The Rings Of Tautee

by Dean Wesley Smith

  “I take that as a yes,” Scotty said.

  All McCoy could do was nod and stare into the big screen at the blue sky and green grass. He really needed a vacation. He knew that now. And from the looks of it, so did Scotty.

  Scotty stood and brushed off his pants, then moved over beside McCoy. He stopped, hands on hips, smiling at the scene on the monitor as if it was a newborn babe.

  “What is it?” McCoy finally managed to say.

  “Why, it’s a golf course,” Scott said. His voice sounded almost sad that McCoy hadn’t recognized what he was working on. “What else would it be?”

  “A golf course?” McCoy asked. “What’s the point?”

  “Escape, lad,” Scotty said. “Here, try this on.” He handed McCoy the large helmet with the wires hooked to the large machines.

  “I don’t think—”

  “Do it,” Scotty said. “It won’t hurt you.”

  Doubting his own sanity, McCoy stared at the rubber padded helmet for a moment, then slipped it over his head. The glasses came down over his face and suddenly, instead of staring at the green grass and blue sky through a monitor, he almost felt as if he were there. And for a moment he thought he could hear the wind blowing over the open fields.

  Almost reluctantly, he pulled off the helmet and handed it to Scotty. “What is it?”

  “Holographic projectors working in tandem,” Scotty said, beaming, and pointing at the two machines. “I think I have them finally tuned. Now, if they’d just stay that way.”

  McCoy snorted in disgust. “Holograms. The future, they call it.”

  “That they are, lad. Maybe someday you won’t need the helmet.”

  “Humph,” McCoy said in response. “They keep saying holograms will be doing everything we do. As if they could replace me with one.”

  Scotty laughed and patted the doctor on the shoulder. “Doctor, no one could replace the likes of you.”

  The illusion of grass on the large monitor started to shimmer slightly and Scotty quickly ducked to the machine on the right, muttering to himself as he went.

  After a moment, the picture stopped shimmering. Scotty slid out of the machine, grinning, a long dark streak running from his right eye to his chin. “Now, what’s so important it couldn’t wait until I finished the eighteenth green?”

  “Eighteen? You did eighteen scenes like that?” McCoy pointed at the monitor.

  “Aye,” Scotty said. “Including the fairways and teeing areas. A golf course needs eighteen holes, ya know.”

  McCoy shook his head, then glanced down at the tricorder in his hand. Suddenly his lack of engineering skills seemed painfully obvious. Scotty could create something out of nothing. McCoy needed help modifying his tricorder.

  “Mister Scott, since we’re not going to Star Base Eleven, I—”

  He didn’t get the rest of his sentence out of his mouth. Suddenly the light in the room dimmed and then came back up. The grass and blue sky both suddenly looked as if they were a lake surface being blown by a stiff wind; then the picture went out. McCoy could smell the distinct odor of overheating equipment.

  Scotty dove for the machine on the right but was too late. Something exploded and sparks flew everywhere.

  “Mister Scott,” the captain’s voice came over the intercom. “We have a power drain.”

  “Aye,” The word held a mixture of sadness, regret, and loss. Scott took a step back from the smoking machines. He shook his head.

  “Mister Scott?” The captain’s voice did not sound happy and McCoy smiled.

  “Give me five minutes,” Scott said, “and I’ll fix your power drain.”

  “Then I’d like a report,” the captain said. “Kirk out.”

  The smoke was thick and smelled of electrical cables. McCoy suppressed both a cough and his smile. He held out the tricorder.

  “Is it broken?” Scott asked.

  McCoy shook his head. “I need some modifications.”

  “Ach, so do these poor beasties. I’ll clean up this mess and then come to sickbay.”

  McCoy slung the tricorder over his shoulder. “Thanks.” He opened the bay door, thankful for the fresh air of the corridor. He coughed once, then stopped outside the door. “One more thing, Mister Scott.”

  “Aye, sir?”

  “Why are you building a golf course?”

  Scotty rose to his full height, as he often did when his pride was assaulted. “I am a Scotsman, lad. We invented the game.”

  McCoy nodded.

  And then waited until he was in the turbolift before he started laughing.

  Chapter Three

  PRESCOTT SAT in her chair in the dimly lit amphitheater. The screens had been dead for hours now. The environmental controls were running on emergency power, and the gravity had gone from normal to low.

  The chair was bolted into the floor for just this sort of emergency, and she wore the restraining bands on her ankles and thighs, roping her in place. The idea had been to bolt everything down in case the gravity controls failed. That way the researchers could continue their work even under the lowgrav conditions of the moon. She doubted that the designers ever thought the bands would come in handy in the almost zero gravity of the remaining hunk of the moon.

  The center’s planners had thought that the gravity controls would break down monthly. Instead, this was the first time anyone had had to use the system. Yet another miscalculation in a whole, disastrous series of them.

  The room shook slightly, stirring the dust. Every few minutes the base rattled. It was already unstable. With each shake, she assumed the containment would break, and the cold darkness of space would rush in and take them all to a very quick but very painful death.

  She licked her lips. They were dry and caked with grit. Dust, dirt, and debris floated around her, unhampered by bolts.

  A computer had broken through one of the screens and was at the moment floating near the ceiling, sent there by that last moonquake. In a few minutes it would settle slowly back to the floor somewhere.

  She had thought she was going to die in this room, but so far it hadn’t worked out that way. Somehow, by some miracle, the base had held together when the moon broke apart.

  All the ripping and tearing and screaming and shaking she had expected to hear, but couldn’t, as she watched the fifteen planets in the Tautee system silently blow apart had happened when the moon shattered. But, apparently, a large chunk of the moon had held together.

  Within that large chunk resided the center.

  Lucky her. Lucky all of them. They had a few extra days to think about dying.

  Folle was pleased; he somehow thought they might survive. He was scavenging, seeing how bad the damage was in the rest of the center.

  And who else was alive.

  She estimated that a few hundred had lived. The computer terminal in front of her had shown her a schematic of the center just before a power surge shut the machine down. Several sections appeared to have collapsed. But several had survived.

  A few hundred tired, injured, homeless Tauteeans to carry on until their air ran out, or their containment cracked and let in the cold of deep space.

  For days after her home planet broke apart, killing over a billion, she didn’t much care if she lived or died. All she kept seeing was the blue-green meadow surrounding her parents’ home, the stream with the silver fish, and her old pet Sandpine. They were now all gone, destroyed by something she had headed. Destroyed by her “project.”

  “I don’t know that for sure,” she said aloud. Folle had said that to her fifty times as he tried to help her regain some strength. We don’t know for sure, he had said. We can’t know.

  He had meant that they couldn’t know because the equipment couldn’t tell them. But she knew the real truth behind Folle’s statement.

  They couldn’t know because not knowing kept them sane.

  If she knew for certain that the Kanst Energy Experiment was responsible for the breakup of the Tautee system, she’d
never be able to take another breath. She and her fellow workers would be the greatest mass murderers of all time. She would have killed all her people.

  Her mind couldn’t embrace that idea.

  Refused it outright.

  Even though she knew that everyone was dead, she could still see her parents’ faces when she closed her eyes. It seemed no different from living the rest of her days in this destroyed facility, far from home.

  Except that her heart ached. Literally ached, as if someone had stabbed her there.

  She took a deep breath and glanced around at the empty room and the debris just now settling back toward the floor in the weak gravity.

  Folle had been gone a long time. He had tried to take her out of this room, this place where she watched her entire race die, but she had refused to leave. For the past two days, he had brought her food and news of the two hundred people in the nearby command center.

  He had told her of the blocked corridors and twisting steel beams. He had said that the others had hope of survival. And he had asked why she hadn’t.

  He knew the answer. He was as good a scientist as she was. The bit of moon that held them together wouldn’t remain in one piece forever. If it didn’t shake itself apart, it would hit other space debris and shatter.

  There were a thousand other possibilities. Every scenario she ran ended with their deaths.

  The main door clanged. She took a deep breath of the dusty air, trying to brace herself for Folle’s energy. He was trying to keep her alive. He was trying to keep all of them alive, for what she didn’t know.

  They had no right to live.

  Even if they hadn’t caused the destruction. Everyone else was dead. They had no right to survive.

  She turned to watch him. He was still a beautiful man, thinner than he had ever been, but beautiful. He jumped off the top step, and half-floated toward her.

  He grabbed her shoulder to stop his momentum, then held the chair as he braced himself against the desk beside her.

  “I have a crew patching leaks in the A Section,” he said.

  She shrugged. “Busy work. We both know it won’t last long.”

  “Long enough to be rescued,” he said.

  He had never said that word before. She bit back a sarcastic comment—How could anyone save you? We killed everyone in the universe—and instead asked, as reasonably as she could, “Do you really believe that some of the big ships from Tautee orbital labs survived?”

  He nodded, glancing around at the empty, blank screens and the destroyed control panels. “We just need to let them know we’re still down here.”

  Maybe if she talked to him, she could get him to abandon this new delusion. She stared at the hole in the screen before her, the one made by the floating computer. But what was the point of destroying his illusions now? So that he could die as miserably as she would?

  “Prescott?” he asked softly.

  She turned her gaze to him, smiled at him, and ran her knuckles along the soft skin of his face. One of them deserved to hope. If he kept busy, then maybe he wouldn’t be frightened when the end came.

  “Are any of the shafts to the surface still open?” she asked.

  “No,” he said, as if it didn’t bother him. “They’re all blocked. But we might be able to clear one. Twenty-zee-one seems to be blocked in only four places.”

  She shook her head sadly and turned to the blank screens. The moon base had never been designed to withstand the moon breaking up. Who could have foreseen such an event? It was a marvel that they were even still alive.

  She punched a few dead buttons that before would have let her see the incoming ships. Sometimes it frustrated her more that everything was broken, that nothing worked. It seemed like such a metaphor for the experiment itself.

  “You know, Folle,” she said, “I just wish I could get one more glimpse of the stars.”

  “You want me to send a crew here to try to get a camera up and running?”

  She shook her head. It would just be more busy work. She knew that seeing the surface wasn’t going to be possible. The moon’s breakup must have destroyed all the cameras on the surface. And severed the connections between here and there. No, the only chance she had of getting out of this grave was to put on a surface suit and somehow dig her way through a kilometer of collapsed tunnels to what remained of the surface. And at the moment she just didn’t have that much energy.

  “You don’t think we’ll be able to repair that tunnel, do you?” he asked.

  “I think this section of moon is staying together with spit, string, and a massive amount of luck,” she said. “And I’m afraid that if we mess with it, we’ll make matters worse.”

  He frowned, caught a chunk of floating steel, and shoved it in his pocket. His pockets were bulging. He must have been doing that everywhere he went. She wondered what he did with the steel when his pockets were full.

  “Can we at least try rigging up an emergency signal?” he asked.

  She swung her chair around and looked him in the eye, being careful in the light gravity not to move too fast. He needed her permission. He was acting as if they still had a mission, as if she were still in charge of something important.

  She signed. “Go ahead if it’ll make you happy. Gather up a crew and I’ll come to the communications room to check on the progress.”

  Folle grinned, the dirt on his face showing lines she had never seen before. “Thanks. Give us an hour,” he said. He turned and jumped carefully toward the entrance.

  “Take your time,” she said.

  She turned back to face the blank screens. Sending an emergency signal was as useful as pressing the buttons on the control panel before her. She let her fingers dance over the dead buttons. Try as she might, she couldn’t make the surface cameras work.

  And no matter how strong the signal, Folle would be shouting into emptiness. Except for a few hundred people trapped in the remains of a moon, the universe was dead.

  No one would rescue them, because no one was out there.

  Chapter Four

  AS PER SPOCK’S RECOMMENDATION, the Enterprise came out of warp farther away from the Tautee system than normal. Spock’s point, which was extremely valid, was that if all fifteen planets had been destroyed, then there might be a great deal of debris, and the Enterprise didn’t want to come out of warp in the center of it.

  They had missed the main debris fields, but not by very much.

  Kirk leaned forward in his chair, one booted foot pressed against the chair itself, the other braced beneath him. He had seen schematics of the Tautee system. It had looked like a thousand other systems—a yellow sun and fifteen major planets, three of which were gas giants.

  The only remarkable thing was that four of the inner planets were in the band of life and had atmospheres capable of sustaining life. Two of the planets were class-M planets, very similar to Earth. Usually a solar system had one or two such planets at the most, but this system was blessed with four.

  The last report from ten years ago was that the Tautee system supported a humanoid population that had started on the fifth planet and spread through the system. The report stated that they were at least fifty to one hundred years from discovering warp drive and leaving their system.

  In other words, there had been nothing remarkable about the Tauteeans. They were evolving just as hundreds of other young cultures were doing throughout the sector, slowly making their way up and out into the stars.

  Until now.

  “All stop,” he said

  Slowly he pushed himself out of his chair, his gaze never leaving the screen. This wasn’t possible.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Sulu and Chekov staring as he did, mouths open.

  He had only seen something like this once before. When the Planet Killer had swept through the galaxy, chomping planets. And even then, it hadn’t left this kind of debris.

  All fifteen major planets orbiting the Tautee sun had broken apart, leaving nothing
more than chunks of floating rock and debris in ever-expanding rings. The screen couldn’t begin to encompass all the damage.

  The outer rings from the destruction of the larger, gas giants were already awe-inspiring, and horribly, horribly beautiful. If he had come upon this without knowing about the way the system had been, he would have stopped the ship and studied everything, just because the sight was so incredible.

  But he did know what had been here before. An entire civilization had been here, spread across four of those planets. Billions of lives that were now vapor in the growing rings.

  What had happened here?

  What had gone wrong?

  “Mister Spock,” he said, his voice not at all steady. He turned toward his science officer, hoping that Spock’s inscrutable Vulcan features showed a hint of what he was thinking. “Are there any survivors?”

  But Spock had his head down, eyes pressed against the scanning device. Kirk understood. It was Spock’s way of covering his own shock at the devastation.

  “Mister Spock?”

  “I am sorry, sir. I was double-checking my readings.” Spock swiveled his chair and faced the captain. Although somber, Spock’s expression was no different than it had been before they left warp. Maybe he wasn’t covering anything at all.

  “It would seem unlikely that there would be any survivors,” Spock said. “Although the society had space travel, it was pre-warp. Ships that primitive could not survive this type of devastation.”

  “Billions of people, Spock. Could anyone have survived?”

  Spock shook his head. “If they did not know this was coming, they would not have survived. The Tauteeans lived mainly on the two class-M planets. When the planets broke apart, their atmospheres were scattered into space. People on the surface would no longer have air to breathe or sufficient gravity to hold them against that surface.”

  Kirk’s fists clenched. Billions of lives lost.

  Billions.

  He had seen destruction before and knew that the numbers didn’t tell half the story. Each of those lives had had loves and hates, goals and dreams, successes and failures. All rendered meaningless in the space of a few days.