by L. A. Graf
“Sulu, how do you feel? You were—you were very badly hurt.” That seemed safe enough to say. Surely Sulu would have noticed his amputation by now, although he might not have any more understanding of why it had happened than they did.
“I know.” The disbelief was still clear in Sulu’s reserved voice, although an odd, wry note had been added to it. “I thought I was going to die back there. Too,” he added in what sounded like a significant tone.
“Back in the shuttle, you mean?” Uhura ventured, although even as she said it, she knew it couldn’t be true. But her eyes had caught a scrap of movement at the flickering edge of her carbide light’s halo, and she was pretty sure McCoy and Sanner must have seen it, too,
Sulu’s laugh rolled out into the darkness, unexpectedly bittersweet. It was so recognizably the laugh of a man who’d lived a long time and seen a lot of pain that Uhura winced, but there was still a core of genuine humor buried deep inside it. “I always think I’m going to die in that damned Gorn shuttle whenever I let Chekov fly! But Pavel never lets us down.” He paused, then spoke again more somberly. “We were the ones who let him down this time, Uhura. We didn’t make it, and now we’re where—in Hell? Or is this some kind of alien purgatory that we have to wait in before we’re allowed to finally be done with it all?”
“Sulu, we’re not dead.” Uhura began walking toward him, both because the sudden grim note in his voice alarmed her, and to cover the soft sounds Sanner and McCoy made as they crept closer through the darkness. [247] She wasn’t sure of much anymore, but she knew they couldn’t let this altered Sulu, recently injured and disoriented as he must be, slip past them into the alien conduits and be lost. “We are in an alien installation, one with medical chambers that healed you before you could die.” Uhura took a deep breath, then bravely continued. “How else could your right hand have been amputated and then healed so fast?”
“You know about that?” A quiet step in the darkness, and Uhura saw the slim figure in the mottled battle jacket separate itself from the shadow of a nearby column. “Did the alien medical chambers here heal you, too? Even after I saw you lying there by the gate with that hole blasted through your heart—”
The pain cracked through the calm shell of his voice so sharply and unexpectedly that Uhura winced at the sound of it, even before she absorbed the shock of his words. Before she could say anything in reply, a flurry of running steps and a thud in the darkness told her that one of the unseen watchers had flung himself at the pilot. There was the sound of a struggle, brief and unexpectedly violent, then a painful groan that sounded suspiciously like Sanner.
“All right, all right, I give up! Hey, I was just trying to make sure you didn’t go running off and get lost in these caves.”
“I don’t know you.” Suspicion hardened Sulu’s voice until Uhura barely recognized it. “Why should I believe you when I don’t even believe it’s really Uhura who’s talking to me?”
“Steady there, son,” said McCoy’s voice from the other side of the column. “Don’t do anything you’ll [248] regret later. All it’s going to take is a little light to get this all cleared up—”
“Doctor McCoy?” Sulu’s voice changed again, this time to a harsh and self-doubting growl. “God, I must be pumped full of torture drugs! I’m hearing people who I know have been dead for years—”
“Let’s see if that’s the truth,” McCoy said calmly and Uhura heard him snap his carbide igniter once or twice. The flame caught and danced to life on the helmet he held in his arms, throwing its pale yellow glow up to splash on the contours of his face. Uhura came forward to join him, pulling her own helmet off and holding it in front of her the same way. It hadn’t occurred to her, until she saw what McCoy had done, that the downward glare from her headlamp must have kept Sulu from seeing who she really was.
“Ouch,” Sanner grumped in the darkness, but a rustle of cloth and the sound of footsteps told Uhura that Sulu must have released him. The pilot stepped into the circle of light she and McCoy now made, his strange black and violet camouflage jacket breaking up his slim outline when he moved in a way that proved how effective it was. The network of fine lines around Sulu’s eyes and mouth had deepened with his baffled frown, but his gaze was steady and sane as it moved from McCoy to Uhura and back again.
“Either it’s really you, from back about twenty years ago,” he said to the doctor, “or the Gorn have gotten a lot better at synthesizing torture drugs than the last time they caught me.” His glance swung back to Uhura. “You look twenty years younger, too, but I’m not—” Sulu lifted his right hand as if to touch his own face, then stopped and stared at the healed stump that used to be [249] his wrist. Uhura watched him worriedly, but all he did was tug down his empty black uniform sleeve to cover the amputated limb, smoothing the fingers of his left hand awkwardly across the glittering silver slashes embossed there. “I’m the same forty-seven-year-old former starship captain who took our last pulse bomb into Tesseract Fortress and never came out again,” he said quietly, almost to himself.
“Because you came here instead.” Uhura tried to infuse her voice with equal parts calmness and firmness. It wasn’t easy, especially when Sulu pinned her with a gaze so self-controlled and keen that she knew he hadn’t lied about having been promoted to starship captain. She went on, feeling her way awkwardly through an explanation that she wasn’t quite sure she really understood herself. “I think there’s been some kind of time slip, some kind of exchange between different versions of you and your younger self. It’s stardate 1704.3, Sulu, and we’ve triggered an alien force field, some kind of transporter device, on a planet called Tlaoli 4. Do you remember any of that?”
“Tlaoli?” The black-clad older version of Sulu shook his head. “I don’t remember any planet by that name. All I remember from around that stardate was getting to that blue planet a day after it exploded, too late to rescue the geological team we were supposed to pick up. What was its name? Psi or Phi something?”
“Psi 2000.” Uhura exchanged glances with McCoy and saw the doctor looking as puzzled as she felt. “In the history you remember, we didn’t arrive in time to visit that planet? You don’t remember catching a viral infection there, or Joe Tormolen dying after he—?”
[250] She stopped, because Sulu was regarding her with what looked like suspicion again. “Joe Tormolen didn’t die that early,” he said. “It wasn’t until after war was declared and the Enterprise crew was split up and sent off to the front. He was on board the Delphi when the frontier fleet tried to stop the Gorn from invading the Prellant system. I was in command of the Hotspur by then, with you as my com officer and half my crew made up of Enterprise ensigns and cadets yanked out of the academy for war duty. And you—” He turned to McCoy grimly. “—you were already dead.”
“No,” Uhura said. “No, that’s not—that can’t be our timeline. In our timeline, we made it to Psi 2000 before it blew up, but we lost Joe Tormolen to the virus he caught there. And then we had to cold-start the engines, which threw us back in time three days ...” She trailed off, seeing from the dubious look on the older Sulu’s face that he didn’t find this alternate history particularly credible or convincing. Uhura took a deep breath and started again. “We came down here on Haoli 4 to rescue a survey crew who were trapped in the caves. While we were here, we ran into some kind of force field, one that seemed to be part of some kind of ancient alien transporter system. It made the captain and Chekov vanish, then made them reappear here, in this cavern. As a side effect, it seemed to cause them to lose some of their memory—”
“Chekov is here?” Sulu took an eager step forward, his lined face lighting with the first hint of gladness Uhura had seen there. “Did he come through this alien machine of yours, too? Is he all right?”
[251] Uhura bit her lip, wishing she didn’t have to disappoint him. “He’s here, yes, but the Chekov I mean is the young ensign who belongs to this timeline. He’s always been here, the same way you were always here unti
l just a few hours ago.”
Sulu nodded, his face growing still and thoughtful again. “The younger version of me, you mean. A different younger version that I can’t remember having been.”
“Yes.” Uhura glanced at McCoy and got a silent nod of encouragement. Either the doctor still thought she was the best one to deal with this version of Sulu, or he didn’t want to upset the former pilot by forcing him to talk to a man he considered long dead. “That younger version of you was still aboard the Enterprise when we lost Chekov and the captain. You came down to the planet in a cargo shuttle to take us back to the ship, but the captain was still missing.” Uhura swallowed down the bitter taste of the words she had to say next. “I allowed you—I ordered you—to take the shuttle up to look for him. And you got caught by the alien force field yourself. We came down here to this cave because we thought it might send you here, where Chekov and the captain had been sent. We didn’t know it would heal you. Or that you wouldn’t be the same Sulu that had vanished.”
The older man in the battle jacket remained silent after she stopped speaking, but he no longer looked suspicious. His dark eyes crinkled thoughtfully, if he were mulling over the ramifications of what she had just told him. Uhura wondered what kind of life this alternate Sulu had lived that allowed him to accept this bizarre [252] twist of fate with neither denial nor protest, but instead with what looked like stoic resignation.
“Which captain?” he asked at last.
Uhura stared at him through the cavern’s shifting shadows, unsure of what he meant. “Which captain of what?”
“Of the Enterprise.” Sulu gave her another of those sharp, probing gazes that his younger self had not yet developed. “Which captain of the Enterprise did you lose in this alien transport device? Pike? Hoffman? I know we only had him for a few months, but I think that was around stardate 1700 or so. Or is it that idiot Mitchell?”
Uhura had opened her mouth to answer, but the reference to the former first officer of the Enterprise, who in her timeline had died on an alien planet several months ago, left her speechless. McCoy, on the other hand, was startled out of his tactful silence.
“Gary Mitchell was never the captain of the Enterprise,” he said bluntly. “And neither was anyone named Hoffman. The captain we’re talking about is James Kirk.”
Only silence followed his statement. Uhura felt a sudden rush of odd sensations: a strange, hollow shakiness in her arms and legs, a sickening swoop in her stomach, a leaden pounding that began to thrum inside her ears. It took her tired brain a moment to realize that all of these were symptoms of terror, and another moment to grasp that the terror emanated not from any part of the alien caves around her, but from the completely blank look on the face of the Sulu who stood before her. Because she knew, even before he stirred and answered McCoy, exactly what he was going to say.
[253] “I don’t know anyone named James Kirk,” the older Sulu said. “He may be captain of the Enterprise in your timeline, but for all I know, in mine he never even existed.”
TO BE CONTINUED
in
BOOK TWO: FUTURE IMPERFECT
About the e-Book
(NOV, 2003)—Scanned, proofed and formatted by Bibliophile.
