Best Destiny

by Diane Carey

  “We’ll be in the Blue before that little turd gets ten thousand miles out. It’ll be a hundred years before anybody stumbles on a pea pod that size in a sector this wide.” He waved his sausage-thick fingers at the screen and added, “Just let it float away. You slugs get back to work. We’ve got a sucking mess to repair all over this crate. We’ll go back and blow that thing up later.”

  He hoisted himself to the upper gallery, where his sparse hair brushed the ceiling and made him feel taller than he was wide for a change.

  There, he stopped.

  He glared at his son’s face.

  At the grayish eyes of a woman he’d sworn he would forget. At the tag-along hatreds he’d run away from.

  Suspicion, which to Rex was the same as knowing, had told him his son had manipulated him into killing Burgoyne. In an odd way, he was proud. He’d have had to ax Burgoyne sooner or later anyway. The ponytail had just provided the right excuse.

  If he wasn’t my own kid, I’d be scared of him.

  Roy was glaring back in that silence he did so well. The kind that whined in everybody’s ears. That said he was thinking about whoever he was looking at. Making decisions. Judgments. Plans. Calling them names in his head.

  Big Rex balanced most of his considerable weight on one foot. Sweat tracked his wide face in two places. Acrimony crusted his warning.

  “You can stay right there,” he said. “We don’t need your help.”

  The airlock turned slowly. The tiny thrusters alternately puffed and then shut off, seeking their prerecorded heading.

  Through the clear band of unbreakable aluminum that made a window, a boy’s eyes creased.

  As his tiny metal prison turned in space, he lay on his back against the padding, arms down, fingers closed on the sides of the ladder so hard that his hands were cramping. How far away would he have to be before his father would blow the cutter into a million pieces?

  Were they waiting until he was on the other side of the cutter, so the explosion would push him in the right direction—away from the Blue Zone and toward the spacelanes?

  The thoughts were ugly, unavoidable, and persistent. He didn’t expect to see beauty ever again.

  Yet there it was.

  It came to get him as his tube stopped turning and found its course.

  Came even in the middle of tragedy. A savage beauty, but a beauty he could finally see. Glazed fire in space, pearly in the centers, licking outward at each other, then braiding and twisting toward a common center.

  His lips tugged apart, and he breathed, “Wow . . . ”

  The trinary.

  The hungry neutron star pulled and sucked at its two companions, and would keep on even after its witnesses were long gone.

  In the core of crisis, Jimmy discovered in himself the ability to pause for a few seconds, suspend all worries, and appreciate beauty.

  Better to have had those few seconds, in case things didn’t work out.

  “I’ll remember,” he whispered. “Dad, I see it now . . . ”

  He stared at the gorgeous fire of the trinary and wanted desperately to tell somebody. He didn’t want to have his father die without knowing that his son finally saw.

  He didn’t want to have his father die. Period.

  The first time, he had run back home and cowered on Earth and in his unconnected, irrational fourteen-year-old mind had blamed his father for his having to see what happened on Tarsus.

  Now he was two years older, and this time he felt different about what was happening. He’d once thought all his growing up was done, except for getting a little taller. He’d seen an execution, so he’d seen it all. He’d seen space. There wasn’t anything more. Go back to Earth and act damaged.

  But this time he was two years older and knew this was the fault of those pillagers out there and not his father.

  Two years, that was all. Two years, and he saw everything differently than the last time. He’d never noticed before today, but he was changing with every month that went by.

  What would be the difference between sixteen and eighteen? Eighteen and twenty? How much would he change?

  Why had he always admired the pioneers of the American West but not the pioneers of space? Too close, probably. Too familiar with people who’d been there. History tended to make heroism bigger and cleaner.

  But it was the same thing. His father and the others—would they retreat? Veronica sure wouldn’t. Jim had seen that his father wouldn’t. Because they were Starfleet, and this was their reason.

  Starfleet smoothing out the rough spots in space, the U.S. Army setting up forts and hammering out the American frontier for the pioneers, the Canadian Mounties—all the forerunners going out in remote areas, into the spines of danger, insisting that even way out there the laws of common decency and individual rights should be adhered to. He realized how easy it had always been for him and his friends to crow about being advanced, but somebody else had gone out before them and taken the big risk, stood up, and demanded that civilization be civilized. They’d gone out and done the hard part of their era. They’d averaged a grave every hundred yards, but the pioneers had never stopped pioneering. They hadn’t run home and acted damaged.

  Where would humanity be otherwise? If not for the Robert Aprils and George Kirks of Earth’s past?

  Still shivering in the alleys of Europe, probably.

  And here he was, holding a chance to do the hard part of his own era.

  What if he’d been two years wiser and two years angrier and had been there to take some wild cowboy action against the executioner on Tarsus?

  What would he do today?

  “Something, that’s what,” he said aloud. “I’ll be a stampede of one.”

  He didn’t know, and neither had the others known, whether he could survive at all in this tin can, so why waste the chance he might have to change the moment? He’d seen their faces when they told him he’d be all right in here, that it would all hold together. Then they put him in a pressure suit and gave him that kind of handshake that everybody recognizes.

  One plus one equaled four of them and one of him, which didn’t add up.

  “It’s not right . . . it’s not right.”

  His own voice buzzed in his ears like something coming over a speaker, but he clung to the sound.

  Moving in the cramped space, under the tiny faint lights, with Veronica’s disembodied hand clamped onto the respirator unit an inch from his face, he nudged the thrusters and turned his capsule until he could see the ship that had attacked them. He saw its engines. Not so different from any he’d seen before. He knew what engine exhausts looked like, impulse or warp. Those were basically the same anywhere, anytime, any ship.

  And being basically the same, any engine could build up to explosion . . . especially with a detachable airlock crammed up its back end.

  He didn’t listen to the little voices shrieking in his head. The voice that made him always protect himself, always consider himself first—he wasn’t going to listen anymore. He was ready to give.

  In spite of the clumsy work gloves attached to the pressure suit, he got his hands snugly around the thruster controls. This was going to take more than just puffing and turning.

  This would take steering and ramming.

  “Well, Dad,” he uttered, “I promised you I wouldn’t watch, and I’m not going to. I’m too busy.”

  He aimed the capsule as best he could using only his hands and eyes. When he thought he was pointed right and trajectory was right, he fired up all the thrusters.

  Suddenly the crawly green and black ship in front of him was very big and getting bigger damned fast.

  The engines’ exhaust expanded before his eyes as though made of rubber, stretching in all directions. Inside, there was the Hades of violent energy popping and boiling unsteadily. That unsteadiness was the destruction his father had done to their enemies.

  Wider, hotter—closer—

  Jimmy crammed his eyes shut. He was two years o
lder, yes. But still not old enough to want to watch death coming.

  “No! Jimmy! No, no!”

  “George!”

  Robert April held on to the bigger man and dug his heels into the deck, trying to prevent this unthinkable turn of events from killing the father as well as the son, and called across the darkened hold.

  “Carlos! Are you sure?”

  Carlos Florida gripped the breadbox-size monitor with both hands as though about to crawl into the screen. “He’s turning—he’s under power and heading right for their engine exhaust!”

  “My God, I gotta stop him!” George bellowed, yanking free and plunging for the gaping exposed machinery in the forward hull.

  Robert scraped after him and got him by the arm again. “You can’t! You’ll tear us apart if you counterthrust that tractor beam! George!”

  “Let me go!”

  Then Carlos’s voice, heavy and beaten, cut right through them both.

  “It’s gone.”

  Locked in a grapple, the other two men froze and glared at him—two distinct expressions, the postures of devastation.

  “I can’t see it anymore,” Carlos said. He couldn’t look up. “I can’t see it at all . . . might have bounced off and disintegrated . . . crashed . . . or it could’ve gone into their engine core and—”

  The captain cut him off by simply saying, “Carlos.”

  Carlos let his shoulders sink and dropped the officiality he was clinging to. “Sorry, sir.”

  Robert wanted to be in two places at once, but George needed him more than Carlos did.

  George Kirk’s face turned almost as red as his uniform. His hand bit hard into the bent-back hull sheeting, so hard that the ragged edges cut him. Blood broke between his knuckles, slowly traced his fingers, then gathered and trailed down the gray metal.

  “Why’d he do that?” he gasped. “Why’d he do that . . . ”

  “For us, I’m afraid,” Robert balmed.

  As George sank to his knees on the deck, doubled over by anguish, Robert forced him to loosen his lacerated hands before permanent damage took over—as if it hadn’t already.

  George never even felt his hands being cut, or the cuts being wrapped with gauze. He sat slumped on the deck, filthy with dust and metal shavings from the drills they’d used to try to save themselves, and he stared at his own bent knee.

  Past it, he saw Veronica’s supine form lying in its white survival suit, mutilated for the sake of Jimmy.

  “His mother’ll never even know what happened . . . ”

  “Where the hell is it!” Rex Moss thrust his huge body forward to the edge of the creaking command seat and bugged his eyes at the screen. “Where’d it go? Caskie, find out where it went!”

  “Got no sensors on that side!”

  “It bounced off and fell apart,” Dazzo cracked from the port side. “Sensors are not working on that quarter.”

  Big Rex twisted against his own bulk. “No viewers? No nothing? What are you pigs good for?”

  “We’re so banged up,” Caskie said, “beats me we can move at all.”

  “Keep looking for it.”

  “How? A little thing like that?”

  Dazzo backed off from his controls a step and kicked the housing. “Half our sensors down and no shields! How can we tell you where it went?”

  “I’m the captain,” Rex said. “I ask, you find the answers.”

  “Captain the sensors back on line, then.”

  “Drop dead.”

  He stood up. Not a castaway task.

  The forward viewscreen was his enemy. He stared it down. His voice was smoke.

  “I’m done putting up with this bullshit,” he said. “Screw the Blue Zone. Get me some engine power and let’s turn this crate around.”

  Caskie and the Klingon both turned, glowered at the unexpected order, and didn’t move to follow it. Caskie asked, “What’re you gonna do?”

  Sour red and yellow lights cloisonnéd Rex’s domineering mass in the center of the control room.

  “I’m gonna do what I should’ve done in the first place,” he said. “I’m gonna put the construction claw on those suckers, rip the sheets off their hull, and kill ’em all right now.”

  “Jimmy, what were you thinking . . . ”

  Unshrouded agony pressed George Kirk to where he sat on the deck and held him down. His surly talent for digesting the unthinkable almost immediately betrayed him this time just by existing.

  No shock. Just raw, unpadded devastation.

  At his side, demanding composure of himself, Robert April labored through his own grief, clutched to the core by the sound of his friend’s misery.

  He arranged himself off his aching knee and sat down beside George, against the tilted wall.

  “Jimmy didn’t want to watch the game from the bench,” he said pacifically. “He knew we meant to sacrifice ourselves for him and for any who might stumble this way in the future. He’s the same blood and thunder as you are . . . a prodigality you should be proud of tonight.” He swallowed dryly and added, “We must be proud of them both tonight.”

  Together he and George gazed across the dim hold at the white spacesuit and the motionless girl whose face was fortuitously turned away from them. Her chest moved up and down in carefully regulated shallow respiration.

  At least she wasn’t awake to know what had happened to Jimmy, to know that her sacrifice had been for nothing.

  Across the deck, Carlos Florida looked also, then turned away and huddled even closer to his monitors, doing a job that a few small hours ago had been Jimmy’s.

  The hold divided into private places.

  Robert allowed himself a cemetery sigh. “He knew Veronica risked her life for him, and perhaps hoped to return the gesture. At least he believed he did that much. Our two young people . . . both valiant under fire.”

  “Both dead,” George trembled out. “Like us.”

  His face felt like shriveled fruit. Pain drummed behind his eyes, and around his heart, which his son had thought was made of marble.

  Robert let his own throbbing head drop back against the hull wall. A ruddy British pink appled his cheeks, and his otter-brown eyes filled with warm esteem.

  “When an officer disobeys direct orders for the sake of his crew, he’s either hanged . . . or promoted. That’s because of the character of decisions made in the unkind arbiter of the field. Jimmy chose to march into a cannon’s mouth on our behalf. And he knew we could see it all happening . . . perhaps he left a message for you in his final defiance. He wanted to show you that he’d learned what you brought him here to learn.”

  Despite the timbre of his words, his Coventry accent painted a quiet English lane for them to stroll, made sparrows sing where there were only sparks, made a lake with reeds where there was only puddled lubricant, and flew flags where there was no wind.

  “You understand, don’t you, George?” Robert hoped. Salient emotion rose on his face, drew him through a half-dozen expressions, any one of which might have been a tearstain upon a letter home. He turned and pliantly gripped his old friend’s hand, in spite of bandages, in spite of blood, to put to flesh the precious thing for which a boy had sacrificed himself. “He was thinking like a man.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  He tensed. He waited for it. Wondered if it would hurt much.

  Brrraaackkk—

  Were all the superstitions and wishful thinking right? Was there life after death? If he opened his eyes, would he see heaven?

  With my record? Better keep the eyes closed.

  He’d felt the strike, the airlock hitting the enemy ship, felt the muscles of metal give, then the jolt of hitting something tougher than the thing he was in, and a sudden stop. No sound other than the shriek of his tiny, pressurized tomb as it was crammed beyond its capacity to withstand. Just a hard hit, and a hard stop.

  He opened one eye.

  And found himself alive.

  That didn’t make any sense. How could he still be alive
inside a big hot engine?

  There was only one answer to that. So he opened the other eye and looked around.

  Both boots smashed against the inside of his tube.

  “A garbage dump!” he grated. “I killed myself in a garbage dump!”

  Looked like a junkyard with walls. Except that the piles of junk were strapped to the walls and the floor and the ceiling with elastic straps and industrial webbing, and anything else that could hold it. His voice rang bitter and ugly in his ears.

  “Great job. Now we know what legends are made of.”

  Another failure. He’d failed again.

  He grumbled at himself, giving himself a sound to cling to, and a sense that maybe he wasn’t as terrified as his insides were telling him. He was cold and realized he was trembling within his survival suit, his spine straight and locked, his legs the same. Hard to breathe . . . his chest hurt.

  He’d missed somehow! Missed the engine exhaust entirely, and smashed through one of the gashes in the ship. Probably one his own father had put in this ship with his buckshot trick. Through his narrow viewband he could barely see the ragged edge of torn metal and shredded insulation and layered hull material, now a colorful mess like a club sandwich with a big bite taken out of it and the mustard leaking.

  Now what?

  Color—there was some light in here.

  Jimmy craned his neck and spotted two small intermittent docking lights or maybe loading lights, both yellow, both blinking sluggishly. Between them, they made some light most of the time.

  That was why the hull insulation looked like mustard. Yellow lights.

  Hssssssssss

  Jimmy heard it—but only for a few seconds. The sound was fading away. The sound of leakage.

  The tube! Leaking!

  He scrambled for his helmet. Hadn’t even bothered to put it on—he hadn’t needed a helmet on to go blow himself up.

  Where was it? Mounted behind his head. Right. He cranked backward, arching his spine, which ached and told him how tense he’d been until now, how tense he still was. Clumsily he pulled the helmet on and yanked the thing Carlos had pointed to. The cowl activated itself instantly with an airy thok, and the suit sucked tight on his body. All at once he had oxygen-rich air to breathe and a sensation of lightheadedness. Pressurized.