On exploratory mission in unexplored space, the Enterprise enters orbit of the second
planet of the 416 Tausret solar system. Although the planet is technically
class-M, it’s barely habitable and looks as though it’s recovering from a
nuclear winter. Interestingly, sensor imaging detects clear evidence of orbital
bombardment by advanced weapons at some point 1500-5000 years ago. There may
have been a civilization here once, Spock says, but no more. They finish taking
sensor readings and are about to leave the system when sensors detect an
artificial object in a slightly-closer orbit around the star. They check it out,
and it’s a derelict starship!
The ship resembles a Starfleet design: a saucerlike hull
about the size of the Enterprise’s—only
sleeker—and two very long, slender engine nacelles. (Actually, it’s a Centuar-class) Even stranger, when they
zoom in on its markings, they see the words United Federation of Planets. The
name on the hull is USS Polaris and
the registry number has too many digits: NCC-69572. Scotty says that the design
looks a lot like projections of where starship technology will be 50 years from
now. Most interestingly, although all
the ship’s systems are shut down and it has no gravity or atmosphere, there’s
an array of solar panels hooked up to one of the ship’s power umbilicals. (In
fact, the sunlight bouncing off the flat surface of the solar panels was what
first alerted us to the ship’s presence) The only power utilization on the ship
is in a cluster of compartments near the center of the ship. A landing party
beams over and finds the power is being used to sustain 130 stasis capsules.
The capsules are beamed back to the Enterprise, and we learn that they’ve been in operation a very long
time, centuries at least. Only 7 are still functioning. It’s a mystery: how can
a ship from the future have been here for centuries? One of the survivors is
the Polaris’s Captain, Jack Shepard.
He’s very weak from the long time in stasis, but quickly realizes he’s in a 23rd
century sickbay. When Kirk comes in and introduces himself Shepard suddenly
becomes very intense and demands to know the stardate. “4318.2,” Kirk replies.
“You’re sure about that?” Shepard presses. “You’re sure it’s
not 4309?”
Kirk repeats the stardate again, gently but firmly. “Four.
Three. One. Eight. Point two.”
“Where are we?” Shepard rasps. “Are we in the Shath- the
Tausret system?”
“That’s right,” Kirk replies.
“4318.2,” Shepard says, sounding relieved. “4318.2. Then it
worked. Thank God it worked.” He collapses into unconsciousness.
Another survivor, a
Vulcan engineer named Storil, is slightly stronger. He tells Kirk that the Polaris is from approximately 70 years
in their future. It was caught in a wormhole and emerged 3000 years in the
past. The crew of 130 was much too small a gene pool to simply settle on a
planet somewhere and start a colony—and anyway, many of them were from different
species and couldn’t interbreed without the help of modern medicine—so the
Captain decided that everyone would go into stasis and try to wait it out. They
had to dump their antimatter pods, since the containment fields would never
function for 3000 years, and they vented the ship’s atmosphere so the vacuum
would preserve everything. Kirk tells him that Capt. Shepard seemed surprised
that the stardate was 4318, and not an earlier one like 4309. Storil raises an
eyebrow. “If this is the USS Enterprise,
and the stardate is 4318, then his relief is most understandable. I share it.”
Spock, who had been listening, turns and leaves. Later, Kirk
meets him on the bridge. Spock has a theory: Storil said that the Polaris was thrown 3000 years into the
past. And their scans of the second planet showed that it was bombarded with
advanced weapons about that long ago. A barrage of high-yield photon torpedoes
would perfectly explain the blast patterns.
Kirk confronts Capt. Shepard, who’s gotten stronger since we
saw him last. Shepard doesn’t quite admit to firing on the planet 3000 years
ago. But, he explains, the planet you knew only as 416 Tausret II, we knew as
Shathis, homeworld of the dangerous, violent Shathis Imperium. According to the
history he knows, the Enterprise was
never heard from again after entering this region of space, and the Shathians
later took credit for destroying it. But that wasn’t the end of it. By his time
the Shathians have allied with the Klingons and launched a genocidal war
against the Federation, wiping out races they deem to be inferior. The
Edosians, Hamalki, and Sulamid are gone. And the Federation is losing the war. What
would you have done in those circumstances, Shepard asks Kirk, if you suddenly
found yourself 3,000 years in the past with all the power of a starship at your
command, back when the Shathians were a simple Iron-Age society?
Not commit genocide, Kirk insists.
I’m talking about
preventing genocide, Shepard counters. The Shathians wiped out three races that
we know of, and who knows how many more? Their empire extends into areas of the
galaxy Starfleet has never explored. We both swore an oath to protect the
Federation, he says. So when you have an opportunity to save even one of its
member races from genocide at the hands of an enemy, aren’t you duty bound to
take it? Even if it means making a hard choice?
Find an alternative. Kirk insists. We can’t defeat our
enemies by adopting the tactics of our enemies. That kind of nonsense almost
wiped out the human race a couple centuries ago.
Shepard shrugs. What are you going to do, Captain.
Court-martial me? I haven’t been born yet. And now that history is going to
unfold a lot differently than the way I learned it, me and most of my crew will
probably never even be born in the first place. How can the Federation legal
system try a man who was never born for a crime that he allegedly committed
millennia before there even was a Federation?
Kirk seizes on the first part of this: Yes, history is going to unfold a lot differently
than the way Shepard learned it. Who’s to say it’s any better? The Shathians
were a major power; who knows what kind of unintended consequences their
absence will bring? For the first time, Shepard seems to stop and think. Maybe
you’re right, he finally says. But if you’d seen the things I’ve seen, you’d
have done exactly what I did. Limited power has been restored on the Polaris, and he returns to his ship.
On board the Polaris,
his remaining crew are doing repairs, trying to resurrect systems that have
been sitting inert for three millennia. Shepard holes up in his Ready Room,
hunched over his computer monitor doing some kind of historical research.
A while later, the Polaris
is patched up enough to travel, and her officers meet with Kirk and Spock in
the Enterprise briefing room. The
former are attired in 24th century Starfleet uniforms they
replicated for themselves (they’re the TNG Season 1 & 2 togs) . Now that
the Polaris is spaceworthy again,
Kirk says that the Enterprise will escort it to the Yard, a remote and secret
Starfleet facility where exotic tech is studied. The Polaris is limited to low warp speeds, so they’ll be taking it
slow.
Before they leave, Spock and Storil have a conversation. The
other Polaris officers are defiantly
supportive of their Captain’s decision; what about Storil? He’s clearly
struggling with it, but says that he sees the logic in Shepard’s decision to
wipe out the Shathians. Spock says “Three thousand years ago, many Vulcans
would also have seen the logic in it. But if our society had allowed them to
dominate, instead of turning to the teachings of Surak, Vulcan would not have
survived. And you and I would not be having this conversation.” Storil doesn’t
reply, but he knows Spock is right.
The Polaris
officers return to their ship, and they get underway. Everything is fine for a
few hours, but suddenly the intruder alert goes off—someone has beamed into the
Engineering section! But there’s no time to react to that because the Polaris veers off and goes to high warp!
Obviously its speed isn’t as limited as the Enterprise
crew was led to believe. Kirk orders pursuit, but the Polaris is doing Warp 12, they’ll never catch them. Security calls
to say the “intruder” that beamed aboard is one of the Polaris officers. Kirk orders him to be taken to the briefing room.
When he and Spock get there, we learn that it’s Storil.
Storil tells them that Shepard took what Kirk said about the
unintended consequences of destroying the Shathians very seriously. After some
research, he realized that in his timeline the Klingons suffered a major
setback twenty-five years from now when Praxis exploded. The fallout from that
disaster is the only reason the Klingon-Shathian alliance hadn’t already
overrun the Federation by his time. But without the Shathian alliance and the
subsequent war with the Federation, Praxis’ energy-production facilities might not be taxed enough for the explosion to happen, and the Klingons will therefore be
stronger and in a position to pose a grave threat to the Federation in 50-70
years. So Shepard has decided to destroy Praxis himself. The Polaris is fast enough to get there
before Klingon patrols can intercept them, and the crew was able to
construct a few quantum torpedoes. True, the Klingon defenses will probably destroy the Polaris during the attack, but not before they destroy
Praxis.
Kirk is aghast; this will start a war! Storil says that Shepard
believes the Klingons will be too devastated by the destruction of Praxis to
fight a war. Any military response will be weak and easily repelled by Starfleet, he’s sure
of it. What do you believe? Spock
asks him.
“I believe Captain Shepard’s conclusions are illogical.”
Storil says. “Because of his decision three thousand years ago, a new timeline
has been created with events that cannot be accurately predicted. This action
will only compound his original error, and will surely cost millions of lives
even if the resulting Klingon-Federation war is as brief as he believes it will
be. He must be stopped.”
Stopped, yes. But how? The Enterprise can’t catch up, but the maybe the Klingons could
intercept if they knew he was coming. Uhura taps into a Starfleet intelligence
drone near the Klingon border and learns that the IKS Devisor—Koloth’s ship—is patrolling the area. They’re too far away
to directly contact the Devisor,
unless they use the drone as a relay. But this will give away the drone’s
location, which won’t make Starfleet Intelligence happy. Kirk decides they’ll
just have to make it up to them by returning the Polaris intact.
Kirk contacts the Devisor.
Koloth is skeptical. Maybe Kirk is just telling him about the Polaris to draw him off his patrol route
for some nefarious reason. I’m telling the truth, Kirk insists. And if you don’t
listen, then you’ll be responsible for the destruction of Praxis and the deaths
of thousands of Klingon civilians.
There are no civilians in the Empire, Captain. Koloth
replies. We are all warriors of one kind of another. But he agrees to help.
Kirk then turns to Storil. We need a way to disable the Polaris before it can destroy the Devisor, otherwise there could still be a war. Storil identifies a
point on the underside of the ship, at the junction of the nacelle struts. If
they can hit it with a precise phaser or torpedo strike, it’ll knock out warp
power.
The plan works. The Devisor
is able to slow the Polaris down
enough for the Enterprise to catch
up, and some precision shooting by Sulu knocks it out of warp and takes out its weapons. Shepard accepts
the inevitable and surrenders.
Suddenly, the Klingons grab the Polaris with a tractor beam. Clearly this is an advanced Federation vessel, clearly an intelligence coup for the Klingons. Bringing it home would be a huge feather in Koloth's cap.
If you try to leave with that ship I'll blow it up, Kirk warns.
Koloth says he's not leaving empty-handed. He'll be in enough trouble when his superiors learn he cooperated with Starfleet, even temporarily.
But you don't have to. Kirk points out. If the Enterprise has the Polaris in tow, they won't be able to stop Koloth from scooping up the nearby Starfleet intelligence drone now that he has a fix on it.
Koloth begrudgingly agrees and releases the Polaris. The Enterprise
takes it in tow, and they
leave Klingon space. Kirk doesn’t throw Shepard and his officers in the brig,
but he does confine them to quarters. When the reach they Yard, Kirk &
Shepard have a conversation. Kirk informs him that Starfleet has decided not to
press charges. After all, as he pointed out there are legal obstacles to trying
people who will probably never be born.
What will become of us? Shepard wonders. You will certainly not be allowed to
join Starfleet, Spock says. Kirk is more diplomatic. Shepard & his crew
have a whole galaxy of possibilities before them. After all, for the first time
in 3,000 years they have no idea what the future holds.
I envy you, Shepard says. The Shathian/Klingon war had
effectively ended Starfleet’s mission of exploration in his time. Starfleet was
aware of peaceful humanoid races living under the Shathian yoke on the far side
of their empire, races like the Cardassians and the Tzenkethi. Maybe Kirk will
play a role in helping them to join the Federation.
Spock simply raises an eyebrow. Later, on the bridge, he and
Kirk talk of the limitless human capacity for self-deception, and Shepard’s
complete inability to see that he’d become the very thing he spent his life
fighting. Humanity may have come a long way, Kirk says, but that’s one
thing they’ll always have to guard against.
