by David Mack
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For all those architects of imagination in whose footsteps I am privileged to walk . . .
and for Leonard
Historian’s Note
The events of this story take place after the Enterprise crew’s mission to the diplomatic conference on Babel (“Journey to Babel”), one week after their mission to Argus X (“Obsession”), and roughly six weeks after a foreign spy escaped from the Enterprise having stolen the mysterious alien artifact known as the Transfer Key (Star Trek: Legacies—Book 1: Captain to Captain).
Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.
—UNESCO Constitution, 1946
One
Una limped alone in a land without shadow. Two merciless suns, high overhead, scorched the white salt flats. Had it been hours or days since she had crossed the dimensional barrier to this forsaken place? Time felt slow and elastic. The glaring orbs of day seemed never to move.
Perhaps this world is tidally locked to its parent stars.
It was a rational explanation for the endless noontime, yet it fell short of explaining what truly felt askew to Captain Una about this bizarre alien universe. Plodding toward a distant sprawl of hills backed by rugged mountains, she was plagued by the sensation of running while standing still, as if in a dream. Far ahead, haze-shrouded hilltops bobbed with her uneven steps and lurched in time with her wounded gait, as salt crystals crunched beneath the soles of her dusty, Starfleet standard-issue boots.
Both halves of her uniform—its black trousers and green command tunic—were ripped and frayed in several spots. It was all damage incurred on the planet Usilde in her home universe, during her harried escape through traps wrought from brambles, nettles, and thorns. To reach the citadel created by extradimensional invaders known as the Jatohr, Una had been forced to defy the taboos of the indigenous Usildar, who both feared and despised the alien fortress, which had appeared without warning years earlier in one of their rain forest’s larger lakes. What Una knew and the Usildar did not was that the alien stronghold was also the key to traveling between this blighted dimension and the one she called home—which meant it was also her only hope of rescuing the other members of an ill-fated Enterprise landing party, who had been exiled here eighteen years earlier while she had been forced to bear helpless witness.
I am no longer helpless. And I will bring my shipmates home.
She swept a lock of her raven hair from her eyes, noted the delicate sheen of perspiration on the back of her pale hand. Peering ahead, she found no tracks to follow, no road to guide her journey. Her training nagged at her. It demanded she proceed based on careful observation and rational deduction, but there were no facts here to parse. Only level sands and blank emptiness, stretching away to a faded horizon. And yet, Una knew she was moving in the right direction. It wasn’t that her Illyrian mental discipline gave her any special insight into this universum incognita; it was something more basic and less rational. It was instinct. A hunch. A feeling.
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 an 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 s
afe 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.
Two
Captain James T. Kirk strode the corridors of the Enterprise with a sense of purpose. On most days, under normal circumstances, he made a point of affecting a relaxed air in front of his crew. On occasion he was even known to share a genial smile with those junior officers and enlisted personnel he passed en route from one part of the starship to another.
This was not one of those days.
His mind was preoccupied to a peculiar degree, bent toward grim memories of recent events. Just a week prior, the Enterprise’s survey of Argus X had resurrected an old horror from Kirk’s past, a gaseous creature that drained iron-based blood corpuscles from living beings—in effect, a vampire masquerading as a cloud of sickly sweet vapor. It was the same alien monster that eleven years earlier had killed over two hundred of Kirk’s shipmates on the Starship Farragut, including his commanding officer, Captain Garrovick.
That score was now settled. The dikironium cloud creature had been exterminated. Despite his commitment to Starfleet’s core mission of peaceful exploration, Kirk felt no remorse for having slain the gaseous fiend, which was capable of interstellar travel. It had posed an unqualified threat to the safety of humanoid life throughout the galaxy. If he were ever to encounter another of its ilk, he would terminate it with the same ruthless dispatch.
If only all my command decisions were so clear-cut.
Weeks had passed since he and Spock had ushered Captain Una—a former first officer of the Enterprise under Chris Pike and most recently the commanding officer of the Starship Yorktown—through a portal to an alternate universe. At the time Kirk had felt skeptical of her nearly fanatical devotion to her lost shipmates. As a captain he sympathized; she had been a lieutenant, commanding a landing party for the first time, when her crewmates were lost. But they had been missing in action for eighteen years. Wasn’t it time she moved on?
Then, last week on Argus X, his nose had caught that cloying sweet odor, and all his rage and grief from a decade earlier had come rushing back, animating his every word and deed until his errand of justice was served. In the shadow of those terrible events, he understood Captain Una’s actions more clearly than ever.
The past is never forgotten; it’s always with us.
Junior personnel strove to avoid drawing Kirk’s hard stare as he quick-stepped through the Constitution-class starship’s curving gray corridors, but there was one officer who was desperate to snag a moment of his attention: his new yeoman, Ensign Kalliope Dalto. A dark-haired, doe-eyed woman from the human colony on Rigel IV—wispy of frame but whip smart and relentless in her pursuit of excellence—she dogged Kirk with tireless patience, a data slate full of ship’s paperwork tucked under her arm.
In a more charitable mood, Kirk would have halted the chase and let her push the fuel-consumption reports and quartermaster’s requisitions into his hand somewhere back by the turbolift. Unfortunately for Dalto, Kirk was still stung by the betrayal of his most recent yeoman, Ensign Lisa Bates, who had absconded from the Enterprise with a powerful and dangerous alien artifact known as the Transfer Key. The gadget had been entrusted to Kirk’s care by Captain Pike, who had inherited the responsibility from Captain April.
And I was the one who lost it.
Bates had been beamed off the Enterprise by a Romulan bird-of-prey, revealing her true allegiance even as she rubbed Kirk’s nose in his failure to detect a spy who had toiled at his side for months. Coming so shortly after the promotion and transfer of Lieutenant Janice Rand, perhaps the best captain’s yeoman with whom Kirk had ever served, Bates’s betrayal had struck an exceptionally cruel blow. Of course, it was unfair to take out his resentments on his newest yeoman, but history taught him it was a tradition as old as the sea.
It seemed, however, no one had apprised Dalto of that fact.
She caught up to Kirk just before he reached the door to the conference room. Her timbre was polite but assertive, neither showing nor brooking disrespect. “Pardon me, Captain!” As he halted and turned to face her, she extended the data slate and stylus to him with a courteous smile. “Today’s reports, sir.”
He frowned but stifled a sigh as he signed one report after another, then handed the stylus and slate back to Dalto. “Thank you, Yeoman.”
She tucked the stylus into its slot on the side of the slate. “Commander Spock and Lieutenant Uhura are waiting for you in briefing room one.”
Kirk arched one eyebrow and shot a sidelong glance at the door behind him. The panel on the bulkhead beside it identified it clearly: BRIEFING ROOM 1.
He forced a mirthless smile. “Thank you, Yeoman. Dismissed.”
Dalto returned the way they had come, heading back to the turbolift with unhurried grace. Kirk continued on his way, into the briefing room—where, as Dalto had duly informed him, his first officer and senior communications officer both stood awaiting his arrival, a portrait of opposites: half-Vulcan Spock with his pale, almost greenish complexion and bowl-cut sable hair, human Uhura with her flawless brown skin and elegant coif. They both faced the door as Kirk entered. He motioned for them to be at ease. “As you were.” They moved to stand behind their customary seats at the asymmetrically pentagonal conference table.
Though Kirk often found the briefing room’s windowless, clamshell-curved blue-gray bulkheads and dark blue carpeting claustrophobic, today he welcomed its privacy. He sat on the narrow side of the head of the table, which cued Spock and Uhura to take their seats.
“What have you found?”
Spock’s delivery was as dry as the deserts of his homeworld. “Not as much as we had hoped, Captain. The Klingons have intercepted and destroyed all Starfleet reconnaissance probes launched into the Korinar Sector.”
“What about long-range scans?”
“Inconclusive,” Spock said. “We’ve detected increased Klingon starship traffic near the Usilde system, but how much of a presence they have established on the surface is unclear.”
Kirk swiveled his chair toward Uhura. “Signal traffic?”
“More than usual,” she said. “All of it encrypted, as expected.”
“I presume we’ve applied the usual ciphers?”
A nod. “Yes, sir. No luck so far.”
Their news left Kirk frustrated. “Until we know what kind of welcome to expect from the Klingons, we can’t risk going back to Usilde.”
His declaration discomfited Spock. “Captain Una is counting on us to facilitate her return from the alternate universe.”
“I’m aware of that, Mister Spock. But at the moment, the Klingons don’t seem inclined to let us visit. Not that it would matter if we could.” He asked Uhura, “Any leads on the stolen Transfer Key? Or my former yeoman?”
“Reports from Starfleet Intelligence suggest the bird-of-prey that picked up Ensign Bates remains active in the Kaleb Sector. But they don’t know if she or the Key are still on board.”
“That’s not much, but it’s a start. Stay on top of that, Lieutenant. If any ship or starbase spots that vessel, I want its coordinates and heading relayed on the double.”
“Understood, sir.”
“As for Usilde, we’re out of time for playing it safe.” Kirk reached forward and thumbed open a vid channel to the bridge. The face of Commander Montgomery Scott, the Enterprise’s chief engineer, appeared on all three screens of the triangular tabletop viewer. “Mister Scott?
Set course for the Korinar Sector, warp factor six.”
“Aye, Captain,” Scott said in his Aberdeen brogue. “Warp factor six.”
Kirk switched off the monitor. Spock fixed him with a questioning look. “Are you sure that’s wise, Captain? With the Organian peace talks about to commence on Centaurus, such action could be construed by the Klingons as a hostile provocation.”
“I promised Captain Una we’d help bring her and her people home. So the Klingons can take it any way they want—but whether they like it or not, we’re going back to Usilde.”
* * *
If there was a name for the disorientation that plagued Sadira’s transition back to living among Romulans, she decided it most likely would be tishaal-rovukam—a Rihannsu word whose closest English transliteration was “situational whiplash.”
She had spent the past several years living under the alias Lisa Bates, playing the part of an eager young Starfleet officer and, most recently, dutiful yeoman to none other than Starfleet’s highest-profile young starship commander, Captain James T. Kirk. Had she aspired to a career on the stage, she might have considered it the role of a lifetime. As a sworn officer of the Tal Shiar, the clandestine intelligence service of the Romulan Star Empire, she had found it a degrading slog.
At least my servitude with Kirk was brief, she reminded herself. And an unqualified success.
Clanks of colliding metal and the hiss of plasma torches filled the cramped engine room of the ChR Velibor. Sadira stood with her back to a gray-green bulkhead, careful not to impede the mechanics and technicians who labored under the watchful eye of the Vas Hatham–class bird-of-prey’s chief engineer, Lieutenant Ranimir. Hovering behind him were the ship’s commanding officer and ranking centurion. Neither Commander Creelok nor Centurion Mirat made any effort to disguise their disapproval of the alien device that was being married to the bird-of-prey’s main power core—a task imposed on them and their crew by Sadira, who had been given free rein by her superiors to test their new prize, the Transfer Key.
