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

by L. A. Graf

  It seems like you’re scared of everything. And he realized that fear was what lay at the heart of his frantic need to be right about this. Not just fear of being wrong, or fear of being reprimanded. Fear in general, and the [135] fact that it churned in his belly like an out of control fire while being apparently absent in everyone else.

  Chekov caught himself slowing as they reached the archway leading into Jaeger’s “ice cave.” Human voices floated out to meet them on the soft glow of a half-dozen carbide lamps. Sanner had produced a few extra of the primitive devices, although the earlier landing party’s helmets had no place to mount them. Chekov and Smith had one of the unmounted lamps, dangling from a piece of rope in the security guard’s hand when it wasn’t waiting equidistant between them while they measured out some distance for the map. Chekov used adjusting the flame on the clunky device as an excuse to pause while they were still out in the ice-bound conduit.

  “Crewman Smith—”

  “You can call me Yuki.”

  He nodded absently, not wanting to lose his momentum now that he’d gotten started. “Yuki ... When you’re down on planetary missions, do you ...” He looked squarely at her, committed himself to the question. “Are you ever afraid?”

  She lifted her eyebrows in surprise, as though the thought had never occurred to her. “Nah. Why should I be?”

  Why indeed. Although she wasn’t quite as tall as Chekov, she was powerfully built and possessed of the reflexes and easy coordination that Chekov had always envied in natural athletes. In addition, she was a security specialist. Unlike the command cadets, who were expected to know a little bit about almost everything, trained security personnel focused only on the skills [136] required to protect a starship and her crew from every imaginable danger. If someone like Smith didn’t feel one hundred percent capable and safe while doing her job, who on board could?

  He nodded slowly, handing back the unmounted lamp and holding out his hand for the tape measure in return. He realized now that he should have expected as much from an experienced crewman. He should have known when he first came to, vomiting up what felt like ten liters of water after tripping stupidly on an icy rock ledge, to find Captain Kirk kneeling beside him and joking about their predicament. Joking. They’d gone down the same chasm, nearly drowned in the same freezing water, and Chekov had been so scared he felt like crying. More than ever, he found it very hard to believe that there was anything resembling command potential hiding anywhere inside him.

  Smith caught his elbow when he turned to escape into the final chamber. “Hey, wait a sec. ...”

  He stopped, but couldn’t bring himself to turn and face her. Cowardice has many forms.

  “I lied a little.” She said it very quietly. Chekov couldn’t tell whose dignity she was hoping to preserve, his or her own. “The first time I went down—maybe the first two or three—I was really scared.” Her hand fell away, and she moved around in front of him to sit on a boulder just outside the entrance arch. “I know that probably sounds stupid. But I’ve been out of Security Academy for almost a year, and it seems like we lose somebody from the division every month. There are so many guys that I helped pack up to go down ... only to have them not come back. When Chief Giotto first told [137] me I was going on a landing party, I almost called in sick.” She tried on a little smile that came nowhere near its earlier brightness.

  “But you don’t get scared anymore?”

  She shrugged, seemed to reconsider giving him another too-easy answer. “Just nervous now, I guess. I mean, I still feel something, but so far this is the first excitement I’ve ever seen on a planet, and it hasn’t been so bad.” She aimed a playful punch at his shoulder. “And I got to meet you, didn’t I?”

  Right now, Chekov wasn’t sure how much value she ought to place on that.

  “Don’t worry—you’ll get used to it. After you’ve been down two or three times, you’ll get so psyched about seeing all the new stuff and learning all the new things, you won’t even think about being scared. I promise.”

  Somehow, that completely sincere assertion charmed him most of all. He smiled. “Two or three,” he echoed, trying for a touch of humor. “I’ll start keeping count, then, so I don’t miss the one where it gets easy.”

  She laughed, a full-bodied, brazen peal that echoed marvelously off the frozen walls. Chekov was beginning to suspect that Smith did very few things by half-measures.

  “Do me a favor—” She bumped close to him as they passed through the entrance, grabbing his arm again to whisper in his ear. “—don’t tell anybody what we talked about. Security guards aren’t supposed to get scared, you know.”

  Neither were future commanders. He gave her hand a single solemn shake. “You have my word as an officer.”

  [138] Her return grip was a good deal stronger than he expected. “I’m not an officer, so all I can do is promise.”

  “That’s good enough for me.”

  The ice chamber seemed to swarm into existence from the darkness as they made their way inside. Flows and curtains of ice, as intricate as any travertine, glowed as their light swept across them, and Chekov could just pick out the positions of the other party members by the auroras haloing their helmet lamps. The ceiling overhead soared higher than the reach of the dim carbides, but its surface twinkled like the stars outside where ice had clustered in the crevices. Mist swirled in gentle eddies, tiny frostlike crystals coalesced out of the chamber’s ambient humidity. Chekov had no idea if this chamber was any colder than the one they’d left behind, but the twisted columns of ice staggered across its expanse leant a unique sense of chill to its murky air.

  “Stop here.” He pushed the tape measure back into Smith’s hand, and backed away from her toward the nearest column. She clapped her end to the edge of the doorway without having to ask what he was doing.

  Already their cave jumpers had dulled to a soft pastel, furred over with frost as though they were grains of sand in an oyster’s maw. It occurred to Chekov that these pillars of ice must have formed in the same way the flow-stone structures had in the previous chamber—built up by dripping water leaking in from overhead. While their spacing wasn’t strictly regular, they occurred often enough across the expanse of room that Chekov suspected they corresponded to the breaches in the ceiling Jaeger had described earlier. That meant matching them [139] precisely to the details of the upstairs map would go a long way toward guaranteeing their safe exit from this place.

  Apparently, he wasn’t the only one to have considered that possibility.

  “Heads up, Rand McNally!” Sanner appeared as if out of nowhere, sliding down the pillar behind Chekov in a shower of dislodged frost. He pushed himself neatly off the column just in time to hit the frozen floor flat-footed. “Sorry about that—” The geologist tousled Chekov’s hair in a gesture the young ensign assumed was meant to be friendly. New bits of ice went flying everywhere. “I didn’t want you to end up with a crampon in your head.”

  “I appreciate your dedication to team safety, Mr. Sanner.” Kirk’s voice preceded the captain out of the darkness. He’d apparently left his helmet and its attached light with one of the other groups, and joined them now bareheaded in the circle of Sanner’s carbide. “How do our chances of making the top look?” the captain asked Sanner. Chekov started to excuse himself, but stopped when Kirk lifted a stilling hand.

  Sanner grinned as he picked ice off of one boot. “Good! This one doesn’t go through, but I’m sure a lot of these must.” He twisted loose a piton with some effort. “Once we locate the right one, I shouldn’t have any trouble getting up there and securing a rope.”

  “Then our only question is how to locate the right one.” Kirk turned to Chekov. “Have you got those maps handy, Ensign?”

  “Yes, sir.” Chekov handed Kirk the notebook without thinking, then realized the captain might not [140] immediately follow how he’d tried to overlay the various pages of mapping one on top the other. Feeling his face heat up with discomfor
t, he moved awkwardly alongside Kirk to flip through several of the sheets. “I didn’t map all of the holes in the floor when we passed them inside the first entrance, sir,” he explained, hurrying to find that sheet to illustrate his explanation. “But as long as we know for certain where this room is below that entrance—” He flipped back several pages to the newest maps. “—we should be able to identify which of these columns corresponds to the holes I did record.”

  Kirk studied the maps for a moment, turning back and forth through the pages himself as if committing them to memory. “All right, then, Mr. Chekov—which pillar is your first choice?”

  Chekov opened his mouth to stammer an answer, then shut it again abruptly. This is when you should tell him! This is when you should admit that you don’t know how you made this map! But he couldn’t. Everything inside him insisted the map was correct—as correct as he could make it—and he couldn’t pretend it wasn’t just because fear made him insecure. He waved Smith over, took the lamp from her hand and positioned her with the tape measure against the side of the frozen column. Then, consulting the earliest of the maps he had redrawn, he said to her, “Tell me when I’ve gone almost seventy-five meters.”

  He flipped open the compass, rotated it carefully to place himself just a few degrees shy of Tlaoli’s magnetic south, and began pacing off the distance to the closest hole he was sure of. Behind him, he could hear [141] Kirk’s steady footsteps, and the arrhythmic clank, clank of Sanner wrestling the last of his pitons out of the pillar before following a few meters farther back. Please, let this be right, Chekov prayed. He didn’t think he could stand to fail Kirk another time.

  He didn’t know how far they’d gone—he had his end of the tape held near his hip, and Smith had the end with the readings that counted. But he knew they must be almost to the pass-through he was looking for when Kirk’s hand suddenly seized on his shoulder. “Do you hear that?” the captain asked with frightening urgency.

  Chekov tried to listen, tried to turn and face his commander before asking what he was supposed to be listening for. Instead, his feet seemed to drop out from under him, and the cold crashed in with a force so powerful, he felt his whole body go numb with shock and terror. Then water flooded into his lungs and he was drowning. And he had no idea or memory of how he came to be here.

  Chapter Eight

  LATER, what Uhura would remember about that moment wasn’t the shock of the event itself or the sudden awareness of danger that prickled in the cavern’s frigid air. It was her own sickening plummet from hope to unexpected horror. She had let herself be lulled into premature confidence, watching Sanner clamber so easily up the icy staircase that could be their ladder out of darkness. She’d even smiled a little, hearing Tomlinson tease Martine about finally giving up the responsibility of her pack full of power supplies. There had been a warmth in the young weapons officer’s voice that implied a little more than camaraderie, although not yet quite affection. Uhura was just romantic enough to appreciate that delicate transition in a man’s voice, and just old enough not to wish she had been its recipient. So she had smiled and [143] remained discreetly silent, listening to Martine gently refuse to ever surrender her burden to a man who’d spent ten hours trying to dig his way out of a cave with his bare hands. There would be small notes and flowers appearing on the weapons deck as soon as they were back on the ship, Uhura thought in amusement. And it was then, in that moment of relaxation, that instant of certainty that there would be a “back-on-the-ship” in the very near future, that she had heard Sanner’s fierce bellow of alarm.

  “They’re gone!”

  The cave geologist stood frozen in the circle of his own carbide glow, particles of frost kicked up into a swirl around him from his sudden plunging stop. Beyond him, where Uhura’s subconscious mind had a moment before recorded an impression of light and activity and human presence, there was now only darkness.

  “What happened? Did someone fall into a crevasse?” The other cave specialist, Jaeger, swung around and began to cross from the far side of the ice-filled chamber. The urgency of Sanner’s outflung arm stopped him in his tracks. “A hidden one, covered with a crust of ice?”

  “No, nothing like that!” Sanner turned to face them with an exaggerated care that revealed even more so than his strained voice just how apprehensive he was. “They were standing on solid rock, I could see it sticking out through the ice. There was some kind of funny rushing noise, almost like a vacuum chamber opening. And now the rock’s still there, but they’re [144] gone!” His voice rose as if it needed to cut through something besides the appalled silence. Perhaps it was their stunned disbelief he was trying to pierce. “The captain and Ensign Chekov just disappeared into thin air!”

  That was it. In that moment, Uhura felt her easy end-of-mission confidence crash down into something that might almost have been despair. Her first instinct was one of pure denial—Sanner couldn’t possibly be right, his story was just too ludicrous to believe. She opened her mouth, but before she could speak, Tomlinson voiced the thought for her.

  “Are you sure of that, Sanner?”

  “No, Lieutenant, he’s right.” Yuki Smith’s voice held such an unhappy mixture of shock and sadness that Uhura’s doubts were shriveling even before the security guard went on to explain. “I was watching Ensign Chekov the whole time he walked the tape out. At sixty meters, he and the captain stopped for a moment, and then they just vanished. The light went away with them—blown out, just like a candle flame.”

  “You’re sure of that?” Jaeger demanded. “They didn’t take a step forward or fall down—they were standing absolutely still when it happened?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sanner craned his head around, and the appalled look on his face told Uhura he had already come to the same conclusion she had. The mysterious force that had once brought ancient starships crashing down on Tlaoli had just proved that it was still in existence ... and that it could make individual people vanish completely. Uhura [145] opened her mouth, unsure of what she meant to say until it emerged.

  “Mr. Sanner, I want you to back away very slowly from where you’re standing.”

  He blinked at her, looking a little startled by the sternness of her order. Uhura gulped in an ice-cold breath, feeling a little startled herself. If anyone had asked her a moment ago who among this group was Kirk’s second-in-command, she would have been hard pressed to remember that it was her. But now that Kirk was gone and a crisis had engulfed them, the realization that she was in charge and responsible for the safety of this small, stranded group unexpectedly steadied her topsy-turvy emotions and gave her voice an edge it usually lacked.

  “How do I know where it’s safe to step?” Sanner demanded. Uhura lost a little more of her own hopelessness as she heard the need for reassurance in his voice. She glanced around the ice cave in search of justification for him.

  “The tape measure that Ensign Chekov dropped is lying on the ground behind you. If you follow it straight back, you won’t hit whatever—whatever took them away.” Uhura wasn’t really sure about that, but she was sure that Sanner needed to move. Whatever alien force had swallowed Kirk and Chekov had swept over them while they were standing still. That implied it could sweep over other members of the party, and Sanner was in the most dangerous spot, only a few meters away from the point where the other two had vanished.

  “Move, Mr. Sanner. Now!” Uhura put all the force she could muster into that final command, and to her [146] surprise it came out sounding remarkably like something Kirk would say. Sanner gulped, but inched three careful backward steps along the tape measure before turning and covering the rest of the distance in an undignified rush.

  “Now, I want everyone else to make their way back here toward the entrance, one at a time. Mr. Jaeger, you’re the closest to that side of the cave. Please move first.”

  The older geologist nodded and came toward her at a less hurried pace. He looked more baffled than worried, and kept peering down a
t the ground as if he was still sure that a natural cave phenomenon could explain what had just happened. “D’Amato next,” said Uhura and watched the other geologist cross back safely from the ice column he’d been examining. Something in Uhura wanted to relax and let them all come back at once, now that three had made it across the ice-sheathed room safely, but she remembered all too clearly her recent brash with overconfidence.

  “Palamas next,” she ordered, ignoring the impatient way Sanner shifted from boot to boot in the entranceway. Since Yuki Smith had never left the threshold, and Davis and Wright were standing right next to it, the number of carbide lights in the chamber had dwindled down to two by now, and the primeval darkness they had chased out of the ice cave was starting to surge back in from its corners. Since Tomlinson wore no light, his shadow stretched out away from Uhura and Martine to join the darkness at the cave edges, like a stream going back to the sea. It wavered a little, either from the carbide flicker [147] or the weapons officer’s own weariness. Or maybe—

  “Tomlinson next,” Uhura said, but before the young man could move, Martine screamed and threw out a hand to stop him.

  “There’s something there, right beside you—Robbie, hold still!”