by Diane Carey
"Burn …" Garamanus visibly shuddered.
Zennor's eyes paled from red to sulfur. "In our culture, we burn only the living."
Kirk stiffened. "The living?"
"Criminals," the Dana said. "Burning is punishment. The dead must be honored."
Zennor added, "Some of our groups require keeping the skulls of the dead with us for four generations before they can be smashed."
Kirk didn't ask. They'd probably just explain and he didn't want to hear that one.
Garamanus turned from the body and didn't look at it any more. "Where is the soul?"
Perplexed, Kirk glanced at Zennor, then back to Garamanus. "I'm sorry?"
"Manann's soul," the Dana said. "We must have it."
"I don't understand."
Suddenly McCoy's face went as white as Garamanus's robe. "I think I do … gentlemen …"
He motioned toward the experimentation room and led them to the archway.
Garamanus and Zennor had to dip their horns to go inside, and once there they stopped in their tracks and stared at the table.
Stared and stared, as if slugged. Far worse was this stare than that with which they had looked at the remains.
There on the cold table lay the piles of herbs, nuts, clippings, hair, and assorted other relics, and the cut-open remnant of the poppet itself, its limp arms and legs no longer supported by stuffing, its open chest showing loose threads, its tiny head and those yarn tentacles canted to one side.
Garamanus turned away from what he saw, and his eyes were terrible on Kirk. "What are you people?"
Silence fell like an ax blade.
Feeling suddenly unwashed, Kirk felt patent shame at not having trodden his course more delicately. They had transgressed more sensitive ground than mere territory, and he had let it happen.
"We meant no insult," he submitted. "We didn't realize how important this is to you. To us, it's just a stuffed doll."
"Vergokirk," Garamanus chafed, "do you devour your young?"
Kirk weighed the question, but saw no other way to answer it. "No, of course we don't."
"Neither do we. But if we did, this is what it would be like."
"You're joking!" McCoy reacted, then suddenly realized he might be committing another error, glanced at Kirk, and clamped his mouth shut.
"The mannequins are representatives of each of us," Zennor told them slowly. "Wherever we go, they tell our life stories. When we go into battle, we leave them behind, or send them in a safe pod. It is honored as if it is the person. This … it is desecration."
"Oh, no," McCoy uttered, so softly that only Kirk heard. His face blanched, his eyes like a cat's in a flashlight. "I'm truly sorry," he said genuinely. "I didn't realize!"
With a crisp warning Kirk began, "Bones—"
"No, no, it was my blunder. Please don't blame Captain Kirk for this, or any of our crew. I take full responsibility. I had no idea this would be any kind of affront. Is there some way I can apologize to your crew? If there's anything I can do, I'll gladly do it."
"McCoy, stand down," Kirk snapped.
Irritated and jaundiced with deep mortal panic, McCoy started to speak again, but caught the captain's glare and managed to stop himself before the error compounded.
Kirk smoldered with the level of tension he'd been driven to, but an instant later demanded better of himself. He understood what McCoy was going through. As a starship captain, his successes had always been magnified, but so were his blunders. He'd learned the hard way that a well-maneuvered pause could ease a bad situation and ordered with his eyes and posture that McCoy give himself that pause before anything else happened.
What else could happen? He had trouble imagining the shuddering rage in Garamanus's face compounded any more than it already was. Not only was the victim's head gone, but McCoy had cut apart the poppet.
Measuring each word with what could only be caution, Zennor looked at Garamanus and declared, "Accidents were inevitable."
Feeling his skin contract, Kirk bit back the weighty declaration that this was no accident, but damned cold-blooded murder. He knew instantly how lucky he was, and Zennor also was, that Garamanus chose not to point that out himself.
Kirk had no way to establish, even for his own comfort, how dangerous that silence was. And when he couldn't think like those around him, he had no anchorage. That bothered him. Bothered him big.
In a last bid for compassion, for both crews, for both civilizations, he turned to Zennor.
"Let me help," he pleaded.
A shadow cast itself upon him and he stepped back. Garamanus was beside him, above him.
The Dana's voice was like the slamming of a gavel.
"We will wait to see what the stars say."
"Absolutely nothing? You're sure?"
"We're sure, sir."
"Give me the rundown again."
Chief Barnes, head of the astrogeology, gave him a pained look and pointed again at the row of bridge monitors on the science side. "There's not much here, sir."
Beside the chief, stellar cartographer Amanda Alto and her brother, solar chemist Josh Alto, both looked too young to be able to do the kind of jobs they were doing.
"As far as we can tell, sir," Josh said, "this sun went through its first red-giant stage three to four thousand years ago and incinerated all its inner planets, which is where life generally occurs. Actually, we don't even have any way to know if there even were inner planets—"
"Except for the number and orbits of the outer planets, which may have changed considerably during the expansion stage of the star," Amanda filled in. "There had to be something there."
"But there's no way to prove it," her brother added, not to be outdone.
Kirk turned. "Any of the rest of you?"
There were seventeen science specialists and staff technicians on the bridge, crowding both the upper and lower decks. As he gazed at them, all the young faces, peppered with a few older ones, all their minds crammed with numbers and probability and measurements, extrapolations of known data and theories of unknown data, the culmination of thousands of years of learning and in fact the very reason the starship could be out here doing what it did, he was struck with the sad realization that all these people were needed just to replace Mr. Spock.
And he still needed Spock anyway.
From beside the command chair, Astrobiologist Cantone broke the silence. "The remote cluster quark resonance scanners, spectrometers, and thermal imagers just aren't picking up anything that indicates there was ever life in the solar system, sir."
"That doesn't mean there wasn't," Specialist Angela Godinez from the astral life sciences department pointed out. "It only means that any evidence of life was destroyed when the sun went red giant."
"Chemical compositions of asteroids that might once have been planetary matter don't give us any clues either, sir," confirmed Astrogeologist Ross.
Others just nodded or shook their heads in canny agreement. They all knew what he needed, and none could provide it.
"If there ever was life here, sir," said Chief Barnes, "there's no possible way to know it anymore."
Destitute. Billions of miles into space, and there was nothing to show for it. An unthinkable risk, flying haphazard into Klingon space, using the thinnest of permissions to do so, likely as not a revoked permission, and like an errant child Kirk had a chilling sensation that the worst was yet to come.
He looked at the forward screen, showing Zennor's ship cruising at warp speed two points off the port bow.
"They came to search for the past," he uttered, "and there's none to find." He parted the sea of blue tunics and pressed his thigh against the bridge rail.
"We'll keep looking, sir," Chief Barnes said with unshielded, and rather pathetic, sympathy for him. "But we won't find anything."
"I understand that," Kirk told him grittily, aggravated that a stellar incident four thousand years ago should have so biting an effect on the eighty-odd years allotted to him in
which he might get something done.
He turned toward the turbolift. "Captain?"
Against the shiny red lift doors, Zennor was a living gargoyle, with one errant shadow creasing his horns. Beside him, Garamanus was like something out of a reversed negative in an old photograph, the image of Zennor, with little of the color. Pale skin, white robes, and for the first time Kirk noted that his pallor might very well be from a life indoors, poring over historical information, piecing together details, with little intimacy to the outdoors and the brightness that bestows russet cheeks. Even on the other side of the galaxy, things couldn't be all that different.
"I'm sorry," he said to them both. "You've seen the data. There's nothing left here to use as proof for any of our theories."
He watched their faces and realized he was beginning to glean expression from those bony, deerlike features and the chromatic eyes. He thought of what McCoy had said to him about seeing aliens as like himself instead of unlike, and saw it now. Just a matter of getting used to them, and then space began to grow smaller between peoples.
Was Zennor pleased? Was that the expression Kirk was reading? If so, the other captain was trying not to show it in front of Garamanus.
Made sense.
"If there is no proof," the deep voice began, "then we must change our plans."
"There is no proof against us," Garamanus spoke up, not facing him. "The Danai will not change yet."
But Zennor did turn. "This evidence is insufficient. I will not launch invasion based upon poor data. We must have absolute proof."
"No proof is nothing," the Dana said, gritting his—whatever those were. "This is our space. All things lead to this area."
Zennor seemed to grow taller. "You wanted it to."
The two massive beings squared off as the Starfleet audience watched from below, and it was as if the two were alone, as if Kirk and all the others had skidded away on the thin ice beneath them.
"I always suspected you of being an unbeliever," Garamanus charged. "Why, if you did not believe, did you sign for this mission? The most important mission of all our civilization's history?"
"Because I do believe we were cast out. But I do not want our civilization impaled upon that belief. There is no greater evil than that which was done to us. I will not have us become what we hate."
Sensing that he was losing control of the bridge, if not the situation, Kirk yanked it back by stepping toward them and saying, "No one says you can't come here. If your civilization wants to move, there are ways to do that. There are habitable planets in Federation space. You're welcome to them. We'll help you. You can live in peace, settle, raise your—"
Flocks, herds, spawn?
"Young."
They were both looking at him now, and if he could indeed read their expressions, then the expressions were very different.
"You two can debate about this later," he plowed on, "but we've got to get out of Klingon space. I know you think well of your ship, but you don't know what the Klingon fleet really is. We'll give you sanctuary, but we must leave now."
"I've seen your ships," Garamanus rumbled. "You have no idea what you stand against. You are less than an annoyance to us."
Angry, Kirk raised his voice. "I don't stand against you. Not yet."
Zennor stepped between them, raised his long clawed hand to Kirk, but turned to face Garamanus again. "Are these the conquerors? The drooling, snarling visions of evil you have held up to us for generations? Every essence of meanness and torture, delighting in agony? Why do you not admit you are wrong? The stars are not here, the proof is not here … the crew will be against you when I show them this. We have come to find evil and found the opposite. Can we fail to grow?"
He paused, waited to see if Garamanus would speak, and when the Dana did nothing but stare, Zennor gestured again at Kirk.
"We tell the conqueror we come to drive him out. He offers us sanctuary. We are damaged. He offers repair. We are attacked. He defends us. We tell him we have no home. He offers to make room for us. Garamanus Drovid, Dana of the Wrath, Keeper of the Magic Eggs and the Gold Sickle, call up your wisdom and not just your research, and tell me … is this the conqueror?"
The large tawny hand clenched so tightly that the long fingernails seemed nearly to break the skin, then fanned open and made a sharp gesture at Jim Kirk's chest.
Challenge boiled between the two impressive creatures. Tension rolled heavily across the bridge, bringing an ache to every head and a clench to every throat. No one moved.
Standing on the tripwire, Kirk knew better than to move and hoped his crew would take his example.
Reaching critical mass, Garamanus glared in bald provocation, but despite anticipation there was no spring of attack, no roar of rage. When he finally spoke, his voice was as passive as a foghorn. His decision, evidently, had been made in those tight seconds, and now he would abide.
"I wish to go back to my ship and be with my people."
Unsure to whom the sentence was directed, Kirk took it upon himself as host to respond. "Transporter room two will be standing by when you want it."
"Go back to the ship," Zennor sanctioned. "We will send a message through the wrinkle. The conquerors are not here. Our place is not here."
Without another word or look, Garamanus flowed toward the turbolift and like some piece of a drifting wind was suddenly gone.
The tension, most of it, went with him.
Well, some of it.
Kirk turned to his science staff. "Duty stations," he ordered.
The flood of blue uniforms toward the lift was as much a flood of relief. There was an uneasy pause as they waited for the tube to clear and another lift to appear there, enough for about half of them to leave; then another two minutes lagged as the remaining science staff huddled the hallway and Zennor by himself in the other half until a third lift was able to arrive.
Then they left, and Zennor was again alone up there.
He and Kirk looked at each other.
Without turning away, Kirk said, "All stop."
He was surveying Zennor as if scanning a sculpture and thinking about what he was going to say.
"I'm glad," he said at last, "that you found enough—or enough lack—of information to convince you we're not enemies."
Zennor's weighty head bowed slightly out of the shadow. "I am convinced not by what we found, but who we found." He offered Kirk a pause that was indeed heartwarming. "If I had found only the Kling, we would be occupying this space by now."
Feeling suddenly better, and supremely gratified, Kirk discovered after a few seconds that he was grinning. He hadn't felt that coming on.
"Captain," Chekov said, straightening sharply at the science station, "long-range sensors are reading a heavy surge in warp-field exhaust, sir! The Klingon fleet is coming in—a very large fleet—at high warp speed!"
Kirk nodded and motioned for the young officer to calm down, set a better example, and comprehend the vastness of space. They had time to move. Not much, but they had it.
He looked at Zennor. "We'd better wear ship and get out of here or they'll hem us in. Now that we know there's nothing here, there's no reason to stay."
Zennor—if that face could—offered what might've been on the other side of the galaxy a smile. "You go. Let me linger. I will happen to be here when they come. If they attack, I am no conqueror to destroy them."
"It's tempting," Kirk allowed, "but no."
The thick horns drew an imaginary pattern on the ceiling. "No matter, Vergokirk. Once we are among you and you have our technology, you will be able to take care of them yourselves." He lowered that drumbeat voice and added, "You know you will have to eventually."
"People change, Vergo," Kirk wagered. "We have to give them that chance."
He started to turn to the helm to usher Byers into a new course, but Zennor said, "No, they don't change. Good is good. Bad is bad."
Stifling any disappointment he might've been tempted to show, Kirk took t
he high road. Mildly he said, "I guess that's just another difference between us."
Every hospital has a morgue, and none wants one.
Leonard McCoy was in his, doing all those hundred things a doctor is obliged to do once he has saved all he can save and there is only clean-up work to do. Logging the names of the dead, matching physical attributes and body marks to the official file of each, to make sure there is no error, that no family gets the wrong letter from the captain, and so each family knows with absolute certainty that the body wrapped in silk and sent into the nearest sun was indeed the son they would never get back. No one should ever wonder. That was his job now, and he took it with supreme care.
Now, after the battle, after the ground assault, after the incident that asked of a serviceman the bottom-line sacrifice, came the time that came so rarely, and he realized in the midst of this sorry duty how lucky he really was to have Jim Kirk for a captain. Kirk had many reputations, saint or demon, depending on—what had he said?—whether or not somebody agreed with his work. And some who liked his work still didn't like him. Call it jealousy, call it impatience, call it just another method of doing business, some people just didn't like him. A lot of people, in fact.
But he was a leader, not a politician, and being liked was the last on his list. Some of his own crewmen didn't like him, but that didn't matter. This shooting star they were riding still had the lowest transfer rate of any ship in the Fleet. And the waiting list was the longest of all twelve starships.
Space was no fairyland and a charming captain did no one any good. They signed on because they knew he would fight for their lives. Down to the last man, he would fight for each of them.
What mattered was times like this, when hundreds of men had gone into battle and only nineteen failed to come out of it. More than any other starship captain, Kirk had a reputation for fundamentally despising the death of a crewman. It was his own tragic flaw. He took a shipmate's death personally. Sometimes too personally for his own well-being, McCoy felt.
In order to be a physician he had long ago learned to reconcile his bone-deep desire to preserve life and the quality thereof with the analytical callousness every doctor needed at times like this.
