Crucible: Kirk (22 page)

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.

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 McCoy 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.

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?

At the same time, I also had a vague notion in the back of my mind that I would like to somehow follow up my own favorite TOS episode, one of those often found at the tops of various fan polls regarding
Trek
's finest hours. For a long time now, I've held aloft Harlan Ellison's “The City on the Edge of Forever” as a high-water mark of the Original Series. So I asked myself if I could find some compelling means of employing the elements of that episode in the trilogy.

While allowing that idea to percolate, I took the time to view the entire series from beginning to end, from the first episode to the last, and then through the seven feature films. Although I had already seen each installment on many occasions over the years, this time I watched them from a different perspective, with an eye toward finding some facet of the characters that either hadn't yet been explored or that would at least permit me to say something about them in a unique manner. As I saw and enjoyed one hour after another, I also realized that since the novels would be a part of the show's anniversary celebration, I should attempt to deeply ground them in those original episodes. I did not wish to limit the tales to the five-year mission necessarily, but I thought that period should in some way play a significant role in the books. Of course, if I managed to tie in “The City on the Edge of Forever,” that likely would be the case anyway.

In watching the complete run of the series, I began to notice something about Dr. McCoy that I previously hadn't. While I had at first imagined that fashioning a story to tell about the
Enterprise
's chief medical officer would be more difficult than doing so for the ship's captain and first officer, I suddenly saw that might not be true. McCoy, I realized, had lived as something of a loner, at least in terms of romance. Such a circumstance might not be considered that unusual during a long space voyage in the service of Starfleet, perhaps, but I also spied hints that this might be true of the good doctor even apart from his time aboard the
Enterprise
.

In “The Man Trap,” the very first
Star Trek
episode ever aired, back on Thursday, 8 September 1966, McCoy briefly mentions his involvement a decade earlier with a woman named Nancy, now married to Professor Robert Crater. In his captain's log, Kirk refers to her as “that one woman in Doctor McCoy's past.” McCoy himself seems alternately anxious and reluctant to see her, but little else is revealed about the erstwhile relationship, other than that they “walked out of each other's lives ten years ago.”

Later in the first season, in the episode “Shore Leave,” McCoy appears to enjoy a dalliance with crew member Tonia Barrows, but the red-tressed yeoman never appears in the series after that, nor do any of the characters ever even speak of her again. McCoy then traverses the entire second season without even a hint of romance. In
Star Trek
's third year, he finally finds love again, this time with Natira in the episode “For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky.” But McCoy's entanglement with the high priestess of Yonada seems as much a consequence of the unexpected discovery that he has xenopolycythemia and only a year left to live as of a real depth of romantic emotion.

And that's it. Through the seventy-nine aired hours of
Trek,
and then through the seven films, those are the only instances in which McCoy's love life is at all revealed. Still, throughout the three seasons and the movies, there is ample evidence that the doctor has an appreciation for the opposite sex. In “Mudd's Women,” he is bewitched by Ruth; in “Wolf in the Fold,” he is anxious to visit a place that Kirk knows “where the women are so…”—so something left to the imagination; in “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” he appears enamored of Dr. Miranda Jones; and in
The Wrath of Khan,
he notes Saavik's good looks. In even more episodes than that, McCoy demonstrates an obvious fondness for women.

Despite all of that, though, he is almost never seen to be involved with anybody. Even in “This Side of Paradise,” when he falls under the uplifting influence of the spores on Omicron Ceti III, he remains alone, sipping mint juleps by himself. Now, I'm sure that the numerous writers of the Original Series did not intend to convey anything in particular about McCoy by this dearth of romantic relationships, that my observations about the character are merely the result of an accidental artifact of episodic television in the 1960s. Still, all of that led me to a question for which I wanted to find an answer: Why did Dr. McCoy have so little love in his life?

At that juncture, I recalled a piece of non-canon information about the doctor long accepted by many
Trek
fans, namely that he had a failed marriage in his past, a difficult, broken relationship that ultimately had driven him out into space with Starfleet. This backstory originated, I knew, in early drafts of the episode that would ultimately become “The Way to Eden.” Instead of Chekov's former girlfriend, Irina Galliulin, McCoy's daughter Joanna came aboard the
Enterprise
. Further supporting the existence of Joanna, McCoy makes reference to his daughter in one of the twenty-two animated
Star Trek
adventures, “The Survivor.” It then occurred to me that an unsuccessful marriage spun McCoy's character in a slightly different direction. Coupled with the loss of his relationships with Nancy, Tonia, and Natira, his failed attempt at matrimony made the question not why he'd had so few romances, but why they had never worked out for him.

I speculated that perhaps something in McCoy's personality prevented him from remaining in long-term relationships. He might have developed a fear of intimacy or a fear of abandonment. There are reasons that such characteristics arise in a person, oftentimes tracing all the way back to their childhood. I already knew from the fifth
Trek
film,
The Final Frontier,
that McCoy had with great difficulty assisted in his father's suicide when the elder McCoy lay dying and in pain. But what of McCoy's mother? I wondered.

While I attempted to work out such details, I thought again about “The City on the Edge of Forever,” and suddenly I realized something. In that episode, when McCoy leaps through the Guardian of Forever and changes Earth's history from the twentieth century onward, he causes the alteration to the timeline by preventing the death of Edith Keeler. Miss Keeler subsequently founds a peace movement that delays the United States's entry into World War II, which in turn allows Nazi Germany and its allies to capture the world. As a result, the remainder of the
Enterprise
landing party find themselves totally alone on the Guardian's planet, with no ship circling in orbit above them and, as Spock notes, “with no past, no future.” But in the modified past, I asked myself, what had become of McCoy?

All at once, I saw that an entire period of the doctor's life had been hiding in plain sight. Yes, his time in Earth's altered past had occurred in an alternate reality that ultimately gets reset, erased by Kirk and Spock chasing him back to 1930 and foiling him from stopping Keeler's death, but still, it
had
happened. If I wanted to investigate that time, I knew that I would need to do two things in order to make the story work for readers. First, I would have to find some means of having the events of McCoy's “other” life inform his “real” life, and second, I would need to utilize that other life to help explain and then deal with his pattern of unsuccessful relationships.

From there, the details of the story at last came together. I would produce parallel narratives, one taking place in McCoy's “present,” during the
Enterprise
's five-year mission and afterward, and one in his alternate past, beginning with his arrival in New York City in 1930. A title even suggested itself fairly quickly:
Provenance of Shadows
—making reference to the origin of the dark side of McCoy's life that had prevented him from finding happiness with a romantic partner.

Once I had finished beating out the plots and themes for the McCoy novel, I turned my attention to Spock. I at once found a starting point for his story late in McCoy's life, at a time when I knew that the two characters would come together in
Provenance
. I immediately liked that, seeing how I could tie the books together. From the two-part
Next Generation
episode “Unification,” I knew that Spock's last canonical appearance had him on Romulus, where he sought to further the cause of reintegrating the Vulcan and Romulan peoples, who had common forebears. I actually wrote a complete outline in relatively short order, putting together a highly complex political tale that employed elements of the first
Crucible
novel, the TNG episode in which Spock appeared, and the tenth
Trek
film,
Nemesis
. From a character point of view, it explored how and why reunification had become so important to Spock.

After sitting on the outline and mulling it over for a few days, though, I decided that I had made a mistake. Too much of the story took place in a time frame far beyond that of the TOS series and movies, and the study of Spock relied on his hopes for uniting the Vulcans and Romulans, an examination far less personal than would satisfy me. Consequently, I scrapped my ideas without ever even submitting the outline to my editor.

And so I began again, this time concentrating once more on the episodes of the Original Series and asking some of the same questions about Spock that I had posed to myself about McCoy. What didn't I know about the character, and what would be worth discovering? I reviewed Spock's arc, beginning with the earliest canonical experiences of his life—his birth, as depicted in
The Final Frontier,
and his near-death ordeal at the age of seven, as seen in the animated episode “Yesteryear”—through to his experiences as a Federation special envoy in the sixth film,
The Undiscovered Country
. To my satisfaction, I found something that didn't quite scan for me, though I had never before thought about it. In
Star Trek
:
The Motion Picture,
it is revealed that, after the
Enterprise
's five-year mission under Captain Kirk, Spock returned to Vulcan and sought to achieve the
Kolinahr
—the shedding of all emotion. I wanted to know why he had chosen to do that.

Now, I understood as well as any
Trek
fan that Spock has always considered himself Vulcan, not human, and that he subscribes to the lifestyle of the former and not the latter. He purports to control his emotions—a claim observably true in most cases—but it also seemed clear to me that he
felt
friendship for Kirk and McCoy, even if he rarely expressed himself in quite that way. Spock also appeared satisfied with his life. Why then had he elected to leave Starfleet, to leave his friends, and to endeavor to fully purge himself of emotion?

I thought about this for some time.
The Motion Picture
also revealed that Captain Kirk had been promoted after the end of the five-year mission to admiral, and posted to the position of chief of Starfleet Operations. Could that have motivated Spock to do what he'd done? That seemed unconvincing and not quite right to me. I couldn't justify Spock's resigning his commission and wanting to totally rid himself of emotion simply because his friend had moved on in his career.

Perhaps a traumatic event had befallen the first officer, I speculated. Because of their appearances in later films, I knew that both of his parents, Amanda and Sarek, were alive during the time frame in question, though
The Next Generation
would reveal their later demises. Surely Spock's own death and then his rebirth in
The Wrath of Khan
and
The Search for Spock,
respectively, could be considered disturbing, but again, both had occurred
after
his decision to undergo the
Kolinahr
.