Final Frontier

by Carey, Diane

  T’Cael’s eyes widened and a faint reseda blush rose in his cheeks, yet along with the touch of embarrassment came a small grin of pride. He hesitated, then forced himself to say, “We’ve . . . broken them all.”

  George stood straight. “All?”

  The grin widened, “Yes . . . while your shipwrights might teach us a few things, our cryptographers could return the favor.”

  Kirk’s glare turned ironic. “Great. When this is over, we’ll start a student exchange program.” And even under the moment’s pressure, his lips too slanted into a kind of grin. Though their lives might end here and now, they had shared the experience of a lifetime, of an era. “Okay,” he said, sighing over the blinking lights of the com board, “Sanawey, it’s up to you. Send a message long-range. Make sure they can’t miss overhearing it. Request status of the Federation fleet at the Neutral Zone.”

  Sanawey’s wide brow puckered. “We don’t have any fleet at the Neutral Zone . . . oh. Oh, that’s good, sir. That’s good.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Sanawey pressed his lips tight and fed the message into the broadcast source, carefully adjusting his instruments to be sure the incoming Romulan ships would tap his frequency. “That’s it. It’s off.”

  “Can you send a message and make it seem like it’s coming in from somewhere else?” George asked him.

  Sanawey frowned. “Yeah . . . I think it’s possible . . . if I bounce it off a planet or something—make it ricochet back to us. It’ll be garbled, though. I’ll have to send a tight beam. It’ll bounce back and scatter. You know, that might even be better. It’ll sound static-y.”

  “Good job, Claw.” April clapped the big man’s shoulder. “Complicated, I know. What we need is for you to arrange a message that seems to come back to us from the Neutral Zone, describing the Romulan fleet that’s amassing there. Which ships, which sectors, which escorts, and so on. Pepper it with the details Mr. Cael gave you. Things we couldn’t possibly know if their fleet wasn’t surrounded by undetected Federation ships.”

  Drake folded his arms and said, “It would drive me buzzy if I was them.”

  “How an entire fleet could remain undetected will confound the commanders,” t’Cael confirmed in his subdued manner.

  George glanced at him. “If they knew you were here, we’d never pull this off. We’ve got to convince them they’re being watched.”

  “If they hear the breakdown of their own fleet coming in from unknown sources,” t’Cael said with a little flare of his brows, “they’ll be convinced.”

  “It’d be like meeting a total stranger and having him prove he was psychic by describing in intimate detail the inside of your house,” George said. “How would you feel?”

  “I’d be disturbed,” t’Cael admitted.

  “Let’s disturb them.” He gave Sanawey a nod and the message began its run through the system and outward into the openness of space.

  T’Cael eyed George. “You’re enjoying this, Kirk,” he accused.

  Suddenly self-conscious, George repressed his enthusiasm and admitted, “I’d rather be enjoying it from a distance.”

  But t’Cael looked more amused than disapproving. The Romulan was intrigued by their tactics. More than he was saddened by the choice April had made. The choice to leave his world to its own fate.

  George spun around to face the fore of the bridge and the viewscreen’s picture of Romulan space. “Carlos, glue yourself to the long-range and yell if there’s any change with those two incomings.”

  “Yes,” April approved. “It’ll be our barometer to see if they’re falling for it.”

  “You humans are a crafty lot, aren’t you?” t’Cael murmured as he imagined the panic that was about to strike on the bridges of the Rihannsu motherships. His people would never understand this kind of strategy, and thus could never suspect it.

  Drake sauntered a few steps forward. “George is very good at this kind of crap, sir.”

  “Drake!” George scolded.

  “I meant craft. Sorry. Mispronounced.”

  April smiled thinly, then turned to Sanawey. “How is it?”

  “The message is coming back in, sir. It sounds thready to me, but maybe they won’t pick up the difference.”

  “It should confuse them, if nothing else. Are we ready for stage two?”

  “Are you?” George asked him.

  “As ready as I’ll ever be.” The captain stepped down and maneuvered himself into good broadcast position beside his command chair, rehearsing in his mind while he awaited Sanawey’s signal. A moment later, it came. He clasped his hands behind his back and started speaking.

  “Attention Starfleet Field Command,” he said, speaking broadly and clearly, to make it easy for the Romulans to grasp his meaning. “This is the command ship in Delta Sector. We are experiencing mechanical failure of our invisibility screen, leaving us open to detection by sensors. Since we may give away the position of the concealed fleet, thereby endangering the covert mission into Romulan territory, we’re dropping back to effect repairs. Until our camouflage is secure, I’m reassigning command of this sector to the destroyer Ambush. Duties regarding seizure of the Romulan Homeworlds will be carried out by vessels whose sensor masks are stable and who remain curtained.” He paused, searching for something else to say, and glanced stiffly at George before he went on. His hands clasped tighter behind his back. “Attention destroyer Ambush and covert fleet. This is the command vessel. We are being pursued by two Romulan carriers. If they continue pursuit into Beta Sector, dispatch them immediately. One of their carriers has already been destroyed by our masked fleet. Take action if the two remaining ships do not retreat. Under no circumstance will you effect attack on the Romulan Homeworlds until and unless the Romulan fleet moves into the Neutral Zone. At that time, you will drop your invisibility screens and seize their Homeworlds. Do not acknowledge any further communications. You may give away your secret positions. Captain out.”

  For the first time since he started talking, he took a long breath. On the upper bridge, Sanawey funneled the message out toward a nonexistent attack force.

  April turned expectantly. “Did I overdo it?”

  George looked at t’Cael for comment, but t’Cael simply raised his brows and shrugged. Stepping down to the captain’s side, George peered over Florida’s shoulder. “We’ll know in a minute. Any changes?”

  Florida, as ordered, hadn’t taken his eyes from the helm monitor. “Not yet. They’re still—wait a minute! They’re slowing down. Falling out of hyperlight. Sir, they’ve stopped!”

  George leaned over the helm, not daring to breathe.

  “Captain,” Sanawey began, his hand cupping the earphone in his left ear, “I’m picking up huge amounts of communication between those two ships and one of their home planets.”

  “Ch’Rihan,” t’Cael murmured, imagining what was being said, and what was being said back, imagining being part of it, trying to guess what he would believe if he had heard these wild messages.

  April breathed deeply. “All right . . . all right . . . Carlos, turn us around. A nice leisurely pace . . . say, warp factor two. And let’s be off before they figure us out.”

  With graceful stealth, the starship swung full about, leaving an imaginary dragnet behind to confound the Romulans into letting them go. Could it work? Could a war be fooled out of happening?

  Captain April watched the maneuvers of his starship with tense amazement. He stepped softly up the bridge steps as though hard footfalls would crumble the webby structure they were escaping on. He moved toward t’Cael. “What do you think?” he asked quietly, watching the viewscreen, still expecting Romulan vessels to pop out of nowhere.

  T’Cael folded his arms contemplatively. “My people are conservative, Captain. We attack only when we’re nearly certain we can win. Otherwise we wait and build strength.”

  “We’ve postponed the conflict, is what you’re saying.”

  “I make no promises. But they’
ll never attack until they’re sure the odds are at least balanced. They’ll coil themselves into knots trying to develop an invisibility device.”

  “It’s not possible. Even if it is, it’ll take years.”

  “Let us hope it takes lifetimes.”

  Unintentionally, he had spoken the last few words directly at George Kirk, who had come to stand beneath them on the recessed command bridge, both hands placed on the rail. Kirk said nothing, but was carefully listening.

  The captain, though, had stopped listening and now gazed thoughtfully into the empty screen of stars receding at warp speed. The stars and nebulae and distortions and traces of ship’s energy and debris left behind by the vessels they’d destroyed, an Imperial Swarm, an Imperial mothership . . . all haunted him now, haunted him with both the echo of crushed life and the unanswered question forever echoing in his mind.

  “Or perhaps we’ve set the stage for more mutual suspicion.” He sighed, a private agony rising in his eyes. “I’ve never been so frightened by something that didn’t happen. God, it would’ve been so easy . . . and I came close to saying yes.”

  A step below him, George leaned forward against the rail and somberly asked, “What’s the matter, Robert? We did it.”

  April didn’t look down at him, but instead took a few small steps forward and continued staring at the viewscreen, which now had shifted to a view of the distant Neutral Zone before them. And beyond it, home space. The question unanswered.

  “Did we?” he murmured, not blinking. His gentle face was framed by the cableknit ivory of the sweater, and from behind haloed by the beautiful spacescapes on the monitors lining the upper bridge. “I have to live the rest of my life wondering about the culture we’re leaving behind. Wondering if t’Cael was right all along. And I have to wonder, as long as I live, if I’ve simply handed a war to the next generation.”

  • • •

  “Approaching the Neutral Zone, Captain. We’re almost home free.”

  Florida’s words carried both relief and a sense of the touch-and-go. The danger they had faced still cloyed them. Almost is only almost, they knew, and no trophies sat on their mantels yet.

  Speaking softly, as though he feared he might snap the thin thread of luck, Sanawey listened to the silence from his earphone and reported, “No signs of pursuit, sir.”

  Captain April took in their reports with a single nod. “Prepare to go to warp factor four as soon as we enter the Neutral Zone.”

  His English trill gave elegance to the simple command. Once again he sat in the command chair, a throne he had earned, and it seemed to his crew that he was bottling the anguish of their accidental mission into alien space, cloaking that anguish with common sense. Some of the light had left his eyes, but the lilt was slowly coming back into his voice. They might never know what he was feeling, and gradually they were learning to accept that.

  Even George, although he had been shanghaied into this, felt oddly responsible for the course events had taken, and for whether or not they made it through the home stretch.

  But even he couldn’t manage approaching Robert right now.

  Only when t’Cael slowly turned toward the captain’s chair did George allow himself to be drawn back into that fold. He said nothing, but held himself perfectly still and waited to see what would happen.

  “Captain April,” t’Cael began, his voice rough from strain.

  April broke from his thoughts. “Yes?”

  “I must apologize.”

  “For what?”

  “For trying to force you into making a decision you both believed was wrong. I should not have asked you to sacrifice your people for the sake of mine. You were willing to stand behind your principles no matter the cost. That will bring respect to your Federation as it moves outward through the galaxy. It was improper for me to demand that you behave aggressively. I am ashamed.”

  Softly, with emphasis, April told him, “You’ve no cause to be ashamed. You forced us to face ourselves. No person, no nation is ever the worse for that. We’ve pushed our morals to the breaking point. It isn’t fun, but . . . it’s exploration of a worthy kind.” Now he swiveled around and looked up at George, wistfulness touching his tired features. “I think George and I realize we haven’t been seeing enough of each other’s perceptions. I suppose being run through the wringer is better than being philosophically celibate. We’re both learning, aren’t we, George? But it’ll take someone wiser than the two of us to command this starship. An amalgam of us, probably, if such a person can be found.”

  “Time will find such a person,” t’Cael suggested. “I can only hope that time will also bring wisdom to my people. I, too, find myself thinking new thoughts. I thank you for them.”

  Still feeling ashamed, t’Cael retreated to the upper walkway and moved away from both George and April. George watched him.

  The Romulan kept his back to the rest of the bridge, gazing into one of the small monitors above the Damage and Repair control board starboard of the command area. The monitor was showing a view of aft space—Romulan territory as they swiftly left it behind, and he wondered if he could comfort that which seemed long past comforting.

  T’Cael’s face was barren as George tentatively peeked around at him. For many long moments, long after he knew George was beside him, t’Cael continued to engage himself with the monitor’s lovely representation of his home space. His gaze was deep, his round eyes untelling, and George became suddenly unsure of the spontaneous decision he’d made back on the planetoid, the one that prevented t’Cael the destiny of his choice—death—as opposed to the obscure future he now faced. He would never see his home space, his own people, his family again. True, he could never pass for long as a Vulcan. The first Vulcan that came along would spot him as a fraud in two minutes. His only option would be to live in seclusion, carefully guarding his racial identity, or risk being harassed and questioned or locked up by people—

  Like me, George admitted to himself, unable to bury the color that rose in his cheeks and forced him to look away from t’Cael for a moment. When he looked back again, there was a touch of melancholy on t’Cael’s face.

  “It’ll work out,” George murmured. His voice was so low that he sounded uncommitted. He realized, as he heard himself, what a mistake that was. Better to say nothing at all.

  Unmoving, t’Cael controlled his response. “Where will I fit in?” he asked, so emotionlessly that it sounded almost hypothetical. “There is no place for me now.”

  George moved closer, hoping his eyes conveyed the depth of his promise. Solemnly he said, “Whatever it takes, however long it takes, I’ll personally make sure you have a place in the Federation. I owe you that,” he added, moving still closer. “In fact, I owe you more.”

  A sudden, unexpected warmth came over t’Cael’s face, and he broke his communion with the monitor to look affably at George. “That’s kind of you. It will be difficult.”

  George interlaced his fingers and leaned on the control console. “Well,” he said, “we could drop you off back on that puny little planet you wanted to get stranded on.”

  A smile broke t’Cael’s sorrow, and with a wistful laugh he said, “I wouldn’t want to trouble you.”

  Allowing their intimacy to linger, George returned the grin, even with its fringe of grief for the grand life t’Cael was leaving behind, a forfeit of all earned glories and of the culture he had so hoped to help. After a time, George poked the intercom.

  “Kirk to sickbay.”

  “Sickbay. Poole here.”

  “Doctor, I’m coming down there. I need to talk to you about some cosmetic surgery.”

  “You want me to get your foot out of your mouth?”

  As George watched, t’Cael’s smile widened and he waited for his future to be sealed for him.

  “Something like that. We’ll be right down,” George said, and clicked off without further ceremony. He clasped t’Cael’s arm and said, “Come on.”

  They almost made
it to the turbo-lift before the captain’s voice stopped them.

  “George, where are you going?”

  As t’Cael paused at the turbo-lift doors, George swung around. “Sickbay. And after that I’m going to my quarters for a few minutes. I want to write a letter to the boys . . . I told them a few wrong things, and I’d like to fix that. I won’t be long.”

  April got up and faced the aft of the bridge. “Haven’t you forgotten something?”

  Striding toward the rail, George asked, “Like what?”

  “We had a contract.”

  “About what?”

  “Tiberius.”

  “Oh . . . you had to remember that.”

  “Well?”

  George opened his mouth and closed it at least three times, trying to find some way to explain. “Well, it’s . . . hard to describe.”

  “Try.”

  “I . . . oh hell, I can’t.” He swung around again, toward the lift.

  “George! Welching on a promise?”

  And around a third time. “Sorry . . . I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  April stepped onto the upper bridge and approached the lift. “But George, this is criminal!”

  A helpless hand flagged between them. “You’ll just have to live with it.” He stepped into the lift, leaving April disappointed behind him.

  “But what are you going to tell Jimmy?”

  George joined t’Cael, who was holding the lift control. “I don’t know,” he said, frustrated. “I’ll lie. I’ll tell him it was my grandfather’s name or something.”

  “But, George!”

  “Well, I can’t tell him the truth, can I?” George grasped the controls from t’Cael.

  The lift doors closed.

  “I don’t bloody know!” April cried.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  CHIEF BIO-ENGINEER JON Kupper settled back into his desk lounge with an exhausted slap. The lounge rocked back to a more comfortable angle, but he was far beyond hope of comfort. Before him through the viewport, mocking, flickered the splendor of the ion storm. Pure destruction. Pure electrokinetic chaos. It flashed and sparkled endlessly, making a frame of voltage around the reflection of his own tired young features.