Star Trek: Duty, Honor, Redemption (53 page)

—but it reached him too late.

Saavik lay on the cold, rocky hillside. The effects of the stun beams were fading, yet she was barely able to move. The madness had possessed her, and now she must pay its price. Her rage had drained her of strength. David’s death had drained her of will. His blood stained her hands.

She forced herself to rise. The young Vulcan watched her, curious and impassive. His form was that of Spock, but the Spock she had known had never been indifferent to exhaustion or to grief. She stood up. David’s body was only a few paces away.

The sergeant snapped an order at her. She understood its sense, but chose to ignore it. The crew member she had tried to throttle leaped forward and struck her, knocking her down. Even the sound of his laughter was not enough to anger her now.

She staggered back up. The guard flung her to the ground again. Saavik lay still for a moment, digging her fingers into the cold earth, feeling the faint vibrations of the disintegrating world.

She pushed herself to her feet for a third time. The guard clenched his fist. But before he could attack, the sergeant grabbed his arm. The two glared at each other. The sergeant won the contest. Neither moved as Saavik took the few steps to David’s body and knelt beside him. She put her hand to his pallid cheek.

When David was near, she had always been aware of the easy and excitable glow of his mind. Now it had completely dissolved. He was gone. All she could ever do for him was watch his body through the night, as she had watched Peter and as she had watched Spock. On the
Enterprise
the ritual had been only that. But on this world his body was vulnerable to predators, indigenous or alien.

Saavik gazed into the twilight. If the
Enterprise
was in standard orbit, she should be able to locate it as a point of light in the sky. Working out the equations in her head forced her to collect her mind and concentrate her attention. When she was done she felt unreasonably pleased with herself.

Am I becoming irrational?
she wondered.
Under these conditions, feeling pleased at anything, much less at the solution of such a simple process, must surely be irrational.

She looked for the
Enterprise
in the spot she had calculated it should be.

She found the moving point of light.

And then—

The transporter beam ripped James Kirk from his ship and reformed him on the surface of Genesis. One after the other, McCoy, Sulu, Chekov, and Scott appeared around him, safe. They all waited, phasers drawn, prepared for pursuit. They had timed their escape closely. The enemy boarding party could have perceived the last glint of their transporter beam, could have tracked them by the console settings, and could have followed them. But they remained alone.

The air was cold and damp and heavy with twilight. All around, a hundred paces in all directions, iron-gray trees reached into the air, then twisted down, twining around each other like gigantic vines. They formed a wide circle around an area clear of trees but choked with tangled, spiny bushes. He took a step toward the forest, where he and his friends could find concealment, and where he would not be able to see the sky. But the thorns ripped into his clothing and hooked into his hands. The scratches burned as if they had been touched with acid. Jim stopped.

Unwillingly, he looked up.

Stars pricked the limpid royal blue with points of light. This system contained only a single planet and no moon. All its sky’s stars should be fixed, never changing their relationship to one another. But one, shining the dull silver of reflected light, moved gracefully across the starfield on its own unique path.

Slowly and delicately it began to glow. Its color changed from silver to gold. Then, with shocking abruptness, it exploded to intense blue-white. The point of motion expanded to a blazing, flaming disk, a sphere, a new sun that blotted out the stars.

Jim felt, or imagined, the radiation on his face, a brief burst of heat and illumination as matter and antimatter met and joined in mutual annihilation.

The
Enterprise
arced brilliantly from its orbit. For an instant it was a comet, but the gravity of the new world caught it and held it and drew it in. It would never again curve boldly close to the incandescent surface of a sun, never again depart the gentle harbor of Earth to sail into the unknown. The gravity of Genesis turned the dying ship from a comet to a falling star. It spun downward, trailing sparks and cinders and glowing debris. It touched the atmosphere, and it flared more brightly.

Just as suddenly as it appeared, it vanished. One moment the
Enterprise
was a glorious blaze, and the next the sky rose black and empty.

It seemed impossible that the stars should remain in their same pattern, for even fixed stars changed after an eternity.

“My gods, Bones…” he whispered. “What have I done?”

“What you had to do,” McCoy said harshly, his voice only partly his own. “What you’ve always done: turned death into a fighting chance to live.” He faced Jim squarely and grasped his upper arms. “Do you hear me, Jim?”

Jim stared at him, still seeing a flash of the afterimage of the new falling star, still feeling the death of his ship like sunlight searing his face. He took a deep breath. He nodded.

The tricorder Sulu carried had been reacting to the new world since the moment they appeared, but Sulu had barely heard it. Now it forced itself on his attention.

“Sir, the planet’s core readings are extremely unstable, and they’re changing rapidly—”

Kirk wrenched his attention to the immediate threat. “Any life signs?”

“Close.” He scanned with the tricorder. “There.”

“Come on!”

Kirk strode through the clearing toward the distorted trees. This time the thorns seemed to part for his passing.

The holographic viewer, which had blazed with light, hung dark and flat; the port looked out on empty space.

Kruge slowly realized how many blank seconds had passed during which he had failed to act, or even to react. The great ship which he had held in thrall had dissolved in his grasp.

Confused and uncertain, Maltz waited by the transporter controls. He had directed the beam to the landing party, touched them, held them—then nothing remained on which to lock.

Kruge was unable to believe what the alien admiral must have done.

“My lord,” Maltz said hesitantly, “what are your orders?”

My orders?
Kruge thought.
Do I retain the right to give orders? I underestimated him—a human being! He did the one thing I did not anticipate, the one thing I discounted. The one thing I would have done in his position.

“He destroyed himself,” Kruge said aloud.

“Sir, may I—?”

If I had known one of the prisoners was his son—if I had interrogated them before sacrificing one—!
Kruge flailed himself with his own humiliation.
Killing Kirk’s son was stupid! It made Kirk willing to die!

“We still have two prisoners, sir,” Maltz said with transparent concern, for he had received no real response from his commander, no acknowledgment of his presence or of their predicament, since the enemy ship exploded and died. “Perhaps their information—”

Kruge turned on him angrily. “They are useless! It was Kirk I needed, and I let him slip away.”

“But surely our mission has not failed!” Maltz exclaimed. They had come seeking Genesis; they retained two hostages who had some knowledge of it, perhaps enough to reproduce it. By his cowardly suicide, Kirk had abandoned them to their captors. Surely Kruge would not let one setback destroy him because of pride….

“Our mission is over,” Kruge said. “
I
have failed. A human has been bolder and more ruthless than I….” His eyes were empty. “
That
…is the real dishonor.”

—and then, the point of light that was the
Enterprise
flared into a nova and scattered itself across the sky.

Saavik gasped.

The ship vanished.

She felt the loss of other lives and dreams much more sharply than she felt the certainty of her own impending death. That did not seem to matter much anymore. It would have very little effect on the universe.

Spock cried out violently, foretelling an inevitable quaking of the planet. The night rumbled; the ground shook. In the distance, Genesis echoed Spock’s agony. Beyond the forest, a fault sundered the plain, splitting it into halves, then ramming the halves one against the other. One edge rose like an ocean wave, overwhelming and crushing the other, which subsided beneath it. The sheer faces of stone ground against each other with the power to form mountains.

A wash of illumination flooded ground and sky. A brilliant aurora echoed the earthquake lights, and ozone sharpened the air.

The planet was dying, as the
Enterprise
had died, as every person Saavik had ever cared about had died, as she expected, soon, to die.

Her guards turned away to gaze into the looming, sparkling curtains of the aurora. Even above the rumblings of the quake, Saavik could hear the electric sizzle of the auroral discharge. The guards watched and marveled. The under-tones of their voices revealed fear.

Instead of fading, the quake intensified. The massive trees rocked. The loud
snap!
of breaking branches reverberated across the hillside. The guards looked around, seeking some place where they might be safe and realizing no such place existed on this world.

The ground heaved. It flung a massive tree completely free, ripping it up by its roots and propelling it onto the bare promontory. The guards plunged out of its reach and stood huddled together, terrified, stranded between the clutching, grasping trees and the abyss.

The resonances of Genesis tortured Spock. Saavik touched David’s soft, curly hair one last time. She could do nothing for him, not even guard him till the dawn. This world would never see another sunrise.

She rose and picked her way across the ragged, trembling surface. Behind her the sergeant spoke into his communicator, a note of panic in his voice. Though Saavik could not understand the words, she could well imagine what he was saying.

Only static replied. Perhaps, when the
Enterprise
destroyed itself, it had destroyed the marauder as well. If that was true, then they were marooned down here after all.

Spock lay prone, shuddering, clenching his long fingers in the dirt. Saavik began to speak to him in Vulcan. If she could calm him enough to approach him, she might join with his mind and alleviate some of his pain.

So intent was she that she did not even hear the guard stride up behind her. He shoved her roughly aside. She stumbled on the broken ground.

“No!” she cried as the guard reached down to jerk Spock to his feet. “No, don’t touch him!”

She was too late.

He reached down and grabbed Spock’s arm. Spock reacted to the touch as if it burned. He leaped to his feet with a cry of pain and anger, lifted the guard bodily, and flung him through the air.

The guard smashed into a contorted tree with a wrenching crunch of broken bone. His body slid limply to the ground and did not move again.

As the sergeant drew his phaser, Saavik struggled to her feet.

“Be easy,” she said to Spock in Vulcan, “be easy, I can help you.”

Spock covered his face with his hands and cried out to the darkness in a long, wavering ululation. He had aged again, aged years, during the short time the guards had kept them apart. Saavik touched him gently, then enfolded him and held him. He was so intent on his own inner contortions that he did not even react.

The sergeant approached, his phaser held ready. He was frightened to the brink of ridding himself of his murderous prisoner, his commander’s wishes and ambitions be damned. Saavik glared at him over her shoulder. He would not reach Spock without going through her first.

A tetanic convulsion wracked Spock’s body, arching his spine and forcing from him a shuddering, anguished scream.

In the dark forest on the side of the mountain, Jim Kirk heard a shriek of agony. He redoubled his pace. He plunged up the steep slope. The faint trail wound between trees that would have done credit to Hieronymus Bosch. The scarlet aurora threw moving shadows across his path. Kirk struggled upward between whipping branches that moved far more violently than the plunging of the earth could account for.

Sulu paced him, with Chekov close behind. McCoy followed at a slightly greater distance. Kirk gasped for breath. The heavily ionized air burned in his throat.

He burst out into a clearing. Saavik stood in its center, supporting—someone—and a Klingon sergeant threatened her with a phaser.

“Don’t move!” Kirk cried.

The sergeant spun in astonishment, leading with his phaser. Kirk fired his own weapon. The beam flung the sergeant backwards. He hit the ground and did not move again.