The Sky's the Limit - Marco Palmieri [9]
A week later, Thomas had packed up all his possessions strewn about in his quarters on UP Orbital, put them in a standard shuttlepod, and was about to leave many things behind for a very long time—some things forever.
“Shuttlepod Ankh, you are go for launch.”
“Thank you, Orbital. Good-bye!”
With that, he guided the pod through the force field and was immediately in space, a speck among giants, with the station hovering behind him, the Enterprise ahead, and two other large starships a bit farther off, partially built and enclosed in assembly frames. He would remain connected to Utopia Planitia. The work there was where his heart lay, and it would take something earth-shattering to change that.
However, Thomas could not help but feel slightly wistful at the sight of the Enterprise, so full of opportunity and unrealized potential. He hadn’t said no to Satie as easily as it perhaps had seemed to her. There was a part of him that wondered what could have been, what unique wonders he would be seeing if only he had stayed on, what adventures he and his crew might have lived through.
Now he had to say good-bye to the ship and to her crew. It was a pity that he would not get to know the people whose reports and files he had browsed through on occasion, at a time when he had still thought that he’d remain their captain even despite Solveig’s decision to stay behind. They were Starfleet’s finest—the best and brightest representatives of at least a dozen species—but more than that, they’d seemed like people he could work well with, even become good friends with, and Thomas was unexpectedly struck now by the same sense of loss that he’d felt at the prospect of being separated from Solveig and the children. The difference, he reminded himself, was that he could feel assured that the thousand potential friends he left behind would be well cared for by their next captain…but leaving his family without a husband and father was simply too painful a thought to endure.
Thomas increased the speed of his shuttlepod and guided it away from the immediate vicinity of UP Orbital, away from the region of heavy traffic at the center of which sat the space station that had been his second home for years, and toward his first home, the house in Central Burroughs. Of course, he’d easily have been able to use the transporter, seeing as there was a special network of satellites linking the dockyards with ground-based transporters spread all over the surface of the planet. Nevertheless, he had opted for the slow approach, since that gave him the opportunity to look back at what could have been, and what would still be, but without him.
With the crater-covered surface of Mars coming ever closer, he turned his attention away from the Enterprise and toward the rest of his life, all the while hoping fervently that Jean-Luc Picard would be worthy of her.
Acts of Compassion
Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore
Historian’s note:
This tale is set after the events of the episode “11001001,” during the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
DAYTON WARD & KEVIN DILMORE
Dayton Ward is a software developer, having become a slave to Corporate America after spending eleven years in the U.S. Marine Corps. When asked, he’ll tell you that he joined the military soon after high school because he’d grown tired of people telling him what to do all the time. If you get the chance, be sure to ask him how well that worked out. In addition to the numerous credits he shares with friend and cowriter Kevin Dilmore, he is the author of the Star Trek novel In the Name of Honor and the science fiction novels The Last World War and The Genesis Protocol as well as short stories in the first three Star Trek: Strange New Worlds anthologies, the Yard Dog Press anthology Houston, We’ve Got Bubbas, DownInTheCellar.com, Kansas City Voices magazine, and the Star Trek: New Frontier anthology No Limits. Though he lives in Kansas City with his wife and daughter,