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

shifting the weight of the bag until it was a little more comfortable, then continued up the dirt road. After a time he came to a natural bend in the path, which afforded him a much better view of the old farmhouse sitting in the clearing beyond.
    Out in the front yard he could see Abner’s dog, a shaggy old bluetick coonhound, Benchley, lying sprawled on the porch, his tongue lolling wetly from the corner of his mouth. The dog raised his head at Kirk’s approach and let out a rather listless aulf- ing sound that was probably the closest thing to an actual bark the ancient dog could muster.
    Yet he was an excellent early warning system. In response to the sound, the front door opened and Abner’s wife, Hanna, appeared, wiping her hands on the towel that was draped over one shoulder.
    She raised a hand and waved, then quickly ducked back inside before Kirk could respond.
    Aunt Hanna reappeared, shuffling out of the door onto the porch, coming to a halt beside the old coonhound. Standing there with her hands on her hips, she reminded Kirk of his mother, and just for a second he was a child again, on the razor’s edge of puberty.
    His brother had just been accepted to Starfleet Academy. Kirk had been out in the toolshed, looking for the right spanner to fix the flow valve on his ground-hopper. Sam stepped out onto the porch in his cadet uniform. His mother was standing beside him, tears streaming down her cheeks; she looked so proud and sad, all at the same time. She placed a hand upon her elder son’s shoulder and told him how smart he looked.
    “What do you reckon, Jimmy? Do you think I could be a famous explorer just like Zefram Cochrane?” Sam asked him with a smile.
    And in that moment, Kirk would have given anything to be away from there: with McCoy and his daughter in Georgia, or back aboard the Enterprise overseeing the refit with Scotty.
    Anywhere, it didn’t matter to him, as long as it wasn’t here.

Chapter 4
    STARFLEET MEDICAL
    SAN FRANCISCO
    “She looks so tiny, so fragile.”
    Sulu rested his forehead on the surface of the glass, the palm of his hand resting on top, as he stared down at his daughter.
    “Just so . . . tiny,” he repeated.
    Beside him, Doctor Linzi Hautala remained respectfully silent, allowing the new father to have this special moment with his child.
    Around them the ward staff went about their business, checking on the dozens of other babies all housed in similar incubators that were arranged around the room. But Sulu barely registered their presence; the room may as well have been completely empty save for himself, Doctor Hautala, and his daughter.
    “It’s not until you see another human being like this, so small and helpless, that you realize how life can be so . . . well, fragile.” Sulu laughed, feeling a little bit self-conscious that every time he opened his mouth he kept spouting clichés. “I guess you must hear this a lot from new parents? Guy becomes a father for the first time, suddenly he turns into a philosopher.”
    “I hear a lot of things, Commander,” Hautala told him. “Some of it good, some of it not so. Parents deciding the careers of their children before they’ve even been out of the womb for a single day, fathers claiming that the child can’t be theirs because it doesn’t look like them—we even had one man, an evolutionary biologist, who took one look at his brand-new eight-hour-old daughter, then broke down in a flood of tears claiming she was a divine miracle. Different people react to becoming parents in wildly different ways. Go easy on yourself for the moment, you’re just human.” She pointed at the small bundle lying in the incubator in front of them. “Now that she’s here, your life will never be the same again.”
    What the doctor was trying to tell him, Sulu realized, was exactly what Scott had been saying to him.
    His new daughter was going to change his life. The thing was, it wasn’t only his life anymore. Everything began