“Seems to me the Romulans owe you two a big thank-you.” McCoy drained his glass. “Not that you’ll ever get it. But you and Quince really did save the Empire.”
Kirk wasn’t listening. “But all that could have happened without Quince having to die. I feel like I marked him for death.”
“Philosophy was my worst subject,” the doctor said softly. “All that damnable logic. All I can say is, it happened, Jim, because you didn’t know. Both of you figured Quince could take care of himself. Maybe if either of you had been more careful, he wouldn’t have died. But how are you supposed to know everything that should have been done? I know Mendez did it intentionally, but in a way, Quince’s death was a sort of accident, a senseless thing, and that’s the cruelest thing of all to have to face.”
Jim took a deep swallow of brandy and felt the fire crawl from the back of his throat all the way down into his chest. “Quince had been down lately. His wife didn’t renew their contract, after eight years.”
“Poor devil,” said McCoy. “I know what that’s like.” He held his empty glass out.
Jim poured another drink for both of them. “When I’m able, I like to think that—it’s crazy—I somehow made life easier for him, by giving him something to do.”
“You have to admit, espionage is more exciting than paperwork. I think you’re right, Jim. I didn’t know Quince all that well, but from the way you described him, he didn’t sound like the kind of person who wanted to die in his sleep.”
“No.” Jim set the bottle down, unable to say anything more. He wanted very badly to be able to believe it.
“And look at it this way: maybe it wasn’t senseless at all. After all, he helped to bring Mendez down. He may have even kept the galaxy from a biowar.”
“I thought about that, too. Apparently, Quince tried to get in touch with Admiral Noguchi the night he died, so an investigation into his death has already been launched. It seems that they’ve already found four other admirals involved with Tanis base.”
“That’s hardly the whole Fleet,” said McCoy. “For a while there, I thought you were afraid you were the only one who wasn’t in on it.”
“I did. I was beginning to think I was some kind of naive Boy Scout not to believe it.” Kirk shook his head, remembering. “I wonder what they’ll do with Mendez.”
“He’ll probably be assigned to psychiatric counseling and a penal colony for a while. That’s if the prosecuting attorney is worth anything.”
“If the attorney’s worth anything,” Jim repeated bitterly. It hardly seemed fair. “And if not”
McCoy shrugged. “I’ve already figured out how Adams will try to get out of his confession. Of course, there’s no way he’ll get out of the fact that he and Mendez were in this thing up to their eyeballs. And Mendez must be sore enough to testify against Adams, what with his turning traitor and trying to sell the virus to the Romulans. I’m sure that bothered the admiral more than Adams’ spilling the beans.”
“So how will Adams get off?” Jim asked.
“Oh, he’ll claim that his insanity was only temporary, that he only killed because of the H-virus. I was afraid for a while that if he lived to stand trial, he’d have no problem going free. But the fact that Stanger was ill, yet protected Ensign Nguyen from Adams, says a lot. It says that the homicidal effects can be resisted. We owe Stanger a lot for that.” He looked questioningly at Jim. “I hope you gave the man a commendation.”
“Promotion. He’s Tomson’s second-in-command now.”
“Glad to hear it.” The doctor rose to his feet. “Well, I don’t mean to drink up all your expensive brandy, Jim, even if I did bring it myself.”
“You don’t have to rush off, Bones.”
McCoy grinned smugly. “Oh, yes, I do. I promised to buy Christine a drink. I don’t want to be drunk before I even get there.” He nodded at the desk. “I’ll let you open your mystery package. ‘Night, Jim.” He nodded and walked out.
“Good night, Bones.” The door closed over McCoy, and Jim sat watching it for a minute.
He had been dreading opening the package from Quince Waverleigh’s lawyer. It took him twenty minutes and another glass of brandy before he could bring himself to do it.
At last, he put his hands on the package. It was not particularly heavy, knowing Waverleigh, it probably contained a bequeathed bottle of tequila and a taped good-bye from Quince. He peeled the thin, crackling paper away easily and slowly eased the lid off the box.
Old Yeller’s beady, dead little eyes stared up at him. He lifted the armadillo out gently, though Yeller felt stiff and unyielding as a wooden plank. Jim pulled the packing from the box in his search for the expected good-bye tape, but there was nothing else inside.
Quince hadn’t even bothered to say good-bye
For no good reason, he felt crushed. He’d half hoped to find something in Quince’s last message that would ease his suffering conscience.
Disconsolate, he stared back at the little animal on his desk, then ran his fingers over it. It had a curious feel to it spine-hard in some spots, soft-skinned and bristly in others. Jim felt self-conscious and silly talking to it, but he wanted to hear Quince’s voice again. “Hello, Old Yeller.”
Old Yeller came alive under his hand. The creature writhed and opened its long, narrow muzzle. Waverleigh’s cheerful voice came out. “Hi, Jimmy.”
“Hello, Quince,” he whispered, feeling morose.
But the little animal kept talking and the tone in Quince’s voice made Jim sit up in his chair and listen.
“Look, Jimmy, if you’ve got Yeller with you, I reckon you’re feeling pretty bad right about now. I hope you got my message okay”
Jim held his breath. Hope you got my message Good Lord, Quince must have programmed the message right before he died. “But I just wanted you to know no regrets. This is the most fun I’ve had since my promotion! So lighten up, Jimmy. You were always too damn intense and too quick to take the blame. Have a drink on me. And give Yeller a pat now and then, so he doesn’t get too lonely.
“Waverleigh out.”
Yeller’s jaw stopped working. Jim reached out and stroked the armadillo’s hard outer shell.
He didn’t stop when the intercom whistled, and Sulu’s placid face appeared on the screen.
“Leaving the Sagittarian arm. Captain. Awaiting your orders.”
“I see.” Kirk looked up from petting Yeller. “Well, Lieutenant, it seems that Command has finally taken pity on us after all that star charting. Lay in a course for Star Base Thirteen. Maybe shore leave will be somewhat more fun than our last assignment.”
The corners of Sulu’s eyes crinkled. “Yes, sir. “He paused. “More fun, maybe, Captain, but certainly not more interesting.”
“I, can tell you’re in need of leave, Lieutenant. You’re beginning to sound like Mr. Spock.” Kirk was surprised to find himself feeling faintly amused. “Kirk out.”
He sighed and looked back at Old Yeller, who once again stood stiffly.
Jim picked up the bottle and poured himself another brandy. He had the glass to his lips when an oddly Quince-like notion seized him. He got a small shot glass from the cabinet, set it next to Yeller’s front paw, and put a thimbleful of McCoy’s brandy in it.
He raised his own glass. “To Quince Waverleigh,” he said, and smiled for what seemed like the first time in a very long while.
COMING NEXT MONTH
This is the story of a hero—and a moment forever lost to history.
It is a tale of Starfleet’s early days, a time before the STAR TREK we know. The story of a secret mission gone horribly wrong—and an instant in time when the galaxy stood poised on the brink of one final, destructive war. It is the story of a ship since passed on into legend, and a man we know only as the father of Starfleet’s greatest captain.
His name is Kirk. Commander George Samuel Kirk.
And the fate of a hundred innocent worlds rests on his shoulders
TURN THE PAGE
FOR
AN EXCITING PREVIEW OF
FINAL FRONTIER
Prologue
A TIME BEFORE stardates. And a captain’s privilege to go there.
Even with the unchanged cornfields lying beneath sprawling blue skies and the barn smell all around him, Jim Kirk discovered he couldn’t quite get away from reality when the communicator in his pocket suddenly chirped. His hand automatically went for the utility belt that usually held his phaser and communicator when he wasn’t on board the ship, and only then did he remember he wasn’t wearing a uniform.
“Mind your own business, Bones,” he muttered as he found the device inside the lightweight indigo fabric of his sailing jacket. He snapped the grip open with too much ease—not something he ordinarily perceived in his movements—and spoke firmly into it. “Mind your own business, McCoy. I’m on leave.”
"On leave and suddenly psychic, too, I see,” the familiar voice plunged back.
“Who else has the gall to disobey direct orders?” Kirk shifted the communicator to his left hand and used his right to wrench open a sliding panel in the barn’s loft wall. Not easy; it hadn’t been open in—no, he didn’t want to count years right now. The eddies of time weren’t his best friends at the moment. The backwashes
“What do you want?” he asked as he reached into the metal cubbyhole behind the panel of century-old barnwood. He was quite aware of the guilty hesitation on the other end of the frequency when McCoy didn’t answer right away.
"I thought you might want company for dinner.”
“That’s the best excuse you’ve got?”
"Well, it’s hard to come up with a shipboard emergency hanging here in spacedock, you know. Dangling a juicy stuffed Cornish hen dinner in front of you was all I could come up with. I’m a surgeon, not a not a damn, I can’t think of anything.”
“Then you have something to keep you busy,” Kirk said sharply. “There are some days when a man doesn’t want to be cheered up. Kirk out.”
He flipped the grid closed and stuffed the communicator and everything it represented back into his pocket. In his mind he saw McCoy’s squarish face skewered with helpless empathy and knew he’d been unfair, but everything was unfair. Where was it written that a starship captain always had to be the exception? This wasn’t his day to be exceptional. Today he wanted to be what he remembered himself as—a tough curly-haired blond kid with big aspirations and a painfully realistic edge to his imagination. He knew that if he looked out the loft door he’d see his mother peeking out the farmhouse window like she had during his entire boyhood, wondering what her son was thinking and not having the nerve to come out and ask. Either that or she just had more respect for his privacy than McCoy did.
No surprise. Bacteria had more respect for privacy than McCoy did.
Kirk shook away an urge to glance over his shoulder and reached into the hidden metal box inside the loft wall. Carefully he pulled out an uneven bundle of letters, ragged and yellowed, a bundle of Starfleet notepaper preserved only with a child’s obsessive care for something particularly precious. His lips curled up on one side as he ran his thumb across the discolored ink of a handwritten line.
“Stone knives and bearskins,” he murmured. His throat closed around any further comment, embarrassing him in front of himself and making him glad he was alone. He straightened up—certainly one thing that had been easier twenty-five years ago—strode through old hay to the loft door, and sat down in a wedge of sunlight with the bundle of notepaper.
The sunlight on his face, real sunlight, made the natural ruddiness rise in his cheeks again. He could feel the color seep back into his skin, aware of how pale starship duty sometimes made him in spite of special whole-spectrum artificial lighting with all its pretense of sunlight. Like pills instead of solid food. The same, but not. Maybe that was because starship lighting had no warmth.
Starship how could a word so beautiful seem so sinister to him now? It hadn’t been the ship’s fault, this tragedy that crushed him to the Earth’s surface like sudden gravity. It hadn’t been McCoy’s fault, though McCoy felt otherwise. It hadn’t been Spock’s fault, though Spock hadn’t been able to help no matter how much he wanted to. So, it must be my own fault. My fault, because I earned command. And for my reward, I pay.
Squinting in the bright daylight, he divided the pile in two, just for the sake of mystery, then picked up a letter and started reading.
“No,” Kirk sighed, “it’s not. But I probably wasn’t listening anyway.” He leaned back on the gray barnwood and crossed his ankles, then indulged in a sip of the coffee he’d brought out here with him. Doused with honey and milk like his aunt used to make for him when she thought he was too young to take coffee black, it was more of a liquid candy bar than coffee. The taste of nostalgia.
He tipped the crusty letter away from the sun and spoke to the handwriting.
“Keep talking. I’m listening now.”
Chapter One
THE SECURITY COMMANDER set his pen down and spun the sensor camera roller, then gazed up at the row of monitors. Each monitor was carefully positioned so that he got a clear view of his own reflection, and it was a damned annoyance to always have to be looking past that fellow with the rusty red hair and the stern expression that reminded him of bleached-out dreams. He blinked to clear the reflection from his mind, and looked past it to the views of the monitors, each of which showed a different compartment, lab or lounge on the starbase. At two o’clock in the simulated night, things were quiet. At least temporarily.
The officer set the computer sentry on automatic survey, picked up his pen, and went back to his writing while he had the chance.
“Don’t make it a sad letter, George.”
George looked up into Lt. Francis Drake Reed’s eyes, eyes shaded by an awning of umber hair that reflected his West Indies heritage. Drake was doing his priest thing again, but this time it was no sham.
“How do you know it’s a sad letter?” George asked, burying the sudden shiver that ran down his arms.
Drake sat on the console and gazed down at him. “I see your face.”
George’s complexion, normally peach-pale, flushed russet. “Hang you.”
“End the letter before it gets sad, George,” Drake pressed.
For a moment, George’s eyes grew cold as rocks, and his brows flattened over them. Don’t tamper with my privacy, they warned. It’s all I have.
“Love Dad,” Drake prodded. He pointed at the paper.
Beneath the smoldering indignation and the embarrassment he felt at being so thoroughly interpretable, George felt the sting of regret. If only he could allow his family to know him so well. If only
Before the rage boiled, he broke his glare away from Drake and dragged his attention back to the paper. His fingers were stiff as he wrote the final words.
He folded the paper immediately, then again, as though the folds would seal out any invasion. Knowing Drake was watching, he slipped the letter into a Starfleet envelope; slid his fingers along the pressure seal, addressed it sloppily, then opened the communications chute and dropped the letter in. The sound of automatic suction told him it was gone. Two weeks from now, his boys would be reading it. And it was too late for him to snatch it back and change anything. The commitment made him nervous. He closed his eyes for a moment and covered his mouth with a bloodless hand. Strange how just writing a letter
“You always get surly when you write to your puppies, Geordie,” Drake said as he folded his arms and shifted against the console. “You have the temper of a resting alligator, you know, and I’d like to hear you admit it freely.”
George glanced at him briefly and let the indignation flow away, disguising the change in fiddling with the monitor equipment. “I’d rather sleep with a Romulan.”
“You might. You don’t even know what a Romulan looks like.”
“I don’t have to.”
“George, you are a bigot.”
“I know.”
Wi
thout the slightest announcement, the office door slid open. That in itself was a surprise; the security office doors weren’t supposed to open except for cleared personnel, and the people who entered, two men and a woman, didn’t seem to be wearing any of the coded clearance badges needed for reading by the computer sentry. George swiveled around slightly in his chair, just enough to get a good look at the woman, who was in the lead. The only thing that he had time to register was her grape-green eyes and the color of her shoulder-length hair—like a wheatfield just after dawn. Biscuit-blond.
She took two measured steps into the office, followed by the two nondescript men, and without a pause she asked, “George Kirk?”
The answer was automatic. “Yes?”
The two men lunged around her, one heading for George, the other for Drake.
Drake was taken by surprise, training or not, and his attacker managed to pinion his arms before he could draw his hand cannon. The woman moved in instantly and pressed a moist cloth over Drake’s nose and mouth. Drake’s eyes widened in terror and disgust at the stifling medicinal odor in the cloth, and his arms and legs turned to putty in the grip of his attackers.
George had had that extra second necessary to raise his feet and kick off the other man’s first lunge, and by the time he rolled to the floor and came up, he had managed to draw his weapon. Lacking time to aim and fire it, though, he simply brought it upward in a sweep and butt-stroked the stranger’s jaw. Had he not been startled by Drake’s sudden collapse at the hands of the woman, he might not have been overtaken. But when Drake went down, the second man moved in on George and kicked him hard across the pelvis. Stunned, George fought the numbness and tried to keep his balance, but the only way to do that was to lean on the hand that held his cannon. The two men grappled his arms and held him as he writhed and tried to kick back, and the woman moved in.
Bloodthirst Page 28
