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

by David R. George III

  “If the people of Rejarris Two did evacuate their planet,” Linojj said from her station, “it could have taken place decades ago. Maybe a warp-capable species did help them.”

  As the first officer spoke, Tenger saw the sensors highlight something else as unusual and requiring analysis. “Captain, I’m reading a fog of other particles in high orbit, in normal space, in roughly the same location as the potential warp signature.”

  “I see it as well,” Fenn said.

  “There’s a mix of metallic elements,” Tenger said. “Many atoms have been ionized. That could signify the remnants of an explosion.”

  “Sensors also show a confusing jumble of rocket propellants and vestiges of antimatter,” Fenn said. “They could be the residue of spent fuel.”

  “Is there a satellite in or near that location?” Sulu asked. She got up from her chair and mounted the steps to the outer ring of the bridge.

  “Negative,” Tenger said. “All the satellites we’ve seen are in low orbit, but . . . there is a trail.”

  Sulu stood beside the security chief, peering down at the tactical console. “Where does it lead?”

  Tenger examined the trajectory. The result surprised him. “It leads down to the planet,” he said. He adjusted the sensors, targeting them to follow the run of particles to their end. “It goes all the way down to the surface.”

  “What’s there?” Sulu asked.

  “Scanning,” Tenger said. “There is a metal-encased structure. It is intact. It doesn’t read like a crash site. In fact . . .” He had focused the sensors narrowly, but the extent of the readings exceeded those limits. He widened the targeted area. “The object is huge. It measures more than a kilometer long . . .” He continued to expand the zone until he could read the entire object. “It is nearly two kilometers long and roughly toroidal in shape. It is lying flat on the ground.”

  “Is that a building?” Commander Linojj asked, striding over from her first officer’s station. “Perhaps a launch facility of some kind?”

  “The particle trail tracks directly to the structure, so that is a possibility,” Tenger said. He enlarged the region of his scans even further. “There is a series of low buildings eleven kilometers away. The nearest settlement beyond that is several hundred kilometers distant.”

  The captain looked over to the sciences station. “Are there any life signs?”

  “Indeterminate,” Fenn said. “The interfering substrate in the crust appears all over the planet.”

  “Have any of the probes scanned this site?” Sulu asked.

  “Checking,” Fenn said. It took the science officer thirty seconds to arrive at an answer. “No, sir,” she said. “We could route the closest probe to be there in less than four hours, or launch another probe to get there in about half that time.”

  “Launch another probe,” Sulu ordered. “In the meantime, let’s send down a landing party to see if we can make sense of any of this.”

  As Tenger prepared to send another class-three probe into the atmosphere, Commander Linojj formed another landing party. She selected Ensign Young, Doctor Morell, and Crewman Permenter again, but chose another member of the security team and an assistant science officer rather than Tenger and Fenn, no doubt because of their responsibilities in programming and launching the new probe. Although Tenger would have preferred to transport back down to the planet, it contented him to execute the duties the captain had assigned him. He cared far less about which tasks he performed in the crew’s quest for answers than he did about finding those answers. He could only hope that what lay below on the planet surface would help them discover what had happened to the people of Rejarris II.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The brilliant blue-white shimmer of the transporter effect cleared from Linojj’s vision, but she immediately squinted at a different sort of brightness. A white-gray spread of snow and ash swathed the ground in all directions. Linojj held up her hand against the glare while she gave her eyes a moment to grow accustomed to it. She didn’t think she would need the polarized goggles she’d brought with her, stuffed into one of the pockets in the cold-weather jacket she wore. The smoke that filled the sky dimmed the daytime hours on Rejarris II, and the ash combined with the snow to dull its albedo.

  The first officer rounded on her heel to ensure that the entire landing party had successfully transported with her, and that they faced no unforeseen dangers. Doctor Morell stood beside Linojj, with Ensign Young and Assistant Science Officer Sandra Alderson behind, and security personnel Permenter and Günther Haas at the rear of the group. Linojj could see the water vapor in their breath condensing before each of them in the cold air. The first landing party to Rejarris II had explored a city near the equator, but the second had just beamed down to a location at a more northerly latitude, with commensurately lower temperatures. The snow, at least, indicated that the planet had begun to heal itself after the asteroid strike.

  Linojj pulled her communicator from where it hung at the back of her waist, beneath her tunic and jacket, and she flipped open its gold-colored grille. The black gloves she wore, fashioned from a flexibly thin fabric, insulated her hands against the cold weather but did not impede her dexterity. “Linojj to Enterprise.”

  A moment passed, and then the captain herself responded. “Enterprise, Sulu here,” she said. “Go ahead, Commander.”

  “We’ve beamed to the planet’s surface without incident,” the first officer reported.

  “Do you see the structure?”

  Glinveer Ved, the only Tellarite among the Enterprise crew and the ship’s transporter chief, had followed the run of particles from orbit, setting down the landing party a hundred or so paces outside the structure to which the trail led. “Yes, I see it,” Linojj said. “We’re on a broad, snow-covered plain, and the structure is lying across our path. It stretches away in either direction until it fades from view.”

  “Do you have any initial impressions?” Sulu asked.

  “Like everything else we’ve seen on this planet, it appears unoccupied,” Linojj said. “Other than that, no, sir.”

  “All right, Commander,” the captain said. “Observe standard procedures. Contact the ship every thirty minutes.”

  “Understood.”

  “Enterprise out.”

  Linojj returned the communicator to the back of her uniform pants. She heard the sound of first one and then two more tricorders as Morell, Young, and Alderson initiated scans. “Do you read any life signs in the area, Doctor?”

  “No,” Morell said. Her cheeks had turned rosy on her well-lined face. She wore the same black gloves as Linojj did, as well as a black knit hat pulled down over her curly white hair, but neither seemed to mitigate the effect of the cold on the older woman. “Whatever that structure is, it’s not resistant to our sensors. I detect no life-forms inside it or anywhere in the area.”

  “What about in the set of buildings nearby?”

  “I read them,” Morell said. “They’re eleven-point-one klicks south-southeast of here. At that distance, my tricorder’s biosensors can’t overcome the interference from the substrate in the soil, so life signs are indeterminate.”

  “Understood,” Linojj said. The news did not concern her. It seemed wildly unlikely to her that the planet would lack life everywhere they searched, but that the natives would populate an isolated building complex. She raised her arm and waved the way forward. “Let’s approach.”

  The first officer started toward the structure. The snow rose ten centimeters and crunched beneath her boots, the footing awkward but not onerous. A light but frosty wind blew steadily toward Linojj and her crewmates, occasionally gusting and carrying granules of snow and ash against the exposed flesh of her face. Although she needed to turn her head and avert her eyes several times as they walked, she counted the wind as an ally, since it likely accounted for the relatively low accumulation on the ground. She imagined tall drifts forming in the distance behind the landing party, swept into existence by the
bursts of moving air.

  As they neared the structure, its size became apparent. Its dark, blue-gray surface bowed toward them, and she estimated its height at twelve to fifteen meters. Snow and ash dusted its upper half like frosting on a cake—or, considering the structure’s shape, like frosting on a doughnut. The curvature of its length took it quickly out of sight to the left and right of the winter landscape. Although smooth along some portions of its visible surface, it also contained numerous seamed areas studded with instrumentation. It looked to Linojj like an enlarged version of a duotronic conduit aboard Enterprise.

  Ensign Young stepped up between Linojj and Morell. “Its outer surface is composed primarily of titanium, aluminum, and magnesium, although my tricorder is also reading several metal-matrix composites with ceramic and organic polymers. It has a circular cross section of fourteen-point-three meters in diameter, and . . .” Young moved closer to the object and crouched down before it. A narrow, dark brown strip ran tucked beneath the lower arc of the structure, free from snow and ash. “It’s also sitting atop a thick metal slab, although it’s not connected to it.”

  “Is that a foundation?” Linojj asked. “Is this a building? Or is it a conduit of some kind?”

  “Neither, I think,” said Lieutenant Alderson. She stepped forward and walked slowly along the structure, referring to the display on her own tricorder. “It’s not hollow, but filled with circuitry. Scans show some recognizable equipment: solar cells, force-field generators, antigravs, thrusters—”

  “Thrusters?” Linojj said. “Could this be a spacecraft? Maybe one that didn’t originate on this planet?” Solar cells could have been used for energy collection, force-field generators to erect shields for protection during both spaceflight and atmospheric insertion, antigravs for liftoff and landing, thrusters for maneuvering and station-keeping.

  “Possibly an automated vessel,” Alderson said. “Although I suppose there could be a crew deck or compartment somewhere within the object. It’ll take some time to scan the entire ring.”

  “I’m not sure it’s of extraterrestrial origin,” Young said, standing back up. “Everything inside falls within the level of technological sophistication we observed in the city. Plus the metal slab it’s sitting on could serve as a landing pad.”

  Linojj considered the object and its remoteness from any cities, but its relative proximity to the nearby buildings. “If this is a spacecraft, or even just a satellite, could the complex eleven kilometers away function as its mission control? A facility utilized to launch and retrieve it, to maintain and monitor it?”

  “It’s possible,” Alderson allowed. “We’d need to investigate the complex to understand its capabilities, and to look for any linkage with the object.”

  “All right,” Linojj said. “Let’s learn as much as we can here first. I want to know if this was ever in space, and what its primary function is.” The first officer drew her own tricorder out of a jacket pocket as the landing party spread out alongside the object. Permenter took up a position at one end of the group, while Haas stationed himself at the other.

  Linojj felt the chill in the air ease as she walked beside the object, which functioned in the middle of the empty plain as a windbreak. Inspecting the display of her tricorder, she saw the profusion of circuitry Alderson had detected. When Linojj had assembled the landing party, she’d considered enlisting the ship’s chief engineer, Rafaele Buonarroti, or one of his staff, but at the time, she and the rest of the bridge crew had believed the great ring-shaped structure a building, not some massive technological object. Once she and the others had completed a preliminary examination of it, Linojj would contact Enterprise and request the assistance of an engineering team.

  The first officer continued along the object, logging everything that her tricorder scanned. A series of narrow tubes in one section read as power-transfer conduits, while those in another section showed as hydraulic hoses. She saw a device mingling solid-state and mechanical components, which she judged an inertial stabilizer. She spotted an external emitter and tracked its connection to an internal gimbal and actuator, clearly one of the thrusters Alderson had mentioned.

  “Commander.” Up ahead, Ensign Young had turned back to face her. As she walked over to him, he alternately checked his tricorder and gazed up at the object.

  “What is it, Ensign?”

  “I’ve found a breach in the object’s casing,” Young said. “Or its hull. Commander Tenger detected ionized metallic elements in orbit that he thought could have been the result of an explosion, and a stream of those elements led here. If this was out in space, if this is a spacecraft or a satellite, this could be what exploded. Maybe that’s even why it’s here: for repairs.”

  “Repairs by who?” Linojj asked. She took a few steps back from the object and looked up at it, but she could see no sign of a breached hull. She raised her tricorder and ran her own scan. A gaping wound appeared at once, running from the top of the object and along the upper half of its inner side, out of view of the landing party. “I see it,” she said. “I’ll call down a shuttlecraft so we can take a look at it firsthand.”

  Linojj reached for her communicator, but Young stepped to the side and pointed. The first officer followed his gesture and saw two parallel series of evenly spaced notches in the side of the object, leading both up and down as far as she could see. “I think I can scale it,” Young said.

  Linojj tucked her fingers into one of the indentations. It felt snug, and the first officer imagined that it had been made for a different purpose, or perhaps to fit the tapered ends of the vine-like appendages she’d seen in the pictures of Rejarris II natives. She kicked the toe of her boot into another notch lower down, which also felt tight, but when she lifted up her free foot to test her weight on the makeshift hand- and footholds, they seemed functional enough. “Exercise caution,” she told the ensign.

  Young pocketed his tricorder in his jacket, then reached up and set his hands in two of the indentations, the right higher than the left. He started climbing, his initial progress slow because of the outward curve of the metal, but when he reached the halfway point, he moved more quickly. Linojj took eight or ten paces backward so that she could better view his ascent. The ensign began stopping at every other notch, letting go with one hand, and brushing away the snow and ash that had collected on the object.

  As Young neared the top, he called out. “I see the breach, Commander.” He swept away a final patch of snow and ash, then scrabbled up onto his knees. Unlike Doctor Morell, the ensign had not chosen to wear a hat, and Linojj saw his short brown hair whipped into a frenzy, the object no longer running interference between Young and the wind. “There’s considerable damage,” he yelled down, but the first officer could barely make out his words. She reached for her communicator, held it up for the ensign to see, then opened it with a flick of her wrist.

  “Linojj to Young.” She saw him take out his own communicator and speak into it.

  “Young here. I was saying that the breach is considerable, Commander. The metal along the edges is mangled and charred. It’s also bent inward, not outward. It looks as though it might have been caused by weapons fire. I’m going to scan it.” Still on his knees, the ensign set down his communicator, then retrieved his tricorder and activated it. Linojj could just hear the shrill plaint of its operation, intermittently carried away by the wind.

  After a few moments, Young picked up his communicator again. “I read charged particles,” he said. “The patterns of force do suggest an external explosion.”

  Linojj questioned who would have attacked the people of Rejarris II and why. From what they had so far gleaned, it made little sense to her, since, by all indications, they had barely even left their own planet, and had yet to travel among the stars. The first officer’s thoughts led her to consider the Tzenkethi again, not only the nearest spacefaring species, but one with a reputation for an overaggressive approach to protecting their border regions. At the same time, she
wondered about the purpose of the object—was it a spacecraft, or a satellite, or something else entirely? “What can you see inside?” she said into her communicator. “Can you tell anything about it, or about its builders?”

  The ensign put down his tricorder and leaned forward on one hand. “It reminds me of a display at the Museum of Engineering in Rotterdam,” Young said. Linojj had never heard of either the institution or the place, but she took the ensign’s meaning. “There’s a lot of old-fashioned solid-state circuitry organized into—” Young abruptly stopped talking, and Linojj saw him look to one side, away from her. “This is odd, Commander,” he said. “I’m looking at the ground on the other side of the object. It doesn’t seem the same as the ground where you’re standing. For one thing, there’s no ash or snow.”

  “Could it simply be a result of the wind patterns inside the ring?” Linojj asked.

  “It’s not that,” Young said. “It’s that I thought I saw snow when I first climbed up here, but now, as far as I can see, the terrain is dark and strewn with rocks and boulders.”

  Boulders? That didn’t sound right to Linojj. She examined her own surroundings, and though concealed in sheets of snow and ash, the topography appeared flat. No outcroppings rose up to suggest that any boulders dotted the area. “What do your sensors show?”

  Young picked up his tricorder and sat back on his heels. Still holding his communicator, he deftly used one hand to scan the land on the other side of the object. “This doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “My tricorder is showing snow on the ground, and high drifts against the inner side of the structure. I’m also getting no readings at all of boulders.” He stood up. “I can’t—”

  A loud hum burst from Linojj’s communicator, and she peered down at it, startled. When she looked back up, she saw Young lunge away from her and disappear, as though he had suddenly decided to leap from atop the object and down the other side. She thought she heard him cry out above the rush of the wind, but then his exclamation unexpectedly ceased. “Ensign!” Linojj called into her communicator, even as she started to run. “Ensign Young!”