Star Trek: Duty, Honor, Redemption (28 page)

“I see,” he said. “Important work. Carry on, then.” He turned and strode quickly away.

Saavik watched him until he had passed out of sight around a corner.

“Nothing needs to be checked on the bridge, David,” she said.

“I had to say something,” David said. “I didn’t want to discuss our personal affairs with him. It isn’t any of his business.”

“But why did he not remind you that the computer would announce any change in the ship’s status?”

“I don’t know,” David said, though he knew perfectly well.

“He has not commanded a starship in a long time,” she said. “Perhaps he forgot.”

“That must be it.”

They continued down the corridor to Saavik’s cabin. Inside, David blinked, waiting for his eyes to accustom themselves to the low light. The room held no decorations, only the severe furnishings standard issue in Starfleet, but the warm and very dry air carried a hot, resiny scent, like the sunbaked pitch of pine trees at high noon in summer.

Saavik stopped with her back to David.

“Saavik,” David said, “I just want you to know—maybe we don’t need to worry, but where I was raised it’s good manners to tell you—I passed all my exams in biocontrol.”

“I, too,” she said softly. “I always regarded learning to regulate the reproductive ability merely as an interesting exercise. Until now…” Her voice trailed off.

David realized that she was trembling. He put his hands gently on her shoulders.

“I have traveled far, and I have seen much,” Saavik said. “I have studied…. But study and action are very different.”

“I know,” David said. “It’s all right, it will be all right.”

Saavik reached up, and her hair fell free around her shoulders. It was thick and soft and dark, and it smelled of evergreens.

Jim Kirk did go to the observation deck. He opened the portals and spent a long time staring at the stars. After a while, the romantic in his soul overcame the admiral in his mind. The pain and grief surrounding Spock’s death eased, the embarrassing encounter with David and Saavik began to seem humorous, and even his misunderstanding of Carol’s wishes became less lacerating in his memory. The whole galaxy lay around him.

He fancied he could still see the star of the Genesis world, far behind, a hot white star red-shifted toward yellow as the
Enterprise
raced away, an unimposing young star made fuzzy by the planetary nebula that surrounded it, by the remnants of the Mutara Nebula. The matter in the nebula had been blasted apart by the Genesis wave, blasted beyond atoms, beyond subatomic particles, beyond quarks, down to the sub-elementary particles that Vance Madison and his partner Del March had whimsically named “snarks” and “boojums.”

Khan had set off the Genesis wave in an attempt to destroy Jim Kirk, an attempt that had very nearly succeeded. Thus he set in motion—what? Even Carol could not say. The resonances in the wave were designed to work upon a very different environment. No one could know what had come into existence on the Genesis world without going back and exploring it. Jim Kirk had many reasons for wanting to see that done and, what was more, for wanting to do it himself.

First he had to return to Earth. To accomplish that, he needed a crew that in the morning would be able to think of something other than their hangovers. Realizing that he had been up here all alone for nearly an hour, he decided it was about time to go back to the recreation deck and shut things down.

He closed the portals against the stars.

David dozed in the intoxicating warmth of Saavik’s body. Vulcans—and, David supposed, Romulans, too—had a body temperature several degrees above that of human beings.

“Lying next to you is like lying in the shade on a hot summer’s day,” Saavik said.

David chuckled sleepily. “You must be psychic.”

“Only slightly,” she said. “Vulcans and Romulans both have the ability in some measure. My talent for it is quite limited. But why do you say so now?”

“I was just thinking that lying next to you is like being in the sun on the first warm day of spring.”

She turned suddenly toward him and hugged him close. Her hair fell across his shoulders. He put his arms around her and held her. She had been raised first among Romulans who rejected her, then in the Vulcan tradition which denied any need for closeness or passion. He wondered if anyone had ever held her before.

She drew back and lay beside him, barely touching him, as if ashamed of her instant’s impulse. David was not so ready to ignore the intimacy.

He traced the smooth, strong line of Saavik’s collarbone with the tip of one finger. He had never been with anyone like her in his life. He caressed the hollow of her throat and cupped his hand around the point of her left shoulder. He had felt the scar on her smooth skin earlier, but just then the time had been wrong for questions. Now, though, he touched the scar in the dark and found it to be a complex, regular pattern.

“How’d you get that?” he asked.

She said nothing for so long that David wondered if his bad habit of asking questions off the top of his head had got him into trouble again.

“Sorry,” he said. “Idle curiosity—it’s none of my business.”

“It is a Romulan family mark,” Saavik said.

“A family mark!” She had told him that she did not know the identity of either of her parents, that she did not even know which parent was Vulcan and which Romulan. “Does that mean you could find your family?”

“David,” she said, and he thought he could detect a hint of dry humor in her voice, “why would I want to find my Romulan family?”

Since the likelihood was that a Romulan had borne or sired her in order to demonstrate complete power over a Vulcan prisoner, David could see her point.

“I never heard of family marks,” he said.

“That is not surprising. Information about them may only be passed on orally. It is a capital crime in the Romulan empire to make permanent records of them.”

“Why don’t you have the mark removed? Doesn’t it remind you of—unpleasant times?”

“I do not wish to forget those times,” Saavik said, “any more than I wish to forget Mister Spock. All those memories are important to me. Besides, it may have its use, someday.”

“How?”

“Should I have the misfortune to encounter my Romulan parent, it is absolute proof of our relationship.”

“But if you don’t want to know your Romulan parent…”

“The family mark permits me to demand certain rights,” Saavik said. “It would be considered very bad manners to refuse a family member’s challenge to a death-duel.”

“A duel!”

“Yes. How else avenge myself? How else avenge my Vulcan parent, who surely died with my birth?”

David lay back on the narrow bunk, stunned by Saavik’s matter-of-fact discussion of deep, implacable hatred.

“I never thought Vulcans as demanding an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

“But I am not—as Vulcans never cease to remind me—a proper Vulcan.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier, wouldn’t it be safer, to—I don’t know, sue the Romulans for reparations?”

“Spoken like a truly civilized human,” Saavik said. “But if I am only half a Vulcan, I am in no part human. Mister Spock was right—I must follow my own path.”

David moved his hand from her shoulder. The intensity of her feelings surprised him, though it should not, not any more, not after tonight.

“Don’t worry, David,” Saavik said, in response to his unease. “I am hardly going to defect to the Romulan Empire in order to find a creature I have no real wish to meet. The chance of my ever meeting my Romulan parent is vanishingly small.”

“I guess,” David said. The Federation had, at best, fragile diplomatic relations with the Romulans. It was a connection like a fuse, continually threatening to burst into flame and ignite a more serious conflagration.

Saavik guided his hand back to her shoulder.

“It feels good when you touch it,” she said. “The coolness of your hand is soothing.”

“Were you born with it? Or is it a tattoo?”

“Neither. It is a brand.”

“A brand!”

“They apply it soon after one is out of the womb.”

“Gods, what a thing to do to a little baby. Good thing you can’t remember it.”

“What makes you think I cannot remember it?”

Horrified, David said, “You mean you
can?
”

“Of course. The white glow is the first beautiful thing I ever encountered, and its touch was the first pain. Do you not remember your own birth?”

“No, not at all. I don’t have any reliable memories before I was two or three. Most people don’t.”

“But most people do, David,” Saavik said. “At least, in my experience. Perhaps you mean most humans do not?”

“Yeah,” David said. “Sorry. Bad habit.”

“No offense taken. I am always glad to learn something new about a fellow intelligent species. The last few hours have been very rewarding. I have learned a great deal.”

David did not know quite how to take that, so he replied with an inarticulate “Hmm?”

“Yes,” Saavik said. “I feel that my experiments have been most instructive.”

“Is that all I am to you?” David said. “An experiment?” He suddenly felt very hurt and disappointed, and he realized that his attraction toward Saavik was a great deal more than physical, something much deeper and much stronger.

“That is one of the things you are to me,” she said in an even tone. “And not the least. But not the most, either. You have helped me learn that I have capabilities I believed I did not possess.”

“Like—the capacity to love?”

“I…I am unprepared to make that claim. I do not even comprehend the concept.”

David laughed softly. “Neither does anybody else.”

“Indeed? My research is unfinished—I thought I simply had not encountered a satisfactory definition.”

“It isn’t something you can quantify.”

“Someone should conduct experiments.”

“Experiments!” David said, slightly shocked.

“Certainly. Perhaps we might collaborate on a paper.”

“Saavik—”

“I have heard a speculation. I am curious to know whether it is true, or merely apocryphal.”

“All right,” David said, beyond surprise. “What speculation is that?”

Saavik turned toward him, propped herself up on one elbow, and let her hair spill over his shoulder and across his chest.

“It is,” she said, “that Romulans are insatiable. Would you care to test this hypothesis?”

David laughed. He reached up and touched her face in the dark. He traced the lines of her lips, and found that she was smiling. She had just discovered another capability that few people would suspect her of possessing. She had a terrific sense of humor.

“Why don’t we do that?” David said.

Jim Kirk strode into the recreation hall.

The wake had deteriorated even further. Cadets stood alone or in small groups, sinking into silent depression. Scott clutched a drink and talked continuously and intensely to a single captive trainee. McCoy lay sprawled in his chair. As a catharsis, this gathering was a wretched failure. It succeeded only in intensifying everyone’s feelings of pain and loss and guilt. Kirk stopped by a small group of cadets.

“I think it’s about time to pack it in for the night,” he said. “You’re all dismissed.”

“Yessir,” one of the cadets said. Her relieved smile, quick, and quickly hidden, was the first smile Kirk had seen all day.

The cadets, just waiting for an excuse to escape the sepulchral atmosphere, all accepted his order without objection or argument. The trainees still sober enough to be ambulatory helped their friends who had overindulged. Within a few minutes, the only cadet left was the one listening to Mister Scott’s tirade. Kirk joined them. The cadet looked pale and drawn.

“Scotty—” Kirk said, when Scott paused for breath.

“Aye, Captain, life doesna make sense sometimes, I was just sayin’ to Grenni here, ’tis the good ones go before their time—”

“Mister Scott—”

“—there’s no denyin’ it. The boy had guts. He had potential—”

“Commander Scott!”

“Aye, sir? What’s wrong, Admiral? Why are ye soundin’ so perturbed?”

Kirk sighed. “Perturbed, Mister Scott? Whatever makes you think I’m perturbed? You’re dismissed, Cadet.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” The cadet’s voice shook. He fled.

“Mister Scott, we’ll reach Regulus tomorrow, and I need a coherent crew. Go to bed.”

“But my poor bairn—I wished to have all o’ us sing a song for him. Do ye know ‘Danny Boy,’ Captain?”

“That’s an order, Mister Scott.”

“Aye, sir.” Scott commenced to sing. “ ‘O Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling—’ ”

“Mister Scott!”

Scott stopped singing and gazed at him blearily, blinking and confused, as Kirk’s tone finally got through to him.