by L. A. Graf
The older version of Sulu nodded. “So our first priority is to take back control of the Janus Gate in a way that won’t put us in direct conflict with its guardians. How do you plan to do that?”
“I have a strategy which I believe will allow us to disable a large enough sector of their defensive shield to get a shuttle through to the planet,” Spock said. “If we wait until the Shechenag are occupied with installing the section of network opposite the Janus Gate’s location—”
“But they left a guard down in the caverns,” the older Chekov said brusquely. “Won’t they alert the mother ship when they see us?”
Spock lifted an austere eyebrow at the interruption. “If they see us.”
“How could they not?” That puzzled question came from the younger version of Sulu, who, like the older Chekov, had entered the caverns only through the Janus Gate, and exited only through the main entrance above the alien time transporter. Uhura opened her mouth to answer him, but to her surprise the younger version of Chekov spoke before she could.
“There’s a back entrance to the cave system,” he said quietly. “One so small and hard to get through that the Shechenag may not even know it’s there.”
Geologist Zap Sanner reached over to give the ensign an approving thump on the shoulder. “Finally [107] figured out why they needed us on this mission, huh? I hope you still remember the path back from the healing chamber to the Janus Gate. The big meltdown that happened when we brought Lieutenant Sulu back from Basaraba probably took the last of my cave reflectors off the walls.”
“It did?” The young Russian looked suddenly uncertain, his gaze shifting from Sulu to Uhura to Spock. “But—but it wasn’t me who mapped that part of the caves,” he blurted at last. “It was the Chekov who went into the Janus Gate and replaced me at the waterfall—”
His older self gave him an incredulous look across the table and Chekov fell silent, an even darker and more mortified blush staining his face. Fortunately, Spock did not appear to notice the ensign’s embarrassment.
“I have programmed Lieutenant Jaeger’s reconstructed maps into my shielded tricorder,” the Vulcan said calmly. “Your knowledge of the caverns will only be required to guide us past the sections Mr. Jaeger and Mr. Sanner could not reconstruct.”
Zap Sanner snorted beneath his breath. “That means we’re there to carry the equipment again,” he muttered to Chekov in a not-very-discreet aside.
“Indeed,” said Spock. “It seems only logical to assign that function to crewmen who have the most experience with Tlaoli’s caverns. And with the Janus Gate itself,” he added, his intelligent glance sweeping back toward Uhura.
She nodded her understanding of that. “What [108] about the Janus device itself, Mr. Spock? Won’t the Shechenag still be guarding it, even if they don’t see us coming through the back entrance of the cave?”
“That would be a logical assumption,” Spock agreed. “However, I did not observe any magnetic shielding on the robotic devices the Shechenag previously used to threaten us. If our plan to deactivate the defensive shield succeeds, much of the power supply will already have been drained from those devices. We should be able to engage the remaining Shechenag in hand-to-hand combat.”
“Why not just blast the whole damned cave with phaser fire from the ship, the way we did before?” McCoy demanded. “That would take all the guards out, and charge the gate up at the same time.”
Spock’s eyebrows lifted in an expression which, in a human, Uhura might almost have called pained. “You may not have been attending to the part of our discussion, Doctor, in which we mentioned our intentions to approach the planet undetected by the Shechenag,” he said with crushing formality. “I do not believe blasting our phasers down through their defensive network will accomplish that goal.”
McCoy grunted acknowledgment of that. “All right, let’s say we get a shuttle down to the planet and manage to take out the Shechenag guards. What do we do then?”
Spock’s eyebrows arched a little farther. “Doctor, I believe you are suffering from the same lack of sleep and nutrition that you were so concerned about in the [109] rest of us. Surely you recall our discussion about using the Janus Gate to send our version of Captain Kirk back to his proper place and time—”
“Of course I recall it,” McCoy countered, somewhat irritably. “You’re the one who’s forgetting something here, Spock. Didn’t we establish with Captain Sulu that the Janus Gate won’t exchange a weaker version of someone for a healthier version? Wouldn’t that keep us from putting young Kirk into the machine and sending him anywhere unless the adult version of him gets hurt or even killed back in the past?”
“I did not forget that, Doctor,” Spock said tartly. “Upon our return to the ship, I scanned the Enterprise crew database to determine if anyone else among the crew was stationed on Grex during the brief Starfleet mission there. Out of a crew of three hundred and twenty-six, I calculated that the probability of finding such a crewman was approximately point one five eight, more than high enough—”
“Don’t tell me what the odds were, Spock,” McCoy interrupted. “Just tell me if you found somebody!”
Security Chief Giotto cleared his throat, a little gruffly. “He found somebody,” the older man said. “I served in the embassy protection force on Grex for fourteen months, right up until the natives went on a rampage and threw us off the planet. I was on the very last transport out, but I don’t remember much about the evacuation. I got hit in the face by a projectile weapon a few hours before we left, and I didn’t wake up until we were back at Starbase Five.”
[110] “A life-threatening experience which makes Chief Giotto an ideal candidate for the Janus Gate’s viewing mode,” Spock said in satisfaction. “If we utilize Lieutenant Commander Giotto to create a connection back to Grex, in the same manner in which we used Lieutenant Uhura to create a connection forward to Basaraba, we can engage the Janus Gate’s associative transport and return our young James Kirk to his proper time, if not his proper place in it.”
“You’re going to throw that boy into the middle of a violent native uprising?” McCoy demanded. “How the hell do you expect him to survive that?”
“By providing him with protection.” Spock steepled his fingers meditatively. “It will be necessary to seek volunteers among the crew who would be willing to go back in time to protect young Kirk. However, since we know that the Shechenag will strenuously resist our attempts to use the Janus Gate again, we must presume that our ability to use the device will be limited. It may not be possible to send crewmen to Grex, then wait to make certain they safely deliver the boy to his father before we are driven away from the machine. If it becomes necessary to strand anyone in the past, we would create exactly the overlapping time disruptions about which the Shechenag warned us.”
“That’s easy enough to fix,” said the older version of Sulu. “Instead of Enterprise crewmen, you send me and Chekov back with this once-and-future captain of yours. Since we’re not going to exist at all [111] once you get your real captain back, it won’t hurt the timeline to leave us there.”
“That would be the logical solution to our dilemma,” Spock agreed calmly. “However, until your existences come to an end when our time bubble collapses, Captain Sulu and Commander Chekov, you remain sapient beings with the right of self-determination. Are you willing to volunteer for this mission?”
“Well, Pavel?” Captain Sulu glanced over his shoulder at his own first officer, his lips curving in an odd, bittersweet smile. “It’s a second chance at suicide. What do you say?”
There was no answering smile on his executive officer’s rigid face, but something hard and cold seemed to have melted from the older Russian’s voice, leaving a thin trickle of amusement behind it. “Sure. When do we leave?”
This is so wrong, Kirk thought as he jogged behind his father through the abandoned streets of Sogo. It wasn’t the untrafficked roads and half-burned buildings that made his stomach clench, but the
fact that he knew he had never seen them this way before—the fact that nothing he’d experienced tonight was like what he’d gone through before. History is different, and I don’t know by how much, or why.
Kirk’s memories of the night his family fled from the Grexxen civil war had faded very little over the years. He remembered all too clearly jumping out of the shuttle that would carry his mother and Sam into [112] orbit because of some misguided sense of heroism. He remembered narrowly escaping his father’s wrath by immediately reboarding another ship with John Maione and his team of peacekeepers. And he remembered that when the peacekeepers’ shuttle had been shot down by the Vragax, Kirk had fled back toward the embassy as fast as he could possibly run, only to be cut off and hunted down in an abandoned office building by a small group of marauding natives. In the past as Kirk remembered it, his father had stormed in and saved him mere moments before he was put to death, then he and George had met Mutawbe and the others back at the auxiliary landing pad where they had successfully escaped into orbit and were rescued by the Eliza Mae a mere handful of hours later.
But so many things were already different. Kirk as an adult had not been with his father—those Vragax hadn’t lived to leave the office building where they’d cornered their human prey. George Kirk was not left behind on Grex to fend for himself and possibly die.
“God, there’s not a native for blocks.” George frowned down at the clunky, shoulder-strung tricorder he had balanced against his stomach. Faint gray light from the tricorder’s tiny readout illuminated an irritable expression Kirk was beginning to suspect was his father’s default when uncertain or under stress.
For some reason, he’d never made that connection as a child. “What about a human?”
[113] George made a little sound of frustration. “I’ve got something that might be human life-signs this way—” He gestured into the darkness ahead of them and off to the right, then looked in the direction he’d just indicated as if to match what he saw against what the instrument was telling him. “—but it flutters in and out, so I’m not really sure.” He turned his fierce glower back down toward the tricorder, and Kirk realized with a strange nudge of affection that his father was embarrassed. “But I could be reading this wrong. I’ve only used one of these things a couple of times.”
The admission unfolded a realization for Kirk that he probably should have made sooner in his life. What his father meant wasn’t that tricorders were so new or exotic that he’d never been exposed to them—they were neither—but rather that they’d always been someone else’s province. George Kirk had never been one of the breathless command hopefuls who bounced here and there throughout Starfleet ships and installations, learning a little bit about everything on their way up the ranks. He had only ever been a security and weapons expert, and that was all he had wanted to be. The science officers handled the tricorders; George Kirk handled the phasers. When Kirk was a boy, he’d interpreted his father’s contentment with his position as a secret indication of cowardice, or at the very least a lack of ambition. He hadn’t realized then what it really meant to be a starship commander, or how important it was to have [114] dedicated men like George Kirk in the ranks to assist a commander in doing his job.
“I’m sure you’re reading it correctly.” Kirk looked around at the buildings and neat lawns surrounding them, already half-recognizing where they were. “It’s not like Sogo is crawling with humans anymore. And that’s back toward where the Kozhu women said they last saw ... your boy.” He nodded George down a cross street that cut more or less in the direction they needed to go. “If nothing else, that’s as good a place as any to start.”
By now, Kirk was fairly certain that no matter where they began their search, they weren’t going to find the fourteen-year-old James Kirk. In addition to all the other changes the adult Kirk could already identify in the timeline, his mind kept going back to the Kozhu woman’s description of the Vragax soldiers who fled the office building where Kirk remembered being rescued by his father nineteen years ago. In the past Kirk remembered, the Vragax didn’t live to leave that building; in the version of events he was living through now, they had not only left, they’d fled in terror, praying to their gods for protection. No fourteen-year-old human boy had put that kind of fear in them.
But seeing a human boy vanish into thin air right in front of them might have.
It was the only explanation Kirk could think of that made any kind of sense. Whatever had transported Captain James T. Kirk back to Grex from Tlaoli must have spirited his younger self away at the same time. [115] Which was why George Kirk hadn’t been able to find his son to rescue him, and why Arran Mutawbe and the others had left the planet without their boss on board. It was also why Kirk couldn’t let George out of his sight, not even for an instant.
The fourteen-year-old Kirk hadn’t died on Grex that night, and neither had his father. And if anything happened to George before the younger Kirk was returned, there would be no one on Grex to protect the boy, no one to guarantee he escaped off-planet. Kirk didn’t want to think about what that would mean for him personally when he finally got back to his own future.
Spock, you’d better be working fast.
George had only voiced a token argument when Kirk insisted upon staying with him to look for his son. Kirk wanted to stay relatively close to where he’d arrived—to maximize his chances of being in the right place at the right time when Spock finally managed to reverse whatever had thrown him here. And his father might be stubborn but he was very far from stupid. Two of them had a much better chance of surviving long enough to find the boy in the first place.
They’d departed the embassy with a tricorder, two communicators, and phasers with fresh power supplies. They’d left the gauss rifles on the landing pad, along with the dead leaves and the blowing ash from the smoldering embassy. Kirk had let his father take the tricorder to disguise the fact that he hadn’t a clue how to use the ancient thing. George Kirk’s only plan had been to use the tricorder to locate what had to be [116] the only remaining human life-sign on the planet other than their own, and then to keep his son safe and hidden until the Eliza Mae made communicator contact when she came into system. Mutawbe hadn’t known whether or not the Eliza Mae had a ship-to-surface transporter, and Kirk didn’t remember the subject having come up nineteen years ago. But even if the only thing they could manage was to send back down one of the evacuation craft after it had been emptied of its refugees, they should still be able to get George and his son off the planet. Assuming, of course, that George and his son and the good Captain Forester managed to stay alive that long.
“You never asked me why.”
Kirk shook off his reverie, glad that the darkness would hide the blush tightening his cheeks. I’m not going to be much help keeping us alive if I don’t keep my mind on the present ... or the past ... “I never had to ask. He’s your son. You can’t leave him behind.”
George shook his head impatiently, paused, then adjusted his course to cut through a breezeway between two low-slung cottages. “No, I don’t mean that.” He played with the controls on the tricorder, but Kirk sensed it was only to give himself an excuse not to lift his gaze. “I mean why I brought them here to begin with. Why I’d drag my family halfway across the galaxy to some primitive hellhole where the natives still kill each other because of what gods their ancestors worshiped.”
You’re right. I never asked. Not now, and certainly [117] not when he was a child. It wasn’t that Kirk hadn’t noticed that his family seemed to be the only one condemned to spend Terran summers on whatever ship or station or strange little outpost George Kirk had been sent to that year. Kirk had always envied all those other unseen children of his father’s colleagues, the kids who got to hang out and play baseball with their schoolmates during summer vacation—the kids who got a summer vacation, instead of leaving Earth’s beautiful spring in time to show up for what was invariably their destination’s midwinter. No matter how much his moth
er insisted it was a very small sacrifice they made for their father, all Kirk ever remembered was the excruciating boredom of three eternal months confined to the civilian areas of diplomatic posts that hadn’t been designed with teenage boys in mind.
Nineteen years and one unexplained time-jump later, he knew something as a starship captain that he hadn’t been able to see as a boy. There were no other families. The men who served with his father were barely more than boys themselves, still the sons of parents barely older than George, who wrote letters home to mothers instead of wives. At fourteen, anyone over the age of twenty had seemed impossibly mature and adult to Kirk. From the lofty age of thirty-three, he sometimes wondered what Starfleet was thinking when it sent such young boys out into the dangerous world.
“Don’t blame yourself. Command told you it was [118] safe. The Kozhu and Vragax were both involved in peace negotiations, there hadn’t been ethnic violence in Sogo since before the Orion occupation.” It was the same thing Kirk would have said to any crewman, but it unwound a knot of old anger he hadn’t consciously realized he’d been holding. “Besides, it was only for the summer.”
George stopped abruptly, jerking a sideways look at Kirk that drew his eyebrows together into a mistrustful glower. “How did you know I’d only brought them in for three months?”
Alarm clenched a cold fist in the pit of Kirk’s stomach, and he stared at his father without being sure how to respond. Of course Forester wouldn’t know something like that. He’d only just arrived on Grex, as far as George Kirk knew, and he shouldn’t have cared one way or the other how one of the security guards here had arranged his family’s vacation.
