It happened shortly after the start of the evening shift.

Later on, everyone agreed on that.

At nineteen hundred hours, forty minutes, on Stardate 6251.1, Captain James Kirk was in the gym on Deck Eight of the Starship Enterprise, sparring with Ensign Lao Zhiming -- twenty-one, compact of build, his reflexes as quick as his mind -- when the whistle of the comm link sounded and one of the basketball players down at the other end of the big, curved room went to get it.

A moment later the man called out, "Captain?"

Kirk ducked a kick, backed off, his hand still raised to guard, panting; Lao relaxed with a grin and teased, "Saved by the bell, sir."

"Me or you?" Kirk grinned back and lightly ran to the comm link nearest them -- there were eight in all in the big, echoey chamber, which curved in a quarter section around the ship's main hull. He did notice that the basketball players hadn't resumed their game. They were inconspicuously loitering, bouncing the ball on the highly polished floor or doing ham stretches on the ribstalls with the air of people not quite eavesdropping, but waiting; just a little -- just the tiniest bit -- nervous about what it was that the bridge had to convey to the captain after he was off duty for the day.

As he slapped the comm button, Kirk was conscious that he, too, felt the twinge of adrenaline, over and above what the sparring match had roused.

Lao kept his distance, but he was listening, too.

"Captain?" Mahase's deep voice sounded completely neutral, as if it were none of her business. "First-line guard buoys of the Federation proximity zone around the Tau Lyra star system report an unidentified vessel."

"That's impossible," said Lao.

Kirk glanced back at him. The boy pushed his straight, sweat-drenched black hair back from his face, his forehead bunched in a frown at the inconsistency of data.

"We ran scans of the whole quadrant three hours ago, sir, just before we came off shift. You saw them. It's a deserted area. No shipping, no mining, no starbases... No civilizations at all, except what's on Tau Lyra Three. Nothing could have come in range of the buoys in that time. Nothing's that close."

"Except the Crossroad." The sweat drying stickily on his chest in the open front of his gi chilled Kirk slightly. There was certainly no other reason to feel cold.

"But there's..." Lao broke off. He was young, a midshipman, just out of the Academy. One day, Kirk knew as surely as he knew his own name, he would be one of the finest captains of Starfleet.

"There's nothing in the Crossroad Nebula?" Kirk finished his protest for him and gave him another lopsided grin, wry this time, as much at his own memories as at the young man's assumptions about how accurate readings were on the fringes of unknown space. "That we know about, Ensign. That we know about."

He turned, and slapped the comm button with the heel of his hand. "We're on our way."

\\c"It's a vessel all right, sir." Lieutenant Tonia Barrows punched up maximum magnification on the long-distance readout, and Kirk tapped the code to put it on the miniature strategic screen on the arm of his command chair. This proving too small to be satisfactory -- the strategic readouts had a sublime disregard for anything beyond the range of a photon torpedo -- he rose and stepped down to the evening-shift navigator's side. Mr. Spock, who had been reading in his quarters when news came of the potential violation, descended from his position at the Central Computer station to join them.

Green lights floated in the onyx abysses of the screen. Dim yellow haze marked the first, far-off effects of the star Tau Lyra's cometary field, though the star itself was too distant to show on the screen. The tiny pinlight was the drone buoy that had sent out its alarm, out beyond even the comets; the moving, antlike glow, the approaching craft.

"Looks like they're heading for Tau Lyra, all right, sir," said Barrows, looking up at Kirk. She was a dark-haired woman, pretty and competent, reputed to play a mean game of poker. In the four years, nine months of the Enterprise's mission, crew members had come and gone, but Barrows was one of the moderate-sized group of those who had been on board from the first.

Evening shift being smaller, the duties of navigator and helm were combined. "Can't tell for certain, but there's sure nothing else around there that they could be making for. High sublight speeds."

"Point of origin?"

"Crossroad Nebula, sir."

Kirk was silent a moment, gauging, measuring in his mind. He could feel the tension go through the bridge crew; less familiar to him than the day-shift gang, though he made a point of spending several hours each evening on the bridge when he could. He knew that the big, easygoing engineering lieutenant Winfield essentially ran the bridge in his absence; he could see him now, trading a worried glance with Lieutenant Mahase, could sense the weight of the silence in the way Dykstra continued to work at the ops station. It was as if he could hear the pulse of each person in the room -- with the possible exception of the unflappable Mr. Spock -- slightly quicken.

He returned to his seat, the Vulcan moving quietly at his heels. "When did the last ship vanish in the vicinity of the Crossroad Nebula?"

"Three point seven standard years ago, Captain. It was the Federation scout Harriet Tubman, with a crew of twelve, out of Starbase Twenty. Prior to that there is an unconfirmed report of the free-trader Sagittarius, last reported in this vicinity. In addition, three of the Federation observation buoys placed on the outer perimeter of Tau Lyra's proximity zone have disappeared, as have three automated drones sent into the nebula by the Federation Science Institute to determine whether there is, in fact, a Turtledove Anomaly Point within the nebula."

"And you know all that off the top of your head?" The turbolift doors whooshed softly shut as Dr. McCoy descended to the other side of Kirk's command chair and fixed the Vulcan science officer with a bright, sarcastic blue eye.

Spock drew himself up a little and replied, "As our current assignment is to release yet another series of instrument packets into the nebula, it seemed logical to familiarize myself with the potential hazards of the phenomenon. Quadrant Six is largely unexplored. The charts we made this morning are the first since the early Vulcan readings five centuries ago, which also marked the region as p'laaka -- prone to unpredictable events. Since that time the Crossroad Nebula does not seem to have enlarged nor unduly shifted position relative to its surroundings. An anomaly, but not a danger."

"Unless you happen to get too close," muttered McCoy.

Copyright © 1990 by Paramount Pictures