Collision Course

by William Shatner

  “He’s one of the eyewitnesses, isn’t he? One of the nine people who actually saw Kodos and can identify him.”

  Joe’s eyes clouded. “That’s not all he saw.”

  “Master Chief, I don’t mean to bring up bad memories.”

  But it was too late for that. Mallory watched as the powerful man across from him seemed to shrink with age before his eyes. “It’s just Joe. Those days are…It’s just Joe.”

  “Joe, then. I need to know what your son can handle.”

  Joe Kirk looked up in alarm. “My son is under a death sentence! Word gets out that he’s one of the nine—” Joe stopped to catch his breath, tried to calm down. “I never bought the story about them finding Kodos’s body, not the way it was burned, no way to identify it. It’s the sort of thing he’d do. Kill someone else to make it look as if he died, so no one would go looking for him.

  “But if he’s out there, then no one knows where. No one knows who he is or what he looks like now. So he could be anyone. Anywhere. And you can be damn sure that after what he did to those colonists, he won’t hesitate to kill anyone who can identify him. Including my boy.”

  Mallory knew there had been more than four thousand casualties at Tarsus IV. He was looking at another right now.

  “No one knows, Joe. I promise you that. I only put it together because of an anomaly in your boy’s medical records—the inoculations he got before he left that summer. And the record of those inoculations has been deleted—I saw to that myself.”

  Joe wasn’t convinced. “That’s not enough intel to go on. You know more than that.”

  Mallory decided to trust the man even more. “One of my department’s special projects is trying to track Kodos. So far…nothing. But we haven’t given up. And we are keeping the names of the witnesses classified until we can be sure they’re safe.”

  Joe accepted that, recovering. “Thank you for telling me.”

  Mallory moved on. “Tarsus IV changed your son.”

  “How couldn’t it? He was fourteen, wanted to go out of the system so badly, ever since he was a kid.” Joe stared past Mallory, and Mallory knew he was looking into the past. “One time, I was home on leave, and Jimmy, he was five. And this one night, we were out walking, out in the fields, the wheat coming up. And the stars, it was in the middle of nowhere back then, our farm, and the stars were like you see them in space, clear, and the Milky Way on fire across the sky. And Jimmy wanted to know which ones I’d been to, the ones I’d seen up close. So I started pointing them out, naming them, and the look…” Joe took a moment, caught up in this sweet, lost moment. “…the look in his eyes as he heard those names…I knew he had it then. The dream. You know?”

  Mallory nodded. It was something everyone at Starfleet knew so well.

  “And Jimmy said to me, he said to me, ‘Daddy, I have to go there.’ And he meant all of them. And I picked him up and I told him he would. I told him he would.

  “And I sent him to Tarsus IV, Mr. Mallory. I sent him to Tarsus IV and I lost my boy…”

  Mallory moved to sit beside the man until he had recovered. And then he made this promise: “I’ll do everything I can to get him back for you.”

  Joe Kirk looked at Mallory like a man who desperately wanted to believe, but could not.

  Mallory knew the feeling all too well.

  33

  His first day as a member of Starfleet wasn’t as bad as Kirk had feared.

  It was worse.

  He and Spock were roused from their cells at Starfleet Headquarters at 0400 hours, given thirty minutes to shower, eat, and get into their civilian clothes. By 0440, they had been discharged from Starfleet custody, signed over to two Starfleet masters-at-arms, and marched onto a Starfleet airshuttle.

  The flight from HQ to the Starfleet Training Center took all of seven minutes. Kirk had watched the Academy pass by below, the lights lining the paths and roadways sparkling through the black silhouettes of the trees. Most of the room lights in Archer Hall were out, and anyway the angle was wrong to see Elissa’s room.

  Spock said nothing on the short trip. Kirk knew there was a lot they both had to say to each other, but they hadn’t had a moment together without a guard or escort since they had been taken from the courtroom.

  At least Spock had demonstrated he wasn’t a complete uncaring alien lump—Kirk had caught him looking down at the Vulcan diplomatic compound as they had sailed over it. The assemblage of alien architecture was difficult to miss, especially at night, when its floodlit buildings glowed like rubies in a field of glittering blue-white diamonds.

  The airshuttle touched down on a well-worn pad about one hundred meters from STC’s main gates. Two white-and-blue Starfleet buses hovered by those gates. As he and Spock were escorted from the shuttle to a pedestrian walkway, Kirk could see that each bus was filled with eager young faces.

  “Looks like you two’ll have a lot of company,” one of the escorts said.

  Kirk didn’t think of the kids in the buses as company. As far as he was concerned, they were the competition.

  Spock, not surprisingly, said, “Indeed.” Kirk was beginning to suspect the Vulcan was nervous.

  Their paperwork—all on large, clunky padds that seemed to be fifty years old, at least—was waiting in the guard shack. They were given five minutes to complete it—all forty-seven pages and fifteen signature windows.

  Given the time limit, Kirk signed without reading; enlistment document, dependency application, record of emergency data, medical waivers describing risk of accident, death, dismemberment, ebullism…he had to stop to read the definition of that term, cringed, signed, kept paging through.

  He rolled his eyes when he signed the final window that affirmed he was voluntarily enlisting, then slid the padd back over the counter to the intake officer.

  “Forty-seven pages in five minutes,” Kirk said to Spock. “Starfleet planning at its best.”

  Spock put on his most bland expression. “I read them all.”

  Kirk frowned, and they were marched out of the office and onto the grounds of the STC.

  At 0600 hours, with the sky brightening in the dawn, Kirk, Spock, and seventy other recruits were encouraged by uniformed personnel to stand at attention in a formation of four lines of eighteen.

  A tall petty officer with a deeply lined face and a booming voice welcomed the recruits with a five-minute recitation of the history of the STC, with all the enthusiasm of someone who had given the same speech a thousand times.

  As an institution, the training center had been operating for well more than a century. The first crews to serve in the old United Earth Starfleet trained here, as did the scientific teams of the United Earth Space Probe Agency. MACO pilots, merchant marines, the first diplomatic exchange groups headed for Andoria, Tellar, and Denobula, all passed through these gates, enlisted personnel and officers alike.

  Kirk guessed that’s why the low buildings looked so old and so behind the times. He was not impressed.

  The moment the history lesson was over, the recruits were marched—again—toward the quartermaster building. Inside, in controlled chaos, tables were laid out with standard Starfleet kit—clothes, boots, underwear, hygiene kits, and a large duffel in which to stuff everything.

  The recruits had five minutes to find everything they needed. Kirk was beginning to see the pattern.

  Then more marching: into another building where the males went through a door on one side and the females through the other, to shed their civilian clothes and give up their personal belongings. Kirk watched as Spock ingeniously argued his way into keeping some kind of Vulcan medallion that he wore around his neck. The Vulcan achieved this by calmly explaining to an exasperated clerk that it had deep cultural significance and that any attempt to force him to remove it would be a violation of his cultural rights as specified on page twenty-seven of the intake documents he had signed less than an hour ago. It seemed Spock had read all the paperwork, after all.

  Dressed
in ill-fitting recruit whites, including stiff-billed ball caps with a red Starfleet chevron, their next stop was the barbershop. Kirk looked in the mirror after his sixty-second makeover and all he saw was his crew-cut father staring back at him. The difference was that Kirk didn’t yet have sideburns that could be cut to a point.

  Spock ended up looking like a mythical elf. The long hair that had covered his ears was now nothing more than dark stubble from which his ears stood out like dangerous weapons. Kirk had to give the Vulcan high marks for apparently not noticing how all the other recruits kept staring at him.

  Less than ninety minutes after stepping through the center’s gates, the transformation of the recruits was startling. Seventy-two civilians, male and female, in multicolored clothes, all shapes and sizes, had been roughly molded into a squad of identically dressed, flush-faced clones. Other than height, about the only difference among them that Kirk could make out was that the females had been allowed to keep more of their hair. Spock, of course, was the exception. He was noticeably different, and not just because he was one of the tallest recruits in the formation.

  Then the gauntlet began.

  Suddenly, eight petty officers appeared out of nowhere and started berating the recruits. This one’s hat was at the wrong angle. That one’s shirt wasn’t aligned properly. What’s that smudge doing on that boot, mister?! Don’t call me sir, I work for a living!

  If recruits tried to apologize, they were shouted at even more. Did I ask for an apology?! Are you giving me an excuse, mister?! Get those shoulders back! Eyes forward! Chin in! Not that far!

  Kirk couldn’t believe how transparent this show of domination was. Two petty officers decided to take on Spock, whose posture, attitude, and uniform were perfect. They couldn’t even make him blink.

  Then one of the two haranguing Spock noticed Kirk watching, and like predators sensing a weak member of the herd, they abandoned their uncooperative prey and swooped in on easier pickings with a barely concealed smirk.

  “What are you looking at, Recruit?!” one shouted.

  Kirk had heard what the others had answered, correctly and incorrectly. It wasn’t difficult to answer correctly. “Nothing, Chief.”

  “I saw you looking, Recruit! Are you calling me a liar?!”

  “No, Chief. It won’t happen again, Chief!”

  “So you were looking!”

  “If you say so, Chief!”

  By now, Kirk had both chief petty officers a few centimeters from his face, screaming at ear-splitting volume, spraying spittle on him as they spoke in rapid-fire cadence.

  “Are you mouthing off, Recruit?!”

  “No, Chief!”

  “Do you think you’re a smart guy, Recruit?!”

  Kirk knew it was wrong, knew it was wrong, but he couldn’t stop himself. “No, Chief—I am a Starfleet recruit!”

  For about half a second, Kirk had a taste of victory—the two petty officers actually paused in their assault as they processed his insult. Then they redoubled their efforts to get Kirk flustered.

  “Do you think this is funny, Recruit?!”

  Kirk thought, This is too easy. “Yes, Chief!”

  Both petty officers sputtered. “What did you say?!”

  “As a Starfleet recruit I am on my honor to tell the truth and ensure the full truth is known, Chief!”

  Four petty officers swarmed around Kirk now, and he was ordered to the ground to do push-ups.

  Kirk dropped as ordered and did as he was told. One petty officer squatted beside him while two others harangued the other recruits for watching. The fourth petty officer got on his hands and knees so he could shout into Kirk’s ear with each push-up.

  Everything blurred together. Not because any of it overwhelmed Kirk. But because none of it meant anything to someone who had gazed down the barrel of a laser rifle and realized he was going to die.

  There was nothing even Starfleet petty officers could do that could come close to what he’d already survived.

  Tarsus IV.

  By the time fourteen-year-old Jimmy returned to his cabin with Matthew and the other boys, he was feeling warmer. The concentrate bars had settled his stomach, too, eased the hunger pangs. Though now he felt guilty for not having saved any for the others.

  “Go get ’em out,” Matthew told him.

  “It’s so cold,” Jimmy said. “Maybe we should wait till morning?”

  “They won’t be cold for long. Get ’em out.”

  Jimmy walked up the three wooden steps to the cabin door, knocked on it. “Hey, guys, it’s me!”

  The door creaked open. Aki Kimura was there, very scared, very small. He was only eight years old, visiting his great-grandparents for the summer. Jimmy had liked meeting his great-grandmother. She’d been in Starfleet, fought the Xindi, had great stories to tell. And she made wonderful soba noodles.

  “Hey, Aki, how are you?” Jimmy asked.

  Aki bit his lip, looked past Jimmy, and gave a small whimper.

  Jimmy turned to see Matthew and the others all aiming their rifles at the open door.

  “C’mon, Jimmy,” Matthew urged. “We gotta get back.”

  Jimmy felt as if he was watching himself on a viewscreen. The words wouldn’t form in his mind, but he could see what was going to happen. The pressure to keep going without thinking, to do what he was told, was too much for him. It would be so easy just to open the door all the way, step back, call out the rest of the kids, and let Matthew and the boys in the red bandanas do what Jimmy feared they would do. So easy. Especially since Jimmy knew that if he didn’t do that, if he resisted, if he argued, he’d be the first to be shot.

  He wondered if they could run. Maybe that was the way. If he could get all the kids to suddenly run out in a stampede, like the transcattle, maybe Matthew would hesitate just a bit, just enough for the kids to race off across the field of withered grain and into the blighted forest and then they’d be okay. They could make it to another valley in the daytime. It would be warm enough. Maybe they could find a cave, and Jimmy even knew how to catch small animals and birds, because his father had taught him official Starfleet survival training when they went camping. If there were some birds left in the next valley, or the valley after that, then Kirk could catch them and all the kids would be okay until someone came to rescue them.

  The plan flashed through Jimmy’s mind in a second. He didn’t know if it could work. But he did know that it had to.

  “What’s the holdup?” Matthew complained.

  “Tell everyone to put on their shoes and slippers,” Jimmy said quietly to Aki. “And wrap up in all the blankets, okay?”

  But Aki shook his head and Jimmy saw tears in his eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” Jimmy asked.

  “They’re not here,” Aki said. “They went after you.”

  Jimmy gently pushed the young boy aside, stepped into the cabin.

  The bunks were stripped of blankets, even sheets. He called the names of the kids he knew. No answer.

  He stepped back into the doorway. “Matthew, they’re not here.”

  Matthew and the red-bandana boys pushed Jimmy back as they stormed into the cabin, using their rifles to pry up the mattresses, kicking open the bathroom door.

  They swore like the older kids—language Jimmy would never use. His father was very strict about that.

  “We’re in so much trouble,” Matthew said. Then he pushed Jimmy against the cabin wall. “Naw, you’re the one in trouble. When Griffyn finds out everyone escaped because of you, you’re off the list, Jimmy.”

  Jimmy saw his way out. “I’ll find ’em, okay? They must’ve gone off the road, tried a shortcut. I bet they’re in the glade by the Leighton farm. That’s the fast way back.”

  Matthew nodded. “Okay, you go through the glade, we’ll circle around on the road and be there when they come out. But if they make it back to the storehouses and Griffyn sees ’em, we’re all off the list, get it? You ruined everything, so all of us have to pay for
it.”

  The other boys glared at Jimmy. He had to get away. “I’ll go now. I’ll run.” He held out his hand to Aki. “C’mon.”

  But Matthew grabbed Aki’s shoulder, pulled him close. “We’ll take care of the brat. You go and you run and I’ll see you on the other side of the glade.”

  Jimmy couldn’t argue. Not with four laser rifles pointed at him.

  “Sure, Matthew,” he said. “I’ll run.” He looked at Aki, knew he wouldn’t see the child again. “I’ll see you, Aki. We’ll catch up with your bahn and oji-san, okay?”

  Aki attempted a brave smile at the mention of his great-grandparents.

  And then, hating himself, knowing that his father would never run from someone needing help, that’s what Jimmy Kirk did.

  And when he heard the laser rifles fire behind him, he ran faster, knowing what a failure he was, knowing how much he had let poor Aki down.

  He didn’t think it would ever be possible to feel worse.

  He was wrong.

  Kirk came out of his haze when he realized his face had just slammed into the paved parade ground.

  “Give me more, Recruit!”

  The order, loud as it was, came from a great distance, almost drowned out by the buzzing in Kirk’s ears and the pounding of his heartbeat.

  “I said, give me more!”

  Kirk realized his arms wouldn’t move. He knew they were there because he could feel them burning along with his chest. But they just lay beside him, useless.

  Even in his haze, though, he knew he shouldn’t offer an apology or an excuse—nothing to set the harriers after him again.

  “Do you hear me?”

  Kirk lay immobile on the ground. If he didn’t play, they couldn’t win.

  Finally, he was aware of the petty officer getting up beside him. The next order was shouted at someone else. “You two—get this shirker on his feet!”

  Kirk felt two pairs of hands grab him under the arms and lift.

  He swayed, unsteady, arms on fire, dimly aware of the petty officers gathering around him again for more.

  They wouldn’t get the better of him, he vowed.