The Folded World (2 page)

Service on a starship had much in common with that experience, he thought. The ship's crew comprised both men and women, not just men, but they were as dedicated to their task as those long-ago cowboys had been. Their camaraderie, tested by blood and fire, was strong. They worked toward goals that mattered.

Kirk turned away from the viewscreen and swept his gaze across the bridge, taking in Sulu and Uhura and Chekov and Spock, seated as usual with his back to the others, the only one not watching to see if their captain had lost his mind. “Sorry,” Kirk said. “I'm back.”

“Back from where, Captain?” The turbolift door whooshed closed behind the newcomer. He was Levi Michael Gonzales, a Federation diplomat. He was a lean man, tall and stoop-shouldered, with a craggy face and a nose that jutted from it like the prow of a sailing ship. His hair was long, hanging to his mid-back, and mostly silver. To Kirk, the odor that always wafted around him smelled slightly rancid, like a pork chop left too long in the sun.

“A figure of speech, Mister Gonzales,” Kirk said. “I was lost in thought for a moment, that's all.”

“Happens to the best of us,” Gonzales said, as if Kirk were somehow not in that exalted rank with the diplomat and might appreciate the assurance of his betters.

“Is there something I can help you with, Mister Gonzales?”

“Minister Chan'ya would like to know what our progress toward Ixtolde is.”

You can tell Minister Chan'ya to just subtract six hours from the last time she asked,
Kirk thought. But Gonzales was a Federation official and Chan'ya an Ixtoldan government representative, and neither category of people, in his experience, was famous for their sense of humor. “I believe we're still on course,” Kirk said. “Mister Chekov?”

The young ensign consulted his screen for only an instant. “Eight days, four hours, and thirteen minutes until we reach Ixtoldan orbit,” Chekov said. His Russian accent and clipped manner of speaking somehow lent his pronouncement extra weight.

“There you go,” Kirk said. “Is there anything else?”

Gonzales let out the briefest of sighs. “I understand that she can seem like a handful, Captain,” he said softly. “But she is important in the Ixtoldan hierarchy, and Federation membership is important to the whole planet. You won't be burdened with her for too much longer, I promise.”

“It's no burden at all, Mister Gonzales.” Not strictly true, but Kirk was no stranger to diplomacy himself.

“Thank you for saying so, Captain Kirk. And a little professional advice? When you tell a lie, try to tame that twinkle in your eyes. It's your tell. I doubt that Chan'ya has enough experience with humans to catch it, but it's obvious to me.”

The diplomat returned to the turbolift without waiting for a response. Once the door had closed behind him, Uhura said, “I guess he told you!” and let out the laugh she had been holding in. Kirk, Sulu, and Chekov joined in.

Spock looked on, his expression typically impassive. “You might recall my mentioning that as well, Captain,” he said. “While I claim no expertise in lying, I share the gentleman's opinion that if it is something one has reason to do, it had best be done as well as possible. The point is not to be found out, is it not?”

“That is indeed the point, Mister Spock,” Kirk said. “I will take your advice, and Mister Gonzales's, under serious advisement.” He caught Uhura's gaze as he spoke, and held it. Then he asked, “Any twinkle?”

“Only the faintest, Captain,” Uhura replied. “I think you've nearly got it.”

•   •   •

“. . . out there, the universe is vast, and it doesn't care about you.” Petty Officer First Class Miranda Tikolo spoke fast, and she talked with her hands, waving them both in different directions, as if to indicate where the universe might be in relation to their table in the crew mess. “It doesn't care whether you live or die. Some of those who inhabit it do, certainly—some would kill you as soon as look at you, and take great joy in doing it.” She shuddered, and Paul O'Meara knew she was thinking of the Romulans. “But I have
to think there are some who are friendly, and wise, and have something to offer besides death and destruction, don't I? Or else what am I doing here? Why are you looking at me like that?”

Because you're absolutely stunning,
O'Meara thought. “I only asked you if you wanted to work out with me later,” he said.

“Oh, right,” she said. “I'm sorry, I can't. I've got an appointment with . . . somebody else.”

“Stanley.”

She let out a little sigh. “Yes, Stanley.”

“You can say his name, you know. It's okay.”

“I know,” Tikolo said. “Only it's—I don't know. Awkward. I'm sorry.”

“Don't be.” He tried to follow the threads of their conversation. He had been eating his meal without tasting it, because his senses had been focused on her: the delicious way she smelled, like the first peach of summer, the way the light played on her lustrous black hair and caught the highlights of her dark eyes, the way her lips, so perfectly shaped, closed over her fork when she took a bite. He was admiring the way her short red dress hugged her figure when she looked up from her food and caught him staring. The idea of spending some time in the gym with her sprang to mind, and he went with it. Somehow she had used that invitation to expound a philosophical treatise on the necessity of exercise, because, as she explained, the universe was either uncaring or downright hostile, so
a person had to keep her body in excellent physical condition, to be ready to defend herself against any danger at any moment.

O'Meara understood, or thought he did, the mental paths she had taken. She rarely talked about her experiences on and off Earth Outpost 4 when the Romulans attacked, but he could see the fallout in the haunted look in her eyes, the way she flinched at loud noises, even the way it sometimes took her longer to laugh than it did other people. Miranda had been thoroughly vetted and cleared for duty, and he had no worries about her psychological state. That did not mean, however, that she was free of those memories, or would ever be.

Mostly, when he looked at her, he saw the most beautiful woman he had ever met, and more and more often he found himself wondering if what he felt was love or just something very much like it.

And then there was Stanley Vandella. O'Meara saw the way Vandella stared at her, and it was like watching his own reflection in a mirror. Vandella felt the same way he did, and if Tikolo had a preference between them, she didn't let on.

That couldn't last much longer. O'Meara tried to pretend it didn't matter to him, that he was fine with any decision, or the lack thereof. But as his feelings deepened—and already his heart seemed to stop every time he got a glimpse of her in the corridor, much less touched her velvet skin or earned a smile
or a kiss—he knew he wouldn't be able to stand it much longer. At some point, she would have to choose. She could pick him or she could pick Stanley or she could even say that she would continue on with both of them, but she would have to definitively say where her heart was.

Kirk sat at the desk in his quarters, answering communications and checking over status reports from crew members and Starfleet headquarters back on Earth. Running a starship sometimes meant making snap life-and-death decisions or facing down existential threats, but more often than not it was a matter of dealing with the forms, reports, and queries common to bureaucracies across the known universe. Right now, he would willingly have swapped all the busywork for a single megalomaniac determined to rule his quadrant of space.

So when he heard the door buzzer, Kirk was delighted at the interruption. “Come,” he said, knowing that the number of people who would have interrupted him was a small handful.

The door opened and Doctor Leonard McCoy walked in, his expressive brow furrowed. He was carrying a bottle and two shot glasses. Without a word, he poured out two fingers. The doctor raised his glass and offered, “Uncle Frank.”

Kirk raised his own glass and drank. The captain suppressed a cough. “Red-eye whiskey, Bones?”

“I remember you telling me it was his favorite. Not one of mine.” McCoy took the visitor's chair and poured them both another shot. He sat looking down, swirling the whiskey along the sides of the glass.

“Spit it out, Doctor.”

“I just had a visit from Petty Officer Tikolo,” McCoy said.

“How's she doing?”

“Without jeopardizing patient confidentiality, I can say that she's better than she has a right to be.”

“As the captain of this ship, I have a right to know about crew—” Kirk began, but McCoy cut him off.

“I know, Jim. You're the captain. I'm the chief medical officer. That means I have to balance priorities. I'm tryin' to thread a needle, here.”

Kirk settled back in his chair. “Thread away, Bones. Tell me what you can.”

McCoy leaned casually on his right armrest. “You're aware of her situation.”

“Of course.” About a year ago, a Romulan bird-of-prey had violated the Neutral Zone, established after the Earth-Romulan War, and had attacked a series of Federation outposts established to keep an eye on the zone. The
Enterprise
had destroyed the Romulan ship—learning, in the process, that the Romulans had developed cloaking technology that, despite some flaws, was more effective than anything in Starfleet's bag of tricks—but not before the Romulans had vaporized several of the outposts.

Miranda Tikolo had been assigned to Outpost 4 for just over a year when the attacks came. A skilled pilot, she had been flying a cargo run between Outposts 3 and 4 when the Romulans struck. Witnessing the destruction of the outpost and her crewmates—and, via her instruments, the pitched battle between the
Enterprise
and the Romulans—she had shut off all the shuttle's systems and drifted in space, hoping not to be noticed. Once the battle was over, she had hailed the
Enterprise
. They had picked her up, astonished to learn that there was even a single survivor from Outpost 4.

Tikolo had been appreciative, and had enjoyed her time on board the starship. When Starfleet's medical personnel cleared her for duty, she requested assignment to the
Enterprise,
which the captain had gladly approved. She had been part of the security detail for seven months now, and Kirk was happy with her performance.

“Given what she went through—all those hours in the dark, alone, floatin' in space, watchin' her crewmates killed right in front of her—it's no surprise that she continues to have some psychological scarring. Those scars don't go away.”

“Bones, are you saying there's a problem?”

“I wouldn't call it that, exactly. She's been havin' nightmares. I think they were prompted by that Ixtoldan battle cruiser accompanying us on this trip. She's only had a glimpse of it, and while it doesn't look
much like a Romulan bird-of-prey, I expect she's conflated the two in her mind.”

“She can't expect to serve on a Starfleet vessel and never encounter an alien ship,” Kirk said.

“I'm sure she doesn't. And I should add that I don't believe she's a danger to herself or anyone else. It's just that the bad dreams bothered her enough that she felt it necessary to tell me about them. It's classic survivor's guilt, Jim. I can say that I understand, but—”

All at once the captain understood what his friend was asking. “Doctor McCoy, you are overstepping—”

“No, I'm not. The crew knows about Tarsus IV. Tikolo needs someone she looks up to. She needs an Uncle Frank.”

Finally Kirk said, “Okay, Bones. As soon as I get a chance—”

The boson's whistle announced a call from the bridge, and Uhura's voice followed.
“Captain,”
she said.
“We're receiving a distress hail from the
U.S.S. McRaven.”

The
McRaven
was a Starfleet ship that had left Earth a few days before the
Enterprise,
her mission so classified that even Kirk didn't know what it was. Because she was following essentially the same course as the
Enterprise,
he assumed the mission had something to do with their own: ferrying Minister Chan'ya and her retinue to Ixtolde, along with the Federation delegation. Ixtolde was an impoverished planet, the sole inhabited world in its solar system. But its populace had acquired the capability for interstellar travel, and had applied
for Federation membership. Everybody wanted it to happen. Trade helped make planets prosperous, and Ixtolde had untapped mineral resources to which others wanted access. The idea was that the
Enterprise
and the
Ton'bey,
the Ixtoldan battle cruiser, would arrive together in Ixtoldan space. Other Ixtoldan ships would meet them there, and the combined delegations would be shuttled to the planet's surface for a grand entrance.

The diplomats were negotiating with Chan'ya en route, and once they reached Ixtolde they would embark on a fact-finding tour of the world, to ascertain that it met the Federation's membership requirements. Kirk wasn't sure how the
McRaven
fit in, but he was convinced it had a role to play.

“How far behind are we?” Kirk asked.

“The
McRaven
appears to be immobilized,”
Uhura reported.
“Although it has been four days ahead of us, at our current speed we're only about a day behind.”

“Do we know the nature of their emergency?”

“
No, sir. I've been trying to raise them, without success. We're just getting the automated distress call.”

Kirk met McCoy's gaze. One of the doctor's eyebrows arched slightly. The captain knew well what that meant. He was curious, too. “Inform the Ixtoldan ship. Intercept course. Warp six,” he said. “I'm on my way.”