Bloodthirst (37 page)

Old Yeller's beady, dead little eyes stared up at him. He lifted the armadillo out gently, though Yeller felt stiff and unyielding as a wooden plank. Jim pulled the packing from the box in his search for the expected good-bye tape, but there was nothing else inside.

Quince hadn't even bothered to say good-bye

For no good reason, he felt crushed. He'd half hoped to find something in Quince's last message that would ease his suffering conscience.

Disconsolate, he stared back at the little animal on his desk, then ran his fingers over it. It had a curious feel to it spine-hard in some spots, soft-skinned and bristly in others. Jim felt self-conscious and silly talking to it, but he wanted to hear Quince's voice again. “Hello, Old Yeller.”

Old Yeller came alive under his hand. The creature writhed and opened its long, narrow muzzle. Waverleigh's cheerful voice came out. “Hi, Jimmy.”

“Hello, Quince,” he whispered, feeling morose.

But the little animal kept talking and the tone in Quince's voice made Jim sit up in his chair and listen.

“Look, Jimmy, if you've got Yeller with you, I reckon you're feeling pretty bad right about now. I hope you got my message okay”

Jim held his breath.
Hope you got my message
Good Lord, Quince must have programmed the message right before he died. “But I just wanted you to know no regrets. This is the most fun I've had since my promotion! So lighten up, Jimmy. You were always too damn intense and too quick to take the blame. Have a drink on me. And give Yeller a pat now and then, so he doesn't get too lonely.

“Waverleigh out.”

Yeller's jaw stopped working. Jim reached out and stroked the armadillo's hard outer shell.

He didn't stop when the intercom whistled, and Sulu's placid face appeared on the screen.

“Leaving the Sagittarian arm. Captain. Awaiting your orders.”

“I see.” Kirk looked up from petting Yeller. “Well, Lieutenant, it seems that Command has finally taken pity on us after all that star charting. Lay in a course for Star Base Thirteen. Maybe shore leave will be somewhat more fun than our last assignment.”

The corners of Sulu's eyes crinkled. “Yes,
sir
. “He paused. “More fun, maybe, Captain, but certainly not more
interesting
.”

“I, can tell you're in need of leave, Lieutenant. You're beginning to sound like Mr. Spock.” Kirk was surprised to find himself feeling faintly amused. “Kirk out.”

He sighed and looked back at Old Yeller, who once again stood stiffly.

Jim picked up the bottle and poured himself another brandy. He had the glass to his lips when an oddly Quince-like notion seized him. He got a small shot glass from the cabinet, set it next to Yeller's front paw, and put a thimbleful of McCoy's brandy in it.

He raised his own glass. “To Quince Waverleigh,” he said, and smiled for what seemed like the first time in a very long while.

COMING NEXT MONTH

This is the story of a hero—and a moment forever lost to history.

It is a tale of Starfleet's early days, a time before the STAR TREK we know. The story of a secret mission gone horribly wrong—and an instant in time when the galaxy stood poised on the brink of one final, destructive war. It is the story of a ship since passed on into legend, and a man we know only as the father of Starfleet's greatest captain.

His name is Kirk. Commander George Samuel Kirk.

And the fate of a hundred innocent worlds rests on his shoulders

TURN THE PAGE FOR
AN EXCITING PREVIEW OF
FINAL FRONTIER

A TIME BEFORE stardates. And a captain's privilege to go there.

Even with the unchanged cornfields lying beneath sprawling blue skies and the barn smell all around him, Jim Kirk discovered he couldn't quite get away from reality when the communicator in his pocket suddenly chirped. His hand automatically went for the utility belt that usually held his phaser and communicator when he wasn't on board the ship, and only then did he remember he wasn't wearing a uniform.

“Mind your own business, Bones,” he muttered as he found the device inside the lightweight indigo fabric of his sailing jacket. He snapped the grip open with too much ease—not something he ordinarily perceived in his movements—and spoke firmly into it. “Mind your own business, McCoy. I'm on leave.”

"On leave and suddenly psychic, too, I see,”
the familiar voice plunged back.

“Who else has the gall to disobey direct orders?” Kirk shifted the communicator to his left hand and used his right to wrench open a sliding panel in the barn's loft wall. Not easy; it hadn't been open in—no, he didn't want to count years right now. The eddies of time weren't his best friends at the moment. The backwashes

“What do you want?” he asked as he reached into the metal cubbyhole behind the panel of century-old barnwood. He was quite aware of the guilty hesitation on the other end of the frequency when McCoy didn't answer right away.

"I thought you might want company for dinner.”

“That's the best excuse you've got?”

"Well, it's hard to come up with a shipboard emergency hanging here in spacedock, you know. Dangling a juicy stuffed Cornish hen dinner in front of you was all I could come up with. I'm a surgeon, not a not a
damn, I can't think of anything.”

“Then you have something to keep you busy,” Kirk said sharply. “There are some days when a man doesn't want to be cheered up. Kirk out.”

He flipped the grid closed and stuffed the communicator and everything it represented back into his pocket. In his mind he saw McCoy's squarish face skewered with helpless empathy and knew he'd been unfair, but everything was unfair. Where was it written that a starship captain always had to be the exception? This wasn't his day to be exceptional. Today he wanted to be what he remembered himself as—a tough curly-haired blond kid with big aspirations and a painfully realistic edge to his imagination. He knew that if he looked out the loft door he'd see his mother peeking out the farmhouse window like she had during his entire boyhood, wondering what her son was thinking and not having the nerve to come out and ask. Either that or she just had more respect for his privacy than McCoy did.

No surprise. Bacteria had more respect for privacy than McCoy did.

Kirk shook away an urge to glance over his shoulder and reached into the hidden metal box inside the loft wall. Carefully he pulled out an uneven bundle of letters, ragged and yellowed, a bundle of Starfleet notepaper preserved only with a child's obsessive care for something particularly precious. His lips curled up on one side as he ran his thumb across the discolored ink of a handwritten line.

“Stone knives and bearskins,” he murmured. His throat closed around any further comment, embarrassing him in front of himself and making him glad he was alone. He straightened up—certainly one thing that had been easier twenty-five years ago—strode through old hay to the loft door, and sat down in a wedge of sunlight with the bundle of notepaper.

The sunlight on his face, real sunlight, made the natural ruddiness rise in his cheeks again. He could feel the color seep back into his skin, aware of how pale starship duty sometimes made him in spite of special whole-spectrum artificial lighting with all its pretense of sunlight. Like pills instead of solid food. The same, but not. Maybe that was because starship lighting had no warmth.

Starship how could a word so beautiful seem so sinister to him now? It hadn't been the ship's fault, this tragedy that crushed him to the Earth's surface like sudden gravity. It hadn't been McCoy's fault, though McCoy felt otherwise. It hadn't been Spock's fault, though Spock hadn't been able to help no matter how much he wanted to.
So, it must be my own fault. My fault, because I earned command. And for my reward, I pay.

Squinting in the bright daylight, he divided the pile in two, just for the sake of mystery, then picked up a letter and started reading.

“No,” Kirk sighed, “it's not. But I probably wasn't listening anyway.” He leaned back on the gray barnwood and crossed his ankles, then indulged in a sip of the coffee he'd brought out here with him. Doused with honey and milk like his aunt used to make for him when she thought he was too young to take coffee black, it was more of a liquid candy bar than coffee. The taste of nostalgia.

He tipped the crusty letter away from the sun and spoke to the handwriting.

“Keep talking. I'm listening now.”

THE SECURITY COMMANDER set his pen down and spun the sensor camera roller, then gazed up at the row of monitors. Each monitor was carefully positioned so that he got a clear view of his own reflection, and it was a damned annoyance to always have to be looking past that fellow with the rusty red hair and the stern expression that reminded him of bleached-out dreams. He blinked to clear the reflection from his mind, and looked past it to the views of the monitors, each of which showed a different compartment, lab or lounge on the starbase. At two o'clock in the simulated night, things were quiet. At least temporarily.

The officer set the computer sentry on automatic survey, picked up his pen, and went back to his writing while he had the chance.

“Don't make it a sad letter, George.”

George looked up into Lt. Francis Drake Reed's eyes, eyes shaded by an awning of umber hair that reflected his West Indies heritage. Drake was doing his priest thing again, but this time it was no sham.

“How do you know it's a sad letter?” George asked, burying the sudden shiver that ran down his arms.

Drake sat on the console and gazed down at him. “I see your face.”

George's complexion, normally peach-pale, flushed russet. “Hang you.”

“End the letter before it gets sad, George,” Drake pressed.

For a moment, George's eyes grew cold as rocks, and his brows flattened over them.
Don't tamper with my privacy
, they warned.
It's all I have.