electric, resonating within him still. Her hair, her skin, her eyes so bright, so full of life, all caught in one exquisite, painfully sharp instant, had left him drained, numb.
There had been too much loss in his life. Teilani. Spock. Only holding his son in his arms once more could renew Kirk’s strength to keep grief at bay.
“Where have you been? Where have you been?” Kirk said.
Joseph’s answer was incredible. He had been close by ever since Kirk had entered the bridge. Very close.
“Right here, Dad!” Joseph squirmed impatiently in his arms, pointed back at Kirk’s desk. “There’s a crawlspace. Uncle Scotty told me. For boxes and old stuff. That’s where I hid when the bad guys came.” Joseph suddenly looked worried. “I wasn’t supposed to talk to anyone until I knew it was safe. Not even you, Dad. That’s okay, right, Dad?”
Kirk squeezed his son one more time. “Perfectly okay.”
Joseph squirmed again, and Kirk reluctantly let him down and unleashed him on the other adults on the bridge.
The child quickly made the rounds, calling out, “Geordi! Uncle Jean-Luc! Uncle Bones!” Then he stopped quietly in front of Norinda, and put on his best manners. “Hello, ma’am.” He stared at her ears. “Are you a Romulan?”
Kirk felt uneasy the way Norinda gazed at Joseph. “Do you like Romulans?” she asked.
Joseph nodded eagerly. “I’m Romulan. Sort of. I’m Reman, too. And Vulcan, and human, and Klingon. Uncle Bones says that makes me pure trouble!” Joseph glanced back at Kirk. “It’s okay to say that, right?”
Kirk nodded, still shaky with relief. “Pure trouble is all right.” He and Joseph had had talks about the concept of species being “pure.” It was an outmoded concept, reeking of past injustices and bigotry. As a Vulcan-human hybrid, Spock had directly experienced such prejudice, and Joseph had been an attentive audience for Spock’s stories of his own childhood.
“Well, I’m not Romulan,” Norinda said. “But I like Romulans.”
Joseph looked at her skeptically. “Then what are you?”
“What would you like me to be?”
Kirk went on alert, looking for any sign that Norinda was reaching into Joseph’s mind, ready to step in if she showed the slightest indication that Teilani was to reappear.
But all that happened in response to her question was that Joseph gave an elaborate shrug and said, “I dunno.”
Norinda stared at Joseph for several silent seconds, then said, “I believe you.” She smiled. “Would you like to see where I live on Remus?”
“Sure,” Joseph said.
That was when Kirk knew it was time to bring this to an end. “There’s no time, son. We have to leave soon.”
“No. You don’t,” Norinda said.
“He’s not going down to Remus.” Kirk wasn’t about to let Joseph out of his sight again. He stood beside his son, put his hand on his shoulder.
Norinda turned her attention from Joseph and Kirk to Picard. “Jean-Luc, you asked for a favor from me, to meet some friends of the Jolan Movement.”
Picard seemed apprehensive. “Yes…” he said cautiously.
“For me to do that favor for you, I need you to do a favor for me. Convince Captain Kirk that his son should visit me on Remus.” She glanced at Kirk, but there was no power to her smile, no subliminal connection. “Just for a day, Captain. Jean-Luc and I will take good care of him.”
Kirk moved to forestall Picard, who clearly was trying to think of something to say to him, as if the favor Norinda mentioned could in any way be as important as his son’s safety.
“I don’t care what favors anyone has promised,” Kirk said. “Joseph is not leaving this ship.”
“Aw, Da-ad,” Joseph said. “I really want to go! Really really! Can I? Please?”
Kirk stared at his son in surprise. Joseph loved to negotiate, but it had been more than a year since he had whined to get something he wanted. Kirk had never responded to that tactic, so Joseph had quickly learned to abandon it.
“Joseph, that’s not—”
But then Joseph did another atypical thing—he interrupted, swinging on Kirk’s hand like a little tree sloth. “I’ll be careful! And I’ll be safe! We can use secret codes, like when you told me to hide in the cabinet when the bad guys came, and then you’d tell everyone that I got beamed up by a Starfleet transporter so the bad guys would think that I was someplace else but all the time I was safe right here, right?”
Kirk’s surprise gave way to a stunning realization.
“And I kept busy up here, like you told me. And I cleaned the recirculators and the walls and—Uncle Bones! Did you like the way I cleaned sickbay?”
Kirk let Joseph’s hand slip from his. His child stood alone on the deck looking up at him.
“I really really want to go, Dad. You really really should let me. Okay?”
It couldn’t be more obvious what was expected of him, so Kirk did what he had to. He shifted gears, looked at Norinda with stern parental concern, and said, “Just one day.”
She nodded in agreement.
Kirk pointed a finger at Joseph. “And you behave yourself, young man.”
“Yes, sir!” Joseph ran at Kirk again, gave him a hug, then ran over to Picard and Norinda. “Let’s go!”
Picard seemed confused. “You’re sure, Jim?”
Kirk shrugged as if his son hadn’t been missing under dire conditions for the past two days. “If I can’t trust you, Jean-Luc…” He waved at Joseph. “Have…fun.”
Joseph waved back. “Thanks, Dad.”
And as simply as that, Kirk said good-bye to his son, and Norinda and Picard and Nran were in the turbolift, on their way back to the cargo bay and Norinda’s transport.
La Forge had stayed behind because of his insistence that the Calypso could fall from orbit at any second, unless he ran his diagnostics at once. But instead of hurrying down to engineering, La Forge remained on the bridge with Kirk and McCoy. “I don’t think Captain Picard was expecting you’d do that,” La Forge said to Kirk, with unconcealed puzzlement. “I mean, I know he’ll appreciate it. It could mean the difference that’ll stop a war, but… well, I’m surprised.”
Kirk enlightened him, grinning. “Commander La Forge, I’m going to take a wild guess that you don’t have children.”
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“Well, I do,” Kirk said. “And trust me, the little boy who just left here with your captain and that shapeshifter isn’t my son. He’s Admiral Janeway’s EMH.”
La Forge whistled in amazement. “You’re kidding!”
Kirk stepped back to the open door of his office. “Joseph, if you’re down there—everyone’s gone! It’s safe!”
Kirk smiled hugely as he heard a scrabbling under his desk, then the clank of a square of decking as it was shoved aside.
He beamed as a familiar little bald head popped up from behind his desk, and as he had the pleasure of being reunited with his son a second time in one day, this time it was for real.
As soon as the cargo-bay status lights indicated that Norinda’s transport had undocked, La Forge was at the communications console on the Calypso’s bridge. He made a halfhearted request for privacy, but Kirk leaned against the console and McCoy sat in the chair beside La Forge’s and neither he nor the doctor gave the engineer any indication they were ever going to move.
So, while Joseph happily went down to the galley to replicate meals for everyone, Kirk and McCoy listened as La Forge reported to Admiral Janeway, repeating everything Norinda had told Picard about the Tal Shiar’s plan to ignite a civil war at the Hour of Opposition.
La Forge did not mention that he was not alone, and neither Kirk nor McCoy made their presence known. Kirk wanted the admiral to feel free of her burden of bureaucratic deception, so she would speak the whole
