by Tony Daniel
“Fire phasers!” Sulu ordered.
A sheet of power took Merling’s collapsing form and surrounded it with phased energy. After a momentary flicker, Merling and the nano were broken down to invisible elemental gas.
“Ugh, what’s that smell?” Scotty said.
“Sulfur in the nano,” Sulu said. “Harmless now.”
“Not to my nose,” Mister Scott replied.
And despite the circumstances, his aching ankles from landing on Merling, and the near-miss encounter with destruction, Sulu had to smile a weary smile.
Thirteen
Captain’s log, Stardate 6415.1. Through industrious research and legwork, Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu and Ensign Pavel Chekov discovered and thwarted a plot by Vesbian military attaché Major Johan Merling to use forbidden nanotechnology to destroy this ship. Merling’s attempted sabotage was only incidental to a plot to obliterate the Horta currently aboard Enterprise. His plan was to force a mass exodus of the planet Vesbius in order to forward the genetic supremacist views of a Vesbian organization, Exos, to which he secretly belonged. Commendations are recommended for Misters Sulu and Chekov.
The Enterprise blazed into the Vesbian system at warp eight and did not slow down until it had reached the orbital plane of the outer planet. Then, using a combination of faster than light and impulse power, the ship maneuvered into orbit around the oncoming asteroid. The first deployment of the Horta to the asteroid’s surface was overseen by Spock and Scott.
The Horta arranged themselves in an ant-like double line and made their way through the Enterprise’s corridors to the transporter room. When they had to enter the turbolifts they waited patiently. Rather than depending on a human operator being always present, Scotty had created a Horta-friendly command handle located in the bottom of the lift the Horta would be using. Unlike the human-centric turning handle, this was a toggle-switching device that could be pressed against to activate. The destination was preset, since all the Horta were going to the transporter room.
Spock, with Scotty’s input on engineering matters, had prepared careful instructions and communicated them to the Horta on what they were to do once they deployed on the asteroid. The Enterprise had conducted extensive external scans, and the asteroid was now mapped to a centimeter resolution. The Vulcan studied the readouts carefully and created what he told the captain was a mental map similar to the smell map used by a Terran canine or other chemical-sensing creature. This map would represent the layout of the asteroid to the Horta.
“I informed them of chemical concentrations, of regions of ice and rock, and the density layers to the depth to which our sensors could penetrate,” Spock explained. “These are things that Horta understand instinctively. They are remarkably quick at assimilating the information. It was as if I were telling a Vulcan, who already knew, the way to Shi’Kahr.”
The Horta marched into the transporter room and were beamed down to the asteroid to meet Scott. He had previously beamed down in an EV suit to where a promising crack lay that might provide ingress to the asteroid’s interior. Within the space of a few hours, the Horta had dug into the asteroid and gone to work. The overall plan was to create weaknesses necessary for the destruction of the asteroid, but to do so in a precise manner. After that, the Enterprise would use her tractor beams and phasers to complete the job. Before the Enterprise went into action, the Horta would gather in a prearranged spot on the asteroid’s surface and be beamed back aboard.
It was a complex operation, something that only a species that was capable of long-range planning and thinking could even conceive of completing. Kirk was more and more impressed with the Horta the longer he was in contact with them. They were not merely intelligent, but advanced. He would, without question, author a report supporting Federation membership.
Would the plan work? Spock believed that it would, and Scotty had become increasingly optimistic about its chances for success. But there were many unknowns. For despite all the scans the Enterprise had completed of the asteroid, there were many uncharted regions the Horta would encounter. In some places, they might need sensors. Mister Scott offered to remain on the asteroid with the Horta to provide backup and assistance.
The only reason the plan had a chance to succeed was the fact that the asteroid was a combination of a nickel-iron asteroid and a comet. The metallic interior was all asteroid, but either through accretion or collision—Spock thought it had been the latter—the asteroid core had accumulated a rock and ice outer coating. Finally, the rind of the asteroid, its surface, was made up of more common silicon debris to depths of ten to fifteen meters, Spock estimated from millennia of strikes from micrometeorites.
If everything went exactly as expected, when the asteroid entered the outer reaches of Vesbius’s gravitational well, and with the proper assist from the Enterprise, the asteroid would break apart; the greater part of its mass would miss the planet, and only meteors would strike the surface. The meteor storm would be bad, potentially harmful, but not utterly devastating to the biosphere of the planet.
• • •
With the Horta and Mister Scott deployed on the asteroid, the Enterprise headed toward Vesbius at warp speed and was soon in orbit. As they drew near to her homeworld, Hannah became stronger. It was as if her body could sense the approaching planet, or perhaps the effect was merely psychological. When Kirk accompanied her from sickbay to the transporter room to beam down, there was a look of elation and relief in her eyes. She was so gaunt that she seemed ethereal to Kirk, only a shadow of the girl he’d met weeks before. If she were an angel returned to her heaven, it was a heaven Kirk could only visit, where he could never remain. For living there required giving up not only being human, but something even more important: his command.
Kirk and Spock accompanied Hannah and Ferlein to the surface of Vesbius, along with a security detail. Spock could answer any questions about Operation Horta that the Council might have. The security detail was there to accompany their prisoner, Hox.
The captain wanted to hold on to Hox, but it was clear that if he did so Hox would die. Kirk negotiated an agreement that Hox would be guarded by Enterprise security until he was handed over to the Vesbian police. The chancellor assured the captain that every measure would be taken to ensure that an Exos compatriot did not liberate Hox.
But Hox was among the least of Kirk’s worries. On Vesbius, ten percent of families had decided to evacuate. These came to about two thousand people. This may have also been a reaction to the terrorist bombings. The tunnel bombs had collapsed two shelters, which was fully one third of the capacity, and five thousand people were without adequate protection from any strike, much less a full-on asteroid hit.
There was no way two thousand people could fit on the Enterprise for even a single trip. The original plan had been to make several trips to ferry the colonists to nearby systems for permanent resettlement and, most tellingly, to accompany and protect what was assumed to be a vast evacuation flotilla. At the moment, that flotilla consisted of the Enterprise and a motley collection of planetary shuttlecraft and merchant haulers.
There was no life-support structure on Vesbius’s airless moons. Furthermore, there was no solution to the problem of autoimmune collapse. The only real hope was to take to space, avoid the strike, and then return in the hopes of finding some scrap of the biosphere left to interact with their Vesbian biological equilibrium. Despite the obvious flaws and huge uncertainties in the plan, Kirk ordered every shuttle the Enterprise had available to take part in the evacuation effort that was under way.
The day after the Enterprise’s return, knowing all that he could do now was wait, the captain beamed down to spend a night with Hannah. On the dawn of the following day, they chose the veranda where they had met for a goodbye. Everything now depended on operational issues neither could foresee, and both were acutely aware that this might very well be the last time they saw one another. Standing together with a view of the verdant fields of the Vesbian colony, the quaint f
armhouses, the cobblestone roads, the distant snowcapped mountains, it was almost impossible to imagine that all of this might be gone within days.
“I’ll try to remember what it was like,” said Hannah. “The memory fades. Yet I believe that if I hold it in my heart, I will someday be able to re-create this for my children or for their children’s children. That is my hope.”
“Our plan could succeed,” said Kirk. “The Horta might be successful. They are very resourceful.”
“If by a miracle the salvation does come,” Hannah said, “I will treat it as a gift, and I will cherish every day that I live on my beautiful world ever after. I will never take this life for granted.” She turned to Kirk, smiled, and touched his lips. “I am not so very unlike a human woman, am I? I am not so very unlike someone you might love?”
There was so much that he might have said, should have said, but Kirk, so often the master of such situations, found himself at a loss. His only response was to kiss her, and the kiss lasted for a long time.
Kirk stepped back. They did not exchange another word. There was nothing left to say, nothing to take the sting from the moment.
“Kirk to Enterprise. One to beam up.”
He gazed at Hannah as the transporter beam engulfed him. His last thought was that at least he’d had such a morning with such a woman.
The captain rode the turbolift in a contemplative mood, but as soon as he stepped on to the bridge, James Kirk knew this was right. Chekov had a report from the asteroid surface that the Horta were finding the asteroid crust harder than expected. If they could not find a way into the planetoid that was relatively easy and would not take weeks, the plan was in jeopardy of collapsing before it had even begun. Kirk called an emergency briefing to assess the situation. This was the life he had chosen, and, very slowly but very surely, Kirk’s mood lightened.
This is where I belong, Kirk thought, smiling at the bustle about him as officers went about their duties with precision and creativity. I made the right decision.
Didn’t I?
Fourteen
When the antimatter bombs went off, Scotty thought they made for a sensor reading to behold. Fortunately, he was on the other side of the asteroid and did not have to directly experience the cataclysm. The antimatter was loaded into strategic fissures in the asteroid surface, and the effects of the explosions were increased by at least an order of magnitude by placement. With a contained reaction explosive, the Horta were able to move in rapidly and clear the pulverized regolith out of the newly exposed passageway into the asteroid.
Exterior sensor scans from the Enterprise had revealed two fault structures that could be exploited. Scott had made three more incisions, as he liked to think of them, with photon torpedoes. These had turned an even smaller fault system into a cracked stretch of crustal plates resembling a hardboiled egg that had been dropped (but not peeled), and created a major weakness to exploit in the asteroid. Because of the odd structure of this asteroid, it shared many behaviors with worlds such as Earth or Vulcan, and had a limited version of plate tectonics in operation. The disadvantage to its being an asteroid was that the crust was exposed to space and a full pounding of micrometeorites over millions of years. This resulted in an outer coating compressed to diamond hardness. Without a way in, the Horta found they could not create the massive system of honeycombed fissures and chambers that the plan called for. Even if they eventually broke through, they wouldn’t accomplish this within the time that they had remaining before the day of the possible strike.
But the photon torpedoes and antimatter explosions proved enough to give the Horta a foothold, and they were able to work into the cracks much more easily than they would have been able to without technological aid.
After the explosions were complete, Scott turned his attention back to his more mundane tasks—seismic sensory activity in his tunnel rover.
Scott had to admit he was having the time of his life. He’d taken a shuttle down to the asteroid surface and met the Horta there. In the shuttle was a scanning device he had constructed himself. It was similar in makeup to the old seismic trucks of Earth, the sensor vehicles that had traveled around Earth of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and pounded the ground to find oil back in the ancient days of carbon energy sources. The principles were basically the same here: You dropped a heavy weight on the ground, and this set up waves of compression and decompression that traveled through the rock. Different densities of different portions of the regolith either slowed or allowed the compression wave to pass through at an average speed. The waves bounced about were directed back to Scott’s sensor device and into vector angles of other devices that he had placed on the asteroid. The engineer was able to triangulate the information he received and construct a 3-D rendering of the asteroid. Furthermore, with the quantum capabilities of the subspace sensors, Scotty was able to refine these measurements, and he could predict not only the general consistency of the rock that would be found there but the particular crystallization patterns that the Horta would encounter. This was useful information to the Horta, akin to telling a sailor what the weather would be like each day on his voyage.
For his part, Scotty had very much come to respect the Horta as natural engineers. They made tunnels that would not collapse due to external pressure. This was a much harder feat than it might appear. One could not simply dig a hole to any depth one might desire in a planet or an asteroid. Pressure on the sides increased with depth. The need to overcome such pressure had been the bane of Earth drillers and miners for centuries. Using specialized teams, the Horta were able to physically restructure the molecular bonds of the tunnel casings and shore up those spaces to an astonishing depth and at almost incredible pressure. One Horta team would cut through the rock, and a second trailing team would shore up the tunnel behind the lead. Then a third crew would come through and do the finishing work of conducting a thorough crack inspection along the way and sealing any stray weaknesses. This method produced tunnels under the surface that were precise.
I can understand why the miners were reluctant to part with the Horta, even for a few days, Scotty thought. It’s like having your own personal army of engineers who can carve a tunnel that’s stronger and safer than anything that your tools could’ve produced.
Scott had created a portable, tent-sized pressure dwelling for himself on the asteroid, and his seismic sensor unit was housed in a two-seater buggy that had a small atmospheric enclosure over the driver and a passenger. The buggy was designed to zip through the Horta tunnels using wheels on the bottom and wheels on the top. Scott had to admit it was fun to go tunnel-running at full speed. He took to calling the vehicle Rover, and it did look a bit like a sleek greyhound, with an extended nose that housed the sensor apparatus.
Lacking the Vulcan’s mind melding ability, Scott had adapted the crude method of communicating with the Horta that the Janus VI miners used. He often wondered what the Horta were really thinking. He was starting to get an idea that whatever it was, it was pretty complicated. These were sentient beings, and it became more and more apparent that they had their own opinions about life, the culture, and the universe.
They were clearly divided into groups that Scott quickly began thinking of as clans. This was something Scott both approved of and understood. After all, he was from a clan-based culture himself. He’d checked with Spock—who had proved helpful with his newly acquired personal trove of background data on Horta culture—and as near as Scotty could tell with his limited ability to communicate with the Horta, the different clans were competing. The prize for those who did the most work seemed to be a grant of proximity to the All Mother upon their return to Janus VI. Scott wished fervently that he could speak Horta; maybe one day he could find a way to do so.
The asteroid’s amalgam of material was proving to possess an extremely complicated structure. The preliminary scans from the Enterprise had not distinguished the multitude of layers that made up this beast of an asteroid. A child of the
gravitational effects of the two moons of Vesbius, the asteroid was a conglomeration of space debris the two moons had swept from Vesbian space and sent into a solar orbit. For millennia, the two moons had been very good at cleaning up and absorbing the blows from space that were aimed at Vesbius. This was important, since the planet was in the Goldilocks zone in the system: the perfect distance from the sun for water to exist in three phases at different times on the planet, and thus the right temperature and orientation for life to emerge.
Many planets were in the Goldilocks zone in the galaxy but held no life. Almost invariably, these were planets without moons. Now the double moons had caused the very problem they usually helped avert. It had taken a few million years, but the combined gravitation of Toro and Cabella, as the two moons were known locally, had pulled the asteroid off course. This had likely happened before in the planet’s history, and it may have accounted for the fact that the life forms encountered on Vesbius had been relatively primitive, with plants akin to Mesozoic Earth ferns, rushes, and mosses. The colonists had introduced flowering plants, as well as a new dominant vertebrate species—Homo sapiens. If the planet was indeed a super organism, Scott was not surprised that the planetary ecosphere had not taken to humanity.
Scotty’s short-range sensors told him that he was approaching the end of a tunnel and drawing near to a group of Horta who were lining it. He pulled the throttle back and slowed. Up ahead, the Horta had sensed his arrival, probably via seismic waves traveling through the regolith, and were headed back to meet him. The leader—each group of four had one “foreman,” generally—signaled Scotty through a series of wigwag maneuvers that were not unlike the dance movements of a honey bee, that they were preparing to evacuate the end of the tunnel so that Scott could go in and complete measurements for the next length of tunnel. Scotty used the rover to wigwag back the appropriate thank you, and he proceeded forward until the nose of the sensor brushed up against the tip end of the tunnel.
