Breakdowns

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  “Sorry,” Sonya said in a small voice. She had flinched at the mention of Lian T’su, a year ahead of Sonya at the Academy and one of the first friends she had made there, who had gone on from her posting on the Enterprise as an ensign to a fine career culminating in the captaincy of the Orion—and a nasty death at Galvan VI.

  Belinda went on. “I don’t think you ever met a decision you didn’t like—and didn’t stick with. I wasn’t surprised you made chief engineer so fast, or that you were so good at it. You were meant to command.” She grinned. “Not like your bratty older sister.”

  At that, Sonya smiled. Besides her brief time in front of the camera as an FNS anchor, Belinda had been, at various times in the last decade and a half, a sculptor like her mother, or, rather, not like her mother, as she was awful at it; a soccer player, until a knee injury forced her out of professional play; a deep-sea diver; an actor; a transporter technician; and now a soccer coach.

  “But you’ve always been the one to jump in feetfirst, to make a decision and stick to it. So what happened?”

  Sonya shook her head. The sand suddenly felt cold between her toes. “I don’t know.”

  Chapter

  3

  The meal was, of course, spectacular.

  By the third course, everyone in the Gold-Gilman house was stuffed beyond reason. Then the aroma of the roast chicken hit, and they suddenly had room for just a little bit more.

  Rachel assured everyone as they each gamely took one more bite of food they were not convinced they’d be able to fit that there was plenty more in the kitchen, as she always did.

  Gold found himself sitting quietly at the head of the table, listening to the family talk. Nobody broached the subject of Starfleet or the da Vinci or Galvan VI. Instead Daniel talked about his and Jessica’s new job jointly supervising the maintenance of orbital habitats. Simone went on at some length about Anne’s accomplishments at school, to the latter’s great embarrassment. This prompted Michael to wax similarly rhapsodic about Tujiro, and soon everyone was talking about how wonderful their children were, which led to Ruth pretending to be aghast at the high expectations her soon-to-be-born daughter would have to live up to. This in turn led to everyone wondering what the girl’s name would be, which Ruth refused to answer—so everyone decided to ask Rinic, who was even more stoic.

  God, I missed this, Gold thought, as even Khor got into the act, telling everyone what he was doing on Earth (some kind of errand for the Klingon High Council that involved talking to some Federation councillors).

  After dessert—Rachel’s famous cream puffs, which somehow everyone found room for—Khor, Esther, Eden, and Bob all said they had to leave.

  The latter two had hardly spoken during the meal, and Gold protested, “Princess, we’ve barely had the chance to—”

  “Dad, I’m not your princess,” Eden said gently. “I’m a grown woman with a life of my own. It was nice to visit, but we need to get back home to Montréal.”

  It wasn’t until after they had said their good-byes that Gold realized that he had had no idea that Eden and Bob were living in Montréal now.

  “And where are you two going?” Rachel asked Esther and Khor. “I know you gave up your apartment when you decided to go meandering around the galaxy,” she said to Esther, “so I know for a fact you don’t have a place to stay.”

  “We will be residing in the Klingon Embassy in Paris,” Khor said firmly.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re staying here.”

  Rachel spoke in the tone that Gold knew would brook no argument. Gold stole a glance at Esther, who looked amused, obviously knowing that the Klingon didn’t stand a chance.

  “With all due respect, Rabbi Gilman, while we have found your hospitality to be excellent, it is not fit—”

  Rachel hit the Klingon councillor with the same half-smile, half-frown she hit her future husband with outside the Starfleet Academy dorm room. “If you find my hospitality ‘excellent,’ Khor, son of Lantar, then you will not sully it by refusing my invitation.”

  Khor hesitated. “You realize what you are saying.”

  “I teach a very popular class in intercultural studies, Khor. I know about Klingon rules of hospitality.”

  Esther then came to her boyfriend’s rescue. “And I also know about my grandmother’s rules of hospitality. We’re staying here tonight, my parmachkai. If nothing else, there’s no way, after sleeping on that damned metal slab of yours for the entire trip here from Qo’noS, that I’m passing up a chance at the guest bed here—with its mattress—for a night.”

  The Klingon looked back and forth between his lover and her grandmother. “If that is your wish, then it shall be so. I shall make the sacrifice of sleeping in comfort.”

  Joey then stepped forward. “I need to get going also. Abigail expected me back home an hour ago.”

  “You should have brought her with you,” Rachel said.

  “I don’t think that would’ve been such a good idea.”

  Gold frowned. “Why the hell not?”

  “Just—trust me, okay? Look, I have to go.”

  “Can’t you stay a little bit, Joey?” Gold asked, realizing that, like Eden, Joey had hardly said a word over dinner. No doubt, like his father, he was content to listen and catch up on the family gossip that he hadn’t heard in years. But Gold had good reason to remain quiet—everyone knew what he’d been up to. “I’d like to know—”

  “Know what, Dad?” Joey asked, suddenly belligerent. “What I’ve been doing with my life? Now’s a helluva time to ask.” He took a breath and calmed himself. “I’m sorry. Look—I have to go.”

  “Joseph Gold,” Rachel said, “you can’t just—”

  “Yes, I can, Mom. And I am. I appreciate you telling me that you were having this get-together for Dad, and I’m glad I came. But this doesn’t change anything. You’re all related to me, but I’ve got my own family now. Good-bye.”

  With that, he walked out the door.

  “Damn,” Daniel said. “You want me to go after him, Pop?”

  Gold shook his head. “There’s no point. He’s right. Family this big’s bound to have stray threads that get cut off from the rug.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Rachel said. “He’s just being a stubborn ass, like he’s always been.”

  “Can’t imagine where he got that from,” Gold said with a smile. “Look, I’m just glad Joey came. And Eden and Bob, for that matter, even if I didn’t get to talk to them. Right now, it’s good just to see them, after all that’s happened.”

  Danielle and Ira, Simone and Jared, and Michael and Hiroko came downstairs. “What did happen, Pop-Pop?” Michael asked. “The kids are all in bed—”

  “They might even get to sleep sometime in the next three hours,” Hiroko added.

  “—so I think we’d all like to know what happened to you.”

  When he walked in the door to his home for the first time in years, David Gold wasn’t ready to talk about Galvan VI. Now, though, after all his family had done to make him forget it for a little while, it was time to remember again. The dead deserved that much, and more.

  Of course, he left the classified specifics of the Wildfire device out of the story, but he told them all he could. Most of all, he told of the sacrifices so many of the crew made, from Stephen Drew’s giving up his own life to make sure the medical staff and their patients made it out of sickbay alive; to Kowal, Feliciano, Friesner, and Frnats, the four members of the damage-control team who got the structural integrity field up and running, thus keeping the ship in one piece a while longer; to Lieutenant McAllan pushing his captain out of the way of a collapsing ceiling, saving Gold’s life, if costing him a hand; to Kieran Duffy’s ultimate sacrifice that not only saved the ship, but an entire species.

  Silence descended upon the living room for many minutes. Finally, Khor spoke up. “They died well, Captain.”

  “Like that’s a comfort,” Jared said.

  “It should be, human,” Khor
said sharply. “Death is the one inevitability of life, the one thing on which we all may rely.”

  “If it’s such a foregone conclusion,” Jessica asked, “what difference does it make how we go to it?”

  “Every possible difference,” Khor said. “Captain Gold’s brave crew died doing their duty, sacrificing themselves so that others might live. Were they Klingons—and indeed, even though they are not—I can say with pride that they would be welcomed in Sto-Vo-Kor among the honored dead.” He held up a mug of bloodwine, which he and Esther had brought as their contribution to the meal, and of which only the two of them had partaken. “I salute them.”

  Rachel held up her own glass of eis wine. “I join the salute.” At the surprised looks of most of her family—except Gold—she said, “Khor is right. They did what they had to do, and what many people would not have been able to do. I would rather they were still alive, but if they had to die, it’s best that this is how they did it. So I salute their memories.”

  Quietly, Gold said, “As do I.” He held up his own mug, which just had coffee in it.

  One by one, the rest of the remaining family also raised their drinks.

  * * *

  The following morning, Gold slept in. He awoke to an empty bed, with the smells of breakfast summoning him to the kitchen. Putting on a bathrobe, he went downstairs to see Daniel, Jessica, Ruth, and Esther sitting around the kitchen table, munching on muffins, with Rachel standing over the oven.

  “Morning, Pop.”

  “Don’t call me ‘Pop,’ son.”

  “Don’t call me ‘son,’ Pop. Sleep okay?”

  Gold smiled. “Don’t know, I was asleep the whole time.”

  Ruth looked plaintively at Rachel. “Gramma, have those two always been like this?”

  “Only since Daniel could talk,” Rachel said.

  “Where’s everyone else?” Gold asked as he poured himself a cup of coffee.

  Ruth said, “Rinic had to get little R.D. off to school, and Danielle, Michael, and Simone had to do the same with their kids, only they all went off.”

  “Khor had that meeting in Paris,” Esther added.

  “We’ve got a few days, Pop,” Daniel said, “so we figured we’d stick around, if that’s okay.”

  “To that, I’m gonna say no?” Gold grinned as he took a seat next to his pregnant granddaughter. “You know, they took a pool on the da Vinci as to what name you and Rinic would pick for my great-grand-daughter. Of course, I’m not supposed to know about that….”

  Blinking, Ruth said, “You’re kidding.” She shook her head. “That’s weird.”

  “What is?”

  “Well, aside from that nice Bolian doctor I met that time, and that Scottish guy with the mustache, I don’t even know any of your crew.”

  Gold chuckled. “Fewer than you think. The doctor you met has retired, and the Scottish guy is the S.C.E. liaison here on Earth, not part of my crew.”

  “Yet they’re making bets about my daughter?”

  Shrugging, Gold said, “It’s just the usual shipboard nonsense.”

  “It’s still weird, Grandpa.”

  Gold considered. “That’s not the worst thing my crew’s been called.”

  My crew, he thought. He liked the sound of that. Whatever silly thoughts were telling him to retire had obviously retreated. He wasn’t ready. Not yet.

  Four years ago, when hostilities had broken out between the Federation and the Klingon Empire thanks to changeling infiltration at the highest levels of the Klingon military hierarchy, one of Gold’s oldest friends, Captain Mairin ni Bhroanin of the U.S.S. Huygens, was killed in combat. At Mairin’s funeral, Gold had confessed to Rachel a desire to retire.

  “You belong in space,” she had said.

  “I belong with my family.”

  “You’ll always belong with your family, but for now you also belong in space. Someday, it’ll just be the one. Then you come home.”

  That day had not yet come. He needed to be home right now, but he knew that he’d need to go back to space soon enough.

  “So what’s on the agenda for today, Pop?” Daniel asked.

  “Research. I need to speak to the families. Khor was right, they all—” He hesitated. “They all died well. Their families deserve to know that. So, since I’ve got a few weeks before the da Vinci will be ready to go back out, I’m going to take that time to track down the families of all twenty-three of my people who died and pay my respects. In person if they’re on Earth, over subspace if they’re not.”

  “Anything we can do to help?” Jessica asked.

  Gold smiled. “Just keep being here. That’s been the best present anyone could’ve given me. Beyond that—I’ll let you know.”

  * * *

  The first person whose family Gold tried to find was David McAllan.

  For two years, every time Gold came onto the bridge, McAllan insisted on saying, “Captain on the bridge.” It was a bit of protocol that had fallen out of favor, though never actually stricken from the regulations. Some captains still insisted on it, of course. Gold had always found such people to be a little too full of themselves. In particular, Gold found it a ludicrous custom to maintain on a ship whose primary purpose was to work in the service of the S.C.E., probably the least spit-and-polish branch of the service.

  But McAllan did insist, and it got to the point where Gold actually started looking forward to it.

  He’d never hear it again, and worse, the reason why he’d never hear it again was because that brave, ultracompetent, spit-and-polish young man sacrificed his own life for that of his captain. Because that was, after all, the proper thing to do.

  To Gold’s shock, he realized he knew nothing about McAllan. Most of his crew, he could recite at least one hobby or odd personal habit or something about them, but about McAllan he drew a blank.

  His Starfleet record, unfortunately, revealed no useful data. His only listed relatives were a mother and father, who both died when McAllan was at the Academy. McAllan’s residence was a house in Greece that he shared with four other Starfleet officers. However, a call to that house revealed that all four were away on assignments, with the house under automated care until one or more of the owners came back to Earth.

  I owe my life to the man, and I can’t even memorialize him to his family or friends.

  With an empty feeling in his stomach, Gold called up the service record of Chief Diego Feliciano.

  * * *

  “He won’t come out of his room. I don’t know what to tell him.”

  Gold sat in the dining room of the home in Havana, Cuba belonging to Arlene Rivera and the late da Vinci transporter chief. Rivera, a nurse, had been married to Chief Feliciano for ten years. The “he” she referred to was their son, Carlos.

  “He turned seven a few days ago. That’s when he first locked himself in there. Now he only comes out to go to the bathroom. That’s when I’ve been bringing him food. But he won’t talk to me or to anybody.” Rivera had been holding a mug full of coffee for the entire time Gold had been sitting across from her nursing his own cup. She had yet to take a sip from it. A petite woman, she had jet-black hair and a round face that was marred by bloodshot brown eyes. “Diego promised he’d be home for his birthday this time. He missed it last year—because of the war, he couldn’t get away.”

  The captain remembered Feliciano talking about having to miss his son’s birthday when they had gone on a mission to salvage an alien ship near a secret Federation outpost. Ironically, that had been the mission on which Commander Salek—Gomez’s predecessor—was killed.

  “He promised that he would be home this time.” Tears started to run down her cheeks. “Why didn’t he keep the promise?”

  Gold’s voice was a cracked whisper. “He would have. Diego always spoke fondly of you and Carlos. ‘My little Carlitos,’ he always called him.”

  A smile struggled to get through the sadness on Rivera’s face. “Carlos hates being called that. I think that’s wh
y Diego did it.” She shook her head, the sadness victorious over the fleeting smile. “Why did he have to die now? He lived through an entire war; why did this have to happen?”

  “I can’t answer that. All I can say is that he died saving the lives of his crewmates—and his sacrifice may have saved an entire race. And I also know that that doesn’t mean a damn thing to a seven-year-old boy who won’t come out of his room. But someday, he will understand.”

  “Good. Then maybe he can explain it to me.” She closed her eyes. “I’m sorry, Captain, I’m not being fair to you.”

  “Nobody expects you to be fair, Ms. Rivera—hell, you’ve got no reason to be. It’s completely unfair—believe me, I know. I had to bury my own son during the war—he was on Betazed when the Dominion took it.”

  “Still, it means a lot that you came here. You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Diego didn’t have to sacrifice his life the way he did, either. But he chose to. I think the very least I owed him was to let his wife and son know how sorry I am—and how much you meant to him.”

  * * *

  “Get out of my house!”

  K.E. Bain all but slammed the door in Gold’s face when he arrived at the apartment in Juneau, Alaska, he shared with his daughter, Lieutenant Kara Bain, the beta-shift ops officer. “Mr. Bain,” Gold began, “I’m sorry, but—”

  “You killed my daughter, you son of a bitch. What the hell were you doing flying around a gas giant anyhow? I’m amazed anyone got out alive.”

  I was trying to salvage a warhead that would’ve wiped out the planet—and maybe destroyed an entire race—but I can’t tell you that. Intellectually, Gold understood the need for classified information, but there were times when it really irritated the hell out of him.

  “Mr. Bain, I just wanted to tell you—”

  “There’s nothing you can tell me that I want to hear, Captain. Now get the hell off my property before I shoot you.”

  Then he actually did slam the door in Gold’s face.

  * * *

  “I just wanted to tell you I’m sorry for your loss.”