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  “You wouldn’t even realize you were in danger until too late,” Robert added.

  “Right. But since this is a warp ship, the screen is computer-generated. The computer translates this according to temperature. So it looks blue from in here. No ship can go in there. Our science doesn’t know of any shielding that can survive inside that. The high gravity and radiation and solar wind would even rip through the starship’s shielding. Solar wind is made of charged particles of plasma shooting off from the sun itself—”

  “How do you know?” Jimmy challenged.

  “What?”

  “How do you know a starship can’t survive in there? That thing back there’s the first starship, isn’t it? Why don’t you just go in anyway and try it.”

  His father drew his shoulders tight in anger and leered at him sidelong.

  “Because we’d be dead, that’s why,” he snarled. “You can’t get past that smart-ass fatalism of yours, can you?”

  “Maybe I just have an adventurous spirit.”

  The collective annoyance could’ve been packaged and shipped. The idea that Jimmy would refer to the Enterprise as “that thing back there”—

  Eyes suddenly hard as walnuts, his father turned more toward him and lowered his voice.

  “Is it asking so much that you relax and enjoy some of these things we’re showing you?”

  Jimmy let his own expression go hard.

  “You drag me up here against my will,” he said, “and I’m supposed to enjoy it?”

  “Can’t you at least try? You’re not here for my good, you know.”

  “Oh, right, forgot. I’m here for mine.”

  He got a mixed victory for his efforts to exterminate his father’s efforts when George slumped, scowled bitterly, and jabbed a thumb toward the back.

  “Get out,” he growled, his teeth together.

  Satisfied, but pushing down the nervousness that came with such a win, Jimmy took his time getting up. There was a certain stage timing to these things. The sooner he could manage to dismantle his father’s hopes in all this, the sooner he could get back to Earth and get on with his life, his way.

  He took care not to give that fantastic sight more than a passing last glance as he got up, crouching to keep from knocking his head on the low forward ceiling.

  But that last glance . . .

  He stopped short.

  Staring—what the hell!

  “What’s the matter with you?” his father asked. “Go.”

  Jimmy tried to say something, but though his lips were hanging open, his throat was locked up tight. All he could do was blink, and point.

  Point at the ship coming at them right out of the Blue Zone!

  Even as Jimmy pointed, the cutter’s sensor alarms went off—warning of intrusion into their flight space.

  “Carlos!” George called.

  Gaping, Jimmy couldn’t move and was shocked when four hands grabbed him, yanked him away from the helm, and stuffed him behind the navigation seat. He had no idea who had grabbed him, and he couldn’t take his eyes off the screen to check.

  Carlos Florida slammed himself into the pilot’s seat, gasping, “That’s impossible! It’s impossible!”

  Two neon-orange glows appeared on the green/black hull of the intruder—and suddenly the cutter rocked under them and filled with the screams of electrical reactions.

  Over it all, Jimmy heard his father’s voice.

  “They’re firing on us!”

  NINE

  USS Enterprise 1701-A

  “I ought to slingshot around the sun, go back forty-five years, and slap myself.”

  Leonard McCoy turned at the captain’s grumble and asked, “Pardon me?”

  Shifting uneasily, James Kirk drew a long breath. The taste of regret.

  “I said . . . I ought to go back and slap myself for the first words I spoke on the bridge. They weren’t exactly poetry.”

  “Why? What were the words?”

  Smears of rosy humiliation ruddied the captain’s cheeks. Kirk was a hard man to embarrass, but he could still embarrass himself.

  He pressed his lips tight, then parted them, then pressed them tight again.

  “I said the bridge smelled.”

  The taste came rushing back. Beside him, McCoy winced.

  Suddenly they were both glad the yellow-alert alarms were honking in the background.

  In spite of that, the two men might as well have been alone on the bridge. In spite of the bustling activity around them, the crew busy with a ship in alert, tense wth anticipation of horror and the Starfleet officer’s nightmare of antimatter flushback, the two felt alone in their reverie.

  Even the concerned regard of First Officer Spock from the raised quarterdeck behind them failed to invade, and certainly failed to comfort. They knew why he wasn’t stepping down. They knew he had picked up the captain’s mood, but wasn’t inviting himself into the conversation. Yet.

  There were some moments only humans could understand—and only some humans at that—as they drew upon a common heritage, the special union with vessels that had carried them since the Vikings.

  Jim Kirk’s brow puckered, and he gazed forward at the vista of deep space as the ship raced forward at incomprehensible speed toward a place whose name made the years peel away at light speed. A place where another starship may have just died.

  “Bones . . . do you know what it is to feel that a ship is alive?”

  The doctor’s silence prodded the captain further into thoughts that couldn’t be measured. Kirk didn’t look at him. Didn’t really want an answer.

  “When I took command,” he said, “and came back onto the bridge for the first time as an adult . . . I wondered if she remembered.”

  He blinked, and looked around the bridge now, a superstitious seaman unable to throttle down those feelings about ships that somehow got into the blood of everyone who depended upon them. To depend on a ship for one’s very life made it ugly to think of the ship as just parts and forms, wood, bolts, and mechanics. No one wanted his life clinging to heartless metal and wood. After all the years of vehicles in history, a pulse of the living had seeped into those manufactured pieces, and there wasn’t a sailor alive who could deny it without being a liar.

  The ship around him now wasn’t that same starship, but her namesake and her design twin. Beautiful, yes, but not the ship to which he owned the apology. That ship—he had sent to destruction, spiraling down into the atmosphere of a hostile new planet, avoiding the necessity of bringing her home to be decommissioned after more than forty years of service. Shunted aside by new designs, caught in the spin of change, now destined to be brought home and picked apart in some drydock somewhere, like a whale decomposing out of water.

  He had taken her out without permission, against orders. In some ways, he was pleased to spare her that fate. She deserved to die in space, where she had lived, where she had made it safe for countless millions to live.

  Circumstance had forced him to send her in and let her burn, to let her go to sleep in space, where she belonged.

  Almost as though the ship possessed a heartbeat—

  Sailors . . . a little moonhappy, all of them.

  Now this ship was being decommissioned too, and she wasn’t that old. The design again. Everybody said the design was being superseded by a whole new batch of technology. Obsolete, supposedly.

  Forty-some years was a long time, wasn’t it?

  “I was only thirty years old,” he went on. “The Fleet’s youngest starship commander. The ship was box-docked when I first came on board, the same as she had been when I boarded her at the age of sixteen. But the bridge looked smaller than when I’d seen it before . . . darker and quieter . . . and there was no one there but me. Only me and the bridge. It was like being alone with a woman I’d slept with but failed to appreciate. I felt guilty and unworthy of her. And I wondered if she remembered those first words.”

  He hesitated, his eyes fixed on the past, hands hanging
just above the arm of the new command chair without actually touching it.

  “I wondered,” he added, “if she’d forgiven me.”

  Alert whistles chirped in the background, demanding attention like young eagles in the nest. Personnel ran on and off the bridge, each doing a small specific thing. Add the small things up . . . one very big thing. Survival in space.

  Dr. McCoy shifted his feet, bobbed his eyebrows in puzzlement, and leaned back against the bridge rail, not exactly relaxed under these conditions.

  “I used to think a person would have to be crazy to command a ship in deep space,” he said. “Now I’m sure of it.”

  TEN

  Forty-five years earlier . . .

  “Evasive! Get some shields up! Everybody take cover!”

  “Astonishing!” Robert April’s voice flushed between the crackling sensors and howling alarms.

  Carlos Florida gasped, “They hit our pod!”

  “Get the panel open!” George shouted. “Get those men out of there!”

  “I’ll get it!” Veronica yelled back, and vaulted to the middle of the ship, where she started working on the ceiling panel.

  The control board sparked, knocking George sideways.

  “There goes our hyperlight communications—” Florida said.

  Robert crouched between George and Florida to see the chunky, unidentifiable black and green ship coming toward them out of the Blue Zone. “What kind of design is that? Looks like it’s built of triangles. I don’t recognize it at all—”

  “Checking!” Veronica Hall called from behind. With her real hand on the panel she was trying to open, she reached down with her fake hand and poked in a code, then went back to the panel.

  Her small computer screen went wild with diagnostic pictures, ship after ship, design after design, schematics and mechanical skeletons, picking out pieces here and there and putting them in boxes. Veronica finally frowned down at it, doing two things at once.

  “No known configuration!” she said, shouting above the crackle as a laser struck their outer hull.

  Florida transferred her readings forward to his own screen. “According to this, it’s built piecemeal from several designs. There’s at least one Starfleet thruster on it . . . a private-shipping cargo train . . . but according to the thruster-exhaust reading, their power formula appears to be what the Andorians are using.”

  “Are they Andorians?”

  “No way to confirm that, sir.” His voice cracked, but he kept control.

  Jimmy felt his face turn parchmenty with terror. He was on his butt, on the deck, not even in a seat, and couldn’t move, not even to crawl away. His eyes were big and hurting as he stared at the forward screen.

  The intruder’s gargoylish ship, green parts flickering bronze in the ugly lights from the trinary, was crowding down upon them on collision course. Its outer hull, shielded by a faint grayish outline that was apparently some kind of shielding, crackled with clinging energy from the Blue Zone.

  “Damn! Where are our combat shields!” his father blurted out. He and Florida were frantically maneuvering back from the encroaching ship.

  “We don’t have any,” Florida said.

  “What do you mean, we don’t have any! No combat shields?”

  “Only navigational ones. Just enough to keep the space particles off us in low warp. I told you this model was silly! It’s meant for peaceful, boring cruises in known spacelanes!”

  “Warm up the lasers! Where are they! Where are the goddamn firing controls?”

  Florida bent downward. “All we have is industrial cutting lasers. They’re under here.”

  “What are they doing down there!”

  “Open a frequency, George!” Captain April ordered. “Hail them!”

  “Hall, do it!”

  Amidships, Veronica scrambled to do that.

  “Frequency open, sir,” she said.

  “George, take it. You’re the captain here.”

  Jimmy looked at Captain April, then at his father in confusion. There was something both scary and odd about that realization . . . that his father was the captain in this vessel. How did these things work?

  Another neon bolt shot from the stranger and hit the upper hull—

  “I can’t get this!” Veronica shouted, still yanking on the panel’s manual latch.

  Suddenly they were all thrown sideways, except her and George, who were still strapped in. Jimmy found himself folded up like an envelope against the starboard bulkhead, and realized the whole cutter was turning against its artificial gravity and whining in protest.

  His father slammed a fist on his own control board, either in rage or tapping himself in, or both.

  Probably both.

  “Attention, unidentified vessel! This is Commander George Kirk of the United Federation of Planets Starfleet, goddammit! I demand to know the meaning of this unlawful discharge of your weapons! You’re in Federation space and you’re also in violation of about twenty statutes of the Interstellar Maritime Laws! Cease fire and identify yourselves!”

  Sweat trickled down his face.

  Sudden silence fell.

  The green and black industrial animal out there stopped firing. Its laser ports glowed as though it were ready, waiting. Maybe thinking. Maybe something George had said was having an effect.

  Jimmy knuckled his own face—and found a wet, hot film. Something had happened to the life support. The temperature control—

  Smoke poured out of places where there shouldn’t even be places. Instantly everybody was coughing.

  The ceiling hatch! It was kinked partly open and smoke was billowing down from there.

  “Dad! Up there!” Jimmy yelled.

  George struggled to his feet, stepped over Robert and Jimmy, motioned Veronica out of the way, and yanked on the stuck hatch. “Thorvaldsen! Bennings!”

  “Bill!” Robert called.

  “Forward life support going on automatic backup!” Veronica called. She cleared her throat. “That last hit—oh, there goes the main-cabin oxygen!”

  George didn’t look at her, didn’t take his eyes off the ceiling panel. “Seal off all sections!”

  Carlos spoke from a dried mouth. “Why are they just hanging out there?”

  “How’s the cargo unit, Ensign?” Robert asked, twisting to address Veronica.

  She fingered her controls with one hand while waving at the smoke with the other. “Secure so far.”

  “Seal that off too. Do whatever you must, but make sure it’s not a target for their sensors. No point giving away information.”

  “Aye, sir, sealing off cargo level and shutting down activity there.”

  He got up and tried to help George get the pod’s hatch open. “See if you mightn’t be able to do something about this smoke also.”

  “Aye, sir, ventilating!”

  The small ship’s engines caterwauled with strain and the ship bucked. Veronica was thrown backward and landed hard, but almost immediately crawled back to her controls.

  George hung on to the ceiling handle, twisting on his toes.

  “Tractor beams!” he shouted. “They’ve got us!”

  The cutter wailed around them with sheer mechanical effort, bucking harder and harder until everyone had to hang on to something, strapped in or not.

  “Sir, our engines!” Florida choked out. He pointed spasmodically at the attacking ship with one hand and at the impulse systems monitor with the other. The indicator bands were washing back and forth crazily. “That monster’s ten times our size! We’ll overload if we fight a thing like that!”

  “Cut the power!” George answered. “We can’t afford a burnout.”

  Florida pounded his controls. The bucking eased and gave way to a nasty teeth-on-edge whistle deep inside the ship.

  “We’ll have to find some other way,” Robert said.

  Setting his jaw, George yanked open a wall panel, grabbed a piece of equipment that had a point, and started levering at the hinge. “Yeah. If
we had a transporter, I’d beam over there and explain it to them. With my bare knuckles. Thorvaldsen! Answer me!”

  His tool flew forward as the panel cracked, then opened with a godawful squawk. He yanked the ladder down, waved at the smoke, and climbed up.

  Almost instantly he slid back down and landed flat on both feet.

  Jimmy and the others stared at him.

  George Kirk had turned into a ghost. Whatever he had seen up there took every cell of blood from his face, left his mouth gaping, his eyes wide, watering, stinging, and red. Robert and Carlos Florida caught his arms, because he looked like he was about to go over.

  “George?” the captain dared.

  Florida stepped past them and started to go up, but George caught him.

  “Don’t—don’t—” he stammered. He shook his head and crushed his eyes closed for a moment.

  Florida’s round face crumpled. His shoulders sagged and he muttered something unintelligible.

  Grief limned every face as Jimmy watched. Why weren’t they going up there? Why weren’t they making sure there wasn’t a single thing left to do for those two men?

  Florida pushed Jim’s father back down into his seat, where he sat stiff as a mannequin.

  Captain April clung to the back of that seat, hugging it. His eyes were closed too, and he was gasping in little breaths. After a moment he wiped his mouth with a palm and looked up at the screen again, at the ship that had fired on them.

  “I simply can’t believe it. How could they survive in the Blue Zone? How could they possibly survive? They came out of there like a trap-door spider!”

  “Doesn’t make a shred of sense,” Florida filled in. His voice was quiet with fear. Perspiration burnished his face and plastered his black hair across his forehead. “As if any of this made a shred of sense . . . ”

  “Why do you think they ceased fire?” Robert wondered.

  Florida trembled, but managed a shrug. “Suppose somebody staked a claim on this area and they think we’re doing the intruding? Maybe they didn’t know this is Federation space.”