Ship of the Line

by Diane Carey

  “I wonder,” Picard said quietly. “Is that bit of evil in us really the thing that makes us strong? The tough side—getting angry, the survival instinct . . . is that what makes us move faster, think harder . . . some call it an edge. ‘Eye of the tiger.’ But every brute has that.”

  “Then what do I have?” the mild Kirk asked. Bitterness cut through the sorrow in his face.

  “You have the thoughtfulness of command,” Picard told him. “You have the elements that allow the survival instinct to become creative. You have what it takes to stay calm when others are losing control. It’s crucial. Especially for command. The captain has to be the last one on board to lose control.”

  Kirk gazed at the tabletop, his fingers interlaced there. “And it’s what makes you realize there are things bigger than your own survival that are worth dying for. It’s what keeps me at my post, fighting the big odds even though I know we’re going to die now and it’s worth that.”

  Picard sat on the edge of the table. “Like Bateson did,” he recalled. “Why you die . . . the reason you fight. The cruder side of us would run.”

  “I don’t want to run,” Kirk uttered. “I don’t want to fight. I want to hide.”

  Picard gazed at Kirk, empathy pulling at his chest. Kirk had men on the surface in trouble, and was facing the loss of his career because he couldn’t handle command anymore. There was more, though—Kirk was also dealing with the lonely personal problem that perhaps he would never be put back together again. The men on the surface might die, but then their misery would be over. A new commander would take the ship, and the future would move on. But there might be no way out of this for Jim Kirk. Had technology broken down one too many times? Would one of him forever be a monk, and the other forever in a cage?

  Kirk’s uncertainty haunted Picard—reminded him too much of himself a short while ago, when he was talking to Riker. All those doubts . . .

  He peered at Kirk critically. “You do have insecurities, don’t you? The intrepid hero—that was just a persona for you, wasn’t it?”

  “In some ways,” Kirk admitted. “I wondered sometimes whether I was the best captain . . . or just the luckiest.”

  “Come now,” Picard chided. “You were an interesting type of leader. Your profile is a rocky road, to be sure, but you ultimately prevailed in most situations because of your strength of will. So much so, in fact, that many captains have stumbled by trying to be too much like you in the wrong situations.”

  “They shouldn’t try to be like me,” Kirk said. “If all captains are cut from the same program, then we’d be too easy to beat. No one wants ships of the line commanded by a set of clones.”

  Here was a man toward whom almost every cadet in the academy aspired, and he was dismissing the idea that any one man could be an ideal captain. Picard grinned through his surprise, with a touch of nostalgia. He too had tried in his youth to be like James Kirk. And Kirk was right—it hadn’t worked for him.

  “The power of command seems so elusive to me now,” Kirk groaned. “He’s vital to me . . . and I don’t know how to get him back . . . back inside me, where he belongs. Where he won’t be . . . wasted.”

  “Wasted,” Picard echoed. “Interesting way to put it. You shouldn’t have beamed down into unstable conditions, Captain. Now you’re debilitated. Unable to help your stranded crew members. You’re weakened now, yet the decisions are still yours to make and you can’t make them. You shouldn’t have been part of the away team.”

  “Away team?”

  “Landing party.”

  Kirk thought about that, then even through his hesitations, he said, “No, I had to go. I have an unwritten contract with my crew. I ask them to do incredible things sometimes. I ask them to take risks, fight, maybe die. I have to show them that I’m willing to bear the same risks. That’s the way it always was . . . in the wars of the past, 1812, the American Civil War, France and England, Napoleon—the officers raised their swords and went out in front, and asked the men to follow. And the men did. They could see that their officers thought there was something worth dying for. They lost a lot of officers, but they knew the value of morale.”

  Picard uttered a grunt of understanding. “Yes, the Klingons say, ‘It’s a good day to die.’ Humans say, ‘It’s a good reason to die.’ Still, Starfleet changed things after your tenure. They urged captains to stay on board, so the captain would be fully able to command if things went wrong.”

  “They had the same thing in my time.” Kirk shook his head. “We just ignored it. When I lose crew, I always feel as if I’ve failed, even if I won. That’s why I led the landing parties.”

  “But you’re not a general in an old-style war, yelling ‘Charge!’ ”

  “Yes, I am,” Kirk said, and this was the first thing he’d said with his old conviction. “And everybody sees me out there, and all their lives they never forget what they saw. That’s the deal I have with my crew members when I say, ‘Go out there and probably die.’ It’s a lot more powerful if you add, ‘I’ll go with you.’ The cause we choose to fight for is more important than all of us. We agree on that. It’s our contract. The captain goes in front of the army, not behind it. The captain takes the first wound.”

  “If you’re debilitated,” Picard tried again, “you can’t see to your men. You’re the most important person aboard—”

  “No, I’m not.” Kirk’s eyes flashed to him with a hint of the fire that had been buried. “Where did you get that idea?”

  “Well . . . I think it’s obvious.”

  “And I think you’re crazy. I’m more expendable than any of my crew. I’m the least important person aboard. The most junior technician on my ship is more important than I am. I’ll let myself be killed before I’ll hand over any of them. And they all know it. They know I’ll fight for their lives. So they’re willing to give them. And you are too,” Kirk said, giving Picard that dangerous look, as if he could see through his skin into his heart. “That’s why within a month of taking command, you started beaming down and breaking that rule. The admirals sit back in starbases and say, ‘You folks go risk your lives.’ They’ve forgotten the need for junior officers to see their captains willing to take the same risks.”

  The room fell silent for a few long moments as the two simply gazed at each other in a weird kind of mutual understanding, and Picard felt as if he were being dissected—but by his own hand.

  “Could that be why,” Picard began slowly, thinking hard, “could it be why you disliked the admiralty? You didn’t want to stop going in front?”

  “Yes,” Kirk said instantly. “It’s that part of us that makes us say, ‘No more.’ ”

  In a jolt of his old self, he slammed the table with the flat of his palm.

  Picard stood up. “So the crew, the ship—they’re more important to you than your own life? I never knew that about you. Only the bravado has come through history. But the crew and the ship were what you really cared about.”

  Kirk paused, touched the table, ran his hand along the grain of the imitation wood. “The ship . . . if you ask a designer, it’s just a mass of metal and circuits. A gathering of electrons. But ask someone who sails her . . . she’s much more. She’s the physical manifestation of our ideals. Work, exploration, protection—all the great things intelligent beings can be and do when we get together. The ship is our home, our commonality. It’s our meeting place.”

  Picard started to say something, then decided to listen. He wanted to hear this part.

  Waving a finger toward the ceiling, Kirk glanced around. “It’s important. At a time of crisis, the ship gives us all a single goal. Stand fast for the ship, and we’ll survive. That’s the connection between the people and the symbol. A ship is more than a symbol. She’s our island of survival.”

  Now Picard suddenly felt the bubbling of his own sentiments, and took a breath that made Kirk look at him, and wait.

  “When I lost the Stargazer,” Picard said, “the loss almost crushed me. Tha
t was my first command. I was one of the youngest captains ever to command a Starfleet vessel. It hurt so much that I started pushing back. I changed the way I thought about ships. I convinced myself that only the people mattered. When the Enterprise-D was wrecked, I was too cavalier about it. I’d conditioned myself not to care . . . after all, it’s just a hunk of metal, isn’t it? That’s what I trained myself to believe all these years, but I’m troubled now. Now that I’ve actually lost her, it’s different. It’s months later, and she’s still gone—somehow I didn’t expect that. Somehow I didn’t think she was truly gone. I’m afraid the crew took my example and didn’t bother to care about the ship either. And so she really is truly gone. And not only gone for us, the crew . . . but everyone else in the Federation. I lost their flagship. I didn’t remember to care about the ship until it was too late. I forgot that the ship is important.”

  James Kirk was watching him, in a most disturbing and real-blooded way. “That’s how it is. The ship is your reason to stick together. She defends you time after time, and you defend her. You keep each other alive until the last possible moment. Then one of you makes the ultimate sacrifice. It’s natural. We’re not the captains of ships. We’re the captains of ideals.”

  Feeling a warm ball of understanding rise from deep in his chest, Picard watched the young Kirk and both hurt and rejoiced with him. So much, in such a compact package.

  Somehow he felt as if he really weighed less. The loss of the ship had been mortally chilling, and somehow to let himself take that loss personally actually helped. And it helped to look at Kirk, to see this young man bearing the same burdens, yet never being paralyzed by them.

  “Computer,” Picard said suddenly, and surprised himself with the quick change, “I want to speak to the other Kirk.”

  Instantly the scene blurred and changed to the lower decks, Main Engineering. Very quiet . . .

  He was alone. No one else was here. These muted blue-gray walls were somehow more comforting than the briefing room, perhaps because there were so many shadows, and red-painted accents and partitions. A dozen steps away, the main engineering control panels were slick black, offset by a wide poppy-red trunk base. Ceiling-high circuit trunks created a forest of obstacles and shadows, and the faint throb of matter/antimatter power made the place eerie.

  Picard stood in a shadow, and watched for a moment. Had the holoprogram made a mistake? Was he alone here?

  A scrape behind him answered that question, and he spun around.

  “Dear God, there’s the fire!” he blurted.

  Yes, there it was. A pair of eyes like an angry cat’s—an angry tiger’s. In spite of himself, Picard flinched at the power of those eyes, and the phaser in the young captain’s grip.

  No—it wasn’t a counterpart. This was the real James Kirk, not a fake, not an imposter, not even a duplicate. It was—a portion, like a cross-section or a diagram. This was the untempered critical-mass core of James Kirk.

  Here, here before him, crouched and ready to pounce, phaser forward and eyes aflame, was all the severity, all the dash and spirit, the mettle and grit that history remembered about James T. Kirk. This creature forgot the other Kirk entirely, left the studious authority behind, drowned in the raw energy. This young man’s face was pasted with sweat, his teeth gritted, his eyes cups of rage. This was pure gale-force Kirk.

  “My goodness,” Picard murmured in bizarre admiration. “What a remarkable creature you are!”

  “I’m the captain!” the counterpart said. “That other one’s telling lies. He’s not the captain. I am!”

  Even beneath the animalistic fury, the voice was undoubtedly James Kirk’s. It carried the same positivity, each word an uppercut. Dauntless, yet somehow threatened, this Kirk stalked the engineering deck, knowing he was being hunted.

  And he was good at this too—he kept his back to cover, put one shoulder down, kept his weapon up.

  “You know what happened, don’t you?” Picard began, seeking for a line of common awareness.

  “Transporter malfunction.” Kirk leaned back against a pylon, and peeked out into the main deck area. “That other one’s looking for me. He’s telling the crew lies about me. I have to get him first.”

  Slowly, Picard stepped toward him. “But he’s part of you. You can’t survive this way. You’ll have to be put in a—”

  “Back off!” Kirk snapped.

  Wrenching the phaser around to Picard, Kirk sucked the breath back in between his gritted teeth, as if he were a wolverine trapped in a hole. His turbulent eyes, like arrowheads, were ringed with wet dark lashes.

  “I don’t need him. I’m better now. I’m stronger. I’m more decisive. I take what I want. This ship is mine. No one will ever take her away from me. She’s mine.”

  “If you’re stronger,” Picard challenged, “what are you going to do about those men on the planet’s surface?”

  The angry Kirk seemed to have forgotten about those men. Reminded now, he simply said, “They knew the risks. He’s coming!”

  Bending his knees, Kirk ducked sideways, then moved out.

  Picard lagged back and watched.

  In an office area, the other James Kirk, the one in the green shirt—the mild one, the worried one—slowly moved through with a phaser. Probably set to stun, Picard realized, and at once noticed that this Kirk, the one in gold, had his phaser set on full power. He fully intended to kill if he fired it.

  Would he fire it? How much intellect was left in him? Did he understand that two halves of a person could not survive apart? That one would be overcome by weakness, the other by violence? He saw that now, in both their faces.

  The two had seen each other. They faced off within a shadow from a divider grid. Both had phasers. Both had fears.

  The fear was shining brightly in both of them, and it was rather a shock. How would each overcome it?

  Or could they at all?

  At first the animal Kirk had been stalking the mild Kirk, but now something changed. The animal began backing away. The mild Kirk came forward. The strange dance continued. Back, back . . .

  “You can’t hurt me,” the mild Kirk said. “You can’t kill me.”

  The animal’s phaser wavered between them.

  “You can’t,” the mild one said. “Don’t you understand? You need me. I need you . . .”

  The movement stopped. Something in those words made the animal Kirk pause in his backing off. He raised his phaser. His teeth came together and his eyes tightened in pure rage.

  “I . . . don’t . . . need . . . you!”

  The phaser wavered. He still didn’t fire.

  A flash of blue behind him then—Spock!

  The Vulcan grasped the side of the animal’s neck and pinched the nerves.

  The savage Kirk’s head snapped back, a horrible grimace showing the shock of paralysis. His hand clenched on the phaser, but the convulsed muscles in his arm pulled the hand up and sideways—and it fired! The streak lanced into a circuit trunk and blasted a hole the size of Picard right in the side. Sparks flew, and this side of the pylon vaporized.

  Spock let go, and the feverish, vicious form of the negative captain dropped to the deck.

  The other Kirk looked nauseated with misery, perhaps even stunned at the savagery with which his other half had set his phaser on full power.

  He knelt slowly, his face matted with disgust at what he saw on the deck before him, the unconscious boyish twin of himself, the shame of humanity. The bad half.

  Kirk was a starving man gazing at a poisoned dinner. He wanted it—he didn’t want it. He had to have it, but it was sickening.

  They’d caught him . . . but it wasn’t enough. Now what?

  “Computer,” Picard quietly said, “let me see the resolution of this.”

  Everything blurred again, and he was standing in the transporter room of the first Enterprise.

  Between Kirk and Spock, sagging and dazed, was the terrorized other twin, weak now and clinging to Kirk. Something ha
d made him afraid, and he felt his fear full-throttle.

  “Have you fixed the transporter?” Picard asked.

  Spock was the one to answer. “We used bypasses to tie directly into the impulse engines and get the transporter working.”

  “But it might kill me,” Kirk added. “We tried it on the duplicated creature from the planet.”

  “Did it put him back together?”

  “Yes. But he died. Spock thinks it was blind terror that killed him. He thinks I can overcome that with . . . intellect.”

  “Don’t you think so?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think . . . I can’t live this way. Compassion is only one piece of humanity. I’m afraid . . . but I have to take him back.”

  “Not only fear,” Picard observed. “You’re embarrassed.”

  Kirk struck him with a leer. “Wouldn’t you be?”

  Spock took the sagging twin’s arm and urged the other Kirk to move toward the transporter platform. Up they went, and Kirk embraced the part of him that had nearly destroyed him.

  There was something different now in the mild Kirk’s face—resolution. He was determined to see this through. That hadn’t happened with the tiger half, Picard recalled. The savage Kirk had faltered. This one didn’t.

  “Hold onto him, Captain,” Spock said, and stepped off the platform.

  “Mr. Spock—”

  The science officer turned before he was down the step. “Captain?”

  Kirk gazed at him with a layered expression. “If this doesn’t work . . .”

  He said nothing else, and for a moment Picard waited to hear the rest, but there was no more.

  Spock’s dark eyes softened. “Understood, Captain,” was all he said.

  Picard didn’t know what they were saying to each other, but he suddenly thought of Riker.

  And that was all the good-bye they got.

  Spock stepped behind the transporter console and enabled the mechanism, while Dr. McCoy looked on in unshielded worry.

  Pring—the console began working. The faint whine made Kirk—both—stiffen in reaction. Lights began sparkling, and the panel of energy did its work. Both Kirks dematerialized.