Star Trek: Duty, Honor, Redemption (9 page)

Deliberately avoiding a look at Kirk, pretending ignorance of the admiral’s discomfort, Spock glanced at McCoy with a very slight smile. For the Vulcan, that was almost as extreme a reaction as Jim’s fit of laughter in the turbolift was for Kirk.

“Take us out, Lieutenant Saavik,” Spock said.

“Aye, sir. Reverse thrust, Mister Sulu, if you please.”

“Reverse thrust, Lieutenant.”

“It is always rewarding to watch one’s students examine the limits of their training,” Spock said. “Wouldn’t you agree, Admiral?”

“Oh, definitely, Captain. To be sure. First time for everything, after all.”

The viewscreen showed the Spacedock receding majestically; then it spun slowly from their sight as Saavik rotated the
Enterprise
away.

“Ahead one-quarter impulse power, if you please, Commander Sulu,” Saavik said.

Jim opened his month to speak, took a deep breath and closed his mouth abruptly, and grabbed his hands together behind his back. McCoy leaned toward him.

“Hey, Jim,” he whispered, “want a tranquilizer?”

Kirk glared at him and shook his head.

The ship accelerated.

“One-quarter impulse power,” Mister Sulu said; then, a moment later, “Free and clear.”

Kirk quietly released the breath he had been holding.

“Course, Captain?” Saavik asked.

Spock turned to Kirk and raised one eyebrow.

“At your discretion, Captain,” Kirk said.

Spock got that expression again, and McCoy’s suspicion that the Vulcan was as concerned about Kirk as he was intensified.

“Out there, Lieutenant Saavik.”

Kirk started.

“Sir?” Saavik glanced back.

“Out there” was something Jim Kirk had said the last time the
Enterprise
was under his command.

“I believe the technical term is ‘thataway,’ ” Spock said.

“Aye, sir,” Saavik said, obviously not understanding.

But McCoy could see that Jim understood.

As soon as the inspection ended, Peter dropped the “left-handed spanner” into its bin and sprinted to his locker. He was late for his math lesson. He scooped up his little computer, banged the locker door closed, turned around, and ran smack into his Uncle Montgomery.

“Uh—” Peter came to attention and saluted. “I’m due in tutorial, sir, with your permission—”

“Permission denied, Cadet. I’ll have a few words wi’ ye first.”

“But, sir, I’ll be late!”

“Then ye’ll be late! What did ye mean wi’ that display of impertinence?”

Oh, boy,
Peter thought.
Now I’m in for it.

“Sir?” he said innocently, stalling for time.

“Dinna ‘sir’ me, ye young scoundrel! Were ye trying to embarrass me in front of the admiral? In front of James Kirk himself?”

“You didn’t have to tell him who I was!” Peter said. “Nobody knew, till now!”

“Aye, is that so? Ye are embarrassed to be my nephew?”

“You know I’m not! It just seems like everybody will think I only got here because of it.”

Montgomery Scott folded his arms across his chest. “Ye have so little faith in ye’sel’?”

“I just want to pull my share,” Peter said, and saw that
that
was not the right thing to say, either.

“I see,” Uncle Montgomery said. “ ’Tis not ye’sel’ ye doesna trust, ’tis me. Ye think I’d do ye the disservice of letting ye off easy? If ye think ye havna been working hard enough, we’ll see if we canna gi’ ye a bit o’ a change.”

I’m definitely going to be late to math,
Peter thought.
Lieutenant Saavik will cancel the lesson, and on top of everything else it’s going to take me three days to get uncle over his snit. Well, smart kid, was it worth it?

He remembered the look on the admiral’s face when he gave him the “left-handed spanner” and decided that it was.

But not, unfortunately, as far as Uncle Montgomery was concerned.

“You know I don’t think that, Uncle,” Peter said, trying to placate him.

“Ah,
now
it’s ‘Uncle’! And stop changing the subject! Ye havna explained thy behavior!”

“He was testing me, Uncle, to see how dumb I am. If that happened, Dannan said—”

“Dannan!” Uncle Montgomery cried. “That sister o’ thine has only just missed being thrown in the brig more times than thy computer can count! I’d not take thy sister as a model, mister, if ye know what’s good for ye!”

“Wait a minute!” Peter cried. “Dannan is…she’s—”

It was true she had been disciplined a lot; it was even true that she had nearly been thrown out of Starfleet. But even Uncle Montgomery had told him a million times that once in a while you had to work on your own initiative, and that was what Dannan did. It didn’t matter anyway. Dannan was Peter’s sister, and he adored her.

“You can’t talk about her that way!”

“I’ll talk about her any way I please, young mister, and ye shall listen with a civil tongue in thy head.”

“Can I go now?” Peter asked sullenly. “I’m already five minutes late, and Lieutenant Saavik won’t wait around.”

“That’s another thing. Ye spend far too much time hanging around after her. D’ye think she’s naught to do but endure the attentions of a puppydog?”

“What’s
that
supposed to mean?” Peter asked angrily.

“Dinna play the fool wi’ thine old uncle, boy. I can see a schoolboy crush—and so can everyone else. My only advice for ye,” he said condescendingly, “is dinna wear thy heart on thy sleeve.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“Nay? Well, then, be off wi’ ye, Mister Know-It-All, if ye are too wise to listen to the advice o’ thine elders.”

Peter fled from the locker room.

Saavik arrived at tutorial rather late, for the inspection and undocking disarrayed the usual schedule. She was surprised to find that Peter was not there yet, either. Perhaps he had arrived and, not finding Saavik, assumed that the training cruise would change the routine. But she thought he would wait more than two or three minutes. Perhaps Mister Scott had lectured his trainees after the engine room inspection.

That could take considerable extra time,
Saavik thought.
I will wait.

When Spock first requested that Saavik tutor Peter Preston in advanced theoretical mathematics, she had prepared herself to decline. Peter, fourteen, was nearly the same age as Saavik had been when the Vulcan research team landed on her birth-world.

Saavik had feared she would compare the charming and well-brought-up young Peter to the creature she had been on Hellguard. She had feared she would resent the advantages childhood had presented to him and withheld from her. She feared her own anger and how she might react if she released it even for a moment.

When she tried to explain all this to the captain, he listened, considerately and with all evidence of understanding. Then he apologized for his own lack of clarity: he had not made a request; he had given an order which he expected Saavik to carry out as a part of her training. Unquestioning obedience was illogical, but trust was essential. If, in all the years that Saavik had known Spock, she had not found him worthy of trust, then she was of course free to refuse the order. Many avenues of training and advancement would still lie open to her. None, however, would permit her to remain under Spock’s command.

Spock had been a member of the Vulcan exploratory expedition to Hellguard. He alone forced the other Vulcans to accept their responsibility to the world’s abandoned inhabitants, though they had many logical reasons (and unspoken excuses far more involved) for denying any responsibility. Saavik owed her existence as a civilized being, and possibly her life—for people died young and brutally on Hellguard—to Spock’s intervention.

She obeyed his order.

Saavik heard Peter running down the hall. He burst in, out of breath and distracted.

“I’m really sorry I’m late,” he said. “I came as fast as I could—I didn’t think you’d wait.”

“I was late, too,” she admitted. “I thought perhaps you were delayed by the inspection, as I was.” Saavik had to be honest with herself, though: one of the reasons she waited was that she thoroughly enjoyed the time she spent teaching the young cadet. Peter was intelligent and quick, and while their ages were sufficiently different that Peter was still a child and Saavik an adult, they were in fact only six years apart.

“Well…sort of.”

“Are you prepared to discuss today’s lesson?”

“I guess so,” he said. “I think I followed projecting the n-dimensional hyper-planes into n-1 dimensional spaces, but I got a little tangled up when they started to intersect.”

Saavik interfaced Peter’s small computer with the larger monitor.

“Let me look,” she said, “and I will try to see where you began…getting a little tangled up.”

As she glanced through Peter’s work, Saavik reflected upon her own extraordinarily erroneous assumption about the way she would react to Peter. Far from resenting the boy, she found great comfort in knowing that her own childhood was anomalous, rather than being the way of a deliberately cruel universe. Cruelty existed, indeed: but natural law did not demand it.

She learned at least as much from Peter as he did from her: lessons about the joy of life and the possibilities for happiness, lessons she could never feel comfortable discussing with Spock, and in fact had avoided even mentioning to him.

But the captain was far more subtle and complex than his Vulcan exterior permitted him to reveal. Perhaps he had not, as she had believed, given her this task to test her control of the anger she so feared. Perhaps she was learning from Peter precisely what Spock had intended.

“Here, Peter,” she said. “This is the difficulty.” She pointed out the error in one of his equations.

“Huh?”

He looked blankly at the monitor, his mind a thousand light-years from anything.

“Your tangle,” she said. “It’s right here.”

“Oh. Yeah. Okay.” He looked at it and blinked, and said nothing.

“Peter, what’s wrong?”

“Uh, nothing.”

Saavik remained silent for a moment; Peter fidgeted.

“Peter,” Saavik said, “you know that I sometimes have difficulty understanding the way human beings react. I need help to learn. If everything is all right, determining why I thought something might be wrong will pose me a serious problem.”

“Sometimes there’s stuff people don’t want to talk about.”

“I know—I don’t wish to invade your privacy. But if, in truth, you are not troubled, I must revise many criteria in my analyses of behavior.”

He took a deep breath. “Yeah, something happened.”

“You need not tell me what,” Saavik said.

“Can I, if I want?”

“Of course, if you wish.”

He hesitated, as if sorting out his thoughts. “Well,” he said, “I had this fight with Commander Scott.”

“A fight!” Saavik said with considerable distress.

“Not like punching or anything. But that isn’t it; he gets snarked off about little stuff all the time.”

“Peter, I think it would be better if you did not speak so of your commanding officer.”

“Yeah, you’re right, only he’s been doing it my whole life—his whole life, I guess. I know because he’s my uncle.”

“Oh,” Saavik said.

“I never told anybody on the ship, only now he’s started telling people. He told the
admiral
—can you believe it? That’s one of the things I got mad about.” He stopped and took a deep breath and shook his head. “But…”

Saavik waited in silence.

Peter looked up at her, started to blush, and looked away. “He said…he said you had better things to do with your time than put up with me hanging around, he said I’m a pest, and he said…he said I…Never mind. That part’s too dumb. He said you probably think I’m a pain.”

Saavik frowned. “The first statement is untrue, and the second is ridiculous.”

“You mean you don’t mind having to give me math lessons?”

“On the contrary, I enjoy it very much.”

“You don’t think I’m a pest?”

“Indeed, I do not.”

“I’m really glad,” Peter said. “He thinks I’ve been…well…acting really dumb. He was laughing at me.”

“You deserve better than to be laughed at.”

He felt humiliated, Saavik could see that. She knew a great deal about humiliation. She would not wish to teach it to another being. She wished she knew a way to ease his pain, but she felt as confused as he did.

“Peter,” she said, “I can’t resolve your disagreement with your uncle. I can only tell you that when I was a child, I wished for something I could not name. Later I found the name: it was ‘friend.’ I have found people to admire, and people to respect. But I never found a friend. Until now.”

He looked up at her. “You mean—me?”

“Yes.”

Inexplicably, he burst into tears.

Pavel Chekov screamed.

Nothing happened….

His mind and his memory were sharp and clear. He was hyperaware of everything on the bridge of
Reliant:
Joachim beside him at the helm, Terrell sitting blank and trapped at first officer’s position, and Khan.

Khan lounged in the captain’s seat. The screen framed a full-aft view: Alpha Ceti V dwindled, from a globe to a disk to a speck, then vanished from their sight.
Reliant
shifted into warp and even Alpha Ceti, the star itself, shrank to a point and lost itself in the starfield.

“Steady on course,” Joachim said. “All systems normal.”

“It was kind of you to bring me a ship so like the
Enterprise,
Mister Chekov,” Khan said.

Fifteen years before, Khan had flipped through the technical data on the
Enterprise;
apparently he had memorized each page with one quick look. As far as Chekov could tell, Khan remembered the information perfectly to this day. With the knowledge, and with Terrell under his control, Khan had little trouble taking over
Reliant.
Most of the crew had worked on unaware that anything was wrong, until Khan’s people came upon them, one by one, took them prisoner, and beamed them to the surface of Alpha Ceti V.

The engine room company remained, working in concert with each other, and with eels.

Out of three hundred people, Khan had found only ten troublesome enough to bother killing.

“Mister Chekov, I have a few questions to ask of you.”

Don’t answer him, don’t answer him.

“Yes.”

The questions began.

He answered. He screamed inside his mind; he felt the creature writhing inside his skull; he answered.

Khan questioned Terrell only briefly, but it seemed to give him great pleasure to extract information from Chekov. By the time he finished, he knew each tiny detail of what precious little anyone on
Reliant
had been told about the classified Project Genesis. He knew where they had been, he knew where they were going, and he knew they reported to Doctor Carol Marcus.