Altair IV filled the main viewscreen.
From orbit the planet had been beautiful in a way that never looked altogether real, its atmosphere scattering the light of Altair into shades of emerald that deepened toward the horizon. Kirk had thought so the first time he saw it, five days ago, before he knew what lay underneath it. Bands of light moved under the cloud cover where no light should have been, spreading through the crust faster than any natural process could have carried them.
No one on the bridge spoke.
Kirk stood beside the command chair. Altaira was a few feet away at the railing. McCoy had suggested she wait below, and she had refused. The doctor had argued with her only once. After that he had stayed close enough to reach her if she needed him and far enough away that she would not feel watched. Kirk was grateful for it, and said nothing.
At the science station, Spock bent over his hooded viewer, the familiar blue light washing across his face as his hands moved from one control to the next. "The destabilization has reached the mantle, Captain. Structural failure is accelerating."
Kirk heard him and kept his eyes on the screen.
A white fracture appeared across the southern continent. At first it was scarcely visible, a hairline on the face of the world. Then it widened, racing across the surface with impossible speed. A second line opened farther north, then a third. The planet was not being torn apart. It was pulling itself apart from the inside, as though something very deep in it had let go.
Altaira's fingers tightened on the railing.
Sulu glanced down at his board. "Shock wave approaching, sir. Recommend we withdraw to a safer distance."
Kirk looked at Altaira. Her eyes had not left the screen. At a safer distance Altair IV would be one more bright point among the stars, and she would lose the last of her world from too far off to watch it go. The Enterprise could take a shock wave.
"Hold position, Mr. Sulu."
Sulu hesitated only a fraction of a second. "Holding."
The bridge lighting dimmed as the viewscreen flared, and for an instant Altair IV became a sphere of white-green fire. The Enterprise shuddered under the first wave of energy. It was not enough to throw anyone off a station. It was enough to remind everyone on the bridge that they were not watching an image. It was happening, and it was close.
"Compensators holding," Sulu said.
Spock had not lifted his eyes from the viewer. "Major fragments are separating from the planetary mass. Gravitational cohesion is failing. At the present rate of disintegration..."
"Spock," McCoy said.
The Vulcan looked up.
"Not now."
Kirk understood a moment before Spock did. The next sentence would have been a figure: minutes, perhaps seconds, a precise accounting of how long the young woman at the railing had left to look at her home. Something passed across Spock's face, so slight that Kirk might have missed it had he not known him so well. The Vulcan's eyes went briefly to Altaira, then back to McCoy.
"Understood, Doctor."
He touched a control, and the data he had been about to speak aloud appeared instead on the small monitor at Kirk's elbow. Kirk did not need to read it.
On the screen, a continent broke apart.
Altaira stepped forward. "My house was there."
Kirk barely heard her. She lifted one hand toward the viewscreen, not pointing at any place in particular, reaching instead for a geography that no longer existed.
"The garden was on the western side. From my room you could see the ridge after sunset."
Another section of the planet went to incandescent dust, and her hand came slowly down.
"And the lake."
That word cost her more than the others.
Kirk watched the last recognizable curve of Altair IV disappear. Mountains, seas, the house and its gardens, the vast underground world beneath them: all of it was fragments now, spreading into the dark. Where the planet had been there was only debris, lit by the distant light of its sun.
For several seconds nobody on the bridge moved.
Kirk had stood on this bridge through losses that were his to answer for, and he had learned how to carry them. This was not his, and he could not have stopped it. It settled on him anyway, the way such things always did, because he was the captain and she was aboard his ship.
He turned to her, and she looked up at him.
There was nothing he could say that would give back what she had lost. He knew that before he opened his mouth. But there were words that belonged to a moment like this one, and he found, to his own surprise, that he had them.
"Alta, a long time from now, longer than either of us can imagine, humanity will climb to where the Krell once stood, at the height of everything they achieved and everything they lost."
She did not look away.
"And when that day comes, your father's name will shine again like a beacon in the galaxy."
Her eyes held his.
"It will remind us of what the Krell forgot," he said, more quietly. "That no matter how high we climb, we are not gods."
Altaira turned back to the screen without answering.
He had not seen Uhura leave her station. She crossed the bridge and stopped beside Altaira, close but not touching.
"Alta. Would you like to come with me?"
For a moment Altaira could not pull herself away from what was left of the planet. Then she nodded. Uhura did not take her arm. She simply waited until Altaira was ready to move, then walked beside her to the turbolift.
The doors closed behind them.
Kirk returned to the command chair. Around him the bridge was coming back to life: the chirp of instruments, Sulu and Chekov trading navigational figures in low voices, Spock resuming the work that still had to be done. That was what officers did, Kirk thought, when there was nothing left to do about what had already happened. They did the next thing.
"Mr. Sulu, take us out of the system. One-quarter impulse until we're clear of the debris field."
"Aye, Captain."
"Once we're clear, lay in a course for Starbase Eleven."
The Enterprise came slowly about, and the debris wheeled off the edge of the screen.
McCoy rested a hand on the back of Kirk's chair. "You all right?"
Kirk looked up at him.
McCoy sighed. "Fine. Stupid question."
Spock came down from the science station with a data slate full of sensor readings. "Captain, Starfleet Command will require a complete record of the destruction and of the events that preceded it. The scientific analysis alone will be extensive."
"They'll get it."
"And naturally," McCoy said, "you're going to sit up all night writing it."
Kirk's eyes stayed on the screen. "Not all of it."
Spock waited.
"But there's one part I'm not handing to anyone else."
"The command report," Spock said.
"The whole story. As well as I can tell it."
McCoy looked from Kirk to the receding field of debris. "That's a hell of a story to fit into a report."
"I know."
Kirk rose. "Mr. Spock, you have the conn."
"Yes, Captain." Spock hesitated, which was rare enough that Kirk stopped. "The scientific appendices will be complete before you require them. You need not wait on them tonight."
It was, Kirk understood, the closest Spock would ever come to telling him to rest. "Thank you, Mr. Spock."
He started for the turbolift, then paused. "Bones? Coming?"
McCoy shook his head. "Later. I want to look in on Alta once Uhura's had some time with her."
Kirk nodded. That was McCoy all over: he knew when to be there and, rarer in a doctor, when to wait.
Kirk stepped into the turbolift alone. "Deck five."
* *
For the first two decks, neither of them spoke.
Altaira stood with her hands clasped in front of her, so tightly that the knuckles had gone pale. Uhura let the hum of the lift fill the space between them. She had spent enough years listening, at her board and away from it, to know when a silence should be left alone.
"Do people always know?" Altaira asked at last.
"Know what?"
"When they've seen their home for the last time." Her eyes stayed on the doors. "I didn't."
Uhura said nothing.
"I thought I was leaving for a few hours. A day, perhaps." Altaira swallowed. "I left a book open on the table. There was a dress over the back of my chair. One of my father's instruments was out in the study, and I told him I would put it away later."
Her voice faltered.
"There is no later."
Uhura reached past her and stopped the lift.
Altaira turned, startled.
"We don't have to get there yet," Uhura said.
"Is that permitted?"
"Probably not." Uhura considered the control panel. "Don't tell Mr. Spock."
The car hung motionless between decks. For a moment Altaira only stared at her. Then some of the tension went out of her shoulders.
"My father used to say I left every door in the house open."
Uhura smiled a little. "Did you?"
"Always."
"And did he complain?"
"Always." The memory nearly brought a smile to Altaira's face. It was gone almost as soon as it came, but Uhura saw it. "He would follow me through the house, closing them. He said one day I would let the whole planet in."
She looked down.
"I was angry with him."
"You had reasons."
"I loved him."
"You had reasons for that, too."
Altaira's eyes filled. "I don't know which one I'm supposed to feel."
"You don't have to choose."
Altaira looked away, but the silence that followed was a different kind. It no longer felt empty.
"When Captain Kirk spoke to me on the bridge," she said, "I thought I understood what he meant." She hesitated. "I don't."
"You don't have to understand it tonight."
A small, unwilling laugh escaped her. "Everyone keeps telling me what I don't have to do."
"Maybe that's because you keep trying to do all of it at once."
This time the smile stayed a little longer. Uhura started the lift again.
When they reached Altaira's quarters, Altaira stopped outside the door.
"I have things from home in there."
"I know."
"If I go inside, that's all that's left."
Uhura considered that before she answered. "No. That's what you managed to bring with you. It isn't the same thing."
Altaira looked at her for a moment. "You believe that?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
Uhura looked down the empty corridor. "Because I've left places I thought I'd always be able to go back to."
"And could you?"
"Not always."
She did not soften it, and Altaira was grateful to her for that.
The door slid open. On a small table beside the viewport sat a narrow case holding the few belongings that had been beamed up from the house. Altaira opened it and took out a pale stone threaded with blue veins.
"I found this by the lake when I was little. My father said it was worthless."
"And you kept it."
"Because he said it was worthless."
Uhura smiled.
Altaira turned the stone over in her palm. "That sounds ridiculous now."
"No. It sounds like something that was yours."
Altaira set the stone on the table instead of putting it back in the case. "Will you stay for a while?"
Uhura sat down beside her. "Yes."
Neither of them spoke again for some time.
* *
The next evening, Kirk sat alone in his quarters with a recorder on the desk and the remains of Altair IV on the monitor.
The Enterprise had been under way for Starbase Eleven most of the day. Altaira had been given quarters, medical attention, and as much privacy as McCoy could defend against the debriefings waiting for her. She was not the only survivor of Altair IV aboard the Enterprise. She was only the one McCoy could do anything for. Kirk had spent the day on the bridge, in engineering, in sickbay, almost anywhere but here.
Against the bulkhead stood four research cases that no one had yet had the heart to unpack.
Now the recorder was waiting.
He switched it on. "Captain's log, supplemental. The Enterprise is proceeding to Starbase Eleven with survivors from Altair IV aboard."
He stopped. The sentence was accurate and entirely useless.
He erased it and began again. "Captain's log, supplemental. Altair IV was destroyed yesterday, following events that began when the Enterprise entered the system five days ago."
He stopped again.
The intercom whistled. Kirk reached over and thumbed it. "Kirk here."
McCoy's voice came through against the murmur of the recreation room. "Most people come down here when they're trying to relax."
"I'll remember that."
"I'm serious, Jim."
"So am I."
"You've been sitting over that report for hours."
Kirk glanced at the chronometer. "Twenty-three minutes."
"You've been writing it in your head since yesterday."
Kirk smiled in spite of himself. "Is that a medical diagnosis?"
"It is when you skip dinner."
"I ate."
"Coffee isn't food."
Kirk leaned back. "How's Alta?"
"Asleep. Uhura sat with her until about an hour ago. I finally talked Alta into taking something mild."
"Good."
"She's got a long road ahead of her, Jim."
"I know."
McCoy was quiet a moment. "No. You know what happened. That's not the same thing."
Kirk looked at the monitor. The debris field had spread farther. In another day, two at most, even the largest fragments would be hard to tell from the stars.
"Come down here," McCoy said.
"In a while."
"You said that yesterday."
"And I came."
"For twelve minutes."
"It was a very restful twelve minutes."
McCoy snorted. "Half an hour. Then I'm coming up there."
"Are you threatening your commanding officer, Doctor?"
"I'm the ship's surgeon. It's one of the privileges."
The channel closed.
Kirk looked at the recorder again. The trouble was not the report. He could write the report. The trouble was the beginning, because every place he tried to start felt like the wrong one.
He turned from the blank log and called up the mission archive. Files scrolled past on the monitor until he stopped on one.
BELLEROPHON
COMMANDING OFFICER: CAPTAIN J. J. ADAMS
STATUS: LOST WITH ALL HANDS
ALTAIR IV
He opened it, and J. J. Adams looked out at him from the screen.
The image was twenty years old. Adams wore the uniform of another era and the face of a captain at the start of a mission whose ending he could not have begun to imagine. Kirk knew that expression. He had worn it himself.
He watched the man a while. Then he switched the recorder back on.
"The official report will say that the Enterprise was ordered to Altair IV to investigate the loss of the Bellerophon. That's accurate." He looked at Adams. "It just isn't where the story begins."
He touched the playback control, and the old captain came to life.
Kirk lowered his voice.
"It began with the Bellerophon."
