Best Destiny

by Diane Carey

  “Robert,” he began.

  “Yes, George?” Robert responded with monklike calmness.

  “I’m going to go on ahead.”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  “Can you hold out here?”

  Robert looked up at him, pale and gathering all the will he had left. He glanced at Carlos in a comradely manner, then back at George.

  “We’ll do whatever is necessary,” he assured him. “You go take charge and find your son.”

  “Where is everybody?”

  Roy ground out his words while pulling at a drawer of circuitry in the corridor wall.

  The circuitry was dead, the intercom didn’t work, the sensors didn’t work, a good seventy percent of the doors didn’t even open anymore in the passages leading to the bridge.

  Off to one side, just out of kicking distance, Jimmy clamped his lips shut, rubbed his hands to keep the blood circulating in spite of his bindings, and didn’t respond. The ship did seem peculiarly, eerily, empty. The crew was missing, communication was down, everything was down except those special shields.

  “What are your people doing?” Roy demanded. “Do you know what they’ve done? Do they have a plan? Do they follow a policy? If you tell it to me, it may help keep us all alive.”

  Bobbing him a glance, Jimmy shrugged. “How should I know? I’m just a kid. Besides, how can a few Starfleet gorillas compete with an intellect like yours? You know . . . Darwin would understand.”

  Roy actually growled at him, teeth locked and nose wrinkled, and threatened him with the stunner.

  Jimmy had been proud of himself for one or two good jabs, and here was his father in eight places at once. His father and Captain April—he tried to imagine Captain April clunking somebody on the head, and just couldn’t see it. Robert April would sit them down and give them a good talking-to, and the guys would feel guilty and give themselves up.

  Then George Kirk would hit ’em.

  A main insulator door opened before them and they went into the upper level of the ship, and came around a corner to a horrid sound of pounding and banging, easily traced to a torn-up section of corridor wall. There, right on the wall, a line of locker-type doors were rattling, which they traced down to one particular locker.

  “Stand back,” Roy ordered, gesturing Jimmy well out of kicking range. Keeping one eye on his captive, his “personal shield,” he traced the banging to what could have been a locker or a control panel with a hinged door.

  Whatever it was, the door was ajar and somebody was in there, rattling like crazy and trying to get out. Roy grabbed the door and tried to pull it open, but only the top quarter would budge.

  “Open it!” a voice roared from inside.

  “Munkwhite?” Roy attempted. “Is that you?”

  “Get me out! Get me out of this hole!”

  “It won’t open.”

  “Open it!”

  “Would you like me to spell ‘won’t’? It’s jammed. Who did this?”

  “Those Starfleeters! They’re here! They jumped me! Just get it open!”

  Roy rattled the door halfheartedly, obviously thinking more of himself and the fact that several Starfleet people were loose on his ship, then gave it a final kick and said, “Well, it’s your tough luck for being stupid.” He turned to Jimmy again. “Come on, you. Let’s make hay while the sun shines.”

  Nervous and ready to use his stunner, he yanked Jimmy in front of him again and off they went, with Munkwhite hammering away in the background almost until they reached the bridge itself.

  There, Lou Caskie was alone, wide-eyed, frozen with pure terror. He looked twenty years older—and he was already old—and on the ravaged bridge, with chunks of machinery the size of sofas and chairs collapsed across almost any sensible path. What Roy had inherited was a miserable ruin now, a hulk of hissing parts and spitting leaks, and one old man who was panicking.

  “What’s left?” Roy called over the crackles and noise.

  “Where’s your father!” Caskie shrieked, his voice snagging. “We’re gonna get killed in here! We’re gonna die like rats!”

  “Where’s the rest of the crew?”

  “I don’t know! Nobody answers! The sensors don’t work anymore! Intercom’s down! Crew don’t answer! They’re all dead!”

  “They’re not dead,” Roy droned, climbing over a big chunk of junk and going down to the bridge center. “But they’re going to be.” He gestured to Jimmy. “You—get down here too. Stand over there where I can see you. What are your friends doing? You tell me!”

  “How should I know? Just a kid, remember?” Though he did as he was told, Jimmy had no cooperation in his voice when he taunted, “Ship sure is quiet, isn’t it?”

  “Shut up! You shut up!”

  “What’re you gonna do?”

  “I’m going to play my last card, smart-ass. I’m going to turn off the heat everywhere but right here.”

  Jimmy felt the cockiness drop from his face. “You can’t!”

  “They’ll all freeze,” Roy said with flaming satisfaction. “And we’ll have Starfleetsicles.”

  “Keep talking,” Jimmy antagonized. “Sooner or later you’ll believe yourself.”

  Enraged, Roy turned on him and started closing the space between them, using his nasty little nerve-stunner to bridge the gap.

  “I’ve had it with you!” he grated. “I don’t need you anymore. This’ll shut you up!”

  From behind them—

  “Stop right there, bud.”

  Jimmy thought it was his own voice, but he and Roy turned at the same instant and found themselves staring down a laser pistol barrel and over that toward one of the engineering crawlway openings—

  At George Kirk.

  Clamping his lips, Jimmy had a flash-thought about not giving away his dad’s disadvantage—the fact that the kid was his kid—but from a low point behind the crawlway Lou Caskie appeared on the other side of the bridge, brandishing a sharp piece of metal.

  Without even thinking, Jimmy shouted, “Dad, behind you!”

  His father reacted almost as spontaneously by putting his foot in Caskie’s face. Clearly, that’s how he had been explaining his way through the ship. An instant later, the old man was out of the picture.

  But while George Kirk was occupied with Caskie, Roy wasn’t standing idle.

  He dove for a panel and put his hand under it—the shield controls—

  “You can’t fire that faster than I can move my finger!” he shouted, trembling. “You can kill me, but not before I turn off the deflectors and we’re all dead! You can’t put me down fast enough! You can’t!”

  He was right.

  “You’ll die! Your son’ll die! Your friends’ll die! I’ll do it! I’ll do it! Give it to me!”

  “All right!” George barked.

  “No!” Jimmy interrupted. “Don’t do it, Dad. He’ll kill us anyway. That’s the way he is.” With a dissecting glare at Roy he added, “We can’t let him win. You were right. This shouldn’t happen to anybody else. Better we all die here.”

  His father straightened and stared at him. “No kidding?”

  Jimmy offered a duelist’s nod. “You bet no kidding.”

  “Shut up! Shut up! I’ll do it!” Roy howled.

  With eyes made of smoke, Jimmy took a step toward Roy. “Then do it. What’s taking so long?”

  On the upper deck, separated from the two boys by a huge chunk of collapsed machinery that he would never be able to get over in time, Jim’s father said, “No!”

  Jimmy stopped and looked at him with a “but” in his eyes.

  “Back down, Jim,” George said firmly.

  Roy crouched there with his finger on the switch, watching the two Kirks and trembling so hard his teeth clattered.

  Broiling, Jimmy felt a hundred arguments rise inside him. He wanted to be defiant, but somehow defiance didn’t fit the bill anymore. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t right.

  Both hands out in a subservient posture, G
eorge lifted the hand laser’s barrel a few inches, raising the aim off Roy, then stepped forward just enough to lower the weapon and set it on the chunk of machinery.

  “Get it,” Roy snapped, and waved at Jimmy. “Pick it up by the barrel and hand it to me.”

  “Get it yourself, chicken,” Jimmy snarled. “I got my pride.”

  “You get it for me or I’ll do this, I swear I’ll do this!”

  “Jim,” George said steadily, “do what he says.”

  Perplexed, Jimmy frowned.

  “Do what he says,” George repeated.

  He connected looks with his son in a manner so honest and so private that both felt the magnetism.

  Jim said, “He won’t do it, Dad. He won’t kill himself.”

  On the upper deck, measuring his options in inches, George Kirk studied his son’s face. There was a certain quiet communication going on between the two of them that hadn’t been there in years—and he was sure he wasn’t imagining it. He could see just looking at Jimmy that there had been a change. Jimmy had a look of confidence—confidence in him.

  Slowly George added, “Orders.”

  Without understanding why, without waiting until he saw the reason, Jimmy simply said, “Yes, sir,” and followed an order that he disagreed with.

  With a winning smirk on his face about having somehow pulled his tail out of the fire again, Roy Moss was closing his white, cold hand around the laser. He licked his lips, stood up, and aimed the weapon squarely at Jimmy’s head.

  Roy was knotted from head to toe, keyed-up and nervous, excited, scared, and elated to the point of giddiness that he’d won, and he had to rub their noses in it.

  “I knew you couldn’t beat me! Nobody beats me. You thought you had me. I know you did. People think that all the time about me, and they’re always wrong. Now everything’s going to be mine and you’re just going to be dead. You should’ve listened to your son, Mr. Kirk,” he said. “Now you can watch him burn.”

  The weapon leveled at Jimmy’s head, and Roy squeezed the molded firing handle.

  Jimmy didn’t wince. He was ready for any scenario, and his trust in his father was riding an all-time high. If he had to catch a laser beam in his teeth, he’d do it just to make the point. He’d learned.

  Ffffssssst . . .

  The weapon whimpered.

  Horror dawned on Roy’s face that he’d been gulled into taking a useless weapon, that he’d been made a laughingstock—the one thing he couldn’t stand. Being suckered by ordinary idiots was too much.

  He had barely realized the weapon wasn’t working when he heard Jim Kirk’s father let out a yell.

  Abruptly the whole ship was yanked sideways—everyone, everything, was thrown. The Kirks hit the same wall at the same time, and Roy turned, saw something flying at him—and part of the collapsed ceiling glanced off his chest and knocked him sideways.

  Though Jimmy was pressed against the bulkhead by gravity and by shock, George had the advantage of knowing what was happening to their ship. He thrust himself against the whining new gravity and got his hands on Roy, and threw him as hard as he could.

  George Kirk’s attack drove Roy toward his shield controls. With a shout of pure, incredulous fury, Roy dove for the panel that controlled his shields again, but that card had been played and the Kirks weren’t going to let him table it a second time. This time Jimmy had an extra second in his own favor and used it for a headlong plunge, tied hands joined in a hammer.

  He knocked Roy to one side, then tackled him and laid him out flat. They ended up lengthwise on the littered deck, pressed against the bulkhead, George Kirk knee-down on Roy’s spine, coiling the boy’s hands with a discarded length of insulation tape—

  Then George grabbed for leverage and shouted, “Hang on, Jim! Hang on!”

  “What is it!” Jimmy yelled over the whine. “What’s happening to us?”

  “You know what it is, pal! It’s a starship!”

  THIRTY-ONE

  “Ah, here’s our Artful Dodger even as we tickle his ears.”

  Robert April’s charming voice took the entire hospital deck of the starship Enterprise and somehow made it a stage play, complete with popcorn and curtain calls.

  The popcorn smell came from the eight or ten different medications being pumped into what was left of Veronica Hall’s body as she lay on a complete life support diagnostic bed. The curtains—they were everywhere, blue and white, some for sterility, some for privacy. All for Veronica.

  “Sir,” Jimmy began as he limped to where the captain sat in his best British visiting position. “You all right?”

  Captain April wore a sling on one arm and a notable bandage on the other forearm, which made Jimmy remember the condition April had been in when they’d last seen each other.

  And that voice, which could make any situation a poem.

  “I’m quite fine, my boy, thank you,” the captain said. “How are you doing?”

  “Bad leg and about forty bruises,” Jimmy said. “One cracked rib.”

  April nodded. “You must be disenchanted such that we’ll never entice you back toward the service. Twice in space, and twice attacked. However will we convince you to stay?”

  Jimmy dropped him an aweless look and grinned. Somehow he felt on more equal footing than he ever had before with this man. “What’s the big deal about making me stay?”

  Robert smiled. “Oh, let’s just say there’s a certain martial tradition I see fledging in the Kirk nest . . . a rare muster of those who will stand on a volcano if tactics beckon . . . hmm?”

  “Hmm,” Jimmy grunted back. “How’s Mr. Florida?”

  “Carlos? A bit stretched in the pinfeathers, but we’re all here, Jimmy, we’re all here . . . not without due commendation to you.”

  Jimmy found himself blushing, and turned to Veronica. “Can I talk to her?”

  “She’s been waiting for you,” the captain said civilly. “Then I’ll take you to your father.”

  He approached the diagnostic maze with the cold fear of those who still have all their limbs. It was like suddenly joining a silent guilt society.

  The girl’s skin was glazed white—from the inside or outside, he couldn’t tell—and made him think of the girls he’d been drawn to before, in better situations, and the moon under which he’d been drawn to them. Every vein that could be reached in her body was attached to a tube, a tape, or a bag. Her right arm and leg were missing, those arteries and sterilities taken care of artificially. Everything looked blue. Her skin, her curtains, her hair, her eyes as she blinked at him—

  He flinched. It was like having a corpse blink at him.

  “Hey, crackerjack,” she murmured.

  Wasn’t much of a voice. He just hadn’t expected to be talking to her.

  Veronica smiled a tiny little smile. “Heard you used some top-notch stopgaps when you got on board their ship.”

  “Bet you can’t say that twice,” Jimmy said. “Bet I can’t either.”

  “Just old-fashioned,” she said. She stopped to swallow, and her eggshell cheeks grew more hollow. “Captain April always talks about old-fashioned ways getting us through . . . guess he’s right.”

  “Yeah, I guess he is,” Jimmy uttered. “How do you feel?”

  She seemed to think the question was funny. “You mean with one less arm and one less leg? I feel okay, considering . . . I’m alive, aren’t I? Lucky to be here. That’s the bottom line . . . don’t worry, Jimmy, they’ll fix me. . . . Starfleet knows how to fix anything . . . the big bird pulled us out, after all, right?”

  “The Enterprise, right,” he said quietly.

  “Jimmy, you did great. Captain told me what you did . . . how you didn’t let them take you easy . . . thanks for giving me a chance to live.”

  A grilling guilt overwhelmed Jimmy as he frowned at the reflection of himself in her respirator. Bad enough he felt this way because she was lying there after saving his clumsy life—bad enough he’d blundered his way to somehow get
ting out of this—but here she was, thanking him. Thanking him. He was getting glory in a cheap way. He was getting it through those who had done the real giving.

  Touching what was left of Veronica—hopefully a wrist and not just a main umbilical—he scooted a little nearer.

  “Veronica,” he began, “it wasn’t me who was the hero. Look at you. You’re the one who sacrificed. You’re the one who really gave.”

  “But I couldn’t be here to talk about it,” she whispered, “if not for you . . . I know . . . they told me everything . . . solves a lot of questions about this area . . . now we can clear up the Interstellar Maritime Laws for this area and rules of the road . . . rights to search . . . ”

  “What?” Jimmy leaned over her and tried to find the focus of her eyes.

  “Signal a merchantman to lay to . . . leakage and breakage . . . apply the negligence clause . . . according to the Interstellar Code of Signals . . . two intermittents . . . ”

  “Veronica?” Jimmy stood up and leaned closer, but there was a hand on his shoulder, drawing him back.

  “She’s dreaming, Jim,” Captain April said. “She’s taking her Academy tests over again. Let’s leave her alone to study, shall we?”

  Jimmy straightened, and sought comfort in the captain’s gentle face. “She won’t have to, will she? In spite of . . . ? She’ll still be in Starfleet, right?”

  Robert April’s soft features turned into that pondside smile he gave when he needed to be believed on an extraordinary level. He slipped his good arm around Jimmy Kirk’s shoulders and walked the boy toward the intensive care door.

  “Starfleet never abandons its own. Once commissioned, always commissioned. All rights and privileges ascertaining thereto . . . no matter how much of the dirty side that person may carry, and indeed sometimes because of it.”

  “Sir . . . you lost me,” Jimmy said. “You might have to put that one in English. I mean—American English.”

  April smiled, sought help at the ceiling, then drew a long, contemplative breath.

  “Trapped me,” he murmured. Hanging a hand on Jimmy, he said, “You survived because you have a bit of the dirt in your soul that let you understand those men.”