The Captain's Oath

by Christopher L. Bennett

  Daramoy grimaced. “You’re a strange man, Kirk, but there’s an honor to you. Whatever happens, I’ll count you in my remembrances.” After another moment of uncertainty, she kissed him, briefly but intensely, then moved to the door.

  “Damn, Jim,” Gary Mitchell whispered, shaking his head in envy. Kirk ignored him.

  The two teams split up in the corridor, and Kirk strove to put Daramoy out of his mind as he led his own party toward the lab where Sherev’s scans showed that their communicators—and hopefully their phasers and tricorders as well—were being stored. At the final intersection, he and Hauraki peered around the corner to see two male guards posted outside the lab. Falling back, Kirk turned to Diaz. “Ensign, you’re the one most likely to pass for Nacmorian from this distance. Think you can create a distraction?”

  The science officer quirked a small smile. “Certainly, sir. I’ve found that men are usually absurdly easy to distract.” She moved out into the corridor, and Kirk frowned after her, unsure whether he’d just been teased. If so, he realized, he might well have deserved it.

  “Excuse me!” Diaz called to the guards. “Could you help me out? The differential analyzer in my lab blew a vacuum tube, and I dropped the replacement tube behind it. I need help moving it away from the wall. Would you mind?”

  A pause, then footsteps. “Sorry, what lab was that? What department are you with?”

  “It’s right around here—it’ll just take a moment. Please, I’d be so grateful.” She stepped back around the corner, retreating out of the guard’s sight. Hauraki was ready when the guard rounded the corner, and the cowled man was quickly rendered unconscious.

  The scuffle made enough noise to draw the other guard’s attention; Kirk heard him cry out in concern. Nodding to Mitchell to follow him, Kirk leaped out into the other corridor and saw the guard running toward them. At the sight of them, the man’s eyes widened in shock; he reversed course and ran for an alarm trigger on the wall. Kirk and Mitchell tackled him and knocked him out before he could raise an alert.

  Soon the other two humans joined them outside the main lab. “Differential analyzer?” Mitchell asked Diaz. “Vacuum tube? Where’d you get all that?”

  Diaz grinned at him. “You should’ve paid more attention to the radio shows, sir. Very educational.”

  Kirk led the party into the lab, where two Nacmorian scientists, a male and a female, were working. The woman, her hair tied back in a bun, was adjusting the intensity dial atop one of the landing party’s small, concealable phaser 1 units. Its emitter nozzle was aimed at a cage in which her male colleague was securing a bronze-furred laboratory animal resembling a cross between a hamster and a monkey. “What do you think setting four will do to it?” the man asked.

  “Well,” the woman replied, “we’ve gone from nonlethal neural disruption to lethal neural disruption. I suppose this one will . . . kill it more?”

  The man laughed. “Maybe it kills it and its whole family.”

  He moved out of the way—and Kirk saw that a rack of pressurized gas canisters rested against the far wall beyond him and the animal, right in the path of the disintegration-level beam they were about to fire.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Kirk announced.

  The scientists looked up, then jerked back in shock. “The aliens!” the man gasped.

  “If . . . if you were . . . me?” the woman asked, paralyzed with fear. “What—what does that mean? Do you have some power to . . . enter my mind?”

  It wasn’t the reaction Kirk had expected, but he could work with it. “If you don’t want to find out, then kindly step away from our property. We’re here to take it back.” He stepped forward and picked up the compact phaser. “For your information, I probably just saved both your lives. You’re tampering with something too dangerous for you to handle. For your own safety, I recommend you return all our equipment to us at once.” He extended the phaser forward. “Unless you want a firsthand demonstration of what the next setting can really do.” It was a bluff; he’d already returned it to the stun setting.

  Both scientists were quick to cooperate in returning their other phasers, then showing them to the adjoining lab where their communicators and tricorders were being studied. Luckily, the study of those devices was deemed a lower priority than weapons research, so the team working in the second lab had already gone home for the night.

  While the team recovered their equipment, the female scientist’s curiosity finally outweighed her fear. “P-please . . . if I could just ask you a few questions about these devices’ composition, their power sources. The radios seem to work on wavelengths we can’t even detect. Please—you could help us so much.”

  “Look at the man giving you your orders,” Kirk told her. “If he had the knowledge you seek . . . do you really think it would help anyone?”

  The scientist sighed and lowered her head. “No. No, it wouldn’t.”

  “But if your devices can do what you imply,” the male scientist added, “then you could end that problem for us.”

  “No,” Kirk told him. “That kind of thinking is the problem.” He set the phaser to heavy stun. “Frankly, you might not even remember this conversation. I’m sorry.” He fired at the scientist, then at his colleague. Both of them slumped to the floor.

  “Scan for records,” Kirk told Diaz. “Find any photographs, recordings, notes, anything about us, and destroy them. We have to leave no proof that we were ever here.”

  While the others carried out this task, Kirk contacted the Sacagawea and advised them to lock on and stand by for beam-out. Soon, the party had gathered all the evidence they could carry with them and phasered the rest into ash—including, disturbingly, the autopsied corpses of two lab animals.

  But before Kirk could give the beam-out order, an alarm sounded. Hauraki and Mitchell ran to the door and cracked it open. The sounds of yelling, pounding feet, and gunfire echoed from a far hallway, and Kirk heard cries from the guards: “It’s the rebels!” “Halt or we’ll fire!” “Stop them, they can’t get away!”

  “Daramoy,” Mitchell breathed. “Jim, we can’t just leave them. They could be killed!”

  Kirk felt the same way Mitchell did. His impulse was to rush to Daramoy’s rescue, to use his superior weaponry to keep her safe and help her free her world. But his sense of duty clamped down on his emotions. He had sworn an oath to uphold the Prime Directive, no matter the temptation. Daramoy’s fate was her own, and he had no right to become involved with it. He reminded himself that tough calls like this were the very reason a captain needed to maintain emotional detachment.

  “You know the rules, mister,” he told Gary. “We have no choice.” He opened his communicator. “Kirk to Sacagawea. Beam us up now.”

  Mitchell stared furiously at his captain. “Screw the rules,” he said. Just as the shimmering chime of the transporter beam began to sound, the navigator tossed his communicator aside and ran out after the rebels—carrying his phaser. Kirk tried to call to him, but he was already locked in the beam, his vision dissolving into sparkles. Mitchell was on his own.

  U.S.S. Sacagawea

  Mitchell’s communicator had been beamed up with the other three, so it took several hours for Diaz to track the navigator down by the energy signature of his phaser’s power cell. Kirk had Hauraki lead a security team to bring him back. By that time, though, Daramoy’s resistance network had already hijacked the radio waves and announced the truth that Ribaul’s forces had attacked their own people and blamed it on alien invaders, and that documents and films obtained from the government bunker would prove it beyond a doubt. Voices of protest were emboldened, and some even dared to say on the air that if the allegations proved true, it should lead to Ribaul’s resignation. In hours, Daramoy had gone from enemy of the state to planetary hero.

  And Kirk had to face Gary Mitchell and tell him he had been wrong to help her do it.

  “I assume the rebels owe their escape to your skills with a phaser,” Kirk said
to Mitchell across the table in an otherwise empty briefing room.

  His friend fidgeted under his gaze. “No more than I could help,” Mitchell said. “I stunned a few guards when nobody was looking. Melted a lock behind us to stop the soldiers from coming after us. I let them save themselves as much as possible. Hell, even if Daramoy realized what I was doing, she was too devoted to her ‘aliens are a hoax’ belief to put it together.

  “Still,” he finished defiantly, “they wouldn’t have gotten out of there alive without my help.”

  “That’s exactly the problem, Gary! They need to be able to do things on their own. That’s why the Prime Directive exists, to stop us from solving other people’s problems and making them dependent on us.”

  “I know the theory, Jim! But it wasn’t a theory down there. It was the lives of people we knew. People who helped us. They saved us, Jim. We’d probably be getting dissected in a lab now if not for Daramoy and the others. Deciding not to help them in return—regs or not, that’s a shitty move, Jim. And you’re better than that.”

  Kirk was silent for a long moment, thinking. Finally, he sighed. “I know. She trusted me, and I abandoned her. I can’t help wondering if that’s who I really want to be. Is that what being a captain means, having to make choices like that?”

  Mitchell leaned forward. “No, Jim. Because that choice was what the book told you to do. Being captain means it’s your call, not the damn book’s. You’re the man on the scene, so for God’s sake, stop second-guessing yourself! Just make your own choices and deal with what comes. That’s what I did down there.”

  Another long pause. “And I’m grateful for it,” Kirk said at last. “If you hadn’t defied my orders, Daramoy and the others would’ve been captured, tortured, probably executed. I would’ve had to live with that on my conscience.” He held Mitchell’s eyes long enough to be sure his gratitude registered—then sharpened his tone. “But that has to be my decision, Gary. Not yours. You said it yourself—it’s the captain’s call. And only the captain’s. Remember that in the future, or you’ll be in for worse than a reprimand.”

  “Understood, Captain,” Mitchell said, lowering his eyes contritely. Yet he seemed to say “Captain” with new appreciation.

  “Now, let’s get back to the bridge,” Kirk said, rising from the table. “I understand Daramoy’s expected to give an address within the hour.”

  Gary followed suit. “Finally, something worth listening to on the radio.” He sighed as they headed out the door. “What really kills me is, I did all that for Daramoy, and I still didn’t get a kiss.”

  Kirk rolled his eyes. He doubted his friend would ever change.

  Eleven

  Among the Agni’s other advantages, their singularity technology gave them superior long-range sensor capability through the use of subspace gravity lensing. This enabled them to scan star systems throughout Federation space and identify the worlds that best suited their objectives. With no inkling of the Agni’s real nature and priorities, Starfleet could never have anticipated where they would make their next move.

  —Dr. Monali Bhasin

  Ministers of Sacrifice, 2289

  U.S.S. Kongo NCC-1710

  Mehran Egdor sat uneasily in the Kongo’s command chair. Being in this seat was what he had aspired to for many years, but not like this.

  He had held the conn frequently over the past sixteen months, of course, when Captain Chandra had been off shift or away from the ship. In his tenure as the Kongo’s first officer, the Rigelian had never felt that his human crewmates considered him unwelcome or unworthy to command the bridge. Their casual acceptance had given Egdor hope that there truly was room for nonhumans to increase their presence in Starfleet command positions. Even the most well-intentioned of people could fall prey to unconscious biases, but they were also the ones who could most easily overcome them.

  But then the call had come from Starfleet Command, ordering them to the Bardeezi system. The Bardeezans were an independent species within Federation-controlled space, trading the rich mineral wealth of their star system to Federation worlds in exchange for protectorate status. Recently, they had detected an incursion on the fringes of their planetary space by a large cylindrical starship identical to the “demon” ships that had crippled the Sacagawea and killed dozens of Egdor’s crewmates in their attempted invasion of Adelphous. Fearing that the vessel was a scout for a second invasion attempt—and concerned that it had somehow slipped past the Federation border undetected—Starfleet Command had sent the Kongo to assist the Bardeezans in defending the multiple populated worlds and mining stations throughout their planetary system—not only because of the Constitution-class vessel’s proximity, but because of Mehran Egdor’s firsthand experience with these invaders. Egdor had relished the opportunity to bring his knowledge to bear in countering them once again.

  So it had been a shock when Captain Chandra had insisted on beaming down personally to Bardeezi Prime to coordinate with the system’s prime and defense ministers, while sending Egdor and the Kongo off on a mere errand to confirm the readiness of the system’s extraplanetary defense stations. Chandra’s decision to leave Egdor out of the discussion was a bewildering affront. He had followed his commanding officer’s orders, of course, but the implication that there were limits to the older human’s faith in his Rigelian first officer had been gnawing at Egdor ever since.

  But then science officer Aaltonen detected five cylinder ships emerging from warp within the system’s main cometary belt, and everything changed. “I’ll remain here to coordinate with the Bardeezans,” said Captain Chandra from the main viewscreen once Egdor touched base with him. Behind the gray-haired, tan-skinned human captain, several rotund, large-eyed bipeds with slate-gray hides and hornlike protrusions on their heads moved through the defense control center as frenetically as their bulky bodies permitted, an activity no doubt paralleled by the full mobilization of their defense forces in space. “It would take you too long to retrieve me anyway. Instead, proceed to the outer system to engage the hostiles. The Bardeezan Defense Fleet will support you, but they will defer to your command.”

  “Me, sir?” Egdor asked, taken by surprise.

  “Of course, Mehran. Why do you think I left you on the ship? In case an attack came while I was down here handling the bureaucracy, I wanted you up there where you could do the most good.”

  The affirmation of Chandra’s faith in him was a weight off Egdor’s mind, and he led the Kongo’s crew into action with renewed confidence. He believed that confidence was warranted, for he and others in Starfleet had spent the past seventeen months studying the first conflict with the cylinder ships and devising defense strategies. Egdor worked with Chansuo Huang, the Kongo’s helmsman and security chief, to reconfigure the vessel’s main deflector dish to defend against the intruders’ deadly armor-plate projectiles, while Huang and Aaltonen coordinated sensor and phaser protocols to allow the hex plates to be targeted as soon as their acceleration was detected. En route to the intercept coordinates, Egdor instructed the Bardeezan defense ship commanders to set up similar protocols as best they could. The Bardeezan ships were smaller and much less powerful than a Constitution-class heavy cruiser, but they were specialized for in-system defense at sublight, and they had potent tractor beams for deflecting the small asteroids and comets that occasionally threatened the Bardeezans’ mining stations.

  Defense against the intruders’ singularity-powered beam weapons was another matter. “If we cannot persuade them to stand down and talk to us,” Egdor told his crew and the listening Bardeezan commanders, “our main strategy will be to attempt to target our shots between their shield plates and disable their vessels. Our previous encounter, along with our intelligence from their encounter with the Klingons, showed that they retreat upon sustaining too much damage. Their use of their shield plates as projectiles is a potential weakness; if we can destroy enough of their plates, or eject them far enough from the battle that the intruders can no longer con
trol them, then we can erode their protection and leave them vulnerable. But don’t risk taking avoidable hits in order to chip away at a few plates; it’s not worth the severe damage we’d sustain to inflict relatively minor damage on their defensive ability.”

  “It’s a strange sort of defense system, don’t you think?” Henrikka Aaltonen asked once Egdor had concluded his address. “Sacrificing pieces of your own shields to use them as weapons.”

  “No stranger than reducing available shield energy to power phasers,” Huang countered. “Or having to stand up from cover in order to aim your hand phaser. It’s a common trade-off in battle—you have to risk something of your own to get the other guy.” He shrugged. “Seems fairer that way.”

  “Your attitude reminds me of another helm officer I once knew,” Egdor said. “She was philosophical about her own injuries from battle, and held no grudges against her foes.”

  Huang nodded approvingly. “She sounds like a clear-headed sort.”

  “She was. She was also killed by the very foes we now face. So I don’t want you to concern yourself with playing fair, Lieutenant. I want you to play to win.”

  “Yes, Commander,” Huang replied, humbled.

  Once the Kongo had rendezvoused with three of the Bardeezans’ largest defense ships—no larger in volume or crew complement than the Sacagawea, though more compact and ovoid in shape—they proceeded to intercept the incoming cylinder ships. Egdor hailed the intruders as required and made the standard offer to engage in peaceful dialogue, along with the standard warning that they would be met with force if they failed to stand down. The aliens were predictably unresponsive, merely continuing to barrel forward. “Are we sure they’re even detecting our hails?” Egdor asked Ensign Goldanskii at communications.