Crucible: Kirk (6 page)

In the clearing, the hum of the transporter grew once more, and then McCoy materialized, along with two more security officers, Hendorf and Mallory. As they approached the first group, Kirk looked away.
What is this?
he thought.
More mistakes that I've made in my life?
He recollected very well this mission to Gamma Trianguli VI, when all four of the security guards had been killed, when Spock had very nearly lost his own life when he'd been struck by a directed bolt of lightning, and when Kirk, in order to save the ship and crew, had been forced to deactivate the machine that had ruled and supported the native population. Before that, planet 892-IV, where although he'd managed to escape with the lives of the members of the landing party, he'd failed to bring Merrick back to the Federation and to justice. And before that, in his previous time in the nexus, the day he'd broken off his relationship with Antonia, and before that—

How long has this been going on?
he wondered.
How long have I been in the nexus trying to “fix” my life?

As he heard the other Kirk talking with the members of his crew, he turned away and walked deeper into the tropical landscape, out of earshot of the landing party. He did not wish to see how this re-created sequence would allow his alternate self to undo the mistakes he'd made in his career, in his life, because it achieved nothing. No matter if Hendorf and Kaplan, Mallory and Marple survived this replayed incident, they had not survived in the real universe. Whatever happened here, Kirk could not obviate his role in their deaths.

And yet, when he had previously been in the nexus, when he had himself experienced these repeated incidents from his life rather than just observing them, he had taken solace, even happiness, in reliving them and being able to alter the outcomes. But even so, he asked himself now, what point had there been to that? Kirk had hardly lived a perfect existence, but in carrying out the many missions he had been assigned, he had always striven to protect the lives of his crew, even though he had not always been successful in doing so. Despite his failures, he knew that he had accomplished a great deal in his years. Beyond the value of the many exploratory, first contact, and diplomatic missions he'd led aboard the
Enterprise,
Kirk had helped to protect the Federation and to foster peace throughout the quadrant. On quite a few occasions, he had saved lives—sometimes many lives, even whole populations. He had lived an existence that had mattered not only to himself, but to others.

Whole populations,
Kirk thought. He recalled the threats to Deneva and Ariannus, and those posed by Lazarus and Gary Seven, Nomad and the doomsday machine, the Guardian of Forever and V'Ger and the probe that had wanted to communicate with humpback whales. Kirk hadn't acted alone, but he
had
acted.

He also remembered another population and another world that had been at risk: the more than two hundred million of Veridian IV. Kirk believed that he had left the nexus and worked with Picard to defeat Soran and prevent the annihilation of the Veridian star and its planets. But then the ribbon of energy had reappeared in the sky, bearing with it utter devastation. Had that been confined to the third world in the system, or had it spread farther and imperiled the fourth as well? He assumed that he'd been spared the destruction expanding into space and raining down on the planet because he'd been pulled back into the nexus an instant before it had reached him. Had that destruction ended, or did it continue even now back in the “real” universe?

In the middle of the jungle on this imaginary Gamma Trianguli VI, Kirk questioned whether the term
now
actually carried any meaning here. He had seen only the past, repeated—and sometimes altered—again and again, but Picard had spoken of being from the future. Once more, Kirk wondered just how long he had been in the nexus.

“You've been here a long time,” a voice said behind him.

Kirk spun around, startled, his arm rushing through the fronds of a tall plant as he did so. As he heard an explosion somewhere in the distance, he saw somebody standing before him—somebody not a member of the
Enterprise
landing party or a native of this world. “Guinan?” he said even before he realized he would speak. He didn't consciously recognize the woman he addressed, though clearly he must have known her on some level.

“We've met before,” she said. She possessed a distinctive appearance: rich, chocolate skin; dark eyes; a wide nose; and prominent, rounded cheeks. Black braids emerged from beneath a violet cloth headdress that had a thick, flat brim at its crown. She wore a long, sleeveless robe, also violet, atop an auburn gown.

“Are you reading my mind?” Kirk asked. The two statements she'd made had seemed to speak directly to what he'd been thinking.

“No,” Guinan said. “I'm just very…intuitive.”

“And you know where we are?” Kirk said. “You know what's going on here?”

“You know where we are too,” Guinan told him. “You've been here before.”

“In the nexus,” Kirk replied.

“Yes.”

Kirk attempted to puzzle it all out. He glanced past Guinan and into the distance, back toward the clearing where he'd seen the
Enterprise
landing party, though he could see them no longer. He felt the need to move, and so he took a few paces away, pushing through the tropical greenery. “I was here before,” he said. “And then I left the nexus.”

“Yes,” Guinan confirmed. “You left and you returned.”

“Is that why there seem to be two of me here?” Kirk asked.

Guinan furrowed her brow, as though in thought. “Do you remember where you and I met?” she asked him at last.

“No,” Kirk admitted.

“Right here,” she said, raising her arms in an inclusive motion.

“On Gamma Trianguli Six?”

“In the nexus,” Guinan said. “I was onboard the transport ship
Lakul
when it became trapped in the energy ribbon. That was when I was drawn into this place.”

Kirk looked down for a second, reminded again of another failure. Peering back up at Guinan, he said, “We didn't rescue you,” he said. “I'm sorry. We tried.”

“But you did rescue me,” Guinan said.

Kirk stared at her without comprehension. He felt as though he had missed some fundamental piece of information. “I don't understand,” he said.

“I was one of those transported safely aboard the
Enterprise,”
Guinan said.

“But you're still here,” Kirk said, feeling as though he had stated the obvious.

“I think of myself as an echo of the person who was pulled off the
Lakul
and out of the nexus,” she said. “I was beamed back into the universe you and I know, but the essence of who I am also remained here, duplicated in some way.”

“And that's what I am?” Kirk asked. “An echo?” That didn't seem quite right to him.

“In some ways, we're all echoes, reverberations one moment of who we were in the previous moment,” Guinan said. “But you are James T. Kirk. You entered the nexus when the energy ribbon penetrated the hull of the
Enterprise-
B, and when you left to go to Veridian Three with Captain Picard, an echo of you remained behind. When you returned to the nexus, that echo was still here.”

Kirk felt his mouth open as a sense of realization washed over him. “That's who I've been watching,” he said. “An echo of myself.”

“That is how I see it, although you and he are both as real as the other,” Guinan said. “But while he has accepted being here, has even experienced great joy from being here, you have not.”

“I did,” Kirk said. “When I first entered the nexus.”

“Yes,” Guinan agreed. “But not now. Why?”

Kirk considered that. As best he could recall, when he'd initially come into this temporal other-space, he'd immediately begun reliving and remaking the events of his life. When he'd reentered the nexus, though, he hadn't attempted to prevent himself from existing in some remembered or imagined moment; he'd simply found himself observing one of those moments rather than participating in it. He supposed that he could even now select some blissful event to experience again, remake some painful incident into something positive, or invent some wonderful new circumstance for himself, but—

“Guinan, just before I returned to the nexus, something happened to the energy ribbon,” he said. “It moved at much greater speed than when I'd previously seen it, and it appeared to expand in a way that destroyed the universe all around it. I'm concerned about the population of a world that might be in its path. Millions of lives may be at risk.” He paused, wanting to emphasize the importance of his next question. “Do you know what happened to the energy ribbon?”

A pall seemed to pass over Guinan's visage. “Yes, I do,” she said.
“You
happened to it.”

(2371/2235)

“There,” Guinan said, pointing past Kirk. He turned to follow her gesture, and once again, everything changed. Where he had one moment been standing amid the lush growth of a jungle, he now stood on a rocky mountaintop. The still, temperate climes of Gamma Trianguli VI had given way here to a cool, blustery wind.

Kirk waited for his sense of dislocation to pass as he peered down from the high tor across a wide, wooded plain. At first, he neither saw nor heard the object of Guinan's attention, but then a growing roar reached his ears. He raised a hand to shield his eyes from the sun, and in the distance, he spied something that he could not immediately identify. A flat, circular object glided low over the land, headed in their direction. As it drew nearer, Kirk realized that he had underestimated its size, and as the noise increased in volume, he also understood that the object did not fly above the ground, but slid across it. Trees splintered in its path and vanished beneath its mass as—

Kirk felt a surge of emotion course through him as he recognized the object: the saucer section of a Starfleet vessel. “Where are we?” Kirk asked Guinan, unable to take his gaze from the disaster playing out before him. “What is this?” He could hear the dismay in his own voice.

“We're still in the nexus,” Guinan said. “This is Veridian Three. And that's the
Enterprise.
Picard's
Enterprise.
While you and he fought Soran, the ship was attacked by rogue Klingons and suffered a warp-core breach. The
Enterprise
crew separated the saucer, but the explosion of the core forced them down.”

Now Kirk turned to Guinan. “How do you know this?” he asked her.

“All of this exists within the nexus,” Guinan said, regarding him levelly. “But I was also on the ship.”

“You—?” Kirk started, but so many questions occurred to him that he allowed the single word to convey his perplexity.

“I was just one of a number of civilians aboard who worked in a capacity to support the crew and their families,” Guinan explained.

“Civilians?” Kirk said, stunned. “Families?” He looked back at the saucer as it continued crashing across the planet's surface.

“Yes,” Guinan said. “The ship carried the families of some of the crew.”

Kirk felt a twist in the pit of his stomach as he watched the great hull grind past the mountain atop which he and Guinan stood. Bad enough for the crew to be placed in harm's way, but for civilians—families!—to be there with them…Kirk shook his head. He didn't know if he could've commanded effectively in such an environment, and he had no idea how Picard managed to do so.

Down just past the base of the mountain, the saucer finally came to rest, close enough that Kirk could just make out the letters and numbers of its designation: NCC-1701-D. The vast hull had to be at least four hundred meters across, greater than the entire length of any of the ships that Kirk in his day had commanded. In the vessel's wake, it had left a wide swath of destruction, a long, dark trench that stretched back as far as Kirk could see, and about which the remnants of trees had been strewn like brittle twigs.

“They managed to level off during their descent,” Guinan said. “Amazingly, their casualties were light.”

“That is amazing,” Kirk said. He looked over at her again. “And you obviously survived.”

An expression appeared on Guinan's face that Kirk could not read. He could not tell whether in that moment she felt peace or sorrow, acceptance or resignation, or something else altogether. “No,” she told him. “I died shortly after the crash.”

Kirk didn't think he would've felt more surprised if Guinan had reached out and pushed him from the mountaintop. Not having any notion of how to respond, he peered back down at the saucer. Dust billowed up from the edges of the disc, but he saw no smoke from fires. Still, the ship appeared inert, and even if most of its crew had endured the downing of their vessel, it seemed obvious that this
Enterprise
would never journey through space again. He could not help remembering standing on the Genesis Planet with Bones and Scotty, Hikaru and Pavel, watching his own
Enterprise
plummet through the atmosphere in the last blazing throes of its existence. “Why are you showing me this?” he asked Guinan.

“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—”