“Those will only limit the size and frequency of the microflares. It won’t block them altogether. And low probability isn’t zero probability. You’re putting these people in danger by not giving them the freedom to move if a flare burst does hit here.”
He sharpened his tone. “More than that—you’re putting others in danger by not letting these people help them. Your hostages were working on a plan to coordinate with flare relief teams when you captured them, did you know that? Not to mention the police officers and Starfleet security personnel who had to be pulled off flare duty to respond to your actions.”
“Fewer than would have come otherwise. That was the idea.”
“But at what cost? Look at what you’re doing, Portia. You talk about wanting the freedom to be a fighter, a warrior. I respect that.”
She scoffed. “Do you?”
“Yes, I do. I think of myself as a military man. I know it’s in my nature to fight, to be aggressive—even to kill if I have to. I accepted that side of myself long ago.”
“But aren’t you the great paragon of Starfleet’s diplomacy? There are textbooks about you already. The captain who came to peaceful terms with the First Federation, the Hortas, the Gorn, the Kelvans. The face of the Organian Peace Treaty.”
Kirk chuckled in spite of himself. “Every one of those peaceful resolutions came at the end of a fight. In several of them, I was slow to open myself to the possibility. My first impulse was to destroy the threat, to protect my crew and my nation. There were other times when I did have to use force, when there was no other way.” He glanced briefly downward. “On Organia, I had peace forced on me over my vocal objections. I had to learn to support it.”
Portia’s keen eyes narrowed. “Tell me truthfully, Admiral. Did you agree with Rakatheema that the Warborn should fight for Starfleet? That we should be its shock troops against the Klingons or Romulans?”
Kirk thought it over, striving to answer honestly. “I believed it was a possibility worth exploring. But not to exploit you. You deserved the dignity of making that choice for yourselves, the same as any other Starfleet officer.
“To be a soldier, Portia, is to put everything that you are on the line. To place your duty, your purpose, above your own life—and over others’ lives, if necessary. In some ways, that’s an even greater sacrifice—a more difficult responsibility to bear. It’s a burden that should never be imposed on anyone who isn’t fully committed to it.”
She stood there absorbing his words for several moments. “All I want is to find my own purpose to fight. To have something worth fighting for.”
“I understand that. I hoped Starfleet could give you that.”
Portia’s wrinkled brow furrowed further. “Nobody can agree on what Starfleet is! Some tell me it’s meant for peace. Others push me to fight for it. How do you reconcile it all?”
Kirk pondered the question, reflecting on many years’ worth of debates with Spock and McCoy, and a few more recent ones with Ashley Janith-Lau. “I’ve been trying to figure that out for most of my life. But I think I have a pretty good idea of the answer by now.”
Her eyes shone with need. “Tell me.”
“The answer is that there is no conflict between those goals—because peace is the only thing worth fighting for. The act of destruction only serves a purpose if it brings about some net positive result.” He gestured with a hand, symbolically reaching toward her. “The Arcturians realized that when they stopped using the Warborn to fight one another, and redefined your purpose as the protection of Arcturus.”
“I couldn’t care less what they made us for. We were just their tools, to be discarded when they didn’t want us anymore.”
“What your ancestors did was terrible, yes. But step by step, through fits and starts, the Arcturians have tried to make it better. To turn something that began destructively toward a more beneficial goal. At first, it was for the benefit of Arcturus. Now, at least, they’re trying to find a solution that benefits you. It’s not perfect, but they’re trying.
“Progress often comes in small steps. Instead of rejecting the next step because it isn’t large enough, we should take it, then use it as a foundation to climb up to the next step, and the next, building momentum as we go.”
She snorted. “Philosophical nonsense.”
“No. It’s the mentality of a soldier. Advance one step at a time, however you can. Hold what ground you can and push forward. If you fall back, gird your loins and push forward again. Never give up the fight as long as you draw breath. Because if you let up, the universe pushes you back.”
He took a step closer. “We fight to bring order to the chaos, not just to create more chaos. If the fight becomes the end in itself, then it has no purpose.
“Portia… the Warborn may have been created to do battle, but that is not the sole purpose of your existence. It’s the means toward becoming what you can truly be.”
The lights flickered, no doubt from the growing flare interference. Kirk gestured toward the door, toward the hostages beyond. “This is your chance, Portia. You say you’ve been looking for something to fight for? Well, that fight is happening. The fight to protect life. My crew is fighting up in space right now to protect this planet. McCoy and Sulu are fighting to save the hostages—and just maybe to save you.”
He reached out a hand again, no longer as mere symbolism. “You can join the fight too, Cadet. Come with me—and we’ll fight together to protect whomever we can.”
Kirk could see that Portia was waging her own battle within. At last, she sagged, letting out a heavy breath. “To be honest, I didn’t know what my endgame would be. I realized this was a bad plan hours ago, but I couldn’t see a way out.”
She peered at him. “If I help you, will you advocate for leniency toward my people?”
He kept his own gaze steely. “Should that matter, soldier? We don’t fight because it’s free of consequences.”
The corner of her mouth turned up slightly. “What’s that line of yours they quote? ‘Risk is our business’?”
He rolled his eyes. “It sounded better before it got overused.”
Portia gave him a nod of understanding and respect, then turned and opened the door. Kirk stood unthreateningly just outside the doorway as she huddled with the other four and informed them of her decision to stand down. Bertram started to argue, but she slapped him down with a few words, and the others quickly fell in line. Then she turned to the hostages. “You’re free to go. There are people out there who’ll need your help soon.”
The activists sighed and wept with relief, all except the two Vulcans, T’Sena and Vekal. The latter merely stared at Portia as if realizing something about her for the first time.
Ashley Janith-Lau rushed to Kirk and embraced him. “Thank you, Jim. I knew you could find a peaceful resolution.”
He smiled down at her. “Don’t tell your fellow pacifists, but I did it by appealing to her as one soldier to another.”
She stared back. “I… guess we have a lot to talk about.”
“Later. Right now we should get you all out of the building. Probably best to be mobile if the microflares hit.”
No sooner did they get outside than Kirk spotted McCoy and Sulu headed his way. Janith-Lau flew into McCoy’s arms and gave him a rather more enthusiastic greeting than she’d given Kirk. He traded a few murmured words with her, then led her over to the admiral, while Sulu touched base with Captain sh’Deslar.
McCoy’s eyes widened briefly in surprise as he saw Portia coming out behind Kirk, but he quickly gathered himself. “Good, you’re here. You’ll both want to hear this. You too, Ashley.”
As sh’Deslar’s people came forward to take the Warborn into custody, Kirk held out a hand to hold them back. “Go ahead, Bones.”
The doctor explained his epiphany about the Warborn being genetically female, and the computer extrapolation he’d performed. “When I projected for masculine development, several of the simulation runs produced close ma
tches for one cadet. That was enough to be granted access to that cadet’s DNA profile, and I’ve confirmed it’s a match.” He held out a data slate. “Here’s our new top suspect for the murder of Rakatheema.”
Portia gasped at the face displayed on the slate, alongside the computer simulations that matched it in various parameters. “Horatio? It can’t be!”
“I hate to break the news under such circumstances. But he’s your biological brother.”
She waved his words away. “That means nothing. How could he be a killer? He’s the one who’s most pious about peace and nonviolence. He sounds the same as these fools.” She gestured toward the activists.
Janith-Lau cleared her throat pointedly. “You seemed pretty convinced we were capable of murder.”
Kirk spoke before they could continue the argument. “We’ll find the answer when we find Horatio. Let me handle that. For now, we have more urgent worries.”
He looked up at the city skyline and its flickering lights. Even the weather seemed to be changing, a cold wind picking up. His thoughts went out to Spock, Uhura, and Scotty on the Enterprise, to Chekov with the defense fleet. If anyone could find the answer before the Earth was engulfed, it was his old crew.
He knew he was needed here—that he had made a difference here tonight. Yet his eyes lifted to the sky, and he wished he could be out there with the Enterprise—even as it flew into the heart of the storm.
Chapter Twenty
United States of Africa
M’Umbha Uhura walked among the elephants, trying to keep them calm. It was the wee hours here, shortly before sunrise, but elephants in their natural habitat slept only a couple of hours a night as a rule, and only when conditions were calm and the temperature, wind, and the like were just right. Now, with a distant flicker in the western sky and the very air feeling charged and agitated, the elephants were in much the same mood.
At a time like this, M’Umbha would have liked to be back home in Nairobi, with Omar and her friends and neighbors. But the elephants were her community too, and they needed someone here to watch out for them. So she had come to them and explained as best she could through her universal translator. The device could allow near-perfect comprehension between civilized humanoids, but elephants were different in many ways and led simpler, more basic lives. For all their raw intelligence, they lacked the context to understand the situation fully.
What she could try to offer instead was comfort and reassurance. She had advised them that the faint, flickering haze growing larger and brighter in the starry sky was an oncoming storm, a different kind than they had seen before, but one that could hurt like lightning if it hit them. She did not have to explain that there was no shelter; to elephants, that was a given with any storm, any threat from predators. They did not have the luxury of civilized beings to feel entitled to exemption from nature’s hazards; they merely endured them as best they could, and supported one another to ease their pain afterward. M’Umbha had promised that she would do the same for them; she and her team stood ready to offer medical aid if any of the herds were struck.
The matriarch of the herd had asked a question: Is this another pain humans have brought onto us?
There had been no accusation in the question, merely a resigned acceptance of reality. It had been generations since the age when humans had routinely enslaved, abused, and killed these magnificent giants, but the clichés about their memory were not exaggerated, and even now their trust was provisional at best.
Still, M’Umbha had not known how to answer the query. Though she did not fully understand the origin of the phenomenon, she knew it was connected to Nyota’s efforts to communicate with some unseen intelligence out in the universe. The last thing she wanted the elephants to think was that her own daughter had brought down this threat upon them. Certainly there was no way Nyota could have known her efforts would provoke this.
She would not say, then, that humans had caused this crisis. But some intelligence, some technology out there, probably had. Someone had caused this through conscious action, probably with no awareness of the damage they were inflicting upon others in the pursuit of their own goals. That would be very familiar to the elephants. Would they care about the distinction between human and nonhuman civilizations?
Instead of dwelling on such questions, M’Umbha thought about her family. She thought of Malcolm volunteering to leave his cozy research hospital, working tirelessly out in space to heal the victims of the flares. She thought of Omar back home in Nairobi, no doubt sitting with their neighbors and cooking for them and telling silly jokes and anecdotes to keep them calm as they waited for a disaster they could not hide from. Most of all, she thought of Nyota bravely rushing forth on the Enterprise to take responsibility for the consequences of her past, and to try to save everyone—the elephants included—from having that pain brought down upon them.
This is what Uhuras do, she thought. We connect people. We build bonds of understanding. M’Umbha knew that somehow, somewhere out there, her daughter was doing just that—trying to make the connection that would let the flares’ creators understand the harm they did, and convince them to stop.
After a time, she finally gave the matriarch her answer, knowing she would not have forgotten the question. “This is a pain that humans are doing their very best to prevent. My own daughter, Nyota, is leading them in that fight. So I believe they will succeed.”
The matriarch flicked her ears skeptically. Nothing can convince a storm not to strike.
M’Umbha smiled. “You don’t know my daughter like I do.”
U.S.S. Enterprise
It had been several minutes now since any microflares had shot through the communications lab. Apparently the restored verteron field, in combination with Reliant’s field in the vanguard, had given Uhura and Shastri the grace period they needed to finalize their preparations. Nonetheless, their headaches and the lingering ringing in their ears helped them keep the urgency of the situation in mind.
Finally, Uhura leaned back from the main console, turning her head to give its display screens one more going over. “I think that’s it. We’re ready to transmit.”
“Great!” Shastri paused, then turned to her. “So why aren’t we?”
She flushed. “I don’t know what to say. There’s no chance they’d understand our speech. Autotranslation could never work with minds that alien.” Not only minds, she realized; the plasma beings’ whole physical universe was so different from hers that there could be few points of commonality for a translation matrix to latch onto.
Shastri smiled. “Who said anything about speech? You already discovered our common language with them decades ago.”
Uhura stared at him. “I sang to them?”
“Every time. Didn’t I mention that?”
“Yes, but I thought… never mind, I don’t know what I thought.” She searched her memory, but that well seemed to have run dry. “What did I sing?”
Shastri blinked multiple times. “I don’t remember. I never really paid attention to the words. I just loved the sound of your voice.”
“All right, then.” She cleared her throat. “How about ‘Two Moons’?”
He stared. “You hated that song! You made fun of the lyrics every time I listened to it.”
“Did I? I have a recording of it in my voice in my personal database. It’s the song that first tipped me off to the vacuum flare connection, when I found similar acoustic patterns in their emissions.”
“You kept that? I convinced you to sing it once, so you could listen to it in your own voice and see if you liked it more.” He chuckled. “You didn’t. Though I thought it was a real improvement.”
She smiled and touched his hand. “Perhaps that’s why I kept it. Anyway, I think the lyrics are fitting here, even if they are a bit corny.”
“Well, I’m game if you are.”
Uhura triple-checked her adjustments, then opened an intercom channel. “Comms lab to bridge. We are ready to attempt co
ntact.”
“Acknowledged, Commander. Proceed.”
Closing that channel, she nodded at Shastri, who laid his hands on his own control panel, ready to refine the parameters of their transmission in response to their signal feedback. He nodded his readiness in return.
Taking a deep breath, Uhura called up the lyrics to the old Martian love song from memory and began to sing:
It seems like we’ve known each other forever.
It feels like a billion years and a day.
It seems so right that we should come together,
So what is this force that keeps us pulling away?
I meet your eyes and I gaze in a mirror.
The love and the fear are reflections of me.
We know each other’s hearts and yet we keep our distance
Two close and loving strangers feels like all we can be.
Two moons racing through the sky.
Hard to come together, but we have to try.
Fear and panic keep us on the run.
If we overcome them, then the two can join as one.
She raised her eyebrows at Shastri: Anything? Checking the readings, he shook his head, then twirled his finger in the universal gesture for “Keep going.” Hoping she wasn’t making a cosmic fool of herself, Uhura took a breath and launched into the next verse:
I reach out my hand and draw it back again
Like some cosmic forces pull it away…
* * *
“Maintain course, Cadet,” Spock advised T’Lara as he studied the plot on the celestial hemisphere display at the base of the helm/navigation console. The Enterprise and Reliant were maintaining a forced orbit around the flare epicenter, remaining at high velocity to minimize microflare damage while also maintaining proximity to the plasma beings’ signal source. “We must remain in Reliant’s wake.”
Living Memory Page 27