Picard slowed him down with a solid punch to his midsection.
The ship shook again, gravity shifted, and now the deck angled down, throwing everyone off balance.
But that didn’t stop Crusher from swinging the desk stool at the first intruder as he tried to reach for his fallen disruptor.
He fell back into the second intruder, and both slipped to the deck.
The victory was short-lived, though. A third intruder was in the doorway, disruptor rifle leveled, well out of reach of a punch or kick.
“Send out the child.” The harsh, mechanical voice was frightening in tone, and in intent.
Eyes wide, Kirk glanced back as did Picard, to see Joseph cowering against the far bulkhead, beside the wall cabinet.
At once, Picard pulled himself forward against the growing slant of the deck to stand at Kirk’s side, ready for Kirk’s forward move to block the third intruder’s line of fire. He had no doubt Joseph’s father would sacrifice his life for his child. But, together, perhaps one of them could draw fire while the other continued the fight.
Instead, Crusher started swinging the cabin door closed and Kirk grabbed the edge of it, pulling it faster as he kicked at the tangled bodies of the first two intruders that blocked it.
The disruptor rifle fired and the door blew back against Crusher, sending her to the deck beside La Forge. Kirk pulled his hand to his chest, clearly in pain.
“The child! Now!” the intruder demanded.
“Never!” Kirk answered.
The intruder lunged forward, expertly flipping his rifle to strike at Kirk with its stock.
Kirk slammed back into Picard, who staggered with the impact. The angle of the deck was too steep now for either of them to stay upright.
As he crashed to the deck, Picard heard Joseph begin to cry with fear.
Kirk swore and scrambled to regain his footing.
The third intruder pulled himself through the door, braced himself against the metal frame, and held out his hand to Joseph. “Come here or I’ll kill your father!”
Joseph wailed with terror now as more of the enemy appeared in the doorway. The ship was overrun.
“Come here or I’ll kill them all!”
Kirk leapt at the intruder.
The intruder leapt at him.
And then, as if the Calypso had fallen into a wormhole, all action in the cabin ceased as the golden light of a transporter beam flickered over everyone, accompanied by a soft musical tone.
Kirk and the intruder turned in mid-fight as both looked for the source of the beam.
Picard found it, as well.
A shimmering curtain of light enveloped Joseph, his tearstained face fading, even as his last cry for his father did the same.
“Joseph!” Kirk’s disbelief tore at Picard. But the child was gone.
An instant later, the intruders leveled their disruptors. Picard saw the flash of their emitters and then…
Nothing.
13
PROCESSING SEGMENT 3, STARDATE 57486.7
Consciousness returned to Kirk in a series of memories, melting one into the other, each of them different, each of them the same.
They were memories of pain, stiffness, the burning of a sudden reflexive breath. The symptoms came from different causes: a Klingon fist, an Andorian knife, an alien kiss. But as it had so many times before, the return of consciousness was accompanied by one all-too-familiar sensation: the hum and sparkle of medical equipment, and by McCoy’s stern scowl above him, as the ship’s doctor worked his miracles on him as surely as Scott worked his miracles on the Enterprise.
“Bones…” That single word came out as a bark. Kirk coughed, cleared the postdisruption congestion in his chest. “You’re all right.”
“My few remaining original parts are just fine.” McCoy moved away from Kirk, and as Kirk struggled to raise his head and squint through the dim lighting, he saw his friend hobbling away, leaning heavily on a cane of pale green metal, like weathered copper. “Unfortunately, they’re not the important ones these days,” McCoy groused to himself.
The doctor came back to Kirk’s medical bed with a strange instrument—what appeared to be an uncut ruby the size of a lemon with something silver and gleaming embedded within it.
But medical instruments weren’t Kirk’s concern. “Joseph?” he asked.
McCoy’s expression was unreadable. “What do you remember?”
Had any other person in the galaxy dared refuse his question by asking another, Kirk would have grabbed him by the throat and squeezed until he had satisfaction. But McCoy had always had reasons for everything he did. Most of the time, those reasons even made sense.
Kirk sank back on the medical bed, closing his eyes as he rapidly arranged his last memories in coherent order. “Scotty said something over the speakers about a cloaked ship grappling the hull. Gravity went out of alignment. The Calypso was boarded. Humanoids in combat environmental suits. No identifying insignia. But they used disruptors.” He opened his eyes, looked at McCoy. “Since you’re still with us, they weren’t set to kill. But whoever boarded us, they wanted my boy. They threatened to kill all of us if he didn’t go with them.”
Kirk took a deep breath, and his chest relaxed. Whatever the instrument McCoy was using on his chest, the pain of disruption was lessening. But there was no cessation of the agony of losing his son far too close to the agony of losing Spock.
“And then what?” McCoy asked briskly.
“Joseph was beamed away. Starfleet signature.”
That was the only reason Kirk wasn’t tearing apart wherever he was in order to find his son. However improbable, Joseph had been rescued by a Starfleet transporter. “Was it the Titan?”
McCoy put the odd medical instrument on a narrow tray. “Here’s the thing, Jim. What you remember is what Picard remembers. Both of you say that Joseph was transported by Starfleet technology.”
Kirk felt his stomach churn, but forced himself not to interrupt. McCoy has his reasons, he told himself. Don’t push him.
“But the mystery is,” the doctor continued, “that there are no Starfleet vessels on orbit of Remus. In fact, we’re the only Federation ship within ten light-years of this system.”
Kirk had to sit up then. The sudden movement made him dizzy, but it was impossible to remain still in the face of this news. “Then where did he go?”
“I don’t know.”
“But it was a Starfleet transporter,” Kirk insisted.
“No argument from Picard.”
“Bones, could there be another Starfleet Q-ship near us?”
McCoy leaned against a counter, hooked his green metal cane over the countertop, and stretched his arm. “Well, there’s the other mystery. Scotty maintains that when we were attacked, our full navigation shields were up. There’s so much junk and mining debris on orbit here, seems that’s standard procedure.”
Kirk saw the problem at once. “So how could Joseph have been beamed through the shields?” Then he saw the solution. “Intraship beaming! He was beamed from one part of the ship to another, inside the shields.”
Kirk’s heart beat wildly. Joseph could still be on the ship.
But McCoy dashed that hope quickly. “No such luck. Apparently the Calypso’s transporter bay doesn’t have that kind of capability. It only has a single transporter array and can’t be backfocused. Besides, Scotty was the last one of us shot. He says he would have seen the transporter system come online. And it didn’t.”
