We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. -- Shakespeare, King Henry V IV.iii

Some Blundering About Star Trek: Picard 3×02: Disengage

You know, I almost feel like the people who make this show actually listen to me. Possibly they listen to everyone, because they are heavy on the fanservice this season. Because you know how I complained a lot about the pacing of the last two seasons – season 1 especially. Well, that’s fixed.

I reckon most viewers went into this season already knowing through nerd-culture osmosis that our big bad would be Amanda Plummer as Vadic, and her ship was the Shrike, and the gang would be hanging out on the Titan. So… Yeah they don’t really waste time beating around the bush. The main thrust of the episode is that Vadic shows up, introduces everyone to her ship, announces herself as the Big Bad, and everyone goes back to the Titan. There’s no time-wasting with their mysterious adversaries refusing to identify themselves, or trying to sell us that she’s not the antagonist.

Star Trek has never been great at villains, and the Next Generation has been worse at villains than other series. I can count the number of truly great Star Trek villains on one hand, and I don’t even need the whole hand. The Next Gen was always better with Frenemies, really. Modern Trek has failed to give us a really compelling antagonist basically ever. Control came close. But then in saunters Amanda Plummer (Whose dad, I would say, is one of those very small number of truly great Star Trek villains) and lights a cigar and helps herself to a big heaping bowlful of the scenery and just goes to town. She casually tells Shaw his own first name to let us know that she’s got access to Starfleet personnel records (She hints at something in his past that will perhaps justify him being such a dick – something that necessitates him keeping is stress-level in check); we wouldn’t be surprised if she was instantly familiar with the famous Jean-Luc Picard, which of course she is (She also knows about Picard’s robot body, which is the closest we’ve gotten to addressing how well-known it is that Picard is a robot now), but she starts with Shaw, with the nobody we don’t especially like ourselves.

Now, we still have a huge bit being held back, because Vadic’s claim that she wants Jack for the bounty is clearly an incomplete view of things: the Shrike is a War Crimes Mobile, armed with mundane weapons in large numbers, and scary weapons in also large numbers, and a mystery weapon in the number 1. And her ante is to seriously damage the Titan not with any of her weapons, but by wanging the Eleos at it. There’s a huge shift here, because seasons 1 and 2 of Picard had a kind of Russell T Davies Doctor Who vibe to them insofar as for large chunks of them, the drama emerged from the fact that Picard was essentially in exile: he was constantly facing challenges where, as Captain of the USS Enterprise (Notice that despite feigning to not know who Picard is, Jack refers to him as “Captain”, ignoring his actual title in favor of the one everyone knows him for), he could have brought the full strength of the Federation to bear, but right now, all he had was a ranger, a drunk, a drug-addict and an AI developer with anxiety issues. Much of the drama came from the fact that Picard had nothing to fall back on, even his old friends. They faced enemies who were pirates and thugs, but weren’t about to take on Starfleet. But now, Picard has Riker backing him up, and he’s standing aboard a ship-of-the-line, and yet there’s Amanda Plummer, mouthful of scenery, just gleefully telling a Starfleet captain how she is going to tortuously destroy his ship and murder his crew. Episode one had a light implication that they were in danger because the Titan wasn’t there to back them up – that surely, these mysterious attackers would back down if confronted by Starfleet. But nope. She’s giggling over the prospect of fighting the Titan.

By the way, the visual of the Titan just ramming itself in-between the Eleos and the Shrike is pretty great. I’m not fully on-board with the ease of Seven shaming Shaw into rescuing them, but at the same time, a longer scene of her haranguing him to go save a couple of legends instead of being “The guy who abandoned Jean-Luc Picard to his death,” would have messed up the pacing.

I notice that there’s a big shift in Shaw’s characterization at this point as well. He’s still a dick, sure. But in the first few scenes, his, “Fuck Picard and Riker, they stole my ship, stole a shuttle, made me look bad and messed up my nap,” attitude is just purely dickish. But from this point on, every time Shaw is a dick, he frames in terms of his crew, and he is, of course not wrong. Picard says “but we can’t negotiate with terrorists,” and “But we can’t hand over a civilian to be murdered by the scary space lady,” and every time, Shaw answers, “There’s a fuckton of people on this ship and I do not want to get them killed.” That’s not just regulations. It’s not just being a pompous ass. He’s doing the math on people’s lives. The audience is primed to agree with Picard – Jack is a person with a name and a relationship to a series regular, and Vadic is a Disney villain with a ship full of isolytic weapons who, because of the laws of conservation of drama, is probably something to do with portal-gunning the recruitment center last week, and the good guys giving a poor sweet innocent con artist to the cartoonishly evil villain is just Big-W-Wrong. But… Shaw still isn’t wrong either, because, yeah, they drug his ship out here and got them in a fight they possibly can’t win against an urban legend and is it really “good guy” behavior to put his crew at risk for Picard’s friend’s kid? (They do not have any reason to trust that Vadic will let them go, and frankly every reason not to given just how over-the-top evil she’s being, but that’s neither here nor there).

I think we know where this is going, more or less. The thing that’s in Shaw’s past? The thing that makes it hard to sleep? Shaw got people killed, and so now he plays it safe. That’s where his arc is going.

Still needs to be kicked in the face for deadnaming Seven.

And Jack kinda gives them an out. Shame on Titan security for not frisking the guy, but he busts out of the brig and nearly hands himself over before Seven catches him. Shaw is ready to let him go ahead and do it – it’s a perfectly Star Trek sort of answer, frankly: if Jack goes willingly, Shaw doesn’t have to endanger his crew or compromise Starfleet principles by delivering him to his death. They can all be quietly respectful of Jack’s noble sacrifice. The needs of the many and all that.

Except, of course, for the Turn. Because Riker’s been alluding to it all episode, and Picard won’t come out and say it or pursue it (And no one on the Titan thinks to run a DNA scan… The Titan crew is not really distinguishing themselves with their competence). So Riker goes down and wakes Bev up (He’s allowed to walk right up to her, grab a hypo of stimulants and shoot her up with only a very weak “Hey, what are you doing?” from the doctor. Again, not sure about this crew) and brings her to the bridge.

And neither of them say it. It’s been twenty years. Picard has a girlfriend, he’s gotten over his mommy issues, he’s got a new body. They don’t have to say it. With a look, he asks the question, and with a look, she answers, and Admiral Jean-Luc Picard stops fucking around and takes command of the Titan, because he can’t let them hand over his son.

I mean, it wasn’t 100% certain, but we all figured that was probably it, right? It was him or Bev’s grandma’s Irish sex ghost (That’s a thing that happened). And I love that the second Picard says, “He’s my son,” Shaw just sighs and is like, “Okay fine we will be Big Damn Heroes.” Was it a son that Shaw lost?

Oh. Oh I get it now. Duh.

I was angry last week that they alluded to trouble at home with the Troi-Rikers. Of course Riker has to be the one to go and wake Beverly, because they don’t come right out and say it – in fact, you could easily miss the implications (This may be in part because Jonathan Frakes was always a better director than he is an actor, and he’s way out of practice now). Picard doesn’t want to pursue it, doesn’t want to even think about it. But it’s Riker who pushes him, who challenges him. Who won’t let him accept Shaw’s entirely correct assessment that there are a lot of people on the Titan and only one Jack Crusher.

Because Riker lost a son. That’s going to be at the root of his trouble at home, isn’t it? When we last saw him, he seemed to have it pretty together; he was living his best life. But grief isn’t linear. That wasn’t, “I got the Starfleet Bug back in me and have been a bad dad,” when he said Deanna and Kestra would be relieved to be rid of him; it was, “I have the big sads, and do not want to keep inflicting it on my telepath wife and daughter.” Will took one look at Jack, and he knew, exactly like he knew when he met Soji. His Strong Dad Energy kicked in, and he knew that was Jean-Luc’s son, and he could not just stand by and let his friend offer up Jack to his death rather than acknowledge it.

Gah, it is just all so lovely and I am kind of lowkey mad I have to wait a whole week for another episode. This is gonna be the Sad Dad season of Star Trek, isn’t it? Sad Dad isn’t really as big a genre for TV as it is for video games, but it’s certainly the sort of late-in-life meditation that fits with a cerebral show like TNG to go out on. We have a lot of parallels to The Wrath of Khan, and not just because I spent half a year rewriting The Wrath of Khan. The Corporate URW title card is feeling like more than an Easter egg: it’s establishing what we’re going for here. Season 2 was in many ways a mashup of Star Trek IV; Season 3 seems to be going for 2, with a bit of VI in there for good measure. We’ve got a potentially planet-killing superweapon, a smart, larger-than-life villain who revels in making big speeches over the viewscreen, a previously unrevealed son of the captain who’s been kept hidden by his doctor mom, a battle in a nebula… Wow this is kind of on-the-nose.

We have this B-plot too, which is a lot less interesting than the main plot, but has to go through its paces to get the story where it’s going. Just as the A-plot wastes no time revealing Vadic, the B-plot decides that one and a half episodes is exactly as long as they can expect us to pretend that we don’t know Raffi’s handler is Worf. He shows up to do some world-class decapitating and save Raffi’s bacon. Raffi is on the downward-spiral part of her character arc. Worf tells her to drop it after Starfleet fingers an obvious patsy to take the fall for the recruitment center attack, and come on. This all could have been avoided if Worf had just been like, “Disengage for now, I need to work this from a different angle for a while,” rather than letting her think he was going to just let the whole thing be swept under the rug. Raffi goes back to her ex, and they finally make explicit what I said last week and have been saying about her since the start, that her ability to see patterns is a Grim Superpower that also leads to her being a conspiracy theorist, which in turn leads to her drug problem. She makes the downward-spiral decision to pursue a Ferengi gangster toward the true culprets after her ex gives her the choice of him helping her with only one of pursuing the spy stuff or patching things up with their son. Then she misses the incredibly obvious hinting when she claims to have worked for the Romulan patsy and the Ferengi Gangster is like “Oh yes that is very interesting and I definitely believe you and do not know you are lying because I have already killed that dude and have his head right behind my divan.” Then she gets high on an unknown drug provided to her by the shady gangster to prove she’s not a cop, and of course it turns out to be something that will impair her too much to fight back and probably too much to maintain her cover. Good thing Worf showed up. Worf also conveniently commits a lot of homicide, clarifying that the bit from the trailer where he describes himself as a pacifist was a joke. He’s using proper sword now rather than a Bat’leth. Because he’s a ninja. I have this theory that the Bat’leth is actually a deliberately shitty weapon – that it was designed to be hard to use and inefficient (It’s a leverage-based weapon that you have to hold at both ends. You have to get way too close to the person you’re stabbing, and it’s too big to be maneuverable when you’re grappling) because Klingons are a Proud Warrior Race and want to show off, so they felt it would be dishonorable to use a proper killing-machine, and prefer to mezza-luna their enemies to death.

I’m excited. I’m hopeful that the cat-and-mouse in the nebula doesn’t last too long, because we’ve still got a bunch of other stuff to get to, but they’ve actually given me faith this year that they know where they’re going with this plot, which is way better than where we were at this point in either of the previous seasons.

Engage.

Some Blundering About Star Trek: Picard 3×01: The Next Generation

I want to be curmudgeonly, but I can’t. They did, so far, pull it off.

Most of the hype leading up to season 3 of Star Trek: Picard has been various forms of, “Oh thank God, they decided to stop fucking around trying something new and just do the TNG reunion nostalgia-fest we wanted the whole time.” If you have been reading my blog’s evolution into a “How is there this much Star Trek for me to talk about?” blog, and I hope you are, you might suspect that this is a marketing tactic that would not work on me so well as on, y’know, the people who keep posting questions on Quora that are thinly veiled rephrases of, “Please help me justify the fact that I can’t stand all the women, gay men, and people of color in Star Trek by making it sound like there’s actually something objectively wrong with it.”

So where are we at the beginning of Picard’s valedictory season? Well, the new Borg and the mysterious transwarp MacGuffin are nowhere to be seen. Rios has been dead for hundreds of years. Soji and Elnor are nowhere to be seen, Jurati is, I assume, off being the Borg Queen. I think Raffi’s got La Sirena for some reason (I didn’t get a good enough look to be sure they aren’t just using the La Sirena sets as a stand-in for “generic civilian ship of the sort a shady ex-starfleet type might use as a private operator”). Stargazer and Excelsior are nowhere to be seen, and we’ll get to Seven in due time.

We actually open on Bevery Crusher, who has become a cool action lady aboard a ship which Memory Alpha tells me is called the “Eleos XII”, though I thought she was saying “Helios” or maybe “Delios”. They’re being attacked by… Let’s go with “Bad Guys”, and she does a lot of murdering them while she waits for the engines to warm up. Her phaser rifle is pump-action, and has both “maim” and “sploosh” modes, switching between them haphazardly. Remember when phasers just had “stun”, “kill” and “disappear”? Okay, I know that they occasionally had to set their phasers to “Extremely nasty death” mode, like when they fought the parasite queen in Starfleet Headquarters’s Inexplicable Boss Fight Room (Seriously, why did they even HAVE a room which was just one big open room with a large throne-like chair and a map and nothing else? The chair had a Starfleet barcode on the back, so this was a normal thing for them to have there, not something specially built for the alien queen). Still. Pump. Action. Phaser. Rifle.

She takes one in the shoulder – fortunately, her attackers have phasers set to “Emulate small caliber gunfire” rather than “Sploosh” – a wound she is unable to treat despite being a doctor, and has to have herself put in stasis. But first, she sends a secret message to Old Man Picard, in the most roundabout and cryptic way she can think of, encrypted with a codec from an unseen adventure (To Rigel VII – the same planet where Pike had recently lost some crew in the original pilot) from the TNG era and obfuscated based on a Borg computer virus that happened off-screen in “The Best of Both Worlds”, transmitted directly to Picard’s old commbadge. I started out thinking it was a little too heavy on the memberberries by having Bev listening to Picard’s old logs when we join her, but I guess it’s actually meant to link back to her invoking the Hellbird virus when reaching out.

But let us pause a moment to contemplate that offscreen during the events of “The Best of Both Worlds”, the Borg infected the Enterprise computer with a virus that… Randomly added 3 to numbers? What, just to dick with them? And they named this virus “Hellfire”? Also, we have an actual canonical example of something mysteriously injecting the actual number 3 into Enterprise systems – that time they got stuck in a time loop with Kelsey Grammer.

Contrary to my fears, Laris has not been quietly killed off-screen; she and Old Man Picard are still very much a thing, and we greet them in the process of packing up the house because she’s got a gig doing security off-world, and her boyfriend is hungry enough for adventure that he looks forward to going with her to… Drink. This scene felt a little clumsy. Also, her job description sounds like a short-term thing, so why is he having the house packed up like he’s moving out? He wants to give Geordi the painting of the D (hee hee. I plan to make “the D” jokes a lot) that’s been hanging over his desk and which is identical to the poster that I think is still hanging in my childhood bedroom unless my mom finally moved it. She stops him.

Apparently, this season is set a few years after last season? (Or maybe not? There’s a ton of inconsistency in the dates of things) Which is a fair way to excuse the status quo being so different, but at the same time, it doesn’t seem to quite mesh with the sense that Laris and Picard’s relationship has a certain newness to it, or that Picard seems not to have kept up with Seven. Or the age of Raffi’s granddaughter.

Still worried they’re gonna fridge Laris in favor of shipping Jean-Luc with Bev, and after last season’s arc, it’s real rough to have him ditch her to go off on another adventure with the old gang, no matter how good a job the universe did at not giving him a choice.

No one from the old gang has heard from Bev in 20 years, and Picard says they parted under a cloud. 20 years would put it around the time of the Mars attack (More or less. I think the Mars attack is more like 17 years ago at this point? Rounding 17 to 20 is fair game in my book, but I bet the nerds are going to insist that they must be different), and I hope they remember that Beverly is from Mars, and probably has feelings about that.

So Picard meets up with Riker at Guinan’s bar because they’re both in town for Frontier Day. Guinan is not present at the moment, but has a lucrative side-line in selling Eaglemoss collectibles, a promotion that has aged like fine wine, what with Eaglemoss going bankrupt between the filming of this episode and the airing of it. She can’t shift the D (hee hee), because no one wants “the fat one”.

Let me tell you, no scene in Star Trek ever gave me tingles the way the reveal of the D (hee hee. Reveal of the D) did back in ’87, but I can totally see Kids These Days not being impressed by the smooth curves and Okudapunk aesthetic in our modern age of harder lines, dimmer lighting, and lens flare.

And… We get to the second Thing From Previous Seasons They Discarded And Made Me Angry: Riker alludes to things not being all fun and happy on Nepenthe, suggesting that Kestra and Deanna are happy to be rid of him. Fuck. Let Riker have his happy retirement, please? If they have it turn out that him taking command of the Zheng He at the end of season 1 reawakened the Starfleet Bug and he’s been neglecting his family, I will be Displeased.

This pretty much brings us to the centerpiece of the episode: the reveal of the Titan-A. Riker describes this as a “refit” of his old ship, but it’s blatantly a completely new ship, a “Neo-Constitution Class”. It looks way more like a Strange New Worlds design than a 24th century design; apparently the actual logic of its design was “What if Starfleet went through a “retro” period at the turn of the century?”

The Titan-A (Letter designators for ships other than Enterprise are a thing now. We had previously seen that in 32nd century on Discovery, but never in the TNG era. I choose to believe that Voyager was the second ship to have its successor get a letter, and once they’d done that, they decided to just make it policy) is not, in my opinion, an especially beautiful ship. Its secondary hull is kind of weird and Grissom-y, and it’s got way too many impulse engines. It’s got a very TOS-movie-era design sensibility, but in NuTrek colors, and while it evokes the original Constitution Class, it doesn’t do so overtly enough to justify selling it as a “New Constitution”.

But the approach scene? Letting the camera slowly make love to the ship as Picard and Riker get a good look at it on the way in? Best “Starship Porn” scene that the modern era has done. It’s everything a Starship Reveal should be, letting us get a good look at the ship and not being too busy or crowded or turning the camera upside-down.

As an aside, I have heard that there’s an explanation for Riker describing the Titan-A as a refit: that it’s essentially a mild sort of con, with the new Titan being built with a few parts salvaged from her predecessor. There’s a popular claim here in the real world – a probably apocryphal one, but one with a chance of being truth-adjacent – that the USS Constellation – a 19th century Sloop-of-War currently on display as a tourist attraction in Baltimore’s inner harbor, was built using timbers salvaged from the 18th century frigate of the same name, and that this might have been done as a legal maneuver to work around congress refusing to authorize a new ship, so the Navy did some creative accounting to “refit” a recently scuttled vessel. Like I said, this is probably complete bullshit, born out of wishful thinking by folks who wanted Baltimore’s tourist attraction to have the same provenance as Boston’s – the older Constellation was a contemporary of the USS Constitution, famously the oldest US Navy vessel in operation.

And then we meet the Titan’s first officer, Commander Seven of-

record needle scratch.

I have not been shy about the fact that I think of “Annika Hansen” as essentially Seven’s deadname. Everyone who uses it in the first two seasons dies. Seven does not want to go back to being the little girl whose parents stranded her in the Delta Quadrant and got her abducted by robot space zombies. She wants to be “Seven”, the identity she forged for herself after her liberation from the collective. So it was upsetting to me when she introduces herself as “Commander Hansen”.

But, again, they pulled it off. Because it’s not just a name; it’s the first hint we get about a man we haven’t met yet: Captain Shaw. And Captain Shaw? Is a dick. He calls Seven by her deadname. He also accuses Seven of siding against him with Picard as a “fellow Ex-Borg”, which is kinda racist? And he hates jazz. And he couldn’t be arsed to greet Picard and Riker. And he couldn’t be arsed to take the chair when they left spacedock. And he doesn’t like bordeaux. And, of course, when Riker and Picard set up a plan to get themselves out to the hinterlands to look for Bev, he just turns them down flat, refusing an order from an Admiral (Picard is retired again? Last year he was running Starfleet Academy. Riker was active reserve last time we saw him, but he doesn’t outrank Shaw).

Seriously, give this man a swagger stick, because he’s got strong Styles energy. I wonder where his arc is going? I assume he will be the person to tell Jean-Luc to go fuck himself this season, but what else? Will he come to see the value of the older generation’s cowboy ways (It’s so strange now to see Shaw dismiss Picard and Riker as being into action and explosions and crash landings, when The Next Generation was for the most part so much more of a regimented, cerebral, thinky sort of Star Trek, and it’s really only the movies where they got to be Big Damn Action Heroes)? Will he be part of the conspiracy? Not actually saying there is a conspiracy, but Bev sure seems to think Starfleet can’t be trusted. All I ask is that there comes a critical moment where Seven gets to say, “I’m not Borg. I’m Ex-Borg, and it’s not Hansen, it’s Seven, you son of a bitch,” then kick him in the face.

I do, though, love how Seven sees right through the subterfuge, and is instantly on-board to steal her own ship as soon as Picard lets her in on the secret.

Here, we pause a second to reflect on the interior of the Titan. It’s… Okay. Too dark, like most starships in this era of “Hey when you use a modern digital camera instead of an old fashioned analogue TV camera, you don’t need to light everything up as bright as the sun.”

I note that like the Stargazer, the bridge of the Titan is set into the middle of a flight of stairs, because there is no OSHA in the 25th century. I am fascinated by the workstations, too, because they have these huge curving screens that are consistent in style as an evolution of the TNG-era LCARS. The scale of them is a little weird though. I find myself imagining the crew constantly damaging their rotator cuffs to reach way up to hit a button all the time.

I think I mentioned that I bought a new car not long ago. Well, new to me; it’s a 2018. It’s my first car with a touchscreen, and its touchscreen is about twice the size of the one in Leah’s car. I test drove a more recent version of the same model, with an even larger touchscreen – basically the whole center console on the 2020 is a touchscreen, and it reminds me a lot of the big workstations on the Titan.

While all this is going on, we check in with our other returning character, Raffi. Who I guess was not the Excelsior’s captain last season, but just the Operations Officer? Because she’s a commander now, same as Seven. She’s also with Starfleet Intelligence, under cover with a secret handler who won’t meet with her in person and is evasive about his true identity and is definitely Worf. Raffi is under cover on M’Talas Prime. Seems early in his showrunning career for Terry Matalas to name planets after himself.

I have no complaints about Raffi’s scenes, unless it turns out that she really did break up with Seven. In particular, I love Raffi’s cover story. Normally, they’d do this thing where they try to sell that she’s gone all piratey and no longer cares about anything but money and her next hit and that she was out for evil. But instead, Raffi’s cover story is, “She fell off the wagon when Seven dumped her, got kicked out of Starfleet over her drug problem, but she’s desperate to get back in, so the reason she’s doing these shady things is that she hopes that a big score will get her back in Starfleet’s good graces.” This is a much more believable cover story than your usual “Nah she just went mercenary,” even if the audience themselves isn’t going to buy it – and they do not ask us to.

The score she’s chasing is a stolen Quantum Tunneling device. That is, a portal gun. I really like the scenes of her trying to interpret the “red lady” clue. I will leave aside how weird it is that her contact sold her the words “the red lady” with no context. I mean, where did he get that? It’s not quite as good as her tracking down Maddox in Season 1, but it’s nice to be reminded that Raffi is a savant at interpreting fragmentary data. That’s the positive side of her (probably neurodivergent) mental configuration that also led to her being a conspiracy theorist (The service record that flashes on-screen for a bit reveals that she stalked Janeway for a while!).

The fact that the Red Lady is a reference to Rachel Garrett is an interesting one, and I can’t help but wonder if our villains’ beef has something to do with defunct timelines – maybe Amanda Plummer is angry about the sheer fucking hubris involved in the Enterprise crew aborting the Klingon War timeline? Though my leading theory at the moment is that the bad guys have a beef over Starfleet allying with the Borg at the end of last season – the references to “The Best of Both Worlds” plus Shaw mentioning the Ex-Borg thing make me think it would be very satisfying for this to be revenge by people who were hurt by the Borg and now feel betrayed that Starfleet has made peace with them.

So the Red Lady is a statue of Rachel Garrett in front of a Starfleet recruiting center, which Raffi figures out just slightly too late to stop it getting Quantum Tunneled into a big hole in the ground, which then politely dumps it from the other end of the hole, way up in the air above. It is a pretty cool visual.

Seven derailing her career to do a solid for Picard and Riker feels nice – we get a very abbreviated sense that she’s chafing as Starfleet – the balance between following orders and following her heart is something that pretty much everyone in NuTrek struggles with. As I’ve said many times, I wish more characters would reach the conclusion that Starfleet wasn’t for them. But I think the arc we’re probably going for here is going to be another rehash of Seven ultimately finding her way while wearing the uniform. I dunno.

We end for this week with Picard and Riker having made it to the Eleos (wasn’t that a toaster pizza?) but under siege from the bad guys, who have returned in a giant sort of scorpion-like ship of a design I feel like I’ve seen before. Kinda like the Shadows from Babylon 5, but more straightforward. Almost thinking there’s a Transformer that turns into it. But our real shock twist is the new character who accosts them and identifies himself as Jack – Beverly’s son. (See? Get it? We called the episode “The Next Generation” and here is the literal son of the previous generation? I mean, actually, it’s pretty cool how the title seems at first to be fan-service reminding us that this season we are just gonna do full-on TNG Reuinion, but it turns out that it connects on multiple levels, with Raffi’s grandkid, and Bev’s son, and Riker’s replacement, and Geordi’s daughter, who is also there, but so far she’s just been a Demora Sulu-style wave and nod; maybe we’ll see more of her later).

Wow. This was a fun, zippy episode, and I really do lament that Picard’s final season has discarded trying to do something new and different in favor of “Let’s just do a proper TNG movie with the same feeling of get-the-band-back-together-after-years-apart that the TOS movies had”. But man, they do such a good job. This episode is so much more focused than the previous seasons of Picard were. And it just feels right. Like, they wham you up front with a title card reading “In the 25th Century…” that evokes the opening of The Wrath of Khan (down to the use of Corporate URW font, which appears only here and in the Star Trek II title cards). The music, which I think is based on the suite from Generations, has a very movie-era feel to it as well, along with a lot of the cinematographic choices. We dispense with the Picard-centric title sequence in favor of a simple title card, and episode titles are on-screen again. Also, along with Corporate URW, we get the return of the Crillee font for the credits. Where seasons 1 and 2 made a point to remind us that this is part of the New Generation of Star Trek – not simply a return to The Next Generation – every little thing they can cram in here seems to scream the message, “The Next Generation is back.” I don’t want to love it, but I kind of do.

Let’s see where they go from here…

PS: The end titles are chock full of little easter eggs on the display panels, revealing that the original Voyager (There’s a “C” now) and the Enterprise-A are both in the fleet museum. Is it too much to hope, I wonder, whether they might get a cameo for Frontier Day?

Yeah, it probably is. But still, would that not be fucking epic?

Fiction: Star Trek: Darkness Visible, Epilogue 3

And here we end, just, by a remarkable coincidence, in time to kick off next week, I assume with the final season of Picard. See you… Out there.

Epilogue 3: Vulcan

The door emitted a little atonal chime in response to Pike’s approach, and he waited pensively. The door opened after an interval long enough to make Pike suspect it was deliberate.

“Stonn,” Pike said, in what he hoped was a neutral tone. It bothered him to be greeted at the door by the man, even if he had made his peace with Stonn’s presence at house S’chnn T’gai.

“Admiral,” Stonn answered. He did not move, did not invite Pike in, nor question his reason for being there. It was an open secret that he was the lover – not that a Vulcan would use the term – of the lady of the house. Pike had taken longer than most to adapt to this reality. But it was logical. She fulfilled the duties demanded by law and tradition. In the decades since Ambassador Sarek and his wife had died to a Romulan-hired assassin at the last Babel conference, she had served as the head of one of Vulcan’s most respected families, and she had cared for her husband when it would have been acceptable to have him quietly institutionalized, even, under Vulcan law, euthanized given his condition. It was too much to ask that she forswear companionship altogether.

“May I speak with her?” Pike asked.

“Very well. Enter.”

As Stonn stepped aside, it occurred to Pike that the Vulcan’s demeanor was even colder than he had grown to expect. Sending her lover to answer the door was dismissive, but of whom? Pike mused grimly that getting what one wanted was not always satisfying.

Stonn guided Pike to the usual sitting room, where T’Pring was waiting for him. Pike bowed. “Greetings, T’Pring,” he said, adopting his most formal tone and trying not to show any emotion, out of respect.

“Chris,” she said. Pike’s long relationship with her let him recognize the familiar and paradoxical mix of warmth and iciness. For T’Pring, their interactions held both value and cost.

Pike sat. Stonn moved to stand beside T’Pring, but she dismissed him with the tiniest nod of her head, and he shrunk away, defeated.

“Has there been any change?” Pike asked.

Her eyebrow twitched. “Chris,” she said, “This is your thirty-seventh visit. In all that time, my husband’s condition has not changed. It is illogical that you persist in hoping for an alternative outcome.”

“Surely, it would be illogical to dismiss as impossible that which is merely highly improbable,” Pike answered.

T’Pring’s eyebrows narrowed slightly. She was not impressed. “The distinction between logic and sophistry can be difficult to discern without extensive training,” she said.

Pike’s composure faltered a bit and he asked the question. “Why did you marry him?”

Her head tilted. The breach of decorum was enough to throw her off guard. Something changed inside T’Pring and she relaxed visibly. Pike and T’Pring had known each other for a significant time even by Vulcan standards, and they were both too tired to continue the ritual.

“It was my duty.”

“Not for love, then,” Pike observed.

“Duty was more important to Spock than love. I choose to honor that. It was the logical thing to do.”

Pike’s eyes flashed briefly toward the archway where Stonn had disappeared. She did not miss it. “It was not my preferred outcome, but the balance of the cost and benefits has been and continues to be favorable. I have honored my commitment to a man I respect, at no serious impediment to the life I have chosen to pursue. May you find your own way as… Pleasant.”

Pike stood, suddenly uncomfortable. “May I see him?”

“Of course.” She rose imperiously, and with a sweep of her hand, guided him to the next room. “Stonn will escort you out when you are finished. Peace, and long life, Chris.”

The response stuck in Pike’s throat. He moved on.

T’Pring’s husband sat motionless, facing the window. “Spock,” Pike said.

The time before he received any response could’ve been hours or days. It was impossible to tell how much he heard or understood. Scans confirmed that his mind was active, but the communication centers of his brain were so badly damaged that even a mind meld couldn’t make contact. Slowly, the chair swiveled toward him.

Pike forced himself not to look away. Spock’s eyes were glassy and unfocused, but they tracked movement sometimes. The lower half of his face was a mass of scar tissue. The Vulcan healers would not perform cosmetic reconstruction without informed consent, which wasn’t possible in Spock’s case.

“We lost Sam,” Pike said. There had been no point in pleasantries with T’Pring, and there was even less with Spock. “And Una’s hurt. I don’t know how bad. Erica too. And there’s others. Another one of my mistakes caught up to me.”

If he was expecting an answer, Pike was disappointed. He went on. “I never got the chance to tell you what happened to me on Borteth. What I saw.” He paused a second.

“Do you remember when I turned down the promotion to Fleet Captain? It was about a year before…” He caught himself. “Before the war. I was supposed to accept it. And six months after that, I was supposed to sacrifice myself to save five cadets in a training accident.”

Pike thought he saw a flicker of a twitch in Spock’s eyebrow, but it was almost certainly wishful thinking. “I thought I could fight fate. I turned down the promotion. Sent some letters. Rearranged some schedules. No one was hurt in the accident. I saved them. I saved more of them than I was supposed to. I thought I won.”

He couldn’t bear it any longer and walked to Spock’s side, looking out the window rather than at his former Number One’s ruined features. “They’re all gone now. The war. Someone told me once that time is the fire in which we…” He trailed off.

“It won’t let me go. Ever since outpost four, I’ve felt like I traded your life for mine. And there’s been others over the years. Sometimes it feels like everyone I get close to. Batel. Sonak. Will. Sam. They don’t always die; some just carry the scars. Nyota. Christine. Una. You.

“This whole world feels wrong, Spock. These last twenty years, the war, all of it. The Federation is doing things that go against everything we stand for. Sam’s nephew, he was working on a weapon. Like nothing… Spock, it’s a planet-killer. I saw what it could do. It… It could be a tool for creation, but never for peace. And if the Federation gets something like that, I don’t know how we live with what it would turn us into.”

He turned back to the door. “I’m sorry I failed you, old friend. I’m sorry I traded your life for mine. This isn’t right. None of this is right. And I’m going to fix it.”

He hesitated a moment, then walked back to the door. He summoned the courage to look Spock in the eye. “The Federation will never allow it. They’ll try to stop me. But I have to end this. I have to change things. I’m going back to Boreth. I don’t care what it takes or what it costs, I’m going to make them give me a chance to change things. To stop the war, to save you, to save everyone. Even if it kills me.”

Pike turned and left. As the door slid shut behind him, the light on Spock’s life support chair blinked in time to an audible alert. BEEP BEEP.

 

Fiction: Star Trek: Darkness Visible, Epilogue 2

Epilogue 2: Vindication

“The council is now in session,” President Roth declared. “If you will all take your seats. Bring them in.”

Una Chin-Riley had changed from her prison uniform into simple civilian clothes. She was escorted by Starfleet security officers, but was unbound. Her eyes were covered by a dark visor. Starfleet Medical couldn’t determine yet whether her Ilyrian enhancements would allow her damaged eyes to heal, and the legal restrictions on genetic augmentation complicated the question of whether she could receive clonal or cybernetic implants. Likewise, the scarring of her face and hands had been triaged, but lengthy surgeries would be needed to restore her appearance and mobility.

Erica Ortegas held her elbow to guide her. Ortegas would be standing trial herself soon, for the loss of the Reliant, but that was largely a formality. She had been offered medical discharge, and was inclined to take it. There was still hope that Starfleet medical could repair the brain damage and restore vision in her bad eye – for now, she wore a metal visor that bypassed the damaged nerves – but the psychological scars would take much longer to heal. At her other side stood Jim Kirk. They’d never met, but Kirk hoped his support would mean something to the council. The others who’d served with Una on Enterprise, thirty years ago now, watched from the gallery. Pike’s absence weighed heavily on Una, but he hadn’t returned to Earth yet. She also wished La’an could be with her, but Kirk’s first officer felt that the last thing to help Una’s chances was a Noonien-Singh in the courtroom.

“Una Chin-Riley,” the President said, “You stand accused of unlawful escape from court-ordered confinement on Salius 6. Of aiding and abetting an act of piracy in the theft of the Starship Reliant. Of conspiracy to commit theft of classified Federation research materials. Of aiding and abetting in the willful destruction of Starfleet property, specifically the USS Reliant. And finally, of providing tactical intelligence and assistance in an attack on a Starfleet vessel, the USS Enterprise, resulting in loss of life. How do you plead?”

Una held her chin high, as best she could. “Not guilty, Mister President.”

“So entered,” President Roth said. “Logs from USS Enterprise having established a preponderance of evidence for physical duress or coercion and in light of the medical reports of Doctors M’Benga, McCoy and Chapel, the charges against you are summarily dismissed.”

Una closed her eyes and let her shoulders relax slightly. The president continued. “The council recognizes your efforts, and your sacrifice, in defense of the USS Enterprise. The ship and its crew owe their lives to you. Even as the incident with Khan reminds us of the dangers posed by genetic engineering, and the reasons for the Federation’s restrictions on the practice, your actions show us that there are other possibilities, and that other cultures might find a different balance. And the ideals that our Federation stands for means that we must balance the safety of the many with the rights of the few. You exemplify the highest ideals of Starfleet, in spite of the treatment you have received under our laws. And for that reason, the previous judgment against you, for the falsification of official records to gain admission to Starfleet Academy in contravention of the Shengzen Convention, is vacated.”

A murmur went up through the assembly. Many were still reluctant, particularly so soon after news of Khan’s escape had broken, but the audience clearly approved; it would have been politically impossible to return her to prison after saving the Enterprise. “Furthermore-” he had to raise his voice over the crowd, “Furthermore! It is the judgment of this court that section seventeen of the Starfleet charter takes precedence over the prohibitions of Federation Eugenics Code 3.” The murmur in the court was louder this time, even though only about half of the gallery understood the technical language. The President explained: “In recognition of your record of distinguished service in Starfleet, your previous judgment having been vacated, you are granted full citizenship in the United Federation of Planets.”

The crowd was more torn. Una herself had expected no more than repatriation to Ilyria. Instead, she was not only free, but free to remain in the Federation. But the President still wasn’t finished. “And additionally, in light of the severity of the penalties already levied against you, your commission in Starfleet is restored. Una Chin-Riley, we can not give back the years of your life that our collective bigotry took from you, but we can grant you the rank of Captain, and, pending medical clearance, return you to active duty status.”

If there were any sounds of protest from the audience, Una didn’t hear it over the prolonged cheers from her friends and supporters. The applause drowned out some of the president’s closing remarks as well, which at this point were a formality. It was by no means a sure thing; there was a devil hiding in the details of “pending medical clearance”. Starfleet could massage the parameters of medical clearance to keep her out of active duty, and with her disabilities, it might even be the right choice.

But she had been vindicated. Even if she never set foot on a starship again, her record would show that she had done her duty and served with honor. That it wasn’t a crime to simply be who and what she was. She leaned toward Kirk and whispered the last question that weighed on her. “Where’s Chris?”

Fiction: Star Trek: Darkness Visible, Epilogue 1

A note on the timeline: I take no stand on the relative ordering of these epilogues, beyond the self-evident fact that Epilogue 1 antecedes Epilogue 2. It makes far more logical sense for Epilogue 3 to come first, but we must allow these little storytelling aberrations.

Epilogue 1: Vengeance

Uhura adjusted her earpiece. “Approach control, this is Enterprise. Ready for docking maneuvers.”

The voice of the spacedock controller came back over the intercom, “Copy. Enterprise is cleared to dock.”

“Lock on,” Kirk said.

Sulu touched his controls. “Systems locked.”

Kirk nodded to Uhura. “Spacedock, you have control.”

On the viewscreen, the doors of the massive space station slowly parted. “Affirmative, Enterprise. Enjoy the ride. Welcome home.”

Under automatic control, the damaged ship maneuvered slowly into the space station. Within the enormous dome, drones, shuttles and repair craft buzzed around, servicing the various ships. Enterprise herself would require transfer to orbital drydock given the amount of damage that would need repair, but first there would be a transfer of the Enterprise’s trainee crew, of the survivors of Regula I and the Reliant, and there would likely be some kind of reckoning over the fates of Khan, of Genesis, and of all the others. An admiral and two captains were dead, not to mention dozens of cadets and scientists.

The doors closed behind the Enterprise and the ship maneuvered toward its assigned berthing point. They passed just close enough to the control tower that Kirk could make out the mass of onlookers, crowded at the viewports to see the legendary USS Enterprise limping home after the historic confrontation with one history’s greatest villains, back from the dead after hundreds of years. The ship turned, and another ship filled the viewscreen.

“Would you look at that,” Uhura breathed. The ship was more than twice the size of Enterprise, and while its general design was similar, the large ship had an undenyable hostile look to it, Enterprise’s curves replaced with harsh angles, and its soft gray tones replaced with matte black that gave the dreadnought the air of a scar, a jagged blackness cutting through the lights of spacedock around it.

“My friends,” Kirk said, grimly, “The great experiment. Vengeance.” He looked to Carol, who had joined them on the bridge for the last leg of their journey. “Admiral Marcus’s legacy. Ready for trial runs.” Carol looked uncomfortable.

Erica Ortegas had taken the navigator’s position. Despite her injuries, she’d wanted to be present for Enterprise’s return to Earth. Saavik had already departed, along with David Marcus, picked up en route by a science vessel bound for the Genesis planet. “They say she’s got twin type-eleven phaser cannons, and she can fire them at full warp,” she said with obvious awe.

Sulu rolled his eyes. “They say if my husband had wheels, he’d be a wagon.”

Enterprise, stand by for final docking procedures,” the controller said.

Uhura touched her earpiece again. “Captain? I’m receiving a message-” she looked surprise. “It’s from the Federation Council. We’ve… We’re being ordered to prepare Commander Chin-Riley for immediate transfer to Federation Legal Services…. To stand trial.”

A pall fell over the bridge. It was broken by Xon. “If I were human,” he said, cautiously, “I believe my response would be, ‘Go to hell.'”

Everyone stopped and turned to the Vulcan. “If I were human,” he clarified.

 

Fiction: Star Trek: Darkness Visible, Part 19

Previously on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

“Bones says she’ll pull through,” Kirk said as he took the seat opposite Pike in the Admiral’s cabin. “That Ilyrian immune system. But it’s too soon to say how fully she’ll recover.”

“How are you holding up?” Pike asked.

“I… Take comfort in my duty. There were a lot of things Sam and I didn’t talk about. I guess I always thought there would be time later. You know, until I heard you do it, I didn’t even know he liked to be called Sam? I thought I was the only one who did it.”

With a little bit of difficulty, Pike smiled. “Did he ever tell you about the time we encountered an ancient Earth probe that had been uplifted with alien technology?”

Kirk’s brow furrowed. “This is the V’ger incident?”

Surprise flashed briefly on Pike’s face. “Actually, no, this was before that. I bring it up because the reason we got out of that was that he had a similar name to the probe’s original designer. We were able to trick it into thinking Sam was its creator.”

Kirk managed a little laugh, but it was short-lived. Pike looked to his display pad. Communications with Starfleet had been reestablished and the first news updates had just come in. “Romulan raid in sector 30. The USS Cornwall was destroyed. First officer was Maat Al-Salah.”

Kirk shook his head. “Someone you know?”

“His father was Hansen Al-Salah. Outpost Four?”

The memory was more distant for Jim, but it came back. “Oh,” he said. “I didn’t know you kept in touch.”

“I didn’t really,” Pike said. “I think it was too hard for Maat. But I followed his career. This war,” he said, wryly.

“There are times,” Jim admitted, “When I can understand why the Federation would be looking at a project like Genesis.” At Pike’s horrified expression, he quickly added, “I’m not disappointed we failed to recover it.”

Pike looked out the window. It was raining in the simulation of Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest. “How soon do they need you back on the Reno?”

“It will be a while. Even without the damage they took when Reliant exploded, it turns out the new engine design couldn’t handle the stress of sustained warp. They’ll need to retrofit the whole propulsion system.”

Pike was about to say something when the door to the captain’s stateroom beeped. “Come,” he said. David Marcus entered and stood awkwardly near where Pike and Kirk were solemnly contemplating untouched drinks. Kirk turned the antique copy of To Kill a Mockingbird over in his hands. He reached into his pocket and retrieved his glasses, then saw one lens had cracked at some point. He discarded them on the table.

Pike spoke first. “Doctor Marcus,” he said, “Captain Kirk just told me about your grandfather. I’m sorry.”

David gave Kirk a guilty look. “We’ve all lost family today,” he said.

“Doctor,” Pike said, cautiously, “Starfleet Command considers Genesis a top-priority project. Can you confirm that all your work was destroyed with the prototype? No backups, nothing left behind on Regula?”

Before David could answer, Pike continued. “Given what you know now, what you’ve seen of the potential for destruction if the Genesis device were… abused. Starfleet would prefer to see your research recovered, but they would… begrudgingly… accept your assurance that no one else, no one with… less noble goals… would be able to recover it. I’m sure your grandfather gave you some sense of how dangerous that would be.”

David thought for a second. “No backups, sir. We’d have to start over from scratch. It… It could take years. Or longer.”

Pike nodded. “Understood.”

He stood. “Jim,” he said, “I need you to handle recovery at Regula and Ceti Alpha Five.”

“Admiral?”

“There’s some urgent business I need to attend to. I’ll meet you back on Earth.”

Once Pike left, David turned to Kirk. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

Kirk offered him his still-untouched drink. David declined. “I’m sorry about your friend,” Kirk said.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” David said. “I was wrong about you, and I’m sorry.”

Kirk smiled painfully. “Is that what you wanted to say?”

“I thought… If you had a few minutes, maybe you could tell me a little bit about him. About my uncle.”


“Acting first officer’s log. Stardate 8141.6. Starship Enterprise departing for Ceti Alpha Five to pick up the crew of USS Reliant. All is well, and yet, I can’t help wondering about the family I leave behind. Sam once told me that a long time ago, he worked for someone who liked to say that there are always possibilities. And if Genesis is indeed life from death, I must return to this place again.”

The shuttlecraft Copernicus cleared the damaged shuttle bay and jumped to warp. “The admiral’s shuttle is clear, sir. Engine room is reporting main power nominal.”

“Thank you, Commander Uhura,” Kirk said, taking the captain’s chair.

“You know, if they end up decommissioning the Reno, we should ask about transferring over here,” McCoy said. “The chair suits you.”

Kirk forced a smile. “There’s something about this ship,” he said.

“It wouldn’t be the Enterprise without a Kirk on the bridge,” La’an said.

“He’s not really dead,” McCoy said, comfortingly, “Not as long as you remember him.”

Kirk looked out into the vastness beyond the viewscreen. “You never really know a man,” he said, “Until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them.”

McCoy gave him a questioning look. “Something Sam was trying to tell me. On my birthday.”

“You okay, Jim?” McCoy asked. “How do you feel?”

He took a deep breath. “Young. I feel young.” He pointed a crooked finger to the viewscreen. “Mister Sulu-” he paused a moment, considering his words. “Hit it.”


This concludes the story proper. But come back again next time for the over-long epilogue, which exists largely because at this time, I do not think I am likely to write a sequel.

At this time…

Fiction: Star Trek: Darkness Visible, Part 18

Previously on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

Jim got to main engineering ahead of Pike, in time to hold him back from rushing the safety door. “You’ll flood the whole compartment!” warned the chief.

“Una?” he asked.

McCoy shook his head. “I’m a doctor, not a fortune teller. That much radiation, I just don’t know. If she were human, she’d be dead five times over already.”

Pike leaned on the transparent partition. “Una!” he called out again.

She stirred, her head turning broadly toward the sound of his voice. She clumsily pulled herself to her feet, pressing her whole forearm to the console rather than grabbing it with her fingers. She wobbled, then collected herself. She tugged at her prison uniform, straightening it as best she could, though again, she used her arms rather than her fingers. Una stumbled toward the transparent wall, and as she approached, Pike could see her eyes were unfocused. He had to force himself not to look away from the burns that marred her face.

She misjudged the distance slightly and walked into the barrier that separated them. Her cheek left a wet mark where it touched the wall. She put a hand up to steady herself. It too streaked the surface. Her fingers splayed limply: she had no fine motor control left, and her skin was raw and weeping. She rested her forehead against the wall and tried to turn her eyes to where she imagined Pike’s would be. He moved to meet her vacant gaze.

“Ship?” she asked, in a raspy voice. “Out of danger?”

“Yes,” Pike said. He placed his hand to match hers.

“And La’an?”

“Recovering,” Pike said.

Una nodded. Or perhaps just wobbled. She let herself slide down the wall into a crouch. Pike followed her movements.

“All right then,” she said. “Took you long enough to come get me.”

“I’m sorry. I should have tried harder.”

“You had your mission.”

“You should’ve been my mission,” Pike said.

“Chris…” Una said, “I’m scared.”

“I’m here, Number One,” he said.

“It’s time.”

Pike looked over his shoulder. “Vent the chamber,” he said. “The second he can get a lock, have Chief Kyle beam her directly to sickbay. Tell M’Benga to prep for radiation and decompression sickness.”

Both McCoy and the chief engineer started to protest, but Jim Kirk reacted without hesitation, putting in the call to the transporter room even as he disabled the safety interlock that protested at the command to purge the irradiated atmosphere while the engine core was occupied.

Una managed to get back on her feet. Her hair flew wildly around her, blown by the rush of air as the room depressurized. Her exposed skin began to glow bright red. “I’ll be damned,” McCoy muttered. “Ilyrian healing trance. Never thought I’d live to see the day.”

“Bones, will it work?” Kirk asked.

“I’m just an old country doctor,” he said. “This? This is more like magic. I don’t know.”

“I’ve got a lock,” came the voice of the transporter chief. “Energizing.” The red glow began to fade, replaced by the blue one of transport.

Kirk helped Pike back to his feet. “My God, Jim,” he said, “So many people. Reliant. Regula. Sallius. Erica. Una. Sam. What have I done?”

Kirk thought for a second. “What you always do,” he finally said. “What you had to do. You faced the no-win scenario and saved as many people as you could.”

Pike turned away. “Not enough,” he said. “Never enough.”


Admiral Pike stood at the end of the loading railway as the mechanical arm lowered the mark 6 torpedo casing onto the track. To his right, Sulu lifted the Federation flag from the casket and stepped away. McCoy put a hand on Jim Kirk’s shoulder. To Pike’s left, Christine Chapel held Uhura’s hand supportively. Even Saavik struggled with her composure.

“We are assembled here today,” Pike started, “To pay respects to our honored dead. When you are a Starfleet Captain, you believe in service. In sacrifice. In compassion. And in love. We stand here today because of the sacrifice of so many people. They did not believe the sacrifice a vain or empty one, and we will not dishonor them by questioning it.”

He stepped aside and allowed Kirk to move forward. “George Samuel Kirk Junior never sought his own command. He was a scientist. I know he would be honored to be laid to rest on a strange, new world, one his sacrifice helped to create and nourish. Of my brother, I can say only this: few among us have been called to give so much, or to face so much pain. And if anything awaits us in that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns, I hope you find peace, Sam.” He placed his hand on the casket. “Give my love to Aurelan and the boys.”

Sulu called the honor guard to attention. A dirge played on bagpipes as the casing moved slowly down the rails into the torpedo launcher, where Enterprise fired it in a pale red arc to the Genesis planet below.

 

Fiction: Star Trek: Darkness Visible, Part 17

Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

On the bridge, Kirk looked to Saavik. “Time?”

“Three minutes, thirty seconds,” she said.

“Distance from the epicenter?”

Sulu answered, “Four hundred kilometers.” He paused, and asked, “We’re not going to make it, are we?”

Kirk looked to his son. David shook his head.

“Captain,” Xon said with surprise, “Main power is nominal.”

“I’m stealing your engineer,” Kirk said. “Go, Sulu!”

The Enterprise shot from the nebula just seconds before the nebula ceased to exist, contracting in the face of the Genesis wave. The diffuse cloud of ionized gasses imploded, millions of years of stellar evolution compressed into a few seconds. Where the nebula had been, a rocky planet remained, glowing red-hot with the energy of its accelerated creation.

“Status on Reliant?” Kirk demanded.

“I have them, sir,” Saavik said. “The ship is starting to break up.”

“Sulu, get us into transporter range.”

“I’m not sure I can, sir,” Sulu said. “They’ve got a big head-start and we’re still limited to low warp.”

Damn. He turned to Uhura. “Is Reliant still jamming our transmissions?”

“Intermittently,” Uhura said. “I’m still having trouble getting through.”

“Open a channel on band sigma three,” Kirk said.

“Sir? That’s an obsolete smuggler frequency. No one’s used it in decades.”

“I’m hoping Khan wouldn’t bother jamming it,” Kirk said. “And I know someone who might be listening, if we’re lucky.”

“Channel open,” Uhura said, then, surprised, “I’m receiving a hail.”

She put it on speaker. A thickly accented voice said, “This is USS Reno. Is that you, keptin?”

Kirk smiled. “About time we caught a break. Reno, the Reliant has been hijacked. Can you assist?”

“Keptin, we are conducting engine calibrations, but have negative tactical capability.”

“That’s okay. They’re not going to put up a fight. They’re about to break up, but Admiral Pike is aboard. We’re too slow to make the rescue. Think you could test those new engine upgrades?”

“Understood, we have your location and are preparing to attempt transwarp.”


Khan punched Pike in the jaw. A few minutes ago, the punch would’ve easily broken it, but Khan was far past running on fumes. It was still enough to make Pike see stars. He shoved Khan away.

“The unconquerable will!” Khan screamed. “Study of revenge, immortal hate!” He threw another punch, but Pike blocked it and countered with a body-blow. “Courage never to submit or yield-”

An uppercut silenced him for a moment. “Khan!” Pike roared, “It’s over. Look around you! Everyone’s dead and this ship is about to explode.”

“Never can true reconcilement grow where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep!” Khan yelled and jumped toward Pike again. “Farewell hope! Farewell fear! Farewell remorse! All good to me is lost, evil be thou my good.”

Pike braced himself against the railing and kicked with both feet as Khan came for him. “I,” he yelled as the kick connected, “Have had!” he kicked again, “Enough!” One more kick. “Of you!” One last kick sent Khan spinning into a pile of debris.

Pike wiped blood from the corner of his mouth. Things inside him were broken, he could feel it; he would need medical attention soon. But he could still walk for the moment. He staggered toward the helm. Reliant was tearing herself apart. Before he could shut down the engines, Khan was back on his feet, he swung a piece of wreckage, but not at Pike; it hit the helm controls, smashing the interface.

Pike gave a quick look around the bridge. The devastation was severe. There wasn’t an intact console left that could issue the shutdown command, and he doubted he had time to reach auxiliary command.

“Grim death,” Khan said, wryly. He fell to the floor, at last too spent to continue the fight. “My son and foe. We die together, Christopher. As it must be.”

Pike looked to the viewscreen. He wasn’t even sure if Enterprise had survived. How much had this cost him, how many more deaths on his head?

Then he felt it. He turned back to meet Khan’s widening eyes. “Not, I think, today,” Pike said. “Enjoy your reign in hell.”


Kirk watched helplessly as Reliant’s saucer began to shear apart in the unstable warp field. Enterprise was closing the distance, but not fast enough. Then, suddenly, from out of nowhere, a modified Sombra-class ship appeared ahead of them. It traced out a hyperbolic arc toward Reliant. Just as the three ships reached syzygy, Reliant exploded. The Reno was sent spinning from the force of the explosion, and even Enterprise, farther out, was shaken. “Pavel!” Kirk shouted.

“I got him!” came the response from the Reno. “I got him! Keptin, Admiral Pike is aboard. We are ready to beam him over to you.”

Kirk slumped into the captain’s chair and sighed. “Mister Saavik, stand down red alert. And-”

There was another chirp from the intercom. Bones. “Jim, if Admiral Pike’s back aboard, you need to get him down to main engineering. Now.”

Sick Day

I have The Rona, so I’m not writing this week. Instead, enjoy this factoid:

We are equidistant in history from the births of Benedict Arnold and Jean-Luc Picard.

Also, though this fact has not been verified by official sources, when the pope dies, there’s a special hammer they whack him with just to make sure he’s properly dead.

Some popes get whacked harder than others, I assume.

Fiction: Star Trek: Darkness Visible, Part 16

Previously on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging…

Aboard the Enterprise, the Genesis torpedo began to glow. A fine mist issued from it as it pulsed with internal energy. On the bridge, Xon announced, “Captain Kirk, I am detecting an unusual energy pattern. It’s like nothing I’ve seen before.”

“From Reliant?” Kirk asked.

“Negative. From us, sir. Deck seven.”

The intercom beeped. “Bridge? This is Chief Kyle. Something weird is happening with the device Admiral Pike had beamed aboard.”

David Marcus had joined them on the bridge as Pike was leaving. He looked at Xon’s console. “That’s the Genesis wave,” he said. “It’s on a build-up to detonation.”

“How soon?” Kirk asked.

“We encoded four minutes.”

“How do we stop it?”

“You can’t.”

“Can we beam it into space? Blow it up?”

David shook his head. “Transporters won’t be able to get a lock now that it’s active. If you damage the casing, it will just release the wave immediately.”

“Transporter room,” Kirk shouted, “Get that thing to the nearest airlock. Engineering, I need warp power in three minutes or we’re all dead.” He pointed to Uhura. “Raise the admiral.”

“Channel open, sir.”

“Chris, Khan activated Genesis. We have less than four minutes.”

Kirk was surprised when a voice he didn’t recognize responded. “This is Una,” she said. “We have a medical emergency. Get us out of here.”

Seconds later, Una and La’an materialized in Enterprise’s main transporter room.

“Number one?” Kyle said, surprised.

“I’ll explain later,” Una said, carrying La’an from the pad. “Where’s Chris?”

“I only have partial power,” Kyle said. “It will take me a second to get a lock.”

M’Benga appeared at the door. “Una?” he said. “You’re hurt.”

“Later!” she repeated, shifting La’an into his arms. She turned and noticed the Genesis torpedo, now glowing brightly. Two cadets were struggling to lift it.

“You need to get that thing off the ship, now,” Una said. “Here.” She pushed the cadets aside and hoisted the heavy device onto her shoulders. The strain of carrying it made her head wound start bleeding again. She couldn’t manage a full sprint with such a heavy load, but she carried it as fast as she could to the emergency hatch. She dropped it, retreated past the next emergency bulkhead, and slammed her hand into the controls. Heavy doors sealed on either side of the section of corridor in front of the hatch before it blew off into space, the Genesis device carried with it out of the ship.

She pushed the intercom button. “Bridge,” she said, “Genesis is off the ship. Get us out of here.”

Una didn’t recognize the voice of Jim Kirk when he responded, “We still don’t have warp power.” Una pressed her hand behind her ear to check if she’d stopped bleeding and looked down the corridor in the direction of the turbolift.


Khan’s strength was flagging. His augmented body had limits, and he had blown far past them. Pike got in a lucky punch that spun him. He fell onto the helm console. Pike took the moment’s respite to draw his communicator. “Enterprise, security to the transporter room. Lock on my signal. Two to beam up.”

“Just a few more seconds, Admiral,” came Chief Kyle’s voice.

Pike prepared to grab onto Khan. If they managed to survive this, outrun the Genesis wave, he was determined to make him stand trial for Salius and Regula.

“Which way shall I fly, infinite wrath and infinite despair,” Khan rasped. “Which way I fly is Hell, myself am hell.”

Then Pike saw the display. “Main power nominal.” Khan smacked his hand into the controls clumsily. They both fell to the deck as Reliant threatened to shake itself apart when its remaining nacelle lit, just barely formed an unstable warp field, and flung the ship superluminal.


“I just lost transporter lock,” Kyle’s voice rattled.

“They will not be able to maintain warp for long,” Xon observed. “I estimate the ship will suffer catastrophic hull failure within six minutes.”

“That’s two minutes longer than we have,” Kirk said. “Sulu, back us away, best speed possible. Engineering, where the hell’s that power?”

Below, Una didn’t have time for a radiation suit, but she took the gloves from an incapacitated cadet. Doctor McCoy grabbed her shoulder as she approached the radiation door before the warp core.

“You out of your mind?” he protested. “No human can tolerate the radiation that’s in there.”

Una gave him a withering look. “Starfleet has been very clear that I am not human,” she said.

“You’re not going in there,” McCoy maintained.

She looked at the chief, slumped in a chair. “Maybe not,” she said. “This is the chief? Can you bring him ’round?”

McCoy turned away to look at him. “Well I don’t think that he-”

She sucker-punched him as he turned back, then caught him as he fell. She gently lowered him to the deck, then returned to the radiation door. The chief revived just as the door sealed behind her. “Who the hell are you?” he shouted through the transparent partition. “Get out of there!”

It was hot as hell in the central compartment of the engine, and the radiation burned. Una heard the engineer’s muffled pleas and obscenities through the partition as she heaved the cover off the focusing chamber. A column of bright white light shot from the open core, and Una felt hotter still as her body desperately tried to repair the damage she was doing to it.

She stared into the column of incandescent gasses. The last thing she saw, before she saw nothing at all, was the dilithium matrix. The problem was straightforward enough. The heat had deformed the tritanium mounts that held the crystals in alignment. She’d helped Khan compromise the cooling system; she was responsible for the damage. The normal fix would be to shut down the engine, vent the radiation, let the entire system cool down, remove the mountings and replace them or machine them back into their original shape. It would take hours, if not days. They had about ninety seconds. She had to take her gloves off. She reached blindly into the column of gasses, found the dilithium crystals by feel. Her hands were starting to go numb. She pushed hard, visualizing the angle of the crystals as she bent the metal. Blind, and rapidly losing her sense of touch as well, she had to rely on dead reckoning to line the crystals up. When she found the spot, the plasma stream reignited, pushing her backward.