As the Enterprise drew closer to the perceived edge of the phenomenon, the anomaly began to resolve itself on the ship’s main viewscreen, from a fuzzy and indistinct haze of light into what looked like a shimmering field of trillions of sparkling gemstones. However, the forward sensors detected only visible light, even as those gems steadily grew into gigantic onyx-hued crystalline asteroids refracting the light from what was now unmistakably a star at the heart of the anomaly. “Captain, I’m not able to get an accurate reading on our distance,” Sulu said, as the proximity alerts remained unsettlingly quiet. If his eyes were to be trusted, the largest of the objects were at least triple the size of the Enterprise.
“Full stop, Mister Sulu,” the captain ordered. For a moment, no one on the bridge spoke a word, all silently taking in the display.
It was Lieutenant Uhura, turned forward in her seat at the communications station, who finally broke the silence. “It’s beautiful.”
“And fascinating,” Spock added, looking from his readouts to the viewscreen. “Sensor scans are still not returning any readings. It would appear that the field is absorbing all the energies directed toward it, from our sensors as well as the majority of the stellar emissions.”
“Except for visible light,” Kirk noted.
“Yes,” Spock said. “Extremely curious.” After years of serving with the Vulcan science officer, Sulu was able to detect the tiniest hint of annoyance underneath his otherwise emotionless tone. “And none of our standard analytical protocols are yielding any information about the nature or composition of the objects.”
“Could we beam one aboard,” the captain suggested, “for more hands-on testing?”
But Spock replied, “Impossible. The transporter would be unable to get a coordinate lock without effectual targeting scanners.”
“Tractor beam?” Kirk asked, and when Spock did not immediately shoot down that idea, the captain said, “Mister Sulu, try pulling in one of the smaller ones.”
“Aye, sir.” The helmsman had to manually target the tractor emitters, but still managed to accurately project a beam and make contact with one of the strange crystals. But it had no effect whatsoever on its trajectory. “It looks like they absorb gravitons, too.”
Kirk rubbed his chin as he considered that, then said, “Well, let’s try approaching this the old-fashioned way, then.” He turned back to his command chair and hit a button on the armrest. “Kirk to engineering.”
The distinctive brogue of the chief engineer replied over the companel speaker. “Scott here, Captain.”
“Correct me if I’m mistaken, Scotty,” Kirk said, resuming his seat, “but don’t we have an old-style grappler assembly in ship’s stores?”
“Aye, that we do.”
“Is it in good working order?”
“Sir!” Scotty sounded genuinely indignant. “You’re not suggesting that I would let any piece of equipment aboard my ship fall into disrepair, are you?”
“Heaven forfend, Scotty,” Kirk answered, successfully keeping the smile he wore from his voice. “How long to get it set up for use in the cargo loading bay?”
“An hour, sir,” Scotty said, then added, “May I ask why, sir?”
“Of course, Scotty,” Kirk told him. “We’re going fishing.”
* * *
The longer Scotty prodded at the inner workings of the old grappler assembly, the more he worried that his quadrupled estimate would not be time enough.
He lay flat on his stomach on the deck of the large bay in the aft section of the ship, aiming a light into the open panel on the side of the bulky gray apparatus. With his other hand, he poked at the outdated circuitry with a probe. To one side lay one of the loading bay’s tractor beam emitters, which was used for the ingress and egress of supply pallets through the exterior cargo hatch, which was situated a deck below the shuttle hangar at the ship’s stern. The power supply and control cable from the tractor emitter was now plugged into the older contraption, but it was stubbornly refusing to activate for some reason. Or, as Scotty now realized, for a whole myriad of reasons.
“Ach,” the engineer grunted through his teeth, between which he clenched a microlaser refuser. He swapped that tool for the one in his hand, and then reached back into the machine’s guts to fix another failed connection. If he didn’t know better, he would have suspected this ancient piece of machinery might actually have been salvaged off the pre-Federation Enterprise. Grapplers like this one were part of the standard equipment on nearly all space vessels of that era, and up through the early part of the current century. But as tractor beam technology improved and became more sophisticated, the older devices had fallen out of use. Scotty himself had not actually seen an operational grappler since his first Academy training cruise, and had been surprised to discover this one during an inventory conducted shortly after his assignment to this ship. As best he could determine, it had been added to the Enterprise’s stores when she was initially launched, at the insistence of Captain April’s executive officer, but had sat unused the entire time since.
Finally, Scotty completed his diagnostic. As he was bolting the cover panel back onto the grappler’s side, the doors to the bay slid open, admitting Captain Kirk. “How’s it coming, Scotty?”
“All set, sir,” Scott said as he pushed himself up and latched the lid of his tool kit shut. He stood, taking his tools in one hand and with the other grabbing one of the handles of the antigrav unit clamped to the disconnected tractor beam emitter. Kirk took the other, and together they moved out of the loading bay into the small control room forward of it, opposite the space doors. Once sealed inside, Scotty seated himself at the primary control panel, set before the transparent aluminum bulkhead that looked out onto the wide, empty deck. “I’ll be honest with you, sir,” Scotty said as he ran a final check of his handiwork. “I’ve never been much of a fisherman, and I’ve never used this type of reel.” It had taken a bit of jury-rigging and creative computer programming to coordinate the cargo bay’s tractor control with the grappler, and the engineer could only hope it would work in practice the way he thought it would in theory.
“Fishing is a sport of patience, Scotty,” Kirk answered with one of his easy smiles. Scott nodded back, appreciative of the captain’s sentiment, but hoping he wouldn’t let him down.
Satisfied with what he saw on his board, Scott then pressed a sequence of controls, beginning the depressurization process. Warning alarms sounded as the atmosphere was evacuated, and once the air had been cycled out and the alarms had fallen silent, Scotty keyed in another command. Looking up from the console through the transparency as the large exterior hatch slid open, he got his first glimpse at what lay beyond the ship.
The Enterprise had reoriented itself so that, from their vantage at the ship’s stern, Scott and Kirk could look directly into the vast field of crystalline shards, tumbling slowly in their orbits. As they moved, their black surfaces reflected back an oddly muted yet stunning prism of colors, like an oil slick on the surface of a shallow puddle. “Oh, my, but that is a pretty sight,” Scotty said in an awed whisper. It seemed unbelievable that they were all but invisible to sensors yet so beautiful to the naked eye.
“The viewscreen did not do this justice,” Kirk told him, sounding equally awed by the sight. “It just goes to prove, there really is no substitute for sending people out here, seeing things like this up close, close enough to touch.” Then the captain tore his eyes away and turned to Scott. “So . . . let’s touch one.”
“Aye, sir,” Scott said as he turned his attention to the targeting panel before him. “At least the fishing pond is well stocked.” The grappler had been built in the day when its operator would more often than not have to rely on visual targeting, so Scott was able to pick out a reasonably sized, slow-moving asteroid from the field, track its trajectory, and as it reached the center of his field of vision, hit the launch trigger.
Trailing a carbon-fiber tether, the large duranium claw flew out the open hatch
and made impact. The four-meter-long, pencil-shaped sliver began to tumble away, but not before the grappler head engaged and secured itself, finding purchase in a small fissure or micrometeor pockmark. Scotty slapped the control that stopped any more line from reeling out and gritted his teeth as the mass the grappler had attached itself to pulled the cable taut. The cable held, though, and after a moment it slackened again, the asteroid’s kinetic energy spent. “Nicely done, Mister Scott,” Kirk said, impressed.
Scott shrugged modestly and pressed another control on the panel to start slowly reeling the line back into the ship. The crystal was drawn closer, meter by meter, bringing it gently toward the open bay doors. Scotty fired one of the miniature positioning jets that formed a ring around the base of the grappler’s claw head, adjusting the captured object’s angle of approach, in order to bring it in cleanly through the open hatch. He misjudged only slightly, and triggered the opposite thruster to compensate.
That one, however, only sputtered feebly before failing. “Damn,” he said, just as all of the control readings from the grappler’s remote assembly went dead.
“What is it?” Kirk asked.
“I don’t know, sir,” Scotty said as he hit more controls and found them all unresponsive. “I don’t know if it was the impact or the age of the blasted machine, but I can’t work the remote maneuvering system.”
“Is the crystal interfering with your command transmissions?” Kirk posited. The reason wasn’t especially important at the moment; the immediate concern was that they had a large asteroid coming at them that could no longer be controlled. The ship’s shields were of no use against the energy-absorbing object, and it was on a path to hit lengthwise against the outer edge of the open hatch, doing serious damage.
The engineer’s first thought was to cut it loose, but inertia would only make that a futile act. As the options raced through Scotty’s head, none struck him as particularly good. But one was the most likely to accomplish the task at hand. “Captain, ye may want to get down,” he said, and then boosted the speed of the grappler tether retrieval to maximum. The straining of the intake reel could be heard through the transparent bulkhead as the line went tight again, and the crystal was pulled around, so that it was coming at the Enterprise straight on, like an oversized harpoon.
“Scotty, what . . . ?”
Watching the velocity of the incoming object as it increased, Scott ignored the second thoughts shouting to be heard from the back of his mind. The long and disturbingly pointed crystal shard had now been pulled into a straight trajectory into the open bay, and Scotty stopped the spinning reel. The asteroid stopped accelerating, but it was still coming at them at close to thirty meters per second.
“Down!” Scotty shouted, as he slammed the button to rapidly repressurize the loading bay, and at the same time tackled the captain, knocking him flat onto the deck. On the opposite side of the bulkhead, air vents opened wide, filling the bay with gas, much of which quickly blew out the open doors into space. The jet of oxygen offered enough resistance to slow the incoming asteroid fractionally, but it still struck the loading bay deck with a mighty crash, bounced, and hit the transparent bulkhead with enough force to crack it. Air started hissing out of the control room, and Scotty disentangled himself from the captain in order to reach up and get the space doors closed. Within seconds they were sealed, and Scotty peered out the still largely intact observation window to see their prize broken into roughly a dozen sharp-edged pieces, none longer than one meter, scattered across the deck. Scott let out a long, noisy breath of relief.
Then, from the deck beside him, he heard the captain groan and then say, “You know, I’m getting a little tired of having my officers knock me to the floor today. . . .”
Two
Spock sighted his target down the barrel of his phaser rifle and fired.
The beam struck the precise center of the crystal fragment held in an elevated brace at the far end of the laboratory, at first having no apparent effect on the sample. After 8.8 seconds at a constant sustained setting, however, visible fractures began to form and grow. After 20 seconds, it broke into pieces, not in an explosive blast as would have been anticipated, but simply splitting and falling away. The thin chips that separated from the large sample sounded like chimes as they landed on the deck.
Spock lifted his forefinger from the firing stud and turned to Kirk, who was standing behind him. “As you can see, the amount of directed energy these crystals are able to absorb is not unlimited,” Spock observed.
“Still, that’s a lot of phaser fire you had to pour into it,” Kirk said, walking down to the other end of the improvised firing range and squatting down to examine the broken pieces. “Any theories on where all that energy is going?”
“It appears that it is being shifted into a dimension of subspace,” Spock said. “There are molecular similarities to dilithium, though it does not have the same effect on subspace.”
Kirk asked, “Can we get through to the other side of the field without it posing a risk to the ship?”
Spock shook his head. “The energy displacement effect is not a risk factor. We do still need to take into account the physical damage the crystals can inflict.”
“And even if we were to try using the ship’s phasers to blast a path through the field,” Kirk said, standing up again, his palm outstretched, holding a small pile of crystal chips, “we’d just end up with that many more pieces of this nystromite to worry about.”
“Yes, sir,” Spock answered, not bothering to protest the captain’s use of the term “nystromite.” The other scientists on his team had coined it during their initial experimentations, even before they had determined its actual molecular makeup and could formulate a more apt scientific designation. But now that the name was being used by the captain, there was little chance of a new one being accepted into common usage.
The captain clenched his fist around the chips and began pacing the laboratory in a characteristic demonstration of frustration. “Mister Spock, we have only scratched the surface here of one of the Federation’s longest enduring scientific mysteries. I’m not keen on the idea of abandoning it so easily.”
“Nor am I suggesting we do so, sir,” Spock assured him. “The focus of my study has been the ways that nystromite absorbs energy, and while resistant to most, there is one form of energy to which it is still susceptible.”
Kirk turned back to Spock. “What is it?”
Spock answered by holding his open palm out to Kirk. After a moment, the captain poured the small pieces from his hand into Spock’s. In turn, the science officer selected the largest of the pieces, turned, and threw it across the lab. He hit the large target sample directly, but this time sent it and its brace falling over. “Kinetic energy, sir.”
* * *
“Kinetic energy,” Pavel Chekov muttered under his breath, only just loud enough for Sulu to hear.
Sulu looked back at him and shrugged. “Hey, if it works, it works.”
“I know, but still . . .” Chekov said, and gestured to the viewscreen. “We’ve been reduced to literally throwing rocks.”
That rock—a large, common nickel-iron asteroid located among the nystromite crystals that dominated the field before them—was being directed by the Enterprise’s tractor beam off its natural path and into the thick of the field. Smaller crystals were knocked aside as it penetrated deeper, leaving a clear path behind.
“Disengage tractor,” Spock ordered.
“Tractor beam disengaged,” Chekov confirmed as he depressed the cutoff button and stifled a sigh. The science team’s research with nystromite had allowed them to make minor refinements to the sensors. The readings were still indistinct—more like sensor shadows than genuine reports of objects in space—but clear enough that Chekov could see that the cleared path was far too narrow for the Enterprise to follow. They would need to repeat this exercise with a rock as big as or bigger than the Enterprise itself, assuming an object of that mass wouldn’
t overtax and burn out the tractor beam emitters. Chekov found it hard to comprehend why Spock had even bothered with such an obviously futile effort.
“Mister Chekov,” the captain said, “arm one photon torpedo, maximum yield and dispersal pattern.”
Then, the Russian understood. “Photon torpedo ready,” he said after quickly keying in the program, and silently apologized to Spock for ever doubting him.
“Fire.”
The torpedo launched from its firing tube and followed the cleared path all the way to the surface of the asteroid, where it detonated. The resulting blast lit up the forward viewscreen, and once the computer activated the protective polarizing light filters, they were greeted by the sight of an open tunnel leading inside the Nystrom Anomaly. It seemed as if every station encircling the center well had suddenly been reactivated, as a flood of new sensor data began to stream into the computer banks to be processed and analyzed. Chekov was shocked to realize just how quiet the bridge had been until then.
“So it is an M1 subdwarf in there!” Sulu declared as he read the new information being fed to their astronavigation console, with not a small amount of pride for having predicted the star’s presence earlier.
“Indeed,” Spock confirmed from the science station. “Along with at least six planets and eight planetoids. The fourth planet may be Class-M.”
“May be, Spock?” Kirk asked.
Spock seemed to hesitate before elaborating. “It appears that the Nystrom system beyond this field is not entirely free of nystromite,” he reported. “It is in particulate form, and is having the effect of degrading our sensor resolution.”
“Would this particulate nystromite pose a danger to the ship?” Kirk asked. “Can we take the Enterprise into the system? Take a closer look at that planet?”
Star Trek: The Original Series: The Shocks of Adversity Page 2
