Star Trek: The Original Series - 162 - Shadow of the Machine (4 page)

The Vulcan captain clasped his hands behind his back and peered up at his guest. “I wanted the honor of escorting you personally. Call it an indulgence on my part.”

Spock leveled a quizzical expression at the man opposite him and waited for him to explain.

“I once undertook the
Kolinahr
ritual,” Syvar explained. “No one more than I understands, or fully appreciates, the discipline and devotion to which you have committed yourself in the pursuit of total logic.”

“You climbed the steps?” Spock asked.

Syvar nodded slowly, and when he replied, Spock noted that there was a touch of sadness in the captain’s voice. “I did, but I did not have the will. I failed.” Syvar directed a stern gaze at the
Enterprise
’s first officer. “You have been given a second chance, an opportunity to return and complete the ritual. For the masters to allow such a thing is unprecedented. But, then, you are Sarek’s son—”

“You are mistaken, Syvar,” Spock said, cutting off the Vulcan captain. “I do not return to Vulcan to continue
Kolinahr
, but the opposite.”

Frowning, Syvar said, “I do not understand. The V’Ger threat is nullified. The
Enterprise
is safely in spacedock, surely your business with Starfleet is concluded.”

“The crew has been granted two weeks’ shore leave while the
Enterprise
is readied for relaunch,” Spock told him.

There was a marked change in Syvar’s demeanor. The broad shoulders encased in the white, short-sleeved tunic slowly began to slump, and he folded his thick arms behind him. The captain was displaying Vulcan disappointment in his honored guest.

“Why would you choose to abandon
Kolinahr
?” Syvar asked.

Spock took time to consider the captain’s words. “As much as I wanted it,
it
did not want me.”

Chapter 3

IOWA

Daylight was filling the skies as James Kirk stepped down from the shuttle and onto the winding dirt track that led to the Kirk farm. The last few heavy drops of rain had ended, freshening the fields.

He glanced down at his chrono: 08:55 Central Time.

Iowa was two hours ahead.

When he’d boarded the connecting shuttle back in San Francisco, Kirk had miscalculated, assuming that he’d arrive in Iowa before seven in the morning, just as the family were starting their morning chores. The moment he realized his error he’d sent a message off to Hanna, letting her know when he’d be arriving.

But Kirk didn’t tell her the reason why. He knew his mistake would really tickle his aunt. Also, he’d never hear the last of it, especially from Uncle Abner.

It was an easy mistake to make, especially when you worked at Starfleet Operations and seldom left the San Francisco area. Starship captains were used to Command contacting them at all hours of the ship’s “day.” Starship clocks were synced to local bases and, if time permitted, the cities on the planets they visited. It was easy to forget about planetary time differences.

It was a long time since Kirk had been back to the old family farm, six or seven years, not since the memorial for Sam and Aurelan. They’d been attacked and killed by a swarm of neural parasitic creatures while living on Deneva. Peter had survived, but he had lost both of his parents in horrific circumstances.

Was that why he had avoided the farm? Too many ghosts?

• • •

Of course, there were the good memories too, of happier times when he and Sam were kids. Swimming in the creek when the weather was hot. The tire swing hanging from the branches of the big gnarled old bur oak that grew at the edge of the water, just at the spot where the banks began to narrow.

There was the time when Kirk was seven years old, Sam would have been eleven. They were playing explorers in the old barn on the top of the hill behind the farm. Sam was Zefram Cochrane. He always insisted on being Zefram Cochrane when they were playing explorers, and he’d never let anyone else be him. Kirk was Lil’ Sloane. He didn’t know who Lil’ Sloane was, not back then, but Sam told him that Lil’ was Cochrane’s right-hand man.

“Lil’ was this huge guy,” Sam told him with a knowing smile, throwing his arms out to either side of him, to show he meant
big
.

“Was he a giant?” Kirk asked.

Sam nodded eagerly at this. “As good as. He was nearly as tall as the old barn door. That’s why they called him Lil’ Sloane, as a joke. And he was loyal too! In fact, he was Zefram’s right-hand man.” Sam squinted down at his little brother then, asking, “Do you know what a right-hand man is, Jimmy?”

Kirk didn’t know, so he shook his head.

“A right-hand man is like your best pal,” Sam explained. “He goes everywhere you go, keeps you company when you’re away from home, sticks up for you against bad people.”

“Like you and me, Sammy?” Kirk asked.

“Yeah, just like you and me.”

It wasn’t until the next year in school that Kirk discovered that Lil’ Sloane was in fact
Lily
Sloane, a woman of normal stature, who’d helped Cochrane build the
Phoenix
, the first warp-capable craft. He never got Sam back for that one.

Once when they were playing in the old barn loft—only it wasn’t a loft, it was the surface of an alien planet on which Cochrane and Sloane had crash-landed—Kirk accidentally fell through a rotting rail. He tumbled down the loft stairs, crashing onto the floor below. He hit his head and broke his wrist. Sam flew down the stairs, and when he saw that his brother was hurt, he carried him all the way back down the hill and back to the house.

They did not play in the old barn again that summer. Kirk wanted to, but Sam said no, that it was too dangerous. He said that last time they’d been lucky, and that if one of them fell out of the loft this time, someone could be killed.

• • •

Kirk paused by the water’s edge, at the spot where he and his brother used to swim. The old oak was still there, but the tire swing was long gone. Looking carefully, he could see the section of branch where the rope had worn the bark away. The water was low at this time of year, the flow nowhere near the raging torrent it would become once the last of the winter thaw had filled it. At the moment it was a trickle, splashing across the four big stones that formed a rough path from one side of the bank to the other.

“Stepping-stones,” Sam had called them, although it took more than a step to get from one stone to the other, as Kirk discovered to his peril many times, when he missed his footing and fell into the water. To a seven-year-old James Kirk, the distance between each of those stones sometimes felt like the width of the Grand Canyon.

From where he stood, Kirk had only to turn his head to the left to see the old barn standing on the hill beyond the farmstead. It was in ruins now, nothing more than a weed-choked rotting frame, with no roof and gaping, broken windows.

“Race you,” Sam would shout over his shoulder as they tore across the fields toward the hill. “Race you, Jimmy Slowpoke. Race you!”

Kirk sighed. He hadn’t realized it until that very moment, but the wound was still wide open. The memory of his brother’s death was still raw.

Too many ghosts.

• • •

“It’s just not me, Jim, I can’t. I just can’t.”

“Four years in the Academy. One year on a ship—and you’re done?”

“Jim, give it a rest!” Sam shouted. “I’m done with Starfleet!”

“Sam, all you ever talked about was exploring. How Starfleet was the perfect way to become—”

“A famous explorer. It’s not me, Jim. Flying around in a tin can, letting someone else do all the exploration, handing me samples to study. I wanted to be out there, getting my hands dirty, doing it myself. I’m joining a scientific study to an Andorian colony, and Aurelan is joining me. We want to start a family, another thing that we can’t do in Starfleet: I’d have to leave them for months or years on end.” Sam bent down and started skipping stones across the stream.

“Baby brother, you were born to be in Starfleet, to be a starship captain.”

Sam turned and told him, “I just have this feeling, Jimmy, that if I don’t do it now, I might never get the chance.”

• • •

There was a splash in the water down to his left, and Kirk turned in time to see a momentary flash of color. It broke the surface, then was gone.
A brook trout
, Kirk decided. Sam and he had caught enough of them out of that stream.

He adjusted the straps at his shoulders, shifting the weight of the bag until it was a little more comfortable, then continued up the dirt road. After a time he came to a natural bend in the path, which afforded him a much better view of the old farmhouse sitting in the clearing beyond.

Out in the front yard he could see Abner’s dog, a shaggy old bluetick coonhound, Benchley, lying sprawled on the porch, his tongue lolling wetly from the corner of his mouth. The dog raised his head at Kirk’s approach and let out a rather listless
aulf-
ing sound that was probably the closest thing to an actual bark the ancient dog could muster.

Yet he was an excellent early warning system. In response to the sound, the front door opened and Abner’s wife, Hanna, appeared, wiping her hands on the towel that was draped over one shoulder.

She raised a hand and waved, then quickly ducked back inside before Kirk could respond.

Aunt Hanna reappeared, shuffling out of the door onto the porch, coming to a halt beside the old coonhound. Standing there with her hands on her hips, she reminded Kirk of his mother, and just for a second he was a child again, on the razor’s edge of puberty.

His brother had just been accepted to Starfleet Academy. Kirk had been out in the toolshed, looking for the right spanner to fix the flow valve on his ground-hopper. Sam stepped out onto the porch in his cadet uniform. His mother was standing beside him, tears streaming down her cheeks; she looked so proud and sad, all at the same time. She placed a hand upon her elder son’s shoulder and told him how smart he looked.

“What do you reckon, Jimmy? Do you think I could be a famous explorer just like Zefram Cochrane?” Sam asked him with a smile.

And in that moment, Kirk would have given anything to be away from there: with McCoy and his daughter in Georgia, or back aboard the
Enterprise
overseeing the refit with Scotty.

Anywhere, it didn’t matter to him, as long as it wasn’t here.

Chapter 4

STARFLEET MEDICAL

SAN FRANCISCO

“She looks so tiny, so fragile.”

Sulu rested his forehead on the surface of the glass, the palm of his hand resting on top, as he stared down at his daughter.

“Just so . . . tiny,” he repeated.

Beside him, Doctor Linzi Hautala remained respectfully silent, allowing the new father to have this special moment with his child.

Around them the ward staff went about their business, checking on the dozens of other babies all housed in similar incubators that were arranged around the room. But Sulu barely registered their presence; the room may as well have been completely empty save for himself, Doctor Hautala, and his daughter.

“It’s not until you see another human being like this, so small and helpless, that you realize how life can be so . . . well, fragile.” Sulu laughed, feeling a little bit self-conscious that every time he opened his mouth he kept spouting clichés. “I guess you must hear this a lot from new parents? Guy becomes a father for the first time, suddenly he turns into a philosopher.”

“I hear a lot of things, Commander,” Hautala told him. “Some of it good, some of it not so. Parents deciding the careers of their children before they’ve even been out of the womb for a single day, fathers claiming that the child can’t be theirs because it doesn’t look like them—we even had one man, an evolutionary biologist, who took one look at his brand-new eight-hour-old daughter, then broke down in a flood of tears claiming she was a divine miracle. Different people react to becoming parents in wildly different ways. Go easy on yourself for the moment, you’re just human.” She pointed at the small bundle lying in the incubator in front of them. “Now that she’s here, your life will never be the same again.”

What the doctor was trying to tell him, Sulu realized, was exactly what Scott had been saying to him.

His new daughter was going to change his life. The thing was, it wasn’t only
his
life anymore. Everything began to change the day he and Susan talked about having a baby.

Sulu had known the conversation was coming for a while, ever since they’d attended a friend’s baby-welcoming party the previous summer in Anchorage. Being just a couple wasn’t enough any longer. They’d both been silent in the shuttle ride back, although perhaps
preoccupied
would have been a more appropriate word.

It wasn’t just Susan who’d been affected; Sulu had found himself bitten by the baby bug too.

It wasn’t an easy feeling to describe—as a matter of fact, Sulu wasn’t completely sure he could explain. All he knew was that suddenly it felt like something was missing, something important. It began to play on their minds like an itch that was just too far out of reach to be scratched.

“I’ve been thinking, maybe it’s time we had a baby,” Susan announced, apropos of nothing, one night while they were lying in bed. “Well, what I mean to say is,
I’ll
have the baby. Your part pretty much stops after the conception.”

She sat up then, and the overhead lights came on in response to her movement. “I’m serious, Hikaru.”

“Hey!” The light was almost blinding, causing Sulu to pull the covers up over his head. “Computer, reset light parameters.”

“Please specify required setting.”

“Anything, I don’t care. Just turn it down a little.”

“Computer, reduce lighting by thirty percent,” Susan said, then she reached over and pulled the covers from his head. “No hiding from me, mister. We should talk about this.”

“Do we have to do this now? I’ve got to be up early in the morning; I promised Mister Scott I’d fly him across to the shipyards,” Sulu said.

But Susan was adamant. “This can’t wait.”

“Look, Suze, we talked about this, we agreed that we don’t have the time for a baby right now. You said that things were really starting to happen for you down in Biomechanics, and with the
Enterprise
refit coming along quicker than they’d anticipated, there’s talk that the launch date could be brought forward to next year.”

“I know, but—”

“It’s just not practical,” Sulu told her. “You know that. It’s not that I don’t want to be a dad . . .”

Susan looked up at him then, her eyes wide with surprise. A smile tugging her lips.

Sulu held his hands up, as though surrendering. “Yeah, okay, I admit it, ever since seeing Beth and Gil with their new son . . .”

“I knew it!” Susan slapped him playfully on the arm. “I knew the sight of all those toddlers running around the place would melt even your icy heart!”

“But this would be different, Suze,” he said. “This would be ours, for keeps—no giving it back at the end of the day. It’s one thing going to parties where the kids are other people’s and we can leave once we’ve had enough. You said that you didn’t want a stranger raising your child. So who would be looking after the baby during the day when you’re down at the lab? I’ll be flying around the galaxy studying wormholes and escorting peace delegations to Babel. My mother really isn’t up to—”

Susan shrugged. “I could always give up the lab.”

Her words stunned him into silence. She had said them so calmly, so matter-of-factly, that just for the briefest of seconds she sounded to Sulu like the strongest, bravest person he had ever known.

That was the first time he’d realized how serious Susan had been about the idea of motherhood, and that’s when he’d known that they were about to become parents.

Sulu felt a hand rest lightly on his shoulder and he glanced up from the incubator. Doctor Hautala was standing at his side, a tight, concerned smile on her face.

“You look exhausted. Go home and get some rest,” she ordered.

“But they need me,” Sulu said, jerking his chin toward the baby. “
She
might need me.”

“But you won’t be any use to either of them if you’re exhausted.” Hautala carefully turned him away from the baby. “Come on, Commander, it’s time you got some sleep. Doctor’s orders.”

Reluctantly, Sulu allowed the doctor to guide him out of the room, but not without one last backward glance over his shoulder at the tiny, sleeping form of his new daughter.

VULCAN

When the shuttlecraft touched down at the port north of ShiKahr, there was only one person waiting on the edge of the platform: Amanda, wife of Sarek. Spock strode over to his mother, leaned down, and kissed her on the cheek.

“Spock,” Amanda said in greeting.

“Mother.”

“Our shuttle is just outside the gate.” Amanda turned and led her son through the darkened tunnel.

Spock could feel the welcoming heat of Vulcan enveloping him; the early morning sky was just beginning to lighten.

As they stepped into the small shuttle, Amanda activated the coordinates for home. With a faint, almost imperceptible vibration, the small craft rose and headed to the ancient outskirts of the city.

Once they were airborne, Amanda turned to her son. “No uniform?”

“I did not want to call attention to my arrival, Mother.”

“No, of course not.”

He recognized the tone of her voice from his childhood; he had heard the same tone used on his father many times. “Do you think my greeting may have undermined my intent?”

“I’m afraid it might have. Then having your mother there to meet you—”

“You are not the only human on Vulcan.”

Amanda smiled at Spock. “No, but I’m the only one who was kissed by her son on his homecoming.”

“You have asked many times for me to do so,” he said.

“Spock, I’m not going to be distracted: What’s wrong?”

“Mother, I cannot continue with the
Kolinahr
.”

Spock watched his mother study him. Her face was lined, her hair gray, yet she looked younger than her years. Spock realized it was her smile. Small, contained, fleeting; however, it lit up her face. “Well, maybe you can go into the family business.”