by L. A. Graf
Was I even gone this long? Shouldn’t my father have found me by now? That thought had been gnawing at him since they’d left the shuttle crash. What if his presence here had irrevocably altered the timeline? He already knew that no one had been with his father when George Kirk appeared like an avenging angel and killed the four Vragax surrounding his son. No one had come back with them to the embassy, no one had covered the last of their escape. Now that he was here—not only as an adult, but as George Kirk’s nominal commander—Kirk wasn’t even sure he could stand by and let the security officer shoot down the four natives without at least giving them a chance to surrender. He was just too confident that the two of them together could save the boy without having to resort to that kind of bloodshed.
[27] But what if you’re wrong? What if it’s already too late?
George’s urgent hiss knocked Kirk out of his reverie. Jogging up to meet him in an open doorway, Kirk barely caught sight of the older man until he was right on top of him, and then had to drop into an abrupt crouch at his side to avoid tripping over him altogether. George didn’t seem to notice. He caught at Kirk’s shoulder to direct his attention, then pointed with the muzzle of his rifle as though it were an extension of his own arm, into the blackened interior of the building beyond the doorway. “I hear voices upstairs.” He mouthed the words almost directly into Kirk’s ear, passing scarcely enough breath to make them audible. “And somebody’s crying.”
Kirk couldn’t even feel indignant that his father would assume his son was huddled in the dark somewhere weeping. He’d been sobbing when he left Maione and the others at the shuttle that night, and hadn’t been able to stop crying until several hours after his father had found him and dragged him back to safety. He was just grateful for the darkness now, so that the embarrassed heat in his face wouldn’t give away how ashamed he still was of that weakness.
“I’ll go first,” George continued. “Keep me in sight, but wait for my signal.”
George counted off one, two, three with the fingers of one hand, and they swung into the open doorway on three as though they’d drilled the maneuver together for months. Kirk blinked hard at the darkness, [28] willing his eyes to adjust, and finally isolated a deeper length of black curving up along one wall. A stairway. George was halfway up it already, silently waving Kirk to follow as he eased around the first landing and peered up toward the second floor. Featureless doors lined the downstairs lobby, each sporting a bright metal plate engraved with Grexxen number pips on the wall immediately next to the doorknobs. An apartment building, then. Or maybe an office complex. Kirk padded up the stairs behind George as silently as possible, listening for the voices his father had followed, and one voice in particular.
The crying was more evident once they rounded the stairwell onto the plushly carpeted second floor. But it was a female, her sobs desperately muffled, and the voice that shushed and tutted to her was neither human nor threatening. “It’s not him,” Kirk whispered, even as his eyes strayed down the long hallway to the familiar door yawning open at the end. “He wouldn’t have gone near them.”
He didn’t go near them. He hadn’t known they were there. He’d simply run as far from the stairwell as he could, passing all the apartments and alcoves and closets, and ducked through that open door into an office whose boxes and equipment he thought would lend him shelter. He’d even tried to lock the door, but was too blind with panic to figure out how.
A terrified scream from inside the nearest apartment made Kirk whirl and snap the rifle up to his shoulder. But instead of a Vragax raiding party, he [29] saw only George Kirk through the opened door, kneeling atop an overturned desk with his gun aimed straight down at whoever had huddled underneath. “Shut up and listen to me,” George said, calmly but firmly. “We’re looking for a human boy.”
“Commander, stand down!”
George spared Kirk only a brief glance out of the corner of his eye, not altering the gun’s alignment by so much as a micron. “Begging the captain’s pardon, sir, but I’ve been dealing with the Grexxen for more than a year now. You have only been here a short while.”
You have no idea how true that is. “I’m still not going to let any officer under me brutalize the natives in the name of familial concern.” He stepped up beside George and closed his hand around the barrel of the gauss rifle to make it clear he was prepared to disarm him if the older man forced the issue. “I said stand down.”
The hesitation was slight—-just enough to rankle Kirk’s instincts as a captain, but not so long that he had to respond to the implied insubordination. Kirk found himself smothering a grin as his father climbed down off the desk and stepped grudgingly behind him. As much as George Kirk hadn’t appreciated his son’s rebellious streak, it wasn’t his mother who had given it to him.
Slinging his own rifle onto his back, Kirk turned cautiously to the women huddled behind the big desk and tried to decide if he should squat down on their [30] level or keep a prudent distance. They were both Kozhu, and obviously civilians, but the situation in Sogo city had been so crazy at the end that he wasn’t sure if such distinctions meant anything anymore. “Do you speak English?” he finally asked, staying where he was on the other side of the desk.
The older of the two nodded. While her bronze-green face was wet from crying, it was the younger girl who choked volubly on her sobs, hands pressed against her mouth in an effort to keep silent. Kirk’s heart thudded painfully with pity.
“We saw the boy.” The older woman held the girl against her, and met Kirk’s gaze with a dignity that left little room for fear. “Vragax chased him that way—” She jerked her chin toward the end of the hall. Toward the office with its boxes, where the young James Kirk had almost died. “—but when they left again, they left without him.”
George was already running in the direction of her nod, calling, “Jimmy! Jim, where are you?” but Kirk stayed with the Kozhu women, going down to one knee after all. The young girl—no older than most of his yeomen—recoiled slightly, and he reached out to touch a reassuring hand to her arm without thinking about how such a gesture would be taken. She stared at him, copper eyes wide and lambent in the darkness, as though she’d just been comforted by a bear.
The older woman frowned gently at him, studying something in his expression or features. “The boy you want—he looks like you. He’s your son?”
[31] Kirk laughed softly and rubbed at his eyes. “No, not my son.”
“Mine.” The growl of anger in George’s voice ignited every defensive instinct Kirk had developed over years of having to deal with the man. Turning a glare back at him, he’d just opened his mouth to suggest George Kirk leave his son behind if the boy caused him so much more trouble than he was worth. Then he saw the stark grief on the older man’s face, naked and laced with terror in the dim light, and all his youthful defiance sank to the pit of his stomach like a stone.
“He’s gone.” George’s voice betrayed none of the emotion on his face. “He’s not there.”
Kirk wondered if his father had just never looked like that when in front of his youngest son, or if Kirk had simply been stupid enough to believe only what he could hear in George’s voice and not what he could see with his young eyes.
Pushing to his feet, he hauled his captaincy around him like a shield and let his mind race ahead to what came next. React to the situation. “What about blood?” If he wasn’t in the room, there were limited options as to how he could have left it. “Was there any sign of a struggle?”
George Kirk looked down at his feet, obviously stilling his mind so he could interpret the details of what he’d seen. “Some stuff is knocked around, but there’re no windows or equipment broken, no blood.”
Then the Vragax hadn’t killed him. They’d had the gun in his face, the alien’s finger had all but [32] depressed the trigger when George stepped in and brought the party to an ugly end. That little band of Vragax hadn’t been working on any kind of larger agenda. They weren’t
going to drag Kirk somewhere else to do their killing, or take his body with him when they left. He was just one more outlet for whatever rage had boiled over in Sogo that night.
But if his father hadn’t arrived in time to rescue him, and the Vragax didn’t shoot him ... then what? Where was the body, if not the boy?
He looked down at the Kozhu women behind the toppled desk. “You said the Vragax left without the boy. Did they say anything?”
She looked for a moment as though she might actually laugh, but instead she said slowly, as though speaking to a stupid baby, “Not to us. We are Kozhu. We hid from them.” Then a certain amount of sympathy must have overweighed her sarcasm, because she added, almost grudgingly, “But they were frightened. One of them was crying and praying to his beyli.”
His personal god. Like a guardian angel, some force to protect him from evil spirits and their doings. No fourteen-year-old boy could have made a Vragax soldier so afraid.
George caught at his elbow, drawing him back away from the desk and the natives still hiding behind it. “Captain, sir ...” He’d recovered what passed for his composure, looking once again only impatient and vaguely irritated. “We’re wasting time here—it must not have been Jimmy they saw.”
[33] Kirk shook his head. “It was.”
“You can’t know that.”
He snapped a sharp look at his father. “How many other human boys do you think are out there tonight?”
George didn’t have a ready answer.
His anger cooled as quickly as it had flared, Kirk gazed absently down the hall, trying to intuit his own behavior in a set of past events that had never happened. “If he somehow got out of that room, he’s headed for the embassy.”
“I told you,” George said tensely. “The embassy’s in pieces.”
“But he knows about the auxiliary shuttle pad,” Kirk reminded him. “It’s outside the embassy walls, and it’s the only place that would still have shuttles to get you off-planet.” In fact, it was the place from which he and George had fled Grex nineteen years ago, in the very last shuttle to leave the war-torn planet. “There’s nowhere else for him to go.”
George gusted a grumbling resignation. “A couple of my boys are holding the last transport. But they’re not going to wait all night. We’d better hurry.”
Yes, they would. But he couldn’t help hesitating to glance down at the women, torn between the past he remembered and the future he was still hoping to create.
George followed his gaze only long enough to take his arm again and try to pull him away. “They are part of the native civilian population,” the security man reminded Kirk stiffly. “Whatever old scores the [34] Kozhu and the Vragax have between each other, it isn’t our problem now.”
Variations on a theme. Kirk could have scripted the political argument that would follow, if only they’d had time to indulge in one. Except this time George wouldn’t be able to dismiss Kirk’s opinions as the delusions of an idealistic little boy. I’m the captain now. I can do whatever I want to.
Shaking his arm loose, he pinned the commander with a disapproving glare. “We made it our problem when we agreed to help them rebuild after the Orions were gone. If we turn our backs now, we’re no better than the Orions.”
“You’re worse than the Orions.” The woman’s tired words shocked Kirk into silence, wounding something more basic in him than a simple political stand. Her weary eyes said she was just as dismayed by his innocence as his father. “They may have called us slaves, but they kept Vragax and Kozhu from killing each other in the streets. It wasn’t until Starfleet gave us freedom that the killing began again.” She sank back into the shadows, pulling the young girl tighter into her arms and making them both very small against the back of a shattered chair. “Go away now. Go look for your boy. We would rather wait here until the Orions return.”
The shuttle flight from Tlaoli up to the Enterprise wasn’t as bad as Sulu had anticipated.
It was much worse.
The cargo shuttle Caroline Herschel which Spock [35] had brought down to the planet was the same class as the Edwin Drake, the ship which had been thrown into the future with Sulu at its helm. Both ships had a normal passenger load of ten, but that was when they weren’t carrying the heavy magnetic shielding that Scotty had installed to insulate their warp cores from Tlaoli’s power-draining subspace fields. In order to evacuate the dozen people left stranded on the planet when the Enterprise had lost the use of its transporter, both shuttles had been emptied of all their nonessential equipment. Now they needed to add Spock, McCoy, and the duplicate copies of Chekov and Sulu to the passenger load. Even taking into account the lighter weight of a fourteen-year-old James Kirk, that put them so far over the Herschel’s carrying capacity that Sulu didn’t even want to think about it.
They spent a frantic half hour under the menacing shadow of the Shechenag ship that had trailed them back from the caverns, emptying the cargo shuttle of everything they could wrench free. Passenger seats, bulkhead covers, even the emergency food and water supplies that they were never supposed to take off without—all of it went flying out the open hatchway. Remembering how he’d flown the Gorn shuttle back on Basaraba standing up, Sulu had even tried to get rid of his pilot’s seat, but found that Starfleet’s shuttle designers had hidden the control circuits for the inertial dampeners inside it. He settled for ripping away all of the upholstery and cushioning from its bare metal struts. With the soundproofing removed, he [36] made the unpleasant discovery that the dampener’s control panel emitted an annoying high-pitched whine, halfway between an unseen mosquito and an overloaded phaser.
Spock paused before settling down in the place where the copilot’s seat had once been. “Do you believe you are competent for piloting duties, Mr. Sulu?” he asked. “In most circumstances you are a far better pilot than I, but if you are suffering from exhaustion or time-dilation effects ...”
“I don’t think I am, Mr. Spock,” Sulu said, honestly enough. “I didn’t get much sleep when I was on Basaraba, but whatever that healing chamber did to me back in the caves seems to have fixed that along with my ribs.” It was true that his ribs were healed, without even an ache or twinge left to mark the place where a brutal blow from a Romulan weapon had broken his bones, and saved his life. But the weariness he’d felt back on Basaraba had been transformed by Tlaoli’s alien healing chambers into something more than just a sense of having rested.
What Sulu actually felt right now was a sharp, crackling alertness, the kind that usually meant a spike of adrenaline had just jolted into his bloodstream. He would have chalked it up to trepidation about the upcoming shuttle flight, except that he didn’t have the rapid pulse and sweaty palms and hollow feeling in his stomach that too many stress hormones produced. Maybe the ancient Tlaoli didn’t just heal their recycled soldiers, he thought. [37] Maybe they also medically enhanced them for the next battle they were going to be sent through time to fight.
Or maybe the alien healing chamber just hadn’t known how to repair his body’s overstressed fight-or-flight response.
Spock acknowledged Sulu’s response simply by handing him a length of lightweight polymer cord. “Your crash webbing was embedded in your seat’s upholstery,” said the Vulcan. “In case of an emergency, this will have to suffice.”
Sulu knotted the cord from one bare metal strut to another, then back again a little farther down his thighs, trying to anchor himself securely enough to the seat that he couldn’t be thrown away from the flight controls by unexpected tremors in Tlaoli’s gravitational field. Spock took the cord from him when he was done, but since there was nothing left to lash himself to, the Vulcan simply braced himself in the far corner of the cockpit. Outside the shuttle, a wine-colored sunset was slowly staining the eastern side of Tlaoli’s rusty sky. Sulu glanced curiously at the shuttle’s chronometer and realized with a start that this was still the same day it had been when he’d been hurled into the future. The long rainy night and stressful day
he’d spent on Basaraba must not have correlated to the same amount of time back at the Enterprise.
“Everyone’s roped down in the cargo bay, too?” he asked Spock as he powered up the warp engines. [38] With the bulkhead covers removed to lighten Herschel’s weight, the roar of the thrust generators was much louder, too. Sulu didn’t envy the fifteen people crowded into the back compartment.
“Yes.” The science officer gazed out at the angular Shechenag aircraft that had hovered watchfully over them as they loaded into the shuttle. The alien ship was finally moving away from them, but it didn’t disappear. Instead, Sulu noted, it began to systematically destroy the survey team’s base camp, not with weapons fire or a bomb but simply by landing its immense weight on the storage tents, one by one. The cybernetic aliens apparently hadn’t lied when they said they no longer engaged in war, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t still be ruthless in their determination to make sure the Enterprise crew did no further damage to the timeline here on Tlaoli.
Sulu opened his mouth to say something about that to Spock, then realized he was procrastinating. The shuttle’s engines were as warmed up and ready as they would ever be. He took a deep breath, then brought Herschel’s vertical thrusters up to full power. The sound of the warp engines rose to an echoing roar in the back of the cargo bay, but the shuttle only managed to lurch a little way off the ground before losing momentum again, like a tethered animal hitting the end of its chain.
“Interesting,” said Spock. “As soon as the thrusters lose contact with a hard surface, they no longer have enough power to accelerate us vertically. Perhaps we [39] will need to leave one of the duplicated officers behind after all.”
Sulu scanned his readouts, measuring engine output against gravitational pull, then darted a quick glance out through the reddening dusk. “I don’t think we’ll need to do that, sir,” he said, and began to painstakingly work the shuttle around to the right without losing any of its lift.