“Captain—” Pike began. “Regulations
clearly state that a directive from Starfleet
Command overrides—”
“What directive?” Kamnach demanded. “That message is incomplete. Garbled by static. A day late and a dollar short. It may as well not be a message at all.”
“Sir—”
“For all we know, the Vestians could have sent that message. For all we know, you did, Mr. Pike,” Kamnach said incisively. “In any event, there isn’t enough of it for us to be clear on Starfleet’s intentions. We will proceed to exercise our own discretion in time of battle. Science Officer, resume your station. Mr. Pike, you’re dismissed.”
Pike rose to his feet.
“No, sir,” he said quietly, hearing his voice echoing in his own head.
Was he out of his mind? He remembered Charlie’s definition of heroism. Did the same concept apply to professional suicide?
“Captain Kamnach, refusing or ignoring a direct order from Starfleet Command is a violation of regulations. On that basis I am relieving you of command.”
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There is a gentleman named Rusty Van Reeves, who is by way of becoming a gifted novelist. (He can’t help it. He was born and raised in Faulkner country, just down the road from where Eudora Welty lived and wrote. Whether it’s something in the water or something in the blood, Rusty has it.)
Rusty understands Christopher Pike’s dilemma. When he was fifteen years old, he broke his neck playing high school football, one vertebra below where Christopher Reeve sustained his now world-famous injury. What this means is that Rusty can breathe on his own and has some movement in his shoulders, but for more than a quarter of a century he has lived with a reality not unlike Christopher Pike’s.
There is no Talos IV for Rusty.
That hasn’t stopped him from running a business, writing a column for his local paper and a novel or three, drawing, painting, and generally being an interesting human being.
This novel is dedicated to Rusty, to the memory of Christopher Reeve, and to the too, too many others who share their plight, in the hope that, in the absence of Talosians, human medical research will transcend, and soon.
Acknowledgments
I want to especially thank Marsha Valence, owner of Tribute Farm, who raises Morgan horses and names them after science fiction authors. It was Marsha who explained to this city kid the best way to train a good saddle horse, and the way in which young Chris Pike gentles, not breaks, Tango is told in her words.
Much gratitude to Marco Palmieri, for asking me, “How’d you like to write the definitive Pike novel?” and making it so, as well as for suggesting the title when I was clearly stumped. The environmental theme was entirely his idea, and a natural fit for the character of Pike.
Special thanks to Keith R. A. DeCandido for gentling the manuscript as Pike did Tango, and for finding a way to save a scene I was particularly fond of despite my talent for muddling linear time.
Lastly, my gratitude, always, to Jack…for being Jack. Nuff said, my love.
I have learned that if one advances confindently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
—Henry David Thoreau
Prologue
2320
The summons came as softly as the touch of a butterfly’s wing, and yet with an urgency which, just as the first time, could not be left unanswered.
Spock considered what the summons had cost him that previous time. Could he seriously have believed it would never come again?
The average Vulcan performed the mind-meld seldom, and usually only with other Vulcans. In that way the individual mind remained sacrosanct, its blade-edged logic inviolate. But by no definition was Spock an average Vulcan. Even the most evolved of Kolinahr masters had not melded with the myriad minds he had encountered in his travels. They had been humanoid minds mostly—discordant, even inchoate, their wants and needs and emotions clashing against Spock’s Vulcan mind (its integrity ever in question anyway because of the human genes composing one arm of the helix), like waves against rock, reshaping it.
Had they, over the decades he had treated with them, softened the corners of his sharp-honed discipline like water against stone, or rather polished it to a multifaceted jewel?
In essence, both.
Every mind-meld left trace evidence, a signature, a subtle alteration of synapse and neural pathway. And more powerful even than these two-way interactions, these approximating equalities of mind, were the one-way transmissions from other telepaths.
Vulcans had a code. One did not initiate mind-meld without consent. And one never, ever entered the mind of another without permission.
Spock had violated that code, once, with Valeris, and paid a price for it. But the alternative would have been to allow a conspiracy by the war-hungry from two empires and his own Federation to flourish, and that was the greater evil. But now he was the recipient of a summons, like the one which had come to him unbidden decades before, from another species of telepath, far more advanced than Vulcans, and driven by a different ethic.
It was why General Order 7, forbidding any Federation citizen from visiting Talos IV, had been enacted in the first place.
Even then, Spock had wondered if the Federation Council truly understood that keeping humans physically removed from the Talosians was immaterial. If the Talosians wish to reach across a galaxy to invade a mind, any mind, they could do so.
It was how they had reached Christopher Pike, and Spock himself, more than half a century ago. And how they had reached him again, now.
Come to us, the summons said in the mind-voice of the Magistrate, the Talosian Christopher Pike had dubbed the Keeper. For your captain. Come soon.
Only that. All of that. Nothing more specific, yet specific enough. Christopher Pike, one of two humans who could command Spock’s loyalty unto death, once again required Spock’s presence on Talos IV, a presence which would once again put him at risk of the death penalty.
Spock calculated the years. Christopher Pike was now over one hundred years old, a somewhat elderly man, in human terms. Was he dying? Perhaps, given the constraints of the injuries that had brought him to Talos, already dead? Perhaps he had undergone a change of heart after so many decades on this world he had once alluded to as his “great ambivalence,” his “captive freedom,” and wished to leave, knowing only Spock could retrieve him? Had Vina died, leaving him alone?
Too many q
uestions, Spock thought. No way of learning the answers while he lingered here. If the Talosians had wanted him to know more, they would have told him. Procrastination, Spock chided himself, is a human trait. You must answer, then you must act. The rest is not important.
The last journey to Talos IV had required considerable machinations. But Spock was no longer a mere lieutenant commander on a starship. As a Federation ambassador, he had a personal shuttle at his command at all times, could log a secret flight plan using a dozen different diplomatic reasons, all of them acceptable, and venture far off course before the aberration was detected. This didn’t mean he would not be pursued, only that he would have more lead time before his absence was noted. The risk of being intercepted was not as great as it had been the first time.
But the risk once he arrived would be the same.
Since the moment Talos IV receded from view on Enterprise’s viewscreen for the second time fifty-two point seven-five-three years ago, Spock had known somehow that this day would come. Now that it was here, what was he to do?
Spock contemplated the means at his disposal, formed a plan, and answered the Magistrate’s summons.
1
2267: Talos IV
A man who cannot move can do little else but think.
Christopher Pike had always been an active man. This was not to say that he couldn’t occasionally lose himself in a good book or a magnificent sunset or the eyes of a beautiful woman. It didn’t mean he never thought deep thoughts or took a moment or ten or thirty to sit quietly and contemplate the meaning of life. It only meant that he did all of these things against the background of a need to move, to do, to participate, to make a difference.
As his ship’s doctor once said, “A man either lives life as it happens to him, meets it head-on and licks it, or turns his back on it and starts to wither away.”
Phil Boyce had been preaching to the choir when he said that. In the thirteen years since Enterprise had left Talos IV behind, Pike had been more active, more engaged, more “in the moment” than ever before in his always-active life. It was clear to anyone who knew him that he had been driving himself, though whether toward something or away from it only those who knew him well could truly say.
Not a few wondered if it had to do with whatever it was that compelled Starfleet Command to enact General Order 7 following Enterprise’s mission to Talos.
Pike couldn’t talk about it, of course. No one except those who had been to the surface and those who briefed them afterward had any idea what had transpired there, and even they did not know what Pike, as the last to beam up and the only one to see Vina as she truly was, knew about the Talosians and their power.
Not given to talking about himself at the best of times, Christopher Pike was especially reluctant to share the fact that he had spent those years away from Talos IV wondering if he would ever again be able to distinguish reality from dream.
All that had ended in a burst of light and noise and chaos and incredible, unbearable pain, on a cadet ship in a remote sector beyond Starbase 11 that Starfleet used for training exercises.
“Starfleet ought to decommission those Class-Js,” Commodore Mendez grumbled when Fleet Captain Pike contacted him out of courtesy because they were passing through his space, and because Mendez had just been assigned to Starbase 11 to relieve Commodore Stone. Pike himself had put in a year at this particular base when he was first promoted to fleet captain. “But you didn’t hear me say that, Chris.”
Christopher Pike’s handsome face had filled Mendez’s viewscreen, his smile wry, those black eyebrows above the piercing blue eyes always frowning slightly no matter what the rest of his face was doing.
“Well, considering you’ve just broadcast it over an open frequency, José, you can’t blame me if you end up with your ass in a sling.”
Mendez was a less active man than Pike, a scholar in his spare time with degrees in heuristics and etymology, perfectly content to warm a desk on a starbase and vacation on Earth once a year to see his grandkids. The irony of Pike’s words (it was not Mendez, after all, who would end up quite literally in a sling) would haunt him for a long time after this conversation was wiped from the official records.
“Be careful, will you, Chris?” Mendez said sincerely, his deep voice made that much deeper by his concern. “Those ships had structural quirks when they were built, which was before you were born and damn near before I was. They’re due to be decommissioned within the year, and I’m not thrilled about the fact you’ve been assigned to take a shipload of green kids out to the middle of nowhere in one of those rust buckets—”
“Yes, Mother,” Pike had interrupted him, then softened his smile to assure Mendez he was taking him seriously. “José, I know the region. And I think after over twenty-five years on active duty, I just might know how to captain a ship under less than optimum conditions.”
“Chris, I didn’t mean—”
“This baby was okayed at Planitia before we left the Sol System. She’ll fly us there, she’ll challenge these soft-handed kids on maneuvers, and she’ll fly us home.”
“So you say,” Mendez sighed, resigning himself. The two men had exchanged some small talk after that, and Pike promised to lay over at the starbase for a drink or two on the way back.
Neither man knew that the next time Pike arrived on Starbase 11, there would be no drinks, no celebration, but the return of a broken man.
Following Pike’s “recovery,” if such it could be called, Mendez had seen to it that he got the best suite in the medical wing, on the top floor of the administration building, where the view was best. One of the round-the-clock medical aides who saw to Pike’s needs—which pretty much meant everything, considering his immobility—would position the motorized chair at one of the tall windows, at an angle which allowed him to overlook the distant hills and, since the planet’s atmosphere was so thin, a realm of stars almost as glorious as one might see from the viewscreen of a starship at station-keeping.
This, Pike supposed, was meant to distract him, at least once in a while, from the fact that he was trapped inside his own body, unable to do more than communicate by sheer force of will, enough functioning motor neurons remaining to move the chair in an awkward chugging motion from time to time, affect a simple signal transducer to beep once or twice, and nothing more.
He could blink his eyes, sometimes move his head, but the machines did everything else. With careful concentration he could operate the transducer to blink once for yes, twice for no. Some of the medical experts who had examined him weren’t sure he would even be capable of that much longer. The consensus was that his condition was degenerative. Off the machines for even a moment, he would begin to die.
What he could do, without restriction, was think. Remember the horrors he’d been through, acknowledge the time lost to unconsciousness and immobility, imagine the horrors that lay ahead, hope the doctors were wrong, hope against hope that it was all a dream and he would wake to find himself as he once was, sound of wind and limb, ready to take on the most mundane assignment, as long as he could buy back his freedom…
…only to wake to find that it was not a dream, and none of what he had once been able to do would ever be possible again.
One for yes, two for no.
Too bad, Christopher Pike thought, that there is no signal for “Let me die.”
A man who cannot move can do little else but think. Until the day a few months later when he understood why Spock had come for him, all he could think of was death.
Had it really been only days ago? Spock had all but kidnapped him, against his protests.
(Not a protest against being taken. In truth he hadn’t had time to decide if he wanted to go or not. His objection was to what he knew Spock would face if he were caught—would face in any event, unless he also chose to remain on Talos. Had he even thought it through? Or were the Talosians compelling him, as they so easily could? It was all of that roiling through Pike’s mind that had him agit
ating himself, focusing his will on blinking “No, no, no!” Meaning “Don’t do this to yourself. Not for me, not for anyone. The cost is too great and I will not be the cause of it!”)
But Spock was adamant and, as he had said himself with characteristic understatement, he had it well planned. Well planned, that was, except that he’d miscalculated Jim Kirk’s dogged determination that no one and nothing intervene between him and his ship. The shuttle with Kirk aboard had given chase until it ran out of fuel and, Spock being Spock, he was compelled to rescue the very officers who would put him on trial for his life.
The court-martial was the pièce de résistance, seeming so real that even Pike had believed Mendez was really there, and that Spock was doomed. Then Captain Kirk had asked the question, “Chris, is this what you want?”
What other answer could he have given them, after all of that? Before Spock came for him, death would have been welcome. Now he had been given a chance at life again. And more.
Now he had what he wanted. Didn’t he? Why then did the thought of seeing Vina again, after all this time, after all he’d been through to get here, fill him with such trepidation?
How do you say hello to a woman you haven’t seen in thirteen years—a woman you thought you’d never see again—when ever since that time you’ve kept her tucked safely away in your heart?
What was he afraid of? Was it the thought that, having almost been the cause of Spock’s execution, having committed himself to spend the rest of his life as only one of two humans in this place, he had made a mistake? Was it the thought that Vina would not be as he remembered her? Would she appear as the “wild little animal” the Talosians had wanted him to see, still in her teens, vulnerable and innocent, yet possessed of a kittenish sex appeal enhanced by a wisdom that surpassed her years? Or would she appear as the woman she would have been had the Columbia never crashed, but returned to Earth, where he and she might have met at some Starfleet get-together, where his interest would have been polite but nothing more, because she was, after all, thirteen years his senior?
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