by L. A. Graf
Kirk didn’t feel the pack try to sink, only a vague tension in his arm in response to its heaviness. He counted his heartbeats to keep from focusing on the deepening burn in his airless lungs. One. Two. Three. The pack’s weight seemed to abate slightly, his floating body equalizing with its new lack of movement. Four. Five. Still gripping its strap in his fist, Kirk carefully brought his feet down to find the stone on either side of the sunken pack. This was bottom. This was down. He tipped his head back to face the darkness beyond his head. So this direction could only be up. Had to be up, or he and Chekov would drown down here forever and the ship would never recover their bodies.
Sixseveneight!
His heels struck hard into the rock, pistoning him toward air. Kirk thought he felt himself move upward, then jolted painfully as instead the pack was ripped from his grasp and his legs, shoulder, torso tangled sideways into rock that was both there and too rapidly falling away. A rumble like dull thunder, or distant rapids, exploded suddenly into the crash of water onto open stone as frigid air replaced freezing water. Kirk [74] gulped in a breath so cold and desperate it hurt, even as he realized that he was not only free of the water, he was falling.
Then he hit bottom for a second time, this time with all the force of gravitational acceleration. He tried to roll with the landing, but couldn’t time himself without being able to see the ground. The rock floor smashed away the breath he’d just taken, cracking against his helmet like a thrown boulder and battering him with a heavy curtain of water. He dragged himself over onto his belly and buried his face against his arms. He still couldn’t breathe, but at least he could avoid the irony of drowning while stretched out in the open air.
Faint movement, barely loud enough to hear over the cascading water, caught his attention from what seemed only a short distance away. Kirk pushed up on his elbows and turned to look out of instinct. Nothing. Only the same unyielding black that had enveloped him since his carbide snuffed out on the way down.
But he wasn’t underwater anymore. Or, at least, he didn’t have to be. Pulling himself up onto hands and knees, he crawled forward, away from the already-weakening torrent. High above him, the birdlike shrilling of whistles danced off the cave walls, punctuated by the occasional bellow of a masculine voice. As soon as I get my wind back, I’ll answer you, Kirk promised Sanner and the others. Although they sounded impossibly farther away now. Whatever he and Chekov had fallen through—however they had fallen through it—they were now several meters further down in a cave that had already swallowed one landing party.
[75] Nano-weave hugged him more tightly as he finally dragged himself completely free of the waterfall. It sounded like little more than a bathtub faucet turned up to maximum now, still rumbling and threatening, but rapidly losing the ability to damage anything. Or so Kirk hoped. Clawing loose the chin strap, he rolled onto his knees and leveled the helmet across his lap. Cold fingers found the lumpy outlines of his carbide lantern, traced it until he found the round reflector and its attached striking mechanism. A quick sniff verified that the distinctively acid smell of acetylene still hissed from the pilot hole, but he had to thumb the striking wheel five or six times before the waterlogged apparatus finally rewarded him with a spark. Light shattered the darkness with a tiny puff!, and a flame no longer than the end of Kirk’s thumb pirouetted in front of the shiny reflector like a vain ballerina. The illumination was so welcome, he didn’t even resent the pain it drove through his dark-adapted eyes.
After long moments of darkness, the tiny shred of fire might have been a supernova. Kirk spotted Chekov immediately, barely raised up on his elbows not far from where a steady rivulet of water still drizzled from the ceiling. At least he was breathing, Kirk thought with almost dizzying relief. At least he didn’t have to write a letter home to the boy’s poor mother, explaining how he’d dragged her son halfway across the galaxy just to drown him on the very first planet he visited.
“Mr. Chekov?” Kirk didn’t really expect a reply. The boy was busy coughing out all the water he’d taken in, and was having trouble enough breathing between spasms to try and make conversation. But Kirk wanted [76] him to know he wasn’t down here alone. “Sorry if dropping us from a great height wasn’t very graceful. I’m a little rusty on my lifeguard technique.”
Chekov, still coughing, nodded as though his captain had offered the most reasonable explanation in the world. It occurred to Kirk that Chekov was either too busy trying to breathe to pay him much attention, or the boy didn’t have a sense of humor. The latter possibility reminded Kirk of Spock, and made him smile a little. He tried to hide the expression by turning away to blow a quick blast on his whistle. Up above, Sanner’s whistle answered in frantic staccato, then fell silent.
“Well, let’s have a look at where we are.” Pushing to his feet, Kirk dialed the flame on his helmet light to maximum before holding it out at arm’s length and turning in a slow circle. The tunnel surrounding them was maybe twice as wide as one of the Enterprise’s corridors, and taller again by half. A surprisingly regular hole—and the clutter of rocks beneath it—marked where Kirk had kicked through the smooth, domed ceiling in an effort to find the water’s surface. So the roof of the tunnel was the bottom of the lake. Or what used to be the lake—icicles were already accreting around the edges of the hole as the last of the trapped water dribbled down to join the stream now slithering off away from them across the floor. But it wasn’t the water, or the rapidly crystalizing ice, that riveted Kirk’s attention near where the dark, corrugated walls met the ceiling. He took a slow step closer, lifting the helmet light higher over his head to illuminate the uppermost corners.
[77] “I don’t understand. ...” He heard Chekov climb shakily to his feet, following a few steps behind. His voice still sounded thick with inhaled water. “How did we get here? Where are the others?”
“On their way down to join us, no doubt.” A strip of what might have been wainscoting ribboned the upper wall, obviously a refined metal for all that time and water had frosted it as dark as tarnished silver. Rusty streaks wept down its rippled surface, neatly tracing the spidery-thin etchings that decorated its surface like scattered grains of rice. “I have a feeling this isn’t flow-stone.”
Chekov moved up next to him, just into his line of sight, and squinted upward toward where Kirk aimed the light. The blue chill to his lips worried Kirk a little, but he was reassured by the keen intensity with which the boy studied the rows of alien markings. “It’s writing,” Chekov said at last, with a sort of dull certainty that caught Kirk by surprise.
The captain nodded slowly. “Possibly. It’s certainly not anything natural.” Then he smiled down at this new member of his crew as the thought suddenly occurred to him. “Congratulations, Ensign Chekov. You’ve just discovered your first alien artifact.”
Chapter Five
“WATCH THE LAST FEW STEPS,” Sanner yelled up through the rush and pour of falling water. “They’re icy!”
Great, Uhura thought, tightening her grip on the rungs of the rope ladder. It’s not bad enough that I’m climbing down through a waterfall. It has to be a freezing waterfall.
She wished she could take a deep breath to ease the tightness in her chest, but at the moment there was too much water splashing around her to make that safe. The chasm above her drained itself in fits and starts into this new lower level of the cave system. When she had started down the ladder, the rush of water had been a mere trickle, but another section of ponded cave runoff must have broken through and was now pouring itself down this new drain. The icy water had drenched her so thoroughly that her carbide lamp had gone out and the [79] wicking fibers of her jumper had expanded like foam in a vain effort to keep her dry. Uhura ducked her head below one shielding arm to take a breath, and still got enough water mixed with her air to make her cough as she took another step down the ladder.
There was no time to stop and clear her throat. Uhura felt the polymer strands jerk and twist as Martine swung onto the
rope ladder from the cave ledge above her. The fear of getting her hands stepped on sent her down the next few rungs a little faster than she’d intended. When she hit the strand of rope that was slick with ice, her boot sole skidded off so violently that it took her other foothold with it. Uhura was left dangling from gloved hands, swinging her feet through buffeting water as she tried to find ladder rungs she couldn’t see.
“You’re almost down!” Sanner’s voice barely cut through the clatter of water hitting the jagged edges of travertine through which Kirk and Chekov had fallen. “You can slide from there!”
Uhura tried to cast a glance down to make sure he was right, but all she could make out were watery shadows silhouetted against a dim carbide glow. She swung her gloved hands around to the outside of the rope ladder and tightened her grip as much as she could, then deliberately let herself drop. It wasn’t until after she began sliding that she felt the icy slickness of the rope ladder’s sides as well as its rungs. Her pace downward quickened alarmingly, despite her fierce grip.
“Got you,” said a calm tenor voice, and Uhura felt herself plucked from the ladder and swung out of the rush of water in one smooth movement.
[80] “Thanks—I think!” Uhura swiped the water from her face and scowled upward, intending to give Sanner a piece of her mind about his advice to slide. To her surprise, the face that gazed down at her was youthful, and lit with amused hazel eyes.
“Yes, Lieutenant?” Kirk asked blandly.
“Nothing, sir.”
He smiled and turned away, ducking back out under the icy waterfall to join Sanner at the base of the rope ladder. The light went with him, and Uhura hurriedly took off her helmet to fumble with its extinguished carbide light. It ignited on the second try, its glow reaching out until it touched the rounded surfaces of a conduit ten feet in diameter and as smooth as the inside of a pipe. The passage sloped slightly, making a gradient that pulled the cave runoff down into darkness on the far side of its new plunge pool. Thin veils of mist shredded off the waterfall as it slowed back to a trickle again, making Uhura wish she’d waited just a few minutes more before she’d made her descent. The mist turned instantly to ice in the frigid air, some of it clinging like hoarfrost to the shards of rusty metal and shattered travertine that littered the conduit floor. The rest swirled in the drafty breeze, forming a fog of tiny ice crystals that made breathing unpleasant and visibility poor.
Uhura picked her way carefully up the sloping conduit, heading for a vague clot of lamplight she could see through the murk. Her movement sent water trickling down her cave jumper in thick runnels as its nanofibers wrung themselves dry, wicking off the water she’d absorbed on her way down the waterfall. Unfortunately, [81] since her hair wasn’t made of microscopically engineered polymers, it remained completely sodden. Uhura just hoped it wouldn’t freeze to her helmet. The cave air felt even more glacial down here than it had in the vertical chasm above.
As she came closer to the carbide light, she could see Diana Wright crouched near the huddled figure of Ensign Chekov. The young Russian was shivering despite his cave jumper’s insulation, and breathing so harshly that at times it almost sounded as if he were strangling.
“Hang on, kid.” Wright loaded medicine from a vial into the tube of her hypospray, then pressed it to Chekov’s throat above the collar of his cave jumper. “That should help you breathe a little better. Can you stand up and move around? You need to generate some kinetic energy so your jumper can pump all that absorbed water out. That’s why you feel so cold.”
“I don’t—” Chekov broke off with a grimace, pushing himself halfway to his feet. Uhura hurried forward and helped Wright haul him the rest of the way up and then push him gently into motion. He walked between them obediently enough, his breath easing to a rasp as the medication took hold, but shivers still racked his body. A wet sheen began to coat his jumper as the polymer expelled its absorbed water.
“I’m not sure how I got here,” the young man blurted after a moment, as if it were a shameful confession he had to make. “I told the captain, but he didn’t say anything.”
Uhura and Wright exchanged speculative looks behind his back. “You don’t remember falling into the cave?” the medic asked. She began to examine his skull [82] under his hair, dark and slick as a seal’s coat with the water it had absorbed. “You might have gotten a concussion after you lost your helmet. Does your head hurt anywhere?”
“No,” Chekov said. “And I do remember falling. There was ice on the ledge, right after we fired the phasers.” He shivered again, strongly enough that Uhura almost lost her grip on his shoulder. “It just seems like that was a long while ago. Didn’t something else happen after that?”
“Captain Kirk jumped in after you,” Uhura told him. “You broke through the bottom of the cave into this level, and then he whistled so we knew you were here. Maybe that’s what you’re remembering.”
“It must be.” Despite his words, the young man didn’t sound entirely convinced. He glanced at the conduit around them as they moved further up its gentle slope. The double glow of Uhura’s and Wright’s carbide lamps clearly showed its artificial curvature, unbroken here by jagged rents or waterfalls. “The first thing I remember clearly is lying on my back and coughing while the captain lit his carbide light. Then he found some kind of alien artifact ...”
“You can take the credit for that discovery, Mr. Chekov.” Captain Kirk materialized out of the chilly mist as if he’d just transported in. Sanner and Martine followed him, their cave jumpers and backpacks glistening with extruded water in the gathered light. “We never would have seen it if you hadn’t fallen in where you did. It’s on the wall over here.” He stepped past Chekov and Wright, crossing the conduit until his carbide light [83] finally drove the darkness back from the far side. “Any idea what it might be, Lieutenant Uhura?”
Chekov seemed a little steadier on his feet now that his cave jumper had drained out most of its water. Uhura released him and went to add her light to the captain’s. Several rows of rice-like markings jumped into high relief under the double illumination. It looked as if they’d been engraved into the rust-streaked metal of the passage wall, rather than being painted on it. Perhaps that was why they’d survived as long as the cave itself.
“It’s definitely an alien script, Captain. The breaks and repetitions make it look like a series of phonemes, but I’ve never seen any alphabet quite like it before.” Uhura glanced over her shoulder at Sanner. “I don’t suppose we can take a visual recording?”
“With this thing?” The cave specialist hefted his tricorder with a snort. “Only if you draw on the screen with a real sharp rock.”
“You could make a copy by hand, in Mr. Chekov’s map book,” Martine suggested. She was peering at the writing and didn’t see the effect of her words, but Uhura was still looking back at the rest of the group. She saw the young ensign slide his hand automatically into the chest pocket of his cave jumper, then jerk in dismay when it came out empty.
“Captain, the map—” Chekov stopped and swallowed when Kirk turned to face him. The light of the captain’s carbide lamp showed them all the young ensign’s stricken expression. “Sir, I don’t have it anymore.”
* * *
[84] “Commander Spock, I’m adjusting orbit again.”
Sulu didn’t wait for a response from the first officer. This was the third time he’d had to correct the ship’s heading in the past hour, and the procedure had become almost routine. Almost. Despite Spock’s intensive use of the ship’s scanners and sensors, they still had no idea where these inexplicable losses of altitude were coming from. That uncertainty bothered Sulu more than he cared to admit.
It was true that whatever force Tlaoli was exerting on them was trivial compared to the power of the Enterprise’s warp drive. Even their sublight impulse engines barely needed to be pulsed in order to bump the ship back up into stable orbit. Chief Engineer Scott thought they were encountering a subspace anomaly in Tlaoli
’s gravity well, and had suggested programming an automatic correction into the impulse engines. But something in Sulu balked at the idea of not knowing exactly when and how the orbital changes were occurring. He had an uncomfortable image of all the ships now rotting on the planet’s surface having made just such an automatic adjustment right before they fell out of the sky. Besides, whatever was affecting the ship didn’t feel like gravity fluctuations to Sulu; they felt like the tug of a more purposeful force. And the only clues to what that force might be were the timing and magnitude of the shifts themselves.
“Was the adjustment within the usual parameters?” Spock inquired without looking up from the communications station. He had temporarily evicted Lieutenant Palmer from her post in an attempt to augment the ship’s signal discrimination amplifiers. Tantalizing [85] flashes of contact had been coming in from the surface of Tlaoli, brief bursts of unusual subspace static from the vicinity of the caves. Only the timing of the bursts, received at precise fifteen-minute intervals, marked them as attempts at communication. No actual message could be filtered out of the snarl of subspace noise.
Sulu checked the helm records to verify his manual adjustment. “Yes, sir. Six percent decay, initiated thirteen minutes after the previous shift.”
The science officer made a noise that was almost, but not quite, a sigh of frustration. “Unfortunately, I do not believe the addition of that data point will allow the computer to identify the origin of these anomalies. Until we see a shift large enough to extrapolate a vector of interaction, we will remain ignorant of the root cause of these diversions.”