Chapter 2 - Kirk's Story.
"Let me start by saying that this was a crazy time. Gary and I were right out of the Academy, finally on a real spaceship. The Farragut was forty years old, its old t-fusion drive creaked whenever we made too sharp a turn, and I think Chief Amber held her together mostly with duct tape. Nonetheless, we would have fought anyone who dared claim she wasn't the most beautiful thing in existence."
"Most of our classmates were stuck on starbases or in-system runs for the initial assignments, but we were among the favored few who were about to try our wings in real space. In other words: we were about as full of ourselves as twenty-year-old midshipmen can get, and you know that's saying a lot. I'm sure you all remember that feeling of the Academy's constraints and confines - mental and physical - of falling away away during those first weeks."
"The Farragut was docked at Starbase 3 for hull repairs and as long as we spent our duty shifts familiarizing ourselves with our stations, we two midshipmen were left pretty much to ourselves. We thought it was paradise - no drills, no curfews. No tests! I remember Gary and I swearing a solemn oath, sanctifying it in Arcturian rum, never to touch five-dimensional Sitter-space math again…"
Kirk took a sip of the ale and grinned at rueful smiles that appeared on several of his friends' faces. Directly after graduation, many Starfleet officers were convinced that nothing could be as grueling as the last months of final exams and training exercises. Most learned that this was wrong pretty quickly…
Spock had tilted his head, and Kirk could see amusement in his eyes.
"Clearly not an oath you worked very hard on keeping," the Vulcan noted.
"Oh, I had every intention of keeping it at the moment it was made. But... it was very bad rum. And I didn't know then that if they give you the Federation flagship to command, your Science Officer isn't going to slow down to explain things to you: you're expected to keep up with the math yourself…"
Scotty laughed. The senior officers' academic seminars that Spock had masterminded on the Enterprise were legendary for a reason. Department heads were asked to always have a passing familiarity with the cutting-edge science informing the other departments. Captain Kirk had always insisted on far more than that for himself, and his officers had regularly tutored him on the science behind the latest technology the ship was using. It wasn't the norm for other Starfleet captains, though, who were often content with giving general orders with no detailed understanding of how those were then to be carried out. Scotty still remembered Spock's disbelieving contempt when he'd found that out.
Kirk took the reins of the story again "So, no more Sitter-space projections. No more waking up in the middle of the night by being beamed directly into a training scenario in Siberia. Instead evenings of freedom, song, cheap wine and not very subtle attempts at picking up female humanoids for me, and picking up anything vaguely bipedal and warm-blooded for Gary. I met a lovely lady and thought I was helplessly and forever in love for the last four days of our leave. Unfortunately for me, she had a little more sense and when I awoke in the morning of our ship-out day, she was gone with a short note of thanks-see-you-on-the-flip-side. I had a black out and was hungover from an Andorian mushroom binge…"
"Jim!" protested Bones, a disapproving frown on his face.
"It was cheap, Bones, and we were young enough to think that we didn't really need a dorsal cortex anyway. So, I was heart-broken and sick enough to think that the world was over and that nothing could be more important than my heartbreak. I didn't even realize that I'd missed the scheduled beam-up time until Gary called on our decidedly non-regulation twinned com-pads."
Kirk nodded ruefully at Uhura when she groaned and complained, "If I had a credit for every private com that young officers try to sneak aboard… They light up the communications system like a Christmas tree, and every idiot thinks that surely the Klingons or Romulans won't be able to track and hack their devices because they have the newest firewall or whatnot… It's a communication security nightmare to have those on-board…"
"Yeah, you'd get credits for us two idiots as well, Nyota. It's just so convenient to be able to access local networks and talk to your pals at will… So, anyway, Gary called a few times, and when I finally dragged myself away from the bed to answer, he told me that I'd missed the beam up. I sobered up pretty quickly at that point, but the damage was done. I saw dismissal, court martial, the brig, maybe a salt mine, in front of me, my career ending before it had even begun…"
Kirk smiled at Bones' skeptical look "Oh, Captain Tennyson wouldn't have busted me for missing a beam up, but I wasn't really in the right frame of mind to think 'proportionate response'. Even so, I have to say, in my own younger idiot's defense, that my first idea was to simply call the ship and confess…" He paused meaningfully.
"I take it that you didn't?" asked Chekov, a mixture of awe and disbelief in his eyes.
"Well, that's when Gary said that he'd already covered for me. Lied to the lieutenant about a computer mix up, that I was already aboard. And I couldn't get Gary punished for trying to help me. I decided that the only thing to do was to find a way to sneak aboard the ship without anyone noticing." Spock's eyebrow had begun to rise in incredulity, and Kirk feared it still had a long way to go…
"Ach, sneak aboard a docked starship, lad? That's not supposed to be possible!" Scotty was clearly enjoying the story and had gotten up to rummage through the liquor cabinet again.
"The belief that there are no no-win scenarios can sometimes lead you down some pretty dumb rabbit holes, Scotty. My particular rabbit hole first took me to the cargo dock, from where I could see the Farragut, in all her antique glory, beginning to detach her first support cables. I knew I had only an hour to get aboard.
Gary had this idea about getting me onto a shuttle, but the last shuttles all had senior officers on them. I'm incredibly glad that I managed to convince him not to try to bribe them, or neither of us would have made it to ensign..." Kirk accepted a glass of something green from the engineer.
The others were laughing at his story, and he was determined to tell the story in the way Gary would have wanted. Gary Mitchell's violent death during the Enterprise's shake-down cruise was one of many traumatic memories that Jim had learned could never be exorcised, only lived with. For a moment he couldn't help himself thinking that being thrown out of Starfleet for bribing an officer would have saved Gary's life… He sought Spock's gaze, drew strength and pushed the destructive thought down. He forced his thoughts back into making this a good narrative.
"Instead, and at this point, ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to please remember that I still had Andorian mushrooms in my blood, I decided to simply jump over to the ship. I'd seen some maintenance workers hauling in support cables. Some of them worked outside in space, attached to long lead lines from the station. They had a few extra space suits, but none of them had thrusters… But who needs thrusters, right? Calculating the exact vector of a space jump is just a geometry problem, right Mr. Spock?"
"Indeed. And not even in five dimensions."
"Indeed. So, I stole a space suit, jury-rigged an air-lock and sprang away from the station towards the Farragut, in a dashingly bold maneuver that unfortunately sent me in just the wrong direction to miss the ship and instead head towards open space... I managed to catch a loose support pylon, and spent 30 minutes, shaking, praying to any deity that would listen, carefully crawling back to the hull of the starbase… And then I tried again."
"Of course you did" muttered Bones, and shook his head. "You can't blame the mushrooms either, Jim. This sounds just like non-intoxicated James T. Kirk."
"Why thank you, Doctor. I think. The next time, things went better. I missed the spot I was aiming for by some 70 meters, but managed to not bounce off by my magnetic boots latching on to the hull. I heroically did not to throw up in my space suit, and started walking, one laborious step after another, across the ship's hull. At this point, Gary had stopped screaming at me, and instead tried to figure out a way to get me inside. I couldn't just knock on the observation dome, after all, and all air locks were being used. He figured he could beam me inside by cargo transporter, if I was really close. But how could he do that without the transporter being being detected - anything human was bound to register as an unapproved materialization, possibly an intruder…" Kirk trailed off deliberately.
"Let me guess, Captain" said Uhura. "You somehow managed to hide yourself in an unscannable box?" Kirk shook his head and grinned.
"You drilled a hole in the hull," suggested Chekov, but Kirk shook his head again. There were a few moments of silence before Spock spoke: "why was the ship having hull repairs?"
"Yes, well done, Mr. Spock. The hull repairs were due to the Farragut having picked up a set of nasty space parasites, strongly attached to the hull and slowly corroding it with their acid."
"I see." said the Vulcan, clearly enjoying, for those who know him well enough to pick up the signs, the puzzle solving. "They would be carefully excised with lasers. Probably from automated drones?"
Kirk nodded. "There were several drones working around the ship, seeking to cut away any organic parasites. And yes, at this point, they had identified me as a parasite as well, because two of them started buzzing over my way…"
"The fact that they were expecting mostly stationary parasites, and I was clearly a moving one, was the only thing that kept me from being blasted immediately. They tried to puzzle me out. Gary was ready to fold at this point, beaming me over and then just telling the lieutenant. But I'd gotten…"
"Obsessed" suggested the doctor.
"Competitively obstinate?" suggested Spock.
"Determined," Kirk continued, "to get this plan working. I suddenly realized that the cargo transporters were running compressed data streams, rather than the open ones used for extra redundancy in the personnel transporters. And that those data streams would probably be similar enough to the sensor sweeps used by the drones to cut away the parasites, but not cut into the hull… I can see your skepticism Scotty, just hang on. So, Gary managed to get unnoticed to a cargo transporter, and I stood still on the hull as the drones got closer and closer. The scan started half a meter away from me, and was followed a moment later by the red glow of the laser, inching closer. I think Gary in fact managed to get me out of there only a half second or so after the laser got going, but it felt like half an eternity - and that's a universally acknowledged, very real unit of subjective time experience for humans, Spock."
Chekov asked over the laughter "Were you caught?" and Scotty followed with "I don't see how you managed to disguise the data stream…"
"I'm not entirely sure of the answers to either of those questions. I got aboard, and we got back to the quarters we shared by simply projecting an aura of certainty and walking fast. The Farragut cast off and for the next several days we did nothing but work very diligently during our shifts, jumping guiltily whenever a senior officer called our names."
"I wrote a report about the security problem of disguising transporter data streams in sensor data streams, as if it was something I'd thought of when seeing the drones, and I bullied Gary into writing a report about how someone, hypothetically, one day might be able to jury rig air locks and steal space suits to get over to a ship, maybe in order to, for instance, place an explosive."
"We had lots of arguments about those reports, but in the end we didn't really have a choice. As the adrenaline rush disappeared, we could tell that we'd made a series of very stupid choices, but I blamed myself, and Gary blamed himself, and we were caught up too much in a tangled web of loyalty to each other to allow the other one to suffer for our shortcomings. Luckily, the Starfleet ethics drummed into our skulls stopped us from covering up potential threats to the service, but we did agonize over the wording quite a bit."
"About a week later, I was called to the captain's ready room. He said that he wanted to go over my theories of data stream concealment, and asked me to reiterate my report. I could see that he had Gary's report on his desk as well, and I suddenly knew that he must have made a connection somehow, maybe seen something amiss with the logs. I also knew then that I couldn't lie to his face. I must have looked guilty as hell, I know I was sweating. He just leaned forward and told me, in a grave serious voice that both Gary and I had earned demerits, and did I know why?"
"I figured the game was up, drew breath to confess everything - Andorian mushrooms and all - when he told me deadpan that although the insights of the reports were very important for security reasons, we'd filed them in the wrong computer folder and sloppy record keeping was not something he tolerated on his ship! He quizzed me on the particulars for another half hour before he dismissed me with a dry: "Well, I think we've all learned something these last few days, midshipman".
"He had me work extra shifts with this sensor specialist in Sciences to come up with ways to counter any attempt to hide transporter data streams. His name was Kanek…"
"The Kanek reconfiguration!" exclaimed Scotty. "It's obsolete now, for sure, but I remember reconfiguring the Enterprise cargo transporters with that. A nasty little trick…"
"You'll be happy to hear that I didn't touch Andorian mushrooms after that, Bones. Or anything like it really."
"I know damn well you didn't, Jim, you've had enough concussions and strange neuroshocks that I think I could draw your brainscans from memory. Of all the stupid things to try… I'm all for alcohol in moderation, we can de-tox that. But it seems young people, then and now, have a nasty fascination for finding the most dangerous way to fry their brains." The doctor shook his head in disgust.
"You and Gary, Mr. Mitchell, you clearly made quite a team" mused Chekov. Like the doctor, he had come aboard the Enterprise after the charismatic navigator had died on Delta Vega.
"More like a natural disaster looking for something to hit. I loved him like a brother, Pavel, but the two of us… we had no balance, and even less intelligence, between us." Kirk's smile was wry and wistful at the same time. He sought Spock's calm gaze and held it in silence for a few seconds.
"The balance between friendship and duty is a perilous knife edge to walk," Kirk concluded, softly.
The group contemplated this statement for a moment, thoughts drifting outwards to distant planets and old choices. It was Scotty who finally broke the silence.
"Ach, well, as long as it is conflicting loyalties, and not greed or power hunger that lead us astray, I think we're still on the right path, crooked though it might be. Starfleet has always shown a leniency for that, as they should. And I was personally very grateful for that when I was a midshipman on the Enterprise..." Scotty deftly made the mood lighter, the musical lilt to his tone promising a humorous anecdote.
"As with the captain's, this story also also starts with a female, but a verra verra..." The engineer held his hands out, maybe half a meter between them and then successively indicated a smaller and smaller size until his hand were cupped with only a handsbreadth between them "...verra wee one."
"Oh, Scotty, don't tell me you seduced a Sentan gnome!" Exclaimed Uhura in mock horror to general laughter.
"No, no, lass," said Scotty with playful wink, "You have a dirty mind, you. But yes, this tale has a… relationship that turned out to be devilishly hard to break up…" He took a sip of his whiskey, letting it roll over his tongue for a few moments before he began…
Author's note: Next up is Scotty! Then McCoy, Uhura, Chekov and finally Spock. If you have any ideas for more tales, I'd love to hear them, maybe we can sneak them in! At any rate, please leave a word or two (or more!) as a review! What did you think about Kirk's tale?
DelJewell and WeirdLittleStories were kind enough to beta read this for me, and I'm ever so grateful for their notes.