by Dayton Ward
After that, Scott knew, there was precious little he could do except wait.
THIRTEEN
Sitting in the co-pilot’s seat of the Galileo II, Kirk rested his elbows on the arms of his chair, making a conscious choice to keep his hands at rest in his lap. Though he preferred to operate the controls himself on those rare occasions when he left the Enterprise aboard one of its shuttlecraft, he was doing his best to heed McCoy’s advice—as the doctor had stated with no hint of eloquence—by “letting his people do their damned jobs.” In this case, that meant allowing Lieutenant Uhura to guide the craft, rather than forcing her to sit idle as so many other junior officers and would-be pilots had been required to do during previous shuttle outings with their captain.
As though reading his mind, Uhura said, “I didn’t have a chance to say it before, Captain, but thank you for bringing me along. I don’t get to leave the ship very often, much less practice my shuttle piloting skills. I thought I might be a little rusty, but it all seems to be coming back to me.”
“You are a qualified pilot, Lieutenant,” said Ambassador Sortino from where she sat in the chair behind Kirk. “Are you not?”
Uhura nodded. “I am, Ambassador. I’m not as good as Mister Sulu, but I can hold my own.”
“You needn’t worry about your skills, Lieutenant,” Kirk said, adopting a mentoring tone. “I dare say you could give Sulu a run for his money.” It was not meant as simple reassuring praise; Kirk was an accomplished pilot in his own right, and recognized Uhura’s natural affinity for controlling the craft. Her deft touch had been evident from the moment she had guided the Galileo out of the Enterprise’s shuttlebay, and reinforced by one of the softest, precise manual landings he had ever witnessed when the craft had arrived at the grounds of the Unified Leadership Council on Dolysia. Following the meeting with Chancellor Wiladra and Spock’s contact from Gralafi, the captain had let Uhura take the craft’s controls again as they, along with Sortino, set off for the mysterious planetoid. The communications officer had not balked at the notion of piloting the shuttle through the energy field surrounding Gralafi, though Kirk himself had experienced some measure of anxiety despite reports from Spock and other Enterprise personnel that their respective transits of the rift had been uneventful.
Lucky us, I suppose. The sobering thought seemed to echo in Kirk’s mind as he considered the ill-fated Huang Zhong and its crew, and his mood darkened even further as he contemplated the nature of the alien technology responsible for the science vessel’s crash. Even with the preliminary reports offered by survivors as to what had happened, it still had been more than a bit sobering to hear Spock’s confirmation of those initial suspicions. The greater shock had come with the first officer’s preliminary report about the possible origins of what he and his team had discovered.
“You look pensive, Captain,” Sortino said as the Galileo’s engines powered down and Uhura keyed the control to open the craft’s main hatch. “What’s on your mind? The Kalandans?”
Kirk nodded, rising from his seat and moving to the now-open hatch. “We know so little about them, even after the time we spent exploring that planet they created. It’s amazing that we might find another example of their technology.”
Sortino asked, “How far away are we from that other planet you found?”
“I’m not sure,” Kirk said as he exited the shuttlecraft, stepping down to the ground and taking his first look at the plateau that served as the Galileo’s landing site. “Two, maybe three weeks at maximum warp.” He frowned, remembering what he could of the star charts of the region he had reviewed while the Enterprise was in transit to the Kondaii system. At the time, he recalled making note of the fact that they were in the same general vicinity as the Kalandan planet. It was the ship’s first time back in this area of space since that original encounter with the artificial world, which ostensibly was built by the Kalandans as an outpost for reasons that remained shrouded in mystery.
“Given what we know of their technology,” Uhura said as she joined Kirk outside the shuttlecraft, “that probably wasn’t a huge distance to them. It doesn’t sound all that crazy to think they might have more than one planet in the same neighborhood. And it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve run into an alien species with that kind of ability.”
“Lieutenant, has anyone ever told you that you can sound a lot like Spock when you want to?” Kirk asked, smiling.
The comment elicited a chuckle from Sortino as she exited the Galileo, then regarded Kirk as she stepped down next to him. “Remind me to read your report about that other planet when we get back to the Enterprise. I’ve never heard anything like that before.”
Kirk replied, “I’ll make the file available to you, Ambassador. I was planning to review it myself.” The subsequent missions he and his crew had carried out were seeing to it that the less-interesting details of that particular incident were starting to blur. On the other hand, etched forever in his memory were the finer points of the time he had spent on that enigmatic world, stranded along with McCoy, Sulu, and Lieutenant Robert D’Amato—an Enterprise geologist who had lost his life to the planet’s automated defense system.
Looking about the plateau, Kirk saw that it was bordered on three sides by hills and on the fourth by a yawning chasm that had looked imposing from the air as the shuttle made its descent. The shuttlecraft Columbus, to which Spock and his science team had been assigned, sat fifty meters behind the Galileo, closer to the edge of the massive ravine. Though the ground beneath his feet was little more than dirt and flat rock, lush vegetation covered the hillsides rising up around them. Unlike the areas near the mining colony, the air here was crisp and clean, and Kirk thought he detected the faintest hint of something sweet tickling his nostrils. As far as he could tell and with the exception of the two shuttlecraft, the region looked to be untouched by the intrusions of the Dolysians, or anyone else, for that matter.
“Absolutely beautiful,” Sortino said. “This view is spectacular.”
“No argument here,” Kirk replied, before looking over his shoulder. “Lieutenant, how far are we from the Havreltipa colony?”
As she stepped away from the Galileo’s hatch, the communications officer replied, “About four thousand kilometers, sir; not quite halfway around the planetoid. According to the reports I’ve read, the Dolysians have explored most of the surface, though largely for the purposes of prospecting potential mining sites. This region apparently lacks any appreciable deposits of erinadium, so it’s unlikely any real mining efforts will be established here.”
“Coincidence?” Sortino asked, “Or just plain good luck for the Kalandans?”
“Excellent questions,” Kirk said, conceding the ambassador’s point. “As Mister Spock might say, it’s logical to assume that if the Kalandans are responsible for what he found, then they were here thousands of years ago, well before the Dolysian people advanced to a technological level that allowed them to travel here from their homeworld. They would’ve known about the Dolysians, and perhaps even foresaw their interest in this planet. Maybe they even anticipated how the Dolysians would find erinadium useful.”
Uhura said, “It wouldn’t be the craziest thing we’ve ever run into, that’s for sure.”
“Precognition?” Sortino asked.
“Maybe,” Kirk replied. “For all we know, the Kalandans may even have had plans for the Dolysians once they achieved a predetermined level of technological advancement.” He glanced at Uhura. “It wouldn’t be the first time we’d run into something like that, either.”
Sortino smiled, shaking her head. “I need to review your mission reports, Captain. I’ve heard the stories, but somehow I think I’m missing all the really good stuff.”
Looking around, Kirk asked, “Well, we’re here, and the Columbus is here. Where’s Spock? He said he’d meet us.” Looking to Uhura, he prompted, “Lieutenant?”
“I’m not picking up any life readings, Captain,” Uhura replied over the quiet whine of
the tricorder she held in her hands. “Wherever they are, they’re not in the shuttle, or anywhere nearby.”
Kirk reached for the communicator on his hip and flipped it open. “Kirk to Spock,” he said as he held the device near his mouth. “Come in, Spock.”
The first officer’s voice replied from the communicator’s speaker grille, “Spock here, Captain. We noted your arrival, and I should be joining you in short order.”
“Are you invisible, Mister Spock?” Kirk asked.
“In a manner of speaking, sir.”
A low rumbling sound rolled across the plateau from the direction of the hillside farthest from the chasm. Kirk turned in that direction, half expecting to see an avalanche despite the admitted absurdity of such a notion. Still, he was relieved to see no surge of tumbling rocks bearing down on them. Instead, there was only Spock, standing no more than twenty meters from them, before an opening in the hillside that Kirk was certain had not been there upon their arrival.
“Greetings, Captain,” the Vulcan called out, his voice carrying across the open ground. His left hand gripped the strap of the tricorder he wore slung over his right shoulder, and Kirk noted the dirt stains on his uniform tunic and trousers.
“It looks like you’ve been busy, Spock,” Kirk said as he and the others began walking toward him.
The first officer nodded, “Indeed we have. I think you will find what we’ve discovered below to be most interesting.” As the landing party drew closer, he inclined his head toward Sortino. “Greetings to you, as well, Ambassador.”
“And to you, Mister Spock.” She gestured toward the gap in the hill’s rocky façade. “You make quite the entrance.”
“No kidding,” Kirk added. “That’s some trick.”
In response to the comments, Spock’s right eyebrow arched as he turned to regard the opening from which he had emerged. “To borrow a human colloquialism, Captain, I believe that you have not yet seen anything.”
In his travels, Kirk had seen his share of alien technology. While much of it was less advanced than that with which he normally interacted, there were those occasions where the sophistication of a computer or other mechanism far surpassed anything with which he was familiar. The Preservers, the Fabrini, and the Shedai, along with so many others, fell into that latter category. As he beheld the subterranean storehouse into which Spock had led him, he once again was reminded that the Kalandans also stood among such august company.
“It really is them, isn’t it, Spock?” Kirk asked as he stepped through the archway leading from the underground passage into the chamber. Even as he asked the question, he already had his answer. Though some of the details were different, they were outnumbered by the similarities to the technology he recalled studying back on that unnamed world: the small, seemingly irrelevant planet guarded by the lone sentinel, Losira. “The Kalandans, again?”
“Even without the prerecorded message we found, the parallels in technology and instrumentation are unmistakable, Captain,” his first officer replied as he stepped around Kirk on his way to a nearby bank of what could only be control consoles designed for unknown users. “There are some divergences, of course. First and foremost, this planetoid does not show any evidence of having been artificially created, as was the case with Kalandan Outpost 1.” Kirk nodded at his friend’s use of the planetary designator he had given to the peculiar, artificially created world, which the Kalandans had opted not to name—at least so far as Spock had been able to determine during his time spent studying the ancient technology they had found there.
Spock continued, “Just based on what we’ve been able to find to this point, the planetoid belongs to the Kondaii system, and was appropriated by the Kalandans for their use many thousands of years ago, well before the Dolysian society evolved on their world.” He indicated his tricorder. “Our readings indicate that this chamber and the equipment in it is much older than what we encountered on the other outpost planet.”
At one of the nearby consoles, where he had been working when Spock led Kirk and the others into the room, Lieutenant Boma turned and pointed to the cube hanging at the center of the room. “That’s a computer control mechanism, sir. Our tricorder scans show that it has power and other connections running through the rock to and from other chambers in this complex. Some of those rooms have devices like this one, while others don’t.”
“A kind of network?” asked Uhura as she paced the room’s perimeter, examining the different consoles and banks of controls.
Boma replied, “That seems to be the case. The whole facility actually looks to be laid out that way, with five clusters of rooms and other compartments all networked by a series of tunnels, with other, larger passages connecting the clusters. Each cluster looks to have its own power source, environmental control, and other self-contained systems, almost as though sections were designed to run independently of each other.” Shaking his head, Boma blew out an audible breath. “We’re still figuring a lot of it out, but Mister Spock’s knowledge of Kalandan technology from your previous encounter is definitely coming in handy.” Redirecting his attention to Kirk, he added, “Captain, we found what looks to be the Kalandan version of a medical bay in one room. Doctor McCoy’s investigating it now.”
Nodding at the report, Kirk held out his hand to Boma. “I’m sorry about the loss of your shipmates, Lieutenant.”
Boma took the proffered hand and shook it, his expression turning solemn. “I appreciate that, sir.”
“How are you holding up?”
As though uncertain as to the best response for the question, Boma paused, casting his gaze toward the floor before replying, “It’s hard, thinking about it, but working helps. I was angry at first, but it’s hard to be angry at people who’ve been dead for thousands of years.” He sighed, shaking his head. “The Huang Zhong was a small ship, so we got to know each other pretty well, very quickly. They were good people, from Captain Arens on down.”
“I’m sure they were,” Kirk replied. The last time he had seen Boma was on the day the lieutenant had requested his transfer from the Enterprise, that act coming after Kirk had been forced to enter a notation into the younger officer’s service record regarding his conduct during the events on Taurus II. His insubordination and near-mutinous conduct toward Spock on that occasion might have garnered him a court-martial from another starship captain, but Kirk had opted for nonjudicial punishment and a formal reprimand. It was obvious at the time that Boma regretted his actions, and even though Spock himself never again discussed the matter, Boma still felt that a new assignment to another ship or base was the best way to put the incident behind him. Kirk had tried to convince him otherwise, but to no avail.
Joining them after taking a circuit around the room and looking over some of the mechanisms for herself, Ambassador Sortino said, “The sophistication of the design looks astounding.”
Spock turned from where he had taken up station at an adjacent console. “Indeed it is, Ambassador, though it also is worth noting that despite this equipment’s relative complexity, it still lacks some of the more refined features we discovered on Kalandan Outpost 1.”
“Well, it’s a damned sight more advanced than anything I ever saw on border patrol,” the ambassador countered.
Spock said, “Although our tricorders were not able to detect it, the system’s own internal monitoring equipment revealed the presence of a massive energy plant, far beneath us and separated from the rest of the complex. Based on the amount of power being generated, it would appear that the plant is responsible for the energy field surrounding Gralafi.”
“The source of the rift is here?” Kirk asked. “In this complex? If that’s the case, we should be able to find evidence of broadcast arrays or some other means of focusing that power into space, right?”
Shaking his head, the Vulcan answered, “Only in a manner of speaking, sir. From what we’ve been able to determine, the planetoid itself, with its rich variety of particular mineral ores, acts as a
form of antenna. Indeed, Gralafi and the energy barrier encompassing it would seem to be intrinsically linked. As Mister Boma earlier hypothesized and the projection of Meyeliri confirmed, the field has several uses, simple protection being its primary function. However, it does conduct the equivalent of covert sensor scans on any vessel passing through it, during which it assesses each ship’s threat potential.”
“That’s incredible,” Sortino said. “An entire planet, deliberately engineered to act as an energy field generator. Imagine what you could do with that kind of power, and the ability to broadcast it on such a scale. What’s even more amazing is that these systems are still functioning even after all this time.”
“Though not without issue,” Spock replied. “Based on what we have learned about the generation of the energy field, the interval during which it remains open is much longer than originally intended. There would appear to be a fault in the control mechanisms overseeing the barrier—one from which the Dolysians have benefited for generations.”
“How about that?” Kirk said, shaking his head. “One civilization’s mistake or misfortune is another’s gain, only in this case, it’s an innocent reward, rather than something obtained via theft or conquest.” He wondered how this revelation would affect Dolysian society once the truth became known. “So, this place just came on line once you found a way in?”
Spock replied, “We found evidence of very few systems in an active state, though other systems did later come on line. It appears some form of passive detection process is monitoring conditions within the complex, and reacts to the presence of living beings. For example, the air in these caves seemed rather stale and oxygen depleted, and it was cooler than it is now. An environmental control system has been activated in response to our being here.”
Stepping closer, Boma gestured toward the stations. “And notice the lack of dust? Some kind of automated maintenance protocols are probably responsible for that.”
