Feeling the weariness he had refused to acknowledge earlier, he walked over to the boulder covering Gary’s grave and sat down beside it. Then, in the privacy of his mind, he repeated the information he had shared with Spock—forcing himself to believe it, to accept it.
Gary Mitchell is dead.
Chapter Three
SPOCK, who had occupied the captain’s chair since his return to the Enterprise an hour or so earlier, surveyed the faces of the other officers manning the bridge.
Piper, the gray-haired chief medical officer. Scott, the talented engineer. Alden, the acting helmsman. Dezago, the communications officer. And, of course, the ever-present Yeoman Smith.
They had all heard Captain Kirk’s brief report. They all knew that Commander Mitchell and Dr. Dehner had perished on Delta Vega, the barren planet the Enterprise had been orbiting for the last several hours.
The knowledge seemed to evoke mixed feelings in them. Feelings of regret, no doubt, for Mitchell and Dehner had been their comrades. But feelings of gratitude and relief as well, for Mitchell had been [27] changing into something they could hardly comprehend.
And what did the report evoke in the Vulcan ... who had spent his life denying his emotions, training himself in the severe and spartan disciplines of the great Surak? What did he feel about his colleagues’ deaths?
He felt nothing at all, of course. But then, emotions served no practical purpose. They were stumbling blocks, as Spock’s father had frequently taken pains to point out.
If you wish to embrace the truth, Sarek had told him, find the cleanest, most direct path. That will be the one uncluttered with love and hate, the one free of jealousy, fear, and shame.
The path of logic.
But just this once, the Vulcan wished that he could break with tradition. He wished he could feel what others were feeling. Not out of base curiosity or even scientific interest, but because he was the first officer on this vessel and he had sworn to help his captain any way he could.
That was what he had done the day before, when he recommended—in the strongest terms possible—that Kirk go to Delta Vega and abandon his friend there. That was what he had done when he ordered a phaser rifle beamed down to the lithium-cracking station, not long before Mitchell’s escape.
And that was what he wished to do now. Simply put, he wished to serve his commanding officer. But, for the first time in his life, he wondered if he was equipped for the task.
[28] Abruptly, Spock stood and glanced at Alden. “Lieutenant,” he said, “you have the conn.”
“Aye, sir,” came Alden’s reply.
Then the first officer turned to the chief medical officer. “You are with me, Dr. Piper.”
Piper, a large-boned man with age spots on his hands, didn’t say anything in response. He just nodded, no doubt preoccupied with the captain and his medical condition.
Together, Spock and his colleague entered the turbolift and headed for the transporter room.
When Kirk materialized on the Enterprise’s transporter platform, Spock and Piper were already there waiting for him.
The doctor winced at the sight of his commanding officer. The captain didn’t blame him, either. With his shirt torn, his mouth bloodied, and his limbs stiff from his exertions, Kirk knew he looked a damned sight worse than he actually felt.
Piper shook his head. “Come on,” he said in his gravelly voice. “I’m taking you to sickbay.”
In the past, the captain had done his best to avoid that place. But this time, he didn’t argue. He didn’t have any fight left in him, his struggle with Gary having sapped the last of his strength.
“Whatever you say,” he told the doctor in a hollow voice, a voice that still echoed with the horror of what he had seen and done.
As Kirk descended from the platform, his eyes met Spock’s. If the Vulcan was concerned for the captain’s [29] welfare, he gave no indication of it. Rather, Spock seemed to study the human as if Kirk were some new life-form he had discovered under a microscope.
The captain wasn’t surprised. Though Spock displayed no feelings of his own, the Vulcan often displayed a keen interest in the emotions of other species. And at that moment, Kirk’s emotions were like a wound, raw and painful to the touch.
A part of him resented the scrutiny. Another time, he might have said something about it. But not this time.
Instead, he handed Spock his phaser rifle. The weapon was nicked and scratched in a couple of places, and it had a thick film of Delta Vegan dust on it, but the captain would never be more indebted to a piece of ordnance in his life.
“Take care of it,” he told his first officer.
Spock accepted the weapon, his gaze dark and probing. “As you wish, sir,” he replied.
Nothing more than that. But then, what had Kirk expected? Even after serving under the captain for more than a year, the Vulcan had never discussed anything with him except matters of policy and ship’s operation.
The closest they had come to any meaningful interaction was a three-dimensional chess game or two. And even those had been silent, almost solemn affairs, devoid of excitement or any other emotion.
“Thanks,” Kirk told him.
“Captain ...” said Piper.
“I’m coming,” the captain assured him.
[30] Leaving his first officer with the phaser rifle in his hands, Kirk accompanied Piper out of the transporter room. The doors whispered open in front of them, granting them access to the passage outside.
It felt strange out there, somehow—strange and unfamiliar, the captain thought, though it had only been a few hours since he and Spock had dragged a sedated Gary through the corridor.
A few hours, Kirk echoed inwardly. Just a few. But the world was different then, wasn’t it? There wasn’t any blood on my hands.
Gary was alive.
Just then, a couple of crewmen turned a corner up ahead of him. As they walked past the captain, they looked at him with a mixture of concern and curiosity, and Kirk knew it wasn’t just his physical condition the crewmen were concerned with.
No doubt, they had heard some things, and perhaps guessed at others. And now they were asking, if only with their eyes: Are you all right? Are you still the commanding officer we signed on with?
He nodded to them, refusing to give in to the heartsickness that threatened to overwhelm him, refusing to give in to the guilt. Looking relieved, the crewmen nodded back.
“Morning, sir.”
“Morning,” he replied.
And he walked on.
A few seconds later, Kirk and the doctor reached a turbolift. Piper tapped the pad set into the bulkhead and the duranium doors slid open to admit them. They went inside.
[31] As the doors closed and the lift began to move, Piper turned to the captain. His eyes were a mirror on Kirk’s pain.
“Jim ... I know it couldn’t have been easy for you,” he said. “What you did down there, I mean. Mitchell was your friend.”
Kirk looked at him for a moment. What the older man was really doing was asking if the captain wanted to talk about the tragedy on Delta Vega. After all, with Dr. Dehner gone, Piper was the closest thing to a psychiatrist on the ship.
Also, the doctor liked Kirk. That wasn’t difficult to see. In the year or so Piper and the captain had served together, the doctor had often treated the younger man like a son.
But when it came to unloading such a terribly personal load of grief ... Kirk just didn’t feel close enough to the doctor to do that. In fact, he didn’t feel close enough to anyone on the Enterprise.
“He was my friend,” the captain echoed numbly, hoping that would suffice as an answer.
Piper considered the response. He seemed to sense Kirk’s reluctance to discuss the matter—and he was too professional to press the issue.
“Mitchell was my friend, too,” the doctor said at last, because he had to say something.
Then the doors opened and they exited the lift.
Spock stood at
his science station, scanning the surface of Delta Vega with his sensor array—making sure that Gary Mitchell was as dead as Captain Kirk had indicated.
[32] It wasn’t that the Vulcan didn’t trust the captain’s powers of observation. Quite the contrary. However, none of them had ever encountered a being like Mitchell before. They didn’t know if there was a possibility of his regenerating himself, now or even at some later date.
On the face of it, it seemed unlikely that Mitchell or anyone else could come back from the dead, Lazarus-like. But stranger events had taken place in the past, and would certainly take place in the future. In that context, Spock felt compelled to be as thorough as possible.
Abruptly, the turbolift doors slid aside. Looking up, the Vulcan saw the captain come out onto the bridge. His hand was wrapped in a soft cast, which would give his broken bones an opportunity to heal.
All faces turned to Kirk. The captain acknowledged them with a glance and settled into his empty center seat.
“Set a course for Starbase Thirty-Three,” he said.
“Aye, sir,” responded the navigator, making the necessary adjustments.
“Take us out of orbit, Mr. Alden.”
The helmsman did as the captain ordered. At the same time, on the forward viewscreen, the curved, gray surface of Delta Vega swung down and away and, finally, out of sight.
Kirk frowned. With his good hand, he adjusted the recorder arm on his chair and activated it.
“Captain’s log,” he said, “stardate 1313.8. Add to official losses Dr. Elizabeth Dehner. Be it noted she gave her life in performance of her duty.”
[33] Intrigued, Spock walked over and stood at the captain’s side. After all, he hadn’t heard any of the details of Dehner’s death.
“Lieutenant Commander Gary Mitchell,” the captain continued, his voice dead and devoid of inflection, “same notation.”
The Vulcan cocked an eyebrow, curious about the lack of information. Kirk appeared to notice.
“I want his service record to end that way,” the human explained. “He didn’t ask for what happened to him.”
True, Spock thought, he hadn’t. He had been a victim of his power every bit as much as Kelso or Dehner.
The captain turned to the viewscreen, where the stars were streaking by on all sides as they left Delta Vega behind at full impulse. The Vulcan scrutinized it, too.
As he had noted earlier, he wished to lend Captain Kirk some support in his time of tribulation. He wished to be helpful. However, as Spock had also noted earlier, he was ill equipped to perform such a service.
Kirk had said as much himself the day before, when they were arguing over their options with regard to Mitchell. Will you try for one moment to feel? the captain had demanded of him. At least act like you’ve got a heart?
Unfortunately, he couldn’t do that. As a Vulcan, he enjoyed a great many talents and aptitudes, but the ability to empathize was very definitely not one of them.
[34] Still, the first officer thought, in the name of duty ... couldn’t he act as if he could sympathize? Couldn’t he assume that attitude, if only for Captain Kirk’s sake?
Of course he could.
“I felt for him, too,” Spock said suddenly of Mitchell.
The captain turned to him, a look of surprise on his face. Shock, almost. When he spoke, there was a spriteliness to his voice that the Vulcan hadn’t heard since he came back from Delta Vega.
“I believe,” Kirk remarked wonderingly, “there’s some hope for you after all, Mr. Spock.”
The Vulcan sensed that additional conversation was called for. Certainly, the captain’s expression was an expectant one. However, Spock didn’t know what to say—didn’t know how to respond.
He wished he had thought out his action more fully. He wished he had been less impulsive in his desire to help. But what was done was done, the Vulcan thought. There was no taking it back now.
Logic dictated only one course of action. If Spock didn’t know how further dialogue should proceed, he would simply refrain from responding at all.
Kirk’s expression changed. He was disappointed, no doubt, by his first officer’s silence. And the longer Spock remained that way, the more disappointed the captain seemed to become.
“Then again ...” he breathed.
Kirk turned back to face the forward viewscreen, leaving the Vulcan with the sense that he had missed a window of opportunity ... that he had failed Kirk [35] just as surely as if he had lost the captain’s molecules in the transporter buffer. Nor was it likely he would come across another such window any time in the near future.
Spock regretted the way the incident had turned out. Nonetheless, he was at a loss as to what else he might have said or done. He felt so uncomfortable in this area ... so completely inadequate.
Frowning, defeated, the Vulcan left the vicinity of the captain’s chair and returned to his science station.
Kirk sat in a chair in his quarters and stared at the empty monitor screen in front of him, just as he had stared at the damned thing for the last twenty-five minutes.
Suddenly, he leaned forward and tapped a pad in front of him, activating the workstation’s recording mode. “Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell,” he said, gazing at the screen as if he were looking at Gary’s parents, “I’m afraid I’ve got some bad ... some bad ...”
He couldn’t finish.
“Computer,” he said, “erase that last message.”
“The message has been erased,” came the response.
The captain sighed and sat back in his chair, wondering how he was ever going to get through this. It was never easy to tell people that their loved one had died while in your care. When you knew them as he knew Gary’s family, it was doubly difficult.
And when you yourself had been their child’s executioner, it was pretty near impossible.
Not that anyone was requiring Kirk to do this. According to regulations, it wasn’t his place to notify [36] the deceased’s next of kin—it was Starfleet Command’s. He would have been well within his rights to let the brass do the dirty work.
But Gary hadn’t just been his officer, his colleague. The man had been his best friend. His family deserved more than an official notice from an unfamiliar face on their home monitor.
Let’s try it again, the captain told himself, finding new resolve. A second time, he sat forward in his chair and tapped the workstation pad, starting the recording function.
“Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell,” he said, “I’ve got something terrible to tell you. Gary’s ... that is, he died in the course of a ... a vital ...”
Kirk cursed himself and shook his head. It was no use. Try as he might, he couldn’t seem to find the words.
Abruptly, he heard a series of beeps—the signal that someone was standing in the corridor outside his door. He was relieved to have something else besides his message to deal with.
“Come in,” he responded.
The doors slid aside, revealing Montgomery Scott. The Enterprise’s chief engineer was a spare, wiry man who somehow looked most comfortable when his face was pinched with effort or worry. It was pinched now, too, but with something else entirely.
“Sorry t’ bother ye, sir,” said Scott.
The captain dismissed the need for an apology with a wave of his hand. “That’s all right, Scotty. I was just ... well, never mind that. What can I do for you?”
[37] “It’s Kelso’s funeral,” said the engineer. “I made the arrangements, as ye asked. It’s set for noon tomorrow.”
Kirk nodded approvingly. “Good work.”
“I did nae want t’ make any assumptions,” Scott remarked. “That is, with regard t’ the service. But it’s customary ...”
The captain felt a pang. “You can count on me for a few words,” he assured the engineer. “Lee Kelso was a fine man and an excellent officer. It’s the least I can do for him.”
Scott managed a smile, albeit a sad one. “Thank ye, sir. That was all, really. I guess I’ll be goin�
�� now.”
Then he was gone, sliding out the door like a ghost. But then, the Scotsman had never been a man to mince words. He was as efficient a conversationalist as he was an engineer.
Kirk sat back in his chair, reminded that Gary wasn’t the only friend and colleague whose loss he was mourning. Fortunately for the captain, Kelso had no family, no next of kin who needed to be informed of his death. The man had been orphaned at an early age, without brothers or sisters.
On the other hand, he’d had plenty of family on the Enterprise, plenty of people who loved and admired him, and basked in the warmth of his congenial and often antic company. Even without blood relatives, Kelso would find no lack of tears shed for his passing.
Kirk turned his attention back to his monitor screen. He still didn’t know a good way to tell Gary’s parents about his death. But then, maybe there was no good way.
[38] “Computer,” he said, “erase previous message.”
“The message has been erased.”
The captain leaned forward in his chair and composed himself. He took a deep breath. Then he tapped the pad and began.
“Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell, this is Jim. I wish with all my heart I didn’t have to give you this news ...”
And he went on from there.
Chapter Four
KIRK WAS IN SICKBAY, sitting upright in a bed, the low throb of his biosensors the only sound in the room. There was a monitor held in front of him on an armlike mechanical extension, positioned conveniently so he could read the contents of its glare-free screen.
But the screen was doing something strange. The image on it was changing several times a second, displaying one scientific monograph after another with blinding speed.
And that wasn’t the strangest thing—because as fast as the images on the screen changed, as fast as one monograph replaced another, Kirk was able to follow them without any trouble at all.
No, not just follow ... absorb them. Understand [40] them. And even extrapolate on the data contained in them.
What was going on? he asked himself. What had happened to him? He reached for the control panel at the base of the monitor extension and made the screen in front of him go blank. In its sleek, rectangular darkness, he could see his own face now.
STAR TREK: TOS #85 - My Brother's Keeper, Book One - Republic Page 3