Here is a new chapter! If this chapter is not new it only means one thing… YOU are from the FUTURE! Brilliant! Do they still have sandwiches there?

In this alternate universe, none of the main characters have, at this point, met Jim. So they are what they would be without Jim's influence. Right now you can't really tell, but as this story continues I hope all will be revealed.

In the meantime, continue to be intrigued (hopefully) and confused (apologetically).

Chapter Five

The Lonely Outpost

"Where you came from… Did I know my father?"

"Yes. You often spoke of him being you inspiration to join Starfleet. He proudly lived to see you become captain of the Enterprise."

"Captain?"

"A ship we must get you to as soon as possible"

After the mind meld and Jim's recovery from the "emotional transference" the two set out for the shelter Jim had originally tried to find.

Old Spock knew it was a Starfleet Outpost, and that there they would find the resources they needed to make their next move, if everything went well. Jim found out he had not been out long. The destruction of Vulcan had happened not to log ago, and with their combined knowledge of what the hell is going on they knew that Nero would not stop with Vulcan.

He was going to Earth.

And possibly every federation planet after that until there was no one left or Nero and his ship were finally destroyed.

It was too late for Vulcan, but it was not too late for anyone else. And it just so happened Jim and Old Spock were possibly the only people who could do anything about it.

Jim wondered as they waked what happened to the Enterprise. Since Nero spared them, supposedly so young Spock could, as his elder counterpart put it, know his enemy's pain.

It was sick, the way that Nero's time travel had not only robbed him of his life and his father, but Spock's planet and the life he would have had as well.

A sympathy for a man he had never met (sans his elder future-y counterpart) swept over him.

When they arrived Jim was not sure what to think. The complex looked meek in white landscape. The inside was even less impressive.

They found the entrance and after struggling a bit with the door due to the storm outside, they finally got somewhere warm.

Jim had been freezing immensely, and the small fire Old Spock had made in the cave before they set out had managed to heat him up a little bit, but his exposure to it had been limited, and it's heat was like a distant memory the instant he stepped out of the cave and back into the storm. Old Spock had a thick coat over layers of warm clothing, but Jim would not take it, as his companion was both elderly and vulcan, desert species.

It did not matter. There were more important matters to attend to.

Not long after they entered thy came across a peculiar alien with a pair of the oddest eyes Jim had ever come across. He later found out the alien was called Keenser.

Keenser led them to the outposts only other inhabitant, a red-haired Scottish man named Montgomery Scott. 'Old Spock' already knew him from his previous life.

As soon as Scott saw Jim and Old Spock, he jumped to his own conclusions.

"You realize how unacceptable this is." He said in a heavy Scottish accent.

"Excuse me?" said Jim.

"… Fascinating." Said Old Spock. Jim shot him a confused look.

"I'm sure it's not your fault, and I know you lads are just doin' your jobs, but could you nae have come a wee bit sooner? Six months I've been living on nothing but Starfleet Protein Nibs and the promise of a real food delivery! Six months, boys! It's pretty clear what's going on here, isn't it? Punishment! Ongoing! For something that was clearly an accident!"

"Uh…" Jim was at a loss of what to say.

"You're Montgomery Scott." Old Spock mused.

"You know him?" Jim asked.

"Yes, that's me. Are there any other hard working and equally-starved Starfleet officers around?"

Keenser claimed he was, but Scott just dismissed him. "You eat nothing. A bean and you're done." Keenser crossed his arms, looking annoyed. "I need food. And now you're here… Wait. Where are your uniforms?"

"You are, in fact, the Mr. Scott who postulated the theory of trans-warp beaming?"

"Yes! That's exactly what I'm talking about! How d'ya think I ended up here? I got into a debate with my instructor on the issue of Relativistic Physics as they pertain to subspace travel. He seemed to think that the range of transporting, say, a grapefruit was limited to a few hundred miles, so I told my instructor that I could not only beam the grapefruit from one planet to the adjacent planet but that I could do so as well with a lifeform! So I tested it with Admiral Archer's prize beagle. Which was a mistake."

"What happened to the dog?"

"I'll tell ya when it reappears."

"Shit."

"Yeah, I feel guilty."

"What if I told you that your transwarp theory was correct? That it was indeed possible to beam onboard a ship that was traveling at warp speed."

"Well if that equation was discover, I would have heard about it."

"The reason you haven't heard of it, Mr. Scott, is because you haven't heard of it yet."

"Wait… are you from the future?" Scott questioned.

Jim tilted his head to Old Spock. "Yeah. He is; I'm not."

"Ah… Well that's brilliant. Do they still have sandwiches there?"

Scott was definitely odd, Jim could tell. He would not have believed Old Spock if not for the mindmeld (which he was worrying about, as he wondered exactly how much information Old Spock had gotten out of his mind when he was putting his own information in. That, and there was the whole weird 'total acceptance' thing that… just unsettled him). Scott just went with it. He probably didn't fully believe them, but he was not calling them out on it (yet). He also seemed to have no problem with the fact that nether Jim or Old Spock were with Starfleet.

Well, Old Spock was with Starfleet. Or was. Or is, since his counterpart currently is.

This future stuff, Jim concluded, sucks.

Very readily, Scott assisted Old Spock and Jim in locating and getting online a rusty heap of a transporter unit, long neglected in the station. It was located in an equally neglected shuttle, which Scott did not bother to repair as he considered it a waste of his abilities.

"Passing by ships would just use their own transporter units," Scott explain. "That is, if they actually wanted to get down here. Not that any stopped by."

They told him an abridged version of what was happening with Vulcan and Nero and the Enterprise. Scott was disturbed by the information, but it only served to motivate him more into helping their mission.

"So the Enterprise has had her maiden voyage, has she? She's a well-endowed lady. Love to get my hands on her ample narcelles, if you'll pardon the engineering parlance." Scott smiled and Jim rolled his eyes.

He them went on to express that even if Old Spock was from the future (as they claimed) he had too much difficulty in believing them, not based on the confusion of how time travel was possible, but based on his skeptitism that the trans-warp equation was real and that Old Spock could do as he was planning (which was to beam them aboard the Enterprise, which was warping, as Scott had determined from the planet's scanners, not to Earth, which made it, in Jim's opinion, the wrong direction), especially since the ship was at warp and they had no proper receiving pad locked in.

He made a rather humorous analogy to blindfolded horseback bullet shooting.

"What's that?" He inquired to Old Spock, who was now entering something into the computer.

"Your equation for achieving trans-warp beaming." Old Spock stated. Scott looked it over with a dumbfounded expression.

"Imagine that! It never occurred to me to think of Space as that part that's moving."

As they prepared to beam away, Old Spock revealed that he was not coming with. Jim did not understand, until Old Spock hinted that if he was to ever meet his counterpart face to face, there would be dire consequences. Jim had had enough of 'dire consequences'.

"What am I supposed to do?"

"To stop Nero, you must find a way. Convince me to help."

He still did not believe Old Spock that in an alternate reality he was with Starfleet and a captain of a ship. Not just any ship, but a flagship! He was not the man Old Spock believed he was, but it terrified him to think he'd prove the old man wrong.

"I'm not even a Starfleet ensign! And the Enterprise is a Starfleet ship. How am I going to manage that?"

What exactly did Old Spock want him to do? Commandeer the ship? He'd get his ass handed to him by the ship's security. Talk his way in to captaincy? Or did he just have to talk his way into making the acting captain listen? (Their captain was ordered aboard Nero's ship, and from experience, they did not get him back. He was either still on the ship or the next marooned member of Club Delta Vega. If that was the case the first officer would be acting captain… and it just so happened that during the transmission, from what was viewable on Nero's screen, Jim noticed [he was especially good at taking in many small details with one glance] that Young Spock [surprise surprise] was the first officer).

"You will find a way."

"How am I going to get you to listen?"

"Use logic and emotion. Challenge his own. Use them."

"You want me to use you… guys?"

"I want you to help guide us. Guide him. Jim, I just lost my planet. I can assure, he and I… we are emotionally compromised."

"And you think I can help?"

"You have, Jim. And you always will."

End of Chapter

"If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary-wise; what it is it wouldn't be, and what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?"

-Alice from Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll