Star Trek®: Mirror Universe: Shards and Shadows

by Marco Palmieri

  “Suitable for what?”

  “Who are you talking to?” Marlena murmured muzzily from the breakfast nook, puttering with the replicator.

  “No one,” Kirk said quickly. “Just rehearsing what I’m going to say when I get to HQ.”

  An hour later, as he passed through the main gate of Starfleet Headquarters, the tale of Pike’s disappearance (kidnapping, murder?) buzzed around him. He bluffed his way past the guards outside the C-in-C’s office, where he knew a weekly strategy meeting was in progress. Striding to the foot of the long table before anyone could stop him, he took something small out of a fold in his lieutenant commander’s sash and tossed it onto the table so that it slid down the highly polished surface almost into the indignant C-in-C’s clasped hands.

  It was Pike’s captain’s insignia. By now, forensics would have found Kirk’s fingerprints on the brandy glass, some skin cells where his fists had connected with the security guards’ jaws, but he’d asked Pike for this talisman of his office so that there would be no question who had assassinated him, even if no one ever figured out how.

  “I’ve done your job for you,” he said quietly, then stood at parade rest, his face devoid of expression.

  He figured they would either kill him or give him what he wanted.

  They gave him what he wanted. Kirk got his promotion and his ship. His superiors were candid.

  “Ships’ captains have a way of meeting untimely ends whenever you’re in the vicinity,” the C-in-C, a crusty old admiral who was rumored to have Klingon ancestry, told him gruffly. “Apparently, the only way to put a stop to it is to promote you to captain yourself.”

  I will stop here, Kirk told himself. A lesser man would be greedy, use the device to eliminate anyone who irritated him or got in his path, give himself away, end up taken down like a mad dog. Other men might aspire to the admiralty, the Senate, the satrapy of a conquered world. All he wanted was Enterprise and the power to use her, and now he had her.

  Unbeknownst to anyone, even Marlena, he also had some powerful newfound “friends” taking up residence inside his head. So the Talosians found him more “suitable” than Pike, did they? The ramifications of that would prove interesting.

  He personally installed the Tantalus device in the captain’s quarters, cleverly hidden behind a wall panel to be used at his discretion. He knew he would have to use it to keep what he had gained but promised himself that he would use it judiciously.

  He only had cause to use it one more time before they left Earth. Easier to get rid of Number One than to explain why he was promoting Spock in her place. There were murmurs among some of the bridge crew, but they eventually subsided. Whatever had made the ship’s two senior-most officers disappear, no one else wanted to be next.

  Accustoming himself to the feel of the captain’s chair for the first time, Kirk sensed Spock’s eyes on him from the science station. The ship was at station keeping inside Spacedock, the rest of the crew still reporting in, and they were alone on the bridge except for a couple of engineers running a last-minute diagnostic on the nav station; Kirk waved them toward the turbolift before swinging his chair in Spock’s direction.

  “Something on your mind?”

  Spock chose his words carefully. “I do not subscribe to magic, Captain Kirk. Nevertheless, Captain Pike’s utter disappearance, without so much as a transporter trace, has apparently been accomplished by a technology so unfamiliar to me as to seem magical.”

  Kirk’s smile was calculated. “Better get used to working with a magician, Spock. You never know what else I might have up my sleeve.”

  He had requested permission to take Enterprise out on a shakedown cruise before the five-year mission. As the youngest captain in Starfleet, he pointed out to his superiors, it would be good for him to “get the feel of her.” When he told Marlena, she marveled at him.

  “What’s that old Earth expression? ‘Butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth’? I know what you’re up to. You’re easily the most evil man I’ve ever known!”

  “Why, thank you!” he said with his most endearing smile.

  He didn’t have to tell Spock where they were going, either. Nor did he have to tell him to alter the ship’s logs after the fact.

  And he certainly didn’t have to tell his newfound friends where he was headed; they could already see it in his mind.

  Is this wise, Magistrate? This Kirk is not the weakling Pike was. We have not had time to condition him as we did Pike. Our influence upon his mind may not be as powerful.

  Which is why we have asked him to come to us, the Magistrate replied. To solidify the bond that will make him ours.

  But the Enterprise that approached the Talos star group this time was not a ship answering what seemed to be an innocent distress call, nor was it the emissary the Talosians were expecting. It was a ship plotting the best possible trajectory to wreak havoc on an enemy world.

  The Talosians weren’t the first aliens to underestimate James T. Kirk. They certainly wouldn’t be the last.

  “Their defenses are virtually nonexistent, Captain,” Spock reported, having done a long-range scan. “Apparently, they have relied on their power of mind for so many millennia that they have no satellite defense system and no weapons of any kind.”

  “Pike’s sealed reports suggested they could knock a starship out of space with their minds alone,” Kirk said. “Let’s not give them the opportunity. Ready phaser sweep. Maximum spread, maximum intensity. We’ll strip away the atmosphere, and bye-bye, Talos IV.”

  “Captain.” It was Spock. “Request permission to pinpoint scan for the human female, Vina. If she is still alive…”

  “Collateral damage,” Kirk said tightly, his eyes on the forward screen. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could sustain the inner rage Pike’s report had indicated was the only thing that could block the Talosians from his mind. He focused on the last time Captain Garrovick had humiliated him in front of the entire crew. Who’s sneering now? he thought. “Weapons, on my mark…”

  The Magistrate had time for one final thought. It appears we have miscalculated…

  Kirk enjoyed the light show, imagined the screams of however many Talosian minds as their fragile bodies disintegrated in the vacuum the phaser blasts left behind. Pike’s death had left a bad taste in his mouth, but this washed it away.

  Belowdecks, Marlena was watching from the bio lab, stopping work long enough to contemplate the ruthlessness of the man to whom she’d joined her fate.

  How does Marlena fit in? she wondered, knowing it would take all her wiles to hold this complex man, but also knowing that she could. As the ruined Talosian world receded on the aft screen, she smiled. She had chosen well.

  Ultimately, Enterprise’s shakedown cruise was cut short by a subspace message ordering Kirk to set course for a world called Gorlan, where rebel factions had foolishly staged an uprising against their Imperial overlords. En route, Kirk made a brief entry in his personal log.

  “Today I did something the Empire will thank me for one day. Now that there is no Talos IV, there is no longer any need for General Order Seven. A telepathic species so powerful should never have been spared in the first place. And nothing so benefits any bureaucracy as the elimination of red tape—swiftly, efficiently, and for the greater good.”

  The Black Flag

  James Swallow

  HISTORIAN’S NOTE: This tale is set in 2277, ten years after the events of the Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror” and Spock’s subsequent rise to power, as chronicled in The Sorrows of Empire from Star Trek Mirror Universe: Glass Empires.

  James Swallow is proud to be the only British writer to have worked on a Star Trek television series, creating the original story concepts for the Star Trek Voyager episodes “One” and “Memorial.” His other associations with the Star Trek saga include the Terok Nor novel Day of the Vipers; “Closure,” “Ordinary Days,” and “Seeds of Dissent” for the anthologies Distant Shores, The Sky’s the Limit, and Infin
ity’s Prism; scripting the video game Star Trek Invasion; and over four hundred articles in thirteen Star Trek magazines around the world.

  Beyond the final frontier, as well as nonfiction work such as Dark Eye: The Films of David Fincher, James also wrote the Sundowners series of steampunk westerns, Jade Dragon, The Butterfly Effect, and fiction in the worlds of Doctor Who (Peacemaker, Singularity, Old Soldiers, and Kingdom of Silver), Warhammer 40,000 (Red Fury, The Flight of the Eisenstein, Faith & Fire, Deus Encarmine, and Deus Sanguinius), Stargate (Halcyon, Relativity, and Nightfall), and 2000AD (Eclipse, Whiteout, and Blood Relative). His other credits include scripts for videogames and audio dramas, including Battlestar Galactica, Blake’s 7, and Space 1889.

  James Swallow lives in London and is currently at work on his next book.

  The deck of the Eighth Happiness vibrated as it was struck again, the resonance humming from one end of the freighter to the other. Griffin lost his footing and fell against the wall of the long corridor that ran the length of the ship’s spine.

  A sweaty hand grasped his wrist and pulled. He looked up to see the navigator’s smoke-dirtied face glaring back at him, wide-eyed and afraid. “You cheapskate!” cried the Proximan. “We’re gonna end up dead because of your greed!”

  Griffin got to his feet and shook off the other man’s grip, scowling. “Stow it, Kendrew. I don’t recall any objections from you when I floated the idea of a smuggling run!” He started toward the command pod at the bow of the ship.

  “How could you have thought we’d be able to cut through the Taurus Reach without being detected?” Kendrew waved his hands in the air, keeping pace. He was talking loudly to be heard over the whoop of the klaxons. “Didn’t you think of that? Didn’t you think we’d get caught?”

  Griffin cuffed him around the head. “If you don’t have anything constructive to say, shut the hell up!” The deck moaned and shuddered again, as if it had been struck by a hammer. Griffin had commanded the Eighth for a long time, and he could read the sounds she made; the ship had been snared by a tractor beam.

  What made things worse was that Kendrew was right. Griffin did know better. With hindsight, the idea that this rattletrap ship could sneak through the Reach without encountering any Imperial entanglements seemed idiotic. But she had convinced him it could be done, and like a fool, Griffin had believed her, even let her loose on the warp engines to modify their energy signature. The woman had told him it would work.

  He spat. He hadn’t thought her kind was capable of lying, but there it was.

  “She’s on the bridge,” said Kendrew, clearly thinking the same way. “I told her to leave, but she wouldn’t.”

  They passed the docking airlock antechamber and reached the hatch to the command pod. Griffin slid the thick door open. “Status?” he called, and got a string of sulky looks from the rest of his crew. “I said, what’s the bloody status?”

  “Shields have collapsed.” The reply was metered and cool. “Engines are offline.”

  Griffin turned to glare at the woman, and in turn she regarded him with an air of utter unconcern. “How did that happen?” he demanded.

  His passenger raised one upswept eyebrow. “This is a light freighter.” She pointed to the vessel moving to bear on the bridge’s viewscreen. Griffin made out a hull formed from a disc and a collection of interconnected rods. “That is an Imperial cruiser. Do you require me to provide you with a detailed explanation of the ratio to which you are outmatched?”

  Griffin’s hands balled into fists. “You promised me—”

  The Vulcan shook her head. “I did nothing of the sort. I merely presented you with an option.”

  The freighter captain growled and went to his station, pulling a pistol from a compartment in the console. “You’ll pay for this!”

  An indicator glyph flashed on the viewscreen, and Kendrew yelped. “Transporters! We’re being boarded!”

  “I would suggest you drop that weapon,” said the Vulcan. “It might be considered provocative.” She had barely finished speaking when the air was cut by a humming buzz, and a dozen columns of ruby-gold light coalesced around the command deck.

  Men and women in blood-red tunics gained solidity and form, and Griffin’s breath caught in his throat as he saw the dagger-and-planet insignia on their chests. Griffin felt as if every detail of the intruders was impressed upon him; he recognized the sashes around their waists, the slender and lethal blades sheathed at their hips. The hallmarks of Imperial Earth’s chosen. But if anything, these invaders wore an air of menace that went beyond any kind of uniform. He saw a tattooed Andorian female, tribal patterning visible down her bare arms and across her midriff, silver rings in her brow and lips; cradling a plasma shotgun lazily in his grip, an ebony-skinned man so large and muscled across the chest that the tunic upon him seemed ready to burst; a wispy, pale Edoan carrying blades in each of his three hands; and standing behind the command chair…

  Griffin found a granite-hard gaze boring into him. Lit from behind by the blinking alarm strobes, the man was tall and imposing, his face defined by the flicker of flame from a thin cigar between his teeth. He wore the uniform of an Imperial officer, but only as an afterthought. His stature was framed by a long gray coat that hung to his ankles. Both hands lay casually on the top of a cross-belt holster, the black forms of phaser pistols beneath them.

  The man cocked his head and smiled, exhaling a little smoke. He nodded at Griffin’s pistol. “Do you know what happens to men who point guns at me?”

  Griffin immediately tossed the weapon at Kendrew, who caught it without thinking. Something silver flashed out of the Andorian’s hand, and the navigator made a choking noise before he slumped to the floor, a dagger protruding from his neck.

  “Yes.” The officer nodded. He drew on the cigar and then gestured at the ship around them. “You tried to get past us without halting for inspection.”

  Griffin sneered and nodded, remaining defiant.

  The man leaned in toward him. “Do you know who I am?”

  He didn’t; all these Fleet types looked the same to him, either pretty boys or brigands dressed up like toy soldiers.

  The Vulcan woman answered the question. “Captain Zhao Sheng,” she began, as if she were reading from a report, “also known as the Yellow Hand, the Untouchable, decorated six times by the Admiralty and once by the Empress Sato herself. Master of the I.S.S. Endeavour under the authority of Starbase 47.”

  Zhao shot the woman a hard look at the last statement. He studied Griffin again. “All true. And so, why did you think that this…” He paused, feeling for the right term. “This scow was a match for my ship?” His voice dropped. “I am almost insulted.”

  The Andorian woman had recovered her knife, and with a nod from her commander, she spoke up. “This vessel has not paid tribute for its passage through the Taurus Reach. The penalty for such an infraction is severe.” She cleaned Kendrew’s blood off the blade, using the dead man’s shirt.

  “The penalty for such an infraction,” repeated the Vulcan, “is at the discretion of the officer in command, according to Imperial diktat. Punishment may be anything from a percentage of confiscation of cargo to summary execution.”

  Griffin glared at her. “Will you be quiet, woman?”

  Zhao nodded, amused. “She’s quite right.” He glanced at the Edoan and the large human. “Tupo, Mkembe? Supervise the boarding parties in the cargo bays. Take half of what you find.”

  “Half?” Griffin choked on the word. “You’re worse than pirates!”

  “What about resistance?” Tupo made lazy cuts in the air with his swords.

  Zhao looked away. “Deal with it.”

  As they left, the Andorian indicated Griffin and the rest of the bridge crew. “Sir?” She pointed with her dagger, making it plain exactly what question she was asking.

  Griffin saw his chance and broke in. “Your apes won’t be able to open my cargo pods! They’re ray-shielded, impregnable. Even cracking the locks would
take centuries!”

  “Oh?” Zhao said conversationally. He considered that for a moment, then snapped his fingers at the Andorian. “Ensign sh’Zenne? Communicator, please.” He took the woman’s device and activated it, then slipped the unit into Griffin’s pocket.

  Leaving his other men to guard the command pod and holding the hatch open so the crew could watch what he was doing, Zhao gave Griffin a shove in the small of the back and propelled him over to the airlock. Sh’Zenne opened the inner door and put the freighter captain through, sealing him in.

  Griffin tried to maintain his defiance. “What are you going to do, huh? Drain out the air? Suffocate me?”

  Zhao shook his head and produced his own communicator, turning away to speak a quiet command into it.

  “You can’t space me!” Griffin yelled, his voice muffled through the thick armor glass. “I’m the only one who knows the unlock codes!”

  “Really?” said Zhao. He nodded to the Andorian, who slapped her palm over the emergency venting control.

  There was a sudden screech of air, and the outer door opened. Griffin was blown out into the void and tumbled away into the dark. Sh’Zenne closed the hatch behind him and repressurized the chamber.

  Zhao made a point of looking each one of Griffin’s bridge crew in the eyes; then he whispered into the communicator again.

  A transporter buzzed, and Griffin rematerialized on the deck at Zhao’s feet. He was covered in rimes of ice, shivering and coughing. Lines of blood from his nostrils and ears streaked his face. Sh’Zenne picked up the trembling man and put him back into the airlock.

  “Go…t’hell…” Griffin managed.

  “Again,” said Zhao, and the exercise was repeated. The airlock opened, and Griffin shot away. Agonizing seconds passed before the man was beamed back, his body racked with pain from the freezing kiss of space.