by Diane Carey
T’Cael gazed at the Nestling. As he spoke, the intimidation he had used on the bridge fell away and honesty colored his voice.
“I must prove to the Council that the Federation has no intention to conquer us. The Praetor has used those rumors to lever himself into power over the Tricameron. If I can prove the Federation doesn’t want war, perhaps even convince them to leave a representative behind to address the Senate, I can steer the council back into control and embarrass the Praetor into backing off. The next few hours will tell whether the Empire will slip backward into dictatorship again or move away from it.” He placed his hand on the frame of the bay entranceway. “I must make the humans trust me.”
Idrys stared at him, realizing he had no intention of taking that Federation ship, that his plans went far beyond simply maintaining the security of the Empire.
He meant to bring down the Praetorate.
A thin film of sweat laced her back beneath her uniform. By not asking her whether she would help him or choose a safer course, he was displaying a confidence in her as deep as his own convictions. Swallowed by the compliment, Idrys hated herself for the fear that rose in her. Still, given the choice between t’Cael and the Supreme Praetor, she would take t’Cael. The humans would trust him; she already did.
He startled her when he broke from his trance and faced her. “It will be up to you to be sure we’re worthy of their trust. You must keep firm control of Raze and of the Swarm. There will be nothing easy about it.”
“I know,” she assured him. “By invoking the Pandect, you’ve given me a weapon. I promise you I’ll use it at the slightest provocation.”
A mirthless grin turned his mouth upward, for he knew too well the maze he was sending her into. He touched a plait of her hair that hung [171] down over one shoulder and twisted it between his fingers. “Be sure that weapon doesn’t have Ry’iak’s ammunition inside. There’s still the charge of family conspiracy hanging over you. He’ll use it if he has the opportunity.”
She sighed. “We should have had him confined when we had the chance. I’ll have him found and boxed up. Better he not be running free during Imperial alert.”
“Wise,” t’Cael said. “I wish you power.”
With a courteous bow of her head, Idrys responded, “I wish you your goal.”
He returned the bow and turned away.
She watched as he strode to the Nestling, which was already humming as its engine warmed up. He climbed inside behind the two subcenturia with a grace born of his years as a warrior.
Before her, a clear panel slid shut between the vestibule and the bay, closing her off from the depressurizing area, and soon the wide door to space opened before the Nestling. She watched, as the narrow craft lifted from the bay deck, drifted through the opening, and turned on a wing toward open space.
The bay door automatically closed.
She was glad for t’Cael sake that he was off the ship. Now they could begin their work from two fronts, and close in.
She touched the nearest intercom. “Enforcement, this is the Commander.”
“Enforcement Squad. Yes, Commander?”
“Locate and restrain Antecenturion Ry’iak and have him brought to the bridge. I’ll meet you there.”
“Immediately, Commander.”
Well, that felt better. She knew her crew, and they were generally loyal to her. She would be able to keep them loyal if she could prevent Ry’iak from picking at their doubts.
With a steadying sigh, she left the hangar bay and turned toward the bridge lift.
A force struck her and rammed the breath from her body. She bent forward and clutched at the sudden tightness, only to find her hands around another hand.
Before her, much too close, was Ry’iak’s emotionless face.
He gripped her shoulder and used the leverage to drive the hazdja deep into her abdomen, pressing it downward at an angle, as experience had taught him was the best way. With the second thrust, another [172] gush of air rasped out of her. Ry’iak pulled his hand away and moved back from the dance of murder, leaving the weapon’s shaft for his victim to caress. As he stepped away, he remembered to steal the commander’s own weapon from her thigh strap and tuck it neatly into his robe.
Idry’s eyes locked on him, her mouth open on a windless gasp. She dropped back and twisted against the corridor wall, clutching the weapon that protruded from her stomach. Convulsing against it, she tried to yank it from her body, but succeeded only in mutilating her bowels with its spiderbarbed point. Once inside her, the mechanism had opened itself. No matter how she tried to wring it out, it churned in tighter. Such was the nature of the hazdja hand lance—a weapon of traditional elegance and no mercy.
Ry’iak watched, keeping just out of her reach, but close enough to enjoy himself. As she writhed, he had to step out of the way twice. His face was stern and blank, for he perceived this as his duty. Gloating would come later, and he would enjoy that too.
Hating him with her eyes, Idrys grasped the hazdja with one hand and reached along the wall with the other, clawing at the intercom panel and a button that would bring her personal guard to this corridor in seconds.
Ry’iak thought about stopping her, but his victory would be grander if she herself simply failed.
His reward came when Idrys slid down across the wall and struck the deck. Her failure was plain. She gritted her teeth, held her body together by force of will, and tried to get back to her feet. She wouldn’t let him win with only one blow.
Ry’iak was more like a macabre voyeur than an assassin as he sidestepped her movements. He wouldn’t touch her again if he could help it, but her determination to stand up dismayed him. She was actually managing to struggle up against the wall, fighting the grip of the hazdja.
Pursing his lips in dissatisfaction, Ry’iak grimaced under the pure hatred in his victim’s eyes. He wished he could watch her without her seeing him.
As Idrys’ knuckle clacked against the rim of the com panel, Ry’iak moved in. He grasped the hazdja and twisted it hard.
A convulsion was his reward. Idrys’ hands rushed back to the pain. She bent double, crumpled into him with a terrible pant, and couldn’t pull another breath from her destiny.
[173] Ry’iak stepped back quickly.
Idrys dropped to her knees, hovered there, then struck the floor and was taken by excruciation. Her eyes glazed over.
Ry’iak waited until her convulsions stopped, and Idrys no longer moved. He paused for another moment, wondering if it was worth it to try to get his expansion lance back, then decided to leave it where it had done him the most good. As he stepped over her, his robe slid across her face, dragging one of her braids. He knew exactly what he would say when he got to the bridge.
Subcommander Kai, he would say, Commander Idrys is dead. Shall we talk?
PART III
Strange New Worlds
Chapter Fourteen
SORROW MARRED THE sympathy on McCoy’s face, tainted even further by guilt. Did he have any right to talk the captain into changing his mind? Did anyone have the right to demand, or even request, the sacrifice of another person’s lifetime? Part of Jim Kirk would always be the captain of the starship. Part of him would remain trapped back in time, where the anguish lived. Other parts of him lived in other places, places and people he had touched over his years of command, people whose lives he had changed by making decisions, by taking his responsibility seriously and doing more than just steering the starship through her missions.
McCoy closed his mouth, having said nothing. In any other condition he could have mocked the self-pity he saw in the captain’s eyes, would have scolded him for getting things out of proportion, would have brought him a drink and insisted he count to twenty before thinking such a thing again.
But he said nothing. His usual cynicism was crushed back. Because he had been the cause of all this.
From the edge of the loft opening, Jim Kirk anticipated McCoy’s objections.
“It isn’t this incident alone,” he said. “But it’s made me aware that I’ve been hiding from myself. I’ve been faking my way through incident after incident since I took command. How long before the odds [178] catch up with me and history is ruined or a civilization is crushed? How long before I make a mistake too big to correct?” He shook his head and squinted into the sunlight. “No more.”
McCoy huffed out his frustration and jabbed a finger at the papers Kirk was holding. “What’s in those damned letters, Jim? Why are they making you talk like this?”
Kirk looked down at the letter he’d been reading when McCoy intruded on the sanctity of the loft. He found the spot where he’d stopped reading, and tried to imagine his father’s voice speaking the words ...
[179] An odd letter. So many things packed into it. As though his father had been trying to stuff all his feelings for the future into one envelope. And what was that last statement supposed to mean?
Looking at the words with adult eyes, Jim Kirk noticed a difference in the handwriting. A sloppier effort. Or a more reckless one? Or maybe the words had come too fast for neatness. Or they’d been more important than the neatness. And his father had been a military man; he liked things neat. He liked them simple.
Nothing simple here. In fact, this letter had turned disjointed, had lost its direction and its purpose of just keeping contact with two kids back on Earth. Kirk detected an urgency as he read the letter now. He saw that it wasn’t very articulate, not the kind of words a ten-year-old and a fourteen-year-old would really understand. He tried to remember if he and his brother had felt any difference in the letters twenty-five years ago, and drew a blank. The elation of getting letters at all had been enough for the two boys who adored a man they hardly saw.
But this letter ...
This letter is different. Were you in trouble? Danger?
“Was your father on a mission, Jim?” McCoy wondered.
Kirk blinked into the sun and realized it had moved and was now warming his legs as they hung over the loft’s edge. He didn’t answer. [180] He grew pensive, as though rethinking a thought he’d had before. He’d given himself excuses for the mystery, but only fabricated ones.
“We don’t know,” he admitted.
McCoy’s voice, a few feet away, rose slightly. “Not even your mother?”
Kirk moved his head a fraction to either side. “This batch of letters arrived almost all at once. Then, nothing. All we knew was that he left Starbase Two suddenly. Under mysterious circumstances. I’ve never been able to squeeze the details out of Starfleet Command, no matter how I use my influence.” He said it slowly, testing it as it came out, because such an admission from a member of Starfleet’s decorated elite didn’t sound too good.
McCoy, for at least the fifth time today, said exactly what popped into his mind.
“Maybe they don’t know.”
Kirk looked over. “What?”
McCoy paused, brows bunched. Had he said that? He leaned forward. “Could that be? Could they not know?” Shifting his position, he wagged his finger at the cornfield and wondered aloud. “Starfleet personnel don’t just vanish from their assigned posts, at least not without investigation.”
“There was no investigation.”
“Just my point. Somebody knew what was going on. No records?”
“None.”
“Maybe that’s it then, Jim. Maybe the information went away with changes of staff at command.”
“It wasn’t that long ago, Bones.”
“Long enough for prearranged memory failure,” McCoy insisted with a wry twist to his tone. “Long enough to let an incident slip away. Damn Fleet frame of mind anyway. How tip-top-secret could it have been for nobody at all to know what went on?”
Kirk stared over the waving cornfield again, caught up by an old yearning to know what happened to his father.
And the old yearning piled itself on top of the new ache, the new pain. The price of heroism was too dear. “Why should any one man pay so much?” he murmured to the blue Iowa sky.
McCoy watched, silenced by the question. Was the one man Kirk, or his father? But he knew; he really did know what the question meant. And he hated knowing.
[181] Weakly, and trying to sound wise, he muttered, “The price of prestige, Jim.”
Kirk’s hand tightened on the letter, though imperceptibly. Price. Always a price for everything. Nothing could be simply had and kept and cherished. The price of high science had dug deeply into his heart this time, perhaps too deeply to repair. He was paying the price of being able to travel time. Most intelligent people would view that as a supreme privilege. So why did he feel so deeply cheated?
“I’ll never forget Spock’s face when he explained it to me,” he murmured, squinting over the flat landscape. “Even he could feel the loss.”
McCoy shifted, suddenly uncomfortable, fearing the subject was about to come up.
“Spock said she was right, but at the wrong time,” Kirk went on, suddenly picturing his first officer, a memory of true reluctance and true sympathy on a Vulcan face that should’ve shown nothing.
“Time ...” As he whispered the word, he saw the woman again. Dull violet lace of a past fashion covered narrow shoulders and breasts he never even considered touching. He never had time to consider it. His heart had stopped at the moment he and Spock discovered that Edith Keeler had to die in order to set time right, and it hadn’t started beating again yet.
He leaned his shoulder against the loft frame and looked down. When he and Sam were boys, it used to make him dizzy to look down from here. Now it made him dizzy to contemplate the quirks of fate—that the life, or death, of one person could dictate vast turns in history.
It seemed silly, like a pebble turning the course of a whole river. What if Alexander the Great had lived one more year instead of dying at the age of thirty-three? What if somebody had tripped John Wilkes Booth and made him drop the pistol? What if Anwar Sadat had ducked down instead of facing assassination with a courage so casual? What if Yoradyl Young had died two days before her speech to the Vulcan Council instead of two days after?
No one knew better than a starship captain how many individuals existed out there. While the deaths of thousands sometimes seemed inconsequential, the death of one could become a fulcrum of history. How tragic, people would say when contemplating the deaths of Alexander, Lincoln, Sadat, Young, Geltredi ... but no one would say that of Edith Keeler. Though she spoke of peace and would have kept the United States from its destiny in World War II, no one with any [182] sense could possibly wish that she had lived past that day. She understood so much, yet she didn’t understand that peace isn’t always attained by example alone.
A woman of peace, but at the wrong time.
Kirk gathered his legs closer to his body, a motion of unaware need. “Spock and I were mistaken,” he said. “Peace wasn’t the way. Pacifism isn’t always the moral course. The moral course then was to resist the aggression. Stalin went on to murder millions of people, and got away with it because the world was tired and battle-weary. He made Hitler look like a second-story man. But because the world was tired of fighting for what was morally right, millions upon millions more had to die. Edith would have hated seeing that,” he added, seeing the face of Edith Keeler as she spoke her words of hope. “And if I’d been a wiser man, I could have found an alternative to letting her die. There must have been some other thing to do, Bones ... some ... alternative ...”
“You’re flogging yourself, Jim,” McCoy said, struggling to keep his tone flat. “It won’t bring her back. And it won’t give her the glory she would’ve had if she’d lived.”
Kirk’s eyes grew unfocused. “She ... did live, didn’t she? Or did we imagine her?”
McCoy pressed his lips together and admitted to himself that he’d had those thoughts too, though more fleetingly than the captain. Unlike events in a real past, they had nothing from 1930 to prove they’d ever been there. Nothing came back through t
he portal that hadn’t gone through in the first place. Not a strand of her silly flapper haircut that might have clung to the captain’s collar, or the smudge of pale lipstick on his cheek.
Nothing came through but the pain. And here they were, clinging to the pain because it was all they had to prove that Edith Keeler had ever existed at all. It wasn’t right that a woman of such optimism and farsightedness should leave a legacy consisting only of pain.
“What do you want, Jim? Answers?” he murmured, helpless. “You know she couldn’t have come back with us. The time-travel process wouldn’t have allowed her to come through. She belonged in another time. She lived then ... she had to die then.”
But Jim Kirk was lost again in that other era, and he didn’t feel obligated to come back. Who could say what it was about a plain face and a dynamic spirit that made her still be alive for him? Once again he relived that nightmarish moment when he stopped McCoy from [183] pushing the woman out of the truck’s path while the truck ran her down and preserved history. She had turned in time to see the truck that killed her; she’d had time to scream before the impact crushed away the echo—
Did she see me stop him? Was there time for her to wonder why I would do such a thing to her?
“The cost of heroism is too high. Haven’t I paid my dues, Bones?” he asked aloud. “Mine and other people’s too?”
From the side of the loft opening, there was a crushing pause, so long and so heavy that even Kirk felt the flow of guilt.
Finally, McCoy spoke. “Certainly, you paid mine.”
The words were cast in contrition, something McCoy wasn’t particularly good at showing.
Kirk looked over now. “It wasn’t your fault, Bones.”
“No,” McCoy acknowledged, “but it was because of me.”
“She would’ve died anyway.”