Ship of the Line - Diane Carey [90]
Picard gazed at Kirk, empathy pulling at his chest. Kirk had men on the surface in trouble, and was facing the loss of his career because he couldn’t handle command anymore. There was more, though—Kirk was also dealing with the lonely personal problem that perhaps he would never be put back together again. The men on the surface might die, but then their misery would be over. A new commander would take the ship, and the future would move on. But there might be no way out of this for Jim Kirk. Had technology broken down one too many times? Would one of him forever be a monk, and the other forever in a cage?
Kirk’s uncertainty haunted Picard—reminded him too much of himself a short while ago, when he was talking to Riker. All those doubts …
He peered at Kirk critically. “You do have insecurities, don’t you? The intrepid hero—that was just a persona for you, wasn’t it?”
“In some ways,” Kirk admitted. “I wondered sometimes whether I was the best captain … or just the luckiest.”
“Come now,” Picard chided. “You were an interesting type of leader. Your profile is a rocky road, to be sure, but you ultimately prevailed in most situations because of your strength of will. So much so, in fact, that many captains have stumbled by trying to be too much like you in the wrong situations.”
“They shouldn’t try to be like me,” Kirk said. “If all captains are cut from the same program, then we’d be too easy to beat. No one wants ships of the line commanded by a set of clones.”
Here was a man toward whom almost every cadet in the academy aspired, and he was dismissing the idea that any one man could be an ideal captain. Picard grinned through his surprise, with a touch of nostalgia. He too had tried in his youth to be like James Kirk. And Kirk was right—it hadn’t worked for him.
“The power of command seems so elusive to me now,” Kirk groaned. “He’s vital to me … and I don’t know how to get him back … back inside me, where he belongs. Where he won’t be … wasted.”
“Wasted,” Picard echoed. “Interesting way to put it. You shouldn’t have beamed down into unstable conditions, Captain. Now you’re debilitated. Unable to help your stranded crew members. You’re weakened now, yet the decisions are still yours to make and you can’t make them. You shouldn’t have been part of the away team.”
“Away team?”
“Landing party.”
Kirk thought about that, then even through his hesitations, he said, “No, I had to go. I have an unwritten contract with my crew. I ask them to do incredible things sometimes. I ask them to take risks, fight, maybe die. I have to show them that I’m willing to bear the same risks. That’s the way it always was … in the wars of the past, 1812, the American Civil War, France and England, Napoleon—the officers raised their swords and went out in front, and asked the men to follow. And the men did. They could see that their officers thought there was something worth dying for. They lost a lot of officers, but they knew the value of morale.”
Picard uttered a grunt of understanding. “Yes, the Klingons say, ‘It’s a good day to die.’ Humans say, ‘It’s a good reason to die.’ Still, Starfleet changed things after your tenure. They urged captains to stay on board, so the captain would be fully able to command if things went wrong.”
“They had the same thing in my time.” Kirk shook his head. “We just ignored it. When I lose crew, I always feel as if I’ve failed, even if I won. That’s why I led the landing parties.”
“But you’re not a general in an old-style war, yelling ‘Charge!’ “
“Yes, I am,” Kirk said, and this was the first thing he’d said with his old conviction. “And everybody sees me out there, and all their lives they never forget what they saw. That’s the deal I have with my crew members when I say, ‘Go out there and probably die.’ It’s a lot more powerful if you add, ‘I’ll go with you.’ The cause we choose to fight for is more important than all of us. We agree on that. It’s our contract. The captain goes in front of the army, not behind it. The captain takes the first wound.”
“If you’re debilitated,” Picard tried again, “you