The Autobiography of James T. Kirk (40 page)

“I’m Dr. Marcus!” I looked at him. Oh my god. He was a little baby the last time I saw him.

“Jim!” Carol came running into the tunnel. It was my family reunion. And I’d just greeted my son with a punch to the gut.

There was no time to catch up.

As I watched, Khan beamed Genesis up to his ship. The most evil man I ever met now had the greatest weapon man had ever created.

“It’s the Genesis wave,” David said. Khan had set it off, and if we didn’t get out of range, we’d be caught inside it, our lives wiped away by its life-creating effect.

We were on the bridge of the
Enterprise
. We’d defeated the
Reliant
in ship-to-ship combat in the Mutara Nebula. I had noticed that David came onto the bridge during the battle, and had allowed myself a moment of pride that my son was getting to see me in action. But it was short-lived. David was the one who recognized that the Genesis Device was going to detonate. He said we had only four minutes. We couldn’t get away; we didn’t have warp drive. We were going to die.

I don’t know how I lost track of what happened next. We were only a few thousand kilometers away from
Reliant
, and then suddenly the cadet at the engineering station said we had warp power. I ordered Sulu to take us to light-speed, a second before the Genesis Device exploded.

We watched an amazing metamorphosis as it condensed all the matter in the Mutara Nebula into a new world. Khan was dead. I thought I’d won and cheated death for myself and the
Enterprise
once more.

I didn’t know how Scotty had fixed the engines. Then McCoy called me from engineering. And then I noticed Spock wasn’t in his chair.

I flew down there. I saw him in the reactor room, cut off from the rest of the engineering section, flooded with radiation. He was the reason we’d gotten our warp drive when we needed it. He had literally opened the warp reactor and repaired it
by hand.

I hadn’t cheated death, I was looking at it. The first officer who’d looked after me for so many years, my partner in so many adventures. He defined me with his friendship and loyalty; he taught me with his knowledge, honor, and dignity. And he sacrificed himself so that we, so that I, could survive.

He said goodbye, and I watched him die.

We had a funeral, and I put his body in a torpedo casing. My best friend was dead, and I couldn’t save him. I had experienced loss before. Gary, Edith, Sam, but this one seemed worse. He had been a part of my adult life like no one else. He himself had escaped death many times, and I assumed he would be immortal.

When I fired his coffin out to land on the new Genesis Planet, I cried, feeling selfish at what I’d lost.

The battle had wrecked the
Enterprise
, so while Scotty led the trainees in the needed repairs to get us home, I mourned. I finished the book Spock gave me. I read as the main character sacrificed himself for the greater good. It was as if Spock were speaking to me from the grave.

David came to see me. I was sad, but my son was reaching out to me. He was a brilliant young man, a little headstrong, certain in his point of view. Carol said he was a lot like me, but I didn’t see it; I saw a man, whose life I hadn’t been a part of, but who was welcoming me into it now. Maybe we could become friends. We spoke about Khan, who he was. David was a smart man; he seemed to understand Khan’s ambition. I remembered when I was in school, talking to my professor John Gill about Khan, about how I admired him. And that conversation was a straight line to Spock’s death; I admired Khan, and because of that he survived to try to kill us all. I’d been a fool; we so often hold up as heroes men who achieve great things, ignoring the sacrifices they force others to make in order to succeed.

David took what I said personally; he thought Genesis wasn’t that kind of achievement. I smiled and nodded, and decided I wouldn’t point out that we all almost died for it.

Scotty got us up and running, and we set out for Ceti Alpha V, where Khan had marooned the crew of the
Reliant
. It was an interesting voyage. Saavik and David started some kind of relationship, though the rest of us could only guess at exactly what was going on. McCoy went into seclusion; I’d wondered if the death of Spock had hit him harder than he wanted to let on.

And I had some time alone with Carol. She too was going through a difficult period of mourning. Khan had tortured and killed her entire staff. She spent a lot of her days reaching out to their families, and I could see it was taking a toll. In bereavement, we found some comfort together.

One night, we were sitting in my quarters, sharing a drink. She told me about David as a boy, as a young man, and the difficulties of raising him by herself.

“He was lucky, though,” I said. “He always had his mother.” After a while, I could see she had something she wanted to ask me, but was hesitating. I forced it out of her.

“Did you ever get married?” she said. I told her I hadn’t, but she could tell that there was another story I wasn’t sharing. She pressed, wanted me to tell her about this mystery woman. I realized I had never really talked about it with anyone.

“Her name was Edith Keeler …”

We rescued the crew of the
Reliant
, all of whom survived, though they were in pretty rough shape, and took them all to Starbase 12. Carol had spent many years there, and she proceeded to set up a base of operations from which to coordinate the study of the Genesis Planet. She lobbied Starfleet Command to assign several science ships right away, but the Admiralty, for some reason, wasn’t cooperating. I tried to intervene, but they said they couldn’t spare any vessel. I volunteered the
Enterprise
, but Morrow pressed me on the damage that she had undergone, and I had to admit she needed more work before I could take her out again.

However, I had to help Carol and David. It was somehow related to Spock’s death. They were helping to fill a hole, and I wouldn’t give up. There was a new science vessel in orbit of Starbase 12,
U.S.S. Grissom
. It was finishing up some minor maintenance, and it turned out I knew its new captain. I decided to pay him a visit aboard his ship. I beamed up and walked onto the clean, bright bridge of the small vessel.

“Admiral Kirk,” J. T. Esteban said, “great to see you again.”

The
Grissom
was on a general patrol in this quadrant, but with Esteban’s help, we were able to get it assigned to this project. I again was kind of proud that I could do something to impress my son.

The news on the
Enterprise
, however, wasn’t so good.

“I cannot fix the damage without a spacedock,” Scotty said. “She’ll run at warp, but that’s about all. I’ve got to get her home.” The commanding officer of Starbase 12, Commodore Jim Corrigan, my old roommate from the academy, was very interested in my trainee crew.

“There’s going to be a lot of ships coming through here needing replacements,” Corrigan said. “It’d be a shame to make all those kids go all the way home just to come out here again.” So I talked it over with Scotty, Sulu, and Uhura, who agreed we could run the ship to Earth with a skeleton crew, and I let the trainees be reassigned. I wanted to stay longer at Starbase 12, squeezing every bit of time I could with Carol and David, when Uhura came to see me in my quarters.

“Sulu was only supposed to be with us for three weeks,” she said. “His ship is waiting for him back in Earth orbit.” I’d forgotten. I was torn, but I had an obligation to him. I told her to prep the
Enterprise
to leave orbit immediately. I went to say goodbye to Carol.

She was in her office with David, going over some of the data on the Genesis Planet. David and Saavik would be going on to begin studying the new world, while Carol would stay behind on Starbase 12 to find more ships. I promised her I was coming back with a fixed
Enterprise
to help on this mission. She smiled.

“You’ll forgive me if I take that with a grain of salt,” she said. As sure as I was that I was coming back, I decided not to argue with her. We had reconnected after all these years, and now I wanted to be with her again. I knew it was what she wanted too. My promise was real; for the first time, I saw the future.

I then turned to David.

“It’s been a pleasure, sir,” he said. I shook his hand.

“Call me … Dad,” I said. After a moment, we all laughed. It sounded ridiculous. “All right, don’t call me that.”

“You left him on Genesis!” Spock’s father, the Vulcan ambassador to the Federation, was in my apartment. I hadn’t seen him in a long time, and he wasn’t sounding logical. He was sounding angry.

I’d come home to a lot of bad news. The Genesis Project was a galactic controversy. No one was allowed to talk about it, and we were all going to be extensively debriefed. This meant Sulu wasn’t getting his ship; they’d already given it to someone else. The
Enterprise
was going to be decommissioned, and I wasn’t getting another ship, not until the Federation came up with a policy on Genesis. But the worst of it was Bones.

I found him in Spock’s quarters on the
Enterprise
, babbling about having to go home to Vulcan. Spock’s death had wrecked him; he had had some kind of nervous breakdown. I remember thinking that I had always taken McCoy’s durability for granted: this reminded me he was only human.

And now Sarek, Spock’s father, whom I’d first met almost 20 years before, was
shouting
at me. He said I hadn’t carried out Spock’s last wish. I didn’t know what he was talking about. He asked to mind-meld with me.

Sarek’s thoughts reached into my head, opening the door to memories I had no desire to relive. I was back in engineering; Spock was saying goodbye. And he was dead again. Sarek broke the meld.

“It is not here,” Sarek said. He told me that Vulcans transferred their living spirit, called the
katra
, to someone or something when they died. But Spock hadn’t been able to meld with me. And then I put it together.

It was Bones. It wasn’t a nervous breakdown. Spock had melded with him, and somehow, McCoy had some bit of Spock in his brain. It was surreal, difficult to conceive, but Sarek’s assuredness that this was true drove me to act. Sarek said I had to get Spock’s body off of Genesis, and take it and McCoy to Mount Seleya on Vulcan. It was not going to be easy; Genesis was off-limits to everybody.