Star Trek: The Next Generation: Starfleet Academy #8: Starfall

by Brad

  Before he became captain of the U.S.S. EnterpriseTM...

  Jean-Luc Picard has failed his entrance exam to Starfleet Academy. Now all his plans for the future are gone, and he must make the best of his life in his parents’ vineyard. Pressure from his father to become more involved in the family business and the constant fighting with his older brother, Robert, make this life difficult. Jean-Luc’s best friend, Louis, tries to cheer him up with an exciting trip, but the future captain’s dream of the stars still haunts him…

  When a chance to re-apply to the Academy arises, Jean-Luc must use all his skills to pass the challenging tests. But the greatest risk he faces is the wrath of his father.

  Will Jean-Luc turn his back on his family as he aims for the stars?

  Cover art by Catherine Huerta

  Interior Illustrations by Todd Cameron Hamilton

  It was only the third day of testing, but none of Jean-Luc’s friends were left....

  The room was made of perfectly black squares, outlined by the gold line of holoconductors. Jean-Luc Picard stood in the center and waited for the command test to begin.

  The darkness shimmered into shape and form. He was standing behind three officers in a cramped command compartment. Through the forward windows he could see the rounded nose of his ship, and beyond that a planet slowly rotated.

  “Computer, what is the name of my vessel?”

  “You are commanding the U.S.S. Ponce de Leon.”

  Jean-Luc swallowed hard. He had read about that ship weeks ago, in the Xenology library. Now he knew. He knew all too well what he was up against in this simulation.

  In 2159, the Ponce de Leon had blundered into two Romulan destroyers. What resulted was less a fight than an act of annihilation. The Ponce de Leon had been lost with all hands.

  “The simulation will begin in fifteen seconds.”

  Star Trek: The Next Generation

  STARFLEET ACADEMY

  #1 Worf’s First Adventure

  #2 Line of Fire

  #3 Survival

  #4 Capture the Flag

  #5 Atlantis Station

  #6 Mystery of the Missing Crew

  #7 Secret of the Lizard People

  #8 Starfall

  Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

  #1 The Star Ghost

  #2 Stowaways

  #3 Prisoners of Peace

  #4 The Pet

  #5 The Arcade

  #6 Field Trip

  Star Trek movie tie-in

  Star Trek Generations

  Available from MINSTREL Books

  The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book.”

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A MINSTREL PAPERBACK Original

  A Minstrel Book published by

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 1995 by Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved.

  STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of Paramount Pictures.

  This book is published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc., under exclusive license from Paramount Pictures.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN: 0-671-51010-X

  First Minstrel Books printing October 1995

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  A MINSTREL BOOK and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Cover art by Catherine Huerta

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  For Dorothy, Sheila,

  and especially David

  STARFLEET TIMELINE

  2264

  The launch of Captain James T. Kirk’s Five-year mission, U.S.S. Enterprise, NCC-1701.

  2292

  Alliance between the Klingon Empire and the Romulan Star Empire collapses.

  2293

  Colonel Worf, grandfather of Worf Rozhenko, defends Captain Kirk and Doctor McCoy at their trial for the murder of Klingon chancellor Gorkon. Khitomer Peace Conference, Klingon Empire/Federation (Star Trek VI).

  2323

  Jean-Luc Picard enters Starfleet Academy’s standard four-year program.

  2328

  The Cardassian Empire annexes the Bajoran homeworld.

  2341

  Data enters Starfleet Academy.

  2342

  Beverly Crusher (née Howard) enters Starfleet Academy Medical School, an eight-year program.

  2346

  Romulan massacre of Klingon outpost on Khitomer.

  2351

  In orbit around Bajor, the Cardassians construct a space station that they will later abandon.

  2353

  William T. Riker and Geordi La Forge enter Starfleet Academy.

  2354

  Deanna Troi enters Starfleet Academy.

  2356

  Tasha Yar enters Starfleet Academy.

  2357

  Worf Rozhenko enters Starfleet Academy.

  2363

  Captain Jean-Luc Picard assumes command of U.S.S. Enterprise, NCC-1701-D.

  2367

  Wesley Crusher enters Starfleet Academy.

  An uneasy truce is signed between the Cardassians and the Federation.

  Borg attack at Wolf 359; First Officer Lieutenant Commander Benjamin Sisko and his son, Jake, are among the survivors.

  U.S.S. Enterprise-D defeats the Borg vessel in orbit around Earth.

  2369

  Commander Benjamin Sisko assumes command of Deep Space Nine in orbit over Bajor.

  Source: Star Trek® Chronology / Michael Okuda and Denise Okuda

  CHAPTER

  1

  Jean-Luc Picard was a failure. He knew that at the very moment his computer screen blanked, with the TIME UP heading flashing at him in angry red. Around him, hopeful students sighed, groaned, or muttered. He did not dare look up. He felt his cheeks burn hot with shame.

  Around him in the large San Francisco testing center, candidates had begun to converse nervously about their chances. He did not want to hear them. He switched off the power to his computer, got up, and went into the hall. He was high up, on the top floor of the fifteen-story Starfleet Records and Testing building. The window looked out across the bay to a gleaming complex of white buildings shining in the morning sun.

  Starfleet Academy.

  Jean-Luc balled his fists in frustration. This was as close as he would ever get—

  Someone stuck his head out the door of the testing room and called, “Hey, you! Results are coming up.”

  Jean-Luc closed his eyes and took a deep breath. If only his mind had not been so preoccupied with what his father would say. If only he had gotten a decent night’s sleep instead of staying awake trying desperately to cram a little more mathematics into his weary brain. If only—

  “Are you coming?”

  He grunted and turned. The big screen in the front of the testing room had come alive, showing the candidates’ identification numbers and scores. A red line near the top of
the list separated those who had passed the test and who qualified to go on to the next from the ones who had failed.

  The ones like Jean-Luc.

  His number glowed from just below the red line. So close, and yet he had not made it. He felt like hitting someone, preferably himself.

  But the lucky ones who had passed were cheering and shaking hands. He forced a smile on his face, a smile that felt ghastly and masklike, and he extended his hand to congratulate a delirious young woman who had come in third.

  Inside, though, he was thinking already of the humiliating trip back to France, back to the vineyard, back to the open scorn of a father who despised modern machinery. A father who, from the bottom of his soul, loathed Starfleet and all it stood for.

  Jean-Luc did not know what he would say, what he would do, when he returned home tomorrow. He felt a rush of excuses—he was tired, he was worried, he was—

  No. Face it. He was, purely and simply, a failure.

  Long before Jean-Luc could see the vineyard, he could smell the young grapes. The fruity aroma was familiar to him, for he had spent all seventeen years of his life on his father’s vineyard outside the village of LaBarre in France. Once he had liked the sweet, sharp scent, but on this hot summer day it almost made him sick.

  His thoughts remained back in San Francisco, where he had spent three grinding days of testing. His stomach still felt twisted and painful, and the bitter taste of failure was still strong in his mouth.

  The young man walked slowly, his thick brown hair lank with sweat. In his mind he relived the testing period that had made all the difference. Starfleet admissions standards were high, and of course the tests were difficult. And yet—

  “I shouldn’t have failed,” Jean-Luc told himself in a voice of quiet fury. “I could do better. I can do better.”

  His heart beat faster with the humiliating memory. He scored second on most of the tests, third on a few others, before the humiliation of the advanced mathematics test and his horrible showing. Just afterward, before the candidates received appointments for the big stress test—the psychological exam that everyone dreaded—a kindly officer took him aside to tell him that his scores were just a shade too low. “Don’t feel bad,” the officer had said with an encouraging smile. “You’re only seventeen. Wait a year and try again. You’ll be surprised at how much more you’ll know then.”

  Jean-Luc clenched his teeth as he remembered the man’s bland attempt to comfort him. Wait a year! Impossible. True, the man had no way of knowing that Jean-Luc had barely won permission from his father to try just this once, but still—

  Something bounced off Jean-Luc’s head, something thrown accurately but not so hard that it hurt. He spun around, raising his fists in anger.

  “So you’re not one of the walking dead after all,” came the teasing voice of his older brother, Robert. He was sitting cross-legged atop a stone wall. He hopped down and strode toward Jean-Luc. “Oh, you’re not going to hit me. Remember, Jean-Luc, you weren’t the only one to win a medal for wrestling.” Playfully Robert lunged at him.

  Jean-Luc bounced back a step, dropped into a defensive crouch. He set his face in a stem mask of challenge. “Come and try me, Robert,” he growled, his voice almost a snarl.

  Robert raised his hands and grinned. “No, thank you very much.” He rolled his eyes heavenward and heaved a deep sigh. “This is the thanks I get for being a considerate brother. I knew you’d be plodding back home, weary with disappointment, and I came to cheer you up—”

  “By throwing rocks at me?” demanded Jean-Luc.

  With a smirk Robert held up something that looked like a little gray ball. It was a small mushroom. “Here’s your rock,” he said. “I picked these out of the moss behind the wall as you came trudging along with your head down and your gaze in the dirt. Did the great hard mushroom raise a lump, little brother?”

  Jean-Luc snorted and strode away. He heard Robert’s hurrying footsteps behind him, and a moment later he felt his brother’s hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” Robert said, and he sounded sincere. “When you called, I could tell how disappointed you were. For what it’s worth, Jean-Luc, I wish you were going to Starfleet Academy.”

  “It isn’t fair,” Jean-Luc said, his voice gruff. He was fighting the impulse to cry. “I could do better. I know I could. If only—”

  The hand on his shoulder gave him an encouraging pat. “If only our father weren’t so old-fashioned. If only you hadn’t been worrying about how he would react to your passing the tests and leaving the vineyard. I know, Jean-Luc, I know.”

  After a few seconds of silence Jean-Luc said, “It isn’t that I don’t love Father.”

  “I know that, too, little brother. But you will admit, he can make himself a hard man to love. Ah, voil#224;! The new section.”

  The Picard vineyard covered many hectares, a countryside of rolling hillsides and thickly planted grape fields separated by rows of ancient oaks. The new section had been prepared for planting only the previous fall. Jean-Luc remembered the hours of back-straining labor to break the soil, to fertilize it, to prepare the land for the precious vines. All so senseless, when machines could do in a few hours the work he, his father, his brother, and their helpers did in weeks of groaning hard labor.

  But such shortcuts were not for Maurice Picard, their proud and domineering father. Jean-Luc often thought that Maurice would have been happier in ancient times, as a vintner in fifteenth-century France, perhaps. Maurice always insisted that the old ways were the best ways, and he made sure that every step of growing grapes was done the old way.

  Jean-Luc saw him now, a distant figure, measuring the tilled hillside for the arbors he and the boys would build that fall. The vines would begin to grow next year, and in a few year’s time the new variety of Picard Rouge grape would yield its sweet juice. If everything had gone exactly right, if all the hard, hard work paid off, the juice would become a world-famous wine, just like Picard Noir. If not—well, one could always rip out the vines, rework the field, and replace the grapes with yet another variety.

  “So much left to chance,” murmured Jean-Luc. He halted, gazing off at the hillside and at his distant father.

  “Chance?” asked Robert.

  Jean-Luc shrugged and turned to walk toward the chateau. “Father hybridizes the grapes the old way. It would be so much easier to have a botanist genetically engineer a grape for whatever traits he wants. As it is, most of father’s experiments are failures.”

  “Ah, yes, the Picards and their failures.”

  Jean-Luc froze in his tracks. “What did you say?”

  “I said to get over your moping,” Robert snapped. “You promised Father that if you failed to get into Starfleet Academy, you’d drop the subject. Live up to your promise.”

  Jean-Luc did not answer. He stalked into the house, went straight to his room, and threw himself on his bed. His breath came painfully, and his throat ached from the effort not to sob. At last he sat up and looked around his familiar room. The ships in bottles, models that he had spent hours building, seemed meaningless and childish to him. Even the carefully modeled Promellian battle cruiser, the pride of his collection, looked like a stupid toy. What good were models when he wanted the real thing?

  But his father would never consent to what Jean-Luc ached to ask him. “There’s always next year,” the officer had told him. And it was true enough that with a little more study, a little more application, his scores could improve. He was almost sure that he could pass the tests if he tried again next year. But he had promised his father….

  Jean-Luc remembered all too well how he had lost sleep before the first round of testing. He remembered, too, how satisfied Maurice had been when he had called home to confess his failure. “Good,” his father had said with an air of finality. “I’m glad you have this Starfleet foolishness behind you. Now, if you want to attend a good agricultural college, I’d be happy to consider that—though they’d fill your head with all sorts of n
onsense about bioengineering and technology. Well, spend a year or two on the vineyard, and then you’ll know what you want to do.”

  Wrong, Father, thought Jean-Luc. I don’t need a year or two. I know what I want to do now. I always knew.

  I want to go to Starfleet Academy.

  If only you would understand.

  Jean-Luc felt no better that evening, when his mother called him and Robert to dinner. Yvette Picard’s voice was musical and soft, and her manner was always elegant. Jean-Luc always thought that a woman like his mother should never have to worry about preparing meals, about cleaning a house; she should have replicators and machines to do all that. But Yvette loved Maurice and wanted to please him, and so every evening she prepared a meal the old-fashioned way.

  And Jean-Luc had to admit that it was always delicious.

  He slipped into his place at the table, the place beside his brother, where he had sat ever since outgrowing his high chair. Robert was there already, as tall as Jean-Luc and a little heavier, a little more muscular. The two boys had the same dark brown hair and the same determined cast of chin, inheritances from their mother and father. Maurice came in looking weary but happy. He settled into his place, the candlelight gleaming on his balding head. He murmured a brief grace, and then Yvette brought the meal in from the kitchen.

  It was hearty fare: onion soup, thick with cheese, a green salad, coq au vin, the chicken replicated but the wine natural, and a delicate almond pastry for dessert. For a few moments they ate silently, and then Maurice looked up. “Well, now that both of our boys are here again, I have a surprise for the family,” he said, a mischievous smile playing on his lips. “Some wonderful news.”

  They looked at him expectantly, but Maurice was in no hurry to reveal his surprise. “Jean-Luc,” he said, “I know that sometimes you don’t hear me say this enough, but I am very proud of you. Captain of your debate team, champion fencer, star marathon runner, valedictorian of your class … Son, I know how hard you have tried to please me. I’d like to please you as well, and I have been thinking over the question of how to do it very carefully. At last something occurred to me.” He took a sip of wine, the Picard Noir 2315 that was in contention for this year’s Grand Prix du Soleil, an award given to the wine named the very best in the entire Solar System. “I hope it will show you how much your efforts mean to me.”