Disclaimer: Star Trek in all its incarnations and all related characters are property of Paramount Pictures. Tony Castro and the USS Corsair were created by me, other adventures of her can be found in my site
E-mail: borg31de777yahoo.es.
Spoilers: A miscellanea of TOS chapters, Star Trek II, Star Trek VI, and Star Trek: Generations
Author Note: this story is structured differently to my other stories in that is divided in a series of mini-chapters. Also, it's only go to be a two or three-parter, although I have plans to continue the adventures of some of the characters presented in this story in the future.
I wish to thank my beta-reader Carycomix for his help and support
Answer to Reviewers: Please, review!
Summary: A few days after the events of Star Trek: Generations, the USS Corsair finds a distressingly familiar visitor from another universe.
STAR TREK: USS CORSAIR
"To boldly go…", Vol. I
1. Blast from the past
Captain's log. Stardate 48671.2
With the situation in Lykandia quiet for now, Starfleet have sent us to investigate the Sagan anomaly, and we have tried to launch several probes inside, but all of them seem to have been destroyed. Originally this mission should have been undertaken by the Enterprise, but…
Captain Antonia Castro sighed and deleted her last words from the memory of the computer. Then, she added a pretty dry entry, detailing the progresses in the study of the anomaly, and adding the data collected during the last few days.
"What's wrong, captain?" asked Counselor Darla, who over the years had learned that with Captain Castro, it was always better a blunt approach.
"Jim's death"
The Counselor didn't need to ask who was 'Jim'. Tony had been very affected the last few days, since the second death of Captain James T. Kirk.
"You know that he died as he wanted, making a difference."
"Yes, I know. But to discover that he had been spared all these years, only to die again. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if..."
"If..."
"Nothing really, Amia. It's no use to brood about the past. What's done is done." said Tony "You know, I met him briefly when I was rescued, but I never saw him again until I enrolled in the Academy. We were somewhat friends, as friends as an Admiral and a cadet can be, you know."
Darla nodded, remembering her own rough time in the Academy with, ironically, the then-Admiral Castro.
"He hitched a ride on all the training cruises that he could. He never liked to fly a desk in Starfleet Headquarters, he wanted to be out there, between the stars." She closed her eyes, remembering with nostalgia "He was always there to see the Enterprise sail away or come back home, like a man looking for the love of his life. I was aboard her also on a few training cruises, but we only coincided in her last training cruise, one that I'll always remember."
"The Genesis incident?"
"Precisely. As I was saying, I served on her a few times, but I sensed the… How could I put it? The magic of the ship. The Enterprise-A was almost a carbon copy, but I never got the same feeling from her." said Tony. "But every one of them was special. The best ship of the fleet. Archer, April, Pike, Jim, Decker, Spock, Harriman, Chekov, Demora Sulu, Garret and Picard. Without the Enterprises they would have been good captains, but with them, they became legends. One ship has fallen, but another will replace her. The Enterprises are Kirk's legacy." As she spoke, Amia could feel how the sadness lifting, to be replaced by her usual energetic mood.
Commander Korg Ramirez, first officer of the USS Corsair, entered the bridge and looked around. He was still getting used to the modifications that had been implemented in the refit that accompanied the repairs after the Battle of Lykandia. Captain Castro had called in a few favors to get the bridge redesigned. Not that he complained about it, the new design allowed for a better communication between the bridge officers, being reminiscent of the one used in the Intrepid class, although retaining the three chairs arrangement in the center.
"Hi, Korg." said Captain Castro when she saw him
"Captain." acknowledged the half-Klingon first officer.
"Always so formal, even after all these years." said Tony smiling.
Korg let flash one of his rare smiles and said:
"Naturality is a trait that I don't posses in a great quantity, cap… Tony."
"Yeah. I still…"
"Captain." Interrupted Khalev, the Andorian science officer. "The verteron emissions of the anomaly have increased, as if something was coming through."
And then, before Tony could say anything the anomaly flashed. Although the filters kicked in immediately, that flash had been so strong that the afterglow still momentarily blinded them.
"Khalev! What has happened?" asked Captain Castro, knowing that the eyes of the Andorian, used to the blinding snow plains of his native planet, would have not been so affected as theirs.
And she wasn't disappointed.
"A small craft has appeared through the anomaly. It seems like a Type 3 shuttlecraft."
'Type F.' Translated Tony, remembering the old designation, and ordered. "On screen."
What she saw on the screen was a white smudge over the red and blue nebula that surrounded the Sagan Anomaly.
"Magnification."
Soon the image changed to an old-style shuttlecraft, whose name and registry number could be easily read now: Galileo II, NCC-1701/7, USS Enterprise.
2. Heroes
"Khalev, scan for life signs." ordered Captain Castro.
"One human female… Captain! The shuttlecraft life support is failing!"
"Brigitte, lock on her life signs and beam her directly to Sickbay!" ordered Captain Castro.
"Done!"
"Korg, you have the bridge. I'm going to see our guest."
A few minutes later, Antonia Castro was besides the new Chief Medical Officer, Sandra Pertini, looking at the woman that they had transported from the shuttlecraft. She was a sandy-haired woman who looked to be in her mid thirties, stockily built, and she was wearing a mini-skirted variant of the green wrap-around tunic that she had seen Kirk wearing in recordings of his first five-year mission aboard the Enterprise. Although there were some slight differences, as the center line of her captain rank braids was silver instead of gold, and the tunic wrapping to the other side. Her face was somewhat familiar, but she couldn't place her.
"Well, Doctor. What can you tell me about her? "
She nodded and started to read from the screen.
"Human, female, 36 years old, good health, although seems to have not been well fed of late, nothing serious. No sign of pregnancies. And she comes from another reality. "
"How do you know? "
"After the Mirror Universe infiltrators of last year, I thought that it was a reasonable security measure to install a quantum frequency scanner in sickbay. "
"That's an excellent idea, Sandra. You are doing an excellent job as CMO. "
"Not so good as Dr. Tsen, he was the best doctor that I have seen since I left the Academy. "
"I miss him also, Sandra."
They stood in silence for a moment before going back to the matter at hand.
"Sandra, I have seen this face, somewhere. Can you compare her DNA with the one of the Starfleet Officers of a century ago?"
"Yes, of course. How accurate do you want the match?"
"We don't know when the point of divergence of her universe took place…"
"Ok. "
She quickly keyed the appropriate commands and less than a minute the later the answer appeared on screen.
"Incredible."
"Not at all, I think that has its twisted logic." answered Tony. "The slight genetic difference must be the change of the Y chromosome by an X chromosome." And she looked again to the screen, where the computer had identified the woman, with more than 90 accuracy, as James T. Kirk,
3. A brave, new world
Captain Jamie Theodora Kirk was slowly regaining consciousness. The memories of the last hours came slowly back to her… An oddly stable rupture in the space-time fabric… Debris of what seemed to be recognizable, although pretty advanced Federation technology… Only a daredevil pilot could fly a ship inside... She overruled her first officer, and took the Galileo into the rupture…A very rough ride… Suddenly a hull breach… Last thing that she saw before darkness was a ship in the distance…Voices…she was hearing voices… Suddenly she felt a ping in her arm and, just as suddenly awoke. Over her she saw two women dressed in what seemed like uniforms. Black jacket with colored shoulders, one red and the other blue, and a purple sweater underneath, with a variant of the familiar Starfleet emblem over the left breast.
"Hello, Captain Kirk." said the dark haired woman, who was wearing the red-shouldered jacket.
"How...?" she tried to get up, but the blonde woman, the one with a blue shoulder strip, pushed her gently, but firmly back into the bed.
"Not now, Kirk. Our captain wants to ask you a few questions."
That made Jamie a bit suspicious. What if this was something like the Mirror Universe?.
"Captain Kirk, I'm Captain Antonia Castro, and I command this Federation Starship..."
Federation. Well, that sounded all right... if they weren't putting on a show for her benefit. She decided to play along, while looking for inconsistencies.
"… as a Starfleet captain, I'm sure that you'll understand why I'm asking you this." said the captain "What the hell were you thinking?"
That startled her.
"What do you mean? And how do you know my name?"
"I mean that you could have sent a probe through the anomaly, instead of the captain going in with a shuttle that had seen better days. And regarding my knowledge of your name... well, your counterpart DNA is still in the record."
She weighted what alternatives she had and decided that the truth was the best option. Whether she liked it or not, this was the only hope for the small convoy of ships that had managed to survive the Collapse until now.
"We are under very dire circumstances, captain Castro. My universe is dying."
4. Truths to be told
"Back then, we didn't know how it happened. We have been able to reconstruct part of it, but we'll never know all. We were at war with the Klingons. A war that started in a backwater planet on the Klingon-Federation border."
"Organia." guessed Tony. When Jamie looked at her with a surprised expression on her face, she elaborated "Your counterpart was sent there in the first stages of the war. Let's say that the Organians weren't what they seemed to be."
"Well, I wasn't sent there, even if the Enterprise was the nearest ship to Organia. Starfleet Command thought that a female captain wouldn't impress the Klingon enough."
"The old Klingon sexism." commented Tony "So if the Enterprise was not sent, who had to deal with them?"
"The Constellation."
Tony nodded, the pieces stating to fall in place.
"Matt Decker. According to your counterpart, a good man to have by your side in a fight, but not exactly very subtle."
"You did know my counterpart?"
"Yes, I knew HIM."
Jamie stared dumbfounded at Tony for that revelation.
"Yes, when we realized who were you, I was also a bit awed. If things had been a bit different we could have been... lovers." She paused and added "I served under him on the second Federation starship Enterprise. Things being what they were, we became good friends. But, better continue with your tale."
"Well, the Constellation arrived too late. There was already a good-sized Klingon fleet orbiting Organia when the Constellation went out of warp. They barely managed to flee in time." Said Jamie "Maybe it would have been better if they hadn't."
"Why do you say that? Wasn't Matt Decker a good friend of yours in your universe?"
"He was, but as you have said he wasn't very subtle. He followed a Klingon supply ship toward a planet that was emitting some kind of temporal disturbance. That was the last thing anybody heard of the Constellation. And soon after that, all Hells broke loose..."
She closed her eyes, remembering the wave that had hit the Enterprise when they were engaged in combat with a Klingon D-7 cruiser. The D-7 had been twisted into an impossible shape before... evaporating, while the Enterprise had barely managed to stay in one piece. When they managed to restore sensors, they found that while the local stars where more or less where they should be, everything else had changed...
"How much time had passed since then, Captain.?" asked captain Castro.
"Two... no, three... three years." answered Jamie.
"That would be 2269, then."
"For us, yes"
"For us? What's that supposed to mean?" said Dr. Pertini.
"Sandra. Have you heard of the Guardian of Forever?"
"Uh?" said both Sandra and Jamie.
"It was an artifact discovered by James Kirk a few months after the Organian incident, a self-aware time portal. I wouldn't be surprised if in your timeline, Captain, the Klingons discovered it first and that was where the supply ship was headed. Back when I was the Helm officer on the Enterprise-A, somebody tried to destroy the Guardian and Spock theorized that the chronal energy liberated by its destruction would twist the time-space continuum into itself, causing the collapsing of the Universe at an exponentially accelerated rate."
"That sounds like Spock, right." said Jamie with a sad smile, then added with curiosity and a note of caution "When did that occur?"
"Eighty-three years ago, year 2288." Seeing the look on Jamie's face she smiled and added: "Yes, I'm much older than I look. I was... changed."
Jamie looked at her with alarm, remembering a friend that uttered the same words nearly five years ago. A friend that she had to kill.
"I'm not Gary Mitchell, Jamie. I don't have delusions of godhood." said Tony, guessing what was passing through Jamie's mind.
"He had to kill Gary also?"
"The Great Barrier?"
"Yes."
They remained quiet for a moment, interrupted by Dr. Pertini asking:
"You still haven't explained what that 'for us' meant."
"What was left of the Universe was a mosaic of pieces of different eras. Most planets were destroyed by the same energies that make the universe such a mess. My science officer thinks that we have a couple years at most until the Universe totally unravels itself" explained Jamie.
"And you intend to cross the Anomaly into our universe." Said Tony
"Yes, that is our intention." Answered Jamie and then asked defiantly "Is there any problem?"
"If the situation is as dire as you say, I don't see any problem. But Starfleet Command can be more difficult to convince." said Tony. "How many ships? And how many people?"
"Our flotilla is composed of thirty-two ships, excluding shuttles, fighters or cargo drones. Of them, seven are combat capable vessels, and the rest are cargo freighters, passenger ships, surveyors, science vessels, and a hospital ship. Fifteen to twenty thousand people"
'Battlestar Enterprise' thought Tony whimsically, and then asked "How many of them are Federation?"
"The Enterprise and an old J-class training ship. There is also a pre-Federation Earth ship and an Andorian Imperial Guard ship from the time of the first Klingon-Federation war. And finally there is a Klingon D-6 battlecruiser from thirty years ago, a contemporary Romulan Bird of Prey and an ancient Gorn warship." Said Jamie. "The other ships are an even more motley collection. There is even a ship from the Delta Quadrant."
5. Decisions
Jamie Kirk paced nervously in the gargantuan shuttlebay of the Corsair, where several engineers were repairing the Galileo in anticipation of Starfleet Command's likely answer. Captain Castro had offered her the use of the Corsair's guest quarters until the shuttle was launched but she knew that she couldn't rest until help was underway, and besides there was the matter of crossing back...
"Jamie?"
She snapped out of her reverie to see that Captain Castro... Tony was next to her, together with a severe Vulcan woman.
"You seemed well lost in your thoughts." Said Tony.
"A bit, what has been Starfleet Command answer?"
"They have said 'yes'. And in the interim, T'Sara..." she pointed to the Vulcan woman "...has devised a way to render the anomaly stable enough to allow your shuttle and a couple of our runabouts to go thru. And later to allow your ships to cross over to our side."
"And why not let them to come here, directly?."
"Because the energy input that will render the anomaly stable has to come from both sides, Captain." said the Vulcan woman, in a dry tone that brought back memories of her late first officer to Jamie. "From this side we can only make it stable enough to allow small ships like your shuttlecraft or our runabouts to cross it."
"Damn..."
"Sorry, but it can't be helped." Said Tony
"It's possible to communicate with the other side? I don't want them to open fire if they see that I don't come alone."
Tony looked to T'Sara who nodded.
"It would be possible to use the internal subspace..." the Vulcan woman started to explain but was cut off by a gesture from Jamie.
"I don't mind the specifics, Lieutenant, but I would be glad if I can talk to my ship as soon as possible." said Jamie, a bit more curtly that she intended.
The Vulcan woman stood there for a moment, and then she nodded. Just before she turned to the door, Jamie was pretty sure that she saw her smirk.
"I hope that I didn't offend her." said Jamie when T'Sara had disappeared. "I was a bit rude."
Tony smirked. "T'Sara needs a lot more to be offended. She was taunted by her ancestry since she was a child on Vulcan."
"Half human?"
"A bit more complicated than that." Said Tony. "And saying more would violate her privacy, and you know how Vulcans respect it."
"I'm well aware of that, believe me." She says remembering the final days of Spock, and how he had refused to comment on what had been happening to him until it was too late.
6. Old friends
"Captain Kirk calling to USS Enterprise" said Jamie from the Communication console. She waited for an answer, but none came, and she was about to call again when the lovely voice of lieutenant Uhura answered.
"Captain? We thought..."
"The news of my death has been greatly exaggerated, Uhura. Tell the commander and Len that I'm fine." said Jamie, speaking the codes that they had agreed upon before she embarked on this seemingly suicide mission. 'We can do it' "Unfortunately we'll have to come back there. The anomaly is not stable enough to let us pass, and we'll have to set a device on our side to do it."
"We?"
"I have found a Starfleet ship on this side and they are willing to help. I'm returning with two of their auxiliary ships. Their captain will explain further you more details." She left the console to Tony.
"Lieutenant Uhura? I'm Antonia Castro, captain of the USS Corsair." Said Tony, feeling strange, coversing with her old friend in that tone. Of course she was not her old friend in reality, but the voice was identical. "The ships depart in half an hour. An engineering team will accompany Captain Kirk in the shuttlecraft as well as one of our support craft. Ah, and I'll go with them."
Jamie looked at Tony, surprised.
"After the lecture that you gave me before, you have the nerve to...?"
Tony dismissed it with a simple gesture.
"I didn't really mean it. I was simply testing you." said Tony. "If I have offended you, I'm sorry, but I needed to know how much were you like your counterpart."
Jamie was about to reply acidly when she realized that she would have done the same thing had the roles been reversed.
"Very well. But I hope that you haven't more mind-games to play with me, captain."
Tony answered with a very wolfish smile.
"Don't worry. I'm reserving them for an enemy."
7. The Crossing
The small silver device was beamed to less than one kilometer from the anomaly and immediately started to bathe it with a eerie blue light. On cue, the old shuttlecraft Galileo and the Runabouts Seine and Volga started their engines and set course into the anomaly.
Captain Jamie Kirk was sitting in the pilot seat of the shuttlecraft while Captain Castro was in the copilot seat. Behind them were three engineers and several big boxes full of equipment.
"I hope that your scientist is right, because it was a really bumpy road coming here."
"Don't worry. I trust one of her estimates more than exact numbers from almost any other people.I have known her since she was a child. In fact, her mother was my roommate in Starfleet Academy. And her father was one of my role models in Starfleet, even if he was a Vulcan." Said Tony as the old shuttlecraft entered the anomaly.
TO BE CONTINUED...