Rodriguez tapped on the slate nervously. “I’m not sure. I don’t detect anything other than what we just cleared—but then, we didn’t detect the distortion until we hit it. It’s very subtle.”
“It didn’t feel very subtle to me,” McCoy muttered to Uhura.
“Warp six was probably too fast under the circumstances,” said Sulu. He turned his chair to face Uhura. “Lieutenant?”
“Intraship’s functioning again, sir. Some static on the subspace channels, but that’s normal for this sector,” she said.
“Send a transmission to the shuttles, reporting what’s happened here. Advise that we are continuing toward Mu Ari at a reduced rate.” Uhura nodded and placed her earpiece back in position. Sulu turned his attention to McCoy for the first time. “Crew status, Doctor?”
“No casualties apart from a sprained ankle,” McCoy replied. “This ship’s had rougher rides.”
“That’s for sure,” said Sulu, turning to face the officer at the engineering subsystems station. His baby face made him look like he was fresh out of the Academy. “Damage report, Ensign Harper?”
“Nothing substantial,” the young man said. “There was that shipwide power outage when we first hit the distortion. Lieutenant DeSalle is investigating it right now. Other than that, all systems are now normal.”
Sulu nodded and turned back to face the viewscreen. “What speed would you recommend, Rodriguez?”
The science officer scribbled some calculations on his slate and checked the scope. “Warp four.”
Leaning forward, Sulu clapped his hands together. “Lay in a course for Mu Arigulon at warp four, Lieutenant Farrell.”
The navigator did as ordered. “ETA is five days, twenty-three hours, sir.”
“Take us forward, Lieutenant Rahda,” Sulu said. “Slow acceleration.”
As the ship began to hum with the power of the warp engines, McCoy moved forward to place his hands on the railing that circled the center of the bridge, leaning down over the command chair. “Listen,” he began, “are we going to… ‘run aground’ again?”
Sulu looked up and smiled. “Relax, Doctor. Everything should be fine. We’ll see it coming this time.” He seemed at ease, but McCoy didn’t buy his casual attitude. The helmsman had to be anxious about being in command of over four hundred people.
“Current speed?” Sulu asked.
“Warp three-point-five,” Rahda replied, her hand slowly pushing forward the speed control. “Everything—”
This time, as every light shut off, McCoy swore that he didn’t just feel the deck buckle, he felt it ripple, throwing him forward. He gripped the railing as hard as he could, keeping himself on his feet—but then a second ripple threw him backwards.
The doctor reeled and hit the communications console with his hip, only narrowly avoiding Uhura. He heard her cry out as she fell off her chair. McCoy reached out with his hand, hoping to catch her and help her back up.
Everything was suddenly dipped in blood red as the emergency lights came on. McCoy had always thought that color choice was unfortunate, but right now he didn’t give a damn. Now he could see. As he guided Uhura back to her seat, everything tilted sideways, sending both of them flying to port as they futilely held on to each other for support.
“Stabilize!” Sulu shouted.
“Working on it!” came Rahda’s voice at the exact same time that Farrell shouted, “Aye, sir!”
McCoy’s feet scrambled for purchase on the deck, and he almost had it—was almost safe—when the bridge recoiled, tilting the other way, knocking him straight onto the floor. Uhura managed to stumble back into her chair and grip her console.
The main lights switched on, and McCoy squinted until his eyes adjusted. Gravity was back to normal, as were the inertial dampers. The deck had stopped lurching. Most of the crew were resuming their positions, except for the young yeoman forward of Rodriguez. She’d somehow ended up clear on the opposite side of the bridge, clutching an unoccupied port station.
“That spatial distortion of yours has a helluva kick.” McCoy had trouble suppressing a pained groan. Damn, that had not been good for his back. He had to use the railing to pull himself up. “I don’t—”
“Doctor McCoy,” Uhura interrupted him, “sickbay is signaling. Nurse Chapel needs your assistance.”
“Tell her I’ll be right down.” He nodded at Sulu, but the lieutenant was only paying attention to Rodriguez, who was explaining something about spatial physics.
McCoy sprinted for the turbolift. In a crisis situation he knew where his place was. His patients came first.
As Montgomery Scott put on his silver EV suit, he remembered all the memos he’d sent to the quartermaster pointing out that if the things weren’t so damn uncomfortable, people wouldn’t complain so much about extravehicular work. He’d never received a reply.
This excursion had been his idea, and his alone. Nevertheless, that didn’t keep him from muttering under his breath while checking all the seals on the suit.
“Thanks, Doctor,” Scotty said as Doctor M’Benga handed him the large helmet he’d just pulled out of the storage unit of the shuttlecraft Hofstadter. The physician had made himself useful by helping Scotty get ready for the work awaiting him outside.
Scotty checked the shuttle’s force field. With the hatch open, the thin energy barrier would be the only thing keeping the air in. The force field was fully operational. Scotty fidgeted with his suit’s controls as the shuttle pulled closer to the satellite, checking the tether line.
He glanced over at Petty Officer Cron Emalra’ehn, the Deltan security guard who’d volunteered to go with him. Scotty was, quite frankly, gobsmacked by the man’s decision. “Are you sure you want to do this, laddie?”
“I like to get away from it all,” Emalra’ehn said. “Too much stuff in here, if you know what I mean.”
Scotty didn’t see how anyone could think that a G-class shuttle had too much stuff in it. On the other hand, he could understand wanting to get outside after four days of low-warp travel. “We’re almost there.” Scotty looked up toward the controls of the Hofstadter, where Spock was making final adjustments to the shuttle’s course. “Right, Mister Spock?”
“Correct.” Spock looked backward just for a moment. “I suggest you put your helmets on.”
Scotty lifted the bulky thing up over his head, and M’Benga helped him activate the seals. Everything checked out: he was ready to go.
Ready, yes, but not overly enthusiastic.
While this had been his idea, Scott found he didn’t want to go through with it. The actual step through the force field into free fall took a lot of gumption. He’d never been one for extreme sports like orbital skydiving.
Ah, sod it, he thought. There was no time to whine now.
“Velocity matched.” Spock’s voice sounded through the suit’s comm. “Ready?”
“Aye, sir.” Scotty nodded and tugged on the cable from his waist to the anchor point by the hatch. Emalra’ehn did the same.
“Opening hatch.”
The door swung up in front of the two men, revealing the expanse of stars—plus a small metal object only a few meters away. It was a satellite built by the missing inhabitants of Mu Arigulon V, one of a thousand orbiting the planet but no longer active. Antennas projected from the side of the sat, which was a cylinder a meter and a half tall and less than half a meter wide. A misshapen dish sat on top.
“Lieutenant Kologwe, please monitor their activity,” ordered Spock. The security officer, sitting in the seat nearest the door, turned on a tricorder.
“Time to go.” Scotty stepped forward, the atmospheric shield fizzling around him.
Simply being in zero gravity was always disorienting, but stepping into it was even more so. One second, Scotty was in a world with up, down, left, right; the next, there was nothing but the limited confines of his own suit. He was drifting slowly forward, carried by the momentum of his step over the shuttle’s threshold. Glancing to his right, he made out Emal
ra’ehn behind him.
The sat appeared motionless. However, Scotty knew that both the little metal ball and the shuttle were moving at 15,000 kilometers per hour relative to the planet, but with their velocities matched, it seemed like neither was moving.
Scott understood the mechanics of low gravity perfectly from a mathematical standpoint, but his stomach never had. While Spock and other scientists worked on the orbital survey, Scott wanted to study the alien satellites. However, Spock had not wanted to spare the shuttle’s limited sensor time to analyze them in detail. Scotty’s idea of bringing one on board so he could study it had been deemed an “adequate” solution. Effusive praise from the Vulcan science officer.
Scotty tapped some controls on his suit, causing its tiny thrusters to fire. Soon he was close enough to the satellite to touch it. Its purple metal surface was pitted by over a century of micrometeorite impacts but otherwise intact. Emalra’ehn had moved to the opposite side, all the while making sure that the tether didn’t get caught on one of the antenna spikes. After Scotty made a quick scan to verify that the satellite was inert, they moved to grab hold of it.
“Got it?” asked Scotty, keeping his eyes on the satellite to avoid vertigo.
Emalra’ehn, on the other hand, was glancing in every direction. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Pity to go back inside already. It’s nice to get out.”
Scotty raised an eyebrow. “Lieutenant Kologwe, bring us in.”
“Aye, Commander,” came her voice over the comm. The cables on Scotty and Emalra’ehn’s suits began to retract, reeling them over to the shuttle. Scotty let his eyes wander over the satellite, wondering what lay beneath its surface. Was it for communications? Scanning? Mapping? Or something more malevolent? Many early-spaceflight civilizations used satellites for housing rudimentary nuclear weapons.
Ah, well. He’d have enough time to speculate later. Taking great care not to lose himself in the infinity of space, he directed his gaze toward the small gray-green orb some Berengarian astronomer had christened “Mu Arigulon V.”
As they came within a meter of the shuttle, the comm came on again. “Stopping the cable.”
Scotty turned toward Emalra’ehn, but he moved his head too quickly. The stars began to spin. Cursing himself, he quickly focused on the satellite. “Fire your thrusters,” he said. They needed to slow the sat down.
Scotty and Emalra’ehn activated their thrusters at the same time, reducing their speed to a gentle drift just as they came within a meter of the hatch. Scotty steeled himself—as disorienting as it was to go from one g to zero g, the opposite was worse. Scott positioned his feet a few centimeters above the deck just before he felt the crackle of the atmospheric force field.
The sudden weight of the satellite caught him by surprise, and he almost lost his grip, but Kologwe was waiting to brace it from inside the shuttle. Emalra’ehn was fine, of course.
The three of them moved the satellite to the back of the shuttle as Doctor M’Benga resealed the door. The two scientists—Jaeger from geophysics and Saloniemi from archaeology and anthropology—looked up from their tricorders, but not for long. They had data from the sensor sweep to occupy their attention.
Scotty pulled off his helmet and slung it onto the deck of the shuttle. “Well, that was exciting.”
Emalra’ehn shrugged. “I’ve had better.”
As Scotty took off his suit, he gave silent thanks that he’d put yet another EVA behind him. Above all, the thing Scotty didn’t like about spacewalking was that it made him realize how small he was compared to the rest of the universe. It made him feel unimportant and useless. Unsettling, that.
Well, there was one good way to combat that feeling. Scott smiled at the thought of studying this piece of alien tech. The sooner he could figure out what this satellite was for, the better.
Lieutenant Commander Salvatore Giotto had to admit he’d been on more challenging missions. He wasn’t bored—and even if he had been, he would have had no right to complain, considering that he’d volunteered—but from a purely professional point of view, Mu Arigulon V was rapidly shaping up to be what security officers called a “haunted planet.”
Haunted planets had one big danger: the lack of excitement led you to become complacent and inattentive. As a junior officer on the Lantree, he had participated in a similar survey, only to be caught unawares by local predators that had gravely injured Captain Gees. With twenty additional years of experience, Giotto felt he was the perfect man to look after James Kirk. The captain could be a challenge. At least on this dirtball there was little chance of him getting into a fight with local aliens—if the scientists’ readings could be believed.
It paid to be wary of first results, another lesson bitterly learned. More than once, Giotto had witnessed how quickly a boring mission could turn into a deadly trap with little hope of escape. For a long time he’d kept the scars on his back to remind him of this, but he’d eventually realized how foolish it was and gotten rid of them.
The Columbus team was exploring the northeastern edge of a once-thriving metropolis. They’d split up—Giotto was with the captain and Ensign Seven Deers. He liked the engineer; nearly as old as Giotto, Seven Deers had raised two kids, making her more practical as well as more taciturn than other crew members.
He squinted in the bright light of the midday sun. The captain was picking out a path through the city, trying to take in as much of it as he could, occasionally asking Seven Deers what she thought the purpose of different structures might be. Giotto would have preferred point, but Captain Kirk would never allow it, so he followed behind, keeping his eyes open to assess where danger might arise.
Toothpick-like towers, barely wider than the Columbus was long, pierced the sky, their tops disappearing in the clouds. Ahead, the thin towers gave way to a squat building, round in general shape, but with many bulges on its outside, like a fat, warty toad. The road system was obviously designed around this mound.
“Ensign,” Captain Kirk began, “do you have any idea what those bulges are?”
Seven Deers looked up from her tricorder. “Dense machinery of some kind, Captain, but I can’t make out what. I’d like to get closer.”
“To do that,” Kirk said with a grin, “we’re going to have to figure out how to open the doors.”
Several large semicircles a little taller than Giotto were set into the ground floor of each building, but the landing party had yet to identify a way to open them. Without even knowing what these aliens had looked like, they couldn’t know how they opened their doors. The thing Giotto didn’t like about new species was that you had no idea how they thought, and if you didn’t know how they thought, you couldn’t anticipate what they were going to do.
“I have—” Seven Deers began to speak, but she was cut off by the chirp of their communicators.
They all reached for the devices, but Kirk had his out first, flipping its antenna grid up. “Kirk here.”
“Captain, there’s somethi—” Yüksel’s voice rang out, but something cut off the end of the transmission. All Giotto could discern was rising panic.
“Yüksel!” Kirk barked into the device. “Where are you? What’s happening?”
“—eneath the surfa—”
They waited expectantly for the signal to kick back in, but after a couple seconds, there was nothing but hissing static. Kirk looked to Giotto.
“He was with Ensign Chekov,” Giotto said, “in the northwest quadrant, sir.”
“Let’s go,” Kirk said, and immediately began moving at a quick jog, taking point. “Commander, keep trying to contact him.”
Giotto had already taken the rear and drawn his phaser; he flipped open his communicator. “Yüksel, do you read me?” he called. “Yüksel!” There was only static.
Kirk was continuing to give orders. “Get a fix on that signal, Ensign!” he called to Seven Deers, who was between the two men. “I want to know exactly where he is.” He held his communicator up again. “Kirk to Chekov.”<
br />
A moment passed while Giotto considered what could have happened to the exobotanist. On this planet for only four hours and already—
“Chekov here, sir.”
“Ensign, where’s your teammate?”
“He was off looking at some plant life, sir.”
“You split up?” Kirk sounded incredulous.
Giotto’s anger was rising. What had they been thinking? You could expect a bit of airheadedness from a scientist like Yüksel, but not from an officer like Chekov. He continued to call for the specialist into his communicator.
“Did you get that transmission?” Kirk was asking. “He was obviously hit by something.”
“Yes, sir.” There was a small pause. “We thought it made sense to cover a greater area. We were exploring a launching complex of some kind. I will meet you where we split up, sir.”
“You do that, Mister Chekov,” Kirk said, snapping his communicator shut. He fell back to draw even with Giotto. “Commander, contact Rawlins and Tra. Make sure they’re safe.”
Giotto switched channels. “Aye, sir.” Kirk sped up to exchange some words with Seven Deers about tracking Yüksel’s signal as Giotto made contact. “Giotto to Tra.”
There were a few moments of silence. “Tra here.” The security guard sounded fine.
“Crewman, did you receive Yüksel’s signal?”
“Yes, Commander. Rawlins and I are fine; we’re looking at what we think is graffiti.”
“What’s your location?”
“We’re in the southeast quadrant of the city. There are a lot of small buildings.”
“We’re converging in the northwest area to look for him. I’ll send you the coordinates. Keep your eyes open.” They didn’t need more people to go missing.
“Always do, sir. Tra out.”
Giotto slipped the communicator back onto his belt. Tra would keep Rawlins safe.
“How are they, Commander?” Kirk yelled over his shoulder, having taken point again.
“They’re fine, sir.”
“Good.”
In his early days on the Enterprise, Giotto had had great difficulty getting used to Kirk’s command style. It was nothing like how things had been done on the Lantree. Captain Gees had always brought his security chief with him on landing parties, and when there had been fighting to do, Giotto or Commander Mauracher, the executive officer, had handled it.
Star Trek®: A Choice of Catastrophes Page 3
