(Disclaimer: These characters belong to others. Only the original ideas in this story are mine.)
“I don’t see what’s so goddamn great about Russia!”
Hikaru Sulu slammed back a shot of vodka and glared around him at the onion domes of Moscow. It was very late at night, still and quiet in the empty plaza. Trees around the perimeter were just bursting into bloom and there was the faintest hint of perfume in the air.
“The three of us made so many plans. Do you know how many years Uhura and I have been waiting around for you to retire? And you finally do and two days later – TWO! GODDAMN! DAYS! LATER! – you turn around and throw it all away!” Sulu’s voice rose to a shout and he punctuated it by flinging his glass away and watching it shatter on the cobblestones. He propped his elbows on the marble surface before him and buried his face in his hands. “If anyone ever finds out what we did . . .” His whisper now was barely a breath. “God help us, Pavel, if they ever find out.”
There was a hand on his shoulder, gentle but firm. “Come on, Hikaru, it’s time to go home.”
He shook free. “Leave me alone, Len. I’m trying to talk sense into Chekov.”
“Come on, Son, you know better than that.” Dr. Leonard McCoy spoke softly. His voice was ragged and tired and infinitely sad. “Hikaru, look at me.”
Sulu looked and kindly blue eyes met his black ones. For a moment he found himself transported, whisked back to the old glory days when his universe was the Enterprise and the future shone before them.
“You have to let go now,” McCoy told him. “Believe me, I know how hard it is. It may be the hardest thing you’ve ever done. But you have to. You’ve flown enough starships, Mr. Sulu, to know that sometimes there’s only one course open. Turn around, Hikaru. Turn around and walk away.”
“I don’t want to,” Sulu whispered. He had managed to grow very old, somehow, yet still his deep voice retained its strength and timbre.
“I know,” the doctor said again. “You have to, just the same.”
Sulu picked up his bottle of vodka. It was the real thing, not synthesized, and the best, the very best that money could buy. He looked around for his glass and then remembered he broke it, shrugged slightly and took a long pull from the bottle instead. It was still more than half full when he finished and he capped it carefully and set it gently on the ground at his feet. It was, by no means, the only such bottle that nestled among the lilies there.
Straightening easily – for all his years he was still strong and lithe – he stared for a long minute at the newly etched surface of the monument before him, the letters sharp and clear in the moonlight.
Admiral
PAVEL ANDREIVITCH CHEKOV
2338 to 2443
Commander of Starfleet
Boldly Go . . .
Hikaru Sulu turned at last, his back ramrod straight and his gait steady despite the vodka. He turned without a backwards glance and walked away from the grave of his dearest friend.
* * * * *
Sulu’s home was large and spacious. Being the three-time President of the Federation and acknowledged as one of the greatest leaders in history did, after all, carry certain perks.
He was standing in the living room, staring out the window and nursing a glass of juice. The room was nearly circular and the wrap-around window took up half the wall, affording him a panoramic view of San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. Sulu remembered another day, long ago, when the sun was breaking through the clouds in shafts of gold and the waters of the bay were rough and choppy. They day they all went swimming with the whales, long ago when Jim Kirk was alive. The day when even Spock was laughing.
“Are you all right?”
Sulu nodded absently, not bothering to turn and meet the possessor of that rich, British voice. Dr. Christian Ramsey came up beside him and stood gazing at the bay. Ramsey was the image of the devil incarnate. Tall and thin, he had a high forehead and a long, saturnine face. His dark eyes were deep set and a carefully tended goatee completed his devilish image. Behind that demonic façade, however, there beat the heart of an angel of mercy. He had been Sulu’s Chief Medical Officer aboard the Excelsior for years and then served under Chekov in that same capacity on all his ships.
Sulu thought of him as their McCoy, but Pavel had always called Ramsey his pet mad scientist.
“I heard you had an interesting evening.”
Sulu shrugged. “Leonard’s been waiting for me to break down. I thought it would be easier if I obliged him.” The former President sighed. He felt guilty about Dr. McCoy. He tried to tell himself that it didn’t really matter. As it was he hardly saw the man, surely he couldn’t be that important to him.
Deep down inside, though, he knew he was lying, trying to salve his conscious. He had seen the good doctor’s face at Pavel’s funeral and he knew how hard the man would take the loss of another friend.
Ramsey knew him well enough to interpret the sigh. “It’s not to late to change your mind,” he said.
“Isn’t it, Christy? Is that what I should do?”
Ramsey didn’t say anything and after a moment Sulu laughed sadly. “You don’t have to answer that. Of course it is. I can think of a thousand reasons – legal and moral and ethical reasons – not to do this. And I can’t think of a single reason why I should. But I’m going to do it anyway.” He took another drink of his juice. “Aren’t I the arrogant bastard, though?”
The doctor answered with another question. “What about Uhura?”
Sulu stared at him and yet beyond him, lips pressed together and brow furrowed with worry. Abruptly he let out his breath in a puff of air. “I don’t know,” he admitted unhappily.
An old-fashioned grandfather clock chimed in a corner and Sulu checked the time with a start. He set down his drink and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?” Ramsey asked.
“I’ve got an appointment in research and development. They’re working on something called a holodeck, a program to manipulate force fields with integrated holograms to create convincing three dimensional illusions.” Sulu offered the explanation ironically. They both knew very well that Ramsey was familiar with the holodeck project.
“But why . . .?”
Sulu’s face turned grim as he paused in the doorway. “Chekov left me a message with them.”
* * * * *
Sulu rode to the research and development complex in the back of a chauffeured shuttle. Normally he would have driven himself, but today he wanted time to think.
Looking back, he was amazed he hadn’t seen it coming. All the signs were there, sharply delineated under the floodlamps of hindsight. There was Chekov himself, suddenly deciding to go ahead with his long-delayed retirement, working like a demon to facilitate the command transfer and finish his memoirs and still find time to spend with his friends.
McCoy had shown up without warning. At the time Sulu hadn’t noticed it, but he realized now that the doctor had been quietly watching Pavel the whole time. And then Spock and Saavik had just happened to return to Earth just in time to say goodbye.
He really should have seen it coming. But he had not. If he had been at all prepared perhaps he wouldn’t have acted so precipitously when Christian Ramsey told him, in the hospital, that they weren’t going to try to save his best friend.
“He’s suffered a massive heart attack, Hikaru. All his systems are shutting down.”
“Give him a transplant! Put him on life support! Put him in stasis until you find an answer!”
“Sulu, I’m sorry. There is no answer. His body won’t support a transplant. He’s been,” Ramsey sighed, looking for words, “he’s been injured too many times and put back together too many times. His body’s aged a lot faster than it should have. He’s just run out of miracles.”
“You have to do something!”
“I’m sorry, Hikaru. He’s my friend too. But there’s nothing we can do. The admiral’s no code. He didn’t want to be a vegetable. He didn’t want to be kept alive by a machine.”
The Russian hadn’t regained consciousness since Sulu came in the room. He wasn’t even going to have a chance to say goodbye. The man who had controlled the fate of the entire Federation stood by helplessly, watching his best friend die.
Ramsey shook his head regretfully. “If only he were a younger man . . .”
Sulu looked up sharply. The doctor caught his eye and shock registered as he read the other man’s mind.
“Hikaru, no. It’ll never work.”
In that dark hour a desperate plan had been born.
* * * * * *
The door to the experimental holodeck slid open smoothly. Sulu was not at all surprised that Chekov had chosen to leave his last message this way. This had been one of the admiral’s pet projects – he was always interested in anything to improve the quality of life for those under his command.
The room was empty, walls and ceiling covered with a hexagonal grid. Creating the holograms themselves was ridiculously easy, Sulu knew, it was only bringing them to life that was hard.
He addressed the computer. “This is Hikaru Sulu. You have a program to play for me.”
There was a faint hum and the room flickered. Suddenly he found himself standing on the bridge of the Enterprise. It was the original Enterprise, he realized, NCC-1701 dash nothing. The door slid open and Chekov came in, crossed to navigation and took his post.
Sulu went over and sat beside him at the helm. Chekov charted a course and sent it to Sulu’s station. As he fed it in, the former helmsman smiled. It was the first course Chekov had ever plotted for him, long ago, when he was the greenest, most nervous ensign ever to don the uniform. There was the subtle thrum of a starship’s engines and the stars on the viewscreen lengthened into silver streaks. Finally the holographic Chekov swiveled his chair to face his best friend.
“You’re probably very angry with me now. Yes, I knew this was coming and no, I didn’t tell you. I’m sorry.” He sighed and looked down at the back of his hands, then raised a very direct gaze to Sulu. “There was just so little time left when I found out. I’ve valued your friendship far too much to waste our last few weeks with dread and regret. I’m sure I never really told you how much you mean to me. You are my best friend and my worst tormentor and my brother in everything but blood. Don’t let our plans go to waste, Hikaru. Go out with Uhura and roam around the galaxy. Visit all our old haunts and look up old friends. Start a few barfights and kiss all the girls. Kiss all the pretty ones twice, for me.
“It’s time for you to go, Hikaru. No good can come of living in the past. When this program is ended it will be erased. Keep me in your heart, my friend, but turn your eyes towards the future. And know that when your turn comes to follow this path, I will be here waiting to chart your course.”
Sulu felt a lump rising in his throat as Chekov smiled sadly at him, then flickered once and disappeared. The bridge disappeared around him, leaving only the chair he was sitting in. Sulu stood up and that was gone too.
“You’re a bully, Pavel,” he said to the empty room, “but I’m more a bully than you ever were.”
* * * * * *
“You don’t have to do this now, you know.” Clearly, Christy was having cold feet. “There’s no time limit now and no danger left except getting caught.”
“Putting it off won’t make it any easier on anyone,” Sulu said. “I’m sorry I got you into this, Christy. I can’t back out now.”
“And Uhura?”
“I’ve asked her to meet me on the Tardis.” This was the former president’s private yacht, where he and his two friends had planned on spending their retirement. Only he and Ramsey knew how appropriate the name was. “Just before we leave I’ll tell her everything. If she decides to come with us, she can. If not, she won’t have time to stop us.”
* * * * * *
Nyota Uhura, a tiny little white-haired lady, walked slowly through the corridors of Sulu’s yacht, worrying about one friend as she mourned another. In the six weeks that had passed now since Chekov’s death, it seemed as if Sulu was avoiding her. He was withdrawn and distant, unwilling to talk, and there was something odd and indefinable in his manner.
Uhura had given her life to service, first serving Starfleet and then the Federation. Twice winner of the Nobel and Z. Magnees Peace Prize, she was known as the Dove of the Federation. She had resolved more conflicts and brought more worlds into the fold than any other diplomat in history.
And she had no family and few close friends left. And one of her dearest friends was dead and the other was shutting her out at a time when she was sure he needed her as desperately as she needed him.
She found Sulu in the cargo bay, sitting on a wooden crate beside a gleaming metal cylinder. He was holding a small kitten on his lap, stroking it absently while he waited for her. She noticed that the bay was full, the Tardis fully provisioned for a long journey. She wondered if the provisions pre-dated Chekov’s death.
“Hikaru?” she said softly, “you wanted to see me?”
There were odd emotions in his eyes – trepidation and resolve.
“I’ve called you here, Uhura, to make a confession,” he said. “I’ve,” he considered, “acted rashly. And I’m going to do something drastic.”
Knots formed in her stomach and ice slithered down her spine. She looked at the silver cylinder uneasily. “What are you going to do with the stasis chamber?”
“It’s already in use,” he replied.
She crossed the cargo bay, leaned over to brush the frost from the viewing window and peered inside. Suddenly she became very still. When she spoke her voice rang with fury.
“You’d better have a damned good explanation for this, Mr. Sulu!”
Sulu smiled gently and reached out to touch her arm, understanding the pain behind the anger.
“I called you here because I mean to explain,” he said. “You’d better sit down, it’s a very long story.”
* * * * *
“Do you remember – this is a rhetorical question, I know you do – do you remember when we went back to save the whales? The actual trip through time, I mean. There was a minute, maybe only a few seconds, when it seemed to me that we were all getting younger. But when we got to old San Francisco we were the same age we started out as. So I thought that it was just an illusion. For a long time I thought that.
“Well, several years ago, just before I retired, I got to talking the whole thing over one night with Christian Ramsey. He said he’d always wondered why we didn’t get younger when we traveled in time. One thing led to another – we were pretty drunk that first time, I remember – and somehow or other we talked ourselves into experimenting. I had this little ship, you see. She has some modifications that aren’t apparent and with one thing and another she’s just perfect for time warp. And, I’ll admit, it’s an adrenaline rush, piloting a ship around a star and flinging it back through time.
“We were very careful. Of course, we were breaking the law every time we did it, but somehow we never let that bother us. We found a star the right size and mass, lost in a deserted area of space where there are no inhabited planets and no traffic of any kind, and we never stayed for more than a few minutes.
“What we found out was that when you time travel, your age does change, but there’s a special synapse in your brain that keeps your body from recording that change. Ramsey calls it the chronos connection. He also theorized that it would be possible to neutralize the chronos connection with a neural inhibitor, travel back in time to a pre-determined point – growing younger in the process – and then re-instate the connection and return to the present.
“We never really intended to try it, of course. The whole thing was just a question of scientific curiosity on his part and joyriding on mine. But then I got a call that Chekov was dying. I found myself standing there watching him die and it occurred to me that, in spite of everything, there was still something I could do.”
Uhura took a long time to answer. “How could you do this? I don’t understand. I was at the funeral. I saw him in the coffin.”
Sulu smiled slightly. “What you saw was a hologram. As for how we did it, we had a little help. Who isn’t important. Half of Starfleet owes their allegiance to Pavel. There were people who had the right connections who were willing to take any risk on his behalf.”
“Or yours, I expect,” Uhura added. Sulu was right about Chekov, though. He had rebuilt Starfleet from the ground up, coming into command of a failing organization riddled with corruption and incompetence and leaving behind a tightly-knit force of scientists and explorers who would serve the Federation for many generations to come. He held the personal loyalty of dozens of officers, from captains down to ensigns. The cadets at the Academy called him “Grandfather Pavel.” He was fond of showing up unannounced. They would walk into a common room or study hall one evening and there he’d be, the Commander of the Fleet. He’d help them with their homework and listen to their problems and tell them wildly improbable stories.
Uhura’s chest tightened as she thought about how much she missed the Russian. She could easily understand Sulu’s actions. But . . .
“It’s only a theory, Hikaru. You can’t possibly mean to test this on Pavel. It’s too fantastic. It just won’t work.”
“It’s not just a theory. It’s never been tested on a human, that’s true. But it has been tested and it does work. Uhura, do you remember Yamato?”
“Yamato? Your cat?”
“Yes, Yamato, my seventeen-year-old cat.” Sulu stood up and placed the kitten he was holding in her arms.
* * * * * *
“Running a full sensor sweep,” Sulu said. The small orange sun hung framed on the main screen. There was not so much as a tiny asteroid visible in any direction. “Sensors clear,” he announced after a moment. He looked over at Uhura in the co-pilot’s sear. “This is your last chance to change your mind.”
“And let you two idiots run around unsupervised?” She laughed shakily. “I do wish we could tell Dr. McCoy and Spock.”
“I know. I wish that too. But Leonard still holds an active commission and Spock is a Vulcan. It wouldn’t be fair to burden them with information that could only be compromising. I’ve broken a lot of laws doing this, Uhura, and now I’ve made you an accessory after the fact.”
The plan was for Christy to administer the neural inhibitor to Sulu and Uhura first. When they had begun their approach to the star, he would take Chekov out of stasis and give him the neural inhibitor as well. How Pavel would react to the time warp when he was already at death’s door was anyone’s guess. Hopefully they would be able to revive him when they arrived in the past. It was entirely possible that they were going to wind up burying a younger Russian.
When they returned to the present they would send out a false signal making it appear the Tardis had been lost in an ion storm. Ramsey, who was not listed as a passenger and would not be going with them, would be handed off to Sulu’s daughter Demora, the only other person fully aware of what was going on. The Tardis had a powerful cloaking device, her own transporter, and an array of weaponry normally uncalled for on a private craft. Believed by the universe to be dead, the three of them would disappear.
They would be castaways, in a sense, but they would be together, and young again, with the galaxy at their feet. Sulu had money, a great deal of money, hidden away in various caches around the Federation, and he had created half a dozen identities for each of them to use if needed. Ramsey and Demora would be their only contacts with their old life. They would be a trio of wandering paladins, exploring and seeking out adventure, watching over the fleet and the federation from the shadows. They would be like Arthur’s knights, waiting out their time in Avalon until they were needed again.
Ramsey came in with a small device, which he pressed first to Sulu’s temple and then to Uhura’s. He left and a few moments later his voice reached them from the intercom in sickbay.
“I’m ready.”
Sulu reached a soft, wrinkled hand over to brush Uhura’s cheek. She smiled back at him, suddenly feeling more alive than she had in years.
He kicked in the engines and dived at the star. “Engaging warp drive,” he said. “Time warp in T-minus three minutes.”
* * * * * *
Somewhere, in another part of the galaxy, a young Russian ensign was plotting his first course aboard a legendary starship while her helmsman groaned quietly to himself and asked how long he was going to have to listen to that awful accent.
Aboard the Tardis, Hikaru Sulu and Nyota Uhura stood in a corner of sickbay, hardly daring to breathe. In appearance, if not in mind, they were as young as their counterparts across the stars. But they had no time yet to appreciate their sudden return to youth. Pavel Chekov, lying on a bio-bed, was as young as they had ever seen him. But he was not moving and he was not breathing and with every passing second it seemed less and less likely that he would ever breathe again.
The readouts above his head showed brain wave activity, but in other areas they were flat and discouraging. Ramsey had run through all the modern methods for reviving a patient. Now he looked a Sulu and Uhura from behind shadowed eyes.
“I only know one more thing to try. It’s a very old method but it might still work.”
He took a pair of paddles from a drawer, spread a clear gel on them and rubbed them together to distribute it evenly. He bared Chekov’s chest, placed the paddles carefully, and pushed a button. Pavel’s body jerked under the powerful electric charge. The readouts remained steady. Ramsey administered a second shock with no more result.
“One last time,” he said.
He placed the paddles carefully and hit the button. For the third time Chekov’s body spasmed.
A single blip appeared on the heart monitor.
Sulu and Uhura held their breaths.
Another blip followed and then another. Ramsey pressed a hypospray to Chekov’s neck and the heartbeat steadied and strengthened. His chest began to rise and fall. The doctor sighed.
“He’ll still need to rest and get his strength back. I think he’s going to be all right now, though. He’s apt to be a bit confused. Have you considered how you’re going to explain all this to him?”
They came over to stand protectively beside him just as his eyelids began to flutter. Dark eyes peered up at them in bewilderment.
“How did the two of you get here first?”
Sulu took his hand and squeezed it and Uhura leaned over to kiss him on the forehead. “We came here together,” Sulu said. “It’s a long story.”
“Oh,” Chekov looked around, taking in the tiny sickbay and acknowledging Ramsey in the background. “And this is heaven?”
Uhura giggled and Sulu grinned. “No,” he said. “This isn’t heaven. This is Avalon.”
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