The chamber around them began to dissolve again, and since Kirk knew they all could have survived the time they had spent here without suits, he also knew what their next destination must be—
—the magnificent desolation of the lunar surface itself.
A gently rolling gray plain of scattered rock and smooth dust took form around Kirk.
For an instant, he allowed a smile of pleasure to play across his face. He had walked on thousands of alien worlds in his career, but he found it ironic that he had never actually set foot on the uncovered lunar surface—the one alien world closest to his home.
He had visited the moon many times, of course. As a child, he had gone on school-organized day trips to Tranquility Park to see the first landing site, carefully preserved in vacuum fifty meters away from the tourist viewing dome. He had enjoyed the occasional weekend of shore leave in the infamous lowgravity hotels of the Lunar Appenines. But somehow, he had never quite found the time to rent a suit and venture out beyond the airlocks, to experience the moon as the first explorers and colonists had.
For all the years he had lived, for all the light-years he had traveled, even dose to home there had always been still more to do, to see, to experience. He could almost hear Teilani add, Andfor you, James, there always will be.
How is it she knows me better than I know myself? Kirk asked himself.
But Janeway didn't leave him any time to consider the answer.
"This way," she commanded, pointing toward a deep shadow at the edge of a small rift fracture, about a hundred meters away. It formed a protected wall of sorts, one that snaked off toward the deceptively near lunar horizon. " Follow the trail."
Kirk looked ahead and saw the path where the dust had been disturbed by the passage of others. But whether they had come this way a few minutes ago, or in centuries past, there was no way to be certain.
Kirk fell into a slow, bouncing gait with Janeway and the rest. In the long seconds before each landing and push-off, he checked the angle of the shadows, glanced up to catch a flare of sunlight, and realized that the Earth should be visible. As he traveled closer to the fracture zone, he angled his head in his helmet to find the planet of his birth. At least, this universe's version of it.
And seeing it, he tripped.
Tumbling forward in the dust, sending up a slow-motion billow, arms spread wide, skidding to a soft landing, overwhelmed.
Janeway and T'Val were at his side at once. Kirk felt them pull him quickly to his feet. T'Val was already scanning him, checking his suit's integrity.
"Are you all right?" Janeway asked.
Kirk couldn't answer.
For the same reason he had tripped.
He twisted out of the women's grip to look again at Earth.
And what he saw made his throat tighten.
Earth was dying.
On the sunlit half, it was as if a colony of virulent mold had spread across a sample dish in some abandoned lab. The seas, once blue, once laced with delicate swirls and arcs of brilliant white clouds, were now vast tracts of brown and black and purple.
The land, once wreathed in green, wrapped by soft bands of desert brown and the dramatic gray-black of mountains, capped north and south by gleaming fields of pristine ice, was now a single smear of gray, broken only by obscuring blots and whorls of ink-black cloud.
And on the nightside, it was as if civilization had been wiped from the planet. All Kirk could see was a handful of glowing red dots—volcanoes or fires burning out of control, he couldn't be sure—and, over what used to be the Midwest region of North America, the flickering dance of lightning from a major storm.
He looked where Montreal should have been—he himself had just been there moments ago, it seemed. But where the sparkling spiderwebs of light from a city and cultural center of eight million souls should have appeared, there was nothing.
"What . . . happened?" Kirk asked, knowing no answer could be satisfactory.
"We already told you," Janeway said coldly.
"You happened," T'Val added, as if she enjoyed his distress.
Kirk stared at his desecrated world. He had heard the mirror Spock's description of this Earth, but the words had only been an abstraction. To actually see it was . . . to think that he was in some way responsible . . .
"We have to hurry," Janeway said.
Kirk felt the women grab his arms again, pull him ahead.
He stumbled forward, but his instinctive training soon pulled his faltering steps into smooth rhythm with his abductors', even while his mind struggled with its shock.
Just before he passed into the shadow of the rift, he looked to his side and saw the mirror Spock staring at him from his own visor.
The counterpart of his closest friend said nothing, but in his eyes were the accusations that raced through Kirk's own mind.
Murderer. Maniac. Monster.
"Spock, I didn't know," Kirk said as he passed into the shadow.
The mirror Spock's voice crackled through the darkness. "Now you do."
Kirk remembered little of the long traverse along the fracture zone. In less than a minute, his eyes had adjusted to the shadow and the reflected sunlight was enough to see the way.
All he heard was the steady breathing of his companions. The mirror Spock's was weak. T'Val's was like a metronome. And Janeway's deep and rhythmic like an athlete's.
Kirk did his best to keep up, aided most of all by the physical labor he had undertaken in the past year. But he realized that if Janeway and T'Val had not reduced their pace in deference to the mirror Spock, they eventually would have had to reduce the pace for him.
Just about the time Kirk was thinking he would have to request a rest break, the party came to a stop. Again T'Val scanned the area; then Janeway pushed at a rock near the base of the fracture wall, and a moment later, a narrow hatch silently swung up from the base to reveal an opening about the size of a Jefferies tube. The outside surface of the hatch was studded with small rocks and sections of dust which didn't move—permanently affixed camouflage. The inside surface was ribbed metal, the same vintage as the ice-mine chamber Kirk had been beamed into after his abduction from Earth.
Kirk could feel vibrations through his boots, and guessed that the upper section of the hatch was an airlock, and what he felt was the machinery that pumped air in and out
Janeway had T'Val enter first. When Kirk's turn came, he found himself standing in the narrow tube just below the hatch, which, Janeway confirmed for him, was an old miners' escape route. Silent vibrations traveled through his suit and blended with a growing rumble of audible sound. As the vibrations and noise stopped, a display inside his helmet revealed that the exterior atmospheric pressure was 250 torr, about one-third Earth normal, which he recognized as the common, low-pressure standard for spacecraft and habitat structures in the early days of space travel, when the threat of explosive decompression was an ever-present possibility.
A few moments later, a muffled hiss accompanied the opening of a second hatch in the lower half of the tube and Kirk used the handrails to swing through it, feet first.
The new chamber he dropped into was again metal-walled, with each surface coated once more in frost. A small fusion globe, weakly flickering, was the only source of light.
Kirk saw T'Val already wriggling out of her suit, and he stepped away from the interior hatch as it began its cycle again. As he heard the air pumps begin their labor, he unsealed his helmet.
The cold in this chamber was even more biting than the last, and Kirk knew they would have to beam out quickly, especially given the mirror Spock's condition.
In less than five minutes, all four of them were in the chamber, their environmental suits safely stowed in a sealed crate for whoever would next come this way. Kirk and the others waited on a transporter platform. Janeway and T'Val now wore loose tunics and leggings over their combat suits, and T'Val carefully adjusted her intendant's cloak so that it covered the mirror Spock's head like a shawl.
>
"I'm almost afraid to ask where we're going next," Kirk said. He was shivering as violently as the mirror Spock had in the last chamber. His ears felt numb. His hands ached.
"Last stop," Janeway told him, trembling less than he did, as if she were somehow used to experiencing these extreme conditions.
"Really?" Kirk asked.
"Let me put it this way," Janeway said. "Where we go after our next beam-in will be up to you."
As Kirk puzzled over any hidden meaning, or threat, in what Janeway had told him, the surrounding ice-mine chamber dematerialized, then re-formed into—
—a riot of color and sound, movement and confusion, so explosive Kirk found it almost overpowering.
"Welcome to Lunar Station New Berlin," a pleasant voice announced. "Please step from the platform as a courtesy for the next passenger."
Kirk's leg muscles tensed as an artificial field of Earthnormal gravity tugged on him, and as he stepped from the glowing circular disk beneath him, he looked around to see that he was in the downtown square of one of the oldest and largest cities on the moon. Janeway had returned them to his universe.
Quaintly retro shops and restaurants, built in the hopelessly naive technological style of the late twenty-first century, ringed the square before him with its open fountains and eucalyptus trees aromatic in the warm lunar air.
Kirk heard music playing, laughter, the excited cries of happy children playing. Relieved, he moved forward, following the flashing lights in the floor that guided him to the nearest passenger exit.
Then he quickly ran down the few stairs to an open pedestrian walkway, and looked up past the sloping roof of the transporter station.
Exactly where he had seen the Earth less than an hour ago, he saw it again, though now against a background of the terraformed moon's summer blue sky, and not the black of space.
But this time, on the nightside, Montreal shone like a jewel, filled with light and with life. North and South America were clearly delineated by their cities and the transportation corridors that wove them together. And on Earth's dayside, the seas were blue, the clouds a filigree of lace, the vast nature parks of Western Europe and Africa vibrantly green and alive.
Kirk felt as if he had returned from the underworld. Each color was purer than before. Each sound clearer. Each breath more precious.
"Now you know why it is so difficult for us," Spock said beside him.
Kirk spun around, but it wasn't his Spock who addressed him. It was the other. Kirk's strange encounter was clearly not over.
"Your Earth, your universe, is a paradise beyond our understanding," the mirror Spock continued. Janeway and T'Val moved up to flank the mirror Spock. In their loose civilian clothing, they did not stand out among the crowd.
"Are we safe from the Alliance here?" Kirk asked, unable to shake the feeling that the Alliance's presence here meant that he was somehow a threat to his own universe now.
"They can detect our transporters when we beam from place to place, but not when we cross over," Janeway said. "We're safe. Until you turn us in."
"Do you actually think I'd do that?" Kirk asked.
"The other Kirk would," Janeway answered.
Kirk looked back up at the blue sky of the moon, at his Earth. Maybe not a paradise to him. But he knew better than ever why the people of the mirror universe would think so.
He closed his eyes for an instant, and saw their Earth again, decaying, decimated. Because of him.
He looked back at his three would-be kidnappers, and suddenly he wondered if they had wanted to kidnap him at all.
"You never intended to hold me captive," Kirk said. "You just wanted me to return to your universe and see your Earth. See what I'd done."
The two Vulcans gave nothing away by their expressions. Even Janeway might as well have been Vulcan by the way she so thoroughly hid whatever she might be thinking and feeling.
But Kirk had worked with Vulcans, at least, one in particular, long enough that he felt confident about reading their moods and intent. He saw before him three beleaguered soldiers, fighting a losing war, looking to him to provide new hope and the chance for victory they could no longer provide themselves.
He looked at them and knew that he could walk away now, and they would not follow. It was not in them to harm an innocent civilian. The choice to help them was truly up to him.
Kirk couldn't help the grin that could only confuse his serious-faced audience. His days of adventure might be over, but he'd just thought of a way he could still make a difference—put right the past, change the future. By making a gift of his guidance and whatever wisdom he had achieved to these soldiers in such desperate straits.
"I know exactly what to do," Kirk said decisively, "to give you the power to resist, and to defeat the Alliance."
The mirror Spock, as literal as the one Kirk knew, asked the obvious question. "And are you prepared to share that knowledge with us?"
"I am." Kirk offered his hand, knowing the Vulcans would not accept it, but that Janeway would.
But it was T'Val who surprised him by stepping close to him and reaching around to his back and sliding her hand inside the waist of his trousers.
Kirk looked at her, startled by the sudden intimate gesture, until he realized she was detaching something from his waistband.
T'Val stepped back, holding up a thin wafer, no more than three centimeters in diameter, no thicker than a few pieces of paper stacked together. A small red light glowed on one side of it. "You may deactivate it, Intendant."
The mirror Spock removed a small padd from his cloak, entered a code sequence.
The light on the wafer changed from red to green.
"Contact explosive," T'Val said. She put the disk beneath her tunic. "I installed it when I used the tissue regenerator on your back."
"If you had refused us," Janeway added, "Intendant Spock would have triggered it, and the shaped explosion would have cut you in half."
"But that is in the past," the mirror Spock said. "For now, we are at your disposal."
Kirk looked at the three soldiers before him and was shaken by how completely he had misread them,
They're aliens, Kirk thought, trying to hide his own reaction to the knowledge of how close to death he had been. Not just to my world, but to my universe.
In that telling moment, Kirk realized that he was now involved in something that no longer made sense to handle on his own.
And, fortunately, even in the twenty-fourth century, he knew exactly to whom he could turn for help.
TWELVE
"Fascinating," Spock said.
"Indeed," the mirror Spock replied.
As the two Vulcans in the opulent hotel suite studied each other with intense curiosity, Kirk looked from one to the other, assessing their intriguing differences as much as their eerie similarities.
The Spock he had met at the beginning of his career, whom he had last seen a year ago on Vulcan, stood with shoulders straight and square beneath his jeweled ambassadorial robe. Kirk recalled having seen Spock's father, Sarek, wearing almost exactly the same formal dress.
But the mirror Spock showed the stress and privations of a lifetime as a fugitive. He was stooped a few centimeters shorter, his shoulders rounded, his hair streaked with more white. And his voice was just a touch weaker, less assured, as if he had more cause to doubt his logic.
Through the window, beyond the open balcony, the lights of Montreal spread out like a galaxy of stars. The faint hum of antigrav cars and transports was carried on the soft evening breeze. Like every other city on this planet, this Earth, it was a city at peace. In the past, Kirk had grown impatient with the perfection of this world: its boringly scheduled weather, its annoyingly free-of-conflict world government; its allpervasive lack of excitement and challenge. But whether it was a sign of all his years of struggle, or a result of the single year he had just spent in a simple cabin on Chal, Kirk was surprised by how much he had enjoyed the week he had spent in this city,
waiting for Spock to arrive. Perhaps perfection was not as bad as he had once thought. At least, in moderation.
Both Spock and his mirror counterpart continued staring at each other, as if caught up in a mind-meld at a distance, if such a thing were possible. Certainly, a physical mind-meld was not in their plans. It had been one of the first things Kirk had suggested to them, a way to have all their questions answered before they even knew the questions existed. But both Spocks, for a reason they would not state, refused to consider it. Now, in the meantime, their silence fueled the mood of quiet expectation in the suite. Janeway and T'Val were on either side of their intendant. Montgomery Scott stood next to Kirk, not attempting to hide his surprise at seeing both Spocks, but not inclined to break the mood of their dramatic meeting.
Finally, though, Kirk had had enough. "I think this calls for a drink," he announced. Without waiting for anyone's reaction, he walked over to the antique wet bar at the side of the suite's sitting room. There was a collection of fine crystal bottles on top of the bar, their fiery reflections doubled by the mirrors behind them. And beneath the bar counter, hidden behind a panel of carved oak, was a replicator alcove, though Kirk hadn't bothered to access it since Captain Bateson had arranged the suite, courtesy of Starfleet.
Since Earth's twenty-fourth-century economy no longer operated with money—something that Kirk still didn't comprehend, no matter how many times Scott explained it to him—Kirk wasn't quite certain how, exactly, Starfleet was responsible for providing the suite when theoretically it was available to anyone on the planet. At least in Kirk's day, during the unsettling time when physical money was being phased out on Earth, a different system of exchange had replaced it. Even then, solid, easily transportable credits remained in circulation on the frontier, just as in this era a bewildering variety of currency was still in constant use beyond the Federation's borders. But however Bateson had managed it, Kirk was grateful for his kindness. After his lunar escapade, the large antigrav mattress in his bedroom had been a blessing for his back.
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