STAR TREK: TOS - The Janus Gate, Book Three - Past Prologue

by L. A. Graf

  He couldn’t see George’s face through the darkness, but the flicker of distant light in the older man’s eyes as he glanced uncomfortably to one side was unmistakable. “Someone must have survived from Maione’s team ...”

  “No one survived, Commander. No one.” There wasn’t much Kirk was still certain of, but that ugly detail hadn’t changed.

  “There were aid workers,” George persisted. “Civilian aid workers.”

  “And most of them returned to the embassy when the fighting first broke out yesterday. You loaded [133] them onto shuttles yourself, along with the embassy staff.”

  George’s eyes flashed back to Kirk’s face with fierce intensity. Kirk could almost imagine the angry glower fueling that stare. “Well, who do you think is in there with him?”

  “I don’t know,” Kirk admitted with a sigh. “That’s what bothers me.” His eyes had adjusted somewhat to the deeper dark, and he silenced George’s protest with an upraised hand. “I’m not saying we shouldn’t try and bring them out of there. But don’t forget those supposed Starfleet officers Mutawbe’s men saw. If the Vragax are trying to lure us into something ugly, this would be how to do it.”

  The elder Kirk seemed to consider that reasoning, his fingers drumming an impatient rhythm on the case of the tricorder. Just when Kirk thought his father would erupt in frustration, George said, very quietly and evenly, “If there’s any chance at all that humans are really trapped inside that building, though, we’ve got to try and bring them out. Even if my son isn’t with them.”

  There was no rational protest he could make to that. Kirk wondered why he’d never noticed before that his father was such an intensely principled man. Maybe it was because the ongoing conflict between dedicated family man and loyal officer so often manifested itself as ill-temper. It occurred to him that all great conflicts between fathers and sons revolved around the fact that you couldn’t truly appreciate an adult until you were one.

  [134] Kirk stepped away from the doorway only long enough to quickly get his bearings and verify that no Vragax had wandered into their cul-de-sac. “All right ...” He motioned George to follow him around the corner of the building, away from the quad. “If we’re going in, let’s at least try to do it discreetly.”

  George made a skeptical noise as he paused to check the charge on his phaser. “I don’t know how discreet you think we can be with these odds.” He counted the power supplies on his belt, picked out the freshest one. “I can take out maybe four at a time with a wide-angle stun, if they’re grouped close enough, but there have to be fifty Vragax out there.” He flashed Kirk a surprisingly familiar half smile. “How fast can you run?”

  “There’s not going to be any running.” Kirk kicked aside dead leaves and the remnants of what had surely been impressive flower plantings in a former life. His foot thumped against something harder than the rest of the detritus and he stooped to sweep it clean. “At least not if we do this right.” Finding a rock too small for his purposes, he straightened and moved on.

  “There’s a sort of underground marketplace underneath this whole area,” he told his father as he carefully kicked his way down the length of the garden. “There are entrances that lead down into it from most of the buildings surrounding that quadrangle. If we can find one of them, we should be able to make our way over to underneath where you’re reading those life-signs, then come up from below.”

  Stuffing his phaser back onto his belt, George [135] hurried forward to help Kirk heft a landscaping rock much larger than the one he’d found before. “How do you know this?” he asked. “I thought you said you’d only just got here.”

  Kirk stopped himself from saying, Mom went there once to buy souvenirs, and instead substituted, “Your son mentioned that his mother came here once. He pointed it out as we flew over.” Nodding George back away from the rock, Kirk took the full weight of it in his arms just long enough to swing it like a pendulum toward a ground floor window. He turned his face down toward one shoulder as the window imploded with a magnificent crash.

  George came carefully forward from where he’d retreated halfway into the street. “Well,” he remarked dryly, “that was certainly in keeping with your suggestion that we be discreet.”

  Kirk couldn’t help but throw his father a boyish grin. “Actually, it is. With all the looting going on tonight, the Vragax are less likely to investigate a breaking window than two men skulking through the landscaping at the edges of their camp.”

  They broke in the last jagged glass teeth using smaller decorative stones, then braced a branch from one of the flowering trees lengthwise down the window channel so they could lift themselves through the opening without embedding glass shards in their palms. Inside, the rock Kirk had lobbed through the window served as a neat step down to a carpeted office floor and a startling lack of sound. Except for the [136] scattered glass and the incongruous lump of stone, everything else inside sat neatly undisturbed, as though the killing and burning outside were half a galaxy away. A plant with beautiful mottled leaves and a spray of delicate white flowers decorated the edge of an organically curving workspace. It bobbed gently in the night breeze let in through the broken window. Kirk felt weirdly as though he’d just climbed through a portal from hell back into the civilized world.

  The hallways beyond the office door stretched out like the dark conduits on Tlaoli, lit only faintly by the starlight filtering through windows at either end. Kirk thought ahead to navigating the underground marketplace without even starlight to see by, and suddenly found himself missing Zap Sanner’s carbide lamps.

  “Here ... What’s this?”

  The doorway George waved him toward wasn’t the same sort as the others lining the hall. Swept into a simple arch, it opened onto a gently sloping path paved in smooth mosaic cobbles. It all looked iron gray in the dim light, but Kirk could imagine the intricate pastel patterns that must be inlaid in the floor and walls. It was the Grexxen eye for delicate color that had first lured his mother down into this native market. Now, on the first night of the alien civil war, Kirk could see just far enough beyond the entrance to tell that the tunnel widened as it wound down into the darkness, but could make out nothing of its beauty.

  George put out an arm to block him when Kirk [137] stepped forward to lead the way down. “No, sir. You’re the captain, you shouldn’t be out front. We don’t even know for sure that the Vragax aren’t bivouacked down there, too.”

  For some reason, that simple but earnest objection made Kirk smile. “I appreciate your concern, Commander,” he said, pushing George’s arm back down to his side. “But if anyone here needs to be protected, it’s you. I’m not exactly in a position to take care of a teenage boy without his father around to help me.” He drew his own phaser and made sure it was set on stun. “Stay close to the wall, and close to me. If we’re going to trip over something in the dark, let’s at least not have it be each other.”

  The wall beneath Kirk’s hand felt cool and silky, like enameled wood, and he traced the gradual curve with light fingers as it drifted eternally away from him, trending both around and down. He tried not to force his eyes to focus in the dark, but instead concentrated on keeping his gaze level in an effort to stave off the dizziness he knew was coming as soon as they left the last faint light behind. Even so, he caught himself clinging to the memory of illumination as it fell away behind them. If he wasn’t very careful, imagined shadows lured trust away from his hands and feet, and vertigo crashed over him every time the wall led in a direction that felt strange to his eyes or the floor altered slope even slightly. When the cobblestones under his feet finally leveled out, the transition felt abrupt and wrong. His foot clapped [138] loudly as it tried to step down lower than the surface that was there, and he stumbled forward several steps before George caught him by the back of his belt and hauled him vertical again.

  Then they stood silent in the heavy blackness and waited for the turbulent shadows to settle.

  “What does
the tricorder say?” Kirk asked at last. His voice sounded harsh and uncivil in the quiet, but was swallowed too quickly by the dark to be offensive.

  Behind him, George cracked the rotating panel that covered the tricorder’s face and cued it back to life. The modest light from its readout chased back the worst of the shadows and lifted a little cloud of brightness between them. “There.” George turned to follow the reading, like a pointer following his nose. “Down that way, about a hundred meters.”

  The whole little market seemed less sinister now that a tiny bit of light reached out into it. Darkness still hid the farthest walls and most of the details, but quaintly stained kiosks winked at them as they crept by, and the fresh kiss of jasmine-scented blossoms drifted out from a wheeled cart overflowing with the same flowers Kirk had seen on the desktop upstairs. Who would take care of them now that their merchant had either been chased out of the city or killed? The thought of all those beautiful plants, dead and rotting in the darkness, was just one more tragedy on a list that was already far too long.

  Slowing beside a shop front that looked like both it and its charming window boxes should be set up on [139] the streets above, George turned in a slow circle without lifting his eyes from the tricorder screen. Kirk pulled up alongside him, glancing down at the readout from habit, then scowling at his own annoyance when he remembered again that he couldn’t read the unfamiliar device. “What have we got?”

  “I think we’re in range of that building.” George craned a look up, then seemed to realize that he couldn’t tell anything that way and bent back to his tricorder. “There are a lot of Grexxen life-signs in range, but they’re all off that way—” He gestured toward what Kirk hoped was the center of the quad. “The human signs are pretty much directly overhead, except ...” His human faith in his own senses betrayed him again, and he glanced back up at the out-of-sight ceiling with a grumble. “We’re in the middle of everything down here. There may not be an entrance into that building.”

  Kirk looked up as well, but what he saw was at least a possibility. “Then I guess we’ll just have to make one.”

  They moved the alien jasmine in armloads, settling the plants as gently as possible around the feet of a potted tree. The wagon itself turned out to be bolted into place. George freed it with two smartly placed shots from his phaser, then swore when Kirk laughed because they had to wait for their eyes to recover from the brilliance. Once under the human life-signs, they braced the wheels with the flower boxes from the little shop, and Kirk climbed unsteadily aboard [140] while George leaned into the wagon to mitigate its rocking.

  The ceiling was closer than Kirk expected. He sensed more than felt stone passing close above him, and ducked his head while simultaneously reaching out to orient himself. His hand rapped sharply against what felt like exposed stone. Just that quickly, he found his equilibrium and balanced himself easily with one hand on the ceiling and both feet planted on the rickety little cart.

  “Know anything about architecture?” he asked George as he cranked up the charge on his phaser.

  The older man snorted so forcefully that Kirk felt it jolt through the cart underneath him. “This is a hell of a time to worry about that.”

  “Just wondering if we were going to get the whole building falling down on our heads.”

  George shifted himself to steady the cart a little better, then snorted again. “Like I said, a hell of a time.”

  Whatever material the Grexxen had used to make the ceiling, it vaporized briskly under the phaser’s beam. Kirk started his cut as far out from the cart as he could safely stretch, going by sound and stench to tell when he’d cut through all the levels of stone and timber, and up into open air. When he was only two thirds of the way around a modest circle, a fracture as wide as his hand opened up opposite his cut with a crack! like a shot from a Vragax rifle. Kirk recoiled away from the collapsing flap, calling, “Heads up!” a moment too late to serve any real purpose. A startling [141] mass of wires, wood, and concrete crashed down just beyond the nose of the cart, throwing up a choking cloud of pulverized stone and plastic. Kirk covered his mouth and nose with one hand and turned away from the wreckage until the worst of it had settled.

  Below him, George Kirk coughed to clear his lungs, but didn’t let go of the cart handles. When he could talk again, he commented hoarsely, “Well, the building didn’t fall down.”

  Not so far, at least. Edging up to the end of the cart, Kirk leaned out to hook his hands over the phaser-cut rim of the hole. “Stay out of the way until I tell you it’s all clear.” It felt ludicrous to worry about the noise now, but he still felt awkward speaking in a normal tone. “And keep your phaser ready in case we have to make a quick retreat.”

  George held up the weapon in curt acknowledgment, and Kirk pulled himself up through the hole.

  The first thing he noticed was the brightness of the atrium, lit from the fires out on the quad. Images of flame danced murkily through layer upon layer of smoky glass panels, peeking into the building without actually rushing inside. Kirk hoped his phaser fire hadn’t been as readily visible to the Vragax as their fires were to him. Then, just as he levered himself up onto his knees on the lip of the hole, he noticed the sound of breathing. Not his own breathing. He froze even before he felt the cool touch of a gauss rifle against the back of his skull.

  “Don’t shoot.” He said it remarkably calmly, even [142] to his own ears. It wasn’t worth sounding desperate. If it was a Vragax behind him, it wouldn’t matter what he said; if it was a human, the sound of another human’s voice should be enough to save him.

  At least, that’s what he thought.

  But the gauss rifle against his neck never wavered. “Ah,” said a voice that somehow managed to be oddly familiar and yet coldly unrecognizable all at the same time. “So this is the great Captain Kirk.”

  Sulu didn’t remember the caverns on Tlaoli being this cold before. The fierce wind that hit them as they descended into the dusky twilight of the sinkhole entrance should have warned him, but although he heard Sanner groan and young Ensign Chekov bite off a dismayed gasp, Sulu didn’t connect the strong flow of air to the temperature gradients that must exist underground. It wasn’t until the nano-woven fibers of his caving suit expanded to their full insulating thickness before they’d even reached the end of the narrow tube twisting down from the sinkhole floor that Sulu realized this expedition was going to be as physically painful as it was dangerous. By the time they dropped down the final ropes to the massive rubble pile that gave them access to the ancient alien-constructed conduits, the exposed skin on Sulu’s face already felt stiff and wind-burned. That tight, raw feeling reminded him of the subarctic night he’d endured back when he’d been stranded by that transporter malfunction on Alfa 117. God, had that [143] been only a few weeks ago? Between the alien virus he’d caught at Psi 2000 and his excursion twenty-five years into his own future at Basaraba, Sulu felt as if that freezing night on Alfa 117 had happened to another person entirely.

  And if they didn’t get the timeline fixed, that was going to be literally true.

  “Man, it’s cold! Taking out those satellites must have really overcharged the power storage banks down here.” The firefly glow of Zap Sanner’s carbide lamp traced a startling cascade of skips and bounces through the darkness as he went clattering down the steep ramp of cave rubble. For a startled moment, Sulu thought the geologist had fallen, then Sanner’s cheerful voice came booming back up to them. “Come on, you guys! It’s not that slippery.”

  “Curb your enthusiasm, Mr. Sanner.” Spock’s shadowy figure descended the uneven rock surface with smooth, easy strides that got him to the bottom almost as quickly as the cave geologist’s reckless scramble. “Please recollect that our mission here is to surprise the Shechenag at the Janus Gate, not to announce our arrival several minutes in advance.”

  “Sorry, Commander,” Sanner said, then added with typical scientific temerity, “You know we’re over a kilometer away fro
m them here, don’t you?”

  “Indeed,” answered Spock coldly. “What I do not know is the maximum distance at which the Shechenag’s cybernetic technology can detect sounds. Do you?”

  [144] “Uh, no, sir.”

  Neither the geologist nor anyone else on their team spoke above a muffled whisper after that, but the frozen cave made noisy conversation for them. The ice that had once been cave runoff cracked and popped against the unyielding template of the limestone walls, and occasionally boomed in the distance as it expanded inside frozen springs and crevices.

  Sulu angled the surprisingly small beam of his primitive carbide light down toward the jagged, crevassed rock pile and began to pick his way down the slope. The teenage James Kirk went past him in an agile series of jumps and leaps, although he managed to restrain the enthusiastic whoops that would have doubtless accompanied his downward rush in any other circumstance.

  After a moment, a second spot of light crept over to augment Sulu’s, closely followed by a third. He glanced up, half-expecting to see the older versions of himself and Chekov, but it was the younger Russian who joined him, followed by the stocky female security guard, Yuki Smith, whose stride seemed to be thrown out of balance by the heavy load of weapons and power-packs she carried. The three of them made better progress by combining the glows of their lights, but they were still the last ones to the bottom. Even Giotto managed to get there before they did despite being burdened with a phaser rifle, and the older Sulu and Chekov were already striding [145] off toward the exit, dimly aglow with Sanner’s and Spock’s waiting lights.

  “Sorry, guys,” said Smith ruefully. Most of their pauses had been made to give her better light so she could find secure footing down the slope. “You can go ahead of me now if you want.”

  “No, thanks.” It wasn’t easy to see the younger Chekov’s face under the steady flame of his carbide lamp, but his voice was dry. “I’d rather talk to you than to myself, if you understand my meaning.”