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But the sky above his head glimmered, with a sudden, distantly familiar splendor that made Soran catch his breath and look up.

A snake of brilliant rainbow light thrashed across the sky, so bedazzling with its promise, its beauty, that his wide eyes filled at once with tears.

No time. There was no time to search for Picard, no time to do anything save scramble up the scaffolding and prepare himself for escape from this temporal hell.

Soran climbed, eyes blinded by the ribbon’s blazing glory, by tears. His heart, once heavy at the thought of the deaths of Veridian IV’s inhabitants, of Picard, of those aboard the Enterprise, now seemed light, absolved of any wrong by the coming wonder of what he was about to embrace. Leandra…

What was the Terran parable? A jewel, a pearl of great price. Worth anything, everything to possess. Surely he, above all others, understood the tale. The nexus was worth any number of lives; who could put a price on eternal paradise? He smiled thinly as he pulled himself up onto the next highest peak, and stepped quickly onto the narrow metal scaffolding that bridged two plateaus.

Soon; soon he would be with Leandra, and as he pulled out his pocket watch—the only tangible remnant he had of her in this hellish universe—he stared into its blank, crystalline face and instead saw hers.

Halfway across the scaffolding, he glanced up, startled —not into his dead wife’s face, but that of a stranger.

A stranger, but somehow vaguely familiar, making Soran think he had seen his holo somewhere before. A human, hair chestnut shot with silver, wearing a Starfleet uniform Soran had not seen in almost a century ….

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“Just who the hell are you?” Soran whispered, but he knew the answer even before a voice replied behind him:

“He’s James T. Kirk. Don’t you read history?”

He whirled to find Picard standing behind him—then turned back again to gape at the grinning impossibility in front of him.

Yes, this was Kirk all right: the captain who had died when the Enterprise-B was trapped by the energy ribbon. Supposedly died—but clearly, Kirk must have been transported into the nexus instead. But what was he doing here, now… ?

Soran knew he had a choice. He could try to pull out the disruptor and kill one of them, permitting the other to tackle him. Or he could flee and kill them one at a time.

He grabbed the metal rungs with both hands and propelled himself upward, onto the rocks. As he scrambled away, Picard said below him:

“I’ve got to get to the launcher; the ribbon will be here in a minute.” “I’ll take care of Soran,” Kirk’s voice said.

The conversation between the two prompted a jolting thought: Picard had somehow been to the nexus, solic-ited help, knowing that he could not both reprogram the launcher and distract Soran. But how could Picard have gone to the nexus, unless…

Unless he, Soran, had been successful. Unless he had already found his way back to Leandra’s arms. Grief pierced him as he scrabbled over rocks and sand.

He would feel no pity for either of them. They were trying to steal his very life from him, just as surely as he would now claim theirs. Pain and madness heightened his agility and his

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senses; he moved quickly, easily over the rocks, and so silently that soon he detected Kirk’s stertorous, gasping breath nearby, on the other side of a giant rock.

He ran around it smoothly, pulling out his disruptor just in time to aim it cleanly at Kirk’s head. The human gazed at him with greenish-brown eyes that were intense, wary, but oddly free of fear.

“Actually,” Soran said, not bothering to keep the exultation from his tone, “I am familiar with history, Captain. And if I’m not mistaken, you’re dead.”

He had intended to squeeze the trigger at that moment—but at the instant the word dead had slipped from his tongue, his eyes had caught a blur of movement to one side.

Picard, leaping down from atop a rock.

The distraction allowed Kirk to rush Soran, who bellowed at the realization that there was no time to take aim, nothing to be done except to hurl himself backward against Picard—and send him rolling down a nearby slope.

The odds were better, but even so, the supposedly dead captain never allowed Soran the opportunity to recover and fire the disruptor. Instead, Kirk threw himself upon the scientist, coming dangerously close to knocking the weapon from Soran’s hand.

Soran struggled with a madman’s intensity, a madman’s strength, merely to hold on to the disruptor, but this aging dead human who fought with an odd glimmer of humor in his eyes was more than a match. Soran cried out, kicked out, lashed out—and yet Kirk shook off each blow and replied with one of his own. And at last he struck Soran’s chin with such force that the scientist almost fell onto the cliffs below, managing

at the last instant to clutch the chain-metal railing as his lungs emptied with a hoarse rush of air. His fingers nearly lost their grip, then through some miraculous intervention, managed to clasp on to the weapon.

Yet when he attempted to raise it and fire, Kirk struck out again—this time causing Soran to stumble, and step out upon empty air.

Mindlessly, he clung to the disruptor as though it could save him and, for a brief, breathless millisecond, clawed one-handed in midair for purchase, seeing before him in the wide sky another dazzling streak: the promise of the future, lost. Then came another instant of grace as he swiped at the chains, the railing, the bridge itself, and his hands came away with a thin lifeline: a rope.

Soran fell.

As he fell, he slid down the rope, one palm and the crook of one elbow burning as they gripped the lifeline, his knees and shins and feet slamming against the hillside. Above him, Kirk and Picard and the scaffolding receded with dizzying speed.

Abruptly, Soran bore down against the rope with his knees, and came to a lurching halt; there he dangled but a second, thumping against the red rockface, disruptor still in his tenacious grip, before he realized what he had to do.

Picard and Kirk had run off the bridge and were moving down the rocks. Soran did not care if they moved toward him; his greater concern was the launcher. And so he carefully replaced his disruptor in his belt, then reached for the remote launcher control pad. Balancing his feet against stone, he pressed the appropriate control, and permitted himself a grimly hopeful smile.