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  “Moorings cleared, sir.”

  “Lay in standard angle of departure.”

  “Laid in.”

  “Move us out, one-fifth sublight.”

  “Point two zero sublight . . . here we go.”

  As if a drumroll suddenly erupted in all their heads, the bridge crew straightened their shoulders. No one wanted to slouch as the Federation’s flagship embarked.

  From deep within the heart of the giant ship, a low hum began. As a great sleeping swan raising her neck, stretching her wings, and pushing forward through the pond, the starship Enterprise glided forward and let the spacedock fall away at her sides.

  Before them, the moon gave them a milky salute, then also slid away to starboard, and left open space before them.

  The solar system was like a concert accompanying the swan, with subtle tones of the French horn and the bass, as she slid past each of the planets that happened to be in the path before them. The planets of the Sol system, particularly pretty to all humans because they were the first any human child learned about. They had been the first vision of “space” for everyone on the bridge right now.

  George wished he could enjoy the sight more, but he was too aware of too many things.

  Aware of Robert, who had stuck his neck out and pulled some very long strings to get Jimmy aboard, and who had bothered to take a mission he had intended to turn down just to do an old friend a favor.

  Not even a Starfleet favor. A trouble-on-the-farm favor.

  And there was Jimmy, clinging to the ship’s rail and glaring at the planets. He looked like he was afraid he’d fall off.

  Either that, or he hated all this as much as he pretended to.

  Maybe he wasn’t pretending. Maybe he really did hate it. Maybe he hated George all the more for dragging him up here. . . .

  George felt himself start to sweat under his Security suit. He drew a careful breath and spoke quietly but firmly.

  “Jimmy,” he said, “step up here.”

  His son blinked a couple of times, then leered up at him. “Why should I?” he asked.

  George gritted his teeth. “Get up out of the command deck, dammit.”

  Jimmy looked around, but his sixteen-year-old smart-ass fatalism prevented him from noting that he was the only intruder in what was traditionally and functionally the captain’s private area.

  He glared up at his father with that question on his face, and still didn’t move.

  George snapped his fingers and pointed at the upper deck, beside himself.

  “Quit lipping off and get . . . up . . . here.”

  Hard crust rose on Jimmy’s face and his horns came up. He didn’t like being ordered around in public. He barely put up with it in private.

  He stepped up onto the quarterdeck, leering at his father.

  “Fine,” he said. “You want me out of there? How ’bout if I leave altogether?”

  Without stopping, he stalked past his father and right to the turbolift, which opened accommodatingly and then closed as the boy turned and stabbed George with a final glare, the kind of glare that said he was a boy who’d been making too many decisions for himself in life.

  Regret gripped George as he watched the lift doors close and swallowed that glare the hard way. He shook his head, touched his brow, and turned around again—

  To find Robert gazing up at him. The captain was out of his command chair now, leaning on the bridge rail, framed by the outermost parts of the solar system as the ship cruised for open space.

  “Ah, the rocketry of youth,” the captain sighed. “Makes my heart swell.”

  George gave him a frustrated, embarrassed shrug. “He doesn’t like being told to do something when he doesn’t personally see a reason to do it. That’ll get him killed someday, if he doesn’t learn better—I thought maybe seeing the solar system . . . this was a mistake. I knew it. I should’ve followed my instincts when they told me to turn around and go back home.”

  “Really, my friend,” Robert chuckled.

  He grinned sagely and joined him on the upper deck, so they could have a semblance of privacy.

  “Take that wasp out of your shorts and relax,” he said. “It’s going to be a charming little cruise, we’ll do the Golden Shovel at Faramond, we’ll cruise right back, and your boy will have seen things he never imagined. You see? Perfectly harmless. So don’t get in a pucker. Whatever’s into the boy, we’ll iron it out. After all, he’s only been on board an hour. Don’t want to ask too much of him all in one dose of medicine, do you? He’s only sixteen! He has so far yet to grow.”

  “I’m glad you can see something in there,” George said, “’cuz I sure can’t.”

  “Oh, I see lots in there,” Robert agreed. “Take a little heart, George. Remember, it’s the belligerent children among us who become the greatest leaders . . . Elizabeth the First, Alexander the Great . . . this kind of person naturally has conflict with parents. Sometimes violent conflict. Why, Alexander was suspected of conspiring in his father’s assassination.”

  “Please, Robert!” George wailed. “Don’t give my kid any ideas!”

  EIGHT

  “Kirk here. Liaison Cutter 4 requesting clearance for launch.”

  “Acknowledged, LC 4. Attention, all hangar deck personnel—clear the bay for depressurizing. Repeat, clear the bay and prepare for launch.”

  Alarms began to ring, piercing the entire aft end of the starship’s secondary hull, warning that the bay doors would soon open and any living thing left in the hangar deck would be blown to bits if he, she, or it were not inside the thirty-foot utility ship about to launch.

  To some inside the small ship, those bells sounded like school was in session again.

  To one in particular.

  “Jimmy, are you strapped in?”

  “I’m trapped, if that’s what you mean.”

  George Kirk cranked around from the copilot/navigator’s seat to look aft at his son, who was sitting behind Robert in the row of passenger/crew seats. Now in a Starfleet off-duty suit, obviously missing the jacket he liked so much and the cap he could hide under, Jimmy glared back at him. He was unstrapped and apparently intending to remain that way. Teenagers were indestructible, after all.

  “Regulations,” George said, somehow containing what he really wanted to say. “I know you don’t care much for the law, but the rest of us do. Buckle up.”

  “Probably a good idea, Jimmy,” Robert April said from his own seat in the crew section behind Carlos Florida’s helm seat.

  Letting them know with jerks and yanks that he didn’t want to be doing this, Jimmy buckled up rather than argue with Captain April. Every little defiance seemed to have a limit after which it became impotent. He liked to make points one at a time.

  Any point he wanted to make here, though, would have to be carefully measured. It was close quarters, and there were people here who wouldn’t understand him.

  There were only seven aboard. Jimmy, his father, and Captain April, of course . . . Ensign Hall, who was close enough to Jimmy’s age to make Jimmy unexclusive in the young club; Lieutenant Florida, Chief Impulse Engineer Thorvaldsen, and a somewhat fleshy-faced engineering technician he had brought with him named Jennings or Bennings or Dennings or something. All here, in this cookie box with seats.

  The two engineers were acting weird, Jimmy noted. Glancing at each other and grinning and whispering as though making plans. He recognized it, because those were the same motions and whispers his gang made before their attempt to escape from Iowa.

  But these guys weren’t going to run away, so there was something else they were excited about.

  “Hangar Chief to LC 4.”

  Beside Jimmy, sitting directly behind Robert, Veronica Hall touched the comm and said, “Go ahead, Hangar Chief.”

  “The bay is secured. You’re cleared for launch. Commander Simon is standing by to verify your flight schedule.”

  “Acknowledged,” Hall said.

  “Depressurizing the
bay . . . now.”

  There was no sound or sensation except for the warning bells, but everyone on board tensed anyway. As the deck depressurized, even the sound of the bells faded away, to be finally no sound at all. The dead silence of space, where no sound can travel.

  No matter how technology smoothed out moments like this, launch was still launch. Still a dive into a place that didn’t want life. In a moment those hangar doors would slide open, and they would be in the unforgiving, inclement realm of space. They wouldn’t have the advantage of a big ship, so big that the sensations of imminent danger seemed far away. This little ship was more like taking a rowboat out on the ocean.

  Seated in the pilot’s seat beside George, Carlos Florida powered up the cutter and placed his fingertips on the controls, just feeling them for a few seconds. He flattened his lips and shook his head.

  “This new design,” he complained. “Kinda clumsy on the power-to-thrust ratios. I can feel it.”

  “As long as you can steer it,” George commented.

  “I’m going to recommend they reconsider this in favor of the smaller design. They’re calling it a shuttlecraft.”

  “Did they ask you?”

  “LC 4, Chief . . . I’m going to open the bay doors.”

  “Chief, LC 4. Ready when you are,” Florida said. Then he grinned at George. “Hell, no, they didn’t ask me.”

  On the computer-generated viewing screen, which looked to anyone inside like a big window, the starship’s dome-shaped hangar bay doors parted and showed the shocking emptiness of open space. It was black, it was big, it was diamond-studded—and it was empty.

  Sitting inside his self-constructed shell, Jimmy Kirk kept the scowl firmly on his features as he felt the ship lift off the deck and move toward the great open space. To his left there was a schematic of the ship he was riding, and he tried to concentrate on it so his nervousness wouldn’t show. Blunt bow, streamlined sextagonal body, probably flatsided for storage reasons—he remembered his father talking about Starfleet’s attempts to conserve space by stacking utility craft. A detachable freight hold underneath made the ship look pregnant. On the top of the control section, outside, was a sensor pod for research purposes or something, so the ship looked like a pregnant whale with a tumor on its head.

  An impulse engine in back, two low-warp engines on either side of it, the whole thing painted eggshell white—warp engines? How fast could this thing go?

  A carnival-ride surge jolted him back to what was happening. His grips tightened on the arms of his seat and he tried to swallow but couldn’t.

  To know there was nothing between him and that deadly depressurized eternity out there but the thin skin of this small ship . . . sure wasn’t the same as chugging around Earth in some nice, safe orbital path.

  “Feels funny the first time,” Veronica Hall offered. Her enormous pale blue eyes flapped at him.

  Jimmy looked at her and clung to what he saw. Better than a schematic, her features were very plain, except for the size of those eyes. She had almost no eyelashes, almost no color in her cheeks, and her lips were pale. Her blond hair was short, pulled back on top, and the rest of it was made into about a dozen little braids that brushed the nape of her neck. She looked to Jimmy like the medieval painting in the hallway of his high school, and he imagined her wearing one of those funny cone-shaped hats with a piece of silk hanging out of the point and a long dress with a high waist and no cleavage. Pretty, in a way. Different.

  He clung to the sight of her and tried to imagine himself as a knight riding beside her, hired by the king to protect her.

  Only then did he realize he was breathing too heavily, giving away his fear. And he was digging his fingernails into the arms of his seat now.

  I can’t act scared. I can’t be scared. I’m not scared.

  Yet he couldn’t muster up a voice as the cutter bore off to the right at a notable tilt against its own artificial gravity. One of the smaller auxiliary viewers showed the Enterprise hanging in space behind them, getting farther and farther away. All they had between them and the cold of space was this thirty-foot city bus with impulse drive and another bus-size hold attached to its bottom. Not much to cling to.

  He cleared his throat. “What kind . . . what kind of ship is this thing we’re in?”

  “It’s a low-warp multiduty ship we use when we want to soft-land or do aerial mapping of a planet, or scout an area,” she said. “Goes about warp two, max.”

  “I thought they could just beam down to wherever they wanted to go from a starship.”

  “They can. But a transport or a shuttlecraft or one of these cutters, they’re used to take a controlled environment along with you until you see what you’re getting into. Can’t beam everywhere until you take a peek first.”

  “But we know where we’re going,” Jimmy countered. “Don’t we?”

  “Yes, Jimmy, we do,” Robert said, twisting around in his straps. “This time, though, your father wanted you to see a few of the remarkable natural wonders of this sector. The Enterprise is going at high warp to settle a border dispute on the far side of the sector while we do our diplomatic tea party on Faramond. We’ll rendezvous with them after—”

  “LC 4, this is the bridge. Do you read?”

  “Reading you, bridge,” Veronica said into the comm.

  After the acknowledgment, the voice changed to that of First Officer Simon.

  “Confirming your flight schedule, sir. Five hours at low warp on the set course, approximately forty-eight hours on Faramond Colony, and rendezvous with us in orbit at Faramond.”

  “Confirm,” Robert said.

  Veronica tapped her unit, bothering to reach across with her left hand, which meant she had to lean forward. “That’s confirmed, bridge.”

  “See you in two days, then. Bridge out.”

  Even as she spoke, the Enterprise veered smoothly off, and left their auxiliary screen.

  “Liaison Cutter 4 out.” She looked forward to the pilot station. “Cleared, sir.”

  “Okay,” George said. “Let’s get our bearings on the Rosette navigational buoy.”

  “Aye, sir,” Florida responded, and told the helm what to do.

  Using only the one hand again, Veronica tapped a record of the conversation into the cutter’s log, then grinned at Jimmy and shrugged as though to show him how routine it all was.

  He didn’t like that. A girl trying to make him feel at ease instead of the other way around.

  He hunkered down, wishing he could hide in the raised collar of his jacket, but the jacket was on its way to a border dispute. So he just clammed up and listened to the conversation at the helm. His father’s voice, and Florida’s.

  “Searching,” Florida was saying. “Got it. Wow, it’s a real clear beacon.”

  “Position?” Jimmy’s father asked.

  “Bearing three points on the starboard quarter.”

  “Come about. Bring it two points abaft the starboard beam and take another one.”

  “Coming about, aye. Two points abaft starboard beam . . . stand by . . . mark.”

  “Log that, then keep going.”

  “Logged. Now it’s broad on the starboard beam—correction—one point abaft starboard . . . coming on the beam now . . . ”

  Jimmy bit his lip unconsciously, trying to feel the ship turning. It had to be turning, unless that navy buoy out there was flying around drunk.

  Staring at the readings, Florida went on. “Coming one point forward . . . two . . . three . . . broad on the starboard bow . . . three points, two, one . . . Rosette Nebula buoy is dead ahead, sir.”

  “Cross-sect and get a running fix by bow and beam bearings.”

  “Aye, cross-secting . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . mark. That’s our heading, sir.”

  “Lock it in.”

  “Locked in.”

  “Ahead standard.”

  “Standard cruise speed, aye,” Florida concluded. He gazed at the big emptiness on the viewscreen.
“Here we go.”

  Amidships, Jimmy Kirk pressed his shoulders deeply into the cushion of his seat. There wasn’t much to feel, but there was a sense of mechanical life coming up into his legs from the heart of the small ship. He didn’t know how to measure it, how to judge it—

  “Know what all that was?”

  Jimmy shook himself and looked to his side at Veronica Hall.

  He collected himself and answered, “I don’t care what they’re doing.”

  “Really?” She rolled her eyes. “You should. A small error in defining a fix can mean a large error in position.”

  “I’m not driving, so I don’t care.”

  “Okay. That’s you, I guess,” she said. “Where are you from?”

  “Riverside.”

  “Sounds pretty. Is it a Federation colony?”

  Abruptly self-conscious, Jimmy realized he hadn’t added the main part of his address. He was used to being with people who already knew.

  “No . . . it’s in Iowa.”

  “Oh! Sorry. The way you said it, I got the wrong idea.” She shook her head. “I guess being out in space all the time stretches my perspective. You know what I mean? I’m from Minnesota, but I haven’t been back in a long time.”

  Jimmy leaned toward her and quietly said, “We could go back together . . . just for a visit.”

  “Nothing to go back to,” she said with a blush. “My family’s scattered all over Federation settlements. What are you doing here?” she asked. “A term paper or something?”

  Jimmy looked forward to see that the others seemed involved in getting the cutter on course, except for the two engineers who were tampering with hand-held equipment they had brought with them.

  Lowering his voice to a grumble just above a whisper, he leaned toward Veronica. “My father dragged me here so he wouldn’t feel so guilty about ignoring us.”

  Her pale, straight brows came together. “You mean you don’t want to be here?”

  “Do you?” he countered.

  “I’d rather die than be anywhere else.”

  Skewering her with a courtroom glare, Jimmy lowered his voice. “Isn’t that just a little crazy for a pretty, promising . . . officer?”