Star Trek: The Lost Era - 08 - 2319 - One Constant Star

by David R. George III

  “What about records?” Sulu asked.

  “We didn’t see anything recognizable as a traditional computer,” Linojj said. “Even if we had, the city was without power. We did discover several items that resembled large books, but instead of paper pages, they contained sheets of a film-like substance. Sensors revealed that they had been inscribed chemically. If that’s how they stored information, it may take some time to decipher their language.”

  Sulu reached forward and picked up a personal access display device. She examined the padd’s screen, which showed the tawny-skinned form of an alien being, the image copied from a picture—one of many—that the landing party had found down on the planet. “Could it be that the population is there, but we just can’t perceive them? Could they be hiding from us?”

  “I don’t think so,” Linojj said. “If they were there but somehow imperceptible to us, they would still interact with the environment, but the undisturbed layers of ash covering everything belies that idea. Nobody’s been in that city for some time.”

  Sulu set the padd back down on the table. “Can we be sure that everything you experienced on the planet was real?” she asked, searching for an explanation.

  The first officer looked across the table at Lieutenant Commander Fenn, who held up her tricorder. “We’re as sure as we can be, Captain,” she said. “Every member of the landing party saw the same things, all of it matched by the data logged on multiple tricorders.”

  “The readings gathered on the surface are also consistent with what our probes have so far detected,” Tenger added. The six class-three devices continued to soar through the skies of Rejarris II, collecting information.

  “I imagine it’s possible that everything we’ve seen is some sort of illusion,” Linojj said, “or that it was all manufactured complete with trace DNA and signs of wear built in, but to what end? Whether intended for us or for somebody else, what purpose would such a ruse serve?”

  Sulu considered her first officer’s point. “You’re right,” she said. “Those possibilities seem even less likely than all the inhabitants of a world vanishing.”

  “Excuse me, Captain,” Young said. He seemed tentative to Sulu.

  “You have something to say, Ensign?” she asked. “I called this meeting for discussion.”

  “Yes, sir,” Young said. “I just wanted to point out that the word vanish implies something sudden, and in this case, where we’re talking about the population of a planet, it also implies some powerful force at work. But while we do know that there doesn’t appear to be anybody left on Rejarris Two, we don’t know when they left or how long it took them.”

  Linojj nodded as Young spoke. When he finished, she said, “We uncovered no evidence that the people all died, but I did notice several details that hinted at them simply leaving. It was nothing definite. We found an arrangement of pictures that seemed incomplete, as though somebody had decided to remove a few to take with them. A collection of clothes that looked as though items were missing. Things like that.”

  “But if the inhabitants of the planet left, where did they go?” Tenger asked. “There are no Class-M worlds in this solar system, and the level of technology we found on the planet tells us that they had yet to develop warp drive. As best we can tell, they only recently visited their moons for the first time.” After the landing party had beamed down, the crew had sent a probe to each of the two small natural satellites orbiting Rejarris II. Scans found a pair of automated, uncrewed spacecraft on the larger moon, and a third on the other. Small and liquid-fueled, the trio of landers demonstrated the rudimentary level of space travel that the natives of Rejarris II had achieved.

  “Maybe they had help,” Linojj said, repeating an idea she’d voiced before transporting down to the planet.

  “Where would that help have come from?” Tenger asked. “We surveyed all the other planets and moons in this system, and none are inhabited. That means that assistance would have had to come from outside. The star nearest to Rejarris is almost five light-years distant, which implies that such assistance would have required the use of warp drive, but we’ve scanned for residual warp signatures and haven’t found any.”

  “Maybe the exodus from the planet took place so long ago,” Fenn said, “that the residual signatures have dissipated.”

  “Or maybe we haven’t scanned closely enough in surrounding space,” Sulu said. “Commander Tenger, plot a search pattern for—”

  The three-toned boatswain’s whistle sounded in the observation lounge. “Bridge to Captain Sulu,” came the voice of the ship’s navigator, Gaia Aldani, who presently had the conn.

  Sulu tapped a control on the intercom set into the conference table. “Go ahead, Lieutenant.”

  “Captain, one of the probes has found something,” Aldani said.

  Sulu pushed back in her chair at once and stood up. Everybody else followed suit. “I’m on my way, Lieutenant. Out.” She deactivated the intercom with a touch. Addressing the two crew members who did not serve on the bridge, the captain dismissed Morell and Permenter. She then led the others through the nearest exit. Passing doors that opened into her office, a turbolift, and a refresher, she emerged through one of two aft entries onto the bridge.

  “Report,” Sulu said. She skirted the combined communications-and-tactical console and moved to the command chair, where Lieutenant Aldani had already started to rise.

  “One of the probes completed its flyover of the southernmost continent and began mapping the sea floor,” she said, pointing toward the main viewer. The blue expanse of a Rejarris II ocean filled most of it, with the edge of an empty brown-and-gray landmass cutting across the bottom left corner of the screen. “The region isn’t far from the pole. Ensign Andreas, show the captain what the probe discovered.”

  “Yes, sir.” Fenn took a position at a secondary sciences station as Devonna Andreas operated the primary console. On the viewscreen, a red line appeared and proceeded to trace a rough circle, mostly over the water, but also along an inland mountain range. The blue then faded away, leaving a shaded area of the sea floor showing. The familiar form—a raised rim surrounding a central uplift at the center—told Sulu exactly what the probe had located.

  “It’s a crater,” she said.

  “Yes, sir,” Aldani confirmed.

  “When was it produced?” Sulu asked.

  “Based on the minimal amount of erosion and several other factors,” Andreas said, “it was probably generated within the last half century.”

  “So the smoke in the atmosphere and the ash on the ground are not the product of a nuclear winter,” Sulu said. “They’re the result of an impact winter.”

  “Yes, sir,” Aldani said.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant, Ensign,” Sulu said. “That’s good work.”

  As the captain sat down, Aldani returned to the navigation console, where she relieved Ensign Shahinian. The first officer stepped up beside the command chair. “It seems that an asteroid has solved our mystery,” Linojj said. “That’s why we didn’t see any destroyed cities anywhere on the planet: there was no war.”

  “It solves one mystery,” Sulu said, “but not the other. An asteroid impact didn’t vaporize everybody on Rejarris Two.”

  “No,” Linojj said, “but if they studied the skies, then they could have predicted the disaster.”

  “But you’ve seen their civilization,” Sulu said. “You’ve seen the satellites that they put into orbit, and their rudimentary launch facilities. Is there any chance that they managed to develop faster-than-light travel?”

  Linojj shrugged and shook her head. “Not based on what we’ve learned so far.”

  “Then that’s our second mystery,” Sulu said. “Where did the people of Rejarris Two go, and how did they get there?”

  * * *

  2

  * * *

  Tenger scrutinized the readings on the tactical console for anything that might provide insight, but that the sensor-analysis programs might not flag
. A few minutes before, he had noted an unusual concentration of silver-oxide molecules, which he’d then tracked back to a damaged satellite. He scanned the compromised device to find that a micrometeoroid had torn through its casing and embedded itself in a battery pack, which proved to be the source of the leaked particles. Other than that, he’d seen nothing that warranted further attention.

  The security chief had arrived an hour early for his shift, displacing Ensign Molina to a secondary bridge station. Tenger typically prided himself on his punctuality, appearing at meetings and for duty at exactly the prescribed times. He had been that way for more than a quarter century, ever since his training at the Academy, when he’d replaced his continual attempts to challenge boundaries with a commitment to formality and discipline.

  At the time he’d chosen to apply for entry into Starfleet, he had not yet admitted to himself—and perhaps had not even realized—the role that his sister’s fate had played in his decision. Revna had not been a beauty, a rarity among Orion women, but their family had at first counted that fact as a boon. On Lokras IV, where they lived, pirates threatened the colony world on a regular basis, not least of all by seizing beautiful young women they could sell on the interstellar black market.

  The Orion Syndicate had also maintained a heavy presence in and around the Lokras region. Their smugglers routinely ran native plants from the planet and peddled them to the manufacturers of illicit drugs, while at the same time trafficking those drugs back to the colony. Their particular brand of avarice instigated a public health crisis on Lokras IV, in turn fomenting terrible social ills. Tenger’s parents protected their daughter and son as best they could, even taking the precaution of having tracer chips embedded in their children’s sides—chips that would sound an alarm if they moved outside designated safe areas, such as home and school and the routes between.

  Tenger, eight years his sister’s junior, had still been attending primary school when she’d matriculated at university. Never a tremendously cheerful sort, Revna soon developed a moroseness that everybody in the family attributed to a lack of self-confidence, owing to her short height and broad, almost masculine frame. But nobody—not even Tenger—understood the depth of her pain, and when she didn’t return home one evening, it became too late for such understanding to matter.

  A police investigation had found Revna’s tracking chip at school, which she’d evidently dug out of her own flesh, carrying it with her to places that wouldn’t trigger an alert signal, and hiding it in those places when she went elsewhere. She remained missing for five days with no hint at all about where she might have gone or what might have happened to her. Tenger didn’t know if his sister had simply run away from home, but something other than a possible threat to her well-being troubled him even more: he hated not knowing.

  When the police had at last collected evidence that Revna might have voluntarily or involuntarily left Lokras IV, the failure of everyone in the family to recognize the seriousness of her despair became clear in the shock they all displayed when they learned where she had last been seen: outside the local spaceport, in an alley not far from the freight terminal, in a seedy, disreputable part of town. They learned that she had often visited that alley, and others, in search of an illegal commodity: the Venus drug. According to one of her friends, Revna wanted to change her appearance, to soften her features and round her curves, and she consumed the banned substance daily for months. Long rumored to be a fiction, the Venus drug—or whatever Tenger’s sister used—didn’t produce the results she so desperately sought.

  Maybe that had driven Revna over the edge, or maybe, as Tenger had suspected, some nefarious thug had taken advantage of her hopelessness. However it happened, she stopped taking the Venus drug and instead tried another prohibited substance: blood-gem. The powerful and devastatingly addictive narcotic made her so chemically and psychologically dependent on it that she sold herself into offworld servitude in exchange for a constant supply.

  The Lokras IV police had followed Revna’s trail to the Erivek system, on the Federation-Klingon border, and from there into the heart of the Empire. On Celos II, weeks of investigation passed without success. Finally, retracting his demand of local officials for an official inquiry into who had brought Tenger’s sister there, and waiving any claims that a crime had been committed by a Klingon national or that an interstellar treaty had been violated, the Orion detective settled for discovering Revna’s whereabouts. He found her in the morgue, dead from an overdose at the age of twenty.

  Tenger had felt as though his world had been torn apart. Too late, his family fled Lokras IV and relocated to the Orion homeworld, where they stayed with Tenger’s paternal aunt. Whatever small amount of independence he’d previously enjoyed evaporated. As protective as his parents had been on Lokras IV, they redoubled their efforts to keep their son safe.

  Tenger had rebelled. At every opportunity, he fought to escape the constant attention paid to him by the adults in his family—father, mother, aunt, uncle, and an older female cousin. He ignored the restrictions his parents placed on him. He acted out not only as a direct result of the trauma of losing his sister, but also because he knew that, at least in part, he blamed his father and mother for Revna’s death. Worse, he blamed himself. He’d only been a boy, but he still believed that he should have grasped the downward spiral of emotion in which his sister had been caught. He didn’t know what he could have done—maybe nothing more than telling his parents, but maybe that would have been enough to save Revna.

  When a Starfleet officer had visited his secondary school as part of the Federation’s cultural outreach, though, Tenger had perceived a means of saving himself. Nonplused by his choice, his family nevertheless did not stand in his way, although they worried that he would defy the structure of the Academy. Instead of railing against the rules, though, he clung to them. In retrospect, it didn’t require psychological training to pinpoint his motivation: he did what his sister could not, living within an exacting set of regulations. More than that, he learned to enforce those regulations—on others, but also on himself. In that way, he felt that he honored Revna’s memory.

  Occasionally, though, Tenger’s punctiliousness gave way to his other dominant personality trait, as it had done that morning aboard Enterprise. The security chief appreciated all the reasons the captain had given for continuing to investigate what had happened on Rejarris II, from the simple desire to solve a mystery, to the search for scientific and historical knowledge, to the Federation’s need to know whether the Tzenkethi had been involved in the disappearance of the planet’s inhabitants. In particular, if the Coalition had played a role, it would serve the UFP well to find out whether they had rescued the population or exterminated them. But for Tenger himself, it had been more of a visceral feeling that had driven him to the bridge well before the beginning of his shift: he hated not knowing.

  As the security chief studied the sensor readings, a door whispered open. He glanced up from his tactical console to see Captain Sulu and Commander Linojj exiting the portside turbolift. He checked the chronometer on his panel and saw that they had arrived just before the beginning of alpha shift.

  “Good morning, Commander,” Sulu said, returning his gaze as she approached the command chair. “You’ve gotten a head start on the day.”

  “Yes, sir,” Tenger said.

  “Too many questions, not enough answers?”

  “Something like that, Captain, yes.” Tenger had begun serving with Demora Sulu eleven years earlier, when he’d transferred from U.S.S. Comet to become Enterprise’s new chief of security. She knew him well.

  As Linojj took her position on the starboard side of the bridge, Sulu addressed Ensign S’Teles, who had taken the conn through gamma shift. He’d risen from the command chair as soon as the captain had entered the bridge. “Good morning, Ensign,” Sulu said. “Anything to report, other then the security chief’s uncharacteristically early arrival?”

  “Other than that, Captain
,” the Caitian said with a lilt that signaled his amusement, “the Enterprise has continued on its orbital search pattern through the night.” Tenger heard the soft vibrational sound that often underscored the felinoid’s words. “We have so far completed forty-seven percent of our scans. To this point, we have detected no signs whatsoever that any ship with an active warp drive, other than the Enterprise itself, has ever visited Rejarris Two.”

  “Thank you, Ensign,” Sulu said. “You’re dismissed.”

  “Yes, sir,” S’Teles said. “Thank you, sir.”

  Over the following few minutes, the rest of the alpha-shift bridge crew arrived to relieve their gamma-shift counterparts. Tenger sent the overnight tactical officer, Cristobal Molina, off-duty, then returned to inspecting the sensor readings as they marched across his display. An hour later, his screen flashed yellow an instant before he registered what the numbers and symbols on his console told him.

  “Captain, sensors are picking up what looks like a neutrino trail embedded in subspace,” he said. “It could be a residual artifact of a warp signature.”

  “Where?” Sulu asked.

  “In high orbit . . . it’s exceedingly faint.” He activated a calibration tool on his panel and worked to fine-tune the sensors. “It’s difficult to localize.”

  “I see it too,” said Fenn at the sciences station. “My instruments highlighted the reading, but they can’t confirm that it’s the result of a warp engine.”

  “If it is,” Tenger said, “it could be years old, maybe even decades.”