by Diane Carey
Jimmy rolled his eyes. “Gosh, thanks.”
“Now, I’m sullenly serious and you’ll just have to bear it. That’s why I laugh when your father frets that you’ll turn out to be a hoodlum of some kind. I tell him he’s seeing only the streak that will save you some day—may save a lot of people. Who can tell the future? You see, Jim,” he said softly, “a clean soul can’t fight a dirty one and win. I couldn’t have, and I’ve always known it. That’s what you have, and men such as I lack. This isn’t the kind of advice I’d ordinarily offer gents of your age, but, Jimmy, keep that bit of the gangster in you . . . you may need it to do things that men like me can’t find the grit in ourselves to do. Know the rules, my boy, but know when to break them.”
Captain April’s words lay before them like a carpet as they walked the corridors of the great starship. They looked at each other, and each knew the other understood—everything. All the ugly everythings that life was really made of.
“There,” the captain went on, “isn’t that a naughty bit of advice for me to give you, officer and gentleman and Englishman that I am? You won’t tell a soul, though. You’re one of mine, I know. Now, let’s closet that and go see how our favorite copperhead rattlesnake is interrogating your prisoner.”
The interrogation grid down in detention was a lot different from intensive care. Just as ugly, but with a clearly less noble purpose. Jimmy had heard the phrase “rogue’s gallery” somewhere before, but until now he’d never limped the halls of one.
The two of them had to go through four separate levels of security before they were allowed to open the door of the interrogation room.
There, inside a small cubicle, the first thing Jimmy saw was the old family friend and general pest, Drake Reed.
Drake was doing his see?-I’m-a-Security-guard-of-the-first-order imitation in a corner. His brown face was stoic, brows up, collar just a bit raised, sidearm pushed forward on his belt, and his hands behind him in the at-ease position.
In spite of all that, he flashed Jimmy and Captain April a Caribbean smile that was all teeth, then instantly fell back into the on-guard face.
Jimmy hoped that meant things were going all right. Sure meant Drake Reed was glad to see them both as they came in slowly and heard the door panel lock behind them.
They stayed very quiet.
At a small, plain black table, wearing a gray Security prisoner suit and looking spookily correct, sat Roy Moss. He bore damnably few scars from the ordeal he and his father had put others through. His hair was even combed and his ponytail nice and neat.
Across the table, also sitting in deference to a bandaged left calf and the narrow sling on his own arm, was George Kirk.
As Jimmy first saw his father, he felt guilty again. He had a few bandages of his own, but he suddenly wanted to take on some of the wounds others had taken and deal with those for them. Suddenly he was aware that he was limping, but that was all that showed. His father had both hands bandaged, and even a small one on his right cheek. If his dad had a sling and Captain April’s shoulder was in an immobilizer, why couldn’t he get a sling or a crutch or something?
Just as he was realizing how stupid that sounded, Jimmy was pressed by the mood of the room and by Robert April’s firm hand to stand silent against the closed door panel.
“You better start opening those pretty lips, boy,” George Kirk was saying in a growling tone. His bandaged hands gripped the edges of the black table as though in pain. “I want the names of the ships. Every last one.”
Roy not only didn’t respond, but didn’t react. He shifted casually, seeming not to understand that he was expected to participate.
“We’ve downloaded most of your computers,” Jim’s father went on, “and I just got the list of most of the ships you’ve attacked, and it’s incomplete. It’s damaged. You can complete it. You’re going to if I have to peel your face, and I wish to hell I was joking. These mysteries that just got solved . . . have you got any idea of the pain . . . the strain, and the anguish you’ve caused? The people who didn’t know what happened to somebody they loved? Don’t you understand why we want to know?”
He leaned forward toward his prisoner, and the interrogation lights fell on his red hair, there dividing into tiny strand-by-strand spectral patches. His hands gripped the table so hard that Jimmy and the captain winced with empathy.
George shook his head and stared downward, dizzied by the pain he described.
He looked up again.
“Don’t you get it?” he demanded. “It’s one thing to have a person die, to have a memorial service and know what happened . . . but do you know what a mystery does? What not knowing feels like? Have you even bothered to keep track of the people you’ve killed? The families you’ve tortured?”
There was nothing in Roy’s face. The most excoriating nothing imaginable. A nothing that could be boxed and preserved.
Roy Moss was the box. A professional nothing holder.
Jimmy glared at the nineteen-year-old statue and saw what he had been aimed toward, what he could have become. Not only could he have died on one of his crazy rebellions, but he could have done worse. He could have turned into this. Mr. I’m Right. At the expense of any—
A sharp cackle of furniture broke Jimmy’s self-recriminations. The chairs crashed to the sides. The table struck Jimmy’s leg and drove him back into Captain April, and suddenly a carrot-topped thundercloud was crushing the shocked prisoner up against the closest wall.
“Dad!” Jimmy plunged in before his father could hurt himself or his reputation, or even hurt Roy. He had his fingers around his father’s knotted arm, tangled in the sling that was being ignored right now.
Drake Reed flew out of the at-ease position, leapt right over a spinning chair, and suddenly became a fully functional Security man. But, surprisingly, he didn’t push George Kirk away from the attack—in fact, he helped smash Roy Moss flat against the wall and made sure it didn’t turn into a brawl. He held Moss’s wrist and knee against the wall and waited to see what would happen.
Jimmy was trying to figure that out when something pulled him all the way back until he had to let go of his father. Captain April’s voice brushed his ear.
“Jimmy—let your father handle this.”
What? Passive Robert April stopping him from letting his dad peel Roy’s face?
But adults didn’t understand reality—no . . . he knew better than that now. Those old traps wouldn’t catch him anymore. Smart people weren’t that simple. There weren’t molds or forms for men like Robert April or George Kirk.
I’m going to be a man who didn’t come out of a mold. I’m going to be like them . . . like both of them, somehow.
His fists had been twisted in his father’s uniform shirt, but now he backed away. With a small nod he let Captain April know that he understood.
Some things just deserved doing.
The room was small. The table and chairs were on their sides now. All the action was happening near the door panel. All the tough decisions. There, under the ugly and unforgiving entry lights.
George Kirk’s face was as red as his hair. He pressed his prisoner tight to the wall, eyes watering with pure sore fury, not just for the dead but for those who had lived with the mystery. His throat muscles twisted like the cords on a sailing ship hard to the wind, and his teeth were gritted and bared all out.
Held by both men, spread-eagled against the wall with George’s fists under his jaw, Roy Moss didn’t want to be hit, but there wasn’t anything else there. No appreciation for why he was being hit, or for the emotions that were driving him to be hit. He was just Roy, all out for only Roy. The pressure of gauzed hands against his esophagus put only the fear of street bruises in his face. He backed tight up against the wall, an inch or two taller than his assailant. George’s forgotten sling batted casually against both their elbows.
Drake didn’t move, but didn’t relent in holding the prisoner from making any countermoves. He waited. Jimmy connec
ted a glance with him, but everyone was waiting.
George saw the fear in Roy’s face. Didn’t bother him. But he also saw the silky skin and hairless jaw, the smooth brow and the eyes without lines, and that he had knocked loose a few strands of lush brown hair to fall forward with youth’s bounce. He saw a tinge of what might be genuine scare. The kind that truly doesn’t understand because there’s not enough experience. He didn’t know the boy.
The boy, the boy.
“I can’t,” he gagged suddenly.
He pushed backward, still holding Roy there, and glared down at the tiles of the floor between his feet and Roy’s. His arms were straight out, trembling now. He started gasping.
“I can’t . . . ”
Captain April stepped around Jimmy, got George by the shoulders, and pulled him away. Drake stepped back also, keeping Roy Moss at arm’s length, and glaring warningly.
Keeping one eye on Roy too, Jimmy found the presence of mind to right a chair so his father could sit down again. As he arranged the chair, he looked at Roy.
Somehow Roy’s expression hadn’t changed, but somehow—there was a nasty victory in his face. Maybe it was the sudden relaxing of his eyebrows or a new set of his upper lip, but it was there, and it was nasty and Jimmy didn’t like it. Roy hadn’t won. He hadn’t.
Why did he seem to think he had?
Jimmy could only hold on to the back of the chair and glare at him. You didn’t win, you snot. Don’t stand there, blinking at me.
Beside him, his father let himself be steered into the chair, then leaned against Captain April and shook his head over and over, gasping, “I can’t . . . I can’t hit a kid. . . . ”
That was enough. Jimmy sidled away from them, took hold of Roy’s elbow in an authoritative grip, as any good Security officer would—
“I can,” he said.
In the textbook of street survival, it was called a roundhouse right. In Jimmy Kirk terms, it was short, low, quick, and a big surprise, and served a little pouched lip on top. A bit of the dirt.
In anybody’s book, the blockbuster punch knocked the cockiness right out and left Roy Moss flat on the interrogation room floor.
Drake Reed scooted backward on all ten toes, hands in the air, and blurted, “Per-cussion!”
Near the toppled table, Robert April held George by the shoulders, looked down, and just chuckled irreverently.
George was still gasping, but now it was a happy gasp.
“Wow . . . how ’bout that. . . . ”
THIRTY-TWO
USS Enterprise 1701-A
“Captain, massive power drain!”
“All stop! Shut down.”
Something in the way the captain responded made the bridge crew know that he had expected this. Or at least he had expected a change, had been thinking ahead, and was saving up those four words.
The bridge crew flew into response.
“Navigation, all stop, aye!”
“Helm, aye! Full drift, sir!”
“Engineering, aye, all remaining thrust shut down, sir.”
“Long-distance communications just buckled, Captain,” Uhura said loudly but calmly. “Unable to communicate with Starfleet.”
“Don’t try,” Kirk snapped.
“Aye, sir, silent running.”
“Mr. Chekov, calculate our ahead reach and make sure we’re not going to hit anything.”
“Ahead reach, aye,” Chekov responded, already frowning over his navigational instruments. “Calculated, sir.”
“Transfer it to the helm and stand by.”
“Transferring . . . standing by, sir.”
The ensign with the pretty eyes at the starboard submonitors—Devereaux—suddenly gulped a chunk of air and blurted, “Reading flushback again, sir! Magnitude nine!”
“Confirmed.” Spock’s baritone supported her squawk. “But this time—we are the source.”
The captain absorbed that statement and all its dozen implications, then moved only his eyes.
“Funny,” he said. “I didn’t feel us explode, did you?”
Still peering into his monitor, Spock said, “According to any recorded science, the only source of antiproton flushback is the explosion of warp engines. The only source of warp engines is hyperlight vessels.” With unmistakable curiosity, he turned his head and somberly added, “And I can confirm that we did not explode.”
Kirk didn’t wait for reports from anyone else in the bridge crew.
He ignored glances from the two engineers behind him, went straight to his command chair’s commlink and tied himself directly in to Commander Scott in main engineering.
“Scotty, Kirk here. Start talking.”
“Captain, this is Engineer’s Mate Tupperman—Mr. Scott’s unable to respond—he’s hands-on up in the tube, sir!”
“Throw a communicator up there.”
“Yes sir, he asked for one . . . but we had to call down to supply—”
“Scott here, Captain. It’s a core-invasive dampening effect at the matter/antimatter mix level. It negated our warp field. Power slipped in one big drain down to twelve percent before we could grab it back, but I’ve got the twelve in abeyance. We’ve encountered this type of damper before, and I’d bet a bundle we can isolate the invasion and use our remaining twelve percent to push against it. On your orders.”
“No, Scotty, stand by on use of the power. Isolate the invasion formula and prepare to act against it, but for now I want you to maintain an illusion of total shutdown. Keep the twelve percent in abeyance and in the meantime let’s pretend we had a total shutdown.”
Scott paused, then said, “You’re implying it’s not natural? There’s someone you want to corner?”
Jim Kirk got a clean mental image of Scott’s squarish face buckling into a combined snarl and furrow, one eye narrowing as the chief engineer anticipated going after somebody who would do this to their Enterprise. Scotty and the Enterprise. Duck and pond.
“That’s right,” Kirk said. “We may need that twelve percent later, and I want to keep it in my back pocket. For now, play dead.”
“Whoever’s doing this, we may need to distract them while we’re doing the necessary technological voodoo.”
“I know how that works,” the captain said. “I’m usually the distraction.”
Uh . . . aye, you are, at that. I’ll buzz as soon as we have the option, sir. Scott out.”
Without turning, Kirk tossed over his shoulder, “Uhura, get Dr. McCoy back up here. Spock, anything?”
Spock’s elegant form straightened in the upper deck shadows, and he turned to speak quietly to the captain.
“Sir . . . I believe I have a fix on the Bill of Rights,” he said. “Alive and intact.”
A cloudburst of relief crashed over the bridge with such palpable force that every crewman physically wobbled and engaged the purely human tendency to look around to see if anybody else was wobbling.
James Kirk stepped up onto the quarterdeck to Spock’s side and asked, “If Bill of Rights didn’t explode, then what caused the flushback?”
“Evidently it is related to the dampening field that has stopped us.”
Kirk got up out of his command seat and prowled the bridge, glaring at the forward screen, which showed him nothing more than the barren Faramond system and its little star. “What’s the location of the Bill of Rights?”
“She is in stable orbit at the Faramond excavation planet, but otherwise appears immobile.”
“Can we adjust our drift? Come within hail of her?”
“Possibly.”
Spock didn’t like to guess or bluff, or take half-informed stabs, but he had learned to do all of those after decades among humans, who would try anything rather than give up. He stepped closer to the captain and offered a theory that would have turned him inside out two decades ago.
“The dampening problem is more an envelope than a curtain, if you will forgive my metaphors. Your order to review the earlier encounter with Faramond has giv
en me some pause regarding deflector shields, and I analyzed the changes in shield technology over the past fifty years. In keeping with the original design, this ship was mounted with older-style starship shields, of the type that can be focused to specific types of energy. The type meant for hard-core exploration rather than exploration, research, patrol, and transport.”
“In other words,” Kirk said, “Enterprise shielding was made for a savage, unsettled galaxy, meant to guard us when we didn’t know what was past the next star.”
One of Spock’s brows lanced upward. “Bluntly accurate, sir. Bill of Rights’ shields are stronger inch by inch, but are more general and less selective. Enterprise may have a chance that Bill of Rights did not have. We may also be able to actually extend our older style shields to include the Bill of Rights.”
“And communicate with her?”
“Exactly. We may also be able to protect her long enough for her to rebuild her own power.”
The captain’s eyes grew slim and sparkled with angry anticipation. “Do it, Spock,” he said.
Spock nodded toward the helm. “Gentlemen . . . dead slow.”
“Dead slow, aye.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Captain?” Uhura interrupted. “I’m getting something from Captain Roth . . . I think.”
“Why do you think?”
“It’s an old code . . . very faint blips.” She leaned toward her equipment, her wall-relief eyes taking on severity, and she tampered with her earpiece and the equipment that fed it. “Part Morse, part Lonteen’s Light . . . I believe it’s intended to be that way—a combination.”
“Definitely Roth,” Kirk said. “Definitely someone who served in my crew. She knows you’re a specialist in old codes and not every starship has you. It’s a bet I’d take. Can you read it?”
“Yes,” she responded with a touch of hesitant humility now that he’d crowned her. “Attention . . . Enterprise . . . have possession . . . Faramond diggers . . . beamed whole colony . . . ” She frowned, gritted her teeth at her equipment, then shook her head. “Blotted out, Captain. Interference from a third source. Direction is vague . . . a planetary source.”