Double Helix 03_ Red Sector - Diane Carey [54]
From the captain’s group nearby, Ambassador Spock and Dr. McCoy finally breached the bubble of intimacy encircling Stiles and his crewmates.
“Mr. Stiles,” the ambassador began, “excuse me. As soon as you’re ready, the captain and dignitaries are ready to go to the wardroom for the honors banquet. We have a table set aside for you and your friends?’
“Yes!” Travis beamed, and shook hands victoriously with one of the Bolts.
“You’re most welcome, gentlemen,” Spock allowed. “And Dr. McCoy has something for Mr. Stiles.”
“Me?” Stiles rubbed his clammy hands on his thighs as Dr. McCoy stepped past Spock.
“Here you go, son.” The doctor handed him a leather-bound packet with a Starfleet seal.
“What is it?” Stiles asked, as he took the plush folder with its satin ribbon and official wax seal.
“It’s your way out,” the doctor said. “Clean and legal. A medical discharge, issued directly from the surgeon general, with a retroactive field promotion. You’ll go out as a full lieutenant, with commensurate pension.”
Stiles looked up. “But you cured me. I don’t have a legitimate medical claim.”
“I cured your body” McCoy told him. Those active and ancient blue eyes flared. “Your soul is still scarred.”
As the moment turned suddenly solemn beneath the doctor’s prophetic words, the men around Stiles fell silent and stopped shifting. Their hands fell away from him and they made clear by their demeanor that he was once again in charge, once more the man who would make the important decision of the moment for them all. A man, making decisions…
He glanced at them, saw the civilian clothes on some of them, Starfleet uniforms on others, and his two worlds suddenly collided. They looked young to him, young and unscarred and inexperienced. “Thank you, sir.” He handed the pouch back to Dr. McCoy and straightened his shoulders. “But I’ve got too much to do. My soul’s just gonna have to heal.”
His friends erupted into silly cheers around him, as if they understood something he wasn’t registering at all. Over there Captain Turner, the princess, the governor and mayor were all looking at him, and now they had started applauding politely. Not the cheers of the huge crowd this time, but something much more substantial and wise. How come everybody knew what he had just thought of?.
Ambassador Spock reached out and took Stiles’s hand. “Congratulations, Lieutenant. And welcome back to Starfleet.”
Chapter Eleven
Eleven Years Later…
U.S.S. Enterprise, Starfleet Registry NCC1701 -D
“THERE’VE BEEN over fifty major outbreaks of raids or attacks on the Neutral Zone by angry Romulan commanders who before this made no violent overtures at all-and with no apparent reason. We’ve got to get some better intelligence.”
Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s comment would generally not have traveled beyond the ears of his first officer and the physician who stood at his side on the command deck, but Ambassador Spock’s Vulcan hearing brought the private conversation to him as he stepped from the turbolift. These were troubled times. Despite them, reverie clouded his thoughts.
To step from a turbolift, to hear the sibilance of the door and sense anticipation, the murmur of a starship’s bridge electrical systems softly working-these were mighty memories.
For a brief moment in a frozen pocket of his mind, the carpet changed texture, the bulkheads drained from tan to bluegay, the rail turned glossy red, lights dimmed, and there were crisp shadows over his head. More blue, more black, and at the center that oasis of mesa-gold. The center of his universe, that dot of gold. Memories only. He dismissed them, but they pursued. He failed to escape them, as he stepped down to the command deck, also failing to understand-until his foot struck the lower carpet-that he was treading the sacred ground of officers aboard a starship, of the captain and his chosen few: and that he was no longer among them. For decades he had not been among them. How swiftly these automatic impulses flooded back! Perhaps