The Face of the Unknown

by Christopher L. Bennett

  “I see it differently, Lieutenant. We’ll be holed up just long enough to make repairs and devise a new strategy.”

  “If we don’t get cooked passing through the planet’s radiation belts!”

  Kirk peered around him. “Sulu, do you have the radiation belts plotted?”

  “Still compiling the scans, sir. There’s a lot of energy bleed.”

  “Do you think you can dodge the worst of them?”

  The helmsman straightened. “Absolutely, sir.”

  “This is a mistake, Captain,” Bailey pressed on. “We should break for the Trojan planet, put its mass between us and the Dassik while we break to warp.”

  “Even at maximum impulse,” Kirk countered, “it’d take nearly ten minutes.”

  “At least we’d be in open space, free to maneuver.”

  “And they’d be free to continue their attack.”

  “Captain, our priority is to find Balok. We can’t do that if we’re trapped here, waiting for the Dassik or the radiation belts to finish us off.”

  “We can’t do it if they destroy us either, Mister Bailey. I’d hoped that by now you would’ve learned the value of patience.”

  Perhaps that was a low blow, but it did the trick. Bailey flushed, but lowered his gaze, chastened at seeming like a hothead again on this bridge of all places.

  “Mister Sulu, proceed,” Kirk ordered quietly.

  As Sulu flew the ship into the giant planet’s intense magnetic field, the sensor plots on the wall monitors became so much static. Soon, only the optical feed on the main viewer still functioned, though solely through Uhura’s heroic efforts to clear the distortion. Thanks to her, they had a spectacular view of the vast world looming before them, a brilliant orb of white interspersed with bands of pale blue, green, and yellow. Here in the star’s habitable zone, the Jovian was too warm to support the ammonia compounds that gave Jupiter its red and brown tinges. Its large moons, torn by craters and tectonic rifts, drifted across its face as the ship soared through the minisystem they comprised. Disruptor bolts still hit the ship, but with diminishing intensity as the magnetic disruption threw off the attackers’ aim. “Optical tracking shows the Dassik taking up positions on magnetic field perimeter,” Chekov reported.

  “Berserkers or not, they’re smart enough not to dive into this soup,” Sulu muttered, his wry tone belying the tension in his shoulders as he watched out for radiation spikes and unaccounted-for moonlets.

  But Sulu’s skills served them well. Before much longer, he’d managed to pull ahead enough to lose the Dassik around the curve of the planet, then promptly veer onto a new course. Kirk ordered all exterior lights doused to make the Enterprise harder to track optically. By the time the eight remaining Dassik ships had maneuvered to engird the Jovian, Sulu had secreted the ship beneath a small, irregular moon, hidden from their visual sensors.

  “Scotty, have you got those crystals replaced?” Kirk asked.

  “They’re good, sir. But no way can we go to warp from here. The magnetic and gravitational fields are too strong to allow a warp field to form. If we want to get out of here, sir, we’ll have to get past these raiders first.”

  “We’ll figure that out later, Scotty. For now, let’s focus on repairs.”

  “Gladly, sir.”

  Bailey let out a held breath. “I guess I was wrong, sir. We made it.”

  Kirk clapped him on the shoulder. “We made it in, Lieutenant. That was the easy part. The real challenge will be making our way back out.”

  Three

  The planet sang to her.

  Nyota Uhura’s assignment, nominally, was to study the nameless Jovian’s magnetic field in order to devise counter­measures for its interference, and to monitor all signal bands for evidence of Dassik activity. As far as optical scans could determine, the mysterious raiders were still lurking in the system, two reassembled ships searching the space around the Jovian while the pieces of the other searched the rest of the system in case the Enterprise was hiding somewhere else.

  But studying the magnetic field meant listening to its radio output, and to Uhura, that was music. Just now, the Enterprise was in the right position to detect one of the planet’s decametric radio storms. The innermost large moon, churned into a volcanic hell by the tidal kneading of the Jovian’s gravity, constantly erupted conducting gases into the intense magnetosphere, creating a plasma torus like the one that engulfed Jupiter’s moon Io. The moon plowing through that plasma created intense magnetic waves that drove a cyclotron maser effect at the planet’s poles, generating a storm of radio emissions even more potent than the system’s star could produce. Every time the orbiting starship passed through the edges of the masers’ emission cones, the radio noise filled Uhura’s ears, sounding like crashing surf or a fierce downpour surging against the roof of her childhood home in Kenya ­during the long-rains season. Sometimes she heard shorter ­S-type bursts instead, a swift Geiger-counter crackle, each individual pop of which was really a swiftly descending tone, a narrow-band signal dropping rapidly through the radio spectrum. If Uhura listened closely enough, she imagined she could almost make out the descending tones within each split-second crackle.

  Between the storms, the planet’s song was quieter, but there was still a pervasive white noise with its own subtle surge and flow, like the susurrus within her ear when she cupped a hand to it, but with frequent sharp bursts of noise from the planet’s intense lightning storms. As she listened, she imagined she could hear patterns within it.

  Except the more she listened, the less convinced she became that all those patterns were imaginary.

  “I can’t pin it down,” she said when she asked Spock to listen for himself. “But there seems to be a faint pattern underneath the static. A steady beat, like something’s generating power. And there are faint spikes that sound almost like signal leakage.”

  Spock considered her words. “You’re sure it’s not just an artifact of the lightning storms?”

  Uhura appreciated his tone—not skeptical, since he knew her abilities and her judgment were solid, but simply procedural, asking her to confirm for the record that everything had been considered. “It’s not lightning, sir,” she said. “But I can’t be sure what it is. Maybe you could run a scan?”

  Spock frowned. “Ship’s sensor resources are needed to scan for Dassik activity.”

  “Only those facing outward from the planet, sir,” she countered reasonably.

  After a moment, he nodded. “Very well. The sensor teams have other responsibilities, but I can perform the scan myself.”

  Spock initiated the scan as a background function at his station while he performed other tasks, including a review of the repair status report that Commander Scott had come to the bridge to present. But soon something caught his attention and he craned forward to peer into his hooded viewer. “Interesting,” he said after a time.

  Kirk, who had been sitting quietly in the command chair, turned around. “What is it, Spock?”

  “Scan results from the planet below, Captain.”

  The captain rose from his chair as the science officer transferred the graphics to the science station’s upper screens. “I only see clouds,” Kirk said, raising his brows inquisitively.

  “Indeed. But those clouds form certain predictable patterns arising from the interplay of thermal, convectional, and rotational forces. The patterns I am detecting here are subtly abnormal.”

  “Abnormal how?”

  “As if something in the troposphere below the clouds were causing subtle disruptions in normal atmospheric convection and heat flow.” Spock turned to face the captain, cocking an eyebrow. “Something large, expansive, and most likely, at least partially solid.”

  Kirk stared. “You don’t normally find anything solid in the atmosphere of a gas giant, do you?”

  “No, you do not, aside from dust or
ice particulates. Generally there is no solid surface at all, only a hydrogen atmosphere growing progressively denser until it transitions into a liquid metallic stage, surrounding a deep solid core of degenerate matter.”

  “Can we scan deeper? Identify what’s causing the ­effect?”

  “We should be able to. Although there is considerable interference with our equipment, we can obtain thermal readings from the planet’s interior. However . . .” Spock called up the appropriate sensor feed on the right-hand wall screen. “Sensors show nothing there.”

  “You’re sure that’s not due to the interference?”

  “The readings are averaged over several minutes, allowing interference patterns to be filtered out. Where there should be some sort of structure affecting the convection patterns, there is nothing detectable.”

  Kirk was beginning to smile for the first time today. “Then we’ve got a bona fide scientific mystery on our hands. And maybe a clue to what Balok sent us here to find.” Kirk turned to the conn. “Mister Sulu, can we drop a probe into the atmosphere without the Dassik noticing?”

  “Uh, yes, sir,” Sulu said, “but it wouldn’t do much good. The winds in the troposphere are intense, well over a hundred meters a second. And one lightning strike at those magnitudes would fry its systems. A probe would have no chance down there.”

  “Hmm.” Kirk pondered. “Then I don’t suppose a shuttle­craft would do any better?”

  “No, sir.”

  “So in order to find out what’s going on down there . . . it would take something with strong enough engines to fight the winds and strong enough shields to withstand the lightning.”

  A grin was starting to form on Sulu’s face. “The Enterprise can handle it, sir.”

  Scott stepped forward. “Hold on a minute, Captain. My people have put a lot of hard work into getting this girl up and running again after the battle. I’d rather not see it all undone.”

  “What’s the matter, Scotty? Can’t the Enterprise handle a bit of bad weather?”

  The engineer lifted his chin with wounded pride. “Well, of course she can, sir. She’s easily got enough power and shielding. The hull repairs are completed, and thruster power is good.” Scott was smiling now, eyes lighting up at the challenge. “We could tie in the inertial damping accelerometers to thruster control for smoother wind cancellation . . .”

  Kirk grinned. “You go take care of that, Scotty. Dismissed. And have fun.”

  “That I will, sir!” Scott left the bridge at a run.

  “Batten down the hatches, everyone,” Kirk ordered. “There’s going to be some rough weather.” Taking his own advice, he returned to his chair. “Mister Sulu . . . take her down.”

  * * *

  “Aye, aye, sir!” Hikaru Sulu said, trying to keep his grin to reasonable proportions and failing utterly. He’d taken on a number of piloting challenges in his years at the helm, and he’d become intimately familiar with how the Enterprise performed in almost any circumstance—even flying her in a planetary atmosphere once or twice. But he’d never had the chance to explore what this beauty could do in an atmosphere as redoubtable as a Jovian’s.

  Sulu took her down gently at first, to minimize the risk of detection by the Dassik ships above. He dropped her more quickly through the ionosphere, though, since a prolonged stay would be too disruptive to the sensors and the navigational deflector, and any electromagnetic disturbance caused by the passage would probably blend into the planet’s overall radio noise. At this altitude, and for some distance below, the atmosphere was still little more than a dirty vacuum. Yet Sulu was beginning to feel a trace of wind buffeting the ship as he sank her through the stratosphere. It increased as they reached the upper haze layers, which were kilometers deep even in this relatively thin portion.

  Once the haze cleared, the cloud belt he was aiming for appeared a rich, vivid blue, tinged here and there with the yellow of sulfur clouds. He steered toward the center of the belt, where the wind speed would be lowest. The Enterprise sank through a few dozen more kilometers of clear hydrogen and methane, the sky becoming increasingly blue above them. Sulu was only now really beginning to get a feel for the scale of this world. Soon, in the distance, the elevated zones of water-ice clouds began to rise up to the north and south, enclosing the ship in an immense canyon with walls of brilliant white. As the ship sank past the sulfur clouds, leaving the yellow and green tinges behind, the blue tint below faded as the thickness of atmosphere between them and the lower cloud belt diminished. Now the ship was sinking through dense white clouds of water vapor just like those on Earth, except that these were immensely deeper. Lightning flickered in the distance, and later—­sometimes seconds, sometimes minutes later—the thunder from a storm the size of Earth could be heard through the hull over the increasing roar of the atmosphere rushing past. The lightning storms here were more frequent and intense than on Jupiter, thanks to the warmer, wetter atmosphere.

  Finally the ship emerged into the clear air below, a hydrogen-methane mix whose pressure at this depth was several times Earth’s surface pressure and whose temperature was just right for liquid water. It was raining, the thick overcast reducing visibility, so Uhura set the screen to enhance the light. Through the haze of raindrops—drops that would just keep falling until they evaporated in the hotter depths and rose back up to the clouds—a vast, dark shape was faintly visible. It seemed like another cloudbank, but it couldn’t be, not down here. As Spock had said, there should be nothing but bottomless clarity for thousands of kilometers down.

  “What’s going on here?” Sulu was startled at the sharp exclamation. He hadn’t even noticed Doctor McCoy entering the bridge. “Jim, are we where I think we are? What could possibly have possessed you to dive inside a—What in heaven’s name is that?”

  Sulu’s eyes followed McCoy’s and everyone else’s back to the viewscreen. The immense dark shape was looming closer now—close enough to see light and color within it. It resembled a vast greenhouse dome, but the scale of it was unimaginable. Startled by the collision alarm, Sulu hastily called up the maneuvering controls on his panel and put the ship into a dive. The dark shape rose up in the viewscreen, seeming to take forever, growing ever closer . . . Sulu was convinced they should have hit by now, but he simply wasn’t grasping how vast it truly was. What had seemed like individual windows on its surface now resolved into entire massive arrays bigger than the Enterprise. Finally the path ahead was clear and the ship flew on with a dark, metallic world as its ceiling, with only open sky below.

  “Spock, how big is that thing?” Kirk asked after a breathless moment.

  “Approximately one thousand, one hundred and eighty kilometers in diameter, sir.”

  “One thou—Spock, there are moons smaller than that!”

  “Indeed. However, this structure is far less massive than a moon of its size. Most of it appears to be hollow.”

  “Is it . . . floating?” McCoy asked. “Like a blimp?”

  Spock shook his head. “Negative. Although the object’s construction appears unusually light for its size, spectroscopic readings suggest a standard oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere within. Even at these pressures, the surrounding hydrogen-methane mix is lower in density.”

  “The ship’s handling lighter, sir,” Sulu observed. “I think we’re flying through the antigrav field that’s holding it up.”

  “I concur,” Spock said.

  Once the Enterprise came out from under its god-sized umbrella, the rain had diminished and the clouds had thinned—or rather, the ship had traveled so far that it had left the bad weather behind. The screen was still enhancing the light, but Sulu was able to see much farther than before. And what he saw were more of the massive shapes—flattened spheroids so huge and distant that it was only possible to make out the vaguest hints of surface detail through the blue haze of atmosphere, like mountains on the horizon. Sulu saw conduits stretc
hing out from the spheroid they had passed beneath, cylinders thicker than the Enterprise but seeming as flimsy as spider webs on this scale, stretching in the direction of the other modules but soon diminishing to invisibility. Sulu put the ship into an arc, confirming that the web of moon-sized structures extended as far as the eye could see in all directions. They extended for a fair depth as well, with at least three distinct tiers visible.

  Finally the arc brought them around to face the original module again, and Sulu had raised the ship slightly above it to get a clearer look. Indeed, the top of it seemed to be an immense, clear dome, but the vista within was like an entire continent at twilight: towering mountains, broad rivers, dark seas, forests in exotic colors, patches of light that could only be cities. A whole land mass floating inside a Jovian atmosphere.

  “Fascinating,” Spock said, and he’d never sounded like he meant it so sincerely. “These structures extend as far as sensors can scan. Just the ones I can detect, if their internal arrangement resembles this one, could collectively hold a habitable volume equal to a half-dozen typical M-class planets. And from my earlier observations of the cloud patterns, it may well extend most or all of the way around this planet.” He paused for effect. “This one Jovian could contain within it a surface area comparable to half the member worlds of the Federation combined.”

  “You’re kidding,” McCoy exclaimed. “All that inside one planet?”

  “A Jovian planet has a much greater surface area than a terrestrial one, Doctor. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot alone is large enough to hold several Earth-sized worlds. And the habitable surface area of Earth is less than a quarter of the total. Not to mention that these modules may well have multiple layers of habitation, multiplying the effective—”

  “Okay. Okay, Spock, I get the point. But it’s just so . . . staggering. Are these things inhabited? Dozens of worlds’ worth of people all living here? Why?”

  “Recall that these structures were undetectable from orbit, Doctor, even though they should by rights have a much more pronounced effect on the planet’s circulation and cloud patterns. They must be deliberately obscuring their signature by some means. The logical conclusion is that they are here for concealment.”