STAR TREK - TOS - Enterprise,The First Adventure

From the moment JamesT.Kirk steps

aboard theEnterprise —the youngest captain in Starfleet’s history—things begin to go wrong. His

Vulcan science officer, Mr. Spock, considers Kirk impetuous; the ship’s chief engineer thinks him an

inexperienced young hotshot; his chief medical officer hasn’t bothered to show up yet; and the new

helmsman would rather be someplace else entirely. To top it all off, Starfleet Command has assigned the

Enterprise adisappointingly tame task: to ferry a troupe of vaudeville performers on a morale-raising

mission to Federation starbases—in short, a USO tour.

Then the largest spacecraft anyone has ever seen suddenly appears in the ship’s flight path ... and on

their first mission together, Kirk and the entireEnterprise crew are facing what could truly be mankind’s

final frontier. ...

POCKET BOOKS

New York London Toronto Sydney Tokyo Singapore

The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you

should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author nor

the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book.”

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the

author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons,

living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

AnOriginal Publication of POCKET BOOKS

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. 1230 Avenue of the-Americas, New

York, NY 10020

STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of Paramount Pictures.

This book is published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc., under exclusive license

from Paramount Pictures.

For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN: 0-671-73032-0

First Pocket Books printing September 1986

18 17 16 15 14 13

POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

Printed in the U.S.A.

To LindaM.,Katya, Rosie, Dottie, Mary, Liz, and Beth,

to Ann, Anne, and Vera,

to Susan & Danny, because of all those Thursdays;

and to Pat and Staarla.

Contents

Prologue.5

Chapter 1.13

Chapter 2.23

Chapter 3.32

Chapter 4.38

Chapter 5.51

Chapter 6.67

Chapter 7.78

Chapter 8.89

Chapter 9.100

Chapter 10.118

Chapter 11.131

Chapter 12.143

Chapter 13.156

Epilogue.177

About the e-Book.180

Prologue

BLOOD FLOWS IN strange patterns in zero gravity—

Jim Kirk cried out and flung himself forward, reaching—

“Gary, no—”

As Gary Mitchell collapsed, Jim struggled forward, fighting to see, fighting to stay conscious despite

shock, fighting to move through the pain of his crushed knee and his broken ribs, fighting to breathe

against the blood in his lungs. If he lost the fight, his closest friend would die.

A scarlet net drifted across the image before him, and he thought that he was blind.

Jim bolted awake, gasping. He had been dreaming. Dreaming again. “Carol ... ?” He wanted to hold

her, to reassure himself that he was right beside her, not back in the disaster of Ghioghe.

Then he remembered, almost as if he were waking from a second dream, that he no longer lived in Carol

Marcus’s house, he no longer slept in her bed. He was alone.

As his room’s computer sensed that he was awake, it lightened the darkness around him. He wiped cold

sweat from his face and touched the scar on his forehead. At Ghioghe, before the gravity went out, blood

from the gash flowed down into his eyes and obscured his vision.

He wished he could go back to sleep; he wished he could sleep without dreaming. But he knew he could

not. Besides, in fighting the recurrent nightmare Jim had left the bedclothes twisted and sweat-damp and

clammy. He threw them aside and rose.

Jim Kirk, the newest captain in Starfleet, the youngest[2]officer ever to reach the rank of captain, the

hero of Axanar and, more recently, of Ghioghe, the next commander of the constellation-class starship

Enterprise, had lived for the past two weeks in a rented traveler’s cubicle, one of a hundred identical

cubicles facing another block of a hundred identical cubicles, in a building similar to at least a hundred

other sleeper buildings clustered near the spaceport.

In his current odd emotional state of excitement over his coming command, worry over Gary Mitchell,

and pain and confusion over the way his affair with Carol Marcus ended, Jim had lived here without

noticing the shabby surroundings. Not that his own furniture, which he had left in storage during this visit

to earth, had much over the plastic built-ins of the sleeper. Jim had never got around to replacing much of

the beat-up junk left over from student digs. But he did have a couple of pieces of heavy old oak from

the farmhouse in Iowa, and a single Persian rug he had bought on a whim even before he realized how

much he liked it, and before he realized how much the liking would cost if he let it develop.

He could barely stand in the sleeper; he could just lie down in the bunk, if he restrained himself from

stretching. He looked around. He would have claimed intimate familiarity with the place, but the claim

would be a fraud. Had he been asked to describe it, he would have failed in every particular. His

indifference to it turned suddenly to revulsion.

He dragged his small suitcase from the tiny storage shelf, pulled it open, and flung into it his few

possessions: a couple of books, including one that had belonged to his father; a thin sheaf of family

photos; a letter from Carol. He could not decide if throwing the letter away would start healing his

wounds, or deepen them.

“Computer.”

“Ready.”

“Close out my account here.”

“Done.”

Jim slammed shut the suitcase and fled the sleeper without a backward glance.

Outside, in the darkness preceding dawn, Jim felt as if his nightmare still lurked at the edge of his waking

perceptions. He always had the same dream, never about the breakdown[3]of pattern, the

miscommunication that led to the battle, not about the battle itself, not even about the actions he had

taken that saved most of his crew but left his ship, theLydia Sutherland, a battered, broken hulk drifting

dead in space. Instead, the dream always repeated those interminable few minutes in the rescue pod,

when Gary Mitchell almost died.

Jim climbed the stairs to the entrance of the Starfleet Teaching Hospital, being careful of his right knee.

So far, this morning, it had given him no trouble. He headed for the regeneration ward. No one stopped

him. He had asked, ordered, pulled rank and pulled strings to get official permission to be here outside of

visiting hours. Finally he simply ignored the rules, and now everyone was used to seeing him.

As he had every day since getting out of regen himself, Jim entered Gary’s hospital room. Gary Mitchell

lay in a regeneration tank, drugged and sleeping and immersed up to his neck in translucent green regen

gel.

Gary hated being sick. It hurt to see him like this. All the specialists kept congratulating themselves on his

progress. But to Jim he looked wasted and frail, as if the gel were draining his youth instead of restoring

his body. Gary’s thirtieth birthday had passed right after he entered regen. Jim was a year and a half

younger, just turned twenty-nine, impatient with the aftereffects of his own injuries, anxious for his friend

to get well.

He sat down beside Gary and spoke to him as if he could hear him.

“They keep telling me you’ll wake up soon,” Jim said. “I hope it’s true. You’ve been here too long, and

it isn’t fair. You would have come out of Ghioghe without a scratch if you hadn’t come back for me.” Jim

stretched his right leg, testing his knee. He had begun to trust the new joint; physical therapy had built up

its strength so it no longer collapsed at awkward moments. He still had exercises he was supposed to do

every day.

“They also claim you can’t hear me because of the drugs. But they’re wrong. I don’t much care if they

think I’m nuts to talk to you.” Jim remembered his last few days in regen, a twilight of half-sleep,

confusion, and dreams. “I saw it all going wrong at Ghioghe. I still can’t believe Sieren could make a

mistake like that. I saw—this is going to sound[4]weird, Gary, I know it, but I saw the pattern of what

was happening. Iknew that if everyone would calm down for thirty seconds, if all the commanders held

their fire for another minute, the crisis would pass. But it didn’t happen that way. Lord, I admired

Sieren.” Jim could not believe Sieren had made the mistake, could not believe Sieren and so many others

had died. He took a deep breath. “I saw the pattern, I knew how to fix it, but I couldn’t do anything, and

it all went wrong. Is that how it was for Sieren? Is that how it would have been for me, if I’d been in

command at Ghioghe? Axanar could have turned out just the same, but it didn’t. We came out of that

one covered with glory and holding a peace treaty. Was that just good luck?”

He thought Gary’s eyelids flickered. But it had been a reflex, or Jim’s own imagination.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Sleep, get well. I have to go up to theEnterprise soon, but if the ship has to do

without a first officer for a few months, it will survive. I’ve nominated you to the position, my friend, as

soon as you’re ready for it.”

“Good morning, captain.”

Gary’s heavy dark hair had slipped down across his forehead. Jim brushed it back.

“Captain?”

Jim looked up. Christine Chapel, a member of the staff of the intensive-care unit, stood near. Jim had

heard her, but he had not realized she was talking to him. He was not yet used to his new rank. His

promotion had come while he was still in regen. He went to sleep a commander whose space cruiser had

been blasted around him; he woke up a captain with a new medal and a constellation-class starship soon

to be under his command. “Sorry, Ms. Chapel. Good morning.”

“The biotelemetry on Commander Mitchell is very encouraging. I thought you’d like to know.” A striking

young woman, she wore her blond hair feathered around her face.

“Then why doesn’t he wake up?” Jim said.

“He will,” Chapel said. “He will when he’s ready.”

She handed him a printout flimsy.

After spending so much time here, he had learned to make sense of it. He scanned the printout. It did

look good. The troubling tangle of neurons in Gary’s regenerating spinal[5]cord had sorted itself out, and

the vertebrae had solidified from their earlier ghostly shadow, when they were only cartilage. As far as

Jim could tell, Gary’s lacerated internal organs had completely healed. Jim handed the printout back.

“I see he has the heart of an eighteen-year-old,” he said.

She smiled. The hoary old regen joke had a dozen punch lines. The standby was “Yes—in a jar on his

closet shelf.”

“Has Dr. McCoy called to ask about his progress?” Jim said.

“No.”

“Strange. We’re supposed to transport to Spacedock later. I hoped Gary would be with us ...”

“Maybe Dr. McCoy decided to extend his vacation.”

“It’s possible.” Jim chuckled ruefully. “I did a better job than I meant to when I bullied him into taking

some time off. I don’t even know where he went.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Why does Dr. McCoy call Commander Mitchell ‘Mitch,’ while you call him ‘Gary’?”

“Everybody calls Gary ‘Mitch’ except me. He picked up the nickname during our first midshipman

training cruise. But I’d already known him for a year, and somehow I just never got around to making the

change.”

“What does he call you?”

Jim felt himself blushing. He wondered if he could get away with telling her that Gary called him Jim, like

everybody else. As soon as Gary woke up, though, he would blast that fiction out of space.

“He calls me ‘kid,’ ” Jim said. “I’m a little younger than he is, and he never lets me forget it.” He did not

tell her he had been the youngest in his class by more than a year. He knew what she would say:

“Precocious, weren’t you?” Being called precocious at fifteen or at twenty was bad enough. At

twenty-nine, it was ridiculous.

“You’ve known Commander Mitchell for a long time, haven’t you?”

“Ten years. No, eleven.” Jim had lost three months in the regen bed and shipped out to Ghioghe in

spring, when the hills east of the city were green from winter’s rain; when he[6]woke up, only two weeks

later in subjective time, the hills were golden and tinder dry with summer. Now, autumn approached, and

Gary was still here.

“Hewill be all right, captain. I promise you that.”

“Thank you, Ms. Chapel. Ms. Chapel ...”

“Yes, captain?”

“Would you do me a favor?”

“If I can.”

He stopped, wondering if he should ask her to do something all the experts said was useless. “I know it

isn’t supposed to make any difference, but I keep remembering the time before I woke up. I could hear

things—or I thought I could hear—but I couldn’t open my eyes and I didn’t know where I was or what

had happened to me. While Gary’s still asleep, would you ... talk to him? Tell him what’s going on, tell

him he’s going to be all right ...”

“Of course I will,” she said.

“Thank you.” He stood up reluctantly. “I’m supposed to report to Spacedock soon. I’d like to leave a

note—?”

“You can use the office in back.”

The note was hard to write, but he finally got something down that he hoped would be reassuring.

In the doorway of the office, he stopped. Her back to Jim, Carol Marcus stood at Gary’s bedside with

Dr. Eng, one of the regen specialists. They inspected Gary’s life-sign readings and compared the printout

with Carol’s projections. Unlike the specialist, Carol was not a medical doctor. She was a geneticist; she

had developed the protocol for Gary’s treatment and for Jim’s.

Jim remembered the first time he saw her, the first thing she said to him. When he began physical

therapy, he lasted about five minutes into the first session. Trembling with exhaustion, sweaty and aching,

thinking himself ridiculous to be so weak, he noticed her watching him and wished no stranger had seen

him like this. Bad enough to have McCoy hovering like an encouraging mother hen.

But Carol overlooked Jim’s exhaustion, the scar on his forehead, his hair plastered down with sweat.

She said, “I wanted to meet the person who belongs to this genome.”

She was serious and elegant, funny and good-humored.[7]She was one of those rare scientists who

make intellectual leaps that turn into breakthroughs. She was extraordinarily beautiful, with her smooth

blond hair and deep blue eyes. Jim felt an immediate attraction to her, and though her job did not require

her to visit intensive care, let alone therapy, she often stopped in to see him.

The first time he left the hospital they went walking together in a nearby park. By the time the hospital

released him, Jim and Carol had fallen in love. She invited him to move into her house.

Three months later, he moved out. He had not seen her for the past two weeks. He had an irrational

urge to step back into the office and stay there till she left.

Don’t be ridiculous, he thought. You’re both adults; you can be civilized about this. He started toward

her.

Dr. Eng pushed her short dark hair back behind her ear, made a notation on the printout flimsy, and

glanced at Carol with a concerned frown. “What are you going to do?”

“Do? I’m going to do all the things you’re supposed to do under these circumstances,” Carol replied.

“You didn’t think this was an accident, did you?”

“No, of course not, it’s just—Why, Captain Kirk! How nice to see you looking so well.”

Carol turned, uncharacteristically flustered. “Jim—!”

“Hello, Carol.” He stopped. He wanted to say everything to her, or he wanted to say nothing. He

wanted to make love with her, or he wanted never to see her again.

“Talk to you later,” Dr. Eng said, and made a diplomatic exit.

“How are you feeling, Jim?”

He ignored the question. His heart beat hard. “It’s wonderful to see you. I have to leave soon. Can we

... I’d like to talk to you. Would you have a drink with me?”

“I don’t feel like having a drink,” she said. “But I will go for a walk with you.”

Jim paused beside Gary, still hoping he might awaken. He did not. “Get well, my friend,” Jim said, and

left Ms. Chapel the note to give him when he regained consciousness.

They did not have to discuss where to go. Jim and Carol walked toward their park.

[8]Without meaning to, exactly, Jim kept brushing against Carol. His shoulder touched her shoulder; his

fingers touched the back of her hand. At first she moved aside.

“Oh—” Carol said impatiently the third time Jim touched her. She took his hand and held it. “Weare still

friends, I hope.”

“I hope so, too,” Jim said. He tried to pretend the electric tingle of physical attraction no longer existed

between them, but he found it impossible to deceive himself that much. Being near Carol made Jim feel as

if a powerful current cast a web over both of them, exchanging and intensifying every passion.

“Are you sleeping any better?” Carol said.

Jim hesitated between the truth and a lie. “I’m sleeping fine,” he said.

Carol gave him a quizzical glance, and he knew he had hesitated too long. She had held him too many

times, when the nightmare slapped him awake in the darkest hours of the morning.

“If you want to talk about it ...” she said.

“No. I don’t want to talk about it,” he said in a clipped impatient tone. Talking about it would do nothing

but give him an excuse to wallow in grief and regret. That was the last thing he needed, and the last thing

Carol needed to hear. Besides, if he told Carol now that he still bolted out of sleep with a shout of pure

fury, tangled in cold sweat-soaked bedding, surrounded by the shreds of dream, confusing darkness with

being blind ... If he told her about trying to go back to sleep in the shabby, cramped traveler’s cubicle ...

If he told her about lying wide awake and exhausted in the night, wishing desperately she was still beside

him, then he would seem to be asking her to take him back out of pity instead of love.

“No,” he said again, more gently, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Still holding hands, they reached the small park and set out along the path that circled the lake. Ducks

swam alongside them, quacking for a handout.

“We always forget to bring them anything,” Carol said. “How many times have we walked here—we

always meant to bring them some bread, but we never did.”

[9]“We had ... other things on our minds.”

“Yes.”

“Carol, there’s got to be some way—!”

He cut off his words when he felt her tense.

“Such as what?” she said.

“We could—we could get married.”

She looked at him; for a moment he thought she was going to burst out laughing.

“What?” she said.

“Let’s get married. We could transport to Spacedock. Admiral Noguchi could perform the ceremony.”

“But why marriage, for heaven’s sake?”

“That’s the way we do it in my family,” Jim said stiffly.

“Not in mine,” Carol said. “And anyway, it still wouldn’t work.”

“It’s worked for quite a number of generations,” Jim said, though in the case of his own parents the

statement stretched the truth. “Carol, I love you. You love me. You’re the person I’d most want to be

with if I were stranded on a desert planet. We have fun together—remember when we went to the dock

and snuck on board theEnterprise for our own private tour—” At her expression, he stopped. “It’s

true.”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s true. And I’ve missed you. The house is awfully quiet without you.”

“Then you’ll do it?”

“No. We talked about this too many times. No matter what we do, it wouldn’t make anydifference.I

can’t be with you and you can’t stay with me.”

“But I could. I could transfer to headquarters—”

“Jim ...” She turned to face him. She held both his hands and looked into his eyes. “I remember how you

felt when you found out you’re getting command of theEnterprise. Do you think anyone who loved you

would want to take that away from you? Do you think you could love anyone who tried?”

“I love you,” he said. “I don’t want to lose you.”

“I don’t want to lose you, either. But I lost you before I ever met you. I can get used to the quiet. I can’t

get used to having you back for a few weeks at a time and losing you over and over and over again.”

[10]He kept seeking a different solution, but the pattern led him in circles and he could find no way out.

“I know you’re right,” he said, miserable. “I just ...”

STAR TREK - TOS - Enterprise, The First Adventure

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: