“Picard,” he said as he lowered his laser.
“Yes,” Kirk said. “I left the nexus with him. We stopped Soran, but then- ” The shuttlecraft jolted hard, as though struck by something. Kirk staggered to his right and almost went down, but righted himself against the bulkhead. When he looked back toward the bow, he saw through the viewport a small vessel that seemed as though it had been constructed out of a collection of triangular hull components. He recognized its origin immediately-Tholian- and knew the time period to which he had come. For his actions down on Beta Regenis II and out here in space, Starfleet had awarded him the Grankite Order of Tactics.
“Hold on,” Jim yelled, now back at the forward console. Kirk grabbed onto the handle of an equipment door as the shuttle veered to port, the inertial dampers taking a fraction of a second to compensate for the rapid movement. Through the viewport, Kirk saw a bolt of plasma energy streak past.
As Jim operated the helm controls, Kirk made his way forward until he dropped into the chair beside him. “Jim,” he said, “stop this. I need to talk with you.”
“You don’t understand,” Jim said, not looking away from where his hands darted across the panel. “I have to- “
“You have to evade the Tholians while you transmit a message to Captain Garrovick aboard the Farragut,” Kirk said. “Down at the research complex, all of the scientists are dead, killed in an unprovoked attack by the Tholians.”
Jim looked up at him but said nothing. Then another Tholian weapon landed, shaking the cabin violently, and he began working the controls again. Kirk remembered that this hadn’t happened before, that while he’d been spotted by the Tholian vessel in orbit, he’d managed to evade it after taking only a single blast of its weapons fire. But then, when he’d piloted the shuttlecraft all those years ago, he hadn’t been distracted by an unexpected passenger. “If you know where we are and what’s going on,” Jim said, “then you know I have to do this.”
“No, you don’t,” Kirk said, but Jim continued taking the shuttle through evasive maneuvers. Kirk reached over and took hold of his counterpart by his upper arms, turning Jim to face him. “You don’t have to do this,” Kirk insisted. “This isn’t even really happening.”
Another plasma bolt struck the shuttlecraft. The forward control console exploded, bathing the two men in a shower of sparks. Smoke filled the cabin, and then Kirk heard the low moan of overstressed metal. He saw a thin crack zigzag up the bulkhead, and then the shuttle fractured, bursting apart around them. For a moment, they floated in the frightening totality of space, the insensate stars peering coldly down on them, the planet hanging off to one side, the Tholian vessel looming above them.
Kirk had not let go his grip on Jim’s arms, and now he called to mind another location, a safe place where he’d been alone. With the stars still surrounding them, Kirk felt something beneath his feet. He peered downward as he felt the pull of gravity, and he saw grass below him. Looking up, he saw that he and Jim now stood amid trees and other modest growth, in what looked to be a wide parkland. An airpod sat nearby, its gull-wing hatch propped open.
Before him, Jim turned in a circle, inspecting their new locale. Three-quarters of the way around, he stopped and raised an arm, pointing. “That’s Mojave,” he said. Kirk looked that way and saw the towers and spires of the California metropolis, saw the stylized four-posted arch that rose majestically from the lake at the city’s eastern end. “I was only here once.”
“After reading a biography of Christopher Pike,” Kirk said.
“Yes,” Jim agreed. “When I was chief of Starfleet Operations.” He continued looking toward the city. “Captain Pike was born and raised there,” he said. “He used to ride horses out here when he was a boy. They’ve got a memorial to him at the city center.”
Kirk stepped forward, interposing himself between Jim and the city. “Except that’s not really Mojave,” he said, “and we’re not really on Earth. We’re in some type of- “
“Temporal nexus,” Jim said along with him. “Yes, I heard you.” He turned and paced away, but then peered back at Kirk. “I remember Picard,” he said. “I remember deciding to leave the nexus and help him, but then…then I didn’t. I stayed, got caught up again in the events of my own life…” The realization appeared to agitate him.
“It’s all right,” Kirk said. “But now I need your help.”
“You need my help?” Jim said. “Here in the nexus?”
“No. Back in the real universe where we lived our life,” Kirk said. “When I left here with Picard, we were successful in stopping Soran, but then something else happened.”
“Something else?” Jim said.
“Something that I-that we-essentially caused,” Kirk said. “A phenomenon known as a converging temporal loop.” He explained what he had witnessed on Veridian Three, as well as the concept of the loop as described by Data. “It’s destroyed a sizable volume of the space-time continuum and taken many lives, perhaps millions, perhaps even many more than that.”
Jim padded back across the grass until he stood directly in front of Kirk. It should’ve seemed like gazing into a mirror, Kirk thought, but it didn’t. The image he always saw when he peered at his reflection showed him the reverse of his features, which didn’t happen here as he looked at this echo of himself. “And you think what?” Jim asked. “That we can go back in time, somehow stop it from occurring.”
“Not we,” Kirk told him. “You.” And then he explained his plan.
SIX
(2271)/2282
Jim Kirk trod back and forth across the grass in the parkland adjoining the city of Mojave. He had just listened to—
Myself? he thought, the very notion absurd on the face of it. Except not all that absurd, he amended, thinking of the incident back during the Enterprise’s five-year mission when a transporter malfunction had produced two versions of him.
And yet this doesn’t seem like that, Kirk thought. Back in orbit of Alfa 177, where the transporter accident had taken place, neither of the two Kirk identities that had been created-and he could still remember existing as each of them-had felt entirely like himself. Right now, though, he did feel whole, and he suspected that his doppelganger did as well.
Kirk glanced over at his double, who appeared to match him precisely, but for the visible effects of the fall he said he’d taken on Veridian Three. Both dirt and blood covered his hands and face as well as his uniform, which had been ripped in many places. According to him, he had been crushed by a metal bridge and on the verge of death when he had been swept back into the nexus. He also believed that he had beheld a powerful destructive force called a converging temporal loop. He now wanted to leave the nexus and go back in time to prevent the loop from ever developing, though he claimed that he could not do so himself as he would, upon exiting this timeless place, die as a result of his injuries.
As fantastic as Kirk found the collection of details he’d just been given, all of it seemed to make an internal kind of sense, but for one thing. He stopped pacing about and addressed that now. “You said that the convergence loop was caused by there being two large, identical sets of chronometric particles in our universe, connected by the conduit of the nexus,” he said.
“That’s right,” the other, bloodied Kirk said, nodding.
“And that those particles were in our body,” Kirk said. Again, his duplicate nodded. “So if I leave the nexus, won’t that unleash another temporal loop?”
“I was concerned about that myself,” the other Kirk said. “But right now, neither of those sets of chronometric particles exists in our universe because the converging loop destroyed them. If you leave and succeed in preventing the loop, then the conditions that caused it in the first place-the two sets of particles joined together by the nexus-will never arise.”