“Because of me?”
“That’s right, idiot. You’re the one who keeps me from looking at all those dive bombers like one big amber blur. Even though, at times, I have to admit it would help. Sure, side with your own kind. If you’re a salmon.”
1556 “My family shouldn’t have to suffer this embarrassment. They’re American citizens, same as you.”
“The folks back home are scared. They’re reacting in a bad, inexcusable way. But switching sides is not the way to fix it. You better screw your head on straight, kid. The Japanese are moving as a racial bloc in a Machiavellian power-grab. They intend to fight to the last child. They’re training eight-year-olds to fight. Did you know that? How long till Ricky is eight?”
1558 “You want to talk about indignity? In ten minutes Hornet took two torpedoes, two planes, and two bombs. Enterprise took two hits and a near-miss. Twenty-four dive bombers scouring us out of the sky. If our AA wasn’t superior, you’d be floating around on a scrap heap. Indignity from sitting in a camp? You know, I’ve only got so much sympathy to spread around. I’ve had forty-four killed and dozens of wounded and damned near shook this ship apart with violent maneuvering to squirm away from torpedoes, men crammed into sweaty ready rooms waiting for the next explosion, boys stuck in their planes on the deck while other planes crash into them on landing—”
“My family!”
“I know your family! Your family are some of my best friends. What’s happening to them smells to high heaven, but this mess smells higher. At least blame the right people!—oh, hell with this. Come here, you little bastard. Just get a little closer to the edge of the balcony.”
“Captain!”
“Get away from me, Roy! Come here, you spineless punk. You see that F-25 over there with the aileron stuck in the upright position and the whole right side pocked with bullet holes? That’s a fella named Souza from the Hornet. He had to make an emergency landing on our flattop because his own carrier’s over there sinking, taking God knows how many men down with her. All her planes were stranded in the air, watching their gas gauges drop, while our Landing Signal Officers crammed planes onto this ship, and me up here executing maneuvers no aircraft carrier was built to make. You ever tried to dodge dive-bombers with eight hundred feet of ship shuddering under you? You ever laid out on a bloody deck in a puddle of burning fuel? Discomfort? Shame? Embarrassment? Indignity? You’re a measly soft-bodied worm!”
“You have no right to call me names! I don’t work for you anymore!”
“I’ll call you what I please! I’ve got a ship full of survivors who watched their buddies ditch and crash and burn and drown. Indignity? It’s ugly what’s happened to your family, but it’s not quite as ugly as crashing your plane into a black sea or dragging your own carcass over the side because your lower body’s blown away. Arizona? You might as well talk about mail call on the moon!”
“Captain! Sir, maybe I ought to get this creep off the bridge wing.”
“Leave him where he is, In fact I’d rather you get off.”
“Sir, we had that conversation!”
“Just stand outside of that hatch for a few minutes.”
“Sir, you’ve got a responsibility as CO to safeguard yourself.”
“I’ll be fine, Roy. Anyway, after today I’ll know whether or not I should bother to keep fighting. If two friends from the old neighborhood can’t work this out alone, what chance does a world of strangers have?”
1562 “All right. I’ve got my Lucky Strike and I’m calm again. But I can change. You know, Luke, you caught me on a real bad day. Hundreds of boys died over the past five days. Those men are out there giving up their young lives, and it’s not very nice for them, the ways they’re dying. It’s perfect purgatory out there. They’re not going through it to take over the world. They won’t be conquering somebody’s country when it’s over. You can’t say the same thing about the Japanese or the Germans.”
“I don’t want to hear this. I listened enough to your talking me into things.”
“What’d you come here for, then? Obviously you went to a lot of conniving to get on my carrier. What do you want from me?”
“I came … I want … I want you to call the government. Get my parents and my wife and son and uncles out of that camp. You can do it. When I found out you were taking the Enterprise, I knew you had the power. They’ll listen to you, Ozzie! The government will listen!”
“Probably.”
“When you call, they’ll find my family and free them.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know … there’s something wrong with that. You’re out here switching sides, fighting for the enemy—I sent you out to do good business for our side, and I find you out here in the middle of the Pacific, telling me you’re Japanese now. Why don’t you have a cigarette while I think about this?”
“Will you get my family out? I’ll work for whichever side you want, if you get them out!”
“Come at a pretty low price, don’t you, pal?”
“My family isn’t a low price. I don’t care anymore which side wins. I was betrayed.”
“Yeah, you were. But it’s just fear and resentment at work in Arizona. It won’t last. You’re looking through the carnival mirror of a war. You know, Japan made the biggest mistake of its history when it attacked Pearl Harbor. A lot of innocent people got sucked into the vacuum. Okay, be mad at the Americans who put your family in a camp, but be more mad at the Japanese, who started all this.”
“I am Japanese. Look at me. My face. My hair. I grew up thinking I was an American. Everybody said I was. My mother was, and my father couldn’t remember anything else. I never looked at you and thought you were a Yank. I thought I was an American, we were the same, you and me. But now I know everybody looked at me and thought I was a Jap. I’ll never be an American. This proves it.”
1564:10 “Luke, I think if you’d showed up five days earlier, everything would be different for you. But seeing you here today, after what we’ve been through at Santa Cruz … nah, I can’t think the same. I’m not calling anybody. Your family will just have to cool their heels in Arizona.”
“You won’t call?”
“I won’t help you.”
“They love you like a brother!”
“And all these boys suffering on my lower decks, dying in the sky and out in the water, they love each other like brothers too. You think those boys from Hornet are going to give up and desert because Enterprise AA was better than theirs? That’s not fair, right? It’s not fair that some rich boys in the states get desk jobs on the mainland and these men are all out here in the ocean and jungles because they’re farm boys from Alabama. So I guess all these boys ought to ditch the effort. Refuse to fight anymore. Hell, everything’s unfair. Yours is a big unfairness. You think I don’t know where your folks are? You think I haven’t been tempted to use my pull to get them out?”
“You knew where they were?”
“I knew since last June.”
“You left them there?”
“They’re paying a price. It shouldn’t be happening. Did you know that some Japanese-Americans really are using their citizenship to spy on the U.S.?”
“That’s not true.”
“Yes, it is. Your family is taking the hit from other people’s actions. It shouldn’t be happening. But if I went to them, they wouldn’t say their son should abandon America. We’ve got to save the country first and fix this other stuff later. What do you think your mom and dad would say if I got them out and told them Lukie was working for the Empire?”
“No, don’t tell them anything! I don’t want you to say anything to my father. I’ll talk to him myself.”
“What if you get killed? Figure your chances of survival are any better than any of the rest of my boys? And you might as well get used to hating me, because I won’t call to get your folks out.
“I won’t call. I won’t call, because of all the other people who’d be left in those camps. If we want them out, w
e have to get this war over sooner. You’ll have to pick for yourself whose side you’re on. Lieutenant, permission to get this man off my aircraft carrier.”
“Aye, Sir. Sir—”
“Yes, Roy?”
“Captain—I’m not sure I understand, and I need you to be absolutely clear. You want us to execute an enemy prisoner without process? Dump him over the side at twenty-eight knots? I’m not saying I won’t do it.”
“No. No. Listen. I want you to put him in an inflatable, fuel him up and get rid of him. He’s not an enemy prisoner. He’s a born and bred U.S. citizen working undercover for our side. It’s our duty to send him back. He’s going to go back and do the right thing, aren’t you, Luke?”
“You’re sending me back?”
“You can rendezvous with the Japanese task force, if you can find them.”
“What would I tell them if I’m in an American boat!”
“Lies. What else does a spy do? Go back and do your job. Just do it with the right colors. Quit looking at people by the slant of their eyes. And your family, never mind them. It’ll be tough on ’em for a while. It’s not exactly a Chattanooga Choo Choo for anybody out here. Your family’s enduring their part of the discomfort for the privilege of living in America. They won’t be dying in a cold sea or crashing into your buddy’s plane on a crowded flight deck or suffocating in a pool of gas. They’re just paying their percentage of this big bill. They’re tough. They’re Americans. Roy, go on and take this man away. Lose him on the water somewhere.”
“It’ll be my pleasure, Sir.”
“Luke, I’ll see you when it’s all over, if both of us live. We’ll decide later what’s going to be said to your dad. And to your little son. See you on the next comer, Snow Boy.”
After the battles of Santa Cruz and Guadalcanal, the Japanese grip on the South Pacific began to slip and was never recovered. Desperation eventually led to the horrors of kamikaze attacks.
The Enterprise was the finest example of World War Two fast multipurpose carriers and fought nearly all the great carrier battles, including Midway, Wake Island, Marcus Island, Guadalcanal, and Okinawa. She was one of the first U.S. ships fitted with CXAM radar, and gained a reputation for effective use of her formidable 40mm quadruple anti-aircraft guns. She was the first carrier to receive a Presidential Unit Citation, May of 1943, and was badly damaged by a kamikaze on May 14, 1945. The war ended while she was being made ready to fight again.
Captain Robert April
U.S.S. Enterprise
“Just remember it’s you they draw strength from. They look to you for guidance … and for leadership. Help them. Show confidence in them.”
Commander Deanna Troi, Star Trek: The Next Generation
GREG COX
No stranger to the Star Trek Universe, Greg contributed the best-selling trilogy The Q Continuum, which gave us a long look at Q and his checkered past. Since it was so well received, Greg has been invited back to write another trilogy, this one set during the Eugenics Wars of the late twentieth century.
In this story, Greg goes back to a somewhat later era to chronicle an early mission for Captain Robert April and the Enterprise. April made one appearance on the animated television series, but ever since his inclusion in Stephen E. Whitfield’s The Making of Star Trek, he’s been acknowledged as the starship’s first commander.
Greg has also explored the Marvel Universe, where he authored an Avengers/X-Men trilogy, as well as two solo adventures featuring Iron Man. Elsewhere in the realm of licensed characters, he has penned Battle On!: An Unauthorized Look at Xena: Warrior Princess.
For the Sci-Fi Channel, Greg happily contributes scads of trivia questions for their Web site.
Cox lives in New York City, where he works as a Consulting Editor for Tor Books. He thanks colleague Diane Carey for fleshing out Captain April and his crew in her novels Best Destiny and Final Frontier.
In addition, he would like to dedicate this story to the memory of John Colicos, who first brought the ruthless Commander Kor to life.
Though Hell Should Bar the Way
Captain’s Log, 10th of October, 2246.
An outbreak of fungus has destroyed the crops on Tarsus IV, threatening an entire Federation colony with famine. As the largest and fastest starship in the sector, the Enterprise is the only ship that has a chance of delivering vitally-needed supplies to Tarsus IV before this unanticipated disaster achieves catastrophic proportions….
“How are we faring, Helmsman?” Captain Robert April asked, leaning forward in his command seat. On the viewscreen before him, starlight streaked past at unprecedented speed.
“Warp factor 7 and holding,” the stocky young man at the helm controls reported, his eyes darting between his instrument panel and the view ahead of the Enterprise’s prow. Lieutenant Carlos Florida did not bother to conceal the excitement in his voice; it wasn’t every day he got to break Starfleet speed records.
Captain April nodded in approval. “And how’s our fine ship bearing up under this truly exceptional velocity?”
Lieutenant Michelle Roberts reported from the engineering station to the captain’s left. “Some minor fluctuations in the forward deflectors, Sir, but nothing we can’t compensate for.”
“Outstanding,” April responded. Despite the dire nature of their mission, he felt a surge of more than justifiable pride at his ship’s speed and resilience. The Enterprise’s standard cruising speed had never exceeded warp 6, but it did his heart good to know that the freshly crowned empress of the fleet could pull out all the stops in an emergency. “Steady as she goes, then,” he instructed the bridge crew. “Let’s keep on making excellent time, shall we? A great many hungry people are depending on us.”
He settled back into his seat, tucking his hands into the snug pockets of the wooly cardigan he wore over his gold command tunic. The well-worn sweater was a sartorial eccentricity that his devoted crew had long since grown accustomed to, one that gave him a professorial air quite in keeping with his benign, fortyish features and twinkling brown eyes. His distinct Coventry accent only added to the almost Dickensian persona of Robert April, founder of the Federation’s interstellar exploration program—and first captain of the Starship Enterprise.
April took a moment to savor the elegant lines and sleek, streamlined design of the bridge. Slightly more than a year into the ship’s maiden voyage of discovery, the nerve center of the Enterprise still looked as bright and shiny as it had on the day the Constitution-class starship had first soared free of her berth in spacedock. The blue-matte walls of the bridge remained fresh and unscuffed, while the gleaming parrot-red rail surrounding the command deck had not yet lost any of its original luster. Lighted instrument panels blinked and sparkled amidst a constant buzz of electronic activity. Warp factor 7, April marveled, imagining that he could feel the full force of the Enterprise’s mighty engines thrumming all around him, despite the vessel’s state-of-the-art inertial dampers. Good heavens!
The Enterprise sped through the vastness of space, crossing light-years every second. What a remarkable achievement this ship is, her captain thought. A sublime testament to human ingenuity and aspiration. Not for the first time, Robert April vowed to return the Enterprise to Starfleet intact once his five-year mission was completed.
But first there were those starving colonists to look after. “What is our estimated time of arrival in the Tarsus system?” April asked.
“Approximately forty-eight hours,” Ensign Isaac Soulian informed him from the navigation station. Soulian double-checked his estimate against the course plotted on the astrogator panel between him and the helm. “Give or take fifteen minutes or so, depending on the amount of interstellar debris in our path.”
“Understood,” April stated. “Thank you, Isaac,” he added, with characteristic informality; despite his rank, the captain was seldom one to stand on ceremony.
Forty-eight hours, April reflected. Literally two full days, at least as days were reckoned on Earth
. Sometime soon, he realized, the brightest minds in Starfleet were going to have to figure out a new way to reckon time in space, maybe even one that took into account the relativistic effects of warp travel. April made a mental note to himself to propose just such a system of, well, “stardates,” the next time he briefed Starfleet Command.
In the meantime, plain old hours and days lay between Tarsus IV and deliverance. April wished there was some way to get to the embattled colony even sooner—the ship’s cargo holds already contained the provisions desperately needed by the colonists—but knew he couldn’t safely spur the Enterprise any faster than she was already going. Forty-eight hours would have to do.
The hard part is going to be the waiting, he thought, regretting keenly that there was nothing else he could do for the famished colonists at this very moment. He briefly considered checking on the situation in sickbay, but knew that wasn’t necessary; his chief medical officer, who also happened to be his wife, was already hard at work readying the sickbay to treat the most severe cases of malnutrition. No need to bother Sarah while she’s busy, he concluded reluctantly, even if I wouldn’t mind her company just now.
“Captain!” Ensign Soulian called out. The urgency in the young Lebanese officer’s voice caught April’s attention at once. “Alien vessel approaching.”
April sat up straight, peering at the viewscreen. Who the devil could this be? As far as he knew, there were no other Federation starships in the vicinity; that was the whole problem, as far as Tarsus IV was concerned. “Onscreen,” he ordered. “Full magnification.”
An involuntary gasp escaped Lieutenant Florida’s lips as the alien spacecraft came into view. April knew how the young helmsman felt; there was no mistaking the ominous outline of a Klingon battle cruiser.
It was deceptively fragile in appearance, the bulbous prow of the warship separated from its aft warp engines by a single tapered concourse. According to Starfleet Intelligence, however, the D-6 battle cruiser possessed formidable shields, plus comparable firepower—as the Federation had learned the hard way at Donatu V.
Star Trek: Enterprise Logs Page 6
