Crucible: Kirk Read online

  “Time bends,” the Guardian said cryptically. “The end is but the beginning.”

  “What does that mean?” Kirk asked, but he knew better than to expect a straightforward answer—or any answer at all. When indeed the Guardian said nothing, Kirk turned and paced away from it. His boots scraped noisily along the hard terrain, and now he felt the chill movement of the air. It struck him that he had no protective garments, no clothing whatsoever beyond that which he wore right now. He had no shelter in this desolate place, no food, no water. In order to achieve his goals, he would therefore have only so much time—

  But of course he had access to time. He glanced back over his shoulder at the Guardian. If Kirk needed anything at all, it waited for him just on the other side of the vortex. He had only to call up a time and place, and then leap to it.

  Virtually any time and place, Kirk thought. The researchers had found few limitations on what they could observe of the past beyond the time surrounding the actual origin of the Guardian. That means that it must be possible to access the moments when the Gr’oth had plummeted to the surface of this world. Persuading the Guardian of the reality of that event might or might not be critical in securing its compliance, but back in the nexus, the other Kirk had believed attempting to do so to be the right choice. Kirk himself had agreed. And maybe the Guardian can convince itself of its own demise, he thought.

  Kirk turned and headed back to the Guardian. When he reached it, he said, “I wish to see tomorrow.” He knew that in the accounts that he had read of the research done at the Guardian, no mention had ever been made of the vortex displaying future events or allowing anybody to travel forward through time. He and the other Kirk had been aware that it might not be possible to find a direct route through the Guardian to 2293 or 2371—or in this case, to 2270, the year when the Gr’oth had slammed into the planet. He chose to see if being more specific in his request would make a difference.

  “Guardian,” he said, “I wish to see the thirteenth day of June in the Earth year twenty-two seventy.” Once again, Kirk received no response, and so he decided to try an indirect path to the event. “I wish to see yesterday.”

  Still nothing.

  For an instant, panic gripped Kirk. He had expected that the Guardian might be either unwilling or unable to present the future to him, but he had no reason to think that it would not replay the past. It had done so before. In his previous trips here, it had shown him the history of humanity on Earth, the dawn of Orion civilization, and a recent day on the planet Vulcan.

  Now, though, the vortex stood empty.

  “‘Since before your sun burned hot in space,’” Kirk said to himself, quoting the Guardian. “‘Since before your race was born.’” When Kirk had exited the nexus, he had come five billion years into the past—or at least he had wanted to do so. He assumed for the moment that he had, despite having no real means of confirming that fact. But if he had arrived here that long ago, then Earth’s sun had yet to form in the cold reaches of space, and the evolution of humanity lay even further ahead in the future than that. Kirk had asked to see yesterday, but for human beings, right now, at this moment, today did not exist. With no today, how can there be a yesterday? Kirk thought. Have I come too far into the past to make use of the Guardian? He wondered too if he had inadvertently condemned himself to living his final days on this barren world, while at the same time being unable to do anything to prevent the destruction caused by the converging temporal loop.

  But today exists for me, Kirk told himself. And so does yesterday. Once more, he would shift from the general to the specific. “Guardian, I wish to see my yesterday.”

  “Behold,” it said. “A gateway to your own past, if you wish.”

  A white mist spilled down from the top of the wide, roughly circular opening through the center of the Guardian’s ring. Then images began to form: Kirk’s mother giving birth, his brother Sam holding him as an infant, Kirk sleeping in a crib. This had been one of the ways in which the historians had learned to refine their requests of the Guardian. If it showed a thousand images of a ten-thousand-year epoch, it would present just ten scenes per century, making it difficult to view or navigate to particular points in time with much precision. Observing the course of a single life, though, because of its relative brevity, allowed for greater granularity: a thousand images displayed of Kirk’s sixty-year life would produce one scene for every three weeks he’d lived. The numbers worked out differently than that, and the Guardian didn’t always show moments spaced evenly apart, but the principle remained that you could see far more detail of a single life through the vortex than you could of a longer period.

  Kirk continued to watch as his existence unfolded before him. He smiled when he saw himself tottering across the family living room and into Sam’s waiting arms, perhaps taking his first steps, but he also felt a deep melancholy as well; Sam had been gone now for almost half of Kirk’s life. Similar emotions played through his mind as his mother and father appeared, as his grandfather did, his uncle, all of them lost for so long at this point.

  He closed his eyes when the colony on Tarsus IV materialized. At the age of thirteen, Kirk had been living there when the food supply had been all but wiped out by an exotic fungus. Governor Kodos had seized full power and declared martial law, then executed four thousand colonists in a horribly misguided and ultimately unnecessary attempt to save the other four thousand.

  Kirk watched with interest, though, as he sped through Starfleet Academy. He saw himself as a young officer aboard the Republic, and then later, aboard the Farragut. Aboard the Enterprise, he saw Spock and Bones and Scotty.

  And then the Guardian of Forever appeared. And then New York City in 1930. And then Edith.

  Kirk turned away. He could not bear to see her. It occurred to him briefly that he could simply step through the time vortex and rejoin his beloved, save her from the traffic accident that had taken her from him—

  But he had already made the decision once to sacrifice his own desires to preserve history. How could he in good conscience abandon that now? He had come here with a greater purpose than his own happiness, and he would see that effort through.

  When Kirk peered back at the Guardian, he saw himself in gangster clothing on Sigma Iotia II. He fought the Kelvans as they commandeered the Enterprise, ferried the Dohlman of Elas to her arranged marriage on Troyius. He spoke with High Priestess Natira on Yonada, argued with the insane Captain Garth on Elba II, observed a glommer devouring a tribble.

  As the period of the Klingon attack on the Einstein station approached, Kirk said, “Guardian, do you perceive yourself with the times that these images present?”

  “I see all,” it said, a pronouncement startling for its lack of ambiguity.

  Kirk thought for a moment how best to phrase what he would say next. “Then you will see the time when you will cease to exist,” he said. “I propose that you can avoid such an end by moving yourself through time.”

  “All that will be, has already been,” the Guardian said inscrutably. “All that has been, will be.”

  “Does that mean that you have already escaped the destruction caused by the starship?” Kirk asked. He did not anticipate a direct answer, but he wanted as much as possible to try to divine the Guardian’s intent, as well as any movement it might have made through time. When it did not reply to his question, he said, “In my lifetime, a temporal phenomenon has devastated a section of the galaxy between the years twenty-two ninety-three and twenty-three seventy-one, with a corresponding loss of life. I wish to prevent that from occurring.”

  Within the ring of the Guardian, Kirk saw himself lying in a coma in the Enterprise’s sickbay, and then unconscious atop a diagnostic pallet in Starbase 10’s infirmary. It struck him that those times in his life had come after the Gr’oth had rammed into the Guardian of Forever. Or had it? Kirk thought. The recordings of the incident had shown the Klingon vessel as it had streaked through the atmosphere, and they had shown its
intended target. But when the Gr’oth had gotten close to the planet’s surface, its mass had obscured the view of the Guardian. Could it be that the time vortex had during those last moments taken itself away, traveling through time to a place and time of safety? If the Guardian had been destroyed, Kirk asked himself, could it possibly be showing me events in my life that had taken place after that? Though he could not be sure, he didn’t think so.

  As his life continued to unfurl within the Guardian, he said, “I will unintentionally cause the shock wave that will destroy a portion of the galaxy, and I need your help to keep that from happening.” When the Guardian did not respond, Kirk explained precisely how and why the converging temporal loop had developed, then detailed his plan to stop it from occurring.

  “Do you understand?” he asked when he had finished.

  No reply.

  “Will you help me?” he tried.

  Nothing.

  “Will you save yourself from the starship in the way that I have requested?”

  “I am my own beginning, my own ending,” repeated the Guardian. “Through me is eternity kept.”

  Kirk could not determine whether that answered his question, but he also realized that he would likely receive no reply more explicit than that, no matter what he asked. Strictly speaking, other than the Guardian allowing him to travel back into his own life right now, its participation would not be crucial to Kirk’s efforts to avert the temporal loop. Being able to move through time via the vortex a second time would make it far easier to carry out his plan, but if necessary, he could succeed without that capability.

  In the mists of the Guardian, moments from the Enterprise’s seven-and-a-half-year expedition to and from the Aquarius Formation flickered past. After that, he saw himself riding a horse on his uncle’s farm in Idaho, and he saw Antonia. He saw Khan Noonien Singh and Carol Marcus. He saw his son, David.

  While the images continued to fade into and out of view, Kirk made additional attempts to converse with the Guardian. He tried to learn if it would indeed protect itself from Korax’s suicidal plunge to the planet, and if it would be available to Kirk in his attempt to thwart the emergence of the shock wave. The Guardian spoke little and revealed less.

  In the end, recognizing that he would learn no more than he already had, Kirk decided to proceed. Either the Guardian would survive beyond 2270 or it would not, either it would assist him when the time came or it would not. No matter, Kirk would do whatever he could to prevent the converging temporal loop.

  He waited quietly as the pictures within the vortex moved on, showing the days aboard his last command, the Enterprise-A. Eventually, he saw himself in retirement once more, this time not sequestering himself away in the hills of Idaho, but traveling the globe and the galaxy: rappelling the Crystalline Trench, climbing Mount Revek, diving the Alandros Caves, rafting the lava flows of the Valtarik volcano, and more. As he reflected on the feats of derring-do that he’d undertaken during his second retirement, he realized how much he had been motivated to engage in such dangerous activities by the general sadness that had settled over his life.

  At last, the images within the vortex reached the days just before he had boarded the Enterprise-B for its maiden voyage. He quickly reiterated his requests of the Guardian, then took a step back with one foot, preparing himself to move quickly. When he saw himself walking along the streets of San Francisco, he knew that the moment had come.

  Kirk sprang forward and leaped through the Guardian of Forever, back into his own past.

  ELEVEN

  2293

  A cool breeze blew in from the bay and across the Presidio, hardly unusual weather for San Francisco late on a summer afternoon. As Jim Kirk walked alongside the facilities building on the Starfleet Headquarters campus, he glanced north, past the international-orange towers of the Golden Gate Bridge to the Marin Headlands. There, he saw fog already beginning to roll in from the Pacific. It would doubtless be a cold, damp night.

  At the intersection with Robert April Way, Kirk turned onto the wide pedestrian thoroughfare, which led up to the main administration building in the center of the grounds. Hugging the wall a little too tightly, he nearly tripped over a low bench situated against the wall. He quickly jogged to his right and skirted both it and a potted bush beside it.

  Several people strode along the gray paving stones and amid the scattered greenery, most of them in groups of two or three, and so far as Kirk could see, all of the them in uniform. Dressed himself in civilian attire—brown slacks and a jade-colored shirt—he felt out of place. Although he had spent more than half his life—

  Kirk heard a scuffling noise behind him and he looked around in that direction. Back past the bench he had almost fallen over, he saw disappearing behind the facilities building a black pant leg, its thin red stripe distinguishing it as part of a Starfleet uniform. Kirk turned around and continued on his way.

  Although he’d officially retired from Starfleet only earlier in the year, it already seemed strange to be back here. He still lived close by, in Russian Hill Tower, and he could even see the Presidio campus from the windows of this apartment. But merely seeing this place did not equate with actually being here.

  Twice, Kirk had declined this invitation. Fleet Captain Strnod had left messages asking to meet with him, both times when Kirk had been off world. Once, he’d been cliff diving into the garnet waters of the Canopus Planet, and the other time, employing artificial wings to fly in the low-gravity environment of Izar’s Shroud. On each occasion, after the message had been forwarded to him, he’d replied with the same simple rejection: “Whatever it is, no thanks. I’m retired.” He hadn’t even wanted to know why Starfleet had asked to see him. If their interest had related to the assassination of Klingon Chancellor Gorkon and the attempt on the life of Federation President Raghoratreii, if the admiralty had perhaps needed him to provide additional testimony about his role in unmasking the conspiracy, they would have made him aware of that. Since Strnod hadn’t specified the reason for calling him in for a meeting, though, Kirk had assumed that they’d merely wanted to try to coax him back into the fold.

  He would never allow that to happen.

  As he followed April Way around a curve that would bring the walkway across the front of the administration building, Kirk thought about the reasons he’d decided to leave Starfleet. In some ways, it had begun with the Enterprise-A, the ship he had commanded for eight years, and the namesake of which he had commanded for a dozen more. When Starfleet had decided to decommission the vessel after its decades of service—the ship had first seen duty as the Yorktown prior to its rechristening, when Kirk had been posted as its captain—the time had seemed right to step away. Many of the senior command crew with whom he had for so long served had aspirations beyond starship duty. Spock had initially returned to training cadets, but then he’d accepted an appointment as a full-fledged ambassador. McCoy had gone back to medical research, Uhura had taken a position with Starfleet Intelligence, and Scotty had retired. Kirk certainly could have assumed the captaincy of another ship, but he’d found little desire to command a vessel other than the Enterprise, and even less to do so without his friends by his side.

  In addition to all of that, the space service in his estimation had become overly political in recent years. With so many interstellar tensions—with the Klingons, the Romulans, the Tholians, and others—missions of exploration had frequently given way to missions of diplomacy. Kirk understood and agreed with the efforts to maintain peace throughout the quadrant, but when he’d peered up at the stars as a boy, it had not been with the dream that he would one day mediate.

  Kirk had also come to realize that he would not find what he needed out in space. He had found her once. He would not find her again.

  Nearing the ten-story administration building, Kirk peered at the huge version of the Starfleet insignia adorning its façade. Years ago, when each starship had carried its own unique emblem, the asymmetrical arrowhead had belonged
to the Enterprise. Later, when the policy of assigning distinct insignia had been discarded, Kirk had been proud that the distinguished record of his vessel had motivated Starfleet Command to adopt its symbol servicewide. Even now, seeing it so prominently displayed at headquarters prompted in him a glimmer of satisfaction.

  When he reached the building, Kirk walked into its sprawling atrium. Beneath the transparent canopy that arced inward and upward from the doors all the way up to the top of the structure, he headed for the large circular desk located at the center of the space, to where a sign written in Federation Standard read VISITORS. Beyond the desk stood several banks of turbolifts. Kirk knew that automated sensors scanned every individual who entered the building, and that those identified as active Starfleet personnel could move freely about. Those not so identified and who did not check in with security would find themselves unable to leave the atrium; turbolifts containing unauthorized individuals would not function.

  As Kirk approached the desk, a young security officer looked up at him. “Captain Kirk,” he said, tapping at the controls of a console. “You can go right up to the tenth floor, office ten-thirteen,” he said. “Admiral Sinclair-Alexander is expecting you.” Kirk couldn’t tell whether the officer had recognized him or the sensors had revealed his identity.

  He thanked the security officer, who informed him that he could use either of the central turbolifts. Kirk hadn’t needed to be told that; when he’d served as Starfleet’s chief of operations, he’d occupied an office on the tenth floor himself. He headed past the desk and over to one of the lifts.

  As the car started upward, Kirk wondered if he’d made the right choice in coming here. After Fleet Captain Strnod had tried and failed to persuade him to attend a meeting here at Starfleet Headquarters, Margaret Alexander—Sinclair-Alexander now, he reminded himself—had added her voice to the request. Kirk had known Madge Alexander for many years now, ever since she had served for a year aboard his first command. A lieutenant at the time, she had performed so well that she’d earned a field promotion during her time aboard the Enterprise, at the end of which she had transferred to the Firenze to serve as its second officer. Her rapid ascent through the ranks had continued when she’d been made a full commander and assigned to the Freedom as its exec. Later, she had served as captain of the Freedom through to its decommissioning, and then she’d taken command of the Saratoga. From there, she had eventually moved into Starfleet Command. When she had followed up Strnod’s invitations to a meeting at Starfleet with one of her own, she’d also mentioned that she would consider it a personal favor. With the request phrased in such terms, he had been unable to refuse.