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

by L. A. Graf

  “Pry bar.” Sanner held out his hand like a surgeon demanding an operating tool. Uhura handed it to him, then began clearing away the curving fragments of flowstone as he pried them off the column, one by one. Their outer [234] surfaces were ridged and crenulated with layered travertine, she noticed, but their inner surfaces were oddly concave and smooth. Uhura ran her gloved fingers over one and frowned.

  “Zap, wait a minute,” she said. The geologist levered off one last milky fragment of rock, then stepped back to catch his breath. Uhura took his place beside the column and lifted her hands toward the much clearer figure of Lieutenant Sulu.

  A smooth curve of almost invisible transparent metal met her palms inches away from the pilot’s face. To her surprise, it wasn’t anywhere near as cold as the cavern’s bitter air. Even through her insulated gloves, Uhura could feel that it was warm and humming with the vibration of some inner force.

  “I don’t think this is a rock formation,” she said over her shoulder. “I think it’s some kind of stasis chamber.”

  “One that got covered up with travertine in the millions of years since the aliens left?” Sanner glanced around at the other pillars throughout the room, spaced with what now looked to Uhura like suspicious regularity. “Do you think they’re all—?”

  “Could be.” McCoy had plastered himself against the luminous curve of the alien stasis chamber, cables plugged back into his ears. “Sulu’s still breathing—in fact, it sounds like he’s breathing a little easier.”

  “He’s not awake, is he?” Concern brought Uhura up next to the doctor, slitting her eyes to peer into the fierce alien radiance. The pilot’s eyes were serenely closed, but there was something about his face that was beginning to bother Uhura. She studied him closely, [235] noticing a network of lines like fine scars around his eyes, his mouth, between his dark eyebrows. Or were those ... wrinkles?

  “What’s that uniform he’s wearing?” Sanner peered over her shoulder. “That’s not the one he had on back at the base camp.”

  Uhura craned her head to look down into the remaining shell of stone, and blinked in surprise. She had watched Sulu climb into the Drake a few hours ago in a clean gold uniform tunic and regulation trousers. Now, he wore a scuffed and stained combat jacket, camouflaged in an odd combination of violet and green, over a black and gray jumpsuit whose silver piping traced a strange, silhouetted version of the familiar Starfleet insignia on the front of its neck-hugging collar.

  “What the hell—” McCoy shouldered both of them aside as he slid himself around the edge of the chamber, staring down at Sulu’s right arm. “Look at his hand!”

  Uhura scrambled back up on the pile of fallen shards, then gasped as she caught a glimpse of what the doctor was staring at. What had once been Sulu’s right hand hung below the blood-stained sleeve of his jacket, but it was barely recognizable now. Blood rilled up and was somehow invisibly wicked away from that awful tangle of shredded tendons and shattered bone. Every few seconds, some part of it was gently moved and pressed against another. Muscles seemed to swell and knit across those joinings, then atrophy away again, allowing the bones to be moved to a different location. Uhura [236] glanced up at the pilot’s serene, sleeping face, then back at the ruined hand again, not understanding how both could belong to the same body.

  “The chamber’s trying to fix him,” said Sanner excitedly. “It must have him sedated or something, and now it’s trying to put his hand back together. It’s not a stasis chamber, Lieutenant! It’s a healing device.”

  “An alien healing device.” McCoy watched the gentle manipulations of Sulu’s wounded hand, then startled Uhura with a curse. “Dammit, that’s the second time it put his first metacarpal into the correct CM joint and then took it away again. I don’t think it knows what the hell it’s doing!”

  “It must be programmed to heal according to an alien body plan,” Uhura said in dismay. “And it’s trying to match Sulu to that.”

  “But if it can’t ...” Sanner glanced worriedly at the bloodstain growing darker on the pilot’s right sleeve. “And he keeps on bleeding like that ...”

  “He’ll die.” The doctor banged a fist on the glowing curve of transparent metal separating them from the injured pilot, cursing again when his blow rebounded harmlessly. “Can we break through this thing?”

  “With a phaser, maybe,” Sanner said. “Not with a sledge and a prybar.”

  “Look!” Uhura stiffened, feeling the back of her neck prickle with horror even in the bitter cold. “What is it doing to him now?”

  The phantom swelling of muscles had stopped, and now, one at a time, the broken bones and hanging tendons looked as if they were melting into mist. Uhura [237] heard McCoy take in a sudden sharp breath, then let it out in a long sigh of regret and resignation.

  “I guess it’s not such a bad doctor after all,” he said gruffly.

  “But—” Uhura watched the alien chamber remove the last jagged fragments of bone from the pilot’s crushed wrist, but it wasn’t until it began sealing the fractured ends of his radius and ulna that she understood. “It amputated his hand?”

  “Yes,” McCoy said. The blood had stopped dripping from the edge of Sulu’s jacket and new skin crept out from under it, sealing across the severed bones. The doctor sighed again. “Which is exactly what I would have had to do, if I’d been the one to treat him.”

  “But what happened to him?” Sanner demanded. “If all the alien transporter did was take him out of the shuttle and send him down here, how did he get his hand crushed? How did he get dressed in those clothes?”

  Uhura had lifted her gaze to the pilot’s sleeping face again, and not only because it was easier to look at than the useless stump of his right arm. “And how,” she asked slowly, “did he get to be twenty years older than when he left camp this morning?”

  Chekov hesitated for only an instant—just long enough to think, I don’t understand! We both went through the same alien force field, and I don’t feel any younger—then blasted frantically on his whistle and scrambled to his feet.

  Tomlinson materialized at the lip of one rock plateau before Chekov had even let the whistle fall from between his teeth. “Did you see him? Did he get past [238] you?” Chekov nodded miserably, but Tomlinson barely paused long enough to notice. “Angela saw him. It isn’t the captain, and I don’t know how he could have gotten here—”

  “It was the captain.” Chekov interrupted without considering protocol, or even realizing how absurdly sure of himself he would sound. “It was Captain Kirk.”

  “Did you see him?” Tomlinson asked again, more peevishly this time.

  “Did you?” Chekov countered through his stung pride.

  At almost any other time in Chekov’s life, he would have been acutely aware of the impropriety of snapping at a senior officer that way. Right now, he only knew a profound annoyance when the lieutenant screwed his face into a scowl and gestured dismissively down at him. “We can argue about this later. Which way?”

  Chekov bit off the impolite retort that first boiled up, and instead pointed down the winding passage ahead of him before breaking into a run himself.

  He was surprised how familiar the shadowy twists and turns seemed—he hadn’t thought he was paying that much attention when he first navigated his way into the karst maze. Maybe it was all the practice tracking and backtracking through the cave system. While Chekov knew they had been on Tlaoli for less than twelve hours (and he had apparently completely forgotten at least three of those), it felt as if he’d been finding his way through some rocky passage or other for days and days. He barely had to glance at the cracks that splintered off to left and right to remember which ones [239] circled back to meet him, which narrowed down to impossibly tight fissures or dead ends.

  What if Kirk slipped through one of those? The thought brought him to a sudden halt at the mouth of one dark, knife-thin passage. No matter what Tomlinson believed, Chekov knew they were no longer looking for a powerfully bui
lt adult male, with all the attendant assumptions about where Kirk could have climbed to and how he could have got there. An athletic young boy on the brink of manhood could slip into some frighteningly small spaces. Chekov realized with a start that this same boy had already sped through the crawlway that had challenged him and Sanner for hours. And the boy had done it without having to remove any of the roots and rocks that Chekov and Sanner had been forced to rearrange in order to fit through the same space. If Kirk—this Kirk—decided to dart into one of these tight side passages, there wasn’t a one of them on the landing party who could possibly follow him.

  Another whistle shrieked far off to his left, this one warped by its passage in and around the twisted maze-work. Cursing, Chekov backed out of the narrow deadend, ducked right to circle one of the pillars, then cut as directly toward the sound as he could manage.

  The little path he finally followed brought him closer to the top of the maze than he expected. He came upon Smith from above, sliding down the sharp water-worn rock at the expense of both his trouser seat and his palms.

  The security guard spun to face him as he landed, her dark eyes anomalously wide. “You’re not going to believe this—”

  [240] “He’s young,” Chekov cut her off. “He’s just a boy. And he’s frightened.”

  She nodded fervently. “Can I still get in trouble? I mean, I hit him! I was trying to stop him, and I hit him! Is he still the captain? Are they going to court-martial me?”

  The question was more esoteric than Chekov could handle at the moment. “He’s still the captain. But if they court-martial you, they’ll have to court-martial us all by the time we manage to catch him.” He remembered grabbing at the boy’s ankle, and how close he’d come to striking out himself. “I think they’ll understand that we’re only trying to help him. Which way did he go?”

  Smith pointed overhead. “Up the way you came down. You didn’t pass him?”

  He hadn’t. And there hadn’t been that many options for where the boy could have gone.

  “He’s up top,” Chekov said with sudden certainty. “He’s trying to get past us overhead.”

  Smith leapt to follow when he scrambled back up the incline. “Mr. Tomlinson and Mr. Martine are up there.” She gave him a hard push from behind, then reached for a hand up in turn.

  “He may not know that.” Chekov hauled her as far up as he could, glad that she was able to pull herself up easily enough once she’d secured a handhold. “And he can’t know the topography as well as we do. I don’t think he realizes how hard it will be to get back off the rocks again.” He turned in a quick circle, looking for some sign of the boy’s passage.

  [241] Smith mimicked his move, but didn’t seem to have anymore success. “Where does he think he’s going?”

  Chekov remembered the terror behind the determination on the boy’s face, and tried to imagine what would move a younger version of his captain to feel such desperate fear. “Away from us. Wherever he’s going, it won’t be back the way he came.” He started to whip his compass out of its pocket, then realized he could just glimpse the lumpy tents and ground rover of the survey team’s base camp between the misty hillocks. He grabbed Smith’s arm. “Come on.”

  Away. Away from the base camp, away from the caves. Whatever Kirk thought he was running from, he’d awakened in the same big, dark, empty chamber as Chekov, probably with even more fear than Chekov had felt. He’d followed the breeze outside, and had gone to this much effort already to put distance between himself and that place. Chekov had a feeling that was all Kirk knew about where he was going—he was just getting away. He probably wouldn’t even think about what to do next until he was far from the danger he’d already faced, and felt a lot more safe.

  They found him again about midway across the broken plateau. The cracks had swelled to ridiculous widths, dropping bare rock sides into valleys where so much of the dirt had washed away that you could almost see down into the cave systems below. The boy made a single convulsive move toward the edge when he saw them approaching. Chekov put an arm out to slow Smith, and stopped her when she reached to take hold of her whistle.

  [242] “We need to call the others,” she whispered. As though they were conspirators and the boy some worrisome kind of spy.

  “We need to not frighten him.” Chekov hadn’t failed to notice the measuring look Kirk cast at the next plateau over. Even Chekov wondered if the boy could clear the gap with a single running leap.

  “Please don’t try it.” Chekov resisted the urge to call him “sir,” then felt absurdly disloyal for leaving the honorific silent.

  The boy cast a final look over his shoulder before straightening as proudly as any young king. “Why shouldn’t I?” His hands worked nervously, unconsciously at his sides.

  Chekov risked taking a few careful steps closer. “Because you can’t possibly make it. I could land a shuttle in that gap.” He felt more than saw Smith move a few steps to his right. A little of the tension in his stomach eased. At least they both understood that they needed to make sure the boy didn’t dart past them. Maybe he should have let Smith call the others after all. “I think we have a misunderstanding here. You don’t need to be afraid of us.”

  The last step was apparently too many. The boy flung his hands up in front of him, shouted suddenly, “Stop!”

  Chekov did.

  “Why do you have to find me?” The boy sounded suddenly pleading, and much younger even than he looked. “Just tell them you didn’t find me! I promise, I won’t tell anybody. My dad is in Starfleet, everybody will believe me. I’ll tell them I hid in the [243] woods, and I never saw anything.” His eyes stood out unnaturally dark in his pale face. “Please, I just want to go home.”

  Chekov wished it were that simple for any of them. “You can’t go home, not yet.”

  Tears welled up in the boy’s eyes, as though the last shred of his reserves had abruptly eroded away. He was suddenly shaking too hard to remain standing. Sinking to his knees, he hugged his arms across his chest and lowered his face in what might have been either desperation or shame. “Please ...” His voice was so quiet, Chekov could barely make out the words. “Please ...” he whispered, almost in prayer. “Please, don’t kill me. ...”

  “Something’s happening.”

  Uhura snapped abruptly awake at the sound of McCoy’s voice, and only then realized that she had been sleeping. Because there had been nothing else they could do, they’d wrapped themselves in silver emergency blankets and arranged themselves around the glowing alien medical chamber in the upper cavern, waiting for it to release this strangely altered version of Sulu into their custody. Despite the cave’s bitter cold, the possible danger, and the shock of what they’d just discovered, the sleepless hours she’d spent on Tlaoli had finally caught up with Uhura. She’d fallen asleep partway through that vigil, so suddenly and unexpectedly that she hadn’t even realized it in time to stop herself.

  She lifted her head off its lumpy and muddy pillow, then felt that pillow stir beneath her. Uhura grimaced, realizing belatedly that it was Sanner’s shoulder she’d [244] been slumped against. Fortunately, the cave geologist must have fallen asleep, too. He woke now, snorting muzzily and blinking out into the darkening glow of the cave. The golden light inside the chamber was slowly glittering away, ebbing down to a last few golden sparks.

  “Is he awake?” Uhura asked quietly.

  “Not yet.” McCoy had shed his blanket and was standing near the column again, using his carbide lamp to peer into its darkening interior. “But it looks like—hey! He’s gone!”

  Uhura scrambled to her feet in a tangle of blankets, hearing Sanner curse and do the same beside her. Two steps brought her up to the pile of shattered travertine that lay around the alien chamber, but even when Sanner added his carbide glow to hers and McCoy’s, they saw nothing inside that invisible cylinder of metal now but empty darkness.

  “It must transport people out when they’re healed,” Uhura said, frowning. �
��That would explain how Chekov and the captain got out into this chamber without breaking through the travertine shell.”

  Sanner grunted agreement. “I was wondering why we hadn’t seen a couple of these columns all cracked apart like Easter Eggs. But where’s Mr. Sulu now?”

  “Around here somewhere, I bet.” Uhura reached up to open the water drip on her carbide lamp to a reckless pour, but the light only spread out a few meters further, leaving the rest of the echoing stone cathedral still bathed in darkness. As far as she could see, however, nothing stirred between the travertine columns that disappeared [245] up into darkness. “Like Chekov and the captain, he might be disoriented, and not really sure what’s going on.”

  McCoy dropped his voice to a murmur. “Uhura, he probably knows you better than any of us. Call for him.”

  She nodded and cleared her throat to shout, then thought about how tense young Ensign Chekov had been after his journey through the alien transporter system, and lowered her voice to a gentler pitch. “Hikaru, where are you?” Uhura slowly turned, making sure her voice was projected to carry into all the echoing corners and crevices of the cavern. “Don’t worry, we’re here to help you.”

  “Uhura?”

  The voice was completely familiar, deep and resonant with just that slight hint of a native California accent. But the emotion in it was so foreign that it took Uhura a moment to recognize it as not just amazement but utter, bone-deep disbelief.

  She took a step toward the darkness where she thought Sulu’s voice had come from. “Yes, it’s me.” She made an urgent shushing gesture at Sanner when it looked as if the geologist was going to open his mouth. McCoy came soft-footed over to join her, nodding approval when Uhura glanced up at him inquiringly.

  “Keep him talking,” the doctor mouthed, barely loud enough to be heard over the hiss of their acetylene flames. Then he turned his own carbide lamp off completely and stepped away into the darkness. Comprehension crossed Sanner’s face, and he extinguished his light, too, vanishing in the opposite direction from McCoy. Uhura hoped the unusual brightness of her own [246] head lamp would keep the unseen pilot from noticing the loss of the other lights.