Skidding down an incline, the captain had grabbed the phaser rifle his friend had knocked out of his hands. He had aimed it at the colossal rock hanging precariously over Gary’s head, which Gary himself had carved out of the barren cliffside.
And he had fired.
Thinking about it, Kirk found himself adjusting his cast again. He would never forget the look on his friend’s face—the realization that, despite all his power, he had somehow lost the battle. But maybe, just maybe, some surviving part of Gary had seen Jim Kirk make the toughest decision of his life and applaud him for it.
At long last, he had learned what his friend was trying to teach him that day so long ago. Before it was too late for him and the rest of the galaxy, he had made the tough decision.
The captain shook his head sadly. Back at the Academy, he had been Gary’s instructor. His teacher. But at that moment, he wasn’t sure who had learned more from whom.
As for the aliens, whose name turned out to be the N’shaii ... with their takeover of Sordinia IV frustrated by the Constitution, they had to have seen they weren’t invincible. They might have learned from the experience and steered clear of the Federation from that time onward.
But they didn’t.
[266] They crossed swords with Starfleet vessels on five subsequent occasions. First at Velarrh VII, where it was the Excalibur that sent them packing. Then at Mos’rammi IX and Indish III, where they fought the Lexington and the Potemkin, respectively. Then again at Linyar II, where they encountered the Excalibur a second time. And finally at Tenekratus IV, where they fell to the phasers of the Defiant.
After that, the N’shaii either gave up trying to seize other people’s planets or took their aggression elsewhere. Starfleet Intelligence believed it was the latter, naturally.
Of course, the aliens might have prevailed if not for the sacrifice made by Lynch, Jankowski, and the two security officers who died along with them. Thanks to the data they downloaded to the Constitution’s computer, Federation scientists even figured out how to deal with the N’shaii’s muon beams before too long.
But it wasn’t until much later, after the invaders had been soundly thrashed, that Kirk’s people learned about the N’shaii themselves. What they discovered was interesting, to say the least.
Originally, he and his colleagues on the Constitution had speculated that the aggressors wanted Sordinia IV for its natural resources. Nothing could have been further from the truth. In fact, the N’shaii had been playing a game of three-dimensional chess.
It came to light that there was not one group of N’shaii, but several—each one a political faction that had been competing with rival factions for thousands upon thousands of years—and one of their favorite forms of competition was to see who could conquer [267] and hold the greatest number of populated planets. Needless to say, it was a sport appreciated more by the conqueror than the conquered.
Kirk gazed at the Enterprise’s viewscreen, where fields of stars streamed by at hundreds of times the speed of light. Too quickly, he told himself. Much too quickly.
With each passing moment, with each pinprick of a star the Enterprise overtook and left behind, they were getting closer to the planet Earth. Closer to the Mitchells and Gary’s funeral service. Closer to the eulogy the captain had been asked to deliver.
How could he do it? he asked himself. How could he stand up in front of all Gary’s friends and relatives and mourn the man’s passing when it was he himself who had put an end to him?
Kirk readjusted his cast. He had made the tough choice, finally—the only choice he could have made under the circumstances. But his friend, his best friend, had perished as a result.
And when he got to Earth, the captain told himself, he would become the biggest hypocrite the galaxy had ever known.
About the e-Book
(OCT, 2003)—Scanned, proofed, and formatted by Bibliophile.
STAR TREK: TOS #86 - My Brother's Keeper, Book Two - Constitution Page 21