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

by L. A. Graf

  “If for any reason you can’t stay in command of the bridge, lass,” he told Uhura blearily, “for God’s sake, just don’t leave Riley with the conn. After what I’ve been through the past two days, I don’t want to have to cold-start those engines ever again!”

  Uhura glanced from the communications station over to the helm, hoping Kevin Riley hadn’t heard that jaundiced comment. The young navigator’s defensively hunched shoulders told her that he had. It was hard not to feel sorry for him. While other victims of the Psi 2000 virus such as Sulu and Spock had spent the last two days immersed in the urgent quest to recover their missing captain, Kevin Riley had remained cooped up on the Enterprise, with nothing to do but mope over his recent all-too-public escapade in the engine room. As soon as this crisis was over, Uhura thought, she would have to invite Riley out to dinner with some friends who could cheer him up. Robert Tomlinson and Angela Martine would be willing to help, she was sure, and perhaps she could ask Ensign Chekov and that young security guard friend of his, Yuki Smith.

  [173] Although if the time bubble they were in collapsed before they managed to get Captain Kirk back, there was no guarantee any of them would still be members of this crew. Or even still be alive.

  Uhura watched the turbolift doors slide shut behind the departing chief engineer and chief medical officer, then toggled a familiar switch on her communications station. “Lieutenant Hadley to the bridge.”

  “Aye, sir,” said the relief communications officer with surprising promptness. His next words explained why. “I’m on the ready deck now. I’ll be there in just a minute.”

  Uhura set down her portable frequency monitor, wondering wryly if her junior officers had suspected she would soon be needing a replacement. No doubt they considered her a candidate for getting yanked off the bridge, too, after the exhausting day and night she’d spent on Tlaoli. McCoy had indeed scrutinized her very narrowly when he’d first stepped onto the bridge, but he must have had enough faith in the restorative powers of his awful-tasting nutritional supplement to leave her in command.

  The turbolift hissed again, and a sandy-haired young man stepped out, still hurriedly adjusting the collar of his uniform. “Lieutenant Hadley reporting to the bridge, sir,” he said before he even noticed the empty captain’s chair.

  “Acknowledged, Lieutenant.” Uhura smiled at his startled expression. “You’ll handle communications [174] for the remainder of this shift. I’m on the conn until further notice.”

  “Aye, sir.” Hadley waited politely for her to vacate her seat, but Uhura noticed he was already scanning the frequency monitors to see what channels she had open. “Anything special to watch for?”

  “Channel three is preset for the emergency communicator Mr. Spock took with him to the planet,” Uhura told him. “It’s for monitoring purposes only. We’re under strict orders not to hail the landing party, so the Shechenag won’t suspect we’ve sent anyone to the planet. Conduct routine scans of all other hailing frequencies and monitor anything that seems like it might be Shechenag transmissions. I’ve downloaded as much of their language as the main computer could decipher into translator program nine.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Uhura gave her boards one last assessing glance as she stood, but everything was still as it had been when Spock and Sulu had departed for Tlaoli: all subspace frequencies silent except for the natural interference that howled and chattered across the spectrum. If the Shechenag ship had left any of its crew down on the planet to guard the Janus Gate, they apparently saw no need to check in with them. Between the alien silence and Mr. Spock’s ban on landing party reports, Uhura had not really had much work to do.

  And now she was going to have even less.

  Uhura lowered herself into the captain’s chair and flexed her fingers on its broad armrests, feeling the [175] living warmth beneath the surface. The entire command console was packed with computer circuits, giving the officer who sat there command and control of the entire starship. Despite all that power humming beneath her fingers, however, Uhura had nothing to do but gaze up at the silent copper planet on the viewscreen and wonder how long it was going to take the Shechenag to work their way back around to this side of the world. When that occurred—if it occurred—her service as substitute captain would really begin. In the meantime, she didn’t even have to work at keeping the captain’s seat warm.

  Uhura had always known that the captain’s job was the hardest on the bridge. What she hadn’t realized before was that it could also be the most physically excruciating. With no screens to watch or instruments to monitor, the ship’s commander had no occupation for those times when tensions were high but absolutely nothing needed to be done. Within just a few moments, Uhura caught herself tapping her fingers restively against the chair’s armrests. She bit her lip, forcing her hands to relax and be still. Bored or not, she had to project the image of an alert and attentive commander, or risk losing the confidence of her crew.

  Uhura had always thought Captain Kirk’s tendency to stride around the bridge and consult his officers at their stations just reflected his own innate energy. Now she was starting to wonder if it was a deliberate strategy for staying watchful and alert.

  [176] “Any change in the ship’s position, Mr. Riley?” she asked the lieutenant in an attempt to fill the silence.

  “Nothing unusual, sir.” The navigator’s rigid shoulders relaxed a little as he focused on answering her question. “We’re exactly on station over the planet’s equatorial plane.”

  “No major gravitational fluctuations?”

  “Just the standard bumps and potholes.” Relief pilot Lieutenant Alden had clearly filled in for Sulu before, probably while the chief helmsman had been lost on Basaraba. His coffee-colored hands moved confidently over the helm controls, correcting for Tlaoli’s unstable gravity fields. “In fact, the perturbations actually seem to be dying out a little.”

  Uhura studied the glittering force-field lines netting their way around Tlaoli, now almost complete except for the darkened patch Spock and Sulu had deactivated. Was it her imagination, or had a pearly luster begun to shine above the ancient planet’s rust-red atmosphere as the Shechenag continued placing satellites on the opposite side of the world? “Maybe part of what the defensive barrier does is keep the planet from dragging any more spaceships down to its surface,” she speculated. “That would prevent them from being destroyed by the force field when they were helpless to escape.”

  Riley gave her a curious look over his shoulder. “I thought the Shechenag were just trying to protect the timestream, sir. Why should they care if ships are destroyed by their force field, as long as nobody makes it to the Janus Gate?”

  [177] “I don’t know,” Uhura admitted. “But we can’t assume we really understand them, Lieutenant, when we’ve barely been able to decode their language. Statements and actions that we’ve interpreted as hostile may not have been intended that way.”

  “I think we’re about to find out if that’s true, sir.” A red light flashed at Alden’s station. “I’ve got a proximity alert from the gravitational sensors. Something big is heading straight for us.”

  Uhura glanced across at Lieutenant Karen Tracey, filling in for Spock at the science panel. “Long-range scanner report.”

  “I’m not showing anything—wait, yes, I am.” The technician adjusted a control at her station, altering the image on the viewscreen to an enlarged quadrant of Tlaoli’s rusty disk. A familiar smudge of unlit black could just be seen crossing the dapple of distant stars. “Sorry, Lieutenant. The radiation from the force field lines completely swamped their ion output.”

  Uhura swung around toward Hadley at communications. “Open a channel to the Shechenag ship, using the same frequency as their previous communications.” She saw the young man’s hands slide across the controls as he obeyed her. “Engage the partial translator and run my voice through it before transmitting. Tell me when you’re ready.”

  “I’m ready now, sir.
”

  Uhura took a deep breath and turned back to the main viewscreen, in case the Shechenag opened a reply channel. “Four more hours are permitted for [178] our departure from this system,” she said, hoping the translator conveyed her attempt to be conciliatory. “We wait to see if our lost crewman returns. No hostility is intended.”

  There was a pause, then the viewscreen rippled to show the barren interior of the alien spacecraft’s bridge. The huddle of cybernetic bodies at the center of that simple space seemed a little smaller, as if some of the controlling aliens had been dispatched on other errands. Of those remaining, two had reared their mechanical suits up on jointed legs to reveal the actual alien bodies inside, agitated as goldfish in a dropped bowl.

  “This is all untruthful,” said one flat voice, immediately overlapped by a second.

  “This is not the native language. You have known our speech always.”

  “No.” Uhura tried to make her own voice just as flat and definitive as theirs. “Our translation device is new and incomplete. We made it to communicate better, to avoid hostility.”

  “Hostility commenced when you damaged the blocking sphere.” The first Shechenag waved several appendages, both real and robotic, to emphasize its point. The gestures seemed almost theatrically fierce in comparison with its toneless machine-generated voice. “We are Shechenag. We do not make war. This planet creates danger for all who come here. We create protection.”

  “Yes, we know.” Uhura swept her own hands out in [179] a placating gesture of her own, although she wasn’t sure the aliens would see or understand. She chose every word she spoke with care. “We do not wish your blocking sphere to be destroyed. The satellites which failed were destroyed by the alien machine down on the planet. We watched it drain their power.”

  That sparked a flurry of twitches and color changes inside several robotic torsos as their translucent occupants erupted into hisses and clatters. None of the comments were turned into English by the Shechenag’s translator. Uhura glanced over her shoulder at Hadley, but the junior communications officer shook his head. Their own rough translating device couldn’t sort out all the overlapping conversations well enough to decipher them.

  The clattering uproar finally died away to a last few cryptic utterances: “Unsure, insecure, observe.” “Remove destabilizing force.” and “Protect. Protect only.” The last comment seemed to be the most popular among the joint commanders of the alien ship; several of them lifted and dropped their jointed mechanical arms in a rumble of approval. Their small glimmering bodies turned pale, then clear again, as if they had voiced their emotional reaction to Uhura’s words and were now calm.

  “Repairs will be made to complete the blocking sphere,” the first Shechenag said while others detached various insectoid robots from their bodies and sent them scuttling out of sight, perhaps to communicate their new plan of action to the rest of their crew. [180] “No approach or maneuver will be permitted at this time. Immediate departure from the system is advised.”

  Uhura took a deep breath, knowing that this was the really risky part. “We prefer to wait for our missing crewman. If he can return through the alien time transporter, he may be able to use a vessel already on the planet to rejoin us.”

  There was an alarmingly long pause, but no flutter of colorful emotion that she could see inside the translucent tank. There was a stillness to the Shechenag spokesman’s cybernetic casing that Uhura thought might indicate either confusion or puzzlement. “No return is possible without intervention in the timestream,” the alien said at last. “No intervention is possible without activation of the prohibited device.”

  “Yeah,” Riley said softly, beneath his breath so the translator pickup wouldn’t catch the words. “Don’t think about that too hard, okay?”

  Uhura hushed him with a restraining hand on his shoulder, and only then noticed that she had stood up from the captain’s console without thinking and come forward to the helm to confront their opponents, just as Captain Kirk often did. She tried to think the way he would have, too, rapidly assessing and discarding the various excuses they could use to remain in the Tlaoli system without arousing the Shechenag’s suspicions. She remembered the comment one of them had made during their own [181] discussion: unsure, insecure, observe. It gave Uhura the rationale she was looking for.

  “This is understood,” she said. “We will make no maneuvers or approaches to the planet. But if it is permitted, we wish to observe the completion of the blocking sphere to assure our leaders that no further disruptions will occur in the timestream.”

  There was a brief exchange of clicks among the group crouched around the speaker, then its translucent tank lifted so that the naked swimmer inside could look more directly at Uhura through whatever version of a viewscreen the cybernetic aliens used. “This is logical and permitted,” the Shechenag said. “Completion of the shield is estimated in point zero six five planetary rotations.”

  And with that, the viewscreen blanked out for a moment, then returned to its normal display of space dusted with stars and Tlaoli’s sunlit face shining like a polished copper coin in the distance. Uhura frowned up at the ancient planet, but her tired brain just wouldn’t do the math computation she needed. She finally turned to Lieutenant Karen Tracey.

  “How long is point zero six five rotations in our units?”

  The science technician made Uhura jealous by not even glancing at her monitor before she answered. “Given the length of Tlaoli’s day, approximately an hour and a half, sir.”

  Uhura bit her lip again, this time to suppress an exclamation that it wouldn’t be dignified to make in [182] front of her crew. She watched the dark smudge of the alien starship cross the stars, then leap into high relief as it passed over Tlaoli’s shining surface and headed for the barren spot where ten satellites had been deactivated less than an hour ago. So far, they’d been successful at keeping the presence of their landing party concealed, but that wasn’t going to do them the slightest bit of good if the shuttle found itself trapped under a completed force shield.

  None of Uhura’s options now were appealing. If she allowed the Shechenag to go about their work, the shuttle might make it out in the meantime without any intervention on her part. But if they didn’t, the Enterprise would be forced to blast apart the protective blockade to free their shuttle crew. There was no way to know if they could destroy this unknown alien technology, and even if they did, such an overt act of hostility might gain the Federation a new and dangerous enemy in this sector of space. On the other hand, if Uhura intervened before the blockade was completed, they would probably still make enemies of the Shechenag and possibly endanger their landing party even more. As fearful as the ancient aliens were of time disruptions, she wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to seize the shuttle as it left Tlaoli, or even tried to attack the Janus Gate itself.

  For one craven moment, Uhura considered asking Hadley to summon Commander Scott to the conn, but she knew the exhausted chief engineer wouldn’t be any better than she was at sorting through their limited options. With a sigh, she sank back into the [183] captain’s chair and tried to make herself think like Kirk.

  “Lieutenant Alden, I don’t suppose you observed any of the maneuvers Commander Spock and Lieutenant Sulu used to deactivate those defensive satellites.”

  The relief pilot threw an almost incredulous look over his shoulder. “Sir, I wouldn’t have missed that show for all the dilithium on Vulcan! When the word went out about what they were planning to do, the entire helm section headed for the auxiliary bridge and rigged the viewscreen down there to watch the lieutenant fly that mission.”

  Uhura gave him a somber look. “Do you think we could carry out that maneuver again if the Shechenag close up the gap in the satellite network?”

  Alden didn’t even hesitate. “Never,” he said. “I didn’t even believe the lieutenant could fly that well off instruments until I saw him do it. And no one else on board can handle this ship the way he
can. No one.”

  Kevin Riley swung around from the navigation station to join the discussion. “There also isn’t anyone else on board besides Commander Spock who could figure out the transporter angles to that kind of precision. Those satellites are only about the size of an escape pod, and right now we’re about ten thousand kilometers away from them. Aiming just to hit them would be hard enough—trying to bounce the beam off them and then down to a precise spot on the planet’s surface is statistically impossible.”

  [184] Uhura frowned up at the viewscreen. A tiny puff of reflected sunlight beside the Shechenag ship marked the launch of a replacement satellite, and a moment later she saw an iridescent strand of light shoot out across the stretch of empty copper sky that marked their landing party’s escape route. Impossible or not, she had to make sure the hole in that barrier stayed open at all costs.

  Because if it closed, they’d not only lose Captain Kirk and the six crewmen who’d risked their lives to save him, they’d also lose their entire future.

  Chapter Eight

  SULU STARED for a long time at the empty space on the far side of the Janus Gate, as if just by staring hard enough he could somehow make Chief Giotto be there, crumpled to his knees perhaps, or obscured by the fading blue glow of the alien device. But no matter how long he looked, the space that had just a few minutes ago been occupied by young Kirk, older Chekov and older Sulu—and by the man who was supposed to maintain their link between the past and the present—stood completely and impossibly vacant.

  “What the hell happened?” The voice that broke the stunned silence was Banner’s, and it sounded just as shaken as Sulu felt. “Where’s Giotto?”

  The tall and silent figure on the other side of the Janus Gate finally stirred, glancing down at the alien [186] control board in front of him. “It appears the Janus Gate has displaced him to the past along with the others. The power overload must have thrown it into full transport mode without my instructing it to do so.”