♦ ♦ ♦
Xintal Linojj resisted the impulse to draw her phaser. As she walked cautiously forward, she slowly moved her head from side to side, casting her gaze upon the round windows that looked out on the landing party from the one- and two-story buildings lining the thoroughfare. She saw no movement anywhere, but the sensation of being watched persisted. Fenn assured her that she read no life signs in the area, and that at such close range, the biosensors of her tricorder readily overcame the interfering substance in the ground. The science officer also confirmed that she detected no power sources or communications signals around them, implying that nobody watched them, even remotely, and no equipment recorded them. Still, it required an act of Linojj’s will not to reach for her type-1 phaser where it hung at the back of her black uniform pants, concealed beneath the hem of her brick-red tunic and the cold-weather jacket she wore atop it.
The air felt crisp as she and the five other members of the landing party walked along the center of one of the wide radial avenues that led from the edge of the circular metropolis directly to its center. In addition to pulling Tenger, Borona Fenn, and Hawkins Young from the bridge, she’d added a second security guard, Crewman Darius Permenter, as well as the ship’s chief medical officer, Doctor Uta Morell. They had transported from Enterprise to the perimeter of the city, where they had chosen to begin their survey. Linojj took point, with Permenter sticking to her side, while Tenger positioned himself as he always did, at the rear of the group, where, as he often said, he could keep all of the people entrusted to his safekeeping within his view.
They had arrived in the city just after midday, and yet the muddy sky lent their surroundings the dim, hazy look and feel of dusk. The high-pitched whines of three tricorders—one operated by Fenn, one by Morell, and one by Young—sounded unnaturally loud as they pierced the silence of the city. The carpet of ash covering the ground muffled the clack of their boot heels against the pavement. Measuring from four to five centimeters deep, the accumulation of the smoky residue kicked up around the landing party as they moved through it, surrounding them at calf level like a miniature, gray snowstorm.
The group reached an intersection, where an avenue that looped around the city crossed the straight thoroughfare they had taken. Linojj stopped and looked around, then called back over her shoulder. “Ensign?”
The communications officer hurried to her, deactivating his tricorder and dropping it to his side. “Yes, Commander?”
“What’s your assessment of these buildings?” Linojj asked, waving her hand toward the structures closest to them.
“Sir?” Young said, as though he hadn’t understood her question.
“You have archaeological training,” Linojj said. “You draw conclusions about historical places and peoples based on what they leave behind. What are your thoughts about this part of the city?”
“I . . . I’m not sure,” Young said, his discomfort obvious. He clearly didn’t know what she wanted of him, and therefore fretted about providing her bad information.
“Don’t worry, Ensign,” Linojj said. “This isn’t a test.” She offered him a thin smile, attempting to put him at ease. “I’m just looking for an opinion as we try to figure out what we’ve discovered here.” As the rest of the landing party congregated about them, Linojj pointed to the nearest building. It rose only a single level and fronted on the arc of the crossing avenue, both its front and back walls shaped to match the curve. Its short side walls ran straight, parallel to the radial thoroughfare. The building featured round windows and a round door, and its roof arched downward, like a flattened dome. Constructed of a seamless, concrete-like material, the entire structure matched the gritty color of the ash all around it.
Young raised his tricorder, but Linojj stopped him. “Forget about sensors,” she said. “Tell me what your first impressions are. Is that a home? An office? A lab or commercial establishment?”
Young took a step toward the building. “It’s difficult to say just by looking at it, Commander. Archaeologists base their conclusions not only on physical evidence, but what they know about a population and a region historically. In some cultures, citizens tend to aggregate in large numbers, residing not in smaller dwellings like that, but in sizable, multi-unit structures. In other societies, people choose to live by themselves in smaller places. There are also numerous examples of other preferences in other civilizations, but I don’t know anything about who lived on this planet, or anything about this city.”
“I understand all of that,” Linojj said, “but what do you think of when you look at that building?”
Young continued to regard the structure without saying anything, and Linojj wondered how badly the situation—or she herself—intimidated him. It hadn’t been all that long since he’d left the Academy. She had opted to include him in the landing party so that he could gain experience—and confidence—in the field, but also because she believed that his diverse training could prove useful in such an enigmatic situation.
Finally, Young said, “It’s dull.”
“What is?” Linojj asked.
“The building,” the ensign said. “It’s absent anything identifiable as ornamentation. It has the round windows and the round door, but those appear utilitarian, not decorative. The walls and the roof are smooth and drab and featureless.” He turned in place and motioned toward the other structures in the immediate vicinity. “All of these buildings aren’t identical,” he went on, “but they all share a lack of adornment.”
“And what does that tell you?” Linojj wanted to know, pleased that she’d gotten the young officer talking.
“Nothing definitive,” the ensign said. “I’d need more information even to formulate a working hypothesis. It could simply be that the inhabitants of the city have no artistic sensibilities. It could also be that they prize creativity to such a degree that they mandate its limitation to certain contexts, such as display in a museum. Or it could even be what Ensign Syndergaard speculated: that this place was built for a population who never arrived, and so never had the opportunity to embellish it.”
“Thank you,” Linojj said. She declined to point out that Young had not actually answered the question she’d asked. They had just begun their investigation, though, and so he might yet contribute to their efforts. Regardless, she would meet with him afterward to discuss whatever shortcomings and strengths he demonstrated on the mission. To Morell and Fenn, she said, “Doctor, Commander, scan that building. I want to be as sure as we can that there’s nobody inside.”
The two officers held up their tricorders in the direction of the structure. “I’m reading no life signs of any kind,” Morell said.
“And there’s no movement whatsoever,” Fenn added.
“Then let’s go find out what’s inside,” Linojj said. She had taken only a single step when Tenger materialized beside her. She knew that, since she wanted to take the landing party into an unexplored, unsecured interior space, the security chief would insist on entering first and checking it for any potential dangers. She saw that he’d already taken his phaser in hand, although he kept it lowered, almost hidden with the grip of his fingers. With it, he quickly signaled to the other security guard, and Permenter fell back at once to protect the landing party from the rear.
Tenger led the way toward the plain structure, the vibrant green of his Orion skin conspicuous against the grayscale environs of the city. When he reached the door, he turned to face Linojj and the rest of the landing party. “I will enter first,” he said, just as the methodical security chief had on so many other missions. “Wait for my signal before you follow.” Linojj nodded.
A round handle protruded from the center of the door. Tenger reached for it with his empty hand. Linojj expected that the door wouldn’t open, and that they’d have to force it, but it swung inward at Tenger’s touch. The hinges growled out their displeasure, a clear indication that they hadn’t been used in quite some time. Tenger called out a greeting. When he re
ceived no response, he stepped inside. He did not raise his phaser as he did so, but Linojj knew that he didn’t need to: she’d witnessed the swiftness of his reflexes in action.
The security chief stood in the doorway for a moment, his broad shoulders nearly filling the frame, his head swiveling from side to side. Linojj tried to look past him into the building, but she saw only shadows. When Tenger moved inside and away from the door, she waited. After a minute or so, he reappeared, a portable beacon gleaming where he had affixed it to his wrist. “There are four rooms,” he said. “They are all empty.”
Linojj strode through the doorway and past him. As her eyes adjusted to the dim interior, she saw that Tenger’s characterization of the room as empty referred only to people, not to furnishings. The window in the curved front wall provided the only illumination, which marginally brightened a patch of the floor, but did little to reveal the objects filling the space. While the rest of the landing party filed inside behind her, Linojj reached into a pocket of her jacket and pulled out her own beacon. She clapped it onto her wrist and switched it on.
As Linojj shined the light about the surroundings, other beams joined hers. Tenger and Fenn moved deeper into the building through an arched passage, while Morell, Young, and Permenter stayed in the front room. Ash had penetrated inside and coated everything in a fine layer. She saw a number of objects she recognized as furniture, though few she would have wanted to use herself. Two similar pieces that she assumed functioned as the Rejarris II equivalent of chairs featured a compressed, bowl-like bench perched atop a tripodal base. Linojj puzzled over another object with two small vertical boards, one mounted high on a metal pole and the other low, with a crosshatched hoop jutting out halfway up. Something that looked a lot like a desk held a pair of posts atop it, one on either side, with a wide, filmy material suspended between them.
More than the forms of the items, though, the colors surprised Linojj. Where outside the city displayed itself in a neutral, monochromatic palette, the beacons of the landing party picked out a scene dressed in one deep color after another. Linojj pointed her beam down at the floor, which showed red even through the ash covering it. Comprising thousands of small, irregularly shaped tiles, the mosaic reflected both artistry and precision. The first officer squatted down and brushed her fingertips across the floor; they came away coated with particles of ash, leaving behind gleaming red commas where they had swept the floor clean.
“Commander,” said Morell. Linojj stood back up and walked over to where the doctor examined a round, open-faced cabinet hanging on an inner wall. Concentric dividers lined its interior, and circular pictures in frames filled most of the spaces between them. “I assume these are—or were—the inhabitants of Rejarris Two.”
Linojj studied the images. She couldn’t tell with certainty, but based upon their spacing within the cabinet, she thought that a few of them had been removed. In the ones that remained, she saw individuals belonging to a species completely unknown to her. Their bodies looked like one torso on top of another, joined together by a narrower, tubular structure. They stood on a ring of a dozen or more short appendages. They possessed nothing resembling a head or neck, but a number of vine-like limbs hung down from the top of the body. Darker specks stippled their amber-tinted flesh, and a glossy vertical strip stood out on one side of their upper torso. The clothing they wore—also quite colorful, Linojj noticed—mostly wrapped around their lower section. She could not discern any gender traits, but could easily classify the smaller individuals in some of the photographs as children.
“Have you ever seen or heard of beings like this?” Linojj asked the doctor.
“No,” Morell said. “They certainly don’t look anything like the Tzenkethi, and I’ve never encountered anything in the medical literature about the Coalition that tells of a member race like that.”
“Can you speculate about them?”
“I can’t tell much just by looking at pictures of them,” the doctor said. “I would guess, though, that the dots of deeper color are cutaneous receptors, probably tactile in function. I’d also bet that the silvery stripe is a sensory organ, perhaps visual.”
“What about sex?” Linojj asked.
“No, thank you, Xintal,” Morell deadpanned. “I’m married.”
Linojj heard a chuckle behind her, but couldn’t tell whether it had come from Young or Permenter. The first officer shook her head, an act more of forbearance than vexation. She’d long ago accepted—and even learned to appreciate—Morell’s arch sense of humor, which Linojj always thought must have developed as a reaction to the emotional rigors of the CMO’s profession and duties. “The aliens, Doctor.”
“Of course,” Morell said. “Again, it’s difficult to draw conclusions based only on pictures, especially since some parts of the body are clothed in every image. The only visible characteristic I see that might be gender specific is the length of the upper limbs.”
Linojj smiled, but she elected to choke back the sophomoric rejoinder that occurred to her. Instead, she looked past the doctor as Fenn and Tenger re-entered the room, the beams of their beacons dancing along the floor in front of them. “What have you found?” she asked.
“Usage, but not for some time,” Fenn said. “The ash that’s gotten inside covers every surface and is undisturbed, other than where the landing party has walked. There are furnishings in all the rooms, and we’ve found clothing, what appear to be household goods and personal items, and many of those items display signs of wear. Sensors also show that the floor has been slightly eroded along some paths, such as the area inside the front door, an area that logically would have seen some of the most use.”
“So your conclusion is that this was somebody’s home?” Linojj asked.
“Probably so, yes,” Fenn said. “At the very least, the physical evidence demonstrates that it was occupied in some capacity, for some reason, over a course of time.”
“Did you find any remains?” Doctor Morell asked.
“No, although my tricorder has picked up trace amounts of DNA,” Fenn said. “Nothing that we can sequence, though.”
“Not only did we find no corpses or skeletons,” Tenger said, “we also saw no half-eaten meals, no items out of place, no signs of panic or violence. Whatever happened to empty this place of its inhabitants—to empty this building, and presumably this city, and perhaps even this entire world—it did not come as a surprise to the people who lived here.”
“But what did happen?” Linojj asked aloud, although she didn’t expect an answer, posing the conundrum more to herself than to her crewmates. She paced over to the window and stared out at the flat-hued city beneath the forbidding charcoal sky. “If the unbroken clouds of smoke in the atmosphere and the ash covering the ground are indications of a nuclear war, then where’s the damage?” The first officer recalled the case of the cultures on the planets Eminiar and Vendikar, which she had learned about in both the Prime Directive class and the Survey of the Alpha Quadrant seminar she’d been required to attend at the Academy. Until just fifty years earlier, the people on the two worlds had waged a centuries-long war, conducted not with physical weapons, but by computer. Both sides launched attacks mathematically, with the results determined by programmatic simulation. People designated as casualties reported to so-called disintegration chambers, which vaporized them out of existence. In that fashion, the war raged on for hundreds of years, the populations of the two planets at risk, but their societies free from the physical destruction of conventional battle. It was, in Linojj’s opinion, both elegant and horrific, a clever means of preserving the material existence of a world, mixed with a callous disregard for the safety of its citizenry.
None of that had any bearing on Rejarris II, Linojj knew. Even if the entire population there had died in a “clean” war conducted on computers, even if every single person willingly marched to their deaths in order to fulfill some fatality toll—a set of improbable circumstances that could justify the Enterprise crew f
inding an intact but unoccupied civilization—that still would not explain the nuclear winter enveloping the planet.
“All right,” Linojj said, moving away from the window and toward the front door. “Let’s see what else we can find.”
The landing party followed the first officer back outside and deeper into the alien city.
♦ ♦ ♦
Sulu sat at the head of the long conference table in the observation lounge situated aft of the Enterprise bridge. After the landing party had returned from their journey through the city on Rejarris II, she had summoned its members to brief her on what they’d found—and on what they hadn’t. “You saw no signs of life whatsoever?” she asked, baffled by what seemed like the inexplicable disappearance of an entire planetary population.
“To the contrary, Captain,” said Linojj, seated directly to Sulu’s left, beside Morell and Tenger. Fenn, Young, and Permenter sat across from them. Behind the first officer, through the viewports lining the aft bulkhead of Deck 1, the ship’s warp nacelles pulsed with energy. A veiled curve of the planet hung off to port. “We saw signs of life everywhere. In each building we entered, whether one of the smaller structures on the periphery of the city, or one of the twenty-story towers at the center, we found furnishings and personal belongings, equipment and supplies. We identified patterns of wear consistent with everyday use, and recorded numerous instances of trace DNA. We just couldn’t find any of the beings who actually lived there.”
It sounded to Sulu almost like double-talk. She understood, though, that the crux of the confusion lay not with the language her first officer employed, but with the situation she described. Sulu leaned back in her seat and ran a hand through her hair, a reflex born from years of pushing her long locks away from her eyes. It caught her momentarily off guard when her fingers whisked easily through her cropped coiffure. She’d had her hair cut short only days earlier, something she’d considered doing for a long time, and which the amount of gray strands weaving through the black had finally convinced her to do.
Star Trek: The Lost Era - 08 - 2319 - One Constant Star Page 4