The Antares Maelstrom

by Greg Cox

  “Shuttle departing in five minutes for that Rigelian freighter. We still have room for eight more evacuees, maybe more if they have small children . . .”

  All hands on deck, Uhura noted. She made it to the bridge, where she saw Captain Kirk conferring with Mister Scott, while Yeoman Landon stood by, taking notes. She couldn’t help noticing that Spock and Chekov had not yet returned from the mission to Yurnos. Their presence was no doubt sorely missed in this crisis. Sulu’s, too.

  “Welcome back, Lieutenant,” Kirk said, acknowledging her return. He was clearly busy, but she appreciated the gesture even if he quickly returned to managing the emergency. She saw that the main viewscreen was occupied by a map of Jackpot City, with the raging fire indicated by a red zone that expanded as the Enterprise’s long-range sensors tracked the spreading blaze. Yeoman Landon handed him a microtape disk, which he loaded into the reader in his chair. He scowled at the new data as though he found it unsatisfactory. “This isn’t good enough. I need to know for certain which areas around the fire have been completely evacuated.”

  “I may be able to help you with that, sir.” Uhura beckoned to Landon, who took her data slate from her. She had transferred the information from her own maps onto the slate before abandoning the Pergium Palace. “I charted the areas my volunteers cleared up until we pulled out of the area.”

  Landon passed the slate to Kirk, who quickly reviewed its contents.

  “Thank you, Uhura. This is just what I needed.”

  She knew the captain well enough to know he was working on a plan. She was curious to know what it was, feeling somewhat as though she had walked into the middle of a play having missed the first act, but figured she’d catch up soon enough. Crossing the bridge, she relieved Palmer, who relocated to an auxiliary comm station over by the environmental and shipboard subsystems rather than taking a break. Uhura sat down at her accustomed post and reclaimed her earpiece for the first time in what felt like forever.

  Home sweet home, she thought.

  She took a moment to survey the standard frequencies, where she found various ongoing in-ship, ship-to-ship, and ship-to-surface communications underway. She sorted through them, efficiently assessing and prioritizing them as she’d been trained to do, before noticing something odd: a faint subspace signal of some sort coming from outside the solar system. The signal was weak and spotty; in the crush of transmissions flying back and forth regarding the crisis on Baldur III, the barely imperceptible signal would have been all too easy to miss if she hadn’t paused to take an overview of the incoming and outgoing messages.

  What have we here?

  Subspace static rendered the fragmented signal difficult to decipher. Uhura had to run it through several advanced filters and restoration algorithms to clean it up enough to realize that it was in fact a distress signal . . . coming from inside the Antares Maelstrom?

  Looks like I got back to the Enterprise just in time.

  * * *

  “Do you think it will work, Scotty?”

  “It’s our best option,” the engineer replied to Kirk. “Sorry I made such a mess down on the planet, Captain.”

  “You already saved the city once,” Kirk replied. “Now we just have to save it from the aftermath of that miracle.”

  Kirk studied the map on the viewscreen. His own proposed solution was also going to leave a mark on Jackpot City, but playing it safe was no answer at all. He could only hope Mayor Poho felt the same way.

  “Lieutenant Uhura, get me the mayor—”

  “Excuse me, Captain,” she interrupted. “I’ve received a distress signal from Lieutenant Sulu. He’s aboard a commercial vessel, the Lucky Strike, that’s lost in the Antares Maelstrom. They’re in extreme jeopardy.”

  The announcement caught Kirk off guard. “What? How did Sulu end up in the Maelstrom?”

  “Apparently it’s a long story, Captain. But the ship, the crew, and its passengers are in danger and requesting our immediate assistance.”

  Kirk didn’t know what to do. His first instinct was to go to the Lucky Strike’s rescue, but Jackpot City was still burning on the screen before him. He was torn between wanting to save Sulu and the other lives at risk in the Maelstrom and his duty to protect the city below. He was also all too aware that the Enterprise was currently crammed with evacuees, and taking on more, all of whom would be in danger if he took the ship into the Maelstrom to answer Sulu’s distress call. Could he in good conscience risk their lives in order to save others?

  “Captain?” Uhura prodded gently. “How shall I respond?”

  Spock would surely point out that there was only one logical choice. Kirk saw that, too, but that didn’t make it any less agonizing.

  “Inform Lucky Strike that the Enterprise is currently engaged with an urgent situation on Baldur III.” Kirk’s stony face and tone strove to conceal what his words cost him. “Tell them . . . we’ll respond when we’re able.”

  “Aye, sir,” Uhura said. “I understand.”

  No one challenged his decision. He was grateful for that, although part of him almost wished for a compelling reason to choose the Lucky Strike over Jackpot City.

  “Sulu is on his own, then, sir?” Scott asked. “For the time being?”

  “I’m afraid so, Mister Scott.”

  Thirty-Two

  The Antares Maelstrom

  “So that’s it?” Dajo said. “They’re not coming to help us?”

  “They’re not coming right away.” Sulu tried to put a positive spin on matters for the sake of morale. “The good news is that, against all odds, our distress signal got through to the Enterprise.” He gave Helena an appreciative nod. “The bad news is that any help will be delayed, which means we just have to hold out until the crisis on Baldur III is dealt with.”

  “And how are we supposed to do that?” Dajo demanded. “We tried fight and flight. Neither is working.”

  Despite Sulu’s ongoing attempts to evade them, the gliders were relentless in their attacks and growing in numbers as well. Constant brownouts, short circuits, damage reports, and flashing annunciator lights testified to their losing battle against both the gliders and the Maelstrom. Seated at the helm, Sulu was tossed from side to side by the ceaseless turbulence and the sudden, random jolts to the ship, neither of which made piloting the vessel any easier. Sapphire pulses flashed constantly on the viewscreen, tinting his view of the roiling chaos all around them. Inertial dampers strained to cushion the upheaval, but with limited success. Sulu suspected that the dampers were taking damage along with the deflectors.

  “Shields down to forty-three percent,” Fass said dolefully. “Stay tuned for more bad news.”

  “Too bad we wasted power on that distress signal.” Dajo glowered at Sulu. “Any other brilliant suggestions, Lieutenant?”

  Sulu racked his brain and came up with one last option.

  “Try talking to them?”

  “You’re joking, right? Do those beasts look like they want to start up a conversation? And what makes you think they’re even capable of that?”

  “What makes us think they aren’t?” Sulu argued. The more he thought about it, the more the effort struck him as worth attempting. If there was one thing he had learned during his years in Starfleet, it was that there was often more to new and unusual life-forms than met the eye, and that deadly misunderstandings could sometimes arise during first-contact situations, as with the Gorn or the Horta, for instance. “For all we know, they could very well be sentient.”

  Dajo wasn’t buying it. “Then why are they attacking us like a school of Izarian fang-fish in a feeding frenzy?”

  “Sentience doesn’t preclude anger or fear, as galactic history demonstrates all too well, but history also teaches that communication can be the first step to resolving conflict, even if wildly different species or cultures have gotten off to a bad start with regard to each other,” Sulu said. “The very existence of the Federation is proof of that.”

  “But even if that’
s true,” Helena said, “and the gliders are sentient, how are we supposed to communicate with them anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” Sulu confessed. “How do they communicate with each other?”

  “That’s somewhere to start, I guess.”

  She replaced her earpiece as she set about answering Sulu’s question. He stopped talking, not wanting to distract her, as he kept trying to get the Lucky Strike clear of the swarm. Dajo left her alone, too, despite his earlier skepticism. Long, bumpy moments passed before she spoke up again.

  “How about that?” She looked surprised by her own discovery. “I’m picking up subspace transmissions between the gliders, as though they’re signaling each other. Took me a while to zero in on the proper frequency, but . . . listen to this.”

  She shared the audio with the rest of the bridge. Dissonant tones warbled over the speakers, bouncing off and overlapping with each other. It sounded like utter gibberish to Sulu’s ear, but the back and forth between them suggested some degree of communication, although it was difficult to tell just how sophisticated the dialogue was. Were these the vocalizations of animals or sentient beings conversing?

  “What in blazes am I listening to?” Dajo asked.

  “Hard to say,” Helena said. “If it’s a language, it’s not like any I’ve heard before.”

  “The universal translator?” Sulu recalled Helena snagging a new UT unit after that brawl at Naylis’s general store. He was suddenly very glad that she’d managed to keep anyone else from walking off with it.

  “It’s having trouble cracking this lingo so far,” she said. “It’s possible that the translation matrix just needs more time to digest the gliders’ speech, or it could be that the standard linguacodes don’t apply to a language this alien, if it’s even a language at all.”

  A thought occurred to Sulu. He plucked his communicator off his belt and lobbed it over to her. “Catch!”

  She snatched it out of the air. “Nice toss. But what am I supposed to do with this?”

  “Cannibalize it, consult it, whatever it takes,” he said. “Its built-in translator function has all the latest Starfleet upgrades, including a new algorithm our Vulcan science officer devised specifically to assist in communicating with nonhumanoid life-forms.”

  Spock had instituted that upgrade himself, Sulu recalled, shortly after he and Kirk and a few others had escaped from an obscure planetoid in the Gamma Canaris region. Spock had judged it worth sharing with the rest of the crew and Sulu figured he had his reasons.

  “No offense,” he said, “but Starfleet-quality software surely beats whatever civilian version you bought off the shelf. Maybe you can upload the program into your own translator, or splice the units together to create more processing power?”

  Helena flipped open the communicator. “Ordinarily, I would vigorously defend my own gear, simply as a matter of pride, but at the moment I’m not inclined to look a gift matrix in the mouth.” She switched on the communicator while working the controls at the comm station. “Give me a few minutes to marry these two units.”

  “Make it a shotgun wedding, if you have to,” Sulu quipped. “We don’t have time for a long engagement.”

  Sapphire pulses and gushing plasma currents drove home his point.

  “Damn,” Fass blurted. “I really want to shoot something instead of just sitting here. I’m going to lose my lunch if this keeps up.”

  Sulu was more worried about them all losing their lives, but he knew where she was coming from. Good thing he had gotten his space legs years ago. It took more than rough sailing to make him queasy.

  “I think I speak for all of us,” Dajo said, “when I say we’d rather your lunch stay where it is for the time being. Consider that an order.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  A high-pitched squeal came from the comm station, drawing Sulu’s gaze back to it. He saw that his communicator was now patched directly into the console’s emergency override panel, while its flip-up antenna faced the external broadcast controls.

  “Sorry!” Helena silenced the squeal with the push of a button. “Just a little system compatibility problem there. Got it smoothed out now, hopefully.”

  “Forget the noise,” Dajo said. “Is it working it?”

  “Let’s find out.” She pressed a speaker button. “Hello? Can you read me?”

  The same inhuman tones echoed across the bridge, just as incomprehensibly as before. Sulu wanted to have faith in Spock’s software, not to mention Helena’s communications know-how, but he couldn’t help wondering if this was an exercise in futility. What if the augmented translation matrix couldn’t decipher the gliders’ “language” in time or at all?

  “Hello?” she persisted. “Can you hear me? Please answer me if you can.”

  He noted that she was keeping her sentences short and simple, to make it easier for the translator and, perhaps, the gliders. They didn’t need to conduct a philosophical debate with the gliders; they just needed to convince them to stop attacking.

  “Talk to me, please. We only want to speak to you.”

  The “please” was possibly superfluous, but he couldn’t blame Helena for erring on the side of courtesy. It would be bleakly ironic to actually make contact with the gliders, only to come off as rude and insulting.

  “Hello. Can you hear me?”

  Sulu was on the verge of declaring the experiment a failure, when the unintelligible tones transformed into English, albeit in a halting fashion.

  “Hear . . . you . . .”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Dajo said. “Patch them over to me, Helena.”

  “No offense, Captain, but I’d rather trade seats with Sulu and let him take it from here. He’s had more first-contact experience than either of us . . . and is probably more diplomatic, to boot.”

  Sulu had to agree with her, especially when it came to bypassing Dajo. They needed to win the gliders’ trust, not try to snow them with a fancy sales pitch. Honesty and diplomacy were what were called for. Sulu trusted his own instincts over Dajo’s, when it came right down to it.

  “Et tu, Helena?” Dajo’s expression darkened. “I’m the captain here. This is my ship!”

  “But our lives are at stake,” Sulu said, “and your passengers’. ”

  Ignoring Dajo’s protests, he stumbled across the bridge to take the comm station from Helena, who scrambled to replace him at the helm. As first officer, she surely knew her way around the controls.

  “Talk . . . at . . . us?”

  Sulu didn’t want to leave the gliders hanging. He wondered which or how many of the beings were taking part in the conversation.

  “Yes. We hear you. We mean you no harm.”

  “No . . . harm?”

  “Yes, but you are harming us. Please stop.”

  “Stop . . . ?”

  Sulu wondered if the gliders realized that the ship was just a ship and that they were actually speaking to living beings inside the Lucky Strike. Was it worth trying to explain that distinction to them? Perhaps later, he decided, if and when the universal translator had a better grasp of their language.

  “Captain!” Fass called out. “The gliders are backing off. I think they may be halting their attacks, at least for the moment!”

  “Can’t complain about that,” Dajo said. “Keep talking to them, Sulu. Mind you, you’re not saying anything I wouldn’t have said myself.”

  Sulu shrugged off Dajo’s attempt to save face. He was more concerned with what the gliders had to say. The bridge was still experiencing extreme turbulence, but Fass was right that the energy bursts appeared to have paused.

  “Did you stop harming us? Thank you. We are not an enemy. We will not harm you. We can be friends.”

  “No friends . . . not belong here.”

  He chose not to press the point. Establishing relations with the gliders could wait for another day, when innocent lives were not at stake.

  “We understand. This is your home, not ours.”

&nbs
p; “Yes. Go. Leave.”

  Their message was clear enough. He just wished he could give them an answer that would satisfy them.

  “We want to leave, but cannot find the way. We are lost.”

  “Lost . . . ?”

  “Yes, we do not know the way.”

  A pause ensued, during which Sulu worried about the current limitations of the translator. Did the gliders truly understand what he was saying? If all they understood was that the ship could not leave, they might decide to finish what they started and destroy the Lucky Strike anyway.

  “Can you show us the way to leave?”

  Another nerve-racking pause, this one shorter than before.

  “Yes. Show you the way. You go.”

  Sulu felt like cheering, but simply grinned at Helena, who gave him a thumbs-up.

  “Thank you!” he said to the gliders. “Please show us.”

  “Follow . . . now.”

  On the viewscreen, the gliders turned away from the ship and fell into formation, all heading in the same direction. The luminous patterns shifting throughout their anatomy served as beacons through the foggy plasma streams.

  “Follow that swarm,” Dajo ordered, somewhat unnecessarily. “Don’t lose sight of them!”

  “Not a chance,” Helena assured him. “I’m sticking to them like a magnetic boot.”

  The gliders set a demanding pace. They were clearly in a hurry to show the door to their unwelcome visitors, which was just fine with Sulu. Even with the attacks on hold, the Lucky Strike was still being battered by the tempest outside, its shields were eroding, and gravity and life-support weren’t going to be able to hold out much longer; the sooner they escaped the Maelstrom, the better chance they stood of escaping Fleetness’s fate.

  They knew which way to go now. The question was: Could they make it back to normal space before the Lucky Strike became yet another lost ship, never to be seen or heard from again?

  Thirty-Three

  Baldur III

  “Fire phasers, Mister Painter. Full power.”