The fog was a tangible thing, muffling the ocean at the foot of the tall, plunging cliff, concealing the jagged rocks awash in surf beneath its woolly blanket. Even the whoosh-boom of the mighty Pacific, here at romantically dubbed Lands End, was reduced by the fog to faint slurping noises that echoed and rebounded eerily in the heavy mist. The man standing by the edge of the cliff was at one moment wrapped in almost total silence, then the next, could clearly hear the mournful barks of the sea lions gathered on the protruding rocks and navigational buoys.

A newborn breeze began whipping his dark wavy hair, and he knew from long experience that it spelled death for this particular fog. San Francisco mists were tenacious, but the wind always won in the end, herding them out to sea, breaking them against the hills, smothering them in the valleys.

For a moment the man felt a sudden pity for the fog, helpless before the air currents. You're getting morbid, he told himself. Stop it right here, or you'll spend the rest of the day depressed. Besides, he checked his wrist chrono, lunchtime was over ten minutes ago... you're late.

But he made no move to turn and retrace his steps back to the dully gleaming parabolas and towers of Starfleet Command. After all, what good was rank if you couldn't take an extra half hour for lunch once in a while? It wasn't as if his aide, Lieutenant Thasten, would shake an accusing blue finger at him... the Andorian would appreciate the chance to catch up on her workload from this morning. He kept her busy... must remember to put her in for a promotion, he made a mental note. Anyone who can keep my office as organized as Thasten has for the past few years has earned the equivalent of a battlefield commission...

He began walking through the moving fogbank, immersed in memories, memories that crowded his mind whenever it wasn't fully occupied with work. The echoes in the mist sounded like a voice, and his mind shaped the sounds into the words he'd heard so often those last three months...

Jim... how soon can I go home, son? Jim, I hate this place... Familiar pain stabbed him, dulling now after six months, but still there. For a second he was back in that austere little chapel in Riverside, Iowa, knowing that in a few minutes he would have to carry the little box to the rows of wall crypts and slide it into the newest one... the polished bronze plate identifying the niche as the final resting place for the earthly remains of his mother, Winona Kirk...

The hiss of a two-seater messenger skimmer jerked him back to San Francisco and the present. It swooped down, hovering a half meter above the clifftop, and the pilot, a young lieutenant, leaned out, her manner at once respectful and urgent. "Admiral Kirk, Admiral Morrow requests your presence, sir."

James T. Kirk hastily swung up into the little snub-nosed vehicle, and the lieutenant lifted them with a rush even before he'd finished activating his safety field. Lands End dwindled away beneath him as he looked down; then, as the craft banked and turned east, Kirk watched the amber-orange towers of the Golden Gate Bridge emerge from the white fogbank like the ethereal spires of some fairyland.

"What's up, Lieutenant? Where are we going?"

"My orders were to take you to central headquarters, sir," the lieutenant said, her expression carefully neutral. "Admiral Morrow did not tell me why, though he did say it was urgent."

Minutes later, the skimmer docked in the central shuttle bay at Starfleet Command, and Kirk headed immediately for Morrow's office. He was still wondering why the commander, Starfleet, had summoned him, and spent a few moments mentally reviewing the status of his current assignments. Nothing wrong there -- he was ahead of time on most of them, and, barring bureaucratic snafus (a continual menace), all would be completed on schedule.

His boots clicked impatiently up to the lifts in the northern tower and the admiral scowled, seeing that all were in use. He forced himself not to fidget as he waited, his hazel eyes traveling impatiently over the magnificent vista of San Francisco and the Bay visible through the fifty-story sweep of plex filling the tower's lobby with polarized sunshine. The fog was completely gone, now, and Sol turned the pale bronze, gold, and white lobby into a shining marvel, broken only at ground level by splotches of green, vermilion, and cobalt-colored plants.

Come on, come on, he thought, forcing himself not to turn and stab the lift button again. Morrow said it was urgent...

The lift chimed softly, apologetically, behind him. "Level 43, Section 17," Kirk announced, stepping into the glassy bullet.

The lift deposited him in the corridor before the admiral's office. As the entrance portal hissed out of his way, Kirk was startled to find himself facing Lieutenant Thasten, who was just leaving. "Thasten, what's going on?"

"I brought your things, Admiral," she said, indicating his packed travel bag sitting on the carpet in the reception area. "Do you know when you'll be back, sir?"

Kirk grimaced. "I didn't know I was going until this moment. I'll let you know, Thasten. In my absence, please ask Commander Arex to attend the services for Captain Ikeya and the Constellation's crew."

"Yes, sir."

Kirk turned away to find Morrow's aide busy keying his voder. "Admiral Kirk is here, sir."

"Please go right in, Admiral," he said, almost immediately, then ushered Kirk into Morrow's private office, the admiral's travel bag grasped firmly in his topmost talons.

Harry Morrow was waiting for them, his dark, handsome face drawn and sober. "Hold the questions, Jim," he said. "One of our ships is in trouble. We haven't got much time. Cochise is standing by. I'll brief you as soon as we're underway."

Kirk nodded, taking his bag from the aide. Morrow pressed a button and a vid-screen wall swung aside, revealing a small transporter unit with two pads. As they stepped up, the aide spoke softly into a communicator, then Kirk felt the familiar sensation of displacement as the walls shimmered, then solidified, revealing a different location.

The first person he saw as he stepped forward into the Cochise's small transporter room was his former First Officer. "Spock!" he exclaimed, striding over to the Vulcan. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"Admiral Morrow sent for me," Spock told him. "I just arrived."

"You're looking well," Kirk said. "How long has it been?"

"One month, six days, seventeen hours, nineteen min--"

"The question was rhetorical, Spock -- as you very well know," Kirk broke in, grinning. "It's good to see you."

"And you, Jim."

"Gentlemen," came Morrow's voice from behind Kirk, "I hate to break up old home week, but we don't have much time."

Kirk turned to follow the admiral. "All right, Harry, let's hear a few of those answers you promised me. Where are we going? Why all the secrecy?"

Morrow nodded. "The secrecy is because you're still James T. Kirk, media darling, and I didn't want reporters getting wind of this situation. The last thing we want is a panic."

"A panic?" Kirk's good-natured smile faded.

Morrow nodded. "The briefing room is this way, gentlemen."

As they left the transporter room, the barely felt vibrations of the ship's engines altered, and Kirk realized they'd already left Earth orbit at full impulse power. Morrow wasn't kidding about being in a hurry, he thought, following the admiral. We must be halfway to Pluto already. Where are we headed? Which ship is in trouble?

Cochise was one of the Hermes Class I Scouts, with a usual complement of about 200 crew and officers. But as he trailed Morrow's broad back through the nearly empty corridors, Kirk realized that the ship must be running with just a skeleton crew.

The admiral led them to the small briefing room, activated the security screens, then waved them to seats. "We have a big problem, gentlemen. Something is threatening the Federation, something with a potential for destruction that is... limitless, I suppose. Worse than Vejur, much worse. The aspect of the problem that is our immediate concern is Alpha Centauri B, and the Kismet, a Federation courier ship which is now stranded about 100,000,000 kilometers from the star."

"Stranded?" Kirk leaned forward, frowning.

"Yes. It's been there for nearly sixteen hours now, helpless, its computer system entirely shorted out."

Spock's eyebrow climbed nearly to his hairline. "The entire system? Most... unusual. The backups are nonfunctional?"

Morrow nodded brusquely. "It's all part of what's happening to Alpha Centauri B. The star has been enveloped by a wave of time displacement that is speeding up its aging. It's consuming itself at an incredible rate -- converting its hydrogen into helium as though millions of years were passing in minutes. We're evacuating the population of Kent to Centaurus, praying that we have enough time to finish before the star swells into a red giant and engulfs its planets. That could happen as early as twenty hours from now, by some estimates."

Kirk stared at the admiral, stunned. Alpha Centauri was a triple star system. Alpha Centauri A was a yellow sun slightly larger and brighter than Sol, orbited by Centaurus and fourteen other, uninhabited planets. Alpha Centauri B was its nearby (thirty to forty A.U. distant) smaller, orange companion. Both were distantly orbited by a small red dwarf, a flare star named Proxima Centauri. Kirk had known that Proxima Centauri was the closest star to Earth's solar system before he could read.

Alpha A had shown signs of instability for hundreds of years, but its slight fluctuations were negligible on a stellar scale. Kirk had never heard of any problems with Alpha B -- under normal circumstances, both stars should have remained unchanged for billions of years. Alpha B was orbited by six planets. The most Earth-like one, Kent, had been settled by humans over a hundred years before. Kirk had visited there more times than he could recall.

He also owned property on Centaurus, only one system away... a valley he'd bought over the years and named Garrovick Valley, in honor of his first captain. Kirk had a brief, piercing memory of his little cabin there, the hours of peace and quiet -- of fishing in the Farragut River.

It took him a moment to find his voice. "And the Kismet? It's caught in this... wave... of accelerated time, too?"

"No," said Spock, positively. "Logic dictates that if it had been, everyone aboard would have been killed instantaneously. Aged and fallen to dust before they could even realize what was happening to them."

Harry Morrow was nodding agreement. "Right. Though they had to explain that to me in words of one syllable too, Jim, so don't look like that."

Kirk had been feeling stupid. "You'd think I'd have gotten used to it after all these years of working with Vulcans. So what is the problem with the Kismet's computers?"

"The EMP effect," the commander of Starfleet told him. "Any massive thermonuclear reaction -- whether it's from a bomb or a star -- causes an electromagnetic pulse that shorts out computers -- and communications. Anyway, the ship is drifting in space, and if it's there much longer..." He shrugged, making a curiously final flick of his fingers.

"Can we get close enough to the ship to rescue the crew without getting caught by the EMP effect ourselves?" Kirk asked.

"I don't know," Morrow said. "Communication is impossible, of course, since their systems are down. Our deflector shields will protect us -- that's how they're managing to evacuate Kent -- but as to whether we can get close enough to the ship to attempt a rescue..." He frowned, shaking his head. "Kismet got caught by the EMP before it had enough warning to activate its shields. All we can do is get there as fast as we can and see what we can do. My science staff is working on the problem of how to stay shielded and still use the transporter... though, as you know, we've never figured out a way to do that yet."

"I will offer my assistance to them," Spock said. "What is our ETA?"

Morrow's eyes flicked to the chronometer. "At warp eight, we should be there in about fifteen hours."

"Cutting it pretty close," Kirk muttered.

"We only found out about it an hour ago. Kismet was in communication with Kent when it was hit, but it took awhile for the news to reach us. Communications from the evacuation area have been sporadic and confusing, as you might guess."

"What percentage of the population of Kent has currently been evacuated?" Spock asked.

"Our last report said seventy-five percent."

"Hell of a lot of people left, then," Kirk said grimly. And then, because he had to know, he said, trying to keep his concern from showing, "I gather this won't affect Centaurus?"

"Alpha B may engulf or sear the outermost gas giants in the Centaurian system," Spock said, his quick glance at his friend acknowledging the reason for Kirk's anxiety, "but Centaurus itself should be far enough away to escape the heat. As to the cosmic rays..." He raised an eyebrow at Morrow.

"We've got special planetary shielding rigged," the admiral told them, "to deflect the rays. Don't worry, Jim, your valley will be safe. I still remember the fishing there."

Kirk sighed. "Thanks, Harry."

Spock steepled his fingers, a familiar gesture to Kirk from all the briefings they'd shared over the years. It meant he was thinking hard. "You said this was only one aspect of a larger problem, Admiral Morrow," the Vulcan said. "Is that larger problem, by any chance, connected with the loss of the Constellation ten days ago?"

Kirk stiffened, glancing quickly from the Vulcan to the admiral.

Morrow nodded, reluctantly. "Yes, it--"

The admiral was interrupted by the signal above the door flashing. When he keyed it open, a Tellarite ensign hurried in, saluting, her tiny eyes crinkled with anxiety. "This message just came in for you, Admiral. Priority One, sir."

Morrow reached for the cassette the younger officer held out. "Thank you, Ensign."

While he watched the admiral scan the message, Kirk's mind flashed back to Morrow's revelation about the Constellation and her fate. He'd known her captain, Carmen Ikeya, for over ten years. She'd been the first woman to command a starship, though now there were several others. He could see her in his mind's eye, almond eyes beneath unruly salt-and-pepper hair, a reckless, "give 'em hell" grin on her lined face. Whatever had happened to Carmen -- and it was apparently more than the official Starfleet designation of "missing, presumed destroyed" -- Kirk was willing to bet she'd gone down swinging.

His musings were interrupted by Morrow's soft curse. The admiral's broad shoulders sagged suddenly. "What is it, Harry?"

Spock, too, was leaning forward in his seat, though his expression, as usual, remained unreadable.

Morrow shook his head. "I just got confirmation that the Kismet carried a passenger. I'd hoped that perhaps he'd been delayed somehow and wasn't aboard..." he sighed, "but he is."

"Who is? What passenger?" Kirk was beginning to feel as if he'd fallen down a rabbit hole.

"I wanted to talk to the three of you together," Morrow went on mumbling, half to himself. "You're such a well-known team, so I ordered him to catch the next ship for Earth."

" 'The three of us...' " Kirk looked over at Spock, who nodded solemnly at him. "You're telling me Kismet's passenger is... Dr. Leonard McCoy."

"Yes."