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A human scientist had summed up eight years of frustrated research by equating the total of recorded conversations between the Guardian and humans to an exchange that might be expected between a human and dogs. The smartest, non-genetically engineered dogs might have a vocabulary of five hundred words, and comprehend a handful of actions and even abstract concepts such as direction and the duration of short periods of time. But what about the other hundred thousand words a dog’s master could use? What hope did a dog have of understanding its master’s philosophy and biochemistry and multiphysics? How could a dog even attempt to respond to its master in the human’s own spoken words? It was frustrating and humbling for humans to be relegated to the status of mute animals, knowing no way to reach up to the Guardian.

  The scientist had bitterly concluded that the researchers at Ellison Outpost had spent eight years conversing with a stone, and had gotten exactly the same results as they might get from asking questions of any rock. A few months later, the Guardian had ceased to respond to questions at all, as if confirming the scientist’s assessment.

  The Vulcan kept her face blank, but her next words, to Kirk’s attuned ears, were a plea by any other name. “I would find it most interesting if you would ask it a question, sir.”

  Kirk nodded. It was a small enough request. In a few minutes, a few hours at most, he would be gone, but the Vulcan would still work here. Why leave her with regrets?

  He turned to the Guardian, focusing on its wide opening through which the other side of the plaza was clear and unobstructed. The ruins beyond stretched to the horizon.

  “Guardian,” Kirk said in a firm, commanding tone, ”do you remember me?”

  The Vulcan betrayed her extreme youth by holding her breath in audible anticipation. An instant later, she remembered the tricorder at her side and brought it up to check its readings of the mute stone.

  “Guardian,” Kirk repeated, ”show me the history of my world.”

  The space bound by the circle of stone was unchanged.

  Kirk turned to the Vulcan. “I’m sorry,” he said. And in an abstract way, he was, even though the mysteries of the Guardian had moved beyond his concern.

  “Thank you for trying, sir,” the Vulcan said. Then she switched off her tricorder and stood with her hands behind her back, as if she were stone herself and had no intention of leaving his side.

  In the past, Kirk might have paused to consider a polite way to ask what he asked next, but time had become more important than hurt feelings these days.

  “Lieutenant Commander,” he said, “I would appreciate it if you would leave me alone here.”

  The startled Vulcan hid her surprise again, though not as well as the first time.

  “Is anything wrong, sir?”

  “I wish to meditate.” It was a lie, of course, but one with which no Vulcan would argue.

  “Of course, sir,” the Vulcan said. She began to walk away. Kirk turned back to the stone. Then he heard her footsteps stop. He looked back at her. A wind had sprung up. Her severely cut hair fluttered against her pointed ears.

  “Sir,” she called out over the growing wind, “this outpost has standing orders that personnel are never to step through the opening in the Guardian. We do not know if or when it might become operational again.”

  “Understood,” Kirk called back, and the Vulcan left him. He was alone with the Guardian. He stared through the opening. Is this what I’ve come back for? Kirk thought. With no more future before me, did I hope in some way to return to the past?

  The wind gusted and Kirk felt himself pushed toward the stone, caught in a swirl of obscuring dust that made his eyes water and his throat raw. He reached out a hand to steady himself. The Guardian was cold to his touch.

  He felt tired.

  He thought of the stateroom Sulu would have for him on the Excelsior. A soft bed. He could even turn down the gravity to ease the ache in his back. The old knife wound he had gotten just before the Coridan Babel Conference so many years ago had been coming back to taunt him of late. Assisted by too many other past injuries, too many sudden transports into different gravity fields.

  “Has it come to this?” Kirk asked the wind and the dust. “Will there be no more worlds to explore? No more battles to fight?”

  The Guardian was silent.

  Just as Kirk had known it would be.

  There would be no more miracles for him in this universe. He had captured a part of it in his life, imprinted a thousand worlds in his mind, had experiences and adventures that humans of centuries past could not conceive, and which humans of centuries to come could never repeat.

  He should be content with that, he knew.

  But he wasn’t.

  For all his confidence, his bravado, his skills and talent and drive to be the best, in his heart, at his core, there were doubts.

  Too many words left unsaid. Too many actions left undone. Too many questions gone unanswered.

  And now, with the journey’s end in sight, with the knowledge that it was time to put aside those things left unfinished, Kirk was not ready.

  His doubts tortured him.

  Edith, his love, in a roadway of old Earth, the truck rushing for her …

  David, his son, on the Genesis planet, with a Klingon knife above his heart …

  Garrovick, his commander, and 200 crew facing death on Tycho IV …

  For all that Kirk had done, had he done enough?

  Could anyone have done enough?

  Or was it all without meaning? Was life a simple tragedy of distraction from birth to death, with no more purpose than this stone before him?

  Kirk knew his journey would be ending soon, and this far into it, he still did not understand what had driven him to take it, nor long to continue it.

  Alone, he whispered a single word to the wind and the dust.

  “Why?”

  And for the first time in two decades, the Guardian of Forever answered….

  Part One

  BABEL

  THORSEN

  The Eugenics Wars of the late twentieth century were more than fifty years in the past, but the evil that had spawned them lived on. Hatred, intolerance, unrestrained greed, all those qualities which defined humanity so well, proved fertile ground as always.

  A generation unborn at the turn of the millennium grew up with a fascination for those who had promised order and salvation in the midst of chaos. In the world of the mid-twenty-first century, crumbling beneath the environmental outrages of the twentieth, that promise was a heady dream. A perfect world was possible if only the mistakes made by Khan Noonien Singh and his followers could be avoided.

  Adrik Thorsen was one of that generation determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

  He heard the call of the supermen whispered through the ages, predating even Khan. He rallied beneath the red banners and dark eagle of the Optimum Movement. He wore the red uniform of Colonel Green. He awoke each day with the knowledge that the destiny of the world, of all humanity, lay in the hands of those who had the will to take drastic, necessary action.

  Adrik Thorsen had that will, and in the mid-twenty-first century, in pockets of despair, regions overcome by anarchy and hopelessness, Thorsen was allowed to enact his policies.

  His quest for perfection began with the weeding out of the unfit. Those who were less than optimal, by infirmity, by genetics, then by religious beliefs and political persuasion, were the first to be coded for deletion. In those early days, killing children for the sins of their parents had been distressing to Thorsen. But in time he came to see the anguish he experienced, and then transcended, as a sign of his own growing perfection.

  True to his own theories, Adrik Thorsen was becoming optimal. If the world would only follow in his footsteps, he could lead all humanity to an era of peace and prosperity that would surpass all understanding.

  But his progress tormented him because he knew that whenever great men such as he dared dream great dreams, inevitably there were those who would
attempt to drag them down. By their very opposition, he considered his opponents to have proven themselves less than optimal. Thus, they, too, could be coded for deletion with all the others unfit to share the world.

  As he journeyed on his own inner search for the Optimum, Adrik Thorsen’s dream consumed him. Then it consumed his own pocket of the world. In time he was certain it would consume the world itself, and Paradise would follow from that moment as surely as night followed day, as constant as a law of nature.

  But first Thorsen understood he must vanquish the laws of history. The biggest mistake that had been made by Khan’s supermen was that they had lost. Adrik Thorsen would not permit that mistake to be made a second time.

  Thus on the morning of March 19, 2061, Thorsen himself led the mission against the WED Research Platform, geostationary orbit, Earth. Six carbon-shelled, single-passenger orbital transfer units carried Thorsen and five trusted troopers to within two kilometers of the corporate space station, undetected by proximity radar. The transfer units were jettisoned and the final approach was made in membrane suits, using nonignition maneuvering units.

  They made magnetic contact with the station’s hull at 01:20 GMT, precisely as scheduled. Their induction scans showed that no alarms had been triggered.

  At 01:27 GMT, they detonated the first spinner charge on the uplink dish, shutting off all communications with the platform’s corporate headquarters. Eight seconds later, a series of secondary detonations flashed along the staff module, splitting it in two.

  Thorsen watched with satisfaction as he counted seven platform crew members expelled from the resulting hull breach, arms and legs kicking frantically, mouths horrifically gaping with silent cries in the vacuum. As he had suspected, two of the crew members wore the blue and white uniforms of the New United Nations peacemaking forces. It was clear that Thorsen and the Optimum Movement were not the only ones who knew what breakthrough had been engineered at this facility.

  According to the operations manifest Thorsen had obtained, ten researchers and an unknown number of peacemakers remained on the platform. By now, the platform’s automated emergency decompression procedures would have sealed internal airlocks. It would be at least five minutes before any remaining peacemakers could don their own membrane suits and launch a counterattack. Thorsen and his troopers were unopposed as they jetted directly to the outermost arm of the platform, where the revolutionary new test vehicle was stored in its own docking module.

  Thorsen knew he could not explosively decompress that module without risk of damaging the vehicle itself. And it would be suicide for any of his troopers to attempt entry through the personnel airlock, where they would become a captive target. Accordingly, Thorsen ordered one of his troopers to the airlock to deploy an inflatable decoy. The decoy was the size and shape of a trooper in a membrane suit, and would draw the attention and laser fire of any crew members inside. At the same time, Thorsen commanded two other troopers to assemble an emergency evacuation blister on the outside of the docking module, sealing it to the hull and pressurizing it. Now his forces could breach the module’s hull without loss of internal atmosphere. The vehicle inside would be safe.

  At Thorsen’s signal, the first trooper cycled the inflatable decoy through the personnel airlock as the troopers in the evac blister used cutting lasers to breach the hull.

  The two troopers floating near Thorsen, ten meters away from the module, watched for the approach of peacemakers from the other airlocks.

  But whoever remained inside the vehicle storage module did not share Thorsen’s respect for rational military action. Before Thorsen’s troopers in the evac blister could finish cutting their entry point, a gout of crystallizing moisture exploded from the vehicle airlock doors at the end of the module. Debris blew out with it, meaning both the interior and exterior doors had been opened at once.

  Thorsen guessed what desperate strategy was being attempted and instantly moved to counteract it. He and the two troopers with him jetted to the open vehicle airlock door. The first trooper to arrive was cut in half by a particle beam, his suit and flesh rupturing in an explosion of instantly frozen blood.

  Thorsen directed a fly-by-wire flare pack to the lip of the vehicle airlock door and ignited it. Anyone inside who had seen the flash would be blind for at least thirty seconds. Then he and the remaining troopers flew into the docking module, lasers on continuous fire, tuned for membrane fabric, not for metal or carbon.

  There were no peacemakers inside, only unarmed researchers, all but one cowering in their pressure suits. Soon, only that one remained alive. She was in the vehicle itself, a reconfigured Orbital Fighter Escort with a single particle cannon on its nose. The modifications that Thorsen knew had been made to the fighter’s vectored impulse drive unit appeared to be all interior. From the outside, it was no different from any other fighter he had piloted.

  Thorsen’s troopers on watch outside the airlock door reported that no peacemakers had yet emerged from the other modules. Thorsen conferred quickly with the troopers in the module with him. They could see the researcher in the fighter through the vehicle’s flight-deck windows. It was difficult to assess what she was doing on the control consoles, but it was apparent that the fighter was still locked into position on its launch rails and would not be able to leave without a manual release.

  Then Thorsen’s induction scans alerted him to impulse circuits cycling through their ignition sequence. The researcher was attempting to power up the fighter’s main drive. Thorsen knew that when the researcher activated it, the plasma venting would kill everyone in the docking module, including her, and the mechanical strain against the launch rails would tear what was left of the entire platform apart.

  Thorsen admired her for her willingness to die for her ideals.

  He nodded at her with respect as he tuned his laser to optical frequencies that would pass through the fighter’s flight-deck windows. Though he forgave her the terror she showed as she saw the muzzle of the weapon point at her; she died badly, without acceptance of her fate at the hands of her superior. She was obviously not optimal Thorsen thus had no regret as he watched her lifeless body slowly spin in the fighter’s cabin.

  Within ten minutes, the troopers had removed the researcher’s body and Thorsen was strapped into the pilot’s chair. Despite the modifications to the vehicle, there were no major changes to the flight controls. He approved. The best innovations were always the simplest. Efficiency was always optimal.

  Thorsen’s troopers released the fighter from its launch rails and Thorsen used the maneuvering thrusters to gently guide the vehicle from the storage module. He told his troopers he would use the particle cannon to decompress the platform’s remaining intact modules; then, when the danger of a peacemaker counterattack had been neutralized, they could board for the next phase of the mission.

  It took Thorsen three minutes to destroy the platform. Bodies floating everywhere, a cloud of death surrounding the distant Earth, as it always had. In two more minutes, he had used the particle cannon to neutralize his own troopers as well. History had too often shown that great men were brought down by those who dared to share the glory for others’ actions. Thorsen felt no remorse because none was warranted.

  At 02:11 GMT, Thorsen sent a coded signal to an Optimum listening post on the moon. The listening post responded with a flight plan that would guide the fighter to Thorsen’s meeting with destiny. And Thorsen’s meeting with destiny would be humanity’s turning point as well.

  Because, as of March 19, 2061, the key to total victory over the Optimum’s opposition, and to the resulting emergence of a new order and salvation for the world, lay in the hands of a young scientist named Zefram Cochrane, who was poised on a threshold from which he would forever change humanity’s place in the universe.

  Driven by the wings of history and dreams of salvation for all who were worthy, and determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past, Adrik Thorsen flew for Titan.

  His plan was s
imple, efficient, optimal—whoever controlled the genius of Zefram Cochrane would control the future of humanity.

  And as of March 19, 2061, the future of humanity belonged to Adrik Thorsen.

  One

  CHRISTOPHER’S LANDING, TITAN

  Earth Standard: March 19, 2061

  For just one moment, a fleeting instant of the time his life would span, Zefram Cochrane thought he heard the stars sing to him.

  He could see them overhead, through the transparent slabs of aluminum that formed the dome over this part of the colony of Christopher’s Landing, Earth’s largest permanent outpost in near-Saturn space. Beyond the dome, the frozen nitrogen winds of Titan swept away thick orange streamers of crystallizing methane and hydrogen cyanide, as they chased the terminator to clear the dense atmosphere for only a few minutes between the clouds of day and the mists of night, allowing, briefly, dark bands to appear in the sky above. In that darkness, the stars flickered for Cochrane, creating a shimmering jeweled band around the dull yellow arc of Saturn that filled a quarter of the sky, so far from the sun that the light reflecting from it made the enormous planet almost imperceptible in Titan’s twilight. Its rings, head-on in the same orbital plane as the moon, were invisible.

  In that narrow window of time, between the beginning and end of a day unlike any other in human history, Cochrane stared at stars he had known all his life, and they were unfamiliar to him. Alone among all humans now alive, as far as he and most others knew, he had seen them as no one ever had.

  Blazing in deep space.

  Orbiting a world belonging to another star.

  Four and a third light-years from Earth.

  Four months ago.

  Cochrane closed his eyes to see the stars as he had seen them then, the constellations familiar to billions of his fellow beings shifted to new perspectives never seen before.

  Four and a third light-years. A world so far away the fastest impulse-powered probes took more than two decades to reach it, and then took more than four years longer to transmit back the data they recorded.