“I…wasn’t playing,” Kirk said. He started walking, heading for the center of camp, anything to get moving. Sadness welled within him.
His friends followed, keeping silent, somehow aware of his need to make sense of what had happened, what he had done.
He thought about the creature. Had it known it was making the ultimate sacrifice for the girl? Was it a sacrifice at all if the spirit of B’ath b’Etel was somehow truly within it, and could move on to another creature after death? Kirk was suddenly overcome by profound grief for the loss of such a unique form of life.
“Jim, we know you weren’t playing,” McCoy said after a time, just before they reached the center of the camp. “But the trouble is, Picard isn’t saying what it was you were doing.”
Kirk sighed and glanced at Spock. “He told you about the murders?”
“He told us about one murder,” Spock said. “Was there another?”
“Sedge Nirra?” Kirk asked.
“We have determined that Sedge Nirra was, in fact, a surgically altered Cardassian,” Spock said. “Indeed, he appears to have been attacked by the same b’ath rayl that attacked you, which rules out the possibility of murder.”
“Same thing about some Bajoran national with a couple of aliases,” McCoy added. “Picard said Sedge and the Bajoran were the two responsible for Nilan’s murder.” The doctor shook his head in disbelief. “A Cardassian and a Bajoran working together to sell stolen artifacts. I’m one hundred-and-fifty-two with more spare parts than a hangar deck, and I still get to see something new every day.”
Kirk led his friends past the center of the camp where a handful of Starfleet ensigns were setting up five long tables for a meal. Lara’s small cooking center was almost hidden behind a stack of portable food replicators from the Enterprise.
He halted between two of the camp’s bubble tents to look down to the Inland Sea, where the bright sunshine sparked in the green shoals of water. Onshore, the camp’s diving platform was beached, no longer necessary, because of the three floating piers that had been assembled among the marker buoys.
“What about the two Bajoran brothers, the divers who went after Picard?” Kirk asked. “Arl Trufor. Arl Kresin.”
“Beverly Crusher did the autopsies,” McCoy said. “I had my hands full with you, thank you very much.”
“Were they murder victims, too?” Kirk asked.
McCoy looked over at Spock. “See, I told you there was something funny going on here.”
“I fail to see the humor, Doctor.”
“How funny?” Kirk asked.
“Try this on for size,” McCoy said. “The divers were drugged. Heavily. That shut down their autonomic reflexes. They lost consciousness and just stopped breathing.”
That was a possibility that had not occurred to Kirk. “What kind of drug? How’s it administered?”
“Interesting you should ask, Jim. Because you were exposed to it, too. And so was Picard.”
That made no sense at all to Kirk. “The drug, Bones—what is it?”
“Nothing I’ve ever seen. Some kind of super tri-ox compound for the most part.”
“Tri-ox?” Maybe this does makes sense after all, Kirk thought. “For breathing underwater?”
“A human being can’t breathe underwater without extensive structural changes,” McCoy said irritably. “But, yes, like the hypopacks divers wear in case their air supply malfunctions. The packs shoot you full of tri-ox so you can hold your breath for half an hour or so.”
“Did Dr. Crusher determine how the divers were exposed to it?”
McCoy shook his head. “No. But from the molecular structure, I’d say the most likely mode of exposure was absorption through the skin. Like a nerve toxin.”
“A toxin,” Kirk said. He thought about the ink-dark water that always accompanied the presence of B’ath b’Etel. Or was it merely a b’ath rayl? A large, unthinking creature, not a god at all? “But Picard and I…we didn’t die.”
“If I had to take a guess—”
“And you usually do,” Spock said. “Logical deduction being somewhat at odds with your predilection for consulting chicken bones and tea leaves.”
“Ignore him,” Kirk said. “Your guess is what?”
“That the divers had a fatal reaction because they absorbed the toxin while using rebreathers. Too much tri-ox combined with an outside source of pressurized oxygen can induce a definite narcotic effect. But you and Picard—if your stories are somewhere in the general area of the truth—you were exposed while you were just trying to hold your breath. I wouldn’t be surprised if you felt some kind of euphoria or mental confusion afterward, but that’s what saved you. A lucky accident.”
Kirk stared at the brilliant white crests of the green waves breaking onshore. “That’s the question, isn’t it?” he said to no one in particular.
“Captain?” Spock prompted.
“Was it all an accident? Or was it B’ath b’Etel’s plan to achieve atonement?”
“All right,” McCoy said. “Now I’m getting worried.”
Kirk looked up at the brilliant blue sky of Bajor, basking in the warmth of this world’s sun. He had been too long without it.
He made his confession.
“Bones, Spock…I believe the creature they say I killed, the b’ath rayl…I believe that it was the last of its species…”
“If that is true,” Spock observed, “then such loss is a tragedy.”
“No,” Kirk said. “It’s a cause for celebration.” Kirk closed his eyes and lifted his face to the sun.
“It means…there was no new b’ath rayl for the spirit of B’athb’Etel to move into. So he was finally free to go to the Celestial Temple.” Kirk didn’t know if what he said was true, but he wanted it to be true. Maybe that was enough.
“Transmogrification of the pagh, Captain? I was not aware that was a tenet of the Bajoran faith.”
Kirk could hear the skepticism in Spock, remembered something Dr. Rowhn had told him. “Different provinces, different details, Spock. But the lessons are the same. The underlying truths.”
McCoy, on the other hand, radiated confusion, and annoyance. “What lessons?”
Kirk opened his eyes, considering—savoring—the whirlwind of activity he and Picard had brought to this small camp, this small piece of Bajor. “The sins of the fathers are not always visited upon the child, Bones. Anything is possible.” Even changing the will of the Prophets, Kirk thought. “If you’re willing to take the risk and…throw caution to the winds.” He laughed quietly as he saw all the puzzle pieces finally solidify into a whole.
“That’s it,” McCoy said. “When you start getting philosophical like that, it’s definitely time for the patient to get back in bed.”
“Not this patient. I say it’s time we found Picard, and we go down to the water’s edge, and we build a big fire…”
“And toast marsh melons again?” Spock asked uncomfortably.
“No. We build a big fire, and I’m going to tell you a story.” Kirk started walking to the shore, to the sea. And to everything that lay beyond.
“Let me guess,” McCoy said as he fell into step. “It’s going to be a long story.”
“They usually are,” Spock commented.
The three friends went forward together, the sun blazing overhead, nowhere near sunset or the end of the day.
“I thought you two liked my stories,” Kirk said. There was a lightness to his steps he hadn’t felt for years.
Shuttlecraft from the Enterprise flashed by overhead. A large cargo transporter pad by the Starfleet bivouac shimmered with the arrival of another pontoon for a floating dock. Picard must be having the time of his life, Kirk thought. Even more fun than a vacation with me. If that’s possible.
“Just tell me one thing,” McCoy said. “Does this story have a happy ending?”
Kirk put his arms around the shoulders of his two friends.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s not over yet.”
Epilogue
The Totality
U.S.S. MONITOR, BEYOND THE GALACTIC BARRIER, STARDATE 55600.7
FOR THREE YEARS, his ship had been dying, but now that extinction was only minutes away, Captain John Lewinski felt no fear, and no apprehension.
Only anger.
“Seven minutes to contact,” Commander Terranova shouted from her station at the helm of the Defiant- class starship. The young Centauran’s voice was raw, near breaking, barely audible over the whine of the Monitor’s warp core, pushed past its limits for too long. Like Lewinski and the rest of his surviving crew, Sel Terranova had been on duty for fifty-three hours without let up, ever since the Distortion had veered from the intergalactic transwarp corridor and had started its pursuit.
There was no question what the outcome of the deadly race would be, but the captain of the Monitor was determined to stretch it out to the final millisecond. Every light-day closer to the Milky Way was a light-day less his final desperate signal to Starfleet would have to travel.
Five years earlier, the Monitor had carried James T. Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard to what was considered by some to be the Borg homeworld. After those tragic events, the Monitor had become Starfleet’s dedicated testbed for the ongoing study of a captured Borg transwarp drive. And it was in that role three years ago that Lewinski had filed a flight plan setting out a routine voyage from the Monitor’s home port of Starbase 324 to Starbase 718, far removed from any potential Romulan listening posts.
The test run was scheduled to last five days. Of the thirty-eight members of the skeleton crew, fully twenty of them were warp-drive engineers.
Whether the Borg drive had malfunctioned that day, or whether it had performed according to specifications still undiscovered, Lewinski didn’t know. What he did know, however, was that seventeen hours and fourteen minutes into the voyage, the Monitor’s transwarp corridor had inflated exponentially—a phenomenon never before encountered. By the time six members of the engineering team had sacrificed their lives to disable the drive’s power conduits, the Monitor had dropped into normal space more than 350,000 light-years from home.
Lewinski knew he would never forget what he had seen on the viewscreen that day. In one direction, the Milky Way Galaxy was frozen in majestic splendor, set off like a whirlpool of jewels by her satellites, the Greater and Lesser Magellanic Clouds, and blemished only by the irregularity of Sagittarius, a dwarf spheroidal galaxy in collision with the Milky Way, directly opposite the galactic core from Earth, and thus unseen through most of human history.
In the other direction, the Great Galaxy in Andromeda beckoned.
And in all other directions, the other galaxies of the universe dusted the endless night, as numerous as stars in the skies of Earth.
When the ship’s position had been confirmed, the crew had quickly realized what their eventual fate would be.
The Monitor was no Starship Voyager. Lewinski was no Captain Janeway.
The Monitor would never return home. End of story.
At first, of course, they had sought to find some hope to sustain them. But the crew’s single fragile straw had quickly slipped from their grasp.
The transwarp drive was inoperative, and for no reason that the surviving engineers could determine.
With only two years of life-support capability and, with only standard warp propulsion, a voyage of centuries before them, the surviving crew had gone to work cannibalizing the ship and husbanding the replicators in order to develop and construct multiply redundant medical-stasis units. A rival engineering team, who wanted to stake their survival on a resonant transporter signal—a technique which had only been used successfully once, and then only for a handful of decades—ended up fighting over power reserves. One engineer died. In desperation, three others beamed themselves toward the Milky Way in the vain hope that a more advanced Federation might be able to reconstruct their signal, and thus themselves, sometime in the distant future.
A year after the transwarp failure, with only seventeen crew left to him, Captain Lewinski himself had discovered the answer to the engineers’ most nagging question: The Monitor had dropped out of transwarp where it did, not because power had been cut to the drive, but because the tunnel it traveled had come to an end.
The tunnel had opened along a weakened rift in subspace. A rift created by the wake of a robot probe traveling at warp velocities.
Lewinski had discovered the existence of the Federation’s three robotic intergalactic craft by accident, scanning through his ship’s vast datalibrary almost at random. If he had been taught about their mission in some long-ago course at the Academy, he had forgotten all about it.
The probes had been launched more than a century earlier, six months apart, each carrying a message from the Federation to the Kelvan Empire in Andromeda. They were outfitted with advanced Kelvan drives, and Lewinski jumped at the chance of perhaps finding one of those enormous probes and using its vast fuel reserves and high-powered communications relays—to increase the Monitor’s operational life, and to let Starfleet know what had happened to the ship.
To his surprise, almost at once, Lewinski had found one of the probes.
At least, what was left of it.
For what the sensors found was a long-dissipated cloud of detritus, as if that probe, too, had reached this far on its journey to Andromeda, and no farther.
The Monitor had swept up the probe’s fractured components with her tractor beam. Lewinski’s surviving crew had scanned and inspected the debris, not one piece of it larger than a human hand—all that remained of a gigantic craft, larger than an old Constitution-class starship in order to hold the enormous quantities of matter and antimatter required for three centuries of continuous operation.
But the probe had not been destroyed by a matter/antimatter reaction as Lewinski’s engineers had first suspected. Neither had it been destroyed by impact, or by weapons, or by any one of a dozen different subspace anomalies known to distort normal spacetime.
After months of grim analysis, there was only one possible conclusion the captain and his crew could reach.
There was something out here in the intergalactic void.
Something that barred the way to Andromeda more effectively than the Milky Way’s own galactic barrier.
Something that destroyed a spacecraft through no known weaponry or technology.
And something that had made contact with the Monitor fifty-three hours ago, and which was now closing on the small, lost, defenseless starship.
“Five minutes to Distortion contact,” Terranova announced.
Lewinski tightened his hands on the arms of his command chair, as if pulling strength from the mad resonance of the warp core that thrummed through his ship. Whatever was approaching, its sensor signature was unreadable, more a spatial distortion than an actual craft.
But whatever it was, it was clear it was under intelligent control. When the Monitor’s sensors had first scanned it, traveling at a warp factor just a few decimal places below the unattainable warp ten, the Distortion had stopped, instantaneously. Then the Monitor herself had been scanned by a sensor sweep of immeasurable power. Moments later, the Distortion had changed course to head directly for Lewinski’s ship at warp nine-point-nine-nine.
Terranova was the first to realize why the Distortion moved at two different speeds, and the subspace sounding chart she had thrown up onto the viewscreen confirmed it.
At first, the Distortion had been traveling along a transwarp corridor, connecting Andromeda with the Milky Way. But now the Distortion was moving off-angle, and so was restricted to ordinary warp velocities.
Lewinski was staggered by implications, even as he ordered his ship to maximum warp. “An established passage between two galaxies,” he had said. “Who built it? Who’s using it?”
But there were none among his crew who could answer.
As the chase continued, the Distortion gaining parsec by parsec, Lewinski had his crew upload every an
alysis they had made of the nature of space and subspace in the intergalactic void. He added to the collected datapackage a real-time link to every bridge input that monitored the approaching Distortion.
Terranova had programmed a compression sequence, so that all the data could be transmitted in less than five seconds. At the same time, even as their ship fled the Distortion, the remaining engineers heroically reconfigured the forward sensor array for one purpose only—to channel the warp core’s energy output into that single, five-second pulse, sending a subspace signal of immense power toward Earth.
The sensor array would be burned out by that pulse, Lewinski knew. The warp core itself would likely shut down and the safety systems would eject it as it cascaded into overload.
And the pulse would have absolutely no chance of reaching the Milky Way by itself.
But somewhere along the path home, Lewinski knew there were two more robot probes, speeding toward Andromeda. And each had sensitive receivers that would detect his message, encode it for long-distance transmission, and relay it to the Federation’s quadrant-wide deep-space tracking network.
It was a wild risk. A desperate chance. But the only action that Lewinski and his ship could take to warn the Federation what they had found where no one had gone before.
“Four minutes to contact,” Terranova said. “Coming into visual contact.”
The viewscreen showed a field of dazzling smears and blobs—each an island universe with hundreds of millions of stars. But unlike the stars seen at warp, these points of light did not move, so distant were they, even at maximum velocity.
Then Lewinski saw a group of galaxies ripple, as if seen through water streaming past a viewport.
“Are they using some sort of cloaking device?” he asked.
Terranova adjusted the ship’s sensors, looked up at the viewscreen, pushed a strand of hair from her forehead as she peered at the image. “That’s not a cloaking field. According to these readings, whatever that thing is, most of it is in another dimensional space. We’re just seeing a small part of it that intrudes into normal space.”
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