"Because she was kidnapped," he said, and if there was any emotion left in him, it was nothing he felt. "Because she was taken by people who told me not to interfere in the politics of the mirror universe." He closed his eyes as if that act might banish existence itself. "Politics I helped create." But existence continued and he opened his eyes and looked at Deanna. "And I did interfere. By going with the Sovereign. By fighting Nechayev. By stealing the St. Lawrence and taking this ship." Kirk's hands would have become fists, but his hands were useless. He was useless. "Because I thought I could beat them the way I've always beaten everyone who's ever stood in my way."
Kirk drove his elbow down on the console and that perfect image of Teilani, taken on that perfect day on that perfect world, vanished from the screen.
From his life.
From his future.
"Not every possibility has been explored," Deanna said.
"By the time we're finished here, it won't matter. Wherever they have her, she is dead."
Deanna stood by his side for several more minutes, studying the individual sensor returns from the prisoners and the guards in the camp hundreds of thousands of kilometers away. But she said nothing more, and Kirk could guess why.
There was nothing she could say that could bring Kirk back from the hell he had created.
Nothing, and she knew it.
"I'm . . . so sorry," she said, placing a hand lightly on his shoulder. And then she moved away, to the forward station beside T'Val at the conn.
Kirk spent the next moments counting Klingons and Cardassians. Wondering what it would be like to kill each one of them. Personally.
Then Scott and La Forge reported in over the comm channels from the lower sensor platform behind the main array.
"Go ahead, Mr. Scott," Kirk heard Janeway acknowledge. In less than an hour in that chair, his erstwhile kidnapper had fallen into the ease of command.
"Geordi and I have taken the liberty of narrowing the bandwidth of what the sensor dish can pick up," Scott explained. "I mean, there's precious little that gets through the plasma storms as it is."
Kirk looked up from his sensor screen. Trust Scotty. That sounded like a worthwhile modification. He was glad that some people still had purpose in their lives.
"Understood, Mr. Scott," Janeway said. "You're giving us the capability to see in greater detail but over a smaller range of wavelengths."
"Right ye are," Scott said. "So, since we seem to be getting all the right readings down where we are now, we thought we'd throw the big picture up on the main screen."
"It's not as if we'd be missing anything," Janeway said. "What we've got up here now is like looking through mud."
"Well, lass, let's just see if we can do somethin' about that. . . ."
The main screen flickered—nothing new about that in the Goldin Discontinuity. Then a new image appeared and remained.
Kirk glanced up at it, only because it was new. A distraction.
The image was monochromatic—a wash of blue gray.
But it was clear. And compared with what they'd been receiving, it was crisp.
It was also chilling.
Quite clearly, this new image showed the Enterprise, floating between the asteroids, undoubtedly held in place by some complex arrangement of tractor beams and antigravs.
And just as clearly, the image showed that the Enterprise was moving, very slowly, into the device that not even the close sensor scan from the St. Lawrence had been able to identify.
Kirk saw Spock stand up and walk closer to the screen. "They are about to achieve their goal," he stated matter-of-factly. "If, indeed, that device can be used to transfer ships between the universes, at the rate the Enterprise is moving into it, in less than an hour she will be gone,"
Janeway stood up and joined Spock. Still seated at the security/tactical station, out of the real arena of action, Kirk shifted restlessly, remembering when he would have been the one standing with Spock like that, gazing into the mysteries of the universe, determining how to control them.
"The Enterprise," Janeway said in reverence, in fear. "No resistance group in my universe can stand up to her."
T'Val was also riveted by the image on the screen, and by all it meant to her universe and her struggle. "They've won, Kate. And there's nothing we can do."
Kirk stood up. He could no longer hold back while the future unfolded. The wrong way. Without his involvement.
"Of course there's something you can do." Kirk's voice was decisive.
Janeway, Spock, and T'Val turned to him.
"Destroy them," he said, his voice firm, steady, filled with experience. "Crush their camp, their device, and if you have to, the Enterprise herself. But how dare you stand there and give up!"
Only Spock stepped away from the others to face him.
"Captain, I have studied the sensor scan we made of their camp during our flyby in the runabout. Any attack on the generators that power that device, whatever its purpose, will collapse the atmospheric forcefield."
"So?" Kirk asked.
"The prisoners will die."
Kirk moved down the steps, onto the main level with the others, leaving behind the sensor board and its empty displays of damning data.
"Not all of them. Riker and the others, they said the barracks were pressurized."
"The majority of the prisoners are civilians, Jim," Spock said. "To lose one civilian's life is unacceptable."
"What is it to lose a billion civilian lives?" Kirk asked. His gaze measured the Vulcan who had been his friend for longer than he could remember, and the woman who had been given the greatest opportunity fate could bestow and yet did not know how to use it. "Because that's what they'll do with the Enterprise and you know it. The Alliance won't be using her to seek out new life, new civilizations. They'll use her to hunt down the resistance and end it. They'll take her into the Badlands and destroy the mirror Defiant. They'll track down the headquarters of the Vulcan resistance and obliterate it.
"They'll use that ship for every purpose Starfleet turns a blind eye toward. To change the orbits of worlds. To stop the fusion of suns. To wipe even the slightest memory of Terrans and Vulcans from the history of the galaxy."
Kirk gestured angrily with his useless hands, not caring if their trailing bandages made him seem as if he were some decaying corpse from an earlier time best forgotten.
He measured the two before him, and saw himself in the middle, between them—James T. Kirk, finally defeated by the loss of the one thing that could never be explained, never be replaced.
After a century and a half of fighting his war with the universe, Kirk had no doubt that the universe had won.
Yet there was something in him still that refused to allow those around him to be defeated as well. Not while he could still make a difference. If not for himself and Teilani, then at least for others.
"I know how offensive it sounds," Kirk said to Spock. "I know how wrong you think it is to put the blood of innocent people on your hands. But you don't know the Alliance." He felt his body shudder involuntarily with the intensity of the words he spoke. "You don't know what it means to hate."
Now he spoke not to his friends, his allies, but to the stars that had always waited for him, to claim the dust of his life, his dreams, his bones, and hold them all in their uncaring, disinterested embrace.
"But after all this time," Kirk said, "I do."
TWENTY-NINE
Picard hit the pressure door hard, with his shoulder. Forced the door open, jumped inside, then raced through the airlock's transfer chamber to leap into the wedge-shaped room beyond—a cluttered storage area with rows of spacesuits hung along two of its walls.
Three Cardassians seated at flashing consoles to one side of the doorway spun round to face him, their hands already reaching for the disruptors at their sides.
But Picard drew both his own weapons and fired first, energy beams lancing through the air, dissolving the enemy even as their flailing limbs reac
hed out for life.
Picard granted them none.
Then Teilani was at his side.
"What is this building?" he asked her, eyes never resting as he scanned the storage area and its haphazard stacks of equipment, each panel of its monitoring equipment ablaze with flashing displays and status lights.
"It's camp headquarters," Teilani said. The area they were in, she explained, the area they had just taken, was one of seven wedges sliced out of the outer rim of the circular building. "And behind one of those doors is the main control room."
Picard fixed his gaze on the storage area's third wall and the three small pressure doors set into it. At least three-quarters of the building's volume was hidden behind them. And he knew there was another full level above. The enemy could be anywhere.
He started forward through the disorderly rows of equipment, a disruptor in each hand, looking for anyone who might be hiding behind a crate. The Cardassians he'd killed near the doorway had been busy at small workstations, a tray of food scattered to one side, a stack of isolinear chips sprayed across the floor to another.
But he had no sense of what they had been doing here. No idea if their work had involved what was happening to his ship, only a kilometer overhead.
Picard made his choice. "Right door," he said. The floor in front of it seemed to be the most distressed, as if it had seen the highest traffic. Perhaps the controls he needed would be behind it.
He was just about to fire at that right-hand door when he heard running feet behind him, approaching the open airlock.
Not the soft pad of a prisoner's discharge suit, but the heavy clang of metal-shod boots.
"Get down!" he shouted to Teilani, then ran out of the storage area, back to the transfer chamber, where he dropped to one knee to brace a disruptor across his forearm as he drew a bead and—
Three Klingons flew up into the air, blown off the plasteel walkway outside the airlock as Picard's withering fusillade of disruptor fire struck them.
Picard saw other guards on the run across the walkways, all heading toward their camp's headquarters.
He stood up in the open airlock to give himself a better angle and fired both disruptors again, slicing the walkway directly in front of him in half, cutting through it so the far side collapsed onto the asteroid's metal ground.
He stepped back into the airlock entrance and fired straight down again to blast the plasteel platform.
Now the command building was isolated from all the others. Alone in the center of the camp.
He glanced up, saw the Enterprise being pulled into the crossover device like an insect being devoured by a carnivorous plant.
Then he backed up, retracing his steps to Teilani, methodically closing each mammoth rolling door behind him, and fusing their controls so whoever came after him into the building would have to carve through its metal walls, or wait until he had used the emergency levers to open the doors from the inside.
When he entered the storage area, he reached behind his head and ripped off the hateful braid of his counterpart's white hair.
Teilani looked at him questioningly.
But Picard knew there was no time to discuss the situation. The rest of his disguise—his Klingon armor—was lightweight, and would provide some protection against disruptor fire. And the regent's discharge suit he wore beneath it was sleeker and lighter than the first one he had been forced to wear as a prisoner. He might be facing impossible odds, but he was well equipped. And it was time to use that equipment.
Picard focused his attention on the third door on the storage area's back wall. He needed to start the escape attempt, if only to add to the guards' confusion.
He raised his disruptors.
"After what's gone on out here, they'll be ready for us," Teilani said. Her voice was even, without fear.
Picard looked at her, and remembered who she really was. Not a frail prisoner to be rescued. But a warrior to be reckoned with.
He flipped a disruptor around, caught it by its barrel, then tossed it to Teilani.
She plucked it easily from the air, spun it again, and expertly rolled her thumb over its power gauge, setting it to FULL.
"They won't be expecting both of us," Picard said.
Then he sprinted toward a crate, leapt over it, and took up a firing position to the left of the target door.
On the other side of the door, Teilani rolled over another crate to the floor and crouched behind it with both hands on her own weapon, ready to create a deadly crossfire.
Impressed again by her attitude, Picard targeted the door controls.
Got ready to fire.
And then, very slowly, creaking only slightly, the target door sighed open, and Picard's aim wavered as he heard a voice from the room speak to him.
"Come in, Captain. I've been expecting you. And you're late."
Picard recognized that voice and lowered his disruptor.
He abandoned his cover and stood slightly to one side of the open doorway, preparing himself to meet Gul Rutal.
One last time.
They were all on the bridge now. All yelling at each other in a way that would be unthinkable for starship crews, even in Kirk's time.
"And what if we meet up with the Sovereign?'' Scott demanded.
"She'll be just as disadvantaged as we are," Kirk said. "And at least we'll have taken the first shots."
"Our captain is down there," Data argued. "This attack could kill him along with the rest."
"Look," Kirk said to the android, "I'm five seconds from getting into a shuttlecraft and doing this myself. Picard's already dead. All those prisoners on that asteroid, the moment the Enterprise has crossed over, they've served their purpose. Accept it. They're already dead. But at least my way, some of them might make it through the attack. And the Alliance won't have the Enterprise." Kirk looked at Janeway. "We've got the coordinates of their generators from that flyby we did. We'll shoot at the backups first. Get their attention. Let them start whatever evacuation procedures they have so as many prisoners as possible can get back to their barracks in safety."
McCoy pounded his fist on the railing he stood beside. "Dammit, Jim. Listen to yourself. 'Some' of the prisoners? Do you know how many people could die down there if we attack?"
Kirk glared at McCoy. "Do you know how many will die if we don't attack?"
"You can't know that."
"Yes, I can." He turned to Janeway. "You've fought the Alliance. You know what they're like. And whether you want it or not, this is your ship. Start the attack, Kate. Start the attack or your resistance movement is finished and your universe is lost!"
Kirk looked her in the eyes and knew this was her moment. Everything she would become in her new life would flow from this next second.
The bridge was silent.
No one dared speak.
Until the commander of the Voyager had made her decision.
And she made it.
"Battle stations," she said. "They're not getting the Enterprise."
Janeway turned to her chair as T'Val ran for the conn.
Beverly Crusher reached out to take Janeway's shoulder, forced her to turn and look at her. "You're going to kill all those people. . . ."
Janeway pushed Crusher's hand away. "I didn't start this war."
Everyone on the bridge looked at Kirk.
Everyone knew whose war it was.
Picard kept his disruptor pointing down though he could hear scuffling in the control room beyond. He was careful not to betray Teilani's presence as he heard her take up a new position behind him.
"I won't let you take my ship," he said.
"We've had this conversation," Rutal said from somewhere deep within the control room.
Picard chanced a glance through the open door. Saw a circular control area ringed by display screens.
On them, he could see guards and prisoners caught up in a mad melee. This was the room he had been looking for. Somewhere inside, on one of its consoles, woul
d be the control he needed to signal for the escape to begin.
"Why don't you come in? So we can talk about something new?" Rutal said.
"Long enough to let your guards cut through the doors outside?" Picard asked.
"I don't need my guards to deal with you."
"Then why don't you come out here?"
"Captain Picard, really. You have a disruptor."
"And you don't?"
A shadow moved by the consoles in the room. Picard resisted the impulse to fire at it.
"Mine isn't as big as yours," the Cardassian Gul said. Her voice now seemed to be coming from farther away, another location.
Picard didn't know why the enemy was moving, what her plan was. Perhaps there was another exit from the control room. But he had to do something to take the initiative.
"You have five seconds to leave the control room," Picard said. "Then I am going to throw in a particle grenade." He had seen some of the camp guards carrying the small but deadly devices, designed to kill organic beings with a minimum of explosive damage. He trusted the Gul might believe he had managed to obtain one.
But her reply suggested she had another strategy in mind. "You have five seconds to drop your weapon, or I will kill you."
The five seconds passed.
"It seems both our bluffs have been called," Picard said. He needed to hear Rutal speak again, so he would know where to fire when he ran into the room.
"But one of us wasn't bluffing," the Gul answered.
To the left, Picard thought.
He began to picture himself rolling in through the door, coming up on his feet, firing to the left at whatever moved.
He got ready to spring forward.
"Jean-Luc!" Teilani cried. "Get down!"
Picard dropped to the floor as a blaze of disruptor energy tore through the air above him and struck a figure who had appeared in the center door of the storage area's back wail.
Of course, he thought angrily as he ducked and ran toward the center door. He had been blinded by the obvious trap— three doors usually meant three rooms.
But here, all three opened onto one room—the control room.
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