Burning Dreams

by Margaret Wander Bonanno

  Strangely unperturbed, Christopher Pike sat in the hearing room throughout the trial, even when his presence was not required. He listened to the testimony about Captain Kamnach’s actions and his own as if they were about two people he didn’t know.

  In view of his nearly half a century of service, Captain Kamnach was granted the courtesy of testifying in closed court, which disturbed Pike not a little. He’d gotten a glimpse of Kamnach on his way into chambers, and saw a spit-and-polish senior officer presenting a perfect facade. There was no sign of the obsessive near-madman he’d removed under guard from the bridge. Which side of Kamnach’s personality would his testimony reflect?

  The only part of the open-court testimony that made Pike smile was Renkova’s, particularly when she talked about “persuading” Wesley to surrender the helm. Seeing Hana Flowers on the stand made him more than a little sad. He knew whatever might have become of their relationship was probably lost forever. Flowers confirmed that for him in the corridor during a recess.

  “I know you’ll never forgive me, Chris…” she began.

  “That’s not true at all. You did what you thought was right.”

  “But I was wrong! If we’d destroyed that second ship, there might have been a war.”

  “You didn’t know that at the time.” He found himself trying to comfort her. “None of us did,” he added, not entirely truthfully.

  “I should have trusted you!” she said plaintively.

  He’d taken her hands in his then. “Hana, it’s over. Whatever happens shouldn’t affect what you and I—”

  “Even if they drum you out of the service?” She shook her head. “No, Chris. If they do, I’m at least partly responsible. I can’t—”

  “And if they don’t?” he asked, not quite daring to hope for it. What did it matter, really? There were other things he could do with his life. He didn’t know what they were just now, or how being dishonorably discharged from Starfleet at the ripe old age of twenty-seven would affect his chances, but he couldn’t think about that unless it happened. “I’d still like to see you again.”

  “I’m sorry, Chris!” was all she said, pulling her hands free and all but running down the corridor, as if that could help her escape her feelings.

  When it was time for the verdict to be announced, and Pike and Kamnach stood before the three-admiral panel to hear the charges read, they might as well have been about someone else.

  “I don’t know which of you I want to yell at first,” the admiral in the center, a crusty old veteran named Oberon who’d spent more time in the judicial system than he ever had in space, grumbled, eyeballing both of them balefully. “The fact that this situation could have turned out quite differently, with us at war with the Vestians, would be enough to keep me up at night if I weren’t already an insomniac.

  “In a way, you’re both guilty of taking the law into your own hands, and in a way you’re both good officers following regulations as you understand them. That’s what makes this such a thorny problem. It’s the regulations that are at fault, and we who establish them are guilty of not seeing the kind of loophole that causes situations like the Aldrin’s to happen. So you’ve embarrassed us. And we don’t like being embarrassed.

  “Commander Hanley’s actions were simple to adjudicate. Testimony and the logs show that he fired a laser weapon without authorization, and he’ll be tried on that basis. But you two…”

  Admiral Oberon paused, poured himself a glass of water, still glaring from one to the other, sweating them. Strangely, neither man was sweating. Captain Kamnach was unreadable. He seemed remarkably serene, more serene perhaps than Pike had ever seen him aboard his ship. As for Pike, it was all he could do to keep his mind on the here and now and not on the departed Flowers. Compared to what he’d dealt with on the Vestian border, the events in this room seemed strangely unimportant.

  Admiral Oberon cleared his throat, consulted the documents on the table before him, and continued. “Lieutenant Commander Pike, based on the testimony of all personnel involved, given both here and in ship’s logs, and particularly that of Captain Kamnach, this panel is prepared to give its verdict as follows…”

  Oberon paused, took a sip of water, and glanced up at Pike under his eyebrows. Whatever reaction he was expecting, he got none. Christopher Pike returned his gaze evenly. He would wait as long as it took. Oberon cleared his throat again and consulted his notes.

  “Given his decades of distinguished service to the ’fleet, we have accepted Captain Kamnach’s request for early retirement, with honors, the record to state that he comported himself in a manner consistent with Starfleet Regulations in the instance of the confrontation with a Vestian vessel in Sector 114 on Stardate…”

  Pike couldn’t believe what he was hearing. This sounded like a whitewash. It was all he could do to keep from shouting his outrage, but discipline held him back.

  “…where, given garbled communications, he acted as he saw fit in a crisis situation,” Admiral Oberon concluded, the look in his eye indicating he knew exactly what Pike was thinking, and at the least respected him for not saying it, given that his career seemed to be hanging in the balance.

  “As for you, Mr. Pike,” Oberon said, not to be hurried. “It is Captain Kamnach’s recommendation that all charges pursuant to this court-martial be dropped, and that you be promoted to the rank of commander and transferred to the next ship available with all due alacrity. Do you wish to contest that verdict, Mr. Pike?”

  Pike’s knees felt weak. He struggled to find his voice. “N-no sir.”

  Did he only imagine that Oberon’s eyebrows twitched in wry amusement? “Very well. We’re adjourned.”

  The buzz in the corridors was confirmed. With the exception of Second Officer Hanley, all crew of the Aldrin, regardless of which side they’d taken during the Vestian event, were exonerated of all charges for following their respective consciences pursuant to orders.

  Science Officer Renkova was given a commendation for “expedient thinking in time of crisis,” as fancy a way as there was to describe knocking Wesley out and commandeering the helm. Pike made his way through the throng of well-wishers and curiosity seekers to congratulate her.

  “Congratulations yourself, Pike!” she beamed at him. “Want to hear something funny? Wesley’s asked me out to dinner!”

  Pike smiled back. “Hope you’re going to take him up on it.”

  “I haven’t decided yet…” she started to say, when they were descended upon by the media.

  Scattering “No comments” interspersed with “Excuse mes,” Pike eased his way through the crowd and out onto the grounds. He needed to walk. He needed to think.

  Why was the victory so bittersweet? Hana Flowers aside, why did he still not feel justified? Did he so strongly need Kamnach to be brought to justice that he couldn’t let it go? Kamnach was essentially being forced into retirement—probably a fate worse than death for a commander who’d done nothing else for nearly half a century. Still, he was out of harm’s way, and could never take the law into his own hands again. And Hanley would at the least be demoted to a position where he wasn’t allowed to fire on anyone ever again. Wasn’t that enough?

  Pike thought of Kamnach leaving the hearing room by a side door to avoid the media, walking away alone. No one had been waiting to congratulate him. With a bizarre twinge of something—guilt, second thoughts, or just that obsessive need for perfection—Pike almost envied him. He almost wished he could be that alone.

  It was not to be. Halfway across the quadrangle, he saw the formidable figure of Admiral Straczeskie bearing down on him.

  “Got a minute, son?” Straczeskie was nearly a hundred, and the brisk walk had made him wheeze a little. “We need to talk.”

  “Admiral, I appreciate your congratulations, but—”

  “I didn’t track you halfway across the grounds to congratulate you,” Straczeskie said gruffly, as if annoyed that anyone with Pike’s intelligence would even suggest such a th
ing. “And that was not a request.”

  Following the outcome of the trial, Pike thought he was beyond surprise. What Straczeskie told him behind closed doors proved him wrong.

  “…bottom line, we’d had our eye on Kamnach for quite some time,” Straczeskie finished. “There was evidence he was taking the law into his own hands out there on the frontier, but we needed something conclusive. But most of his crew had been with him for years and didn’t want to risk their own necks and, frankly, we didn’t want to hang them out to dry, either. So we needed to bring someone in from the outside. His first officer’s needing leave time was the perfect opportunity.”

  Pike said nothing. Whatever he hadn’t allowed himself to feel during the hearing, he was feeling now. The predominant urge was to put his fist through a wall. He tightened his jaw and kept that thought from showing on his face.

  “I’m sorry it had to be you, Chris,” Straczeskie said not unkindly. “But in a way you were the perfect choice. You’re nothing if not honest, and a perfectionist to boot. If anyone could be counted on to be aware of what Kamnach was up to and call him on it, it was you.”

  “So I was the stalking horse,” was all Pike trusted himself to say.

  Straczeskie eyed him carefully, assessing his mood. “That would be a fair characterization of your role in the affair, yes. I’m only telling you now because I thought you deserved to know. And because I know this conversation will never leave this room.”

  Pike thought about that. “Permission to speak candidly, sir?” Straczeskie nodded. “Captain Kamnach destroyed that Vestian ship on the wrong side of the border. That alone should have been sufficient grounds for disciplinary action.”

  Straczeskie sat down heavily, passed a hand over his eyes. “I know that,” he said, and his voice was suddenly that of an old, and tired, man. “And if it were anyone but Kamnach, it might have been. But it turns out it was a rebel ship, and it did in fact destroy the Tellarite vessel whose debris trail Aldrin intercepted.

  “An eye for an eye. As part of our new treaty, the Vestians have accepted that. So the destruction of the Aloku wasn’t enough to hang Kamnach on. But ignoring a direct order from Command was—if, and only if, a senior officer was willing to call him on it. And because you put yourself at risk to do that, regulations will be reviewed, and most likely changed, to prevent a commander in the field from taking that kind of liberty in the future.”

  Straczeskie looked up at Pike, standing at ease but not easy, and his look was almost pleading. “You comported yourself well, Commander. I know you’re not one to gloat, but this was a win-win scenario for the service, and for you personally. The least you can do is say ‘Thank you, sir’ and savor it.”

  Pike unclenched his jaw, stood a little straighter and said, “Thank you, sir.”

  Straczeskie gave a short bark of a laugh, and shook his head. “You’ll thank me, but you won’t enjoy it. You are your father’s son! Are all Pikes this stubborn?”

  Pike realized he was being a tight-ass, and forced himself to relax a little. “Afraid so, sir.”

  “So am I, Mr. Pike. So am I.” Straczeskie waved him off. “Get out of here. I understand your family’s waiting to celebrate your promotion.”

  Something occurred to Pike as he was halfway out the door. “Sir? Does Charlie know?”

  “About what you and I didn’t just talk about?” Straczeskie nodded. “I owe Charlie Pike my life. And I ran into him before I found you. He knows.”

  Christopher Pike’s anger didn’t end there. He brought it with him back to the ranch in Mojave, and even three days’ ride through the arroyos with Charlie didn’t dissipate it. Tango, picking up some of Chris’s mood, was unusually skittish, and startled at a sidewinder on the trail, stumbling and coming up near lame.

  Checking Tango’s feet for stones and walking him a while to ease him, Chris finally let go of everything he’d been keeping inside.

  “It isn’t right, Charlie! I wasn’t thinking about my career out there on the border. I was thinking about avoiding a war, and getting the crew home safely. Command had no right to use me that way!”

  Charlie had dismounted and was walking his own horse as well to keep Chris company. “Guess you forgot the second half of the oath, then,” he said diffidently. “You got the ‘protect’ part down, but you forgot about the ‘serve.’”

  Chris snorted in disgust. “Or maybe I’m just not cut out for command!”

  “Or maybe that’s exactly why you are cut out for command,” Charlie suggested quietly, stopping to watch a pair of hummingbirds cavorting around each other in midair. “Because you think of the larger picture and not your personal agenda.”

  “Ah…” Chris shook that off irritably, then blurted out what was really on his mind. “I’m thinking of quitting, Charlie. Resigning my commission. I don’t like being used!”

  Charlie did not react the way another man might. He let the words dissipate on the clear desert air for several minutes without answering them. The two men came to a riverbed, dry most of the year, but recently replenished by the winter rains, and stopped to let the horses drink, making themselves comfortable under an overhang in the rock wall enclosing the trail, carved by a million years of blowing sand.

  “Well?” Chris demanded as the silence, punctuated by the sounds of the horses snorting and blowing, the cry of a raptor too high up in the blue to be visible, went on too long for his comfort. “Aren’t you going to talk me out of it?”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Charlie mused. “Make it easier for you to decide.”

  Chris looked chagrined, busied himself picking up a small, rounded stone from the ground at his feet and studying it intently.

  “Chris, why do you think I’ve spent my whole life turning down promotions?” Charlie asked, studying his son’s handsome bowed head, his defeated posture. “Why do you think I never stayed in but for one mission at a time? It’s because I don’t have the courage to make those decisions. You do.”

  Chris scowled at him. “Dammit, Charlie, don’t twist it around!”

  “I may not know what heroism is, but I recognize fear when I see it,” Charlie challenged him.

  “You’re right!” Chris snapped, springing to his feet and flinging the stone hard enough to carry it across the riverbed. “I am afraid. Afraid they’ll use me again, turn my strengths into weaknesses, play games behind my back, games that involve my crewmates’ lives. That’s not what I signed on for!”

  Charlie tugged at one ear. “Then I guess you’re right. You ought to quit.”

  “Now you’re twisting it the other way!” Chris said angrily, heading down to the water’s edge to bathe his face and calm himself.

  “If you say so.” Charlie inhaled sharply, sighed, studied the horizon, chose his next words carefully. “Your father took the coward’s way out. I thought you’d be stronger.”

  Chris stood up so fast his head swam. From where he was standing, Charlie’s face was in shadow and he couldn’t read his expression. He tried to process what he’d just heard.

  “Wait a minute. Are you saying you knew my father?”

  Charlie nodded. He was studying his slouch hat, turning it slowly in his hands as if he’d never seen it before. “Know him still. Inasmuch as a man ever really knows himself.”

  Above them the raptor cried again, a high ascending scream broken abruptly as it plummeted after prey. Tango had finished drinking and was nosing at Chris’s pockets, searching for sugar. Chris seemed to have grown roots. He didn’t know what to say, was almost afraid to move, afraid somehow to believe what he was hearing. Finally he recovered enough to push the big bay’s head aside and went to crouch beside Charlie under the overhang, out of the sun.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” His voice wavered, first with incredible sorrow, transforming slowly into rage. “You sonofabitch, why didn’t you tell me?!”

  The memory did not fade this time, but broke off abruptly, and all the layers of illusion surrounding
it split away, leaving only a man trapped in his own body, trapped in a motorized chair, enclosed in a subterranean chamber carved out of raw rock, on a world not his own.

  “That is the crux of it, then,” the Magistrate suggested.

  Pike had not heard hir approach, but knew somehow that s/he was truly “there,” and not illusion, even as he knew Vina was not there, for the first time since he’d arrived. He hadn’t realized until now how much she’d become his muse, his reason for wanting to tell the story of who he was and why.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. Spoke? Thought? They were one and the same now, though he accompanied his thought by tilting his head back, looking the Magistrate in the eye, despite the effort it cost him.

  “I think you do. You spoke of ‘debris.’ Is it not the emotional debris you and Charlie created that concerns you more than long-ago starship battles?”

  “Are you a psychiatrist as well?” Pike asked dryly. “Yes, it’s all debris, all so unnecessary. The Vestian ship, the dead aboard our own, the wreck of Kamnach’s career, Charlie’s telling me something he should have told me from the very beginning. Or maybe it was my fault for not asking. Maybe he thought I didn’t want to know.”

  “Maybe?” the Magistrate echoed. “Did you never talk about it again?”

  S/he had taken hold of Pike’s chair and was pushing it, slowly but purposefully, out of the featureless chamber where Pike had ended the memory, along a well-traveled path between the rock walls that, it seemed to Pike, slanted gradually upward.

  “We did. But not for a long time after that day. He saw how angry I was, and didn’t make excuses. Once again it was Hobelia who told me the whole story. Charlie and my mother were together for about a year before she realized his restlessness would never allow him to stay with her. Being Willa, she set him free, didn’t bother telling him she was pregnant. He came back after another year-long voyage and there I was.