The captain turned to Damion. “I see.”
The dark-haired man indicated the table beside them with a gesture. Like the one in the Enterprise’s briefing room, it had a three-sided monitor sitting in the center of it, though this device’s screens were a bit larger than the ones Kirk was used to.
“Let’s get the ball rolling,” said Damion, “shall we?”
The captain shrugged. “Why not?”
As he sat down, he saw the other captain produce a data padd like the one Spock favored. At least, that was how it looked. Damion tapped some information into it, then laid it on the table.
A recording device, Kirk thought. Not unheard of in debriefings, but an unusual touch nonetheless. Or should I say another unusual touch, the captain remarked inwardly,
“You know,” he said helpfully, “my communications officer is transmitting my pertinent captain’s logs as we speak. I’m sure you’ll find everything you need in them.”
Damion smiled a humorless smile. “It’s my job to be thorough,” he explained. “I’m sure you understand.”
Kirk smiled the same smile back at him. “Of course,” he said.
But, clearly, the proceedings were becoming rather formal. The captain couldn’t help feeling he was entering an interrogation instead of a debriefing—that he was going to be pumped for information by someone whose agenda wasn’t necessarily the same as his own.
Life began to feel as if he and that twentieth-century lab frog had a fair amount in common.
“Now, then,” Damion began, “as I understand it, you were contacted by Admiral Saylor fifteen days ago. He gave you new orders—to explore and even exceed the boundaries of our galaxy.”
Kirk nodded. “That’s correct. And, of course, we followed those orders to the letter.”
“You reached the limits of our galaxy?” the dark-haired man asked.
“What we think of as our galaxy,” the captain amended.
“Very well,” said Damion, taking the amendment in stride. “And what did you find there?”
Kirk took a breath, let it out. He found he didn’t like his interrogator much. “We were confronted by an energy barrier.”
Saylor leaned forward, the wrinkles around his eyes deepening. “An energy barrier, you say? Did you actually see this barrier, Jim? Or did it simply turn up on your sensor grid?”
“We saw it,” the captain told him. “It was large, pinkish in color. And bright—very bright. Even with our viewscreen filters in operation, it hurt my eyes to look at it.”
“Then what?” Damion asked.
“It didn’t seem to present any danger to the ship,” Kirk explained, “so we tried to cross it—again, in accordance with the admiral’s orders. It turned out to be a mistake.”
Damion tilted his head slightly. “In what way?”
In what way? Kirk echoed inwardly. In every way you can imagine, he thought. But that wasn’t what he said.
“When we came in contact with the barrier,” he answered, “it became a lot more intense. A lot more tumultuous. It tossed us around violently, rendering our warp drive inoperative. More importantly, it caused a number of fatalities among the crew.”
“How many?” asked Damion, though his question smacked more of curiosity than sympathy.
Kirk lifted his chin as he considered the question. “Nine members of my crew perished instantly as a result of injuries to their central nervous systems. Two others died some time later. One was Lieutenant Gary Mitchell, my primary helm officer. The second was Dr. Elizabeth Dehner, a psychiatrist who had joined us to study starship crew reactions under emergency conditions.”
“Eleven altogether, then,” Damion concluded. He might as well have been making out a shopping list, for all the emotion he showed. “And when, exactly, did Mitchell and Dehner succumb?”
The captain frowned at the man’s choice of words. “They didn’t. At least, not in the way you mean.”
Damion’s eyes narrowed. “Would you care to elaborate?” he asked, though it wasn’t really a question.
Not really, thought Kirk. Unfortunately, it appeared he had little choice in the matter.
“Both Mitchell and Dehner were on the bridge when we encountered the energy barrier,” he reported. “So were half a dozen other officers, myself included. Most of us were unaffected by the exposure, but Mitchell and Dehner”—he couldn’t help cringing inside at the memory—“lit up like sparklers on the Fourth of July.”
Saylor shook his head. “The Fourth of July … ?”
It wasn’t the first time the captain had forgotten—not everyone in the Fleet had grown up on Earth, and many who had grown up there weren’t all that well versed in American history.
“A national independence ritual in the old United States of America,” Damion explained efficiently. “It was typically celebrated with gunpowder-based fireworks displays.”
“That’s the one,” said Kirk.
The admiral nodded. “And you say these people … lit up?”
“That’s correct,” the captain told him. “They throbbed with energy, pulsated with it. If there’s a better way to describe what happened, I can’t think of it.”
The dark-haired man considered the information. “And what effect did this have on them?” he asked.
“In Dr. Dehner’s case,” said Kirk, “it didn’t seem to have any effect at all—once we disengaged from the barrier. Lieutenant Mitchell, on the other hand, complained of weakness. And …”
Damion’s brow knit. “Yes, Captain?”
Kirk remembered how his stomach had tightened when he saw his friend stretched out on the deck beside the helm console. He remembered kneeling beside him, asking him how he was … turning him over as quickly as he could, so he could get a look at Gary’s face.
And he remembered how shocked he was by what he saw there. “His eyes,” the captain said, “had begun to glow.”
“To glow?” Damion echoed, despite himself. He looked at Kirk askance. “You’re exaggerating, I take it.”
The captain shook his head slowly from side to side. “I wish I were. Mitchell’s eyes were alight with some kind of energy I had never seen before.” He swallowed. “It was an eerie sight, to say the least.”
“I can imagine,” said Admiral Saylor.
“And that was the only effect it had on him?” asked Damion.
Kirk looked at him. “No. After a while, I witnessed other changes. From time to time, his voice took on a weird, echoing quality. And he began reading at speeds none of us could believe.”
Damion’s eyes hardened. “You saw him do this?”
Kirk nodded. “And I wasn’t the only one. My first officer and I were monitoring Mitchell from the bridge, tracking his behavior. What’s more, Mitchell knew it.”
“What do you mean?” asked Saylor.
“He sensed us watching him,” the captain elaborated, a chill climbing his spine as he recalled the incident. “He turned around and smiled at us, the way an adult might smile at a curious child. That’s when we started to understand what had happened on the Valiant.”
Again, the admiral was at a loss. His frustration showed on his face. “And the Valiant was … ?”
“An Earth ship,” Kirk explained, “that beat us to the galaxy’s edge by some two hundred years. We found its communications buoy shortly before we discovered the energy barrier.”
Saylor looked at Damion, surprised and intrigued if his expression was any indication. However, the dark-haired man didn’t look back at him. “Please continue,” Damion told the captain.
Kirk complied. “As it turned out,” he said, “the Valiant’s experience was remarkably similar to our own. Though several of its crewmen were injured when it encountered the barrier, one of them managed to survive—just as Mitchell had survived.”
He paused, remembering how tense Spock had seemed as he extracted the buoy’s information, piece by piece. “Then something strange happened on the Valiant. Her captain began making i
nquiries about extrasensory perception—inquiries that became more and more urgent, more and more frantic as time went on. Finally, for no apparent reason, the man destoyed his own ship.”
The admiral looked shocked—but not Damion. As usual, he didn’t register any emotion at all.
“He destroyed it?” asked Saylor.
“Yes,” Kirk confirmed.
“For no apparent reason, you say?”
“None we could determine,” the captain told him. “At least, not from the communications buoy alone. But before long, we began to get an inkling of what might have led him to that act.”
“And how did that come about?” Damion asked.
“As I noted,” said Kirk, “the Valiant’s captain seemed to have become obsessed with extrasensory perception. With that in mind, my first officer decided to analyze the personnel records of our own people—especially those who had been injured by the energy barrier. What he found was that Lieutenant Mitchell had the highest esper quotient on the Enterprise. Dr. Dehner had the second-highest esper quotient.”
“And,” the admiral noted, “of all those affected by the barrier, they were the only two who survived.”
The captain nodded. “The only two.”
It had been an eerie realization, to say the least. It had felt as if the deck under his feet had turned to quicksand.
“Then the Valiant crewman,” said Saylor, “the one who was injured and survived … you think he could have been an esper as well?”
“That would explain his captain’s preoccupation with the subject,” Kirk told him.
The admiral regarded him. “And his decision to destroy his ship … had something to do with that crewman as well?” He seemed to be at a loss again. “Is that the conclusion you and your first officer came to?”
The captain sighed. “Allow me to apologize, sir. I didn’t mean to get ahead of myself.”
“But that is what you and your exec were thinking,” Damion concluded, his eyes bright with curiosity. “That this crewman on the Valiant was the cause of his captain’s drastic action.”
“That’s what we were thinking,” Kirk confirmed. He looked at Admiral Saylor. “You have to understand, sir, Lieutenant Mitchell was changing rapidly. And I’m not just talking about his eyes, or his voice, or the remarkable speed at which he read.”
“Then what?” asked the admiral.
The captain frowned. “He was becoming something more than human—something that could shut down its own vital signs at will. And then start them again. Or even make subtle adjustments in the ship’s operating systems.”
Saylor didn’t seem ready to accept such events. “Jim, if you’re taking liberties with the truth here …”
“It’s all in my report,” Kirk assured him. “Every word of it.”
Damion scowled—the first small sign of emotion that he had shown since the debriefing began. “Let him go on, sir,” he told the admiral.
Saylor grumbled, but did as the dark-haired man suggested. “Let’s hear the rest,” he said.
The captain recalled the way Gary had lain in his biobed, his eyes ablaze with that weird, silver light. His friend had seemed so distant, so terribly aloof from everyone. Now, of course, Kirk knew why.
Gary had been reaching into himself. He had been exploring the breathtaking depth of his burgeoning powers. And no one except Gary himself had had any idea of what he was up to.
“Of course,” Kirk said as dispassionately as he could, “none of these developments necessarily constituted a reason to fear the man.” He eyed Saylor, then Damion. “I should point out at this juncture that Lieutenant Mitchell was my friend—my best friend—and I had always trusted him implicitly. It was difficult for me to think of him as a menace to my ship or crew.”
“But you were wrong,” the dark-haired man suggested.
“I was wrong,” the captain admitted.
So very wrong.
“And your officers?” Damion wondered. “What did they think of the changes in Lieutenant Mitchell?”
Kirk shrugged. “Dr. Dehner was even less wary of him than I was—though I realized later that she was attracted to him, and might not have been looking at the situation objectively. But Mr. Spock, my first officer … he saw right through to the truth.”
“Which was?” asked the admiral, eager to hear it straight out.
The captain took a breath, then let it out. “That Mitchell was evolving into something that would soon have little or nothing in common with us,” he answered reluctantly. “That he was becoming a serious threat to the Enterprise and everyone on her.”
Kirk remembered the intensity of his argument with the Vulcan, recalling the way they had laid into each other with their words. “Spock reasoned that we had two choices if we were to avoid the fate of the Valiant—kill Lieutenant Mitchell outright or strand him on an unpopulated world.” Even now, he could feel the awful weight of that decision. “I chose the latter.”
“You decided to abandon your friend?” asked Damion.
It sounded to Kirk like an accusation. “I had no choice,” he told the dark-haired man between clenched teeth. “It was either him or the other four hundred and ten people on the Enterprise.”
The room was silent for a moment. Then, bit by bit, the captain regained control of himself.
“The nearest unpopulated world,” he said, “was Delta Vega—a planet with a lithium-cracking facility.”
“I know it,” Saylor replied. “A stark, forbidding place.”
Kirk nodded sadly. He recalled how guilty he felt—how it tore him up inside to leave his friend in such a hellish environment.
“When we got there,” he went on, “Mitchell seemed to know where we were and what we were planning. Nonetheless, we managed to catch him unaware. We sedated him, beamed down to the surface with him, and imprisoned him behind a high-intensity forcefield. Then we borrowed what we needed from the planet’s lithium-processing equipment.”
“Borrowed?” the admiral echoed.
“When we tried to cross the energy barrier,” the captain reminded him, “we lost our warp drive. The only way we could repair it was to strip the facility’s backup systems.”
“So you were killing two birds with one stone,” Damion observed.
Again, Kirk thought, the man’s choice of words left something to be desired. “You might say that,” he answered in the same cold tone.
“But you said Mitchell died eventually,” Damion noted. “And Dehner as well. Or am I mistaken?”
“You heard it correctly,” the captain told him.
“Under what circumstances did they die?” asked the dark-haired man.
Kirk eyed him. “That depends.”
Damion returned the look. “On what?”
With his left hand, Kirk reached for the dark-haired man’s data padd. Picking it up, he shut off its recording function. Then, as Damion and Admiral Saylor looked on, he set it down on the table again.
“It depends,” he continued evenly, “on whether or not you still intend to record this conversation.”
“And if I do?” asked the dark-haired man.
“Then Mitchell and Dehner died in the pursuit of their duty,” Kirk told him, “and I don’t care to go into any further detail.”
The admiral looked at him in amazement. “You don’t care … ?” he repeated, dumbfounded. “Do you know where you are, Jim?”
“I do indeed, sir,” the captain assured him. “And I recognize my obligation to both you and the Fleet. However, I have an obligation to my people as well, and I won’t say or do anything that will smear the good names of Gary Mitchell and Elizabeth Dehner.”
Saylor scowled. “You were dispatched on a scientific mission—a mission eleven of your crewmen died to carry out. And now you’re telling me you’d withhold the results of that mission?”
“Not at all,” Kirk replied. “The scientific results are and will remain part of the official record, as entered in my logs. It’s the other re
sults I don’t care to parade in public—the personal behaviors that took place, which have little or nothing to do with what we can learn from our encounter with the energy barrier.”
“But you have no objection to discussing these behaviors off the record,” Damion established.
The captain nodded. “That’s correct.”
The dark-haired man considered him for a moment. Then he said, “All right. I can live with that. Proceed, Captain Kirk.”
No “please” this time, Kirk observed. But then, pleasantries were reserved for officers who were pliable—not those who dared to question Starfleet Command and its chosen representatives.
“As I told you,” the captain went on, “we took what we needed from the lithium-processing equipment. But as we worked, Lieutenant Mitchell was continuing to change—continuing to grow stronger. Unbeknownst to myself and First Officer Spock, he reached out with the power of his mind and strangled one of my other officers with a cable.”
Saylor winced.
“Then,” said Kirk, plowing ahead, “he burst through the field that confined him, knocked the rest of us out, and took Dr. Dehner with him.”
“My god,” the admiral exclaimed. “That poor woman.”
The captain didn’t respond to the remark. He simply proceeded with his story, telling it as he saw fit.
“When I woke,” Kirk continued, “I knew what I had to do. After all, it was my fault my friend had gotten so far. I left orders with my chief medical officer—if I didn’t contact the ship in twelve hours, Spock was to break orbit and irradiate the planet with neutron beams.”
“An extreme measure,” Damion remarked.
“For an extreme situation,” the captain responded. “Then I picked up a phaser rifle Spock had brought down with him, tucked it under my arm, and went after Lieutenant Mitchell.”
“On your own?” asked Saylor.
“On my own,” Kirk confirmed.
“Wasn’t that ill-considered?” the admiral wondered. “A being powerful enough to break free of a forcefield—”
“Would be powerful enough to smear me all over the landscape,” the captain said, finishing Saylor’s thought for him. “True enough. But the odds of rescuing Dehner wouldn’t have been any better if I had brought an army with me. I was hoping I could talk to Mitchell, reason with him. And if I couldn’t, the only life I would be sacrificing was my own.”
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