Crucible: Kirk by David R. George III

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