Ship of the Line - Diane Carey [31]
In its belly right now were precious museum collections of artifacts from famous lost ships, crews, and passengers, rescued from slow but inevitable destruction at the bottom of Earth’s salty seas, brought here to be appreciated by successive generations who otherwise would forget.
And that old ship, the cutter—Riker remembered from three years ago how sad Captain Bateson had looked at his great loss, and wondered if he were seeing the same resignation in his own captain now. Morgan Bateson was here on Starbase 12 right now, Riker knew, working on the new starship that had just been commissioned when he and his crew had been transferred so unceremoniously to this century. Bateson was regarded as a hero, and he deserved to be. He’d managed to keep most of his crew together and working. That was a feat in itself.
Beside Riker, the captain’s dignified voice startled him suddenly.
“I made,” Picard declared, “a big mistake.”
Then he said nothing else for the moment, and went on sipping his tea.
Riker paused, held his breath. He couldn’t remember hearing those particular words out of Picard in all the years they’d been together.
Well, all right, might as well play this out. Maybe they could get to a goal line somewhere.
“I can’t think of any mistake you made,” he baited. “I was in command of the starship at the time. You weren’t even there.”
“I should have been. A captain commands not just a ship, but a situation.”
“Sir,” Riker pointed out, “don’t forget … we won.”
Picard shifted his feet and kept looking out. His expression didn’t change much. There was a perplexed tightening of his brow. “Then why do I feel as if we lost?” Looking down there at the old-style primary hull and the nostalgic nacelles, Picard quietly mused, “I wonder how James Kirk handled losing his Enterprise.”
Riker skewered Picard with a look. “Why him, all of a sudden?”
“Not all of a sudden. I met him only briefly, through a quirk of fate, yet he made an impression on me. He wasn’t the man legend declares him to be. He wasn’t all-encompassing and bigger than life … I don’t believe he saw himself as a faultless monolith at all. I presided over his death, yet I felt entirely inadequate to that charge. For a man who took things so personally, what was it like to lose that marvelous, strong, first Enterprise? He ordered the destruct sequence, did you know that?”
“No,” Riker said. “I didn’t know that.”
“Yes. His ship had come to the end of her tether, but he still summoned up one last chance for his crew to live. They did live, by the way, all of them who were on that ship that day.”
“And so did all of us.”
“Yes, but somehow, even though it’s happened to me again, I still can’t imagine what it must’ve been like for him.” Picard gazed out into the center of the Starbase spool at the moored Bozeman. “That was a different time, those years of early expansion. Captains were more autonomous. Their ships were really their ships. They were out of touch most of the time. Whatever happened, they simply had to handle it. They had to break regulations sometimes, even make up regulations. No Federation council looking over their shoulder, no civilians or desk officers second-guessing their every move, scouring their decision with hindsight … there’s a certain loss in the civilizing of Federation space. I wonder how James Kirk managed to never lose his edge.”
Unable to bring himself to ask the perfect next question—Are you afraid you’ve lost yours?—Riker came up with a completely different question and forced it out.
“Why don’t you go ask him?”
The captain had begun turning away from the window, and now paused, perplexed. “I beg your pardon?”
Leaning against the vaulted window