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

by L. A. Graf

  “Yes, sir.” Fisher paused to clear his throat uncertainly. “We did try hailing the Enterprise at Psi 2000, Captain, to tell you about what we’d found and to get updated orders, but no one answered. Since we didn’t really have a ranking officer on Tlaoli, we got all the lieutenants together by communicator and took a vote on what to do. It was unanimous, sir. We decided to move the six members of the karst team up to the northern continent and have them explore the cave closest to most of the wrecks, to see if they could verify whether there was a large transperiodic ore deposit there.”

  Kirk glanced over at his science officer, whose narrow Vulcan face had been growing steadily more [25] somber as he listened to the geologist’s report. “What’s the matter, Spock?”

  The Vulcan’s eyes snapped back into focus from their pensive stare. “I have been scanning the entire northern karst terrain with long-range sensors since Mr. Fisher first reported that Survey Team Three had been sent there, Captain,” he said quietly. “I have not detected any trace of life, either on or beneath the surface.”

  “That’s exactly the problem, Mr. Spock.” Fisher spoke a bit more loudly, as though taking the volume of Spock’s voice to mean the science officer had moved farther away from the com station. “None of our scanners have been able to see anything under that karst terrain, either, not since about four hours ago.”

  Kirk nodded, starting to do the math in his head. “Was that when you last made contact with the cave team, Mr. Fisher?”

  “Yes, sir. They entered the caves seven hours ago, and were reporting on their progress hourly. The last time we talked to them, they mentioned having some problems with their tricorders, so when we didn’t hear from them an hour later we figured maybe they were having communicator problems as well.”

  “That’s something we should be able to verify.” Kirk caught up Uhura’s gaze with his own. “Lieutenant, try to punch through to Survey Team Three’s communicators. With the power of the Enterprise’s signal generator and receiver, we might be able to pick up something Mr. Fisher’s handheld communicator couldn’t.”

  “I’ll try, sir.” Uhura turned to skim her fingers over the panel. Kirk watched without interrupting as she [26] opened a second channel, then jacked the narrow-beam power setting up to its fullest. They could have sent a shout all the way to Sigma Draconis at that power.

  “Enterprise to Tlaoli Survey Team Three. Come in, please.” She cocked her head in her slight pause, as though listening to sounds no one else around her could hear. Another slight adjustment to her controls, then, “Enterprise to Survey Team Three, please respond.”

  Still nothing. Uhura looked back over her shoulder at the captain, shaking her head almost apologetically. “Nothing, sir. If I had to guess, I’d say that Survey Team Three’s communicators just weren’t working.”

  Which fit with Fisher’s earlier assumptions. “So you were right about their communicators not working, Mr. Fisher. What did you do next?”

  “We tried to fly over in the research shuttle and scan for them, but as soon as we got close to the cave area, all of our geophysical sensors started to malfunction. And then—” The geologist’s voice tightened. “—then the shuttle started to lose power, too, sir, for no apparent reason. We managed to get out of the karst area and back to the wetlands base camp before we had to set down, but now the shuttle doesn’t even have enough power to charge the ionization rings on the impulse engines.”

  “How far away are you from the cave site?”

  “Thirty kilometers, sir. Since we didn’t know you’d be coming back early, we put a rescue team together and started hiking from the wetlands back into the karst terrain. Best estimate of our arrival time at the cave is—” Fisher paused to exchange murmurs with someone in the background “—sometime tomorrow evening, sir.”

  [27] “Thirty hours from now?” Kirk frowned up at the image of Tlaoli 4 on the viewscreen, trying to imagine how any part of its worn and ancient surface could be so difficult to travel. “Mr. Fisher, do you know how far Survey Team Three penetrated into that cave system before you lost contact?”

  “At least two kilometers, sir. They started in at local sunrise, which would be about six hundred hours ship time.”

  Kirk twisted a quick look over his shoulder to glance at the chronometer on the arm of his command chair. “It’s thirteen hundred hours now.” God, only thirteen hundred? “If Team Three had turned around and started back out of the cave four hours ago, when we know their equipment began to malfunction, they should have reached the surface about ship’s noon.” He paced over to the viewscreen again, peering up at the dots on it thoughtfully. “When you brought Team Three up to the northern continent, Mr. Fisher, did you leave their equipment behind?”

  “No, sir. Lieutenant Jaeger thought it might take several days to explore the caves thoroughly enough to find the source of the shipwrecks, so we brought all of their supplies and tents up with them.”

  “Good.” That simplified one thing, at least. Kirk swung back to Uhura. “Lieutenant, see if you can make contact with Survey Team Three’s base communicator unit.”

  Uhura addressed her panel again, repeating her formal hail. Despite the lack of response, even Kirk could hear the faint buzzing that burned across the open channel. “That’s the sound of an open subspace channel, sir,” Uhura told him, correctly reading the intent look on his [28] face. “I think the main communicator at their base camp is operational; there’s just no one there to answer it.”

  Kirk rapped his fingers thoughtfully on the edge of her panel, his thoughts leaping ahead of him now that his suspicion was verified. “No sane geologist would stay inside a cave if their equipment wasn’t working, especially if they knew there was some kind of dangerous transperiodic ore deposit down there.” He didn’t mean to step through his reasoning out loud, but didn’t dare stop once he noticed Uhura and the others staring at him. It wouldn’t do to have them see he was sometimes caught off guard by his own impulses that way. “The fact that Survey Team Three hasn’t left means they probably can’t leave.” He nodded, certain now. “They’re trapped down there.”

  A worried crease furrowed Uhura’s brow. “Captain, do you think their lights have malfunctioned in addition to their tricorders and communicators?” She seemed to hesitate before going on to suggest, “It wouldn’t be safe for them to move in total darkness, would it?”

  “No, it wouldn’t.” He didn’t even like the image of the survey team trying. “They could also be trapped by a roof collapse, or flooded out by a surge in water levels.” He frowned a threat up at the planet on the viewscreen. “A lot of things can go wrong in a cave.”

  “That’s what we thought, sir.” He’d almost forgotten about Fisher down on the surface. “What do you want us to do?”

  Kirk shook off the parade of unpleasant images Uhura’s question had set loose in his head. “All I need right now, Mr. Fisher, is the coordinates of the cave where you lost Team Three, and the location of their [29] base camp. From here on in, the cave rescue will be our responsibility. You head back to the wetlands base camp and start packing your samples. We’ll evacuate you and the other survey crews by transporter as soon as you’re ready.” He barely waited for the geologist to acknowledge his orders before nodding at Uhura to cut the channel. “Mr. Spock, we did a preliminary assessment before we sent the landing party down to that planet. Bring up the surface scans—I want to see what that northern karst terrain looks like.”

  “Aye, sir.” A few brisk taps on his science controls overlaid the small brown planet on the viewscreen with a detailed grid depicting its surface. “This is the topographic data gathered by our long-range scans. I had the computer convert it into three dimensions and zoom to a low-elevation viewpoint to better illustrate the terrain.”

  Kirk moved down to reclaim his command chair as the network of growing lines slowly enlarged on the screen and rotated on the main screen. What had initially looked like a gently rumpled rock plateau resolved
on closer inspection into a jagged nightmare of steep monolithic mounds, knife-sharp ridges and jumbled boulder fields pocked with sinkholes so deep that their bases were lost in shadow. “Where the hell is all that vertical relief coming from? I thought this planet was ancient.”

  “Twelve billion years old,” Spock clarified. “Approximately four times the age of Vulcan. Most of Tlaoli’s surface is eroded down to a peneplain, Captain, but in the karst areas, the erosion is occurring underground in the form of caves. When those caves collapse, they form this kind of surface landscape.”

  [30] Kirk could suddenly understand why it would take more than thirty hours to cross less than thirty kilometers. “Do we have those coordinates yet from Fisher? I want to see where that cave is.”

  No one said anything in acknowledgment, but Kirk heard the gentle sounds of data transfer behind him as Uhura and Spock combined their information. A red dot appeared near the center of the crazy-quilt terrain. “That is the cave Survey Team Three entered, Captain,” Spock said. A smaller blue dot appeared a short distance to the north on the barren gray plateau. “And that is the new location of their base camp.”

  “Which we know still has power, even if the people in the cave don’t.” Still half-lost in thought, Kirk bounced the side of his hand against the com button on the arm of his command chair. “Bridge to engineering. Mr. Scott, are you down there?”

  “Aye, Captain, but I can’t give you any warp drive right now.” The chief engineer sounded particularly gloomy, and more than just a little harassed. “I’ve just taken the warp nacelles offline to clean out the thrusters and recalibrate the field angles. It’ll take a half hour to get them put back together again, much less up and running.”

  Kirk smiled at Scott’s attempt at clairvoyance. “Thanks for the heads-up, Scotty, but I don’t need the warp drive just yet. What I do need is for your engineers to manufacture some equipment for me so I can outfit a landing party for an emergency cave rescue.”

  “Aye, sir.” Kirk could almost picture the way Montgomery Scott’s face crinkled doubtfully as he answered; Scotty had quite the knack for acknowledging an order [31] while still managing to convey his complete incomprehension of it at the same time. “And what kind of equipment might you need that’s not already in our stores?”

  “Primitive equipment. The kind that doesn’t depend on dilithium power cells or permanent magnetic batteries.” Kirk paused a moment to mentally outfit a cave party in his head, then translate all the necessary equipment into its old-fashioned counterparts. “I’ll need chemical batteries that can ran our communicators and tricorders, and headlamps that use carbide fuel illumination.”

  “You want combustion lamps?” The chief engineer sounded scandalized, as if he were being asked to equip the Enterprise with a hitch for a team of draft horses. “And just how many of these will you be needing, Captain?”

  “Five or six, for sure—twice that many if you have time.” Kirk glanced around the bridge, his gaze skipping past the tall figures of Spock, Stiles, and Leslie almost without seeing them, until finally coming to rest on Uhura’s far more petite form. “Lieutenant Uhura, you’re the smallest communications officer aboard, aren’t you?”

  Her eyes widened in apparent surprise. “Yes, sir.”

  “Then you’ll be coming with me.” He angled his voice back down toward the com. “Mr. Scott, I want that equipment within an hour.” The plan became more clear by the moment. Kirk already knew what he had to do for every step before leaving the ship, and was already impatient at having to slow down and actually issue the orders. “Yeoman Rand,” he summoned, almost before he’d finished switching channels on the com. “I need you to locate our ship’s smallest medic, our smallest power supply expert, and our smallest geologist. And [32] the smallest person on board who’s had some recent orienteering experience, say within the last four months.”

  If his assistant was startled by the strange request, nothing in her composed voice gave the emotion away. “Smallest by weight or by height, sir?” was all she asked.

  “By height. We may be crawling through some narrow cave passages, so make sure none of them are claustrophobic. I’ll give you a list of the equipment they’ll each need. Tell them all to meet me in the main transporter room by fourteen hundred.”

  “Aye-aye, sir. Rand out.”

  “Spock, you have the conn.” Kirk pushed to his feet, energized at the prospect of taking action. “Keep the ship in the highest orbit that’s gravitationally stable, just in case that planet really does throw some kind of sub-space aperture at us. And make sure Scotty gets those warp nacelles back online as soon as he can. We might need to evacuate quickly.” He vaulted up the steps to the turbolift, but couldn’t resist pausing at the threshold to toss a grin back at the silent Vulcan. “It’s a good thing we opted for coming here instead of meeting the Antares. If we’d waited until after our rendezvous, we might have arrived too late.”

  Spock arched one eyebrow in an eloquent remark Kirk wasn’t sure how to interpret. “Indeed, Captain,” was all he said, “that is the aspect of our situation that troubles me the most.”

  “Listen up, all you scuts! You’re not going to be doing anything in there that a well-trained monkey couldn’t do just as well or better. Unfortunately, we used up our last [33] trained monkey cold-starting the engines, so you guys are all we have left.”

  Ensign Pavel Chekov lingered just inside the engine room’s main doorway, delaying his departure long enough to eavesdrop on First Technician Singh’s welcome to the department’s new temporary workers. There were three of them this time, their races and genders obscured by bulky radiation suits, clustered together like mutant goslings as they scurried across the huge bay behind Singh.

  “In-and-out in fifteen-minute shifts. I don’t want you formulating opinions about the new magnetic bottle, trying to figure out how we pulled off such a nifty ignition feat, or analyzing the engines’ function. Your job is to scour subspace residue out of the interior thruster compartments. You’ve got your scrubbers, you’ve got your rad monitors. If anything blinks or turns red, get out. We’ll have a medic outside with a tasty antiradiation cocktail waiting for you. But if you do everything the way you’re told, you’ll be eating supper tonight instead of a fistful of meds. Any questions?”

  A suited arm waggled above the clutter of helmets, only to sink out of sight again when its owner finally realized that Singh’s offer had been largely rhetorical. Get used to it, Chekov wanted to tell the new arrival. Because no matter who you were back home, or how brilliant you were at the academy, once you got to a starship you were assumed to be about as useful as a Belgian chocolate until you proved yourself otherwise. Here, you were just the latest batch of scuts.

  Sighing, Chekov slipped out into the corridor without waiting to see when Singh would deign to acknowledge [34] the nervous faces and waving arms (he always did eventually; he just liked to make sure that the recent arrivals knew they were at his mercy first). At least this temporary work crew got to do something interesting. Chekov had spent three and a half weeks in engineering, and the most exciting thing he’d done had entailed being locked out of the department while a member of the bridge crew powered down the engines and sang very badly for eighteen hours. Now that there was real, hard work to be done beyond calibrating sensors and counting surplus hand tools, he was off to spend fourteen days in astrophysics. While the ship was in orbit around an M-Class planet. While no one needed stellar analyses, pulsar identifications, or even the most simple navigation equations. As if a month in Planetary Sciences while the ship was in deep space hadn’t been irony enough.

  How all this leaping from department to department was supposed to help him become the perfect starship commander made less sense to Chekov every day. He still couldn’t remember the operational tolerances of a theta-class warp shield, could remember only half of the fifty or so points used to determine the environmental class of a planet (although, thank God, retaining the meanings of
the various classifications themselves proved anomalously easy), and he had yet to figure out how to tell which deck he was on without stealing surreptitious peeks at the bulkhead markings. I’m the future commander of a starship? he would think with something approaching horror while wandering aimlessly in search of a turbolift shaft that wasn’t where he remembered. What was Starfleet thinking?

  [35] It wasn’t much consolation to realize there was apparently no one here from his academy class with any hope of a career beyond polishing laboratory glassware or mopping up coolant spills. Or so Singh and all the other noncom supervisors before him had assured Chekov from almost his first day on the job. This was apparently not the most promising collection of new crewmen to have ever graced the Enterprise’s hallways.

  But I just want to fly the ship, Chekov could have told them. I want to be on the bridge, and see the planets when we first come into orbit, and watch the stars drift by while everyone from the daylight shift is at home in bed. He’d figured out, just from what he’d overheard at mealtimes or in the gym, that the Enterprise already had a helmsman so good that the man would have to go blind and lose the use of one hand before Kirk would consider replacing him. That meant the chances of Chekov working on the bridge during first shift were so small he couldn’t have found them with an electron microscope. I don’t care where we’re going, or who’s giving the orders, or what we have to do to get there, just please, please, please! don’t leave me down in the lower decks!

  He’d already walked several sections too far forward before realizing he’d completely bypassed the proper turboshaft to take him up to crew’s quarters. Maintenance teams had apparently begun the chore of removing graffiti from the starship’s bulkheads, thus eradicating the obscene line-drawing Chekov had been using to identify his turbolift for the last day or so. He tried again (unsuccessfully, he was certain) to lock some distinctive [36] image from this junction in his memory, then ducked into the car and sent it racing up toward Deck Six. He could just imagine himself explaining to the captain, “No, sir, I cannot find my own quarters, but I can pilot a starship anywhere in the galaxy without getting lost, I promise.”