Star Trek: The Original Series: The Rings of Time

retired Air Force Captain John Christopher. Only four years had passed, by Kirk’s reckoning, since he had bid farewell to Captain Christopher on the bridge of the Enterprise, but of course, decades had passed for Shaun’s father, who had not even conceived his son the last time Kirk saw him. And now Kirk was occupying Shaun’s body!

Talk about a small universe, he thought. Or should that be a small space-time continuum?

What were the odds that they would cross paths like this again, despite a gap of centuries? Kirk had to wonder if some cosmic intelligence was playing games with him, or was it just that time-travel conundrums were like some kind of persistent infection? Maybe once you caught one, you were always susceptible to a relapse? Spock would surely have a theory on the subject, possibly involving temporal linkages or chroniton entanglement. McCoy would probably just chalk it up to a bizarre twist of fate.

Maybe the truth was somewhere in between.

Over at an adjacent terminal, Fontana looked up from her own correspondence. “How are the kids? They having a good time with Debbie this summer?”

“Sounds like it.” Kirk wished he could pump Fontana for more details on Christopher’s family but changed the subject instead. “How about you? Any exciting news from home?”

“Not unless you count my idiot brother breaking his ankle snowboarding. And my mom has a new gallery opening next weekend.” She snickered. “I told her I probably couldn’t make it.”

“I suspect she understood,” Kirk said, relieved to be talking about anything other than Shaun Christopher’s mysterious loved ones. He resolved to scour the e-mail more thoroughly later for whatever personal info he could glean from it. “You’ll have to catch her next show.”

He wondered if Fontana’s mom was a painter, a sculptor, or what.

Watch out, he warned himself. Don’t let on that you don’t know.

“I just hope she’s taking good care of Gus,” Fontana said. “God, I miss the little guy.”

Wait. Fontana had a child, too?

“Any message from him?” he asked.

She looked puzzled by the question. “Last time I checked, bulldogs weren’t much on letter writing.”

Damn, Kirk thought. I got it wrong again.

“Well, you never know,” he said, trying to recover. “You can do wonders with dog training these days.”

“Ha, ha, ha,” she said. “Very funny — not.”

O’Herlihy sniffled over at the far terminal. His back was turned to the other astronauts. Kirk thought he heard the man choke back a sob.

He seized on the distraction. “You all right, Doctor?”

“I’m fine,” O’Herlihy insisted. He rotated to face them. “Just a little choked up, that’s all.” He wiped a tear from his eye and licked his finger to make sure it didn’t get away. “What can I say? I miss my family.”

Kirk had already picked up on the fact that the doctor was a devoted family man. He had previously caught O’Herlihy mooning over home-video footage of a wife and a college-age daughter. They had looked like lovely women. He couldn’t blame O’Herlihy for missing them.

“Nothing wrong with that,” Fontana said. “Every-thing okay with Jocelyn and Tera?”

“They’re well,” he reported, although his hoarse voice betrayed how powerfully the letters from home had affected him. He made an effort to regain his composure. “My apologies. I shouldn’t get so emotional.”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Kirk said. “After all, you’re human, not Vul—” He started to say “Vulcan” but caught himself. “I mean, you’re only human.”

“We all are,” Fontana added.

“I know,” O’Herlihy said. He stared plaintively at the screen before him. “They just seem so far away sometimes. Like I’m never going to see them again.”

Kirk tried to remember O’Herlihy’s biography but couldn’t bring up the details. He just remembered the name from the mission logs.

“You will,” Fontana promised. “They’ll be there waiting for you when we get back.”

And so will Christopher’s family, Kirk realized. They were millions of kilometers away now, but what about when he got to Earth? How in the world could he face Shaun’s own flesh and blood?

He couldn’t even tell them what had become of the real Shaun.

If he even still existed at all.

Fifteen

2270

“Here comes another one!” Sulu blurted.

A boulder-sized chunk of ice hurled toward the domed colony on the viewer. Between its size and its velocity, it had a good chance of breaching Skagway’s fading deflectors and maybe even the lunar habitat itself. A breach in the dome was a worst-case scenario that seemed to be growing more likely by the moment.

“Got it,” Chekov said.

Without waiting for a command to fire, Chekov unleashed a salvo of phaser beams that shattered the frozen meteoroid into hundreds of smaller fragments only moments before it would have slammed into Skagway. Vaporizing the object would have been cleaner, but they needed to conserve the phaser banks’ power. Pulverized ice crystals rained down on the besieged colony.

Chekov let out a held breath. “That was a close one.”

“Just like the last two,” Sulu commented. “Is it just me, or are these giant hailstones getting more and more frequent?”

“Your perceptions are quite accurate, Lieutenant,” Spock stated from the captain’s chair. “The frequency of such near-collisions has increased by a factor of six-point-seven over the last twenty-four hours. As the rings continue to destabilize, ever more debris is being drawn toward Klondike VI, placing Skagway in jeopardy, even as the moon’s own orbit brings it steadily closer to the inner rings — where it will face additional hazards.”

They were fighting a losing battle, Spock knew. Once Skagway entered the inner rings, the challenge of defending the colony would increase exponentially. And the Enterprise’s tractor beams, while state-of-the-art, were hardly sufficient to hold even a small moon in place.

He called up the latest tracking data on Skagway’s orbit. The figures scrolled across the display panel on his right armrest. He performed the necessary calculations in his head. The analysis took only seconds.

“Mr. Sulu.” He addressed the helmsman. “Skagway’s orbit has contracted by a factor of nine-point-two. Please adjust our own orbit to compensate.”

“Already on it, sir,” Sulu said. “Matching course and speed.” He kept his gaze fixed on the wayward moon. “Don’t worry, Mr. Spock, I’m not letting those people out of sight.”

Chekov sighed. “Too bad those drifting icebergs aren’t letting them alone, either.”

Spock detected a note of fatigue in the ensign’s voice. By his calculations, Chekov had now been on duty for fourteen hours, twelve minutes, and forty-four seconds. A swift review of Chekov’s defensive phaser fire indicated a slight but significant loss in reaction time. Spock made a decision.

“Lieutenant Ita,” he instructed, “please relieve Ensign Chekov at the nav station. Mr. Chekov, you are relieved.”

“Sir?” Chekov looked back at him in dismay.

“No criticism is intended, Ensign,” Spock assured him. Five years of working alongside humans had taught him the importance of taking their egos and emotions into account in command situations. Maintaining crew morale was not his forte, but he had learned that it was not a factor that could be safely overlooked, particularly where humans were concerned. “Your performance has been exemplary, but you, like all living organisms, are subject to fatigue. It is only logical to rotate key personnel as required. You may resume your duties after a suitable interval of