Chapter One His shadow stretched before him in the blazing light of Chal's twin suns, but James T. Kirk stood alone.
For a year he had known that this day would come. This final moment when all he had worked for on this world would end in victory, or in final, ignominious defeat.
All or nothing.
It was the way Kirk liked it.
The hot suns of Chal burned at his back. But he did not let their assault deter him from what he must do --
Now!
With a sharp intake of breath, Kirk wrapped his arms around the wrinkled gray covering of his enemy -- the beast that had relentlessly mocked him all through the year.
His muscles strained. Sweat poured from him.
His vision blurred with the effort.
All or nothing.
And then --
Movement!
He was doing it! He dug in his feet, struggled as he had never struggled in his life until --
-- with a startling crack a band of fire shot through his lower back like a phaser burst and he collapsed to the soil of Chal, gasping in agony.
James T. Kirk's back had gone out.
Again.
And the malevolent tree stump, that last gnarled mound of deadwood that was the final obstacle in the field he had cleared, the field where his new house would be built and his garden planted, remained in place. Mocking him still.
Kirk tried to sit up.
His back made him reconsider the idea.
He lay there for an endless time, finger tapping the soil. The pain did not bother him so much as the forced inactivity. Where's Dr. McCoy when you need him? he thought.
Then a shadow fell over him. A very short shadow. The sound of its owner's approach so silent he had been taken by surprise.
"What'sa matter, mister? You having a nap?"
Kirk raised his hand to shield his eyes as he stared up at...The child's name escaped him.
"Who are you?" Kirk asked.
The young boy, no more than six, put one finger up his nose as if performing exploratory brain surgery on himself. "Memlon."
Kirk remembered him now. Memlon lived two farms along the road to City. Like most of the people of Chal, his features combined a suggestion of Klingon head ridges with a slight Romulan point to his ears. Like those of most children everywhere, the knees of his white trousers were smudged with grass, his cheeks with dirt.
"Do your parents know where you are?" Kirk asked, hoping to send him on his way.
"Uh-huh." Memlon nodded slowly as he withdrew his finger from his nose to hold up his right hand to show Kirk his subspace locator bracelet, a civilian spin-off from Starfleet's communicators.
"Then isn't there something else you should be doing?"
Memlon wiped his finger on the white tunic he wore. The tunic showed evidence of previous similar maneuvers. The child shook his head. "What are you doing?"
Kirk sighed as he realized that his back still wasn't going to let him sit up. So he rolled onto his side and pushed himself into a sitting position ... slowly. "I am trying...to remove that tree stump...from what will be my new dining room."
Memlon studied the twisted stump with the practiced eye of a six-year-old who had all the answers. "Don't you got a phaser?"
"No. I don't...got a phaser."
"My mom has a phaser." Memlon drew a bead on the stump with his finger, then did a remarkably realistic imitation of a phaser's transonic squeal, followed by a less-than-realistic "Pow!" The child looked back at Kirk with an expression of pity. "You want me to ask my mom if you can borrow it?"
"No. I am going to take that stump out by myself. With my own hands."
The child stared at Kirk as if the adult had suddenly begun speaking in an ancient Vulcan dialect. "Why?"
"Memlon," Kirk said. "Look around this field. Do you remember what it was like last year?"
Memlon held up his hand, fingers spread. "I'm six," he announced. As an afterthought, he held up one finger from his other hand as well.
Kirk took that to mean that Memlon had no memory of what this field used to look like. But Kirk did.
Three years ago, it had been like any other part of Chal's legandarily beautiful tropical islands: a slice of paradise, an Eden. Two years ago, the planet's plant life had been deliberately exposed to a virogen -- a hideous disease organism which had reduced Chal's islands to an apocalyptic landscape of brown stubble and withered yellow vegetation. Not a flower had bloomed on the planet in more than a year.
But then, in that same year, Kirk had returned to this world eight decades after his "death" during the maiden voyage of the Enterprise-B. With Spock and McCoy, and with Captain Jean-Luc Picard and his new generation of Starfleet's finest, Kirk had discovered the conspiracy that had inflicted that hideous act of environmental terrorism on the worlds of the Federation. With the interplanetary civilizations of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants on the brink of environmental collapse, he and his allies had helped the Federation defeat the Vulcan Symmetrist movement. McCoy came up with an antivirogen, and the ecosystems of a hundred worlds were now being restored through their own natural healing processes.
Kirk had not saved the Federation, but he had bought it extra time to consider the fate that awaited it. In the next thirty years, he knew, and now others did too, that a new strategy of expansion and exploration must be embraced to allow humanity, and all the people of the galaxy, to live as part of the galactic ecology, not as its exploiters and spoilers. Otherwise, the next time environmental crisis struck, there would be no last-minute redemption.
But that was a challenge for Picard and his contemporaries. Kirk had fought his own war, too many times. So he had once again returned to Chal, and to his love, Teilani.
The spaceman had hung up his rockets. He was on this world to stay. To find a simpler life.
He had found it in this small patch of forest.
It was no more than a clearing in the midst of newly reborn vegetation, alive with birds and insects, ringed by vibrant green leaves, wreathed with flowers of uncountable colors. But it was Kirk's new home, new world, new universe.
A year ago, Teilani at his side, her hand in his, their hearts entwined, Kirk had stood in this clearing and, in an electrifying moment of self-realization, understood that he was Chal.
Born of conflict.
Subjected to incredible trials that had brought both to the edge of extinction.
And now, against all odds and expectations, reborn.
Kirk had never been one to waste the moments of his life, though he had too often been driven by his heart and by the moment, not by his intellect and reflection.
Here in this field, where his mind's eye in that instant had seen a simple wooden home, ringed by a veranda, powered by a simple windmill, and had seen the crops in the plots of soil to be carefully tended, Kirk resolved that his life would change.
Teilani had looked at him then, into his eyes, and so great was their love, so close their connection, that Kirk had not had to explain a word of what had arisen in his mind.
"Your'e right," Teilani had said with perfect understanding "We'll build here. A house. A home."
And so in this field, Kirk had toiled.
Each tree he had cut down had been carefully stripped and planed to be used for that dwelling, so that nature's bounty wasn't squandered. Each tree had been replaced by a new seedling, precisely planted to provide shade for that dwelling and to maintain the balance of this world, so that nature was respected.
With a team of ordovers -- the horned, horselike beasts of burden of Chal -- pulling a hand-forged plow, Kirk had leveled the hillocks and filled in the depressions. He had carried the rocks that now strengthened the bank of the stream that flowed at the edge of the clearing. His skin had darkened benea