The Captain's Oath

by Christopher L. Bennett

  Once more urgent matters were settled, it was time to deal with Kamisha Diaz. She may have done remarkable work making amends for her sabotage of the peace talks, but the sabotage itself had been a serious offense, one that could have cost thousands of lives or even brought a species to the brink of extinction. Kirk couldn’t just let it go.

  “I understand, sir,” Diaz told him when he came to visit her under confinement in her quarters. “I won’t make any excuses for what I did. It was a major crime. I deserve to be drummed out of Starfleet.”

  Kirk studied her sadly. Even after all this, he saw great potential in her. He wasn’t prepared to throw that away. Maybe this was how Commander Cheng had felt about young Lieutenant Kirk back on the Farragut, seeing him racked with guilt about his failure to prevent Captain Garrovick’s death, but refusing to let him hang himself for it.

  “Kamisha . . . What you did was at the bidding of Colonel Orloff. You may not have officially been in her chain of command, but she was effectively a superior officer. You don’t have to take the blame for what she pressured you to do.”

  “My responsibility is to you, Captain. I should’ve contacted you or Commander Adebayo immediately. But I chose to go along with her.”

  “You made a mistake. And you corrected it before any great damage could be done. I can’t say there won’t be consequences. There will have to be a hearing, and at the very least, there will be a serious reprimand on your record.”

  She lowered her head and gave a dejected sigh. “So much for trying to beat your ‘youngest captain’ record, sir. I’ll be lucky to make it to lieutenant. I don’t see Starfleet trusting me again any time soon.”

  Kirk took a step closer. “You still have people who trust you, Ensign. You’re the only person in the Federation that the Agni really trust right now. And the Regulan Council trusts you too.” He smiled. “That’s why both parties have requested that I assign you to detached duty as their official translator and diplomatic liaison.”

  She jerked her head back up, staring at him openmouthed. “I—you mean—really, sir?”

  He chuckled. “That’s right. It won’t be easy work, and it will probably be very slow going. Worst of all, you’ll have to deal with politicians on a regular basis.”

  She echoed his chuckle with a feebler one. “Well, I did say I deserve to be punished.”

  “Call it ‘rehabilitated,’ Ensign. This is a chance to make a real difference. To learn about a new, truly alien species, and to build a lasting peace between former enemies. I can’t think of a worthier achievement for a Starfleet officer.”

  Diaz smiled wistfully. “The worthiest achievement would be to keep exploring the galaxy under your command, Captain. And one day to follow in your footsteps. But . . . this will do nearly as well.”

  ENTERPRISE

  2265

  Twenty

  When all you have are your memories, let no one take them from you—least of all yourself.

  —Aulacri proverb

  Comet surface, Karabos system

  Kirk had tried to contact Skovir and tell her what Spock and Sherev had learned from the vault on Karabos II’s surface, but the terraforming director refused to accept his hails. With little time remaining, Kirk proceeded with the plan to beam over to the largest comet and activate its thruster pods manually. He just hoped that Skovir and the Aulacri government would understand his actions once they learned the whole truth.

  Kirk, Mitchell, and Scott beamed over to the comet in thruster suits, necessary since its surface gravity was a fraction of a percent of Earth’s. A forceful step could send them into orbit. They also carried harpoon guns to anchor themselves to the surface, which should make it easier to open and operate the Aulacri thruster unit’s manual controls.

  The cometary surface around them was made mostly of water ice intermixed with coal-black carbon compounds, but Kirk was struck by how familiar it looked. The towering crags and scarps surrounding the level plain where they stood reminded him uncannily of the desert terrain of the American Southwest, if viewed in monochrome—and through a fisheye lens, for the horizon, where he could see it, was startlingly close and curved vertiginously down and away. A faint haze of ice crystals and rock dust filled the air, a new-formed atmosphere spit out by the erupting geysers as the comet warmed in Karabos’s ever-nearer light. The ground beneath Kirk’s feet was covered in fine scree, and the visible rock—or rather, ice—underneath it was cracked and crazed like the top of a fresh pan of brownies. The brittle, friable appearance of the surface made Kirk grateful that he was featherlight in this gravity.

  The primary thruster unit was anchored before them in the middle of the plain, one of the few relatively level and solid surfaces on the comet. It was a hexagonal pyramid about six meters high, with a rosette of thrust control vanes surrounding the opening at the apex. From each face extended a leg that had bored into the surface to secure it here.

  But once the trio circled around to the control panel under Scott’s guidance, Kirk saw that the surface had not been as solid as it seemed. A large pit gaped in the ground, and from it a crack extended clear to one of the thruster’s anchor legs, which had been torn loose. “A geyser must’ve erupted here,” Mitchell said. “Right by the thruster. We’re lucky it’s still attached.”

  “Not so lucky, Commander,” Scott said, shaking his head as he examined the control panel. “Look.”

  The panel was torn open and pitted, its controls and inner circuitry wrecked. “Shrapnel from the geyser must’ve done it,” Scott said.

  “Can you bypass the controls?” Kirk asked.

  “Not in the available time, sir. We need to get to one of the other thrusters. This was the master unit, but I can still access the control network from one of the auxiliaries. The thruster’s still good to fire, it’s just a matter of startin’ it.”

  “How much time do we have?”

  “Less than ten minutes for minimum safe deflection,” Mitchell said.

  “Lead the way, Mister Scott,” Kirk said, grateful for the comet’s relatively small size.

  Despite the shortness of the journey, it was not without its hazards. The comet’s surface was cracking and shifting beneath their feet as they coasted above it using their suit thrusters. Puffs of vapor spat out of cracks in the surface, and at one point, a geyser erupted from a spot they’d passed over no more than ten seconds earlier. Any closer, and the icy shrapnel might have done to their EV suits what it had done to the main thruster’s controls.

  As they neared the auxiliary thruster, another obstacle presented itself. Five Aulacri, immediately recognizable through the tail sheaths extending back from their thruster suits, blocked the humans’ path. “Watch yourselves,” Kirk said to the others. He remembered how lithe, quick, and acrobatic they had been in the entertainment they had put on the other day, even though they were scientists by profession. He wasn’t about to underestimate their fighting prowess.

  “Turn back now!” Skovir’s voice came over the comm channel. “This is your final warning! Please, Captain Kirk, abandon this insane risk in the name of an unwanted past!”

  “Skovir, listen to me,” Kirk said. “You’ve been wrong about the Karabosi this whole time.”

  “The Karabosi are dead! They deserve to stay that way!”

  Before Kirk could answer, she lunged at him, kicking off the large thruster unit with her strong legs and using her suit jets to accelerate toward him. It happened too quickly for Kirk to react; before he could reach his own thrust controls, she slammed into him feetfirst. The impact brought her to a near halt while sending Kirk sailing backward on a tangent to the surface, which quickly began curving down away from him. He tumbled, drifting farther and farther into the hazy sky.

  Finally, he recovered enough to reach the thruster control panel on his suit. Once he stabilized himself, he began thrusting back toward the surface. He raised his harpoon gun and fired a tether line into the ice, using it to reel himself in faster.

&
nbsp; As he neared the thruster site, he saw Mitchell and Scott fending off their own attackers; unlike Kirk, they’d had the presence of mind to anchor themselves with their harpoon tethers ahead of time. The Aulacri moved fluidly and swiftly in the minimal gravity, using their tails to reorient their bodies in midair like falling cats, relying on their suit jets only for thrust rather than direction changes.

  Scott had managed to wrap his tether around one of the Aulacri like a lasso, binding his arms to his sides, but another was thrusting toward him. Mitchell was struggling in the grip of the remaining two; Kirk drew his phaser and stunned one, who drifted slowly off and down toward the surface while Mitchell continued to vie with the other. Kirk aimed at the second attacker . . .

  And his harpoon tore free from the crumbling surface. The line lost tension and snaked toward him, tangling his arms and legs. He scrambled free, having to detach the harpoon gun from his belt to do so. But the surface was now rising rapidly toward him. He fired his jets, but still hit hard and bounced at a shallow angle.

  Kirk caught himself on a craggy outcropping, bringing himself to a halt. He looked around until he spotted the others: Mitchell was holding his own against the terraformer whose arms, legs, and tail were wrapped around him, but Scott had been overpowered by his two attackers, who were binding his arms behind him.

  “Captain!” Seeing a shadow on the ground before him, he looked up to see Skovir crouching atop the outcropping, her own harpoon gun leveled at his helmet visor. “Your time is almost up. Another few minutes and it’ll be too late to divert the comet. You’ve lost!”

  “You have no idea how much you’ll lose if you let this comet hit, Skovir!”

  “I’ll lose everything I’ve worked toward for twenty years if I don’t!”

  Kirk felt a faint, building rumble in the ground beneath his feet, saw pebbles begin to break away from the outcropping on which Skovir stood. “Director, we need to move now!”

  “You’re staying right where you—”

  Kirk lunged upward, taking her by surprise. He slammed into her and knocked them both into the sky . . . and as they tumbled, they caught glimpses of the massive geyser that erupted right where they had been standing moments before. A burst of sublimating water vapor and fragments of ice slammed into their suits, but they were far enough away that it did minimal damage.

  As he fired his thrusters to stabilize them several hundred meters above the comet’s surface, Skovir met his eyes in bewilderment. “Maybe now you’ll listen to me,” he said, gripping her upper arms firmly as he let gravity draw them slowly back down. But it seemed the fight had gone out of her.

  “Skovir, you were wrong. The Karabosi didn’t try to destroy the Aulacri.”

  “W-what? What are you saying?”

  “What Spock and Sherev found down there in the vault—it’s a gene bank. It contains preserved genetic samples of thousands of different forms of Karabosian life—including the Karabosi themselves.”

  Skovir snarled. “Of course they preserved themselves and not us!”

  “That’s where your history got it wrong, Skovir. My people scanned the genetic code of the Karabosi samples. It’s essentially identical to Aulacri genes. Skovir, there weren’t two different species on Karabos II. There was only one—your ancestors.”

  The terraformer was stunned. She shook her head in disbelief. “No. No, they got it wrong. You saw the images! The Karabosi were larger than us, more hirsute, more gray-skinned.”

  “Only a surface difference—the result of four millennia of genetic drift in the new environment of Aulac. But no greater than the difference between the ethnic groups of my species. Skovir—the Karabosi were not your enemies. They were you.”

  “No. It can’t be true! We’re nothing like those genocidal monsters!”

  He gripped her arms again, but this time to support her rather than restrain her. “No, you’re not—not anymore. Because your people learned from their mistakes. The survivors who made their way to Aulac—they must have been ashamed of the savagery that led them to destroy their homeworld. They must have resolved to become better, to get it right the second time and leave that dark side of themselves behind.”

  They touched down lightly on the surface, and Kirk saw that the fighting had stopped; the other Aulacri were listening raptly to their dialogue. Skovir looked up at him searchingly. “If that is what our ancestors wanted, then why not let us finish what they started? Let us wipe away the last vestiges of our ancestors’ crimes and give our people a new, purified beginning on Karabos II?”

  “Because that’s not how it works, Skovir,” Kirk said. “You can’t move forward by forgetting your past. You have to learn from all of it, the good and the bad.

  “Many of us have similar atrocities in our ancestry. My own ancestral culture on Earth, in a land called America, was founded on one of the greatest genocides in my planet’s history, the theft of an entire continent from its native peoples . . . and on the brutal enslavement of humans from yet another continent. Yet at the same time, America pioneered representative democracy, social justice, diplomacy, and innovation, laying the foundation for the guiding principles of the Federation. Both extremes coexisted in the same culture, as they do in so many. It’s a paradox of history we struggle with to this day.”

  “And . . . how do you resolve it, Captain?”

  “For myself . . . by having faith in humans’ ability to learn from our mistakes. It’s only by admitting our wrongs and our failures, by confronting them honestly, that we can ever transcend them. The greatest evils are committed by those who assume they can do no wrong. It’s our acceptance of our capacity to do evil that drives us to be better.

  “Your ancestors, Director, built the peaceful, benevolent society you so prize out of guilt and regret toward what they did to their own homeworld. If you erase the knowledge of their misdeeds, then your descendants will lose that incentive to keep striving to improve.”

  Skovir shook her head. “I still can’t believe anything good could come from reviving the knowledge of that violent, hateful culture, even if they were our forebears.”

  “Director, your forebears were the same as mine. For every cruel, violent faction driven by greed and hate, there were others striving for the greater good. The people who built that vault were determined to preserve as much as they could of the world that others of their race—your race—were about to destroy. In addition to art and literature from every major culture on Karabos II, they preserved genetic samples from every ethnic group. Viable samples that can be cloned. So that, one day, the Karabosi people—all their peoples—might live again.

  “You wanted to remake a world from scratch, Skovir. Wouldn’t it be better to restore one?”

  Skovir gasped as the weight of his words finally sank in. “By the Seed! We only have minutes left! We have to get these thrusters up and running immediately!”

  U.S.S. Enterprise

  It was as close as Kirk ever wanted to cut it. Half an hour later, he, Skovir, and the others stood on the Enterprise bridge together, clenching their fists as the comet streaked through the upper atmosphere. The thrusters and the Enterprise’s tractor beam had been nudging its trajectory outward arcsecond by arcsecond that entire time, and the simulations gave a reasonably high probability of success. But they were only just now coming back into orbit, with no time to evacuate Spock and Sherev before the moment of truth, so Kirk couldn’t bring himself to relax until the comet had completed its passage through the edge of the atmosphere and flown back on into the depths of space, depositing a fraction of its water and ammonia vapor and leaving the planet surface unharmed.

  Skovir turned to him. “You stopped us from making a terrible mistake, Captain Kirk. And you have given us the chance to reclaim hundreds of Karabosian species we had thought to be long extinct—and to allow many of our own ancestors to live again, after a fashion.” The clones, of course, would not have the memories of their originals, but they would be the Karabosi’s di
rect inheritors, and they could be raised with the culture their forebears had left for them in the archive’s data sheets. They would add a whole new subculture to the Aulacri’s diversity, and though Kirk expected that had the potential for conflict, he had faith that both cultures—the one preserved by the ancients in defiance of the others’ violence and the one built by the Aulacri to ensure it was never repeated—would find their way through it and be better for it.

  Watching the last wisps of cometary vapors diffuse into Karabos II’s atmosphere, Gary Mitchell sidled over to Kirk. “That’s, what, three peoples saved from extinction now? This is starting to be a habit with you.”

  Kirk shook his head. “No. I’d say Mister Spock deserves the credit for this one.”

  His old friend looked at him askance. “Don’t let Rhen hear you say that.”

  “I think Rhen would agree with me. If Spock hadn’t insisted on staying behind, if he hadn’t solved that puzzle as quickly as he did, the Karabosi civilization would’ve been destroyed all over again, and we’d never even have known it.” Kirk shook his head. “I still don’t know what made that logical, scientific mind so driven to fight on their behalf, but I’m glad he did.”

  Mitchell grinned. “Sounds like you’ve finally accepted your new first officer.”

  Kirk thought it over. “I think we still have a lot to learn about our Mister Spock. But I look forward to finding it out.”

  ENTERPRISE

  2264

  Twenty-One

  For the past quarter-century, the Agni have remained on peaceful but distant terms with the Federation and have resisted a closer relationship, needing nothing from it besides acceptance of their parallel existence within its space. Since neither order of life can exist in each other’s worlds, since they can barely even perceive one another and can communicate only indirectly and imperfectly, the Agni are in many ways more remote from the Federation than the most distant M-Class civilizations yet discovered. Yet their coexistence within Federation systems is proof that even the most extreme divides can be bridged.