by David Mack
Saru felt what he could only describe as a flash of insight. “A map!” He restored the original image of the Juggernaut. “What if these lines indicate that the information was being projected by the vessel for the natives to see and record? If that’s the case, maybe it was trying to show them where it had come from, in a format they would understand.”
Now young Troke nodded. “A constellation map.”
“Exactly.” Saru straightened with pride and towered over Troke. “Of course, there are numerous variables to consider before we can make effective use of this clue. We need to construct a virtual model of the galaxy as it existed approximately nine million years ago. We’ll need to account for stars that have gone supernova in the past nine million years, and rule out those that have formed after that period. We’ll also have to correct for the movement of this star system as it orbited the galactic center and chart its drift away from the galactic plane. Then, using its position as a center point, we’ll have to search for constellation patterns that would have been visible to the naked eye from this world at that time, and then compare any likely matches against known entities in the Federation Galactic Catalog.”
If that list of action items intimidated Troke, he didn’t let it show. Instead he smiled and said, “I’ll have it ready for you in ten minutes, sir.”
“Thank you, Mister Troke.”
As the science officer hurried back to his station, Saru’s console flashed with an alert of an incoming message on a secondary channel from the Enterprise, coded for his personal review. He accepted the signal and was pleased to hear Commander Una’s voice through his panel. “Saru,” she said, “I might have good news. I’ve analyzed the cave art and found new details surrounding the Juggernaut.”
“A possible star chart,” Saru said, “provided one can compensate for nine million years of galactic rotation, stellar movement, star formation, and supernovae.”
Her excitement abated, but she remained upbeat. “You already knew?”
He couldn’t help but smile. “Great minds think alike.”
* * *
Too many bodies stood in a paranoid huddle around the subspace transceiver. Kolova felt the weight of the crowd behind and around her as she loomed over the shoulder of Kiva Cross, the ex-Starfleet officer whom Tassin had cajoled into helping their ad hoc insurgency.
Cross, for her part, seemed oblivious of the pressure in the room. The vaguely Polynesian-looking young woman had put all her focus on the hodgepodge of gadgets she had insisted be hauled down into the bunker to facilitate her efforts.
Watching Cross work without understanding what she was doing made Kolova more anxious. She leaned closer and asked, “Is it working?”
Cross answered in a condescending deadpan, “If you mean, ‘Is it recording comm traffic to, from, and between the ships in orbit?’ then yes, it’s working.”
“So what are they saying?”
“No idea.” Cross looked up with a bored roll of her eyes. “We’re recording encrypted signals. Once we have a few more transmissions in hand, I’ll analyze them for cipher patterns.”
Her blasé attitude seemed to grate upon Ishii, who asked in his rasp of a voice, “How long will that take?”
A shrug conveyed Cross’s disinterest. “Minutes? Hours? Depends how chatty they are.”
Bowen leaned in on the other side of Cross and tapped his wrist chrono. “In case it wasn’t obvious, we’re under a bit of time pressure. So if there’s any way you could speed this up—”
“Keep your pants on,” Cross said. “This is just foreplay. Once I get a few kiloquads of data, the real fun begins.” She tapped a readout on the front of her portable comm console. “At the rate they’re flapping their gums, I’ll be ready to start cracking any minute now. So chill.”
Chandra the engineer poked his head past Bowen to get a better look at Cross’s setup. “Nice gear. Is that a Van Muren transceiver with a Ko-Mog subspace amplifier?”
His question earned a look of quiet respect from Cross. “Good eye.”
“What’s your decryption matrix?”
This time she side-eyed him. “Proprietary.” The curtness of her reply deflated what remained of Chandra’s curiosity, and he fell back into the anonymous ranks of the crowd.
Kolova, however, remained unsatisfied. “Are you sure you can break their codes?”
“Pretty sure. The Shenzhou is sending and receiving real-time holovids. Total data-hogs. Hard as hell to crack. And the Enterprise has some newer comm tech. That’ll take time.”
“None of that sounds encouraging,” Kolova said.
“Ain’t supposed to be easy.” Cross tweaked some settings on her equipment. “One thing working in our favor: Starfleet’s like any other big organization—slow to change. All I need is one legacy cipher in the mix and we’ll have an in.” She pointed at some indicators as they flipped from red to amber. “There we go. A possible vulnerability.” She started keying in new commands. “Give me another ten minutes, and we’ll know what they said in the comms we’ve intercepted, and then we’ll be able to monitor them in real time.”
Kolova clasped her hands on Cross’s shoulders. “Well done.”
Cross squirmed free of Kolova’s grip, clearly resistant to uninvited physical contact. “Just remember that when it comes time to hand out pardons”—she looked up at the governor with dark, accusatory eyes—“or to forget the names of your conspirators.”
* * *
Was there any more exquisite agony than being forced to wait to deliver good news? Saru stood outside the privacy-frosted doors of Captain Georgiou’s ready room, awaiting its reversion to clarity so he could deliver his latest report. His lanky frame felt energized with excitement.
The off-white opacity clouding the doors’ window panels melted away, giving Saru a look at the holographically projected forms of Captain Pike and Admiral Anderson, two human men who seemed very much to have been cast from the same mold. Saru pressed the visitor signal next to the doors and waited. After a momentary pause, Georgiou’s voice spilled from a speaker above the visitor button: “Come.”
The doors parted with a soft swish, and as Saru entered the ready room the hologram of Admiral Anderson faded like a lost memory. Saru stopped in the middle of the room beside Pike’s holographic avatar. Georgiou sat behind her desk, her countenance sullen, her left hand wrapped around her right fist. Saru could not remember the last time he had seen his captain in so dark a mood; his Kelpien senses felt her anger as she said, “Report, Lieutenant.”
Her tone inspired Saru to stand almost at attention, further accentuating the height differential between himself and Captain Pike, to say nothing of his advantage over Captain Georgiou. “Lieutenant Troke and I have made a major discovery, based on our analysis of the cave art I documented with Commander Una of the Enterprise.” He gestured toward the conference table on the opposite side of the ready room from Georgiou’s desk. “If I might be permitted to make use of the—”
“Go ahead,” Georgiou said. She got up and walked out from behind her desk. “Just make it quick, Saru.”
“Of course.” He led Georgiou and the Pike hologram to the conference table and switched on its holographic presentation system, which projected images above the table. Then, from the main computer, he accessed the file he and Troke had prepared. A spectral image of a star and planets appeared above the table and ever so slowly began to rotate. “Mister Troke and I believe we have identified the origin point of the Juggernaut, based on evidence already gathered by Mister Johar and his team, cross-referenced with clues the Juggernaut itself provided to this planet’s native inhabitants nine million years ago, and which they faithfully recorded.”
Pike squinted at the image. “That doesn’t look familiar. What are we looking at?”
“The Giunta system,” Saru said. “A Class-K main-sequence star with eleven planets that range from rocky to gas giants. It’s located in an outer sector of the Alpha Quadrant, on the spinward edge of
the Perseus Arm.”
“That’s pretty far out there,” Georgiou said. “Farther than anyone’s explored.”
“True,” Saru said. “But Starfleet has dispatched a large number of automated deep-space probes over the past few decades, mostly for the sake of creating rudimentary star charts. A handful of those probes were also designed for long-range cultural observation. That’s how Troke and I came to cross-reference our discovery of the Giunta system with intercepted alien comm traffic which identified that system as the former home of the Turanian Dynasty.”
Pike held up a hand. “Former home?”
“Yes, sir. All recent scans suggest the system is uninhabited. However, nine million years ago, it was the seat of a major interstellar hegemony, one whose sole remaining legacy is its reputation for tyranny.” Saru switched the image above the table to show illustrations of the alien vessel that had triggered their present crisis. “Representations of the vessel we know as the Juggernaut appear to be prevalent in the mythology and history of numerous civilizations located in that sector of the galaxy, according to transmissions intercepted by Starfleet and analyzed by teams at the Daystrom Institute and the Vulcan Science Academy.”
Georgiou folded her hands behind her back as she examined the images up close. “How often did these Turanians dispatch Juggernauts to other worlds?”
“Whenever they detected one worth colonizing,” Saru said. “The Turanians inducted worlds into their hegemony by sending each planet a Judge—or as we call it, a Juggernaut. If the planet had no intelligent native species, the planet was immediately claimed in the name of the dynasty. But if the planet was inhabited by sapient life-forms . . .”
The next part of his report was difficult for him to deliver without succumbing to emotion; its parallels of the horrors that had shaped his homeworld of Kelpia struck close to his heart. Mustering his resolve, he continued. “They were put to ‘the Test,’ regardless of their civilization’s level of development. It would seem the Turanians did not restrain their labors of empire with anything resembling our Prime Directive.”
He updated the image to show panels from the cave art he and Una had documented. “The Test was a series of trials designed to test the intellect and adaptability of potential new subject races. According to the legends, the Judges customized the Test for each new race it encountered. Those that failed the Test were deemed unworthy, and their cultures were exterminated”—he presented the image from the caves, of the Juggernaut laying waste to a broad landscape—“without delay, and without mercy.”
A somber nod from Pike preceded his next question. “And those that passed?”
“Were offered the chance to submit to the Turanian Dynasty and swear their allegiance—along with seventy-five percent of their culture’s output in energy, natural resources, and refined goods, with regular increases expected in each category, in perpetuity. Those who accepted the terms were declared subjects of the dynasty and placed under its control.”
Georgiou frowned. “And those who refused? Let me guess.” She nodded toward the cave-painting of planetary annihilation. All Saru could do was nod in confirmation.
“Well, that’s just great,” Pike said. “Even if Spock and your XO survive whatever that thing has in store for them, what are they supposed to do when it asks them to hand over one of our colonies to some alien empire that doesn’t even exist anymore?”
“It’s a question with no right answer,” Georgiou said. “Unless the Juggernaut, or Judge, or whatever the hell that thing is, is willing to listen to reason.”
“It hasn’t seemed to be in a talking mood so far.”
“No,” Georgiou said, “it hasn’t.” She sighed. “I just hope that whatever terms the Juggernaut offers Burnham, she doesn’t wind up making a choice on behalf of the Federation based on nothing more than her stubborn pride.”
“I was just thinking the same thing about Spock.”
Saru could not muzzle his disgruntled opinion. “This might not have been the right mission to assign to a pair of Vulcans.”
Georgiou scrunched her face in confusion. “Saru . . . Burnham is human.”
He shut down the holographic display. “With all due respect, Captain, I remain unconvinced of that assertion.”
* * *
As Thumper vanished yet again, and the next obstacle became visible, Burnham tensed. Not so much from fear, but from what felt like annoyance. “How many of these tests do we have to pass to reach the core?”
“A question neither of us can answer with certainty,” Spock said. “Though my estimation of our position comports with your expectation: we should be very close to the ship’s center.”
They reached the bottom of a curved slope in the oval passageway and gained their first clear look at the next impediment to their mission. A meter-deep barrier occupied the center of the passage, its core space alive with arcs of fire and flashing blades moving in a variety of directions—some slicing in wide curves, others stabbing into the middle from either side, and large circular blades with fearsome teeth rising up from the deck like deadly half-moons that never broke free of their horizon. Between the blades arced flashes of light in a multitude of colors. The overall effect was at once hypnotic and intimidating.
Burnham stopped a few meters from the deadly dance of blades. “Whoever concocted this has got to be out of their minds.” She lifted her tricorder and scanned the barrier. “Blades of tritanium. Energized plasma in magnetically controlled arcs. Pulses of high-energy laser light. All in overlapping patterns of coverage.” She set the tricorder back to passive mode and returned it to her side. “I was hoping it might be a holographic illusion.”
“Such mercy would seem inconsistent with the tests we have endured so far.”
“True.” She rested her hand on her phaser. “Normally, I’d shoot through this thing. But even with both our phasers at full power, we’d never be able to melt tritanium blades.”
Spock nodded. “Yes, most unfortunate. But perhaps not unexpected. Once again, the Juggernaut seems to know not only our strengths, but also our limitations.” He scrutinized the bulkheads around them. “However, each challenge has been solvable.”
Burnham watched him as he studied the overhead, and then the deck. “What are you looking for? You don’t really think they’d give us an on-off switch, do you?”
“Nothing so simple,” he said. He took a few steps back the way they had come, and then he squatted to run his fingertips along the edges of a deck plate. “But I refuse to think the makers of this vessel would have brought us this far only to leave us without options.”
She eyed the blades and flames with mounting dread. “What if the option is death? What if they mean for one of us to sacrifice ourselves to the trap so the other can pass?”
“That is a possibility,” Spock said, “but it would seem inconsistent with their penchant for symmetry. Note that the obstacles we have overcome so far all seem to have been created for two subjects. I suspect this one will prove to—” His fingers found purchase along the edge of the deck plate. “I have something.”
Spock pried the plate loose, lifted it off the deck, and set it aside against the bulkhead. Beneath where the plate had rested was an alcove approximately one meter wide, two meters long, and three meters deep. On its forward wall was a ladder; on its side walls were numerous levers, sliders, and large dials, all festooned with alien markings.
Looking over Spock’s shoulder, Burnham asked, “A control booth?”
“So it would seem.”
Burnham looked around the sunken booth, then back at the barrier of blades, and at once she realized the cruelty of the test’s design. “There’s only enough room for one person to work in the pit at a time, and whoever’s down there won’t be able to see the portal.”
“A most ingenious trial,” Spock said. “One of us will need to act as the observer and report to the other as adjustments are made to the controls.”
“Well, I’m glad you’r
e amused.” She swung her leg over the edge and found the ladder. As she climbed down into the pit, she said to Spock, “You’re the spotter.”
“As you wish.” After she reached the bottom, he said, “Begin when ready.”
She picked a large lever and began reversing its position. It resisted her efforts, and when she had moved it as far as it would go, she had to hold it in place. “Any change?”
“One of the blades on the right has ceased to emerge. But the rate at which the far circular blade rises and falls has increased.”
“All right,” Burnham said. “Let’s see what else we can tweak.” Straining as if she were trying to shift the weight of the world, she flipped one toggle. “Now?”
Spock replied, “The plasma arcs have retreated to the edges of the portal, but the vertical slashing blade has increased in frequency. Also, the right-side blade you suppressed before is beginning to resume its pattern.”
His observation made Burnham look back at the first lever. It was gradually reverting to its previous position. “Well, this is fun. The controls are geared to reset themselves.” She flinched as the toggle she had just flipped snapped violently back to its previous position. “Some faster than others.” She adjusted her tricorder to an active sensor mode. “I’m going to record my actions and how long it takes the controls to reset. I need you to interplex your tricorder with mine so we can coordinate our analyses of causes and effects.”
“Updating interplex circuit now,” Spock said. “Scanning the barrier.”
Burnham faced the left wall of controls. “Continuing adjustments. Call out changes as you see them.” She forced a large dial through a full counterclockwise turn.
“The forward circular blade has retracted,” Spock said. “Laser pulses have increased in frequency and intensity.”
“Dammit.” Burnham shook her head. “Every function we suppress enhances another.”
