"Understood, Commander."

In the end, the chief engineer managed to cut the time to Arhennius by approximately sixty-five seconds, but at the same time the fleeing bird-of-prey inched its own speed up, cutting over forty seconds from its own arrival time.

They would still be twenty seconds behind when Scott reached the Arhennius system.

With Arhennius now a glowing ball on the Enterprise viewscreen, the Klingon ship abruptly deactivated its cloaking field.

"Details, Mr. Data," Picard snapped a fraction of a second after seeing the image on the viewscreen leap into full clarity.

"Its present course will take it through the solar corona. Its shields may not be enough to protect it. Arhennius is only a quarter more ma.s.sive than Sol, but it has more than twice the energy output."

"The G.o.ddard- " Picard began, but Data continued.

"The G.o.ddard is indeed in the bird-of-prey's cargo hold. It is still powered down. There is a single, humanoid life form on the Klingon ship's bridge."

"Not within the G.o.ddard?"

"That is correct, Captain."

"And no Klingons? Anywhere in either ship?"

"As I said, Captain, there is a single humanoid life form."

"Captain Scott?"

"His presence would be entirely consistent with the readings," Data said.

"Then why-Mr. Worf, try again to open a channel."

"A channel is open, sir, but there is no response."

"But he can hear us?"

"If he is listening."

"Very well." Picard paused, pulling in a breath. "Captain Scott, if you are indeed on board the fleeing bird-of-prey, please respond. This is Captain Picard of the Enterprise. You are welcome to any a.s.sistance we can provide."

There was still no response. Data glanced up from the ops station readouts. "The life form's pulse has accelerated to an unacceptable level."

"Captain Scott, will you at least explain what you are hoping to accomplish? Our sensors show your ship heading directly into the star's corona. It is doubtful that your shields can protect you."

Still no response.

"The ship is once again accelerating," Data announced. "It will be entering the star's corona in- "

"You must follow him, Captain!" Guinan said abruptly.

"We are following him, Guinan. As soon as we're within transporter range, we'll beam him out."

"You don't understand! You won't get the chance. Arhennius itself is his goal. He intends to use its gravity well to slingshot back in time."

Picard blinked. Suddenly he saw Scott's earlier actions in a whole new light, particularly his seemingly nostalgic accessing of the logs of previous incarnations of the Enterprise. Those logs, Picard realized belatedly, contained not just the logs of the Enterprise itself but those of all Enterprise personnel-even when they served on other ships!

Including the Bounty, the Klingon ship that had carried Scott and Kirk and the others back to the twentieth century.

The Bounty, a bird-of-prey very much like the one Scott was at this moment piloting.

Guinan was right.

Scott was intending to go back in time, just as he had done before, when the alien probe had almost destroyed Earth because of the extinction of the whales. Using Spock's on-the-fly calculations, Scott and the others had sent the Bounty whipping through Sol's gravity well and back in time to when whales had still existed. And the calculations Spock had used to make the jump would have been included in at least one of the logs Scott had accessed!

But why was he doing it now?

And where in time was he going? Had he decided he couldn't catch up with the seventy-five years of new technology he'd missed out on? Had he decided he would sooner try to go back to a time when his knowledge was state of the art, not hopelessly outdated?

Unlikely. Despite some bad moments immediately after his rescue from the Jenolen, Scott was no quitter. And he certainly wouldn't risk upsetting the entire timestream for such a purely personal goal.

"Mr. Scott!" Picard said, his tone filled with as much authority as he could muster. "I order you to stop!"

"His communications system has shut down, Captain," Data said. "All power is being diverted to the warp drive and the shields. He did not hear your order."

"He didn't want to hear it," Riker muttered.

The Klingon ship was bulleting toward the Arhennius corona, once again accelerating despite the fact that it was already far exceeding its design specs. Picard half expected it to fly to pieces at any instant.

"Follow him," Guinan said, coming as close to shouting as he had ever heard her do. "If you ever trusted me, Captain, trust me now!"

He shook his head sharply. "Two ships will only disrupt the timestream even more than one. And we can't follow him precisely, not without knowing a hundred times more than what the sensors can tell us. By the time we reach Arhennius- "

"Sensors are detecting increasing amounts of chronometric radiation, Captain," Data announced, bringing a sudden hush to the bridge.

"Origin?"

"Impossible to say, sir. There is no discrete source. It is simply there-and growing at an exponential rate."

"The radiation is there because the timestream is already changing, Captain!" Guinan said with even more intensity. "You must follow him-now! Before we all forget that it has even changed!"

For a moment, Picard's mind seemed to spin out of control. Even the image of Arhennius on the viewscreen shimmered and shifted as the Klingon ship accelerated directly into the corona. The ever-increasing warping of s.p.a.ce caused by the ship's drive was, he knew, clashing ever more violently with the spatial distortion caused by the immense gravity of the star. Soon, the clash between the two essentially irresistible forces would literally squeeze the ship out of the here and now, sending it careening through time itself like a rocket shot up out of a planet's atmosphere, not into orbit but into a suborbital trajectory that would bring it plunging back like a meteor.

But these ships-the Klingon bird-of-prey and, if he heeded Guinan's desperate plea, the Enterprise-would be propelled not out of a planet's atmosphere but out of the entire s.p.a.ce-time continuum, into a jagged arc through the unknown, an arc that would bring it plunging back at some distant time that only the most precise measurements and calculations could determine.

Measurements and calculations they had no time to make.

They could find themselves years or centuries distant from their own time.

If they survived at all!

Suddenly, the chronometric radiation intensified a hundredfold, setting off a klaxon-like alarm on the bridge, and Picard felt the universe-his memory of the universe-begin to shift like windblown desert sand.

With his last rational thought, he barked out the order that sent the Enterprise plunging into the Arhennius corona only seconds behind Scott and the Klingon ship. But even as the Enterprise shuddered under the strain, new images began to appear on the viewscreen, images beyond the corona they were shooting through at impossible speeds.

Images of a solid phalanx of Borg cubes.

Then that universe winked out and there was only the terrible shuddering of the Enterprise as the conflicting forces of the straining warp drive and the intense gravity field of Arhennius battered at each other and at the ship caught in the t.i.tanic crossfire. Finally, after microseconds that seemed to stretch into minutes, as if the Enterprise and its crew were relativistic particles descending the last few millimeters before plunging through a black hole's event horizon, the fabric of s.p.a.ce-time was ruptured for the second time in less than a minute, and the Enterprise was sent hurtling through time.

Eight.

FOR PICARD, the shuddering and kaleidoscopic roller-coaster ride seemed to go on forever, threatening to tear the Enterprise apart and scatter its fragments across centuries of time.

But all he could see in his mind's eye were the Borg cubes that had appeared-had seemed to appear, he told himself again and again-in the universe he had just been catapulted out of. Even though Scott had launched himself into the past only seconds before the Enterprise had followed, something Scott had done at the far end of his arc into the past had already disrupted the timestream, bringing the Borg-Suddenly, the bone-jarring, eye-searing ride was over.

Like a plane emerging from the fury of a hurricane into the silent stillness of the storm's eye, the Enterprise reentered the s.p.a.ce-time continuum. Behind them, Arhennius was a rapidly shrinking ball of nuclear fire. Ahead was only a familiar and unremarkable star field.

"All stop," Picard snapped. The image on the viewscreen shimmered briefly as the Enterprise dropped out of warp.

"Where- " Picard began but broke off. "When are we, Mr. Data?"

"The computer's preliminary survey of the coordinates of nearby stars indicates we are in the latter half of the twenty-third century."

"And Captain Scott's ship?"

"Sensors indicate no ships within the Arhennius system, Captain."

Picard winced inwardly at the words, even though they were far from unexpected. If anything, they confirmed what he-what they all had been thinking as the Enterprise dove into the Arhennius corona: Slingshotting through time on the fly is not an exact science. Under these conditions, there was simply no way of determining the precise trajectory either Captain Scott or the Enterprise took. There was therefore no way of knowing precisely when either vessel had reentered normal s.p.a.ce-time with respect to the other.

"Can you at least estimate how far apart our arrival times might be, Mr. Data?"

"Not with any certainty, Captain," Data said as he consulted his instruments again. "Ensign Raeger appears to have come as close to duplicating Captain Scott's trajectory as is humanly possible. There was no way, however, to compensate for the Enterprise's greater ma.s.s. I can only say that it is unlikely that our arrival was more than a few months before or after Captain Scott's."

"So he may not have arrived yet?"

"That is correct, Captain."

A flicker of hope brushed at his mind. "Check for warp trails, Mr. Data. If he is already here, he certainly would have left a warp trail, no matter where he went."

"He would." Data scanned a new set of readouts. "However, the only warp trail within the Arhennius system is that of the Enterprise itself."

Picard felt relief wash over him. "So he hasn't arrived yet. Perhaps we can lie low and wait for him, then stop him from doing whatever he was planning to do. And hope that no one from this era notices us."

He was silent a moment, looking at the deceptively familiar star field on the viewscreen. "Mr. Worf, maintain complete radio silence, but scan the subs.p.a.ce spectrum for any time-coded traffic."

"I have been scanning since we first arrived," the Klingon said, "but I have found no subs.p.a.ce traffic."

"Subs.p.a.ce frequencies in use in the twenty-third century- "

"I have already compensated for all known differences, Captain," Worf said, a touch of reproach in his I-know-my-job tone. "There is no subs.p.a.ce traffic on any of the frequencies used by members of the Federation or by either Klingons or Romulans during the second half of the twenty-third century."

The relief Picard had experienced moments before turned to a chill, his eyes drawn again to the viewscreen. "Mr. Data, how reliable is the computer's estimate of the current time? Could it be off by centuries rather than decades? Could we have gone back to a time before subs.p.a.ce radio was used in this quadrant?"

"It is highly unlikely, Captain, but I will know for certain in a moment," Data said, consulting a new set of readings that had just appeared on his control panel. "The computer has just completed a luminosity scan of the fifty nearest variable stars, including Sol, and is comparing these values with the values that Starfleet and other organizations have recorded continuously since before the founding of the Federation. That will narrow it down to a period of a few months, and then- "

Data broke off as another set of readings appeared. "In terms of Old Earth chronology," he continued after a moment's study, "the year is 2293. Now that we know the year, the computer can scan remote galaxies for known supernovas whose light would have reached the Arhennius system during that year. Because of their distance and faintness, this will require more time, but..."

Data continued to explain, but Picard was no longer listening. Hearing the year-2293- had been enough.

It was not the year Captain Scott had signed onto the Jenolen.

It was a year earlier, the year the Enterprise-B had been launched.

The year that James T. Kirk, Scott's captain and friend, had died saving that other Enterprise.

For a moment Picard resisted the inevitable conclusion, but as his mind darted back to the conversations he had had with Scott in the days after his rescue from the Jenolen, all doubt vanished. The man's nostalgia for the first Enterprise had been huge, but his loyalty to its captain had been monumental.

Monumental and, no matter how n.o.ble, ultimately and obviously misguided.

There was no question in Picard's mind as to where and when Scott had intended to go.

And what he had intended to do.

But that knowledge, Picard told himself grimly, did nothing to resolve the one question that really mattered: Where and when had Scott actually gone?

And what had he done that could have changed history so drastically that the Federation no longer existed-or at least was not using subs.p.a.ce radio-in 2293 and had been replaced by the Borg by 2370?

Scotty cursed silently as he listened once again to the time-coded subs.p.a.ce messages he had finally been able to tap into with the G.o.ddard's comm system. Instead of several weeks, he had only days before the destruction of the Lakul and the near destruction of the Enterprise-B!

In his rush to slip away from Picard's Enterprise and then to keep from being overtaken by it, he must have miscalculated his trajectory. Or the actual ma.s.s of Arhennius or of the Bounty 2 itself was a minuscule fraction different from the values he had entered. Or any of a hundred other possibilities. Even the formulae themselves, as recorded in Spock's log months of subjective time after the event itself, might have contained minute errors. Spock was, after all, half human.

He would probably never know which number or calculation had tripped him up, and in fact it didn't matter. It was done. He was where he was, when he was, and there was still a chance he could pull it off.

If the Bounty 2 held up.

Against all odds, it had already survived the warp eight race to Arhennius and the bone-jarring, hull-plate-rattling pa.s.sage through time, so there was no reason-other than a wee dose of common sense-to think that it would not survive the next five days. He could-and almost certainly would-spend his every waking hour monitoring the drive, nursing it along, adjusting each and every variable before any had a chance to drift even a micron off their optimum values.

And at least Picard had not followed him-or hadn't been able to. Either way, Scotty was grateful for small favors. He would need all he could get, not to mention some large ones as well.

Entering the coordinates at which, in little more than five days, the Lakul and the Robert Fox would be-had been?- destroyed, he murmured a prayer to whatever G.o.ds of the Highlands watched over errant engineers and engaged the warp drive.

As Picard had expected, Data's supernova survey revealed they were within two weeks-before or after-of the moment Kirk had died saving the Enterprise-B.

Briefly, he told Guinan and the bridge crew what he was virtually certain Scott had been attempting to do. Only Riker looked doubtful.

"Could he be that irresponsible? The man was a Starfleet officer for nearly half a century."