Best Destiny

by Diane Carey

  “Are you telling me,” he began, “that you agreed with that bag of kangaroo crap . . . and you didn’t say anything?”

  When Roy didn’t speak, but only stared up at his father with a calculating eye, Big Rex took that as an answer in itself.

  A yes.

  The huge man’s eyes grew even thinner. His face glistened with sweat under the tiny backup lights. He took another step, up onto the work level, butchering his son with his glare. Slowly, he grilled, “Why . . . not?”

  Throat drying up, Roy knew he’d better come up with something

  —just the right something. His father wouldn’t buy platitudes or tolerate lies, and knew what both sounded like. Roy knew better than to wave the bloody shirt of challenge when his father had his innate radar so obviously clicked on.

  “You wouldn’t have listened to me.”

  Roy took great care not to shrug as he said it. He needed to seem submissive without showing too clearly that he was pretending. His father knew him, but how well?

  Well enough to know there was more to his motivations?

  At moments like this, Roy Moss couldn’t simply shrug off his father as the same kind of moron as the rest of the crew. He couldn’t comfort himself with dreams of having been switched at birth and imagine that he was really carrying the brains of some unknown genius.

  At a moment like this one, he could clearly see whose sense of self-preservation he had inherited.

  The scarlet-blue mountain of skepticism moved another step closer, squashing Roy’s drifting thoughts and yanking him back to the moment. If Angus Burgoyne had been dangerous because he was quarrelsome, Big Rex Moss was dangerous for a dozen better reasons, all subtle.

  Below, Roy tried not to give away the fact that a parent could still terrorize, no matter how old a child became. All of a sudden, nineteen wasn’t old enough.

  Rex Moss glowered, grinding his teeth as he digested his own suspicions.

  “You wanted him dead,” he surmised finally. “You wanted that, didn’t you?”

  It was no question. He rolled his tongue inside a fleshy cheek and added two plus two. His eyes fermented as he leered down at his own son and asked the ugliest question of a voyage that was turning ugly.

  “Who . . . threw that knife?”

  FIFTEEN

  “They’re gaining on us, Mr. Kirk. If they grab us with their tractor again—”

  “Don’t remind me,” George snapped. “I’ve got an idea. Where’s the jettison tube on this model?”

  Carlos puckered his brow and said, “Abeam on both sides.”

  “Okay.” Clearly hatching a plot, he stooped near Jimmy and looked at the monitors. “Which one of these is the mass-to-thrust ratio of that ship out there?”

  Although Jimmy had been watching the monitors for a long time, he suddenly realized he knew nothing about them. With his father hanging over him, he felt particularly unfledged.

  “There it is,” George said, picking on one very small monitor with a divided screen showing two wobbling graphs. “Good . . . just might work. Heads up! Here’s the project. I want you all to collect anything that’s expendable. Anything broken, anything we don’t need. What’s in these crates anyway?”

  “Archaeological implements for Faramond,” Robert provided. “Toys for the children, farming and gardening tools, household appliances for the colony—”

  “All of it, into the tube.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Hall! Get out of the wall. Carlos, come here! Jimmy, get up and help with this.”

  For twenty minutes they did the craziest thing Jimmy had ever seen. They ripped the bent-back sheeting right off the walls and stuffed it into the port side jettison tube. They stuffed everything in there from little bolts and pins to big saws, pitchforks, shovels, computer parts, spatulas, kids’ toys, and even their garbage from lunch.

  He only paused once to ask why they were transporting all these hand tools to a modern colony, and all he got back was Robert April’s British lilt—“No one’s ever improved on a good old shovel, dear boy.”

  So he quit asking questions.

  All the time they were doing it, Jimmy was trying to think. This had something to do with those two molecules Veronica had mentioned, and something to do with the thrust-to-mass gauge. He found himself plunging whole-soul into helping his father peel back pieces of the ship itself and cut them off and stuff them into the tube. Somehow this wasn’t the same as going through the motions of building a fish pond or stepping a sloop’s mast, though he had done those things with his father too. This wasn’t the same as his father doing something for him, or him doing something because Dad said so, or because Dad had come back from space to put time in with the family.

  Suddenly he winced—and not because he’d scratched himself on the sheeting. Is that the way I always saw it? Damn—did I ever say it to him that way?

  He glanced at his dad’s face, blotchy with effort, hair shaggy as red seaweed, arms straining, and for the first time he saw some of himself—if only in the shape of his father’s shoulders and the way the muscles knotted up. They had the same muscles, the same knots. The same furrow in the brow, the same mouth when it tightened with effort, with determination.

  For the first time, Jimmy looked at his father and saw some of himself.

  Always . . . always . . . “Jimmy, you look just like your mother!” “Why, Winn, he’s the spitting image of you.” “I don’t believe how much you boys look like your mother. George, didn’t they get anything of yours?”

  There was always laughter following lines like those. Some joke between his parents and their friends.

  Suddenly he wanted desperately to have something of his father’s. A muscle. An expression. A bad habit. Anything.

  Our eyes aren’t even the same brown—

  “Enemy ship is getting awfully close, Commander.” Veronica’s announcement cracked a diligent silence that had fallen as they stuffed anything and everything into the tube.

  Jimmy paused, panting, and stared at her. Enemy . . .

  “How close?” his father barked.

  Kneeling at the monitors, Veronica said, “They’re nine hundred sixty thousand kilometers behind us and closing at about three thousand kilometers per second.”

  “Damn! They’re on top of us.”

  “Gives us about five minutes,” Carlos added.

  “Likely they’re attempting to close in to use a weakened tractor system, George,” Robert pointed out.

  Jimmy was about to ask a question—probably a stupid one—when he pulled open a breadbox-size hatch in the forward bulkhead and found himself staring at four beautifully mounted hand lasers. He backed off a step and stared at them. Weapons . . . why was everything so new all of a sudden? Why were his knees locked and aching?

  Somebody moved beside him, and without turning his head from the row of lasers, he asked, “Are these supposed to go . . . with the rest?”

  Please don’t let it be Dad next to me—

  “Pardon me? Oh, Jimmy, the hand lasers, of course,” Robert April uttered. “No, my boy, those we keep.”

  “But they’re in a whole other ship. We’ll never get to use them. Shouldn’t we shuck all the weight we can?” Jimmy said.

  “No, no,” the captain said. “There’s a spacefarer’s rule of thumb that started, oh, a century or so ago, I believe, with our first establishment of space forts. We call it ‘W and W’ . . . water and weapons. At all cost, in a survival situation those two elements you must keep. You can do without food much longer than you can do without water, so you must keep water. Weapons can provide protection, power, and heat in space, which has no heat or power.” He wagged a finger toward the neat row of hand lasers. “Two ships or not . . . those we keep.”

  “Okay, that’s enough!” George bellowed from behind them.

  Jimmy flinched, thinking maybe he and the captain had stopped to talk too long. Then he turned and realized his father was talking about enough stu
ff being pushed into the jettison tube.

  His father closed the double-thick hatch, shoving in the jagged corner of a cracked lamp lens before he could get the thing closed.

  “It’s a brilliant plan, George,” Robert said as the hatch clacked. “The king would approve.”

  Jimmy cranked around. “What plan? I don’t get it. Aren’t we just shucking extra weight?”

  The captain hung his good arm over Jimmy’s shoulders, steered him toward the monitors and gauges, and pointed at the one with the shattery graphic of the enemy ship.

  “Watch.”

  George Kirk straightened up in his son’s periphery and said, “Carlos! A hundred and eighty degrees about.”

  “One-eighty, aye. Coming full about, sir.”

  The irritating hum of the strained impulse engine strained even more as thrusters pushed and burped against the natural course. That was the “force” acting upon the vessel—and it was turning.

  The captain’s arm over his shoulders was suddenly pitiful protection as Jimmy felt his jaw drop and his heart fall to his socks. He felt suddenly cold—he even shivered.

  “We’re going to play chicken,” he gasped, “with a ship ten times our size?”

  “Look at this. Hey, Caskie, get a blink on this.”

  “What?”

  “The idiots are turning around.”

  Big Rex hunched forward in the command seat as much as his bulk allowed, and threaded his fingers as though anticipating a hot meal.

  Beside him, Lou Caskie’s nearly toothless grin broke wide as the old man gaped at the forward viewscreen. “Walkin’ right into our tractor beam. Walk right in, walk right in.”

  “They know they can’t outrun us. By damn, they’re gonna fight.”

  Together, and knowing their Andorian engineer was standing on the engine room ladder, also looking, they watched the Starfleet hulk complete its turn and begin an approach.

  Yes, it was a hulk—a wreck. The proud white neo-enamel coating on the outer skin was streaked with burns and ruptures now. A recognizable pennant that had once said “Starfleet” now said only “leet.” The sensor pod on top was open like a used eggshell, still drooling threads of fluid and frozen atmosphere. A magnification inset showed the limbless gore left over from two, maybe three people still strapped into what might have been observation harnesses. The main cabin wasn’t much better after a direct laser cut, with a surgical slit opening it from bow to amidships. Random electrical threads and sparks still searched for a connection.

  Behind the captain’s station of their own damaged ship, now filthy with scorches and oil stains, bleeding out the corner of his mouth, Roy Moss kept his voice low.

  “We don’t have shields,” he warned quietly.

  His father’s glare burned into his back.

  The young man turned.

  Big Rex sat in the command seat, bulbous and huge and angry, still rubbing his knuckles from the little reprimand he’d given his boy.

  Roy gazed back at him sidelong and touched a tongue to his bleeding mouth. Reprimands were such interesting times, such times of study. Would he ever be bigger than his father? He was already taller, but when Big Rex stood before him and said, “Come over here,” there was nothing to be done but walk over there and be punished.

  Roy knew about that. Once, he had refused.

  Not anymore.

  Who threw that knife? Who threw that knife?

  They both still heard it in their heads.

  Both knew the answer now. But the question still rang and rang, because there was defiance at its core. The real kind, not just the smart-mouthed kid snapping back because he was annoyed.

  Rex glared and rubbed, and his son heard the message of the knuckles.

  Never again, tail. Don’t manipulate me again. I’ll find out.

  A shudder crawled through Roy. His sore, recently beaten thighs and shoulders told him to keep quiet and do his job.

  His father turned away finally and squinted at the ravaged Federation vehicle.

  “Whoever’s left over there, they gotta be in the hold,” he chewed out. “Driving the mechanics hands-on.”

  “Cannot be done,” Okenga said from the ladder. “Must have computer control.”

  Still keeping his voice on low guard, Roy tried to get on his father’s good side by saying, “He’s not talking about Andorian scavenger engineers. He’s talking about Starfleet pilots. They don’t just steal technology. They invent it.”

  Without taking his eyes off the Federation’s crippled ship as it hobbled closer on the viewscreen, Big Rex warned, “Back to your work, runt. I’m not through with you. Right now I want that tractor beam.”

  “You’re going to need deflectors.”

  Lou Caskie dropped his rotted grin and advised, “Nobody asked you. Didn’t hear nobody ask you.”

  He didn’t turn around. Neither did Big Rex.

  Rex’s enormous body jiggled in a dozen places as he suddenly laughed at what he saw on the screen. “These weeners are going to play chicken with me. I love when suckers play my game . . . my way.”

  Okenga abruptly jumped, looked down, scowled, then climbed to the top of the ladder and made room for Dazzo to come up. But not enough room apparently. The two argued and snarled, each trying to get the best position to see the screen. When they noticed Roy watching them in contempt, the Klingon pushed Okenga aside, put his teeth together, and ordered, “Back to your deflectors, boy!”

  Settling onto both knees and pretending to do as he had been told, the younger Moss reasoned not to argue aloud with these wastes of time. He spoke only to his tools and the quivering circuits in the open floor beneath him. “My name . . . is Roy,” he murmured.

  He made a few halfhearted adjustments on the crashed deflector system—his perfect, beautiful, delicate, special brand of shielding program that let them go places no one else dared go. He would mend them, yes. But he would hold back. Make sure these porks kept on needing him. At least, as long as he needed them.

  In the privacy of his mind he relegated repairs to one side and kept doing them, but indulged in adding up how much he’d skimmed off these porkers’ stash. They were so mallet-headed, they didn’t even realize he’d been stealing from them even while they were stealing from their victims. When he had enough . . . that would be a day with one sun. Himself.

  No one was paying attention to him anymore. He slowly stood up and turned to the viewscreen.

  On the screen, the Federation ship was heading straight at them, closing fast even for open space.

  “What do you think, boss?” Caskie was asking. “What they doing?”

  “Assuming we’re stupid, that’s what,” Big Rex huffed. “They don’t know how to think dirty. That’s their problem. Always has been. Gonna be a bigger problem for ’em the further they fly.”

  “Farther,” grumbled an unwelcome correction from behind.

  “Warm up the pokers,” Big Rex said, waving his right arm at the Klingon.

  Dazzo limped to the shabby, pieced-together mass they called a weapons control board and checked their power. “Some. Less than one quarter.”

  Satisfied, Rex wobbled his head from side to side and grinned with one corner of his mouth.

  “That’s all I need.”

  They fell into a predatory silence. The ship out there looked mighty small.

  Roy stood up and moved forward, his eyes, his mind, his sense of survival all on that screen.

  “Back off,” he said. “Stop us.”

  Big Rex said, “I don’t back off.”

  “You’d better. Something’s going on.” He moved another step forward. “They’ve got something up their sleeves.”

  “Like what?” his father argued. “They know they can’t outrun us, so they’re turning and pretending they’ve got something left to fight with! It’s that stupid nobility coming at us. Starfleet white knights.”

  “You’d better stop this ship.”

  “Shut your mouth or I’ll shut
it for you! We’ll crumple them like a piece of paper!”

  Abruptly Roy spun to his father and shrieked, “Don’t you think they know that, you moron! This is Starfleet you’re laughing at!”

  Glaring up from his seat, Rex Moss slashed out so hard and with such impulse that he almost rolled onto the deck, and struck his son across the cheekbone. Reeling, Roy stumbled and caught himself somehow on Dazzo, who shoved him off, then slapped him hard enough to drive him to the deck.

  When Roy turned over, bleeding and dazed, his father’s wide shadow fell across him and he blinked up at a mountain of a man.

  “What’d you call me?” Rex demanded. “What . . . did you call me? Call me that again.”

  The shadow fell darker, closer.

  “They’re practically on top of us!” Caskie called. “I got the laser locked on ’em. You want me to shoot?”

  Big Rex ignored him and moved closer to Roy with a surprising sense of drama for a man his size. He glared down.

  “I want to hear it again,” he said. “Let’s hear that word come out of your skinny neck again, smart boy.”

  Roy scooted backward, but dared say, “How did you survive before me? Don’t you understand the physics of space?”

  Rex paused. Anger gave way to experience with his son—he narrowed his eyes, thinking, sensing.

  Roy took those seconds to crawl to the manual controls and get himself to his feet, never taking his eyes off his father.

  “Hey!” Caskie called then. “Hey, they’re doing something!”

  Big Rex turned. “Doing what?”

  “Opened their jettison tube . . . ”

  Shock breaking on his wide face, Rex lumbered around again, pointed at his son, and shouted, “Cover! Cover! Give me shields!”

  Behind the command center Roy twisted a lean upper body so fast that his own ponytail slapped him in the face. Hands on deflector controls he knew were still useless, he skewered his father with a demonic glare.

  “There . . . are . . . none!”

  Finally, too late, it sank into Rex that what they really needed was protection and not size. Size had always helped him, and for the first time was failing. He pulled himself around, gripping the back of his chair so hard that it squawked, and howled at the horror on the viewscreen.