by David Mack
Sulu announced over his shoulder, “Thirty seconds to the landing site.”
“Mind the local foliage, Lieutenant,” Spock said. “it can be quite dense.”
“Aye, sir. I have clear sensor readings of the landscape. Our approach is open.” True to his word, even in near-perfect darkness, Sulu guided the shuttlecraft down through a gap in the rain forest’s tightly packed canopy, into a small and nearly level glade. The Galileo touched down with the gentlest of bumps, and then the purr of its impulse engines and thrusters dwindled to silence. “We’re down and secure, Mister Spock.”
“Well done, Lieutenant. Open the hatch.”
Servomotors whined as the hatch slid open. Sultry heat flooded the interior of the shuttlecraft, followed by the sawing song of insects, the harsh screeches of avian life-forms, and the growls of animal hungers echoing in the night.
Spock led the way outside. “Follow me, and stay close.”
He heard the other three men’s footsteps as they followed him outside. Sulu, the last one to exit the shuttlecraft, closed its hatch. Once the door was shut, the only light in the glade was the weak and distant glow of the stars. As Sulu adjusted the straps of his backpack, Spock said, “Switch to night-vision goggles.”
He and the others all had practiced this. Each man retrieved a pair of light-amplifying goggles from an outer pocket on the side of his backpack. Spock secured his in place and powered them up. At once the impenetrable black of night gave way to a surreal scene as the goggles intensified ultraviolet light to render the nightscape in frost-blue shadows and highlights. The other members of the landing party all showed Spock a thumbs-up signal, indicating their goggles were functioning correctly. He signaled them with a gesture to fall in behind him.
Superimposed over his holographic view of the rain forest were subtle scrolls of data from his tricorder, indicating direction and range to the landing party’s first objective. Using the heads-up display as his guide, he led Sulu, Chekov, and Scott through muddy paths tangled with roots and low-hanging vines, down a steep slope cloaked in waist-high fronds, then through a gully to another clearing, one smaller than that in which Sulu had landed the Galileo.
“This way,” Spock said, pointing toward a jumble of broken foliage. The others joined him at the hastily assembled pile of natural camouflage. “Help me remove this.” Working as a team, it took them less than a minute to expose the alien travel pod Spock had concealed more than a month earlier, after having stolen it to effect a hectic escape with Captain Kirk from the fortress and dimensional portal the Jatohr called their sanctuary.
Sulu doffed his pack, pulled out his tricorder, and conducted a thorough scan of the pod, employing protocols he and Spock had developed together. “Its security circuit is still responding to external signals,” Sulu said. “Scanning for the access codes to the citadel.”
Somewhere nearby, a throaty roar gave the impression of a large carnivore with an even larger appetite, on the hunt and keen to make a meal of the landing party. Scott and Chekov both drew their phasers and listened for further warnings of unwanted company, animal or otherwise.
“Got it,” Sulu said. “You were right, Mister Spock. The pod does transmit the access code inside a subharmonic of the main response frequency.”
Chekov pivoted left, then right, his hand tight on his phaser. “Does that mean we can go now?”
“Yes, Ensign,” Spock said. With one tap on his goggles’ exterior controls, he instructed his tricorder to switch its guidance circuit to their next destination: the Jatohr citadel. As soon as it locked in he started walking, without fear or hesitation, deeper into the forest primeval. “This way, gentlemen. We have much to do before daybreak.”
“Assuming we live that long,” Sulu said.
“If all goes to plan,” Spock said, “there is no reason to think we won’t.”
Scott chuckled softly, then said under his breath to Chekov, “See, lad? What did I tell you? Beneath that cold Vulcan logic beats the heart of an optimist.”
Sulu and Chekov laughed. Spock could only shake his head.
“Really, Mister Scott. I see no reason to stoop to insults.”
“Sorry, sir,” Scott said—yet Spock suspected the man felt no remorse.
I shall never understand the human need for derogatory humor.
* * *
A soul could lose itself in the crags and crevices that lined the mountain pass, and Una was all but certain she had lost her bearings as her Usildar escorts ushered her through one fissure after another, ever deeper into the rocky labyrinth.
“Is it much farther?”
“It is as far as it is,” said Feneb.
The only thing Una found more maddening than Feneb’s tautology was the endless maze of stone paths and switchbacks down which he and his cohort led her.
Before long, the repetition of their surroundings, the perpetual sameness of the landmarks and other features, coupled with the renewed sensation that the twin suns had stalled in the sky, left Una battling disorientation. It was as if every detail she saw had been crafted to sap her will.
In a blink Una found herself in a secluded box canyon at the end of the trail. Caves dotted its red-stone walls; makeshift rope nets facilitated movement between its upper and lower tiers. A number of Usildar navigated the rope nets with preternatural ease. On the canyon’s floor stood a small cluster of tents.
Una had no memory of navigating a turn in the rocky paths that brought her here. One moment she had been in the maze; the next she was in the canyon. All she could think of by way of an explanation was that she had let her mind wander, and so had missed the transition, just as she had when she first found herself in the foothills.
How long ago was that? When did I get here?
There was no time to look for answers. Semifamiliar faces emerged from the tents. Una had prepared herself to confront time-worn visions of her former shipmates, but the people who walked out to meet her looked like her lost friends as they had been when they parted, eighteen years earlier. She set down her backpack and walked toward them.
Lieutenant Commander Martinez was sun-browned but still vigorous—except for his eyes, which looked impossibly ancient. His once indomitable bearing was worn down, beaten into a tired slouch. Beside him was Ensign Tim Shimizu; he had the physique and face of a young man, but all traces of his youthful humor and vitality had vanished, leaving the haunted eyes of one who had seen too much to retain his hold on hope. Behind them were the three security officers who had been part of their landing party on Usilde in 2249—Lieutenant Griffin, Ensign Le May, and Petty Officer Cambias.
Lingering back by the tents were four more lost Enterprise personnel, all officers cruelly kidnapped from the ship’s bridge by the Jatohr: relief navigator Ensign Cheryl Stevens; Ensign Bruce Goldberg, who had been Captain April’s beta-shift yeoman; Ensign Dylan Craig, from the sciences division; and Lieutenant Ingrid Holstine, the relief communications officer.
All of them stared at Una, as if straining to dredge her likeness from their memories. Hoping their chain of command had remained intact despite their long exile, Una made a point of walking toward and addressing Martinez. She raised a hand in greeting as they came to a halt a few yards shy of each other. “Raul? It’s me. Una.” Not seeing any recognition in his eyes, she reverted to her shipboard nickname: “Number One.”
He cocked his head forward and narrowed his squint. “Una? Is that really you?”
“Yes, Raul. It’s really me.”
She wasn’t sure what she had expected. A joyous reunion, mayhap? A firm clasping of hands? Maybe even a vigorous but platonic embrace?
Tears flooded Martinez’s eyes, and he dropped to his knees in front of her and sobbed into the sandy earth. “It’s been so long, Una. It’s been forever. We thought you’d forgotten us.”
Could this really be the same man she had kno
wn? The hard-as-nails taskmaster? The proud leader, the fearless soldier? It looked like him, but this man was broken, shattered inside in ways Una would never have thought possible. She kneeled beside him and set her hand on his shoulder, for whatever small measure of comfort that feeble gesture could provide.
A shadow fell over them. Una looked up into the mirthless eyes of Shimizu. He broke his glum frown just long enough to say, “Nice to see you, Number One. Welcome to hell.”
Four
There were faster ways to reach the Jatohr fortress than traversing the rain forest on foot, but all of them, Spock knew, were nearly certain to draw the Klingons’ attention. One could mask a shuttlecraft from sensors with a measure of technical legerdemain, but concealing one, or an airborne Jatohr transport pod, from the eyes of a Klingon sentry standing watch atop the citadel’s eerily organic-looking curved outer walls was nearly impossible without a cloaking device—an advantage that was, for the moment, exclusively in the domain of the Romulans.
Armed with night-vision goggles, he and the rest of the Enterprise landing party had moved with stealth down a narrow trail that snaked through dense jungle and thick underbrush. Using narrow-stream aerosol capsules, they had cleared a path, dissolving prickly twisting vines with a substance designed to break down plant fibers while leaving animal tissues and other materials unharmed. Unlike phasers, the spray gave off no light to attract watchful eyes, and it had the advantage of being almost silent. Best of all, after breaking down the branches, the compound turned inert and the dissolved plants became organic fertilizer.
Spock found it noteworthy that only the native Usildean flora was affected by the spray. The pervasive infestation of invasive gray plant species that had taken root along the shoreline and spread deep into the jungle now proved impervious to the defoliant, suggesting their internal chemistry and cellular structures were unlike anything as yet known to Federation science.
Soon the landing party arrived at the forest’s abrupt edge and confronted a hundred-meter-wide patch of scorched earth that stood between the jungle and the lake beyond. Great effigies of carved wood and vines, all shaped like Jatohr, peppered the no-man’s-land. The rough-hewn scarecrows faced the jungle, the meaning behind their grim presences abundantly clear: turn back.
“Use caution here,” Spock warned. “Captain Una said the Usildar have set pitfalls and other traps here.”
Scott adjusted his tricorder. “Scanning for hidden surprises. Anything we pick up will be relayed to our goggles.”
“Good work, Mister Scott.” To the others Spock added, “From this point, remain silent until we reach the fungus patch along the lakeshore.”
Spock knew the Usildar posted sentries along the tree line to guard against anyone crossing their forbidden zone. He hoped the fortunate combination of moonless darkness, their dark uniforms, and the coal-black burnt ground would make the landing party all but impossible for the Usildar to see.
It took them only a few minutes to traverse the open ground, which was littered with large melons apparently scattered to serve as obstacles and to funnel trespassers into the traps, all of which the landing party evaded with ease.
When their boots squished and crunched across the thick carpet of pungent gray fungus on the other side, it required effort for Spock to mask his displeasure at the odious reek. To the consternation of his shipmates, the stench of decay only grew worse as they neared the gray algae-covered lake, which burbled like a witch’s cauldron spewing nitrogen and methane.
They all crouched along the water’s edge. From the lake’s center rose a structure Usilde’s natives called the citadel. Its central tower was ringed by a curve-topped, circular outer wall whose nacreous texture was evocative of the shells of invertebrates—features reflective of the physiology of its architects, an extradimensional species of giant gastropods called the Jatohr. Towering, jagged fingers of pitted rock poked upward from the scum-covered lake at random points around the bizarre alien fortress.
Sulu scanned the citadel with his tricorder. “I’m reading movement along the tops of the walls.” He pointed out the Klingon sentinels to Spock, Chekov, and Scott. “Four guards. Each one alone. At regular intervals on the upper perimeter.”
The four Klingons were hard to see, even with the light-intensifying goggles, but in seconds Spock observed each one. “Well done, Lieutenant.” He reached into a side pouch of his pack and pulled out a full-face diving mask that included a compact rebreather apparatus and a built-in air supply. “Masks on. Mister Chekov, Mister Scott: arm ultrasonic repellent as soon as we’re underwater.”
The landing party donned its diving masks and followed Spock, who waded with care into the lake. His body sliced a path through the odoriferous tin-colored algae choking its surface. After they all had submerged, Spock’s sensitive Vulcan hearing registered the activation hums of Scott’s and Chekov’s ultrasonic repellent devices. Their pulses’ frequencies pitched upward, beyond the reach of even Spock’s superlative auditory senses. As they did, he noticed that all the aquatic creatures within view made haste to flee the landing party.
Just as we had desired, Spock noted. He made a mental note to log a commendation for the Enterprise’s senior marine biologist, Lieutenant Marina Frants, when he returned to the ship.
Moving in close formation, the four officers crossed the lake to one of the Jatohr fortress’s several underwater entrances. Many dozens of meters away, next to the entrance of a more distant landing bay, Spock noted the breach a misdirected Klingon photon grenade had blasted through the citadel’s foundation weeks earlier, during his and Kirk’s harried escape from the city mere minutes after its occupation by the Klingons.
Odd, he thought. I recalled that breach being wider. He attributed the variance between his memory and his observation to the speed of his and the captain’s escape. Despite his Vulcan mental discipline, Spock’s human half remained vulnerable to adrenaline’s sensory distortions.
With a nod, he instructed Sulu to commence his next part in the mission. Sulu activated his tricorder—which Mister Scott had most helpfully waterproofed before they left the Enterprise—and triggered the security sequence they had hacked from the Jatohr pod abandoned in the rain forest. Sulu made a few minor adjustments, then one of the citadel’s undamaged underwater entrance hatches dilated open like an iris, without a sound, directly ahead of them.
Spock waited for Sulu’s all-clear, and then he led the landing party inside. They surfaced inside a moon pool, a hangar for a squadron of amphibious pods. Pale blue strips glowed overhead to light the spacious chamber, in which even the faintest sounds echoed. The landing party waded toward shallower water, then prowled up the gradual ramp that led out of the moon pool to the promenade that encircled it. Their synthetic bodysuits, whose exteriors had been treated with hydrophobic compounds, shed their water with prejudice. It took only seconds for the entire landing party to exit the pool, but by the time they stepped onto the floor, their garments were dry enough that they left not a single footprint to mark their passage.
The four men removed and stowed their rebreathers and diving masks. Spock motioned them toward a door to an airlock, from which they could access a network of corridors that would lead to the control levels of the citadel. He keyed the door’s access code into a panel beside it, then it, too, dilated open ahead of them. The four men crowded into the airlock as Spock repeated the process, closing the first portal behind them and opening the one ahead. “This way,” he said, skulking down the shadowy passageway, whose walls and ceilings were as curvilinear as the citadel’s outer walls, making them seem more like lava tubes or something else wrought by nature than like something engineered by a scientifically advanced culture.
No one spoke as the landing party sneaked through the alien complex. Halfway to their destination, they took cover behind the walls’ protruding, riblike structures as a Klingon patrol marched past ahead of them at a junc
ture between two intersecting tubular passageways. It was unclear whether the Klingons would shoot to kill on sight, or seek to capture intruders; regardless of the truth, Spock was of no mind to find out firsthand.
They arrived at a spiraling ramp tucked into a recess along the wall. Spock checked to make sure it was clear, then waved the others past him while he guarded their rear flank. Scott descended the spiral ramp first, followed by Sulu, then Chekov. Spock backed down the ramp behind them, watchful for any sign of detection or pursuit.
At the bottom of the spiral, the team regrouped into a forward-facing huddle. Together they looked out at the massive, bizarre machinery that constituted the bowels of what the Jatohr’s command consoles had designated the transfer-field generator. Unlike the master control room, which was secured behind a door that could be bypassed only with the aid of a transporter, this sprawling, tiered sublevel was accessible from several different areas of the fortress. Just as Spock had feared, however, it was crowded with Klingon scientists and armed guards.
“There’s your gizmo,” Scott said. “But good luck gettin’ to it.”
Chekov wondered, “Are the guards to keep us out, or the scientists in?”
A shrug from Sulu. “Could be both.”
Spock lowered his voice as he surveyed the unfavorable tactical situation. “Mister Scott, can we access the Klingons’ computers from here?”
“No, sir. They’ve locked down their circuits, tight as a drum.” He pointed toward a secluded cluster of Klingon computer hardware, from which ran a confused tangle of data cables. “We can patch in from there—if I can get to it.”