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

by L. A. Graf

  Yuki Smith leaned in between Sulu and Chekov, bumping both of them in the back with her phaser rifle. “Does that mean there’s another Mr. Giotto back in the cave where we were stuck for so long?” she asked worriedly.

  “Possibly. The gate was programmed only for viewing mode ... but the power surge may have triggered an actual replacement.” The noticeable hesitation in Spock’s voice made Sulu wonder if the Vulcan was less sure of his deductions than usual. “Mr. Sanner, you can move more quickly through the caves than anyone else. Check the healing chamber for a light inside one of the columns.” There was another, even longer pause, then an audible intake of breath before Spock resumed. “Mr. Giotto remembered being badly wounded at the time of the native uprising on Grex.”

  “On my way.” The geologist headed off into the darkness with long, loping strides. It took a long time for the clattering sound of his footsteps to fade into the sound of dripping water and uneasy silence. Sulu watched Spock for a long time, then glanced back across the chamber at Chekov and Smith, seeing the same question in their eyes that he was feeling. Why wasn’t Spock doing anything, or issuing further orders? It looked for all the world as if the Vulcan had frozen into ice at his station, although, in fact, the [187] Janus chamber was getting warmer and warmer all the time. Had something happened to him, perhaps some side effect of subspace radiation or the last treacherous snap of a rent tearing through space and time?

  “Mr. Spock?” Sulu took a cautious step out into the chamber. The curtains of blue light that had billowed around the Janus Gate had at first seemed to be completely gone, but now they looked like they might be coalescing again in the darkness. A damp breath blew on Sulu’s frost-burned face, and he stiffened in alarm until he realized what he was feeling was a cascade of mist from melting ice. The nano-woven fibers of his caving suit squirmed against his skin as they condensed down to a thinner and more water-repellent foam. Beads of moisture were already glittering on the suit’s outer surface, and runnels dripped off his helmet from a layer of frost he hadn’t even known was there.

  “Commander Spock, are you all right?” It hadn’t seemed odd at first that the Vulcan had stayed at his post beside the Janus Gate, since there was always the chance Giotto would reappear and Spock would need to adjust the controls to bring their version of Kirk back with him. But now that the device had clearly lost most of its stored power, the science officer’s continuing stillness was beginning to alarm Sulu.

  There was no answer. Sulu took another step out into the mist, then another. Nothing happened, so he edged around the side of the chamber in the same direction Spock had taken.

  [188] “Lieutenant Sulu!” The note of concern in that Russian voice stopped Sulu in his tracks. He glanced back over his shoulder at Chekov and Smith, barely visible now except for the misty gleams of their carbide lights. “Watch out for the Shechenag robots, sir. Mr. Spock stepped on one with a cutting blade, remember.”

  “Thanks, Ensign.” Sulu angled his carbide light down toward his feet and saw a crumpled heap of mechanical limbs a half meter in front of him. He stepped over it carefully and continued on his way, as far as he remembered the Vulcan going before he turned to approach the alien time machine along its corridor of safety. Although the Janus Gate was now lit only by the dimmest of flickers at its heart, Sulu paused to scan the ground again and see if he could find any footprints or tracks in the icy crust.

  What he saw through the flowing mist made his eyes narrow in dismay. A line of dark smudges ran across the ice, tracing a path from where he stood to the tall, silent figure beside the Janus Gate. When Sulu bent down to touch one of those marks, the frozen slush he brought up on his gloved finger glittered a distinctive green in the glow of his carbide. It was the color of Vulcan blood.

  “Mr. Spock?”

  Still no reply. Sulu followed the line of bloody footprints toward the first officer, feeling apprehension thud like stones inside his gut. If they lost Spock as well as Giotto, any hope of retrieving Captain Kirk was truly lost ... but the closer Sulu came, [189] the more apparent it was that Spock had not been pulled into the Gate’s time-warp nor made catatonic by some unknown side effect of its use. The Vulcan’s eyes were closed and his angular face was deeply intent, as if he were meditating on something profound. Sulu paused an arm’s length away, remembering stories he had heard about the nearly mystical ability of Vulcans to survive even severe injuries. Maybe Spock’s meditation had something to do with that.

  “Is the commander all right?” That was Smith’s anxious voice, echoing oddly through the curdled mist.

  “I think so,” Sulu said. “He looks like he’s in some kind of trance right now.” Sulu settled himself to wait where he was, not wanting to approach the Janus Gate any closer, yet not feeling right about leaving the Vulcan alone in this defenseless condition. “I’m not going to bother him. It’s not like we can do anything but wait and see if another Giotto came out through the Janus Gate.”

  “What will it mean, if he did?” Chekov asked. “Can we send him back to Grex once he’s healed, and then get the captain back along with our version of Mr. Giotto?”

  “Maybe ... but if the younger version of Giotto goes back healed instead of wounded, we’ll have changed our timeline again. We’ll just have to hope that’s not as big a change as taking Captain Kirk out of it completely.” Sulu was starting to see why the Shechenag had insisted it was impossible to repair [190] damage to any timeline. Thinking about the cybernetic aliens reminded him abruptly that with all of the Janus Gate’s stolen power discharged, the way was once again open for them to invade the caverns. “Don’t forget to keep an eye on the ceiling in case the Shechenag decide to drop in on us,” he reminded the junior officers.

  “We can’t see the ceiling through the fog, sir,” Chekov pointed out. Despite the tension, Sulu found himself smiling, just a little, at the young ensign’s unfailing earnestness.

  “Well, just keep an eye on whatever you can see up there. And let’s not talk anymore. If we’re quiet, we should be able to hear those robots of theirs clattering against the rocks long before we see them.”

  The two young Enterprise crewmen fell obediently silent, not even whispering to each other in the doorway. Sulu wished he could enforce the same order on the cavern itself. As the temperature climbed, the Janus chamber began to make an entire symphony of sounds: meltwater dripping from a thousand places, then rushing and gurgling its way farther underground, the slow groan and thunderous cracking of ice detaching from the walls. As the minutes passed, the noises echoed back from the rest of the frozen caverns as well, making Sulu wonder how Spock could keep himself tranced amid the din. The only warning he had that Zap Sanner was coming back were the yelps of surprise and dismay that [191] Smith and Chekov made when the geologist came plunging out of the dark conduit behind them.

  “Nothing.” The word was spit out between tearing gasps as the geologist caught at the edge of the cavern wall to support himself. He must have run at full speed to the breakdown cavern where the alien healing chambers were, Sulu realized, through passages filled with melting ice and mist. For a long time, Sanner didn’t manage to make any other sounds but gasps, but then he didn’t really need to. The bleakness in that single word had told them everything they needed to know.

  “You mean Mr. Giotto wasn’t there?” Smith asked anyway.

  Sulu could tell Sanner nodded because his carbide glow fell and lifted twice. But it took another few minutes for the geologist to regain enough breath for continuous speech. “There were no lights in any columns ... no versions of Giotto hiding anywhere in the cavern. I even checked the ropes up to the exit, but they were all still coated with frost. No one went out that way.”

  “Then Giotto wasn’t exchanged with his younger self,” Sulu reflected. “I guess that’s good, in a way. It means we won’t have changed the timeline any further, as long as we can still get Captain Kirk and Mr. Giotto back again from the past.”

  “But how
are we going to get them, sir?” Chekov demanded. “We don’t have anyone left who has a connection to Captain Kirk’s past—”

  [192] “Yes.” Spock’s voice echoed deep and strong as a church bell in the misty darkness. “We do.”

  Sulu took a step toward the Vulcan, seeing both alertness and pain in his expression. “Are you all right, Commander? Is there any medical treatment we can give you?”

  “None that will accomplish more than I have already done,” the science officer said calmly. “And it is far more important right now to address Ensign Chekov’s question. I believe there is another way for us to contact Captain Kirk and Chief Giotto, but there is one major impediment to our doing so.”

  Sulu glanced up toward the cavern’s ceiling, but saw no robotic intruders swarming down through the billowing fog. “What impediment is that?”

  “Power.” Spock gestured at the Janus Gate. Inside its gyroscopic arms, the light that had once been too brilliant to look directly at now flickered like a will-o’-the-wisp. “The device has used all the energy we channeled into it from the Shechenag satellites. Unless we find a way to recharge it, we will not be able to retrieve anyone from anywhere.”

  Between George Kirk and Antonio Giotto, Kirk had nearly fifty years of combined security experience at his disposal. As he watched them tease open the shielded Orion bulkhead using nothing but a Phaser’s tuning apparatus and George’s antique tricorder, Kirk realized that he’d never fully appreciated all the practical skills that came with a good security [193] specialist. Not in his own father, and certainly not in the interchangeable personnel he routinely ordered up as protection forces for his landing parties. These were handy men to have around. He hoped he’d have the opportunity to make better use of them in the future—any future.

  A single stony clunk! announced the separation of the door’s mammoth locking mechanism a mere fifteen minutes after George and Giotto had set to work on it. They backed away from the rapidly brightening entrance along with everyone else, Giotto quickly reassembling his phaser while George worked on realigning his tricorder to scan the freshly opened stash ahead of them.

  “Orion locks are so useless,” the older man remarked with a mixture of frustration and disgust. “If they didn’t use more shielding than God on anything they thought was important, they’d be robbed by their own slave races every ten minutes.”

  Apparently, that shielding was enough most of the time, though. Kirk doubted that most of the races who had access to an Orion stash possessed the sort of high-end lock-picking equipment George and Giotto had just used. The ruthless practicality that made Orions such formidable enemies in combat probably also kept them from wasting any more resources than necessary, whether it was on locks or lighting or personal hygiene. He was just glad someone in this Orion cabal had seen fit to keep a ship available as an escape route.

  [194] Mazelike corridors split in all directions just past the threshold of the hidden door, smooth and modern and drilled out of the surrounding rock with all the sturdy, joisted lack of aesthetics of a crude dilithium mine. Kirk wouldn’t have mistaken it for some service access to the underground Grexxen market even if he hadn’t seen the effort necessary just to get inside. There was the same faintly sulfurous odor as he’d smelled on the Orions themselves, and the glaringly bright overhead lights pulsed with the disturbing reddish cast of Orion’s native sun. Stepping around one of the many piles of crates and grav-sleds littering the corridor, Kirk glanced back at George and his tricorder. “Anything?”

  The older man studied the readout for a moment, then shook his head. “I think I’ve got a pretty clear map of the facility—the shielding’s all outside the main perimeter. I’m not getting any life-sign readings except for ours.”

  “What about the warp core?” Kirk asked.

  Another minute adjustment of the device’s sensors. “Still there.” He used the tricorder to point down one of several possible paths. “A little more than a kilometer, that way.”

  Giotto stayed close to George, keeping watch for unexpected booby traps or personnel while George led them deeper into the installation using nothing but the tricorder’s sensors. They stayed grouped together more closely now, since they no longer had the concealing space of the open marketplace, but they [195] were still careful to keep the boy near the center with the adult men stationed as armed guards all around.

  Kirk suspected the Orion tunnels weren’t as convoluted as they seemed, but it was hard to tell around the clutter all but blocking their progress. A few steps forward turned almost immediately into an extended wriggle between stacks of equipment and supplies, and it wasn’t always clear where they turned a corner or where they left the main conduit for one of its less crowded side branches. Shouldering aside a metal crate that looked almost like an upright coffin, Sulu mused aloud, “I wonder if the Orions are coming or going?”

  Giotto leaned back to help him steady the box before it swayed over on top of them all. “They left more than a year ago—I was with the team that tossed the last of them out.”

  Kirk saw George flick a curious frown over his shoulder at Giotto, and wondered himself which of his father’s young subordinates had grown up to be Kirk’s chief of security. After nineteen years, Kirk only remembered three or four of George’s team from Grex, and those faces were so clouded over by grief and guilt that he seldom thought about them before today. It disturbed him a little to realize how effortlessly the past could shield itself from the present.

  Turning back to his tricorder, George seemed to set aside the question of Giotto’s identity as yet another Special Forces enigma that he had no right to pursue. “He’s right—the last of the Orions supposedly shipped out fourteen months ago. And we’ve had the [196] whole planet locked down tight as a drum since then, to make sure nobody else tried to raid the contraband stashes the Orions left behind.” He shook his head definitively. “There’s no way the Orions or anybody else got a ship past us and landed under Sogo city without us knowing about it.”

  “Then these Orions have been here all along,” Chekov said.

  Giotto made a face that said he found the possibility unlikely. “But why? What’s in it for them to hide out underground on a planet they don’t even control anymore?”

  The lack of interest in Chekov’s shrug couldn’t have been more profound. “I’m just telling you the tactical realities, based on what you’re saying.” He stepped aside to glance down one of the side corridors, obviously more concerned with keeping watch than actually entering into this discussion. “I have no idea what the hell’s going on around here.”

  “No, he’s right,” George said thoughtfully as he picked his way around several piles of some unidentifiable ore. “If you think about it, it explains a lot. Ever since we got here, there’s always been a core of Vragax who refused to cooperate in the rebuilding process, no matter how hard Starfleet tried. They’d be part of negotiations with the Kozhu about how to structure a democratic government right up to the point when they just refused to come back to the table. No explanation given. Or they’d seem to agree to a division of arable land in the southern [197] hemisphere, then instigate nighttime raids on Kozhu settlements there.” He motioned for Giotto to help him open a wider path down the middle of the hall. “After fourteen months, we’d made next to no progress in getting this planet back on its feet as a free society, all thanks to them.”

  Kirk remembered his father’s angry tirades about the lack of native cooperation from the first time he’d been on Grex. As a boy, he’d always believed his father reacted with so much anger because he didn’t think the Federation should be on Grex to begin with, and so saw every setback in the restructuring process as proof that the Federation’s efforts were being wasted. It had never occurred to Kirk that the irritation George had expressed so freely in those days had been because he so badly wanted the mission to succeed and didn’t know how to make that happen.

  It was his younger self, though, who said with almost
adult clarity, “I guess they weren’t representing any real Vragax faction. The Orions were putting them up to it all along.”

  “We should have known the Orions wouldn’t give up the planet so easily.” It was the first time Kirk could remember hearing his father respond to anything his younger self said as though they were equals. “Hell, we should have known they’d try and sneak in the back door after we’d locked the front! When the violence broke out tonight, we all assumed the Vragax rebels had found a stash of Orion weapons we’d somehow overlooked. I mean, how [198] else could they get the gauss rifles and the sonic grenades and the microbolt that took down Maione’s shuttle? It never occurred to us that there had been Orions here the whole time, stirring up dissent and supplying a handful of troublemakers with weapons to guarantee the rebuilding process never got off the ground.”

  “I guess a few bad apples can ruin an entire planetary society.” Chekov heaved one of the abandoned grav-sleds upright, then caught it with one hand before it could drift any farther down the hall. “This is all very fascinating,” he said with a complete lack of sincerity, “but we still need to get you and your son off this planet.” He rolled one of the metal crates onto the waiting sled. “Can we save the history lesson until later?”

  Kirk nodded Giotto to stay close to George and the boy as they continued down the hall, then stepped forward to hold the sled steady while Chekov heaved another metal-sided crate on top of the first. “What are you doing?”

  “Assuming the Orions are going to come back at some point.” This time he waved for Kirk to help him lift a particularly heavy piece of strange equipment. “Once we find this ship, we still have to get into it and figure out if we can fly it. I thought slowing the Orions down might be a good idea.”