The U.S.S. Enterprise tore through space for destinations unknown as per her standing orders. On her bridge, it was eerily quiet given that it was the night shift and many of her consoles remained inactive, yet her most important component was still fully operational. Captain James T. Kirk sat in his command chair in silence as he absent mindedly twiddled a data cartridge in his hand. The incident with the Narada had been long past them, but the whole incident continued to rage in the young captain's mind. The idea that the whole reality that the other Spock knew, that Nero and his crew knew, was something he and his crew would no longer know, weighed heavily on his mind.
'James T. Kirk was considered to be a great man, who went on to captain the USS Enterprise, but that was another life. A life I will deprive you of just like I did your father!' Nero had claimed back onboard his radically advanced mining ship. And that was what bothered Kirk the most, the man Spock had known and Nero had read about. That Kirk was a man of importance who had apparently done some amazing things, but this Kirk had extreme doubts that he could ever measure up. Did he and that other Kirk really have anything in common besides their parentage and lineage, and even that may have been changed by other unknown time travel events.
It was eating him up inside and he knew of no way of sating that hunger. Looking up at the viewscreen with exhausted, bloodshot eyes, Kirk decided to get his mind off of it with a tour of the ship. He nodded briefly at the night watch officer and walked off the bridge in silence. Walking around the ship, he casually acknowledged the occasional crewmember that came his way, but the ship was just as maddeningly quiet as the bridge had been. Kirk was now desperate for some conversation and wondered where he'd get it.
"Warp eight!" declared a voice from the cafeteria interrupting his ruminations.
"Warp eight? Are ye daft man?! That lassie could clearly go warp nine, maybe even warp nine point five!" came a recognizable Scottish accent. Kirk furrowed his eyebrows at this development and peeked in to the mess where Montgomery Scott and Keenser where sequestered in a corner of the mess and huddled around a portable holographic terminal. Kirk silently filtered into the room and sauntered up to the two and finally saw what the two were looking at. It was a ship of whose origin he had never seen before. It had a lengthy elliptical primary hull that, rather than saucer looked like a butter holder, and a neck with a singular torpedo launcher and then a curved secondary hull below it that ended in a pair of warp nacelle struts that curved upwards and ended in two nacelles that were lower in altitude than the saucer section.
"And what are you two looking at?" the captain demanded. Scotty and Keenser looked at each other shocked.
"Hello captain, I ummm, I ummm," he stuttered as he turned around and hurriedly tried to shut off the imager when Kirk caught his hand and leaned in close to look at the image that had a brief descriptor below it.
"Starfleet Galaxy-Class starship, Commissioned 2363, Name: USS Enterprise, Registry Number: NCC-1701-D?!" exclaimed Kirk in astonishment before turning to his chief engineer. "Scotty, what is this?"
The engineer pondered this for a moment before turning to his commanding officer.
"I don't know captain, what is this?" he offered lamely. He then turned to Keenser, who began whistling nervously before turning his head away. Kirk sighed and briefly scowled before hitting a button on the imager and now a new starship appeared that was longer and sleeker than the first. The description read: Starfleet Sovereign-Class starship, Commissioned 2372, Name: USS Enterprise, Registry Number: NCC-1701-E.
"Scotty?" Kirk warned if he didn't get an answer soon. The Scotsman scrunched up as if debating whether to give an answer before looking at the captain deciding he'd better.
"During the battle with the Narada, I…may have managed to perform a remote access to her computers and done a dump of some of its data," he responded nervously.
"You did what?!?!" shouted Kirk in disbelief. Scotty laughed nervously.
"Well, I figured that with the timeline altered, we need some benchmark to measure ourselves against as time progressed and I figured we were the rights ones to do it. So my crawler program copied as many records that pertained to us and this ship and re-transmitted them back to me," the engineer revealed. "And damn if it didn't return some fine beauties. Take this baby for instance. I didn't get the full technical specs on her, but from what I could, she's got Type XI phaser arrays along with both photon torpedoes and something called a quantum torpedo launcher. She's meanness alright."
Kirk shook his head. "But Scotty, aren't you worried you're ruining the timeline even more with this stuff?"
"Aye," the man admitted nodding his head. "But I will nae transmit this information to anybody and anyone who tried would immediately be locked and the records destroyed."
"All the same, I'd rather you destroyed it," said Kirk, despite his inner turmoil from earlier. "We need to choose our own destinies rather than be controlled by someone else's."
"Aye," Scotty agreed, before producing a datachip. "I'll delete it soon enough, but I just want to sit here and dream about the future of engineering."
A new ship appeared on the screen, 'Starfleet Excelsior-Class Starship, Commissioned 2293, Name: USS Enterprise, Registry Number: NCC-1701-B'.
"Though maybe I'll keep this one and her predecessors, the preliminary sketches for this class have already been drafted by the Corp. of Engineers," said the engineer.
"Scotty," Kirk warned. The Scotsman laughed.
"Yes sir," he said with a grin. Kirk shook his head in shame and was headed out the door when Scotty stopped him.
"Sir, I was nae able to pull any personnel records with the exception of one, yours," he revealed. "I guess you were someone of great importance over there and was the first one found. The only record is in this datachip, I thought you might want it."
Kirk nearly had to restrain himself from leaping to acquire the chip and at least try and make it seem like he was not a hypocrite.
"Thank you Scotty," he admitted and headed for the exit. But one other question rolled around in his head. He turned back and now found a new starship presented. 'Starfleet Ambassador-Class. Commissioned: 2332, Name: USS Enterprise, Registry Number: NCC-1701-C'.
"What kind of a legacy did she have?" Kirk had to ask. Scotty turned to look at him with a lighthearted smile. He was not referring to just one ship, but all of them.
"She was the stuff of legends," he invoked. Kirk nodded and left as an image of a vessel bearing the registry NCC-1701-A appeared after he had gone.
"Warp seven," said Keenser finally speaking up again. Scotty looked at him wide-eyed.
"Blasphemy! She can go at least warp seven point five," he promised as the two began arguing anew about the unknown technical aspects of the vessels.
Cabin: James T. Kirk held his head in his hands as if to ward off a headache as his computer lay powered up, but the datachip lay next to it, having not been plugged in. Inside Kirk's head, the debate raged long and hard about what to do. Did he have the right to undermine his own future by trying to be this other man? What if tried to become this other man and ended up failing in some important task because things didn't go the way that the datachip said it would because of this alternate reality they were now in?
James T. Kirk was a great man…but that was another life.
How could he measure up to this man that even a petty miner from the future would know and recognize? Could he even hope to be this great man of legend? Kirk didn't have the answers and the datachit was nearly burning a hole in his desk demanding to be read.
"Aaahhh!!!" shouted Kirk as he grabbed the datachip and slammed it into the reader and as the first image shot up, all of his troubles instantly dissipated. The image confronting him caused him to break out into a broad grin and he spun around once in his chair as he began laughing as hard as he could.
He and that other Kirk did have something in common, something that resonated deeply in both of them, something that no time traveler could change. It was something that no alternate reality could ever hope to make different either, their one true love in life. They would never abandon her for as long as they lived and they would give up everything to her.
"I'll never give up on you," he swore. He didn't need to see more, he had seen all he needed to see. Kirk lightly tapped the desk with a melancholy smile and hit the erase button and left his room. As the data in the chip began erasing itself, the holographic image remained until the very end. She was white and had twin nacelles with glowing red caps and two long struts connecting to her cigar shaped secondary hull and a long connecting support to her saucer shaped primary hull. She was a lady alright, a lady of the line and to Kirk, she was beautiful.
Starfleet Constitution-Class, Commissioned 2245, Name: USS Enterprise, Registry: NCC-1701.
And then image blanked out and the computer shut down. And the Enterprise continued on her course to destinations unknown.