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

by L. A. Graf

  “About changing the orbit again?” Riley asked. “Sir,” he added as a hasty afterthought. With Spock currently down in sickbay to have his shoulder put back in place, and Scotty deeply absorbed in trying to repair the damaged sections of the ship, command of the Enterprise had unexpectedly defaulted to Sulu. He hadn’t bothered [123] to call Rhada or Hansen to the bridge to replace him at the helm, since he knew Spock wouldn’t let McCoy keep him out of commission for very long. But Sulu had never missed fourth-in-command Uhura more than right now.

  “I think the orbit’s fine just the way Mr. Spock approved it,” Sulu told his navigator, and wished he could believe that as firmly as he could say it. When they had first gotten impulse power back and swung the Enterprise away from her unplanned trip to the cometary cloud, he and Riley had laid in a course that kept them safely distant from Tlaoli and its starship-snagging power surges. It wasn’t common for a ship to maintain a cruising level that far away from the planet, because when gravity could no longer be balanced against the ship’s momentum to create a stable orbit, constant monitoring was required of the ship’s pilot and navigator. But since Tlaoli’s gravity well was no longer safe to orbit in, and neither the ship’s scanners nor her transporters needed to be in range of the planet’s surface until they had been repaired, Sulu hadn’t expected any objections when he’d asked the ship’s commanding officer to approve the course change.

  But to his surprise, Commander Spock had vetoed the new course that had been presented to him. Instead, he’d ordered Sulu to resume cruising at their previous orbital level, at the far end of gravitational stability but well inside the planet’s gravitational field. The Vulcan’s rationale was, as usual, chillingly logical: To study the forces generated by this seemingly mundane planet, they had to activate it by staying within its reach. Of course, as Riley had sourly pointed out after Spock had left the [124] bridge, the counterargument to that was pretty much the exact same statement.

  “So what were you thinking about?” Riley inquired, and once again only tacked on the obligatory “Sir?” afterward.

  “Warp cores,” said Sulu absently, then took in a deep breath as he realized what he’d said. The restlessness plaguing him had been so bone deep that his surface thoughts had seemed trivial in comparison, idle speculations on the various salvage operations going on around the ship at that moment. I should tell the commanding officer about what I just realized, Sulu thought, then remembered that the commanding officer right now was himself. He sat indecisive for a moment, before it occurred to him to consider what Captain Kirk would do if he’d been the one to think of this. That made it easy.

  “Riley, take the helm.” The simple act of leaving his seat released so much of Sulu’s restlessness that he suddenly understood why the captain tended to roam the bridge whenever things got tense. “I’m going to go check on something. Rhada will be coming on duty soon. Call her to the bridge early if anything strange starts happening.”

  “But you can’t—” Riley closed his mouth on that protest, apparently realizing that, as the ship’s current commanding officer, Sulu could in fact do anything he wanted. Even though he was technically Sulu’s subordinate at this moment, however, they were still junior officers together, and junior officers looked after each other. “You sure you know what you’re doing here, [125] D’Artagnan?” the navigator asked in an undertone of real concern.

  “Yes,” Sulu said. And then, in a burst of honesty, “Pretty sure.”

  Riley snorted. “Well, get going, then. I’ll try to remember the difference between forward and reverse while you’re gone.”

  He was joking, of course. Like all starship navigators, Kevin Riley had trained as an emergency pilot and was perfectly capable of watching over the Enterprise as she orbited Tlaoli’s modest disk. Unless the planet began tugging them down toward it again. That thought didn’t stop Sulu, but it did lend some extra speed to his leap up the bridge steps and into the turbolift.

  The lift seemed sluggish, and it jerked rather than slid through the transfer to the secondary hull. The auxiliary power generators were strong enough to run the ship’s essential systems, but that didn’t mean they all ran as smoothly as usual. Sulu caught himself drumming his fingers impatiently on the side of the lift chamber and forced himself to wrap them into fists instead. The trip to the main shuttlebay always took longer than he thought it should, he reminded himself. For all its deceptive nimbleness in battle, the Enterprise was an immense ship of the line, after all.

  The turbolift finally slowed to a halt, its final jerk strong enough to make Sulu sway on his feet. The door didn’t even try to slide open, however, and after a moment it occurred to Sulu that the force of the photon shock wave might also have breached the shuttle bay. A slow, underpowered hiss built up in the lift chamber [126] and, with another little jerk, the doors grudgingly slid open on the vast coldness of the main shuttle bay.

  It was entirely dark.

  It was a good thing, Sulu thought in exasperation, that he was fifth in line of command among the primary bridge crew. Of course the shuttle bay would be dark. Hadn’t he just been thinking about how only the ship’s essential systems would be powered up to minimize the strain on the auxiliary generators? If he had been Captain Kirk, he’d have already thought of that and brought along a portable light for his inspection. As it was, he either had to face a long turbolift ride back up to the bridge—and possibly an interrogation from Mr. Spock once he got there—or take his chances bumping around in the dark looking for shuttles.

  This time, Sulu’s moment of indecision paid off. The longer he stood in the open doorway, the more his eyes adjusted to the dark, until eventually he could see the vague firefly glow that marked the cockpit windows of each shuttle nose. All the controls inside were alight and flashing, ready as usual for instant deployment should the need arise. The refracted glimmer of multicolored lights not only reassured Sulu that he could locate the shuttles in the darkness, it also told him that his original speculation about them had been correct.

  He strode out into the shuttle bay with confidence, not even faltering when the turbolift door hissed shut and made the immense dark space even darker. He ducked under the first shuttle’s landing gear with only the slightest brush of his head against the hull, and fumbled along the side until he found the touch panel that [127] activated its hatch. It folded itself open with the powerful hum of a vessel whose warp core was functioning and fully connected. Brightness cascaded down around him as the internal lights sprang on in the shuttle’s hold.

  “Yes!” breathed Sulu in satisfaction. He vaulted into the hold and hurried forward to the cockpit. The shuttle’s communicator was as alive and glowing as the rest of it, and he tuned it easily to the internal Enterprise frequency.

  “Lieutenant Sulu to Commander Spock.”

  There was a pause, as if the ship’s communications systems were having a little trouble with the automatic channel connection back to this unexpected source. Then he heard an imperturbable voice reply, “Spock here.” From the background roar and shriek of ventilators and welding torches, Sulu guessed the first officer had already left the confines of Sickbay and was supervising the repairs to the hull and sensor array.

  “Commander Spock, I’m down in the main shuttle-bay—”

  “And who has the conn, Lieutenant?”

  Sulu swallowed. It had not occurred to him that he had to delegate command of anything but the ship’s helm when he’d left the bridge, and none of the other junior officers there had thought to remind him. “Umm—Lieutenant Riley, sir.”

  “May the saints preserve us all.” That was Montgomery Scott’s distant but heartfelt voice through the din. Sulu winced, remembering that only twenty-four hours ago, the young man he’d just left in charge of the ship had been holed up in the engine room, blithely consigning them all to total destruction.

  [128] “Yes, well—it occurred to me, Mr. Spock, that the shuttles weren’t connected to any of the Enterprise’s
power circuits when the transporter beam hit that energy field. I came down to see if their internal warp cores were still functioning. And they are, sir.”

  “You’re a remarkably bright lad, Mr. Sulu.” Scott’s voice held nothing but admiration now. Even alone in the darkened shuttle bay, Sulu felt his cheeks tighten a little with embarrassment. “We can hook one or two of those little warp cores into the main circuits and punch ourselves back up to full power before you can say whist.”

  “I actually wasn’t thinking of that, sir,” Sulu admitted. “I was thinking that we could take a shuttle down to the planet right now, without waiting for the transporters to be fixed.”

  For a while, there was only forbidding silence on the other end of the communicator channel. “An interesting suggestion, Lieutenant,” Spock said at last. “But allow me to point out that the research shuttle originally sent down to the planet lost its power when it flew over the caves where Captain Kirk is now trapped. What makes you think that any other shuttle would be safe to fly?”

  “Nothing, sir. But if I stayed away from the cave region, I could at least evacuate the members of the landing party that didn’t get transported back to the ship.” Sulu took a deep breath, gazing down at the reassuring lights that flashed up from the piloting boards. “And after that ... you were the one, Mr. Spock, who said we needed to activate Tlaoli’s energy field again in order to study it.”

  “Indeed,” Spock said. “However, it would be [129] preferable, Lieutenant, not to be in danger of falling out of the sky when you did so.”

  “If you don’t mind me interrupting, Mr. Spock,” said Montgomery Scott’s voice in the background. “Now that I’ve seen how well our warp core’s magnetic shielding stood up to that planet’s power drain, I’m thinking that I could manage to install a similar shield around the shuttle’s core and engines together, so they couldn’t be made to lose power. Mr. Sulu might lose his communicator and his sensors, but if he can fly by sight he at least won’t fall out of the sky.”

  “I can fly by sight,” Sulu assured them both. “During the day for certain, and maybe even at night once I’ve found my way around the area once or twice.”

  “There should be several hours of daylight remaining on the side of Tlaoli where the remaining survey crews are.” Spock’s voice had lost its repressive edge and now sounded merely thoughtful. “How soon will you be able to divert a crew of engineers to the task of shielding one of the shuttles, Mr. Scott?”

  “If it means getting the captain back and evicting that young idiot Riley from the conn?” Sulu could practically feel the gust of the Chief Engineer’s snort. “Immediately!”

  “You’ve got ice in your hair.”

  Chekov combed a hand back through his hair without actually looking up from the map he had wedged against the conduit wall. Bits of half-frozen water spattered the surface of his notebook, deflating on impact into regular liquid drops, only to begin freezing again almost immediately. He’d given up being irritated by [130] them. Swiping them off his workspace with the side of his hand, he then had to pull his glove off with his teeth to keep from smearing wet nano-weave all over the map. At least he knew the glove would dry. It had managed to do so the dozen other times he’d paused with it suspended in his mouth while he finished updating his measurements.

  By now the ice was everywhere. It had coated the travertine flowstone like poured polyurethane, sharpening the delicate oranges, greens and reds of the original mineral salts into a crystalline riot of color. The omnipresent shush and drip of water that had accompanied their descent into the caves was now silenced. In its place, expanding ice ticked an irregular rhythm, sometimes firing off a deep-voiced cannon shot to catch everyone by surprise and make them jump. It reminded Chekov of how the lake at the heart of Gorky Park grudgingly gave itself over to autumn’s advance every year. You could hear the battle raging several blocks away for weeks at a time, until winter finally swept in one long bitter night and put an end to all of it. The next morning, the lake lay still and silent, as smooth and tame as if it had been paved over by glass.

  Tlaoli’s caves were not so simple a matter. Chekov had long ago given up trying to represent the true shape of their passages on his map. Ice had reduced them all to narrowed, glass tubes, with less floor exposed every meter they traveled, and only faint hints of the surfaces beneath. If the landing party somehow passed from these artificially straight and regular conduits into more wild and undirected natural cave at this point, Chekov almost doubted any of them would be able to tell until [131] they caught themselves straddling another abyss. Which made the compass readings and measurements he recorded on this new map even more important than the ones he’d had to recall from his memory of the trip in. At least up top they would have the fallback of the spot markers they’d left propped on little ledges and piles of stones, pointing back the way they’d come in. Down here, they had only Jaeger’s memory and Chekov’s maps to tell them where they stood in relation to the surface world. A discrepancy of five or ten meters could mean the difference between finding the topside entrance, or wandering about down here until their carbide ran out.

  A little laugh from the other end of his old-fashioned tape measure brought part of his attention back to the security guard Kirk had assigned to assist him. “I don’t know how you can work in this cold without gloves.” Crewman Yuki Smith switched the metal roll from one hand to the other, careful not to move it from the spot where Chekov had instructed her to hold it, but obviously eager to alternate her gloved hands in her pockets in an effort to keep herself warm. “They’re gonna have to cut off half my fingers by the time we get home.”

  Chekov flexed his own fingers, noted that they were pink with cold but only a little stiff. He shrugged and went back to writing. “It’s not so bad.”

  Smith fidgeted foot-to-foot for another long moment, then guessed, “You’re Russian, aren’t you?”

  The question, so apparently unrelated to anything else they were doing, surprised him almost to the point of embarrassment. He looked up for the first time, and [132] found Smith’s round Asian face split by a delighted smile.

  “I thought you might be,” she explained cheerfully. “I could kind of tell by your name, and your accent. But mostly it was just by how the cold doesn’t seem to bother you while I’m dying!” Then, when it seemed to occur to her that even further explanation might be required, “I lived in Moscow for four years.” She sounded quite proud of this feat. “My dad’s a history professor—he had a temporary position at the University of Moscow when I was six.” Just as quickly, she colored self-consciously and dipped an awkward little shrug. “Everybody at the University knew English, though, so I never did learn how to speak Russian.”

  As near as Chekov had been able to tell, no one else on board the ship knew how to speak Russian, either. “You pronounce Moscow correctly,” he told her. Partly because it was true, and partly because it seemed like the sort of thing she would be glad to know.

  He was right. Her smile exploded into full brightness again, as though he’s just paid her the most wonderful compliment. “I do?”

  “You do.” He released his end of the tape measure and let it go skittering back toward her across the icy floor.

  Smith caught the slithering tape in a smooth, athletic gesture, arcing the metal holding reel over to her other hand as she again switched pockets. “You must be really good at this.” It seemed an odd compliment to pay someone who was only doing what he’d been told, but became odder still when she continued, “You haven’t [133] had to ask me even once for the measurement. I can never estimate distances like that.”

  Ice as cold and killing as anything the cave had yet produced curdled inside his stomach. “Of course I’ve asked. I must have asked!” Every passage they’d traversed had its length marked in meters on his map, every minute angle or turn they’d made had its own compass reading carefully noted alongside. And yet even as he protested, he realized that he couldn’t specifica
lly remember asking Smith to read off any values. Ever. Not even when they first left the big column-crowded upper chamber where Smith’s party had waited for so long. Chekov tried to swallow with a throat suddenly clogged with panic. “What was the last measurement?” he asked, as evenly as he could manage.

  Even though she’d already dropped the reel back into one pocket, she came up with the number quickly enough. “Seven point nine meters.”

  Which was exactly what he had written within that narrow stretch of tunnel. He hadn’t thought he was that good at visually measuring anything, not even a nearly straight line. But at the same time, he hadn’t thought he could reconstruct his original map in the kind of detail he’d finally managed. Once he’d gotten started, though, it had all seemed very straightforward and obvious—as though he were sketching streets that he knew well, even if he’d never drawn them before.

  While anyone else might have given himself credit for simply discovering skills he hadn’t known he possessed, Chekov found himself struggling with the urge to retrace their entire route through these lower tunnels, checking each value he’d already committed to his map [134] but apparently never measured. It was bad enough that he’d had to make the reconstruction at all—he didn’t want to find out how Captain Kirk would react to finding out that the new maps they had might be completely untrustworthy.

  “We should catch up with the others.” He tried to mask his unease by hastily gathering up the rest of the gear. Chiseling a little shelf in the ice for one of the spot markers, he arranged it extra carefully, as if that could make up for everything else he’d done wrong today.

  They measured the next two segments—both of them straight and purely line-of-sight—with maximum care and minimum conversation. Chekov made a point of verifying each compass reading before writing it down, and of asking Smith (sometimes twice) for each linear value before letting her roll up the tape measure. In every case, he knew what the answer would be as soon as he thought to look for it. Even so, the thought of backtracking gnawed at him as they approached the entrance to the final chamber. What kind of an officer am I? he thought angrily. If I’m not sure about the accuracy of my work, I should say something! Yet another part of him was sure. He knew without being able to defend his conviction that the numbers as they stood were correct—that backtracking would only waste time without supplying them with the slightest bit of useful information. His certainty about that scared him a little.