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

by L. A. Graf

  “I have no choice, Doctor,” said Spock patiently. “None of our long-range sensors can focus on the karst terrain, and the landing party’s communicators no longer appear to function. Our only solid connection is through Lieutenant Uhura’s narrow-beam communicator, and that gives us only a single point coordinate.”

  “Which is exactly why you shouldn’t be transporting anyone based on that,” McCoy snapped. “If the edge of the transporter beam happens to land halfway through someone’s skull, you’re going to kill them by beaming them up!”

  “I am aware of that, Doctor.” Spock templed his fingers and rested his chin against them, a pose that usually meant he was sorting through a complex sequence of logical deductions. “We can presume that the captain is aware of it, too, since he knows we cannot lock on to their communicator signals. If he still wants to be transported out of the cave system, then either he has managed to gather his team into a tight group around Lieutenant Uhura’s communicator or—”

  [98] He fell silent, as if he didn’t think the doctor would appreciate where his logic had led. McCoy’s frown deepened, and after a moment he jabbed a finger toward the Vulcan, although Sulu noticed that he didn’t quite poke him. “Or what, Spock?”

  “Or the captain is in such dire straits that the risks of an incomplete transport are outweighed by their need to escape.” The Vulcan turned away without waiting for McCoy’s response. “Lieutenant Palmer, transfer the frequency of Lieutenant Uhura’s narrow-beam signal down to the main cargo transporter, so that Mr. Scott can use it to center the beam.”

  “Sir, he’d better hurry,” said the junior communications officer urgently. “The signal’s fading fast.”

  “I’m on it,” said Scotty’s voice from the open intraship channel. “I’ve already got the cargo controls linked through to my console here, and as soon as we get that frequency—aah, there it is. I’ve got the beam centered, Mr. Spock. On your orders.”

  Sulu glanced up at the haggard brown crescent that hung in their mostly dark viewscreen. Tlaoli’s day side was slowly withering as the system’s pale yellow sun swung out of view, in what looked like the most pedestrian of sunsets. What was going on under the surface of that seemingly innocuous planet? he wondered. Had the captain found the survey team in need of immediate evacuation, or was the rescue team itself in such danger that they were willing to risk an unlocked transport?

  “Spock,” McCoy warned. “Think about what you’re going to do here.”

  “I always do, Doctor.” Like Sulu, Spock gazed up at [99] the viewscreen as if he could somehow see the effects of his decision there. “Proceed with transport, Mr. Scott.”

  “Transport initiated—no, shut down, shut down now!”

  Sulu had less than a second to wonder what the chief engineer’s outburst meant. An eerie shudder ran through the bridge, so strong and deep that he knew it must have shaken the entire ship. He shot a glance down at his helm controls and saw their smooth white orbital curve spiral off into multicolored chaos as the ship slewed into an insane and unplotted deceleration curve. The unknown force that had previously flirted with them, gently tugging them toward the surface, had in the space of an instant become a full-fledged roaring pull, like a tractor beam operating on a monstrous and inhuman scale.

  Sulu reached for the impulse controls before he was even aware of conscious thought, jamming them to full starboard thrust to compensate for the ship’s sudden curl toward the planet. For an instant, he felt the sublight engines hurl themselves into the effort to turn the ship, then their power indicators abruptly fell to zero on his screens. An instant later, the screens themselves went dead, the lights on the bridge snuffed out, and Sulu heard the eerie silence as the life support systems stopped functioning. He grabbed onto the helm as hard as he could, knowing what was coming next. But the ship was wheeling too sharply to port. When the inertial dampeners gave way, the centrifugal force they’d been holding back slammed across the bridge like a tidal wave.

  Chapter Six

  THERE SHOULD HAVE BEEN SIRENS, Sulu thought dazedly. He reached out for something to hang onto, trying to brace himself against the persistent pull of centrifugal force. His hand slid helplessly across a smooth surface that could only be the main viewscreen. Where are the sirens and flashing red lights? If this isn’t an emergency, I don’t know what is.

  But the bridge of the Enterprise remained eerily silent, and the only light came from the fluorescent glow of the evacuation lights, triggered by the dark and lack of power. Sulu glanced around and saw fallen figures everywhere. Only Spock was still on his feet, fighting the ship’s dizzying spin with that superhuman resilience Vulcans could summon in emergencies. The first officer had just finished lifting Dr. McCoy into the command [101] chair, and was flipping open his personal communicator. Sulu spared a moment to admire Spock’s quick thinking. With no power, the ship’s internal communications system would be as useless as its inertial dampeners.

  “Spock to engineering. We need auxiliary power on the bridge.”

  Sulu levered himself up to hands and knees, and took advantage of an aft plunge to slide toward the helm. He caught it just as the ship rolled to starboard, and cursed as his own chair banged him smartly in the back. At least he was now close enough to grab onto it and pull himself up into his seat. He hit the emergency belt release, hoping it would still work. Fortunately, the ship’s designers must have made it internally powered, and it sprang out to encircle his waist with a reassuring click. He saw other members of the bridge crew doing the same thing, one by one struggling back into position. Unfortunately, their stations remained dark and lifeless, so there was nothing any of them could do once they got there except wait.

  Except for Spock. He headed over to join John Russ at the engineering panel, somehow managing to keep his balance despite the ship’s severe roll and pitch. He looked like a man walking through an invisible windstorm. “Commander Scott, can you hear me? We need auxiliary power on the bridge.”

  “I hear you, Mr. Spock.” The chief engineer sounded as close to frantic as Sulu had ever heard him. “But I’m stuck here in the transporter room with none of the turbolifts working. I’ve got my crew down in engineering working on the auxiliary generators, but we lost every [102] shred of backup power we had stored in our batteries. It’ll take us a minute or two just to prime them. As soon as I’ve got any power at all, I’ll be routing it up to you. I’ll warn you, though, that it won’t be enough to run all the bridge stations.”

  Spock was already hauling panels out of the engineering station. From somewhere in his engineer’s tool kit, Russ had found a stronger emergency light and was slanting it down onto the intricate boards. Sulu could see the Vulcan’s slender fingers flash across the controls, rearranging the flow of nonexistent power. “I am giving priority to helm controls and sensors,” Spock said into the communicator that he had given Russ to hold. “Send the rest to the impulse engines, Mr. Scott.”

  “Can’t we fire the impulse engines manually?” Sulu asked. Without a working viewscreen or helm monitor, he couldn’t be sure where the Enterprise was heading, but his pilot’s instincts told him that it was down toward the planet again. “If we continued on the heading we had just before we lost power, we’ve got to be deep into the gravity well by now.”

  “A distinct possibility,” admitted Spock. “But without enough power to charge the ionization rings, there is no way to activate or aim the impulse engines.”

  “How about the warp drive?” Russ asked.

  “Bollixed.” Even heard secondhand and distantly through Spock’s communicator, Scott’s voice sounded very grim. “That was the first place the power drain headed for after it knocked out the main transporter. I had to cut every circuit between the core and the drive nacelles or the electromagnetic surge would have [103] blasted our dilithium crystals to smithereens. I think I managed to save the core, but it’s not connected to anything now.”

  “Did you let the rest of our power just get
drained?” McCoy demanded.

  “Aye, Doctor,” said Scotty. “I don’t know what kind of energy field that transporter beam activated, but it overrode every safety switch I threw. There was no stopping it without destroying all the power circuits in the ship, like I did in the warp core. I thought it would be better to just let it run its course and power the ship back up when it was gone.”

  “A logical prediction, Mr. Scott,” said Spock. A dim flicker of light appeared on the main viewscreen, but Sulu ignored it to focus on his piloting monitor instead. Light began to pulse on the helm as it got a wash of power from the auxiliary generators. Sulu hurriedly punched through the helm’s initial start-up sequence, canceling most of its safety checks and tests in order to get it up and running sooner. “Let us hope that the Enterprise manages to stay aloft long enough for it to come true.”

  Sulu glanced up from his coalescing orbital curves just in time to see the night-dark surface of Tlaoli rising toward them on the viewscreen.

  A wave of frigid air rolled across the underground chamber, cleaving itself on the narrow flowstone columns until it seemed to come at them from all directions with hurricane force. Kirk ducked his head to avoid the bite of blowing ice, realized even as he did that the gesture was pointless. There was no wind. The [104] flames on the rescue team’s carbide lamps never so much as flickered, and Chekov—still engrossed in his map reconstruction—made no subconscious move to protect his thin plastisheet pages from fluttering about. It was just another temperature drop, Kirk realized. As sudden and profound as all the rest.

  An eerie hiss filled the chamber as a new skin of ice adhered to the travertine walls. Kirk had clustered both parties into a single tight group as far from any nonliving structure as he could, offering as clean a lift as possible on the assumption Scott would opt to pick them up with the cargo transporter. He’d placed Uhura with her open communicator channel at the center of the group, letting the others fit in where they would. Right now, he was just relieved that no one was touching the flowstone during this latest quick freeze.

  “This is getting ridiculous.” Sanner bumped shoulders with Kirk as he batted fresh frost off the front of his jumper. “Does anybody know the minimum temperature these cave suits are rated for?”

  No one did.

  “I would give my eye teeth to know what is causing this effect.” Jaeger, close on Kirk’s other side, heaved a frustrated sigh that materialized in front of his face as a tattered curtain of steam. He looked across Kirk toward Sanner, one frustrated scientist appealing to another. “I don’t care what Fisher says, there’s no way this can be due to transperiodic ore deposits. They generate heat and create energy, not the other way around! This negative gradient that we’re seeing in both power and heat ... that energy has to be going somewhere.”

  [105] “Into the latent heat of crystallization,” his fellow geologist said cryptically.

  “But that wouldn’t be enough to explain ...” Jaeger’s unswollen eye narrowed in a way that gave him a slightly piratical look. “Not unless there was some trace contaminant in the cave runoff that inhibited freezing and allowed the crystals to absorb far more than the usual amount of energy.”

  “Something like dilithium?” Kirk inquired wryly.

  “We analyzed for dissolved dilithium, Captain, back when we first entered the cave.” That was the third and quietest geologist, D’Amato. “The levels were always below detection limits.”

  “Then maybe there’s some other element or compound here, something we don’t even know about yet,” Sanner said excitedly. “I’ve seen papers proposing the existence of ultra-transperiodic quadra-hydrogen—”

  “And I’ve seen papers that say Zephram Cochrane had outside help in designing the first warp drive,” retorted Jaeger. “That doesn’t make it true! It’s more likely we’re seeing an exaggerated version of evaporative cooling due to subsurface airflow through the caves.”

  Sanner let out an explosive snort. “Yeah, that would be reasonable—if the air in here were moving at about a thousand kilometers an hour!”

  “Do you think the cold is why the aliens built this place?” Tomlinson asked from the other side of their huddle. He stood just behind Ensign Martine, a little closer than Kirk suspected was strictly necessary for [106] transporting purposes. Tomlinson’s fellow weapons officer did not appear to mind the proximity. “To take advantage of the refrigerating effect?”

  Jaeger was busy scowling at Sanner and merely made a curt, dismissive gesture with his hand. It was the other geologist, D’Amato, who answered. “The structure we’re inside—” He motioned vaguely at the huge chamber around them, “—the conduits, these larger chambers—those are all millions of years older than the cave system above us. I’m not even sure this structure was originally underground when the aliens built it.” His hands played restlessly with the cover on his tricorder, as though wishing he could snap it open and access the information trapped inside. “The limestone was probably deposited over the structure, then began dissolving millions of years later, probably because the original conduits and rooms provided large, natural permeability contrasts. The only reason we see flowstone decorations inside the man-made—well, alien-made—parts is because of cracks that formed in the ceiling a few millennia ago, like the break at the back of this room.”

  “You’re assuming this travertine formed the same way it would in a natural cave,” Sanner objected. “But what if it was the cold that made it precipitate out in the first place?”

  Jaeger heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Zap, please recall that most carbonate minerals have retrograde solubility—”

  Kirk restrained his own sigh, all too aware how obvious even the most quiet expression of frustration would [107] be right now. While in one regard he appreciated the way scientists could generate a speculative debate out of anything, right now it was the conspicuous absence of the transporter beam, rather than the presence of the cold or the relative age of caverns versus ruins, that bothered him the most. He caught Uhura’s eye while Sanner and Jaeger began to vigorously debate the pros and cons of freeze-drying versus evaporation as an explanation for the various travertine formations they had seen. “Anything yet?” he asked quietly.

  The communications officer looked as though she’d been waiting for his question. “I’m sorry, Captain. I signaled until I ran out of power, and I didn’t get any indication that the ship was attempting to respond.”

  “But you’re sure the signal got through?”

  She shrugged a little. “As sure as I can be, sir.” Half-turning, she reached toward Martine for another chemical battery. “Would you like me to try again?”

  Kirk shook his head and waved Martine to stop digging about in her pack. “No, Lieutenant, thank you.” He caught himself sighing anyway. “Either the Enterprise wasn’t able to receive our message, or they weren’t able to comply. In any case, wasting another battery isn’t going to get us out of here any faster.” He noticed abruptly that the rest of the group had fallen silent, listening to his conversation with Uhura while at the same time trying to seem as though they weren’t technically eavesdropping. “At ease, everyone,” he ordered, a little brusquely.

  The team broke obediently apart, heading to different quarters of the chamber in groups of two and three in what was no doubt their effort to give Kirk some privacy [108] to sort out where they’d go from here. He wasn’t sure whether or not he fully appreciated the gesture. Only Ensign Chekov stayed within an arm’s length of his commander—he simply sat down where he stood and continued working on his map. Uhura stooped to quietly leave her helmet on the ground next to him before following Martine and Tomlinson. Kirk wasn’t certain the boy had consciously heard the dismissal, much less noticed the lieutenant’s simple kindness. He’s either very good at concentrating, or just old-fashioned anal. Both of which traits had their uses.

  Kirk waited until Wright had finished settling Davis back on her makeshift futon of packs with D’Amato and Palamas sitt
ing on either side to keep her warm, then summoned the medic over with a flick of his hand. He met her halfway, letting her fall in beside him as they walked a little distance away from the others. “I need a report on Chekov and Davis,” he said quietly. “Are they able to walk out of here?”

  Wright tossed a look back over her shoulder, taking in both patients with that single quick glance. “Ensign Chekov’s fine,” she said, turning back to Kirk. “His breathing’s clear now, he’s alert. I’m not so sure about Davis. She’s in a lot of pain, and while she hasn’t suffered a loss of consciousness, I’m not convinced she’s entirely stable.”

  Kirk nodded his understanding. “But can she walk?”

  “If she can’t, I’ll carry her.” At first, Kirk thought she’d meant the remark as a joke. Then he saw the serious crease between her dark blue eyes. “Captain, until I can do a proper medical scan, I can’t tell how badly [109] she’s injured. That bump on her head could just mean a killer headache, or it could mean she’s bleeding into her brain. It’s important that we get her out of here as soon as possible.”

  It’s important to get us all out of here. No matter what kind of temperatures their cave jumpers were designed to withstand, Kirk knew that none of them would survive the night if the cold continued to deepen. He thanked Wright, trying to seem calm and confident about their chances, and started back across the chamber to check on the other two parts of his plan.

  Chekov still sat where Kirk had left him, cross-legged with his compass and map notebook balanced in his lap. Kirk paused just behind him to steal a look at what might be their only roadmap home. “I’m impressed.”

  Chekov jerked in surprise, instinctively clapping one hand down on top of his notebook as though hiding illicit notes from a prowling teacher. But not before Kirk glimpsed a nearly complete rendering of the cave system’s upper level, with remembered measurements appended to the main passage and many of the dead ends and side tunnels simply not filled in.