by Judith
“Too late, Keptin. They’ve matched it precisely.”
Uhura went to work on her board. Kirk was too impatient to wait for Spock. “Come on, Mr. Spock—is that the Excalibur or the Lexington?”
Spock looked up from his science viewer with an expression of un-Vulcan-like bemusement. “Captain, it is neither. According to my calculations, that ship is from the future.”
Kirk’s eyes widened. “How far in the future?”
“A century at least,” Spock said. “And it is trapped in the same fatal trajectory we are.”
The turbulence ended.
For Picard, it was as if the Enterprise had moved into the eye of some galactic hurricane. All he was aware of was the gentle background symphony of normal bridge functions. And his throbbing, broken wrist.
The main screen flashed with static as the sensors reset themselves. When the image cleared, Picard could see that most of it was computer-enhanced, as if very little of what the sensor grid was able to perceive would make sense to human eyes. Picard [395] guessed that, for the most part, he was looking at subspace sensor returns. But of what?
The Data-thing shouted commands to O’Brien at Ops, telling him how to adjust sensor readings to improve the screen image. Unfortunately, the sensor grid had not been reset since the Romulan collision and O’Brien was unable to comply with the settings he was ordered to make.
Finally, though, the blurred images coalesced on the screen. In the lower right was a bizarre, three-lobed object which appeared to pulsate. Picard guessed it was the subspace event horizon, though could not explain the shape and movement unless the second, lower horizon hid three singularities linked in close orbit—which would require velocities in excess of the speed of light. Picard remembered reading abstracts about multi-singularities as an exotic new form of gravitationally collapsed object, but whatever phenomenon the Enterprise was now facing, this was no ordinary black hole.
To the upper left of the screen were two much smaller objects. One was only a dot of light, presumably the science package the Garneau had been on station to recover. But the second object was clearly a starship—and the Garneau’s captain had not mentioned that. In addition, it was clear that both objects were spiraling down toward the subspace event horizon, and not away from it. Picard didn’t know how the Garneau had been expected to recover either.
“I compliment you on your ship,” the Data-thing said. “It is hours away from failure.”
The main screen images changed their position as the Enterprise changed course.
“Captain Picard ...”
Picard turned at the sound of Worf’s voice, weak and shaky. He had a bad cut across his warrior’s brow, being treated by Dr. Crusher even as he leaned over his tactical board. “The course we are on ... we are heading for the singularity ...”
“Just for the time being,” the Data-thing said. “First there is a shuttlecraft we must rendezvous with. And then your mighty ship will take us back.”
[396] “We’ll never make it,” La Forge said urgently. He was still at his engineering station but Picard could see science displays on his screens. “Captain, the Kabreigny Object is a multisingularity. The closer we get to the subspace event horizon, the more the quantum metric of space will be compressed around us. It won’t matter how much power we have for our engines—we just won’t have enough space left to maneuver in!”
The Data-thing looked over his shoulder, about to speak. But he didn’t. Picard could guess what had happened. The Thorsen personality had accessed Data’s onboard data banks and discovered that La Forge was right.
“Take us back now,” Picard said. “You know we can’t make it back if you take us further in.”
The Data-thing remained silent, looking as Data often had, eyes to the side, as if engaged in some internal conversation. “I will never surrender,” the android said at last. He looked at Picard. “I must destroy him, no matter what the cost.” He turned back to his board, rapidly entering more commands. Picard heard the Enterprise’s impulse engines increase their output.
“What are you doing?!” La Forge cried. “Captain! He’s drawing power from the SIF to give us greater speed.”
For the first time since passing through the event horizon, the great ship shuddered. Picard heard creaking from the superstructure around the bridge. The images of the two objects on the screen were becoming larger as the Enterprise gained on them. She shuddered again.
“I can’t override him, Captain!”
“You’ll destroy the ship!” Picard shouted at the Data-thing. “What can be worth that?”
“To prove I am right,” the Data-thing said.
An ominous vibration started as the engines began to whine. Picard felt the full weight of command descend upon him. More than a thousand crew members depended on him to get them back to safety. But there was nothing he could do. The Thorsen machine could not be reasoned with. It could not be swayed. It could not be stopped.
In frustration, Picard swung his left fist against the Data-thing’s head. “Give me back my ship!”
[397] Slowly, the Data-thing rose from his position. Picard did not back away. He would not face death cowering. This monster from the past would have no power over him.
“I will kill you now,” the Data-thing said.
“At least I’ll die knowing that you’ve been stopped,” Picard shot back. “Swallowed forever by this black hole. Exactly where you belong.”
The Enterprise shuddered again as the Data-thing raised his fist.
“Stop!” Beverly Crusher stepped in front of Picard, medical tricorder in hand. Her son was beside her, carrying a first-aid kit. “Can’t you see the captain is delirious?” the doctor said to the Data-thing.
The Data-thing paused, distracted by the interruption. “All the more reason for him to die. He is nonoptimal.”
“But you’ll need him when we get out,” Dr. Crusher insisted. She responded to the android’s expression of confusion. “I heard Worf and La Forge talking. The ship has enough power to get out of here. They were just trying to scare you.”
The Data-thing’s eyes flashed dangerously. He glared at La Forge and Worf on the upper level. “Is that so?”
The Enterprise lurched. Wesley almost lost his grip on the medical kit.
“Yes,” Crusher said. She aimed the medical tricorder at Picard. “I mean look at this. His brain functions are all scrambled by pain. He’s not responsible for—” She stopped suddenly, then turned the tricorder on the Data-thing. “Oh, my,” she said. “Do you feel all right?”
The Data-thing drew back from her in disdain. “I am not organic.”
“Some of you is,” Dr. Crusher said, adjusting the tricorder controls. “Check your design specifications. You’ve got several biological components and I’m picking up a disturbing breakdown in functions.”
The Data-thing slid his eyes to the side again.
“Here, look at this,” Dr. Crusher said. “Goodness, you’re facing a major system shutdown.”
The Data-thing seemed to struggle to bring his eyes to bear on [398] the tricorder. “No! I am optimal! I am beyond the flesh!” He snatched the instrument from Dr. Crusher’s hand, twisted it around, rightside up, and—
—crashed to the deck, immobile.
Wesley Crusher stood behind the space the Data-thing had just occupied, a single finger extended. Where it had activated Data’s Off switch.
The Enterprise lurched heavily, throwing those standing to the side.
Picard lost his breath with the sharp stab of pain from his wrist. Recovering with difficulty, he ordered McKnight back to the conn. “Status report!” he called out over the whine of the engines and the creaking of the deck.
“SIF at seventy percent!” La Forge answered. “Switching power back from impulse engines.”
“Sir!” Worf added, “we are still in a direct trajectory toward the singularity.”
Crusher slapped a hypospray to Picard’s wrist, startling him. Bu
t moments after it hissed, he felt blessed relief, though his hand hung limp and useless.
“Can you identify those vessels?” Picard asked as he moved back to his command chair. Troi was helping Riker down the ramp to join the captain. Wesley dragged Data’s inert form to the side of the bridge. Worf remained leaning against his tactical console, La Forge near him at engineering.
The Enterprise bucked as if she had hit something solid. Collision alert alarms sounded.
“SIF feedback!” La Forge shouted as the Enterprise seemed to careen into a spiral, vibrating coarsely.
“We passed through some sort of molecular dust cloud,” O’Brien yelled out. “Reads like vessel debris.”
“Another vessel?” Picard exclaimed. “Why all this interest in this black hole?”
Then Riker was beside him, broken leg held tight in a splint, and Troi sat to the captain’s left. Picard’s bridge was fully staffed. With engineering, this crew was the Enterprise’s last hope.
“Routing power,” La Forge called out as the Enterprise continued to angle, inertial dampers straining to hold the interior [399] together, hull metal screaming all around them as the structural integrity field fought the staggering tidal forces straining to tear the ship apart.
“Sir,” Worf boomed, “sensors have identified the larger ship below us. It is a Constitution-class vessel!”
“Constitution-class?” Picard repeated. “They’ve been out of service for at least fifty years.”
“Captain Bondar said the scientific package was launched a century ago,” Riker said. “Maybe the starship’s part of an earlier recovery attempt.”
“Is it possible we’re being exposed to temporal distortions as well as spatial ones?” Picard asked. He raised his voice. “Worf, plot a four-dimensional point-of-origin solution to the starship’s entry point.”
Computer graphics flickered over the viewscreen. Then the line tracing back from the Constitution-class vessel began to flash.
“Sir,” Worf replied in loud and obvious consternation. “Trajectory calculations indicate the vessel penetrated the upper event horizon from a point approximately eighty to one hundred years in the past.”
“Mr. Worf,” Picard said, as the shaking of the ship seemed to quiet. “Can you identify that vessel?”
“Scanning for identification codes ...” the Klingon said. “Scanning ...” Then it seemed as if the universe itself became still as Worf spoke again, his voice filled with disbelief and awe. “Captain Picard, the other ship is the Enterprise 1701. And sir ... her captain, James T. Kirk, is hailing us. ...”
TWO
TNC 65813
t = ∞
At the precise instant that he felt sure all was lost, Zefram Cochrane saw the Klingon battle cruiser ripple in a flash of golden light, then dissolve into a sparkling band of luminescence. As quickly as the threat had come, it had vanished. For a moment, the shimmering remains of the cruiser reminded Cochrane of the stars he had watched from beneath the dome at Christopher’s Landing, as if they were the common thread woven through his life.
“Zefram, what happened?” the Companion asked.
“James T. Kirk,” Cochrane said, not even considering any other possibility.
There were giants in these days.
He felt fortunate to have lived to have seen them.
Uhura’s clear voice rang out over the confusion of the bridge. “Sir, I am picking up a Starfleet standard identification code from the vessel.”
Kirk and Spock locked eyes. A Starfleet vessel. From the future. There was only one thing they could do.
“Uhura, cut communications!” Kirk ordered.
At the same time, Spock downgraded the resolution of the main [401] screen. Where the image of a familiar, saucer-and-twin-nacelle-style starship had been taking shape in greater detail the closer it approached, only a handful of blocky pixels remained to indicate the future ship’s position.
Reluctantly, Uhura shut down the automatic hailing sequence. She turned to the captain. “But what if they’re our only way home?” she asked.
Kirk held up his hand to tell Uhura he would answer her in a moment. “Spock, how much longer to impact with the subspace event horizon?” he asked.
“In subjective time, perhaps an hour. However, we will only be able to maintain our structural field integrity for another twenty-six minutes.”
The turbolift doors opened and McCoy came onto the bridge.
“Then we still have a few minutes to decide what to do,” Kirk said to Uhura. “But if that ship is our only way home, it will be to our home in the next century.”
“The next century?” McCoy said. He looked at the screen. “Damn. We’re past the event horizon, too, aren’t we?”
“And we’ve just made contact with a Starfleet vessel from at least a century into the future.”
McCoy raised an eyebrow. “Really? Did you communicate with it?”
Kirk shook his head. He knew Starfleet’s standing orders. Time travel to the past was possible. The Enterprise had done it herself. Now all Starfleet vessels had been given procedures to follow in the event they encountered a ship from the future and those procedures forbade communication. The reason was that the Prime Directive worked both ways. Just as Starfleet did not want to interfere in the normal development of other cultures, neither did it want anyone else to interfere in the normal development of the Federation. If information from the future were to be inadvertently transmitted to the past, new timelines might develop, ones that diverged from the Federation’s natural evolution. Even a detailed sensor image of a ship from the future might transfer advanced design knowledge to the past, so Starfleet had decreed that all viewscreens must be set to low-resolution modes in the event of visual contact.
[402] But there was one exception to the no-contact rule: If a present-day vessel faced certain destruction, contact was permissible provided the present-day crew abandoned their own era and went forward through time with their rescuers. Only in this way could all knowledge of the future be kept from those still in the past.
Kirk knew that the logic of the situation meant that it was the ship from the future which must make first contact. The future-day crew were assumed to be in a position to know the historical circumstances they were involved with. If their history showed that a ship had been lost in the past, then the ship from the future was authorized to make a rescue attempt.
Kirk also knew that whatever was going to happen to his ship in the next twenty-six minutes was already ancient history to the vessel above him. According to regulations, he had to trust to them to act accordingly. And he would.
For a few more minutes at least.
But then, regulations be damned.
“Captain,” Worf said, “the ‘Enterprise’ has stopped hailing us.”
“Was it a live hail, or a recording?” Picard asked. He clung to his chair as his Enterprise continued to shake all around him. But the movements were becoming less severe.
After a moment’s delay to compare the sound signatures, Worf reported that they had received an automatic recording.
“Respond anyway, Mr. Worf.”
“Our send capabilities are locked out, sir. Colonel Thorsen only keyed open our channel to the Garneau.”
“Damn,” Picard said. “Can our sensors show if there is any crew on board?” Picard asked.
“There is too much interference at this distance to be sure, sir.”
Troi asked, “What makes you think there wouldn’t be a crew?”
Picard sighed. “This trajectory is carrying that Enterprise to certain destruction,” he explained. “And history shows that that ship was destroyed under Captain Kirk’s command. But for the life of me, I can’t remember when. Do you, Number One?”
Riker shook his head. “It’s been a long time since I read Admiral Chekov’s books,” he said.
[403] La Forge announced that the SIF had been restored to full power. The whine of the ship’s impulse engines dropped b
ack to a steady thrum and Picard’s Enterprise regained her stability.
Picard leaned forward. “Wesley, have you read the accounts of Kirk’s missions?”
“Yes, sir,” the young man replied promptly. “I know that the original Enterprise was destroyed by Captain Kirk himself, in ... twenty-two ... eighty-five. I think. But it was on a classified mission so I don’t know where it happened.”
“Seventy-nine, eighty years ago,” Picard said, growing more annoyed with himself. “Just within the margin of error Worf calculated.” He tapped his temple. “This is maddening. Have we come to depend on the computer and Mr. Data for all our historical needs?”
Troi looked even more perplexed. “I don’t understand your problem, Captain.”
Picard pointed at the screen with his uninjured hand. “That is James T. Kirk’s Enterprise and it will be destroyed within minutes. It may be within our capability to save it. Yet, we might be observing it in the mission in which it was destroyed, so if we do change its fate, then we are changing our past.” Picard shifted in his seat again. “Mr. La Forge, ask your engineering crew if any of them recall the exact circumstances surrounding the destruction of Kirk’s Enterprise. And see if there is any way to get even some of the ship’s library computers on-line.”
La Forge began polling the crew members in engineering, still locked behind the isolation doors that were immovable without the lockout codes devised by the personality that had taken over Data.
Picard instructed Ensign McKnight to bring their Enterprise closer to Kirk’s, to see if their sensors could pick up any sign of life on board.
“Why are life signs so important?” Troi asked.
“Because there was no loss of life when Kirk’s Enterprise was destroyed. If we find there are crew members on board, then the ship is not meant to be destroyed here, and we are free to attempt to rescue it.”
“Captain Picard,” O’Brien said, “the faster we go along this [404] course, the more difficult it will be to return. The quantum compression waves are beginning to pile up like waves breaking against a shore. And they’re starting to limit the amount of space we have to maneuver in.”
