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

by David R. George III

  The captain pulled the shuttlecraft from the flight plan she’d laid in and engaged manual control. She spotted the message Young had chiseled into the ground and landed beside it. Amundsen settled with a reassuringly solid thud.

  “Any other movement out there, Ensign?” Sulu asked.

  “No, sir,” Kostas said.

  The captain resumed the playback of Tenger’s message. “It is possible that the portal has sent you to a present-day location in a neighboring star system, or within starship range of the Federation—or even to a world within the Federation itself. If such is the case, then we will abandon our rescue efforts and transmit a message to Starfleet Command so that the Enterprise or another vessel can be sent to retrieve you. You may be able to ascertain your position by analyzing the star patterns where you are.”

  Sulu had already performed such an analysis when she and Kostas had taken the shuttlecraft into orbit in search of Enterprise. The computer had been unable to match any location within the Milky Way that had the starfield surrounding the planet. Wherever the portal had sent them, it had not been close to home.

  “At the present time, Captain, I am not permitting anybody else to travel down to the surface of Rejarris Two, either by transporter or shuttlecraft. I may have to revisit that decision should a solution require a hands-on modification to the portal. Until then, we will work aboard the Enterprise to figure out a means of bringing you and the other crew members back to the ship. If you require any supplies, please let us know and we will send them through the portal to you.”

  “At least we won’t die of thirst or starve to death,” Kostas said wryly. The ensign’s half-smile pleased Sulu, who’d seen earlier that the reality of being marooned far from Enterprise and the Federation filled Kostas with dread.

  “I will provide a status report to you every two hours,” Tenger said. “The Enterprise carries only two more log buoys, after which time we will have to modify probes to carry our messages to you. It will take some time to exhaust those, but if necessary, we can begin transporting down encoded padds to a point just above the portal, with the expectation that gravity will then conduct them to you. We will maintain a continuous vigil on the shuttlecraft once it comes into view of the probe, so that you can relay a message to the ship at any time.” The security chief paused, as though searching for more to say. Finally, he ended the transmission with a simple, “Tenger out.”

  When the Starfleet logo appeared, Sulu thumbed off the display. She checked the incoming feed and saw a file appended to it. Sulu saved it to the shuttlecraft’s internal memory. “I’ll get a padd,” she told Kostas. “Make sure that our proximity alert remains set.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sulu headed toward the equipment drawers in the aft bulkhead. She would load the program Tenger had sent onto a padd, then record a message to the security chief. She agreed with his decision not to allow any more of the crew down to Rejarris II, and she endorsed having the crew study the sensor readings of the portal. She would inform him of her own plans to take the shuttlecraft and—

  As the captain pulled a padd out of an equipment drawer, she heard a hiss, like air escaping through a hole in an environmental suit. She imagined damage to the shuttlecraft, and even envisioned another creature outside tearing through the hull. When she followed the sound, though, it led her to Ensign Young, and the hiss turned into a gasp. “Ensign Kostas!” Sulu called, dropping the padd and moving to her ailing crewmate. “We have a problem.”

  As Kostas hurried from the front of the cabin, Young began to cough, and pink spittle appeared on his lips. Sulu threw her hand beneath his back and hauled him to a sitting position. Kostas pulled her medical tricorder from where she’d set it on a chair and scanned Young.

  “There’s fluid buildup in his lungs,” she said, her voice rising. “I need to . . . to administer a drug to dilate his veins.” She sounded as though on the verge of panic, though not uncertain about what she’d said. She spun around and looked all about the cabin, clearly searching for her medkit.

  Sulu quickly wrapped an arm around Young’s chest and moved him backward, propping him up against the aft bulkhead. Then she turned to Kostas and took her by the shoulders. “Ensign, you can do this,” she said firmly. “I know you haven’t had much experience out in the field as a medic, but you trained for this. Let that take over.”

  Kostas nodded mutely once, then said, “Yes, sir.” She took a deep breath, let it out. “Thank you, sir.” She looked back over at Young, then found her medkit where she’d left it, in a recess beneath the antigrav stretcher. As she armed herself with a hypospray and began preparing its contents, she said, “He’s going to need oxygen, Captain. There should be an emergency supply aboard.”

  “I’ll get it,” Sulu said. She marched through the opening in the aft bulkhead and into the equipment storage area. She found several canisters of oxygen and masks by the environmental suits. If necessary, she thought, we can have the crew send down more oxygen from the ship.

  The captain brought the canister and mask back out to the main cabin. Kostas kneeled beside Young, wiping away the blood-tinged spittle from his lips with a cloth. Sulu could see him already breathing easier. She held out the oxygen to Kostas.

  “Thank you, Captain,” she said. She attached the mask around Young’s face and activated the canister. A digital display indicated its function. Kostas exchanged her medkit for her tricorder and monitored her patient. Sulu stayed with her. After a few minutes, the ensign said, “Hawk’s doing better.”

  “Do you know Ensign Young?” Sulu asked, recognizing the familiarity in Kostas using an obvious nickname for Hawkins Young, though the captain herself had never heard it used aboard the ship. Then again, he’d only been a member of the crew for a relatively short time. “Do you know him well, I mean?”

  “Not well,” Kostas said. “He was a year behind me at the Academy. We think we once had a class together, but we could never figure out if that was true. We both enjoy swimming, though, so we’ve seen each other a few times down at the ship’s natatorium.”

  “What’s his condition?” Sulu asked. “Will he be all right?”

  “For now,” Kostas said. “He’s suffering from pulmonary edema. I’ve administered a preload reducer to lower the pressure in his lungs, and the oxygen will help. I’ll need to keep an eye on him, and at some point, he might need assistance breathing. We can adapt an environmental suit, if necessary. Even though his condition is stable right now, the underlying cause has to be treated.”

  “What is the underlying cause?”

  “I can’t be sure, Captain, but I think the creature injected him with venom,” Kostas said. “I can treat Ensign Young, but I don’t have the training to develop an antivenin.”

  “No, of course not, and nobody would expect you to be able to do that,” Sulu said. “But Doctor Morell leads an impressive medical staff aboard the Enterprise, and we now have a means of communicating with her, so she’ll be able to help.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kostas said. “Thank you, sir.”

  “I’m going to record a message for Commander Tenger,” the captain said. “I’ll append Ensign Young’s medical readings and any observations about his condition you want to add.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sulu found the padd where she’d dropped it to the deck, then made her way back to the forward console. Before she sat down, she put her hands on her hips and stared out at the barren alien landscape. She attempted to gather her thoughts, to consider all that she needed to tell Tenger. As she worked through the content she would include in her message, she noticed a shape outside, maybe eight or ten meters from the bow of the shuttlecraft. She thought it might be another life-form, and she leaned forward on the main console as she tried to make out any details.

  She suddenly stood up straight and slammed her eyes closed. It didn’t matter. She knew what she’d seen, and she doubted that even time could ever cleanse her mind of the image: Xintal Linojj’s s
evered arm.

  * * *

  5

  * * *

  Doctor Uta Morell circled out from behind the desk in her office and accepted the padd from Malthus Dey, one of the medical technicians on her staff. “The results look promising,” Dey said with a smile. Morell appreciated the statement and the positive attitude—both especially meaningful coming from the crewman. An expert in toxicological preparation and testing, Dey offering his imprimatur on any prospective treatment usually heralded a high probability of success. For that reason, Enterprise’s chief medical officer had five years earlier lured Dey away from his position at the Central Hospital of Altair IV’s prestigious Toxin Assessment Wing. Her promise to him of an opportunity to encounter exotic and previously unknown poisons had not gone unfulfilled.

  “That’s good to hear,” Morell said, gazing down at Dey. Though not particularly tall herself at one and five-eighths meters, she still towered over the Pygorian, who barely reached a meter in height. Average in size and coloring for his people, he had exceedingly fair skin, which lacked pigment, as did his eyes, though a small disk of dark hair crowned his head. “How close are we, do you think?” Morell asked.

  “Very close, I believe,” Dey said. “The parameters you provided for the antivenin allowed me to use a formulation partially harvested from zabathu antibodies in response to the venom of a stinging centipede.”

  “A zabathu?” Morell said, concerned. “That’s an Andorian animal, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, and so is the stinging centipede,” Dey said. “And thanks to our three Andorian crew members, that’s why we have the zabathu antibodies in sickbay’s stores. Even though Ensign Young is human, the fraction of the antivenin that’s Andorian in origin is just enough to elicit an autonomic response in humans, but not enough to alter their biochemical balance.” He pointed to the padd he had handed to the doctor. “You’ll see.”

  “My concern is that we’re trying to produce antivenin without having an actual sample of the venom it’s designed to counteract,” Morell said.

  “I know,” Dey said. “It’s an unusual set of circumstances, but we do have the biosensor readings that Ensign Kostas provided to us, both of Ensign Young and of the animal that attacked him. We’re just fortunate that the human reaction to the venom mimicked that of the Andorian reaction to the stinging centipede.”

  “If this works, Malthus, you’re going to make the medical literature again.”

  “The preservation of Ensign Young’s life will be reward enough,” Dey said. “That wouldn’t even have been possible without the quick intervention of Ensign Kostas.”

  “Galatea has done a noteworthy job,” Morell said, “not just in her initial reaction to Hawk’s distress, but in keeping him alive for the three days since.” The young engineer had taken some rudimentary medical classes at Starfleet Academy, and in her two years aboard Enterprise, she’d supplemented that education with regular training sessions in sickbay. That she had enough knowledge and skills to follow instructions well enough to manage Young’s pulmonary edema for seventy-two hours without being able to treat the underlying cause bespoke her abilities as a field medic. Among other difficult tasks, Kostas had been required at one point to perform a tracheotomy on the ailing ensign. “Thank you for this,” Morell said, holding up the padd. “I’ll take—” The doctor clipped her sentence short when she saw Nurse Veracruz appear in the open doorway. “Yes, Rosalinda?”

  “Commander Linojj is asking to speak with you, Doctor,” the nurse said.

  “All right, thank you,” Morell said. “Please tell her I’ll be right there.”

  “Yes, Doctor.” The nurse withdrew.

  “Malthus, would you please take this to Doctor Benzon,” Morell said, handing the padd back to Dey. “Ask him to begin reviewing the results and tell him that I’ll join him shortly.”

  “Of course.” Dey took the padd, and Morell followed him out of her office. While the med tech headed left down the short corridor that connected to sickbay’s main ward, Morell went right, toward the surgical suite. She passed intensive care—mercifully empty at the moment—and entered recovery, where they’d kept Commander Linojj since operating on her residual arm.

  “Good afternoon, Xintal,” Morell said, keeping her tone light and upbeat. The first officer had been understandably devastated to lose a limb, and indeed, the entire crew had reacted to the terrible incident with a collective sense of shock. But Doctor Benzon had begun counseling Linojj, which had already helped stabilize and improve her emotional state. The news that morning that preliminary tests graded the viability of fitting her with a biosynthetic arm as high had only advanced her progress.

  In fact, the report of Linojj’s prospective limb replacement had bolstered the disposition of the whole crew. Three days earlier, when the first officer had suffered her injury and the captain and the two ensigns had vanished, the mood aboard Enterprise had sunk dramatically. Even though Sulu, Young, and Kostas remained separated from the ship, the reestablishment of contact with them had sown hopeful expectations for their eventual recovery.

  “Thank you for coming so quickly, Doctor,” Linojj said. She sat propped up on a bio-bed, pillows behind her back and an active padd in her lap. She wore the powder-blue jumpsuit provided to patients, its right arm ending just past the shoulder, where the silver metal cuff protected Linojj’s compromised flesh and bone. “I wanted to talk to you about my progress.”

  “All right,” Morell said, though she hesitated to say anything more than she’d already told the first officer. The doctor looked up at the diagnostic display above the head of the bio-bed and examined the readings shown there. “Your overall physical condition is good,” she said. “Your wound remains stable, and you know what this morning’s test showed: when we’ve finished preparing your biosynthetic arm, you should be able to undergo replacement surgery in short order. If successful, your recovery should take—”

  “Doctor,” Linojj said, interrupting. “Excuse me, but we’ve gone over all of that. I wanted to talk to you about when I can be released from sickbay.”

  “I see,” Morell said. “Xintal, I know you’d be more comfortable back in your own quarters, but since you won’t be doing much of anything anyway, it’s best to keep you here for the time being so that we can monitor your physical condition continuously.” The doctor did not reveal that she wanted Linojj under psychological observation as well.

  “I’m not talking about going back to my cabin,” the first officer said. “I’m talking about returning to duty.”

  “Oh,” Morell said, surprised. “Honestly, I hadn’t really anticipated you going back to active duty for some time.”

  “Until after the replacement surgery,” Linojj said.

  “Yes.”

  “But there’s no guarantee that the operation will succeed, is there?”

  “No,” admitted Morell. “But as we learned this morning, the chances are very good.”

  “And I’m happy about that,” Linojj said. “But what happens if I can’t have a biosynthetic replacement arm? What happens if my body rejects it, or I can’t make it work?”

  “There are other types of prosthetics,” Morell said. “Not as sophisticated, but still useful.”

  “Right,” Linojj said. “But my point is that why should I wait to see if I’ll be able to keep a biosynthetic arm, when I might not be able to. Fit me with something else for right now and let me go back on duty.” The first officer delivered her words with a commanding tone, as though issuing an order.

  “I’m afraid it’s not that simple, Commander,” Morell said, resorting to a more formal demeanor to match Linojj’s own. “We have surgically repaired your residual limb in preparation of attaching a biosynthetic replacement. Providing you with a different arm in the interim would likely undermine that preparation. Additionally, even a less sophisticated prosthetic would require counseling and occupational therapy.”

  “Then forget about a substitute limb,” Linojj sa
id. She picked up the padd from her lap and tossed it onto a shelf by her bio-bed. “The captain has been away from the ship for three days now, and in her absence, my place is on the bridge.” She spoke quickly, her manner becoming agitated.

  “When you’re injured, Commander, your place is in sickbay,” Morell said, “and right now, it’s my job to keep you here.”

  “I don’t think so, Doctor.” Linojj swept the bedclothes away and swung her legs over the other side of the diagnostic pallet. When she did, she overbalanced and started to fall to her right; her shoulder moved, but with no arm on that side, she could not brace herself. Morell lunged awkwardly across the bio-bed and caught the first officer at the sides of her torso, keeping her upright.

  Linojj yelled, not in pain, but in obvious frustration, pounding the pallet with her remaining fist.

  “It’s all right,” Morell said gently. She came around to the other side of the bio-bed to face the first officer. The trident-shaped hollow in Linojj’s forehead flushed lavender, and tears spilled from her eyes. The doctor reached forward and took hold of her patient by the sides of her upper arms. “Everything’s going to be all right, Xintal,” she said quietly, her words barely more than a whisper.

  Linojj let herself slip from the side of the bio-bed and into the doctor’s embrace. Morell stood a head shorter than the first officer, and yet Linojj felt small, almost insubstantial, in her arms. The doctor held her tightly as her body convulsed with her weeping.

  Morell thought about the report she had yet to read on the antivenin Dey had prepared and tested. She knew that Benzon could ably handle the medical appraisal, though, and so she put it out of her mind. Instead, she would stay with Xintal Linojj for as long as the first officer needed her.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The rocky plain stretched in one direction toward foothills that eventually escalated into mountains, but in another, it gave way to a dense forest. Sulu flew the shuttlecraft at a height of just fifty meters, alternately inspecting her scans of the surface and gazing through the forward port at the verdant expanse of tall leafy trees. By herself aboard Pytheas, she traveled with the autopilot engaged.