Duty, Honor, Redemption

by Novelization by Vonda N. McIntyre

  Kruge regarded Torg. “It works. Oh, yes, it works.” He touched the controls of the player to let the tape continue.

  “It was this premature detonation of the Genesis device that resulted in the creation of the Genesis planet.” On the screen, a Constellation-class Federation starship fled the expanding wave that turned the dust and gases of a nebula into a mass of energy and sub-elementary particles, thence into a blue new world.

  Kruge turned off the machine, removed the information insert, and slipped it beneath his belt.

  “Tell this to no one,” he said to Torg. He glanced significantly across the control room at Maltz.

  “Understood, my lord.”

  “We are going to this planet,” Kruge said. “Even as our emissaries negotiate for peace with the Federation, we will act for the preservation of our people. We will seize the secret of this weapon—the secret of ultimate power!”

  Torg nodded, nearly overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he had seen. “Success,” he whispered. “Success, my lord.”

  “Station!”

  “Yes, my lord!”

  Torg returned to his position. At Kruge’s side, Warrigul whined and slavered, reacting to the emotions of its master. Kruge dropped to one knee to soothe the creature.

  “My lord,” said the helm officer, speaking carefully in the tongue of subordinates. “We are approaching Federation territory.”

  “Steady on course,” Kruge snapped, easing his impatient first stratum with a second stratum of approval. “Engage cloaking device.”

  “Cloaking device—engaged.”

  From within the ship, it was a most odd and satisfying sensation. The ship and all its contents and all its occupants became slightly transparent. Voices grew hollow, like echoes.

  Warrigul howled in protest. Lower subordinates shuddered at the keening cry, knowing that the cloaking device put the creature’s temper on a thin edge. It had a similar effect on people. Once in a while it would, without warning, drive someone mad. But this time everyone survived the transition sane. Kruge smiled and stroked his beast, satisfied in the knowledge that outside the cloaking field, his ship was completely invisible.

  Six

  Saavik stepped onto the transporter platform beside David.

  “Transporter room,” Captain Esteban said through the intercom. “Stand by to energize.”

  “Transporter room standing by.”

  “Energize.”

  The beam caught Saavik up and dissolved her. A moment later it reassembled her, atom by atom, on the surface of the world David had helped to create.

  From her point of view, the world solidified around her. She had no real sensation of being torn asunder and put back together. Throughout the entire process she could feel sensations from her body, feel the weight of the backpack on her shoulders, hear and see and think.

  The Genesis world lay wreathed in silver haze. Great primordial fern-trees reached into the air then drooped down again with the weight of their own leaves. The fronds had captured miniature pools of glittering rainwater.

  David appeared beside her and looked around with wonder.

  “It really is something, isn’t it?” he said.

  “It is indeed,” Saavik said. She took her tricorder from her belt and turned it on. David did likewise. The bio readings were what she had expected, similar to the long-range scans. The animate life signals matched nothing she had ever seen before, but they definitely existed.

  David set off through the forest as Saavik switched the emphasis on her tricorder and scanned again. She raised one eyebrow in astonishment.

  “This is most odd, David,” she said.

  He glanced impatiently back.

  She frowned and took out her communicator. “Saavik to Grissom.”

  “Grissom here.”

  “Request computer study of soil samples for geological aging.”

  “I’ll handle that later,” David said.

  Saavik wondered why his voice was so sharp and tense. She, too, was anxious to proceed, but not to the point of recklessness.

  “My readings indicate great instability.”

  “We’re not here to investigate geological aging, we’re here to find life forms!” He scanned around with his tricorder. The signals changed and strengthened. “Come on!” He hurried off between the trees.

  Saavik felt an intense uneasiness, but she followed David.

  “Grissom to landing party.” Even through the communicator, Saavik could hear the worry in Captain Esteban’s voice. “We show you approaching indications of radioactivity. Do you concur?”

  “Affirmative, Captain. But our readings are well below the danger level.”

  “Very well. Exercise caution, Lieutenant. This landing is ‘captain’s discretion.’ I’m the one who’s out on a limb here.”

  Saavik stood in the midst of a profoundly unknown world and replied, straight-faced, “I will try to remember that, Captain.”

  She strode after David, who had hurried several hundred meters ahead of her. He paused to take readings, and she caught up to him. Her tricorder showed strange and fluctuating life-signs. She flipped the setting quickly from bio to geo and got the same disturbing readings of instability. At the very least this area would be prone to severe earthquakes.

  Reluctantly Saavik changed the sensor again.

  The metallic mass she had detected from on board Grissom lay very near. She glanced in the direction of the reading. Before her the trees thinned out into a blaze of sun. The air was very warm and very humid. Saavik could not see beyond the sun’s dazzle in the steamy haze.

  She walked toward the source of the readings. Before her, just out of sight, lay a casket that held the body of her teacher. She did not need to see it to be certain he was dead. Because now, she was certain. Her speculations in response to the life-sign readings had been fantasies, dreams, wishes. She felt nothing of the neural touch that had disturbed her so deeply back on the Enterprise. If Spock were nearby, if by some incredible action of the Genesis wave, or some unsuspected ability of the Vulcan-human cross, he had returned, Saavik would perceive him. Of that she felt quite sure.

  David pushed his way through the thick fronds of the fern-trees and into the glade beyond. The sunlight burst upon him and he stood still, blinking.

  Saavik moved more slowly out of the green shade, giving her eyes the few seconds they needed to adapt.

  “It is Spock’s tube!” David said. He squinted at it, trying to screen out the light.

  “David…” She pointed to the base of the tube.

  A mass of pale, moist worms writhed and wriggled in the shadow of the casket. A few fell from the cluster into the sunlight and frantically burrowed into the dark loam.

  His eyes now accustomed to the brightness, David saw what she was pointing at. He took one step toward the slimy creatures and stopped. A muscle along the side of his jaw tightened, and he swallowed hard.

  “Well,” he said bitterly. “There’s our life-form reading. It must have been microbes, caught on the surface of the tube. We shot them here from the Enterprise.” His voice was tinged with irony and disappointment. “They were fruitful, and multiplied.” He looked around the otherwise peaceful glade. “Probably contaminated the whole planet.”

  Saavik could think of several other explanations for the presence of the worms, but as the casket appeared still to be sealed, she hoped David’s explanation was correct.

  “But how could they have changed so quickly…? Did you program accelerated evolution into Genesis?” Perhaps the creatures were far more complicated than they appeared at first glance. She focused her tricorder on them, but could not reproduce the reading that had brought her here.

  David approached the torpedo tube. His tricorder bleated and clicked, registering the increased radiation flux and confirming the torpedo tube as the source. Nevertheless, the level was well below the danger point.

  David grimaced, then forged ahead, kicking his way through the worms. Saav
ik followed until she realized what he intended to do. She stopped, unwilling to see again the terrible burns on Spock’s sculpted face, preferring not to consider the effects of climate.

  She started despite herself when David slowly raised the lid of the bier. He stared down into the casket.

  “Saavik…”

  Pushing a path through the worms with her boots, Saavik joined him.

  “…He’s gone,” David said. He reached into the empty coffin and drew out the black shroud. “What is it?” he asked.

  She took the silvery, silky piece of heavy black fabric from his hands.

  “It is Spock’s burial robe,” she said, her voice even, but her thoughts in dis-array.

  Saavik heard a low, threatening rumble. The ground shook gently beneath her feet. Merely a temblor, not a true quake, but a precursor to and a promise of events more violent.

  As the quivering of the earth faded away, a frightened cry echoed through the forest. A mammal? A predatory bird? A creature unique to this world? David spun toward the sound, that lonely shriek of pain, then, when the echoes had faded and the cry came no more, he looked back at Saavik.

  She felt sure he was thinking, as was she: No highly evolved microbe screamed that scream.

  Dannan fidgeted on the sofa in the living room. It was early evening, and beginning to grow dark outside. The day seemed to have stretched on forever.

  Uncle Montgomery sat on the other side of the room, in silence and in shadows.

  Dannan’s mother had vanished back into her studio. Everyone in the family knew better than to disturb her when the door was closed. That was one of the things Peter’s father had never been able to get through his head; it was the final bit of selfishness Dannan’s mother could not tolerate. Dannan returned from school once to find, rather to her relief, that the elder Preston had packed up his things and departed, muttering about eccentric artists and heading for—he said—a Federation colony, on the first available ship. Dannan had smiled to hear that, for if he thought an artist who did not like to be interrupted when she was working was eccentric, wait until he met the people who shipped out to colonies. He had not been a bad person, just a self-involved one who should perhaps never have tried to join a family. Dannan wondered if anyone knew where he was, to let him know about Peter.

  Dannan rose, crossed the living room, and took in one stride the three steps up to the foyer. She slipped into her boots and went out the front door, into the village. She made her way down the steep cobbled street to the river’s edge, thence through the town and back to the churchyard, the cemetery, and the old oak grove.

  The evening was extraordinary. In the west, the sun lined the horizon from below in a thick ochre gold. The color shaded upward into a soft, intense, and glowing mauve. Dannan could not describe the sky in terms of clear spectral colors, only in mixes and delicate hues. What color did one name the region where the sky shaded from predominantly gold to predominantly violet? She could not answer. In the east, the enormous blood-red harvest moon began to glide above the horizon. The just-set sun and the just-risen full moon combined to create a lavender twilight.

  Tonight was the autumn equinox. Dannan spent most of her life on starships, where every day was the same length and one counted one’s time by the artificial measurement of star dates. When she came home, to a place where seasons still mattered and time was more subjective, she experienced the days and nights and dawns and evenings, the colors and sounds and scents, as a brand-new discovery.

  Twilight remained when she reached the graveyard, though the livid gold horizon had faded and the sky had changed from lavender to deep blue. Stars glinted here and there, bright and steady in the cold, still air. They were never as clear as they were in space. She was glad Peter had at least had a chance to see them from above the atmosphere.

  Dannan sat on her heels by Peter’s grave. Beneath the flowers that lay thick and fragrant upon it, the raw earth smelled of rocks and ripped turf. She could make out his name, and the summation of the short years of his life, carved into gray granite. He lay among ten previous generations of his family, the first of his generation to die. Because of the family’s tradition of taking the name of one’s parent of the same gender, her brother was the only Preston among many Scotts, more Stuarts, a scatter of MacLaughlins, and one Ishimoto, a great-uncle Dannan remembered with great fondness.

  She wished she had some memento of space to leave on Peter’s grave, some alien bloom to put down to remind everyone that he had dreamed of and sought after and loved the stars.

  As the moon rose higher, Dannan saw a hard glint among the flowers littering Peter’s grave. She reached between the soft petals and picked up the bit of gold. It was a medal, the star of valor, with ruby. She wondered for an instant if it was Peter’s, if her mother or her uncle had put it here, but in the same instant she recognized it as the wrong form for a posthumous medal. It was not engraved with name or place, so it had not yet been formally presented. It had to belong to one of Peter’s classmates.

  A sound broke the silence that lay easily over the graveyard.

  At first Dannan identified the noise as a dog, a lost puppy. She stood up and waited to hear it again.

  It came from the oak grove.

  Dannan strode toward the trees. Fallen leaves crunched beneath her boots. All the scary childhood stories about ghosts and changelings passed through her mind, though she knew the sound came from someone who was merely flesh and blood.

  Besides, she thought, I’m a Starfleet officer, remember? With citations for bravery of my own.

  Big deal.

  She heard the sound again: a sob.

  “Come on out,” she said.

  The usual silence of the grove was one of calm. This was the breathless quiet of concealment and apprehension.

  “Come on,” Dannan said. “It’s cold out here.”

  The young man scuffed out of the trees, the red coat of his uniform black in the moonlight. He stopped before her, hanging his head.

  “Who are you?”

  “One of Peter’s shipmates.”

  He was several years older than Peter, he must have been a third or fourth year student, while Peter was only first.

  “Is this your medal?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  He still did not look up.

  “I thought Peter deserved it more than I did.”

  “Because he’s dead and you’re alive?” Dannan was about to tell him how brutally often the difference came down to nothing but chance.

  “No!” he said before she could continue. “No!” He hung his head lower, if that were possible. His voice was muffled and reluctant. “Because he stayed…and I ran.”

  Dannan stepped toward him with a flare of shock and surprise and anger. She wanted, quite simply, to kill him. She was perfectly capable of doing it with her bare hands.

  But then the boy did raise his head, as if baring his throat to accept her revenge. He made no move to defend himself. The utter defeat was all that saved him.

  She understood why he had lurked in the grove during the funeral, and why he had not shown himself. She did not understand why he was still here.

  “Get out of here,” she said. “Why don’t you just go home?”

  His shoulders slumped. “I can’t,” he said. “I’m AWOL, for one thing…and I used up all my money getting here. I don’t know how to get back.”

  “That shows great foresight,” Dannan said. “Is that what they teach you at the Academy these days?” She sighed. “You’d better come with me.”

  Dannan took Grenni back to her mother’s house, wondering what the devil to do with him.

  Uncle Montgomery had not moved from his place in the corner when Dannan returned, and the door to the pottery studio still was closed.

  “I believe you know this gentleman,” Dannan said sarcastically to her uncle as Grenni followed her into the living room. “He came…for Peter’s funeral.”

  Un
cle Montgomery greeted Grenni with every indication of pleasure and gratitude for his presence.

  “ ’Tis good o’ ye to come pay thy respects to our bairn—”

  “Stop it!” Grenni cried. “Why do you keep being so nice to me? You know where my station was—you must know Pres is dead because of me!”

  Scott stared at him.

  “You know he was the only one in our section who held his post! I was cadet commander, I should have ordered him out of danger!”

  “He’d no’ ha’ gone,” Scott said.

  “Then neither should I.”

  “Perhaps not,” Scott said. “Then we would have two funerals to attend today, instead o’ one.” He rose and approached the boy, took him by the shoulders, and looked him in the eye. “Dinna get me wrong, boy. Ye did a cowardly thing. Now ye must decide if ye are fit for the career ye’ve chosen. If this is thy character—”

  “It isn’t!” Grenni said. “I don’t know what happened—I don’t understand why it happened. I never did anything like that before in my life!”

  Montgomery Scott nodded. “Ye hadna been properly prepared for what we faced. ’Tis at least as much my fault.”

  “Are you saying—you forgive me?”

  “Aye.”

  Grenni looked at Dannan. “Do you forgive me too, Commander?”

  “Not bloody likely,” Dannan said.

  Her uncle and the cadet both looked at her, shocked.

  “Dannan—” her uncle said, raising his voice in protest.

  “But I’m sorry!” Grenni cried. “I didn’t mean it! If I could make it up—”

  “Make it up? Make up for the death of my brother?” Her voice was cold with contempt. “I don’t think so.”

  “I know there’s nothing I can do, that’s what makes it so awful—”

  “Ye dinna want to be vengeful, Dannan,” her uncle said.

  “No,” she said, surprised to find that vengeance was not what she wanted. “You’re right, Uncle. But so are you, Cadet. There’s nothing you can do….”

  Uncle Montgomery stood up angrily. “Ye always were a cold-hearted little—”