The Autobiography of James T. Kirk (24 page)

I was facing an invisible ship with a weapon that could pulverize large asteroids. I had to make sure the ship didn’t get home, or we’d be facing an all-out war. But I couldn’t cross the border without also risking a war that could be blamed on us. The
Enterprise
and the Romulan ship played a game of cat-and-mouse for hours. The commander of the enemy craft was clever, but his ship wasn’t the juggernaut it pretended to be; we learned that its power was drained by its invisibility field, and its weapon had a limited range. The
Enterprise
could beat it: we could outrun its weapon. But during the engagement I’d failed to stop them before they returned to their space; they’d made it to the other side of the border, a border I’d been ordered not to cross. I had to draw them back.

I decided on a risky strategy. We’d suffered damage at the hands of the enemy ship, so it wasn’t difficult to appear vulnerable. And though they’d made it into the Neutral Zone, I gambled that they wouldn’t resist the opportunity to finish us off. So I ordered us to play dead.

If they fell for it, we’d have little time to fire. They couldn’t fire their weapon while they were invisible, and we couldn’t fire until we could see them. I had to make sure we fired before they got off a shot. As a precaution I sent Stiles to help Tomlinson, who was manning the forward phaser control room by himself.

I sat looking at the viewscreen, waiting for the ship to appear. My shields were down, engine power at minimum. If that ship fired first, we wouldn’t be able to escape their plasma weapon. As I waited, I thought about the
Enterprise
and its 400 crewmen. They could all be dead in a moment, and it would be my fault. The seconds passed, and I became less sure of myself. I had a last-minute thought that maybe I should power up and warp away. That was the safer course. I was about to give that order when Sulu spoke up.

“Enemy vessel becoming visible,” he said. I was committed. I told the phaser control room to fire.

And nothing happened.

The enemy ship was getting closer. For some reason, Stiles and Tomlinson weren’t following my orders. I tamped down my panic, keyed in the public address system, and shouted for Stiles to fire. No response.

I looked up at the Romulan ship. It was so close now. I had the thought that I’d killed us all.

And then the phasers fired; the Romulan was hit.

What I didn’t know at the time was there had been an accident in the phaser control room, reactor coolant was leaking in and suffocating Stiles and Tomlinson. Fortunately, Spock was nearby, went into the control room, and fired the phasers. He then pulled Stiles out in time to save his life. I’d always thought Spock might have been overcompensating by choosing to get Stiles first. His choice had further ramifications.

Because Spock chose Stiles first, Tomlison died.

I later found Angela Martine in the chapel, praying. It was surprising to me that in this day and age people still found comfort from this. But I was in no position to criticize how this woman chose to grieve. She turned and saw me, then came to embrace me.

“It never makes any sense,” I said. “But you have to know there was a reason.” This seemed empty; to appeal to her patriotism, her service, but I really didn’t know what to say. Neither did she, and she soon left me alone in the chapel.

I looked up at the podium. I thought of the traditions of so many religions, where clergy, preaching from a similar podium, would offer comfort, protection, or motivation. And those clergy were required to sacrifice their personal lives to provide that comfort and motivation. They could help others achieve happiness and contentment, and the clergy’s only reward was that service. There was really no rest for them.

I understood that job. I left the room and got back to work.

“We have a request from Dr. Tom Leighton that we divert to Planet Q,” Spock said, at our morning meeting. “He reports it’s urgent.”

I hadn’t seen Tom since his wedding, five years before. He had grown into the image of his father, a bear of a man, but without the light touch. He still carried the burden of what had happened on Tarsus IV, even into adulthood. It had influenced his career path; he became an astroagricultural scientist, specifically devoting himself to the development of synthetic foods for Earth colonies. And he still wore the patch on half his face. But his career success and his marriage to a lovely, supportive woman had softened him somewhat. The wedding had been celebratory, and I saw some hope for happiness for my old friend.

“Planet Q is three light-years off our course,” I said.

“He reports he has discovered the formula for a synthetic food that could avert famine on Cygnia Minor,” Spock said.

This was a strange coincidence. Cygnia Minor was an Earth colony whose population growth had gone unchecked, and its arable land had been diminished because of uncontrolled development. It was off the major shipping routes, so a food crisis could develop there quickly, though it hadn’t yet; Starfleet and Federation colonies had been placed on alert to the situation less than a month before. The fact that Leighton already had a solution to the problem was unbelievable. But I had to follow it up.

“Inform Starfleet Command, and set course for Planet Q,” I said, and Spock left. I was always a little ambivalent about seeing Tom; it brought up a lot of memories that I’d pushed away, but I also felt a kinship and a responsibility to him.

When we arrived at the planet, I received a message for me to meet him at a theater in the capital city of Yu. I didn’t know what to make of it, but I beamed down. The city was modern and sprawling, with a large distinctive arch at the city’s entrance. I found my way to the theater, shaped like a giant silver chicken egg that lay on its side. There was a ticket waiting for me at the box office, and I went inside.

On the stage, the Acturian version of Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
was being performed. As I found my way to the empty seat, I gathered I’d missed a good portion of it, as Macbeth was already about to kill King Duncan.

Tom was already there, sitting in the seat next to me. He did not give me a warm greeting; he was concentrating on the stage. This whole thing seemed very strange. I was here to get a food synthetic, but he was going to make me sit through a three-hour play.

And then he told me to pay attention to the voice of the actor playing Macbeth.

“That’s Kodos the Executioner,” he said, his voice intense and angry. I was baffled. Was he saying Macbeth reminded him of Kodos? I looked at the actor. It had been almost a quarter century, and the man playing the part did bear a small resemblance. But it was unbelievable that Tom thought it actually
was
him. I started to think Tom brought me here under false pretenses.

At the intermission, I told Tom I didn’t have time to sit through a play. He took me back to his home where he told me the truth. There was no food synthetic; he had made it up to get me to Planet Q. Tom had seen this actor, Anton Karidian, and was sure he was Kodos. It made no sense. His theory was Governor Kodos had escaped death and was now traveling around the Galaxy acting in plays? My old friend, who I’d been through so much with, sounded insane.

Until Tom ended up dead. Murdered.

“Are you Kodos?” I was a few feet from Anton Karidian. He did evoke Kodos in some way. But my memory still wasn’t clear. I had only seen him the one time; he had towered over me, and I had been scared, in shock, crying. I didn’t fully remember what he looked like. But Tom was dead, and Tom had been sure.

“Do you believe that I am?” he said. I said that I did, but I still wasn’t sure. Circumstantial evidence had piled up. Karidian’s history began almost to the day that Kodos’s ended. And there had been deaths, seven people, all of whom had seen Kodos and knew what he looked like, each of whom died just when the Karidian players were nearby.

But I still wasn’t sure.

If this was Kodos, I thought, what a monster; what an ego. He killed thousands of people, escaped punishment, but rather than going into hiding, he
performs on a stage
; his need for attention outweighed all other considerations.

Tom had been murdered after telling me he was sure Karidian was Kodos. I’d found him, stabbed to death out near his home. I’d felt guilty for not believing him immediately, and I had become obsessed. I engineered the situation so Karidian and his players would travel on the
Enterprise.
I was going to find out if Tom was right, and if this was his killer, and his parents’ killer, and the killer of all those people I’d known as a child, I would have my revenge.

It was all coming back, the horror of Tarsus, of that night. I was confronted again with my helplessness in the face of evil.

So I became evil, and I went after Karidian in what I thought must be a weak spot.

I tried to seduce his 19-year-old daughter, Lenore.

She was lovely, smart, and she seemed easily dazzled by me. We had long walks together, both on Planet Q and then the ship. We talked about acting, Shakespeare, commanding a ship, her life in the space lanes. One night aboard the ship, I took her to the softly lit observation deck and kissed her. And then I took her back to my quarters.

She was lonely, as I was, and I began to feel guilty, because I felt a real connection to her. But my whole purpose had been to shake her father’s identity from the shadows. She was of no help. She told me she’d never known her mother, who died in childbirth, so her father had been everything.

“He is a great man,” she said that night we were together in my cabin. “He has given me so much, I’ll never be able to repay him for this wonderful life and career he’s given me.” Though she was an adult, she was also a child, and I was trying to take away her only parent, as Tom’s parents had been taken away. I decided I had to challenge him directly and leave this poor girl out of it.

So I went to see him in his quarters, and made him read the speech he gave when he killed all those people. I had written it out from memory, and made him record it.

“The revolution is successful …” I always remembered that phrase. He’d said it back then with confidence, with arrogance, as if the crazed rationale for killing all those people was somehow a cause. Now, an older man said it wearily, with some bitterness. He got through the whole speech.

I still didn’t know.

“I know how to use this, Captain,” Lenore said, aiming a phaser at me.

She was an actress, and she had been acting, pretending to be enthralled by me. She was the one who had killed Tom, along with the six other people. The whole time, she wanted me dead, because I was one of the people who she thought could hurt her father. It was ironic that she wanted to kill me, because I still couldn’t remember. I had to be told by Karidian that he was Kodos. I was a fool, almost as big a fool as Karidian, the narcissist, who didn’t realize how he had damaged his daughter until it was far too late.

We were standing on the set of
Hamlet
in the
Enterprise
’s theater, where the Karidian players had been performing. Lenore raised the weapon and pulled the trigger.

And her father stepped in front of it, saving my life. It was again his own vanity that led him to do it. He’d destroyed so many lives, which mattered to him not at all, but when he’d discovered that his own daughter was a murderer, that moved him to regret, to self-sacrifice.