“Then you also know Spock was absorbed by an unknown phenomenon– “
Janeway interrupted to correct him. “Disintegrated.”
Kirk continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “– and his fate remains undetermined.”
Janeway shook her head. “Is that what this has been about?” she asked. “You’re not just looking for the people responsible. You really think he’s still out there?” The admiral’s voice held both pity and annoyance. The combination was not lost on Kirk. But he didn’t take the bait.
“Of course I do,” he said. The dream wasn’t evidence he could share with her. But there was other proof. “I saw what Norinda was capable of. The shapeshifting– “
With a wave of her hand, Janeway cut him off again. “I know all this. The changing into clouds of dark smoke, mounds of black sand, cubes of different sizes…”
Kirk paused a moment, struggling to keep his vivid recollection of Spock’s disappearance, and the revulsion and the fear it came with, from weakening the case he knew he had to make. “Norinda controlled a technology-or natural abilities-beyond our capacity to define them. Spock might be dead. But he might just as well have been taken by an alien transporter.”
Janeway got up from her bench, then walked to the replicator to study its controls. Kirk understood that the admiral was trying to prevent herself from saying something she might regret. They were both attempting to restrain themselves.
Janeway punched the code for coffee, standard. “One more time,” she said. “You saw him disintegrated before your eyes.”
Kirk joined her by the replicator, waited until she’d taken her coffee mug. “I’ve seen Spock ‘disintegrated’ thousands of times in transporter beams.” He punched the controls for a Vulcan espresso-no caffeine.
“Then for all the times you’ve been ‘unavailable’ for special duty, why haven’t we found you heading back to the Romulan home system?”
Kirk held his coffee cup in a mock toast to Janeway. She merely cupped her own mug for warmth.
“Because,” Kirk said, “Norinda failed to provoke a civil war between Romulus and Remus and the Jolan Movement fell apart after her disappearance.” He took a sip of the hot liquid, detecting as always the loss of authenticity in replication. “As Spock would say, whatever her ultimate goal, logic suggests she’s trying to set up a new movement on another world.”
Janeway stared at him with something close to suspicion. “At your debriefing, you told the review board exactly what Norinda’s ultimate goal was.”
“I told the review board what Norinda said was her ultimate goal. There’s a difference.”
“What?” Janeway demanded.
Kirk stayed silent for a moment. He had originally encountered the shapeshifting alien life-form called Norinda in the early months of his first five-year mission as captain of the Enterprise, NCC-1701. She had lied to him then, told him a story about having escaped from “the Totality”– an ominous alien force that had somehow conquered the Andromeda Galaxy.
A lifetime later, he had met her again on Remus, where she claimed to lead a peace movement that had been banished from Romulus. But all the while, it was Norinda and her followers who’d been attempting to start the very civil war that she claimed to oppose.
“She told me she’d make the Romulans and the Remans want peace by exposing them to war,” Kirk said. “She said her goal was to leave both planets in ruins, with millions dead, because only then would the survivors realize the value of love.”
“But you don’t believe that.”
Kirk’s mind filled with images of all the different forms in which Norinda had appeared to him, remembering how she’d used some kind of subconscious telepathy to assume the appearance of the woman most desired by whomever she happened to speak with.
“She’s a monster,” Kirk said at last. “The only peace she can bring is that of the grave. She even appeared to my son as his mother.”
Kirk had had this discussion a year ago. He had settled it then. He settled it now. “I believe all Norinda wants is destruction. To her, the only world that can be at peace is a world without life.”
Janeway hesitated, then seemingly changed the subject of their conversation.
“Have you ever thought that Starfleet’s goals and yours might not be that far apart?”
“Admiral, if you’re looking for common ground, you’re not going to find it. I want to rescue Spock. Starfleet thinks he’s dead.”
“But it’s obvious to me that you’re trying to find Spock by tracking down Norinda. I suggest that’s where our goals converge.”
Kirk reconsidered what he knew of Janeway. She was shrewd, immensely capable. She had brought her ship and her crew back from the wilds of the Delta Quadrant with honor. Her promotion to the admiralty had been a foregone conclusion. He even found her quite attractive and thought he could find her more so, if she ever decided to stop being an admiral for a day.
But he also knew that she was more solidly connected to Starfleet than he had been or ever would be, now. Like his friend Jean-Luc, Kathryn Janeway could be relied upon to put the needs of Starfleet and the Federation first. Except, of course, in cases of egregious misconduct.
But for Janeway, in those circumstances for which there were no clear-cut divisions between right and wrong, Starfleet would always be right by default, until proven otherwise.
Which means, if Starfleet is searching for Norinda… Kirk paused in the midst of that thought.
“I’ve always suspected there was something you weren’t telling me,” he said. “The day you offered me this ship, I sensed it. Right now, I’m feeling it even more.”
“Now you’ve changed the subject,” Janeway said. She gave Kirk a tight smile.
“You’ve given me seven missions this past year. I took them all.”
“You completed four.”
“You called off my surveillance mission to the Neutral Zone before I could reach it. The Andorian political prisoner you asked me to ‘escort’ to Deep Space Nine died en route-complications of torture.”
“Suffered at the hands of the Klingons,” Janeway said as she carefully placed her untouched coffee on the galley countertop. “Not Starfleet.”
“So that only leaves one mission in contention,” Kirk said.
“There’s no contention. You were ordered to Inver Three. You refused to go. And a Starfleet covert observer team was lost as a result. Which brings us back to your court-martial.”
“My son is on this ship,” Kirk said. “My friends, Bones and Scotty. All of us civilians. Inver Three was unsafe. You needed to send in a recovery team. Not a spy ship.”
“You were the recovery team,” Janeway said accusingly. “An extraction team never would have made it through planetary defenses. But the Belle Reve wouldn’t have been questioned. Six men and two women would be alive today except for your refusal to obey orders.”
“If you had asked me, I would have gone. But I don’t put the innocent in harm’s way. And the Starfleet I know wouldn’t think of it.”
That was when Kirk decided he had had enough of explaining and defending himself-to Janeway, and to Starfleet. He turned his back on such reminders of his old life. He headed for the open door that led to the central corridor, and his new life.
Kirk stepped into the corridor, remembering to duck his head while passing through the small hatch opening; the painful lessons of a year on this cramped vessel had taught him to be more mindful. This main passageway-barely wide enough for two people to stand side by sidewas similarly constricted. Anyone taller than two meters had to contend with low-hanging overhead conduits and light fixtures.
Behind him, he heard the clanking of Janeway’s boots on the corridor’s metal-grid decking.
“Kirk-you can’t walk away from this. We had a deal.”
Kirk kept moving toward the interdeck ladder. “My deal was that I wouldn’t place my crew in danger.” He couldn’t say it more plainly than that. A few quick steps more and he reached the ladder leading up to the bridge. The Belle Reve had a single turbolift, but he preferred to climb whenever he could. The gym on the ship was little more than a treadmill with an erratic gravity adjustment.
“Captain Kirk! Get back here.”
