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

by David R. George III

  “Aye, Commander,” Verant said, without hesitation. Linojj made note to commend the lieutenant for her responsiveness.

  “Enterprise out,” Linojj said.

  “Shintral is moving away,” Tenger said.

  “Captain, the stresses—” Fenn began, but Linojj talked over her.

  “Syndergaard, take us in, fastest possible speed,” she said, striding over to stand beside the helm officer. In response, the ensign sent his hands dashing across his console. The sound of the ship changed as power increased and the ship moved. “Tenger, prepare the Enterprise’s tractor beam to substitute for Shintral’s. Can you tie the ship in to the computer’s coordination program?”

  “We’ll have to,” Tenger said. “The Enterprise’s tractor beam is far more powerful than the portable models we attached to the shuttlecraft. We’ll need to make adjustments with respect to our distance from the portal and the intensity of our beam. We’ll also need to tie in to the helm to match velocities with the shuttlecraft.”

  “Have engineering get on it now,” Linojj said. She rested her hand on Syndergaard’s shoulder. “Get the necessary distance information from Commander Buonarroti. Bring us into position and match speeds as best and as quickly as you can.”

  “Yes, sir,” Syndergaard said.

  Linojj looked at the main screen and saw that Shintral had already departed the operation, its missing tractor beam noticeably absent, giving the scene an unbalanced quality. “Viewer ahead.” The image jumped almost at once to show what lay before Enterprise: the murky form of Rejarris II, cloaked in its impact winter, filled the screen.

  For Linojj, time seemed to pass too slowly. She turned aft and peered at the communications station. “Open a channel to all auxiliary craft,” she said.

  Kanchumurthi worked his controls. “All vessels are receiving you, sir.”

  “Linojj to all shuttlecraft and CMUs,” she said. “The portable tractor beam on Shintral has failed. The Enterprise is moving in to take its place, and the synch program will be adjusted accordingly. Maintain your positions. Enterprise out.”

  “Commander, the portal’s hull is at risk of fracturing,” Fenn said.

  “How long?” Linojj asked Syndergaard.

  “Less than a minute.”

  “Tenger?” Linojj asked.

  “Commander Buonarroti has modified the synchronization routine to adapt the Enterprise’s tractor beam to match the intensity and sweep of the portable versions,” said the security chief. “But there isn’t enough time to couple the ship’s helm with those of the shuttlecraft and CMUs.”

  Linojj wanted to pull Syndergaard from his console and take over the task herself. The first officer had spent four years at the helm of Enterprise and had more experience there than anybody aboard the ship. With only one arm, though, she could not outperform Syndergaard. And I don’t have to outperform Torsten, she thought. He’s as good as they get.

  “Ensign Syndergaard, you’ll have to fill in for the computer,” Linojj said. “Do you think you can match speeds precisely with the shuttlecraft?”

  “Yes, sir. Absolutely, sir.” Linojj appreciated hearing the confidence in the helm officer’s voice, which thankfully fell short of arrogance.

  “Take us into position as soon as we arrive at the portal,” Linojj said. “Tenger, ready to engage the tractor beam program.”

  “Aye.”

  Seconds passed, and then Linojj heard the sound of the engines change even before she saw the portal become visible on the viewer against the backdrop of clouds. The first officer wished that Enterprise could have towed the structure into orbit by itself, but it could only have made such an attempt by employing its tractor beam over just a section of the enormous structure, and therefore unevenly. The ship’s emitter had neither the power nor the range to distribute a beam effectively around a circular object more than half a kilometer in diameter, and then to haul it into space from deep within the gravity well of a planet.

  “We have arrived at the portal and are moving into position now,” Syndergaard said. Linojj watched the lieutenant’s fingers move nimbly across his panel. “Matching velocity with the shuttlecraft . . . and we are a go for tractor beam.”

  “Tenger,” Linojj said at once. Never hesitate.

  “Engaging computer control of our tractor beam.”

  On the main screen, although she hadn’t requested it, the image changed from a view ahead to one of the portal section directly below Enterprise. A hazy blue-white beam appeared and unfurled toward the structure. Almost at once, Fenn announced, “Sensors are showing dramatically reduced stresses in Shintral’s arc of the portal.”

  Linojj wanted to clap her hands together, something she wouldn’t have done even if she hadn’t lost one of her arms. The thought amused her, though, which she thought probably a good sign. “Well done, everybody,” she said. “Tenger, have Lieutenant Verant take Shintral back down to the surface and repair its tractor-beam mount as quickly as possible.” Under normal circumstances, she would have brought the shuttlecraft back aboard, but she didn’t want to risk impacting the current operation with a rendezvous inside the atmosphere.

  “Aye, sir,” Tenger said.

  “And prepare Galileo with a portable tractor beam as well, just in case we need it.”

  Tenger relayed the order to Buonarroti, who confirmed that his engineers would set to modifying Galileo at once. As it turned out, the Enterprise crew didn’t need the services of the last shuttlecraft for the operation. By the end of alpha shift, the portal had been placed in high orbit.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Demora Sulu sat at the main console on Amundsen, staring out at the terrain passing below without really seeing it. Instead, the face of her father rose in her mind, a frequent occurrence in the three days since the shuttlecraft crew had found the remnants of the Excelsior escape pod. As she had for the last few years, she tried to remember the last time that she’d actually seen him in person. For a long time, she thought it had been when Enterprise and Excelsior had overlapped their crews’ shore leaves at Starbase 11 a year or so before Command had lost all contact with her father’s vessel. Sulu retained a strong memory of sitting with him at the Black Hole Saloon, sharing a bottle of Aldebaran sparkling wine she’d saved for the occasion.

  At some point, though, Sulu recalled that she’d broken out that particular vintage for Captain Harriman, on the day in 2307 when Enterprise’s refit had been completed and the ship returned to active status. Had she sipped a different wine with her father, or had it been another time when the two had last been together? During the long months of the modifications to Enterprise, Sulu had split her time between the engineering labs at Utopia Planitia, familiarizing herself with the forthcoming upgrades to the ship; Starfleet Academy on Earth, where she both taught and took classes; and, toward the end, in the shipyard, where she assisted Harriman in overseeing and reviewing the changes to their vessel. At the beginning of that period, though, she took three weeks’ leave, traveling to Riviera to enjoy her time off, and on the way back, she diverted to Starbase 71, where Excelsior had docked for repairs to its deflectors after an explosive encounter with a Revot destroyer. She spent half a day with her father aboard his ship.

  But I know we had a drink together at the Black Hole, she thought. When was that? At any time through the years, she could have gone back through her logs and figured it all out, and perhaps one day she would, but she had so far chosen not to do so. She tried not to think about her confusion too much; she supposed that she preferred to cling to the memory of her time with her father at Starbase 11 as their last meeting, if only because it happened—or she thought it happened—closer to when he and his starship had gone missing.

  “Captain?” Sulu realized that she had been addressed more than once. Ensign Young stood beside her, a concerned expression on his face.

  “Yes, Ensign?” she said. “I’m sorry. I was just thinking.”

  Young sat down next to her at the main console
. His condition had improved considerably in the past couple of days. Kostas had capped his tracheostomy tube, making speech easier for him, and he had begun moving about the cabin. “Were you thinking about your father?”

  Sulu blinked in surprise. “You certainly don’t lack for nerve, Ensign.” Rarely did young officers approach her with personal questions about her life. Not rarely, she corrected herself. Never.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Young said. He gazed down into his lap, obviously abashed. Sulu immediately regretted her response. Not only had Hawkins Young been through a great deal already in the past couple of weeks, but like herself and Kostas, he remained cut off not only from Enterprise, but from the entirety of what had been his life.

  “No, Ensign, I’m sorry,” she said. “Yes, I was thinking about my father.”

  Young raised his head, and Sulu recognized the genuine interest in his eyes. “I learned about him at the Academy,” he said. “Both in class and out. A few of my instructors had served with him, and they sometimes told the cadets stories. I also read about him on my own. I’ve always been interested in the histories of the great starship captains.”

  Sulu felt her eyebrows rise. “I think my father would be surprised, and more than a little uncomfortable, being categorized as a ‘great starship captain.’ ”

  “I’d have to argue with him, then,” Young said with a smile. “He had an amazing career, even going back to his days before he made captain. He was the third officer on the Enterprise when he had to take the conn and face down the Klingons at Organia. And when he served on the Courageous as second officer, he saved the Bajoran colony of Pillagra. There was also the part he played in retrieving Captain Spock, and then in saving Earth from the whale probe. And those are only a few of his exploits before he took over as the captain of the Excelsior.”

  Exploits, Sulu thought, and she couldn’t prevent herself from smiling. She felt a sense of contented reflection, mixed with melancholy. Over the course of many years, she had heard about those incidents, and so many others, firsthand from her father. She imagined that she could provide Young with quite a few details that hadn’t made it into the official record. “He was a man with many talents, and with more interests than some entire crews. He could really tell a story, and as you’ve apparently learned, he had a lot of them to tell. He had a big laugh and was quick to use it, and he was fiercely loyal to his crewmates and friends. I think, in his own quiet way, he was a great man.” She paused for a moment, a bit apprehensive about speaking on such a personal level with the ensign, but also gratified to be remembering her father and talking about him. “He saved my life,” she concluded.

  “I know,” Young replied. “At Askalon Five.”

  Sulu hadn’t been thinking about that confusing and difficult time, which had ended with an army of rampaging clones pursuing her and her father, and the two Sulus nearly leaping together to their deaths. “I wasn’t actually referring to the incident at Askalon Five,” she told Young. “I was talking about when my mother died.”

  “Oh,” Young said. Sulu could see that the prospect of learning more about his commanding officer intrigued him, but also that she’d shaken him by mentioning the death of her mother. “I . . . I’m sorry . . . I didn’t—”

  “It’s all right, Ensign, you couldn’t know what I meant,” she said. Sulu became aware that Kostas, who had been sitting at the rear of the cabin and working on a padd, had turned her attention to the conversation. The captain, who scrupulously maintained her privacy around her crew, considered putting an end to the exchange, but she discovered that she didn’t want to; she wanted to talk about her father. What difference is it going to make, anyway? she thought. If we can’t get back to our own place and time—

  But she didn’t want to contemplate that possibility just then. “I was six years old when my mother died,” she said. “She wasn’t with my father at the time, and so I didn’t even know him.” She surprised herself with her candor, but she didn’t feel the need for discretion. “I was devastated when I lost my mother; I was just a girl, and she was my whole world. I don’t really know what I would have done, where I would’ve gone or how I would’ve turned out, if not for my father welcoming me into his life when he found out about me.”

  Young stayed silent for a moment, and then he finally managed again to say, “I’m sorry.” He could have intended his words about the death of her mother, or even about their own situation, separated from Enterprise and with their futures becoming more uncertain by the day, but she thought he referred to the crashed escape pod they’d found.

  “It’s fine, Ensign,” Sulu said. “I suppose it’s good to finally know for sure what happened to my father.” Except that I don’t really know what happened to Dad, do I? Sulu asked herself. A destroyed Excelsior escape pod likely meant the destruction of the ship, but that didn’t tell her how or why that had taken place. Or how a pod ended up on this planet, she thought. Had her father and his crew abandoned ship near Rejarris II, and one or more of the escape craft passed through the portal? Or had Excelsior itself traveled through the looking glass, only to meet its demise on the other side—wherever and whenever that other side happened to be. Not only don’t I truly know the fate of my father, she thought, I now have more questions than ever—including the one I don’t really want to ask.

  She asked it anyway. Could any of the Excelsior crew—including Dad—still be alive? If the survivors had passed through the portal, either on Excelsior or in escape pods, that could explain Starfleet losing contact with the crew, but that didn’t necessarily mean that they had all died.

  Sulu didn’t like the question because it lacked a ready answer. Eleven years earlier, she had raised similarly unanswerable questions, over and over again, across months. Against all odds, she had held on to the hope that, despite his ship’s disappearance, her father had not perished. Coming to accept his death over time had perhaps made the process easier for her than it might otherwise have been, but she had no wish to do so all over again.

  “It’s possible that he and the Excelsior crew could still be out there somewhere,” Young said.

  “I suppose we’ll find out,” Sulu responded without much enthusiasm. After tricorder scans of the wreckage had confirmed its material consistency with that of Starfleet escape pods, she and Kostas had eventually located two more hull fragments that contained identifying information—in each case, a partial registry number. The first read C-200, and the second, CC-2, both consistent with Excelsior’s NCC-2000 designation. They had also detected genetic material, but it had been too badly damaged to classify, and in insufficient quantity to determine whether or not anybody had died there. Still, she could do little other than conclude that the pod had been launched by Excelsior.

  On that basis, and allowing for the theoretical chance that one or more of the ship’s crew could have survived whatever calamity had befallen their ship, Sulu had initiated the continuous transmission of a message out across the planet. So far, they had received no response—neither from Excelsior survivors nor anybody else. She didn’t think that they would. Or at least that’s what I keep telling myself.

  It actually troubled Sulu a great deal more that they had yet to receive word from Enterprise. It had been more than a week since the portal had lost power, severing her landing party’s contact with the ship. It clearly could require more time than that for the Enterprise crew to reenergize the structure, but she also wondered if something else had happened. Efforts to restore power to the portal could have inadvertently damaged it, or altered its settings, or even destroyed it. Even the most benign of those possibilities could add months or even years to a rescue attempt.

  Because Sulu, Kostas, and Young had spent their time exploring the planet on which they found themselves, they’d traveled farther and farther afield from the area where they’d all first arrived. To ensure the continuity of communications with that location, from where the Enterprise crew would seek to contact them, the captain had see
ded two comm relays along their exploratory path. Several times each day, they sent a transmission via the relays to Pytheas, the shuttlecraft that remained at the portal’s destination point, triggering it to transmit a return message. To that point, they had sent and received each message successfully. Sulu could only hope that they would hear from the Enterprise crew soon.

  If we ever hear from them again, she thought, though the captain chastised herself for her negativity. Still, in addition to her responsibility for her own life, she had to consider Hawkins Young and Galatea Kostas. At some point, she would need to begin thinking about their next course of action. Even if they didn’t hear from the Enterprise crew in the near term, Sulu expected that she and the others would continue to search the planet in the hopes of locating those who had constructed the portal. If that effort ultimately failed, if she, Kostas, and Young could find no means of helping themselves return home, and if they did not hear again from the Enterprise crew, then Sulu would have to figure out a way to reach beyond the world and the planetary system where they’d been marooned—although she did not relish the prospect of facing an entirely unknown universe.

  Except it’s not entirely unknown, is it? she thought. That much, at least, she believed she had verified. After sunset each day, she used the shuttlecraft’s sensors to record details of the night sky, and although virtually nothing looked familiar either to her or Amundsen’s computer, she still thought she’d found what she’d been searching for. With only a pair of planetary shuttlecraft on which to travel, though, it could prove impossible to cross the interstellar void to get her landing party where she wanted to take them. If she—