- 4 -

"On my location, two to beam up," I said into my communicator, and a few seconds later we materialized in Enterprise's transporter room.

"Is that a cat?" asked the transporter chief.

He was staring dubiously at the occupant of the transporter pad next to mine.

"Indeed it is," I said, picking up the cage containing the beast and stepping down from the transporter pad platform. "His name is Rusty. Please have him and my shoulder bag taken to the shuttle flight deck. I'll be taking a shuttle out shortly and I'll need them both with me."

"Very good, ma'am."

"Is Dr McCoy back yet?"

"Yes, he and Nurse Chapel returned from the planet surface about half an hour ago. I heard her say she was going to her quarters. He went directly to sickbay."

"Excellent, thank you."

I needed to see McCoy without Christine being present, so this was perfect.

McCoy's eyes lit up when the door whooshed open and I entered sickbay. He looked pleased to have a potential 'customer'.

"Ah, Lieutenant Commander Lawson. Good to see you, Jenna. What can this old sawbones do for you today?"

"I've decided I don't care for my altered features. I'd like my old face restored."

"That shouldn't be a problem. Based on the examination I conducted when you first joined the crew, the alterations were relatively minor and will be easy to undo. Shouldn't take me hardly any time at all. Let me just call Nurse Chapel."

"That won't be necessary, doctor," I said. "Override Mississippi accept."

At these words Dr McCoy snapped to attention and stared straight ahead as he had on the planet, his eyes just as vacant.

"Override Mississippi accepted," he replied, his voice flat. "What are my orders?"

"You will restore my face not to the image in my medical file but to that in Janice Lester's. You will do this without questioning why and without any assistance from Nurse Chapel. You will also inject me with the therogen derivative you formulated to counter the effect on the brain of the temporo-spatial fractures in Tholian territory. When you've done all that, I need you to delete my medical files and another fifty or so adjacent to them. Make this all look like some form of systems failure. Your memory after all this will be that you restored my face to look like the image in my medical file. You will of course not remember this conversation. Confirm."

"Orders confirmed and accepted."

"Good. Override Mississippi release."

McCoy shook himself, smiled, and said:

"Right, lie down please and we'll soon get this done."

It's a tribute to the medical technology of this century that within thirty minutes, my face restored and healed, I was heading for the shuttle flight deck. I kept my head down so that no monitor would capture a full-face image of me. Since many here knew what Janice Lester looked like, it had been necessary to have my face altered before I came aboard. Not by much - I still resembled her - but enough that everyone would assume that resemblance to be accidental. Details of the procedure McCoy had performed on me would be automatically uploaded to Jenna Lawson's medical file. There was nothing I could do about that, but I could make sure they were never seen by anyone else. Whenever we made contact with another starship vessel such files were routinely copied between us and, eventually, would find their way to the central database at Starfleet Headquarters. By instructing McCoy to delete my files and to disguise that fact by destroying another fifty, I'd ensured the fact I now had Janice Lester's face would go no further. Eventually, copies of the missing medical files would make their way back from Starfleet to the Enterprise, of course, but mine would predate my procedure.

When I entered the shuttle flight deck, I gave a sigh of relief. My luck was holding. As the crew manifest had promised, the crewman currently overseeing it was Lieutenant Nyongo. He didn't know me and had not been on Enterprise either of the two times Janice Lester was aboard, so he would notice nothing different about my appearance.

As I crossed the deck to my shuttle - the Vasco de Gama - so Lieutenant Nyongo emerged from it.

"Is my stuff aboard?" I asked.

"Yes, ma'am, and I've just completed all the pre-flight checks. You're good to go."

"Thank you, Lieutenant."

I entered the craft, closed the hatch behind me, and climbed into the pilot's chair. Tholian space, here I come.

As soon as the shuttle was clear of Enterprise I turned the automatic pilot on and slid a datacard into the slot on the control console. This contained all the navigational and other details my flight would follow from here on out. It had been programmed by Cassandra after months of carefully following Rusty the cat's many possible futures. Doing so enabled her to see the consequences of every alternate turn and slight change in direction and velocity of the shuttle until she had plotted my course through that fractured region of Tholian space. This would both take me to the future and have me pop out there in exactly the right location. Oh, and that's why she had given me Rusty, of course. Me being a wild card, she could not see my potential futures, so without another living being accompanying me plotting that course would have been impossible for her.

I stepped away from the pilot's chair and grabbed my shoulder bag. In it was a uniform from Cassandra, one of a different rank to my own.

"I made this for you," she said when she gave it to me.

"It must've taken you ages," I'd said, impressed, "but I could have had a replicator on Enterprise whip one up in seconds and saved you the effort."

"Yes, but replicators keep a record of what they create and who ordered those things. It's important for there to be no record. This way there isn't."

I quickly stripped off the uniform I was wearing and donned the other, pleased to swap the hosiery and ludicrously short skirt of my Starfleet uniform for something more sensible. That done I returned to the pilot's chair. Exitar was sufficiently close to Tholian space that within thirty minutes I had crossed their border and was approaching the area of temporally and dimensionally fractured space I'd aimied the shuttle at.

It was time.

I opened a communications channel.

"Enterprise, Enterprise, come in Enterprise. Mayday, mayday! This is Lieutenant Commander Jenna Lawson aboard shuttlecraft Vasco de Gama. Controls are non-responsive and the craft is headed at high velocity for the area of space where the USS Defiant was lost. I repeat, mayday, mayday, assistance required."

I'd left it late enough that there was no possibility of Enterprise reaching me before I was in that area of space. This way there would be no mystery about the tragic loss of Jenna Lawson. It would be recorded by Starfleet as some combination of mechanical malfunction and pilot error.

I was minutes away now, so there was one final thing I needed to do. Just approaching that space caused changes in the human brain that resulted in uncontrollable rage. Thanks to the therogen derivative Dr McCoy had injected me with I'd been spared that rage, but what the effects might be of travelling through it was uncertain. Cassandra believed I'd experience hallucinations and so need to strap myself down "just as Odysseus tied himself to the mast of his ship so he would not be lured onto rocks by the song of the sirens". I agreed with her.

I moved to the rear of the shuttle, taking one of those seats that were also equipped for prisoner transport.

"Computer, authorisation Lawson five alpha bravo. Secure me to seat six and do not release me until we return to normal space. Ignore any further commands I give you to the contrary."

"Affirmative."

Metal bands snapped out of the armrests and locked my wrists in place.

And then we were sliding between the fractures of an area where space itself had been ripped apart. We were immediately wildly buffeted about and strange, unearthly light flooded into the shuttle. The buffeting soon eased, while the light remained. It was distracting but, so far, not a problem.

"The future?" said a voice. It was my voice, ringing out from nowhere and everywhere.

"Yes, the future. Thirty years from now when the Empire is just about to launch its invasion of the Federation."

That voice was Cassandra's and this was part of the conversation we had had in her tent on Exitar.

"Audio hallucinations," I murmured, "pulled from my memory."

Then I heard laughter.

"Ah Jim...Jim, Jim, Jim. You're making this too easy. I expected better of you. At the very least, a man should be able to hold on to his manhood."

The voice was female, Janice Lester's voice, but when it spoke next it was male; it was Jim Kirk's voice.

"You let your guard down, Jim, and I seized my opportunity. That's how things are done on board your starship, how they're done throughout the Terran Empire."

These were the words Janice taunted me with when she stole my body, words now come back to haunt me.

"I've come up with a complete cover story for when you get to the future."

This was Cassandra's voice again.

"And what do you expect me to do there?"

"What you've been doing here, acting as a spy and working to ensure the victory for the Empire. But you're also my fail-safe for if things go wrong. I'll contact you in that future. Aragonians are a very long-lived race so to your eyes I will hardly appear to have aged."

The laughter returned, the triumphant laughter of Janice Lester in my body.

"If it was my destiny to become Jim Kirk, clearly it was just as much your destiny to end up as Janice Lester. So we're both now who we're supposed to be, and Camus II is where our new lives begin."

"No, not my destiny, not my destiny at all!" I shouted, pulling at my restraints, dimly realising the rage that had finally hit me was not my fault but being unable to control it.

The voice became sneering and contemptuous.

"Never again will you be tall, muscular, and commanding. What you are now - a small, soft, vulnerable woman - is what you will be for the rest of your days."

"No!" I yelled, "No! No!"

If I could have blocked my ears I would have.

"Every time you see your pretty face in a mirror I want you to remember that by letting your guard down, by being too trusting, you *earned* that face. You're female because you deserve to be."

"No, no, I don't!" I frantically protested. "I'm a man, a man! I don't deserve to be a woman!"

"You deserve to be because you allowed yourself to be fooled, to be bested, by a woman. Your manhood is now my manhood. You lost it to me, and I'm keeping it. Men used to follow you into battle. Now no self-respecting man would follow you anywhere but into bed. So, Janice, how does it feel to be Mrs Coleman?"

What? The question shocked me back to my senses.

"Wonderful, but I'm keeping my own surname. This is the twenty-third century, after all."

"Quite right, too."

This was no longer me and her it was *them*, the Jim Kirk and Janice Lester of the Federation. The segue had happened seamlessly.

"How about you? Are you looking forward to getting back out there?"

"Like you would not believe. I was born to be the captain of a starship. Adventuring out among the stars is where I belong."

"I've got an adventure of my own coming up in nine months."

"Nine...does that mean?"

"Yes, I'm pregnant."

"That was quick. I'm impressed."

"I told you Arthur and I had a lot of lost time to make up for, and we have been."

"Good for you, good for you, good for you, good for you, good for you, good..."

The voices faded away, as did the swirling lights. Quite suddenly we were in normal space again, spat out of a temporal whirlpool that was rapidly closing behind us, leaving the shuttlecraft drifting aimlessly.

We were back in normal space, and I was free of my restraints. But we were not alone.

Bearing down on us was a Federation starship, but larger than I was used to and of more advanced design. The shuttlecraft was floating somewhat above the plane of the saucer section, so I was able to clearly read the name on it: USS Endurance.

This was it. Time for the next chapter of my long, strange journey to begin. I opened a hailing frequency.

"Greetings," I said, "I'm Janice Lester, captain of the USS Enterprise, and I need your help to rescue my husband, Jim Kirk."

"""""""""""""

The End

"""""""""""""