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

by L. A. Graf

  Dr. McCoy had just come out of the mess tent to report that his emergency operation on Davis had been a success when they had seen the joyful flurry of leaps and arm waving atop the karst mound to the north. Everyone watching from below knew that meant the unseen shuttle had made a find. Even though they had all seen the bright glint that flashed across the sky, their [210] celebratory cheer must have drowned out the distant explosion that followed. Even the sound of running feet hadn’t alarmed them—after all, wouldn’t one of the crewmen sent to watch the Drake come hurrying back to tell them how far away Captain Kirk had been spotted? But even before she saw Chekov’s grim face, something about the sound of his labored, almost sobbing breath as he approached warned Uhura that the news would be bad.

  Now, after a near-vertical climb up a fractured limestone cliff that had seemed more of an annoyance than the terror it might otherwise have been, Uhura couldn’t even decide how bad the news actually was.

  “Why isn’t there any smoke coming up from the crash site?” she demanded.

  Silence fell over the karst mound, profound enough to let Uhura hear the rustle of wind through the bonsai trees many meters below. Tomlinson stared over his shoulder at her as if he’d been stunned by the question, while Smith and Chekov exchanged baffled and forlorn glances, like cadets caught unprepared by a pop quiz. It wasn’t until Jaeger hurtled over the edge of the fractured rim-rock with a painful gasp, followed a moment later by the man who had hoisted him up that slope, that anyone even acknowledged Uhura’s question.

  “Wind couldn’t be blowing it away,” Sanner said, leaning down to haul Jaeger to his feet. “Look at the mist from those cavern vents down there—straight as a plumb line.”

  “Maybe the shuttle landed in a pond or something,” suggested Smith. “That could explain—”

  Her voice hadn’t carried much conviction to begin [211] with, but it shriveled away entirely at the explosion of snorts she got from the two cave geologists. “There’s no standing water that high on a karst plain,” Sanner informed her. “The water table’s hundreds of meters below, down at the feet of those big towers over to the east.”

  “Oh.” Smith took an abashed step backward, teetering for a moment on the edge of the mound before Chekov grabbed and steadied her. “Of course.”

  “I think ...” Jaeger unfolded one of his topographic maps, smoothing it down across the rippled gray surface of the karst mound and anchoring it with chunks of rock. A dirt-stained finger traced a path from the round contours of their current perch to the more linear elevation lines that marked Tomlinson’s little ridge. “Yes, look. That sinkhole over there—” He stabbed at another set of concentric circles, these marked with slashes like inward-pointing teeth. “—is where we first entered the upper level of the caves. That means the hollow where you saw the shuttle disappear—” His hand swept over another section of the map, where the contour lines spread further apart. “—sits directly over the ice cave where we first lost Captain Kirk.”

  “Damn.”

  That was Zap Sanner, expressing himself with his usual irreverence. For once, Uhura felt as if the cave specialist spoke for all of them. She cleared her throat, but it still took an effort to put the horrible thought she’d just had into words.

  “You think Lieutenant Sulu flew his shuttle into that same alien force field we encountered in the ice cave?”

  Jaeger peered up from his map, gray eyes glittering in [212] his bruised and slashed face. “There might be other possible hypotheses,” he said dryly. “But have you ever heard of something called Occam’s razor, Lieutenant?”

  “The simplest explanation is usually the right one,” blurted Yuki Smith, as if to atone for her previous mistake.

  “Yes,” said Jaeger. “Precisely.”

  Uhura squinted past the jagged ridge rocks, but the rusty glare of Tlaoli’s morning sun drowned any hint of blue light that might have rippled in the shadowy hollow beyond. It was no wonder Sulu had flown into the alien force field unwittingly. Uhura just hoped Captain Kirk hadn’t stumbled back into it unwittingly, as well.

  Although if he had. ...

  “We know Ensign Chekov went from the ice cave to the upper breakdown chamber where the survey team was stuck without lights,” Uhura said, abruptly. The conclusion she had just come to was so disquieting that she wanted to make sure she verified each logical step with her subordinates. “And we’re pretty sure that’s where the captain was sent as well, right?”

  “He couldn’t have gotten past us if he’d materialized anywhere else,” Jaeger agreed.

  Sanner nodded. “And it sure looked like someone crawled out of that sinkhole ahead of us.”

  “Someone did,” Chekov said flatly, then added a belated, “Sir.”

  “Then we have to assume the upper chamber is where the alien force field always sends people.” Uhura made the only decision she could, given the evidence they had, although it took all her willpower to actually say it.

  [213] “We’ll have to go back into the cave and look for Sulu there.”

  Tomlinson let out a sound halfway between a groan and a grunt of surprise. “Lieutenant, you don’t think the shuttle could possibly have gone down there, do you?”

  “I don’t know what that alien installation can and cannot do, Mr. Tomlinson,” Uhura said. “But that cavern was certainly big enough to hold a shuttle.”

  “Provided it didn’t try to materialize around one of the flowstone columns,” Jaeger commented. “Or take enough kinetic energy with it to flatten it against a wall.”

  Uhura sighed. “I know there’s no guarantee we’ll find Lieutenant Sulu down there, Mr. Jaeger, much less alive. But if there’s even a small chance he was sent there, then he’s trapped underground without any caving equipment, and probably without power or lights, either. We have to make sure we’re not leaving him there like that.”

  That stark statement left a trail of unhappy silence after it, broken eventually by the youngest member of their group. “Sir,” said Chekov. “I’ll volunteer to go back underground with you.”

  Smith glanced over at him, then let out a large, resigned sigh. “Me, too.”

  Uhura couldn’t quite summon a smile, but she at least managed to give them what she hoped was a kindly look. “Actually, I need you two and Mr. Tomlinson to look for Captain Kirk up here, since you were the ones who saw where Lieutenant Sulu signaled that he found him.” She rifted her gaze back to the karstlands, where the morning mist was breaking into glittering strings and shreds. “Take Martine or D’Amato with you, and [214] keep a tricorder turned on while you walk out there. If you see it start to lose power, or get a ridiculous error reading, I want you to turn around and come back immediately. I don’t want to send anyone else through that alien transporter if we can help it.”

  “Aye-aye, sir,” chorused Chekov and Smith.

  Tomlinson, however, had served for longer on the Enterprise and had a rank technically equal to Uhura’s, even if he was considerably junior to her on the command list. “Who will you take down into the caves with you, sir?” he demanded.

  “Mr. Sanner, of course.” Uhura glanced over at the cave specialist. She needn’t have worried—Sanner was already tugging the topographic map with its superimposed sketch of the various cave levels away from a reluctant Jaeger and muttering something about counting cave reflectors. “And either Lieutenant Wright or Dr. McCoy, whoever is willing to come and provide medical care, in case ...” Uhura trailed off, unwilling to tempt fate by putting her worst case scenario into words. “We shouldn’t need any more people than that, as long as we leave the ropes up on the edge of the sinkhole to get us out.”

  “Getting us out won’t be the problem,” Sanner said. “And if we got Davis out with a fractured skull, I’m pretty sure we can take Mr. Sulu out no matter what’s happened to him.” The cave geologist surprised Uhura with a snort of wry but genuine laughter. “What I want to know, Lieutenant, is how you think we’re going to get the shuttle out if
it’s down there.”

  “We’re not,” Uhura said frankly. “But if it is there, [215] Mr. Sanner, we just may use its warp core to take that alien force field out, once and for all.”

  Tlaoli’s sun was not as bright as many, or as hot as some. The polished brass disk that had finally lifted itself above the farthest ridges of exposed rock barely warmed the air, and the tentative fingers it reached between monolithic shoulders of rock were too pale and watered down to burn away the mist that still swirled catlike around their ankles. No wonder the vegetation consisted of nothing more than stunted trees and scrubby grass, Chekov thought. The anemic morning fog looked to be all the moisture the karstlands got, at least during this time of year, and if Chekov understood what Jaeger had said earlier over their reconstructed maps, even that little bit of moisture was sucked beneath the surface into the caves below almost as soon as it touched the ground. It struck him as almost absurd to realize he had nearly drowned only a few dozen meters beneath a veritable desert.

  “Careful.” Yuki Smith nudged him, none too gently, out of the path of another sinkhole. He’d seen it, just as he’d seen the dozen others she’d felt the need to steer him around, but he thanked her anyway. Apparently, the security guard was convinced no one could monitor their direction on a hand compass and watch where he was going at the same time.

  Behind them, Robert Tomlinson and Angela Martine muttered over tricorder readings, running just as much risk of stumbling into a sinkhole as Chekov did, as far as he could see. He spared a glance over his shoulder to make sure they’d navigated themselves safely past that [216] particular obstacle, then turned his attention back to his compass and the bearing he hoped was taking them closer to Captain Kirk.

  “I hope their tricorder is as good as you are at finding trouble before we step into it,” he commented to Smith. He felt a little awkward making small talk with someone he hardly knew, but Smith insisted that they’d become good friends during the hours of cave travel he no longer remembered, and he had climbed on top of her head. It seemed the least he could do.

  Apparently, he could have done it more quietly.

  “You worry about your end of the hike, Ensign,” Tomlinson called forward to him. “We’ll worry about ours.” Staring fixedly at the tricorder screen, he pulled Martine to a stop before waving at Smith and Chekov. “Hold up.”

  They halted obediently enough, although Chekov kept himself half-oriented toward the compass heading they’d been following, as if he’d suddenly forget which way they’d been going.

  Martine shook her head at the tricorder readings without waiting for Tomlinson to elaborate on why he’d stopped them. “That’s not a big enough error,” she said. “It’s not outside our standard deviation.”

  “But it’s bigger than we’ve been getting,” Tomlinson argued. “And Lieutenant Uhura said we should turn back at the very first sign—”

  “She said we should turn back if the error readings became ridiculous.” Chekov gritted his teeth against the embarrassment of everyone turning to stare at him, but didn’t back down. “I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t mean to interrupt.” Which wasn’t entirely true. “But the possibility [217] that we’re close to the alien transporter’s range of affect is remote, sir.” He held out his compass toward them as though the bobbing needle there would make everything clear. “Mr. Jaeger’s maps of the cave system—”

  “They’re your maps, too,” Smith pointed out, but Chekov only nodded absently in acknowledgment.

  “—indicate that the alien force field most likely originates south-southwest of the base camp. We’re maintaining a strict easterly heading to reach the rock formations where Mr. Sulu saw the captain. While I appreciate that Lieutenant Uhura wants to be careful, we’re much more likely to fall down a sinkhole right now than walk into the alien energy field.”

  “That’s assuming the force field hasn’t expanded enough to intersect our route,” Tomlinson said, a little grimly.

  Chekov nodded. “Yes, sir, it does. Because if the field is maintaining a spherical shape the way Mr. Jaeger speculates it is, then by the time it reached us out here it would have already passed over the base camp and everyone else in the party.” He felt immediately awkward when his extrapolation flashed alarm across the others’ faces. It occurred to him for the very first time that what he viewed as practicality might come across as coldness to others. He wondered if he should do something about his tendency to give that impression, then decided he’d worry about it once they’d located the captain and gotten everyone safely back on board the ship. “It’s just, if we’re going to assume the worst, then there’s no sense going on. If not ...”

  The lieutenant sighed and pushed the tricorder into [218] Martine’s hands as though too frustrated to watch it anymore. “All right, good point.” It struck Chekov that being in charge of a party didn’t necessarily mean you always knew what to do. “Let’s keep going, then. If we get any ridiculous error readings ...” He glanced aside at Martine, mirrored her grin despite himself, and sighed again. “We’ll ask Mr. Chekov then whether or not we’re allowed to worry.”

  The sun kept them company as they threaded between sinkholes and twisted trees. Chekov tried to keep them on as straight a course as possible, given the landscape, but twice had to back them out of a confusion of collapsing ground and find a way around to solid footing again. When they finally reached the broken forest of stone where Sulu had spotted Kirk, it came upon them suddenly, like a beach giving over to the sea. For some reason, Chekov had assumed they would have to climb down among the standing stones, into the solution cracks like mice between house walls. Instead, the exposed rocks suddenly towered over them Like giants at parade rest, and they were on the bottom without even trying.

  Tomlinson and Martine drew alongside Chekov and Smith, and Tomlinson shaded his eyes to squint up at the jigsaw of broken plateaus. “So I wonder if the captain took the high road or the low road.”

  At least with four of them they didn’t have to make the same decision. They split along separate fractures, Tomlinson and Martine seeking out the steep trails that would take them to the top of the rocks while Chekov and Smith wound through the lower valleys. They each had a whistle from the cave rescue supplies, but Chekov [219] did what he could to keep everyone in sight, even if only occasionally. No matter how certain he’d sounded about it being safe to continue, even he couldn’t shake a sick feeling of dread that one of them would stumble into the alien transport system and disappear without the others realizing.

  Stripes of pale sunlight rimmed the tops of the maze-like cracks, painted on almost ruler-straight above the shadows cast by the rocks on every side. Chekov couldn’t believe the sun wasn’t higher by now. Surely it was at least mid-morning. But the uneven floor that wound and cut its way through the stones was still chilly in its darkness. It was almost like wandering through the caves again, only this time without the warming nanosuit or the reassuring presence of Sanner at his back.

  “What are we going to do if we find him?”

  Chekov jumped aside, falling back against one of the walls with his heart hammering. Smith drew back from the narrow crack through which she’d spoken, her face almost vanishing into the shadows. “Sorry about that.”

  Chekov tried to cover his startlement by straightening and clearing his throat. “I just didn’t expect the rocks to talk.”

  She giggled, a discordantly girlish sound, and came forward again to frame her face in the crack. “I’m serious, though. If the captain is running away from us, and he doesn’t know who he is ... What are we going to say to him? I mean, what’s going to make him hang around and listen?”

  Chekov didn’t know how to answer her. He hadn’t gotten that far in his own thoughts. Amnesia or no, he [220] couldn’t quite believe that Captain Kirk retained no sense of himself, no rationality or dignity or sense. Even if, for some reason, the captain thought he was being pursued by enemies, surely his first sight of them would tell him that they wer
e friends and he was safe.

  If not ...

  “I don’t know,” he admitted at last. “We can’t very well chase him.”

  “Actually I’m more worried about catching him. He’s a strong guy, you know.”

  That was something else Chekov had never really thought about, but he was sure Smith was correct. This whole rescue operation was beginning to look more uncertain with each question the security guard posed.

  High above them, and some distance ahead, a whistle shrilled in silver-bright alarm. Smith pulled away from her peep hole, out of sight, and Chekov jerked a guilty look back over his shoulder toward where Tomlinson and Martine must have gotten well ahead of them. “They’ve found something!” The captain. They must have found the captain.

  He tried to mark the whistle’s direction based on the slant of the sunlight and the rise of the stones, but wasn’t entirely certain he could maintain his orientation while jogging through the rock maze in search of a way through. Several twists and turns out of sight to his right, he could hear running footsteps, irregular on the rocky ground. He opened his mouth to warn Smith to be careful about hurrying so fast toward their destination lest she lose her footing and break a leg. Before he could do so much as call her name, though, a running figure [221] plowed around the rocks in front of him and crashed them both into the dirt.

  Chekov knew the instant it happened that he hadn’t collided with Smith. He had a quick impression of slender youthfulness and ratty civilian clothes just as he and the stranger went tumbling, and while his imagination wasn’t quick enough to assign any meaning to this impression, he at least understood that it wasn’t Smith. Rolling, Chekov shot out a hand to grab a flailing ankle when the other person tried frantically to kick himself free and get up again. “Stop! I’m not—”