STAR TREK: TOS - The Janus Gate, Book Three - Past Prologue

by L. A. Graf

  Another grunt, this one carrying a wealth of skepticism. “I just hope he had the sense to head there.”

  Kirk kept his face turned toward the firelit streets behind them. Part of him wanted to tell his father that he was being unfair to his son, but he knew himself well enough to realize that was just a ghost of adolescent indignation. You really couldn’t blame George Kirk for feeling that way, he thought, a little surprised by the embarrassment that stirred, ever so faintly, in the pit of his stomach. It wasn’t like his younger self hadn’t given his father every reason to distrust him this night nineteen years ago—it was just hard to [93] separate where things had started from where they ended up when the excitement was all over.

  The last time George Kirk had seen his youngest son on Grex, the boy was wedged into a narrow corridor alongside his mother and older brother, trying very hard not to seem as frightened as he’d become during their hurried evacuation of the staff apartments. He and Sam were the only children, his mother the only woman not clutching an attaché of vital Federation documents or brandishing a phaser.

  “Stay with Ensign McCullough.” George Kirk held his wife by the shoulders and looked sternly into her eyes, apparently convinced that she wouldn’t understand these simple instructions unless she was looking straight at him. “She’ll take care of you and the boys until I can join you on the Eliza Mae.”

  His mother nodded dutifully, but her dark eyes were wide and uncomprehending. “How will we know where to find you? What if the Eliza Mae can’t pick up everyone? What will happen then?” It bothered Kirk more than he liked to admit, hearing his mother sound so much like a frightened girl.

  In one of his rare moments of tenderness, George Kirk reached up to gently sweep her hair aside and cup his hand to the side of her face. “You don’t have to find me,” he promised softly. “The Eliza Mae will have room for everybody, and I’ll be coming right behind you, just as soon as all the noncombatants are clear.” He kissed her quickly and with an [94] uncharacteristic lack of reserve. “You look after the boys. I can take care of myself.” Then he looked a question Kirk didn’t understand over her shoulder at the stocky blond security guard, and McCullough nodded once, curtly, in reply. Apparently satisfied with that answer, George stepped back from his wife and summoned the small team of men waiting for him with a wave of his arm. They disappeared down the hall toward the embassy proper without even a backward glance.

  “If you’ll come with me, Mrs. Kirk.” McCullough took her arm before Kirk’s mother had a chance to answer, drawing her away from the embassy with resolute politeness. “We’ll all be out of here soon, but we have to keep moving.”

  They had packed in behind the rest of the evacuees, herded down the narrow hallway like sheep through shearing gates. But instead of clever dogs, what pushed them along were the screams that had started up on the streets outside, and the reflections of fires on the walls of the rooms they left behind. Kirk shuffled along with everyone else, clinging to Sam’s belt to keep from being separated in all the pushing and confusion. By the time they reached the outside, he was overhot and breathing hard, and the lack of a cool night breeze only made him feel dizzy and sick. Instead of the refreshing autumn bite he’d grown to expect from Grexxen evenings, the air was hot and dry with heat blown over the walls from the fires outside. Flakes of ash drifted down like tiny leaves from monochromatic trees. Kirk watched a small Work Bee vehicle make a swift [95] vertical ascent from the embassy’s shuttlepad, its belly painted amber by the burning city streets below it.

  His mother combed hair back from her face with one hand and craned her neck to watch the Work Bee disappear. Another small craft almost immediately took its place. “What if they shoot us down before we get out of atmosphere?” she asked McCullough fearfully.

  “They can’t, ma’am. They’ve only got projectile weapons and a few phasers, nothing that can hurt the spacecraft once we’re airborne.” To this day, Kirk didn’t know if McCullough honestly believed that was true, or if she’d only said it to comfort the wife of her commander.

  They crossed the short expanse of open tarmac at a run, and McCullough sprinted ahead of them to hold the hatch open with her body and push them all in ahead of her. The inside of the tiny maintenance shuttle stank of sweat and panic, crammed almost to bursting with panting bureaucrats and administrators. The seats had been removed, along with all the tools and equipment the shuttle usually carried, and Kirk wondered for one awful moment whether or not this was actually a ship that was supposed to go outside an atmosphere. Thinking back on it now, he realized that this was the moment when he became truly afraid, the point at which he understood that things on Grex had gotten so bad that they would never be fixed and the people crowded into this shuttle alongside him were actually fleeing for their lives.

  [96] Just as that realization rocked him, he heard the frantic cry from outside. “Wait!”

  The men who had been hauling shut the hatch hesitated, and another young man came running up to shoulder his way inside. His face was flushed, his neat business suit ash-stained and rumpled. But, unlike the other embassy staffers, instead of an overstuffed briefcase he hugged two young children in his arms. The older of the two whimpered fitfully, her face buried against his shoulder as though she couldn’t be frightened by what she couldn’t see; the younger one stared about the crowded shuttle with huge copper eyes, her round, bronze face angelic with fascination.

  Behind Kirk, McCullough announced, not unkindly, “You can’t bring them with you, sir.”

  The young man stared at her. For some reason, Kirk noticed that his eyes were startlingly blue. “You can’t expect me to leave them.” His British accent seemed perversely civilized and out of place amid all the violence.

  “There isn’t room, sir—”

  “But they’re Kozhu!”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Their mother gave them to me.” He cast pleading eyes around the shuttle. “She was one of the interim adjudicators. The Vragax all know who she is! They’ll kill her—they’ll kill her family!” He squeezed the children tighter, turning half away from McCullough as though daring her to try and take them. “Please, they’re only children ...”

  [97] McCullough was silent for a long, painful moment, and the Starfleet pilot at the front of the craft called back, “It doesn’t matter who or what they are. We’re overweight as it is. We might still make it into orbit with you on board, but with you and both the kids ...” He shook his head ruefully. “I’m sorry.”

  They’re small, Kirk thought with almost analytical clarity. They don’t even have to stand on the floor. He ducked under Sam’s arm and past the men at the hatch without consciously thinking about what he intended. But by the time his feet hit the tarmac, he was giddy with the lightness of what he was doing.

  “Jimmy!” He heard a commotion inside the shuttle that he assumed was his mother lunging forward after him and McCullough and Sam restraining her. “James Tiberius Kirk, you get back inside this shuttle this minute!”

  He backed away from the hatchway, just in case she proved able to shrug McCullough off. “Mom, it’s okay! I’ll take the next transport!” I’m George Kirk’s son—they’re not going to leave me behind. He wasn’t so sure about two alien toddlers. “You go on. I’ll be fine!”

  “We haven’t got time for this,” the pilot complained from the front of the shuttle, and Kirk yelled back, “Take off without me! I’m okay!” before his mother could order him aboard again.

  Just then, a big hand clamped on the back of his neck and pulled him another two steps back from the open hatchway. “I’ve got him, Rivas.” Lieutenant [98] John Maione tucked Kirk against another of the guards behind him with only a token thump of his hand against the boy’s chest as a reprimand. “Go ahead and lift off. Jimmy can ride out with us. I’ll make sure the chief knows.” Until that moment, Kirk hadn’t realized that he and his mother and brother had been packed aboard the very last shipload of civilians on Grex�
�if Maione and his commandos were lining up to board the next vehicle, that meant there was no one else left to evacuate. The thought of riding into orbit with the embassy’s elite protection troops filled young Kirk with a giddy excitement.

  The shuttle’s thrusters roared up to power, and brittle leaves skated away from the outtakes just as someone inside leaned out to haul the hatchway closed. “Thanks, John.” Rivas’s voice only just beat the booming of the shuttle’s door. “Take care.”

  Maione shooed Kirk away from the pad to make room for the next vessel’s landing, but the look on his face was wry with amusement, not the anger Kirk expected. “You’re dad’s gonna kill you.” The lieutenant swiped away dry leaves that had clung to the boy’s curly hair. “You know, Jim, you might want to save some of that nobility until you’re a little older.”

  Later, when his father railed at him for being self-centered, thoughtless, and irresponsible, he clung to the word nobility with all the strength of his young heart.

  But both his youthful nobility and its consequences were years in the past now. Or at least [99] several hours. Captain James Kirk realized, as he watched his father click shut a portable IR scanner that he must have found among Maione’s men, that he didn’t even know what had ever become of the softhearted Englishman and his two young native wards. He remembered that the Eliza Mae had arrived only seventeen hours after the evacuation, and that none of the impromptu lifeboats had suffered losses during that time, but he had no idea where anyone who had fled with them ended up after that night. He resolved to seek the young Englishman out just as soon as he was back in his proper time frame.

  “All clear.” George tucked the IR scanner into his belt and clambered on hands and knees up to the surface of Ith. Even the building fires were dimming by now, their automatic fire suppression systems kicking in despite the chaos running rampant through the streets around them. Kirk and his father covered the last few blocks to the embassy without seeing any sign of the natives they’d be leaving behind. Except for the empty shoes.

  The last Federation-owned ship on the planet was an all-but-disposable cargo sloop which had come through the atmosphere when the embassy crew first arrived and really wasn’t expected to leave it again. Technically it had boosters enough to put it back into orbit in the event its initial cargo delivery had to be aborted for some reason. Technically. Kirk had never actually heard of anyone attempting such a feat before.

  [100] A tall figure, so thin it might have been built entirely of sticks, peeled away from the cargo sloop’s shadow and came partway to meet them. “Did you not find him, Chief? Or has he just grown quite a bit from this morning?”

  Kirk recognized the melodious voice as belonging to Arran Mutawbe, George Kirk’s second-in-command. Even after all these years, he remembered Mutawbe’s fierce, ready smile and gentle sense of humor as clearly as he remembered the man’s beautiful voice. For some reason, though, he hadn’t recalled that Mutawbe stood well over two meters tall. Maybe it was because everyone was taller than he was when he was fourteen, and his young mind hadn’t made a distinction based on how much taller they were.

  “This is Captain Forester from the last personnel drop.” George’s voice was as curt and steady as always, but Kirk noticed that he stepped up his pace to the shuttle without waiting to see if Kirk and Mutawbe followed. “Jimmy’s not here?”

  “No, sir. But we’ve been hard-pressed to keep a good lookout—the rebels keep circling back to snipe at us. Rory thinks he saw a couple of Starfleet boys near the tree line a little while ago, but we’re not missing anybody and I don’t trust the Vragax not to be luring us out into the open.” Mutawbe took the gauss rifle when George handed it to him, then the IR scanner and the shock grenades. “Tony took one in the face last time the snipers was past, sir.” His voice lowered sadly. “He’s not doing so good.”

  [101] George threw additional equipment off his utility belt into the floor of the sloop, then began reaching in to pull out a fresh phaser and a heavy shoulder bag that Kirk realized with a start was an antique tricorder.

  No, not antique—probably brand new.

  “Then you’ve got to get Tony out of here,” George said without turning around. He tucked the phaser into his belt, then pulled out a communicator and flipped it open to run a check of its circuits.

  Mutawbe watched his commander for a moment, then asked carefully, “What about your boy, sir?”

  George picked up a handful of extra power supplies for both the phaser and the tricorder, fitting them one by one into his rapidly filling belt. “I’ll find him.”

  “And we’ll wait, sir—”

  George spun on Mutawbe, his expression in the waning firelight desperate and fierce. “No, you will not wait.” He wrestled his tone back under control before continuing. “I will not put any more of my men at risk because my son ran off on some half-cocked adventure. You’ll get in this sloop and take Tony and the others into orbit where they’ll be safe until Eliza Mae arrives. She’s three days out, tops. If I can’t find Jimmy by then ...”

  He fell silent, but Kirk knew what he was thinking. If I can’t find him by then, he’s nowhere here to be found. The trouble was, Kirk had a feeling that was already true.

  Chapter Five

  THE MAIN BRIEFING ROOM on the Enterprise froze into silence, the crystalline kind of silence Uhura usually associated with the instant just before a photon bomb went off. Then the older version of Chekov startled her, not by exploding but by wheeling to fix the younger version of Sulu with an unblinking stare.

  “You saw our future,” he said. “How certain are you that I would die to prevent it from happening?”

  Sulu looked from the older man to Mr. Spock. “Completely,” was all he said, but his voice carried a wealth of conviction. From across the table, McCoy gave Uhura a speaking glance and jerked his head toward the older version of Sulu.

  “And we know Captain Sulu would do that, too,” [103] Uhura said. “If it weren’t for the Janus Gate, he would already have died to stop the Gorn invasion.”

  “I am aware of that, Lieutenant,” Spock said crisply. “But Captain Sulu’s loyalty to his own timeline does not imply an equal willingness to sacrifice himself for ours.”

  The older starship captain smiled. “I had forgotten what a stickler you were for logical certainty, Mr. Spock. I don’t know if I can give you any guarantee that Chekov and I are committed to helping you restore the timeline that has your lost Captain Kirk in it. But if we look at this logically ... Right now we’re floating in an isolated time bubble you created when you cold-started the engines back at Psi 2000. Is that right?”

  “That is correct.” Spock’s voice had taken on an edge it held so rarely that it took Uhura a moment to recognize it as impatience. “We have only twenty-eight hours of that time bubble left before we rejoin the main timestream and once again become the only Enterprise in the galaxy. At that point, I calculate a ninety-seven percent probability that we will no longer remember Captain Kirk, and thus will lose all hope of repairing the damage we have done to the past.”

  Sulu nodded. “And if that happens, if we don’t manage to repair the timeline by that point, what will happen to me and Chekov?”

  Spock lifted one eyebrow, as if the question was so meaningless it had never occurred to him. Uhura cleared her throat as the silence lengthened.

  “If the timeline we rejoin is the one that never had [104] a Captain Kirk in it,” she hazarded, “then we might never have found this planet or left any survey teams here to discover the Janus Gate.”

  “And we definitely wouldn’t have gotten thrown back in time,” Zap Sanner chimed in. “Because, according to these guys, their Enterprise got to Psi 2000 too late to catch the virus that killed the research team there.”

  The older Sulu nodded, as if they’d confirmed what he was already thinking. “So if we don’t repair the timeline and you never find or use the Janus Gate—”

  “—then we won’t be able to sav
e you or Chekov from Basaraba.” McCoy waggled a finger at Spock, looking gleeful at having caught him in a logical lapse. “So much for your worries about them sabotaging our plans! They’re going to disappear in twenty-eight hours whether they help us or not.”

  Uhura took a deep, dismayed breath when she saw where this line of logic was leading. “But if we don’t use the Janus Gate, you’ll never find out that the Gorn are holding a Metron prisoner in Tesseract Fortress.”

  “Much less be able to free him and stop the Gorn invasion of Vulcan,” the older Sulu agreed. “All in all, I think that gives us several logical reasons to help you get your captain back.”

  There was a brief silence, broken by several forceful Russian words. Despite her passing knowledge of the language, the phrase wasn’t familiar to Uhura, but she saw a startled shade of red touch Ensign [105] Chekov’s cheeks as he glanced at his scowling older counterpart.

  “That’s what you can do with your logical reasons,” the older Chekov growled, staring steadily across at Spock. “I swore an oath when I was commissioned as a Starfleet officer. Rescuing fellow Starfleet personnel from danger was one of the things I promised to do. It doesn’t matter where I am in time, I’m still a Starfleet officer.”

  The Vulcan gave the two older men a speculative look. “May I assume you would be willing to travel backward in time another twenty years in order to ensure the timeline is repaired?”

  “Yes,” said the older Sulu and the older Chekov in one voice.

  Spock paused a moment, then inclined his head in a grave nod. It was probably as close as he could come to an apology, Uhura thought, and it was certainly all the satisfaction he intended to give a still-grinning McCoy. The first officer resumed their interrupted planning session before the doctor could make any other comments on his logical lapse.

  “We are agreed that we will ignore the Shechenag’s ultimatum to leave the system,” the Vulcan said. “We must send the young James Kirk back to his proper place and time, and to do that we must have access to the Janus Gate. However, I would prefer not to engage an unknown race in battle, as that would be time-consuming at best and catastrophic at worst. Even if the Shechenag have forsworn the [106] practice of war, their technology appears to include enough powerful defensive mechanisms that any confrontation with them could prove deadly.”