Captain's Peril

by William Shatner

  Spock seemed to think about that statement for a moment, but before he could respond, the familiar tones of a bo’s’n’s hail came from the turbolift communicator. It was followed by Lieutenant Hounslaw Tanaka’s intercraft announcement: “Captain Kirk, please report to the bridge.”

  Piper dismissing me, Kirk thought, a lieutenant ordering me to the bridge. I wonder what it would be like to be captain of this ship.

  Kirk hit the transmit control by the wall communicator. “Kirk here.”

  Tanaka answered at once in his typical crisp fashion. “Captain, we’ve just received a Code Five message from Starfleet, your eyes only.”

  Kirk instantly reactivated the turbolift. “On my way.” He grinned at Spock. In the hierarchy of Starfleet communications, a Code Five message ranked a little below a declaration of war, and a little above planetary evacuation. Any ship’s commander who received a Code Five had to immediately prepare to withdraw from any current action—even battle and humanitarian aid missions—to respond to an unexpected emergency of primary importance to the Federation.

  “Looks like we’ll have to continue this discussion another time,” Kirk said as the ’lift car resumed its ascent.

  “I shall look forward to it,” Spock said.

  Kirk surprised himself as he realized that he shared the Vulcan’s sentiments.

  Then the ’lift car’s doors parted, and Kirk stepped out into the place he was born to be.

  Chapter Six

  BAJOR, STARDATE 55595.5

  Impact.

  PICARD HEARD DUST SCREAM, felt heat flash-sear him, then saw tranquil blue sky streaked by white and distant clouds.

  He had just enough time to wonder where he was and what had happened, when he was flipped violently round and once again beheld the desert of Bajor flying past below him.

  I can’t still be falling, Picard thought with annoyance. The holodeck is obviously malfunctioning.

  And then more dust, another scream, more heat, though not as intense as before.

  He rose up into the sky a second time.

  This was no simulation. Picard knew what was happening.

  He was bouncing.

  His forcefield had come on in time, and in so doing had acted like an inertial dampener in transferring virtual Casimir particles from his falling body to the ground. It had then responded to the sudden surge in absorbed energy by expanding to a sphere at least ten meters in circumference, dumping that energy as a blast of heat without cooking the person in the center of the field.

  No, not “person,” Picard suddenly thought as once again his spherical forcefield rolled in midair like an enormous air-bag lander from the pioneering days of planetary exploration. Me! And Kirk!

  In the same instant that Picard looked frantically for Kirk, before his forcefield hit ground again, he felt the tug on his arm. Hope soaring, he twisted in his helmet, saw that his grip hadn’t failed.

  Kirk was still with him.

  But his head rolled freely and blood streamed from his nose.

  More dust.

  This time Picard realized the screaming he heard was a high-pitched static burst on his helmet speakers, corresponding to the forcefield’s sudden flash of heat.

  Picard blinked as dust again swept over him and Kirk. Closer this time, billowing now in a continuous cloud. He and Kirk must have stopped bouncing.

  A surreal image flooded his mind: Two small figures rolling across the Bajoran desert, in the center of an invisible forcefield ball, about three meters above the ground.

  Automatically, Picard made the calculation, estimating that roll would persist for at most another minute or two, until the forcefield had dissipated all the kinetic energy it had absorbed from his and Kirk’s impact. And just as he accepted the idea that he and Kirk had survived, he felt the sudden drop of zero-g and landed flat on his back, teeth slammed together, all air knocked from his lungs.

  He stared out through his faceplate into the blinding light of Bajor’s sun. And even as he struggled to breathe again, realized why he had fallen those last few meters, why his faceplate wasn’t automatically darkening.

  His suit’s batteries had finally failed, as well.

  Dark stars flickered at the sides of his vision.

  Picard fought a momentary surge of alarm as he pictured himself blacking out beneath a desert sun in a suit that no longer had a cooling system or air circulators. But like Kirk, Picard was not inclined to give in to the inevitable so easily, and even as his vision darkened and his lungs ached, he forced one gloved hand up to the release tabs at the base of his helmet, and popped his faceplate.

  That’s odd, Picard thought as he felt himself at last drift into darkness. It smells like the sea.

  A few moments later, he wondered why that should be.

  A few moments after that, he realized he wasn’t unconscious, and he was breathing again.

  With a groan, Picard rolled to the side and pushed himself into a sitting position. His jumpsuit weighed him down as if it were made of neutronium, but when he saw Kirk, lying face down in the dry dust beside him, Picard was on his feet and at Kirk’s side at once.

  He checked to make sure Kirk was indeed breathing, and only then twisted off his own helmet and released the locks on his gloves.

  “Jim! Wake up! We’re down!” Picard popped the shoulder toggles that attached his unused backpod to his suit. Even before he heard the crunch of the discarded pod striking the hard ground, he felt a full hundred kilos lighter, despite the bulkiness of the rest of his suit.

  He knelt beside Kirk to throw shade over him, patted his shoulder, trying to bring him to consciousness. Without a medical sensor, he didn’t want to risk moving his friend until he knew if Kirk was injured.

  “Jim! Wake up! I don’t plan on burying you a second time!”

  Kirk’s eyes fluttered open, stared sideways into dirt.

  “Jim? Are you conscious?”

  “I must be,” Kirk said weakly. “I don’t usually dream about being in pain.”

  “Pain is good,” Picard said with relief. “Boothby always said pain is nature’s way of telling you you’re still alive.”

  “Well…tell nature she’s made her point.”

  Picard pulled off his own chestplate. “Can you move your fingers?”

  “You mean, could I close them around Quark’s throat?”

  “Give it a try.” Picard held his breath.

  Kirk’s fingers dug into the ground, moved back and forth in an acceptable strangling motion.

  “Very good,” Picard said encouragingly. “Now try your toes.”

  Kirk’s boots scraped the dirt, and Kirk sighed. “I think I passed my diagnostic.” Then he suddenly brought his arms to the side and pushed himself up to sit beside Picard.

  “You’re sure you’re all right?” Picard asked.

  Kirk rolled his neck from side to side, rubbed his hands, then grinned. “Want to do it again?”

  Now Picard sighed and sat down beside Kirk, to disconnect and pull off his jump boots. “I’d rather consider it a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

  “Better than an end-of-a-lifetime experience.”

  “Marginally.”

  Kirk tossed his own boots into the dirt, looked around.

  Picard checked the terrain as well. Absolutely flat. Parched ground, tessellated with a patchwork of mud crusts and cracks.

  “So…” Kirk said, “any idea where we are?”

  “Somewhere on Bajor, I presume.”

  Kirk rubbed under his nose, winced, then discovered the trickle of blood. “That would be my first guess, too.” He gently tapped up and down the sides of his nose, and Picard could see he was checking to feel if it was broken. “Think we can narrow it down any?”

  “How much do you remember of the jump?” Picard asked.

  Kirk glanced away for a moment, then looked back at Picard with a half smile. “I…uh…remember the Enterprise. Odd. Being back at the beginning.”

  Picard nod
ded. He’d often had dreams of his own first days on his Enterprise.“What about the jump? You know this terrain better than I—at least, I sincerely hope you do. It would be good to have some idea how far from our landing point we are.”

  Kirk heaved himself to a standing position, then kicked off the bottom half of his jumpsuit. “Can’t be more than a few kilometers.”

  Picard stood to kick off the rest of his own suit. “How can you be sure?”

  Kirk took a deep breath. “Smell that? An ocean in the middle of a desert?”

  “Surely not the Inland Sea?” Picard was surprised by Kirk’s certainty.

  “What else would it be?” Kirk asked. He tugged his long white shirt from his loose, burnt-umber trousers. Both garments were traditional desert wear on Bajor, as were Kirk’s high-cut boots, woven from wide bands of soft leather to permit them to breathe in extreme heat. Picard was wearing similar clothing, though the fibers and leather were all synthetics from the Enterprise’s replicators, his shirt a pale tan, his trousers and boots dark brown. Dr. Crusher had helped him pick them out.

  “The storm we passed was on the shore of the Valor Ocean,” Picard said. “We couldn’t have come too far inland on a direct descent.”

  Kirk’s gaze sought the western horizon. “You’re right. We switched off our forcefields to get rid of ionization, and…”

  “Your suit never came back online,” Picard said.

  Kirk touched his obviously sore—though unbroken—nose again, and Picard had the sense that his friend was suddenly remembering the details of their failed orbital jump.

  Kirk shook his head, as if amazed by something. “I was going to try the K’Thale Deployment.”

  “It wasn’t as if you had a great many options.”

  Kirk looked at Picard. “But you were there. I should have known you would have linked up with me.” He frowned. “Probably would have been a lot easier if I had kept my suit on and looked for you.”

  Picard refrained from saying, You’re damn right. Instead, he said, “It was my first jump. You couldn’t have known I could control my forcefield that precisely.”

  “Jean-Luc,” Kirk said, “if I was going to jump with someone I thought didn’t know what he was doing, you can be sure I would have rented better equipment.”

  Picard wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that. “You knew there was a risk of failure?”

  Kirk grinned. “No wonder I had dreams of being back on the Enterprise. You’re reminding me of Spock.”

  “I imagine that could be taken many different ways, so I shall choose to take it as a compliment.”

  “Good choice.”

  “So what now?”

  Kirk gestured to Picard’s dismantled suit. “Your batteries went dead?”

  Picard knew what Kirk meant. “No communicator. No signal beacon.”

  Kirk looked up at the sun, wiped sweat from his forehead. “No water.”

  “How long before anyone at the camp realizes we’re overdue?” Picard asked.

  Kirk looked apologetic. “I couldn’t be sure what day we’d actually be able to make the jump, so…”

  Picard felt the stirrings of alarm. “So they’re not expecting us till when?”

  Kirk shrugged. “Today, tomorrow…the day after tomorrow.”

  “We could be out in this desert for three days?”

  “Look on the bright side,” Kirk said lightly. “Without water, we’ll never last that long.”

  “I feel so much better.”

  Kirk brushed off his hands, then pointed to the west. “Shall we?”

  Picard pointed back to the east. “Surely you mean that way.”

  Kirk shook his head. “That’s the way we came.”

  “It’s a shorter distance to the Valor Ocean than it is to the Inland Sea.”

  “It is,” Kirk agreed, “but it is also where we’ve been, and this way—” He pointed west again “—is the way we’re going.”

  Kirk’s logic—or illogic—was like a red flag to Picard. “You said yourself we won’t last three days in this desert without water.”

  “That’s right,” Kirk interrupted before Picard could continue. “So what’s the difference if we die of thirst going forward instead of going back?”

  “We have a chance of reaching the Valor Ocean.”

  “We have a chance of reaching the Inland Sea.”

  “But we’re farther from it.”

  “That’s right,” Kirk agreed again, his blithe agreement even more irritating than his logic to Picard, if that were possible. “But no one is expecting to find us on the Valor coast. And there are seven archaeologists expecting us to show up on the Inland Sea.”

  Picard pursed his lips in annoyance. “Eventually.”

  “Given a choice in odds between slim to none, I’ll pick slim any day.”

  Picard surrendered. He knew Kirk well enough to realize that no one, not even Spock, could win this argument with him.

  Kirk’s response indicated his understanding that Picard had surrendered to his strategy. “It all comes down to degrees of risk,” he concluded.

  Picard reentered the fray. “Jim, there’s no such thing as ‘degrees of risk.’” He scanned the western horizon for any sign of a landmark, any hope of shade. “A thing is risky, or it is not.”

  A distant look washed over Kirk’s face.

  “I used to think that,” Kirk said quietly.

  His friend’s sudden seriousness surprised Picard, as did his next question.

  “You believe that because of your crew, don’t you?”

  Picard stared at Kirk, baffled. They were both starship captains. When they were in the center chair, everything they did was for their crew. Kirk knew that as well as he did.

  “No,” Kirk abruptly said, as if he had read his friend’s mind. “Don’t even bother to answer. I don’t know why I asked. Of course your crew is the answer.”

  “Don’t you feel the same?” Picard asked wonderingly.

  Kirk turned back to the western horizon. “Let’s walk.”

  They set off together, and in the relentless desert heat, Picard was glad for the breeze created by their trudging movement. But his question was still unanswered. “I’m curious, Jim. When it came to your crew, did you ever come to feel that some risks were more acceptable than others?”

  Kirk was silent for a moment. Then he said, “When I started out…? Back on the Enterprise in her first five-year mission…risk didn’t exist.”

  The tone of Kirk’s voice was one of sadness to Picard.

  “I was young, Jean-Luc. Invincible. There was nothing I couldn’t do. So I did it all.” Kirk gave Picard a sidelong glance. “I have the feeling you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  Picard thought back to his early days on the Stargazer.“Exactly,” he murmured, and felt at once the bittersweet tug of memories, realizing in the same moment that the same sadness was in him. Though he had no awareness of its precise cause.

  Kirk resumed his reflection. “Then it becomes a curse. You think you’re invincible, so you take on greater and greater risks, and the more you succeed, the more invincible you believe yourself to be.”

  Kirk might as well have been speaking Picard’s own thoughts. “Until the day you lose,” Picard said.

  Kirk nodded. “If you’re lucky, the loss isn’t absolute.”

  Picard saw the flaw in that. “Which could tend to make you feel invincible again.”

  “Personally, yes.” Kirk’s voice grew grim. “But not when the loss affects others.”

  Picard nodded again, once more knowing precisely what Kirk meant. “I remember the day I first lost a member of my crew because of orders I had given.”

  “Every captain does.”

  Picard seized the rare opportunity, to try to see deeper into Kirk. “Was that the day you began to reconsider risk?”

  Kirk shook his head, and now Picard had no doubt of the burden carried by his friend. Even Kirk’s footsteps across the Bajoran
desert seemed to convey less substance, less force. Picard suddenly saw their passage as he might from the viewpoint of an orbital skydiver—two small brushstrokes of shadow, insignificant against an infinite canvas of lifeless dried clay.

  “That’s the tragedy of it,” Kirk said. “The day I lost my first crewman was a day I learned nothing.”

  Picard couldn’t leave it at that. He sensed Kirk had more to say and wanted to say it.

  “How did it happen?” Picard asked.

  The shadow of sadness around Kirk lifted suddenly, as he smiled at a joke that only he could understand.

  “That’s what I dreamed of when we landed. Being on the Enterprise. About five, six months into my first year. We’d just received a Code Five alert from Starfleet.” Kirk stopped and looked up at the pure blue, unchanging sky. “That’s how I ended up taking my first orbital skydive.”

  Picard watched as Kirk continued to stare upward, into space, and knew his friend was staring into time as well.

  “Sounds like you’ve come full circle, Jim.”

  “Full circle,” Kirk agreed. His gaze returned to Bajor’s desert landscape stretched before them. He began to walk forward again, and Picard did as well.

  And as they continued toward the unchanging horizon, Kirk began to tell Picard his story.

  Chapter Seven

  U.S.S.ENTERPRISE NCC-1701, STARDATE 1003.7

  KIRK STEPPED FROM THE turbolift with Mr. Spock, into that gleaming new refit bridge whose construction he had overseen, knowing, as always, that he was where he belonged.

  Alone in his cabin, he might spend the ship’s night thinking about Pike and what that captain might have done in comparison to what he himself had done that day. In the gym, training with the security teams, he might envy their camaraderie and wonder if starship captains might ever develop friendships with crew members without rank becoming an issue.

  But on the bridge, all doubts and desires fled for Kirk. As always. He couldn’t imagine a better place to be, nor did he ever want to.

  To his right, Spock was already heading for his science station. Lieutenant Hounslaw Tanaka had left his communications console and was hurrying toward Kirk, electronic clipboard in hand. Yeoman Jones, a nineteen-year-old enlisted woman from Mars, who was on her first out-of-system assignment, was even now waiting by the center chair with a cup of coffee. Lieutenant Lloyd Alden was at navigation, with Lee Kelso beside him at the helm. Ensign Ommie Pascal was struggling with what was supposed to have been a simple repair at the engineering console for the second shift in a row—which Chief Engineer Scott swore was helping build the young woman’s character. The bridge’s display screens were cycling through their automatic functions, while the reassuring tones of the computers monitoring navigational shields and forward sensors announced that all was in order. The air was cool, the atmosphere relaxed and charged at the same time.