Star Trek: The Original Series: The Rings of Time

Enterprise is devoting every resource to this crisis, as the captain would have us do.”

If he were truly here, he amended silently.

Spock remained troubled by the uncertainty regarding Kirk’s fate. Although he had no doubt where his duty lay at the moment, he could not help wondering what had become of his captain — and his friend.

Where are you, Jim? Do you still exist?

Governor Dawson called him back to the present emergency. “And have you made any progress?” she asked. “Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate all of that fine skeet shooting you’ve been doing, but we’re still getting pummeled down here, and our shields are about shot. And they tell me this entire moon is circling the drain.”

An apt metaphor, Spock thought. “That is correct. Your orbit is contracting steadily, and you can expect to enter the inner rings in forty-nine-point-eight standard hours.”

“Fantastic,” Dawson said sarcastically. “As if we didn’t have enough to worry about.” She gazed at Spock hopefully. “I don’t suppose that high-powered starship of yours can nudge us back where we belong?”

“Regretfully, no,” Spock said. “Our tractor beams are insufficient to the task.”

“I was afraid of that.” She didn’t sound too surprised. “So, what else have you got?”

Qat Zaldana spoke up. With Spock now occupied commanding the Enterprise, the bulk of the scientific analysis had fallen on her. “We’re still studying the situation, but we’ve determined that the trouble with the rings — and our moon — may have something to do with an unusual phenomenon we’ve detected down on the planet.”

“What phenomenon?”

Qat Zaldana explained about the apparently simul — taneous contraction of the hexagonal vortex at the planet’s pole. The governor was familiar with the land-mark, naturally, but was clearly uncertain about the significance of this development.

“I don’t understand,” the governor said. “What does that damn hexagon have to do with us?”

Spock wished he knew. “I have given the matter some thought,” he informed her. “We lack the data to reach a definitive conclusion, but let us theorize that the hexagon — or whatever lies within it — was somehow instrumental in maintaining the gravitational integrity of the planet’s rings. If that is so, then perhaps that ancient mechanism is now malfunctioning, with the results that we are currently witnessing.”

“Maybe it’s finally just broken down after all these years,” Qat Zaldana speculated. “I’ve been reviewing the data on both Klondike VI and other ringed planets such as Saturn, and I’ve determined that the hexagons might well be an artificial phenomenon, possibly along with the rings themselves. We think we understand the gravitational forces creating the rings, but what if the mass of the planet’s core is actually much less stable than we’ve always believed? I mean, it’s not like anyone has ever actually visited the core of a gas giant; that’s beyond our technology, even today. What if Klondike VI and planets like it are actually much denser than we suspect, and the hexagons somehow act as counteragents creating the conditions that allow the rings to exist?”

Governor Dawson shook her head. “Is that even possible?”

“Conceivably,” Spock stated. “The mass and density of a planet are not always fixed constants. I have personally witnessed the disintegration of a dying planet, whose gravity fluctuated dramatically in its final days.” The planet in question, Psi 2000, no longer existed at all, and the Enterprise had nearly been caught in its gravitational death throes. “It may be that Klondike VI is similarly variable — without the stabilizing influence of the hexagon.”

Dawson nodded. “All right. So, how do we get the hexagon working again?”

“That has yet to be determined,” Spock confessed.

“Why did I know you were going to say that?” She groaned aloud. “Look, this is all very interesting scientifically, but what about my people and this colony? What’s our time frame here?”

“As I said, we have more than two days before Skagway enters the inner rings, which will increase the danger by several orders of magnitude, and perhaps another twenty-seven hours before the moon enters the planet’s atmosphere.” Spock considered whether the time to find a solution that would save the colony, and all of its inhabitants, was running out. “We should accelerate our plans to evacuate the colony.”

By his calculations, it would take sixteen-point-thirty-three hours to bring aboard as many evacuees as the Enterprise could safely transport. Even allowing for an adequate margin of error, they still had time to spare, but they needed to prepare for the worst.

“I’ve already begun drawing up lists of who gets to leave and who has to stay,” she admitted ruefully. “Children first, of course, but after that, the choices will break your heart. I know they have mine.” The strain of her position showed on her face. “I knew I should have retired years ago. I could be on New Pangea now, playing with my grandchildren, not deciding who lives and who dies.”

Spock was Vulcan, but he still grieved with her.

“Perhaps it still won’t come to that,” Qat Zaldana said, but her words rang hollow. Unknowable cosmic forces were in play, and they were running out of time.

A warning siren sounded in the governor’s office. She looked up in alarm as the room shuddered on the screen. Dust fell from the ceiling. A paperweight rolled off her desk. “Helfrost,” she muttered. “Not ag—”

The transmission was cut off abruptly.

“Governor!” Qat Zaldana exclaimed. “Skooka!”

The intercom whistled. Spock hit the speaker button on the viewer. “Spock here.”

“Sorry to interrupt, sir,” Sulu reported from the bridge. “But another barrage of meteoroids just hit the moon, about twenty kilometers west of the colony. Probably shook things up a bit.”

Spock overlooked Sulu’s typically human lack of precision. He had already deduced as much from the tremor that had cut off the transmission.

“And the colony itself?” he asked.

“No direct hits on the dome,” Sulu reported. “It’s still in one piece.”

For now, Spock thought.

But for how much longer?

Sixteen

2020

The specs for the Lewis & Clark’s first-generation impulse engines were enough to give Scotty conniptions. Kirk couldn’t believe how primitive they were. Poring over the technical data on an old-fashioned “laptop” computer, he saw all sorts of ways to make the antique engines safer and more efficient. Perhaps by reconfiguring the drive coils to increase the plasma output…

Too bad he couldn’t share those innovations with the crew. He could spare generations of future spaceship engineers decades of trial and error. But humanity would have to discover those advances in its own good time, as he knew it would.

Provided he kept his mouth shut.

He floated in the middle of his quarters, stretched out facedown in the air, with the portable computer tethered to his wrists. A foot loop secured him to the wall. Scrolling through the files by means of a keyboard struck him as just as quaint and inefficient as those so-called engines. He missed the helpful female voice of the