Star Trek: Duty, Honor, Redemption (26 page)

Saavik armed the torpedo guidance control with the course she had so carefully worked out, and moved forward.

“We embrace the memory of our brother, our teacher.” Her words were inadequate, and she knew it. “With love, we commit his body to the depths of space.”

Commander Sulu moved from the line. “Honors:
hut.
”

The ship’s company saluted. Mister Scott began to play his strange musical instrument. It filled the chamber with a plaintive wail, a dirge that was all too appropriate.

The pallbearers lifted Spock’s black coffin into the launching chamber. It hummed closed, and the aiming lock snapped into place.

Saavik nodded an order to the torpedo officer. He fired the missile.

With a great roar of igniting propellant, the chamber reverberated. The bagpipes stopped. Silence, eerie and complete, settled over the room. The company watched the dark torpedo streak away against the silver-blue shimmer of the new world, until the coffin shrank and vanished.

Sulu waited; then said, “Return:
hut.
”

Saavik and the rest returned to attention.

“Lieutenant,” the admiral said.

“Yes, sir.”

“The watch is yours,” he said quietly. “Set a course for Alpha Ceti V to pick up
Reliant
’s survivors.”

“Aye, sir.”

“I’ll be in my quarters. But unless it’s an emergency…”

“Understood, sir.”

“Dismiss the company.”

He started out of the room. He saw Carol, but he could not say to her what he wanted to—not here, not now; he saw David, watching him intently. The young man took a step toward him.

Jim Kirk turned on his heel and left.

Saavik dismissed the company. She gazed one last time at the new planet.

“Lieutenant—”

She turned. David Marcus had hung back from the others, waiting for her.

“Yes, Doctor Marcus?”

“Can we stop the formality? My name’s David. Can I call you Saavik?”

“If you wish.”

“I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry about Mister Spock.”

“I, too,” she said.

“When we talked the other day—I could tell how much you cared about him. I’m sorry it sounded like I was insulting him. I didn’t mean it that way. To him or to you.”

“I know,” she said. “I was very harsh to you, and I regret it. Starfleet has brought you only grief and tragedy….”

David, too, glanced at the new planet, which his friends on Spacelab had helped to design.

“Yeah,” he said softly. “I’ll miss those folks, a
lot.
It was such a damned waste….”

“They sacrificed themselves for your life, as Spock gave himself for us. When I took the
Kobayashi Maru
test—” She paused to see if David remembered the conversation, back on Regulus I. He nodded. “—Admiral Kirk told me that the way one faces death is at least as important as how one faces life.”

David looked thoughtful, and glanced the way James Kirk had gone, but of course his father had long since departed.

“Do you believe, now, that he is your father?” Saavik asked.

He started. “No. Maybe. I don’t know.”

Saavik smiled. “We perhaps have something in common, David. Do you remember what
you
said to
him?
”

“When?”

“When you tried to kill him. You called him, if my memory serves me properly, a ‘dumb bastard.’ ”

“I guess I did. So?”

“He is not—to my knowledge—a bastard. But I am. And if Admiral Kirk
is
your father, then I believe the terminology, in its traditional sense, fits you as well.”

He stared at her for a moment, then laughed. “I’m beginning to think the ‘dumb’ part fits me even better.”

He reached out quickly and touched her hand.

“I really want to talk to you some more,” he said suddenly. “But there’s something I have to do first.”

“I must return to the bridge,” Saavik said. “It is my watch.”

“Later on—can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

“That would be difficult: one cannot buy anything on board the
Enterprise.
”

“Sorry. That was kind of a joke.”

“Oh,” Saavik said, not understanding.

“I just meant, can we get together in a while? When you’re free?”

“I would like that,” Saavik said, rather surprised at her own reply and remembering what Mister Spock had said about making her own choices.

“Great. See you soon.”

He hurried down the corridor, and Saavik returned to the bridge.

The admiral closed the door of his cabin behind him and leaned against it, desperately grateful that the ceremony was over. He wondered what Spock would have thought of it all: the ritual, the speeches…. He would have said it was illogical, no doubt.

Jim Kirk unfastened his dress jacket, pulled it off, and pitched it angrily across the room. He dragged a bottle of brandy off the shelf and poured himself a shot. He glared at the amber liquor for a while, then shoved it away.

Too many ghosts hovered around him, and he did not want to draw them any closer by lowering his defenses with alcohol. He flung himself down on the couch. The blanket Carol had tucked around him the night before lay crumpled on the floor.

He smelled the pleasant, musty odor of old paper. He tried to ignore it, failed, and reached for the book Spock had given him. It was heavy and solid in his hands, the leather binding a little scuffed, the cut edges of the pages softly rough in his hands. Jim let it fall open. The print blurred.

He dug into his pockets for his glasses. When he finally found them, one of the lenses was shattered. Jim stared at the cracked, spidery pattern.

“Damn!” he said. “Damn—” He laid the book very carefully on the table; he laid the glasses, half-folded, on top of it.

He covered his eyes.

The door chimed. At first he did not move; then he sat up, rubbed his face with both hands, and cleared his throat.

“Yes,” he said. “Come.”

The door opened. David Marcus came in, and the door slid closed behind him. Jim stood up, but then he had nowhere to go.

“Look, I don’t mean to intrude—” David said.

“Uh, no, that’s all right, it’s just that I ought to be on the bridge.”

David let him pass, but before Jim got to the door his son said, “Are you running away from me?”

Jim stopped and faced David again.

“Yes,” he said. “I guess I am.” He gestured for him to sit. David sat on the couch, and Jim sat in the chair angled toward it. They looked at each other uncomfortably for a while.

“Would you like a drink?” Jim asked.

David glanced at the abandoned snifter of brandy on the table; Jim realized how odd it must look.

“No,” David said. “But thanks, anyway.”

Jim tried to think of something to say to the stranger in his sitting room.

“I’m not exactly what you expected, am I?” David said.

“I didn’t
expect
anything,” Jim told him ruefully.

David’s grin was crooked, a little embarrassed. “That makes two of us.” His grin faded. “Are you okay?”

“What do you mean?”

“Lieutenant Saavik was right…You’ve never faced death.”

“Not like this,” Jim admitted reluctantly. “I never faced it—I cheated it; I played a trick and felt proud of myself for it and got rewarded for my ingenuity.” He rubbed his eyes with one hand. “I know
nothing,
” he said.

“You told Saavik that how we face death is at least as important as how we face life.”

Jim frowned. “How do you know that?”

“She told me.”

“It was just words.”

“Maybe you ought to listen to them.”

“I’m trying, David.”

“So am I. The people who died on Spacelab were friends of mine.”

“I know,” Jim said. “David, I’m truly sorry.”

The uncomfortable silence crept over them again. David stood up.

“I want to apologize,” he said. “I misjudged you. And yesterday, when you tried to thank me—” He shrugged, embarrassed. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” Jim said. “You were perfectly correct. Being proud of someone is like taking some of the credit for what they do or how they act. I have no right to take any of the credit for you.”

He, too, stood up, as David appeared to be leaving.

“Then maybe I shouldn’t—” David stopped. Then he said, very fast, “What I really came here to say is that
I’m
proud—proud to be your son.”

Jim was too startled to reply. David shrugged and strode toward the door.

“David—”

The young man swung abruptly back. “What?” he said with a harsh note in his voice.

Jim grabbed him and hugged him hard. After a moment, David returned the embrace.

On the bridge of the
Enterprise,
Lieutenant Saavik checked their course and prepared for warp speed. The viewscreen showed the Genesis world slowly shrinking behind them. Doctor McCoy and Doctor Marcus, senior, watched it and spoke together in low tones. Saavik worked at concentrating hard enough not to notice what they were saying. They were discussing the admiral, and it was quite clearly intended to be a private conversation.

The bridge doors opened. Saavik, in the captain’s chair, glanced around. She stood up.

“Admiral on the bridge!”

“At ease,” Jim Kirk said quickly. David Marcus followed him out of the turbolift.

Doctor McCoy and Carol Marcus glanced at each other. McCoy raised one eyebrow, and Carol gave him a quick smile.

“Hello, Bones,” Kirk said. “Hi, Carol….” He took her hand and squeezed it gently.

“On course to Alpha Ceti, Admiral,” Saavik said. “All is well.”

“Good.” He sat down. “Lieutenant, I believe you’re acquainted with my…my son.”

“Yes, sir.” She caught David’s gaze. He blushed a little; to Saavik’s surprise, she did too.

“Would you show him around, please?”

“Certainly, sir.” She ushered David to the upper level of the bridge. When they reached the science officer’s station, she said to him, softly, straight-faced, “I see that you did, after all, turn out to be a bastard.”

James Kirk heard her and stared at her, shocked.

“That is a…‘little joke,’ ” she said.

“A private one,” David added. “And the operative word is ‘dumb.’ ”

Saavik smiled; David laughed.

Jim Kirk smiled, too, if a bit quizzically.

McCoy leaned on the back of the captain’s chair, gazing at the viewscreen.

“Will you look at that,” he said. “It’s incredible. Think they’ll name it after you, Doctor Marcus?”

“Not if I can help it,” she said. “
We’ll
name it. For our friends.”

Jim thought about the book Spock had given him. He was remembering a line at the end: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.” He could not quite imagine Spock’s questing spirit finally at rest.

Carol put her hand on his. “Jim—?”

“I was just thinking of something…. Something Spock tried to tell me on my birthday.”

“Jim, are you okay?” McCoy asked. “How do you feel?”

“I feel…” He thought for a moment. The grief would be with him a long time, but there were a lot of good memories, too. “I feel young, Doctor, believe it or not. Reborn. As young as Carol’s new world.”

He glanced back at Lieutenant Saavik and at David.

“Set our course for the second star to the right, Lieutenant. ‘The second star to the right, and straight on till morning.’ ”

He was ready to explain that that, too, was a little joke, but she surprised him.

“Aye, sir.” Saavik sounded not the least bit perplexed. She changed the viewscreen; it sparkled into an image of the dense starfield ahead. “Warp factor three, Helm Officer.”

“Warp three, aye.”

The
Enterprise
leaped toward the distant stars.

The needs of the one

Spock was dead.

The company of the
Enterprise
gathered together on the recreation deck to remember their friend.

Doctor Leonard McCoy, ship’s surgeon, moved half a pace into the circle. As he raised his glass in a final toast, he glanced at each of his compatriots in turn.

Admiral James Kirk and Doctor Carol Marcus stood on either side of Carol’s grown son, David Marcus. David was Jim’s son, as well, unknown until now, but now acknowledged.

Commander Uhura, Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott, Commander Pavel Chekov, and Hikaru Sulu, recently promoted to commander, had clustered together along one arc of the circle. Every member of the ship’s company showed the strain of the harrowing past few days, except Lieutenant Saavik. Her Vulcan training required her to be imperturbable, and so she appeared. If her Romulan upbringing gave her the capacity to feel grief or loss or anger at the death of Spock, her teacher, McCoy could see no shadow of the emotions.

McCoy had known the rest of the ship’s company, the trainees, only a short time, not even long enough to learn their names. He knew for sure only that they were terribly young.

“To Spock,” McCoy said. “He gave his life for ours.”

“To Spock,” they replied in unison, except for Jim, who brought his attention back to the ship from some other time, some other place, a thousand light-years distant.

A moment after the others had spoken, he said, “To Spock.”

Everyone else drank. McCoy put his glass to his lips. The pungent odor of Kentucky bourbon rose around his face. He grimaced. The liquor was raw and new, straight out of the ship’s synthesizer. He had nothing better. The
Enterprise
’s mission had been an emergency, an unexpected voyage into tragedy, and Leonard McCoy had come most poorly prepared.

He lowered the drink without tasting it.

“To Peter,” Montgomery Scott said. His young nephew, Cadet Peter Preston, had also died in the battle that took Spock’s life. Scott made as if to say more, could not get out the words, and instead drained his glass in one gulp. Again, McCoy could not bring himself to choke down any liquor.

When all the glasses had been refilled, David Marcus stepped forward.

“To our friends on Spacelab,” he said.

McCoy pretended to drink. He felt as if the alcohol fumes alone were making him drunk.

When no one else came forward to propose a toast, the quiet circle dissolved into small groups. Almost everyone had begun to feel the effects of the liquor, but the drinking was a futile effort to numb their grief.

Whose stupid idea was it to have a wake, anyway? McCoy wondered. Who thought this would help? And then he remembered, Oh, right, it was me and Scott.

He orbited the serving table. It gleamed with an array of bottles. He picked one up, paying little attention to what it was, and filled another glass. McCoy and Scott had spent all day preparing for the wake. The synthesizer had tried to keep up with their programming, but it was badly overloaded. Ethyl alcohol was a simple enough chemical, but the congeners any decent liquor required were foreign to the ship’s data banks. Everything smelled the same: strong and rough.

Montgomery Scott beetled toward McCoy, stopped, and gazed blankly at the table full of half-emptied bottles. McCoy picked one at random and handed it to the ship’s chief engineer.

“That’s scotch,” he said. “Or anyway, close enough.”

Scott’s eyes were glazed with exhaustion and grief.

“I recall a time, when the lad was nobbut a bairn, that he…” Scott stopped, unable to continue the story. “I recall a time when Mister Spock…” He stopped again and drank straight from the bottle, choking on the first gulp, but swallowing and swallowing again. Obsession and compulsion drove him. He and McCoy had planned the wake and insisted on holding it, though it was foreign to the traditions of most of the people on board and quite alien to the traditions of one of its subjects.

“This isna helping, Doctor,” Scotty said. “I canna bear it any longer.”

McCoy climbed onto a chair. Looking down, he hesitated. The deck lay ridiculously far away and at a strange angle, as if the artificial gravity had gone on the blink. McCoy steadied himself and stepped up on the table, placing his feet carefully between bottles bright with amber. Then he remembered an alien liquor called “amber” by Earth people. He had not ordered it from the synthesizer because it required the inclusion of an alien insect to bring out its fullest flavor, like the worm in tequila. McCoy felt vaguely sick.

His foot brushed one of the bottles—quite gently, he thought—and the bottle crashed onto its side. It spun around and its contents gurgled out, spilling across the table, splashing on the floor. McCoy ignored it.

“This is a wake, not a funeral!” he said, then stopped, confused. Somehow that sounded wrong. He started again. “We’re here to celebrate the lives of our friends—not to mourn their deaths!” Everyone was looking at him. That bothered him until he thought, Why did you get up on the table, if you didn’t want everyone to look at you?

“Grief,” McCoy said slowly, “is not logical.”

“Bones,” Jim Kirk said from below and slightly behind him, “come down from there.”

Even in his odd mental state, McCoy could hear the edge in Kirk’s voice. Twenty years of friendship, and Kirk was still perfectly capable of pulling rank. McCoy turned and staggered. Jim grabbed his forearm and tightened his grip more than necessary.

“Whatever possessed you to say such a thing?” Kirk said angrily. Even the anger was insufficient to hide the pain.

“Don’t know what you mean,” McCoy said. Permitting Admiral Kirk to help him, he stepped down from the table with careful dignity.

David Marcus had inherited his mother’s tolerance for alcohol. He had drunk several shots of some concoction as powerful and as tasteless as Everclear. Despite a certain remoteness to his perceptions, he felt desperately sober. His hands remained rock-steady, and his step was sure.

McCoy and Scott had insisted, cajoled, ordered, and bullied until nearly the whole ship’s company congregated in the recreation hall for this ridiculous wake. Alone or in pairs, people stood scattered throughout the enormous chamber. Across the room, Doctor McCoy and Admiral Kirk exchanged words. Kirk looked both angry and concerned. McCoy adopted a belligerent air.

They’re both completely pickled,
David thought.
Fixed like microscope slides. James T. Kirk, hero of the galaxy, is drunk. My illegitimate father is drunk.

David had not yet quite come to terms with the recent revelation of his parentage.

“Doctor Marcus—”

David started. He had been so deep in thought that he had not noticed Commander Sulu’s approach.

“It’d probably be easier if everybody just called me David,” he said.

“David, then,” Sulu said. “I understand that I owe you some thanks.”

David looked at him blankly.

“For saving my life?” Sulu said, with a bit of a smile.

David blushed. He automatically glanced at Sulu’s hands, which had been badly seared by the electrical shock from which David had revived him. The artificial skin covering the burns glistened slightly.

Sulu turned his hands palm-up. “This comes off in a couple of days—there won’t even be any scars.”

“I almost killed you,” David said.

“What?”

“It’s true I did resuscitation on you. It’s also true that I did it wrong. I’d never done it before. I’m not a medical doctor, I’m only a biochemist.”

“Nevertheless, I’m alive because of what you did. Whether you erred or not, you kept me from death or brain damage.”

“I still screwed up.”
Like I may have screwed up everything I’ve done for the last two years,
David thought

“It might not matter to you,” Sulu said. “But it makes some difference to me.” He turned away.

David blushed again, realizing how churlish and self-centered he had sounded. “Commander…uh…” He had no idea how to apologize.

Sulu stopped and faced David again.

“David,” he said, carefully and kindly, “I want to give you some advice. When we get back to Earth, you and your mother are going to be the center of some very concentrated attention. Some of it will be critical, some of it will be flattering. At first you’ll think the abuse is the hardest thing to take. But after a while, you’ll see that handling compliments gracefully is an order of magnitude more difficult.” He paused.

David looked at the floor, then raised his head and met Sulu’s gaze.

“But I need to learn to do it?” David asked.

“Yes,” Sulu said. “You do.”

“I’m sorry,” David said. “I really am glad you’re okay. I didn’t mean to sound indifferent. After they took you to sickbay I realized I’d done the procedure wrong. I didn’t know if you’d make it.”

“Doctor Chapel assures me that I’ll make it.”

David noticed that Sulu avoided mentioning McCoy, but thought better of saying so. He had stuck his foot in his mouth far enough for one day.

“I’m glad I could do something,” David said.

Sulu nodded and walked away. David had not noticed if Sulu drank during the toasts, but the commander appeared to be completely sober.

He might be the only sober person on the ship right now,
David thought.

But then David saw Lieutenant Saavik, all alone, watching the party without expression. He watched her, in turn, for several minutes. Back on Regulus I, she had told him that Spock was the most important influence in her life. He had rescued her from the short, brutal life that a halfbreed child on an abandoned Romulan colony world could look forward to. Spock had overseen her education. He had nominated her to a place in the Starfleet Academy. He was, David supposed, the nearest thing she had to a family. That was a delicate subject. She seldom discussed how the cross that produced her must have come about.

David walked up quietly behind her.

“Hello, David,” she said, without turning, as he opened his mouth to speak.

“Hi,” he said, trying to pretend she had not startled him with her preternatural senses. “Can I get you a drink?”

“No. I never drink alcohol.”

“Why not?”

“It has an unfortunate effect on me.”

“But that’s the whole point. It would help you loosen up. It would help you forget.”

“Forget what?”

“Grief. Sadness. Mister Spock’s death.”

“I am a Vulcan. I experience neither grief nor sadness.”

“You’re not all Vulcan.”

She ignored the comment. “In order to forget Mister Spock’s death, David, I would have to forget Mister Spock. That, I cannot do. I do not wish to. Memories of him are all around me. At times it is as if he—” She stopped. “I will not forget him,” she said.

“I didn’t mean you should try. I just meant that a drink might make you feel better.”

“As I explained, its effects on me are not salutary.”

“What happens?”

“You do not want to know.”

“Sure I do. I’m a scientist, remember? Always on the lookout for something to investigate.”

She looked him in the eye and said, straight-faced, “It causes me to regress. It permits the Romulan elements of my character to predominate.”

David grinned. “Oh, yeah? Sounds interesting to me.”

“You would not like it.”

“Never know until you try.”

“Have you ever met a Romulan?”

“Nope.”

“You are,” she said drily, “quite fortunate.”

Carol Marcus felt very much alone at Mister Spock’s wake. She sat on the arm of a couch, concealed by the subdued light and shadows of a corner of the room. She felt grateful for the translucent wall that alcohol put between her and the other people, between her and her own emotions. She knew that the purpose of a wake was to release emotions, but she held her grief in tight check. If she loosed it, she was afraid she would go mad.

The pitiful gathering insulted the memory of her friends more than exalting it. Perhaps Mister Scott and Doctor McCoy believed it adequate for Captain Spock and Mister Scott’s young nephew. But the mourning of a few veteran Starfleet members and a surreptitiously drunken class of cadets, barely more than children, gave Carol no comfort for the loss of her friends on the Spacelab team. She kept expecting to hear Del March’s cheerful profanity, or Zinaida Chitirih-Ra-Payjh’s soft and musical laugh. She expected Jedda Adzhin-Dall to stride past, cloaked in the glow of a Deltan’s unavoidable sexual attraction. And she expected at every moment to hear Vance Madison’s low, beautiful voice, or to glance across the room and meet his gaze, or to reach out and touch his gentle hand.

None of those things would ever happen again. Her collaborators, her friends, were dead, murdered in vengeance for someone else’s error.

Jim Kirk managed to get McCoy down from the table and away from the center of attention before the doctor had made too much of a fuss, and, Kirk hoped, without making a fool of either of them.