Best Destiny

by Diane Carey

  He rubbed his palms. They were moist. Cold. The palms of a frustrated man whose arms were never quite long enough.

  Trying to compose his dread, he turned away from the main screen and found himself once again looking updeck.

  “What am I going to find, Spock?” he asked quietly.

  Spock stepped closer, lowered his voice. They both knew how to converse in such a way that no one else heard, even in the confined environment of a ship’s bridge. And there was something about a conversation between anyone and the captain that made others turn their faces away and allow the privacy. Any ship was like that. Crew learned this one thing fast—there were some moments the captain didn’t want to be approached.

  “I have been isolating and arranging scattered data on Faramond, sir,” Spock said, his tone even and perhaps sympathetic. “It is an archaeological dig of an ancient culture which was highly advanced, far beyond us, but they are extinct . . . or have gone away. It is a multispecies dig, quite a vast project, in fact, and—”

  “And Captain April is supposed to break ground with the Golden Shovel,” Kirk murmured.

  Spock’s brows gathered like two fireplace pokers falling together. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Nothing. Go on.”

  “As in most archaeology,” Spock continued fluidly, “writing is a critical link. Any recording material that survives is considered valuable. Commonality is the key. Discovery of the same language on two continents is an indication of seafaring, and on two planets is an indication of possible space travel, yet raises endemic questions. For instance, discovering Sanskrit on Mars . . . did we go there, or did they come here?”

  “We went there,” Kirk prodded, intolerant of illustrations today. “Go on.”

  Something in his voice made Spock pause, then step down to the lower level with him. The Vulcan’s posture was relaxed, as though to silently comment on the captain’s impatience, and that some things would have to be explained point by point, slowly.

  “Not everyone carves on stone,” he said. “Some people write on the backs of envelopes, or jot notes on table napkins. With the advent of computers into daily life of the average person, such things tended to lessen with time, but use of paper, as you know, has never lost its appeal and tends not to in societal cultures. This is fortunate since formal records are rare in archaeology.”

  “I know,” the captain said. “What do we have from ancient Crete? We have inventory of the king’s olives and oils and breads. We don’t have the letter the king sent to the high priest of Jupiter.”

  Spock frowned, this time for a different reason. “High priest of Jupiter, sir?”

  “It’s a joke. Move along.”

  “Yes . . . you have the essence. We have political graffiti, but we do not have Sophocles’s plays.”

  “Are you being facetious?”

  Pausing, Spock appeared to understand the accusation without understanding how anyone could possibly have any good reason to be facetious. “Not at all,” he assured Kirk. “You must understand that volumes of poetry are nearly unheard of in archaeology. Library material is simply not found. Archaeologists build their careers upon the middens of vanished peoples . . . refuse heaps . . . things in intestines of mummies. That’s why finds such as the Fabrini Lexicons or the Rosetta Stone are considered so precious.”

  “I get it,” Kirk said impatiently. “We have the scratchings about who to elect and how they were going to liberate one another from whatever religion had hold of them, and my ancestor invented the wheel but unfortunately he didn’t leave me a note. What’s your point?”

  Spock shifted and rearranged his hands behind his back. “At Faramond, the archaeologists have been working for forty-five years, and last year reported a major leap in the dig.”

  “Which was what? A shoehorn with the manufacturer’s name? The word for ‘toilet bowl’ is the same in two places? Don’t make me beg, Spock.”

  Spock stepped closer. He dropped his attempts to preface and simply blurted out what he had to say.

  “They think they have discovered a basic chemistry book,” he said. “Perhaps a children’s text.”

  Kirk paused to remember his grade school chemistry and get an idea of what might be in the book, then forced himself to sound more patient. “What does that mean to them?”

  “It means we can begin to read the language. We are now on the way to translating the language, by way of universals.”

  “Universals,” Kirk interrupted. “The laws of gravitation, physics

  —simple science?”

  “Yes, sir. Water is water, hydrogen is hydrogen. That is the key to an alien language . . . there are no metaphors for the laws of physics and chemistry. Newton’s law of gravitation cannot be described in a parable. We know this Old Culture was a spacefaring culture, and a people who can’t communicate in basic science terms can never get into space. With science, we can communicate brilliantly without a single vocalized word.”

  “So we’re on the verge of discovering what was the big attraction on a cold planet.” Kirk paced a step or two away, then back. “Always wondered myself.”

  “Yes.” Spock seemed somewhat relieved. “The planet has long been inert. Any settlers had to bring their own heat and respiration, which lessens its appeal for any kind of work. We have been baffled as to the reasons the Old Culture settled there at all, and especially how they left. There is no evidence of ships. No fuel or lubrication residue, no vessel technology, no docks, no markers for spacefaring, no maintenance facilities, and no remains of workers or farers. That has been the standing confusion of Faramond for nearly half a century. We know they departed in a single exodus, but we do not understand how. An enduring question for Federation archaeologists, Captain.”

  “I have a different question,” Kirk said, pacing again. “What happened between the discovery of that chemistry book and the Bill of Rights’ arrival? A cold planet, in a cold solar system, that had to have domes built on it before a single pick could be stuck in the ground, that wasn’t used for farming or mining, but was developed. What’s there? What’s there that caused antiproton flushback, when the only thing known to our science that causes flushback is the explosion of warp engines? I hate it, Spock . . . I hate asking myself what’s on Faramond that could’ve caused the Bill of Rights to explode. An Excelsior-class starship doesn’t . . . just explode.”

  He knew he sounded angry. He’d been through this before—the death of an entire ship, of an entire planet, or a solar system—but that didn’t make it any easier for him to swallow or even to comprehend. Not even forty-five years’ experience could sweeten that poison.

  He knew it showed on his face, and didn’t care.

  “You may have to make a bet, sir,” Spock said.

  Kirk paused, turned, and squinted. “You’re telling me to make a bet?”

  His Vulcan friend gazed at him steadily with a reassuring quiescence.

  “Yes,” he said.

  He didn’t have to say anything else.

  More than logic was at work. Hope was at work. Defiance of hazard was at work. Belief in the skills of Roth and those young people who had trained under Jim Kirk was at work. Serving with Kirk and these humans over the decades had taught Spock to do the one special thing that humans did better than anybody else in the known galaxy.

  Gamble on themselves.

  Abruptly the main bridge entryway hissed open, and something told Kirk to swing his chair and look.

  There stood a presence of glowering weight. Skinny, but glowering.

  A moment, and McCoy had brought his glower down.

  “Bones?” Kirk prodded.

  McCoy closed his eyes in illustration, shook his head, then opened the pale blue glower again. “Biggest psychological spider web I’ve stumbled into in years,” he said. “I think you’d better fill me all the way in. And at this speed, you’d better talk fast.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Forty-five years earlier . . .

&nb
sp; USS Enterprise 1701-A

  “Picking up body parts, Commander Simon!”

  “Specify! Human or what?”

  “Difficult to specify, but definitely organic tissue masses in small amounts. Some of it could be legs or arms. Also getting debris that’s nonorganic . . . hull material . . . mechanical parts, including some pieces that are clearly identifiable as Starfleet issue.”

  “How clearly, Jones?”

  There was a pause. One of those that anybody can read.

  Then . . .

  “Stake my rank on it, ma’am.”

  Lorna Simon, under any other circumstances, would have enjoyed pointing out how that wasn’t much of a testimonial coming from just an ensign, but this time there was more on her mind than a cheap joke.

  “Order battlestations,” she said.

  The bridge jumped to action at key points, and an instant later, the entire starship echoed.

  “Red alert. Red alert! All hands come to battlestations. Battlestations!”

  The starship Enterprise hovered just outside the Blue Zone, her red sensor disk washing the area down, her crew disturbed by what was coming out in the rinse.

  None more than Drake Reed, who had watched his best friend and a boy he felt he’d raised go out into this bizarre area of space only a few hours ago and was wondering if he would be able to see them come back. Now came the bad moments of imagining how long his friends had suffered—or how short a time—and if they were still suffering just out of his reach. Or if mankind should stay out of space unless there was a starship like this around them. But how many of these special ships would there ever be to go around? And not even a starship could be in ten places at once.

  He’d been through times like this with George Kirk before, but this time . . .

  “A ship! Commander! I’m picking up something just inside the Blue Zone!”

  Simon cranked her ancient frame around with notable difficulty and more than a little cantankerousness, and barked at the cub minding the science station. “Inside? Repeat that!”

  “Affirmative—inside! And intact! Moving under power, I mean!”

  “Impossible.”

  “Correction!”

  “I thought so.”

  “It’s not one ship! It’s two!”

  “You sure you’re reading that thing right, son?”

  “Clearly power-regular . . . not just debris.”

  “You’re telling me they were just pulled into that mess?”

  “It reads as the cutter and some other . . . thing. It’s just pulling them along in there.”

  “Are they docked?”

  “Appear to be docked, yes.”

  “Oh, that’s enough! Let me have a look at that.” Simon hobbled to the upper deck, peered into the submonitor, then shook her head. “I’ll be slam-dunked . . . ”

  “Tremendous interference,” Ensign Jones said, “but regular signals. I don’t know what to make of it. Maybe leakage . . . but it wasn’t just torn apart in there. I don’t know how,” he added, “but they’re still in there.”

  “Pinpoint the source.”

  “I tried. It won’t pinpoint.”

  “Hey, Trinidad. Step up here.”

  Drake spun around from his hopeless gaze at the natural terror on the main screen, the trinary and its dead zone, and knew his friends were in there and that nothing could survive in there. Reluctant to move backward instead of forward, even though that made no sense at all, he did as he was bade and joined Lorna Simon on the quarterdeck. He felt the sensor readout making odd lights on his tawny complexion.

  “Madame Simon, ma’am?”

  “This loose screw George of yours.”

  “Ah . . . ”

  “Troublemaker?”

  “Oh, tut . . . not maker, per se . . . attractor, perhaps . . . handler, possibly . . . ”

  “He’s good at handling trouble?”

  “Oh, better than handling normalness, I might say! A good rascal to have on your side.”

  “Doesn’t give up at the drop of a hat?”

  “Ma’am, this George of mine doesn’t give up at the drop of an anvil.”

  “Even to finding a way to survive inside the Blue Zone?”

  Drake put a hand on his chest and said, “Commander, you ask big questions for a mere continental like moi. But I see these screens, and I see something pulsing in a place where nothing should pulse.” He hesitated, measured his chances of finishing the next sentence, then said, “George Kirk would be out here betting on us with all his credits if the situation were backward.”

  The weathered woman glared at him for a long count to see if he would back down in his faith, and he didn’t.

  She nodded once, then stepped down to the command arena.

  “Here’s what we do,” she said as she settled back into the command chair as though she’d been there for decades. Which she had. “Channel as much of the warp-drive power as you can through the tractor beam.”

  “Warp drive?” Isaac Soulian raised his head from the science station. “You want us to reroute it?”

  “Engineering’ll know how. Get Marvick on it.”

  Ensign Jones gave her the kind of look nobody should ever give an officer. “Just ask the circuits to do something they weren’t made to do?”

  She cast him a glance. “We’re not under drive, are we?”

  “No, Commander—”

  “Then use the power for something else. Just do it, son, they’ll figure it out downstairs. I want the strongest possible traction with the best possible beam integrity.”

  “Yes, ma’am . . . ”

  “I want you to start ‘plucking’ at the Blue Zone.” She used her craggy old hand to pick at the air as an example, although their faces said they all had the idea. “See if you can . . . grab anything.”

  “Florida! What’ve you got?”

  “We’ve got a one-way ticket, sir,” Carlos said as he joined George Kirk in an isolated corridor. They were both scouting ahead while Captain April stayed behind with their injured Veronica. “Our ship reads as falling apart. What I wouldn’t give for a ten-second glance into the formula for these shields—”

  “What about the recon?”

  “The what?”

  “Reconnaissance. Looking around in here. What’ve we got here?”

  “Half the compartments on this ship are open to space, so they’re blocked off. We’ll have to find our way around indirectly. It’s a pretty sizable ship, but it’s all battered up. We’ll have to be careful . . . not open any locked panels or hatches. A lot are sealing off ruptured areas.”

  “We also have to be careful not to damage the ship itself too much. Hurt these shields, and we’re all dead.”

  “Oh—that’s true . . . and also they know their way around, but we don’t. Those are our disadvantages.”

  “And no hand weapons.”

  “Oh . . . right. Sorry, Mr. Kirk. I’m just not used to this kind of thing.”

  “After serving with a luck-buster like me? Sure you are.”

  Carlos smiled, shrugged, and turned a little red at the reminder that his only forays into near-death had been at George Kirk’s side.

  “Here’s how it goes,” George told him. “I scout ahead about fifty yards at a time. You come next, and fifty yards later, Robert’ll do his best with our little girl. Got it?”

  “Got it, sir. You can count on me.”

  “Let’s get the captain and the girl, and find my son, and get our behinds out of here.”

  “Fine. I admit it. There’s a starship coming after you. You’re sunk. Starfleet’s coming after you now.”

  “What do you know about it?” Roy snapped at his prisoner’s relentless picking as he prodded Jim Kirk to walk in front of him through the ship.

  Why did the ship seem so empty? And it was too quiet for a full ship with a lot going on. The damage was obvious, but where were all the men? Where were all the white and black and brown and blue and mottled faces he usually found
handy to cuss out?

  “I don’t have to listen to you,” he said to his only company, grabbing for a moment’s assurance. “You’re going to be dead and I’m going to still be alive.”

  They stepped over two badly burned bodies. Roy tried not to be affected by the bodies, though he was noticing there were fewer and fewer of the crew visible in the corridors. Where was everybody?

  “No,” Jim Kirk tossed over his shoulder, “not this time. You’ve blown it this time. You attacked a Starfleet research cutter. You got caught—you’re in the brig or dead. And there’s not any border patrol coming after you. There’s a starship. They won’t buy guesses about ships getting lost or sucked into the trinary. They know a Starfleet crew doesn’t just ‘get lost.’ What can a pack of racketeers do about it? You’re thieves. You’re nothing but pirates.”

  “We’re not pirates!”

  “Why not? Because you don’t call yourselves that? You only do everything pirates do. Sorry. My mistake.”

  “We’re Vikings.”

  “And murderers. You justify your actions by convincing yourselves that your victims deserve what they get. You’re smugglers. Hoods.”

  “Leave me alone! Or I’ll take my father’s suggestion!”

  Roy’s shout stabbed through the barren, smelly corridor as he forced Jimmy to walk. Jimmy did as he was bade, walked where he was told, climbed whichever ladders were put before him, stood aside and worked at the tough vinyl bindings on his wrists when Roy had to stop and fix something, but he wouldn’t shut up. He wouldn’t quit picking at the malignance he’d seen between Roy and the others on this ship. Unlike those moments on board the Enterprise or the cutter, here he knew what to do. These people were people he understood—too well, he was ashamed to realize. These were what he had been headed toward becoming until a few short hours ago.

  He could still get out of it, and get his father and his friends out of it with whole skins. To do that, the one to watch, the one to manipulate, would be Roy Moss.