Burning Dreams

by Margaret Wander Bonanno

  “Oh, is that how it works?” Chris knew half of Charlie’s reasons for not staying in Starfleet had had to do with his resistance to authority.

  “Well, don’t take my word for it,” Charlie demurred. “But they didn’t make you captain of the football team or student class president solely on the basis of your charm and good looks. You’re a leader, Chris. No avoiding it.”

  “Maybe.”

  “And—?”

  “And that’s what scares me. I guess I could handle running a department or something. Even leading a landing party under dangerous conditions is something I’d have to think hard about. But captaining a ship? A hundred or more people’s lives in my hands, out there in the middle of the unknown?” Chris frowned. “I don’t want that kind of responsibility.”

  Charlie let that statement hang in the air unaddressed for a long moment. Finally he said, “It’s not your fault she died, Chris.”

  Chris started as if he’d been slapped. “I know that! Where the hell did that come from?”

  “Do you?” Charlie asked, unperturbed. “Do you really know that? Or do you still have some little shred of doubt that’s holding you back?”

  “That’s got nothing to do with—”

  “—with why you push yourself to be the best at everything you do, then duck out of the awards ceremonies and skip the homecoming parade? With why you’ve got everything going for you, but you’d rather enlist in Starfleet as a grunt and work your way up the hard way or not at all than apply for the Academy, knowing you’d get in in a heartbeat? Yeah, I think it has everything to do with it.”

  A dozen angry retorts roiled through Chris’s mind, but he left them there. “It’s like you say, I do what I have to do to be able to sleep at night,” he said finally.

  “Will you be able to sleep at night if you don’t fill out that application you’ve had up on your computer screen for a month or more?” Charlie asked quietly.

  Chris’s cheeks flushed. “I’m just not sure I’ve got the right stuff.”

  “Only one way to find out,” Charlie suggested.

  “I guess so,” Chris acknowledged. “One thing, though…I don’t want you pulling any strings for me. Putting in a good word with Admiral Straczeskie or anything. You do know he’s an admiral now?”

  “Seems to me I heard that,” Charlie acknowledged.

  “Promise me you won’t say anything to him about me?”

  “It’s not as if a rear admiral is going to be influenced by anything a transporter chief has to say…”

  “…unless of course that transporter chief took a laser blast for him.”

  Charlie sighed. “Okay, if that’s what you want. I promise I won’t say another word.”

  It took Chris a moment to register what he’d just said.

  “You didn’t—!” Chris started to sputter. “Damn it, Charlie…”

  “If you apply, if you pass all the testing, Admiral Straczeskie will be the one to conduct your admission interview, that’s all. The rest is up to you.”

  “As if he’d turn me down once I got that far!” Chris snorted.

  Charlie rounded on him, a little annoyed. “He’d be out of his mind to turn you down, Christopher. If it’s what you want, you have every right to strive for it. And you’ll make it. I know you will, even without my help.” Charlie turned on his heel and headed back toward the house, his shadow long in the setting sun. “Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m finished talking about this.”

  Christopher Pike applied for Starfleet Academy and, not surprisingly, aced most of the entrance exams. He went on to excel in all his classes. Math, sciences, languages, leadership, and first-contact skills came naturally to him, and the endurance tests and survival skills were a breeze for someone with his stamina and experience.

  He did have one flaw, and that was an almost obsessive need to be perfect. He brooded over mistakes, went back and retested himself until he got as close to the highest score as possible. While it looked good on his academic record, it also made him his own worst enemy, and more than one of his examiners hesitated. Still, they gave him the benefit of the doubt, and ultimately he would graduate at the top of his class. More than one of his instructors remarked that if Earth could produce the ideal young Starfleet officer, Christopher Pike would be that officer.

  10

  2320: En Route to Talos IV

  A Vulcan lute has many voices. All are beautiful, but some are more plaintive than others. Spock stilled the strings with one long hand and rested the neck of the instrument against his shoulder. His mood was contemplative.

  The journey is simpler this time, he thought as he set the lute aside and scanned the vicinity yet again, listening for comm chatter at the full range of the shuttle’s receivers and hearing only static, running scanners to satisfy himself that no vessel was in pursuit, and that there was nothing up ahead he need concern himself about, yet. But simplicity is no guarantee of outcome.

  The first such journey had been predicated on a lie. The Talosians had duped him into believing he was receiving a personal comm message from Fleet Captain Pike requesting that Enterprise divert to Starbase 11. Only after Kirk had complied with this ostensible request and changed course did the Magistrate communicate to Spock precisely what hir people were doing and why; by then he was caught up in their agenda and, truly, as he told Pike, “had no choice.”

  He had wondered ever since if the humans involved truly understood the implications of the Talosians’ ability to contact a single individual by power of mind from across parsecs of space, and manipulate him to their will.

  “What about Vina?” Number One asked once Pike appeared on the transporter platform. “Isn’t she coming with us?”

  “No,” Pike answered, “and I agreed with her reasons.”

  With that the landing party had returned to the bridge, Pike gave the order to leave orbit, and they were finally able to set course for the Vega colony. It was not until they were there and Pike was downplanet overseeing the care of the sick and wounded that Number One assembled everyone else in the landing party to give a report, from their own perspective, on what they had witnessed on Talos.

  Spock corroborated what everyone else had seen—the barren landscape, the deceptively frail aliens with their incredible power of mind, the illusions they had created—but when he began to talk about that power and those illusions, Number One had cut him off abruptly.

  “Yes, yes, that’s all very well, Mr. Spock, but we’re concerned with measurable effects here, not soft science. If telepathy can even be considered a science.”

  Young and still outspoken, Spock had been perturbed at her dismissing telepathy as “soft science,” and attempted to say so.

  “On the contrary, Number One, I don’t think you realize the very real, quantifiable effect an encounter with a telepathic species of the Talosians’ superiority can have.”

  “I said that’s enough, Mr. Spock!” she’d snapped, and it didn’t need telepathy for him to read in her face and voice a message which said, loud and clear, Don’t talk about this now, because the captain for one is still in a precarious state of mind, and Yeoman Colt’s not the most stable personality at the best of times. If either of them starts to think too deeply about this, we’re all in trouble. Stow it for now, possibly forever, or as your superior officer I guarantee I will make your life exceedingly difficult!

  Impervious to the threat, Spock did finally see the reasoning behind it, and while he might disagree with Number One’s not entirely objective response, he had been constrained to silence.

  He’d wondered ever since if he was the only one at that briefing to consider the fact that once a Talosian mind entered a human’s, it could do so again with that particular human at any time, and that, by implication, the Talosians could follow the course of “their” humans’ lives from any distance, across any number of years or even decades, for as long as that human or, as he had realized on Starbase 11, Vulcan might live.

&nb
sp; It was how they had known about Pike’s accident aboard the cadet ship. It was how they had known to use Spock to bring Pike back to Talos. And it was how they had found Spock, and summoned him, once again, more than half a century later.

  The escape from Starbase 11 had been a logistical nightmare, however well planned: smuggling Pike out of the medical suite and onto Enterprise, altering standing orders, commandeering the ship and locking her on course, evading pursuit—by Captain Kirk and, Spock believed until midway into his court-martial, Commodore Mendez in the shuttle—and, for all he knew, by every other ship in the ’fleet, all on the supposition that he would eventually either be caught, extradited and condemned to death, or exiled forever with Pike on Talos. The odds against his success, even with the complicity of the Talosians, had been less than optimal.

  And yet, he had succeeded.

  When the trial was over, with Kirk’s permission, he had beamed down to Talos IV with Pike, expecting perhaps a flutter of the eyelids from the wounded man, a single flash of light that signified “Yes…thank you…good-bye.”

  But the Magistrate met them at the beam-down point, and Spock had felt compelled to ask a question.

  “Captain Pike,” he had begun. “I must return to the Enterprise. Are you certain you wish to remain here?”

  The Magistrate had, as Spock had come to expect, worn that small, enigmatic smile, having read Spock’s thought before he voiced it. Was there a hint of genuine humor in hir eyes as s/he “listened” to Pike’s voice in hir mind?

  “He says to tell you, ‘You’re asking me this now, after you’ve risked your life to get me here? Not very logical, Mr. Spock.’”

  The Magistrate, Spock realized, could very well be misleading him. But the words had the tone and tenor of the Christopher Pike he knew, and they rang true.

  He said his farewells and left Pike there, and as it is not a Vulcan’s wont to brood or second-guess himself, he had returned to Enterprise without succumbing to the slightest doubt that he had done the right thing.

  That first time had demanded a complex and arduous journey leading to the optimal conclusion. This time, the journey had been simplicity itself. Spock had merely notified his staff that he would be taking some of his considerable unused leave time, logged a flight plan with Starfleet Command, and flown his personal shuttle in a leisurely arc away from Vestios Prime, where he had been attending an economic summit celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Vestians’ admission to the Federation, as if he were bound for Vulcan.

  He never actually said he was going to Vulcan, but the flight plan was consistent with that destination, and he simply allowed the curious to assume that it was where he was going. Given the increasing numbers of Vulcans in Starfleet and the diplomatic corps, enough was known, and far more conjectured, about Vulcan mating rituals so that humans at last knew better than to ask.

  There was in fact little to draw him to Vulcan these days. His mother was dead, his relationship with his father strained yet again. His property was overseen by able administrators; he had no wife or offspring to welcome his arrival. For a Vulcan, he was remarkably free of extended family; for a Starfleet officer, he was remarkably free of the interpersonal entanglements that made people wonder where you’d disappeared to if they didn’t hear from you after a few days. Since Jim Kirk’s death, he had buried himself in work and solitude. No one had questioned his departure and, to this point several days into his journey, apparently no one was looking for him. So far, so good.

  Less than a day away from Vestios, he had abandoned the flight plan and set course through a little-traveled, minimally charted sector he hoped would bring him to Talos before the shuttle’s fuel cells gave out. After that…

  There might not be an “after that.” He would cross that bridge when he came to it.

  For now, all that mattered was to stay out of scanner range of Starfleet vessels in the area and not give anyone any reason to think he had gone walkabout. He had recorded several subspace messages which he would “bounce” off uninhabited moons or larger asteroids along his path so as to redirect them along a trajectory where they would reach the requisite starbases and suggest that he had adhered to his original course.

  He was, this time as last time, the Talosians had seen, the perfect choice—his past loyalty to Pike unquestionable, his life expendable by their standards. Fortuitous that even the festivities on Vestios had concluded the night before he was summoned. Or was it fortuitous? Had the Talosians known, in such exact detail, that he would not be missed? Were they watching him, even now?

  He and Christopher Pike had discussed that very possibility a long, long time ago. Because what Number One had feared was true: Christopher Pike understood the dangers of Talosian telepathy all too well.

  “…because once they’re inside your head, they never leave. Don’t tell me that thought’s never occurred to you, Mr. Spock.”

  It was night, a night made that much darker by the fact that the planet where they were stranded had no moon. Pike and Spock had, for reasons of expediency, taken shelter in the canopy of a very tall tree. Below them, a search party composed of a species of intelligent predator with an unpleasant habit of killing and eating whole whatever it hunted, was stalking them.

  They had discovered that the predators, like Earth’s snakes, were also congenitally deaf, so Pike and Spock could talk in low voices even with several of the hunters in proximity. There were other things they couldn’t safely do, which they’d found out the hard way when the rest of their landing party had been killed, but at the moment the two survivors were as safe as they could be between now and the time Enterprise came back to look for them, if it did. The only way to keep the “heebie-jeebies” away, as Pike called them, was to keep talking.

  “Indeed, Captain,” Spock had offered tersely, still not certain that they were entirely safe. His eyes were more adapted to the dark, and he could see movement slithering among the shadows perhaps fifty meters below them. Eventually the temperature would drop and the cold-blooded hunters would have to seek shelter, and he and Pike could climb down from their perch and move on, but for now…“I have considered the likelihood that the Talosians may be listening to us even now.”

  “You said ‘listening to us,’” Pike remarked. “Can they see us, do you think?”

  “Uncertain, Captain. Theirs is a complex form of telepathic communication quite unlike a Vulcan’s. I regret we could not remain on Talos IV long enough for me to study it.”

  “Maybe they’d have been better off keeping you as a specimen instead of me!” Pike said, only half-joking. “Sorry, I didn’t mean…the whole episode makes me jumpy, even now. Sometimes I find myself wondering whether they ever really did let me go, or if everything that’s happened since has been a dream…”

  The conversation had been brief, and never repeated. Spock might have wished there had been other occasions to continue the discussion, particularly since the more he thought about it, the more he became convinced that the reason he had been summoned to Talos this time was that Christopher Pike was either dying or already dead. He had no way of knowing this for certain, but it was the premise he had been operating under since he had received the summons.

  Perhaps, he thought, it is only a matter of his wanting to see Earth once more before he dies. Or some last wish to have his remains returned to the planet of his birth. Even so, would he put me at risk of the death penalty for such a wish? Not the Christopher Pike I once knew. There is something more here. Nevertheless…

  Methodically, Spock scanned the vicinity once again. The day before he had found it necessary to take shelter behind a nickel-cored moon in order to elude a convoy of Ferengi scavengers looting an untethered satellite floating loose in the system, but other than that he had had this sector of space largely to himself. He’d taken the liberty of using his diplomatic access to ascertain the locations of any Starfleet vessels deployed in the vicinity, and hoped to avoid them.

  That hope had been r
ealized thus far. But a telltale bleeped and he checked his scanners. He was no longer alone. A vessel was on approach at one-ninety-four mark five, as yet too distant to identify. Spock scanned for a comm signature. There was none, not even random chatter. Apparently, whoever she was, she was on silent running. This was not good. Warily, Spock weighed whether evasive maneuvers would help him elude notice, or rather serve to give his position away. There was nothing nearby to hide behind this time. He chose to remain on his present course. He had a fair idea who was out there.

  Within moments, scanners confirmed ship’s configuration: Federation starship, Excelsior class. Spock suppressed the ghost of a smile. If there had been no last-minute changes since his last briefing with Starfleet Command, all would be well.

  He did not have long to wait.

  “My, my, my…” a familiar voice came through on discrete—someone knew the DiploCorps’ coded frequencies. “Ambassador Spock, I presume?”

  “Correct, Captain Sulu.”

  “How long has it been?”

  “Entirely too long, Captain. I trust you are well?”

  “Flourishing, Ambassador. And you?”

  “Quite well, thank you.”

  The familiar face materialized on the forward screen. In these his later years, Hikaru Sulu had grown leaner and more striking than ever. The planes of his face may have become more angular, and the jet-black hair gone iron-gray, but he still moved with the panther-like grace of a much younger man, and his voice, always deep and resonant, had acquired a richness and a calm that evidenced the serenity of his inner self.

  Even after all these years, Sulu was still given to collecting rare plants and expanding his collection of exotic antique weaponry from cultures all over the quadrant. As his image solidified on the shuttle’s forward screen, Spock could see a few of his prize specimens mounted on the bulkhead behind him, and a many-tendrilled liana beauregardis, draped over one shoulder, purred as he caressed it.