Kirk stared at her without comprehension. He felt as though he had missed some fundamental piece of information. “I don’t understand,” he said.

“I was one of those transported safely aboard the Enterprise,” Guinan said.

“But you’re still here,” Kirk said, feeling as though he had stated the obvious.

“I think of myself as an echo of the person who was pulled off the Lakul and out of the nexus,” she said. “I was beamed back into the universe you and I know, but the essence of who I am also remained here, duplicated in some way.”

“And that’s what I am?” Kirk asked. “An echo?” That didn’t seem quite right to him.

“In some ways, we’re all echoes, reverberations one moment of who we were in the previous moment,” Guinan said. “But you are James T. Kirk. You entered the nexus when the energy ribbon penetrated the hull of the Enterprise-B, and when you left to go to Veridian Three with Captain Picard, an echo of you remained behind. When you returned to the nexus, that echo was still here.”

Kirk felt his mouth open as a sense of realization washed over him. “That’s who I’ve been watching,” he said. “An echo of myself.”

“That is how I see it, although you and he are both as real as the other,” Guinan said. “But while he has accepted being here, has even experienced great joy from being here, you have not.”

“I did,” Kirk said. “When I first entered the nexus.”

“Yes,” Guinan agreed. “But not now. Why?”

Kirk considered that. As best he could recall, when he’d initially come into this temporal other-space, he’d immediately begun reliving and remaking the events of his life. When he’d reentered the nexus, though, he hadn’t attempted to prevent himself from existing in some remembered or imagined moment; he’d simply found himself observing one of those moments rather than participating in it. He supposed that he could even now select some blissful event to experience again, remake some painful incident into something positive, or invent some wonderful new circumstance for himself, but-

“Guinan, just before I returned to the nexus, something happened to the energy ribbon,” he said. “It moved at much greater speed than when I’d previously seen it, and it appeared to expand in a way that destroyed the universe all around it. I’m concerned about the population of a world that might be in its path. Millions of lives may be at risk.” He paused, wanting to emphasize the importance of his next question. “Do you know what happened to the energy ribbon?”

A pall seemed to pass over Guinan’s visage. “Yes, I do,” she said. “You happened to it.”

THREE

(2371/2235)

“There,” Guinan said, pointing past Kirk. He turned to follow her gesture, and once again, everything changed. Where he had one moment been standing amid the lush growth of a jungle, he now stood on a rocky mountaintop. The still, temperate climes of Gamma Trianguli VI had given way here to a cool, blustery wind.

Kirk waited for his sense of dislocation to pass as he peered down from the high tor across a wide, wooded plain. At first, he neither saw nor heard the object of Guinan’s attention, but then a growing roar reached his ears. He raised a hand to shield his eyes from the sun, and in the distance, he spied something that he could not immediately identify. A flat, circular object glided low over the land, headed in their direction. As it drew nearer, Kirk realized that he had underestimated its size, and as the noise increased in volume, he also understood that the object did not fly above the ground, but slid across it. Trees splintered in its path and vanished beneath its mass as-Kirk felt a surge of emotion course through him as he recognized the object: the saucer section of a Starfleet vessel. “Where are we?” Kirk asked Guinan, unable to take his gaze from the disaster playing out before him. “What is this?” He could hear the dismay in his own voice.

“We’re still in the nexus,” Guinan said. “This is Veridian Three. And that’s the Enterprise. Picard’s Enterprise. While you and he fought Soran, the ship was attacked by rogue Klingons and suffered a warp-core breach. The Enterprise crew separated the saucer, but the explosion of the core forced them down.”

Now Kirk turned to Guinan. “How do you know this?” he asked her.

“All of this exists within the nexus,” Guinan said, regarding him levelly. “But I was also on the ship.”

“You- ?” Kirk started, but so many questions occurred to him that he allowed the single word to convey his perplexity.

“I was just one of a number of civilians aboard who worked in a capacity to support the crew and their families,” Guinan explained.

“Civilians?” Kirk said, stunned. “Families?” He looked back at the saucer as it continued crashing across the planet’s surface.

“Yes,” Guinan said. “The ship carried the families of some of the crew.”

Kirk felt a twist in the pit of his stomach as he watched the great hull grind past the mountain atop which he and Guinan stood. Bad enough for the crew to be placed in harm’s way, but for civilians-families!- to be there with them…Kirk shook his head. He didn’t know if he could’ve commanded effectively in such an environment, and he had no idea how Picard managed to do so.

Down just past the base of the mountain, the saucer finally came to rest, close enough that Kirk could just make out the letters and numbers of its designation: NCC-1701-D. The vast hull had to be at least four hundred meters across, greater than the entire length of any of the ships that Kirk in his day had commanded. In the vessel’s wake, it had left a wide swath of destruction, a long, dark trench that stretched back as far as Kirk could see, and about which the remnants of trees had been strewn like brittle twigs.

“They managed to level off during their descent,” Guinan said. “Amazingly, their casualties were light.”

“That is amazing,” Kirk said. He looked over at her again. “And you obviously survived.”

An expression appeared on Guinan’s face that Kirk could not read. He could not tell whether in that moment she felt peace or sorrow, acceptance or resignation, or something else altogether. “No,” she told him. “I died shortly after the crash.”

Kirk didn’t think he would’ve felt more surprised if Guinan had reached out and pushed him from the mountaintop. Not having any notion of how to respond, he peered back down at the saucer. Dust billowed up from the edges of the disc, but he saw no smoke from fires. Still, the ship appeared inert, and even if most of its crew had endured the downing of their vessel, it seemed obvious that this Enterprise would never journey through space again. He could not help remembering standing on the Genesis Planet with Bones and Scotty, Hikaru and Pavel, watching his own Enterprise plummet through the atmosphere in the last blazing throes of its existence. “Why are you showing me this?” he asked Guinan.

“This is why,” she said, and she reached up and took his arm. As he turned the way she led him, the nexus again transformed their surroundings, from outside the wrecked ship to what surely must have been its interior. Once his disorientation passed, he saw a large, circular area rimmed with inactive control stations, some of them smashed, others showing evidence of being subjected to intense heat, though if any fires had burned here, they had by now been extinguished. Fiber-optic lines, conduits, and structural beams littered the decking, and a dome at the top of the compartment had shattered, revealing clouds high up in the sky overhead. Sunlight streamed in through the opening, illuminating a small area at the center of the bridge, the rest of which remained in shadows.

From his location with Guinan in a recess beside a pair of doors in the upper, outer bulkhead, Kirk saw people moving about, all uniformed in ways reminiscent of Picard. He saw dirt and blood on the officers who moved through the light, but nobody present seemed to have suffered grievous injuries. Guinan motioned to the lower area of the bridge, just past a long, curving structure, toward where a tall, bearded, dark-haired officer spoke to a yellow-eyed, sallow-complected individual. “What have you got, Data?” the taller man said.