Crucible: Kirk Read online

  Another pulse struck the door, the percussive sound pushing Kirk back into motion. He rushed across the room and through a single door, this in one of the two straight walls. He found himself in a lab shaped identically to the last one, but oriented and equipped differently. Various stations lined the walls, but two very large machines sat in the middle of the room, their purposes a mystery to Kirk. Bordering one of them, a low platform contained an enormous slab of metallic rock, at least five meters long, five meters wide, and two deep. It had obviously been carved out of the planet’s surface and brought here for study.

  As he had in the previous lab, Kirk locked the doors, then hied from panel to panel, hunting for the controls of the pressure dome. He’d only checked two consoles, though, before he stopped and turned back to regard the mass of native stone. Then he peered at all three entrances into the room, a single door in each of the two straight walls and a set of double doors in the curved wall. The great rock would have fit through none of them, he realized; it must have been beamed here.

  Kirk returned his attention to the panels, but now he began looking for transporter controls. He knew that the planet’s atmosphere inhibited transport through it, but within the Pelfrey Complex itself, within the pressure dome, it must have been possible. The scientists must have employed a workpod to drag the mammoth stone into the hangar, and then from there beamed it into the lab.

  At the fifth console he came to, Kirk saw a symbol composed of two outward-pointing arrows on either side of a square. A series of dots formed the bottom half of the square, as though the shape was dematerializing. Kirk scrutinized the controls and saw that they did indeed conform to those of a transporter.

  Activating it, he found the targeting sensors and scanned for human life signs. Four sets of coordinates appeared on the display, confirming that sensors, useless within the planet’s atmosphere, still functioned within the pressure dome. As quickly as he could, Kirk beamed the colossal stone from atop the platform and onto the floor of the lab. Once he’d done so, he locked onto the other three Farragut crewmembers and transported them here.

  Once they’d materialized, Kirk went to the platform and, without explaining the situation, pointed out DeGuerrin’s wound to Dr. Mowry. Together, Kirk and Ketchum lifted the security officer and lowered her to the floor, where the doctor took the medkit hanging at his side and began examining her. Kirk then returned to the transporter controls and scanned for all life signs. He saw only the four in this room and understood that the sensors clearly hadn’t been calibrated for Tholians. “Doctor,” he called back over his shoulder, “this transporter doesn’t recognize Tholian life-forms. I need to know distinguishing characteristics I can scan for.” Mowry didn’t respond right away, no doubt continuing to minister to DeGuerrin. “Doctor,” Kirk said, “I need to know now or we’re all going to die.”

  “They have two arms and six legs,” Mowry said. “They have an exoskeleton. They—”

  “I need something I can scan for easily,” Kirk said.

  Mowry did not respond for a moment, but then said, “They have body temperatures of over two hundred degrees.”

  “Now that I can scan for,” Kirk said, more to himself than to the doctor. He did so, and found not the sixteen Tholians that DeGuerrin had estimated, but twenty-one. He started to adjust the sensors to target their plasma pistols, intending to transport the weapons here, but then something else occurred to him: even unarmed, twenty-one Tholians might be able to overwhelm just four Starfleet personnel. “Doctor Mowry,” he asked, “can Tholians survive in normal human temperature ranges? At say twenty or twenty-five?” It couldn’t be any warmer than that within the complex.

  “No,” Mowry said. “At one hundred, a Tholian’s exoskeleton will begin to crack.”

  Kirk operated the targeting sensors again, fine-tuning his goals. He hesitated to take the action he’d planned, though, reluctant to cause such loss of life. The Tholians invaded this complex, Kirk reminded himself. They killed the twelve personnel stationed here, and they’re trying to kill us too.

  As though providing corroboration of his thoughts, weapons fire suddenly battered the door through which Kirk had entered the lab. He reached forward and triggered the transporter. Kirk heard the familiar whine of the materialization sequence, and he turned to see the green environmental suits of the Tholians appear on the platform, along with any other equipment they’d been holding, including their plasma weapons. The suits hung in the air as they formed, holding the shapes of their wearers, then with the other equipment fell in a clatter to the platform.

  From the neighboring lab rose a horrible shriek and a series of frantic chirps and clicks. Kirk didn’t need to understand the language of the Tholians to differentiate their cries of pain. He took no pleasure in what he’d done, but he accepted the necessity of it.

  Peering back at the transporter console, Kirk checked the readings of the twenty-one Tholians. Some of them continued to move, mostly in haphazard fashion, but not for long. Within a minute, all motion had ceased.

  Kirk walked back over to where Mowry treated DeGuerrin. Standing beside Ketchum, he asked the doctor, “Is she going to be all right?”

  “Yes,” Mowry said, looking up at Kirk. “And I guess we will be too.”

  “We’ve got a fighting chance, anyway,” Kirk said. “But I still need to take the Dahlgren into space and get a message to the Farragut about what’s going on here. There’s got to be a Tholian ship around, so I’m going to have to elude it, but I’m confident that I can. The planet’s atmosphere will provide good cover for me.”

  “We’re not all going?” Ketchum said.

  “I think you’ll be safer here,” Kirk told him. “There’s only one way into the complex, and that’s through the hangar. If any more Tholians try to enter, you’ll be able to defend yourselves the way I just did. Let me show you.”

  Kirk escorted Ketchum back over to the transporter console, where he demonstrated for the ensign how he had scanned for the Tholians and beamed away their environmental suits and weapons. Kirk then returned to the platform and pulled the Tholian equipment from it and onto the floor, selecting one of their plasma pistols to go along with his own, nearly depleted laser. Then he stepped up onto the platform and told Ketchum to transport him to the hangar. “If I’m not back in—” He calculated the amount of time it should take him to get into orbit, send a message to the Farragut, and return to the complex, then added in a buffer for any evasive maneuvers he might have to take if he encountered a Tholian vessel. “If I’m not back in three hours, you’ll have to take one of the workpods into orbit and attempt to reach the Farragut,” he told Ketchum.

  “Yes, sir,” the ensign said.

  “Energize,” Kirk ordered. As he dematerialized, the lab faded from view, and then a subjectively indeterminate amount of time later, the hangar appeared in its place, the shuttlecraft directly in front of him. Kirk hurried to board the Dahlgren, and only as the hatch hummed closed after him did he see through a viewport the half-dozen Tholians scattered about the hangar. The dark red, multilegged beings, about the same general proportions as a humanoid, had crumpled to the floor, their carapaces ruptured, a bright ichor pooling about them. Despite their being adversaries, Kirk wished that their attack on the research station had not made his actions necessary.

  Knowing that he had a duty to perform, Kirk allowed himself only a moment for such thoughts, then put them out of his mind. He took a seat at the shuttlecraft’s forward console, quickly bringing the Dahlgren up to power. As he engaged the antigravs to lift the shuttle and take it out of the hangar, he hoped that he would not be detected by the Tholian vessel—or vessels—when he cleared the atmosphere, or if he did, that it would turn out to be a single transport or scout ship with minimal armaments. The Dahlgren, he knew, had no weaponry of any kind.

  With no other choice, Kirk pointed the bow of the shuttlecraft upward and began the ascent to orbit.

  Not knowing to what place or time
he should go, Kirk had instead concentrated on an identity, then turned in place on the metallic plain of the Otevrel’s artificial world. As he’d hoped, the nexus had changed about him, taking him where he needed to go. Now, he stood in the cramped body of an old Starfleet shuttle, peering ahead to where another version of himself piloted the craft—the same version he’d seen meeting Antonia for the first time, escaping with Merrick from planet 892-IV, and leading a landing party down to Gamma Trianguli VI.

  Kirk took a step forward and opened his mouth, but then didn’t know how to address this other Kirk. He peered through the bow viewport for a moment, where he saw a thick planetary atmosphere giving way to stars above. Finally, he simply said, “Jim.”

  The other Kirk—Jim—spun around in his seat, drawing an outmoded laser pistol from his side. “Who—” he started, but then stopped, obviously shocked to see Kirk standing there. He stood up then, slowly, still brandishing his weapon. “Who are you?”

  “You know who I am,” Kirk said. As best he could tell, at one point in time, they had been the same person, deciding to abandon the chimera of the nexus in order to help Picard prevent the deaths of the inhabitants of Veridian IV. And Kirk had left, but according to Guinan—and as Kirk also somehow perceived—this echo of himself had been left behind, no less real, but now with a life that had diverged from his own path.

  “You can’t be me,” Jim said, though in a less-than-authoritative way that suggested he sought to convince himself of his assertion.

  “Not anymore I’m not,” Kirk agreed, “but until a short time ago, yes, we were the same person.” He recalled how Picard had phrased the situation, and he repeated it now. “We are both caught up in some type of temporal nexus.” Kirk considered how best to convince his alter ego of their circumstances, but then he saw awareness dawn on Jim’s face.

  “Picard,” he said as he lowered his laser.

  “Yes,” Kirk said. “I left the nexus with him. We stopped Soran, but then—” The shuttlecraft jolted hard, as though struck by something. Kirk staggered to his right and almost went down, but righted himself against the bulkhead. When he looked back toward the bow, he saw through the viewport a small vessel that seemed as though it had been constructed out of a collection of triangular hull components. He recognized its origin immediately—Tholian—and knew the time period to which he had come. For his actions down on Beta Regenis II and out here in space, Starfleet had awarded him the Grankite Order of Tactics.

  “Hold on,” Jim yelled, now back at the forward console. Kirk grabbed onto the handle of an equipment door as the shuttle veered to port, the inertial dampers taking a fraction of a second to compensate for the rapid movement. Through the viewport, Kirk saw a bolt of plasma energy streak past.

  As Jim operated the helm controls, Kirk made his way forward until he dropped into the chair beside him. “Jim,” he said, “stop this. I need to talk with you.”

  “You don’t understand,” Jim said, not looking away from where his hands darted across the panel. “I have to—”

  “You have to evade the Tholians while you transmit a message to Captain Garrovick aboard the Farragut,” Kirk said. “Down at the research complex, all of the scientists are dead, killed in an unprovoked attack by the Tholians.”

  Jim looked up at him but said nothing. Then another Tholian weapon landed, shaking the cabin violently, and he began working the controls again. Kirk remembered that this hadn’t happened before, that while he’d been spotted by the Tholian vessel in orbit, he’d managed to evade it after taking only a single blast of its weapons fire. But then, when he’d piloted the shuttlecraft all those years ago, he hadn’t been distracted by an unexpected passenger. “If you know where we are and what’s going on,” Jim said, “then you know I have to do this.”

  “No, you don’t,” Kirk said, but Jim continued taking the shuttle through evasive maneuvers. Kirk reached over and took hold of his counterpart by his upper arms, turning Jim to face him. “You don’t have to do this,” Kirk insisted. “This isn’t even really happening.”

  Another plasma bolt struck the shuttlecraft. The forward control console exploded, bathing the two men in a shower of sparks. Smoke filled the cabin, and then Kirk heard the low moan of overstressed metal. He saw a thin crack zigzag up the bulkhead, and then the shuttle fractured, bursting apart around them. For a moment, they floated in the frightening totality of space, the insensate stars peering coldly down on them, the planet hanging off to one side, the Tholian vessel looming above them.

  Kirk had not let go his grip on Jim’s arms, and now he called to mind another location, a safe place where he’d been alone. With the stars still surrounding them, Kirk felt something beneath his feet. He peered downward as he felt the pull of gravity, and he saw grass below him. Looking up, he saw that he and Jim now stood amid trees and other modest growth, in what looked to be a wide parkland. An airpod sat nearby, its gull-wing hatch propped open.

  Before him, Jim turned in a circle, inspecting their new locale. Three-quarters of the way around, he stopped and raised an arm, pointing. “That’s Mojave,” he said. Kirk looked that way and saw the towers and spires of the California metropolis, saw the stylized four-posted arch that rose majestically from the lake at the city’s eastern end. “I was only here once.”

  “After reading a biography of Christopher Pike,” Kirk said.

  “Yes,” Jim agreed. “When I was chief of Starfleet Operations.” He continued looking toward the city. “Captain Pike was born and raised there,” he said. “He used to ride horses out here when he was a boy. They’ve got a memorial to him at the city center.”

  Kirk stepped forward, interposing himself between Jim and the city. “Except that’s not really Mojave,” he said, “and we’re not really on Earth. We’re in some type of—”

  “Temporal nexus,” Jim said along with him. “Yes, I heard you.” He turned and paced away, but then peered back at Kirk. “I remember Picard,” he said. “I remember deciding to leave the nexus and help him, but then…then I didn’t. I stayed, got caught up again in the events of my own life…” The realization appeared to agitate him.

  “It’s all right,” Kirk said. “But now I need your help.”

  “You need my help?” Jim said. “Here in the nexus?”

  “No. Back in the real universe where we lived our life,” Kirk said. “When I left here with Picard, we were successful in stopping Soran, but then something else happened.”

  “Something else?” Jim said.

  “Something that I—that we—essentially caused,” Kirk said. “A phenomenon known as a converging temporal loop.” He explained what he had witnessed on Veridian Three, as well as the concept of the loop as described by Data. “It’s destroyed a sizable volume of the space-time continuum and taken many lives, perhaps millions, perhaps even many more than that.”

  Jim padded back across the grass until he stood directly in front of Kirk. It should’ve seemed like gazing into a mirror, Kirk thought, but it didn’t. The image he always saw when he peered at his reflection showed him the reverse of his features, which didn’t happen here as he looked at this echo of himself. “And you think what?” Jim asked. “That we can go back in time, somehow stop it from occurring.”

  “Not we,” Kirk told him. “You.” And then he explained his plan.

  SIX

  (2271)/2282

  Jim Kirk trod back and forth across the grass in the parkland adjoining the city of Mojave. He had just listened to—

  Myself? he thought, the very notion absurd on the face of it. Except not all that absurd, he amended, thinking of the incident back during the Enterprise’s five-year mission when a transporter malfunction had produced two versions of him.

  And yet this doesn’t seem like that, Kirk thought. Back in orbit of Alfa 177, where the transporter accident had taken place, neither of the two Kirk identities that had been created—and he could still remember existing as each of them—had felt entirely like himself. Right
now, though, he did feel whole, and he suspected that his doppelganger did as well.

  Kirk glanced over at his double, who appeared to match him precisely, but for the visible effects of the fall he said he’d taken on Veridian Three. Both dirt and blood covered his hands and face as well as his uniform, which had been ripped in many places. According to him, he had been crushed by a metal bridge and on the verge of death when he had been swept back into the nexus. He also believed that he had beheld a powerful destructive force called a converging temporal loop. He now wanted to leave the nexus and go back in time to prevent the loop from ever developing, though he claimed that he could not do so himself as he would, upon exiting this timeless place, die as a result of his injuries.

  As fantastic as Kirk found the collection of details he’d just been given, all of it seemed to make an internal kind of sense, but for one thing. He stopped pacing about and addressed that now. “You said that the convergence loop was caused by there being two large, identical sets of chronometric particles in our universe, connected by the conduit of the nexus,” he said.

  “That’s right,” the other, bloodied Kirk said, nodding.

  “And that those particles were in our body,” Kirk said. Again, his duplicate nodded. “So if I leave the nexus, won’t that unleash another temporal loop?”

  “I was concerned about that myself,” the other Kirk said. “But right now, neither of those sets of chronometric particles exists in our universe because the converging loop destroyed them. If you leave and succeed in preventing the loop, then the conditions that caused it in the first place—the two sets of particles joined together by the nexus—will never arise.”

  “Right,” Kirk said. He understood the logical argument that the other Kirk had just put forward, but thinking about these time-related concepts seemed dizzying. It’s more than dealing with time, Kirk thought. It’s also about not wanting to leave the nexus. “Why should I trust you?” he said, hunting for a reason to stay here, but as soon as the words had left his mouth, he knew they carried no weight.