by Shards
"Actually," Kirk said, taking both of her small hands in his. "I had something else in mind."
How one man managed to overcome four of Pike's personal guards, more heavily armed than usual and stationed at intervals outside his quarters for extra security with so many civilians onboard, would be a tale told down the years and exaggerated with each telling. Kirk's characteristic guile and skill were augmented by his knowing that, back in their rooms, Marlena was monitoring with the Tantalus device.
"Keep an eye on me," he ordered her, his face more serious than she had ever seen it. "But don't intervene unless I get in trouble."
"You're giving me an awful lot of responsibility," she said, reluctant to touch the device this time, even though they'd practiced it together. "How do you know I won't kill you?"
Even as she said it, Kirk had to remind himself, for all the trappings and sophistication, just how young and vulnerable she really was.
"Because I think you like to watch, but you don't really want to kill personally," he said. "Besides, if anything happens to me..."
She nodded. She knew. Without him as her protector, she would have to start anew, perhaps with someone less appealing, more willing to cast her aside. She had seen what happened to other officers' women when the officers grew tired of them.
So it was with relief that she watched as Kirk took down each of the guards all by himself.
It was too easy, Kirk thought, again wondering if he was, in fact, the intended victim. Maybe it was someone's revenge for the death of Captain Garrovick or a host of other actions from his past come home to roost. The hair on the back of his neck prickled ominously as he pressed the buzzer outside Pike's door.
"Come," said a voice that sounded as if it were coming from the bottom of a well.
Despite his reclusiveness, Kirk had expected to find Pike at least going through the motions of dressing for the festivities, which were already starting on the main rec deck. The absolute darkness he encountered once the door closed startled him, and he prepared for an ambush that didn't come.
"It's all right," the voice said, as the lights came up slowly. "I've been expecting you."
Kirk wasn't sure what he would find in that darkened room, but the sight of the real Christopher Pike took him aback. He recovered himself.
"How did you know it would be me?"
"I didn't," Pike said wearily. "I just knew it would be tonight. You haven't brought a phaser. A knife, then?"
Kirk shook his head. "I promise it will be quick. There's a little something I need you to do for me first..."
Pike gave Kirk what he wanted. As he did so, his shoulders began to heave. He was weeping openly.
"I can't sustain the illusion. Don't let anyone see me like this!"
"Don't worry," Kirk said with a compassion he didn't know he possessed. Why would anyone care what he looked like after death? Apparently, the only thing Pike still had left was his vanity. "No one will see you at all."
Pike sat with his hands in his lap, a man defeated, awaiting his execution. His passivity almost made Kirk hesitate. He'd wanted to savor this death, but Pike was throwing himself on his sword. There was no satisfaction in this. Only the thought of what it would earn him at the end convinced Kirk that he had to go through with it.
He poured Pike a drink from the bottle of Saurian brandy on the desk at his elbow, then poured one for himself.
"I'll take good care of her," he promised. Pike showed no curiosity as Kirk turned to leave. "It won't be long now."
Pike merely nodded, resigned, and Kirk had the courtesy to dim the lights again on his way out. The Tantalus device could find its target even in the dark.
Kirk deliberately walked through the main rec deck on his way to the transporter room. He wanted to make certain he was seen. Then he hurried back to the rooms he shared with Marlena. She stood behind him at the Tantalus device as, with the touch of a button, Christopher Pike ceased to exist.
That night, Kirk slept as soundly as he'd slept the night after Captain Garrovick died, and at first, he thought the old woman's voice was part of a dream. But it was still there in the morning as he straightened the tunic of his dress uniform in the mirror, and it had a quality half thought, half speech, but nothing at all of dream.
James...It is James?
"Who wants to know?" he said aloud, forcing himself not to spin around to see what he couldn't see in the mirror.
We note you with interest. Christopher was weak, unsuitable. You, on the other hand...
"Suitable for what?"
"Who are you talking to?" Marlena murmured muzzily from the breakfast nook, puttering with the replicator.
"No one," Kirk said quickly. "Just rehearsing what I'm going to say when I get to HQ."
An hour later, as he passed through the main gate of Starfleet Headquarters, the tale of Pike's disappearance (kidnapping, murder?) buzzed around him. He bluffed his way past the guards outside the C-in-C's office, where he knew a weekly strategy meeting was in progress. Striding to the foot of the long table before anyone could stop him, he took something small out of a fold in his lieutenant commander's sash and tossed it onto the table so that it slid down the highly polished surface almost into the indignant C-in-C's clasped hands.
It was Pike's captain's insignia. By now, forensics would have found Kirk's fingerprints on the brandy glass, some skin cells where his fists had connected with the security guards' jaws, but he'd asked Pike for this talisman of his office so that there would be no question who had assassinated him, even if no one ever figured out how.
"I've done your job for you," he said quietly, then stood at parade rest, his face devoid of expression.
He figured they would either kill him or give him what he wanted.
They gave him what he wanted. Kirk got his promotion and his ship. His superiors were candid.
"Ships' captains have a way of meeting untimely ends whenever you're in the vicinity," the C-in-C, a crusty old admiral who was rumored to have Klingon ancestry, told him gruffly. "Apparently, the only way to put a stop to it is to promote you to captain yourself."
I will stop here, Kirk told himself. A lesser man would be greedy, use the device to eliminate anyone who irritated him or got in his path, give himself away, end up taken down like a mad dog. Other men might aspire to the admiralty, the Senate, the satrapy of a conquered world. All he wanted was Enterprise and the power to use her, and now he had her.
Unbeknownst to anyone, even Marlena, he also had some powerful newfound "friends" taking up residence inside his head. So the Talosians found him more "suitable" than Pike, did they? The ramifications of that would prove interesting.
He personally installed the Tantalus device in the captain's quarters, cleverly hidden behind a wall panel to be used at his discretion. He knew he would have to use it to keep what he had gained but promised himself that he would use it judiciously.
He only had cause to use it one more time before they left Earth. Easier to get rid of Number One than to explain why he was promoting Spock in her place. There were murmurs among some of the bridge crew, but they eventually subsided. Whatever had made the ship's two senior-most officers disappear, no one else wanted to be next.
Accustoming himself to the feel of the captain's chair for the first time, Kirk sensed Spock's eyes on him from the science station. The ship was at station keeping inside Spacedock, the rest of the crew still reporting in, and they were alone on the bridge except for a couple of engineers running a last-minute diagnostic on the nav station; Kirk waved them toward the turbolift before swinging his chair in Spock's direction.
"Something on your mind?"
Spock chose his words carefully. "I do not subscribe to magic, Captain Kirk. Nevertheless, Captain Pike's utter disappearance, without so much as a transporter trace, has apparently been accomplished by a technology so unfamiliar to me as to seem magical."
Kirk's smile was calculated. "Better get used to working with a magician, Spock. You
never know what else I might have up my sleeve."
He had requested permission to take Enterprise out on a shakedown cruise before the five-year mission. As the youngest captain in Starfleet, he pointed out to his superiors, it would be good for him to "get the feel of her." When he told Marlena, she marveled at him.
"What's that old Earth expression? 'Butter wouldn't melt in your mouth'? I know what you're up to. You're easily the most evil man I've ever known!"
"Why, thank you!" he said with his most endearing smile.
He didn't have to tell Spock where they were going, either. Nor did he have to tell him to alter the ship's logs after the fact.
And he certainly didn't have to tell his newfound friends where he was headed; they could already see it in his mind.
Is this wise, Magistrate? This Kirk is not the weakling Pike was. We have not had time to condition him as we did Pike. Our influence upon his mind may not be as powerful.
Which is why we have asked him to come to us, the Magistrate replied. To solidify the bond that will make him ours.
But the Enterprise that approached the Talos star group this time was not a ship answering what seemed to be an innocent distress call, nor was it the emissary the Talosians were expecting. It was a ship plotting the best possible trajectory to wreak havoc on an enemy world.
The Talosians weren't the first aliens to underestimate James T. Kirk. They certainly wouldn't be the last.
"Their defenses are virtually nonexistent, Captain," Spock reported, having done a long-range scan. "Apparently, they have relied on their power of mind for so many millennia that they have no satellite defense system and no weapons of any kind."
"Pike's sealed reports suggested they could knock a starship out of space with their minds alone," Kirk said. "Let's not give them the opportunity. Ready phaser sweep. Maximum spread, maximum intensity. We'll strip away the atmosphere, and bye-bye, Talos IV."
"Captain." It was Spock. "Request permission to pinpoint scan for the human female, Vina. If she is still alive..."
"Collateral damage," Kirk said tightly, his eyes on the forward screen. He wasn't sure how much longer he could sustain the inner rage Pike's report had indicated was the only thing that could block the Talosians from his mind. He focused on the last time Captain Garrovick had humiliated him in front of the entire crew. Who's sneering now? he thought. "Weapons, on my mark..."
The Magistrate had time for one final thought. It appears we have miscalculated...
Kirk enjoyed the light show, imagined the screams of however many Talosian minds as their fragile bodies disintegrated in the vacuum the phaser blasts left behind. Pike's death had left a bad taste in his mouth, but this washed it away.
Belowdecks, Marlena was watching from the bio lab, stopping work long enough to contemplate the ruthlessness of the man to whom she'd joined her fate.
How does Marlena fit in? she wondered, knowing it would take all her wiles to hold this complex man, but also knowing that she could. As the ruined Talosian world receded on the aft screen, she smiled. She had chosen well.
Ultimately, Enterprise's shakedown cruise was cut short by a subspace message ordering Kirk to set course for a world called Gorlan, where rebel factions had foolishly staged an uprising against their Imperial overlords. En route, Kirk made a brief entry in his personal log.
"Today I did something the Empire will thank me for one day. Now that there is no Talos IV, there is no longer any need for General Order Seven. A telepathic species so powerful should never have been spared in the first place. And nothing so benefits any bureaucracy as the elimination of red tape-swiftly, efficiently, and for the greater good."
The Black Flag
James Swallow
HISTORIAN'S NOTE: This tale is set in 2277, ten years after the events of the Star Trek episode "Mirror, Mirror" and Spock's subsequent rise to power, as chronicled in The Sorrows of Empire from Star Trek Mirror Universe: Glass Empires.
James Swallow is proud to be the only British writer to have worked on a Star Trek television series, creating the original story concepts for the Star Trek Voyager episodes "One" and "Memorial." His other associations with the Star Trek saga include the Terok Nor novel Day of the Vipers; "Closure," "Ordinary Days," and "Seeds of Dissent" for the anthologies Distant Shores, The Sky's the Limit, and Infinity's Prism; scripting the video game Star Trek Invasion; and over four hundred articles in thirteen Star Trek magazines around the world.
Beyond the final frontier, as well as nonfiction work such as Dark Eye: The Films of David Fincher, James also wrote the Sundowners series of steampunk westerns, Jade Dragon, The Butterfly Effect, and fiction in the worlds of Doctor Who (Peacemaker, Singularity, Old Soldiers, and Kingdom of Silver), Warhammer 40,000 (Red Fury, The Flight of the Eisenstein, Faith & Fire, Deus Encarmine, and Deus Sanguinius), Stargate (Halcyon, Relativity, and Nightfall), and 2000AD (Eclipse, Whiteout, and Blood Relative). His other credits include scripts for videogames and audio dramas, including Battlestar Galactica, Blake's 7, and Space 1889.
James Swallow lives in London and is currently at work on his next book.
The deck of the Eighth Happiness vibrated as it was struck again, the resonance humming from one end of the freighter to the other. Griffin lost his footing and fell against the wall of the long corridor that ran the length of the ship's spine.
A sweaty hand grasped his wrist and pulled. He looked up to see the navigator's smoke-dirtied face glaring back at him, wide-eyed and afraid. "You cheapskate!" cried the Proximan. "We're gonna end up dead because of your greed!"
Griffin got to his feet and shook off the other man's grip, scowling. "Stow it, Kendrew. I don't recall any objections from you when I floated the idea of a smuggling run!" He started toward the command pod at the bow of the ship.
"How could you have thought we'd be able to cut through the Taurus Reach without being detected?" Kendrew waved his hands in the air, keeping pace. He was talking loudly to be heard over the whoop of the klaxons. "Didn't you think of that? Didn't you think we'd get caught?"
Griffin cuffed him around the head. "If you don't have anything constructive to say, shut the hell up!" The deck moaned and shuddered again, as if it had been struck by a hammer. Griffin had commanded the Eighth for a long time, and he could read the sounds she made; the ship had been snared by a tractor beam.
What made things worse was that Kendrew was right. Griffin did know better. With hindsight, the idea that this rattletrap ship could sneak through the Reach without encountering any Imperial entanglements seemed idiotic. But she had convinced him it could be done, and like a fool, Griffin had believed her, even let her loose on the warp engines to modify their energy signature. The woman had told him it would work.
He spat. He hadn't thought her kind was capable of lying, but there it was.
"She's on the bridge," said Kendrew, clearly thinking the same way. "I told her to leave, but she wouldn't."
They passed the docking airlock antechamber and reached the hatch to the command pod. Griffin slid the thick door open. "Status?" he called, and got a string of sulky looks from the rest of his crew. "I said, what's the bloody status?"
"Shields have collapsed." The reply was metered and cool. "Engines are offline."
Griffin turned to glare at the woman, and in turn she regarded him with an air of utter unconcern. "How did that happen?" he demanded.
His passenger raised one upswept eyebrow. "This is a light freighter." She pointed to the vessel moving to bear on the bridge's viewscreen. Griffin made out a hull formed from a disc and a collection of interconnected rods. "That is an Imperial cruiser. Do you require me to provide you with a detailed explanation of the ratio to which you are outmatched?"