“After repairs, the Columbus achieved a decaying orbit. We had, at best, almost an hour before we were forced down again. I chose to ignite all our fuel at once. Not for propulsion, but as a signal. One with little chance of being detected. A signal that meant the Columbus would burn up in minutes.”
Spock again felt the heat of that terrible moment. The buffeting of the thickening atmosphere. The acrid bite of burning insulation as the temperature rose. The unspoken accusations of his crew. The approach of death.
“But obviously the signal was detected,” Marinta said.
Spock drew a breath, dispelled the past. “The signal was detected.” He sat forward in his seat as he waited for the armored compartment door to be opened by the bodyguards outside. “And now I am preparing to commit the same act of desperation. To ignite all the fuel, as it were.” He held Marinta’s gaze. “It is not logical. But I believe it is my last best hope.”
“Our best hope.” Marinta’s bright smile was undisguised.
Spock nodded. “For both our people. One people.”
The door puffed out, then hummed as it slid open.
Primedian’s night air was cold, unusual for the season. The musty, layered scent of age enveloped Spock, and for a stifling moment he felt as ancient as the city’s weathered blocks and roadways.
Two private bodyguards—Romulan, in drab and featureless civilian garb—stood outside, their stern features harshly shadowed emerald by a single, overhead streetglow that shone straight down. Each guard had a micro- communicator in one pointed ear. Narrow disruptor tubes in magnetic holsters were strapped to their forearms, their outlines almost concealed by the fabric of their sleeves.
“It’s time,” Spock said, to himself as much as to anyone else.
But Marinta reached out and lightly placed her hand on a fold of his robes, taking care not to touch his arm. “Mister Ambassador…”
Spock looked at her, waited.
“The shuttlecraft. I’ve read so many accounts of your life. It wasn’t the Columbus. It was the Galileo.”
In defiance of his self-mastery, Spock felt his stomach tighten. She was right. How could I have forgotten? Have I grown so old?
“Of course,” he said calmly, fiercely walling off anything he thought, anything he felt. He had commanded the Galileo, not the Columbus. “I misspoke.”
If Marinta sensed anything of his inward struggle, she did not share it with him.
She merely took her hand from his robes. “I’ll…wait for you here?”
“That would be best.”
Saying nothing else, Spock stepped from the transport, into the night, into what must happen next.
But his lapse of memory tore at him, spurring the unwanted memories of heat and smoke and…
He saw two figures in an alley. Dead eyes locked on his in bitter accusation.
Latimer and Gaetano, both in their antique uniforms. Sodden with fresh blood.
Spock’s guards saw his reaction, spun together, disruptors already in their hands as they aimed across the street at…
The empty alley.
Like burrowing snakes, the disruptors slipped back up the guards’ sleeves.
“Did you see something, Mister Ambassador?”
Spock answered by walking toward the private entrance to the towering coliseum, robes swirling around his boots.
The bodyguards hurried to match his pace.
No sign of what Spock felt or thought was visible in his demeanor.
But within, he was consumed by doubt and felt the first insinuating tendrils of what any human would recognize as panic.
His decision had been made. His path could not be altered any more than a decaying orbit could escape the siren call of gravity.
But he had commanded the Galileo, not the Columbus.
And just as he was haunted by the mistakes he had made in the past, he feared the mistakes that still remained before him, and already felt remorse for those who could be harmed because what he must do next might somehow be wrong.
Consumed by doubt, displaying confidence, Spock strode into the first coliseum built on Romulus, where three thousand Romulans were waiting to hear his message of peace and reconciliation.
But what Spock felt or how he looked didn’t matter.
Because exactly fourteen minutes later, those three thousand Romulans saw Spock die.
1
QO’NOS, STARDATE 57471.0
The swinging bat’leth blazed in the sun of Qo’noS, as if the Klingon sun itself reached out a fiery arm to strike down James T. Kirk.
Huffing, puffing, drenched in sweat, Kirk instinctively calculated the blade’s killing arc, then threw himself sideways beyond the reach of his opponent.
He pulled in his free arm to hit the unforgiving surface of the combat pit with his shoulder. With his other arm outstretched, holding his own bat’leth as a counterbalance, he sought to stabilize his center of gravity.
For one sweet moment, airborne and in swift action, Kirk knew his form was perfect, his tactic sound.
Then his shoulder struck rock-hard clay and it was as if he’d landed on an agonizer set to level eleven.
Breathless as brilliant fireworks of pain receded from his wide-open eyes, Kirk watched the shadow of his opponent rise over him, to block the searing sun and the yellow Klingon sky. He saw his opponent’s blade lift straight up, preparing to deliver the k’rel tagh—the ritual stroke of major severance.
Flat on his back in the combat pit, Kirk knew he was seconds away from decapitation. And that’s where he saw his chance.
His opponent had underestimated him.
A more experienced bat’Wahl—bat’leth warrior—would have responded to Kirk’s position by performing a series of k’rel meen lunges, first double-slicing across his chest to disable the pectoral muscles he could use to raise his own bat’leth in defense. That preliminary attack would be followed by one, possibly two, a’k’rel tagh attacks—minor severances—to detach one, possibly both of Kirk’s arms. Only then would a true bat’Wahl deliver the k’rel tagh, when his opponent was deserving of a warrior’s death and no longer capable of counterattack.
A perfect counterattack is what Kirk had before him now. One swing of the tip of his blade in a disemboweling meen p’Ral stroke left to right across the fighter’s stomach and the bout would be over.
But even as Kirk instinctively calculated the proper trajectory for his swing, he also saw the exhaustion in his opponent’s eyes.
There was a better way for this fight to end.
Kirk threw his arms up and shrieked in fear!
His opponent’s blade swept through the humid air and struck Kirk’s unprotected neck, and—
—sliced through cleanly, the holographic projection of the deadly tip flickering only once as the circuits in the practice weapon registered the kill.
“Ya got me,” Kirk moaned.
His opponent giggled.
Kirk pushed himself to a sitting position, grimacing as he pulled his opponent close to his chest, ignoring the pulsing pain of his sprained shoulder in the joy of hugging the most precious being in the galaxy.
Joseph Samuel T’Kol T’Lan Kirk, child of James and Teilani.
Their child had been born of love just five years ago. Their child had been born a monster.
Kirk, the father, was human; all too human, he sometimes feared.
Teilani, the mother, was Chalchaj ‘qmey; in the standard Klingon language: a Child of Heaven. Among the
