Travis gave him a comradely squeeze. “Maybe he doesn’t even want to stay in Starfleet.”
“I sure wouldn’t,” Jason commented.
The other twin added, “He’s done his duty.”
“Twice over,” Matt agreed. “They owe him now.”
“What a life,” Travis went on. “Speaking engagements all over the Federation—”
“Scholarships,” Dan Moose said.
Blake made an exaggerated bow. “Honorary degrees—”
“Ceremonial dinners,” Matt fed in.
“Starring in training films, have books written about you—hell, write your own book! Any idiot with a pen can do that!” Perraton looked at him admiringly. “You’re gonna get rich and fat, Eric. Wish to the devil it could’ve been me!”
Until this moment Stiles had been lost in a daze, but Travis’s latest sentence snapped him into biting clarity. He straightened his shoulders—a miracle in itself—and slipped abruptly back in command. Escaping from Travis’s cordial embrace, he took hold of his friend’s arm and control over the moment.
“No, you don’t,” he said. “I’m glad it wasn’t you and you’re glad too, and don’t forget it, Travis. I’m so happy I could cry to see all of you, but I’m not the kid you knew.”
Their faces changed, subtly, though even after all this time he could still read them. Perhaps even better than before. Some were arguing with him in their minds. Others were realizing they may have made a mistake to say what they’d been saying, perhaps even to be here today.
From the captain’s group nearby, Ambassador Spock and Dr. McCoy finally breached the bubble of intimacy encircling Stiles and his crew-mates.
“Mr. Stiles,” the ambassador began, “excuse me. As soon as you’re ready, the captain and dignitaries are ready to go to the wardroom for the honors banquet. We have a table set aside for you and your friends.”
“Yes!” Travis beamed, and shook hands victoriously with one of the Bolts.
“You’re most welcome, gentlemen,” Spock allowed. “And Dr. McCoy has something for Mr. Stiles.”
“Me?” Stiles rubbed his clammy hands on his thighs as Dr. McCoy stepped past Spock.
“Here you go, son.” The doctor handed him a leatherbound packet with a Starfleet seal.
“What is it?” Stiles asked, as he took the plush folder with its satin ribbon and official wax seal.
“It’s your way out,” the doctor said. “Clean and legal. A medical discharge, issued directly from the surgeon general, with a retroactive field promotion. You’ll go out as a full lieutenant, with commensurate pension.”
Stiles looked up. “But you cured me. I don’t have a legitimate medical claim.”
“I cured your body,” McCoy told him. Those active and ancient blue eyes flared. “Your soul is still scarred.”
As the moment turned suddenly solemn beneath the doctor’s prophetic words, the men around Stiles fell silent and stopped shifting. Their hands fell away from him and they made clear by their demeanor that he was once again in charge, once more the man who would make the important decision of the moment for them all.
A man, making decisions…
He glanced at them, saw the civilian clothes on some of them, Starfleet uniforms on others, and his two worlds suddenly collided. They looked young to him, young and unscarred and inexperienced.
“Thank you, sir.” He handed the pouch back to Dr. McCoy and straightened his shoulders. “But I’ve got too much to do. My soul’s just gonna have to heal.”
His friends erupted into silly cheers around him, as if they understood something he wasn’t registering at all. Over there Captain Turner, the princess, the governor and mayor were all looking at him, and now they had started applauding politely. Not the cheers of the huge crowd this time, but something much more substantial and wise.
How come everybody knew what he had just thought of?
Ambassador Spock reached out and took Stiles’s hand. “Congratulations, Lieutenant. And welcome back to Starfleet.”
Chapter Eleven
Eleven Years Later…
U.S.S. Enterprise, Starfleet Registry NCC1701-D
“THERE HAVE BEEN over fifty major outbreaks of raids or attacks on the Neutral Zone by angry Romulan commanders who before this made no violent overtures at all—and with no apparent reason. We’ve got to get some better intelligence.”
Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s comment would generally not have traveled beyond the ears of his first officer and the physician who stood at his side on the command deck, but Ambassador Spock’s Vulcan hearing brought the private conversation to him as he stepped from the turbolift. These were troubled times. Despite them, reverie clouded his thoughts.
To step from a turbolift, to hear the sibilance of the door and sense anticipation, the murmur of a starship’s bridge electrical systems softly working—these were mighty memories.
For a brief moment in a frozen pocket of his mind, the carpet changed texture, the bulkheads drained from tan to blue-gray, the rail turned glossy red, lights dimmed, and there were crisp shadows over his head. More blue, more black, and at the center that oasis of mesa-gold. The center of his universe, that dot of gold.
Memories only. He dismissed them, but they pursued.
He failed to escape them, as he stepped down to the command deck, also failing to understand—until his foot struck the lower carpet—that he was treading the sacred ground of officers aboard a starship, of the captain and his chosen few: and that he was no longer among them. For decades he had not been among them. How swiftly these automatic impulses flooded back! Perhaps this was why he spent so little time aboard ships anymore.
He nearly stepped back and waited to be invited, but by now Captain Picard had risen and turned to greet him.
“Ambassador, welcome aboard,” the captain began, his deep theatrical voice communicating undisguised delight, and he even smiled.
Spock took his hand, a gesture he had come over the years to find suspiciously comforting, and thus held it longer than necessary for courtesy. When embarking on difficult missions, especially those couched in mystery, he had come to depend upon the sustenance of the human tendency to get to know one another quickly and with a speck of intimacy. Few races in the galaxy had that talent. He had come to cherish it.
“You know Mr. Riker,” the captain invited pleasantly.
“Ambassador, hello!” William Riker, yes—the ship’s first officer. A bright smile, and no attempt to subdue his pride that a distinguished Federation identity had come aboard his starship.
“Good evening, Mr. Riker,” Spock offered, and also took Riker’s hand.
“And Dr. Crusher, of course,” the captain added, turning.
Only the ship’s doctor, Beverly Crusher (in fact the person he had come here to meet), restrained herself from offering to shake a Vulcan’s hand.
She was a stately woman, tall, reedy, and red-haired, with a sculpted face that echoed a Renaissance painting Spock had once seen in the Manhattan Museum of Art. He found it a credit to Dr. Crusher that he remembered the painting now for the first time in nearly nine decades, but recalled also his thoughts at the time that the woman in the picture was pale and too thin. Understanding that humans’ emotional condition frequently communicated itself to their physical appearance, he surmised that the doctor was strained and troubled. She did not smile as did her captain and first officer, and that he also found suggestive.
“Good evening, Doctor. I’m gratified to have you involved.”
“Now you’ll get some answers, Beverly,” Captain Picard told her with a placating smile.
She glanced at him, then stepped closer to Spock.
“I’d like to say it’s my pleasure, Ambassador,” the woman said, “but unfortunately I doubt any of us will enjoy the next few weeks.”
“That will depend upon the outcome, as always.”
Spock slipped his traveling cloak from his shoulders and let his attending yeoman take it from
him, leaving his arms a little cool with unencumberment. Though he felt obliged by tradition to wear the Vulcan robes and plastiformed emblems when moving among the public or visiting Starfleet localities, such dress aboard a ship seemed provincial. Among these men and women, he could feel comfortable in simple black slacks and his cowl-necked daywear tunic. The cobalt-and-purple quilted strips running from his shoulders to his thighs were the only jewel-tones on the bright tan bridge, excepting only the shoulder yoke of medical blue on Beverly Crusher’s uniform.
Again, he found himself wading in memories unbidden.
And a few he had dismissed freely—the officers here on this bridge were people he knew, had encountered in a previous mission, and since allowed to fade from his mind. He had learned long ago to remember the names of ships, captains, and some officers—but that cluttering one’s mind with lieutenants, yeomen, and others tended only to inaccuracy. Eventually those crewmen and officers either disappeared into the mists of service or civilian life, or became commanders and captains themselves, in which case their names and ranks and ships turned into a long roster he would just have to amend later.
He remembered Captain Picard’s senior security officer, the noted Klingon who defied so much to be here, but he could not summon the name. The android at the science station, however, had a name that no mathematician could forget—Data.
“There’ve been two more skirmishes this morning, Ambassador,” Captain Picard reported. “The Starfleet ships Ranger and Griffith were set upon just outside the Crystal Ball Nebula, and the Ranger was actually boarded.”
“Is everyone all right?” Spock asked.
“No fatalities, sixteen casualties, and apparently one of their passengers was kidnapped. The details are hazy so far.”
Troubled by these unpredictable rashes, so obviously driven by emotion rather than by tactical plans, Spock paused a moment to gather his thoughts.
“Unfortunately, events are moving forward with the rapidity typical of a national crisis. We can now officially call the disease an epidemic.” Spock lowered his voice and significantly added, “Captain, the proconsul of the Senate died yesterday.”
“Uh-oh,” Riker opined.
Picard grimaced. “That means instability at the top of the empire.”
“Dr. McCoy should be arriving soon,” Spock told them, “with current information about the medical aspects of the Romulan crisis. You should shortly be receiving a signal from a Tellarite grain ship upon which he’s traveling at the moment.”
“Leonard McCoy,” Dr. Crusher observed, “is the only man I’ve ever known who can shuttle in and out of nontreaty cultures as easily as the rest of us visit the stores in a shopping promenade. He can charm his way past border guards and squirm past warrants like some kind of spirit.”
“Hardly charm,” Spock commented. “In any case, we should shortly have fresh information. The massive sickness is causing havoc throughout the empire.”
“We’ve been feeling the effect,” Captain Picard validated. “These border eruptions are like wildcat strikes. Isolated leaders are finding excuses to attack Federation outposts and ships, staging incidents on purpose, hoping one of them will flame into all-out conflict. Nothing that smacks of coordination, however, not so far.”
“They are not coordinated attacks at all,” Spock concurred. “As certain members of the royal family die, their followers—and sometimes the family members themselves—are flaring up in frustration and anger.”
“And fear,” Crusher added. “The royal family is spread all over, and they’re all in charge. And they’re all terrified. They’re not only dying themselves, but also watching their children die. It’s not a gentle disease, Ambassador…it attacks quickly, painfully, then inflicts a slow death. It behaves like a curse. Some people think that’s what it is. Terrified people do terrible things.”
“We’ve got a reason to be terrified too,” her captain said. “As more and more of the royal family die, others who have had no chance for power are seeing an opportunity for upheaval. The Federation’s managing to handle these spurts without considering any one of them an act of war, but how long can we hold out? If the structure breaks down too much—”
“Could that happen?” Dr. Crusher asked. “Could the empress really be deposed because she and her whole family are sick?”
Riker looked at Crusher. “If the empress dies, all the hungry near-orbiters who never had a shot at the throne will start smelling velvet.”
“With too many decisive defeats of Romulan flare-ups by Starfleet crews,” Picard added, “the empress could be deposed very quickly and someone more hungry for war could take over. No matter how you look at it politically, there’s every reason to stir up trouble and virtually no reason not to. So our goal in these skirmishes is to prevail, but not so decisively that the Romulan commanders are deeply humiliated or destroyed. We try to push them back without squashing them, stalling for time, seeking a biological solution. If the empress falls and her relatives are all infected too, there could be decades of instability on one of the Federation’s longest borders. We have a stake in restoring the status quo.”
“True,” Spock agreed, relieved that they shared his hopes. “Better to have a stable empire as a neighbor than anarchy at our gates.”
“Well, we’ve done a good job so far,” Will Riker injected, “of keeping these flare-up attacks from turning into acts of war.”
“As the family breaks down,” Spock said, “some dissident elements are striking out at the Federation, even though the core of the royal family is not yet ready to do that. Some of these elements are in control of ships.”
Spock turned a fraction toward him, careful not to turn his back on the captain. “Those closest to power—the empress, her immediate relatives, and their immediate relatives—seem more concerned about stopping this biological attack than using it as leverage to foment trouble.”
“Wouldn’t you, sir? They see a chance that they might not have to die.”
“Not everyone craves havoc, Mr. Riker. As Dr. Crusher pointed out, many of these victims wish only to live and see their children live, and to do so in a fairly stable civilization. Unfortunately, the empress must walk a very thin tightrope. For her own survival as a ruler, after nearly two hundred years of anti-Federation propaganda, she must not be seen as cowardly or complacent toward the Federation. The Romulan people on the outskirts, including those in command of ships, have been told all their lives to distrust the Federation. Now all the Romulan leadership is suddenly dying. What would you expect them to think?”
“Yes…” Riker’s eyes widened. “How much of a leap would it be to assume the Federation is doing this?”
Spock rewarded him with a nod. “The propaganda is turning on them.”
“And now they need our help.” Dr. Crusher folded her long arms. “It figures. Has it occurred to anyone that this may be a genetic anomaly?”
“Isolated to the royal family?” Picard protested. “How likely is that?”
“Pretty damned likely, Jean-Luc.” Crusher held out a hand. “The Romulans used to do genetic experiments—about a century ago, a little more. Those experiments could just now have incubated to mutancy and be coming back to bite them. It could be completely incurable. In that case, are we getting involved just to prove we didn’t do it? I’m not sure I can prove a negative that big. If that’s what the Federation expects, I’ve got an impossible mission here.”
Wondering if indeed all physicians were necessarily cantankerous, Spock found himself sympathetic to her dilemma. The ball she had been cast was a familiar one to medical specialists with deep-space exploration, for they had the most experience dealing with the unknown, the foreign, and the unheard-of as commonplace. He had in his long life seen this firsthand, seen that expression in the eyes of many doctors into whose hands a monumental task had been shoved.
“Like myself, Doctor,” he placated, “I know you prefer clarity to choices. However, choices are the more fr
equent curse of authority. The Romulans are advanced, but the Federation is much more advanced in the medical field. We’ve had to deal with so wide an array of alien members.”
Will Riker cocked a hip and leaned against the navigation station, drawing a glance from the crewman manning the helm. “They might as well accept our help. They can always kill us tomorrow.”
“Whatever the sociopolitical ramifications,” Spock added, “they simply need our help.”
“Captain, short-range emergency sensors,” the fierce voice of Picard’s Klingon officer erupted suddenly. As they all turned to look up at him, towering there over the tactical station at the back of the wide bridge, the surly lieutenant raised his eyes from the board and glared at the forward screen. “A Romulan Scoutship just decloaked off our bow!”
“Shields up, Mr. Worf. Red alert. Battle stations. Helm, hold position.”
Lieutenant Worf watched the incoming angular feather-painted Romulan wing on the wide forward screen. “Should I arm photon torpedoes also, sir, considering their duophasic shields?”
“Ah, certainly.”
Spock turned. “Captain, may I suggest—”
“I understand, Ambassador, but no Romulan commander expects less and I don’t intend to show squeamishness.”
Retreating, and somewhat embarrassed at this change in himself, Spock instantly acceded, “Forgive me.”
“Captain, they are hailing,” Data reported.
“Ship to ship, Mr. Data.”
“Frequencies open, sir.”
“This is Captain Jean-Luc Picard, U.S.S. Enterprise, Starfleet. Identify yourself, please.”
“Subcommander Cul, Captain, Imperial Reconnaissance Scout Tdal.”
“You’re in violation of the Neutral Zone treaty by several light-years, Subcommander. Explain your presence here.”
“Our weapons are cold, Captain. We have a passenger.”
Picard paused, then glanced at Spock.
Spock was careful to keep his expression subdued, although this was probably a fruitless attempt, for even that subtle effort belied involvement.