Strange New Worlds X

by Dean Wesley Smith

  “I don’t need any more,” Q told him. “This test has shown me everything I need to know. Decker demonstrated a disappointing lack of insight and Kirk did nothing to change my mind. They’re a menace to their universe!”

  “Don’t be such a sore loser, Q,” the other smirked. “You were testing their strength, not their potential. It’s not their fault you didn’t need to rescue them. They beat you at your own game! Accept it and move on.”

  “I will not accept it and move on!” Q shouted, inflamed by the other’s attitude. “They’re barbarians! Their minds are far too small to understand the grand purpose of the universe and their arrogance far too great to let them realize it. I think it would be best if we simply wall them off to make room for the next race.”

  “I’m not sure why you’re getting so worked up, Q.”

  “This isn’t about me,” Q told him. “These humans have demonstrated that they have the power to defeat one of the most destructive forces ever to exist, yet they’ve also just shown that their intelligence hasn’t even progressed beyond the first level. We need to decide what to do about them now, before they’re allowed to do any real damage.”

  “As you wish,” the tall Q said. Closing his eyes for a moment, he began communing with the Continuum. Moments later, a slight smile tugged at the corner of his lips at the same time that a look of sheer horror crossed the face of his brother!

  “That’s outrageous!” Q exclaimed.

  “Congratulations, Brother. You’re elected!”

  “I don’t have time for this! My work is far too important to set aside while I baby sit an insignificant race in a remote arm of a backwater galaxy!”

  “You know the rules,” the other Q said. “You called for the Assessment. You’re the one who gets to gather the evidence and present it to the Continuum.”

  “What about the results of this test? Surely that’s sufficient!”

  The other shook his head. “You heard the Continuum. This test was designed with force as its only answer. It wasn’t a fair test of their true character. Personally, I think you’re looking at this the wrong way. There’s a lot of potential here, Q. Maybe all they need is wise counsel to help them bring it out. Until now, you haven’t given them your full attention. Perhaps it’s time for a change.”

  It had all been a trap. Q realized that, now.

  Before his brother left, he offered a heartfelt condolence and some final encouraging words of advice. As he winked out of existence, however, the momentary gleam of satisfaction that lit his face revealed the lie. The other Q had been trying to persuade him to take a race under his wing for countless ages. Thanks to a few hasty words, their gambit was a complete success.

  Q studied Kirk for a very long time, eyes lost in thought as an idea slowly began to take shape. If the Continuum was truly united, there would be no appeal, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t find some fun along the way.

  “You’ve caused me quite a bit of trouble, Mister Kirk,” he finally mumbled. “Quite likely, more than you could ever possibly understand with that microscopic brain of yours. Have you anything to say for yourself?”

  The frozen Kirk ignored Q and continued to stare fiercely at the tiny screen, facing down the terrifying image of the planet killer.

  “Hmm? You still worried about this thing?” Q asked, casually jerking his thumb at the view screen. “Don’t be. It’s as dead as last year’s uniform,” he smirked, glancing down at the simple green tunic currently favored by Kirk. “Your race, on the other hand, has had a stay of execution—a last-minute appeal from a higher power, as it were.”

  Q stood up and paced around auxiliary control. “My brethren seem to feel that I haven’t given you a fair test. They’re wrong, of course, but your pitiful race isn’t worth a confrontation with the Continuum. So, I’m going to give you another chance,” he offered magnanimously.

  “You’ll need to be patient, though. What I have in mind is going to take some time,” he explained as he walked back to Kirk and sat on the edge of the command console. “You see, I’m going to borrow a page from their own playbook. I won’t be the one to design your next test, I’ll let you humans do that for me. We’ll use your own rules to test whether or not you can live up to the standards and expectations you set for others. That should satisfy even the most difficult of critics, would you not agree?”

  He leaned closer to Kirk and whispered, “I’ll be watching you humans very closely from now on. I’m sure you’ll hand me a golden opportunity before long—I’d give you a hundred years, at the most.” With an evil chuckle, Q snapped his fingers and disappeared, but his parting words echoed eerily throughout the quiet room.

  “And on that day, Mon Capitaine, I’ll be back.”

  Empty

  David DeLee

  David DeLee lives in central Ohio with his wife Anne, his favorite daughters—they made him say that—Grace and Sarah, and four cats. After appearances in Strange New Worlds 8 (“Promises Made”) and Strange New Worlds 9 (A Bad Day for Koloth”), “Empty” marks his third entry in Strange New Worlds. He wishes to thank his family for their support, his parents John and Barbara for always being there, and a special thanks to Dean, Margaret and Paula for making it all possible. Now severely infected by the writing bug David is hard at work on several new writing projects.

  T he shipwide intercom whistled. It pierced the silence of the captain’s quarters but could not penetrate the somber pallor settled over the room like a shroud. A second whistle blast was followed by Spock’s voice. “Bridge to Captain Kirk.”

  At his desk Kirk reached out from the shadows, thumbed the switch without sitting up. “Kirk here.”

  “We’ve received clearance to depart Starbase 2, sir.”

  “Thank you, Mister Spock. Prepare for departure. I’ll be up momentarily.”

  “Yes, sir. Spock out.”

  “Time for one more?” McCoy faced him across the desk, held the bottle of blue Andorian ale over Kirk’s glass. When he didn’t get a response he filled the glass then topped off his own.

  Kirk sat and tapped a metal nail file on the desk and stared at the narrow glass of ale. He’d found the grooming implement on his desk a week ago, left behind by Janice Lester while she occupied his body.

  Why hadn’t he thrown it away?

  A reminder? Of what? A keepsake?

  “I’ll say one thing for the Andorians,” McCoy said, taking a sip of his drink, “they sure brew one hell of a batch of hooch.”

  Kirk tapped the nail file, paying no attention.

  “Jim?”

  He looked up. “What’s going to happen to her?”

  McCoy’s forehead wrinkled with concern, his blue eyes studying Kirk. “Who? Janet Lester?”

  Their reason for being at Starbase 2, to turn Janet Lester and her assistant, Doctor Arthur Coleman, over to Starfleet authorities. The senior staff had spent days debriefing Starfleet security regarding the recent events aboard the Enterprise involving Lester and Coleman. Kirk, Spock and McCoy had spent even more time with the SCE and archeological teams assembled to return to Camus II to examine the alien mind transference machine they’d discovered there.

  Kirk nodded. “Janet.”

  “She’ll undergo a full battery of tests—medical, psychological, emotional.” McCoy sipped his drink. “If she’s found free of mental disease or defect, in other words sane, she’ll stand trial. Answer for her crimes on Camus II, and for what she did to you.”

  Kirk listened but didn’t really hear. “How’d it happen, Bones? What causes a person to become that … obsessed?”

  “I could give you the long, drawn out, and ungodly boring clinical theories to explain it. Complete with a lot of psychobabble words thrown in, but that’s not what you’re asking.”

  Kirk went on, hardly hearing a word. “She blamed me. Hated me, for what I’d achieved. What I’d become. Could it somehow be my fault?”

  “Of course not,” McCoy snapped, banging his glass down and lea
ning over the desk. Kirk started to protest but McCoy cut him off. “Hold it a minute, Jim. Just hold it.”

  He took a moment to gather his thoughts. “The mind’s a complex thing. Even with all our fancy equipment, our diagnostic beds and our scans and optic probes and cortex mapping, there’s still a hell of a lot about it we don’t know yet. Things get especially fuzzy when you start trying to nail down abstracts like emotions and morality, our sense of right and wrong, our feelings. Just ask Spock.” He paused. “What makes a person snap like that? Who the hell knows?”

  Kirk stared past his desktop monitor. Past the bulkheads of his quarters, past the vacuum of deep space outside, back to another time, another place. “She was in her second year at the academy when I met her.”

  “Tell me,” McCoy urged.

  “Advanced xenobiology.” Kirk’s lips curled into a smile. “I was in my last year, spending way to much time in the simulators preparing for my practicals. My academic grades were slipping. Professor B’Targi …”

  “I know him. Tough old bird.”

  “… he dressed me down one day about my grades. Told me if I didn’t get them up in xenobiology he’d see to it I didn’t graduate regardless of whatever else I had going for me.”

  “Sounds like B’Targi.”

  Kirk nodded. “His heart was in the right place. He had a promising young cadet who could help me, he said. The next day he assigned Janet Lester to tutor me.”

  “And you being Jim Kirk around a pretty woman couldn’t help but be … Jim Kirk.”

  He gave McCoy a self-effacing smile. “Am I that transparent, Bones?”

  McCoy considered. “Let’s say predictable.”

  “There were signs, Bones, even back then. We’d talk for hours about what it would be like to command a starship, to explore galaxies, see things, go places no other human being had ever been before. She was so passionate, so determined to be selected for command. So …”

  “Obsessed?”

  “It was all she talked about. How she would let nothing get in her way. Nothing else mattered to her.”

  Kirk took a slug of his drink. “I should have seen it, Bones, should have been able to do something to help before it was too late.” He put his glass down, slowly turned it, stared as the muted light reflected off its angled sides. “But I was too wrapped up in myself, too blind to see it. Or maybe I just didn’t care enough—”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself. Jim. You were young, under a lot of pressure. It wasn’t your place.”

  He smashed his fist into the desktop, stood up. “Damn it, Bones. Don’t you see? Janet, Ruth Cartwright, Areel Shaw, Carol Marcus. Different names, different people but they’re all the same; women who cared about me, who put their trust in me. And I gave them nothing in return. Except pain.”

  “That’s unfair, Jim. To you and to them.”

  Kirk turned, tapped the back of his fist in the palm of his hand. He paced, felt like a caged animal. His quarters suddenly felt too small, too confining. He wanted to get out, get away, to escape. An entire galaxy out there and he felt boxed in.

  McCoy stood. “There are people in our lives, all of us, who we’ve hurt. Or who have hurt us. You’re no different than anyone else, Jim. Those women, every one of them, they knew who you were going in. They knew what you were about and they came along for the ride anyway. If they meant to change you or thought you were something else, that was their problem. You’ve never deceived anyone, never said you were more than, or less than, who you really are. Don’t take on something that’s not yours.”

  Kirk nodded but he wasn’t convinced. Maybe what McCoy said was true, maybe it wasn’t. All he knew was he felt responsible; responsible for the pain, the tears, the loss.

  McCoy continued to scrutinize him. “There’s something else, isn’t there? Something you’re not saying. What is it?”

  Without acknowledging McCoy was right, Kirk opened the drawer of his desk. He extracted a file and dropped it on the desk with a slapping noise. Across the cover was marked; STARFLEET CONFIDENTIAL.

  “What’s this?” McCoy asked.

  “Orders. The Enterprise’s been called back to Earth, the San Francisco Fleet Yards for a refit.”

  “A refit! No damned way. Why?”

  Kirk looked around his quarters as if the answers were somewhere on the barren off-white bulkheads. He wished they were. “She’s old, Bones. Been through a lot.”

  “Poppycock!”

  Kirk raised an eyebrow, and a smile touched his lips. “Twenty-five years of service, she’s worn out, Doctor. There’s new technology out there. A new, vertical warp core, new warp narcelles, impulse engines, weapons, computer systems, integrating interfaces. She needs a face-lift.”

  McCoy gave him that sideways glance Kirk hated. It was the one that made him feel like McCoy could see right through him.

  “How long?”

  “How long what?” Kirk asked, though he knew exactly what McCoy was looking for. He was buying time, time to sort out the answers. Hell, to find the answers.

  “You know damn well what. The refit. How long are we going to be hung up in dry dock?”

  “Eighteen months.”

  “Eighteen months! Jesus, Jim, what’ll we do in the meantime? Twiddle our thumbs?”

  He could’ve answered with words. Instead Kirk extracted another file from the desk. This one was considerably thicker than the last, and it took two hands to hold it without spilling its contents. He tossed it onto the desk. Several of its four hundred and thirty pages fanned out from between the brown file covers.

  “What’s this?”

  “More orders.”

  McCoy gave him a quizzical look. “What kind of orders?”

  “Transfer orders.”

  The size of the file was not lost on McCoy. “No God damned way, Jim! There must be—”

  Kirk nodded. “Four hundred and thirty.”

  “That’s the whole damned crew.”

  Kirk nodded again. “It’s over, Bones. Our five year mission, when we reach dry dock, reach Earth, it’s over.”

  At a loss for words, McCoy stared at the thick file. Finally, he said, “Transfers to where?”

  “Other duty assignments. Some are opting out, retiring. Promotions for most of them. The senior staff. With my recommendations they’ll have pretty much their choice of assignments. Ships, command positions. Their choice. They’ve earned it.”

  McCoy reached for the chair behind him. He slumped into it, heavy, hard. With a sigh he stared at the dark carpet and shook his head.

  The silence in the room had a bereaved quality to it. Like at a funeral with a room full of people, everyone wanting to say something, the exact right thing, but no one knowing what that was. Afraid to say something wrong, they say nothing at all and the silence grows, taking on a life of its own.

  Finally McCoy lifted his head, stared at Kirk. “We need to fight this. You need to fight this, Captain.”

  Kirk shook his head before downing the last of his ale in a single gulp. “No.”

  McCoy blinked like he’d been slapped. He came to his feet in a shot. “No? What do you mean, no?”

  “Exactly what I said, Bones. No.” Kirk crossed over to his desk, deposited his glass and moved into the sleeping area of his quarters.

  McCoy followed, stopping at the partition between the two areas, respecting the division of privacy.

  Kirk activated the wardrobe, stripped off his wraparound tunic, dropped it into the laundry receptacle, and pulled on a gold duty uniform top. Once dressed, he stepped past McCoy and back behind his desk to call up the day’s duty roster on his monitor.

  Feeling McCoy’s continued scrutiny he snapped off the monitor again. “It’s a tour of duty, Doctor. And it’s over. Done. Move on.”

  Kirk stepped passed him, headed for the doors.

  “Hold it.” McCoy practically barked the words out.

  Kirk whirled, not yet close enough to activate the doors to his quarters.
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  “That emotionless, ‘let’s move on’ cock-and-bull might work for Spock but not you, Jim. What’s going on?” McCoy’s gaze nailed him to the spot with the intensity of a force field. “There’s more. What is it?”

  Kirk cocked his head toward the desk. “My orders. They’re in there too, Bones.”

  When it was clear Kirk wouldn’t tell him, McCoy crossed to the desk, and flipped the file folder open. Kirk’s was the first one. Right on top. McCoy read it, looked at Kirk then read it over again, like it might have changed in the interim.

  He seemed to have trouble finding his voice. When he finally did, he said, “To any other man in the Fleet I’d say congratulations, shout it out from here to the Neutral Zone and break open the closest case of bubbly.”

  “And me?”

  “Clasp you on the shoulder,” which he did, with a smile. “And say well deserved, Captain—which it is—and now let’s get back to work.”

  “Bones.”

  “Maybe we—should break out another bottle. You got anything stashed around here, Jim?”

  “Bones.”

  “Chief of Starfleet Operation.” He opened a cabinet, then another in his search for a hidden something to drink. “Are they daft? What on Earth would make them think you’d even consider it? Rear Admiral James T. Kirk. Does have a ring to it, though.” Abandoning his search, McCoy straightened.

  “Bones.”

  He pulled Kirk by the arm toward the door. It swished open, startling two passing crewmen. McCoy gave them a quick nod as he stepped into the corridor. He turned back. “Come on, we’ll go down to Scotty’s quarters. He’s bound to have something we can drink. Talk to him about this crazy refit nonsense.”

  “I’m taking it.”

  That stopped him cold. “Say again?”

  “The promotion.” Kirk joined him in the corridor. “I’ve thought about it and I’m taking it.”

  “Maybe you’re the one who’s daft.”

  Kirk shook his head and walked down the corridor to the nearest turbolift.

  “Captain,” a crewman said, passing him.