by Diane Carey
“No—” Jimmy repeated. “I can—I can bring the starship back!”
“There won’t be time,” his father said. “As soon as they pull us into the Blue Zone, we’re all dead anyway.”
Robert nodded and patted Jimmy’s shoulder. “It’ll be your job to advise Starfleet of what’s happened here.”
Seeing the protest rise on his son’s face, George went on. “We’re going to do what we have to do. As soon as you’re out of range, we’ll blow the aft end, ram into that ship, and demolish them so they don’t have a chance to throw another tractor on you. We’ll all go up and that’ll be that. At least they won’t do this to anyone else.” He stopped, took a harsh breath, collected himself, and added, “You’ll understand someday.”
Jimmy stood before them with his mouth gaping and nothing coming out of it. Thoughts clogged his head, excuses, arguments, defiances—
But nothing that would make any sense.
Two hours. The Enterprise coming back in thirty.
As soon as they entered that Blue Zone, they were dead. Even if they managed to launch him in the airlock, the others were still dead. Captain April, Lieutenant Florida, Dad . . . Veronica, who had already paid her price . . .
He licked his lips and could almost taste the nobility with which the others were facing death for his sake. His sense of obligation started to scream. If anyone should sacrifice, it should be him. He was the only one who hadn’t given anything yet.
Forcing himself not to stammer, he asked, “Why don’t you send Captain April? He’s got a better chance than I do. He knows more about—”
“Jimmy, we don’t have time for this,” George said. “You’re just going to have to do what I say.”
He stuffed an O-2 canister into Jimmy’s hand.
Standing there holding the canister, Jimmy squinted at him. What had just happened?
There was something seriously different about his father’s voice. A no-kidding difference. A this-is-it difference.
“We’ll be ready in about five minutes,” Robert said, steering Jimmy away. “You go and get into a pressure suit. You’ll need to have it on as a backup. Go ahead . . . see if you can’t get used to the idea, eh?”
Just like that. Get used to it?
He stood a few steps away, holding the canister in one hand and nothing in the other, without a clue what to say to make the situation any better.
Someone handed him a pressure suit—he didn’t even notice who. Limb by limb he pulled it on, staring mostly at the deck.
The others were back to work, as though they’d just told him he was going to have to be late for team wrestling practice.
“I still need a clamp.”
“Where are those vise-grips Veronica was using earlier?”
“Welded into the wall, holding the ship together.”
“What about the other ones?”
“In the walls.”
“Damn.”
“Gentlemen, there must be one last bit of resourcefulness left between us to hold this in place, surely.”
“Can’t we tape it into place? Medical tape, maybe?”
“Wouldn’t hold. The unit vibrates.”
“Maybe it can free-float.”
“I wouldn’t trust it. One bump, and it could start leaking. Cut his survival time in half.”
“There’s gotta be something left. There’s gotta be something.”
“Sir . . . sir . . . ”
Out of the jumble of voices Jimmy found himself roused by the weakest one. He spun around, and saw Veronica blinking at them from across the deck, where she lay in the puffy white spacesuit.
Surprisingly, it was George who pushed his way past the others, past Jim, and knelt at her side.
“Yeah, honey? What do you need?”
“Use my hand,” she said weakly. “You know . . . as a clamp.”
George gazed at her.
Not four feet away, the disembodied prosthetic hand lay on the deck in the puddle of pink fluid, looking pasty but too human, right down to the end of the wrist, where the attachment cowl showed its synthetic muscles and connections still partly attached to the torn-off piece of her forearm. The fingers were still spread in that position of shock and surprise, reminding them all of what Veronica must have felt as the coolant blew over half her body. The ring finger was even twitching a little.
No one else moved.
Veronica seemed to sense the reluctance, and she was ready. She blinked up at George.
“It’s just a tool,” she murmured. “Let me help save him.”
A few feet away, listening, Jimmy Kirk grew up ten years in ten seconds.
He watched as his father flattened his lips in a regretful excuse for a grin, brushed Veronica Hall’s bangs out of her remaining eye, then made very little ceremony about doing what she asked. He simply reached over her, scooped the prosthetic hand from the deck, shook the pink fluid and torn muscle tissue off, and got up.
“Good suggestion, Ensign,” he said.
“Thank you, sir,” she gurgled up at him. “He’s . . . a good shipmate.”
George nodded awkwardly—the moment was very hard for him, hard for them all. Then he hurried toward the airlock.
As he passed, he took Jimmy’s arm.
“Come on, pal. Let’s do this.”
Carlos Florida strained to point into the two-foot-diameter airlock at what he was talking about, without crowding his student out entirely.
“You’ve got these little candlepower thrusters here, here . . . there, and up there. They swivel, like this. I’ve got them set to steer you away from the trinary and back toward the spacelanes. Here’s the light. Sorry there isn’t any more than that. It’s on a very small battery, but I know nobody likes to sit in the dark. Up there is the observation window. It’s narrow, but it goes all the way around, although I don’t know what you’re going to have to look at. On the bottom left is your SOS attachment. It’ll automatically broadcast on subspace, and you don’t even have to touch it. We couldn’t get it to fit very well, so try to not bump it or anything. Somebody’ll spot you easy. The Enterprise, or somebody. Think you understand everything? The SOS? The flares? The distress signals? And how to alter your course?”
Carlos wrapped up his crash course in survival, and couldn’t keep his emotions from bumping up against a touch of pride that they’d managed to do this.
Unable to speak as his own throat dried up, Jimmy managed a nod. He knelt there at the bottom of the airlock, holding his survival helmet, all the lessons about how to work it still floating loose in his brain. Pull it on, yank this latch, it’ll automatically attach itself to the suit’s cowl, the airlock could rupture, the suit’ll offer another ten hours of such-and-such. The whole contraption, airlock, suit, and all, the whole plan wasn’t exactly foolproof. The whole thing assumed their attackers were too damaged to throw another tractor beam on the airlock as it puffed merrily away from the scene of their crime.
Carlos fidgeted. All these things were going through his head too.
“Now, you realize . . . could be days before anybody spots your signal . . . right?”
Obviously he was afraid a sixteen-year-old who’d never been hungry might not understand.
Determined to make him feel better, Jimmy said, “Well, you know how teenagers are always trying to get time alone.”
There was some ballast in seeing that Carlos seemed reassured. “Wish you luck,” Carlos said. He offered a handshake. “You’re a good shipmate, Jim.”
The handshake was surprisingly soulful in this chilly, struggling environment.
Jimmy started to point to Veronica and stammered, “That’s what she—”
He cut himself off and just returned the handshake as warmheartedly as he could, not wanting to diminish Carlos’s compliment. He was absolutely set on not complaining or arguing or saying the wrong thing, or doing more than he already had to make anybody feel bad.
That effort almost twisted his neck off as they l
ed him to the airlock and prepared the vaultlike panels that would come down just before the airlock could be detached.
As Carlos and George worked on the vault panels, Robert April collected Jimmy to one side and plied him with that soft-spirited gaze.
“Best of British luck, old fellow,” the captain said. “Brace up, be stalwart. Just do your job, no questions . . . it’s all that’s asked of a member of the crew, eh?”
Jimmy cleared his throat and said, “Yes, sir . . . I’ll do my best.”
“That’s the spirit.”
Dauntlessly, Robert didn’t make a scene in spite of the sensibilities bubbling on his face. He offered an emboldening handshake, just as Carlos had, then patted Jimmy’s hand once he got hold of it.
“Proud to have had you aboard, my boy,” he said. “You’ve been a good shipmate.”
Jimmy couldn’t manage to respond. Was there something about that phrase?
Or maybe just the idea . . .
Shame chewed at his ankles. What if they were just being nice to him so he wouldn’t feel bad that they were all going to die for him?
Worst of all was the half-truth. He sure hadn’t started out to be a very good shipmate. Suddenly all he wanted was to really be one.
“Panels are set, sir,” Carlos said from the port side.
George nodded and simply said, “Thanks.” Then he motioned Jimmy toward the airlock hatch.
The others left father and son to do this alone.
Typically a man to whom tender moments were faux pas waiting to happen, George Kirk simply pressed his lips tight, furrowed his brow, and when the right words eluded him yet again, called upon the simplest ones.
The two stood simply looking, as though trying to memorize each other’s face.
He swallowed, parted his lips, and said, “I just want one thing.”
Jimmy squinted in empathy, shrugged, and uttered, “Guess I can handle one thing.”
George blinked at the floor, then found whatever he needed inside himself to look up again.
“Promise you won’t watch.”
As though caught in two nets, neither moved. The sound rolled and rolled. The idea haunted their imaginations.
Then George added, “I’m sorry, son.”
A sound of pain. The words hurt him, simple or not. The pain showed in his face.
Helplessly, he motioned Jimmy up into the companionway.
Perhaps a kind of shock took over; there would never be a satisfactory compilation of the emotions gripping either of them at that moment, but Jimmy found himself up inside the tube, where there was room to turn around, but not much more. The ladder had been padded into a kind of cot, and he was lying on it, wondering how the longest hours of his life suddenly seemed to have flashed by. Wasn’t he going to get a few more minutes? He needed only a couple more—
Below, George reached up, rubbed his son’s knee the way he used to when little Jimmy was afraid at night.
He tried to speak, but couldn’t.
Jimmy gazed back at him from the top of the tube.
Then someone said something. Robert April’s priestly voice. The captain’s hand came into the picture, and George stepped away.
His father’s face . . . the last thing Jimmy saw before the hatch bumped closed and the vault panels were drawn to make the hold safe once the airlock was blown.
That was it. That was the difference! The new thing he heard in his father’s voice—a tone that said they would never see each other again. The past no longer mattered, because now there was no future for them together.
In the nearly dark tube, lit only by two small orange backup lights, Jimmy touched the inner skin of the airlock. “Dad?”
They couldn’t hear him. They were right out there, inches away, but they couldn’t hear him. The airlock was soundproof, airtight—
“Dad?” he said again, louder.
“I’m sorry, son . . . I’m sorry, son.”
Jimmy stared at the tiny thruster switches and the blinking lights.
Right, left, up, down, reverse. Like a child’s toy.
He stared and stared.
For the first time in his life he saw a true choice of paths—and he had his hands on the controls.
TWENTY
“They’re launching something!”
“You’re spacesick. That’s a research cutter. How can they have anything to launch?”
“You come and see for yourself, then.”
Big Rex took a long time to hoist himself from his seat and appear at Lou Caskie’s side and shove him away so they could both see the secondary screen. The crackly main viewer in front of the command station was now showing only a corner of the Starfleet ship, enough to prove it was still being pulled along behind them.
The little viewer, clearer than the main one, showed a little blue and silver tube slowly moving on its own.
Big Rex squinted at the frosty screen. “Maybe it’s another SOS buoy. Split the main screen and stick it up there.”
Caskie swore at his controls as he pecked and pulled at them. The main screen fizzed, flashed, then divided to show a poor view of the ejected tube over the partial view of the cutter.
“How big is it?” Roy craned his neck and called from where he was feverishly trying to restore their shields.
Caskie shrugged his knobby shoulders. “Size of a coffin.”
“Oh, that’s all,” Big Rex said. “They’re giving themselves a funeral!”
Laughter rolled around the dark helm area.
Behind Big Rex and Caskie, the Andorian engineer and a handful of the crew from below decks had come up to watch the win—a kind of tradition among thieves—and now they laughed and shook each other’s hands. Big Rex’s body wobbled like a pile of water balloons as he chuckled his way back to his command seat.
Behind them all, Roy hunkered at the deflector auxiliary, tight-lipped with sequestered rage. Progressive stupidity had allowed them to damage their prize, and now he had to get the shields back before they could go into the Blue Zone and finish wrecking it. Just to survive. That was all they’d get out of this one.
If these fools had listened to him, they’d have hulled the Starfleet cutter in several small places with a surgical laser, let the crew die, then collected their “salvage.” Instead, the morons were laughing and backslapping each other and celebrating a disaster as though they’d won something.
But this. This.
Pushing his moment of control further and further into the future, just as he had drawn it to his fingertips.
Keep the goal in mind. Do whatever it requires. Tolerate anyone.
He felt the future ticking. This Starfleet cutter must have been a supply ship for Faramond. Nobody would come out here just to look at a couple of stars immolating each other. They were going to poke around Faramond with the rest of those archaeological bughunters. They thought they were just looking for artifacts and small cultural revelations from an old civilization.
How long before one of the fools found out what he had found out?
A race against time and chance, but a race that he could run just so fast. Maybe a year. Maybe six months. Everyone would get out of his way.
He crawled out from where he was working, unfolded his legs, and looked past the back of his father’s fleshy neck at the viewscreen.
“Hit it with the laser,” somebody from the crew said.
“Coolants are blown,” the Andorian engineer said. “All we can do to make the tractor work.”
Lou Caskie dabbed at the open cut on his head from the buckshot hits they’d taken before. “Why don’t we dump the cutter and suck on that little thing? They’re dead in space anyway. Ain’t going nowhere.”
“Even a rabbit can smell a trap,” Roy spoke up. Contempt dripped from his tone. “They could want us to bring it on board.”
Before his father could snap an insult, a skeletal human from the crew, whose name Roy didn’t even know, blurted, “A bomb? You mean it’s a bomb?”
/> Roy lifted one shoulder. “I might do it if I were them.” Then he eyed the mob he was reluctantly running with, and added, “Considering.”
“Let’s push it away, then!” The bony man twisted around, looking from one to the other of the crew, trying to find somebody to agree with him.
“If it’s an SOS,” Big Rex said, “they could be wanting us to push it away for them.”
“That’s right,” Roy said.
He enjoyed how everyone stared at him, surprised. Defending his father? Ah, to keep them guessing, to remain unpredictable—a good game.
“They hit our coolants,” he added. “They know we have tractors but no lasers.”
Their cook, a mask-faced, pug-nosed Tellarite, asked, “How do they know?”
Roy’s delight fizzled. He glared at the Tellarite and spelled out, “Are we shooting at them?”
The Tellarite blinked around, trying to see through his receded eyes, which Tellarites couldn’t do very well, and was typically insulted just by being answered in some other way than he wanted, but said nothing else. He was new enough in the crew that he hadn’t started an argument yet, though he and the Klingon had been spitting at each other so much, the rest of the crew wouldn’t even walk between them unless they had their backs to each other.
“If it’s a bomb,” Big Rex went on, “it’ll just blow up out in space. If it’s an SOS, it would take fifty years just to get out of the solar system on those tiny thrusters. They’re betting we’ll get nervous and spin it out of the area and do their job for ’em.” He hunkered down and glared at the split screen. “Why don’t we have a backup tractor beam?”
“Why use up time and power?” Dazzo rumbled from the port side controls. “We never needed backup tractors before. We attack only one thing at a time.”
Big Rex slumped forward, shook his head, and complained, “Can’t you measles ever think ahead?”
Staying where nobody could hear him, Roy arched his aching back. “Question answers itself.”
When nothing happened in the next few seconds and that small blue and silver tube just puffed and turned on the split screen, their unappointed new leader shoved out of his chair and lumbered toward the aft of the bridge, one eye on the forward screen as he made his decision.