Star Trek: The Original Series: The Rings of Time

was first discovered. It made sense. Shaun and Fontana would have made sure that Zoe couldn’t open the airlock on her own. I would have done the same thing.

But he had more than two centuries of scientific expertise on these early astronauts. Perhaps there was some way to take advantage of that. His gaze fell on Zoe’s smart tablet, which she had been allowed to keep in her cell. “Give me that device of yours.”

She batted the tablet over to him. “Why? What are you up to?”

“Wait and see.”

A tool chest on one wall contained the equipment that the crew used on their extravehicular activities. Kirk used a zero-g screwdriver to pry loose the casing at the back of the tablet, exposing the crude silicon circuitry. Its wireless capacity had also been disabled, he noted, but he might be able to remedy that. The only question was whether he could do so in time with the primitive tools at his disposal, as well as making the necessary improvements to its programming.

Spock could do this blindfolded with chopsticks, he thought. Too bad he’s not here.

Zoe watched over his shoulder as he tinkered with circuits. Needing additional components, he cannibalized the headphones in a spare “Snoopy cap.” He was reluctant to pillage the EVA gear but didn’t see any other option. Everything depended on giving Zoe’s tablet a twenty-third-century upgrade.

“Wow!” she murmured. “Who knew you were MacGyver in disguise?”

He didn’t get the reference but assumed that it was a compliment.

“Hand me those magnifying lenses,” he requested.

“Yes, Doctor.” She passed him the lenses like a nurse in sickbay. “What exactly are you doing?”

“Improvising.”

Sweat beaded on his brow as he struggled with the archaic equipment. The lack of proper tools frustrated him. Time ticked by agonizingly, and he would have traded an entire ringful of dilithium crystals for one good laser solderer. His mind flashed back to that time in the Great Depression when Spock had managed to modify a tricorder using far more obsolete materials than these. He smiled tightly, encouraged by the memory. If Spock could put together a working mnemonic memory circuit out of nothing but “stone knives and bearskins,” then he should be able to hot-wire a twenty-first-century computer tablet using NASA hardware.

Or so he kept telling himself.

“Almost there,” he muttered.

A sudden impact shook the airlock. A metallic bang sounded as if it was coming from right outside the ship. The signal light above the inner hatchway went out.

Uh-oh, Kirk thought. That could be trouble.

“Yikes!” Zoe dropped a screwdriver, which drifted slowly toward the floor. “What was that?”

“The rings,” Kirk guessed. It was the only plausible explanation for the impact. “The ship must be passing through the rings. An iceberg slammed into the hull.”

Smaller impacts buffeted the hull, like hail pounding against a tin roof. For a moment, he thought he was back in the Klondike system, with its unstable rings, but Saturn’s rings had their own share of hazards if you were suicidal enough to brave them, which O’Herlihy clearly was. Praying that none of the collisions would breach the hull, Kirk listened tensely for an alarm. When no siren sounded, he assumed that the ship’s tough titanium skin had withstood the storm for now.

“Sounds like we’re okay,” he told Zoe. “That first bang must not have been big enough to sink us.”

“You sure about that? ’Cause it sounded damn big to me.”

“Yes,” he had to agree. “It did.”

The collision was an unwelcome reminder that they were running out of time. Even if they survived their periodic passages through the churning rings, Saturn’s ferocious atmosphere still waited to crush the fragile spaceship to a pulp. Hurricane winds would whip the shattered fragments around the planet at speeds exceeding a thousand kilometers per hour. And then, of course, there was the danger of burning up in reentry.

Granted, history had recorded no such disaster, but perhaps he had changed history already just by being there. There were too many unknown variables. He couldn’t count on the Lewis & Clark surviving as it had under Shaun Christopher’s command.

“Start getting into one of those spacesuits,” he ordered Zoe. “Just in case.”

She hurried over to where the suits hung on the wall. “How come?”

If they lost their atmosphere, he wanted her pre-pared. A spacesuit would buy her precious time.

“Just do it,” he said, “and hurry.”

She didn’t argue with him. “Hey, if you were into cosplay, you just needed to ask.”

The barrage outside abated swiftly. Kirk recalled that the rings, although almost three hundred thousand kilometers across, were often less than a kilometer thick. They would have passed through the rings in no time. They were safe for the moment.

Until their polar orbit carried them through the rings again.

Biting his lip, he hastily finished his modifications to the tablet. Unable to replace the casing he had pried off before, he had to leave its inner workings exposed. He hoped the ship’s sterile atmosphere would not contaminate its circuits too quickly.

“Done,” he pronounced. “I think.”

“Glad to hear it,” Zoe said, climbing into a water-filled cooling garment. “Now, you want to tell me what you have in mind?”

He approached the locked inner hatch. “I believe the colloquial term is ‘hocking.’”

“You mean ‘hacking’?”

“Right,” he confirmed, suitably corrected. “That.”

He pointed the tablet at the sealed doorway. In theory, he should be able to “hack” into the ship’s computerized locking system. The elementary programming had been child’s play compared with, say, rewriting the parameters of the Kobayashi Maru simulation back at the Academy. Twenty-first-century firewalls were still a long way from foolproof.

“Wish me luck,” he said. “Open sesame.”

He keyed the override command.

Nothing happened. The hatchway remained sealed.

“Damn,” he muttered. He tried another command, with equally disappointing results. The hatch refused to budge. The indicator light above the exit flashed neither red nor green.

“What’s the matter?” Zoe asked. “Why isn’t it working?”

“That collision,” he realized, “back in the rings. The impact must have damaged the mechanism. I can’t get it to respond.”

“So, we’re stuck in here after all? While the doc is playing kamikaze with the ship?”

“Maybe not.” He turned away from the inner hatch toward the one leading to the open cargo bay outside. “There’s still another way out.”

She looked where he was looking. Her jaw dropped. “Seriously?”

“Wouldn’t be a real NASA mission without a proper spacewalk,” he said, “and I’m not sure we have any workable alternatives.”

She stared at the outer hatch and gulped. “Beats sitting around waiting to crash into Saturn, I guess.”

“My point exactly.” He began removing the second spacesuit from its niche. “Help me get into this suit.”

Under ordinary circumstances, donning the suits would take at least fifteen minutes. Adrenaline and necessity sped them through the elaborate process in ten. They rushed through the various checks and tests, cutting corners wherever possible. By the time they had put each other’s helmet on and pressurized the bulky suits, there was barely enough room in the airlock for both of them. They tested their radio receivers.

“What’s the plan?” Zoe asked. “Where are we going in these unflattering get-ups? Once we’re out of this space-age dungeon, that is.”

“You’re not going anywhere. You’re staying here.”

“Hell, no!” she protested. “You can’t just leave me here!”

“It’s too dangerous,” he insisted. “I’ve had spacewalk training. You haven’t. And trust me, it’s not like taking a stroll back on Earth. You’re not equipped for this. I’m sorry.”