The Face of the Unknown

by Christopher L. Bennett

  “Scotty, I know you’ll rise to the occasion. We have to try.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  After another few moments, Spock announced, “Calculations complete. Sending now.”

  “Received,” Lekur’s aide said a moment later. “We verify. Ready for interface.”

  “Now, Mister Scott,” Kirk said.

  “Hold on to something,” Scott warned. “Here we go—mark!”

  Kirk felt his weight fluctuate for several seconds, then it stabilized again. “Interface established,” Spock reported. “Power transfer under way.”

  “Antigrav power increasing,” the aide announced.

  “Compensating for fluctuations . . . holding steady . . .”

  “See?” Bailey said. “I told you it’d work.”

  Then an alarm went off. “Instabilities accelerating,” Spock announced.

  “Scotty, more power!” Kirk called.

  “No!” cried Lekur. “Captain, the added power is intensifying the instabilities! Your systems’ phase isn’t matching with ours, it’s going out of sync!”

  But it was too late. An alarm sounded as the world module suddenly heaved. The Enterprise, gravitationally bound to it, shuddered in resonance. “Captain, two more antigrav units have blown out!” Spock called. “The module is tilting again.”

  * * *

  Sulu and Chekov had reached the second disk from the bottom when the world tilted around them and the groaning of the tower increased sharply in pitch and volume. “Everybody move!” Sulu cried, and all pretense of an orderly evacuation was abandoned. He and Chekov hurried the evacuees down the increasing slope of the floor toward the center shaft as fast as they could in this gravity, taking the rear themselves. The floor continued to shudder beneath Sulu’s feet. Each time it sank a little more, he was convinced it would be the last time. He only prayed these were the last people in the disk.

  Once he and Chekov reached the center shaft, the ceiling above them had already cracked open as the raised half-disk began to tear free. He and Chekov dodged falling debris as the floor sank faster, the spry ensign outpacing Sulu. Hikaru saw the floor in front of him beginning to crack and put on a final burst of speed to catch up with Chekov, who’d just crossed over in time. He made a running leap just as the floor gave way. He fell short, his midsection colliding with the edge, and scrambled for purchase as he slid back. Chekov dove forward and caught him by the upper arms, straining against Sulu’s twice-normal weight.

  But then the building lurched and sent them both toward the edge. Sulu looked down. Beyond his dangling feet, the broken disk segment had crashed into the bottom­most disk below it and caused it to begin giving way as well. The noise was deafening, and a cloud of choking dust rose to obscure Sulu’s vision as his feet flailed for purchase.

  Then something pulled Chekov back, lifting Sulu along with him. When the dust cleared, he saw they owed their rescue to a Bogosrin female, one of the largest sentient beings Sulu had ever seen. Lifting them both had been easy for the giant bearlike alien, who set them down on her broad back. “Hold on,” she rumbled as she began loping forward quadrupedally. Sulu clung to her clothing for dear life.

  Luckily the Fiilestii built big to accommodate their wings, so the Bogosrin was able to fit in the spiral stairwell. They descended as rapidly as the evacuees before them would allow, finally emerging into the open air. They weren’t safe yet, though, for the lowest disk still formed an enormous roof above them. “Go!” Sulu cried. “Everyone, fast as you can, get out from under!” He and Chekov jumped off the Bogosrin’s back so as not to slow her down, then did their best to hasten the others along. The Linnik in the crowd had the hardest time moving swiftly, but the other species seemed to be reflexively ­solicitous toward them, taking their hands to pull them forward or lifting them bodily and carrying them, ­protecting them like the children they resembled.

  Luckily they were on what was now the downhill side of the building; as the raised half of the bottom disk broke free and crashed to the ground alongside them with terrifying speed, it damaged nothing but the evacuees’ nerves and maybe their hearing. But now the building was unbalanced, with more weight on the downslope side. Its collapse was inevitable. The deep straining and cracking sounds kept getting louder, and Sulu knew that once the tipping point was reached, it would be fast. He flipped open the communicator, coughing in the dust. “Enterprise, stand by for transport, wide beam around this signal!” Wide beam to get as many as possible and to take their motion into account. But he knew that beaming up a moving target was an iffy proposition.

  Still, miraculously, the building held up until everyone was clear, as far as he could tell. But he and Chekov didn’t make it very far before the noise from behind grew deafening. Instinct told him to keep running, but he had to look back to make sure he was running the right way. So he saw the stunning, horrifying spectacle of a tower kilometers high disintegrating under its own weight. It didn’t topple like a felled tree, for it was too big and brittle; it only moved a slight distance sideways before it broke apart, its disks pancaking down on one another. A tremor rippled outward through the ground and he lost his footing, twisting his ankle. He was far too close. The impact of the building would be like a series of explosions, sending out deadly shrapnel and powerful atmospheric shock waves. At this distance, he’d be a dead man.

  Then someone was pulling him up, dragging him backward as he watched the tower collapse in on itself. Just before the shock wave hit, his rescuer pulled him behind something, a large metal sheet that must have fallen from an adjacent tower and sliced into the ground at an angle. Shrapnel pummeled the metal sheet and some fragments pierced it like bullets. It teetered over him, pushed back by the shock wave, but it held. He looked around; Chekov was there too, along with a number of the evacuees. He looked up to see who had saved him and beheld the familiar face of Anne Nored. “Thanks,” he got out.

  “You’re welcome,” the brown-haired security lieutenant said. “Are you able to walk?”

  “I don’t think so. Not under these conditions.”

  Nored looked at Chekov. “Get him back to the Enterprise. I’ll help with the other evacuees.”

  Sulu stared as she pulled herself to her feet with surprising ease. “How are you doing that?”

  Nored gave a wistful smile. “Carter and I once spent four months on a relief mission to Pangea.” Sulu was surprised. Nored rarely spoke of her engagement to Carter Winston, who had been the Federation’s ­wealthiest philan­thropist before his disappearance five years ago. “It’s a high-gravity mining colony. I wouldn’t want to live there, but it was one hell of a workout.”

  Sulu felt he should say something. “He . . . was a great man. I’m sorry.”

  Nored shook her head. “It was a loss to the galaxy, not just me. So I haven’t let it define me. I joined Starfleet to keep on helping people, like he did.”

  “Lucky for me,” Sulu said with a grin. “Just stay away from the towers. The rest could come down at any time.” She nodded thanks and loped away. Fortunately, there was a lot of space between the towers, so no domino effect was likely—and this area, where a tower had already fallen, was probably a safe place to be. He hoped the remaining evacuees had the sense to keep as far as they could from the towers that still stood.

  But as Chekov called the ship for beam-out, Sulu looked around through the blowing dust and saw that not everyone had been spared from the shock and shrapnel. Some of the bodies around them were not moving. Some had been torn open by flying debris.

  As the transporter beam took him, he felt guilty about escaping with only a twisted ankle.

  * * *

  Kirk was relieved to hear that Sulu and Chekov had beamed aboard safely. Outside, the immense module continued its slow lurching. One of the conduits stretched taut and broke loose at its connection point. The conduit snapped back like a whip, tearing itself apa
rt, and three conduit shuttles full of evacuees were flung out. One was able to level out under its own power, setting a course for the Enterprise, the nearest safe refuge. But the other two were damaged from collisions with the conduit walls and tumbled out of control. “Get tractor beams on those shuttles!” Kirk ordered. The beams snagged one of them, but the other was too far; the atmosphere attenuated the beam, and the shuttle plummeted down toward the bottomless darkness below. There must have been at least thirty people in that shuttle. The thought tore at Kirk’s gut.

  But there was no time now for grief. “Lekur, how many left to evacuate?”

  “At least thirty thousand. Our transporters are taking over a hundred a second, but the module won’t last long enough at this rate. We can’t trust the conduits anymore, and we’ve already beamed in every airborne ship we can spare.”

  Kirk looked up. “Do they have tractor beams?”

  “Some do.”

  “Then let’s use them to hold the module up.”

  “It’s too vast! It won’t handle the strain!”

  “We need anything that can buy us time!” Grimacing, Lekur nodded. Kirk turned to the helm. “Rahda, get us up above the dome. Uhura, are those Web shuttles in the bay yet?”

  “Twenty more seconds, sir.”

  It took longer than that to get into position. To allow the tractor beams maximum spread, Lieutenant Rahda parked the ship several kilometers up, just below the cloud ceiling. Mighty winds pummeled the Enterprise while lightning snapped against its shields. “Tractor beams on!” Kirk ordered. “Maximum power, maximum spread!”

  Rahda had already extended the targeting scope from the helm console, peering into it to aim the tractor emitters. The ship trembled as the beams latched on. The screen projected a ventral camera view. The tractor beams, eerily visible as discontinuities in the rainfall, spread out in a cone and latched on to as much of the dome as they could hold, but it was still just a fraction of its area. Around the Enterprise, nine smaller ships used their own tractors to shore the world module up at its edges. At all the contact points, triangular chunks of transparent aluminum began to tear free from the dome, windows sucked out of their geodesic frames by the beams and tumbling upward under their pull. Many of them were blown free of the beams by the wind, looking like fountains of glass spewing upward. The ruptures would be letting the outer atmosphere rush in, increasing the internal pressure dangerously, but the interior volume was vast enough that it would take minutes. With luck, everyone would be out by then.

  Beneath the dome, the scene was terrifying. One by one, the vast, beautiful pagoda-like towers were collapsing in on themselves in mighty explosions of dust and debris. Fires were burning and a gray-brown miasma filled the air. “Kirk to transporter room. Are our security teams still in the module?”

  “Yes, sir,” came Lieutenant Kyle’s voice.

  “Kirk to evac teams! Stand by for beam-out!”

  “Not yet, sir!” came Nored’s voice. “There’s still . . .” Her voice dissolved into choking. “Still work to do.”

  “You’ve done more than enough! It’s getting too dangerous down there.”

  More choking. “Understood.”

  He switched the channel back. “Now, Mister Kyle!”

  A moment later, the ship experienced a sudden, sharp tremor, then a continuous, unsteady shuddering. “Captain, the module is beginning to buckle,” Spock called. “The strain from the tractor beams is ripping it apart!”

  “Kyle, have you got the team?”

  “Aye, sir. The last of them are aboard now.”

  “Good. Lekur, how many people left?”

  “Still about ten thousand! You’ve got to hold it longer!”

  “Scotty, can we get any more tractor power?”

  “I can barely keep what we have! We’ve already blown two dilithium circuits. We’ve got no safety margin. And the shields are taking a pounding from the lightning.”

  “Hold her together another ninety seconds, Scotty!”

  A bolt of lightning penetrated the shields, its voltage so intense that it jumped over all the circuit breakers, causing electric arcs to coruscate across the bridge consoles. The lights flickered and the ship trembled. The targeting scope sparked and buzzed from the inside. “Rahda, look out!” Bailey cried, pulling her away from the helm console just before the scope blew. Bailey himself took the brunt of the hit, collapsing alongside Kirk’s chair.

  “Medical team to the bridge!” Kirk ordered just as Rahda moved to Bailey to see to his condition.

  But other concerns presented themselves once the static cleared from the main viewscreen. “Scotty, we’re sinking!”

  “Impulse engines are offline! That behemoth is pulling us down! We’ve got to cut her free, or we’ll be dragged down with her!”

  “Use thrusters! Keep us aloft!”

  “It’ll only slow us down!”

  “We just need another minute!”

  By now, the medical team had arrived to take Bailey to sickbay. A jolt ran through the deck as the thrusters kicked in, but as Scott said, it only decreased their descent by a small margin. Huge chunks of debris were tearing loose in the tractor beams now, flying up toward the Enterprise. Kirk’s instinct was to order full ventral shields, but the lightning from above posed a greater threat. They’d simply have to live with some hull damage.

  But the debris sucked up by the beams was a symptom. The uneven stresses were twisting and tearing the world module apart. A mighty construct, larger than a hundred cities, enduring for thousands of years, and now it was breaking into rubble, imploding from the atmospheric pressure. “Spock,” Kirk said quietly. “Life readings?”

  “Fewer than a hundred,” Spock replied. A moment later . . . “Now none.”

  A heavy sigh escaped Kirk’s throat. “Release tractor beams. Get us out from under this storm.” He dreaded asking the next question. “Lekur. How many did you get out?”

  The Bogosrin’s head hung low. “Not enough. At least thirty-six hundred people were still in there.”

  Kirk absorbed the news solemnly. “Triumvir . . . I’m sorry. We did everything we possibly could.”

  “You did more than enough, Kirk.” Lekur’s voice was an ominous growl. “It was your power transfer that overloaded the system! If you’d left well enough alone, we could’ve gotten everyone out in time!

  “Those deaths are on your head, Kirk. And you will be held to answer.”

  Eight

  “Force Leader Grun. You are ordered to proceed at once to the Ranth sector and resume the hunt for orbships. We can no longer afford to have three cluster ships out of action in pursuit of a quarry that may not even exist. The hunt for the Linnik is too urgent.”

  Grun seethed inwardly at the orders. The image of War Leader Vraq on the command pod’s viewer was distorted and laden with static, presumably due to the interference of the giant planet’s radiation belts. But his voice was recognizable enough, and his identification codes were valid. And Vraq’s cold condescension, that haughty turn of his head, was just what Grun would expect from someone in his position. After a lifetime of orders from his father and brother—orders that had ­usually been accompanied by blows or been tailored to cause him humiliation—Grun had developed a deep-rooted resentment at being compelled to do anything against his wishes. He understood the urgency of their mission against the treacherous Linnik, but he despised being lectured about it.

  But he had also learned to keep his resentment buried and avoid exposing his true intentions until the opportunity to strike presented itself. If he could not find and destroy the Enterprise to avenge the Dassik blood it had spilled, he would find some other way to compensate for this stain on his pack’s prestige.

  Still, losing Kirk galled him. The same childhood that had trained him for patience had also trained him for persistence. Since nothing had come easily
to him, since there had been obstacles to his success at every turn, he had learned to stalk his quarry with tenacity and never let go until he achieved victory. To be forced to walk away from a goal he had set himself was galling.

  The final straw was the smug look on Dral’s face. “Shall I ready the ships for departure, Force Leader?” he asked, his words deferential but his tone insolent.

  Grun swallowed his bile and his pride with it. For the moment, as so many times before, he would have to tolerate a setback. But it was harder now. He’d thought he was finally free of such humiliations, and yet . . .

  He took a breath, readying himself to give the order, schooling his tone to ensure he would not sound as defeated as he felt. But before he could get the words out, monitor officer Remv called, “Force Leader!”

  Grun would have jumped at the interruption even without the urgency in Remv’s tone. “Speak!” he said, striding over to the third-tier officer’s console.

  “I have detected anomalous emissions from the planet, sir. Here.” Young Remv magnified a sector on his screen. The view became dominated by a turbulent storm bank, one flickering with intense lightning. Below it was a graphic displaying energy spectra from the selected region. “The storm makes readings difficult, but some of these energy bursts suggest more than lightning. This spike here, and this here . . . they resemble the output of an overloading warp reactor. And these gravimetric fluctuations suggest artificial gravity generation, possibly a tractor signature.”

  “Yes!” Grun cried. “They are down there. The Enterprise! We cannot leave now, not when we finally have the spoor!”

  But Dral shook his head. “I see nothing in these readings. Just noise. It is a foolish hunter who strikes at the wrong time because his ears mistake the rustle of tree branches for the step of his prey.”

  “Must you question everything, Dral? Can you never simply act?”

  “When I am sure of what action is wise. We are not berserkers anymore. That is what caused our downfall the last time! Now we must be more shrewd.”