Cold bit at Kirk's cheeks as he followed his youngest crewman deeper into the frozen dark. The glow of the boy's carbide lamp barely disturbed the surface of the blackness, and it didn't soften the hard angles of the fresh ice sheets surrounding them at all. It only pushed the dark ahead of them, one cautious step at a time. Chekov followed the invisible line sketched for him by his compass and Kirk tried not to make the ensign any more nervous than he already was by treading on his heels as he followed.

The maps were good, Kirk thought, flipping through the painstakingly drawn pages and mentally reliving the landing party's passage through each of those chambers and tunnels as he did so. Amazingly good, considering they'd had to be re-created in the midst of everything else the group had gone through to get this far. Now they were close to being out of this subterranean icebox. The exit was only a few tens of meters over their heads -- hot showers, full meals, and clean, dry uniforms were just a short vertical climb in their futures, and Kirk was as glad as anyone else to be done with this part of their adventure. At least he could attack the mystery of the star-ships scattered across Tlaoli's surface from the relative safety of his own bridge, with his crew safe and whole alongside him.

An unexpected bark, popping against the unseen walls of the cavern, yanked Kirk to a halt. He shot a quick look in the direction where the clatter seemed to settle, but, strain as he might, could only see the same opaque blackness that had hidden every other danger since they'd set foot in this cave. Kirk grabbed at Chekov's shoulder to halt him. "Do you hear that?" he asked urgently, releasing the boy to turn and check the party members they'd left near the entrance.

Heat from a sudden fire swarmed up into his face and knocked him to the ground.

Kirk's first instinct was to guard the map -- the precious, re-created map that was their best insurance against wandering through these caves forever. He tucked it flat to the belly of his cave jumper and rolled facedown in the frozen mud to shield it from the flames. But just that quickly, the heat and light receded as though sucked out through a blasted airlock, and the ground beneath him was dry and hard and anomalously warm against his frost-reddened cheek.

He reached out one hand to slap at the ground in front of his face. Concrete. He'd fallen down in a cave on the fringes of the frontier, but he'd somehow landed on an expanse of what was unmistakably poured concrete.

Voices and sirens pushed Kirk's senses past what had been the unseen walls of the cavern, opening up the darkness into an expansive night with five tiny, bloody moons strung diagonally above the tree horizon like a necklace of badly set garnets. Dry leaves skated across the road in fits and starts, leaping spastically into the air where they were startled by hot thermals, then flashing into ash in the dragon's breath of flaming trees and burning buildings. Kirk heard someone cry out in a barking language that he knew wasn't human, but when he rolled to place the sound there was nothing to see but a still unburnt tree line dancing freakishly in the shadows from the fires across the way.

The staccato popping of antique firearms drew his stomach up into his throat even before the more familiar whine of phaser fire sang out in reply. Starfleet. Whatever was happening here, there were Starfleet people involved in it -- maybe even his own people. He wasn't going to lie here on the ground and just wait for the battle to find him, not if there was anything he could do to help.

Stuffing the map down the front of his jumper, hescrambled to his feet and turned a circle to give himself a starting point from which to get his bearings. The road on which he stood was unlined and empty -- like a logging road that went only one place and didn't need to supply any additional directions to what little traffic used it. An impressive deciduous forest walled one side, it's tattered canopy still scattering the dying leaves of early autumn. Across the road from the forest, a handful of older trees had been left to decorate the edges of a concrete-and-glass city that grew gradually taller as the buildings moved away from the road. It was on this side of the landscape that the fires burned.

Kirk stared toward the stair-step pyramids and cylindrical towers already swathed in robes of flame, until they stood out both bright and dark against the nighttime sky. I should know this place. Bits and pieces of memory jostled for attention at the back of his brain, only to be beaten into silence by the horrific scene in front of him. If he knew this town, this planet, it was in some vastly different context. Like a familiar painting, inexpertly recreated from a new and confusing angle. Or tourist streets seen at night when he'd previously only walked them during the day.

That he should know this place seemed terribly important -- enough to make his heart pound faintly, like a drum still muffled by distance -- but the front of his mind insisted, No! Go find the others! before he could spend too long trying to excavate the memory. Blinking hard, Kirk pulled his eyes away from the conflagration, and ducked into the cover of the tree line.

The road arced back toward the heart of the burning city, and the old growth forest followed it only partway. Kirk paused at the edge of the trees and crouched behind a massive trunk to survey the firelit expanse between forest and town. The road itself remained clear, but quick figures darted between buildings and immobile vehicles just inside the edges of the city. Some of them clumped together in terrified, stumbling groups as they scrambled toward perceived safety; others carried what were obviously weapons, although who or what they pursued wasn't always so clear.

Kirk fingered the collar of his gold cave jumper. Movement had cracked off the sheets of mud made brittle by the dry autumn air, leaving him pale and exposed. While his gold command tunic was only marginally darker, at least he had on black trousers and boots beneath the jumper, which would cut his visibility in half. Besides, he had a feeling that the moisture-wicking nano-weave was going to be about the least useful thing he could have brought here with him. He would much rather have had one of Martine's phasers, or at least one of Sanner's climbing ropes.

He stowed the folded jumper in a hollow beneath the tree's hunched up roots, burying it under a few large handfuls of leaf litter and hoping he'd be able to find the spot later if he needed it. He buried Chekov's notebook with its maps and attached mechanical pencil along with the jumper. He couldn't imagine what use he could possibly find for it, but it still somehow seemed ungrateful to just abandon it after forcing the boy to sit on the floor of a frozen cave and re-create the thing from memory.

The weapons fire had thinned, with only a single phaser wailing in futile response to increasingly bold chatters of gunfire. Kirk threaded between shrubbery and buildings, hugging walls as closely as he could so as to present the smallest possible target to anyone trying to shoot down on him from above. It would help to know who's doing the shooting. It would tell him what sort of tactics to expect, not to mention what sort of weapons and what sort of physical capabilities. He didn't like not knowing who the bad guys were.

As if in answer to his thoughts, a pair of gunmen clattered down the long flight of open-rail steps that wrapped around the building in front of Kirk. The metallic thunder of their footsteps rang hollowly somewhere in the back of Kirk's memory, and he suddenly knew the building at his shoulder was a tall extended-family dwelling without understanding how he knew that or why it should make the inside of his mouth taste like bile. When the first man to reach the ground lifted his head at the foot of the stairs, he looked across the neatly trimmed hedgerow and locked eyes with Kirk as though he'd known all along the captain would be there. And even his pale copper-penny eyes looked terrifyingly familiar to Kirk.

Kirk struck out before the man could swing his long weapon into firing position. Twisting to one side, Kirk jammed the muzzle of the rifle down toward the ground and landed a solid blow on the man's jaw without interrupting his turn. The momentum alone snapped the man's head aside and wrenched the rifle from his grasp. Still gripping the muzzle, Kirk stepped neatly over the toppled body and let the rifle's heavy metal stock finish its swing into the shins of the man above him on the stairs. A hissing thread of heat tore past very close to Kirk's skull, then the second man was down atop his partner, and Kirk had knocked him senseless with the butt of the first man's gun. He rubbed at his temple where the shot had narrowly missed him, and stared down at the unconscious bodies. He knew where he was now. He knew when he was. He just didn't understand how he had gotten here.

They were both obviously Grexxen -- their faces a bronze so extreme it bordered on greenish, and their hair the same faded copper as their eyes. A little hair dye and a pair of dark glasses, and either of them could have passed as human in any metropolitan center on Earth. But they weren't human -- they were Vragax. Even after all these years, thinking about that militant tribe of Grexxen natives filled Kirk's stomach with acid and made him want to spit out every foul epithet he'd ever heard. Because even after nineteen years he couldn't forget the helmetlike fall of Vragax braids, or the smell of their puhen oil-based warpaints, or the way they laughed at how humans died when they shot them down in the streets.

He shook both men out of their pants with no more care than he'd have shown a sack full of potatoes. Tying them both to the stairs, he took their weapons and every power cell and munition they had between them. One of them also had a string of handheld explosives. The other had a radio that didn't appear to be picking anything up on its open frequency. Kirk turned it off to keep it silent, then threw it as far away into the bushes as he could.

The streets were familiar now. Eerily undersized, as though he'd expanded them in his memory, and still uncomfortable in that tourist-streets-after-dark way. He remembered abruptly that his father had never let them leave the embassy grounds after nightfall. "It's not a curfew," George Kirk had insisted. "I just won't have any boys of mine showing disrespect for the local authorities with their shenanigans." As though the shenanigans of two human boys could have inspired anything to rival what had finally gone down on this planet.

He checked both the charges and the loads on the gauss rifles as he jogged, almost by memory, back toward the burning Starfleet embassy. They both had several hours' use still in them, and more than sixty shots between them, not counting reloads. He flipped the switch to single shot to save on ammunition. Unlike the Vragax, he had no use for mowing down large swaths of the civilian population with every squeeze of the trigger. Anything he couldn't do one bullet at a time, he wasn't interested in doing at all.

He found the shuttle nose-down in the lawn of a Kozhu-run infant-care facility, half-buried in the dirt it had ploughed up ahead of its long skid, like a dead giant beneath a carelessly thrown shroud. Just like he remembered it. It was easier to see what had killed it, now that he was older and understood better what to look for. A small, exhaust-seeking microbolt had blown away the rear of one nacelle and part of the stern bulkhead. The remaining engine had been just enough to let Ensign Leone put them down in something more like a landing than a crash, but not enough to let either Zeke Leone or his copilot walk away from the attempt. The shuttle had split open on impact, trailing debris and bodies behind it for a hundred meters. The fact that neither the Vragax nor the Kozhu were supposed to have surface-to-air weaponry powerful enough to take down a Starfleet shuttle hadn't saved Leone or the other men who'd gone down on the shuttle with him.

Kirk ducked behind the mound of steaming dirt, just beside where the shattered pilot's seat should have been. Across the shuttle's nose from him, nine men in the red-and-black of Starfleet security littered the torn-up ground like broken dolls. Kirk closed his eyes against the memory of their leader seizing him by the front of his shirt and commanding, "Go! Get back to the embassy and tell your dad we need backup!" And, God help him, Kirk had gone. He'd wriggled out the back of the dying shuttle and left them, telling himself it was an order, telling himself he was doing the right thing and that his father would bring back a combat team that would know exactly what to do.

But as fast as he ran, as hard as he tried, he never saw the embassy or Lieutenant Maione's squad again. Until now.

Grabbing the lip of the shuttle's buckled roof, Kirk pulled himself up and over, careful to roll down the other side as swiftly as possible and drop into a crouch in the deep shadows there. He couldn't tell how long it had been since the Vragax natives had finished their slaughter here, but he didn't want to risk being targeted by whoever might still be lurking in the burning darkness that used to be Sogo city. The men around him had been killed by whatever the Vragax had on hand -- magnetic propulsion gauss slugs, phasers, the short ceremonial darts from Vragax spear throwers. Kirk knew Maione's men must have taken down a good many Vragax with them, but there were no native bodies mixed in with the carnage. In the midst of their bloody rampage through Sogo, the Vragax still took time to collect their own dead for whatever it was they considered dignified disposal.

Kirk sensed more than saw a furtive movement toward the rear of the shuttle, dark-on-dark, almost silent despite the bits of broken shuttle and restless autumn leaves. Sinking back against the rucked-up earth, Kirk thumbed the primer on one of the gauss rifles and lifted it slowly to his shoulder. The chain of tiny electromagnets lining the inside of its barrel whined almost beyond the pitch of human hearing as they built up the necessary charge.

The shadow creeping up on Kirk along the shuttle's splintered flank halted. "John?" Tension poised the burly silhouette so still it might have been a statue. "Maione, is that you?"

It could have been a recording of Kirk's own voice. Why did I never notice that before? he wondered. Swallowing hard, he let the gauss rifle sink to rest across his knees. "Maione's dead." He hoped he sounded confident and in control. He hoped he didn't sound too much like himself. "I'm the only one left."

The other human padded closer, hunkering down on all fours to share Kirk's shadow and the relative protection of the artificial hill. There wasn't enough light to really see him clearly, but Kirk knew even through the darkness that his uniform was Starfleet, his tunic red, and his eyes were the same angry green as the East Coast ocean in winter. He was a commander, he was forty-six years old, and he was the meanest son of a bitch to ever head a security squad. "Name and rank," the man snapped, reaching for the second gauss rifle without asking, much less waiting, for position.

"Forester." Kirk blurted the name without thinking, then was forced to add, "Captain," because he wouldn't be able to hide the braid on his sleeves. "I came in with the last group of replacements."

The other man nodded as though he'd expected as much. "I didn't even get a chance to read you in, sir. My apologies."

Kirk felt an oddly uncomfortable blush push up into his face. "None necessary." Because I wasn't really here -- I shouldn't be here now -- But he made himself ask steadily, "What's your name, soldier?" as though the answer would hardly make any difference, as though he didn't already know.

"Commander George Kirk, sir, interim security chief." He powered up his rifle, then helped himself to one of Kirk's spare clips and shoved it into the half-empty magazine. "And I'm out here, sir, because I'm looking for my son."

For the second time in twenty-four hours, Uhura found herself standing shocked and helpless in the blue glow of Tlaoli's Janus Gate. The first time she had felt this paralyzing fear was when Captain Kirk and Ensign Chekov had disappeared without warning as they tried to evacuate a trapped caving team from these ice-sheathed caverns. Now, with the alien time transporter they had discovered here free of its distorting travertine shell and obediently responding to Spock's commands, the source of her shock was a phalanx of metal-clad aliens who had just banned them from ever using the Janus Gate again.

With all her heart, Uhura wished the time transporter would whip out a glowing blue curtain and make these enigmatic intruders disappear, the same way it had taken their missing captain. But the Janus Gate's power stores were once again exhausted, and the fiery glow at its heart had shrunk back down to a sapphire flicker. Despite the drizzle and mist from the ice melting all around them, Uhura could see that the armored bodies of the cybernetic aliens had linked together to form a solid metal stockade around the Gate.

The aliens who called themselves Shechenag had descended as silently as spiders, gliding down frictionless wires from the solution pits in the ceiling. They had timed their entrance perfectly -- the unwary moment when triumph and relief had swept through the Enterprise crewmen after they successfully used the Janus Gate to haul Lieutenant Sulu back from the distant future to which he'd been sent. The tense and exhausting hour Uhura had spent as the focus of the alien device had been worth it: Her quest across time had brought back not only their missing helmsman but also the future version of Chekov who'd helped Sulu survive a hellish future where the Gorn ruled the galaxy.

But there had been no time to celebrate. Before they could use the Janus Gate to try to rescue Captain Kirk from his own past, before Sulu and Chekov had even been retrieved from the healing chamber where the Janus Gate had sent them, a horde of metallic insects had plunged down into their midst, using metallic claws with stinging electrical anodes to herd them all to the edge of the cavern. Any attempt to resist -- or even to retain their equipment, as archaeologist Carolyn Palamas had tried to do with her visual translating device -- had been met with such swift and ruthless punishment that the victims were either still shaking with residual shock or, like Security Guard Yuki Smith, completely unconscious.

"How is she, Doctor?" Spock asked McCoy quietly while the Shechenag clicked and whistled among themselves, apparently consulting each other on their next move. It was very odd to see the glittering translucent bodies of the actual aliens inside the clear shells of their armored suits, turning back and forth toward one another as the conversation rattled among them.

"I think she's just been knocked unconscious." McCoy looked up from the sprawled body of the security guard, putting his old-fashioned stethoscope back into the chest pocket of his caving suit. The anxious faces of young Ensign Chekov and an even younger James T. Kirk craned past the shoulders of the other members of the party to listen to the doctor's verdict. "If she doesn't wake up pretty soon, though, it might mean something more serious is wrong."

"This one of your species is not injured." The flat machine-generated tone of that voice would have told Uhura it came from among the line of Shechenag even if she hadn't seen Spock turn his head and lift one eyebrow at the speaker. Inside the perfectly still metallic casing, several spindly limbs gesticulated for emphasis. "This one received only mild electron overdose to suppress aggressive behavior."

"Are her symptoms consistent with electrical shock, Doctor?" the Vulcan science officer asked.

McCoy lifted one of Smith's eyelids. "Yes. They're also consistent with giving herself a concussion when she hit the ground." He lowered his voice to a grumble. "Spock, I don't like the idea that those walking tin cans over there are listening to everything we say."

"Indeed," said the Vulcan. "However, lowering your voice is not a logical response to the situation, Doctor. I believe it is safe to assume that their sound detectors are equally as advanced as the rest of their technology."

Uhura wrenched her gaze away from the aliens barricading the Janus Gate, although part of her still desperately wanted to watch to make sure no other insectoid robots detached themselves from those odd metallic bodies. "Mr. Spock, they learned our language from the archaeological translator," she said, in flawless Vulcan. "But it was only programmed for an English translation."

The science officer's slanted eyebrows went up again, this time in appreciation. "A fact which I should have remembered, Lieutenant," he replied in the same language. "Especially since I distinctly recall noting its ethnocentricity in naming the transporter for the human god Janus rather than the Vulcan goddess Yelanna." Spock eyed the Shechenag watching them, then switched abruptly to Andorian. "By using no more than a dozen phonemes from any one language, we should be able to confuse any translating device they might have brought with them."

Uhura glanced at the blank faces around them. "As well as most of our crewmates," she reminded Spock in Andorian, then deliberately turned her back on the Shechenag and gave the rest of their team the Starfleet hand signal that meant, Covert communication only, enemy is listening.

What felt like a sharp metallic caliper closed on Uhura 's shoulder, tight enough to startle a gasp out of her. There was a flash of black and violet motion between the other bodies, and she suddenly found herself standing between the older versions of both Chekov and Sulu, both of them clearly poised to attack if the Shechenag did anything more threatening. With a hiss of sophisticated gears and tiny bearings, how eve r, the alien merely rotated its limb to bring Uhura around to face it, then released her.

"This one will face us so we can see all of its attachments," the alien said, with no more emphasis or emotion in its voice than before. Inside its clear shell, however, two small stalked eyes swiveled in what looked almost like a glare. "Operations intended to reactivate this device will not be permitted. You have ten hours to leave this system. Departure from this cave should be immediate."

"That sound definite," McCoy said in halting schoolboy French. "We leave?"

Uhura had to bite her lip against a hysterical giggle, since the expression on Spock's lean face would have done credit to the most chauvinistic Frenchman. "We intend to leave," he said in English, answering both the doctor and the alien facing them. "An immediate departure, however, will require a transporter beam to be generated from our ship. With your permission, I will contact them--"

Uhura tried to school her face to look perfectly calm, but she felt her heart leap with excitement as she recognized Spock's ingenious strategy. If the Shechenag didn't know that the transporter beam would repower the Janus Gate rather than take them back to the Enterprise, there was a chance they could get the hostile aliens trapped in one of the random subspace warps that floated around the alien device when it was fully charged.

After a moment's pause, however, a burst of chattering from the other Shechenag made the one closest to them step back. A flush of colors passed across the surface of its floating chitinous body, although Uhura couldn't be sure if that represented a flush of strong emotion or just a rapid mental reassessment of the situation. Inside the clear torso tank, its stalked eyes elevated to peer at Spock with what looked like sudden attentiveness.

"Operations intended to reactivate this device will not be permitted." There wasn't the slightest variation in the Shechenag's machine-generated voice, but two of its clawlike appendages flashed upward with violent swiftness. Uhura was abruptly shouldered backward between the older versions of Chekov and Sulu, and had to stand on tiptoe to peer over their shoulders. The cybernetic alien had made no other move toward them. Inside its clear tank, the small floating body was also pointing upward, making it clear that its motion was intended to be directional. "Immediate evacuation can also occur using these ropes," it said. "No disabling has been done to your shuttle-craft. One trip back to your ship will be permitted."

Uhura saw the older version of Sulu glance over his shoulder at his younger counterpart. "Will the shuttle carry all of us in one trip?" he asked in fluent Japanese.

"If we throw out everything including the bulkhead supplies?" the younger pilot replied in the same language. "Maybe."

The older Sulu glanced at the man standing beside him, with the odd bittersweet smile Uhura had seen him use when his sense of amusement was tickled by something other people might think morbid. "We're expendable now, Pavel," Sulu said in rough but understandable Russian. "You want to stay down here and see if we can peel some of these shrimp out of their shells?"

"That may not forward our goals, Captain," Spock informed him in much better Russian, before Chekov could answer. Uhura wasn't sure how the Vulcan managed it, but his voice sounded equally formal and mannered in every language he used. "And there is a distinct probability that you will be needed more for later actions." He switched back to English, turning to meet the translucent gaze of the Shechenag who had issued the evacuation orders. "We will depart in the shuttle when we have transported all members of our party to it. However, we may not be able to leave the system within ten hours, because of the disabled status of our warp engines." "You are given ten hours to depart the system." Perhaps because of its lack of anything like human emotion, the mechanical voice sounded completely implacable to Uhura. "If you are still within the system after ten hours, you will not be able to depart."

"Are you threatening to attack us?" Spock inquired politely.

The alien's metallic body took an odd, swaying step backward on its multiply jointed legs. "We are Shechenag," it said, just as it had done when it first spoke to them. There was a pause, as if that should have been enough explanation for them. When Spock continued to meet its gaze inquiringly, the alien rattled off something in its native tongue and was answered by a clattering chorus from its comrades. "Shechenag once made war for nine millennia," said the toneless voice. "We make no war now. After ten hours, nothing departs or enters this system for one thousand years. You are warned."

Spock surprised Uhura with a polite inclination of his head toward their captors. "We thank you for the warning," he said, then glanced over his shoulder. In the back of the group, the younger Chekov and Kirk were helping a groaning Yuki Smith to her feet. "Mr. Sanner, please climb up to the cave entrance above us so that we may begin evacuating everyone."

"Spock, you coq au vin!" Even in his atrocious French, McCoy's voice sounded recognizably indignant. "We no leave without Jim!"

"Non," the Vulcan said simply. "We shall power up the Janus Gate from space and see if that dismays our enemies."

"Mr. Spock," Uhura said in urgent Vulcan. "If the Shechenag are telling us the truth about fighting a war for nine millennia, maybe they are the original inhabitants of Tlaoli. Maybe this Gate belongs to them."

"I have considered that possibility," Spock replied in his native language. "But the ancient Tlaoli people left this Gate for use by anyone who followed them. It would not be logical for them to chase away those successors now, especially if they could simply deactivate the Gate they built." He switched to the more guttural sounds of Tellerite. "I suspect these are not the aliens who built the Gate, but rather the enemies against whom it was once used. That would explain both their fear of using it, and their conviction that it cannot undo the disruptions it causes in the timeline."

The older Chekov cleared his throat. "So you don't think they really know how to deactivate this device?" he asked Spock in slow but passable Tellerite. "All they can do is try to barricade it from us?"

"That is my belief," Spock said.

"And if we cannot destroy their barricade by powering the Janus Gate from space?" asked the older Sulu, also in Tellerite, "What will we do then?"

Spock swept a measuring glance across the Shechenag, with their menacing cybernetic armor and the detachable robots now being arranged in a protective circle around the Janus Gate itself. He paused, then deliberately switched back to English again so all of them could understand his next words. "In that case, we will be forced to attack our problem more directly."