“Don’t thank me,” Mitchell warned as he set the bottle down on the coffee table. “I take it you haven’t heard the rumors about Enterprise’s next mission, have you?”
Kirk paused just as he was about to bring the whiskey to his lips. “No. What rumors?”
Mitchell shook his head. “Drink first. I think you’re going to want a few in you before hearing this…”
4
Pike sighed in frustration. “Took me ten years to get that old chair the way I like it,” he grumbled, shifting one way then the other in his new bridge’s new center seat.
“I can check with the station supervisor, sir,” Kirk said, “and see if they can still salvage it from the old—”
“I’m kidding, Number One,” Pike told him. Mostly, he added to himself as he stood up. Both of his knees cracked loudly, and a small twinge went up his back. You’re getting old, Chris. Maybe the new command seat wasn’t such a bad thing; otherwise he might be tempted never to get up out of his chair again.
Pike nodded and took in one more look at his bridge. The forward viewscreen was larger, and the bulky comm units had been removed from his chair and the other stations, replaced with less obtrusive audio transceivers. Otherwise, it was identical to the original, right down to the dull gray bulkheads, doors, and rails. Pike had often wished there could be at least some bright colors, besides the console lights, to break up the monotony. But then, Starfleet wasn’t meant to be a colorful organization, was it?
Another difference was the faces manning a number of stations. A young, dark-skinned woman—whose name escaped Pike at the moment—sat at communications, while the new science officer, a man named Masada, sat at the science station. Both tried not to notice their new CO’s eyes on the backs of their heads as they ran through their tests of the new bridge’s system. Masada was particularly discomfited, given that Pike had already upbraided him about the long ponytail he wore when he first reported aboard. He studied his boards intently as his right hand repeatedly ran over the now exposed back of his neck.
“Sir?”
Pike turned toward Chief Engineer Scott, who had been running his own diagnostics at the engineering station, and now stepped down into the center well. “Everything checks out at optimal levels,” he said, handing the captain a data slate. “The Bozeman lads did a find job nursing the ole girl back to health.”
Pike gave Scott a small grin as he scanned the report, unclipped the stylus, and made his mark at the bottom. “Thank you, Commander,” he said, handing the device back.
“Captain?”
Pike turned to the melodic-voiced woman sitting at communications, holding one of the new wireless Feinberg receivers to her ear. “Yes, Lieutenant…” Dammit, what was her name?
The young lieutenant flashed him a lovely, forgiving smile. “Penda, sir.”
Pike nodded quickly. “Sorry. Yes, Lieutenant Penda?”
“It’s Admiral Komack at Starfleet Command,” she informed him. “He says our guests are standing by and ready to be received.”
“Acknowledged. Number One?” Pike gestured to Kirk, who fell in behind him as he headed for the turbolift. “Transporter room,” he said as he gave the control wand a twist and the car started descending.
Christopher Pike had never been big on small talk, and that held especially true when it came to his subordinates. He could be sociable when the occasion called for it, and was downright gregarious when among friends. But with very few exceptions, he did not like to get close to his crew on a personal level. Still, the silence between himself and Kirk right now was grating on him somehow, and after a moment’s hesitation, he asked, “Did you manage to get down to Iowa at all this week, Number One?”
Kirk blinked once before slowly turning his head. “I’m sorry, sir?”
“Iowa. Your brother and his family still live there, don’t they?”
“Yes, sir, they do.”
“And did you get a chance to visit?”
“Yes, sir, I did.”
Realizing this stab at small talk was going even worse than normal, Pike just nodded and turned to stare again at the lift doors.
“They are all the family I have left, after all.”
Pike winced at Kirk’s cold tone. He hadn’t wanted to pick at that scab. Kirk had been less than thrilled when Pike had confirmed the rumors he had heard about their upcoming mission. The captain could hardly blame him; it had only been six months since losing his wife and son. He had refused to take any leave at the time, dealing with his loss instead by throwing himself into his work. Until now, Pike had believed his first officer had been coping. He could only hope he’d somehow continue to do so.
The turbolift opened, and the two senior officers crossed the corridor into the transporter. “Mister al-Khaled,” Pike prompted with a nod. The engineer at the transporter console nodded back, made the final setting adjustments, and slowly nudged the rematerialization sequencer to its full power. On the platform, three columns of tiny swirling lights shimmered and coalesced into solid, humanoid form. “Welcome aboard the Enterprise,” the captain told the trio, though his eyes fixed on T’Pol, looking frail and, despite her alleged lack of emotion, nervous. “I’m Captain Christopher Pike.”
The petite, dark-haired woman standing at T’Pol’s right stepped down from the platform and marched directly up to Pike. “Ambassador Nancy Hedford, chief negotiator,” she said, thrusting her right hand out and looking up at him as if challenging him to doubt her. Given that she looked barely twenty-five, Pike could see how that would be a common reaction she’d faced. “My colleague, Ambassador Garrett Tarses,” she continued, indicating the tall, middle-aged gentleman still standing at T’Pol’s side. “And I understand you’ve already made the acquaintance of Lady T’Pol of Vulcan.”
Pike nodded in answer to Hedford, and then nodded again more deeply to the older woman. “It’s a pleasure to see you again, ma’am, and I’m very glad you’ve agreed to join this mission.”
T’Pol nodded back. “Captain,” she said in a quiet tone that in no way sounded like the woman who had threatened him with an antique phaser a few days earlier.
Looking away, Pike gestured and said, “My first officer, Commander James Kirk.” Kirk did not nod, did not speak, but simply stood stock-still, staring blankly at some point on the bulkhead behind the diplomatic party. And though his face was just as impassive as the Vulcan’s, the emotions that Pike saw in his eyes were far, far darker ones. After a much too long silence engulfed the transporter room, Pike turned to the lieutenant behind the transporter console. “Mister al-Khaled, would you show our guests to the VIP quarters?”
“Yes, sir,” the younger man said, moving forward to engage the visitors and leading them out.
Once the double doors slid shut behind T’Pol’s slowly shuffling form, Pike turned on his first officer. “And just what was that, Number One?”
“Sir?” Kirk answered, feigning shock at the captain’s harsh tone of voice.
“You’re not happy about this mission. I understand that. However, I also don’t care. I expect you, going forward, to comport yourself appropriately.”
“I don’t understand what I’ve done that’s been inappropriate, sir.”
“You don’t play stupid very well, Commander,” Pike snapped. Then he moderated his tone a bit as he said, “You’re a good officer, Jim. You could be a good captain someday. But you cannot allow personal considerations to interfere with the performance of your duties.”
Pike watched a storm of emotions play silently across Kirk’s face, before he asked, “Permission to speak freely, sir?”
“Granted,” Pike said with a nod.
“Sir, I understand we have to respect the chain of command. But, with respect, what you cavalierly refer to as my ‘personal considerations’ is the cold-blooded murder of a three-year-old child and his mother.” Anger and pain seemed to roll off Kirk like waves of heat over the sands of the desert.
“And I can never know
what you’ve been through,” Pike admitted. “But we’ve all lost people to this cold war with the Coalition, Number One.” Unbidden, the face of the last officer Pike had given the name “Number One” floated up in his memory, first as she was when she transferred to his command, an eager, handsome young officer…then as she was at the end, burned and disfigured, unable even to beg to be put out of her misery.
Pike willed the image away. “With any luck, this summit will help bring an end to all that, finally let us and the Vulcans bury the hatchet after two hundred years of suspicion and mistrust.”
Kirk shook his head almost imperceptibly. “Captain, you can order me to hide my emotions. But you can’t order me to get rid of them altogether; even if I could, I wouldn’t. I’m a human being; I need my emotions. I need my pain.”
Pike sighed. “If that’s what I have to do, Number One…I’m ordering you to keep your personal feelings in check, and to comport yourself in a manner appropriate for an officer of your rank and station.”
“Aye, sir,” Kirk answered flatly, before marching out of the transporter room.
“This is going to be a fun trip,” Pike muttered to himself as he watched the doors slide closed again.
“This is where they put the VIPs?” Ambassador Hedford sniffed as she took in the cabin to which she’d been assigned. “I’d hate to see where they put the insignificant peons.”
“Then you’ll want to avoid deck seventeen, ma’am.”
Hedford turned toward the officer who had been assigned to escort her, standing just inside the cabin doorway. He kept a dead-pan expression, but there was a glint of humor in his eye. “Thank you, Lieutenant. I’ll be sure to remember that.” She looked around the guest quarters again and sighed. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office normally employed its own fleet of warp yachts for ferrying diplomats to and from their various missions. In this instance, though, it was decided by people well above her pay grade that the symbolism of using the Enterprise outweighed all other considerations. She thought it was silly, but had given in to Minister Fox on the matter, thinking it a minor point.
That was before she’d boarded. “Oh, this won’t do,” she said, throwing her hands up and letting them fall at her sides. “There’s not enough room for three people to meet and work together in here.”
“There is an observation lounge at the end of this corridor, ma’am,” the lieutenant said. “I can see that it’s reserved for your exclusive use for the duration of your mission.”
Hedford shrugged in response to that offer. “We’ll need a secured subspace radio link back to Earth, and access terminals for each of us to the ship’s library computers.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem, Ambassador. I’ll see to it myself.”
Hedford looked again to the dusky-skinned Starfleet officer, and saw he was openly smiling at her now. Is he…flirting? With me? A small part of her was appalled that any man who would willingly put on the ugly mustard-brown uniform of Earth’s military forces would be attracted to her. The greater part, though, noticed his dark eyes and exotically handsome Middle Eastern features…
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” she said curtly, and turned her back, pretending to study the rest of her cabin until she heard the door slide shut behind the lieutenant. She pushed down the tiny tinge of regret she felt for her rude dismissal of the handsome young officer. She was here to do a job, and she wasn’t about to jeopardize that for trivial personal matters. For Prime Minister Winston to have chosen her for such an important, historic mission was a tremendous vote of confidence.
Only five years earlier, she’d been a junior administrator assigned to the Commonwealth Mission on Epsilon Canaris III. One of humanity’s most far-flung colonies, it had been considered a trouble spot since the end of the last century, when the Canarans tried to declare themselves independent from United Earth.
At first, the reaction from the homeworld was muted; these were fellow human beings, after all, and no one wanted to be the first to advocate clamping down on their freedoms. But then the idea of independence started to spread, with small but vocal movements cropping up on a dozen colony worlds. Even the Martian Colonies started agitating for a break away from the rest of their neighbors in the Sol system.
Just as the Parliament started to openly worry what the end effect would be if so many worlds, whose resources the United Earth economy had become so dependent on in recent decades, broke away from Earth, a violent demonstration erupted in the Canaran capital between Earth loyalists and secessionists. Eleven were killed, including one government official, which by itself would have been enough of a black eye for the independence movement. However, another of the dead activists was later discovered to have not been human. Starfleet troops were dispatched to Epsilon Canaris, as well as the other colonies threatening secession, to counter the alien-backed insurrection.
The Canaran independence movement wasn’t entirely extinguished, though. Every decade or so, a new conspiracy theory would crop up, accusing Starfleet Intelligence of planting the altered alien “patsy” on Canaris, or else having the autopsy results falsified. But even if those far-fetched stories weren’t widely believed, there still remained a solid undercurrent of disdain toward their distant rulers.
When Hedford had first arrived at Canaris, it was a world on the precipice of collapse. Because of its distance from Earth and proximity to Coalition and other alien trade routes, Canaris had become a major base for black market activity, so much so that the underground economy actually outpaced the planet’s legitimate mining and agricultural industries. Her superiors at the Canaris mission devoted all their attention and energies toward stopping this illicit activity, while at the same time they failed to realize that the leaders of these black market cartels were laundering their credits by buying up legitimate businesses and infrastructure—as well as buying several legislators. Despite United Earth policy not to negotiate with criminals, Hedford approached the largest of these players and helped them negotiate a deal whereby they not only got to keep their legitimate assets, but let their other competing endeavors coexist in something resembling friendly competition. She also managed to find a few loopholes in the import-export laws that allowed such products as Andorian silk and Tallonian crystals to be traded legitimately.
Her superiors on Canaris tried to get her recalled back to Earth. Their superiors, however, saw the results of Hedford’s approach, and instead recalled the rest of the team from the Canaris mission. They then decided to see what she might be able to accomplish at other trouble spots around the Commonwealth, to similar outcomes. And now here she was, entrusted with perhaps the most vital diplomatic challenge in Earth history—let alone her career.
Hedford unpacked her small bag, setting her clothes into the cabin’s bureau of drawers, which rotated out from inside the room’s wall—the limited space she had here was, she had to admit, efficiently utilized—and arranging her collection of data cards alongside her computer workstation. This assignment had come on such short notice—short notice to her, at least, though apparently it was something Carter Winston had wanted to do since coming to office—and she had so much to familiarize herself with. Not only did she plan to review the Compact of the Interstellar Coalition itself, but all of its antecedents, including the preliminary drafts of the charter of the would-be Coalition of Planets, and the transcripts of the doomed talks that took place in San Francisco in 2155. Tarses, a thirty-year veteran in the field of interstellar affairs, would help her with the task of combing through the kiloquads of documentation, while T’Pol…well, she wasn’t quite sure what T’Pol was supposed to do, but she imagined her unique perspective would be of some value.
Hedford realized she should check on the ancient Vulcan woman in the cabin next door to hers. They had only gotten the chance to exchange traditional Vulcan greetings at the prime minister’s residence in Geneva before they’d beamed up to the Enterprise, and the ambassador was looking forward to getting acquainted with her over the nex
t several days. After all, this would be the first time she’d ever been at a negotiating table with an alien beside her, not just opposite.
Hedford stepped out into the corridor and pressed the signal tab beside T’Pol’s door. She was greeted with silence, as she was the following two times she tried signaling. “Lady T’Pol?”
“In here, Ambassador.” She turned toward Garrett Tarses’s voice, seeing him in a doorway several meters down the corridor, in what she assumed was the observation lounge. Inside, she saw a comfortably large space—more than suitable to her needs, as the lieutenant had promised—with several floor-to-ceiling portals looking out onto the star-dotted sky. She was surprised to see they were in motion; as big as this ship was, she hadn’t felt its engines power up, and it was only because she saw Luna growing larger as it slid across their view that she knew they were heading out of the Sol system.
And directly in front of the windows, her face mere centimeters from the transparency, T’Pol stood gazing out. Both Hedford and Tarses stayed back by the lounge doors, silently watching the alien woman, as she in turn watched the stars move toward them, seeming to stretch into long streaks as the ship broke the subspace barrier and exceeded the speed of light.
The silence lasted for a seemingly interminable time, and was broken by what sounded strangely like a sob. Hedford and Tarses looked at each other briefly, hesitated, and then Hedford said, in a near whisper, “Lady T’Pol?”
T’Pol dipped her head as she turned, avoiding the others’ eyes. “One hundred and three years, two months, eighteen days,” she said. “That is how long I have been in exile on Earth. I believed I would never see the stars like this again.” Her voice was flat as she spoke, but it was impossible not to perceive the feeling behind her words.
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