Star Trek®: A Choice of Catastrophes

by Michael Schuster

  Being determined isn’t enough. You need results… and you’re not getting any of those.

  He’d looked over the notes Mark Piper, the Enterprise’s previous chief medical officer, had recorded. A “negative energy” the ship had encountered had killed all of the espers on contact, except for two. They had been transformed into dangerously powerful beings. There was no apparent connection between that case and the current one.

  McCoy brought up the displays of the five espers. Their decline had slowed, but they were still sinking. If he wasn’t able to find a solution soon, every one of them would die. The doctor was stumped, much as he hated to admit it. He rubbed his eyes. The sound of approaching feet made him look up. It was Chapel. “How are you doing?” he asked.

  “Nearly done,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “How are you doing?”

  “All right. I’ve been worse.”

  She didn’t look all right, but McCoy didn’t press the point. He probably looked awful, too, but they still had work to do. “Anything I should handle?” he asked, flicking off his monitor.

  Chapel glanced at the list. “There’s Ryerson. Zoology specialist, first degree burns on his torso. Nurse Odhiambo’s treated him, and he’s okay physically, but I feel he might like to see a doctor. Do you think you have a moment to settle his mind? All you’d need to do is tell him he’ll be out of here in a little while.”

  McCoy smirked. “I should be able to do that. Not that I’m capable of doing much else.”

  Self-criticism? How novel. Funny what you come up with when you have enough time for reflection. Normally, you just keep on moving, moving, moving, leaving yourself no time for anything substantial. You push the past away from you and try to forget it, not because it’s good medicine, but because it’s what you’ve always done to avoid the pain. That’s not doctoring, it’s cowardice.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the whistle of the intraship. “Sickbay here.”

  “Bridge.” It was Lieutenant Uhura again. McCoy hoped she wasn’t calling to say they were going back to warp speed. That was the last thing he needed now. “Doctor, can you send someone up here? We’ve got a few injuries.”

  A few injuries! The incident had been three hours ago. “Why did you wait so long?”

  “We’ve been busy,” said Uhura drily. She sounded tired.

  In three hours, a lot could go wrong, especially when the injured didn’t receive any medical attention. McCoy wondered what could possibly have been so important that they hadn’t found time to notify sickbay. “I’ll be right up.”

  “Thank you, Doctor. Bridge out.”

  “Let’s hope it’s nothing serious,” Chapel said.

  McCoy gathered up his gear, saying, “Academy graduates don’t have an ounce of common sense. Trying to keep a stiff upper lip, while their arms fall off because they think it’ll impress their commanding officers.”

  Sulu’s forehead was covered with a raised purple bruise, the result of an impact with the deck. His cheek and chin were bloody, and his lower lip was split. He looked like he’d been attacked by a mugato. McCoy ran his tricorder’s Feinberger over the lieutenant’s forehead, checking for any kind of internal damage.

  “We have a crisis, Doctor,” Sulu said in defense when McCoy asked him to explain his state. “I needed to remain in command. I intend to bring this ship back to Captain Kirk in one piece.”

  McCoy’s anger evaporated as he was suddenly struck by the impossibility of trying to live up to the image Jim always projected. Jim wouldn’t have reported to sickbay under these circumstances. McCoy knew that if Sulu didn’t bring the Enterprise back in himself, he’d feel like he’d let down the captain.

  He shut off the Feinberger, watching as its analysis streamed into his tricorder. “How do you feel?” he asked.

  Sulu shook his head, grimacing slightly. “I’m fine.”

  Right. “I’d like you to come down to sickbay nonetheless. Everything looks all right, but it’s better not to take any chances where the brain is concerned.”

  And this is a brain problem where you’d actually know what to do, after all. Unlike poor Bouchard and the rest.

  Sulu squinted at him, dubious. “So nothing’s actually wrong?”

  “No,” McCoy had to admit, “but there’s no sense in—”

  “In that case, Doctor, I will remain in command of the Enterprise until the crisis abates. Please give me something for the pain.”

  McCoy loaded up a hypospray but didn’t inject it yet. “Mister Sulu, I strongly advise that you come with me to sickbay and let us check you thoroughly.”

  “Is that an order, Doctor?” Sulu was usually an open book, but McCoy was finding him hard to read.

  Dammit. Under extreme circumstances, the chief medical officer could order a commanding officer to stand down if their ability to command was compromised. McCoy had threatened it on more than one occasion, but he’d never actually gone through with it.

  “No,” he said at last, and jabbed Sulu’s arm with the hypo, injecting its contents into his bloodstream. “No, it’s not. But if you pass out up here, it will be.”

  McCoy began working his way around the bridge, double-checking that everyone else was fine. He started with science, where Lieutenant Rodriguez was working to coordinate the results from several different labs analyzing the phenomenon. He kept repeating to someone on the comm, “That shouldn’t have happened. It doesn’t make any sense!” He looked harried and didn’t even say anything to McCoy other than a muttered “I’m fine.”

  The yeoman on the bridge was Tina Lawton. McCoy didn’t know her well, but this had to be her first time in a crisis. She was handling it with aplomb. The incident had left her with a small gash on her forehead that was easily healed. As so often happened when he talked to young women, McCoy found his Georgia accent becoming a little bit more prominent. She seemed flattered by his attentions, and McCoy enjoyed it.

  You would like it, wouldn’t you? Keep your mind on the job.

  Rahda and Farrell at helm and navigation were taking readings. The Enterprise hadn’t advanced since hitting the last distortion. McCoy looked at the spatial plot between their consoles, but other than the fact that it was covered in squiggles, which must represent spatial distortion, he didn’t know what to make of it. The unsettling thing was that there were just as many squiggles in front of the Enterprise as there were behind it.

  Ensign Harper’s red shirt was soaked with sweat, and McCoy injected him with an antiperspirant, telling him it was a stimulant. No sense embarrassing the man. Harper seemed to have his hands full running the damage control teams, their biggest problem being the power losses that had affected the ship with every distortion. There was no evident cause; none of the Enterprise’s energy systems had taken any damage.

  McCoy had set up his journey so that he’d end with Uhura. Sulu was having an animated discussion with Rodriguez and Farrell about what route they should take. The doctor used the opportunity to get information. “Any word from the shuttles?” he asked quietly.

  Uhura shook her head. “Every subspace signal we send into the zone of distortion comes right back to us about five minutes later. It’s like something is absorbing them and retransmitting them.”

  “We were in contact with the landing party before, though.” McCoy frowned. “What changed?”

  “The farther we’ve moved into the zone, the worse the distortions have become. Not just ahead of us, but behind us. We can pick up some really rough ones behind us, but if we’d hit them we wouldn’t be here.”

  “So going backward isn’t an option?” McCoy asked.

  Uhura took her earpiece out. “No more than going forward.”

  “We’re going to continue forward,” said a deep voice close to him. McCoy looked up and realized that Sulu was now standing with the two of them.

  McCoy glanced around the bridge, taking in the crew’s frantic discussions and the chirp of instruments. “I hope you know what you�
�re doing.”

  “We can’t stay still,” Sulu said. “We have no way of getting a signal out. It could be weeks before another starship gets out here to look for us.” Only the very fringes of this sector were charted; there was no Federation presence beyond Deep Space Station C-15.

  “We could send out a probe,” said Uhura, “but I’m not convinced it would survive long in the distortions.”

  Sulu nodded. McCoy was struck by how calm he looked despite the giant purple bruise across his forehead. “That’s what I thought.”

  It became clear that the young officer was looking for validation. He wanted someone to confirm that he was making the right decision. “Well, moving forward seems like our best bet to me,” McCoy said. “I’ll tell sickbay to brace for more casualties.”

  Sulu’s spine seemed to straighten up at that, and he looked slightly more authoritative than a moment ago. “We shouldn’t hit any more distortions,” he said. “They’re only in subspace, so as long as we stay out of warp, they can’t affect us.” He glanced over at Rodriguez, who was listening to their conversation. “Correct?”

  Rodriguez moved slightly closer to their impromptu conference around the communications console. “Yes, sir. More importantly, we won’t be able to affect the phenomenon. We think they’re feeding on the space-time distortions our engines create.” He rubbed his hand against his face. “It’s not my area of expertise, but Padmanabhan and Bellos in spatial physics are fairly certain…”

  Sulu moved back to the command chair and sat down. “Course set, Mister Farrell?”

  The navigator checked the plot to the left of his console. “Yes, sir. We are laid in for Mu Arigulon.”

  “Maximum impulse, Mister Rahda,” Sulu ordered. McCoy was impressed by how quickly his deep bass voice had regained its authority, given how uncertain he had sounded a few moments ago.

  You always mask your own uncertainty in complaints and crabbiness. Sulu masks it in authority and carries it off. Give him time and he’ll be as good as Jim. But everyone will always see straight through you.

  “Maximum impulse, aye,” Lieutenant Rahda said. “Engaging engines.”

  As she pushed the controls forward, McCoy imagined he felt the ship’s power throb through the deck beneath his feet. He quickly moved to the railing above the command chair—he didn’t quite trust Sulu and Rodriguez’s assertion that nothing would happen, and he wasn’t going to be tossed around again like last time.

  As the Enterprise crept up to a significant fraction of light speed, McCoy tried not to let himself relax. He was afraid that whispering voice of self-doubt would creep in when he did.

  FIVE

  Stardate 4757.7 (1529 hours)

  The shuttlecraft Hofstadter sat forlornly in the rain.

  Ensign Antti Saloniemi was inside, reading and rereading the text on his data slate. It was almost impossible to concentrate: Petty Officer Emalra’ehn had left the side hatch open a crack when he’d gone on a quick patrol, and the whistling of the wind across the gap was driving him mad. He’d been warned against closing it by Emalra’ehn, who’d wanted to be able to get back in the shuttle quickly in case something came up.

  “Visualization: orange vegetable of mysterious provenance,” he read aloud. What is this?

  The UT baseline provided by Mister Scott had turned out to be an excellent starting point, though it was naturally better with more technical language. Right now he was trying to read the scroll found by the Columbus. It had come out scrambled. Best as Saloniemi could tell, it was a children’s book. Strangely, the language didn’t seem to have any verbs, which meant that the translations were hard to parse.

  “Impairment of orange vegetable’s forward motion.”

  His eyes zipped back and forth across the curvy lines on his slate: waves, circles, dots, curls. He found it helpful to examine the original text so he could get a feel for it. On the surface, the squiggles bore a marginal resemblance to Old High Vulcan script, with their curls and crossed lines, but you might make the same connections between old Terran cuneiform and written Klingonese. Making baseless assumptions was one of the worst things you could do when studying new languages.

  “Intersection with blue fruit. Collision! Chaos! Exclamation of—”

  The hatch came open the entire way, letting a blast of wind and rain into the shuttle. Saloniemi jumped as he looked up, but it was only Emalra’ehn stomping in, his poncho leaving cascades of water all over the deck. The hatch shut behind him.

  “Find anything?” the Deltan said.

  Saloniemi shook his head. “I could ask you the same thing.”

  “Nothing. Just plants. And water.”

  “Doesn’t that make your job easier?”

  Emalra’ehn took off his poncho and deposited it on an empty seat. “It makes you complacent. Slow and stupid. If nothing happens for a few hours, you start to think it’s like that all the time. Then, when something does happen, it comes as a surprise and kills you. You don’t want that.”

  Saloniemi couldn’t help but laugh. “No, I definitely don’t want that.”

  The security guard’s face was deadly serious. “I’m not joking.”

  “I know that. Believe me, I do. But the way you said it…” He let the sentence trail off, rather than say anything that would make the other man angry or feel insulted.

  “Ah. I get that a lot.”

  “You do?” Saloniemi regarded him with surprise. “What, exactly?”

  “People think I’m funny. I’m not.”

  “Ah.”

  In a quick move that startled Saloniemi, Emalra’ehn crossed the distance between them and extended his hand. It took the ensign a moment to realize this was an offer, not a threat. “Call me Cron.”

  “Um. Thank you.” He shook the man’s hand, then fell silent. “I’m Antti, by the way.”

  “Yeah. Wet day, isn’t it?” By way of demonstrating this, Emalra’ehn shook his head, splattering Saloniemi with rain.

  “Um, I guess so.”

  “I quite like the rain. Helps me relax.”

  “Ah,” was all Saloniemi said. He heard a distinctive beep emanate from his controls. “The computer’s found something. I’d better check.”

  “Yeah.” Emalra’ehn moved to the back of the shuttle.

  Saloniemi didn’t believe it. The computer had found a few phrases matching the Mu Arigulon language in an Orion database the Federation had picked up used in a deal with the Haradin. The Orions had traded with the representatives of a distant world for some rare metals. They hadn’t known the location of the planet, but they had known it was somewhere within this sector, and they had also known its name: Farrezz.

  He reached for the communicator to call Mister Spock.

  Chekov and Kirk were exploring another subterranean structure. Chekov’s preliminary readings—interference made getting a full picture difficult—indicated that the network of tunnels they’d found extended underneath the entire city. They’d already gone up one of the tunnels to find themselves in a building on the surface.

  Thanks to the airtight seals, there was no dust. If something had taken Yüksel down one of these tunnels, it was impossible to know which one.

  There were pictures on the walls down here, round pieces of unknown material with very realistic renderings of landscapes and machinery. No natives, however—at least none they’d seen so far.

  Taking a tunnel that angled down, they made good use of their flashlights and proceeded at a decent pace. No traces of artificial lighting, no light shafts to let the sun in. The natives either had very good eyesight, or they’d all carried their own personal light source with them. Or, it occurred to Chekov, maybe they didn’t even need light.

  After a number of curves and bends, they emerged into a large chamber, the largest yet, but all it contained was a round metallic structure, cagelike, in the center. A platform in the middle of it covered most of a hole in the floor. The cage was taller than they were, almost reaching to the ceiling,
and large enough to accommodate ten humanoids.

  The ensign wondered, Could this be an elevator? Or was he applying familiar functions to alien tech? As Captain Kirk walked up to the device and began running his hands over it, Chekov pulled out his tricorder and began scanning down the shaft.

  The shaft led down about fifty meters and emerged into a large cavern so vast it took his breath away. “Bozhe moi,” he whispered, unable to contain his amazement. From the look of it, the cavern ran beneath both the city and the spaceport complex. Could this be where Yüksel had been taken. The exobotanist could be down there somewhere! “Captain, I have found something!”

  Kirk turned around. “What is it, Mister Chekov?”

  “An underground cavern beneath a large part of the city, sir. Enormous, but scans aren’t detailed enough to tell exactly how big it is.”

  “Good work, Ensign.” Kirk smiled for a brief moment, then pulled out his communicator, summoning the rest of the Columbus party.

  Chekov continued to scan. It wasn’t easy to get decent readings of the cavern, with the rock around them impeding his efforts. This wasn’t the only shaft; similar ones dotted the entire area, the closest about half a kilometer in either direction.

  Seconds later, Giotto burst out of the tunnel, with Seven Deers, Rawlins, and Tra behind him.

  “Report, Ensign,” the captain ordered.

  Chekov explained what he’d uncovered to the rest of the team. “Yüksel could be down there.”

  “Don’t assume, Ensign,” snapped Giotto.

  With a mix of disappointment and frustration, Chekov could see that nothing he could do would please the security chief. “I suspect that many of the tunnels lead here eventually,” he said. “Besides, sir, it is the only lead we have.”

  “I know that,” said Giotto brusquely. “I’m just suggesting you don’t pin your hopes on it.”

  Seven Deers was taking a closer look at the machine. “This contraption might still work,” she said.

  Kirk seemed skeptical. “It’s a miracle it hasn’t rusted through.”

  Seven Deers shook her head. “Oh, this wouldn’t rust, Captain. It’s made of the same hyperbonded material as the doors and tunnel walls.”