Then Joseph began to glow.
For a moment, just a moment, Kirk felt unreasoning fear.
Then he recognized the spectrum of that energy his son produced, that his son was part of.
Picard fumbled for his own tricorder, took readings as the purple light from Joseph filled the huge room.
“Density… negative,” Picard read from the tricorder’s small display. He changed a setting. “Radiation negative…”
Kirk didn’t need a tricorder to know what the last reading would reveal. Neither did Picard.
“Energy negative,” they said together.
Joseph was light.
Norinda was darkness.
Kirk knew he witnessed a battle that was older by far than his first encounter with the Totality, older by far than Earth itself.
“The galactic barrier…” Picard said.
Kirk understood. “Built as a defense… four billion years ago, when only one species lived in this galaxy.”
BEGONE FROM HERE, the voice said.
“Never!” Norinda cried in defiance.
Her tendrils flickered hungrily toward Joseph, but exploded into inky mist at each contact with the energy that surrounded him.
Joseph’s form could be seen no longer. He blazed with the same energy that fueled the galactic barrier-the same energy Kirk had seen on the first mission to take him past the boundaries of Earth’s frontiers and for the first time to truly go where no one had gone before.
Kirk held up his hand to cover his eyes, but that light could still be seen.
Then Kirk realized that even as his child achieved victory, he himself had lost.
Even the simple act of holding up his hand was impossible.
Strength melted from him. His arm fell to his side. He could no longer sit up. He stretched out on the dark floor, each breath more difficult than the one before, knowing that soon he’d draw his last.
It was time for him to die.
And then… he saw Jean-Luc on the floor beside him, also gasping for air.
“Jean-Luc,” Kirk said, “you’ve got to hold on.”
“I will,” Picard replied as if puzzled by Kirk’s concern. “The gravity increase will only last a few seconds.”
“Gravity increase?”
“The Enterprise and the Belle Reve must’ve finally locked on to the combat tricorder. We’re in a projected gravity field.”
If Kirk had had the strength, he would have laughed.
Picard gave his friend a questioning look. “What… did you think you were dying?”
Kirk gazed up at the rich purple light that filled the command center, a glorious light, he realized, that had followed him all through his career.
“Not today,” he said. “Never today.”
And then the light intensified beyond anything Kirk had experienced before, erasing all the Norindas, filling him, his vision and his heart, becoming a radiance so bright and pure he knew that even Teilani might see it, and know that their love still survived.
“Teilani,” Kirk whispered as the light took him, “we won….”
38
AFTERMATH
Most of the abductees returned from Norinda’s dark realm. Exactly how, no one could say. But the colonists of Delta Vega, once an old mining station, awoke the morning after the events on Vulcan to find almost a thousand newcomers standing in confusion in the fields and forests surrounding their colony’s Central City.
Starfleet Command came to the conclusion that Delta Vega had been chosen to receive the abductees because, in the Alpha Quadrant at least, it was the closest Class-M planet to the galaxy’s edge and thus to the galactic barrier. Though this assumption implied that some intelligence had done the choosing, Starfleet did not address the issue. At least, not in their public analysis.
With reports of other abductees being returned to the Klingons and the Romulans, researchers were now expecting, over the decades and centuries ahead, to hear similar stories from cultures with whom the Federation had yet to make first contact.
Some abductees were still unaccounted for. As Spock had said, some of the personalities he encountered in the realm of dark matter apparently accepted the invitation to go deeper within the Totality. None of those people had yet returned, the captain and crew of the U.S.S. Monitor among them. They were explorers, so perhaps their decision was understandable.
Initial follow-up reports suggested that perhaps as many as four hundred Starfleet personnel had been replaced by projections. But more than five thousand replacements occurred on Vulcan. Strategists were arguing vehemently over why Vulcan had been singled out by the Totality for such extensive infiltration. The majority view was that the Totality, in its blind faith in its mission, had decided that logic alone would encourage Vulcans to accept their invitation.
Not one Vulcan did. Each of that world’s abductees returned.
There was interest also in what happened when the Enterprise and the Belle Reve succeeded in their gravity attack on Shi’Kahr: When Norinda was reabsorbed and vanished, every other projection, whether in Starfleet or other agencies, dissolved. For a few months, at least, Starfleet intended to continue random gravity increases on starships and starbases, just to be sure no new projections attempted to infiltrate. However, there was reason to believe the Totality could never again attack: Readings from hundreds of subspace observatories confirmed that the galactic barrier had undergone a dramatic change in just a matter of days, becoming stronger than ever before, as if it had somehow been recharged. Quick calculations indicated that the increased negative-energy range of the barrier was enough to prevent the opening of any new portals to the dark-matter realm.
Privately, Starfleet Command was beginning to consider the barrier in a new light. Rather than a navigational nuisance that kept Starfleet vessels in, it was seen as a welcome phenomenon that kept something out.
While Starfleet’s public report did not address the issue of how the recharging of the barrier might have occurred, a small handful of Starfleet personnel, active and retired, felt they knew the answer.
A month after the events on Vulcan, the group gathered in a small clearing on an ocean world named Chal. In the clearing was a half-built cabin, an old tree stump still buried in the ground, and a simple grave marked with a polished stone and the dedication plaque from a starship called Enterprise.
A new marker had been added near the grave. It was inscribed in four languages: Standard, Vulcan, Klingon, and Romulan. There was no body beneath it because no body had been found, and neither did anyone expect to find one.
In one of those languages, the marker read simply:
JOSEPH SAMUEL T’KOL T’LAN KIRK OF CHAL
WITH LOVE
For those who knew, it was memorial enough.
Epilogue
