Crucible: Kirk Read online

  Edith put on her hat, and then Kirk held open her cloak, helping her on with the navy blue garment. After he and Spock had donned their own coats, they headed for the double doors at the front of the mission. There, Spock held open one of the doors, and Kirk followed Edith out into the cool night. The lights of street lamps and automobiles reflected from the damp surfaces of the sidewalks and roads, wet from an earlier rain shower.

  “Good night, Mister Spock,” Edith said, glancing behind her as Spock exited the mission.

  “I’ll see you back at the apartment,” Kirk told him with a quick wave.

  “Good night,” Spock said, returning Kirk’s wave with his own clumsy gesture. Given their circumstances, Spock had done what he could to blend in to their ancient setting, his efforts essentially succeeding, though to varying degrees.

  As Spock moved off down the sidewalk to the right, Kirk put his arm around Edith’s back and started into the street. They stepped down from the sidewalk, but then two quick beeps sounded to their left. At the same time that Kirk saw an automobile bearing down on them, he hauled Edith backward. Tires squealed on the pavement as the automobile stopped right before them. The driver honked his horn again, and then once more for a longer burst.

  Kirk’s heart raced. Not only had Edith just been endangered, but he realized that he might at that moment have changed history, relegating Earth to a Nazi victory in World War II. But McCoy’s not here yet, Kirk told himself. This can’t be the time.

  Edith’s hand had gone up around his back, and now she urged him forward. As they passed in front of the stopped automobile, Kirk made an effort to cover his anxiety, offering a wave of apology to the driver. He dropped his arm from around Edith and took her hand as they hurried to the far sidewalk.

  “Oh,” he began, remembering that he and Edith had earlier talked about taking a romantic walk down by the waterfront. Before he could continue, though, Edith excitedly suggested that, if they hurried, they could see a movie over at the Orpheum. As she mentioned how she’d love to see the film, Kirk said, “What?” He knew that he’d much prefer spending time with Edith in a setting where he could interact with her, rather than in a place where they would have to remain silent.

  As they stepped up onto the sidewalk, Edith said, “You know, Doctor McCoy said the same—”

  The name struck Kirk as effectively as a blow to the face. He whirled around to Edith, letting go of her hand and grabbing her by her upper arms. “McCoy?!” he said. “Leonard McCoy?”

  Edith gazed up at him in evident confusion. “Yes,” she said. “He’s in the mission, he’s—”

  “Stay right here,” Kirk told her forcefully. He looked past her then, down the street in the direction that Spock had walked. He shouted his friend’s name, then let go of Edith and started back across the street, back toward the mission. “Stay right there,” he called back to her. As he saw Spock hurrying back along the sidewalk, Kirk could only think one thing: McCoy! If they had found him, then maybe they could determine some means of repairing the damage to the timeline without having to let Edith die. Maybe they could even find a way of bringing her back with them to the future.

  Kirk ran in front of another automobile, earning him another beep of a horn, but he paid it little attention. He leaped the curb in front of the mission just as Spock arrived there. “What is it?” the first officer asked.

  “McCoy,” Kirk said, pointing to the front doors. “He’s in—” He stopped in midsentence as he looked toward the mission and saw the doctor emerging from within. “Bones!” he yelled, and he rushed toward his old friend.

  “Jim!” McCoy called. Kirk embraced Bones, saying his nickname again, almost as though trying to confirm his presence here. Beside them, Spock had reached for McCoy’s hand, and now the two shook enthusiastically, a rare show of emotion for the Vulcan.

  “I’m so happy to see you two,” Bones said. As he spoke, Kirk peered back toward Edith. He saw that she had started walking back across the street, her eyes focused on the trio in front of the mission. Without looking, Kirk heard the sound of an approaching vehicle, and in an instant, he knew that the time had come. “I didn’t know where I was, or how I got here,” McCoy began, but he stopped as Kirk stepped away from him and back across the sidewalk.

  Kirk staggered forward even as both of his friends yelled to him. “No, Jim!”

  Kirk stopped at the curb. “Edith—” he said, the single, desperate word not much more than a whisper. Edith continued walking toward him, seemingly unaware of the danger. Kirk wanted to go to her, wanted to throw himself into her path and save her from her fate, no matter the consequences.

  Instead, he stood there.

  And then somebody bumped him from behind, attempting to push past him. Kirk knew it had to be McCoy. He raised his arm to block the doctor’s progress, then turned and threw his arms around his friend. Unable to watch, Kirk buried his head atop McCoy’s shoulder, his eyes slammed shut. He heard the whine of tires on the street, and then he heard Edith scream. He did not even recognize her voice, but then a terrible sound reached him as her head struck the pavement.

  That quickly, Kirk had lost everything in his life that could have been.

  The beat of footsteps went up as people rushed to the scene of the accident. Kirk couldn’t move, couldn’t even open his eyes. The pain of his loss pressed in on him, filled him, and he wanted nothing more in that moment than to let go, to crumple lifeless to the ground beside his beloved.

  “You deliberately stopped me, Jim,” McCoy accused him, and Kirk realized that he still held on tightly to the doctor. He opened his eyes as McCoy continued his indictment. “I could have saved her,” he said. “Do you know what you just did?”

  Kirk pushed away from McCoy then, lurching over to the front doors of the mission. There, he leaned heavily against the jamb. What have I done? he thought, and even though he knew the answer, it didn’t matter; he knew that the question would remain with him always.

  “He knows, Doctor,” he heard Spock say. “He knows.”

  Kirk felt empty and weak. He clenched his fist, fighting just to maintain his equilibrium. In his mind’s eye, though, all he could see was Edith’s face.

  EIGHTEEN

  2293/2371

  Within the mysterious mists of the Guardian, the events of Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s life played out once more. Jim Kirk had completed his preparations for the journey to come, taking the shuttlecraft out of the crater and hiding it in the base of a deep crevice. He then fixed its engines to explode in a way that would leave behind as little evidence as possible, then beamed back to the Guardian of Forever. There, he watched closely, waiting for the right moment. When it came, he jumped through the time vortex.

  As he landed softly on a rocky surface, he saw a sandstone wall rising before him. A hot, dry wind blew past, bringing with it the scent of dust and the grit of the air. He turned and peered out across the rocky terrain, recognizing the surface of Veridian Three from the images he’d seen within the Guardian. He looked for any sign of Picard or Soran, but then an explosion ripped apart a stone ridge twenty or twenty-five meters away. Rubble rained down on the landscape as a cloud of dust rose into the air. Through it, Kirk thought he saw movement, a dash of color, red and black, but then it vanished behind other rocks.

  He stepped forward, believing that he’d just seen Picard. Suddenly, two bright green pulses screamed through the air, obviously shots from an energy weapon. Kirk backed up against the sandstone wall, taking cover as best he could as the ridge where he thought he’d seen Picard exploded again. Above it, the orange spark of a massive force field blinked on and off. On the ridge, a rock slab fell from its place and tumbled heavily to the ground.

  More debris showered down around Kirk. He waited, not wanting to reveal himself to whoever had fired the weapon—Soran, no doubt. As the seconds ticked away, he watched the surrounding area, which offered numerous places to conceal oneself: fissures cut the ground and boulders stood tall
all around.

  Finally, unwilling to wait any longer for fear of failing in his mission, he started forward. But then he saw a hand appear at the edge of a crevice just in front of him. Cautiously, he stepped over to it and looked down. There, he saw Picard attempting to pull himself upward. The future captain of the Enterprise saw him and froze, clearly unsure what to make of another person here on Veridian Three.

  “I’m here to help you stop Soran,” Kirk said. He bent down and reached for Picard’s hand. For a moment, the captain didn’t move, but then he seemed to make a decision and he allowed Kirk to take his hand and pull him out of the crevice. When Picard stood before him, Kirk said, “I’m—”

  “Kirk,” Picard said, obviously bewildered by his realization. “James T. Kirk.”

  “Yes,” he confirmed, and then he told an abbreviated version of the tale that his future self had offered. “When I was lost aboard the Enterprise-B,” he said, “I didn’t die. I was pulled into the nexus.” An expression of at least partial understanding seemed to dawn on Picard’s face. “I was able to leave it now, to come here and help you stop Soran from destroying the Veridian star and the two hundred thirty million on Veridian Four.”

  “How is that possible?” Picard asked.

  “I don’t know, but does it matter?” Kirk asked. “That was Soran firing at you just now, wasn’t it?”

  “It was,” Picard said. He paused, and Kirk knew that he weighed the current circumstances as best he could. Kirk felt no need to try to convince Picard of his identity or his intentions, knowing that the captain would reach his own conclusions. One fact, he knew, would stand out for Picard: no matter who Kirk actually was, he could easily have subdued the captain when he’d stood over him a moment ago; instead, Kirk had helped him.

  “Soran’s got a handheld energy weapon,” Picard said at last, “but he’s alone here. If we attack him from opposite sides, one of us should be able to stop him. The missile he wants to launch into the star is in that direction—” He pointed. “—but he’s also got ladders and bridges and platforms scattered all over the mountainside.”

  “How much time is there before he launches the missile?” Kirk asked.

  “Soon,” Picard said. “Perhaps only a matter of minutes.”

  “Then we’d better get going,” Kirk said.

  Kirk leaped.

  He felt the hanging section of bridge beneath him shake as he sprang forward across open space, and then he landed hard on the other side. He took hold of a chain there with one hand, pushing the fingers of his other hand through the grated surface and grabbing on there. That section of the bridge shifted and swayed, its metal components whining and cracking beneath the force of his landing and his continued weight on it. It dropped suddenly to an even steeper angle, and he quickly let go of the chain and clutched that hand through the grating as well.

  He heard a clatter above him, and he glanced upward just in time to see Soran’s control pad sliding down the surface of the bridge toward him. Letting go with one hand, he reached up and somehow caught the device. He studied its marking and controls for a moment, then pointed the pad toward where Soran’s trilithium missile sat cloaked. With the bridge trembling beneath him, Kirk pushed a button—fortunately, the right button. Atop its platform, Soran’s deadly weapon faded into view. Below it, Picard climbed the ladder leading up to it, rushing to stop the missile from launching.

  Kirk tucked the control pad into his waistband, then reached again for the chain. He intended to pull himself up as quickly as he could, but then he heard the snap of metal fracturing above him. He knew that he didn’t have much time.

  That was when the bridge fell.

  Kirk had no idea whether he’d retained consciousness or how much time had passed, but he heard what he gradually recognized as the scrape of footsteps in the dirt. He tried to move, but found it impossible even to keep up the effort for more than a second or two. He’d fallen to the ground on his back, and the great mass of the wrecked bridge pinned him there. Though he felt no pain, he knew that he’d been crushed, his organs damaged to a fatal degree. His eyes and ears still functioned, and he tasted blood in his mouth, but he could do nothing now but wait for death to take him.

  Somebody or something moved about him, in the rocky surroundings and the metal ruins that would form his tomb. He saw a metal bar slide away, and a chain, and he heard the heavy pieces clanking to the ground. Then, above him, Picard gazed at him through the ruins of the bridge.

  Kirk blinked, searching for the strength to speak. “Did we do it?” he asked softly, remembering how his future self had told him the way in which Picard had urged him to leave the nexus. “Did…we make a difference?”

  “Oh, yes. We made a difference,” Picard said seriously. “Thank you.”

  “Least I could do,” Kirk struggled to say, “for the captain of the Enterprise.” He peered away from Picard, thinking of the odd course the last moments of his life had taken. On the brink of being swept into the nexus, only to leave it to come here in an attempt to save the lives of two hundred thirty million people he had never met, he had instead taken a final trek through space and one last trip through the Guardian. In the end, he had come here after all, had done what he had apparently done once before, namely stopping Soran and preventing the destruction of the civilization on Veridian IV. “It was…fun,” he told Picard. Kirk smiled as best he could.

  Time seemed to slow down. He peered past Picard and into the sky over his right shoulder. Amid the high clouds scattered across the field of blue, Kirk saw something. At first impossible to make out, the faint image gradually resolved itself into hazel eyes, a slender nose, lips that curled upward in an inviting smile. Edith, Kirk thought, and in that moment, he felt fulfilled all of the desperate hopes he had never even dared to have. He knew that, impossibly, she waited for him on the other side.

  “Oh, my,” Kirk said. Though he did not close his eyes, his vision faded, dimming from the outside until he could see nothing. But in his mind, the image of Edith’s face remained.

  More ready than he’d ever been to rejoin his true love, Jim Kirk let go of life.

  EPILOGUE

  The Edge of Forever

  James T. Kirk stood in the middle of the great, empty plain, watching as first the images and then the mists within the Guardian of Forever faded. He had just viewed the life of his counterpart, whom he had transported out of the Enterprise-B’s main deflector control room and into the shuttlecraft Archimedes—where before that earlier Jim Kirk had materialized, Kirk had been pulled back here by the Guardian. Although he hadn’t known whether the time vortex would accede to his request, Kirk had actually asked to be returned here if he managed to prevent the converging temporal loop. Once he had beamed his alter ego out of the path of the energy ribbon, that had been the case.

  Now, he stood before the mysterious portal, having just watched the last moments in the life of that other Kirk, confirming that he had aided Picard and had thereby saved the population of Veridian IV. Remarkably, everything had transpired more or less as he had planned just before he had left the nexus the second time. He had no idea whether any echo or other version of himself remained within that timeless other-space or not, since he had stopped himself from entering it in the first place. And he didn’t quite understand how he had essentially managed to replicate himself, since five billion years from now he would die on Veridian Three beneath the mass of a metal bridge.

  He did know this: he stood here on a world before Earth’s sun had formed, all of his responsibilities satisfied. The converging temporal loop had been averted, the crew of the Enterprise-B had been rescued from the clutches of the energy ribbon, the people of Veridian IV had been saved, and he had avoided altering the timeline between 2293 and 2371. The universe believed him dead. Now, alone here with the Guardian, his thoughts turned to Edith.

  When Kirk and Spock had traveled back in time to 1930, the only option they’d had in restoring history had been to stop Mc
Coy from damaging it. In the years since, though, when he’d been unable to keep his memory from returning to Edith, Kirk had occasionally imagined taking some action not only to save the life of his beloved, but to allow him to then spend his life with her. He’d considered going back to the Guardian and somehow finding a way of bringing Edith safely forward, or of remaining in the past with her, without altering the timeline. Although he’d had a number of ideas on the subject, he’d never seriously considered attempting any of them.

  But now, standing here with the Guardian of Forever before human beings had ever even evolved on Earth, before there had even been an Earth, he reconsidered. In many ways, he had all the time in the world. All the time in the universe, really.

  “Guardian,” he said.

  AFTERWORD

  Here There Be Dragons

  And by dragons, I mean to say spoilers. If you haven’t yet read the novel that you are holding in your hands, or if you intend to read either of the other volumes in the Crucible trilogy for the first time, then turn back now. You can always return here and read this afterword at a later point.

  In the forewords to this and the other two books, I wrote in nonspecific terms about the process involved in penning the three tales. There, in those introductory pieces, I didn’t want to reveal too much about the stories, preferring to allow them to speak for themselves. Now, though, with the trilogy completely written—and, I hope, completely read—I thought that some readers might find interest in my revisiting in a more explicit way some of the details involved in the development and creation of Crucible.

  After editor Marco Palmieri offered me the opportunity to write a Star Trek trilogy and I accepted the invitation, I began to consider just how I should go about crafting it. I decided almost at once that I didn’t want to plot out a single, large story that would spread across the three books. Rather, I preferred to tell a trio of individual tales, all self-contained, but also inter-weaving with and informing one another. With that viewpoint in mind, it soon became clear to me that one way to approach the trilogy would be to center each volume around one of the three main characters of McCoy, Spock, and Kirk. After all, the episodes of the Original Series had primarily been rendered in such a fashion, and since these novels would help celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Star Trek, why not have them reflect that aspect of the show?