Best Destiny

by Diane Carey

  Over the crates Robert April appeared and straightened up. His gentle features were crushed in discomfort, brown eyes pinched and dull as he supported himself on the angled wall and moved away from where he had been working. His brown hair was mussed, but he was on his feet. Wincing several times, he managed to pull out of his smudged Irish cardigan and drape it over a piece of bent-back sheeting. Rubbing his left shoulder, he stepped back so that Jimmy’s father could climb up into the ceiling—or practically walk up, the way the ship was tilted. George’s upper half vanished into the ceiling right under the impulse engine, one of those places where mistakes really counted.

  Huddling in self-imposed seclusion in the corner, Jimmy turned away and settled back to watching his eight disembodied monitors rather than having to witness the technical activities he couldn’t help with.

  The monitors—just as disturbing. They flashed, crackled, buzzed, and snapped at him, trying to get power from each other through the web of wires. Machines just didn’t have it in them to cooperate or share, or work together in any way. There was something profound about that right now, but Jimmy didn’t feel like being poetic.

  He ended up staring at the monitor that showed the relentless pursuit of the spider ship, coming closer by the minute in the emptiness of space.

  A glance showed him his father’s legs dangling from the open ceiling, never quite relaxed, always with a strained purchase on the hold’s flooring, and he glared with bitterness.

  He turned away again.

  It’s his fault. We wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t come up with this stupid idea. The captain wouldn’t be here. Maybe Thorvaldsen and that other guy wouldn’t be dead. They said they only came out here because April wanted to do Dad a favor. Give him an excuse to haul me into space. That’s the only reason he’s working so hard to get us out of this. It’s his fault and he knows it.

  He talked and talked and talked to himself, feeling sorrier by the moment for the fellow he was talking to, but no matter what, he couldn’t get past the fact that everybody else was handling the fear and working through it.

  But here he was, stricken silent and unable to make himself useful, so he was blaming his father.

  Useful? He couldn’t even think straight.

  “Jimmy Tiberius.”

  With a flinch, Jimmy looked up.

  Robert April sat down beside him, holding his left arm and moving stiffly. “Feel all right?”

  Jimmy shifted and wrapped his arms around his knees. “I guess,” he said. Then he pointed at the captain’s arm. “I should ask you that.”

  “Oh, I’ll get along, never fear.” He settled and tried to find the best position possible on a floor that was meant for crated cargo. “So . . . they’ve made you master of the hold, have they?”

  “What?”

  “You’re in charge of the ship’s hold.” With his good hand he indicated the arc of monitors flickering around them. “Every ship must have a master of the hold, a ship’s boatswain, chiefs of deck, people to whom responsibilities have been delegated. No duty is too small or too menial aboard a ship. If a chap fails to do his duty, then someone else must do it. Things can’t go undone, not even the tiniest thing. Quite old traditions, and quite efficient.”

  “Even on a starship?” Jimmy asked.

  “Especially,” Robert said, “on a starship. You know,” he went on, “your father came up with the name for the Enterprise. Did you know that?”

  Perplexed by the change of subject, Jimmy tried to be cold. “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “Oh, yes. He was involved in her first mission. We rescued a distressed colony from their disabled ship far within a very nasty area of space. I had been planning to name the starship Constitution, but after George risked so much, I thought he deserved . . . oh, a little reward, let’s call it.”

  “That’s some reward,” Jimmy droned, trying not to be impressed while still at least being passably polite to the captain. “What was the big risk?”

  The captain looked at him, brows up. “You mean he never told you?”

  “Never told me. Surprise, surprise.”

  “I see . . . I suppose he took it seriously that some parts of the mission remain top secret . . . but not the part about the rescue. I went down with a head injury, and your father took over the whole operation. And it was a great deal dirtier than anything on the books, I can tell you.”

  Jimmy gave him a sly look. “But that’s all you can tell me, right?”

  “Well . . . yes.”

  “That’s what I thought. What are they doing over there?”

  He pointed to where Carlos was joining his father at the aft end of the hold.

  “They’re cannibalizing some of the interior flux conductors and rechargeable gadgetry in there.”

  “How come . . . ”

  “Beg pardon? How come they’re doing it?”

  Lowering his voice, Jimmy dared to ask, “How come . . . you’re not in charge?”

  Modestly, the captain tilted his head and said, “Oh, there can be only one captain to a mission, my boy.”

  “So what? You rank my dad, don’t you? Why’s he making all the decisions?”

  “I do, yes, but this is his assignment, not mine, you see.” Robert let his head drop back against the hold wall and tried to relax. “I appointed him charge of the cutter, observation of the trinary, and the voyage to Faramond. I can’t arbitrarily take it back now, can I? We would lose the consistency of command. All sorts of things could go wrong. Someday I’ll turn the entire starship over to someone else, and the future of Federation space will be in hands other than mine. There are styles of command as surely as there are styles of dance. Any good commander must understand that, as must any good crew.”

  Jimmy glowered and fixed his gaze on his father and Carlos as they tampered with the mechanisms.

  After a moment he asked, “How are you going to keep other people from using the starship and all that power in ways you didn’t intend?”

  “Oh, I’m not!” the captain said emphatically. “Diversity isn’t any good if it’s only one man’s diversity. Now, is it?”

  Such a quick answer, so well thought out. Obviously this wasn’t the first time such a problem had dogged Robert April’s conscience. Yet he seemed utterly comfortable with what he had just said.

  The idea settled softly around them, all its open possibilities and its inherent strifes gurgling with promise.

  Unable to pop off a challenge—probably because there really wasn’t a good one—Jimmy tucked his chin between his knees and muttered, “Guess not.”

  He felt the captain smiling at him. Maybe saw it out of the corner of his eye.

  “You see, Jimmy,” Robert said on a philosophical sigh, “I think humanity is all right. Mankind is cunning and artful, enthusiastic, and ultimately smart. Oh, we blunder from time to time, sometimes a bit butterfingered while we build on some unclear vision, but we always learn from our blunders and we rarely forget. And we never, ever . . . stop trying.”

  The enthusiasm in his voice, the faith in his tone, the ease of his posture, all belied this environment and the damnable hum of their straining engines.

  “So we’re stubborn,” Jimmy said. “So what?”

  The captain ignored all the so-whats coming out of this boy and smiled warmly again.

  “There are a dozen other civilizations more advanced than humanity, just in known space,” he said. “The Vulcans, Orions, Andorians, the Alpha Centaurians . . . a few others. Yet they keep to themselves while looking down their noses at us. What good is that? Humans have been the only ones to reach out, to ask others to join us in our common future. We’re the only ones to initiate a galactic unity. Oh, how I love the sound of that. . . . ”

  Jimmy didn’t want to look at him, but couldn’t help sensing him there and feeling him there, and drawing strength from him. Somehow Robert April made the death around the corner seem a light-year away.

  Just when Jimmy was thinking
he might get out of this conversation with his ego intact, that gentle voice came back with a new suggestion.

  “You don’t trust others very readily, do you, Jimmy?”

  Cold warnings flushed through him at the captain’s statement. He swallowed hard.

  Then he asked, “Who’ve I got to trust?”

  A long, burdened silence picked at them. Jimmy’s own words lay hard around him until he could feel the weight on his legs and his heart.

  Then the captain asked, “What about your father?”

  This was the question he dreaded most, and had known would inflict itself upon him sometime in this conversation. He thought he was ready for it.

  “What about him?” he challenged. “I don’t see him that often.”

  “Don’t you? That’s odd . . . I remember signing several leaves for him. How much is ‘enough,’ according to you?”

  Embarrassed to find he had no answer, Jimmy offered a shrug as a miserable facsimile.

  “He left my mother,” he said finally.

  “Ah, that lets a little light in,” the captain said. “You’ve resented your father on your mother’s behalf? Not on your own?”

  “I can take care of myself,” Jimmy indignantly verified. “She can’t.”

  “Can’t she? That’s odd . . . she married him while he was a guard at Starfleet Headquarters. She always knew what it meant. There was some difficulty at first, of course—they were both so young . . . in fact, they were on the edge of divorce until he went into the Security Division. Their relationship has always been best off at . . . well, at a distance, if you understand.” Captain April paused, thinking back with a puzzled nostalgia on his face. “As a matter of fact, I don’t recall their having any serious strain between them until . . . oh, I’d say two years ago. Perhaps three.”

  Color raged across Jimmy’s freckled cheeks. He didn’t have to think back to realize who had been the cause of the two or three years of tension.

  “He didn’t have to drag me into space,” he said. “I like Earth. I like sailing. On real water. It’s always space with him. He can have it.”

  “Oh, yes . . . space is a jealous concubine, I know,” Robert said. “It demands a whole heart from those of us who tend it. You see, the Federation doesn’t have an iron-bound coast. It’s incumbent upon Starfleet to constable the settled galaxy wherever we’re called upon. Our colonists depend on us, as do our allies, and, frankly, anyone else who needs help, friend or foe. There’s so much to be done, so many fragile details to tend . . . no one’s life is perfect. If you’re waiting for perfection, you’re liable to spend your life deeply disappointed.”

  “I might never get the chance to get disappointed,” Jimmy said. “Not if we’re going to sit here and—”

  “And get whitewashed, yes. I understand. But it certainly isn’t your poor father’s fault.”

  “He’s the one who hauled me out here, isn’t he? He’s the one who had to be in Starfleet, had to go off to space. He’s the one, not me.”

  Robert lay a hand on his own chest in a knightly fashion. “If you want to blame someone,” he said, “blame me. I dragged your father kicking and screaming into Starfleet. Then I talked him into staying when he pondered going back to Earth. It’s my fault, Jimmy.”

  He tapped his chest with the flat of his hand, as though to borrow a bit of his heartbeat to swear his oath upon.

  Then he added solemnly, “Men like your father don’t come out of every dozen. A man willing to gamble, willing to take his turn at the wheel . . . we simply need people like him so very badly.”

  They sat in silence for a few minutes, aware of the disembodied monitors flickering and burping in front of them. The captain leaned forward once, adjusting something he didn’t like on one of the screens, then settled back again.

  “A Security Division commander has plenty on his hands these days, with more and more interstellar traffic launching every day, every minute.” He gestured forward, at the only screen that showed a staticky picture of the enemy ship closing on them. “These fellows out there, they know they’re in trouble. That bit of hesitation after your father hailed them . . . they know they’ve stumbled upon Starfleet. That means they’re not only in trouble for attacking us, but even if they can explain that—claiming they thought we were someone else or some such crockery—they’re still subject to the theory of infection and contracts of affreightment and other laws of interstellar commerce . . . likely they don’t have those things, so they can’t let us go now even if they made some kind of mistake in the attack. It’s like picking an argument in a pub and finding you’ve picked one with a professional boxer. All the little laws and regulations and treatises we’ve had to hammer into shape to form interstellar law—each one has been an adventure in itself. I’m sure your father’s told you about some of them in his letters—that reminds me! Did your brother Sam manage to stick out those insidious ten-hour sessions in the lab and get his extra embryology credit?”

  Irritated at hearing about his smart older brother, Jimmy hugged his knees and grumbled, “I don’t know. I guess so.”

  “Oh—that reminds me about something else. How did the fishing pond work out? The one you dug out behind your barn? Quite industrious for a boy of fourteen. I recall George reading that and asking if I had a connection whereby he could get fish eggs to stock that pond for you. My goodness, seems like yesterday . . . did the eggs take? Did you get any fish out of it?”

  Puzzled at the way the conversation had turned, Jimmy drew his brows together and muttered, “Got some trout out of it.”

  The captain chuckled softly and gazed at the deck. Finally he shook his head and smiled.

  “Oh, the ribbing your poor father takes for those letters!” he went on. “For going to the trouble of sending real paper letters instead of transmissions . . . he’s endured more hounding than a plebe at the Academy, but that connection is precious to him . . . to know that his family is touching the paper that he touched.”

  Sitting on needles, Jimmy fidgeted and stared past his knees to where his father and the others were working at such a fevered pace, but all he saw was the past.

  “How do you know so much about my family?” he asked.

  “How?” Robert raised his soft brows as though he’d been asked how fish swim. “My dear boy . . . you’re all he talks about.”

  Those words floated around them like the last stanza of a patriotic song, carrying a sentiment above the ground and refusing to let it fade.

  Troubled, pensive, and thoughtful, Jimmy found out what shame tasted like. His lips parted, dry. The moisture they needed was in his eyes.

  For the first time since leaving Earth, there was no razor blade in his response.

  “I . . . quit reading the letters.”

  He sounded like a criminal confessing a crime. Felt like one too.

  Beside him, Robert April’s soft voice turned bleak and disenchanted.

  “Oh, Jimmy . . . ”

  “Where’s my goddamned tractor beam, boy?”

  Big Rex settled with appropriate grunts into a chair meant for a much thinner man.

  The captain’s chair. Though this was satisfying after all these months of putting up with a scavenging dog like Burgoyne, Rex had to do some down and dirty tucking to get himself between the chair’s arms.

  “Boy!” he called again. Now that he was in the chair, he couldn’t turn any farther than the chair would turn, which wasn’t much of a swivel on this model.

  “I’m right behind you. No reason to bellow.” Roy Moss buried his contempt in steadiness and glanced at the back of his father’s bloated neck. “We have only ten percent tractor beam. We can pull them, but we’ll have to get very, very close to get a good grip.”

  “Let’s do it, then. Okenga! Dazzo! Can’t you idiots get any more speed out of this hog?”

  The Klingon poked his head up from the engine room.

  “Not before the coolant compressor is back to twenty percent. You want to p
ush it? Come and do it yourself, human.”

  Down he went, without waiting for a comment from the new leader.

  Unlike Burgoyne, who would’ve demanded more speed at any cost and taken offense at being called “human” even though he was human, Rex Moss didn’t argue. The engineers would want to catch that Starfleet ship as much as he did. They didn’t dare let it go. They’d work hard enough without his hammering at them, and probably work better.

  Behind him, his son noticed the silence and paused to cautiously evaluate it. After a moment Roy ventured, “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  Big Rex tilted his large head without turning. “Like what?”

  “Like trying a few . . . other things before we decide to drag them into the Zone. Things that may let us keep that ship and its mechanisms. Those alloys and the new programming . . . wait until the shields are usable—”

  The captain’s chair cranked to its full third around. Now Rex could glare at his son sidelong, hard, mean.

  Suspicion and familiarity did mutual damage between them. Big Rex deserved every nickname he had ever been given, yet there was a keen, diamondlike edge to his sense of what others were thinking, especially when he felt threatened.

  He could smell subterfuge.

  His eyes carried an immutable dare as he looked at Roy now. In spite of the difficulty of getting into that chair, he grunted forward and levered his bulk out of it. He never took his eyes off Roy as he stood up and turned away from the main screen.

  Backdropped by the flickering image of the ship they were pursuing, he moved toward his son.

  One step, another.

  Still holding his micromechanical tools, Roy didn’t get up. That could get him killed, and he knew it. This wasn’t a good time to be three inches taller than his father. The slightest hint of challenge, the wrong kind of flinch—

  His father’s wide shadow fell upon him, blotted out what pathetic light was left on the bridge. In the harsh threads of red and blue worklights stabbing from the deck rims and the garish contribution of the Rosette Nebula from outside, this massive man became a gargoyle in a burning temple.