The Face of the Unknown

by Christopher L. Bennett

  “You won’t know that if you don’t give it a shot.”

  “How do I give it a shot when I am on the Enterprise and she is . . . wherever she is?”

  “Do what I did last year. Take an extended leave.”

  “I’m still an ensign! I don’t have that much leave time built up!”

  “Then take a temporary ground posting. Whatever. If Irina’s stayed on your mind this long, then it’s worth doing something about it!”

  A brilliant flash of light distracted him—perhaps mercifully—from Sulu’s suggestion. He blinked away the afterimage of the vast lightning bolt that had struck the dome in front of him. “I thought the dome was supposed to dim the lightning!” he called.

  “It did!” Sulu said. “That one was huge! Do you have any idea of the amount of energy in these storms? You could wreck a fleet with it!”

  More lightning was striking the dome now as the storm intensified. Beyond, Chekov could see one of the conduits connecting this module to its neighbors; it was swaying under a fearsome wind. He reminded himself that the conduits were made to handle that kind of stress, that the modules were built to channel the lightning into their batteries. He tried to relax and concentrate on the flight.

  But as the minutes passed, the storm only grew fiercer. Something odd seemed to be happening to the angle of the dome rim. “Sulu! Am I getting wobbly or is the ­module . . . swaying?”

  A pause. “I think it’s swaying.”

  “It’s supposed to do that, right? And the antigravs compensate so we don’t feel it?”

  “I guess so.” Several more lightning strikes punctuated his sentence. “Still, maybe we’d better land and talk to someone.”

  “Good idea!”

  The two of them banked toward the nearest tower, aiming their glide path toward the edge of one of the disks. But as they neared it, suddenly Chekov felt something yank him downward. He was falling! And this time, so was Sulu. The wings were no longer holding enough air to do more than slow their descent.

  For a frightening moment, it looked like they were about to collide with the edge of the thick disk. But they just barely slipped under it and fell toward the top of the next disk, hundreds of meters below. And they were falling fast. The antigravs will kick in, Chekov reminded himself. The antigravs will kick in the antigravs will kick in the antigravs will—

  “Kick” was the right word. The wingsuit antigravs did engage, but too weakly to prevent a crash landing. Following Sulu’s lead, Chekov spread out as wide and flat as he could, depending on the thick air beneath his wingsuit membranes to provide what cushioning it could. Still, he hit hard and tumbled. The ground cover was thick and soft, but the landing still hurt.

  Groaning, he tried to sit up—and found he couldn’t! He struggled into a seated position, but it was a strain, and it left him woozy as the blood rushed from his brain. His helmet pressed down uncomfortably on his head. He pulled it off, and it fell hard to the ground.

  “What’s happening?” Sulu asked as he struggled upright in turn.

  “The gravity,” Chekov said. “The module’s antigravs must have failed. We’re feeling Cherela’s full gravity at this altitude. Maybe . . . four and a half times Earth’s.”

  “No,” Sulu said after testing it out for a moment. “We couldn’t even move then. This is no more than two g’s. The system must still be running at a reduced level.” Chekov felt his innards sink, and from the look on Sulu’s face, the helmsman felt it too. “But it’s fluctuating.”

  “Sulu—those antigravs are what hold this module up against its own weight. If they fail . . .”

  But Sulu was looking up at the enormous disk that filled the sky above them. The module was undoubtedly swaying now, and a deep groaning sound was audible all around them. “What I want to know is . . . what’s holding that up?”

  Seven

  “The gravity fluctuations are getting worse, Captain,” Sulu reported over the comm. “I don’t know how much longer this module can hold up.” The ominous sounds of structural strain under his voice, and the alarmed crowd chatter that followed them, told Kirk that his helmsman had good reason for his concern.

  On the viewscreen, Triumvir Lekur reacted differently. “Nonsense, Captain Kirk. The Fiilestii module has ‘held up’ for over a thousand years. This is just a localized antigrav failure. We’re already redirecting power from neighboring modules to shore it up until we can repair the storm damage.”

  “I don’t know if that’s going to be enough, Captain,” Sulu called. “If anything, the wind and lightning are getting stronger! The locals I’ve talked to say they’ve never seen it this bad, not at this altitude, anyway.”

  “Triumvir,” Kirk said, “maybe you should order an evacuation as a precautionary measure.”

  “We know what we’re doing, newcomer!”

  Spock stepped forward, speaking with a calmness Kirk would be unable to manage at the moment. “If nothing else, Triumvir, removing the populace from the module would reduce the load on the strained antigravs.”

  The big Bogosrin snorted, seeming a bit abashed. “Of course, you’re right. Only sensible. Rrr, take a damn lot of work, though. Not densely populated, that one, but still it’s over a million people.”

  Once Lekur had issued orders to set the process in motion, Kirk said, “The Enterprise can help. If you’ll release us from the hangar, we can—”

  “All due respect, Captain, there’s nothing your people can do that can’t be done better by the thousands of more experienced engineers and crisis managers we have here. You don’t know the Web.”

  “You said it yourself, it’ll take a lot of work to evacuate the module. We can use our transporters and shuttlecraft to help out.”

  Lekur bowed his head. “Right again. Forgive an old builder his stubborn pride. To have this happen when we have visitors . . .”

  Kirk smiled. “Forget about it. I’ll just—”

  “Captain!” It was Sulu’s voice, but nothing followed it save the sound of screams and a loud metallic groaning.

  “Sulu!” There came a series of sharp percussive sounds, then nothing. “Sulu, come in! Lekur, what the hell’s going on there?”

  “We have a video feed,” one of the triumvir’s technical aides said. Uhura sent the feed to the main viewscreen, reducing Lekur’s image to an inset window. The view was evidently from a camera atop one of the Fiilestii towers looking down and out at the other towers beyond. At first, the view looked normal, until it zoomed in and Kirk realized that material was falling off the disks’ surfaces in one direction—water, sand, loose objects. The people atop the disks were clinging for dear life or trying to scramble for entrances into the interior. The entire module had tilted, the camera along with it.

  “My God,” Kirk said. There were no handrails at the rims of the disks; the winged Fiilestii had no need for them in the normal low gravity of the module. Kirk and the bridge crew watched in horror as a group of Linnik, small but recognizable in their loose, shimmering garments, tumbled toward the edge. A restraining force field snapped into visibility, catching them—and then giving way, not designed to cope with the increased gravitational pull. They plummeted off the side.

  To Kirk’s relief, they then vanished in swirls of light. “Emergency transporters engaged,” another of Lekur’s aides announced with even greater relief. But what about Sulu? Kirk wondered. Had he gone over the edge as well? Had he been retrieved in time?

  “Chekov to Enterprise! Come in!”

  “Kirk here! Chekov, where’s Sulu?”

  “I’m right here, Captain,” Sulu’s voice came, sounding breathless. “Dropped my communicator. We’re inside the structure, but I’m not happy being here.”

  “Captain,” Chekov interrupted, “if the module isn’t leveled out, the strain on the towers will—”

  “Understood! Lekur, let us out of
this hangar! We need to get there now!”

  “Captain,” Spock told him, “the Fiilestii module is forty percent of the way around the planet. We cannot get there in less than an hour without exiting the atmosphere and risking detection by the Dassik.”

  “Then we’ll risk detection! Lekur, come on, man!”

  “There’s a better way,” the Bogosrin said. “We’ll beam you. Send your matter stream through the conduits.”

  Kirk blinked. “Beam the Enterprise?”

  “Easy to do, with the power of Cherela to draw on.”

  “That would be inadvisable, Triumvir,” Spock said. “The Enterprise was beamed across space by an advanced transporter once before, during an encounter with a ­Kalandan outpost. The vessel was reassembled fractionally out of phase, resulting in a nearly catastrophic engine malfunction.”

  “Kalandans? Ancient history. Our transporters are much better. And it’s not across space, more like station to station. We’ll have more control over reassembly.”

  “There’s no choice, Spock,” Kirk said. “Not while our people are in danger. Lekur, do it!”

  “Standing by,” the second aide said at Lekur’s prompt. “Please drop all your deflector screens and depolarize any hull-reinforcement fields so they won’t interfere with the dematerialization.”

  “Do as she says,” Kirk told the bridge crew. He hit the shipwide intercom button. “All hands, this is the captain. The entire Enterprise is about to be beamed to the site of an emergency. I’m assured there’s no danger, but it might be best to shut down any nonessential systems and . . . try to hold still. Stand by.”

  “Scott to bridge! Captain, beam the whole ship? I’ve barely got everything back in alignment after that Kalandan mess! And you know how dangerous it is to beam antimatter! If it isn’t kept carefully segregated in the particle stream, we could end up with some of our pieces missing, even blow up on reassembly!”

  Now he tells me. “No choice, Scotty! Just batten down the hatches and pray!”

  “Ready, Captain,” Spock announced moments later.

  “Lekur, go!”

  The overhead and outer bulkheads of the bridge began to shimmer and sparkle. The effect closed in on Kirk until everything around him was dissolving into dancing light. The whine of the phase transition sang through the air, engulfing him, growing deafeningly loud, as though the particles of the Enterprise were screaming in his ears as they were torn apart from one another. Then phosphenes clouded his view as his own retinas began to disintegrate. It was the slowest dematerialization he’d ever been through. His entire body tingled and grew numb.

  After an uncertain time in limbo, he felt the tingles again, saw the shimmers, and the bridge re-formed around him, a crystal fairyland of dancing light gradually giving way to solidity. Kirk’s ears kept ringing even after the transporter hum had faded, and he blinked away after­images in his eyes. “Scotty, are we in one piece?”

  “Checking . . . aye, antimatter containment reads nominal. It’ll take a full diagnostic to be sure of the rest, sir.”

  “Later, Scotty.” On the viewscreen, he could see the ­Fiilestii module. The conduits around it were visibly whipping about in the fearsome winds, winds that ­buffeted the Enterprise as well. “Deflector shields up! Rahda, get us in range of that module!” The relief helmswoman ­acknowledged and brought thrusters to bear to counteract the winds. Kirk could now see that the module itself was rocking with stately slowness. Lightning speared down from the vast storm bank overhead to strike the dome and the snaking conduits. “Lekur, how’s that antigrav reinforcement coming?”

  “We’re getting it leveled out,” the triumvir told him. “The antigravs are still weakened, but we can ease—­careful, Mnorgrel, don’t let the flow rate surge!—ease the stress on the towers. They’ll still be overloaded, but at least in the direction they’re designed to cope with. Should make things safer until we can get the people out. Rrrh, Mnorgrel, what did I just tell you?”

  “All right.” Kirk hit the intercom again. “All hands, prepare to assist in mass evacuation. Ready all shuttlecraft to transport rescue parties to the Fiilestii module.”

  * * *

  “Enterprise to Sulu and Chekov,” came Kirk’s voice. “Stand by for transport.”

  Sulu took Chekov’s communicator. “Negative, ­Captain!” he said. “We’re needed here, evacuating the building.” Another deep rumble made Sulu look around at the wide hallway, making sure its walls and ceiling were still intact. The module may have leveled out again, but a structure this large was almost fluid, and stresses were still rippling through it. “There’s been some structural buckling. People are trapped in the side that was higher up.”

  “Understood. Just get out of there as soon as you can.”

  Sulu could hear the reluctance in Kirk’s voice—not only at having to leave his crew in harm’s way, but at not being there himself. The captain’s willingness to risk himself on the front lines regardless of regulations was part of the reason why Sulu admired the man so much. But Sulu himself could do no less.

  “Sulu, over here!” Chekov beckoned to him, studying his tricorder readings. It was a strain to walk in this gravity, but they were managing with a little help from their wingsuit antigravs. “There are over fifty people trapped in here.”

  The tricorder readouts supplemented the evidence of Sulu’s own eyes. The door to the chamber beyond was stuck, its frame warped as the disk buckled under its own unbalanced weight. “Stand back.” He drew his hand phaser and set the dial to its highest intensity. The deadly particle beam burned through the door quickly, taking less than thirty seconds to carve a hole. The Fiilestii, Linnik, and others within poured out as Sulu and Chekov urged them to stay orderly and avoid the burning-hot edges.

  “What’s going on?” asked a Linnik female in green robes. “Is it the final collapse? So soon?”

  Sulu didn’t know what she meant. All he could do was try to be reassuring. “It’s a temporary antigrav failure. We’re evacuating as a precaution.”

  “Temporary. That’s what they always say.” The childlike alien hurried away, muttering, “Maybe now they’ll have to listen.”

  There’s one in every crowd, Sulu thought. He soon forgot the encounter in the press of search and rescue. He and Chekov located and freed a few hundred more trapped Web denizens over the next half hour. It was exhausting work in this gravity, but they couldn’t stop to rest. Sulu hoped Doctor McCoy would have something for his sore knees and ankles . . . and hips . . . and back . . . and neck . . .

  For one brief, glorious moment, Sulu’s weight dropped and he felt free. At last! They fixed the antigravs! But a second later, weight returned, more crushing than ever, and slammed him to the floor. It hadn’t been gravity cancellation he’d felt, it had been free fall. Far from being fixed, the antigravs had cut out completely for a second and then engaged again at a weaker level than before. The building creaked and shuddered around him, absorbing a new set of stresses.

  What did that Linnik say, Sulu thought, about a final collapse?

  * * *

  “It should have worked,” Lekur insisted on the viewscreen. “Somehow the instability is growing faster than we can cancel it out. We just can’t feed enough power to this part of the network in time, not without compromising adjacent modules.”

  “So power’s all you need?” asked Bailey, who had arrived on the bridge minutes before and now stood alongside Kirk’s chair.

  “Not all, but it’s the main thing.”

  Bailey turned to the science officer. “Mister Spock, could the Enterprise gravity system be interfaced with theirs, to feed them the extra power?”

  Both of Spock’s brows went up. “Lieutenant, the module is thousands of times more massive than the ­Enterprise.”

  “I remember flight training, Spock—the gravity and inertial damping systems are designed to counte
ract thousands of g’s if necessary. So the power’s there. At least enough to shore up their own systems.”

  “If the instabilities are increasing exponentially, pouring more power into the system may not be enough to stop them.”

  “But it’d hold them for a while, right? Enough to get the people out, at least.”

  “We have no way of knowing if our systems are even compatible with theirs. There could be unpredictable fluctuations. The feedback could damage the ship.”

  Bailey was growing impatient. “Don’t you have anything to offer besides worst-case scenarios, Mister Spock?”

  “Lieutenant,” Kirk said, urging calm. Bailey quieted down, but his urgency remained. So Kirk asked on his behalf, “Spock, what are the odds of damage to the ­Enterprise?”

  “I have insufficient data to compute the odds.”

  “So you can’t say for sure this won’t help,” Bailey spoke up.

  “But we can’t say for sure it will,” Kirk countered. “Bailey, I understand your urgency, but we mustn’t act in haste. We won’t be any use to the people we can save if we wreck the ship trying to do too much.”

  The younger man stepped toward him. “Captain, I’m not the same hothead who served on this bridge three years ago. I’ve learned a lot about First Federation systems in that time. I’m confident that this can work. Yes, there’s a risk, but there was a risk when we answered Balok’s distress call too. We did it because trying to help was the right thing to do.”

  Kirk studied Bailey for a moment. The intensity he remembered was still there, but it was more tempered and seasoned now, just as he had always hoped it would be one day.

  The captain turned back to his first officer. “All right, Spock. If anyone can make this work, it’s you and Scotty. So let’s make this happen.”

  But once he’d filled in his chief engineer, Scott’s reaction was rather less confident. “Aye, we’ve got the power, sir, but keeping the energy flow stable will be like riding a bucking bronco covered in engine grease.”