Star Trek: The Original Series: The Rings of Time (star trek: the original series)

by Greg Cox

  “Having trouble?”

  Zoe Querez floated into his quarters without waiting for an invitation. She executed a midair flip so that they were oriented in the same direction. Her slender fingers snagged the elusive blob, then wiped it on her shorts. She had no quarters of her own, he had learned, but was spending more and more time outside the brig. Nobody really had time to babysit her anymore.

  “A little.” He handed her the towel so she could wipe off her suit. “Thanks for the assist, Ms. Querez.”

  Even though he had since learned who she was, he remained dumbfounded by her presence on the ship. So far, the Lewis & Clark’s mission was playing out very differently from what he recalled from the history tapes. A stowaway? A briefly glimpsed alien probe? None of that was in the official accounts of the mission, let alone history as he knew it. Which just made his current predicament all the more challenging. How was he supposed to avoid changing the past when that past wasn’t what he thought it was?

  All he could do was try to get through this mission without blowing his cover, then find some way to send a message to the future. Perhaps a letter in a safe-deposit box, to be delivered to McCoy at an appropriate date hundreds of years from now? Or a time capsule built to survive World War III? Or, better yet, an old-fashioned radio message directed to where a starbase would be two hundred fifty years from now? In theory, his SOS would arrive at just about the right time for Starfleet to receive it.

  Granted, the brass increasingly frowned on unnecessary trips to the past, for fear of wreaking havoc with the timeline, but surely they would grant the Enterprise some leeway in this case. He hoped that Spock and the others would come looking for him. Then maybe they could deal with the little matter of putting his mind back into his own body!

  In the meantime, he had to keep pretending to be Shaun.

  “What’s with this ‘Ms. Querez’ stuff?” Zoe asked. “We’re not on a first-name basis anymore?”

  Oops, Kirk thought. “Sorry. Just a little distracted.”

  “Yeah, I can see that.” She hooked her foot into a wall loop to keep from drifting around the chamber. Her striking brown eyes inspected his unshaven face. “Maybe you should just let it grow out. A little stubble looks good on you.”

  “Thanks,” Kirk said. “But given the length of this cruise, I need to shave sometimes or end up looking like Rip Van Winkle.” Except that Rip woke up in the future, he thought, and I’m stuck two centuries in the past.

  “Good point,” she agreed. “Probably not a great look for you. Why hide that rugged, Right Stuff mug of yours?”

  Kirk raised an eyebrow. Was she flirting with him?

  Despite his unusual circumstances, he couldn’t help being intrigued. Zoe was an attractive woman. And he was going to be stuck on this slow-moving spacecraft for weeks to come…

  But how would Shaun react to her overtures? Was he married, engaged, or otherwise attached? Not for the first time, he wished he had access to the Enterprise’s computer banks. Back on his own ship, he could have called up all of the particulars on Shaun in a moment. By contrast, the Lewis & Clark was too far away from Earth even to have access to — what did they call it these days? The Interweb?

  “I tried growing a beard one summer,” he divulged, assuming that revelation was harmless enough. What human male hadn’t stopped shaving at some point? “It was not a universal success.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” She reached for the razor. “Here, let me help.”

  Taking the razor from his hand, she leaned in closer, and he caught a whiff of a delicate fragrance. She deftly shaved his cheeks and chin with a gentle touch. His two-day-old shadow was quickly transferred to the razor blade and from there to the towel. Not a single stray whisker escaped into the closed environment of the ship. When she was finished, she paused to admire her work. “Yeah, that’s more like it.”

  Kirk checked himself out in the mirror. He liked what he saw.

  “I have to agree. Thanks.” He rubbed his chin, which was now as smooth as a Deltan’s cranium. She hadn’t nicked him once. “Where did an intrepid journalist-slash-stowaway learn to use a razor like that?”

  “Hello?” She smirked at him. “Have you seen my legs?” She wiped the razor clean and handed it back to him. She gave him a sly look. “Maybe you can return the favor someday.”

  Kirk grinned. “I think I’d like that.”

  “Ahem.” Fontana appeared in the doorway. “Am I interrupting something?”

  “Not at all,” Zoe replied, completely unruffled. “How can we help you, astronaut?”

  Fontana ignored her and spoke directly to Kirk instead. “Daily mission briefing in five minutes, remember?” She scowled at Zoe. “If you’re not too busy.”

  “Right,” Kirk said. “The briefing.” He was still learning the ship’s routine. “Thanks for the reminder. Guess I’m still a bit foggy from that zap the other day.”

  He wondered how much longer he could milk that excuse. Certainly, it was plausible enough. Powerful electric shocks were known to cause memory loss. Should he take advantage of that angle more, or would that risk affecting the mission in a significant way? He wouldn’t want to get Shaun relieved of command on grounds of partial amnesia or suspected brain damage. That might have a serious impact on history.

  “No problem,” Fontana said, her tone softening. She eyed him with obvious concern before finally acknowledging Zoe’s presence. “If you could give us a few minutes.”

  It was not a request.

  “Sure. Whatever.” Zoe shrugged. “I need to brainstorm my next blog, anyway, not that I’m going to be able to post it anytime soon.” She rolled her eyes. “You’d think a spaceship this high-tech would have free Wi-Fi, at least.” She winked at Kirk as she glided out the door. “Don’t forget. You owe me.”

  Fontana watched to make sure the other woman left. Her feet claimed the loop Zoe had been using before. She crossed her arms over her chest.

  “What was that all about?”

  “Nothing,” Kirk said, unclear if he was fibbing or not. “She was just helping me shave.”

  “Since when do you need help with something like that?”

  Careful, Kirk thought. He wasn’t sure what Fontana’s problem was. Did she simply disapprove of him socializing with the stowaway, or was it more than that? Once again, he wished he knew more about Shaun’s personal life. How was he going to fake this for the rest of the voyage? He didn’t know enough about who he was supposed to be.

  “I was just being polite,” he assured her. “After all, the four of us are going to be in close quarters for a long time. We might as well try to get along.”

  “I suppose,” she said doubtfully. She peered the way Zoe had gone. “But I still don’t trust her. She doesn’t belong here.”

  Kirk couldn’t disagree. “You can say that again.”

  That seemed to mollify her. “I’m sorry. I know I must sound like a stereotypical jealous ex, but…” Her eyes moistened, and she drew nearer. “Oh, Shaun. I thought I was never going to see you again.”

  Her face was only inches away from his. Her lips parted expectantly.

  Kirk didn’t know how Shaun would respond. “Fontana… Alice…”

  “I know, I know.” She seemed to take his hesitation in stride. “We both agreed that it was a bad idea, that our careers — and the mission — took priority, but that was before I watched you drifting off into space. I almost lost you, Shaun.”

  Kirk stalled. “I’m sorry to put you through that.”

  “It just got me thinking, you know.” Her eyes entreated him. “Did we make a mistake, Shaun? Are we wasting precious time?”

  Time is definitely an issue here, Kirk thought. The oddity of his situation was not lost on him. Had he really traveled two centuries into the past to find himself in the middle of a complicated love triangle? And the devil of it was, he had no idea which, if either, woman he — or, rather, Shaun — was supposed to end up with.

  G
ood thing McCoy isn’t around to see this. He’d never let me hear the end of it.

  The video-com buzzed.

  “Paging Christopher and Fontana.” O’Herlihy’s voice interrupted the awkward moment. His face skyped onto the miniature video screen. “What’s keeping you two?”

  Kirk tried to conceal his relief. “We should probably get going.” Fontana looked disappointed and maybe even a little hurt. He gave her a smile to ease the sting. “We can… talk more later.”

  If Zoe didn’t get to him first.

  “Roger that.” She gave him a funny look, as if something wasn’t quite right, before hitting the speaker button on the comm. “Hold on to your horses, Marcus. We’ll be right there.”

  Kirk hoped that she would chalk up his reticence to ordinary human misunderstandings and relationship issues. That would certainly be the most likely explanation as far as she was concerned. How could she possibly guess the truth?

  He could barely believe it himself!

  “Don’t forget your lucky dog tags,” she reminded him.

  “What? Oh, right.” The metal tags, which had apparently once belonged to Shaun’s father, were tethered to a hook. Kirk wondered if they were the same tags John Christopher had worn when he was beamed aboard the Enterprise. He placed them around his neck. “Can’t forget these.”

  “You never did before,” she said.

  The briefing took place on the ship’s flight deck, since the Lewis & Clark lacked the space for a separate conference room. Kirk couldn’t help comparing it with the bridge of the Enterprise. Like the rest of the ship, it seemed remarkably cramped and primitive by comparison. There wasn’t even a yeoman to serve coffee.

  “There you are,” O’Herlihy said as Kirk and Fontana arrived. He had the copilot’s seat turned toward the back of the module. “Dare I ask what was keeping you?”

  Kirk sighed inside. Did everyone on this ship know more about Shaun’s private life than he did?

  Probably.

  “Nothing that you need to know about.” Fontana adopted a light tone that was probably at odds with her true feelings about what had just happened. She took a place on the ceiling, where she could keep an eye on the two men. “Don’t be a dirty old man.”

  “Occupational hazard,” O’Herlihy quipped, not unlike McCoy. “Just ask my wife.”

  “Sorry for the delay, Doctor.” Kirk settled into the pilot’s seat. He guessed that was Shaun Christopher’s usual spot. “My fault. I guess I’m not exactly at the top of my game.”

  “Don’t apologize,” O’Herlihy said. “If we were back on Earth, you’d already be on medical leave, if not under observation twenty-four/seven.”

  Yes, Kirk decided. He definitely reminds me of Bones.

  “We have a job to do, Doctor. I intend to do it.”

  He had already started covertly studying the ship’s operations manuals. The technology was remarkably simple by twenty-third-century standards. Scotty would have been appalled by the unsophisticated systems and engineering. Why, they were still getting by on a first-generation impulse drive. Zefram Cochrane hadn’t even been born yet.

  If nothing else, Kirk reflected, he had been given a front-row seat to space history in the making. The Lewis & Clark was a covered wagon compared with the Enterprise, which just made its crew’s dedication and courage all the more impressive. Fontana and O’Herlihy, not to mention Christopher, were true pioneers, venturing out into the unforgiving void with nothing but a crude titanium hull to protect them. They had no deflectors, no phasers, no photon torpedoes, no transporters. Not even artificial gravity or universal translators.

  I need to appreciate this opportunity, he thought. Not take it for granted.

  “All right, then,” O’Herlihy said. “Let’s get down to business.” He leafed through a stack of printouts. “We’ve received the latest updates from Mission Control. Seems they’re keeping a tight lid on any info about that probe, and they expect us to do the same.”

  “So, they’re keeping the whole thing quiet,” Fontana said. “Just like they did about our unwanted guest earlier.”

  Kirk observed that Zoe had not been invited to the briefing. No surprise there. He wondered what the enticing stowaway was up to at that moment. Just working on her “blog,” whatever that was?

  “Exactly. They don’t want to stir up any more controversy about this mission, especially since we didn’t manage to retrieve the probe.” O’Herlihy clucked in regret. “A pity it zipped away like that. Just think of all we could have learned from it!”

  Don’t worry, Kirk thought. We’ll run into it again — two hundred and fifty years from now.

  “It’s completely gone?” Fontana asked. “There’s no sign of it?”

  O’Herlihy shook his head. “LIDAR tracked it to the edge of the solar system before losing it. Hubble has lost sight of it, too. It’s long gone.”

  Kirk frowned. He hoped that they hadn’t also lost their best chance of putting him back where he belonged, both physically and temporally. He remembered how battered and decrepit the probe had appeared in his time. What if the future version of the probe was too damaged to reverse whatever it had done the first time?

  Is it already en route to Klondike VI, he wondered, or does it have other errands to attend to first? Maybe some other gas giants to observe?

  “I wonder where it came from,” Fontana said. “And what it was doing here.”

  “We may never know,” O’Herlihy said sadly. “In the meantime, however, NASA wants us to continue with our mission and complete our observations of Saturn and its moons. And, Lord, is there plenty to observe.”

  “Such as?” Kirk asked.

  “Take a look at this.” O’Herlihy relocated to one of the auxiliary terminals and called up an image on a monitor. Kirk and Fontana looked over his shoulder. “These are our latest photos of Saturn’s north pole, taken during our last pass.”

  The famous hexagonal vortex looked just the way Kirk remembered it from the future, spread vibrantly for thousands of kilometers atop the planet. It looked just like the travel photos and calendar shots he had seen his entire life, not to mention his own personal memories.

  “It’s back to normal,” he realized. “Just like before.”

  “That’s right,” the scientist confirmed. “What’s more, I’ve been running an analysis of the rings. They’ve also stabilized. The vast majority of the ring matter has already fallen back into its usual formations.”

  “Just in the last day or so?” Fontana stared at the monitor. She voiced the thought they were probably all thinking. “Was it the probe? Did it do something?”

  “Possibly. Probably.” O’Herlihy scratched his beard. “There were those energy pulses right before you ran into difficulty, Shaun. As nearly as I can tell, the pulses were directed at the planet’s north pole, right into the heart of the vortex.”

  Kirk pondered the scientist’s report. “What kind of energy, Doctor?”

  “I’m not sure,” O’Herlihy admitted. “Possibly a stream of charged particles or directed plasma waves. Like a laser, almost.”

  Or a phaser? Kirk wondered. Actual phasers would not be developed by Earth science for at least two centuries. Had the probe fired some variety of phaser at Saturn? Spock had not detected any defensive systems aboard the probe, but perhaps its phaser banks operated on different principles and were not recognized by the Enterprise’s sensors. Or maybe the beams were simply a previously unknown type of directed energy. In either case, they would be beyond O’Herlihy’s experience.

  “So, the beams rebooted the hexagon somehow?” Fontana speculated, apparently more interested in their function than their nature. “Which stabilized the rings? That’s fantastic!”

  But not unheard of, Kirk thought. He recalled the alien hieroglyphics on the probe and that obelisk back on Miramanee’s world. Once activated, the obelisk had projected a powerful deflector beam that had kept the planet from being struck by an oncoming asteroid. Was it possible th
at the probe had been designed to serve a similar purpose, fixing Saturn’s deteriorating rings? Or, more likely, resetting some other mechanism hidden somewhere deep within the mysterious hexagon?

  “You may be on to something,” he told Fontana. “Perhaps the probe was here to repair Saturn’s rings.”

  “And it left once it completed its mission?” Marcus seized on the idea, visibly fascinated. “But who sent the probe? And what interest would they have in maintaining Saturn’s rings?”

  Good questions, Kirk thought. He wished he could tell O’Herlihy and Fontana more about the Preservers, not that there was much to tell. The ancient aliens were a mystery even in his own time. Had they anticipated humanity colonizing this solar system in the future and wanted to keep Saturn and its moons stabilized for Earth’s benefit? Or did they have another motive for fixing the ringed giant? Perhaps they simply wanted to preserve one of the sector’s natural wonders for conservation or aesthetic reasons. It would be funny, he mused, if the Preservers ultimately turned out to be some sort of cosmic park service.

  “Shaun,” O’Herlihy asked him, “you were out there when those pulses fired. What did you see before the probe shocked you?”

  You mean, what did Christopher see, Kirk thought, before I set up shop in his body. In truth, his last memory before finding himself in orbit was of touching the probe in the Enterprise’s transporter room. He hadn’t seen the pulses O’Herlihy was talking about.

  “To be honest, it’s all kind of a blur,” he said. “Sorry.”

  Marcus sighed. He sounded disappointed but not too surprised. “I was afraid of that. A little traumatic short-term-memory loss was to be expected, I suppose.”

  “Is that serious?” Fontana asked, sounding worried.

  “I doubt it,” the doctor said. “Patients who have been in accidents often have little recollection of the actual events. It’s probably nothing to be concerned about, provided the rest of Shaun’s memory is intact.” He looked Kirk over. “You do remember who I am, right?”

  He made it sound like a joke, but Kirk thought he heard something more serious underneath.