Belle Terre

by Dean Wesley Smith

  Chekov shot a startled look at Reddy. “What?”

  The pilot’s dark face was stiff with restrained panic. “We can’t pull up. We’re losing thrust.”

  Swallowing the sour taste of dread in his mouth, Chekov stretched in front of Reddy to punch at the blast controls for the atmospheric engines. The gut-sinking surge in acceleration that should have followed the thruster fire never came. Instead, coarse juddering slammed through the shuttle’s frame, and Chekov’s adrenaline spiked along with the temperature gauge before he could slap off the engines.

  “The intakes are clogged.” He searched the console for some encouraging reading with growing alarm. All he saw was olivium-sparked incoherence. “Can we recalibrate our sensors?”

  Reddy forced a quick reboot through the main shuttle computer, then shook his head stiffly. He looked almost too tense to breathe.

  Chekov dug behind himself for the seat restraint, settling back to belt in. “We have to slow our descent.” He didn’t even turn to look back at Plottel and Baldwin. “Get back and strap down.”

  “Using what?” Baldwin wanted to know. He sounded near to tears.

  Plottel made a calming little noise, and Chekov heard him tug the other man toward the cockpit doorway. “We’ve got the safety harnesses,” Plottel said evenly. “Come on, Kev.”

  They passed out of hearing, and just that quickly out of Chekov’s thoughts. The faint spasm of guilt following his silent dismissal didn’t last long—his years in Starfleet had taught him not to tangle up his concentration with things outside his control. That meant Plottel and Baldwin, Sulu and Uhura, any chance of a career on board the still-distant Reliant—

  Wind caromed against the shuttle with a sound like wild banshees. Chekov gripped the edge of the console, his stomach lurching up into his throat. “Inertial dampers are failing.” It wasn’t a guess.

  “Everything’s failing.” Reddy fought to bring their nose up, might have been succeeding, all his efforts drowned in the pounding of wind and sand. “No attitude thrusters, no antigrav backup—”

  Of course not. Not on a shuttle this battered by countless trips down through the dust storms of Belle Terre. Chekov tried again to boot up the sensor displays on the copilot’s console, blowing a glitter of accumulated dust off the controls and wishing cargo shuttles had anything resembling a survivable glide ratio. The front windshield writhed with sun-stained browns and reds. Hints of horizon, flashes of what might be water. Not sure what inspired his sudden urgent certainty, Chekov reached over to grab Reddy’s sleeve. “Raise shields.”

  The pilot spared him a single sideways glance. “We’re not a starship. The only thing these shields are good for—”

  “Raise shields!” Instinct, faster than thought. Without waiting for Reddy’s understanding, he pushed the shield generator to maximum. They’d been falling stern-first, dragged down by the weight of engines and emergency supplies. Now their rear kicked upward, hard enough to throw them both forward into the dual panel, fast enough to make the shuttle echo with the groan of metal fatigue.

  With an abruptness that made his gut clench, the shuttle broke clear of the dust and hurtled into shockingly transparent air. Chekov didn’t have time to wonder if this was the same clearing that had first lured Reddy to the surface, because their trajectory was taking them straight down into it. And at the bottom, far too close, he saw the glitter of raw, reflected sunlight. His instincts had been right—they were only seconds away from contact with the surface.

  Dust-swarmed inertial dampers struggled against the violent shifts in mass, but couldn’t entirely save them from the impact. It came with a weird sluggishness, as if the ground had somehow oozed around their shields instead of crashing into them. Then silvery curtains of water geysered up over the windshield, and all view of this world was drowned.

  OUR FIRST SERIAL NOVEL!

  STAR TREK ® STARFLEET: YEAR ONE

  A Novel in Twelve Parts ®

  by Michael Jan Friedman

  Chapter Eleven

  “I know,” said Matsura, “this comes as a surprise to you.” He glanced at his fellow captains, Dane included. “To all of you.”

  In their places, Matsura would probably have been surprised as well.

  He was an Earth Command officer by training as well as inclination, not one of the research types Clarisse Dumont had foisted on the Federation’s new Starfleet. And at that moment, with every Earth colony in the Oreias system threatened by a mysterious fleet of alien marauders, his military skills were needed more than ever.

  But this one time, Matsura felt compelled to pursue a different course of action.

  “Listen,” he told the others, “I may be on to something. I was studying the Oreias Seven colony back on the Yellowjacket a little while ago, and I noticed there were two hills at the edge of the colony.”

  “Wait a minute …” said Shumar. “There were two hills outside the Oreias Five colony as well.”

  “I’m aware of that,” Matsura replied. “I got the information from your first officer a few moments ago.”

  “Two hills,” Stiles repeated quizzically. “And that means something?”

  “It sure as hell might,” said Shumar.

  “So what did you see when you went to examine the terrain for yourself?” asked Cobaryn.

  “I’m not sure,” said Matsura.

  Zipping open the front of his uniform, he delved into an interior pocket and pulled out a handful of what he had found. They were fragments of something, each piece rounded, amber-colored, and brittle.

  “I did some digging with my laser,” Matsura told the others, “and this is what I came up with. The hill was full of it.”

  Cobaryn held his hand out. “May I?”

  Matsura deposited his discovery in the Rigelian’s silver-skinned palm. Then he watched Cobaryn’s ruby eyes glitter with curiosity as he held the material up to the light.

  “Any idea what it is?” asked Shumar.

  Cobaryn made a face. “Something organic, I would guess.”

  “I’d say so too,” Shumar chimed in. He glanced at Hagedorn. “Can we bring up a scanner?”

  “Absolutely,” said Hagedorn.

  Before two minutes had elapsed, one of the Horatio’s security officers produced the device Shumar had requested. Shumar hefted it, pointed its business end at the stuff in Cobaryn’s palm, and then activated it.

  “What is it?” asked Matsura.

  Shumar checked the scanner’s readout. “It’s a polysaccharide.” His brow creased. “One that we found in great abundance in the hardest hit area on Oreias Five.”

  “So we have a pattern,” said Matsura.

  “So it would seem,” Cobaryn responded.

  “Though it’s one we don’t understand yet,” Hagedorn pointed out.

  “True,” Shumar conceded. “But if one of the other colonies is near a couple of hills, and the hills happen to have this stuff inside them, there’s a good chance that colony will be a target soon.”

  Stiles scowled. “And if it is? You think we ought to sit in orbit and wait for an attack?”

  Shumar shook his head. “No, because the aliens might go back to Oreias Five. Or Oreias Seven, for that matter.”

  “So what should we do?” asked Dane, who, in Matsura’s memory, had never posed so earnest a question before.

  “We use our five good ships to hunt the aliens down,” said Shumar, “just as Captain Stiles proposed. That’s the best approach to keeping all the colonies from harm.”

  “But at the same time,” Matsura added, “Captain Shumar and I pursue our hill theory … and see if we can figure out why the aliens decided to attack Earth colonies in the first place.”

  Cobaryn smiled. “A reasonable strategy.”

  Hagedorn regarded Matsura. “You’re certain about this? I could always use an experienced hand on my bridge.”

  “Same here,” said Stiles.

  Clearly, thought Matsura, they didn’t think his services
would prove critical to the research effort. Still, he shook his head. “Thanks,” he told his former wingmates, “but you’ll do fine without me.”

  Hagedorn seemed to accept Matsura’s decision. “Suit yourself. We’ll hook up with you when we get back.”

  “After we’ve plucked the aliens’ tailfeathers,” Stiles chipped in.

  But Matsura had engaged the triangular ships, and he knew it wouldn’t be as easy as Stiles was making it out to be. Not by half.

  “Good luck,” said Matsura.

  It was only inwardly that he added You’ll need it.

  Alexander Kapono had been overseeing the spring planting on Oreias Eight when he was called in from the fields.

  As he opened the curved door to the administrative dome, he felt a breath of cool air dry the perspiration on his face. It was a welcome relief after the heat of the day.

  “What is it?” he asked Chung, one of his tech specialists.

  Chung was sitting on the opposite side of the dome behind his compact communications console, a smaller version of the one used on the bridges of Earth Command vessels. “You’ve got a message from Starfleet.”

  “Captain Dane?” asked Kapono.

  Dane had said he would be in touch when they figured out what had prompted the attack on Oreias Five. However, the administrator hadn’t expected to hear from the captain so soon.

  The technician shook his head. “It’s from a Captain Matsura. He says he’s on his way to take a look around.”

  “Doesn’t he know Dane did that already?”

  “He says he wants to visit anyway.”

  The administrator grunted. “I guess he thinks he’s going to find something that Dane missed.”

  Chung chuckled. “I guess.”

  To Kapono’s knowledge, Earth Command captains had never worked this way. It made him wonder if Dane, Matsura, or anyone else in Starfleet had the slightest idea of what he was doing.

  Cobaryn peered over his navigator’s shoulder at a pattern of tiny red dots on an otherwise black screen. “Are you certain?”

  “As certain as I can be, sir,” said Locklear, a man with dark hair and blunt features who had navigated an Earth Command vessel during the war. “This is almost identical to the ion concentration that led the Horatio and the Gibraltar to the aliens.”

  The captain considered the red dots. They seemed so innocent, so abstract. However, if Locklear was right, they would steer the Cheyenne and all her sister ships into a clash as real as flesh and blood.

  “Contact the other ships,” Cobaryn told his navigator. He returned to his center seat and sat down. “Let them know what we have discovered.”

  “Aye, sir,” came the response.

  The fleet had spread out as much as possible to increase its chances of picking up the enemy’s trail. However, it would only take a few seconds for the Cheyenne’s comm equipment to span those distances.

  “They’re responding,” said Locklear. “The Horatio is transmitting a set of convergence coordinates.”

  During the Romulan War, Hagedorn had led Earth Command’s top Christopher squadron—the one that had secured the pivotal victory at the planet Cheron. It made sense for Cobaryn to defer to him in tactical matters. Anything else would have been the height of arrogance.

  “Chart a course,” the Rigelian told his navigator.

  “Charting,” said Locklear.

  “Best speed, Mr. Emick.”

  “Best speed, sir,” his helmsman returned.

  Cobaryn sat back in his chair and regarded his viewscreen, where he could see the stars shift slightly to port. They were on their way to a meeting with their sister ships.

  And after that, if all went well, they would attend a different kind of meeting … along with their mysterious adversaries.

  Bryce Shumar wiped some sweat from his sunburned brow and considered the hole he was standing in—a ten-foot deep burrow that descended into the heart of a tree-covered mound of red dirt.

  Oreias Eight’s sun was a crimson ball of flame, its sky an immense vast blue oven. The colonists who had come to watch Shumar work—a collection of children and their caregivers, for the most part—didn’t seem to mind the relentless heat so much.

  But then, they had had a few months to get used to it. The captain had been on the planet’s surface less than half an hour.

  Training his laser pistol at the unusually thick tree root at his feet, he pressed the trigger. The resultant shaft of blue energy pulverized the root and dug past it into the rocky red ground below.

  “Why don’t I take over for a while?” asked Matsura, who was sitting on a grimy shelf of rock at the level of Shumar’s shoulders.

  The former Earth base commander cast a glance at him. It was true that his wrist was getting tired from the backlash of all his laser use. However, he hated to admit that he was in any way less physically capable than Matsura, who was a good several years his junior.

  “I’m fine so far,” said Shumar.

  “You sure?” asked Matsura.

  “Quite sure,” the older man told him. Setting his jaw against the discomfort in his arm, he continued his task.

  Suddenly, the ground seemed to collapse beneath the onslaught of his laser beam and Shumar felt his feet slide out from under him. Before he knew it, he was sitting in a drift of loose red soil …

  With something hard and amber-colored mixed into it.

  “Hey!” cried Matsura, dropping down from his perch to land on a ledge of dirt that was still intact. “Are you all right?”

  Shumar took stock of his situation. “I’m fine,” he concluded, though not without a hint of embarrassment.

  The younger man reached down and picked up a molded piece of amber-colored material about a third of a meter long. “Look at this,” he said.

  Shumar’s eyes narrowed as he considered the object. It was the substance they had been excavating for, but in aggregate form.

  “Same stuff?” asked Matsura.

  “Looks like it,” Shumar told him.

  He poked through the dirt with his fingers and dug out another fragment. This one had a molded look to it as well, and it was even bigger than the first piece. As he brushed it off, he came to a conclusion.

  “It’s part of a shell,” he said.

  “How do you know?” the other man asked him.

  “It’s too regular to be a random accretion,” Shumar pointed out. “And it’s not strong enough to be part of an internal skeleton.”

  Matsura nodded. “So how do you think it got in here?”

  Shumar frowned. “Good question.”

  “If the shell belonged to an animal,” the younger man speculated, “the thing could have burrowed in here and died.”

  “But, remember,” said Shumar, “we found evidence of similar remains in and around all those other mounds. So burrowing would have to have been an instinctive behavior for this animal.”

  “And it would have to have been in existence on Oreias Five and Oreias Seven as well.”

  Shumar nodded. “Which means it was transported here by an intelligent, spacefaring civilization.”

  Matsura looked thoughtful. “For what purpose?”

  For what purpose indeed? Shumar asked himself.

  He turned the piece of shell over in his hands, watching it gleam with reflected sunlight … and an alternative occurred to him. “On the other hand,” he muttered, “maybe it wasn’t an animal at all.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Matsura.

  But Shumar barely heard the man’s question. He was still thinking, still following the logic of his assumption. Before he knew it, the mystery of the Oreias system had begun to unravel itself right before his eyes.

  “Are you all right?” Matsura prodded, concern evident in his face.

  “I’ve never been better,” said Shumar. He turned to his colleague, his heart beating hard in his chest. “Have you ever heard of Underwood’s Theory of Parallel Development?”

  Matsura shook his
head. “I don’t think so.”

  “It encourages us to assume, in the absence of information to the contrary, that species develop along similar lines. In other words, if an alien has a mouth, it’s likely he’s also developed something along the lines of a table fork—even if his mouth doesn’t look anything like your own.”

  “And if you find buried shells …?” asked Matsura.

  “Then you have to ask yourself why you might have buried them—or more to the point, why you might have buried anything.”

  Suddenly, understanding dawned in the younger man’s face. “Then that’s it?” he asked. “That’s the answer?”

  Shumar smiled, basking in the glow of his discovery. “I’d bet my starship on it.”

  In fact, that was exactly what he would be doing.

  Aaron Stiles shifted in his center seat. “Anything on scanners yet?” he inquired of his navigator.

  Rosten shook her head. “Nothing yet, sir.”

  The captain frowned. It had been clear from the increasing integrity of the ion trail they had been following that the enemy wasn’t far off. It could be only a matter of minutes before they picked up the triangular ships and got a handle on the odds against them.

  Not that it mattered to Stiles how many aliens he had to fight. This time, there was no retreat. One way or the other, he and his comrades were going to put a stop to the attacks.

  “Sir?” said Rosten.

  The captain glanced at her. “You have them?”

  “Aye, sir,” his navigator assured him.

  Stiles got up from his seat and went to stand by Rosten’s console. Studying it, he could see a series of green blips on the otherwise black screen. He counted six of them.

  Good odds, he thought. Excellent odds.

  He returned to his seat and tapped the communications stud on his armrest. “Stiles to Hagedorn.”

  The captain of the Horatio responded a moment later. “I know,” he said over their radio link. “We just noticed them. I’ll contact the others.”

  “Bull’s-eye formation?”

  There was a pause on the other end. “You know me too well, Captain. Bull’s-eye it is. Hagedorn out.”

  Stiles smiled grimly to himself, then turned to his weapons officer. “Power to all batteries, Mr. Weeks.”