Crucible: Kirk (7 page)

“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 mention 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.

(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 possibly 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.

Kirk paced across the compartment and over to an exterior viewport. He peered out at the stars burning hot in the deep, never-ending winter of space.
People die,
he told himself, reciting a fact he knew all too well. Since he'd been five years old and had lost his grandfather, death had been a regular companion in his life. His parents, gone. His uncle, his brother, his sister-in-law, gone too. David, the son he had barely known. Miramanee, carrying his unborn child. Captain Garrovick and two hundred of the
Farragut
crew. Gary Mitchell. Lee Kelso and Scott Darnell and so many others from the crews he had led through space, whose names he could recount because they had perished on his watch and he could do no less than remember them.

And Edith.

Once, when he thought he had lost Spock, he had admitted to David that he had never truly faced death, but that had not been quite true. Kirk had lived beneath the specter of loss for most of his days; he'd simply grown far too weary of it. Back then, he had grasped at the scant hope provided by Spock's father, Sarek, and amazingly, through a confluence of amazing circumstances, he had managed to help resurrect his friend.

And how many times have I skirted my own death by the narrowest of margins?
he thought. He had been torn from within the
Enterprise-
B and thrown out into space and had still survived. Not that long ago, subjectively, he had fallen scores of meters and been crushed by a metal bridge on Veridian Three, yet he survived even now.

I've faced death,
Kirk thought,
and I've railed against it.
Occasionally, he had succeeded in beating it back, saving the lives of his crew, of his friends and of strangers, of himself. But the end had still come often enough, plucking the people he cared about from his life like petals from a dying flower. Ultimately, he knew, entropy, disorder, and death would win out over all—over those he loved, over himself, over the inhabitants of Veridian IV.
I should just let go of all this,
Kirk told himself.

But he wouldn't. He
couldn't.
That simply wasn't who he was.

Standing alone in the observation deck of the old
Enterprise,
Kirk stared out at the unfeeling void, unwilling to allow it to dictate the terms of life and death. Then he began to formulate a plan.

The black hole hung invisibly in the sky among the countless points of light that formed the Milky Way. Below, the surface of the planet-sized metal sphere extended away from Kirk in all directions, bathed only in the scant illumination provided by the distant stars. The fourth of seven “worlds” in this artificial solar system, the almost-featureless globe approximated the circumference, mass, and gravity of Earth.

Kirk had come here from the Starfleet archives, which he had visited with the echo of Picard still in the nexus. After Kirk had cobbled together the most workable strategy he could for stopping the converging temporal loop, he had gone to the archives from the
Enterprise'
s shuttlebay observation deck, coincidentally to check the record of the
Enterprise-
B's own shuttlecraft. After that, he had prepared to depart the nexus. He hadn't known precisely how to do that, and neither had Picard. Like everything in this timeless region, though, it seemed reasonable to assume that it could be effected simply by an effort of will. He had no comprehension of the physical aspects of the nexus, but he envisioned it as a limitless blank canvas upon which minds drew their own realities. So thinking, he had then found himself, alone, on the largely empty shell of the Otevrel's fourth orb.

The crew of the
Enterprise
had first encountered the sociocentric, quasi-nomadic species during the ship's exploratory journey to the Aquarius Formation. Kirk had never walked the surface of the Otevrel “planet” like this—he, Bones, and Scotty had traveled here from the ship in a shuttlecraft—but as he had already learned, events within the nexus often bore only passing resemblance to their counterparts in reality. In further verification of that, Kirk realized that he did not currently wear the environmental suit he had donned before boarding the shuttle on this particular mission, but rather one of the old life-support belts that Starfleet had introduced during the final year or so of his first command. The belts generated a personal force field for the wearer that maintained the appropriate atmosphere, temperature, and pressure about them. Kirk had liked the greater freedom of movement that the belts had provided over traditional environmental suits, but Starfleet had stopped using them when concerns had arisen regarding the long-term effects that prolonged proximity to the force fields would have on living tissue.

Now, Kirk peered down at the wide white band encircling his waist and the soft yellow glow it produced about his body. When he did, he also saw something that he hadn't thought about since he had first returned to the nexus: his uniform, still covered with the dirt of Veridian Three, still torn, still showing streaks and smudges of his own blood on his white shirt and crimson vest. He remembered falling after he'd retrieved Soran's cloaking control pad, whirling through the air with the distorted section of the metal bridge, until he had landed on the ground, crushed beneath the deformed mass. In that moment, he recalled, he had known as surely as he had ever known anything that he had only seconds left to live.

But then the energy ribbon had swallowed him up once more, bearing him back into the nexus—where time had no meaning. The seconds remaining in his life had never come, nor obviously had his death. Clearly, too, his existence within the nexus had been a function of his mind and not his body, for even without the flow of time, the injuries he'd suffered on Veridian Three should have rendered him incapacitated.

But what happens when I leave here?
Kirk asked himself. The answer seemed manifest: back in the physical universe, he would be immediately debilitated by the damage done to his body. Seconds later, he would be dead.

Kirk considered his dilemma. He saw absolutely no means of preventing the temporal shock wave without exiting the nexus. He also could conceive of no way to return to the physical universe without dying. Even if he appeared in sickbay directly in front of McCoy and ordered the doctor to place him in a stasis field at once, and even if McCoy could then repair his injuries, doing all of that could easily alter the timeline.

No,
Kirk thought.
I can't do this.