by S. D. Perry
Since she wasn’t a manipulative person by nature, she gave the approach careful thought, well aware that the doctor rarely gave anything up without a fight. With the crew physicals finally finished and correlated, only the final report left to be turned in, they had a fair amount of unoccupied time; still, she waited until they were both about to go off shift before approaching him. It would keep him from feeling trapped, she hoped, providing him with a fast escape. And when she finally spoke up, she did so with her hands on her hips, ready to drag it out of him with what tools she had.
“Dr. McCoy, you’ve hurt my feelings,” she said sternly, and was glad to see a look of genuine surprise on his face, very different from the slightly dazed look he’d been wearing lately. It was a start.
“I’m—sorry,” he fumbled. He obviously had no idea what he was apologizing for, but for as grouchy as he could get sometimes, he was also a gentleman at heart.
“I thought we were friends,” she said, hoping she sounded properly wounded.
The doctor blinked. “Ah, I thought so, too.”
“And here you’ve been walking around for days with your chin practically on the ground, and you don’t think enough of me to tell me what’s wrong,” she said.
He finally got it, and the scowl that crossed his face was as real as his surprise had been. She was glad to see that, too.
“Nurse, I don’t believe that you’re entitled to know about my personal affairs,” he said acidly. “That’s why they’re called ‘ personal.’”
“You don’t trust me,” she accused, crossing her arms tightly. “After all this time, all we’ve been through together, you still don’t trust me.”
She had him. He had the same look he’d worn when he’d forgotten her birthday two years before.
“Now, don’t be like that.”
“Then tell me,” she said, finally letting her real concern show through. “Tell me what’s wrong, so I can help.”
He stared down at the floor. “There’s nothing you can do.”
“Let me try.”
He looked up at her, and after a moment, he nodded. “Let’s sit down.”
He told her everything. The diagnosis and the prognosis. Remembering his friend Dr. Patterson, and asking Chekov to find her, and then what happened on the station. Christine felt tears welling up early on but managed to hold them back, knowing that if she cried he’d be sorry he told her.
When he was finished, she reached out and took his hand, holding it firmly in hers. “You have to tell the captain,” she said. “And not because he needs to know, but because he’s your friend.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I thought I might wait . . .”
Christine squeezed his hand. “I do know. You need the support of your friends right now, more than anything.”
He didn’t look convinced but she knew how important it was, knew that she had to push. “Doctor, promise me you’ll tell him.”
“Of course I’ll tell him,” he grumbled. “I don’t exactly have a choice.”
“Soon,” she said. “Promise me you’ll do it soon. You could tell him when you turn in the physical report.”
He sighed, and his sincere sarcasm was back, too. “Fine. Now, if you’re finished telling me what to do, would it be all right with you if I left?”
Christine nodded, afraid to speak, knowing her voice would break. He stood up from the chair he’d pushed next to the desk, and watching him put his cantankerous face back on like a mask, she managed a smile for him.
Dr. McCoy didn’t say anything, either, but before he left he rested his hand on her shoulder for just a few seconds, and she knew that he was thanking her as well as he could.
She waited until he was gone, buried her face in her hands, and wept.
* * *
McCoy went to his quarters. He carefully poked around the edges of how he was feeling for a little while, not quite sure what he was going to find . . . but when he realized he wasn’t going to have some sort of melodramatic breakdown, he cut straight to the point.
Karen Patterson was dead, and he was probably going to die soon, and that was a hard truth, but he wasn’t going to run from it. He didn’t think he was quite ready to embrace it, but maybe that was something a person worked up to, gradually. There were people he didn’t want to leave, who he knew would think of him and miss him, and that was more than a lot of people had.
There.
Dr. McCoy suddenly realized that he was hungry, damned near famished, in fact, and decided he’d go get himself something to eat. No point in starving himself to death.
* * *
Spock was unable to find his focus.
Usually, he would perceive his lack of concentration as a reason to pursue a deeper meditation, but there were times he recognized as more difficult than others. He opened his eyes and stood, walking to his desk where he sat again, templing his fingers.
It was the thought of his last discussion with the captain that had intruded on his meditation, for what he’d told Spock and what he’d avoided speaking about. Both disturbed him.
First, the captain’s report to Starfleet, the report extensive but the gist of it simple. The Omega molecule was too dangerous to be studied. The destructive, long-term consequences for a spacefaring civilization were too great. Two Lantaru-sector colonies had essentially been cut off from the Federation by the damage to subspace, now years away from any kind of contact with anyone, and for that they’d been most fortunate, considering what might have happened. The captain had then recommended that Starfleet Command strongly consider banning any and all future Omega research.
Spock understood the captain’s reasoning, and could not disagree with it—as he’d told the Romulan commander himself, the sanctity of life was preeminent in his tenets. But he could not support it, either, and thus an intellectual conflict he’d long struggled with had further defined itself—between his sworn duty, to serve and protect the Federation, and his personal ideology, to faithfully seek knowledge in all its forms. How could he comfortably accommodate both, in consideration of what the Omega molecule had brought to light?
He considered the Romulan commander’s understanding of his commitment to duty, reflecting on her perceptions of him when they had been joined. She’d found the disharmony over the theft of the cloaking device, and it had given her relief to know that he struggled still, duty or integrity. Her perception was that without a struggle, without some depth of internal strife, neither held meaning; that to be whole, one had to continually challenge the decisions one made. It was an interesting viewpoint, and he had not yet rejected it.
Ex Astris Scientia. From the stars, knowledge. It was the Starfleet motto, emblazoning the very flag of the Academy, and it had always appealed to him in its simplicity and truth, for the concept it represented. A concept that could very well be betrayed by the Starfleet mechanism—because although he was certain their decision would not be made lightly, Spock thought it highly probable that a prohibition would be issued against Omega research. If they chose to implement the captain’s suggestion . . . how could Spock continue to serve without question? If he couldn’t have faith that the Federation’s most basic article would not be violated, how would his commitments change?
The conflict wasn’t new. The Omega impasse simply epitomized it by its extremity, but Spock did not see a logical means to work through it, unless it was by choosing the lesser of two evils. Unfortunately, he didn’t know which it was.
What the captain had not discussed—logical conclusions from evidence that had presented itself throughout the Sphinx/Kettaract situation—indicated only that he was not yet prepared to broach the subject. It was quite clear that Jim was wrestling with a loss of certitude in the things he held dear, and although there was the possibility for most in those circumstances, that evidence would be ignored in favor of tranquility, Spock knew that he would not falter. The captain’s consistency of character required that he would always choose truth over pea
ce of mind.
Spock himself recognized that everything changed, and that some incidental results were inevitable.
Chapter Twenty
The captain sat in his chair gazing at the main screen, his thoughts far away.
He thought about all that had happened in recent days, about the decisions that were sometimes made, when someone couldn’t accept that what they had was enough. He thought about the implications of a few things Jain had said, and about the message his old friend had tried to get to him. He could feel himself fighting against the conclusion that he was slowly coming to, that perhaps the two were connected, fighting it as much by reflex as by choice. He knew he would lose.
He watched the freezing dark slip by, knowing that things were different for him now, that there’d been a fundamental shift in how he perceived things, and that he could never go back. He was deeply immersed in an unsettling scrutiny of himself and what he was trying to protect, so much so that he didn’t notice either his first officer or the ship’s doctor when they stopped by to see him, both of them troubled with reflections all their own. Each man lingered next to him for a moment or two before slipping away, leaving him be.
The soft, lulling sounds of the bridge soothed his tired mind a little, but not quite enough to let him rest easy.
Epilogue
TWO MONTHS LATER
When Kirk finally arrived at the tavern, they were all there, waiting. Five men in civilian clothes, inhabitant’s clothes, just like his, sitting at a scuffed wooden table in the back room. The tavern he’d chosen was nowhere special, a town that no one had ever heard of on a planet no one ever visited. It was exactly the right place to have a meeting that didn’t exist, a meeting that had taken weeks to bring about.
Kirk sat down, smiling, glad to see them all regardless of the circumstances. “Gentlemen. Have introductions been made?”
Phil Waterston, captain of the U.S.S. Constitution, shook his head. “I don’t know about everyone else, but I just got here.”
Kirk introduced them to one another, even knowing that a few had met before. Commodore Bob Wesley. Commodore Aaron Stone. Captain Nick Silver. Commodore Jose Mendez. Captain Waterston. There were nods of recognition, smiles, a handshake where it was convenient.
A young boy, a native of the planet, wandered back to ask what they wanted. At the shrugs from the others, Kirk asked for a pitcher of the local brew, a kind of fermented grain drink from what he could gather.
As soon as the boy was gone, Silver spoke up. “Talk to us, Jim. What’s this about?”
Kirk reached into the lining of his shirt and pulled out a hardcopy of the Starfleet Charter. A part of it, anyway, sections 28 through 34 printed out on a single sheet of paper. He handed it to Wesley, sitting to his left.
“I’d like each of you to read section 31, carefully,” he said. “It’s short, it won’t take long.”
Their server brought back a brimming pitcher and a half-dozen mugs before disappearing again. Kirk filled the mugs as the hardcopy was passed around the table, Stone reading last. When he raised his head, looking as confused as the rest of them, Kirk began his story.
It took a few minutes and he didn’t like telling it, but he left nothing out, starting with the line from section 31 that rather obscurely referred to the establishment of “an autonomous investigative agency,” one that held nonspecific discretionary power over nonspecific Starfleet matters. Hidden in plain sight.
From there, Jack Casden and the Sphinx. The possibility that Admiral Cartwright and perhaps Commodore Jefferson had been involved in a plot to get the cloaking device and then keep its use a secret, knowingly or unknowingly. Kettaract’s politics, and the death of Gage Darres. The Lantaru station, and the terrible accident that had occurred there, that was responsible for the Omega Directive, only just instituted for Starfleet flag officers. He told them about everything . . . except for Jain, of course, because that part of it still hurt, and because it wasn’t necessary for them to know about her. And he avoided bringing up Bones’s near brush with death. The disease the doctor had diagnosed during the crisis had since been cured, thanks to their discovery of the Fabrini medical archive.
When he’d finished, no one spoke for a moment. He could see some skepticism, some doubt—but he also saw five good men, men he would trust with his life . . . and he believed that each of them might say the same about him.
Mendez cleared his throat, looking unhappily at Kirk. “You realize what you’re telling us, what you’re saying.”
“I do.”
Wesley shook his head in disbelief . . . but Kirk could see beneath it, could see that he just didn’t want to believe. Kirk knew exactly how he felt.
“You’re telling us that there’s a shadow agency operating within our ranks, Jim, and has been for over a century—how sure are you about this?”
Kirk raised his hands, motioning at their group. Three commodores, three captains, each of them with established lives in different sectors, commands in different parts of the galaxy. “You tell me.”
He watched it sink in, watched each of them struggle against the idea just as he had struggled. A part of him, an innocence, had died when he’d accepted the truth, and he hated that he was asking them to do the same, to sacrifice their trust in the sanctity of their home—because that’s what Starfleet was, to all of them.
“So what are you proposing?” Waterston asked. “It sounds like we won’t even be able to prove that this ‘Section 31’ exists.”
Stone was nodding. “If all this is true, they’ve already done a good job covering their tracks. There’s not even any evidence, is there?”
Kirk shook his head. “No. And I doubt that there’s going to be any, not now. Maybe not for a long time. They’re careful, whoever they are, very careful, and it appears that they have the resources to keep doing what they’re doing. Which is why I propose no action at all—”
He quickly pressed on before anyone of them could respond, well aware of what each man was thinking. Hadn’t he thought the same things?
“—because it won’t work, we don’t have anything on them, and if this is the type of group I think it is, bringing this out in the open means they disappear,” Kirk said, looking seriously at each man in turn, knowing their frustration as his own. “Gone, faster than we can point a finger. For now, all we can do is wait for them to make a mistake. And they will . . . maybe not this year, or next, but nobody can hide forever.”
“Why this meeting, then?” Mendez asked. “If there’s nothing we can do . . .”
“Because there is something you can do,” Kirk answered. “Something that I should have done, when I first got the order from Admiral Cartwright, when I knew—I knew—that something wasn’t right. What you can do is keep your eyes open. What you can do is listen, and watch, and tell the people you trust to do the same.
“I’m convinced that what Starfleet stands for is good and true, and I think this Section 31, whatever it is, exactly, is only a very small part—like a tumor, a cancer. Something that doesn’t reflect any of the virtues and beliefs that Starfleet is about. But if each of you—each of us—is willing to question that one order that doesn’t feel right, if we are willing to accept the responsibility of keeping our faith, by no longer taking it for granted—if we’re willing to do that, then the cancer won’t be able to spread.”
He spoke the rest only in his mind. All it requires is accepting that there’s something hiding in the shadows, in the darkness that you didn’t even know existed. Oh, and losing some of your innocence—but it doesn’t hurt for very long.
The six men talked for a while longer, but everything had been said that needed to be. One by one, they left the tavern to return to their lives, perhaps not as shining and pure as they had thought them before, until only Kirk remained.
He sat, thinking, for long time. Finally, as the shadows began to stretch across the floor, the captain picked up his mug and toasted the empty air, setting it down again withou
t drinking. He dropped a few coins on the table and walked out, wondering if any of it was worth anything at all, knowing at his core that it was.
About the Author
S. D. (Stephani Danelle) Perry writes multimedia novelizations in the fantasy/science-fiction/horror realm for love and money. She is the author of Avatar, the two-volume relaunch of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine® novels, which begins the arc of stories set after the TV series. She’s also a two-time contributor to the acclaimed short-story anthology Star Trek: The Lives of Dax. Her other works include the best-selling Resident Evil series of novels, several Aliens novels, as well as the novelizations of Timecop and Virus. Under the name Stella Howard, she’s written an original novel based upon the television series Xena, Warrior Princess. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and beloved dogs.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
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