by Diane Carey
STARFLEET ACADEMY
Cadet David Forester has made it to Starfleet Academy’s Command School, where the starship captains of the future are trained on mission simulators that make you feel as if you are really on the bridge of a Federation starship. But there’s trouble at the Academy—sabotage, conflict, and a series of “accidents” throw Forester’s team of cadets into a scramble for their very lives.
Determined to save his crew, Forester rushes to stop a plot to destroy the Academy itself, and is thrust into a mission with Starfleet legends Captain James T. Kirk, Captain Hikaru Sulu, and Commander Pavel Chekov. Together they must find the cause behind a series of ever deadlier raids on Federation outposts by an unknown enemy.
Cadet David Forester Had an Exciting First Day at Starfleet Academy…
“The whine of the phasers cleared my head. I turned to the guy under me, gritted my teeth and got used to the idea of bashing a face in.
“Somebody grabbed my elbow, stopping my punch. I quickly freed my other hand and threw a punch at the person who was holding back my other arm. He twisted with the hit, but didn’t go down. In fact, he held me tighter.
“I stared at him with sudden recognition…. My first day at the Academy, and I, David Forester, had just punched Captain James T. Kirk in the jaw….”
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Chapter 1
“Two years ago we again put out the call and challenged you to go where no man has gone before” I am Aex Rotherot, and as Commandant here I’m very proud to welcome you to Starfleet Academy Command School. Since Starfleet Academy was founded, the United Federation of Planets has sought the best and brightest from over a thousand worlds.”
Boy, did we look fine.
Since I was three years old and my mother dug the grit of Earth out of my ears and scrubbed me pink, I never felt cleaner. Being a cadet at Starfleet Academy was breathtaking enough, but being accepted to the Command School—I almost flipped over the whole idea. Until now, it only had been a letter of acceptance tacked to my headboard, but today…
“David. David!”
“What?” I shook myself and looked at Robin. He had a shocky glaze on his cheeks. Did I look like that?
“You’re slowing down,” he told me. “Shouldn’t you keep moving?”
I stepped up my pace in the long line of command cadets, but the splendor of this place admittedly socked me with a big awe and even bigger insecurity. The rafters were vaulting and snowy white, the thirty-foot backdrop curtain a shimmering electric blue, and the rows upon rows of seats covered in gold plush. White, blue, gold … Starfleet.
I thought I was going to go blind.
On either side of the auditorium were thirty-foot windows. To our right, we had a perfect view of the shimmering blue San Francisco Bay, which the curtains in here were meant to imitate. We could just see the Point Bonita Light standing sentinel as it had since the 1800s.
On our left sprawled the stately complex of Starfleet Command, its courtyards demarcated by formal sculpted boxwoods, and its hills jeweled with the Thomas Jefferson Rose Garden.
Somebody had done this on purpose—positioning this particular building right between those two overwhelming vistas, stationing Starfleet Academy right where we could train and study and sweat within sight of Starfleet Command.
And it was working.
On the main platform, commandant Rotherot paused in his introduction to give the queue of cadets a chance to finish filing into place and sitting down. I was almost in front—about three rows from the platform, and blinked into the natural sunlight brought down from a prism-ceiling that was meant to save power but also to imitate the deck prisms of old sailing ships, just so everyone would remember the roots of tradition here. This place was tradition to the gills, and as bright as the summer outside.
Just as I sat down, another officer, smaller statured than Rotherot and with slick black hair and an amused expression, climbed the short steps and joined the commandant on the platform.
“Robin!” I gasped abruptly. “That’s Captain Sulu! I didn’t expect him to be here!”
“Kinda wish I was someplace else too,” Robin murmured.
I scolded him with a glance. “You’ve been saying that for days, but you’re still here.”
He looked at me nervously and tried to change the subject. “Didn’t you tell me Captain James Kirk was supposed to be the keynote speaker.”
Robin’s problems melted out of my mind at the thought of what he had just said—
“James T. Kirk!” I said. “I hope he’s still coming! Maybe we can shake his hand.”
“Oh, no—I don’t want to shake his hand! You’re not going to make me, are you?”
Typical. Robin never wanted to be noticed. So while I was standing next to him, I wasn’t supposed to be noticed either. That was his version of security.
Commandant Rotherot was still waiting for the last few cadets to settle down, using the moments to make sure the citations and pins on his chest were all straight and polished. He even licked his finger and pressed back a hair that really wasn’t out of place, and the gesture hit me like a punch. Was he insecure too? Could that be? Did senior officers get nervous?
Then Rotherot noticed Captain Sulu watching him quizzically, amused, and he quit fidgeting.
“Don’t you think we should get started, Commandant?” Captain Sulu asked—I could hear him from only three rows away. What a voice.
“He isn’t here yet,” Rotherot said.
Sulu smiled. “Jim Kirk hasn’t missed a command school opening for eight years. He’s gotten to where he enjoys them. He’ll be here, so—”
The deep voice faded as Sulu turned to look at something and the sound went off in another direction.
What was going on? I looked around, but the only thing that happened was Rotherot taking the lectern rather nervously. The rest of the cadets took their seats behind me and Robin. We looked like a spirited investment in the future, and I was proud and—all right—terrified to be part of it. I wasn’t one of those kids for whom Starfleet had been a known constant while I was growing up. In fact, I hadn’t given the service a single thought until high school.
Then, one silly vacation with my eccentric uncle to a flight-sim camp, and I was hooked. I started driving everything, anything that would go. Rolling, flying, skimming, floating—I wanted to go.
Now, I was here.
Guess I went. Sometimes life could be a whirlwind.
<
br /> The huge backdrop behind Rotherot startled me when it turned into a giant field of stars—a display screen of some kind, but big! And gorgeous … Starfleet vessels of all types sailed by, vessels from the past, from the early days of exploration, clunky and strong ships that had taken the worst poundings space could offer. They reminded me in some ways of the Conestoga wagons used by pioneers. They seemed primitive and flimsy and easy to laugh down our noses at, but in fact they were well armed and tough enough to rattle across great expanses and actually get where they were going. For just a few seconds, I got lost back in time with them.
“David?” Robin’s voice was distant, meaningless. “Something wrong?”
I didn’t answer. The starships were starting to appear. The early classes of fleet ships built by the Federation once they established Starfleet as their exploratory and defensive arm. Just like the old time cavalry, they were the ones who went out and carved paths into the wilderness for settlers to come after. They’d established the forts, and people had gone out to connect the dots of the galaxy. Pretty soon, I’d be going.
The first of my family—a pretty big family at that—to join Starfleet … Everyone else went to Clark University.
Not like Robin. He had about five Starfleet servicemen in his family past. That’s why he was here, in a place where he just didn’t belong, facing a future that didn’t fit him.
“Move aside, plebe,” a mass of protoplasm barked on the other side of Robin.
I looked around in time to see this mass give Robin a subtle but firm shove with one sausagelike finger. A senior cadet towered over us, his shoulders cutting out light from the ceiling prisms.
“Out,” the senior growled down at Robin.
“Hey.” I stood up. “You got a problem?”
“No problem, except your pal is sitting in my girl’s seat.”
Girl? Was there a girl? Oh, Yes—
“Not here, Frank.” A female cadet appeared from behind the senior pulled on his meaty arm.
“Why don’t you just ask politely for us to move down?”
“Because seniors don’t ‘ask,’ that’s why, junior.”
“Frank, just sit down,” the woman said.
I took Robin’s arm and we shuffled down one seat, causing the whole row of cadets to shift like a choppy wave. Nobody made any protests—seemed some of them knew this guy.
Good thing, because I was ready to protect Robin, and that Frank could easily have separated my head from any related tissue.
Luckily, the senior let the girl move in and sit between him and Robin, but only after we moved down a seat so the pair of them had room to sit together. I’d heard about the strictness of senior cadets, for it was they and not officers who kept other cadets in line at command school.
At the lectern, Commandant Rotherot straightened his pins and medals one more time, then started talking again.
“Ladies and gentlemen, it’s my proud duty to present the new head of the Command School—”
A loud whine blasted across the auditorium. At first I thought it was an alarm of some kind, maybe a mistake by the backstage guys running that beautiful screen full of ships passing by, but all at once I noticed that half the field of cadets were ducking their heads.
Somebody shouted, “Down! Down!”
I twisted around to see what was happening—never occurred to me that the cadets might actually be ducking for a good reason—and a second whine broke across the auditorium so close that my right ear ached.
I cranked to my right.
A cadet at the back of the auditorium stood with legs braced, and in his hands was a phaser rifle!
A cadet—a Vulcan cadet.
Had a Vulcan snapped?
“I know him!” I said under the noise to Robin. “That’s Sturek. I had a couple of computer classes with him last—”
Somebody yelled, “Look out!”
The Vulcan—Sturek—broke stance and rushed down the aisle toward the front platform.
Beside me, Robin craned around, too confused to duck. Past his startled face I saw an angry-looking human woman with brassy hair and an Andorian woman rush in from the wings, and they were firing some kind of projectile weapon at Commandant Rotherot!
The senior named Frank bolted to his feet, but froze in place, his arms flared at his sides. He wanted to do something, but seemed completely lost about what to do.
On the platform, Captain Sulu jumped in front of Rotherot and was driven down by the shots. I pushed to my feet and gripped the top of the seat in front of me, but that was as far as I got before a dark-skinned human about my age dropped from the ceiling—-right out of the ceiling!--on some kind of cable.
Well, this was … what was this?
“David!” Robin’s voice was suddenly behind me.
He hadn’t moved. I had. I was standing on the back of the chair in front of me—launching off it, more like, and the platform was only a couple more jumps away, and that dark-skinned guy was just hitting the platform behind Sulu and Rotherot.
Behind me, the field of cadets was paralyzed with shock and horror as phasers sang across the auditorium, and I was pretty horrified to find myself rushing the stage. That dark-skinned guy was like a boxing sandbag when I hit him, but he went down just as his phaser rifle screamed against my ear. I must’ve hit him just right, because he outweighed me by a good thirty pounds and probably could’ve turned me into goop if I hadn’t had the advantage of momentum.
The two women were rushing the platform now. Against their forms I noticed that the display screen had frozen with one ship halfway passed. One of the women stopped and aimed at Rotherot, but Sulu forced himself up and got her by both ankles. The platform shuddered beneath me as they crashed to it. He’d brought her down.
“Get off me!” the guy under me howled. I had his right arm pinned and the phaser rifle under my leg, but his left arm was free and he pummeled me freely in the head and shoulder. The only blow I felt in the midst of shoving this guy down was a whack on the ear that sent my head reeling.
Sturek loomed over me! I saw the flash of a phaser rifle and thought I was dead, but a new figure vaulted over me, skimming my right shoulder and caught a toe on my shoulder blade. The solid figure landed on one knee instead of both feet, but still managed to slam Sturek against the back wall.
Twisting to look, I saw a stocky Starfleet officer’s thick arms strain in his uniform tunic. His face was flushed, his amber eyes hard—I knew those eyes. How many portraits had I see just in the past six weeks…
James Kirk!
Kirk smashed the Vulcan to the back of the stage, and the phaser rifle flew out and skittered to the deck inches from the hand of the guy I was holding down, distracting me for an instant—there were now two phaser rifles within a few inches of me. Could I get one? Should I?
The guy under me wasn’t so doubtful. He surged up in a sudden gush of power and threw me off, and scrambled toward Sturek’s phaser rifle.
“No!” I shouted, and plunged for his legs just as he got the rifle and rolled over.
I overshot and landed on his rib cage. He bawled in pain as my action nearly dislocated one of his shoulders, and he slammed into the stage deck, dragging me with him.
There was another uniform on the stage now, and I knew this one right off too. Commander Chekov. He was an instructor at the command school. He’d organized the cadets and given us our initial orientation not two hours ago. Now he was chasing down that Andorian woman and the human woman, who were both firing at him, but he managed to dodge them, and he had his own hand phaser with which he was keeping them from getting aim on the run. They were headed out of the auditorium.
Were they giving up? Or had Captain Sulu been the target of all this?
The whine of those phasers cleared my head. I turned to the guy under me. Even though I’d never even kicked a cat in my whole life, I pulled back a fist, gritted my teeth and got used to the idea of bashing a face in.
Somebody grabbed my e
lbow! I couldn’t throw the punch—and I’d made up my mind to throw it. Furious and caught in the heat of insult, I freed my other hand and swung it instead, but around at the person who was holding back my arm. Contact!
Clipped him right in the mouth. Caught a knuckle on his tooth.
He twisted with the hit, but didn’t go down. In fact, he held me tighter.
I stared until my eyes stung. I’d just clipped James Kirk in the jaw!
Chapter 2
Why was Captain Kirk holding me back? Wasn’t he on my side?
The guy under me squirmed away, and for some reason I let him go.
Sulu rose behind Kirk like a Tahitian god. “Belay that, cadet!”
He was talking to me. I guess he thought I was going to throw another punch. I looked, and saw that my fist was balled up again, ready to go.
James Kirk shifted back and pulled me to my feet. “Good job. Stand down.”
He turned to the field of stunned cadets, most of whom were on their feet by now. In contrast to Commandant Rotherot’s fastidious neatness, Kirk didn’t care that his maroon uniform jacket was rumpled and bunched, his hair disheveled, and his lip bleeding. He looked rough and didn’t care. He yanked down the chest panel of his jacket, leaving the white lining showing, and let it hang that way.
His voice carried to the back of the hall.
“You’ve just seen an assassination by terrorists! How many attackers were there? How many got away? What were they wearing? Male or female? Human or not? And why did only one cadet take action?”
Rubbing his reddened jaw, he paused to let the questions ring, and turned to look at me.
I felt cold all over. Beside me, Sturek helped the dark-skinned guy to his feet.
Captain Kirk’s questions rolled in my head—could I answer any of them?
The field of cadets glanced at each other, realizing they’d been had. Rotherot got up and checked his appearance. Commander Chekov strode down the main aisle with the two women at his sides. They seemed damned pleased with themselves.