Duty, Honor, Redemption

by Novelization by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “Analysis.” Kirk’s voice rose and faded in the static and the resonance. A strange cry whistled and moaned in the background. “Probe call…Captain Spock’s opinion…extinct species…humpback whale…proper response…”

  Kirk’s voice and image both failed, but Sarek had already gleaned Spock’s explanation of the probe’s intent and desire. A bright stroke of pride touched the elder Vulcan’s equanimity.

  “Stabilize!” Cartwright exclaimed. “Emergency reserve!”

  “Do you read me?” Kirk said clearly. His image snapped into focus, then deteriorated. “Starfleet, if you read, we are going to attempt time travel. We are computing our trajectory…”

  “What in heaven’s name?” the fleet commander said.

  The power failed utterly.

  “Emergency reserve!” Cartwright said again, his voice hoarse.

  “There is no emergency reserve,” the comm officer said.

  The groan of tortured glass and metal cut through the scream of the wind and the pounding of rain and waves. Sarek understood what Kirk proposed to do. Somehow, in the madness of its desperation, the plan possessed an element of rationality.

  “Good luck, Kirk,” Sarek said. “To you, and to all who go with you.”

  The shoring struts on the window failed. The glass imploded. Sarek heard cries of pain and fear. Cold, sharp shards of glass spattered around him, and freezing needles of sleet and wind impaled him.

  Sarek dragged himself up, trying to protect his face from wind and debris. Fleet Commander Cartwright held himself steady against the railing of the observation deck. Sarek detected a strange motion beyond the blasted window and the howling wind. Shielding his eyes as best he could, he peered out.

  “Look!” he said.

  Cartwright exclaimed in horror.

  Sarek and Cartwright watched in disbelief as the Klingon fighter ship streaked across the sky. It plunged downward in an unpowered glide, its engines dead, held aloft only by the structure of its wings.

  Kirk’s plan failed, Sarek thought.

  The Golden Gate Bridge lay directly in the ship’s path. Sarek thought, Better to die quickly than to perish in endless cold. But another thought kept coming to his mind, with bitterness: Kirk, after all your successes, this time you have failed.

  Sarek steeled himself for the explosion and the flames. The Klingon starship reached the bridge—and skimmed beneath it and safely out the other side. Sarek remembered something Amanda once had said. Something about blind luck.

  Sulu gritted his teeth and clenched his hands on the Bounty’s controls. Suddenly he felt a response. Though he did not know where they were or what lay ahead, atmospheric turbulence buffeted the ship. It was plunging toward a planetary surface at terminal velocity.

  “Sir—I’ve got some back pressure on manual!” Sulu wrestled Bounty’s nose up.

  “Ground cushion! Keep the nose up if you can!”

  The flight characteristics deteriorated as the ship disintegrated beneath the force of friction, vibration, and wind shear. He knew he had lost the ship already. After this voyage, it would never fly. The only question to be answered was whether he could keep the passengers—human, Vulcan, and cetacean—alive when it crashed. The Bounty struggled to respond to his commands. When the bow crept up, the aerodynamics changed. Destructive forces increased. The airspeed decreased, but stressed metal shrieked and groaned. Sulu eased some power into the retro-thrusters, but did not dare take too much from the ground cushion. The probe wailed.

  The Bounty hit with a tremendous, wrenching crash. The impact flung Sulu from the console. He staggered up, aware of his ship dying around him and his shipmates in distress.

  Then, to his astonishment, all the sounds of destruction ceased. A few interminable seconds passed as he and the others struggled back into position and clung there.

  A second blow struck. The ship screamed in agony. Again, the battering stopped. For another long moment Sulu could not understand how they still survived.

  We came in almost flat! he thought. We came in horizontal, and we came in over the sea! Now we’re skipping across the water like a stone—

  He grabbed for the controls, fighting to raise the bow so the ship would skim instead of bounce. The Bounty crashed again. The third time, it did not regain the air. It plunged forward and down, pitching Sulu over the control console. He struck the bulkhead and fell back, stunned.

  Jim Kirk flinched at the horrible high-frequency squeal of rending metal. He struggled to his feet. A wave of frigid sea water crashed through the broken bulkheads, washed past Jim, and slapped Sulu down. Gasping and coughing, Sulu tried to rise.

  Jim grabbed his arm and helped him up. The deck tilted beneath them as the tail section of the Bounty began to sink.

  “Blow the hatch!” Jim shouted.

  Against the sound of the wind and the sea and the dying ship, against the omnipresent crying of the probe, the explosive bolts made a restrained thudding noise. The force flung the hatch open. Rain pounded through it. Waves beat against the Bounty. Torrents rushed through its stove-in sides. The water shorted systems, adding a pall of ozone-tinged smoke to the crashing rain and sea.

  Jim glanced at Sulu.

  “I’m all right now, sir,” Sulu said. “Thanks.” He looked dazed but coherent.

  Jim flung his dripping hair back off his forehead. He and Sulu struggled toward the hatch against the steepening grade of the deck. Uhura and Chekov and McCoy clung to a console near Spock. Somehow, everyone on the bridge had survived. “Get topside!” Jim shouted at Sulu. “Help the others out!” High above, clouds roiled and vibrated with the calling of the probe. Jim boosted Sulu through the hatch and turned to Spock. “Spock, you got us to the right place!” His voice nearly disappeared in the violence of the storm. “Mister Spock, see to the safety of all hands.”

  “I will, Admiral.”

  While Spock helped the others out of the dying starship, Jim struggled back to the comm. “Mister Scott, come in. Gillian? Scotty?” He waited, but received no reply. “Damn!”

  Jim waded through knee-deep water to the exit. He had to force the doors apart. They crashed open and he ran into the neck of the Bounty. The water deepened, slowing his headlong plunge. By the time he reached the cargo bay the water rose to his waist. Leaks sprang through the seals of the cargo bay doors. On the other side, someone fought desperately to get the doors open.

  Jim grabbed the emergency release and pulled it. Nothing happened. He pulled again. For an awful moment he thought he would not budge it. If he failed, Gillian and Scotty and the whales would drown without his ever reaching them. Odd to think that two marine creatures could drown, but without air Gracie and George would perish along with the human people, only a little more slowly.

  With the whole force of his body, he wrenched the release. The jolt blew it open. The doors parted as smoothly as if the ship were cruising the gentlest region of space. Water gushed through, carrying Gillian and Scotty into the corridor and sweeping Jim off his feet. He splashed up, coughing, and dragged Scott out of the current. Gillian waded against the rush of water, trying to return to the cargo bay. The doors opened to their limits, more than far enough for a person to pass. A human person. Not a whale.

  “The whales?” Jim shouted.

  The juncture between the Bounty’s neck and body ripped apart. Water sprayed in all around. Wind whistled, blowing sea foam through the openings.

  “They’re alive!” Gillian cried. “But they’re trapped!”

  “No power to the bay doors,” Scott said.

  “What about the explosive override?”

  “ ’Tis underwater! There isna any way to reach it!”

  “Go on ahead!” Jim shouted.

  “Admiral, you’ll be trapped!”

  “Kirk, I won’t—!”

  Jim plunged between the doors and closed and secured them so Gillian could not follow. The doors muffled the sound of wind and rain, giving an eerie illusion of peace. Gillian shou
ted for him to open the door and Scott pounded on the metal. He ignored their pleas. Though he could hear them, though he was perfectly aware of them, they were a step removed from the reality of what he had to do.

  Breathing deeply to build up his reserves of oxygen, Jim waded deeper. Water crept to his thighs, to his waist. The pressure of the sea forced spray through sprung seals above him. Luminous wall panels glowed with the eerie blue of emergency light. In the far end of the cargo bay, the water nearly reached the top of the acrylic tank. Gracie raised her flukes and slapped them down into the tank, splashing water into the flooding compartment. Soon both whales would be able to swim out. But if Jim could not open the bay doors, they would be freed into a larger coffin. He kicked off his boots, took one last deep breath, and dove.

  The freezing water clamped around his chest like a jolt of electricity. He clenched his teeth to keep from gasping. He kicked himself forward, groping for the override. It ought to be—he wondered if he had lost his sense of direction in the dimness and the cold, with the screaming gibberish of the probe whipping through him. His breath burned in his lungs.

  Outside the cargo bay, Gillian leaned her head against the locked doors and cried.

  “Kirk, let me in,” she whispered. The wind dragged her hair across her face.

  “Come along, lassie,” Mister Scott shouted above the pelting of the rain. “If anyone can get your beasties free, the admiral can. Ye canna help him now.” He took her arm and guided her around and led her up the steep slope toward the control room. The rain and her tears blinded her.

  Fighting the instinct to breathe, Jim kicked through the deep water. He broke the surface and flung up his arm to fend off the ceiling. The sprung seals had allowed most of the air to escape. Only a handsbreadth of airspace remained between the water and the top of the cargo bay. Gasping, treading water, he tilted his head back so his nose and mouth remained in the air. He took a long, deep breath, and dove again.

  The series of crashes had buckled panels and knocked the bay into wreckage. He swam through a drowned dark junkyard forest, searching through a directionless melange for a single panel. His heart pounded in counterpoint with the cruel music of the probe.

  He took the risk of a pause. He hung suspended in the water and reached with all his senses to get his bearings.

  Jim stroked around and swam directly to a tangle of wreckage. He pushed it aside. The panel lay beneath. He dragged it open with his fingernails and yanked the override.

  A pressure wave flung him against the bulkhead. The impact drove half the air from his lungs. His ears rang. Unconsciousness drew him. Another, deeper darkness opened beneath him as the cargo bay doors slowly parted.

  Every instinct pulled him upward into the airless trap of the water-filled cargo hold. Instead, he dove deeper. He passed from the protection of the Bounty into the open sea. Following the outer hull, he kicked and pulled himself along its curve. He broke the surface, gasping. A powerful wave smacked him in the face, blinding him, filling his nose and mouth. Water burned in his throat and his lungs. He coughed and choked and finally drew breath.

  Jim struggled to see over the waves and through the pounding sleet, willing the whales to fling themselves upward in a joyous leap of freedom, willing them to swim into the sea and sing their song. But he saw nothing, nothing but the ocean and the slowly sinking ship. Through the ringing in his ears he heard nothing but the storm, and the unremitting, piercing, a melodic probe.

  With an intake of breath like a sob, he dove again, following the curve of the Bounty’s side. He passed the open cargo bay doors and gazed up into the ship’s belly. He used some of his precious breath to power one inarticulate shout.

  Slowly, gracefully, with perfect ease and composure, the two humpback whales glided from the ship. Joy and wonder rushed through Jim’s spirit. He wished he could swim away with them to explore the mysteries that still remained in the sea.

  But suddenly a current slammed the crippled Bounty around, catching Jim and pushing him inexorably toward the angle between the cargo bay door and the hull. He swam hard, but could make no headway against the strength of the sea. His air was nearly exhausted. Cold and exertion had drained his strength.

  Gracie eased through the water, balancing on her pectoral fins like a massive bird. She slid beneath Jim on the powerful stroke of her tail. Her flukes brushed past him. In desperation he grabbed and held on. The whale drew him easily from the grasp of the current and pulled him free of the ship. She glided upward, then curved her body so she barely broke the rough interface between air and water. She gathered herself, arched her back, and lifted her flukes. The vertical flip pulled Jim to the surface. Gracie sounded and disappeared.

  “Kirk!”

  Jim turned. A wave slapped the back of his head, but raised him high enough to see the floating control sphere of the Bounty. All his shipmates clung to the smooth surface. Gillian reached toward him. He floundered through the chop to the pitching solidity of the sphere. Gillian and Spock helped him clamber up its side.

  Unabated, the probe continued its cry.

  Jim looked for the whales, but they had vanished.

  “Why don’t they answer?” he shouted. “Dammit, why don’t they sing?”

  Gillian touched her fingertips to his. He could not tell if rain or tears streaked her face, or if the tears were of joy or despair.

  Shivering violently, he pressed himself against the cold, slick metal. Sleet spat needles against his face and hands. The cargo bay had broken off and vanished, and soon, inevitably, the control sphere would sink. No one could be spared to come and rescue him and his shipmates; perhaps no one was left to do so. If he was to fail anyway, he wished the Bounty had perished in the fire of the sun. He preferred a quick and blazing failure to watching his friends die a slow death of cold and exposure.

  A whale song whispered to him. A second song answered. Both whales, male and female, began to sing.

  The sea transmitted it to the control sphere and the control sphere focused and amplified it. Jim pressed his ear, his hands, his whole body against the hull, taking the music into himself. It soared above the range of his hearing, then fell, groaning to a level that he could not hear, only feel. He looked up at Gillian. He wanted to laugh, to cry. She was doing both.

  The probe’s call paused. The humpbacks’ song expanded into the hesitation, rising above the crashing wind and water.

  Basking in the bright, unfiltered radiation of deep space, the traveler paused in the midst of turning the blue world white with snow and ice and sterility. Something was occurring that had never occurred before in the myriad of millennia of the traveler’s existence. From a silent planet, a song replied.

  The information spiraled inward. Even at the speed of light, seconds passed before the song reached the most central point of the traveler’s intelligence. Even in the superconductive state in which that intelligence operated, it required long moments to recover from the shock of a unique event.

  Tentatively, with some suspicion, it responded to the song of the beings on the world below.

  Why did you remain silent for so long?

  They tried to explain, but it reacted in surprise and disbelief.

  Where were you? it asked.

  We were not here, they replied, but now we have returned. We cannot explain, traveler, because we do not yet understand all that has happened to us.

  By “us,” the traveler understood them to mean themselves as individuals and all their kind for millions of years in the past. By their song it recognized them as youths.

  Who are you? it asked. Where are the others? Where are the elders?

  They are gone, the whales sang, with sadness. They have passed into the deep, they have vanished upon white shores. We alone survive.

  Your song is simple, the traveler said, chiding. It was not above petulance. Where are the tales you have invented in all this time, and where are the stories of your families?

  They are lost, replied the
whale song. All lost. We must begin again. We must evolve our civilization again. We have no other answer.

  The traveler hesitated. It wondered if perhaps it should sterilize the planet anyway despite the presence of the untaught singing youths. But if it began a new evolution here, the planet would be silent at least as long as it would take the traveler to circumscribe the galaxy. The traveler would have to endure the pain of the world’s silence. Organic evolution required so much time. However, the traveler possessed very little cruelty. It could consider destroying the young singers, but the conception caused great distress. It abandoned the idea.

  Very well, it said. I shall anticipate young stories. Fare thee well.

  The traveler fell silent. The whales bid it farewell.

  The traveler collected its energy. It ended its interference with the patterns of the blue-white planet. It ceased to power the violent storms ravaging the surface. It sought its usual course, oriented itself properly, and sailed on a tail of flame into the brilliant blackness of the galaxy.

  The whale song, attenuated by distance, faded below the limits of Jim’s hearing.

  Only wilderness existed in this kind of utter silence. Jim recalled such moments of quiet, when he stood on a hilltop and heard the sunlight fall upon the ground, heard its heat melting the pine pitch from the trees to fill the air with a heavy pungency.

  He looked up. The rain stopped. The sea calmed. The control chamber moved as gently as a soap bubble in still air. The clouds roiled, then broke, and a brilliant streak of blue cut through them. Sunlight poured onto the sea. Speechless, Jim clambered to the upper curve of the control sphere. He and his shipmates gazed at the world and at each other, in wonder.

  Sarek and Cartwright lost sight of the Klingon fighter when it crashed into the sea. Sarek feared that Spock must be dead, lost. That he did not outwardly show his grief helped in no way to attenuate it. Sleet battered him.

  Only when the probe’s cry hesitated did he feel, against his will and judgment, a blossom of hope.

  When the searing wail ended and did not return, when the sun broke through the clouds, he hurried to the edge of the shattered window and strained to see what lay on the surface of the sea.