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

by L. A. Graf

  “Spock, why don’t you just come out and say that you don’t know what the hell is going on?” Leonard McCoy had come up onto the bridge half an hour ago, ostensibly to check on Sulu’s and Kevin Riley’s vital signs, but more likely to keep a watchful eye on their efforts to contact the captain’s rescue team. Sulu wasn’t sure if McCoy actually doubted the first officer’s leadership, or if he just didn’t trust the junior bridge officers to ask the kind of blunt and probing questions he did. “Anyway, isn’t our real problem that we can’t contact the rescue team?”

  “No, Doctor,” Spock said evenly. “That is our immediate problem. Given the evidence of the previous starships which have crashed on this planet, I suspect the real problem is something much larger and more [86] fundamental, which is causing both our loss of altitude and the captain’s loss of contact.”

  McCoy groaned. “Please don’t tell me we’ve got another planet getting ready to blow up on us. I don’t think I could deal with that.”

  Spock lifted an unsympathetic eyebrow. “Your emotional condition is irrelevant to the discussion, Doctor. At the moment, all the evidence suggests that Tlaoli is stable but generating some kind of anomalous force whose interactions with us cannot be predicted. Whether or not that force derives from a natural transperiodic ore deposit—which seems doubtful—it certainly does appear to coincide with the region of caves Survey Team Three was exploring. If we could determine the nature of that anomaly, we might be able to neutralize it sufficiently to keep the Enterprise safe, and to rescue the lost survey team and the captain’s party.”

  “And if we can’t determine its nature?” McCoy demanded.

  The Vulcan lowered his voice, but Sulu was still close enough to the command console to hear his grave reply. “Then, Doctor, there is a statistically significant chance that we will become the twentieth starship to crash on this planet.”

  There was a moment of tense silence inside the fog-shrouded darkness of the alien cave. Then Captain James T. Kirk did the kind of thing that made his crewmen willing to follow him into Hell. He didn’t swear, exclaim in surprise, or even ask young Ensign Chekov how he could have possibly lost the only map of their [87] escape route. Instead, Kirk said matter-of-factly, “After the dunking you got, Mr. Chekov, that’s no surprise. We’ll just have to reconstruct it as we go along.”

  He made the missing map sound like a minor inconvenience, a problem they could rectify with just a little hard work. And Captain Kirk’s gift for command, Uhura thought, was that he brought out so much of the best in his crew that he really could turn catastrophes like this into minor inconveniences. She saw the young ensign’s shoulders straighten with fierce determination. “Aye-aye, sir.” He reached into his backpack for his spare notebook. “I’ll start on it right away.”

  “Good.” Kirk swung around and eyed the dark length of passage that ran uphill, away from the trickling waterfall and their dangling rope ladder. “We’ll explore this side of the passage first. That should give the cave runoff enough time to finish draining before we go down the other way.”

  “Let’s just hope the survey team isn’t down where the water’s draining to,” Wright said. Uhura flinched, and wished the medic hadn’t put that particular fear into words. It was all too easy for her to visualize the landing party trapped without lights in the underground darkness, hearing the rush and spill of oncoming water but unable to get out of its way—

  Wright’s comment must have had the same effect on the rest of the rescue team. An appalled hush fell over them, made even more intense by the quiet trickle of the plunge pool in the background. Uhura could see Kirk frown and glance back in the direction of the waning waterfall, as if he was reconsidering his decision. [88] Before he could break the silence, however, Angela Martine spoke in an urgent whisper.

  “Voices! I hear voices!”

  Sanner frowned and opened his mouth, but Kirk gestured him back into silence. “Women hear better than men,” he reminded the cave expert, in an almost soundless whisper. “Everyone quiet.”

  Uhura stiffened, trying to calm her own breathing enough to let her hear past it. At first, all she could sense was the soft drip and splash of water behind them, then above that came an almost inaudible murmur, the distorted and wordless slush that words turned into when they echoed down long stretches of empty space. “I hear them, too,” she said. “They’re coming from uphill.”

  Kirk’s breath misted out in a small but intense sound of relief. “Start walking—and whistling.” He set off at a brisk pace with his own whistle clenched between his teeth. He blew a loud clarion blast, then paused to see if there was a response before he blew again. One by one, all of them joined in until the conduit echoed with the pulse of whistle blast and pause. All except Chekov, that is. The young ensign was intent on sketching a memorized version of his cave map into his plastisheet notebook as they walked, using the borrowed light of Diana Wright’s carbide.

  The murmur of echoed voices grew to a distant clamor as their conduit joined up with another. They had to pause for a moment to make sure which branch the echo sounded loudest in, but both Uhura and Martine agreed on the steeper of the two paths. After that, the response to their whistles had slowly resolved into a muffled chorus of male and female voices, while the [89] passage curved up into a distinctly engineered spiral. As soon as the word “Help!” resolved from the din, Kirk dropped his whistle and ordered the rest of them to do the same. “This is Captain Kirk, and we’re coming to get you,” he shouted back. “One person keep shouting, to make sure we don’t lose the way.”

  “Captain!” That was a strong male voice, suddenly sounding energized despite its hoarseness. “We weren’t expecting a rescue team from the ship! What are you doing back at Tlaoli so soon?”

  “We—” Kirk paused, then apparently decided it would be better not to try and explain the events of the last few days. “We got a little ahead of schedule at Psi 2000.”

  “That’s great!” The voice grew more faint, as if its owner had turned to shout in a different direction. “Hey, guys! It’s Captain Kirk!”

  There was a pause, then a distant burst of laughter from the lost survey team. “Very funny, Mr. Tomlinson!” This was a different male voice, a little lower-pitched and a lot more exhausted. “So which survey team finally found us, hm? Mr. Fisher’s or Mr. Boma’s?”

  “I’m telling you, it’s the captain, with a team from the Enterprise!”

  “Of course it is. And I am telling you that you don’t want to admit you have lost our bet. That would mean that it’s Mr. Fisher. Hello, Edward!”

  The voices grew clearer as they hiked up the last steep curve of the spiral. “We’ve got to be getting awfully close to the surface, Captain,” Sanner commented. He peeled off one glove and licked his finger, then held it up above his head. “I can feel a draft of warmer air coming [90] through here. We may not need to backtrack all the way through the cave to get out.”

  Kirk glanced over his shoulder at Chekov, still sketching furiously in his notebook. “Let’s not make any assumptions until we know what’s going on,” he said quietly, then raised his voice. “Survey Team Three, you still there?”

  “Nowhere much else to go, Captain,” said the first hoarse voice, at surprisingly close range. The conduit suddenly straightened again, and the glow of Kirk’s carbide light caught on a mud-sodden figure in a gold jumper standing at the end of it. The young man blinked furiously at what must have seemed to him like a fierce glare of light, but he managed to smile despite that. “With the captain’s permission, sir, allow me to say that you are a sight for sore eyes. Er, literally.”

  “It’s good to see you, too, Lieutenant Tomlinson.” Kirk was already reaching up to adjust the water flow on his carbide lamp, dampening the rush of acetylene gas. The glow around them dimmed to a softer gold halo as Uhura and the others did the same. “What’s the status of your party?”

  “Holding up pretty well, sir, after four hours of digging in the dark,”
said the young weapons officer. He waited for them to reach him, then turned to walk beside Kirk as they climbed up another tight spiral of conduit. “We were pretty sure one of the other survey teams would come looking for us after a few hours. In the meantime we’ve been trying to clear a path through a pile of cave breakdown that Mr. Jaeger thinks is blocking a natural exit from this upper cavern. Crewman [91] Davis, our surveyor, got hit by some falling rock and has a pretty bad concussion. We’ve been taking turns watching to make sure she doesn’t lose consciousness. Lieutenant Jaeger has done most of the crawling through the rubble pile, and he’s a little banged up. The rest of us are okay.”

  “You have blood on your hands,” Martine noted softly.

  Tomlinson glanced over at his fellow weapons officer, and his smile warmed a little at the look of concern he saw on her face. “Yeah, well ... caving gloves only last so long when you’re trying to dig through rock with your fingers. We were almost getting ready to give up when we heard your whistles, way off in the distance.”

  “For that you can thank Ensign Chekov—” Kirk’s voice broke off abruptly as Tomlinson led them around a final curve of conduit and, without warning, into a space that looked like an underground cathedral. Huge columns of travertine ran from floor to arching ceiling, frosted and laced with flowstone until they looked like tall, thin wedding cakes. A giant rubble pile spilled down the back of the space, and hanging draperies of travertine above it showed where the mineral-laden cave runoff had come from to decorate this space. Above the rubble, the room’s smooth, constructed roof had cracked and split upward into a darkness so high that their dimmed carbide lights couldn’t chase away all its shadows.

  “Wow.” Tomlinson paused to regard the jagged spill of boulders. “That looks a lot worse than I remembered from when our lights went out. No wonder we were having so much trouble getting to the top.”

  [92] “I’d think getting down again would be even worse.” Kirk followed the young weapons officer out into the echoing space of the chamber, to where four other survey team members waited around a jumble of packs that had been heaped up to make a bed for the fifth member of the party. They were all blinking like owls at the approach of light, although not as painfully as Tomlinson had done. Their eyes must have had a chance to get accustomed more gradually as the carbide glow of the rescue party spilled through into their cavern.

  “Is it really the captain?” asked the woman on the bed, turning to squint in their direction.

  “Yes, it is.” Kirk headed over to the injured crewman, with Diana Wright nearly treading on his heels. “How are you feeling, Davis?”

  “Like someone fired a photon torpedo through my head, sir.” The dark-haired woman began to sit up, but Wright was already beside her and had lowered her back down before she could do more than grimace in pain. The medic began unwinding the clumsy blood-stained bandage on the surveyor’s head. “Sorry, sir. I really can stand up and walk, if you need me to.”

  “With any luck, we won’t.” Kirk glanced around at the other members of the survey team, all mud-stained and exhausted but beaming with the unexpected relief of being rescued by the man they trusted more than anyone else aboard the Enterprise. One of them, a stocky young Asian woman in security red, had as many bloody scrapes on her hands as Tomlinson did, although it didn’t affect her cheerfully crooked smile. Another, a middle-aged man whom Uhura vaguely remembered [93] from a previous landing party, had a badly swollen eye and a reddish gray bruise spilling down one cheek to meet a fresh cut on the edge of his mouth. His blue cave jumper had long gashes across the shoulders despite its roughly woven nanofibers. Although his facial injuries kept him from smiling, the look he threw at Sanner was definitely amused.

  “Carbide lamps, eh, Zap?” The slight trace of a German accent told Uhura this must be Karl Jaeger, the survey team’s cave specialist. “Wait until the Society of Interstellar Speleologists hears about that.”

  Sanner scrubbed at his chin, looking embarrassed. “It was Captain Kirk’s idea. When Fisher told us about the power problems you guys were having down here, the captain figured you might have lost your lights. He decided to use something that didn’t run on electricity.”

  “Mr. Fisher had power problems, too?” Jaeger exchanged worried glances with Tomlinson. “He didn’t try to bring the research shuttle here to look for us, then, did he?”

  “Yes, he did,” Kirk said. “And nearly crashed when it lost power, although he didn’t say that in quite so many words. But he made it back to the wetland base camp. In fact, he’s probably been beamed back aboard ship by now.” He glanced around at the members of the lost survey team, clearly noticing the exhaustion on their faces now that the initial excitement of being rescued had faded. “When did you start losing your power?”

  “Not for a long while into the trip,” said one of the blue-clad women in the party. She lifted a surveying tricorder from the ground beside him and gave it an [94] exasperated look. “Crewman Davis says she got the whole upper level and most of the lower level of the cave mapped into her tricorder before it crashed and lost all the data. That took us almost three hours, didn’t it, Lieutenant D’Amato?”

  The other male scientist, as muddy and tired as Jaeger, nodded. “But I noticed the first fluctuations in my tricorder when I started to analyze the rocks around the ice cave. That was about half an hour earlier.”

  “Ice cave?” Kirk demanded.

  “A large chamber similar to this one, but at the lower end of the conduit system,” Jaeger explained. “It was much colder than the rest of the cave when we first entered it. I initially thought it might be the location of the natural transperiodic ore deposit we were looking for, but that was before we realized this whole structure was an alien installation.” He glanced up at his darker-haired colleague. “Lieutenant D’Amato still thinks the power drain is coming from somewhere near that chamber, which was another reason we decided to stay at this end of the caves. We didn’t want the other survey teams to run into the same problem we did.”

  “We thought maybe they would hear us digging and help clear the cave exit from the surface,” said Tomlinson. “That way, we could just climb out here instead of retracing the whole trip in.”

  “With any luck, we won’t need to do either of those things now.” Kirk glanced around until his gaze found and snagged on Uhura. “Lieutenant, I think it’s time to contact the ship.”

  She blinked, then pulled her narrow-beam [95] communicator out of her pack, seeing from its lack of monitor lights that its chemical battery had died since the last time she’d used it. Martine was already extracting another battery from her backpack. “I can try to hail them, sir.” Uhura attached the new power supply, although she left in the inert spacer that kept the chemicals separate until electrical power was required to flow. “But there’s so much subspace static on the channel that I’m not sure they can hear anything I’m saying.”

  “Can they detect that we’re hailing them?”

  “Yes, sir. As long as Lieutenant Palmer keeps this frequency centered on her receivers, she’ll know when it’s active. She probably gets a burst of static whenever I call.”

  “Well, that should work,” said Kirk. It was hard to see his expression in the dimmed glow of their lamps, but Uhura thought he was gazing at her impatiently. “Shouldn’t it, Lieutenant?”

  Uhura felt a small burst of sympathy for Chekov, who must have spent much of his time on this planet feeling as unsure and bewildered as she did now. “Work for what, sir?”

  “For sending a message up to the ship.” Kirk reached up to tap on his helmet. At first, Uhura thought he was rattling his carbide rocks to make them burn brighter. Then she heard the rhythm he was making, and her eyes widened in comprehension. “We’re going to do it just like we’re doing everything else on this rescue mission, Lieutenant. The old-fashioned way.”

  “Commander Spock!” Lieutenant Palmer swung around from the communications panel, her voice loud [96] and excited eno
ugh to cut through all the other conversations on the bridge. “I’m getting a signal from the planet!”

  Spock’s eyebrows lifted abruptly, the closest he ever came to showing surprise. “Put it through, Lieutenant.”

  “Aye, sir.” Palmer swung back to her panel and punched a control there. Sulu grimaced as a burst of static assaulted the bridge of the Enterprise, followed by a few seconds of silence, then by an even longer salvo of static. Another silence, another short burst—

  “It’s Starfleet code!” Palmer said. “Lieutenant Uhura must have guessed that we weren’t able to deconvolve her signal, so she’s turning her communicator off and on to contact us.”

  “N,” recited Spock, as he listened to the static. “S, P.”

  “That’s not the beginning of the message, sir.” Palmer bent over her communications panel, scrolling back the buffer to the beginning of Uhura’s coded communication. “It started with T, R and A.”

  ‘Transport,” Sulu said softly.

  He saw Spock nod confirmation as the long-short-long code for the letter “O” crackled through the bridge, followed by the two short bursts that were “R”. The static paused for an unusually long time after the final “T”, then began the pattern all over again. “She’s just repeating that word, sir,” Palmer said unnecessarily.

  “Then we shall presume that Captain Kirk wishes to be transported back to the ship.” Spock leaned over the arm of the command console and activated the ship’s intercom. “Bridge to Mr. Scott.”

  “Scott here.”

  [97] “Commander, how wide an area can we encompass with the ship’s cargo transporter?”

  “Depends on how careful you need to be with the cargo,” the chief engineer responded. “If you want it beamed in molecule for molecule, then I’d say about four cubic meters.”

  “Spock!” McCoy took a step closer to where the Vulcan first officer stood near the empty command chair. The doctor’s forehead rumpled with the intensity of his scowl. “You’re not going to beam up the captain and his team like a pile of packing boxes, are you?”