THE TREK OF IT

"Arse-face! Need a word!"

The tall Scotsman in civilian clothes, with grey, curly hair had barged into Admiral Cartwright's office. The admiral, who had been in an important meeting with the Vulcan ambassador, looked shocked.

Sarek, if he was shocked, did not show it. "Do you know this gentleman, Admiral?"

Cartwright sighed. "This is Malcolm Tucker, the Federation's top media liaison officer. Malcolm Tucker, this is Ambassador Sarek of Vulcan."

"Nice to meet you, Mr. Ambassador," said Tucker. "Live long and prosper. Now, fuck off."

The admiral stood up, furious. "Now, listen. I know you get a lot of leeway from the Federation Council, but you cannot simply barge in here and – "

"No respect, Admiral, but there are a lot of very important, deeply fucking pissed off people that think I can. And one of them's the President! But if you want to tell them I cannae, go right ahead."

The ambassador stood with profound Vulcan grace. "Perhaps I should wait outside."

"I apologise, Ambassador. This won't take long."

As soon as Sarek had left the room, Cartwright blasted: "You better have a damn good explanation – "

"No, you'd better have a damn good explanation! For how it is that the Federation has launched some sort of peace initiative with the Klingons, and I'm the last one to fucking know about it!"

"That information," Cartwright told him, slowly, "is on a need to know basis."

"And you don't think I fucking need to know?"

"No. You're not an admiral, or a starship Captain, or a diplomat. You're a civilian spin doctor. One with ideas a long way above his station, I might add."

Malcolm Tucker grinned a particularly dangerous grin. "People like me keep people like you in a fucking job, you little prick. You leave me out the loop, you might well find yourself out a fucking airlock. Now, because I'm only just learning about this, it might be too late for me to do anything about it."

"You? Are going to do something about it?" Cartwright was incredulous.

"How do you feel about peace with the Klingons, Admiral? Think it's a good idea, do you?"

"I have… reservations."

"Aye, well, I've got more than reservations. It would be a PR disaster! Think about it! If there's peace, people on both sides of what used to be the Neutral Zone will come and go as they please. And that means, their journalists can talk to our journalists and there's not one fucking thing I can do about it! And you know what that means? It means, everything they know gets to be public knowledge throughout the Federation! All the shit I've worked fucking twenty hour days for the last thirty years to keep under the fucking carpet!" He began to pace furiously, working up a real head of steam. "The Organians, for example. Do you think the average Federation citizen would sleep better at night knowing there's non-corporeal fucking space-Quakers that can break our guns with a fucking thought? How about High Teer James Leonard Akaar of Capella IV? How are we gonna explain that shit, eh? Oh, here's another good one! The good people of Zeta Bootis III, who have just split the fucking atom, thanks to Starfleet's genius gun-for-gun policy. If that gets out, you'll have to push through mass protests to get to work in the morning. We are talking riots in the fucking streets of San Francisco! Do you not understand? This planet here is known throughout the Federation as fucking Paradise! It's my job to keep it that way, by keeping the shit your captains get up to out there off the fucking front pages, and you're gonna throw that away with this peace nonsense, and you werenae even gonna tell me about it?"

Tucker was now baring his teeth at the admiral. The greyish veins in his temples were throbbing viciously. A long, ugly silence passed. "Who's your peace envoy?" Tucker asked, at last.

Cartwright considered telling him that that information was classified. But the spin doctor looked well capable of ripping the admiral's head off before finding the information some other way. Besides, if there was a chance this insane Scotsman might actually be able to do something…

"Captain Kirk."

"Yes!" cried Tucker, punching the air. "Finally, some good news! I always knew having a mad bastard like that out there would come in handy, that's why I got him off wi' that Genesis thing."

Cartwright raised an eyebrow. "You 'got him off'?"

"Well, made it impossible for Starfleet to make any other decision if it didnae want a fucking revolution on its hands."

Admiral Cartwright looked bemused.

Tucker sighed, and explained, as if to a small child, "Think about it! This mad fucker assaults several Starfleet officers, breaks a mental patient out of a secure ward, steals one starship, sabotages another, takes his stolen starship to the one place he was specifically ordered to stay the fuck away from, blows the stolen starship up, then, on his way home, makes fucking mince meat of the Temporal Prime Directive… yet, some how, public opinion has the idea that he's some sort of all-conquering hero who can do no fucking wrong… and it never occurred to you there was a spin doctor involved? How fucking naïve do you have to be afore they let you be an admiral these days?"

Cartwright ignored the insult and said, "Okay. So how do you think this helps us?"

"Because, he's a fucking loose cannon. Loose cannons are always useful if you want to stir up some shit."

"Now, look here," said Cartwright, deadly serious. "You can barge into my office, eject the Federation's most celebrated ambassador, insult me all you want… but I'm damned if I'm going to let you mix metaphors in my office!"

Tucker smiled grimly at the rebuke. "Jim Kirk has spent his life fighting Klingons. Plus there's the wee detail that they murdered his son in cold blood. Trust me, there's nae cunt hates them cunts as much as that cunt. So it should be an absolute piece of pish to provoke him into blowing them out the fucking sky. Then I do a wee bit spin doctor magic so's everyone believes it was the Klingons' fault, you pin a medal on the mad bastard's chest, and we can get back to business as usual. No peace in our time."

For the first time, Tucker sat down and rubbed his temples. Cartwright could almost see the springs and cogs of a plan coming together behind those throbbing veins in the older man's temples.

Finally, Tucker looked up and said, "Right. Here's what we're gonna do…"