A follow-up to 'The Doomsday Machine.' Charged with an ugly duty, Captain Kirk writes to a former love about how a memory of beauty made it all right.

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Coral

by Rob Morris

Dear Carol:

I sent this message to your private account in hopes that this would bypass any and all concerns you might have that this was about my seeing David. It is about David, but it is not about his custody, upbringing, or knowledge of his parentage.

I'll explain. Your classification is high enough to be told this if you haven't heard already. The silence from Solar Systems L-360 through L-373 is no mere subspace transmission mishap. Carol, they're gone. An ancient weapon--a literal planet-killer--emerged from God only knows where and cut the many inhabited worlds within them to pieces. What sort of enemy was it built to fight? Whether that enemy was an aspect of the Antichrist itself or just another nightmare Brobdingangian machine, it was a sight to behold, and it made us one and all feel irrelevant.

We originally believed that only L-370 to L-373 was affected, but later scans showed that this thing really wanted to replace Death's Scythe in our collective thoughts. I swear that even Spock hesitates when calculating the numbers of dead involved. I'd include some attached
pictures and stats, but for now that would violate a few dozen emergency protocols, and in this instance they make more sense to me than normal. The best description I can offer is that of an evil cornucopia. When the short-term restrictions are lifted, I'll send you the images, and you will
understand.

Commodore Matt Decker, his crew and the USS Constellation itself were also casualties of this monster. Matt had beamed his crew to an imagined safety on a world that was soon erased. When we found him, in that shattered hulk that was once a starship---Carol, I almost prayed he would die soon. His son Willard is a teacher at the Academy, last I heard, and I would rather have shown him a corpse than the broken leader so hell-bent on vengeance, he nearly took Enterprise with him. His theft of a shuttlecraft killed him but showed us the way to end that nightmare. The monster was dead, but so was a great man. And he was but one of so very, very many. It was done, and we got the hell out of there.

We were perhaps four days out when Starfleet ordered us to go back. We hadn't made the mess, but it was ours to clean up. Did I mention the damned thing sported a hull of pure neutronium? At a staff meeting, nerves were badly on edge. No one wanted to be near this thing again. Sulu called up his former skills as ship's physicist and just suggested slapping a cloak on it, albeit one that would not work for line-of-sight viewing. Unworkable. Scotty suggested attaching warp engines to the hull of the planet-killer, and just sending it back where it came from. Security risk. Spock and Bones got into it over an idea that had The Federation working with the other powers to find a certain neutralizing method. After Chekov made what I have to call a forgettable suggestion, Uhura reminded us of the urgency of it all. Seems the thing is a hazard to communication, and thereby apt to be noticed sooner than we might like.

Frustrated, I went to sleep that night--and I dreamed of you, Carol. That wonderful night when we didn't realize we had just conceived David. That sweet, pure honeyed moment in time when words like personality or career just didn't matter. Then the dream shifted and I saw you building a path of small rocks leading back to the house we once shared, and at the open door stood David. Together we three gathered all those stones back up, and with them we filled up a yawning hole.

I woke up and knew that a dream is only a dream, and it couldn't change who we are, or why we broke up. But Carol, I thought also of the project you have devoted your life to, and felt I knew how to beat this sword into a great gosh o'mighty tractor.

Getting it in motion was actually simple. A photon torpedo explosion at its tail, a tractor beam creasing its outer mouth-rim, and a reconfigured shuttle, courtesy of Scotty were all it took. As we nudged and prodded a dead and still potentially deadly carcass back along its path of death and destruction, a scan from Spock said we had done it. The natural gravity well of the maw took in the fragments of the many shattered worlds, which we in turn compacted back further in the hole till the device was full of much of its own handiwork. And that wasn't all.

The new mass inside the already massive machine hyper-accentuated its gravimetric attraction to the remaining fragments for systems around. Some fragments were already striking with such force they were fusing the fragments together. Carol, we've birthed a new giant world that one
day might even know life. Like the environmentally nightmarish ship wrecks that later became life-giving coral reefs, this 'Doomsday Machine' is being made to give back some of what it took from the universe. A simple effort to fill the cannon barrel with cement has become the seeding of that same barrel with flowers. Flowers not placed in the gun barrel by an idealistic pacifistic teen opposing a war, but sprung up by divine edict in response to creation's violation by yet
another would-be ultimate weapon.

I know it won't be with me, Carol, but I hope you and David one day see it. And I hope that when you do, you also remember the other time we made life together.

Love always,

Jim