Crucible: Kirk Page 2

“I don’t need to be lectured by you,” he snapped back, Picard’s words uncomfortably close to the ones Kirk had repeated to himself all the long years of his life. “I was out saving the galaxy when your grandfather was in diapers.” He paused for an instant, deciding to change the tenor of his response. “Besides which,” he said lightly, “I think the galaxy owes me one.”

  Picard regarded him for a moment, then turned away. Before he did, though, Kirk took note of the expression on his face, one he had seen many times before—most often in a mirror. “Oh, yeah,” he said beneath his breath. He walked back down the steps and over to stand beside Picard. “I was like you once,” he said. “So worried about duty and obligation I couldn’t see past my own uniform.” Once, he had saved three and a third centuries of human history, possibly Earth itself, maybe even the Federation, and all it had cost him had been the love of his life. “And what did it get me?” he said. “An empty house.” He had lived too long with the pain.

  Picard looked at him, and Kirk could see that the future captain of the Enterprise actually understood. “Not this time,” Kirk told him, and he started back over to the steps and then to ascend them. “This time, I’m going to walk up these stairs and march into that bedroom and tell Antonia I want to marry her.” When he reached the second floor, he balanced the tray against the jamb, took hold of the knob, and threw the bedroom door open wide. “This time,” he said, determined, “it’s going to be different.”

  Inside, Antonia looked up at him from where she still lay in bed, her long hair spread out on the pillow behind her head, the dark strands contrasting the white fabric. She gave him a wide smile, and he returned it. He glanced back at the door for a moment as he pushed it closed with his foot, then turned back to see—

  Not the master bedroom of his vacation home, but a barn. For a moment, he felt disoriented. Horses whickered and the dry, earthy scent of hay filled the air. The tray now gone from his hands, Kirk peered behind him, but the doorway through which he’d just come—through which he thought he’d just come—had gone too. He didn’t know what had happened, but as he looked around, he recognized his location. Not only that, he also thought he knew when he was. This time it’s going to be different, he’d said, and maybe now, he could ensure that from the beginning. With his own thoughts and hopes, he realized, he had chosen to come to this place, to this time.

  Kirk moved to his left, deeper into the barn. By turns disconcerted and thrilled at this new setting, he gazed all around. As he did, he saw that Picard had again come after him.

  “This is not your bedroom,” the captain said.

  “No, it’s not,” Kirk said. “It’s better.”

  “Better?”

  “This is my uncle’s barn in Idaho,” Kirk said. He had always thought of the place in that way, even long after his father’s brother had died and passed the property on to him. “I took this horse out for a ride eleven years ago,” he said, walking over to the already saddled beast he had called Tom Telegraph. “On a spring day,” he said. He moved to the nearest door, lifted its wooden latch, pushed it open, and gazed out into the sunshine. “Like this one,” he said. “If I’m right, this is the day I met Antonia.” He looked back over at Picard. “This nexus of yours, very clever. I can start all over again and do things right from day one.” This time, he thought, he would not be left with an empty house. Without another word, he crossed back to Tom Telegraph, mounted his saddle, and rode him outside.

  He recalled where he’d met Antonia, up on the crest of a hill out past the ravine he’d so often jumped. Breaking the horse into a gallop, he headed across the open countryside in that direction. The rays of the midmorning sun warmed Kirk’s face, the steady beat of Tom Telegraph’s hooves accompanied by the whisper of the switchgrass through which they moved. It had been a long time—too long—since Kirk had ridden, and it felt good to be doing it again.

  I know how real this must seem to you, Picard had said, but it’s not. And Kirk knew the truth of that. He hadn’t gone back to the day he’d met Antonia, only to some remarkable simulacrum of it. But with a great sense of liberation, he also thought that might be enough for him. He remembered Christopher Pike, the man he’d succeeded to command of the Enterprise. A strong, vital man, Fleet Captain Pike had been horribly mutilated when during an inspection tour of an old cadet vessel, a baffle plate had ruptured. Pike had saved numerous lives, hauling one young officer after another from the delta rays inundating the affected area, but in the process had condemned himself to life in an automated wheelchair, unable to do anything but move slowly about and signal “yes” and “no” in response to questions. But then Spock had taken his old captain back to the forbidden world of Talos IV, where the powerful mental abilities of the small population there had then allowed Pike to live an illusory life of the mind, apparently happily. Why couldn’t Kirk do the same here in the nexus? Why shouldn’t he?

  Kirk directed Tom Telegraph into a moderately wooded area. Amid trees and bushes, he pushed the horse toward the hill, and before it, to the ravine. They picked up speed as they approached the meters-wide chasm. Kirk loosened the reins, leaned forward out of the saddle, and grabbed hold of Tom Telegraph’s mane.

  At the ravine, the horse leaped up and forward. He crossed the gap in the earth and landed in stride. Up ahead the hill rose to its crown—

  Something’s wrong, Kirk thought. He swung the horse around and to a halt, peering back at the ravine. Tom Telegraph had cleared the dangerous natural obstacle with no trouble, with apparent ease, even. Kirk hadn’t been concerned for a second.

  But I should’ve been, he thought.

  Kirk spurred the horse on again, back toward the ravine. Again he prepared for the jump, and again Tom Telegraph soared into the air and across the open space. They landed, and once more Kirk stopped the horse and faced back in the direction of the chasm.

  Behind him, he heard the approach of hoofbeats. He waited as Picard rode up, coming to a halt a few meters to his left. Kirk looked over at him, then pointed toward the ravine. “I must’ve jumped that fifty times,” he said. “Scared the hell out of me each time.” And then he revealed the uncomfortable truth: “Except this time. Because it isn’t real.”

  Kirk fell silent, the superficiality of this faux existence weighing heavily on him. In the distance, a horse whinnied, and he looked up to the hilltop for which he’d been headed. “Antonia,” Picard said.

  Antonia, Kirk thought as he saw her sitting tall astride her own horse. Romeo, Kirk recalled the beast’s name, and then: Not Romeo. And not Antonia. “She isn’t real either, is she?” he said. “Nothing here is. Nothing here matters.”

  Kirk walked Tom Telegraph toward Picard and his horse and started to circle around them. “You know, maybe this isn’t about an empty house,” he said, even as he knew that it was. But he couldn’t do anything about that, could he? He had cleared out his house by choice, for the good of the many. He could not undo that. On the other hand, he could help Picard attempt to save millions of lives. “Maybe it’s about that empty chair on the bridge of the Enterprise. Ever since I left Starfleet, I haven’t made a difference.” Kirk finished going around Picard, coming to a stop a couple of meters to his side.

  He thought for a moment. He had left Starfleet for several reasons, but largely because of that empty house. If he couldn’t fill it, if he couldn’t change his life in the way that he wanted to change it—and his time away from the space service suggested that he couldn’t—then didn’t he have a responsibility, to himself as much as to others, to return to the duty and obligation of which he and Picard had spoken?

  Slowly, he stepped Tom Telegraph to the side, until he stood next to Picard’s horse. “Captain of the Enterprise?” Kirk asked.

  “That’s right,” Picard said.

  “Close to retirement?”

  “I’m not planning on it,” Picard said.

  “Let me tell you something: don’t,” Kirk said, recollecting his own mistakes and seeing in
Picard a kindred spirit. “Don’t let them promote you. Don’t let them transfer you. Don’t let them do anything that takes you off the bridge of that ship, because while you’re there, you can make a difference.”

  “Come back with me,” Picard said. “Help me stop Soran. Make a difference again.”

  Kirk had already decided that he would. He could not stay here in this place, in this time, or in any place or any time that the nexus offered. He had already stayed far too long. No matter how many events he relived here, no matter how many mistakes he rectified, none of it would truly matter to his life.

  He took Tom Telegraph in front of Picard’s horse so that Kirk could face the captain directly. “Who am I to argue with the captain of the Enterprise,” he said with a grin. “What’s the name of that planet, Veridian Three?”

  “Yes.”

  “I take it the odds are against us and the situation is grim,” Kirk said, warming to the idea of taking on this challenge.

  “You could say that,” Picard agreed.

  How many times had Kirk rushed into a burning building? As many times as he had made it safely back out, save once: he had gone down to the primary deflector control center aboard the Excelsior-class Enterprise, had apparently succeeded in saving the ship, but he hadn’t returned. Now, finally, he would—and he would storm right back into another burning building. “You know, if Spock were here, he’d say that I was an irrational, illogical human being for taking on a mission like that,” he said. “Sounds like fun.”

  Picard smiled, then turned his horse and started back the way he’d come. Kirk peered up at the top of the hill one last time, at the imitation of Antonia, and he knew that he’d made the right choice. He went after Picard, having no idea how the captain intended to get them to Veridian Three.

  As they trotted forward, though, Kirk saw a brilliant white light suddenly blossom, as though emerging from the fabric of existence around them. The gauzy blue of the sky, the green of the trees, the flaxen hue of the switchgrass, all bled and faded. The field of white grew to envelop Picard and his horse, then engulfed Kirk and Tom Telegraph as well. For a subjectively immeasurable span of time, he could see nothing, could hear nothing, could sense nothing. Even the feel of his own body vanished, as though he existed only as thought. He wanted to run but had no legs, wanted to scream but had no voice—

  And then with dizzying swiftness, the force of gravity held Kirk. Light shades of brown formed before his eyes, and a hot, dry wind brushed the flesh of his face. He smelled the dust of the arid region, tasted the grit of the air. The rapid change of place unsettled him.

  He took a moment to steady himself, no longer on horseback now but on foot, and then suddenly an explosion boomed not far behind him. He turned from the sandstone wall he had been facing to see a cloud of dust rising before a stone ridge twenty-five meters away. Debris showered down upon the rocky topography like rain. Kirk thought he saw motion at the base of the cloud, a quick flash of red and black, but it seemed to disappear behind an outcropping.

  He stepped forward, thinking he knew the source of the movement, but then through the daylight shrieked two bright green pulses, the discharge of an energy weapon. Kirk threw himself backward as the shots pounded into the same stone ridge where the previous explosion had taken place. A huge force field blinked orange above the area as another cloud of dust went up and a huge slab of rock tumbled side-over-side to the ground.

  As more rubble peppered the area, Kirk waited. The source of the blasts remained hidden from view around the rocky mountain by which he stood. Seconds passed, and then a minute. He surveyed the ragged terrain, strewn with rocks and boulders, cut with fissures and grooves. When he saw and heard nothing, he prepared to move, to try to find Picard or this Soran of whom the captain had spoken. But then a hand appeared on the edge of a crevice that ran across the landscape in front of Kirk. He stepped up to it and peered down to see Picard climbing upward. They made eye contact, and Kirk lowered himself to his knees and helped the captain up.

  “I take it that was Soran firing at you,” Kirk said.

  “It was,” Picard confirmed. “He’s got that handheld weapon, but he’s alone here. If we go at him from two sides, one of us should be able to stop him.” As Picard gazed in the direction from which the energy fire had come, he explained that Soran had briefly experienced the nexus himself eighty years ago, aboard one of the very transports that the skeleton crew of the Excelsior-class Enterprise had endeavored to save. Prior to that, Soran had lost his entire family in an unprovoked attack by a brutal alien species, and apparently the nexus had allowed him to overcome the pain of that terrible loss, at least while he’d been within it. Having been swallowed up himself by the timeless other-space and subjected to its effects, Kirk found that eminently understandable.

  According to Picard, after Soran had been beamed from the transport, and consequently from the nexus, he had then spent the ensuing decades searching for a safe means of reentering it. The energy ribbon, which made a circuit through the galaxy every thirty-nine years, functioned as a doorway into the nexus. Soran had developed a scheme to reroute the path of the ribbon so that it would intersect the surface of a world—this world, Veridian Three. In order to accomplish that, he had deployed a trilithium weapon of his own design to collapse a star, Amargosa, thereby affecting the gravity in this sector. Now, he intended to do the same thing to this system’s star. After Soran had then made it back into the nexus, the shock wave resulting from the destruction of Veridian would tear apart each of its six planets, including the fourth, home to a preindustrial society numbering two hundred thirty million.

  “Soran has covered these crags with a complex of platforms, bridges, and ladders,” Picard said. “It appears that he’ll launch his trilithium missile, then make his way to the highest platform to wait for the ribbon to sweep him up into the nexus.”

  “How much time have we got?” Kirk asked.

  “Minutes only,” Picard said.

  “Then let’s go.”

  Kirk threw his closed fist through the scaffolding, catching Soran on the side of his face. The white-haired man fell backward and off the top of the rocks, fifty meters or more above the ground. Kirk heard him grunt once, but Soran did not scream.

  As quickly as he could, Kirk extricated himself from the web of metal bars that held up the platform at the apex of the rock formation. As he did, he saw Picard clambering back up from where he’d tumbled during their hand-to-hand struggle with Soran. “I thought you were going for the launcher,” Kirk said to him. In fact, by returning when he had, Picard had prevented Kirk’s death at the emitter end of Soran’s handheld energy weapon.

  “I changed my mind,” Picard said. “Captain’s prerogative.” Together, they started back down from the summit, heading for the trilithium missile that sat poised to take flight. As they reached that level and approached the launcher, though, Kirk heard a low whooshing sound from ahead, and he looked over to see the bronze missile fade into nothingness, obviously cloaking. More important, the launcher and its control panel also vanished.

  Suddenly, Kirk heard another noise, above and to his left. He peered over and saw Soran falling down the side of the cliff face at the end of a rope, which he’d evidently grabbed hold of when he’d fallen. Now, he slid down fifteen meters, then jerked to a stop. A small object flew from his hands, clattered along the rocks, and landed atop one of the metal bridges constructed here.

  “We need that control pad,” Picard said, clearly concluding that Soran had used it to cloak the missile. They started for the device at once, Kirk in the lead. As he reached the bridge, though, Picard said, “Captain, look!” Kirk glanced up and immediately saw the source of Picard’s concern. “Where’s Soran?” Against the sheer rock face, the rope now hung empty. Either Soran had fallen or he’d found his way to safety.

  It didn’t matter. With time running out, they had little choice in how to proceed. Kirk turned and pointed back toward the location of th
e missile. Picard nodded and started for it, while Kirk hurried across the bridge toward the control pad.

  Suddenly a pulse of green light flashed from below. It passed beneath the bridge, and Kirk turned to see it strike the rocks behind him, creating a momentary fireball. Before he could do anything, Soran corrected his aim and sent a pair of energy bursts slamming into the center of the bridge in front of Kirk. He felt the blasts as they rent the metal structure in two. Kirk reached for a pole at the side of the bridge, wrapping one arm around it as the surface beneath his feet fell. Both ends of the bridge remained attached to the rocks, though, depending from them at steep angles.

  Expecting another blast from Soran’s energy weapon at any moment, Kirk didn’t wait, but began pulling himself up along the chains that hung between the poles at the sides of the bridge. As he did so, he saw Picard rushing back down from the missile platform, obviously to help him. Kirk pulled his knees in and used his feet to push himself upward from one of the poles. Above, he saw Picard positioning himself at the end of the bridge and preparing to reach down to him. Kirk took hold of the upper chain with his left hand and maneuvered himself onto his back, then reached his right hand up toward Picard.

  Only centimeters separated their fingertips, but it might as well have been parsecs. Kirk strained, as did Picard, and the gap narrowed, but not enough. At the same time, he felt his hold on the chain slipping.

  A terrifying instant later his hand came completely free. Kirk began sliding down the bridge. “No!” he yelled, elongating the word as he descended toward a fall that would likely kill him.

  But then Picard’s hand slapped down hard atop his wrist, the captain’s fingers closing around it in a strong grip. Kirk reached again for one of the chains, found it, and began hauling himself up again. With Picard’s help, this time he made it.

  The two captains dropped onto the rocks at the end of the bridge, Picard no doubt as hot and exhausted as Kirk. The twenty-fourth-century captain peered down to the location from where Soran had fired his weapon, and then up at the sky. Kirk followed his gaze and saw a whirling, weaving band of fiery energy he remembered well from the main viewscreen on the bridge of the Enterprise-B. He’d also seen it up close, when it had torn through the outer bulkhead of the deflector control room. Kirk had been ascending a ladder when he’d been blown out into space amid a coruscation of brilliant light. As though through a fog, he’d seen for just a moment the massive form of the Enterprise above him, and beyond it, the pinpoints of the brightest stars, Sol among them.