“It would be stupid to kill you,” Sarah countered, rising from the chair, “especially given my own unique position. I’d waste years regaining a similar advantage.” She crossed to the door, which slid open at her approach. Pausing at the threshold, she turned and regarded her husband one final time. “For now, at least, you’re more valuable to me alive than dead.”
She exited the room, and the door slid shut, leaving Robert April alone to contemplate all the ways in which his universe had changed, and how long “the Quiet Tyrant” might be allowed to continue occupying it.
Ill winds, indeed.
The Greater Good
Margaret Wander Bonanno
HISTORIAN’S NOTE: This tale is set in 2264, three years before the events of the second-season Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror.”
Margaret Wander Bonanno is the author of over twenty works of fiction across several genres and the co-founder of Van Wander Press. She lives on the Left Coast, and very much enjoys being a grandmother.
Please visit her website, www.margaretwanderbonanno.com.
Every creature, James T. Kirk thought as Lieutenant Spock contemplated the untenable position of his king’s knight, has its weaknesses. It’s only a matter of discovering what they are and exploiting them.
“That was a most illogical move, Mr. Kirk,” Spock said finally, extricating his knight, but not easily.
“All the same, Mr. Spock,” the newly promoted lieutenant commander said with the winsome grin that got him what he wanted almost as often as coldblooded murder did, “it had the desired outcome.”
When this game was invented, Kirk thought, the loser usually forfeited his life. Simpler times then. But Mr. Spock is worth more to me alive.
Three moves later, Spock tipped his king over, conceding defeat. It was an unusual enough event to have drawn a crowd in the officers’ lounge on Earth’s main spacedock. The background noise was just sufficient, Kirk thought, to block their conversation from the listening devices that were everywhere.
He was inordinately proud of his self-control. Not only had he just beaten one of the best chess players in Starfleet, but he’d managed to do so despite the fact that the great love of his life was watching through the floor-to-ceiling window just beyond Spock’s shoulder. She seemed more beautiful every time he saw her.
Enterprise! Kirk had to stop himself from whispering the name aloud. She stood alone in Spacedock, sleek and resplendent, her yearlong refit nearing completion before her next five-year mission under Captain Pike. Only the fact that there were others in the room stopped Kirk from going to the window and pressing his hands against the surface so that he could be closer to her.
His ship. She had to be. His attraction to her was almost visceral. He had adored her from a distance for years, because she belonged to another man, a man who didn’t deserve her. But someday he would have her, no matter who tried to get in his way.
Concentrate! he warned himself. Think three moves ahead. This is only the first step…
“Must be difficult finding players at your level,” he ventured, tearing his eyes away from the window and watching Spock carefully. “I gather Captain Pike doesn’t play?”
“Indeed, he does not,” Spock said with a slight frown as he reset the board, indicating that he was still trying to figure out where he’d gone wrong. Then he seemed actually to hear what Kirk was implying. “I am curious how you ascertained this.”
“Just gossip,” Kirk said disarmingly. There was nothing as easy as lying to an honest man. There was a strange, feral gleam in his eyes, the kind of hyperfocus one saw in predators when the prey appeared suddenly over the rise and they began to stalk.
“Spock’s the key,” Marlena had said casually, tossing the information over her shoulder the way she was in the habit of doing with her luxuriant dark hair. “Others will grumble about life under Pike, but they’re cowards, or lazy. Spock’s ambitious, but not the way you think.” She yawned and stretched like a cat. “Are you coming to bed?”
“In a minute,” Kirk said distractedly. “How do you know all this? Don’t tell me you managed to seduce a Vulcan?”
Was that jealousy, Marlena wondered, or just enlightened self-interest?
“Not the way you’re imagining,” she said, yawning again and giving him her most appealing look. “Vulcans thrive on intellectual foreplay.”
“Intellectual—you?” Kirk started to say, then saw her eyes narrow and changed his tune. He owed her for getting close to Spock in ways he couldn’t, and if he angered her, she wouldn’t tell him anything more. “I’m sorry, that was low. I’d be interested in what you found out.”
“I seem to have a knack for the sciences,” was how she had begun her conversation with Spock, holding back the kittenish sexuality that usually got her what she wanted. “My sponsor…” The word lover didn’t seem appropriate in this context. “…has promised to pull the necessary strings to get me into the Academy, but I thought I’d do most of the work by remote, complete the labs aboard ship, then finish out the last year on Earth.”
“A reasonable approach,” Spock had said. “A starship offers far more opportunities to examine as-yet-uncategorized species and phenomena.”
“But I was wondering,” Marlena had said before he could ask why she’d brought this to him. “Farragut’s an older ship, and even if she weren’t being held over to investigate what happened with that horrible vampire cloud…” She managed an appropriately sad face for the two hundred dead crewmen, including Captain Garrovick. “Would it be better for me to request a transfer to a newer ship? Enterprise, for example…”
“He assigned someone from his department to show me around,” she told Kirk now. “You’d be amazed what a girl can find out if she knows what questions to ask.”
He’d finally come to bed, and she was caressing him, though her words seemed to excite him more than her touch; not only Vulcans were stimulated by intellectual foreplay, apparently.
“Spock and that—woman, if you can call her that—that machine masquerading as a woman, Number One, apparently don’t get along. More than once, she’s given Pike recommendations that could have gotten them all killed. Spock’s second-guessed her and gotten reprimanded. He won’t say it, but he thinks he’d be a better first officer.”
“And then captain,” Kirk suggested. “All he’s got to do is work up the courage to eliminate Number One and then go after Pike.”
“I don’t think he wants that,” Marlena said, feeling him pull away from her. “And there’s something else…”
“What? The drinking?” Kirk said impatiently, out of bed and pacing now. “I know all about that. How Pike’s ship’s surgeon feeds him martinis in his quarters where the crew can’t see, keeps him not quite drunk all the time, makes him easier to manipulate? And Number One probably covers up for him. Which, if I know my Vulcans, is something Spock wouldn’t do.”
“Something bigger than that,” Marlena suggested.
That got Kirk’s attention. “What?”
She shrugged. “Something about a rescue mission that went wrong. Whole ship was sworn to secrecy afterward; that’s all I could get. There’s even supposed to be a general order involved.” She rolled over, genuinely sleepy this time. If Kirk was going to sit up plotting all night, well, she had an exam tomorrow. “Guess you’ll have to do the rest yourself…”
Chess as metaphor for life, Kirk thought, watching Spock set up the board again. And while he won’t admit it, Spock’s bothered by losing that last game. Let’s see what I can do with that. Learn his weaknesses, work with his strengths…
Marlena had seen the feral glint in Kirk’s eye during the Farragut debriefing. Some might have taken it for grief or posttraumatic shock; in fact, the brass had recommended that Kirk take extended leave and visit a therapist. But Marlena knew him too well. She wasn’t quite sure how he’d steered Garrovick and the rest of the crew into the path of the vampire cloud, but it had gotten him another rung up on the lad
der, and that had been the goal all along.
“You actually enjoy killing,” she said over dinner the evening after the debriefing.
Kirk was startled at the thought. “No, I really don’t. It’s an awful lot of work. I wish there were some other way. But you know what they say. ‘If you’re going to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs.’ I was only after the command crew. The enlisted men just…got in the way.”
“And now you’re going after Pike,” Marlena marveled. “How many of Enterprise’s crew do you figure will ‘get in the way’?”
“Only those who resist me,” Kirk murmured, lost in thought. “Besides, look at it this way—Pike’s a liability. His sloppy judgment could get his entire crew killed. A more competent commander would actually save lives. Pike’s death would be for the greater good.”
Marlena shook her head. “My hero!” she said wryly.
“I cannot tell you what happened on Talos IV, Mr. Kirk,” Spock said solemnly. “To do so would be a violation of General Order Seven, and I do not wish to be executed for treason. However…”
He handed off the data disk so quickly it took Kirk a second or two to realize what it was and wonder where he could hide it. He started to say something, but Spock’s raised eyebrow silenced him.
“I have told you nothing,” the Vulcan pointed out.
“I’m aware of that, Mr. Spock. But how you got access to this information—”
“—is not for you to know.”
“What if it’s traced? Every download leaves a signature.”
Spock’s expression might almost have been pitying. He was, after all, an A7 computer expert. Kirk finally relaxed.
“And in exchange?”
“Number One is an excellent first officer,” Spock observed casually.
“But you think you’d be a better one.” Kirk got up from the chessboard. “Thank you for an excellent game, Mr. Spock.”
As he left their meeting, it occurred to Kirk that having a second in command who preferred to let others do his killing for him might be a liability. A captain would never know where the potential attack was coming from.
Worry about that once you’re in the chair, he told himself, the data disk weighing him down.
What he found on it lifted his mood considerably.
“That’s it!” he said, almost shouting.
“What is it?” Marlena was reading over his shoulder, but not as quickly, as she was massaging his neck at the same time.
“Incredible,” Kirk said. He didn’t know what outrageous revelations he’d hoped to find on the disk, but this surpassed his expectations. “A telepathic species with this kind of power…and he let them live! Pike let them live. I don’t have to tell you what the Empire thinks of telepaths.”
No, he didn’t. Everyone knew the Empire’s policy toward telepathy. The talent, so rare in Terrans, was deemed too dangerous if found in the possession of other species.
“But why?” Marlena was puzzled. “And more to the point, why did they let Pike live? Someone should have tried to kill him.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Kirk mused. Then the part of his brain that enabled him to think three moves ahead, or piece things together three moves backward, kicked into gear. “Of course—that has to be it!”
Marlena stopped massaging his neck and squeezed his shoulders. “What is? Tell me!”
Kirk spun his chair around, mischief on his face. “Uh-uh. You’re a smart girl. Figure it out for yourself!”
“Don’t tease me!” She pouted. “My mind doesn’t work like yours. Tell me!”
“Your mind has more steel traps than mine ever will,” he replied, grabbing her by the waist and moving her toward the bed.
An hour later, she was still trying to worm it out of him. Sated and content, he told her.
“There’s only one reason the Talosians didn’t crush Pike and his crew like cockroaches. They wanted something more…”
What they’d wanted were eyes and ears inside an Empire that they knew would eventually attempt to surround them, absorb them, and learn their secrets.
Given your terror of telepathy, you humans will simply attempt to destroy us and pillage our world for its resources, the Keeper had mused in Pike’s mind. We have seen in your mind what they have done to others, and they will do the same here, if we do not act.
Weak, sick, every bone in his body aching, aware that his mind had been violated and he had given up information he didn’t even know he possessed, Pike glared at the Keeper balefully.
Not a day ago, he’d hoped they’d simply kill him. That had seemed to be their intention when he refused to “mate” with that insipid human female. How could he survive if they let him go? If his own crew didn’t kill him in the state he was in, Command would see through whatever explanation he gave for his escape and have him executed.
We will give you the skills to prevent this, the Keeper was saying now, but Pike wasn’t listening. Without Boyce and his concoctions to kill the pain, he had been to the core of himself, a weak-willed pretty boy pushed to the front of his graduating class at the Academy ahead of far more capable men, not on the basis of achievement or guile or even family connections but because he was charming and he photographed well, and Starfleet needed a wholesome-looking poster boy to counter the stories of corruption at every level, officer assassinating officer, incompetence leading to ships lost with their entire crews.
In any case, Pike thought, facing the awful truth in a subterranean cage on an alien world from which there now seemed only two means of escape—death or betrayal—his whole life to this point had been a sham. A glory-filled sham, to be sure, and if he hadn’t survived assassination by wit and guile, at least he had survived. That was the law of the universe, wasn’t it, survival? Faced with the possibility that he might not have to die, Pike discovered another truth about himself. He wanted to live, no matter the cost.
Besides, what would he be betraying? A fleet that considered its members expendable? An Empire built on betrayal and counterbetrayal? A philosophy that dictated, above all else, “Save your own skin”?
“What do you want from me?” he asked the Keeper now.
We wish you to be our early-warning system, the Keeper explained. Our…canary in the coal mine, if I understand the metaphor correctly.
“Meaning—?” Pike staggered to his feet for the first time in days, half starved, filthy, unshaven, but suddenly repossessed of the will to live. He felt the pain leaving his joints. So, that had been an illusion, too.
“Meaning,” the Keeper said, speaking aloud for the first time. Its voice was feeble, old-womanish. “We will free you, and the women. Oh, yes, we captured two more of you. They’re being held separately. We intended to go forward with our original plan to use you as breeding stock. But a larger plan suggested itself.
“You will be returned to your ship, and your ship will return to your Empire. You will tell your superiors essentially what happened here, and they will quarantine our world until they feel they have the strength to vanquish us. When that time comes, you will let us know so that we can prepare.”
“How will I do that?” Pike demanded, as close to the barrier between himself and the Keeper as he could get. He rubbed his arms to get their strength back, wished he could do the same for his mind. Think! he told himself—never his strong point at the best of times, but now, with this creature hearing his thoughts almost before he thought them, what was the point? He was trapped. But he would live. Focus on that, he told himself. It’s all you’ve got.
You have already begun, the Keeper said in his mind.
Forever after, Pike would try to rationalize what he did next or, rather, what he didn’t do. He should have filled his thoughts with rage—the only thing they couldn’t read through—turned the ship around, and destroyed them. Instead, against all of his training and his experience, he had simply taken back his pitiful life and run.
It was, he told himself, because he coul
dn’t trust his crew to do the same, fix their minds on a single angry thought that would serve as a more powerful weapon than a laser cannon. It was, he told himself, because he was physically weakened, disoriented, a prisoner of war newly released into the sunlight and trying to get his bearings. It was because he was thinking of his crew and what would happen to them if he guessed wrong…
It was, he finally admitted in the dark and solitude, because he was no leader but a coward, just as he’d always known he was.
How was it that pitiful female had described her captivity by the Talosians?
“They own me!”
They owned Christopher Pike as well, and he would regret it every day of his life.
“What would a species so powerful possibly want with us?” Marlena wondered.
Kirk shrugged. “Control over the Empire? Maybe the entire quadrant? Pike’s classified report indicates that they’re dying out on their world. They lack physical strength. Their technology is in ruins. There must be a reason they didn’t destroy Pike and the ship with him.”
“You think he’s a spy?” Marlena guessed, stroking his chest.
“Or something else,” Kirk mused. “There’s something beyond being able to buy off the right people that protects him—some power these Talosians gave him—but what?”
“Let’s say these creatures gave him some sort of magic, some sort of power,” Marlena said. “It would make him a formidable opponent.”
Kirk’s eyes had taken on that feral look again. “That just makes it more fun, doesn’t it?”
But how to do it? Kirk wondered. Pike didn’t know him, didn’t fraternize with mere lieutenant commanders, in fact rarely left the ship even when she was in Spacedock. Aboard, he was surrounded by his cadre of loyal officers and those who would kill anyone if the credits were right.
Star Trek®: Mirror Universe: Shards and Shadows Page 8