Best Destiny

by Diane Carey

  As Moss crumpled, he let the communicator fall out of his hand and into Jim Kirk’s expectant grip.

  The dirt was still in him, and he was taking Robert April’s advice. He brought out the gangster to understand the gangster, and he knew Roy Moss didn’t have a Starfleet oath in his soul—the oath to sacrifice himself for anything, or anyone, or any dream.

  With Moss hunched at his ankles, Jim Kirk flipped the communicator upward.

  “Kirk to Bill of Rights. Four to beam up, priority one!”

  THIRTY-SIX

  The three from the Enterprise burst onto the bridge of the class of starship that was going to make everything they had known obsolete—the Excelsior-class starship Bill of Rights.

  Behind them, two beefy, armed, and mean Security men in helmets hauled the shackled man who had insisted he was going to make even this ship obsolete.

  Going hand over hand along the starboard side of the rocking vessel, Spock invited himself to the science station to peer over the shoulder of Bill of Rights’ science officer, but kept his hands to himself. McCoy stayed to one side also on the upper deck, but was chewing on some crack about who was going to make what obsolete.

  Captain Alma Roth swung around in her command chair, her dry brown hair flying in three directions, and she looked like she’d just gotten up after a bad night’s sleep. Instantly she found the face of the man she wanted to talk to.

  “The ship is completely drained, sir! Transporting you took the last of our batteries,” she said as Jim Kirk stepped down to her side. “We’re being pummeled by power surges and massive waves of radiation! There are indications of imminent antimatter detonation inside that planet in roughly eight minutes! It’ll tear us apart and—”

  She stepped very close to him and grasped his sleeve.

  “I really don’t know what to do,” she whispered. “I really don’t.”

  He gazed into her pale face, noted that she suddenly looked a lot older than thirty-seven, and evenly told her, “It takes guts to admit that. Give yourself credit.”

  “They promoted me too fast, sir,” she said. “Do you want me to admit that too, in front of my crew? I should have, and long before something like this.”

  Kirk scowled and grinned at the same time. “Alma, I’m surprised at you. What do you take us old fogies for? Think we’d give a ship to someone just because we’re tired of making decisions ourselves? Look me in the eye and say, ‘No, Jim.’”

  She sucked in a shuddering breath and through her teeth she actually laughed and said, “I can’t call you Jim!”

  “Have you got a fix on the Enterprise? They’re not drained yet.”

  From behind, Roy Moss said, “Like hell it isn’t drained.”

  “Shut up,” one Security guard snapped, and tightened the shackles on Moss’s arms just to prove who was in charge.

  Kirk glanced back, but resolutely stayed with his conversation with Roth. He’d already been informed they only had eight minutes, and he needed one of those to explain.

  “Is the dampening field gone?” he asked, raising his voice but trying to keep from shouting in spite of the alarms whooping and the ship shaking. He crossed in front of Roth to squint at the diagnostics on the starboard side.

  “Yes!” Roth said, following him. “But the ship’s power is down and we can’t regenerate under this bombardment of radiation! According to my engineers, it’s compromising our own intermix stability ratios!”

  “All right.” He turned to her, one hand on the bridge rail. “Use your impulse reserves just enough to turn the ship toward Enterprise as she moves in.” He looked up at the science officer and asked, “Is Enterprise any closer than she was an hour ago?”

  “Aye, sir!” the officer said. “She’s within two hundred fifty thousand solar miles!”

  “Puffed in on that twelve percent,” Kirk thought aloud. “Close enough for shield extension in less than thirty thousand miles—”

  “Sir,” Roth began. She dug her fingernails into his sleeve, and this wasn’t the grip of a person who wanted to give up. “I don’t understand.”

  The statement was perfectly clear. No argument, no panic, no demands.

  Kirk whirled around. “Spock! Explain to the captain.”

  Spock was already dropping to the central deck behind Roth’s command chair. “Enterprise can make her shields specific to the electromagnetic resonance of the planetary radiation waves and extend the shield to protect Bill of Rights—”

  “And keep us stable enough to regenerate?” Roth interrupted.

  “Yes,” Spock said simply.

  Kirk confronted Roth again. “Enterprise needs thirty minutes to regenerate. What’ve you got?”

  Roth panted a few times, desperate and excited, and her eyes got wide in what could almost have been conspiracy. “Bill of Rights only needs five minutes! Enterprise can shield us from the radiation, then we can pull Enterprise away before the planet explodes! Captain Kirk! You have the conn!”

  She gestured him with both hands to her command chair, and actually stepped out of his way.

  But he shook his head and spoke quietly in spite of the Klaxons and the flashing and the running.

  “I don’t need the conn, Captain. Mr. Scott on Enterprise knows what we need. Just wheel Bill of Rights around into that shield envelope and take it one step at a time. After all, you’ve got almost five minutes.”

  Reinvigorated as a plebe, Roth drew her shoulders tight and spun to her left. “Lieutenant DesRosiers! Digest and calculate!”

  “Aye, Captain! Minimal impulse on line! Turning toward Enterprise!”

  A hum of effort rose through the ship, and with it a lance of hope went through everyone there, piercing what Kirk recognized as that crew sensation that the ship might be sinking and their next moves might be their last and most desperate, nervously expecting the abandon-ship to be the next order.

  Suddenly all that changed. Alma Roth grabbed tight hold on the idea that the time-hardened Enterprise and her technical eccentrici ties and the new-age Bill of Rights could combine their skills and gamesmanship and yank both out of a maelstrom even as it bit at them from beneath.

  Within fifty seconds the ship jolted.

  “Mr. Scott on Enterprise advises we are in their shielding envelope!” DesRosiers shouted over the red alert whooping in their ears.

  “Shields are around us, Captain Roth!” the science officer shouted. “We’re stabilizing!”

  “Intermix!” Roth ordered, smashing back a handful of flying brown hair. She even found an instant in her gasping and ordering to throw Kirk a wild-eyed grin. Then she flung herself to the port side, grabbed the bridge rail, and shouted at DesRosiers, “Prepare tractor beams for immediate lock-on as soon as we’re hot!”

  “Aye, aye, intermix formula calculating. Traction on line!”

  Kirk backed off a few feet to let the process happen. Somehow he managed not to blow everybody’s flush by crossing his fingers.

  As Roth barked orders to her crew and relayed cooperations back and forth from engineering and from communications with the Enterprise, Kirk stepped to the upper deck, jabbed a thumb at the two Security men to stand aside, and moved in on Roy Moss. He grabbed Moss with both fists and forced him to look at the forward screen, at the planet that was burning up from inside out.

  He felt his own eyes like scorched nuggets in his head.

  “Look at it!” he said through his teeth. He took Roy’s collar and choked him until he looked. “A hundred thousand years of culture and technology, and we’re losing it! All because of you. For generations after we’re all dead, Roy Moss will be equated with stupidity. The one who lost Faramond for us and everything it could have taught us. You got what you wanted, Roy. You’re going to be famous. Humiliated before the known galaxy. Your name will go down in history as the biggest buffoon of all time.”

  At first he thought his words weren’t getting anywhere, just as no one’s words had gotten anywhere with Roy Moss—


  Until he felt the quiver at the ends of his hands. The shudder.

  He looked from the screen to Moss, and found himself holding a red-faced, weeping old man.

  Dampened and brought to bay this time not by a fist but by facts, Moss slipped back against the consoles, and Kirk let him go. Moss could swallow anything but humiliation, and Kirk had given him a mouthful.

  The Security guards closed in again as Kirk moved away, but there was no protest from the quivering, gurgling, whimpering mess that once had threatened them all.

  Kirk found himself near the turbolift, beside McCoy.

  He blinked at the doctor. “You were right. It was revenge,” he said.

  McCoy nodded, not quite as flippantly as usual.

  “I liked it,” Kirk added.

  Any smug responses were cast aside as a force grabbed the ship and threw everybody grasping for handholds.

  When the warp engines came back on line, they all felt it. The ship whined and hummed beneath them, and the bridge flashed like firecrackers, and howled with warning whistles and alarms as if she were some great locomotive ready to haul a record line of cars, and Roth’s crew scrambled at their emergency stations.

  “Compensators!” Roth was calling, on line to her chief engineer. “Implement traction on the Enterprise, and let’s get both ships away from that planet!”

  Kirk grabbed for McCoy as the doctor stumbled when the countertractors activated, then the three of them retreated even farther into the turbolift vestibule to stay out of the way.

  All this time the captain’s string had been pulling on him like a long, quiet noose. Now it would be the other way. The string would reach from the past, from Enterprise to Enterprise, to keep all ships and all who sailed them alive.

  “Look at them, Spock . . . Bones,” Kirk said. “I’ve been talking about retirement as though it’s all over. As though I’ve done it all. And I haven’t done anything close to all. We’re all young—so’s the human race,” he added. “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to keep on going.”

  At his side, Spock was gazing at him but remaining appropriately silent, and Kirk knew what that meant.

  At his other side, Leonard McCoy clung insectishly to a hand hold and grumbled, “I knew you were gonna say that, I just knew it. Now Scotty’s got to sell his boat and I’ve gotta send back the firewood I just had delivered to my cabin, and Spock’ll have to starch his backup uniform—you know what a problem you are? Lewis and Clark and Kirk—”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Forty-five years earlier . . .

  Officers’ Lounge, Starbase One

  Fingers were funny things. Open ’em, close ’em, imitate ’em with prosthetics . . . lose ’em altogether . . .

  Boot heels caught in the struts, Jimmy lazily sat on a turning stool in front of the big viewport at Starbase One. Beside him, the beauty of Earth was settled like quartz in the soil of space. From their orbit he could look up from appreciating his fingers and appreciate the Northern Hemisphere, the wide United States, and even thought he could see the Skunk River, and the rope bridge if he squinted. Yep, there she was, hanging like wet laundry.

  He rubbed his sore knuckles with which he had cashiered Roy, and almost let in a flicker of self-pity, but then thought about Veronica and flushed the self-anything.

  The door panel brushed open behind him, and he cranked the stool around enough to see the carrot-red hair, the ruddy cheeks, and the other reds and blacks of his father and the Security uniform that so ideally blended with George Kirk’s personality.

  Neither of them said anything.

  George was petrified. He inhaled nervously several times before he could even remember to exhale. The officers’ lounge wasn’t very big, and it was completely empty except for them, because this was the weekend and everybody was planetside.

  George took the long, long way around to getting anywhere near his son.

  His boy was looking at him, at least. Well, that was something.

  He steeled himself for the inaccessibility that had been lurking under the freckles just days before, and the wall behind which his son had withdrawn, the sun of sociability, and the mean falcon’s glare from that apricot face.

  There was still a touch of unripe, inharmonic youth, a stroke of skepticism groping for something to disbelieve—

  Or was it the shadows in here?

  Jimmy just sat there on the stool, his muscular shoulders hunched and his hands folded, legs kinked up on the supports of the stool, and waited.

  “Don’t know what to say,” his father mumbled. “I was hoping I could give you a perfect . . . y’know . . . perfect voyage.”

  Jimmy nodded. His dad was very nervous. Funny, but he’d never noticed that his dad could be nervous before. Just hadn’t ever seen it. Maybe he just hadn’t ever looked. He’d seen a lot of things in the past few hours that he’d never looked at before.

  For an instant he was back in the airlock, about to be launched on a desperate journey, the last breath of the living. In his head rang the things he was going to say, the awkward apologies, the painful confessions, all the things that had pushed at his lips while he sat on the needles of loss only hours ago.

  Would his dad be embarrassed if those words were spoken now?

  There must be a better way to say those things than blurting them out like a bad commercial. Some better way than words. There would be time, Jimmy thought, and a better way.

  Maybe he’d look around for that too. A way to talk without talking too much.

  After a few seconds of fidgeting from his father, Jimmy offered a shrug, then pursed his lips. He gazed at his father, and made his own eyes shine with the ancient Rosetta trinary, the human confidence of Starbase One, and the snow-white sorcery of a starship.

  And as he gazed, his eyes told about the bloody cry for help scrawled on a piece of metal, and about a boy’s last good-bye, this time to himself as a boy.

  Jimmy wanted all those to be in his eyes for his father to see. He refused to look away, or down, or at anything other than his dad’s eyes, because this time the message knew where it was meant to go.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said soothingly. “Perfection stinks.”

  George gaped, blinked, shook his head, then tried to talk again and failed.

  After a few bad seconds he managed to say, “I know I’ve let the years slip away . . . guess there’s no way now to convince you space is worth seeing. Sure don’t blame you . . . and I, uh, I want you to know I’m done.”

  Jimmy looked sidelong at him. “Done?”

  “Y’know—done . . . sticking my nose in and trying to change your mind. I’m done with that.”

  George anticipated a typhoon by squinting into what he thought might be the first wind, but nothing came. Jimmy just sat there, swinging idly back and forth a few inches, hands clasped.

  His son nodded. “Thanks.”

  A message was just getting through George’s hard hide that he’d underreckoned his boy again. Maybe Robert was right . . . Robert had been impressed all along by the fire and underlying survival instinct of Jimmy Kirk.

  Time for me to be impressed too, George thought. Late with everything.

  He cleared his throat and paced sheepishly around the clean deep-plum carpet, thankful that he had something freshly vacuumed to stare down at instead of his own feet.

  “Your mom and I always accused you of running away from everything,” he said sullenly. “We didn’t understand.”

  He cranked on his throat muscles until he managed to look up at Jimmy. A man should have the guts to look up at a moment like this.

  “You were running to something,” he finished.

  Moved by his father’s confession, Jimmy thought back on the quiet gallantry of sacrifice from his father, Captain April, Veronica Hall, and Carlos Florida, who were willing to save him while giving up their own lives to a purpose. He’d found out how critical it was to do a job and just do a job. On board a ship, no matter how menial a
job was, if it didn’t get done by the person assigned to it, then somebody else would have to do it. Nothing could just go undone. Nothing could go judged by the doer.

  His dad was still looking up. “I’m sorry for not understanding,” he said.

  Jimmy raised his shoulders, then let them drop. “No problem. But there’s something I’m going to tell you.”

  “Anything. Go ahead.”

  “I’m not going into the pre-Academy program at high school.”

  His dad licked his lips, shrugged sadly, looked down again, and groped, “Can’t . . . say I blame you.”

  “I’m going directly into the Academy itself.”

  The astonishment in those ruddy cheeks and dark eyes was like getting a medal all by itself.

  Jimmy liked the feeling of causing surprise to pepper that face. Wanted it again.

  “Wha—what?” his dad gasped.

  “I want to go right into the Academy. Captain April said he could arrange it, so I’m going to let him. I promised I could get my grades up and stay out of trouble. That’s the deal. I’m going to do it.”

  “But—but—but I thought—I thought—”

  “Well,” Jimmy popped off, “we can’t let criminals like the Mosses think they can just have their way out there, can we?”

  “No, no, no . . . we . . . uh . . . no, sure can’t . . . but, uh, Jim, not everybody gets in, you know . . . I never did . . . ”

  “Dad,” Jimmy said, and slipped off the stool to stand before his father with the big viewport as his backdrop and all of Earth as his mantle. “I’m going to the Academy.”

  George tried to take a step, but his legs locked. He might prick something. Break the bubble. What was he seeing in front of him?

  Who was he seeing?

  Terrified he might blunder what was happening, he stammered, “You, uh . . . you’ll have to give up your . . . your . . . ”

  “My gang?” Jimmy slid off the stool and moved forward, coming toward his father with a confidence that didn’t include the flippant disgust that had always been there before. He was almost George’s height and much steadier.