Crucible: Kirk by David R. George III Page A

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