by David Mack
“Sir, the quotation on page seventy-one of the rates is by Noah Porter, a nineteenth-century president of Yale College, sir!”
The upperclassman smiled. “And what is that quotation, plebe?”
Reciting from memory, Saavik replied, “Sir, the quotation is, ‘Rely on your own strength of body and soul. Take for your star self-reliance, faith—’ ”
“Wrong!” the second-class cadet interrupted, even though Saavik had made no error. He held out his open palm. “Your agonizer, plebe.”
Her hesitation was so brief, she doubted he even noticed it.
She felt her pulse racing and her blood burning with rage. Being punished for an actual error was one thing; being abused when she had committed no infraction made her muscles tense with the urge to strike and her hands ache to close into fists and pummel the smug upperclassman.
I will not succumb to my passions, she told herself, surrendering her agonizer. I am no longer that outcast child on Vulcan. I am in control.
The first jolt of the agonizer turned her thoughts white with pain.
Saavik calmed her fury by remembering Spock’s teachings.
I cannot control the actions of others, so I must master how I react to their actions. Discipline is strength, and strength is power.
A second zap from the agonizer made her feel as if she had been lit on fire. She bit down on her cries of anger and her howls of suffering.
I will not embarrass Spock or Sarek, she promised herself. They have trusted me to see this through. I will not fail them.
The upperclassman waved the agonizer in Saavik’s face. “You look like you want to say something, plebe. Do you want to curse at me?” He grinned at his friend, then looked back at Saavik. “Or maybe you want to beg for mercy?”
There was no right answer. If she asked for mercy, he would punish her for insubordination. If she declined mercy, he would say she asked him to continue “assisting” her. Summoning her defiance, she erred on the side of honor.
Through clenched teeth, she replied, “Sir, no, sir.”
He triggered the agonizer again, unaware he was tilting the balance of Saavik’s inner struggle between discipline and instinct, or that if he tilted it far enough for instinct to prevail, Saavik would snap his neck like a brittle twig—and most important … she would enjoy it.
2274
17
A Secret Called Freedom
Carol Marcus leaned through the doorway of her thirteen-year-old son’s bedroom as she announced, “David! Time for dinner.”
She caught only the end of a snap-quick movement as David hid something behind him while answering, “Okay, Mom. Be there in a second.”
Knowing the proclivities of boys David’s age, Marcus’s gut reaction was suspicion. She stepped farther inside his room and nodded at him. “What are you hiding, young man?”
He held up a data slate and answered in a nonchalant tone, “Nothing, just homework.” His attempt at casual diversion was betrayed by his furtive glances in every direction except toward his mother.
Stepping beside his bed, she planted one hand on her hip and extended the other. “Let me see it.” He froze, locked in a fearful yet defiant stare. Hardening her tone, Marcus added, “David Samuel Marcus, hand me that data slate this instant!”
David’s face twisted into a frown as he grudgingly surrendered the electronic tablet. Marcus plucked it from her son’s hand, scowled at him, and braced herself to see what grotesque entertainment the boy had found.
Perusing the hyperlinked contents loaded on the device, she was both relieved and terrified. David had acquired a substantial collection of unabridged texts by censored anti-authoritarian philosophers. It included tracts by Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill; essays by Thomas Paine; stories by Ayn Rand and George Orwell; poetic reflections on individualism by N. E. Peart; meditations on revolution by Zacarías Manuel de la Rocha; and transcripts of suppressed speeches by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi. Mere possession of such materials might be sufficient grounds for her precious son to be tortured to death or publicly executed as an example to others.
Slack-jawed, Marcus stared at her son. “What are you doing with this?”
Affecting a sheepish cringe, David said, “Reading.”
“Where did you get it?” she demanded.
He shrugged. “It’s not hard to find. You just have to look.”
“Well, you shouldn’t be looking for things like this,” she said, masking her fear with anger. “This is a Starfleet starbase; they monitor transmissions on and off the station. If they detect you downloading something like this—”
“They won’t,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I know how to use the ’crypter.”
“Don’t think you’re so clever,” she admonished him. “Commodore Reyes is no fool, and neither are the people who serve him.” Lifting the slate, she asked, “How many times have you downloaded this sort of thing?”
“Just the once,” David said. “It was compressed and encrypted to look like something else. I was careful.”
“I’ll bet,” Marcus said. “When did you get this file?”
“About a week ago.”
Marcus considered the facts. If the incoming file had been recognized by the station’s comm filters, it likely would have been blocked automatically. Since no one had come to question David about it, it was possible he had evaded a terrible fate thanks to the virtual camouflage provided by Vanguard’s sheer volume of data traffic. Still, there was no point taking chances. She began keying in her security code on the data slate.
David asked, “What are you doing?”
“Deleting this before anyone comes looking for it.”
“Stop! Don’t!” His voice was pitched with such desperation it stayed Marcus’s hand. When she met his pleading gaze, he continued. “You always say information has to be protected. Well, what about this information? Isn’t it valuable? Aren’t you always telling me we need to find ways to question authority? Well, what’s the point if we let them tell us what questions we can ask?”
She was stunned into silence by her son’s tirade. He had always been a very bright student, years ahead of his peers. A few months earlier he had exhausted the station’s secondary education resources, forcing Marcus to enroll him in a long-distance learning program from the Mars Institute of Science, augmented by an independent-study curriculum she administered. Now, barely a teenager, he was already presuming to teach his mother to respect her own lessons.
Looking again at the tablet’s contents, she was struck by what a tragedy it would be to expunge a copy of such hard-to-find knowledge. She could only imagine how many people had risked incarceration, injury, or death to preserve copies of these forbidden texts down through the centuries. Did she, or anyone else, really have the right to erase such a hard-won record of history?
Tapping on the slate’s interface with its stylus, she said, “I’m not deleting it, but I am improving its encryption with one we use in the Vault. From now on, the only people on the station who will be able to unlock this tablet are me and Commodore Reyes—and if we’re lucky, he’ll never know this exists.”
Still wearing a hangdog expression, David asked, “Are you taking it away?”
“That depends what you mean,” she said.
“Are you going to let me keep reading it?”
She arched one eyebrow at the boy as she finished locking the file. “You’ll see it again,” she said. She pointed the stylus into the corners of the ceiling. “But only after I’ve had a chance to add a few more safety precautions in here, to make sure no one’s eavesdropping on us. After that … I think we’ll call this ‘supplemental reading’ for the independent-study portion of your education.”
Her decision drew a smile from the brilliant teen, but Marcus quelled her son’s jubilation with a stern admonition. “Don’t say a word about this outside these quarters,” she said. “No matter how exciting you think this stuff is
, you can’t go around talking about it. Not to anyone, no matter how much you think they might agree with it. People aren’t always what they seem, David—remember that.”
“I will,” he said, mirroring her serious manner. “I promise.”
“Good,” she said, hoping he really understood and wasn’t just humoring her. “Because not everyone will be as sympathetic as I am.”
2275
18
Half the Battle
Captain Zhao Sheng stands in his quarters aboard the I.S.S. Endeavour, regards the agonizer in his hand, and questions everything he has ever believed.
How many times have I let someone else use this to hurt me? What did I ever learn from it except to fear the lash, like every sailor since antiquity?
He has paid close attention to news of Admiral Spock’s accomplishments and reforms. From brokering peace between Elas and Troyius to abolishing the use of agonizers on the Enterprise, the Vulcan iconoclast has challenged Starfleet time and again, and each time has emerged stronger for it.
Zhao wonders how his crew will function without agonizers, without an agony booth, without a constant pall of terror.
He decides to try it and see the results for himself.
Midshipman Second Class Par chim Grum stands at the edge of San Francisco Bay, his back to Starfleet Academy. He takes a small booklet from his uniform pocket, intending to rip it up and hurl its shreds into the moonlit water.
The Tellarite cadet hesitates. For some reason, the book intrigues him.
He reflects on the moment, hours earlier, when he confiscated the small tome from a female Vulcan plebe, whom he caught reading the unsanctioned text while seated on a circular bench beneath an old elm tree near the parade green.
Grum asked accusatorily, “Are those your rates, plebe?”
“Sir, no, sir,” the young woman replied.
“Give them to me.”
“Sir, yes, sir,” the woman said, handing the book to Grum.
He perused the book quickly. It was a compilation of nonsense bordering on sedition. Grum was about to put the plebe on report until he noted the name of the book’s author: Admiral Spock. Stuffing it into his pocket, he barked, “Give me twenty push-ups, plebe!”
The woman performed her penance, and then Grum ordered her to proceed to the next item on her plan of the day.
Now he stands facing the bay with the book in his hands. Something in its words calls out to him. He opens it to a random page and reads what it says.
Each page compels him to read the next one.
When he reaches the end, he hungers for more, so he flips back to the beginning and reads it from its first word. It offers him a vision of a nobler culture for Starfleet, a great society, and a cause worthy of the name of honor.
Grum returns to his barracks and hides the book in his locker.
Lieutenant John Harriman sags like an abandoned marionette as the agonizer booth is powered down. His tormentors open the cylindrical chamber’s front panel, and he collapses to the deck at their feet.
The Andorian and the Tellarite laugh at him as he coughs up blood.
“That should teach you to mind your manners,” says the Tellarite.
The Andorian kicks Harriman in the ribs. “Don’t talk to a captain’s woman unless she talks to you first.” Reaching down, he grabs Harriman’s hair. “Get it?” He pushes Harriman’s face back onto the deck. The Tellarite grunts in disgust.
Harriman can’t even see straight as the two security-division thugs drag him by his feet through the corridors of the I.S.S. Hornet. Despite being dazed and sick from what felt like hours inside the high-tech torture device, he can discern clearly the malicious chortles of his shipmates as he is hauled like garbage through the Paladin-class frigate’s busy corridors.
By the time he hears the door of his quarters swish open, he is ready to vomit. His handlers drop his feet and lift him by his arms. They hurl him inside his quarters. Thrashed and limp, he lands in an awkward position, half on and half off his rack. Finally his guts heave, and he splutters stomach acid and bloody spittle across his bedsheets.
He hears the Andorian and the Tellarite laugh again as they leave his quarters. The Andorian calls out from the doorway, “If you can’t take punishment like a man, maybe you should go serve on Admiral Spock’s ship.” Their cruel guffaws echo from the corridor even after the door hisses shut.
Harriman drifts in and out of consciousness that night. Nightmares plague his sleep. Lingering nausea, stinging wounds, and aching bruises dominate his moments of wakefulness.
Morning comes. Reveille sounds.
A voice on the intraship comm squawks, “All bunks, turn to!”
The wounded lieutenant masters his pain. Stands. Walks to his quarters’ private head. Faces his swollen, damaged face in the mirror. Cracks a mirthless grin and inspects his bloodied, broken teeth.
He fills a glass with water. Rinses his mouth and spits.
Showers. Towels dry. Puts on a clean uniform.
And submits his formal request for transfer to the I.S.S. Enterprise.
Captain Stephen Kornfeld of the I.S.S. Bismarck has a choice to make: open fire, or open hailing frequencies.
Starfleet regulations regarding first contacts in deep space are clear: capture the alien vessel; subdue its crew; remand prisoners to the chief medical officer for vivisection and analysis; and file a full after-action report to Starfleet Command.
But Kornfeld has read Admiral Spock’s treatise on benign first contact. The Vulcan’s ideas make sense to him. They fly in the face of general orders and more than a century of military protocol, but Kornfeld thinks Spock might be on to something. If it works, it might change Starfleet’s rules of engagement forever.
His bridge crew waits for his order. Hands are poised above consoles, waiting to sound Red Alert, raise shields, and lock phasers.
The peculiar-looking vessel on the main viewer drifts closer.
“They’re in firing range, Captain,” says the helmsman.
Kornfeld narrows his eyes and thinks. He swivels his chair and asks his science officer, “Has the alien vessel raised shields or charged weapons?”
“Negative, sir,” replies the young woman at the sensor display.
The captain makes his choice. “Ensign Thiel, open hailing frequencies.”
Commander Hiromi Takeshewada of the I.S.S. Constellation hides in a corner of the ship’s gymnasium, hoping the pounding rhythm of her furious heavy-bag boxing workout will muffle her uncontrollable sobs of rage.
She is a line officer. A combat veteran. Executive officer of Starfleet’s flagship, the second-in-command to Grand Admiral Matthew Decker.
I deserve better than this, she tells herself.
Decker is a martinet, the kind of commanding officer who equates volume with leadership and abuse with discipline. Every day he verbally flays her in the presence of her subordinates and undermines her ability to function as the ship’s executive officer. Some days he hits her. Those are the good days.
On bad days he entertains himself by randomly shocking Takeshewada with her agonizer. The worst days are when he combines his sadistic tendencies with his sexual perversions, forcing her to submit to his sick whims and gross violations while he clutches her agonizer and uses it to inflict jolts of varying severity.
Today was one of those days.
She pounds her gloved fists against the heavy bag and works up a sweat. I still have his stink on me, she realizes, wincing with revulsion. It only makes her hit the bag harder and faster.
She knows an officer of her rank and experience should be exempt from such depredations, even by a flag officer, but to protest is akin to suicide.
Who would I cry to? she asks herself rhetorically. He’s the grand admiral. Top of the food chain. There’s no one who can help me. I’m all alone out here.
Throwing her hands in a frenzy, she loses control. Her punches cease to land with any rhythm or force. She’s just flailing her arms
against the bag, twisting and thrashing and screaming … and then she collapses to the deck, spent and silent.
Takeshewada closes her eyes. Her breathing is loud inside her head. She feels her chest rising and falling, her heart racing, her limbs trembling.
When she opens her eyes, she senses someone standing behind her.