“A courageous gesture,” Damion told him, though there was a hint of irony in his voice.
The admiral looked at him. “Captain Kirk is a courageous man.”
The dark-haired man returned the look, but declined to make any other comments. Deriving a measure of satisfaction from the exchange, Kirk continued with his account.
“After a while,” he said, “I found Dr. Dehner. I thought she would be at Mitchell’s mercy, a mere pawn in his game—but as it turned out, I was wrong about that. You see, she had changed, too.”
Saylor cursed colorfully beneath his breath. “She had the same powers you’d seen in Mitchell?”
“The same variety,” the captain told him, “though she didn’t appear to have the same command of them. In time, however, she would no doubt have become just as strong as he was—and just as aloof.
“I tried to enlist her help … appeal to what was left of her humanity. It wasn’t easy, of course. Lieutenant Mitchell had already shown her the rewards of being on his side, which were staggering. But I planted some doubts in her mind, made her wary of him. I was starting to make some progress when Mitchell decided to join us.”
Kirk remembered how it was. One second, there was no sign of his friend. The next, he was standing on a rocky ledge, his temples gray as if with age, his bearing even more regal than before.
No longer Gary. At least, that’s what he had told himself at the time.
“I saw in Mitchell’s eyes that there was no hope of reasoning with him,” said the captain. “So I fired my phaser rifle at point-blank range—for all the good it did me. He disarmed me with a wave of his hand. Then, as if to show me how hopeless my position was, he dug a grave for me in the ground at his feet. He even made a headstone for it.”
The admiral shook his head in amazement. Damion just looked at him, clearly more interested than impressed.
“Then,” Kirk went on, “just when it looked as if my luck had run out, Dehner helped me after all. She sent a bolt of energy at Mitchell. He staggered and sent a bolt back at her. She attacked again; he counterattacked. And back and forth it went, enough energy crackling through the air to tear a mountain in half.”
He shivered as he thought of it. Despite the danger, despite everything that hung in the balance, he had been mesmerized by the spectacle. “In the end,” he said, “the doctor was mortally wounded. She slumped back against the rock. But she had weakened him. She had given me a chance.”
The captain shook his head ruefully. After all, this was the hardest part. “I took advantage of it as best I could,” he recalled. “Mitchell and I struggled, hand to hand, but even in his weakened state he was a match for me.” He held up his cast. “Somewhere along the line, he damaged my wrist. Eventually, we fell into the grave he dug for me. I was fortunate enough to climb out first and recover my rifle.”
Saylor frowned beneath his mustache. “But didn’t you say your phaser fire had no effect on him?”
“It didn’t,” Kirk agreed. “But I didn’t fire at Lieutenant Mitchell. I fired at a hunk of rock he had loosened from the cliff face above us.” He felt his throat tighten, but he finished his story. “The boulder fell on him, crushing the life out of him.”
“Unbelievable,” said the admiral.
The captain adjusted his cast again, but he remained silent. Even now, days later, the memory was an open wound, raw and bloody and hideously painful.
Damion pondered Kirk’s words for a moment. Then he asked, “Are you certain you killed him?”
The question rankled—but it was a fair one, under the circumstances. “First Officer Spock scanned the area for life signs for some time after the incident. He didn’t find any.”
“You said Mitchell could suppress his biosigns,” Damion reminded him, his eyes piercing and alert.
The captain nodded. “He could—but why would he want to? What could he gain by pretending to be dead?”
Damion seemed to see the sense in that. In any case, he didn’t press the point any further.
Kirk fixed the dark-haired man with his gaze. “Now let me ask you a question, Captain.”
Damion looked at him. “I beg your pardon?”
Kirk leaned forward. “Tell me … why is it you didn’t seem surprised when I told you about the energy barrier we encountered?”
The lines in Damion’s face hardened, but he didn’t answer.
“Or when I described the message buoy launched by the Valiant?” Kirk asked. “Or the information we gleaned from it?”
Still no answer.
“Is it possible you knew about the barrier already?” Kirk persisted. “And about the buoy and maybe even the fate of the Valiant? Is that why my mentioning them didn’t mean anything to you?”
Damion shook his head, his expression giving away nothing. “I’m not the one being debriefed here, Captain.”
“Maybe not,” Kirk conceded. “But still, I’d like my questions answered. If my crew and I have been used as guinea pigs, the least you can do is give me the courtesy of admitting it.”
“Jim,” said Saylor, “Damion’s right. He’s the one asking the questions here.” But the admiral’s expression told Kirk that he wouldn’t mind hearing some answers himself.
The dark-haired man regarded Kirk for what seemed like a long time. At last, he nodded. “All right, Captain. As long as we’re speaking off the record … we did know about the Valiant. That is, we knew that it had been lost in that part of space some two hundred years ago. But I assure you, we didn’t know the manner in which it had been lost, or that it represented a danger to any of your crewmen.”
“Why wasn’t I told about it anyway?” Kirk wondered. “Why wasn’t I at least warned that another ship had gone that way?”
Damion didn’t flinch. “The Valiant’s situation was classified,” he said, “for reasons I can’t go into. Information was available on a need-to-know basis only—and Command didn’t believe you needed to know.”
Kirk didn’t like the man’s answer. He didn’t like it at all. But he knew he could find it in himself to accept it.
He had learned over the years that, even as a starship captain, he wouldn’t be privy to everything in Starfleet’s files. Certain kinds of data would be denied to him. This was just one more annoying example of it.
“Keep in mind,” the dark-haired man continued, “after you discovered the Valiant’s communications buoy, you had more data than we did—and it didn’t change your decision one iota. You still didn’t deem the situation dangerous enough to turn away from the energy barrier.”
Kirk frowned. “There’s a difference, Captain. When I ask my people to put their lives on the line, I don’t pull any punches. I don’t withold potentially important information from them.”
“You’re honest with them,” Damion noted.
“Damned right,” the captain confirmed.
“You can afford to be,” the dark-haired man observed. “You’re only their captain. You’re not Star-fleet Command.”
Chapter Four
NURSE CHRISTINE CHAPEL looked up from the biobed where she had been running a diagnostic routine for the last several minutes. Across the breadth of the Enterprise’s wide, pastel-colored sickbay, Chief Medical Officer Mark Piper was sitting alone in his office, going through some of the many personal items he had gathered for packing.
Chapel recognized a few of them. For instance, the stone carving of a big-bellied Baliba’an fertility goddess. It had been given to the doctor by some Oritixx traders he had healed after they narrowly survived the explosion of their merchant vessel.
Not that Piper had had any serious need of the goddess’s services. With four sons, a daughter, and more than fifteen grandchildren, the man had done fine before making her acquaintance.
Then there was the latinum honor medallion he had received on Cerebus Prime, where he had saved millions by discovering a cure for Hiinkan Plague. The last the nurse had heard, the Hiinkans were naming their third new medical ce
nter after the doctor.
The last memento was a primitive dart—the one Piper had removed from Lieutenant Mitchell after he and the captain were ambushed by native hunters on Dimorus. It had been touch and go for the lieutenant for a while, but the doctor had finally pulled him through.
And now Mitchell was dead, despite everything, she thought. Dead and buried on a lonely planetoid far from the beaten track. It was funny the way life worked. Funny … and often unbearably tragic.
The nurse checked the biobed and saw that the diagnostic was complete. As it happened, the bed was in perfect condition. Noting that on her padd, she crossed sickbay and joined Piper at his desk.
The chief medical officer looked up at her. “Just going through a few things,” he explained a bit awkwardly, his eyes uncharacteristically liquid beneath bushy, dark brows.
Chapel smiled. “I can see that.”
Piper looked around. “I don’t know … I guess I’ll miss this place, Christine. But most of all,” he told her, “I’ll miss you. You’ve been one hell of an associate.”
The nurse nodded, trying desperately to keep a rein on her emotions. “Thanks,” she replied. “I couldn’t have asked for anyone better than you either. I just hope …”
“Yes?” the doctor asked.
Chapel shrugged. “I just hope whoever replaces you is half the physician you are.”
That brought some color to Piper’s cheeks. “Well,” he said, “now you’ve done the impossible, Christine. You’ve made an old man blush.”
The nurse regarded him for a moment. “No,” she told him. “It’s you who’ve done the impossible, Doctor, more times than I care to count. And I’m going to miss you very, very much.”
Unable to control herself any longer, she gave the chief medical officer a hug—the kind she never would have given him while there was still the prospect of their working together. What’s more, Piper hugged her back, the way he might have hugged one of his granddaughters.
Finally, he released her. “Go ahead,” he told Chapel. “Finish what you were doing. I don’t want the next doctor to curse me for leaving him with a bunch of temperamental biobeds.”
The nurse straightened. “Of course not,” she agreed. Then she swallowed back the lump in her throat, crossed sickbay again, and initiated the diagnostic routine for the next biobed.
Things aren’t going to be the same around here, she told herself. No matter who his replacement is.
* * *
Dr. Leonard McCoy sat in front of the surgeon general’s desk, peered out the man’s floor-to-ceiling window at the gulls wheeling over the undulating waves of the blue Pacific, and said, “Damn the Capellans. Damn ’em all to hell.”
If McCoy listened closely, he could hear the squawking of the gulls through the plexiglass. What did they have to complain about? he wondered. They were only birds, and Terran birds at that. For godsakes, they hadn’t even heard of the Capellans.
The doctor’s gaze was drawn to the surface of the rounded, black desk. There, between his monitor and some pictures of his family, the surgeon general kept a small jar full of Vertigranen incense clusters—little, purple grapelike things that, when popped open, gave the air the honeyed smell of a Vertigranen rainforest in spring bloom.
“So,” said a rich baritone voice from behind him, “how did you like your little mission on Capella Four?”
McCoy turned in his chair and saw the balding, stoop-shouldered figure of Harris Eggleton fill the doorway behind him. Eggleton, who had served as the highest-ranking official at Starfleet Medical for the last seven years, was McCoy’s immediate superior.
“How did I like it?” asked the younger man, as Eggleton laid a meaty hand on his shoulder en route to his chair. “I didn’t, that’s how. The Capellans have got to be the stubbornest, orneriest, most backward people in the universe.”
“Why do you say that?” asked the surgeon general, depositing his big, unwieldy frame into his overstuffed, black chair.
McCoy grunted disapprovingly. “Here I am, ready to improve every aspect of their miserable lives with Federation medical science, and what do they tell me? They’re not interested. Why’s that? I ask, dumbfounded. Because, they say, only the strong are meant to survive.”
“And you think that’s hogwash?” Eggleton suggested.
“You’re not kidding I think it’s hogwash! Why in blazes did the Capellans agree to have us beam down in the first place if they were going to ignore everything we had to offer?”
The surgeon general scratched his sparsely covered head and smiled to himself. “As I understand it, Leonard, they didn’t ignore everything—just our medical technology.”
McCoy jabbed a finger at his superior. “And that’s just what those blockheads needed the most. Do you have any idea what the infant mortality is on that planet?”
“Sixteen percent, I believe,” Eggleton replied. “But that doesn’t mean the Capellans are going to do anything about it. They’re stuck in their ways, just like a lot of cultures.”
McCoy didn’t comment. He just fumed.
“Frustrating,” said the older man, “isn’t it? Makes you want to grab them by their shoulders and shake some sense into them.”
McCoy nodded. “Exactly right.” Of course, the Capellans were a lot bigger than he was, and shaking them wouldn’t have been an easy task—but that was beside the point.
Eggleton shrugged. “To tell you the truth, that’s why I decided to take this job at Starfleet Medical. There’s none of the mess you run into when you’re dealing with alien cultures. None of the personalities, either. Here, the most contentious thing you have to deal with on a daily basis might be a cranky microbe.”
The younger man looked at him, taking note of the man’s ulterior motive. “In other words, Doctor, you’re saying I’d have to be a lunatic to go back out into space.”
“Hey,” said the surgeon general, “your words, not mine. I’ve made no secret of how much I want you to stay here and put your talents to good use. I mean, you are the fellow who created the technique we use for establishing axonal pathways between grafted neural pathways and basal ganglia … or am I thinking of a different Leonard H. McCoy?”
McCoy blushed. “Stop it. You’re embarrassing me.
Eggleton looked him in the eye. “I’ll stop embarrassing you, Leonard. But I won’t stop arguing that all this planet-hopping isn’t for you. At least, not at this point in your career.”
McCoy frowned. From the age of twenty-six, when he joined the Fleet, he had been stationed on any number of alien worlds. He had even served as assistant chief medical officer on a starship for a while.
Then his father had fallen ill with a rare disease and he had asked for a transfer to Earth. He was told he could serve under Eggleton at Starfleet Medical in San Francisco, and his father would be transferred to a local facility, so he could keep an eye on the old man.
It was the worst time of McCoy’s life. His father went downhill quickly, but somehow he stopped short of actually dying. Instead, he lay there in his biobed, his sunken chest laboring pitifully as a respirator pumped in breath after breath, comatose but technically still alive.
Faced with subjecting his father to a lingering, painful death, McCoy had made the decision to take him off life support and watched him die—only to see a cure for the old man’s disease discovered a few weeks later. The irony of it nearly shattered him.
In the end, he managed to cope, but only by clinging to familiar things. Starfleet Medical was one of them. And even after McCoy got past the worst of his father’s death, even after he regained his equilibrium, it seemed easier to remain in San Francisco at the age of thirty-eight than to take the initiative and find a berth on a starship.
He hadn’t sought out the Capella IV assignment. It had simply fallen into his lap. But the prospect of going out into space again had excited him, and the doctor had accepted the mission with great optimism … an optimism that had barely beamed down to the planet’s su
rface before it was dashed by the obstinacy of the natives. So much for the romance of the frontier, he had thought at the time.
“I’ll tell you what,” said Eggleton. “Take the day off, all right? Work off some of that frustration in the gym or in the pool or however you like. Then show up here tomorrow, refreshed and renewed, and we can get started on that choriomeningitis vaccine.”
McCoy worked up a smile. “Thanks,” he replied, “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 more functional, and the air didn’t contain even a hint of Vertigranen incense.
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