STAR TREK: TOS - The Janus Gate, Book Three - Past Prologue Read online

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  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  About the e-Book

  Chapter One

  COLD BIT AT Kirk’s cheeks as he followed his youngest crewman deeper into the frozen dark. The glow of the boy’s carbide lamp barely disturbed the surface of the blackness, and it didn’t soften the hard angles of the fresh ice sheets surrounding them at all. It only pushed the dark ahead of them, one cautious step at a time. Chekov followed the invisible line sketched for him by his compass and Kirk tried not to make the ensign any more nervous than he already was by treading on his heels as he followed.

  The maps were good, Kirk thought, flipping through the painstakingly drawn pages and mentally reliving the landing party’s passage through each of those chambers and tunnels as he did so. Amazingly good, considering they’d had to be re-created in the [2] midst of everything else the group had gone through to get this far. Now they were close to being out of this subterranean icebox. The exit was only a few tens of meters over their heads—hot showers, full meals, and clean, dry uniforms were just a short vertical climb in their futures, and Kirk was as glad as anyone else to be done with this part of their adventure. At least he could attack the mystery of the starships scattered across Tlaoli’s surface from the relative safety of his own bridge, with his crew safe and whole alongside him.

  An unexpected bark, popping against the unseen walls of the cavern, yanked Kirk to a halt. He shot a quick look in the direction where the clatter seemed to settle, but, strain as he might, could only see the same opaque blackness that had hidden every other danger since they’d set foot in this cave. Kirk grabbed at Chekov’s shoulder to halt him. “Do you hear that?” he asked urgently, releasing the boy to turn and check the party members they’d left near the entrance.

  Heat from a sudden fire swarmed up into his face and knocked him to the ground.

  Kirk’s first instinct was to guard the map—the precious, re-created map that was their best insurance against wandering through these caves forever. He tucked it flat to the belly of his cave jumper and rolled facedown in the frozen mud to shield it from the flames. But just that quickly, the heat and light receded as though sucked out through a blasted airlock, [3] and the ground beneath him was dry and hard and anomalously warm against his frost-reddened cheek.

  He reached out one hand to slap at the ground in front of his face. Concrete. He’d fallen down in a cave on the fringes of the frontier, but he’d somehow landed on an expanse of what was unmistakably poured concrete.

  Voices and sirens pushed Kirk’s senses past what had been the unseen walls of the cavern, opening up the darkness into an expansive night with five tiny, bloody moons strung diagonally above the tree horizon like a necklace of badly set garnets. Dry leaves skated across the road in fits and starts, leaping spastically into the air where they were startled by hot thermals, then flashing into ash in the dragon’s breath of flaming trees and burning buildings. Kirk heard someone cry out in a barking language that he knew wasn’t human, but when he rolled to place the sound there was nothing to see but a still unburnt tree line dancing freakishly in the shadows from the fires across the way.

  The staccato popping of antique firearms drew his stomach up into his throat even before the more familiar whine of phaser fire sang out in reply. Starfleet. Whatever was happening here, there were Starfleet people involved in it—maybe even his own people. He wasn’t going to lie here on the ground and just wait for the battle to find him, not if there was anything he could do to help.

  Stuffing the map down the front of his jumper, he scrambled to his feet and turned a circle to give [4] himself a starting point from which to get his bearings. The road on which he stood was unlined and empty—like a logging road that went only one place and didn’t need to supply any additional directions to what little traffic used it. An impressive deciduous forest walled one side, it’s tattered canopy still scattering the dying leaves of early autumn. Across the road from the forest, a handful of older trees had been left to decorate the edges of a concrete-and-glass city that grew gradually taller as the buildings moved away from the road. It was on this side of the landscape that the fires burned.

  Kirk stared toward the stair-step pyramids and cylindrical towers already swathed in robes of flame, until they stood out both bright and dark against the nighttime sky. I should know this place. Bits and pieces of memory jostled for attention at the back of his brain, only to be beaten into silence by the horrific scene in front of him. If he knew this town, this planet, it was in some vastly different context. Like a familiar painting, inexpertly recreated from a new and confusing angle. Or tourist streets seen at night when he’d previously only walked them during the day.

  That he should know this place seemed terribly important—enough to make his heart pound faintly, like a drum still muffled by distance—but the front of his mind insisted, No! Go find the others! before he could spend too long trying to excavate the memory. Blinking hard, Kirk pulled his eyes away from the [5] conflagration, and ducked into the cover of the tree line.

  The road arced back toward the heart of the burning city, and the old growth forest followed it only partway. Kirk paused at the edge of the trees and crouched behind a massive trunk to survey the firelit expanse between forest and town. The road itself remained clear, but quick figures darted between buildings and immobile vehicles just inside the edges of the city. Some of them clumped together in terrified, stumbling groups as they scrambled toward perceived safety; others carried what were obviously weapons, although who or what they pursued wasn’t always so clear.

  Kirk fingered the collar of his gold cave jumper. Movement had cracked off the sheets of mud made brittle by the dry autumn air, leaving him pale and exposed. While his gold command t
unic was only marginally darker, at least he had on black trousers and boots beneath the jumper, which would cut his visibility in half. Besides, he had a feeling that the moisture-wicking nano-weave was going to be about the least useful thing he could have brought here with him. He would much rather have had one of Martine’s phasers, or at least one of Sanner’s climbing ropes.

  He stowed the folded jumper in a hollow beneath the tree’s hunched up roots, burying it under a few large handfuls of leaf litter and hoping he’d be able to find the spot later if he needed it. He buried Chekov’s notebook with its maps and attached mechanical pencil along with the jumper. He couldn’t imagine what [6] use he could possibly find for it, but it still somehow seemed ungrateful to just abandon it after forcing the boy to sit on the floor of a frozen cave and re-create the thing from memory.

  The weapons fire had thinned, with only a single phaser wailing in futile response to increasingly bold chatters of gunfire. Kirk threaded between shrubbery and buildings, hugging walls as closely as he could so as to present the smallest possible target to anyone trying to shoot down on him from above. It would help to know who’s doing the shooting. It would tell him what sort of tactics to expect, not to mention what sort of weapons and what sort of physical capabilities. He didn’t like not knowing who the bad guys were.

  As if in answer to his thoughts, a pair of gunmen clattered down the long flight of open-rail steps that wrapped around the building in front of Kirk. The metallic thunder of their footsteps rang hollowly somewhere in the back of Kirk’s memory, and he suddenly knew the building at his shoulder was a tall extended-family dwelling without understanding how he knew that or why it should make the inside of his mouth taste like bile. When the first man to reach the ground lifted his head at the foot of the stairs, he looked across the neatly trimmed hedgerow and locked eyes with Kirk as though he’d known all along the captain would be there. And even his pale copper-penny eyes looked terrifyingly familiar to Kirk.

  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 knew when 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 their puhen 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 the front of his shirt and commanding, “Go! Get back to the embassy and tell your dad we need backup!” And, God help him, Kirk had gone. He’d wriggled out the back of the dying shuttle and left them, telling himself it was an order, telling himself he was doing the right thing and that his father would [10] bring back a combat team that would know exactly what to do.

  But as fast as he ran, as hard as he tried, he never saw the embassy or Lieutenant Maione’s squad again. Until now.

  Grabbing the lip of the shuttle’s buckled roof, Kirk pulled himself up and over, careful to roll down the other side as swiftly as possible and drop into a crouch in the deep shadows there. He couldn’t tell how long it had been since the Vragax natives had finished their slaughter here, but he didn’t want to risk being targeted by whoever might still be lurking in the burning darkness that used to be Sogo city. The men around him had been killed by whatever the Vragax had on hand—magnetic propulsion gauss slugs, phasers, the short ceremonial darts from Vragax spear throwers. Kirk knew Maione’s men must have taken down a good many Vragax with them, but there were no native bodies mixed in with the carnage. In the midst of their bloody rampage through Sogo, the Vragax still took time to collect their own dead for whatever it was they considered dignified disposal.

  Kirk sensed more than saw a furtive movement toward the rear of the shuttle, dark-on-dark, almost silent despite the bits of broken shuttle and restless autumn leaves. Sinking back against the rucked-up earth, Kirk thumbed the primer on one of the gauss rifles and lifted it slowly to his shoulder. The chain of tiny electromagnets lining the inside of its barrel [11] whined almost beyond the pitch of human hearing as they built up the necessary charge.

  The shadow creeping up on Kirk along the shuttle’s splintered flank halted. “John?” Tension poised the burly silhouette so still it might have been a statue. “Maione, is that you?”

  It could have been a recording of Kirk’s own voice. Why did I never notice that before
? he wondered. Swallowing hard, he let the gauss rifle sink to rest across his knees. “Maione’s dead.” He hoped he sounded confident and in control. He hoped he didn’t sound too much like himself. “I’m the only one left.”

  The other human padded closer, hunkering down on all fours to share Kirk’s shadow and the relative protection of the artificial hill. There wasn’t enough light to really see him clearly, but Kirk knew even through the darkness that his uniform was Starfleet, his tunic red, and his eyes were the same angry green as the East Coast ocean in winter. He was a commander, he was forty-six years old, and he was the meanest son of a bitch to ever head a security squad. “Name and rank,” the man snapped, reaching for the second gauss rifle without asking, much less waiting, for position.

  “Forester.” Kirk blurted the name without thinking, then was forced to add, “Captain,” because he wouldn’t be able to hide the braid on his sleeves. “I came in with the last group of replacements.”

  The other man nodded as though he’d expected as much. “I didn’t even get a chance to read you in, sir. My apologies.”

  [12] Kirk felt an oddly uncomfortable blush push up into his face. “None necessary.” Because I wasn’t really here—I shouldn’t be here now—But he made himself ask steadily, “What’s your name, soldier?” as though the answer would hardly make any difference, as though he didn’t already know.

  “Commander George Kirk, sir, interim security chief.” He powered up his rifle, then helped himself to one of Kirk’s spare clips and shoved it into the half-empty magazine. “And I’m out here, sir, because I’m looking for my son.”

  For the second time in twenty-four hours, Uhura found herself standing shocked and helpless in the blue glow of Tlaoli’s Janus Gate. The first time she had felt this paralyzing fear was when Captain Kirk and Ensign Chekov had disappeared without warning as they tried to evacuate a trapped caving team from these ice-sheathed caverns. Now, with the alien time transporter they had discovered here free of its distorting travertine shell and obediently responding to Spock’s commands, the source of her shock was a phalanx of metal-clad aliens who had just banned them from ever using the Janus Gate again.