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The Bridge’s viewscreen showed a tunnel of stars that hurtled toward them, breaking into long rainbow streaks at the edges of the screen as the Enterprise shot past. It was a lie, of course: an illusion that humans manufactured in an effort to reduce the infinite multiverse into something that they could understand. Spock preferred the truth, and kept his eyes fixed on his scanner.
“Warp 6.7.”
“Keep her steady, Mr. Sulu.”
“Aye, Captain . . . Warp 6.8. 6.85 . . . 6.9!”
The otherspace in which the Enterprise traveled during warp was exactly that: other. It was an alternate dimension in which light traveled faster than in ‘normal’ space, and therefore, given enough power, a massed object could do so as well. The view here was far less exciting than what the viewscreen showed: the distant stars appeared disappointingly staid relative to the Enterprise because, after all, their light in this dimension was still traveling faster than the starship. The only sign of the ship’s passage was the wavering, alien ‘other light’ that suffused Spock’s screen as they slipped from one dimension into the next.
“Warp 6.94 . . . 6.97 . . . 6.99 . . . 7.0!”
The Bridge erupted into cheers. Spock straightened and looked over the heads of his shipmates at the streaking bands of light that were the viewscreen’s interpretation of their accomplishment.
The Captain grinned and punched a button on his command chair, opening intraship communications. “Now hear this, ladies and gentlemen. We are officially traveling at seven hundred times the speed of light. The Enterprise is the first Earth ship to reach Time Warp Factor 7!”
Spock heard the cheering start before the Captain switched off the channel. At her station Uhura winced and pulled the comm link from her ear. She caught Spock’s look and smiled. “Bit loud, that.”
Spock nodded in acknowledgment. His response was unnecessary, since the truth of her statement was self-evident, but he had learned that superfluous interactions of this kind were simply a part of communication among humans. He wondered at times how it had been for his mother, adapting to life among an alien people. Vulcan language customs must have been equally difficult for her to understand.
He felt a stab of pain at the thought, and swiftly repressed it. In the eight months that had passed since Vulcan’s destruction he had become practiced at this, and he was confident that no sign showed on his face as he descended the steps to stand beside the Captain’s chair.
“Clarification, Captain: we are now traveling at seven hundred sixty-nine point eight three times the speed of light in Earth-normal space. The scale of Time Warp Factors is non-linear.”
Captain Kirk looked over at him. “Clarification noted, Mr. Spock. Seven hundred and sixty-nine . . .”
“Point eight three.”
“. . . Point eight three times the speed of light is still pretty damn good, don’t you think?”
“You said it, Captain!” A new voice broke in. Engineer Scott had barely waited for the turbolift doors to open before squeezing through them. He jumped the three steps down to the command deck, grinning broadly. “And she’s holding steady, too. Did you feel that last shift to 7.0? Nope, and neither did I. Smooth, that’s my girl. Smoooth.”
He was virtually quivering with enthusiasm. Spock folded his hands behind his back. He could acknowledge a certain satisfaction in the scientific and technological achievement, but he did not see that one had to express it as energetically as Mr. Scott.
“Hmph.” Dr. McCoy followed Scott to the deck. He was scowling, which Spock had come to regard as his usual expression. “And who knows what effect it’ll have on us? I’ll tell you. No one, that’s who. Because no one’s ever done it before. But never mind tests, never mind measurements, no, it’s head first over the brink and damn the consequences! As if there weren’t enough things out there waiting to kill us, we have to go racing off even faster to find more!”
“The mission is called to ‘boldly go where no man has gone before,’ Doctor,” Kirk said.
“Oh yes, and that was a great idea, wasn’t it? Whoever came up with that one must have been a blooming genius. How much shielding is on this ship, that’s what I want to know. Has anyone tested it at Warp 7? It could crack like an egg at any minute, and then you’ll know what Warp 7 feels like all right, you’ll be right out there feeling it without a suit!”
Spock drew a steadying breath. Service with the doctor, he had found, proved an excellent exercise in his self-mastery. “There is no additional strain on the ship’s hull at Warp 7, Doctor, any more than there is at Warp 1. At warp speed the ship is contained within an artificial ‘bubble’ of normal space-time created by the interference pattern generated by the warp nacelles. The bending of spacetime relative to the ship’s hull is therefore rendered null. Hence you experience the linear passage of your own internal timeline even as you traverse dimensions in which, relative to Earth-normal space, you are traveling backward in time.”
McCoy stared at him. “Huh?”
“What he means is, Bones, don’t worry about it.” Kirk grinned. “You’re as safe here as you would be in your own little garden at home.”
“Speak for yourself,” McCoy said. “My ex-wife took the garden along with the house.”
“As safe as you would be on a fishing trip, then.” Kirk was not to be deterred.
Sulu joined in the conversation, turning his chair to look at them. “It’s a shame, though, isn’t it? It’d be nice to feel something. Here we are going seven hundred times the speed of light, and we might as well be doing Warp 1. There’s just a vibration in the deck plates.”
“Fishing? There are gators in Georgia.” McCoy was wandering a single-minded world of his own.
“Here now, there’s no call to be talking of vibrations,” Scott said. “She’s a good ship.”
Spock was hardly listening. Traversing dimensions . . .
“I didn’t say she wasn’t,” Sulu said. “But she’s so big. Now, what we need is a shuttle. Like a one-man fighter, something you can feel.”
“Shuttles cannot travel at warp speed,” Spock said absently. He was thinking. Mass was proportional to speed in Earth-normal space. It was basic Einsteinian physics, known to Earth science since the early 20th century. As one approached the speed of light in any dimension mass increased on a parabolic curve to infinity. Warp out of Earth-normal space, however, and faster than light travel was possible.
But time was not fixed. At 769.83c one would travel 277.6 hours backward for every one hour forward in time relative to Earth-normal space. Under normal circumstances this had no impact, for the ship’s engines were balanced to maintain a space-time envelope equal to that of normal space. If you traveled at warp speed for two hours, you would drop out of warp to find that two hours had passed on Earth as well as for you.
But what if the engines were not balanced?
“I know,” Sulu said. “That’s just it, don’t you see? A one-man fighter at warp speed, just think of how that would be!”
“Ach, it’ll never happen,” Scott said. “There isn’t enough power.”
“You can put dilithium crystals on a fighter.”
“It isn’t th’ dilithium, man, nor the antimatter either. We’ve plenty o’ that. But you’d never get the engines balanced on a craft that small. Ye’d nae be able ta maintain a stable warp shell.”
“There’s got to be a way,” Sulu said.
There is, Spock thought. If one did not need to maintain it for long.
“All right, Lieutenant,” Kirk said. “We’ll save that history-making attempt for tomorrow. Stations, everyone.”
Twenty six years, eight months, five days and sixteen hours was 237,976 hours. Divide by 277.6 . . .
“I still don’t like it,” McCoy said, climbing the steps to the turbolift. “You can’t tell me that it’s normal.”
“Well I am telling you that,” Scott said. “The Enterprise is as safe as houses.”
Thirty point nine hours, Spock thought as he returned to the science station. A shuttlecraft could not maintain sufficient speed for that long. But the Enterprise could. He could adjust the engines to create a warp bubble that was just enough to traverse dimensions, but not enough to compensate for the time differential. Thirty point nine hours to travel twenty-six point six seven years backward in time. Thirty point nine hours to stop Nero from ever encountering the Kelvin. Thirty point nine hours to save Vulcan.
The ship lurched.
“Red Alert!” Kirk shouted as the impact alarms blared. “What the hell was that?”
“I don’t know, sir!” Sulu was staring first at his board, then up at the viewscreen. “My instruments read normal – there’s nothing there for us to hit!”
“We are dropping out of warp,” Spock said, grabbing for his viewer as the deck tilted beneath his feet. “Sensors show no objects of sizeable mass in this area. Switching to energy scan.”
“Keptin, I show one object within 800 meters. It’s tiny – I can barely read it.”
“Meteor?” Kirk said.
“Negative,” Chekov said. “There’s no solar system in this area. There’s nothing to create a meteor field, sir.”
“Maximum magnification,” Kirk ordered. “Spock, I want to see what that thing is.”
Spock had not yet finished calibrating his instruments for an energy scan. But preliminary results suggested that calibration was not necessary. He switched back to mass detection, focused on the object that Chekov had spotted, and blinked. In defiance of all logic he checked his instruments a second time. There was no malfunction.
“Spock . . .” Kirk said.
“Aye Captain,” Spock said. “On screen now.” He pressed a switch.
“What the hell?” Kirk and McCoy spoke at the same time.
“There is more, Captain,” Spock said. He called up the results of his initial energy scan and sent them to the main viewer. Then he straightened and turned to look.
The singularity was light-years in diameter. It sprawled like a malignant entity before, above and below them. Gas ionized and crackled like lightning between its vast and shifting spires. Space and time were warped within its folds, light shifted to ultraviolet as it fell into the depths. And in orbit around it was a tiny, wooden phone box.
“Well I’ll be damned,” McCoy breathed. “I wouldn’t have believed it possible. Spock, you’ve developed a sense of humor.”
“Hardly, Doctor,” Spock said. “The object is real. Preliminary scan suggests that it is what it appears to be: a primitive communications device, circa Earth year 1960.”
“It’s a police box,” Uhura said. Kirk swung around to look at her. She coughed. “I mean, it says ‘Police’ on the side. You can see it.”
“But it can’t be,” Kirk said. “Unless . . . Spock, what is that thing out there?”
“It is a rift in spacetime,” Spock said. “A class 8 singularity that is superficially akin to a black hole. It is warping space and time around itself.”
“Time,” Kirk said. “Could it have . . . snatched that box from Earth in 1960? Like a vacuum, picking up random bits of things from the universe and bringing them here.”
“It would require immense power to warp spacetime to that extent,” Spock said. “I do not believe that the singularity is capable of that.”
“Spoilsport,” McCoy muttered.
Spock ignored him. “Furthermore the ‘police box’ is shielded to prevent internal scan. I cannot penetrate its surface. This suggests that despite its appearance it is considerably more advanced than present day Earth technology.”
“Alien?” Kirk asked.
“That is a statistical possibility,” Spock said.
“But the sign is in English,” Uhura said.
“An alien culture advanced enough to block our sensors might also have developed the ability to scan our databanks and display information it wished us to see in language that we could understand,” Spock said.
“You mean they could be scanning us now?” Kirk frowned.
“Oh come on,” McCoy said. “Isn’t that a bit far-fetched?”
Spock raised an eyebrow. “It is a police telephone box in orbit around a rift in spacetime, Doctor. I would suggest at this point that anything is possible.” He paused. “It could also potentially be from Earth’s future, or from an alternate reality in which Earth’s technology advanced more quickly than in our own. More data is needed to refine our estimate.”
Kirk drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Uhura, open a hailing frequency.”
“You don’t think anyone’s inside that wee thing, do you, Captain?” Scott said.
Kirk shrugged. “Only one way to find out. Besides, it’s a phone box, isn’t it? Let’s give it a ring.”
“Frequency open, Captain,” Uhura said. “Something’s receiving us, anyway.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant.” Kirk rose to his feet. “This is Captain James T. Kirk of the U.S.S. Enterprise. You are in Federation space. Please state your identity and intentions.”
Static crackled and hissed over the open channel. Spock caught what sounded like a man’s voice saying, “. . . Enterprise . . .” It cut off in a squeal of feedback.
“Uhura, can we clear that channel?” Kirk said.
“Trying, sir.” Uhura’s hands danced over her board, adjusting settings. “I’ve boosted the gain as high as it will go. Applying dampers . . . it’s that singularity, sir. With the amount of hard radiation it’s generating I can’t . . .”
“This is the Doctor,” the viewscreen cleared to show a humanoid male speaking from what appeared to be the control room of a spaceship. He looked young, with tousled brown hair and a scattering of freckles over his nose. The static had vanished, and when he spoke his voice was as clear and textured as if he were standing on the Bridge with them.
“Good work, Lieutenant,” Kirk said.
“It wasn’t me, sir,” Uhura said, frowning at her board. “The interference is being overridden at the other end of the channel.”
“Did you say Federation space?” the man asked. Spock raised an eyebrow. The translator, if it was a translator, rendered his voice with an Earth-English, faintly Scottish accent.
Scott’s eyes narrowed. “Renfrewshire . . .?” he murmured, too quietly for the link to pick up.
“I did,” Kirk said. “We represent the United Federation of Planets. And you are?”
“UFP, right,” the man said. “So that makes this the . . . 23rd century, am I right? Judging by your ship’s design I’d say around the year 2250. Did I get it close?”
Kirk exchanged a glance with Spock. “Close enough,” he said. “I’m sorry, you said your name was Doctor . . .?”
“Just the Doctor,” the man said. “I need to come aboard your ship.”
Kirk gave him a long look. “I don’t think so.”
“I’ll explain later,” the Doctor said. “But right now it’s vitally important that I come aboard.”
“You haven’t even told us your name!” Kirk said. “We don’t know who you are or where you’re from. You could be a Romulan agent for all we know. And you just happen to turn up here, right when an unknown singularity erupts in Federation space, and you expect us to bring you aboard with no questions asked?”
“Captain, I appreciate your concern, I really do,” the Doctor leaned into the viewscreen, his gaze intent. “But you’re going to have to trust me. Because you’ve got a 23rd century starship in contact with an expanding flexural rift in space and in ten minutes it’s going to rip your ship apart if you don’t let me come on board right now to stop it.”
“Cut communications!” Kirk said. “Spock, status report.”
“Checking internal sensors,” Spock said as the image of the man on the viewscreen winked out, replaced by the crackling spires of the singularity. “No undue stress on ship’s hull reported.”
“Power levels read normal,” the ensign at the engineering station said.
“Ach, he’s making it up,” Scott said, peering over the ensign’s shoulder at the auxiliary engineering board. “She’s fine.”
“Shields holding, Captain,” Sulu said. “. . . Wait. That’s odd.”
“What’s odd, Mr. Sulu?” Kirk said.
“Nothing, sir, it was just a blip – wait, there it is again. Something’s happening to the shields.”
“Routing helm readouts through the science station,” Spock said, working his board one-handed while staring into his viewer. “Status appears normal . . . correction. There is a fluctuation in the secondary feedback channel.”
“Meaning what, Mr. Spock?” Kirk’s voice was tight.
Spock did not answer immediately, his eyes fixed on the flickering numbers in his viewer while his mind raced. “The shield harmonics are changing, Captain. The subharmonic to primary frequency ratio is increasing by a factor of nine every eight point five seconds. It appears that the singularity is generating energy in sync with the frequency of the Enterprise’s shields. The feedback harmonization is causing an amplitude increase proportionate to the influx of rift energy.”
“What?” Scott said. “But that cannae happen! It’s nae possible for a natural phenomenon to match harmonics w’ the shields. If it did –”
“It would generate a feedback resonance within the ship’s hull of 2.8 GHz, tripling every eight point five seconds,” Spock straightened up from his viewer and looked at the Captain. “Estimate hull critical in nine point six minutes.”
“Get us out of here,” Kirk ordered. “Sulu, back us off. Chekov, lay in a course to –”
“No, Captain!” Scott shouted.
“Inadvisable, sir,” Spock said in the same breath. “Breaking contact with the rift now would result in an immediate overload of our shielding circuits. Our shields would collapse, exposing us to the full spectrum of energy emitted by the singularity.”
“It’ll cook us like an egg,” Scott said.
“I knew it!” McCoy said. “That’s the thing about space: there’s always something out there waiting to kill you.”
“All right,” Kirk said. “We can’t get out and we can’t stay as we are. Can we . . . dampen that signal somehow to stop it from breaching our hull?”
There was a silence. McCoy was the first to break it, waving an arm toward the singularity that crackled across the viewscreen. “Dampen that? With what? It’d be like throwing a cup of water on Vesuvius!”
“I am forced to concur with the doctor,” Spock said, only momentarily thrown by the reference to ancient Earth history. “We do not possess the means to damp a class 8 rift in spacetime.”
Kirk sighed, throwing himself down in his command chair. “Suggestions?”
“There’s still the Doctor,” Sulu said.
Kirk groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I knew it. I just knew that someone would say that.”
“Evidence suggests that he does possess technology superior to our own,” Spock said.
“Your futuristic alien, eh, Spock?” Kirk said. He waved a hand as Spock started to answer. “Never mind. Lieutenant Uhura, hail –”
“Keptin!” Chekov interrupted. “He’s gone! The blue box is gone!”
“What?” Kirk said. “What’s he –”
Uhura’s board whistled. She touched a hand to the comm link in her ear, her eyes widening. “Captain, it’s Engineering. They say that a telephone booth has just materialized inside the control room!”
“What the blazes,” Kirk began, getting to his feet, when a voice crackled over the intercom. “Sorry to drop in on you like this, Captain, but you’re running short on time. Tell you what, I’ll have you in for a cup of tea on my ship once this is over, to make it up to you.”
“Our shields are up!” Kirk said. “How the hell did you get on board?”
There was no answer. The intercom had cut off.
“I’d say the odds are tilting toward futuristic alien,” McCoy murmured.
“Enough of this,” Kirk said, striding for the lift. “Lieutenant Uhura, you have the Bridge. Spock, Dr. McCoy, Scotty: you’re with me.”
*~*~*
There was a telephone box in Engineering. It stood next to the warp core, 2.5 meters tall by 1.3 meters square. It was blue. One of its doors was open. A thick cable snaked from its interior over the engineering deck to the base of the warp core. A man was lying on his back under the warp core’s control console. Loops of wiring draped down to the floor around him as he worked at something in the console’s interior.
“Oi!” Scott shouted. “What d’ye think you’re doing?” He strode into the control room, flanked by Kirk and McCoy. Spock stepped aside to a sub-workstation and began calling up ship’s data.
“Saving your lives,” the Doctor grunted. “Hand me that cable, will you?”
“McEvery, what are you doing?” Scott said as a red-haired technician knelt to hold the cable in place. “You’re not listening to him?”
“Spooky, isn’t it?” the Doctor said. He took a probe from his pocket and held it to the junction of the cable and console. There was a sharp ultrasonic whine. Spock winced.
“I don’t know, sir,” said one of the other technicians who stood around the console. “He did seem awfully sure . . .”
“Well, he’s not human,” McCoy said, aiming his scanner at the Doctor. “Two hearts: circulatory system strung up like a Christmas tree, blood pressure off the scale –”
“Oi! I am under some stress at the moment,” the Doctor protested, running his probe along a wire filament. “It’s understandable.”
“Four minutes until hull critical,” Spock said.
“Gotcha!” the Doctor swung out from under the console. Gripping the sonic probe between his teeth, he leaned over and flipped a row of switches.
There was a flash of brilliant blue light as the warp core pulsed, sending a violent shudder through the ship. The Doctor fell across the console. Kirk, McCoy, Scott and most of the technicians were thrown to the floor. Spock managed to stay upright by clinging to his terminal.
“Feedback resonance increased 300%,” he called over the rising whine of the engines. “Hull rupture imminent!”
“What!” said the Doctor. “What? But this is a transwarp drive, isn’t it?”
“What the hell’s that?” Scott yelled. “Ye daft idiot, get yer bleeding hands off’f my ship!”
In that moment several things became clear to Spock at once. “Transwarp drive is a theory,” he said. “In which the warp drive is modulated through a parallel dimension – what interface frequency did you use?”
“919 GHz,” the Doctor said.
“Hull breach on deck 18!” called one of the technicians. “Force shield in place, but it won’t hold for long!”
Spock fought his way across the heaving deck to the warp console. “Engines now at 700 GHz,” he said, his hands flying across the touch panels. “Increasing to 770 GHz . . . 800 GHz.”
“She’s going critical!” Scott shouted as the engines rose to a scream. “Spock, you’ll blow the containment!”
“802 GHz,” Spock said. “Doctor, will your ship match that?”
“Yes, but she’s set for –”
“Can you override your interface settings to allow for automatic scan?”
“Ha, I’m on it!” the Doctor pulled what looked like a cricket ball from his pocket and drew back his arm. Looking up, Spock saw for the first time that through the open telephone box door was a large, brightly lit room with a control panel and moving engine that looked something like a smaller version of the warp core.
The Doctor threw the ball like a baseball pitcher aiming for home plate. It sailed through the open door and hit a lever on the ship’s control panel, knocking it back.
“Interface locked,” Spock said. “Holding at 802 GHz . . . 750 . . . 700 GHz.” The howl of the engines subsided, cycling back down to their usual hum.
“Right, that’s sorted,” the Doctor said, turning to the warp console. “Now where is it . . . aha, here we go.”
He tapped a sequence of keys. “Feeding in counter-resonance at 700 billion cycles per second.”
“I have it,” Spock said. “Tying in hull stabilizers . . . damping field in place. Holding.”
The Doctor released a long breath as the shuddering faded from the deck plates. “Willie Mays taught me that throw. Glad it still works.”
McCoy picked himself up, rubbing his knee. “What just happened?”
“We have connected the Doctor’s ship to the Enterprise,” Spock said. “It is generating a damping signal to cancel out the feedback resonance from the shields.”
“It’s bought us some time,” the Doctor said. “A couple of days, anyway, to figure out what to do about that rift out there.”
“Well,” Kirk said. “I guess we have to thank you, Doctor.”
“Right, sorry! Captain Kirk, wasn’t it?” the Doctor bounded across the deck and grabbed Kirk’s hand, shaking it with both of his own. He radiated energy: his rumpled brown suit and carelessly knotted tie adding to the impression of a being in constant motion. “Apologies for the gate-crashing, but there wasn’t time to explain. I’ve been busy.”
“I can see that,” Kirk said, disengaging his hand from the Doctor’s grasp. “But maybe now you can tell us: who are you? And what are you doing here?”
“Oh, I’m a traveler, just passing through. Saw a spot of trouble and thought I’d help.” The Doctor turned away, wandering across the control room. “I must say this is a beautiful ship. Clean, spacious, full shielding, artificial gravity, warp drive: the works.” He took a pair of glasses from his jacket pocket and put them on, leaning backward to look up the column of the warp core.
“Gorgeous! The only question is,” he straightened up and removed his glasses, gazing around at them all. “How did you create that rift out there if you haven’t got transwarp drive?”
“What? We didn’t make that thing!” Scott said.
“It’s radiating energy at the same frequency as your shields,” the Doctor said.
“So?” McCoy said.
“The odds of a natural phenomenon matching the exact shielding frequency of the Enterprise are three million, two hundred and fifty-seven thousand, eight hundred and four to one,” Spock said.
The Doctor grinned. “Exactly. Vulcans: I love ’em! I’m the Doctor, by the way. We didn’t have time to be properly introduced.”
“Spock,” Spock said. “May I ask you a question?”
“Can’t see how I’d stop you.” The Doctor shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels, evidently enjoying himself. “Ask away.”
“You have on several instances now referred to a lack of time,” Spock said. “But you are a time traveler, sir.”
The Doctor stopped smiling. “Ah. Well, that’s a Vulcan for you. As it happens, I’m a part of events now. I can’t cross back over my own time stream.”
Spock frowned. “I fail to understand why. T’Pei’s Theory of Causality would seem to suggest –”
“All right,” Kirk cut in. “Enough theorizing for the moment. Whatever that singularity is, however it got there, we have to deal with it. Doctor, you said we had a couple of days?”
“Yes, yes,” the Doctor said, looking around. “The Tardis can maintain the damping field for that long.”
“Fine. I don’t want to stay here any longer than necessary,” Kirk said. “Scotty, seal up that breach on deck 18 and check the rest of the ship for damage. Spock, Doctor: you have 24 hours. There’s a briefing at 1100 tomorrow. I want to know how we’re going to get out of here then. Doctor McCoy, come with me. Dismissed.”
“He’s a bit touchy, isn’t he?” the Doctor said as Kirk strode from the room, McCoy at his heels.
“His ship is in danger, and he cannot do anything to free it,” Spock said.
“Hmm. That’s fairly insightful, coming from a Vulcan. Studied a bit about human emotions, have you?” the Doctor leaned one hip against the warp console and folded his arms, casting a searching look at Spock.
Spock returned the look, one eyebrow raised. There was a brief silence.
“Well, we won’t find any answers hanging around here,” the Doctor clapped his hands. “You’ve got a science lab or something, do you? Lead the way! Allons-y!”
“Oh, and you lot,” he added, wheeling around in mid-stride to face the engineering crew. “Hands off of my ship, all right? Just because the door’s open doesn’t mean you can go inside.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, sir,” Scott said. Spock, who had seen the looks that Scotty had been casting toward the glowing interior of the blue box, filed this statement as an example of what humans called a ‘white lie.’
“Oh, that’s good,” the Doctor said. “Because the Tardis protects itself against intruders, and it isn’t pretty. Now where was that lab? This way? Let’s go!”
He charged away. Spock exchanged a glance with Scott and followed.
*~*~*
“Oh, now this is nice,” the Doctor said as the pressurized doors slid open to reveal the main science lab curving out before them. “Let’s see what you have here: DNA replicators, liquid particle extrapolators, anti-proton pulse generators – an artificial environment simulator! I haven’t seen one of these since I was a kid!”
Scientists in uniformed blue looked up in bemusement as he darted between the long rows of workbenches to peer through the glass wall of the giant tank that dominated the center of the room.
“Hee! You’ve got everything in here. But the thing is, Spock,” he swung himself up to sit cross-legged atop a workbench. “You and I both know that the Enterprise created that singularity. So the Enterprise has to be the way to close it.”
“That is a working hypothesis,” Spock said, looking around at the members of his staff who had drifted over in the Doctor’s wake. They quickly retreated under his stare to busy themselves at their stations. Within minutes the room humming with quiet productivity, the technicians around them apparently deaf to anything but the pursuit of science.
Satisfied, Spock turned back to the Doctor. “However, the Enterprise does not possess the means to generate a spacetime anomaly of that scale. If it was artificially created it must have been done in this ship’s future.”
“Intersection of potential realities, you mean?” the Doctor rubbed a finger over his eye. “Nah. It can’t be that, or we’d have encountered your future ship.”
“The accident that created the singularity might have destroyed the future Enterprise,” Spock said.
The Doctor glanced up. “What makes you think it was an accident?”
They looked at each other. “Doctor,” Spock said. “The rift is tearing a hole in the universe. There is no version of the Enterprise crew that would deliberately do such a thing.”
“Never say never ever,” the Doctor murmured, as if to himself. “But in any case this singularity intersected with this ship, at this time. Why? What were you doing when the rift opened up?”
“The Enterprise was completing a test of Time Warp Factor 7.”
“Standard warp, yeah,” the Doctor said. “And nothing in the engines could have caused it.”
“The engines were functioning within normal operating parameters,” Spock said. “I must conclude that it is not something that the Enterprise did that created the rift, but something that it will do in the future. The singularity has rippled back in time from that point.”
“Bah,” the Doctor ran his hands through his hair, standing it further on end. “Start thinking like that and you’ll be afraid to do anything ever again. Anyway, why would it intersect with you now? Something at that moment, that second when the rift opened, something connected it to you. But what?”
“I do not know,” Spock said. “It is an error to speculate ahead of one’s data. Invariably one begins to twist the facts to suit one’s theory.”
“Right then!” the Doctor unfolded himself and jumped down to the floor. “So we need more data. Got a spectral analyzer, do you? And a warp-fold scanner, excellent!”
But three hours later they were no closer to finding the solution. The Doctor rested his chin in his hands, gazing at the screen full of their latest read-outs. “Energy harmonics, frequency, amplitude ratio, radiation signature – everything points to a link with this ship. So how in the hell did a 23rd century starship tear a hole in the fabric of reality?”
“Unknown,” Spock said.
The Doctor leaned back in his chair, rubbing a hand over his face. “You’re sure no one on board was experimenting with transwarp drive?”
“Yes,” Spock said, a trifle shortly. It was the fourth time that the Doctor had posed the question.
“Well, you should know,” the Doctor said. “Because if anyone here could do it, it’d be you.”
Spock did not answer. He looked down, straightening a pile of memory disks on the counter.
“All these years I’ve always been the cleverest man in the room,” the Doctor continued. “I tell you, Spock, I wish I’d met you years ago. The things we could have done! You and me, in my ship, with the whole of time and space for our observatory. Just think of that!”
Spock’s hands stilled on the disks. “May I ask a question?”
“Oh, I think we’ve established that as a ‘yes,’” the Doctor said.
“You said that you could not cross your own time stream. Why is that?”
“Interfere with your own history and you create a paradox,” the Doctor said. “Because if you change something so that it does not happen, then how did you know to change it? You see? The universe doesn’t handle paradoxes well. It fights you. Fight back and something will break. Either the universe, or you.”
“Have you tried it?”
A shadow passed over the Doctor’s face. “Yes.”
“What happened?”
The Doctor did not answer. After a moment Spock looked away.
The silence was broken by a pneumatic hiss as the science lab doors slid open.
“There you are!” McCoy bustled in. “Found anything yet?”
“Oh, lots,” the Doctor said. “For starters, I found a centi-credit piece lying on the floor over there. Someone just dropped it. And then I found this pen in a drawer.” He held up a stylus. “It writes in zero gravity, isn’t that great? Of course you could just use a pencil, but if you did that then what would you spend your money on? Just think: somewhere there’s a whole government agency devoted to making pens that write in zero gravity, while somewhere else there’s a whole agency making ships with artificial gravity generators. Never mind your warp cores; never mind your universal translators: bureaucracy is where the real innovation is. Zero gravity pens! I love it!”
“As for the anomaly, there is nothing to report at this time,” Spock said, as McCoy stared. He waited a polite moment. When McCoy did not speak he added, “Was there some purpose to your visit, Doctor?”
McCoy found his voice. “Uh, yeah. Right.” Turning to the Doctor, he straightened. “It’s standard procedure to screen anyone coming on board ship within 24 hours of arrival. We have to make sure that you aren’t carrying anything that would be harmful to our crew, or vice versa. Normally we’d have done that before giving you access to the ship, but in this case . . .”
“Oh, I quite understand,” the Doctor said. “The whole history of human travel, it’s been the same. You wouldn’t believe the tests they put us through on the Titanic. Well, I say ‘us,’ I mean ‘not me,’ obviously. Still, it was worth it, wouldn’t you say? Knowing that even the people in steerage were really healthy right up until the end.”
“The nature of the human physician at least has not changed,” Spock said. “That Dr. McCoy has managed to restrain himself from prying into your personal affairs for this long is frankly astonishing.”
“Watch it,” McCoy said. “Your physical is scheduled for next month, but don’t think I can’t move it up sooner if I want.”
The Doctor grinned. “So how about it, Spock? All right if I take a break to get poked and prodded?”
“Very well,” Spock said. “I will begin another scan of the anomaly in your absence.”
The Doctor nodded. “See if you can get another reading of the power amplification rate while you’re at it. Something about it seemed odd to me. Now then!” he turned to McCoy and clapped his hands. “Sickbay! Allons-y!”
He started for the door, McCoy falling in beside him as he went.
“Oh, and Doctor,” Spock said.
The Doctor and McCoy both turned, speaking at the same time. “Yes?”
Spock raised an eyebrow. “With regards to your proposal. The possibilities are . . . intriguing.”
The Doctor smiled. “Aren’t they just,” he said.
They left. Spock could hear McCoy’s voice, as the doors hissed closed behind them, “Don’t worry, it won’t take long. And then maybe we’ll go down to the mess hall and get you something to eat. Just because he works all hours without a break doesn’t mean that you have to.”
“Do you have chips?” the Doctor asked, as their voices faded into the distance.
Spock turned thoughtfully back to his console. He programmed another sensor sweep of the anomaly with particular attention to its energy and power spectra. He instructed the computer to send the results to his personal terminal in his quarters. Then, still thoughtful, he left the science lab.
The ship was cycling down for the evening shift. Non-essential labs and work areas would be closed, their lights dimmed and environmental settings turned down to conserve power. The recreation deck and the mess halls would be crowded with dayshift crew just coming off duty.
Had Spock given sway to his human heritage so far as to admit a preference, he might have considered this his favorite time of the ship’s day. As it was he merely acknowledged that the quiet hours afforded time for private research and meditation without interference from his human shipmates, and let it go at that.
The door of his quarters slid shut behind him. For a moment Spock stood still, allowing the dim warmth to wash over him, so different from the cold glare of the rest of the ship. In the sole concession to personal comfort that he allowed himself, his quarters were set to a temperature of 48C and the lights dimmed to an approximation of the red half-light that had filtered through the study halls at home. He had considered on occasion that it would also be possible to increase the gravity field within his quarters to mimic Vulcan’s 1.27g, but dismissed the thought as being hopelessly self-indulgent.
His senses acclimated to the change in environment, he crossed to the desk and keyed on his terminal. He had long ago bypassed the voice interface in this computer, finding it more elegant and efficient to work with manual control. The dual monitors sprang to life under his touch, data scrolling across their displays.
Spock looked them over briefly. The in-depth scan that he had ordered would not be complete for some hours yet, but preliminary results showed nothing new. There was still no sign of what, if anything, connected the rift with the Enterprise. Spock tapped his fingers lightly against the keypad. He was beginning to wonder if they were on the wrong track entirely in searching for the anomaly’s origin.
The power analysis might give him a new angle of attack when it was complete. In the meanwhile . . . Spock called up the readings taken during the Enterprise’s warp test that day. A diagram of the Enterprise appeared on his left-hand screen, a web of fine lines representing the interaction of the warp bubble with normal spacetime around it. The equations describing that interaction were displayed in a scrolling text on the right-hand monitor.
Spock rotated the display through three dimensions. Then he cleared a space among the equations on the right-hand screen and began to type. As he did so the projected warp field around the Enterprise began to change, flattening and narrowing back from the ship’s forward hull, like an arrow through space and time.
*~*~*
McCoy was having trouble. It was not that the Doctor was a recalcitrant patient. On the contrary, it was that he was entirely too willing and interested in everything around him, besides which he appeared to have the attention span of a seven-year-old.
On entering Sickbay he had promptly embarked on a self-guided tour of the premises, complete with running commentary on everything he saw. Most of McCoy’s instruments were passed over after a single glance and a shrug which he felt was unnecessarily dismissive. At one point the Doctor paused, turning McCoy’s favorite hypospray over in his hand. “Still using these things, I see.”
Then his attention was caught by something else and he tossed the hypo aside. McCoy caught it, feeling stung.
“It does the job,” he said defensively. It was one thing for a supercilious alien to lord his superiority over humanity. They’d seen that plenty of times, and McCoy was used to it. But criticizing his hypospray was personal.
The Doctor wasn’t listening. He was crouched beside a black unit that hummed steadily in a corner. He’d put his glasses on and was running his sonic probe over it. “What is this? A blood replicator?”
“Replicator and filter,” McCoy said. He slipped his hypo into the pocket of his lab coat. “Most of the crew is human, but it’s hard to keep enough blood in storage for all of them if there were an emergency. Add someone like Mr. Spock into the mix and it becomes a real problem. This way we can replicate his blood if we need to, and we can also filter out any contaminating agents if he became infected.”
“Ingenious,” the Doctor said, unfastening the top of the replicator. He withdrew a nanocircuit board and surveyed it with his probe. “Primitive application, mind, but the idea is brilliant. I hope you don’t mind if I record the design. I could use something like this on my ship.” He raised the circuit to his nose and sniffed it.
“Okaaay,” McCoy said. “Now how about you lie down on the nice med table and let me do a quick scan?”
The Doctor replaced the nanocircuit board and stood up. “Why should Mr. Spock’s blood be any more of a challenge than anyone else’s? There are Vulcan donors, surely.”
“Not as many as there used to be,” McCoy said, leading him over to an exam table. “Anyway, they wouldn’t work for him. He’s half-human. So far as I know he’s the only Terran/Vulcan hybrid around.”
“So that’s it,” the Doctor said. He poked the table a few times and then obligingly hopped up to sit on it. “I knew there was something. He’s unique.”
“He is at that,” McCoy said, guiding him to lie down. “Thank God. What I’d do if there were two of him . . . hello? What do we have here?”
It wasn’t easy to get a good scan because the Doctor kept sitting up and twisting around to see the readouts above the bed. McCoy leaned an arm across his chest to hold him down, staring up at the screen. The pulse monitor was beeping in a double rhythm with every pulse of the dual hearts. The blood pressure indicator had shot to the top of the scale while the thermometer registered at 23.4C – just above room temperature. Add to that a metabolic rate almost twice human normal and the most bizarre respiratory system that he had ever seen . . .
“What are you?” McCoy breathed.
“Time Lord,” the Doctor said. He grinned. “I should have warned you. I’m unique too.”
McCoy looked at him. “What?”
“I’m a Time Lord,” the Doctor said. “From Gallifrey.”
McCoy shook his head. “That’s impossible. There’s no such thing as Time Lords – they’re a myth.”
“I get that a lot,” the Doctor said.
“They’re like the Preservers,” McCoy went on, running a hand scanner over the Doctor’s chest. “Stories of them crop up in mythologies here and there, but there’s never been any real evidence . . . and no sign of Gallifrey. The Torchwood Foundation sponsored an expedition a few years ago to search for it, sort of a modern day Heinrich Schliemann looking for Troy. They never found anything. The legend says that it was destroyed in a storm.”
“Really?” the Doctor said.
“Well, whatever you are, you are one of a kind, I’ll give you that much.” McCoy held up the scanner to read it. “I’ve never seen anything like this. There’s some sort of energy here, like static charge built up inside your mitochondria. It’s as if every cell were about to replicate simultaneously. But it’s not doing anything – just sitting there. What is that for?”
The Doctor did not answer. He was staring straight ahead, his eyes wide. Then without warning he sat up abruptly, swinging his legs over the side of the exam table. “Not as many as there used to be,” he said. “Why? What year is it?”
McCoy blinked. Then he smirked. “You’re the supposed Time Lord,” he said. “Don’t you know?”
The Doctor shot him a look that seemed to pierce straight through him. “I’m on a ship that’s in contact with an expanding flexural rift in spacetime,” he said. “That is a hole in the universe out there, and it is tearing the fabric of reality and time itself apart – not to mention giving me one hell of a headache. Right now I’m lucky I can still tell past from future – never mind what arbitrary number a bunch of talking apes assigned to the date.”
McCoy’s smile faltered. “It’s 2258,” he said. “Are you all right?” He moved the scanner over the Doctor’s head.
The Doctor caught his wrist in a surprisingly strong grip. He stared at McCoy, his brown eyes flecked with gold, intense and, in that moment, very alien.
“What day?”
*~*~*
The door of Spock’s quarters chimed. He did not answer immediately, intent on the formula that he was deriving.
The door chimed again. Spock sighed. “Come in.”
The door hissed open with a draft of cool air. Spock looked up, blinking as the harsh white light of the corridor spilled into the room.
“I knew it,” the Doctor said. The door slid closed behind him as he entered. “I said so, didn’t I? If anyone could do it, it would be you.”
“Doctor,” Spock said. He rose to greet his guest in the traditional fashion. “May I offer you water?”
It was a ritual of high significance on a desert planet, and the Doctor seemed to recognize it as such. “Thank you,” he said. He shifted his shoulders under his jacket, pulling his collar away from his neck. “Blimey. Warm enough in here, is it?”
“Computer,” Spock said. “Adjust cabin temperature to ship normal.”
The ship’s computer beeped. A moment later cool air began to flow from the vents. “Thank you,” the Doctor said again.
Spock poured two glasses of water from the carafe he kept in the small cooling unit behind the desk. The Doctor accepted his glass in silence and, to Spock’s surprise, saluted him with it in the appropriate manner before drinking.
“You have spent time on Vulcan,” Spock said as they put the glasses aside.
“Now and then,” the Doctor said. “I went a few times to the Debates, when Surak competed.” His expression softened. “Now there was a Vulcan! Such a mind he had . . . and a wicked sense of humor, too, though of course he didn’t show it. We went camping once, in the Pelsht Mountains. Well, I say camping: it was one of his meditative retreats, really, when he was writing The Principles of Logic. Stayed up two days straight arguing that one with him – I said you couldn’t reject emotion, emotion was what made you human, and he said that was the point. Still, I suppose it was for the best. Having seen how Vulcans were before the Reformation – you couldn’t have gone to the stars like that, you would have made the Sontarans look like amateurs playing with toy swords in comparison.”
Spock gave him a long look. “You debated Surak.”
The Doctor grinned. “Oh yes. And I lost, too, which really tells you something. But he was right, in the end. Emotions in Vulcans are dangerous.”
“They are controlled,” Spock said.
“And aren’t we all better off because they are,” the Doctor said. “But the emotions are still there, for all your perfect control, still driving your brilliant minds. And still dangerous. Case in point . . .”
He dropped into Spock’s chair and tapped a key. The darkened monitors lit at once, still displaying the warp flight formulae. The Doctor snapped on his glasses, leaning forward to peer at them.
“Oh, now look at that,” he said, tracing a finger along Spock’s equation. “That, now that is genius. Folding the warp field into its own temporal wake . . . fantastic!”
“It was a theoretical exercise,” Spock said.
“No it wasn’t,” the Doctor said. He leaned back, hooking an arm over the back of the chair as he looked at Spock. “That calculation is a way of using the Enterprise to slice through time. It’s brilliant, sure, and clever as hell, but there’s nothing theoretical about it. The effects are all around us.”
There was a pause. “There is nothing in the equations to connect it to the anomaly,” Spock said at last.
“Not as such, not now, sure,” the Doctor said. “But look at the curve of the gravity well. Here,” he typed a factor into Spock’s equation. “For every hour you travel backward in time, all that potential energy of what might happen, what might change, that gets fed into the mass differential of the Enterprise. As the Enterprise travels farther and farther back in time, it stretches spacetime in its wake. Like a razor blade drawing down a rubber sheet, pressing harder and harder as it goes.”
“The warp shell counters the effect,” Spock said. He leaned over the Doctor’s shoulder and tapped out a sequence of keys. “Here and here. It extends behind Enterprise to cancel the mass differential.”
“Like putting stitches in a wound,” the Doctor said. “That works for a while. But what happens when you start to pull on the edges? You’re changing history, Spock! If you succeed then eight billion Vulcans will live who did not live before. All those brilliant minds thinking and working and creating – all that potential energy is tearing a hole in the universe. Here. Right along the Enterprise’s wake.”
Spock straightened. There was a tight, hot ache in the center of his chest. He drew a slow breath, and then another, willing it to relax. When he finally was able to speak his voice was level. “Nero changed history when he destroyed Vulcan. He forced this timeline to branch into an alternate reality. None of this was supposed to happen. All I will do is set it right again.”
The Doctor looked at him, and his eyes were ancient: fathoms deep and dark with sorrow. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Spock, I am so sorry, but this is the path that you were meant to walk. You’re right: somewhere out there, in a million million different realities, there is one where this never happened, where Vulcan lived. But you can’t reach it. You’ll tear every universe apart if you try.”
Spock stared at him. Quite unnoticed, his hands clenched into fists. “How do you know?”
The Doctor sighed. “I know,” he said. “I’m a Time Lord, it’s in my bones. What’s right, and what’s wrong: what’s meant to happen and what can never be. I can feel it.”
Spock looked away. “Emotion again.”
“Yup,” the Doctor agreed. “That’s me. And it’s you too, I’m afraid.”
Spock did not answer. Anything he could say in response to that would be nothing short of a lie.
After a moment the Doctor stood up. He circled to face Spock, close but not touching him. Even without physical contact Spock could feel the hum of his mind against his own, the psychic aura of another telepath uncomfortably close. He tightened his shields.
“Dangerous thing, emotion,” the Doctor said. “I know. I also know that you’re in control of it. You can stop this now. You can let it go.”
Spock swallowed. “I came back,” he said. “I met myself – my older self. He was dragged back in time along with Nero. He told me that he – that I – had promised to save Nero’s people, and I failed. So Nero destroyed Vulcan in vengeance on me.” he was trembling, the strain showing in his voice. He closed his eyes in an effort to hold onto some vestige of control.
“An entire world died because of me. My people, my family . . . my mother . . . they all died because of me.”
“I know,” the Doctor said gently. “God, Spock, I know. But you can’t save them now. There are a hundred thousand other worlds out there that will die if you do.”
Spock opened his eyes. “I expect that you will now tell me that the good of the many outweighs the good of the few.”
“Or the one.” The Doctor’s mouth quirked in a wry smile. “That was one of Surak’s better aphorisms, I always thought.”
“Really.” Spock set his jaw, meeting the Doctor’s eyes. “Who are you to tell me that?”
The Doctor did not answer for a long moment. He held Spock’s gaze while a wealth of different emotions flickered across his eyes. Finally he said, “I’m the Doctor.”
“A Time Lord,” Spock said, not bothering to conceal the skepticism in his voice.
“No, actually,” the Doctor said. “I’m the last of the Time Lords. The only one left in the universe. My planet burned.” He swallowed hard. “I made it burn.”
There was a long silence. Spock’s heart was pounding, his stomach knotted somewhere in his chest. He kept from shaking by main force of will. “Why?” he said at last.
The Doctor breathed out slowly. “There was a war,” he said. “The last Great Time War. My people fought . . . but they lost. It was going to spill out into the universe. It would have consumed every galaxy, every star and planet would have been destroyed before they even came into being. Everything. The whole of creation was at stake, so I stopped it.”
“By killing your world,” Spock whispered.
“Yes.”
“And now you want me to do the same.”
The Doctor looked at him and then away, shaking his head. He seemed to be on the brink of either laughter or of tears.
“Spock,” he said. “Believe me when I say that I never want anyone to have to do the same as I did.”
Spock stood very still. His throat was tight. “Computer,” he said abruptly. “Restore temperature to cabin default.”
As the hot air swept over them Spock closed his eyes. He could almost imagine it was a morning breeze that ruffled the hair on his forehead, blowing from the desert plains of Kol. Those plains stretched for a thousand miles: wind-carved hills and canyons layered in red and gold rock worn smooth as glass. From the edge of his hometown they rippled out to the edge of sight, where they met the towering slopes of Mt. Seleya: twice the height of the tallest mountain on Earth, capped with snow even in Vulcan’s summer.
Spock breathed in, then out, feeling the warmth, the red light of home. He thought of the roses that his mother grew in her garden, carefully screened from the sun: bushes stunted by the lack of water, their blossoms of red and yellow and white shrunken by the heat but smelling all the sweeter for that. He thought of her, her gentleness, her easy smile: so strange, so different from the other boys’ mothers, and yet so very right for him.
The knot in his chest had wound so tight that he could not breathe. Grief and fury warred within him: Vulcan grief at the passing of even one life, forced now to confront the loss of billions. Vulcan fury that had fueled millennia of war: that could destroy every other planet in existence in retribution for his own.
And humans called them emotionless. If they only knew.
Spock forced himself to inhale a shaking breath. Drawing on every discipline at his command, he willed the tension to ease from his chest, the hot sting away from his eyes. He was in control. The emotions were there at his core, love and hate and grief and rage: never expressed but never denied. He did not repress them. He mastered them, and he used them.
Spock crossed to his desk. He selected the equation that he had written into the warp field formulae. He stood looking down at it, white script glowing against the black of the screen. He took a last breath of Vulcan’s desert breeze. For a fleeting moment he imagined that he could smell roses.
He tapped the delete key.
As the equation vanished from the screen the hum of the ship’s engines faltered and went silent. The lights flickered, and the artificial gravity increased for a fraction of a second, making them stagger for balance, and then dropped back to normal. The Enterprise’s engines came back on, their hum at lower pitch than before.
Spock straightened and folded his hands behind his back. He looked at the Doctor.
The Doctor returned his gaze. “Thank you,” he said. He did not smile. Spock was grateful. He could not have borne it if he smiled.
The intercom switched on. “Bridge to Mr. Spock.” It was the excitable, anxious voice of the young lieutenant who manned the science console during night hours. “Mr. Spock, the rift just vanished! Just now! I was running a scan and it just –”
“Spock!” the lieutenant’s voice cut off as the intercom squealed, as it always did when the Captain leaned on the override button. “Spock, what the hell just happened?”
“One moment, sir,” Spock said. His voice sounded calm, normal. Controlled. “The rift was unstable and it has collapsed upon itself. The Enterprise is in no danger. Analysis is underway.”
He punched the intercom button. “Lieutenant, continue scans of this area. I will be there shortly.”
He switched the wall unit off. The Doctor was looking uncomfortable.
“Ah,” he said. “This is the part where I usually slip away quietly.”
Spock did not say anything. It had been the right choice. The only choice. He knew that. But his chest still felt as though it were full of broken glass.
The Doctor hunched his shoulders, pushing his hands into the pockets of his suit pants. “That proposal, you know . . . the offer still stands.”
It was a moment before Spock answered. “I have sworn an oath to Starfleet. I cannot neglect my duties here.”
“Yes, yes of course,” the Doctor said. “I’ll just be going then.” But he did not move.
Spock took a breath. “I must check the engines,” he offered.
The Doctor did smile at that, just a little. “As it happens, I’m headed that way myself,” he said. “I’ll walk you.”
They did not speak again until they were in the turbolift, humming down toward the Engineering Section. Spock broke the silence, curiosity overcoming his natural reticence. He had just killed his planet. He was gripped by a fey lightheadedness, as though nothing he did now mattered particularly much.
“What would you have done if I had refused?”
The Doctor looked at him. “I would have stopped you.”
How? It was on the tip of Spock’s tongue to ask, but he did not. He met the Time Lord’s eyes and saw the darkness there, the power that lay deep beneath the golden brown veneer of humanity. And he thought that if anyone could understand him now, if anyone could know the depths of Vulcan rage, and love, and control – if anyone could exceed them – it was this man. This Doctor.
The last of the Time Lords.
The lift doors hissed open and they stepped out onto the Engineering Deck. It was crowded with technicians, hurrying between the consoles, calling readouts to each other in a flurry of activity while Mr. Scott stood in the center and shouted at them.
“Don’t tell me that the magnetic field’s reading normal, the whole bloody system shut down! How many times do I have to tell you, ye cannae just trust th’ computer! Now get that bleeding multimeter out and use it!”
“Ah, everything’s in good hands here, I see,” the Doctor called cheerily, striding through their midst. The faint Scottish burr of his voice was suddenly much more evident. “Nothin’ tae worry about, it was just a wee blip when the shields reset. That feedback from the rift, you know, all gone now. So I’ll just be taking this and be on my way.”
He swung himself onto his back under the warp console. There was an ultrasonic whine that set Spock’s teeth on edge, and then the Doctor was straightening up, coiling the cable from his ship under his arm.
“There now, all better. I’ll just pack this up and clear out of your way.” He kept talking all the while he was winding up the cable, his voice echoing resonantly as he entered the police box.
Spock followed silently, and was waiting when the Time Lord returned. The Doctor stepped out of the box and pulled the door shut behind him. He leaned back against the wooden frame, his hands in his pockets as he looked at Spock.
It was quiet. The bustle of the Engineering crew seemed far removed from them.
“Well,” the Doctor said. “I guess that’s it, then.” He hesitated. “It was incredible, what you did. I know how hard it was, but . . . you were brilliant. I thought you should know.”
Spock folded his arms behind his back. “It was genocide, Doctor.”
The Doctor flinched. “No. No, Spock. They would have died anyway. I’m sorry, but they would have died along with the rest of the universe if you had not done it. You are not responsible for that.”
Spock considered that. He raised an eyebrow. “It seems then that I am no more and no less responsible for the death of my people than you are for yours.”
The Doctor stared at him. His mouth worked soundlessly for a moment, but it seemed that he was at a loss for words. It was, Spock reflected, an event hitherto unheralded in his experience with the Doctor.
“Spock,” the Doctor said at last. “Spock, I . . . God. You can’t judge, you don’t know, but . . . thank you. Thank you. I’d hug you if I could.”
Spock took a step backward, just a touch nervously. He raised his hand in formal salute. “Live long and prosper, Doctor.”
The Doctor returned the salute, smiling. “Long life, Spock. Prosper, and live long.”
He stepped into the Tardis and shut the door. After a moment the light at the top of the box began to blink, and there was a pulsing throb of engines. They grew louder, then softer, louder again, and then stopped.
The Tardis door opened and the Doctor stepped out. “It is a time machine, you know.”
Spock frowned. “I cannot go back –”
“No,” the Doctor said quickly. “No, I didn’t mean that, it’s just . . . you wouldn’t have to be gone for long. In this time, I mean. You could still fulfill your duty to Starfleet.”
He stepped aside and pushed open the door. Spock hesitated for a long moment, a lifetime’s devotion to duty precariously balanced against the driving curiosity at his heart. For once, curiosity won. He walked past the Doctor and into the Tardis. The Doctor followed him, closing the door behind them.
“Fascinating.”
The End.