Collision Course

by William Shatner

  “On Vulcan,” Sarek said, gazing into his beloved wife’s eyes, “our son faced unique circumstances because it was known that he was neither Vulcan nor human, but a blending of the two. But on this world, for his sake, we have kept that knowledge from the Earthmen, and his studies have proceeded as they should.

  “For the two of us, or for you, to go to Starfleet and by that action reveal Spock’s human heritage, what will happen to his studies then?”

  After more than twenty years with this dear man and his people, Amanda was able to appreciate what her husband meant by those words and the way that he said them, and she lost herself to him all over again.

  “You do love him, don’t you,” she said softly.

  Sarek’s expression betrayed an almost subliminal sense of his puzzlement. “Emotion has nothing to do with it. Spock will be a great scientist someday. For the sake of all those people and all those worlds that will benefit from his discoveries, it is logical that we do what we can to remove obstacles from his path.”

  Amanda smiled at Sarek, understanding. “Someone should go to him. To help straighten this out.”

  “I will make arrangements.”

  “I love you,” Amanda said.

  Sarek’s face remained appropriately and lovingly neutral. “You are my wife,” he agreed, “as I am your husband.”

  Amanda’s smile grew as she savored the passion within that simple yet complex statement. Her husband and her son were her life, and nothing made her happier than knowing how close the three of them were, joined by such mutual love and understanding.

  Everything would soon be made right.

  12

  Sam Kirk woke late that afternoon, head pounding, mouth dry. He pushed himself up from the faded green couch, blearily focused on the empty bottle of Stark’s, cursed himself for not leaving at least a drop to help him wake up.

  He hung his head, trying to remember what it was he was supposed to do. There was something, he knew. Something important…

  He heard a sound behind him, twisted around.

  George Joseph Kirk, his father, all six and a half feet and two hundred and fifty pounds of him, was delicately sprinkling fish food into the saltwater tank.

  He looked back at his son, and Sam didn’t have to focus to see the disapproval on his father’s darkly tanned and deeply lined face. “I let myself in.” His voice was deep, husky. Cold.

  That much was obvious. Sam had a more important question on his mind. “What’re you doing here?” He looked over by the door to the hallway, saw his father’s old Starfleet duffel bag beside it.

  “Jim’s been arrested.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.” Joe Kirk put down the cylinder of fish food and carefully closed the cover on the tank.

  Sam stood, winced as he stretched out the kink in his neck. He looked over at a wall clock, an old one Jimmy had picked up in one of those shops he did odd jobs for in New Union Square. It showed Earth and Mars time, reconciling the two different day lengths and calendars. And all mechanical, Jimmy had said, as if that was special somehow. Whatever, he had spent a week rebuilding it so it worked.

  “It’s after four,” Joe said.

  “Is Mom here?”

  Joe went to the window, tugged open the slatted metal blinds. “Someone has to run the farm.”

  Sam couldn’t take it. He’d been talking to his father for less than a minute and this had to come up again?

  “Don’t start.” He walked unsteadily to the bathroom. He was pretty sure he had a block inhaler there. That’d calm down his head, make the old man a bit easier to deal with.

  “When’d you see your brother last?”

  Sam ignored the question, opened the medicine cabinet over the sink in the one-piece modular bathroom. He found the small cylinder of the inhaler, shook it. At least one dose left. He’d have to buy another.

  He covered his nose with the soft plastic cup, turned the cylinder on, and inhaled as it buzzed.

  When he opened his eyes again, his headache was already receding. He saw his father in the doorway and even felt revived enough to smile.

  His father, true to form, scowled back. “Look at you.” Pure disgust.

  Sam waved his hand over the faucet to turn it on. “You let yourself in.” He cupped the cold water, threw it on his face.

  “When did you see your brother last?” Joe repeated.

  Sam dried his face with a threadbare, dingy towel. “Last night. With his girlfriend.”

  “What did you get him into?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” He pushed past his father, went back to the main room, heading for the kitchen alcove.

  His father stopped him with a huge, calloused hand on his shoulder, spun him around. “You listen to me, George.”

  “Sam.” The name shot out of Sam like venom from a snake.

  “I don’t care what you want to call yourself.” Joe Kirk looked around at the disaster that was his first child’s apartment. “I don’t care that you live like an animal. I don’t care that you’ve thrown your life away.”

  “Good. You can leave any time.” Sam tried to pull away, but his father wouldn’t let go.

  “Jim’s another matter.”

  “Then why aren’t you with him?”

  Joe’s temper flared and he grabbed a handful of his son’s shirt, pulled him close. “If your mother could hear how—”

  Sam pushed back with both hands against his father’s barrel chest, solid muscle. “Lemme go!”

  Joe didn’t budge. “If Jim’s in trouble, then I know why.” He shook Sam. “You.” Then he let go, and Sam stumbled backward. “Tell me what you’ve done this time.”

  “Nothing! It was all Jimmy’s idea.”

  “What was?”

  Sam realized he had already said too much, tried to backtrack. “Whatever he’s in trouble for. I don’t know. He had something planned with his girlfriend.”

  “Your brother doesn’t get into trouble.”

  “Oh, you wish.”

  “He listened to me and your mother.”

  Sam waved his hands as if trying to erase this entire conversation. “For how long, Dad? And guess who’s to blame for that? Not me. Not Mom.” He turned to the small cooler, opened it, stared inside at open containers of engineered food, nothing natural, or appetizing.

  “I gave you both everything you could—”

  Sam slammed shut the cooler door so hard he could hear the containers inside fall over. He wheeled around to confront his father. “Stop it! You didn’t even listen to what we wanted. You gave us everything you wanted! Half the time, you weren’t even there!”

  “I had my job. I worked for Starfleet so my father’s farm could be yours.”

  “But—I—never—wanted—it! Jimmy—doesn’t—either!”

  “It stays in the family.”

  “You think we’re still family? After everything that’s happened?”

  Joe took a step toward his son, raised his hand, and just as abruptly dropped it.

  “Look at you,” Sam said accusingly. “You were getting ready to hit me, and you wonder why I left Riverside?”

  Joe looked at him, eyes stabbing. Jimmy’s eyes. “I’ve never hit you. I’ve never hit your brother.”

  “You didn’t have to, Dad. You sent Jimmy to Tarsus IV.”

  Joe blinked. “That was a long time ago.”

  “Three years. He still has nightmares. I hear him. You don’t.”

  Sam saw his father’s body tremble, and braced himself just in case. “You’re the eldest,” Joe said thickly. “That was your trip.”

  “Right. Blame me.”

  “No one’s to blame.” Joe Kirk didn’t meet Sam’s eyes, but whether that was because of shame or sorrow, his firstborn was not sure.

  Sam’s words spilled out of him in an angry rush. “Jimmy told me what happened there. Not all at once. It’s not anything he likes to talk about. But you know what, Dad, if I had been there, I’d
have done what they said. How’s that make you feel? How do you think that makes me feel? I would have done what they said.”

  Sam shook his head. The nerve block was wearing off. He was hungry. He needed a drink. And he didn’t need or want to be having this conversation. He grabbed his jacket from the couch and headed for the door.

  Joe stared at him, uncomprehending. “You’re not leaving. We’re going to see your brother.”

  Sam kicked his father’s duffel to the side, viciously. “You see him. I can’t. Someone’s got to make things right!”

  13

  “Sit down, kid.” Mallory indicated the chair across the table. “Is it James? Or Jim? Tiberius…?”

  Kirk sat down, leaned back, crossed his arms. “Does it matter?”

  Mallory nodded at Agent Gilfillan, who looked weary after her long night questioning Kirk. Kirk took pride in having worn her down. At seventeen, he felt on top of his game, indestructible.

  Gilfillan remained in the corridor, touched a control to seal the door of the interrogation room.

  Mallory waited until the door closed before he spoke again.

  “James, then. You don’t look like a Tiberius.”

  Kirk shrugged. This man’s assessments meant nothing to him.

  “Old family name?” Mallory asked.

  “My grandfather had a thing about him.”

  “The emperor?”

  Kirk thought that was a strange question. “Yeah.”

  “Because there was another one. Not quite as well known. And not quite as bloodthirsty.”

  Kirk hadn’t known that. “Another Emperor Tiberius?”

  “No, a politician. Two centuries before the emperor. A strong spokesman for farmers’ rights. I thought that might have been the connection. Was your grandfather a farmer, too?”

  Kirk nodded, his interest somewhat sparked. “So no other emperors?”

  “Roman emperors? No. But there was a Byzantine emperor with the same name about five hundred years later.”

  “You know a lot about history.”

  Mallory gave him a half-smile, the expression hard to read. “A little. Does it matter?”

  Kirk grasped that he was being lightly mocked, but ignored that to push this curious exchange to whatever limits he’d be allowed to. “For my grandfather, it was definitely the Roman Emperor Tiberius.”

  “Any idea what the fascination was?”

  Kirk shifted in his chair, engaged now despite himself, studying Mallory as intently as Mallory studied him. Kirk understood that they were each trying to get the other’s measure.

  “A life of contradictions, my grandfather said. Full of lessons.”

  Mallory appeared to be genuinely interested, which Kirk suspected was a ploy, just as his attempt to change the subject to Mallory’s knowledge of history had been. “What kind of lessons?”

  “A brilliant general who became a depraved and hated ruler. You know, find what you’re good at and stick to it. That kind of thing.”

  “What are you good at?”

  Here we go, Kirk thought. But he wasn’t about to let this old guy win so easily. He pointed to Mallory’s padd. “Special Agent Gilfillan had my life history on her padd. If you’re her boss, you’ve got it, too.”

  “I’m not her boss.”

  This time, Kirk refused to ask the obvious question. Gilfillan had manipulated him that way, and he wasn’t about to let it happen again.

  Mallory didn’t let the silence remain unfilled. Surprisingly, as if acknowledging Kirk’s strategy, he turned on the padd.

  Kirk’s eyes raced across it. Even upside down, he recognized his own flyer’s license ID image. But he didn’t recognize the form it was displayed on, although he could see that the form had a Starfleet emblem at the top.

  “I’m just someone who likes history,” Mallory said, answering the unasked question anyway as he tapped his way through several other forms on the padd’s display, as if reviewing them. Kirk had the feeling, though, that whatever was in his record, Mallory was like his father and had every word memorized already. “Can you guess why?”

  Kirk tried another tactic. “You like to live in the past?”

  But Mallory didn’t even react to his attempt at an insult. “Patterns,” he said. “You’ve heard that old saying: Those who don’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it?”

  “I guess.” Kirk wondered what all this had to do with him.

  “It’s true,” Mallory said with a curious frown. “For seven thousand years or so, humans appear to have lived in a permanent state of forgetfulness. Seven thousand years from the first agricultural communities to the great urban centers of the twenty-first century—not one generation free of war or famine or injustice. And then…we woke up. It took the worst war we’d ever experienced, but out of all that came Cochrane and a new generation that for the first time wouldn’t forget. Because the pattern was broken. So no more wars. No more need. No more injustice. The world, our world, is the way it is today because we remember the patterns of history and we do not repeat them.”

  “You can skip the lecture,” Kirk said. “I didn’t steal the Starfleet staff car.”

  Mallory regarded him with cool amusement. “Did I ask you if you had?”

  Kirk realized he had fallen for a more subtle interrogation technique. For the first time, he began to feel he was beyond his depth. He had no clue what Mallory was up to, only that his interrogator had some agenda as yet unknown to him.

  “You were going to.”

  But Mallory shook his head. “You spent four hours denying it with Agent Gilfillan. Why would I waste time going down that road again?”

  Kirk’s eyes narrowed. What was this guy after? What does he want from me?

  “Because I’m looking for patterns,” Mallory said, answering his own question. He patted the edge of the padd. “I’ve got your whole life story to check. Most of it, at least.”

  Those words contained a threat, Kirk was sure of it. He tensed, waiting, wondering.

  “Face the facts, kid. Whether you did it or not, the theft of that car is the reason why you’re here.”

  Whether you did it or not. Kirk couldn’t get his head around the meaning of that statement.

  “For that reason alone, SCIS did what any investigatory body would do…checked your records to see if you’ve ever been involved in anything like this before.”

  Kirk sat up straighter. “Did they check the Vulcan’s records?”

  Mallory’s response rebuked him. “I’m not here to talk about the Vulcan.”

  Kirk slouched in his hard-backed chair, sullen. “Whatever you say.” He stared past Mallory at one of the imagers mounted high on the plain, dull, Starfleet-blue walls, letting whoever was watching know how totally uninvolved and bored he was.

  “So here’s my problem. Your records don’t make sense.”

  “That’s not my fault.”

  Mallory held the padd so Kirk couldn’t see it, even upside down. “Didn’t say it was. Have you ever been off-world?”

  Kirk felt his stomach tighten. Here it comes. “Yeah, sure. Been to the Moon on class trips.”

  “Tranquility Park? The alien ruins?”

  Kirk nodded.

  “Anywhere else?”

  “Uh…Pluto. The museums there.”

  “Jonathan Archer’s ship?”

  Kirk shook his head. He looked around, seeking another imager.

  Mallory repeated his question.

  “No.”

  “You don’t like starships, I take it.”

  “No.”

  “Odd thing,” Mallory said. He ran his finger across the padd’s unseen display. “It says here you joined the Star Cadets when you were eight. Set a record for merit badges in your age group. Before that, you were in the Junior Explorers.” He turned the padd around and Kirk was mortified to see an image of himself, age five, in a baggy blue jumpsuit with a ball cap pulled down so far it made his ears stick out like warp nacelles. His hand was
engulfed by his father’s. That was all of Joe Kirk that was in the image.

  “Is that your father?”

  Kirk’s voice hardened. “Look, if you have something to say, say it. I’m not here to reminisce about all the goofy stuff I did when I was a kid, okay?”

  Mallory tapped onto another page. “On 14 January 2246, you visited the Laurel Blair Salton Medical Clinic in Des Moines.”

  “So?”

  “So you had a series of inoculations and protein inhibitors that in my day we used to call the Spaceman’s Cocktail.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “There’s only one reason a thirteen-year-old gets that battery of injections. You were going to be exposed to an alien ecosystem.”

  Kirk took a chance to bring this unwanted intrusion to an end. He leaned forward to make his demand. “Is there anything in those records that says I was exposed to an alien ecosystem?”

  “Not a word,” Mallory said, his attention still on the padd. “And that’s what strikes my interest. It means your pattern’s fractured somehow. Smart kid. Loves space travel. Junior Explorer. Star Cadet. Apparently obsessed with collecting merit badges. Plus top grades at school.”

  Mallory briefly glanced up at Kirk.

  “Same patterns I see in the records of my bosses—Starfleet admirals, for the most part.”

  Kirk’s face felt stiff. It was all he could do not to throttle Mallory, not to try to escape by any means.

  Mallory went back to reading the padd. “So you get all the shots you’d need to go to an alien world…but you don’t go anywhere. Far as the records are concerned, about a year later you went on a week-long school trip to Pluto, and that’s all. Apparently, you haven’t been off-world since.”

  “That’s what I said.” Kirk crossed his arms tightly, all too aware of the hammering in his chest.

  “I’m more interested in what you didn’t say. You got the shots. You didn’t go anywhere. By the next school year, you were barely getting by. You ‘borrowed’ one of your teacher’s flyers. I see the Riverside protectors have sealed a file on you, which means you got up to something. Maybe now you can see my problem.”