Collision Course

by William Shatner

  “But all of that is contingent on your not giving Master Chief Gianni a single excuse to write you up over the next four weeks of basic. Is that understood, Recruit?”

  Kirk blanched at the idea of spending four more weeks in this hellhole, but kept that reaction to himself. “Understood, Command Master Chief.”

  “Dismissed.”

  Kirk stepped back once to show a respect he neither felt nor believed the CMC deserved, then spun around and left the office, not certain that he had exactly won in this encounter, but pleased that Starfleet, by being unable to ship him to New Zealand, had definitely lost.

  And any day that Starfleet lost was a good day in his books.

  In the CMC’s adjacent study, Mallory heard Fifield call out, “Are you happy?”

  Mallory switched off the screen he’d been using to watch Kirk’s interview with the CMC and joined Fifield in his office.

  “You didn’t need me to bend the rules, after all,” Fifield said.

  Mallory stared at the closed door through which Kirk had just left. “I didn’t expect that.” He guessed Fifield’s unspoken question. “That he’d pick up on Starfleet procedure so quickly.”

  “All I can say is that I’m glad I didn’t have to give in to him the way you wanted.” Mallory had instructed Fifield to berate Kirk as much as he wanted, but in the end the recruit was to remain at the STC and not to be transferred to New Zealand.

  Fifield rearranged the padds on his desk. “Why’s Command so interested in James Kirk, anyway? He doesn’t belong here. He doesn’t want to be here. Forget about this New Zealand threat. Just cut him loose. Everyone wins.”

  Mallory had no intention of getting drawn into a debate with the CMC, just as he made no attempt to explain his decisions to Judge Otago. When he had seen Gianni’s report on Kirk’s offense, he had immediately contacted Fifield and with the full weight of Starfleet Command had formally requested that the CMC not turn Kirk over to Starfleet Justice. As it turned out, though, the request had not been necessary. Mallory hadn’t had the slightest indication that Kirk would be able to work within the system to ensure that result for himself. Now, having seen Kirk in action, Mallory realized it was time to move up his plans.

  “We still need him,” Mallory said.

  “Mr. Mallory, if you want to do that kid some good by exposing him to discipline and an ordered way of life, then get him into UESPA or one of the military commands. Starfleet’s not for him.”

  Mallory glanced past Fifield to the painting behind him, commemorating the last time Starfleet’s primary mission of exploration had been set aside for an overtly military role. There was only one way to be certain that change in fundamental policy would never again be forced on Starfleet—constant vigilance against threats arising from entities that did not share the Federation’s peaceful goals.

  With that in mind, Mallory graciously thanked the CMC for his input. It was an easier way to end this discussion than by telling him how wrong he was. Then he began to dictate the new orders Fifield was to prepare for Recruit Kirk.

  If the tragic events in that painting were truly to remain in the past, never to be repeated, Starfleet needed people like James Kirk as much as James Kirk needed Starfleet.

  37

  The next day, after instruction period, Kirk and Spock both were given new orders. This time, Master Chief Gianni was not in good humor as she passed over the printed documents. Kirk hoped that meant he’d scored another win.

  He scanned the orders swiftly, then smiled, victorious. Both he and Spock had been transferred to an advanced engineering stream, which they were to join at once.

  “It is not logical,” Spock said as they walked to Aldrin Hall to report.

  “It is for Starfleet.”

  “How did you come by this low opinion?”

  Kirk felt no need to explain himself again. He changed the subject. “What makes our new orders so illogical to you? I mean, more than usual?”

  “We are still due for three and a half weeks of basic training.”

  Kirk shot him a wry glance. “As if there’s anything more Gianni can teach you. You get everything right the first time.”

  “That does make sense in my situation. But not for you. No offense intended.”

  “Yeah, right. More like they saw my test scores and, having seen my brilliance, realized basic stuff for me was a waste of time.”

  “Unlikely. I have observed that, at the recruit level, Starfleet is a large and complex organization that can only operate by adhering to strict routine. Breaking that routine is most probably something that occurs only under remarkable circumstances.”

  “Well, I’m a remarkable guy.”

  “Or,” Spock continued as if Kirk hadn’t spoken, “the situation is being manipulated.”

  Kirk halted in his tracks. “Run that one by me again.”

  Spock stopped, took up a position with his hands behind his back, as if speaking to someone of higher rank. “I merely point out that our new orders are not typical of how the STC operates.”

  Kirk gave him a skeptical look. “How would you know how things ‘typically’ operate around here?”

  Spock seemed surprised by the question. “I have read the Recruits’ Manual.”

  “We’ve been here three days, Stretch. That thing’s eleven hundred pages.”

  “Eleven hundred and twenty. Including the index.”

  “Whatever,” Kirk waved away the Vulcan’s automatic elaboration. “You’re suggesting that someone, for some reason, has plucked us out of the crowd to give us special treatment?”

  “Different treatment,” Spock amended.

  “Yeah, yeah.” Kirk regarded him with sharpened interest. “I know I don’t qualify for different treatment because my engineering aptitude comes nowhere near yours. So why are we both assigned to an engineering specialty?”

  Spock’s face took on a thoughtful look, as if he found the back-and-forth inquiry engaging. “Rather than think of those characteristics by which we differ, it might be more illuminating if we think of those characteristics we share.”

  “Okay,” Kirk said, impatient, “so that rules out ears, sense of humor, and speed-reading. How are we the same?”

  “Most obviously,” Spock began, “in the way we came to the STC. Though not unheard of, it is rare for offenders to be given a chance to enlist.”

  Kirk thought that point over, and concluded that the Vulcan might be onto something. Something that he himself had missed. “Okay, Stretch, here’s something else that’s the same for both of us—we got caught up in Griffyn’s operation. At least I did. And I brought you along for the ride.”

  “Interesting,” Spock said, and Kirk was sure the Vulcan had thought of another connection.

  “You think that’s it?” Kirk asked him. “Someone’s moving us around because of something we know about Griffyn? These orders, they might’ve come out of nowhere because you stirred something up when you called the embassy.”

  Spock’s face lost any discernible expression.

  “You didn’t call the embassy?”

  “I was not given permission to make a personal call.”

  “Two Vulcans might have been murdered. That must mean something to you.” Kirk studied Spock, wondering if a Vulcan—this Vulcan—was capable of lying after all, and then, almost at the same time, he wondered what could trigger him to do so.

  “We should resume walking,” Spock said, and did. So did Kirk. They were less than two hundred meters from Aldrin Hall. “Perhaps when we are established in our new specialty stream, I will have another chance to request a personal call.”

  Now Kirk was certain Spock was keeping something back. “Just tell them it’s your father’s birthday, or your parents’ anniversary. Starfleet’s a sucker for family togetherness.”

  “Sucker,” Spock repeated, looking pleased. “Now I understand.”

  Kirk wished he could say the same.

  An hour later, Spock gazed out the window
of the monorail, contemplating the mystery before him.

  A theft ring was operating within the Vulcan Embassy, and his father was implicated as the thief both stealing and selling stolen artifacts, though that was, of course, impossible. Yet Sarek did know of the theft ring’s existence and even claimed that the compound’s security agents knew about it as well, although he had not trusted his son enough to confide this to him.

  What Spock had been able to determine on his own, firsthand, were the names of the criminals buying the stolen artifacts and the location of their base of operations on the Pacific Rome.

  To those details, he now added the information unwittingly provided by Jim Kirk, which implied it was likely the same criminals were also involved in the dilithium theft from the Academy—a theft for which Kirk claimed his female friend Elissa had been falsely accused.

  But implication and secondhand data supported only supposition. What if he had acted on uncertain logic?

  Most troubling of all to Spock was Kirk’s insistence that Elissa had been set up. It seemed the Academy honor board agreed. The charges against her had been dropped, apparently as a result of Kirk’s efforts to clear her name.

  As Spock continued his search for patterns, he arrived at one possible match, a disturbing possibility: Sarek was also being falsely accused.

  Spock had no direct experience with criminal conspiracies. But in his studies of the classic literature of this world, especially the masterful works of M. Spillane and E. McBain, he had learned that diverting suspicion through false evidence could be a successful strategy.

  He took a moment to consider this new line of thought. If Elissa and Sarek both were set up to serve as misdirection, then what was the correct direction?

  What was the link between the stolen Vulcan artifacts and the stolen dilithium?

  And how did all the facts and suppositions he’d gathered fit into his suspicion that he and Kirk were both being steered into specific positions as recruits within Starfleet?

  No matter how many ways he viewed this problem, all of Spock’s logic invariably converged on only one possible conclusion: Another, bigger crime was being planned, and he and Kirk were being put into place to take the blame.

  It would follow then that, if his own conclusion was true, Kirk’s corollary was also true: Such powers of manipulation could be exercised only by a person or persons in Starfleet itself. What other way was there to explain how he and Kirk had received their offers to enlist, and their current change of orders?

  Spock knew the situation, though clear, was dangerous to him personally. He was a lone teenager on an alien world, unable to trust anyone in his compound, not even his parents. And if whoever was behind this ominous conspiracy would not hesitate to murder two Vulcan consular agents, then they certainly would have no compunctions about killing him.

  Or Kirk.

  The two of them were pawns in some larger game, as surely as if they were ceramic pieces being moved among the levels of a chessboard. And when pawns came under attack, there was only one possible response.

  Mount an offensive.

  Spock’s body pitched forward suddenly as the monorail car slowed with a jerk, then inclined sharply downward, plunging into what felt like an endless fall.

  Completely taken by surprise, Spock did what no Vulcan child ever would—he cried out in alarm!

  “I warned you about the force field,” Kirk said. “Everything back where it should be? Stomach? Eyeballs?”

  Spock sat ramrod upright on the bench seat, face as frozen as a statue’s. If Kirk had to guess, he’d say the Vulcan was embarrassed by what had just happened.

  “We are in a precarious situation,” Spock said.

  Kirk had come to understand a little about his Vulcan companion by now. Spock was probably not referring to being startled by the monorail maneuver. “Tell me about it.”

  Spock raised his eyebrows. “This is hardly the place to discuss—”

  Kirk waved him to silence. “Another colloquialism, Stretch. I meant, I understand. I agree.”

  The monorail car slowed.

  Kirk glanced at Spock, who’d regained his general-purpose equanimity. “By any chance, did you mean our position is even more precarious than you thought it was before?”

  Spock nodded once. “We need to take action at once.”

  “Now you’re talking.” Kirk almost punched the Vulcan in the shoulder, but knew better by now.

  The car stopped and the doors opened.

  “Counterattack,” Kirk said fiercely.

  For once, Spock didn’t question or protest.

  As ordered, Kirk and Spock reported to a small lecture hall in Lily One—the main lab of the complex. They’d both been given advanced standing in an STC warp-propulsion specialty course already under way. But before they could attend the course, they would first need to complete a day-long orientation lecture and safety-training tour, then pass a follow-up examination.

  Given that there were no lectures and tours for enlisted personnel scheduled, Kirk and Spock had been added to a group of Academy plebes—first-year mids—who’d just arrived for early orientation.

  Kirk surveyed the five plebes clustered together, down at the lecturer’s level, in the center of the hall. There were too few of them to bother with sitting in the banks of seats that ringed the small amphitheater. The plebes were all male, all fresh-faced and eager, with recruit-like stubble on their heads, and wearing immaculate midshipman gray uniforms, quite different from the baggy STC whites Kirk and Spock wore. All were the epitome of what Kirk had always termed ‘suckers.’

  He and Spock walked down the aisles and stood just behind the clustered plebes. Kirk shifted restlessly from one foot to another while an earnest orientation officer in a pale blue lab coat delivered a sanitized history lecture about Lily Sloane, leaving out the best parts of her stormy, on-again off-again relationship with Zefram Cochrane.

  Next up was a safety officer, also in a lab coat. Her lecture topic was more interesting to Kirk: all the horrific ways careless mids could die in the warp lab should anything go wrong when they weren’t prepared. At the end of her talk, the safety officer opened a case of delta-radiation monitors on the lectern beside her, then called out the first participant’s name.

  “Dedo, Andrew Jude.”

  Kirk didn’t hide his disdainful smile as a dark-eyed young man with black bristles covering his freshly shorn scalp marched up to the lectern with all the bearing of someone who was about to receive a medal of valor.

  “Dewhurst, Philip Peter.”

  Another eager young mid stepped forward proudly, this one as pale-skinned as the first had been tanned.

  “Mubarak, Bish Salim.” This mid was the tallest, and marched as if he had practiced for hours.

  Kirk leaned over to Spock to whisper something sarcastic, but the Vulcan wasn’t watching the parade of mids. He was holding one hand to his chest, apparently deep in thought.

  “Something bothering you?” Kirk asked him quietly. Spock had seemed to recover from his monorail whiplash, but who knew with Vulcans?

  “Why would they be giving us delta-radiation monitors?”

  “So they can tell the difference between us being cooked medium and well-done,” Kirk said. “Why do you think they’re giving them to us?”

  “Silver, Charles Anthony,” the safety officer called out. This blond and blue-eyed plebe was older than the others, and from the way he marched, Kirk guessed he had grown up on another world with slightly different gravity—he still didn’t have his Earth legs.

  “If the static warp core in this complex is not in operation,” Spock said in a low voice, “then there is no chance of anyone being exposed to delta radiation. Therefore, assigning monitors is illogical.”

  Kirk watched Spock’s hand at his chest. “You sure you’re not hurt or anything?”

  “Swarts, Phillip Frederick.” The last plebe reported to the safety officer, green eyes intent, looking very serious.
<
br />   “I am in excellent health,” Spock said, almost petulantly.

  “Then what’s the problem?” Kirk asked. “They probably just want us to get used to wearing monitors.”

  “Kirk, James…Tiberius?”

  Kirk chose to saunter, not march, to the safety officer, who pinned the thumb-sized monitor to his uniform, turned it on to make the green SAFE indicator light up, then pointed out to him the blue DANGER light. Kirk showed her he knew where the ALERT button was, then walked back to join Spock behind the plebes.

  Except Spock wasn’t there—until he reappeared a moment later.

  He’d been on one knee, adjusting one of his boots.

  “Spock…uh, Mr. Spock?”

  Naturally, Spock attracted the attention of all five plebes as he received his delta-radiation monitor and had it demonstrated for him.

  Back in his place with Kirk, Spock stood quietly as the safety officer then held up a small audio unit and played the lab’s seven different alarm tones, defining each. She pointed out, quite unnecessarily, Kirk thought, that no one had ever actually heard the final, steady-tone alarm, because by the time that one sounded, every living thing inside the complex’s force field would already be dead.

  “Starfleet humor,” Kirk whispered to Spock.

  But Spock was lost in thought again, staring straight ahead.

  Kirk sighed in relief when, after an interminable hour, the lecture part of the program came to a close and another orientation officer entered. This one, though, wore a full Starfleet uniform, complete with red shirt. No lab coat for him.

  This officer looked over the seven members of his group, paying no more nor less attention to Spock than to any other person. And then he said the words Kirk had been waiting for—the words that meant he and Spock could at last take action, fight back, find the evidence, and reveal the truth once and for all.