Pike called Spock to the ready room in the sixth week.
He did not offer coffee this time. He sat behind the desk and did not get up, and there was a padd in front of him that he did not need, because he had all of it in his head, and he let Spock stand a moment before he spoke.
"Every second Thursday," Pike said, "at twenty-two hundred, five of my officers go into Mister Scott's quarters and do not come out for an hour. The same five. The doctor. The engineer. My communications officer. My science officer. And a security lieutenant who has not had a social engagement of any kind in the three years I have known him." He looked up. "And lately a sixth. An ensign. Brandt."
Spock said nothing.
"I have commanded this ship for thirteen years, Commander. I know what it is when people who came off the same landing party begin meeting in the dark and telling no one. I have seen it twice. Once it was a mutiny. Once it was a handful of good officers who had decided, together, quietly, that they were the only sane ones left aboard. Both times it ended in a funeral."
"Sir..."
"I am not finished." Pike stood. "I know what you are doing. You are trying to find a way to bring back a man who does not exist. On my ship, with my people, on time that belongs to Starfleet. You have been at it for six weeks, and you will go on, if I let you, until it kills one of you or all of you.
"And I am the captain. A captain who watches six of his best people fold their grief into a cell, and does nothing, is not a kind man. He is a negligent one.
"So I am going to give you an order, Mister Spock, and I am going to give it once. It stops. The meetings stop. The computer time stops. All of it, tonight. You go back to being the finest science officer in the fleet, and you let that man rest, because wherever he is he is at peace, and you are not, and I will not stand here and watch you take five other people apart chasing him into the ground."
The ready room was very quiet.
And James Kirk was not in it, and had no idea it was happening, and would live his whole life and die without ever knowing that a man he had never met stood up on a starship four hundred years in the future and ordered the end of the only effort that would ever be made to bring him home.
And neither man on either side of that desk yet knew the thing that would one day make the moment unbearable to remember: that the order Christopher Pike had just given, out of decency, out of care for his crew and his ship and his own conscience, was an order to keep his own legs. Pike had carried the knowledge of the chair for years, and had made his peace with it, and did not yet understand that it had lifted off him because the dead man had fallen out of the world, nor that to bring the dead man home was to call it back down on himself. Spock did not understand it yet either. It would be the better part of a year before he ran the projection that laid it out in front of him, alone, at 0400. On this night, in the sixth week, they stood in their separate ignorance, one man ordering the end of the search and the other accepting the order, neither yet grasping that they were bargaining over the same man's spine.
"Yes, sir," said Spock.
Pike looked at him for a long moment, and something moved behind his face that Spock could not read, and then he sat back down.
"Dismissed," he said.
* *
The meetings stopped for exactly one cycle.
On the second Thursday after the order, at twenty-two hundred, Nyota Uhura did not go to Mister Scott's quarters. Neither did the doctor, nor the engineer, nor anyone. Spock sat in his own quarters with the lights up and a book he did not read, and kept the order, because he was a Vulcan and it was an order and he had said yes.
And at twenty-two hundred on the fourth Thursday he got up, and went down to deck four, and lifted his hand to knock on Montgomery Scott's door, and it opened before his knuckles reached it, because they were all already inside. Nobody had told them to come. Nobody had needed to.
Scotty poured the glasses. He poured six, and set two of them, full, in front of the two men from security, and no one said a word about the order, then or ever, because there was nothing to say about it that weighed as much as the fact that they had come.
From that night, everything was covert.
They stopped using the science lab except as cover. The real work lived on the secondary banks and stayed there, behind a lock held by a lieutenant who had already decided where he stood. They met at shifting hours and came by different routes, and never let two of them be logged together in a corridor without a reason. What had been grief became a conspiracy, with the shape and the discipline and the deniability of one, because a captain had made it one with a single order, and six people had looked at the order, and looked at each other, and chosen the man who was not there.
* *
Christopher Pike knew inside the month.
Of course he knew. He was the captain. He knew it the way a captain knows the weight of his own ship. He knew the meetings had resumed, and knew they had gone quiet, and knew that somewhere down in his secondary core a Vulcan was still, patiently, illegally, reaching for a dead man.
And on a Thursday in the third month, walking the ship at twenty-two hundred because he could not sleep, Christopher Pike came down the corridor on deck four and saw the light burning under Montgomery Scott's door, and heard, very faintly, the particular sound of people who are not speaking, and stopped.
He stood there a while.
Then he put his hands behind his back, and kept walking, and did not knock, and never, in all the time that came after, gave that order again.