Collision Course

by William Shatner

  The first day went downhill from there.

  34

  At the end of that first day, Kirk and Spock had been assigned to the eighteen-member Gold Team, under the direct command of Master Chief Petty Officer Mary Elizabeth Gianni. Their leader was a formidable woman who claimed to hold the center’s record for largest number of recruits to wash out before completing basic training. She also claimed she had never seen a group of recruits so ill-suited to the service.

  Spock did not believe her. While marching past the Blue Team barracks, he had heard distinctly another petty officer make the same claim to his charges. In any event, there seemed to be no logic in an all-volunteer service that first strove to attract the best candidates possible, then tried to dissuade those candidates from completing their training. In fact, he had observed a great deal of posturing and dramatics in just his first few hours here.

  Spock was not impressed.

  Misleading training techniques aside, though, this first day had been an interesting experience.

  The other recruits had gawked at him, especially after his long hair was shorn to half-centimeter stubble, but he was used to that level of attention from aliens. Something he was not used to was that no one had shown him any special treatment. The training staff had been as loud and disruptive toward him as they had been to the other recruits. Spock found that refreshingly satisfactory.

  Not that they had been able to disrupt his concentration, of course. He recognized that was the purpose of the exercise: to desensitize recruits to noise, disorder, and confusion, so they could think clearly and act decisively in emergency situations on board a vessel in deep space, or when surrounded by hostile aliens on a distant world, or during any one of the hundreds of other unexpected disasters that could befall explorers. Vulcan children, however, learned to ignore noise, disorder, and confusion as toddlers. If a yowling sehlat demanding dinner were able to divert a Vulcan child from preparing that dinner, Spock doubted that any household would allow the pets—the consumption rate would be unacceptable.

  Spock had had a sehlat and survived. Given just that one facet of Vulcan upbringing, he knew there was nothing that the Starfleet trainers today could have done or said, at any volume, to affect his concentration.

  Interestingly enough, he had seen a similar unshakable mental focus in Jim Kirk. True, the trainers had been able to exhaust the human teenager physically after his 112 push-ups, but there was no real trick to that, Spock knew. Each species had its own physiological limits which no force of will could overcome. That was elementary biology. Even Vulcan muscles could be starved of energy after a thousand push-ups or so in Earth-normal gravity.

  But despite forcing Jim Kirk into physical exhaustion, the Starfleet trainers had not been able to throw him off-balance mentally. Spock had been fascinated to watch that particular contest. It was almost as if, at some time in his past, the young human had faced a situation or situations exceeding any pressure the trainers could subject him to.

  The other recruits, all human, most from Earth, had behaved as expected, reflecting their inexperience with the harsh realities of life away from their paradisiacal planet and colony worlds. As the trainers hoped, the young novices were flustered by the onslaught of shouted, overlapping commands and they lost the ability to concentrate effectively. Spock had no difficulty reading in their untutored conduct an explosion of emotional states, from anger to embarrassment to frustration. Admirably, though, no one had spoken back to the trainers or run off. Instead, they had accepted the confusion and fought to rise above it.

  If their responses were common to all humans, and not just those predisposed to a Starfleet career, Spock could see how the human species, at some time in the future, might rise above its tendencies for erratic behavior.

  Everything considered, he was looking forward to the days ahead. He anticipated that they were going to be even more interesting, and he hoped that soon they might also prove challenging. But for now, as far as he was concerned, Starfleet training was something to observe, not to take part in.

  Spock’s musing came to an end when Master Chief Gianni completed her barracks inspection, the last activity of the scheduled “night routine.”

  Spock, like the other eighteen recruits, stood at parade rest by his bunk in the common sleeping area. His footlocker was open with all items on display, arranged as indicated in the Starfleet Recruits’ Manual, which was the one book the new recruits were currently allowed to have in their personal reading padds. He wore his recruit whites, boots gleaming, hat stowed in the locker, his bunk taut with precision, as demanded.

  Gianni found fault with several other recruits, scolded them loudly, and stood over them as they realigned the items in their lockers or remade their bunks. When she came to Kirk, whose bunk was two down from Spock’s, she found no fault with his preparations, but made cutting remarks about the dirt on the front of his uniform—he had not been allowed to change since the incident on the parade ground.

  When Gianni came to Spock, she eyed all his preparations with deep suspicion, but in the end could find nothing to find fault with. Though it seemed to cause her some distress, she said, “Good work, Recruit.”

  Spock remained at parade rest, hands behind his back, eyes forward.

  Gianni didn’t walk on. “You’re allowed to say ‘thank you’ when complimented, Recruit.”

  Spock immediately said, “Thank you,” and Gianni launched her attack.

  “Thank you, what?”

  Spock considered her attempt to find at least one thing to correct about him a reach, but he gave her her due. “Thank you, Master Chief!”

  Gianni walked on, completed her inspection, then stood at the front of the barracks precisely as a time alert chimed. “Twenty-two hundred hours is lights out. Feel free to cry yourself to sleep because you miss your mommies and daddies, and I will see you at oh five hundred. Good night, Gold Team!”

  Almost in unison, the eighteen recruits shouted, “Good night, Master Chief!” And then the barracks plunged into darkness, the void penetrated only by a pale green lightstrip that ran along the center of the common area, apparently to guide new recruits to the latrine in the middle of the night.

  Spock quickly undressed and got into his bunk in his underwear. Sleepwear was apparently not part of their Starfleet kit at this time.

  To relax before his evening’s meditation, he resumed his ongoing calculations to prove the Riemann hypothesis for prime numbers. He perceived he was getting close, and with a few more years of calculations, he felt confident of achieving success. It was soothing work.

  Within twenty minutes, even as he pictured the equations setting the pattern of trivial zeroes established by the Riemann zeta function, Spock could hear and identify sixteen different breathing patterns in the barracks, all indicative of exhausted sleep. For a few moments, he wondered about the identity of the one recruit, other than himself, who was not yet asleep, and then he heard surreptitious movement.

  With his dark-adapted vision, Spock had no trouble seeing Jim Kirk rise from his bunk, already dressed. Silently, the human moved toward the barracks exit door and slipped out. No one else was disturbed—their sleeping patterns hadn’t changed.

  Spock weighed the pros and cons of going after him—they still needed to talk about Kirk’s brother’s involvement with a criminal organization that included a woman named Dala. Spock was unwilling to accept that the unwelcome name was a coincidence—real crime was too rare on this planet. But there was also the possibility that Kirk was planning on escaping from Starfleet as his brother had suggested. If that was the case, then the only logical course was to avoid further entanglements with Kirk.

  That conclusion reached, Spock set aside his calculations and brought his hands together, fingertips joined, to begin his meditation. An hour of that, followed by a few minutes of sleep, and he would be ready to face a new day in Starfleet, with or without Jim Kirk.

  He had little doubt it would be much easier wi
thout.

  Whether it was because of the growing ache in his arms and chest, or his worry for Sam, or just that he was constitutionally unable to do what he was told by people he did not respect, Kirk left the barracks because he had to walk.

  The damp night air off the bay was bracing, and the light fog swirled in misty streamers as it flowed past the floodlights and footpath markers that traced the low buildings and the many ways through the STC.

  Kirk saw few other pedestrians around. As he crossed a path between two large buildings, he glimpsed a large group of enlisted members jogging in the athletic field. They had backpacks, and two runners up front carried unit flags. Night maneuvers, he guessed. That’ll be something to look forward to, he thought with a sigh.

  Another building held the officers’ club, and the windows flared with light. As personnel entered and exited the building, Kirk could hear raised voices in excited conversation, the clink of flatware and glasses. Since all Starfleet officers were trained at the Academy, he guessed everyone inside that particular club worked at STC. Looking from across a garden walkway, he could see into the building through its bright windows. He saw teams of white-jacketed servers bearing heaping plates to the officers at the tables.

  Kirk thought back to the extruded food chunks he and the other recruits had been served six hours ago, in what was mockingly called the evening meal. It looked like the officers were eating steaks in there. The hypocrisy of the place astounded and annoyed him. He walked on, grateful, at least, for the fact that he wasn’t hungry.

  He rounded one building and there before him were three shuttle landing pads, well within the center’s grounds. He decided they were probably for official Starfleet traffic, and not airshuttles bringing in new recruits. Beyond them, he saw the elevated monorail station. The trains there departed either for the Sloane Complex island or the Academy. He tried not to dwell on the thought that Elissa was only twenty minutes away. There was no use in torturing himself.

  Kirk chose to skirt the well-lit pads and see if a train schedule was posted at the station. It was. Generally, it appeared he could count on a train leaving for the Academy every twenty-five minutes during the operational hours of 0500 to midnight. The headlight of an arriving monorail train stabbed the darkness as it silently approached the station, and Kirk ducked back into the shadows. By the time any passengers reached the ground, he was long gone.

  Already feeling more settled by his unauthorized outing, Kirk circled back toward the Gold Team barracks and encountered a small observation tower, no doubt intended for some obscure and probably unnecessary training activity. It was only about fifteen meters tall, with a ladder running up the center support pylon. There were no lights on it. Ignoring the complaints from his arms, Kirk climbed the ladder, and his impulse was rewarded.

  At the tower’s top was an open-air platform that offered a view over the east side of the center, to the bay, the Golden Gate, and, almost invisible through the growing fog, a few pale lights that marked the old Presidio and the Academy.

  But Kirk didn’t care about that. He stared into the soft gray nothingness, willing the fog to part just enough for him to see a few of the lights of San Francisco.

  But the fog did not obey him. Instead, it grew thicker, until even the lights of the bridge that offered a way out of this place and back to his life were swallowed.

  Now the only lights were those of the center—his life’s new boundaries.

  Shutting out the despair that waited, always, to claim him, Kirk climbed down the ladder.

  He reached the Gold Team barracks just before 2400 hours. The door opened quietly, and he had no trouble retracing his silent steps to his bunk.

  This wasn’t where he wanted to be, but at least now he felt he could sleep. He stripped off his clothes and slipped under the covers.

  The lights blazed on.

  “Mister Kirk,” Master Chief Gianni shouted.

  35

  This time, the punishment wasn’t push-ups for Kirk. It was calisthenics.

  For everyone.

  Within five minutes of Kirk’s return to the barracks, all eighteen members of Gold Team, groggy and stumbling, were up, changed into exercise gear, and jogging out to the athletics field.

  Gianni put them through their paces for an hour—lunges, jumping jacks, Klingon squats, and push-ups. And she made certain every member of the team understood why they were out in the cold and the fog in the middle of the night.

  “Starfleet is a team,” she told them as she paced in front of the huffing and puffing teenagers. “You sorry lot are a team! Each one of you is responsible for team success! Do you hear me?!”

  The wheezing, gasping voices answered: “Yes, Master Chief!”

  “When you are in deep space and your ship’s in distress, each one of you is responsible for protecting your whole crew from harm! Do you hear me?!”

  “Yes, Master Chief!”

  “If a crewmate dies, then it is your fault! And that will be worse than death for you! Do you understand?!”

  “Yes, Master Chief!”

  The exercises were so standard and Master Chief Gianni’s rote exhortations so obvious that Spock found he could actually meditate during the activity, at the basic level, at least. Thus, at the end of an hour, he was the only member of Gold Team not to have faltered, the only member not out of breath, the only member not even sweating. He felt refreshed.

  The other members, complaining among themselves, red-faced, coughing, and walking slowly back to their barracks, took notice of the fact that what had been punishment for them was not punishment for Spock, and before they were halfway back from the athletics field, Spock found the only other member of his team he could walk with was Jim Kirk, who had been ostracized by the group just as thoroughly.

  They said nothing as they walked beside each other. Spock couldn’t ascertain what it was Kirk was feeling, and he didn’t want to know.

  Back in the barracks, five minutes after the second lights-out for the evening, Spock heard seventeen breathing patterns indicative of sleep. Expecting no other disturbances for the night, he fell asleep at once.

  This time he dreamed of his sehlat, and the dry, hot, peaceful deserts of home.

  For Kirk, his second day in Starfleet began in a blur. Reveille at 0500 hours. Then barracks inspection, during which he found everything in his locker had been jumbled about. The same had happened to Spock’s. Then breakfast at 0545. The unappetizing extruded protein was delivered in the form of thick white slabs of pseudo-eggs and thin pink sheets of pseudo-ham.

  Kirk and Spock ended up facing each other over their trays at the end of a table in the canteen. No one else would sit with them.

  “Just fruit?” Kirk asked. He wasn’t really interested, but he wanted to show the other members of his so-called team that he was capable of having a conversation.

  “I prefer not to eat animal flesh,” Spock said as he ate his apple with a knife and fork.

  Kirk held up a strip of glistening pseudo-ham with his fingers. “I guarantee this has never been anywhere near a real pig.”

  “Of course not,” Spock said. “It has been designed to last for years of storage as emergency shuttle rations.”

  Kirk stared at the dangling strip of pink substance. “Shuttle rations?”

  “That is what recruits eat for the first two weeks of basic training. The information was in the documents we signed yesterday. As we gain in expertise and earn our ratings, we will be rewarded with improved rations. Starfleet advancement is based on competition.”

  Kirk dropped the extruded protein back on his tray. “They plan everything.”

  “Careful planning is essential to surviving in the unforgiving environment of space.”

  “You’re actually enjoying this, aren’t you?”

  Spock couldn’t understand how the human could ask him that question. Vulcans were the first alien species to make public contact with humans. They were the alien species humans had known the lo
ngest and interacted with the most. But humans still knew shockingly little about them, and Spock wondered if that ignorance arose from a general disinterest or some misguided belief that, in the end, all aliens were just like humans.

  “I am a Vulcan,” Spock said evenly. “Vulcans do not ’enjoy.’ That is an emotional response to stimuli.”

  Kirk grinned. “Whatever you say, Stretch. But if that’s the case, I’d sure like to know where all the little Vulcans come from.”

  Spock ignored him and his ignorance.

  Then Kirk leaned forward, whispered, “We need to have that talk about what Sam and I were discussing in the cell.”

  Spock turned his attention to his orange. “At 0820 hours, the first instruction period will commence. At that time, you and I are directed to go to the processing building to take our Starfleet Vocational Aptitude Tests.” The other members of Gold Team had taken their tests prior to induction and most were already assigned to their specialty streams. “We will be able to talk then, without risk of being overheard.”

  Kirk nodded, went back to his extruded breakfast. “It’s good to know that Vulcans know the importance of keeping a secret.”

  Spock methodically chewed his orange segment, with no intention of taking part in a conversation on that particular topic. He had far too many secrets of his own to protect, and could not begin to imagine ever sharing them with humans.

  The SVA Tests were scheduled to take place over three hours. Spock completed his in thirty-four minutes, Kirk in two hours. The education petty officer skimmed through their test padds to be sure no sections had been missed, and seemed disappointed when he had to release the recruits early.

  “Noon meal is at 1100 hours,” Spock informed Kirk as they left the building. “That gives us thirty minutes.”

  “A ‘noon’ meal at eleven A.M.” Kirk shook his head. “What kind of ranking does that give Starfleet on the old logic meter?”