Star Trek: The Children of Kings

by David Stern

Boyce must have reacted unconsciously, taken a step forward without being aware of it. He became aware of Pike’s hand, on his arm once more, holding him back, squeezing even tighter. And then he became aware of something else as well.

  The gamina in his pocket. The gamina Deleen had wanted him to give to Liyan, to help the tallith out of her quandary. That was no longer possible, of course.

  It occurred to him, though, that there might still be a use for the serum after all.

  “Hang on a second,” he said, and drew the vial out of his pocket.

  Deleen saw it, and her eyes widened.

  “Gamina,” she said.

  “That’s right.” Boyce pulled a hypo from the medikit and turned to face her.

  And the past rose around him once more.

  Mobile 7. Argelius. Neema and Cadan stood in the doorway of the lab, watching him like hawks. Making sure—Neema in particular—that he explained not just the procedure but its potential side effects. He was doing his best.

  Jaya, among the three candidates they’d chosen, was doing her best, too.

  Even back then, she was a bit of a scientist.

  “Repair the genome?” she asked. “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “Think of it this way,” Boyce said. “We all—all of us—every living thing in the universe—come with a set of instructions. Things that tell our bodies how to grow and when to stop growing. And that’s—”

  “The genome,” Jaya finished.

  “Yes. That’s right, Jaya. That’s the genome.”

  “It’s a very complicated set of instructions, though.” Neema stepped forward. “I want you to be sure you understand that. It’s a very complicated set of instructions, and we’re not entirely sure that we’ve got all the pieces of it right yet. So—”

  “So why don’t we wait?” That was another of the children speaking, a boy named Connall, just about Jaya’s age. “Until you’re sure you have it right. One hundred percent right.”

  “You can do that if you want, Connall,” Neema said. “That’s a perfectly valid choice. You can all do that.”

  “Wait and see what happens,” Jaya said.

  “Yes,” Neema replied.

  “But I’m in the final phase, aren’t I, Dr. Boyce?” Jaya asked. “A few weeks, and the Dezzla’s will start, won’t it?”

  “A few weeks. A few months.” Boyce shook his head. “Hard to be certain of the exact time frame.”

  A shadow fell over him then. He knew without turning who it was. Neema. He knew what she wanted to say—rather, what she wanted him to say—as well.

  “What I should also tell you, all of you, we’re learning more about Dezzla’s every day. Odds are, we can help you survive it—what’s going to happen to you—without the treatment. Without repairing the genome.”

  “Survive,” Jaya said.

  “Yes.”

  “The way she did?” The girl gestured behind Boyce, toward Cadan.

  “I don’t know,” Boyce said. “There’s a lot that’s still a mystery to us.”

  Cadan cleared her throat. “What happened to me, it’s not so bad, children. And they have treatments now—more every day.”

  “I don’t want to wait,” Jaya said, standing. “I want you to fix me. Now.”

  Boyce nodded. That was what he wanted, too.

  “Wait, human.” Gurgis stepped between Boyce and Deleen. He gestured to the hypo. “What is that?”

  “The cure.”

  “Cure?” The Orion frowned. “For what?”

  “This.” He reached down, took hold of Liyan’s arm, and pulled back the sleeve of the gown the tallith had been wearing, exposing both pale green flesh and black, rope-like veins.

  “Fascinating,” Spock said. “Some sort of circulatory condition.”

  “It affected her neuro-muscular system as well,” Boyce said. “Her behavior. Especially the last few months. You must have noticed.”

  He was speaking to Gurgis, who frowned now. Boyce doubted the man had noticed anything in Liyan’s thrall, as it were.

  “Without it, the same thing will happen to her,” the doctor said, gesturing to Deleen.

  “Inject her,” Gurgis snapped. “Immediately. Then you, Videl, will take the humans to the courier Hostil . And from there to the edge of the Borderland.”

  “Escort duty.” Videl snorted. “I will give the task to one of the other commanders.”

  “I want you to do it yourself,” Gurgis snapped.

  The two began arguing.

  Boyce turned to Deleen. If he had seen any hesitation in her eyes, he would have found an excuse, somehow, to avoid the injection. All he saw, though, was certainty.

  “I’m ready,” she said.

  “Hang on.” Captain Pike stepped forward. “You sure about this, doctor?”

  Boyce looked at him and realized that somehow, Pike had figured out there was something going on here. More than met the eye. The captain knew him better than he’d thought, Boyce supposed.

  Three months of working together would do that.

  “I’m sure,” he said, and Pike stepped back.

  Boyce stepped up next to the girl. If he was right, the gamina would change her. Do to Deleen what it had done to her mother. For a while, at least. It was only one dose. Hopefully, it would be enough for her to save herself, at least, from Gurgis. Possibly it would last long enough to prevent the Trade Confederacy from falling apart completely. Maybe Deleen would be able to preserve a portion of her mother’s legacy. Maybe.

  Boyce stepped up next to her, and put the hypo to her arm.

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he whispered.

  “That’s all right.” She nodded. “No one ever does.”

  EPILOGUE

  The fleets, Klingon and Federation, were in the process of disbanding. Returning home, back to patrol, back to normalcy. Standing down from battle stations, from the brink of war. Supposedly. Pike wasn’t so sure. He wasn’t so sure about anything having to do with the Klingons anymore. Kritos he could trust. This K’Zon, from what he’d seen, what he’d heard …

  Things were going to be different out here now. And not necessarily for the better.

  The comm sounded.

  “Pike here.”

  Garrison’s face appeared on the little viewscreen. “I have Excalibur for you, sir. Captain Vlasidovich.”

  “Patch him through.”

  Dmitri’s face appeared. He looked over Pike’s shoulder and frowned.

  “You have rearranged furniture.”

  “I rearranged?” Pike smiled. “You’re the one who moved things around.”

  “New arrangement was more efficient use of space. Do you not value efficiency?”

  “Did Nolan move your things around?”

  “He knew better.” Dmitri smiled. “You have good crew. Pitcairn, especially. Tell him to request transfer to my ship.”

  “Hah. You’ll have to send me two engineers to replace him.”

  Dmitri nodded. “I suppose. Which two?”

  “Give me a few years. I’ll let you know.”

  “Hah yourself. Good-bye, Christopher.”

  “Good-bye, Dmitri.”

  Pike reached for the keypad to end the transmission.

  “Wait. I have almost forgotten. I have message from Michaela for you.”

  “Michaela.” She—and Hood —had warped out of orbit earlier that morning, while he was sleeping. Without even saying good-bye. When he woke up, Pike had been, frankly, miffed. “Go ahead.”

  “Softie.”

  “That’s the message?”

  “That is message.”

  Pike smiled again. “You see her before I do, you tell her to say that to my face.”

  “I am recalling she did already. In your cabin.”

  Pike reached for the keypad again. “Good-bye, Dmitri.”

  “Good-bye, Christopher.”

  The screen went dark. He stared at it a moment.

  Softie. Huh.

&
nbsp; He punched up Hood ’s patrol schedule.

  Two months from now, she was scheduled for R&R at Ceros 4. Enterprise was going to be in the neighborhood—relatively speaking. It would be a little ahead of schedule, but Dmitri was right. He had a good crew. They deserved a little R&R too.

  The door comm sounded.

  “Come.”

  Boyce entered the room. “You wanted to see me?”

  “I did. Have a seat, please. Want a drink?”

  “No.”

  Pike shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  He reached into the cabinet beneath the table, pulled out the bottle Dmitri had left him, and poured himself a glass.

  Boyce looked at the label and whistled.

  “Double V. This stuff’s hard to get.”

  “Not necessarily. Depends on whom you know.” Dmitri, for example, knew the distillery’s owners. Back at the Academy, Dmitri used to get a case to give to the staff at winter break.

  The captain took a sip—too big a sip, he realized instantly; he was not a drinker—and promptly was seized by a coughing fit.

  Boyce, watching with amusement, waited till he was finished coughing to speak. “Smooth, eh?”

  “You bet. You sure you don’t want some?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Okay.” Pike took another—much smaller—sip. “Let’s talk about it, Phil.”

  “Talk about what?”

  “Whatever. Argelius. Ben Tuval. The Orions.” He shrugged. “Jaya, even. You never talk about her. Or Argelius, for that matter.”

  The doctor was quiet for a second. “There’s a reason for that,” he said. “I messed up. Everyone thinks I’m such a hero for what happened there, but the truth is …” He sighed and shook his head.

  “The truth is what?” Pike pressed.

  “It’s a long story,” Boyce said.

  The captain waited for the doctor to continue. He waited five seconds and then ten. Boyce shifted position in his chair and opened his mouth. And shook his head.

  Pike took another glass out of the cabinet and set it down on the table.

  Boyce looked up at him and smiled wryly. “You think that’s going to help?”

  “Maybe. There are some things a man will tell his bartender that he won’t tell his commanding officer.”

  Boyce looked at him a moment, then nodded. “I guess that’s true.”

  “Of course it is.”

  Pike poured him a fingerful, then settled back in his chair.

  The doctor took a sip and began, at last, to talk.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Gene and Majel Roddenberry are space dust; DeForest Kelley and James Doohan are gone as well. Harve Bennett has left the stage; Chris Pine is James T. Kirk.

  In other words, change is afoot in the Star Trek universe, and considering that Gene Roddenberry’s original series bible dates back to the early sixties, I think it perhaps high time, and J. J. Abrams’s 2009 reimagining of Trek not only recharged my twenty-third-century batteries, but freed me of the need to write specifically to one vision of humanity’s future.

  The Children of Kings is a prequel to that 2009 film; the Enterprise as it might have been under Captain Christopher Pike (though I have to admit when I was writing Pike’s scenes, I still pictured Jeffrey Hunter, rather than Bruce Greenwood. Old habits, dying hard, I suppose). I’ve drawn from the original Trek pilot, The Cage, of course, for some of the characters/characterizations, as well as D. C. Fontana’s novel Vulcan’s Glory, and Margaret Wander Bonanno’s Burning Dreams . For the science behind gamina and the bronchial shunt (among other things), I am grateful to Mike Stamm and Ann Carlson. I am grateful to my family, as well, for their six-eyed support while I wrote this book.

  And finally, I must thank Margaret Clark, not only for suggesting I combine Captain Pike, the Orions, and Dr. Boyce into a novel, but for her support over the years. It has meant a lot. It still does.

  Dave Stern

  December 1, 2009