It was with visible effort that Jellico reined himself in. In slow, measured tones he asked, “Is Janos there…and what do you mean, ‘possibly much more’?”
“Yes. He’s here,” said Calhoun evenly. “And the term ‘possibly much more’ refers to the security of the UFP itself.”
“You’re talking in riddles,” Jellico accused him. “Calhoun…what the hell is going on? If you have a shred of hope of preserving your command, you tell me right now.”
“Very well,” Calhoun said. He leaned against the back of his chair but remained standing. “It is my belief that, via a mind-tampering technique called ‘the Knack,’ the Selelvians have manipulated the Federation Council into acceding to their demands. They’re going along with the Selelvians because they don’t have any choice.”
“Calhoun…” Amazingly, Jellico looked speechless. “Do you know what you’re saying?”
“Generally, yes. It’s preferable to speaking incoherently.”
“Good work, sir,” muttered Burgoyne, “that’s just what you need to do: Piss him off even more.”
“Do you have any proof that the Selelvians are doing this?”
“Aside from the fact that I consider the UFP’s decision to be uncharacteristic and serving of Selelvian interests? No, sir, I do not.”
“And why would they be so interested in seeing Ensign Janos executed?”
“I don’t know, sir. It could be he possesses some particular knowledge that they want. It could be they plan to dissect him, see what makes him tick. For all I know, it’s exactly what they say: a desire to avenge themselves upon him for the death of Lieutenant Commander Gleau.”
“A death I understand even you acknowledge he is most likely responsible for.”
“That would be correct, sir.”
“Calhoun,” said Jellico, and he leaned forward so much that it seemed as if his face were going to come right through the viewscreen. “We’re not stupid. We know where you’re heading: Alpha Sigma IX. We received reports from the Daystrom Institute that you were sending them harassing messages.”
“I would dispute the term ‘harassing’…”
“You will turn your damned ship around, you will return Janos to the Trident, and then you will submit yourself for full psychiatric evaluation.”
“Admiral…”
“Yes, Captain?”
Calhoun sounded extremely solicitous as he said, “If you were thinking of leaving Starfleet and taking up a career as a fortune-teller, I’d strongly reconsider. Because every one of your predictions just now was dead wrong.”
Jellico said nothing for a time. And then finally, he announced, “All right, Calhoun. You’ve pushed it too far this time. Whatever happens next is going to be entirely on your head. Do you understand? It’s on your head.”
With that, the transmission abruptly ended, leaving Calhoun to say, “It always is, Admiral. It always is.”
Then
Elizabeth Shelby barely had time to take a breath before her head was shoved under water and held there securely.
She lashed out with her right foot, doing so blindly. But a combination of skill and luck were with her, and her heel glanced off her attacker’s crotch. Not sufficient to send him into screaming agony, but enough to cause him to loosen his grip.
With a quick upward thrust she splashed to the surface, and saw Wexler’s pained expression several feet away from her. “Now, that wasn’t necessary,” he grunted.
Several quick strokes sent her gliding away from him, on the other side of the swimming pool, from which relative safety she shouted, “You are such a jerk, Wexler! I swear to God!”
“At least I remember who my friends are!”
“Easy to remember what you don’t have!”
A throat was cleared loudly at the far end of the pool and they turned to see Calhoun and Leanne, in bathing suits and having just emerged from the locker rooms. Leanne folded her arms and gave them her best scolding look. “Do we have to separate you two?”
“Perhaps they’re still interested in one another and this is just a way of pursuing it,” Calhoun suggested.
It was raining heavily outside, the rainwater spattering harmlessly on the roof of the Academy’s indoor swimming pool. It was relatively deserted this day, most students having taken the weekend to go home after a recent series of grueling midterms. However, since Calhoun wasn’t going home, Shelby decided to stay at the Academy with him. Leanne had been recovering from a wrenched shoulder she’d gotten during self-defense class and decided not to aggravate it by traveling, so Wexler had remained with her.
At the moment, though, Shelby wouldn’t have minded wrenching Wexler’s shoulder so he and Leanne could have a matched set.
“Your boyfriend is being an idiot,” she said archly to Leanne.
“Oh, is he,” said Leanne. She eased herself into the pool, moving tentatively so as not to unthinkingly lean back on the injured arm. “Well, nice to know you can count on some things.”
“What’s he being an idiot about?” asked Calhoun. He walked around to the deep end of the pool and dove in cleanly. Shelby couldn’t help but marvel at how far Calhoun had come in regard to his aquatic comfort level. He still wasn’t the world’s greatest swimmer, but he got around in a perfectly satisfactory manner, and didn’t balk about going into the water anymore. She waited until he surfaced to reply.
“The Kobayashi Maru,” she said.
He stared at her blankly. “The what now?”
She couldn’t quite believe he didn’t know what she was talking about. “The simulation,” she said. “The starship simulation. All fourth-year students on command track take it. We’re fourth-year, we’re command track. So we take it.”
“Right, of course, the Kobayashi Maru,” said Calhoun in such a way that she couldn’t quite determine whether he’d remembered or not. “So what about it?”
Wexler turned in the water to face Calhoun. “You haven’t heard? Little Elizabeth’s term scores were high enough that she’s aiding in the updating and reprogramming of it.”
“Why is that necessary?”
“Because a century ago, a smart-ass cadet reprogrammed it,” said Shelby. “Made the simulation more to his liking. Since then every year it’s updated. The differences are minor, but they’re just enough to keep the probabilities shifting and no one can pull the same stunt.”
“What about the smart-ass cadet? Was he expelled for cheating?”
“Actually,” she admitted, “he was given a commendation for original thinking.”
Calhoun shook his head, water flying off his hair. “I will never understand this place. But…so what was going on with you and Wexler just now then?”
“Nothing,” Wexler assured him. “I swear on my mother’s grave.”
“Your mother’s alive, Wex,” said Shelby.
“Yes, but she’s got her grave all picked out. Brilliant view, really.”
Shelby splashed water at him and, using a clean sidestroke, swam over to Calhoun. “Wexler wanted me to tell him what we’re going to be doing.”
“Doing?”
“With the simulation.”
“Just want to know what the back door is,” said Wexler.
“There is no back door!”
“Back door?” Calhoun looked like he was getting more lost by the moment.
Shelby rubbed water from her eyes and ran her fingers through her hair before it became a hopeless snarl. “Every year the same rumor goes around: That there’s some sort of code word you can say that unlocks the Kobayashi Maru scenario and makes it so simple that a plebe could take it with flying colors. And it’s never true,” she said very pointedly to Wexler. “There are no back doors, no cheats, no ways around of any kind. The test is the test, and that’s all there is to it. So stop trying to come up with ways around it, because you’re annoying the hell out of me.”
“I don’t understand why you would want to, Wex,” said Calhoun.
“Exactly,”
Shelby said, draping an arm around Calhoun and floating next to him.
“Elizabeth has been made part of this team to tinker with this test. You and I and others should be willing to rise to it rather than try to circumvent it.”
“See?” Shelby nodded approvingly. “See, Wex? Mac gets it.”
“And besides,” concluded Calhoun, “it’s not as if what she and her associates are going to come up with will be a challenge.”
“That’s precisely the—” Her head snapped around. “I beg your pardon? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing in particular,” Calhoun said. “Just that I personally am not concerned—”
“Because you think whatever I come up with for the scenario, you’re going to find a way to deal with it. My God, Calhoun, what an arrogant prig you can be sometimes.”
“Well…yes. That’s true,” he allowed. “But that has nothing to do with this. In this case I’m simply saying that I won’t be outwitted by a computer simulation, no matter how devious it is.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Yes. I planned too many strategies in my life, Elizabeth. I can certainly deal with whatever is cooked up by some computer programmers.”
“And I think you’re wrong, Mac,” she said challengingly. “So when it’s time for the test, I guess we’ll see who’s right and who’s wrong, won’t we.”
She got no rise out of him. Instead, very mildly, he replied, “Yes. I suppose we will.”
“Well, now this is interesting!” Wexler called out. “Mac, you actually think you’ll win?”
“Yes. I will,” said Calhoun.
Leanne spoke up from across the pool. “Before y’all get even more het up, it might not be a bad idea to define certain terms, such as ‘win.’”
To which Calhoun responded coolly, “You survive and your enemy doesn’t.”
There was a thoughtful silence and then Shelby said defiantly, “Okay. I can accept that definition. You, Calhoun,” and she grinned, “are in more trouble than you know what to do with.”
“I usually am,” replied Calhoun.
Chapter Fifteen
Now and Then
She looked so young.
Eppy had always looked timeless to him somehow, never-changing. But now, as she sat opposite him in the ready room, wearing the uniform of a fourth-year Starfleet cadet, he realized he’d forgotten the youthful eagerness in her face, the sense of innocence. He wouldn’t have recognized it for what it was back then. They’d all felt so grown-up, so adult. We were children. Children playacting as adults.
The circumstances of his own background had certainly worked against him. It had never, ever occurred to Mackenzie Calhoun to resent the situation that had thrust him into a leadership role for his people. He had so eagerly embraced his seeming destiny that he never thought about such things as a lost childhood, skipped developmental years. He’d taken up the spear and battled his enemies with the ferocity of any adult because that was what had to be done.
“That’s what it was, you know,” said young Eppy. “There’s a certain point in people’s lives where they learn the concept of boundaries. When the rules are laid out for them and they grow to understand what they can and can’t do. You never had that. At the time in your life when you should have been learning it, you were too busy rewriting the rules. You have trouble working within the system because the very first system you encountered, you destroyed. And everyone patted you on the back and cheered you and told you how wonderful it was that you had done so. Maybe that’s why you felt drawn to Starfleet. You felt an innate need to exist within some sort of system of order. You needed someone to tell you what the rules were. To say to you, ‘You can only do this much and no more or there will be consequences.’”
“If it’s what I wanted,” said Calhoun, “then why do I find it so impossible to live within those confines?”
“Because it’s never an easy fit. In some ways, Mac, you’re like an eternal teenager. Always feeling the need to push at the boundaries the ‘grownups’ set for you.”
He shook his head. “How did you ever learn to tolerate it?”
“I chose to find it charming,” she replied, smiling.
Calhoun sighed and came around the desk to her. He didn’t try to touch her, because he knew his hand would pass right through her and somehow that seemed rude. “Did you ever consider how much easier things would have been for you if you’d never met me, Eppy?”
“Every day. Every damned day,” she said with mock gravity.
“Look at you,” he said. “You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. And I screwed it up for you.”
She laughed delightedly at that. “Oh, and aren’t you full of yourself. The vast shadow of Mackenzie Calhoun stretches so far that absolutely everything in my life that isn’t to my one hundred percent satisfaction is because of you. I never made any decisions on my own, I never took any responsibility for my actions.”
“Well, it sounds silly when you put it that way. Still, I didn’t have to do what I did during the Kobayashi Maru,” he said.
She shrugged. “And I didn’t have to react the way I reacted. As you said, we were children playacting that we were adults.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No, but you thought it. Close enough.”
“I just…I keep thinking…”
“That’s a start,” she said dryly.
“I keep thinking,” he continued, making no effort to smile, “that you would have been better off if I’d never come between you and Wexler.”
“Maybe. Then again, maybe I’d have been worse off.”
“How could you be worse off? Look at the situations I’ve put you into….”
“You put me into?” She snorted derisively. “You put me into nothing, Calhoun. I put myself into them. I knew what I was getting into when I signed on as your first officer. And I…” She paused, looked down. “And I knew what I’d lost when I thought you were dead.”
They said nothing for quite some time. In the distance, he could hear the ship’s powerful engines humming.
“This is still how you see me, I suppose,” said Shelby finally, pointing at herself. “The eager young, doe-eyed cadet whose life you saved. This ‘innocent’ thing that you’ve conjured me up to be in your skull. Well, I’ve got news for you, Mac. I was never that innocent.”
“Never?”
“Never,” she said flatly. “Even as a baby, I was worldly-wise and capable of dishing out dazzling rhetoric while engaging in deft wordplay and snappy conversation.”
“I stand corrected,” said Calhoun, and bowed slightly.
She rose from her chair, so light, weightless. “I would never admit this to you,” she said, “but usually your instincts are more reliable than all the rules or decisions that Starfleet could possibly make. I get so angry when you circumvent the chain of command or come up with bizarre solutions to problems that would never have occurred to any truly sane person…but that’s only because, deep down, I’m a bit jealous of you that I’m not nervy enough or creative enough to match you.”
“Okay, now you’re just saying things to make me feel better.”
“Of course. It’s your stupid dream.”
She was so close to him. It would have taken the slightest movement of his head to bring their lips together. “You don’t think you would have been better off without me?” he asked.
“Calhoun…I was never without you. Even before I was with you, I was never without you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Figure it out,” she said, and her lips passed into his.
“Captain?”
Calhoun sat up so abruptly that he banged his knees under the desk. He looked around but wasn’t at all disoriented, because he was still in his ready room. Shelby, however, was gone. Instead Burgoyne was standing there, looking a bit uncertain. “Are you all right?”
“Fine, fine.” Calhoun shoved the base of his palms into his
eyes and rubbed furiously. “I didn’t know I was going to fall asleep.”
“I was hoping you would,” said Burgoyne.
“Concerned about my health?”
“Yes. Well, that, and I had twenty-seven hours without sleep in the pool.”
Calhoun stared at hir blankly. “You were all taking bets as to how many hours I’d stay awake before I passed out?”
“Not all. Soleta stayed out of it so she could be an impartial judge. You know, as to whether light dozing constituted sleep. That sort of thing.” S/he smiled slightly, displaying hir fangs. “You know, Captain, we do have several shifts, plus you have your very own quarters. You are allowed to go down there and sack out from time to time. Probably more comfortable than your chair here in the ready room.”
“I’ve slept in worse, believe me,” said Calhoun. He stood and stretched, wincing at the kinks in his back. “I felt the need to stay nearby. Just in case.”
“In case what?”
“In case anything. ETA to our destination?”
“A little over one hour.”
“Good.” He nodded and then said again, “Good.” He chuckled. “I was dreaming I was talking with Shelby.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
Burgoyne didn’t seem especially impressed. “In the realm of your wildest imaginings, you were sitting and talking with your wife in your ship’s ready room. I have to say, Captain, that’s what I’ve always admired about you. You dare to dream the big dreams. That was quite a flight of fancy.”
“Belay the sarcasm, Burgy.” He rubbed the last of the sleep from his eyes. “Did you want something?”
“Peace of mind, sir.”
“You’ll get it in the grave, and maybe not even then.”
“I need to know if you truly believe what you said about the Selelvians.”
“A little late to be asking that now, isn’t it, Burgy?”
“Perhaps, Captain. Look…” Burgoyne was crouched in the chair. Not seated, but instead balanced lightly on hir feet, looking as if s/he was capable of springing at any time. Not that Calhoun considered that such a thing might happen or that he was in any sort of danger. “I can almost accept—although I’m not happy about it—that you kept me in the dark on this. You wanted me to have plausible deniability. You were concerned about my career. But I need to know for myself, in terms of comprehending the greater good. Do you truly believe the Selelvians are somehow unduly influencing the Federation?”