The captain saw that Spock was serious. It left him little choice.
[53] “All right,” Kirk relented.
The memories seemed to well up of their own accord, good ones and bad, transporting him back to a kinder but no less complicated time. A time of opportunities and uncertainties, hopes and fears.
“It was like this ...”
Chapter Five
EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD JIM KIRK proceeded down the echoing hallway to his new office, his arms so full of textbook tapes that the topmost nestled under his chin. Cadets of all stripes walked by on either side of him, trying not to stare—and staring anyway.
Of course, Kirk could have waited for campus security to bring him an antigrav cart, just like any other new professor. But then, he was different from other new professors.
While they were veterans of Starfleet, he was only eighteen years old. Whereas they had earned their ranks in the course of mission after mission and achievement after achievement, he had been given a lieutenancy based largely on his conduct during the negotiations that led to the peace of Anaxar, for which [55] he won a medal and the praise of his commanding officer.
Of course, the Palm Leaf of Axanar was just icing on the cake. Throughout his freshman year, Kirk had displayed a willingness to work hard and excel. He had been described by at least one professor as “the best command candidate I’ve had in nearly a decade,” and by another as “a young man with virtually unlimited potential.”
Hence, the teaching position—and the eagerness that accompanied it. Kirk’s predecessor had removed the last of his personal effects less than half an hour earlier, and the lieutenant was already moving in to claim his new office with all the determination of a Klingon commander seizing a planet.
Never mind that it required a trek all the way across campus, or that the office hadn’t been cleaned yet by the buildings-and-grounds people. Kirk was propelled by unbridled enthusiasm.
It was only in the last few minutes that he had begun to regret that enthusiasm. The stack of tapes was heavy and unwieldy—so much so that the muscles in his arms were beginning to cramp. Kirk was starting to feel as if he might not make it all the way to his destination without dropping his materials on the floor.
He had an impulse to set his burden down, admit that he had been foolish to try to lug it so far, and call for a cart after all. No doubt, that would have been the sensible thing to do.
But Kirk couldn’t exercise the sensible option. The Academy had placed great faith in him—not only to [56] share his knowledge and insights with his fellow cadets, but to maintain his dignity among them. If he fell short of completing his little expedition, the brass would certainly hear of it.
And Kirk would be embarrassed.
His mouth twisted involuntarily. He hated being embarrassed.
Lord knew, he had been caught red-faced often enough the year before, when Finnegan was around to plague him. The upperclassman had made his life at the Academy a living hell.
But Finnegan had graduated—if only by the skin of his teeth—and taken a position on a starship bound for the Romulan border. At that very moment he was light-years from Earth, probably too busy analyzing sensor readings to think about the plebe he had tortured at every turn.
This year, Kirk resolved, he would be embarrassed no more. He would be cool, unflappable ... the very picture of composure.
Unless, of course, he spilled his tapes all over the floor.
Just as he thought that, the lieutenant heard something—a gibe, followed by muted laughter. Glancing to his left, he caught sight of a pair of first-year cadets in black-and-gold Academy togs.
One of the cadets was tall and thin, with a long, freckled face and an unruly thatch of red hair. The other was of average build, with dark hair and eyes. The second cadet had a certain look about him—a cockiness, the lieutenant thought—that set him apart from the other plebes.
[57] It figured he would make that kind of remark.
Kirk stopped and addressed the man. “I beg your pardon?”
The cadet’s expression turned sober. “Sir?”
“Did I hear you correctly?”
“That depends,” said the cadet.
“On what?”
The cadet lifted his chin. “On what you heard, sir.”
Kirk’s arms ached like crazy, but he wasn’t about to go until he had gotten some satisfaction. “What I heard,” he said without inflection, “is that I look like a stack of books with legs.”
The cadet’s dark eyes twinkled. “That’s correct, sir. I mean, yes, I said that. But then, you do look like a stack of books with legs.” He shrugged, poker-faced. “No disrespect intended, of course.”
“Of course,” the lieutenant echoed. “Tell me ... what’s your name, Cadet?”
The man hesitated for a moment—a primitive and not unexpected reaction. “Mitchell, sir. Gary Mitchell.”
Kirk assessed the cadet. “I’ll see you in class, Mr. Mitchell.”
The man looked at him, unable to conceal his confusion. “Class, sir?”
“That’s right,” Kirk told him. “Federation History.”
The cadet tilted his head. “I think you’re mistaken, sir. I’m in Commander Chiarello’s Federation History class.”
It was the lieutenant’s turn to smile, despite the burning sensation in his arms. “You were in [58] Commander Chiarello’s class. Now you’re in mine,” he said. “I’m going to arrange for a transfer, Mr. Mitchell ... so you and I can get better acquainted.”
The man didn’t seem to know how to respond. At last, he muttered, “Thank you, sir.”
“The pleasure is all mine,” Kirk assured him. “Before we’re done, you may find that you’ve become a stack of books with legs, too.”
Mitchell frowned ever so slightly.
“As you were,” the lieutenant told him. Then he resumed his progress along the corridor, his muscles knotting painfully.
He listened intently to see if the plebe was inclined to utter any more remarks, now that he had his back turned. Fortunately for Mitchell, Kirk didn’t hear any.
It was fortunate for Kirk as well. After all, his arms couldn’t have taken any more conversation.
As it happened, he made it all the way inside the confines of his office before he couldn’t stand it anymore—and the stack of tapes cascaded from his arms. “Thank you,” he said to no one in particular, closing his eyes and reveling in the feeling of relief.
Letting the door slide closed behind him, the lieutenant plunked himself down in his chair. His arms hung in his lap, stiff and useless, but at least his ordeal was over.
It was only after the ache had begun to subside that Kirk turned to the workstation on his desk, brought up the roster of first-year cadets, and requested Mitchell’s transfer.
* * *
[59] Seventeen-year-old Gary Mitchell waited until the stuck-up lieutenant turned the corner. Then he glanced at Karl-Willem Brandhorst, his red-haired roommate and fellow plebe.
“What’s his problem?” Mitchell wondered out loud.
“Don’t you know who that is?” asked Brandhorst.
Mitchell shrugged. “Should I?”
“Does the name Kirk ring a bell? James T. Kirk?”
Mitchell shook his head. “Can’t say it does, actually.”
Brandhorst rolled his pale blue eyes. “Come on, Gary. Kirk’s the biggest thing around here since Garth of Izar. Starfleet Command can’t wait to shove him into a big, comfy captain’s chair.”
Mitchell studied the other cadet, wondering if Brandhorst was pulling his leg. Apparently, he wasn’t.
“What’s so great about him?” he asked.
The redhead grunted. “From what I’ve heard, just about everything. He’s smarter than anybody they’ve seen in a long time. He works twice as hard as anyone else. And he’s got this air about him, this ... well, you saw it yourself. It’s like he was born to command.”
Mitchell pondered the information. “Well
,” he said finally, “he wasn’t born to command me.”
Brandhorst looked at him. “If I were you, I’d belay that kind of talk. Kirk’s already got his eye on you. The last thing you want to do is rub him the wrong way.”
Mitchell laughed and slapped his red-haired companion on the back. “You know what, Karl? You’ve [60] got to loosen up. You’re taking all this Academy stuff way too seriously.”
The other cadet frowned. “You’d better start taking it seriously, too, my friend, or they’ll kick your sorry butt out of here. There’s a list of a thousand candidates just itching to take your place.”
Mitchell knew Brandhorst wasn’t exaggerating. Getting into Starfleet Academy was the rarest of privileges. Only an infinitesimal percentage of those who took the exam ever qualified.
It wasn’t that Mitchell wasn’t pleased to be there, or that he discounted the advantages of a future in Starfleet. He wanted to see the stars as much as any of his fellow cadets, and he knew he had to get through the Academy if he hoped to do that.
He simply didn’t feel compelled to worry much about his studies, or for that matter, his instructors’ opinions of him. For as long as he could remember he had gotten by on the strength of what came naturally. He saw no reason to change his strategy now.
“Let ’em itch,” Mitchell replied at last. “I’m here for the duration.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Brandhorst.
“Bet the farm on it,” his roommate assured him.
Kirk tapped a stud on his control board and the oversized screen behind him came alive, displaying a ninety-two-year-old sensor image of a sleek, silver-gray Romulan Bird-of-Prey.
The vessel was essentially a cylinder with a cigar-shaped nacelle aft of amidships on either side of it. Its [61] underbelly bore the blue-green device of a proud, winged predator—presumably, one native to the skies of Romulus, though no one in the Federation had ever determined that for sure.
“This,” the lieutenant said, turning to his amphitheater of a classroom and his class of twenty-two first-year cadets, “is the ship the Romulans used to wage war against the people of Earth. That war began in 2156 and continued until 2160, claiming tens of thousands of lives from both sides, and culminating in the decisive Terran victory at the Battle of Cheron.”
His students studied the screen and the curious-looking vessel depicted on it. All except one of them, Kirk noticed.
Gary Mitchell had glanced at the image of the Romulan vessel when it first came up, but had shown little interest in the subject since. He seemed to prefer staring out the west-facing window at the cloud-strewn sky hanging over the Pacific.
“Phasers, disrupters, photon torpedoes ... none of those technologies had been invented yet,” the lieutenant pointed out. “Both sides had to resort to the use of atomic weapons, which seemed to blow up in their prefire chambers as often as they did anywhere else.”
Mitchell, he saw, had begun inspecting his fingernails.
“A great deal,” said Kirk, “is made of the fact that Earth’s forces had warp-speed capability, while the Romulans had to rely on mere impulse engines. But if [62] you think about it, that difference wasn’t the overwhelming strategic advantage it appears to be.” He paused. “Anyone care to explain why?”
A number of hands shot up. None of them were Mitchell’s.
“Mr. Santangelo?” said the lieutenant.
Santangelo, a small fellow, spoke in a surprisingly deep, melodious voice. “Many of the battles took place within solar systems, where planetary gravity wells prohibited the use of faster-than-light travel.”
“That’s one reason,” Kirk agreed. “And the other?” He eyed the students who had raised their hands. “Mr. Eisner?”
Eisner had a high forehead and jughandle ears. “As you mentioned, sir, both sides had primitive weapons. For anyone to even think of hitting anything, they had to engage the enemy at impulse speeds.”
The lieutenant nodded. “Good job, both of you.”
He touched his controls again and the image on the screen changed. Instead of a single Romulan vessel, it showed an entire fleet of them.
“At one point,” Kirk told his class, “Romulan forces came close to Earth—a lot closer, in fact, than many people like to remember. That proximity, that sense of the wolf at our door, had a profound effect ... not only on the population that had remained behind on the human homeworld, but on Earth’s ships and their crews.”
Every cadet in the room nodded as he or she tried to imagine what it had been like. Again, Mitchell was the sole exception. He was peering out the window again.
[63] “What do you suppose their reactions might have been?” the lieutenant asked his students.
As before, he saw several hands go up. Predictably, Mitchell’s wasn’t one of them.
“Mr. Mitchell?” he said.
The cadet turned to him. If he was embarrassed or even surprised, he gave no indication of it. He just stared at Kirk with an almost eerie lack of expression on his face.
“Their reactions?” Mitchell echoed.
“That was the question,” the lieutenant confirmed.
“On Earth? Or among the defenders out in space?”
“Let’s start with the defenders.”
The cadet went on staring at Kirk. His brow creased a bit. “Something unexpected,” he said at last. “Not fear ... that’s what one might be tempted to think. But the defenders weren’t afraid. No ... they became determined, like cornered animals. Having their backs against the wall just made them fight that much harder.”
It was the lieutenant’s turn to stare. “That’s exactly right,” he said, impressed by Mitchell’s level of insight. “The crews on those ships fought like savages defending their caves. And before they knew it, they had begun to push the invaders back.”
The cadet smiled, obviously pleased with himself.
Kirk didn’t return the smile. Instead, he went on with his lesson. He spoke of what life was like on Earth during the war. He spoke of the battles on which the fortunes of the combatants pivoted. And he spoke of the Romulans themselves—or rather, what little had become known about them.
[64] Of course, he posed questions along the way, to get his students thinking in ways they might not have thought before. And every time he believed he had caught Mitchell napping, he posed a more difficult question—one that required some serious reflection.
But the cadet fielded every one of those questions flawlessly. Before long, it became obvious to the lieutenant that Mitchell was more formidable than he seemed at a glance.
Eventually, the chimes sounded, signaling the end of Kirk’s class. “I want you all to read Dandridge’s accounts of the Battle of Cheron,” he said, as his students saved their notes and picked up their padds. “We’ll be looking at that in depth next time. Dismissed.”
The cadets got up. Mitchell was the last to rise and the last to file past the lieutenant.
“Mr. Mitchell,” Kirk said.
The plebe stopped. “Sir?”
“I’d like to talk with you for a moment.”
“What about, sir?” Mitchell asked.
The lieutenant frowned. “This is just between you and me. Not upperclassman and underclassman, not teacher and student. Just you and me.”
The cadet nodded. “I understand.”
Kirk waited until the door hissed closed. Then he turned to Mitchell. “Tell me,” he said. “How do you do it?”
“Do it?” the underclassman asked.
“How did you answer all those questions without batting an eyelash,” the lieutenant asked, “when it’s [65] clear you’re not the least bit interested in the subject matter?”
Mitchell smiled a cryptic smile, piquing Kirk’s curiosity even more. “You won’t hold it against me, sir?”
“You have my word,” said the upperclassman.
The plebe shrugged. “I just get these ... flashes of insight, I guess you’d call them. I’ve gotten them all my life.”
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“Flashes of insight?” Kirk wondered. “You mean you can tell what’s going on in my head?”
“No,” said Mitchell. “It’s not that black-and-white. But I can tell how you feel about something. And most of the time, I can put that together with some other cue and come up with a picture.”
Growing up in Iowa, Kirk had heard about such people. He had just never run into one himself.
“I’m no Vulcan, mind you,” said Mitchell. “But, more often than not, I can figure out what people are thinking.”
The lieutenant wanted a demonstration. “All right, then,” he said. “What am I thinking right now?”
The cadet examined Kirk’s expression. “You’re thinking I’m only half the jerk you figured me for.”
The upperclassman realized his mouth was hanging open. With a conscious effort, he closed it.
“Pretty close?” Mitchell asked.
“Pretty close,” Kirk conceded.
“That’s a big reason I got into the Academy,” the cadet admitted. “I mean, I wasn’t exactly a model student in other ways. But when it came to figuring [66] things out ... figuring people out, I should say ... I’ve always been among the crème de la crème.”
The lieutenant shook his head. “But you study, too,” he insisted, refusing to believe the contrary.
The plebe shrugged. “I study the things I feel like studying. Warp-engine design, for instance. And stellar navigation. I can’t get enough of that stuff. But when it comes to history, philosophy, comparative sociology ... I get bored pretty easily.”
Kirk winced at the admission. In all the time he had been at the Academy, he had never heard anyone say anything like that.
Also, he didn’t know how he felt about the idea of someone getting by on intuition alone. It didn’t seem fair to the other cadets.
“I know,” said Mitchell. “You think what I do is cheating, in a way. You think I should step aside and give my spot to some more deserving person—someone who fits the mold a little better.”
The lieutenant felt himself go red in the face. “I didn’t say that,” he responded defensively.
STAR TREK: TOS #85 - My Brother's Keeper, Book One - Republic Page 5