Текст книги "Killing Time "

Автор книги: Della Hise

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Before Kirk could think of a response, McCoy leaned forward, refilled the suddenly empty glasses, and continued. "Personally, I don't think there's anyone in Starfleet who couldcommand you—admirals and such included. But sometimes your mind gets tired of playing 'Captain Kirk.' Deep inside, there's still a part of you that needssomeone to look up to—and that person just happens to be your first officer in this case. When you go to sleep, the little boy in you needs someone to relate to—and that little boy automatically chooses Spock—sort of a big-brother figure for your dreams."

Kirk considered that, and felt some of the worry leave him. It made sense—was even logical. "Okay," he conceded. "As I've said before, you're probably right. But … your explanation still doesn't cover one thing."

McCoy waited.

"Spock," Kirk said at last, laying the single syllable in the air.

McCoy stared mutely at his captain, then raised both brows questioningly. "What about him?"

"He … had the exact same dream that I did. He was the captain, I was an ensign, and the Enterprisewasn't exactly the Enterprise."

McCoy reached instantly for a stack of computer tapes which rested haphazardly on one corner of the desk. "You should've told me that to begin with," he grumbled with a smile. "It would've spared you my lecture on the psychological significance of dreams."

Kirk returned the smile. "Maybe I needed to hear it anyway, Bones," he suggested. "It got me out of doing my nightly paperwork and gave me a chance to mooch some of your brandy, too. Not a bad way to spend an hour."

"Whoever said that starship captains always take the most direct approach to a problem obviously never met you, Jim," the doctor replied, rising to his feet and moving into the anteroom of the office. "I'll want a list of the people you've talked with so far," he called through the open door. "In the meantime, I'll get some of my people on it, too. I want to interview everyone on this ship and get a percentage rate. If it's just a few isolated cases, then it's probably just psychological—stress, boredom, whatever." He reappeared in the main office carrying a hefty stack of computerized clipboards. "But if it turns out to be more than twenty-five percent of the crew …" His voice drifted off momentarily. "If it's morethan that, Jim," he repeated, "we'll have to inform Starfleet Command; put in for shore leave at a starbase."

Kirk nodded. "Any speculations, Bones?" he asked hopefully.

"I'm a doctor," McCoy pointed out as one of the clipboards slipped from his arm and clattered to the floor, "not a dream merchant." He plopped the remaining portable computers onto the desk, thumbing the intercom to the outer offices. "Nurse Chapel, I want six lab techs in here before the echo dies!"

Kirk grinned at his friend's obvious enthusiasm. "Looks like you're going to be a dream merchant this week," he pointed out, and quickly found an excuse to leave, recognizing the doctor's need for professional privacy and space.

But as he walked down the corridor toward his quarters, he couldn't help looking over his shoulder just once. Something felt wrong … and he hoped it wasn't already too late.

Lieutenant Jeremy Richardson looked at the bed, feeling a shiver crawl along his spine. After adjusting the thermostat on the wall and dimming the lights, however, he crawled beneath the heavy covers and listened to the sound of his own breathing. For a moment, he thought he saw a shadow—a dark, nebulous form which moved and took shape by the bed. He closed his eyes, but the phantom worked its way behind the lids.

It smiled at him—his own smile.

It winked … with his own eyes.

Chapter Three

CAPTAIN JAMES T. KIRK awoke in the middle of a night which was blacker than usual, startled by a dream which slipped through the ethereal fingers of memory. It left him alone and irrefutably shaken inside himself; and though he tried to open weighted eyelids, he discovered himself paralyzed.

The images of the dream continued to move, like obscene specters in his mind, like information being fed into a computer not prepared to accept new programming. He fought, writhing under the disheveled covers until beads of sweat stood at prompt attention on his forehead.

Intellectually, he knew he was awake; yet the nightmare quality lingered, refusing to deliver him into the sanity of consciousness.

His mind was ripped from him, pulled into unseen hands, then reshaped to create another creature, an entirely different being. His muscles remained taut, as sails on a ship; and he found himself too frozen with horror to move or breathe. Memories which had once been pleasant were suddenly unreachable as his past disappeared down a long, black tunnel. Painful recollections took shape before his inner eye—women he had loved, women he had lost. A ship– his.All gone.

"S-Spock?" he cried out, hearing it as a scream in his mind, but as little more than a dry whisper suspended in reality. The Vulcan should be there … yet was not. The familiar link seemed obscure and distant, as if it no longer existed.

For a single terrifying moment, Spock was dead; and the human knew instinctively that he was alone with ghosts. In the past, the idea of solitude had never frightened him; but now, a sense of mindless, terrible loneliness came to dwell in him with a vengeance, wrenching a cry of anguish from his throat as his mind instinctively sought Spock's.

No … not dead. Not quite. He thought he could almost sense the mental rapport which had always been there before. But it too slipped away … and was gone.

Time cartwheeled.

Backward … Forward again.

Somewhere in the back of his conscious mind, the human chastised himself for the abrupt and unprecedented failure of his command pose; but as his eyes finally wrenched themselves open, he realized that it had been nothing more than a dream within a dream.

With a gasp, he caught himself wondering where he was, why he was trembling in fear, and why he had been mentally reaching out to a man whom he'd never personally met. And, most of all, he wondered why he should consider the ShiKahr's Vulcan captain to be a friend.

Shaking the disorientation from his mind, he forced himself to start breathing again, and slowly fell back into the strange bed as the dream transmutated and became reality.

A quick glance at the other single bed confirmed that his roommate—a man who had been introduced to him less than twenty-four hours previously as Paul Donner—was still sound asleep, apparently untroubled by dreams.

With an effort, Kirk rose, stumbled into the small bathroom, and splashed cold water on his face until the discomfort alone chased the last shards of sleep from his mind. But the anger returned with a vengeance when he realized that he wasn'ta starship captain, would neverbe a starship captain … and that the dreams were just another way the Talos Device kept coming back from his past to haunt him.

Yet even those memories which had always been so sharp and clear seemed distant now—more than a vision … less than a recollection. He told himself firmly that dreams of disorientation and bitterness were bound to linger for a while; he'd been drafted into active Starfleet duty less than six months ago, and only assigned to the VSS ShiKahryesterday. He glanced suspiciously around the dimly lit quarters, ignoring the easy snoring from Donner, and trying to shake the feeling of alienation as he studied the unfamiliar surroundings. None of it felt right … but he had expected nothing more or less.

And he also accepted the fact that he did not wantit to feel right. . . .

Cautious, hardened hazel eyes scanned the bedroom carefully, gave one last check on Donner's status, then traveled to the small bag of personal belongings he'd brought on board and tossed haphazardly into one corner. Moving back into the living area, he knelt by the bed, fumbled with the tattered suitcase, then withdrew two small items. With trembling hands, he lifted the syringe to the bathroom light, filled it with the last few drops from the ampoule, then turned the instrument toward his wrist. For a moment, something inside him rebelled; something warned that drug-induced acceptance of Fate might not be the answer he needed. But he swept the nagging thought aside when stray fragments of the dream returned to remind him of what he had lost … what he had never possessed.

She … silver woman-goddess. She.

Dead and buried.

He brought the hypo down against his bare wrist, flinching only slightly when the high-pressure needle injected cold fluid into the vein with a hiss which reminded Kirk of a serpent.

Donner moved in his sleep at the sound, slapping at his round face as if chasing an imaginary fly or spider. Then, with a grunt of dismay, the powerful body rolled onto its stomach, and strong arms pulled a pillow over tousled hair as he slumped deeper into sleep.

As the drug entered his system, Kirk replaced the damning evidence back in the bottom of the suitcase and staggered unsteadily to the bed, barely drawing the covers over his chest before the dizziness took him. He realized with dismay that that had been the last dose of lidacin. On Earth, the drug had been easy to buy … but on a starship, it would be next to impossible.

As his eyes lowered, he bit his lip until pain intervened. Sleep. Shewould be there. But onlythere.

With a heavy sigh, Ensign Kirk surrendered to the effects of the drug, to a darkness populated by spirits and a more acceptable reality. He was no longer the man he had been all his life, no longer Captain James T. Kirk. Now he too was a specter, another ghost of a far-removed surreal reality. The James T. Kirk he had known was now nothing more than a dream, a psychic stranger who occasionally came to the ensign in nightmares to demand a rank and a ship which would never be his in this universe.

Captain James T. Kirk no longer existed as the Romulan flagship descended from hyperspace and slipped into orbit over its home world … more than twenty light-years away.

Captain Spock walked down the deserted "night" corridors, completing the daily inspection with routine precision. Everything was in order: fire control systems fully operational on Decks 4 through 11; low-level radiation leakage in engineering well within normal range; matter/anti-matter pods checked and serviced by Chief Engineer Scott; warp drive functioning properly; ship cruising at Warp One on routine patrol of Romulan Neutral Zone.

The Vulcan studied the checklist on the computerized clipboard, made the appropriate notations, then placed the instrument under one arm and turned to go back the way he'd come. But as he gazed down the long, empty corridor, he felt something cold close over him. Dizziness surrounded him; gravity was suddenly twice normal. The deck seemed closer to his head than his feet. He inhaled deeply, surprised at the uncharacteristic sensations of vertigo. With one hand, he quickly reached out, steadying himself against the bulkhead as his ears detected the too-loud clatter of the clipboard hitting the floor.

Reality wavered like a malcontent child throwing a tantrum; and for a single instant, the corridors were … different.Fully lit. Daytime. Greater curvature—as if he were suddenly on a deck closer to the center of the saucer-dome. Instead of the Vulcan inscriptions denoting deck levels and instructions, Terran English swam before his eyes.

He blinked to clear the absurdity; then, recalling the correct procedure to combat vertigo, sank to his knees and placed his head firmly against the wall, breathing deeply. The air was thicker—Earth-thick instead of Vulcan-thin.

Alone. Thee are alone, Spock. Thee are no longer my son.

He shook his head violently, trying to clear words which melted into his consciousness from a time in the past. Words his father had said to him when he'd accepted command of the ShiKahr.He'd denied it—instinctively. But Sarek had been correct. Somehow, whatever companion he'd once envisioned finding among the stars had escaped him. And yet, the actual memories of Vulcan—of his own past—were far less real, more comparable to images on a vid-screen than to actual memories. But it didn't hurt that way. Nature's way of making rejection easier to accept.

For an instant, nausea rose in his stomach, and he tasted the metallic salt of a madness he had not felt in years. Vulcan. T'Pring. Home and wife and family and expectations: gone. What remained? The stars—something T'Pring would have forbidden. Space-freedom. Isolation—acceptable … for a Vulcan. And Command—a different type of home altogether.

He took another deep breath, trying to stand. But before he could gain his feet, a face materialized before his mind's eye: firm features, tanned flesh, expressive hazel eyes, and a compelling human grin. Single lock of gold-bronze hair falling to the middle of a high forehead. Still … a stranger. A man who inhabited dreams.

T'hy'la?He wondered briefly if this human could be the companion, the friend, the brother. But … no. Images received during periods of physical—or mental—illness could not be considered accurate.

He closed his eyes once more, fought down the nausea, and slowly inched his way back up the wall. But his legs trembled violently as he clutched the bulkhead.

Through a long tunnel which had neither a beginning nor an end, he heard voices. His eyes opened; he followed the sound.

"Captain?"

A hand touched his shoulder—firm, strong, human.

"Captain? Are ye all right? Here, sit down and I'll get in a call tae Sickbay, Captain Spock."

The hand urged him gently toward the deck, but he resisted, shaking his head in negation. He blinked once more, and forced his eyes to focus. Engineer Scott looked back at him as the ethereal tunnel shortened and finally disappeared. The Vulcan took a deep, unsteady breath, and reality stabilized.

"That will not be necessary, Engineer," the captain replied, unconsciously moving back until the other man's hand fell away. He realized disjointedly that it was Scott who had brought him back—but … back from where?He tasted a single moment of illogical resentment. "I am … quite well now."

Scott looked dubious. "Are ye sure, Captain?" he asked worriedly. "If you'll pardon my sayin' so, ye look like ye've just been around the galaxy at warp speed—without a spacesuit!"

Again, the Vulcan shook his head, and absently straightened the maroon command tunic. The silk fabric felt cold, he realized disjointedly. Cold and alien and out of place. He glanced around the corridor. All normal now. Proper curvature of halls. Vulcan inscriptions. Darkened night corridors. All completely normal.

"I shall … retire to my quarters, Engineer," he stated in a voice which left little room for disagreement. "You may carry on with your duties."

Scott stared blankly at the Vulcan commander. "With all due respect, Captain," he replied, "it's three in the mornin'. My duty shift ended four hours ago." He reached out as if to steady the Vulcan, then stopped when the captain stepped away, deliberately avoiding his touch. "At least let me see ye tae your quarters," he offered.

Finally, the Vulcan nodded. "Very well, Mister Scott." Illogical to argue, he thought, remembering just how concerned these unpredictable humans could be. He studied the engineer out the corner of his eye as they began to walk—quite slowly, he noted—down the corridor and toward the turboshaft. Upon reaching the lift, he turned, facing the other man. The engineer's face was compassionate, warm and friendly … but not the same face as in the persistent vision.

"I am really quite well now, Mister Scott," the Vulcan reassured the other man, feeling a sudden need to be alone. "Please do not trouble yourself further on my behalf."

After a long moment of silence, Scott nodded, and reluctantly stood aside, wondering if he would everunderstand the Vulcan captain's stubbornness.

* * *

Ensign Jim Kirk hadn't been aboard the VSS ShiKahrtwo days before the first fight began. He stared at the young oaf who had been assigned as his roommate, and felt the anger rise with visible results to darken his cheeks.

"Look, Kirk," the haughty ensign said with a sarcastic grin, pressing his weight against Kirk to pin him to the corridor wall. "We don't want you here any more than you want to be here. So you'd better just get used to doing what you're told!"

Jim wrestled valiantly, but to no avail. Donner was at least thirty pounds heavier, six inches taller, and considerably more aggressive than Kirk had felt in a long time. What with the Dark Times on Earth, the sudden reinstatement of the military draft, and Romulan forces threatening to invade Alliance territory at any moment, a lot of the fight had gone out of him. But as he observed the open resentment on Donner's baby-round face, a spark of the old fire rekindled itself in his veins.

"Why don't you climb down off my back, Donner?" he asked coldly, lifting his knee in defiance, then grunting with pain when the other man's grip tightened painfully on his throat. "If we're going to be forced to live together," he continued in a choked voice, "then you'd better get used to it, too!"

The grip loosened somewhat as Donner's face loomed closer.

"I was here first, draft-dodger!" Donner reminded him arrogantly.

Kirk laughed despite the pain in his throat, his legs, his arms. His voice lowered to a deceptive purr. "So were the Neanderthals, Donner," he replied sarcastically. "But just remember one thing, soldier boy: I have no great love for Starfleet, for the Alliance, or for you and your goddamned superiority complex! I'll get out of here—even if it kills bothof us in the process." A dangerous smile came to his lips. "Or maybe you'll just disappear in the middle of the night—just like your Neanderthal ancestors!"

Donner laughed aloud, then impulsively tossed the smaller man against the bulkhead as if discarding a soiled shirt.

"For a littleson-of-a-bitch, you've got awfully bigideas!" The cold gray eyes hardened as Donner's hands attached themselves to the uniform collar of Kirk's shirt. "Now listen up, runt, and listen good. Your personnel records are no secret to anyone on board this ship. You were obviously given a choice between Starfleet and prison—and for some reason unknown to God or man, you chose the Fleet. So you're just going to have to live with that decision—or your butt's going to end up in the brig for the duration of this voyage. Clear?"

Kirk stared at the other ensign with cold, lethal hatred. Of all the possible roommates, he just hadto get Donner. "Who died and made you God?" he asked pointedly.

But Donner only shrugged with a leering grin. "Security posting has certain advantages, Kirk," he pointed out with a seemingly innocent gesture. "You're just lucky Vulcan stepped into the government back on Terra, or you wouldn't have had anychoice! You'd've been taken out and strung up from the nearest high-tension wires. But since you're here, and since the rest of us have to put up with you for the remainder of your little visit, you'd better get it drilled into that puny little head of yours that you're my personal slave? Understand, runt?You eat when I say so; you sleep where I tell you and you do whatever the hell I tell you to do!"

Kirk noticed out the corner of his eye that several other crewmembers were starting to stop and stare at the altercation, and he felt the hot rush of embarrassment rise in his face once more. But for a moment, the dreamlike quality washed over him, bringing dizziness and nausea, and he could only stare mutely at the other man until the solid reality of anger returned. He lowered his head, biting the inside of his mouth in a last-ditch effort to wrestle his admittedly hot temper back under control. But it was a losing battle.

"I understand perfectly, Donner," he said in a voice which was oddly compliant. But he raised hazel eyes aflame with unconcealed hatred.

In the background, Kirk heard a few of the crewmembers giggle appreciatively.

That was his last conscious memory before Donner's doubled fist sent him spiraling down into the dark abysm of nightmares he had come to know so well. But even in that defeat, Kirk tasted an odd-flavored victory.

No one commanded him. No one owned him.

There were three additional fights that week; and when Ensign James Kirk failed to appear on duty for the fourth consecutive day, he received the written summons to report to the captain's quarters for disciplinary consultation. He did not go.