Best Destiny

by Diane Carey

  “Would you like me to take command, George?”

  Jimmy’s attention snapped around. He held his breath and stared at his father. What would happen?

  He never found out.

  Carlos’s sudden cry was both dream and nightmare. “George! Come here, quick! She’s alive!”

  Jimmy sucked in one sharp breath, then quit breathing until his chest started hurting and reminded him to start again. Two shocks hit him—that Veronica could somehow still be alive, and that Carlos was so moved as to call George by his first name.

  George scratched to his feet and shot to Carlos’s side with Robert right behind him.

  “She’s got a heartbeat,” Carlos gasped. “Let’s do it. Can we do it?”

  They were all trembling, breathing in little gusts, trying to think straight, trying to stay calm.

  “We have no facility to treat this,” Robert said. “Supercold burns . . . blood cells crystallized . . . detroyed . . . ice crystals in the cells themselves—exposure killed the flesh and muscle . . . ”

  “She’ll never use the right eye again,” Carlos added.

  The tones of voice were recognizable on almost an instinctive level. No hope—but responsibility to try? Try to save her under these conditions, only to die later because of the conditions?

  “What should we do?” George asked.

  Jimmy winced. He felt crushed between the half-dozen terrible answers to that question. History class. World War II. Troops struggling on foreign soil, behind enemy lines, in the middle of battle, when choices were nightmarishly few. Soldiers so badly mutilated that their unit mates gave them morphine—then more morphine—then all the morphine—until death came to help them all.

  Decent people forced to do these things—

  Was that what the question meant?

  To face death . . . to see someone mutilated nearly to death—two different things, two distinct horrors, and a weird sense of choice.

  Then he heard his father ask, “What would Sarah do?”

  “Oh, Sarah . . . ” Robert murmured his wife’s name under his breath as though wishing she were there at the same instant as being glad she wasn’t. “Immobilize that arm, wrap the leg, stabilize the vitals, first-aid that facial burn. Make her comfortable.”

  “Thermal sheets?” Carlos suggested.

  George swallowed a clump of frustration. “We jettisoned them. Damn, that was stupid!”

  “Maybe the pressure suit. We can warm her up, strap the wounds, keep her from bleeding to death, but . . . ”

  There’s nothing we can do, not here, not like this.

  The unspoken truth dangled around them, twisting with residual puffs of electrical smoke.

  They felt a jolt from outside the ship—a yank that almost would have thrown them off their feet if they hadn’t already been down.

  Without being asked, Carlos crawled toward a monitor that was sitting on the deck with its own cable twisted around it. He studied the grainy image, then frowned and spoke as though he couldn’t be surprised anymore.

  “Tractor beam’s on us again . . . only about one quarter its original power.” He turned to the others. “But I don’t think we’ve got anything left to break it with.”

  George blinked painfully, his eyes creased. “They’re going to pull us into the Blue Zone. They’re going to crush us once and for all.”

  Beside him, Robert April touched the forehead of the injured girl as she began to move her head and to groan faintly.

  Gently he said, “We must face facts . . . ”

  NINETEEN

  “Jimmy,” George called. “Jim, can you give Robert a hand?”

  Maybe they were trying to keep him busy.

  Jimmy wasn’t interested in reasons anymore. He pulled Veronica’s spacesuit back out of the locker, along with two of the personal emergency medical kits, moving like a zombie in a strictly-for-scare campfire story.

  Elsewhere in the ravaged hold, his father and Carlos Florida were doggedly trying to repair their haven before the atmosphere all leaked out, plugging holes the autosealers couldn’t handle, welding torn sheets of the inner hull in case there was another laser hit, generally seeing what was left.

  Moving numbly and without thinking, Jimmy felt as if his mind was on magnification 10. Details, exaggerated before his eyes, possessed him as though crowding out the encroachment of bigger truths. As though dressing a doll, he helped Robert draw the suit onto Veronica’s body, over the wrapped remains of her leg and the tourniquet on the stump of her right arm, now destroyed almost to the shoulder.

  By the time he and the captain closed the suit over the girl’s chest, taunted by her shallow breathing, too steady because of the painkillers they’d given her almost to the point of overdose, Jimmy couldn’t even remember putting the suit on her legs and arms.

  The suit had a built-in retractable cervical collar that the captain gently tugged out to hold Veronica’s head immobile. He had to be careful around the right side of her head—her fluid-caked hair and what was left of her eye now covered by one of several patches on that half of her face.

  The patches didn’t look right. This wasn’t the way a hospital would put them on . . . no one here was a doctor. . . .

  Dulled by shock, Jimmy just watched as Robert broke the silver seal marked “Emergency Only” and poked at the tiny controls that put the suit into medical mode. Jimmy heard the captain’s calm explanation of what the suit was doing every step of the way—automatic monitoring of her vital signs, ongoing intravenous feed of medications, and anything else the captain put into the suit’s medi-guard brackets. From the medical kits he took several finger-size vials and attached them to the brackets. One of them was anesthetic, one was blood coagulant, one was antibiotics, another was something else . . . Jimmy heard, but couldn’t listen.

  “If her heart or breathing stops,” Robert was saying, “the suit will even do cardiopulmonary resuscitation. There are pumps and respirators built in. They have a limited functional time once on the go, of course, but they’ve saved plenty of lives in space during these critical first few hours.”

  Jimmy nodded, but most of it went around him. The suit would take care of her.

  Hours. We don’t have hours. . . .

  “Captain?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  Feeling his forehead crinkle, Jimmy blinked and shook himself. He hadn’t said anything. As he opened his mouth to ask what was going on, he saw Robert April’s pliantly animated face easing the moment, gazing downward, touching the girl’s left cheek—

  —as Veronica blinked up at him with her remaining eye.

  An electrical flinch went through Jimmy’s body. She was awake! She was not only alive—she was awake.

  His mouth dried up as he realized he might have to talk to her. What could he possibly say?

  Veronica’s undamaged left eye was slightly dilated, and she focused with some effort on Robert as he pampered her with his gentle expression.

  “I got lucky again, didn’t I?” she murmured.

  Robert managed a very peaceful grin. “Veronica,” he coddled, “brave as ever.”

  She swallowed with great trouble and licked the side of her mouth that wasn’t taped under the patches. “What’ve I . . . got left?”

  Even through his shock Jimmy could tell that Robert was battling to press the misery out of his expression.

  “Mmm, yes,” the captain began, “your right thigh is a bit torn up, and part of the same hip. I can’t tell about your eye, but I’m certainly no expert. However, there’s . . . not much left of the right arm, darling.”

  She digested his expression through the fog of medication. “That’s okay,” she whispered. “It’s . . . still under . . . warranty.”

  Robert chuckled, but he was fighting himself. Several moments went by as he gathered his composure and fought to keep his expression benign. He leaned a little closer and brushed her one bare cheek with his knuckles, clearly frustrated that it was the only part of
her that he could touch. He couldn’t even dare hold the hand she had left.

  “Is it any wonder,” he said finally, “why Starfleet wanted you so badly?”

  He wiped a bit of moisture from her left eye, and her cheek puffed into a little white ball as she tried to smile.

  “At least,” she began, “it didn’t get my good arm.”

  Jimmy sucked a painful breath as his chest tightened. How could she lie there with half the cells in her body killed, the ship around her falling apart, and say something like that?

  “How do you feel, dear?” Robert asked her.

  “Don’t feel much,” she said, as though she knew that was what he wanted to hear. Even in that condition she was trying to make the captain think he’d done enough for her.

  Incredible.

  A clatter rang through the metal walls from forward, and he flinched out of his thoughts and turned to look.

  Under the forward airlock his father and Carlos were doing something to the hatch that had apparently just fallen off.

  Jimmy shook himself and forced a lucid thought out of the cotton wadding in his head. Fallen off? The hatch wouldn’t fall off. They must have taken it off on purpose. Maybe they were going to use it for a big bullet. He couldn’t guess anymore. He’d never imagined all the bizarre jury-rigging they’d done in the past few hours, or the strange ways they’d found to use seemingly ordinary things that were lying around. When he first came down, he’d have sworn the hold was barren of anything that could be used in a fight, yet here they were, hours after the first deadly attack, still alive, still picking their way forward, and they’d even managed a couple of counterattacks.

  Maybe not enough, but it was something.

  “Jim,” Robert said, “stay with her. I’m going to help your dad if I can.”

  Jimmy scooted a little closer to Veronica and said, “Yes, sir.”

  In a moment he and Veronica were alone. She was trying to turn her head, to look at him now that the captain was gone.

  Sensing that she needed a human face to cling to, Jimmy moved even closer and leaned over her, no matter how it squeezed his heart to have to look at her damaged face.

  “Hi,” he began.

  She whispered back, “Hi.”

  When she smiled at him, he almost choked. “I’m . . . I’m really sorry . . . ”

  That was all he could get out before his throat knotted up.

  “Oh,” she murmured slowly, “they’ll fix me. One arm . . . one eye . . . just call me Admiral Nelson.”

  He frowned. “Who?”

  Picking back through endless classes he’d sworn were too boring to commit to memory, he sifted out the lesson about events in history that changed history. If this hadn’t happened, that never would have. If so-and-so hadn’t been decisive, or had lived two years longer, or had given up when he lost that battle or that argument, or that arm or that eye . . .

  “Yeah,” he uttered, “Horatio Nelson! I remember that! The ship—my dad wanted to take me to see that ship of his. It’s still sitting in cement in England! God, I remember that—”

  “Classic navy,” she said. “He was . . . always my inspiration . . . at the Academy. You know . . . one arm.”

  “That’s right,” Jimmy breathed. “He lost an arm in a battle at sea. And then he lost an eye, and he still commanded the whole British fleet. Hey!” He snapped his fingers. “Trafalgar, right?”

  “Right,” she gurgled. She drew several long, even breaths, mercifully dazed by the medication, but wasn’t fighting what the suit was doing for her.

  “I can’t believe I remember that,” he went on, fixing his eyes on the medical cartridges but seeing something else. “I failed the stupid test . . . how come I’m remembering it now?”

  “’Cuz you need to,” she said. “Makes all the difference.”

  She pulled the answer out as easily as drawing a business card—as though she kept it handy in the emotional survival kit she’d built for herself.

  She licked her swollen lips again. “Did you get to see it?”

  Jimmy came back to the present abruptly. “See what?”

  “The Victory?”

  “Oh,” he uttered. “No, we never made it. Kind of a . . . busy summer that year.”

  “Maybe we’ll go sometime,” she said.

  He shook off the self-embattlement and forced himself to look squarely at her. “If I have anything to do with it,” he said, “we sure will.”

  Her sore mouth tugged into a smile again, and her whisper had a tiny, courageous lilt.

  “Hey . . . something to live for!”

  So much bravery in such a weak noise. The steel rod of it went through Jimmy, and he clung to it and determined that it would straighten his spine and that the fear would be backpocketed from now on.

  Used to thinking of himself as the only person bearing a load, he was suddenly aware of the banging and creaking behind him as his father worked to save them all. There wasn’t anything in his father or in any of the others that was concern for themselves. He had blamed his father for this tragedy, for the deaths of the engineers, and been completely wrong to do that. These were Starfleet people and they all knew their chances of dying in space. They were doing what they believed was best and right, death or not.

  All these other people—they left their families too. Maybe he thought that was normal . . . or worth it . . . all he saw around him were Starfleet people doing the same thing.

  Jimmy knotted his fists, and relived the awful lesson that things he said didn’t necessarily go away thirty seconds later and he couldn’t do damage control on whatever popped out of his mouth when he wanted a fast sting.

  You got me into it.

  “I’ll apologize,” he muttered, eyes wide and fixed again on the survival cartridges.

  Veronica blinked her one dilated eye at him. “Mmmm?”

  “I’ll find the time,” he said. “There’s gotta still be time—there’s gotta be a couple seconds. I’ll get him alone for a couple seconds and just say it.”

  “Jimmy, come here for a minute.”

  His father’s voice was a trumpet out of the night, and suddenly Jimmy couldn’t wait to do anything they asked him to do—anything. They needed him! They needed his help! He still had a chance.

  He spattered an insensible phrase to Veronica, and she uttered back that he should go without worrying about her, and he was on his feet, scrambling his way forward to where the three men were huddled under the open companionway.

  “What can I do?” he asked.

  Robert April took hold of Jimmy by an elbow and said, “It won’t be easy, my boy.”

  “That’s fine,” Jimmy shot back. “I’ll do anything.”

  Hearing that seemed to disturb them more than reassure them. Just as he was wondering what to do about that, his father sighed and said, “Well, okay . . . Carlos, explain it to him.”

  Obviously on edge, he gestured with the screwdriver in his hand at the hatch they were just now reattaching to the bottom of the companionway, and he busied himself working on it. His lips flattened with effort and his elbow went up and down as he put his strength into what he was doing.

  Carlos faced Jimmy and pointed up at the companionway. “This tube is airtight, and it’s detachable for easy maintenance. We’re almost done jury-rigging a portable life-support system—I don’t guess you need to know all the details . . . but it’s kind of a lifeboat now. Kind of an escape pod. We hooked up an automatic SOS beacon, and emergency flares. We also attached several little candlepower thrusters which we pulled off the docking directionals of this hold we’re in. I’m trying to get them to work.”

  “They’ll work,” George ground out with determination.

  “I think so. It’ll be a decent lifeboat if we can just find a way to clamp that respiratory support unit onto the regulators.”

  “There’s got to be some way to do it.”

  Carlos turned back to Jimmy. “The Enterprise should be back in this sect
or in about thirty hours, and they should be able to pick up the beacon—”

  “You’re sending me out?” Jimmy choked. “You’re ejecting me in that thing?”

  “It’s your best chance to survive,” Robert said sedately. “You’ll have to accept the chance, my boy.”

  Frantic that they didn’t understand, Jimmy said, “Oh, I’ll do it! I’ll bring them back for the rest of you! I can do it!”

  He almost bounced on the hope of it. Finally—something he could do right!

  Then he paused in the middle of his excitement and jabbed a finger upward. “But what about those outlaws? Are you going to be able to hold them off till I get back?”

  Nobody answered him.

  He looked at Robert, then Carlos, then back again at Robert. Why weren’t they answering?

  The captain seemed thinner and emotionally drained, his brows moving like soft caterpillars, his maple-sugar hair glittering with metallic dust under one of the meager utility lights that was still working. He looked at George, eyes full of something that only George Kirk could decide, commander or not.

  Only then did Jimmy notice that the cranking of the screwdriver had stopped in the middle of a crank.

  His father was kneeling there under the hatch on one knee, elbow up, where it had stopped, the glow from that same little light turning his hair a dirty terra-cotta, and he was looking at Robert from underneath that arm. He resembled a bad boy who’d been caught breaking into the toy chest.

  The arm went down. His shoulders sagged. He tapped the palm of his bruised hand with the screwdriver and struggled through some inner argument with himself.

  Then he said, “Tell him the truth.”

  Senses suddenly on fire, Jimmy started to pull away. His shoulder bumped an open panel and stopped him. “No . . . ”

  “They’re pulling us into the Blue Zone, Jim,” Robert said. “We’ve barely two hours before we’re swallowed up.”

  “After we eject you in the airlock,” Carlos said, “we’ll flush the impulse drive with any power we’ve got left and blow off the aft end and slam forward through their tractor beam right into that ship. The explosion’ll take care of them.” He tipped his head toward the outside, where their attackers chugged relentlessly through space. “And us too.”