by L. A. Graf
When Spock had flown the Herschel down from the Enterprise, he hadn’t landed at the base camp itself, the way Sulu had done with the Drake. As a pilot, the Vulcan was steady and workmanlike but not particularly talented. Faced with Tlaoli’s unreliable gravitational shifts and jagged terrain, he had opted to put the shuttle down on the edge of the windswept karst outside the towers surrounding the base camp. It had been a fortunate decision, leaving plenty of airspace off to starboard for Sulu to now maneuver in. There might be a bump or two along the way, he thought as he aimed the shuttle toward the clearest line of sight, but hopefully nothing bad enough to breach Herschel’s hull and make her unspaceworthy.
With another deep breath, Sulu transferred the shuttle’s thrust from purely vertical to a slightly more upward-angled vector. With less energy devoted to fighting gravity, more of the engine’s energy could be converted into motion. Before it could begin falling back to ground, the Herschel began to surge forward, gathering speed as it went. It was still no more than a handspan above the ground, and Sulu could hear the [40] scrape of brittle shrubs and projecting rocks against the shuttle’s tough duranium belly. He didn’t take his eyes off the speed and altitude gauges, one of which was moving faster than he’d expected, the other of which seemed stubbornly stuck on its original value. Even with the warp engines powered up to their maximum level, he could hear the startled and questioning lift of voices from the back compartment as his passengers endured the brushes and bumps.
“There are several large rock formations ahead of us, at a distance of approximately sixteen thousand meters,” Spock informed him in a calm and measured voice. It might have reassured Sulu more to hear the Vulcan science officer sound so normal if he hadn’t known that Spock could speak just as calmly even when he was facing certain death. “We will need at least thirty-five meters of additional elevation to provide clearance.”
“We’ll get it.” Sulu had already begun converting their horizontal thrust back to vertical by using the shuttle’s own momentum as the catalyst to tip the balance between gravitational pull and upward lift. By slowly nudging Herschel’s nose so that it angled up into the darkening Tlaoli sunset, he had managed to raise the shuttle a full ten meters off the ground. If they could just overtop the rocks Spock had noted ahead of them, they’d have nothing but clear air ahead of them and plenty of time to trundle their way up to the Enterprise. But the thrust conversion was an excruciatingly slow process, and it wasn’t being [41] helped by the Motional drag of the occasional karst moundtops they were still brushing across.
“Thirteen thousand meters,” Spock said. Sulu glanced down at his velocity readout and frowned. Their speed had increased to six hundred kilometers per hour, giving them more momentum but also carrying them much faster toward a potentially deadly rendezvous with the karst monoliths whose dark silhouette had begun to obliterate the amethyst glow of sunset. He coaxed the shuttle into a little steeper angle and felt it shudder as it reached the outer envelope of lift that it could sustain. If he tried to angle upward any more steeply, the overloaded craft was going to fall right out of the sky. If that happened, even at the paltry twenty meters of altitude they had managed to gain so far, Sulu suspected not many of his roped-in crewmates would walk away from the crash.
“Nine thousand meters,” Spock said calmly.
Sulu swept a glance across his controls, racking his brain for anything else he could do to lighten Herschel’s load, or add to its slowly building momentum. As a cargo shuttle, there were no weapons he could fire to create additional push and using the shields to ward away the rocks would only reduce the power output going to the thrusters. He almost wished the shields were already up, so he could turn them off and divert the freed power to their engines ... and then Sulu suddenly knew what he could do.
“Hang on!” he yelled as loudly as he could, hoping the people back in the cargo bay could hear him. [42] He waited until he saw Spock brace himself more securely against the cockpit walls, then reached under his seat and fumbled for the switch that would deactivate Herschel’s inertial dampeners.
The reaction was immediate. Uncompensated gravitational forces slammed Sulu back into his metal chair frame and held him pressed there more strongly than any shock webbing could have done. He felt the pull of increasing acceleration in the muscles of his face and throat as he slowly wrenched his head around to read the shuttle’s thrust. The difference was small, but crucial: Horizontal thrust had suddenly increased by ten percent. Sulu forced himself to alter the shuttle’s angle of ascent slowly, oh so slowly, to keep the uncompensated inertial forces from tearing his passengers—and his copilot—away from their braced holds.
“Five thousand meters.” Spock’s voice hadn’t varied even slightly in its measured tone, despite the fact that Sulu could see the muscles of his chest and shoulders knot as the Vulcan fought to keep from being thrown across the cockpit. Only his superhuman strength kept him in place now. “We still need an additional seven meters of altitude.”
“It’s coming.” Sulu pushed the shuttle up to the brink of its lift envelope again, felt it shudder as it teetered on the ragged edge of staying aloft or plunging back to earth. Its nose wavered, seemed to duck—then one of Tlaoli’s random little gravitational shifts suddenly jerked it up and sideways, adding a full three meters to its altitude.
[43] For a long moment, the horizontal part of that jolt threatened to send the shuttle into an uncontrolled sidelong skid. Sulu had to drop the Herschel’s nose to keep it from rolling, losing back one of those precious meters to gravity in the process, but the upward jerk had also increased the shuttle’s momentum enough to let him push the angle of its climb up another five degrees. He threw a quick glance at the altitude meter and knew with a veteran pilot’s certainty that they were going to make it even before Spock said, “One thousand meters to the highest rock formations. It now appears we have sufficient altitude to clear them.”
Sulu knew he was right, but he still held his breath as the dark pinnacles of limestone loomed beneath them, far closer than his piloting instincts said any solid object should be to a shuttle now moving at over one thousand kilometers per hour. The Herschel passed over them without a bump or scrape of sound, but the wake of air she dragged with her hit the rock formations hard enough to send ripples of turbulence surging out in all directions. Sulu nearly lost his seat as the shuttle bounced through the suddenly choppy air. He grimaced and fought against the continuing unbalanced pull of gravity to lean forward and reactivate the inertial dampeners. It was only after he felt his straining body relax into the stabilized gravitational field that he realized the torque he’d been exposed to had woken up a familiar dull ache in his rib cage. Apparently, the Tlaoli chambers hadn’t completely healed the damage there.
[44] “Thank you, Lieutenant,” said Spock.
Sulu wasn’t sure if the Vulcan science officer was commending him for his piloting or just for turning the inertial dampeners back on again. To be safe, he acknowledged the comment with merely a standard, “Aye, sir.”
The Herschel continued to lumber upward slowly into the darkening red-violet sky, but now Sulu could ease her back from the precarious edge of her lift envelope and let her ascend as slowly and gracefully as a hawk circling on a thermal draft. The higher they climbed, the less Tlaoli’s gravity dragged on them and the more thrust he could devote to rising vertically. The inertial dampeners smoothed out most of the continuing gravitational jolts, allowing Spock to extricate himself from his uncomfortably cramped position in the corner of the cockpit, and move forward to scan the copilot’s instruments. Although many of them displayed the warning red that meant Tlaoli’s subspace interference had exceeded their maximum error levels, the shuttle’s homing transponder still showed a clear vector on its screen.
“Once we reach the edge of the atmosphere, we will need to alter course toward the ecliptic plane in order to rendezvous with the Enterprise,” Spock informed him. Around them, the sky was darkening with m
ore than the approach of night. The increasingly bright twinkle of stars above the rusty fringe of Tlaoli’s horizon told Sulu they were in the upper stratosphere now and would soon reach the point [45] where the air was thin enough to let them safely engage the warp drive. He cut back on the thrusters to keep from overloading them, and began banking the shuttle toward an ecliptic orbit.
“Are you finished torturing your passengers?” asked a Russian-accented voice from the passage connecting the cockpit to the cargo bay. Sulu didn’t bother to look around to see which version of Chekov had disobeyed Spock’s orders to stay in back until they reached the Enterprise. The caustic words were enough to identify him.
“Pavel, you’re probably the only one aboard who feels tortured when someone saves your life,” said a deeper and much more familiar voice. Despite himself, Sulu felt a small shudder crawl up between his shoulder blades. There had been no time, after the Shechenag captured and herded them through the caverns of Tlaoli, to really absorb the fact that he was not the only version of Sulu in the group. Now that it had time to sink in, Sulu found himself torn between intense curiosity and equally intense shyness, as if there were some point of etiquette that said he shouldn’t be allowed to know what he would be like a few decades from now.
He stole a furtive glance at the middle-aged man who had joined the older Chekov in the cockpit door, and was a little startled by how few physical changes he saw, aside from the lines at the corners of his eyes. The older man had the same trim build, dark hair and dark eyes that Sulu saw in the mirror [46] every day, but there was still something indefinably different about him. Sulu couldn’t tell if it was the erect way he carried himself, or perhaps just the confidence that let him smile so wryly at his younger self, but somehow there was no doubting that this version of Sulu had earned his promotion to starship captain. Even if they managed to alter the future and avoid the Gorn conquest of space, Sulu thought wistfully as he returned his gaze to his instruments, this was still the man he hoped he would turn into.
The older Sulu leaned over his shoulder and ran a practiced eye across the instrument panel to check their course. “Aren’t we going to reconnoiter the Shechenag’s main ship before we head back to the Enterprise?” he asked, in a voice that somehow managed to imply that it would be a very good idea to do so without actually impinging on Spock’s nominal position as commander of the landing party.
“The Janus Gate creates sufficient subspace interference that our instruments here are useless, Captain.” Sulu wasn’t sure if Spock was deliberately acknowledging the other Sulu’s superior rank by using his title, or if it was just a logical way of distinguishing the two different versions of the pilot from each other. “I had planned to conduct a long-range surveillance from the Enterprise.”
The older man made a noncommittal noise. “The Shechenag might take any approach as a sign we intended to engage them in battle.”
[47] “Or at least were disobeying their orders to leave the system,” Sulu added tentatively.
“Well, we can at least do a visual inspection.” Chekov leaned into the cockpit and jerked a thumb toward the starboard side of the cockpit window. “There’s the Shechenag ship, right over there.”
It wasn’t easy to see at first, but Chekov was right. A shadow of solid black brushed out the star-studded glitter of outer space, on a track that would soon intersect with their own. Sulu cut the Herschel’s thrust and mentally cursed his dependence on instruments to orient himself to objects in space. Even though he knew his proximity alerts and sensors were malfunctioning, he hadn’t thought to replace them with a thorough visual scan of the sky.
Apparently, the Shechenag didn’t feel a need to light their starships from outside for safety the way all Federation vessels were required to be illuminated except in times of war. In fact, there was almost no evidence of light on the ship at all—no windows or portholes or even rings of docking lights to mark the entrances to the shuttle bays it presumably had. If the older Russian hadn’t caught sight of it, they might have missed the alien ship entirely despite its massive size and slow movement. Either the cybernetic aliens saw in wavelengths other than the common visual spectrum humanoids tended to use, or they depended on their own instruments even more so than Sulu did. Which made Sulu wonder what would happen to them if they stayed in orbit around Tlaoli for too long.
[48] “What’s it doing?” his older counterpart asked after they had watched the ship for a few minutes.
Chekov snorted. “Besides moving through space, not much that I can see.”
“No, it’s the way it’s moving.” Sulu had noticed it, too, the subtle cycle of deceleration, drift, and acceleration that the Shechenag ship displayed on its slow orbit around Tlaoli. “It looks as if it’s slowing down to do something every so often, then moving on again.”
“Vulcans cannot see as well in the dark as humans do,” Spock said calmly. “Lieutenant Sulu, if you would extinguish the cockpit lights—”
Sulu found the small dial on the Herschel’s instrument panel and dimmed both his displays as well as the overhead lights. It took his eyes a moment to adjust to the intense darkness of space, but when they did the pattern of the Shechenag ship suddenly made perfect sense.
“They’re dropping satellites!” he blurted.
“Or mines,” Chekov said.
A dozen of the tiny objects strung out like dimly glowing pearls behind the main ship, tracing the curve of its orbit around the nightside of Tlaoli and back toward its retreating sunset terminus. The detached objects weren’t the only things glowing, either. Strands of light as iridescent as spider silk connected each satellite to the next, stringing them into a necklace that seemed to be held together by electromagnetic force rather than any physical agent.
[49] “It’s an integrated network,” the older Sulu said quietly. “Once it’s installed around the entire planet, it will probably generate some kind of defensive array.”
Chekov grunted curt agreement. “If it’s anything like the kind we installed around some of our colonies once the Gorn started attacking from space, it won’t let ships pass either way once it’s been activated. And,” he added grimly, “it looks to me like it’s being activated as they install it.”
Chapter Three
“HEY, where does this go?”
Chekov automatically detoured the couple of steps necessary to crane a look up the access ladder Kirk had leaped onto and gleefully begun to climb. He immediately felt stupid for having gone through the motions. “Uh ...” He barely knew where the main corridors and turbolift shafts led on board this ship, much less all the auxiliary conduits and passageways. Trying to cover his uncertainty, he hauled the boy back down to the deck with a little more force than necessary. “It just goes up to the next deck. It’s a maintenance access.”
Just in case he hadn’t sounded uncertain enough, his older self snorted with unconcealed disdain from where he waited with Sulu on the other side of the corridor. Chekov bit down hard against a flush of [51] embarrassment and tried to act as though he hadn’t heard. Bad enough that Spock had given him responsibility for leading their guests to a set of quarters he’d never seen before—it was far worse to have one of them be a man who must know every insecure and self-castigating thought that passed through his head. Waving to Kirk a little impatiently, Chekov said, “It doesn’t go anywhere interesting. Come on.”
Kirk tossed one last look up the ladder, but followed readily enough when the small group continued down the corridor. Hurrying a little to reclaim his place alongside Chekov, he asked cheerfully, “You have no idea where it goes, do you?”
Chekov didn’t look at him. “No.”
Kirk nodded as though that confirmed something he’d long suspected. “Do you actually serve on board this ship?”
Chekov darted an irritated glance at the boy, then softened when he saw Kirk’s playful grin. Embarrassed all over again, he admitted quietly, “I’m new,” and hoped the Chekov behind them wouldn’t have a
nything to add.
“Does that mean we’re gonna get lost?” Kirk actually sounded pleased by that prospect, glancing down the next intersection with an air of boyish adventure. “How many days do you think we can wander the decks without going past the same place twice?”
Judging from Chekov’s experience so far, quite a few. “We’re not going to get lost.” He tried to make the assertion sound confident instead of desperately [52] hopeful. But then the older man behind him muttered something to Sulu that Chekov didn’t quite hear, and he felt obliged to add, “It just might take us a few extra minutes to get anywhere we’re trying to go.”
In retrospect, he probably should have worked harder at making Spock understand his lack of familiarity with the ship’s layout when the first officer saddled him with this assignment. But he’d been the last one on an examination bed, in the midst of blowing as hard as he could into the respiratory sensor Nurse Chapel had just handed him, and Spock had lingered in the doorway only long enough to announce, “Ensign Chekov, please see that our guests are settled in these temporary billets,” before dropping a padd on the desktop and exiting as brusquely as he’d arrived. At the time, it hadn’t seemed appropriate to leap up and chase the first officer out into the hallway just to exclaim, “But I can’t even find my own quarters half the time! We’ll be wandering the ship for hours!”
Now, he was starting to regret that earlier inaction.
“Apparently, in this alternate timeline, crew quarters are no longer on deck six.”
The sound of his own voice—but colder, and not as heavily accented—sent an unpleasant shiver up Chekov’s spine. It was as if he were hearing his most critical inner demons projected aloud. Halting, he turned back the way they’d just come to find the older version of himself gesturing with mock courtesy down a side corridor that Chekov had just walked blithely past. He recognized it immediately as the [53] route they needed to take to reach the turbolift for the crew’s quarters, and wanted to kick himself for not making the realization just a few seconds earlier. The expression of tolerant sympathy on Captain Sulu’s face didn’t make him feel any better about it, nor did being forced to step in front of both men to resume his lead position as they turned the corner. “Excuse me, sirs ...”
