Star Trek - [Mirror Universe 003]

by Shards

  It was, he finally admitted in the dark and solitude, because he was no leader but a coward, just as he'd always known he was.

  How was it that pitiful female had described her captivity by the Talosians?

  "They own me!"

  They owned Christopher Pike as well, and he would regret it every day of his life.

  "What would a species so powerful possibly want with us?" Marlena wondered.

  Kirk shrugged. "Control over the Empire? Maybe the entire quadrant? Pike's classified report indicates that they're dying out on their world. They lack physical strength. Their technology is in ruins. There must be a reason they didn't destroy Pike and the ship with him."

  "You think he's a spy?" Marlena guessed, stroking his chest.

  "Or something else," Kirk mused. "There's something beyond being able to buy off the right people that protects him-some power these Talosians gave him-but what?"

  "Let's say these creatures gave him some sort of magic, some sort of power," Marlena said. "It would make him a formidable opponent."

  Kirk's eyes had taken on that feral look again. "That just makes it more fun, doesn't it?"

  But how to do it? Kirk wondered. Pike didn't know him, didn't fraternize with mere lieutenant commanders, in fact rarely left the ship even when she was in Spacedock. Aboard, he was surrounded by his cadre of loyal officers and those who would kill anyone if the credits were right.

  Was that it? Kirk wondered. Find out whom to bribe and bribe them? And how was he supposed to go about finding who was willing to kill Pike without tipping off the others? Even if there were some way to get close to him, one-on-one-rumor had it Pike used to box in his prime; if they were peers, that might work, but no-how was it possible to know the limits of the powers these Talosians had given him?

  The data Spock had given Kirk were meticulous, insofar as what the Vulcan knew. But he hadn't been on the planet with Pike; only the women had. Send Marlena to talk to them? Not the frigid Number One, certainly, who would treat an officer's woman like something she'd tracked in on her shoe, but the other one, what was her name-Colt? No. Probably clinging to some silly infatuation with Pike, willing to give her life rather than betray him, hoping he'd choose her as his woman. Kirk had known a few of those, even had to eliminate one, as he'd worked his way up the ranks.

  Besides, Marlena had done her bit. Now it was his turn. Still, try as he might, he couldn't think of a way to get to Pike alone. Maybe he should just let it lie for now.

  But all things come to him who waits, often from the most unexpected sources. And sometimes fortune favors the foolish.

  In the meantime, he was still on medical leave following the disaster aboard the Farragut, and regulations would not allow him to return to duty until he'd been debriefed by what was euphemistically known as a "grief counselor." Kirk knew what that meant, and he didn't want Starfleet shrinks poking around in his head. Their drugs and devices would uncover the truth about how he'd led the crew into the path of the vampire cloud, and while Command would not discipline him for what was essentially within the rules of promotion in this man's fleet, the survivors of some of the dead crewmen might have other ideas, not excluding bribing the shrinks to learn what role Kirk had played in their loved ones' deaths.

  He knew he couldn't avoid a psych debriefing entirely, but he suggested an alternative to SOP. Would Command let him do his required sessions with an old friend, a vetted former Academy member, now second in command at the most prestigious psychiatric facility in the Empire?

  They would. Remembering to look properly solemn, Kirk felt the grin spreading across his face as soon as he was out of HQ and away from the watching devices.

  "Pack your things," he told Marlena. "We're taking a little vacation."

  Command had still not decided who would replace Captain Garrovick, and it was clear to Kirk that lieutenant commander was as far as he could push that envelope. Farragut was in Spacedock, her crew on extended leave until everything was sorted out.

  "A vacation, in a mental hospital?" Marlena wrinkled her nose when he told her. "That sounds...thrilling!"

  "Come on, where's your sense of adventure?" Kirk said. "Simon's an old friend from the Academy. Did I ever tell you how he helped me solve a little...problem I was having with another upperclassman?"

  Finnegan, he thought fondly. You bullied the wrong man. Even death couldn't wipe that stupid grin off your face.

  Simon van Gelder had decided Starfleet wasn't for him, dropped out of the Academy and gone into psychiatry, and rose quickly by the usual methods to assistant director of the Tantalus Penal Colony. But now he was the one who needed a favor.

  "Don't want to say too much on subspace, even on scramble, Jim," van Gelder said, his rough-hewn face filling the comm screen. "But I could really use your help."

  He'd owed van Gelder since the Academy; it was a debt he'd like to have paid off. In exchange for handling his little "problem" (which Kirk assumed meant "disappearing" someone who stood between van Gelder and something he wanted), he'd wangle a nice, bland psych evaluation stating that Lieutenant Commander Kirk showed no long-term sequelae from the trauma of watching his crewmates die and being helpless to save them, was fit to return to duty, and scored high in leadership potential.

  "So, while you're getting therapy, what am I supposed to do?" Marlena pouted. "Sit in a padded cell and do my nails?"

  "You can watch them 'reprogram' the inmates," Kirk suggested. "It's great entertainment. Dr. Adams is actually responsible for the latest refinements in agonizer technology. He holds several demonstrations a year, and people come from all over the Empire to watch."

  Marlena's eyes lit up as he described some of the creative torture techniques developed in Tristan Adams's personal bedlam. "Actually, that does sound like fun." She relented finally. "The better to refine my own techniques, darling." She gave him a little pinch for emphasis, just hard enough to make him wince. "But you have to promise to take me shopping first."

  Kirk groaned theatrically. "I'll have to make captain just to keep you in shoes! Not that you need an excuse to go shopping, but why now?"

  Marlena batted her eyelashes at him. "Well, a girl has to be prepared for all contingencies. I've never been to an insane asylum before. I don't have a thing to wear!"

  Doctors see their patients at their most vulnerable, learn things about them that no one should ever have to know. It was why the suicide rate in the profession was so high.

  Nightly on his rounds, Philip Boyce saw Pike as no one else-not even Pike himself, who had removed all mirrors in his quarters-could see him.

  The crew saw a handsome, virile man, younger than his years, with a pleasant voice and a sparkle in his eye, a man no less cruel than any other senior officer, but at least when he sentenced you to the Booth, he did it with a smile.

  Boyce saw the man behind the mask, a man ruined by alcohol and other bad habits that only gilded his essential dissolution of character. The doctor straightened his shoulders, bracing himself for the nightly horror show that transpired in the captain's quarters as the bloom of youth faded from Pike's features because he couldn't maintain the illusion all the time.

  Only in the privacy of his darkened cabin were the true ravages Pike's double life had visited on him apparent.

  Boyce was the only one permitted to see him this way, aged to his chronological age plus the effects of long-term alcohol abuse. The once luxuriant dark hair with the widow's peak was reduced to thinning strands of gray. The sparkling blue eyes were dulled and red-rimmed, the whites crisscrossed with the broken capillaries of the habitual drunk. His skin was slack, his neck wattled. There was a tremor in his hands that only Boyce's magic potions could cure.

  Boyce didn't know how this shipwreck of a man managed to sustain his youthful appearance whenever he stepped beyond the door of his cabin, and he didn't want to know. He'd run some medical tests on the sly once; they showed nothing unusual, and Boyce had left it at that. He knew when Pike had ch
anged; he didn't want to know why.

  It had begun on that accursed planet no one could talk about on pain of death. Where before Pike had been as ruthless as the next man, crushing his adversaries, stepping over his peers, he had come back from Talos IV a changed man-hesitant, soft, indecisive, and a drunk.

  His ship's doctor managed him on a delicate chemical high-wire act between the amount of alcohol he needed to ingest to get through his day and the amount of counterbalancing pharmaceuticals that would keep him from staggering and slurring his words while at the same time not showing up on random tox screens.

  More often than not, Boyce had to err on the side of caution. More often than not, Pike seemed off his game, occasionally stupid. Mistakes were made, errors of judgment that sometimes got his ship into difficulties from which only a command crew accustomed to covering up for him could extricate it.

  There were hearings on the worst blunders, but the charges never stuck. The few crewmembers foolish enough to file them found that somehow their accounts of what happened conflicted with the ship's logs and with their shipmates' versions. Pike skated every time. And the luckier of his complainants only found themselves transferred off his ship.

  But Boyce dreaded his nightly visits to the captain's cabin almost as much as Pike dreaded letting him in.

  "Here you go," Boyce would say gruffly, trying not to stare at Pike in the darkened cabin as he poured him the first martini of the night.

  Boyce was a well-read man. He remembered an ancient story about a dissolute man who kept a painting of himself as a young man hidden away in an attic; the portrait aged while the man stayed young, until the very end, when all of his crimes revisited him, and he instantly crumbled to dust.

  Boyce had only read the story because it was forbidden, written by some centuries-dead fop during a more permissive age.

  Having read the illicit story, passed around furtively during his med-school years, he'd thought it was silly. Now he confronted the man in that portrait nightly. Christopher Pike was only forty-five, but he looked nearly twice that age.

  Once upon a time, the two men's sharing a drink had been a welcome nightly ritual, a chance for old friends to relax and enjoy a conversation away from the rigors of rank and command and the long knives in the shadows.

  Now neither man spoke, and only one of them drank. After about an hour, Boyce would inject Pike with what he hoped was a sufficient amount of time-released protoacamprosate and other drugs to allow him to keep the buzz from the alcohol without tripping over his own feet when he arrived on the bridge the next morning.

  When the martinis were gone, Boyce went, too, knowing that Pike would sleep at least until the gin wore off, then start his careful daily ritual of Saurian brandy and other substances he had cached all over the ship to sustain him throughout the day.

  Pike wasn't the only ship's captain with a serious alcohol problem. In fact, in this man's fleet, it was hard to find a sober one. It was no job for a man with a conscience. Not that Christopher Pike could be accused of having such an impediment, but something was eating his guts out.

  "They won't leave me alone," he muttered on this particular night. "I keep telling them there's nothing to worry about. All they have to do is look through my eyes to see. If the Empire was going to make a move on them, I'd tell them. Why don't they trust me, Phil?" he pleaded, a look of genuine terror in his faded blue eyes. "Why don't they trust me?"

  He'd made similar outbursts before, and Boyce had always put him off. He did not want to know who "they" were, whether "they" were real or just delirium tremens. He knew himself well enough to know he wouldn't do well under torture. One burst from an agonizer, and he'd sell his own mother. The less he knew about anything, the better.

  "I don't know, Chris," was all he said.

  "Have to trust me..." Pike murmured. "Have to trust me..."

  He'd been sitting on the edge of his bunk at the start of this round. Now he shut his eyes and started to list. Boyce heard him snoring and realized he'd fallen asleep sitting upright. A trickle of drool formed at the corner of his slack-open mouth. Gently, Boyce pushed on his shoulder until Pike tipped over, took his boots off, and lifted his legs onto the bunk.

  He was about to let himself out, but he forced himself to look back one more time. As happened every night, Pike was somehow transformed from broken old man to pretty portrait once again. No matter how many times he watched it happen, Boyce couldn't turn away.

  He was lost in deep and troubled thought, or he'd have checked the corridor first. Instead, he almost collided with Spock. How long had the Vulcan been lurking in the shadows, and why?

  "We need to talk, Doctor," was all Spock said, his grip on Boyce's bicep indicating that it was not a request.

  There were advantages to having a brother who was a famous research biologist, Kirk thought as he eased the sleek little shuttle out of the section of the Planitia Yards reserved for privately owned craft. George Samuel Kirk-Dr. George Samuel Kirk, if you please-had only the year before been granted the Z-Magnees Prize for his work in precision frontal lobotomy, a refinement of an ancient technique to excise "bad" brain cells and render patients docile, if slow-witted-in other words, perfect for work in mines and factories where robotics weren't suitable.

  The advantage to his brother was twofold. One, Sam had no interest in a military career, and Jim had no interest in science unless he could manipulate it to make his life easier. Neither brother had to worry about the other getting in the way of his career and having to be eliminated.

  Two, the prizes and grants and prestigious appointments Sam earned had made him a wealthy man, and an indulgent one. He owned a fleet of shuttles, some with no serial numbers-the better to transport abducted political enemies to his experimental labs unnoticed-and if his kid brother wanted to take one out for a spin to impress the young lady, well, Sam was only too happy to oblige, no questions asked.

  Because Simon van Gelder had been adamant about one thing.

  "Come as a civilian, Jim. If this thing backfires, I don't want Starfleet implicated, and trust me, neither do you."

  There was a third advantage to arriving in orbit around Tantalus in a big-ticket private shuttle. It impressed the hell out of the director of the colony, Dr. Tristan Adams.

  The Tantalus Penal Colony was the last stop for those deemed intractably criminally insane. Technically, there were no longer any such persons in the Empire, now that modern medicine had eliminated the kind of "insanity genes" that made some Imperial citizens incapable of obeying orders.

  "However," Dr. Adams was saying as he showed Kirk and Marlena around, his high forehead furrowed with seriousness, "while no one is born insane anymore, there are still some mutations which evidence in adulthood and, since insanity per se is not a crime, these people are not eliminated but sent to us for long-term treatment."

  Trying to look interested, Kirk suppressed a yawn. Marlena didn't even bother. Bored with peering into the individual padded cells where inmates either lay immobile on their narrow beds or sat upright staring off into the distance, she wanted to see the "reeducation" chambers and had said as much.

  Adams looked at her curiously and stopped lecturing. "We'll discuss that over dinner," was all he said, then moved on down the seemingly endless maze of corridors.

  Deliberately lagging behind Adams in the hope of communicating with van Gelder, who tagged along but so far had said nothing beyond the usual exchange of pleasantries when their shuttle docked, Kirk gave van Gelder a puzzled look. Van Gelder gestured with his chin in Adams's direction, as if to say, Wait for it!

  Coming to a bend in the corridor, Adams stopped abruptly and turned to face his guests. "Dr. James, you know why these patients are here?"