To his left, starting a meter or so above the deck and rising to the overhead, a pair of wide ports angled away from the bulkhead, allowing a view directly into the hangar deck. Kirk went to one of the ports and peered down. Situated on the combination turntable and lift at the center of the bay, a shuttlecraft-the Aristarchus, NCC-1701/9-sat ready for flight should it be needed. For just a second, the sight triggered thoughts of Kirk’s piloting drills back at the academy, but he quickly disregarded them. He hadn’t come here to reminisce.
Turning away from the hangar deck, Kirk looked across the narrow observation compartment at the viewports in the outer bulkhead. Through them he saw the stars, many stationary because of the Enterprise’s great distance from them, others seeming to move as the result of parallax. Even by this point in his career, Kirk had visited numerous planetary systems, but the vastness of the galaxy had always provided him new frontiers.
Some of that expanse had been destroyed now, though, and with it, lives lost. Kirk himself had evidently been the source of that destruction, albeit inadvertently. Regardless of his role in the catastrophe, though, he wanted to do something about it.
But it’s even more than that, he thought. Because of his part in what had happened, he might be the only person capable of taking action in these circumstances. Even if somebody outside the nexus could determine precisely what had taken place, what could they possibly do to counteract the damage that had been done?
Based not only upon what Guinan had told him, but also upon his experience with Picard on Veridian Three, Kirk believed that he could exit the nexus at any place and, of even greater import, at any time. More specifically, he could travel into the past, meaning that he could at least theoretically prevent the shock wave from ever occurring. Considering the nature and apparent cause of the converging temporal loop, Kirk reasoned that there could be only two ways of precluding it from developing: either he must stop himself from entering the nexus in 2293 or from exiting it in 2371. By accomplishing either of those goals, he would avert his existence-and that of the substantial set of chronometric particles within his body-at two distinct points in time with a conduit connecting them. Without those requirements, the temporal loop would not converge and the shock wave would not arise.
But if I don’t enter the nexus in twenty-two ninety-three, he thought, then the Enterprise-B and its crew and passengers would be destroyed by the energy ribbon. Kirk supposed that he might be able to travel back in time and find a means of saving the Enterprise without having to be down in the deflector control room, but if he did that, then he would not vanish and be presumed dead. In that case, he would alter the timeline, something he must avoid doing; he had already sacrificed his own happiness to preserve history, and he would not allow time to be changed now.
And there’s another problem, Kirk thought. If he didn’t enter the nexus in the first place, then clearly he would never leave it. That would provide another means of preventing the temporal loop, but if he didn’t leave the nexus to assist Picard on Veridian Three, then Soran would succeed at launching his weapon and the population of two hundred thirty million on Veridian IV would die. The calculus seemed impossible to negotiate.
Kirk paced across the compartment and over to an exterior viewport. He peered out at the stars burning hot in the deep, never-ending winter of space. People die, he told himself, reciting a fact he knew all too well. Since he’d been five years old and had lost his grandfather, death had been a regular companion in his life. His parents, gone. His uncle, his brother, his sister-in-law, gone too. David, the son he had barely known. Miramanee, carrying his unborn child. Captain Garrovick and two hundred of the Farragut crew. Gary Mitchell. Lee Kelso and Scott Darnell and so many others from the crews he had led through space, whose names he could recount because they had perished on his watch and he could do no less than remember them.
And Edith.
Once, when he thought he had lost Spock, he had admitted to David that he had never truly faced death, but that had not been quite true. Kirk had lived beneath the specter of loss for most of his days; he’d simply grown far too weary of it. Back then, he had grasped at the scant hope provided by Spock’s father, Sarek, and amazingly, through a confluence of amazing circumstances, he had managed to help resurrect his friend.
And how many times have I skirted my own death by the narrowest of margins? he thought. He had been torn from within the Enterprise-B and thrown out into space and had still survived. Not that long ago, subjectively, he had fallen scores of meters and been crushed by a metal bridge on Veridian Three, yet he survived even now.
I’ve faced death, Kirk thought, and I’ve railed against it. Occasionally, he had succeeded in beating it back, saving the lives of his crew, of his friends and of strangers, of himself. But the end had still come often enough, plucking the people he cared about from his life like petals from a dying flower. Ultimately, he knew, entropy, disorder, and death would win out over all-over those he loved, over himself, over the inhabitants of Veridian IV. I should just let go of all this, Kirk told himself.
But he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. That simply wasn’t who he was.
Standing alone in the observation deck of the old Enterprise, Kirk stared out at the unfeeling void, unwilling to allow it to dictate the terms of life and death. Then he began to formulate a plan.
The black hole hung invisibly in the sky among the countless points of light that formed the Milky Way. Below, the surface of the planet-sized metal sphere extended away from Kirk in all directions, bathed only in the scant illumination provided by the distant stars. The fourth of seven “worlds” in this artificial solar system, the almost-featureless globe approximated the circumference, mass, and gravity of Earth.
Kirk had come here from the Starfleet archives, which he had visited with the echo of Picard still in the nexus. After Kirk had cobbled together the most workable strategy he could for stopping the converging temporal loop, he had gone to the archives from the Enterprise’s shuttlebay observation deck, coincidentally to check the record of the Enterprise-B’s own shuttlecraft. After that, he had prepared to depart the nexus. He hadn’t known precisely how to do that, and neither had Picard. Like everything in this timeless region, though, it seemed reasonable to assume that it could be effected simply by an effort of will. He had no comprehension of the physical aspects of the nexus, but he envisioned it as a limitless blank canvas upon which minds drew their own realities. So thinking, he had then found himself, alone, on the largely empty shell of the Otevrel’s fourth orb.
The crew of the Enterprise had first encountered the sociocentric, quasi-nomadic species during the ship’s exploratory journey to the Aquarius Formation. Kirk had never walked the surface of the Otevrel “planet” like this-he, Bones, and Scotty had traveled here from the ship in a shuttlecraft-but as he had already learned, events within the nexus often bore only passing resemblance to their counterparts in reality. In further verification of that, Kirk realized that he did not currently wear the environmental suit he had donned before boarding the shuttle on this particular mission, but rather one of the old life-support belts that Starfleet had introduced during the final year or so of his first command. The belts generated a personal force field for the wearer that maintained the appropriate atmosphere, temperature, and pressure about them. Kirk had liked the greater freedom of movement that the belts had provided over traditional environmental suits, but Starfleet had stopped using them when concerns had arisen regarding the long-term effects that prolonged proximity to the force fields would have on living tissue.