Duty, Honor, Redemption

by Novelization by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “Sure—you can help by accepting my apology and forgetting what it is I’m apologizing for.”

  When McCoy wanted to avoid interrogation, he could sidestep with the best of them. Jim had not quite reached the point of trying to get an answer out of his old friend by pulling rank. Besides, when had it ever done him any good, with McCoy, to assert his authority as a starship captain?

  “Apology accepted. Forgetting—that’s going to take a little longer. If you want to talk, you know where to find me.”

  Kirk returned to the bridge, still disturbed about McCoy, and feeling that his visit to sickbay had been very nearly futile.

  On board Grissom, Saavik thanked the duty officer for giving her a cabin assignment. The young Vulcan did not bother to stop by her room. She had nothing with her to drop off, and a more pressing matter to attend to than observing the decor of Grissom’s cabins.

  She felt the faint shift in the ship’s gravity fields that indicated they had warped out of orbit. Grissom, a small, fast ship, could travel between Regulus and the Mutara sector much more quickly than the crippled Enterprise.

  Saavik entered the main laboratory and stopped short.

  Before her stood a being like a column of rippled crystal. Saavik had never met a Glaeziver before. They were very rare. They intended and planned to be extinct within a hundred Standard years. Their planet had been destroyed in the nova of its star. They possessed such strong ties to their world that they never found another on which they felt anything but alien. And so they disbanded, scattering throughout the Federation and perhaps even beyond.

  It occurred to Saavik that if Genesis could be programmed to copy their lost world closely enough, they might change their collective decision to die. If they possessed a world to return to, they might choose to live.

  “Hello,” Saavik said formally. “How may I address you?”

  The utter motionlessness of the being gave Saavik the impression of enormous potential energy preparing to translate itself into motion. When the Glaeziver stirred, it did so with a controlled power that belied the delicacy of its form. The many transparent strands making up its substance brushed together with a chiming like jewels in the wind.

  “You’re well-mannered for an opaque being,” the Glaeziver said. Its voice was like a cymbalon. “If you can pronounce my name, you may use it.” It spoke a beautiful word like a song, which Saavik reproduced as best she could.

  “Not bad,” the Glaeziver said. “You may call me that, if you like. I prefer it to Fred.”

  “ ‘Fred’?” Saavik said.

  “One of my co-workers fancies that my name sounds like a phrase of Chopin’s. How may I address you?”

  “My name is Saavik.”

  “How do you do, Saavik. What can I do for you?”

  “I wish to analyze a sample from the interior of Regulus I. May I use your equipment?”

  “Can you talk and work at the same time?”

  “Certainly.”

  “In that case, I’ll make you a deal. We will analyze your sample on my equipment while you tell me what has been going on out here—inside Regulus I, and in the Mutara.”

  “That appears a fair trade to me,” Saavik said.

  “Great. What kind of analysis do you want—macroscopic, molecular, atomic, sub-atomic?”

  “Molecular, please.”

  “You got it.”

  Glaezivers had a reputation for being very formal and standoffish. Saavik found it quite interesting that the being had held to formality during their introductions, but spoke very casually otherwise. It was very easy to think of it as “Fred.”

  Saavik’s cabin was standard for a Federation ship, designed and intended for a human being. The lighting imitated the spectrum of Earth’s star, and the temperature conformed to the temperate regions of their home planet. Saavik glanced around the room, approving of its lack of extraneous decoration and its communications terminal, disapproving of the heavily padded furniture. She preferred hard chairs and a sleeping mat.

  She reprogrammed the environmental controls. The light dimmed and reddened, and the temperature began gradually to rise. Saavik sat down for the first time since arriving on Grissom. Preparing for the survey of Genesis and analyzing the sample from Regulus I had given her plenty of work, for which she was grateful. It took her mind off the fears she had had for her own sanity.

  But since leaving the Enterprise, she no longer sensed Spock’s presence. If she still believed in ghosts—as she had when she was little, for things happened on Hellguard that an uneducated and unsophisticated child could explain no other way—she would have believed Spock’s shade to be haunting the Enterprise. But she did not believe in ghosts anymore. She believed that for a short while she had been at least a little bit insane.

  And now? To test herself, to test the silence, Saavik took the risk of opening her mental shields. She closed her eyes and reached out, seeking any resonance, real or imagined, of Spock.

  After some minutes she opened her eyes again. She had found nothing.

  The echo of her teacher had vanished. He was gone, and Saavik grieved for him. But at least she was not mad.

  She picked up the printout of the Regulus I sample and reread the analysis.

  Someone knocked on her door.

  “Come.”

  David entered, smiling. “Hi. Guess what. I’m right next door. Great, huh?”

  “That depends. Have you come to your senses?”

  “What? Are you talking about what happened down in the Genesis cave?” He shrugged it off. “Yeah, sure, sorry—I don’t know what got into me. I guess I was overexcited.”

  “That is your explanation?”

  “What’s the matter? I’m sorry I tried to take your phaser—that was dumb. If it’s any comfort, you twisted the hell out of my wrist. I can still feel it. And, look, there’s a bruise here on my hand where you put your thumb.”

  “You should not have resisted,” Saavik said. “You injured yourself with your own violence.”

  “And you got your revenge.”

  “Why do you assume I want revenge? Or that I would take pleasure in hurting you? That is beside the point. You know that I do not use recreational drugs. Even if I did, I was on duty when we beamed down to the Genesis caves. How could you not warn me?”

  “Saavik, what are you talking about?”

  Saavik was prepared for a laugh and a claim of “a little joke.” She was not prepared for deliberate obtuseness. She handed him the printout.

  He scanned it.

  “Interesting organic makeup. What is it?”

  “You should know. You designed it.”

  “I never did. I never saw this set of molecules before in my life.”

  “David, that is an analysis of the Genesis vines—the vines you created.”

  “It’s nothing like. Well, superficially, maybe. But this whole subset of molecules—”

  “I ran the samples twice,” Saavik said. “I am hardly infallible, but this summary is accurate.”

  “But it shouldn’t look like this. I don’t even know what half the stuff is.”

  “This,” Saavik said, pointing to a heterocyclic compound, “is an extremely potent psychoactive alkaloid.”

  “What!” David looked at it more closely. “My gods, it could be, couldn’t it?”

  “It is. It is also the reason we behaved as we did—why we nearly abandoned our tasks to go exploring, like two irresponsible children—”

  “ ‘We’?” David said, rubbing his wrist. “You could have fooled me, if you were about to do anything out of line.”

  “I came very close to it,” Saavik said. “The active ingredient in those vines is a narcotic.”

  “I designed it so you could brew tea out of the leaves if you wanted. I put a lot of caffeine in it, that’s all.”

  Saavik could see the resemblance between the molecule in question and caffeine, but it had gone through considerable mutation to become what it was.


  “I think you would not want to brew tea out of this plant,” Saavik said. “Or make wine of its fruit.”

  “You never know,” David said.

  Saavik raised one eyebrow.

  “Just kidding,” David said.

  Four

  Phase three of Genesis spun like a mobile drifting in the breeze. David watched the newly-formed star system on the Grissom’s viewscreen. Despite his calculated calm, he was astonished that the new world was his creation. So far it looked like the programs had worked perfectly. The lack of a sun for the world to orbit had enabled the star-forming subroutine. The great dust-cloud of the Mutara Nebula had provided plenty of mass to form a small, hot star.

  David leaned against the bridge rail. He felt out of place and in the way, despite the ship’s being there at least partly because of him. Behind him, at the main sensor station, Saavik seemed to David very much in place, cool and controlled.

  She had forgiven him for the incident in the Genesis caves back on Regulus I. David truly had not designed a plant containing a chemical of the potency they found. They had talked about what might have gone wrong. The changes in the experiment’s outcome were of a far greater magnitude than David had expected. He was still trying to convince himself that everything really had evolved nearly the way the Genesis team intended, only a little more so. He was not ready to admit any serious doubts to himself, much less discuss them with anyone. Even Saavik.

  Saavik completed the current log entry.

  “…We are approaching destination planet at point zero three five. So noted in ship’s log.”

  She removed the data cube from the recorder and delivered the log to Captain Esteban to certify and seal.

  “Very well, Lieutenant.” To the helm officer, he said, “Execute standard orbital approach.”

  “Standard orbit, aye.”

  “Communications. Send a coded message for Starfleet Commander, priority one…”

  He paused for a moment. David decided, with a smile, that the captain was thinking over his message to be sure it would not include a single informal word.

  “ ‘Federation science vessel Grissom arriving Genesis planet, Mutara sector, to begin research. As ordered, full security procedures are in effect. J.T. Esteban, commanding.’ ”

  “Aye sir, coding now.”

  David found the security on Grissom restrictive and a little scary. Genesis had always been, in theory, a secret project. Acceding to the security requirements had been the only way they could get the research funded. The whole team had taken a rather lackadaisical attitude toward the rules, mostly by thinking about them as infrequently as possible. They had all been certain that the first implementation of the project would make secrecy impossible.

  That’s one thing we were right about, David thought. But now the authorities wanted to try to clamp the lid back down.

  On Grissom, dealing with Starfleet directly instead of one step removed, David had the distinct impression that they wished he knew nothing about the project and that they would have denied him clearance if they could have done so without looking ridiculous.

  Captain Esteban turned toward him. “Doctor Marcus,” he said, “it’s your planet.”

  Astonished, and pleased despite himself, David grinned. “Thank you, Captain. Begin scanning, please.” He joined Saavik at the science station as she activated the macroscopic scanner. It glowed into life, forming a schematic of the world before them. The schematic showed a stable sphere, with core, mantle, crust and oceans, absolutely indistinguishable from a naturally evolved world.

  Well, what did you expect? David asked himself. That it would be flat?

  Suddenly he laughed, and all his doubts and fears evaporated in the sheer pleasure of inspecting his handiwork.

  “This is where the fun begins, Saavik!” he said.

  She replied, sotto voce, “Like your father…so human.” Then, turning on the recorder, she took the irony and humor out of her voice. “All units functional, recorders are on…. Scanning sector one. The foliage is in a fully developed state of growth. Temperature, twenty-two point two degrees Celsius.”

  “Sector two…indicating desert terrain,” David said. “Minimal vegetation, temperature thirty-nine point four.”

  At several team presentation meetings the discussion had centered on whether to include desert or any other severe climates at all. Vance said he was not interested in working on anything “so beautiful it’s sappy,” Del (as usual) agreed with Vance. Zinaida persisted, as Deltans often did, in quoting the Vulcan philosophy, “infinite diversity in infinite combinations.” David wondered how Vulcans liked being quoted by the Federation’s most renowned sensualists. He himself had pushed for trying to make Genesis a shirt-sleeve environment from pole to pole. That would have been quite a challenge. He was, however, out-voted.

  “Sector three,” Saavik said. “Sub-tropical vegetation.”

  David glanced across the bank of sensors. They must be scanning a region where several different ecotypes blended into one another.

  “Temperature—” Saavik said. She stopped and checked her readings again. “Temperature decreasing rapidly.”

  My gods, look at that, David thought. Infinite diversity indeed.

  “It’s snow,” he said. “Snow in the same sector. Fantastic!” He could not get a topographical map off the sensor he was using, but he assumed they must be looking at a snowcapped mountain upthrust in the midst of subtropical forest edged by desert.

  “Fascinating,” Saavik said.

  “All the varieties of land and weather known to Earth within a few hours’ walk!” David knew he was exaggerating, just a bit, but for a time the team had engaged in a sort of informal competition to see who could design the most complicated conditions within the smallest area. Nobody had quite come up with a workable way to juxtapose arctic and equatorial climates, but everyone had developed a different method of coming close. Some of the schemes were positively Byzantine. The trouble was, Carol eventually declared the competition out of hand and said she would not include any of the results in the Genesis device.

  Maybe she changed her mind, David thought.

  “You must be very proud of what you and your mother have created,” Saavik said.

  David gazed at the sensors and felt some of his doubts and fears beginning to creep back.

  “It’s a little early to celebrate,” he said.

  One of the sensors erupted into frantic beeping. Saavik started, then covered her surprise by bending intently over the monitor.

  “Same sector,” she said evenly. “Metallic mass.”

  “Underground, right?” David said. “Probably an ore deposit.”

  “Negative,” Saavik said. “It is on the surface, a manufactured object.”

  Manufactured! David thought. Debris from Khan’s ship? The Genesis torpedo? But that was impossible—anything in range of the Genesis wave had disintegrated into a plasma of sub-elementary particles. Then he realized—

  “There’s only one thing it could be!” he said.

  He glanced at Saavik. Surely the same answer must have occurred to her. She gazed intently at the sensors.

  “Short-range scan,” David said.

  Esteban joined them at the console and glanced over the readings.

  “Approximately two meters long,” Saavik said. “Cylindrical in form…”

  “A photon tube—!”

  Saavik continued to avoid David’s look.

  She’s upset, David thought, and she’s embarrassed about being upset. I don’t blame her—If I thought I’d buried a friend, and then his coffin turned up…

  “Could it be Spock’s?” Esteban asked.

  David had noticed that the captain did not much like being surprised.

  “It has to be,” David said. There were several ways it could have reached the surface of the Genesis world without burning up in the atmosphere like a shooting star. “The gravitational fields were still in flux. It must have soft-landed.�
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  “In code to Starfleet,” Esteban said. “ ‘Captain Spock’s tube located intact on Genesis surface. Will relay more data on subsequent orbits.’ ”

  “Yes, sir,” said the communications officer. “Coding your message.”

  Saavik continued to stare at the changing sensors. David neither questioned nor challenged her. Instead, he reached out and put his hand over hers. Still she said nothing, but she did not draw away from him, either.

  As the ship passed over the surface of the new world, crossing the terminator into darkness, the sensor’s beeps grew fainter and fainter. The ship moved out of line-of-sight of the torpedo tube and the signals cut off abruptly.

  J.T. Esteban thoughtfully stroked his thumb under his jaw and considered what to do. Spock’s coffin was supposed to have been launched in a standard burial orbit, one that should have resulted in complete ablation. There should be nothing at all left of it. That it had landed intact created all sorts of problems, from the possibility of contamination to the responsibility for retrieving the casket and either re-launching it (J.T. would send it into the star, so there could be no mistake), or holding a formal interment on the surface of Genesis. Technically, Spock’s most recent C.O. should make the decision. But with any luck, someone at Starfleet HQ would give the word. Jim Kirk could do without going through the wringer again over the death of a friend.

  Under any other circumstances, J.T. might have taken it upon himself to decide what would be done, but not this time—not when it involved something as important as Genesis.

  PERSONAL LOG OF JAMES T. KIRK

  WITH MOST OF OUR BATTLE DAMAGE REPAIRED, WE ARE ALMOST HOME. YET I FEEL—UNEASY. AND I WONDER WHY. PERHAPS IT IS THE ERRATIC BEHAVIOR OF SHIP’S SURGEON LEONARD MCCOY, OR THE EMPTINESS OF THE VESSEL. MOST OF OUR TRAINEE CREW HAVE BEEN REASSIGNED. LIEUTENANT SAAVIK AND MY SON DAVID ARE EXPLORING A NEW WORLD. THE ENTERPRISEFEELS LIKE A HOUSE WITH ALL THE CHILDREN GONE…. NO, MORE EMPTY EVEN THAN THAT. THE NEWS OF SPOCK’S TUBE HAS SHAKEN ME. IT SEEMS THAT IHAVE LEFT THE NOBLEST PART OF MYSELF BACK THERE, ON THAT NEWBORN PLANET.