Captain's Glory

37

VULCAN SPACE CENTRAL

STARDATE 58571.6

Kirk heard the voice that was not a voice, and he recognized it.

It brought him from the darkness that was poised to claim him. He had to know, he had to see his son one last time.

“Jim, look…” Picard said in awe.

He helped Kirk sit up. He helped Kirk see what was before them.

Joseph and the one Norinda.

Surrounded by her duplicates, she was a transformed creature, solid once again, human once again, collapsed on her knees before Kirk’s son, consumed and defeated by the unyielding need she had tried to force on all life.

Joseph had also been transformed, and Kirk blinked back weary tears.

The harsh masculinity Norinda had brought forth in his child had softened. Joseph was himself again, neither one gender nor the other. His ridges, his ears, all the marks of distinction that had echoed the myriad species of his genetic makeup, had also blurred, until there was nothing more to point to, to call out a difference.

The thought came to Kirk unbidden-an ancient wisdom revealed: Infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

Never had he understood that more than at this moment.

A perfect being… he thought in wonder.

NO, the voice answered him.

JUST A BEING.

Norinda’s voice was petulant, defensive. “You can’t win this time!”

Her body began to change again, taking on its formless bulk of black cubes, black sand, primordial matter in constant motion.

This time…? Kirk thought. How long had this battle been raging? How many times had these foes met?

Norinda had become a waving mass of writhing tendrils snaking through the air, darting at Joseph, seeking to draw him into her embrace.

But Joseph stood unflinching, spread his arms to her as if to offer no resistance.

As if in the face of her love, he offered love in return.

Kirk saw the combat tricorder on Joseph’s wrist-he had made himself the target for Starfleet’s new weapon, though Kirk didn’t understand how his son could have known of that plan.

Then Joseph began to glow.

For a moment, just a moment, Kirk felt unreasoning fear.

Then he recognized the spectrum of that energy his son produced, that his son was part of.

Picard fumbled for his own tricorder, took readings as the purple light from Joseph filled the huge room.

“Density… negative,” Picard read from the tricorder’s small display. He changed a setting. “Radiation negative…”

Kirk didn’t need a tricorder to know what the last reading would reveal. Neither did Picard.

“Energy negative,” they said together.

Joseph was light.

Norinda was darkness.

Kirk knew he witnessed a battle that was older by far than his first encounter with the Totality, older by far than Earth itself.

“The galactic barrier…” Picard said.

Kirk understood. “Built as a defense… four billion years ago, when only one species lived in this galaxy.”

BEGONE FROM HERE, the voice said.

“Never!” Norinda cried in defiance.

Her tendrils flickered hungrily toward Joseph, but exploded into inky mist at each contact with the energy that surrounded him.

Joseph’s form could be seen no longer. He blazed with the same energy that fueled the galactic barrier-the same energy Kirk had seen on the first mission to take him past the boundaries of Earth’s frontiers and for the first time to truly go where no one had gone before.

Kirk held up his hand to cover his eyes, but that light could still be seen.

Then Kirk realized that even as his child achieved victory, he himself had lost.

Even the simple act of holding up his hand was impossible.

Strength melted from him. His arm fell to his side. He could no longer sit up. He stretched out on the dark floor, each breath more difficult than the one before, knowing that soon he’d draw his last.

It was time for him to die.

And then… he saw Jean-Luc on the floor beside him, also gasping for air.

“Jean-Luc,” Kirk said, “you’ve got to hold on.”

“I will,” Picard replied as if puzzled by Kirk’s concern. “The gravity increase will only last a few seconds.”

“Gravity increase?”

“The Enterprise and the Belle Reve must’ve finally locked on to the combat tricorder. We’re in a projected gravity field.”

If Kirk had had the strength, he would have laughed.

Picard gave his friend a questioning look. “What… did you think you were dying?”

Kirk gazed up at the rich purple light that filled the command center, a glorious light, he realized, that had followed him all through his career.

“Not today,” he said. “Never today.”

And then the light intensified beyond anything Kirk had experienced before, erasing all the Norindas, filling him, his vision and his heart, becoming a radiance so bright and pure he knew that even Teilani might see it, and know that their love still survived.

“Teilani,” Kirk whispered as the light took him, “we won….”