Ship of the Line - Diane Carey [93]
The two had seen each other. They faced off within a shadow from a divider grid. Both had phasers. Both had fears.
The fear was shining brightly in both of them, and it was rather a shock. How would each overcome it?
Or could they at all?
At first the animal Kirk had been stalking the mild Kirk, but now something changed. The animal began backing away. The mild Kirk came forward. The strange dance continued. Back, back …
“You can’t hurt me,” the mild Kirk said. “You can’t kill me.”
The animal’s phaser wavered between them.
“You can’t,” the mild one said. “Don’t you understand? You need me. I need you …”
The movement stopped. Something in those words made the animal Kirk pause in his backing off. He raised his phaser. His teeth came together and his eyes tightened in pure rage.
“I … don’t … need … you!”
The phaser wavered. He still didn’t fire.
A flash of blue behind him then—Spock!
The Vulcan grasped the side of the animal’s neck and pinched the nerves.
The savage Kirk’s head snapped back, a horrible grimace showing the shock of paralysis. His hand clenched on the phaser, but the convulsed muscles in his arm pulled the hand up and sideways—and it fired! The streak lanced into a circuit trunk and blasted a hole the size of Picard right in the side. Sparks flew, and this side of the pylon vaporized.
Spock let go, and the feverish, vicious form of the negative captain dropped to the deck.
The other Kirk looked nauseated with misery, perhaps even stunned at the savagery with which his other half had set his phaser on full power.
He knelt slowly, his face matted with disgust at what he saw on the deck before him, the unconscious boyish twin of himself, the shame of humanity. The bad half.
Kirk was a starving man gazing at a poisoned dinner. He wanted it—he didn’t want it. He had to have it, but it was sickening.
They’d caught him … but it wasn’t enough. Now what?
“Computer,” Picard quietly said, “let me see the resolution of this.”
Everything blurred again, and he was standing in the transporter room of the first Enterprise.
Between Kirk and Spock, sagging and dazed, was the terrorized other twin, weak now and clinging to Kirk. Something had made him afraid, and he felt his fear full-throttle.
“Have you fixed the transporter?” Picard asked.
Spock was the one to answer. “We used bypasses to tie directly into the impulse engines and get the transporter working.”
“But it might kill me,” Kirk added. “We tried it on the duplicated creature from the planet.”
“Did it put him back together?”
“Yes. But he died. Spock thinks it was blind terror that killed him. He thinks I can overcome that with … intellect.”
“Don’t you think so?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think … I can’t live this way. Compassion is only one piece of humanity. I’m afraid … but I have to take him back.”
“Not only fear,” Picard observed. “You’re embarrassed.”
Kirk struck him with a leer. “Wouldn’t you be?”
Spock took the sagging twin’s arm and urged the other Kirk to move toward the transporter platform. Up they went, and Kirk embraced the part of him that had nearly destroyed him.
There was something different now in the mild Kirk’s face—resolution. He was determined to see this through. That hadn’t happened with the tiger half, Picard recalled. The savage Kirk had faltered. This one didn’t.
“Hold onto him, Captain,” Spock said, and stepped off the platform.
“Mr. Spock—”
The science officer turned before he was down the step. “Captain?”
Kirk gazed at him with a layered expression. “If this doesn’t work …”
He said nothing else, and for a moment Picard waited to hear the rest, but there was no more.
Spock’s dark eyes softened. “Understood, Captain,” was all he said.
Picard didn’t know what they were saying to each other, but he suddenly thought of Riker.
And that was all the good-bye they got.
Spock stepped behind the transporter console and enabled the mechanism, while Dr. McCoy looked on