Star Trek: Duty, Honor, Redemption (34 page)

“I never did. I never saw this set of molecules before in my life.”

“David, that is an analysis of the Genesis vines—the vines you created.”

“It’s nothing like. Well, superficially, maybe. But this whole subset of molecules—”

“I ran the samples twice,” Saavik said. “I am hardly infallible, but this summary
is
accurate.”

“But it shouldn’t look like this. I don’t even know what half the stuff is.”

“This,” Saavik said, pointing to a heterocyclic compound, “is an extremely potent psychoactive alkaloid.”

“What!” David looked at it more closely. “My gods, it could be, couldn’t it?”

“It is. It is also the reason we behaved as we did—why we nearly abandoned our tasks to go exploring, like two irresponsible children—”

“ ‘We’?” David said, rubbing his wrist. “You could have fooled me, if you were about to do anything out of line.”

“I came very close to it,” Saavik said. “The active ingredient in those vines is a narcotic.”

“I designed it so you could brew tea out of the leaves if you wanted. I put a lot of caffeine in it, that’s all.”

Saavik could see the resemblance between the molecule in question and caffeine, but it had gone through considerable mutation to become what it was.

“I think you would not want to brew tea out of this plant,” Saavik said. “Or make wine of its fruit.”

“You never know,” David said.

Saavik raised one eyebrow.

“Just kidding,” David said.

Phase three of Genesis spun like a mobile drifting in the breeze. David watched the newly-formed star system on the
Grissom
’s viewscreen. Despite his calculated calm, he was astonished that the new world was his creation. So far it looked like the programs had worked perfectly. The lack of a sun for the world to orbit had enabled the star-forming subroutine. The great dust-cloud of the Mutara Nebula had provided plenty of mass to form a small, hot star.

David leaned against the bridge rail. He felt out of place and in the way, despite the ship’s being there at least partly because of him. Behind him, at the main sensor station, Saavik seemed to David very much in place, cool and controlled.

She had forgiven him for the incident in the Genesis caves back on Regulus I. David truly had not designed a plant containing a chemical of the potency they found. They had talked about what might have gone wrong. The changes in the experiment’s outcome were of a far greater magnitude than David had expected. He was still trying to convince himself that everything really had evolved nearly the way the Genesis team intended, only a little more so. He was not ready to admit any serious doubts to himself, much less discuss them with anyone. Even Saavik.

Saavik completed the current log entry.

“…We are approaching destination planet at point zero three five. So noted in ship’s log.”

She removed the data cube from the recorder and delivered the log to Captain Esteban to certify and seal.

“Very well, Lieutenant.” To the helm officer, he said, “Execute standard orbital approach.”

“Standard orbit, aye.”

“Communications. Send a coded message for Starfleet Commander, priority one…”

He paused for a moment. David decided, with a smile, that the captain was thinking over his message to be sure it would not include a single informal word.

“ ‘Federation science vessel
Grissom
arriving Genesis planet, Mutara sector, to begin research. As ordered, full security procedures are in effect. J.T. Esteban, commanding.’ ”

“Aye sir, coding now.”

David found the security on
Grissom
restrictive and a little scary. Genesis had always been, in theory, a secret project. Acceding to the security requirements had been the only way they could get the research funded. The whole team had taken a rather lackadaisical attitude toward the rules, mostly by thinking about them as infrequently as possible. They had all been certain that the first implementation of the project would make secrecy impossible.

That’s one thing we were right about, David thought. But now the authorities wanted to try to clamp the lid back down.

On
Grissom,
dealing with Starfleet directly instead of one step removed, David had the distinct impression that they wished he knew nothing about the project and that they would have denied him clearance if they could have done so without looking ridiculous.

Captain Esteban turned toward him. “Doctor Marcus,” he said, “it’s your planet.”

Astonished, and pleased despite himself, David grinned. “Thank you, Captain. Begin scanning, please.” He joined Saavik at the science station as she activated the macroscopic scanner. It glowed into life, forming a schematic of the world before them. The schematic showed a stable sphere, with core, mantle, crust and oceans, absolutely indistinguishable from a naturally evolved world.

Well, what did you expect?
David asked himself.
That it would be flat?

Suddenly he laughed, and all his doubts and fears evaporated in the sheer pleasure of inspecting his handiwork.

“This is where the fun begins, Saavik!” he said.

She replied,
sotto voce,
“Like your father…so human.” Then, turning on the recorder, she took the irony and humor out of her voice. “All units functional, recorders are on…. Scanning sector one. The foliage is in a fully developed state of growth. Temperature, twenty-two point two degrees Celsius.”

“Sector two…indicating desert terrain,” David said. “Minimal vegetation, temperature thirty-nine point four.”

At several team presentation meetings the discussion had centered on whether to include desert or any other severe climates at all. Vance said he was not interested in working on anything “so beautiful it’s sappy,” Del (as usual) agreed with Vance. Zinaida persisted, as Deltans often did, in quoting the Vulcan philosophy, “infinite diversity in infinite combinations.” David wondered how Vulcans liked being quoted by the Federation’s most renowned sensualists. He himself had pushed for trying to make Genesis a shirt-sleeve environment from pole to pole. That would have been quite a challenge. He was, however, out-voted.

“Sector three,” Saavik said. “Sub-tropical vegetation.”

David glanced across the bank of sensors. They must be scanning a region where several different ecotypes blended into one another.

“Temperature—” Saavik said. She stopped and checked her readings again. “Temperature decreasing rapidly.”

My gods, look at that,
David thought.
Infinite diversity indeed.

“It’s snow,” he said. “Snow in the same sector. Fantastic!” He could not get a topographical map off the sensor he was using, but he assumed they must be looking at a snowcapped mountain upthrust in the midst of subtropical forest edged by desert.

“Fascinating,” Saavik said.

“All the varieties of land and weather known to Earth within a few hours’ walk!” David knew he was exaggerating, just a bit, but for a time the team had engaged in a sort of informal competition to see who could design the most complicated conditions within the smallest area. Nobody had quite come up with a workable way to juxtapose arctic and equatorial climates, but everyone had developed a different method of coming close. Some of the schemes were positively Byzantine. The trouble was, Carol eventually declared the competition out of hand and said she would not include any of the results in the Genesis device.

Maybe she changed her mind, David thought.

“You must be very proud of what you and your mother have created,” Saavik said.

David gazed at the sensors and felt some of his doubts and fears beginning to creep back.

“It’s a little early to celebrate,” he said.

One of the sensors erupted into frantic beeping. Saavik started, then covered her surprise by bending intently over the monitor.

“Same sector,” she said evenly. “Metallic mass.”

“Underground, right?” David said. “Probably an ore deposit.”

“Negative,” Saavik said. “It is on the surface, a manufactured object.”

Manufactured!
David thought.
Debris from Khan’s ship? The Genesis torpedo? But that was impossible—anything in range of the Genesis wave had disintegrated into a plasma of sub-elementary particles. Then he realized—

“There’s only one thing it could be!” he said.

He glanced at Saavik. Surely the same answer must have occurred to her. She gazed intently at the sensors.

“Short-range scan,” David said.

Esteban joined them at the console and glanced over the readings.

“Approximately two meters long,” Saavik said. “Cylindrical in form…”

“A photon tube—!”

Saavik continued to avoid David’s look.

She’s upset,
David thought,
and she’s embarrassed about being upset. I don’t blame her—If I thought I’d buried a friend, and then his coffin turned up…

“Could it be Spock’s?” Esteban asked.

David had noticed that the captain did not much like being surprised.

“It has to be,” David said. There were several ways it could have reached the surface of the Genesis world without burning up in the atmosphere like a shooting star. “The gravitational fields were still in flux. It must have soft-landed.”

“In code to Starfleet,” Esteban said. “ ‘Captain Spock’s tube located intact on Genesis surface. Will relay more data on subsequent orbits.’ ”

“Yes, sir,” said the communications officer. “Coding your message.”

Saavik continued to stare at the changing sensors. David neither questioned nor challenged her. Instead, he reached out and put his hand over hers. Still she said nothing, but she did not draw away from him, either.

As the ship passed over the surface of the new world, crossing the terminator into darkness, the sensor’s beeps grew fainter and fainter. The ship moved out of line-of-sight of the torpedo tube and the signals cut off abruptly.

J.T. Esteban thoughtfully stroked his thumb under his jaw and considered what to do. Spock’s coffin was supposed to have been launched in a standard burial orbit, one that should have resulted in complete ablation. There should be nothing at all left of it. That it had landed intact created all sorts of problems, from the possibility of contamination to the responsibility for retrieving the casket and either re-launching it (J.T. would send it into the star, so there could be no mistake), or holding a formal interment on the surface of Genesis. Technically, Spock’s most recent C.O. should make the decision. But with any luck, someone at Starfleet HQ would give the word. Jim Kirk could do without going through the wringer again over the death of a friend.

Under any other circumstances, J.T. might have taken it upon himself to decide what would be done, but not this time—not when it involved something as important as Genesis.

Jim Kirk stalked the bridge of the
Enterprise.
Sorting out his thoughts in his personal log had failed to diminish his unease.

He paused next to the science station, where Spock always sat. He put his hands on the back of the chair.

The transmission from Esteban, on Genesis, troubled him. He felt unreasonably angered and betrayed at the news that Spock’s coffin had soft-landed. Kirk had ordered a trajectory that should have burned the tube to ashes in the upper atmosphere of Genesis. Whether Spock’s body returned to its constituent atoms quickly, in fire, or slowly, in the earth of a new world, surely did not matter to the Vulcan any longer. But Kirk, who wished the flames for himself when he died, had made a decision and given an order, and some unforeseen and unknown conspiracy of the universe had served to defy him.

Starfleet had sent the medical rescue ship
Firenze
out to meet the
Enterprise
and to transport all but a few of its trainee crew, injured and healthy alike, back to Earth, so at least he no longer had a boatload of children to worry about.

The
Enterprise,
though patched and limping, was out of immediate danger. It could easily have made it to Alpha Ceti V to rescue
Reliant
’s crew, whom Khan marooned when he hijacked their ship. But before the light of
Firenze
’s engines had fairly red-shifted out of the visible spectrum, Starfleet recalled the
Enterprise
to Earth and sent another ship to Alpha Ceti V. “The
Enterprise
is fully capable of carrying out this mission,” Kirk had said, and HQ replied, with a fine disregard for irony, “But, Admiral, your ship is dangerously shorthanded.” By then Kirk did not know whether to laugh, cry, or blow his stack. He decided, instead, to make the best of it.

David’s decision to return with
Grissom
to the Genesis world disappointed Kirk. Carol was barely speaking to him. One relationship that had started well and one that he had thought to resume were dissolving into nothingness.

And finally, there was Leonard McCoy. Kirk
was
worried about him. Kirk could have understood grief; he could even have understood a refusal to admit to grief. He could not comprehend McCoy’s disjointed conversation, his brief episodes of intense activity, and his speaking Spock’s words in Spock’s voice.

For a while Kirk had felt good about having his ship back, but the price of regaining it was far too high.