Best Destiny Page 7

  As the stratotractor left the tangle of dockage and came out into open space again, they saw before them the majesty of what mankind had built on its own doorstep.

  A hard lump of air made Jimmy tuck his chin when he had to swallow.

  Starbase One . . .

  A man-made heaven, beside Earth.

  A giant silver spool with thread of lights, rotating slowly on its own axis, whispering into a boy’s ears, First of my kind, first of my kind, welcome, welcome.

  Jimmy swallowed a smile. He offered Starbase One only a constricted eagle eye.

  He tried not to listen, just as he had ignored the whispering of the Skunk River, but these things spoke to him somehow and he could never forget. That’s how it had always been. The distance had always whispered to him. The sunset, the howling wind, the hum of aircraft, the shiver of sails. Anything a hundred miles beyond wherever he was standing. Testimonials to the great outside had always whispered to Jimmy Kirk.

  He gazed down through the popcorn clouds at the planet below, at the detail offered to him by the special windows and the cameras that brought pictures up to the monitors above himself and Captain April, and, trying to keep a handle on his narrowmindedness, he muttered, “Guess you can’t bathe nude in your backyard anymore.”

  “Mmm, guess not,” April responded. “In fact, Starfleet has expressly requested that officers not do that.”

  A smile pulled, but Jimmy chewed it down.

  “Before many more years,” April went on, “I hope to have officers who won’t have to worry about that sort of thing . . . you know, the kind who don’t have clothes to take off.”

  Jimmy leered at him. “Huh?”

  “Aliens. I hope to attract more aliens into Starfleet.”

  “Why? Who needs ’em?”

  “Don’t you think that would make service more interesting? More noninsular, so to speak?”

  “Not for me. I wouldn’t want to spend my time working next to some slimy lieutenant with a tentacle.”

  “Well, why not? You, the adventurous type who doesn’t care what’s around the next tree? Why, I’d have thought you’d be the type clawing to get out to space, Jimmy.”

  The boy turned suddenly and purposely dark. “I’ve been to space,” he said sourly. “Once.”

  New silence broke out as the forward area opened up and showed spines.

  April shifted uneasily, realizing his error.

  “Oh,” he uttered. “Yes . . . of course you have. Sorry.”

  Jimmy bathed in the syrup of satisfaction while keeping his face bitter, then coldly added, “Don’t apologize to me. I’m one of the ones that lived.”

  Great. Played right into his hands. He knew his father was back there, holding his breath, hoping for a reaction.

  There would be none. There would be only a prisoner’s glower, only disdain for that which had taken him away from where he wanted to be, when they all knew he had a fair reason for never wanting to go into space again. They were taking him away from Earth, away from Emily, away from those who did what he told them to do.

  Though he was seeing the glittering spacedocks and the magnificence of Starbase One, Jimmy peered only through his own savage tunnel vision. He worked so hard to keep his face barren that his cheeks got stiff and his eye muscles actually hurt. Squinting them a little in the docklights helped, and he hoped it looked like a frown. No matter how the struts glowed in the sun’s aurora or how the strings of docklights shimmered on the transport ships, he refused to be impressed. He kept his body stiff and aweless.

  It took every ounce of his willpower to deny his father even the smallest satisfaction. Keeping his face a practice in nonwonder, he stood before Niagara Falls and felt no spray.

  After a few more seconds of calculated nothing, Jimmy got his reward.

  “I’ll go make sure Drake’s all right,” his father said from behind them. “Don’t want him accidentally locked inside a damaged potato. I’ll . . . be right back.”

  A twinge of victory ran up Jimmy’s spine. His father sounded defeated.

  Captain April turned. “George, didn’t you want to see . . . you know.”

  As the lift panel slid open, George Kirk appeared surly and crestfallen.

  “I don’t know if I want to see her or not right now, Robert,” he muttered, and simply left.

  The panel sighed shut. Now Jimmy was alone with Captain April and that field of astonishments out there. They looked at each other.

  No matter how he tried, Jimmy couldn’t muster the same rude disregard for Robert April that he gave his father. So he kept his father in mind in order to keep the chill on his face.

  “Who’s ‘her’?” he asked, bristling.

  Captain April blinked.

  “Beg pardon? Oh!” Then he chuckled. “Oh, you’ll see soon enough. An old friend of your father’s and mine, you might say. He’ll perk up when he sees her, don’t you worry.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You don’t care? That’s no way to talk, my boy.”

  “Isn’t it? He held a gun on me.”

  “Oh, now, Jimmy!” the captain admonished. “Is this the same family I spend Christmases with?”

  Jimmy shrugged. “Shows how he thinks of me, that’s all I know.”

  “Certain it wasn’t just instinct at work?” His grin twisted warmly. “A Security commander has to go on instinct more than most of us. Don’t you realize that?”

  Eyes still hard, Jimmy charged, “Is that a reason?”

  “No, no, of course not . . . let’s try to forget it, shall we? We’re all starting out on a wonderful adventure. We won’t let a bit of domestic sandpaper spoil it, will we? Of course not. Oh, look! See those little one- and two-man worker vehicles? We have funny names for those, like potatoes and hedgehogs and sandbaggers—”

  “Sandbaggers,” Jimmy repeated. “That comes from wooden racing boats.”

  The captain looked at him. “Does it? How so?”

  Suddenly on the spot, Jimmy sifted for a nearly faded memory. “The East Coast . . . sandbaggers were racing sloops in the 1860s, I think. They had big sails with extra-long booms, and they used sandbags for movable ballast. Every time the boat tacked, they’d toss the sandbags to windward.”

  “Really! What a spartan way to run a race! Must’ve taken a great deal of skill and timing. Where’d you learn about such a thing?”

  Sensing he was being cornered, Jimmy shoved his enthusiasm into retreat. He wasn’t about to say where he’d learned that. It would mean mentioning his father.

  “Just happened to hear about it,” he muttered.

  “It’s champion that you know these things,” Captain April said genuinely. “Spacefaring is just an extension of basic seamanship. Good fellow. Proud of you!”

  He clapped a congratulations on Jimmy’s shoulder and kept his hand there as he gazed at Starbase One.

  Jimmy felt heat rising in his cheeks. He stewed in silence as the stratotractor moved across the starbase’s main doors.

  And didn’t go in.

  When he realized that, Jimmy straightened and frowned. “What’s going on? Where are we going?”

  A cagey grin appeared on Captain April’s lips. “We’re going around to the other side of the base, to the Starfleet box dock.”

  “Why? I thought we were going someplace on this—”

  Bucket of bolts.

  “—ship.”

  “Oh, no. We’re going on another ship, my boy. Another ship altogether. Look . . . ”

  The stratotractor was just coming around the starbase, breaking out into open space with the planet glowing at their left, half in daylight and half in night. In the coal-black distance shimmered the thing April had called the box dock.

  It was an elongated red hexagon hovering there in the blackness, peaceful and separate, glowing with rectangular lighting bars much softer than the strings of lights on the merchant spacedocks.

  There was something inside it.

  Somethin
g white.

  Jimmy pressed his shoulder against the rim of the viewport and determined to remain composed. He would offer a nodding acceptance to whatever Robert April showed him, and an open derisiveness to whatever his father showed him. He made promises to himself. He folded his arms and let his hands go limp at his sides to show how bored he was.

  “This is Captain April aboard Strato 838, requesting permission to approach.”

  “Acknowledged, Captain. You’re free to approach. Please use the port side arrival patterns and fall into magnetic tractor beam port-four for docking. We’ll do the rest.”

  “I will, thank you. April out.”

  A few more clips and taps, and the robotic piloting took over.

  They drew closer and closer to the box dock, moving higher into orbit, up, up, up toward the box dock—until the angle of the dock’s ribs could no longer hide what hovered inside.

  Robert leaned forward in nothing but love.

  Bathed in beaconage, there she was. The gazingstock of Starfleet.

  With the diamondlike poise of a resting Lippizaner stallion, a huge milk-white ship beguiled the blackness. Two pencil-shaped warp nacelles pierced back from her lower hull, implying speed. The lower hull, where mankind’s genius of engineering found expression, provided the ship’s sense of ballast. Robert knew those impressions had been designed into her in defiance of common place understanding that a ship in space could be shaped like almost anything. There was no wind resistance to consider here. Here, such a ship was designed for only two things: purpose . . . and raw inspiration.

  He knew. He had been there at the beginning. Seen the design plans. Seen the flash in the eyes of the designers. Heard their gasps of hope. He had touched Starfleet in its embryonic years, known and worked with the intrepid designers who dared have ideas, and this was the brilliant white mystery that came from those ideas.

  As they came around to the fore of the ship, Robert gazed up and smiled at the primary hull, spreading above their approach like the bell of a great bass horn waiting for a tuning note. For the first time they were given a view of the entire ship, without interruption by dock struts.

  There was a sound at his side, barely audible. One of those little human sounds there’s no name for but that all humans recognize.

  Robert glanced—and noticed the change.

  Beside him, Jimmy Kirk was canted forward over the panel, committing the deadly sin of enthusiasm. He forgot his sworn duty to melancholy, and stared.

  Robert April placed a warm hand on the boy’s hunched shoulder, and spoke with quiet adoration.

  “We call her . . . Enterprise.”

  “She’s a starship, Jimmy . . . isn’t that a masterful word? Starship . . . her express purpose is to roam free to untouched stars. And she has the power to do it too. She and her kind will hammer through the frontiers of space, approach and contact faraway civilizations, bridge cultures, learn, share, grow . . . she’s a flintbox for the firewalkers among us. The starship Enterprise.”

  He hesitated, drew another breath, then sighed heavily.

  “Isn’t she a royal flush,” he murmured.

  Before them was the calm, elegant antithesis of Iowa. Jimmy knew his lips were hanging open, knew his shoulders were chinked forward and that he was leaning on both hands as though he wanted to break right through this viewport and touch her—he knew all that.

  And could no more stop it than get out and fly.

  He was going to go aboard that . . .

  “She’s a testimony to just how much good mankind can do,” Captain April went on. “The first of her kind. Our flagship. Her engines are the first full time-warp commodities. She’s built for constant thrust, none of the usual getting up to a speed, then going on momentum. She just keeps going faster and faster until the captain tells her not to. We’re not even sure how fast she’ll be able to go eventually. Until now she’s been on a few stressing-out missions, but soon she’ll be embarking on a series of five-year missions in deep space. We’re going to go out, take our technology with us, our medicine, our dreams, our tenacity, our willingness to help and the wisdom we’ve gotten from our own mistakes . . . we’re going to climb aboard that mastercraft, and we’re going to head out. In time there’ll be a dozen like her, going in a dozen directions for years at a time. They’ll be like the first pioneers who went out in a reed boat . . . no contact with anyone, no help nearby, relying on their own spit and thatch to survive. That’s adventure, Jimmy . . . real adventure. Isn’t she something to write home about?”

  Behind them, George Kirk stood in silence with Drake Reed.

  Robert and the boy hadn’t heard them come back in—or were too captivated to notice. George’s own attention was swallowed up too by the giant white angel, shellacked and mounted on ebony before them. He and Drake barely breathed at the sight of her.

  George hadn’t seen the starship in almost five years. Not since all the decals, pennants, and insignia had been added. He had known her only as a white-on-white masterpiece with lights. Now, though, she was decorated with red nail polish and black eyebrow pencil in fine, unblended lines, and she said who she was and who had made her, and she said it with all the simplicity and pride of naval tradition.

  NCC 1701 . . . USS Enterprise . . . Starfleet, United Federation of Planets.

  But even this wasn’t the shock of the day for George Kirk.

  Now he gazed no longer at the ship, not at Robert, who was softly talking, but at his own son—

  —who was listening.

  Jimmy the unbeguiled, Jimmy the hard, Jimmy the cold . . . was leaning so far forward he was almost climbing on the control panels. He was poised on all ten fingertips, his face a sheen of reflections from the starship.

  For the first time in years, George saw his son’s brick wall of disillusionment begin to crack.

  “I don’t understand the doomsayers among us,” Robert was saying softly, “those who think of our culture as some kind of disease, who say we should hide and not inflict ourselves upon the galaxy . . . after all, look what we’ve done!”

  The boy was looking. He didn’t blink. Couldn’t turn away. Couldn’t belittle what he saw.

  Beside him, Robert April smiled, let his voice go higher with excitement, and added, “If that was circling above your planet, wouldn’t you want to talk to her?”

  The four stood, two in front, two behind, as the stratotractor followed a prenegotiated path on invisible magnetic beams along the starship’s port side. The cold-cream hide of the ship reflected the docklights in blurred pools and cast them back on their faces.

  Then, there were voices again.

  “This is Captain April, requesting permission to come aboard this lovely lady of ours.”

  A raspy but competent voice responded, one that seemed very used to the jargon of such moments.

  “Simon here, Captain. Permission granted and welcome back. We’ve got you on approach. You’re clear for docking, port torpedo loading bay.”

  “Thank you, Enterprise. Pleasure’s all ours. April out.”

  Robert angled away from the viewport, and only then noticed George and Drake.

  “Ah, gentlemen, you’re back. That was my first officer. You’ll like her. She’s almost as old as Starfleet and twice as experienced. She’s a grandmother too, so she knows how to handle peppery little boys!”

  He poked Jimmy, but withdrew his hand quickly when the boy winced and smashed backward into the wall as though he’d been hit with an electric shock.

  “Oh, Jimmy!” Robert said. “Sorry—didn’t meant to startle you.”

  The boy gaped at him, seemed confused, then noticed his father and Drake, and fought to get control of himself again. Deliberately he did not look back out the viewport. He avoided watching as the vessel they were in approached the starship’s gleaming secondary hull.

  Now there was nothing but panels of hull material, faintly dotted with rivets and fitted bandings, little flashing lights, and the portal to which some
part of this ship would go in like a foot into a shoe.

  Then they would be on board the starship, and Jimmy wouldn’t have to look at her from out here again.

  He seemed to be holding his breath, waiting for that, so he could get control again.

  “Jimmy, you all right?” Robert asked with a sympathetic grin.

  Before their very eyes, the portcullis of resentment slammed down again between them and George’s son. The sensation was so strong, so obvious, that Robert actually backed away a step and George had to buck an urge to leap inside before the gate came down.

  He didn’t make it. They could almost hear the clang.

  “If I was all right,” the boy snarled, “I wouldn’t be here.”

  George felt his whole body tighten. “You watch your lip, buster. That’s Captain April you’re talking to.”

  If the reprimand had any effect on Jimmy, they couldn’t see it—except that he didn’t say anything else.

  He held very still a moment, broiling, then stepped around his father toward the lift.

  “Keep track of him, Drake,” George snapped.

  Drake nodded, but it was Jimmy who turned and spoke.

  “Don’t worry,” the boy said. “He’s got me in custody.”

  He stepped to the lift, the panel opened, he got in, Drake followed, and that was that.

  Once the lift panel breathed shut, George sagged as though he’d just survived a bar fight.

  Robert sidled toward him, both hands balled in his cardigan’s pockets, his expression one of affection and even amusement.

  “George, he’s a wonderful boy.”

  “He’s a brat!”

  “Oh, yes . . . but he’s a wonderful brat!”

  SIX

  USS Enterprise 1701-A

  “Hard to think of Bill of Rights as one of a whole new breed of starship, isn’t it?”

  “No,” Jim Kirk said. “It’s hard to think of kids like Alma Roth commanding ships of their own. There’s a difference.”

  “Well . . . that’s what I meant.”

  Leonard McCoy kept his voice down as he joined the captain on the command deck. With everything going on, it was easy for him to remain ignored. Attempting to ease this awful time—the time that was always awful, the interim of travel between realizing there was trouble and getting to the trouble—he tugged the breast flap of his uniform jacket down from his throat into its informal position.