by Diane Carey
“Good.” Chekov stood up. “Take positions at—”
The “lift” doors opened again and Captain Sulu entered in the middle of a conversation … with James T. Kirk.
My feet froze. I couldn’t move my feet. What was wrong with my boots?
“Because I’m shipping out on the thirtieth of this month,” James Kirk was saying.
“It’s just one deep-nebula navigation class,” Sulu protested. “It was your idea in the first place. At least launch the seminar—”
They came onto the bridge and paused on the upper deck.
“Two weeks and that’s it,” Kirk said. “Get ready to sign some releases.”
“Releases?”
“Well, you don’t want to be held responsible, do you?”
Leaving Captain Sulu with that thought, Kirk scanned the bridge and a touch of nostalgia warmed his ruddy cheeks.
Then he looked at Chekov. “Gentlemen? Is it loaded up?”
“Ready now, sir,” the commander said. “Would you like to see the cadets attempt the action?”
Kirk almost said yes, then glanced around and seemed to be assessing the presence of his two former bridge officers and Sturek and me. What was he thinking about?
He stepped down to the command deck, circled the captain’s chair, touched it, ran his hands along the back and down the arm. A chill skittered across my shoulder as if I were that chair, feeling the warmth of his reminiscence and the challenge of his presence. Sulu and Chekov both grinned sentimentally, and Sturek looked at me for just an instant. We were witnessing a precious, fleeting moment.
James Kirk gazed at the captain’s chair. “Why should the cadets have all the fun?” he asked. Then he looked at Sulu and Chekov in turn. “I always wanted to have a second crack at this. What do you say, gentlemen?”
A grin broke across Sulu’s face that lit up the whole bridge. The place actually got bright.
Chekov nodded firmly at his former commander and caught the enthusiasm. “Why not! It’s all yours, sir!”
“All hands,” Kirk said, his voice suddenly ringing “take your posts.”
What?
I figured I’d better move. So I took the helm. It was closest.
Sturek dropped from the upper starboard deck and landed in the navigation chair. That was where we’d have to sit if we were going to run the program.
A form appeared at my side and another in my periphery beside Sturek. We both looked up, and at our sides stood Sulu and Chekov. Sulu was looking down at me. Chekov was looking at Sturek.
Well, “looking” didn’t exactly describe it.
“What’s wrong?” Captain Kirk asked impatiently.
Chekov fanned his arms at me and Sturek. “They’re in our seats!”
Kirk settled into the command chair. “Then you can be Scotty. Sulu, you be Spock. I can do this without the two of you, but I need Scotty and Spock.”
“Indeed!” Captain Sulu puffed up like I didn’t think he could, raised his chin and struck a pose long enough to get that word out.
“Aye-aye, Captain, sarrr!” Chekov rolled some kind of accent over the accent he already had—this was crazy.
We knew who they were talking about, of course, but why were they? Spock, the famous Vulcan first officer who had set a pattern for his entire race by entering Starfleet and gaining acclaim at James Kirk’s side, and Captain of Engineering Montgomery Scott, whose innovations at deep-space warp engineering had provided me with something to use to smack Robin around—the legendary crew of senior officers were lesson number one for any Starfleet cadet.
Here I was, sitting in the helm chair, and behind me was Captain James T. Kirk, the prototype of Starfleet tenacity, a man who’d been known to work every advantage until it cracked, and he wanted to play a simulator game!
Sturek surveyed me briefly from the nav seat—he didn’t know what was going on either.
I flinched when the bridge around us surged to life and began to hum and click with electrical activity. Chekov must’ve turned it on from up there. He was standing now at the engineering station, and Sulu had climbed up to the science console and was standing there with his arms folded and one eyebrow up.
Didn’t make any sense.
I glanced around at Captain Kirk just to see if these antics were some kind of a joke, and he pointed at me. “You be Sulu,” he ordered, then pointed at Sturek. “And you be Chekov. I know it’s asking a lot, but Academy cadets are supposed to be able to endure anything.”
He settled deep into the command chair, relishing the feeling.
“Mr. Spock,” he began, his voice ringing, “implement program MONAD 1701!”
“Implementing, captain,” Sulu responded with an unrecognizable lilt. He worked the science board, and on several subsystems monitors and the main screen scenes popped up that I didn’t recognize—old-style views of space and ship motion, and there were sounds I’d never heard before, somehow more musical than usual bridge noises.
A jolt of nostalgia hit me. All this seemed familiar … and it felt right.
“Navigator,” Kirk said, “make your course six five zero mark two.”
Sturek glanced at me again. He was confused too, and worried.
“Six five zero mark two, laid in, captain,” he said.
“Warp factor five, helm.”
My turn—
“Warp five, sir!”
“Steady as she goes.”
A shiver ran my spine and a grin cracked across my face. I was really doing this! Captain James Kirk was right here! The Captain James Kirk was giving me orders! I’d gotten a steady-as-she-goes from James T. Kirk!
When my board changed in front of me, I almost forgot to relay the change.
“Captain, shields just snapped on! Something coming in at multiwarp speeds!”
“Yellow alert,” the captain said, boiling everything down to a single action.
“Yellow alert,” I responded, quite properly if I did say so myself, and the bridge panels changed to flashing amber.
“Evasive maneuvers, Mr. Sulu,” Kirk added.
I parted my lips and said, “Evasive maneuvers.”
Had my voice changed? I looked at the upper deck—Captain Sulu had said the same thing at the same time.
Everybody paused, looked at everybody else, and Sulu shrugged. “Habit,” he threw in.
Kirk bobbed his brows once, and shrugged back.
“Extremely powerful bolt of energy coming in, captain,” Sulu said then, speaking rather evenly and fluidly, but with a sense of spirit. Was that how the famous Mr. Spock sounded?
“Mr. Scott!” Kirk spoke up. “I need full shields!”
“Captain,” Chekov gulped from the upper engineering station, “uh dunt ken eef we heff de powerrr!”
I gaped at Sturek. What was that supposed to be?
Kirk cranked around in his chair. “He wouldn’t say that! We haven’t even been hit yet!”
“Oh … right!” Chekov looked at his board and seemed to be enjoying himself. “I’ll give it all I got, sarrr!”
On the main screen, a white globular bolt rushed toward the “ship,” getting bigger and brighter, like a gigantic water balloon rolling toward us.
“It’s gonna hit!” I called out, hoping I was speaking up at the right moment.
The bolt overtook the whole viewscreen, and Slam! The simulator bridge heaved up under us and shook to one side! At engineering, Chekov kicked over the nearest chair. Sulu jumped down from the science deck and spun the captain’s chair halfway around, spinning kirk right out of it. Kirk stuck his foot out sideways and knocked my chair out from under me!
All I saw as I went down was Sturek’s completely baffled face and the delight of Sulu’s mischievous expression. Why were they beating us up?
“Begorra!” Chekov crowed from somewhere inside a plume of exhaust from a “blown” console.
“That’s Irish,” Kirk scolded.
Chekov smiled and kept up that weird accent-on-accent.
“Shields down to forrrty parrrcent, sarrr!”
Defensively Kirk glowered at the main screen. “Not on the first hit, they weren’t,” he said derisively. “Not that ship.”
Captain Sulu climbed back to the upper deck and secured his posture in Spock-form. “We should be dead within moments. Undoubtedly this is Ensign Chekov’s fault.”
The “ship” shook under us again as I tried to get back into my toppled seat.
“Helm, I said evasive maneuvers!” Kirk snapped.
“We’re losing power, sir!” I told him.
“Another bolt approaching, captain,” Chekov said with great agitation. “Mr. Sulu is steering us right into them!”
The new hit slammed the bridge with shockwaves.
Unimpressed, Kirk simply said, “Arm torpedoes one and two.”
Then he paused and looked around fitfully, troubled.
“Something’s missing,” he murmured.
I was looking at him, but had no idea what he could possibly be talking about. Sulu looked too, but didn’t seem to have the answer either, which made me feel a little less clumsy.
“Oh, yes!” Kirk suddenly leaned to one side as if addressing himself and struck an attitude I didn’t recognize. “But, Jim, you can’t just open fire on an unknown spacecraft!” he rasped, then shifted to the other side of the chair. “Mind your own business, Bones, I’m a captain, not a social worker. Mr. Chekov! Fire torpedoes!”
Sturek was completely paralyzed. The antics of the senior officers were utterly mystifying to him, and even as I was beginning to get into it, he was losing ground.
I cuffed him in the elbow, which shook him enough so that he remembered he was Chekov. He pawed his console and breathlessly responded, “Torpedoes away, sir!”
Whoosh—Whoosh—
A deadly sound, even in the simulator. Full-power photon torpedoes jetting into space, perfect killing machines with the bottled power of a solar flare. Made me wince. Imagine if those were real!
Piloting the starship in the presence of all the incarnations of the famous first crew, I indulged in a shiver of thrill and played my console as if I could sound a fanfare with it.
“Another bolt coming in, Captain” Sulu droned. “Quite illogical. I may throw up.”
“Logic, my eye, Mr. Spock,” Kirk tossed over. “Mr. Chekov, give me retreat coordinates.”
Sturek glanced at him, then worked his board.
I turned halfway around. “Retreat, sir? That’s not in the program.”
His amber eyes hit me and skewered in. “Did I ask you?”
“No, sir!”
“Retreat heading laid in, sir,” Sturek said.
“Helm, retreat, warp factor six.”
Again I looked around. “Sir, those bolts are coming in at warp fifteen! We can’t outrun them!”
He actually crossed his legs and tilted his head at me. “Are you questioning your captain’s orders, cadet?”
As if I’d been punched, I gulped, “No, sir! Warp factor six! Retreat heading!”
“Navigator, effect emergency warp core dump on my mark! Three … two … one, mark!”
Taken by surprise, Sturek fumbled briefly, then found the tie-ins.
The whole bridge bumped hard, almost throwing me from my chair again.
Ffffffooooom—all screens showed a big greenish blast of contamination and every kind of crud imaginable. The computers rushed to calculate the impact, then jolted us with a second flush of shock effect.
Victory fanfare played over the sound system—the music of a technical win! He’d beaten the simulator!
Sulu came forward on the upper deck, and Chekov appeared in my periphery on the port side.
“It’s dead, Jim!” they both cried out.
At the same time, with the same inflection … how did they know to do that?
James Kirk sank back in the command chair and moaned, “Pathetic.”
Sturek was looking at his controls as if they’d grown pointed ears. “The antimatter dump caused an energy flushback … marvelous!”
I abandoned my board and swung around to Kirk. “You did it, sir!”
He gave a little shrug. “I had thirty years to figure it out.”
“I would never think to retreat!”
“Better learn.” He dismissed me as easily as that and glanced warmly around the bridge. “Thank you, gentlemen. We’ll have to meet like this again sometime.”
As Sulu and Chekov beamed at him happily, James Kirk rose from the command chair, then caressed the arm of the chair as if shaking hands with an old friend. For a moment, neither Sturek nor I dared disturb his reverie. He’d just given us a gift, and to rupture his moment of peace would’ve been improper.
As I watched one of the most famous men in Federation history move about only steps from me, I sensed a loneliness no one had ever mentioned. Were captains lonely?
He pulled himself away from the chair in one of the saddest moments of strength I’d ever witness, and headed for the upper deck lift doors, and didn’t look back.
I paused, waiting for him to cast one last glance, but he didn’t.
In those four or five seconds, I learned a hard lesson.
“Captain—”
Pushing out of my chair, I hurried to the upper deck so he wouldn’t have to look down again.
He turned. “Question?”
“What’s it like,” I began, “when the ships out there are really trying to kill you?”
James Kirk, the unexploitable, glanced at Captain Sulu, then at Commander Chekov, down at Sturek through a cloud of fritzing smoke, and finally back at me. Harnessed anticipation crossed between the two of us.
“You’ll find out,” he said.
Chapter 8
“Corin, you’ll have to figure out some way to shortcut those firing sequences and coordinate them with Jana’s course plottings. Robin, I don’t see any way around your giving us more accurate numbers on the warp core surges. You’ll have to shave it down one more decimal point on each of these scales. Sturek, maybe you can help him by trimming the sensor shifts, and I’ll concentrate on applying a few of the more advanced strategical maneuvers and making my orders more specific to each degree. M’Giia, if you could … M’Giia?”
“Yes?”
“Are you listening?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”
Sounded all right when she said it fast, but she’d been looking at that viewscreen, and Flank Malan and his crew were over there.
I’d decided to go over our latest simulation exercises in the cadet lounge, because—well, I didn’t have a very good reason. Except they seemed to act more at ease in here than anywhere else, and I needed them to be at ease with each other for at least ten minutes a day. At least they’d be paying attention to me, or so I’d thought.
And it was cool an here, something we needed after a very hot day. We’d spent all morning in the simulator, then noon cleaning up what we’d done all morning, then all afternoon on the cross-country obstacle course, carrying water-soaked logs over our heads. That was the Academy’s way of expanding our minds while destroying our bodies.
Then, of course, we had to write up reports of how it felt and analyze our own mistakes. And for free time, which was now, we got to analyze our miserable destruction of the simulator. A well-rounded day, all in all.
The Starfleet News Service was playing on the big screen again, running through the day’s business as it pertained to Starfleet, and every other story had something to do with the activity—all right, slaughter—on Bicea Colony.
Scheduling at the Academy was very tight. We had full weekdays from reveille at zero-six hundred to evening drills, and only after showers and study hours could we break to the lounge, so that’s what almost everybody did at least twice a week. The lounge building not only housed the lounge, but the Olympic pool, the indoor track, and an arcade of hand-eye coordination games. Even when we weren’t training, we still were.
And, of course, th
e lounge was where we could just sit and stare at a great big screen and if we didn’t want to look at the screen we could look at Frank Malan.
Another command decision I could polish and hang on my barrack wall.
My nerves were still buzzing from those hot-wired minutes at James Kirk’s helm, making it torture to level out and concentrate on keeping my crew banded together. After every surge of thrill came a shudder borne up by those last three words he’d left me with. You’ll find out.
Somehow he’d managed to inspire me and terrify me in the same breath.
“Listen to this!”
I didn’t recognize the voice, but I knew that tone, and instantly looked up at the wide screen. A huge flock of cadets was watching now, and Frank Malan and his troglodyte troopers were right up front.
On the screen, Commandant Rotherot was making another announcement.
“—and the president of the Federation has issued a formal apology to the Klingons over Starfleet’s aggressive actions as incurred by the U.S.S. Sentinel. The Klingon High Council accepted that the exchange of weapons fire was based upon a misunderstanding—”
“Misunderstanding!” Frank Malan roared. “The Federation sold out Starfleet! They apologized to those butchers!”
“That’s pretty extreme, Malan,” I said, loudly enough for most of the cadets to hear.
Okay I’d probably end up with my spinal column holding up one end of the volleyball net, but they ought to hear a dissenting opinion from someplace, right? At least hear it.
“Face it,” I added. “You’re jumping to conclusions. The Federation isn’t ready to blame the Klingons for Bicea.”
“Easy talk from somebody who won’t get involved,” M’Giia coldly accused.
Malan moved through the crowd and stood beside M’Giia’s chair, “You ought to stick up for your own crewmate, at least, Forester. The Federation’s a pack of wimps, allowing the Klingons to massacre our families.”
“That theory doesn’t hold water,” I told him. “Klingon colonies on the Neutral Zone are being attacked too.”
He pointed at me. “Those are just rumors started by the Klingons to cover their tracks.”
He started to say something else, but Captain Sulu’s voice came over the comm. “Cadet Malan, report with your crew to the planetarium.”
