The Operative (A Star Trek novel)

Chapter Two

The main conference room is a warm, richly paneled chamber with a long wooden table that sometimes doubles as a dining table when important guests pay a visit. Along the walls are reminders of earlier incarnations of the proud Enterprise line: models and paintings of ocean-going ships, space shuttles, and starships, paintings of battles, even portraits of illustrious captains. The lighting is indirect and comforting, almost the exact hue of mid-autumn late afternoon sunlight on Earth. Ethnocentric to the Terrans aboard, like more of Starfleet than Kirk would like to admit. Still, no one has complained yet.

Kirk sits down at the head of the table.

So much has changed, he thinks, since he first took command of his original Enterprise, so long ago now. This ship is better in almost every way than NCC–1701 was—newer, faster, more powerful, better appointed. He only has to look at this conference room and contrast it with the ones on the first ship—cramped, spare little rooms furnished only with a long synthetic table, several chairs, library computer displays, and scatterings of nondescript abstract light sculptures on the walls.

Yet, as glad as Kirk is to have a second chance to command an Enterprise, he misses the original. NCC–1701A is a fine ship, and he loves her; but she can't completely replace his first, dead love in his heart.

The ship isn't all that has changed. The officers sitting around the long table have been with him almost from the beginning of his command. They are beginning to show the stretch of the years.

As is he, he is all too aware.

Spock, his first officer, sits calmly at his usual place, a data pad on the table in front of him replacing the library computer console of the old days. His pose of relaxed alertness is peculiarly Vulcan. He is, like most Vulcans, lean and angular, with black shiny hair cut straight across his forehead and arching behind his elegantly pointed ears. Greenish light cast upward from his data pad gives him a more than usually satanic air. He is still relatively young by his race's reckoning, doomed to watch his human friends grow old before his eyes. But he is not untouched by time and care and experience. Here is a being who has been dead and brought back to life, who has seen more than almost any other of his race. His face is lined, like some cliff on his home world that has been etched and blasted by the fierce desert winds. His eyes, though, are still as curious and bright as when Kirk first met him.

Sitting next to Spock is Leonard McCoy, his chief medical officer. Along with Spock, he is one of Kirk's two closest friends. He is thinner and older—certainly older-looking—than Spock. His expression seems frozen in an attitude of benign cynicism. He looks to Kirk as if the years have whittled all superfluous mass from him, leaving him lean, but hale and vigorous, like an old tree with a strong, green heart.

Across the table is Montgomery Scott, Enterprise's chief engineer. He is as jovially portly as the other two are thin and serious. When he was a young man, Scott was something of a firebrand, at least for an engineer, and not at all averse to a bottle of good Scotch whiskey or a good-looking member of the opposite sex. Even now, with the equanimity that comes with age, his fiery Scot nature still occasionally surfaces to "put the fear o' God" in any in his command who dares to displease him—most often by abusing his darlings, the machines and engines of the starship.

The other two officers seem the least touched by the passing years; but of course, they are younger. Nyota Uhura, the chief communications officer, is timeless, an ebony statue of classical beauty. She has matured rather than aged, Kirk thinks, giving up lithe sensuality for a stately, subdued elegance. Pavel Chekhov, the chief navigator, still looks boyish, even though he, too, served with the others on the original Enterprise. He is a skilled officer, despite the fact that there is almost a palpable air of mischief floating around him. Kirk can think of no one he would rather have at the navigation/fire control console in a tight spot, despite the fact that to look at him, you would think he would be more at home in the midst of The Tempest.