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

by David R. George III

  “Next level,” she yelled as she increased the force of her phaser, setting it to kill. She didn’t wait to see if Kostas had heard her over the creature’s roar, but once more raised her weapon and fired. An instant later, the ensign’s beam joined hers.

  The creature screamed. It stumbled, one of its legs missing a step and dragging along the ground. Its legs tangled and it went down hard, its head smashing into the ground face-first, its body skidding along the earth.

  The captain reached out and shoved Kostas in the arm. The ensign staggered to the side and her phaser beam ceased, but Sulu continued to fire, wanting to ensure the creature’s incapacitation. She tried to time her escape, but waited a second too long. As she stopped firing and threw herself to the side, the creature crashed into the shuttlecraft. The end of one of its legs lashed across Sulu’s hip and rammed her against Amundsen’s hull. Her elbow struck and her entire lower arm went numb, while pain flashed hot in her right side.

  Sulu collapsed to her knees, her body doubled over the creature’s thick, muscular leg that had pinned her against the shuttlecraft. She didn’t know the creature’s status—dazed, unconscious, or dead—but she felt no movement where its leg touched her. She could feel the heat of its leathery hide, though, could smell its sweat. She gagged, but managed not to vomit.

  “Captain,” a voice called as though from far away, and Sulu realized that she felt light-headed. She didn’t know if she had struck her skull against Amundsen, but she guessed that she must have. She didn’t want to lose consciousness, not outside with a predatory creature that might still be alive.

  Even if it’s dead, Sulu thought, where there was one, there will be others.

  “Captain,” a voice said again, and that time, Sulu recognized it as belonging to Ensign Kostas. Sulu looked up to see the engineer coming around the unmoving body of the creature. “Captain, are you hurt?”

  “I’m banged up, but I think I’ll be all right,” Sulu said. “Help get me out of here.” She pushed at the creature’s heavy leg, and Kostas reached her arms around it, dug her heels into the ground, and pulled. It moved a few centimeters at a time at first, before finally dropping from Sulu’s waist and onto the ground. “Thanks,” she said around deep breaths of air. She gazed about and realized that she could not see the officer they had come to rescue. “How’s Ensign Young?”

  “I don’t know,” Kostas said. “He wasn’t moving, but I came to check on you first.”

  “I’ll be all right,” Sulu said again. “Get a medkit and tend to Mister Young.”

  “Yes, sir.” The ensign hesitated, though, and then said, “Captain, I don’t think you should stay here beside this thing.”

  “Believe me, I won’t,” Sulu said. “None of us will. Now, go.”

  Kostas looked past the captain toward the open hatch of Amundsen. The creature blocked the way, and the ensign had to climb over one of its legs to board the shuttlecraft. Sulu stepped away, leaning heavily against the hull. She eyed the creature warily, then called to the ensign to bring her a tricorder.

  Kostas reappeared quickly. She handed the captain the tricorder she’d requested, then jumped down past the creature and made her way around it, toward Ensign Young. Sulu took a couple of slow, deep breaths in an attempt to regain her bearings. Finally, she activated her tricorder and scanned the creature. She recognized only some of what she saw inside it, but it appeared to have both circulatory and respiratory systems, neither of which showed any movement: the creature was dead.

  Sulu expanded the range of the sensors and scanned the area, both above- and belowground. She read life-forms—from microorganisms, to worms, to bugs, to several small animals—but nothing remotely resembling the one that had attacked them. Satisfied about the immediate safety of the landing party, she padded slowly around the carcass of the creature.

  As the captain stepped past its flat, stationary tail, the two ensigns came into view. Young lay on his back, while Kostas kneeled beside him, ministering to whatever injuries he’d suffered. Sulu saw his chest rising and falling steadily, which pleased her, though she saw no other movement. When she drew closer, she saw Young’s eyes closed. She also saw a great deal of blood.

  “What’s his condition?” she asked.

  “He’s been hurt badly,” Kostas said without looking up. She had set her own tricorder down on the ground, as well as the medkit, from which she extracted a small pair of scissors. She used them to cut off Young’s uniform shirt around the front of his right shoulder, revealing a fifteen-centimeter gash. “I think that thing did this,” Kostas said. “It’s deep, but fortunately it didn’t reach his lung. His hand has also been slashed, and he’s got some damage in his other shoulder; it appears that he dislocated it at some point, but pushed it back into place himself.”

  “That might have happened when he fell,” Sulu said, and she gazed up at the structure.

  Except that there was no structure.

  Sulu thought that she must have become disoriented after striking her head, and so she turned and looked all around her. She saw only a vast, rocky landscape beneath a setting orange-red sun. No structure. No snow or ash.

  “Can Ensign Young be moved?” Sulu asked.

  “Once I stabilize his shoulder,” Kostas said. “I have to clean and dress both his wounds, but the key will be to keep his shoulder from tearing open further. That’s about all I can do. He’s going to need surgery.”

  “Do the best you can, Ensign, and do it as quickly as you can,” Sulu said. She peered out over the empty plain, at the clouds scudding across a cerulean sky, and she wondered precisely where and when they were. “I think we might be in trouble.”

  * * *

  4

  * * *

  “Commander, sensors are showing two energy surges at the structure,” said Lieutenant Rainbow Sky.

  Tenger—Enterprise’s chief of security and, in the absence of Demora Sulu and Xintal Linojj, the ship’s acting captain—rotated the command chair to face the Native American officer crewing the tactical station. “Can you tell the nature of the surges?” he asked. Captain Sulu had arrived at the planet’s surface aboard Amundsen only a few minutes earlier, and already Tenger’s concerns for her welfare grew.

  Rainbow Sky’s hands gamboled across the tactical console with speed and grace, eliciting a series of chirps and tones in response. “The surges originated at different points on the structure,” he said. “Energy beams of some kind are firing on the shuttlecraft, and . . . I’m reading a third beam now . . . and a fourth.”

  Tenger looked to Lieutenant Commander Kanchumurthi at the communications station. “Open a channel to Amundsen.” As the comm officer worked his panel, Tenger stabbed at the controls on the arm of the command chair. “Bridge to transporter room.”

  “Transporter room,” came the coarse voice of Lieutenant Ved. “Go ahead, Commander.”

  “Establish transporter locks on Captain Sulu and Ensign Kostas aboard Amundsen,” Tenger said. “Prepare for emergency beam-out.”

  “Yes, sir. Right away.”

  “Channel open to Amundsen,” Kanchumurthi said.

  Tenger tapped a second control. “Enterprise to Captain Sulu.”

  “Commander,” said Rainbow Sky, urgency in his voice. “Amundsen just fell off sensors.”

  Tenger didn’t hesitate. “Transporter room, energize.” He waited, knowing that it was already too late. A few seconds later, Lieutenant Ved confirmed it.

  “Bridge, this is the transporter room,” he said. “Emergency beam-out failed. I established transporter locks, but lost them just before the order to energize. Subsequent attempts to reacquire the locks have been unsuccessful.”

  “Acknowledged,” Tenger said. “Keep trying, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Bridge out.” Tenger rose from the command chair and climbed the steps beside the tactical console. He could feel the tension mounting among his crewmates, so he asked loudly enough for all of them to hear
the question to which they all needed an answer. “Was the shuttlecraft destroyed?”

  “No, sir, not that I can tell,” Rainbow Sky said. “Sensors did not pick up any indications of an explosion or a crash.”

  “What about the beams?” Tenger wanted to know. “Could they be masking the shuttlecraft?”

  “I don’t think so,” Rainbow Sky said. “For one thing, they’ve stopped. For another, I could read the shuttlecraft even after the beams started, and their intensity didn’t increase while they lasted. In fact, one of the beams, the last one, failed almost immediately.”

  Tenger tried to consider all of the possibilities. “Could they have been transporter beams? Could they have beamed Amundsen away?”

  “They didn’t read like that,” Rainbow Sky said. “Plus the infrastructure on the planet and the level of technology suggest that the native population hadn’t yet developed transporters.”

  “That’s not categorical, though,” Tenger said. “And we’re not that sure of our facts. The structure is isolated from every settlement on the planet, so it’s possible that it might not even be of indigenous origin.”

  “Still, they didn’t read like a transporter,” Rainbow Sky said. “If anything, they resembled tractor beams, although I saw fluctuations in them, which you wouldn’t expect from a directional force.”

  Tenger glanced at the tactical display, where a readout showed a line rendering of the structure and Amundsen above it. “Where did the sensors lose contact with the shuttlecraft?”

  “Here,” Rainbow Sky said, pointing to an area inside the ring. “Very close to where Ensign Young fell from the structure.”

  “What was Amundsen’s altitude when it dropped from our scans?” Tenger asked.

  Rainbow Sky touched several controls in a short sequence. The image on the display changed, rotating from a vertical view to a horizontal one. Seen through the linear representation of the structure, the shuttlecraft flew not very far above the ground. “Between seven and eight meters.”

  “They were landing,” Tenger said, more to himself than to Rainbow Sky. “They were landing, and they were going to come down inside the structure. When Ensign Young fell into the structure, we lost contact with him, even though Commander Linojj could still see him.”

  “Do you think the shuttlecraft is still down there, and that we simply can’t communicate with the captain?” Rainbow Sky asked.

  “Perhaps,” Tenger said. “Captain Sulu might have landed Amundsen in an attempt to retrieve the ensign.”

  “Meaning that the shuttlecraft could reappear at any time,” Rainbow Sky said, “once the captain recovers Ensign Young and starts back to the ship.”

  “Perhaps,” Tenger said again, though he suspected that a resolution would not prove quite so simple. “Monitor that area on sensors for any sign of Amundsen.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Tenger considered how best to proceed. One thing seemed abundantly clear to him: with three crew members—including Captain Sulu—out of touch on Rejarris II, and a fourth in sickbay with a missing limb, the security chief would refuse to send anybody else down to the structure, either by transporter or shuttlecraft. “How long before the probe reaches the structure?” The captain had ordered the probe to the site when the crew had first discovered the unexplained object.

  Rainbow Sky checked his console. “Twenty-five minutes, sir.”

  “All right,” Tenger said, stepping back down from the outer ring of the bridge. “I want to see images the moment the probe is in position.” He sat in the command chair, wondering what those images would show. He expected to see Amundsen intact on the surface of the planet, inside the structure, and to verify that Captain Sulu and the others had survived. If so, he and the crew would need to figure out how to get them back to Enterprise, and before that, how to communicate with them.

  About the latter, Tenger already had an idea.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  From where she sat at Amundsen’s main console, Sulu looked over her shoulder to the starboard aft corner of the cabin, where she and Kostas had moved away the chairs in favor of an antigrav stretcher. As she watched, the engineer-cum-medic finished securing the portable cot to the bulkhead. After the ensign had treated Young’s injuries as best she could, Sulu had returned to the shuttlecraft so that she could position it closer to the wounded man. Before moving Amundsen, though, the captain had attempted to contact Enterprise, without result.

  Once Sulu had relocated the shuttlecraft, she and Kostas had deployed the stretcher. They carefully shifted Young onto it, then carried him aboard. He remained unconscious by virtue of a sedative.

  Kostas walked back to the front of the cabin and sat beside Sulu. “We’re all set, sir.”

  “Good. I’ve programmed a course that follows in reverse the shuttlecraft’s precise movements, not just once we reached the planet’s surface, but all the way from orbit,” Sulu explained. “I’m not sure if the structure is still out there and we just can’t see it or scan it, if it’s disguised somehow, or if our perceptions are somehow being altered or manipulated, but I want to retrace our route to see if we can get back to the Enterprise that way.”

  In truth, Sulu suspected something entirely different. While Kostas had been tending to Young outside the shuttlecraft, the captain had turned toward the section of the structure closest to them—toward where she remembered that section to be—and she’d begun walking. She moved carefully, with one hand held up, palm out, in front of her chest. She estimated the distance of their location from the structure at between ten and twenty meters. She turned back once she’d gone fifty.

  “While we’re close to the surface, scan for the structure,” Sulu told Kostas. “Once we’re in orbit, look for the Enterprise.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The captain executed a standard safety checklist, then lifted off. Amundsen rose only a short distance, then glided back to where it had first touched down. It landed beside the dead creature, then launched again. As the shuttlecraft reached the point where the gold beams had shot toward it, Sulu saw Kostas brace herself with a hand to the edge of her console. The captain didn’t bother, and the moment passed without incident.

  Sulu kept her attention on the view through the forward port. She hoped to see the structure suddenly reappear, to see a broad plain mantled in the off-white mixture of snow and ash, but as Amundsen traveled outward to twenty-five meters, and then to fifty, and finally to a hundred, she thought that less and less likely. Instead, she glimpsed a nearby mountain range she hadn’t seen on the journey down from Enterprise, covered in what looked like old-growth trees, something completely missing from the impact-winter landscape they’d to that point observed on Rejarris II.

  As the shuttlecraft gained altitude, the captain hailed Enterprise. She made multiple attempts. She received no reply. When Sulu at last stopped, Ensign Kostas spoke into the ensuing silence.

  “Captain, there’s no continuous cloud cover,” she said quietly. “The continent below us has mature vegetation and a different coastline than our probes mapped. Gravity—” Her voice dropped to a whisper when she uttered the word, as though she wanted to hide what she intended to say—perhaps not from Sulu so much as from herself. “The planet’s gravity is ten-point-two-nine meters per second squared. The Enterprise’s sensors recorded it as nine-point-six.”

  “Ensign,” Sulu said, “I don’t think that’s Rejarris Two below us anymore.”

  “No, sir,” Kostas replied, the resignation in her voice not quite masking a hint of fear. “But how? And where are we?”

  “I don’t know where we are,” Sulu said, “but I think that the structure acted as a gateway. When we descended into it to rescue Ensign Young, we passed into another place.”

  “But then why didn’t we return to Rejarris Two when we flew back up?” Kostas asked.

  “I don’t know, Ensign,” Sulu said. “The best theory I can formulate is that the gateway physically displaces items that pass throu
gh it into another location, to wherever we are now. But the gateway doesn’t exist here, only on Rejarris Two, so we have no means of returning there.”

  “Then how are we going to get back to the Enterprise?”

  “Ensign, what I just told you is only a theory, so the first thing we’re going to do is test it,” Sulu said. “That means achieving orbit and searching for the Enterprise. It might be that our initial readings of Rejarris Two were inaccurate, that our senses and sensors were somehow deceived. If that’s the case, then the Enterprise might still be circling the planet.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kostas said. She sounded unconvinced.

  They continued their journey in Amundsen, mostly in silence. Kostas regularly checked on the status of Ensign Young, whose condition she continued to report as unchanged. The captain periodically attempted to raise Enterprise, never successfully.

  Once the shuttlecraft achieved orbit, Kostas scanned for the starship. Sensors could not find Enterprise, although they did detect the same neutrino trail embedded in subspace that Tenger and Fenn had earlier. Sulu didn’t know what to make of that, but it seemed to her too significant a reading to discount as coincidence. It probably meant that the same starship had visited both Rejarris II and the planet below—and they did seem to be two different worlds, considering that two moons circled the former, and Sulu and Kostas could find none revolving around the latter. Neither could they locate any of the artificial satellites that had been orbiting Rejarris II.

  “Why?” Kostas asked.

  “Why what, Ensign?” Sulu asked.

  “Why would anybody construct a gateway that operated only in one direction?” she asked. She sounded frustrated, but the captain also suspected that the young officer worried about being stranded in an unknown place, with no means of getting home.