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

by David R. George III

  “Perhaps they didn’t have the time or the knowledge to build a two-way gateway,” Sulu suggested. “Or perhaps they only needed to travel in one direction.”

  The ensign’s eyes widened in sudden understanding. “The asteroid,” she said.

  “Yes,” Sulu agreed. “Maybe the people of Rejarris Two knew that an asteroid was headed for the world and that the collision would have a devastating effect, not only on the people it killed directly, but on all those left behind to endure an impact winter. They didn’t have warp capability, but maybe they discovered another way to escape the pending disaster.”

  “But then where are they?” Kostas asked.

  “I don’t know,” the captain said, “but on our way back down to the surface, scan for life signs.”

  “We’re heading back down to the planet?”

  “At the moment,” Sulu said, “we have nowhere else to go.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Amid the tension pervading the bridge, Rafaele Buonarroti felt out of place at the first officer’s station, even though he’d reconfigured half of it as an engineering panel. He’d certainly crewed the exec’s console before—had done so on numerous occasions—but never as the result of such disastrous circumstances, with Captain Sulu missing and Commander Linojj so terribly wounded. Consequently, when he peered at the image on the main viewscreen, he couldn’t contain his reaction. “Cosa nell’universo è?” he said: What in the universe is that?

  “The probe’s sensors are unable to read anything on the ground inside the ring of the structure other than ash and snow,” said Borona Fenn from her position at the sciences station.

  “Not to point out the obvious,” said Gaia Aldani at navigation, “but there’s no snow or ash visible anywhere that I can see except outside of the structure.”

  Buonarroti studied the scene on the viewer, transmitted to Enterprise from a probe dispatched to observe Rejarris II inside its cloud cover. The chief engineer realized that he hadn’t even noticed the lack of the mixed accumulation within the structure, so focused had he been on the black beast in the center of the screen. He did note, however, that he saw neither the shuttlecraft nor any members of the landing parties—including Demora Sulu. “Is that a projection we’re seeing, then?” he wondered aloud. “Are we looking at an image created by the structure, maybe to hide what’s actually there?”

  Fenn operated the probe’s sensors. “Nothing I see substantiates that,” she said.

  “I agree,” said Rainbow Sky at tactical. “The structure is under power, but I do not detect anything like a visual projection. Even if an attempt were being made to hide something from view, though, our sensors are reading what is actually there.”

  “Unless that too is a deception,” Buonarroti said, although he immediately saw the illogic of such a scheme, which Fenn quickly spelled out.

  “If that were the case, why wouldn’t the two false images—the one presented to our eyes and the one presented to our scans—why wouldn’t they match?” she said. “It wouldn’t make sense to hide something by presenting two illusory images, when the very inconsistency of them would demonstrate that at least one of them must be false.”

  “There is no deception,” Tenger said, his tone certain. He stood from the command chair and moved to the center of the bridge. “Commander Fenn, magnify the area that includes the many-legged animal, out to a distance of ten meters all around it.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  On the viewer, light-blue lines drew a rectangle about the designated area, which then expanded to fill the screen. The beast looked to Buonarroti as though some mad scientist had grafted spider and porcupine DNA onto that of a rhinoceros, then covered the result in black paint. He found it hideous. Since the probe had maneuvered into position above the structure and transmitted a live feed of it to Enterprise, nobody on the bridge had seen the beast move, and yet its still form unsettled Buonarroti.

  Tenger circled the helm, climbed to the outer part of the bridge, and strode to the main viewer. He stood for a moment with his muscular arms folded across his burly chest and examined the image on the screen, then pointed to a section of the ground beside the beast. “What do you make of this?” he asked, apparently addressing everybody present.

  Buonarroti rose and walked past the outer stations until he reached Tenger. He inspected the screen until he saw what the tactical officer had indicated: a long, straight-edged depression in the soil, slightly rounded at its extremities, with a perpendicular series of narrow V-shaped grooves toward one end. Up close, Buonarroti recognized it at once. “That’s the imprint of a shuttlecraft engine nacelle.”

  “I believe it is,” Tenger said, and he gestured to a second depression parallel to the first, just visible near the bottom of the screen and not quite as easily discerned. Seen together, the markings could hardly be mistaken for anything but the artifacts of a Starfleet planetary shuttlecraft.

  “Can you provide a scale for these?” the chief engineer asked Fenn.

  “Because sensors are reading something different than what we see at that location, I can only establish an approximate scale,” Fenn said. “I can base it on the assumption that the altitude of the probe is the same above both the ground that the sensors detect and the ground that we see.” A distance gauge appeared at the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, and blue lines traced the linear measurements of the two indentations.

  “Those are the right dimensions,” Buonarroti said. “The shuttlecraft did land there.”

  “But why isn’t it still there?” asked Torsten Syndergaard at the helm.

  “Because Captain Sulu and Ensign Kostas presumably recovered Ensign Young,” Tenger said, “after which they attempted to return to the Enterprise.”

  “ ‘Attempted to return’?” Buonarroti said.

  “Clearly they have not returned to the ship,” Tenger said, “nor have we detected them in orbit or received any messages from them. Considering everything that the crew have seen, scanned, and experienced, I have concluded that the structure is a portal of some kind.”

  “Yes,” Fenn agreed. “A unidirectional portal.”

  “Yes,” Tenger said.

  “So you’re saying that Ensign Young fell from atop the structure, or was pulled from it, and passed into another place?” Buonarroti asked.

  “Into another place or another time,” Tenger said. “Or perhaps both.”

  Buonarroti considered whether the captain and the other members of the crew might have been displaced to another part of the planet, but then discounted the possibility. If they had ended up elsewhere on Rejarris II, they surely would have contacted Enterprise. Also, although the substrate in the planet’s soil interfered with biosensors, the probes had still made a visual record of every area over which they flew, and none of them had observed any large animal life, and especially nothing like the beast currently visible on the main screen, all of which bolstered the argument that the landscape they could see within the structure did not exist on the world they orbited. Tenger’s theory also made something else clear. “The one-way nature of the portal explains why none of our three missing crew have returned.”

  “It might also explain Commander Linojj’s injury,” Fenn said. “If she reached her arm through the portal, past the threshold that marks the transition between one place and another, and then she tried to pull it back . . .” The science officer did not finish expressing the gruesome thought.

  “What are we going to do?” Ramesh Kanchumurthi asked at communications. In response, Tenger turned toward Buonarroti, and the chief engineer understood why.

  “If the portal functions in one direction, then we may be able to make it function in two,” Buonarroti said. “Or we might be able to reverse its flow.”

  “Once you begun studying the device, choose the course that seems most quickly achievable,” Tenger said.

  “Right,” Buonarroti said. “Can we transport an engineering team down, or should we use another shuttlecraf
t?”

  “Neither,” Tenger said. “Until we have a solution, I will not risk losing any other members of the crew.”

  “Meaning we’ll have to use ship’s sensors and those of the probes to analyze the guts of that thing,” Buonarroti said. “I’ll probably need Commander Fenn and some of her people. This is likely to be as much a scientific problem as it will be an engineering one.”

  “All the resources of the Enterprise are at your disposal,” Tenger said.

  Buonarroti thought about the enormous size of the device—essentially a tube fourteen meters in diameter stretched into a ring more than two kilometers long. He took some solace in the idea that the inhabitants of Rejarris II had reached a level of technological sophistication far short of the Federation. Still, if the portal possessed more than even a small fraction of unique components, it could take more than a few days or weeks, and more than the complement of a single starship, for the Enterprise crew to achieve their goal. Buonarroti didn’t bother to mention that to Tenger, who surely understood the complexity of the situation and would undoubtedly point out that the sooner their efforts began, the closer they would be to retrieving the captain and the two ensigns. In his position as the ship’s security chief, Tenger often acted with a dedication to poise and logic almost Vulcan-like in its consistency.

  “Sir, until we have a means of altering the portal,” Aldani asked, “what about the captain and the others?”

  Though he said nothing, Buonarroti wondered if the missing crew members were all still alive. The second landing party had not mentioned seeing the beast, meaning that it had entered the area around the time that Captain Sulu had taken Amundsen down to the surface. Its motionless body suggested a battle that the shuttlecraft crew and Ensign Young had won, but at what cost?

  “Since circumstances have brought us to this conclusion, I assume that they will bring Captain Sulu and Ensigns Young and Kostas to the same conclusion,” Tenger said. “Since they have actually passed through the portal, though, they may possess additional information about it that would be of use to us in devising their return to the Enterprise.”

  “But . . . what difference does that make if the portal functions in only one direction?” Syndergaard asked. Buonarroti wondered the same thing.

  “It does not function entirely in one direction, a fact we have all witnessed,” Tenger said. “Because of that, I intend to have a conversation with Captain Sulu.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Amundsen glided in over the mountains and across the rocky plain, all of it awash in the pink glow of a gathering dusk. As on the shuttlecraft’s journey into orbit, Sulu had programmed their course to match its previous movements between earth and sky. She had no specific reason for doing so, other than the uncertainty of the situation.

  “Scans are showing the carcass of the creature just ahead,” Kostas said. “It does not appear to have moved.”

  “Thank you, Ensign,” Sulu said. She felt relieved at the information, not because the creature hadn’t somehow come back from the dead and scrambled away, but because she’d feared that they wouldn’t be able to locate the area to which the gateway had sent them, that somehow their setting had changed again. “I’m going to land in the area,” she told Kostas, “but beside the message Ensign Young etched, rather than next to the creature.” She worked the helm to alter the end of their flight plan. As she did, a warning klaxon blared to life in the cabin.

  “Proximity alert,” announced Kostas. The ensign quickly quieted the alarm. “There’s something moving up ahead of us.” Once they had returned to Amundsen after battling the creature, Sulu had ordered Kostas to set the sensors to notify them of any significant motion within three kilometers of the shuttlecraft. “Scanning,” the ensign said. “It’s near our landing site. Near the body of the creature.”

  As Sulu waited for more information, an indicator brightened on her console, accompanied by an alert tone. “We’re receiving an incoming transmission,” she said.

  “From who?” Kostas asked, perplexity blended with excitement in her voice. Sulu shared her confusion; they hadn’t been able to communicate with Young through the gateway, nor had they been able to raise the ship once they’d followed the ensign, and so they’d inferred such contact impossible.

  Sulu checked the provenance of the message before accepting it. “It’s on a Starfleet emergency channel,” she said. “It’s carrying a starship identification marker on it: it’s from the Enterprise.”

  “They must have modified the gateway,” Kostas said, her bewilderment apparently dying away. “Maybe we can travel back through it now.”

  “I don’t think we can leap to that conclusion,” Sulu said as she continued to evaluate the message. She checked its transmission source, which confirmed her suspicions. “This is being sent by a log buoy.”

  “Do you think something happened to the Enterprise?” Kostas asked, clearly concerned. The crews of Starfleet vessels employed log buoys when circumstances prevented them from using their ship’s communications system while facing the impending capture or destruction of their starship.

  “No, I think the ship is fine,” Sulu said. “I think that the crew have made the same determination that we have, that the structure is a gateway, and they sent the buoy through as a means of contacting us.”

  Kostas worked the sensor panel. “Scans confirm that the movement up ahead was a log buoy setting down.”

  Sulu accepted the transmission and turned to her left, to a display set into the port bulkhead. The skewed chevron of the Starfleet emblem appeared briefly, replaced by the olive-green face of Tenger. He sat at the desk in her office. Behind him, visible through a large port, the taupe form of Rejarris II spun slowly on its axis.

  “Captain, I am recording this message for transfer to a log buoy, which I intend to send down to the planet and into the interior of the structure there,” the security chief said. “I am hopeful that you, Ensign Kostas, and Ensign Young are in good health. During your approach to the structure, sensor scans showed multiple energy surges, and we detected beams fired at Amundsen. We immediately attempted to establish transporter locks on you and Ensign Kostas, but were unable to do so. The shuttlecraft then vanished from sensors.”

  Tenger exhibited the same professional demeanor he always did, but the captain thought she could perceive anxiety in him. Although the ship’s second officer, he’d rarely commanded the ship in times of crisis, since Sulu and Linojj seldom left Enterprise simultaneously. The captain didn’t think his unease the result of the sudden demands placed upon him, though, but of his concern for his four colleagues, two of whom he counted as close friends; Sulu and Linojj had been Tenger’s crewmates for more than a decade.

  “When we could not reach you,” Tenger went on, “we continued with our plan to send a probe to the structure in order to study it visually. We can presently see the imprints of Amundsen’s engine nacelles in the ground, though we cannot see the shuttlecraft. We have formed the opinion that the structure is actually a spatial or temporal portal that has conveyed Ensign Young, Ensign Kostas, and you to another space or time.” Sulu hadn’t considered the possibility that the gateway might have sent her and the others into the past or the future. “We also believe that the portal functions in only one direction, though this is in part based upon our assumption that you tried unsuccessfully to return through it aboard the shuttlecraft, a fact we need you to confirm or refute.”

  Sulu wondered just how Tenger thought she could do that, considering the one-direction nature of the gateway and their inability to establish a communications channel between Amundsen and Enterprise. Does he want me to use semaphores? she thought caustically. She then realized that she actually could do that—or at least something like it.

  “Commander Buonarroti is currently leading an engineering team in evaluating the sensor readings and images of the portal, with the intention of learning how to modify it to allow us to safely retrieve you. Commander Fenn is likewise guidin
g a scientific team to find those answers. If there is any information you can provide from your perspective, it could aid us in our efforts.”

  The captain would inform the Enterprise crew that the gateway—or the portal, as Tenger called it—did not exist in the place and time to which she and the ensigns had been delivered, thus confirming its one-way operation. Other than that, she didn’t know what she and Kostas could tell them that would assist with their rescue attempt. But maybe, it suddenly occurred to her, they could find a means of procuring such information.

  Tenger’s message continued. “We have appended to this transmission a program that will allow you to record a message on a padd that will then be translated into text and continuously scrolled across the display. It will also transcribe sensor readings. If you return the shuttlecraft to its previous location and place the padd atop it in scrolling mode, the probe above the portal will allow us to read your message.”

  Sulu thought the proposed method an inelegant yet likely effective solution to resolve their inability to communicate normally through the portal. She also noted that Tenger referred to the shuttlecraft’s previous location, singular, but she had landed Amundsen in two separate places: in the area beside which the creature lay dead, and the area beside where Ensign Young had begun to carve out his own message. She thought that meant that the Enterprise crew probably hadn’t seen the ensign’s improvised communiqué, perhaps because it had been swallowed by late-afternoon shadows. Sulu would therefore inform them of the words Young had so painstakingly engraved.

  “Excuse me, Captain,” Kostas said, and Sulu reached forward to pause the security chief’s message. “We’ve almost reached the landing point.”

  Sulu confirmed their location and course on the helm panel, then glanced through the forward viewport. Up ahead, the unmoving form of the creature sprawled across the landscape. Since last they had seen it, its legs had splayed out across the ground about it, like a visual representation of its life force slipping away. Beside it sat the Enterprise log buoy, a cylinder sitting on a three-legged base, with a bright green light blinking atop it.