“HOW CAN THE MACHINE ‘decide’ not to send him?” McCoy leaned precariously around the edge of the conduit’s mouth, squinting against the icy blue glow still filling the chamber. “Isn’t sending people through time what it was built to do?”
Chekov resisted an urge to grab the doctor by the belt and drag him back around the corner to safety. He’d already had his hands slapped once for trying to politely restrain McCoy while Spock first tested the device, and had a feeling he might actually get yelled at this time if he tried to intervene. Instead, he came carefully up alongside McCoy in the entrance, where he might be in position to “accidentally” get in the way if McCoy tried to go any farther into the cavern.
“Spock, maybe you read the instructions wrong.”
Uhura looked up from where she and Spock had drawn together over her translator. Chekov wasn’t sure if it was anger or frustration that sharpened her normally gentle voice. “If anyone read the instructions wrong, Doctor McCoy, it was me. I was doing the translating.”
“But Spock’s the one twiddling the knobs.”
“I do not believe anyone has made an error.” The doctor’s criticism made no apparent impact on the first officer. Spock’s eyes never shifted from their study of the glowing console, his face beneath the wash of blue light as impassive as ever. “I believe the device functioned precisely as it was designed.”
McCoy took a short step forward, turning almost immediately into a tight circle as better sense overrode his instinct to pace into the Vulcan’s line of sight. “How can that be? You said it was designed to send soldiers into combat.”
“Healthy soldiers.”
At first, Sulu didn’t even look up to acknowledge the attention suddenly cast in the direction of his comment. He stood, barely visible on the opposite curve of the device, with his hand closed around his foreshortened right arm and the pack of rock explosives hanging heavily from his back. For the first time Chekov could remember, the competent, battle-hardened captain from their future looked inexpressibly weary and old.
“Healthy soldiers,” Sulu said again, holding up his empty sleeve in silent explanation. “I apparently don’t count as a healthy soldier anymore.”
Chekov felt an unexpected despair kick him weakly in the stomach. Until that moment, he hadn’t realized how much he’d been counting on this transfer to work. How much hope he’d invested in their being able to easily exchange both Sulu and Kirk for their proper counterparts and thus set the world to rights again. It was all he could do to keep from turning away and retreating into the conduit in disappointment.
“But you’re the only soldier we’ve got!” McCoy’s objection sounded angry instead of forlorn, but Chekov thought he heard the same desperation in the doctor’s words. “Are you saying that there’s no time in the future when our Sulu runs into one of your Gorn and needs pulling out? Wouldn’t replacing him with a Sulu with no hand be better than not replacing him at all?”
“Apparently,” Spock answered calmly, “the device does not think so.”
Carolyn Palamas edged a little ways closer to the mouth of the conduit, lifting her soft voice almost apologetically so that it might carry into the cavern beyond. “The original builders must have had some cutoff at which they thought it was no longer to their advantage to keep…” She shrugged, as though unhappy that she couldn’t think of a better term. “…recycling a combatant.”
“But a hand…!”
Sulu interrupted McCoy’s protest. “For me it’s just a hand, Doctor. A hand I lost because the alien medical equipment couldn’t sufficiently recognize it to figure out how to put it back together.” The glance he aimed down at the missing limb was more regretful than bitter. “Who knows what the device thinks I’ve lost?”
Yuki Smith raised her hand tentatively, like a student in class a little afraid of offering something stupid to the discussion. “Does this mean we aren’t going to be able to send the captain back?” She tucked her hand in quickly when everyone turned to look at her. “I mean, is the device ever going to think a fourteen-year-old kid is better than the full-grown Captain Kirk?”
Spock seemed to consider the question for a moment. “That is an issue we will confront after we have retrieved Lieutenant Sulu from the future,” he said at last.
McCoy snorted. “Which you intend to do how, Spock?”
It was Lieutenant Uhura who volunteered the answer. “By sending someone else.” She tipped her tricorder so that Spock could read the screen. “The associative transport function doesn’t just take troops with you into battle,” she explained aloud to the others while the Vulcan studied her translation, “it also allows you to bring troops back for reassignment elsewhere. Which means you should be able to retrieve both me and Lieutenant Sulu from the future, as long as I can find him.”
Sulu shook his head. “You can’t go.”
“I’m the obvious choice,” she countered. “You said I was with you…at the end. That means I should arrive close to the same time and place as our Lieutenant Sulu did, which should make it easy for me to locate him. I won’t need to be there more than a few minutes.”
“You won’t have a few minutes,” Sulu said. “Uhura, we were absolutely surrounded when you and I were killed. The only reason it would work to send me is because I didn’t care if it killed me to go. Your Sulu would have been sent back to you, and I would have died, but it would have been over. I didn’t have to try and reach someone and bring them back intact.” He shook his head again, more sadly this time. “Even if he’s standing right at your shoulder, Uhura, I don’t think you’d be able to retrieve him fast enough.”
Uhura met his gaze without flinching, although her voice betrayed her frustration. “But we have to try something.”
“I’ll go.” Chekov didn’t realize he’d spoken aloud until everyone turned to stare at him. He fought down a blush, but continued, “You said I wasn’t there in the fortress with you—I was in a shuttle up above.”
Sulu surprised him with an ironic, lopsided smile. “You were in a shuttle that you were planning to crash into the Fortress as a diversion.”
Chekov answered his smile with a shrug. “So Mr. Spock will make sure I transfer in just before that happens, and I won’t crash. If Lieutenant Sulu survived being transported into the battle at all, I’ll at least have some time to look for him.” He looked back and forth from Sulu, to McCoy, to Uhura, surprised and a little angry at the skepticism he saw on all their faces. “I can do this. I want to.”
“Do you know how to fly a Gorn shuttle?” Sulu made no effort to hide the sarcasm in his question.
“I can fly a Starfleet shuttle,” Chekov countered. “I’m sure you can explain the differences well enough to keep me from crashing if I don’t want to.”
No one said anything for a long moment, then Sulu laughed softly and rubbed at his eyes as he shook his head. “And I thought the stubbornness came later.”
“My mother would disagree.”
At the mouth of the conduit, Smith raised her hand again and edged up next to Chekov. “Can’t we at least send him with a phaser or something?”
“Good idea. Send us both with phasers.” Sulu grinned at Chekov as he boldly stepped away from the console and into the ocean of blue light that could no longer threaten him while he was on his own. “I may not be able to replace myself,” he told Chekov, “but I’ll bet we can use that associative transport function to send me along as your backup. And you’re going to need someone who knows the territory.”
Much as he didn’t want to admit it, Chekov also knew he’d be relieved to have the company. “All right.”
Spock motioned him forward by sketching the path around the edge of the transport field with an economical sweep of his arm. “Then if Mr. Chekov would care to join us at the console”—he centered himself on the device and awoke the strange controls —“I believe the future is waiting.”
* * *
“It looks like the sky’s clear. Let’s go.”
Sulu balanced himself a little more carefully on his wooden stilts and dug his fingers deeper into the manipulative hollow designed for reptilian claws. The shuttle’s warp engines responded with their usual rough surge of power, but he was ready for it now and angled the flaps on the parabolic wings to transform the jerk of upward motion into a smooth forward thrust. The Gorn shuttle sailed out over broad-leaved treetops that sparkled with sunlit pools of rain, heading for the perimeter walls of Tesseract Fortress. It was amazing, considering how short and frenzied his first flight over this alien landscape had been, how indelibly those crenulated walls had carved themselves into his memory. Sulu repressed an urge to slam the shuttle into faster flight, or to take evasive action. As hard as it was for him to believe, he had the evidence of his bruised and aching forehead to assure him that the Romulan cloaking device really did make the shuttle invisible to eyes and sensors. They would only be noticed if he did something stupid, like fly too fast or too close to an open window.
Even knowing that, however, it took all the self-control Sulu possessed to guide the Gorn shuttle into a slow, low-altitude circle above Tesseract Fortress with its outward pointing rows of projectile weapons. He could feel the sweat gathering again under his rain-damp uniform tunic, although this time it was from sheer anxiety and not exertion. Pretend you’re a hawk, soaring on a thermal current, he told himself. But the ferocious vibration of the overpowered aircraft he was piloting made that illusion hard to maintain.
“The portal hub is located underground, between those two tallest towers,” said Chekov’s emotionless voice inside his helmet. “When we crash the shuttle, we’ll have to take it straight down between them to avoid getting caught up by the wings.”
The bleak reminder that Sulu’s lifespan in this future reality depended on coming up with an alternate plan for destroying the Gorn fortress suddenly made the shuttle’s flight path seem a lot less important. Sulu began peering out through the curved cockpit window at the stone fortress below, letting his subconscious mind worry about balancing thrust and velocity and aerodynamic lift. To his surprise, the shuttle slowed and steadied into an even smoother circle than he’d managed to create when he was concentrating on it. Sulu sent the cloaked aircraft skimming around the first of the towers, staying well clear of open windows and crenulated walls where guards might be stationed. The far side of the fortress held something he didn’t remember seeing before—a wide, enclosed courtyard jostling with military vehicles. Each one was surrounded by moving figures whose broad backs glittered green in the morning sun as they loaded pallets stacked high with supplies and piles of gleaming cylinders that must be weapons.
“The invasion forces you were talking about?” Sulu asked Chekov as they glided over the sprawling supply yards.
“Yes.” Chekov must have been counting in Russian under his breath. Sulu’s helmet speaker picked up only an occasional mutter of “… chetiresta vocyemnadset, chetiresta dyevyenadset, dyerto…” before the older man said, “There’s almost twice as many vehicles here as there were the day before yesterday. They must be pulling their forces in from all across this quadrant.”
“That’s good,” said Sulu. “When we destroy the gate, more of their forces will be trapped here.” For some reason, that comment struck Chekov into an extended silence, just the way Sulu’s first use of “sir” had. “What’s so funny now?” Sulu asked.
“Nothing,” said the emotionless voice in his ear. “It’s just that I keep forgetting you really are him, only younger. He said exactly the same thing when we first saw this place.”
A shiver crawled up Sulu’s spine. In his attempt to ignore it, he shoved his hands a little too deeply into the Gorn manipulative hollows and the shuttle surged across the terrace with a burst of speed he hadn’t exactly intended to give it. Sulu cursed and pulled it back to a gentle glide, but not before he saw some scaled faces glance upward from their equipment-loading. With any luck, they’d put that puff of breeze down to the last of the sunrise storm.
“Hard aport,” Chekov snapped. “Get us out over the forest, as low as you can.”
Sulu had served long enough on the Enterprise to know when he should obey first and ask questions later. Restraining the urge to hurry, he swung the shuttle across the crenulated edge of the Gorn fortifications and settled it down into the rain-wet fronds of a towering stand of tree ferns, just deep enough to let their visual deception screens blend in with the swaying greenery while leaving them a clear view of the massed Gorn forces. “Do you really think they noticed us?” he asked then, at last.
“No,” Chekov said, surprising him. “But even if they shoot up a spray of energy disruptors just for the hell of it, they would knock us right out of the sky. It’s not worth the risk.” He paused a moment, then added with a thin wisp of something that might almost have been whimsical humor in his voice, “Mr. Sulu, could you turn the shuttle so I can see, too?”
“Sorry, sir.” Sulu adjusted the shuttle’s position with an ungainly lurch of its engines. It settled back down at ninety degrees to its former position, allowing both him and Chekov to gaze out from the wider side of the cockpit dome.
From here, they couldn’t see the equipment loading terrace anymore, but they had a good view of the fortress’s outer rim instead. The crenulated wall was almost obscured along this side by a vast tent city that had been erected in the clearing beyond. The tents were arranged with unmistakably military precision, color-coded from practical shades of green to drab grayish-black, then, on the outside the bright clashing reds, oranges, and purples that Sulu recognized as the colors of the great Klingon fighting houses. Knots of massive, green-scaled reptilian bodies clustered near the greenish tents. From their size and the immense sweep of their predatory jaws, Sulu assumed those were the Gorn. The few Klingons he saw among them wore elaborate armor and tied their hair in wilder, more barbaric fashion than the taut Klingon space officers he had met on stations in the Alpha Quadrant. But the distant figures Sulu stared at the longest were the unknown aliens he saw sitting on the ground near the dull black tents. They were the most humanoid of the three, with smooth faces and slender, tall bodies. A squinting look at their pale faces showed Sulu an eerily familiar combination of upward slanting eyebrows and pointed ears.
“Are those Vulcans?” he demanded incredulously.
“What?” Sulu felt their helmets scrape as the older man followed the direction of his gaze. “No, those aren’t Vulcans. They’re Romulans.”
“Really? That’s what Romulans look like?” Sulu tried to stand on tiptoe to see better and nearly lost his balance on his ungainly stilts. He steadied himself, then settled the Gorn shuttle back into the tree ferns. “Why do they look so much like Vulcans?”
“Because they’re sibling races, originally evolved on the same planet.” Chekov’s voice had turned very thoughtful. “This is interesting. You don’t usually see Romulans in Gorn first-strike battalions.”
“Why not?”
“Slave race,” the older man said succinctly. “The Gorn crushed the Romulan Empire before they attacked the Federation because they wanted their ships and cloaking technology. The Romulans work for the Gorn at gunpoint, and they’re often brought in to help run the bureaucracy on occupied planets. But I’ve never seen the Gorn trust them to help lead an invasion before.”
Sulu frowned, remembering what Chekov had said when he’d first described the situation here. “You said they might be massing for an invasion of one of the major inner planets. If they were planning to invade Vulcan—”
“Then it would make sense to bring Romulans in the first assault wave,” Chekov agreed. “Neither the Gorn nor the Klingons can match Vulcans when it comes to strategy and tactics, but Romulans can think the same way as their cousins.” He startled Sulu with a sudden smack against his shoulder. “You know, you were right. It was worth coming out to reconnoiter the fortress one more time. Take us back.”
“Back?” Sulu said blankly, and glanced back over his shoulder at Chekov. “Back where?”
“Back to your wrecked shuttle.” Chekov’s mouth, held in place by its mask of old scars, never changed expression, but there was an air of fierce anticipation in his squared shoulders and out-thrust chin. His dark eyes gleamed with an expression that caught Sulu by surprise: not just grim amusement, but what looked almost like delight. “We’re going to salvage that magnetically shielded warp core of yours and bring it back here. It will do a hundred times more damage than a pulse bomb, especially if we can set it to implode inside of the portal.”
“But how are we going to get it inside the portal?” Sulu demanded. “Do you know how much a warp core weighs?”
“A lot,” the Russian admitted. “Do you know how many Romulan slaves it takes to carry one?”
“No.”
“Me, either,” Chekov said. “So we’re just going to keep on freeing them until we find out.”
* * *
The transportation alcove on the Janus Gate device looked less like a console and more like a piece of abstract alien sculpture. Chekov stepped gingerly into the curve of its embrace, trying to decide how to orient himself to its incomprehensible features. He could make very little sense in its conflicting lines and contours. Certain surfaces pointed upward, others angled down toward the floor, but he wasn’t fooled into thinking this told him anything about what the original architects considered “up” and “down.” Even the appendages Sulu had so casually pronounced handgrips looked unsuited to anything Chekov recognized as a hand, much less anything he would have called gripping.
“Place your hands on the device, please.” Chekov nodded and took a deep breath. He’d just promised Smith that the cold in the main chamber wouldn’t bother him, that a lifetime of Moscow winters had made him impervious to anything above absolute zero. But he was shivering as he laced his hands around the Janus Gate’s contact bars.
A vibration so slight it might have been the racing of a small animal’s heart fluttered against his palms. The device wasn’t cold like the rest of the chamber—it was blood-warm and yielding, almost like touching his own flesh.
“Using the readings we obtained from Captain Sulu’s attempted transport, I shall endeavor to place you in the appropriate time frame.” Spock made eye contact with him across the device’s blue-flame heart. The weird light painted the Vulcan’s face an eerie, dark gray. “However, I would suggest you describe what you see before we complete transport in order to verify the coordinates.”
Chekov heard Sulu laugh from somewhere out in the dark chamber behind him. “It wouldn’t help much if we both ended up on the Kerzhat.” He didn’t know how the captain could sound so relaxed.
“I understand.” Chekov nodded again, swallowing hard in a throat that was suddenly painfully dry. “What happens if I let go?”
Spock lifted a curious eyebrow, apparently considering the possibility for the first time. “Logic suggests that either you will be severed from the device and our contact with your crisis point temporarily lost, or your physical form will be dispersed across the subspace rift into infinity.”
Chekov was beginning to suspect that it was best to enter into such heroics with as little information as possible.
“Don’t let go,” Sulu suggested dryly.
A net of electric blue light swarmed over his hands, and Spock’s voice said from a very great distance, “I am engaging the time controls.”
Lightning—silent, bright, actinic—seemed to vaporize the frost-blackened chamber around him. In its place, a sky so pale it was almost white, mirrored by an expanse of pristine snow and low, ice-covered houses.
“There’s snow…” Ghostly sensations distracted him, making it hard to concentrate enough to report on what he saw. The sound of the wind as it cut between the houses. The prickle of snow against his unprotected cheek. “… I hear dogs…” And the syncopated calls of black-headed geese somewhere beyond his view. Chekov couldn’t decide if this specific moment was familiar, or just representative of all his accumulated memories of the world he grew up in as a boy.
“That can’t be right.” Sulu’s voice sounded startlingly real and nearby. “We’re in a montane forest on Basaraba—we’ve never been in a snowy environment there. And I’ve never heard dogs or anything like them.”
“Wait…” Chekov felt them rushing up from behind just before they burst into view under him—almost through him. A team of lean, rough-coated dogs towing a sledge, with a driver so young and out of control that he’d already lost one glove and the hood of his gray fur parka. The memory came back to him quite suddenly, and Chekov smiled at his own youthful indiscretion. “No, this is Earth—”
On the other side of the temporal rift, the sled cracked violently against something under the ice, leaped a startling height into the air, then crashed back to ground on its side. Unconcerned with the boy still dragging behind them, the dogs kept running with their tails flailing banner-high over their backs.
“—I’m twelve. I fell from a dogsled and was dragged—” He came nowhere near dying, but it was the first time in his life when he’d been honestly convinced he was about to be killed. If not by the dogs, then by their owner when he found out that Andrei Chekov’s precocious son had “borrowed” his team without asking.
“Interesting.” Chekov found it hard to believe that Spock found anything intriguing about his misspent youth. The Vulcan proved him right by adding a moment later, “Apparently the time placement controls are more individual than they first appeared.”
“It sounds like you’re about thirty-seven years off,” Sulu volunteered.
Uhura said, “The device says, ’Major crisis point located within fifty-three [word unknown] units of time.’”
Back in the transport chamber, years away from the boy who finally managed to extricate himself from the sled’s rigging and roll to a stop behind the disappearing dogs, Sulu remarked irritably, “It would help to know what ‘units of time’ the device was using.”
“Indeed it would, Mr. Sulu. Unfortunately, we have only limited data with which to work. Mr. Chekov?”
He felt funny answering aloud, as though the distant past version of himself would overhear and turn to look. “Sir?”
“I have located another crisis point. Are you ready?”
“Yes, sir. Go ahead.”
The lightning flashed again, erasing the Russian countryside with a cobalt expanse of frigid nothing. He gasped at the sense memory of water flooding into his lungs.
“Mr. Chekov…?”
“It’s the cave.” He tried not to cough, but found it hard to separate himself from the remembered horror of struggling to find the surface, gasping for air only to flood himself with water so cold it stopped his heart. “This cave, earlier, when I… drowned. I’m not directly on top of myself, though. I’m about…” He tried to sense his own presence, vaguely felt the touch of a lifeless limb as it sank toward an unseen bottom. “… about a meter and a half away.”
Darkness crashed aside, the faint blue light of the cave suddenly blinding him. Chekov took a deep, grateful breath of the chilly air as across the device from him Uhura reported, “‘Major crisis point located within fifteen [word unknown] units of time.’”
Spock nodded, but didn’t look up from his manipulation of the device. “Thank you, Ensign. Your input is helpful in fine-tuning the device’s settings.”
Chekov nodded mutely, not trusting himself with words.
The first crisis point had been easy—he’d survived it the first time, he remembered surviving it, and the memory had actually softened into a humorous story with a few years’ distance. But the drowning—near-drowning?—left him feeling shaky and sick to his stomach. He barely remembered hitting the water, had no memory at all of being fished out and revived, thanks to the Janus Gate having switched him for a healthier version of himself. So which Chekov had he felt struggling in the dark water beside him? The one who had replaced him an instant before his own death? Himself just before the device switched him out the first time? Some other Chekov, in some other timeline, who didn’t earn a second chance because Spock pulled this Chekov back without allowing a transfer?
He scrubbed at his eyes, trying to erase the feeling of cold water against his skin. It was hard enough to think about surviving a brush with death—he didn’t like having to worry about whether all the various alternate versions of himself also survived.
“Engaging time controls.”
Chekov hurried to wrap his hands around the contact bars. The cerulean flash—then the burnt-orange stain of emergency lighting—the stinging metallic stench of ozone and melted plastic—
Because it seemed important, he said immediately, “I don’t recognize where I am.” With that admission came a weird, illicit thrill. He was peering into his own future.
Sulu’s voice again, unlocatable in the unfamiliar surroundings. “I guess the third time’s the charm.”
He didn’t feel particularly charmed. Something like a hideous reverse déjàvu pushed his heart into the base of his throat. “It looks like I’m on a spaceship… or a station….” Duranium walls, with English writing barely visible in the spastic play of shadow and light.
“Can you see any kind of identifier?” He couldn’t tell who asked him that.
His view slewed abruptly, away from the writing, toward a shattered doorway and the smoke-filled corridor beyond it. Chekov realized with a shock that he was almost completely overlaid on himself. A ghost painted into a dream world. Except in his dreams it was usually the sensations which were fierce and vivid, the visuals muddy and hard to recall.
“There was writing on one of the walls… give me a minute….”
He tried to will himself to turn. Instead, his future self glanced down, where an erratic smarter of bloody footprints hinted at a gruesome dance of combat and retreat. He caught a glimpse of his own hand, and a pistol-shaped weapon he didn’t recognize.
“… There’s been some kind of battle….”
A horrible sensation exploded through him from behind. He gasped, felt himself—one of his selves—arch away from a nerve-flaying anguish that almost rocked him out of his body. Then he was suddenly on his back, pinned to the ground by a force so powerful he swore it had drilled right through him and grabbed hold of his spine—
“Mr. Chekov, please report—”
—then the stinking mouthful of teeth so close to his face he could feel the ivory rasp against his cheek, and he realized the monster was speaking to him—a sibilant hiss that some part of him recognized as words even though he didn’t understand. Without willing it, without thinking, he bucked beneath the thing’s crushing weight and spat into its iridescent face—
“Mr. Spock, shut it off!”
—and a great clawed thumb curved along the line of his cheekbone and pushed into his eye—
“Shut it off before he lets go of the console!”
Chekov sat down hard on the floor of the Janus chamber, every nerve in his body still singing with the memory of the thing’s bulk on top of him, its breath against his face. Curling forward, head between his knees, he clapped one hand over his still-tearing right eye and retched dryly into the other.
McCoy’s head appeared around the edge of the conduit entrance. “Everything all right in there?” he called, alarm evident in his tone.
Spock replied with his usual understated calm. “We are all accounted for, Doctor. Please stand by.”
“Pavel… ?” Sulu slid to his knees beside Chekov. He felt the captain’s hands on his shoulders, refusing to let go even when the younger man’s first instinct was to scuttle away from the contact. “Pavel, where were you? Tell me what happened.”
“… I was…” Chekov forced himself to lift his head and focus on the device looming directly above them. He thought it would help fix him back in this present, but instead it just made everything he was feeling seem more dreamlike and surreal. “…I was captured…” Saying it out loud helped a little. “They talked to me—I don’t know what they said, but…”
Sulu’s hand tightened painfully on his shoulder, a spastic, involuntary reaction. Chekov turned to look at him, and the captain said, very quietly, “Then you spit on them, and they put out your eye.”
He didn’t want to think about how Sulu knew the details, so he only nodded.
Sulu twisted to call over his shoulder, “We’re still off by about five years.”
Spock nodded acknowledgment, reaching to make a series of adjustments to the device’s controls.
Sulu turned back to Chekov with an expression so bleak it was painful. “The Gorn took you captive during the evacuation of Starbase Six. I still had sixty-five people to clear out of the lower decks, and it took me more than twelve hours to come back for you.” He lifted Chekov’s hand gently away from his eye, reassuring them both with that simple gesture that it was intact and still functioning. “We were able to replace the eye. And you never told them a damned thing.”
Chekov looked into this stranger’s face, and tried to imagine inspiring the loyalty he saw there in any-one, much less this battle-hardened veteran. “You came back for me?”
“I only wish I’d come back sooner.”
But you came back. He knew what a Gorn was now, and knew that both the Janus Gate and his future self believed at that moment that he was certain to die. Even Chekov wouldn’t have faulted Sulu for giving up hope on his friend and not going back to find him. But he’d gone back anyway.
Chekov pushed to his feet, grabbing at Sulu’s outstretched arm for support when he found his legs still a little unsteady. “We must be close now.” And I’m not going to leave you abandoned in the future. If only because of a future debt he hoped would never come into existence, he owed something to this man he barely even knew.
Taking hold of the console, he squared his shoulders and nodded across the device to Spock. “I’m sorry for the delay, sir. I’m ready.”
The Vulcan took him at his word. “Very well. Engaging time controls… now.”
A fierce chill swept over him that he didn’t remember from the first near-transfers, then settled on his skin as a sheen of cold sweat. Nerves, Chekov realized. Fear, that was all.
That was all.
He looked up from where he’d fixed his eyes stubbornly on the contact bars, across the device’s familiar blue flame and skeletal housing. Uhura and Spock bent so close together over the lieutenant’s translation equipment that their heads almost touched, and even the Vulcan’s normally unreadable face held an expression Chekov could only interpret as mild surprise.
Uhura glanced up as though suddenly realizing the others would be waiting to find out what happened. “The device isn’t identifying any future crisis points.”
Chekov frowned, unbelieving. “That was the last dangerous moment in my life?”
Sulu moved up next to him, his expression grim. “We’ve nearly been killed at least a dozen times in the five years since Chekov was captured by the Gorn. Try again, Spock.”
The Vulcan was shaking his head, a brief, regretful motion. “I have already moved the time variation control through a space representing Mr. Chekov’s maximum possible lifespan. There may be other possible crisis points before that last one, but there is nothing it can fix on after that.”
“Maybe it’s not just a moment near dying that the machine locks in on,” Uhura said quietly. “Maybe it’s the fear that comes from knowing you’re about to die.”
Chekov felt more than heard Sulu’s slow sigh. “You could be right. After those twelve hours with the Gorn, it seemed like Chekov never really cared again whether he lived or died.” He looked at the young ensign in frank apology. “Maybe if I’d gotten there sooner, I could have saved the whole man and not just the eye.”
Disappointment and frustration twisted together in Chekov’s heart. “So you can’t use me? I can’t go?”
“It would appear not,” Spock said.
Placing her tricorder beside Spock on the console, Uhura stepped back from the operator’s console and squared her shoulders in what she no doubt meant to be a gesture of confidence. But it was determination Chekov saw in her eyes, not necessarily bravery. “Well,” she said simply, “I guess it’s my turn after all.”