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“Hey Bones. D’you believe in ghosts?” Jim slurs.
“You’re drunk, Jim,” the doctor says, not even looking up from his notes. He has a test the next day in Xeno-Bio and he’d learned quickly how to zone out of or shut down Jim’s drunken ramblings.
“Yeah, yeah,” Jim waves him off, brow furrowing slightly. “But do you believe in ghosts?”
Bones sighs. “Sure.”
“Sir,” Jim pleads, quietly, desperately. “My crew was just – they were just following my orders. I take – I take full responsibility for my actions, but they were mine, and mine alone. If I transmit Khan’s location to you, all I ask is that you spare them.” He stares into Marcus’ eyes, desperate for some sign that the man will let them go. His mouth is dry as he continues. “Please, sir. I’ll do anything you want. Just let them live.”
“Well,” Marcus sighs. “That’s a hell of an apology. But aren’t you missing someone from your crew?”
Jim shakes his head hesitantly. All of his crew is accounted for, except—
A whirl of transporter, and suddenly their Chief Engineering Officer has been beamed aboard their ship. Jim gapes at Scotty, then turns back to Marcus.
“We caught him as he was trying to sneak aboard,” the admiral shrugs. He leans back. “If it’s any consolation, Kirk, I was never going to spare your crew.
“Fire at will.”
When reporting to the rest of Starfleet Command, Marcus almost sticks with the story that he’d spun for Kirk, but in the end he picks a different, more fitting one:
While in pursuit of John Harrison, the Enterprise had been loitering at the edges of the Neutral Zone on the Federation side, trying to contact Kronos for permission to pursue Harrison, when a group of Klingons had viciously attacked and completely destroyed the U.S.S. Enterprise.
There was no warning and there were no survivors.
(The outcry is immediate. Starfleet’s trouble-making poster boy is useful even in death.)
Ghost: \’gōst\, noun; the soul or spirit of a dead person or animal that can appear, in visible form or other manifestation, to the living. (See: phantom ships, ghost trains)
It is thought ghosts haunt because they have unfinished business, that they cannot rest until they fulfill their purpose. Ghosts haunt because of strong attachment; it may be positive or negative, and attached to a person, place or thing.
Can ghosts talk to each other? Evidence suggests so. There are several examples of electronic voice phenomenon in which two or more voices are caught in conversation.
Hey Bones. D’you believe in ghosts?
“—screen. Broadcast shipwide for the record.”
“Captain K—”
“—wasn’t expecting you. That’s a hell of a—”
“The communicator’s on the fritz again, sir,” Lieutenant Nielson reports.
“Always through this part of space,” the captain sighs. “What’s the incoming transmission this time? Another Klingon message?”
“No, sir, seems to be—”
“—your prisoner, Kirk?”
“Per Starfleet regulation—”
“Oh,” Nielson says quietly, pulling in a sharp breath. “It seems to be one of the last transmissions of the U.S.S. Enterprise, sir.”
The captain looks stunned for a moment. “Where’s it coming from?” he demands.
“I don’t know, sir,” Nielson shrugs apologetically. “But things like this happen with ships sometimes – transmissions get caught somehow and keep being broadcast even if the ship is destroyed.”
Everyone knows what happened to the Enterprise. Everyone knows why they’re patrolling the edge of the Neutral Zone even more carefully than before, keeping an eye on the Klingons while the Federation debates what to do about this. Admiral Marcus is pushing for war and while many agree with him, not all do.
Admiral Marcus…
Nielson frowns, but pushes it out of his mind. It wasn’t his voice on the transmission; Marcus had never had any reason to be on the edge of the Neutral Zone, much less to have been talking with the late Captain Kirk out here.
“—not drop those shields, Mr. Sulu.”
The communicator goes silent.
When Jim Kirk ran into the other Spock on Delta Vega, the Vulcan said that it was something like fate which had brought them together, which would bring the rest of the Enterprise crew together. Jim hadn’t pegged him for believing in destiny or whatever (Jim pretty firmly did not; he didn’t really go in for that pre-destined bullshit), but Spock had seemed pretty certain.
He also was not wrong.
Scant days before Admiral Marcus publicly released the news of what had happened to the U.S.S. Enterprise, Starfleet caught a blip of something just behind Earth’s moon, like a starship.
But when they scanned again, there was nothing there, not even any kind of debris that could have triggered the sensors. They chalked it up to a technical error.
(Marcus killed 428 Starfleet officers aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise, one fugitive, and seventy-two cryogenically frozen war criminals.
He didn’t bother cleaning up after himself, but it didn’t matter. The debris didn’t stay around for very long.)
In deep space, it’s not easy to keep up with news from Federation planets. It’s also not very easy to call for help if, for example, you have a misunderstanding with locals on an unexplored planet and they blow out your engines, leaving you stranded.
Unless, of course, there happens to be another starship nearby that can hear your distress signal.
“U.S.S. Enterprise hailing U.S.S. Orion, do you copy, Orion?”
“Yes, we copy, we copy! We need an engineer, our engines are having difficulties and most of our engineers are down on the planet being held by the locals!”
“Standby, Orion, we’ll beam someone aboard.”
The Enterprise crewmembers do a fantastic job helping to patch up the Orion’s engines. Orion quickly beams up its stranded officers and gets the hell out of dodge, marking the planet down as somewhere to come back to in the future with plenty of caution.
Weeks later, closer towards Federation space, the Orion’s crew learns that the Enterprise’s crew was killed in action several months previously.
Rumors spread quickly. Space is big, but the Enterprise isn’t exactly trying to hide itself.
Sometimes it seems that way, though, from the way that it will appear on screen out of nowhere and then disappear again, like it was never there. If you catch a glimpse of it through windows, the ship seems like it’s barely being held together; it’s badly damaged, and sometimes it seems like it shouldn’t be spaceworthy at all.
Sometimes, it flickers like a mirage or an apparition, and when the crewmember blinks, it’s gone again.
The thing is, Admiral Marcus definitely reported it destroyed, and no starship could be out in the black for that long without support from Starfleet. There would have been reports of it docking somewhere, sometime, for fuel or food or repairs.
But there aren’t.
Firefights break out between the Klingons and the Federation, up and down the edges of the Neutral Zone, before bleeding out into different parts of space. The Federation does what it can to help the civilians affected, but sometimes officers arrive down on the planets too late. They haven’t been at war in a long time.
But sometimes, they arrive to find that someone has already evacuated them. Or that someone is currently evacuating them.
Crewmembers from the U.S.S. Enterprise look normal for the most part, but sometimes they slip. They fade a little, become more translucent, or the illusion of healthy skin is pulled back to reveal the grinning skulls underneath, because no one on that ship made it out alive.
Four hundred and twenty-eight crewmembers, one fugitive, and seventy-two cryogenically frozen war criminals were murdered by Admiral Marcus. (Not that anyone knows that.)
Four hundred and twenty-eight crewmembers still do their duty, even in death.
Maybe Jim Kirk was bad luck from the moment he was born, but at the very least he was excellent at inspiring people, and convinced everyone around him to excel and to perform above and beyond what was demanded of them.
When Federation vessels are injured, sometimes the Enterprise helps.
Sometimes it does not
Dreadnought class ships never catch even a glimpse of it.
Admiral Marcus daren’t go into space. The first time he did, after the Enterprise, his ship inexplicably broke down and he was almost stranded.
While he waited for help to come, he saw a small, pale ship in the distance. He hailed it, and Jim Kirk appeared on the screen, grim and deathly pale. His crew stood steadfastly behind him.
None of them said anything to him, but he couldn’t disconnect and they stayed for hours, until Starfleet finally tracked his ship’s signal.
“You’re lucky Khan didn’t stay behind,” Kirk murmured before the transmission finally cut off. Marcus thought of the Dreadnought class, designed by Khan, and thought of the loathing the man had held for him.
Admiral Marcus does not believe in ghosts, but for that moment he was afraid.
Nowadays, the Enterprise is made of mist and shadows; it holds the cold of space in its corridors and nobody aboard it breathes. Four hundred and twenty-eight crewmembers diligently keep it in shape.
It is a ghost ship and a ship of the dead.
See, there are some things even death cannot stop.
No matter what timeline, the Enterprise was always meant to be. The stubborn, persistent personalities making up its crew were always going to find their way onto that ship. They nurse deep loyalty and love for their ship and its captain and will travel with it for as long as they can, would dedicate their their lives to it, allow it to consume them.
The Enterprise was always meant to be and thus, the Enterprise is.