Star Trek: The Original Series - 162 - Shadow of the Machine Read Free

“We’ll be too busy getting the old girl shipshape. Besides, the bairn’ll be out in the world almost six months before you’ll have another chance to stop and raise a glass to the wee one.”
    That’s when it had really struck home.
    Sulu had thought about it before, obviously. He was a Starfleet officer who was about to become a father for the first time. But to hear it out of the blue made it all seem . . . well, so real.
    Really real.
    His baby, his first child, and he was about to abandon it before it was even born. Okay, maybe abandon was too harsh a word, but to an impartial observer, he seemed perfectly content to just disappear across the galaxy at a very important time. He’d be there occasionally, during the brief periods of shore leave, but he wouldn’t be there to share in all the really important stuff: feeding, tantrums, the sleepless nights, and the first tottering steps across the kitchen floor.
    Weren’t the first years of a child’s life the most crucially important for bonding with its parents? Sulu was sure he’d heard that somewhere, probably from Doctor McCoy; either that or he’d read it in that book on parenting Uhura had given him. Whether it was true or not, those years were certainly crucial to him , and he was going to miss them.
    Sulu rested his elbows on his desk, chin on both fists, and tried his best to tune out Pavel Chekov’s excited jabbering. The Russian had been talking virtually nonstop for the past twenty minutes. He’d appeared at Sulu’s door clutching breakfast in one hand and a data slate with a map of his beloved Russia in the other, and it was starting to make the dull, aching throb in Sulu’s head much, much worse.
    An early start—that’s what Chekov had told him was needed. Get the day’s duties out of the way as swiftly and efficiently as possible. They could be down in the shuttlebay early enough to guarantee a place on the first flight to Earth.
    “Of course, if we shuttle into Smolensk it would then give us enough time to take a tube across country to Podolsk, but we do run the risk of missing Uhura’s connection,” Chekov was saying, somewhere in the background. “If only she was flying out to southern Africa after our trip across Russia, as I’d originally suggested, then we would not have this problem. We could have had enough time to take the passenger express up to Tula and Ryazan first. But did she listen to me? No, of course she didn’t, no one ever listens to me.”
    Sulu sighed wistfully as he gazed about his empty cabin. Every personal item that belonged to the helmsman, everything that he had hung up on the walls and arranged upon shelves to hide the bland characterlessness and uniformity of a starship cabin, was now packed carefully into three holdalls stacked neatly along the bulkhead by the door.
    “Tell me again why we have to pack up every single item and cart it all down to Earth with us.”
    Chekov glanced up quickly from the map. He frowned. “You know exactly why we have to take our belongings with us.”
    “Because, my dear Hikaru, they need to do a sweep of the entire ship, and the equipment uses a high-frequency radiation field.”
    This new voice was female and seemed to come from directly behind them, momentarily startling both men.
    Nyota Uhura was standing in the open doorway of Sulu’s quarters, one hand resting lightly on the doorframe. Instead of her pastel yellow uniform she was clad in a light mauve tunic and skirt, a white silk sash tied loosely around her waist.
    “Unless you want to be wearing irradiated underwear for the next five years, I’d follow orders,” she said.
    “What’s with the civvies?” Sulu asked, waving a hand at her clothes. “You know, if I wasn’t such a nice person, and I didn’t have a million and one things to do, I’d put you on report.”
    “Maybe some of us aren’t on duty anymore,” Uhura said. “Maybe some of us are so wonderfully efficient that they finished up all