Best Destiny

by Diane Carey

  Moss stalked around on his promontory, picking and twisting at his control box, shaking his head so that the ponytail swayed, and spitting insults.

  “Moss,” Kirk began, “are you paying attention to me?”

  “I heard you,” Moss said. “What else? You’re only twenty feet down.”

  “Good. Now, pay attention. There’s nothing here but the controls. The other civilization left a hulk. They took it all with them. They didn’t want to be followed! Putting power to it could create a disaster.”

  Stopping whatever he was doing, Moss looked down. “Oh, how nice. You figured this out in the thirty minutes I was gone, did you?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Oh, you’re ‘serious.’ I’m glad you know so much more than I do. When the Bill of Rights suddenly appears in orbit at Earth, then everybody’ll know a lot. And I’ll have six hundred living witnesses.”

  McCoy pushed forward to the bottom of the promontory. “What if they’re not living! Maybe this thing wasn’t meant to transport humans! Have you considered that?”

  “I don’t care about that. It’s so simple, what can go wrong? Besides, if they die, they die. Even if the transporter works enough to move the ship, it’ll be justified in the long run. Nobody’ll care who lived or died. How many of Columbus’s sailors died of dysentery on the trip from Spain? Who cares, right?” He pointed at the projection of the trapped starship and said, “When that monster appears at Starbase One, what can anyone say but ‘thank you’? The victors write the history books, Doctor. Now, back off before I make you history! Look at my hands,” he said. “Look at them! Left! Right! I’ve got the only phaser! I’ve got the only communicator! I’ve immobilized your magnificent prizes! Your starship! I’ve frozen Starfleet’s best ships! There they are, hanging there!”

  He whisked his hand across the little viewscreen’s image of Bill of Rights.

  “This is my planet now! On it is the only thing the Federation doesn’t have! You were here at the beginning, Kirk, and now you’re here to see my reward! You . . . watch!”

  He went after his control box like a squirrel going after a walnut.

  Nothing happened.

  Roy looked at them, and they looked at him.

  Then Roy looked at the picture of Bill of Rights and held his breath.

  Still nothing.

  Roy looked at the ship, looked at his hand-held activator, gave it a little shake, put it to his ear, looked at it again.

  From below, Kirk asked in a low voice, “Did you put any safeties on it?”

  “What?”

  But the captain’s words weren’t really a question at all. “You didn’t put any safety backups on your equipment, did you?”

  Moss just gaped down at him as though he were the crazy one.

  Behind Spock, one of the balloons hissed, and broke open. Steam fizzed from it. Then the steam turned into a spray.

  Then the spray turned into a geyser. . . .

  USS Enterprise 1701-A

  “Mr. Scott, to the bridge!”

  The bridge of the sparkling new “old-style” starship thumped with frantic movement.

  Pavel Chekov bounded out of the command chair and took his more comfortable position at the science area. He’d always felt better here than in any facet of command.

  “Chekov, take the conn,” he muttered as he glared into the science monitors. “Chekov has better things to do—”

  “Pardon, sir?” a fresh-faced lieutenant called from the science station down the starboard control board from him.

  “Nothing,” he clipped, his Russian accent adding a certain scissor to his word. “What takes Mr. Scott so long to get up here?”

  “No idea, sir,” the science lieutenant said noncommittally, but he and Devereaux exchanged a glance.

  They knew what it was. Mr. Scott didn’t want command either. He wanted to be down there with those engines.

  Want or not, responsibility had them all by the throat, and Montgomery Scott thundered out of the turbolift, barking orders.

  “Red alert. Battlestations. Stabilize all external systems. Police all local frequencies. All weapons on line. And see what you can do about that bloody communications problem.”

  Warning alarms erupted—somehow comforting those who had been on edge waiting for them—the ship darkened to alert-status maroon lights, the graphics came into crisp, bright focus, and the bridge rippled into a series of “ayes.”

  And Uhura’s voice throbbing through the entire vessel—

  “Battlestations . . . all hands to battlestations . . . ”

  “Reading matter/antimatter power feeding through the core of the planet Faramond, Mr. Scott!”

  “Ah, that’s just a duck flapping in your ear,” Scott growled as he pressed himself into the command chair. “It’s a dead planet.”

  The lieutenant pushed a flop of thin blond hair out of his eyes and insisted, “Sir, there’s a massive runaway matter/antimatter reaction generating power through the interior of the planet!”

  “Slow down, lad. Just man your post.”

  The lieutenant sucked a breath, held it, then said, “The core is starting to become molten again, sir.”

  Scott looked at him a moment, divided the panic from the young man’s ability to read the science equipment, then decided to believe him.

  “Can the planet take it?” he asked.

  “After being cold for millions of years? Doubt it, sir. All the energy is being taken up by the body of the planet itself and it’s all going to become molten.”

  “It’s reverting,” Scott said. “It’s all going to go up. The whole planet’s going to explode!”

  “Yes, sir—and, sir? Bill of Rights is in orbit. She’s going to be swallowed by the blast!”

  Scott hit the young officer with a look of the obvious, then arranged himself in the command chair, leaning hard on one side. “Not to mention our personnel sitting down there on that bomb. Pull up that twelve-percent power, lad. Divide it half to thrust, half to shields.”

  “Aye, sir. Power coming up . . . ”

  “Shield engineering acknowledges, Mr. Scott,” Devereaux called from the port side.

  “Impulse engineering signals ready, sir,” Chekov told him.

  “Ahead one quarter impulse. Let’s show ’em what this ship can do.”

  “One quarter impulse, aye!”

  “What’s happening, Spock!”

  Kirk stumbled toward the control balloons as Spock and McCoy joined him there. The balloons were beginning to dissolve, one at a time.

  “He activated it,” Spock said simply. “The power—”

  A fissure opened in the pond bed not ten yards from them. For a terrible instant they had to work to keep each other on their feet.

  Was there any feeling worse than the planet itself coming apart under those who must live upon it?

  “Mr. Moss!” Spock called over the volcanic noise. “You were right. The entire planet is a giant transporter conductor! That explains why the Old Culture chose a cold rock for their project! But the control mechanism was beamed away too! The power you have put into it now has nowhere to go!”

  “A huge short circuit,” Kirk muttered.

  “I beg your pardon?” Spock shouted over the sound of a planet tearing itself apart from within. “I failed to hear you, Captain!”

  “Moss!” Kirk staggered toward the rock wall. “Moss, if you don’t want to listen to me, at least listen to him!”

  He waved at the smoke pouring from the cracking shells of the ancient computer controls and found his way toward Roy, but McCoy grabbed for him and hollered, “Jim, we’ve got to get away from here!”

  Kirk ignored the flaming obvious, shoved past him, and choked out, “Moss! We’ve got to get off this planet!”

  “No, no,” Moss said. Insanely calm, he shook his head and smiled. “You just want me to leave. I’m not leaving my prize.”

  “You idiot, the entire planet’s melting under us!”
r />   Spock twisted toward them without taking his hands off the cracking balloons. “Captain, planetary surface is collapsing.”

  “The surface is collapsing!” Kirk repeated to Moss. “The planet’s melting! Give me the communicator!”

  “It’s not melting,” Moss insisted. “You must have done something. What did you touch down there?”

  Looking up from the grotto at the hunched shoulders and brittle outline of his oldest enemy, Kirk felt his fists ball up and his arms go hard.

  “It wasn’t us, you spoiled maniac,” he snapped. “Wake up and get over it!”

  Moss actually cocked a hip despite of what was happening around them. “Get over what?”

  Kirk pushed forward, his hands on the rocks now.

  “So you had a bad father! So what! Parents don’t last forever, good or bad! Get over it! Comes a time when there’s no excuse. ‘Poor me, I had a bad life, so I get to go out and be bad to others.’ Like hell you do. You’ve been dragging that fat corpse around for forty-five years waiting for it to sit up and say, ‘Son, you did a good job.’ It’s not going to happen! You’re never going to get his recognition! You’re going to have to grow the hell up!”

  From the vantage of his promontory, Roy huddled his shoulders and they could see, in spite of the banging, clanging, heat, sweat, and burning, a big shiver go through him. “Don’t . . . don’t speak to me like that. . . . ”

  “That’s your problem right there,” Kirk growled up at him.

  “Captain!” Spock called.

  McCoy cranked partly around at Spock’s shoulder and shouted, “Jim, you better look at this!”

  “Captain, continents are collapsing!” Spock continued. “Dry oceans are beginning to break open!”

  “I’m about to break open myself.” Kirk climbed toward Moss. “You’re going to give me that communicator, you whining baby. Don’t you understand? There’s nothing here! The Old Culture didn’t go out in a radius from a central hub! They moved the hub!”

  Moss was thrown to one knee, and had trouble rising, but the shake-up made him really feel what was happening to the planet.

  “No . . . no, that’s not right. You see, I’ve—”

  Kirk waved a hand dismissively. “You can’t do this because they didn’t want to be followed! They took the secret with them! No excuses anymore! You’ve had gold fever for a half-century, fixated on gold that’s not here! Your own dream blinded you! You’re a spoiled, angry kid, still looking for the same things you were looking for when we met! And you still haven’t found them!”

  The captain felt the swirling tempest of conflicting atmosphere tearing at his hair as the dome above them shuddered and began to lose integrity—the only thing still keeping them alive. Once the dome went, there would be nothing but a scalded ball in space.

  He didn’t care. He saw only his anger. He started climbing the crystal rocks, using the anger as his staircase. The crystals cut into his fingers as he climbed, an inch at a time.

  “And I’m not going to let you have it. You can kill me, but I’m going to take it all with me. You’re still getting nothing!”

  “You stop talking like that to me!” Moss bellowed, his diaphragm crushing inward. He shot a hand toward the artificial sky, finger pointed. “I’ll drag that ship of yours down! I can do it! I’ll drag it down!”

  Suddenly, Kirk stopped climbing. He straightened and pressed his lips tight, his glare the kind that cuts.

  Then he said, “Go ahead.”

  Behind him McCoy kept poking at Spock, until Spock had to shrug him off, but they were both staring, neither moving at all, certainly not daring to interrupt.

  Above, Moss tilted his head. “What?”

  “You heard me,” Kirk said. “Go ahead and try it. Those people up there are better than you are.”

  Roy’s mouth twisted and flinched. “Are not. Now . . . you think—you think about it. They are not. I have the only communicator. I can tap into my power stations and haul that ship down. Then what’ll you have, Captain?”

  The man he tried to taunt merely straightened a little more on the rocks under him and had no problem staring upward in spite of crashing and howling planetary collapse.

  “I said go ahead.”

  “Oh, you’re bluffing, come on,” Moss said. “I mean, I know the tactics, right? We’re both too smart for that.”

  “Try me.”

  The words, the eyes, the man himself, suddenly statuesque—there was no dare about him. No game. Nothing.

  He meant what he said.

  Moss glowered down at him, huffed reflexively a few times, grinned without thinking about it, then brought his communicator around tightly to his chest and started pecking at it.

  Past his hands and the small black mechanism, though, were the eyes of James Kirk.

  Antique-gold eyes and low brows. Wind ripping at the soft taupe hair and the undone chest flap of the burgundy Starfleet uniform he’d earned the hard way. Shoulders that had never been square but had remained unbending under a weight few could carry for so long, and not a flinch now. Less than ever, in fact.

  Below, Spock lost the last of his interest in the gurgling computer controls. At McCoy’s side he turned to watch what would happen. Life was ultimately more captivating than any machine, even though that life stood on a precipice and threatened to jump or be pushed.

  Moss was clearly irritated. “I’m going to do it,” he said.

  Kirk didn’t move. “I know you are.”

  Moss pointed upward again, but in a smaller way. “Your ship. Your big identity.”

  “I know what it is. Our only way off the planet. Yours too.”

  Shifting from one foot to the other as the promontory started quivering, Moss added, “Your whole crew, y’know.”

  “They swore the same oath I did. They’re ready.”

  “Wait a minute . . . am I missing something?”

  “As usual. And we don’t have a minute. Go ahead.”

  Curious as much as afraid he was missing something, Roy asked, “Why doesn’t this bother you?”

  “Why?” Kirk’s mouth took on a bitterly satisfied grin. “Because I’ve gotten more out of this in five minutes than you’ve gotten out of it in fifty years.”

  “How d’you figure?”

  “Because, you brat, I know those people went somewhere. They left the machine, but they took their dreams with them. And somewhere far away from here they built on those dreams. There are ways to meet them, but my ways, not yours. There are more places to explore—more people to meet—I’ve got your dream, Moss. And you can’t have it.”

  “What,” Moss asked, his voice getting high, “what are you . . . talking about?”

  “I’m talking about your dream!” Kirk said. His words shot out like staples. “I’m gonna take it. If I leave here, I’m gonna take it. And if you kill me, I’m still gonna take it.”

  Moss stood over him, fundamentally baffled. Never mind the frantic environment and the planet falling down around them, Jim Kirk stood below him with his arms casually at his sides and a damning chalk drawing of satisfaction instead of anger on his face, one foot up a little higher than the other on the uneven terrain and a hand resting dynamically upon it. He looked like a painting, he really did—he was enjoying this!

  “I was ready to give up,” Kirk told him, “but if I live through this, I’ve got you to thank for the rest of my life. And if I don’t live, I’ve accomplished things I never dreamed would have my name on them when you and I first met. All because you helped turn me around forty-five years ago.”

  Rocks cracked off points and fell around them. Pieces of the interior shell of the dome chipped away and spun like giant needles into the ground inches from them, shattering and spraying them. Each jolt of the planetary core reinvigorated the knowledge that James Kirk was not his ship, or even his rank.

  Kirk barely moved. He never took his eyes from Moss, and he never even raised an arm to protect himself from the fallout.
/>   “You think those ships up there are Starfleet?” he said, rolling a hand upward as though this conversation were happening in a lounge instead of in the midst of a planet pulling itself apart. “I’ve been through that,” he went on. “I’ve scuttled my ship. I took her out and watched her die in space. I made that decision. And I’m still here! Those are ships, but that’s all they are—vessels for ideals. The ideals . . . you can’t kill.” He nodded at Moss, and at the communicator. “You have the ship. Go ahead—crush it. You can’t kill the dream.”

  Strange how softly he was speaking. Strange that Moss heard him, or read his lips, or got it telepathically—no one could tell. Strange that Spock and McCoy watched from below and saw what was happening, and somehow also heard in spite of the great collapse. Strange that Jim Kirk, a boy on a bridge, saw so well that there was no one thing that could be an answer to a dream.

  “It doesn’t matter if you’re captain or admiral or emperor or god,” he finished. “Reach the position at which you can be of most value. But you didn’t do that, Roy. You wanted shortcuts. All this time you’ve been wrong. Forty-five years, dead wrong. All you have is a big short circuit. And my ship?” He tucked his lip and shook his head. “Still wrong. The man isn’t his ship. The ship is the man. So go ahead. The only one here with anything to lose . . . is you.”

  No matter how McCoy had analyzed Roy John Moss, no matter how over decades Spock had learned to be more interested in life than in machines—no matter anything that had happened to them in the past ten hours or ten years, James Kirk still knew Roy Moss and men like him better than anyone else including Roy Moss.

  The captain who knew everything he needed to know now began to climb again. Crystals chipped under his fingers and his boots, but he kept going until he was all the way up, standing beside Roy Moss and in front of the weapon leveled on him that Kirk had dared and dared and dared to go ahead and put a hole through him.

  Because no hole was going through what he sculpted out of the raw rock of Jimmy Kirk over the years. No holes.

  Shuddering, Roy Moss grew smaller and smaller, staring at Kirk.

  Kirk jabbed out a confident hand, caught Moss by the wrist, and pressured the bigger man down toward the cracking rock.