She stepped through at 0600 and the ship was alive.
Nobody had prepared her for the ship itself. It was not a recording and not a memory. The deck hummed under her boots. The air smelled right. Forty feet away, somebody laughed.
Homecoming hit harder than horror would have. She went to one knee against the bulkhead, hand flat on the wall, and fought not to weep. For two years she had done her job on a perfectly good ship that was wrong by one man. This one was right.
She had not been managing. She found that out in about a second and a half, 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. She 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.
Then she heard his voice, warm and amused and absolutely certain, six decks above her, coming out of a wall. Six hundred entries had not preserved that. The ship had.
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. She pulled again, felt something tear in her shoulder, and kept pulling.
And behind her, three 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.
* *
Six decks above her, 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.