Part 6 (1/2)

Picard could only shrug. ”He was also three-quarters of a century out of his own time. His friends and family were almost certainly all dead, and everything he knew about engineering was seventy-five years obsolete. And it's not as if he hadn't done it before. Don't forget he was along when Kirk brought those two whales from the twentieth century.”

”And saved Earth,” Riker said, frowning. ”You're saying this time he was planning to risk Earth, risk upsetting the entire timestream just to save one person?”

”There's no point in arguing the wisdom of his action, Number One. Nor of ours when we followed him. We can't take either of them back. What we can do-all we can do for now-is try to find out where and when he actually went and what he did that resulted in the timestream we find ourselves in. And then work from there.”

Picard paused, looking around the bridge, his eyes lingering momentarily on Guinan, who, in a most uncharacteristic act, lowered her eyes. ”To that end,” he went on, ”I'm open to any and all ideas. For a start, can we take it as a given that Mr. Scott overshot his intended destination and went further into the past than he intended?”

Riker nodded. ”Based on what Mr. Worf's not hearing in subs.p.a.ce, I'd say we have to. Either that or he purposely made a second jump. Nothing he could have done here and now-or even a few weeks ago-could silence every starfaring race in this sector.”

Picard nodded. ”Mr. Data, is it possible for Mr. Scott to have overshot by not just years but decades? Even centuries?”

”It would be highly unlikely, Captain, but not impossible if something catastrophic occurred during the jump itself.”

”Just how catastrophic?” Picard asked impatiently when Data paused for a moment.

”For example,” Data continued, ”anything that could cause his s.h.i.+p to unexpectedly gain a great deal of velocity or lose a great deal of ma.s.s. A change in either of those parameters would drastically alter his trajectory and- ”

”And essentially destroy the s.h.i.+p and kill Mr. Scott. Is there anything survivable that could have thrown him that far off target?”

”Nothing that I have been able to hypothesize, Captain. However, neither Mr. Scott nor the s.h.i.+p would have to survive in order for the timestream to be affected. If something happened during the jump, whatever was left of the s.h.i.+p would complete the jump. And whatever was happening to the s.h.i.+p would continue happening wherever and whenever it emerged.”

Picard's stomach knotted. ”You're saying that if, say, a warp core breach or an antimatter containment field breakdown was somehow initiated during the maneuver, the explosions could happen after it was completed? When it emerged into normal s.p.a.ce?”

”Given the right timing, Captain, that is entirely possible.”

Picard was silent for a long moment, his eyes on the familiar starfield on the viewscreen. Finally he looked back at Data.

”At least it gives us a place to start,” he said. ”Mr. Data, access all records of the Arhennius system.”

As he waited for the results, he pulled in a deep breath and reached for the control that could send his voice to every corner of the Enterprise. He had a responsibility-a duty-to fulfill, and he had already put it off too long. Beyond the bridge, there were nearly a thousand crew members who still thought they were in a universe and a time that made sense.

Steeling himself, he lightly touched the control. ”This is the captain,” he said quickly, not giving himself time to have second thoughts, and then went on to explain as succinctly as possible what had happened and where he had, without their knowledge or consent, taken them.

There were no interruptions, only a pall-like silence as his voice echoed throughout the s.h.i.+p. Gradually, his face regained the color it had lost when the truth of their situation had first fully penetrated his consciousness.

When he finished, the silence was total, but after a few seconds voices began to emerge from the intra-s.h.i.+p comm system. No protests, no recriminations, only words of acceptance if not support. They had faced death with him any number of times, often in corners of the universe so remote they might as well have been in another time, and few had ever complained. They had known what they were signing up for when they had entered the Academy and even more so when they had signed on to the latest stars.h.i.+p to carry the notorious Enterprise name. They weren't about to desert either Starfleet or their captain now.

Even so, Picard couldn't help but wonder if he himself had overreached.

And if that other captain of the Enterprise, who was unknowingly the cause of the current disastrous state of affairs, would be appalled at what he had ”inspired” Captain Scott to do.

Or gratified.

Scotty's plan had been simplicity itself.

He would find the Enterprise-B, uncloak just long enough to transport the captain into the Bounty 2, and then return with him to the ”present” via a second slingshot trajectory, already calculated. In the chaos surrounding the energy ribbon as it destroyed both the Lakul and the Robert Fox and almost destroyed the Enterprise-B, he would never be noticed during the brief time he was uncloaked. And during the journey itself, the improvements he had made to the Bounty 2's cloaking mechanism would insure that no twenty-third-century sensors would get so much as a whiff of him.

And nothing would change.

That was the beauty of it, and the only reason he had gone ahead with it. As far as the universe of 2293 was concerned, Kirk would still have died while saving the Enterprise. The fact that, instead, he would be taken to 2370, could not possibly have any effect on the intervening decades.

That had been the plan, simple and straightforward.

Until, despite his round-the-clock monitoring of every aspect of the Bounty 2's drive systems, Scotty found himself with time to simply think-and worry-about what could go wrong.

Grudgingly, he began to realize that, under the spell of an enthusiasm that had bordered on obsession, he had ignored-or at least rationalized away-many of the dangers that a mission through time entailed. Particularly a mission to a time in which the Khitomer Accords were only a few months old, a time when many in both the Federation and the Klingon Empire were still desperate for the Accords to fail.

A time when Admiral Cartwright, whose traitorous actions had come within a whisker of sparking a new war, was still seen by some as a hero.

Reports of even a glimpse of a Klingon bird-of-prey uncloaking within a pa.r.s.ec of Earth-reports that would almost certainly be confirmed when the Enterprise-B's sensor records were later examined-would be just what the Accord's diehard enemies wanted.

Anything could happen, including the war that Cartwright and his co-conspirators on both sides of the Klingon border had failed to ignite. Millions of lives would be lost.

That kind of chance, he belatedly realized, he simply could not take.

But neither could he bring himself to abandon Jim Kirk less than two days from his death.

In the end, after hours of agonizing, when it became clear he would reach his destination with more than an hour to spare, he swallowed hard and decided on a compromise.

He left the cloaked Bounty 2 in the redundant concealment of a convenient pocket nebula, confirmed one last time that the G.o.ddard's jiggered sensors could indeed locate the cloaked s.h.i.+p, and continued the last few hours in the shuttlecraft. The G.o.ddard, incapable of being cloaked, was more likely to be spotted than the Bounty 2, but with everything else that would be going on, it was still unlikely. And even if it were noticed, little attention would be paid to it since, despite its advanced technology, it was obviously a Federation craft, not Klingon. Even if the Enterprise sensor records were later examined, its presence would be a puzzle, not a provocation.

It would be filed away with other puzzles, not used by zealots as a pretext to break the Accords and start a new war with the Klingons. Time would heal itself of any minor wounds incurred in 2293, and the universe of 2370 would remain the universe of 2370.

The only difference would be that Jim Kirk would be there.

Alive.

Nine.

THE HISTORY of the original timeline's Arhennius system, as sketchily outlined in the Enterprise computer records, provided no clues. Federation s.h.i.+ps had scanned it at a distance for life signs and for habitable worlds, but all they found were two gas giants about the size of Saturn and two airless b.a.l.l.s of rock a little smaller than Venus. There was no record of any s.h.i.+p-Federation or Romulan or Klingon-ever having entered the system itself. Therefore, Scott's bird-of-prey could have emerged at virtually any moment in the past two hundred years and undergone the most violent destruction possible, and it would have produced nothing more than a short-lived flare that wouldn't have been visible even to the most powerful telescopes in neighboring systems. The only time it would have even been noticed was during the few hours the Arhennius system was being scanned by long range sensors from almost a pa.r.s.ec away.

In any event, the Enterprise sensors had as yet found no indication that any such explosion had ever taken place in the Arhennius system, not in the last hundred years, not in the last million, although there was evidence of a half dozen low-yield photon torpedoes approximately a century ago.

”So,” Picard said as the negative results of the scans continued to stream across the bottom of the viewscreen, ”if he didn't accidentally overshoot catastrophically, what did he do?”

”There is one possibility, Captain,” Riker volunteered. ”Perhaps instead of overshooting, he undershot and had to make a second jump, and that's when he overshot, not because of something catastrophic but because of a mistake. Maybe his bird-of-prey was spotted by a Federation s.h.i.+p and he had to get out of there fast. Maybe he didn't have time to make all the calculations, maybe he missed the trajectory he was aiming for. He could've ended up anywhere-anywhen- alive and well. And if that's what happened, Captain, if he undershot, then he hasn't arrived yet. Perhaps we could do what you suggested earlier-just wait here for him to show up and beam him out before he has a chance to make a second jump.”

Picard shook his head. ”I doubt it, Number One. Even if everything you say is true, it wouldn't work. The timeline we are now in is almost certainly the timeline created by Captain Scott's interference decades or centuries in the past, no matter how or why he arrived there. It is not the timeline that Captain Scott would have emerged into at the completion of a first jump that fell short. He would have emerged into the original 2293, the one we are all familiar with, not into this one.”

”That is essentially correct, Commander,” Data said when Riker looked at the android questioningly. ”Whether the original timeline still exists somewhere is debatable, but even if it does exist, we almost certainly cannot access it.”

”'Almost' certainly?” Picard asked. ”Tell us more, Mr. Data.”

Data turned his attention briefly to a different set of readouts before answering. ”It is perhaps significant that, ever since we arrived, there has been a ma.s.sive amount of chronometric radiation permeating all s.p.a.ce within sensor range.”

”More than can have been generated by the arrival of a s.h.i.+p from three quarters of a century in this universe's future?” Riker wondered.