms stuck halfway into an open wall
panel and reminded Jimmy of the
jury-rigging and faking-it that had gone on between himself and the
others in the cutter's hold. He remembered
Carlos Florida's phrase
comunder the hood.
He recognized the alien as an Orion, and knew
better than to get close to an Orion who was
panicking.
And this one was.
So was everybody else. Antimatter leakage?
Bad?
He kept back as the thieves dodged this way and
that, shouting
down crawlways and pounding on unresponsive
panels, then dodg
ing again.
"What can we do?" Big Rex Moss shouted. He
turned from one
crewman to the next, grabbing them each by the collar
or the sleeve
as they scrambled past him. "Stop the leak! We'll
blow up! Do
something!"
Jimmy surmised that the best he could do was stay out
of the way
and let them panic. He surmised maybe his father was
doing
something to fake a leak or create the illusion of a
leak. If so, it was
to his advantage to stay calm. If the leak was
real, it was to his
advantage to stay out of the way and let it get
solved.
"The port warp engine!" the Orion shouted into a
small screen that played erratic lights on his
face. "Detonation thirty seconds!
Twenty-nine! Twenty-eight! Twenty-seven!"
"Do something!" Rex Moss called.
"Twenty-six!"
All at once, everybody on the bridge turned
not to Rex, not to the
Orion engineer, but to Roy Moss.
Big Rex himself lumbered toward his son.
"Well?" he bellowed.
Roy straightened and looked down at him.
There was something different. For the first time Jimmy noted
that his words from the corridors hadn't gone unrooted.
There was
something distinctly changed between Roy and Rex Moss.
Some
thing beyond a son's fear of a brutal father.
This was a coarse glare of challenge and offense.
Roy glowered down at his father and rancorously said,
"Yes?"
His father looked like a man about to have a heart attack.
"Do
something!"
Tension broiled raw on the grill of the
Mosses.
Finally the son shifted his weight and asked, "Why
should I?"
"Reading antimatter leakage!"
"From inside the Blue Zone?"
"Affirmative! Heavy waves!"
"That's what we've been waiting for, kids."
Lorna Simon tried to make her voice sound
calm and reassuring
for the young folks aboard, and especially for this Drake
Reed, who
had the look of a man watching his best friend walk up
the
guillotine ramp.
She couldn't help standing up. There were times when even
the
command chair of a ship like the
Enterprise
wasn't enough.
Not when antimatter leakage came out of a place
where some of
her children were lost. And she'd been thinking about retiring
again . . . just couldn't make herself do it. Times like this
kept
pulling her back.
"Get your sensors cracking!" she snapped.
"Pinpoint it! Reed, get
down here and take the navigation chair! Let's put
our tractors into
that mess and get our people out of there!"
Nobody was moving. All sweating, but nobody
moving. All
stared at Roy.
He let them sweat. His advantage reaching its
strongest moment, and he used it to add friction. Not
even his father knew what to do.
"Fifteen! Fourteen! Thirteen! Twelve!" the
Orion engineer
shouted.
Roy stepped down to his father's level. "Get out
of my way, you
imbecile."
Big Rex Moss had no choice, and apparently
he knew it.
Hating the universe, he stepped aside.
On the port side, the Orion's voice
cracked. "Eight! Seven! Six!"
Roy stepped past Big Rex as though he were
nothing.
The effect was astonishing for Jimmy as he
witnessed the other
things that can happen between a father and son. His young
captor,
who just minutes ago had been so surprised at the
idea of taking
over, now seemed to figure that his father wasn't
worthy of respect
or fear any more than these other low forms of life.
With one hand-as though to make a point-Roy reached
into a
section of the open port side mechanical panels
and worked some
unexplained magic, then yanked on something.
They had only two seconds to spare when the
countdown stopped
and the Orion choked on the phrase, "Port engine
is ejected!
Starboard engine is still stable!"
An instant later the ship shifted under them and
knocked them
off their feet. Jimmy grabbed for balance and
realized that the discarded engine had just blown up and
knocked them with
backwash. He struggled to keep himself up in spite
of his hands
being tied and curtailing his balance, and only when the
ship settled
again did he realize he'd missed a chance. He
should have hit
somebody or kicked something or jumped somewhere.
Another little lesson to log away for the future.
Roy enjoyed-as much as that hideous, spiteful
expression could be called enjoyment-having gotten his
father and the others out of
a situation that would have killed them all if he hadn't
been here.
He straightened, and faced Big Rex.
"I'm going below," he said. "I'm going to secure
the shielding and
do whatever else needs doing so that doesn't happen
again.
You . . . just stay here and be the big man."
Rancor dripped from his tongue.
He stepped aft, scooped up a utility tin
marked
chemical rinse,
and gestured for Jimmy to lead the way out.
Below, once again in the corridor, Roy fell into a
callous silence
that Jimmy read with all but obvious glee.
Finally Roy took one too
many of his captive's snotty glances and said,
"You're pretty cocky
for a noxious runt with his hands tied up."
Jimmy cast him a glance of pure flint. "I'm
not the one consider
ing patricide."
"Oh, shut up! Where'd you even learn a word like
that?"
"Heard it in a play."
"Well, keep it to yourself. You don't know what
you're talking
about."
"Yes, I do," Jimmy insisted as Roy shoved
him into one of the
engine rooms and pushed him off to a safe distance.
Roy grumbled something unintelligible, then crawled
over a
dangerously jagged pile of electrical parts and
circuit boards that
had fallen from the ceiling. He ended up on all
fours to get over the
pile, then crouched in a corner, opened the tin he'd
brought from
the bridge, and began selecting fine
pieces of equipment and
dipping them one by one into the chemical cleaner.
Between them, the pile of shattered boards crackled and
occa
sionally snapped with live electricity, as though
laughing at the two
human boys trying to keep their noses above the
water in a very
serious adult business.
Jimmy stayed aside. He didn't have duking it out
with Roy Moss in his plan-yet. He'd used his
fists enough in his life, and this was
a new adventure. He was going to see how far he
could annoy this
one.
Tenacity kicked in again. He discovered he was
pretty good at
reading other people, but until today, until now, he
hadn't read himself very well. He determined
to survive, not just sacrifice
himself, but live through it, and let his father know.
He erupted out of his private thoughts and glared at
Roy.
"I can't figure you out," he said. "You're
obviously brilliant, and
your father thinks it's some kind of parlor trick. When
it gets him
something, maybe then he'll respect you. Until
then, you're noth
ing. If you don't realize that, you're stupid
too."
Roy buried himself in his dipping and cleaning, mumbling
incoherencies, not really conversing at all, but just
growling out his
frustrations.
It was working, Jimmy knew. He could goad Roy
by making him
feel stupid, because that's what he knew would work on
himself. He
felt the whole future was lying out before him in Roy
Moss-the
perfect example of what his father had been trying
to avoid
happening to Jimmy in two or three years. An
angry young man
who wasn't sure about the Tightness of what he was
doing.
"Stupidity . . . stupid people can make a living .
. . undisciplined people can't. . ."
Roy was muttering louder now, and Jimmy was
catching some of
the phrases.
"Idiots claim part of it
...
never give it up
...
mine and all
mine . . . scratching Faramond like lice . . ."
"Faramond?" Jimmy went so straight against the
wall that he hit
the back of his head. "What about Faramond?"
Roy looked up, eyes wide. A tiny
electrical chip dripping fluid
from his fingers to the floor. He looked like a trapped
squirrel.
"What interest have you got in Faramond?" Jimmy
badgered.
"None of your business! Who do you think you
are-Sherlock
Holmes?"
The look on Roy's face said it all again that he
wasn't used to
having somebody around who could figure things out,
smell traps, make deductions.
He tried to go back to dipping and cleaning.
Jimmy pushed off the wall and pointed his bound
fingers.
"You've got something on Faramond that you aren't
telling your
father about!"
"He's still my father!" Roy bellowed. "Shut up!"
The guilt came back to prick at Jimmy as he
read the other boy's
face. Roy had shown him what it was like to have a
really
bad father,
yet Roy was showing more loyalty to Big Rex than
Jimmy had
shown to his own father.
"You know something nobody else does," he kept
on. "That's
right, isn't it? Sure! Why else would you put up
with this shipload of
maggots? That's why you keep your mouth shut, isn't
it?"
Roy's arms shook violently, his face turned
red, and he visibly
broke. "I don't need them! I'm well on my
way to taking over! I've
been funneling off my own stash, stocking for
my future!
My
future!
Which isn't going to include these cretins!"
Jimmy edged along the wall, forcing Roy to turn
away from the
main corridor doorway. "What is it?" he
teased. "Bet you've been
dying to tell somebody. Why not me?"
"I don't need to tell anybody! It's mine!
When I get all I need, I'm
going to take what these fools have stolen and blow them
all out into
space! They wouldn't be alive anyway if not for
me, so it won't
really change anything! I'll get everything I
want! And when I do, I'll
get rid of these people! They don't mean anything to me,
and I'm not going to feel bad after I do it! Darwin
would understand!"
"What about your father? That include him?"
"Look, he's my father! I'm stealing from him for his
own good!
Doesn't mean I have to kill him! He'll understand
when the time is
right for him to understand! He won't have any choice! You
saw
what just happened on the bridge! I'm in charge
now! I've got
something on Faramond that's worth a lifetime's work,
and it's all mine! It'll make me an emperor!"
Jimmy didn't say anything.
He didn't have to.
The shadow being cast from the meager corridor light said
everything. Roy spun around.
Big Rex Moss stood in the anteroom
doorway.
And there was nothing fatherly left in his eyes.
Young Roy Moss transformed from a dominant
bastion of the
future to a shriveled victim in three seconds.
He even got shorter.
He shoved upward against the wall, an electrical
piece in one hand
and the tin of fluid in the other. The tin was heavy, and
dropped the
few inches to the floor, sloshing, but landing upright.
"I'll share everything with you!" he whined as his father
moved
slowly into the anteroom. "You heard me
tell him that! It was going
to be for us! The two of us!"
The offer came too late. The idea alone that
Roy had been
stealing from his own people kept scorching the air.
But Big Rex Moss wasn't in a mood for
teamwork.
"I shoulda killed you a long time ago," he grated.
"I'll do it now.
I'll kill you just like I did your mother."
Rex Moss never took his small, hot eyes off
his son. He started
climbing over the hill of collapsed parts and conduit
boards. The
pile crunched and snapped as his feet pressed
down, then his hands,
one by one. Parts groaned under the weight as he
crawled closer and
closer, giving him a platform from which to lunge down
upon Roy.
Jimmy was ranked by the very presence of the enormous
man, but he knew an opportunity when he saw
one, and started sidling
toward the doorway. If he could just clear it-
A hand caught him at the throat. Or was
it a catcher's mitt? So big
that the palm alone spread from his ear to his shoulder, the
hand
drove him deep into the room and slammed him into the
side wall
so hard, it left him dazed and numb.
"Siddown!" Rex Moss roared. "You're
next!"
The voice echoed like a kettledrum.
Cut down to size, Jimmy Kirk realized he was
being given a crash
course in the anatomy of open murder, and there was
nothing he
could do about it. Big Rex Moss could reach the width
of the
anteroom to either side without even leaning. There would be
no
getting past him.
Tyrannosaurus Rex was going after his own son
again. He
climbed right over the pile of trash and snapping parts
in the center
of the room and got Roy by the throat.
"Where's my stash?" the father demanded. "Where've you
been
putting it?"
Rex was choking Roy to death. There was no doubt for
any of
them. But he was so enraged and choking Roy so hard that
Roy
couldn't have answered if he'd wanted to.
Terrorized into action that had never been raked up out
of him
before, Roy suddenly raised the electrical chip in
his left hand and
raked it across his father's flabby cheek as though
scraping paint.
Rex bellowed in rage and pain, hoisted Roy
clear into the air
overhead, and pitched him across the room.
Dizzy and tingling, Jimmy struggled to get to his
knees and keep aware of what was going on, but he
couldn't muster enough dare to
challenge the giant again. Not just a giant, but an
enraged
giant. . . one who had been personally betrayed.
Rex came again over the pile of half-connected
machinery,
crunch by crunch, grab by grab, ignoring short
circuits snapping
right under his hands and knees.
"Where's my stash!" he demanded. "I want
all
of it!"
Before him, Roy shook and moved his mouth, but no sound
came
out. Bruises were already forming on his neck.
"Steal from me?" Rex went on, coming closer and
closer.
Roy tried to maneuver away, but there was nowhere to go
other
than along the wall back toward where he had been
before. He
edged sideways, confused and unable to think, eyes
flashing from
side to side, fixing on his father every second or
two, for Rex was almost over the pile again, almost
to him-
His boot bumped against the tin of chemical cleaning
fluid and
almost knocked it over. The liquid splashed.
Roy grabbed for it and, miraculously, he got it.
Perhaps he meant only to discourage his father, perhaps
to splash
some of the fluid in the hideous face coming
nearer and nearer, but the tin had other ideas. The top
came off completely, and the entire
contents of the tin, a half gallon of chemical
fluid, fanned out across
Rex Moss, and across the pile of parts under him.
The pile of charged and connected parts, half of them still
flowing
with power.
A funnel of sparks went up in a giant short
circuit. Big Rex
bellowed to a pitch no man his size should be able
to hit, and he
froze stiff, then started to shake.
His eyes bugged out, then out farther. Electricity
broke into jolts
through his arms and legs and set his hair on fire.
Sizzling like an ox on a spit, Rex Moss
started to fry. His clothing
burst into flames as though someone had cast a spell
on him and
was burning him in effigy somewhere. Locked by ugly
science to the
material under him, Rex grabbed convulsively with
both hands at
the mountain of metal, eyes still fixed on his
son. Lightning surged
through him and left scorch marks on his forehead as
wave after
wave permeated his enormous body, the soaked
clothing and wet
metal conducted electricity with nothing short of
passion, and he
started to cook.
There was nothing for him to do but hang there, and fry
...
and
fry
...
and fry.
Jimmy dodged for cover, betrayed by his tied
hands, and barely
got under a broken chair as the sparks rained and
splattered around
him. He glimpsed Roy dodging for cover too, his
face redefining
astonishment.
The stink of burning chemicals and blistering flesh was
nauseat
ing as the liquid soaked in and crackled
viciously. The big man
collapsed, his body poaching where it lay, flabby
face bubbling as
though it had been blow-torched, eyes wide with pure
horror, but still fixed on his son as the life seeped
out of them.
Ultimately, the last grab fell from his fingers.
He lay there, a
sizzling heap on top of a sizzling heap, slowly
being cauterized by
electrical heat.
Overcome by terror and scalded by splashed fluid and
sparks,
Roy lay almost on his back and stared through his knees
at his
father's broiled body.
Suddenly he cringed against the wall, slammed the
wall with his
fist so hard his fingers could have shattered, and he shouted
bitterly.
"Why did you make me do that? Why'd you make me
kill him!
That's not supposed to happen! He was a big man!
Now, look at
him! Look at him!"
Rex was still staring at his son, and neither of the
boys could tell if
he was even dead yet.
Suddenly Roy jolted to his knees and closed the
distance between
himself and Jimmy with staggering speed and held the stunner
at
Jimmy's head-the stunner that Jimmy didn't even
realize Roy still
had.
"You'll pay for this! I'll make you pay!" Roy
spat, half sobbing
and half enraged, unable to take the blame for his
father's death
himself.
The fried junk under Rex Moss shifted
abruptly and the huge
body shifted too, drawing Roy's attention again.
He turned away from Jimmy and spoke to his
father's gawking,
blistered face.
"Not my fault
...
not my fault. . . it's not. . ."
Jimmy came out of his hiding place and looked, but
not with the
regret or compassion that Roy demanded. There was
simply
nothing left in him for these people, who had possessed
chance after
chance to mend their mistakes and hadn't done it.
"Now you can render him down into soap," he droned.
"Get
some use out of him."
Shuddering, Roy leaned against the wall, both knees
bent, breath
coming in sucks and blows through his nostrils, his teeth
gritted,
lips closed tight. Every cell in his body was shaking
with palsy, as
though he were ninety instead of nineteen, and he couldn't
stand up without leaning.
Expression after expression came and went, none of
them partic
ularly rational, but Jimmy could see that Roy was
rallying his mind
and trying to get it to override his emotions-of which he
had
plenty.
An interesting process to watch. Insanity taking
seed.
"Destiny," Roy said finally on one of those gasps.
"Makes
sense . . ."
Scooping his ever-present nerve stunner from where it had
fallen
beside him, he pushed himself off the wall and stood over
his
father's body, shoulders tucked down and inward, feet
out, knees
in, trying to keep balance. He still looked old.
"It knew," he murmured. "Forced me to take
over . . . grow up
before I was ready
...
it knew maybe I
am
ready
...
I just didn't
believe it. Destiny . . ."
He straightened a little, seemed to be gathering his inner
strength, almost against his own will. Being in charge was something
he had
thought about all his life but had never considered within
reach.
Unwilling to walk too near Big Rex's body,
he sidled along the
wall until he could extend a long arm and get
Jimmy by the collar.
"I've got to get to the bridge. Get moving."
Veronica Hall let out a bone-shattering groan
as her shipmates
dragged her through a jarred door panel, then lay her
down in the
corridor as they gathered their wits and their options.
George panted, sweated, and tried not to let his
hands clench too
tightly as he watched Robert and Carlos
replace Veronica's medical
cartridges for the fifth time since coming aboard this
vessel. A
strange ritual, this lurking about, covert,
dangerous, in danger, all
the while hauling an injured girl who needed nursing
as diligently as
if she were lying in an infirmary.
While watching this again and feeling the acid of
responsibility
and inadequacy peeling the paint off his heart,
George made a
decision that tasted bitter as he forced himself to speak
up.
"Robert," he began.
"Yes, George?" Robert responded with
monklike calmness.
"I'm going to go on ahead."
"Yes, I understand."
"Can you hold out here?"
Robert looked up at him, pale and gathering all
the will he had
left. He glanced at Carlos in a comradely
manner, then back at
George.
"We'll do whatever is necessary," he assured him.
"You go take charge and find your son."
"Where
is
everybody?"
Roy ground out his words while pulling at a drawer
of circuitry in
the corridor wall.
The circuitry was dead, the intercom didn't work,
the sensors
didn't work, a good seventy percent of the doors
didn't even open
anymore in the passages leading to the bridge.
Off to one side, just out of kicking distance, Jimmy
clamped his lips shut, rubbed his hands to keep the
blood circulating in spite of
his bindings, and didn't respond. The ship did
seem peculiarly,
eerily, empty. The crew was missing, communication
was down,
everything was down except those special shields.
"What are your people doing?" Roy demanded. "Do you know
what they've done? Do they have a plan? Do they
follow a policy? If
you tell it to me, it may help keep us all
alive."
Bobbing him a glance, Jimmy shrugged. "How should
I know?
I'm just a kid. Besides, how can a few Starfleet
gorillas compete
with an intellect like yours? You know . . . Darwin
would under
stand."
Roy actually growled at him, teeth locked and
nose wrinkled, and
threatened him with the stunner.
Jimmy had been proud of himself for one or
two good jabs, and
here was his father in eight places at once. His father and
Captain
April-he tried to imagine Captain April
clunking somebody on
the head, and just couldn't see it. Robert April would
sit them down and give them a good talking-to, and the
guys would feel guilty and
give themselves up.
Then
George Kirk would hit "em.
A main insulator door opened before them and they went
into the
upper level of the ship, and came around a corner to a
horrid sound
of pounding and banging, easily traced to a torn-up
section of
corridor wall. There, right on the wall, a line
of locker-type doors were rattling, which they traced
down to one particular locker.
"Stand back," Roy ordered, gesturing Jimmy
well out of kicking
range. Keeping one eye on his captive, his
"personal shield," he
traced the banging to what could have been a
locker or a control
panel with a hinged door.
Whatever it was, the door was ajar and somebody was in
there, rattling like crazy and trying to get out. Roy
grabbed the door and
tried to pull it open, but only the top quarter would
budge.
"Open it!" a voice roared from inside.
"Munkwhite?" Roy attempted. "Is that you?"
"Get me out! Get me out of this hole!"
"It won't open."
"Open it!"
"Would you like me to spell 'won't"? It's jammed.
Who did this?"
"Those Starfleeters! They're here! They jumped
me! Just get it
open!"
Roy rattled the door halfheartedly, obviously
thinking more of
himself and the fact that several Starfleet people were loose
on his
ship, then gave it a final kick and said, "Well,
it's your tough luck for
being stupid." He turned to Jimmy again. "Come
on, you. Let's
make hay while the sun shines."
Nervous and ready to use his stunner, he yanked
Jimmy in front
of him again and off they went, with Munkwhite hammering
away
in the background almost until they reached the bridge
itself.
There, Lou Caskie was alone, wide-eyed, frozen
with pure terror.
He looked twenty years older-and he was already
old-and on the
ravaged bridge, with chunks of machinery the size of
sofas and
chairs collapsed across almost any sensible path.
What Roy had
inherited was a miserable ruin now, a hulk of hissing
parts and
spitting leaks, and one old man who was panicking.
"What's left?" Roy called over the crackles
and noise.
"Where's your father!" Caskie shrieked, his voice
snagging.
"We're gonna get killed in here! We're
gonna die like rats!"
"Where's the rest of the crew?"
"I don't know! Nobody answers! The sensors
don't work any
more! Intercom's down! Crew don't answer!
They're all dead!"
"They're not dead," Roy droned, climbing over a
big chunk of
junk and going down to the bridge center. "But they're
going to be."
He gestured to Jimmy. "You-get down here too.
Stand over there
where I can see you. What are your friends doing? You
tell me!"
"How should I know? Just a kid, remember?" Though
he did as
he was told, Jimmy had no cooperation in his
voice when he
taunted, "Ship sure is quiet, isn't it?"
"Shut up! You shut up!"
"What're you gonna do?"
"I'm going to play my last card, smart-ass.
I'm going to turn off
the heat everywhere but right here."
Jimmy felt the cockiness drop from his face. "You
can't!"
"They'll all freeze," Roy said with
flaming satisfaction. "And
we'll have Starfleetsicles."
"Keep talking," Jimmy antagonized.
"Sooner or later you'll
believe yourself."
Enraged, Roy turned on him and started closing the
space
between them, using his nasty little nerve-stunner to bridge
the gap.
"I've had it with you!" he grated. "I don't
need you anymore.
This'll shut you up!"
From behind them-
"Stop right there, bud."
Jimmy thought it was his own voice, but he and Roy
turned at the
same instant and found themselves staring down a laser
pistol barrel and over that toward one of the engineering
crawlway
openings-
At George Kirk.
Clamping his lips, Jimmy had a flash-thought about
not giving away his dad's disadvantage-the fact that
the kid was

kid-
but from a low point behind the crawlway Lou Caskie
appeared on
the other side of the bridge, brandishing a sharp piece
of metal.
Without even thinking, Jimmy shouted, "Dad, behind
you!"
His father reacted almost as spontaneously by putting his
foot in
Caskie's face. Clearly, that's how he had
been explaining his way
through the ship. An instant later, the old man was out
of the
picture.
But while George Kirk was occupied with
Caskie, Roy wasn't
standing idle.
He dove for a panel and put his hand under it-the
shield
controls-
"You can't fire that faster than I can move my
finger!" he shouted,
trembling. "You can kill me, but not before I turn
off the deflectors
and we're all dead! You can't put me
down fast enough! You can't!"
He was right.
"You'll die! Your son'll die! Your frs'll
die! I'll do it! I'll do it!
Give it to me!"
"All right!" George barked.
"No!" Jimmy interrupted. "Don't do it,
Dad. He'll kill us anyway. That's the way
he is." With a dissecting glare at Roy he added,
"We can't let him win. You were right. This shouldn't
happen to anybody else. Better we all die
here."
His father straightened and stared at him. "No kidding?"
Jimmy offered a duelist's nod. "You bet no
kidding."
"Shut up! Shut up! I'll do it!" Roy
howled.
With eyes made of smoke, Jimmy took a step
toward Roy. "Then
do
it. What's taking so long?"
On the upper deck, separated from the two boys by a
huge chunk
of collapsed machinery that he would never be able to get
over in
time, Jim's father said, "No!"
Jimmy stopped and looked at him with a "b" in his
eyes.
"Back down, Jim," George said firmly.
Roy crouched there with his finger on the switch, watching
the two Kirks and trembling so hard his teeth
clattered.
Broiling, Jimmy felt a hundred arguments
rise inside him. He wanted to be defiant, but
somehow defiance didn't fit the bill
anymore. It wasn't real. It wasn't right.
Both hands out in a subservient posture, George
lifted the hand
laser's barrel a few inches, raising the aim off
Roy, then stepped
forward just enough to lower the weapon and set it on the chunk
of
machinery.
"Get it," Roy sna pped, and waved at Jimmy.
"Pick it up by the barrel and hand it to me."
"Get it yourself, chicken," Jimmy snarled. "I
got my pride."
"You get it for me or I'll do this, I swear
I'll do this!"
"Jim," George said steadily, "do what
he says."
Perplexed, Jimmy frowned.
"Do what he says," George repeated.
He connected looks with his son in a manner so
honest and so
private that both felt the magnetism.
Jim said, "He won't do it, Dad. He won't
kill himself."
On the upper deck, measuring his options in inches,
George Kirk
studied his son's face. There was a certain quiet
communication
going on between the two of them that hadn't been there in
years-and he was sure he wasn't imagining it. He
could see just
looking
at Jimmy that there had been a change. Jimmy had
a look of
confidence-confidence in
him.
Slowly George added, "Orders."
Without understanding why, without waiting until he saw the
reason, Jimmy simply said, "Yes, sir," and
followed an order that
he disagreed with.
With a winning smirk on his face about having somehow
pulled
his tail out of the fire again, Roy Moss was closing
his white, cold
hand around the laser. He licked his lips, stood
up, and aimed the
weapon squarely at Jimmy's head.
Roy was knotted from head to toe, keyed-up and
nervous,
excited, scared, and elated to the point of giddiness that
he'd won,
and he had to rub their noses in it.
"I knew you couldn't beat me! Nobody beats
me. You thought you had me. I know you did. People think
that all the time about
me, and they're always wrong. Now everything's going
to be mine
and you're just going to be dead. You should've listened to your
son,
Mr. Kirk," he said. "Now you can watch him
burn."
The weapon leveled at Jimmy's head, and Roy
squeezed the
molded firing handle.
Jimmy didn't wince. He was ready for
any scenario, and his trust
in his father was riding an all-time high. If he had
to catch a laser
beam in his teeth, he'd do it just to make the point.
He'd learned.
Ffffssssst
...
The weapon whimpered.
Horror dawned on Roy's face that he'd been
gulled into taking a
useless weapon, that he'd been made a
laughingstock-the one
thing he couldn't stand. Being suckered by ordinary
idiots was too
much.
He had barely realized the weapon wasn't working
when he heard
Jim Kirk's father let out a yell.
Abruptly the whole ship was yanked
sideways-everyone, every
thing, was thrown. The Kirks hit the same wall at
the same time,
and Roy turned, saw something flying at him-and part
of the
collapsed ceiling glanced off his chest and
knocked him sideways.
Though Jimmy was pressed against the bulkhead
by gravity and
by shock, George had the advantage of knowing what
was happen
ing to their ship. He thrust himself against the whining new
gravity
and got his hands on Roy, and threw him as hard as
he could.
George Kirk's attack drove Roy toward his
shield controls. With
a shout of pure, incredulous fury, Roy dove
for the panel that
controlled his shields again, but that card had been
played and the
Kirks weren't going to let him table it a second
time. This time Jimmy had an extra second in his
own favor and used it for a
headlong plunge, tied hands joined in a hammer.
He knocked Roy to one side, then tackled him and
laid him out
flat. They ended up lengthwise on the littered
deck, pressed against
the bulkhead, George Kirk knee-down on
Roy's spine, coiling the
boy's hands with a discarded length of insulation tape-
Then George grabbed for leverage and shouted,
"Hang on, Jim!
Hang on!"
"What is it!" Jimmy yelled over the whine.
"What's happening to
us?"
"You know what it is, pal! It's a starship!"
"Ah, here's our Artful Dodger even as we
tickle his ears."
Robert April's charming voice took the entire
hospital deck of the
starship
Enterprise
and somehow made it a stage play, complete
with popcorn and curtain calls.
The popcorn smell came from the eight or ten
different medica
tions being pumped into what was left of Veronica
Hall's body as she lay on a complete life
support diagnostic bed. The curtains-
they were everywhere, blue and white, some for sterility, some
for
privacy. All for Veronica.
"Sir," Jimmy began as he limped
to where the captain sat in his best British visiting
position. "You all right?"
Captain April wore a sling on one arm and a
notable bandage on
the other forearm, which made Jimmy remember the
condition
April had been in when they'd last seen each other.
And that voice, which could make any situation a poem.
"I'm quite fine, my boy, thank you," the captain
said. "How are
you doing?"
"Bad leg and about forty bruises," Jimmy said.
"One cracked
rib."
April nodded. "You must be disenchanted such that we'll
never
entice you back toward the service. Twice in
space, and twice
attacked. However will we convince you to stay?"
Jimmy dropped
him
an aweless look and grinned. Somehow he
felt on more equal footing than he ever had before with
this man. "What's the big deal about making me
stay?"
Robert smiled. "Oh, let's just say there's a
certain martial
tradition I see fledging in the Kirk nest
...
a rare muster of those who will stand on a volcano if
tactics beckon . . . hmm?"
"Hmm," Jimmy grunted back. "How's Mr.
Florida?"
"Carlos? A bit stretched in the pinfeathers, but
we're all here,
Jimmy, we're all here . . . not without due
commendation to you."
Jimmy found himself blushing, and turned to Veronica.
"Can I
talk to her?"
"She's been waiting for you," the captain said
civilly. "Then I'll take you to your father."
He approached the diagnostic maze with the cold
fear of those
who still have all their limbs. It was like suddenly joining
a silent
guilt society.
The girl's skin was glazed white-from the inside or
outside, he
couldn't tell-and made him think of the girls
he'd been drawn to
before, in better situations, and the moon under which he'd
been
drawn to them. Every vein that could be reached in her body
was
attached to a tube, a tape, or a bag. Her right
arm and leg were missing, those arteries and sterilities
taken care of artificially.
Everything looked blue. Her skin, her curtains,
her hair, her eyes as
she blinked at him-
He flinched. It was like having a corpse blink at
him.
"Hey, crackerjack," she murmured.
Wasn't much of a voice. He just hadn't expected
to be talking to
her.
Veronica smiled a tiny little smile. "Heard you
used some
top-notch stopgaps when you got on board their
ship."
"Bet you can't say that twice," Jimmy said.
"Bet I can't either."
"Just old-fashioned," she said. She stopped
to swallow, and her
eggshell cheeks grew more hollow. "Captain
April always talks
about old-fashioned ways getting us through . . .
guess he's right."
"Yeah, I guess he is," Jimmy uttered.
"How do you feel?"
She seemed to think the question was funny. "You mean with
one
less arm and one less leg? I feel okay,
considering . . . I'm alive,
aren't I? Lucky to be here. That's the bottom
line . . . don't worry,
Jimmy, they'll fix me. . . . Starfleet knows
how to fix anything
. . . the big bird pulled us out, after all, right?"
"The
Enterprise,
right," he said quietly.
"Jimmy, you did great. Captain told me what
you did . . . how
you didn't let them take you easy . . . thanks
for giving me a chance
to live."
A grilling guilt overwhelmed Jimmy as he
frowned at the reflec
tion of himself in her respirator. Bad enough he
felt this way because she was lying there after saving his
clumsy life-bad
enough he'd blundered his way to somehow getting out of this-but
here she was, thanking him. Thanking him. He was
getting glory in a cheap way. He was getting it
through those who had done the real
giving.
Touching what was left of Veronica-hopefully a
wrist and not
just a main umbilical-he scooted a little nearer.
"Veronica," he began, "it wasn't me who was the
hero. Look at
you. You're the one who sacrificed. You're the one
who really gave."
"But I couldn't be here to talk about it," she
whispered, "if not
for you
...
I know . . . they told me everything . . .
solves a lot of
questions about this area . . . now we can clear up the
Interstellar
Maritime Laws for this area and rules of the road . .
. rights to search . .."
"What?" Jimmy leaned over her and tried to find the
focus of her
eyes.
"Signal a merchantman to lay to
...
leakage and breakage . . . apply the negligence
clause . . . according to the Interstellar
Code of Signals . . . two intermittents
..."
"Veronica?" Jimmy stood up and leaned closer,
but there was a
hand on his shoulder, drawing him back.
"She's dreaming, Jim," Captain April said.
"She's taking her
Academy tests over again. Let's leave her
alone to study, shall we?"
Jimmy straightened, and sought comfort in the captain's
gentle
face. "She won't have to, will she? In spite of.
. . his She'll still be in
Starfleet, right?"
Robert April's soft features turned into that
pondside smile he
gave when he needed to be believed on an
extraordinary level. He
slipped his good arm around Jimmy Kirk's shoulders
and walked
the boy toward the intensive care door.
"Starfleet never abandons its own. Once
commissioned, always
commissioned. All rights and privileges ascertaining
thereto
...
no
matter how much of the dirty side that person may
carry, and
indeed sometimes because of it."
"Sir . . . you lost me," Jimmy said. "You
might have to put that
one in English. I mean-American English."
April smiled, sought help at the ceiling, then
drew a long,
contemplative breath.
"Trapped me," he murmured. Hanging a hand on
Jimmy, he
said, "You survived because you have a bit of the dirt in
your soul
that let you understand those men."
Jimmy rolled his eyes. "Gosh, thanks."
"Now, I'm sullenly serious and you'll just
have to bear it. That's
why I laugh when your father frets that you'll turn out
to be a
hoodlum of some kind. I tell him he's seeing
only the streak that
will save you some day-may save a lot of people. Who can
tell the
future? You see, Jim," he said softly, "a
clean soul can't fight a dirty
one and win. I couldn't have, and I've always known it.
That's what
you have, and men such as I lack. This isn't the kind of
advice I'd
ordinarily offer gents of your age, but, Jimmy,
keep that bit of the gangster in you . . . you may need
it to do things that men like me
can't find the grit in ourselves to do. Know the rules,
my boy, but
know when to break them."
Captain April's words lay before them like a carpet
as they
walked the corridors of the great starship. They
looked at each
other, and each knew the other understood-everything. All

ugly everythings that life was really made of.
"There," the captain went on, "isn't that a
naughty bit of advice for me to give you, officer
and gentleman and Englishman that I
am? You won't tell a soul, though. You're one of
mine, I know. Now,
let's closet that and go see how our favorite
copperhead rattlesnake
is interrogating your prisoner."
The interrogation grid down in detention was a lot
different from
intensive care. Just as ugly, but with a clearly less
noble purpose.
Jimmy had heard the phrase "rogue's gallery"
somewhere before,
but until now he'd never limped the halls of one.
The two of them had to go through four separate levels
of security
before they were allowed to open the door of the interrogation
room.
There, inside a small cubicle, the first thing
Jimmy saw was the
old family friend and general pest, Drake Reed.
Drake was doing his
see?-rm-a-Security-guard-of-the-nrst-o
rder
imitation in a corner. His brown face was stoic,
brows up, collar just
a bit raised, sidearm pushed forward on his belt,
and his hands
behind him in the at-ease position.
In spite of all that, he flashed Jimmy and
Captain April a
Caribbean smile that was all teeth, then instantly
fell back into the
on-guard face.
Jimmy hoped that meant things were going all right.
Sure meant
Drake Reed was glad to see them both as they came
in slowly and
heard the door panel lock behind them.
They stayed very quiet.
At a small, plain black table, wearing a gray
Security prisoner suit
and looking spookily correct, sat Roy
Moss. He bore damnably few
scars from the ordeal he and his father had put others through.
His
hair was even combed and his ponytail nice and neat.
Across the table, also sitting in deference to a
bandaged left calf
and the narrow sling on his own arm, was George Kirk.
As Jimmy first saw his father, he felt guilty
again. He had a few
bandages of his own, but he suddenly wanted to take
on some of the
wounds others had taken and deal with those for them.
Suddenly he
was aware that he was limping, but that was all that showed. His
father had both hands bandaged, and even a small one on
his right
cheek. If his dad had a sling and Captain
April's shoulder was in an
immobilizer, why couldn't he get a sling or a
crutch or something?
Just as he was realizing how stupid that sounded, Jimmy
was
pressed by the mood of the room and by Robert
April's firm hand to
stand silent against the closed door panel.
"You better start opening those pretty lips, boy,"
George Kirk
was saying in a growling tone. His bandaged hands
gripped the
edges of the black table as though in pain.
"I want the names of the
ships. Every last one."
Roy not only didn't respond, but didn't
react. He shifted casually,
seeming not to understand that he was expected to participate.
"We've downloaded most of your computers,"
Jim's father went on, "and I just got the list of
most of the ships you've attacked, and
it's incomplete. It's damaged. You can complete
it. You're going to
if I have to peel your face, and I wish to hell I
was joking. These
mysteries that just got solved . . . have you got any
idea of the
pain
...
the strain, and the anguish you've caused? The people who
didn't know what happened to somebody they loved?
Don't you
understand why we want to know?"
He leaned forward toward his prisoner, and the
interrogation
lights fell on his red hair, there dividing into tiny
strand-by-strand
spectral patches. His hands gripped the
table so hard that Jimmy
and the captain winced with empathy.
George shook his head and stared downward, dizzied
by the pain he described.
He looked up again.
"Don't you get it?" he demanded. "It's one thing
to have a person
die, to have a memorial service and know what
happened . . . but
do you know what a mystery does? What
not
knowing feels like? Have you even bothered to keep track
of the people you've killed?
The families you've tortured?"
There was nothing in Roy's face. The most
excoriating nothing
imaginable. A
nothing
that could be boxed and preserved.
Roy Moss was the box. A professional nothing
holder.
Jimmy glared at the nineteen-year-old statue and
saw what he had
been aimed toward, what he could have become. Not
only could he
have died on one of his crazy rebellions, but he
could have done
worse. He could have turned into this. Mr. I'm
Right. At the
expense of any-
A sharp cackle of furniture broke Jimmy's
self-recriminations. The chairs crashed to the
sides. The table struck Jimmy's leg and drove
him back into Captain April, and suddenly a
carrot-topped
thundercloud was crushing the shocked prisoner up against the
closest wall.
"Dad!" Jimmy plunged in before his father could hurt
himself or
his reputation, or even hurt Roy. He had his
fingers around his
father's knotted arm, tangled in the sling that was being
ignored
right now.
Drake Reed flew out of the at-ease position,
leapt right over a spinning chair, and suddenly became
a fully functional Security
man. But, surprisingly, he didn't push
George Kirk away from the
attack-in fact, he helped smash
Roy Moss flat against the wall and
made sure it didn't turn into a brawl. He
held Moss's wrist and knee
against the wall and waited to see what would happen.
Jimmy was trying to figure that out when something pulled
him all the way back until he had to let go of his
father. Captain April's voice brushed his ear.
"Jimmy-let your father handle this."
What? Passive Robert April stopping him from
letting his dad
peel Roy's face?
But adults didn't understand reality-no
...
he knew better
than that now. Those old traps wouldn't catch him
anymore. Smart
people weren't that simple. There weren't molds or forms
for men
like Robert April or George Kirk.
I'm going to be a man who didn "t come out of a
mold. I'm going to
be like them . . . like both of them, somehow.
His fists had been twisted in his father's uniform
shirt, but now
he backed away. With a small nod he
let Captain April know that he
understood.
Some things just deserved doing.
The room was small. The table and chairs were on their
sides
now. All the action was happening near the door
panel. All the
tough decisions. There, under the ugly and unforgiving
entry lights.
George Kirk's face was as red as his hair.
He pressed his prisoner
tight to the wall, eyes watering with pure sore
fury, not just for the
dead but for those who had lived with the mystery. His throat
muscles twisted like the cords on a sailing ship
hard to the wind, and his teeth were gritted and bared all
out.
Held by both men, spread-eagled against the wall with
George's
fists under his jaw, Roy Moss didn't want
to be hit, but there wasn't
anything else there. No appreciation for
why
he was being hit, or for
the emotions that were driving him to be hit.
He was just Roy, all
out for only Roy. The pressure of gauzed hands
against his
esophagus put only the fear of street bruises
in his face. He backed
tight up against the wall, an inch or two taller
than his assailant.
George's forgotten sling batted casually against
both their elbows.
Drake didn't move, but didn't relent in
holding the prisoner from making any countermoves.
He waited. Jimmy connected a glance with him, but
everyone was waiting.
George saw the fear in Roy's face. Didn't
bother him. But he also
saw the silky skin and hairless jaw, the smooth
brow and the eyes without lines, and that he had knocked
loose a few strands of lush brown hair to fall
forward with youth's bounce. He saw a tinge of
what might be genuine scare. The kind that truly
doesn't under
stand because there's not enough experience. He didn't know the
boy.
The boy, the boy.
"I can't," he gagged suddenly.
He pushed backward, still holding Roy there, and
glared down at
the tiles of the floor between his feet and Roy's. His
arms were
straight out, trembling now. He started gasping.
"I can't. . ."
Captain April stepped around Jimmy, got
George by the shoulders, and pulled him away.
Drake stepped back also, keeping Roy
Moss at arm's length, and glaring warningly.
Keeping one eye on Roy too, Jimmy found the
presence of mind
to right a chair so his father could sit down again. As he
arranged
the chair, he looked at Roy.
Somehow Roy's expression hadn't changed, but
somehow-
there was a nasty victory in his face. Maybe it was
the sudden relaxing of
his eyebrows or a new set of his upper lip, but it
was there, and it was nasty and Jimmy didn't like it.
Roy hadn't won. He
hadn't.
Why did he seem to think he had?
Jimmy could only hold on to the back of the
chair and glare at
him.
You didn't win, you snot. Don't stand there,
blinking at me.
Beside him, his father let himself be steered into the chair, then
leaned against Captain April and shook his head over
and over, gasping, "I can't
...
I can't hit a kid. . . ."
That was enough. Jimmy sidled away from them, took
hold of Roy's elbow in an authoritative
grip, as any good Security officer
would-
"I can," he said.
In the textbook of street survival, it was
called a roundhouse right. In Jimmy Kirk
terms, it was short, low, quick, and a big
surprise, and served a little pouched lip on top.
A bit of the dirt.
In anybody's book, the blockbuster punch
knocked the cockiness
right out and left Roy Moss flat on the
interrogation room floor.
Drake Reed scooted backward on all ten
toes, hands in the air,
and blurted,
"Per-cussion!"
Near the toppled table, Robert April held
George by the shoul
ders, looked down, and just chuckled irreverently.
George was still gasping, but now it was a happy
gasp.
"Wow . . . how 'bout that. . . ."
Part Five
HARD ABOUT
USS
Enterprise
1701-A
"Captain, massive power drain!"
"All stop! Shut down."
Something in the way the captain responded made the
bridge
crew know that he had expected this. Or at least he
had expected a
change, had been thinking ahead, and was saving up those
four
words.
The bridge crew flew into response.
"Navigation, all stop, aye!"
"Helm, aye! Full drift, sir!"
"Engineering, aye, all remaining thrust shut down,
sir."
"Long-distance communications just buckled, Captain,"
Uhura said loudly but calmly. "Unable
to communicate with Starfleet."
"Don't try," Kirk snapped.
"Aye, sir, silent running."
"Mr. Chekov, calculate our ahead reach and
make sure we're not
going to hit anything."
"Ahead reach, aye," Chekov responded, already
frowning over
his navigational instruments. "Calculated, sir."
"Transfer it to the helm and stand by."
"Transferring . . . standing by, sir."
The ensign with the pretty eyes at the starboard
submonitors-
Devereaux-suddenly gulped a chunk of air and
blurted, "Reading
flushback again, sir! Magnitude nine!"
"Confirmed." Spock's baritone supported her
squawk. "But this time-
we
are the source."
The captain absorbed that statement and all
its dozen implica
tions, then moved only his eyes.
"Funny," he said. "I didn't feel us
explode, did you?"
Still peering into his monitor, Spock said, "According
to any
recorded science, the only source of antiproton
flushback is the
explosion of warp engines. The only source of warp
engines is hyperlight vessels." With
unmistakable curiosity, he turned his
head and somberly added, "And I can confirm that we
did not
explode."
Kirk didn't wait for reports from anyone else
in the bridge crew.
He ignored glances from the two engineers behind him,
went
straight to his command chair's commlink and tied himself
directly
in to Commander Scott in main engineering.
"Scotty, Kirk here. Start talking."
"Captain, this is Engineer's Mate
Tupperman-Mr. Scott's un
able to respond-he's hands-on up in the
tube, sir!"
"Throw a communicator up there."
his
Yes sir, he asked for one . . . but we had
to call down to supply- his
"Scott here, Captain. It's a core-invasive
dampening effect at the
matterstantimatter mix level. It negated our
warp field. Power slipped
in one big drain down to twelve percent before we could
grab it back,
but I've got the twelve in abeyance. We've
encountered this type of
damper before, and I'd bet a bundle we can
isolate the invasion and
use our remaining twelve percent to push against it.
On your orders."
"No, Scotty, stand by on use of the power.
Isolate the invasion
formula and prepare to act against it, but for now I
want you to
maintain an illusion of total shutdown. Keep the
twelve percent in
abeyance and in the meantime let's pretend we had a
total shut
down."
Scott paused, then said,
"You're implying it's not natural? There's
someone you want to corner?"
Jim Kirk got a clean mental image of
Scott's squarish face
buckling into a combined snarl and furrow, one eye
narrowing as
the chief engineer anticipated going after somebody who
would do
this to their
Enterprise.
Scotty and the
Enterprise.
Duck and pond.
"That's right," Kirk said. "We may need that
twelve percent later,
and I want to keep it in my back pocket. For
now, play dead."
"Whoever's doing this, we may need to distract them
while we're
doing the necessary technological voodoo."
"I know how that works," the captain said. "I'm
usually the
distraction."
Uh. . . aye, you are, at that. I'll buzz as
soon as we have the
option, sir. Scott out."
Without turning, Kirk tossed over his shoulder,
"Uhura, get Dr.
McCoy back up here. Spock, anything?"
Spock's elegant form straightened in the upper
deck shadows,
and he turned to speak quietly to the captain.
"Sir
...
I believe I have a fix on the
Bill of Rights,"
he said.
"Alive and intact."
A cloudburst of relief crashed over the bridge
with such palpable
force that every crewman physically wobbled and engaged the
purely human tendency to look around to see if
anybody else was
wobbling.
James Kirk stepped up onto the quarterdeck
to Spock's side and
asked, "If
Bill of Rights
didn't explode, then what caused the
flushback?"
"Evidently it is related to the dampening field that
has stopped
us."
Kirk got up out of his command seat and prowled the
bridge,
glaring at the forward screen, which showed him nothing more
than
the barren Faramond system and its little star.
"What's the location
of ihe Bill of Rights?"
"She is in stable orbit at the Faramond
excavation planet, but
otherwise appears immobile."
"Can we adjust our drift? Come within hail of
her?"
"Possibly."
Spock didn't like to guess or bluff, or take
half-informed stabs,
but he had learned to do all of those after decades
among humans,
who would try anything rather than give up. He stepped
closer to
the captain and offered a theory that would have
turned him inside
out two decades ago.
"The dampening problem is more an envelope than a
curtain, if
you will forgive my metaphors. Your order to review
the earlier
encounter with Faramond has given me some pause
regarding
deflector shields, and I analyzed the changes
in shield technology
over the past fifty years. In keeping with the
original design, this
ship was mounted with older-style starship shields, of the
type that
can be focused to specific types of energy. The
type meant for
hard-core exploration rather than exploration,
research, patrol, and
transport."
"In other words," Kirk said,
"Enterprise
shielding was made for a
savage, unsettled galaxy, meant to guard us when
we didn't know
what was past the next star."
One of Speck's brows lanced upward.
"Bluntly accurate, sir.
Bill
of Rights"
shields are stronger inch by inch, but are more general
and less selective.
Enterprise
may have a chance that
Bill of Rights
did not have. We may also be able to actually extend
our older style
shields to include the
Bill of Rights."
"And communicate with her?"
"Exactly. We may also be able to protect her
long enough for her
to rebuild her own power."
The captain's eyes grew slim and sparkled with
angry anticipa
tion. "Do it, Spock," he said.
Spock nodded toward the helm. "Gentlemen . . .
dead slow."
"Dead slow, aye."
"Aye, sir."
"Captain?" Uhura interrupted. "I'm
getting something from
Captain Roth
...
I think."
"Why do you think?"
"It's an old code . . . very faint blips."
She leaned toward her
equipment, her wall-relief eyes taking on
severity, and she tam
pered with her earpiece and the equipment that fed it. "Part
Morse,
part Lonteen's Light
...
I believe it's intended to be that way-a
combination."
"Definitely Roth," Kirk said. "Definitely
someone who served in
my crew. She knows you're a specialist in old
codes and not every
starship has you. It's a bet I'd take. Can you
read it?"
"Yes," she responded with a touch of hesitant
humility now that
he'd crowned her. "Attention . . .
Enterprise. . .
have posses
sion . . . Faramond diggers . . . beamed
whole colony . . ." She
frowned, gritted her teeth at her equipment, then
shook her head. "Blotted out, Captain.
Interference from a third source. Direction is
vague
...
a planetary source."
Kirk swung around to Spock, partly to leave
Uhura alone with
her aggravation, and partly to grab the sense of impending
advan
tage he felt picking at him. "They beamed up the
archaeologists!" he said. He looked hungrily
at the main viewer, which showcased
the dinky star system, its ornery little star, and the four
unimpressive planets of which Faramond was one
deep space chunk of dirt.
"Better hostages aboard
Bill of Rights
than sitting in a cave on
Faramond. Uhura, stop attempting
to communicate with
Bill of
Rights.
Try to break through to Faramond."
She turned toward him. "Will there be anyone there now,
sir?"
"We'll know in a minute."
"Yes, sir."
She tapped and annoyed her instruments until they
chirped at
her.
"Sir, you're right," she said. "Making contact. I
can give you
audio."
When she gave him the nod, he stepped down to his
command center, turned to that main viewer, and talked
to open space.
"This is Captain James T. Kirk of the USS
Enterprise.
I want to
speak to Roy Moss."
A dim, eerie pause held the breath of all who
heard. Clearly, there
was someone on the other end, listening.
Everyone on the bridge knew what that sounded like. It
was
different from the sound of no contact.
The pause was broken only by the meager interruption
of the
turbolift door emitting Dr. McCoy. He
came down to the captain's
level just in time to hear a new voice from the
machines.
Kirk concentrated on the screen and repeated, "This
is the USS
Enterprise,
James T. Kirk commanding. Is Roy Moss on
the
planet?"
He almost felt foolish asking again, but the whole
idea was
foolish. Just a hunch. Just a guess-
"This is Roy Moss. Who up there knows who I
am?"
"I'll be damned," the captain whispered.
He circled his own chair, one hand lingering upon it.
He digested
that voice. Tried to hear the sound again in his mind, then
reach
back forty-five years to see if it was the same.
He couldn't tell.
Forty-five was a lot of years for a voice
to stay the same.
"This is James Kirk," he said again.
"So?"
Dr. McCoy stepped down and leaned toward him.
"He doesn't remember you, Jim," he
murmured. "It all fits."
Kirk wanted to commend the doctor for having done his
home
work, but the torch of anger that burned through him caught
all his
attention.
"He almost killed me, but he doesn't have the
humanity to
remember. I remember every crewman and even every
enemy who
died under my command, but he doesn't remember me."
McCoy leaned even closer and muttered, "People
don't impress
him."
Kirk's brows tightened downward and he raised his
voice.
"You've come a long way from the Blue Zone,
Moss. But you're still
a petty little tyrant, aren't you? Still just stealing."
"Who
are
you!"
Another pause like the first one-a pause of thought or
realiza
tion.
"Ohhhhh!. . . Jim Kirk! I know who you
are! I haven't thought of you in years!"
"Nor I you," Kirk shoved back without a beat.
"How did you find me? Why did you come?"
"You're holding a starship hostage. Did you think
we wouldn't
notice?"
"How did you even know? They can't contact you, there's
no
long-distance blipping, they can't move or signal-was
Squinting bitterly, Kirk taunted, "Maybe
we're smarter than you
are."
"Yes, you're brilliant as ever. Kirk, caught
in the same trap as the
other ship. Sure, I remember you now. I ought
to leave your ship dead
in space for what you did to me. What the hell, I
just might. I don't
need two ships."
Kirk started to speak again, but Ensign Devereaux
squeaked,
"Sir-uh-oh!"
"Specify, Ensign," Spock told her.
"There's a
...
some kind of a laser hitting our hull, sir. It's
old
and weak, but it's heating up on our unprotected
hull."
"Scott to Bridge. Captain, you might have to use
that twelve
percent you "re holding back for the shields. That's
a weak wee heater,
but it's building up on us. Permission to power up?"
"I agree. Maybe we can make a deal. First you
tell me what this is
all about. What is it you want this time, Roy?"
"Why don't you just beam on down and I'll show you."
"Why should I?"
"Because you're itching to. For the same reason you
couldn't just
get away forty-five years ago and had to bust your
way onto my ship.
And I want to see the look on your face
when I make your whole
career meaningless."
"I'd like to see you try," Kirk said. "We're not
in transporter
range."
"Hah! That's beautiful. Not in range. That's
poetry, it's really
poetry. Yeah, a transporter's not much good from
way out there, is
it?"
Nervous at Moss's odd sense of humor
regarding the fine,
dangerous science of transporting, Kirk moved
along the back of his
command chair. "Why don't you let us come
into transporter
range?"
Roy Moss just laughed and laughed.
"You'd love that, wouldn't
you?"
"What's so funny?" Kirk challenged.
"Afraid I'll beat you
again?"
The laughter stopped abruptly, and that hideous
pause reprised.
"You never beat me,"
Moss said.
"Come on down in a shuttle.
Then you'll really appreciate what I've got.
But you come down
alone, got it? All alone."
"I've got it."
"If you try to screw me up, I'll drag that
other ship right down into the atmosphere and burn her
into little pink bits of metallic dust. You
got that?"
"I said I did. I'll be right down."
"You be forewarned. . . I'm not a teenager
anymore."
The threat made everyone on the bridge look up.
There was
something very cryptic and not at all silly about the last
words as
the communication abruptly cut off and the bridge went
silent.
The captain sensed what was happening, but ignored it.
"Neither am I," he uttered.
Kirk swung around to Uhura and made a slicing
motion across
his throat. When she signaled that
communication was definitely cut off, he vaulted
to the upper bridge. "All stop."
"All stop," the crewmen at the helm responded
in chorus.
"Secure from battlestations. Go to yellow alert."
"Aye, sir, secure from battlestations . . .
secure from red alert,
aye . . ."
"Yellow alert, aye, sir."
Spock seemed uneasy with the level of
cross-grained bluffing and
restraint, but contented himself with technicals as he
said, "This
man obviously fails to understand his own science. He
possesses a
warp-dampening field. Each time the
Bill of Rights
attempted to go
into warp, the field would be countered and drained, sending
out waves of antiwarp, or flushback. The
flushback reaction moves at
hyperwarp, faster than a ship, and can be detected
light-years away.
He can lure a ship to the planet and hold it there,
but does not understand that his trap launches its
own warning signal."
"He's a genius," McCoy added, "but there are
gaping holes in his
knowledge. He accepts ninety percent knowledge as one hundred
percent. He didn't realize this thing could be
detected from so far away. He's always been this
way, hasn't he, Jim?"
"Always, considering a forty-five-year hole in
my
knowledge about him," the captain droned. "Roth must have
bluffed him somehow. Or outguessed him fast enough
to beam up the Faramond archaeologists." He
aimed toward the turbolift, fists
knotted, and turned at the last moment.
"We may be able to use that somehow . . . before he can
make
good on that threat. I didn't come all this way
to find the
Bill of
Rights
intact just to lose her again. All hands, general
quarters until
further notice. Commander Chekov, you're in charge
until Mr.
Scott's engineering voodoo is ready.
Communicate with Captain
Roth if you find any way to do so. Mr. Spock,
Dr. McCoy, both of you come with me. Mr.
Chekov, notify the flight deck to prepare a
shuttlecraft for launch. The three of us will be down
on
Faramond . . . being damn distractive."
He mounted the short steps toward the turbolift-and
found
himself blocked by Dr. McCoy and a very fierce glare
that was part
country doctor and part pioneer gunfighter.
"Jim, what's making you do this?"
Kirk glowered at him. "Do what? Go down and
take care of the
problem?"
"No. Go down and take care of this
particular
problem. Do you
really know what motivates this man?"
"It's just revenge, Doctor. Stand aside."
But McCoy wouldn't get out of his way. "Revenge
doesn't
motivate Roy Moss," he said. "He
doesn't care about those things.
Doesn't understand intangibles like duty,
self-worth, satisfaction,
and betterment-only that he has a bigger pile of
whatever than
anybody else."
"Make your point," the captain demanded.
"I am making it. You're the one who ordered me
to become an expert on this man, and I did. Roy
Moss never grew up. He's still
nineteen years old. He hasn't learned a
damned thing in forty-five
years."
"I'll tuck that away."
The captain started to step past him, but McCoy
actually
bumped into the frame of the lift door and grabbed the
captain's
upper arm in determination to stop him and get his say.
By now the
whole bridge was watching.
"Where would you be if not for Roy Moss?"
Kirk's shoulders squared self-consciously. "Where
would still be?"
"Oh, yes. You thought I was paying attention just
to facts on those
archives you send down to me. A chief surgeon
has to also be
trained in crew psychology. I know you were out in
space for only
the second time, and I know what happened the first time.
Those
pirates would never have attacked your ship without
Roy's shields.
Without Roy Moss, would sixteen-year-old Jim
Kirk ever have
become the Jim Kirk of Starfleet? You
probably wouldn't have gone
into the Academy, and you certainly wouldn't have made it
if you
had. And all the things pioneered by you and your crews
and the
Enterprise
might never have happened." The blue eyes flared
suddenly. "You didn't think about any of that, did
you?"
"He wanted to bring glory to himself, not to me. Get
to your
point."
"We never get over some things from our teenage
years," McCoy
pestered-truth in the form of needles. "I'm just
asking, is this the
best thing for you to do? If this wasn't Roy Moss .
. . would you go
down there at all?"
Suddenly on a roll, McCoy sucked a breath
and kept hammering,
heedless of the taupe fire in the captain's eyes and the
tightening he
saw in the captain's jaw. He took no warnings,
but kept on.
"Despite all you've achieved," he drilled,
"could it be that you
still want to best Roy Moss in a one-on-one
contest? Could it be that
after all these years you still have to prove who's the better
man?
Could it be that
you're
the one who wants revenge?"
Kirk felt his face flush. His eyes started
to feel like pincushions, prickled and burning.
"It was his psych file I had you analyze,
Doctor," he warned, "not
mine. Now, get yourself the hell out of my
way."
The gritty, druidic landscape crunched under his
feet as James Kirk
stepped out of the shuttlecraft after piloting through the
narrow
tube that led them inside the atmospheric dome on
an otherwise
unlivable planet. The domes themselves were
impressive-five of them, each ten miles long,
three wide. Ah, technology.
He paused and gazed at the planet's
purple-on-gray surface. It
looked like elephant hide with crystals spilled
on it.
"Well, Dad," he murmured, "forty-five
years late, but I made it."
"You say something, Jim? Lord amighty, who'd
want to set up a
colony on this dry cracker?"
Kirk was deciding whether or not to respond
to McCoy, when a
bright, violent curtain of screaming light struck
them and they
huddled. Blinded, they stood their ground, but all
arms came up to
protect their eyes, and Spock shouted over the
whine, "Sensors,
Captain!"
With a nod Kirk said, "Stand your ground!"
The sensor screamed and crawled over them, then a
voice
bellowed as though through a bullhorn. "Drop the
phasers and all
three communicators. Smash the communicators.
I want to have
the only one."
"Golly, who can that be?" McCoy dryly
grumbled as the light
snap ped off as suddenly as it had hit them.
"Do what he says," Kirk ordered.
A few seconds were lost as they blandly removed
their weapons and dropped them on the dirt, then ground
the communicators into
the dust with their heels.
Kirk scouted the land, then walked the necessary twenty
yards
and confronted Roy John Moss as though they'd
seen each other
yesterday.
"All right," he demanded. "What's so
funny?"
Roy Moss stood a few feet above them on a
raised piece of
ground, holding a phaser on them in one hand and a
fairly basic
non-Starfleet communicator in the other. There was
something
hooked to his belt that looked like a control box
chirping for
attention like a baby bird, but he ignored it.
He seemed more fascinated by the forty-five years"
difference in
their appearances, and scrutinized his old adversary for
every line
and every curl that was new, trying to see through the decades
to the
scrubbed, freckled, muscular blond boy who had
given him such trouble at that key time in his life.
Moss himself had taken on a coarseness that hadn't
been there in
his youth, was grayer and somewhat thicker at the waist,
but other
than that he was recognizable by anyone who knew what
he was
looking for-and Kirk did.
Yes, this was Roy Moss. Even the ponytail was
still there. Iron-gray, but still there. So was the distrust in
the eyes. The
startling intelligence right on top of the distrust.
Yes. The same
person.
There were ghostly lines and glimpses of Rex Moss
in his face
now that he was so much older, none of which had emerged
yet at
the age of nineteen. Back then, he and his father
hadn't appeared related at all. His nose was
meatier now, as Rex's had been, and
there was more flesh at his throat. There was a beard now,
a
Galahad-type pointed beard, a few shades
lighter gray than the
ponytail, and small mustache that was almost white.
That's what the years had done-put the father into the son.
The
age around his lips, the yellowish-whiteness in his
eyes, the thinness
of hair in spite of the persistent ponytail, the
color of his skin-
those were from Rex. Sometimes resemblances
took twenty years to
show up. Or forty years . . .
Do I look like my father now? Are there hints of him
in my eyes
that my mother would recognize? The way my cheeks
crease when
I'm angry, or the tuck of my chin?
Ghosts from the past.
The eyes were the recognizable. Strange, Kirk
noted, that the
glare could look so familiar after so long. A
chilling sensation . . .
Moss involved himself in his memories for a few
seconds, seemed
to relive the whole experience on the
Shark,
then leered with a
weird fascination at Spock and McCoy as they
came to Kirk's side.
"Said you'd come alone," he pointed out.
"I lied," Kirk said.
Moss tipped his head, and after a moment even nodded.
"That's
good. I like that. I'da lied."
He gestured them toward him, but he was
holding a phaser on
them from enough paces away that they couldn't jump him.
"It helps me," he went on almost as though he were
talking to
himself. He attached the control box to his belt
next to his
communicator, made a long grab for McCoy, and
yanked the doctor
toward him. "It keeps you under control. One move
from you, or the Vulcan and I'll shoot this other
guy. I know your type. You'd
rather I shoot you than him, so I'll shoot him if you
do anything."
Spock made an instinctive move to put himself between
McCoy
and Moss, but Kirk motioned him off with just a flick
of his brows.
Moss would indeed kill McCoy if he decided
to. Moss would
kill-there was no reason to doubt it forty-five years
ago or now.
"They're each here for a reason," Kirk told him.
"What reasons?"
"You figure them out. You're the genius."
"All right, I will. Just give me some time.
And if any of you try to
knock me over, I'll just shoot wild. See that
dome over us,
pretending to be a sky? That's what I'll hit.
Then we're all dead. I
guess that's simple enough, even for you tough guys,
right?"
Kirk didn't even glance up at the poor
excuse for blue overhead.
He knew this was a lie. Roy wouldn't hit their
only protection.
But Roy's eyes still had the glint of assumption, as
they had in his
youth, and the Starfleet officers took this as the warning
it was
meant to be.
Kirk looked past Moss to McCoy-the one who was
here to
deduce Moss's psychological condition.
The doctor bit his lower lip and raised his brows in
an expression
Kirk had seen before.
Don't push.
"So," Moss said, "you're here in the
Constitution-style ship,
aren't you? Sounds familiar now that I think about it.
Kirk . . . captain . . . weren't you an
admiral for a while? I remem
ber the colonists babbling about this. Now you're back
captaining the old version of starship?"
"The first version," Kirk corrected. He didn't
care if arrogance
came off in his tone.
"Thicker walls," Moss said, "trimmer decks,
different thrust-to-mass ratio, touchy intermix
formula," he rattled off, "and nothing
inside but a few hundred crewmen. I wouldn't
trust that many
people. Of course, all the ship is, really, is big
speed. Just big fast.
That's all your old starship is. Basically a
house for its own engines.
Weapons and science labs can be mounted on a barge,
after all.
Starship isn't a starship unless it's fast. . . and
I'm about to use one of them to make them all
obsolete."
Kirk glanced at Spock.
The Vulcan offered an expression in only his
eyes that the captain
read as a shrug. Use the
Bill of Rights
in some kind of experiment?
Three Starfleet spines suddenly went rigid, and
they stopped and
glared at him.
"Keep moving!" Roy ordered, jamming his weapon
into the soft place under McCoy's ribs. "I'll
slaughter him first and your old ship
second."
"It's not an old ship," Kirk snapped. "It's
the second starship
Enterprise.
A remake of the first Constitution-class sh-was
"Who cares? It uses a classic
deflector-shield method, doesn't it?
My
method . . . which still never got credit for?"
Moss phaser-pointed them across the bleak, rocky
landscape
pocked with a few archaeological tents and pathetic
excuses for
hiking paths, under an eerie, unnatural glow from the
miles-long
dome, but he kept his phaser at
McCoy's back and eyed the others the whole time, and
they eyed him back.
"Hmm?" he badgered. "The method which was stolen from
me?
Any of you going to admit it?"
"There were others working on it who would've broken through
soon," Kirk said. "You never got credit because you
didn't stick
with the project. You didn't do the development."
"Because I was sitting in a rehab colony, thanks
to you and your
papa. I sat there till I was twenty-five.
Thinking the whole time.
Then, I came here."
Moss didn't sound angry, yet his tone was laced
with a disturbing
irony and a devious grin that bothered the
Starfleeters. He obvious
ly liked the bothering part.
Spock's voice buttered the crunchy purple
landscape.
"We diagnosed your special deflector shield
decades ago. You
found a way to focus the deflection against isolated
threats, and no
more. It made your shields seem a hundred times more
powerful
than they actually were. Federation engineers dissected
your theory, applied it, combined shields with
sensors-was
"Stole my ideas."
"Expanded," Spock repeated firmly, "your
theories and further
developed them, because they know that every scientist stands
upon the shoulders of those who come before. It is a
building
process."
"And you're a needle-eared regurgitator. Big
deal. It's all talk."
Jim Kirk suddenly stopped walking and scraped
around in front of Moss. "You think everyone else
should start from scratch at the Stone Age, even though
you didn't, right?"
Stock-still, Moss gripped the phaser tightly between
them. "Peo
ple who came before me were idiots."
"You don't give any of them credit for the foundation
you're
standing on. Take from all, give to none, share
nothing, fear being
robbed-your obscurity was your own choice. You could've
continued work on those shields, but you fumbled the ball,
Roy. You made
your own purgatories. Don't blame anybody
else."
"Purgatory?" Moss waved his free phaser in
a big arch. "I don't
need any security out here! Tourists come and go,
delegations come
and go, diggers come and go, boatloads of students .
. . I've been
working here undisturbed for thirty years. I
wasn't going to take any
chances that a little oinker like you would ruin my plans again.
Now
I'm ready. All this ancient equipment is lined
up and cleaned-it's
fairly simple. I figure it all happened about
a hundred thousand
years ago, and the problem was that the stars have shifted. So
I had
to recalibrate it."
Kirk felt his features crunch when the subject
suddenly changed
in such a bizarre way. He used what he
knew about Roy Moss to try to deduce what was
happening. His feet got cold, as though he'd just
stepped into a pool of ice water.
was "It"?" he prodded.
Moss glared at him analytically, then all of a
sudden looked at
Spock. "Ohhhh . . . you brought the Vulcan
here to figure out my
science, didn't you? That means this other one
...
is a psychiatrist.
He's supposed to figure out my motivations or
my mental stability,
right?"
McCoy gave him a dirty glare. "I'm
Leonard McCoy, ship's chief
surgeon. I'm here in case of injuries."
"And in case of insanity," Moss was sure. "The
other side of the
balancing act. I know how these command things work. And
everybody sends the chief surgeon down in case of
skinned knees
and splinters. That's all right-you're still a hell of a
good target,
Doctor, and your captain over here knows
I'll drill a juicy hole in
you if they don't behave, so go ahead and analyze
me up and down
the cliffs for all I care."
He waggled his phaser directly at McCoy's
head to make his
point, and something about the way he di d it erased any
doubt that
he would shoot.
"Get down there. Down that ladder."
He pointed to some kind of geological bowl,
crater, or dried pond
bed that opened before them and went down two choppy
levels,
where he had put a simple wooden ladder.
Moss grinned as they started down before him, and he
stayed up on a small, glittering promontory,
then pulled the ladder up behind
them, and they were trapped.
"You should see the looks on your faces. You'd think
you were
midshipmen."
"Why don't you get to the point?" Kirk demanded.
"What is it
you want?"
"Respect."
"You won't get it from me. You've got to earn it."
The words were barely out and-
zing-
back forty-five years to
the sound of his father's voice. The same words, the
same feelings,
new dangers.
"You'll give it to me," Moss said, "when you see
what I got here.
About four thousand miles from here, there's a machine.
Its power
core is a hundred and sixty miles straight
down underground, so
your ships can't find it. Here-watch this. You'll like
this."
He fingered his control box without even taking it off his
belt, and
things started to change in the very rock.
Behind Moss, a picture of the
Bill of Rights
formed as though projected on the rock. There was no
projector, but there was the
picture, as tall as Moss.
"Jim, look out!"
McCoy shoved him from one side and Spock pulled
him from the
other just in time to keep him from dropping into an opening that
appeared at the pond bed's center. Before they could
react any more
than that, a set of dull-colored pill-shaped
orbs the size of melons rose in no particular
order out of the ground. There was no noise,
no metallic substance about the oblong things, and they
were
disturbingly unarranged.
"Control center, Captain," Spock said.
"Probably a computer
access. Obviously built to the social taste of the
ancient culture."
"They must have thought Faramond was pretty, then,"
McCoy
commented when the orbs stopped rising.
Only to the educated eye did this smooth collection
of bowling
balls appear to be a computer of any kind. To a child
it might look
like a gathering of balloons, each independent with a
glowing
interior and a pliant, almost gummy
surface, all different colors, but
all versions of the ivory-to-ash spectrum.
In the side of the pond bed, right out of the dry rock
there, part of the rock separated and revealed what
looked like a child's idea of a
library-books or tapes, stacked side by side,
in long, curved racks.
Apparently, these and the balloons were meant to be used
together.
At least, that was the symmetry of their movements.
Spock's eyes lit up when he saw the
volumes, but he didn't say
anything.
Kirk and McCoy pushed up behind Spock for a
look at the
brilliant past culture. Certainly the
collection seemed alien. Though
neither captain nor physician dared touch the
balls, Spock was on them like a bee on pollen.
His long fingers left marks on doughy surfaces,
but the marks
filled in almost immediately, as though he had pressed
wet mud.
"Poke all you want," Moss said. "Unless you
know the order of
information feed, you're just poking at rubber. At first
I thought
they might be kids' toys."
"Where is your power center?" Spock asked him.
Roy looked at him in a disgusted manner. "It's
built in."
"But
where
is it," Spock emphasized. "Physically?"
"Underground, I told you."
"How do you know?"
"Because I put it there. It's the only thing that was
missing. It
took me my whole adult life, but I added a
matterstantimatter
converter to the central core complex. It's almost as
powerful as
what you have on your pretty ship, Mr. Brock."
"Spock," McCoy corrected fiercely.
"Fine. Where did you idiots think I was getting the
power for my dampening field? Magic? Anyway,
the machine is ready to go and
all I have to do is turn it on. All you have to do,"
he added, "is
watch."
"What does this machine do?" Kirk asked.
"Wait a minute!
Don't start it up yet! Tell us what it
does!"
Moss squared off before them, squared his shoulders,
squared his
brows, squared everything about his posture, as though
to build
himself into a castle before their very eyes.
"I'm going to move the fastest thing in the galaxy a
hell of a lot
faster than it can go. I'm going to show how you move
things
around if you're Roy Moss. I'm going to take
your big fancy
Bill of
Rights,
all its six hundred eighty crewmen, and all the
Faramond
archaeologists, and transport them all the way
back to Starbase One
in a single beam. And you're going to serve as my
living witnesses.
How's that for a destiny, hm?"
Roy Moss stood above them, looking from
each to the next as
though to taunt them. His eyes were wide, brows up,
arms fanned
outward.
"You haven't figured it out yet, have you?" he
quizzed. "I've
given you enough information-was
"You have discovered a long-distance transporter,"
Spock said.
His interruption sliced Roy's insult in half.
"Some form of
frequency-focus method of travel."
Moss confirmed Spock's words by looking a bit
disappointed.
"Wait a minute," Kirk said. "Is this thing
operative? Do you
understand
how
it works?"
"I don't have to," Moss said. "I've figured
out how to operate the
controls. You drive that ship up there, but could you
build a warp engine? Of course not. You don't
need to. That's for mechanics to
do."
Jim Kirk moved dubiously from one side of the
dry bed to the
other, just as he had paced the sunken command deck of his
bridge,
never taking his eyes from Roy Moss.
"This thing has been shut down for a hundred thousand
years,"
he said, "and you're going to plug power into it and go from
there?"
"I've got it aimed. What can go wrong?"
"Have you tested it? Put any power to it before today?"
"No. Why would I?"
McCoy rolled his eyes. "Uh, boy
..."
Moss looked at the doctor. "If I did that,
Starfleet would have
heard it and come in and taken it all away from me.
After all, one little buzz and here you are, right?"
Above them on his ledge, he huffed a sigh, pushed his
phaser into
a pocket, and looked at the ground.
"I'm the only one who figured out how to make it
work," he said.
"Faramond's an old, cold system and I'm the
one who made it
warm again. When I was fourteen, we salvaged a
ship on its way
back from here-was
"You mean you pirated a ship," Kirk drilled.
"Shut up. The ship had all kinds of relics from
here that made the
Federation decide to dome and dig. But
archaeologists are always
looking backward. Even though I was fourteen, I
was the only one
who looked forward. I'm the one who figured out the
normalized
symbols, that the language over here under this rock was
the same
as the language over there under that outcropping
...
I found the
commonality and discovered that it was a device for
frequency-
focus travel . . . instantly stop existing here,
start existing there.
What would
that
be worth to the settled galaxy? The Fabrini and a
half-dozen others have found this stuff, and
none of them knew
what to do with it."
All three Starfleet men surged forward.
"The Fabrini were here?" McCoy gasped. "Have you
had this
checked?"
Even Spock let a trace of shock run through his
question. "A race
as advanced as the Fabrini passed this by?"
Kirk stepped as far forward as possible and pressed,
"Doesn't
that tell you something?"
Moss couldn't ignore their reaction. In fact,
he seemed proud that
an extinct but far superior race had come here and
gone away
without the prize.
"They just couldn't figure out how to work it," he said.
"I've turned up a dozen artifacts from past
digs of other visiting
civilizations. None of them were as patient as I
was. They came and
went, and after a few years they got used to me and I
just went about my work."
Kirk felt Spock step forward to ask a
question, and caught his old
friend by the wrist just in time to keep him silent. "How do
you
know you're doing all this correctly?"
"Because it was
simple!
You don't think for a hobby, do you? If I
took your shuttlecraft back a couple hundred
years, it would still be
obvious which way it points and where the pilot sat,
wouldn't it?
Drop a World War Two biplane into King
Arthur's age, and a clever
person could figure out how it steered." Moss nodded
at them with raw pomposity. "I told you-I had it
figured out when I was a kid.
Before I even met you, Jack."
"Jim," McCoy spat.
"Yeah, Jim, Jim, right. All I had to do was
ask
why
any advanced
race would put an instrument here. It's a cold
system, right?
Nothing growing, no heat, no life-a
giant gravitational field and
not much else. A big magnet. So that's what I
went looking for. I let
the Federation archaeologists set up the domes and the
artificial
atmosphere, then I started picking."
Moss pecked at the dirt and stone with his toe, as a
child pecks at
beach sand.
"Those Federation dopes ran around here, scooping up
trinkets and brushing off fossils, while this
incredible technology sat idle
just a few miles away. They never figured out what
happened to the
Old Culture, and I had it figured out when I
was fourteen." He
looked at them as though to be sure they were paying
attention to
his win. "Somehow the gravity or mass of this
planet, or maybe its
effect on surrounding space, were necessary to their
project. But
why a cold planet? I asked myself that question-and I
answered.
They needed an inactive core, because that's
exactly where the heart
of their transporter is-at the gravitational dead
center! That's
where I found it when no one else was smart enough
to look. Great, right?"
Pacing again, he started grumbling as though talking
only to
himself.
"I tolerated those piratical pigs in order
to get my stake for the big
score, then you came along and set me back
years. I never depended
on anybody else again. Just me. I knew w hat a
long-distance transporter would be worth to the Federation.
Or anybody. Klingons, Romulans, I
don't much care. It'll make me one of the most
powerful beings around to control the LDT. The
LDT . . . good sound to it, doesn't it?"
"Yes, Roy"-Kirk glared up at him and
pushed-"you cling to
that "it." You don't have anything else. You've
always expected "x"' to come in the future.
Forty-five years and you still have nothing but a
someday. Even after all these years, you still have no
today."
Silence fell suddenly and left only the buzz of the
dome.
Roy Moss had counted on having to immobilize a
starship to use
as his example. He hadn't counted on having
to immobilize Jim
Kirk.
Deprived of respect, he went hunting for it. His
eyes were boiling.
"What do
you
have?" he asked. "You're a captain. So what?
You've risked your life a hundred times, I'll
bet. What've
you
got to
show for that? A couple of stars and bars? You're at the
end of your
career, you've run all over the galaxy, you've
gotten a lot of people
killed, and for what? You don't even own that ship out
there!
Everybody says "Kirk's ship," but it's not
your ship. You've been in
charge of a machine that could lay waste
to anything! You could've
flown into orbit around some planet and declared yourself
god to
any culture fifty years younger than yours, and
there's nothing they
could've done about it. They'd have to say, "Yes,
you're god, you
sure are." You never knew what you could've had!
Which of us has wasted his life?"
Abruptly, cruelly, Jim Kirk's attention
was dragged back to the
most potent weapon anyone could strike him with, and
he went
bitterly silent, a prisoner to the words from up there.
"If you hadn't stopped me forty-five years
ago," Moss badgered,
"I would've developed this back then! All the
deaths in four decades
of exploration and accidents at high speeds-they're
all your fault! Who are you now, Jim Kirk?"
To Spock and McCoy's unexpected dismay-a
dismay he could
feel on either side of him-the captain didn't say
anything.
The control box on Roy's belt started
yelping at him, and he
grabbed it and read something on it.
"All right, what're your friends doing in that stupid
ship?" he
demanded.
"Okay, I'll just hit "em with another damper.
I'll just go pull the
stopper out of the bathtub again. Something must be broken.
Equipment failure or something. Stay down there,
because you
can't get out. I've got the area electrically
sealed. Sure, Mr. Vulcan, I
see your face-play with the machine all you want. You
couldn't
figure it out in twenty years, and you couldn't hurt
it with a phaser.
Even I don't know what it's made of. I'll be
back as soon as I beat
your friends off. I can't wait to see your faces when
you see history
happen."
"Spock," the captain said.
Immediately Spock turned to the ancient, alien
controls and the
snakelike shelving of ancient books,
or cards, or whatever they
were. He scanned the books first with his eyes, then
with his
tricorder, then picked up one and began leafing through
its stiff,
leatherlike pages.
"I am uneasy with this," Spock puzzled.
"Others have been here, including races as advanced as
the Fabrini, yet even they could not
make the long-distance transporter operate. It is
unlikely that Roy
Moss is the most brilliant creature to come
along in the
galaxy . . . ever."
"Don't tell
him
that," McCoy drawled.
Spock turned to him and added, "There must be a
reason these
intelligent races have left this mechanism alone.
His assumption
that we could not locate this machine's core simply
because it is
underground-was
"Makes perfect sense, Spock,"
McCoy shoved in, "given his
psych profile. He only sees weaknesses in
others. He was never
formally trained, learned everything on his own, and
didn't even
realize his flushback could be detected from far
away. One of us said
it before-gaps in his knowledge-was
"Spock said it," the captain supplied.
"Well, one of us said it," McCoy went on.
"Moss is smart, but
he's learned only enough in life as he's needed to know
to achieve his goals or protect himself. He sees
no value in knowledge itself, did you notice that? Only in
knowledge as it leads to power."
"Or recognition," Spock added.
"Jim-Jim, what's bothering you?" The doctor
stepped toward Kirk, ignoring their commander's
attempt at solitude. "Jim, don't
let him get to you. This man's psychological
profile isn't any
different from the one you handed me on board the ship.
He hasn't
changed in almost five decades. He's a
textbook example of
Huerta's Emperor Syndrome, and even that
wasn't enough for him.
He'd become an emperor, then spend all his
riches trying to become
a deity. I should write a dissertation on him!
McCoy's Pharaoh
Syndrome."
"If we survive, you can write a book."
Kirk turned to Spock and
said, "What do you think?"
"A long-distance transporter is a fabulous
advancement, if he can
indeed do it," the Vulcan said fluidly as he
picked through the
ancient library. "No more death, no danger, no
risk of travel at
warp speeds . . . there could be instant exploration,
far less cost and
loss of life in the name of a single look at a new
place or a contact with a new race-was
"I don't trust him." McCoy pushed between them.
"Jim, how
thorough could he have been? As critical as you were to the
turns in
his life, he didn't even remember you!"
"The incident meant a lot more to me, Bones,"
Kirk said. "All he
remembers is that he lost. He's completely
wrapped up in himself.
That's the scary part. Roy Moss doesn't think
about people. If this
thing works, even a little bit, even if it costs the
lives of everyone on
board
Bill of Rights
to find out how to operate it, he thinks the
Federation will forget about those lives eventually and
honor him
for the discovery. And he's much more dangerous at
sixty-five than
he was at nineteen."
"This man," Spock said, "does not seem to consider
the reality of
probability, Captain. He accepts a
ninety-percent chance of success,
but not the ten-percent chance of failure. There are no
allowances
for failures of machines, failures of others,
failure of himself.
Yet-was
"Yes, he bets everything on every spin of the wheel,"
McCoy
finished. "The hole in his plan is that he never
sees the hole in his plan."
Kirk pushed his way out from between them so he could
pretend
to be alone again. "The
Bill of Rights"
crew and all the Faramond
archaeologists might fall through that hole. The
entire ship may
die."
Kirk's thoughts were now with the
Enterprise.
The original.
But now that first ship was gone, burned up,
sacrificed, and there
was a replica in her place. A model of her, a
tribute, yes, but not the
original ship that had taken them through voyage after
voyage,
danger upon danger, and somehow survived. An
incredible feat,
considering that even poor docking could rip a hull
apart.
The same style of ship, the same kind of hull
structure, the same interior structure, the same
mass to thrust, and all those other same
things that Roy Moss had so casually tossed off.
But it wasn't the
same ship. This one hadn't earned her stripes.
She hadn't been
given a chance.
That was the miracle of the old ship . . . that she had
survived all
those dangers, all those storms, all those attacks,
all those hands at her helm, all the brand-new things
that no other ship had encoun
tered because no other ship had gone out so far, and all the
little
mistakes that might have been made by whoever was at the
controls
from moment to moment-a compilation of survival and skill
and luck that only old ships could show off.
She'd been lucky, the old
Enterprise.
This new ship was a tribute,
yes, but she hadn't paid her way yet.
And now she wouldn't get the chance.
Starfleet had apparently already made that
decision.
Spock and McCoy could see the gravestone sitting
on Jim Kirk's
shoulders, tooled with an inscription dictated
by Roy John Moss.
An era about to pass. Even the tribute was being
decommissioned.
McCoy maneuvered closer, just to Kirk's
periphery. "Moss has
managed to incapacitate the
Bill of Rights
and the
Enterprise,
but he
didn't count on the wild card
...
he didn't count on Jim Kirk being here again."
"Just as well," the captain said. "I'm tired of people
counting on
me."
The captain's voice lacked its old burn. A
lot was missing that
could be painted in colors of fire. Was this why men
chose to retire?
When the fire washed away?
If the pond bed had had bars, Jim Kirk's
hands would have been wrapped around them. He would have been
staring between them,
the cold metal pressed against his face and blood
running to his
cheeks. His eyes would have been fixed upon the
landscape, if there
were one.
There was nothing in his eyes that had been there four or
five
decades ago. Today he wasn't the bulldoggish
James Kirk he'd been
on the bridge of his command ship, who flourished during
danger,
gone on the hunt for it, who tasted adventure on the
tip of his
tongue and had to bite.
He wasn't even the Jimmy Kirk he'd been
on the bridge of the
Shark,
secretly enjoying the sensation that rashness had
provided to
a goalless teenager. That was the time he'd first learned
that spunk
could be put to a valiant purpose.
His dad had taught him that. . . .
All the red-blooded overzeal was gone from him now.
He kept
waiting for the valor to arise as it had in every other
situation, but nothing came this time.
He had lost more than years when the first
Enterprise
went down,
for he'd failed to go down with her. He was tied to his
ship by the
captain's string-and when a ship dies unhelmed by its
master, the
string draws tight and kinks the captain's spine for the
rest of his
life. He may never again walk as tall, move as
swiftly, glare as
fiercely.
Such wa s the portrait here. The captain without his
ship. The
mind without its heart. James Kirk without his
Enterprise.
"My ship is gone," he murmured. "My career
is ending. Maybe
this is my best destiny, Bones. My full
circle . . . from Roy Moss to Roy
Moss. This is where it began .. . maybe this is
where it's meant
to end."
Usually an ardent man whose short words were delivered
sharply,
McCoy barely moved behind his shoulder this time, and had
the
good sense not to touch him.
Seconds whispered past.
The captain's phrases roamed and settled without
really having
anywhere to go. No one in here wanted them. McCoy
didn't even
have to glance over his own shoulder to Spock to know their
thoughts were consonant.
"Spit in the eye of'meant to," Jim," the
doctor said gently. "You
always have before . . . why not this time?"
Like boys telling ghost stories in a tent deep in
the alien night, they kept their voices low.
"Is he right, Bones?" Kirk didn't look at
him. "Did I prevent
something from happening that could've kept thousands of people
alive over the years? Of all the decisions I've
had to make in my
career . . . how many have been wrong-and I'll never
know? Have
I done more harm than good in my life?"
He turned and watched Spock move from the control
bubbles to
pick through the ancient volumes, as he had for what
seemed much longer than twenty or thirty minutes
since Roy left them here alone.
Spock was working, yes, but he was watching Kirk
too. And he was
hearing.
"Oh, Jim, for cryin" out loud," McCoy
muttered, carrying it on a sigh. "How much do you have
to see?"
"I
see,
"the captain snapped. "If Moss hadn't been
smart enough
to pursue power, he would've been frustratingly
torturing little
animals to get an illusion of power. If he'd
gained power, he'd have
found out it wasn't enough and would've had to blame
somebody
and started killing millions of people. That's
how it starts-how do I know I'm any different?
What would I have become if his father's
ship hadn't attacked my father's ship that day? I was
a frustrated
boy, enticing others to follow me on crazy chances,
making
decisions they should've been making for their own lives,
and that's
what I kept doing for the rest of my life."
McCoy shook his head as though somebody had hit
him. "Now,
you know that's not what I was getting at-was
"Yes, you did." Kirk nailed him down.
"Jim," the somber Captain Spock interrupted
as he looked up
from his instant education about the alien machine. He
stood still,
one hand holding a volume, the other on a bubble.
"The past
cannot be redrawn," he said quietly, "nor can the
future be drawn
in advance. You learned from your experience with Roy
Moss. He
failed to learn. He continues to underestimate those who
are his
equals or his betters."
Supplanted by the hum of the dome above them, his
voice was
the bass chord of a cello-soothing and simple.
"It is a classic error of military history.
Disaster after disaster,"
he said, "because generals underestimate. Overestimate
and be
timid, underestimate and be destroyed. All leaders
march that
line
...
all captains sail it."
Though he paused, from experience the other two knew
he wasn't
finished.
"I have been content these many years," he said, "to march
that
line at James Kirk's shoulder."
Spock wasn't prudent about sentimentality as he
had been when
they'd first struck out together in the dawn of Federation
longdistance exploring. In fact, now he was proud
of it. How many
Vulcans could be sentimental and still be
Vulcan?
Kirk gazed at him, and for a flash saw the younger
Spock. Then
the flash ended, and Spock gazed back at him without
the veil of
embarrassment they had over the years torn down.
Moderately Kirk grinned at him with one side of
his mouth.
"How do you always know the right thing to say?"
"I do not," Spock said. "I merely estimate very
well."
"What should we do, Jim?" McCoy asked.
"Jump him?"
Kirk shook his head. "If this machine is on some
kind of buildup,
jumping him won't stop it," he said. "Spock
...
is he demented?
Or is there something to all this-stuff?"
Spock frowned, still pressing and feeling his way across
the
floatless gray balloons. They knew from his
expression that in a few
short minutes he had analyzed Moss's data as
Moss had failed to do
in fifty years.
"It definitely is a computer," he confirmed.
"I can deduce from this information here that Roy Moss
is right."
"Ouch," McCoy said.
Spock looked up, then stepped to the racks of
books or pamphlets or whatever they were,
pulled one out, and showed them
what looked like hieroglyphics with ink and fish soup
splattered on it. "Fabrini, intermingled with a
language I do not recognize.
However, I can tell that he is right. This is a
long-distance
transporter
...
on the order of light-millennia."
McCoy turned serious and stepped closer. "Good
Lord."
"I estimate that beaming the
Bill of Rights
back to Starbase One,"
Spock went on, "would barely warm up the
machine."
Though he was impressed, though his iron eyes
flashed with a
scientific fascination that didn't come along very often
these days,
Spock's voice carried something that Kirk pounced
on.
"But it's not going to work, is it, Spock?" he
asked intuitively-
not really a question.
Seeming relieved, Spock put the book in its
place, then paused with his back to them and his hand on the
rack.
"These books are scientific logs, and I do not
believe they were
left by the Old Culture originally at all.
They were left by following visitors, and are
purposely made in a low-tech way, so others would
not be saddled with incompatible communication
technology."
"Brother," McCoy drawled, "would I like to get
a gander at your
idea of'low-tech.""
"Not now, Bones," Kirk admonished. "Spock,
go on."
"Thank you. The logs seem to have been begun by the
Fabrini,
but were added to by other races. None is
complete, and each subsequent race apparently
abandoned the attempt to use this
machine."
"Why would they abandon it?" the captain persisted.
"If it was so
valuable?"
"Because," Spock said, "it seems to be missing a
central connec
tion. This is the terminal . . . but there is no
core."
Kirk stepped away, then circled the leathery
collection of bubbles. "Are you telling me this is a
hulk? A shell?"
Spock turned around. "Yes, Captain. It will
accept commands,"
he said, "but it has no place to send them."
He drew a long breath, knowing he was speaking
to intelligent
men, but attempting to put across a concept meant
only for
scientists who had no other life or concern than
science.
"Moss is correct that if an old airplane were
dropped into the
Middle Ages, a clever individual could
deduce how it may have
steered and flown, but he may not realize it has no
engine. What lies
before us, a hundred sixty miles under the ground, and
all that extends to the planet's core, is
essentially a computer without software. The shell of the
machine remains here, but the Old
Culture took the important parts with them in
case they should
want to move again, or to prevent others from following,
I would
surmise. In our lifetimes, it will never work as a
long-distance
transporter."
"They didn't want us to come walking in their back
door!"
McCoy said excitedly.
Taking the Vulcan's nod as encouragement, Kirk
empathized
with those he would never meet. "So Roy decided what
it was, then
never considered that the people who built it were smarter than
he
was. I find it damned impolite to look back
on the past and be
arrogant toward those who invented our advancement."
"Well said," Spock commented as though they were sitting
in
front of a fire.
Then-maybe they were.
The captain spun toward him. "Is it useless,
Spock?"
"Not at all." Spock raised his voice, his
scientist's passion
shooting through the sobriety. He yanked control
back, but he was
still excited. "Not at all-the remnants themselves can
give our
science tremendous direction, sir-was
"Jim, think about it!" McCoy interrupted. "We
can analyze the
metallurgy, the control techniques, the
directional power transfers,
the molecular structure-was
Kirk blinked at him for a moment, and realized how
easy it was
to forget that McCoy was very much a scientist, if a
scientist of
nature more than mechanics.
"Moss's shields from forty-five years
ago are an excellent exam
ple," Spock said. "The technology Starfleet
developed from their
principles has given us nearly a half-century
of relatively safe space
exploration and battle survival rates." His
large, elegant hands
swept the gray control center, then the racks of
volumes, then all of
Faramond. "This can be a leap in technology
to rival the Theory of Relativity or the discovery
of the space warp. Captain, think of it."
He stepped forward, as close to excited as the
Vulcan ever became.
"The Old Culture used this single compact
mechanism to beam
their entire civilization countless billions of
miles from here-what
can we learn from what they left behind?"
"Yes . . ." the captain said. "Yes, but,
Spock
...
if the Fabrini
and others got to a certain point, then stopped . . .
what will
happen when he puts power to a mechanism that was
meant never to be used again?"
There was a pause, then McCoy was the one to answer.
"Probably the same thing that happens to the medieval
guy when
he tries to fly that biplane off a mountainside."
"My God, that's the scariest thing I've heard
in-hell, must be a half-hour
..."
McCoy echoed his own grumbles and paced, but there was
real
fear in his voice and no one attempted to scold him
for making a
joke.
In fact, Kirk wheeled toward him and spoke with
zeal under his own dread. "The entire civilization just
picked up and beamed out of here together?"
"Millions of people," Spock agreed, "billions
of miles a way,
thousands of years ago. They are, as you say . . .
long gone."
McCoy scowled at him. "Why? Why would a whole
culture want
to beam across the galaxy?"
At his side, the captain yanked attention
back to himself, and to
the glitter in his eyes. "Why would a man get in a
reed boat and try
to cross an ocean? Why sit on top of a Roman
candle and try to
break out of a planet's gravitational pull? Why
are you and I here
today? Why, Bones! Because the whole culture wanted
to go
look
...
go see what it's like in another place . . . think
of it-an
entire culture that said, 'Let's go!""
He found himself staring upward and wishing the dome would go
away so he could look at the stars and think about what
was beyond
them. His entire body pushed upward, his arms, his
shoulders, his
chin and thighs, and one foot even went up on a
toe.
McCoy winced, then ambulated his brows and said,
"I'd've liked
to see

ballot."
But the captain had already moved away a few steps,
though the
ground shuddered and made a rumbling growl beneath his
feet, still
looking up. In his eyes a hunger began
to reignite even as they
watched. In a moment he began to speak, and there was
something
in his voice that neither of his closest companions had
heard in a
decade.
Maybe two.
"Bones . . . it's us. It's humanity. We
said, "Let's go!" And so did
they!"
Paces away, McCoy was poking Spock in the
shoulder with a long
forefinger and holding very still, hoping Spock was looking
too and would be a witness.
James Kirk gazed up at the atmospheric
dome as it turned
nauseating colors above him, yet saw not a bit of
it.
"Think about that," he murmured. "Think how
far there must
still be to go
...
what must still be out there.
...
I haven't thought
about it in years! He asked me what we get out of
what we do, but he
doesn't understand it's not like looking for gold.
Exploration is an end in itself!
That
is what we get!"
As he was gazing upward, the poison came back
into his
periphery.
Roy Moss, back on the promontory in front
of the projection of
Bill of Rights
on the rock wall, was annoyed and bitching.
He pointed at the projection.
"They're finding little ways around my damper! Why do
people
even try? What's this guy's name? What's he
doing?"
"As if we'd tell you," McCoy
high-browed.
Moss stalked around on his promontory, picking and
twisting at
his control box, shaking his head so that the ponytail
swayed, and spitting insults.
"Moss," Kirk began, "are you paying attention
to me?"
"I heard you," Moss said. "What else? You're
only twenty feet
down."
"Good. Now, pay attention. There's nothing here but the
con
trols. The other civilization left a hulk. They
took it all with them.
They didn't want to be followed! Putting power
to it could create a disaster."
Stopping whatever he was doing, Moss looked down.
"Oh, how
nice. You figured this out in the thirty minutes I
was gone, did
you?"
"I'm serious."
"Oh, you're "serious." I'm glad you know so
much more than
I do. When the
Bill of Rights
suddenly appears in orbit at Earth,
then everybody'll know a lot. And I'll have six
hundred living
witnesses."
McCoy pushed forward to the bottom of the
promontory. "What
if they're not living! Maybe this thing wasn't meant
to transport
humans! Have you considered that?"
"I don't care about that. It's so simple, what can
go wrong?
Besides, if they die, they die. Even if the
transporter works enough
to move the ship, it'll be justified in the long run.
Nobody'11 care
who lived or died. How many of Columbus's
sailors died of
dysentery on the trip from Spain? Who cares,
right?" He pointed at
the projection of the trapped starship and said, "When that
monster appears at Starbase One, what can anyone
say but "thank
you"? The victors write the history books,
Doctor. Now, back off before I make
you history! Look at my hands," he said.
"Look at
them! Left! Right! I've got the only phaser!
I've got the only
communicator! I've immobilized your
magnificent prizes! Your
starship! I've frozen Starfleet's best ships!
There they are, hanging
there!"
He whisked his hand across the little viewscreen's
image
of Bill of
Rights.
"This is my planet now! On it is the only thing
the Federation
doesn't have! You were here at the beginning, Kirk, and
now you're
here to see my reward! You . . . watch!"
He went after his control box like a squirrel going
after a walnut.
Nothing happened.
Roy looked at them, and they looked at him.
Then Roy looked at the picture of
Bill of Rights
and held his
breath.
Still nothing.
Roy looked at the ship, looked at his hand-held
activator, gave it a
little shake, put it to his ear, looked at it again.
From below, Kirk asked in a low voice, "Did you
put any safeties
on it?"
"What?"
But the captain's words weren't really a question at
all. "You
didn't put any safety backups on your
equipment, did you?"
Moss just gaped down at him as though he were the
crazy one.
Behind Spock, one of the balloons hissed, and
broke open. Steam
fizzed from it. Then the steam turned into a spray.
Then the spray turned into a geyser. . . .
USS
Enterprise
1701-A
"Mr. Scott, to the bridge!"
The bridge of the sparkling new "old-style" starship
thumped
with frantic movement.
Pavel Chekov bounded out of the command chair and took
his
more comfortable position at the science area. He'd always
felt
better here than in any facet of command.
"Chekov, take the conn," he muttered as he
glared into the
science monitors. "Chekov has better things
to do-was
"Pardon, sir?" a fresh-faced lieutenant
called from the science
station down the starboard control board from him.
"Nothing," he clipped, his Russian accent adding
a certain scissor to his word. "What takes
Mr. Scott so long to get up
here?"
"No idea, sir," the science lieutenant said
noncommittally, but
he and Devereaux exchanged a glance.
They knew what it was. Mr. Scott didn't
want command either. He wanted to be down there with those
engines.
Want or not, responsibility had them all by the
throat, and
Montgomery Scott thundered out of the turbolift,
barking orders.
"Red alert. Battlestations. Stabilize all
external systems. Police
all local frequencies. All weapons on
line. And see what you can do
about that bloody communications problem."
Warning alarms erupted-somehow comforting those who had
been on edge waiting for them-the ship darkened
to alert-status maroon lights, the graphics came
into crisp, bright focus, and the bridge rippled into a
series of "ayes."
And Uhura's voice throbbing through the entire
vessel-
"Battlestations
...
a
hands to battlestations
..."
"Reading matterstantimatter power feeding through the
core of
the planet Faramond, Mr. Scott!"
"Ah, that's just a duck flapping in your ear,"
Scott growled as he pressed himself into the command
chair. "It's a dead
planet."
The lieutenant pushed a flop of thin blond hair
out of his eyes and
insisted, "Sir, there's a massive runaway
matterstantimatter reaction
generating power through the interior of the planet!"
"Slow down, lad. Just man your post."
The lieutenant sucked a breath, held it, then
said, "The core is
starting to become molten again, sir."
Scott looked at him a moment, divided the
panic from the young
man's ability to read the science equipment, then
decided to believe
him.
"Can the planet take it?" he asked.
"After being cold for millions of years? Doubt it,
sir. All the
energy is being taken up by the body of the planet itself
and it's all going to become molten."
"It's reverting," Scott said. "It's all going
to go up. The whole
planet's going to explode!"
"Yes, sir-and, sir?
Bill of Rights
is in orbit. She's going to be
swallowed by the blast!"
Scott hit the young officer with a look of the obvious,
then
arranged himself in the command chair, leaning hard on one
side.
"Not to mention our personnel sitting down there on that
bomb.
Pull up that twelve-percent power, lad.
Divide it half to thrust, half
to shields."
"Aye, sir. Power coming up
..."
"Shield engineering acknowledges, Mr. Scott,"
Devereaux called
from the port side.
"Impulse engineering signals ready, sir,"
Chekov told him.
"Ahead one quarter impulse. Let's show "em
what this ship can
do." "One quarter impulse, aye!"
"What's happening, Spock!"
Kirk stumbled toward the control balloons as
Spock and McCoy joined him there. The balloons
were beginning to dissolve, one at a
time.
"He activated it," Spock said simply. "The
power-was
A fissure opened in the pond bed not ten yards from
them. For a
terrible instant they had to work to keep each other on
their feet.
Was there any feeling worse than the planet itself coming
apart under those who must live upon it?
"Mr. Moss!" Spock called over the
volcanic noise. "You were
right. The entire planet is a giant
transporter conductor! That
explains why the Old Culture chose a cold
rock for their project! But the control mechanism was
beamed away too! The power you have
put into it now has nowhere to go!"
"A huge short circuit," Kirk muttered.
"I beg your pardon?" Spock shouted over the sound
of a planet
tearing itself apart from within. "I failed to hear you,
Captain!"
"Moss!" Kirk staggered toward the rock wall.
"Moss, if you don't
want to listen to me, at least listen to him!"
He waved at the smoke pouring from the cracking
shells of the
ancient computer controls and found his way toward
Roy, but
McCoy grabbed for him and hollered, "Jim,
we've got to get away
from here!"
Kirk ignored the flaming obvious, shoved past
him, and choked out, "Moss! We've got to get off
this planet!"
"No, no," Moss said. Insanely calm, he
shook his head and
smiled. "You just want me to leave. I'm not leaving
my prize."
"You idiot, the entire planet's melting under us!"
Spock twisted tow ard them without taking his hands off the
cracking balloons. "Captain, planetary
surface is collapsing."
"The surface is collapsing!" Kirk repeated
to Moss. "The planet's melting! Give me the
communicator!"
"It's not melting," Moss insisted. "You must have
done some
thing. What did you touch down there?"
Looking up from the grotto at the hunched
shoulders and brittle
outline of his oldest enemy, Kirk felt his fists
ball up and his arms go
hard.
"It wasn't
us,
you spoiled maniac," he snapped. "Wake up and
get over it!"
Moss actually cocked a hip despite of what was
happening
around them. "Get over what?"
Kirk pushed forward, his hands on the rocks now.
"So you had a bad father! So what! Parents don't
last forever,
good or bad! Get over it! Comes a time when there's
no excuse.
'Poor me, I had a bad life, so I get to go
out and be bad to others."
Like hell you do. You've been dragging that fat
corpse around for
forty-five years waiting for it to sit up and say,
"Son, you did a good
job." It's not going to happen! You're never going
to get his
recognition! You're going to have to grow the
hell up!"
From the vantage of his promontory, Roy huddled
his shoulders
and they could see, in spite of the banging, clanging,
heat, sweat,
and burning, a big shiver go through him. "Don't. .
. don't speak to
me like that. . . ."
"That's your problem right there," Kirk growled up at
him.
"Captain!" Spock called.
McCoy cranked partly around at Spock's
shoulder and shouted,
"Jim, you better look at this!"
"Captain, continents are collapsing!" Spock
continued. "Dry
oceans are beginning to break open!"
"I'm about to break open myself." Kirk climbed
toward Moss.
"You're going to give me that communicator, you whining
baby.
Don't you understand? There's nothing here! The Old
Culture
didn't go out in a radius from a central hub!
They
moved the hub!"
Moss was thrown to one knee, and had trouble rising, but
the
shake-up made him really feel what was happening
to the planet.
"No
...
no, that's not right. You see, I've-was
Kirk waved a hand dismissively. "You can't do this
because they
didn't want to be followed! They took the
secret with them! No
excuses anymore! You've had gold fever for a
half-century, fixated
on gold that's not here! Your own dream blinded you!
You're a
spoiled, angry kid, still looking for the same things you
were
looking for when we met! And you still haven't found
them!"
The captain felt the swirling tempest of conflicting
atmosphere
tearing at his hair as the dome above them shuddered and
began to
lose integrity-the only thing still keeping them
alive. Once the
dome went, there would be nothing but a scalded ball in
space.
He didn't care. He saw only his anger. He
started climbing the
crystal rocks, using the anger as his staircase.
The crystals cut into
his fingers as he climbed, an inch at a time.
"And I'm not going to let you have it. You can kill me,
but I'm
going to take it all with me. You're still getting
nothing!"
"You stop talking like that to me!" Moss bellowed, his
diaphragm
crushing inward. He shot a hand toward the
artificial sky, finger pointed. "I'll drag that
ship of yours down! I can do it! I'll drag it
down!"
Suddenly, Kirk stopped climbing. He
straightened and pressed his lips tight, his glare the
kind that cuts.
Then he said, "Go ahead."
Behind him McCoy kept poking at Spock,
until Spock had to shrug him off, but they were both
staring, neither moving at all,
certainly not daring to interrupt.
Above, Moss tilted his head. "What?"
"You heard me," Kirk said. "Go ahead and try
it. Those people
up there are better than you are."
Roy's mouth twisted and flinched. "Are not. Now .
. . you think
comy think about it. They are not. I have the only
communicator. I
can tap into my power stations and haul that ship down.
Then
what'll you have,
Captain?"
The man he tried to taunt merely straightened a
little more on the
rocks under him and had no problem staring upward in
spite of
crashing and howling planetary collapse.
"I said go ahead."
"Oh, you're bluffing, come on," Moss said. "I
mean, I know the
tactics, right? We're both too smart for that."
"Try me."
The words, the eyes, the man himself, suddenly
statuesque-
there was no dare about him. No game. Nothing.
He meant what he said.
Moss glowered down at him, huffed reflexively
a few times,
grinned without thinking about it, then brought his
communicator
around tightly to his chest and started pecking at it.
Past his hands and the small black mechanism, though,
were the
eyes of James Kirk.
Antique-gold eyes and low brows. Wind ripping
at the soft taupe
hair and the undone chest flap of the burgundy
Starfleet uniform
he'd earned the hard way. Shoulders that had never
been square but
had remained unbending under a weight few could carry
for so
long, and not a flinch now. Less than ever, in
fact.
Below, Spock lost the last of his interest in the
gurgling computer
controls. At McCoy's side he turned
to watch what would happen.
Life was ultimately more captivating
than any machine, even
though that life stood on a precipice and threatened
to jump or be
pushed.
Moss was clearly irritated. "I'm going to do
it," he said.
Kirk didn't move. "I know you are."
Moss pointed upward again, but in a smaller way.
"Your ship.
Your big identity."
"I know what it is. Our only way off the
planet. Yours too."
Shifting from one foot to the other as the promontory
started
quivering, Moss added, "Your whole crew,
y'know."
"They swore the same oath I did. They're
ready."
"Wait a minute
...
am I missing something?"
"As usual. And we don't have a minute. Go
ahead."
Curious as much as afraid he was missing something,
Roy asked,
"Why doesn't this bother you?"
"Why?" Kirk's mouth took on a bitterly
satisfied grin. "Because
I've gotten more out of this in five minutes than
you've gotten out of
it in fifty years."
"How d'you figure?"
"Because, you brat, I know those people went somewhere. They
left the machine, but they took their dreams with them.
And
somewhere far away from here they built on those dreams.
There
are ways to meet them, but my ways, not yours. There
are more
places to explore-more people to meet-I've got your
dream,
Moss. And you can't have it."
"What," Moss asked, his voice getting high,
"what are
you . . . talking about?"
"I'm talking about your dream!" Kirk said. His
words shot out
like staples. "I'm gonna take it. If I
leave here, I'm gonna take it.
And if you kill me, I'm still gonna
take it."
Moss stood over him, fundamentally baffled. Never
mind the
frantic environment and the planet falling down around
them, Jim
Kirk stood below him with his arms casually at his
sides and a
damning chalk drawing of satisfaction instead of
anger on his face, one foot up a little higher than
the other on the uneven terrain and a
hand resting dynamically upon it. He looked like a
painting, he
really did-he was
enjoying
this!
"I was ready to give up," Kirk told him, "but
if I live through this,
I've got you to thank for the rest of my life. And
if I don't live, I've
accomplished things I never dreamed would have my name on
them
when you and I first met. All because you helped turn
me around
forty-five years ago."
Rocks cracked
off
points and fell around them. Pieces of the
interior shell of the dome chipped away and spun like
giant needles
into the ground inches from them, shattering and spraying them.
Each jolt of the planetary core reinvigorated the
knowledge that
James Kirk was not his ship, or even his rank.
Kirk barely moved. He never took his eyes from
Moss, and he
never even raised an arm to protect himself from the
fallout.
"You think those ships up there are Starfleet?" he
said, rolling a
hand upward as though this conversation were happening in a
lounge instead of in the midst of a planet pulling itself
apart. "I've
been through that," he went on. "I've scuttled my
ship. I took her
out and watched her die in space, stmade that
decision. And I'm still
here! Those are ships, but that's all they are-vessels
for ideals. The
ideals . . . you can't kill." He nodded at
Moss, and at the communi
cator. "You have the ship. Go ahead-crush it. You
can't kill the
dream."
Strange how softly he was speaking. Strange that
Moss heard him,
or read his lips, or got it telepathically-no
one could tell. Strange
that Spock and McCoy watched from below and saw what
was
happening, and somehow also heard in spite of the great
collapse.
Strange that Jim Kirk, a boy on a bridge,
saw so well that there was
no one thing that could be an answer to a dream.
"It doesn't matter if you're captain or
admiral or emperor or
god," he finished. "Reach the position at which you can
be of most
value. But you didn't do that, Roy. You wanted
shortcuts. All this
time you've been wrong. Forty-five years, dead
wrong. All you have
is a big short circuit. And my ship?" He
tucked his lip and shook his
head. "Still wrong. The man isn't his
ship. The ship is the man. So
go ahead. The only one here with anything to lose
...
is you."
No matter how McCoy had analyzed Roy
John Moss, no matter
how over decades Spock had learned to be more
interested in life than in machines-no matter
anything that had happened to them
in the past ten hours or ten years, James Kirk
still knew Roy Moss and men like him better than
anyone else including Roy Moss.
The captain who knew everything he needed to know now
began to climb again. Crystals chipped under his fingers
and his boots, but
he kept going until he was all the way up, standing
beside Roy Moss
and in front of the weapon leveled on him that Kirk
had dared and
dared and dared to go ahead and put a hole through him.
Because no hole was going through what he sculpted out of the
raw rock of Jimmy Kirk over the years. No
holes.
Shuddering, Roy Moss grew smaller and smaller,
staring at Kirk.
Kirk jabbed out a confident hand, caught Moss by the
wrist, and
pressured the bigger man down toward the cracking
rock.
As Moss crumpled, he let the communicator
fall out of his hand
and into Jim Kirk's expectant grip.
The dirt was still in him, and he was taking Robert
April's advice.
He brought out the gangster to understand the gangster, and he
knew Roy Moss didn't have a Starfleet oath
in his soul-the oath to
sacrifice himself for anything, or anyone, or any
dream.
With Moss hunched at his ankles, Jim Kirk
flipped the communi
cator upward.
"Kirk to
Bill of Rights.
Four to beam up, priority one!"
The three from the
Enterprise
burst onto the bridge of the class of
starship that was going to make everything they had known
obsolete-the Excelsior-class starship
Bill of Rights.
Behind them, two beefy, armed, and mean Security
men in
helmets hauled the shackled man who had insisted
he was going to
make even this ship obsolete.
Going hand over hand along the starboard side of the
rocking
vessel, Spock invited himself to the science station
to peer over the
shoulder of
Bill of Rights'
science officer, but kept his hands to
himself. McCoy stayed to one side also on the upper
deck, but was
chewing on some crack about who was going to make what
obsolete.
Captain Alma Roth swung around in her command
chair, her dry
brown hair flying in three directions, and she
looked like she'd just
gotten up after a bad night's sleep. Instantly
she found the face of the man she wanted to talk to.
"The ship is completely drained, sir!
Transporting you took the
last of our batteries," she said as Jim Kirk
stepped down to her side.
"We're being pummeled by power surges and massive
waves of
radiation! There are indications of imminent
antimatter detonation
inside that planet in roughly eight minutes!
It'll tear us apart
and-was
She stepped very close to him and grasped his sleeve.
"I really don't know what to do," she whispered.
"I really don't."
He gazed into her pale face, noted that she
suddenly looked a lot older than thirty-seven,
and evenly told her, "It takes guts to admit
that. Give yourself credit."
"They promoted me too fast, sir," she said.
"Do you want me to
admit that too, in front of my crew? I should have,
and long before
something like this."
Kirk scowled and grinned at the same time.
"Alma, I'm surprised
at you. What do you take us old fogies for? Think
we'd give a ship to
someone just because we're tired of making decisions
ourselves?
Look me in the eye and say, "No, Jim.""
She sucked in a shuddering breath and through her teeth she
actually laughed and said, "I can't call you Jim!"
"Have you got a fix on the
Enterprise?
They're not drained yet."
From behind, Roy Moss said, "Like hell it isn't
drained."
"Shut up," one Security guard snapped, and
tightened the
shackles on Moss's arms just to prove who was in
charge.
Kirk glanced back, but resolutely stayed with his
conversation
with Roth. He'd already been informed they only had
eight
minutes, and he needed one of those to explain.
"Is the dampening field gone?" he asked, raising
his voice but
trying to keep from shouting in spite of the alarms whooping
and
the ship shaking. He crossed in front of Roth
to squint at the
diagnostics on the starboard side.
"Yes!" Roth said, following him. "But the ship's
power is down
and we can't regenerate under this bombardment of
radiation!
According to my engineers, it's compromising our own
intermix
stability ratios!"
"All right." He turned to her, one hand on the
bridge rail. "Use
your impulse reserves just enough to turn the ship toward
Enter
prise
as she moves in." He looked up at the science
officer and
asked, "Is
Enterprise
any closer than she was an hour ago?"
"Aye, sir!" the officer said. "She's within two
hundred fifty
thousand solar miles!"
"Puffed in on that twelve percent," Kirk thought
aloud. "Close
enough for shield extension in less than thirty thousand
miles-was
"Sir," Roth began. She dug her fingernails
into his sleeve, and this
wasn't the grip of a person who wanted to give
up. "I don't
understand."
The statement was perfectly clear. No argument, no
panic, no
demands.
Kirk whirled around. "Spock! Explain to the
captain."
Spock was already dropping to the central deck behind
Roth's
command chair.
"Enterprise
can make her shields specific to the
electromagnetic resonance of the planetary
radiation waves and
extend the shield to protect
Bill of Rights- his
"And keep us stable enough to regenerate?" Roth
interrupted.
"Yes," Spock said simply.
Kirk confronted Roth again.
"Enterprise
needs thirty minutes to
regenerate. What've you got?"
Roth panted a few times, desperate and excited,
and her eyes got
wide in what could almost have been conspiracy.
"Bill of Rights
only needs five minutes!
Enterprise
can shield us from the radiation,
then we can pull
Enterprise
away before the planet explodes!
Captain Kirk! You have the conn!"
She gestured him with both hands to her command chair, and
actually stepped out of his way.
But he shook his head and spoke quietly in spite
of the Klaxons
and the flashing and the running.
"I don't need the conn, Captain. Mr.
Scott on
Enterprise
knows
what we need. Just wheel
Bill of Rights
around into that shield
envelope and take it one step at a time.
After all, you've got almost
five minutes."
Reinvigorated as a plebe, Roth drew her
shoulders tight and spun
to her left. "Lieutenant DesRosiers!
Digest and calculate!"
"Aye, Captain! Minimal impulse on line!
Turning toward
Enterprise!"
A hum of effort rose through the ship, and with it a lance
of hope
went through everyone there, piercing what Kirk
recognized as that
crew sensation that the ship might be sinking and their next
moves
might be their last and most desperate, nervously
expecting the
abandon-ship to be the next order.
Suddenly all that changed. Alma Roth grabbed
tight hold on the
idea that the time-hardened
Enterprise
and her technical eccentrici-
ties and the new-age
Bill of Rights
could combine their skills and gamesmanship and yank
both out of a maelstrom even as it bit at
them from beneath.
Within fifty seconds the ship jolted.
"Mr. Scott on
Enterprise
advises we are in their shielding
envelope!" DesRosiers shouted over the red alert
whooping in their
ears.
"Shields are around us, Captain Roth!" the
science officer
shouted. "We're stabilizing!"
"Intermix!" Roth ordered, smashing back a handful
of flying
brown hair. She even found an instant in her
gasping and ordering
to throw Kirk a wild-eyed grin. Then she flung
herself to the port side, grabbed the bridge rail, and
shouted at DesRosiers, "Prepare tractor
beams for immediate lock-on as soon as we're hot!"
"Aye, aye, intermix formula calculating.
Traction on line!"
Kirk backed off a few feet to let the process
happen. Somehow he
managed not to blow everybody's flush by crossing his
fingers.
As Roth barked orders to her crew and relayed
cooperations back
and forth from engineering and from communications with the
Enterprise,
Kirk stepped to the upper deck, jabbed a thumb at
the two Security men to stand aside, and moved in on
Roy Moss. He
grabbed Moss with both fists and forced him to look at
the forward
screen, at the planet that was burning up from inside
out.
He felt his own eyes like scorched nuggets in his
head.
"Look at it!" he said through his teeth. He took
Roy's collar and choked him until he looked.
"A hundred thousand years of culture
and technology, and we're losing it! All because of
you. For
generations after we're all dead, Roy Moss will be
equated with
stupidity. The one who lost Faramond for us and
everything it
could have taught us. You got what you wanted,
Roy. You're going
to be famous. Humiliated before the known galaxy.
Your name will
go down in history as the biggest buffoon of all
time."
At first he thought his words weren't getting anywhere, just
as no one's words had gotten anywhere with Roy
Moss-
Until he felt the quiver at the ends of his hands.
The shudder.
He looked from the screen to Moss, and found himself
holding a
red-faced, weeping old man.
Dampened and brought to bay this time not by a fist but
by facts, Moss slipped back against the consoles,
and Kirk let him go. Moss
could swallow anything but humiliation, and Kirk had
given him a
mouthful.
The Security guards closed in again as Kirk
moved away, but
there was no protest from the quivering, gurgling,
whimpering mess
that once had threatened them all.
Kirk found himself near the turbolift, beside
McCoy.
He blinked at the doctor. "You were right. It was
revenge," he
said.
McCoy nodded, not quite as flippantly as usual.
"I liked it," Kirk added.
Any smug responses were cast aside as a force
grabbed the ship and threw everybody grasping for
handholds.
When the warp engines came back on line, they all
felt it. The
ship whined and hummed beneath them, and the bridge flashed like
firecrackers, and howled with warning whistles and
alarms as if she
were some great locomotive ready to haul a record
line of cars, and
Roth's crew scrambled at their emergency stations.
"Compensators!" Roth was calling, on line to her
chief engineer.
"Implement traction on the
Enterprise,
and let's get both ships away
from that planet!"
Kirk grabbed for McCoy as the doctor stumbled
when the
countertractors activated, then the three of them
retreated even
farther into the turbolift vestibule to stay out of the
way.
All this time the captain's string had been pulling on
him like a
long, quiet noose. Now it would be the other way.
The string would reach from the past, from
Enterprise
to
Enterprise,
to keep all ships
and al l who sailed them alive.
"Look at them, Spock . . . Bones," Kirk
said. "I've been talking
about retirement as though it's all over. As though
I've done it all.
And I haven't done anything close to all.
We're all young-so's the
human race," he added. "I don't know about you,
but I'm going to
keep on going."
At his side, Spock was gazing at him but remaining
appropriately
silent, and Kirk knew what that meant.
At his other side, Leonard McCoy clung
insectishly to a hand-
hold and grumbled, "I knew you were gonna say that,
I just
knew it. Now Scotty's got to sell his boat and
I've gotta send back
the firewood I just had delivered to my cabin, and
Spock'll have to
starch his backup uniform-you know what a problem you
are?
Lewis and Clark and Kirk-was
Forty-five years earlier. . .
Officers' Lounge, Starbase One
Fingers were funny things. Open "em, close 'em,
imitate 'em with prosthetics . . . lose 'em
altogether . . .
Boot heels caught in the struts, Jimmy
lazily sat on a turning stool in front of the
big viewport at Starbase One. Beside him, the
beauty
of Earth was settled like quartz in the soil of
space. From their orbit
he could look up from appreciating his fingers and
appreciate the
Northern Hemisphere, the wide United
States, and even thought he could see the Skunk
River, and the rope bridge if he squinted.
Yep, there she was, hanging like wet laundry.
He rubbed his sore knuckles with which he had
cashiered Roy,
and almost let in a flicker of self-pity, but then
thought about
Veronica and flushed the self-anything.
The door panel brushed open behind him, and he
cranked the
stool around enough to see the carrot-red hair, the ruddy
cheeks,
and the other reds and blacks of his father and the Security
uniform
that so ideally blended with George Kirk's
personality.
Neither of them said anything.
George was petrified. He inhaled nervously
several times before
he could even remember to exhale. The officers"
lounge wasn't very
big, and it was completely empty except for them,
because this was the weekend and everybody was planetside.
George took the long, long way around to getting
anywhere near
his son.
His boy was looking at him, at least. Well, that was
something.
He steeled himself for the inaccessibility that had been
lurking
under the freckles just days before, and the wall behind which his
son had withdrawn, the sun of sociability, and the
mean falcon's
glare from that apricot face.
There was still a touch of unripe, inharmonic youth, a
stroke of
skepticism groping for something to disbelieve-
Or was it the shadows in here?
Jimmy just sat there on the stool, his muscular
shoulders
hunched and his hands folded, legs kinked up on the
supports of the
stool, and waited.
"Don't know what to say," his father mumbled. "I was
hoping I
could give you a perfect. . . y'know . . .
perfect voyage."
Jimmy nodded. His dad was very nervous. Funny, but
he'd never
noticed that his dad could be nervous before. Just
hadn't ever seen
it. Maybe he just hadn't ever looked. He'd seen
a lot of things in the
past few hours that he'd never looked at before.
For an instant he was back in the airlock, about
to be launched on
a desperate journey, the last breath of the living.
In his head rang
the things he was going to say, the awkward apologies,
the painful
confessions, all the things that had pushed at his lips
while he sat on
the needles of loss only hours ago.
Would his dad be embarrassed if those words were spoken
now?
There must be a better way to say those things than
blurting them
out like a bad commercial. Some better way than
words. There
would be time, Jimmy thought, and a better way.
Maybe he'd look around for that too. A way
to talk without
talking too much.
After a few seconds of fidgeting from his father,
Jimmy offered a
shrug, then pursed his lips. He gazed at his father,
and made his
own eyes shine with the ancient Rosetta trinary, the
human confidence of Starbase One, and the snow-white
sorcery of a
starship.
And as he gazed, his eyes told about the bloody
cry for help
scrawled on a piece of metal, and about a boy's
last good-bye, this
time to himself as a boy.
Jimmy wanted all those to be in his eyes for his father
to see. He
refused to look away, or down, or at anything
other than his dad's
eyes, because this time the message knew where it was meant
to go.
"Don't worry about it," he said soothingly.
"Perfection stinks."
George gaped, blinked, shook his head, then tried
to talk again
and failed.
After a few bad seconds he managed to say,
"I know I've let the
years slip away . . . guess there's
no way now to convince you space
is worth seeing. Sure don't blame you . . .
and I, uh, I want you to
know I'm done."
Jimmy looked sidelong at him. "Done?"
"Y'know-done . . . sticking my nose in and trying
to change
your mind. I'm done with that."
George anticipated a typhoon by squinting
into what he thought
might be the first wind, but nothing came. Jimmy just
sat there,
swinging idly back and forth a few inches, hands
clasped.
His son nodded. "Thanks."
A message was just getting through George's hard
hide that he'd
underreckoned his boy again. Maybe Robert was right.
. . Robert had been impressed all along by the
fire and underlying survival
instinct of Jimmy Kirk.
Time for me to be impressed too, George thought.
Late with
everything.
He cleared his throat and paced sheepishly
around the clean
deep-plum carpet, thankful that he had something
freshly vacu
umed to stare down at instead of his own feet.
"Your mom and I always accused you of running away from
everything," he said sullenly. "We didn't
understand."
He cranked on his throat muscles until he
managed to look up at
Jimmy. A man should have the guts to look up at a
moment like
this.
"You were running
to
something," he finished.
Moved by his father's confession, Jimmy thought back
on the
quiet gallantry of sacrifice from his father,
Captain April, Veronica
Hall, and Carlos Florida, who were willing
to save him while giving
up their own lives to a purpose. He'd found out
how critical it was
to do a job and just

a job. On board a ship, no matter how menial
a job was, if it didn't get done by the person
assigned to it, then
somebody else would have to do it. Nothing could just go
undone. Nothing could go judged by the doer.
His dad was still looking up. "I'm sorry for not
understanding,"
he said.
Jimmy raised his shoulders, then let them drop.
"No problem.
But there's something I'm going to tell you."
"Anything. Go ahead."
"I'm not going into the pre-Academy program at
high school."
His dad licked his lips, shrugged sadly, looked
down again, and
groped, "Can't . . . say I blame you."
"I'm going directly into the Academy itself."
The astonishment in those ruddy cheeks and dark eyes was
like
getting a medal all by itself.
Jimmy liked the feeling of causing surprise
to pepper that face.
Wanted it again.
"Wha-what?" his dad gasped.
"I want to go right into the Academy. Captain
April said he could arrange it, so I'm going
to let him. I promised I could get my grades
up and stay out of trouble. That's the deal. I'm going
to do it."
"But-but-but I thought-I thought-was
"Well," Jimmy popped off, "we can't let
criminals like the
Mosses think they can just have their way out there, can we?"
"No, no, no
...
we
...
uh
...
no, sure can't. . . but, uh, Jim,
not everybody gets in, you know
...
I never did . . ."
"Dad," Jimmy said, and slipped off the stool
to stand before his
father with the big viewport as his backdrop and all of
Earth as his
mantle. "I'm
going
to the Academy."
George tried to take a step, but his legs
locked. He might prick
something. Break the bubble. What was he seeing in
front of him?
Who was he seeing?
Terrified he might blunder what was happening, he
stammered,
"You, uh . . . you'll have to give up your . . .
your . . ."
"My gang?" Jimmy slid off the stool and moved
forward, coming
toward his father with a confidence that didn't include the
flippant
disgust that had always been there before. He was almost
George's
height and much steadier.
He took his father's arm and turned him toward the
door. "1
don't think I need them anymore, do you? If they
need me," he
added, "they can join Starfleet."
Through blurring eyes, George Kirk was taking that
real first look
at this son of his.
At this man.
They walked together toward the doors of the Starbase
One
officers' lounge.
"I'll be darned," he murmured. "I guess they
can . . ."
As the wide doors opened before them, they caught at
the same
moment a glimpse of the brass placard on the
beautiful polished
walnut panels. Neither mentioned the placard, but father
and son
felt it go by, and felt it breathe on their shoulders
its blessing for the
valiant of Starfleet.
Sail forth-steer for the deep waters only.
Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with
me, For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared
to go, And we will risk the ship, ourselves, and all.
- Walt Whitman
USS
Enterprise
1701-A
"This is the president. My greetings,
Captain."
"Mr. President, hello."
"still
must add once again our profound thanks. How many
times can
we thank you for your superhuman feats?"
"Only human, Mr. President. I do have a
special notice, how
ever."
"Go right ahead."
"We're not decommissioning this vessel, or
retiring the
Constitution-class of starships."
"We're not? But the Admiralty- his
"Will have to consider new facts. I have evidence that the
older
style of starship construction and power ratios may
prove indispen
sable. The galaxy is only partly explored, and
we can't prudently
shelve valuable capital. We will make a new
decision."
"still
see. . . very revealing, Captain. Certainly we
cannot ignore
your conclusions. And obviously when we
needed the
Enterprise
this
time, she was therefor us-again. I risk being
presumptuous, but I
agree a growing Federation should not cast away our
early strengths.
I have authorized your command crew's reprieves from
retirement
while I call a special congress of the
Admiralty for you to address. I
look forward to the result. . . there are those of us who
cling to the
Constitution-class for more than tangible reasons.
We may be glad you can provide tangible
reasons, sir. Visit me upon your arrival."
"I will, sir. I'd like you to be my guest in the
officers' lounge.
There's a plaque there I'd like to polish with my
elbow."
"My pleasure to witness it, Captain."
"Thank you. Kirk out."
"This is Starbase One, out."
James Kirk drew in a deep cleansing breath,
then took a moment
to flick a hangnail off his thumb. All of a
sudden a little piece of him
was embedded in the plush carpet of the new ship's
bridge. All of a
sudden it was a little more part of him than it had been a
day ago.
Ships were like that. Something had changed in the ship's
heart.
Suddenly she wanted to be part of him instead of the other
way
around. They had saved each other's lives, and the
lives of others.
Strange, how things could change.
He glanced around him, at the upper deck, where
McCoy stood
beside Uhura, where Chekov stood beside Spock, and
over to port,
where Scotty was leaning on the glossy new engineering
section, and
all at once the ship wanted them, and wanted
desperately to prove
she was worthy of them.
That light was in all their eyes, and it was in his. The
let's-fly light.
Jim Kirk patted the arm of his command
chair, and told her in his mind that the captain's string
was still in his pocket.
"Mr. Chekov," he said, "reverse the ship."
"Reverse the ship, aye. All decks
responding."
"Mr. Spock?"
"Captain?"
"Bring her about. . . steady as she goes."