
Kirk struck out before the man could swing his long weapon into firing position. Twisting to one[7]side,
Kirk jammed the muzzle of the rifle down toward the ground and landed a solid blow on the man’s jaw
without interrupting his turn. The momentum alone snapped the man’s head aside and wrenched the rifle
from his grasp. Still gripping the muzzle, Kirk stepped neatly over the toppled body and let the rifle’s
heavy metal stock finish its swing into the shins of the man above him on the stairs. A hissing thread of
heat tore past very close to Kirk’s skull, then the second man was down atop his partner, and Kirk had
knocked him senseless with the butt of the first man’s gun. He rubbed at his temple where the shot had
narrowly missed him, and stared down at the unconscious bodies. He knew where he was now. He
knewwhen he was. He just didn’t understand how he had gotten here.
They were both obviously Grexxen—their faces a bronze so extreme it bordered on greenish, and their
hair the same faded copper as their eyes. A little hair dye and a pair of dark glasses, and either of them
could have passed as human in any metropolitan center on Earth. But they weren’t human—they were
Vragax. Even after all these years, thinking about that militant tribe of Grexxen natives filled Kirk’s
stomach with acid and made him want to spit out every foul epithet he’d ever heard. Because even after
nineteen years he couldn’t forget the helmetlike fall of Vragax braids, or the smell of theirpuhen oil-based
warpaints, or the way they laughed at how humans died when they shot them down in the streets.
[8]He shook both men out of their pants with no more care than he’d have shown a sack full of
potatoes. Tying them both to the stairs, he took their weapons and every power cell and munition they
had between them. One of them also had a string of handheld explosives. The other had a radio that
didn’t appear to be picking anything up on its open frequency. Kirk turned it off to keep it silent, then
threw it as far away into the bushes as he could.
The streets were familiar now. Eerily undersized, as though he’d expanded them in his memory, and still
uncomfortable in that tourist-streets-after-dark way. He remembered abruptly that his father had never
let them leave the embassy grounds after nightfall. “It’s not a curfew,” George Kirk had insisted. “I just
won’t have any boys of mine showing disrespect for the local authorities with their shenanigans.” As
though the shenanigans of two human boys could have inspired anything to rival what had finally gone
down on this planet.
He checked both the charges and the loads on the gauss rifles as he jogged, almost by memory, back
toward the burning Starfleet embassy. They both had several hours’ use still in them, and more than sixty
shots between them, not counting reloads. He flipped the switch to single shot to save on ammunition.
Unlike the Vragax, he had no use for mowing down large swaths of the civilian population with every
squeeze of the trigger. Anything he couldn’t do one bullet at a time, he wasn’t interested in doing at all.
[9]He found the shuttle nose-down in the lawn of a Kozhu-run infant-care facility, half-buried in the dirt
it had ploughed up ahead of its long skid, like a dead giant beneath a carelessly thrown shroud. Just like
he remembered it. It was easier to see what had killed it, now that he was older and understood better
what to look for. A small, exhaust-seeking microbolt had blown away the rear of one nacelle and part of
the stern bulkhead. The remaining engine had been just enough to let Ensign Leone put them down in
something more like a landing than a crash, but not enough to let either Zeke Leone or his copilot walk
away from the attempt. The shuttle had split open on impact, trailing debris and bodies behind it for a
hundred meters. The fact that neither the Vragax nor the Kozhu were supposed to have surface-to-air
weaponry powerful enough to take down a Starfleet shuttle hadn’t saved Leone or the other men who’d
gone down on the shuttle with him.
Kirk ducked behind the mound of steaming dirt, just beside where the shattered pilot’s seat should have
been. Across the shuttle’s nose from him, nine men in the red-and-black of Starfleet security littered the
torn-up ground like broken dolls. Kirk closed his eyes against the memory of their leader seizing him by