by Greg Cox
Doubts haunted her. She slowed her pace and looked back. As desolate as she found the landscape ahead of her, it was a feast for the senses compared to the vast yawn of nothing at her back. Nothing interrupted the marble-white void of the sky or the featureless expanse of the desert stretched out forever beneath it. Waves of heat radiation shimmered in an unbroken curtain, giving the boundary between earth and air the sheen of liquid metal. But nothing else moved here. Nothing living flew in the air; nothing walked, crawled, or slithered across the parched soil. There was no wind to stir so much as a mote of bleached dust from the ground.
The hills looked just as barren, and the mountains behind them were forbidding. But for all their threat of hardships, they also promised shelter and a break from the monotony. And so Una pressed on toward them, confident her shipmates would have made the same choices eighteen years earlier. Martinez would not have let himself or the others perish in the open desert, she assured herself. He would have sought shelter, water, and resources—all of which are more likely to be found in the mountains than on this sun-blasted plain.
Una wondered if she would recognize her old shipmates after so long apart—or they, her. The last time Martinez and the others had seen Una, she had been an eager young lieutenant, a helm officer aboard the Enterprise under Captain Robert April. Back then, they had perpetuated her Academy nickname “Number One” because of her history of taking top honors in nearly every academic and athletic endeavor with which Starfleet could challenge her. Rather than chafe at the sobriquet, she had appropriated it, after a fashion: because her native Illyrian moniker was all but unpronounceable by most humanoid species, she had chosen to serve under the name “Una” since her earliest days at Starfleet Academy. In later years, after she had climbed the Enterprise’s ladder of rank to serve as executive officer under the command of Captain Christopher Pike, it had been a welcome coincidence that Pike had proved partial to addressing his XO as “Number One,” a holdover from ancient Terran naval traditions dating back to that world’s age of sail.
Perhaps the only former crewmate of hers who could pronounce her true name was Commander Spock. She had long admired his penchant for favoring his cool, logical Vulcan heritage over his more emotional human ancestry. In his youth, of course, he had exhibited a disturbing tendency to betray his heightened emotions by raising his voice on the bridge—an unseemly habit Una had helped him overcome, in the interest of honing his sense of decorum as a Starfleet officer. Where many of their peers might have bristled at Una’s catechism, Spock had taken her counsel to heart with a near-total absence of self-consciousness.
Spock and I have always understood each other better than most people do. But his devotion to logic blinds him to the power of hope.
If not for the compassionate understanding of Spock’s captain, James T. Kirk, the current commanding officer of the Enterprise, Una’s mission might already have ended in failure. She had taken a grave risk in stealing the Transfer Key—a device of not only alien but extradimensional origin—from its longtime hiding place in the captain’s quarters of the Enterprise. Having recently perused Kirk’s report of a similar device he encountered in an alternate universe, and Spock’s report of how a transporter malfunction had opened a pathway to that universe—first by accident, then a second time by design—she had gleaned new insights concerning the alien gadget she and Captain April had seized on Usilde in 2249. With that resource at her command, Una had planned to power up the now-abandoned Jatohr facility on Usilde and open the doorway between her universe and this one, to which her shipmates had so long ago been cruelly exiled by the Jatohr. To make that opportunity a reality, she had risked ending her career in a court-martial and jeopardized the imminent Federation-Klingon peace talks to return with the Transfer Key to Usilde—an action that had served only to attract the Klingons’ attention to the primitive planet and the advanced alien technology it harbored.
Regardless, Una had hoped there would be time to save her friends and escape with the Transfer Key. To her dismay, the other five members of her Usilde landing party, as well as four officers “blinked” off the bridge of the Enterprise, were nowhere to be found when, at last, the gateway between universes was opened once more. And so she had made a fateful decision: she struck a bargain with Kirk and Spock. They would keep the Transfer Key safe from the Klingons and return to Usilde in sixty days to reopen the door between universes. Which meant Una had that long, and not a day more, to find her lost shipmates and return with them to her arrival point in the desert—which she had marked with an X, scorched into the salt with the phaser she had borrowed from Kirk—for their long overdue homecoming.
It was an outrageous proposition. A mission doomed to fail.
Una didn’t care. She had beaten impossible odds before.
She would either bring her shipmates home . . . or die here with them.
About the Author
Greg Cox is the New York Times bestselling author of numerous Star Trek novels and stories, including Miasma, Child of Two Worlds, Foul Deeds Will Rise, No Time Like the Past, The Weight of Worlds, The Rings of Time, To Reign in Hell, The Eugenics Wars (Volumes One and Two), The Q Continuum, Assignment: Eternity, and The Black Shore. He has also written the official movie novelizations of Godzilla, Man of Steel, The Dark Knight Rises, Ghost Rider, Daredevil, Death Defying Acts, and the first three Underworld movies, as well as books and stories based on such popular series as Alias, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Farscape, The 4400, Leverage, Riese: Kingdom Falling, Roswell, Terminator, Warehouse 13, The X-Files, and Xena: Warrior Princess.
He has received three Scribe Awards from the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers and lives in Oxford, Pennsylvania.
Visit him at: www.gregcox-author.com
FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR: Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Greg-Cox
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ISBN 978-1-50
11-2529-4
ISBN 978-1-5011-2530-0 (ebook)
