Star Trek: Seekers: Second Nature

by David Mack

  “The ship is not responding,” Hesh said, trumping Theriault’s opportunity to put a positive spin on the unhappy news. “The reason for their lack of response is not yet known.”

  Theriault cuffed the science officer’s shoulder. “He wasn’t asking you, Lieutenant.”

  Hesh froze as he realized his faux pas. He said nothing as he avoided eye contact with her and the rest of the landing party, choosing instead to spend the next minute inspecting his boots. Unfortunately, from Theriault’s perspective, the damage had been done.

  Tan Bao aimed his own nervous stare across the sea toward the big island. “What if those things get beamed back down? What if they come after us?”

  Dastin was less optimistic. “Nguyen, are you kidding? Nimur and her gang are the least of our problems. What if the ship left without us? What if we’re stranded? I didn’t pack more than a day’s rations, did you? What if the fruit here tastes like mugato shit?”

  The nurse squinted at Dastin with mock suspicion. “Do I even want to know why you’re familiar with the flavor of mugato excrement?”

  “Actually,” Hesh interrupted, “my scans of the local environment suggest there is sufficient potable water and consumable food on this island to last us indefinitely. Furthermore, based on the levels of fructose in the native fruits, and their relatively modest levels of various acidic compounds known to produce sour flavors, it seems likely the local produce will prove more than acceptable to our respective palates.”

  The Arkenite’s reward for an attempt at peacemaking was baffled glares from Dastin and Tan Bao, and a scrunched grimace of confusion from Theriault.

  Dastin shook his head. “Never let facts derail a good rant, Hesh.”

  “I do not understand.” Hesh thought for a moment, then seemed to have an epiphany. “Wait. You have told me about this. You were ‘busting’ on each other.” Slow, pained nods of confirmation from Tan Bao and Dastin. “My apologies.”

  “Forget it,” Dastin said.

  A crackle of static spat from Theriault’s still-open communicator. She lifted it, hoping to hear a reply from the ship, but there was nothing on the channel except noise. She set the gain on the transmitter and was about to hail the Sagittarius again when she heard a distant scream in the sky. She looked up, more out of reflex than because she expected to see anything. A sick feeling swirled in her gut as she saw a fiery streak slash across the heavens high overhead. The burning trail cut a sharp arc through the purpling dusk and then made a sharp and decisive diving turn.

  Watching the fireball descend, Theriault became aware that the landing party had pressed in close behind her, all of them with eyes turned skyward. For the first time that she could recall, there was fear in Dastin’s voice.

  “Is . . . is that . . . ?”

  Hesh lifted his tricorder. Its high-pitched oscillations lasted only a few seconds. “It is too far away for me to make a definitive scan. However, radiation emissions are consistent with a vessel approximately the mass of the Sagittarius, and containing a matter-antimatter reactor. Its trajectory will put its crash site on the far eastern shore of the populated island.”

  The incandescent blaze went into a straight dive and picked up speed as it neared the planet’s surface, indicating that it was in the throes of an uncontrolled descent, a slave to gravity. It dipped beneath the dark edge of the horizon and vanished. For several seconds, the only evidence of its passage was the fading streak of ionized gas it had left in the atmosphere.

  Then came a harsh white flash from beyond the horizon, followed by a mushroom cloud.

  The landing party stood and stared, shocked and silent for nearly half a minute. Then the far-off rumbling of the blast reached them, and Theriault felt a tear form in the corner of her eye.

  She wiped it away with the side of her palm and reminded herself she was in command.

  “Dastin, help me build us a shelter. Hesh, scrounge up some of that fruit you were talking about. Tan Bao, see if you can find a source of potable water. And let’s be quick about it. It’s getting dark, and I think we might be here a while.”

  • • •

  “Helm is not responding! Still no main power! Twenty-five seconds to impact!”

  Terrell heard Nizsk’s frantic reports from the helm, but he had no more orders to give her, no advice that could delay calamity. They had already been robbed of the option to bail out in the escape pod. They were all going down with the ship, captain and crew alike.

  Momentum pinned Terrell into his command chair, to which he clung with every sinew in his hands and arms. The sickening sensation of free fall warned him that the ship’s inertial dampeners were close to failing. Even if, by some miracle, the Sagittarius regained enough power to pull out of this death-spiral into the sea, there was a serious risk the g-forces associated with such a maneuver might crush the ship’s humanoid crewmembers into pulp.

  We should be so lucky as to have that chance.

  The main viewscreen had long since turned to dark static-snow, a fact for which Terrell was almost grateful. Watching a planet’s surface rush up to meet one could be a hypnotic experience, exactly the sort of thing to make one’s mind go numb at what might prove to be a critical—or final—moment in one’s life. That was not how Terrell wanted to meet his ending. He was determined to die with his eyes open, to go down fighting with every last ounce of strength he possessed. He refused to die as a mere spectator to his own fate. He would feel it.

  Time crawled as death beckoned. Terrell took note of every fleeting expression on the faces of his bridge crew. The rigid tension of Razka, who sat poised over the communications panel; the barely contained melancholy and terror of Ensign Taryl; the frantic labors of the otherwise inscrutable insectoid Ensign Nizsk, fighting to make the helm answer her commands; and the preternatural, hard-earned calm of Lieutenant Commander Sorak, whose Vulcan training had given him the tools to control his fear and face the inevitable with eerie sangfroid.

  Nizsk’s high-pitched shriek pulled Terrell back into the moment: “Fifteen seconds!” As if the Kaferian had uttered a magic spell, consoles around the bridge sputtered to life, along with the helm. Nizsk keyed in commands and cried out, “Hang on!”

  The impulse engines whined, and the hull creaked and moaned as if the ship were a dying leviathan suffering a final indignity. Some of the consoles that had just been revived stuttered back into their dark slumbers, and the centripetal force of their course change crushed Terrell against his command chair so hard he couldn’t breathe.

  Images flashed across the main viewscreen, snippets of the view outside the ship. At first it was just a teal wall of static, and then Terrell saw the line of a horizon as his ship turned its nose away from a direct impact with the sea. Gravity’s deathgrip relaxed its hold on Terrell as a dark smear on the screen resolved itself into a tiny landmass—an island—and rushed forward to meet them as they skimmed the water’s surface at a distressingly low altitude.

  “Helm, pull up!”

  “Not enough power, sir! We have to set down!”

  Terrell hoped he had heard Nizsk incorrectly. “Where, Ensign? There’s no clearing!”

  “It’s there or in the water, sir.”

  Long years of training at Starfleet Academy had taught Terrell that water landings were often the preferred choice in crash-down scenarios. He looked over his shoulder at his Vulcan second officer. “I’d take water, wouldn’t you?”

  Sorak was unusually emphatic in his reply. “Given the current state of our hull? No.”

  There was no time to argue, so Terrell trusted the old Vulcan’s wisdom. “If you say so.” He raised his voice for Nizsk. “Put us in the weeds, Ensign!”

  “Landing gear deployed! Firing braking thrusters!”

  The sparkling emerald expanse of the sea blurred past until only the forbidding silhouette of the jungle island remained ahead of the Sagittarius. Then they slammed into the wall of trees, and the violent deceleration launched Terrell from his chair.
He and the rest of the bridge crew were thrown against the forward bulkhead, which quaked from the constant, excruciatingly loud, bone-jarring cacophony of impacts. The overhead lights went dark, leaving only the dim glow of emergency lighting to trace the outline of the bridge.

  A final thud of collision signaled the halt of the ship’s uncontrolled skid through the jungle. It took a few moments for Terrell’s eyes to adjust to the much dimmer lighting on the bridge. He listened for sounds of breathing or distress. “Everyone, sound off by rank.”

  “Sorak here, sir.”

  “I’m okay, sir,” Taryl replied.

  “Ensign Nizsk, still at my post.”

  Razka rasped, “Bruised but ready to serve, Captain.”

  Terrell drew a deep breath, blinked once, and was relieved to be able to distinguish the unique profiles of all his people. “Good flying, Nizsk. Sorak, Razka, get me damage and casualty reports, on the double. Taryl, go outside and scout the area in a half-kilometer radius.”

  Everyone acknowledged with overlapping muted replies of “Aye, sir,” and went to work. Terrell, suddenly aware of a painful twinge in his left knee, limped back to his command chair and slumped into it, grateful to be alive.

  That’s one wish granted. Now let’s see if I can get all my people off this rock in one piece.

  • • •

  Sweat ran in heavy beads from Ilucci’s scalp. His thinning hair made his perspiration’s descent to his forehead easier each year. Only his unkempt eyebrows had kept him from being blinded during the majority of his working hours.

  Above his head dangled the battery panel, to which he had connected the high-load cable that his engineers had risked their asses to patch directly into the impulse coil.

  With seconds to spare, he had realized that if there was no more slack to be wrung from the cable, then it would have to come from the panel. And that was when he had recalled that one of the peculiarities of Starfleet design was that starship construction crews rarely cropped the cables behind most utility panels if they could use a standard-issue one-meter cable, coil the excess, and tuck it behind the panel to save time during the final stages of assembly on a ship of the line. Every panel Ilucci had ever serviced aboard the Sagittarius—not to mention every other ship he’d ever served on—had embodied that lazy, wasteful practice.

  That “wasteful” bit of institutional sloth had just saved the ship.

  As the seconds had counted down to disaster, he had torn the battery control panel off the bulkhead, and then he had pulled the input jack for the transfer cable free of its mount. To his relief, it had been backed by a typical excess of nearly thirty centimeters of slack wire.

  Ilucci had guffawed like a maniac as he plugged in the high-load cable and then fell to the deck. Then he’d heard the whining of the impulse engines. What a beautiful sound.

  Next had come the wild percussion of collisions, and the roar of the hull gouging a path across solid ground. Now the ship was silent, full of smoke, and miraculously still intact.

  He glanced over his head at the loose panel, which was anchored by nothing except the high-load power cable he had jacked into it. It was in violation of nearly half a dozen Starfleet safety regulations. Technically, he had turned his entire engineering deck into a case for his own court-martial.

  He rested his head against the bulkhead and shut his eyes. If they want to write me up, that’s fine by me. But for the next five minutes, I’m taking a nap.

  23

  Tensions had been high on the bridge of the Endeavour before it had received the mayday from the Sagittarius. Now the ship was at Red Alert and on a direct course for danger. Panels on either side of the main turbolift flashed with crimson light, but all of Captain Atish Khatami’s attention was on the ominous threat pictured in the center of the main viewscreen—and the troubling fact that, to all appearances, the Klingon cruiser was the only ship in the vicinity.

  Her first officer, Lieutenant Commander Katherine Stano, looked up from the hooded sensor display. “The Voh’tahk is holding position but coming about to face us.”

  Khatami recognized the Klingons’ maneuver as pure posturing. “They’re daring us to make orbit. Helm, steady as she goes. Lieutenant McCormack, arm phasers and torpedoes but don’t lock them onto the Voh’tahk until I give the order.”

  “Aye, Captain,” replied the freckle-faced young navigator. Her colleague at the helm, the Arcturian pilot Lieutenant Neelakanta, confirmed the order simply by following it.

  The pair had served together the past few years at the helm of the Constitution-class starship and had gelled into an effective partnership, even if at first glance they might appear mismatched. Young, slight of build, and red-haired, McCormack looked like an out-of-place farmer’s daughter, while Neelakanta resembled—to Khatami’s eyes, at least—a half-melted bald man made of dull red wax, his long face defined by its overlapping, drooping layers of flesh.

  Stano stared at the Klingon ship as it grew larger on the viewscreen. Khatami put her first officer back to work. “Commander, keep scanning the planet’s surface for any sign of the Sagittarius. Their S.O.S. might have meant they were making a forced landing.”

  “Yes, sir.” Stano turned back to the sensor display and hunched over it, eyes wide and searching for a reason to hold on to hope.

  Watching the younger woman, Khatami at last found a small degree of grudging respect for Stano’s choice of a neatly tucked beehive hairstyle. It didn’t need to be pushed away from her face when she leaned forward or bent down, so it spared her what had once been a frequent distraction. As utilitarian as the hairdo was, however, Khatami still preferred her own neatly coiffed bob cut—just as she preferred her uniform with trousers, while Stano had elected to adopt Starfleet’s miniskirt uniform, for reasons that still eluded Khatami’s understanding.

  Lieutenant Hector Estrada, the oldest of the ship’s senior officers, swiveled away from the communications panel. “Captain, we’re being warned by the Voh’tahk not to enter orbit.”

  “Return the favor, Lieutenant. Warn the Voh’tahk’s commander not to get in our way.”

  The mostly bald, mustached Estrada arched his thick eyebrows with momentary alarm before slowly rotating his chair back toward his console. “Aye, sir.”

  Khatami had no desire to start a shooting war with the Klingons, but she refused to be pushed around by them, either. The Organians said we’d be friends one day. She stifled a soft, cynical laugh. You can’t be friends with someone you don’t respect. And you can’t respect someone who lets you bully them. So we’ll just call this my overture to friendship.

  Her ruminations were interrupted by Lieutenant Stephen Klisiewicz, the ship’s third-in-command and senior science officer. “Captain? I think you should see this.” He handed her a data slate with a report he had just extracted from the ship’s library computer.

  It was an update from Starfleet Intelligence regarding the I.K.S. Voh’tahk. Specifically, an alert concerning who had just been placed in command of the D-7 heavy cruiser. Khatami handed it back to Klisiewicz and lowered her voice. “How recent is that?”

  He whispered back, “Confirmed nine days ago by first-hand sources on Somraw.”

  She regarded the Klingon vessel with a new measure of caution and respect. Not many Klingon commanders had reputations that preceded them, and even fewer had become infamous to the point that their presence would give Khatami pause. Captain Kang fit both descriptions.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant. Return to your post.” Klisiewicz nodded, and then he climbed the short stairs out of the command well and returned to his regular station on the upper level.

  Stano snapped upright and turned toward the captain. “Sir, I’ve found the Sagittarius!”

  “Is she intact?”

  “Looks like it.” Stano keyed commands into her console. “Estrada, I’m sending you their coordinates. Hail them on a coded frequency, see if you can raise them.”

  Estrada was already at work on the ta
sk. “Aye, sir. Transmitting now.”

  Khatami used the panel on her command chair’s armrest to open an internal comm channel to sickbay. “Bridge to Doctor Leone.”

  The ship’s nasal-voiced chief surgeon answered at once. “Go ahead, Captain.”

  “Tony, it looks like the Sagittarius went down hard on the planet’s surface. We don’t know yet how bad they’re hurt, but they might need medical help.”

  “Understood. I’ll have Nurse Sikal put together a triage team while I prep sickbay.”

  “Very good. Commander Stano will let Sikal know when to meet the landing party. Bridge out.” She thumbed off the channel to sickbay and opened another to main engineering. “Bridge to Commander Yataro.”

  The ship’s recently assigned new chief engineer, an ambitious Lirin officer, responded after a brief delay. “Yataro here.”

  “Commander, prep a damage control team to beam down to the Sagittarius.”

  “Understood. Anything else, sir?”

  “That’s all for now. Bridge out.” Khatami closed the channel. She had adjusted quickly to the new chief engineer’s habit of curt conversations. He seemed to have a keen dislike of small talk, and he preferred his duty-related conversations to be short, direct, and unambiguous. Strangely, he was an excellent problem-solver and unraveler of riddles—byproducts, Khatami suspected, of his deep-seated aversions to uncertainty, chaos, and obfuscation.

  Estrada touched his hand to the transceiver nestled in his ear, listened intently for a moment, then shot a hopeful look at the captain. “Sir, I have the Sagittarius.”

  “On speakers.” Khatami waited until Estrada signaled her that the channel was open, and then she continued. “Sagittarius, this is Captain Khatami on the Endeavour. Do you copy?”

  Terrell’s voice was blanketed in static. “We read you, Captain.”

  “What’s your status?”

  “Heavy damage across the board, and I think we scuffed the paint something awful. Nothing a week at Starbase Pacifica won’t fix.”