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

by L. A. Graf

  His fingers clawed at the mud five or six centimeters below the handhold. “I can almost ...” He willed himself to reach farther, almost lifted up on one foot to extend [184] his length. I am not going to strand us down here for the sake of a few centimeters! “Stand on your toes,” he ordered abruptly.

  Sanner made an explosive noise that might have been a laugh. “Stand on what?”

  “I’m serious!” He only needed the tiniest bit more height. “Stand on your toes!”

  Someone grumbled something Chekov couldn’t quite understand from the bottom of their pyramid, then the whole human structure shifted a little aimlessly. Chekov felt himself swayed back away from the wall, and his heart leapt up into his mouth as he grabbed for whatever purchase he could find on the crumbling soil face. The root which had hovered just beyond his reach suddenly seemed to surge up in front of his face. He grabbed it, grabbed at another shorter root less than an arm’s length away, and heaved himself up toward the precious surface. “Push!” he shouted down at Smith. “Push me up!”

  Her hands clamped onto the bottoms of his boots, shoved—and he was up. The grass at the edge of the sinkhole gave spongily beneath his hands and knees. He crawled another body’s length away, pursued by images of collapsing the rim back down on the others and plunging them all back to the floor of the hole. When he reached a distance where the ground felt hard and dry and unyielding, he rolled onto his back with a groan. Beautiful stars, beautiful warm breeze, beautiful dry, clean grass. It was all he could do to keep from stripping out of his cave suit just to feel the balmy flush of dry air across his duty uniform.

  “Hey, Ensign? You okay up there?”

  [185] Chekov suddenly remembered Smith and the lieutenants still down in the sinkhole, balanced precariously one on top of the other. He rolled to his knees and began working at the knot in the rope around his waist. “Everything’s fine!” He hoped Smith could hear him. He didn’t want to venture closer to the crumbling lip of the sinkhole if he didn’t have to. “I’ll tie off the rope.”

  The roots that had helped him to the surface supported a thick, twisted tree that seemed to grow upright only so it could bow back down and sweep the ground with its crown. Smaller siblings peppered the undulating rocky landscape, their broken-backed shapes recognizable in the dim starlight only because the rocks that crouched alongside them weren’t swaying in the night breeze. Chekov leaned his weight into the last pull on the knot, to make sure his handiwork would hold. “The rope’s secure!”

  That was when he saw the footprints.

  Not footprints, really, but mud scars and dents of deliberate disturbance on the opposite side of the sinkhole’s mouth. As though someone else had clawed his way to the surface, tearing loose grass and rocks as he labored to drag his body over the edge to freedom. Someone without the support of a human pyramid beneath him. Someone who had performed the miracle of making the horrible slippery climb without help.

  Chekov pulled off his helmet and turned up the drip on his carbide lamp. Acetylene hissed with renewed vigor, and the small flame he finally ignited leapt suddenly bright in front of the round reflector. He walked around the sinkhole to train the light more fully on its torn-up edge, then began a careful scan of the ground [186] nearby. He could orienteer, but he was no tracker. What might have been a footprint leading away from the cave exit wasn’t always followed by another, and they sometimes seemed to point in contradictory directions. But the splayed, muddy handprint he found on a boulder ten meters away from the edge was unmistakable.

  He heard someone tromp up behind him with a confident, unhurried ease he was already learning to recognize.

  “Everything okay?” Smith asked, leaning over his shoulder with a friendly intimacy she didn’t seem to realize.

  Chekov barely noticed her closeness. “I don’t know ...” He nodded toward the handprint still pinned by his helmet light.

  Smith granted in surprise. “Do you think that’s the captain?”

  Chekov shook his head slowly, then allowed, “It must be,” because that was what his stomach had told him from the beginning. He lifted his eyes to the still, moonless darkness beyond the reach of their lights. “But where does he think he’s going?”

  Chapter Ten

  “UHURA TO Enterprise. Come in, Enterprise.”

  A roar of static filled the storage tent where Survey Team Three had left their main communicator, wedged between the sample crates and supplies they had hastily dumped into this shelter when they relocated their base camp. As Uhura had cleared a path to it through the mess, she had found a spare photon lamp and now had it jacked up to its highest illumination, as if that could somehow erase the memory of too many dark hours underground. The volume on the communicator was also turned up as far as it could go. Uhura was so tired that she couldn’t make her eyes focus on the flickering bars of the frequency monitor, so she was trying to make her ears do the work instead. Unfortunately, even loudly amplified static had a tendency to become [188] tedious after a while. Every time Uhura caught herself drifting off, she jerked upright in the hard metal seat and forced herself to send another hail. She was beginning to doubt the ship could hear her any better than she could hear it, but the activity at least kept her a little more alert.

  The tent flap opened with a hiss of parting electrostatic seals, letting in a swirl of Tlaoli’s dusty air along with a figure so caked in dried mud that his once salt-and-pepper hair had become a solid, grizzled gray. Deep furrows of weariness added to Zap Sanner’s appearance of having prematurely aged, but the cave specialist’s eyes still held their usual cheerfulness.

  “Hey, Lieutenant,” said Sanner. “We’ve got some soup and coffee going over in the mess tent. Why don’t you come get some?” He grinned and jerked a thumb at the communicator. “I bet you’ll be able to hear that from there just as easily as you can here.”

  “Sorry.” Uhura dialed the volume down to a normal level, and only then realized that the static roar had given her a headache. She rubbed at her forehead and grimaced as she felt mud crumble and sift down between her fingers. “I assume you finally got Crewman Davis up to the surface?”

  “Yeah. Once you’ve got enough rope and pitons and come-alongs set at the top, you can haul damn near anything out of a cave.” Sanner gave her a quick, embarrassed look. “Uh, sorry, sir. I didn’t mean—”

  Uhura smiled and shook her head at him. She had no trouble believing that the captain had scaled that brutal vertical slope on his own, but she wasn’t ashamed of [189] waiting until Sanner had rigged a sling and pulley system to help her scramble up to the top. She knew that physical courage was part of what made Kirk a natural and inspiring leader, but right now, Uhura was willing to settle for just being the highest-ranking officer in the group.

  “How is Crewman Davis feeling?”

  “She’s pretty out of it,” Sanner said bluntly. “Wright found a working set of medical instruments here and got the subcranial bleeding stopped, but she says Davis needs microsurgery within a few hours.”

  “And we have to get her to the Enterprise for that.” Uhura gave her static-clogged communicator a frustrated look. She still remembered the surge of hope she had felt when they had retraced their rugged hike through the karst to Team Three’s relocated base camp, and she’d seen that its power generator was still up and running. She’d thought that with the more powerful base communicator here she might actually have a chance to reestablish contact with the ship, but it looked as if Tlaoli’s static interference had expanded to clog the entire subspace spectrum.

  “Any luck yet?” Sanner asked, following her gaze to the communicator.

  “No. I haven’t gotten even a flicker of signal to focus in on, much less a response.”

  The furrows in his mud-caked face deepened a little more. “You don’t think the Enterprise left the system, do you?”

  Uhura felt her head shaking before she’d consciously decided to do it. “Commander Spock would [190] never leave us stran
ded down here, knowing we were in trouble.”

  “Yeah. Especially not with Captain Kirk ...” Sanner’s voice trailed off uncertainly, and Uhura winced. If and when the Enterprise ever responded to her hail, she wasn’t sure how she was going to explain what had happened to the captain. First he disappeared into thin air, then we think he came back with amnesia and ran away from us, and now he’s probably out wandering around on a dangerous karst plateau in the middle of the night. It was almost as if the Psi 2000 virus had chased them back through space and time, creating yet another insane crisis, but this time without the man who’d extricated them from the last one.

  “Hey,” Sanner said, awkwardly. “Don’t worry, Lieutenant, we’ll find him as soon as it’s light out. In the meantime, you really should get something to eat. Can’t you set that thing to hail the ship automatically?”

  “I’m afraid they won’t be able to separate a normal hail from the subspace interference. I’ve been using a rolling frequency assignment to find out which bands are penetrating the noise best. Then I’ll pulse those manually to send the Starfleet code for ‘emergency pickup.’ ”

  “Can’t you just set the transmitter to pulse that signal on all bands, all the time?”

  “Yes, but ...” Uhura’s voice trailed off. She was still thinking like a ship’s communications officer, she realized, assuming she had to be present at the com in order to elaborate on the simple emergency signal. But the Enterprise already knew what the situation was down [191] here on Tlaoli. Even an automated and coded message sent from the location of the base camp would be enough to tell Mr. Spock they had managed to escape the cave. “You’re right, Mr. Sanner. Hang on a minute while I program that in.”

  “No problem,” he said, and grinned again. “I told that kid Chekov to guard our share of the food with his life. I’m pretty sure he took me seriously.”

  Somewhat to her own surprise, Uhura felt laughter bubble up through her exhaustion. “Shame on you, Zap. It’s his very first landing party—he’s going to take everything seriously.”

  “Well, somebody has to cure him of that.” Sanner unsealed the tent seams again and held one wall up for her to pass through. Uhura stepped out and paused, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the profound darkness of night on an uninhabited planet. It didn’t take long to notice the light spilling out from the open mess tent, or the tantalizing smell of coffee and bread and vegetable soup that came with it. Uhura was halfway there before she even noticed the dim lemony glow on the opposite horizon.

  “Zap, what’s that light out there?” she demanded, pulling the cave geologist to a halt. He glanced in the direction she pointed, scrubbed a hand through his beard and muttered under his breath as if he were counting something.

  “Moonrise, I think,” he said eventually. “Sun won’t be up for another three hours or so.”

  Uhura followed him into the mess tent. “Do you think the moon would give us enough light to look for Captain Kirk?”

  [192] Sanner shrugged. “Depends on what phase it’s in. We’ll have to ask Jaeger about that.” He suited his action to his words by raising his voice to a cave-piercing bellow. “Hey, Karl! Will the moon be bright enough for us to start looking for the captain right away?”

  Jaeger glanced up from the mess tent table on which he had spread several topographic and geologic maps. “That depends. Do you care if you fall into a sinkhole or two along the way?”

  “Never mind.” Uhura crossed to the food service unit in the corner, where the quiet, dark-haired ensign was guarding a steaming kettle of soup and half a loaf of rehydrated bread as conscientiously as if they were made of dilithium. The soup had a scorched taste, as if it had been heated up too quickly, and the bread was slightly soggy, the way rehydrated food always was. But after the tense and exhausting hours she’d spent underground, Uhura had no complaint to make about either. Even the coffee, brewed bitingly strong the way security guards always seemed to make it and poured out with an apologetic smile by Yuki Smith, tasted like pure ambrosia—at least, once Uhura had surreptitiously mixed in several teaspoons of sweetened dry cocoa that she found on a lower shelf.

  It was a measure of Uhura’s hunger that she didn’t really notice the level of noise and activity in the mess tent until after she’d spooned up the last of her soup. Then she looked around in some surprise. She was sure she had remembered to issue official permission for her subordinates to get some sleep in the hours before [193] dawn. After the long and arduous journey they’d made through Sanner’s umbilical exit from the cave, and then the nerve-racking scramble up the muddy slopes of that final sinkhole, she thought most of them would have been thankful to head for the camp’s dormitory tent. But aside from the injured crewman Davis and her attendant medic Wright, not a single member of Survey Team Three or the cave rescue party appeared to have heeded her suggestion. Uhura was so new to the idea of being in command of a mission like this that it took her a moment to realize that it was probably her own example of staying awake and at work that had inspired their behavior.

  At one table, Sanner, D’Amato, and Palamas had cabled their scientific tricorders into the base camp’s generator and were extracting the data they had gathered before the power failure, arguing vigorously about its internal errors as they did so. At another table, Chekov and Smith had gone to help Jaeger sketch out yet another reconstruction of the alien cave system, this time overlain directly on a topographic map of Tlaoli’s surface. And in an empty space near the entrance, Martine and Tomlinson were assembling scaffolding and power supplies into something that looked like a small siege tower. Uhura got up and went to join them.

  “What are we building, Lieutenant?” she asked, peering up at the apparatus he was attaching to the top of the structure.

  “A light flare, sir.” Tomlinson showed her the bank of photon lamps he had lashed together. “Angela and I thought if the captain was wandering around at night, [194] not sure where he was, and he saw a really bright light ...”

  “Good idea,” Uhura agreed. “But will it be visible all the way back at the cave exit where we lost him?”

  “If we calculated the voltages right, it should be,” Martine answered. “We’ve jacked the power up with a couple of heavy-duty electron accelerators, but these photon lamps are combat-rated and they should be able to handle the load. We’ll point them straight up, of course, so nobody gets blinded.”

  Uhura shot her a quick look, trying to decide if that had been a joke, but both weapons officers gazed back at her gravely. “Very good,” she said, for lack of anything more intelligent to say. “Um ... is it ready to go?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then let’s take it out and set it up.”

  That at least, seemed to have been the right thing to say. Martine stopped fussing with the wiring and Tomlinson clambered off the scaffold and whistled for Chekov and Smith. The two younger crew members came over as if they’d been half-listening for his signal, and the three of them heaved the small tower up to their shoulders while Martine and Uhura lifted the tent flaps out of their way. A few steps past the tent wall, they plunked the light flare down again.

  “It doesn’t really matter where we put it, since it’s pointing straight up,” Tomlinson explained to Uhura. “Now, all we have to do is make sure we don’t blow out the main power circuit when we first turn it on.”

  “I’ll turn off the food server, and tell those guys inside to unplug their tricorders,” Yuki Smith said and [195] slipped back into the tent. When she came back, the four scientists trailed after her, D’Amato with his unplugged tricorder still clutched in his hands. “Okay, everything’s off.”

  Martine finished connecting the flare’s power cables to the main generator feed while Tomlinson climbed up the scaffold again to check the photon lamps. “Ready to go,” he reported as he vaulted off. There was a pause, and Uhura realized everyone was looking at her expectantly.

  “Power it up, Mr. Martine,” she said, with more confidence than s
he felt. She had never realized before that part of being in command was taking responsibility for the ideas and decisions of your crew as well as your own.

  “Aye-aye, sir.”

  There was an ominous crackle from the midsection of the tower—Uhura hoped that was just the accelerators jacking up the voltage—then a fierce white column leaped high into Tlaoli’s night sky. Even at its margins, the glare was strong enough to make Uhura blink and turn away. After a moment, her eyes adjusted well enough to see not only the flood-lit sprawl of the base camp but also the rocky rim of the dry canyon in which it was located. Tlaoli’s lemony little moon had just finished lifting over that rocky horizon, but its light paled to dim ivory beside their flare.

  “Lieutenant.” That was D’Amato’s diffident voice, somber and pitched low enough that only Uhura could hear. “I’m not sure this is such a good idea.”

  “Why not, Mr. D’Amato?”

  The geologist held out his tricorder, on which small [196] lights were blinking furiously. Its display panel showed a single blue curve that was dropping, slowly but steadily.

  “What’s that?” Uhura asked.

  “Total power consumption here in the base camp,” D’Amato said. “Unless this contraption of Tomlinson’s is reducing our generating capacity, which seems unlikely, the curve implies—”