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  For Nichelle Nichols

  Remember thee?

  Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat

  In this distracted globe. Remember thee?

  Yea, from the table of my memory

  I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,

  All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past

  That youth and observation copied there,

  And thy commandment all alone shall live

  Within the book and volume of my brain,

  Unmix’d with baser matter.

  —William Shakespeare Hamlet

  Historian’s Note

  The events of this story take place in the summer and autumn of 2279, approximately six years after the reunited crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise saves Earth from a powerful machine life-form called V’Ger (Star Trek: The Motion Picture) and six years prior to Khan Noonien Singh’s escape from exile on Ceti Alpha V (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan).

  Prologue

  Passenger Transport Ballou

  Iota Leonis system

  Michael Ashrafi leaned against the forward viewport, straining his eyes as if it would somehow bring Argelius II into view sooner. “Ar-jee-lius, here we come!”

  Vekal suppressed a twinge of annoyance. “As I have stated five previous times, Michael,” the Vulcan youth said, “it is ‘Ar-ghee-lius.’ A voiced velar plosive as opposed to a voiced palato-alveolar affricate. How illogical that your alphabet employs the same symbol for both.”

  “It’s perfectly logical,” countered Zirani Kayros with an impish tilt to her hairless head. “Alphabets evolve over time and must adapt their existing symbols to new or foreign sounds.” The Tiburonian tapped one of her broad, elaborately contoured ears. “Sometimes they lack enough symbols to cover them all.”

  “Then they could simply add diacritical marks to clarify the distinction.”

  Michael scoffed, crossing his arms over his bright red shirt. “You’re one to talk about logic, Vekal. How logical is it for a Vulcan to sneak off on a pleasure trip to sample the hedonistic wonders of Ar-jee-lius?”

  Vekal fidgeted in his seat. “Respect for infinite diversity requires study and understanding. I am simply here to… observe how Argelian civilization has managed to achieve two centuries of peace while freely indulging emotional desire, as opposed to restraining it. If I am to work with emotional beings once we begin our term at Starfleet Academy—”

  Kayros chuckled. “So you thought you’d sample a few of those ‘indulgences’ for yourself, right? Strictly in the name of immersion anthropology.” She leaned closer, affecting a pretense of seductive behavior. “Admit it, Vekal. Vulcan teenagers are as curious about sex as the rest of us. Aren’t you?”

  Vekal had never expected to be so relieved by the sound of a navigational hazard alert. Reflexively, he turned to look out the forward port, where brilliant pinpoints of light were flashing briefly into existence, almost blinding him before the port’s filters engaged to dim the view. As the Ballou began to decelerate and turn, the pilot’s voice emanated from the intercom. “Passengers, please return to your seats. We’re encountering some kind of gravimetric and EM turbulence. I’m bringing us briefly to a relative halt while I assess— Aahh!”

  Suddenly the blinding lights were inside the ship, just for a moment or two as it passed through the edge of the effect, despite the pilot’s efforts to avoid it. The result was akin to a lightning strike inside the compartment, the heat searing Vekal’s skin and the shock waves in the air deafening him.

  When he gathered himself afterward, he noted that the engines had shut down and the display screens were dark. The overhead lights flickered and the air carried the scent of burned circuits and vaporized metals. Glancing at the viewport, Vekal saw that the Ballou was in a slow rotation.

  He looked toward the cockpit, but Kayros had already recovered and was climbing the gangway leading up to it. Sliding the door open, she looked inside and gasped. Vekal strove to make out her words over the ringing in his ears. “Get the medkit! I think he’s been shot!”

  It was an illogical assumption; more likely, one of the pinpoint energy anomalies had passed through the Argelian pilot’s body, as they presumably had with the engines. “Send a distress call!” he said loudly as Michael went for the medical kit.

  Kayros checked the console and shook her head. “The power’s down!”

  It was reasonable to surmise that the craft had an automatic distress beacon with independent power, but there was no way to be certain. Vekal put that matter aside for now; the pilot was the first priority.

  Michael gave him a wry look as he handed over the medkit. “See? This is what you get when a Vulcan tries to have a good time.”

  U.S.S. Reliant NCC-1864

  Approaching Iota Leonis system

  “Any luck yet, Mister Chekov?”

  Commander Pavel Chekov frowned at the radiometrics display on his science console, making one more attempt to refine its scan settings. “Negative, Captain,” he told Clark Terrell, who hovered over his left shoulder. In his months aboard Reliant, Chekov had learned that the burly, bearded captain was the populist type, often found pacing the outer ring of bridge stations to get his crew’s reports at close range rather than holding court from the captain’s chair in the center. Chekov appreciated Terrell’s personal touch most of the time, but having his commanding officer looming over him when answers were slow in coming was not his favorite sensation.

  “We are not quite close enough to separate out the source of the sensor interference,” Chekov went on, looking up into Terrell’s broad, brown face. “Radiometric readings are still blended in with the flux from Argelius’s sun, while gravimetric and subspace readings are intermingled with the heavy warp traffic around the planet. It is a popular tourist destination, of course.”

  “Which is exactly what worries me.” Terrell strode forward two stations, allowing the tension in Chekov’s shoulders to ease slightly. “Any luck cleaning up that distress signal, Lieutenant Kyle?”

  The fair, goateed Englishman looked up from the communications station. “Nearly there, sir. The interference is rising and falling in surges, but it seems to be diminishing overall, and of course the gain increases as we get closer. I’m getting fragments now—I estimate another minute or two.”

  Terrell nodded. “Do your best, John.” He turned to the helm. “Stoney, any chance of gaining a bit more speed?”

  “We’re maxed out already, sir,” Lieutenant Commander Ralston Beach replied in his pronounced New York accent. “In fact, I don’t like going this fast into a high-traffic area with low sensor visibility.”

  “Needs must as the Devil drives,
Stoney.”

  “Even the Devil would slow down if he were driving into that mess, Captain.”

  Terrell chuckled. “Touché.”

  The talk of the Devil brought Chekov no reassurance. His first visit to Argelius II had been a dozen years earlier, on shore leave from the Enterprise after a series of stressful missions. The visit had been very… well, “relaxing” was hardly the word, but quite pleasant and fulfilling for a twenty-two-year-old ensign on his first visit to a hedonistic society. He had gone down to the surface in a shore party including Lieutenant Uhura, who had promptly lit out on her own pursuits, as they had not yet become more than casual friends. It had been a rewarding but blurry few days—at least for Chekov. Uhura had also seemed highly satisfied when he had seen her again at the transporter station, but he had respected her privacy. However, once they returned to the Enterprise, they had been shocked to discover that the vessel had been invaded in their absence by a murderous incorporeal entity calling itself Redjac, which claimed to have been Jack the Ripper and other infamous serial killers from history—or rather, to have possessed and controlled their bodies, as it had possessed a local administrator who had killed several Argelian women as well as Karen Tracy, a medical technician Chekov had been rather fond of. Naturally, Captain Kirk and Mister Spock had managed to save the day, beaming the entity’s deceased host body into open space on wide dispersal. Chekov hadn’t been sure if he was glad or sorry to have missed it, given that most of his crewmates were still coming down from the tranquilizer high Doctor McCoy had put them on to starve the entity of the fear that sustained it. Lieutenant Sulu seemed to have had nearly as good a time at the helm station as Chekov had on the planet.

  But who could really say what it would take to kill an incorporeal entity that had survived for centuries? Chekov knew from his recent experience with the Spectres that it was possible to kill such an entity while it was joined to a humanoid host, but Redjac had evidently been able to jump between hosts far more readily—even possessing the Enterprise computer for a time. What if dispersing its transporter beam had only weakened it temporarily? Could these disruptions affecting multiple ships near Argelius be a sign of its restoration?

  Chekov reined in his imagination. He was Reliant’s chief science officer; his job was to formulate hypotheses based on evidence, not speculation and old fears. Soon they would have more information about the nature of the disruptions, and Chekov could practically hear Spock’s voice in his head reminding him to take the time to fill the gaps in his knowledge with data rather than hastening to fill them with conjecture.

  Indeed, it was only moments more before Kyle was able to clear up the signal interference. “Argelius II Orbital Control coming through now, sir,” he reported.

  Terrell nodded. “On screen.” He turned to the main viewscreen.

  “… ontrol to Fed… essel, do you read?”

  “Argelius Orbital Control, this is Captain Clark Terrell of the U.S.S. Reliant. We read you.”

  The dark-eyed humanoid woman on the screen gave a sigh of relief. “Oh, thank the… trying to reach you for hours!”

  “Is your situation urgent?”

  “Not… ad as we feared, Captain. But multiple ships ha… damaged by some sort of gravime… ic and electromagnetic discharges in proximit… the planet. Multip… ges coming and going unpredictably. They’re coming less often n… eem to be growing weaker, but several ships req… assistance.”

  “We stand ready to assist, Argelius Control. Where are we needed most?”

  The Argelian looked down, evidently checking her displays. “That would be the Ballou, a passenger transport. We… ceived their distress signal, but the interference keeps us from getting a precise fix. But with Starfleet sensors…”

  “Please transmit their last known course and position, Control. We’ll get right on it.”

  Kyle efficiently caught the transmitted data and passed it over to the science station. Chekov directed sensors to the indicated area and soon got a hit. “Got it, sir. It’s adrift, power almost gone.” He worked the controls to refine the dynoscanner readings. “Three… no, probably four life signs, one weak.”

  “Then we’ve got no time to lose,” Terrell said. “Stoney, time to play Coast Guard.”

  * * *

  “It was the weirdest thing I ever saw,” Michael Ashrafi told Terrell as he sat on the edge of his bed in sickbay. Beside him, Nurse Matsuda was applying a salve to Zirani Kayros’s radiation burns, as she had already done to Ashrafi. Doctor Wilder was in surgery tending to the Ballou’s pilot, while Doctor Valentine was treating the Vulcan youth, Vekal, for his more severe burns and hearing loss.

  “There were these really bright flashes of light—just pinpoints, just for a split second, but blinding, like lightning. Unpredictable, like… like distant fireworks.” He rubbed a hand through his shaggy black hair. “Except not so distant. The pilot tried to stop short and ease around it, but he didn’t quite make it. We brushed the edge of the—the storm, or whatever, and the pinpoints started to pop up inside the cabin. They didn’t burn through the hull, mind you—they just appeared right there in midair.”

  “The way the pilot’s wound looked,” Kayros said with a squeamish expression, “it was like something had burned a hole in him from the inside.”

  “Probably what happened to the engines too,” Ashrafi said. He peered at Terrell. “Starfleet’s probably seen weirder things than this, right? You know what this was?”

  Terrell patted his shoulder. “We’re working on it, son. But for now, at least the phenomenon seems to have subsided. Hopefully it won’t repeat.”

  “From your lips to the Great Bird’s ears,” Ashrafi said. He tilted his head, grinning wryly. “I came to Argelius to have a blast, but this isn’t the kind I had in mind.”

  The captain chuckled. “You three are all enrolled in Starfleet Academy?”

  Ashrafi nodded. “We start in the fall.”

  “But you’re already friends?”

  Kayros nodded. “We met at a three-week pre-Academy program on Alpha Centauri.”

  Terrell nodded. There were various preparatory and affiliate programs offered on different worlds for aspiring Academy entrants, or for accepted cadets seeking a head start. Starfleet had demanding educational standards, and even commissioned officers were expected to continue studying and learning throughout their active service. Therefore, any additional learning that cadets chose to pursue beforehand was welcome and encouraged.

  Terrell turned at the sound of the corridor door, which opened to admit Commander Chekov. “Captain, I have the analysis of the sensor readings from Orbital Control.”

  “Have you been able to identify the phenomenon?”

  Chekov hesitated. “Up to a point, sir. The outbursts appear to be… well, essentially, they are extremely large vacuum fluctuations.”

  Ashrafi stared at him. “ ‘Wacuum fluctuations’? What the hell are those?”

  “Oh, come on, Michael,” Kayros said. “Elementary quantum physics, remember? The Uncertainty Principle—energy can spontaneously be created as long as it’s destroyed in a brief enough time that it doesn’t unbalance the books.”

  He stared at her blankly. “I’m a communications student, Zirani. I barely got through that course.”

  The young Tiburonian frowned. “But that’s not supposed to show up on a macroscopic scale, beyond special cases like the Casimir effect.”

  Chekov smiled at her. “Very good, miss. You’re right, as a rule. But it’s a matter of probability. There’s always the infinitesimal chance that a spontaneous quantum fluctuation could produce a massive amount of energy. It’s incredibly unlikely, but in a vast universe…”

  Terrell stared at him. “I could buy that happening once, but this was numerous outbursts over hours.”

  “I’m not saying it’s the answer for certain, sir. But it’s theoretically possible. The bursts appeared to have the gravimetric signature of quantum wormholes. A single burst of su
fficient energy could churn the cosmic foam, so to speak, enough to cause spontaneous tunneling events, possibly a cascade of such wormholes. The energy arising in one spot could spill out through those wormholes, displaced around it in space and time, and those other bursts could produce a chain reaction, until it eventually died down.”

  The captain crossed his arms. “So you think this was a one-time freak event. We don’t have to worry about it happening again.”

  Chekov straightened. “I am not saying that, Captain. Russians always plan for the worst. And I cannot yet rule out the possibility that some outside influence triggered the event. But at the moment, we have no data to suggest that. And it is within the realm of possibility that it was a unique natural event.”

  Terrell nodded. “All right. We’ll stay in the system for a few more days, just in case.” He smiled. “If nothing else happens, we might as well take advantage of the opportunity for some R and R.”

  Ashrafi hopped off the bed. “Sounds good to me! When do we go?”

  “Ah, yes, about that,” Chekov said. “Once Doctor Wilder reported your names, our communications officer notified your families.” He crossed his arms, taking in both Ashrafi and Kayros. “It seems that your parents have been wondering where you snuck off to. They’re on their way to pick you up.”

  The mop-headed boy groaned and sank back onto the bed. “This is the worst vacation ever.”

  Terrell caught his gaze. “Look at it this way, son: at least you get to go home from it.”

  Chapter One

  U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701

  Kaleb sector

  “Admiral,” Captain Spock observed, “the work bee crews have been thorough in their inspections.”

  Admiral James T. Kirk flushed slightly at his old friend’s words, a gentle reminder that his aimless fidgeting to distract himself could be taken as a criticism of the Enterprise’s diligent cadet crew. “Of course, Spock,” he said, abandoning his pretense of looking over the work bee bays’ charger connections. Returning to the Vulcan captain’s side, he gazed out across the landing bay’s wide floor, toward the open hangar doors at the rear and the stars gleaming through the nigh-invisible shimmer of the force field that held in the bay’s atmosphere. “I’m just eager for the Lemaître to return, so we can get this mission over with. It’ll be good to get back to the Academy.”