She stepped through at 0600 and the ship was alive.
That was the thing nobody had prepared her for and nobody could have. It was not a recording. It was not a memory. She was standing in a corridor on deck seven of the U.S.S. Enterprise, and the deck was humming under her boots, and the air smelled the way it had always smelled, and forty feet away somebody laughed.
And she was home.
That was the assault. She had braced for horror and got homecoming, and she went down onto one knee against a bulkhead with her hand flat on the wall and had to fight, with her whole body, not to weep. Two years of a wrong ship and a wrong bridge and a wrong captain, in a universe that was perfectly good and had a hole in it exactly the shape of a man. She had lived in it and done her job and told herself she was managing.
She had not been managing. She found that out in about four seconds, kneeling in a corridor on deck seven, with the true history running through her like current.
Eleven minutes. She got up.
* *
The junction was thirty meters aft. She walked it. She did not run, because running draws eyes, and she was in uniform and she was a lieutenant and she was, to any crewman she passed, entirely unremarkable.
She passed two of them. One nodded and said, "Lieutenant," and she said, "Ensign," and did not break stride and did not look at his face, and therefore did not find out that he was a man who would be dead in nineteen months on a planet whose name she would never learn.
The intercom whistled. She kept walking. And a voice came out of the wall.
"Bridge to engineering. Scotty, I've got a spike on the helm board. Is that you playing with my ship again?"
*
Nyota Uhura stopped in the middle of a corridor on deck seven of the U.S.S. Enterprise and put both hands flat against the bulkhead.
She had forgotten.
That was the obscenity of it, and it went through her like a blade. She had spent two years building an archive of six thousand entries to hold onto a man, and it had not worked, because you keep the sentence and you lose the voice. And she had lost it. And here it was. Warm. Amused. Absolutely certain. Eleven meters and one deck away, in a chair, in a room she could reach in ninety seconds.
Sir. Captain. Sir, it's me. It's Nyota. And you don't know it yet, but in about four hours you are going to walk through a door, and you are not coming back. And everything you do for the next forty years is going to be right. And it is going to cost you everything. And there is not going to be one single person there to see it. Sir, please. Please just say something else.
*
The intercom clicked off.
Nyota Uhura stood in the corridor with her hands on the wall and her eyes shut, and she was crying, and she did not have time for it, and she did it anyway, for four seconds, which was all she permitted.
Then she opened her eyes and walked to the junction and opened the panel.
*
The relay was fourth from the left, third rank, and it was hot. It was already beginning to fail; she could see the discoloration in the casing where the surge would find it in about six minutes, and she got both hands on it.
It did not come. She braced her foot against the frame and pulled, and it did not come, and she pulled again and felt something tear in her shoulder and kept pulling.
And behind her, four hundred years away, on a plain of dead stone, a Vulcan was watching a countdown, and a Scotsman was holding a warp core inside a tolerance of nine percent with his hands actually on the housing, and a starship captain was standing perfectly still with his arms at his sides, waiting to find out how he was going to die.
The relay came out. She went backward onto the deck with it in both hands, and it was so hot it took the skin off her palms, and she did not let go, because if she dropped it somebody might put it back.
She lay on her back on the deck of the Enterprise and breathed.
* *
Above her, one deck up, the helm console did not overload. Nobody was thrown across the bridge. Nobody's hand went out to a rack of hyposprays that had not been secured. A man in blue did not go down on his knees with a cordrazine ampule in his fist.
Nothing happened at all.
She heard the intercom whistle, distantly, and a voice said something about a fluctuation, and another voice, dry and Southern and irritable, said something in reply. And somebody on the bridge laughed.
And Nyota Uhura lay on the deck of a ship that no longer existed, with a burned-out relay clutched to her chest and both hands ruined, and listened, for four seconds, to the sound of a universe with James Kirk in it.
Then she got up and ran.