by L. A. Graf
As Chekov lifted the rifle over the top of the barricade to fire a blind salvo down the hall, Kirk asked Sulu, “Can you see anything from where you are?”
The other captain leaned to put one eye to the small crack he’d managed to insinuate between the crates. “Six gunmen, all natives.” He waited through the next round of gunfire. “I don’t think they have energy weapons, just projectiles.”
That was one advantage. “Either unskilled workers or an advance guard,” Kirk guessed. He followed Chekov’s example and aimed a single phaser shot over the edge of the barricade on wide-dispersal stun. Native voices shouted in a mixture of anger and alarm, but Kirk heard the clatter of their retreat a few meters farther down the hall. “Now let’s hope we can [226] get that door open before one of them thinks to drag in an Orion pulse cannon.”
“If we’re here that long, we have more problems than just that door.” Chekov raised up just high enough to glance over the rim of their barricade, squeezed off a shot at whatever he saw, then dropped back down to floor level again. He turned a furious glare on Sulu. “Where is he?”
The other captain remained calmly attentive to his spy hole. “Give it a minute.”
“Why?” Chekov demanded. “They’re twenty years in the future, dammit! They could put him in the device six weeks after we left, and he should still arrive the moment the man went down!”
Kirk followed the angry gesture thrown in his direction, and realized with a jolt that the “man” Chekov referred to was Giotto. He tightened his hand protectively on the security chief’s shoulder. “Is this what you meant when you said Giotto was linked back to the device? That it would somehow replace him if he died?”
“No, that wasn’t our plan.” Sulu sat back from the barricade with a sigh, rubbing at his right wrist as though it pained him. “But that’s something like how the device works. As long as you’re healthy, it takes whatever version of you steps into the machine and uses that version to replace a damaged version of you from somewhere else in your timeline.”
“Which means the younger version of him we lifted out when we came here should have shown up by [227] now.” Chekov’s face was drawn with anxiety, and Kirk had a feeling there was more at stake in Giotto’s failure to appear than was obvious to him at the moment.
“We’re in!”
George’s shout rang out just ahead of the bay door’s loud exhalation, and the hatch rolled aside with a tremendous rambling that made their metal crate barricade shiver and spread at the seams. Kirk lunged forward to steady the segment closest to him, and saw two of the Vragax outside break from their own cover to flee down the corridor back the way they’d come. He had a feeling that the Orions and whatever heavy weapons they still had at their disposal wouldn’t be long in coming.
Shouldering up beside Chekov, Kirk slapped Sulu on the shoulder and motioned toward Giotto. “Get him inside the bay and loaded on board our transport. Chekov and I will cover you.”
The older captain nodded, but it was a boy’s voice that said, dismally, “There’s only one seat.”
Kirk twisted a look back over his shoulder, meeting his own eyes in the doorway even as a projectile burned past his ear so close that he heard the buzz of its passage. The boy was on his knees, as protected as possible, craning around the edge of the bulkhead with his eyes wide and hollow with despair. “It’s a personal escape craft.” Kirk knew he was trying to sound adult and brave, but he was too close to tears to be convincing. “There’s only one seat. My dad says I can fit under the panel while he flies, but—”
[228] “Go!” Kirk told him. Nothing else the boy had to say mattered.
“I’m not leaving you!”
This isn’t the shuttle! Kirk wanted to shout at him. I’m not Maione! But he knew the boy wouldn’t understand, not for another nineteen years.
Instead, it was Chekov who said, “Don’t worry about us. We have our own escape route.”
It occurred to Kirk that his young ensign was going to evolve into a rather accomplished liar.
“But I heard you,” the boy protested, his hands clenching and unclenching on the bloodied floor. “Mr. Giotto isn’t coming.”
Chekov cracked open his rifle to expel a jammed projectile from the barrel. “Mr. Giotto was Plan A.” He sounded much calmer than before, but his face was still grim and pale. “We still have Plan B.”
The boy said nothing for a moment, and Kirk heard his father call, “Jimmy! We have to go, son!” from somewhere farther back in the shuttle bay. Instead of answering that shout, the boy asked, very quietly, “You really have a Plan B? You’re not just lying to me.”
For the first time, Chekov turned to look at him, and the sincerity in his expression made Kirk both angry and glad. “I wouldn’t lie to you,” the older man said, taking advantage of the strange, earnest trust in the boy’s eyes in a way that made clear to Kirk he hadn’t been the one to earn it in the first place. “We have a Plan B. Now go with your father.”
The boy hesitated for another long, painful [229] moment. Then, just before Kirk would have broken from the others to drag his younger self into the bay, the boy backed away from the doorway and let it roll shut behind him with a boom like distant thunder. As though that final sound were some sort of signal only he could understand, Chekov turned stonily back to the barricade, and away from their last chance of escaping Grex alive.
Kirk watched him reassemble his rifle and switch it back to single rate-of-fire. “I don’t suppose we have something more than a good lie to fall back on.”
The shuttle’s launch roared through the corridor, toppling metal crates both across their barricade and around their Vragax attackers down the hall. “I didn’t lie,” Chekov said, charging the gauss rifle’s barrel until the whole gun began to hum. “We really do have a Plan B.” He looked up at Sulu, and Kirk saw the silent communication that passed between them even though he didn’t know the language.
But he recognized the shocked disbelief on the other captain’s face an instant before Chekov swung the rifle toward Sulu—and fired.
For a moment, Sulu thought the Vulcan was intending to use him as a support because he no longer had enough strength to walk back out to the Janus Gate by himself. But when Spock’s fingers tightened around his shoulder like a vise and steered him toward the blue-lit chamber with irresistible Vulcan strength, Sulu realized he was going to be used for [230] something more than just a crutch. A jolt of shock went through him when he realized Spock was guiding him toward the far side of the time transporter, where Giotto had stood—and then vanished—just a short while before.
“You don’t need to push me, Commander,” Sulu said. The words were prosaic enough, but he hoped they would convey his determination to carry out whatever obligation his duty as a Starfleet officer required. “I can see well enough to walk out on my own.”
The Vulcan science officer relaxed the intensity of his grip, but did not let go of Sulu’s shoulder. “You have never approached this part of the device, Lieutenant,” he replied calmly. “With the amount of power in the Janus Gate now, the protected area leading to it has undoubtedly narrowed.”
Sulu blinked and swung his head back and forth so he could use the more light-sensitive edges of his vision. “I see it.” Ribbons of intense blue fire twisted and burned on either side of the chamber, but a channel of clear air kept them from meeting each other. “I can get there from here, Commander.”
His voice must have carried his willingness clearly enough for even a Vulcan to comprehend. Spock removed his hand from Sulu’s shoulder. “I believe I will be able to send you directly to Captain Kirk on our first attempt, but if you see Basaraba instead, tell me immediately. And whatever happens, Mr. Sulu, do not release those supports.”
[231] Sulu followed his gaze to the oddly curved attachments projecting out from this side of the alien time transporter and felt his fingers curl involuntarily, as if to memorize the muscle motion he would need to keep himself linked to Tlaoli and
the present. “Aye, sir,” he said, and started down the evanescent path toward the roiling blue fireball that was the Janus Gate.
Despite his stiffness, Spock moved back around the edge of the chamber quickly enough that he was already in place by the time Sulu had summoned up the will to place his hands on the black metal supports. Runnels of liquid blue light already crawled along the arms that enclosed the gate’s subspace field generator, only a few centimeters away from his fingers. Sulu forced himself to stand still as those streaks of light spiraled toward him.
“I have set the machine for viewing mode,” Spock said calmly. Sulu nodded, trying not to think of what had happened the last time they had tried to use the Janus Gate to peer into the past. It didn’t seem as if the room was quite as bright now as it had been then, but there was no guarantee the Enterprise wouldn’t send another phaser shot or transporter beam down at any moment, adding more energy to the alien power storage system. “This should take you directly to—”
Sulu gasped, then nearly choked on the intense bite of cold air inside his unwary throat. There had been no warning, just an instant of disorientation and a sense of sudden jarring—then he was standing [232] somewhere completely different. An echoing space like a corridor or a shuttle bay, brightly lit by red-tinged photon lamps and echoing with the spang and whirr of projectile fire. Sulu glanced around, finding himself just barely able to swing his head and completely unable to move aside from that.
“This definitely isn’t Basaraba,” he informed a Spock he could no longer see, and saw an abrupt jerk of motion off to one side, as if someone else had heard and recognized his voice.
“Sulu! Here!”
He knew that harsh Russian-accented voice, although it grated now in a painful way it had never done before, even in their most desperate moments together on Basaraba. Sulu clenched his hands around the cold metal supports he could still feel back on Tlaoli, and with an enormous effort slewed himself around to look in that direction. He could see two faces swing up to stare at him from behind what looked like a tumble of battered metal crates. Gunfire still blazed out across the room behind them, but neither man was shooting back at their attackers. Instead, it looked as if they were huddled over two fallen comrades—one propped awkwardly against the corridor wall, the other cradled inside Chekov’s bloodstained arms.
“Go!” the older Russian said, his voice cutting like a ragged knife through the clatter of weapons fire. “Take Giotto and go!”
The other crouching man rocked back on his heels. “You knew he’d come,” he said, in a voice Sulu [233] recognized even when it sounded as shocked and exhausted as this. “It’s because of the way the time machine works—”
“That you’re going to be able to get back to where you should be, and erase everything that has happened in my lifetime!” Chekov reached out with a long black rifle, but all he did with it was shove Kirk farther away from him. “Now go!”
The captain scrambled to his feet and turned to heave Giotto upright, in preparation for hefting him in a fireman’s carry. Sulu heard the security chief groan in pain, and with another surge of sheer willpower managed to pull himself closer to both men.
“Mr. Spock, I have them! I have Captain Kirk and Commander Giotto.” Sulu almost reached out with his real hands, but caught himself just before his fingers slipped off the cold metal arms of the Janus Gate. This required a mental effort, not a physical one. He felt his teeth dig into his lip, felt blood drip and then freeze against his face as he forced himself to stretch the disembodied shadows of what would have been arms if he had really been present in this timeline. Something as sharp and unpleasant as an electric shock jolted through him. A flash of eerie blue light leaped out from where Sulu seemed to stand and connected with Giotto. An instant later, the security chief was gone.
Sulu heard a distant sound of startled shrieks and wails of fear, and the gunfire stopped abruptly, in the ringing silence that followed, he could hear Chekov [234] whispering, over and over again, “... I’m sorry ... I’m so sorry ...”
Kirk threw one last glance over his shoulder, and in the blue light that Sulu realized must be coming from himself, he saw compassion blossom on the captain’s face. “He knew—” he said softly. But before he could complete the sentence, another electric jolt shuddered through Sulu, and Kirk disappeared as well.
But something still connected Sulu himself to this past he’d never lived through. He squinted through the sterile glare of reddish light, not at Chekov, but at the slumped figure in his protective grasp. There was no way to see the dead man’s face, turned as it was into his first officer’s bloodstained shoulder, but Sulu recognized that wiry build. He saw it in the mirror every day.
“You shot him.” It wasn’t an accusation so much as a belated realization, an understanding of how Spock had managed to send him to a place he’d never been. The glare Chekov gave him scorched his face with embarrassment. Sulu suddenly knew what Kirk had been trying to tell the older Russian. “I know you only did it to get me here. He must have known, too—”
“He didn’t know anything.” The older man’s voice had thickened to a barely recognizable mutter. “Except that he was going to die—”
“To keep the Gorn invasion from happening,” Sulu insisted. “And you know he would have wanted—”
He broke off, because it was clear his words weren’t needed anymore. Chekov had lifted his head, an odd, arrested expression chasing the pain out of [235] his eyes for the first time Sulu could remember. “Do you hear that?” he asked softly.
But before Sulu could reply, the Russian officer’s crouched figure, and that of his crumpled captain, rippled once as if a wind had blown through them, then faded into darkness and were gone.
Chapter Ten
ONE MILKY THREAD at a time, the alien ship spun its slow cocoon around the blurry red disk that was Tlaoli. Kirk had started out counting each of the tiny satellites as the big ship placed them, but soon lost track as the white cataract they constructed grew too bright and dense. Now, the black surface of the ship stood in stark silhouette against that glowing backdrop. Soon, the alien protection sphere would be complete, and not even a hint of the planet’s russet surface would be visible then. Only the Shechenag knew what would happen after that.
Enterprise had towed the big ship out of the planet’s thermosphere the moment the shuttle cleared the satellite field. They’d deposited the Shechenag safely beyond the range of the Janus Gate’s [237] power-draining effect, even though Spock believed the device was too low on power now to reach beyond its own atmosphere in search of more. Kirk tried to explain the concept “Better safe than sorry,” but only earned himself a stoic Vulcan lecture on the illogic of making decisions based on statistically unlikely outcomes.
It took the Shechenag less than four hours to reinstate power and return to their self-appointed task. They’d answered no hails in that time, and sent out no signals that Uhura could detect. They might have been any other soulless force of nature for all that they seemed interested in discussing their mission with the humans or finding out how the final activation of the Janus Gate had been resolved. Maybe they already knew. Kirk felt a strange guilt at having caused such vast upset and disruption for another race, like a child whose innocent game of catch inadvertently destroyed a priceless stained glass window. He caught himself wishing he could somehow go back and prevent any of it from happening.
But that’s how we got here in the first place.
“You sent for me, Captain.”
Kirk drew his attention away from Tlaoli’s slowly accreting shroud, back to this dark observation deck and the officer who’d just entered it behind him. Spock’s reflection in the transparent aluminum window gazed back at him with the same cool patience Kirk had been trying to get used to ever since promoting the Vulcan after Gary Mitchell’s death. He [238] remembered the pain he’d seen on that face only a few days before, when the Psi 2000 virus uncovered a cache of buried emotion so raw it would
humiliate even the sternest Vulcan. And he wondered which Spock was the one he’d begun to let into his confidence—the one who admitted to loving his human mother, or the one he was afraid stood behind him now.
He turned his focus back outward toward the Shechenag ship. “Yes, Mr. Spock, I did.” Two more satellites drifted neatly into place while he struggled with how to approach what was bothering him. “I’ve been thinking about the events leading up to my ... retrieval from the past,” he said at last.
Spock nodded as he stepped closer to the long window and joined Kirk in studying the alien construction. “And certain—” He paused to choose his words, and the unexpected show of consideration irritated Kirk. “—emotionally charged aspects of the events disturb you.”
“You knew.” He hadn’t wanted to sound accusatory, but found he couldn’t hide his anger and disappointment despite his best intentions. “After Giotto was accidentally transported, there was no way to reestablish a link to Grex without using someone who was already there.” He looked at the Vulcan bluntly. “You knew Chekov was going to kill Sulu to make that link available.”
“Indeed.” Kirk knew it was irrational to expect remorse in the Vulcan’s tone, but he still found himself wanting something more than mere logical [239] acceptance of what had happened. When Spock gave it to him, however, it was in a very different form than he’d imagined. “Commander Chekov informed me of his intentions before the transfer was attempted.”
Kirk swallowed around the sudden unpleasant lurch in his stomach. He thought he’d been prepared for where this conversation would take them—into the unsavory reality of his alien first officer convincing a subordinate human to do something unthinkably merciless. It had never occurred to him that the human involved had actually volunteered for the task.
