Crucible: Kirk Page 6

  “This is why,” she said, and she reached up and took his arm. As he turned the way she led him, the nexus again transformed their surroundings, from outside the wrecked ship to what surely must have been its interior. Once his disorientation passed, he saw a large, circular area rimmed with inactive control stations, some of them smashed, others showing evidence of being subjected to intense heat, though if any fires had burned here, they had by now been extinguished. Fiber-optic lines, conduits, and structural beams littered the decking, and a dome at the top of the compartment had shattered, revealing clouds high up in the sky overhead. Sunlight streamed in through the opening, illuminating a small area at the center of the bridge, the rest of which remained in shadows.

  From his location with Guinan in a recess beside a pair of doors in the upper, outer bulkhead, Kirk saw people moving about, all uniformed in ways reminiscent of Picard. He saw dirt and blood on the officers who moved through the light, but nobody present seemed to have suffered grievous injuries. Guinan motioned to the lower area of the bridge, just past a long, curving structure, toward where a tall, bearded, dark-haired officer spoke to a yellow-eyed, sallow-complected individual. “What have you got, Data?” the taller man said.

  “I am reading nine hundred thirty-seven discrete humanoid life signs, Commander,” Data said, consulting a compact device that must have been a tricorder. “Some are faint, but most are strong. There may even be more.”

  “Nine hundred?” Kirk whispered to Guinan.

  “The total number of people aboard ship was just above a thousand,” she explained. The figure initially surprised Kirk, but then, he had noted the size of this Enterprise.

  Suddenly, he detected a considerable vibration in the decking. At first, he thought that the saucer must be shifting its position on the ground, but the trembling not only continued, it intensified. A low rumble grew in the enclosed space.

  “Data, what is that?” the commander asked.

  “Scanning,” Data said as he adjusted his tricorder. “I am detecting the energy ribbon.”

  “Where?” the commander asked.

  “Moving now along the surface of the planet,” Data said.

  “It’s returned here?” The commander clearly hadn’t expected that information.

  “Yes,” Data said, and then, “No, not precisely. I am reading a massive shock wave driving it along its path.”

  “A shock wave from what?” the commander wanted to know, even as Kirk understood that it must be the same destructive phenomenon he had seen before being carried back into the nexus. “Did Soran’s weapon launch?” Kirk knew that it hadn’t.

  Again, Data operated his tricorder. “Negative,” he reported. “Solar energy levels indicate that the Veridian star is intact, but…I am reading a complete breakdown of the space-time continuum along the course of the shock wave.”

  “Caused by what?” the commander asked again.

  “It is unclear, but it appears to be emerging from the past,” Data said, raising his voice as the rumbling increased in volume. Kirk recognized the character of the sound, having heard it before. It chilled him.

  “From the past?” the commander said, also speaking louder, the skepticism in his voice plain.

  “The shock wave matches a theoretical concept known as a converging temporal loop,” Data reported. “Two significant and identical sets of chronometric particles, connected by a conduit of some sort, essentially merge across time and space, annihilating everything between them. It seems to have been triggered within the last few minutes.” Data looked up from the tricorder and over at the tall man. “Commander, the shock wave is destroying the planet.”

  “What can we do?” the commander asked, yelling now as the noise grew louder still.

  In response, Data peered upward. Kirk lifted his gaze to the center of the overhead too, to where the dome had been smashed, and saw that it was already too late. In the scrap of sky visible there, the intense radiance of the energy ribbon appeared, and then about it, existence began to crumble. Kirk quickly looked around and saw confusion mingling with fear on the faces he could make out.

  And then both darkness and light collapsed upon them. Those few touched by the bright energy of the ribbon seemed to fade away, but for one gruesome instant, Kirk saw the wave of blackness tear apart the rest of the crew. He turned away, slamming his eyes closed, unable to bear it. The great din pushed in on him like a physical force, threatening to crush him, until—

  It all faded.

  Kirk opened his eyes. Though Guinan still stood beside him, the nexus had taken them to yet another time and place. Once more, they stood atop a mountain, one of many in a chain of spectacular snow-capped peaks. Directly below Kirk and Guinan spread a crystalline city of surpassing beauty. Slender spires reached up elegantly toward a vibrant twilit sky, while artfully crafted structures reflected the light as though delicately dancing with it. On the horizon to the left, opposite the setting sun, a string of prismatic pearls arced across the heavens. The glittering dots swirled from one color to the next, like a spinning chain of self-contained rainbows. Kirk had never seen anything quite like it.

  “What is that?” he asked, transfixed, the horror of what he’d just witnessed on Veridian Three slipping from his mind with the change of scene.

  “Geysers on the moon,” Guinan said. “They discharge water beyond the pull of the low gravity, sending it into space. The ice freezes there and reflects the sun as it falls to the planet.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Kirk said. “Where are we?”

  “This was the world of my people,” Guinan said. “This was Lauresse, the city I called home.”

  “‘Was?’” Kirk asked.

  “This place…most of my people…were destroyed by invaders,” Guinan said. “I managed to escape, but…” She did not complete her thought, but offered a different one. “In the nexus, I spend much of my time here.”

  “I can see why,” Kirk said as he gazed out over the city. It saddened him to hear of Guinan’s loss, of the extermination of her people. It also reminded him of the awful events he’d just seen replayed on Veridian Three, as well as of the potential threat to the population of the neighboring planet. “Guinan,” he said, “the converging temporal loop, caused by the two identical sets of chronometric particles—”

  “That was you,” she said. “In twenty-two ninety-three and twenty-three seventy-one.”

  “Me?” Kirk said, attempting to work out what Guinan claimed and taking into account what Data had said. “My body contained a unique set of chronometric particles both before I entered the nexus and after I left it.” Back during the five-year mission, McCoy had detected a discrepancy in Kirk’s M’Benga numbers, a measurement comparing the expected and actual energy of the humanoid nervous system. That had ultimately led to the identification of chronometric particles within his body. “So once I exited the nexus, two identical sets of particles existed at two different points in time and space.”

  “And they were connected by the nexus,” Guinan said, distinguishing the “conduit” that Data had mentioned. “Your departure with Captain Picard to Veridian Three then initiated the convergence loop.”

  “But it didn’t happen right away,” Kirk noted.

  “I’m sure it did,” Guinan said. “But it must have taken time for the loop to close across a span of seventy-eight years and scores of light-years.”

  Kirk nodded his head as he tried to fathom the extent of the devastation about which he and Guinan spoke. “So every point in time and space between my location in twenty-two ninety-three on the Enterprise-B and my location in twenty-three seventy-one on Veridian Three—”

  “And obviously in neighboring time and space,” Guinan pointed out.

  “Was completely obliterated,” Kirk finished.

  “Yes,” Guinan said.

  The idea staggered Kirk. Not only had Veridian IV and its population likely been wiped out, but the same must have been true of other worlds, not to menti
on starships, beginning with and including the Enterprise-B. Kirk stood in silence as he tried to come to terms with the enormity of the situation.

  Then, from the city below, the graceful sound of bells began to play. The gentle ringing seemed to Kirk an appropriate accompaniment to the fragile-looking structures from which it rose. He listened for a few moments, allowing the lilting notes to calm his troubled mind. But then something else occurred to him.

  “Why me?” he asked Guinan. “Why couldn’t it have been Picard? He entered and exited the nexus too.”

  “It was you,” Guinan said. “Data stated that the converging temporal loop required a significant set of identical chronometric particles.”

  “Right,” Kirk said, not knowing how Guinan knew this about him, but comprehending the wealth of information available to her within the nexus. He recalled again his exceedingly high M’Benga numbers, and that Spock and McCoy had ultimately used that quantity to distinguish chronometric activity within his body. As far as Kirk knew, his numbers, which had grown sizably during his time in Starfleet, had been by far the highest ever recorded. Some of that had been attributable to his various travels through time, but his readings had always remained greater even than those of individuals who had time-traveled as much as he had. Bones had theorized that other unusual experiences must have contributed to his high numbers, possibly including some unexplained forms of instantaneous transport, such as when Trelane had whisked him from the Enterprise bridge or when the Providers of Triskelion had pulled him through space across more than eleven light-years; or possibly his exposure to other universes, such as when he had slipped through a place of interphase in Tholian space or when the ship had reached the “magical” realm of Megas-Tu; or possibly the transference of his mind out of his body, such as when he had permitted Sargon to switch consciousnesses with him or when Janice Lester had forced him to do so. Whatever the cause or causes, the chronometric activity within his body had been extremely high by the time he’d entered the nexus.

  “Guinan,” Kirk said, “the crew aboard Picard’s Enterprise, were they pulled into the nexus?” He’d seen some of them vanish from the bridge when the bright light of the energy ribbon had touched them.

  “Some of them were drawn into the nexus,” Guinan said, “but most were not.”

  “Why?” Kirk asked. “Why not all of them?”

  “It just depended on who was touched by the energy ribbon first,” she said, “and who was struck by the shock wave.”

  Kirk nodded. The luck of the draw, he thought. He could just as easily have been ripped apart by the converging temporal loop as pulled back into the nexus.

  But you didn’t die, he told himself. And that meant that he had a responsibility to do everything he could to find a way to undo the destruction that had been wrought on the universe. Many of the crew aboard Picard’s Enterprise had been killed, probably many of those aboard Harriman’s Enterprise as well, not to mention the hundreds of millions on Veridian IV and whatever other worlds had been impacted by the loop. “Guinan,” he said, “Picard left the nexus to go back to Veridian Three in the minutes before Soran launched his weapon. Where can I go?”

  “Time has no meaning here,” Guinan said. “You can go anywhere, any time.” She paused, then asked, “But where would you go?”

  Kirk looked at Guinan and asked himself the same question: Where would I go? But then he realized that he had asked the wrong question. He needed to determine not where he could go, and not even when, but what he could do.

  Turning away from Guinan, Kirk peered out over the magnificent city below. The peal of the bells still drifted upward, a fragile melody that sounded almost as though the notes had been generated from the crystal buildings themselves. Now, though, Kirk stopped listening, stopped even seeing the great city, instead turning all of his senses inward.

  After a few minutes, he bade Guinan good-bye.

  FOUR

  (2267/2276)

  Kirk strode purposefully through the corridors of the Enterprise—his Enterprise. On the promontory overlooking the city of Lauresse, he had taken his leave of Guinan. He’d realized that she had come to him in order to help, and he’d told her how much he appreciated it. But as he’d begun to consider what actions he could take to reverse the devastation caused by the shock wave of the converging temporal loop, he’d discovered that he needed to do so alone. Guinan had understood, and she had reminded him that he had all of the nexus—essentially the entirety of his life, real or imagined—in which to find solitude.

  When Kirk had reentered the nexus, he hadn’t chosen or participated in the events in which he’d then found himself: meeting Antonia for the first time, escaping the clutches of the proconsul on planet 892-IV, transporting down with a landing party to Gamma Trianguli VI. Prior to that, though, before he’d left the nexus with Picard, he had lived or relived much. Standing with Guinan above her city, he had harked back to those experiences, then turned from her—

  And stepped out of a turbolift and onto deck seventeen of the Enterprise.

  Now, he walked among the crew of his first command, the familiar vibration of the ship telling him that it traveled at warp. Headed aft, he passed Yeoman Atkins and Ensign Nored, Crewman Moody and Lieutenant Leslie, offering each a curt nod. Nostalgia welled up within Kirk, along with the unexpected sentiment that these had been simpler, happier times in his life. He knew that hadn’t been the case, though. He remembered well the weight of responsibility that came with leading a crew, as well as the terrible cost that his position had claimed from him. He had loved Edith as he had loved no other woman, either before or after. For the most part, he had found fulfillment each day that he’d been able to step onto the bridge of the Enterprise or the Enterprise-A as its commanding officer, and he still felt that there had been something special about his first captaincy, but he could not deny the great scar it had placed permanently on his soul.

  Kirk reached his destination and proceeded through the pale blue doors, which glided open at his approach. He marched down a short corridor, then turned right through a pair of irregularly shaped hexagonal entryways and onto the empty observation deck. Not wanting to deal with the more intense recollections that it might bring him if he spent time in his quarters, he had opted to come here, to this place he had occasionally visited during his years aboard ship. He’d selected this time, after the crew’s encounter with the Elluvex and before they reached the Pyris system, because he’d recalled having a few days of light duty. He also remembered coming here alone during that period and remaining undisturbed by any of the crew.

  To his left, starting a meter or so above the deck and rising to the overhead, a pair of wide ports angled away from the bulkhead, allowing a view directly into the hangar deck. Kirk went to one of the ports and peered down. Situated on the combination turntable and lift at the center of the bay, a shuttlecraft—the Aristarchus, NCC-1701/9—sat ready for flight should it be needed. For just a second, the sight triggered thoughts of Kirk’s piloting drills back at the academy, but he quickly disregarded them. He hadn’t come here to reminisce.

  Turning away from the hangar deck, Kirk looked across the narrow observation compartment at the viewports in the outer bulkhead. Through them he saw the stars, many stationary because of the Enterprise’s great distance from them, others seeming to move as the result of parallax. Even by this point in his career, Kirk had visited numerous planetary systems, but the vastness of the galaxy had always provided him new frontiers.

  Some of that expanse had been destroyed now, though, and with it, lives lost. Kirk himself had evidently been the source of that destruction, albeit inadvertently. Regardless of his role in the catastrophe, though, he wanted to do something about it.

  But it’s even more than that, he thought. Because of his part in what had happened, he might be the only person capable of taking action in these circumstances. Even if somebody outside the nexus could determine precisely what had taken place, what could they po
ssibly do to counteract the damage that had been done?

  Based not only upon what Guinan had told him, but also upon his experience with Picard on Veridian Three, Kirk believed that he could exit the nexus at any place and, of even greater import, at any time. More specifically, he could travel into the past, meaning that he could at least theoretically prevent the shock wave from ever occurring. Considering the nature and apparent cause of the converging temporal loop, Kirk reasoned that there could be only two ways of precluding it from developing: either he must stop himself from entering the nexus in 2293 or from exiting it in 2371. By accomplishing either of those goals, he would avert his existence—and that of the substantial set of chronometric particles within his body—at two distinct points in time with a conduit connecting them. Without those requirements, the temporal loop would not converge and the shock wave would not arise.

  But if I don’t enter the nexus in twenty-two ninety-three, he thought, then the Enterprise-B and its crew and passengers would be destroyed by the energy ribbon. Kirk supposed that he might be able to travel back in time and find a means of saving the Enterprise without having to be down in the deflector control room, but if he did that, then he would not vanish and be presumed dead. In that case, he would alter the timeline, something he must avoid doing; he had already sacrificed his own happiness to preserve history, and he would not allow time to be changed now.

  And there’s another problem, Kirk thought. If he didn’t enter the nexus in the first place, then clearly he would never leave it. That would provide another means of preventing the temporal loop, but if he didn’t leave the nexus to assist Picard on Veridian Three, then Soran would succeed at launching his weapon and the population of two hundred thirty million on Veridian IV would die. The calculus seemed impossible to negotiate.