Ship of the Line - Diane Carey [89]
Kirk tapped off the comm and looked at Spock. “Isn’t there any way we can help them?”
Spock bowed his head; almost in shame. He was deeply pained by the strain in Sulu’s voice and the fact that there seemed to be no answers. “Thermo-heaters were transported down, they … duplicated. They won’t operate.”
The comm blessedly interrupted the terrible litany of failure. “Mr. Spock?”
“Spock here.”
“Transporter technician Wilson found injured near the captain’s cabin. Says the imposter called him by name, took his hand phaser.”
“Acknowledged. Continue the search.”
Haunted now by the fact that his distorted counterpart was armed, Kirk began, “We’ve got to find him before he … but how?”
Spock drew his brows together, but with a glimmer of hope. “Apparently this double, however different in temperament, has your knowledge of the ship. Its crew. Its devices. This being the case, perhaps we can outguess him by determining his next move. Knowing how the ship is laid out, where would you go to evade a mass search?”
“The lower levels. The engineering deck.”
“I’ll get hand phasers for us,” Spock said. “I’ll meet you in the main section in ten minutes with a search team.”
“No team,” Kirk said. “Just you and me.”
“Captain—”
“Please, Spock … no arguments.”
Sympathy crimped Spock’s features. Troublement and emotion crackled just below the blanketing surface.
“Very well, sir,” he said, almost as dejected as Kirk. He swung off the table and quickly left the briefing room.
Picard moved to the place where Spock had been and watched James Kirk. This Kirk, this belevolent, drained man, had no fire in his eyes, no pulse of multiactive thought. He was instead passive to dullness, but clearly battling with himself. He had lost a piece of himself, a critical piece—the piece that made him want to command.
Had Picard lost that too? Had he lost more than a ship? A piece of himself?
If so, he suddenly wanted to find it.
“Strange,” he murmured. “We always imagine that if we could take away all the agression and base needs, the dark gut reactions of human beings, we would have a superior man. You don’t look very superior right now, Captain Kirk.”
“I don’t feel superior,” Kirk said. “Besides, benevolence is easy—just make everyone an android with the brute programmed out. Would you put your android in charge of the ship on a long-term basis?”
He looked at Picard—a startling instant, until Picard remembered that the computer had his record and logs just as it had James Kirk’s.
“Data? … No, not long term,” he admitted. “Not yet. He has the intelligence, but he doesn’t have the instinct. He can follow a line of logic, like Vulcans—”
“But Vulcans haven’t prevailed as the strong shield of the galaxy, as you might imagine they would. The synthesis of the two parts of us has allowed humans to be the prevailing wind of the galaxy.” Kirk listened to his own words, then sighed. “And I’ve lost it.”
“I wonder,” Picard said quietly. “Is that bit of evil in us really the thing that makes us strong? The tough side—getting angry, the survival instinct … is that what makes us move faster, think harder … some call it an edge. ‘Eye of the tiger.’ But every brute has that.”
“Then what do I have?” the mild Kirk asked. Bitterness cut through the sorrow in his face.
“You have the thoughtfulness of command,” Picard told him. “You have the elements that allow the survival instinct to become creative. You have what it takes to stay calm when others are losing control. It’s crucial. Especially for command. The captain has to be the last one on board to lose control.”
Kirk gazed at the tabletop, his fingers interlaced there. “And it’s what makes you realize there are things bigger than your own survival that are worth dying for. It’s what keeps me at my post, fighting the big odds even though I know we’re going to die now and it’s worth that.”
Picard sat on the edge of the table. “Like Bateson did,” he recalled. “Why you die … the reason you fight. The cruder side of us would run.”
“I don’t want to run,” Kirk uttered. “I don’t want to fight. I want to hide.