Constitution

by Michael Jan Friedman

  “Mr. Borrik,” he told the communications officer, “send the data Lynch and Jankowski collected to the briefing room.”

  “As you wish, sir,” the Dedderac responded.

  The second officer turned to Gaynor. “You’ve got the conn,” he said. “I’ll be back after I’ve reviewed the data.”

  The security chief scowled at him. “Acknowledged.”

  Without another word, Kirk made his way to the turbolift. After what seemed like a long time, the doors opened and he got inside. When they finally closed behind him, he pounded the heel of his fist on the wall—not once, but three times, each blow harder than the one before it.

  What have I done? he thought, as he cradled his fist in his other hand. What have I done?

  Chapter Twelve

  KIRK PULLED A CHAIR OUT from the briefing room table, sat down and reached for the controls in the base of the three-sided monitor unit. Manipulating them, he saw the monitor screens come to life.

  Each screen showed the same solid block of data, reflecting the merest portion of whatever information had been in the satellite’s computers. It would be up to the second officer to cull through it and find something he could use against the enemy.

  Certainly, Kirk could have assigned the task to one of his subordinates. He could have given it to Borrik or Gary or even Gaynor and no one would ever have called him on it.

  But he was the command-track officer in the group. He was the one who had been trained to see things others might have missed and to turn them into significant advantages. And he was the one to whom Captain Augenthaler had entrusted his ship and crew.

  Under the circumstances, he couldn’t let someone else go through the data. He had to do it himself.

  But as he began to pore over it, he thought again of Lynch and Jankowski. And of Park and Zuleta. And of the decisions he had made that had sent them all to their deaths.

  Was Gaynor right? he wondered. Had he done the wrong thing by not sacrificing the survivor of the first landing party?

  It wouldn’t be the first time he had hesitated and watched his colleagues die as a result. Once before, he had been called on to make an important choice and chosen badly.

  No, he told himself. I can’t think about this. I have to find a way to beat the mother ship, and I have to find it now.

  Suddenly, Borrik’s voice came crackling over the intercom system. “Lieutenant Kirk?” said the Dedderac.

  “I’m here,” the second officer responded. “What is it?”

  “The aliens’ barrage has stopped,” Borrik reported.

  “Stopped?” Kirk echoed. He sat back in his chair. “Just like that?”

  “If I were to speculate,” said the Dedderac, “I would say it had something to do with the arrival of the mother ship. It is the only discernible event that has taken place in the last few minutes.”

  The second officer considered the possibility. “Whatever the reason,” he decided, “we have to assume it’s only a respite. Have you tried to contact the capitol again?”

  “I have, sir,” Borrik responded. “However, even with the barrage discontinued, the atmosphere is still too highly charged for me to get a signal through. We can only hope that will change.”

  Kirk nodded. “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

  “Borrik out,” came the dutiful reply.

  The second officer eyed the data on the three-sided monitor. He still couldn’t relax, he told himself. Not when the attack on the capital might resume at any moment.

  However, he could get a cup of coffee.

  Kirk got up, went to the food unit in the room and punched in his requirements. The unit beeped and produced a mug of steaming black coffee.

  He returned to the table and set the mug down on the dark, polished surface. Then he took his seat again, stole a sip of the coffee and returned his attention to the monitor.

  But before he could really dig in, he was interrupted again—and this time, it wasn’t by unwelcome thoughts or Mr. Borrik. It was the door mechanism, chiming to tell him that there was someone outside requesting entry.

  Normally, of course, someone could just walk into the briefing room unannounced. But Kirk had set the mechanism to screen prospective visitors in an attempt to concentrate on his work.

  Sighing, the second officer got up and touched the control pad set into the bulkhead. As the doors slid aside, they revealed his friend Gary standing outside in the corridor.

  Kirk looked at him. “Aren’t you …”

  “Supposed to be on the bridge?” the navigator asked. “I was. Then my shift ended and my replacement arrived.”

  That’s right, thought the second officer. Gary’s shift would be ending about now. “And you decided to give me a hand?”

  His friend shrugged. “You looked like you needed help … of some kind. I’m here to give it to you, whatever it is.”

  Kirk looked at him. “Come on in,” he said.

  Gary entered and took a seat beside the second officer’s. Then he glanced at the monitor. “You’re still at the beginning,” he observed.

  The second officer nodded. “It was difficult to concentrate.”

  “You had things on your mind,” his friend suggested.

  Kirk grunted. “Things.”

  For a moment, neither of them spoke, the steam from Kirk’s coffee curling in the air between them. Then Gary asked, “Do you want to talk about it? Or are you determined to wallow in your misery?”

  The second officer felt a hot spurt of anger in his throat. It was easy for his friend to make the problem sound trivial. After all, he wasn’t the one who failed his captain so miserably. He wasn’t the one with two hundred deaths on his head.

  He wasn’t the one who had to live with all those ghosts.

  “You look angry,” Gary told him.

  “It’s none of your business how I look,” Kirk responded. He took a sip of his coffee and put it down again.

  The navigator ignored the remark. “That’s good,” he said. “You’re getting angry. Maybe I can make you even angrier. Maybe you’ll get so furious you’ll finally tell me what’s eating away at you.”

  For a moment or two, the second officer was tempted to tell Gary to go to hell. But he didn’t—and he realized why. He wanted to unburden himself as much as his friend wanted to take on that burden.

  “All right,” he answered. “You asked for it.”

  Gary sat back in his chair. “I’m all ears.”

  Kirk frowned. “You asked me the other day if something happened on the Farragut—something that had me down. Well, something happened, all right. Something pretty bad.”

  His friend didn’t say anything. He just sat there, listening. And after all, wasn’t that what the second officer wanted him to do?

  Taking a deep breath, Kirk launched into his story. “As you know, I spent the last three years serving on the Farragut under Captain Garrovick.”

  The navigator nodded. “Uh-huh.”

  “I was never assigned the same duty two days in a row,” the second officer recalled. “Garrovick told me it had to be that way if I was going to command a starship of my own one day. He said a captain had to know every last little detail of his vessel, every one of its strengths and weaknesses—not to mention the strengths and weaknesses of his crew.”

  “You mentioned that in one of your subspace communications,” said Gary. “Just before I was posted to the Constitution, I think.”

  “And did I tell you where I spent most of my time?” Kirk asked.

  The navigator shrugged. “At the helm, I’d imagine.”

  “Sometimes,” the second officer agreed. “But I wound up in engineering a lot, too. And also at the forward phaser station.”

  Gary grunted softly. “Somehow, it’s hard for me to picture a fast-tracker like you at a phaser station.”

  Kirk shook his head. “Captain Garrovick didn’t seem to have a problem picturing it. I was there two, maybe three times a week. But nothing ever happened. All
I ever saw there were a lot of stars rushing past.”

  “I know the feeling,” the junior officer remarked.

  “Then we came to a world called Tycho Four,” said the second officer. “It was a small, red planet scored with deep fissures and pocked with dormant volcanoes—but rich as hell in dilithium ore. Captain Garrovick kept us in orbit for a day and a half, sending down teams on a rotating basis to take readings and samples. Naturally, I was on the planet’s surface every chance I got.”

  After all, to a young officer, the worst duty planet-side was preferable to the best job back on the ship. People joined Starfleet to see alien landscapes, not the inside of a duranium hull.

  “But just before we were supposed to leave,” Kirk continued, “the first officer sent me to the forward phaser station. I got over there, exchanged pleasantries with the ensign I was replacing, and sat down. Then I ran a quick diagnostic. Everything checked out fine, so I locked my hands behind my head and leaned back in my chair.”

  He paused, feeling his heart start to pump harder, feeling the muscles spasm in his jaw.

  “And?” his friend prodded.

  “And that’s when I saw it,” the second officer said, remembering the moment. “In the distance.”

  Gary eyed him. “Saw what?”

  Kirk winced, perceiving the thing on his phaser-station monitor all over again. He was fascinated by the memory, unable to put it aside.

  “Something big and white and gaseous,” he breathed, “translucent in some spots and too dense to see through in others. It was rolling toward the ship like a storm-driven cumulus cloud.”

  The navigator didn’t seem to understand. “I thought you told me you were above the planet’s atmosphere.”

  “We were,” the second officer said. “It only looked like a cloud. As it turned out, it was something quite different.”

  He felt his heart sink in his chest. “I stood there for a second, maybe two,” Kirk related. “I was entranced by the thing. After all, I had never laid eyes on anything like it.” He swallowed, still locked into his recollection. “And the way it advanced on us, hesitating and then surging ahead, hesitating and then surging … I got the feeling that it was alive.”

  Gary looked at him. “Alive?”

  The second officer nodded. “As alive as you or I, except in a different form. Where we’re flesh and blood, it was made of something else—its molecules more loosely arranged.”

  The navigator shook his head. “Hard to imagine.”

  “But there it was,” said Kirk, “hovering in front of me. Finally, I remembered where I was and what I was doing there, and I forced myself to stop gaping at the thing. My hand went to the phaser firing panel and locked on to the creature’s coordinates, just in case it turned out to be a threat.”

  Just in case, he added silently, appalled now at his naïveté. If only he had known then what he knew now.

  “Mind you,” he declared, “I didn’t think it would be a threat. I was just acting in accordance with Starfleet procedures. Then, without warning, the thing vanished from my external sensor monitors.”

  Gary’s eyes narrowed. “It was gone?”

  Kirk shook his head. “Not gone.”

  “Then where was it?” his friend asked.

  “I didn’t know at first,” said the second officer. He shivered, remembering. “Then I felt something brush past me.”

  Suddenly, he had an urge to get up, to move. He left his seat and his coffee mug and circumnavigated the table.

  “It was like a breeze,” he said, “but too cold to be a breeze … horribly and ineffably cold. And I smelled a strange, sickly-sweet odor in the air, as I were being smothered in molasses.” His nostrils flared. “It was the thing … the cloud. It had gotten into the Farragut somehow.”

  Gary looked skeptical. “But, Jim, if it got into the ship, that would mean it was—”

  “Intelligent,” Kirk responded. “I know.” He stopped and sat down on the edge of the table. “I could feel it as I lost consciousness.” The sensation came back to him with terrible intensity. “A predatory alien mind, thinking … planning …”

  “Are you sure?” asked the navigator.

  The second officer nodded solemnly. “As sure as I can possibly be,” he said softly.

  For a heartbeat, he fell silent. The only sound in the briefing room was that of the engines. Then Kirk went on with his story.

  “When I came to,” he said, “I found myself lying in the corridor outside the phaser station. I must have staggered out there at some point, though I had no recollection of it. There were others there, too. Lots of them, in fact. And …”

  The second officer felt a lump in his throat, keeping him from finishing his sentence. However, he believed Gary could divine what he was trying to say from his expression.

  “They were … dead?” his friend asked.

  “Dead,” Kirk declared, finding the strength to say it at last. “Cold and white and rigid as marble statues, drained of every last red corpuscle in their bodies.”

  The navigator’s brow creased with comprehension. “And you think the cloud thing did it?”

  Kirk nodded. “I knew it even before I checked the sensor records. The creature had made its way through the corridors of the Farragut, hunting down crewmen and feeding on their blood. And when its hunger was satisfied, it had gone back out into space.”

  Gary’s eyes narrowed. “The sensor records confirmed that?”

  “They confirmed it, all right. Down to the last grisly detail,” the second officer told him.

  Gary shook his head. “It must have been horrible.”

  “More horrible than you can imagine.”

  “I’m sorry, Jim. Really.”

  “Not half as sorry as I am,” Kirk responded. He got up and came around the table again. “After all, I’m the one who killed them.”

  It took his friend a moment to understand what he was talking about, but Gary finally got it. And when he did, he balked at the logic that had led the second officer to that conclusion.

  “No,” the navigator insisted. “That’s wrong. You said you only hesitated for a second or two.”

  Kirk smiled bitterly. “A second or two … in which I might have destroyed the thing with a maximum-intensity phaser barrage—and preserved the lives of more than two hundred men and women, the captain included.”

  “You don’t know that,” his friend argued.

  “I know those people are dead,” the second officer countered, “and I know I didn’t do anything to protect them. I know I just sat there, spellbound by the sight of an unfamiliar life-form, failing to discharge the responsibility entrusted to me by my captain.”

  Gary looked puzzled. “But your commendation—”

  “Was an empty one,” Kirk told him, dismissing it with a gesture. “After it was over, after the creature was gone, I went up to the bridge and gave some orders. Got us moving again, that sort of thing. But truthfully, I should have been court-martialed instead of commended.”

  He sat down heavily and drew a deep, painful breath. “So now you know,” he told the other man. “Now you know everything.”

  * * *

  Mitchell regarded his friend. Kirk’s eyes seemed to have taken on a harder cast. Shadows had collected beneath them. Clearly, telling his tale had taken its toll on him.

  But, finally, the navigator had the whole hideous picture in front of him. And at last, he believed he understood.

  Ever since that day on the Farragut, Kirk had been racked with sadness, with guilt and uncertainty. He had walked among the spectres of the Farragut dead, apologizing to them for his failure each step of the way.

  It was no wonder the second officer had seemed distant when he arrived on the Constitution. It was no surprise he hadn’t warmed to any of his colleagues—not even his old Academy buddy.

  In a dark corner of his mind, the man was still reliving that pivotal moment when he could have pressed a pad and unleashed a phaser ba
rrage at the cloud creature. He was still replaying the memory and punishing himself when he hesitated, the way he had in life.

  Then, suddenly, it had become more than a memory. Kirk had been thrust into the command chair of the Constitution and forced to make a life-and-death decision. And once again, his hesitation—albeit of a different variety—had resulted in a tragic loss of life.

  “Jim,” said Mitchell, “the life of a Starfleet officer is full of tough decisions. I don’t have to tell you that. But we all do the best we can … and afterward, we move on.”

  The second officer gazed at him with tortured eyes. “I can’t move on, dammit. Don’t you see? I waited too long to help those people on the Farragut. And then, just a little while ago, I waited too long again—and four of my fellow officers paid the price.”

  The navigator nodded, seeing exactly what his friend was talking about. “And now you’re afraid you’re going to do the same thing over and over again. You’re afraid that when the next crisis materializes, you’re going to make another mistake and cost someone his or her life.”

  Kirk sighed. “I don’t want anyone else to die on my watch, Gary. I’ve got enough ghosts to last me a lifetime … and then some.”

  Mitchell drew a breath, then expelled it. All right, then, he thought. I tried to skirt the issue, but my pal doesn’t want to do that. So we’ll go the other way—we’ll confront it head-on.

  “Listen, Jim,” he said, “I don’t know what happened on the Farragut that day, and I don’t think anyone, alive or dead, is in a position to judge you on that count. But when it came to Jankowski and Lynch and what took place on that satellite …”

  His friend looked up at him. “Yes?”

  The navigator frowned. “I think you made the wrong decision. I think you should have gotten the Constitution the hell out of there, landing party or no landing party.”

  Kirk regarded him. “So you agree with Gaynor?”

  “I do,” Mitchell told him.

  His friend didn’t argue his case. He didn’t say anything at all. He just sat there and absorbed the comment.

  “But you won’t make the wrong decision next time,” the navigator said. “Or the time after that.”