by Judith
“Change views,” Scott said grimly and the screen flickered once, revealing a new image of the world from over the secondary temperate continent now, where the FCO had once concentrated their sampling runs. Scott recognized the distinctive southern coastline, but that was all. The major agricultural bands that stretched across the land mass were scorched and [32] lifeless, as blackened as the battle damage that scarred the Enterprise. Once, the crops from that land had fed tens of millions.
Scott stared at the screen with grief and revulsion. At the Academy, all cadets were required to study the worlds that had been destroyed by their dominant species’ wars and environmental mismanagement. Those harsh lessons were at the core of the Federation’s underlying principles of respect for life in all forms. Even the Klingons knew how fortunate they were to have survived global warfare and ecological collapse to become spacefarers. So few self-aware, technological species had. The Enterprise, in her time, had visited enough of those barren worlds to engrave the lessons permanently in the hearts and minds of her crew: War was never an answer and life must be held sacred above all else. Only the Prime Directive came as close in importance in determining the goals and actions of the Federation.
And Scott still couldn’t understand how such honorable ideals, in the hands of a captain who had dedicated his life to upholding them, could have possibly led to the horrifying obscenity of the dying world on the viewscreen.
But others could, it seemed. For the first time Scott noticed everything that was printed out on the screen to identify the feed: SENSOR SATELLITE FIVE / 310° LONG / 205° LAT / 00:91:24 / KIRK’S WORLD.
Scott slapped his hand against the base of the machine, hitting its manual power switch hard enough to make the screen shake. “Ye slimy sons o’ ...” His voice choked off in anger. He had heard the replacement crew using that hateful name for Talin IV, and now they had gone so far as to program it into the automated logs. Well, he’d program a worm to go through the computer and delete all references. He’d take Styles’s name out of the duty roster as well, transfer him to kitchen operations. I’ll turn this ship upside down before I’ll ...
“Och, what’s the use?” Scott said to the silence of his room. He’d been thinking: before I’ll let them win. But the truth was, they already had.
[33] The message light kept blinking at him from the blank screen. What could be left to tell me that would be worse than what I already know? he thought.
“Computer: Present my messages, please.”
“Working,” the computer’s familiar voice said. The ship’s backup datastores had had enough shielding to escape the subspace pulse that had destroyed the computer system’s main circuitry. Once the standard replacement components had been installed in the first stages of the Enterprise’s emergency repairs, full computer functions and memory had been restored with only a 1.5 second gap in the sensor readings preceding the pulse, which was the length of time it took dynamic memory to be written to permanent backup. Even with mortal wounds, she was a fine ship.
The viewscreen presented the image of an unencrypted ComSys transmission screen—a common method by which Starfleet personnel could receive personal messages over subspace. Scott’s name was clearly encoded at the top of the screen, overprinting the blue background shield of the United Federation of Planets. The stardate showed it had been received less than an hour ago. The message was tagged as one of one, but the sender’s name was not listed.
Trying not to fool himself into hoping it was a message from the captain, Scott asked the computer to play back the recorded transmission. The screen cleared again, but not to an image of the message’s sender—simply a screen of black text on a white background. Scott leaned forward to read it.
Command Bulletin: Effective this stardate, Spock, Ensign, S179-276SP, Science Specialist, Starfleet Technology Support Division, San Francisco, Earth, has resigned his commission in Starfleet. Resignation accepted, effective as received, Admiral Raycheba, Starfleet TechSupDiv.
Scott swore. “They broke him to a bloody ensign? What are they thinking of? How could—”
[34] The viewscreen flashed the word ‘more.’
“Continue,” Scott said, and the message began to scroll.
Spock is the last of the so-called Enterprise Five to resign from Starfleet. Starfleet Command Information Office has issued related statements calling for all Starfleet personnel to learn from the tragic lessons of the incident at Talin IV, and to prove to the citizens of the Federation that the actions of a handful of renegade officers do not reflect upon the exemplary training and—
“Screen off, computer. Screen bloody off!”
The viewscreen darkened instantly.
“Computer: Who had the gall to send that message to me?” Scott’s voice trembled so badly that he wondered if the computer would recognize him.
“Message unattributed.”
Scott slowly and rhythmically pounded his fist on his work desk. “Aye, it would be, the cowards. It would be.” He wanted to put his fist through a bulkhead. He wanted to shout loudly enough that they’d hear him back at Command. He wanted a stage to tell the worlds of the injustice of all that had transpired. But McCoy had been right.
The doctor had begged to be court-martialed. He had even punched Vice Admiral Hammersmith in front of witnesses at Starbase 29 when he and Spock had been transferred to Technology Support. That’s when McCoy had sent word back to Scott that it was obvious that none of them was going to be put through any type of trial, secret or otherwise. As far as Command was concerned, the less said about Talin IV, the less damage would be done to Starfleet. “They have better ways to get us out of the damned service,” McCoy had said to Scott in a subspace message.
And then the doctor had been the first to resign, without even going on report for striking an officer—proof as far as McCoy was concerned that Starfleet wasn’t about to give any of them a public forum. Kirk followed McCoy’s lead when Uhura had [35] been jailed. Sulu and Chekov left together. Spock had been determined to fight from within the system, but it seemed that not even a Vulcan could stand up to the combined weight of Starfleet and the Federation Council. So, just as McCoy had said, the Enterprise Five had been banished from the service without incident, without trial, and without record. Starfleet had obtained almost everything that it had wanted.
I might as well give them the last of it, Scott thought, opening his fist into a useless hand. There’s nothing left to fight for. Not from here, at least.
“Computer.”
“Working.”
“Prepare a hardcopy message to Lieutenant Styles, USS—no, make that to Vice Admiral Hammersmith, Starbase 29.” Scott would be damned before he would acknowledge Styles as master of this ship. Since Starbase 29 was the closest Federation administrative outpost to the Talin system and had been given authority over the Enterprise’s disposition, Scott reasoned that the base’s commander was the next logical choice to address his message to. He thought Mr. Spock would agree.
“From Scott, etc. Message goes: Effective immediately, I wish to tender my resignation from Star—”
“Clarification,” the computer interrupted.
“Aye, what is it?”
“Starfleet Command Regulation 106, Paragraph 1, specifically identifies the role of the chief engineer and/or designated subsystem specialists as subject to preeminent exception to Term of Service Procedures as detailed in Starfleet Com—”
“Computer: Could ye digest that gobbledygook for me?”
“The chief engineer cannot resign while the Enterprise is undergoing a class-two refit.”
Scott put his elbow on the desk and rested his head on his hand. It wasn’t just personnel like Styles, even Starfleet equipment was out to get him. But Scott had picked up a few tricks in his years with Kirk. Especially when it came to Kirk’s way with computers. “Computer, if I resign, effective immediately, [36] then I will no longer be the chief engineer when Vice Admiral Hammersmith receives my message,
therefore he will not be empowered to prevent my resignation.”
But the computer didn’t hesitate for a microsecond. “That is a circular argument.”
“Well, then, let me put it to you this way: If you don’t transmit my message to Hammersmith, then I shall rewire you into a food processor.”
This time the computer remained silent.
“Well, computer? What are ye doing?”
“Scanning personnel records of Montgomery Scott to project hypothetical level of technical proficiency in the reconstruction of organic material synthesizers from duotronic components.”
“And ... ?”
The computer reset its audio circuits. It sounded like someone clearing her throat. “Message as dictated reads: ‘Effective immediately, I wish to tender my resignation from Star—’ Please proceed.”
Scott sighed. “Thank you, computer.” It was a small victory, but these days Scott was grateful to take any that he could get. He felt it would be a long time before he would taste anything like it again, if ever. He glanced at the wall over his chest of drawers where his bagpipes hung. Twenty meters beyond them was open space. And the captain. And McCoy. And all the rest of those who rightfully belonged on the Enterprise. Perhaps by resigning, Spock was acknowledging that McCoy had shown them all the way. It was not logical to expect to uncover the real reasons behind what had happened at Talin IV by battling Starfleet. Perhaps Starfleet wasn’t the enemy here. Perhaps there were other enemies, and other ways to find victory.
Scott turned back to the patient viewscreen which displayed the words he had dictated. Though it was difficult for the engineer to admit it, for the first time machinery wasn’t enough. He no longer belonged on board the Enterprise. What had made this ship so special was her crew and her captain. The spirit of her would live just as well somewhere else, as long as they could be together.
[37] And they would be together again, Scott suddenly realized. They had to be.
Scott smiled, the first time he had felt like it in months. Then he spoke the rest of the words that would free him from Starfleet, so like Spock and Kirk and McCoy and all the rest, he could do what duty demanded of him.
THREE
“They musta been sorta crazy, doncha think, mister?” the child asked, wrinkling her face in consternation. She was about eight standard years old, taller than most her age which meant she was probably from one of the smaller Martian cities where the citizens had voted against higher gravity. But the clothes she wore—a lacrosse jersey from one of the intersystem championship leagues sloppily pulled over balloon overalls and red Skorcher moccasins—could have come from child outfitters anywhere from the Venus highdomes to the Triton hollowcells. Sol system, which once had been such a grand adventure, had become one large city, less than one-millionth of a subspace-second across.
Leonard McCoy scratched at the six-week growth of whiskers that was slowly and itchily becoming a beard. It was one thing being back in his home system in a cabin in a nature reserve, but civilization was making him edgy. When had the Moon gotten this built up and civilized, anyway? It wasn’t the same as he remembered it had been when he was a boy.
“Doncha think, mister? Huh, mister?”
McCoy looked down at the child standing beside him at the railing. “Don’t you know you shouldn’t talk to strangers?”
The child blinked at him. “You’re not that strange, mister. I [39] talked to an Andorian once. They listen through these feeler things on their heads. They look sorta like they got two blue worms stickin’ up from their heads or somethin’.” The child shook her head knowingly. “Now that’s strange.”
“Well, young lady, Andorians think we’re strange because our ears are squashed to the sides of our heads. In fact, they wonder how we can hear anything. And compared to them, we don’t hear a lot.” McCoy decided to spare the child a recitation of the standard frequencies of a typical Andorian’s hearing range.
“Wow, do you know any Andorians, mister?”
McCoy was bothered that the child was impressed by the fact that he might have known an Andorian or two in his life. It was such a little thing. Especially considering that the child and McCoy were standing at the viewing railing of Tranquility Park. Fifty meters away beyond the transparent aluminum wall, the spindly-looking second stage of the-first crewed vehicle to land on Earth’s Moon sat beneath the brilliant, unfiltered sunshine as it had for more than two hundred years. Where McCoy and the child stood had once been an unimaginable frontier, the quest for which had shaped the dreams of an entire century of living, breathing, and hoping human beings.
Those pioneers had come to this dead world in fragile ships powered by chemical rockets and controlled by binary computers only one step removed from an abacus. They had come without the capability for remaining more than a handful of hours, and decades before the development of any technology that could be reasonably utilized here. Why? So they could hop around for a few minutes in constricting, multilayered environmental suits that had been needle-sewn together by hand, and scoop up an unrepresentative few kilos of surface rocks and soil. Now almost two and a half centuries later, the anonymous spot which Armstrong and Aldrin had reached by risking their lives as the final two humans in a chain of thousands who had toiled years toward that goal, had become a holiday resort—a favorite stop for honeymooners and students on day excursions from Earth.
Civilization, McCoy thought sourly. The death of dreams. He [40] narrowed his eyes at the child. “Look, kid ... what’s your name?”
“Glynis,” she said.
“Well, Glynis, do you know what that is out there by the old flag?”
The child gave an exaggerated nod. “The lower stage of the Lunar Excursion Module, Eagle,” she recited. “Launched July 16, oldstyle one nine six nine C.E. The first of twelve successful landings on the Moon prior to the building of Base One. Launch authority was ... um, the National Space and ... no, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Uh, the United States of North ... no, just of America.” Glynis grinned happily up at McCoy. “Neil A. Armstrong, Commander. Edwin E. Aldrin, Lunar Excursion Module pilot. Michael Collins, Command Module Pilot. ‘We came in peace for all mankind.’ ”
McCoy was impressed. He was never surprised when children could reel off the names of every lacrosse player in the system—along with their favorite colors and breakfast foods, or the complete lyrics and plot nuances of the latest holosaga, but he thought it rare to find a child who had turned her innate talents to the study of history. “That’s very good,” he said, and meant it. “Now how does a girl your age happen to know all that?”
The child became very solemn. “I have to.”
McCoy raised an eyebrow. “And why’s that?”
“You haveta know that stuff to get into the Academy.”
“Starfleet Academy?”
Glynis nodded again, mouth set, very serious.
“How old are you?” McCoy asked.
“Almost nine.”
“And you already know you want to join Starfleet?”
The child looked puzzled as if she didn’t understand why McCoy had asked the question. “I have to,” she said.
“You have to? Why?”
She drew herself up and looked proudly into McCoy’s eyes. “I’m going to work on a ... starship.”
[41] McCoy heard the slight hesitation in the child’s voice as she said that final word, almost as if there was too much magic in it to ever speak the word lightly. He understood. But still ...
“You want to work on a starship and you think the Moon pioneers were ‘sorta crazy’?”
Glynis gazed out at the lunar landing stage in the middle of the stark graywhite landscape. “That’s nothin’ like a starship. It’s kin da small, doncha think? And they didn’t have enough radiation shielding. And no gravity. And they had to use electricity to run their systems. And—”
McCoy squatted down by the child to bring his eyes level to hers, and held up a finger to quiet he
r, just for a moment. “You know, a hundred years from now, if they ever build that transporter beam wave guide from the Earth to here and people can visit the Moon in two seconds instead of two hours, little children are going to be saying the same thing about us and how crazy we were because we had to get here in old-fashioned impulse shuttles.”
The child looked skeptical. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” McCoy said. He pointed out to the Eagle’s landing stage. “What you have to remember when you look out there is that that machine isn’t some flimsy, primitive, radiation-transparent antique.”
“It’s not?”
McCoy shook his head. “More than two hundred years ago, when children looked at the Eagle, that was their starship. And they dreamed about flying on it for all the same reasons that you want to fly on the starships we have today.”
Glynis looked away from McCoy, squinting out through the double-story window overlooking Tranquility Base. “That was sorta all they had back then, wasn’t it?”
“But when they launched it, it was the best.”
“And there’re going to be better starships a hundred years from now?”
McCoy nodded.
“But the ones we have now ... they’re the best, right?”
[42] “Yes. They are.” McCoy was hit with a sudden wave of sadness and he wasn’t surprised.
The child thought about that answer for a moment, and McCoy could almost see her rearranging facts within her mind, pulling out pictures of old-fashioned spacecraft and sticking them beside state-of-the-art Constitution-class vessels.
“I wonder what it was like to live back then,” she said.
McCoy straightened up again. “Just the same as it is to live now.” He smiled at the child’s look of surprise. “The spaceships change, but people don’t. That’s one of the things you’ll learn in the Academy.”
