When Spock first requested that Saavik tutor Peter Preston in advanced theoretical mathematics, she had prepared herself to decline. Peter, fourteen, was nearly the same age as Saavik had been when the Vulcan research team landed on her birth-world.
Saavik had feared she would compare the charming and well-brought-up young Peter to the creature she had been on Hellguard. She had feared she would resent the advantages childhood had presented to him and withheld from her. She feared her own anger and how she might react if she released it even for a moment.
When she tried to explain all this to the captain, he listened, considerately and with all evidence of understanding. Then he apologized for his own lack of clarity: he had not made a request; he had given an order which he expected Saavik to carry out as a part of her training. Unquestioning obedience was illogical, but trust was essential. If, in all the years that Saavik had known Spock, she had not found him worthy of trust, then she was of course free to refuse the order. Many avenues of training and advancement would still lie open to her. None, however, would permit her to remain under Spock’s command.
Spock had been a member of the Vulcan exploratory expedition to Hellguard. He alone forced the other Vulcans to accept their responsibility to the world’s abandoned inhabitants, though they had many logical reasons (and unspoken excuses far more involved) for denying any responsibility. Saavik owed her existence as a civilized being, and possibly her life—for people died young and brutally on Hellguard—to Spock’s intervention.
She obeyed his order.
Saavik heard Peter running down the hall. He burst in, out of breath and distracted.
“I’m really sorry I’m late,” he said. “I came as fast as I could—I didn’t think you’d wait.”
“I was late, too,” she admitted. “I thought perhaps you were delayed by the inspection, as I was.” Saavik had to be honest with herself, though: one of the reasons she waited was that she thoroughly enjoyed the time she spent teaching the young cadet. Peter was intelligent and quick, and while their ages were sufficiently different that Peter was still a child and Saavik an adult, they were in fact only six years apart.
“Well…sort of.”
“Are you prepared to discuss today’s lesson?”
“I guess so,” he said. “I think I followed projecting the n-dimensional hyper-planes into n-1 dimensional spaces, but I got a little tangled up when they started to intersect.”
Saavik interfaced Peter’s small computer with the larger monitor.
“Let me look,” she said, “and I will try to see where you began…getting a little tangled up.”
As she glanced through Peter’s work, Saavik reflected upon her own extraordinarily erroneous assumption about the way she would react to Peter. Far from resenting the boy, she found great comfort in knowing that her own childhood was anomalous, rather than being the way of a deliberately cruel universe. Cruelty existed, indeed: but natural law did not demand it.
She learned at least as much from Peter as he did from her: lessons about the joy of life and the possibilities for happiness, lessons she could never feel comfortable discussing with Spock, and in fact had avoided even mentioning to him.
But the captain was far more subtle and complex than his Vulcan exterior permitted him to reveal. Perhaps he had not, as she had believed, given her this task to test her control of the anger she so feared. Perhaps she was learning from Peter precisely what Spock had intended.
“Here, Peter,” she said. “This is the difficulty.” She pointed out the error in one of his equations.
“Huh?”
He looked blankly at the monitor, his mind a thousand light-years from anything.
“Your tangle,” she said. “It’s right here.”
“Oh. Yeah. Okay.” He looked at it and blinked, and said nothing.
“Peter, what’s wrong?”
“Uh, nothing.”
Saavik remained silent for a moment; Peter fidgeted.
“Peter,” Saavik said, “you know that I sometimes have difficulty understanding the way human beings react. I need help to learn. If everything is all right, determining why I thought something might be wrong will pose me a serious problem.”
“Sometimes there’s stuff people don’t want to talk about.”
“I know—I don’t wish to invade your privacy. But if, in truth, you are not troubled, I must revise many criteria in my analyses of behavior.”
He took a deep breath. “Yeah, something happened.”
“You need not tell me what,” Saavik said.
“Can I, if I want?”
“Of course, if you wish.”
He hesitated, as if sorting out his thoughts. “Well,” he said, “I had this fight with Commander Scott.”
“A fight!” Saavik said with considerable distress.
“Not like punching or anything. But that isn’t it; he gets snarked off about little stuff all the time.”
“Peter, I think it would be better if you did not speak so of your commanding officer.”
“Yeah, you’re right, only he’s been doing it my whole life—his whole life, I guess. I know because he’s my uncle.”
“Oh,” Saavik said.
“I never told anybody on the ship, only now he’s started telling people. He told the admiral—can you believe it? That’s one of the things I got mad about.” He stopped and took a deep breath and shook his head. “But…”
Saavik waited in silence.
Peter looked up at her, started to blush, and looked away. “He said…he said you had better things to do with your time than put up with me hanging around, he said I’m a pest, and he said…he said I…Never mind. That part’s too dumb. He said you probably think I’m a pain.”
Saavik frowned. “The first statement is untrue, and the second is ridiculous.”
“You mean you don’t mind having to give me math lessons?”
“On the contrary, I enjoy it very much.”
“You don’t think I’m a pest?”
“Indeed, I do not.”
“I’m really glad,” Peter said. “He thinks I’ve been…well…acting really dumb. He was laughing at me.”
“You deserve better than to be laughed at.”
He felt humiliated, Saavik could see that. She knew a great deal about humiliation. She would not wish to teach it to another being. She wished she knew a way to ease his pain, but she felt as confused as he did.
“Peter,” she said, “I can’t resolve your disagreement with your uncle. I can only tell you that when I was a child, I wished for something I could not name. Later I found the name: it was ‘friend.’ I have found people to admire, and people to respect. But I never found a friend. Until now.”
He looked up at her. “You mean—me?”
“Yes.”
Inexplicably, he burst into tears.
Pavel Chekov screamed.
Nothing happened….
His mind and his memory were sharp and clear. He was hyperaware of everything on the bridge of Reliant: Joachim beside him at the helm, Terrell sitting blank and trapped at first officer’s position, and Khan.
Khan lounged in the captain’s seat. The screen framed a full-aft view: Alpha Ceti V dwindled, from a globe to a disk to a speck, then vanished from their sight. Reliant shifted into warp and even Alpha Ceti, the star itself, shrank to a point and lost itself in the starfield.
“Steady on course,” Joachim said. “All systems normal.”
“It was kind of you to bring me a ship so like the Enterprise, Mister Chekov,” Khan said.
Fifteen years before, Khan had flipped through the technical data on the Enterprise; apparently he had memorized each page with one quick look. As far as Chekov could tell, Khan remembered the information perfectly to this day. With the knowledge, and with Terrell under his control, Khan had little trouble taking over Reliant. Most of the crew had worked on unaware that anything was wrong, until Khan’s people came upon them, one by one, took them prisoner,
and beamed them to the surface of Alpha Ceti V.
The engine room company remained, working in concert with each other, and with eels.
Out of three hundred people, Khan had found only ten troublesome enough to bother killing.
“Mister Chekov, I have a few questions to ask of you.”
Don’t answer him, don’t answer him.
“Yes.”
The questions began.
He answered. He screamed inside his mind; he felt the creature writhing inside his skull; he answered.
Khan questioned Terrell only briefly, but it seemed to give him great pleasure to extract information from Chekov. By the time he finished, he knew each tiny detail of what precious little anyone on Reliant had been told about the classified Project Genesis. He knew where they had been, he knew where they were going, and he knew they reported to Doctor Carol Marcus.
“Very good, Mister Chekov. I’m very pleased with you. But tell me one more thing. Might my old friend Admiral Kirk be involved in your project?”
“No.”
“Is he aware of it?”
“I do not know.”
With an edge in his voice, Khan asked, “Could he find out about it?”
Kirk was a member of the Fleet General Staff; he had access to any classified information he cared to look up. Chekov tried desperately to keep that knowledge from Khan. His mind was working so fast and well that he knew, without any doubt, what Khan planned. He knew it and he feared it.
“Answer me, Mister Chekov.”
“Yes.”
Khan chuckled softly, the sound like a caress.
“Joachim, my friend, alter our course. We shall pay a visit to Regulus I.”
“My lord—!” Joachim faced his leader, protest in his voice.
“This does not suit your fancy?”
“I am with you. We all are. But we’re free! This is what we’ve waited for for two hundred years! We have a ship; we can go where we will—”
“I made a promise fifteen years ago, Joachim. You were witness to my oath, then, and when I repeated it. Until I keep my word to myself, and to my wife, I am not free.”
“Khan, my lord, she never desired revenge.”
“You overstep your bounds, Joachim,” Khan said dangerously.
The younger man caught his breath, but plunged on. “You escaped the prison James Kirk made for you! You’ve proved he couldn’t hold you, Khan, you’ve won!”
“He tasks me, Joachim. He tasks me, and I’ll have him.”
The two men stared at each other; Joachim wavered, and turned his head away.
“In fifteen years, this is all I have asked for myself, Joachim,” Khan said. “I can have no new life, no new beginning, until I achieve it. I know that you love me, my friend. But if you feel I have no right to any quest, say so. I will free you from the oath you swore to me.”
“I’ll never break that oath, my lord.”
Khan nodded. “Regulus I, Joachim,” he said gently.
“Yes, Khan.”
“That’s it,” Carol Marcus said to the main computer. “Genesis eight-two-eight-point-SBR. Final editing. Save it.”
“Ok,” the computer said.
Carol sighed with disbelief. Finally finished!
“Fatal error,” the computer said calmly. “Memory cells full.”
“What do you mean, memory full?” She had checked memory space just the day before.
The damned machine began to recite to her the bonehead explanation of peripheral memory. “The memory is full when the size of the file in RAM exceeds—”
“Oh, stop,” Carol said.
“Ok.”
“Damn! David, I thought you were going to install the Monster’s new memory cells!”
All their computers stored information by arranging infinitesimal magnetic bubbles within a matrix held in a bath of liquid hydrogen near absolute zero. The storage was very efficient and very fast and the volume extremely large; yet from the beginning, Genesis had been plagued by insufficient storage. The programs and the data files were so enormous that every new shipment of memory filled up almost as quickly as it got installed. The situation was particularly critical with the Monster, their main computer. It was an order of magnitude faster than any other machine on the station, so of course everyone wanted to use it.
David hurried to her side. “I did,” he said. “I had to build a whole new bath for them, but I did it. Are they filled up already?”
“That’s what it says.”
He frowned and glanced around the lab.
“Anybody have anything in storage here they’ve just been dying to get rid of?”
Jedda, who was a Deltan and prone to quick reactions, strode over with an expression of alarm. “If you delete my quantum data I’ll be most distressed.”
“I don’t want to delete anything,” Carol said, “but I just spent six weeks debugging this subroutine, and I’ve got to have it.”
At a lab table nearby, Del March glanced at Vance Madison. Vance grimaced, and Carol caught him at it.
“All right you guys,” Carol said. “Del, have you been using my bubble bath again?”
Del approached, hanging his head; Vance followed, walking with his easy slouch. They’re like a couple of kids, Carol thought. Like kids? They are kids. They were only a few years older than David.
“Geez, Carol,” Del said, “it’s just a little something—”
“Del, there’s got to be ninety-three computers on Spacelab. Why do you have to put your games on the main machine?”
“They work a lot better,” Vance said in his soft beautiful voice.
“You can’t play Boojum Hunt on anything less, Carol,” Del said. “Hey, you ought to look at what we did to it. It’s got a black hole with en accretion disk that will jump right out and grab you, and the graphics are fantastic. If I do say so myself. If we had a three-d display…”
“Why do I put up with this?” Carol groaned. The answer to that was obvious: Vance Madison and Del March were the two sharpest quark chemists in the field, and when they worked together their talents did not simply add, but multiplied. Every time they published a paper they got another load of invitations to scientific conferences. Genesis was lucky to have them, and Carol knew it.
The two young scientists played together as well as they worked; unfortunately, what they liked to play was computer games. Del had tried to get her to play one once; she was not merely uninterested, she was totally disinterested.
“What’s the file name?” she asked. She felt too tired for patience. She turned back to the console. “Prepare to kill a file,” she said to the computer.
“Ok,” it replied.
“Don’t kill it, Carol,” Del said. “Come on, give us a break.”
She almost killed it anyway; Del’s flakiness got to her worst when she was exhausted.
“We’ll keep it out of your hair from now on, Carol,” Vance said. “I promise.”
Vance never said anything he did not mean. Carol relented.
“Oh—all right. What’s the file name?”
“BH,” Del said.
“Got one in there called BS, too?” David asked.
Del grinned sheepishly. Carol accessed one of the smaller lab computers.
“Uh, Carol,” Del said, “I don’t think it’ll fit in that one.”
“How big is it?”
“Well…about fifty megs.”
“Christ on a crutch!” David said. “The program that swallowed Saturn.”
“We added a lot since you played it last,” Del said defensively.
“Me? I never play computer games!”
Vance chuckled. David colored. Carol hunted around for enough peripheral storage space and transferred the program.
“All right, twins,” she said. She liked to tease them by calling them “twins”: Vance was two meters tall, slender, black, intense, and calm, while Del was almost thirty centimeters shorter, compact, fair, manic, and quick-tempered.
“Thanks, Carol,” Vance said. He smiled.
Jedda folded his arms. “I trust this means my data is safe for another day.”
“Safe and sound.”
The deepspace communicator signaled, and he went to answer it.
Carol stored the Genesis subroutine again.
“Ok,” the computer said, and a moment later, “Command?”
Carol breathed a sigh of relief, “Load Genesis, complete.”
A moment’s pause.
“Ok.”
“And run it.”
“Ok.”
“Now,” Carol said, “we wait.”
“Carol,” Jedda said at the communicator, “it’s Reliant.”
She got up quickly. Everyone followed her to the communicator. Jedda put the call up on the screen.
“Reliant to Spacelab, come in Spacelab.”
“Spacelab here, Commander Chekov. Go ahead.”
“Doctor Marcus, good. We’re en route to Regulus. Our ETA is three days from now.”
“Three days? Why so soon? What did you find on Alpha Ceti VI?”
Chekov stared into the screen. What’s wrong? Carol wondered. There shouldn’t be any time lag on the hyper channel.
“Has something happened? Pavel, do you read me? Has something happened?”
“No, nothing, Doctor. All went well. Alpha Ceti VI checked out.”
“Break out the beer!” Del said.
“But what about—”
Chekov cut her off. “We have new orders, Doctor. Upon our arrival at Spacelab, we will take all Project Genesis materials into military custody.”
“Bullshit!” David said.
“Shh, David,” Carol said automatically. “Commander Chekov, this is extremely irregular. Who gave this order?”
“Starfleet Command, Doctor Marcus. Direct from the General Staff.”
“This is a civilian project! This is my project—”
“I have my orders.”
“What gold-stripe lamebrain gave the order?” David shouted.
Chekov glanced away from the screen, then turned back.
“Admiral James T. Kirk.”
Carol felt the blood drain from her face.
David pushed past her toward the screen.
“I knew you’d try to pull this!” he shouted. “Anything anybody does, you just can’t wait to get your hands on it and kill people with it!” He reached to cut off the communication.
Duty, Honor, Redemption Page 8
