“Yes, I do. I think of myself as a military man. I know it’s in my nature to fight, to be aggressive—even to kill if I have to. I accepted that side of myself long ago.”

“But aren’t you the great paragon of Starfleet’s diplomacy? There are textbooks about you already. The captain who came to peaceful terms with the First Federation, the Hortas, the Gorn, the Kelvans. The face of the Organian Peace Treaty.”

Kirk chuckled in spite of himself. “Every one of those peaceful resolutions came at the end of a fight. In several of them, I was slow to open myself to the possibility. My first impulse was to destroy the threat, to protect my crew and my nation. There were other times when I did have to use force, when there was no other way.” He glanced briefly downward. “On Organia, I had peace forced on me over my vocal objections. I had to learn to support it.”

Portia’s keen eyes narrowed. “Tell me truthfully, Admiral. Did you agree with Rakatheema that the Warborn should fight for Starfleet? That we should be its shock troops against the Klingons or Romulans?”

Kirk thought it over, striving to answer honestly. “I believed it was a possibility worth exploring. But not to exploit you. You deserved the dignity of making that choice for yourselves, the same as any other Starfleet officer.

“To be a soldier, Portia, is to put everything that you are on the line. To place your duty, your purpose, above your own life—and over others’ lives, if necessary. In some ways, that’s an even greater sacrifice—a more difficult responsibility to bear. It’s a burden that should never be imposed on anyone who isn’t fully committed to it.”

She stood there absorbing his words for several moments. “All I want is to find my own purpose to fight. To have something worth fighting for.”

“I understand that. I hoped Starfleet could give you that.”

Portia’s wrinkled brow furrowed further. “Nobody can agree on what Starfleet is! Some tell me it’s meant for peace. Others push me to fight for it. How do you reconcile it all?”

Kirk pondered the question, reflecting on many years’ worth of debates with Spock and McCoy, and a few more recent ones with Ashley Janith-Lau. “I’ve been trying to figure that out for most of my life. But I think I have a pretty good idea of the answer by now.”

Her eyes shone with need. “Tell me.”

“The answer is that there is no conflict between those goals—because peace is the only thing worth fighting for. The act of destruction only serves a purpose if it brings about some net positive result.” He gestured with a hand, symbolically reaching toward her. “The Arcturians realized that when they stopped using the Warborn to fight one another, and redefined your purpose as the protection of Arcturus.”