The Captain's Oath

by Christopher L. Bennett

  “Captain Wesley, what’s the range on those plasma beams?” Kirk called.

  “Unknown, but much greater than the plate projectiles.”

  “Oh, no,” Mitchell said. “I’ve been too busy watching the battle with the Leonov . . . one of the hostiles almost has its bow to bear on us!”

  “Evasive action!” Kirk cried.

  Khorasani worked her controls. “Thrusters are sluggish!” she called. “They need more power.”

  Egdor cursed. “The dish is demanding too much power. Rerouting back to thrusters!”

  But it was too late. On the screen, the nearer cylinder ship was now a perfect circle around a blazing point of light. The light burst out and filled the screen, dazzlingly bright . . .

  * * *

  “Captain! Jim, wake up!”

  As Kirk revived, he recognized that Egdor was shaking him, calling to him. The first officer’s pale, craggy face was burned and bleeding, and it felt to Kirk like he was in similar condition. “Sta . . . status.” He looked around. The bridge was dark and filled with smoke. The constant electronic chirp and chatter of the computers and sensors was nearly silenced.

  “We’re in bad shape. It was a severe hit. Main power is out . . . I’m not even sure the nacelle’s still attached. But the battle seems to have stopped, so there’s that. Maybe the others drove them away.”

  Kirk sighed. Or the others are destroyed and the “demon” fleet is on its way to Adelphous.

  He looked around. The first person he saw was Azadeh Khorasani. Her bionic arm spasmed from random power surges . . . but it was clearly the only part of her that would ever move again. He wondered if she would still be forgiving of the enemy that had killed her.

  “Moravec’s gone too,” Egdor reported. “Yu . . . she’s breathing, but we need medics, fast.” He knelt by the science officer, tried to do what he could.

  For a moment, Kirk was afraid to check on Gary Mitchell. But then he heard a familiar groan. He turned in time to see his old friend staring at Khorasani’s body with a look of resigned sorrow. “Oh, damn,” Mitchell grated as Kirk moved to his side. “I really thought she was indestructible.”

  Kirk reminded himself to focus on those who could still be helped. “Are you hurt?”

  Mitchell shook himself, finally looking away from Khorasani. “Nothing serious, I think. God, you look worse than I feel.”

  Kirk reached out and hit the nearest comm switch. “Kirk to sickbay. Medical assistance to the bridge. Any emergency medical teams, please respond.” But there was no signal. He looked toward the turbolift doors; they were burned and crumpled, the lift behind them wrecked. There was no way in or out of the dead bridge.

  As if to correct his thought, the sound of a transporter beam filled the air. Robert Wesley materialized along with his CMO and a paramedic team. “Jim, Mehran, thank God. We were afraid we’d lost you.”

  Kirk stared at Khorasani and Moravec. “We were the lucky ones. Status of the fleet?”

  Wesley sighed. “We held out long enough for the reinforcements to arrive. With the help of the Potemkin and the others, we managed to drive the aliens into retreat. They’ve left Federation space. But it came at a high price. Jim, we lost the Leonov with all hands.”

  Kirk winced, lowering his head. Hundreds of people lost, many of whom he had known personally. Guilt tore through him. “We were supposed to back them up.”

  “You backed each other up. That’s how this works. After you were hit, T’Saren made a choice to shield you. She and her crew fought them with everything they had, held the line just long enough to keep you alive until reinforcements came.” Wesley clasped his shoulder. “Jim, you made a difference. Your deflector dish insight helped us hold our own against them. The mission was a success . . . though the cost was great.”

  “The rest of the fleet?”

  “We survived, but not without loss.” The elder captain sighed. “Including Captain Baek and his bridge crew.”

  Kirk looked around at the ruined bridge—the ruined crew. “Why, Bob? Who were they? What did they want? Why did they attack? There has to be some reason for all this. It has to mean something.”

  Wesley put a hand on his shoulder as the paramedics prepared Elena Yu for transport. “I know how you feel, Jim. But honestly, I’ll be willing to live without an answer if it means we never see those demon ships again.”

  Starbase 24

  The Sacagawea had needed to be towed back to the starbase. Her warp drive was crippled, her hull ruptured, her spaceframe damaged. The starbase engineers remained unsure if the vessel would even be salvageable. Kirk felt guilty that he cared almost as much about that as about the eighty-seven dead and thirty-nine badly wounded members of his crew.

  “It doesn’t make you a bad person,” Bob Wesley had assured him when he confessed to it at the wake in the Moonbeam Club. “Or a bad captain. We all grow attached to our ships. They aren’t just meaningless hunks of metal and composite. They keep us alive. They take us to places we never dreamed possible. We value the ships because of what they do for the crew, not in spite of the crew. So don’t be guilty that you care for the body of the ship as much as the people inside it. Just transfer that care, that love and devotion, to whatever ship you serve on next. And the one after that, and the one after that.”

  Kirk had stared into his drink, unable to meet the senior captain’s eyes. “Do you really think they’ll let me have another ship after this?”

  “Jim, you did nothing wrong. I know how it feels now, but that feeling is a burden shared by every captain in Starfleet, myself included. It doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It means you’re really one of us now. And you’ll learn from it and try harder next time, same as we all do.”

  The JAG office’s routine inquiry a few days later came to the same conclusion—that neither Kirk nor any other captain in the task force had been in any way derelict in their duty. The finding had brought Kirk only limited comfort, but the chance to see Areel Shaw again provided a temporary distraction on the night after the inquiry.

  While Kirk’s career may have been secure, he no longer had a ship to command. Even if the Sacagawea could be repaired, it would take months in dry dock. In the meantime, the surviving crew would be reassigned. As for the injured, the most severe cases had already been shipped out to the Starfleet Medical facility on Vega Colony—a long trip, but worth it for the specialized care they could receive there. When Kirk learned that the Starfleet archaeological post in the Vega system was in need of a new commander, he immediately applied for the position.

  “A ground assignment?” Commodore Lam asked when he made the request. “It seems a waste of your talents, Jim.”

  “With respect, Commodore, you told me yourself that I should keep learning and broadening my horizons.”

  “I did, didn’t I? But are you really committed to the work? Or are you just going there to stick close to your injured crew—and mark time until the Sacagawea’s fixed? It’s not good to get too attached to a single ship, you know.”

  “Permission to speak freely?”

  “As a rule, yes.”

  “Border patrol wasn’t my preferred assignment either, Commodore. I joined Starfleet to be an explorer. But did I ever commit myself less than fully to my duties here?”

  “No. You’re one of the most dedicated officers I’ve ever served with. I just don’t want to see you languish where you aren’t making full use of your potential.”

  Nonetheless, Lam agreed to endorse Kirk’s transfer request, and before long, the orders came through. All that remained was to say his farewells to the remainder of his crew. “I guess you’ll have to go on without me from here,” Gary Mitchell told him over subspace. The navigator had already departed for his recuperative leave, which he had chosen to take on Argelius. “However will you survive?”

  Kirk smiled at his old friend. “You really think you’d be happy doing archaeology, digging through dead ruins?”

  “I guess not. That kind o
f brain work is much more your sort of thing.”

  “It won’t be forever. It’s a low-priority post, so they might rotate me back to the Sacagawea once she’s repaired. Whatever ship I get, though, I’ll try to request you for it.”

  “Don’t hold your breath. I’ve already gotten orders to report to the Anggitay next month.”

  Kirk searched his memory. “That’s a Centaurus-class scout, right? Pretty small.”

  “But fast and good with maneuvers. Just like me.” Mitchell chuckled. “Which reminds me, you gotta get out here to Argelius sometime. There’s this café I know where the women are so—”

  “Tell me later, Gary. You’re supposed to be there for rest, remember?”

  “Jim, no one comes to Argelius to rest.”

  That left only Mehran Egdor, who came to see Kirk while he was packing up the meager belongings in his starbase quarters. “I understand you recommended me for promotion to captain,” the Rigelian said. “I wanted to thank you for that attempt.”

  Kirk frowned. “ ‘Attempt’?”

  Egdor held out the data slate with the orders. “First officer of the Kongo, under Captain Chandra.”

  The human’s eyes widened. “A Constitution-class ship. That’s a major step upward, Mehran.”

  “But not the one I wanted.”

  Kirk clasped his shoulder. “You’ve made it to where I was until a year ago. I have no doubt you’ll catch up before long.”

  Egdor studied him. “But now you’re taking a ground post. I trust you intend to remain in the race, Jim.”

  A pause. “I go where I’m needed. That’s the job.”

  “It’s more than duty for us, Jim. It’s a calling. Don’t forget that. Don’t stop striving for greater heights.”

  Egdor left, and Kirk was alone with his memories. Packing up the last of his sparse belongings, he looked around his now-barren quarters, reflecting on his time on Starbase 24 and the Sacagawea.

  Mere seconds later, he strode to the door and left. There was nothing here for him anymore.

  ENTERPRISE

  2265

  Seven

  A great terraformer needs the green thumb of a gardener, the eye of a painter, and the soul of a poet. And of course it doesn’t hurt to be a raging egomaniac.

  —Gideon Seyetik

  Aulacri terraforming command ship

  Upon the Enterprise’s arrival in orbit of Karabos II, the head of the Aulacri terraformers, Director Skovir, had invited Kirk to bring a delegation aboard her ship to discuss the situation. Kirk brought Spock and Mitchell with him, leaving Chief Engineer Scott in command of the ship. He knew he would need to learn to work with his new first officer, but he had come to rely on Gary Mitchell as a gadfly, reminding him not to become too rigid and bound by the rules. Kirk doubted that the highly regimented Spock could counterbalance him in the same way.

  The Aulacri were small but fierce-looking, with gray-brown skin, sharp teeth, pronounced cheekbones, and narrow eyes under heavy brows that tapered to the bridges of their upturned noses, giving them a part-feline, part-simian aspect that was amplified by their long, prehensile tails. Despite their somewhat predatory appearance, they welcomed their Starfleet visitors with cheerful enthusiasm and warmth. Skovir insisted on treating the party to a meal before they got down to business, and even presented them with live entertainment, as several of her junior terraformers put on an impromptu acrobatic performance for them, tumbling, jumping, and spinning in a way that seemed to come naturally to their people. It seemed they had retained more from their distant brachiating ancestors than most humanoids had. It also seemed that Skovir’s group really wanted to make a good impression on the Federation.

  This continued once Skovir showed the trio of officers a presentation of her terraforming plan for Karabos II, projecting a holographic simulation over her copper-haired head as she spoke. “The current climate of the planet is too hot and dry to support M-Class life,” she explained. “The ancient natives devastated their world with antimatter bombs, heating it sufficiently that its oceans evaporated and their hydrogen escaped into space through photodissociation.” A shudder of revulsion went through her lithe frame. “Fortunately, the Karabos system has an extensive cometary belt relatively near its star, giving us an abundance of water ice, nitrogen, and organic compounds to replenish the planet’s lost supply.”

  “The people of my world, Earth,” Kirk said, “have spent the past century employing a similar method to terraform our neighbor planet Mars. But our efforts were directed mainly at bombarding its ice caps to melt the water and carbon dioxide trapped within them, in order to warm the planet with the greenhouse effect. It seems you have the opposite problem here.”

  “Yes, our bombardment has a different goal,” Skovir said. “The four largest impactors are partially depleted comets with a high proportion of rock and metal in their composition—dense and massive enough to survive atmospheric entry and strike the surface. The impacts should propel enough dust and ash into the upper atmosphere to induce global cooling, allowing the cometary water vapor to precipitate into new oceans and waterways.”

  “You would need to calculate the impacts very precisely,” Spock replied. “Too powerful an impact would propel much of the cometary volatiles beyond the atmosphere altogether, as well as ejecting some of the existing atmosphere into space. You would lose more than you gained.”

  “Quite so, Mister Spock!” Skovir replied with a sharp-toothed grin. “This is why the rest of the comets will make a shallower entry, vaporizing slowly as they descend into the atmosphere.”

  “Then would that not be sufficient to allow the terraforming to proceed without endangering the archaeological sites on the surface?”

  Skovir’s pleasure in the discussion dimmed at the question. “It would be nice if it were that simple, wouldn’t it? But as you say, Captain Kirk, your Earth people also chose direct bombardment of the surface. Why did they do that, if I may ask?”

  Kirk considered his words. “As I understand it, to accelerate the process by releasing Mars’s own volatiles.”

  Skovir nodded. “To accelerate the process. Terraforming is slow, the work of generations. Those who begin it know we will not live to see the completion of our work. But that does not mean we are free from time pressures. Our worlds teem with people, people who need new places to live and start families. The sooner we can make a new world livable, the better.” She shrugged. “With all due respect to your archaeologists on the surface, Captain, I care more about what those future lives will build than about the ruins left over by people long dead.

  “Especially a people as savage as the Karabosi,” she added with some heat. “A people so brutal and violent that they bombed their own civilization out of existence. Drove not only themselves but their whole biosphere extinct through their cruelty toward each other, their irresponsibility toward their world. Frankly, I don’t believe a people such as that have anything useful to teach us.”

  Kirk pursed his lips. “I remember Doctor Sherev saying that investigating civilizations that destroyed themselves through war could help us learn how to avoid the same fate.”

  “We avoid that fate by learning to care for our worlds’ ecosystems,” Skovir said, “to nurture and create rather than exploit and destroy. And we avoid it by settling other worlds, so that a cataclysm on one world, natural or otherwise, will not wipe out our entire species.”

  Mitchell leaned forward in his seat. “There are a lot of planets in the galaxy, though. This can’t be the only world you could terraform.”

  “It’s the best one, certainly, of the worlds in Aulacri space. As you know, our territory is fairly limited, which is why we need to add to our tally of livable worlds. And Karabos II is the world that comes closest to fitting our needs already. Its gravity, rotation rate, and orbital parameters are nearly ideal for Aulacri habitation. Besides, it was habitable in the past, and merely needs to be restored to its former state—a simpler operation than transforming
a world that was never habitable.”

  “So why the rush? This is the work of lifetimes, like you said. Can’t you just give Sherev and her team enough time to finish their work?”

  Skovir’s fierce-looking features took on a wistful mien. “I assure you, Commander Mitchell, we’ve already given Doctor Sherev and her team as much time to conduct their survey as we could spare. But the timing of our operation is dictated by orbital mechanics. As a starship flight officer, you surely understand the complexities of orbital dynamics.” Mitchell nodded. “Objects massive enough to survive atmospheric entry, and to deliver the necessary quantities of water, nitrogen, and organics, are difficult to redirect. And we do not have the powerful tractors and verteron beams that the Federation employs; we must instead rely on thruster units installed upon the comets themselves. So we had to find comets that were already on trajectories close to what we need, so that they could be gently nudged onto new courses without risking fragmentation. We’ve already waited more than twenty years for the optimal orbital configuration. If we missed this one, the next suitable one wouldn’t be for thirty-six more years.”

  She turned to Kirk. “This operation needs to happen now, and it’s already underway. The impactors are on course to hit Karabos II within sixty hours. You must convince Doctor Sherev and her team to evacuate while they still can.” Skovir sighed. “I only hope that you can. She seems irrationally determined to remain. She even refused to join us for this meeting, for fear it was some sort of ploy to remove her team.”

  Kirk and Mitchell traded a knowing look. It sounded as if, without Starfleet discipline to temper it, Sherev’s stubbornness had reached new heights. Still, Kirk didn’t want to make any promises until he’d heard both sides. “Rest assured, Director Skovir—we will do everything in our power to find the best possible resolution for this dispute.”