Andos never had to consider her decisions for long; both her centuries of experience and her Rhaandarite mental acuity enabled her to weigh all the variables with a swiftness Lucsly admired. To the Rhaandarite mindset, the rules of the universe were clearly laid out, and decision-making was simply a matter of determining and following those rules. Lucsly strove to lead his life by the same principle, but the universe he perceived had a way of being more chaotic than he wished. Andos’s clarity reassured him that there was a deeper order after all, even if it was hidden from limited human minds. “Then you must go at once, as soon as I arrange transportation with Starfleet. You as well, Agents,” the director added, her gaze taking in Lucsly and Dulmur. “All respect to Agents Ranjea and Garcia, but we need as much expertise on the scene as we can bring to bear.”
“You are absolutely correct, Director,” said T’Viss. “I am confident that this crisis is even worse than we are currently aware.”
U.S.S. Capitoline NCC-82617
Stardate 60145.7
The Capitoline was one of Starfleet’s precious few slipstream-drive ships, enabling them to reach the Lembatta Cluster in mere hours. By the time T’Viss completed her meditation, two hours and six minutes into the voyage, they were already past Davlos and skirting the Klingon border—something which was far safer to do now, in the age of the Khitomer Alliance, than it would have been in the era of Grey, Delgado, and Kirk.
But politics was irrelevant, Lucsly reminded himself as he and Dulmur sat down with T’Viss in the Vesta-class starship’s most secure briefing room. If they didn’t shut down the confluence quickly, all the history that had led to the current era of relative peace could be nullified and replaced with something impossible to predict. Probably something worse, he added, convinced that going against the natural flow of history never turned out for the better. Well, almost never, he grudgingly admitted. There were a few rare exceptions . . . but Lucsly was positive this was not one of them. He knew from certain sources that a major disruption of the past century’s worth of history could have a devastating impact on the galaxy for many centuries to come.
So he was eager to learn what T’Viss had to tell him. The physicist appeared fatigued, drawn, almost alarmed—the opposite of what he would expect in the wake of meditation. “I have released the block,” she announced. “I am still assimilating the memories . . . but I believe it will help me to do so if I present them in a narrative fashion.”
Dulmur leaned forward. “So you knew about the second timeship? Do you know who made it? Where they got that alien drive?”
He fell silent under T’Viss’s withering glare. “It is generally the nature of a narrative, Agent, that it progresses linearly. I must work through this from the beginning—the earliest point of the repressed memories.”
Dulmur leaned back, chastened. Lucsly simply put on his interviewer face and said, “All right. We’re listening. Where does the story begin?”
The elderly physicist met his gaze intently. “Unsurprisingly, Agent Lucsly, it begins with the U.S.S. Enterprise. With Captain James T. Kirk . . . whose litany of temporal violations must now be increased to eighteen.”
VIII
U.S.S. Enterprise
Stardate 7583.5
June 2274
Lieutenant Commander Hikaru Sulu stood at the bridge railing behind Captain Kirk’s right shoulder, trying to look like he belonged there. Or at least trying not to glance around for a more comfortable place to be.
At the helm station that was normally his, Ensign Monique Ledoux looked over her shoulder. “Five minutes to coordinates, Captain,” the tall Congolese woman said.
“Acknowledged,” Kirk replied from the center seat. He glanced over his own shoulder at Sulu, who nodded and raised his wrist communicator.
“Bridge to sensor crews,” Sulu instructed. “Begin ongoing scans on all subspace and gravimetric bands. Be ready for anything.” He hoped he didn’t sound nervous. It had been a while since he’d felt so uneasy about filling the role of acting first officer. But then, it had been fairly light duty until now. Since the refitted Enterprise had been launched in haste during the V’Ger incident late last year, the shakedown and testing process of the new design had been largely skipped over. Kirk, who had convinced Admiral Nogura to give him back his captaincy for the emergency, had subsequently made the impromptu decision to take the ship out on a “working shakedown,” testing its systems in normal field use—and given that he and his crew (most notably Willard Decker, who had nobly sacrificed himself at the critical moment) had just saved the entire population of Earth from being digitized by a prodigal space probe with delusions of grandeur, Starfleet Command wasn’t about to tell him he couldn’t. But after six months in service, Kirk had finally given in to the pleas of Starfleet’s engineering corps to bring the ship in for propulsion tests and systems analyses, assessing the long-term performance of the prototype technologies that were soon to be installed throughout the fleet. It had been easy duty for everyone but the engineers, and Commander Spock—who had given up his Kolinahr training and returned to service during the V’Ger incident—had taken advantage of the lull to join a rescue expedition that recovered a group of Vulcan refugees from a world on the Romulan border. Apparently Spock had become rather attached to one of the rescued children, for he had extended his leave of absence in order to tutor her.
As it happened, Sulu had been promoted to second officer just a few months earlier, once he’d decided to commit in earnest to the command track he’d only tentatively pursued before. He’d still been settling into that role, so having the responsibilities of a first officer suddenly thrust upon him had been a challenge. But things had been quiet enough during the system tests, and the Enterprise’s missions since had been fairly routine—colony supply runs, ferrying diplomats, and the like. It seemed that Starfleet wanted to show off its shiny new Enterprise around the Federation, now that it had passed its exams with flying colors. So the first three months of Sulu’s tenure as acting first officer had been a relatively easy introduction to the post. The most excitement he’d had in the past month had been reading Crewman Spring Rain on Still Water’s oceanographic reports from the Enterprise’s recent follow-up visit to the water world Argo, to verify the continued stability of the planet’s newly un-sunken continent and to provide resources and rebuilding assistance to the native Aquans who had reoccupied its main city four years ago. Spring Rain was a Megarite who had a distinctive, poetic way of communicating, as well as a love of water that was rarely satisfied aboard a starship but was fulfilled in spades down on Argo. The combination made for some of the most lyrical scientific reports he’d ever read.
But then Admiral Delgado’s orders had come in and Sulu had realized things were about to get complicated. The admiral had weathered the political storm over the collapse of his prototype timeship project, holding on to his leadership of Starfleet Science Ops by refocusing his efforts away from temporal research. But Delgado’s orders—and the presence of the DTI scientist T’Viss, who stood to Sulu’s left, hovering over Petty Officer Uuvu’it at the science station—showed that the admiral hadn’t entirely given up his old tricks.
At the helm, Ledoux counted down the seconds to warp egress, then brought the ship down to impulse, using the automatic course preset controls rather than the manual override lever Sulu favored—but that wasn’t Sulu’s place to judge at the moment, he reminded himself. On the main viewer, the prismatic flow of warped starlight dissipated in a burst of light, revealing the glow of a G5 star, and in the foreground the dim, small circle of their destination. Ledoux reached over to the main viewer controls to magnify the image. She’d brought the ship out farther from orbital distance than Sulu would have—again, not his place to criticize.
Sulu had been on leave the last time the Enterprise had been to this star system, but he knew the planetoid on the viewscreen had not been there at the time. Once he’d returned to the ship and been regaled by John Farrell and Janice Ra
nd about the exact duplicate of Earth they’d discovered here, he’d assumed they were joking until he’d reviewed the log tapes and read the science team’s reports about the bizarre subspace anomaly that had pulled the Earth of a parallel reality into this one. He knew now that in the years since, Science Ops and the DTI had been monitoring that anomaly—a subspace confluence, as T’Viss called it—and judged it unstable. Now the Onlies’ Earth, as it was known, had finally disappeared, presumably sucked back to whence it came. Luckily, all the feral, near-immortal children had long since been evacuated and cured of the disease that would have killed them upon their long-deferred puberty, though at the cost of reducing their life expectancies to normal. And there had been enough warning of the impending confluence breakdown (or whatever) for the Federation researchers who remained on the planet to get away in time, though it had been a hasty evacuation.
But when the Onlies’ Earth had vanished, something else had appeared in its place. Something at once unexpected and strikingly familiar. Something Delgado and the DTI had both insisted the Enterprise investigate posthaste—and if they were on the same page again, that meant it must be big.
“Scanning,” said Hrrii’ush Uuvu’it through the voder/translator that interpreted his high, chirping voice. The science officer was a Betelgeusian—tall, hairless, blue-gray, with pointed ears and a brownish triangular muzzle containing a beaklike speaking mouth above a fierce-looking eating mouth. Normally the bridge science station was not a posting for enlisted crew, but Uuvu’it was smart and driven, having swiftly worked his way up from crewman to petty officer, and he and Sulu had a good working relationship. Uuvu’it came from a predatory breed that relished competition, and he saw his scientific studies as a hunt for knowledge, chasing down answers and tearing them from the universe’s throat. “Aha!” he crowed after a moment. “Confirming, Captain. The planetoid’s atmosphere, surface spectra, and internal mass distribution are consistent with that of a Vedala planetoid! However, the atmosphere is tenuous, dissipating. No auroral illumination layer. Oceans receding. Surface vegetation is scant.” Sulu could see that as Ledoux brought the ship into orbit and the sunlit side began to appear on the viewscreen. He’d seen a Vedala planetoid once before—making him one of the few humans who could say that, for there were only a few in known space and their inhabitants were notoriously reclusive—and it had been a beautiful worldlet covered in oceans and exotically colored vegetation, wreathed in an aura of blue light from the atmosphere layer that illuminated the sunless world. This one was mostly brown and red, covered in desert and dried ocean beds, with only small patches of liquid water and live vegetation remaining. Only the nearby star illuminated it. It reminded Sulu of the halfterraformed Mars, only in reverse. The immensely powerful artificial gravity generators and force fields that the Vedala used to hold in their worldlets’ atmosphere and moisture must have failed long ago on this one.
“Life readings?” Sulu asked.
Uuvu’it turned to the life-forms detector panel in the retractable auxiliary console to his left, next to where Sulu stood. He raised the fine-tuning rod and played it like an instrument, refining the sensor scans with delicate motions of his talonlike fingers. But his body language had the intensity of a cat preparing to pounce on its prey. If there was any higher life hiding down there, Uuvu’it was determined to hunt it down. Finally, he let out a whistling sigh of defeat. “Nothing, sir. No Vedala, that’s for sure.”
“Are there any energy signatures consistent with technological devices?” T’Viss asked him.
“Some faint infrared hot spots beneath the surface, nothing more. Ooh, this is interesting . . . they line up with gaps in the neutrino background. Something down there is dense enough or exotic enough to absorb a fair number of neutrinos.”
T’Viss turned to the center of the bridge. “Captain, I suggest sending landing parties to those sites.”
Kirk rotated his chair to face her. “I’m still uneasy with that suggestion, Doctor. The Vedala are a powerful race. I’d rather not offend them.”
“Attempts have been made to contact them about this planetoid’s return to our local continuum, but they have taken no action. If they have abandoned it, then we are entitled to investigate it.”
“The Vedala are not the most communicative race in the galaxy. Just because they haven’t answered our hails doesn’t mean they’ve abandoned this asteroid. They could be on their way to claim it even now.”
“As could the Klingons or Romulans, Captain—neither of which would show your regard for other beings’ property. If there are temporal or transdimensional technologies down there . . .”
“Understood,” Kirk said. “We have to keep them out of enemy hands, if nothing else. I still don’t like it.”
Rather than lifting an eyebrow as Spock would, T’Viss merely narrowed her gaze. “Your personal gratification is hardly relevant.”
Once T’Viss turned back to the science station, Kirk threw a wry look at Sulu, who could only shrug. He and the captain both understood what was at stake here, even if Sulu’s understanding was secondhand. On that first visit to a Vedala planetoid, occasioned by the Vedala’s summons of Kirk and Spock to address a reputed threat to galactic safety, the two officers had beamed down with the expectation of facing great peril, with Kirk leaving orders for Mister Scott in the event of their non-survival. That was the way it was with the Vedala; they were the oldest spacefaring race still known to be active, wandering the galaxy in their terraformed planetoids since the time of the Neanderthals, and the spacers’ tales handed down from civilization to civilization universally agreed that if the fabled Vedala deigned to summon aid from other races, the dangers their champions faced would be epic indeed. And yet Kirk and Spock had returned within two minutes, saying only that the Vedala had “changed their minds.” Sulu had suspected there was more to the story than met the eye, but the captain and Spock would say nothing more.
But now that Sulu was acting first officer, Kirk had filled him in for the purposes of this mission. At the Vedala’s request, Kirk still couldn’t reveal what had happened on their planetoid; indeed, they had somehow affected his mind so that his memory of the specifics had faded. But he had remembered one thing he deemed important enough to report to Starfleet Command: those two minutes from Sulu’s perspective on the Enterprise had been nearly two days for Kirk and Spock. The Vedala had long been rumored to have the ability to manipulate time as well as space, and this seemed to confirm it. That was why T’Viss was here now on behalf of the DTI: if the Vedala could manipulate time, then there could be devices down on that planetoid—devices now abandoned and free for the taking—which could place the timeline in jeopardy. Thus, they had to be identified and secured at all costs, before the news of a derelict Vedala worldship triggered an interstellar feeding frenzy.
Still, Kirk had confided in Sulu that he was uncertain about Admiral Delgado’s motivations in this. It was unlikely to be a coincidence that a Vedala planetoid had materialized at the heart of the subspace confluence effect. Those worldlets generally tended to drift in the spaces between stars or take up temporary orbits in otherwise empty systems, but they were occasionally known to vanish from one location and reappear in another with no indication of the intervening passage. Either they could move very fast or they could somehow jump across great distances. The confluence event suggested they could travel between timelines as well, or perhaps between times. Was it possible that Delgado was still looking for a way to achieve time travel? Had the DTI sent its representative here to secure the technology against the admiral as well as the Klingons and Romulans? And if so, Sulu wondered, which side should the Enterprise be on?
At the science station, Uuvu’it tensed. “I’m picking up something more now, Captain,” he said. “It was hidden around the curve of the planetoid. Trace subspace energy emissions coming from one of those neutrino voids.”
T’Viss studied the spectrum readouts in the radiometrics display above the science co
nsole. Sulu leaned forward to examine them as well, drawing on his astrophysics training. The rounded viewer to the left of the display showed a graphic of the planetoid with the neutrino voids plotted, forming a regular array. “Those subspace emissions look . . . erratic,” Sulu observed. “Like whatever’s generating them is malfunctioning.”
“A premature assessment,” T’Viss declared. “There may be some underlying periodicity we have not yet discerned. Perhaps we are not receiving the full emission pattern. If the generating structure has components which block neutrinos, they may also be blocking portions of the energy pattern. I suggest a deeper subspace scan.”
Uuvu’it gave a look to Sulu, who nodded and turned to Kirk. “Seems reasonable.”
“Proceed,” the captain said.
The Betelgeusian worked the wave analyzer controls with his right hand while using the other to program the library computer for in-depth analysis and comparison with known energy patterns. The power level gauges crept upward as the scans intensified. “Come on,” Uuvu’it murmured. “You can’t hide forever. Come out and let me play with your nice, juicy secrets.” Sulu chuckled at T’Viss’s scandalized expression. “There!” he crowed as the radiometric display lit up with more spectral data. “It’s coming in . . . oh. No, that’s not what I had in mind.”
“Mister Uuvu’it?” Kirk asked, rising from his command chair and standing against the rail that separated it from the science station.
“We’re not reading deeper, they’re giving off more energy. Look, the thermal output has increased on the site we’re scanning. And others around it. The subspace energy readings are surging as well.”
“Surging?” Kirk asked. “That doesn’t sound good.”
“Ah, then I chose the right word.”
Kirk and Sulu traded an alarmed look. This was technology powerful enough to move a dwarf planet, possibly even between realities. Not something you wanted to mess with. “Halt scans,” Kirk said. “Ledoux, take us out to a safe distance.”
Star Trek: DTI: Forgotten History Page 15
