Star Trek: Duty, Honor, Redemption (43 page)

Sulu thought of his magnificent new ship, up in Spacedock, waiting for him, nearly ready to fly. That was where he should be, not down here Earthbound, waiting for debriefings, waiting to testify, waiting to find out from Starfleet whether he had kept his nose clean enough to rate being given back his command.

They had no right to take it from me in the first place, he thought. But they did, and they made very clear the conditions under which I might hope to regain it.

Yokomen, tsuki, yokomen,
sweep and turn—

He lost the rhythm and the pattern. He stopped. He blotted the sweat from his forehead, from the sides of his face.

He weighed
Excelsior
against what James Kirk had asked of him. He weighed his ambitions against his allegiance; he weighed the future and the past.

He made a decision, without regret and without reservation.

He swirled back into the routine, moving lightly over the springy wet grass while the last fall roses perfumed the air. The pattern of his motions was smooth and pure, the way he hoped and tried to form his life.

Saavik ran through the steamy, humid glade, pushing aside rain-laden fronds that doused her with cascades of sun-warmed water. She followed the sound of the cry, pierced to her center by its despair. The tricorder in her hand beeped and clicked with life-sign readings, but she hardly glanced at it. Its data were superfluous.

She burst from the forest. It ended so abruptly that she stopped. David hurried up behind her, breathing hard.

“Not so fast,” he said between gasps. “We don’t know what that scream was.” He bent over to catch his breath. “It might be a predator—it might be one of Vance’s dragons.”

Saavik wondered who had designed this section of the landscape. Enormous cactuslike trees stretched bulbous fingers to the sky. On the rocky surface, gray, leathery succulents spread their thick leaves like wounded wings, soaking up the sun.

The ground quivered gently beneath Saavik’s feet. It was like a caress—but the illusion shattered when the pain-filled cry came again. Whatever made that sound experienced no pleasure from the trembling land.

Saavik strode forward, the gravel of the desert crunching beneath her boots and sliding beneath her heels. The rounded, waterworn stones made the surface treacherous and slippery and difficult to negotiate.

“Was this a ‘little joke’?” she said to David.

“What?”

“Waterworn stones, in a desert that has never seen water? False history, false geology.”

“We wanted to make it seem real,” David said. “Layered. Not as if everything were brand-new.”

“In that, you certainly succeeded.” The cacti might each have been a thousand years old. The succulents might have been left over from an earlier age, living fossils of the beginnings of evolution.

She continued deeper into the forest of cacti. The dryness was a relief after the oppressive humidity of the glade, but what glimpses she could get between the gnarled and looming trunks hinted at another abrupt change of climate.

A hundred meters farther on, the ground was covered with snow.

The rumble of a temblor surrounded her. She tensed—and the cry came yet again. She had been expecting it—

We hear the cry whenever the ground quakes, she thought. As if there were some direct connection…. But she amended her hasty deduction. She did not have enough data to draw a significant conclusion, and besides, the creature, the being, might simply be frightened by the earthquakes.

“Grissom
to ground party. What’s going on down there?”

Saavik stopped and flipped open her communicator.

“Saavik here, Captain. We have strong life sign readings, bearing zero-one-five. We are proceeding to investigate.”

“All right, Saavik, I concur…. But be advised that we
are
tracking a severe and unnatural age curve for the planet. The harmonic motion of the core is increasing in amplitude at a rate that is making me
very
nervous.”

Saavik covered the microphone of the communicator. David was staring in the direction of the snow, apparently ignoring her conversation with Captain Esteban.

“Do you have an explanation?”

“Later,” he said with an intensity that belied his outward indifference to Esteban’s information. He gestured impatiently. “Let’s
go!
” Without waiting, he started toward the snow-covered bluffs beyond the desert, moving away from her in more important ways than simple distance.

Saavik uncovered the communicator pickup. “
Grissom,
your message acknowledged. Will advise. Saavik out.”

She snapped shut the communicator and followed David across the desert. He had already passed beyond the limits of the twisted cactus trees. A breeze ruffled his curly golden hair. With every step he took the wind grew stronger. By the time Saavik reached the edge of the forest, the wind had begun to swirl flakes of dry snow against David’s feet. He was only about fifty meters ahead of her. She stepped out of the shelter of the cacti, into the whine of the wind. The temperature dropped precipitously, perhaps thirty degrees in as many paces. The wind howled past them.

David reached the first patch of solid snow, stopped, and gazed down at something. Saavik joined him. A trail of small, blurry footprints led from the edge of the snow and up the white-blanketed slope. The wind had obscured their outlines. A sudden flurry of snow threatened to bury them entirely.

The sky held no clouds. The snow was not falling; it was, rather, being carried by the wind from some other source. The icy, stinging flakes cut the visibility to almost nothing.

Saavik sat on her heels and looked closely at the vanishing footprints. She shook her head and rose to her feet.

“Those are not, I think, the tracks of
Sauriform Madisonii,
” she said. Neither, though, were they the tracks she had hoped to find.

In the Starfleet officers’ lounge, Jim Kirk feigned calm as he waited for Harry Morrow’s reply. Morrow stared silently out into the night, his reflection black on black against the wide expanse of the window that stretched seamlessly from one side of the lounge to the other. The Starfleet commander’s expression remained unreadable. Kirk forced himself not to clench his fists.

“No,” Morrow said finally. “Absolutely not, Jim. It’s out of the question.”

All the repressed tension fueled Kirk’s words. “Harry—Harry, I’m off the record now. I’m not speaking as a member of your staff. I’m talking about thirty years of service. I have to do this, Harry. It has to do with my honor—my life. Everything I put any value on.”

He cut off his plea when a steward stopped at his elbow with a tray, removed empty glasses, replaced them with full ones. Jim held himself silent. After an interminable time, the steward left.

“Harry—”

“Jim,” Morrow said carefully, “you are my best officer, and if I
had
a best friend, you’d be that, too. But I am Commander, Starfleet, so I don’t break rules.”

“Don’t quote rules, Harry! We’re talking about loyalty! And sacrifice! One man who died for us, another at risk of deep—permanent—emotional damage—”

“Now, wait a minute!” Morrow said. “This business about Spock and McCoy and mind-melds and—honestly, I have never understood Vulcan mysticism. Nor do I understand what you hope to accomplish—I’m sorry! I don’t want you to make a fool of yourself. Understand?”

“Harry, you don’t have to
believe.
I’m not even sure
I
believe. But if there’s even a chance that Spock has an…an eternal soul—then that is
my
responsibility.”

“Yours!”

“As surely as if it were my own.” He leaned forward. “Harry, give me back the
Enterprise!
With Scotty’s help—”

“No, Jim! The
Enterprise
would never stand the pounding.”

Kirk realized that Morrow had not understood a word he had said all evening. Harry did not believe him and did not trust him. Worse, he would not permit him to draw on a thirty years’ friendship to help him complete a task that bound him as strongly as any Starfleet mission he had ever undertaken.

“You’ve changed, Harry,” he said with anger and contempt. “You used to be willing to take some risks.”

“I used to have different responsibilities than I have now,” Harry said sadly. “Jim, I’m not completely unsympathetic to your request, believe me. I’ll contact Esteban. If anything comes of…what
Grissom
has found on Genesis, I will of course order them to bring it back.”

“How long—?”

“At least six weeks.”

“Impossible. Harry, Leonard McCoy is being driven mad! He wasn’t properly prepared for what happened to him, he wasn’t trained—in six weeks the damage could be fatal!”

“You’re not dictating any terms here!
Grissom
’s mission is vital—we have to have the data on Genesis before we can make a decision about it! And you want me to order them to turn around and come straight back so you can—save a dead man’s soul? Can’t you see how that would sound? No. I’m sorry.”

“I repeat: give me back my ship.”

“I’m sorry, Jim. I can’t let you have the
Enterprise
.”

“Then I’ll find a ship—I’ll hire a ship!”

“Out of the question!” Morrow said again. “You can hire one—but you won’t get it anywhere near Genesis. The whole Mutara sector is under quarantine. No one goes there until the science team gets back, and probably not even then. Council’s orders.”

“Then let me speak to the Council!” Jim’s voice rose, so absorbed was he in the urgency of his quest. “Harry, please! I can make them understand!”

He realized that every person in the lounge was either staring at him or making a noticeable effort to avoid doing so. He drew back, forcing his temper back under control.

“No,
you
understand,” Morrow said. “You simply have no conception of the political realities of this situation. Tensions are strung so tight you could play them like a piano! The Council has its hands full trying to deal with delegations from both the Romulan and the Klingon Empires. My gods, Jim, can you imagine the repercussions if you go in there and announce your personal views on friendship and metaphysics?” He shook his head slowly, stroked the condensation in stripes down the side of his glass with his forefinger, and clenched his fist. “Jim—! Your life and your career stand for rationality, not intellectual chaos. Keep up this emotional behavior, and you’ll lose everything. You’ll destroy yourself!”

As one friend accused him of abandoning lifelong rationality because of a duty to another friend who had continually perceived him as totally illogical, Jim Kirk felt an almost hysterical urge to laugh.

“Do you hear me, Jim?”

Jim stared at him for a long time, searching for some way to respond to having been so irrevocably refused. He sagged back in his chair.

“Yes, I hear you,” he said. He truly was not sure if he had heard everything Harry Morrow had said to him, but it did not matter. He sighed. “I…just had to try.”

“Of course,” Morrow said. “I understand.”

Jim said nothing, certainly not,
No, you don’t, you don’t at all.

“Now take my suggestion, Jim,” Morrow said kindly. “Enjoy your leave—and let all this tension blow away.”

“You’re right,” Kirk said with reluctance. He picked up his glass and raised it to Morrow. “Thanks for the drink.”

“Any time.”

Jim set it back down without tasting it, rose, and walked from the lounge, eyes front. He was very much aware of Morrow, watching him with concern, very much aware of all the other senior Starfleet officers, deliberately avoiding him.

This was the world in which he had lived for thirty years, the world in which he always before felt comfortable and welcome. The palpable chill said: The pressure finally got to him, Jim Kirk finally cracked.

The rumors would fly across Starfleet at transwarp speed, grow, and take on a life of their own.

He left the lounge, stepping out into the terminal of the spaceport. Restrained conversation and low lights gave way to brilliant illumination and the hubbub of crowds. He felt more out of place here than he ever had on any alien world. He wondered if there was any place left for him at all.

He looked around, feeling conspicuous in his Starfleet uniform. Finally he found Sulu and Chekov. They were a hundred meters across the terminal, wearing civilian clothes and sitting together on a circular bench, people-watching. Chekov wore a jumpsuit of relatively severe tailoring, while Sulu wore jeans and sandals and an embroidered white Filipino festival shirt. Sulu saw Kirk first and nudged Chekov. They waited for him with elaborate casualness. Kirk glanced around carefully, looking for other Starfleet personnel. He wished he had asked the two younger officers to wait for him somewhere more private. The way things stood, the less they were seen with him the better. He needed their help, but with any luck he might be able to get them out of all this relatively unscathed.