- 2 -

Watching Captain Grace Coleman beside me in the command chair I found myself thinking once again about how improbable my being her number two was. My name is Janice Lester, and she believes me to be a thirty years younger version of her mother, time displaced from an alternate universe. Captain Coleman is the daughter of this universe's Arthur Coleman and Janice Lester, a woman who has no idea she was once their Jim Kirk. She was here when I first came aboard USS Endurance. We talked for a long time, each of us intrigued by the other for obvious reasons. I did not share my own bodyswapped status with her, not that I could have, nor that I knew about hers, yet our conversation still revealed some things that were fascinating and others that were horrifying. The thought of willingly laying with Arthur Coleman of all people and having two children with him made me shudder. Her Coleman had died in an accident, and she was now the wife of Janice Rand. Which suited me just fine. The Jim Kirk of old could have been a problem, but as an aged, happily married stay-at-home wife and mother oblivious of her true past he was no threat at all.

The tale I've told everyone about my origins, that where I'm from I'm captain of the USS Enterprise and married to my Jim Kirk, is a lie, that universe made up. I was born James Tiberius Kirk, and in the universe I'm actually from and was a loyal servant of the Terran Empire. I was captain of the ISS Enterprise, until the day our Janice Lester stole my body and switched lives with *me*. When my male body was destroyed over there I vowed to travel here to steal the body of their Jim Kirk. That hadn't worked out and now here I was, a spy, and still loyal to the Empire.

We were heading back to Earth when we got the call. All contact had been lost with Charon Base and though long-range scanners indicated *something* had happened out there on the edge of the solar system no one had any idea what. Starfleet had ordered the Endurance to Charon at maximum warp to assess the situation, and provide whatever aid we could. Chief Engineer Moira Makutsi had protested that we were overtaxing the engines but that couldn't be helped. Still, it was strange that Endurance alone had been given this task when there were almost certainly other ships closer to Charon than us.

Sweeping into the solar system from deep space on a long parabolic arc, the USS Endurance dropped out of warp barely a thousand miles from Charon. Waiting for us was a nasty surprise.

It wasn't there.

"Shields up!" shouted Grace Coleman, rising from her chair as we found ourselves in a debris field of rocks, some of which were many times larger than the ship itself.

"Charon," I said, awed by what I was seeing on the screen, "this has to be all that's left of Charon."

"Agreed, Captain," said Science Officer Reyna Skullcrusher her instruments confirming what we'd all suspected.

"Scan for any survivors of Charon Base, Ms Crusher."

This was Starfleet's preferred contraction of Reyna Skullcrusher's surname, the full version being considered inappropriate for use during official shipboard operation.

Reyna did as Grace asked, but it was hopeless.

"Negative, Captain," she said. "No survivors."

"Any luck contacting Starfleet, Ms Nyonga?"

"Negative, Captain," said Zoe Nyonga, our communications officer. "Too much sub-space interference. It must be why no distress call got out."

"I concur," said Reyna. "I am getting unusual radiation readings, but the local subspace... It's almost as if it's been churned up by the passage of something large and powerful."

"We need to recover what bodies we can. Ms Lester?"

"On it, captain," I said, activating the internal communications system build into the armrest of my own chair.

"Transporter room, this is Commander Lester," I said. "Prepare to transport aboard mortal remains of Charon Base staff as their locations are marked by the helm."

Helmsman Kevin Okuda and navigator Michael Shaw were already doing this, pinging the corpses as they drifted into vision on the screen. Even as we watched, one of them started dematerialising.

"With me, Ms Lester," said Grace, leaping to her feet. "You have the bridge, Ms Crusher."

We took the turbolift down to the deck where medbay was located and made our way there. Dr Saavik and Nurse Willoughby were already examining the first of the corpses when we arrived. Unlike some of the others we'd seen, this one was still relatively intact. Kate let out an involuntary gasp when she saw it.

"Marianne Dorleac," she said, regaining her composure. "I'd forgotten she was stationed on Charon Base."

"Did you know her, captain?"

"Yes, from Starfleet Academy. She was...a friend."

From what I'd heard of Grace's time at the Academy I was pretty sure that in this case 'friend' meant 'sexual conquest'.

"Cause of death, Dr Saavik?"

"Explosive decompression, captain, as expected," said the teenage Vulcan, "though some of the flesh has also been singed by a high-energy beam. There are some unusual radiation readings, too."

"Show me."

The nurse handed her his medical tricorder. It was strange not having Carter Willoughby III making sardonic comments, but even he had been sobered by the fate of Charon.

"The same readings we recorded on the bridge," said Grace, frowning, "and I have this nagging feeling I've seen them somewhere before. If only I could remember where."

Then she snapped her fingers.

"Got it!" she said. "C'mon, we have to return to the bridge."

When we got there, Grace wasted no time.

"Put the radiation readings you took onscreen, please, Ms Crusher. And call up radiation readings from USS Constellation mission report of stardate 4202.1 for comparison."

Reyna did as ordered, replacing the images on the bridge viewscreen of the space directly ahead of us with both sets of readings. They were identical.

"I..I think I recognize this from my time at Starfleet Academy," said Kevin Okuda, while beside him Michael Shaw nodded in agreement.

"As do I, Mr Okuda," said Grace Coleman, "as should anyone who studied the destruction of the Constellation and the accompanying Enterprise mission report. Charon was destroyed by another doomsday machine."