From the moment James T. Kirk steps
aboard the Enterprise—the youngest captain in Starfleet’s history—things begin to go wrong. His Vulcan science officer, Mr. Spock, considers Kirk impetuous; the ship’s chief engineer thinks him an inexperienced young hotshot; his chief medical officer hasn’t bothered to show up yet; and the new helmsman would rather be someplace else entirely. To top it all off, Starfleet Command has assigned the Enterprise a disappointingly tame task: to ferry a troupe of vaudeville performers on a morale-raising mission to Federation starbases—in short, a USO tour.
Then the largest spacecraft anyone has ever seen suddenly appears in the ship’s flight path ... and on their first mission together, Kirk and the entire Enterprise crew are facing what could truly be mankind’s final frontier. ...
POCKET BOOKS
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. 1230 Avenue of the-Americas, New York, NY 10020
Copyright © 1986 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of Paramount Pictures.
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ISBN: 0-671-73032-0
First Pocket Books printing September 1986
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POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.
Printed in the U.S.A.
To Linda M., Katya, Rosie, Dottie, Mary, Liz, and Beth,
to Ann, Anne, and Vera,
to Susan & Danny, because of all those Thursdays;
and to Pat and Staarla.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Epilogue
About the e-Book
Prologue
BLOOD FLOWS IN strange patterns in zero gravity—
Jim Kirk cried out and flung himself forward, reaching—
“Gary, no—”
As Gary Mitchell collapsed, Jim struggled forward, fighting to see, fighting to stay conscious despite shock, fighting to move through the pain of his crushed knee and his broken ribs, fighting to breathe against the blood in his lungs. If he lost the fight, his closest friend would die.
A scarlet net drifted across the image before him, and he thought that he was blind.
Jim bolted awake, gasping. He had been dreaming. Dreaming again. “Carol ... ?” He wanted to hold her, to reassure himself that he was right beside her, not back in the disaster of Ghioghe.
Then he remembered, almost as if he were waking from a second dream, that he no longer lived in Carol Marcus’s house, he no longer slept in her bed. He was alone.
As his room’s computer sensed that he was awake, it lightened the darkness around him. He wiped cold sweat from his face and touched the scar on his forehead. At Ghioghe, before the gravity went out, blood from the gash flowed down into his eyes and obscured his vision.
He wished he could go back to sleep; he wished he could sleep without dreaming. But he knew he could not. Besides, in fighting the recurrent nightmare Jim had left the bedclothes twisted and sweat-damp and clammy. He threw them aside and rose.
Jim Kirk, the newest captain in Starfleet, the youngest [2] officer ever to reach the rank of captain, the hero of Axanar and, more recently, of Ghioghe, the next commander of the constellation-class starship Enterprise, had lived for the past two weeks in a rented traveler’s cubicle, one of a hundred identical cubicles facing another block of a hundred identical cubicles, in a building similar to at least a hundred other sleeper buildings clustered near the spaceport.
In his current odd emotional state of excitement over his coming command, worry over Gary Mitchell, and pain and confusion over the way his affair with Carol Marcus ended, Jim had lived here without noticing the shabby surroundings. Not that his own furniture, which he had left in storage during this visit to earth, had much over the plastic built-ins of the sleeper. Jim had never got around to replacing much of the beat-up junk left over from student digs. But he did have a couple of pieces of heavy old oak from the farmhouse in Iowa, and a single Persian rug he had bought on a whim even before he realized how much he liked it, and before he realized how much the liking would cost if he let it develop.
He could barely stand in the sleeper; he could just lie down in the bunk, if he restrained himself from stretching. He looked around. He would have claimed intimate familiarity with the place, but the claim would be a fraud. Had he been asked to describe it, he would have failed in every particular. His indifference to it turned suddenly to revulsion.
He dragged his small suitcase from the tiny storage shelf, pulled it open, and flung into it his few possessions: a couple of books, including one that had belonged to his father; a thin sheaf of family photos; a letter from Carol. He could not decide if throwing the letter away would start healing his wounds, or deepen them.
“Computer.”
“Ready.”
“Close out my account here.”
“Done.”
Jim slammed shut the suitcase and fled the sleeper without a backward glance.
Outside, in the darkness preceding dawn, Jim felt as if his nightmare still lurked at the edge of his waking perceptions. He always had the same dream, never about the breakdown [3] of pattern, the miscommunication that led to the battle, not about the battle itself, not even about the actions he had taken that saved most of his crew but left his ship, the Lydia Sutherland, a battered, broken hulk drifting dead in space. Instead, the dream always repeated those interminable few minutes in the rescue pod, when Gary Mitchell almost died.
Jim climbed the stairs to the entrance of the Starfleet Teaching Hospital, being careful of his right knee. So far, this morning, it had given him no trouble. He headed for the regeneration ward. No one stopped him. He had asked, ordered, pulled rank and pulled strings to get official permission to be here outside of visiting hours. Finally he simply ignored the rules, and now everyone was used to seeing him.
As he had every day since getting out of regen himself, Jim entered Gary’s hospital room. Gary Mitchell lay in a regeneration tank, drugged and sleeping and immersed up to his neck in translucent green regen gel.
Gary hated being sick. It hurt to see him like this. All the specialists kept congratulating themselves on his progress. But to Jim he looked wasted and frail, as if the gel were draining his youth instead of restoring his body. Gary’s thirtieth birthday had passed right after he entered regen. Jim was a year and a hal
f younger, just turned twenty-nine, impatient with the aftereffects of his own injuries, anxious for his friend to get well.
He sat down beside Gary and spoke to him as if he could hear him.
“They keep telling me you’ll wake up soon,” Jim said. “I hope it’s true. You’ve been here too long, and it isn’t fair. You would have come out of Ghioghe without a scratch if you hadn’t come back for me.” Jim stretched his right leg, testing his knee. He had begun to trust the new joint; physical therapy had built up its strength so it no longer collapsed at awkward moments. He still had exercises he was supposed to do every day.
“They also claim you can’t hear me because of the drugs. But they’re wrong. I don’t much care if they think I’m nuts to talk to you.” Jim remembered his last few days in regen, a twilight of half-sleep, confusion, and dreams. “I saw it all going wrong at Ghioghe. I still can’t believe Sieren could make a mistake like that. I saw—this is going to sound [4] weird, Gary, I know it, but I saw the pattern of what was happening. I knew that if everyone would calm down for thirty seconds, if all the commanders held their fire for another minute, the crisis would pass. But it didn’t happen that way. Lord, I admired Sieren.” Jim could not believe Sieren had made the mistake, could not believe Sieren and so many others had died. He took a deep breath. “I saw the pattern, I knew how to fix it, but I couldn’t do anything, and it all went wrong. Is that how it was for Sieren? Is that how it would have been for me, if I’d been in command at Ghioghe? Axanar could have turned out just the same, but it didn’t. We came out of that one covered with glory and holding a peace treaty. Was that just good luck?”
He thought Gary’s eyelids flickered. But it had been a reflex, or Jim’s own imagination.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Sleep, get well. I have to go up to the Enterprise soon, but if the ship has to do without a first officer for a few months, it will survive. I’ve nominated you to the position, my friend, as soon as you’re ready for it.”
“Good morning, captain.”
Gary’s heavy dark hair had slipped down across his forehead. Jim brushed it back.
“Captain?”
Jim looked up. Christine Chapel, a member of the staff of the intensive-care unit, stood near. Jim had heard her, but he had not realized she was talking to him. He was not yet used to his new rank. His promotion had come while he was still in regen. He went to sleep a commander whose space cruiser had been blasted around him; he woke up a captain with a new medal and a constellation-class starship soon to be under his command. “Sorry, Ms. Chapel. Good morning.”
“The biotelemetry on Commander Mitchell is very encouraging. I thought you’d like to know.” A striking young woman, she wore her blond hair feathered around her face.
“Then why doesn’t he wake up?” Jim said.
“He will,” Chapel said. “He will when he’s ready.”
She handed him a printout flimsy.
After spending so much time here, he had learned to make sense of it. He scanned the printout. It did look good. The troubling tangle of neurons in Gary’s regenerating spinal [5] cord had sorted itself out, and the vertebrae had solidified from their earlier ghostly shadow, when they were only cartilage. As far as Jim could tell, Gary’s lacerated internal organs had completely healed. Jim handed the printout back.
“I see he has the heart of an eighteen-year-old,” he said.
She smiled. The hoary old regen joke had a dozen punch lines. The standby was “Yes—in a jar on his closet shelf.”
“Has Dr. McCoy called to ask about his progress?” Jim said.
“No.”
“Strange. We’re supposed to transport to Spacedock later. I hoped Gary would be with us ...”
“Maybe Dr. McCoy decided to extend his vacation.”
“It’s possible.” Jim chuckled ruefully. “I did a better job than I meant to when I bullied him into taking some time off. I don’t even know where he went.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Why does Dr. McCoy call Commander Mitchell ‘Mitch,’ while you call him ‘Gary’?”
“Everybody calls Gary ‘Mitch’ except me. He picked up the nickname during our first midshipman training cruise. But I’d already known him for a year, and somehow I just never got around to making the change.”
“What does he call you?”
Jim felt himself blushing. He wondered if he could get away with telling her that Gary called him Jim, like everybody else. As soon as Gary woke up, though, he would blast that fiction out of space.
“He calls me ‘kid,’ ” Jim said. “I’m a little younger than he is, and he never lets me forget it.” He did not tell her he had been the youngest in his class by more than a year. He knew what she would say: “Precocious, weren’t you?” Being called precocious at fifteen or at twenty was bad enough. At twenty-nine, it was ridiculous.
“You’ve known Commander Mitchell for a long time, haven’t you?”
“Ten years. No, eleven.” Jim had lost three months in the regen bed and shipped out to Ghioghe in spring, when the hills east of the city were green from winter’s rain; when he [6] woke up, only two weeks later in subjective time, the hills were golden and tinder dry with summer. Now, autumn approached, and Gary was still here.
“He will be all right, captain. I promise you that.”
“Thank you, Ms. Chapel. Ms. Chapel ...”
“Yes, captain?”
“Would you do me a favor?”
“If I can.”
He stopped, wondering if he should ask her to do something all the experts said was useless. “I know it isn’t supposed to make any difference, but I keep remembering the time before I woke up. I could hear things—or I thought I could hear—but I couldn’t open my eyes and I didn’t know where I was or what had happened to me. While Gary’s still asleep, would you ... talk to him? Tell him what’s going on, tell him he’s going to be all right ...”
“Of course I will,” she said.
“Thank you.” He stood up reluctantly. “I’m supposed to report to Spacedock soon. I’d like to leave a note—?”
“You can use the office in back.”
The note was hard to write, but he finally got something down that he hoped would be reassuring.
In the doorway of the office, he stopped. Her back to Jim, Carol Marcus stood at Gary’s bedside with Dr. Eng, one of the regen specialists. They inspected Gary’s life-sign readings and compared the printout with Carol’s projections. Unlike the specialist, Carol was not a medical doctor. She was a geneticist; she had developed the protocol for Gary’s treatment and for Jim’s.
Jim remembered the first time he saw her, the first thing she said to him. When he began physical therapy, he lasted about five minutes into the first session. Trembling with exhaustion, sweaty and aching, thinking himself ridiculous to be so weak, he noticed her watching him and wished no stranger had seen him like this. Bad enough to have McCoy hovering like an encouraging mother hen.
But Carol overlooked Jim’s exhaustion, the scar on his forehead, his hair plastered down with sweat. She said, “I wanted to meet the person who belongs to this genome.”
She was serious and elegant, funny and good-humored. [7] She was one of those rare scientists who make intellectual leaps that turn into breakthroughs. She was extraordinarily beautiful, with her smooth blond hair and deep blue eyes. Jim felt an immediate attraction to her, and though her job did not require her to visit intensive care, let alone therapy, she often stopped in to see him.
The first time he left the hospital they went walking together in a nearby park. By the time the hospital released him, Jim and Carol had fallen in love. She invited him to move into her house.
Three months later, he moved out. He had not seen her for the past two weeks. He had an irrational urge to step back into the office and stay there till she left.
Don’t be ridiculous, he thought. You’re both adults; you can be civilized about th
is. He started toward her.
Dr. Eng pushed her short dark hair back behind her ear, made a notation on the printout flimsy, and glanced at Carol with a concerned frown. “What are you going to do?”
“Do? I’m going to do all the things you’re supposed to do under these circumstances,” Carol replied. “You didn’t think this was an accident, did you?”
“No, of course not, it’s just—Why, Captain Kirk! How nice to see you looking so well.”
Carol turned, uncharacteristically flustered. “Jim—!”
“Hello, Carol.” He stopped. He wanted to say everything to her, or he wanted to say nothing. He wanted to make love with her, or he wanted never to see her again.
“Talk to you later,” Dr. Eng said, and made a diplomatic exit.
“How are you feeling, Jim?”
He ignored the question. His heart beat hard. “It’s wonderful to see you. I have to leave soon. Can we ... I’d like to talk to you. Would you have a drink with me?”
“I don’t feel like having a drink,” she said. “But I will go for a walk with you.”
Jim paused beside Gary, still hoping he might awaken. He did not. “Get well, my friend,” Jim said, and left Ms. Chapel the note to give him when he regained consciousness.
They did not have to discuss where to go. Jim and Carol walked toward their park.
[8] Without meaning to, exactly, Jim kept brushing against Carol. His shoulder touched her shoulder; his fingers touched the back of her hand. At first she moved aside.
“Oh—” Carol said impatiently the third time Jim touched her. She took his hand and held it. “We are still friends, I hope.”
“I hope so, too,” Jim said. He tried to pretend the electric tingle of physical attraction no longer existed between them, but he found it impossible to deceive himself that much. Being near Carol made Jim feel as if a powerful current cast a web over both of them, exchanging and intensifying every passion.
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