Future Imperfect

Continuing from 'Present Tense', the rescue mission sent out by Mr Spock in search of the missing Enterprise crew has also disappeared. Lost in both time and space, the three-man team on board the shuttle Copernicus are flung by the power of the vortex into a hellish future, where the Gorn Hegemony has all but conquered the United Federation of Planets. Stranded on a transformed Federation colony, now a Gorn mining outpost worked by human slaves, Helmsman Hikaru Sulu encounters an older version of a man he barely knows: Pavel Chekov, leader of the scattered bands of freedom fighters against the tyrannical Gorn oppressors. Nor is Sulu himself unchanged by this new future -- in this timeline he has become a battle-scarred Starship captain.

For Captain James T. Kirk, meanwhile, the vortex has had the opposite effect, as he himself is hurled back through time and into his former boyhood...