Spectre

by William Shatner

  His gaze found Picard.

  His hand reached out.

  "Captain . . . I'm sorry. . . . I'm—"

  And then, as if he were a lightning rod, the first and last tendril of antiproton energy blazed from the plasma-filled sky and hit the youth, and engulfed him.

  The image of the impact etched itself forever into Picard's memory, but he did not turn away.

  The ensign's hair was on fire. Flares of light burst forth from his eyes and mouth, and crackles of energy shot out from his rigid, outstretched fingers.

  The overseers held Picard so he would have no choice but to see what was happening, but Picard did not struggle. A starship captain always faced the consequences of his actions.

  Finally, the ensign was gone. Replaced by a crumpled, blackened body, bearing no resemblance to the life that had once been there. The promise.

  The overseers pushed Picard to his knees. He felt blood trickle from the bridge of his nose, dripping onto the walkway's smooth surface, but he did not move. Even when the side of Krawl's boots shoved against his cheek, close enough that Picard knew he could twist the monster onto his back and break his neck with one deadly blow.

  But what of the rest of his crew?

  "This was your fault, Terran. Remember that."

  Picard felt the agonizer probe tap his shoulder. But it wasn't turned on.

  And for all the rage that burned within him, Picard knew Krawl was right.

  Among his crew, each death was his fault.

  They trusted him. They put their lives in his hands. Willingly.

  And as Picard got slowly to his feet, he made a silent promise to the ensign that that trust had not been misplaced.

  Each death might be his fault. But he would see to it that those who were responsible would pay the full price.

  Personally.

  He raised his head to look at Krawl's obscenely grinning mouth, but no higher, not yet.

  The overseer would die.

  Picard was as certain of that as he was that he would once again take the center chair of the Enterprise.

  "Better," Krawl said. "You have a special assignment today."

  Picard did not react. For his plan to work, he had to be with his gold team at the end of the shift. It was absolutely necessary to take control of the antigrav platform that took them down into the mines. Only that platform could take his team up to the crossover device and the Enterprise.

  But though he gave no outward sign of his concern, Krawl seemed to sense something. Like a hunter scenting the instinct for escape in his prey.

  "Have I interfered with something?" the Klingon asked with mock concern.

  "Just don't send me down into the mine," Picard said in a low voice. "I . . . I can't stand that anymore."

  Krawl had obviously never heard of the ancient Terran folktale of Brer Rabbit. His momentary suspicion was deflected, as Picard had hoped, and he shoved Picard forward, force-marching him across the walkway to an off-limits barracks.

  The ominous symbol of the Alliance—the Cardassian raptor whose wings embraced the Klingon triskelion—was emblazoned on the wall of the facility, though in all other respects, the structure was identical in size and shape to every other building but the double-height command center.

  In the past week, three Enterprise crew had been taken here.

  None had returned.

  Picard hoped that at least one member of his gold team would learn of this, so they would not wait for him at the end of the shift. The escape had to be attempted today; otherwise, the Enterprise would be lost.

  Krawl pushed Picard toward an airlock platform to one side of the barracks.

  All the life-support facilities on the asteroid's surface were pressurized, Picard had noted. That made sense to him.

  In the case of insurrection, the forcefield could be dropped long enough to kill the prisoners by suffocation, while the overseers remained safe within their sealed barracks.

  Picard had allowed for that capability in his plan.

  Now Krawl pushed Picard's head down so he could see nothing, and Picard heard the delta-shift overseer enter a security code into the airlock panel.

  The thick circular Cardassian door rolled open.

  Krawl kicked Picard to make him move forward, then left him in the transfer chamber.

  "Good-bye, Terran," the Klingon said with a scornful laugh. "Each ensign I kill today, I dedicate to you."

  Picard wheeled around but only in time to see the door roll shut, and Krawl grinning at him through the small viewport.

  Then there was a rush of air as the pressure equalized, and the interior door rolled open.

  Picard knew the drill, knew the tests the overseers set up for prisoners.

  He stood his ground.

  Then a familiar voice said, "Very good, Jean-Luc. You have learned your lessons."

  The voice was familiar because it was Picard's own.

  "Please, enter. My home is your home, in more ways than you can imagine."

  So Picard walked forward, stepping from the airlock into a large area that reminded him in design of the patterned wall panels of Deep Space Nine. It was utilitarian in finish, yet in one corner, a section was furnished almost like a private apartment.

  In the midst of that unlikely setting stood Picard's counterpart, resplendent in the battle armor of a Klingon regent. Yet this man's existence and appearance were no longer a surprise to Picard. By now, he had grown used to seeing this unsettling duplicate of himself.

  But Picard was not prepared for the woman who stood beside the regent. A woman he knew.

  She was draped in the sheerest of Argelian silks, no more substantial than a veil. Her long hair was drawn back in the Klingon style, intricately braided with glittering Klingon bloodstones—the gift of a warrior. But even the heavy makeup she wore, as if there had been some attempt to have her resemble an Orion slave girl, could not disguise the distinctive pattern of her subtle head ridges, nor the points of her ears, nor the distinctive scar that marred her singular beauty.

  The regent saw the flicker of recognition in Picard's eyes.

  "You know this prisoner?"

  Picard shook his head. Too many lives were at stake in the planned escape to allow him the satisfaction of facing down his doppelgänger. Any action Picard took here today would have to be swift, and deadly. "I was mistaken. She looked familiar, but . . . I was wrong."

  The mirror Picard looked upon his captive in feigned shock. "A mistake? Jean-Luc Picard—captain of the Enterprise— admits a mistake?" He held a hand to his heart. "And here I thought I knew you so well. You must admit, I played you like a Centauri salmon, getting you to voluntarily reestablish the command codes for your ship. Or, should I say, my ship."

  Picard glared at his counterpart, but still refused to escalate their confrontation. He had come to realize that no matter what he felt about his duplicate, it was more than matched by the overwhelming contempt his counterpart felt for him.

  The regent looked back at the woman in silk. "For myself, I'm not often wrong. And when I am . . . I hate to be reminded of it. Are you like that, too, Jean-Luc?"

  Picard said nothing.

  His counterpart accepted that silence as agreement. "I think you are like me. I think you're embarrassed by mistakes. So, the best way to forget those mistakes, mon cher ami, is to erase them, n'est-ce pas?"

  Picard stared straight ahead, giving his counterpart nothing to react to.

  "You forget, Jean-Luc," the regent said, as if deeply amused by Picard's lack of response, "I might as well be reading your mind."

  Then, with a loud and startling slap, the mirror Picard drew his disruptor, thumbed it to full power so its capacitor hum filled the air, and aimed it directly at the woman.

  "And since you don't know this unfortunate, since her continued existence can have no meaning to you other than to remind you of your failings, I'm sure you won't mind if I erase her from existence. Will you?"

  The woman looked
up, no fear in her eyes.

  Only courage.

  But then, Picard knew, that was the only reaction to expect from the remarkable woman so loved by James T. Kirk.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The tossing of the runabout reminded Kirk of old sailing vessels. There was a rhythm to the motion, a pattern to anticipate, accept, and direct.

  Flying in these conditions required that he keep his hands on the controls at all time, but he found the activity almost enjoyable.

  Doing something—anything—was preferable to waiting. Especially because all that had happened since he had decided on this course of action was the passage of time.

  "You like piloting, don't you?" Janeway asked.

  She was in the copilot's chair now, spelling Scott. Runabouts were designed for longer journeys than shuttlecraft, and there were bunks in the back, and a small galley. Scott, T'Val, and McCoy were presumably sound asleep, secure in their privacy screens and antigrav bunks.

  But Spock and his counterpart seemed to have little use for rest. They remained in the passenger area, engaged in earnest conversation. Kirk had smelled tea an hour ago, and for their sake, he hoped it contained a stimulant. The conversation had been going on for close to thirty hours.

  Then again, if, like Intendant Spock, he knew he was facing an irreversible slide into an incurable disease, he supposed he wouldn't have much use for sleep, either.

  "Piloting's a lost art," Kirk said. He kept his eyes moving from the sensor screens to the incredible panorama of the plasma storms they flew through. The mirror Voyager's warpparticle trail set the runabout's course, directly into unknown, and unknowable, territory.

  It wasn't the first time Kirk had made such a journey. From time to time, when he let his concentration drift, he found himself admitting that sometimes it was the best kind of journey of all.

  "You seem to be doing well enough at it," Janeway told him. "Piloting, I mean."

  "I've spent my time at the helm." Kirk braced himself as a small shudder made the craft tremble. He compensated before the dampers could, rolling the runabout gently, riding the compression wave out.

  "Was that part of your training?" Janeway asked. "To be a starship captain?"

  "Part of it. Theoretically, we were trained to be able to do everything that needed to be done on board a starship." He smiled, remembered how full of confidence and bravado he had been at the beginning of his career, certain he could handle a Constitution-class vessel on his own. Who needed a crew? "None of it well, though. Thinking back, the whole point was to learn integration. To know what everyone else's duties were, so we could see how they worked together."

  "And did you?"

  "Not at first." Kirk watched his hands move across the controls as if they belonged to someone else. Like so many aspects of his training, his piloting skills had returned without conscious thought. A year on Chal and all his best intentions had not been enough to drive the starship captain from the man. He didn't want to think what that might mean.

  It was a conversation he would have with Teilani when they reunited.

  And they would reunite.

  He refused to consider any other eventuality.

  "I was thirty-one when I earned my first ship." Even as Kirk said the words, he didn't know how such a thing could ever have been possible. Had he ever really been that young? That naive? That full of wide-eyed innocence? "And back then, I thought I could do everything."

  He remembered meeting Chris Pike on the day Pike had been promoted to Fleet captain, and Kirk had been given the Enterprise. Kirk had known the ship would be available. After two five-year missions, Pike wanted a change and Kirk wanted that ship. For years he had played the political games behind the scenes at Command. Gone to the right parties, volunteered for the right committees, directed all his duty assignments to that one, inescapable destiny he knew was his.

  But the day that long-sought goal had finally been achieved, Kirk had felt anything but prepared. When he had first taken the center chair, with the Enterprise in spacedock, with the mysterious Vulcan who would come to be his friend looking menacing at his science station, and the unflappable and soon-to-retire Dr. Piper at his side, Kirk had felt more like an understudy called to the stage without knowing his lines than the captain of a starship.

  But somehow, he and his ship and his crew had survived that first shakedown cruise. When the orders had come through for a five-year mission—again, something he had worked toward since graduating the Academy—he had once again felt the faint misgivings of doubt infect him.

  But the mission had been completed—the Enterprise returning more or less intact; his crew lessened by death, strengthened by experience, united by triumph and sorrow.

  Kirk had always taken it as one of the supreme ironies of life that only when he had completed his mission and left the Enterprise to become a deskbound admiral had he finally understood what it meant to be a starship captain.

  "You can't do it all yourself," Kirk now said, merging their course with the currents of plasma as if the runabout were an extension of his body. "All through the Academy, they burn it into your brain—it's all up to you. Everyone's depending on you. The captain's got to be the one in front, taking the first shot, firing the first torpedo, being responsible."

  "But that's not it?" Janeway asked.

  "Being responsible, yes. That's the most important part. But everything else, it's just Starfleet laying down the party line." He glanced at Janeway beside him, and despite the fact that she was an adult, that she had lived and trained and fought as a soldier in a war few people in the Federation would ever have the strength and determination to face, he saw in her eyes that familiar cadet gleam.

  For a moment he thought of that child in the field of Chal.

  He surprised himself by remembering the child's name.

  Memlon.

  Eyes wide, curiosity still unbound.

  He remembered Teilani asking him what he thought of the child.

  Kirk had said the boy needed someone to explain things to him.

  You'd be good at that, Teilani had said.

  Kirk wondered if that was true. He wondered if he could live up to the quest for knowledge that burned in Janeway.

  Because he saw that same hunger for knowledge in her. She wanted to know.

  So she could become something more.

  And there was no question in Kirk's mind what that goal was.

  "At the Academy, I struggled with almost all my science classes," Kirk said. "Then they put me on a ship with Spock, and all those science classes amounted to was that for the first few months I had the vocabulary to ask a few questions now and then. If he hadn't been a Vulcan, he probably would have laughed at me for most of them.

  "In engineering classes, they taught me how to build a starship, if I had to, with my own two hands. And then they gave me Scotty. He could build the same starship in his sleep, with one hand, in a third the time, with fifty percent fewer pieces, and it would run more efficiently, too."

  "So what you're saying is, it all comes down to your crew."

  Kirk looked out at the rolling clouds of the storm and thought of his crew. His first crew. His best crew. He saw their faces, heard their names as if a roll call were under way on the hangar deck and a dangerous mission still lay ahead. A mission that only the Enterprise could take on.

  Spock and McCoy and Scotty were still with him, here in this craft. But Sulu and Chekov and Uhura, wherever the worlds and time had taken them since their missions together, they would always be with him, too, always a part of whatever success the universe had conspired to give him.

  It all came down to one simple truth. One simple statement. "You can't be a captain of an empty starship," Kirk said. In life, he knew, there were other truths more important. But in his work, in his career, that was the one above all others.

  Then he realized he had been concentrating too much on himself—a tendency of which Teilani had laughingly reminded him, more than once.
From his solitary audience's expression, Kirk could see that his insights regarding his Starfleet career were not exactly what she had had in mind as a subject of conversation.

  "Do you know the Janeway of this universe?" she asked.

  Kirk knew it wasn't the change of subject the question might seem to be. He saw where the question was heading and he left it in Janeway's hands.

  "No," he said. "She was after my time. But from everything I've heard about her, I know she's one of the best."

  After a moment's silence, Janeway asked, "Is she like me?"

  Kirk hoped this Janeway wouldn't hold it against him, but even here, even now, he felt there was no time to waste.

  So he gave her the answer he knew she was working toward.

  "Kate, there's no doubt in my mind you could be a starship captain. Whatever it is a person needs for that job, in your heart, your mind, your spirit, it's in you, too. Don't forget that."

  Janeway rode in silence for many minutes after that. Like Kirk, she watched the ever-changing vista of the plasma fields.

  The region they were in now was dominated by waves of deep amber and red.

  Kirk remembered the sunset on the holodeck, in the recreation of Yosemite, when Janeway had tested her environment by kissing him.

  He wondered if she was thinking of the same, sharing the memory.

  "I hated you, you know," she said out of nowhere.

  But again, Kirk looked beneath the words to find their meaning.

  "You hated Tiberius."

  She threw his own words back at him. "If I'm in any way like your Janeway, then you're the same as Tiberius."

  Kirk was silent. She'd voiced something he had not fully grappled with himself. Nor was he ready to yet.

  "When T'Val gave me this assignment, I wanted to kill you. Even if you cooperated with us."

  Kirk saw a sudden billow of plasma compression heading directly for the runabout, and brought the craft up to skim over top of it. "Since you're telling me all this, I have to assume you've changed your mind."

  "If we live through what you're planning, ask me again."

  Kirk couldn't look away from the controls, so he couldn't be sure if Janeway was trying to make a joke.