Now, Kirk peered down at the wide white band encircling his waist and the soft yellow glow it produced about his body. When he did, he also saw something that he hadn’t thought about since he had first returned to the nexus: his uniform, still covered with the dirt of Veridian Three, still torn, still showing streaks and smudges of his own blood on his white shirt and crimson vest. He remembered falling after he’d retrieved Soran’s cloaking control pad, whirling through the air with the distorted section of the metal bridge, until he had landed on the ground, crushed beneath the deformed mass. In that moment, he recalled, he had known as surely as he had ever known anything that he had only seconds left to live.
But then the energy ribbon had swallowed him up once more, bearing him back into the nexus-where time had no meaning. The seconds remaining in his life had never come, nor obviously had his death. Clearly, too, his existence within the nexus had been a function of his mind and not his body, for even without the flow of time, the injuries he’d suffered on Veridian Three should have rendered him incapacitated.
But what happens when I leave here? Kirk asked himself. The answer seemed manifest: back in the physical universe, he would be immediately debilitated by the damage done to his body. Seconds later, he would be dead.
Kirk considered his dilemma. He saw absolutely no means of preventing the temporal shock wave without exiting the nexus. He also could conceive of no way to return to the physical universe without dying. Even if he appeared in sickbay directly in front of McCoy and ordered the doctor to place him in a stasis field at once, and even if McCoy could then repair his injuries, doing all of that could easily alter the timeline.
No, Kirk thought. I can’t do this.
Then he realized that he knew somebody within the nexus who could.
FIVE
2255/(2255/2271)
The plasma blast seared the air beside the left ear of Lieutenant James T. Kirk. Though he didn’t see the pulse as it rocketed past him, he did feel its heat, did hear the low, menacing hum it generated. He flinched and dived down to his right, throwing himself to the outpost floor behind a dense tangle of wrecked equipment. On the far side of the room, the plasma shot exploded against the wall, sending up a thunderous report and leaving behind a scorched, smoking scar in whatever type of metal had been utilized to construct the Pelfrey Complex here on Beta Regenis II.
Next to Kirk, Lieutenant Commander Leslie DeGuerrin sat with her back against a broken console that had crashed onto its side. Tall and strongly built, she calmly studied the gauge on her laser pistol. “Almost drained,” she told Kirk. It didn’t surprise him. They’d been engaged in this firefight for more than an hour, and for the last half of that time, they’d abandoned the stun settings-and the correspondingly lower power requirements-of their weapons. When it had become apparent that the landing party faced a force at least three times their number, DeGuerrin had made it clear that the odds of their getting out of the complex alive would increase dramatically if they could permanently eliminate enemy fighters, rather than just rendering them unconscious for a short time; Tholians typically recovered quickly from the stun effect of Starfleet lasers.
Kirk raised his own pistol and examined the power indicator. “Mine’s down to nineteen percent,” he said. “What do we do now?” DeGuerrin had led their four-member team here from the Farragut. While the starship completed a badly needed delivery of medicine and medical personnel to the New Mozambique colony, Captain Garrovick had sent the shuttlecraft Dahlgren to Beta Regenis II. There, in the domed Pelfrey Complex that had been constructed on the inhospitable surface of the class-K planet, Dr. Mowry-the ship’s assistant chief medical officer-would administer the annual physical examinations to the outpost scientists, as required by Starfleet regulations. At the same time, DeGuerrin, Kirk, and Ensign Ketchum would collect research materials and reports that needed to be conveyed to Starfleet.
DeGuerrin looked up from her laser pistol. “I’m not sure what we can do,” she said. “How many of them did you count?”
“There have to be at least fourteen,” Kirk said, basing the figure on what he had seen and heard of the Tholians since the Dahlgren crew had come under attack. Because the nonhumanoid aliens wore environmental suits, it had been particularly difficult to tell one from another, but Kirk felt confident that he’d identified as least that many distinct individuals.
“I thought at least eighteen,” DeGuerrin said, “including the two we killed. That leaves no less than sixteen.” Kirk didn’t dispute DeGuerrin’s assessment, trusting her expertise in security matters. He also understood what she hadn’t said: that, given the circumstances, the quartet of Farragut crewmembers had virtually no chance of defeating a Tholian contingent of that size. “We’re going to have to make a run for the Dahlgren,” DeGuerrin said, clearly choosing retreat over continuing the battle.
But while Kirk would’ve gladly considered escape a victory at this juncture, he also knew two facts that made such a course problematic. To begin with, this facility had been erected for the purpose of allowing a scientific team to investigate both the planet’s atmosphere and its volatile crust; the former inhibited the use of transporters, sensors, deflector shields, and communicators, while the latter contained unusual compounds that might provide useful in power generation and the manufacture of weapons. Kirk didn’t know what the researchers and scientists had learned so far, but he did know that any knowledge they had gleaned needed to be kept out of the hands of the belligerent Tholian Assembly.
He also knew that if the Farragut crewmembers attempted to reach the Dahlgren in the complex’s hangar, they would find a group of Tholians waiting for them. He said as much to DeGuerrin. “Even if we managed to get to the shuttlecraft and were able to launch,” he added, “they must have a ship somewhere nearby.” Since the Tholians could not have beamed through the atmosphere, they must have landed at the complex at some point, but when Kirk had set the Dahlgren down in the hangar-he’d piloted the shuttle here from the Farragut-he had seen no craft there other than the scientists’ two workpods.
In fact, the first indication of there being something wrong at the facility had come when DeGuerrin’s team entered and found it silent. Within the small pressure dome, the Pelfrey Complex consisted of a series of concentric, interlocking rings. The hangar and life support machinery occupied the perimeter and encircled a loop of hydroponically grown crops. Next came living quarters and common areas for the dozen scientists and support personnel stationed on Beta Regenis II. At the center of the complex, a series of laboratories had been set up. It had been there, in one of the labs, that the Farragut crew had found the twelve bodies. DeGuerrin had ordered the team back to the shuttlecraft at once, but too late; the Tholians had already cut off their escape.
“Our only other choice is to try to find a way of destroying the complex,” DeGuerrin said. Suddenly, two more plasma weapons fired, one pulse striking the far wall and the other slamming into the heap of ruined equipment behind which Kirk and DeGuerrin had taken cover. He automatically recoiled, but the security officer only reacted by climbing to her knees and firing her laser pistol from behind the pile of equipment.
When she finished, Kirk said, “This place is encased in a pressure dome. It shouldn’t take too much effort to make it fail.”
“No,” DeGuerrin agreed, but then she shook her head. “The Tholians are wearing environmental suits, though. They could potentially survive a catastrophic failure of the dome.”
“They could,” Kirk said. “The scientists here also kept their own environmental suits back in the hangar, but we could never reach them.” He shrugged. “I wasn’t thinking about saving us or killing the Tholians, though. I was only thinking about protecting the research that’s been done here. Even if the data or the samples or whatever work has been accomplished isn’t wiped out, the collapse of the dome atop the complex would make retrieving any of it more than a simple operation.”