Captain's Glory

15

THE GATEWAY, VULCAN

STARDATE 58563.6

The images projected onto Kirk’s retinas seethed with static, and were sometimes barely recognizable.

The sounds transmitted directly to his ears drifted in and out of comprehension, ghostlike, mournful, offering up fragments of words, a sudden insight from the tone of a voice, a murmured prayer as the end neared.

The recording lasted seven minutes.

At an earlier time in his career, Kirk would have discounted its story. It was that fantastic. That unbelievable.

But now, he’d experienced enough of life’s mysteries to understand that the universe held an inexhaustible trove of secrets to discover. Just because his mind couldn’t immediately grasp all of what this recording seemed to represent, Kirk knew, was no reason to disbelieve it.

However, there was every reason to question it.

“How did you get this?” he demanded.

Marinta didn’t answer. Instead, she looked past Kirk toward the entrance of the bar and in an unhurried movement tugged her hood back into place. “We should go,” she said. She palmed the small player padd as she stood up from her chair.

Kirk had no choice; she knew this outpost better than he did. He got to his feet, pulling his own hood into place.

As he followed her to the back, where the light was even dimmer, he glanced over his shoulder to see two Vulcans in red uniforms talking to the server behind the bar.

Marinta opened another door, motioned to Kirk to step past her into the corridor beyond. Then, as she quietly closed the door behind them, she removed a second device from her robes. It was an IDIC pin, a plain, inexpensive version like those sold to tourists in the town square.

Marinta attached the pin to Kirk’s cloak, made an adjustment to it.

“It’ll disguise your biosignature,” she said. “It’s only effective against general sensor sweeps, but at least to a security tricorder you’ll appear to be Vulcan.”

“What about you?” Kirk asked.

Marinta turned back a fold of her robe to show she had her own IDIC pin. “Our intelligence was correct. They didn’t find you at the s’url, so they’ve begun a search.”

Kirk could see that Marinta wanted to hurry along this new narrow wooden corridor, but his suspicion regarding her motives was undiminished.

He held up the transparent viewing cylinder. “Convenient that the authorities arrived just as we were going to discuss this.”

Marinta didn’t bother to hide her annoyance. “The recording you saw was an intercepted transmission. We obtained it eighteen months ago from a Tellarite freighter.” She gestured down the corridor, urgent. “We have to go.”

She started to walk quickly. Kirk made no further protest, kept pace.

“Wherever you got it from, the recording’s been altered.”

Kirk had seen enough visual sensor logs to recognize the cruder forms of forgery. Years ago, he had been victim of that kind of fraud himself.

“Not altered,” Marinta said. “Enhanced. The original subspace signal was severely degraded. It traveled three hundred and fifty thousand light-years.”

“Which is, of course, impossible.”

Marinta stopped by another wooden door-this one distinguished by carved Vulcan script and an ornamental inlay of oxidized copper.

“On the face of it, yes. And yet, you’ve seen the recording for yourself. You recognized Captain Lewinski?”

She tapped a fist against a section of the dirt-stained wall, and a hidden panel opened, revealing a palm scanner. Marinta placed her hand against it and the scanner bed glowed green.

Taking one last look back along the corridor, Kirk confirmed that he had indeed recognized the captain in the images he had seen. Nine years ago, Lewinski, Kirk, and Jean-Luc Picard had undertaken a joint mission on the Monitor. At the time, Lewinski had done Kirk and Picard the honor of changing the name of his vessel from Monitor to Enterprise.

The heavy carved door swung open to reveal a narrow wooden staircase leading up into total darkness.

Marinta stepped back, indicating for Kirk to go first. With some misgivings, Kirk complied.

Marinta continued her efforts to convince him as they climbed. “And you’re familiar with the trajectory and the capabilities of the Kelvan Expeditionary Return Probes?”

Again, the Romulan was correct. Kirk himself was responsible for that audacious mission.

More than a century earlier, a generational ship from the Kelvan Empire in the Andromeda Galaxy survived passage through the galactic energy barrier only to crash in Federation space. Though the Kelvans on that ship had intended to lay the groundwork for conquering the Federation’s own galaxy, they were in fact refugees from what they described as a natural disaster affecting Andromeda-a rise in radiation levels that would make all of their home galaxy uninhabitable.

Within two years of this first contact with the Kelvan scouts, the Federation launched three high-speed robotic probes to the Kelvan Empire in order to relay the Federation’s offer of planets suitable for Kelvan colonization. Even with the probes’ use of advanced Kelvan warp technology, the Federation’s leaders of today knew the spacecraft would still require two more centuries to reach their destination. Presumably it would be an additional three centuries until the Federation bureaucrats of the twenty-ninth century could look forward to handling the disposition of the Kelvan evacuation armada.

“I’m very familiar with the probes,” Kirk said. He saw no reason to offer further detail.

The staircase shook slightly as the wooden door at its base closed solidly.

Kirk wheeled around, suddenly certain he had heard running footsteps an instant before.

“Did you hear something?” Kirk asked.

Marinta shook her head, pushed him forward. “We need to get to a place of safety, where they won’t be able to scan us individually.”

Kirk kept climbing the stairs, picking up his pace in response to Marinta’s increasing insistence.

She paused at the top of the stairs, producing a small sensor padd. In the dim light from its screen, Kirk could see a narrow metal door only a meter ahead.

“What now?” he asked. He hated being at this woman’s mercy. He couldn’t be sure whether they were being followed. He couldn’t be sure whether she was merely leading him on.

Marinta kept her attention focused on the sensor padd’s screen. “We have to wait,” she said.

“For what?”

She looked at Kirk, changed the topic. “In addition to the Kelvan probes, do you recall the unusual colony world that some call Mudd?”

“I know it, but I don’t see the relevance.”

“Two hundred thousand synthetic humanoids,” Marinta prompted, undeterred. She stared past Kirk, down the stairs into darkness. “Robotic survivors of a scientific outpost established by another Andromedan species. Unlike the Kelvans, they claimed they were escaping their sun’s destruction.”

“I remember the world, and the humanoids,” Kirk said. The planet had been the site of his second run-in with the exasperating Harcourt Fenton Mudd. “But how does it tie in with the Monitor transmission and the Kelvan probes?” He peered into the darkness, too. But saw nothing. Heard nothing.

“Consider the distance the makers of those synthetics traveled,” Marinta said. She’d dropped her voice to a cautious whisper. “Surely if it were only a single star’s death they faced, there were other safe havens more readily available in their own galaxy.”

That simple fact was all it took for the answer to crystallize for Kirk. “Something else is happening in Andromeda,” he said.

“The signs have been there for decades,” Marinta agreed. “But no one put the details together. The synthetic beings, the Kelvans…”

Kirk didn’t need her to continue. “It’s not a natural disaster. It’s not dying stars or rising levels of radiation. They were all escaping the Totality.”

Marinta snapped the sensor padd closed. “Now!” she said, then pressed her shoulder against the metal door.

It creaked open onto a deserted street, illuminated only by the pale light of the planet’s companion stars.

Kirk hesitated, about to demand that Marinta provide a full explanation of what she was implying before he took another step.

Then he heard the low-power hum of a phaser and the crack of wood splintering.

Flashes of light flickered at the bottom of the stairwell, spiking through the suddenly shattered door.

Marinta hissed, “Keep moving!” She dragged Kirk onto the street by the sleeve of his cloak.

Kirk ran beside her until they rounded a corner and found themselves on a more crowded street.

Shops were open and light spilled from them onto the sand-covered walkways.

Marinta settled into a purposeful walk, lowered her head as if she were nothing more than a novice.

Kirk did the same at her side, all the while listening intently for the sound of running footsteps behind them.

As if they weren’t in danger, as if they weren’t being pursued, Marinta continued their conversation. “Whatever the Totality is,” she said quietly, “we must conclude its conquest of Andromeda is complete.” She glanced at Kirk from the recesses of her hood and he saw her dark Romulan eyes flash at him. “And now it’s invaded our galaxy, to do the same.”

Kirk kept walking, weaving through the crowd of pilgrims and tourists, almost overcome by the chilling pattern that was coalescing in his mind.

From a strategic perspective, everything the Totality had attempted to date fit perfectly with a plan for military conquest.

Even for a life-form that could, as the Monitor transmission implied, construct transwarp passageways between galaxies, the logistics of projecting enough force and combatants from Andromeda to this galaxy had to be an enormous undertaking. So what better way to conquer this new island universe than by turning its own inhabitants against each other-utilizing the resources already in place?

Kirk thought back to his own first meeting with Norinda, when she herself had claimed to be a refugee from the Totality. Though he’d only realized it now, her game plan had been revealed from the beginning: all the starship captains who had come to her aid, she had pitted against one another. But that competition hadn’t been a game as she had described it-and as Kirk had accepted it. It was a carefully calculated ploy to determine which of the species inhabiting this quadrant would be the easiest to turn into a weapon to be used against the others.

At the time, he’d been surprised when Norinda had awarded victory to an unknown species with an undetectable vessel. Only in hindsight had Starfleet realized the Romulans had won Norinda’s contest.

Thus the Romulan Star Empire had become the incubator for Norinda and her plans to sow dissension.

Until her second encounter with Kirk.

When Spock had staged what appeared to have been his assassination on Romulus, Kirk had investigated, arriving just as Norinda’s plan to foment civil war between Romulus and Remus had been set to proceed.

Kirk’s arrival had not been a coincidence. Spock’s desperate action had been triggered by the inexplicable resistance his unification movement encountered. Spock had suspected there was an unknown group spreading dissension, but hadn’t know it was Norinda and her followers in the Jolan Movement.

But Kirk had exposed Norinda’s manipulation of Romulan politics. With Picard and with Spock, with the Belle Reve and the holographic doctor, and even with the help of Joseph, Kirk had revealed the true nature of Norinda and maintained the stability of the Romulan Empire.

Norinda’s plan had failed.

But in confronting an intelligence with the capacity to conquer entire galaxies, Kirk knew, it was the height of arrogance to think that there would not be a second plan.

“They couldn’t force us into a war,” Kirk whispered to Marinta, “so now they’re working to keep us confined by destroying our ability to travel between the stars.”

“Trapped,” Marinta agreed. “So they can systematically eliminate us, world by world. Their logic is unassailable.”

The Romulan’s cool summation triggered a flash of anger in Kirk. “You think we should give up?”

Marinta turned toward him, and with an extremely familiar expression, raised an eyebrow at the question.

“On the contrary. The reason I’ve contacted you is because you’ve shown a consistent ability to succeed in the face of logic.”

There was something familiar about those words, something unusual about this Romulan, but Kirk was unable to define either characteristic in words. He only felt them.

“Who else knows about the recording?”

Marinta and he had stopped to talk, and Kirk could see she was uncomfortable with remaining still. Now she scanned the crowded market street. “Other than the specialists who died at Starbase Four-ninety-nine, only a handful.”

Kirk’s suspicion grew. “Why haven’t you shown it to more people?”

Marinta turned, the movement sharp and sudden, and for the first time Kirk saw her Romulan passion rise above what he took to be her Vulcan training.

“The people at the starbase died, Captain. Everyone who gets the recording and tries to study it dies.”

Kirk stared at the young woman, and not because of her display of emotion.

Marinta appeared to sense something had changed.

“What is it?” she asked.

Kirk didn’t know where his next words would lead, but had to find out. “You called me ‘Captain.’ There’re not too many people who do that these days.”

Marinta closed her eyes as if realizing an error. But she didn’t try to bluff.

She met Kirk’s gaze, let him see she had nothing to hide. “I spent a great deal of time with Ambassador Spock. I worked with him on Romulus. A year ago… that night in Primedian, at the coliseum…”

“When he staged his assassination,” Kirk said.

Marinta didn’t argue. “I was with him. I was… part of the plan.”

“Why wouldn’t you tell me that from the beginning?” Kirk asked.

Marinta’s nerves won the battle and she turned on her heel, began walking quickly.

Kirk caught up with her. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked again.

“I was concerned you’d hold it against me. That you’d doubt the veracity of the Monitor transmission.”

Kirk had the feeling that he was missing something, that Marinta hadn’t fully explained what she wanted.

“I don’t understand what’s so important,” Kirk told her. “Even if the recording’s real, all it does is explain what happened to the Monitor.”

“It’s more than that, Captain Kirk.” Marinta stopped again, and with a display of anger that did not fit her Vulcan robes, pressed the padd player into Kirk’s hand. “This recording could tell us how to defeat the Totality.”

Kirk made no move to slip the padd into his own cloak. “Not in what I saw.”

Marinta’s eyes swept the street like a soldier’s on patrol. “There’s more to the transmission than seven minutes of visual-sensor recordings. Captain Lewinski compressed three years’ worth of research into the signal. Everything he and his crew had been able to learn about the Totality’s subspace conduit, the way one of the Kelvan probes had been destroyed, the nature of what Lewinski and his crew called ‘the Distortion’ that was coming after them. It’s all in that recording. All you need to do is separate the data from the noise.”

“Why me?” Kirk asked. “Why not the authorities?”

Marinta looked up at Kirk as if he had heard nothing she’d told him. “The Totality can be anywhere, be anyone…. Captain Kirk, there are no more authorities. There’s no one we can trust.”

Kirk could understand Marinta’s argument, but he needed one more piece of reassurance .

“How do you know you can trust me?” he asked her.

With an expression of angry defiance, Marinta tugged back her hood, grabbed Kirk’s right hand, placed it on her face as she positioned her own hand on Kirk’s katra points.

There in the street, surrounded by shoppers, watched by gawkers, she gave the ancient incantation.

“My mind to your mind… my thoughts to your thoughts…”

Kirk felt the familiar onslaught of telepathic contact. “But you’re Romulan…” he gasped.

“Our minds are one,” Marinta intoned.

And then Kirk felt his thoughts and her thoughts entwine and blend and both participants shared the presence of Spock in their lives and their minds.

He was the common ground that bound them together.

The common ground that let Marinta know she could trust Kirk, that let Kirk know he could trust her-a Romulan who believed in the unification of her people and Vulcans, who had worked for that cause, worked for Spock, trained in the Vulcan disciplines, and found within her mind the ancient talents that reached back through time to when Romulans and Vulcans had been one and the same.

Kirk broke the contact. He had seen and sensed just enough, and felt no need to progress to greater depths of intimacy.

But one clear emotion rang loud and true as he took his hand from Marinta’s face.

“You loved him….”

She didn’t deny it.

And then a spotlight blasted down on them from overhead and Kirk heard amplified voices bellow: “Outworlders, remain where you are. You are under detention.”

The authorities had arrived.

Authorities who could not be trusted.