Kirk walked across them, heading for the sliding translucent partitions that shielded the command center beyond.
He had been here before, several times, and even as an active Starfleet captain, then admiral, he had been challenged by armed guards on this level.
Tonight, it was as deserted as the city above.
For a moment as he paused before the partitions, Kirk wondered if there were any Vulcans left at all on this world. Could it be possible that they had all been absorbed into the Totality?
The silhouette of a hand appeared on the partition directly in front of him, glowing green-the color of Vulcan blood and thus a sign of warning.
He placed his hand against the silhouette.
The partition slid open.
He stepped into the command center for Vulcan Space Central-a dark, domed room constructed like a stadium-size version of a starship’s bridge.
Kirk scanned the multiple display screens on the far side of the curved wall. Each screen-ten meters tall, fifteen wide-showed complex moving graphs and charts related to orbital space around Vulcan and her planetary system. Banks of silver-gray workstations rose in graduated tiers, ringing the outer wall, looking in to the center and to the main screens. And there, in the center, he counted nine chairs on a raised dais. Each of the chairs was balanced on a single pointed stalk instead of multiple legs-a rare case of Vulcan technology employed strictly for aesthetic effect. Each also had small display screens and input pads angled out from its arms.
Kirk knew that more than a hundred technicians, and Starfleet and Vulcan Planetary Defense personnel, should be working here at any given time.
But even this facility was deserted.
He stepped up on the dais.
On each of the nine chairs, the small display screens rolled with static, as if they had all been taken offline.
As if this center no longer served a purpose.
It took Kirk only a moment to decide that that was the message Norinda wanted to send him: According to the Totality, nothing here was necessary anymore.
That last thought had just settled in his mind when Norinda spoke quietly behind him.
“You’re right, James.”
Kirk jumped forward, spun around, swinging his gravity weapon from his back to aim it at—
Norinda wasn’t there.
He slowly turned on the dais. No sign of anyone.
Her voice fluttered in his ear again. “Why do you resist?”
Kirk snapped around.
No one. Nothing.
He was being toyed with. Taught a lesson.
“I’m not resisting,” he called out, and his words echoed in the empty room. “I’m here.”
“With a weapon?” He couldn’t tell where Norinda’s voice came from. It was as if she were invisible.
“We need to talk,” Kirk said. He pointed the weapon to the ceiling, keeping it ready, but not threatening.
“That’s all I’ve ever wanted,” Norinda said.
“Show yourself,” Kirk demanded.
Norinda’s light laughter echoed through the empty center. “Say what you truly mean, James.”
“Show me my son.”
“I’ll show you Joseph,” Norinda’s voice whispered. “But he’s not your son anymore….”
Those words constricted Kirk’s heart, even as the hiss of a sliding door spurred him to instant action.
He turned again, weapon held ready, to see light from a corridor flood into the room, capturing someone in silhouette and shadow before it.
The figure walked forward, familiar, but different.
The door slid shut, the glare of the outside light was ended.
“Joseph…?” Kirk said, in recognition, in doubt.
The dark skin was right, the dappling, the ridges… his mother’s gently upswept pointed ears.
But his son was taller, broader in the shoulders, no longer a child of twelve… older, a teenager, almost a man.
“Joseph,” Kirk said again as his son stepped up on the dais. “What’s happened to you?”
The boy-the youth-looked down at his hands as if seeing them for the first time and noticing that he had changed. “Nothing that isn’t supposed to,” he said.
His voice was deeper. His eyes dark, so like his mother’s.
“Father,” he said.
Somewhere in his being, Kirk registered the word as a form of address, not a term of endearment. Not the breathless shout of “Dad!” or the happy, childish cry of “Daddy!”
He had been apart from his son for less than a week, but it might as well have been five years.
Kirk quickly glanced around the command center again, saw no sign of Norinda. “It’s time to go,” he said.
But Teilani’s child, Kirk’s son, the sum total of their life and love and legacy, was no longer theirs. No longer Kirk’s.
“No,” Joseph said. “My place is here…”
Kirk could not drive the next words from existence.
“… with Norinda.”
And like a shadow becoming real, a shifting patch of darkness rose up from the dais and floated into a column that became the creature Kirk had met so long ago, in the Mandylion Rift.
Absolutely beguiling, enchanting, desirable, and deadly.
She laughed as she embraced Kirk’s son, and claimed him.
Kirk knew it was the sound of victory.
31
U.S.S. ENTERPRISE
STARDATE 58571.4
Having is not so pleasing a thing as wanting.
It was an old Vulcan saying, and it was foremost in Riker’s thoughts as he sat in the captain’s chair on the bridge of the Enterprise. It was the command Riker had always wanted, but now that it was his, he felt he was an interloper.
Because the Enterprise was more than a ship. Indeed, he had served on two vessels to bear the name. But the crew had remained the same, as had the captain.
The first time Riker had declined a command of his own, he had done so for no other reason than to advance his career. Far better to be the executive officer on any of the Galaxy-class starships than commander of a smaller ship that would never be given a mission to push out beyond the edges of the Federation’s frontier.
But twice more during his posting on the Enterprise, command had been offered and Riker had declined. Both times, he knew, it was because his career path had been redefined. He didn’t want to be commander of just any starship-he wanted to live up to the ideals and the tradition of the U.S.S. Enterprise.
Then came the day when he finally realized that Picard and his Enterprise should never be separated.
When Jonathan Archer had retired from Starfleet, his Enterprise had been given a place of honor in orbit of Pluto, and millions had walked its corridors since, awed by the history that ship had seen and made. Kirk’s last Enterprise had likewise been retired with no thought of giving it to another commander.
