“No,” Sulu said—perhaps a little too enthusiastically, he thought. He genuinely wanted the ensign to stay, though, and not just because of the monotony of his medical seclusion and forced inactivity. “If it’s all right, I’d like you to stay a little while longer.”
Trinh looked at him uncertainly, but then she sat back down in the chair. “Doctor McCoy did warn me not to tire you out.”
“I won’t tell him if you won’t,” Sulu said. Then, wanting to move past the incident so that Trinh wouldn’t be compelled to leave, he said, “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” Trinh said. “Of course, I can’t promise that I’ll answer you.”
“Your name is Mai Trinh?”
“Yes,” she said. “My full name is Mai Duyen Trinh.” Though she spoke unaccented Federation Standard, the ensign pronounced her name Mī Dwin Tring, with a distinctly foreign inflection. Sulu assumed that resulted from her Vietnamese origin, but he hadn’t heard enough native speakers in his life to know for sure.
“I thought that in Vietnamese names,” he said, “the first name listed was the surname.”
“It is,” Trinh said. “Mai is my family name, and Duyen Trinh is my given name.”
“But I’ve heard Captain Kirk and Mister Spock call you Ensign Trinh,” Sulu said.
“That’s right,” Trinh said. “But they were correct when they did. The captain actually asked about my name when I first came aboard, and I explained that, in the Vietnamese culture, the formal form of address combines a title with the final part of the given name.”
“So if we were friends,” Sulu said, “I wouldn’t call you Mai?”
“You’d call me Trinh.”
Sulu nodded his understanding. Then, before he could stop himself, he blurted, “I’m Hikaru.”
Trinh’s lips widened into what seemed like an involuntary smile. “It’s nice to meet you, Hikaru.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Trinh.” He returned her smile, and even felt a rush of heat begin to crawl up from his uniform collar.
“I suppose we should be on a given-name basis,” Trinh said with a chuckle, “since I’m now responsible for your life.”
Sulu’s brow furrowed, and mercifully, he felt his flush abate. He had no idea what Trinh meant by her comment, and he told her so.
“Oh, you know,” she said. “That old concept—Asian, I think, maybe Chinese—that when you save somebody’s life, you become responsible for them.”
Sulu didn’t understand. “Wait,” he said. “Are you saying that you saved my life?”
Trinh’s mouth dropped open. “You didn’t know?”
“I don’t remember anything after I saw a missile strike the da Gama,” he said. “When I asked Doctor McCoy in sickbay what had happened, he told me that I’d taken a bad fall, which is how I hit my head and dislocated my shoulder.”
Trinh’s eyebrows rose. “I guess the doctor didn’t read my report,” she said. “I can’t tell you exactly what happened to you after the da Gama was destroyed, but when my team couldn’t beam up to the Enterprise because the ship was under attack, we took cover in the cave system out by the canyon. From there, I scanned the area for life signs, and I saw a human moving toward the caves, through the woods. That turned out to be you.”
Sulu shook his head, and a wave of vertigo made him regret it. “I don’t remember any of that.”
“You’d almost reached the caves when you stopped,” Trinh said.
“I stopped?” Sulu asked. “Why?”
“I believe that you set your tricorder to emit the life signs of two hundred humans and Andorians,” Trinh said. “A rocket was bearing down on the area, so I think you must have been hoping that it would target those false life signs. I ran out of the cave to try and help you, just in time to see you throw your tricorder into the canyon. The rocket followed it down, but then the force of the explosion sent you tumbling down a slope toward the canyon rim.” Trinh hesitated and looked down at the deck, as though she didn’t know what else to say.
“What did you do?” Sulu asked, fascinated by an episode in his life about which he recalled nothing.
“I ran,” Trinh said, still peering down. “I reached you just as you went over the edge, and I managed to grab you by the neck of your shirt as you did.”
“You caught me?” Sulu said. “But . . . how? I mean, you’re—” So little, he thought, but then refrained from saying the words because they might sound pejorative.
“I’m petite,” Trinh said, finally peering back over at Sulu. “I know. It must have been an adrenal effect. It didn’t last long, though. I managed to prevent you from falling, but you were still hanging precariously over the edge of the cliff, and I couldn’t pull you up. Fortunately, Clien saw what was happening from the mouth of the cave—against my order, by the way—and he raced over to help. When you reached up, he grabbed your arm and, together, we heaved you back onto solid ground.”
Sulu lifted his left hand to his right shoulder, as though the revelation of what had taken place had injured his arm anew. “That’s an incredible story.”
“It was . . . memorable,” Trinh said. With a grin, she added, “Well, at least it was for me.”
“I don’t how to respond to that,” Sulu said, still rubbing his shoulder. “I mean, other than to tell you how grateful I am.”
Trinh waved a hand before her, as though she had done nothing out of the ordinary, but still, Sulu could see that his appreciation pleased her. “That’s just life on a starship, right?” she said.
“Sometimes,” Sulu said. “But that doesn’t take anything away from what you did. Thank you.”
Trinh looked away again, and Sulu saw a flush creeping up her cheeks. She abruptly stood up and nervously straightened the creases in her uniform pants. “I really didn’t come here to regale you with my ‘heroic deeds,’ ” she said. “I just wanted to see how you were feeling.”
“I’m glad you did,” Sulu said. “And thanks to you, I’ll be fine.”
“Thanks to Clien too.”
“Yes, thanks to Clien too,” Sulu said.
Clearly uncomfortable with the turn of the conversation, Trinh said, “Well, I should let you get your rest.” She started toward the door.
“Trinh?” Sulu said. She stopped and turned back just past the divider that separated the two sections of his quarters. “Since you’re responsible for my life now,” he said, “maybe, when I get better, you should have dinner with me.” He paused, then added, with what he hoped would be amusing effect, “You know, so you can make sure I’m getting the proper nutrition.”
“What about Clien?” she asked. “He helped save your life too.”
“That belief about being responsible for a life you save? You said it was Asian, meaning human, not Andorian,” he said. “I think it should be just you and me for dinner.”
Trinh smiled again, not quite as freely or as broadly as earlier, but with a degree of bashfulness that added to her charm. “I’d like that, Hikaru.” With a bounce in her step, she turned and left Sulu’s quarters.
But she did not leave his thoughts.
• • •
The small, circular table sat in one of the two spaces Kirk could reasonably call corners in the crescent-shaped bar. He had chosen it for its relative privacy, tucked away from the few other patrons in the long, curving establishment. Other than with the man sitting across from him, the captain hoped to avoid conversation with any Starfleet officers who might stop in to The Roadhouse, the oddly named watering hole on Starbase 25. Not only did no roads pass by the Starfleet facility, which orbited the planet Dengella II, but with its location on the edge of the Federation, few space lanes led there either.
Kirk peered through the run of transparent deck-to-overhead ports that lined the outer side of the dimly lighted bar, to where Enterprise floated against the magnificent blur of the Milky Way. Several power and communications umbilicals tethered the ship to the cone-shaped starbase. A repair framework enc
losed the port nacelle, and from his vantage, Kirk could see workbees and spacesuited engineers swarming about it.
Enterprise had arrived at the starbase a week earlier, limping on its functioning but wounded warp drive. Scotty had been true to his word and had gotten the starship to its destination, but not without complications. Along the way from Ağdam, the port nacelle faltered twice, necessitating additional repairs. The captain came close to contacting Starfleet Command for assistance, but Scotty somehow inveigled Enterprise’s warp engines back into service. In his imagination, Kirk pictured his chief engineer sitting astride the damaged nacelle, holding it together with his bare hands and cajoling it to work. Scotty’s success impressed even Spock.
The captain turned from glancing out into space when the waiter arrived back at the table. In one hand, he held aloft a circular tray, from which he plucked a tumbler showing two fingers of an amber liquid. “Irish whiskey,” he said, his sturdy musculature and blue flesh distinguishing him as a Pandrilite. The nametag on his crisp, white shirt read Garo. He deposited the drink in front of the other person at the table, Commodore Robert Wesley, then followed it with a second glass. “And a water back,” the waiter said.
Nearly two decades Kirk’s senior, Wesley had a long, well-lined face that seemed serious even when it wore a smile. For a time, he had colored his hair back to the dark brown of his youth, but he’d apparently abandoned such vanity. His short but full locks, worn in a squarish cut, had gone completely gray.
The commodore thanked Garo, who lifted the final item from his tray. The waiter set down the etched cordial glass, filled with a crimson liquid, in front of Kirk. “And for you, a Denebian liqueur.” Garo then collected the empty glassware from the table and refilled his tray. He’d ably served the captain and the commodore for the previous hour, when the two men had arrived in the bar from their respective starships.
“Thank you,” Kirk told the waiter. The captain reached forward and took the stem of the glass between two fingers. Though he had initially resisted getting together with Bob Wesley, he felt glad that he’d eventually changed his mind. The commodore had arrived at the starbase in his ship, U.S.S. Lexington, two days prior, and had sent several messages to Kirk inviting him to meet for drinks. Even though the captain had known Wesley for some time, he hadn’t wanted to see anybody, least of all one of his peers. Kirk still struggled with the impending culmination of his crew’s five-year mission, something he knew he needed to deal with, but that he had no desire to discuss with anybody. After the commodore’s fourth invitation, though, he finally capitulated.
As the waiter left the table, Wesley nodded toward Kirk’s liqueur. “I’ve watched you drink that stuff, but I just don’t know how you can do it.” He held up his glass and swirled its contents. “This is a drink for a man.”
Kirk scoffed at the assertion. “You sound like my chief engineer,” he said.
“Scotty?” Wesley asked. “He might have a better taste for alcohol than you do, but the Scots don’t even know how to properly spell whiskey.”
“I’ll be sure to tell him you said so.”
Wesley raised his glass high in salute, then knocked back a healthy gulp from his glass. “Be sure to tell him what you were drinking,” he said. “That stuff is so minty. It’s like liquid candy.”
Kirk lifted his own glass to his lips and savored the ambrosial aroma before taking a sip. The strong flavor, containing both sweet and peppery components, tasted fine, and when he swallowed, a spreading warmth flowed down his gullet. “Minty on the tongue and fiery in the throat,” he told Wesley. “When you’re a starship captain and travel the galaxy, you get exposed to all sorts of new experiences. But you wouldn’t know about that, would you, Bob, stuck out on Mantilles?” He set his glass back down on the table, as though punctuating his question with it.
In the time they’d so far visited over drinks, Kirk hadn’t until that moment brought up the peculiar detour that the commodore had taken in his career. After three decades in Starfleet, Wesley resigned his commission and settled in the Pallas 14 star system, on Mantilles, at the time the most remote inhabited planet in the Federation. Knowing the commodore as he did, Kirk believed his departure from the service out of character; Bob Wesley loved Starfleet, and he loved commanding Lexington. Even though Wesley became the governor of Mantilles, Kirk thought the position a peculiar fit. He never doubted the commodore’s ability to do the job, but he also never understood his decision to take it on in the first place.
Wesley lifted a finger from around his glass and pointed at Kirk. “Jim, I think maybe you’ve had enough of that stuff,” he said. “You know I’m back on the Lexington.”
“I do,” Kirk admitted. He hadn’t intended to broach the subject at all with Wesley—the commodore had a right to his privacy—but Kirk felt intensely curious about the sequence of events. And maybe he had begun to feel the effects of the alcohol he’d imbibed, because he then said, “I guess you weren’t exactly cut out for a life in politics, were you, Bob?”
“As if the upper echelons of Starfleet aren’t filled with politicians,” Wesley returned. If he took offense at Kirk’s comments, he hid it well. “But no, I guess it wasn’t for me.”
The captain considered changing the subject, but since Wesley didn’t seem bothered by it, Kirk continued. “To be honest, Bob,” he said, “despite your impressive service record, I’m surprised that Starfleet Command made it so easy for you. The admirals take a dim view of their best personnel resigning their commissions, and an even dimmer view of commanding officers changing their minds so drastically.”
“Who said they made it easy?” Wesley asked.
“Come on, Bob,” Kirk said, not accepting the implied denial. “They put you right back in the big chair aboard the Lexington.”
The commodore stared askance at Kirk for a moment, actually tilting his head to one side. “Are you putting me on, Jim?”
“What?” Kirk asked, not really understanding the question. “No, of course not.”
“Then you really don’t know?”
“Know what?”
Wesley quaffed the remainder of his whiskey—Kirk noted that he hadn’t even touched his glass of water—and put the tumbler back down on the table. He then glanced around the bar, as though satisfying himself that none of the few patrons present would overhear him. “What’s your security clearance, Jim?”
Kirk hadn’t anticipated the question, but he answered it anyway. He suspected that Wesley already knew his clearance level, otherwise the commodore wouldn’t have asked about it. Wesley leaned in over the table and dropped the volume of his voice to a conspiratorial tone.
“Jim,” he said, “I didn’t choose to go to Mantilles. Starfleet Command put me there.”
“What?” Kirk said. “Why?” He couldn’t think of a good enough reason to remove an officer of Wesley’s caliber from the command of a starship.
“We were having a problem out that way with the Tholian Assembly,” the commodore said. “Pallas Fourteen is a long way from everywhere, without much backup in the neighborhood.”
“Surely the Tholians wouldn’t attack a Federation world,” Kirk said. “They can be punctilious and arrogant, but they don’t want war.”
“They might not want war, but they’ve been preparing for it,” Wesley said. “Starfleet Intelligence discovered that the Tholians enlisted the help of the Remalla to plant spies on Mantilles.”
“But why?” Kirk asked. “Mantilles is so remote, it doesn’t possess any strategic value, and it doesn’t have any rare or unusual resources that the Assembly would want.” He thought of the Enterprise crew’s visit to the Pallas 14 system after a spaceborne entity had consumed the outermost planet and then set its sights on Mantilles. Spock had ultimately communicated with the being and convinced it to spare the planet and its population of eighty-two million. The captain wondered if the Tholians thought that they could somehow harness the entity for use as a weapon. Or perhaps they believed it
part of a Federation threat.
The timing isn’t right, though, Kirk thought. By the time the entity had appeared in the Pallas 14 system, Wesley had already left Starfleet and become governor of Mantilles, so clearly that hadn’t motivated the Tholians to infiltrate the Federation world. “But if Starfleet Intelligence learned about the Remalla agents, maybe it was because SI was already keeping a close watch there,” Kirk reasoned aloud. He looked his friend in the eyes. “Bob, was Starfleet using the planet for some purpose that might have jeopardized Tholian security?”
“All I can say,” Wesley told him, not flinching beneath his gaze, “is that Starfleet Command considers Mantilles vital to Federation interests.” The commodore didn’t need to say more—and despite the high level of Kirk’s security clearance, probably couldn’t say more.
“Obviously, you must have succeeded there,” the captain said.
“We rooted out the Remalla spies,” Wesley said. “I don’t know with certainty what happened after that, but my guess is that the Federation ambassador to Tholia delivered some potentially devastating news to the ruling conclave. The Klingons had just agreed to several substantial trade and diplomatic agreements with the Assembly, but if the High Council learned of the Tholians employing alien spies to infiltrate other powers—even the Federation—that could have brought a rapid end to those compacts.”
Kirk shook his head when he considered the political machinations of the Tholian Assembly, as well as those of the United Federation of Planets. He remembered his own experiences with Starfleet Intelligence, including a particularly harrowing assignment into Romulan space to purloin one of the Empire’s cloaking devices—an assignment Kirk had opposed because it had put his crew at tremendous risk.
Wesley seemed to want to say no more on the subject of his mission as governor of Mantilles, and so Kirk let the matter drop. Instead, he turned the conversation back to Lexington. “Well, I’m glad you’re back to exploring now.”
“So am I, and grateful for it too,” the commodore said. Kirk thought that Wesley wore his gratitude more like relief. “What about you? How long before the Enterprise heads back out?”
Star Trek: TOS: Allegiance in Exile Page 11
