McCoy worked up a smile. “Thanks,” he replied, [65] “but I’d rather get started right away. No time like the present and all that.”
The surgeon general nodded approvingly. “Whatever you say, Doctor. Far be it from me to stand in the way of progress.”
The younger man stood. “See you later, then.”
“Absolutely,” said Eggleton.
As McCoy left the man’s office, he found he was glad to get back to work. Real work, he remarked inwardly, not some glorified baby-sitting assignment. At Starfleet Medical, he made real discoveries. He furthered the cause of science in measurable ways.
His boss was right, he told himself, as he walked down a long, well-lit corridor to his own office. He was too set in his ways to go back to deep-space exploration. He had found his niche there on Earth.
In a way, the doctor thought, it was good he had made the trip to Capella IV. Otherwise, he might have wondered if he had made the wrong decision about staying on Earth. He might have wound up with doubts he would never have had a chance to dispel.
Suddenly, something occurred to him. Was it possible, he wondered, that Eggleton had sent him to the Capellans because he thought McCoy was getting an itch to move on? Was it possible the surgeon general had known just how annoying the assignment would be to his star research biologist—and that was exactly why he gave it to him?
As McCoy pondered the possibility, he turned and entered his office. It had a nice window, but nothing as expansive as Eggleton’s, and it faced the city skyline instead of the ocean. His desk was smaller and [66] more functional, and the air didn’t contain even a hint: of Vertigranen incense.
But it was his. It was familiar.
It was home, for petesakes.
As always, he glanced at his personal monitor screen, to see if there were any messages for him. There were several, as it turned out.
The first one was from Joanna, his daughter. A teenager now, she was on a skiing vacation in Wyoming with her friends, and she wanted him to know she was having a good time.
The doctor sighed. He wished he could have been a bigger part of Joanna’s life when she was younger. But her mother had broken his heart so badly, he had spent most of the girl’s earliest years in space, running away from a life that had spiraled out of his control.
The next four communications were from various colleagues asking McCoy for help or advice regarding their respective projects. He scanned them quickly to see what they wanted, then stored the messages until he had gone over the others in the queue.
A sixth missive was from a woman the doctor had been seeing. She wanted to know if he cared to escort her to a cocktail party on Alcatraz, even though the two of them weren’t exactly an item anymore. He sent back an emphatic “No, thank you, ma’am.”
McCoy hated cocktail parties—almost as much as he hated transporters, in fact. If the woman had paid a little more attention to him while they were going out, she might have known that. It was no wonder their relationship hadn’t gone anywhere.
[67] Then came the seventh message, which was a lot more of a surprise than any of the others. It was from Jim Kirk, with whom the doctor had served on the Constitution several years earlier.
Kirk was captain of the Enterprise now, and had been for over a year. His navigator was Gary Mitchell, a brash but entertaining young man whom McCoy had also met on the Constitution.
Kirk and the doctor corresponded every so often, but never twice in the same month—and they had spoken only a few weeks ago, when the captain had gotten wind of his friend’s mission to Capella IV. So what was so blasted important that Kirk had seen fit to break with tradition?
McCoy frowned as he stared at the captain’s name on the screen. He had a bad feeling about Kirk’s message, somehow, a sense that he wouldn’t like what he found in it. But that was silly, wasn’t it?
Kirk could have been calling to say he had fallen in love or made first contact with a previously unknown species. He could have been calling to tell his friend that he had discovered an alien paradise—or better yet, a lifetime supply of Romulan ale.
There was a whole universe full of things the captain could have sent a message about, and they weren’t all bad by a long shot. But as the doctor opened the file and read the communication, he realized it was bad.
It was very bad.
Leaning back in his chair, McCoy drew a ragged breath and tried to cope with what he had just read. [68] “Gary ...” he said softly. “Lord, man ... what did you do to yourself?”
Captain Damion’s comment was still ringing in Kirk’s ears as he made his way back to Starbase 33’s transporter room, closely escorted by the ever-attentive Lieutenant Willoughby.
You’re only their captain, Damion had told him smugly and unemotionally. You’re not Starfleet Command.
Kirk swore beneath his breath. Only their captain indeed. Who did the man think he was?
Willoughby turned to him. “Did you say something, sir?”
The captain shook his head. “No, Lieutenant. Nothing.”
It wasn’t that Kirk had any illusions of absolute autonomy, even on his own starship. Regardless of the circumstances, he was always aware of the fact that he reported to a higher authority.
But as commanding officer of the Enterprise, he shared a relationship with his crew that the brass back in San Francisco had no role in. When a crewman was asked to risk his life, it was Kirk who did the asking. When a crewman was asked to kill, it was Kirk who took responsibility for it. And when a crewman died, it was Kirk who bore the guilt.
Not Starfleet. Him.
“Sir?” said Willoughby.
The captain glanced at her. “Yes, Lieutenant?”
He expected her to say something about how nice it was to meet him, or how much she hoped he had [69] enjoyed his visit. But the woman didn’t say anything like that. What she did was ask a question.
“Can you give me any advice, sir?” Willoughby inquired. “About serving on a starship, I mean?”
“Advice?” he echoed, caught off balance.
“Yes, sir,” she responded. “You see, I’m shipping out on the Defiant the middle of next week.”
Kirk nodded. “I see.” He gave the matter some thought. “As I recall,” he told Willoughby, “Captain Serling is commanding the Defiant these days. He’s a no-nonsense type of commander. He doesn’t like to see anyone deviate from the rules—especially someone who’s new to his ship.”
The lieutenant looked grateful for the tip. “Thank you, sir. I’ll be sure to remember that,” she told him. But as they proceeded down the corridor, she began to frown.
“Problem?” asked the captain.
Willoughby sighed. “To tell you the truth, sir, I thought I would be excited to take this posting. After all, I’ve been campaigning for it for several months now.”
“But?” said Kirk.
The lieutenant shrugged. “I guess I’ve got a few butterflies. I mean, it’s my first time on a starship, outside of a couple of Academy training missions. What if I start out on the wrong foot? I’ve heard of people who ran into a problem or two whose careers never recovered.”
The captain shook his head. “The surest way to find yourself with a problem is to spend your time worrying about it. If I were you, Willoughby, I’d [70] concentrate on doing the best job I can ... and leave it at that.”
He could see her filing the advice away for future reference. “I’ll remember that too,” the lieutenant promised him.
The transporter room was looming up ahead. Together, Kirk and Willoughby entered and nodded to the technician on duty.
“Captain Kirk will be returning to the Enterprise now,” the lieutenant told the man behind the console, though he had no doubt already been notified of the captain’s departure.
“Aye, sir,” the operator replied, and made a few last-minute adjustments in his control settings. “Ready, sir,” he told Kirk.
The captain took his position on the transporter pla
tform. “Best of luck,” he told Willoughby.
She smiled. “I appreciate that, sir.”
He turned to the technician. “Energize.”
A moment later, Kirk found himself in the smaller, more modestly furnished and eminently more familiar environs of the Enterprise’s transporter room. Lieutenant Kyle, who was standing behind the control console, looked up from his panel to acknowledge the captain’s appearance.
“Welcome back, sir,” he said.
“Thank you,” Kirk told him.
Then he headed out the door and into the corridor. A turbolift ride later, he found himself emerging onto the ship’s bridge, drawing glances from his command staff.
[71] Their consoles were making shrill sounds as they worked, bright orange graphics flashing on their screens. And as always, there was the hum of the engines, more subdued now with the propulsion drives disengaged.
Home, the captain thought.
Spock, who was sitting in the center seat, gave it up when he saw Kirk coming. “Captain,” he said.
“Mr. Spock,” Kirk responded, as he sat down and made himself comfortable. “Anything to report?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” said the Vulcan.
The captain hadn’t expected there would be, in the short time he had been gone. He turned to Alden, who was sitting at the helm-navigation console next to Lieutenant Stiles.
“Heading one seven seven mark six,” Kirk said, rattling off the numbers. “Full impulse, Lieutenant.”
“Aye, sir,” Alden responded.
Next, the captain glanced at his navigator. “Chart a course for Earth,” he told Stiles.
“I’ve already begun, sir,” responded Stiles, who had no doubt recognized the heading.
Spock looked at Kirk. “If you have no further need of me, sir, I would like to check on the progress of my aeroponics experiments.”
The captain signified his permission with a nod. After all, the Vulcan was the Enterprise’s chief science officer as well as his exec. “Go to it, Mr. Spock. Dismissed.”
With his first officer heading for the turbolift, Kirk sat back in his chair and watched Starbase 33 slide off [72] the bridge’s main viewscreen as Alden brought the ship about. What he had been through with Damion and Admiral Saylor seemed to slide away as well.
But not Willoughby. A little uncertain of herself but desperate to do well, she stuck in his mind and wouldn’t let go.
The captain knew why, too. Seven years earlier, he had been a young lieutenant himself, embarking on his first real mission. And he had had his share of problems, all right. Big problems, even bigger than any Willoughby might have envisioned.
For a while, they had threatened to overwhelm him, to crush any hope he had of a long, productive career. But fortunately for Kirk, he’d had a friend to see him past the rough spots. ...
2257
His knees wobbly, his throat sore with mounting grief, twenty-four-year-old Jim Kirk knelt over the bloodless corpse of his colleague.
Just a few minutes earlier, it had housed the spirit of a security officer named Piniella, an energetic young woman from Barcelona with flashing, dark eyes and a deep, hearty laugh and a love of strong liqueurs. Now it was a dead thing, its skin ivory-white and cold to the touch, its eyes staring blankly at the fate that had overtaken it.
Clenching his teeth against a flood of emotion, Kirk cursed long and loud in the depths of his soul. Then, [73] with clumsy fingertips,, he drew Piniella’s eyelids down over her eyes.
He looked around him and saw the other corpses that littered the floor of the corridor in either direction. There were seven or eight of them in all, each as cold and bone-white as Piniella, each one gaping at the last thing they had seen in the world of the living.
Kirk knew what it was because he had seen it, too. But, unlike Piniella and the others, he wasn’t a limp, cold bag of bones, little more than a marker to show where a living being had been.
He was alive.
And that was the problem.
Numbly, as if in a dream, the lieutenant got up and advanced to the intercom station built into the bulkhead on his right. With a touch of his hand, he activated it.
“Kirk to Captain Garrovick,” he said, his voice a rustling of leaves in a lonely autumn cornfield.
No answer.
“Kirk to Captain Garrovick,” he repeated, a little louder this time.
Still no response.
He tried the first officer next. Then the second officer, and the third. The results were the same each time. No one answered. All he heard when he called out each name was the ghostly hum of the engines and the twanging echo of his voice.
“Damn,” the lieutenant shouted out loud, his stomach tightening so hard he could barely breathe.
He glanced at Piniella again. From where he stood, the security officer looked like something sculpted [74] from blue-white limestone, something dressed in a Starfleet uniform as a macabre joke.
Were they all like that, Kirk wondered, every command officer on the Republic? Each one a husk drained of life and will and color, a porcelain puppet with its strings cut?
Then the enormity of it hit him. Maybe everyone was dead—not just the command staff, but every man and woman on the ship, every one of them an unsuspecting victim of the phenomenon that had assaulted them. Maybe, through some inexplicable twist of fortune, the lieutenant was the only survivor among the four hundred and twenty crewmen who had set out from Beta Trianguli five days earlier.
No, Kirk insisted. He couldn’t stand it if that was the way it had happened. He couldn’t—
“Lieutenant Kirk?” said a voice, echoing back on itself.
He turned to the intercom grid, his heart pounding. “Konerko?” he breathed. “Is that you?”
“Thank heaven,” the ensign responded, her tone one of heartfelt relief. “I thought it had gotten you, too, sir.”
“Where are you?” Kirk asked her.
“I’m on the bridge. But they’re all dead here—the captain, Commander Tolan, Chief Smiley—everyone. I’ve taken the helm for the time being, but I’m not really qualified to—”
“Stay right there,” he told her. “I’m on my way.”
Negotiating a course through the shoals of his lifeless comrades, trying his best not to notice the [75] wide-eyed rictus on their faces, the lieutenant made his way to the nearest turbolift on knees that threatened to betray him. A bend in the corridor showed him a new field of corpses, even more densely populated than the one he had left behind.
My god, he thought, his stomach coiling even tighter. How can there be so many of them?
As he advanced, putting one foot in front of the other, he realized with a start that his friend Gilhooley was lying among the dead. The man’s merry blue eyes were rolled back in his head, his mouth yawning wide as if to drag in one last breath.
The day before, Kirk had played three-dimensional chess with Gilhooley in the ship’s lounge and laughed at the man’s off-color limericks. Now the poor bastard was a slab of meat rotting on the floor—no longer a person, but an empty husk.
It didn’t seem real to the lieutenant. But then, how could it? How could anyone wrap his mind around the meaningless deaths of hundreds of his fellow human beings?
But that wasn’t the worst of it. Not by a long shot, he thought. The worst part was the knowledge of how those deaths had taken place.
Swallowing hard, Kirk staggered on.
Eventually, he came in sight of the turbolift. As he reached it, his breath loud and strange-sounding in his ears, he fumbled with a computer pad set into the bulkhead. A moment later, the doors slid aside with a sigh and revealed the contents of the compartment.
There were two bodies inside. Kirk knew them—or [76] rather, knew who they had been in the world of the living. Hasegawa had hoped to be a chief engineer someday. Ojibwe had planned to get married when his tour was up. They would do neither of those things.
The lieutenant’s throat threatened
to close on him. So much death, he thought. So many shattered hopes ...
Taking a deep, wheezing breath, he punched in the command that would halt the turbolift and keep its door open.
Then he entered the compartment and, as gently as he could, started to drag Ojibwe out into the corridor. He wasn’t sure why he needed to do such a thing. He just knew that it had to be done.
“Sir?” came a strangely plaintive voice from behind him.
Dropping Ojibwe, Kirk whirled and reached for the wall of the compartment to support himself. But whatever he had pictured in his mind in that startled fraction of a second, he didn’t find it.
It was only a couple of crewmen standing there—a man and a woman dressed in the red of operations. They looked familiar, though the lieutenant didn’t recall their names. And judging from the hollows beneath their eyes, they were every bit as spooked as he was.
For a moment, Kirk just stood there looking at them, his heart slamming against his ribs so hard it hurt. Then he bent down, hooked his fingers under Ojibwe’s armpits, and lifted him again.
“Come on,” he told the crewmen, mustering some [77] authority. “Give me a hand. We’ve got to get up to the bridge.”
At first, they seemed too stunned to acknowledge his command. But after a moment they shrugged off their inertia and surrounded Hasegawa. Between the two of them, they managed to pick him up. Then they carried him out into the corridor and laid him down beside Ojibwe.
Seconds later, they all reentered the lift. Kirk got it moving with another command. As they heard the whine that told them they were traveling through the ship, the lieutenant turned to his companions.
“Where were you?” he asked.
He didn’t have to elaborate. They knew exactly what he meant.
“In the forward sensor station,” the man told him, “scanning the planet’s surface, when that thing attacked us—”
“What was it?” asked the woman.
Kirk turned away from them. “I don’t know.”
STAR TREK: TOS #86 - My Brother's Keeper, Book Two - Constitution Page 6