“Serjeant.”
“Yes, Koronin.”
He answered with commendable deference and he used the proper form, no longer addressing her as “my lady.” Spoken by a member of a bandit work crew, the title was an insult.
She took the title most seriously; she would not use it again until she regained it in the eyes of the highest stratum of her society. But she would regain it.
“Prepare a course to the Federation Phalanx.”
Starfleet stewards never let the detritus of a party collect; half-empty glasses and dirty plates, littered trays and open bottles vanished as soon as they appeared. When all but a few guests had strolled off to their beds, a single table held a few bottles of cooling champagne, a fan-shaped array of champagne flutes,. and a tray of hors d’oeuvres, as if in preparation for another, much smaller party.
Jim sat by an observation port, occasionally glancing into the Spacedock bay. He was too tired and keyed up even to feel sleepy. He wanted to try to explain to his mother why he had been so angry; he wanted to talk to Sam and apologize for blowing up at his concern. But Winona would be sound asleep, and Sam, still going strong, had liberated a guitar when the musicians were dismissed. He played it softly, accompanying Lieutenant Uhura, who strummed a small [73] harp and sang a lilting Irish song. A couple of the members of the vaudeville company remained, but Amelinda Lukarian had vanished.
In a better mood, Jim would have joined the singers and happily listened to Lieutenant Uhura all night long. Instead, he rose and left the hall, pausing at the serving table to pick up two glasses and a full bottle of champagne.
“Jim, wait!”
Sam joined him at the turbo-lift. He carried a third glass and a small storage container.
“I wondered how long it would take you to get around to this,” Sam said.
“Maybe I’m just going off to get drunk. In private.” The turbo-lift arrived. Jim got inside.
Sam glanced at the glasses. “My brother, the two-fisted drinker.”
Jim grinned sheepishly and let Sam into the lift. “I certainly appreciate this show of moral support.”
Sam tossed the container in the air and caught it. Carved vegetables rattled against the translucent plastic. “I’m just coming along to make friends with the horse.”
They paused at the top of the catwalk. Lukarian had pulled a cot close to the corral so she could sleep with one hand stretched through the rails. The winged horse stood near her, dozing, its nose brushing Lukarian’s fingers. The lustrous black of the creature’s coat shaded to deep purple and peacock blue at the tips of its ears, on its legs, in large dapples across its back and flanks. Its mane and tail cascaded in random locks of black and intense blue and purple and iridescent green. It had folded its great wings to its sides, and the color of their feathers blended with the shades of its coat.
“We’d better come back later,” Jim said.
At his voice, Athene raised her head, snorting. Lukarian sat up, blinking away the sleep.
“What do you want?” She kicked aside the blanket. She had changed out of her black suit into drawstring pants and a baggy slouch shirt.
Jim climbed down the companionway, holding the bottle and glasses in one hand.
“I came to apologize,” he said.
[74] “We brought a peace offering.” Sam opened the container and brought out a handful of carved vegetables. “Does Athene like carrot roses?”
“Yes. Carrots, anyway. She’s never had anything quite so elegant as a carrot rose.”
As Jim opened the champagne, Sam offered Athene a carrot. She approached him warily, her wings fluttering. For all her apparent ferocity, she had calm, soft, gray eyes. She stretched her neck toward him, like a crafty old pony suspecting a bridle hidden somewhere, such as behind Sam’s back. She lipped the morsel from his palm.
“Did the admiral order you to come down here?” Lukarian said. “It doesn’t matter whether you apologize—I’m not pulling out, no matter what, I’d prefer to be booked where we’re welcome, but the company can’t afford luxuries like being picky.”
“He didn’t make me apologize,” Jim said. “And there’s no need to back out of the commission.” He laughed, without humor but with the understanding of irony. “Besides, it wouldn’t change things if you did. The admiral has made up his mind. If you quit, he’ll just find somebody else.”
“And if you quit?” Lukarian said.
“I’m not allowed to quit,” Jim said. He thumbed the cork out of the neck of the bottle, being careful not to pop it and spook the winged horse again.
Lukarian chewed her thumbnail thoughtfully. “This isn’t quite what you expected, is it?” she said.
“That’s ... an understatement.”
“Pax?” Lukarian asked.
“Pax.”
They shook hands, more civilly this time.
The winged horse finished chewing Sam’s carrot rose, put her head over the bars of the corral, and nudged Lukarian, who stretched out her hand and let the creature nip up something from her palm. The horse’s teeth crunched on a bite of carrot while Jim tried to recall when Sam had given Lukarian any of what he had brought, or when she had put her hand in her pocket. Her hand had been empty a moment before. He shrugged to himself and poured champagne for her, for Sam, for himself.
“To ... to peace,” he said.
[75] Their glasses touched with a high, light ring.
“How did you get to be a captain?” Lukarian absently scratched behind her creature’s ears.
Jim’s fair skin colored. “Just lucky, I guess.”
Lukarian blushed too. “I didn’t mean it like that. I meant, aren’t you kind of young to be a captain?”
“I’m twenty-nine,” he said. “Well out of short pants. Aren’t you kind of young to run a ... a vaudeville company?”
“That’s different,” she said. “I sort of inherited my job from my daddy.”
“So did Jim,” Sam said with a grin.
“I didn’t know Starfleet worked like that,” she said.
“It doesn’t,” Jim said. “Once you get to know my brother, you’ll find he has an unusual sense of humor.”
“Oh.” She gave them both a quizzical glance.
“What’s the use of this corral?” Jim said. “Can’t it just fly out?”
“Jim, look at the wing ratio,” Sam said. “There’s no way it could get off the ground at one gravity.”
“She can’t fly out,” Lukarian said. “But she can jump out if she’s scared enough.”
“I’d rather not have her running loose on the shuttlecraft deck,” Jim said.
“Someone’s always with her. Last night I was only gone for a minute. I was trying to change and get everybody organized and—It was bad luck that you came in right then.”
“Why do you have a flying horse, if it can’t fly?”
“My daddy got her when she was just a filly. I didn’t think we should buy her. Vaudeville is supposed to have animal acts, but Athene—I knew, I just knew, that if we exhibited a winged horse without flying her, the audience would get cranky. I was right, too. Besides, equiraptors all go crazy. But of course as soon as we got her, I fell madly in love with her. I was just the right age.”
“Equiraptor?” Jim said. “Not pegasus?”
“No. Pegasus was mythical. Athene is real. Besides, ‘equiraptor’ is more accurate. She has some bird-of-prey genes—she can eat meat. I don’t suppose you brought any shrimp, did you? She loves shrimp.”
“I’ll bring shrimp next time.”
[76] “How many of her are there?” Sam asked. “Who did the recombinant work? Why haven’t I heard about it?”
“There’s a guy up—down—in the northwest. He has a whole herd—a flock?—of them. He never publishes, he gets too much flak from the pure-genists.” She grimaced with disgust. “They’re perfectly willing to buy steak-flavored soy protein. It makes their food bills lower, and never mind that you mix forms a lot farther apart than
birds and mammals. But if you say, Hey, boys and girls, let’s make a chimera, let’s make a flying horse, they start screaming ‘pagan witchcraft!’ ”
Sam chuckled, recognizing the type. “You said winged horses—equiraptors?—go crazy. Because they can’t fly?”
“It isn’t that they can’t fly, but that they believe they ought to be able to fly. If you see the difference.”
“What gravity can they fly in?” Sam asked.
“The theory is, around a tenth of a g. Nobody’s tried it. It costs too much to counteract the gravity field over as big an area as you need.”
“It shouldn’t cost that much,” Jim said, glancing around the shuttle deck and feeling disappointed, despite himself, that the fifteen-meter ceiling could hardly give the winged horse much room in which to fly.
“It costs too much if you have to do it on the budget of a vaudeville company,” Lukarian said. “But it would be quite a sight, wouldn’t it?”
“It would indeed,” Jim said.
“My friends call me Lindy,” she said.
“His friends call him Jim,” Sam said.
She glanced quizzically from brother to brother.
“That’s right,” Jim said. “My friends call me Jim.”
Chapter 4
ON THE BRIDGE of the starship Enterprise, Jim Kirk prevented himself by force of will from tapping his fingers on the armrest of the captain’s seat. The last thing he wanted was to let everyone know just how nervous, aggravated, and upset he felt.
This morning he had bid farewell to his mother and brother at such great length that when they finally did depart, they departed with relief. He hardly blamed them. He felt too worried to make intelligent conversation or even to exchange family gossip, and, after all, only a finite number of ways exist to say good-bye.
He had given the ship a complete inspection, he had conferred with Lieutenant Uhura about the communications network and with Commander Spock over data analysis systems. Mr. Spock answered all Jim’s questions emotionlessly, in detail, and in terms Jim had mostly never heard, much less understood. Despite his stoic exterior, Mr. Spock seemed to suspect that Jim was testing his competence, that Jim was seeking an excuse to displace him from the position of first officer.
Jim even asked Amelinda Lukarian if her company needed extra equipment or supplies. “Jim, all I need is a good juggler,” she said. “I don’t suppose you can juggle, can you?”
As it happened, he could, in a manner of speaking, but he hardly intended to admit it and find himself on stage at the next starbase, clutching two beanbags and trying to keep the [78] third in the air. The only time he could get all three bags simultaneously airborne was when he dropped them.
Amelinda was too keyed up by the Starfleet commission, too excited over going into interstellar space for the first time to pick up on his hint that he wanted an excuse to stay in port another day.
On reflection, he could hardly blame her. She might be persuaded to conspire to delay the Enterprise, but she would do it reluctantly, trying to balance the assumption—unjustified, he hoped—that to refuse to help Jim would damage their fragile truce, against the assumption—entirely justified, Jim felt—that insisting on a delay would win the company no points with Admiral Noguchi. The admiral had already called Jim once, wondering in an elaborately casual fashion just when Jim intended to set out.
In short, Jim had kept the Enterprise in the docking bay as long as he could, and far longer than he wished to. He could not delay much longer.
He did not want to leave without Dr. Leonard McCoy, though, and Dr. McCoy was nowhere to be found.
The last few months had been hard on McCoy. Though he had kept Jim and Gary and the other survivors of Ghioghe alive, the doctor had been all but excluded from their treatment once they got back to earth. It took specialists, the specialists told him.
So, when Jim recovered from the regen drugs enough to notice McCoy’s aggravation, he encouraged him to take some time off. I bullied him, Jim thought. I might as well admit it. But where did he go?
McCoy had left no itinerary; if he had his communicator, he was ignoring it.
The Enterprise could not function without a chief medical officer. Leaving Spacedock without a doctor would be unfair to ship and crew; it would be dangerous. If McCoy did not appear soon, Jim would have to request another doctor. Maybe he ought to request a search party at the same time.
“Captain Kirk,” Lieutenant Uhura said, “Spacedock Control sends its compliments and asks if you would like to make a reservation for a time of departure.”
Jim detected Admiral Noguchi at work.
“Send my compliments to Control—correction, address [79] my compliments to Admiral Noguchi at Spacedock Control, and request a departure clearance for ... sixteen hundred.”
“Aye, captain.”
Uhura relayed the message. Jim willed the departure time to be too crowded. Sixteen hundred was the closest thing to a rush hour that Spacedock possessed. Being bumped from his requested time would give him the excuse to stall for a while longer.
Jim rehearsed possible retorts: “Very well, if Spacedock can’t handle its traffic well enough for us to depart at a civilized hour, Enterprise will leave at oh two hundred.” He wondered if he could pull off the cool contempt that line required.
“Control reports that they have logged sixteen hundred as departure time for Enterprise,” Uhura said.
Damn! Jim thought.
“Very good, Lieutenant Uhura,” he said. “Thank you.” He rose. “I’ll be in my quarters.”
He left the bridge, fuming at himself for being caught in his own cleverness. He could have requested eighteen hundred, even twenty, and got away with it, but he gambled and he lost. Now, unless he tracked McCoy down within an hour, he would have to report him missing and he would have to request another doctor; and he would have to explain himself to Admiral Noguchi.
In his cabin, he opened a private communications line. Jim received no answer when he called McCoy’s Macon, Georgia, apartment. Not even a concierge replied, for the doctor disdained to use any robot or computer controls in his living space. He even washed his own dishes, on the rare occasions that he ate at home instead of going out. His club had no idea where he might be.
Jim thought for a moment, then called an old friend of McCoy’s, an adviser from medical school.
Dr. Chhay, though thirty years McCoy’s senior, had none of his old-fashioned objections to robot servants. The distinctive electronic voice of a brand-name concierge answered Jim’s call.
“One moment, please. I will see if Dr. Chhay is free.”
The doctor’s image appeared. Jim had met McCoy’s mentor only once, but he could hardly forget the unique blend of [80] types that made up her features: gold Asian eyes, golden-brown hair with eastern European curl, a café-au-lait complexion, emphasis on the café. She must have been heartbreakingly beautiful even as a young woman, and maturity had given her an elegance and presence that at first had knocked Jim flat and later made him feel, in a strange and tongue-tied way, that he was in the company of royalty, the real thing, not the commercial figureheads that had passed for royalty for the last couple of hundred years.
“Hello,” she said. “It’s—Commander Kirk, is it not? Leonard’s friend.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jim said. “It’s captain now.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thank you.” He blushed furiously. Why did I brag about making captain? he wondered. He cleared his throat in embarrassment. “I’m sorry to bother you. I just wondered if you’d seen him recently.”
“No, I haven’t. The last time I saw him was when we all had dinner together. Can it have been over a year ago?”
Jim’s only pleasant memories of that dinner were of Dr. Chhay. Leonard and his wife’s brittle civility had been worse than outright conflict. A few weeks later they finally decided on a permanent separation.
“Yes, ma’am, almost two years now.”
“Is he all right?”
“Yes, ma’am, I’m sure he is. He’s just ... momentarily misplaced.”
Her glance combined doubt with mild amusement. “Surely Jocelyn knows where he is.”
“I don’t think so—I mean,” he said quickly, “I haven’t reached her yet.” McCoy must never have told Dr. Chhay of his and Jocelyn’s divorce. Maybe I should tell her, Jim thought; and then, It really isn’t my place to tell McCoy’s friends the details of his personal life; and finally, It’s too late now, anyway.
“Give him my regards when you see him, captain,” Dr. Chhay said. “We must all get together again sometime.”
“Yes,” Jim said. “I will. Good idea. Thanks.”
“Good-bye, captain,” she said.
“Good-bye, Dr.—” He let his voice trail off, for her image had faded from the screen.
[81] Why did I make such a fool of myself? he wondered. He sighed, and tried to console himself with the thought that he might not be the first man to turn into a babbling moron while trying to talk to Dr. Chhay.
Jim thought for a moment. Dr. Boyce, chief medical officer of the Enterprise during most of Chris Pike’s command, now headed medical services at Starbase 32. He was too far away to be of any help. But his replacement, Mark Piper, had retired to earth. Jim put through a call. Maybe Piper could be persuaded to return to active duty until McCoy turned up.
Dr. Piper’s image appeared on the screen. Thank you, Dr. Piper, Jim thought, grateful to reach someone who answered calls in person.
“This is Mark Piper,” the image said. Jim started to reply, but the image kept talking. “If you leave your name, I may call you back. Then again, I may not.”
Jim swore softly as the recording informed him that Dr. Piper looked forward to getting in some serious staying at home.
Jim’s plan sank.
It probably wouldn’t have worked anyway, Jim thought. Piper doesn’t sound anywhere near ready to come back out of reserve.
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