The lift eased to a stop, then began gliding horizontally through the ship, toward the port side. Kirk could sense the strain of the engines as they struggled against the gravimetric distortions caused by the energy vortex. The ship still shuddered in the clutches of the tremendous forces.

Kirk raised a hand to the ship’s schematic and traced a finger along the unfamiliar lines of this Enterprise. This doesn’t feel right, he told himself, just as he had on the bridge, but now he added, Not even for me. He supposed that if he took command of this vessel and ventured out into the galaxy, it would one day become his ship, but right now, it didn’t feel like that. Not like the first day he had set foot aboard the Constitution-class Enterprise twenty-eight years ago, not like the times he had returned to that ship after its refits, and not even like when he’d initially reported to NCC-1701-A, the former Yorktown renamed as a reward to Kirk and his crew for their service after the destruction of their original Enterprise. He would be content to leave this ship to Captain Harriman. As much as he loved command, Kirk needed to explore more than space; he needed to explore his own life.

The lift eased to a halt and when the doors parted, Kirk shot from them like the beam from a phaser.

The Enterprise rocked, and with it, the Archimedes. Kirk sat at the shuttle’s forward console, his feet spread wide to steady himself in his chair. As he studied the sensor readouts, he knew that the time for action had drawn near.

Turning to his right, he checked the placement of the data card on which he’d recorded his message. It sat in an I/O receptacle, and once he’d activated it, it would play after any control on the forward console or on the hatch had been pressed. He then peered into the rear compartment, where he saw half a dozen phasers sitting on the transporter pad. Finally, he checked the programming he’d executed that tied the shuttle’s antigravs and thrusters into its sensors.

All his preparations complete and verified, Kirk waited. According to the chronometer, it had been three minutes since he’d detected the destruction of the second transport vessel, the Lakul, within the energy ribbon. It could not be more than a minute and a half or two minutes before his counterpart enabled the main deflector to emit a resonance burst and break the Enterprise free. When that happened, he would have only seconds to act.

While Kirk waited, he pressed a control that slid the protective shielding from the forward viewports, affording him a view of the hangar door. Thirty seconds passed. Sixty seconds. Ninety.

On the panel before him, an indicator detected a resonance burst emerging from the ship’s main deflector. Kirk immediately touched a button, which would initiate thirty seconds later the condition for the playback of his recorded message. He then moved at once to the rear compartment, where he dropped to his knees and quickly triggered the maximum overload setting on each of the six phasers. Once he’d done that, he stood and performed a transport.

On the pad, the weapons disappeared in a nimbus of blue-white light. A glance through the forward viewports showed them materializing in the shuttlebay. Kirk then energized the transporter a second time.

As a halo of brilliant light formed in the air before him, he could only hope that he’d planned all of this well enough.

Jim Kirk found the ladder leading down into the maintenance corridor. He descended into the bowels of the ship and hurried forward, striving to keep his footing as the Enterprise continued to quake. Coolant leaks hissed in the enclosed space, intermittently sending up eruptions of vapor from rents in the bulkhead. Kirk raced through the clouds, feeling their cold touch.

Reaching the primary deflector control center, Kirk entered through its wide doors. Here too a fog of coolant blurred the air. Just a glance down into the compartment showed him where he needed to go. He climbed down a ladder to a walkway and removed the grating that covered the access to the main deflector relays. The ship reeled again, and the grate slipped from his hands and fell at least ten meters, rattling along the bulkheads as it did. Down another ladder, and at last he reached the main deflector control assembly. He opened the access plate and the relay emerged from behind it, automatically rising to situate itself beside the override panel. Kirk pulled himself back up the ladder and moved to the housing for the override. He opened the plate there to expose a series of optical chips utilized to program the main deflector. As quickly as he could, he chose the two that would allow him to do what he needed to do, and he started to reseat them in the circuit accordingly.

“Bridge to Captain Kirk,” he suddenly heard Scotty’s voice.

“Kirk here,” he called as he slid the second chip into the appropriate slot. He jabbed at the override controls, reprogramming the relay to permit the resonance burst.

“I don’t know how much longer I can hold her together,” Scotty said, a familiar plaint. In other, less serious circumstances, Kirk would’ve laughed.

He finished working at the control panel, then hastily backed up and bent down to the deflector control assembly. With both hands, he grabbed the safety and pulled it free. Stepping back to the override panel, he bent and rammed the mechanism into place.

“That’s it!” he called. “Let’s go!”

“Activate main deflector,” he heard Harriman order, his voice strong.

In the control center around Kirk, none of the equipment seemed to change, but he heard a loud whine that he knew must be the resonance burst. Even as the ship shook, he could feel it steadying by degrees, the feel of the drive becoming less labored.

“We’re breakin’ free,” Scotty said.

The drone of the resonance burst ceased and the control center quieted dramatically. Kirk detected a change in the movement of the ship. He could never have described the sensation, but he had spent enough time aboard starships to recognize the change in attitude. He knew at that moment that this Enterprise and this crew would be safe.

Kirk started away from the deflector equipment, moving back along the walkway toward the ladder up. He reached it and began to climb, but then stopped. In the relative calm of the primary deflector control center, Kirk suddenly heard a familiar sound, its presence here and now making no sense to him.

Suddenly he saw bright blue-white light arising before his eyes, clouding his vision. He knew that he’d been caught in a transporter beam, but he had no idea why. Before him, the outer bulkhead vanished.

Then so did he.

SIXTEEN

2293

Jim Kirk materialized on a small transporter pad in a cramped space. He looked around, then stepped down and walked through the compartment’s only exit. He found himself in what appeared to be the main cabin of a Starfleet shuttlecraft, though of a class he’d never before seen.

The deck moved beneath him, in the same relatively sedate manner that the Enterprise had as the resonance burst had broken the ship free of the energy ribbon. Kirk peered forward to the front of the craft, where through the viewports he saw a starship’s hangar deck. He could understand why Harriman or Scotty or somebody else aboard the Enterprise would have transported him out of the deflector control room, since he’d seen the outer bulkhead breached just as he’d been beamed away. What he could not fathom is why he would be brought to a shuttle sitting in the ship’s hangar. If he-A bright flash of light suddenly flared through the viewports and a loud explosion filled the air. Kirk felt the concussion against the hull of the shuttle. It continued one second after another, and as he toppled to the deck, he couldn’t tell whether the detonation was one long blast or several shorter ones. When finally the deafening noise quieted, he felt the shuttle shift beneath him, as though lifting off.