Star Trek: Duty, Honor, Redemption (21 page)

“How can you say that? Isn’t it obvious? We weren’t together, and there was no way we were ever going to be! I never had any illusions about it, and to give you your due you never tried to give me any. You have your world, and I have mine. I wanted David in my world.” She let go of Jim’s hand. She had always admired his hands: they were square and strong. “If he’d decided to go chasing through the universe on his own, I’d have accepted it. But I couldn’t have stood having you come along when he was fourteen and say, ‘Well, now that you’ve got him to the age of reason, it’s time for him to come along with his father.’ His father—someone he’d never known except as a stranger staying overnight? Jim, that was the only possibility, and that’s
too late
to start being a father! Besides, fourteen-year-olds have no business on a starship, anyway.”

He stood up, walked away from her, and pressed his hands and forehead against the wall as if he were trying to soak up the coolness and calmness of the very stone.

“You don’t need to tell me that,” he said. His shoulders were slumped, and she thought he was about to cry. She wanted to hold him; yet she did not want to see him cry.

“David’s a lot like you, you know,” she said, trying to lighten her own mood as much as Jim’s. “There wasn’t much I could do about that. He’s stubborn, and unpredictable—Of course, he’s
smarter
—that goes without saying….” She stopped; this attempt at humor was falling even flatter than the other.

“Dammit,” she said, “does it matter? We’re never going to get out of here.”

Jim did not respond. He knelt down beside Pavel and felt his pulse. He avoided Carol’s gaze.

“Tell me what you’re feeling,” she said gently.

He sounded remote and sad; Carol tried to feel angry at him, but could not.

“There’s a man who hasn’t seen me for fifteen years who thinks he’s killed me,” Jim said. “You show me a son who’d be glad to finish the job. Our son. My life that could have been, but wasn’t. Carol, I feel old, and worn out, and confused.”

She went to him and stretched out her hand. “Let me show you something. Something that will make you feel young, as young as a new world.”

He glanced at Chekov. Carol was not a medical doctor, but she knew enough about human physiology to be able to see that the young commander was sleeping peacefully.

“He’ll be all right,” she said. “Come on. Come with me.”

He took her hand.

She led him toward Genesis.

Unwillingly Jim followed Carol deeper into the caverns. The overhead light-plates ended, and they proceeded into darkness. Carol slid her free hand along the cave wall to guide them. Jim soon realized that it was not as completely dark as it should have been, underground and without artificial illumination. He could see Carol. The reflected light glinted off her hair.

The light grew brighter. With the sensitivity of someone who spent most of his time in artificial light and beneath alien stars, who valued what little he saw of sunlight, Jim knew, without question, that the glow ahead of him was that of a star very like the Sun.

He glanced at Carol. She smiled, but gave no word of explanation.

Without meaning to, Jim began to walk faster. As the light intensified, as its quality grew clearer and purer, he found himself running.

He plunged from the mouth of the cave and stopped. Carol joined him on the edge of a promontory.

Jim Kirk gasped.

His eyes were still dark-adapted: the light dazzled him. The warm breeze ruffled his hair, and he smelled fresh earth, flowers, a forest. A rivulet tumbled down the cliff just next to him, casting a rainbow mist across his face.

A forest stretched into the distance, filling the shell of the lifeless planetoid that had been Regulus I. It was the most beautiful place he had ever seen, a storybook forest from children’s tales. The gnarled trees showed immense age and mystery. The grass in the meadow at the foot of the cliff was as smooth and soft as green velvet, sprinkled with wildflowers of delicate blue and violent orange. Where the shadow of the forest began, Jim half expected to glimpse a flash of white, a unicorn fleeing his gaze.

He looked at Carol, who leaned against the cliff next to the tunnel entrance, her arms folded. She smiled.

“You did this in a day?” Jim said.

“The matrix forms in a day. The lifeforms take a little longer. Not much, though.” She grinned. “Now do you believe I can cook?”

He gazed out, fascinated at her world. “How far does it go?”

“All the way around,” she said. “The rotation of the planet gives us some radial acceleration to act in place of gravity, to probably forty-five degrees above and below the equator. I expect things get a little strange out at the poles.” She pointed past the sun. “A stress field keeps the star in place. It’s an extreme variable; twelve hours out of twenty-four, it dims down to give some night. Makes a very pretty moon.”

“Is it all…this beautiful?”

“I don’t know, Jim. I haven’t exactly had a chance to explore it, and it’s a prototype, after all. Things always happen that you don’t expect. Besides, the whole team worked on the design.” Her tone grew very sad. “Vance drew the map; his section had a note at the far border, way up north, that said ‘Here be dragons.’ Nobody ever knew if he was kidding or not. Or—maybe Del did.” Carol’s voice caught; Jim almost could not hear her. “Vance said, once, that it wasn’t worth making something up that was so pretty and safe if it was insipid.”

She started to cry. Jim took her in his arms and just held her.

In the storage bay of
Reliant,
Khan completed his inspection of the massive Genesis torpedo. He had tapped its instruction program; though the mechanism itself was complex, both the underlying theoretical basis and the device’s operation were absurdly simple.

He patted the sleek flank of the great machine. When he tired of ruling over worlds that existed, he would create new worlds to his own design.

Joachim came into the storage bay and stopped some distance from him.

“Impulse power is restored, my lord,” he said.

“Thank you, Joachim. Now we are more than a match for the poor
Enterprise.
”

“Yes, my lord.” His tone revealed nothing: no enthusiasm, no glory, not even any fear. Simply nothing.

Khan frowned.

“Joachim, have you slept?”

Joachim flinched, as if Khan had struck him.

“I cannot sleep, my lord.”

“What do you mean?”

Joachim suddenly shivered, and turned away.

“I
cannot
sleep, my lord.”

Khan watched his aide for a moment, shrugged, and strode out of the storage bay. Joachim followed more slowly.

On the bridge, Khan ordered the ship out of orbit. He had calculated carefully to put Regulus I between
Reliant
and the relative position the
Enterprise
must keep until it regained power. Foolish of Mister Spock to transmit the ship’s vulnerability to any who could hear.

Regulus I’s terminator slid past beneath them, and they probed into the actinic light of Regulus.

“Short-range sensors.”

Joachim obeyed. Khan brought the display to the forward viewscreen and frowned. There was Spacelab, broached and empty.
Enterprise
should have been drifting dead nearby in a matching orbit.

It was nowhere to be found.

“Long-range sensors.”

And still nothing. Khan stood up, his fists clenched.

“Where are they?”

In the Genesis cave, Saavik accompanied Doctor McCoy back into the rock caverns. Pavel Chekov had to be moved to where he could be made more comfortable. David Marcus came along to help. They improvised a litter and carried Chekov out of the caverns.

They made the climb down the cliff with some difficulty, but arrived safely in the meadow below. Doctor McCoy made a bed for his patient, who slept so soundly he barely seemed to breathe.

David Marcus lay down in the grass.

“I knew it would work,” he said. “If only…” He flung his arm across his eyes.

Saavik watched him curiously, if somewhat surreptitiously. David Marcus, it seemed, dealt with grief a good deal better than she did. In addition, despite his original denial, David had assimilated being introduced to his father with considerable grace.

Saavik doubted she would be able to say the same of herself. It would be an unimaginably dreadful event if anyone ever identified the Vulcan family to which one of her parents had belonged. If that ever happened, if they were somehow forced to acknowledge her, the only way either she or they could survive a meeting with honor and mind intact would be for her to kneel before them and beg their forgiveness for her very existence.

And if she ever encountered the Romulan who had caused her to be born…Saavik knew well the depths of violence of which she was capable. If she ever met that creature, she would give herself to the madness willingly.

David kept going over and over what had happened on Spacelab. Somehow he should have been able to
do
something; he should have known, despite Del’s reassurance, that his friends were in a lot more trouble than they could handle.

He was afraid he was about to go crazy.

He decided to pick some fruit from the cornucopia tree in the center of the meadow. He was not the least bit hungry, but at least that would give him something to do.

When he stood up, he felt Saavik’s gaze. He turned around and looked at her; she was staring so hard, or so lost in thought, that she hardly realized he had noticed what she was doing.

“What are
you
looking at?” he said belligerently.

She started and blinked. “The admiral’s son,” she said with matter-of-fact directness.

“Don’t you believe it!”

“I do believe it,” she said.

Unfortunately so do I,
David thought. If his mother had only been trying to keep Jim Kirk alive, she would hardly have kept up the deception after the fight. It was far too easy to prove parentage beyond any doubt with a simple antigen-scan. If McCoy couldn’t do it with the equipment in his medical pouch, then David could probably jury-rig an analyzer himself from the stuff they’d brought down from Spacelab. It was just because the proof was so easy that he did not see any point to doing the test. It would merely assure him of what he would rather not have known.

He shrugged it off. What difference did it make who his biological father was? Neither the man he had thought it was, who had died before he was born, nor the man his mother said it was, had ever had any part in his life. David could see no reason why that should change.

“What are
you
looking at?” Lieutenant Saavik said.

David, in his turn, had been staring without realizing it. He had always been fascinated by Vulcans. In fact, the one time he had met Jim Kirk, when he was a kid, he had been much more interested in talking to Kirk’s friend Mister Spock. David assumed it was the same Mister Spock whom Saavik had earlier been trying to contact. If David had to be civil to a member of Starfleet, he would a whole lot rather it be a science officer than a starship captain.

Funny he had not noticed before how beautiful Saavik was. Beautiful and exotic. She did not seem as cold as most Vulcans, either.

“I—” He stopped. He felt confused. “I don’t know,” he said finally.

Saavik turned away.

Damn,
David thought,
I insulted her or hurt her feelings or something.
He tried to reopen the conversation.

“I bet I know who I’m looking at,” he said. “Mister Spock’s daughter, right?”

She spun toward him, her fists clenched at her sides. He flinched back. He thought she was going to belt him. But she straightened up and gradually relaxed her hands.

“If I thought you knew what you were saying,” Saavik told him, “I would kill you.”

“What?”
he said. “Hell—trust a member of Starfleet to react like that. Try to give somebody a compliment, and look what you get.”

“A compliment!”

“Sure. Hey, look, there aren’t that many Vulcans in Starfleet; I figured you were following in your father’s footsteps or something.”

“Hardly,” she said, her voice and her expression chill. “You could not offer a worse insult to Captain Spock than to imply he is, or even could be, my father.”

“Why?” he said.

“I do not care to discuss it.”

“Why not? What’s so awful about you?”

“One of my parents was Romulan!” She spoke angrily.

“Yeah? Hey, that’s really interesting. I thought you were a Vulcan.”

“No.”

“You look like a Vulcan to me.”

“I neither look like a Vulcan nor behave like a Vulcan, as far as
other
Vulcans are concerned. I do not even have a proper Vulcan name.”

“I still don’t see why Mister Spock would be insulted because I thought you were his daughter.”

“Do you know anything about Vulcan sexual physiology?”

“Sure. What difference does that make? They still have to reproduce, even if they only try it every seven years.” David grinned. “Sounds pretty boring to me.”

“Many Romulans find Vulcans sexually attractive. Under normal conditions, a Vulcan would not respond. But the Romulans practice both piracy and abduction, and they have chemical means of forcing prisoners to obey.”

She paused. David could tell this was difficult for her, but he was fascinated.

“To lose the control of one’s own mind and body—this is the ultimate humiliation,” Saavik said. “Most Vulcans prefer death to capture by Romulans and seldom survive if they are driven to act in a way so alien to their natures. The chance that my Vulcan parent even lives is vanishingly small.”

“Oh,” David said.

“Romulans make a game of their cruelty. A few take the game so far as to father or conceive a child from their coercion, then compel the Vulcan woman to live long enough to bear it, or the Vulcan man to live long enough to witness its birth. That completes the humiliation and confers great social status on the Romulan.”

“Hey, look, I’m sorry,” David said. “I honestly didn’t mean to hurt your feelings or insult Mister Spock.”

“You cannot hurt me, Doctor Marcus,” Saavik said. “But as I am not entirely a Vulcan, it would be possible for me to hurt you. I would advise you to take care.”

She stood up and strode away.

Saavik paced through the meadow, wondering what had possessed her to tell David Marcus so much about her background. She had never volunteered the information to anyone else before, and she seldom spoke about it even to Mister Spock, who of course knew everything. The obvious explanation, that she had wanted to be certain Marcus would never speak in a completely offensive manner to Spock, failed to satisfy her. But she could think of no other.

She climbed down the bank to the edge of the stream, picked up a smooth rounded pebble, and turned it over and over in her hand. She marveled at the complexity of the Genesis wave. In a natural environment a water-worn pebble would take years to form.

She skipped the stone across the surface of the stream. It spun across the current and landed on the other side.

This was without doubt the most beautiful place Saavik had ever seen. It was all the more affecting because its beauty was neither perfect nor safe. She had heard, far in the distance, the howl of a wild animal, and she had seen the sleek shape of a winged hunter skim the surface of the forest. It was too far away for even Saavik to discern whether it was reptile or bird or mammal, or some type of animal unique to this new place.

The only thing wrong with it was that she was here against her will.

She took out her communicator and tried once again to reach the
Enterprise.
But either the signals were still being jammed or no one could answer. And Doctor McCoy was right, too: Mister Spock should by now have taken the ship and departed for a starbase. If he could.

She climbed the bank to return to the meadow.

Doctor Marcus, junior, lay on a hillock at the edge of the forest, staring meditatively at the sky and chewing on a blade of grass. The admiral, Doctor McCoy, and Doctor Marcus, senior, sat nearby under a fruit tree, picnicking on fruits and sweet flowers.

Saavik hesitated to invade their privacy, then recognized that if Doctor Marcus and Admiral Kirk wished to be alone, Doctor McCoy and David would have gone elsewhere. She started across the field toward them. She had several ideas she wanted to propose to the admiral. Anything would be better than standing idly by, in paradise or not, while the world they had come from dissolved into hell.

Admiral Kirk seemed so very calm and relaxed. As she neared the group, Saavik unfavorably compared her own reaction to the
Kobayashi Maru
simulation to Kirk’s composure in the face of real death or permanent exile.

Saavik wondered again how Lieutenant James Kirk had reacted to the simulation that had shaken her own assurance. Captain Spock had said Kirk’s solution was unique, and that she must ask the admiral herself if she wished to know what it was.

“That’s what I call a meal,” Kirk said.

“This is like the Garden of Eden,” Doctor McCoy said with wonder.

“Only here, every apple comes from the tree of knowledge,” Doctor Marcus said; then added, “with all the risk that implies.”

She leaned forward and put a bright red flower behind Admiral Kirk’s ear. He tried to stop her, but not very hard, and finally submitted.

Jim Kirk felt a bit silly with a flower stuck behind his ear. But he left it where it was, picked a handful of bright purple blossoms from a thick patch nearby, and began to braid them together into a coronet. Noticing Saavik’s approach—and her pensive expression—he motioned for her to join them.

“What’s on your mind, Lieutenant?”

“The
Kobayashi Maru,
sir,” she said.

“What’s that?” David asked.

Doctor McCoy explained. “It’s a training simulation. A no-win scenario that tests the philosophy of a commander facing death.”

“Are you asking me if we’re playing out the same story now, Lieutenant?” Jim picked another handful of flowers.

“What did you do on the test, Admiral?” Saavik asked. “I would very much like to know.”