Still, he could do with a little ribbing. “Thanks for your confidence. We’ll contact you again in a few hours. Try not to miss us too much.”
Sulu chuckled. “We’ll do our best, sir. Enterprise out.”
“Mister Spock, are you ready to proceed?” said Kirk.
“Affirmative, Captain. Initial orbital surveys have already revealed that the planetary ruins are relatively intact. I estimate that this planet has been abandoned for a period of one hundred to one hundred and fifty years.”
The first probes of the Mu Arigulon system had shown that this planet had metal alloys and other traces of technological and industrial development—but no active energy signatures or life signs. Whoever had lived there was long gone. “Any clues as to what happened to the inhabitants?”
“I hesitate to indulge in wild speculation, Captain. I need more data before I can begin to formulate a reasonable hypothesis.”
“Of course, Mister Spock. I wouldn’t want to rush the scientific method.”
“Very admirable, Captain. I take it that you will be landing soon?”
“As long you don’t mind being left behind.”
“Sir, we did agree on this at the mission briefing. However, if you would prefer for Columbus to wait while Hofstadter makes the orbital survey, that can be arranged.”
Kirk smiled. His sense of humor was frequently lost on Spock—or so it appeared. The captain had never been able to solve the mystery of whether Spock merely pretended to misunderstand. If he did, were his retorts attempts at wit?
“Never fear, Mister Spock. I won’t disrupt your careful plan.” A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “We’ll land just as soon as you tell me where.”
“Transmitting coordinates now, Captain.”
Kirk looked at Seven Deers, who nodded. “We’ve got them, Spock. See you on the surface when you’re done up here.”
“Yes, Captain. Hofstadter out.”
“Course laid in, Ensign?”
Seven Deers checked her controls. “Aye, Captain. The landing site is outside the largest metropolitan area in the northern hemisphere.”
“Well,” said Kirk, looking around at the crew of the shuttle, “what are we waiting for? Let’s go.”
ONE
Stardate 4757.4 (0848 hours)
Two days after leaving C-15, McCoy was still restless. Together with Christine Chapel, the Enterprise’s head nurse, he was organizing the medical supplies that they’d gotten from Phi Kappa. Tedious but necessary work. They’d been at it for a while, and just as the doctor had feared, it was allowing his mind to wander.
Maybe it was time for him to move on. He’d heard that Starfleet was beginning to put together crews for the next generation of ships to succeed the Constitution class. If he managed to finagle himself onto one of their duty rosters, he’d be able to go really far out, blazing new trails in frontier medicine.
The problem was, he’d be disappointing his captain and his friend. Not only would Jim have to search for his third CMO in four years, he would take McCoy’s desertion personally. Either way, McCoy would be miserable, but it was a feeling he was already intimately accustomed to.
He and Chapel were interrupted in their work by the arrival of Lieutenant Kelowitz. He claimed to be a patient, but insisted that he would talk only to McCoy. “That’s never a good sign,” McCoy whispered to Chapel. He took the young man into his office, sitting down behind his desk while Kelowitz stood, his hands flapping around uselessly. Kelowitz was a little shorter than the doctor, and his hair a little lighter. They’d been on a couple of landing parties together, but McCoy knew virtually nothing about him apart from the fact that he was a tactical officer.
McCoy nodded toward the chair, and the other man sat down, though he still didn’t know what to do with his hands, folding and unfolding them repeatedly.
“Now, tell me what’s the matter, son.” Whatever Kelowitz might reveal, it would be hard to embarrass McCoy after twenty years of medical practice, so he used his most reassuring tone.
“Doctor, I was wondering if you could give me some advice.”
“Advice?”
“You’ve, um, helped out others before, and I was hoping you could do the same for me.”
“You’ll have to tell me what this is about first.”
Kelowitz avoided looking directly at him. “It’s personal. You see, I’ve been working with Mister DeSalle recently, and—He’s kind of—”
McCoy was beginning to get a pretty clear idea of what the young man was really here for. “Lieutenant, I’m just the ship’s doctor…”
“Um… sorry, sir. But Demick told me that Brent told her that you told him that when he—”
McCoy breathed in deeply. Clifford Brent, one of his med techs, had landed a secondary assignment on the bridge, and the doctor had given him advice on how to handle the senior staff, especially Spock. The thought that his advice was a sought-after commodity evaporated his bad mood. McCoy stood up and sat on the desk, adopting a casual air. “Okay, tell me what the problem is.”
Ten minutes later, McCoy had sent Kelowitz on his way, no longer fidgeting. Chapel gave him an amused look as he emerged from his office. “What was that about?”
McCoy shook his head. “Just a young man needing some advice.” He looked at the tray of tri-ox cartridges in front of him, waiting to be sorted, and just like that, his bad mood was back. He could use some advice.
Hoping to keep his mind from lingering on painful thoughts, he started counting off cartridges, but lost track in the low twenties. He grumbled, “Why do I have to be stuck here while Kirk and Spock are having fun? M’Benga should be here, and I should be there.”
Chapel had put up with his complaining the past few days, but this time she surprised him. “So you’ve said repeatedly, Doctor.” Her gentle tone didn’t quite cover her annoyance.
McCoy snorted and restarted his counting.
“What’s the matter, Doctor?” asked Chapel at last.
He lost track in the upper fifties this time. “Dammit, Christine! I was almost done!”
“Sorry, Doctor.” She turned her attention back to her slate.
“Nothing’s the matter.” He was unable to stop himself. “Why should something be the matter? I like counting tri-ox capsules and supervising cargo transfers and being trapped on a boring starship on a boring mission while Kirk and Spock gallivant around the galaxy.”
Chapel didn’t look up, but even so, McCoy realized that maybe he was going a little too far. His volatile nature was sometimes difficult to manage, especially when he felt he was doing work that didn’t make use of his experience. Well, Chapel had taken worse from him before; she was certainly used to his occasional dark moods.
McCoy reached for the first tri-ox capsule, to start yet again, when the deck under his feet moved abruptly and he was knocked forward. In an instant, the lights went out and all the displays shut off. His hand hit something large and flat, which shot away and crashed onto the floor—it must’ve been the tray.
“What—” Chapel began, but she cut herself off when the lights all whirred back to life. No sooner had McCoy regained his bearings than he felt the deck shift again. Nowhere near as badly as the first time, but longer. What in blazes was going on?
“I’ll check the situation monitor,” he said, heading back to his office. The deck moved underneath him yet again. The doctor almost fell, but he made it to his computer. Nothing. Even intraship was down.
He returned to Chapel, who was preparing for casualties. Their first one came in barely a minute after the mysterious incident: Jacobs, a security guard, whose limp indicated to the doctor that he’d twisted his ankle.
McCoy hated being left in the dark. With Jim in command, he was accustomed to barging up onto the bridge whether he was needed or not, but with Lieutenant Sulu?
To hell with it. “Can you handle things, Nurse?”
She already had the hobbling Jacobs on one of the beds, and she nodded a
t McCoy, who headed out. Even though she’d never admit it, Christine was probably glad to get rid of him.
When Pavel Chekov was a teenager, he had been fascinated by the massive raised highways that crisscrossed Russia. Built in the twentieth century to support wheeled vehicles, they had become redundant with the invention of the hovercar and then the transporter. Yet no one had ever torn them down, and Chekov had hiked through the reclaimed countryside on six lanes of concrete no vehicle would drive again.
It made human endeavors seem pointless. The structures had outlasted the needs they were designed to fill. He doubted the inhabitants of Mu Arigulon V had designed this complex array of metal frameworks and roadbeds to support a diverse panoply of plant life.
“What do you think this is, sir?” asked Fatih Yüksel. The Turkish exobotanist was older than Chekov by several years. Chekov felt uncomfortable giving orders to someone who’d already been in Starfleet when he was still in elementary school.
“It looks like a support structure for a launch facility,” said Chekov. He gestured back behind them as they pushed their way through the bushes. “It reminds me of the old Plesetsk Cosmodrome. I am picking up tanks that must have once held some kind of fuel or reactant.”
“No spaceships.” Yüksel was scanning the area with his tricorder. When the Columbus landing party had split up, he had requested this part of the city, pointing out that it had the highest concentration of plant life. Chekov had been assigned to go with him.
“But was there ever a spaceship?” Chekov knew that for every planet that made it into space and made contact with the interstellar community, there was another whose space program had collapsed, preventing the inhabitants from discovering warp drive. “I want to get a closer look at the launch pad. Maybe the locals left the planet.”
“Well,” Yüksel said, “what I really want to get a look at is the flora ahead.” He pointed to where the bushes gave way to thick vines descending from the gantries above.
Chekov checked his tricorder. They were supposed to stay together, but the two locations were within a kilometer of one another. If anything happened, each would be able to come to the other’s aid. “Okay,” he said. “We will split up.” As the senior officer, it was his call to make.
The botanist smiled. “Good move, sir,” he said. “We’ll have this planet surveyed in no time.”
“Good luck, Mister Yüksel.” Chekov pushed off into the bushes. When he glanced over his shoulder, he saw the petty officer vanishing into the green draping vines. Shortly, the only sign of him was the rustling noise that was slowly fading away as they parted from one another.
Petty Officer Fatih Yüksel continued to push his way through the dull green flora. Bits of machinery he couldn’t identify lay unused and rusting, covered in what seemed like a moss. Let Chekov and the others try to figure out what had happened to the inhabitants; he was interested in what had taken their place. The plants in this area would have adapted to an urban environment over the past century, and would make a remarkable study.
The complex had been open once, but was now a tangled mass of plants. Yüksel was trying to reach its center, where his tricorder indicated a tree—the largest one in this area. He wanted to take a core sample that could be analyzed, revealing past climates and possibly indicating what had caused this planet to be abandoned.
He pushed his way through an overhanging set of vines and came upon a small building in the middle of the complex, about ten meters tall and four meters wide. This structure, like all the ones they’d seen from the Columbus, possessed no flat surfaces. With its irregular but continuous walls, it looked like something that had been grown. There were no obvious windows, and no door that he could recognize. But it was inside the building that his tricorder was picking up the tree’s signature, so he began to circle it. As he reached the other side, he discovered that a wall had crumbled in.
Or rather, had crumbled out. Within the building grew an enormous tree, similar to a Terran one but a dull green. It had no leaves, but sported fat, bulging buds all over its branches. One of its branches had extended past the confines of the building, knocking out part of the wall, through which Yüksel could barely make out the trunk.
Yüksel scrambled eagerly over the bits of wall between him and the alien tree and stepped inside. Everything was bathed in a light green glow. The roof had collapsed, allowing light to stream in. He had no idea what the structure had been designed for; now it was entirely occupied by this tree, which was two meters thick and taller than the building.
Yüksel realized that its base wasn’t on this level—the floor had a hole in it, through which the tree had grown. The standard site for taking a core sample was 1.3 meters up from the base, so he would need to get down into the lower area. There was a small gap between where the floor ended, torn and crumbled, and where the trunk began, but he couldn’t see down there—too dark.
Yüksel slung his backpack off his shoulders and pulled a flashlight out, shining it into the depths of the structure. The floor, he estimated, was two meters below; he could hang off the edge and drop. Determined to get his sample, he stowed his tricorder and tossed the backpack down first, followed by the flashlight, providing him enough of a view to know where to land. He carefully dangled himself over the edge and let go.
When he hit the floor, his foot hit a piece of rock, but he quickly regained his footing. Glad that he’d made it down unhurt, he recovered the flashlight and moved its beam around the room, a basement with large semicircular shapes set into the wall. But that wasn’t what interested him. Awed by the immense sight that was the alien tree in front of him, Yüksel grabbed the sampling kit out of his pack and began to activate the core sampler. He couldn’t wait to see what the results were. Preliminary meteorological analysis by Lieutenant Jaeger on the Hofstadter indicated a recent period of global warming, and that—
A scraping noise from behind Yüksel disrupted his concentration. What was that? An ancient piece of machinery coming to life?
He turned around, casting his flashlight in the direction of the sound. Nothing. What could have caused the noise?
He had heard something.
Yüksel dropped the sampling kit and unslung his tricorder. He continued to shine his light all across the room, but what had moments ago seemed mysterious and exciting was now gloomy and foreboding. Strange shadows crisscrossed his vision.
Something scraped again, behind him. Lanet olsun! He’d better call Chekov.
His hand reached for his communicator. Before he could activate it, there was a loud snap, and then something thick and flexible hit him in the back, like a giant whip.
It threw him off balance. Yüksel landed on his hands and knees, dropping his flashlight. He had no time to get up. Out of nowhere, a weight pressed down on his back. As its pressure increased, Yüksel was forced to take in smaller and smaller breaths. In moments, he was pinned to the floor.
The beam of his flashlight hit the wall, now useless.
McCoy had always been impressed by how calm the Enterprise’s bridge was, even in a crisis situation. When you had Jim Kirk in the command chair, with his nerves of steel, and Spock at his side, steady as a rock, there seemed to be no better choice than to follow their example.
This morning, the bridge was filled with chatter, with subdued conversations. Sulu was at the helm controls; a young woman in a command uniform, Lieutenant Rahda, was standing next to him. Crew members at the upper stations looked a little frantic. Sulu carefully adjusted controls on the console, trading information with Farrell at navigation. The ship rumbled again as they worked, causing Sulu to run his fingers over the controls.
McCoy stepped over to Lieutenant Uhura at communications. She was listening to reports on her earpiece and manipulating her own panel. Intraship was back up again, evidently. “Copy that, damage control. I’ll relay that information to Lieutenant Sulu.” She looked up as McCoy approached her and smiled, but didn’t say anything as she continued to handle
all the requests coming through her board. “You’d better send that on to physics section, they’ll know what to do with it.”
He watched her work for a few more moments, then she pulled her earpiece out. “Hello, Doctor,” she said.
A number of message lights were still blinking. “Don’t you need to answer those?” McCoy asked.
“Part of being a good communications officer is knowing when not to answer,” she said, gesturing at the few lights that were still on, all of them amber. “I handled everything important. Those are low-priority.”
He smiled. “What’s the situation up here? We didn’t hear anything down in sickbay.”
“We’ve encountered a spatial distortion,” replied Uhura. “‘Run aground’ is what Lieutenant Rodriguez said. Subspace is too rough and unstable here for the ship to move through.”
McCoy spared a glance at the science station, where Rodriguez was writing notes on a data slate as he peered into the scope. “What about the shuttles?” he asked. “They didn’t hit this, did they?”
Uhura shook her head. “The captain reported that they reached Mu Arigulon early this morning with no problem.”
“Yet two days away, and we hit… something.” McCoy gestured vaguely toward the viewscreen, though this section of space looked no different than any other. The deck vibrated beneath him, but this time the sensation was barely noticeable.
“Gotcha!” Sulu’s triumphant cry drew McCoy’s eye back to the helm console, where the lieutenant was standing up. “She’s all yours, Lieutenant Rahda.”
The woman obligingly took her seat back. “All systems normal,” she reported. “We are maintaining position, one-point-oh-five light-years away from Mu Arigulon.”
“Situation report,” ordered Sulu as he settled back into the command chair, turning to face Rodriguez.
The lieutenant picked up his slate, peering at his notes. “The ship hit a spatial distortion,” he said. “A bump in space-time. It’s not been previously charted in this sector.”
“How large?” asked Sulu.
Star Trek®: A Choice of Catastrophes Page 2
