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

by David R. George III

  The captain had begun exploring the planet not long after reestablishing contact with Enterprise. While her crew studied the portal on Rejarris II, she sought to locate those who had created the device—who had done so presumably for the purpose of fleeing the asteroid that would ultimately drive their planet into an impact winter. The evidence of a ruined but empty world suggested that they had been successful in their escape. Even if they could not reverse the flow of travel through the portal, they might still provide enough information about the device to assist the Enterprise crew in doing so. Through two and a half days of searching, though, Sulu had yet to find any of those who had abandoned Rejarris II.

  It’s not just that I haven’t seen any people, she thought. She also hadn’t seen any sign of their continued existence—or even of their past existence. She saw no settlements of any kind, and no indications that anybody had ever even traveled in the area.

  That’s consistent with what we saw from orbit, Sulu thought. Or what we didn’t see. Although the captain had kept a keen eye on the planet surface during their search for Enterprise aboard Amundsen, she had seen no lights that could have corresponded to cities. As far as she could tell, the planet that she, Young, and Kostas had accidentally come to was as devoid of a population as Rejarris II.

  Except that this place is alive. Where Rejarris II had been strangled by unbroken clouds and smothered in fields of ash, the world below sported open skies and clear ground, painted not in the grays of epic destruction, but in the greens of thriving flora. Sulu had also spotted fauna: birds flying above the trees, along with an occasional larger animal lumbering below breaks in the canopy, though she had seen nothing like the creature that had attacked Ensign Young.

  The captain glanced at the chronometer and realized that she would need to turn back soon. She also saw her scheduled contact with Kostas about forty minutes away. Once they had regained contact with the Enterprise crew and Sulu had decided to scout the surrounding areas, she’d chosen not to remove Ensign Young from the destination point of the portal. Although Kostas had performed admirably in keeping him alive, he remained unconscious and in serious condition. It seemed obvious—and Doctor Morell had verified—that the instant the Enterprise medical staff completed production of an antivenin, it should be delivered through the portal and administered to Young.

  Because Kostas needed to stay with her patient, the captain had ordered Tenger to dispatch a second shuttlecraft. On Sulu’s authority, Lieutenant Verant piloted Pytheas down to the surface of Rejarris II, but only to within five kilometers of the portal. After she programmed the autopilot to finish the shuttlecraft’s journey, Lieutenant Ved transported her back to Enterprise. Sulu and Kostas watched as Pytheas seemed to appear out of nowhere, at a distance from them of thirty meters, providing a margin of safety. Not very high above the ground, the shuttlecraft quickly descended and alit.

  When Sulu took her excursions across the local region, she left Kostas aboard Amundsen to look after Young, but leaving the ensign behind served a second purpose. Not wanting to deplete Enterprise’s supply of log buoys and probes, the captain had ordered communications carried through the portal on padds, which did not have the capability of broadcasting over long distances. Remaining in place aboard Amundsen, the ensign could therefore transmit any messages from the ship directly to Sulu. Likewise, because she stayed in the line of sight of a probe hovering above the portal, Kostas could relay the captain’s responses back to Enterprise. Sulu had also implemented a policy that she would contact the ensign every two hours for a status report.

  Down below, an orange glow bathed the wide span of the forest. Evening approached as the sun set. Sulu released the helm from autopilot and prepared to turn Pytheas around. As she did, though, she saw a wide break in the trees stretching across the path of her shuttlecraft. She checked the sensors, which revealed a river winding its way through the forest. Knowing that most populations that evolved on Class-M planets required fresh water for their survival, the captain decided to begin her eventual loop back to Kostas and Young aboard Amundsen by following the river, at least for a short while.

  After Sulu settled the shuttlecraft onto its new heading and reinitiated the autopilot, she looked out at the water. It flowed placidly along, averaging seventy-five meters in width as it wended a path through the trees. Scans showed a diverse fishery, with at least a dozen different varieties. Animal life teemed in the forest along the banks. She saw something resembling a small bear ambling along in the shallows, as well as several four-legged creatures that resembled deer, but for their burgundy coloring.

  Burgundy, Sulu thought with a grin. I would love a glass right about now. The last few days had been stressful, but her desire for red wine originated not from the need to calm herself, but from her connoisseurship of the grape. Her father had long ago introduced her to the world of fine wines, an appreciation she had subsequently cultivated. Serving aboard a starship that took her throughout the Federation and beyond—throughout the quadrant and beyond—offered her innumerable opportunities for new tastings, and the privileges of rank meant that she could keep a small stock of wines in her quarters aboard ship. Sulu did not collect wines, but acquired them to enjoy and share with friends. Her father might not have convinced her of the joy in most of his leisure pursuits, but he had certainly helped make her an oenophile.

  Dad, she thought, wistful. She still missed him, and she knew she always would, but she felt grateful that she had spent so much time with him. Sulu had known her mother for only six years, but her father for three decades. She’d really gotten to know him, first from a child’s perspective, but then as an adult.

  Although Dad always had the enthusiasm of a child, Sulu thought. She frequently teased him about the sheer volume of his interests, insisting to him that he changed avocations as often as most people changed clothes. He usually just smiled and quoted the writer Robert Heinlein: Specialization is for insects. She loved him for that, and for the fact that he didn’t so much take pride in his numerous and varied hobbies, but that he honestly and fully enjoyed them. He was, she supposed, a Renaissance man, given his interest and knowledge in so many diverse fields: botany, fencing, antique firearms, xenophilately, genealogy, archery, bibliophily—

  In her peripheral vision, Sulu saw something that snapped her from her reverie. She looked off to port and saw a long, narrow break in the forest. She had flown over clearings during her recon, but the shape and size of the hole in the canopy seemed peculiar to her.

  Once more, the captain took control of the shuttlecraft and altered course. She flew toward the area maintaining altitude and saw an area almost completely devoid of vegetation, though dead leaves covered some of it. On her second pass, she dropped to just above the treetops, which allowed her to distinguish a slope in the ground. Finally, after employing sensors to ensure that no large animals roamed near the area—and none of the spiderlike leviathans tunneled beneath it—she maneuvered Pytheas into the odd clearing and set down at one end.

  Sulu checked the temperature, and though it had dropped a few degrees during her journey, she didn’t feel the need to don any outerwear. She did, however, arm herself with a phaser pistol, a tricorder, and a communicator. The chronometer told her that she still had twenty minutes before she would check in with Ensign Kostas, although the deepening shadows outside the shuttlecraft reminded her that she should already be heading back to her crew.

  The captain exited Pytheas, making sure to close the hatch behind her. The slope she had seen from above started at the floor of the forest and angled downward. It had rounded sides and looked almost like a crater. Sulu walked beside it, measuring its length at fifty-six meters, and the depth at its farthest end at eight. Fallen leaves littered the bottom of the grade, but the soil along the sides appeared blackened. The trees that had once stood there lay toppled in the surrounding forest, some of them in fragments, and all of them similarly charred and aiming away from what must have been the point of imp
act.

  When she gazed back toward the shuttlecraft, the view solidified her intuition that something had crashed to the ground there. Activating her tricorder, she scanned the depression that had been gouged out of the forest floor. The details that appeared on her display did not contradict her conclusion: the ground and trees had been burned, the soil along the bottom compacted by the high pressure of something that had collided with it at speed.

  Sensors also showed a small piece of metal buried at the end of the trench. It too had been subjected to intense heat, but Sulu read refined duranium and tritanium among its components—advanced materials commonly used in the construction of starship hulls. Clearly a large vessel had not crashed there, but she thought it likely that something smaller had.

  Something like a shuttlecraft, she thought. The idea sent chills through her. Something about the situation seemed wrong to her. No, not wrong, she thought. Oddly familiar.

  Sulu walked back toward the shuttlecraft and the shallow end of the trench. She wanted to walk down into it and dig out the piece of metal that she had scanned, but the sun had eased lower in the sky, dimming visibility as dusk took firm hold of the land. She could no longer see the far end of the cavity that had been carved into the ground. She would have to return the next day.

  Back aboard Pytheas, the captain recorded the planetary coordinates so that she could readily find the location again. She didn’t know if the crash site marked the path of those who had fled Rejarris II, but she would scour the surrounding area in the hopes of finding additional clues, or possibly even the people themselves.

  Sulu set a course back to Ensign Kostas and Ensign Young aboard Amundsen. The shuttlecraft rose from the forest into a brilliant sky filled with the pinks and oranges of a dazzling sunset. Sulu took a moment to appreciate the beauty of the scene before heading back to the place that had become a temporary and unwelcome home.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The doors whispered open before Tenger, and he strode through them into the engineering laboratory. The noise within struck him first; it filled the large compartment: the commingled voices of two dozen or more crew members, joined together with the chirps and tones of console feedback, the whine of tricorders, the hum of the transporter. Not quite a cacophony, it fell short, perhaps, in the organization of its individual sounds.

  Platforms fronted by control stations lined each of the bulkheads, all of them utilized to design, analyze, and test components. Tenger saw pieces of equipment on almost all of them, with engineers laboring over various devices and a number of the ship’s scientists assisting. The commander recognized some of what he saw, but most of the components seemed outsized and, if not primitive, at least archaic.

  Four square holographic stages sat in the middle of the lab, with operating panels on either side of the grouping. Tenger noted that the stages had been networked together, creating one large platform, which clearly had been done so that the combined unit could accommodate the huge structure currently projected atop it. The security chief studied the great cylindrical slice of equipment, clearly a cross section of the portal. Commander Buonarroti and one of his engineers, Lieutenant Warren Roscoe, stood before the impressive hologram, their heads together and their hands buried inside the glut of circuitry.

  Tenger climbed the steps to the stage, then waited for an opportune moment to approach Enterprise’s chief engineer. He did not want to interrupt the analytical process. While Captain Sulu and Ensigns Kostas and Young appeared to face no immediate dangers—inside the shuttlecraft, they could readily escape the clutches of any other hostile beasts that attacked—Tenger did not wish to test the situation for long. He hoped to return them to the ship as quickly as possible.

  When Buonarroti and Roscoe finally stepped back from the reproduced segment of the portal, the silver-haired lieutenant espied Tenger first. “Commander,” he said.

  “Lieutenant,” Tenger said, and then, as Buonarroti turned to face him, “Commander. I wanted to check on your progress.”

  “I’m not really sure we can call it progress just yet,” Buonarroti said.

  Tenger felt his brow knit together. “Are you finding equipment that you don’t understand?” he asked.

  “No, it’s not that,” Buonarroti said. “Everything we’ve seen so far corresponds to the level of technology that the landing parties encountered on Rejarris Two, and so it all falls well within our understanding. The difficulty is that we still haven’t discovered how all of this—” He gestured toward the holographic cross section of the portal. “—accomplishes what it does. The answer must be in there somewhere, but the structure is just so big, and there’s no one component or set of components that stands out from the rest.”

  “We’ve scanned the entire length of the torus-shaped structure that forms the framework of the portal, and we’ve found virtually no empty space,” Roscoe added. “That means we’re researching more than two hundred fifty thousand cubic meters of equipment.”

  “Can it be done?” Tenger wanted to know.

  “I’m confident that it can be done, and I’m confident that we can do it,” Buonarroti said. “I just haven’t developed a feeling yet for how long it’s going to take us to understand how the portal functions, or how long it will take us to reverse its flow—if that’s even possible.”

  “And what if it’s not?” Tenger asked.

  “Once we know how the portal works,” Buonarroti said, “we may be able to construct a smaller version of it and deliver it to Captain Sulu.”

  “Calibrating it could be problematic, though,” Roscoe said. “In addition to needing to figure out how the structure creates a pathway from origin to destination, it’s also unclear how it’s set for that destination. We’re not even sure if it’s creating a passage through space or time or both. It might even be linking a point in our universe to a point in another.”

  The chief engineer nodded as if in agreement, but then said, “All of that’s true, but no matter how the portal functions and where it sends people, if it’s been done once, it can be done again.”

  “But you can’t estimate the length of time it will take to do it?” Tenger asked.

  “We might find the answer in an hour, or in a week, or in a month,” Buonarroti said. “But the more work we do, the more we study the portal, the better able we’ll be to evaluate how long it will take us to understand it and retrieve the landing party.”

  The chief engineer’s response, while understandable, did not satisfy Tenger. To Roscoe, he said, “Carry on, Lieutenant.” The engineer started, evidently not expecting to be dismissed at that moment. He recovered quickly, though, and moved back to the holographic copy of the portal segment.

  Tenger descended from the platform, with Buonarroti following behind him. When they had moved far enough away from everybody else in the lab to afford them some degree of privacy, the security chief and acting captain stopped. “Commander,” he said quietly, “I know that this is a difficult task, not only to achieve the return of the captain and the others, but to approximate how long it will take to do that. What I need to know from you right now is whether I should contact Starfleet Command. Do we need the assistance of other starship crews? Do we need to bring in the Starfleet Corps of Engineers?”

  “This is taking longer than any of us want it to, and it’s frustrating that we can’t know just yet the amount of time we’ll need to get this done,” Buonarroti said. “I could guess, but that wouldn’t serve any of us.” He leaned in closer and spoke even more quietly. “Tenger,” he said, clearly intending to emphasize his words by using the security chief’s name, “if you’re asking my opinion, it seems like a very bad idea to call out the cavalry so close to Tzenkethi space. We’re far enough away that the Enterprise went unnoticed, or if not unnoticed, then it didn’t raise enough of an alarm within the Coalition for them to send one of their ships after us. But if other Starfleet vessels descend on the same solar system so near their borders, you can believe that they’d tak
e an interest—not just in us, but in whatever it is that’s brought us here.”

  “Meaning the portal.”

  “You know how belligerent the Tzenkethi can be,” Buonarroti said. “They might well view the portal as a dangerous technology, one that Starfleet is attempting to exploit and weaponize.”

  “Yes,” Tenger said, recognizing the truth of the chief engineer’s words. The territorial and distrustful Tzenkethi might imagine the Federation creating a portal that opened directly into Coalition space, and then sending a squadron of Starfleet vessels through to attack. If positioned out in space, even an Excelsior-class starship like Enterprise could easily fit through the portal. “Yes, you’re right, of course,” Tenger said. “I’m just concerned about Captain Sulu, Ensign Kostas, and Ensign Young.”

  “We all are,” Buonarroti said. He glanced back over his shoulder in the direction of the holographic stage, then back at Tenger. “We’re all working as diligently as possible to accomplish this, and I know that you know that. I promise you that if we get to a point where the process is taking too long and I can’t tell you how much more time we’re going to need, or if I determine that our efforts will be measured in months or years rather than in days or weeks, I’ll let you know at once.”

  “Thank you, Rafe,” Tenger said, using Buonarroti’s nickname among his friends, pronouncing it Rah-fee. “When you have—”

  “Commander Tenger,” a voice suddenly called out. The security chief looked around to see Lieutenant Commander Fenn staring over at him with both eyes. The intensity of her gaze and the tension in her body language conveyed a sense of exigency. Tenger quickly headed in her direction, with Buonarroti at his side.