“Our assignment is to assist the colony on Atticus IV in constructing an emergency radiation shelter and helping the colony’s twenty-three thousand citizens relocate there before the radiation surge arrives,” Kirk said. “Doctor McCoy, as a precaution, you need to prepare as much hyronalin and other anti-radiation treatments as you can synthesize over the next two days, to bolster the colony’s supply in case the shelter isn’t completed in time.”
“You mean we don’t know when the surge will hit?” an alarmed McCoy asked.
“We predict four days,” Sherev told him. “But occasionally the subspace topology can shift and either lengthen or shorten the radiation’s travel time. So there’s always a risk.”
“Oh, joy,” McCoy grumbled. “I hope I don’t end up regretting that I ever met you two.”
Atticus IV
Ling Jiang, the colony administrator, looked tired but satisfied as she stood next to Rhenas Sherev, gazing at the nearly complete emergency shelter that had been excavated at the base of a large, sturdy mountain a hundred kilometers northeast of the colony. “We never would’ve finished in time without your help, Commander,” she said. “Nor would we have been as fully equipped to survive in there until the surge passes.”
“Well, you’ll also have to think about what comes after,” Leonard McCoy called out, striding over from where he’d been finishing up the precautionary hyronalin injections for the last wave of evacuees. “That radiation storm’s gonna kill most of your crops. And you can’t rely on emergency rations for long. You’ll need a plan to get fresh food growing as quickly as possible.”
“Our agronomists have been working on a strategy, Doctor,” Jiang said. “We faced similar problems when we first settled. This planet’s fairly barren, at least on land. Most of its life is in the ocean, which is why it seemed ideal to colonize. At least that means most of the indigenous forms will survive.” She fell silent, her expression growing solemn.
“Is something wrong, Administrator?” McCoy asked.
“Anything we overlooked?” added Sherev.
“No, it’s not that. I just realized . . . it’s probably too late for the Chenari.”
The Starfleet officers frowned. “Chenari?” Sherev asked.
“They’re a preindustrial society on a planet a few parsecs out. Our scientists have been monitoring their civilization for the past two decades, taking occasional orbital scans—no contact, of course. They’re nonhumanoid, relatively peaceful. Mostly limited to one continent, but starting to explore beyond it.” She blinked away tears. “At least, they were. They’re closer to the quasar than we are. If the surge is a day away from us . . . then Chenar has surely been hit already. And its people would’ve had no way to predict or understand what was happening. A whole burgeoning civilization—and it’s probably gone now.”
McCoy and Sherev traded a look. The doctor spoke first. “We need to talk to Jim.”
U.S.S. Sacagawea
Captain’s log, supplemental
We have arrived in orbit of the planet Chenar to find its surface devastated by the radiation surge that passed through the system three days ago. It seems we have arrived too late—all life has been rendered extinct.
“That’s what we thought at first,” Kirk reported to Captain Ronald Tracey, whose saturnine visage was projected on the desk screen in Kirk’s ready room. “But Commander Sherev’s detailed scans have detected life signs consistent with several hundred Chenari sheltering in a deep underground cavern. We think they got lucky—they were a colony far from their home continent, so they happened to be on the far side of the planet when the worst of the surge hit. The resultant atmospheric storms must have driven them underground in time to survive the rest of the surge. There are enough of them that it would be a tight fit on the Sac, but if we—”
“No,” Tracey said.
Kirk blinked. “Excuse me?”
“You said they were preindustrial. Primitives. You know the Prime Directive as well as I do. It’s up to them to survive on their own, if they can.”
“A few hundred people? That’s barely a stable population base under the best of circumstances. And with their crops and game animals dead, their atmosphere poisoned and eroded—sir, they have no chance of survival without our help.”
“And you think they could survive life in the Federation?” Tracey’s deep voice boomed. “People who’ve barely invented sailboats? Seeing aliens and starships would probably drive them mad.”
“The colony’s reports call them an intelligent, peaceful people. These are explorers, sir, curious about their world.”
“Don’t start identifying with them, Kirk. You aren’t responsible for their lives. But you are responsible for follow-up on Atticus IV. I need you back there to clean up after the storm.”
“The Atticans are fully prepared and resourceful, sir. They can take care of themselves for an extra day or so before we arrive. The Chenari can’t.”
“Then maybe they just weren’t meant to survive. You have your orders, Kirk. Tracey out.”
Kirk sat at his desk for some time, wrestling with himself. After a while, he reached out and activated his log recorder. “Personal log, supplemental.” He’d found over the years that rehearsing his thoughts out loud helped him work through these internal debates. “Captain Tracey has issued clear orders: Obey General Order One . . . and let a civilization go extinct. And I am forced to wonder: Is it always going to come down to a war between the Prime Directive and my conscience?”
He resisted the thought. “No. I believe in the Prime Directive. It’s not just an arbitrary rule, but a check on human arrogance. It reminds us to trust that other civilizations are intelligent and capable enough to solve their own problems . . . better qualified to understand their own needs than outsiders are. It’s about recognizing that the Federation’s superior technology does not equal superior wisdom or intellectual capacity.”
He rose and began to pace. “Maybe that’s why Captain Tracey’s attitude toward the Chenari is sticking in my craw. He dismissed them as ‘primitives.’ He made it sound as if they were unintelligent—and therefore unworthy of rescue.” He paused. “No, that’s unfair. Tracey’s still a fellow captain, with the same training, the same values as myself. He’s no doubt preoccupied with his own rescue operations, concerned with coordinating the entire effort across multiple worlds. I can’t fault the man for that. Still . . . that doesn’t mean the Chenari deserve to be shrugged off as an inconvenient distraction.”
He thought of Daramoy, and what would have happened to her if Gary Mitchell hadn’t bent the rules. He didn’t need to enter that in his personal log; he’d done so often enough already.
Closing the log channel, he opened the intercom to the bridge. “Kirk to Adebayo.”
“Adebayo here, Captain. Go ahead.”
“Have Commander Sherev prepare a rescue party equipped for cave exploration, and have McCoy ready a medical team. We’re saving the Chenari.”
Chenar
Kirk watched with a mix of admiration and concern as Rhenas Sherev hopped down the forty-five-degree slope of the cavern floor with apparent ease, barely bothering to keep a hand on the safety line. He considered himself an experienced rock climber—hence his decision that he needed to accompany the rescue team personally, though delaying the inevitable chewing out from Captain Tracey was a consideration as well—but Sherev had been born and raised in one of Andoria’s underground cities even before she took up archaeology, so she was basically in her native environment here. Only Kreftz, a security crewman from Denobula, was handling the descent into the cavern as easily as Sherev was, if not more so. Kirk was keeping up with them reasonably well, but the other humans on the rescue team struggled their way down the slope more slowly, with Dr. McCoy inevitably keeping up a running litany of grumbles and complaints whenever he managed to catch his breath. Ensign Diaz stayed close to the doctor, watching him as if expecting him to collapse at any moment. Her solicitousness only made McCoy
more annoyed.
Once Sherev and Kreftz made it to the bottom of the slope ahead of the others, the science officer took tricorder scans of the seemingly level ground ahead to check for potential pitfalls. The Chenari had wisely ensconced themselves deep in this cave system, well away from the hazardous conditions up above. The radiation from the quasar burst had passed by now, but it had seared away Chenar’s ozone layer, allowing lethal levels of ultraviolet radiation from the system’s sun to reach the surface. It had also heated much of the upper atmosphere enough to dissociate its atoms and disperse it into space, leaving the remaining air thin and dry. A gentle wind flowed steadily outward through these caverns, whose entrance was low enough for the outside pressure to remain fairly substantial for now; but over time, the air in here would grow thinner as the pressure equalized with what remained outside.
Once the captain caught up with Sherev, he told her, “I don’t think you should be so casual about moving through this cave, Commander. However comfortable and familiar it may feel, it’s still an alien world with unknown dangers.”
“Which I’m an old hand at keeping my eyes and antennae peeled for, Jim. Trust me, it’s not recklessness. I learned that lesson back at Vega.” She shrugged. “I just make it look easy.” Kirk was less than reassured.
Once the rest of the party had reached the bottom and McCoy had more or less caught his breath, the doctor asked, “So how much longer until we reach the Chenari? The deeper we have to go, the harder it’s going to be getting them out, especially if they’re suffering from radiation or malnutrition.”
“We’re getting very close to the life signs,” Sherev said.
Kirk addressed the whole team. “We should proceed cautiously from here. Remember, these beings have never seen alien life before. According to the Attican survey reports, they’re herbivores, timid by nature. If we come on too strong, we could spook them, make them afraid of us.”
“Or worse, provoke an aggressive response,” Sherev added. “Even herbivores can be deadly when they feel cornered.”
“And if they panic and we have to stun them,” Kirk finished, “it’d be impossible to drag them all to the surface.”
“How are we going to approach them?” Diaz asked. “We’ve always been trained to avoid revealing ourselves to primitive cultures.”
Sherev raised a finger. “First off, banish that word ‘primitive’ from your mind. It’s easy to build a civilization when you have transtators and dilithium circuits and bulk synthesizers. It takes a lot more ingenuity, insight, and patience to do it with wood and bronze and muscle power. We’re all just coasting on the hard work that our ‘primitive’ ancestors did in figuring out how to build civilization in the first place.”
The junior science officer lowered her head. “Yes, Commander.”
“The obstacle we face is that the Chenari simply have a radically different view of the world than we do. We’re about to introduce them to concepts they’ve never encountered—ourselves included. That’s going to be a hard gulf to bridge.”
“And how do you suggest we go about that?” McCoy asked, his tone gentle and curious.
Sherev thought for a moment. “Best to keep it simple. We’re friends, we’re here to help, we can take you someplace safe. We don’t want to scare them with too much new information. But we should be honest too. It’s the simplest way to earn their trust.”
“So . . . tell the truth, but not too much of the truth?”
“Is that so different from how you reassure a patient, Doctor?”
McCoy quirked an eyebrow. “I suppose not. But finding the right balance is something you have to play by ear, judging each patient’s mood and probable reactions. You have to read people. How do we read a species we’ve never met? Especially one that looks like . . . oh, how did they describe it . . . plush mini-Triceratops with vestigial wings?”
“We’ll have to play it by ear,” Kirk answered.
Once the party was sufficiently rested, the captain led them forward once more. The cavern soon narrowed into a tunnel, and Kirk spotted something that made him call the rescue party to a halt. Just in front of the tunnel entrance was a gourd and a small bundle wrapped in leaves. “Sherev?”
The science officer stepped forward and scanned them with her tricorder. “Just what it looks like, Captain. A water gourd and a small bundle of food—something akin to a rice ball, I’d say, but with dried berries and nuts mixed in.”
“It looks too neatly placed to have been dropped there,” Kamisha Diaz observed.
“Confirmed,” said Sherev, waving her tricorder farther forward. “The heat trail and trace skin cells show a Chenari came up this passage and returned only minutes ago.”
Kirk chuckled, drawing the stares of the others. “First contact protocols,” he said. “We were so worried about how we’d proceed, but the Chenari beat us to it. We should’ve realized—they’re settlers on a new continent. Of course they’d expect to encounter unfamiliar peoples and have to establish communication and trade with them.”
“I see,” Sherev said. “They must’ve heard us coming. Leaving an offering of food and water here is a way to make first contact from a distance—to let us know they’re here and they’re willing to be friendly, but they don’t want to rush things. We have to prove ourselves friendly in return.”
Diaz was peering down the tunnel as she scanned it. “It seems to widen again about twenty meters down. A natural bottleneck. Neutral ground?”
Kirk nodded. “Ensign . . . proceed to the far end and leave a ration bar and water pack there. Break them open so the Chenari don’t have to figure out how. But keep alert and have your phaser ready just in case.”
“Aye, sir.” The ensign crept into the passageway, retrieving the items from her pack.
McCoy sidled up beside Kirk. “Why Diaz? Because she’s the smallest, the least threatening?”
Kirk smiled. “Because it was her idea. Besides—I remember how I felt the first time I got to initiate a first contact. Diaz deserves to feel that too.”
The doctor peered at him. “Well, that didn’t take long. Youngest captain in Starfleet, yet you’re already training the next generation.”
“My captains did it for me,” Kirk said. “I feel it’s my duty to pay it forward.”
Diaz soon returned, and the party waited, watching the far end of the tunnel. Soon, there was movement at the far end, a shadowed figure that appeared briefly and then retreated with Diaz’s offerings. The party waited for over fifteen minutes, until the figure (or another like it) returned and left another water gourd at their end before retreating once more. “Step two,” Kirk interpreted. “Inviting us to advance that far and no farther.”
Kirk nodded to Diaz to go first, with himself and Sherev following single file and the rest coming behind them. They emerged from the tunnel into a large, high grotto with a steep, nearly vertical wall some thirty meters before them, rising a good fifteen meters to a plateau studded with stalagmites like trees in a forest. Stalactites filled much of the ceiling overhead like chandeliers, but there were no intact stalagmites in the basin below, just an agglomeration of boulders and scree, as if a portion of the plateau had collapsed into the basin some time in the past. The basin was empty aside from themselves, but Kirk could see a trail of footprints in the dirt and scree on the ground, leading back to the wall. He spotted a rope piled beside a stalagmite near the edge of the plateau, and there was a flickering glow of firelight somewhere behind it. “They must have climbed up there and pulled up the rope,” he said.
“I could climb that easily,” Crewman Kreftz said, sizing up the wall.
“No,” Kirk told the Denobulan. “We want them to feel safe. Earn their trust. We’ll play it their way.”
Diaz picked up the offered water gourd, looking puzzled. “Okay, so what are we supposed to do next?”
An alien voice sounded from the plateau above. “Water.”
Diaz peered at the shadows between the stalagmites.
“Hello?”
“Water. That is water.” Their communicators, preprogrammed with the Atticans’ survey data, provided the translation promptly.
Kirk traded a look with Sherev. “The next step,” the science officer said. “A language lesson.”
“Luckily we can skip that part,” Kirk said. He nodded to Diaz.
The young ensign stepped forward nervously. “It’s all right,” she called. “We understand your words. Please speak to us. We come in peace.” She shook with excitement and whispered to the others: “I always wanted to say that!”
There was a flurry of agitated movement up above, and a chatter of voices too low and frenetic for the translators to catch. “How do you know our tongue?” one of the Chenari finally said. “Have you met our kind before?”
“Uh . . . We have a . . . tool that lets us speak to you. It can . . .” After struggling for a moment, she sighed and said, “I mean, yes. We have . . . encountered your people before.” She turned to Kirk and Sherev and whispered, “That’s technically true, right?”
More indecipherable discussion from above. “We do not know of your kind. We have met no people in this land, and none on our own land mass who looked as unlike us as you do. We would have thought you were animals if not for your garments and tools.”
“We come from very far away,” Diaz said. “Some of us have . . . visited your homeland in recent years. It’s because we knew of you that we came to seek you out when the disaster struck.”
After more consultation, the spokesperson said, “It is good that this is not your land, or you would have been killed. The storms are unnatural. They burn the skin, poison the blood. How did you pass through them to come here?”
“The storms have died down. They won’t return any time soon, but it’s no longer possible to live on this—this land. That’s why we’ve come. To take you someplace safe, where you can live.”
There was more frenzied chatter from above, yet there was no response from the spokesperson. “You may have come on too strong, Ensign,” Sherev said. “They don’t yet know if they can trust us.”
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