Best Destiny

by Diane Carey

  Kirk swung around to Spock, partly to leave Uhura alone with her aggravation, and partly to grab the sense of impending advantage he felt picking at him. “They beamed up the archaeologists!” he said. He looked hungrily at the main viewer, which showcased the dinky star system, its ornery little star, and the four unimpressive planets of which Faramond was one deep space chunk of dirt. “Better hostages aboard Bill of Rights than sitting in a cave on Faramond. Uhura, stop attempting to communicate with Bill of Rights. Try to break through to Faramond.”

  She turned toward him. “Will there be anyone there now, sir?”

  “We’ll know in a minute.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  She tapped and annoyed her instruments until they chirped at her.

  “Sir, you’re right,” she said. “Making contact. I can give you audio.”

  When she gave him the nod, he stepped down to his command center, turned to that main viewer, and talked to open space.

  “This is Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise. I want to speak to Roy Moss.”

  A dim, eerie pause held the breath of all who heard. Clearly, there was someone on the other end, listening.

  Everyone on the bridge knew what that sounded like. It was different from the sound of no contact.

  The pause was broken only by the meager interruption of the turbolift door emitting Dr. McCoy. He came down to the captain’s level just in time to hear a new voice from the machines.

  Kirk concentrated on the screen and repeated, “This is the USS Enterprise, James T. Kirk commanding. Is Roy Moss on the planet?”

  He almost felt foolish asking again, but the whole idea was foolish. Just a hunch. Just a guess—

  “This is Roy Moss. Who up there knows who I am?”

  “I’ll be damned,” the captain whispered.

  He circled his own chair, one hand lingering upon it. He digested that voice. Tried to hear the sound again in his mind, then reach back forty-five years to see if it was the same. He couldn’t tell. Forty-five was a lot of years for a voice to stay the same.

  “This is James Kirk,” he said again.

  “So?”

  Dr. McCoy stepped down and leaned toward him. “He doesn’t remember you, Jim,” he murmured. “It all fits.”

  Kirk wanted to commend the doctor for having done his homework, but the torch of anger that burned through him caught all his attention.

  “He almost killed me, but he doesn’t have the humanity to remember. I remember every crewman and even every enemy who died under my command, but he doesn’t remember me.”

  McCoy leaned even closer and muttered, “People don’t impress him.”

  Kirk’s brows tightened downward and he raised his voice. “You’ve come a long way from the Blue Zone, Moss. But you’re still a petty little tyrant, aren’t you? Still just stealing.”

  “Who are you!”

  Another pause like the first one—a pause of thought or realization.

  “Ohhhhh! . . . Jim Kirk! I know who you are! I haven’t thought of you in years!”

  “Nor I you,” Kirk shoved back without a beat.

  “How did you find me? Why did you come?”

  “You’re holding a starship hostage. Did you think we wouldn’t notice?”

  “How did you even know? They can’t contact you, there’s no long-distance blipping, they can’t move or signal—”

  Squinting bitterly, Kirk taunted, “Maybe we’re smarter than you are.”

  “Yes, you’re brilliant as ever, Kirk, caught in the same trap as the other ship. Sure, I remember you now. I ought to leave your ship dead in space for what you did to me. What the hell, I just might. I don’t need two ships.”

  Kirk started to speak again, but Ensign Devereaux squeaked, “Sir—uh-oh!”

  “Specify, Ensign,” Spock told her.

  “There’s a . . . some kind of a laser hitting our hull, sir. It’s old and weak, but it’s heating up on our unprotected hull.”

  “Scott to Bridge. Captain, you might have to use that twelve percent you’re holding back for the shields. That’s a weak wee heater, but it’s building up on us. Permission to power up?”

  “I agree. Maybe we can make a deal. First you tell me what this is all about. What is it you want this time, Roy?”

  “Why don’t you just beam on down and I’ll show you.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because you’re itching to. For the same reason you couldn’t just get away forty-five years ago and had to bust your way onto my ship. And I want to see the look on your face when I make your whole career meaningless.”

  “I’d like to see you try,” Kirk said. “We’re not in transporter range.”

  “Hah! That’s beautiful. Not in range. That’s poetry, it’s really poetry. Yeah, a transporter’s not much good from way out there, is it?”

  Nervous at Moss’s odd sense of humor regarding the fine, dangerous science of transporting, Kirk moved along the back of his command chair. “Why don’t you let us come into transporter range?”

  Roy Moss just laughed and laughed. “You’d love that, wouldn’t you?”

  “What’s so funny?” Kirk challenged. “Afraid I’ll beat you again?”

  The laughter stopped abruptly, and that hideous pause reprised.

  “You never beat me,” Moss said. “Come on down in a shuttle. Then you’ll really appreciate what I’ve got. But you come down alone, got it? All alone.”

  “I’ve got it.”

  “If you try to screw me up, I’ll drag that other ship right down into the atmosphere and burn her into little pink bits of metallic dust. You got that?”

  “I said I did. I’ll be right down.”

  “You be forewarned . . . I’m not a teenager anymore.”

  The threat made everyone on the bridge look up. There was something very cryptic and not at all silly about the last words as the communication abruptly cut off and the bridge went silent.

  The captain sensed what was happening, but ignored it.

  “Neither am I,” he uttered.

  Kirk swung around to Uhura and made a slicing motion across his throat. When she signaled that communication was definitely cut off, he vaulted to the upper bridge. “All stop.”

  “All stop,” the crewmen at the helm responded in chorus.

  “Secure from battlestations. Go to yellow alert.”

  “Aye, sir, secure from battlestations . . . secure from red alert, aye . . . ”

  “Yellow alert, aye, sir.”

  Spock seemed uneasy with the level of cross-grained bluffing and restraint, but contented himself with technicals as he said, “This man obviously fails to understand his own science. He possesses a warp-dampening field. Each time the Bill of Rights attempted to go into warp, the field would be countered and drained, sending out waves of antiwarp, or flushback. The flushback reaction moves at hyperwarp, faster than a ship, and can be detected light-years away. He can lure a ship to the planet and hold it there, but does not understand that his trap launches its own warning signal.”

  “He’s a genius,” McCoy added, “but there are gaping holes in his knowledge. He accepts ninety percent knowledge as one hundred percent. He didn’t realize this thing could be detected from so far away. He’s always been this way, hasn’t he, Jim?”

  “Always, considering a forty-five-year hole in my knowledge about him,” the captain droned. “Roth must have bluffed him somehow. Or outguessed him fast enough to beam up the Faramond archaeologists.” He aimed toward the turbolift, fists knotted, and turned at the last moment.

  “We may be able to use that somehow . . . before he can make good on that threat. I didn’t come all this way to find the Bill of Rights intact just to lose her again. All hands, general quarters until further notice. Commander Chekov, you’re in charge until Mr. Scott’s engineering voodoo is ready. Communicate with Captain Roth if you find any way to do so. Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, both of you come with me. Mr. Chekov, notify the flight deck to prep
are a shuttlecraft for launch. The three of us will be down on Faramond . . . being damn distractive.”

  He mounted the short steps toward the turbolift—and found himself blocked by Dr. McCoy and a very fierce glare that was part country doctor and part pioneer gunfighter.

  “Jim, what’s making you do this?”

  Kirk glowered at him. “Do what? Go down and take care of the problem?”

  “No. Go down and take care of this particular problem. Do you really know what motivates this man?”

  “It’s just revenge, Doctor. Stand aside.”

  But McCoy wouldn’t get out of his way. “Revenge doesn’t motivate Roy Moss,” he said. “He doesn’t care about those things. Doesn’t understand intangibles like duty, self-worth, satisfaction, and betterment—only that he has a bigger pile of whatever than anybody else.”

  “Make your point,” the captain demanded.

  “I am making it. You’re the one who ordered me to become an expert on this man, and I did. Roy Moss never grew up. He’s still nineteen years old. He hasn’t learned a damned thing in forty-five years.”

  “I’ll tuck that away.”

  The captain started to step past him, but McCoy actually bumped into the frame of the lift door and grabbed the captain’s upper arm in determination to stop him and get his say. By now the whole bridge was watching.

  “Where would you be if not for Roy Moss?”

  Kirk’s shoulders squared self-consciously. “Where would I be?”

  “Oh, yes. You thought I was paying attention just to facts on those archives you send down to me. A chief surgeon has to also be trained in crew psychology. I know you were out in space for only the second time, and I know what happened the first time. Those pirates would never have attacked your ship without Roy’s shields. Without Roy Moss, would sixteen-year-old Jim Kirk ever have become the Jim Kirk of Starfleet? You probably wouldn’t have gone into the Academy, and you certainly wouldn’t have made it if you had. And all the things pioneered by you and your crews and the Enterprise might never have happened.” The blue eyes flared suddenly. “You didn’t think about any of that, did you?”

  “He wanted to bring glory to himself, not to me. Get to your point.”

  “We never get over some things from our teenage years,” McCoy pestered—truth in the form of needles. “I’m just asking, is this the best thing for you to do? If this wasn’t Roy Moss . . . would you go down there at all?”

  Suddenly on a roll, McCoy sucked a breath and kept hammering, heedless of the taupe fire in the captain’s eyes and the tightening he saw in the captain’s jaw. He took no warnings, but kept on.

  “Despite all you’ve achieved,” he drilled, “could it be that you still want to best Roy Moss in a one-on-one contest? Could it be that after all these years you still have to prove who’s the better man? Could it be that you’re the one who wants revenge?”

  Kirk felt his face flush. His eyes started to feel like pincushions, prickled and burning.

  “It was his psych file I had you analyze, Doctor,” he warned, “not mine. Now, get yourself the hell out of my way.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  The gritty, druidic landscape crunched under his feet as James Kirk stepped out of the shuttlecraft after piloting through the narrow tube that led them inside the atmospheric dome on an otherwise unlivable planet. The domes themselves were impressive—five of them, each ten miles long, three wide. Ah, technology.

  He paused and gazed at the planet’s purple-on-gray surface. It looked like elephant hide with crystals spilled on it.

  “Well, Dad,” he murmured, “forty-five years late, but I made it.”

  “You say something, Jim? Lord amighty, who’d want to set up a colony on this dry cracker?”

  Kirk was deciding whether or not to respond to McCoy, when a bright, violent curtain of screaming light struck them and they huddled. Blinded, they stood their ground, but all arms came up to protect their eyes, and Spock shouted over the whine, “Sensors, Captain!”

  With a nod Kirk said, “Stand your ground!”

  The sensor screamed and crawled over them, then a voice bellowed as though through a bullhorn. “Drop the phasers and all three communicators. Smash the communicators. I want to have the only one.”

  “Golly, who can that be?” McCoy dryly grumbled as the light snapped off as suddenly as it had hit them.

  “Do what he says,” Kirk ordered.

  A few seconds were lost as they blandly removed their weapons and dropped them on the dirt, then ground the communicators into the dust with their heels.

  Kirk scouted the land, then walked the necessary twenty yards and confronted Roy John Moss as though they’d seen each other yesterday.

  “All right,” he demanded. “What’s so funny?”

  Roy Moss stood a few feet above them on a raised piece of ground, holding a phaser on them in one hand and a fairly basic non-Starfleet communicator in the other. There was something hooked to his belt that looked like a control box chirping for attention like a baby bird, but he ignored it.

  He seemed more fascinated by the forty-five years’ difference in their appearances, and scrutinized his old adversary for every line and every curl that was new, trying to see through the decades to the scrubbed, freckled, muscular blond boy who had given him such trouble at that key time in his life.

  Moss himself had taken on a coarseness that hadn’t been there in his youth, was grayer and somewhat thicker at the waist, but other than that he was recognizable by anyone who knew what he was looking for—and Kirk did.

  Yes, this was Roy Moss. Even the ponytail was still there. Iron-gray, but still there. So was the distrust in the eyes. The startling intelligence right on top of the distrust. Yes. The same person.

  There were ghostly lines and glimpses of Rex Moss in his face now that he was so much older, none of which had emerged yet at the age of nineteen. Back then, he and his father hadn’t appeared related at all. His nose was meatier now, as Rex’s had been, and there was more flesh at his throat. There was a beard now, a Galahad-type pointed beard, a few shades lighter gray than the ponytail, and small mustache that was almost white.

  That’s what the years had done—put the father into the son. The age around his lips, the yellowish-whiteness in his eyes, the thinness of hair in spite of the persistent ponytail, the color of his skin—those were from Rex. Sometimes resemblances took twenty years to show up. Or forty years . . .

  Do I look like my father now? Are there hints of him in my eyes that my mother would recognize? The way my cheeks crease when I’m angry, or the tuck of my chin?

  Ghosts from the past.

  The eyes were the recognizable. Strange, Kirk noted, that the glare could look so familiar after so long. A chilling sensation . . .

  Moss involved himself in his memories for a few seconds, seemed to relive the whole experience on the Shark, then leered with a weird fascination at Spock and McCoy as they came to Kirk’s side.

  “Said you’d come alone,” he pointed out.

  “I lied,” Kirk said.

  Moss tipped his head, and after a moment even nodded. “That’s good. I like that. I’da lied.”

  He gestured them toward him, but he was holding a phaser on them from enough paces away that they couldn’t jump him.

  “It helps me,” he went on almost as though he were talking to himself. He attached the control box to his belt next to his communicator, made a long grab for McCoy, and yanked the doctor toward him. “It keeps you under control. One move from you, or the Vulcan and I’ll shoot this other guy. I know your type. You’d rather I shoot you than him, so I’ll shoot him if you do anything.”

  Spock made an instinctive move to put himself between McCoy and Moss, but Kirk motioned him off with just a flick of his brows. Moss would indeed kill McCoy if he decided to. Moss would kill—there was no reason to doubt it forty-five years ago or now.

  “They’re each here for a reason,” Kirk told him.

 
; “What reasons?”

  “You figure them out. You’re the genius.”

  “All right, I will. Just give me some time. And if any of you try to knock me over, I’ll just shoot wild. See that dome over us, pretending to be a sky? That’s what I’ll hit. Then we’re all dead. I guess that’s simple enough, even for you tough guys, right?”

  Kirk didn’t even glance up at the poor excuse for blue overhead. He knew this was a lie. Roy wouldn’t hit their only protection.

  But Roy’s eyes still had the glint of assumption, as they had in his youth, and the Starfleet officers took this as the warning it was meant to be.

  Kirk looked past Moss to McCoy—the one who was here to deduce Moss’s psychological condition.

  The doctor bit his lower lip and raised his brows in an expression Kirk had seen before. Don’t push.

  “So,” Moss said, “you’re here in the Constitution-style ship, aren’t you? Sounds familiar now that I think about it. Kirk . . . captain . . . weren’t you an admiral for a while? I remember the colonists babbling about this. Now you’re back captaining the old version of starship?”

  “The first version,” Kirk corrected. He didn’t care if arrogance came off in his tone.

  “Thicker walls,” Moss said, “trimmer decks, different thrust-to-mass ratio, touchy intermix formula,” he rattled off, “and nothing inside but a few hundred crewmen. I wouldn’t trust that many people. Of course, all the ship is, really, is big speed. Just big fast. That’s all your old starship is. Basically a house for its own engines. Weapons and science labs can be mounted on a barge, after all. Starship isn’t a starship unless it’s fast . . . and I’m about to use one of them to make them all obsolete.”

  Kirk glanced at Spock.

  The Vulcan offered an expression in only his eyes that the captain read as a shrug. Use the Bill of Rights in some kind of experiment?

  Three Starfleet spines suddenly went rigid, and they stopped and glared at him.

  “Keep moving!” Roy ordered, jamming his weapon into the soft place under McCoy’s ribs. “I’ll slaughter him first and your old ship second.”