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.

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.