Star Trek The Original Series The Folded - By Jeff Mariotte Page 0,1

the carnage, trying to send someone back who could offer aid to the wounded. In the time before she was born, her father had told her, people had cared about the troubles of others. That had changed, he said, as growing cities in the east had demanded ever more of the crops and livestock produced by the villagers. Feeding the cities had left the countryside hungry, and the hungrier they became, the less compassion they showed. Aleshia had been born hungry and had known no other life. She thought that people ought to be better than they were. In truth, however, little in her experience bore that out.

Several minutes later she had climbed the rocky slope to her house, gone inside, and barred the door. Beads of sweat ran down her cheeks, and her eyes stung from the smoke outside. The house yet stood, but it would need some work, as her father had guessed, and one window had cracked from the giant’s passing. Father would replace that, or not, as he chose. If she caught him in a good mood, tomorrow or next week, she might suggest it.

Until then, she would hope to keep away from him, to escape his notice as much as she could. This was Aleshia’s fate. Not a happy one, but she labored under no illusion that life was meant to be happy. She was hungry but not starving, and as healthy as anyone could expect. She had walls to keep out the cold and a roof to block the rain. She had a father to protect her against threats from other folk, though she sometimes wondered if those threats could prove more hurtful than his own attacks.

Happiness? That was for dreams, nothing more. Even then, she knew it was illusion. When she was happy in a dream, she wept upon waking, because she knew that it was imaginary and fleeting. It would never last. Was this really all there was in life, all she had to look forward to? Growing old amid hunger and heartache, living in fear of tomorrow and the day after that? Somewhere, she had to believe, things were better. Not here, not for her . . . but perhaps there was a way to find such a place, if it existed.

Those were foolish thoughts, however, that had nothing to do with her life or her future. She was locked in place, and she would stay there until she died, until a giant strolled through town and crushed her under his heel. And that, she thought, might be more merciful than more years of labor for her father and then for some other man, a husband. Knowing the road ahead, Aleshia sat on the stone floor, amid broken crockery and shattered glass, buried her face in her skirts, and cried.

And when she was finished crying, she got to work.

Two

“Captain’s log, Stardate— No, wait, never mind. Abort recording.” James T. Kirk rose from his captain’s chair and walked to the viewscreen at the front of the bridge, as if he could stand there and see home.

“Is everything all right, Captain?” Nyota Uhura asked.

“Yes,” he said, aware that he sounded as distracted as he felt. “Yes, Lieutenant. Everything is fine, thank you. It’s just . . . I had forgotten the date.”

“Stardate is—”

“No, I mean the real date. Back home.”

“The sixth of August,” Lieutenant Sulu said from his position at the helm.

“Yes,” Kirk said again. “That’s right.”

The captain peered into the darkness of deep space. The crew of the Enterprise would understand the date’s significance if he explained it. But they had a starship to operate, and the story would take too long to tell properly. It had started during his thirteenth year, when he and eight others witnessed the massacre of four thousand colonists on the planet called Tarsus IV.

Following that trauma, his parents had decided that he’d be better off on Earth for a while. His parents’ Starfleet careers didn’t allow them to remain planetside for long, but young Jim Kirk was dropped off at his uncle Frank’s farm in Idaho, a lush, green spread that shouldered up against the Rocky Mountains. He stayed for just over a month, and the period meant to be recuperative turned out to also be transformative.

While he was there, he accompanied Uncle Frank and one of Uncle Frank’s best friends, a rancher named Ned Devore, on a cattle drive. Ned had several hundred head of cattle that needed to be moved out of a high-elevation