The captain turned back to the viewscreen, observing the growing volume of microflare activity depicted along Earth’s orbital path. This situation—the Enterprise preparing to fly into a vast cloud of energy in hopes of communicating with the intelligence generating it, in order to protect Earth—contained elements that created a certain sense of familiarity. Doctor McCoy would most likely refer to it, inaccurately, as déjà vu.

Spock dismissed it as a matter of mere happenstance. One could find certain parallels between any number of unrelated situations if one selected the points of comparison arbitrarily enough. For instance, the V’Ger incident bore certain parallels, not only to this current situation, but to the encounter with Nomad a dozen years ago and to the rescue of the Mantilles colony from consumption by a sapient cloudlike cosmozoan a decade ago. It was in the nature of the intelligent mind to seek patterns and connections, but the process was prone to generate false positives that a rational thinker must disregard as irrelevant.

Yet another side of Spock—the side that his mother had instilled from childhood with an appreciation for art and literature—could not help but be struck by the resonance of his thoughts being drawn back to Nomad at the climax of a crisis indirectly precipitated by that probe’s assault on Nyota Uhura. That act, as traumatic as it had been for Uhura, had appeared at the time to be peripheral to the threat Nomad had posed, a minor atrocity compared to its planetary genocide in the Malurian system. Yet it had been that seemingly incidental act that now, through an unpredictable chain of circumstance, came close to fulfilling Nomad’s ultimate aim of wreaking destruction upon Earth.

It proved what Surak had taught: No life was incidental. The death of a foot soldier or an innocent bystander could have consequences greater than the death of a king or a general, for all lives were interconnected in intricate and unpredictable ways.

His thoughts turned to the Arcturian Warborn—a people created to be disposable, now seeking to discover their own value. Already, in their short time at Starfleet Academy, they had made a difference in many lives, for better or worse. Yet the value of their lives—of their participation in others’ lives, which came down to much the same thing—continued to be questioned, even by the Warborn themselves. One life had already been lost as a result, and there was no way to anticipate what further harm that loss could do in years to come, as its consequences rippled through the web of causality. Spock hoped that Admiral Kirk would succeed in resolving that conflict before more lives were ended.

For now, though, his own purpose was to ensure that the admiral had that chance. Even on separate missions, he and Kirk were still connected.

As we have been, and always shall be.

Chapter Nineteen

Starfleet Medical