The Autobiography of James T. Kirk (25 page)

Kodos the Executioner was dead, by his own child, by his own actions. His whole life he had never taken responsibility for his crimes, and it killed him in the end. I was reminded of Shakespeare’s King Lear: “We make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity.”

The quote also applied to me. Catching him had been my “necessity,” and I became a villain.

The
Enterprise
was falling into Psi 2000, an ancient, ice-covered planet in its death throes. We’d originally been sent to pick up a scientific party and watch the planet break up from a safe distance. Things didn’t go according to plan. The scientific party had all succumbed to a strange disease that made them lose their self-control. One of them, a crewman named Rossi, had turned off the life-support system, and then gotten in the shower with his clothes on, while they’d all frozen to death. When we got there, everyone had been dead for over a day, and our landing party brought the disease back to the
Enterprise.

The ship had quickly become, for lack of a better term, a nuthouse. A half-naked Sulu tried to stab me with a sword, and my new navigator, Kevin Reilly, literally turned off the engines. McCoy eventually found a cure, but not before we began to spiral into the planet’s atmosphere. There wasn’t enough time to turn the engines back on through the usual process. Our only hope was Spock: Could my brilliant science officer come up with a formula to “cold start” the engines? It was our last chance.

Spock, despite succumbing to the disease, came through. With Scotty’s help, they manually combined matter and antimatter, creating a controlled implosion that jump- started our engines. We pulled away from the dying world.

And the immense power sent us into a time warp. We travelled backward in time over seventy hours.

The importance of the discovery was initially lost on me, because I had also succumbed to the disease. It was a little like being drunk—it removed the perimeter I kept around myself. It had also brought to the front of my mind just how attached I’d become to the
Enterprise
. I had found something I was willing to commit everything to, but because it was an inanimate object, the ship could give nothing in return. It was a dark psychological moment: I loved something that couldn’t love me back. My science officer, however, was trying to make me see that we’d discovered something much more important than the heart of my relationship problems.

“This does open some intriguing prospects, Captain,” Spock said. He pointed out we could go back in time to any planet in any era.

“We may risk it someday, Mr. Spock,” I said, but I wasn’t really processing it. I told Sulu to lay in the course for our next destination. As he did, however, I thought of something.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Spock, it’s three days ago. That means Psi 2000 hasn’t broken up yet.”

“Yes,” he said. And then he understood what I was getting at. “The scientific party might still be alive—”

“Mr. Sulu, reverse course! Get us back to Psi 2000, maximum warp!”

We made it back and beamed down. They were all succumbing to the disease, but we found Rossi as he was turning off the life-support systems. I had to stun him with my phaser, but we stopped him, and saved them all. McCoy gave them the cure, and we got them back up to the ship, where we watched the breakup of Psi 2000 again, this time from a safe distance.

Some days we’d had our losses, but some days we had our wins.

The ship jerked violently. I checked the navigation sensors; we hadn’t even reached the center of the ion storm; it was going to get much worse. I became concerned that the eddies of the storm would pull us off course if the helm didn’t compensate.

“Hold on course, Mr. Hanson,” I said.

“Aye sir,” he said. “Natural vibration force two … force three …” Hanson, the beta shift helmsman, compensated for the force of the storm by reversing the starboard engine. He was not the man I wanted at the helm in the middle of an ion storm. He lacked confidence and experience, but I couldn’t relieve him now.

No one fully understood what caused ion storms, the magnetic conflagrations of ionic particles traveling at thousands of kilometers an hour. Their mystery was part of their sway. They caused terror in a starship crew and its captain; they felt malevolent. You would move the ship, and it felt like the storm was countering your moves, trying to swallow you whole. And its greatest power was this fear it caused, fear that might lead a captain to make a wrong decision.

I checked the board, then ordered engineering to increase thrust, and called the ion pod.

“Ion pod,” Ben Finney said. He sounded calm and confident. He’d been in the sensor pod during an ion storm before; he knew the orders were to gather as much sensor data as possible, but to get out before the pod itself gained a charge. It was a delicate balance, since navigating an ion storm without some data from the pod was almost impossible. Ion storms had been known to change their size by several million kilometers in a matter of minutes. The more data a ship had, the quicker it could find its way through.

“Stand by to get out of there, Ben,” I said. I looked down at the panel by my right hand. The yellow alert light flashed; when I hit red alert, that would be Ben’s signal to get out of the pod. I looked up, saw from the navigational sensors we were a third of the way through the storm.

“Steady as we go, Mr. Hanson,” I said.

“Outer hull pressure increasing,” Spock said.

“Natural vibration now force five,” Hanson said. “Force six …” The ship could take this increased vibration, but the faster we could get through the storm, the better. I checked the telemetry from the sensor pod; it was giving me a three-dimensional view of the storm on the navigational console. The
Enterprise
was a little blip; the computer projected our course forward. I made a quick calculation; we’d be through in less than three minutes on our current heading, but it was going to be a rough ride.

The ship jolted; now the shuddering became continuous.

“Natural vibration now force seven,” Hanson said, yelling above the din.

I looked down at my control pad and signaled red alert. Ben would know to get out of the pod.

The red alert klaxon was almost lost in the sound of the ship’s vibrations; it was being buffeted now like an empty tin cup on a tidal wave, the inertial dampeners straining to keep us all upright. I watched the board near Hanson; he wasn’t compensating enough.

“Helm, come right two degrees,” I said.

“Aye sir,” Hanson said. He initiated the change just before the ship was knocked hard. The inertial dampeners couldn’t work fast enough, and the ship lurched to the starboard. I was thrown from my chair. I saw Spock had tumbled near the helm. He clawed his way up to the control, and diverted more power to the dampeners so that the ship turned upright again. I helped Hanson back to his chair, then checked our course: still a few minutes from the edge of the storm. The whole bridge was shuddering. I felt a tide of panic, but regained control; my decisions were the right ones.

And then my mind went back to the pod. In a storm of this magnitude, if we lost any of our control circuits to a burnout, the ship would be dead. Seconds had passed; Finney had had plenty of time to get out. Everyone on the bridge was caught up in their work, eyes on their consoles, doing their jobs to keep the ship safe. And I did mine. I went back to my chair and pressed the jettison button. It flashed green. The pod was away.

Soon, the vibration began to subside, and the ship began to calm.

“Natural vibration force five … force four …” Hanson said, his voice cooling with each lower number.

“Sir,” Uhura said, “Mr. Finney has not reported in.” It was standard procedure for the officer manning the pod to check in immediately after he’d gotten out.

“Inform security, he could be injured,” I said, and got back to paying attention to getting the ship through the storm.

After a full day of searching, they didn’t find Finney. It was determined that he must have still been on the pod when I jettisoned it. It made no sense; he knew the risks, he knew once the red alert had sounded, he had to get out of there.

The truth of what happened made even less sense. A few weeks later, I watched playback from the ship’s log on a viewscreen. There was a closeup of my right hand, pressing the jettison button, but during the yellow alert, well before the ship was being torn apart.

And I was being court-martialed for it.

I sat facing Commodore Stone and three other command-grade officers in full dress, in the courtroom on Starbase 11. Their contention was that either I had some kind of mental lapse and panicked, jettisoning the pod earlier than I had to, or something far worse. The prosecution made the case that I’d grown to resent Ben Finney, and I used the opportunity to get rid of him.

But watching that viewscreen, looking at my hand jettisoning the pod much earlier than I remembered, I had to question my own memory. I knew how I felt about Ben: he was a pain in the ass, but he was also a good, reliable officer. The idea that I would kill him for such a petty reason was simply untrue and insulting. The theory that I had panicked was a little easier to take; I’d come close to panicking during the storm, but I held it together. I’d made the right decisions.

Except the playback of the log excerpt said otherwise. I looked guilty.

I wasn’t alone; I had a lawyer named Samuel Cogley. He was an older man, tough and well-read. He was obsessed with books, the old, bound kind. He seemed quaint to me, and during the trial there wasn’t much he could do in the face of the computer record. But it turned out his passion for the written word would end up saving my career.

Cogley had rested our case, just when Spock came into the courtroom with new evidence. Spock discovered that someone had tampered with the
Enterprise’s
computer. But because we’d rested our case already, the court didn’t have to hear it. That’s when Cogley showed his true value.

He made an impassioned speech about man fading in the shadow of the machine, losing our individual rights as our computer technology takes over our way of life. It was a speech that I imagine was relevant to humans of many ages, going all the way back those people who succumbed to the primitive Internet of the early 21st century. And it moved the court to hear the evidence.

The court reconvened on the
Enterprise.
Spock testified that the modification made to the computer was so subtle, only a programming expert could pull it off. There were only three people qualified in Spock’s view: him, me, and Ben Finney. It was then Cogley who made the seemingly outrageous assertion that Ben Finney had altered the log, after he supposedly died, to make it look like I’d killed him.

Which meant he had faked his death and was still hiding somewhere aboard the ship. With the ship’s sensors, we were able to prove that he was still alive.

Finney had lost his senses. He’d become obsessed with taking revenge on me for ruining his career. He was truly sick, and I had to find him myself. He was hiding in the ship’s engineering spaces. His twisted plan revealed, we fought, and he desperately tried to kill me, but was in no condition to take me on. In the end, he was on the deck, beaten and sobbing.

“Ben,” I said. “Why? You have a daughter and wife who love you.”

“No they don’t,” he said. “They don’t.”

He was ill, truly ill. I’d never seen it until now. I didn’t know if he’d been born with it, or if the circumstances of his life had created it, but either way, Ben was lost.