Best Destiny Read online

  Dedicated to the young men and women in the Vision Quest program, and to the crews of the Schooners New Way and Bill of Rights, who prove that troubled youth can not only be saved…they can save themselves

  What you from your fathers have inherited, Earn it, in order to possess it.

  —Goethe

  Commanding a starship is your first best destiny.

  —Captain Spock to Admiral James Kirk in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

  FOREWORD

  Ahhhh! We’re back and it sure feels good!

  Diane and I have been on sabbatical for four years from the Star Trek universe, but we haven’t been idle. We traveled back in time to write a three-book series set during the American Civil War. Though we are once more flying around in the future for humanity’s best destiny, we’re still working in the past — this time James Kirk’s past.

  At first we thought we would just swing back into Star Trek, concerned only about changes in Trek. We didn’t realize we were bringing so many changes in ourselves.

  Nor did we expect any connection between the genres…but the past and the future were way ahead of us. They had something else in mind.

  After a few thousand pages of raking our Civil-War-era characters over the coals, the two of us found ourselves burgeoning with unexpected insight into what might have shaped the life of Captain James Kirk. Tiny events, not big ones, can ultimately make a hero, or fail to make one. Suddenly the tiny things were important, all because we had become so sensitive to the small events that shaped our own history. In writing our Civil War series, Distant Drums, Rise Defiant, and Hail Nation (Bantam Books, 1991, ‘92, ‘93), Diane and I have been hammered by the very lesson Star Trek has been trying to teach us all along.

  Just as “the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many,” the actions of the one can overwhelm the actions of the many. Let me show you how.

  In 1861 the European aristocracy saw the New World cracking in two, and smiled. The Confederate States of American, they felt, were the inevitable winners of the conflict. History gurgled with examples of weaker powers emerging victorious when defending their home soil. More significant, however, it seemed impossible to drag the rebellious states back into a “voluntary” union. To the European elite the United States of America — the big experiment in mob rule — was at an end. Now the Europeans would be justified in crushing any rising democratic sentiment on their own continent. They’d simply point over here and say, “See? Won’t work.”

  Dismemberment of the United States was too tempting for the European powers to ignore. By 1862 Britain and France were poised to recognize the Confederacy and offer monetary and military aid to the new country — fan those flames! Watch that nation crumble!

  They hedged their bets, however. They waited for one big Confederate military victory to prove the Confederacy’s ability to not only survive Northern aggression, but end it. In a daring move that took advantage of infuriatingly timid Union General McClellan’s turtlelike military pace, General Lee split his smaller army of grays into three parts and invaded the North. As the gods looked down upon the impending battle, the odds against the survival of western democracy were very long.

  The gods and the aristocracy lost their collective shirts that day!

  The North was dealt a wild card. One of General Lee’s men lost a few pieces of paper that contained a complete set of orders for the impending battle. Now, if a cow had happened upon the orders and eaten them, this would have come to nothing but a historically insignificant belch. But instead, the lost orders ended up in General McClellan’s hands, and the future history of the world was changed.

  With Lee’s battle plans in hand, a blind man on a three-legged horse could have led the Union Army to a flashing victory and ended the war then and there. Since it was McClellan who had the paper, the Union managed only a stalemate.

  Because that accident with the piece of paper and McClellan’s personality got together on the same day, North and South had to endure three more years of wartime carnage. The Confederate Army was turned back and the European powers never considered intervention so seriously again.

  A minor incident in a day’s work…a careless Confederate courier can’t keep his paws on a few pieces of paper, so the United States of America survives its greatest trial.

  If not for this one clumsy moment, there might not be a single unified nation here today, but a handful of squabbling nation-states each jealously guarding its borders. We’d spend our time suspicious of every bit of trade, every law, every traveler, arguing over who got to take advantage of whom, who got to set which rule, who should patrol which road, who got to toll which river. We would never have been able to pull together to build a society or nurse a flourishing economy.

  There would be no “we.”

  How different would the world look today if the United States had not existed to play its role in the economic and military developments of the last century?

  And what makes a hero? Single people can turn events, even if they’re not dropping battle plans out of their map cases.

  Later in the war President Lincoln finally found a hero for his war-weary country. A non-McClellan emerged, willing to fight with the firmness needed to end the civil conflict and reunite the nation. It was General U. S. (Unconditional Surrender) Grant. While Grant lacked General Lee’s military acuteness, he made up for it with a pit bull’s tenacity and the dispassion of a surgeon.

  If we were inventing Grant’s past from scratch, as we had the chance to do with Jim Kirk, would we create a polished youth, a successful collegiate, a square-shouldered officer?

  Probably. But history taught us something else, just in time.

  General Grant, later to become President Grant, had no success early in life; in fact, before the Civil War his life was marked by failure after failure. He was completely out of place in civilian life, and could barely feed his family during those days without a uniform. The war was Grant’s last chance to avoid stunning mediocrity.

  How might events have been different if Grant had been successful and wealthy at the advent of the war? Would he have been as driven toward success, having already had it?

  Why was President Lincoln willing to take any personal or political risk to reunite the country? What is it that forges heroes like U. S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, or, as we have tried to extrapolate, James T. Kirk?

  Best Destiny is a Star Trek historical novel. Like the heroes of the real-life past, we know much about the deeds of Captain James Kirk. Through the television series, movies, books, and comics, Kirk and crew have been dragged through and survived a multitude of adventures.

  But why them? What in our characters’ pasts gives them that extra pinch of determination and guile it takes to survive the trials of space travel? What minor events and twists of fate, like those in the American Civil War, piled one upon another, resulted in Captain Kirk rather than Chief Surveyor Kirk, or Sixth Level Accountant Kirk, or Mr. J. T. Kirk, 101 No Particular Avenue?

  Best Destiny is not a complete picture by any means. However, Diane and I do hope we’ve developed an insightful and entertaining peek into the steel personality of James Kirk while he was still raw iron and coal.

  So join us in the future, and explore the Star Trek past. If you enjoy Best Destiny, perhaps we’ll do more of the past … in the future.

  And don’t throw away any marching orders that fall into your hands. They might affect the path to your own best destiny.

  Gregory Brodeur

  HISTORIAN’S NOTE

  This story takes place shortly after the events chronicled in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

  PROLOGUE

  USS Enterprise 1701-A

  United Federation of Planets Starship,
r />   Constitution-Class

  Naval Construction Contract 1701-A

  Captain James T. Kirk, Commanding

  “You’ll retire with extraordinary honors and the boundless gratitude of an unfolding Federation. We have a real chance for prosperity in the galaxy . . . a large portion of that chance is due to your vitality of will, your fundamentality of purpose, and your belief in us, Captain Kirk.”

  “Thank you, Mr. President. I don’t know what to say.”

  On the starship’s forward viewscreen, the president of the Federation took an uncustomary pause. His white eyes never flickered within his whey complexion and the frame of long, chalk-white hair, but today hope did luminate in them.

  “I could suggest something,” he said, “if you were willing.”

  An “aw-shucks” grin creased James Kirk’s face, and he fingered the armrests of his command chair for one of the last times.

  “Thank you again, sir,” he said. “We’ve had our time in the light. It’s time for others now.”

  The president offered his idea of a nod, barely a movement at all. His Deltan albinism made almost any expression something only the perceptive would notice.

  “We shall speak again,” he said, “and privately raise a glass to your career, sir, and to your officers. Starfleet Command has authorized Starbase One’s interior occulting light to flash in alternate white and gold, as salute to the Enterprise. I shall consider it my privilege to sign your Bell Book personally in note of arrival, as this will be her last time coming in.”

  “When we return to Starbase One,” Captain Kirk pointed out.

  “At your discretion. No authority will supersede your own as to the final cruise of the Enterprise. Enjoy it.”

  The president nodded his elegant shaggy head, those alien eyes seeming not to really see.

  The screen suddenly went black. Only the audio system operated for a last few seconds, in the voice of an official communications person.

  “United Federation of Planets, Office of the President, Starbase One, out.”

  Captain James Kirk wagged a finger toward the bridge communications station, noted the acknowledgment, and settled a little too calmly back into his command chair.

  “I want to speak to Mr. Scott,” he said.

  No one acknowledged him. No one wanted to. Somehow protocol didn’t fit just then. A moment later the communication tie-in on the command chair’s armrest spoke for itself.

  “Scott here, sir.”

  “Condition of the ship, Scotty.”

  “Aye, sir. We’ve got all damaged decks evacuated and sealed off and isolated priority repairs. Warp engines are fine. Cosmetic repairs can wait, but I’ll have the ship’s engineering up to full integrity within twenty hours.”

  The captain leaned an elbow on that armrest and lowered his voice. “Mr. Scott . . . you understand the ship is being decommissioned upon our return to Starbase One.”

  “I do, sir. But if Starfleet Command is going to retire a space-worthy Enterprise without my corpse rotting in her hull, I guarandamntee yeh they’ll have pain doing it. I intend to make them go down on record as having decommissioned a service-ready starship.”

  Silence pooled on the bridge. There was no echo, but there might as well have been.

  The captain was gazing at nothing, as though preparing to follow his vessel into that nothing. He and the chief engineer. Their ship.

  “I understand,” he said. “You carry on, Mr. Scott.”

  “Thank you, sir, I will and a half. Scott out.”

  The captain crossed his legs and leaned back as though to digest what he had heard, and what he had uttered back.

  “Steady as she goes,” he said to the helm before him.

  On the quarterdeck behind him, a very thin man with eyes the color of water and hair that had gone merrily gray felt his own square features harden up. Dr. Leonard McCoy had waited all his life to become a country codger, and he was enjoying it. He could scowl openly at such exchanges. He could snarl at anybody, and not get hit in the mouth.

  With an aggravated frown he stepped sideways to the science station, as he had a hundred times before in years past, and muttered again to the same person who had heard his mutters those hundred times.

  “What can we say to him, Spock?” McCoy began, easily loud enough for the captain to hear.

  A figure straightened inside the science station cowl. The entire bridge seemed to inhale as the alien presence turned to the ship’s fore. Small, alert eyes brushed the bridge, set in the triangular features of his face that McCoy had once regarded as hard, cold, built deliberately on angles. Sober and thrifty—that underpinned the study of being Vulcan.

  How old was the Vulcan now? McCoy skimmed the medical records he kept handy in his mind and tried to equate Vulcan years with human years. Failed, as usual. They just didn’t equate. Spock’s straight hair, once stove-black, was now a dignified sealskin gray. His quill-straight brows were still dark, still angled up and away, but were shaggier than in his youth, though they still made the Vulcan look to McCoy as did all Vulcans—like tall, skinny bats with clothes on.

  Add them to the one feature that had made Vulcans so hard to take seriously . . . the elongated ears that came to points. McCoy had decided those ears were the reason Vulcans had given up emotion. They couldn’t stand being teased.

  Suddenly McCoy felt lucky to be standing beside this man. Despite the years of mutual antagonism, he and Spock had been through every form of effort, every kind of death, every kind of life together; each offered himself in sacrifice for the other time after time, and somehow they were both lucky enough to still be standing there.

  McCoy knew he was also lucky to be standing next to the first Vulcan in Starfleet, the first of what had turned out to be many. The Vulcans had always tried to be unimpressible and self-contained, but because of this one, they had changed their minds.

  Because of the young Spock, the impertinent radical who had shunned his race’s Olympian seclusion, Vulcans no longer prided themselves on inaccessibility. They’d discovered that Starfleet, though founded by those silly humans and still primarily run by them, wasn’t quite the lawless fluster the Vulcans had assigned humanity in the past, and that it didn’t cause concussion to the art of being Vulcan. In fact, they’d found out that Starfleet emblemized law in settled space, was counted upon by dozens of defenseless worlds in a touch-and-go galaxy. The Federation was the great castle that protected them, and Starfleet was its knighthood.

  Even enemies knew it. That was why there had been affluent peace for so long. Starfleet insisted upon it, had the muscle to back it up.

  The Vulcans were now proud, yes, proud to be part of Starfleet, to actively defend the Federation, to participate in the strength that prosperity insisted upon, and they too bristled when that path was blocked. Those who had once turned their very straight backs on Spock in his Starfleet uniform now nudged their own sons and daughters into Starfleet Academy, eager to see them answer a bugle call they themselves had once rejected, and to see them participate in the spaceborne operations a thriving interstellar community simply had to have gone on.

  Yes, things had changed.

  Though he was standing right beside McCoy, Spock also didn’t bother to mutter, or even to lower his voice, on the bridge. This critical deck was built for acoustic perfection, so no order went unheard, no whisper unconsidered, no buzz unanswered.

  On top of that, there was the captain’s damned alertness. Like a leopard at rest.

  “What can we say,” McCoy sighed, “to make it easy to watch all the Enterprise fade into history?”

  Spock shifted his weight. “The Constitution-class starship is no longer considered state-of-the-art in patrol/exploration craft, Doctor. That accolade now goes to the Excelsior-class.”

  “Excelsior-class,” McCoy grumbled. “Looks like a swollen-up party balloon at a Starfleet shoving-off party.”

  The captain glanced at them, stood up, and casually circled
his command chair, running his hands along the soft back.

  “All things change, gentlemen,” he said. “All things grow. It’s our duty to be gracious.”

  He hesitated, gazing at the viewscreen and the enormity of space.

  “How would it look to the young,” he added, “if we botched our final duty?”

  USS Bill of Rights

  United Federation of Planets Starship, Excelsior-Class

  Naval Exploration Extension 2010

  Captain Alma Anne Roth, Commanding

  “Contact Starfleet! Level One distress, immediately!”

  “Trying, Captain! No power on normal channels! No power at all!”

  “Then use abnormal channels! Get a message out before it’s too late!”

  “Aye, aye—switching to telemetry!”

  James Kirk’s hair had gone darker with age instead of lighter, as had his temperament, yet he still bore the tan of a sailor and the browns of a fox—acorn, walnut, toast, bone, berry—in his cheeks and hair. He had always been on the foliage side of the color wheel.

  It was dark in the forest today.

  “Jim,” McCoy attempted, “just because you’re retiring from command doesn’t mean you have nothing to give. The Federation doesn’t want you to retire from Starfleet—nobody does.”

  “Nobody?” James Kirk responded. “I’ve lived not only a good life, but a great one. I’ve cheated death a hundred times in the field, beaten the perils of space, and now the people who were kids when I was in my prime are in their prime. It’s their turn. I can’t take mine and theirs too. I’ve spent my time behind a desk and in front of a classroom, and neither of those are for me, Bones. They’re decommissioning this entire class of starship in favor of the Excelsior-class heavier design, and without a ship . . . the best part of my life is over.”

  His two closest friends regarded him somberly. They were seeing all the changes in each other, and not so much how things had stayed the same. They were still together after twenty-five years, yes. Their legacy was approaching what appeared to be a close. They had all learned to look forward to retirement.