Then one star faded more quickly than the others, leaving two to shine on by themselves just a few moments longer.
Kirk turned away then, consumed by his thoughts of Spock.
But McCoy was there for him, standing with his battered Reman cane.
“We knew it couldn’t last forever, Jim. That we three couldn’t last.”
“That doesn’t make it any easier,” Kirk said.
McCoy smiled at him then, and to Kirk, it was as if he looked back in time, to the first day a young Leonard McCoy had walked onto the bridge of his Enterprise, with that same wry smile.
“It’s not supposed to be easy,” McCoy said. He touched his hand to his heart. “That’s what lets us know how much we had, and how much we should treasure what’s left.”
Kirk looked back to the screen. Only the distant stars remained, now.
Then a turbolift arrived and Kirk’s heart lifted as he saw Joseph with Beverly Crusher and the Doctor.
Joseph took Kirk’s hand and leaned against him, instead of giving him one of his usual hugs. He was subdued and Kirk knew why. Whatever had happened to Spock on Remus, it was as if he had died before the child’s eyes, and that was something Joseph could not forget. Nor could his father.
The Doctor shook Kirk’s free hand.
“Hi, Dad,” the hologram said.
Kirk looked at the holoemitter on the doctor’s arm. “Good as new?”
“Better.”
Doctor Crusher asked if she could speak to Kirk alone, and Joseph went with the hologram to see the bridge stations. Will Riker commanded the center chair, and had none of his mentor’s nervousness about having children on his bridge.
As soon as they’d gone, Crusher showed Kirk three medical instruments that resembled hyposprays, but weren’t.
“I think you should take these,” she said.
“What are they?” Kirk asked.
“Genetic comparison modules. When we were on Remus with the Doctor disguised as Joseph, a Romulan physician wanted to use these on what he thought was your son.”
“I don’t understand the significance.”
“I brought them back with me because I thought they might contain the genotypes of Joseph’s relatives. I thought that was why they wanted him on Remus. To trace his line-age.”
“What did they contain?”
“Are you familiar with the work of Doctor Richard Galen?”
Kirk knew the name well. “Jean-Luc was one of his students. He helped complete Galen’s identification of what could be the Progenitor species, the ones who may have seeded this galaxy with life.”
Crusher nodded, pointed to the modules. “That’s the genotype in these devices. The reconstructed hypothetical Progenitor genotype.”
Kirk was perplexed. “Why would anyone want to compare Joseph’s genotype to…that?”
Crusher had no answers. “I don’t know. But I’ve given all my research to Doctor McCoy, and…well, I think you should look into it.” She glanced over at Joseph where he sat at an engineering station. “He is…a unique child.”
“That’s one way of putting it.” Kirk put the modules in his jacket pocket. “Thank you.”
Worf and Picard arrived next. Worf carried a carefully wrapped package for Joseph that was obviously a d’k tahg knife. “With your approval, of course,” Worf told Kirk.
“Only if you teach him how to use it properly,” Kirk answered.
Worf smiled with a soft snarl and went to join Joseph at the engineering station.
Picard remained with Kirk, both men watching the knot of personnel that had gathered around Joseph.
“Quite a charming lad,” Picard said.
“That’s another way of putting it,” Kirk replied.
Picard didn’t understand the comment, but had another topic to bring up.
“I spoke with Admiral Janeway. She sends her regards, and her regrets.”
“I should probably speak with her, too,” Kirk said. “Give her the full report about Norinda.”
“She mentioned that,” Picard said. “And she also mentioned that she had a proposition for you.”
Kirk forced a smile. “I like her, Jean-Luc, but she out-ranks me.”
“You’re incorrigible, Jim. Her proposition involves the Calypso.”
“What about the Calypso?”
“If you want her, she’s yours.”
“It’s a scow.”
“It can be modified.”
“A new bridge?”
“Anything’s possible.”
“What’re the conditions?”
Kirk could see that Picard knew more than he was revealing. “Reasonable.”
Kirk knew what a Starfleet admiral’s definition of “reasonable” would be—anything but.
“The Calypso is a Q-ship,” Kirk said. “Which means Starfleet and Admiral Janeway would expect me to carry out covert missions.”
“From time to time,” Picard agreed. “But the rest of the time, she’s your ship, your crew. Your home.” He patted Kirk’s shoulder. “Think about it?”
“I will.”
“And sooner, rather than later,” Picard suggested.
“Something I should know about?” Kirk asked.
“Talk to the Admiral,” Picard said. Then he left to speak to Riker.
For a few moments, Kirk stood alone on the bridge, surrounded by activity, but not sharing in it.
He lasted two minutes.
Then he tracked down a communicator, to contact Janeway.
What good was a captain without a ship?
What good was a ship without a mission?
Epilogue
The Monitor Transmission
STARBASE 499, STARDATE 57503.1
“The signal took almost two years to reach us,” Commander Soren said. She was Vulcan, chief science officer of the starbase, a specialist in communications. But unlike her audience, she already had seen the final transmission from the U.S.S. Monitor. And she was frightened.
From his place at the head of the long, black conference table, Admiral Meugniot objected. “From three hundred and fifty thousand light-years? Impossible.” His frown of disapproval was like a slash of paint on a ceremonial mask, its shape distorted in the shadow thrown up by the reading lamps on the table, for now the only source of light in the spacious briefing room.
Soren stood beside the main viewscreen, hands held behind her back. “Subspace radio travels at a pseudo velocity of warp factor nine-point-nine-nine-nine-nine.” Her voice was flat, lost in the quiet of the sound-deadened room.
“Within the galactic network,” Meugniot said, not bothering to hide his scorn. “With relay stations to boost the signal, keep it bound.” He made a show of impatiently scrolling through the text of the large, classified padd on the table before him. “But this signal, you claim, originated from outside the galaxy. One-sixth of the way to Andromeda.” He shook his head. “It’s a hoax, Commander. That’s the only explanation. I hear the Tal Shiar are back in business on Romulus, and this is exactly the kind of false intelligence they’d develop to have us switch our defense priorities.”
Soren waited for the whispered discussion among the others at the table to end. In addition to Meugniot, there were six admirals in attendance, along with four starship captains, their science officers, and three civilians—two men, one woman—who had pointedly not been introduced. Soren did not need her logic to know that meant the civilians were likely senior officers in Starfleet Intelligence. But at least their presence suggested someone at Command understood the serious nature of the Monitor transmission. Perhaps, Soren hoped, that person at Command was also frightened.
“There is a full engineering report included as a supplement to the main document,” Soren said, her voice betraying nothing of her true feelings. “Recall that the Monitor was a testbed for captured Borg technology, with many novel subsystems. Furthermore, Captain Lewinski and the surviving crew had three years to refine the onboard technology. In the end,
anticipating their destruction, they reconfigured their forward sensor array to emit a single, five-second subspace pulse, drawing one hundred percent of the power output of the ship’s warp core.”
The crew of the Monitor had also been afraid, Soren knew. To see the need for that transmission, to carry it out, knowing that their ship would then be adrift in intergalactic space—that was the action of a desperate crew. But a crew who had stayed true to their duty as Starfleet officers.
“I don’t care how much power they had,” the admiral objected. “Over that distance, there is no way a subspace signal wouldn’t spread out to the point where it could not be distinguished from normal subspace static. Especially static from extragalactic sources. It’s the Romulans up to their old tricks.”
Soren wondered what it would feel like to take the admiral by his shoulders and shake him. To tell him he was missing the point of this gathering. The technology of the signal’s transmission was not the issue. It was the signal’s content that had led the commander of Starbase 499 to call this extraordinary meeting at Soren’s request.
But, instead, the science officer calmly said, “The signal was relayed, sir. By at least one of the Kelvan Expeditionary Return Probes currently presumed to be en route to Andromeda.”
The admiral was not one to be contradicted. “That probe is more than a century old.” He appeared to have more to say, but one of the civilians interrupted.
“Commander Soren, could you show us the transmission?”
Just that one, brief request from the thin pale man in the black suit was enough to silence every other voice at the table.
“Certainly,” Soren answered. “As noted in your briefing padds, this is a reconstruction based on a severely degraded transmission. Almost three months of effort has gone into restoring it to this stage, using existing engineering plans of the Monitor and images of the crew from their personnel files in order to create—”
“Show it,” Meugniot ordered.
Soren nodded to the admiral, then turned again to the civilian, for she knew that if there were to be a defense against the threat described in this transmission, it would come from Starfleet Intelligence—the only part of Starfleet that dared consider the unthinkable.
“The majority of the signal consists of text and instrument data which is proving almost impossible to reconstruct, due to lack of redundancy. But the last one-hundredth second of the transmission included the following visual images, which represent the last moments of the Starship Monitor, reported lost on a routine transwarp engine trial mission, Stardate 52027.4.”
She touched the playback control on her own padd. And because she had seen the transmission once, she did not need to see it again. She did not want to. Instead she watched the audience. The admirals, the captains, the science officers, the civilians. The last hope of the Federation.
The table lights dimmed, then Captain John Lewinski spoke to those people, giving his final captain’s log. Their upturned faces were painted by the flicker of subspace static, and the rippling lines of distortion that could not be removed for fear of losing any scraps of information still hidden in the signal.
Soren’s processing engineers had obtained recordings of Lewinski’s other logs, so they could be guided in the re-creation of his voice. But it still warbled, an eerie effect, as if this really were a ghost now speaking to them across the years and the light-years since his death.
Lewinski told them about the Distortion.
It had made contact with the Monitor in intergalactic space, near the debris field of the first Kelvan Expeditionary Return Probe.
Lewinski’s investigation of that debris revealed the probe had been deliberately destroyed, by a process that appeared to alter the fundamental constants of space-time, making it impossible for complex matter to exist.
The other revelations were even more outrageous, more unnerving.
The Monitor had mapped a transwarp tunnel that had been constructed between the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way. The Distortion traveled along that tunnel at a near-instantaneous speed, approaching the theoretically impossible warp ten.
The few seconds of sensor scans the Monitor had been able to make revealed that the Distortion was an artifact employing dimensional engineering, one part existing in normal space while the rest of it was in warp space at the same time. Another impossibility.
And then the Distortion responded to Lewinski’s hails by firing a dimensional weapon at his ship.
The Monitor’s sensors recorded its approach.
Lewinski waited until the last possible second to transmit the five-second subspace pulse that had drawn every last erg of energy from his ship’s warp core.
What had happened after that, there was no way to be certain. But Soren’s specialists had created a simulated engineering model of the ship. It showed how every system on the Monitor would have been burned out by the burst of power transmitted through its forward sensors.
The model showed the point-by-point destruction of the Monitor’s subsystems. It showed the warp core ejecting.
The analysts suggested that if any of the crew had survived the shock of the ejection and sudden drop out of warp, then they would have had, at best, three hours of residual heat left. Provided the air was still breathable, uncontaminated by smoke from the fires on every deck, some crew might have survived as long as ten hours. But no one would have lasted longer than a day.
To Soren, though, those estimates were pointless. The crew had survived less than five minutes.
She knew that because she had seen the analysis of the dimensional weapon that had been fired at the Monitor. The last few seconds of the Monitor’s sensor records had not been as compressed, and had arrived in better condition, more easily reconstructed.
Thus the last few seconds of the transmission being shown on the viewscreen now contained crisp images of that weapon, coming closer.
And more than impossible, that weapon was incomprehensible. Because every bit of data told the analysts on Soren’s team that they were looking through that bright blue point of light, into another universe.
The flickering stopped, telling Soren that the final frame of the transmission report was being displayed, listing the key conclusions of her team.
She knew them well. The Monitor had discovered evidence of an alien intelligence that could travel at near-instantaneous warp ten; that had engaged in galactic engineering; that could construct artifacts that existed in two different dimensional realms at the same time; that could use weapons that altered the fundamental constants of this universe; and that could open doorways into other universes.
There was nothing in Federation science that could grapple with such capabilities.
There was nothing in the lost histories of the first civilizations in this galaxy that came close to suggesting that any culture had attained what the Monitor transmission described. The Iconian gateways, the Guardian time portal, even the Q Continuum, all had some tenuous connection to the laws of multiphysics that described the rest of the universe, and governed known science.
But there was no branch of knowledge that could make sense of what the Monitor had discovered.
And what so disturbed Soren was unequivocal evidence that whatever the Monitor had discovered, it was hostile.
And it was coming this way.
The final viewscreen image faded and the reading lights glowed brightly again.
Except for the three civilians, every person at the table was involved in conversation. Soren’s sensitive ears picked up suggestions for forming task forces, for sending out more probes, for calling general meetings of the Federation Council, for holding secret meetings.
It brought her comfort to hear the explosion of ideas. Perhaps the Federation could withstand this new threat. Perhaps there was no reason to be afraid.
And then one of the civilians stood. The woman. She caught Soren’s attention. “If I may?” she asked.
Soren nodded and the woman walked
from the table to join her at the viewscreen. It was impossible, but in the shifting lights and shadows of the briefing room, just for those few seconds it took for the human female to reach her, she had looked just like Soren’s Vulcan mother.
But in the pool of light by the viewscreen, Soren could see why she had made the mistake. The woman wasn’t human after all, she was Vulcan. Then the woman smiled, and Soren hid her astonishment at that display of emotion, wondering if in fact the woman might be Romulan.
“Admiral Meugniot,” the woman said, “members of the emergency board. I know that what we have just seen could be considered alarming.”
Soren’s face remained impassive, but she was startled by the woman’s choice of words. Could be?!
“But as someone who has studied this phenomenon in depth—”
Soren was even more surprised by that statement.
“—I would like to explain why it’s nothing to be frightened of.” She looked directly at Soren then, and her smile was exactly like that of Soren’s mother; the secret smile that Vulcans share only in their most private moments, with their most beloved.
“Nothing at all,” the woman said. “Indeed, what is coming is something to be welcomed.” She held out her arms as if to embrace everyone in the room. “Because it is the true reality of existence.”
Soren stared at the woman, even as her outline seemed to blur before her. Vaguely she was aware of a distant, almost explosive shudder that passed through the floor of the briefing room. She thought there might have been alarms going off, warning lights flashing, combadges chirping.
But none of that seemed important.
This woman had something compelling to say, and Soren wanted to hear it, even as the woman turned to her and reached out to her with a hand that seemed to be made of writhing particles of black powder, stretching like dust in a whirlwind to caress Soren’s face, exactly as her mother had caressed her as a child.
“No need to be afraid,” the woman whispered in flawless Vulcan.
Soren took the woman’s hand, ignored the screams that came from the people at the conference table, ignored the banging on the briefing room door, the even more violent explosion that seemed to tilt the room for a moment.
Captain's Blood Page 27
