Elusive Salvation (Star Trek: The Original Series)

by Dayton Ward

Kirk had for the most part been unable to affect how his status as a playing piece on the ever-evolving board changed over time. Now far removed from his former life as a starship captain, his role as chief of Starfleet Operations included sending other starship commanders to push outward the boundaries of both territory and knowledge, dispatching them as explorers and defenders of Federation security. Meanwhile, Kirk’s lengthy career and hard-won experience, and even the notoriety that had come his way over the years, had seen to it he now was “too important” or “too valuable” to risk being lost in space.

“That is correct, Captain. Ptaen scientists discovered a way to alter our genetic structure so that our life spans were artificially shortened. Instead of living for the equivalent of several of your centuries, our people would live just a fraction of that time. This was the primary means of controlling our population. In the beginning, the genetic manipulation was introduced to all living Iramahl, or at least the vast majority, including our pregnant females. Over time, the process evolved both on its own and with the help of Ptaen scientists who seemed to take great joy in finding more effective ways to forward these modifications. For generations, we passed along the very chains used to enslave us. The chains were not metal, but instead the strands of our own genetic code.”

He had only been mildly surprised to learn that the message Jepolin mentioned had come from yet another extraterrestrial being living on Earth during the nineteenth century. The Iramahl envoy had not shared the identity of that individual, which only served to make Kirk wonder just how many aliens had decided to call Earth home in the centuries before humanity left their world and found other civilizations living among the stars. It seems we’re the galaxy’s preferred vacation destination.

Even now, three years after learning the truth behind Seven and the Aegis, Roberta found it hard to imagine that humans had been taken from Earth thousands of years ago, and that they and their descendants had been trained and genetically enhanced over uncounted generations. It still amazed her that the aliens behind this effort had invested such a staggering amount of time and resources before deciding when the time was right to deploy their prodigies to Earth. The proof of that was Gary Seven, as well as those agents who had preceded him, each bearing the burden of their broad, all-encompassing mission that was—as Seven had described—to “prevent Earth from destroying itself before it can mature into a peaceful society.”

“I’m not allowed to time travel here on Earth unless it’s a super emergency. You know, like the world’s on fire and the flames are visible from Mars kind of emergency.”

How much of what humans finally became after scratching, scraping, and pulling themselves from the ruins of famine, environmental calamity, and nuclear war was due to the unheralded efforts of Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln?

Seldom did a day go by that Leonard McCoy did not want to take a phaser to a piece of equipment that had wronged him in some real or perceived manner. There also were rare occasions when he thought of taking some offending piece of technology to the nearest airlock and jettisoning it into space.

Here we go, Kirk thought. Nogura sighed. “Did you know the Department of Temporal Investigations has a file on you bigger than your Starfleet personnel record? They’re thinking about starting up a special section just to deal with all of the trouble you cause them. I’m not sure, but I think you may even have your own code name. ‘Clock Wrecker,’ or some such damned thing. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s a rumor I can get behind.”