Crucible: McCoy

by David R. George III

  “You should go, Doctor,” he said.

  McCoy hesitated in the hatchway and then asked, “Spock, are you sure this is the right thing to do?”

  “Doctor, the Klingons have commandeered the Enterprise and taken over the vital functions of the ship,” Spock said. “If we do not leave, they will surely kill us.”

  “And what makes you think the Klingons won’t shoot our escape pods out of space?” McCoy asked. He found the notion of flying in a three-hundred-meter-long starship bad enough, but to limp through darkness in a tin can, with an armed enemy watching you do it…

  “The Klingons have a warrior culture, Doctor,” Spock said. “They will stand and fight to the death, but they are less inclined to fire upon an adversary in retreat.”

  “This seems like an awfully big risk to take on sociological grounds,” McCoy said.

  “Doctor, we do not have time to stand and argue this point,” Spock said. “I’m ordering you into the escape pod.”

  McCoy nodded, knowing that Spock only did what he thought best and that his judgment could be trusted. He ducked down low and sidled through the hatchway. When he sat down, he turned to give Spock a hand boarding the pod, but he saw the first officer still outside, reaching to close the hatch.

  “Spock, aren’t you coming?” asked McCoy, rising and moving back toward the door.

  “I am in command at the moment,” Spock said, “and I therefore bear the responsibility of making sure that all of the crew make their way off the ship.”

  “Spock,” McCoy called, “let me—” The first officer—the acting captain—slammed the hatch closed. “Spock!” McCoy called, but he saw the horizontal meter above the hatch cycle from green, through yellow, to red. Spock had sealed him, Palmer, and Rahda in the escape pod.

  McCoy sat down a second before the module shot through its launch tube and out into space. In the transparent canopy above, he saw the form of the Enterprise for a moment, and then the pod turned, and he lost sight of the great ship. The rust-colored planet came into view, and McCoy recalled his two other visits here: one, when he had overdosed on cordrazine and Jim and Spock had gone back in time to 1930 to bring him home, and another, when Spock claimed to have restored a timeline that only he and Jim recalled being altered.

  Seems like this place wants to get rid of me, he thought. He looked at the control panel set into the bulkhead before him, and asked Palmer and Rahda, “Does anybody know how to operate this thing?” Before they could answer, though, he began to work the console, the crew’s periodic escape-pod training quickly coming back to him. He set the controls for a soft landing on the planet below, and then with nothing else to do, sat back and waited.

  They’ve got my ship, Kirk thought as he climbed in the dim glow of emergency lighting.

  Worse, they would soon have the Guardian, and with it, all of human history, all of Federation history. How would they destroy the past, and by extension, the present and the future? Allow the Nazis to win the second world war, or the Holy Roman Empire to control the planet from ancient times? Or something far greater, far more permanent, like poisoning the atmosphere of primordial Earth, or simply murdering the first hominids to arise? It would not take much.

  Kirk reached the next deck, his destination, and pressed his ear against one of the door panels. As he did so, he looked down. Far below, he saw the turbolift, the hatch in its roof still open. When the car had braked to a halt, doubtless robbed of power by the invading Klingons, he’d ordered the others to various destinations: auxiliary control, the armory, the hangar deck, engineering. They and the rest of the crew would try to take back the Enterprise, but they all probably had less time than they thought. If Korax chose to send any of his crew down to the planet and they discovered the Guardian, then it could all be over very quickly.

  Hearing nothing at the door, Kirk reached up to the control panel beside it. He touched a button, but received no response. Clearly the Klingons had cut power all over the ship.

  Climbing up another few rungs, Kirk searched for the door’s manual release. In the shadowy tube, barely illuminated by the muted emergency lights, he reached around until he found the release handle. Before he threw it, he glanced down once more, imagining that he could see a patch of Sulu’s gold uniform shirt through the open turbolift hatch.

  Hikaru, he thought, and then pushed away the image of the helmsman being shot. He didn’t have time for that right now. But time was what he needed more than anything.

  Kirk worked the release, and one of the two door panels slid open. He listened again for a moment. When he heard nothing, he stepped from the ladder and onto the deck. In the muted light, he made his way down the corridor and into the next, and then from there to the transporter room. He removed the access panel beside the doors and once more found the manual release. He went inside, then pushed the panel closed behind him.

  In the transporter room, Kirk found, as he’d expected, that the power had been cut here too. He moved to the equipment cache in the rear bulkhead, opened it, and pulled out a utility belt, communicator, tricorder, handheld beacon, and four phasers. Setting everything but the beacon down atop the transporter console, he switched it on, dropped to his knees, and rolled over onto his back. On the underside of the console, in the spare light of the beacon, he removed the access plate, then started rerouting both the primary and secondary couplings.

  Five minutes later, Kirk had found enough power for a single transport. He stood up and operated the controls, utilizing the targeting sensors to pick out his destination. Once he’d set the automatic function, he wrapped the belt around himself and attached the communicator and phasers to it. Then he gathered up the tricorder and headed for the pad. As the beam took him and the Enterprise faded from his view, he wondered if he would ever see the ship again.

  Kirk materialized on a vast, broken plain. A grim twilight reigned, and a ceaseless wind moaned across the unwelcoming terrain. Fractured columns and other remnants peppered the landscape, but not as they had before. Since he had discovered this place, it had changed.

  Only the Guardian had remained constant: its peculiar, irregular shape; its coarse surface; the power it exuded.

  When first Kirk had come here, mounds and vertical walls of rock had surrounded the enigmatic temporal artifact. In the lands beyond that, large architectural ruins had provided mute testament to a civilization that had come and gone a million years in the past. Or at least that’s what they’d thought.

  In the three years since the Enterprise had tracked ripples in time to this planet, Starfleet had attempted to build a research facility on the surface nearby. Every attempt—even those halfway around the world—had been met with violent earthquakes that had altered the landscape, burying ruins, carving through the land, and toppling some columns while leaving still others unaccountably unaffected. Although the Guardian would not confirm their suspicions, the project team who had worked here had concluded that the vortex itself would permit no such endeavors on its soil. As a result, the Einstein research station had been constructed in orbit.

  A chill shook Kirk. He hated this place. When he’d initially seen the Guardian of Forever, and when he’d come to understand its significance, it had proven a source of mystery and possibility that had spoken to his imagination. But in chasing McCoy through the Guardian, back through time, it had quickly become a vessel of unbearable anguish. Even the second time Kirk had visited here, the promise of the Guardian’s potential had been overshadowed by the ease with which its use could destroy everything, great and small.

  And yet now I seek salvation from it, Kirk thought. This place had wounded him so deeply, but now, he sought its relief. “Guardian,” he said, stepping up to the great, asymmetrical ring, “do you remember me?”

  The Guardian did not respond. Kirk had read the literature of those who had worked here, not out of curiosity—he would as soon forget this place, this thing, as study it—but in support of his mission on his second visit here. The r
esearchers reported that the vortex did not always reply to their questions, while sometimes it offered comment when none had been requested. Beyond that, much of what the Guardian did say came, as Spock had once put it, couched in riddles.

  “Guardian,” Kirk tried again, “are you machine or being?” This had been one of the first questions he had asked the vortex three years ago. As Kirk recalled, it had told him that it was both machine and being, and neither machine nor being, and that it was its own beginning, its own ending. Now, it said nothing.

  “Guardian,” he tried again, “I wish to visit yesterday.”

  “Behold,” it said, its voice reverberating even in the thin air. “A gateway to your own past, if you wish.”

  The great, roughly circular opening through the center of the Guardian appeared to mist over from the top, and then images began to form: humans riding on camels in the desert, living in ancient cities, soldiers marching. Earth, thousands of years ago. But Kirk could not select one day out of millions, could not accurately step through the portal to the time he chose, with all of it passing so quickly. That had been a problem in tracking McCoy three years ago back to 1930, but since then, the researchers had learned how to refine their requests.

  Kirk activated the tricorder and checked the time. Just before he had spoken with Korax, he had noted the stardate and hour, and now he calculated to what moment he needed to travel. He wanted to change the past, but only in one very specific way; he would risk nothing else. “I wish to visit the Starfleet vessel Enterprise,” he said, “in orbit of this planet, twenty-three Federation minutes ago. Location: the bridge.”

  The images within the Guardian faded, the mists within which they hid evaporating into nothingness. A gust carried dust and dirt past Kirk, its low whimper accompanying his rising doubts about his chances of succeeding in his mission. But he remembered what he had seen, and knew that this would happen.

  At last, the mists formed once more within the Guardian, and Kirk saw there the bridge of his ship, the half-formed bodies of the Klingon boarding party in the process of materializing. This had been the moment.

  “The time and place are ready to receive you,” declared the Guardian.

  “Thank you,” Kirk said. Once, he had let the love of his life die in order to save the Federation. Now, in a fitting bookend to that, he would give up his own.

  He deactivated his tricorder and then drew each phaser in turn. He adjusted the setting of each, maximizing its destructive yield. Once enabled, every one of them began to emit a high-pitched whine. Carrying two in one hand and two in the other, Kirk counted out half the time it would take the weapons to overload. Then he took two steps and leaped through the time vortex, the fragile convergence of all possibilities.

  He landed on the outer, upper deck of the Enterprise’s bridge, near the sciences station. Ahead and to his left, a dozen Klingons materialized, their disruptors drawn. They looked around frantically, and Kirk could tell that some of them, and then all of them, heard the overloading phasers. They turned toward him, obviously trying to evaluate the situation, trying to make sense of what their eyes and ears told them. Kirk raised his arms high, providing a target for them, deciding that death by disruptor would be preferable to the alternative.

  That was when the phasers in his hands exploded.

  McCoy sat in a chair in auxiliary control, staring at the viewscreen. He watched the Klingon ship lumbering away and didn’t know what to think. He felt exhausted, and in pain, and he knew that he would remember this day for a long time, no matter how hard he tried to forget it.

  Earlier, McCoy had treated his share of the wounded—including Nurses Chapel and Doran—who’d arrived in sickbay at the same time. He’d finished up by tending to Lieutenant Rahda, who during the Enterprise’s battle with the Klingons had been thrown against a bulkhead, fracturing her tibia. After that, the Enterprise had been shaken by a huge explosion, one he later discovered had wiped out the entire bridge. Though nobody seemed quite sure what had happened, it had apparently prevented a Klingon boarding party from taking control of the ship. It had also apparently killed the six crewmembers on the bridge at the time: Jim, Sulu, Uhura, Chekov, and Lieutenants Leslie and Haines.

  At the same time, a second group of Klingons had transported from their vessel to the Enterprise’s engineering section. But the crew of the Gr’oth had been devastated during its battle with the Enterprise and the other Starfleet ships, and it had only so many men left capable of mounting an attack. Significantly outnumbered by the Enterprise crew, the boarding party in engineering had been defeated—though not before killing eleven Starfleet officers and wounding twenty-seven others.

  Now, McCoy sat in auxiliary control, where Spock and the second-shift bridge crew worked to guide repair efforts. Though not laid out precisely like the ship’s main bridge—it had a large console arcing across the center of the compartment, as well as a handful of peripheral stations—auxiliary control could be utilized as a centralized command center if necessary. When the Enterprise’s bridge had been destroyed, all command and control functions had automatically been routed here—though the engines and many of the ship’s systems had gone down, and even now remained offline.

  His gaze absently on the viewscreen, McCoy hadn’t even noticed the Gr’oth’s movement until it had turned almost entirely toward the planet. “Spock,” he said, and when the first officer—now the acting captain—looked over, McCoy pointed to the viewer. “Where are they going?”

  Spock looked at the screen and stood from where he sat near the central console. “Mister Hadley,” he said, “is the tractor beam operative?

  “No, sir,” Hadley said from one of the secondary stations. Spock didn’t ask—he obviously didn’t have to ask—but McCoy knew that neither the transporter nor any of the weapons currently functioned. If Spock wanted to stop the Klingon ship from leaving, he would have to think of something else.

  “Mister Immamura, has warp power been restored aboard the Gr’oth?” Spock sounded skeptical, and with good reason, McCoy thought. Sensors indicated only a handful of Klingons left alive aboard their ship, with virtually all systems failing, including life support.

  “Negative, Mister Spock,” Immamura said. “They’re moving on thruster control alone.”

  Hard to get back to the Empire that way, McCoy thought.

  “Lieutenant Palmer,” Spock said, walking around the central console to stand between it and the main viewer. “Hail the Gr’oth.”

  “Yes, sir,” the lieutenant replied.

  Static appeared for a moment on the viewscreen, and then a Klingon bridge appeared. Dark and quiet, McCoy thought it looked more like a tomb than a starship command hub. He could see only one panel with illuminated controls on it, located before and to the right of a raised central dais containing what had to be the captain’s chair. Several Klingons lay inert around the bridge, on the deck or collapsed atop their stations. Only two appeared alive and conscious, one in the command chair and one at the seemingly working console.

  “Kirk,” said the Klingon seated atop the dais. It sounded as though he would say more, but then didn’t. He had trouble breathing, and his purplish complexion indicated cyanosis. McCoy did not doubt that, before long, he would lose consciousness and eventually asphyxiate.

  “Korax,” Spock said. “Almost all of your crew are dead, and your ship is crippled. Your transporters are still functioning. If you beam over to the Enterprise, our doctors will treat your crew and you will survive.” The functioning transporters of the Gr’oth, McCoy knew, had been a source of concern for Spock once the Klingon boarding parties had been stopped. Concerned that the remainder of Korax’s crew would escape their dying ship by beaming down to the planet, and that they would then discover the Guardian of Forever, Spock had sent two shuttlecraft down to the surface, carrying security teams to prevent Klingon access to the time vortex. But the few surviving crew of the Gr’oth had remained aboard their ship. Now, McCoy thought he knew why.
With the battle cruiser moving, but with the ability to go virtually nowhere, they could have only one destination.

  “Survive,” Korax said, echoing Spock’s last word. “To see the Federation…use their…new weapon…against the Empire?” It appeared increasingly difficult for the Klingon commander to breath, let alone talk. “No,” he said. “You will not…succeed.”

  “Korax,” Spock said, “the Federation has created no such weapon, nor do we seek the extermination of the Klingon Empire. We wish only peaceful coexistence.”

  Even facing death, Korax managed to sneer. “Peaceful…no.” He hauled himself up out of his chair with obvious effort. “Will destroy…your weapon,” he said. “And it will be…a good day to die.” The Klingon bridge faded from the viewscreen, and in its place, the Gr’oth reappeared, now farther away from the Enterprise.

  Spock turned and pressed a button on the central console. “Auxiliary control to engineering,” he said.

  “Scott here,” replied the chief engineer. “Go ahead, Mister Spock.”

  “Mister Scott, how close are you to restoring engine power?” Spock asked.

  “Engine power?” Scotty said. “We’re barely able to keep life support intact right now. It’ll be at least twenty-four hours before we can move on impulse, and it might be days or even weeks before we can get the warp drive back online.”

  McCoy stood up and walked over to Spock. The Vulcan looked haggard, and if the doctor didn’t know better, he would have thought him troubled by grief. The crews of two Starfleet vessels, as well as those of three—and maybe four—Klingon ships, had been lost here today, and the Enterprise had suffered seventeen of its own casualties: eleven in engineering and six on the bridge. And among the dead had been Jim Kirk, Spock’s best friend.

  “You know what he’s going to do,” McCoy said quietly to Spock, referring to Korax.