Star Trek: The Lost Era - 08 - 2319 - One Constant Star

by David R. George III

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  To Dana Joseph Robitaille,

  the original Dude,

  a kind and generous friend with a raucous sense of humor, a man of high ideals and bright mind, a kindred spirit with whom I have shared many an adventure, and a true brother to me

  But Odysseus, far away hath lost his homeward path to the [. . .] land, and himself is lost.

  —Homer

  The Odyssey, Book XXIII

  2303

  * * *

  Odyssey

  * * *

  * * *

  Prologue

  * * *

  All at once, a terrible sense of loss overwhelmed her.

  Lieutenant Commander Demora Sulu pushed back from the main console of the warp shuttle and turned away from the dizzying tableaux of stars dancing beyond the sloping forward viewport. She dropped her elbows onto her knees and her face into her hands. Nausea roiled her stomach. Though suddenly damp from perspiration, her skin felt cold beneath her touch.

  As she huddled in the pilot’s chair, the image of her mother rose in her mind, despite that Susan Ling had perished more than twenty-five years earlier. She’s been gone for more than three-quarters of my life, Sulu realized, and yet I still think about her so often. She recalled with great clarity her mother’s slender but taut figure, the jet hair that fell in a lustrous spill all the way down to her waist, her delicate features and electric-green eyes. Sulu frequently visualized her in a parade of the stylish, futuristic clothing that Susan Ling once favored.

  But she did not imagine her like that as she sat doubled over and alone in the cockpit of the unnamed, unmarked shuttle. At that moment, Sulu remembered the visage of her mother wracked by Sakuro’s disease. After her symptoms had manifested, she’d bolted with her daughter from Marris III, but too late. By the time they reached Starbase 189 and its superior medical facilities, Susan Ling had lost so much weight that her body seemed little more than a flesh-covered skeleton. Her musculature had begun to disintegrate and her organs to fail. Fever held her in its grip, sweat matting her tangled ebon tresses. When she coughed, her face—drawn but still beautiful—contorted into a rictus of pain.

  Even though Sulu had lived only the first six years of her life with her mother, and though Susan Ling had passed away more than two and a half decades earlier, she still felt her absence. To the child she’d been, the death of the only parent she’d ever known to that point had been devastating. Her mother had not only raised her by herself, but she had never introduced or even mentioned any other family members. When Susan Ling died, she took the young Demora’s entire world with her.

  And that’s what I feel like now, Sulu thought. Like everything I know in the universe—everyone—has been ripped away from me. She thought of her father, Hikaru, unknown to her—and she to him—until Susan Ling had, in the provisions of her will, left her to his custody. Demora had resented her mother’s erstwhile lover at first, had perhaps even hated him—or at least the idea of him—but over the years, she’d come to accept him as her father, to love and respect him, and to be glad that he’d come into her life.

  And now he’s lost to me, she thought. I’ll never see him again. Not him, not her grandmother—whom she had never even gotten to know—and not any of her more than seven hundred crewmates aboard Enterprise, many of them friends, some of them very close ones. Not Vanetta Angelis, the engineer she’d been seeing for several months, a woman for whom Sulu’s feelings had already begun to deepen. Not Aravesh ch’Vrane, a man who served as one of the ship’s xenobiologists, and whom she and Vanetta had recently begun dating. Not even Admiral Sinclair-Alexander, the Starfleet flag officer for Enterprise’s operational sector, nor Admiral Aziz, the Intelligence director who’d sent her and Captain Harriman on their current mission.

  John, Sulu thought, and she lifted her head from her hands to glance at the doors separating the cockpit of the shuttle from its rear compartment. Back there, she knew, the Enterprise captain slept—or he attempted to, anyway. As one day had bled into the next over the previous few weeks, getting rest had become more and more problematic for both of them. Paradoxically, the less they’d been able to do, the more exhausted they’d grown, at least on an emotional level, and yet fatigue had not translated into slumber.

  As bad as I feel, John feels even worse. Harriman did not appear to blame himself for the awful predicament in which they found themselves, but he wore the mantle of command heavily. Sulu expected that most, if not all, starship captains did, but she still respected his seriousness of purpose.

  Wherever we end up, at least I’ll have one friend. She had known the captain for ten years, ever since she’d graduated Starfleet Academy and drawn an assignment as a helm officer aboard the newly launched Enterprise-B. The two had enjoyed a cordial working relationship from the beginning, and Sulu had steadily climbed the ship’s chain of command. Just eighteen months earlier, Harriman had championed her promotion to the rank of lieutenant commander and her appointment as his executive officer. In that year and a half, the close proximity in which they had to work, along with the level of trust required between any two people in their respective positions, cemented and deepened their already solid bond.

  Sulu sat up in her chair, then rose to her feet. Though she had devised nothing more to do, nothing more to try, than she and Harriman already had over the previous twenty-two days, she felt driven to action. She moved to the port bulkhead—just three strides across the breadth of the cabin—and examined the engine readouts. The warp nacelles of the highly modified civilian shuttlecraft remained effectively offline, while the impulse drive idled on operational standby. Thrusters kept the vessel locked in its current position.

  Sulu barked out a humorless laugh. As if our “current position” has any real meaning, she scoffed to herself. I never thought I’d yearn to float along the edge of the Neutral Zone—or even to see a couple of Romulan birds-of-prey bearing down on us. If we ever—

  The sound inside the cabin shifted. Sulu distinguished a slight increase in the volume of the thrusters, and felt the familiar but almost imperceptible clutch of the inertial dampers as the shuttle moved. An instant later, the hum of the impulse engines grew to suffuse the compartment, the sublight drive automatically engaged by a navigational routine she’d programmed. Sulu peered through the forward viewport and saw a sight she welcomed: a steady, recognizable pattern of stars, a grouping of seven suns that looked to her like a backward question mark. A surge of profound relief coursed through her.

  As Sulu stared at one of the brightest stars in that region of space—Adelphous, she recalled—she heard the doors leading to the rear section of the shuttle whisper open behind her. She wanted to turn toward Captain Harriman, to share with him the development for which they’d been hoping, but she couldn’t pull her gaze from the port. As ridiculous as she knew it to be, she had the sense that if she looked away, the array of familiar stars she saw might abruptly vanish.

  Harriman walked up beside her. “We’re moving,” he said. Though the captain spoke quietly, Sulu could hear the flutter of excitement lurking within his words.

  “We’re back,” she said, still focused on Adelphous and the inverted question-mark configuration of stars around it. “We’re home.” Her voice broke on th
e last word, and her vision swam. Tears pooled in her eyes, a result of the emotion that moments before had fought its way out of her after she’d suppressed it for more than three weeks. The prospect of she and Harriman returning to the Federation transmuted her sorrow into joy, though, her feeling of loss becoming one of salvation.

  Not wanting the captain to see her display of feeling, Sulu stepped back across the cockpit and sat down at the pilot’s console. Harriman followed, taking a seat beside her. “Verify our location and course,” he ordered.

  “Checking,” Sulu replied. She blinked and a tear slid down her cheek. She quickly swept it away with the back of one hand, then sent her fingers darting over the controls. She read the data aloud as they marched across her monitor. “We’re approximately half a billion kilometers from the system’s termination shock . . . traveling at full impulse velocity . . . on a vector directly away from Odyssey.” The previously unvisited star appeared in the stellar cartography database designated only by a catalogue label, but about a week into their ordeal, they had named it after the ancient epic poem by Homer. Although it fell within the Hertzsprung gap on standard luminosity/spectral-type charts—absolute magnitude +1, class F7—it did not differentiate itself as unusual; the planetless, high-mass star had simply reached the stage in its life cycle when it transitioned from fusing hydrogen in its core to fusing helium.

  No, it’s not unusual at all, Sulu thought cynically. Not unless you count what it did to us. Except that they didn’t know with certainty that Odyssey had caused their plight. Circumstances suggested that it somehow had, but the readings of the yellow-white sun that they’d collected and studied had revealed nothing out of the ordinary, let alone any sort of mechanism for what they’d experienced. Eventually, in their attempt to escape and return home, they’d had little choice but to retreat to the outer regions of the star’s heliosphere, which necessarily limited the efficacy of the sensors.

  “I’m detecting no ships anywhere nearby,” Harriman said as he worked beside Sulu. She understood that, although he had no doubt scanned for any vessels, he would have specifically searched for those of the Romulan Imperial Fleet. When she and the captain had first taken their shuttle into the Odyssey system, it had been in an attempt to elude a patrol ship that had pursued them out of the Empire.

  But that was twenty-two days ago, Sulu thought. Because of that, it didn’t surprise her that they no longer had company in that unexplored region, away from both Romulan territory and the Federation, and far from any established space lanes.

  “I’m powering up the nacelles,” Harriman continued. Technically, they’d left the warp engines in a state of stasis, significantly reducing the possibility of the shuttle’s detection on the long-range sensors of the Romulans—or anybody else—but allowing Sulu and the captain to reinitiate faster-than-light travel without needing an extended startup process. “Sixty seconds to warp capability.”

  “Course for Foxtrot Three laid in,” Sulu said. One of a baker’s dozen of subterranean, asteroid-based outposts, the Foxtrot complexes threaded along the Federation side of the Neutral Zone, their crews maintaining a steadfast vigil on the border movements of the Imperial Fleet. The Starfleet base had not been Sulu and Harriman’s intended destination once they’d completed their reconnaissance in Romulan space. As their situation had persisted, though, the captain had decided that, should they manage to extricate themselves from their dilemma, they would head not for Starbase 23, but for the Federation facility closest to their location.

  Sulu finished reviewing their route on the navigation panel, then risked a glance through the forward viewport. She feared that she would see an arrangement of stars unknown to her—or worse, numerous arrangements blinking into and out of existence in rapid succession. Instead, she saw Adelphous tucked in the run of stars that resembled a backward question mark.

  “The nacelles have been released from stasis and are fully active,” Harriman announced.

  Sulu operated the helm controls. “Going to warp.” She watched the effect through the port as the shuttle streaked into the starfield. “Warp one,” she said after a few seconds, and shortly after that, “Warp two.” Although their specially augmented shuttlecraft could achieve a cruising speed of warp three, and in exigent circumstances, could manage a burst at warp four, they sought to avoid drawing attention to themselves. Despite what the sensors promised, the Romulans could be hiding behind their cloaking devices anywhere in the vicinity, and a bird-of-prey could easily overtake the civilian equivalent of a Starfleet Gagarin-class warp shuttle, no matter how extensive the modifications.

  Sulu looked over at the captain. He wore the same civilian clothing—dark slacks and a long-sleeved navy-blue shirt—he’d had on earlier, which told her that he hadn’t even attempted to sleep. Like him, she’d dressed in something other than a Starfleet uniform: black pants and a ruby-colored blouse. They carried nothing in the shuttlecraft that would identify them as Federation officers in the event of their capture. Their masquerade as simple traders would give way, if necessary, to a deeper cover as independent intelligence merchants. The captain had planned the details of their covert mission into Romulan space meticulously.

  In the previous five years, Harriman had from time to time left the Enterprise for extended periods—usually a few weeks at a clip—under the guise of taking some of his accumulated leave. Perhaps that had occasionally been the case; certainly he’d never returned to the ship without colorful tales of his holiday. But after witnessing the concentration and precision he demonstrated during their current mission, Sulu concluded that Starfleet Intelligence had utilized him on other occasions—although she hadn’t asked him any questions on the subject, and he hadn’t offered any confirmations.

  Exhaustion settled around Sulu like a warm blanket. She closed her eyes, inhaled deeply, then let her breath out slowly. Finally believing that she and the captain had successfully fled the adverse influence of Odyssey, she felt some of the tension in her body ease. “We really are home,” she said, as though uttering the words aloud again would concretize their validity.

  “We really are,” Harriman agreed. “But when are we?”

  The question jolted Sulu. So fixed on their location, she had forgotten about the temporal aspect of what they’d endured. She immediately reached for the controls of the shuttlecraft’s internal chronometer, then executed a measurement of sidereal time. The two readings didn’t match. She informed the captain as she subtracted one stardate from the other. “We’re one hundred seventy-three hours in the future.”

  “Not the future,” Harriman said. “Our new present.”

  Sulu nodded her understanding: they’d arrived home close enough to their own time that they needn’t risk revisiting Odyssey. “So for us, it’s been three weeks since we left Romulan space, but for the rest of the galaxy, four weeks have passed,” she said. “Adding in the time we spent in the Empire, that means Starfleet Intelligence thinks we’ve been gone eight weeks.” Their mission to observe and record field tests of the Romulans’ latest upgrades to their cloaking technology had been slated for twenty-seven days, including travel time. Instead, nearly two months had passed since they’d disembarked Enterprise at Starbase 23. “They probably think we’ve been either captured or killed,” she said. “And who knows what the crew think.”

  “By now, Captain Rendón will have apprised them of our independent choices to extend our separate leaves,” Harriman said. During a major refit of his own vessel, the Excelsior-class Concordia, Demián Rendón had been temporarily reassigned to command Enterprise in Harriman and Sulu’s absence. “Or maybe one of us has taken ill, nothing serious, but something contagious and requiring quarantine. Maybe the other of us has been called upon to deal with a family emergency. Whatever their chosen explanations, Starfleet Intelligence will have worked it out.”

  “But what does S.I. think?” Sulu asked.

  “Not that we’ve been captured, not without proof,” Harriman said with
confidence. Once more, Sulu perceived that he’d been through similar situations before. “Even if the Romulans suspected Starfleet of espionage, and even if they manufactured evidence to support such a claim, Intelligence would see through it.” Sulu remembered the coded phrases and gestures she’d been taught prior to the mission, subtle ways of verifying her identity and disclosing her circumstances in the event she’d been taken prisoner and her likeness transmitted to the Federation. She also knew that Starfleet Intelligence supported a number of undercover operatives, double agents, and informants within the imperial apparat, some of whom occupied positions in which they would be able to substantiate or refute any allegations of Sulu and Harriman’s detention. “In the absence of the confirmation of our capture, S.I. likely considers us delayed and possibly missing. It’s too early for them to conclude that we’ve been killed, and far too soon for them to publicly announce . . .” Something appeared to occur to Harriman. He glanced away for a moment, as though in thought.

  “Captain?”

  He looked back at Sulu. “It’s too soon for them to publicly announce our deaths.”

  The idea of being declared dead troubled Sulu. Not for the first time, she considered the impact of such information, whether erroneous or not, on the people in her life—not least of all her father. Although a Starfleet officer himself and therefore cognizant of the dangers of life aboard a starship, he would still take the news of his daughter’s death hard, despite whatever story Intelligence concocted to explain it.

  “It’s all right, Demora,” the captain said, obviously reading the emotions on her face. “Nobody thinks we’re dead, and more important, we’re not dead.”