Kirk nodded. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”
It didn’t take them long to uncrate some Federation food packs. With nourishment in hand, they sat down together at the long wooden table under the orange-fabric awning in the center of the empty camp.
And as they waited for the other members of the troubled expedition to return, Picard reviewed what he and Kirk might best discuss together. After a moment’s thought, he decided to ask Kirk to continue the story he’d begun in the desert.
A story of earlier expectations, and other wrong conclusions.
Somehow, to Picard, it seemed fitting.
Chapter Thirteen
U.S.S.ENTERPRISE NCC-1701, MANDYLION RIFT, STARDATE 1007.2
DOING NOTHING was never an option for Kirk.
So in the seventh hour of the Enterprise’s slow, almost blind progress through the gas cloud of the Mandylion Rift, her captain went to the gym.
Only one other crew member was present: Spock, lifting antigrav weights. Or so it seemed.
“Captain,” Spock said as Kirk approached the rack of antigrav training units.
“Mr. Spock,” Kirk acknowledged. With the Enterprise’s subspace sensors still offline, Kirk was not surprised to find his science officer here. There was nothing he could do on the bridge either. Not until sensor capability was restored. At least Scott’s team had repairs well underway.
Kirk studied the rack, looking for antigravs with the correct hand-grip. He rested his hands on the ends of the towel around his neck, surreptitiously glancing at Spock again. For someone who supposedly was training with weights, the Vulcan wasn’t putting much effort into it.
“Something wrong, Captain?”
Kirk shook his head, tossed his towel onto the rack, then pulled out a matched pair of antigravs and set them to a mass of five kilos each for his warmup set. The caution lights on the units’ control panels flashed as the Casimir generators in each reversed polarity and began to gain mass.
When the lights stopped flashing, Kirk stood with one antigrav in each hand, arms hanging straight at his sides. The antigravs were each generating force equivalent to a five-kilo mass. He took a breath, looked at Spock again.
The Vulcan still hadn’t moved.
What is he doing? Kirk thought.
Spock stood in a utility jumpsuit, holding an antigrav training unit in each hand, his arms angled out from his sides at about forty-five degrees. Spock had been in the same position since Kirk walked in through the doors.
“Captain?” Spock said again. Kirk had dropped any pretense of not staring at his science officer.
“Mr. Spock, what, exactly, are you doing?” Kirk hadn’t noticed before, but Spock was sweating.
“Lifting weights, sir. Part of my physical-conditioning routine.”
Arms straight, elbows up, Kirk raised his own set of antigrav weights to both sides, working his shoulders. “Trouble is, Mr. Spock, you’re not lifting them. You’re…holding them.”
“On the contrary, sir, I am lifting them, albeit very slowly.”
Kirk counted fourteen repetitions, then dropped the antigravs. As their inertial sensors detected their rate of fall, their reversed polarity fields switched off, and each unit floated gently to the deck.
Still watching Spock, Kirk rolled his shoulders back and forth. Maybe the Vulcan’s arms were a bit higher than they were before. But not by much.
“Slowly?” Kirk asked.
Spock didn’t move a muscle as he replied. Or if he did, Kirk couldn’t detect it.
“The length of time the muscle groups are under strain during one extended lift is equivalent to the aggregate total of the strain endured during multiple short repetitions such as those you have just engaged in.”
Kirk stared at his immobile science officer for a few moments, then crouched to pick up his weights again. “‘Logical’ weightlifting, Spock?”
“I prefer the term ‘efficient.’”
Kirk reset his weights to cycle from ten kilos to two kilos in five stages, then began his shoulder raises again.
“How long…have you…been lifting…” he began to ask between gulped breaths.
“These weights?” Spock added helpfully.
Kirk nodded as he felt the weights cycle to their next setting, going from ten kilos to eight.
“Four minutes, seventeen seconds at the point at which you enquired,” Spock said. “The entire range of motion will take eleven minutes.”
Kirk felt his shoulders burning as the weights reset to six kilos, allowing him to continue on even as his muscles were progressively exhausted. “I can’t believe that’s as good for you as this,” he gasped.
“Indeed, it is better.”
Kirk felt sweat prickle his scalp as he struggled to keep his arms rising and falling. The weights reset to four kilos, but it still felt as if hot needles had been thrust into his shoulders.
“Is that…because…you’re Vulcan?”
“No. This is a more efficient form of exercise for humans, as well.”
The weights reset to two kilos, but Kirk’s muscles were drained and after he failed in two attempts to lift his arms, he dropped the antigravs in relief.
“Mr. Spock,” he said as he caught his breath, “if that form of exercise is so much better than the regular way, why isn’t everyone doing it?”
“Because it is much more difficult.”
Kirk’s shoulders still burned. “You’re joking. No, don’t answer that.” He tried to read the control display on one of Spock’s anti-gravs. “What do you have those set on, anyway?”
“Forty kilos,” Spock said.
Kirk frowned. He doubted he could complete one shoulder raise with a forty-kilo weight in each hand, let alone hold the weight almost motionless for eleven minutes.
“But that setting is because I am Vulcan. My muscle fibers are different from yours.”
Kirk made a noncommittal noise, then picked up one of his antigravs again, tapped the control panel to set it for forty kilos, then braced himself as the caution lights flashed and the device became heavier. And heavier.
He tried holding it with both hands, decided that Vulcan muscles had to be totally different from human muscles, and dropped the device again, to let it fall slowly to the deck.
“A problem with the antigrav?” Spock asked innocently.
“Not at all,” Kirk muttered. He reset the weights for another cycle of stepped repetitions and began again. Then he asked, “So what do you think will happen to the Klingon ship when it hits that subspace pulse?”
“Very little.”
“What? The Klingons can withstand that sort of attack and we can’t?”
“The Klingons are not as vulnerable to that form of attack.”
Spock still remained apparently frozen in place, though his arms were almost completely outstretched. Kirk was pleased to see that at least they were trembling.
“Mr. Spock, are you saying a Klingon battlecruiser is better than the Enterprise?”
Spock took a breath and Kirk hoped it was because he was tiring. “No, sir. I simply point out the fact that a Klingon battlecruiser is not equipped for conducting extensive scientific studies as are we. A great deal of the disruptive subspace signal we experienced will not be received by the Klingon ship because it has no sensors capable of detecting it.”
Kirk hadn’t thought about that. “Does that mean the Klingon can travel at warp in the cloud?”
“Doubtful. Its navigation systems should be at least as adversely affected as were ours.”
“Good,” Kirk said as he dropped his weights again.
Spock’s arms were now fully extended at ninety-degree angles, elbows slightly higher than the line of his shoulders. Sweat trickled from his dark bangs, and the tremors in his arms had become more apparent.
But whatever effort Spock was expending, it didn’t stop him from questioning his captain. “Permission to speak freely?”
Kirk sighed as he rubbed at his shoulders
. “I thought we had settled that, Spock. No need to ask. You may always speak freely to me.”
“Very well. Why is it that you turn everything into a competition?”
Where did that come from? Kirk thought. “I don’t turn everything into a competition.”
“Our mission to the center of the Mandylion Rift is one recent example,” Spock said.
Kirk snorted. “I didn’t turn this mission into a competition. It is a competition. The Enterprise and at least four other ships trying to reach the alien vessel—”
“If it is a vessel,” Spock interrupted.
“—first,” Kirk concluded.
“Another example then. Lifting weights,” Spock said.
Kirk didn’t understand the change in topic. “What about it?” He hefted his antigravs again, set them for another cycle, but this time beginning at eight kilos.
“You are attempting to compete with me now,” Spock explained.
“No. I am not.”
“You set your antigrav to forty kilos.”
“I was curious, Mr. Spock. You said yourself that Vulcan muscle fibers are different from human ones. What’s the sense of competing under those conditions. It would be like…”
Spock completed the simile for him. “…the Enterprise with her advanced capabilities going against the more basic technology of a Klingon battlecruiser?”
“Mr. Spock,” Kirk said, wondering if Spock was after something too subtle for him to recognize, or if this odd, back-and-forth conversation passed for Vulcan small talk, “the competition between the Klingon Empire and the Federation has been going on for decades. Again, I had no hand in creating it.”
“Neither do you seek to avoid it.”
Kirk lost the rhythm of his movements. With no other option available to him, he let his arms flop to his sides while the antigravs were still generating six-kilo masses.
“Spock, do you want to avoid competition with the Klingons?”
The Vulcan’s response was delivered calmly. “Seen out of context, some answers to that question might be construed to be in conflict with my oath as a Starfleet officer.”
“You’re damn right,” Kirk said. “Is there a point to this conversation?”
Spock angled his head, the slight movement either the closest Kirk’s science officer might ever come to a shrug or an indication that the Vulcan was finally in the process of slowly lowering his weights.
“We are nearing a situation fraught with possibilities that do not lend themselves to logical outcomes.”
Kirk shook his head. “I beg your pardon?”
Spock blinked away the sweat trickling into his eyes. “The conditions we are likely to encounter when we reach the center of the Mandylion Rift…”
“You mean, when we locate the alien vessel,” Kirk said, then quickly added, “if that’s what it is.”
“Yes, sir. Those conditions are likely to involve…competitive situations with the commanders of the other ships who are also presumably searching for the alien…object.”
Kirk still couldn’t see what Spock was getting at. “Why are you so concerned about ‘competitive situations,’ Mr. Spock?”
“I am concerned about the degrees of risk we might encounter. Specifically, the degrees of risk which you might take on for yourself.”
Kirk was intrigued to hear that phrase come from a Vulcan. Degrees of risk, he thought. How can that be logical? He was beginning to suspect that once Spock stepped away from the hard and fast facts of science, he wasn’t the undefeatable master of debate Kirk had feared.
He picked up his weights again. Time to go through his final set. He considered it unlikely Spock could distract him twice.
“Mr. Spock, when it comes to ‘degrees of risk,’ I would argue that in the case of our mission, risk is an absolute. It exists, or it does not, and any discussion of measuring it by degrees is trivial.”
Spock’s eyes appeared to Kirk to brighten with interest. Taking up the challenge, is more like it, Kirk thought suddenly.
“Captain, if I may be permitted to disagree, I would like to point out an earlier action which you have taken, which exposes a flaw in the logic of your statement.”
Kirk replied through clenched teeth as he raised and lowered his arms. Spock does want to turn this discussion into a debate—a competition—with me!“Very well, Mr. Spock. Disagree all you want.”
Spock cleared his throat. “Sir, I would argue that two months ago, you made a decision representing acceptable risk, when you dropped all but our navigational shields to indicate our peaceful intentions as we approached the Trelorian ship. On the other end of the scale being discussed, your decision to personally lead the landing party to the colony on Dimorus, before life sciences had conducted a thorough investigation into the colonists’ mysterious deaths, could be considered an un acceptable risk. The difference between the two is not, with respect, ‘trivial.’”
“I see.” Kirk completed his set, dropped his weights again, untroubled by the now-extreme muscle fatigue in his shoulders. This debate was becoming much more interesting to him. Especially since he knew he could win it easily. “Then answer me this, Mr. Spock: Two months ago, what’s the worst thing that could have happened if my decision to drop shields before the Trelorian ship had been the wrong decision?”
Kirk grabbed his towel from the rack.
He smiled as he sensed hesitation in Spock. It was as if the science officer suspected a trap was being prepared, but couldn’t be certain how it might be sprung.
“The worst thing that could have happened would have been complete destruction of the Enterprise and the loss of all crew.”
“That seems logical to me,” Kirk agreed, enjoying the reaction he was sure he saw Spock try to conceal at his use of the word “logical.” “Humor me, now—”
“Something I do quite regularly with the other humans on this ship,” Spock interrupted. The Vulcan’s arms were almost completely at his side now, their trembling noticeably reduced as the angle had changed.
No question about it that time, Kirk thought. I’m definitely getting to him.
“Then you’ll have no trouble telling me what the worst result might have been of my decision to lead the landing party on Dimorus.”
Spock’s eyes narrowed, the action telling Kirk his science officer had identified the trap. “Complete loss of the landing party.”
“Five people,” Kirk said. “Out of four hundred and eighteen.”
“At the time,” Spock conceded, or so Kirk interpreted his tone, “ship’s complement was four hundred and twelve.”
“So,” Kirk said, in anticipation of the moment of victory, “if I understand your argument correctly—”
“I will correct you in the event of any misapprehension.”
“Thank you, Mr. Spock.” Kirk wiped his face with his towel, aware that his science officer was using a strategy he himself knew well—throwing off an opponent’s timing by making inappropriate comments. Kirk had used it to great effect on the lacrosse fields at the Academy. Though his comments had tended to be more blunt and generally involved his opponents’ parentage.
Kirk flipped his towel over his shoulder and continued. “To recap, you believe it was acceptable to risk the destruction of ship and crew, yet unacceptable to risk the lives of five crew members.”
Spock took on the patient air of a parent explaining something to a wayward child for the tenth time. “You were one of those five crew members, Captain. Indeed, had not Lieutenant Mitchell thrown himself into the path of the poison dart released by the Dimoran vole, you quite likely would have died.”
“Gary didn’t die.” Though he’d come close to doing so, Kirk knew. Right now, his best friend had been off the Enterprise for six weeks undergoing treatment for exposure to the creature’s toxin. The last time Kirk had checked with Starfleet Medical, it would be at least another two months before Mitchell would be cleared to return to duty.
“Fortunately, Lieutenant Mitc
hell does not share your many allergies to alien proteins.”
Kirk sighed. What had promised to be an entertaining contest was quickly descending into pointless bickering over inconsequential details.
“Mr. Spock, the important thing is, I didn’t die. And the Trelorians didn’t attack when our shields were down.”
“The fact that there were no negative results does not change the initial conditions of either scenario.”
Kirk couldn’t have said it better himself. Game over. He’d won. “Exactly, Mr. Spock.”
Spock opened his mouth as if to say something, then looked at Kirk with what was clearly an expression of confusion. “You agree with me?”
Kirk was surprised by the question. “No. You agree with me.”
“I do not.”
“You just said you did.”
“I said the fact that you succeeded in both examples does not alter the fact that unfavorable results were possible at the outset.”
“Which is exactly my argument, Mr. Spock. Unfavorable results were possible in both cases. Risks existed. What does it matter if the risk involves one man or four hundred?”
Spock released his weights and they floated to the deck. “It matters considerably to the other three hundred and ninety-nine men.”
“Mr. Spock, are you prepared to say that the life of any one person aboard the Enterprise is more valuable than another?”
Now Spock looked insulted, vaguely. “Logic demands it.” He began to rotate his shoulders as Kirk had done, though again, much more slowly.
“Logic doesn’t apply.”
Spock’s expression of utter horror was barely disguised. “Logic always applies.”
“Explain.”
Spock unfolded his own towel from where he had carefully placed it beside the weight rack. “Should your yeoman die, the ship’s mission would not be altered. Should you die—”
“You would assume command until a new starship commander arrived from Starfleet, and the ship’s mission would not be altered. And if the ship were lost, then a new ship would take her place. And another after that. It’s the nature of what we do, Mr. Spock.” Kirk folded his arms. “No man is more important than the mission. And no life is more important than another. Not on my ship.”
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