STAR TREK: TOS - The Janus Gate, Book One - Present Tense

by L. A. Graf

  Kirk had a feeling he’d have no choice but to get used to it if he planned on staying with Kirk for the next five years. “Mr. Sulu, set course for Tlaoli, warp four.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Kirk settled back into his command chair as the ship beneath him began the purring hum up to warp speed. He could feel something subtly amiss, a deep trembling in her bowels that hadn’t been there three days ago ... three days from now. ... Something else for Scott to work on while they bided their time at Tlaoli, and while Kirk assessed the rest of their damage, physical and otherwise.

  “I don’t see what he’s so worried about,” McCoy grumbled, coming to lean his elbows on the back of [12] Kirk’s chair as the ship got under way. “How much damage can we possibly do to history in just three days?”

  Kirk gave a dark little laugh and rubbed at the knot in his shoulder where the antiviral shot still stung. “I think that’s exactly what he’s worried about, Bones.”

  “Enterprise to Tlaoli Base One. Come in, Base One.”

  Only silence answered Uhura’s standard hail. She frowned, then got a firm grip on her overactive imagination and reminded herself that they were no longer at Psi 2000. The bridge crew behind her wasn’t giggling or ranting or threatening to commit suicide—they had all been inoculated against the alien virus, and the ones most affected, such as Sulu and Riley, had been sent down to sickbay for an in-depth toxin screen and some much-needed rest. Even with second-shift officers such as Stiles and Leslie at navigation and helm, the ship’s command center had regained its usual quiet efficiency. And for further reassurance, all Uhura had to do was glance sideways at the viewscreen.

  The sunlit planet that the Enterprise had just swung into orbit around wasn’t silver-blue and quivering with tectonic instability. It was old and brown and done with life, worn down to nothing but dusty grasslands and rocky karst plains and thick rims of saltwater swamp around its drying oceans. It revolved around an ordinary yellow star and was accompanied by an ordinary natural satellite about half the size of Earth’s moon. The only thing unusual about Tlaoli 4 was the rose-quartz tinge of its atmosphere, caused by the high load [13] of windblown iron oxides and garnet dust. The planetary assessment team had assured them there was nothing strange or dangerous about that. It just meant that the landing parties would see some spectacular sunsets.

  Uhura knew perfectly well that this placid little planet had been given the highest safety rating possible, which was why the Enterprise had left its landing teams behind while it had gone on to its rendezvous with Psi 2000. There was no hint of peril in the humming silence of her open communicator channel, either, she told herself bracingly. With only a few scientists assigned to each of the three planetary survey teams—and only a few days available for them to describe and catalog as much as they could of an entire planet—the probability of someone sitting at the main communications panel when she hailed was pretty remote. She closed the first base camp’s channel and instead scanned through the frequency distributions of the communicators she’d assigned to the fifteen members of the landing party. She had bracketed the ranges so that each team overlapped only with its own members. That made it a fairly easy task to select multiple communicator addresses for her next hail.

  “Enterprise to Tlaoli Survey Team One.” She watched rainbows of subspace frequencies replicate across her board as the communications computer automatically generated the multiple hail. “Come in, Technician Fisher, Lieutenants Boma, Kulessa, and Kelowitz.”

  The reply came back so fast that Uhura thought she could still hear the hiss of the hand communicator being [14] snapped open. “Fisher here,” said a startled voice. “Enterprise, are you in system?”

  “Yes, we arrived early. Captain Kirk thought—”

  “Is the captain on the bridge?” Fisher cut across her explanation with much more urgency than politeness.

  “Affirmative.” Uhura swung away from her panel and caught the bright hazel glance that immediately darted her way. In the months she’d served under James T. Kirk, Uhura had come to depend on her captain’s attentiveness to his bridge crew so much that she had internalized it into her own actions. A slight turn of her head and shoulder would get her noticed in a moment or two, whenever Kirk finished signing orders or conferring with his line officers. A more complete swing got her a quicker look, and a rapid pivot always got his full, focused attention. “Captain, Geological Technician Fisher of Survey Team One needs to speak with you.”

  “Put him through,” Kirk said, and Uhura toggled the open communicator channel into the main bridge speaker. “Report, Mr. Fisher.”

  “We’ve got a problem, Captain.” One thing Kirk had successfully pounded into his crew over the past year was to waste no time with regulation greetings in times of crisis. “Actually, we have several problems, sir, but the most urgent one is that we’ve lost touch with Survey Team Three.”

  Kirk frowned across the bridge at Spock. “Where was Team Three assigned?”

  The Vulcan Science Officer opened his mouth, then clamped it shut again and tapped a query into his science panel. The chaotic frenzy of their visit to Psi 2000 [15] had apparently erased even his supernaturally good memory of what the different Tlaoli landing parties had been sent down to do.

  Before he could respond, Fisher answered for him through the com channel. “That was the cave exploration team, Captain. They were originally set down on that big karst plateau in the southern continent, but yesterday we flew them up to check on a smaller karst terrain in the northern continent, due west of where the wetland team is stationed.”

  Kirk’s frown deepened. “Why did you reassign Team Three’s location, Mr. Fisher? I believe your standing orders were to stay near your base camps until the Enterprise returned.”

  “Yes, sir, I know.” There was a pause and a mutter of inaudible conversation in the background behind Fisher, as if his fellow scientists were suggesting things for him to say. Uhura could hear the geologist take a deep breath and plunge back into speech as if speed could somehow make his confession less painful. “Captain, we did disobey our standing orders. But it was because of what we found down here after the Enterprise left the system. We were afraid there might be a safety risk, sir, to the ship.”

  “A safety risk to the research shuttle you took down to the planet’s surface, Mr. Fisher?”

  “No, sir,” the geologist said firmly. “A safety risk to the Enterprise.”

  Uhura glanced over her shoulder in surprise at the drab brown planet on the viewscreen, but saw nothing more threatening on its ancient and worn surface than she had a few minutes ago. She noticed Captain Kirk [16] gazing up at Tlaoli with a similar look of incomprehension. When he spoke, however, his voice held none of the doubt that was so clearly expressed on his face. A good commander like Kirk never passed premature judgement on his crew’s decisions, especially when they were on the surface and he was still on board.

  “What made you think the Enterprise might be in danger, Mr. Fisher?”

  The geologist paused to listen to another advisory murmur of voices behind him. “Sir, we think you and Mr. Spock should see this for yourselves. Request permission to uplink our visual tricorder’s data buffer through my communicator to the main viewscreen.”

  Kirk lifted an eyebrow at Uhura, and she nodded back at him while her fingers danced across the communications panel, widening the bandwidth she’d assigned to Fisher’s handheld communicator so it wouldn’t choke on the much thicker flow of a visual record. “Permission granted. Spock, make sure we get this in the main computer log.”

  The Vulcan science officer gave his captain the kind of austere look that said the command had been unnecessary, but all he replied was, “Aye, sir.”

  There was a pause as the data stream from the planet spooled itself into the viewscreen’s buffer, then the dusty little planet abruptly vanished. It was replaced by a much more grainy image of sand dunes rippling into the horizon. The image panned slowly to the ri
ght, over a long, pale scar where a lake or sea had dried up into what looked like endless salt flats, then paused a moment before zooming in to focus on an anomalous patch [17] of darkness in the midst of all that white. The tricorder continued to increase its magnification until each pixel of the image covered a hand’s width of the viewscreen. Even with that lack of resolution, Uhura could clearly see the intricate lines and curves of something unnatural, some shape that had been constructed rather than deposited or eroded.

  “Alien ruins?” Kirk said to Spock.

  The science officer lifted an eyebrow at the confusing angles and lines now frozen on the screen, waiting for the next spool of data to be received. “That would not be impossible, Captain, but I admit that it would surprise me. Our initial long-range surveys of Tlaoli indicated that its ecosystems have been incapable of sustaining animal life for several millions of years. Very few structures, whether natural or constructed, can withstand surface erosion for that long.”

  “So we don’t know if the planet was ever occupied?”

  “On the contrary,” Spock said, with the sidelong look of reproof he saved for what he considered particularly egregious leaps of illogic. “Our preliminary studies detected an anomalous lack of near-surface metal deposits, and absolutely no trace of fossil fuels or enriched nuclear isotopes anywhere in the upper crust. Based on that, we assumed that an alien race did indeed occupy Tlaoli once, millions of years ago, but left when its resources became exhausted and its ecosystems began to collapse.”

  “Or went extinct,” Kirk said wryly. “So what the hell is that?”

  Uhura glanced over her shoulder again. The still [18] image on the screen rippled and was replaced by another, sharper image obviously taken at much closer range. She could clearly make out the smooth curves of the main hemispherical structure rising from the salt deposits of the former lake. Whatever it was, it looked to Uhura as if the lake had actually dried up around it, embedding the lower parts completely in its evaporated deposits. The tricorder image scanned a little further along, then paused to focus in on two dark towers rising from the salt flats in the background. It took her a minute to recognize them as the ends of pointed fins that looked unmistakably like shorter and bulkier versions of the Enterprise’s warp nacelles.

  “Captain, that’s a ship!” said Lieutenant Leslie from the helm, startled out of his usual phlegmatic silence.

  “And it’s not an atmospheric shuttle, either,” Kirk agreed grimly. “It looks like a deep space vessel. Spock, can the computer identify its origin based on the design?”

  The science officer tapped a quick inquiry into his computer monitor and watched the results flicker across his screen at rates faster than any human could have absorbed. “It appears similar to the starships constructed by ancient civilizations we know from the galactic core, Captain, but it cannot be assigned to any known race or planet.”

  “Hmm.” Kirk watched the image until it flickered and disappeared, replaced once again by the undistinguished brown disk that was Tlaoli 4. “Was that the end of the tricorder transmission, Lieutenant Uhura?”

  “Aye, sir.” She shrank the communicator’s data feed back down to the optimum range for voice transmission. [19] “Survey Team One should be back on line now, Captain.”

  “Mr. Fisher,” said Kirk crisply. “Where and when did you find that ship?”

  “About fifty kilometers from our base camp, sir, two days after you left the system. It is a starship, isn’t it?”

  “We think so,” Kirk agreed. “But starships have been known to crash on planets for lots of reasons, Mr. Fisher. It might have been shot down in some kind of war, or been forced to land by a mechanical systems failure. It doesn’t necessarily mean the planet it landed on is dangerous.”

  The geologist’s answer came back so readily that Uhura knew he must have anticipated Kirk’s remark. “That’s what we thought, too, sir, when we first saw it. We didn’t even go any closer to look at it, we just marked it on our survey sheets for a later archeological survey to examine. But after we found the other remains, we started to wonder—”

  “Other remains?” Kirk demanded. “Of other starships?”

  “Yes, sir.” Fisher paused, and this time there wasn’t so much as a whisper of voices to be heard in the background. The explanation for the Survey Team’s violated orders had obviously reached a crucial stage. “We were doing a geophysical survey of the salt flats, Captain, when we first spotted that thing, so we knew what its electromagnetic signature looked like. And for the next two days, we kept seeing what looked like that same signature over and over again, but it was always deep below ground so we couldn’t be sure. Then we started surveying the smaller karst plateau on the northern [20] continent, and we could actually see down to where the signature was coming from, at the bottom of a couple sinkholes. A lot of them weren’t very well preserved, and none of them looked the same as any of the others, but they were all definitely spaceships.” Fisher paused to take a deep breath. “Sir, I know it sounds unbelievable ... but including the signatures we detected under the salt deposits, we think at least nineteen different starships have crashed down here on Tlaoli.”

  Chapter Two

  THE BRIDGE OF THE Enterprise was never truly silent, with the white background noise of the ship’s life-support systems overlain by the clicks and taps of crew members interacting with their various data stations. But there were times, like now, when the bridge crew seemed to take a collective breath in such unison that Kirk felt as if silence had abruptly descended.

  Spock was right, he thought, a bit wearily. We should have hidden out in deep space and just waited for the rest of the universe to catch up to our timeline. But even as he thought it, he knew that a three-day delay in arriving at Tlaoli wouldn’t have helped the situation. If the Enterprise had arrived three days from now to find the landing parties so distressed and the cave survey team missing for nearly a week, Kirk would never have [22] forgiven himself for twiddling his thumbs in safety only a few light-years away.

  Still, the thought of plunging back into danger only a few hours after their escape from Psi 2000 was more than Kirk had hoped to ask from his crew.

  But the Enterprise was on a deep-space mission, and everyone on board her had been forced to learn how to weather one crisis after another without losing focus or succumbing to fear. After only a moment of dismayed silence, the bridge crew went back steadfastly to their monitors and station displays. Kirk saw Uhura run what she probably meant to be a discreet safety check on her station, even as she filtered a faint hiss of encroaching static from Fisher’s signal.

  “Very well, Mr. Fisher.” It was the standard acknowledgment to a subordinate’s report, but Kirk tried to make it sound no more formal or full of tension than a simple “so far, so good.” “I see why you thought there might be a problem. But I still don’t understand why you moved Team Three to a new location.”

  “Our spatial analysis showed an unusual concentration of wrecks in and around the northern karst terrain, Captain.” Fisher launched into his explanation with an ease that made Kirk suspect he appreciated his captain’s calm reaction to the news. “Lieutenant Boma’s wetland survey team had noticed a lot of subspace static interfering with their tricorder readings whenever they got close to that same area, so we suspected that the karst dissolution had allowed some kind of late-stage ore deposit to form there. That could have concentrated enough transperiodic elements like dilithium or trifluorine to [23] generate a natural subspace aperture.” The geologist’s voice had taken on the slightly pedantic rhythm of a researcher who was already forming his hypothesis into a potential scientific paper. “A natural subspace anomaly like that was found on the dilithium-enriched asteroid that started the prospecting rush in Beta Carinae back in 2204. It’s been suggested by several recent studies that the same kinds of deposits might explain places where things have mysteriously disappeared through time, like the Bermuda Triangle back on Earth—”

  “W
e observed no evidence of either transperiodic elements or subspace radiation in our preliminary surveys of this planet, Mr. Fisher.” Spock cut across the scientist’s theorizing with the relentless cool only Vulcans could manage. “In fact, Tlaoli 4 was determined by the planetary assessment team to be singularly lacking in anything resembling either an ore deposit or a power source.”

  The pedantry in Fisher’s voice vanished, replaced by a more apologetic tone. “I realize that, Mr. Spock. But it was the only thing we could think of to explain how an uninhabited planet could knock a starship out of orbit. According to the Rogers-Kline-Roth hypothesis, a transperiodic ore deposit could interfere with sensor readings enough to explain why it often goes undetected.”

  Spock lifted a disdainful eyebrow, glancing toward Kirk as though assuming the captain shared his assessment of Fisher’s hypothesis. “I do not believe that either Professor Rogers-Kline or Professor Roth understands the physics of six-dimensional space sufficiently well to make any prediction about possible sensor interference, [24] much less one that so conveniently explains away their lack of evidence—”

  Kirk did his best to smother a tired grin. “Gentlemen.” The situation wasn’t particularly funny—nothing about the prospect of losing an entire survey team, not to mention his starship, struck Kirk as something to laugh about. Yet he could never help being at least a little amused by the deadly seriousness with which scientists could debate the least important details of any crisis. “I suggest you continue this academic discussion after we’ve made sure that Survey Team Three is safely accounted for.” Spock closed his mouth obediently, no doubt bookmarking the next sentence in his argument for later retrieval. Kirk turned his attention back to the now-silent geologist on the other end of the com channel. “Mr. Fisher, I’m still waiting to hear why you disobeyed orders and moved Team Three.”