STAR TREK - TOS - The Janus Gate, Book - 1 - Present Tense

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Contents

Chapter One.4

Chapter Two.10

Chapter Three.15

Chapter Four20

Chapter Five.26

Chapter Six.33

Chapter Seven.40

Chapter Eight47

Chapter Nine.53

Chapter Ten.61

Chapter Eleven.68

Chapter Twelve.76

About the e-Book.84

Chapter One

THE GREAT STARSHIP TREMBLED, frame and struts wailing in distress as she careened into her

own attenuated warp field. Behind her, the ice-blue sphere of Psi 2000 shattered like a bursting bubble,

filling theEnterprise’s main viewscreen with glittering fragments that evaporated almost as soon as they

were made. A planet in its death throes, chasing after a starship who just might be dying herself.

James Kirk gripped the arms of his command chair so hard his hands hurt. He’d never heard a ship howl

like this before. As many times as he’d pushed this girl to her limits—and sometimes beyond—he’d

never truly, in his heart, believed for a moment that she could fail him. But he’d also never imploded a

small universe inside her belly, never sling-shotted all hundred tons of her[2]through a dying planet’s

gravity well and flung her back out into space. Never felt her surge so convulsively ahead of herself as the

fabric of space all around her thinned, stretched, twisted into a bright spinning whiteness that teetered just

on the edge of comprehension—

Then, just that suddenly, it was over.

Kirk felt as though he bolted awake from a dream. Solidity returned with an almost audiblepop!, and all

around him his bridge crew stirred at their stations, casting half-glances at each other and touching the

edges of panels and screens to make sure they were really still there.

Kirk forced himself to uncurl his grip on the command chair and straighten his shoulders. No matter how

distracted the crew might seem by their duties, they would be aware of their captain’s mood, just as he

was always aware of theirs. They didn’t need to sense any uncertainty in their commander after the chaos

they’d all suffered these last few days. The movement made his upper arm throb where McCoy had only

moments ago injected him with a dose of antiviral serum as he came aboard the bridge. Not for the first

time, he wished the doctor hadn’t ripped open his uniform sleeve to administer the injection. Sitting

bare-shouldered in front of the crew made him feel ill-kempt and undignified.

“Are you all right, Jim?”

Kirk glanced aside at Spock, worried for just an instant that the Vulcan had somehow sensed his spasm

of insecurity. He sketched a self-conscious nod as his first officer stepped up to the arm of the command

chair. “You?”

The Vulcan paused a moment, as if it had only occurred to him to consider his condition because his[3]

captain asked. Then he nodded as well. A blur of surreal light still throbbed at the center of the

viewscreen, and the ship beneath them thrummed in dangerous sympathy.

“We found a cure.” McCoy, out of Kirk’s view behind the shoulder of the command chair, sounded

definitive but grim. As though his intellect knew this to be true, but his emotions weren’t quite so sure

despite the empty hypospray in his hands. “We’re over that part of it.”

It was the only part McCoy could influence, not to mention the part that had first gotten them into this

mess. Kirk didn’t have the heart to tell the doctor that developing an antiviral inoculation to counteract

the infection they’d brought up from Psi 2000 was probably the least of their worries now. He still hadn’t

moved his eyes from the viewscreen, where blurred light had replaced the usual streaming view of stars,

almost as if they had somehow all congealed into that formless glow. At first, Kirk thought the viewscreen

had sustained some unspecific damage in their flight from the dying planet, ruining its ability to show them

the space outside. Then a single spinning star, coiled almost like a tiny galaxy, peeled away from the mass

and slid swiftly underneath their bow. That was when Kirk realized hewas seeing the space outside,

twisted until it was unrecognizable.

“Obviously, we were successful.” Spock no doubt read Kirk’s thoughts on the captain’s

all-too-expressive human face. His own face was impassive, dark eyes flicking over the maelstrom

outside as though counting every misplaced star. “The engines imploded.”

Unless what we’re racing toward is the afterlife.Only minutes before, they’d been screaming through Psi

[4]2000’s upper atmosphere, plummeting toward the planet’s disintegrating surface with half the ship’s

crew incapacitated by a neurogenic virus for which they hadn’t yet devised a cure. One of those infected

crewmen had shut down the ship’s main reactor hours before, for reasons known only to his own fevered

imaginings. The engines had been left powerless, her matter/antimatter cores too cold to ignite by the time

Chief Engineer Scott discovered the full extent of what had been done. If they didn’t want to end up just

another cloud of detritus amid the planetary rubble, they had to be willing to dare a drastic gamble.

Theory said they could throw matter and antimatter together without the usual quantum physics

introductions, so long as there existed a magnetic bottle of such perfect mathematical shape that the

resultant explosion could be turned back in upon itself, collapsed into a microsecond’s singularity, and all

of its raging energy channeled into a reactor ready to cast it back out again in an instantaneous leap to

light speed.

“It’s never been done,” Spock had objected when Kirk explained the plan to him.

As far as Kirk knew, no one had ever pulled a 190,000-ton starship out of a planetary nosedive before,

either, but that wouldn’t stop him from trying. “We might go up in the biggest ball of fire since the last sun

in these parts exploded, but we’ve got to take that one in ten thousand chance that we’ll succeed.”

And taking that minuscule chance had flung them here. Wherever “here” was.

“Captain!” Sulu twisted around at the helm, straining[5]to look at Kirk and his panel all at the same time.

His face was still drawn and pale in the aftermath of viral infection. “My velocity gauge is off the scale!”

Kirk leaned forward, hands clenched, and flashed keen eyes across Sulu’s console. He couldn’t see the

numbers, but the play of lights across the panel told their own story.

“Engine power went off the scale, as well,” Spock told the captain as the readouts began to fall into

some kind of strange sense in Kirk’s mind. “We are now traveling faster than is possible for normal

space.”

Faster than Kirk had dreamed possible, even at warp speeds. Middle-school conundrums inspired by

Einstein, Hawking, and Cochrane came rushing back like a badly distorted echo, and he heard himself

saying, “Check elapsed time, Mr. Sulu,” before his conscious mind even realized why he wanted to

know.

Yet, somehow, he wasn’t entirely surprised by the shock in his young helmsman’s face when Sulu

complied. “My chronometer’s running ...backwards, sir ...”

Of course it was. Kirk settled back into his command chair with a slow nod. They’d performed the

impossible intermix, flooded the engines with nearly infinite power, and roared away from Psi 2000 in full

reverse. Back the way they’d come. “A time warp. We’re going backward in time.” Kirk’s agile mind

was already racing through the implications, rehearsing how he would word his report to Starfleet

Command, worrying about just how much he should tell them, then feeling guilty when his first instinct

was to withhold as much of the details of how they accomplished this as he could. Starfleet itself could be

trusted with the knowledge, of course, but if[6]anyone else ever found out about it and gained the ability

to travel through time, changing the past and destroying the future, there was no telling where the havoc

would end.

Kirk dragged himself back to the moment. He wouldn’t have to worry about explaining anything to

Starfleet if they didn’t first shake loose from their accidental time slip. He thought about the trajectory

Spock and Scotty had so carefully planned for their slingshot around Psi 2000, and about the surge in

engine powerEnterprise had experienced just following her warp core implosion. “Helm, begin reversing

power.” Sometimes, the most obvious course of action looked that way for a reason.

Sulu’s nimble hands flew across his panel. Kirk understood the basics of the language his pilot used to

coax the ship to his bidding, but had never met anyone who employed it so instinctively and well. A dim

sense of movement, so ghostly it was almost a sound, slid along the length of the vessel in response to

Sulu’s commands. The distorted image on the main screen bled a few microns closer to resolution; the

moment felt suddenly less attenuated, tasted faintly of metal and ozone. When Kirk felt some unexpected

resistance buck through the ship’s frame, he startled more sharply than he intended. “Slowly,” he

reminded Sulu through clenched teeth.

The helmsman had the grace not to glance away from his work. “Helm answering, sir,” he reported in his

usual steady, professional tone. “Power reversing.”

The blurry corona on the forward screen seemed to throb, draw inward like the fiery heart of an event

horizon, then folded so swiftly in on itself that its brightness[7]snuffed into black like a candle flame in the

fist of a god. With an almost bashful slowness, individual stars blossomed one-by-one across the fresh

darkness. Tiny diamonds in red, blue, and yellow, washed over by the familiar gauzy veil of the Milky

Way.

Spock had gone back to his science station, and was bending intently over his viewer. Kirk heard

McCoy release an unsteady breath from behind him, and wondered how long the doctor had been

holding it.

“We’re back to normal time, Captain,” Spock announced, somewhat unnecessarily.

Kirk nodded absently. The stars were too comforting to turn away from just now. “Engines ahead.” He

was a little surprised at how relaxed he sounded. As though he accidentally hurled his ship backward in

time every day. “Warp one.”

“Warp one, sir,” Sulu echoed.

And just that simply, they were back to business as usual. Kirk almost thought hecould take the ship

through time every day, and his crew would follow without question as long as their captain said

everything would be okay. It was a frightening power to hold over them all, but a reassuring one, as well.

“Mr. Spock ...” He finally pulled his gaze away from the viewscreen, knowing that its return to a familiar

starscape didn’t solve the problem of where—and when—they were.

“Yes, sir.”

“The time warp—” Kirk swivelled the command chair to face Spock as the science officer descended

the steps from his station. “What did it do to us?”

[8]“We’ve regressed in time seventy-one hours.” Then he elaborated, as though the humans listening to

him might not appreciate the full impact of what they’d done. “It is now three days ago, Captain. We

have three days to live over again.”

Thinking about the mental and physical anguish Scott’s engine implosion had only barely wrenched them

free of, Kirk had to suppress a sudden urge to laugh. “Not thoselast three days.” Why was it that you

were never given the opportunity to relive your three best days of shore leave? Was that part of the price

Fate extracted for letting humans pull off such outrageous feats as time travel to begin with?

“This does open some intriguing prospects, Captain.” Spock’s brows knit into what would have been a

worried frown for anyone else. “Since the formula worked, we can go back in time. To any planet, any

era.” Apparently, his own imagination had finally begun to catch up to Kirk’s.

“We may risk it some day, Mr. Spock.” Kirk hadn’t forgotten the misgivings that had swept over him

when they first realized what they’d done. “Resume course to our next destination, Mr. Sulu.”

“Course laid in, sir.”

“Steady as she goes.”

Lingering beside Kirk’s command chair, Spock stirred. “Captain, if I may ...”

“Is there a problem, Mr. Spock?”

Spock seemed to seriously consider his captain’s question before answering, even though his hesitation

lasted barely a heartbeat. “Potential complications,” he finally said. Another brief pause that Kirk

suspected no one but he actually noticed. “Given our current[9]situation, continuing on to our next

destination may be ill advised.”

McCoy gave a little snort from behind Kirk. “You’ve got something against arriving early?”

Spock lifted his eyebrows in a semblance of Vulcan surprise. “Indeed, Doctor, arriving early is precisely

the problem.” He turned his attention back toward Kirk, tacitly more concerned with his captain’s

understanding than with the doctor’s. “We are presently at stardate 1704. Again. According to

Starfleet—according to history—theEnterprise’s next scheduled destination is Psi 2000 for the retrieval

of the geological survey team.”

“So if we show up three days early for our rendezvous with theAntares, there will be questions about

why we aren’t where we’re supposed to be.” Just as it had when he first realized what they’d done,

Kirk’s agile mind immediately leapt through the tangle of implications.

“Questions,” Spock stressed, “which would be received—and answered—by two separateEnterprises,

the first with no knowledge of the second.”

McCoy shrugged, twisting the empty serum vial off the hypospray in his hands. “So we explain the

situation, tell Starfleet what happened.” He fitted the vial back into the medikit at his hip.

“Except we didn’t.” Kirk waited while McCoy frowned, then stilled as the doctor began to realize

where the conversation was going. “We went to Psi 2000, Bones. We stayed there through the

destruction of the planet, and we never once heard from Starfleet. Not aboutEnterprise being out of

position, not about anything. Which means either something happens to us[10]now, and we never make

the early rendezvous with theAntares —”

“Or we never tried to make the early rendezvous in the first place.” McCoy rubbed his mouth

thoughtfully.

Kirk clapped him on the shoulder in an effort to lighten the mood. “I know which of those two options

I’d prefer.” But he was serious about his concern, despite his wry smile.

“So we do what?” The doctor looked between Kirk and Spock with a scowl the captain recognized as

being worried frustration rather than the irritation it resembled. “Hang out in deep space and hope

nobody stumbles across us?” He gave an almost petulant grunt. “Seems like an awful waste of three

perfectly good days.”

“I don’t see why being displaced in time should mean we have to waste any.” Kirk stood to lean over

the railing between his command chair and Spock’s station. “Mr. Spock, we left a planetary survey team

back in the Tlaoli system, in sector alpha nineteen.”

Spock nodded slowly. “They are scheduled for retrieval immediately after our rendezvous with the

Antares .” Kirk had a feeling his first officer already knew where he was heading.

“I’m sure they’ll be delighted to have a little company for the next three days. And limiting ourselves to

planet-side research on a previously uncharted planet—” Not to mention a little judicious shore leave.

“—ought to minimize our potential impact on the timestream. Wouldn’t you say?”

Spock crossed his arms in what might have been Vulcan displeasure, but the curious arch of his

eyebrows[11]made his expression hard to quantify. “It could be argued that our very existence at this

moment in time has already altered history in ways we cannot yet recognize. Therefore, any action we

take—even inaction—unavoidably impacts the current timestream.”

McCoy made a wry face. “And if a butterfly flaps its wings in Tibet?”

Spock frowned and cocked his head, obviously ready to address the doctor’s apparent non sequitur,

but Kirk stepped between them to head the discussion off. “Unfortunately, we can’t go back and take

ourselves out of this timestream,” he said to Spock, “so we have to work with what we’ve got.”

“True,” his first officer conceded. “Then no doubt sequestering ourselves on Tlaoli 4 is our most ...

productive option.” He said “productive” as though congenitally incapable of understanding the human

need for almost constant activity.

Kirk had a feeling he’d have no choice but to get used to it if he planned on staying with Kirk for the

next five years. “Mr. Sulu, set course for Tlaoli, warp four.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Kirk settled back into his command chair as the ship beneath him began the purring hum up to warp

speed. He could feel something subtly amiss, a deep trembling in her bowels that hadn’t been there three

days ago ... three days from now. ... Something else for Scott to work on while they bided their time at

Tlaoli, and while Kirk assessed the rest of their damage, physical and otherwise.

“I don’t see what he’s so worried about,” McCoy grumbled, coming to lean his elbows on the back of

[12]Kirk’s chair as the ship got under way. “How much damage can we possibly do to history in just

three days?”

Kirk gave a dark little laugh and rubbed at the knot in his shoulder where the antiviral shot still stung. “I

think that’s exactly what he’s worried about, Bones.”

“Enterpriseto Tlaoli Base One. Come in, Base One.”

Only silence answered Uhura’s standard hail. She frowned, then got a firm grip on her overactive

imagination and reminded herself that they were no longer at Psi 2000. The bridge crew behind her

wasn’t giggling or ranting or threatening to commit suicide—they had all been inoculated against the alien

virus, and the ones most affected, such as Sulu and Riley, had been sent down to sickbay for an in-depth

toxin screen and some much-needed rest. Even with second-shift officers such as Stiles and Leslie at

navigation and helm, the ship’s command center had regained its usual quiet efficiency. And for further

reassurance, all Uhura had to do was glance sideways at the viewscreen.

The sunlit planet that theEnterprise had just swung into orbit around wasn’t silver-blue and quivering

with tectonic instability. It was old and brown and done with life, worn down to nothing but dusty

grasslands and rocky karst plains and thick rims of saltwater swamp around its drying oceans. It revolved

around an ordinary yellow star and was accompanied by an ordinary natural satellite about half the size of

Earth’s moon. The only thing unusual about Tlaoli 4 was the rose-quartz tinge of its atmosphere, caused

by the high load[13]of windblown iron oxides and garnet dust. The planetary assessment team had

assured them there was nothing strange or dangerous about that. It just meant that the landing parties

would see some spectacular sunsets.

Uhura knew perfectly well that this placid little planet had been given the highest safety rating possible,

which was why theEnterprise had left its landing teams behind while it had gone on to its rendezvous

with Psi 2000. There was no hint of peril in the humming silence of her open communicator channel,

either, she told herself bracingly. With only a few scientists assigned to each of the three planetary survey

teams—and only a few days available for them to describe and catalog as much as they could of an

entire planet—the probability of someone sitting at the main communications panel when she hailed was

pretty remote. She closed the first base camp’s channel and instead scanned through the frequency

distributions of the communicators she’d assigned to the fifteen members of the landing party. She had

bracketed the ranges so that each team overlapped only with its own members. That made it a fairly easy

task to select multiple communicator addresses for her next hail.

“Enterpriseto Tlaoli Survey Team One.” She watched rainbows of subspace frequencies replicate

across her board as the communications computer automatically generated the multiple hail. “Come in,

Technician Fisher, Lieutenants Boma, Kulessa, and Kelowitz.”

The reply came back so fast that Uhura thought she could still hear the hiss of the hand communicator

being[14]snapped open. “Fisher here,” said a startled voice. “Enterprise,are you in system?”

“Yes, we arrived early. Captain Kirk thought—”

“Is the captain on the bridge?” Fisher cut across her explanation with much more urgency than

politeness.

“Affirmative.” Uhura swung away from her panel and caught the bright hazel glance that immediately

darted her way. In the months she’d served under James T. Kirk, Uhura had come to depend on her

captain’s attentiveness to his bridge crew so much that she had internalized it into her own actions. A

slight turn of her head and shoulder would get her noticed in a moment or two, whenever Kirk finished

signing orders or conferring with his line officers. A more complete swing got her a quicker look, and a

rapid pivot always got his full, focused attention. “Captain, Geological Technician Fisher of Survey Team

One needs to speak with you.”

“Put him through,” Kirk said, and Uhura toggled the open communicator channel into the main bridge

speaker. “Report, Mr. Fisher.”

“We’ve got a problem, Captain.” One thing Kirk had successfully pounded into his crew over the past

year was to waste no time with regulation greetings in times of crisis. “Actually, we have several

problems, sir, but the most urgent one is that we’ve lost touch with Survey Team Three.”

Kirk frowned across the bridge at Spock. “Where was Team Three assigned?”

The Vulcan Science Officer opened his mouth, then clamped it shut again and tapped a query into his

science panel. The chaotic frenzy of their visit to Psi 2000[15]had apparently erased even his

supernaturally good memory of what the different Tlaoli landing parties had been sent down to do.

Before he could respond, Fisher answered for him through the com channel. “That was the cave

exploration team, Captain. They were originally set down on that big karst plateau in the southern

continent, but yesterday we flew them up to check on a smaller karst terrain in the northern continent,

due west of where the wetland team is stationed.”

Kirk’s frown deepened. “Why did you reassign Team Three’s location, Mr. Fisher? I believe your

standing orders were to stay near your base camps until theEnterprise returned.”

“Yes, sir, I know.” There was a pause and a mutter of inaudible conversation in the background behind

Fisher, as if his fellow scientists were suggesting things for him to say. Uhura could hear the geologist take

a deep breath and plunge back into speech as if speed could somehow make his confession less painful.

“Captain, we did disobey our standing orders. But it was because of what we found down here after the

Enterprise left the system. We were afraid there might be a safety risk, sir, to the ship.”

“A safety risk to the research shuttle you took down to the planet’s surface, Mr. Fisher?”

“No, sir,” the geologist said firmly. “A safety risk to theEnterprise .”

Uhura glanced over her shoulder in surprise at the drab brown planet on the viewscreen, but saw nothing

more threatening on its ancient and worn surface than she had a few minutes ago. She noticed Captain

Kirk[16]gazing up at Tlaoli with a similar look of incomprehension. When he spoke, however, his voice

held none of the doubt that was so clearly expressed on his face. A good commander like Kirk never

passed premature judgement on his crew’s decisions, especially when they were on the surface and he

was still on board.

“What made you think theEnterprise might be in danger, Mr. Fisher?”

The geologist paused to listen to another advisory murmur of voices behind him. “Sir, we think you and

Mr. Spock should see this for yourselves. Request permission to uplink our visual tricorder’s data buffer

through my communicator to the main viewscreen.”

Kirk lifted an eyebrow at Uhura, and she nodded back at him while her fingers danced across the

communications panel, widening the bandwidth she’d assigned to Fisher’s handheld communicator so it

wouldn’t choke on the much thicker flow of a visual record. “Permission granted. Spock, make sure we

get this in the main computer log.”

The Vulcan science officer gave his captain the kind of austere look that said the command had been

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