by Gene DeWeese
Eight
FOR PICARD, the shuddering and kaleidoscopic roller-coaster ride seemed to go on forever, threatening to tear the Enterprise apart and scatter its fragments across centuries of time.
But all he could see in his mind’s eye were the Borg cubes that had appeared—had seemed to appear, he told himself again and again—in the universe he had just been catapulted out of. Even though Scott had launched himself into the past only seconds before the Enterprise had followed, something Scott had done at the far end of his arc into the past had already disrupted the timestream, bringing the Borg—
Suddenly, the bone-jarring, eye-searing ride was over.
Like a plane emerging from the fury of a hurricane into the silent stillness of the storm’s eye, the Enterprise reentered the space-time continuum. Behind them, Arhennius was a rapidly shrinking ball of nuclear fire. Ahead was only a familiar and unremarkable star field.
“All stop,” Picard snapped. The image on the viewscreen shimmered briefly as the Enterprise dropped out of warp.
“Where—” Picard began but broke off. “When are we, Mr. Data?”
“The computer’s preliminary survey of the coordinates of nearby stars indicates we are in the latter half of the twenty-third century.”
“And Captain Scott’s ship?”
“Sensors indicate no ships within the Arhennius system, Captain.”
Picard winced inwardly at the words, even though they were far from unexpected. If anything, they confirmed what he—what they all had been thinking as the Enterprise dove into the Arhennius corona: Slingshotting through time on the fly is not an exact science. Under these conditions, there was simply no way of determining the precise trajectory either Captain Scott or the Enterprise took. There was therefore no way of knowing precisely when either vessel had re-entered normal space-time with respect to the other.
“Can you at least estimate how far apart our arrival times might be, Mr. Data?”
“Not with any certainty, Captain,” Data said as he consulted his instruments again. “Ensign Raeger appears to have come as close to duplicating Captain Scott’s trajectory as is humanly possible. There was no way, however, to compensate for the Enterprise’s greater mass. I can only say that it is unlikely that our arrival was more than a few months before or after Captain Scott’s.”
“So he may not have arrived yet?”
“That is correct, Captain.”
A flicker of hope brushed at his mind. “Check for warp trails, Mr. Data. If he is already here, he certainly would have left a warp trail, no matter where he went.”
“He would.” Data scanned a new set of readouts. “However, the only warp trail within the Arhennius system is that of the Enterprise itself.”
Picard felt relief wash over him. “So he hasn’t arrived yet. Perhaps we can lie low and wait for him, then stop him from doing whatever he was planning to do. And hope that no one from this era notices us.”
He was silent a moment, looking at the deceptively familiar star field on the viewscreen. “Mr. Worf, maintain complete radio silence, but scan the subspace spectrum for any time-coded traffic.”
“I have been scanning since we first arrived,” the Klingon said, “but I have found no subspace traffic.”
“Subspace frequencies in use in the twenty-third century—”
“I have already compensated for all known differences, Captain,” Worf said, a touch of reproach in his I-know-my-job tone. “There is no subspace traffic on any of the frequencies used by members of the Federation or by either Klingons or Romulans during the second half of the twenty-third century.”
The relief Picard had experienced moments before turned to a chill, his eyes drawn again to the viewscreen. “Mr. Data, how reliable is the computer’s estimate of the current time? Could it be off by centuries rather than decades? Could we have gone back to a time before subspace radio was used in this quadrant?”
“It is highly unlikely, Captain, but I will know for certain in a moment,” Data said, consulting a new set of readings that had just appeared on his control panel. “The computer has just completed a luminosity scan of the fifty nearest variable stars, including Sol, and is comparing these values with the values that Starfleet and other organizations have recorded continuously since before the founding of the Federation. That will narrow it down to a period of a few months, and then—”
Data broke off as another set of readings appeared. “In terms of Old Earth chronology,” he continued after a moment’s study, “the year is 2293. Now that we know the year, the computer can scan remote galaxies for known supernovas whose light would have reached the Arhennius system during that year. Because of their distance and faintness, this will require more time, but…”
Data continued to explain, but Picard was no longer listening. Hearing the year—2293—had been enough.
It was not the year Captain Scott had signed onto the Jenolen.
It was a year earlier, the year the Enterprise-B had been launched.
The year that James T. Kirk, Scott’s captain and friend, had died saving that other Enterprise.
For a moment Picard resisted the inevitable conclusion, but as his mind darted back to the conversations he had had with Scott in the days after his rescue from the Jenolen, all doubt vanished. The man’s nostalgia for the first Enterprise had been huge, but his loyalty to its captain had been monumental.
Monumental and, no matter how noble, ultimately and obviously misguided.
There was no question in Picard’s mind as to where and when Scott had intended to go.
And what he had intended to do.
But that knowledge, Picard told himself grimly, did nothing to resolve the one question that really mattered: Where and when had Scott actually gone?
And what had he done that could have changed history so drastically that the Federation no longer existed—or at least was not using subspace radio—in 2293 and had been replaced by the Borg by 2370?
Scotty cursed silently as he listened once again to the time-coded subspace messages he had finally been able to tap into with the Goddard’s comm system. Instead of several weeks, he had only days before the destruction of the Lakul and the near destruction of the Enterprise-B!
In his rush to slip away from Picard’s Enterprise and then to keep from being overtaken by it, he must have miscalculated his trajectory. Or the actual mass of Arhennius or of the Bounty 2 itself was a minuscule fraction different from the values he had entered. Or any of a hundred other possibilities. Even the formulae themselves, as recorded in Spock’s log months of subjective time after the event itself, might have contained minute errors. Spock was, after all, half human.
He would probably never know which number or calculation had tripped him up, and in fact it didn’t matter. It was done. He was where he was, when he was, and there was still a chance he could pull it off.
If the Bounty 2 held up.
Against all odds, it had already survived the warp eight race to Arhennius and the bone-jarring, hull-plate-rattling passage through time, so there was no reason—other than a wee dose of common sense—to think that it would not survive the next five days. He could—and almost certainly would—spend his every waking hour monitoring the drive, nursing it along, adjusting each and every variable before any had a chance to drift even a micron off their optimum values.
And at least Picard had not followed him—or hadn’t been able to. Either way, Scotty was grateful for small favors. He would need all he could get, not to mention some large ones as well.
Entering the coordinates at which, in little more than five days, the Lakul and the Robert Fox would be—had been?—destroyed, he murmured a prayer to whatever gods of the Highlands watched over errant engineers and engaged the warp drive.
As Picard had expected, Data’s supernova survey revealed they were within two weeks—before or after—of the moment Kirk had died saving the Enterprise-B.
Briefly, he told Guinan and the bridge crew what
he was virtually certain Scott had been attempting to do. Only Riker looked doubtful.
“Could he be that irresponsible? The man was a Starfleet officer for nearly half a century.”
Picard could only shrug. “He was also three-quarters of a century out of his own time. His friends and family were almost certainly all dead, and everything he knew about engineering was seventy-five years obsolete. And it’s not as if he hadn’t done it before. Don’t forget he was along when Kirk brought those two whales from the twentieth century.”
“And saved Earth,” Riker said, frowning. “You’re saying this time he was planning to risk Earth, risk upsetting the entire timestream just to save one person?”
“There’s no point in arguing the wisdom of his action, Number One. Nor of ours when we followed him. We can’t take either of them back. What we can do—all we can do for now—is try to find out where and when he actually went and what he did that resulted in the timestream we find ourselves in. And then work from there.”
Picard paused, looking around the bridge, his eyes lingering momentarily on Guinan, who, in a most uncharacteristic act, lowered her eyes. “To that end,” he went on, “I’m open to any and all ideas. For a start, can we take it as a given that Mr. Scott overshot his intended destination and went further into the past than he intended?”
Riker nodded. “Based on what Mr. Worf’s not hearing in subspace, I’d say we have to. Either that or he purposely made a second jump. Nothing he could have done here and now—or even a few weeks ago—could silence every starfaring race in this sector.”
Picard nodded. “Mr. Data, is it possible for Mr. Scott to have overshot by not just years but decades? Even centuries?”
“It would be highly unlikely, Captain, but not impossible if something catastrophic occurred during the jump itself.”
“Just how catastrophic?” Picard asked impatiently when Data paused for a moment.
“For example,” Data continued, “anything that could cause his ship to unexpectedly gain a great deal of velocity or lose a great deal of mass. A change in either of those parameters would drastically alter his trajectory and—”
“And essentially destroy the ship and kill Mr. Scott. Is there anything survivable that could have thrown him that far off target?”
“Nothing that I have been able to hypothesize, Captain. However, neither Mr. Scott nor the ship would have to survive in order for the timestream to be affected. If something happened during the jump, whatever was left of the ship would complete the jump. And whatever was happening to the ship would continue happening wherever and whenever it emerged.”
Picard’s stomach knotted. “You’re saying that if, say, a warp core breach or an anti-matter containment field breakdown was somehow initiated during the maneuver, the explosions could happen after it was completed? When it emerged into normal space?”
“Given the right timing, Captain, that is entirely possible.”
Picard was silent for a long moment, his eyes on the familiar starfield on the viewscreen. Finally he looked back at Data.
“At least it gives us a place to start,” he said. “Mr. Data, access all records of the Arhennius system.”
As he waited for the results, he pulled in a deep breath and reached for the control that could send his voice to every corner of the Enterprise. He had a responsibility—a duty—to fulfill, and he had already put it off too long. Beyond the bridge, there were nearly a thousand crew members who still thought they were in a universe and a time that made sense.
Steeling himself, he lightly touched the control. “This is the captain,” he said quickly, not giving himself time to have second thoughts, and then went on to explain as succinctly as possible what had happened and where he had, without their knowledge or consent, taken them.
There were no interruptions, only a pall-like silence as his voice echoed throughout the ship. Gradually, his face regained the color it had lost when the truth of their situation had first fully penetrated his consciousness.
When he finished, the silence was total, but after a few seconds voices began to emerge from the intra-ship comm system. No protests, no recriminations, only words of acceptance if not support. They had faced death with him any number of times, often in corners of the universe so remote they might as well have been in another time, and few had ever complained. They had known what they were signing up for when they had entered the Academy and even more so when they had signed on to the latest starship to carry the notorious Enterprise name. They weren’t about to desert either Starfleet or their captain now.
Even so, Picard couldn’t help but wonder if he himself had overreached.
And if that other captain of the Enterprise, who was unknowingly the cause of the current disastrous state of affairs, would be appalled at what he had “inspired” Captain Scott to do.
Or gratified.
Scotty’s plan had been simplicity itself.
He would find the Enterprise-B, uncloak just long enough to transport the captain into the Bounty 2, and then return with him to the “present” via a second slingshot trajectory, already calculated. In the chaos surrounding the energy ribbon as it destroyed both the Lakul and the Robert Fox and almost destroyed the Enterprise-B, he would never be noticed during the brief time he was uncloaked. And during the journey itself, the improvements he had made to the Bounty 2’s cloaking mechanism would insure that no twenty-third-century sensors would get so much as a whiff of him.
And nothing would change.
That was the beauty of it, and the only reason he had gone ahead with it. As far as the universe of 2293 was concerned, Kirk would still have died while saving the Enterprise. The fact that, instead, he would be taken to 2370, could not possibly have any effect on the intervening decades.
That had been the plan, simple and straightforward.
Until, despite his round-the-clock monitoring of every aspect of the Bounty 2’s drive systems, Scotty found himself with time to simply think—and worry—about what could go wrong.
Grudgingly, he began to realize that, under the spell of an enthusiasm that had bordered on obsession, he had ignored—or at least rationalized away—many of the dangers that a mission through time entailed. Particularly a mission to a time in which the Khitomer Accords were only a few months old, a time when many in both the Federation and the Klingon Empire were still desperate for the Accords to fail.
A time when Admiral Cartwright, whose traitorous actions had come within a whisker of sparking a new war, was still seen by some as a hero.
Reports of even a glimpse of a Klingon bird-of-prey un-cloaking within a parsec of Earth—reports that would almost certainly be confirmed when the Enterprise-B’s sensor records were later examined—would be just what the Accord’s diehard enemies wanted.
Anything could happen, including the war that Cartwright and his co-conspirators on both sides of the Klingon border had failed to ignite. Millions of lives would be lost.
That kind of chance, he belatedly realized, he simply could not take.
But neither could he bring himself to abandon Jim Kirk less than two days from his death.
In the end, after hours of agonizing, when it became clear he would reach his destination with more than an hour to spare, he swallowed hard and decided on a compromise.
He left the cloaked Bounty 2 in the redundant concealment of a convenient pocket nebula, confirmed one last time that the Goddard’s jiggered sensors could indeed locate the cloaked ship, and continued the last few hours in the shuttlecraft. The Goddard, incapable of being cloaked, was more likely to be spotted than the Bounty 2, but with everything else that would be going on, it was still unlikely. And even if it were noticed, little attention would be paid to it since, despite its advanced technology, it was obviously a Federation craft, not Klingon. Even if the Enterprise sensor records were later examined, its presence would be a puzzle, not a provocation.
It would be filed away with other puzzles, not used by zealots as a
pretext to break the Accords and start a new war with the Klingons. Time would heal itself of any minor wounds incurred in 2293, and the universe of 2370 would remain the universe of 2370.
The only difference would be that Jim Kirk would be there.
Alive.
Nine
THE HISTORY of the original timeline’s Arhennius system, as sketchily outlined in the Enterprise computer records, provided no clues. Federation ships had scanned it at a distance for life signs and for habitable worlds, but all they found were two gas giants about the size of Saturn and two airless balls of rock a little smaller than Venus. There was no record of any ship—Federation or Romulan or Klingon—ever having entered the system itself. Therefore, Scott’s bird-of-prey could have emerged at virtually any moment in the past two hundred years and undergone the most violent destruction possible, and it would have produced nothing more than a short-lived flare that wouldn’t have been visible even to the most powerful telescopes in neighboring systems. The only time it would have even been noticed was during the few hours the Arhennius system was being scanned by long range sensors from almost a parsec away.
In any event, the Enterprise sensors had as yet found no indication that any such explosion had ever taken place in the Arhennius system, not in the last hundred years, not in the last million, although there was evidence of a half dozen low-yield photon torpedoes approximately a century ago.
“So,” Picard said as the negative results of the scans continued to stream across the bottom of the viewscreen, “if he didn’t accidentally overshoot catastrophically, what did he do?”
“There is one possibility, Captain,” Riker volunteered. “Perhaps instead of overshooting, he undershot and had to make a second jump, and that’s when he overshot, not because of something catastrophic but because of a mistake. Maybe his bird-of-prey was spotted by a Federation ship and he had to get out of there fast. Maybe he didn’t have time to make all the calculations, maybe he missed the trajectory he was aiming for. He could’ve ended up anywhere—anywhen—alive and well. And if that’s what happened, Captain, if he undershot, then he hasn’t arrived yet. Perhaps we could do what you suggested earlier—just wait here for him to show up and beam him out before he has a chance to make a second jump.”