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  Still . . .

  “I’m going to be an officer and a gentleman about it,” Kirk said. He didn’t look up at them. “It’s time to lower the pennant, spend time on the family farm, rediscover old friends . . . go out on the oceans of my home planet and do some serious adventure of another kind.”

  Not even his two closest friends could decipher how deeply he meant those words.

  “Captain, excuse me,” Uhura said. Long familiarity with her deep, clear voice told them she was disturbed. Her chocolate features and those fashion-runway eyes gave the bridge a flavor of the exotic. “I’m picking up an echo of communication from Bill of Rights.”

  Kirk angled away from Spock and McCoy as though he was glad to be changing course.

  “Are we authorized to intercept that?” he asked.

  “No, sir, not technically.”

  “Then why are you doing it?”

  “Sir, it’s coming in on the coded emergency channel, over telemetry,” she enunciated carefully. “I’d say their audio was down, except that it’s coming over the lowest grade signal capacity. In the Academy, communications students sometimes refer to that as the ‘panic channel’ because it reads like a last resort. Permission to accept and decipher?”

  “Quickly.” His brows came together and he spoke fast. Suddenly everyone who knew him was tense. They’d seen his instincts at work before. “Well? Haven’t you got—”

  “Sir—receiving an SOS from them!”

  She worked more swiftly as stillness came over the bridge, leaving only the hums, chirrs, and buzzes of her systems at work and the sounds of a starship’s bridge on automatic, running the ship as best it could while the people were busy—waiting—worried.

  Then suddenly she wailed, “I’ve lost them!”

  “Sir?” a young ensign interrupted from the starboard upper deck as she peered into her viewer. She frowned into her screen and didn’t say anything else. But there was something in that one syllable.

  And an instant later—

  “Captain! Antiproton flushback!”

  The head of every experienced person on the bridge suddenly shot around at her, as though she had cursed at a kitten—then killed it.

  “Shields up!” Kirk barked at the helm, then spun around. “Spock, confirm that!”

  The Vulcan was already laying his large hands upon the long-range sensor panel on the quarterdeck, while the other bridge officers were scrambling to go into pre-alert, as always when the commander ordered shields.

  Kirk wasn’t waiting. He dropped into the command chair on one thigh and snapped, “Chekov, lay in a course for the source of the flushback and engage!” Then he regained control over his tone and added, “Prepare for emergency warp speed.”

  The compactly built Russian at the helm pursed his lips but kept his voice in control. “Emergency warp, aye.”

  “Flushback confirmed, Captain,” Spock reported. There was dark trouble in his tone now.

  Kirk slammed his chair’s comm link with a fist. “Engineer Scott, prepare our shields for forward-intense against antiproton flushback.” Then he cast back at Uhura, “All hands on deck. Code one emergency.”

  She didn’t nod, but went straight to her controls. Her voice thrummed through the huge vessel with an evenness that somehow intensified the urgency.

  “This is the bridge . . . all hands on deck . . . all hands on deck . . . code one emergency, repeat, code one emergency!”

  The emergency alert panels began to flash a steely electric-blue light. As it flashed, a familiar voice plunged up like a Celtic drumroll through the system.

  “Scott to bridge! Repeat and verify that forward-intense order. Did you say flushback?”

  “Kirk here, Scotty. Verified.”

  “Aye, sir!”

  “Uhura, close all outgoing communications. Log the Perils of Space Rescue Response Clause, the time, stardate, circumstances, and decision to act without headquarters contact.”

  “Aye, sir, logging.”

  “Sensors on long-range, wide dispersal, Mr. Chekov.”

  “Long-range wide, aye.”

  McCoy frowned. He knew those tones too well from people with whom he’d spent a half century on the not particularly welcoming doormats of space.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  No one paid any attention to him.

  He was used to that too.

  Careful not to trip or bump anyone as the bridge erupted into a flurry, the doctor moved cautiously back up to the quarterdeck and went sideways to the science station and its poised alien officer. There, he leaned on an elbow to make sure he was out of the way, and lowered his voice.

  “Spock, what does it mean?” he asked. “I’ve never heard of antiproton flashback before—”

  “Flushback,” Spock corrected him. His mind was on more than just the word, yet he frowned as he said it. Even through Spock’s poise, McCoy could tell it was a hated word.

  “You haven’t heard it, Doctor,” he said heavily, “because antiproton flushback cannot occur in nature.”

  “When can it occur?”

  Spock straightened then, posture tight, and looked at the forward screen as the ship shot into warp speed, and the galaxy blew by. He gazed at the long streaks of distortion as though all were new and very frightening. His angular brows drew tightly inward, and for some reason too personal to be voiced, he gazed at the back of James Kirk’s head, the back of a captain intensely occupied with whatever lay before them.

  The answer, even in its Vulcan reserve, was bitter.

  “To our science . . . only in the explosion of warp engines.”

  Silence clacked between them. A sentence like that demanded silence, murdered for it, thrived upon it.

  But this was a starship’s bridge, and something was on their wind. Silence couldn’t reign here.

  Voices, voices, all over, from the depths. Sounds. Technology leaping to the call of men and women. Men and women leaping to the call of trouble.

  Reports. Different voices. Each its own purpose.

  “Science decks checking in, Captain. All hands ready.”

  “Engineering reports all hands on deck, sir.”

  “At warp two, Captain. Chief engineer signals ready for emergency acceleration on your signal.”

  The captain’s voice.

  “Emergency warp speed.”

  “Emergency warp, aye . . . ”

  The ship began a low whine, from her bowels.

  “Warp three . . . warp four . . . ”

  “Emergency jump,” the captain said. “Go to warp nine.”

  A pause. A nervous confirmation.

  The surge of speed, eruptions of successive warping, without pause, without rest—crack, crack, crack, crack.

  “Warp nine, Captain. Stressed, but holding.”

  “Go to yellow alert.”

  “Yellow alert, aye!”

  “Yellow alert, yellow alert . . . all hands to emergency stations . . . yellow alert, yellow alert . . . ”

  ONE

  Tension on the bridge could have been lifted and carried.

  It would have cast the people into chaos, except for the anchor of the captain’s voice. The captain on any ship was the only reason the crews could ever sleep or eat, for no one can sleep or eat where there isn’t the anchor.

  With that anchor on board, no storm was too bad, no fog too thick, no silence too damning.

  Knowing the ship around them was screaming through space at warp nine, piercing through increasing waves of antiproton flush and heading not away from that horrifying fact of death but right into it, the crew clung to the captain’s voice.

  “Mr. Chekov, project our course and report what’s there in a funnel of fifty light-years in diameter. Specify any outposts, Federation or otherwise, areas of contention, reported storms, and call up manifests of any shipping that has passed through that area in the past ten days.”

  “Aye, sir, projecting the course. I’ll have that for you in a few
moments.”

  “Short moments, Mr. Chekov.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  On the quarterdeck, the ensign who had first noticed the flushback swallowed obvious guilt at having been the bearer of awful news. Wasn’t her name Dimitrios? Demarris? De-something.

  McCoy knew that look, had carried it plenty of times himself.

  With nothing to do—yet—in this emergency, he stepped away from the science station and over to the other side of the bridge to the young woman.

  She was trying to get some moisture back into her mouth while she tracked the surging waves of flushback and tried to pinpoint their source. Not an exact science at all, if her expression was any clue. Her hands were shaking.

  “Don’t drink coffee,” McCoy suggested.

  The ensign blinked, glared at him, confused. Then she turned back to her screen and squinted into it.

  “I don’t know what you mean, sir.”

  “Don’t drink any coffee until whatever’s happening isn’t happening anymore.”

  She bit her lip, then only said, “Thank you, sir.”

  McCoy shifted his feet, watching the bridge personnel move tightly at their stations and the lights and panels of the bridge crackle with activity. A ship at warp nine was plenty active.

  “It’ll make you nervous,” he added, “and you’ll have to—”

  “Yes, sir,” the ensign snapped. “I understand. Thank you.”

  She wanted him to go away, and Leonard McCoy wasn’t the go-away type.

  “What’s bothering you, Ensign . . . ”

  “Devereaux, sir.”

  She swallowed a couple more times, resisted the urge to glance at him and damn him for his doctor’s intuition, but then she lowered her voice and let it out.

  “If there’s something out there that made an Excelsior-class ship blow up,” the ensign said, “what chance do we have?”

  McCoy offered the girl an annoyed glare, then swaggered a step closer to her, took her elbow, and turned her away from her console.

  She gawked at him as if he were crazy.

  The doctor didn’t care that he was interrupting her work. Didn’t care that she had been the one to tell everybody that a sister starship might have just been blown to bits. He was concerned about something else.

  He nodded down toward the main deck, to the command chair, and to the man in it.

  “Kid,” he said, “that is our chance.”

  Ensign Devereaux looked down there too. Through his grip on her elbow, McCoy could feel some of her trembling go away as she watched James Kirk in his command chair.

  There was just something about Captain Kirk.

  The ensign cleared her throat, licked her lips, and turned back toward her station. Halfway there she paused, and gazed at Dr. McCoy. She was still afraid, but not in quite the same way.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said. “I won’t forget.”

  At the navigation station on the upper deck, Commander Chekov straightened from his backbreaking hover and turned to look at the heart of the bridge also.

  “Captain,” the Russian said, speaking around his own accent as much as possible. “I have put up the merchant marine manifests on this screen for you to review. There are very few, sir. And there are no storms, no contested areas, no border disputes, no reported hazards in the specified funnel of space, no Starfleet outposts, no unfriendly settlements, and only two star systems within a hundred light-years. One is uninhabited, and on the other there is only a Federation archaeological excavation on a small outside planet.”

  Captain Kirk came up out of his chair. He had always had trouble sitting when there was action going on.

  “Name the project,” he ordered.

  “I have never heard of it before, sir,” came the clipped answer. “It is logged as . . . Faramond.”

  If McCoy was any judge of people he knew and people he didn’t know, no one else on board had heard of that place either. One glance around the bridge told him that.

  But then he looked down again at the captain.

  On the face of the man he knew so well, McCoy saw a glitter of dangerous recognition.

  The captain turned like a policeman about to make an arrest. He paced behind his command chair, caressing it. He glared forward into the rage of warp nine as stars and space debris blistered past the main viewscreen. His brows drew together and his eyes narrowed. A fire came into them which his friends thought talk of retirement might already have killed.

  Though he watched the screen before him, he was gazing into the past. His lips parted and he spoke, but not to anyone there.

  “Faramond . . . ”

  TWO

  Forty-five years earlier . . .

  A rope footbridge over the swollen North Skunk River, Mahaska County, Iowa

  “Stick with me and you’ll get the ride of your lives.”

  A surly clutch of teenagers clung to those words as tightly as they clung to the tatters of the ages-old jute footbridge. Beneath them, the swollen Skunk River lazily whispered dare you, dare you, dare you and suggested they fall on in.

  “Don’t look down! Nobody look down.”

  Immediately the grunts and complaints went silent. Nobody wanted to get chewed out by the stocky boy with the sawdust-colored curls and the stingers in his eyes.

  “Keep moving,” he added. “No looking down.”

  “It’ll be our luck a tourist tram floats by and sees us,” Zack Malkin said. He wanted to scratch his neck, but he didn’t dare let go. “We’re on the Tramway’s historical trail, you know.”

  “They won’t.”

  “What if they do?” Lucy Pogue spat. Her soggy, bloodshot eyes were wide and her hands twitched on the prickly ropes. “You didn’t think of that did you, genius?”

  “We’ll wave at ’em, all right?” their leader snapped, scowling from under the brim of his grandfather’s touring cap. With a shift of his shoulders he rearranged his high school jacket to free his arms a little. “Shut up and keep moving. One step at a time. And don’t look down.”

  “I don’t like this, Jimmy,” said a brittle, fragile boy who had trouble breathing. He didn’t look down, but he did glance back over the third of the walkway they’d already crossed. “Nobody told us we’d have to cross something like this.”

  “There’s going to be a lot out there that nobody tells us about. We’ve got to find out for ourselves,” their leader said, “before it’s too late.”

  Tom Beauvais squinted into the sun and cracked, “You mean before we get caught.”

  “We could just sit at home,” Jimmy shot back. “Be real safe that way.”

  The only person ahead of him was a girl whose powdery complexion barely picked up the light of the western sun. Her small eyes were like clear gelatin—hardly any color but lots of shine—and they were tightened with fear. Her cheeks were large, the shape and color of eggshells, and on a less swanlike creature might have been ghastly.

  Shivering, she murmured, “Jimmy . . . ”

  “Keep moving,” he told her softly. “Don’t try to hurry. We’re not going to move any faster than you can go. That’s why I had you go first. I’m right here next to you, Emily. Nothing can possibly happen.”

  Their muscular leader curled his fingers around the jute and packtwine ropes and willed the sixty-foot-long footbridge to hold up.

  It stretched from one cliff to another, east to west over the river. It had two sides for handholds and a walkway on the bottom that once had been tight and safe—a long time ago. Now it was rotting. An adventure, or a death wish.

  Jimmy gritted his teeth at it. It’d been there for two decades, so it could just stay there another ten minutes. He’d argued them down about how this was the best way to cross the Skunk without getting caught, and how the authorities would be after them by now, and anything else he could tell them to keep them in line. He tried to make this look easy, to pretend the old ropes weren’t scratching his palms and to act light on his feet.

  Givi
ng the others his voice to concentrate on, he kept talking.

  “Always think four or five moves ahead. That’s the trick.”

  “If it’s such a good trick,” Tom countered, “why didn’t you think of one of us going across this wreck first to see if it would hold up?”

  His brow in a permanent furrow, Jimmy tightened his eyes and tried to slip around the truth. “Better this way. Even distribution of weight.”

  He held his breath, hoping nobody would notice how little sense that made. He squinted into the west and ignored the sun’s glow off his own peach-fuzzed cheeks.

  Peach fuzz. That was his father’s phrase. Peach fuzz, baby face, greenhorn. Damn his cheeks for fitting that description. Deliberately he looked away from the sunlight.

  “We’re pioneers,” he said. “We’re going straight up the Oregon Trail, just like the people who settled this country and put in the railroads and the towns like Riverside across this part of Iowa. Only instead of horses or steel, we’re hopping the Stampede.”

  Though he had played for team spirit, his only reward was a nasty grunt from Tom. “Sure. We’re going to hop onto the fastest train in North America while it’s doing nine hundred kpm five centimeters above the ground, in a tube. That’ll be a whole new definition of ‘friction.’”

  “Glad you’re paying attention, Beauvais.”

  “Glad you can fly, Kirk.”

  Jimmy shot a glare at him. Warning.

  “Even the Stampede stops once in a while,” he said. “All we have to do is make Omaha at loading time and we’re aboard. Next stop, Oregon, and next after that . . . South America.”

  “What’re we gonna do when we get to South America?” Quentin Monroe asked.

  “Anything we damned well please.” Jimmy glanced past Lucy and Zack again to see how Quentin was doing, and hoped Beauvais would look after the little guy.

  Quentin’s brown face was ink-spotted with big black freckles, enhanced by his spongy black hair and perpetually worried eyes, which in this light looked like two more inkspots. Jimmy hadn’t wanted to bring him along. Quentin was only fourteen and everybody else in the gang was sixteen, he’d never held his own in a fight, and he hadn’t even been to the city, but there was something about the frail black boy that said I’m okay, I’ll grow, I’ll learn.