“Admiral Kirk,” Amanda said. “It’s a pleasure to see you again.” I had met Spock’s mother several years before on the Enterprise. She was human, and like many human mothers, completely maternal, protective, and loving of her son.
“The pleasure is mine, Amanda,” I said. “I was hoping to talk to Spock.”
“He’s not here. In fact, he hasn’t been for over a year,” she said. “He’s undergoing the Kolinahr.” Her expression saddened a little. I didn’t know what she was referring to.
“What is the Kolinahr?”
“It’s the discipline where a Vulcan sheds his emotions completely. It is rigorous and unforgiving.” I could see now why she was sad. The big misconception about Vulcans was that they didn’t have emotions. That wasn’t true; they just chose not to listen to them, to instead obey the philosophy of logic. But the emotions were still there, and a human mother like Amanda could still believe her son loved her, even if he couldn’t show it. However, this was different.
“So, he will actually have no emotions?”
“That’s his intention,” she said. “He’s in seclusion, at the Kolinahr temple, where he will stay.”
“For how long?”
“Captain, Kolinahr is a …” Amanda said. She got choked up at the thought, then forced her way through. “He will be there for the rest of his life. Communication with the individual members of the temple is forbidden.” It seemed that the practitioners of the Kolinahr acted as a kind of logic “think tank,” working with each other, providing help to the Vulcan society through only occasional contact.
I thanked her and ended the communication. I now understood. She had lost her son completely. She would never see him again, and neither would I.
“There was a Vulcan in my graduating class at the academy,” Chekov said later, while we were going over candidates. “His name is Sonak. He’s currently second-in-command of the science vessel Okuda.” I looked at his record; it was impressive. I then looked at his photo. He even looked a little like Spock.
A week later, the young Vulcan was sitting across from me in my office.
“Do you like serving aboard the Okuda?” I said.
“The question, sir,” Sonak said, “is irrelevant.”
“So serving aboard the Enterprise as science officer is something you’re interested in?”
“Again, sir, that is irrelevant,” Sonak said. “I am interested in serving in Starfleet. Where I should serve is up to you and those in command.” I smiled. I think one of the things I like about Vulcans is their lack of fear when addressing superior officers. After he left, I convened my staff and told them to pass him along to Decker with my highest recommendation. It was at this meeting that Uhura asked for special consideration of a “friend of hers” for transporter chief. She showed me the file on the viewscreen.
It was Janice Rand.
I hadn’t seen her in four years, and as I looked over her record, she’d accomplished a lot. She’d aged a little, lovely but now a mature woman. I guess enough time had passed that the guilt and discomfort over what had happened had faded. And I wasn’t going to be aboard the ship anyway. I told Uhura to make sure Will knew about her.
I also informed them that I wanted them to return to the Enterprise. Chekov requested to be put in charge of security; I wasn’t completely comfortable with this, as I had hoped to have everyone back in his or her old jobs. (The fact was, this was really Decker’s call, and I had no rational explanation for this desire. In a few weeks I would figure out what was behind it.) Chekov had also broken my bad luck streak with navigators, excelling in the position. But I didn’t want to hold him back, so I recommended it. Uhura wondered if I didn’t want to keep one of them around to help train whoever my new staff would be, but I told her I felt the Enterprise wouldn’t be the same without them.
“It won’t be the same without you, sir,” she said. I appreciated the compliment, and I realized what was behind all my efforts regarding crewing the ship; I was literally trying to re-create a moment in time, the high point of my career, of my life. But I was re-creating it without me.
As the day approached for the refitted Enterprise’s launch, I found myself growing despondent. I’d look out and see the shuttle and trams flying everywhere, and I felt trapped, cheated that I wasn’t on my old ship. Finally, three days before she was to begin her shakedown cruise, I decided to take a vacation.
My mother’s brother had a farm in Idaho. He’d passed away several years before and left it to Mom. She didn’t have any use for it, but hadn’t gotten around to selling it either. Caretakers looked after it; my uncle had had a couple of horses and a fair amount of land. I decided this was the perfect chance to take a family vacation. I invited Mom and Dad to join me, and they brought my nephews. I thought a little time with my family might just be what I needed, since my other family was about to leave the Solar System without me.
It was a lovely couple of days and brought back some fond memories of childhood to be out with the boys and my parents. I had the sense right away upon seeing Mom that there was something on her mind, but she wanted to talk about it in private. When Dad had taken the boys off to fish in the creek, Mom stayed to talk to me alone.
“I ran into Carol Marcus,” she said.
“Oh?” When I had returned to Earth, I had thought of looking up Carol. Something always prevented me from following through.
“It was at a conference in Bejing,” she said. “Did you know she had a son?”
My mother was clever. She either knew or had guessed. I wasn’t going to make it easy. I said I had heard she had a child.
“Cute kid,” she said. “Reminded me of you when you were little.” She wanted me to tell her. But I couldn’t. I was a little raw now; the Enterprise was leaving without me, and the idea of facing the son I hadn’t seen since he was a toddler was too much for me to handle. At first, I thought she understood, since she seemingly changed the subject.
“Are you sorry not to be on board the Enterprise?”
“Yes,” I said. “I didn’t think it would be this hard to let it go.”
“Sometimes we think we know what we want, and we ignore other possibilities around us,” she said. “I regret the time I missed as your mother …”
“I know how hard you tried to make up for it,” I said. “But don’t you wish you’d had a little more time in Starfleet?” She laughed.
“What I wish is that we’d been more careful,” she said. “But I know now a few more years in Starfleet wouldn’t have satisfied me. I was a little lost, never really clear on what I wanted to do, who I wanted to be. I blamed your father because I was envious at the clarity of his decision making. I compounded one bad decision with another, and missed some wonderful years with my sons that I’ll never get back.” She teared up at this; she was thinking of Sam. I took her hand. She smiled and went on.
“There’s no rule book on how to be a parent and have a career. Man or woman, you end up sacrificing something. But whatever age your child is, there’s always time to fix things.”
She was telling me to try. She made me remember that I was a father. David would be ten. I could try now. I could reach out to him. Maybe Carol would be open to that, especially since I wasn’t tethered to a ship. I had stability, I was only 38. But what if Carol had moved on? What if she was with someone else? The thoughts flew through my head. Whatever her situation, there was still David, my son. Mom wanted me to see it wasn’t too late. I could reach out to them. I would reach out to them.
As I decided that this is what I needed to do, my wrist communicator suddenly signaled.
“Kirk here.” It was my new chief of staff on the other end, Morgan Bateson, my first yeoman all those years ago. He informed me there was a Code One Emergency, which signaled a possible invasion or disaster code. He told me he’d already sent a tram to my location. I signed off.
“What is it?” Mom asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. I saw the white tram
in the sky coming toward us. “Please make my apologies to Dad and the boys.” I gave her a hug. “And thank you for giving me so much to think about.”
Once I was aboard the tram, a yeoman provided me with a clean uniform, and I then watched a recording from the Epsilon IX Station, located near the Neutral Zone with the Klingon Empire. Commander Branch, the station’s commander, dictated a report.
On my screen, a luminescent cloud of energy, immense, moving at warp speed through the Galaxy. Since nothing organic could move faster than the speed of light, this meant it was not a natural phenomenon. I watched as the cloud destroyed three Klingon K’Tinga-class cruisers and kept on coming. Branch then closed his report.
“The cloud, whatever it is, is on a precise path heading for Earth.”
I immediately checked on the availability of starships that could intercept it. Given the speed it was traveling, and the course it was on, only one star-ship was in interception range. And it had a new captain who’d never dealt with a crisis like this before.
I don’t know exactly at what point I decided I had to be the one to take over. I think my certainty might have come from the thoughts I had been having about David. Figuring out how to get back the Enterprise was a simpler task than figuring out how to be a father after all these years. Racing off to deal with a threat that had erased three powerful Klingon warships without slowing down was easier for me than facing possible rejection from Carol.
By the time I landed in San Francisco, I was determined to take over command of the Enterprise for this mission. I ran into Commander Sonak and was so sure of myself that I told him to report to me on the ship. Nogura, however, wasn’t going to make that easy.
“Out of the question,” he said, sitting at his desk. “I need you here.” He raised a good point that if I felt Decker wasn’t ready, why did I recommend him so enthusiastically? He also said I’d stacked the ship with the most experienced crew on any starship, many of whom could be captains themselves. The only argument I could make was that, as good as Decker was, I’d be better.
“Admirals don’t command starships,” Nogura said.
“Then make me a captain,” I said.
“You’re being ridiculous,” Nogura said. “Request denied.” Nogura wanted to go through a list of crew positions that hadn’t been filled to make sure the ship was as fully staffed as possible before it left, but I wasn’t listening. I couldn’t let this go. It was too important; couldn’t he see that he was putting Earth in danger? I had inflated my own abilities to such a degree that I was under the delusion that I alone could save the situation. I decided to play a card he didn’t know I had.
“Admiral,” I said, “before we continue, there is another matter I wanted to bring to your attention. It’s regarding the planet Dimorous. I’ve uncovered some disturbing information about it.”
Nogura looked at me. A heavy silence followed. He had no idea what I knew, and in fact I didn’t really know what I was implying, but from his reaction, it was something dangerous to him and his reputation.
“I see,” he said. “Well, whatever it is, can it wait until after the current crisis has passed?”
“I think so, sir,” I said. “I can put it on the agenda for the next meeting of the Admiralty Operations Committee.” Nogura knew what I was doing. If I were no longer in the Admiralty at the next meeting, it wouldn’t be on the agenda.
“Very well.” Nogura went on to say he had reconsidered my recommendation regarding command of the Enterprise. I’d made a bargain with the devil; whatever Dimourous was really about, it was serious, and I’d just blackmailed not only an admiral, but the man who was probably the biggest supporter of my career. There would be payment for this. But right now, I had the Enterprise.
“You’re what?” Will said. A second before, he’d been his usual affable self, but his demeanor transformed as soon as I told him I was taking over, and that he would stay on as my first officer.
We were standing in the Enterprise’s new engineering section. Crewmen buzzed about, hurrying to get the Enterprise ready to leave orbit in 12 hours. I’d found Decker with Scotty working on a problem with the transporter system. I looked at him; he was too young, and it was a mistake putting him in command. He wasn’t ready. This was for the best, I thought. I was very convincing, to myself at least.
Will was furious, and I couldn’t really blame him. He’d been working for two and a half years as captain of the Enterprise, yet had not spent one day in actual command of the ship. All his work had been in rebuilding it, almost from the ground up. And now, hours away from reaping the rewards of his hard work, I was taking it away from him.
“I’m sorry, Will,” I said.
“No, Admiral, I don’t think you’re sorry,” he said. “Not one damn bit.” He knew me better than I thought. He was right; I wasn’t sorry. I was getting exactly what I wanted. I’d given him the impression of being his mentor, that I would look after him. So he dismantled his life to take this job, putting his trust in me, and now I’d betrayed him. Will left, and I got an admonishing look from Scotty.
And then a console blew up.
The transporter system was malfunctioning, right in the middle of a beam-up. Scotty and I ran to the transporter room. Rand was on duty; she was trying to fix the problem, but it was out of her control. The faulty circuit was in engineering. Scotty and I took over the console.
On the transporter pad, two figures started to materialize. And then started to deform. I tried my best to pull them through, but it was too late. The figures on the pad screamed in agony. I recognized one of them; it was Sonak. The images faded from the pad, their screams with them. We would find out shortly that both died as a result.
I then noticed Rand. I hadn’t seen her since she’d received her posting on the ship. This was one of her first days on duty, and these were the first people she tried to beam up. And they were dead.
“There was nothing you could’ve done, Rand,” I said. “It wasn’t your fault.” I may not have sounded that comforting, as I was devastated myself. Because I’d been in command for five minutes and already lost two of my crew. The faces of the 55 who’d died when I last commanded this ship started to flood back. Had I done the right thing? Was I really the right man for the job? Doubt crept in.
“That’s all we know about it, except that it is 53.4 hours away from Earth.”
I stood in front of the crew on the recreation deck, who I’d gathered to show the transmission I had received from Epsilon IX. I knew they needed to see that, despite the destructive power of that cloud, I was still confident. In the middle of my laying out our orders to intercept it, we received another communication from Epsilon IX. I had it relayed to the viewscreen, and the crew watched with me as Commander Branch appeared.
It was not a good idea. Commander Branch did his best to hold it together as the cloud, an advanced energy field, attacked his station. We went to an external view, saw the power field engulf it. Then suddenly the station was gone, and all that remained was the cloud.
I looked at the crew. Whatever confidence I had instilled in them was spent; we were going out to face something that would probably kill us. I tried to redirect their focus on their work.
“Prelaunch countdown will commence in 40 minutes,” I said, and then left. I went to my quarters. It was clean and large, much larger than my old quarters on this ship. I changed out of my admiral’s uniform and into one of the captain’s uniforms hanging in the closet. I looked at myself in the mirror. I felt younger, better. And then again I thought of the two dead crewmen, one of them Commander Sonak, whom I’d just spoken to an hour ago. I tried to push the guilt away as I strode from my quarters and headed for the turbolift.
I walked onto the bridge and sat in the command seat. The bridge was different; darker, not as warm as it used to be. But the chair felt good; I’d missed it.
“Transporter personnel reports the navigator, Lieutenant Ilia, is already aboard and en route to the bridge,” Uhu
ra said. This was the last-minute replacement for the navigator who died in the transporter accident. I’d sent word to Nogura to get me someone as soon as possible who could fly this ship, so I assumed this must be the most qualified person available. The name sounded familiar to me, and I suddenly remembered where I’d heard it, as Uhura continued. “She’s a Deltan captain.”
The turbolift doors opened, and a bald woman stepped onto the bridge.
“Lieutenant Ilia, reporting for duty, sir,” she said. She had a heavy Deltan accent. Despite her baldness, or perhaps because of it, she was exquisite.
I welcomed her aboard and saw Will Decker get up from his chair. They exchanged a greeting that immediately told me that this was the Ilia that Decker had left to join me on the Enterprise. He’d abandoned a comfortable life with her for the promise of command, which I’d just stolen. I could feel the resentment in both their tones as she realized what had happened.
“Captain Kirk has the utmost confidence in me,” Decker said. Earth was in danger; I would have to live with the sarcasm.
“In simpler language, Captain, they drafted me!” McCoy said, as he stepped off the transporter pad. He’d grown a thick beard and seemed even more cantankerous than I’d remembered. But I was thrilled. I’d seen very little of him over the past few years. He’d gone on a one-man medical teaching crusade, sharing his knowledge of “frontier medicine” with any doctors who’d listen. I’d arranged for Nogura to implement his reserve activation clause, forcing him to join me; McCoy quickly picked up on the fact that I didn’t share his indignation about being brought back against his will.
I told him I needed him. He stared at me, surprised at the vulnerability I was showing. But I was alone; I’d forced my way back onto the ship, convinced everybody I was the person for the job, and I’d already presided over the death of two crewmen. The ship itself wasn’t dependable, had a lot of new, untested equipment, and my first officer hated me. I needed the pieces of the Enterprise that I knew I could depend on, like my old crew. And now I needed the emotional support of a friend who I could count on to be honest, to tell me when I was wrong. I threw my hand out, silently begging McCoy to take it; it was a lifeline, not for him, but for me. He took it and smiled.
The Autobiography of James T. Kirk Page 23
