Star Trek: Duty, Honor, Redemption (33 page)

No one else had yet entered the room. The deep shadows offered no hiding places.

“Who is there?” she said.

It occurred to her that someone might be trying to play a joke on her, though no one had ever done so before. No one had ever even told jokes to her. Until a few days ago she had considered them completely frivolous, and thus beneath notice. Jokes could be based in cruelty, she knew, but it was usually a sort of benign cruelty.

Cruel it would be, and not the least bit benign, to play a joke on Saavik by calling out her name, in Mister Spock’s voice.

“Saavikam—”

She clapped her hands over her ears. The voice spoke in Vulcan, using a Vulcan form of address.

“
Saavikam,
why did you leave me on Genesis?”

The voice was audible only to her.

It was not a joke.

“Mister Spock,” she whispered, “why are you not at peace? I watched over you, and I sent your body into the new world. I thought that would please you…”

She heard voices in the corridor. Bringing herself back to some semblance of composure, she pulled her hands from her face and straightened her tunic.

Admiral Kirk and Captain Esteban entered.

“Hello, Lieutenant,” the Admiral said. “I see you’re on time. Think how much we could get done, J.T., if we were as organized and imperturbable as Lieutenant Saavik.”

Nothing Kirk had said to Saavik required a reply, so she remained silent. She felt neither organized nor imperturbable.

This time she did feel as if she were going mad.

Saavik had experienced mind-meld several times during her life, most often with Spock. The touch of his mind was the first civilized experience she had ever had. The touch of a mind was unique. It was impossible to mistake the mind of a person one had touched for that of any other sentient being, strange or familiar. Yet the voice Saavik had felt, the consciousness that had just cried out to her, had felt like Mister Spock’s. Which it could not have been.

“You’re very quiet, Lieutenant. Are you having second thoughts about this mission? You did volunteer, you know—you can change your mind.”

“No!” she said more forcefully than she had intended.

He gave her a quizzical look, not precisely a remonstration, but not approval either.

“No, sir,” she said in a more collected tone. “I believe it is extremely important for me to go on this mission.”

“Very well. Where the devil is David?”

“He’d better hurry along if he’s coming,” Esteban said. “I can’t wait all day.”

“
Is
David coming, Admiral?” Saavik asked.

“He better be,” Kirk said. “He read me the riot act about not asking him in the first place.”

At that moment David strode in, a small pack slung over his shoulder.

“We were just about to give up on you,” Kirk said.

“I was saying good-bye to my mother,” David said. “Any objections?”

“None at all,” Kirk said mildly.

Kirk shook hands with Captain Esteban.

“Good to see you again, J.T. Let’s not leave it so long before we cross paths again.”

“We’ll be back in a month or six weeks, Jim.”

“We’ll plan to get together then.” Kirk turned to Saavik and, to her surprise, extended his hand to her. She shook it gingerly.

“Good luck, Lieutenant. Take care of my son.”

“Aye, sir,” she said, and wondered how many layers a human being, accustomed to the ambiguities and “little jokes” of Standard, would find in his order.

“David.”

Kirk reached out to his son. When David warily grasped his hand, Kirk drew the young man toward him and into a bear hug.

“Take care of yourself, son,” he said.

David extricated himself rather less gracefully than he might. David’s mercurial character, Saavik thought, was not ready to forgive what had passed between him and the admiral.

“Don’t worry,” David said. “There’s nothing dangerous in the Mutara sector anymore. Nothing dangerous at all.”

Kirk watched the young people—Esteban, David, and Saavik—vanish from the transporter platform. Off into the unknown. He did wish he were going with them.

Instead, he called the bridge and asked Commander Sulu to warp out of orbit and head back toward Earth. Then Kirk himself headed for sickbay.

McCoy was up and working. His façade was excellent, but Kirk could tell it was only a façade. To Kirk, McCoy appeared pale and fragile and distracted, despite the gentle joke he made with an injured young cadet, despite the steadiness of his hands and the certainty of his voice.

“Good morning, Bones,” Kirk said. “Talk to you in your office?”

“Hi, Jim. Sure. One minute.”

McCoy joined him in the office as soon as he had finished with his patient.

“What’s up? Need a good hangover remedy?”

“I might ask you the same question.”

McCoy gave up his jocular pose. “But I wasn’t—” He stopped. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. I owe you an apology anyway. Scotty wanted to have a wake for his nephew, and I thought, Why not include Spock? All I can say is it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“It’s over and done,” Jim said. “If I’d thought about it I probably would have put my foot down before the whole thing got up any momentum. My only excuse is I had other things on my mind. But I’m worried about you. Last night, you were acting…odd.”

“Odd?” McCoy chuckled. “I’m not surprised. The synthesizers aren’t quite up to decent liquor.”

Kirk frowned, detecting a false note in McCoy’s dismissal of last night’s events.

“I don’t mean drunk. You didn’t act drunk.”

“I didn’t?” McCoy exclaimed, all too heartily. “I must be out of practice.”

“Don’t you remember what you said?”

“About what?”

“You stood up on a table and said ‘Grief is not logical’ in a pretty damned good imitation of Spock’s voice. That isn’t your usual sort of…humor.”

“That isn’t humor of any sort,” McCoy said. “I must have been farther gone than I thought.”

“Tell me what’s wrong,” Jim said. “Bones, let me help.”

“Sure—you can help by accepting my apology and forgetting what it is I’m apologizing for.”

When McCoy wanted to avoid interrogation, he could sidestep with the best of them. Jim had not quite reached the point of trying to get an answer out of his old friend by pulling rank. Besides, when had it ever done him any good, with McCoy, to assert his authority as a starship captain?

“Apology accepted. Forgetting—that’s going to take a little longer. If you want to talk, you know where to find me.”

Kirk returned to the bridge, still disturbed about McCoy, and feeling that his visit to sickbay had been very nearly futile.

On board
Grissom,
Saavik thanked the duty officer for giving her a cabin assignment. The young Vulcan did not bother to stop by her room. She had nothing with her to drop off, and a more pressing matter to attend to than observing the decor of
Grissom
’s cabins.

She felt the faint shift in the ship’s gravity fields that indicated they had warped out of orbit.
Grissom,
a small, fast ship, could travel between Regulus and the Mutara sector much more quickly than the crippled
Enterprise.

Saavik entered the main laboratory and stopped short.

Before her stood a being like a column of rippled crystal. Saavik had never met a Glaeziver before. They were very rare. They intended and planned to be extinct within a hundred Standard years. Their planet had been destroyed in the nova of its star. They possessed such strong ties to their world that they never found another on which they felt anything but alien. And so they disbanded, scattering throughout the Federation and perhaps even beyond.

It occurred to Saavik that if Genesis could be programmed to copy their lost world closely enough, they might change their collective decision to die. If they possessed a world to return to, they might choose to live.

“Hello,” Saavik said formally. “How may I address you?”

The utter motionlessness of the being gave Saavik the impression of enormous potential energy preparing to translate itself into motion. When the Glaeziver stirred, it did so with a controlled power that belied the delicacy of its form. The many transparent strands making up its substance brushed together with a chiming like jewels in the wind.

“You’re well-mannered for an opaque being,” the Glaeziver said. Its voice was like a cymbalon. “If you can pronounce my name, you may use it.” It spoke a beautiful word like a song, which Saavik reproduced as best she could.

“Not bad,” the Glaeziver said. “You may call me that, if you like. I prefer it to Fred.”

“ ‘Fred’?” Saavik said.

“One of my co-workers fancies that my name sounds like a phrase of Chopin’s. How may I address you?”

“My name is Saavik.”

“How do you do, Saavik. What can I do for you?”

“I wish to analyze a sample from the interior of Regulus I. May I use your equipment?”

“Can you talk and work at the same time?”

“Certainly.”

“In that case, I’ll make you a deal. We will analyze your sample on my equipment while you tell me what has been going on out here—inside Regulus I, and in the Mutara.”

“That appears a fair trade to me,” Saavik said.

“Great. What kind of analysis do you want—macroscopic, molecular, atomic, sub-atomic?”

“Molecular, please.”

“You got it.”

Glaezivers had a reputation for being very formal and standoffish. Saavik found it quite interesting that the being had held to formality during their introductions, but spoke very casually otherwise. It was very easy to think of it as “Fred.”

Saavik’s cabin was standard for a Federation ship, designed and intended for a human being. The lighting imitated the spectrum of Earth’s star, and the temperature conformed to the temperate regions of their home planet. Saavik glanced around the room, approving of its lack of extraneous decoration and its communications terminal, disapproving of the heavily padded furniture. She preferred hard chairs and a sleeping mat.

She reprogrammed the environmental controls. The light dimmed and reddened, and the temperature began gradually to rise. Saavik sat down for the first time since arriving on
Grissom.
Preparing for the survey of Genesis and analyzing the sample from Regulus I had given her plenty of work, for which she was grateful. It took her mind off the fears she had had for her own sanity.

But since leaving the
Enterprise,
she no longer sensed Spock’s presence. If she still believed in ghosts—as she had when she was little, for things happened on Hellguard that an uneducated and unsophisticated child could explain no other way—she would have believed Spock’s shade to be haunting the
Enterprise.
But she did not believe in ghosts anymore. She believed that for a short while she had been at least a little bit insane.

And now? To test herself, to test the silence, Saavik took the risk of opening her mental shields. She closed her eyes and reached out, seeking any resonance, real or imagined, of Spock.

After some minutes she opened her eyes again. She had found nothing.

The echo of her teacher had vanished. He was gone, and Saavik grieved for him. But at least she was not mad.

She picked up the printout of the Regulus I sample and reread the analysis.

Someone knocked on her door.

“Come.”

David entered, smiling. “Hi. Guess what. I’m right next door. Great, huh?”

“That depends. Have you come to your senses?”

“What? Are you talking about what happened down in the Genesis cave?” He shrugged it off. “Yeah, sure, sorry—I don’t know what got into me. I guess I was overexcited.”

“That is your explanation?”

“What’s the matter? I’m sorry I tried to take your phaser—that was dumb. If it’s any comfort, you twisted the hell out of my wrist. I can still feel it. And, look, there’s a bruise here on my hand where you put your thumb.”

“You should not have resisted,” Saavik said. “You injured yourself with your own violence.”

“And you got your revenge.”

“Why do you assume I want revenge? Or that I would take pleasure in hurting you? That is beside the point. You know that I do not use recreational drugs. Even if I did, I was on duty when we beamed down to the Genesis caves. How could you not warn me?”

“Saavik, what are you talking about?”

Saavik was prepared for a laugh and a claim of “a little joke.” She was not prepared for deliberate obtuseness. She handed him the printout.

He scanned it.

“Interesting organic makeup. What is it?”

“You should know. You designed it.”