by L. A. Graf
The captain tried on a fatherly smile; he hadn’t intended to startle the boy, and now felt slightly guilty for appearing to sneak up on him. “You have a good memory, Ensign. That map’s going to help us a lot.”
“Thank you, sir. ...” Chekov looked back down at his work, then glanced abruptly at the helmet next to him as though equally startled to find it there. Kirk couldn’t tell for sure in the dark, but he thought the boy was [110] blushing. “I’m sure it’s only because we were over the territory so many times, sir.”
Not that many. But maybe it felt like more when you were the one who had to first walk it, then measure it, then draw it and walk it again. “Put your finishing touches on,” Kirk warned him. “We’re going to be heading out soon.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
Which left only one element of their escape still open to question. “Mr. Sanner—How confident are you that you can climb back up that crack we all came down half an hour ago?”
Sanner paused to balance himself halfway up the pile of rubble Jaeger’s team had tried to clear a way through. “With the ladder all frozen to the walls?” He gave a crooked grin and hopped a few levels closer to the floor. “Do I have to promise not to fall?”
Kirk wasn’t in the mood for the geologist’s humor. “That would be preferred, yes.”
Picking up on his captain’s tone, Sanner finished his climb to the floor. “I can do it if I have to, sir,” he said, more seriously. Then he tossed a concerned look toward Davis on her makeshift infirmary. “But even if we make it up the ladder, I’m not sure everybody else is going to be able to walk that ledge back to the cave entrance. Not with all the ice that’s going to be there. I don’t have enough crampons for all of us.”
And trying to pass one or two pairs back and forth down a line of inexperienced cavers was a disaster just waiting to happen.
“Captain ...” Jaeger sat on one of the larger travertine [111] boulders, collecting samples of stone and ice into slides and tiny jars. “Am I correct in assuming that we won’t be transporting out of here?”
“It’s beginning to look that way, Mr. Jaeger.” “Then might I suggest an alternative?” He answered Kirk’s nod with one of his own, then carefully snapped shut the last of his little jars. “There is another cavern similar to this one at the other end of the conduit system.”
“I remember,” Kirk said. “You called it ‘the ice cave.’ ” “Because that was where we first noticed the chilling anomaly, yes.” Jaeger made a little face, as though he regretted that particular misnomer now that every surface in the cave system was covered in ice. “According to our tricorders, that chamber was only a few dozen meters below the natural cave’s main entrance. There were breaks in the ceiling’s integrity that I think correspond to a cluster of vertical pipes just inside the mouth of the cave.” His hands outlined what he was trying to describe, and Sanner nodded enthusiastically.
“I remember those! I wanted to drop a light down to see how far they went, but we didn’t have time.” He turned to Kirk with renewed intensity. “Even if I have to rock climb up those pipes, I’m pretty sure I could get back up there and drop a rope for the rest of you.”
With any three of the men up above, they could simply tie the rope around Davis and haul her up manually if she couldn’t make the climb on her own. A fist of dread that Kirk hadn’t even fully acknowledged began to loosen its grip on his heart, but a thought occurred to him that made it vise-tight again.
[112] “Didn’t you say that was where you thought the transperiodic ore deposit was?” Kirk jerked his head back toward D’Amato, tinkering with his tricorder even as he wedged himself tighter up against a shivering Davis. “Where Lieutenant D’Amato thought the power drain was coming from?”
“True,” Jaeger admitted. “But a lot of that was based on the unusual chilliness we noticed in that room. Now that the cold has spread through the entire cavern system, I’m not sure that going through the ice cave would necessarily be any more—or any less—dangerous than any other route we could take.”
“And if those solution pipes lead us straight up to the cave entrance,” Sanner pointed out, “we can get out of here a hell of a lot faster than if we went back along the ledge through that vertical chasm.”
If for no other reason than that, Kirk was willing to investigate this alternate route. No matter what strange phenomenon was causing the increasing cold in these caves, so far all it had done was get progressively worse. It would be worth taking a calculated risk as long as it paid off in a quicker escape.
“All right, gentlemen, we’ll try your way first.” He helped Sanner collect up the rest of Jaeger’s gear. “Maybe while we’re hiking, the Enterprise will have a chance to fix whatever problems she’s having topside and we can try hailing her again.”
“That would be an even better solution,” Jaeger agreed. He sounded weary with the cold and the long hours spent waiting in the dark. “It seems almost unbelievable that the ship should be having mechanical [113] problems right at the moment when we needed her to retrieve us.”
Kirk considered the events of the past few days and found an unexpected smile tugging at his mouth. He hoped it didn’t look as sardonic as it felt. “Not really, Lieutenant. Not if you knew what the ship’s been through since we left you here.”
“Well, there is one thing we know for sure.” Sanner swung a pack over his shoulder and straightened his carbide light on his head. “Whatever’s going on up there, it can’t possibly be as bad as what’s going on down here.”
Sulu had a hard time tearing his gaze away from the ominous planetary shadow that was Tlaoli. He knew that staring at its looming bulk wouldn’t do anything but deepen the icy spike of adrenaline in his bloodstream, but there was something hypnotic, almost majestic, about the way the planet swirled closer and closer on their visual scanners. It might almost have been beautiful if he hadn’t been sickly aware that it was actually the Enterprise doing the spinning as she was dragged down the curve of Tlaoli’s gravity well by the strange forces emanating from this malevolent alien planet.
“Helm, report!” Spock said sharply.
Sulu glanced down at his monitors and discovered that his hands had somehow punched in the appropriate course analysis commands while his brain was transfixed with the unexpected beauty of disaster. “Five minutes to terminal atmospheric impact,” he said. “We need full thrust from the auxiliary engines in two minutes or [114] less, sir, or we won’t be able to change course in time to avoid it.”
“Mr. Scott, did you hear that?” Spock asked through his personal communicator. He had handed it to McCoy to hold for him now, and the doctor had thoughtfully dialed its amplifier to maximum levels. Right now, that only made it easier to hear the bleakness of the chief engineer’s voice.
“I can’t give you impulse power that fast, Mr. Spock. The ionization rings have just started charging. Three minutes is the soonest I can give you even partial thrust.”
Sulu punched the estimate into his projected course curves. “That will put us through the thermosphere and several kilometers into the mesosphere before we change course,” he warned. “Without shields, the ship could burn up or break apart completely.”
“And we cannot power the shields without creating further delay in the ignition of the impulse engines. Hmmm.” Spock’s tone was deliberative rather than despairing, as if he’d just been given a complicated intellectual puzzle to solve. Sulu heard an indignant snort from McCoy, still strapped into the command chair.
“Don’t just stand there thinking about how ironic it all is, Spock. Do something!”
The Vulcan turned, swaying just a little as the ship plummeted into another series of spins. “Do you have a suggestion, Doctor?”
McCoy glared at him. “No. But if the captain were here, I know he wouldn’t just be standing around thinking! He’d be—hell, I don’t know—throwing rocks out the hatches to lighten the load or something!”
[115] Spock’s voice turned ve
ry dry. “Dr. McCoy, we are not a hot air balloon.”
“But we could throw out photon torpedoes!” said Sulu. “If we could manage to get the shields up in time—”
At first, he wasn’t sure Spock understood what he meant. Before he could open his mouth to explain further, however, the Vulcan first officer swung around so abruptly that for the first time, he lost his balance and slid across the plunging bridge. McCoy shot out his free hand to steady him, but instead of grabbing hold, Spock simply plucked the communicator out of the doctor’s hand and let his momentum carry him across to the unmanned weapons station. “Mr. Scott! Stop charging the impulse engines and divert that power to shields and torpedo bays. I repeat, divert impulse power to shields and torpedo bays!” He glanced over his shoulder at the engineering station. “Mr. Russ, reroute the power circuits from helm to weapons control—”
“I can do it quicker from here, Commander.” Sulu punched in a command he had only ever used in battle simulations, usually ones in which the ship ended up being destroyed. It was designed to shunt all helm power temporarily to weapons, so the ship could fire one last-ditch salvo at an overwhelming enemy. An ordinary planetary gravity well probably wasn’t the sort of enemy the ship’s designers had foreseen when they built in that emergency override, but otherwise this was exactly the kind of desperate situation it was designed for. Sulu just hoped the final outcome would be better.
His helm panel abruptly went dark, and Sulu glanced [116] over in time to see a flicker of lights spring up on the weapons panel instead. “Torpedo bays at full power!” said Scotty’s tense voice. Sulu wondered if he, like Spock, had understood the plan without being told, or if he was loyally obeying orders that must have seemed suicidal on their face. “It’s going to take a few minutes for the shields to reach full strength—”
“We don’t have a few minutes.” Sulu had glanced at the countdown clock on his monitor, just before the screen went black again. The neon shriek of auroral discharge across the viewscreen confirmed his memory of where the orbital curves intersected the planet’s atmospheric layers. “We’re already into the thermosphere. If we don’t change the ship’s course in the next thirty seconds, we won’t be able to avoid terminal impact.”
“Launching torpedoes now,” was the first officer’s terse reply.
There was a brief pause, just long enough for the silence on the bridge to become almost suffocating in its intensity. In that hush, Sulu could hear the hissing of Tlaoli’s uppermost atmosphere across the Enterprise’s unprotected hull. Then a streak of silver knifed across the spinning night sky, the glow of gases scorched to phosphorescence by the force of an unseen object tearing through them at tremendous speed. In another minute, that same glow would envelop the Enterprise and all hope of avoiding destruction would be gone. “Torpedo detonation in five seconds,” Spock said calmly. “Four, three, two, one—”
Photon torpedoes made impressive light displays when they exploded in deep space. In the plasmalike thermosphere of a terrestrial planet, however, they were [117] nothing short of spectacular. The initial burst of light was only a little larger than normal, but its afterglow seemed to expand and brighten rather than fade. It flared from white to blue, from blue to nearly ultraviolet. For a moment the glow almost vanished, but then it burst out again as a series of auroras that streamed and rippled and dripped down the sky like liquid ribbons.
The atmospheric shock wave hit the ship three seconds later, slamming it so fiercely back toward empty space that sparks flew out from the weapons station and Mr. Spock finally staggered and fell. Sulu felt more than heard the deep groaning thunder of the ship’s tough duranium hull as it absorbed the force of the impact through the incomplete shields, and heard the distant shriek of hull breach alarms. After a moment, he realized they were coming from Spock’s open communicator, which had fetched up against the helm console.
“Rerouting power to helm control,” Sulu said, although he wasn’t sure if anyone was listening to him. He reversed the emergency override and ran through another abbreviated start-up sequence, then waited impatiently for the helm’s internal gyroscopes to detect the speed and direction of the ship’s unpowered motion. His instinct told him the Enterprise had reversed her course, but she was now surging in an unknown direction, helpless as flotsam carried on the expanding tide of the torpedo blast. He waited while the helm curves built up on his screen, and was relieved to see that although they were an unstable pulsing green, they were at least no longer spinning in multicolored chaos.
[118] “We’ve been thrown out of planetary orbit and are headed for the outer edge of the solar system on vector nine-one-seven, speed seventeen hundred kilometers per second and stable.” He glanced over his shoulder, searching for Spock’s tall figure. It was nowhere to be seen, and the empty command chair told him that McCoy must have gone in search of the fallen Vulcan. “Commander Spock?”
“Helm report acknowledged,” said a tight Vulcan voice. Sulu heard a grunt from McCoy, then saw the doctor lever Spock carefully to his feet near the viewscreen. The Vulcan stood with one shoulder hunched so awkwardly that the joint must have been knocked out of place. “Are any planets or asteroids known to intersect this heading, Lieutenant?”
“Nothing closer than the system’s cometary cloud, sir,” Riley reported as his own navigation boards came to life. Despite the continuing wail of alarms from the fallen communicator, power was starting to flow back into all of the bridge stations. Sulu could hear the life-support ventilators reactivate, filling the bridge with their familiar white noise. “And we should have several hours to adjust our course before we get there.”
“Very good, Mr. Riley.” Spock shrugged off McCoy’s supporting arm and walked up the inertially generated tilt of the bridge deck toward the command chair. For once, the Vulcan actually sat down in it, releasing his breath with a small hiss although no expression of pain touched his narrow face. His intraship communicator whistled to life and he began to reach toward it, but [119] froze in midmotion. “Doctor, if you would—” he said between his teeth.
McCoy snorted and came over to depress the button for him. “That’s what you get for disobeying safety protocols, Mr. Spock. The regs clearly state that when inertial dampeners aren’t working—”
“All sectors, damage reports,” Spock said into the intercom, effectively cutting off the physician’s lecture.
“Scott here,” said the main intercom. Behind the sound of the chief engineer’s voice, Sulu could hear purposeful shouting and the sound of running feet as the lower decks crew scrambled to cope with the breach in the Enterprise’s hull. “Since the ship isn’t tearing herself entirely to pieces, Mr. Spock, I’m assuming we managed to blast ourselves back out of the planet’s gravity well.”
“You are correct, Commander. How much damage did we sustain in the explosion?”
“Enough to keep me busy for the rest of our three-day visit here,” Montgomery Scott said. “We didn’t lose anyone in the hull breach, thank God, but it did wipe out our entire sensor array. If you want to do anything that involves scanning, beaming, or even communicating with that planet down there, Mr. Spock, you’ll have to wait at least six hours to do it.”
“That is—unfortunate,” Spock said after a moment. His voice held a deepening timbre that might, in a human, have signified either sadness or regret. Sulu glanced over his shoulder in surprise, and saw Dr. McCoy giving the Vulcan an even more astonished look. Spock gazed back at them with a hint of reproach in his eyes, as if he found it hard to believe that the [120] recent crisis could have erased their memories of what had taken place just before it. “I assume you recall our previous discussion, gentlemen, about why the captain might have called for immediate transport back to the ship. If any of our inferences were correct, six hours may be far too long a time for the cave rescue team to survive.”
Chapter Seven
THERE WAS A STRANGE kind of time dilation that occurred during times of crisis, Sulu had noticed. The
rush of adrenaline triggered when your life hung in the balance stretched each individual second out like a bead of molten glass, drawn and twisted to an unbearably fragile thread. Once the instant had been endured, however, it melted back into transparency and was gone, leaving no trace of its passage in your mind. More than once when he’d piloted the Enterprise during long frantic chases or escapes, Sulu had glanced down at his helm chronometer and been astounded to see just how long he’d actually been on duty.
But time also took its revenge. The stretch of duty that followed right after a serious crisis moved as slowly and ponderously as geologic time, each minute weighted with the leaden aftermath of too much [122] adrenaline and too much stress. It made some officers talk more than usual and others fall silent; some reluctant to leave their posts even when their shifts had ended and others anxious for release. In Sulu’s case, the aftermath of tension always left him restless and bored and itching for more work. He could usually quench his unrest with a fierce session at the gym and a good night’s sleep, but he did occasionally wonder if it meant he found the rush of making life-and-death decisions addictive. He wasn’t sure that was a good trait to have when you were climbing Starfleet’s command ladder ... although he privately suspected that it was a trait he shared with James Kirk.
“Stop fidgeting!” Riley grumbled at him from down the helm. The navigator was usually one of those crewmen who got light-hearted and garrulous after a crisis, but Sulu suspected he was restraining his natural reaction so as not to remind anyone about his recent antics back at Psi 2000. “You’re driving me and the computer both nuts.”
Sulu glanced down at the stylus he had been tapping absently against his helm monitor, and was abashed to see that he had left a trail of thousands of little points dotted along their new orbital curves, as the computer obediently recorded each of his mindless marks. “Sorry,” he said, erasing the electronic litter with a brush of his hand across the screen. “I was thinking.”