The captain grunted. “Are you kidding? My [12] senior year, I ate there every Sunday night. I guess I never mentioned it.”
McCoy grunted, too. “Or maybe you did. I probably had my nose in a medscanner at the time. Anyway, Sal’s expecting us.”
Kirk nodded, allowing the years to fall away as he remembered. “Sal ... my god, Bones. I wonder if he ever married that woman who used to sit at the corner table.”
“By the big, ol’ mural of Positano?”
The captain smiled. “That’s right. You’ve seen her?”
The doctor chuckled as they stopped at a turbolift. “Damned right I have. And let me tell you, the woman still sits there a lot. But that’s only because she wants to keep an eye on her husband.”
Kirk was delighted that Sal had gotten his heart’s desire. “Good for him,” he replied. “Gary always said she’d—”
He tried to finish his sentence, but he couldn’t. His mouth had suddenly gone dry. The smile must have vanished from his face because McCoy’s vanished as well.
“You all right?” the biologist asked.
The captain nodded. “Fine,” he said, readjusting his cast.
But he was anything but fine. The tragedy of his friend’s death was weighing him down again, crushing him the way he had tried to crush Gary with that rock on Delta Vega.
For a moment, Kirk had forgotten what had happened to his friend. For a moment, he had begun to smile again. But it was only for a moment.
[13] “Listen, Jim,” said McCoy, his expression a sympathetic one, “if you’d rather we didn’t—”
The captain held up his good hand. “No. I want to go.” He took a deep breath and watched a couple of officers walk by. “I want to see Sal again. After all, I have to congratulate him.”
His friend seemed to sift through the statement, analyzing it for its truth content. The researcher in McCoy must have been satisfied with the results, because he said, “Yes, you do. And I imagine Sal will be glad to see you too, after all these years.”
Kirk had an idea. “Just one request,” he told McCoy.
“What’s that?” the biologist asked.
“Let’s walk there,” the captain suggested.
McCoy smiled a little uncomfortably. After all, the restaurant was a mile away up a pretty steep hill, and Kirk knew his friend had never been one for pursuing an exercise regimen.
But McCoy didn’t argue with him. All he said was, “Suit yourself.”
Chapter Two
ON THE WAY to Velluto’s, which was nestled among hundred-year-old, white towers on the old, patrician incline of Nob Hill, Kirk and his friend the research biologist spoke of many things.
First, they spoke of McCoy’s daughter. Joanna McCoy had gone on a ski trip to Wyoming and broken her leg crashing into a tree. Of course, the doctor said, the injury had occurred on the last day of the excursion, after the girl had sent him a message telling him what a good time she was having.
Apparently, the injury wouldn’t have taken place at all if Joanna hadn’t been horsing around with a boy who had caught her eye. The boy in question broke an arm on a neighboring tree.
“Teenagers,” McCoy muttered, as an old-fashioned cable car slid up the street beside them on [15] electromagnetic rail tractors. “You can’t live with them and you can’t place them in stasis chambers until they’ve attained some modicum of sanity.”
The captain and his friend also spoke of the Constitution and the officers under whom they had served there. Captain Augenthaler, First Officer Hirota, and Chief Medical Officer Velasquez had remained on the vessel, Kirk had heard. However, Communications Officer Borrik, a Dedderac, had returned to his homeworld to assume the leadership of his clan.
“What about Gaynor?” asked the biologist.
Several weeks before McCoy’s arrival on the Constitution, Kirk had thrown security chief Jack Gaynor in the brig for insubordination. But by the time the doctor came aboard to work under Velasquez, Kirk had forgiven Gaynor—and vice versa.
“He transferred to the Potemkin,” the captain said. “Left a couple of months after you did, in fact.”
“I thought you and he had made your peace,” McCoy suggested.
Kirk shrugged. “We did. In fact, I’d filed several commendations for him, as you know. But a second officer’s slot had opened up on the Potemkin and Gaynor jumped at the opportunity.”
The biologist grunted. “So he finally got what he wanted.”
“I guess so,” the captain returned.
The two of them climbed the hill for a while in silence, the sky a deep blue canopy arching over them, the waterfront sprawling below them in all its alabaster glory.
[16] Finally, they spoke of Gary Mitchell.
“You didn’t get along with him when you first met.” McCoy commented. “I remember you telling me that.”
“We were different,” Kirk noted. “He was irresponsible. I was a stickler for doing the right thing.”
His friend chuckled. “Seems to me you must have rubbed off a little on each other. By the time I met Gary, he was anything but irresponsible. And you ... well, you scared me sometimes.”
The captain was surprised. “I scared you?”
McCoy nodded. “You seemed so eager to take risks. You were like a kid with a new toy.”
Kirk had never thought of himself that way before.
“It’s funny,” the biologist continued. “Unlike you, I got along with Gary pretty much right off the bat. But then, I never ended up getting as close with him as you did.”
The captain looked at him. “What was it you called him that time?”
McCoy thought about it for a moment, squinting in the bright sunlight. “When he was trying to get Carvajal to switch shifts with Barton?”
Kirk nodded, picturing the scene in his mind. He could see his two best friends, Gary and McCoy, squaring off in the rec lounge—not angry, exactly, but pretty close to it.
“I said he was manipulative,” the biologist recalled.
“That’s right,” the captain said. “Manipulative.”
“He just went too far sometimes,” McCoy remarked. “There was a certain arrogance about him, as if he didn’t just think he was right—he knew it.” [17] He frowned. “But I have to say, even when he was playing god, his heart was always in the right place.”
Playing god? Despite the warmth of the day, Kirk felt a chill in the small of his back. Had Gary been doing that all the way back on the Constitution? Had he been treating people as if they were pawns on a giant chessboard?
Then the captain remembered their days at the Academy together—how Gary had tried to mold him into what he thought a commanding officer should be, how he had even tried to orchestrate his friend’s romances. Maybe he had played god, long before he ever gained the power to become one.
But there was a difference. Until his transformation began, Gary had never manipulated anyone or anything for his own benefit. He had always performed his machinations with others in mind.
Suddenly, McCoy stopped and drew a deep breath. “All right, Jim. Do me a favor. Tell me you didn’t want to do this just for the exercise.”
Kirk looked at him, caught off-guard. “I beg your pardon?”
“To be honest,” said the biologist, “my feet are killing me ...” He held his thumb and forefinger about a millimeter apart. “... and I’m about this close to jumping on the next cable car. So if there’s something you want to talk to me about that you can’t say in a restaurant, I wish you’d let me know what the hell it is already.”
Kirk gave in. “All right, Bones. I’ll tell you what it is.”
As luck would have it, a park was looming on their right—a plot of grass and shrubs surrounding a [18] marble spire dedicated to those who had perished in the Battle of Donatu V. There were several benches made of the same marble positioned along the perimeter of the greensward.
They looked too comfortable to pass up. “Let’s sit,” said the captain, “shal
l we?”
The two of them sat on a west-facing bench and Kirk felt the sea breeze wash over him, full of brine and bluster. Beside him, McCoy waited with uncharacteristic patience.
“Where to begin,” said Kirk.
“Always a problem,” his companion conceded.
The captain sighed and picked a place. “Some weeks ago, I received orders from Starfleet Command. Classified orders, mind you. The kind that I wasn’t supposed to discuss with anyone.”
“Not even an old friend at Starfleet Command?”
“Not even him,” Kirk confirmed.
“Or it would cost you your career?”
“Something like that.”
McCoy nodded. “I hear you. Go on.”
The captain frowned as he reconstructed the briefing in his mind. He could see Admiral Saylor’s face on the monitor screen in his quarters as he outlined the mission’s parameters.
“They wanted the Enterprise to go out to the edge of the galaxy, Bones. They wanted me to map what I found out there.”
His friend’s eyebrows shot up. “The edge of the galaxy, eh? You must have been excited.”
“To say the least,” Kirk replied. “No Federation vessel had ever probed that far. It was going to be a groundbreaking voyage—and Starfleet Command [19] had selected the Enterprise to carry it out. I was proud of that, I don’t mind telling you. Damned proud.”
He glanced at the base of the memorial spire, where the names of the Klingons’ victims were inscribed. They hadn’t been the first to die in space, he thought, nor would they be the last.
But some deaths are better than others, the captain told himself. Not only for the deceased, but for those who remain behind. Some deaths are clean, straightforward. And others ...
“So you went,” McCoy prodded him.
Kirk nodded. “And the trip was relatively uneventful. The most remarkable thing we encountered was an asteroid belt. Then, shortly before we arrived at the prescribed coordinates, we discovered something unusual after all—an old disaster recorder.”
His friend tilted his head. “A what?”
“A disaster recorder,” the captain repeated. “They were launched by spacegoing vessels in the twenty-first century whenever things looked bleak. That way, if the situation continued to go downhill, there would at least be a warning posted so other ships wouldn’t make the same mistake.”
McCoy regarded him incredulously. “This thing was two hundred years old? Are you pulling my leg?”
“Not in the least. What’s more,” said Kirk, “it was still functioning. Mr. Spock analyzed its memory banks and found out it was launched by a ship called the Valiant, which had set out from Earth nearly a hundred years before the dawn of the Federation.”
[20] His friend whistled. “And it was out there, near the galaxy’s edge? Two hundred years ago?”
“Not just near the edge,” the captain replied. “It went past it. But in the process, it seemed to have run afoul of some unknown force—something that battered the Valiant and claimed the lives of six of her crewmen.”
“Sounds ominous,” said McCoy, his expression clouding a bit.
“I thought so too, at the time,” Kirk recalled with a shiver. “And the behavior of her captain sounded even more ominous. Not long after the Valiant’s encounter with that unknown force, he began searching the ship’s data files for information on ESP.”
“Extrasensory perception?” the biologist asked wonderingly. He shook his head. “What the devil for?”
A cable car bell rang in the distance. The air seemed to vibrate with the sound.
“Our question too,” said the captain. “Unfortunately, the man in charge of the Valiant didn’t tender an answer. Then, after a while, he stopped searching for data—and started thinking about destroying his ship.”
McCoy’s eyes narrowed. “That’s horrible. But ... did he say why? Did he give a reason?”
Kirk shook his head. “No. He just went through with it. At least, that’s what the evidence suggests.”
His companion mulled that last part over. “So, essentially, he was telling everyone to turn back—to avoid whatever fate he fell victim to.”
“I suspect he was,” the captain agreed.
[21] “But knowing you,” McCoy continued, “you didn’t do that.”
“No,” Kirk admitted softly, as the cable car bell rang again. “I didn’t. If anything, I thought the warning made it more important that I investigate. After all, I told myself, other Federation ships would come that way eventually—and when they did, they had to know what they were up against.”
The biologist chuckled humorlessly. “I know you like a book.”
“Maybe so,” the captain allowed. “In any case, I went on. And I hoped our twenty-third-century technology would enable the Enterprise to survive whatever had doomed the Valiant.”
He was wrong, it would turn out. Terribly wrong. But he didn’t want to get ahead of himself.
“Before long,” he said, “we came to the edge of the galaxy—or at least, what we in the Federation have come to think of as the edge of the galaxy. That’s when we found what the Valiant had found—some kind of undulating, naturally occurring energy field. We could see its glare, measure the force it exerted against the deflector shields ... but external sensors couldn’t seem to get a coherent fix on it.
“Nonetheless,” Kirk went on, “we stuck with our mission and went in for a closer look.” He could feel the muscles in his stomach tighten. “That’s when everything started to fall apart.”
McCoy was interested—intensely interested. “In what way?”
The captain told him how the Enterprise was tossed about like a leaf in a tornado. The captain [22] told him about the disabling of the ship’s warp drive and the casualties the crew suffered.
And he told him what happened to Gary Mitchell.
“Lit up?” the biologist echoed.
Kirk nodded. “As if he were an old-fashioned light bulb and someone had just given him a jolt of electric current. And he wasn’t the only one. There was a young psychiatrist on the ship, a woman named Elizabeth Dehner. The same thing happened to her.”
McCoy screwed up his features in an expression of sympathy. “Is that how Gary died, Jim?”
Kirk shook his head. “No. Gary didn’t die. He just ...” How could he put it? “... underwent some significant changes.”
The biologist looked at him, almost as annoyed as he was fascinated. “Now, what the blazes does that mean?”
The captain adjusted his cast again. Here and now, overlooking the ocean and a pristine array of upland buildings under a bright blue sky, it was difficult to imagine that any of it had happened. Gary’s transformation and death ... it all seemed so impossibly far away.
But back then, on the dark and lonely edge of the galaxy, it had been as real as the matter-antimatter reaction that gave the ship the power to traverse the stars, or the blood pumping through Kirk’s veins. It had been as real as life itself.
“His eyes were the first indication of it,” the captain remembered. “As soon as I picked him up off the deck, I saw them glowing at me.”
“Glowing?” McCoy blurted.
[23] Kirk nodded. “Hard to imagine, I know. They stayed that way, too, even though the rest of him appeared to return to normal.” He swallowed. “But he wasn’t normal, Bones. He was already starting to become something inhuman. Something strange and powerful.”
McCoy scowled. “You’re scaring me, Jim.”
“No more than Gary’s transformation scared me, Bones.”
“When you say strange and powerful ...” The biologist struggled with the concept. “What do you mean, exactly?”
The captain shrugged. “He began reading at speeds even Spock could barely believe. And when Dr. Dehner was in his room, he shut down his vital signs. Frightened her half to death, it seems.”
McCoy was at a loss for words. No doubt he was pondering what he had been told, trying to wrap h
is mind around it.
“Then,” said Kirk, “he graduated to fiddling with the Enterprises critical systems—taking them over, if you can imagine that—and all from the comfort of his biobed.”
His friend stared at him, his face having lost some of its color. “That’s powerful, all right.”
Birds cried out in the distance, as if echoing the sentiment.
“About that time,” the captain told him, “Mark Piper discovered something. Apparently, Gary, Dr. Dehner, and the nine crewmen who had perished had something in common.”
McCoy looked puzzled for a moment. Then, gradually, his eyes lit up, as he began to put two and two [24] together. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “A talent for extrasensory perception.”
“Exactly right,” Kirk confirmed, impressed with his friend’s insightfulness. “Suddenly, the Valiant’s logs took on a whole new sense of immediacy for us. Had there been someone like Gary on the Valiant? we wondered ... someone who had begun to evolve into something superhuman? And had the Valiant’s captain feared him enough to destroy his vessel rather than bring that individual back to Earth?”
McCoy sighed. “So what did you do?”
What indeed? the captain thought. “Nothing, at first. After all, I had always trusted Gary implicitly, no matter what was at stake. Sure, there was something in his attitude ... an arrogance, a disdain for those around him ... that put me on my guard a bit. But I couldn’t bring myself to believe he was a threat to my ship and crew.”
“And Dehner?” asked the biologist. “She was a psychiatrist, wasn’t she? What did she say?”
“She believed it even less,” Kirk replied. “But then, she was young, and she may have had some feelings for Gary.”
He shook his head as he recalled how Dehner had argued on Gary’s behalf in the Enterprise’s briefing room. At the time, she had made sense. In retrospect, he wasn’t so sure.
“We were fools, as it turned out. Both of us,” he said.
McCoy regarded him. “And what changed your mind?”
The captain frowned. “I have Mr. Spock to thank for that—Spock, with his dispassionate, [25] characteristically Vulcan view of the situation. He set me straight about Gary. Then he told me I had two choices—I could kill my friend or I could abandon him on a barren, unpopulated world called Delta Vega, the site of a lithium cracking station.”
STAR TREK: TOS #87 - My Brother's Keeper, Book Three - Enterprise Page 2
