Star Trek: That Which Divides

by Dayton Ward

  “This is incredible,” Boma said, his voice barely a whisper.

  Meyeliri continued, “Despite its proximity to an inhabited planet, it is ideally suited for our people in terms of environment and natural resources. Therefore, we designed the energy field encompassing this world to protect this facility from the curious. The field will open for short durations at regular intervals in order to receive updated information from our homeworld. As residents of this repository, you have the means to make contact with the homeworld as necessary. Otherwise, you will live in solitude, overseeing the facility’s operation until such time as replacement caretakers arrive. Again, welcome, and I wish you well.”

  “I wonder if any Kalandans ever heard that message,” McCoy said after Meyeliri’s image faded.

  Boma said, “It sounds like this whole planet is nothing but one giant contingency plan. They send people here to man it, make sure everything keeps running, but then what?”

  “Perhaps they were afflicted by the same disease that eventually destroyed the rest of the Kalandan race,” Spock replied. From what he and Lieutenant Uhura had learned on the other outpost, Kalandans dispatched to other planets throughout this part of the galaxy had been called back to their homeworld. That happened when the disease was beginning its deadly campaign, and before it was known that it would prove lethal to their civilization. “The answer may well be here, along with the rest of the information the Kalandans were able to amass.”

  Moving to look about the room, Boma said, “The complete history and knowledge of an entire civilization, right here at our fingertips? This is amazing. You could make a career out of studying something like this.”

  McCoy cleared his throat. “What I don’t understand is, if this planetoid was supposed to be protected from the Dolysians, or anyone else for that matter, then why does the energy field open at all? If the Kalandans thought it needed to open from time to time, then why stay open so long? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It may well be that the systems overseeing the rift are malfunctioning,” Spock said. “After all, they have been in continuous operation for thousands of years. Even the most robust mechanisms require periodic maintenance. It’s logical to assume that some form of automated repair work takes place as required, but even those devices may be suffering the effects of age. It would be interesting to investigate that possibility.”

  “You have to wonder how the Dolysians are going to handle this,” McCoy said. “I mean, they had to at least consider the possibility that the field around this planet was an artificial creation, but to have it confirmed? And then be faced with all of this?” He shook his head. “They’re going to have their hands full, that’s for sure.”

  “Indeed,” Spock conceded. How would the Dolysians react to the knowledge that fate and circumstance had seen fit to appoint them custodians for the amassed knowledge of an extinct alien civilization? How would the information stored here affect their society, and what was the potential for disaster if access to that knowledge was left unchecked?

  The situation, Spock decided, had just become a great deal more complicated.

  TEN

  Standing in the middle of the Enterprise’s hangar bay, Montgomery Scott watched as two of his junior engineering assistants maneuvered a container loaded with tools and other equipment into the cargo shuttlecraft Caroline Herschel. Each of the crewmen held an antigravity loader attached to one side of the container, simplifying the process of moving the heavy crate into the proper position to be put aboard the compact craft.

  “Aye, that’s it, lads,” Scott said, nodding in approval as he held up the data slate he had been carrying with him all afternoon and used the device’s stylus to mark the container on his inventory list as having been loaded. Double-checking the slate’s information, he added, “Now, we just load the equipment we need aboard the Copernicus, and that’ll do it.”

  One of the crewmen pushing the container through the shuttle’s open hatch, a young, muscled fellow named Miles McLoughlin, shook his head. “I can’t wait for the day when transporters are good enough to beam cargo from point to point around a ship.”

  Scott could not help smiling upon overhearing the remark. “What’s the matter? You’re not afraid of a little hard work, are you? Imagine having to do all of this without the antigravs. That’d make your day a wee bit pleasant, no?”

  “Don’t give him any ideas,” said McLoughlin’s companion, Crewman Scott Hertzog, offering the other man a playful smack on the arm. “We’re almost done.”

  “That we are,” Scott confirmed, using his data slate to point to the lone remaining container sitting on the hangar deck. “Let’s get that loaded, and the first team will be ready to head out.” With all of the necessary equipment now prepared for transport, he knew that the real work was only just beginning. “Grab a hearty meal while you can, lads, as you’ll likely be getting your fill of field rations over the next few days.”

  “All the reconstituted beef stew you can eat,” Hertzog said, offering a wide grin. “If that’s not fancy living, I don’t know what is.”

  McLoughlin’s expression was one of mock derision. “How can you stand that stuff? It’ll melt your stomach lining if you eat enough of it. Now, the chicken loaf? That’s actually not too bad.”

  “I prefer that my meats be presented in non-loaf form, thank you very much,” Hertzog replied. Turning his attention to Scott, the crewman asked, “So, all we have are three days, sir?”

  Nodding, the chief engineer said, “Aye, that’s it. We’ll have to be working at warp speed to get it all done in time.”

  Under other circumstances, Scott would have been content to call it a day and have his people get a good night’s rest before setting out in the morning to begin the salvage operation. However, time was a driving factor in his team’s activities. The task given him by Captain Kirk to strip the wrecked Huang Zhong of all sensitive equipment and other components would, by the engineer’s estimation, require almost continuous effort over the next seventy or so hours.

  “Three days is an awfully tight window, sir,” McLoughlin said. “Do you think we can get it all done?”

  Scott shrugged. “We’re certainly going to give it our best shot.” While he would have preferred a longer period of time to carry out the assignment, the deadline was necessary in order to meet the goal of having all Enterprise personnel as well as the Huang Zhong survivors away from the Gralafi planetoid well ahead of the rift’s projected time of closure. He had three days to remove and ferry away everything that could be salvaged from the crashed science vessel—weapons and defense systems, sensors, computer core, various components of the propulsion system, and whatever else could be crammed into the various Enterprise shuttlecraft that had been dedicated to the detail. Once that was accomplished, whatever remained of the ship at the end of the time allotted to Scott and his people would have to be destroyed.

  “It’s too bad,” Hertzog said, sighing. “The Huang Zhong’s only been in service for a couple of years. If circumstances were different, we could tow it out of here and back to a shipyard for repairs.”

  “You want to babysit it for three years until the rift opens again?” McLoughlin asked, his grin wide as he regarded his friend.

  Hertzog replied, “Okay, I guess Starfleet can build another one.” Then, as though realizing the potential callousness of his remark, he added, “I just wish we could say the same about the people we lost.”

  “Aye,” Scott said, considering the Huang Zhong’s captain and those members of its crew who lost their lives in the crash. He had not known any of them, but they were fellow Starfleet officers and enlisted personnel, so they were brothers and sisters. While he would rather be diverting his engineering expertise into learning what had contributed to the science vessel’s demise, he knew that Commander Spock was heading up that effort. If anyone could learn the truth about what had happened here, it was the Enterprise’s formidable science officer.

  We owe
that much to Captain Arens and his people. Scott cleared his throat, thinking of the eleven caskets which had been placed with reverence in one of the Enterprise’s cargo bays. While it was not the ideal location in which to house the remains of the Huang Zhong’s crew, recovering the bodies and bringing them back to the Enterprise, so far as Scott was concerned, had been the first and most important of the tasks he had been given to complete.

  “There’s nothing we can do for those poor souls, lads,” he said, forcing his attention back to the matters at hand. “What we can do is the job we’ve been given, and maybe help Mister Spock to find out what happened to them, and maybe prevent that from happening to anyone else.” He certainly had no desire to see any more caskets come to rest in his cargo bay.

  Seeing nods of approval and even determination from his subordinates, Scott nodded. “All right then. It looks like we’re ready to go here. Go and grab something to eat, and be back here in an hour with your kit packed. The first team leaves at fifteen-thirty hours.” According to the information he had been given, it was coming up on early morning in the region of the planetoid where the Huang Zhong had crashed. Fourteen hours of daylight would be available to his team on their first day of work, much more conducive to their efforts than if the rift surrounding Gralafi were closed. Scott had read in one of the briefings about the small, seemingly rogue world that, during the nearly three-year cycle when it was cut off from Dolysia, was shrouded in perpetual darkness. One of the rift’s many odd properties was that it somehow blocked the sun from being visible from Gralafi’s surface, even though it allowed light and heat from the star to reach the planetoid. The engineer tried to imagine what living and working as part of the mining community would be like under such conditions, never able to see the sun they knew was there, somewhere, hidden by whatever bizarre spectacle surrounded the odd little planetoid they called home. It was but one more mystery for which Spock would doubtless be trying to find an explanation even as he investigated what might have brought down the Huang Zhong.

  Better him than me, Scott mused, realizing for the first time that he was alone on the hangar deck, the rest of his team having already vacated the premises to finalize whatever preparations might still need to be addressed before their scheduled departure for Gralafi. I’ve got my own mysteries to solve, like how in the name of all that’s holy am I supposed to get all of this done in three days?

  Despite the friendly nature of relations between the Dolysians and the Federation, miners living and working on the planetoid could not be allowed unrestricted access to the wreckage of the Huang Zhong. The measures about to be taken by Scott and his engineers—gutting and scuttling the ship—though extreme, were required by regulations when it came to the presence of Starfleet vessels in situations such as this, when operational security and the protection of classified material and information was at issue. With the pending closure of the rift, waiting for towing vessels to be dispatched by Starfleet was not an option, and neither was leaving behind a cadre of Enterprise personnel to safeguard the downed ship until the mysterious rift enveloping the Gralafi planetoid deigned to open once again. That left salvage and demolition up to Scott and his engineers, and accomplishing both tasks in the time allotted by Captain Kirk would prove challenging, to say the least.

  Complicating the situation, if only slightly, was the fact that with both Kirk and Spock off the ship, command of the Enterprise had for the moment been left to Scott himself. This would prevent him from traveling to the planetoid, at least until the captain or the first officer returned. Therefore, Scott’s senior engineering assistant, John Kyle, would be overseeing the salvage activities and was in fact already on the planetoid, taking care of various preliminary tasks in advance of the main work party. None of that diminished Scott’s desire to be on Gralafi, watching over the delicate operation.

  Such is life, he reminded himself. I guess I’ll just have to conjure this particular miracle for the captain via remote.

  His reverie was broken by the sound of an alert klaxon wailing across the hangar deck. Snapping his head toward an alarm indicator set into the bulkhead near the exit hatch, Scott noted that it was flashing a bright, blinking crimson. No sooner did that register than the intercom’s whistle pierced the air over the sound of the siren, and was followed by the baritone voice of Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu.

  “Red Alert! All hands to battle stations! This is not a drill. Mister Scott to the bridge!”

  Sitting in the command chair at the center of the Enterprise’s bridge, Sulu kept his gaze fixed on the main viewscreen, doing his best to examine each of the stars highlighting the black curtain of space displayed before him. He stared, waiting for anything—the slightest flicker or blink—that might betray the presence of what he knew was lurking out there.

  Come on, he thought. Poke your head out here. Just once.

  “Shields are at full power,” reported Lieutenant Manjula Rahda from where she sat at the helm console in front of Sulu. Normally assigned to gamma shift, she had been called to duty early in order to serve in Sulu’s stead while he held the conn. “Fire control reports all weapons standing by.”

  Sulu nodded at the report. “Very well. Chekov, anything new on sensors?” As he spoke, he realized that he was gripping the arms of the command chair with such force that his fingers were beginning to tingle. He forced himself to release the tension in his arms, and even leaned back in his seat. The actions did little to lessen his heightened apprehension. Relax, Lieutenant. How does the captain manage to make this look so easy?

  Standing at the science station and bent over the console’s hooded scanner interface, his face bathed in a soft, blow glue, Ensign Pavel Chekov replied without looking up, “Negative, sir. There was a momentary surge of neutron radiation, but now there doesn’t seem to be anything there.”

  “I think we all know better than that,” Sulu replied, his eyes drawn if only for a moment to the Red Alert indicator, which still flashed before him from the center of the dual console that served both the helm officer’s and navigator stations. Though he had ordered the audible alarms silenced, the illuminated signal was more than sufficient to communicate the seriousness of the situation. “They’re out there, somewhere.” The Enterprise sensors had taken only seconds to register the odd neutron radiation reading, which could not be attributed to the starship itself, the mysterious spatial rift, or any of the civilian ship traffic in or near the anomaly or the Dolysian planet. Instead, the scanners had within microseconds searched the memory banks of the Enterprise’s main computer and found a match to the collected readings. The computer then automatically routed that information to the vessel’s defensive systems at the same time that it apprised the science station—and by extension, Sulu and the rest of the bridge—of what it believed it had found.

  “A cloaked Romulan ship,” Chekov said. Though the ensign remained composed, Sulu still heard the slight tension in the younger man’s voice.

  “And we’re sure it’s not a sensor reflection?” Sulu asked. “Or something else given off by the rift?”

  Chekov shook his head. “I’ve double-checked the readings. The computer is certain we detected a Romulan ship, if only for a few seconds.”

  So, where is it? The unspoken question ringing in his ears, Sulu returned his attention to the viewscreen. There remained only empty space, punctuated by distant stars. Was he expecting the Romulan vessel to just reveal itself right before his eyes? Were that to happen, the helm officer knew that it likely would be a prelude to something far more disagreeable than the unease currently gripping him.

  “I thought our sensors had been modified to identify cloaked ships,” said M’Ress, the female Caitian lieutenant seated at the communications station. As always, her speech sounded low and even relaxed. Sulu often wondered if her voice was a reflection of how she truly felt, even during situations like this where anxiety would seem like a natural reaction, or if the felinoid officer was just very good at hiding her emotions i
n times of stress. He preferred to believe the former.

  “The sensors were upgraded after Captain Kirk stole the cloaking device from that Romulan ship,” Chekov said, “and Mister Scott was able to figure out, at least to a point, how it worked.”

  Sulu recalled Spock’s briefing following the successful completion of Captain Kirk’s top-secret mission to obtain by any means necessary a Romulan cloaking device, during which the captain had employed subterfuge and deception not only against the commander and crew of a Romulan warship but also the men and women under his own command. The Enterprise’s chief engineer had been able to study the pilfered technology for only a few days before the device was handed over to Starfleet’s tactical division. Despite the limited opportunity afforded him, Scott was able to determine the cloaking generator’s basic functionality, including the faint neutron energy signature it emitted while active and drawing power from the vessel in which it was installed. The signature it produced while fitted to the Enterprise’s propulsion system was different from those of Romulan vessels that had been scanned, but there was enough commonality between the various readings that Scott was able to program an algorithm for the computer subprocesses overseeing the ship’s sensor array. It was this new set of instructions that allowed the scanners to identify the telltale clue of a cloaked vessel as it entered detection range. The question now troubling Sulu was whether the sensors were accurate, or if they had fallen prey to some heretofore unknown properties exhibited by the Dolysian rift.

  Behind him, Sulu heard the pneumatic hiss of the doors to the turbolift opening, and when he swiveled his chair to look he saw Montgomery Scott stepping onto the bridge. The chief engineer’s gaze was already focused on the viewscreen, and Sulu watched his features darken into a scowl as he attempted to process what he was seeing—or not seeing.