Crucible: Kirk (20 page)

2293

Kirk worked the helm controls of the shuttlecraft—the
Archimedes,
he had learned during his voyage—and brought it down through the cloud cover. Below extended the dull plain of this ancient, barren world. Fissures and rock formations appeared here and there, breaking up the otherwise-featureless surface.

The journey to this planet had taken weeks. Kirk had traveled well away from normal starship routes and shipping lanes, periodically setting down on some empty moon or asteroid. His goal had been to move through space unobserved, thus avoiding making any alterations to the timeline. He'd also throttled the shuttle back to impulse power a number of times in an attempt to mask his trail.

Up ahead, Kirk saw the horizon drop away. He checked the sensors and read the measurements of the crater. It descended to a depth of two hundred meters and stretched a kilometer in diameter. Here, twenty-three years earlier, while Kirk had lain comatose in a turbolift aboard the
Enterprise,
Korax had taken his own wounded starship and raced through the atmosphere, intent on laying waste to what he believed to be the site of a new Starfleet weapon. Instead, the Klingon commander had destroyed—or killed—the Guardian of Forever.

Or at least, so Kirk had thought. So everybody had thought. But on the recording that had brought him here now, Kirk's future self had revealed that when he'd left the nexus the second time and visited this place billions of years in the past, he had told the Guardian of its demise. More than that, he had asked both for its help and for it to save itself. It had seemed only reasonable to the future Kirk that a time portal would be able to move itself through time, and he had warned the Guardian to do just that before Korax's ship reached the surface of this world. He had also requested that when it did so, it moved itself to now, to the days after the
Enterprise
had encountered the energy ribbon. Kirk, his future self had hoped, would then be able to use the Guardian to complete his plan.

The shuttlecraft
Archimedes
flew past the raised rim of the crater and out over the wide hollow. Within, the depression seemed empty, devoid of any characteristics beyond the radial lines reaching out from its center. The place seemed as dead as the rest of this haunted world.

Kirk performed a sensor sweep. He found no life signs, but he also scanned in particular for waves of time displacement, a singular trait of the Guardian. He studied the area within the crater itself and then out beyond that, to the limits of the sensors.

He detected nothing.

Kirk brought the
Archimedes
down, following along the rounded slope. Near the center of the crater, he landed the shuttle. Before disembarking, he went to the rear compartment and retrieved a tricorder. He hesitated for a moment, then pulled out a phaser as well.

Outside, the ground crunched beneath his boots. The air seemed still and stale, the surroundings inert. Kirk corrected his earlier appraisal: this place did not feel haunted; it felt abandoned.

Activating the tricorder, Kirk scanned the immediate area. The readouts reflected the crash here of a Klingon starship: specific types and levels of radioactivity, certain metallic fragments atop and within the soil, the residue of materials unique to the construction techniques of the Klingon Imperial Fleet. He also detected, deep underground, rock strata of wildly varying ages: one hundred years, one thousand, one million. But while the latter readings indicated the presence at one time of the Guardian, they showed no sign of it being here now.

Maybe the Guardian
was
destroyed,
Kirk thought. Or perhaps, prior to the impact, it had taken itself backward in time billions of years, spending its existence in an eternal loop. It had claimed to be its own beginning and its own ending, and perhaps that was what it had meant.

Kirk raised his eyes and peered along the rim of the crater above him. “Guardian!” he called. His voice seemed shallow in the empty place, and it generated no echo.

He waited for a few moments, then called again. He received no response, nor had he really expected any. Finally, he turned and headed back to the shuttle.

Seated at the front console, Kirk gazed out at the vacant crater. If the Guardian did not do what his future self had asked, if it did not save itself from being destroyed by Korax's ship by moving itself forward in time to now, then what would he do?
Or maybe I'm too late,
Kirk thought. Maybe the Guardian had already appeared during the weeks it had taken him to reach this planet, and then taken itself away again.

Whatever the case, if the Guardian did not appear, Kirk would have to choose another course. His future self had charged him with two responsibilities: work with Picard to stop Soran in 2371, and avoid changing history between now and then. If Kirk could not utilize the Guardian to reach Veridian Three at that time, then he would have to find another clandestine means of reaching the future.

Of course, you can always just live another seventy-eight years,
he told himself. But he knew that he would need to live those decades in complete seclusion. In the years between 2293 and 2371, the universe had believed him dead, and in order to avoid altering the timeline, that would have to continue to be the case. Kirk did not relish the thought of living completely alone for all of that time, but even if he attempted to do so, and even if he managed to keep himself hidden away, he could not guarantee that he would even live to the year 2371.
And at one hundred thirty-eight, just how much help will I be in physically trying to stop a madman?

No, much as he hated the idea, he needed the Guardian.

Kirk worked the sensor controls, programming to scan continuously for any indications of temporal displacement—and to be safe, for life signs. Then he stood up and moved to the rear compartment, where he opened the emergency survival cache. From it, he took a ration pack and a pouch of water.

Back in the front of the shuttle, he began to eat. It troubled him to have so little control of whatever would come next. The course his life would take from here, as well as the fate of the hundreds of millions on Veridian IV, might depend on the Guardian of Forever.

That thought did not fill him with confidence.

On his thirteenth day at the bottom of the crater, Kirk woke with the gray dawn, just as he had on the previous dozen days. He rose from his bedroll and immediately checked the sensors. They read clear, and the log confirmed what the lack of any alarms through the night had already told him: there had been no sign of the Guardian.

Kirk walked back into the rear compartment, into the refresher. Afterward, he ate his morning rations and drank the allotment of water he allowed himself. When he'd finished, he grabbed up his tricorder and phaser and went outside.

The days here had passed slowly and without variation. The overcast skies brightened and darkened, but other than that, they never changed. The impact crater caused by Korax's vessel stood as silent and unmoving testament to the destruction that could be wrought by distrust, but it too remained the same.

It seemed appropriate to Kirk that he had ended up here again. The sacrifice that this place had demanded of him had never left him. He had never expected to return here. After he and Spock had traveled back to Earth in 1930 to retrieve Bones and restore history, he had wanted nothing more than to put as much distance as he could between himself and the Guardian, between his life without Edith and his life with her.

But when the
Enterprise
had been scheduled a couple of years later to return, Kirk had relented. He and Spock and Bones had been ordered, by virtue of their previous experience with the Guardian, to directly support the efforts of a group of Federation historians, and he had not allowed his emotions to keep him away. He had instead focused on his duties as a Starfleet officer, suppressing as best he could the memories of his own shattered dreams. Still, the Guardian had demonstrated how easily the timeline could be altered, how effortlessly lives could be torn asunder.

The third time he'd come here, when the
Enterprise
had received a distress call from the Einstein research station that had once orbited here, he had not even made it down to the planet's surface. Rather, the temporal emanations had caused a Klingon squadron to assume the worst and launch an attack. Kirk and his crew had largely—and almost miraculously—survived that encounter, while many other Starfleet and Klingon officers had not. Kirk had not even seen the Guardian during that incident, and yet something—his proximity to it, he supposed—had left him with the uncomfortable feeling of being linked to it in some way. It made no sense, but—

The air suddenly shifted and cooled slightly, and Kirk heard a sound he could not place, but that he vaguely recognized. He looked over to the center of the crater and saw a mist hovering above the land. His heart began to race, but whether out of anticipation or dread he could not tell.

A moment later, the mist cleared, and the irregular ring of the Guardian of Forever stood there, looking precisely as it had on the other occasions Kirk had seen it. He walked up to it at once, feeling a sense of urgency that he immediately recognized as foolhardy. Whether he traveled to Veridian Three now or a year from now, he would arrive at the same time, at the same place.

“Guardian,” he said. “Do you know me?”

It did not respond, which did not surprise Kirk. Before his second visit here, he had read the reports of the researchers, who noted that the Guardian did not provide answers to every question put to it. Kirk decided to ask something he had asked before and which had netted a reply.

“Guardian,” he said, “are you machine or being?”

Still nothing.

Kirk opted for a different approach. “Guardian, my future self helped to rescue you from destruction.”

“I am my own beginning, my own ending,”
it said, sections of its asymmetrical loop glowing in time with its words. Its voice sounded loud and deep, even within the wide space of the crater.

“Have you come here, to this time, from twenty-three Earth years ago?” Kirk asked, wanting to verify what he had been told.

“I am the Guardian of Forever,”
the vortex declared.
“I am the union and the intersection of all moments and all places. I am what was and what will be. Through me is eternity kept.”

“Did you travel to this time to avoid your own end when a Klingon vessel crashed onto this world?” Kirk wanted to know.

Again, the Guardian answered only with silence.

There's no use waiting to see if this will work,
Kirk thought. “I wish to see the past of Jean-Luc Picard, whose life once intersected with that of my future self,” he said. He could have asked to see the life of the future Kirk, but since he had himself never entered the nexus, his future self had never left it, had never joined Picard's battle against Soran—at least, that's what he thought. Temporal mechanics frequently failed to make sense. Still, regardless of his own involvement or lack of involvement in fighting Soran, Picard definitely had, and so a replay of his life would reveal the time to which Kirk needed to travel.

“Behold,”
the Guardian said.
“A gateway to the past, if you wish.”

The white mist reappeared, falling from the top of the Guardian's ring and through the wide opening at its center. Then images began to form: a baby being born, being held by his mother, crying as he was fed. Sleeping, crawling, learning to walk. Going to school, walking between rows of plants, wrestling with a larger, older boy.

Kirk watched as the life of a man he had never met unfolded before him. The experience felt voyeuristic, like an invasion of this man's privacy. But he continued to look on, the lives of two hundred thirty million Veridians the overriding issue.

As the minutes passed, so too did the weeks and months and years, and eventually the decades too. Kirk saw Picard grow from an infant into a boy, from a teenager into a man, from a son into a student, from a cadet into a starship captain. He looked on in wonder as a Starfleet vessel with four warp nacelles became visible within the Guardian. Later, a larger ship appeared, and Kirk recognized its designation at once: NCC-1701-D.

Finally, he saw Picard materialize in a rocky wilderness. He looked just as Kirk's future self had described him, as did the man Picard subsequently fought: Soran. The
Enterprise
captain failed, though, and a missile launched from the planet's surface and traveled into the star it orbited. Above, the unmistakable form of the energy ribbon twisted through the air, and when the Veridian star collapsed, the ribbon shifted downward, skimming along close to the ground. Electric bolts shot from it across its length, and roiling clouds followed behind it as it advanced. It passed over Picard and Soran, surrounding them with jags of energy and a billowing haze.

And then the images within the Guardian ceased. The mist continued flowing through its opening, but where Kirk had been watching scenes from Picard's life, he now saw a shadowy emptiness.
The nexus,
he thought. Picard had been pulled into it and had continued to live, but he no longer did so within this universe. He asked the Guardian for confirmation of this, but it did not answer.