Trinh understood that Spock possessed a mixed parentage—his mother had apparently been human—but his comportment matched his appearance, both of which seemed one hundred percent Vulcan. Cold and stoic, the science officer did not joke or smile, nor did he respond to such behavior, a fact that had led to several uncomfortable moments for Trinh, who tended to keep the atmosphere light around the labs. More than his Vulcan demeanor, though, Spock wore his long service of nearly two decades in Starfleet like a second skin. He spoke and acted with precision, did not appear to make even the smallest mistakes, and set an incredibly high standard, both by expectation and by example, for the personnel in Enterprise’s science division.
I’d be a fool not to be intimidated, Trinh thought. At the same time, she recognized that the discomfort she felt reached far beyond her place in Starfleet’s command structure, beyond her reactions to the exemplary records and strong personalities of Enterprise’s top officers. She had not discovered all of the issues with which she struggled once she’d arrived on board; she’d hauled many of them along with her from what she had begun to think of as her “former life.”
The doors to the transporter room parted before Trinh and she hastened inside. She expected to find the room empty but for the operator; after all, she’d nearly sprinted through the corridors to get there. Instead, she had to pull up short, almost running into the broad back of a man wearing a red uniform shirt. Peering past him, she saw the room filled with people, including Commander Spock and the ship’s chief medical officer, Doctor McCoy. Captain Kirk stood on the other side of the small room, facing them all.
The captain appeared to be in midsentence, but after the door whisked closed behind Trinh, the transporter room fell quiet. Then Captain Kirk said, “Nice of you to join us, Ensign.” When all eyes in the room turned toward her, Trinh felt her heart begin to race.
“Y-y-yes, sir,” she stammered. “Sorry, sir. We—the anthropology department—we were conducting an experiment.” Although it registered in the next instant that the captain had made his remark with one side of his mouth curled up in a half smile, her obvious tardiness embarrassed her.
Captain Kirk looked to the man in front of Trinh. “Mister Lemli,” he said. The crewman held a hand out to Trinh. It took her a second to understand that he meant her to take the phaser pistol clutched in his fingers. She quickly pulled the strap of her tricorder up over her shoulder, then accepted the weapon and, as she’d been taught to do at the Academy, attached it to the belt of her pants, at her right hip.
“Mister Kyle?” the captain asked, peering toward the man stationed behind the transporter console.
“All set, sir,” Kyle said. “I’ve targeted an open area that appears designed as a community square. It’s in the center of the city, so you should find out quickly just what you’re dealing with.”
“And you continue to read no life signs there?” asked Commander Spock.
“No, sir, none,” Kyle responded.
Captain Kirk pulled on his field jacket, an oversized tan garment sporting a number of pockets. As the other members of the landing party did the same, Trinh followed suit, first removing her tricorder’s strap from her shoulder and then resettling it there atop her jacket. Then the captain turned to Doctor McCoy. “Well, Bones, shall we?”
“Bones”? Trinh thought. Had she heard Captain Kirk correctly? After her initial assignment to Enterprise, she’d been required to undergo a physical, which the doctor had conducted. He introduced himself at the time as Leonard McCoy, leaving Trinh to speculate that the captain had just called him by a nickname. She couldn’t imagine a less appropriate sobriquet for a physician, and surmised some form of black humor at work.
As Captain Kirk and Commander Spock mounted the two steps to the transporter platform and turned to face forward on the front pair of pads, the doctor grumbled a reply. “Shall we what?” he said. “Shuffle the atoms of our bodies all over the damn galaxy just so we can go visit a deserted city?”
Despite his complaint, though, the doctor stepped up onto the platform as well, moving onto one of the two side pads. Mister Lemli and a second red-shirted man followed, planting themselves on the rear pair of pads. That left a single empty space for Trinh, beside Doctor McCoy. She took it.
“Mister Kyle,” the captain said, “energize.”
The lieutenant worked the console before him, and a high-pitched hum rose in the room. As it did, Trinh considered the doctor’s complaint about shuffling the atoms of his body. She’d never encountered anybody who suffered from transporter phobia, but she’d heard such people existed. Doctor McCoy’s complaint, though, seemed like something different from an irrational fear, and she wondered if he fell into another category of individuals who resisted travel by transporter, namely those concerned about an essential loss of self in the process. Trinh understood the metaphysical debate about beaming from one place to another, including the argument that when somebody rematerialized, they became a second person, identical to but distinct from the person they’d been when they dematerialized. As a matter of course, artists often cited a similar claim when delivering their work from one location to another; they wanted their original art to remain original, and not dismantled atom by atom and then reconstructed in the same fashion.
Trinh couldn’t tell, though, whether Doctor McCoy genuinely disliked the transporter or whether he played at it for effect. During her interaction with him in sickbay, he’d come off both as a charming gentleman and as a bit of a curmudgeon. Whatever the case, Trinh felt the reverse of the doctor’s protest: she relished the opportunity to have her body disassembled and reassembled at the molecular level. She had come to appreciate the notion that, each time she traveled via transporter, she distanced herself from the life she had lived to that point, perhaps even becoming a new person—perhaps becoming many new people, another with each successive beaming.
Golden motes formed across Trinh’s field of vision, and Lieutenant Kyle and the Enterprise transporter room faded from view. Did consciousness slip away from her, for even the briefest time? Or, perhaps of more importance, did her mind lose the thread of continuity that tied her from the moment of her birth in Hoi An to her present self? Trinh didn’t know—it certainly didn’t feel as though any of that had happened—but when she appeared on the surface of the first planet in the R-775 star system, she liked to think that she could proclaim herself “the new Mai Duyen Trinh.”
As she looked about, though, all such thoughts faded from her mind. Commander Spock had told her that the landing party would be visiting an abandoned city, and she’d envisioned empty buildings, no doubt decaying after an unknown period of neglect. Instead, she saw a scene of utter devastation.
In front of her, the captain and first officer turned in place, examining their surroundings. Trinh did the same. The six Enterprise crew members stood in the middle of a cobbled square, perhaps a hundred meters on a side. At one point, buildings had clearly bordered the space, but they had all been left in ruins. Here and there, a ragged portion of a wall reached skyward, as though still struggling to stand up to whatever force had laid the city low. Stone and mortar spilled across the ground like heaps of mangled bodies. The blackened lines of burned timber formed twisted geometric shapes, the skeletal remains of what had once marked the achievement of a people no longer in evidence.
As Trinh gazed around, her breath puffing from her mouth in transitory clouds of white, she saw that the annihilation reached in every direction. Even into the distance, nothing rose above the swells of wreckage save for the occasional half-collapsed wall. An eerie silence pervaded the area, and a layer of gray dust coated the dead city like a shroud. Based on appearance alone, Trinh estimated that the debris had stretched essentially unchanged across the landscape since before she’d been born, since before the Federation had been born, and for potentially far longer even than that.
Ahead of her, Trinh saw Commander Spock take hold of the tricorder hanging on a strap across his
shoulder. He activated the device, and she heard its sharp whine as the first officer scanned their surroundings. The city, she knew, would read as lifeless.
“It’s like Cestus Three,” Trinh heard Captain Kirk say, but she didn’t understand the reference.
“Are you suggesting that the Gorn might have had something to do with this?” Commander Spock asked.
“No,” said the captain. “The Hegemony is on the other side of the Federation. I was speaking about the scale of the destruction.”
“Then I concur,” said Commander Spock.
Captain Kirk began to walk forward, and the first officer fell in step beside him. Trinh looked to Doctor McCoy, who nodded in the direction of the two men. Trinh, the doctor, and the pair of security guards started after them.
Realizing that she had been brought down to the planet for a reason, Trinh found her own tricorder where it hung at her side. She opened its cover and initiated her own scans, searching not for signs of life but for those of death. The captain would want to know the details of the city’s loss, of its population’s demise. Had they escaped whatever had flattened the place where they lived, or did their remains hide beneath the tonnes of rubble? Trinh wanted to know too.
As Captain Kirk and Commander Spock led the landing party across the square, a sudden gust burst across the open space, lifting a steel-colored curtain of dust fluttering above the cobblestones. A chill gripped Trinh, and she closed her field jacket about her. Off to one side, the wind howled through some piece of wreckage, a low moan that added to an atmosphere that already felt haunted.
In front of Trinh, Captain Kirk stopped. She looked up from her tricorder to see that they had walked almost to the end of the square. The captain squatted down to inspect a pile of fractured brick and stone. Something must have caught his attention, because he reached forward and began clearing away chunks of broken matter, not throwing them aside, but carefully placing them on the ground beside him.
Trinh watched the captain so intently that when he called her name, it startled her. She hied forward. “Sir?” she said.
“What do you make of this, Ensign?” Captain Kirk asked.
At first, Trinh didn’t understand the question. What could she possibly tell simply by looking at a mound of shattered building materials? She would have to study the composition of the ruins, painstakingly searching for clues about the people who had built the city and what had become of them. Archaeological investigation required time and patience, and often enough, a fair amount of good fortune.
As Trinh’s gaze passed over the area the captain had uncovered, though, she saw, among the ragged shards, bits of smooth, gently contoured surfaces, mostly covered by grime, but showing through in enough places to reveal a lustrous finish. The captain had pulled only brick fragments away, Trinh saw, and she quickly surmised that those reddish blocks had once formed a straight-sided base, atop which—
“It was a statue,” she said.
“Yes,” the captain said. He pulled away two more hunks of brick, then with both hands hefted one of the larger pieces of silver-white chalcedony. It measured perhaps forty centimeters long and a dozen or so through its circumference. It looked very much like a section of an arm. “And maybe a statue depicting a humanoid,” Captain Kirk said.
“Maybe,” Trinh allowed. She pulled open a compartment on her tricorder and retrieved a small, fine-tuned scanner. She passed it over the polished stone in the captain’s hands, made an adjustment on the tricorder to isolate the marble’s physical structure, then scanned for it in the mass from which he’d extracted it. Trinh saw representations of numerous other pieces appear on the small display on her tricorder. “I’m reading a large quantity of this tooled stone,” she said. “I’ve also got software that will attempt to virtually fit it all back together into a unified whole.” She keyed in a control sequence on her tricorder to initiate that program. On the screen, sets of pieces began flying together as the software searched for matches in the surface geometry of the sculpture’s fragments. They aggregated slowly at first, and then with greater frequency as the reproduction took shape, leaving a smaller and smaller population of unplaced segments.
When the figure became recognizable enough, Trinh offered her tricorder to the captain. He set the stone scrap back down, then took the tricorder and stood back up. Trinh stood with him, leaned in, and pointed at the top of the display. “It appears that the head and the bottom of the left leg have been pulverized,” she said, “but this is essentially what the statue looked like.” The image showed a female form, with a neck, a torso, two arms and most of two legs. Given its proportions, the sculpture captured more than just a humanoid form: it appeared human.
“Spock, take a look at this,” the captain said. He held out the tricorder so that the first officer could see its monitor.
A single eyebrow rose on Spock’s forehead. “Interesting,” he said.
“There are no known human colonies out this far,” said Captain Kirk.
“No,” Spock said, “but we have encountered a number of alien races whose outward appearance mimics that of humans: the natives of Sarpeidon, the Scalosians, the Fabrini, to name just a few.”
“Could the settlement here be the work of the Preservers?” the captain asked. Trinh recognized the name as that given to an advanced alien race who had rescued failing cultures in danger of extinction and relocated them to other planets to allow them to survive. Nearly two years earlier, the Enterprise crew itself had found the first evidence of the Preservers’ existence. Trinh knew of the incident because of the shock waves it had sent through the world of anthropology.
“Possibly,” Spock said. “If so, it could account for our finding only this single settlement on the whole of the planet.”
“But . . .” the captain said. He handed Trinh’s tricorder back to her, then turned and looked around at the devastated city. “What happened? Were the people here attacked? Did they do this to themselves? Was it some sort of natural disaster?”
“There may be no way of knowing,” Spock said. “The thoroughness of the destruction suggests the use of energy weapons, and yet we read no heightened levels of radiation. However, if the city was destroyed long ago, which is at least what cursory observation suggests, the radiation levels could have returned to normal by now. At the same time, if the city had been deserted that far back in the past, weather and environmental forces could also be responsible for the extreme state of decay we see.”
“Any thoughts, Bones?” the captain asked. Trinh looked over and saw that the doctor too had put his own tricorder to use.
“I don’t have much to add,” said Doctor McCoy. “I’m reading virtually no life signs inside the limits of the city—” He glanced around. “Or inside what used to be a city. That’s somewhat surprising, as you’d expect more encroachment by both plants and animals over time, particularly along the borders.”
“What could account for that?” the captain asked.
“It could be that the soil here’s been rendered toxic to the local life-forms in some way I obviously can’t measure,” Doctor McCoy said. “Or there could be something on the perimeter—a force field or something like that—that’s keeping most of the plants and animals out.”
“Spock?” the captain asked.
“Sensors have detected nothing of the sort in or around the city,” the first officer said. “Nor have we identified any artificial power sources anywhere on the planet.”
Doctor McCoy shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you, Captain.”
Captain Kirk nodded. He looked around again, but this time, he seemed to consider what he and the landing party should do next. “Spock, Ensign Davis discovered the city when he saw large quantities of refined metals on the surface. Where are they?”
The first officer once again worked his tricorder, the device’s shrill call slicing through the square. “I am reading significant amounts of aluminum, gold, silver, and iron, mostly in the form of steel,” said
Commander Spock. “It is buried within the fallen buildings.”
“Household appliances,” offered Trinh. “Computers, ovens, refrigeration and freezing units.”
“Quite likely,” said Commander Spock, his concurrence with her assertion providing her a moment of professional pride.
“What about the tritanium and rodinium?” the captain asked.
The first officer continued to consult his tricorder. “They do not appear to be within the confines of the city,” he said. “But I am reading both in considerable amounts to the east, one-point-six kilometers beyond the city, and in smaller but still significant amounts half a kilometer to the southwest. The latter appears to be several dozen meters belowground, in a complex of caves.”
“Explanations?” Captain Kirk said. “Theories?”
“Insufficient data,” said Commander Spock. “We will need to investigate.”
“Then let’s investigate.” The captain reached to the back of his belt and collected his communicator. He flipped it open and said, “Kirk to Enterprise.”
“Enterprise. Scott here, Captain.” The ship’s chief engineer and second officer spoke with a rich but understandable Gaelic accent.
“Scotty, we need a site-to-site transport here on the planet,” the captain said. “Details from Mister Spock.”
The first officer opened his own communicator and spoke with Lieutenant Commander Scott, detailing their new destination for him. As he did so, the captain reached a hand up to Trinh’s elbow and led her several paces away. Doctor McCoy followed along. “What’s your take on all this, Ensign?” he said.
“Commander Spock is right,” Trinh said. “We just don’t have enough information right now.”
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