By the time Kirk arrived at the turbolift, the entire bridge crew had entered before him. As he himself stepped inside the car, he saw Sulu’s eyes widen, the lieutenant peering past him, back onto the bridge. Kirk guessed in that moment that the Klingons had begun to materialize behind him. He reached for the lift’s activation wand, but Leslie already had his hand on it. “Deck two,” the lieutenant said. Kirk expected a disruptor bolt to blast him in two at any moment, but then the doors squeaked closed behind him. As the turbolift started to descend, he realized that they’d actually made it.

And then an explosion rocked the lift, knocking it sideways. Kirk hurtled forward, raising his arms to protect not just himself, but his crewmates. His head struck the side of the lift, and then—

Everything went dark.

Kirk sat in an easy chair, a hardcover novel-the twenty-first-century classic Renaissance and Blues-open on his lap. He’d read the same sentence half a dozen times and now decided to give up altogether. So many thoughts filled his head, though one image in particular kept returning to his mind.

After closing the book, Kirk reached forward and set it atop the bed, then rose and crossed the quarters that Commodore Stocker had assigned him here at Starbase 10. Kirk had been released from the station’s infirmary only this morning, after spending sixteen days there in recovery. The explosion that had demolished the Enterprise bridge and killed the members of a Klingon boarding party had sent the turbolift plunging down its shaft until it had become wedged between decks. All six members of the bridge crew had survived, though Kirk had struck his head and fallen into a coma. During the three days he’d remained unconscious, Scotty and his engineering crew had repaired the ship enough to get it back to base.

When Kirk had finally left Starbase 10’s infirmary this morning, Bones had accompanied him here, to these guest quarters. Later, Spock had arrived with Commodore Stocker to discuss with him all that had happened during and after the Enterprise’s battle with the Klingons. They hadn’t stayed long, promising to return tomorrow after he’d gotten some rest. Spock had seemed oddly reticent to Kirk, but he simply ascribed that to all that his first officer and the rest of the crew had recently endured, perhaps an indication of posttraumatic stress. He imagined that even Vulcans-and particularly half-Vulcans- might not be immune to such disorders.

Kirk reached the computer terminal on the far side of his quarters and sat down before it. Of all that Spock and Stocker had revealed to him today, one thing continued to come back to him. He’d watched with them the visual recording made by the security team aboard the Enterprise shuttlecraft Kepler, and what it had showed deeply disturbed him. He knew that he had no real reason to view it again now, but he found that he couldn’t stop himself.

He worked the terminal console, providing the computer with his security clearance and a request for the Kepler recording. After a moment, the display filled with a frozen split-screen image. On the left, an aerial view showed the Guardian of Forever, standing alone on a vast, broken plain. The irregular, coppery ring stood as he’d always seen it, a strange and inexplicable alien object of great power and potential. Fractured columns and other archeological artifacts littered the ground around it, but since he and the crew of the Enterprise had discovered the place three years ago, the landscape had changed, even if the Guardian had not. When he had first gone there, mounds and walls of rock had surrounded the time vortex, and in the distance, the ruins of a long-dead civilization had provided an eerie backdrop.

After the Enterprise’s initial visit to the world of the Guardian, Starfleet had attempted to construct a research facility there. All such efforts, even those made on the other side of the planet, had failed, wrecked by violent seisms that had altered the landscape. Ruins had been buried, the ground had cracked open in places, rock formations had toppled. The Guardian itself had refused to confirm or deny any part in producing the earthquakes, but Starfleet had believed it responsible, unwilling to allow any construction on the planet’s surface. As a result, the Einstein research station had been built in orbit.

On the right side of the computer display, the Klingon vessel Gr’oth hung frozen within the planet’s atmosphere, the forward edges of its hull blazing red from the friction with the air. While Spock and Scotty and the rest of the crew had fought to fend off Klingon boarders in main engineering, and then had worked to repair the Enterprise, Korax had done this. Kirk raised his hand and touched a blinking green button on the computer panel. The recording began to play on the monitor.

Kirk watched as the Klingon battle cruiser dived toward the surface-toward the Guardian. Seconds passed, and the glowing sections of the Gr’oth’s hull grew hotter still, shifting from red to white. Finally, the D7 warship appeared on the left side of the monitor, its body obstructing the view of the Guardian as the ship raced toward the alien object.

The Gr’oth crashed directly into the Guardian of Forever. The split-screen ended, replaced by a single view. The display dimmed as a brilliant fireball burst from the point of impact. A huge mushroom-shaped cloud rose at great speed, reaching high into the sky.

Kirk touched another control, and the recording skipped ahead to its end. He halted the image there and beheld an enormous crater carved out of the ground where once the Guardian of Forever had stood. Kirk saw no signs of either the Gr’oth or the Guardian, but clearly both had been vaporized by the great heat of the blast. Nothing could have survived the explosion.

For a long time, Kirk sat and stared at the devastation. When he and his crew had discovered the Guardian, he had been awed by its power and abilities and enraptured by the amazing possibilities it offered. But after chasing McCoy through it and back into time, the vortex had become a symbol of profound pain for him, a reminder that the best part of his life had come and gone and would never return.

Now, as he gazed at the image of the ruined landscape, at the place from which the Guardian of Forever had delivered to him the love of his life and then stripped her away from him, he felt terrible anguish. Somehow, it was as though he had lost Edith all over again.

EIGHT

1930

In the encompassing darkness carried in with the deep of night, Kirk could have lain awake and fixated on the burden of his responsibilities, could have intentionally eluded sleep in order to lament the unthinkable possibility that Spock had delivered to him four days ago. He could have done those things, just as he had in nights past, but he didn’t. Instead, he found the will to drift above his fatigue and his concerns, concentrating now on the warmth of Edith’s bare form lying against his own, on the relaxed cadence of her breathing, on the now-musky scent of her flesh. In these perfect moments, he shut out the rest of the universe.

Just a few minutes ago, Edith had reached away from him to switch off the lamp on the nightstand. Then she’d rolled back over to him, and he’d enfolded her in his embrace. He held her now, his arms encircling her as though they’d been designed specifically for that purpose.

In the twenty-five days since he and Spock had arrived in Earth’s past, Kirk had attempted to resist the feelings that had begun to develop within him from the first instant that Edith Keeler had walked into his life. It made no sense for him to fall in love with a woman with whom he could have no possible future. Whether or not her death would be required in order to preserve the timeline, as Spock had suggested might be the case, Kirk intended to right the flow of history, after which he and his first officer would return to their own time in the twenty-third century. At that point, Edith would necessarily be gone from his life forever.