A golden eagle soared above the lake, watching the Native American camp. It did a quick barrel roll and pivoted, heading for a green-bronze obelisk.
As it swooped in for a landing, it flashed into the shape of a human girl with reddish hair. She landed on the ground next to a brown-haired boy who was busy trying to string a bow.
"A little harder...OW! Dangit..." He stuck his cut finger in his mouth, soothing the hurt.
"Need some help?"
"No, I can do it, Lia." Michael went back to the task, futilely struggling with the weapon.
Lia rolled her eyes and walked over to Allison, who was in meditation at the edge of the obelisk base. Allison opened her eyes, blinked, and stretched. "Oh...hey. What's up?"
"Something big's happening over at the Indian camp," Lia reported. "Some kind of ceremony, I think..."
Allison was instantly on her feet. "Both of you, get behind the obelisk. Now!"
Confused, they did so, taking their personal items with them. And none too soon, either. The instant they were hidden, the sound of soft deerskin boots on twigs reached their ears. Discreetly peeking around the obelisk, the three ensigns could see Kirk and the Indian tribal elder approaching.
Ducking back behind the obelisk, Allison could not help but smile.
"What?" Lia whispered.
"'Kirok' is getting married," she answered.
~~~~~~~
After a half an hour, the Indian man left the amnesiac Kirk at the base of the obelisk. The three teens watched him stand in that place for a few minutes, thinking to himself, before he too "walked the holy path" to the lodge.
The instant Kirk was out of sight in the forest, two voices rose above the singing of the birds. Kirk and Salish, arguing over Miramanee.
Allison was up the nearest tree in an instant, hopping from treetop to treetop until she was directly over the fight. She watched nervously as Kirk threw Salish across the clearing, and was cut by the knife. Shoot, she thought as Kirk cradled his wounded hand. That's gonna be hard to hide...
She watched as Kirk fled into the forest, leaving Salish behind. She chose her moment. Dropping silently from the tree, she walked up behind him and reached out for his shoulder.
Kirk jerked as her fingers touched him, and he slumped to the ground. Allison stood over him for a moment, then raised an eyebrow. "Cool," she said, and then called for Lia to bring her field medikit that she had packed.
Less than a minute later, Kirk's hand was perfectly healed. Allison put away the protoplaser and pressed a hand against Kirk's face. She concentrated hard, and he began to recover from the nerve pinch.
By the time he was fully awake, all three teens were once again hidden.
~~~~~~~
Back at their camp, Michael turned to Allison. "Are you nuts? That was a big risk! What if he'd seen you?"
Allison calmly looked at him. "That 'big risk' that you refer to was completely necessary. Can you imagine the uproar it would cause if a 'god' showed up at his own wedding, bleeding all over the place? That'd kinda ruin the image, wouldn't it? Gods don't bleed, and all that."
Lia frowned. "Is that why we needed to be here?"
"Part of it, anyway," Allison said. "I mentally ran through the episode. At the 'joining,' Jim's hand was perfectly fine. I'd always wondered why it was."
"So now what?" Michael asked. "Do we just sit here and wait for the Enterprise to pick us up?"
"Pretty much," Allison said.
"Well, shoot."
~~~~~~~
Jessie paced back and forth between McCoy's desk and the door to his office. "I can't believe she pulled a fast one on us! She could have at least told us before she took off to live with some Indians!"
McCoy threw back a shot of Saurian brandy. "Sounds like your young friend's been watchin' Jim for way too long," he drawled. "Damn reckless Yankees...always runnin' off on some damn fool idealistic crusade."
May held back a snort of laughter. McCoy gave her a sideways glance, and she shrugged as if to say, 'I didn't say anything!'
"Allison must have a good reason for leaving unannounced," Kristian declared after a moment. He and May had been called down to Sickbay and briefed on the situation shortly after it was discovered that the three ensigns were missing. "She's not the kind of person that acts rashly for no reason."
"Just like Jim," McCoy felt inclined to point out.
Steve was unfazed. "But why would Lia and Michael go with her? What do they hope to prove?"
Jessie stopped pacing and turned to McCoy. "Does Spock know she's gone?"
McCoy snorted. "Wouldn't surprise me, but I'll check when he's off-duty."
~~~~~~~
A week after the Enterprise left the Preserver planet, Allison could be found up a tree, looking over a small padd. She reclined against the tree trunk, on leg propped up on a branch in front of her, the other leg dangling. She was not disturbed in the slightest by the fact that she was nearly twenty feet off the ground, despite a life-long fear of heights.
Before she had left the ship, Allison grabbed the padd and a data disk. Now she reviewed the contents of the disk, looking over the information. Displayed on the screen was the history of the Danks family, starting in the year 2000 and going forward to the 23rd century.
Allison looked over some of the names, raising an eyebrow at all her 'new' relatives. "Weird," was all she said as she looked them over.
As far as she could tell, her younger brother had no descendants at all. Her older brother, on the other hand, had married a woman from the central United States. The Danks family line expanded through them, all the way down to a Winona Danks. And she had married-
Allison stopped reading, staring at the name on the padd. Impossible! She must have misread it.
She went back and read it again. No mistake.
Allison scratched a pointed ear in half-confusion, half-wonder. "No way. No way in Hell." But it was true, and she wasn't sure how she felt about that.
"I can not believe that he is my great-great-great-great-great-grandnephew," she said aloud. "And yet...I HAVE to believe it. I can't understand why I didn't see it earlier...we're so alike! We act alike...hell, we even LOOK alike!"
Shaking her head, she brought up a new data stream and began reading again. She had to learn more about this.
~~~~~~~
"Why you pointy-eared, son-of-a-"
"Doctor, please refrain from insulting my mother."
McCoy glared at Spock across the desk. "You knew all along, did you? You knew Allison and the others left to go after Jim, and you never told us!"
The somewhat annoyed Vulcan looked up at him. "Yes, that is true. I did not intend to tell you, either. Now you know, and it is unavoidable that you will begin another tirade."
"Damn straight!" McCoy began to pace. "Do you have any idea how valuable that girl and her friends are to Starfleet? Hell, to the entire Federation! If they die, or if they can't tell us where Jim is, we may never see them or our captain again! What does your logic tell you about that?"
"Logic," Spock said solemnly, "has nothing to do with it." That earned him a stunned silence from McCoy. "Allison is an emotional being, whether she appears to be Vulcan or not. And she has some sort of empathetic attachment to the captain."
"You mean like a psychic bond?" McCoy blurted without thinking.
Spock raised an eyebrow. "In a manner of speaking. It is similar to the Vulcan family bond, but with a variation." He picked up a padd and slid it across the desk to McCoy. "I went through our library banks."
McCoy warily took the padd, and read it over. His jaw dropped nearly to the floor, and his eyes went wide as dinner plates. "Oh. My. LORD."
~~~~~~~
Over the next month, the three ensigns had to work hard at making sure that Salish didn't try anything else. There were a few attempts at cutting Kirk again, but each attempt was thwarted by a psychic suggestion from Michael. Salish eventually gave up on an active role, biding his time until the arrival of the asteroid.
Allison didn't share her findings with either of the other teens, keeping her family history to herself. She was planning on finding her most prominent relative after the Enterprise returned, and telling him first. She wasn't sure how he would take the news.
Two months after the arrival at the Preserver planet, Allison came into camp with a grim look on her face. The wind was blowing harder, and the sky was darkening prematurely.
"Pack up camp," she shouted over the wind. "The asteroid's just about here, and the Enterprise should be right before it."
Lia and Michael scrambled to pick up their meager belongings. Allison gathered up her padd, medikit, and other posessions in her black bag and opened her communicator. "Danks to Enterprise! Danks to Enterprise!" she called into the transmitter.
A familiar voice answered. "Enterprise. Commander Spock here."
Even now, the three teens could hear the sounds of an angry crowd at the base of the obelisk. "We request beam up. Now," Allison said urgently. "And go to the Transporter Room with Doctor McCoy. You'll both be needed shortly."
"Acknowledged."
The transporter beam came and swept them away, leaving behind nothing but footprints to show that they had ever been there.
~~~~~~~
The instant she was done rematerializing, Allison leaped off the transporter pad and grabbed McCoy's arm. "Get down there, now. Right next to the obelisk." When McCoy stared questioningly, not understanding, her temper snapped. "Oh, for the love of Surak, just GO! Medical emergency, Bones. There's an angry mob and they're stoning Jim to death!"
The two senior officers were on the transporter pads and gone before anyone else could react.