by L. A. Graf
Chapter Seven
“CHEKOV?” Kirk’s brain volunteered the identification so rapidly that even he barely understood what connection he’d heard between the chillingly calm voice and the shy boy Spock had picked out for the landing party earlier that morning. When he turned to look down the barrel of the rifle, though, what he found was a man at least fifteen years older than himself with only a physical resemblance to the boy whose map Kirk had buried at the edge of the forest just a few hours ago. The person behind the dark eyes was clearly someone else entirely.
“Commander Chekov ...” Antonio Giotto moved smoothly around into this strange, older Chekov’s view, his own gauss rifle primed and humming. “Sir, [160] I’d suggest you put that gun down, or you’re not going to see any version of the future.”
The look Chekov angled at Kirk’s security chief suggested he might almost enjoy seeing Giotto try to make good on that threat, but he didn’t resist when the third member of their party stepped forward and pushed the muzzle of his rifle to one side.
“You’ll have to forgive my first officer, Captain. We’ve been dodging Grexxen natives for the last couple of hours, and it’s made us all a little jumpy.”
Kirk thought that he ought to be more startled to find an older Sulu in the company of this older Chekov, but all the other strangeness he’d encountered since leaving Psi 2000 was beginning to make him numb to new surprises. Instead, his attention had locked on the young boy at the very back of their group. Better rested than Kirk was himself, and sealed into a dark gold cave suit not unlike the one Kirk had ditched upon first arriving on Grex. In so many ways, this was the face he still saw in the mirror. It was the face he would see even if he lived to be a hundred years old.
Apparently realizing that they were both staring, the boy tossed off what he no doubt thought was a nonchalant wave. Kirk lifted his own hand in reply.
“Captain Forester?” George Kirk’s loud whisper cut across these bizarre introductions. “Captain, is everything all right up there?”
“Forester?” Sulu asked, eyebrows raised. But it was a practical question, not condescending.
Climbing to his feet, Kirk gestured toward the boy [161] they were all obviously protecting. “It didn’t seem wise to try and explain who I am.” While Sulu nodded his understanding, Kirk leaned over the hole he’d made in the floor and called down quietly, “Everything’s fine, Commander. It’s just a few of my men.” He couldn’t help stealing another look back at the boy, and found himself still under his younger self’s scrutiny. “And they do have your son.” As often tonight as he’d spoken with George Kirk about his son, it hadn’t truly felt weird until this moment, when there was actually a physical boy to be both the object of Kirk’s search and Kirk himself.
George’s voice was sharp with worry and relief. “Jimmy?”
“I’m fine, Dad.” The boy drew up alongside Kirk, studiously not making contact with the captain even though he leaned over the same hole to wave down at his father. “These guys took real good care of me.”
Shadows drifted past on the fringe of Kirk’s sight, blurred and distant through the overlapping panels of glass until they seemed almost like firelit ghosts in the darkness. Vragax on the quad outside, either wandering from place to place or patrolling the edges of the open area they’d adopted as their camp. The immediacy of danger burned away whatever strangeness Kirk still felt at meeting himself and these temporally altered versions of his crew. “Let’s move this downstairs before we find ourselves with company.”
The boy swung himself down through the hole too quickly for anyone to insist on helping him, followed [162] almost immediately by Chekov and finally Sulu. Kirk listened for the neat thump and slide of each of them using the angled flower cart to catch their weight and guide them to the ground. Outside, Vragax singing swelled giddily in the distance, then receded.
“Mr. Giotto ...” Kirk held out his hand to take Giotto’s rifle so the chief could climb down.
The security man only shook his head and took a modest step backward, the rifle angled across his chest. “Sorry, sir. You first.”
It was so much the answer Kirk would have expected that he had to smile. “Apparently, you, at least, are my Mr. Giotto.”
“Yessir.”
“I’m sure you’ve got one hell of a report for me.”
“Oh, yessir.”
By the time he and Giotto had joined the others down below, a cloud of light warmer and stronger than from George’s antique tricorder screen pooled around the little group. Kirk recognized the smell of acetylene gas even before he saw the carbide lamps in Sulu’s and Chekov’s hands, or heard Giotto rasp the wheel on his own lamp. Wherever they’d come from, however they’d gotten here, their cave suits and lamps made it clear that they’d passed through the same caverns on Tlaoli Kirk had. The Tlaoli power drain explained their lack of Starfleet-issue equipment, although not how they’d managed to follow him here, or how they planned to get everyone back. At least the lamps would come in handy [163] in the equally treacherous darkness of Sogo city tonight.
On the other side of the flower cart, a step away from being swallowed by the dark, George Kirk had his son by the arm as though determined to never let the boy out of his grasp again. Kirk couldn’t make out the words, but he didn’t really have to—even nineteen years later, the memory of that lecture made his face burn with the same angry embarrassment he could see on the boy’s face now. No matter what was said in the future, this would be at the heart of every argument between them for the next nineteen years.
“Commander.”
His father jerked around at Kirk’s summons, his own face stiff with embarrassment even though the darkness hid any evidence of a blush. As though noticing everyone else for the first time, he let go of his son and straightened guiltily.
Kirk didn’t get as much satisfaction from his father’s discomfort as his fourteen-year-old self would have expected. “We don’t have time for that right now. The boy knows he made a mistake.” He pinned the boy with his most severe command stare. “Don’t you, Mr. Kirk?”
Not yet capable of that kind of steel, the boy only nodded slowly. “Uh ... Yes, sir.”
“Good. Then let’s get on with business.” He waved everyone away from the hole in the ceiling, just to make sure no one above would suddenly catch sight of the glow from their carbides. When they were safely tucked among a clutter of tables and chairs [164] several meters away, Kirk turned to Giotto. “I’m assuming that when Mr. Spock sent you, he also sent an extraction plan.”
His chief of security nodded unhappily. “The plan was for me to maintain contact with ...” He glanced at Sulu and Chekov as though for assistance, then finished for himself, “... our base of operations. Once we located you, I was to return you to Mr. Spock while Mr. Chekov and Mr. Sulu escorted your ... Commander Kirk and his son to safety.”
Implying that the older men wouldn’t be coming back with them. At least not right away. When Kirk looked a silent query toward Sulu, the other man responded without elaborating on that aspect of Giotto’s summary. “Unfortunately, we seem to have experienced an equipment malfunction. We lost contact with Mr. Spock almost immediately.”
And presumably a simple communicator wouldn’t be enough to solve that complication. “So I take it Mr. Spock ... isn’t here?” He couldn’t think of a better way to phrase what he wanted to know without saying too much in front of George Kirk.
Sulu’s answer was studiously literal. “Mr. Spock is where you left him.”
Which meant Spock was when Kirk had left him, and not anywhere Kirk could get to by force of will. Sighing, he gave a curt nod. “Well, he managed to find me once before. We’ll have to trust he can do it again. In the meantime, we’ve got to get these two to safety.” He turned to George Kirk and his son. “The [165] Eliza Mae won’t be arriving for another sixteen hours. Is there anywhere on the planet the Vragax aren’t likely to visit before then?”
George frowned th
oughtfully even as he shook his head. “I just planned on holing up in one of the more defensible rooms at the embassy,” he admitted. “I was hoping Eliza Mae would get here early.”
“She won’t,” Kirk and Giotto answered in a single voice.
Their certainty seemed to take George by surprise. “You guys aren’t actually the embassy replacement team, are you?” The question had obviously been building in him for a while.
Kirk rubbed at his eyes, not looking forward to constructing a new webwork of lies. “No, we’re not.”
“Then who are you?”
“Special Forces,” Chekov said without blinking. He barely looked up from topping off the load in his gauss rifle. “We’re here on special assignment. We can’t give you the details.”
George Kirk nodded slowly, looking back toward Kirk as though this explanation cleared up a lot. “I noticed your uniform was a little different, and I wondered. You could have told me, sir.”
“You’re right. I should have trusted you.” Although it felt strange to be apologizing for a lack of trust just for the sake of strengthening a further lie.
Before George could say anything more, a youthful voice from the center of their group asked modestly, “What about the wind farm?”
[166] It took Kirk a moment to connect the boy’s suggestion with Chekov’s Special Forces lie, then his mind darted back to their original conversation, and he smiled. This is why it’s good to have a kid around. He understood the blank looks on George’s and Giotto’s faces better than they did themselves. Fourteen months on the planet, and none of the adults had bothered to explore beyond the sectors assigned to them by Starfleet. In less than three months, Kirk and his brother Sam had hiked the woods beyond Sogo city so many times they could actually recognize and find individual trees. Only Kirk had been daring enough to climb the long ridge a few kilometers outside town, just to track down the source of a deep, powerful droning he and Sam had noticed a few days before. But he still remembered standing amid a forest of tall white windmills with his hands over his ears and his teeth singing from the bone-rattling hum.
“That’s good,” Kirk said, nodding approval at the boy. “Even if the Vragax decide to do something about the electrical situation in the city, they aren’t going to do it before tomorrow, and the noise alone will keep anyone from using it as a campsite until then.” He tried to picture the route up the hill through the trees, and realized it had been overwritten through time by that final image of the windmills against the sky. “Do you remember how to get there?” he asked his younger self.
The boy nodded. “Sure.” Kneeling, he plucked a handful of small white flowers from a planting [167] nearby. “The embassy’s here.” He placed one coin-sized blossom by his right knee. “If we’re in under the Kaefen Rae courtyards, we’re here.” A neat little square of beheaded stems, a little ahead of him and toward his left. “That means the wind farm is this way—” He leaned far forward to tap the ground beyond both props. “—maybe an hour’s walk through the trees.”
“Northeast,” George announced, studying the schematic.
“Will these underground passages take us that far?” Sulu asked.
That would be too easy. “I don’t think they’re that extensive.” Kirk looked a question at the boy he knew had memorized the city’s layout more recently than he had, and the boy shook his head with a rueful scowl. “But it will get us out from under the courtyard and away from the heavy concentration of Vragax,” the captain went on. “Commander Kirk and I came in from the south, but if we head northeast from here, we should be able to find—or make—another way out once we get there.”
They tucked George and the boy in the center of their group, with Kirk and Chekov leading, Sulu and Giotto bringing up the rear. It wasn’t the most efficient arrangement, considering their only compass was the elder Kirk’s tricorder, but even George didn’t complain. He wanted to keep his son safe, and he was willing to sacrifice even his valued practicality to guarantee that result. Kirk wondered if he realized [168] how much everyone else here was willing to sacrifice for the very same reason.
As they wound their way through the underground marketplace, individual shops, sculptures, and kiosks unfolded in the pale glow of their carbides like shells lifted out of the sand by a gently rising wave. Kirk watched his reflection ripple past in windows glazed against nonexistent weather, and he thought about the meticulously detailed villages he’d visited in caves back on Earth. What was the humanoid fascination with re-creating the surface world underground? He’d thought it a quaint relic from Earth’s nineteenth century until he’d visited Grex as a boy, although he hadn’t bothered to try and analyze it then. Now he wondered if it was a way to separate from the uncontrollable aspects of the world above, or just an attempt to make the underground world not seem so alien and frightening.
Kirk had a feeling he wasn’t going to feel safe underground again for a very long time.
He stole a glance at the man pacing silently next to him, and thought about a very similar younger man who had been walking with him when this all began.
“Ensign Chekov was with me when I was ... displaced.” He tried not to stare too frankly at his companion. “I take it he was sent somewhere else, too?”
The question seemed to take Chekov by surprise. “I wouldn’t know about that,” he answered gruffly. A discomfited frown crossed his face, and he seemed to struggle with himself for a moment before finally adding, “But he was fine when we left. He’s with Mr. [169] Spock and the others.” He looked at Kirk with an interest that was more clinical than curious. “You’ve been gone from them for more than two days. In my reality, you never existed at all.”
“Because my younger self was ... removed.”
“Apparently.” Chekov turned his attention forward again. “You mean a great deal to those people. They’re risking everything to make sure you’re reinstalled in their timeline, just like before.” He made no effort to hide the bitterness in his tone. “I hope to hell you’re worth it.”
A sliver of light, as thin as a hair but blindingly bright, slashed down the edge of Kirk’s vision like lightning. He heard George take a sharp breath behind him, but was already bolting aside and waving at the others to follow suit. “Kill the lights! Take cover!”
Whether it was the hours on Grex already spent dodging the enemy or experience from past battles Kirk could only imagine, Chekov and Sulu had responded as quickly and instinctively as Kirk. Carbides went out even as they darted for cover on either side of the cobbled path, and Kirk saw George and his son disappear inside a kiosk full of colored scarves just before the tricorder’s face snapped shut and killed its own light.
The darkness didn’t last. Light flooded the path they’d just abandoned, spilling from a broad door that hadn’t existed even a moment before. Where the wall had split between two empty shops, four huge figures lumbered out into the market with a trio of [170] Vragax trailing solicitously at their heels. Kirk would have recognized the Orions even if he hadn’t heard the roar of their voices or seen the flash and clash of their golden ear- and nose-rings. Orion males carried a smell about them as distinctive as their jade-colored skin and dreadlocked beards—the smell of their sulfur-rich homeworld, and too many months crowded into pirate vessels overloaded with spices and ores. Even if they had intended to pass through the marketplace with any kind of stealth, they would have been hard-pressed to reach the surface unnoticed.
By the time the Orions had rounded the bend and their voices had faded into the subterranean distance, the door from which they’d emerged had sealed itself shut as though never having been there at all. Even so, Kirk waited a full five minutes for the smell of their passage to fade before thumping Chekov on the shoulder as a signal to relight his carbide.
“I thought the Orions had been gone from Grex for more than a year.” Kirk stared down the path after them, his nerves still insisting they were dangerously close for all that his nose and ears told him otherwise
.
Giotto stood from behind a raised garden bed. “So did I.”
“And I could have sworn we’d found all the stashes where the Orions hid their pirated contraband.” George swung his tricorder back and forth over the now nonexistent door, playing impatiently with the sensitivity controls. “This one must be shielded seven [171] ways from Sunday if even our ship’s sensors didn’t pick it up.”
“Maybe it’s not a full-fledged stash,” Kirk said. “Maybe it’s just the equivalent of an Orion safe house.”
George shook his head and turned the tricorder around so Kirk could see its face. “That’s no safe house, sir. I may not be picking up anything now that this door is sealed, but the tricorder got a real clear warp core reading for as long as it was open.” He hooked a thumb back over his shoulder, his expression tense with excitement. “Captain Forester, there’s a spaceship inside that hole.”
This was not the first time Uhura had been left in command of the Enterprise. As the chief communications officer, she stood fourth in line behind Spock and Mr. Scott as a ranking line officer, and she’d often taken the conn when the senior officers were summoned to sector meetings or other planetary duties. Usually, those were times when the Enterprise was stationed in orbit around some stable civilian planet or Federation starbase, not on a desperate deep-space mission with a hostile alien race nearby. But Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott had spent the past two days almost continuously on his feet, first overseeing the repairs to the ship’s warp engines, then taking Spock’s place on the bridge while the Vulcan joined the planetary team in the search for Captain Kirk. By the time they’d managed to deactivate the Shechenag defense network and send a third [172] expedition to Tlaoli to return young Kirk to his proper time, the tall Scotsman was literally swaying with exhaustion. Dr. McCoy, in one of the periodic visits he tended to make to the bridge during times of crisis, had declared the chief engineer no longer fit for duty and hauled him away for some much-needed sleep. Scott had agreed to go, with one adamant provision.
