STAR TREK: TOS - The Janus Gate, Book One - Present Tense

by L. A. Graf

  “Do we have a problem, Mr. Sanner?” The glow from Kirk’s carbide lamp brightened as he turned up his water drip, then swung around until it faced the cave specialist. Still, it barely made enough of a dent in the darkness around them to reveal the frown on Sanner’s mud-streaked face. “Have we lost the trail of Survey Team Three?”

  “Not exactly,” said the geologist.

  “Then what exactly have we done?” Kirk inquired. It was hard to see his expression beneath the glare of the carbide lamp, but Uhura knew that tone well enough to straighten up automatically, even in the darkness.

  “We ran out of cave,” Sanner said baldly. “This passage ends around the corner.”

  [62] The silence that followed his remark was the thudding kind Uhura usually associated with stand-offs between groups of armed men. Oddly enough, it was the quiet young ensign who broke it. “So we’re on another sidetrack?” he asked stoically, pulling out his notebook and flipping through to find the most recent page.

  “No.” Sanner took off his helmet and turned it around in his hands, slanting it down along the wall of the vertical fracture. About a meter in front of Uhura, the unmistakable print of a human hand gleamed on the rock face, outlined by diverted runnels of cave water. “Survey Team Three came through here. They left prints on the travertine all the way to the end.” He put his helmet back on with a snort. “I thought Jaeger knew better than to let them touch flowstone with their bare hands like that. It poisons the crystal growth faces and kills the formation.”

  “Maybe they’d lost their lights by the time they got here,” Angela Martine said quietly. “Holding onto the wall might have been their only way to keep from falling.”

  “But if they came this way, where are they now?” Wright asked. “We went down every cave passage that looked like it might be worth following. Every time, we either came to a dead end or saw no evidence that Survey Team Three had gone any farther than we did.”

  “So they’re not behind us,” Uhura said. “And if they can’t be ahead of us, either—”

  “—then there’s only one place they can be.” The geologist leaned out over the chasm, angling his carbide lamp to catch the narrow ribbons of water that spilled off the ledge, disappearing into glitter and dark. “Which is why I wish I could see how far down this goes.”

  [63] Kirk leaned over, too, adding his carbide glow to Sanner’s. The mist-filled depths stayed obstinately dark. “Why would they have climbed down there?”

  “To see if it goes,” Sanner said, as if that explained everything. Their silence must have told him that it didn’t. “There’s lots of times like this when you’re exploring caves and it looks like you’ve come to a dead end. But if you just keep poking around in the little cracks and roof holes and pinches, you can get through to whole new sections of the cave.”

  “This,” said Kirk wryly, “is not what I’d call a little crack.”

  “No,” Sanner admitted. “If there was any other hole that looked more promising, I’d be squirming through it now. But we didn’t see any good side passages coming here, and there’s no use going up a vertical solution fracture. It always just narrows upward, and it hardly ever leads to another section of the cave.” He jerked a thumb at the water cascading from their rock ledge. “The real cave development is always down where that stuff goes. That’s where rocks get dissolved the most.”

  “And you think Lieutenant Jaeger would have known that?” Kirk asked.

  “We’ve gone caving together on at least a dozen planets, sir. I know if I’d gotten to this point and still had my lights, I’d be trying to get a little farther through.” Sanner sighed and wriggled out of his backpack. “I hate to throw our one rope ladder down there when we don’t know how deep it is or how jagged the rocks are at the bottom, but the damn tricorder can’t scan past the end of [64] my arm. We’ll have to hope this is close to where those guys went down—”

  “Wait, Mr. Sanner.” Kirk sounded thoughtful. “You say you’ve caved with Jaeger. If he had any inkling that his lights and survey instruments were on the verge of losing power, would he have still gone down into this fracture?”

  “No, sir,” Sanner said emphatically. “No way. The first rule of cave exploration is to head back out at the first sign of anything going wrong.”

  “So if we’re sure Survey Team Three went down this crack, that means they still had full power for their lights.” Kirk reached up to tap the lamp on his helmet, making some of the rocks inside rattle and hiss out more of their flammable gas. “Our carbide lamps are probably one-tenth as strong as the photon lanterns the survey team carried. They must have been able to see much further down, maybe even spotted an opening ...”

  “Possibly, sir,” Sanner agreed. “But we can’t see what they saw. Our best bet is to go down right here, so we don’t miss their trail.”

  “You’re assuming the bottom is accessible everywhere.” Kirk glanced along the narrow rock ledge they stood on, then moved to stamp his foot down hard on an out-thrust part of the rim. A large section of rock broke off and plummeted into the crevice below. It vanished into the mist and darkness, but they clearly heard the splash that echoed up after it. It sounded as if had hit fairly deep water. “I’d rather not have to swim once we got down there, Mr. Sanner.”

  “Me, either.” Sanner scrubbed thoughtfully at his chin, leaving mud streaks from his caving gloves. [65] “Maybe we could lower the rope with someone on it in a couple places, to see how accessible the bottom is.”

  “I’ve got a better idea.” Kirk held out a hand to Martine and she gave him the phaser she was still holding. “Let’s charge up three or four of the weapons and fire some wide-angle sprays at low power into the crevice. They should be able to light the place up so we can see what Survey Team Three saw.” He handed the weapon he was holding back to the young ensign. “Lieutenant Uhura, you take one, too. I want you and Mr. Chekov to concentrate your firing on the upper parts of the fracture. Ensign Martine and I will aim for the lower, narrow parts.”

  “Aye sir.” Uhura took the phaser and charge unit Martine had handed to Wright. She started to insert the charge unit into the butt of the weapon, then paused. “Power up now, or on your signal, Captain?”

  “On my signal, for maximum illumination,” Kirk said. Out of the corner of her eye, Uhura saw the young command-track ensign hurriedly eject his charge unit, then stand with his shoulders a little hunched, as if he expected to be called on his mistake. She wished she had a chance to tell him that on a real landing mission like this, he wasn’t being graded on his performance.

  Martine handed the captain a phaser, then extracted a fourth one for herself. “We could spread out a little farther, sir, and still overlap our light on wide-spray,” she suggested to Kirk.

  The captain nodded. “Mr. Chekov, go a few meters back down the passage. Lieutenant Uhura, follow Mr. Sanner a few meters further ahead. Fire on my signal.”

  Uhura moved along the ledge toward the shoulder of [66] wet rock at its end, leaving just enough room for Sanner to stand and watch the light show. She turned and adjusted the phaser, then aimed it toward the upper parts of the chasm. “Ready, sir,” she said, and heard a Russian-accented voice echo hers from further down the passage.

  “On my mark,” said Kirk. “Fire.”

  The wide-spray beam of the phasers dazzled Uhura’s sight for a moment. Her eyes quickly adjusted to the brighter light, but all she could see inside the chasm was a chandelier glitter of falling water drops and the mirror-sharp reflection of standing water below. The walls on both sides of the vertical cavern looked as smooth and opaque as poured milk.

  “Nothing here, or around the corner,” reported Sanner.

  “Cease fire,” Kirk ordered. It took Uhura’s eyes longer to adjust back down to the warm carbide glow of their helmet lamps. She glanced at her phaser’s charge readout and could barely believe what it told her.

  “Captain, my power unit is nearly drained!”

  �
�Mine, too.” Kirk undipped the power cell from his phaser, frowning. “We must be close to whatever is leaching power out of them. How many more cells do we have, Ensign Martine?”

  “Fifteen, sir.”

  “Then from now on, we’d better fire only two at a time.” Kirk turned to retrace their steps. The glow of his carbide lamp sketched a glittering path along the wet walls, then snagged on the motionless figure at the end of the line. “Is something wrong, Mr. Chekov?”

  “No, sir.” The young man hurriedly turned to go, then [67] glanced over his shoulder with the tentative look that ensigns often got when they weren’t sure they had the right to state their own opinions. “Begging the captain’s pardon—is it my imagination, sir, or has it gotten colder in here since we fired the phasers?”

  “Colder?” Kirk repeated. “Why would it get colder?”

  Uhura paused to let Wright take her time on a particularly wet and treacherous part of the ledge. As soon as she stopped moving, she felt it, too—a chilly bite in the dank air that hadn’t been there before. “I think Mr. Chekov’s right, Captain,” she said, and got a grateful look from the young ensign. “I feel colder, too.”

  “We might be passing an opening to another cave passage. Sometimes, the first clue is that you feel a draft.” Sanner peeled off one of his caving gloves and waved his bare hand through the air as they continued along the ledge. “It does feel like it’s getting colder along here. Captain, could we fire the phasers again?”

  Kirk took the power cell Martine held out to him, and passed it along to Chekov. “Mr. Chekov, you aim high. Ensign Martine, you’ll fire with him. Lieutenant Uhura and I will wait for the next section of cave. Ready?”

  “Aye, sir,” said Martine and Chekov in unison.

  “Fire.”

  Once again, the brilliant white of phaser light flashed out in the cavern, chasing all the shadows out of the dangling stalactites and turning the blackness below them into a glittering fountain of white falling water. Uhura scanned the rock walls on either side of the cascade, and saw only long spans of travertine laced with occasional balconies of thicker flowstone. She craned her head to [68] see if there was a pool of water in the bottom of this section, too, but before she could even catch a glimpse of mirrored reflection, the phaser light flickered and died.

  “The power cells drained faster this time, Captain,” Martine reported grimly.

  “I noticed. Mr. Sanner, any sign of a passage?”

  “No.” The geologist motioned them to continue onward. “But there’s got to be one around here somewhere, sir. Feel how cold it’s getting?”

  No one answered him, because no one needed to. The cave air, formerly cool and soft with underground humidity, now held an almost wintry bite. Uhura shivered, chilled for a moment before the temperature-sensing fibers of her cave jumper measured the change and adjusted their insulating capacity upward.

  “I know it wasn’t this cold the first time we came through here, because I’m not sweating at all this time.” Wright glanced down into the chasm beneath their feet and grimaced. “And I’m just as scared now as I was then.”

  Angela Martine cleared her throat. “Could we be affecting the temperature by firing the phasers? Maybe we’re helping to open the cave up further every time we fire.”

  “Or maybe the phasers are catalyzing some kind of reaction in the transperiodic ore deposit,” Sanner suggested. “If it’s undergoing some kind of chemical change, that could explain the weird subspace static and power fluxes that we’re seeing down here.”

  “Be that as it may,” Kirk said crisply. “It doesn’t alter the fact that some of my crewmen are trapped somewhere inside this cave, and we have to find out where [69] they are. We need to keep firing the phasers, even if it does make us a little colder than we were before.” They rounded another curving twist in the passage, and the sound of falling water grew fainter below. “This seems like a good spot to check. Lieutenant Uhura, are you ready?”

  Uhura slid the new power cell Martine handed her into her phaser, leaving it just short of making contact. “Ready, sir.”

  “Fire on my mark.” Kirk lifted his own phaser, then slapped the power cell into it in one smooth motion. “Fire!”

  Uhura tamped the power cell down and triggered the wide-angle phaser spray. Her eyes seemed to adapt faster this time to the white dazzle of light—or was that dazzle a little less white than it had been before? It was certainly shorter. Before Uhura even had time to glance away from the phaser’s rapidly falling power indicator, the bright light flickered and faded away. As it did, a distinct arctic chill swept through the cave, accompanied by an almost subliminal crackling. Uhura could feel her cave jumper hum with the effort to tighten its weave even further and maintain her body heat against the sapping cold.

  “I think I saw something,” Sanner said urgently. He leaned out over the chasm and angled his carbide reflector downward, but the hazy light made no headway against the darkness below. “There’s still water down there, but there seemed to be some kind of opening along the side wall, just a little further down the way we came.”

  “Let’s see if we can get one more good look at it.” Kirk held out his hand to Martine for another power [70] cell, then fired his phaser in the direction Sanner pointed. The flash was fierce but swift, more like the glare of a bursting photon torpedo than a weapon designed for hours of steady use. In that burst of light, however, even Uhura caught a glimpse of the shadowy arch of something that looked almost like a window set into the travertine walls of the fracture.

  “That’s it.” Sanner’s breath misted in the frigid air, frosting immediately into tiny ice crystals. He seemed too excited to care. “I know Jaeger would climb down to look at that, if he still had lots of power.”

  “Then that’s where we’re going.” Kirk pocketed his phaser, and swung around on the ledge, gesturing Chekov to begin moving again. Their carbide lights seemed to Uhura to spark an unusually bright glitter off the cave walls near them. She froze abruptly, her muscles locking up before her brain had even finished putting together bits and pieces of what she’d glimpsed.

  “Careful!” she called out, when she finally realized what she had seen. “The run-off is starting to freeze—”

  Her warning came too late. She saw one of Kirk’s boots slip out from under him, but the captain’s quick reflexes let him grab onto the travertine wall and pull himself back to safety. The young ensign named Chekov wasn’t so lucky. Both feet slipped out from under him on the ice-slicked ledge and his grab at the wall caught only air. With a sound more like a gasp than a yell, he went plunging down into darkness.

  Kirk crooked his fingers into the wall’s irregularities, suspended his breathing, and willed his weight to drift [71] forward over his toes instead of backward into the abyss. He hovered with his cheek not quite touching the slick travertine only because the alignment of muscles and bones had accidentally placed him here. As if to punctuate the delicacy of his position, he heard the fragile shattering of the water’s surface somewhere behind him and unknowably far below. He intuited what had happened even though he didn’t dare crane his head around to see. “Sanner!”

  He didn’t have to ask the question outright—the geologist wasted neither words nor time. “The kid’s down.” The scrape and clatter of boots and equipment belts as Sanner scrambled to some new position. “I can’t see his light.” Another moment’s pause, this time filled with a brisk ripping sound as Sanner tore open his pack. “It’ll take me a minute to tie off the ladder—”

  Then there was no point spending even longer discussing it. “Do it. Meet us down there as close to Jaeger’s exit as you can.”

  “Captain, I wouldn’t—!” One of the woman. Kirk assumed it was Wright. It didn’t matter—before she’d finished her warning, he’d let his balance deviate the necessary hair’s breadth. He was already so close to falling that the mere thought of doing it made it so.

  The moment’s free fall rushed past more qu
ickly than Kirk expected. He had time for one instant of surreal panic as the total darkness swallowed his lantern flame in the wind of his fall, then razor-bright cold crashed around him and sucked him into silence.

  His whole body seized once, violently, in reaction. He’d clenched his teeth before impact with the water, so [72] was only able to take in an agonizing noseful when his lungs tried to gasp. He thought about Chekov, unprepared for both the drop and the landing, and felt a pulse of adrenaline bring his body back under his control. He tried to remember how long someone could go without breathing while immersed in frigid water—he knew it was longer than under normal circumstances, but the exact figure wasn’t the sort of detail he’d thought to memorize in his capacity as a starship commander. His lack of foresight irritated him now.

  The smooth irregularity of flowstone bumped against his hip. Twisting to find the solid bottom with one hand, Kirk brought his feet under him and pushed off. But instead of breaking into air, he glided a too-long distance only to fumble headfirst into another expanse of rock. He felt his way in the direction all his instincts said was upward, found himself jammed shoulder-to-shoulder between two equally impenetrable surfaces, surged away from that confinement into limbo again. Why hadn’t he anticipated this disorienting darkness? Too used to waterproof lights. It hadn’t even occurred to him that carbide would be useless underwater. The edge of panic he’d tasted earlier flooded his mouth, threatened to ambush his common sense and leave him flailing. Kirk fought the animal impulse to gasp for air—any air!—and concentrated instead on stilling his thoughts and calming down his pounding heart.

  Common sense. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t hear, he couldn’t breathe, but gravity still functioned. Kirk’s body and his equipment pack were both heavier than water, which meant they would sink straight down, [73] given half a chance. Expelling the stale air he’d been hoarding, Kirk tried to notice the feel of the bubbles as they rolled past his face, tried to sense toward which direction they were rising. He couldn’t. So he slipped his pack off his back and dangled it from one hand, barely maintaining a hold on its strap so that gravity could take it from him and draw it away. If this didn’t work, there were no other options. He’d blown away any second chances with his last lungful of air.