Star Trek_ Generations - J M. Dillard [0]
The story begins with the launching of the U.S.S. Enterprise, NCC-1701-B and the mysterious disappearance of Captain James T. Kirk. Then seventy-eight years later, Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D receives a distress call from a remote scientific observatory.
Picard learns that a newly developed super weapon has been stolen by a desperate scientist with an insane plot. Facing the most difficult task of his career, Captain Picard must seek out the one person with the power to help him, a person long thought dead: Captain James T. Kirk.
Together, the two captains will be tested as they’ve never been before. And both men will be forced to make the greatest sacrifices of their careers to save countless millions from a madman with a plan for mass destruction.
Star Trek: Generations
By J. M. Dillard
Part One
SPACEDOCK, EARTH2293 Old Earth Date
ONE
In the captains quarters aboard the Enterprise-A the nautical clock chimed, breaking the silence to softly mark the passage of time. James Kirk paused over the suitcase open on his bunk, neatly folded civilian tunic in hand, and straightened to listen. As he did, a second clockan antique mantelpiece, cased in polished dark cherry and wound for the first time in years, specially for this occasionbegan to strike the hour.
Nineteen hundred hours. Spock and McCoy would be arriving soon to accompany him on the long gauntlet of traditional firewatch partiesthe crews celebration of the last night aboard a vessel at the end of a long mission.
Nineteen hundred hours, the sound of time moving inexorably onward. The night had already begun and would move all too swiftly to its inevitable conclusion.
Kirk dropped the tunic inside the suitcase and moved over to the bulkhead to press a control, key in a code. A panel slid up, and he retrieved a handful of small cases, each of which hid a medal. He did not stop to examine them, but placed them carefully in the suitcase, just as he had done a handful of times before in his life, when he had taken leave of the captains quarters in the very same fashion and wondered whether it might be his last.
He had wondered a lifetime ago, when he was still young and the first starship named Enterprise had returned to spacedock at the end of her five-year mission. He had been angry then at the realization that Admiral Nogura was determined to force him into accepting a promotion to the admiralty, and a desk job. Now there was no anger, no frustrationonly sadness and an overwhelming sense of loss. And a faint stirring of pride at the memory of when, all those years ago, he had fought to get his ship backhad taken on Heihachiro Nogura, the head of Starfleet himself, and won.
This time, Kirk did not wonder whether this would be the last night he would stand aboard the Enterprise as her captain. There could be no doubt that it was. He and the ship were both to be decommissioned, along with the senior bridge crew: Spock, McCoy, Uhuraeven Scotty, who had chosen to take retirement rather than remain in Starfleet without the opportunity to serve with this particular crew.
There could be no more gambits, no more ploys to get his ship back, to stave off the inevitable. He had exhausted them all; and now he himself was exhausted after fighting so many years to keep his command. He absently massaged an aching muscle in his back, recently injured while working in the mines on the Klingon penal colony of Rura Penthe. He had not been able to bring himself to trouble McCoy about it; it would have been an admission of the truth that he was getting too old to withstand the rigors of the captaincy.
He looked about for something else to pack, reached for a holo on the dresser, and gazed into the smiling countenance of his and Carols son, David. David, too, had fallen prey to time some years before, when he died at Klingon hands. Kirk gently set the picture back down, beside the mantel clock and antique paper book set aside for the occasion. Davids holo was always the first thing he set in a cabin to make it his own, the