Duty, Honor, Redemption Read online

  “I would not,” she said.

  “No? Why?”

  “For one thing, sir, I am an excellent swimmer.”

  One of the other students giggled. The sound broke off sharply when a classmate elbowed him in the ribs.

  “The water,” Kirk said with some asperity, “is crowded with extremely carnivorous sharks.”

  “Sharks, Admiral?”

  “Terran,” Spock said from the back of the room. “Order Selachii.”

  “Right,” Kirk said. “And they are very, very hungry.”

  “My answer is the same.”

  “Oh, really? You’re a highly educated Starfleet officer. Suppose the other person was completely illiterate, had no family, spent most of the time getting thrown in jail, and never held any job a low-level robot couldn’t do. Then what?”

  “I would neither request nor attempt to order or persuade any civilian to sacrifice their life for mine.”

  “But a lot of resources are invested in your training. Don’t you think you owe it to society to preserve yourself so you can carry out your responsibilities?”

  Her high-arched eyebrows drew together. “Is this what you believe, Admiral?”

  “I’m not being rated, Lieutenant. You are. I’ve asked you a serious question, and you’ve replied with what could be considered appalling false modesty.”

  Saavik stood up angrily. “You ask me if I should not preserve myself so I can carry out my responsibilities. Then I ask you, what are my responsibilities? By the criteria you have named, my responsibilities are to preserve myself so I can carry out my responsibilities! This is a circular and self-justifying argument. It is immoral in the extreme! A just society—and if I am not mistaken, the Federation considers itself to be just—employs a military for one reason alone: to protect its civilians. If we decide to judge that some civilians are ‘worth’ protecting, and some are not, if we decide we are too important to be risked, then we destroy our own purpose. We cease to be the servants of our society. We become its tyrants!”

  She was leaning forward with her fingers clenched around the back of a chair in the next row.

  “You feel strongly about this, don’t you, Lieutenant?”

  She straightened up, and her fair skin colored to a nearly Vulcan hue.

  “That is my opinion on the subject, sir.”

  Kirk smiled for the first time during the meeting: this was the first time he had felt thoroughly pleased in far too long.

  “And you make an elegant defense of your opinion, too, Lieutenant. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard that problem quite so effectively turned turtle.”

  She frowned again, weighing the ambiguous statement. Then, clearly, she decided to take it as a compliment. “Thank you, sir.” She sat down again.

  Kirk settled back in his chair and addressed the whole class. “This is the last of the simulation exams. If the office is as efficient as usual, your grades won’t be posted till tomorrow. But I think it’s only fair to let you know…none of you has any reason to worry. Dismissed.”

  After a moment of silence the whole bunch of them leaped to their feet and, in an outburst of talk and laughter, they all rushed out the door.

  “My God,” Jim Kirk said under his breath. “They’re like a tide.”

  All, that is, except Saavik. Aloof and alone, she stood up and strode away.

  Spock watched his class go.

  “You’re right, Spock,” Kirk said. “She is more volatile than a Vulcan.”

  “She has reason to be. Under the circumstances, she showed admirable restraint.”

  The one thing Spock did not expect of Lieutenant Saavik was self-control as complete as his own. He believed that only a vanishingly small difference existed between humans and Romulans when it came to the ability to indulge in emotional outbursts. But Spock had had the benefit of growing up among Vulcans. He had learned self-control early. Saavik had spent the first ten years of her life fighting to survive in the most brutal underclass of a Romulan colony world.

  “Don’t tell me you’re angry that I needled her so hard,” Kirk said.

  Spock merely arched one eyebrow.

  “No, of course you’re not angry,” Kirk said. “What a silly question.”

  “Are you familiar with Lieutenant Saavik’s background, Admiral?” He wondered how Kirk had come to pose her the particular problem that he had. He could hardly have made a more significant choice, whether it was deliberate or random. The colony world Saavik had lived on was declared a failure; the Romulan military (which was indistinguishable from the Romulan government) made the decision to abandon it. They carried out the evacuation as well. They rescued everyone.

  Everyone, that is, except the elderly, the crippled, the disturbed…and a small band of half-caste children whose very existence they denied.

  The official Romulan position was that Vulcans and Romulans could not interbreed without technological intervention. Therefore, the abandoned children could not exist. That was a political judgment which, like so many political judgments, had nothing to do with reality.

  The reality was that the evolution of Romulans and Vulcans had diverged only a few thousand years before the present. The genetic differences were utterly trivial. But a few thousand years of cultural divergence formed a chasm that appeared unbridgeable.

  “She’s half Vulcan and half Romulan,” Kirk said. “Is there more I should know?”

  “No, that is sufficient. My question was an idle one, nothing more.” Kirk had shaken her, but she had recovered well. Spock saw no point in telling Kirk things which Saavik herself seldom discussed, even with Spock. If she chose to put her past aside completely, he must respect her decision. She had declined her right to an antigen-scan, which would have identified her Vulcan parent. This was a highly honorable action, but it meant that she had no family, that in fact she did not even know which of her parents was Vulcan and which Romulan.

  No Vulcan family had offered to claim her.

  Under the circumstances, Spock could only admire the competent and self-controlled person Saavik had created out of the half-starved and violent barbarian child she had been. And he certainly could not blame her for rejecting her parents as completely as they had abandoned her. He wondered if she understood why she drove herself so hard, for she was trying to prove herself to people who would never know her accomplishments, and never care. Perhaps some day she would prove herself to herself and be free of the last shackles binding her to her past.

  “Hmm, yes,” Kirk said, pulling Spock back from his reflections. “I do recall that Vulcans are renowned for their ability to be idle.”

  Spock decided to change the subject himself. He picked up the package he had retrieved before coming into the debriefing room. Feeling somewhat awkward, he offered it to Kirk.

  “What’s this?” Jim asked.

  “It is,” Spock said, “a birthday present.”

  Jim took the gift and turned it over in his hands. “How in the world did you know it was my birthday?”

  “The date is not difficult to ascertain.”

  “I mean, why—? No, never mind, another silly question. Thank you, Spock.”

  “Perhaps you should open it before you thank me; it may not strike your fancy.”

  “I’m sure it will—but you know what they say: It’s the thought that counts.” He slid his fingers beneath the outside edge of the elegantly folded paper.

  “I have indeed heard the saying, and I have always wanted to ask,” Spock said, with honest curiosity, “if it is the thought that counts, why do humans bother with the gift?”

  Jim laughed. “There’s no good answer to that. I guess it’s just an example of the distance between our ideals and reality.”

  The parcel was wrapped in paper only, with no adhesive or ties. After purchasing the gift, Spock had passed a small booth at which an elderly woman created simple, striking packages with nothing but folded paper. Fascinated by the geometry and topology of what she was doing, Sp
ock watched for some time, and then had her wrap Jim’s birthday present.

  At a touch, the wrapping fanned away untorn.

  Jim saw what was inside and sat down heavily.

  “Perhaps…it is the thought that counts,” Spock said.

  “No, Spock, good Lord, it’s beautiful.” He touched the leather binding with one finger; he picked the book up in both hands and opened it gently, slowly, being careful of its spine.

  “I only recently became aware of your fondness for antiques,” Spock said. It was a liking he had begun to believe he understood, in an odd way, once he paid attention to it. The book, for example, combined the flaws and perfections of something handmade; it was curiously satisfying.

  “Thank you, Spock. I like it very much.” He let a few pages flip past and read the novel’s first line. “ ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…’ Hmm, are you trying to tell me something?”

  “Not from the text,” Spock said, “and with the book itself, only happy birthday. Does that not qualify as ‘the best of times’?”

  Jim looked uncomfortable, and he avoided Spock’s gaze. Spock wondered how a gift that had at first brought pleasure could so quickly turn into a matter of awkwardness. Once again he had the feeling that Jim Kirk was deeply unhappy about something.

  “Jim—?”

  “Thank you, Spock, very much,” Kirk said, cutting Spock off and ignoring the question in his voice. “I mean it. Look, I know you have to get back to the Enterprise. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  And with that, he was gone.

  Spock picked up the bit of textured wrapping paper and refolded it into its original shape, around empty air.

  He wondered if he would ever begin to understand human beings.

  Two

  DUTY LOG: STARDATE 8130.4: MOST SECRET

  LOG ENTRY BY COMMANDER PAVEL CHEKOV, DUTY OFFICER. U.S.S. RELIANTON ORBITAL APPROACH TO ALPHA CETI VI, CONTINUING OUR SEARCH FOR A PLANET TO SERVE AS A TEST SITE FOR THE GENESIS EXPERIMENT. THIS WILL BE THE SIXTEENTH WORLD WE HAVE VISITED; SO FAR, OUR ATTEMPTS TO FULFILL ALL THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE TEST SITE HAVE MET WITH FAILURE.

  Reliant—better known to its crew, not necessarily fondly, as “this old bucket”—plowed through space toward Alpha Ceti and its twenty small, uninhabited, undistinguished, unexplored planets. Pavel Chekov, on duty on the elderly ship’s bridge, finished his log report and ordered the computer to seal it.

  “Log complete, Captain,” he said.

  “Thank you, Mister Chekov.” Clark Terrell leaned back in the captain’s seat. “Is the probe data for Alpha Ceti on-line?”

  “Aye, sir.” Chekov keyed the data to the viewscreen so that Captain Terrell could display it if he chose. For now, the screen showed Alpha Ceti VI. The planet spun slowly before them, its surface smudged blurrily in shades of sickly yellow. Nitrogen and sulfur oxides dominated its atmosphere, and the sand that covered it had been ground and blasted from its crust by eons of corrosive, high-velocity winds.

  Alpha Ceti VI was a place where one would not expect to find life. If the crew of Reliant was lucky, this time their expectations would be met.

  And about time, too, Chekov thought. We need a little luck.

  At the beginning of this voyage, Chekov had expected it to be boring, but short and easy. How difficult could it be to find a planet with no life? Now, several months later, he felt as if he were trapped in a journey that was boring, unending, and impossible. Lifeless planets abounded, but lifeless worlds of the right size, orbiting the proper sort of star, within the star’s biosphere, in a star system otherwise uninhabited: such planets were not so easy to discover. They had inspected fifteen promisingly barren worlds, but each in its turn had somehow violated the experimental conditions’ strict parameters.

  Chekov was bored. The whole crew was bored.

  At first the ship had traveled to worlds at least superficially documented by previous research teams, but Reliant now had begun to go farther afield, to places seldom if ever visited by crewed Federation craft. The computer search Chekov had done on the Alpha Ceti system turned up no official records except the ancient survey of an automated probe. He had been mildly surprised to find so little data, then mildly surprised again to have thought he had ever heard of the system. Alpha Ceti VI had come up on the list of Genesis candidates for exactly the same reason no one had bothered to visit it after the probe report of sixty years before: it was monumentally uninteresting.

  Terrell displayed the probe data as a corner overlay on the viewscreen, and added a companion block of the information they had collected on the way in.

  “I see what you mean about the discrepancies, Pavel,” he said. He considered the screen and stroked the short black hair of his curly beard.

  The probe data showed twenty planets: fourteen small, rocky inner ones, three gas giants, three outer eccentrics. But what Reliant saw on approach was nineteen planets, only thirteen of them inner ones.

  “I’ve been working on that, Captain,” Chekov said, “and there are two possibilities. Alpha Ceti was surveyed by one of the earliest probes: their data wasn’t always completely reliable, and some of the archival preservation has been pretty sloppy. It’s also possible that the system’s gone through some alteration since the probe’s visit.”

  “Doesn’t sound too likely.”

  “Well, no, sir.” Sixty years was an infinitesimal distance in the past, astronomically speaking; the chances of any noticeable change occurring since then were very small. “Probe error is a fairly common occurrence, Captain.”

  Terrell glanced back and grinned. “You mean maybe we think we’re headed for a ball of rock, and we’ll find a garden spot instead?”

  “Bozhemoi!” Chekov said. “My God, I hope not. No, sir, our new scans confirm the originals on the planet itself. Rock, sand, corrosive atmosphere.”

  “Three cheers for the corrosive atmosphere,” Mister Beach said, and everybody on the bridge laughed.

  “I agree one hundred percent, Mister Beach,” Terrell said. “Take us in.”

  Several hours later, on orbital approach, Chekov watched the viewscreen intently, willing the ugly little planet to be the one they were looking for. He had had enough of this trip. There was too little work and too much time with nothing to do. It encouraged paranoia and depression, which he had been feeling with distressing intensity on this leg of their voyage. On occasion, he even wondered if his being assigned here was due to something worse than bad luck. Could it be punishment for some inadvertent mistake, or the unspoken dislike of some superior officer—?

  He kept telling himself the idea was foolish and, worse, one that could become self-fulfilling if he let it take him over and sour him.

  Besides, if he was being punished it only made sense to assume others in the crew were, too. Yet a crew of troublemakers produced disaffection and disillusion: the ship was free of such problems. Or anyway it had been until they pulled this intolerable assignment.

  Besides, Captain Terrell had an excellent reputation: he was not the sort of officer generally condemned to command a bunch of dead-enders. He was soft-spoken and easygoing; if the days stretching into weeks stretching into months of fruitless search troubled him, he did not show the stress. He was no James Kirk, but…

  Maybe that’s what’s wrong, Chekov thought. I’ve been thinking about the old days on the Enterprise too much lately and comparing them to what I’m doing now. And what I’m doing now simply does not compare.

  But, then—what would?

  “Standard orbit, Mister Beach,” Captain Terrell said.

  “Standard orbit, sir,” the helm officer replied.

  “What do we have on the surface scan?”

  “No change, Captain.”

  Chekov got a signal on his screen that he wished he could pretend he had not noticed.

  “Except…”

  “Oh, no,” somebody groaned.

  Every crew member on the bridge turned to stare at Chekov with one
degree or another of disbelief, irritation, or animosity. On the other side of the upper bridge, the communications officer muttered a horrible curse.

  Chekov glanced down at Terrell. The captain hunched his shoulders, then forced himself to relax. “Don’t tell me you’ve got something,” he said. He rose and came up the stairs to look at Chekov’s data.

  It is getting to him, Chekov thought. Even him.

  “It’s only a minor energy flux,” Chekov said, trying to blunt the impact of his finding. “It doesn’t necessarily mean there’s biological activity down there.”

  “I’ve heard that line before,” Terrell said. “What are the chances that the scanner’s out of adjustment?”

  “I just checked it out, sir,” Chekov said. “Twice.” He immediately wished he had not added the last.

  “Maybe it’s pre-biotic,” Beach said.

  Terrell chuckled. “Come on, Stoney. That’s something we’ve been through before, too. Of all the things Marcus won’t go for, tampering with pre-biotics is probably top of the list.”

  “Maybe it’s pre-pre-biotic,” Beach said wryly.

  This time nobody laughed.

  “All right, get Doctor Marcus on the horn. At least we can suggest transplantation. Again.”

  Chekov shook his head. “You know what she’ll say.”

  On the Regulus I Laboratory Space Station, Doctor Carol Marcus listened, frowning, as Captain Terrell relayed the information Reliant had collected so far.

  “You know my feelings about disturbing a pre-biotic system,” she said. “I won’t be a party to it. The long range—”

  “Doctor Marcus, the long range you’re talking about is millions of years!”

  “Captain, we were pre-biotic millions of years ago. Where would we be if somebody had come along when Earth was a volcanic hell-pit, and said, ‘Well, this will never amount to anything, let’s mess around with it’?”

  “Probably we wouldn’t care,” Terrell said.

  Carol Marcus grinned. “You have it exactly. Please don’t waste your time trying to change my mind about this, it simply isn’t a matter for debate.”