Spock before, though Spock is certain they have never met. While on the planet, Hikaru Sulu meets up with his idol, Captain Hunter, who commands a fighter ship, Aerfen, that had been his first choice for assignment. Kirk arranges for Sulu to transfer to the Aerfen. In the process Sulu will be forced to leave behind his lover, Security Chief Mandala Flynn. While en route to the penal colony, odd things continue to happen, such as Scotty seeing Spock appear in two places at the same time. Suddenly, a disheveled Mordreaux appears on the bridge, injures Braithwaite, and shoots Kirk and Flynn with a weapon containing a neurophilic metallo-organic substance, colloquially termed 'spiderweb', that seeks out and strangles nerve fibers, and are thus extremely deadly. Flynn alerts security before she succumbs, but they insist that Mordreaux never left his quarters, which is quickly confirmed. Kirk is rushed to sickbay where Dr. McCoy struggles to save him, but Kirk dies while Spock is mind-melded to him. The disoriented Braithewaite later sees the two terminate the life support that was maintaining Kirk's brain-dead body, causing him to suspect Spock and McCoy of a conspiracy plot. Spock determines from questioning Mordreaux that he was imprisoned for developing and using a time travel device. Spock concludes that the older Mordreaux who murdered Kirk was from a different timeline in which Mordreaux became insane and returned to take revenge on those he blamed for his persecution. Since Kirk's death was committed through time travel, Spock constructs a time travel device to go back and try to save Kirk, without success; this results in Scotty's earlier observations. Spock then tries to go even farther back in time to repair the damage to spacetime caused by Mordreaux's earlier time travel; the naked singularity was one of the first physical manifestations of this damage. However, Spock's efforts are complicated by the proliferation of timelines and the difficulty in modifying them. During one of these trips, Spock encounters the younger Braithewaite on Aleph Prime, explaining why the lawyer found him familiar. Ultimately, it is Mordreaux who convinces himself to halt the research. An even older version of the physicist, from a period where the fabric of reality is breaking down, goes back in time and joins Spock in confronting the younger Mordreaux, at a time just before Mordreaux first uses the device (which act will cause the naked singularity