by L. A. Graf
Should I tell him? Kirk didn’t know why he’d hidden his identity to begin with, except from the vague sense that he should have as little impact on past events as possible. But hadn’t the changes already wrought in the last few hours negated any chance he had of extricating himself without leaving evidence he’d been here? He opened his mouth, not entirely sure what he intended to say.
The tricorder in George’s hand chirruped sharply. Flipping back the cover, the older man scowled down at the little screen as though irritated that it had interrupted them. Then a look of almost smooth intensity [119] washed all emotion off his face, and he reached to grab Kirk by the arm and drag him through a broken doorway into a building’s dark interior.
Kirk followed his father’s lead, crouching in the shadows off to one side of the door and squinting out into the nighttime. He heard the band of Vragax before he saw them. They made their way down the middle of the street in no particular hurry, talking and laughing in their native tongue so loudly that they struck cheerful echoes off the buildings around them. There were five of them, three carrying bags that looked like pillowcases stuffed with random items, the other two taking turns balancing a bottle of what was probably the native liquor on the ends of their rifles.
Kirk waited until they’d passed out of sight—but not out of hearing—farther down the street to whisper to his father, “You can apparently read that thing well enough after all.”
“The proximity alarms are the easy part.” He turned down the device’s volume controls, then padded over to a window to watch the Vragax go. “They’re not even pretending to keep a watch out for enemies.”
Kirk stood and went to join him at the window. “They know Starfleet’s gone, and the Kozhu are probably all in hiding by now.”
They crept out a rear entrance, making more of an effort now to stay off the main thoroughfares and in the shadows of buildings and bushes. Vragax passed them twice more, raucous and relaxed, and Kirk [120] eventually realized that they were all headed in roughly the same direction. Motioning George to follow, he skirted a row of market stalls and lowered himself into a maze of elaborate landscaping that had somehow escaped the night’s violence. Dry branches and spent blossoms crackled under his hands and knees as he crawled to the edge of the planting.
The huge garden followed the edge of a pretty stone quadrangle, raised up to what would be Grexxen eye-level. Lying beneath the tangled planting, Kirk scanned the open area with a sense of growing dread. Tents and campfires and even little circles of tables and chairs littered the blue stone courtyard, augmented by atonal music from a half dozen different electrical devices. Kirk smelled the deliciously spiced roast dondurma that was his only fond memory of Grex, and watched a group of Vragax warriors jostling playfully to be first to scoop his share out of the fire. In surreal contrast, a string of Kozhu women were tied one to another around the base of a bubbling fountain that had probably been quite restful before today.
“They’re coming from every direction.” Kirk risked lifting up on his elbows to watch another loose collection of Vragax wander in between two of the tall office buildings. They were greeted with much hooting and applause. “It’s like a gypsy camp ... or a bivouac.”
Beside him, George angled the tricorder toward the black glass pyramid that crouched just behind the [121] string of captive women. “Whatever it is, those human life-signs we’ve been following are right in the middle of it.”
Reporting to the bridge for the first time since he’d come back to the Enterprise felt much stranger than Sulu expected. It wasn’t just the fact that he’d crossed so much space and time since he’d last sat at the starship’s helm. He’d also never before manned the helm dressed in a formfitting gold suit made of nano-woven fibers. The caving gear wasn’t uncomfortable, since it adjusted its thermal properties to allow for insulation or ventilation as needed for any environment, and he wasn’t even the only one wearing it—Giotto and Spock were also dressed for immediate shuttle departure—but it still made Sulu feel conspicuous. Or maybe that feeling came from knowing there was an older version of himself standing on the back deck of the bridge, watching their maneuvers against the Shechenag with a critical forty-seven-year-old eye.
“Are you ready, Mr. Sulu?”
“Not quite, sir.” Sulu didn’t glance up from the automated course corrections he was inputting to his piloting console, but he could tell from the silence at the other end of the ship’s helm that Spock had already finished programming his own station. The first officer had sent Navigations Officer DePaul to man the long-range sensors several minutes after he’d ordered Sulu to relieve Rhada at the helm, but Spock had already finished rerouting the ship’s transporter [122] controls from the engineering station to the navigations computer, where he could do the complex calculations that would be required for the maneuvers they were about to attempt. Montgomery Scott had made no protest when the Vulcan informed him he would be the one controlling the transporter beam. No one else had the mental acuity and swift physical reflexes required to handle the duty Spock had assigned to himself.
Sulu’s task was simpler but no less challenging: he had to keep the ship hovering in an absolutely true position above the planet while the transporter beam was being used. Any deviation, Spock had warned him, would result in the kind of total power loss that had almost caused the Enterprise to crash on Tlaoli thirty-six hours ago. If they’d been in orbit around any other planet, Sulu would have programmed the ship’s computer to fire the delicate microbursts of impulse power at precisely the right instant to cancel out the combined vectors of gravity and centrifugal force. But Tlaoli’s unpredictable gravitational fluctuations meant that the task of holding several thousand tons of starship perfectly still in space fell to her human pilot. All Sulu could do in advance was input many possible engine firing sequences into the helm computer, so that he could activate any one with a single tap instead of a time-consuming series of keystrokes. He assigned a double-right thrust to his last open control, then glanced up at Spock. “Ready, sir.”
Spock acknowledged with a nod but never took his [123] gaze from the main viewscreen ahead. Since they had pulled back to the more distant orbit requested by the Shechenag, the rust-red disk of Tlaoli no longer spilled off the edges of the screen. It shone against the stars like an antique copper coin, the alien defense system a spiderweb of glittering strands across its face. No dark shadow smudged across the stars around it—the Shechenag ship was on the far side of the planet, installing the last satellites for its planetary shield. Spock had used the ship’s long-range sensors to make sure of that back in the briefing room, when they had finalized their strategy. Now all they had to do was hope the aliens would remain engaged long enough for them to put their plan into effect.
“Lieutenant DePaul, give me a bearing from the location of the Janus Gate on the planet to the nearest Shechenag satellite.”
“Aye, sir.” The navigations officer squinted down at the science display screen, which was calibrated for Vulcan eyesight. “Bearing three-four-three-point eight, two-one-nine-point-two mark eight. Transmitting to your data station now.”
“Acknowledged.” Spock’s thin fingers flew across the navigations board as he calibrated the angle and intensity he would need to give the transporter beam. “Mr. Sulu, are we stabilized above the planet?”
“Aye, sir.” Sulu had been carefully adjusting the impulse engines ever since he’d told the first officer he was ready, guessing that Spock would waste no [124] time in commencing the operation. At any moment, the Shechenag might finish installing their satellite network, or circle the planet to check on the side they’d already completed. The Enterprise could not be caught doing something as suspicious as transporting absolutely nothing back and forth through the space around Tlaoli.
“Keep us steady,” Spock reminded him. “Activating transporter beam now.”
Unlike phasers, there was no way to see a transporter beam as it cut through space. For Sulu, that
was a blessing. He could ignore the viewscreen above his head and pay attention just to the tiny fluctuations of his piloting curves. So far, all the adjustments he’d had to make had been minor and easy to input by hand. But he knew the pattern of Tlaoli’s gravitational jerks and bumps. Any minute now, one should be coming ...
A minute flash of blue and yellow appeared on his screen as the Enterprise felt the incipient tug of altered gravitational pull and began to drift off-station. Sulu felt one of the preprogrammed controls depress under his fingers before he was even conscious of selecting it, and only knew it was the right one when his orbital curves merged back into a perfect white arc. Maybe he should be grateful for whatever alien adjustments the Tlaoli healing chamber had done to his stress hormones after all, Sulu thought as he gazed in some amazement at his own hands.
“I believe our first attempt at satellite deactivation has been successful,” Spock said. He glanced up [125] from the helm toward the viewscreen. “Enlarge sector eighteen to twenty-nine, Mr. Scott.”
“Aye, sir.” The viewscreen swooped closer and lost most of its resolution as the chief engineer magnified that section of the defensive array. Tlaoli’s subspace interference meant that long-range sensors were far more limited in their ability to re-create a distant image here than in other systems, but there was still enough clarity to see the glimmering iridescence of force-lines crisscrossing the planet’s murky copper atmosphere. Sulu scanned the screen eagerly, and found the gap he was looking for near the very top. Between two barely visible glints of satellite, there no longer glittered a bright crackling strand of protection. By aiming the ship’s transporter beam at the precise angle required to refract it off that energy field and toward the Janus Gate below, Spock had linked the subterranean energy-storage capacity of the ancient time transporter with the satellite’s internal power generator. And just as it had done to the Enterprise thirty hours previously, the Janus Gate had sucked the satellite dry.
“It doesn’t seem to have propagated any further down the network,” Scotty commented from his station on the back deck of the bridge.
“Precisely as I suspected,” Spock replied. “Each Shechenag satellite is responsible for creating only a single line of force. Therefore, the failure of one will not result in a complete failure of the network.” He glanced back across at DePaul. “I am awaiting the vector to the next satellite, Mr. DePaul.”
[126] “Sorry, sir.” The navigator peered down at his brightly lit display again. “Bearing three-four-five-point-three, two-one-seven-point-zero mark two. Transmitting to your data station now.”
“Acknowledged. Steady as she goes, Lieutenant Sulu.”
Easier said than done, Sulu thought. Tlaoli’s unpredictable gravity field had chosen just that instant to bounce the Enterprise through a series of chaotic tremors, each of which had to be counteracted individually. The pilot concentrated on shutting out all extraneous noise from the bridge, all the distracting sounds of voices and machines and even the hum of his own data station. His world condensed down to two things: the position of the Enterprise in space on his helm display and the rapid-fire series of impulse engine firings necessary to keep that pristine white spot from splitting itself into unstable blue and amber echoes. His fingers continued to move without conscious thought, sometimes flying across the manual input controls, sometimes stabbing at one of his preprogrammed firing sequences. It felt like the worst kind of piloting exercise he’d had to endure in his Academy days, the kind where the flight simulator kept throwing problems at you faster and faster until it found the point where you failed.
But this time, there could be no failure point. One slip of the transporter beam off the energy lines of the Shechenag defensive screen, and the Janus Gate would suck power down from the Enterprise just as [127] efficiently and ruthlessly as it took it from the alien satellite network. Sulu had to be just as ruthless in his concentration, jettisoning all of his normal attentiveness to the other operations on the bridge. He hunched over his screen, taking full advantage of the hair-trigger reactivity that the Tlaoli healing chamber had given him, accidentally or perhaps on purpose ...
“Lieutenant Sulu.”
The intensity of those words finally snapped the pilot’s focus away from his helm display. “What’s wrong?” he demanded, his gaze skating around the bridge in search of some power loss that he hadn’t been able to prevent. All he saw were blinking lights and glowing screens, along with a circle of somewhat startled-looking faces. It took another minute before Sulu realized they were all staring at him. “What happened?”
Spock lifted an eyebrow at him from the other end of the ship’s helm control. The Vulcan’s face looked a little tired, but intellectual curiosity flickered brightly in his eyes. “We have deactivated a sufficient number of Shechenag satellites to create a gap through which the shuttle may pass. You no longer need to keep the ship on station.”
“Oh.” Sulu glanced down at the helm display and had to forcibly stop himself from punching at another control to drag its slight bluish tinge of drift back to solid white. He closed his eyes for a moment, then carefully tapped in the course parameters that would put the ship back into a normal circling orbit of [128] Tlaoli. “If you would call Mr. Rhada back to the helm, sir.”
“I have already done so,” Spock said gently. “And she is standing right behind you.”
Sulu glanced over his shoulder and saw the second-shift pilot eyeing him with the same awed expression as the rest of the bridge crew. That wasn’t me, he wanted to cry out as he left the helm and followed Spock and Giotto toward the turbolift That was something Tlaoli did to me to make me like its recycled soldiers!
But when he stumbled a little with an unexpected surge of muscle weakness as he took a step up to the back deck of the bridge, Sulu felt himself caught and steadied by a familiar hand. He glanced up into his own dark eyes, framed with crow’s-feet and weathered lines and filled with a wry look of recognition.
“I remember that,” the older man said. “It’s the aftereffect of piloting through too much of a life-and-death crisis. Don’t worry, it goes away after a while.”
Sulu paused to let his older self enter the turbolift first while he considered the implications of what the other man had said. If a version of Sulu from a timeline in which he’d never been healed by ancient alien technology knew exactly what he was feeling now—
Captain Sulu gave him an amused look as he stepped into the turbolift in stunned silence. “What’s the matter?” he asked, then his eyes narrowed perceptively. “Didn’t you already know how good a pilot you were?”
[129] “Not really,” Sulu admitted. “I never had to pilot a ship in a situation that critical before.”
“I know.” His older self met his gaze with a steadiness and resolve that Sulu could only hope to be capable of some day. “And with any luck, if we can rescue your Captain Kirk and put him back where he belongs, you’ll never have to do it again.”
Chapter Six
KIRK LOOKED FROM the black glass pyramid to the nearly incomprehensible tricorder readout in his father’s hands, then back again. This is not someplace I ever went to. Not that such details mattered anymore. They had already strayed so far from events as Kirk remembered them that he was skeptical about whether things could still be set right again.
On the quadrangle below, Vragax moved back and forth between their scattered little camps like sightseers at a bazaar, greeting fellow militants with much laughing and shouting and tossing about of weaponry. Firelight glinted off their tight copper braids, and Kirk thought he could smell the astringent bite of phak leaves, which he remembered the natives chewed as a sort of natural amphetamine. He [131] wondered how much of the violence tonight had actually been inspired by a fervent hatred of the Kozhu and how much by the promise of copious amounts of phak for all the Vragax left standing afterward.
Tipping the tricorder screen back toward his father, Kirk waited for one of the chattering bands of Vragax to pass out
of earshot before whispering, “Are you sure the readings originate inside that structure?” There were a half dozen other buildings surrounding the quadrangle, most of them much less inconveniently situated. Even if the Kozhu prisoners hadn’t been tethered just outside the pyramid’s main entrance, the whole building was set too far into the quadrangle to make a covert approach from the rear possible.
George swung the tricorder in as wide an arc as he could manage beneath their brushy cover, then pursed his lips around an unhappy frown. “It’s got to be.” He quietly closed the cover and tucked the tricorder behind him. “And the readings are a lot stronger now. There’s three in there for sure, maybe four.”
“Three?” For some reason, that bit of information made Kirk’s heart thump with alarm. “I thought your son was alone.”
“That’s what I’ve been assuming.” George pushed off with his elbows to wriggle backward out of the bushes, and Kirk ducked his own head out of the tangle of dead foliage to follow. The dry snap and crackle of their retreat seemed dangerously loud to his adrenaline-raw nerves. He held his breath until [132] he’d disentangled himself from the edge of the quadrangle, as though stilling his breathing would somehow make their presence less obvious.
“Jimmy must have hooked up with someone else who couldn’t make it back to the embassy in time.” Kirk heard his father climb to his feet once the older man had cleared the landscaping, then felt George reach down and grab hold of his foot to guide him out of the last of it as well. “At least he’s not out in this all by himself.”
Standing, Kirk dragged George away from the garden and the gradually filling quadrangle beyond it. “Who could Jimmy possibly be with?” he hissed, unable to shake his unease. The doorway he snugged them both into was one of the few around them still intact, its sculpted overhang plunging the little alcove into heavy shadow. “What other humans are left on this planet besides you and me?”