The Autobiography of James T. Kirk

by David A. Goodman

  She was lovely, smart, and she seemed easily dazzled by me. We had long walks together, both on Planet Q and then the ship. We talked about acting, Shakespeare, commanding a ship, her life in the space lanes. One night aboard the ship, I took her to the softly lit observation deck and kissed her. And then I took her back to my quarters.

  She was lonely, as I was, and I began to feel guilty, because I felt a real connection to her. But my whole purpose had been to shake her father’s identity from the shadows. She was of no help. She told me she’d never known her mother, who died in childbirth, so her father had been everything.

  “He is a great man,” she said that night we were together in my cabin. “He has given me so much, I’ll never be able to repay him for this wonderful life and career he’s given me.” Though she was an adult, she was also a child, and I was trying to take away her only parent, as Tom’s parents had been taken away. I decided I had to challenge him directly and leave this poor girl out of it.

  So I went to see him in his quarters, and made him read the speech he gave when he killed all those people. I had written it out from memory, and made him record it.

  “The revolution is successful …” I always remembered that phrase. He’d said it back then with confidence, with arrogance, as if the crazed rationale for killing all those people was somehow a cause. Now, an older man said it wearily, with some bitterness. He got through the whole speech.

  I still didn’t know.

  “I know how to use this, Captain,” Lenore said, aiming a phaser at me.

  She was an actress, and she had been acting, pretending to be enthralled by me. She was the one who had killed Tom, along with the six other people. The whole time, she wanted me dead, because I was one of the people who she thought could hurt her father. It was ironic that she wanted to kill me, because I still couldn’t remember. I had to be told by Karidian that he was Kodos. I was a fool, almost as big a fool as Karidian, the narcissist, who didn’t realize how he had damaged his daughter until it was far too late.

  We were standing on the set of Hamlet in the Enterprise’s theater, where the Karidian players had been performing. Lenore raised the weapon and pulled the trigger.

  And her father stepped in front of it, saving my life. It was again his own vanity that led him to do it. He’d destroyed so many lives, which mattered to him not at all, but when he’d discovered that his own daughter was a murderer, that moved him to regret, to self-sacrifice.

  Kodos the Executioner was dead, by his own child, by his own actions. His whole life he had never taken responsibility for his crimes, and it killed him in the end. I was reminded of Shakespeare’s King Lear: “We make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity.”

  The quote also applied to me. Catching him had been my “necessity,” and I became a villain.

  The Enterprise was falling into Psi 2000, an ancient, ice-covered planet in its death throes. We’d originally been sent to pick up a scientific party and watch the planet break up from a safe distance. Things didn’t go according to plan. The scientific party had all succumbed to a strange disease that made them lose their self-control. One of them, a crewman named Rossi, had turned off the life-support system, and then gotten in the shower with his clothes on, while they’d all frozen to death. When we got there, everyone had been dead for over a day, and our landing party brought the disease back to the Enterprise.

  The ship had quickly become, for lack of a better term, a nuthouse. A half-naked Sulu tried to stab me with a sword, and my new navigator, Kevin Reilly, literally turned off the engines. McCoy eventually found a cure, but not before we began to spiral into the planet’s atmosphere. There wasn’t enough time to turn the engines back on through the usual process. Our only hope was Spock: Could my brilliant science officer come up with a formula to “cold start” the engines? It was our last chance.

  Spock, despite succumbing to the disease, came through. With Scotty’s help, they manually combined matter and antimatter, creating a controlled implosion that jump- started our engines. We pulled away from the dying world.

  And the immense power sent us into a time warp. We travelled backward in time over seventy hours.

  The importance of the discovery was initially lost on me, because I had also succumbed to the disease. It was a little like being drunk—it removed the perimeter I kept around myself. It had also brought to the front of my mind just how attached I’d become to the Enterprise. I had found something I was willing to commit everything to, but because it was an inanimate object, the ship could give nothing in return. It was a dark psychological moment: I loved something that couldn’t love me back. My science officer, however, was trying to make me see that we’d discovered something much more important than the heart of my relationship problems.

  “This does open some intriguing prospects, Captain,” Spock said. He pointed out we could go back in time to any planet in any era.

  “We may risk it someday, Mr. Spock,” I said, but I wasn’t really processing it. I told Sulu to lay in the course for our next destination. As he did, however, I thought of something.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Spock, it’s three days ago. That means Psi 2000 hasn’t broken up yet.”

  “Yes,” he said. And then he understood what I was getting at. “The scientific party might still be alive—”

  “Mr. Sulu, reverse course! Get us back to Psi 2000, maximum warp!”

  We made it back and beamed down. They were all succumbing to the disease, but we found Rossi as he was turning off the life-support systems. I had to stun him with my phaser, but we stopped him, and saved them all. McCoy gave them the cure, and we got them back up to the ship, where we watched the breakup of Psi 2000 again, this time from a safe distance.

  Some days we’d had our losses, but some days we had our wins.

  The ship jerked violently. I checked the navigation sensors; we hadn’t even reached the center of the ion storm; it was going to get much worse. I became concerned that the eddies of the storm would pull us off course if the helm didn’t compensate.

  “Hold on course, Mr. Hanson,” I said.

  “Aye sir,” he said. “Natural vibration force two … force three …” Hanson, the beta shift helmsman, compensated for the force of the storm by reversing the starboard engine. He was not the man I wanted at the helm in the middle of an ion storm. He lacked confidence and experience, but I couldn’t relieve him now.

  No one fully understood what caused ion storms, the magnetic conflagrations of ionic particles traveling at thousands of kilometers an hour. Their mystery was part of their sway. They caused terror in a starship crew and its captain; they felt malevolent. You would move the ship, and it felt like the storm was countering your moves, trying to swallow you whole. And its greatest power was this fear it caused, fear that might lead a captain to make a wrong decision.

  I checked the board, then ordered engineering to increase thrust, and called the ion pod.

  “Ion pod,” Ben Finney said. He sounded calm and confident. He’d been in the sensor pod during an ion storm before; he knew the orders were to gather as much sensor data as possible, but to get out before the pod itself gained a charge. It was a delicate balance, since navigating an ion storm without some data from the pod was almost impossible. Ion storms had been known to change their size by several million kilometers in a matter of minutes. The more data a ship had, the quicker it could find its way through.

  “Stand by to get out of there, Ben,” I said. I looked down at the panel by my right hand. The yellow alert light flashed; when I hit red alert, that would be Ben’s signal to get out of the pod. I looked up, saw from the navigational sensors we were a third of the way through the storm.

  “Steady as we go, Mr. Hanson,” I said.

  “Outer hull pressure increasing,” Spock said.

  “Natural vibration now force five,” Hanson said. “Force six …” The ship could take this increased vibrat
ion, but the faster we could get through the storm, the better. I checked the telemetry from the sensor pod; it was giving me a three-dimensional view of the storm on the navigational console. The Enterprise was a little blip; the computer projected our course forward. I made a quick calculation; we’d be through in less than three minutes on our current heading, but it was going to be a rough ride.

  The ship jolted; now the shuddering became continuous.

  “Natural vibration now force seven,” Hanson said, yelling above the din.

  I looked down at my control pad and signaled red alert. Ben would know to get out of the pod.

  The red alert klaxon was almost lost in the sound of the ship’s vibrations; it was being buffeted now like an empty tin cup on a tidal wave, the inertial dampeners straining to keep us all upright. I watched the board near Hanson; he wasn’t compensating enough.

  “Helm, come right two degrees,” I said.

  “Aye sir,” Hanson said. He initiated the change just before the ship was knocked hard. The inertial dampeners couldn’t work fast enough, and the ship lurched to the starboard. I was thrown from my chair. I saw Spock had tumbled near the helm. He clawed his way up to the control, and diverted more power to the dampeners so that the ship turned upright again. I helped Hanson back to his chair, then checked our course: still a few minutes from the edge of the storm. The whole bridge was shuddering. I felt a tide of panic, but regained control; my decisions were the right ones.

  And then my mind went back to the pod. In a storm of this magnitude, if we lost any of our control circuits to a burnout, the ship would be dead. Seconds had passed; Finney had had plenty of time to get out. Everyone on the bridge was caught up in their work, eyes on their consoles, doing their jobs to keep the ship safe. And I did mine. I went back to my chair and pressed the jettison button. It flashed green. The pod was away.

  Soon, the vibration began to subside, and the ship began to calm.

  “Natural vibration force five … force four …” Hanson said, his voice cooling with each lower number.

  “Sir,” Uhura said, “Mr. Finney has not reported in.” It was standard procedure for the officer manning the pod to check in immediately after he’d gotten out.

  “Inform security, he could be injured,” I said, and got back to paying attention to getting the ship through the storm.

  After a full day of searching, they didn’t find Finney. It was determined that he must have still been on the pod when I jettisoned it. It made no sense; he knew the risks, he knew once the red alert had sounded, he had to get out of there.

  The truth of what happened made even less sense. A few weeks later, I watched playback from the ship’s log on a viewscreen. There was a closeup of my right hand, pressing the jettison button, but during the yellow alert, well before the ship was being torn apart.

  And I was being court-martialed for it.

  I sat facing Commodore Stone and three other command-grade officers in full dress, in the courtroom on Starbase 11. Their contention was that either I had some kind of mental lapse and panicked, jettisoning the pod earlier than I had to, or something far worse. The prosecution made the case that I’d grown to resent Ben Finney, and I used the opportunity to get rid of him.

  But watching that viewscreen, looking at my hand jettisoning the pod much earlier than I remembered, I had to question my own memory. I knew how I felt about Ben: he was a pain in the ass, but he was also a good, reliable officer. The idea that I would kill him for such a petty reason was simply untrue and insulting. The theory that I had panicked was a little easier to take; I’d come close to panicking during the storm, but I held it together. I’d made the right decisions.

  Except the playback of the log excerpt said otherwise. I looked guilty.

  I wasn’t alone; I had a lawyer named Samuel Cogley. He was an older man, tough and well-read. He was obsessed with books, the old, bound kind. He seemed quaint to me, and during the trial there wasn’t much he could do in the face of the computer record. But it turned out his passion for the written word would end up saving my career.

  Cogley had rested our case, just when Spock came into the courtroom with new evidence. Spock discovered that someone had tampered with the Enterprise’s computer. But because we’d rested our case already, the court didn’t have to hear it. That’s when Cogley showed his true value.

  He made an impassioned speech about man fading in the shadow of the machine, losing our individual rights as our computer technology takes over our way of life. It was a speech that I imagine was relevant to humans of many ages, going all the way back those people who succumbed to the primitive Internet of the early 21st century. And it moved the court to hear the evidence.

  The court reconvened on the Enterprise. Spock testified that the modification made to the computer was so subtle, only a programming expert could pull it off. There were only three people qualified in Spock’s view: him, me, and Ben Finney. It was then Cogley who made the seemingly outrageous assertion that Ben Finney had altered the log, after he supposedly died, to make it look like I’d killed him.

  Which meant he had faked his death and was still hiding somewhere aboard the ship. With the ship’s sensors, we were able to prove that he was still alive.

  Finney had lost his senses. He’d become obsessed with taking revenge on me for ruining his career. He was truly sick, and I had to find him myself. He was hiding in the ship’s engineering spaces. His twisted plan revealed, we fought, and he desperately tried to kill me, but was in no condition to take me on. In the end, he was on the deck, beaten and sobbing.

  “Ben,” I said. “Why? You have a daughter and wife who love you.”

  “No they don’t,” he said. “They don’t.”

  He was ill, truly ill. I’d never seen it until now. I didn’t know if he’d been born with it, or if the circumstances of his life had created it, but either way, Ben was lost.

  A young ensign had been recommended to me by the commandant of Starfleet Academy, and he joined the ship at Starbase 11. He had just graduated from the academy, and had exceptional grades in the sciences and navigation. I always introduced myself to new crewmen when they first came aboard; I remembered that Garrovick had done that for me, and I routinely followed his example. I also had established a practice of either Spock or myself mentoring the new crewmen, at least for a little while. So when the young man beamed aboard, I was in the transporter room.

  “Ensign Chekov, reporting for duty, Keptin,” he said, standing at attention upon seeing me. I was surprised at the thickness of his Russian accent; 23rd-century language education had for the most part done away with them. Except when the individual didn’t want to get rid of it. I would quickly become convinced that Chekov fell into this category.

  “At ease,” I said. “Welcome aboard, Ensign.” I shook his hand.

  “A pleasure to meet you, sir,” Chekov said. “I believe our ancestors are from the same region.”

  “I’m sorry?” I said, genuinely confused, but he kept going.

  “Perhaps they served the now-forgotten Communist Party of the ancient USSR …”

  “Ensign,” I said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Your ancestors were from Kirkovo, Bulgaria, yes? Though I was born in St. Petersburg, my mother’s father was born in Odessa, which is just across the Black Sea …”

  “Sorry to disappoint you, Ensign,” I said, cutting him off, “but my ancestors are not from Bulgaria. And I don’t believe any of them were ever communists.” Chekov could not hide his disappointment, and I couldn’t hide my amusement. I told him to report to sickbay for his physical. I decided I’d let Spock mentor this one.

  “Our last item, sir. Commodore Wesley has made a crew transfer request,” Spock said. It was our morning briefing, in my quarters. McCoy was there, having stopped in for coffee before going on duty. “It struck me as rather odd.”

  “Who does he want?” I already knew the answer. Commodore Wesley was requesting Janice Rand be trans
ferred to his ship, the Lexington, to fill an opening in his communications department. Bob Wesley had been an instructor for a short time when I was at the academy. We’d then met several times when I was captain of the Hotspur, and struck up a friendship. I asked him this favor, and he happily obliged me.

  “He is offering her a promotion to lieutenant,” Spock said.

  “What’s so odd about that?” McCoy said. “It sounds like a good opportunity.”

  “It is odd, Doctor, because Yeoman Rand has not requested a transfer,” he said. There wasn’t anything that got by Spock, which was usually a good thing. However, in this case, I’d hoped to keep anyone from being aware of my hand in this.

  “Does Janice want to go?” I said, specifically avoiding the question Spock was implying. If he asked me directly, I wouldn’t lie to him. He looked at me and seemed to sense I was avoiding the subject.

  “I have kept Lieutenant Hong from presenting it to Yeoman Rand,” he said, “awaiting your approval.” I told him he should take it to her, and Spock nodded and left. Once he was gone, however, McCoy didn’t waste any time getting to the heart of the matter.

  “Commodore Wesley is a friend of yours, isn’t he?” I nodded. “I don’t think she wants to leave,” McCoy said. “And as your doctor, I’m not sure this is the best way to deal with the situation.” McCoy was the only one who knew about my guilt regarding Janice, and that it continued to afflict me. It had faded a little; I thought I could deal with it. But recent events made me reconsider.

  “Bones, it’s just better if she’s not here. It’s how I should’ve dealt with Finney. Maybe if I’d gotten him away from here, away from me—”

  “It’s not the same thing at all,” McCoy said. “Ben Finney was sick. Paranoids are clever; they can seem normal most of the time. I gave him six quarterly physicals and I missed it.”

  “Maybe I should get you transferred,” I said. McCoy could see that I was closing the subject.