AN: Sorry for the short chapter! The next scene is quite long so I had to separate them.
Sh'athylnik slipped up behind Kirk. "I can access the system that will send us back to Federation space," she said, "but it will take several hours to activate."
Kirk looked to the Caretaker. "Unless you help us."
"Oh, I wish I could," the Caretaker said, "but I have very little time left, so I have initiated a self-destruct program."
Kirk's stomach swooped. "If you destroy the array, you leave us stranded here."
"The Ocampa's enemies cannot be allowed to control this installation," the Caretaker insisted. "You have to go. Go now!"
As if to underscore the urgency of his words, a blast shook the Array. Around the them, the illusion of the barn flickered, revealing the alien architecture underneath. Kirk thought it was part of the self-destruct sequence, but the Caretaker looked wildly around, alarmed. Kirk snapped open his communicator.
"Kirk to Enterprise. What's going on out there?"
"More Magog ships have arrived and engaged with us," Spock said. "One of them just collided with the array."
The hologram died completely, leaving Kirk and Sh'athylnik in a high-ceilinged room whose walls were lined with complex panels and controls. Kirk barely noticed; his attention was fixed on the Caretaker. With the illusion stripped away, he was no longer an old man, or anything humanoid. He looked more like an enormous, purple jellyfish than anything else.
He forced his attention back to the Enterprise. "More Magog? How many."
"Eighty-nine, sir."
Kirk listened with growing horror as Spock described the Magog ships and their tactics. "Captain," Spock finished, "If you are you able to convince the Caretaker to return us to the Alpha Quadrant, now would be the ideal time."
"Standby." Something was happening to the Caretaker. His body rippled and began shrink, falling in on itself.
"The self-destruct program has been damaged," the Caretaker breathed. He no longer sounded like an old man, but his voice was still strained and weak. "Now this installation will not be destroyed... but it must be. The Magog, the Kazon, the others... must not be allowed to gain control of it... they will annihilate the Ocampa..."
His voice failed. His body collapsed entirely, leaving nothing but a small rock lying on the floor where he had been. Kirk knelt beside it and cautiously picked it up. It looked and felt like a rock, no different than any rock he could find on Earth, though it seemed heavy for its size. He turned it over in his hands, wondering. The Caretaker had been unlike any alien he had ever encountered, and yet so much like him, too. He, too, was an explorer. They could have learned so much from one another, but now...
"Captain, should I activate the program to send us back?" Sh'athylnik asked.
Kirk set down the rock. "And if we do?" he asked softly. "What happens to the Ocampa once we're gone?"
"Whatever was going to happen to them, anyway." Sh'athylnik said. "If we try to protect the Ocampa, we'll be violating the Prime Directive."
"To hell with the Prime Directive," Kirk snapped. "What is it with first officers and the Prime Directive?"
Sh'athylnik crossed her arms over her chest. "You were the one who chided the Caretaker for not allowing the Ocampa to develop on their own terms. Now that he's gone, will you begin interfering in his place?"
"We're already interfering! Khan was right—we've been interfering from the moment the Caretaker dragged us here. If the Enterprise wasn't fighting those Magog ships, the Array might not have been damaged and the self-destruct system would be counting down even now. We've already affected the Ocampa, the Caretaker, and maybe even the balance of power between the Magog and the other species in this system."
"You can't know that," Ta'sar countered. "You can't know what might have happened, or what happen in the future. All you can know is that you're about to break the Prime Directive, the most important principle of Starfleet."
"The Prime Directive is already in shreds. Don't we have a responsibility to fix what we've broken?" When her expression remained unchanged, he said, "You saw their city, you saw what kind of people the Ocampa are. If we do nothing, we'll doom them as surely as if we killed them ourselves."
Sh'athylnik flattened her antennae and looked away. "What about the crew?" she asked. "What about us?"
Kirk looked away, too. "I don't want to be stuck out here any more than you do," he said softly. "But I can't sacrifice the lives of the Ocampa for our convenience. We'll just have to find a different way home."