"Indeed." Then Kirk saw comprehension in the mirror Spock's eyes. "Ah, I see. In this universe, our friendship continued. What else does your logic tell you?"
"You want something from me, but I don't know what. And the Alliance knows you came looking for me, but doesn't want you to succeed."
"Almost flawless," the mirror Spock conceded "The Vulcan resistance needs access to Starfleet databanks, which only you can provide for us. But the Alliance does not know that we have specifically sought you out for this. As a matter of course, they attempt to stop all our activities, wherever they uncover them."
Kirk heard Janeway returning with slow lunar steps. "But the Cardassians came after us so quickly here."
"They detected our transporters in use."
Kirk didn't like the implication hidden in that statement. "You mean, agents of the Alliance are already stationed in this solar system, in this universe, looking for signs of your activities?"
Before the mirror Spock could answer, Kirk shuddered as Janeway grabbed his shoulder from behind.
"Where?" she asked.
". . . lower . . . back . . ." It was all Kirk could say.
Then he felt a spot of heat deep within his back, just at his waist. Slowly it diffused along his entire spine. He took a deep breath, like breathing for the first time.
His back felt tender, almost as if a small object were being pressed a bit too tightly against his skin, but it no longer pained him.
Without meaning to, Kirk allowed a small moan of pleasure to escape. His back hadn't felt that good in a year, even under Teilani's ministrations.
And again, a moment after that purely visceral response to the change in his back, he felt that same regret he'd experienced while looking at the remains of the Cardassian he killed.
He turned to Janeway, took the flashing medical instrument from her hand. "What is it?"
"Standard tissue regenerator. Did it work?"
Kirk pressed the small control that turned the device off. He dropped it and it fell so slowly Janeway had ample time to pluck it from the air. "I promised myself I'd never use one of those things again."
"Fine," Janeway snapped. "When we're out of here, I'll remember to hit your back with the butt of a phaser rifle. Will that be better?"
If he hadn't seen her wipe the blood off her mek'leth himself, Kirk would never have believed this woman had the discipline to be a warrior. There was promise in her, if nothing else. But her temper would be a formidable barrier to her growth.
Kirk decided to show her how self-control was maintained.
"I'm sorry," he told her. "Thank you. My back feels much better and I appreciate what you've done."
Janeway said something under her breath that almost sounded Klingon—Kirk could only make out what seemed to be a reference to his mother. Then she added, "As soon as T'Val's on her feet, we'll have to leave." She returned to the ruined transporter platform without waiting for a reply.
The mirror Spock spoke softly. "She doesn't know what to make of you, Captain. She knows only the Kirk of her universe. And she is one of the few Terrans to actually have a counterpart in this universe. That is always a difficult adjustment to make."
"I thought we all had counterparts," Kirk said.
"Since the time you crossed over, the universes have diverged even more. Our studies have shown that among those of our generation, yours and mine, more than eighty percent of the Terran and Vulcan populations were identical. But today, because history has progressed so differently in the two universes, many people born here, where the Terran and Vulcan populations are larger, were not born in my universe. Therefore, there is correspondingly less duplication."
Kirk read between the lines. "Why just Terran and Vulcan populations? Isn't the whole universe affected?"
The way the mirror Spock hesitated, Kirk could tell he was holding something back. "As far as I could ascertain from the comparisons I was able to make based on the information I absorbed from melding with your Dr. McCoy, our two universes were once virtually identical. Certainly, the alien cultures you encountered prior to your crossover were identical to their counterparts in my universe."
"But human—Terran, that is—and Vulcan history, that's where the difference lies? Only among those two people?"
"It is not a subject I have had time to explore in recent years," the mirror Spock said. "Suffice to say, when those of us who are little more than slaves or hunted fugitives in our own reality find out that we have a double who enjoys a life of privilege in this one, it can have an adverse emotional effect."
Kirk followed the mirror Spock's gaze to see Janeway using the medkit instruments on T'Val. The injured Vulcan female was sitting up, pale, but speaking. "What does her counterpart do?"
"To be precise, 'did.' In your universe, Kathryn Janeway became a starship captain."
Kirk was taken by surprise. He had seen the potential in Janeway, but to think she was that capable was a revelation. And then it hit him. Why her name had sounded familiar. "There was that starship I read about, the one that disappeared, that they just received some message from . . . Voyager?"
"Correct. Transported to your Delta Quadrant by an unknown alien technology."
"Then your Janeway has come out ahead." Kirk saw the mirror Spock's confusion. "She still has her life in the region she was born, not exiled to an unknown quadrant where she'll probably never see home again."
"It is hardly a life many would desire. To Janeway, she only knows that except for an accident of birth, she might have grown up without want, explored her love of science, of music. If the question had been put to her, as illogical as it might sound, she would have chosen a life such as that, even knowing it would end with exile, or even be cut short by early death, instead of what she endures today."
Kirk found that difficult to accept. Everything he had experienced in his own life had taught him that the one true, inarguable purpose of life was to live. Any other purpose was a matter for philosophers. Any other choice was escape, no different from choosing to cloud one's mind with chemicals or holographic Fantasies or circuitry implants. With the exception of the decisions soldiers might make to risk their lives in pursuit of victory, Kirk could only imagine one possibility in which a person might willingly embrace death, and it left him saddened for Kathryn Janeway.
"You told me there was no hope left in your universe," Kirk said. "Can that be possible?"
"An insightful question," the mirror Spock said. "I trust the answer will provide even greater insight for you." He drew his cloak closer around his narrow shoulders. "In my universe, Captain Kirk, the only hope left is what you now choose to bring to us."
Kirk had already guessed it would come to that. For whatever reason, this Spock was turning around their last conversation of more than a century ago. Then, Kirk had told the mirror Spock that one person with a vision could make a difference. Now, it was Kirk's turn. At least, according to this Spock.
"I take it you mean that the hope I could offer you is that information you want from the Starfleet databanks."
"And again, correct."
"What kind of information?"
"In the past century, your technology has advanced considerably faster than it has in my universe. We need weaponry. Ships. Faster and more powerful than anything the Alliance has. A cell of Terran rebels operating near Bajor has achieved great success with just such a strategy."
But Kirk wasn't interested in details. If technical specifications were all these people needed, he didn't understand why they had gone to such lengths to obtain them. More specifically, he didn't understand why they had come after him. "Given everything you've told me, I don't see how Starfleet could refuse you."
"Try the Prime Directive," T'Val said behind him.
Kirk was startled. He was so engrossed in his conversation with this other Spock that he had lost track of Janeway and her Vulcan accomplice.
"Starfleet has already placed our universe off limits," T'Val said bitterly. "They have was
hed their hands of us."
Hearing that explanation, Kirk smiled. He couldn't help it. " That's why you came to me? Because you needed someone who could break the Prime Directive for you?"
Janeway's voice was tight, the first tremors from a volcano about to explode. "This is not at all humorous."
"No," Kirk said, trying to put some of his own self-control to work. "I know it's not. But the irony of it. That's the one thing I kept doing that made Starfleet want to wash their hands of me. Breaking that damned directive. That that is the reason you've come looking for me . . . I mean, aren't there any other officers in Starfleet? How about Jean-Luc Picard? He knows the difference between right and wrong without being hobbled by Starfleet technicalities. You might not know it to look at him, but he'd cut through the regulations as fast as I would if he thought the end result was fair."
From their reactions to what he had said, Kirk saw some unspoken message pass between the three rebels from the mirror universe. But all the mirror Spock would say was "Jean-Luc Picard would not be suitable."
Kirk thought that was an odd reaction, and he suddenly wondered if there might be a Picard counterpart in the mirror universe.
Then Janeway checked her tricorder and announced that it was time to leave.
Kirk walked with them to the cavern's entrance, and followed them into the mine tunnels again.
As they proceeded in silence, moving again with the slow loping stride of lunar gravity, Kirk tried to decide why Picard wasn't right for what the rebels wanted, while he was. Then he remembered what this Spock had been saying to him earlier as they had hurried through the tunnels to the cavern.
"You're looking for justice, aren't you—all of you?" Kirk asked. "You've come to me to change the playing field because I, or my counterpart, at least, was the one who brought the Klingons and the Cardassians into their Alliance."
"No psychohistorian, on Earth or on Vulcan, could ever have predicted that impossible pairing," the mirror Spock answered. "It is in the Cardassian nature to seek allies. But it is not a common Klingon trait, except under exceptional circumstances. Yet somehow, Tiberius was able to go to the leaders of both groups, and convince them to follow him to reclaim the Terran Empire."
"The war," Kirk said, understanding. 'The war of my causing."
They paused at another intersection as Janeway took readings.
"It was the most brutal war in the history of the known galaxy," the mirror Spock said, hugging his arms to his chest. This part of the mine was getting colder. Kirk could see that the mirror Spock had begun to shiver. It was such an unusual sight, a Vulcan who had lost control of his autonomic functions, that Kirk had to force himself not to stare. "It did not matter that under my rule the Terran Empire had withdrawn from the occupied worlds and was engaged in reparations. The legacy of hate the Empire had sewn was reaped a thousandfold. World after world joined the Alliance. Its only purpose, to erase Earth and Vulcan from the universe."
Again Kirk struggled to understand why everything in the mirror universe seemed to keep focusing on those two planets. Spock's world. Kirk's world. Why those two?
Janeway waved them down the tunnel to the left. It descended steeply and the fusion globes were farther apart, making each step treacherous.
T'Val took a hand torch from her combat suit and used her biomechanical hand to keep the beam focused on the tunnel floor before the mirror Spock.
As they continued down, Kirk began to learn why this Spock had aged so much more drastically than his own—his life had been much more difficult. "I faced Tiberius in battle a dozen times," the mirror Spock said, now openly breathing hard. "We held each other at bay as often as one or the other of us could declare victory. After so many years of working together, we had no secrets from one another. But then, the final battle came. Wolf 359. Seven point eight light-years from Earth. Strategically, the last major staging area before reaching Earth herself."
The mirror Spock halted momentarily, his gaze unfocused, as if reliving that battle in his troubled mind.
Janeway took his arm to urge him forward again. "The battle lasted three days," she told Kirk. "The combined Klingon/ Cardassian Armada faced what remained of the Imperial Starfleet. Three hundred and ninety ships of the Terran Empire were lost. More than one hundred and ten thousand lives. Then the lines broke and there was nothing . . . nothing to stop the Armada from reaching Earth."
"The surface of the Earth was carved by particle beams," the mirror Spock said, "for no other reason than sheer hatred. For four days, a convoy of Klingon battlecruisers did nothing but fire their disruptors into the Great Lakes of North America, boiling them almost dry, forever changing the atmosphere of the Northern Hemisphere. The Cardassian fleet did the same to the Southern Hemisphere by burning the rain forests of South America and Asia. Then they poisoned the oceans so the biosphere of Earth could no longer produce enough oxygen to be self-sustaining."
Kirk's mouth was dry. This went beyond any act of war he could imagine. It was insanity, but at a level almost unbelievable. "What was Tiberius thinking . . . ?" he asked.
"I doubt Tiberius had anything to do with what happened to Earth," the mirror Spock said, almost wheezing. "By the time the Battle of Wolf 359 had ended, Tiberius was gone." The Vulcan continued to stumble forward—only, it seemed, by means of Janeway's assistance.
"What happened to him?"
"What didn't?" T'Val answered beside Kirk. Her artificial hand kept the hand torch trained on the ground ahead of Spock with the precision of a machine. "Some say his flagship was destroyed on the second day of battle. Some say as soon as the Imperial fleet was routed, the Klingons captured him and tortured him to death. Or threw him from an atmospheric cruiser twenty miles above the surface of the Earth."
"Some say the Cardassians captured him and sealed him in a hollow asteroid," Janeway said. Her voice bounced oddly off the icy rock walls of the dark corridor that surrounded them. "The only prisoner floating in absolute darkness, in a void a kilometer across." To Kirk, it sounded as if Janeway felt that would have been too easy a punishment for his counterpart. "Or else they dissected him over the course of a Cardassian year, keeping him alive and aware the whole time, until he was only a mesh of tissue and nerves and blood vessels to be offered to a pack of voles."
Kirk shivered at the level of revulsion his counterpart had inspired.
"Whatever his fate," the mirror Spock said, "after the fall of Earth, Tiberius was never seen again. Nor was he ever expected to be seen. It was quite clear that the Alliance, once formed, had no more use for him, and if he had survived the Alliance war to defeat the Empire, then he would have been assassinated as soon as his usefulness had ended."
Despite the atrocities Tiberius had committed, Kirk couldn't help feeling a pang of sorrow for his counterpart. Throughout his own life, Kirk had always fought to be the person in control. Yet Tiberius had been manipulated, first by Spock, then by the Alliance. In the end, he had lost everything to betrayal. Dangerous thoughts, Kirk suddenly told himself. How could he have sympathy for a monster like Tiberius?
"What happened to Vulcan?" Kirk asked.
The mirror Spock answered that question, for once all emotion driven from his tone, as if he were the Vulcan he had been a century ago. "My world did the logical thing. We surrendered. I negotiated the terms myself."
Kirk could guess what the result had been. This Spock had already described what his world was like today. "And the Alliance betrayed you."
"Vulcan was scourged," T'Val said. "Its biosphere was left intact, but nothing else was."
"But you escaped," Kirk said.
The mirror Spock merely nodded, as if he finally had no more breath to speak. Janeway's steady pace did not slacken.
"And ever since then," T'Val volunteered for the other Vulcan, "Spock has been a fugitive. Intendant of the Vulcan resistance."
They reached a level section of the tunnel. T'Val's torch beam found a narrow crevice in the tunnel wall. Janeway di
rected them through it.
A winding, cramped passageway led to a small chamber, littered with the remains of antique spacesuits. Kirk looked around and guessed that this had been a staging area for the ice miners. Another transporter platform was installed here, though it was smaller than the first he had seen.
"Is that powerful enough to take us to the surface?" Kirk asked. These portable models were generally used for shortdistance transports in dangerous environments. He wasn't certain how deep they were, but he felt that the moon's surface must be several kilometers above them. And beaming through solid rock was much more energy-intensive than passing through vacuum.
But Janeway discounted Kirk's concerns. "It doesn't have to take us to the surface." She stepped up on the platform, then helped the mirror Spock up as well.
"Then, where will it take us?" Kirk asked. He took his position, too, and noticed that T'Val moved to stay out of contact with him. "To another cavern?"
"No," the mirror Spock said. "To another universe."
Kirk opened his mouth to object.
But he was too late.
The ice-mine chamber dissolved around him as, for the first time in a century and the second time in his life, James T. Kirk passed through the looking glass.
TEN
Neelix threw himself forward and took the first shot, doubling over soundlessly in the Voyager's brig.
Picard wouldn't let the Talaxian's sacrifice be in vain.
He leapt up, slamming into the Klingon who had hit Neelix, spinning him around to smash into the second Klingon.
The second Klingon stumbled backward, raised his own disruptor, and fired from the hip.
Just as the misdirected beam hit the first Klingon, Picard released his hold and dropped him to the deck. Then, in the heartbeat before the second Klingon could fire again, Picard struck—a blow to the arm dropping the Klingon's weapon, a blow to the mouth breaking the Klingon's front teeth.
A fountain of pink blood sprayed into the air as the wounded warrior shook his massive head. Picard backed away as the Klingon fixed on his foe, snarling like a ravenous beast. Hair wild, blood from his torn mouth streaming down to his dull metal armor, the warrior pulled his d'k tahg from his belt in a single fluid movement, flicked open the weapon's side blades with an ominous click, and lunged for Picard.
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