Star Trek: Duty, Honor, Redemption (29 page)

“ ‘Sing “Danny Boy” ’is not an order. ‘Go to bed’ is an order.”

“Oh. Begging your pardon, sir. Aye, sir.”

Scott glanced around him, as if searching for something. Suddenly he looked very tired and old. He trudged away.

McCoy was the last member of the wake remaining. Jim sat on his heels beside McCoy’s chair. The doctor snored softly.

“Bones,” Jim said, shaking him softly. “Bones, wake up.”

McCoy flinched, muttered something incomprehensible, and lapsed back into snoring.

“Come on, old friend.” Jim dragged McCoy’s arm across his shoulder and hoisted him to his feet. McCoy sagged against him and muttered a few more words. Jim froze.

“What?”

McCoy straightened up, swaying, and looked Kirk directly in the eye.

“Using a metabolic poison as a recreational drug is totally illogical.”

McCoy collapsed.

Doctor Christine Chapel watched herself function efficiently. She felt very much like two different people, one performing as she should, the other separated from the world by shock. She felt numb and clumsy. That she could function at all astonished her. Yet she did what needed to be done, caring for the crew members, mostly young cadets, who had been injured during Khan’s attacks; dispensing hangover remedies to those who had neglected to take a preventive after Mister Spock’s wake; and looking in occasionally on Leonard McCoy. She was extremely concerned about him.

She paused in the doorway of the cubicle in which she and Admiral Kirk had put him the night before. She left the lights on very low. She suspected that when Leonard woke, his headache would be a credit to its species.

He moaned and muttered something. Chris moved farther into the small room, squinting to see better in the dim light. Leonard tossed on the bunk, his face shining with sweat. His tunic was soaked. Chris felt his forehead. His temperature was elevated, not yet dangerously so, but certainly enough to make him uncomfortable.

“Leonard,” she said softly.

He sat bolt upright, staring straight ahead. Slowly he turned to look at her. He moved in a way she had never seen him move before, but in a way that was eerily familiar.

“Vulcans,” he said, in a voice much lower than his own, “do not love.”

Chris took an involuntary step backward.

“How dare you say that to me?” she said, in a quiet, angry voice. The pain pierced through the numbness to her enclosed, repressed grief and spread like fire through her. She turned, hiding her face in her hands. She could not break down now. The ship had to have a doctor, and McCoy was in no shape to take over.

The obsession she had had with Spock for so long still embarrassed her, though it had burned out years before. She had forced herself beyond it by sheer determination and by the power of the knowledge that what she desired from him, he simply could not give. His inability to respond to her had nothing to do with Christine Chapel. He had never had the choice between “interested” and “uninterested.” All his training and experience required him to be disinterested, and so he had behaved.

Once Chris accepted that, she began to appreciate his unique integrity. It took a long time for her to get over her youthful fantasies, but once she did, her fondness for Spock strengthened. Losing a friend, she had discovered in the past few days, was much worse than losing a remotely potential and unrequiting lover. Accepting Spock’s death, she thought, would be an even longer and more difficult task than persuading herself not that he never would love her, but that he never could.

She took her hands from her face and straightened up, under control again. This was a bad time to cry. Leonard McCoy’s sense of humor was quirky, but not cruel. For him to say what he had said to her meant either that something was seriously wrong or—the simplest, if least flattering, possibility—that he was still intoxicated.

Saavik woke suddenly and sat up, startled. Mister Spock was speaking to her. His deep voice still echoed in her cabin. Saavik was not prepared to answer him. She was dazzled by strange dreams and fantasies.

“But I am not a Vulcan,” she said. “You said to me—”

She stopped. He was not here—he had never been here. Spock was gone.

Spock’s voice had sounded so real…but what she thought was reality was a cruel dream, and what for a moment had seemed impossible fantasy was real.

David lay sleeping beside her, cool and fair. She touched his shoulder lightly. He stirred gently but did not wake. Saavik wondered if she could be going mad with grief, or with guilt. She did not feel mad.

But Spock’s voice had seemed so real…

Delicately, Farrendahl nibbled at the fur-covered web of skin at the base of the first and second fingers of her right paw. A bad habit, she knew it, one she had picked up from a human shipmate who bit his nails. A human’s nails were such flimsy things that it hardly mattered whether they were damaged or properly sharp, but Farrendahl would never sink so low as to bite her claws. They were far too useful.

At times like these, though, she needed a nervous habit to fall back on. Her primate-type crewmates either objected to or thought amusing the more obvious forms of grooming. Never mind that she found them soothing. Farrendahl did not like to be laughed at. Primates, humanoids as they preferred to call themselves in Standard, could be astonishingly repellent when they laughed.

Farrendahl sat on her haunches in the navigator’s hammock, chewing on her paw and blinking at the unfamiliar stars. Having passed out of Federation space and into the gray area between set borders some hours before, the ship now fell under the protection of no one. It had become potential prey to all. This, Farrendahl disliked intensely.

A signal came through her console. She blinked at it, too, then in response to the new order changed the course of the ship for the third time in a single circadian. The resulting course, if left unchanged, would bring the ship face to face with the Klingons. This, Farrendahl disliked even more.

No wonder their mysterious passenger was unwilling to name a destination. No wonder the ship’s grapevine sprouted rumors of an enormous payment to the captain. Great wonder, though, if the captain passed on part of his largesse in the crew’s bonuses without a confrontation.

“I dislike the scent of this,” Farrendahl said. She growled softly in irritation. “It smelled bad when we began, and its odor has become progressively more putrid.”

Her compatriot bared his teeth in that offensive primate way, and an intermittent choking noise came from his throat. In short, he laughed.

“Since when do cats learn anything useful from their sense of smell?” he said.

Compatriot—! A high-class word to apply to any member of this ship’s crew of ill-mannered, poorly reared mercenaries.

“Since when,” Farrendahl said to Tran, “have I been a cat?” Instead of baring her teeth, which another member of her own species would have recognized as a threat, she placed her paw on the scarred control panel. She stretched out her fingers so her paw became a hand, then slowly extended her claws. The sharp tips scratched the panel with a gradual, hair-raising shriek.

“A cat?” Tran exclaimed. “Did I call you a cat? Who in their right mind would call you a cat?”

“I saw a cat once,” Farrendahl said matter-of-factly. “It was digging through a garbage heap in a back alley on Amenhotep IX. I disliked it. Please explain the similarities between it and me.”

“Don’t push it, Farrendahl.”

“But I desire to be enlightened.”

“All right. Both of you were in the back alley, weren’t you?”

Farrendahl leapt, knocking Tran to the deck. The artificial gravity, set for economy’s sake at an annoyingly low intensity, turned her attack and Tran’s fall into a most unsatisfactory series of slow bounces. But they ended up as Farrendahl planned, with the human on the floor and her claws and teeth at his throat. This was a main reason she never bit her claws.

“And was there not an ugly monkey-looking creature in that same back alley, only insensible from noxious recreational drugs?”

“Probably there was,” Tran said, laughing again.

Farrendahl bristled her whiskers out, acknowledging Tran’s good-humored surrender. She was about to release him when the captain walked in on them. He stopped, folded his arms across his chest, and glared at the crew members.

“If you two haven’t any work, I can find some,” he said. “We don’t have time for your continual horsing around.”

Farrendahl growled softly and rose, extending her hand to Tran to help him rise. He leaped to his feet like a gymnast in the low gravity.

“A cat, a monkey, now a horse,” Farrendahl said in a low voice. “Perhaps our mysterious mission is to transport a menagerie.”

Tran chuckled and returned to his place at the control console.

“I heard that,” the captain said. “Ten demerits.”

“You’re in a charming mood today, Captain,” Farrendahl said. She ignored the threat of demerits. She had already earned so many that ten more scarcely counted. Demerits were a source of great hilarity among the crew, ever since the time they precipitated a minor mutiny. One planetfall, on a more or less civilized world and after a long, boring journey, the captain forbade Farrendahl, Tran, and several others to leave the ship. Too many demerits, he said. Farrendahl said nothing. She simply ignored him, and she and the others went out anyway.

He could have left while they were rousting around. He could have locked them off the ship and hired another crew. But he stayed where he was, leaving the ship open to them when they returned. Apparently he preferred his tried and semi-competent, if insolent, people to a new bunch that he would have to have trained.

He continued to assign demerits, but that was the only time he ever referred to them, and he never again tried to use them for anything.

The captain ignored Farrendahl’s smart remark and paused at the control console. Farrendahl despised him on every possible level. He possessed power and the title of captain not because he deserved them or had earned them but simply because he owned the ship. He knew little about running it and less about the computers that formed its guts.

“Perhaps you are concerned that we will discover what you are being paid for this trip,” Farrendahl said, putting him on notice that they all did know and that they all expected their cut.

He glared at her as she slipped smoothly into the navigator’s hammock. He kept his silence. He was a bully, but he was also a coward, and he avoided any serious confrontation with Farrendahl.

“When do we find out where we are really going?”

“When you need to know,” he said.

“Waste of fuel,” Farrendahl said just loudly enough for him to hear. It amused her that he would worry the comment around in his mind, trying to find a way to conserve the fuel wasted by their roundabout route. If he had ever learned to pilot his ship himself, he would not have to depend on Farrendahl. She supposed she should be grateful for his lack of application.

The contempt in which she held him was diluted by her awareness of her own failings and limitations. She had been disappointed when, after the “mutiny,” the captain capitulated to his impertinent crew. But she might have found another berth—whatever else she was, she was an able navigator, and now and then a shipmaster turned up who was willing to waive small matters like papers and background. She could have found another place, but she did not. Inertia kept her in the same, riskless position. Beneath her contempt for the captain lurked a certain contempt for herself. Perhaps they deserved each other.

The captain remained by the console, his attitude that of one studying the readings, his eyes with the blank stare of someone who had no idea what he was looking at.

“We’re on course,” Farrendahl said, “as long as you don’t have any more changes in mind. Unless you do, I am going to sleep.”

Lacking any reply, she slid from the hammock and padded away toward her cabin.

David stepped out of the turbolift, onto the bridge. Saavik, already on duty, glanced over her shoulder at him. A look passed between them that they innocently assumed no one else noticed or understood. Saavik returned her attention to her work as if it were easy for her. David wrestled himself back to this morning and away from last night.

It must be nice,
David thought,
to have the ability to control your feelings so completely
. Being able to focus one’s attention on a single subject gave remarkable results.

“Good morning, David,” James Kirk said.

“Uh, hi.” David could not bring himself to call Kirk “father.” More than twenty years lay between them, years during which they could have known each other. David wondered what he would be like if he had known James Kirk as his father when it might have made a difference. He had found some reason to respect the Starfleet officer. Affection would take longer.

Kirk responded to David’s unease. “How would you feel about calling me ‘Jim’?”

“Okay, I guess.”

Kirk paused for a moment, then turned away again. David realized he had hurt the admiral’s feelings with his lukewarm response.

“This is going to take some getting used to,” he said.

“Yes,” Kirk said. “For me, too. We need to talk about it. In private.”

David took the hint and kept the personal matters to himself, saving them for someplace other than the bridge of the
Enterprise.

“There it is,” Kirk said.

In the viewscreen, Regulus I hung dark and mysterious before them. The barren worldlet had always given David an eerie feeling. It had never evolved life. It had never had a chance of evolving life. It had no water and no air and too little gravity to hold either one. But Genesis had changed all that. The planetoid’s interior had been turned into an entire, new, inside-out world, one with an ecosystem designed from scratch by Carol Marcus’s team. It was like a Jules Verne novel brought to reality, and David was proud of his part in creating it. The memory of the short time he had spent beneath the surface of the world remained as a warm glow of pride and power. He wanted to go back inside and explore. No experiment ever turned out precisely as one planned. David wanted to discover the unexpected results. They were always the most interesting.